After a long hiatus, I'm back at my podcast, and to kick it off, I'm reading my 2005 novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, "A miraculous story of secrets, lies, magic and Internet connectivity." It's going to take a while -- this is a looong book -- and I'm really looking forward to it. I haven't re-read this book since it was published, and it's been enough time that it's like reading something someone else wrote, which is really cool and fun.

Here's the Publishers' Weekly summary:

"It's only natural that Alan, the broadminded hero of Doctorow's fresh, unconventional SF novel, is willing to help everybody he meets. After all, he's the product of a mixed marriage (his father is a mountain and his mother is a washing machine), so he knows how much being an outcast can hurt. Alan tries desperately to behave like a human being'or at least like his idealized version of one. He joins a cyber-anarchist's plot to spread a free wireless Internet through Toronto at the same time he agrees to protect his youngest brothers (members of a set of Russian nesting dolls) from their dead brother who's now resurrected and bent on revenge." MP3 Link, Podcast feed link

Julian Kreusser is an adorable foodie five-year-old with his own cooking show, "The Big Kitchen With Food" on Portland cable access TV. He cooks others' recipes and his own ("Yummy Yummy Citrus Boy") and he's absolutely fabulous. BrooklynTwang sez, "his story is full of win - there is the coolness of a 5 year old boy who loves cooking, the refreshingness of a cooking show with an awkward host, and what appears to be some very cool free range parenting, encouraging the kids enthusiasm for something and letting him use food processors, stoves, etc. to follow his muse. I just watched an episode and it was rad. It even included a plug from Julian to buy your food locally because its better for you!"

Five-Year-Old Chef Gets His Own Show, (Thanks, BrooklynTwang

(Warning, explicit content: the video below shows a man being shot to death).

In the early hours of New Year's Day, 27-year-old BART police officer Johannes Mehserle shot and killed 22-year old Oscar Grant. A number of people who were riding the BART train that night witnessed the shooting, and shot video or photos on handheld cameras or phones. The victim's family today filed a lawsuit for $25 million. Five days after the shooting, the accused officer still has not given a statement. He is said to be have received death threats and authorities are apparently moving him from place to place to protect him from harm. Some people are speculating the shooting may have been an accident -- the officer may have grabbed his gun by mistake because he thought he was instead grabbing a Taser device. I have operated both devices, though certainly not in those extreme stress conditions, and I find that argument hard to understand. The weapons are so different. Snip from SF Chron article, to that point:

[Use-of-force training and research firm founder Bruce Siddle] said changes in how the brain processes information in a stressful situation might have led the officer to mistake the butt of his service weapon for the Taser. But other experts found the idea that the shooting resulted from such a mix-up hard to believe.

"That's as reflexive as you getting in on the driver's side of the car (instead of) the passenger side if you want to drive it," [Florida criminologist George] Kirkham said. "There's no remote similarity to a conventional firearm. ... The Taser is just like apples and oranges."

The fact that so many videos and images are surfacing in this case is significant, because each set of images provides a different view of the killing, with different visual information. Snip from that same SF Chron article:

Roy Bedard, who has trained police officers around the world, advanced a different theory after his first viewing of the video: that the shooting was a pure accident, a trigger pulled because of a loss of balance or a loud noise.

But in an indication of how the videos might move the investigation, Bedard reached a different conclusion after viewing the shooting from a different angle.

"Looking at it, I hate to say this, it looks like an execution to me," he said. "It really looks bad for the officer. ... We have to get inside his head and figure out what he was thinking when he fired the shot."

I first heard about the story from Jake Appelbaum's blog: BART Police (in Oakland) murdered a man on NYE. Here is one video (nsa.org). Here is another released by a Bay Area CBS affiliate -- first, we see the entire, raw footage a 19 year old eyewitness shot on her camcorder, then we hear her explain what she saw and experienced -- she says a female BART police officer tried to forcibly confiscate her camcorder.

Here is still another video (YouTube), and many YouTube users are annotating and re-uploading video to offer amateur opinions on what's going on, and who did what, why.

Today's Worth1000 photoshopping contest strikes gold with the magna-ification of screen idols. Vincent Price is a natural for the dewy-eyed treatment.

Vintage Hollywood Manga

The latest in Flickr user Jek in the Box's series of mystical sock monkeys is "Saras Sock Vati," a Hindu deity in sensible elasticated wool. Don't miss the Sock Buddha and Sock de Milo.

saras sock vati (via Neatorama)

Scuba_SM sez, "I found this site about early firefighter's respirators. The embellishments like the decorative plaque and beveled glass on the air gauge show the craftsmanship that went into it. I think it's pieces like this that really capture the steampunk fan's imagination."

Vajen Mask (Thanks, Scuba_SM!)

Ralph Cooksey-Talbott is a landscape photographer who studied under Ansel Adams in Yosemite in the 1970's. Ansel published one of his photographs in the portfolio section of his book "Polaroid Technique Manual." Ansel and Orah Moore, another of Ansel’s students, suggested that he shorten his name to Cooksey-Talbott, and that's the name he's worked under ever since.

Cooksey is currently doing vertical panoramic photography that is reminiscent in composition to monumental Asian landscape ink-on-silk paintings. He calls them Vertoramas and I think they are exceptionally beautiful. Besides selling prints, Cooksey provides many of his images as free desktop pictures (here's some zipped sets or just check for a Free Desktop link across the top when you're browsing his galleries). And he's also put up a lot of informative tutorial articles and videos on his site.

--Bruce (Thanks, Howard!)

Cooksey-Talbott Gallery

(Shawn Connally and Bruce Stewart are guest bloggers)

Three German children under the age of 8 were caught trying to get to Africa so two of them could get married. In warm environs, no less.

When asked why they were going, groom-to-be Mika explained his seemingly simple plan.

"We wanted to take the train to the airport, and then catch a plane, then we would unpack, and get married once we arrived. Then we wanted to go for a little holiday," he said.

There’s a slightly different version of the story on SkyNews, with a quote from a shocked and amazed mother. Now that may be taking free-range kids a bit too far!

Child elopers' Africa plan foiled (Thanks, Katie Wilson!)

(Shawn Connally and Bruce Stewart are guest bloggers)

Ed Begley, Jr, says:

Thought I would send along this video from my friend Jay Leno about a new wind turbine called the MagWind from Enviro-Energies that he and I will be installing soon. As many of you have asked about "vertical axis wind turbines," I thought you'd like to see the latest in this technology.

Jay Leno's wind turbine

Randell Mills, founder of BlackLight Power, claims to have invented a reactor that makes hydrogen atoms drop to an energy state below ground level, which causes them to release "100 times as much energy as you’d get by just burning the hydrogen." IEEE Spectrum interviewed several physicists about it, and they say it's poppycock. Nevertheless, the company developing the technology has received $60 million in funding.

“This is scientific nonsense—there is no state of hydrogen lower than the ground state,” says Wolfgang Ketterle, an MIT scientist and a Nobel Prize laureate in physics. “Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, and it’s had time enough to find its ground state.”

Anthony Leggett, a professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and also a Nobel laureate, says that quantum mechanics is “consistent with just about everything we know about atomic physics, so the onus is firmly on anyone who wants to discard it to prove his case.” He adds, “I don’t see that [BlackLight] has got anywhere near doing this.”

But turn to Randell Mills, the founder, chairman, chief executive, and president of BlackLight Power, and he’ll tell you that this lower-energy hydrogen, which he calls hydrino, is very real indeed.

“We produce hydrino on demand,” he tells IEEE Spectrum, adding that his team has isolated and characterized hydrino’s properties using spectroscopy and has even created hydrino-rich materials it can provide for analysis.

BlackLight Power says it's developing a revolutionary energy source—and it won't let the laws of physics stand in its way

Tom Teodorczuk of the Guardian interviews BB guest blogger alum Clay Shirky about the future of media. For traditional media, he says, "2009 is going to be a bloodbath."

The things that the Huffington Post or the Daily Beast have are good storytelling and low costs. Newspapers are going to get more elitist and less elitist. The elitist argument is: "Be the Economist or New Yorker, a small, niche publication that says: 'We're only opening our mouths when what we say is demonstrably superior to anything else on the subject.'" The populist model is: "We're going to take all the news pieces we get and have an enormous amount of commentary. It's whatever readers want to talk about." Finding the working business model between them in that expanded range is the new challenge.

Why pay for it at all? The steady loss of advertising revenue, accelerated by the recession, has normalised the idea that it's acceptable to move to the web. Even if we have the shallowest recession and advertising comes back as it inevitably does, more of it will go to the web. I think that's it for newspapers.

Clay Shirky on traditional media

Justin Hall twittered this website:

"The Texas Border Sheriff's Coalition has joined BlueServo in a public-private partnership to deploy the Virtual Community Watch, an innovative real-time surveillance program designed to empower the public to proactively participate in fighting border crime. The TBSC BlueServo Virtual Community Watch is a network of cameras and sensors along the Texas-Mexico border that feeds live streaming video to www.BlueServo.net. Users will log in to the BlueServo website and directly monitor suspicious criminal activity along the border via this virtual fence."

Virtual Stake Outs - Live Border Cameras

Animator Nina Paley's brilliant film, "Sita Sings The Blues," has been wowing the festival circuit but you're probably not going to see it anytime soon. That's because the company that controls the synch rights to the 80+ year old music in the film want so much money for licensing that Paley can't afford to distribute her movie, despite all the critical acclaim.

Question Copyright has a 42-minute interview with Paley on the heartbreak of having to strangle her acclaimed art.

After pouring three years of her life into making the film, and having great success with audiences at festival screenings, she now can't distribute it, because of music licensing issues: the film uses songs recorded in the late 1920's by singer Annette Hanshaw, and although the recordings are out of copyright, the compositions themselves are still restricted. That means if you want to make a film using these songs from the 1920s, you have to pay money — a lot of money.

It's a classic example of how today's copyright system suppresses art, effectively forcing artists to make creative choices based on licensing concerns rather than on their artistic vision.

The music in Sita Sings The Blues is integral to the film: entire animation sequences were done around particular songs. As Nina says in the interview, incorporating those particular recordings was part of her inspiration. To tell her — as many people did — to simply use different music would have been like telling her not to do the film at all. And that's part of her point: artists "internalize the permission culture", which in turn affects the kinds of art they make.

How Copyright Restrictions Suppress Art: An Interview With Nina Paley About "Sita Sings The Blues" (Thanks, Karl!)

These Etsy-sold CCTV decals make a handsome addition to your white goods, porcelain fittings, and other smooth surfaces.

SECURITY CAMERAS vinyl toilet fridge wall or window decal (Thanks, Iain!)

Looks like Apple's going to drop the DRM on the music in the iTunes store -- but there's no indication that the DRM that's too evil to be borne for music will be likewise dropped from audiobooks and video. Right now, Apple will only sell audiobooks from Audible -- and Audible will only sell audiobooks with DRM (even if the author and publisher don't want it). I don't get it -- if DRM is so foul that it can't be borne when it comes to music sales, why is it acceptable for other kinds of media in the iTunes store? And if Apple is so committed to getting rid of DRM, why did it renew Audible's exclusive, DRM-only audiobook deal, after Steve Jobs said that he wanted to get the DRM out of the iTunes store? And as the single largest shareholder in Disney, you'd think The Steve could get someone there to consider selling videos without DRM?

"Over the last six years songs have been $0.99 [79p]. Music companies want more flexibility. Starting today, 8 million songs will be DRM free and by the end of this quarter, all 10 million songs will be DRM free," he told the crowd.

Apple has also revised its pricing structure, offering a two-tier system with songs available for $0.69 and $1.29. Prices will vary slightly in the UK.

At present, the firm has a one-price-fits-all strategy - currently 79p per track - with no subscription fee.

The new model will have a varied pricing structure, with what the company calls "better quality iTunes Plus" costing more.

Apple to end music restrictions (Thanks, Debcha!)

Cookie Monster devours a pair of buildings that resemble the the Twin Towers. From the cover of the October 1976 issue of Sesame Street magazine.

The Wall Street Journal reports that U.S. citizens have suddenly become quite thrifty.

Usually, frugality is good for individuals and for the economy. Savings serve as a reservoir of capital that can be used to finance investment, which helps raise a nation's standard of living. But in a recession, increased saving -- or its flip side, decreased spending -- can exacerbate the economy's woes. It's what economists call the "paradox of thrift."

U.S. household debt, which has been growing steadily since the Federal Reserve began tracking it in 1952, declined for the first time in the third quarter of 2008. In the same quarter, U.S. consumer spending growth declined for the first time in 17 years.

Hard-Hit Families Finally Start Saving, Aggravating Nation's Economic Woes

Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, author of Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries, tells the entertaining story of what it's like to be sucked into a black hole.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson: Death by Black Hole (via How Good is That?)

Some high school students in Maryland are reportedly taping fake license plates to their cars, then speeding past speed cameras so that owners of the cars with the real license plates get fined.

Students from Richard Montgomery High School dubbed the prank the Speed Camera "Pimping" game, according to a parent of a student enrolled at one of the high schools.

Originating from Wootton High School, the parent said, students duplicate the license plates by printing plate numbers on glossy photo paper, using fonts from certain websites that "mimic" those on Maryland license plates. They tape the duplicate plate over the existing plate on the back of their car and purposefully speed through a speed camera, the parent said. The victim then receives a citation in the mail days later.

Students are even obtaining vehicles from their friends that are similar or identical to the make and model of the car owned by the targeted victim, according to the parent.

Local teens claim pranks on county's Speed Cams (Via The Agitator)

Campaigning law prof Charlie Nesson wants the whole world to see how the RIAA shakes down students, so he's asked for the proceedings to be webcast. The RIAA wants to hide under a rock:

A Harvard Law professor representing some students sued by the recording industry for illegally downloading music has filed a motion to broadcast online the proceedings of two cases being heard by the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts.

The professor, Charles R. Nesson, argues in the motion that to stream the court proceedings over the Internet — or as the students put it in their request, 'admit the Internet into the courtroom' — would help the public understand the legal issues at play in the industry’s lawsuits against thousands of computer users, many of whom are college students.

The plaintiff, the Recording Industry Association of America, which announced last month that it would stop bringing new cases against students in favor of working with Internet Service Providers to take action against repeat offenders, has described its lawsuits as an educational effort focused on illuminating the consequences of illegally sharing music — something Mr. Nesson takes a jab at in the motion.

'Surely education is the purpose of the Digital Deterrence Act of 1999, the constitutionality of which we are challenging,' the motion reads. 'How can RIAA object? Yet they do, fear of sunlight shone upon them.'

Defendants in Music-Industry Lawsuit Ask for Trial to Be Broadcast Online (Thanks, Michael!)

NRK, the Norwegian public broadcaster, has had to pull its legal MP3 archive of all 212 Beatles songs. Turns out the agreement they had with the local rights society didn't mean what they thought it meant.

Our new agreement with rights holder TONO gives us rights to publish radio and TV shows we aired a long time ago. But the agreement NRK has with rights holders IFPI and FONO only allows us to publish shows that has been aired the last four weeks. And since “Our daily Beatles” was aired in 2007, we have to pull it from the podcast (see below for details about the agreements).

NRK pulls “Our daily Beatles” podcast because of rights (Thanks, Oyvind!)

Ethan Ham sez,

Turbulence.org recently released “Tumbarumba,” a project by Benjamin Rosenbaum and myself (Ethan Ham). Tumbarumba is an anthology in the form of a browser add-on. To read the stories, readers must stumble upon them while browsing the web. The browser add-on will occasionally insert a story fragment into a web page as it loads it. The result is a disorienting surreal sentence that sometimes is nonsensical and sometimes amusingly close making sense. If the reader spots the fragment, they can interact with it in a way that will cause the full story to appear—albeit in the format of the web page on which it was found.

The authors in the anthology are:

Haddayr Copley-Woods, Greg van Eekhout, Stephen Gaskell, James Patrick Kelly, Mary Anne Mohanraj, David Moles, John Phillip Olsen, Tim Pratt, Kiini Ibura Salaam, David J. Schwartz, Heather Shaw, Jeff Spock

Tumbarumba (Thanks, Ethan!)

The coolest thing about your kid's first Christmas is that you get to watch her unwrap all the amazing kiddy treasures that your friends and family found. It was a fantastic haul this year, no doubt about it, and my favorite was Mommy?, a 2006 pop-up book by Maurice "Where the Wild Things Are" Sendak that I'm thinking of keeping for myself.

Mummy? is a practically wordless, six-page popup that follows the travails of a little boy who's looking for his mother in a castle full of monsters. The left panel shows junior saying "Mommy?" and the right panel shows a leering monster; flip it up and see how the boy has defeated it. Mommy?'s dimensionality is fabulous -- the monsters explode in all directions, portrayed in fabulous grisly style that's a cross between Big Daddy Roth and Marc Davis's Haunted Mansion ghouls.

The flip-up right panels showing the monsters' comeuppance are witty, marvellously engineered, and deeply satisfying. The ending -- the Bride of Frankenstein bursting through the door, saying, "Baby!" -- is a great touch. This is the kind of papercraft you can feel good about giving to a kid (even if you don't want to part with it).

Mommy?

A UK campaign to raise money to buy London bus-ads to promote atheism was a massive success -- 800 of the busses took the streets today, and the campaign is spreading around the world.

Today, thanks to many Cif readers, the overall total raised for the Atheist Bus Campaign stands at a truly overwhelming £135,000, breaking our original target of £5,500 by over 2400%. Given this unexpected amount, I'm very excited to tell you that 800 buses – instead of the 30 we were initially aiming for – are now rolling out across the UK with the slogan, "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life", in locations all over England, Scotland and Wales, including Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, York, Cardiff, Devon, Leeds, Bristol and Aberdeen.

From today's launch, two hundred of the buses will run in London, because the campaign was originally started as a positive counter-response to the Jesus Said ads running on London buses in June 2008. These ads displayed the URL of a website which stated that non-Christians "will be condemned to everlasting separation from God and then you spend all eternity in torment in hell … Jesus spoke about this as a lake of fire prepared for the devil". Our rational slogan will hopefully reassure anyone who has been scared by this kind of evangelism.

The atheist bus journey (Thanks, Paul!)

Julian Gough sends us his NYT piece, "A Modest Proposal For The Publishing Industry": "It's a piece in yesterday's New York Times. It's a parody of all the recent, massive, Treasury bailout plans. (Having done banks, insurance and cars, the Treasury are now solve the unread books crisis for us). It is written as an official statement from Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, using language taken directly from all his real statements (with just a few key words changed)."

"As we all know, lax writing practices earlier this decade led to irresponsible writing and irresponsible reading. This simply put too many families into books they could not finish. We are seeing the impact on readers and neighborhoods, with 5 million readers now behind on their reading. Some are just walking away from novels they should never have been reading in the first place. What began as a sub-prime reading problem has spread to other, less-risky readers, and contributed to excess inventories.

These troubled novels are now parked, or frozen, on the shelves of libraries, bookstores, and other reading institutions, preventing them from financing readable novels. The inability to determine the worth of these novels has fostered uncertainty about novels in general, and even about the cultural condition of the institutions that own them. The normal buying and selling of nearly all types of literature has become challenged.

The role of the ratings agencies cannot be overlooked in the creation of this crisis. The Pulitzer, Booker and the National Book Foundation continued to award these novels their top ratings, even as unread copies piled up all over America.

A Modest Proposal For The Publishing Industry on nytimes.com (stupid registration required), A Modest Proposal For The Publishing Industry on Julian's site (no registration required!) (Thanks, Julian!)

Josette from O'Reilly sez, "Call for makers! It is now official the long awaited first UK Maker Faire will take place in Newcastle, UK on March 14th-15th! Maker Faire seeks to inspire, inform, connect and entertain thousands of Makers and aspiring Makers of all ages and backgrounds through the public gathering of tech enthusiasts, crafters, educators, tinkerers, hobbyists, students, authors and commercial exhibitors."

Maker Faire seeks to inspire, inform, connect and entertain thousands of Makers and aspiring Makers of all ages and backgrounds through the public gathering of tech enthusiasts, crafters, educators, tinkerers, hobbyists, students, authors and commercial exhibitors.

The first UK Maker Faire will take place in Newcastle 14-15 March 2009 as part of Newcastle ScienceFest - a 10 day festival celebrating creativity and innovation.

In the last decade Newcastle has joined forces with neighbouring Gateshead and has transformed itself into one of Europe's most exciting places. Architectural icons such as the gigantic Angel of the North (whose 54m wingspan is longer than a jumbo jet!) best symbolises the region's unquenchable thirst for creativity and sense of fun.

Maker Faire, Newcastle, UK 14-15 March 2009 (Thanks, Josette!)

Molly sez, "Robbins Barstow's film Disneyland Dream was included in this year's National Film Registry (25 films selected by the Library of Congress annually). He is a tireless advocate for amateur film and a great supporter of Home Movie Day. Steve Martin wrote to Robbins Barstow after the news of Disneyland Dream being selected for the Film Registry. Martin appears in the home movie, he's 11 years old and worked selling guidebooks. Go home movies!"

We've blogged Robbins's amazing home movies here before. The man's a hero of the medium. Well-deserved congratulations indeed.

From the Library of Congress’s press release:

Disneyland Dream (1956)
The Barstow family films a memorable home movie of their trip to Disneyland. Robbins and Meg Barstow, along with their children Mary, David and Daniel were among 25 families who won a free trip to the newly opened Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif., as part of a ‘Scotch Brand Cellophane Tape’ contest sponsored by 3M. Through vivid color and droll narration (”The landscape was very different from back home in Connecticut”), we see a fantastic historical snapshot of Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Catalina Island, Knott’s Berry Farm, Universal Studios and Disneyland in mid-1956. Home movies have assumed a rapidly increasing importance in American cultural studies as they provide a priceless and authentic record of time and place.

The film, along with 15 other Barstow Travel Adventure titles, is available for viewing and downloading at the Internet Archive.

Robbins Barstow’s “Disneyland Dream” Named to National Film Registry, Steve Martin and Disneyland Dream (Thanks, Molly!)

The 2008 Hugo award nominations have opened -- if you were a member of the 2008 WorldCon in Denver, or have bought a membership to the 2009 WorldCon in Montreal, you're eligible to nominate. I'll be sending in my nominations this week, and just in case you were wondering, here's the stuff I wrote that's eligible for this year's ballot:

* Best novel: Little Brother, Tor, 2008
* Best related book: Content, Tachyon, 2008
* Best novella: True Names (with Benjamin Rosenbaum), published in Fast Forward, Pyr Books, 2008, edited by Lou Anders * Best novelette: The Things That Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away, Tor.com, July 2008

No matter what you plan on nominate, I urge you to send in your form! Hugo participation seems to dwindle every year. The present form's just a PDF, but they're promising a web-based one shortly (I'll post again when it's live).

Hugos

Loligo Lothario sez, "With all of the recent postings on cephalopod oriented erotica (or tentacle porn, as it is coarsely called), I had wondered if you had not stumbled on this musing on why those fixated on tentacles really lack imagination, and how other invertebrate oriented erotica can be really really hot. Invertebrates are amazingly kinky, as pointed out in some lovely marine science blog The Oyster's Garter as it looks at the sex lives of tunicates, slugs, and more. So really, why can't we get beyond the tentacle, I ask?"

Taking a step to the side, let us briefly consider phylum Mollusca class Bivalvia. Yes, bivalves at first seem boring - little sessile clam-like things that they are. However, bivalves engage in the one behavior that heretofore I think sounds like the most delightful sexual activity ever. Free spawning. I mean, seriously, think of it, you catch a sudden whif of the right scent, the right temperature, or a little shake, and then EXPLODE in pleasurable gamete release. I, myself, have had this happen right in my face in an orgy of mussel bukkake, but picture the potential for some nubile nymphet subjected to the experiments of a dastardly doctor in fusing the sexual needs of a scallop with the body of his scientific muse.

This is of course not to mention the abilities for bivalves to form threadlike attachments with their byssal gland, and the ever shape-changing, muscular, pulsing, turgid, bivalve foot. Or, the bizarre, soft, delicate anatomy of free swimming shell-less bivalves who, if airborne, could wreak erotic havoc on an entire countryside if presented by the proper author or animator.

A Brief Essay on the Sad Lack of Imagination in Invertebrate Oriented Erotica with Brief Notes on the Lascivious Nature of Both the Lophotrochozoa and Ecdysozoa, or, Getting Beyond "Hur hur! That Squid Tentacle Looks like Penis!"