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Jay Lake has just published Mainspring, a stupendous clockpunk novel about a young man's quest to find -- and wind up -- the mainspring of the planet. Lake made his prodigious reputation in alternative and independent presses, and Mainspring marks his debut with a major house, Tor Books.
Mainspring is a nonstop adventure yarn that's the equal of anything from Fritz Leiber or Robert Howard, with a premise that's so mindbendingly weird that it'll have you giggling in public. The idea is that the universe is a giant, magnificent clockwork, the planets themselves on gears whose teeth are visible in the night sky. A humble apprentice is catapulted into adventure when an angel charges him with a quest to save the world from ruin when its mainspring winds down.
There's zeppelin battles, demented theology, and lots and lots of clocky, mechanical goodness here. This is blasphemy at its finest.
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Howard Rheingold, a pioneering Internet writer and oft-cited Boing Boing inspiration turned 60 yesterday. Rheingold's Virtual Communities inspired me to join The WELL, and I was privileged to be interviewed for his Smart Mobs. Howard is a brilliant thinker, a stirring writer, an inspiring speaker and an unstoppable shoe-painter.
Happy birthday, Howard! You're an inspiration to us all!
(Thanks, Justin!)
(Image ganked from Wikipedia)
Ethan Kaplan is Head of Tech for Warner Bros Records and he's one of the good guys, a 28-year-old geek who's trying valiantly to get the record industry to stop fighting the weather and embrace technology. To that end, he reports on REM's latest venture, REM in Dublin, where the band encouraged fans to bring cameras to their shows and record and upload audio and video and upload it, then the band blogged their tour and linked to their favorite fan-recordings.
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I love Sarah Hood's "Landscape" jewelry, made from model train landscape miniatures. I gave my mom a necklace like this for her birthday a couple years ago, and she adores it.
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(via Craft)
Toypography blocks are kids' alphabet toys that can be used to spell words in Japanese characters or Roman ones -- the characters snap apart and re-form across multiple alphabets.
Link
(via Grow A Brain)
I love the idea of science fiction turning its lens on the present, of finding the same frisson of futuristic speculation in looking around at the contemporary world. Gibson's insights on the subject are laser-focused, as his commentary on film adaptations of literature and several other subjects.
Link (via Futurismic)TVP: But having said that, isn't it a bit uncanny that all of the dystopian texts of science-fiction appear to be aiming at the present that we're experiencing right now?
WG: Well, I would find that spookier if I had been believing all along that those sort of dystopian themes in science fiction were about some sort of vision of the future. I think they were actually like being perceived in the past when that stuff was being written. 1984 is a powerful book precisely because Orwell didn't have to make a lot of shit up. He had Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin as models for what he was doing. He only had to dress it up a little bit, sort of pile it up in a certain way to say, "this is the future." But the reason it's powerful is that it resonates of history. It doesn't resonate back from the future, it resonates out of modern history. And the power with which it resonates is directly contingent on the sort of point-for-point mimesis, like sort of point-for-point realism, in terms of what we know happened.
Link, Link to slideshow
The newspaper's content is not exactly hard-hitting. It covers the basics of local politics and the writers translate stories from English papers into Urdu. Still, the paper is widely read and appreciated by Muslims in Tripplicane and Chennai where the paper has a circulation of 20,000.While the Musalman is a Muslim newspaper, it is a hub of South Asian liberalism, employing both women and non-Muslims. Half the katibs are women and the chief reporter is Hindu. Staff members say that Indira Gandhi, former prime minister of India, once called the business the epitome of what modern India should be.
Love this Worth1000 photoshopping contest on the theme of "medical anomalies." A photoshopper's sideshow exhibit.
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Mashup legend Girl Talk hijacked his own set at the Montreal Jazz Festival last month. Towards the end of his set, he walked out of the auditorium and set up his laptop in the parking lot with two 200W speakers powered by a generator. 400 people converged on the lot while Girl Talk did another set, open air, no permit, while the cops looked on in bewildered amusement.
Open Source Video, the "open" copyright documentary, captured the event for posterity.
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(Thanks, Brett!)
So, this is dumb for (at least) two reasons:
1. Some teenager will hack this by attacking the least secure implementation of BD+ -- the manufacturer who makes the most mistakes. The BD+ people will argue that BD+ wasn't cracked -- some idiotic company's bad BD+ version was cracked. Yes, true. And that's why BD+ doesn't work: it has to be implemented by companies whose customers don't want BD+.
2. It doesn't matter if BD+ works. There's HD-DVD and all the other compromised DRMs, with the same works released on all of them. If BD+ survives, it's only because DRM crackers can get everything BD+ protects more easily by cracking something else. As the bear joke goes, "I don't have to outrun the bear -- I only have to outrun you." Another analogy: BD+ may be an impregnable steel door, but it protects a safe whose other five walls are made of rice-paper.
Still, it'll be funny to watch BD+ get creamed by a Scandinavian 16-year-old who only started caring about this stuff when the MPAA subverted his country's legal system in a failed attempt to shut down The Pirate Bay (other trackers may be run by the MPAA as honey-pots -- accept no imitations!) Link
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The Net Neutrality fight is over whether carriers like AT&T should be allowed to charge us three times for our Internet connections. Right now, we pay twice. In the example of Boing Boing, you pay for your Internet connection and we pay for our Internet connection. In the net discrimination world, carriers like AT&T would be able to degrade your connection to Boing Boing unless we paid a fee for "premium service" for the carrier to send you the Internet stuff you ask for.
In Weinberger's essay, he argues that the only solution to Net Neutrality is to kill the carriers' traditional business-model of making profit by selling additional services on their networks -- to "delaminate" carriers, separating providers of bits from providers of services.
Carriers are gigantic corporate welfare bums. They receive an enormous state subsidy in the form of a right of way that gets them into every household in America. Imagine if the location of every tunnel, pole, and line had to be contracted for and paid for separately -- the carriers would go bust.
I say, if the telcos don't want to use our largesse to benefit us, let's take all that lovely right of way back again. Buy out their wires at a fair market price and give their state monopoly on right of way to someone who wants to earn a profit in the public interest -- not by using our connections to bilk network service providers out of "premium service" fees.
Delaminate the bastards. The only way to get Net Neutrality with teeth is by changing the business models of the businesses providing us with access. Peel apart the layers like a piece of rotting plywood.LinkThe first layer will be for companies that want to provide access to the Internet. We'll pay them to let us attach a computer, cell phone or any other device — even a Princess Phone, once we get it all VoIPed up — to the Internet and begin to send and receive bits. As many bits as we want. All bits treated equally. The companies can compete over price, bandwidth, uptime, and other properties of the network.
The upper layer will be for companies that want to provide content and services using the Internet.
The health of these two layers is reciprocal: Customers will use more bits because there are more services and content available to them in the next layer. There will be more services and content because the market now has lots of bandwidth, enough to handle new types of applications.
Link (Thanks, Alex!)
The resulting imperative is an immediate moratorium on additional coal-fired power plants without CCS. A surge in global coal use in the last few years has converted a potential slowdown of CO2 emissions into a more rapid increase. But the main reason for the proposed moratorium is that a CO2 molecule from coal, in effect, is more damaging than a CO2 molecule from oil. CO2 in readily available oil almost surely will end up in the atmosphere, it is only a question of when, and when does not matter much, given its long lifetime. CO2 in coal does not need to be released to the atmosphere, but if it is, it cannot be recovered and will make disastrous climate change a near certainty.
(Image ganked from Jay Dugger's Flickr photostream: Unknown Coal Plant Near Saint Louis, Missouri)
Ian sez, "The Wellcome Trust, one of the UK's largest medical charities, has released its image collection under Creative Commons licenses, with a new web site to search through it. I'm not sure how many thousand images there are, but for science teachers and anyone doing research into the history of medicine and biosciences, this will be a huge bonus."
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(Thanks, Ian!)
A Japanese artisan makes the superb steampunk watches -- neatly tying together two of my fetishes, timekeeping and Victorian inventor aesthetic. Dear Lord, there's a lot to love here. I want three more arms so I can buy five of them and wear one on each wrist.
Link, Link to more work
(Thanks, Robert!)
Assload of steampunkery on Boing Boing
