Upcoming appearances
* Oct 13-15, NYC: New York Comic-Con
* Oct 26, Torino: VIEW conference
* Nov 8, Berlin: evening reading (TBD)
* Nov 9, Munich: evening reading livestreamed in cooperation with www.lovelybooks.de (TBD)
Upcoming Appearances • October 19, 2011 in Washington, DC: Speaking at "What will turn us on in 2030?", a conference on energy futures.
• March 29-31, 2012 at York College of Pennsylvania: Writer in residence
★
The Mexican art, technlogy, games, and culture magazine GATOPARDO interviewed me recently, about Boing Boing and all things online. The interviewer, Wookie Williams, is as cool as his name. Content is in Spanish. — Xeni
Upcoming appearances
* Oct 13-15, NYC: New York Comic-Con
* Oct 26, Torino: VIEW conference
* Nov 8, Berlin: evening reading (TBD)
* Nov 9, Munich: evening reading livestreamed in cooperation with www.lovelybooks.de (TBD)
California governor Jerry Brown vetoed a bill that required the police to get a warrant before searching a telephone. Without this law, California's police will continue their practice of searching the cellphones of people they arrest, "which in the digital age likely means the contents of persons’ e-mail, call records, text messages, photos, banking activity, cloud-storage services, and even where the phone has traveled."
Brown blamed the Supreme Court, which found that current US laws don't protect against this sort of snooping, saying that the court's finding should stand. But all courts can do is tell you whether or not something is legal in the current system -- it's not their job to say what the law should be.
That's the legislature's job, and they did it: California's lawmakers passed this bill because deep, intrusive snooping without a warrant is an affront to human rights, privacy and dignity. In Brown's view, it seems that no laws should be passed -- rather, we should just freeze the current legislation and let courts refine it for the rest of time.
Brown’s veto message abdicated responsibility for protecting the rights of Californians and ignored calls from civil liberties groups and this publication to sign the bill — saying only that the issue is too complicated for him to make a decision about. He cites a recent California Supreme Court decision upholding the warrantless searches of people incident to an arrest. In his brief message, he also doesn’t say whether it’s a good idea or not.
Instead, he says the state Supreme Court’s decision is good enough, a decision the U.S. Supreme Court let stand last week.
“The courts are better suited to resolve the complex and case-specific issues relating to constitutional search-and-seizure protections,” the governor wrote.
Because of that January ruling from the state’s high court, the California Legislature passed legislation to undo it — meaning Brown is taking the side of the Supreme Court’s seven justices instead of the state Legislature. The Assembly approved the bill 70-0 and the state Senate, 32-4.
The great science reporter Robert Krulwich of NPR has a beautiful story up from earlier this year about epically tall trees in the ancient forests of California. I missed this when it was first published, but it's been making the rounds again this week on Twitter. Krulwich begins by introducing us to a tree in Humboldt Redwoods State Park in California, nicknamed "Stratosphere Giant." It's 369 feet high, "about twice the size of the Statue of Liberty (minus the foundation)." But...
After its short four-year reign as World's Tallest, two hikers, Chris Atkins and Michael Taylor, were deep in another section of another park, Redwood National Park (purchased in 1978 during the Carter administration) when they came across a new stand of trees, taller than anyone had ever seen before. The tallest of the tall is 379 feet 4 inches, 10 feet taller than the Giant. It's now called "Hyperion."
We have the precise measurements because after Chris and Michael announced their discovery, a team of scientists, led by Humboldt State University ecologist Steve Sillett, climbed to the top of the tree and dropped a tape down to the ground. Some things are still that simple. Steve's colleague, Jim Spickler (check out his biceps! scary), repeated the climb and brought a camera, so we can go with him. This video, which comes with dramatic music in all the right places, is, to use a much overused word, but I'll use it anyway..."awesome".
That video is above. Note that the exact location of these trees is not being disclosed, for the protection of the trees. Check out the rest of Krulwich's blog post here. A little aside: back when I was a weekly contributor to NPR, my producers sometimes used to tell me when we were stuck on a story, "ask yourself, what would Krulwich do?" He's that amazing of a storyteller, in text, on TV, and in audio.
Upcoming Appearances • October 19, 2011 in Washington, DC: Speaking at "What will turn us on in 2030?", a conference on energy futures.
• March 29-31, 2012 at York College of Pennsylvania: Writer in residence
Your tax dollars build bridges. They pay the salaries of teachers and firefighters. Tax dollars help put people through college, provide a safety net for the elderly and the disabled, and pay for fighter jets and nuclear bombs.
You may not agree all those ways your tax dollars are spent, but they are all, at least, fairly tangible. When it's time for re-election, your senator can point to a roads project, a school, a saintly grandmother, or a missile silo. Through these projects, Americans are being educated, cared for, and protected.
But it's hard to make that clear cost/benefit analysis for basic scientific research. At least, not on a timetable that matches up with election cycles.
Basic research is often weird, and it's often boring. It's the years spent mapping the neurons of zebra fish, so that future scientists can have a more detailed biological model to work with. It's the chemical analysis that has to happen, so that two decades from now somebody else can discover a new cancer-fighting drug. Basic research is about curiosity, and knowledge for knowledge's sake. By it's very nature, basic research relies on public funding. But by it's very nature, it's hard to explain how the public benefits from the basic research we fund.
Attila Kovacs is one of the scientists who put your tax dollars to work. An astrophysicist at the University of Minnesota, he specializes in the study of space dust. That is, yes, dust. In space. It's the sort of thing that would be very easy to mock. (Imagine Bill O'Reilly making a joke about lemon-scent space Pledge.) But Kovacs says space dust matters more than you think. And he makes a good case for why it's important to spend tax dollars on funny-sounding science.
My latest book, Made by Hand, in paperback on Oct. 25
A good one from our friends at Photoshop Disasters. It's almost like the artist wanted to see how many ways he/she could fuck up the photo and still get it approved.
UPDATE: Marktech suspected the giant head was a result of the angle from which the photo was taken. He adjusted the perspective, and it looks much less freakish. Thanks, Marktech!
The Big Giant Head
Upcoming appearances
* Oct 13-15, NYC: New York Comic-Con
* Oct 26, Torino: VIEW conference
* Nov 8, Berlin: evening reading (TBD)
* Nov 9, Munich: evening reading livestreamed in cooperation with www.lovelybooks.de (TBD)
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
On June 24, My Morning Jacket descended on Oakland's historic Fox Theater for an epic performance in support of their majestic album, Circuital. Remedy Editorial's Scott Compton and his merry band of video documentarians made the scene on behalf of Boing Boing. You'll remember Scott and crew as the artistes who brought The Swell Season and The Decemberists to the big little screen for Boing Boing Video. We are now honored to feature their loving cut of My Morning Jacket, interviewed and live in concert on June 24, 2011. Here's Scott:
About our time with the band:
We spent about 45 minutes interviewing the band. This is one of those happy stories where you meet your heroes and they are even cooler than you had hoped. They were unscripted, present, and exhibited a great esprit de corps both in the interview and onstage. I got the sense that they were appreciative of their fans. I'm an even bigger fan now and I hope the BB audience enjoys the extended 21 minute experience.
Thanks to MMJ road manager Eric Mayers for his collaborative spirit and of course the beautiful Fox Oakland theatre and Tony Leong of Another Planet Entertainment.
About the production:
MMJ live shows are legendary and I wanted to give the MMJ fan a sense of what it was like to be in the audience at the Fox in Oakland.
Every concert is covered by a countless smartphones, so we dialed up some talent. Starting with a call to friend and DP John Chater of Chater Camera. John got behind the project with his RED Epic rolling 4480x1920pixels at 120FPS. I think that John's handheld, slo-mo footage at the front of the stage is incredible and a fresh look at the band.
Along with John, we filled the room with Canon HDSLRs. Louisville native and editor/cameraman Carson Porter and Photographer Bart Nagel, my longtime creative partner in crime answered the call. Our post team contributed greatly to the production. Colorist Ayumi Ashley handled data wrangling of the 6 cameras, while Remedy editor Jeff Boyette and Asst Joel White shot and did AC work.
About the post-production:
We had a combination of RED .r3d and Canon H264 footage to handle in post. It was a bucketful for certain. My company Remedy Editorial is primarily a Final Cut / After Effects shop, but since Apple stumbled with the release of FCPX, we thought this would be good opportunity to put Adobe Premiere 5.5 through it's paces. Staff editor Jeffrey Boyette, who edited our previous BB video for the Decemberists, began the editorial without any hands on Premiere experience. He did a stellar job finding the story and creating the. Colorist Ayumi Ashley spend 3 days and did an beautiful job color matching and painting using DaVinci Resolve software. Big ups to MMJ sound recordist Ryan Dean for the music recording and mixer Marc Pittman for the final production mix.
My latest book, Made by Hand, in paperback on Oct. 25
Daniel Clowes' comic book, Eightball # 23 contained a 48 page story called "The Death–Ray." It's a superhero origin story about a teenage boy named Andy who discovers he has superpowers whenever he takes a puff of a cigarette.
I won't spoil the story by telling you how Andy acquired this ability, but he also discovers a costume along with a comical-looking ray gun that can instantly and silently remove any life-form from the face of the Earth without a trace. Andy and his loyal sidekick Louie -- often the targets of bullies at school -- use and abuse Andy's omnipotence as a tool of revenge and vigilante vengeance, with mixed results.
This new hardcover edition (published by Drawn and Quarterly) is presented in a much larger format than it appeared in Eightball #23. As usual, the art and design is exemplary -- Clowes tells this story of triumph and betrayal in the form of one- and two-page chapters that jump between first person narrative, fly-on-the-the-wall reporting, and after-the-fact documentary style interviews. This masterpiece makes it clear (at least to me) that Daniel Clowes is one of the greatest living cartoonists.
I wish Clowes would write a novel. Not because I don't like his art (I love it), but because his graphic novels can be read in less than an hour, and I would like to become immersed in one of his stories for a much longer time.
Upcoming Appearances • October 19, 2011 in Washington, DC: Speaking at "What will turn us on in 2030?", a conference on energy futures.
• March 29-31, 2012 at York College of Pennsylvania: Writer in residence
Here's what Blackboards in Porn had to say about the photo above.
AFTER SCHOOL:
- math
1 + 1 = 2
1*
Mathematics - university/nursery school level.
This is clearly an extremely advanced level mathematical course, focusing on the Peano axioms for the natural numbers which formalised mathematics in the late 19th century. This course would culminate with Gödel's second incompleteness theorem which shows that the consitency of the Peano axioms cannot be formalised within Peano arithmetic itself.
Alternatively, it could be that the pupil, even at her advanced age, hasn't grasped that 1 + 1 = 2, and that all the after school one-to-one lessons in the world aren't going to work. Indeed, she probably won't even understand what 'one-to-one' means.
8/10 - loses two marks for 'math'.
Disclaimer: The blog is safe for work, in so much as there is no nudity. However, it is somewhat astounding how easy it is to look at a photo of a room full of fully clothed people and know, immediately, that said photo is a still from a porn. Make of that what you will.
Upcoming appearances
* Oct 13-15, NYC: New York Comic-Con
* Oct 26, Torino: VIEW conference
* Nov 8, Berlin: evening reading (TBD)
* Nov 9, Munich: evening reading livestreamed in cooperation with www.lovelybooks.de (TBD)
The Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle -- the latest installment in the Humble Bundle project, which distributes DRM-free games on a pay-what-you-like basis with a portion of each payment earmarked for charity -- has cracked the $1 million mark, with over a day left until the bundle closes.
Pay what you want. Frozen Synapse normally costs $25, but we're letting you set the price! The Frozen Synapse soundtrack is also included with your purchase ($6) and we recently added two more games: TRAUMA ($7) and SpaceChem ($15). Plus, if you pay more than the average price, we'll throw in the entire Humble Frozenbyte Bundle — a $45 value!
Upcoming appearances
* Oct 13-15, NYC: New York Comic-Con
* Oct 26, Torino: VIEW conference
* Nov 8, Berlin: evening reading (TBD)
* Nov 9, Munich: evening reading livestreamed in cooperation with www.lovelybooks.de (TBD)
Marc Brownlow's Skull Truffles look like a fabulous seasonal treat:
I wanted to create a Halloween treat for adults. Something not to be gobbled, but savored. As a kid, I thought shelled walnuts looked like tiny little brains. This gave me an idea: What if I coated them with candy for Halloween? I envisioned eating handfuls of tiny candy brains…laughing maniacally. That could be fun, but if they were placed in miniature edible skulls, it would really put them over the top. If those skulls were white chocolate… Well, now we’re talking!
I just needed a way to make the skulls. Sculpting each one with modeling chocolate would quickly become tedious, so making some sort of mold seemed like the obvious solution. Besides, modeling chocolate isn’t exactly the best tasting stuff on the planet. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to make them into some sort of crazy truffle. A white chocolate shell with a surprise bittersweet center sounded tasty.
Upcoming appearances
* Oct 13-15, NYC: New York Comic-Con
* Oct 26, Torino: VIEW conference
* Nov 8, Berlin: evening reading (TBD)
* Nov 9, Munich: evening reading livestreamed in cooperation with www.lovelybooks.de (TBD)
The Children of the Sky is the third novel in Vernor Vinge's Zones of Thought cycle of novels, three brick-sized, Hugo-award winning novels that are the near-perfect balance of science fiction's twin traditions of wild speculation and high-intensity storytelling.
A summary of Children's plot: Imagine bootstrapping a fallen civilization into transcendance using nothing but a collection of hive-mind Machiavellis, a crippled hyperadvanced space-ship, and a pack of surly, scheming orphaned adolescents. Oh, and then there's the vengeful god ramscooping itself to relativistic speeds a mere 30 lightyears away.
That gives you an idea of just how far-out and far-ahead Vinge is thinking. The story revolves around the refugees from a crashed spaceship -- the children of a hubristic human colony that had edged up to the border of the galaxy's transcendent zone, where hyperadvanced beings can manipulate the very laws of physics. These Icaruses had hoped to raid the gods' archives and find a shortcut to their own godhood, but instead they woke a monster, one that chased them to a distant world and nearly killed them. But they were saved by a hero who twisted the laws of physics and sent the Blighter Fleet (as the monster was called) thirty lightyears away in the blink of an eye, and died in the process.
Ravna Bergsndot survived the armageddon, and it was she who woke the orphaned children from their coldsleep caskets, and, with them, set about rebuilding a civilization advanced enough to turn back the Blighter again, racing to bring her exile-world from medieval fiefdoms to physics-bending demigods in a mere century.
In this, the humans are aided by the Tines, a race of doglike hive-intelligences. Three or more Tines come together and form a collective consciousness, synchronizing with high-speed, ultrasonic chirps. A literal society of minds, the Tines are essentially immortal -- they need merely replace injured or killed individuals with new members. But the Tines are sorely limited in ways as well: if two Tines get to close to one another, their "mindsounds" will mingle, and their consciousness dissolve. Adding new Tines to a pack-individual can change its identity, sometimes creating new and unrecognizable packs.
Even with the Tines' ingenuity, Ravna's quest would be hopeless, except that she is able to avail herself of the libraries of the Out of Band II -- the crashed starship that brought them to the Tines' world -- and its endless archive recording other civilizations that had bootstrapped themselves out of similar situations. With the Oobii, this should be nothing more than a serious engineering challenge.
But even the children of near demigods are not immune to human frailty and scheming. And the Tines are hardly universally benevolent. What starts out as a fascinating thought-exercise in how you could combine knowledge, computation and raw materials to make an advanced civilization out of stone-age conditions quickly turns into a fabulous novel of intrigue and politics, as crosses, double-crosses and triple-crosses pit Tines and humans against one another in a quest for power, dominance, and vengeance.
Vinge's explosive imagination and deft storytelling make epics zip past like hummingbirds -- you'll steal daytime moments to read more, and lie awake at night contemplating what you've read. Vinge is best known for the mind-bending ideas that his science fiction delivers like a warhead (he came up with the notion of the "Singularity," among other things), but the missile is as well-engineered as its payload: Children is an adventure story with teeth, mindbending technical speculation blended with graceful storytelling.
This is the third (and not the concluding) volume in the cycle. The first two are A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. Theoretically, you could follow Children's plot well enough without the benefit of the first two, but they are such treats themselves, you'd be depriving yourself if you did.
Upcoming appearances
* Oct 13-15, NYC: New York Comic-Con
* Oct 26, Torino: VIEW conference
* Nov 8, Berlin: evening reading (TBD)
* Nov 9, Munich: evening reading livestreamed in cooperation with www.lovelybooks.de (TBD)
Having recently conducted a security audit of several free/open source software programs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Chris Palmer and Dan Auerbach have published some guidelines for improving security in free/open software:
Avoid giving the user options that could compromise security, in the form of modes, dialogs, preferences, or tweaks of any sort. As security expert Ian Grigg puts it, there is “only one Mode, and it is Secure.” Ask yourself if that checkbox to toggle secure connections is really necessary? When would a user really want to weaken security? To the extent you must allow such user preferences, make sure that the default is always secure.
Upcoming appearances
* Oct 13-15, NYC: New York Comic-Con
* Oct 26, Torino: VIEW conference
* Nov 8, Berlin: evening reading (TBD)
* Nov 9, Munich: evening reading livestreamed in cooperation with www.lovelybooks.de (TBD)
A security guard in Braehead shopping centre near Glasgow questioned a man who was taking pictures of his young daughter looking cute while eating an ice-cream. The guard told him that photography in the mall was "illegal" and demanded that he delete any photos he'd taken while there. When the man told him he'd already posted the photos to Facebook, the guard summoned a policeman, who said that he could confiscate the phone under the UK's terrorism laws. The policeman took his details and "he was eventually allowed to leave."
The official statements from the mall and the police are maddeningly bureaucratic and every bit as stupid as the original incident: "a full review of the circumstances surrounding the incident and the allegations made is under way" say the police; "Our priority is always to maintain a safe and enjoyable environment for all of our shoppers and retailers," says the mall.
Just a reminder: pretty much everything that's legal on the public street is legal in a private store. A store or mall can have a policy saying "You can't wear purple here" or "You must enter the premises backwards" or "No photography allowed," but those are policies, not laws. A store's representatives can ask you to leave for violating their policies, but that's pretty much it (of course, if you refuse to leave, that's a different matter).
Upcoming appearances
* Oct 13-15, NYC: New York Comic-Con
* Oct 26, Torino: VIEW conference
* Nov 8, Berlin: evening reading (TBD)
* Nov 9, Munich: evening reading livestreamed in cooperation with www.lovelybooks.de (TBD)
A media theory moment: UK media outlets are reporting on the government/ISP deal to "block child pornography", and are universally regurgitating the press release's language, saying this will "block adult content at the point of subscription." I've yet to see any of them adopt a more rigorous, neutral phrasing, like "Some pornography, and things that an unaccountable group classifies as porn, will be blocked." Instead, to a one, they imply (or state) that all porn will be blocked, and nothing but porn will be blocked. Parents who rely on this service to block porn are in for a surprise when they discover all their favorite stuff has been misclassified as porn and when their kids discover all the unblocked porn.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
Here's an excellent photo of Walt Disney and Salvador Dali admiring what I presume to be Walt's model train. It was likely taken around the time of their collaboration, Destino. Production on that film began in 1945 but it didn't premier until 2003. (Thanks, Mark Pedersen!)
Upcoming appearances
* Oct 13-15, NYC: New York Comic-Con
* Oct 26, Torino: VIEW conference
* Nov 8, Berlin: evening reading (TBD)
* Nov 9, Munich: evening reading livestreamed in cooperation with www.lovelybooks.de (TBD)
Germany's Chaos Computer Club published the sourcecode for a piece of malware used by the German government to spy on citizens. The software was discovered in the wild and reverse engineered. It can be used to spy on or control remote PCs. Because of flaws in the software, anyone who was infected with this by German police was vulnerable to spying by "anyone on the street." The German supreme court banned the use of trojans to spy on German citizens in 2008.
The analysis also revealed serious security holes that the trojan is tearing into infected systems. The screenshots and audio files it sends out are encrypted in an incompetent way, the commands from the control software to the trojan are even completely unencrypted. Neither the commands to the trojan nor its replies are authenticated or have their integrity protected. Not only can unauthorized third parties assume control of the infected system, but even attackers of mediocre skill level can connect to the authorities, claim to be a specific instance of the trojan, and upload fake data. It is even conceivable that the law enforcement agencies's IT infrastructure could be attacked through this channel. The CCC has not yet performed a penetration test on the server side of the trojan infrastructure.
"We were surprised and shocked by the lack of even elementary security in the code. Any attacker could assume control of a computer infiltrated by the German law enforcement authorities", commented a speaker of the CCC. "The security level this trojan leaves the infected systems in is comparable to it setting all passwords to '1234'".
To avoid revealing the location of the command and control server, all data is redirected through a rented dedicated server in a data center in the USA. The control of this malware is only partially within the borders of its jurisdiction. The instrument could therefore violate the fundamental principle of national sovereignty. Considering the incompetent encryption and the missing digital signatures on the command channel, this poses an unacceptable and incalculable risk. It also poses the question how a citizen is supposed to get their right of legal redress in the case the wiretapping data get lost outside Germany, or the command channel is misused.
She was very interested in the many signs splayed out across the
sidewalk. We spotted some people with a pile of cardboard, paint, and
brushes, and asked if we could contribute.
Sasha asked us what she should write, and we told her to write about
something that she cared about and wished could make the world a nicer
place. She was very proud to add her sign to join the rest.
My latest book, Made by Hand, in paperback on Oct. 25
My daughter and I built a guitar out of a lunchbox this weekend. It actually sounds better than the cigar box guitars I've built. For frets, it uses toothpicks.
If you decided to listen to this sample of how it sounds, please remember that I am a horrible guitar player.
My latest book, Made by Hand, in paperback on Oct. 25
I found these waterlogged insects in my backyard yesterday. I prefer to call them "children of the earth," but they are also known as "potato bugs" and "jerusalem crickets." Click image for a closer look.
Common myths: As is true for other large arthropods (e.g. solfugids), there are a number of folk tales regarding Jerusalem crickets which are untrue; first and foremost, they are not venomous. However, they can emit a foul smell and are capable of inflicting a painful bite - but neither is lethal, as some of the tales would suggest. They also do not cry like children, nor do they rub their legs together to make sounds.
My latest book, Made by Hand, in paperback on Oct. 25
My pal Kyle Wiens, founder of iFixit, is in Africa with Wired's Brian X. Chen to make a documentary about "e-waste in Africa, and the repair technicians who turn our unwanted junk into coveted treasures." He'll be reporting regularly on The Atlantic's Technology website.
How can we fight entropy? For starters, repairing our broken possessions and maintaining our machines. We need hackers, tinkerers, mechanics and repair technicians fighting for our survival. We need fixers.
The mechanics who keep the world running are the hidden strength of our civilization. They are the oil that keeps the engine of progress running smoothly. These specialized technicians are just as essential to society as the engineers who designed our technology.
But who are they? What motivates them to dissect filthy cars and inhale solder fumes every day? How do they learn their skill, in a world that disrespects their work and increasingly denigrates their trades? And finally, perhaps most importantly, at what point does repair become craftsmanship?
I'm going to find out. I'm going to go find these fixers and tell their story. I just left for Africa, where I'll be journeying through the slums of Kibera, Egypt's infamous Garbage City, and Cairo's electronics markets, revealing how and why fixers do what they do -- their tips and tricks of the trade, life stories and philosophies.
According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) website, the usual treatments for Crohn's are "drugs, nutrition supplements, [and] surgery." The drugs include anti-inflammatory drugs, steroids, immune-system suppressors, and antibiotics. Surgery is common. According to the NIH website, "two-thirds to three-quarters of patients with Crohn’s disease will require surgery." Require surgery? Those are strong words. It's a digestive problem, what about diet? No, says the NIH website. "No special diet has been proven effective for preventing or treating Crohn’s disease. . . . There are no consistent dietary rules to follow that will improve a person’s symptoms." Other authorities agree. "There's no firm evidence that what you eat actually causes inflammatory bowel disease," says the Mayo Clinic. According to the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation of America, "there is no evidence that any particular foods cause or contribute to Crohn's disease."
Reid Kimball disagrees. Reid, who lives in Oregon, designs video games. He grew up in Massachusetts. During his junior year of high school, he came down with Crohn's. It was embarrassing. One day in class, he raised his hand to go to the bathroom. By the time the teacher called on him, it was too late. A few months later, a colonoscopy showed inflammation at the junction of his small and large intestines. The surface should been smooth; instead, it looked cobblestoned.
His gastroenterologist prescribed Pentasa, an anti-inflammatory drug. If Reid had bought it himself, it would have cost $600/month. There's no cure, said the doctor. If Pentasa works, he'd need to take it for the rest of his life.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
Weezer's former bassist Mikey Welsh tweeted the above on September 26. Then he followed up with, "correction - the weekend after next." Guess what? He died on Saturday. In Chicago. According to CNN, "a cause of death had not yet been determined."
Upcoming appearances
* Oct 13-15, NYC: New York Comic-Con
* Oct 26, Torino: VIEW conference
* Nov 8, Berlin: evening reading (TBD)
* Nov 9, Munich: evening reading livestreamed in cooperation with www.lovelybooks.de (TBD)
Play This Thing reviews Megamash, a weird chimeric Flash game that combines several kinds of play and requires players to figure out how to use the mechanics of each genre to solve puzzles:
At first, it seems like a simple platformer in which you play a bunny collecting carrots and avoiding enemies. But half-way through the level, you pass through a barrier into a sidescrolling shmup, and become a spaceship shooting aliens with the space bar.
In otherwords, the game is actually a sort of mashup of seven different games, and you pass from one to the other over the course of a level. And indeed -- this is the clever part -- you often need to do something in one "game" in order to advance in the level. Thus, in the rabbit platformer, a crate you need is surrounded by impenetrable blocks; but when you fire across the shmup/platformer boundary, the bullets turn into falling fireballs, which obliterate impenetrable blocks, freeing the crate you need.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
This lovely steam-powered jalopy, built in 1884, is said to be the oldest automobile still running. It sold at auction on Friday for $4.6 million. From CNN:
The four-wheeled De Dion-Bouton et Trepardoux, nicknamed "La Marquise," was originally built for the French Count De Dion, one of the founders of the company that built it.
Fueled by coal, wood and bits of paper, the car takes about a half-hour to work up enough steam to drive. Top speed is 38 miles per hour. The car came close to that speed during what has been billed as the world's first automobile race in 1887, according to RM Auctions.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
Record label/publisher Dust-to-Digital -- creators of Victrola Favorites and Take Me To The Water, have just released what appears to be another exquisitely-packaged book and CD set. I Listen To The Wind That Obliterates My Traces is a collection of vintage vernacular photographs related to music paired with a selection of 78rpm recordings that are from the same era as the photography. From Dust-to-Digital:
The subjects range from the PT Barnum-esque Professor McRea - “Ontario’s Musical Wonder” (pictured with his complex sculptural one man band contraption) - to anonymous African-American guitar players and images of early phonographs…
The two CDs display a variety of recordings, including one-off amateur recordings, regular commercial releases, and early sound effects records. there is no narrative structure to the book, but the collision of literary quotes (Hamsun, Lagarkvist, Wordsworth, Nabakov, etc.). Recordings and images conspire towards a consistent mood that is anchored by the book’s title, which binds such disparate things as an early recording of an American cowboy ballad, a poem by a Swedish Nobel laureate, a recording of crickets created artificially, and an image of an itinerant anonymous woman sitting in a field, playing a guitar.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
Last month, I broke the news that Survival Research Laboratories was restoring their first ever machine, the "De-Manufacturing Machine" (1979), for a group exhibition titled "Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974–1981" that just opened at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Above is video of the machine in action at the show opening, co-starring a fantastic lineup of mechanically reanimated eels, chickens, and fish. Don't miss the behind-the-scenes footage of Mark Pauline's hotel room the previous night where the circuit bent contraptions were surgically fused with their new biological companions.
Portrait of a cute mature couple enjoying themselves while preparing food — Yuri Arcurs.
Rich and Tasty: Recipes for the New Class Warfare A book proposal by Anonymous.
High Concept: It now seems inevitable that the downtrodden will succeed in wresting power, wealth and influence from the elite. But we live in America. A vast swath of the unemployed are not just disenfranchised. They are highly educated. They are discerning. And they are hungry.
★
A "beta edition" of the Science Fiction Encyclopedia's third edition (which is online-only) is up and available to the public. I served as a volunteer advisor to the project, and can't wait to see how it progresses as the millions of words' worth of canonical research finds its way online. (via Scalzi) — Cory
Upcoming appearances
* Oct 13-15, NYC: New York Comic-Con
* Oct 26, Torino: VIEW conference
* Nov 8, Berlin: evening reading (TBD)
* Nov 9, Munich: evening reading livestreamed in cooperation with www.lovelybooks.de (TBD)
Everything is a Remix, the short video series previously featured here, is back with a new installment on The Matrix, in which Rob Grigsby Wilson and his friends trace the influences, lifts, cribs, and sneaks that went into the Wachowskis's "original" movie.
My latest book, Made by Hand, in paperback on Oct. 25
[Video Link] Kids around the nation will be happy to hear that Jesusween celebrators plan keep their candy for themselves and instead "give out Bibles and Christian gifts -- in a friendly way!" on October 31.
J.D. Salinger published very little, considering his literary legend. His place in classic American literature of the 20th century is secured mostly by his single novel The Catcher in the Rye, his collection of short fiction Nine Stories, and his series of short stories and novellas known collectively as the Glass Family saga. His idiosyncratic prose and dialogue, as well as his oddball characters, tend to elicit strong reactions from readers, either positive or negative.
Musician Dan Bull (YouTube) created this rap mix of Radiohead's Street Spirit to honor the protests in New York and elsewhere. "I made the song because I believe the monetary system needs to be reviewed, and the peaceful nature of the protests inspired me to get involved," he writes. "Being in the UK I couldn't attend in person, so I thought I'd attend musically instead."
My latest book, Made by Hand, in paperback on Oct. 25
Keeping things honest, Washington style.
Deep-pocketed corporate interest are writing big checks to members of the supercommittee, the group of 12 senators and members of Congress who have been tasked with coming up with a plan to cut over $1 trillion from the budget in the next decade.
Ten members of the committee got $83,000 from some of the biggest corporate donors in the country in the three-week period in August that is covered in the latest federal election filings, according to a new analysis by the Sunlight Foundation.
Brown’s veto message abdicated responsibility for protecting the rights of Californians and ignored calls from civil liberties groups and this publication to sign the bill — saying only that the issue is too complicated for him to make a decision about. He cites a recent California Supreme Court decision upholding the warrantless searches of people incident to an arrest. In his brief message, he also doesn’t say whether it’s a good idea or not.
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A good one from our friends at Photoshop Disasters. It's almost like the artist wanted to see how many ways he/she could fuck up the photo and still get it approved.
UPDATE: Marktech suspected the giant head was a result of the angle from which the photo was taken. He adjusted the perspective, and it looks 
About our time with the band:
Here's an excellent photo of Walt Disney and Salvador Dali admiring what I presume to be Walt's model train. It was likely taken around the time of their collaboration, 
My daughter and I built a guitar out of a lunchbox this weekend. It actually sounds better than the cigar box guitars I've built. For frets, it uses toothpicks.
How can we fight entropy? For starters, repairing our broken possessions and maintaining our machines. We need hackers, tinkerers, mechanics and repair technicians fighting for our survival. We need fixers.
Weezer's former bassist Mikey Welsh tweeted the above on September 26. Then he followed up with, "correction - the weekend after next." Guess what? He died on Saturday. In Chicago. 
The subjects range from the PT Barnum-esque Professor McRea - “Ontario’s Musical Wonder” (pictured with his complex sculptural one man band contraption) - to anonymous African-American guitar players and images of early phonographs…
Check out Gama-Go's 
