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Boing Boing
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Elderly woman prohibiting from photographing empty swimming pool "to prevent paedophilia"
An 82-year-old woman in Southampton, UK was told she couldn't take photos of an empty wading pool because she might be a paedophile. Because, you know, anything that children touch regularly becomes part of their souls, and if a paedophile looks at those objects, it's just like sexually assaulting a child. Makes me glad, as a father, to live here in the UK, where the clear-eyed, sensible view of paedophilia is doing so much to ensure the safety of my daughter from assaults by strangers (an occurrence that is so rare as to be practically nonexistent) while doing practically nothing to protect her from the people who are statistically most likely to assault her -- her family, her friends' parents, her teachers, and other people known to her, who account for the overwhelming majority of assaults on children. > An amateur photographer was told she could not take snaps of an empty paddling pool because she might be a paedophile. Betty Robinson was ordered to put away her camera by a council worker when she began snapping the outdoor pool. 'It's absolutely ridiculous – it's bureaucracy gone mad,' said the 82-year-old widow from Southampton. She was with friend Brenda Bennett as she took pictures of the city's common – where the pool is situated. My pool picture ban over paedophile fears (Thanks, Marilyn!)...
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Today on Boing Boing Gadgets
Today on Boing Boing Gadgets, we looked at a Mondrian MP3 player and catalogued Congress' fight with evil robots. There was a gorgeous birdsong box automaton and an iPhone 3G that comes in Brownlee's favorite color, whore red. And laboratories at night sure are pretty. We liked the Periodic Coffee Table, although it couldn't help but get us wondering how much cooler an Periodic Coffee Table of Imaginary Elements would have been. That's a project for you boys and girls at home... don't forget the Cavorite. But we digress. The hirsute and porcine finally lasered off his Zune tattoos. Brownlee really likes Half-Elf Tentacle Assault, surprising no one. Sprint is bizarrely selling its towers, only to lease them back. A racing game is giving testers epileptic seizures. Corn plastics do not make good water bottles and Toshiba says "this is not the UMPC you are looking for." And Neil Young doesn't understand anything about digital audio. From Joel, an ode to bacon. From Rob, the skewering of a PS3-loving bumpkin. From John, Elder's Game meets Lord of the Flies at summer camp. Finally: half a terrabyte of foot fetish porn for your perusal. We were really on a roll today. Link...
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Living on the Edge: Danny O'Brien's talk about moving our personal info off Web 2.0 and onto our computers
Here's some (way shakycam) video of Danny O'Brien's OpenTech presentation, "Living on the Edge," an extremely provocative and interesting talk about how we might restructure the Internet so that our personal and important moments aren't hosted by YouTube, Flickr, and Blogger, but rather on our own machines. Link, Link to slides...
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Post-apocalyptic bookmobile PSAs from Mississippi
Matt sez, "When I was in fifth grade, Mississippi Public Broadcasting decided to introduce a series of short films to educate children on how to use the library. For some godforsaken reason, the people at MPB decided that the best way to do this would be through a post-apocalyptic science fiction serial with children roaming the blasted earth in a… bookmobile… like a cross between 'Reading Rainbow' and 'Damnation Alley.' Confused? So was I. I loved the library and post-apocalyptic movies and television programs, and even I was completely nonplussed. Apparently someone has uploaded the entire run onto YouTube. The music still gives me the creeps!" Link (Thanks, Matt...
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Cameraheads in Seattle protest CCTVs in public places
The Camerahead Project is a Seattle protest group upset about the growing prevalence of CCTV cameras there -- they're staging a bit of theater tomorrow in Cal Anderson Park, walking around with giant cameras on their heads to get people thinking about what it means to have their public spaces under constant surveillance. Local artist Paul Strong, Jr. says he’s holding the demonstration, called the Camerahead Project, to remind people that video surveillance cameras are recording their every move at Cal Anderson Park and three other parks around town. “The project not only raises the questions of who is watching who and who is watching the watchers, but also … why we are being watched at all,” he says. “There is so much going on in the news about wiretapping and data mining, all these little thing that happen locally go right by.” I met Paul at one of my signings in Seattle for Little Brother and loved his camerahead outfit -- he says it was inspired by Pablo Defendini's Little Brother poster. Link...
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