Boing Boing

I am unable to stop listening to Gigi d'Agostino's unpleasant cover of Strawberry Fields Forever. It's not merely bad, but an atrocity that seems a parody of dance music: overlaying the cacophony is a recurring simulation of club-inflicted tinnitus. Why can't I get it out of my head? The Beatles wedded to nascent stirrings of 1990s nostaglia? Insane! I know! Perhaps you imagine it could not be worse. You would be wrong. Exhibit A: Candy Flip's own version of S.F.F., which stormed the British charts in 1990. Then I was but a child and knew no better--now there no excuses. YouTube has more. Also from the same abyss: listening to the theme tune from Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds (wherein the apotheosis of European culture is found at the intersection of French literature, Spanish television and British children's music); You are a Pirate; and anything at all by The Shamen....

Catherine Lainé of the sustainable tech non-profit AIDG, who was featured in this Boing Boing Video interview on Friday, is in Haiti

An open letter from Christopher Csikszentmihalyi, Director

Today in the Observer, business columnist John Naughton describes in exquisite detail the blinkered pig-ignorance of Business Secretary Peter Mandelson's plan to de-fund basic research in favor of "prioritising research that would contribute to Britain's future prosperity." That is, he's only going divert funding to those small, incremental technologies that have well-understood, overhyped revenue models, leaving out the visionary basic science that has historically accounted for the largest payouts for industry and government. If Mandelson's criteria had controlled spending 50 years ago, no one would have wasted money on go-nowhere egghead flights of fancy -- like the laser. Lasers are thus a critical part of our technological infrastructure, yet no one involved in the research that led to them had any inkling of what their investigations would produce. The original idea goes back to a paper Albert Einstein published in 1917 on "The Quantum Theory of Radiation" about the absorption,