boingboing_net

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/327519831/as-fuel-prices-soar.html

Snip from an article in today's New York Times about a slew of designers and firms developing new models of airships. These passenger-carrying aircraft float on the wind, rather than being propelled solely by fuel (more precise explanation here). And, ah, hopefully they don't blow up in the sky or whatever.

As the cost of fuel soars and the pressure mounts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, several schemes for a new generation of airship are being considered by governments and private companies. “It’s a romantic project,” said Mr. Massaud, 45, sitting amid furniture designs in his Paris studio, “but then look at Jules Verne.”

It has been more than 70 years since the giant Hindenburg zeppelin exploded in a spectacular fireball over Lakehurst, N.J., killing 36 crew members and passengers, abruptly ending an earlier age of airships. But because of new materials and sophisticated means of propulsion, a diverse cast of entrepreneurs is taking another look at the behemoths of the air.

Mr. Massaud, a designer of hotels in California and a stadium in Mexico, has not ironed out the technical details, nor has he found financiers or corporate backers for his project — to create a 690-foot zeppelin shaped like a whale, with a luxury hotel attached, that he has named Manned Cloud.

“A dirigible is something magical,” said Jérôme Giacomoni, who was 25 when he founded Aerophile with a friend. “But most of the ideas are crazy.”

boingboing_net

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/327504549/body-armor-developer.html

This video is not new, but a friend just pointed it to me. It is noteworthy because it shows a dude shooting himself in the chest and not dying. Also, because it includes mock-pizza-boxes crafted for a robbery enactment on television. The mock pizzas appear to be made of palm thatch. How do they do that?

Richard Davis, former U.S. Marine and onetime pizza delivery guy in Detroit, survived a gun shootout (he killed three armed robbers when they attacked him during a delivery). He went on to develop new forms of concealable body armor using kevlar. Those products are now widely used by military and law enforcement personnel, and private sector folks who have reason to believe they will be shot. This video tells a bit of his life story.

Richard Davis: video
[ YouTube, via, thanks, Susannah Breslin ]

boingboing_net

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/327402678/europeans-you-have-u.html

If this bill passes, then Europeans' access to the network that delivers freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, access to medicine, family, civic engagement, banking, government services, and the whole sweep of human online endeavor would last only so long as they avoided three unsubstantiated accusations of downloading music or video or software without permission.

Worse still, the bill is set to be voted upon on July 7 -- that's this Monday.

The Open Rights Group has instructions for contacting your MEP. If you live in the EU and you care about your future as a citizen of the information society, call right away and make sure your MEP knows that this matters to you.

“One week before a key vote in the reform of European law on electronic communications (”Telecom Package”), La Quadrature du Net (Squaring the Net) denounces a series of amendments aimed at closing the open architecture of the Internet for more control and surveillance of users..

…this set of amendments creates the unprecedented mechanism known as graduated response in European law; judicial authority and law courts are vacated in favour of private actors and “technical measures” of surveillance and filtering. According to rules set forth by administrative authorities and rights holders, intermediaries will be forced to cooperate in monitoring and filtering their subscribers, or they will be exposed to administrative sanctions”

See also: Three false copyright accusations and we'll cut off your Internet access

boingboing_net

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/327395725/anatomic-model-puzzl.html

Kikkerland's online shop carries the whole line, albeit at about 10 percent higher prices than other webstores that carry one or two. My advice is to check out the items here, find the ones you want and google for a cheaper one at another store. Link

boingboing_net

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/327387577/strosss-new-novel-sa.html

Today is the two hundredth anniversary of the final extinction of my One True Love, as close as I can date it. I am drunk on battery acid and wearing my best party frock, sitting on a balcony beneath a pleasure palace afloat in the stratosphere of Venus. My feet dangle over a slippery-slick rain gutter as I peek over the edge: Thirty kilometers below my heels, the metal-snowed foothills of Maxwell Montes glow red-hot. I am thinking about jumping. At least I’ll make a pretty corpse, I tell myselves. Until I melt.

And then –

boingboing_net

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/327150212/barlows-forth-of-jul.html

mediacrisis

• 12:58 Wow, I haven't slept in like this in awhile. #

booticon

• 13:06 12 hours of sleep FTW. #
• 17:51 Totally behind someone on I91 with an Obama sticker, an Apple sticker, and a Darwin emblem. I'll forgive them for driving a Nissan Murano. #
• 18:17 I'm at Enfield, CT, USA (CT, USA) - bkite.com/00QK2 #
• 19:38 In the middle of goddamn Suburbia. - bkite.com/00QOc #

boingboing_net

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/327093081/where-the-linear-cro.html

Snip from an essay published by Kevin Kelly today over on his Technium blog:

All extropic  systems -- economy, nature and technology -- are governed by self-accelerating feedback cycles. Like compounding interest, or virtuous circles, they are powered by increasing returns. Success breeds success. There is a long tail of incremental build up and then as they keep doubling every cycle, they explode out of invisibility into significance. Extropic systems can also collapse in the same self-accelerating way, one subtraction triggering many other subtractions, so in a vicious cycle the whole system implodes. Our view of the future is warped and blinded by these exponential curves.

But while progress runs on exponential curves, our individual lives proceed in a linear fashion. We live day by day by day. While we might think time flies as we age, it really trickles out steadily. Today will always be more valuable than some day in the future, in large part because we have no guarantee we'll get that extra day. Ditto for civilizations. In linear time, the future is a loss. But because human minds and societies can improve things over time, and compound that improvement in virtuous circles, the future in this dimension is a gain. Therefore long-term thinking entails the confluence of the linear and the exponential. The linear march of our time intersects the cascading rise and fall of numerous self-amplifying exponential forces. Generations, too, proceed in a linear sequence. They advance steadily one after another while pushed by the compounding cycles of exponential change.

Balancing that point where the linear crosses the exponential is what long-term thinking should be about.

boingboing_net

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/327093082/jesse-helms-leaves-t.html

To rob the Negro of his reputation of thinking through a problem in his own fashion is about the same as trying to pretend that he doesn't have a natural instinct for rhythm and for singing and dancing.

boingboing_net

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/327074852/iran-death-penalty-f.html

New legislation has been proposed in Iran that could make blogging a crime punishable by death. Cyrus Farivar has a story on today's edition of the PRI radio show The World: Iran considers harsh penalty for some bloggers (3:30).

Over at Global Voices, Hamid Tehrani writes:

On Wednesday, Iranian members of parliament voted to discuss a draft bill that seeks to “toughen punishment for disturbing mental security in society.” The text of the bill would add, “establishing websites and weblogs promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy,” to the list of crimes punishable by death.

In recent years, some Iranian bloggers have been sent to jail and many have had their sites filtered. If the Iranian parliament approves this draft bill, bloggers fear they could be legally executed as criminals. No one has defined what it means to “disturb mental security in society”.

Such discussion concerning blogs has not been unique to Iran. It shows that many authorities do not only wish to filter blogs, but also to eliminate bloggers!

Image: "Women In Black," by Matthew Winterburn, who has some really neat photos of Iran in his Flickr stream.

boingboing_net

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/327066125/some-douche-steals-i.html

The headstone marking the final resting place of deceased Joy Division singer Ian Curtis is suddenly missing.

Whoever stole it is a total douche, and deserves a special place in hell where screaming emo demons torture them with burns from a thousand clove cigarettes, poke them with a million blunt eyeliner applicators, and blind their eyes with painfully asymmetrical hair extensions for all eternity.

The grave marker, wherever it is now, reads: "Ian Curtis 18 - 5 - 80" and the words "Love Will Tear Us Apart".

Here is a story in the Times UK, and above is a music video by Jonathan Beamish for the earliest recorded version of "Love Will Tear us Apart," produced as a John Peel Session for the BBC in 1979 (jesus! 30 years ago, wow).

boingboing_net

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/327066126/captain-america-fuck.html

Happy Fourth of July, everyone. Blow some shit up!

Captain America Fuck Yeah
[YouTube; the song in this unauthorized and infringalicious fan video was lifted from the great Matt Stone and Trey Parker epic, Team America: World Police, referenced in these BB posts of yore: 1, 2.]

boingboing_net

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/326889359/new-eboy-peecol-figu.html

boingboing_net

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/326860987/tattooed-living-zomb.html

boingboing_net

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/326860988/lost-scenes-from-met.html

Among the footage that has now been discovered, according to the unanimous opinion of the three experts that ZEITmagazin asked to appraise the pictures, there are several scenes which are essential in order to understand the film: The role played by the actor Fritz Rasp in the film for instance, can finally be understood. Other scenes, such as for instance the saving of the children from the worker’s underworld, are considerably more dramatic...

The rediscovered material is in need of restoration after 80 years; the pictures are scratched, but clearly recognizable. Martin Koerber, the restorer of the hitherto longest known version of “Metropolis”, who also examined the footage, said to ZEITmagazin: “No matter how bad the condition of the material may be, the original intention of the film, including all of its minor characters and subplots, is now once again tangible for the normal viewer. The rhythm of the film has been restored.”

boingboing_net

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/326860989/bugs-have-creepy-fac.html

boingboing_net

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/326847849/america-loves-drugs.html

The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy tried to dismiss the study, Bloomberg News reported:

Trying to find a link between drug use and drug enforcement doesn't make sense, said Tom Riley, spokesman for the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy in Washington. "The U.S. has high crime rates but we spend a lot on law enforcement and prison,'' Riley said yesterday in a telephone interview. "Should we spend less? We're just a different kind of country. We have higher drug use rates, a higher crime rate, many things that go with a highly free and mobile society."

Funny, ONDCP takes precisely the opposite line whenever a state considers liberalizing its marijuana laws. In a March press release, deputy Drug Czar Scott Burns railed against a New Hampshire proposal to decriminalize marijuana, saying such a move "sends the wrong message to New Hampshire's youth, students, parents, public health officials and the law enforcement community," and would lead to "more drugs, drug users and drug dealers on their streets and communities."

boingboing_net

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/326813952/serialization-of-the.html

My friend Joe Hutsko contacted with the intriguing offer to serialize his novel, The Deal, on Boing Boing. I jumped at the chance. I read The Deal when it first came out in 1999 and loved the thrilling story about a Apple-like company's undertaking to create an iPhone-like device.

Here's a link to Chapter 05 as a PDF. (Here's chapter 1 and an introduction to the book, and here are the previous chapters)

To buy a paperback copy of the book, visit JOEyGADGET or purchase directly from Amazon.

boingboing_net

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/326769913/video-documentary-on.html

boingboing_net

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/326705248/interview-with-charl.html

boingboing_net

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/326705249/nyc-cops-harass-club.html

Last year, New York police officers were seen dancing in the streets just before arresting four men in a city nightclub on charges of selling $100 worth of cocaine. It took six months and the men's life savings, but their names were finally cleared when prosecutors took the unusual step of announcing in court that the men had committed no crime.

That's because club surveillance video shows that the undercover cops had no contact with the accused men in the two hours they were in the club.

Now, club owner Eduardo Espinoza says the police are retaliating against him.

boingboing_net

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/326705250/xkcds-choices-now-an.html

jenlight

omgwhatareyoulookingat?