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NEWSWEEK Cover: The Politics of Endangered Species FOXBusiness - NEW YORK, June 1, 2008 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ ----To make it on the Endangered Species list, animals need to be under threat of becoming extinct, but it also takes a good deal of luck. Wildlife lawsuits, as far as the eye can see A Bear Makes The List |
 TrustedReviews | Google Unveils iPhone 'Killer' FOXNews - Google unveiled the software for its much-anticipated new phone last week, and it's loaded with fun features, including an unlocking tool that allows users to create a secret shape that must be drawn on the screen. Android will be 100% open source, says Google Developers Crazy In Love With Android |
Oil plunges; dollar, hurricane season eyed Forbes - LONDON (Thomson Financial) - Oil plunged on fears of lower demand after recent record prices, dollar strength and receding worries over the hurricane season. Tropical Storm Arthur Knocks Down Oil Prices By $1 Threat of Storms Could Drive Gas to $5 or $6 a Gallon |
Reuters - Global sales of semiconductors
rose 5.9 percent in April on solid demand for personal
computers, mobile phones and products using flash memory, an
industry group said on Monday.
 E Canada Now | Hackers admit to Comcast attack VNUNet.com - The two hackers who successfully gained control of Comcast's website have been speaking out about the attack. 'Defiant' and 'EBK', who operate with the Kryogeniks hacking group, claim to have gained access to the site using a vulnerability and social ... Hackers throw Comcast into disarray Defiant of Kryogeniks: We Warned Comcast First |
 eFluxMedia | Man Claims He Shot Video of Space Alien ToTheCenter.com - According to ABC News, a Denver resident, Jeff Peckman, claims to have video footage of an alien peering inside his house through a window. Banana Squash Nerf Ball Alien Unveiled in New Video ET? It's hard to see in hyped video |
 KPIC | Almost There: Space Shuttle to Dock in Two Hours eFluxMedia - By Alice Turner The space shuttle Discovery is due to dock with the International Space Station (ISS) in little over two hours, at 1:54 pm EDT (1754 GMT). Space shuttle closes in on space station Discovery to arrive at the space station today |
 eFluxMedia | Minnesota Town Tells Google To Stay Out CRN - A Minnesota town has asked Google to remove images of its streets and homes of its 4500 residents from its Google Maps feature. North Oaks, a private community outside of St. North Oaks, Minn., To Google: Get Lost US town tells Street View to push off |
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Canadian Group Files Facebook Privacy Complaint Slashdot - bergkamp writes "A Canadian public policy group filed a complaint charging Facebook with 22 separate violations of a Canadian personal information protection law. Facebook's Paucity of Privacy Inflames Canadian Privacy Advocates Facebook vs. Canadian Privacy Laws |
 Alaska's SuperStation | Rain, more rain coming The Columbian - By JUSTIN CARINCI, Columbian Staff Writer The forecast this week calls for more rain and cool weather. It's a phenomenon that amateur meteorologists call "Rose Festival Week. Rain possible through the week Summer heat, little or no rain |
AP - China pressed ahead with a restructuring of its telecommunications market Monday as mobile phone company China Unicom Ltd. announced plans to take over a fixed-line provider and sell off a mobile business.
AFP - A paralysed man using only his brain waves has been able to manipulate a virtual Internet character, Japanese researchers said Monday, calling it a world first.
 Fangoria |
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Ms Berryman said parents at the nursery were happy with the heightened security measures.My daughter starts going to a creche part time this week -- thankfully they're not fingerprinting us just yet. Link (Thanks, Imipak!)She said it made life a lot easier for parents when dropping off and picking up so that they were not hanging around waiting for their children.
"There is no actual information recorded, only the information that we've already got," she said.
AP - Under pressure to help dispose some of the electronic waste it helped create, Best Buy Co. is testing a free program that will offer consumers a convenient way to ensure millions of obsolescent TVs, old computers and other unwanted gadgets don't poison the nation's dumps.
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Lostpedia
"The Lost encyclopedia"
Episode synopses, island maps, fan theories, and flash-forward recaps. Nothing on Sleestaks, though — and they were, like, featured creatures, right?
Uncyclopedia
"The content-free encyclopedia"
A parody site inspired by inaccurate but hilarious Wikipedia entries. Jimbo's creation is defined here as a massively multiplayer online editing game played by redundancy experts.
Chickipedia
"The wiki of hot women"
Learn that Scarlett Johansson is known for "her popularity with up-and-coming celebrity men" ... and going-nowhere Web surfers.
Wookieepedia
"The Star Wars wiki"
Did you know that "snot vampire" is slang terminology for the Anzati species? Of course not. No one did.
Dickipedia
"A wiki of dicks"
Sample entry: Gerald "Geraldo" Rivera is a TV journalist, noted egotist, former talk-show host, and a dick.
Dealipedia
"The business deal wiki"
Michael Robertson, founder of MP3.com, started this archive of M&A activities, IPOs, bankruptcies, and scoops on who made money (including him) on the deals.
Congresspedia
"The citizen's encyclopedia on Congress"
Fourteen members of the US House and Senate are currently under investigation. Know of others who should be? Add 'em!
Pedialyte
"Helps kids feel better fast!"
Flavors include grape, cherry, apple, and bubble gum!
Like a wisecracking sidekick who winds up stealing the movie from a too-bland lead actor, graphics processing units are edging more general-purpose central processing units out of the limelight.
"There's this conventional wisdom [that the] GPU equals games, and a fast PC is a fast CPU," says Rob Csonger, Nvidia's vice president of corporate marketing. "The truth today is the GPU is accelerating everything because everything is rendered now."
Over the past several years, graphics processing units have evolved from highly specialized components coveted by Mountain Dew-swilling Unreal Tournament devotees to high-performance computing engines used by academic researchers. The latest shift has seen yet another transformation of the GPU into a fully programmable, open-architecture chip, in some cases just as flexible as -- and packing far more parallel-processing power than -- today's general-purpose central processing units.
The evolution of the GPU has prompted changes throughout the computer industry, from PC manufacturers who are modifying systems to better take advantage of GPUs, to software makers who are adding features designed to exploit the now-ubiquitous graphics chips.
Recent demos by Adobe showing how Photoshop and Flash might make use of GPU acceleration are merely the latest in a parade of software and hardware vendors copping to the power of the GPU.
While much of the GPU market these days is still anchored to the videogame market, graphics rendering has become increasingly important to a wide range of ordinary computing tasks. On the mobile front, the iPhone and iPod Touch, both of which use a version of Imagination Technologies' PowerVR MBX mobile graphics processor core, have cemented the notion that whizzy graphics capabilities can add exponentially to user experiences -- especially on touchscreen devices. Other handset manufacturers, such as Nokia and Sony Ericsson, have also started incorporating robust 3-D graphic acceleration chips into their high-end phones. And modern operating systems, like Microsoft's Vista and Apple's Leopard, can barely open a text file without making heavy use of the GPU, thanks to their 3-D interfaces and slick visual effects.
What's more, the GPU's parallel architecture makes it well suited to a variety of modern computing tasks.
"When you look at the GPU what you're basically looking at is a highly parallel processing engine," explains Mercury Research analyst Dean McCarron. While today's top-end CPUs boast four cores, GPUs have anywhere between 80 and 128 cores. That makes them particularly adept at doing tasks that require a lot of simultaneous number crunching, such as 2-D and 3-D graphics, but also cryptography, scientific modeling, transcoding HD video streams and even running financial market simulations.
Many high-end GPUs also include a video unit for faster encoding and decoding of video data, which companies like Elemental Technologies are already taking advantage of with new GPU-accelerated video-processing software.
"Ultimately, everything you now see on your computer now touches the GPU in some way or another," notes McCarron.
The GPU's increasing clout is also starting to have a profound effect on how manufacturers and chipmakers build computers.
For instance, Gateway recently introduced a budget gaming laptop, the P-6831 FX, that makes use of a mid-range GPU (the Nvidia GeForce 8800M) to compensate for a relatively anemic CPU (a 1.6-GHz Intel Core Duo) -- a strategy that gives the laptop decent performance with a budget $1,200 price tag. The laptop has been more or less sold out at Best Buy since its introduction early this year.
On the software side, consumer-oriented companies are also increasingly relying on the GPU.
Adobe recently announced that the forthcoming version of its Flash Player would start using GPU acceleration to support 3-D effects, video card acceleration and large bitmap images of up to 8,191 pixels per side.
"When you boil it down, the GPU is really just a type of CPU that is used for calculating floating point operations," says Tom Barclay, senior product marketing manager for Adobe's Flash Player. "With that, you get high bandwidth, you get additional memory, and you get what's basically a really versatile processor."
Cooliris is another company that figured out how to harness the GPU, in this case for a better web-browsing experience. Working with Nvidia, the company recently debuted an application called Piclens.
Instead of relying on the 2-D interface you get when hunting down pictures and videos on YouTube, Flickr or Google, Piclens renders all of those results as a glowing tower of images that you can scroll through and zoom in and out of effortlessly.
"People get caught up in the 3-D element of [Piclens] -- the flashy element -- but I think there is also a fundamental navigation problem we're solving," says co-founder Josh Schwarzapel. That is: How do we make a dauntingly large volume of content easily searchable?
As more and more of our personal content finds its way into digital form, graphics-intensive interfaces to that data, like Piclens and Delicious Library, will look less like visual frippery and will become essential tools for navigation.
In the end, the display may not be the computer, as Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang declared in a 2002 Wired Magazine profile. But in today's computing environment, the pixel is definitely king. And that can only mean good things for the GPU's future.
1883: The world's first elevated electric railway in the world makes a trial run. It's in Chicago, of course. It's indoors, and it won't last, but the idea will.
New York City began elevated railway service in the early 1870s, running in Manhattan on Ninth Avenue and Greenwich Street. It was America's first elevated railroad, but it was steam-powered. Steam locomotives put out prodigious amounts of smoke and soot -- hardly what you'd want to be adding to the already-dirty air of a teeming metropolis. And they were plenty noisy, too.
German inventor and industrialist Werner Siemens built a short, small-scale electric railway at the 1879 Berlin Industrial Exhibition. Using the new invention of a third rail to feed power to an electric locomotive, it carried up to 30 passengers at a time at about 4 mph along a line merely 600 yards long.
Elevated railways were a reality. Electric railways were a reality. Who would combine the two technologies?
Perhaps you've heard of Thomas Edison.
Edison and Stephen D. Field incorporated the Electric Railway Company in the spring of 1883 with a capital of $2 million (about $42 million in today's money). They aimed to dazzle the crowds at the Chicago Railway Exposition, and they did. They built a narrow-gauge 3-foot-wide track in the gallery around the edge of the main exhibition building, with tight curves at each end of the 1,552-foot track -- less than one-third of a mile long.
The locomotive weighed 3 tons and was 12 feet long by 5 feet wide. It drew current by rubbing a wire brush on each side of an electrified, central third rail. The 15-horsepower locomotive pulled a passenger car at a stately 9 mph. Between June 5 and the exhibition's conclusion June 23, Chicago's protoype 'L' had carried 26,805 passengers.
Edison and Field also took their electric railroad to an exposition at Louisville, Kentucky, that year. It enjoyed similar success there.
The demonstration was proof of concept, and both Chicago and New York City debated, discussed and promoted various ideas and systems over the next decade. Chicago won the race.
The world's first permanent elevated electric railway, the Metropolitan West Side Elevated Railway, opened in 1895. It began at Franklin Street in Chicago and headed west, splitting into three branches. It was connected to Chicago's other elevated lines in the famous Loop by 1897, and the others were converting to electric power by century's end.
The technology had literally gained traction.
Source: Various
Like a wisecracking sidekick who winds up stealing the movie from a too-bland lead actor, graphics processing units are edging more general-purpose central processing units out of the limelight.
"There's this conventional wisdom [that the] GPU equals games, and a fast PC is a fast CPU," says Rob Csonger, Nvidia's vice president of corporate marketing. "The truth today is the GPU is accelerating everything because everything is rendered now."
Over the past several years, graphics processing units have evolved from highly specialized components coveted by Mountain Dew-swilling Unreal Tournament devotees to high-performance computing engines used by academic researchers. The latest shift has seen yet another transformation of the GPU into a fully programmable, open-architecture chip, in some cases just as flexible as -- and packing far more parallel-processing power than -- today's general-purpose central processing units.
The evolution of the GPU has prompted changes throughout the computer industry, from PC manufacturers who are modifying systems to better take advantage of GPUs, to software makers who are adding features designed to exploit the now-ubiquitous graphics chips.
Recent demos by Adobe showing how Photoshop and Flash might make use of GPU acceleration are merely the latest in a parade of software and hardware vendors copping to the power of the GPU.
While much of the GPU market these days is still anchored to the videogame market, graphics rendering has become increasingly important to a wide range of ordinary computing tasks. On the mobile front, the iPhone and iPod Touch, both of which use a version of Imagination Technologies' PowerVR MBX mobile graphics processor core, have cemented the notion that whizzy graphics capabilities can add exponentially to user experiences -- especially on touchscreen devices. Other handset manufacturers, such as Nokia and Sony Ericsson, have also started incorporating robust 3-D graphic acceleration chips into their high-end phones. And modern operating systems, like Microsoft's Vista and Apple's Leopard, can barely open a text file without making heavy use of the GPU, thanks to their 3-D interfaces and slick visual effects.
What's more, the GPU's parallel architecture makes it well suited to a variety of modern computing tasks.
"When you look at the GPU what you're basically looking at is a highly parallel processing engine," explains Mercury Research analyst Dean McCarron. While today's top-end CPUs boast four cores, GPUs have anywhere between 80 and 128 cores. That makes them particularly adept at doing tasks that require a lot of simultaneous number crunching, such as 2-D and 3-D graphics, but also cryptography, scientific modeling, transcoding HD video streams and even running financial market simulations.
Many high-end GPUs also include a video unit for faster encoding and decoding of video data, which companies like Elemental Technologies are already taking advantage of with new GPU-accelerated video-processing software.
"Ultimately, everything you now see on your computer now touches the GPU in some way or another," notes McCarron.
The GPU's increasing clout is also starting to have a profound effect on how manufacturers and chipmakers build computers.
For instance, Gateway recently introduced a budget gaming laptop, the P-6831 FX, that makes use of a mid-range GPU (the Nvidia GeForce 8800M) to compensate for a relatively anemic CPU (a 1.6-GHz Intel Core Duo) -- a strategy that gives the laptop decent performance with a budget $1,200 price tag. The laptop has been more or less sold out at Best Buy since its introduction early this year.
On the software side, consumer-oriented companies are also increasingly relying on the GPU.
Adobe recently announced that the forthcoming version of its Flash Player would start using GPU acceleration to support 3-D effects, video card acceleration and large bitmap images of up to 8,191 pixels per side.
"When you boil it down, the GPU is really just a type of CPU that is used for calculating floating point operations," says Tom Barclay, senior product marketing manager for Adobe's Flash Player. "With that, you get high bandwidth, you get additional memory, and you get what's basically a really versatile processor."
Cooliris is another company that figured out how to harness the GPU, in this case for a better web-browsing experience. Working with Nvidia, the company recently debuted an application called Piclens.
Instead of relying on the 2-D interface you get when hunting down pictures and videos on YouTube, Flickr or Google, Piclens renders all of those results as a glowing tower of images that you can scroll through and zoom in and out of effortlessly.
"People get caught up in the 3-D element of [Piclens] -- the flashy element -- but I think there is also a fundamental navigation problem we're solving," says co-founder Josh Schwarzapel. That is: How do we make a dauntingly large volume of content easily searchable?
As more and more of our personal content finds its way into digital form, graphics-intensive interfaces to that data, like Piclens and Delicious Library, will look less like visual frippery and will become essential tools for navigation.
In the end, the display may not be the computer, as Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang declared in a 2002 Wired Magazine profile. But in today's computing environment, the pixel is definitely king. And that can only mean good things for the GPU's future.
Link to Play This Thing review, Link to WTF?It's a World of Warcraft screenshot, right? Well, no -- it's a screenshot from WTF?!, a Flash-based sidescroller parodying WoW. And it's note-perfect, too -- every interface element and the backgrounds and characters look like they're ripped straight from Azeroth.
The gameplay is pretty similar, too, for all that this is a sidescroller -- the same tedious level-grind, based on the same sort of tedious quests ("go kill seven sheep"). But the satirical way it treats that level-grind is priceless, a telling commentary on the common tropes of the MMO. The quests get increasingly weird -- your newbie quest giver asks you to go cast a spell on sheep that have been transformed by the evil mage Karl Marx into communist brain-slaves to restore them to their rightful ovine form, and then tells you to go kill Marx himself. But Marx shows you that your previous quest-giver is simply a tool of capitalist oppression, and becomes your new quest giver. Sigmund Freud also makes an appearance.
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: Subways are as much a part of big-city living as high-rises and gridlock, and they get about as much love. For many people, subways are crowded, noisy places only marginally better than being stuck in traffic -- and most of them are. But the best of them are not only efficient, they reflect the character of the cities they serve and the people they carry.
In honor of the first test run of Chicago's "L" train, we're touring the globe by subway. Please let us know about your favorite subways in this article's comments
Left: The Tokyo Metro and Toei lines that compose Tokyo's massive subway system carry almost 8 million people each day, making it the busiest system in the world. The system is famous for its oshiya -- literally, "pusher" -- who shove passengers into packed subway cars so the doors can close. And you think your commute is hell.
Photo: Associated Press/Itsuo Inouye
: The Moscow Metro has some of the most beautiful stations in the world. The best of them were built during the Stalinist era and feature chandeliers, marble moldings and elaborate murals. The extravagance gave way to bland utilitarianism under Nikita Khrushchev but returned during the 1970s. With more than 7 million riders a day, keeping all that marble clean has gotta be a drag.
Photo: Jason Rogers/Flickr
: Everything about New York is larger than life, and its subway system is no exception. It's got 468 stations, 842 miles of track and twice as many daily riders (5 million) as every other rapid-transit system in the United States combined. The city that never sleeps has a subway to match. It's one of the few in the world that runs 24/7.
Photo: Associated Press/Bebeto Matthews
: Londoners call their subway the Underground, even though 55 percent of it lies above ground. No matter. When you've got the oldest mass-transit system in the world, you can call it anything you like. Trains started chugging through cut-and-cover tunnels in 1863 and they've been running ever since. Some 3 million people ride each day, every one of them remembering to "Mind the gap."
Photo: Associated Press/John D. McHugh
: The Berlin U-Bahn (for undergrundbahn, or underground railway) opened in 1902 and grew rapidly until the city was divided at the end of World War II. Then things got complicated. The system was divided along with the city, with trains from East Berlin all but ceasing service to the west and trains from West Berlin bypassing railway stations in the east that became known as Geisterbahnhöfe, or ghost stations. The one exception was Friedrichstraße station, a transfer point and border crossing for entering East Berlin. The system was unified after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and now carries more than 400 million people each year.
Photo: Associated Press/Fritz Reiss
: The Paris Métro stands alongside the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe and Louvre as an icon of the city. The system is renowned for its Art Nouveau architecture and is so ingrained in daily life that Parisians have a saying -- "Métro, boulot, dodo." (Metro, work, sleep.) And where else but Paris would you find museum pieces from the Louvre displayed on subway platforms? They're replicas, but still …
Photo: blond avenger/Flickr
: Shanghai is the third city in China to build a metro system, and it has become the country's largest in the 12 years since it opened. Shanghai Metro has 142 miles of track and plans to add another 180 miles within five years. By that point, it would be three times larger than the Chicago L. The system carries about 2.18 million people a day.
Photo: Associated Press/Eugene Hoshiko
: The Hong Kong MTR has the distinction of being one of the few subway systems in the world that actually turns a profit. It's privately owned and uses real estate development along its tracks to increase revenue … and ridership. It also introduced "Octopus cards" that allow people to not only pay their fares electronically, but buy stuff at convenience stores, supermarkets, restaurants and even parking meters. It's estimated that 95 percent of all adults in Hong Kong own an Octopus card and they generate more than 10 million transactions each day.
Photo: Associated Press/Vincent Yu
: The award-winning Metro Bilbao opened in 1995 and proves that even subway stations can be architectural masterpieces. The system was designed by Sir Norman Foster whose work includes the Gherkin in London, the Reichstag dome and Hong Kong International Airport. Foster embraced a modern design, favoring steel and glass, and Sarriko station won the 1998 Brunel Award for Railway Design. The station benches won the Spanish National Industrial Design Prize in 2000.
Photo: Samuele Silva/Flickr
: It's old, it's crowded and it's noisy as hell, but Chicagoans love the L like they love deep-dish pizza. The nation's second-oldest rapid-transit system is one of the city's Seven Wonders, behind the lakefront and Wrigley Field but ahead of icons like Sears Tower. The railroad junction known as Tower 18 -- where lines converge from four directions -- was for decades the busiest in the world. The L was also the world's first elevated electric railway.
Photo: Associated Press/Charles Rex Arbogast
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The iconic fashion designer Yves Saint-Laurent has died at age 71. It is in part because of his influence on modern popular style that pants are now considered fashionable for women:
Originally a maverick and a generator of controversy — in 1968, his suggestion that women wear pants as an everyday uniform was considered revolutionary — Mr. Saint Laurent developed into a more conservative designer, a believer in evolution rather than revolution. He often said that all a woman needed to be fashionable was a pair of pants, a sweater and a raincoat. “My small job as a couturier,” he once said, “is to make clothes that reflect our times. I’m convinced women want to wear pants.”Another snip from the NYT obit:
“Every man needs aesthetic phantoms in order to exist,” Mr. Saint Laurent said at the announcement of his retirement. “I have known fear and the terrors of solitude. I have known those fair-weather friends we call tranquilizers and drugs. I have known the prison of depression and the confinement of hospital. But one day, I was able to come through all of that, dazzled yet sober.”
Does standing up a lot during the day reduce susceptibility to colds? Go ahead and doubt it; I did. But Roberts has data to back it up, and while it would be foolish to believe that standing up a lot during the day would eliminate colds across an entire population -- foolish, that is, without experiments to prove it -- Roberts' own practice of standing up a lot has a lot more empirical back-up than many of the more "sensible" things we naively believe.You can download a PDF of Roberts' paper, Self-experimentation as a source of new ideas: Ten examples about sleep, mood, health, and weight.Here's anther one: for a long time Roberts had a problem with his sleep. He woke too early, could not go back to sleep, and then was tired in the morning. He tried different ways to cure this problem until, through a combination of coincidence, experiment and analysis of the data, he discovered an expected correlation: his problem disappeared when he skipped breakfast. He cured his early awakening by not eating until 11 a.m.
The idea that skipping breakfast may reduce early awakening was, wrote Roberts, "a new idea in sleep research." Strangely, Roberts was not hungry in the wee hours when he was troubled by early awakening, which lead him to suspect that it was not discomfort that roused him, but rather some glitch in his sleep cycle caused by anticipation of food.
Shown above, a photo by Gina Ferazzi of a batch of "seed bombs," used by guerrilla gardeners to quickly plant seeds on the sly.
Scott is a guerrilla gardener, a member of a burgeoning movement of green enthusiasts who plant without approval on land that's not theirs. In London, Berlin, Miami, San Francisco and Southern California, these free-range tillers are sowing a new kind of flower power. In nighttime planting parties or solo "seed bombing" runs, they aim to turn neglected public space and vacant lots into floral or food outposts.Link (via Ramshackle Solid)Part beautification, part eco-activism, part social outlet, the activity has been fueled by Internet gardening blogs and sites such as GuerrillaGardening.org, where before-and-after photos of the latest "troop digs" inspire 45,000 visitors a month to make derelict soil bloom.
White Mischief is next Saturday, June 7, 8pm-3am at Scala in King's Cross, themed to another Jules Verne novel, this time "Around the World in 80 Days".Link to event details, Link to photos of the previous attendees, Link to line-up, Link to Facebook page for White MischiefFor members of the public, tickets are still available - including group discounts for bookings of five people and above - though we strongly recommend people book ahead, as advance tickets are far cheaper than those bought on the door and previous shows have sold out.
The four rooms and two stages are being themed by set dressers who worked on Punchdrunk's Masque of the Red Death. Interactive adventures will include a "trip around the world in a hot air balloon"; and a chance to discover the ancient Oriental mysteries inside the Hall of Oracles. Parisian "petit gypsy string orchestra" will be playing sets at unexpected quarters spontaneously around the building.
Live bands and vaudeville / circus performers will be arriving by every means of conveyance from all four corners of the globe.
Flying in from Berlin, Miss Behave, one of the few surviving female swordswallowers (and a Guinnness World Record holder who is about to start her own run at the Roundhouse); from Spain, snake dancer Seffi; from Japan, DJ Lady Kamikaze, playing vintage jazz and blues; from Turkey, the band Oojami, complete with their own Sufi dancer; from the United States, "electro chamber rock" band The Outside Royalty and DJ duo Theodora Goes Wild and Sheriff Marshall Lawman ; from Africa to London, DJ Todd Hart, playing an all-African set; from Australasia, acerbic compere Dusty Limits; from the UK, outrageous diva, the Radio 1 playlisted Ebony Bones...
Of particular interest to fans of Victoriana might be the Penny Dreadfuls, a "Victorian comedy troupe" whose sketch comedy has been a hit on BBC7, Radio 4 and at Edinburgh...and Miss Amundsen, Bipolar Explorer, a steampunk enthusiast herself, who will be performing an aerial act above the audience's head while playing an accordion.
See also: White Mischief, London's steampunk variety night
Update: Toby adds, "I just received this message from Jason Willbourn at Stentor Industries who will be attending White Mischief and has specially made these brilliant 'Around the World in 80 Days' steampunk rayguns/pith helmets/goggles."
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