Snip from an essay published by Kevin Kelly today over on his Technium blog:

All extropic systems -- economy, nature and technology -- are governed by self-accelerating feedback cycles. Like compounding interest, or virtuous circles, they are powered by increasing returns. Success breeds success. There is a long tail of incremental build up and then as they keep doubling every cycle, they explode out of invisibility into significance. Extropic systems can also collapse in the same self-accelerating way, one subtraction triggering many other subtractions, so in a vicious cycle the whole system implodes. Our view of the future is warped and blinded by these exponential curves.

But while progress runs on exponential curves, our individual lives proceed in a linear fashion. We live day by day by day. While we might think time flies as we age, it really trickles out steadily. Today will always be more valuable than some day in the future, in large part because we have no guarantee we'll get that extra day. Ditto for civilizations. In linear time, the future is a loss. But because human minds and societies can improve things over time, and compound that improvement in virtuous circles, the future in this dimension is a gain. Therefore long-term thinking entails the confluence of the linear and the exponential. The linear march of our time intersects the cascading rise and fall of numerous self-amplifying exponential forces. Generations, too, proceed in a linear sequence. They advance steadily one after another while pushed by the compounding cycles of exponential change.

Balancing that point where the linear crosses the exponential is what long-term thinking should be about.

To rob the Negro of his reputation of thinking through a problem in his own fashion is about the same as trying to pretend that he doesn't have a natural instinct for rhythm and for singing and dancing.

New legislation has been proposed in Iran that could make blogging a crime punishable by death. Cyrus Farivar has a story on today's edition of the PRI radio show The World: Iran considers harsh penalty for some bloggers (3:30).

Over at Global Voices, Hamid Tehrani writes:

On Wednesday, Iranian members of parliament voted to discuss a draft bill that seeks to “toughen punishment for disturbing mental security in society.” The text of the bill would add, “establishing websites and weblogs promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy,” to the list of crimes punishable by death.

In recent years, some Iranian bloggers have been sent to jail and many have had their sites filtered. If the Iranian parliament approves this draft bill, bloggers fear they could be legally executed as criminals. No one has defined what it means to “disturb mental security in society”.

Such discussion concerning blogs has not been unique to Iran. It shows that many authorities do not only wish to filter blogs, but also to eliminate bloggers!

Image: 'Women In Black,' by Matthew Winterburn, who has some really neat photos of Iran in his Flickr stream.

The headstone marking the final resting place of deceased Joy Division singer Ian Curtis is suddenly missing.

Whoever stole it is a total douche, and deserves a special place in hell where screaming emo demons torture them with burns from a thousand clove cigarettes, poke them with a million blunt eyeliner applicators, and blind their eyes with painfully asymmetrical hair extensions for all eternity.

The grave marker, wherever it is now, reads: 'Ian Curtis 18 - 5 - 80' and the words 'Love Will Tear Us Apart'.

Here is a story in the Times UK, and above is a music video by Jonathan Beamish for the earliest recorded version of 'Love Will Tear us Apart,' produced as a John Peel Session for the BBC in 1979 (jesus! 30 years ago, wow).

Happy Fourth of July, everyone. Blow some shit up!

Captain America Fuck Yeah
[YouTube; the song in this unauthorized and infringalicious fan video was lifted from the great Matt Stone and Trey Parker epic, Team America: World Police, referenced in these BB posts of yore: 1, 2.]

What look are you trying to achieve with your tattoos?
They’re about the human body as a decomposing corpse – the art of a rotting cadaver. It’s also a tribute to horror movies, which I love.

What influenced your tattoos? When I was a kid I was a big fan of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and I wanted to be a ninja turtle and live in the sewers. But as I got older I fell in love with zombies and wanted to become one. Oh, and I love George A Romero’s Living Dead movies.

Anyway, the closest thing I could get to becoming a zombie was to get tattooed like one.

Among the footage that has now been discovered, according to the unanimous opinion of the three experts that ZEITmagazin asked to appraise the pictures, there are several scenes which are essential in order to understand the film: The role played by the actor Fritz Rasp in the film for instance, can finally be understood. Other scenes, such as for instance the saving of the children from the worker’s underworld, are considerably more dramatic...

The rediscovered material is in need of restoration after 80 years; the pictures are scratched, but clearly recognizable. Martin Koerber, the restorer of the hitherto longest known version of “Metropolis”, who also examined the footage, said to ZEITmagazin: “No matter how bad the condition of the material may be, the original intention of the film, including all of its minor characters and subplots, is now once again tangible for the normal viewer. The rhythm of the film has been restored.”

The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy tried to dismiss the study, Bloomberg News reported:

Trying to find a link between drug use and drug enforcement doesn't make sense, said Tom Riley, spokesman for the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy in Washington. 'The U.S. has high crime rates but we spend a lot on law enforcement and prison,'' Riley said yesterday in a telephone interview. 'Should we spend less? We're just a different kind of country. We have higher drug use rates, a higher crime rate, many things that go with a highly free and mobile society.'

Funny, ONDCP takes precisely the opposite line whenever a state considers liberalizing its marijuana laws. In a March press release, deputy Drug Czar Scott Burns railed against a New Hampshire proposal to decriminalize marijuana, saying such a move 'sends the wrong message to New Hampshire's youth, students, parents, public health officials and the law enforcement community,' and would lead to 'more drugs, drug users and drug dealers on their streets and communities.'

Last year, New York police officers were seen dancing in the streets just before arresting four men in a city nightclub on charges of selling $100 worth of cocaine. It took six months and the men's life savings, but their names were finally cleared when prosecutors took the unusual step of announcing in court that the men had committed no crime.

That's because club surveillance video shows that the undercover cops had no contact with the accused men in the two hours they were in the club.

Now, club owner Eduardo Espinoza says the police are retaliating against him.

Government workers repeatedly snooped without authorization inside the electronic passport records of entertainers, athletes and other high-profile Americans, a State Department audit has found. One celebrity's records were breached 356 times by more than six dozen people...

When the scandal erupted earlier this year, State Department officials suggested that the department maintained a list of 'flagged files' to ensure that records of high-profile individuals were not breached. But investigators found that only 38 people were on the watch list, and there was no system or specific methodology for putting them there.

The watch list has since been expanded to more than 1,000 people, including all members of Congress, Supreme Court justices, senior administration officials, and entertainers, media personalities and sports figures.

Recently at Boing Boing Gadgets, we debunked the robot Diggbot; wondered if Apple should redesign the MacBook Pro; marveled at an amazing modular musical instrument for kids; and chuckled at the Comicon Star Trike of 1982.

John spotted the world's tiniest RC choppers and Roku's open-source Netflix player; Tokyo Watch did the unthinkable; and Jackson Pollock painted his hi-fi, sort of. There was a fancy USB hub; a consumer wind turbine; a robot bartender; a portable moisture condenser for your pied-à-sietch; a polystyrene statute; and a Sci-fi USB tube speaker.

Finally, we saw a cool Apple patent for gesture-touch, and learned the truth behind the Gatling gun.

Public schools in Barnegat were locked down briefly after someone reported seeing a ninja running through the woods behind an elementary school.

Turns out the ninja was actually a camp counselor dressed in black karate garb and carrying a plastic sword.