Pygmy tarsiers, long believed extinct, have been found in Indonesia, according to a story in The Globe and Mail. In August, researchers from Texas A&M, led by Sharon Gursky-Doyen, trapped two males and a female in moutain-top mist nets on Mt. Rore Katimbo in Lore Lindu National Park in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. With distinctive eyes, the pygmy tarsiers are primates; they are"about the size of a small mouse;" they have claws instead of nails, which is a distinguishing feature.

Here's a short video from the researchers showing the pygmy tarsier running up a tree.

link to Texas A&M article.

Jack Imel playing the marimbas and tap dancing to "Pagan Love Song." (Via Filled with Chocolate Pudding!)

Longtime Boing Boing collaborator Bruce Sterling is closing the long-running Viridian Notes transmissions I enjoyed so much, and with it -- if I'm understanding correctly? -- the entire "Viridian episode" he dreamed up and nurtured over the last decade. Snip:

Recent events have clearly established that the character of the times has changed. The Viridian Design Movement was founded in distant 1999. After the years transpiring – various disasters, wars, financial collapses and a major change in political tone – the world has become a different place.

It remains only to close the Viridian episode gracefully, and to conclude with a few meditative suggestions.

As I explained in the first Viridian speech, any design movement – social movements of any kind, really – should be designed with an explicit expiration date. The year 2012 would have been the extreme to which Viridian could have persisted. Since the course of history has grown quite jittery, this longer term was spared us.

Some Viridian principles can be lightly re-phrased, buffed-up and likely made of practical use in days to come. Others are period notions to be gently tossed into the cultural compost. I could try to describe which are which – but that's a proper job for someone younger.

I'm following current events with keen interest. There's never been a better time for major political and financial interventions in the green space. However, Viridian List is about design interventions, it was not about politics or finance, so a decent reticence is in order at this juncture.

The Last Viridian Note (Thanks, Jolon)

PHOTO: "Fageda d'en Jordà," 2007, by MorBCN, of Barcelona, found on his Flickr stream.

Michael Minelli is suing Simon & Schuster because he does not think his photograph belongs in the book Hot Chicks with Douchebags.

In the book, Louis noted that Minelli's "popped-collar, spikey-haired presence was so far beyond regular douche, so far beyond uberdouche, he could spontaneously create a new element on the periodic tables--Douche Nine." At the time he was photographed by Louis, Minelli was working the door at the popular "Rehab" party at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. As first reported by Courthouse News Service, Minelli's Clark County District Court lawsuit seeks unspecified financial damages and legal fees. Last month, three New Jersey women sued Louis and his publisher over their appearance in "Hot Chicks with Douchebags," which they claimed was "vulgar" and presented them as "females who date dubious men."

Alleged "Douchebag" sues author

While on the trail to the falls in Johnston Canyon, which is a wonderful walk off a road that runs between Banff and Lake Louise, we came across this beautiful snow-made creation that declares a couple's love for each other. The snow-made man and woman were starting to melt but here's good wishes to their anonymous creators.

Lidija Davis on ReadWriteWeb summarizes current VC advice for startups and entrepreneurs:

Go back to the garage. That's the message venture capitalists at the Dow Jones VentureWire Technology Showcase in Redwood City CA today, are offering to entrepreneurs and startups.

In the midst of one of the worst economic crises the world has seen, investors are in the main optimistic, and agree that to weather this storm and come out on top, today's entrepreneur's need to change their mindset and go back to basics: go back to the garage, and success will follow.

Expect to hear startups saying "yeah, we've gone into 'garage-mode,'" modeling after the term "stealth-mode." The only trouble is what to do with all the boxes?

image source.

Brian Francis Slattery's novel Liberation is a magical, riveting poetic story of a post-economic America where the dollar has vanished and slavery has sprung up in the resulting economic chaos. It concerns the adventures of the Slick Six, a gang of fun-loving super-criminals whose unbeatable fighter, Marco, is at sea on a prison-ship when the nation falters. The guards on the ship kill the warden, begin to trade prisoners to slavers for food and fuel, and Marco kills them all, sets the ship free, sails the world, and comes back to what's left of America.

America has dissolved. New York is now the barony of The Aardvark, the crimelord who put Marco away in the first place, as punishment for the Slick Six's incursions against his territories. The Aardvark presides over the capitalization and enforcement of slave-farms across America, and he hunts all of the Slick Six with a mindless, unwavering determination to wreak perfect vengeance.

Marco resolves to find and reunite the Slick Six and to use them as a spearhead in a war on the institution of slavery and on The Aardvark, who reaps a fortune from it. And therein begins the tale, a road-novel that tears back and forth across America, told from the point of view of The Vibe, or fate, which guides the hands of all the dozens of remarkable characters in the story.

Slattery's prose style is complex, poetic, visionary and reeling, a cross between Kerouac and Bradbury, salted with Steinbeck. His people are all magic -- a tribe of stoners called the Americoids, a resurgent Sioux nation led by a visionary war-chief, a hive-like murderous circus, a free-state in Asheville presided over by an American Brahmin-turned-mayor, the prisoners on the liberated ship.

In Marco, we meet one of the great tortured heroes of fiction: an unstoppable badass who is haunted by his past as a child-soldier and who hunts now for peace with his past and a future he can be proud of. There is action and dashing in the story and true love and music and cooking and acrobatics and commerce and economics and crime and nobility. It's a heady stew, a road novel shot through with mysticism and a love of freedom that soars over the pages.

In case it's not clear, I loved this book. I can't wait to read more (I've just ordered Spaceman Blues, Slattery's first novel). This is a book to fall in love with.

Liberation on Amazon

Michael Holloway from the UK Open Rights Group sez,

Today we're proud to release ORG’s annual Review of Activities. It’s been a bumper year for digital rights. From HMRC posting half the UK’s bank details to the Darknet, to the ongoing campaign against Phorm, to three strikes and the rightsholder lobby’s so-far thwarted attempt to take control of your internet connection, this year was the year digital rights went mainstream. Thanks to generous support from the ORG community, we’ve been there giving an informed perspective on the issues to the natonal press, working with policymakers behind the scenes and mobilising the grassroots into effective action.

Threats to our digital liberties continue to menace us. 2009 will see new challenges, such as the Government’s proposed Intercept Modernisation Programme. That’s why, as we celebrate ORG’s third birthday, we’re also asking the community to renew their support for ORG. The ORG-GRO campaign is delivering excellent results (huge thanks to all the people who have contributed so far). But the leap from 750 to 1000 fivers received each month is not yet enough to guarantee us long term financial stability. We must reach our target of 1500 fivers before the end of the year. And we can’t do that without you.

ORG review of activities, Join ORG (Thanks, Michael!)

(Disclosure: I co-founded ORG and am proud to serve on its advisory board)

Today on Boing Boing Gadgets, we took Google's new iPhone voice search app for a spin, and reflected on the nostalgic smell of old NES cart sleeves, as well as the analog fluttering of old clocks.

Brownlee wrote a post in morse code about a morse code watch, and admired an ad-hoc iPhone number pad for MacBooks. Meanwhile, Joel flustered about Apple's crappy hardware DRM and made an Arrested Development connection in regards to a busted philanderer's dirty iPhone pics, which he swears are a firmware "glitch."

Guest blogger Tony Hightower gave us the scoop on organic motion: motion capture without the suit. A carbon-fiber acoustic guitar was attractively lute-like. Covert gamers cram old GameBoys into their graphing calculators. Joel deeply inhaled the miasmic retch of a Stitch himidifier.

Also in the day, Joel invited readers to goatse his new picture frame (email 2062270093 DERP tmomail.net if you'd like to get in on the fun). Brownlee wanted to play his complete Tiny Tim collection on a horrifyingly surreal SpongeBob SquarePants dock. We took a Tesla for a spin by proxy, and made a call on our banana phones.

Otherwise, Beschizza ripped apart a Boeing 788 in a stress test. and discovered a surprisingly cheap MacBook Air prototype that may not be all it seems. And Dan Lyons, aka "The Real Steve Jobs", is now being censored by Newsweek for doing exactly what he was hired for.

Oh, also. The Zune? Prepare for its imminent release.

Link

Here's Far Cry 2 technical director Dominic Guay talking about the importance of "procedural content generation" for massive online games -- basically, using software to create worlds that had previously been hand-built by artists. It makes a lot of sense, but what fascinates me is the narrative possibilities for fiction about games: these procedural systems have or will shortly attain a level of complexity that makes it impossible to predict their outcomes. It's the Halting Problem -- worlds where software off the rails could generate impossible situations, upside-down worlds, treasure heaps, cowardly monsters and brave grass. I'm thinking especially of abandonware worlds where only a few players remain and the gamemasters have stopped paying close attention. What odd maps might be drawn as the die-hards explore the outermost reaches of these worlds?

"Another big benefit [of procedural content creation] is that you end up being able to do stuff you simply couldn't do otherwise," Guay continued. "It opens up innovation fields. If you're creating things through code, you have a deeper understanding of what you're doing, and you can bake in some limitations."

"Our artists needed to be able to build not a random tree, but a type of tree," he said by way of example. "It's actually much closer to building a particle system than building traditional art assets. Artists play with parameters more than they play with vertices."

Creating those tools allowed artists to define trees based on characteristics gleaned from extensive photo reference, more than to create a number of discrete tree variants based on those references...

When a team member made a seemingly minor after-hours change to the ecosystem, it ended up increasing the asset density of the game world by 25 percent -- resulting in more than a few headaches.

"If I'm tweaking a jungle procedurally, maybe I'll just tweak it in my test map," Guay said. "But when I integrate it into the game, somewhere in the 50 square kilometer game world, maybe in just three small areas, it might cause problems, and we won't find those problems until QA uncovers them."

MIGS: Far Cry 2's Guay On The Importance Of Procedural Content (via /.)

Wagner James Au sez, "Not only are [Obama's FCC Transition Team leaders] Kevin Werbach and Susan Crawford great Net Neutrality advocates, they're also into online games/virtual worlds-- Werbach belongs to not one but *two* WoW guilds, and Crawford calls herself a "big fan" of Second Life. Agreeing with his guildmaster Joi Ito, Werbach's also a big supporter of WoW as a model for the future of work and software development."

“What [Warcraft] does,” he continued in that post, “is provide an incentive for people to develop new software and ideas for collaborative production. Many of those ideas will translate to other group activities, including those within the business world. I think MMOGs will be, at a minimum, a significant testbed for these new technologies, because users see a direct benefit and are willing to experiment with new things.”

Unsurprisingly, this perspective extends to virtual worlds like Second Life, which has been an important component in Werbach’s Supernova technology conference. On her own blog, Professor Crawford, a board member at ICANN, also counts herself “a huge fan of Second Life” for the way it lets users retain IP rights to their content (though she confesses to difficulty when it comes to moving her SL avatar around.)

Obama’s FCC Transition Team Co-chair a WoW Player

See also: Net Neutrality fighters to head Obama's FCC transition team

Hurrah! This Friday marks the return of The IT Crowd, my favorite sitcom/nerd media EVAR, back for a triumphant third season!

Although Reynholm jumped out of a high window in the last series, his playboy son Douglas (Matt Berry) shows every sign of carrying on the family name (plundering the pension fund, putting flakes of gold in the drinking water, etc) and more or less takes over tonight's very funny opening episode. That leaves our IT-department trio of geeky Moss, lazy Roy and uptight Jen slightly overshadowed. But the sweet scene where Moss and Roy try some role-play to help Moss deal with park bullies just about makes up for it.

The IT Crowd (Thanks, Alan!)

LIFE and Google have teamed up to put 10,000,000 historic images online -- about 20 percent of the images are live now. The Disneyland images are great -- here's the old Submarine Ride. LIFE photo archive hosted by Google (Thanks, Neil and Slashdot!)

This week, Boing Boing tv is debuting regular product reviews produced with Joel and the crew, and we'll blog 'em here on Gadgets first. What better way to kick the series off than a lulz-filled analysis of the Lippi Selk Bag, a sleeping bag with arms and legs that makes our Joel look like a bespectacled Gumby? The funky-chunky "sleepwear system" ranges in price from $169 to $399. I imagine they'd really come in handy at one of those outdoor all-nighter raves, unless you get lucky -- interpersonal intra-bag intercourse might be logistically difficult in these.

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Tell Joel what you think of his Gumby impersonation in the Boing Boing Gadgets comment thread for this video. And here is a direct MP4 link, if you prefer a downloadable video to the Flash embed above.

I'm doing my guestblogging assignment this week while in Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada. I came here to give a talk about Make and makers at Digitel (Digital Game and Intelligent Toy Enhanced Learning), by invitation of Mike Eisenberg of University of Colorado at Boulder's Craft Technology Lab. After my talk, my wife and I went for a hike to see some of the magnificent mountains that surround Banff. The first real snow of the season came last Sunday. I took this photo below of Mount Rundle with the Bow River making a loop in the Banff valley. The town is out of the picture to the right.

Tonight I've bought a book about the geology of Banff. Mount Rundle is on the cover. It's called How Old is that Mountain? by Chris Yorath. I want to learn more about this part of the Canadian Rockies and what they're made of.

Following our successful lift off, today on Offworld we saw the community start to extend the life of 2D Boy's brilliant indie puzzler World of Goo, and saw reason to be hopeful for Microsoft's upcoming Xbox 360 karaoke game Lips, despite entering a post-Rock Band, post-SingStar environment.

We also heard good news about continued development on Citizen Siege, the darkly political game from the developers of the Oddworld series, nearly convinced David to take a Holiday In Cambodia, and found that one of the next games that could very well suck up the majority of our time could come from... Neopets?

Link

ACCRC is in desperate straits. The Bay Area electronics recycler is going through tough times with an emergency re-org and a lack of funds to pay taxes and healthcare for its employees. Its own internal problems are compounded by a sudden drop in the price of scrap metal. ACCRC has been a friend to Make and Maker Faire, and generally anyone in the Bay Area who uses computers and electronics and wants to make sure they are recycled properly.

Alex Handy, a member of a small team stepping up to see what they can do to help, told me that "the business has always been profitable because the recovery of the metals in circuit boards, combined with the California SB-20 bounty on monitors, have always been lucrative. When copper and other scrap metal prices were through the roof two years ago, things were great. We could make enough money off of electronic recycling to fill in the gap left after monitor recycling. But copper, like oil and every other commodity of late, has bottomed out. It's not as scarce as people were anticipating because many factories worldwide aren't ordering more, or as much, thanks to the economic slow-down."

ACCRC has cut-back staff and sold off items in its inventory that still had some value. Still, ACCRC needs to raise money, and there's a Donate button on the ACCRC website. The team is trying to keep the organization afloat and survive long enough for scrap market to recover and put the organization back together. Please help if you can.

The release of the Dead Kennedys pack for Rock Band may lead to my first videogame console purchase since the Atari 5200. Dead Kennedys for Rock Band (Boing Boing Offworld)

Cool videos using a video camera mounted to a Coke bottle. Video mounted to Coke bottle

The best science fiction short video ever, only it's real. (Via Mt. Holly Mayor's Office)

BB pal Vann Hall turned me on to Europa Film Treasures, featuring, as he says, "tons of historical footage in a well-annotated website. (And downloadable with the right tools!) Seen above, a still from Jön az öcsém (1919), directed by Michael Curtiz of Casablanca fame; and John MacFadyen (1970), a Scottish animation featuring credits painted right on the film stock. And here are the most popular films on the site right now:

1. The Apple-Knockers and the Coke (1948)
2. Das Sandbad (1906)
3. Farfale (1907)
4. Das eitle Stubenmädchen (1908)
5. Gordon Highlanders (1899)

Europa Film Treasures

In 2004, ex-con Charles Manning, 61, was infected in prison by a flesh-eating bacteria that ate away at his groin. Prison doctors first thought he was just having an allergic reaction. He sued and the Washington Department of Corrections settled by giving him $300,000. From the Associated Press:

By the time he was taken to a hospital, Manning had an internal abscess that required doctors to remove several pounds of flesh from his pelvic region.

Surgeons made a replacement penis with skin from his thigh.

"Wash. prisons, inmate settle disfigured groin case" (Thanks, Scott Compton!)

I haven't played Spore yet, but I find this image of appendages in the latest Spore patch to be just the kind of Wunderkammer-esque collection that I appreciate. Brandon Boyer has more over at our new Boing Boing Offworld games blog! "EA tosses new parts into Spore patch"

I get lots of books sent to me to review. I can't read them all, even though many of them look promising. Here are a few I plan to read, eventually. I hope.

Show Me How: 500 Things You Should Know Instructions for Life From the Everyday to the Exotic

My 5-year-old daughter and I quickly paged through this book filled with cartoon-like project ideas and made a lost of things to do: grow an avocado tree from a seed, invent clay oddities, assemble a super slingshot, tell time with a poato clock, blow a humongous bubble, make a delicious s'more, and about 20 other things.

The Mental Floss History of the World: An Irreverent Romp through Civilization's Best Bits

From the publishers of mental_floss, this book contains entertaining snippets and stories in the vein of one of my favorite books, The People's Almanac. Here's an excerpt, about the Amazon:

When it’s not making people crazy, the Amazon seems to inspire bizarre, larger-than-life schemes. In 1967, American shipping magnate and billionaire Daniel Ludwig bought a larger-than-Connecticut sized chunk of the Amazon to create a gigantic industrial and agricultural complex called the Jari Project. It didn’t work out. All the construction led to massive soil erosion, screwing up the “agricultural” part of his plan. After sinking $1 billion into the project (back when $1 billion really meant something) Ludwig called it quits in 1982. It was eventually put up for sale for $1--a great deal, if you’re willing to assume $354 million in debt. The bright side: For anyone with a dollar and a dream, it’s your lucky day: the Jari Project is still for sale!

Falling off the Edge: Travels Through the Dark Heart of Globalization Time correspondent Alex Perry traveled around the world to see the effects of globalization "on the ground, instead of the executive suite."

Perry takes readers to Shenzen, China's boom city where sweatshops pay under-age workers less than $4 a day; and to Bombay, where the gap between rich and poor means million-dollar apartments overlook million-people slums. He shares a beer with Southeast Asian pirates who prey on the world's busiest shipping artery. And he puts us in the middle of a firefight between American Special Forces and the Taliban.

He shows that for every winner in our brave new world, there are tens of thousands of losers. And be they Chinese army veterans, Indian Maoist rebels or the Somali branch of al Qaeda, they are very, very angry.

Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail From Istanbul to India Travel writer Rory MacLean revisits the old South Asian "hippie trail."

In the 1960s and 1970s, hundreds of thousands of young westerners in search of enlightenment blazed the “hippie trail” that ran through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal. Forty years later, Rory MacLean revisits the trail, where he encounters the tie-dyed veterans who never made it home, meets locals reaping the rewards and regrets of westernization, and crashes up against Taliban fighters and Islamic extremism, which has turned the hippie trail into a path of dust and danger.

The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac: Styles, Stats, and Stars in Today's Game

An idiosyncratic, highly personal take on professional basketball. The illustrations and overall design are stunning. I don't even like pro sports, but I am planning to read this. Check out these sample pages (click for big).

Wham-O Super-Book: Celebrating 60 Years Inside the Fun Factory

When Carla, David, Gareth, and I edited The Happy Mutant Handbook in 1995, Carla wrote a chapter about the world's greatest toy company, Wham-O! Besides the Hula Hoop, Super Elastic Bubble Plastic, the Super Ball, Slip-n-Slide, and the Air Blaster, Wham-O made a bunch of charmingly weird but less-well-known toys, such as Cute Scoot, Sun Vu, Fun Farm, Instant Fish, Fun-Gun, and many more. This book, by Tim Walsh, presents the history of Wham-O along with lots of color illustrations from the Wham-O archives. It's already one of my treasured keepsakes.

Wham-O's irresistible toys practically define childhood for an entire generation. The Frisbee Hula Hoop SuperBall Slip 'N Slide Silly String and Hacky Sack are all cherished companions that brought kids together and still enjoy an enduring popularity today. Super-Book ("the most fantastic book ever created by science") showcases these amazing toys and a wide array of entertaining and downright odd playthings dreamed up by a company started by two childhood friends. Released in time for the 60th anniversary of Wham-O and featuring an engaging history of each plaything colorful vintage packaging and ads as well as photographs of the toys this boisterous book is sure to inspire nostalgia and a trip to the nearest park Frisbee in hand.

That's just a small sample from my book stack. I'll post more soon!

Unlike Sad Guys On Trading Floors, this is no laughing matter. A trader on the floor of Sao Paulo's Bovespa stock exchange shot himself in the chest. According to the Associated Press, Paulo Sergio Silva's condition is not known. From the AP:

It was not clear if he shot himself due to the recent sharp losses in Brazilian stocks or for other reasons.

Trading was halted for a few minutes after the shot was fired on Monday.

"Trader shoots himself on stock exchange floor"

Transmedia artist Guy Overfelt created this massive inflatable "smoke" installation for the Cantocore Export Guangzhou show in China a couple months ago. It follows the thread of Overfelt's previous Inflatable Trans-AM. From the description of the piece, titled "Untitled" (Up in Smoke):

This time the inflatable Smoke is fabricated in Guangzhou, factory direct. Beyond Paul McCarthy-like reductive shapes coming off the assembly line or the Chinese Olympic team leaving the others’ in the dust, the simple shape raises questions about what these factories are pumping out in Guangzhou.

Guy Overfelt's inflatable smoke (Thanks, Heather Sparks!)

I enjoyed the "carnie girls" collection of vintage paperback covers from the Good Girl Art website. Shown here are covers to two (sadly out-of-print) carnival-themed books I highly recommend: Madball, by Fredric Brown, and Nightmare Alley, by William Lindsay Gresham. (Update: Nightmare Alley is available in the anthology Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s.)

Good Girl Art, usually shortened to GGA, is the term that describes certain types of Vintage Art, and specifically Paperback Cover Art. Richard Lupoff in his The Great American Paperback defines it as "A cover illustration depicting an attractive young woman, usually in skimpy or form-fitting clothing, and designed for (mild erotic interest). The term does not apply to the morality of the 'good girl', who is often a gun moll, tough cookie, or wicked temptress." The GGA designation seems to have originated with comic books and is usually applied to attractive sexy young women who are either in peril or are perpetrating the peril like my favorite gun moll on the right. So it is often politically incorrect but can also be empowering when at the right end of a gun.

Good Girl Art Paperbacks (Via Shane Glines)

In this week's Boing Boing TV update, we discuss what's ahead with the launch of BOING BOING: OFFWORLD, and we speak with the YES MEN about their EPIC STUNT last week in which they printed and distributed lots and lots of copies of a New York Times fantasy-edition, with the headline IRAQ WAR ENDS. Mark blogged about this last week, with video.

We speak to three of the guys who made this event possible over a multi-channel iChat session that gets kind of melty sometimes. They are: Steve Lambert from the ANTI ADVERTISING AGENCY, Andy Bichlbaum from the YES MEN, and Scott Beibin from THE LOST FILM FEST. Some of those names might be aliases, who knows, caveat lector.

They say they received a cease and desist over email from HSBC over a parody HSBC ad that appears in both the print and online editions of their Faux NYT, but oddly, the C&D (they showed us a copy) is addressed to the REAL New York Times. We have not yet been able to confirm the lawyergram's validity with HSBC, but the email headers suggest it's legit.

In this Boing Boing TV update, you will hear music from Q-Burns Abstract Message and Eighth Dimension Records, and you'll hear me talk about BBtv's new programming changes. (Special thanks to Eddie Codel, Sean Bonner, and Scott Beale, who covered the Yes Men item early on).

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Link to Boing Boing tv blog post with subscription instructions, and here is a direct link to an MP4 file.