DIY subversion

Here's one way to get off the grid:



August 3rd, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: effing the man

Photoshop Diplomacy

The revelation that Iran manipulated images of recent weapons exercises to include more missiles has predictably set alight the internet meme machine. I like this image in particular. It reminds me of a great Mark Twain quote: "Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its one sure defense."



July 12th, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: Iran, international relations, Hello Kitty

Step 2: Put your kid in that box

From the Smithsonian's Flickr stream of historic, public domain photos, a shot commemorating the end of being able to ship your children by postal mail:



Reads the caption: "This city letter carrier posed for a humorous photograph with a young boy in his mailbag. After parcel post service was introduced in 1913, at least two children were sent by the service. With stamps attached to their clothing, the children rode with railway and city carriers to their destination. The Postmaster General quickly issued a regulation forbidding the sending of children in the mail after hearing of those examples."

Reposted from BoingBoing.
June 28th, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: its my kid in a box baby

Suits me

Israeli suit manufacturer Bagir apparently clothes 1 in 6 European men. And now they are going to start doing it with plastic bottles.

Their new line of Eco-Gir clothing replaces wool and whatnot in favor of recycled plastic bottles. It takes about 30 pop bottles to fashion a complete suit that retails for $200. Lining and all.



No word on what happens if you put Mentos in the pocket of a suit made strictly from bottles of Diet Coke.

I do know what the Harry Rosen men's clothing store intends to do. So says Larry Rosen, Chairman and CEO, in response to my inquiry:

"Thank you for your e mail and for your patronage.

We will certainly be investigating the line of Eco-Gir clothing you mentioned, although we have no immediate plans to carry the Bagir line at this time. A new initiative we have undertaken is to ensure the recyclability of all our bags and boxes this year, as we do feel strongly about the environment."

May 27th, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: eco-joy, PVC fashion, do want

Classifying Curiosities

I try not to repost all the glorious tidbits of miscellany I enjoy everyday from BoingBoing, but this piece is too incredible not to pass along.

Takeshi Miyakawa Design has come up with the perfect metaphor for our digital age. In an era when everything is miscellaneous, what better conceptual container than a recursively self-deconstructing fractal cabinet of wonders to put them in?

Cabinets of curiosities (also known by their far superior German name, Wunderkammer)have a long history. They became popular during the renaissance as a way for the wealthy and educated to display their knowledge of the world. Acting as a sort of periodic table of the elements for class, owners would display their finest and rarest curiosities in the upper-most drawers and arrange them based on their relation to other objects, either according to popular pseudo-scientific concepts such as "the humors", Ptolemaic cosmologies, or even Goethe's geologic models of Europe.

Takeshi's cabinet is therefore the perfect contemporary inversion of this concept, having no particular beginning or end and thereby placing every object in an unmediated relation with the others.

May 13th, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: Wunderkammer, fractal, miscellany

Copyfight Update

Here is the one 12-minute presentation Canadians need to watch to inform themselves of the ongoing Canadian copyright "debate".

The Harper Conversatives have proposed new legislation that will make many non-commercial aspects of "fair use" illegal on the internet, restricting Canadian creativity, commentary, and parody.

Prof. Geist's argument is that harshly restrictive intellectual property laws inhibit collective creativity, hamper incentives to develop new business, distribution and monetization models, pander to narrow "old-media" interests, and put Canada at a competitive disadvantage. He makes his argument by debunking copyright "myths" including the need for Digital Rights Management (DRM, aka anti-circumvention) technologies that lock down legitimate non-commercial acts such as home recording; the validity of locking consumers to the manufacturers closed standard (which is also anti-competitive); and the inability of content producers to protect themselves and profit under more open regimes.

In effect, these proposals place a disproportionate amount of power in the hands of a minority few who simply can not be trusted to act in the public or cultural interest. Just last week, none other than Microsoft demonstrated this by declaring that it would no longer support its DRM-laden commercial music standard. Not only did this leave hundreds of thousands of honest consumers with worthless and unplayable music collections, it doubly punishes them for choosing to trust the corporation and buy their music rather than download DRM-free copies with the added flexibility to play on non-Microsoft music players and be sampled and remixed into new songs.



More info at Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic.

April 30th, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: copyright, CIPPIC, DRM, monoculture