Over at the Creative Commons blog, Fred Benenson writes:

Al Jazeera is releasing 12 broadcast quality videos today shot in Gaza under Creative Commons’ least restrictive Attribution license. Each professionally recorded video has a detailed information page and is hosted on blip.tv allowing for easy downloads of the original files and integration into Miro. The value of this footage is best described by an International Herald Tribune/New York Times article describing the release:

In a conflict where the Western news media have been largely prevented from reporting from Gaza because of restrictions imposed by the Israeli military, Al Jazeera has had a distinct advantage. It was already there.

More importantly, the permissive CC-BY license means that the footage can be used by anyone including, rival broadcasters, documentary makers, and bloggers, so long as Al Jazeera is credited.

Al Jazeera Launches Creative Commons Repository (Via Sean Bonner) and here is the Al Jazeera Creative Commons Repository.

Shoot the Baddies, by Flickr user Olly Moss, whose portfolio site is here . (Thanks, Wayne de Geere!)

Over at Boing Boing Gadgets, Brownlee has the details on this Atari 400 stuffed with a DIY analog music synthesizer. I like how none of the knobs are labeled. "Atari 400 goes analog synth"

Today on Offworld, we saw cards to tell someone special you, honestly, love them more than Xbox, new games T-shirts teased from Japan's UNIQLO, and, hilariously, the best Left 4 Dead/Randy 'Macho Man' Savage crossover of all time.

Elsewhere, we listened to a new megamix of songs from Xbox Live Arcade flagship game Geometry Wars, learned to knit our own LittleBigPlanet Sackboy, and saw how designer Nicholas Felton's latest Feltron annual report delved into the minutiae of Grand Theft Auto's Liberty City.

Finally, we saw Wall-E's unofficial cameo in Crayon Physics Deluxe, and, most amazingly, saw the first official video for the retro-futurist 'Breakout 2600: The Musical' genius of Gaijin Games's Bit.Trip Beat.

My clown friend Gary Peare says:

While your thoughts are being filled with images of Felix Adler (the Jell-O clown), take a look at this.

This is a photo of a flower arrangement sent by the folks at Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus for the memorial service this week of Wayne Scott, a former circus clown who for years made all our shoes for us.

It’s an amazing and touching tribute.

Memorial for a Cobbler of Clown Shoes

Joshua Glenn says:

My latest io9 post takes a look at the coolest robots, androids, and cyborgs of Pre-Golden-Age SF. These include: Tiktok the Mechanical Man of Oz. The biological "robots" (an original coinage) who rebel against their human masters in Karel Čapek's 1921 play, "R.U.R." Futura, the evil fembot star of Thea von Harbou's "Metropolis"; and Sola, a female android who refuses to kowtow to her lustful inventor. The Nyctalope, the first cyborg superhero, star of a series of French pulp novels from the 1910s-20s. And Professor Jameson, whose brain is transferred into a mechanical body 40 million years after his death, in a story that inspired Isaac Asimov's benevolent robots. PLUS: A complete list of 19th and early 20th-century fictional robots.

Cool robots, androids, and cyborgs of Pre-Golden-Age SF

Index to complete series

1. Introduction to Science Fiction's Pre-Golden Age (1904-33)

2. The 10 Best Apocalypse Novels of Pre-Golden Age SF

3. The Most Amazing Book Covers from Pre-Golden Age SF

4. The Coolest Robots of Pre-Golden-Age SF

Engineers at the University of California, Santa Cruz built this prototype robotic exoskeleton to amplify the strength of the wearer's arms. Noninvasive electrodes on the skin detect the neural activity in muscles and translate those signals into movements of the robot arms. Lead researcher Jacob Rosen says his latest exoskeleton provides 95 percent of a human's natural range of motion. From UCSC:

"People with muscular dystrophy and other neuromuscular disabilities could use the exoskeleton to amplify their muscle strength, and it could also be used for rehabilitation and physical therapy," said Rosen, an associate professor of computer engineering in the Jack Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "One of the major challenges in this field is to establish an effective human-machine interface, or 'bio-port,' between the operator and the wearable robot, such that the robot becomes a natural extension of the human body," he said. "This bio-port may be established at the neural level, allowing the human brain to control the wearable robot with the same type of signals that it uses to control its own actuators, the muscles."

"Medical robotics expert explores the human-machine interface"

My Institute for the Future colleague Anthony Townsend is collaborating with Outside.in's John Geraci in a new effort for hacking the urban environment. DIYcity is having its first NYC meet-up tomorrow, January 14, at 7pm at the Project for Public Spaces. I'm really looking forward to how the project evolves! From the overview:

Intro: How do you want to reinvent your city?

Twitter bots, aggregators, social software, mobile apps - we use these things more and more in our daily routines to make our lives better. But can we also use them to remake our cities altogether? How can these technologies be applied to transform urban spaces, changing them from the centralized, hard-coded things they are today into finely-tuned, fluid, user-operated systems that are efficient, sustainable and fit for life in the 21st century?

DIYcity is a place where people figure these things out by actually building and launching applications that address the problems around them.

DIYcity

UPDATE: Sean Savage says there's a DIYcity meet-up in San Francisco tomorrow, too!

Scott says:

It's a demo of my dad's new Voice Box (harmonizer/vocoder) as performed by a pair of really talented folks I found via YouTube (I found Jack and Nataly when researching user-generated videos for the new EHX site).

The Voice Box's harmonizer is vaguely like Songsmith, in that you feed it a mic and an instrument, and it can then create multipart vocal harmony -- the vocoder is totally different, it give more of that robotic man-machine sound.

Voice Box Demo by Jack Conte and Nataly Dawn

How much do you love the Jell-O clown? (1949 Cushman Archives) Jell-O clown

The magnificent Mark Ryden has a long-awaited solo show of paintings opening February 7 at Tokyo's Tomio Koyama Gallery. The exhibition, titled "The Snow Yak Show," will run until February 28. Kirsten Anderson posted a sneak preview of a few pieces at her Write Some Good Blog. Kirsten and her partner-in-crime Kenny Montana will head to Tokyo for the opening and plan to report on BB about their adventures. "Yakity Yak Ryden's Back"

Here's a little peek at a page from Robert Crumb's forthcoming Book of Genesis, a literal adaptation from the first book in the Old Testament. It's been years-in-the-making (Here's a 2004 Guardian article about it). The only other book I'm looking forward to with as much excitment as this one is Harvey Kurtzman's Humbug anthology.

The long-awaited publication of Robert Crumb’s Book of Genesis, an adaptation of the Bible story, which Norton will be publishing in Fall 2009. I had the privilege of seeing some of the pages in France two years ago, and the scope of the work has haunted me ever since. I’m sure the religious right will be all up in arms with cliché horror that a quote unquote “cartoonist” has defamed their sacred cow, but Crumb is taking this work very seriously, and Genesis is some of his best work.

R. Crumb Illustrates The Book of Genesis literally

The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts has an exhibition called To the Ends of the Earth: Painting the Polar Landscape. New Scientist has a 14 images from the show. Beautiful. Shown here: "The Ice Dwellers Watching the Invaders" (around 1875) by William Bradford.

To the Ends of the Earth: Painting the Polar Landscape

Here's Danielle of Danielle Ate the Sandwich singing "Dream a Little Dream of Me" and playing the ukulele.

In 2006, we posted about the Institute For Figuring's collaborative project to crochet a handmade coral reef. It's come a long way. The Crochet Coral Reef is on display at Santa Monica's Track 16 Gallery until February 21, along with the Toxic Reef, made from plastic trash. From the press release:

One of the acknowledged wonders of the natural world, the Great Barrier Reef stretches along the coast of Queensland Australia, in a riotous profusion of color and form unparalleled on our planet. But global warming and pollutants so threaten this fragile marvel that it may well be gone by the end of the century. In homage to the Great One, Christine and Margaret Wertheim of the Institute For Figuring have instigated a project to crochet a handmade reef, a woolly testimony that now engages thousands of women the world over.

Vast in scale, collective in construction, exquisitely detailed, the Crochet Reef is an unprecedented, hybridic, handicraft invocation of a natural wonder that has become, in itself, a new kind of wonder spawned from tens of thousands of hours of labor.

Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)

This photo has been making the rounds online on Spanish and French "paranormal" blogs. Is it a bird? A toy? An insect? Or something much much... freakier? Loren Coleman weighs in with a bit of Fortean skepticism at Cryptomundo. "Carnivorous flying mammal?"

Glyn sez, "Passengers who buy a London train or tube ticket would automatically be giving their consent to be searched, under proposals now under consideration."

Senior British Transport police officials told MPs today that they wanted to change the railways' "conditions of carriage" to close a loophole that means officers using mobile knife-detecting arches at stations have no legal power to search someone who sets them off unless they have a reasonable suspicion that they are breaking the law.

Police seek new rights for searching rail passengers (Thanks, Glyn!)

The late Rufus Hussey shows off his respectable beanshooter (slingshot) skill in this video, probably made in the early 1990s. Watch him throw a quarter in the air and ding it with a rock, and shoot a Japanese beetle off a leaf. Rufus Hussey - The beanshooter man

Videogum has some funny things to say about this commercial for Microsoft's Songsmith. The technology actually looks kind of neat -- you sing anything you want and the program creates bland instrumental music to match your vocals. But the commercial itself is hilariously clunky.

In 2009, even the lamest cultural contributions have some kind of underlying self-awareness. Like, even the people who work for Bill O’Reilly, or the SkyMall catalog, are aware that what they work on sucks. But a job’s a job and they probably find a way to have fun with it (especially at the SkyMall catalog.) So that’s why this REAL commercial for Microsoft’s new Songsmith software (you sing at it and it creates horrible musak to accompany you) is completely insane. Not only is it apparently earnest and not a parody, self- or otherwise, it seems like it comes from a bizarro parallel universe where irony was never discovered. It’s like Microsoft found some kind of home-schooling Christian commune in the woods and hired them to make their commercial.

Funny commercial for Microsoft's Songsmith

(Flash embed above, MP4 download here.) Television host and gadget-o-phile Drew Carey visited with the Boing Boing crew in Las Vegas to roam the blinking, beeping halls of CES 2009. He was there with his lovely fiancé, and her three year old son, Connor. Today's episode documents Connor's search for talking robots and "tiny cars I can ride in." Along the way, Drew stops at the Intel booth to check out a $47,000 VR racing system that puts you in the driver's seat on famous racetracks around the world -- the system includes topographically accurate maps, down to the pebble, of famous tracks.

Join the discussion for this Boing Boing Video over at Boing Boing Gadgets.

Previous "live from CES" videos on Boing Boing Gadgets:
* CES Video: Asus Netbookstravaganza, with Bamboo, Gold Lamé, and Lamborghini (MP4)
* CES Video: Palm Pre Hands-On with Joel and Brownlee, post-review huddle with Ars Technica (MP4)
* Boing Boing Gadgets at CES: Video Report, Day Two (MP4)
* Boing Boing Gadgets at CES: Video Report, Day One (MP4)

A music video directed by Kangaroo Alliance for Buddy System. MP4 here. See also Clap Paw. (Thanks Susannah Breslin, via antville, via promo.)

This image, drawn in ink on heavy paper, and annotated "3/4 in. connectors," was in a box of papers and files that I shipped from my storage locker in Toronto. It's incredibly familiar, but I have no idea what it is. Anyone recognize it?

The excellent faux-educational brit comedy series "Look Around You" launches on Adult Swim this Sunday Jan 18th, at 1 am. (Thanks, Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz)

Orestes Pursued by the Furries, A remix of Adolphe William Bouguereau's 19th century masterpiece "Orestes Pursued by the Furies." 'Shopped by "anonymous," brought to our attention by Boing Boing community member Takuan.

Conrad sez, "I discovered that my parents bought ten of the most popular national papers in the UK the day after the September 11th and stored them in the attic, so I decided to take photos of the front pages and put them on Flickr. It's interesting to see the tabloid reaction compared to the broadsheets." Newspapers of September 12th 2001 (Thanks, Conrad!)

Fee sez, "The government releases the 1911 census in the UK today, three years ahead of the normal 100 year embargo. The website allows family historians to search for ancestors using names and birth dates, and provides a lot more information than previous censuses, including the length of marriage, number of children, including those who have died, and more accurate information about places of birth. That's the upside: the downside is that it costs 10 credits to view a transcript, and 30 credits to view the actal census return filled in by an ancestor... and 60 credits cost £6.95. As a friend said, it seems a bit odd that the tax payer can be asked to pay for the original collection of the material, and then stiffed to this extent for access to the information."

Use the census to search for your ancestors (Thanks, Fee!)

The FlightSuit is a lycra diaper for your bird, designed not to impede flight while capturing those pesky feces and hold them at a safe distance from the little feller. Use raw, or with disposable liners.

Bird Diaper (via Red Ferret)

See also: A product only my cleaning girl will love: Bird Diapers

I love this self-made roboticist's "30 Second Son" robot (named for its mean time between failures). It pulls him around his rural Chinese village in a clanking rickshaw while making funny faces and chanting, "I'm a rickshaw-pulling robot. Wu Yulu is my Dad, I take him out about town.".That's about the perfect robotic application if you ask me. We should send one to Mars. Wu Yulu, the inventor, has lost a house and a wife to his robotphilia (the wife came back),

Chinese farmer robot inventor (via Dvice)

Today on Offworld we saw Super Mario in real life (with a guest appearance by.. Obama?), a new blog for cult Super Nintendo game Earthbound, still waiting for its long overdue official revival in the West, and listened to the soundtrack for one of our most anticipated DS games, EA's Henry Hatsworth.

We also saw what happens when Mega Man takes on every boss character at once, looked at an indie community's fantastic mutual effort to create a 2D platformer engine and looked back at Klonoa, one of Namco's most underappreciated franchises, saw an awesomely retro-futurist version of Pong coming to WiiWare as part of a new PixelJunk-esque art-game series, and, as above, saw the first gorgeous Audrey Kawasaki-esque concept shots of Marian, the first full debut game from indie dev Infinite Ammo.