danah sez, "This is a video of students marching seven miles in Texas to cast their votes on the first day of early voting."

Texas Republicans have worked overtime to make it harder for key Democratic voting groups to vote and be represented fairly. The redistricting games they've played are infamous. And for the Prairie View A&M; University precincts, they put the early-polling place more than seven miles from the school.

So what did the students in this video do? They shut down the highway as they marched seven miles to cast their votes on the first day of early voting.

Link (Thanks, danah!)

Sighn says:

I just want to let you in on a project I'm working on. A hand cut edition of 1 million. No joke, this will probably take the next 30-60 years to finish.

I am now planting a tree for every piece sold off my site. I'm also planning a 24 cut-a-thon this summer, where I will see how many I can cut out in one day.

Link | Video

The Day After
Jasmina Tešanović

22.2.2008

The day after: the streets are suspiciously clean. The local government has taken care to obscure the shame of the rioting, because obviously, it has echoed around the world and Serbia is once again the leading news in the foreign press.

The Serbs, with their legitimate right to mourn for the loss of Kosovo, were transformed into vandals who loot their own city. They broke into many foreign shops, stealing off with the foreign branded goods, made by those powers which gave away Kosovo. It's a greedily practical turn to the famous "inat" and spiteful defiance that Serbs generally offer the world community.

Images and footage of the broken windows, burned flags, demolished embassies, and drunken teenage patriots is cruising the world on YouTube. Our newly elected president, who wisely and rather obviously retreated to Rumania during the ruckus, asked for decent behavior and peace last night.

Other participants of the rally have no such regrets. The truest "heroines" of this charade are two young blondes filmed by candid camera and posted on YouTube in a long snippet called "Kosovo for tennis shoes."

These wannabe global consumers are relentlessly looting sports clothes from broken windows and dragging them in heaps through a town in chaos.

Donnie Hoyle teaches patch tools and levels in episode 7 of his funny "You Suck at Photoshop" tutorial. Link

The Bell System produced this great musical 15-minute short film to promote its presence at the 1964 World's Fair in New York. The film features monotonic voice-overs declaiming the virtues of tomorrow's telephone systems, along with earnest folk-singing about the miracle of telephony, as well as a ride-through on the Bell System Ride. Link (via Paleofuture)

Law students at the University of Ottawa's Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) have created a great, 5-minute video explaining time-shifting and Canadian copyright law. In light of recent efforts to reform Canadian copyright law, this is perfect, informative material to show to your friends. Link (Thanks, Mike!)

This clip from a 1960s UK TV special, The Music of Lennon & McCartney has guest performances of three songs. My favorite is the jazzy drums and keyboard instrumental version of "A Hard Day's Night" by Alan Haven and Tony Crombie, complete with shots of mod gogo dancers' boots kicking in time to the wild riffs.

Link | (Here's Part 1.)

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Middle Finger. Today on Boing Boing tv, two short videos from the Ministry of Unknown Science: first, an internet kung fu classic in which mysterious combat masters fell their foes with obscene gestures. Next, an infauxmercial for a speech therapy institute where people is learning for to talk more good with words and mouths. Special thanks to Timothy Walker of TMOUS.

Link to Boing Boing tv episode with downloadable video, and discussion.

Prosecuting Music Piracy, a RIAA training video for prosecuting attorneys, has leaked onto the net -- it focuses on busting counterfeit CD vendors, and talks about how prosecutors should also use music piracy as a charge against drug dealers with large music collections:

Starring ex-prosecutor Deborah Robinson and Frank Walters, an ex-Maryland State trooper, it was made to "assist in the training of U.S. prosecutors responsible for handling music piracy cases."

It includes footage from "surveillance" videos and, "techniques on how to identify illegal sound recordings and highlights," not to mention, "examples of how illegal music is sold."

And here's the kicker.

It even claims to provide instructions on, and we quote, "qualifying an RIAA investigator as an expert."

So that's where Doug Jacobson and MediaSentry acquired their skills!

Link

Hero Ha is an adorable three-year-old Korean kid who likes to stand around in his diaper with a giant guitar slung over his shoulders, performing truly excellent renditions of Beatles songs. Here he is singing "Hey Jude." Link

Here's some amazing footage -- uncut -- from a feature film that Suzanne Pleshette and Tony Curtis made in Disneyland in the sixties. There's not really much dialog and it kind of meanders, but it's really golden nevertheless: high-production-value footage of Disneyland from the golden age. Link (Thanks, Bill!)

Lisa sez,

Some friends of mine have just released RetarDEAD, a low-budget indie film that's a sequel to Monsturd.

Evil has come to the Butte County Institute of Special Education, and its students will never be the same. Armed with a fatal hyper-intelligence serum, the mad Dr. Stern single-handedly transforms a quiet community into an army of flesh-eating zombies. It's a showdown of limb-chopping, head-bursting proportions as Stern's nemesis, F.B.I. agent Susan Hannigan, and the local sheriff's department take on the zombie plague in the ultimate battle royale. In short, it's sort of like "Flowers for Algernon" meets "Night of the Living Dead."

Jello Biafra, former lead singer of the Dead Kennedy's plays the town's mayor. I also sing the theme song duet with Girl Trouble lead singer Kurt "KP" Kendall - and as a backup singer in the "Retardettes." The song has been released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License, so it is free and available for remixing.

Link (Thanks, Lisa!)

Seth Schoen, staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and one of the world's top DRM technical researchers, has written up an analysis of the DRM that Adobe has built into the latest version of Flash for videos, which prevents video viewers from making mashups and re-edits of the video they see on the net.

Amazingly, Adobe seems to have entirely missed the fact that the reason that the Flash video format has taken off is that it's so fluid, versatile and remixable -- not because they sucked up to some Hollysaurs and crippled their technology.

Now Adobe, which controls Flash and Flash Video, is trying to change that with the introduction of DRM restrictions in version 9 of its Flash Player and version 3 of its Flash Media Server software. Instead of an ordinary web download, these programs can use a proprietary, secret Adobe protocol to talk to each other, encrypting the communication and locking out non-Adobe software players and video tools. We imagine that Adobe has no illusions that this will stop copyright infringement -- any more than dozens of other DRM systems have done so -- but the introduction of encryption does give Adobe and its customers a powerful new legal weapon against competitors and ordinary users through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Recall that the DMCA sets out a blanket ban on tools that help "circumvent" any DRM system (as well as the act of circumvention itself). When Flash Video files are simply hosted on a web site with no encryption, it's unlikely that tools to download, edit, or remix them are illegal. But when encryption enters the picture, entertainment companies argue that fair use is no excuse; Adobe, or customers using Flash Media Server 3, can try to shut down users who break the encryption without having to prove that the users are doing anything copyright-infringing. Even if users aren't targeted directly, technology developers may be threatened and the technologies the users need driven underground.

Link

Chris's grandfather, Robert Yetter, shot and edited this film from the 1962 Seattle World's Fair. Chris sez, "They go up in the Space Needle and take a few trips over the fairgrounds in the monorail and some weird pod transportation service." Link (Thanks, Chris!)

See also: Seattle World's Fair 1962 picture postcard

Wired Science came to Maker Faire in Austin in October 2007. Here's the video segment. Link

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Joel's spotted this classic 1953 Tex Avery toon about the future of TV:

Cartoon genius Tex Avery produced this short in 1953, showing off TVs for smokers, water drinkers, and those afflicted by airplanes overhead. The integration of real footage with the cartoon is fantastic.

Link, Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

This video from People For the American Way and the Electronic Frontier Foundation features photos and interviews of people who don't want the telecoms to be immune from prosecution for illegally wiretapping US citizens.

Americans speak out against telecom immunity, urging Congress to stand up to the Bush administration and stop the spying. SIGN THE PETITION:

Link (Thanks, Drew!)

Italian designer Edouardo Carlino's Hi-Can canopy bed is a high-teh cocoon with a high resolution monitor to watch movies, play games, and control your house. It looks kind of like an Apple product, if you ask me. Link

I Want to Be the Guy is an insanely hard platformer video-game that mashes together art, bosses, and other play elements from several 8-bit console cartridges from the golden age. Here's a video of someone running the game -- mesmerising. Link (via Waxy)

Here's a Google Talks video featuring the late Dr. Robert Bussard, former Asst. Director of the Atomic Energy Commission and founder of Energy Matter Conversion Corporation (EMC2).

This is not your father's fusion reactor! Forget everything you know about conventional thinking on nuclear fusion: high-temperature plasmas, steam turbines, neutron radiation and even nuclear waste are a thing of the past. Goodbye thermonuclear fusion; hello inertial electrostatic confinement fusion (IEC), an old idea that's been made new. While the international community debates the fate of the politically-turmoiled $12 billion ITER (an experimental thermonuclear reactor), simple IEC reactors are being built as high-school science fair projects.

Dr. Robert Bussard, former Asst. Director of the Atomic Energy Commission and founder of Energy Matter Conversion Corporation (EMC2), has spent 17 years perfecting IEC, a fusion process that converts hydrogen and boron directly into electricity producing helium as the only waste product. Most of this work was funded by the Department of Defense, the details of which have been under seal... until now.

Dr. Bussard will discuss his recent results and details of this potentially world-altering technology, whose conception dates back as far as 1924, and even includes a reactor design by Philo T. Farnsworth (inventor of the scanning television).

Can a 100 MW fusion reactor be built for less than Google's annual electricity bill? Come see what's possible when you think outside the thermonuclear box and ignore the herd.

Link

TV Signoffs collects videos of the signoff videos of TV stations of the bygone era. These are just great -- I was always an early riser as a kid so I would catch the sign-on every morning. Link

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency carries stunning videos of Earthrise from the moon, shot with the Kaguya's cameras:

Kaguya carries two high-definition television cameras, each fitted with a 1,920 by 1,080 CCD. However, most of the movies are downsampled and cropped to 320 by 240 pixels (which is about half the resolution of a standard-definition TV). Almost all of the movies are from the wide-angle camera, which has a field of view spanning 51.23° by 30.17° and faces forward along Kaguya's orbit. The narrower-angle tele-camera has a field of view spanning 15.60° by 8.80° and faces backward. Typically, the cameras are employed in a time-lapse mode, and the movies play at 8x speed, but a few of the movies (especially Earthrise/Earthset movies) are shown at slower 4x or even real-time speeds.

Link

Today on Boing Boing tv: Klaus Pierre, a French/German actor, aspires against all odds to become America's next great action hero.

We met Klaus in the previous BBtv episode "Point Break and Heartbreak," in which he revealed his devotion to the great Keanu Reeves; today, Klaus studies broadsword combat, in hopes of conquering the RenFaire circuit and moving every zig for great justice. But breaking through to true action hero stardom requires endurance, dedication, talent, and Keanu Reeves underwear -- guess which one out of four Klaus actually has.

Link to BBtv post with video and discussion.

Here's a funny little 8-bit animation explaining how to deal with the typical kinds of things that happen in an online forum. Link

Matthew says:

Swedish graduate student Emil Ernerfeldt created the program Phun, a 2D physics playground, and has made it free to download for non-commercial use.

He demonstrates it in a zenful YouTube video, where he creates devices like cars and piston engines in seconds using simple shapes.

Download app here.

Here's a fantastic take-off on the Barak Obama Yes We Can video, in which McCain sings "bomb bomb bomb Iran," and says that we're going to be in Iran for 100 years, while singing Americans look on in abject terror. Link

More news on the Draft Lessig front: a couple days ago, I posted here about the movement to draft Larry Lessig to run for Congress to fill Tom Lantos's recently vacated seat. Now, Larry's put up a "Lessig08" site with a video that explains the nature of his "anti-corruption" campaign to reform government to reduce the perverting effect of money on public policy. The site does not say that Larry will run for Congress, but it does invite you to show support for the idea so that Larry can gauge whether it's feasible for him to make a run without taking any corporate or special-interest money.

This site hosts this video to explain the launch of two exploratory projects — first, a Change Congress movement, and second, my own decision whether to run for Congress in the California 12th.

I have decided I want to give as much energy as I can to the Change Congress movement. I will decide in the next week or so whether it makes sense to advance that movement by running for Congress.

Link

The Perucci Brothers, a pair of kinetic artists, created this insanely elaborate domino run for the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center. I've never seen anything that comes close to this for sheer, audacious, obsessive domino nerddom. Link (Thanks, Jason!)

In today's episode of Boing Boing tv:

An all-knowing "Life Booth" controls humans and their thoughts, in this animated short by twentysomething French animators Loic Tari and Samantha Duris. In Le Programme du Jour, we follow a pre-programmed day in the life of asymmetrically-faced citizen B42-347, who "follows the rules of the Life Booth" until life takes an unexpected twist. Link to Boing Boing tv episode, with video and discussion, and more about the creators.