Here's an annotated list of things that are not quite libraries, not just books. Thanks for hosting me as a guestblogger this week as I've scooted around the country with… Read the rest of the article: At the edges of libraries

Ed Felten from the Freedom to Tinker blog has written a post with Princeton senior Sauhard Sahi called Census of Files Available via BitTorrent. The survey takes a random sample… Read the rest of the article: What's really on bittorrent anyway?

Follow-up on an earlier post. Phil Agre has been found and is safe according to the LAPD Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. The facebook group Fans & Friends of Phil… Read the rest of the article: Phil Agre located, search not quite over

From Popular Mechanics from 1910 comes this advertisement for Nelson's Perpetual Loose-Leaf Encyclopaedia. Reviewed by the New York Times in 1908, the set was supposed to be "A book that… Read the rest of the article: "The only perfect reference work" Nelson's Perpetual Loose-Leaf Encyclopaedia

The FAA has a lot of public data on air traffic safety if you know where to look for it. Last year, in response to a highly publicized bird strike,… Read the rest of the article: Airplane bird strikes are now public information

Physarum polycephalum + oat flakes = Tokyo subway map? Because they couldn't mathematically determine a "perfect" solution, the researchers decided to task the slime mold with a problem human designers… Read the rest of the article: Slime as Engineer – brainless mold mimics Tokyo subway

The Braille system, in which the characters of a language are represented via the position of dots in a six-dot cell, is called "the world's first binary encoding scheme" for… Read the rest of the article: The peculiar challenges of Chinese Braille

The Harry Houdini Collection from the Library of Congress is available (at least 30 or 40 full texts of published materials) through Google Books. Read titles such as The right… Read the rest of the article: Read Houdini's books via Google Books and Library of Congress

The Common Cold Unit was formed in 1946, "a collection of huts" in Salisbury, Wiltshire, UK. Volunteers were recruited to come and get infected with cold germs in an effort… Read the rest of the article: Catch a cold for the holidays: a history of The Common Cold Unit

Luke Fishbeck aka Lucky Dragons demonstrates his Make A Baby project. [more] [W]hen you hold one of the wires in your hand and someone else holds one and you touch… Read the rest of the article: Skin contact between performers creates a positive social environment

Former BB guestblogger Douglas Rushkoff and PBS produccer Rachel Dretzin have created a documentary called Digital Nation. PBS has added some learning resources along with the standard mini-movies with titles… Read the rest of the article: "If we're there, where aren't we?" — PBS looks at life online

Who is Charles Dickens ranting about in this letter to Henry Austin? "Is it tolerable that besides being robbed and rifled, an author should be forced to appear in any… Read the rest of the article: Copyright disputes in the 1840s

For the Love of Culture, Google, Copyright and our Future. Astute and moving commentary by Lawrence Lessig, a love letter to the real-space library. Whatever your view of it, notice… Read the rest of the article: Lessig on Copyright and Culture: "Things could have been different"

For LOST fans: Search kayak.com for Sydney to LAX one-way non-stop on 9/22/2010. [via the Franklin Fellow]

A concise history of the [Judas] Priest logo. [via modcult]

Bernard Pietenpol wanted to build "a plane that was affordable and easy to construct for home builders." He designed and built the AirCamper which flew using an automobile engine… in… Read the rest of the article: Pietenpol's DIY airplane: "a common man's airplane"

Valentine: A supernatural thriller published in 14 languages, and multiple digital reading devices, simultaneously. Creative Commons licensed. Multilingual peeks over at Robot Comics. Valentine is a fantasy / thriller graphic… Read the rest of the article: Valentine: serialized multilingual device-independent comics

Librarians are the worst sort of pirates. Eric Hellman has a wry look at how Offline Book "Lending" Costs U.S. Publishers Nearly $1 Trillion To get to the bottom of… Read the rest of the article: Book Sharing Bankrupting Publishing Industry!

The Center for Democracy and Technology filed two sets of comments (1, 2) to the Federal Communications Commission regarding privacy concerns and expectations that will come along with a national… Read the rest of the article: Build privacy into national broadband policy says CDT

The Bob Baker Marionette Theater (covered in this previous Boing Boing post) is celebrating their 50th Anniversary all year. The Bob Baker theater, the longest running theater of its kind… Read the rest of the article: Puppets are fun