Welcome to the seventh serialized installment of J.C. Hutchins' human cloning thriller 7th Son: Descent. If this is your first exposure to our free serialization of 7th Son, you can easily catch up by experiencing the story via links found at J.C.'s About 7th Son page. You can also dive in right away, thanks to...

THE STORY SO FAR: The Beta clones finalized their plans for their cross-country trek. Gen. Hill explained the true power of Code Phantom security clearance. The clones called home, to chat with family and lovers. John and the Mikes headed westward, to California . . . and a likely showdown with John Alpha.

Meanwhile back at the 7th Son facility, Jay, Jack, Kilroy2.0 and Father Thomas attempted to understand John Alpha's scheme. Kilroy2.0 enlisted the help of his cyberflock. Their dedication was chilling: "I comply."

Check out this week's installment below. If you're enjoying this serialized experience, support the book by purchasing a copy at Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Borders, or printing this PDF order form and presenting it at your favorite bookstore. You can learn more about the book at J.C.'s site.

7th Son: Descent, Part 7

After the first minute I hated it. After a day I loved it. After a week, I'm on ibuprofen. I like the Magic Mouse, especially the touch-sensitive surface and flick scrolling, but am just not sure how long my metacarpals can take it.

A few hours ago, I made a post about the Houston Chronicle's investigation into the practice of local charities, including the Salvation Army, requiring proof of immigration status before giving toys to children. The Salvation Army has written to me to clarify that their checking of social security numbers and other ID is intended to "verify that individuals and families are not registering more than once at multiple Salvation Army facilities and to ensure people actually have the number of children they claim."

Jennifer Byrd sez, "As The Salvation Army's National Public Relations Director, I wanted to inform you that the original Houston Chronicle story was a bit misleading in how it portrayed the use of social security numbers and ID by The Salvation Army in Houston to register people in need. In actuality, no program run by The Salvation Army at a national or local level requires the recipient of services to present documentation that verifies they are a U.S. citizen."

From the Houston Chronicle's followup story:

Flanagan and Salvation Army spokesman Juan Alanis spoke up Tuesday after a story in the Chronicle noted that both groups require birth certificates, Social Security numbers or other documents indicating immigration status. They said it's not their intent to discriminate.

Alanis acknowledged that families cannot register for the Angel Tree program, which allows children to request specific gifts, unless one member of the family can present a Social Security number.

"It is not because we seek to discriminate. The Salvation Army is not in the business of verifying legal status," he said. "We have to be good stewards. If we let people register without checking, that could be abused."

Alanis said the agency uses Social Security numbers, rather than some other type of identifier, because "that's just the way we've found to verify it at this point. If other agencies do something different, we'd be interested in finding that out."

Charities say they don't intend to discriminate (Thanks, Jennifer!)

Travis sez, "'H.M.' are the initials of a patient who had a portion of his brain removed many years ago to combat epilepsy. One of the unanticipated side effects was that he was unable to form new memories. Its a very famous case in the brain and cognitive sciences. Anyway, the guy died a little while ago and now they're turning his brain into 30,000 cross sectional slides. They're slicing it up right now and there's a live feed from the UCSD lab which is doing it."

The Brain Observatory - In Memory of H.M. (Thanks, Travis!)

Sue sez, "Keith Lo Bue is an Australian assemblage artist who makes jewelry, eyeglasses and other objects as well as teaching assembly as an art form. Lots of fascinating stuff to browse here."

Keith Lo Bue - Eyewear (Thanks, Sue!)

Noah from the wonderful Skull-a-Day site got interviewed by Robert Hicks, PhD, Director of the Mütter Museum (Philadelphia's astounding pathology musuem). The Mutter is one of the most astounding, humbling, beautiful places I've ever been.

No Bones About It! Featuring Noah Scalin (Thanks, Noah!

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez,

People may remember there has been a bit of a spat over the Oregon Attorney General's Public Meeting Manual. This is part of a series of issues in the state of Oregon over the question of who may copy and public the law of the land.

I'm pleased to report that Attorney General John Kroger today released that manual, appointed a special Deputy Counsel to handle these kinds of transparency issues, and announced a set of hearings about the issues involved.

This is good news! It does not yet address the most fundamental issues, such as whether the state may assert copyright over the law, but it is a formal set of hearings that will examine the issue, which we're happily going to participate in.

Some background on the Oregon issue is available at the Public.Resource.Org Oregon.Gov page and you should read the Attorney General's announcement. If Oregon resolves the issue of who may copyright the law, this will be real progress.

ATTORNEY GENERAL JOHN KROGER ANNOUNCES GOVERNMENT TRANSPARENCY INITIATIVE (Thanks, Carl!)

Here's a detailed look at the way that Warner accounts for digital download revenue to one of its acts, Too Much Joy. The author of the piece works for Rhapsody, the back-end for a lot of digital music services, and knows exactly what kind of information Warner gets from these services, and he butts up against what looks like utter carelessness on the part of the label when it comes to fulfilling its contractual obligations to its signed acts.

Back to my ridiculous Warner Bros. statement. As I flipped through its ten pages (seriously, it took ten pages to detail the $62.47 of income), I realized that Warner wasn't being evil, just careless and unconcerned - an impression I confirmed a few days later when I spoke to a guy in their Royalties and Licensing department I am going to call Danny.****

I asked Danny why there were no royalties at all listed from iTunes, and he said, "Huh. There are no domestic downloads on here at all. Only streams. And it has international downloads, but no international streams. I have no idea why." I asked Danny why the statement only seemed to list tracks from two of the three albums Warner had released - an entire album was missing. He said they could only report back what the digital services had provided to them, and the services must not have reported any activity for those other songs. When I suggested that seemed unlikely - that having every track from two albums listed by over a dozen different services, but zero tracks from a third album listed by any seemed more like an error on Warner's side, he said he'd look into it. As I asked more questions (Why do we get paid 50% of the income from all the tracks on one album, but only 35.7143% of the income from all the tracks on another? Why did 29 plays of a track on the late, lamented MusicMatch earn a total of 63 cents when 1,016 plays of the exact same track on MySpace earned only 23 cents?) he eventually got to the heart of the matter: "We don't normally do this for unrecouped bands," he said. "But, I was told you'd asked."

My Hilarious Warner Bros. Royalty Statement (via Making Light) (via Making Light)

John from the Creative Commons label Vosotros sez,

On March 16, 2007, a great thing happened in Culver City, California. For the first time ever, all three contestants of the game show Jeopardy, without ending in a score of zero, tied. At the time, at least two incorrect interpretations of this event were made; one being that it was a chance occurrence, the other that it was caused by mistake.

In fact, this tie was purposefully created by the episode's returning champion Scott Weiss, a puzzle-lover who must have been thrilled when he saw the opportunity arise (in the form of his tailing opponents being tied) in the Final Jeopardy round. Instead of wagering the customary one dollar extra needed to win, Weiss bet the exact amount required to tie, should all three contestants question the answer correctly, which they did.

When I saw this happen-- coincidentally I was watching the show that evening, something I did rarely before and have barely since-- it struck me as a profound gesture of good sportsmanship. All three got to keep their winnings and play again on the next episode.

Drawing on an amount of gathered research as well as formulated opinion on the event, we organized this twelve-song interpretation of the story, which takes place in ancient Greece. The album is entitled (a telling of) The Greatest Event in Sports History. As you might be able to guess by now, there is a fair amount of humor in this album. But also, I hope, a good and resounding lesson to be learned.

LMM 2.10 - The Greatest Event In Sports History

Our friend Teresa Nielsen Hayden shares these truly beautiful videos of time-lapse photography shot in the Alps, with Beethoven compositions for the soundtrack. They're like ambient video bedtime stories for internet grownups. I feel drowsy and dreamy already, with the full moon overhead this evening.

The videos were created by Michael Rissi of Zurich, whose Vimeo profile describes him as a medical physicist and timelapse enthusiast who is fond of the Canon EOS 50D.

Here is Day, set to everyone's favorite bit of the Seventh. Here is Night, and the Moonlight Sonata. More at magictimelapse.ch/en.

Both HD videos embedded at 970 pixels wide after the jump.

Yes, Obama LSD blotter.

Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has launched a series of web videos which tell the stories of people in Congo, an African country that has seen violence and human rights atrocities of phenomenal scale during an ongoing civil war. The online shorts are part of a larger MSF campaign called Condition: Critical. I asked Pete Masters of MSF to tell us more about the videos. His response below, and links to all videos after the jump.

Condition: Critical was launched one year ago by Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) to bring to the world's attention the plight of the people living through the war in Eastern Congo (DRC). BUT, rather than MSF at the focal point, it is the people and their stories that take centre stage. In this, the last chapter of the Condition: Critical project, listen to the stories of four people telling how the conflict has affected their lives.

Francoise (in the video above) was locked in her hut when they came and set it alight. Although she escaped, her sons did not make it; one she could not save from the fire and the other died in hospital. Although she is horribly burnt, she tells how it is the hurt in her heart that really affects her.

Bahati is far from his village which he cannot return to because of the ongoing violence. He talks about how he now works as a lumberjack, trying to make enough money to survive while teaching anyone who wants to learn so they might also have a means of survival.

The Rotating Kitchen by Zeger Reyers started rotating last Friday and will continue to rotate until February 28th 2010.

Rotating Kitchen

Mind Hacks reports on a study published in Forensic Science International about "legal highs" that contain synthetic cannabinoids that mimic the effects of marijuana. Apparently, these drugs are made by a "highly organized neuroscience-savvy industry" that stays one step ahead of governments that outlaw the designer drugs. As soon as one analog is outlawed, another one appears for sale almost immediately.

Two things came to mind when I read this. One, the US has laws that outlaw drugs that are chemically similar to illegal drugs, so I don't see how these "legal highs" can be sold legally in the US. Two, who knows if these analogs are safe? I keep thinking of that NOVA episode, "The Case of the Frozen Addict," about the guy who destroyed the part of his brain that produced dopamine after he took some kind of Demerol analog he'd cooked up. It turned him into a living frozen statue.

[D]rugs like speed, heroine, cocaine and ecstasy require legally controlled raw materials but the processing stage is low-tech. That's why some types of speed are called 'bathtub crank', because some of it is literally synthesised in a bathtub, as images of meth lab busts illustrate.

But this is not the case with cannabinoids which require a complex and careful lab process with many stages and sometimes the separation of mirror image molecules (enantiomers) from each other as only one of the 'reflections' is desirable. These are not trivial process. They can't be done in back rooms and they can't be done by amateurs.

What's more, these aren't just copy-cat syntheses done by your average underground lab who know the illicit process and just want to recreate it. These are new compounds, perhaps reported only a handful of times in the scientific literature and selected for their specific effect on the brain.

Spice flow: the new street drug pharmacology

(Image: Spice drug.jpg, GNU Free Documentation License, Wikimedia Commons)

Our friends at Arrested Motion have a bunch of photos of the new Shag exhibition at the Corey Helford Gallery in Los Angeles. Shag's new work is darker, weirder, and more complex than anything he's done before and I was blown away when I saw it in person. Shag used Adobe illustrator to draw the pieces (which measure 6 feet x 4.5 feet) and they are printed on canvas. Shag told me each drawing took about a month. Each one is limited to five copies and they cost $5000 each. (Photo above by deeselby)

Openings: SHAG - “Autumn’s Come Undone” @ Corey Helford Gallery

NYC artist David Foox has created these super cute organ donor figures wearing hospital gowns and organ-shaped heads. The doll versions are on exhibit at 323 East Gallery in Royal Oak, Michigan through December 18th, but you can also buy the vinyl toy versions for $15 each on the artist's web site. Seems like the perfect Christmas gift for your doctor friend — where else can you get figurines called Black Market Kidneys and Pickled Liver?

David Foox's web site via The Underwire

A few hours ago, I made a post about the Houston Chronicle's investigation into the practice of local charities, including the Salvation Army, requiring proof of immigration status before giving toys to children. The Salvation Army has written to me to clarify that their checking of social security numbers and other ID is intended to "verify that individuals and families are not registering more than once at multiple Salvation Army facilities and to ensure people actually have the number of children they claim."

Jennifer Byrd sez, "As The Salvation Army's National Public Relations Director, I wanted to inform you that the original Houston Chronicle story was a bit misleading in how it portrayed the use of social security numbers and ID by The Salvation Army in Houston to register people in need. In actuality, no program run by The Salvation Army at a national or local level requires the recipient of services to present documentation that verifies they are a U.S. citizen."

From the Houston Chronicle's followup story:

Flanagan and Salvation Army spokesman Juan Alanis spoke up Tuesday after a story in the Chronicle noted that both groups require birth certificates, Social Security numbers or other documents indicating immigration status. They said it's not their intent to discriminate.

Alanis acknowledged that families cannot register for the Angel Tree program, which allows children to request specific gifts, unless one member of the family can present a Social Security number.

"It is not because we seek to discriminate. The Salvation Army is not in the business of verifying legal status," he said. "We have to be good stewards. If we let people register without checking, that could be abused."

Alanis said the agency uses Social Security numbers, rather than some other type of identifier, because "that's just the way we've found to verify it at this point. If other agencies do something different, we'd be interested in finding that out."

Charities say they don't intend to discriminate (Thanks, Jennifer!)

The BookMine, an old and rare book dealer, has been collecting funny conversations with customers and would-be customers. Here are a few:

(phone call)
Hello. I have some old books for sale.
What kind of books?
Old ones.
OK. What subject areas?
Where does it say that?

(grown-up, looks around)
Do you have any real books?
Yes.
Well, not like the ones you have here. You know, real books!

I'm not sure what you mean.
You know, books that are real.
Sorry, none of our books are real!

(phone call)
I have some old books.
Really, so do I.
How much will you pay me for them?
Good question. What do you have?
I'm not sure.
Why don't you bring them by.
Drive all the way downtown?
That's usually the way it works.
You're kidding!
Not really.
How much do you pay for books?
Depends on what you have.
Are there any other bookstores in town?
Yes.
What are their phone numbers?
Hang on, let me look them up for you.
(After being left on hold for 10 minutes, he finally hung up)

Funny conversations between book dealer and customers (via TYWKIWDBI)

I don't even have an iPhone, but I'm digging these icon pillows. They're colorful, cute, happy, and soft, characteristics that I wouldn't ordinarily associate with a shiny black gadget.

Etsy via Gizmodo

In other news, world's high school math teachers declare Wolfram Alpha, "dead to us."

Have you ever given up working on a math problem because you couldn't figure out the next step? Wolfram|Alpha can guide you step by step through the process of solving many mathematical problems, from solving a simple quadratic equation to taking the integral of a complex function.

[For example] When trying to find the roots of 3x2+x-7=4x, Wolfram|Alpha can break down the steps for you if you click the "Show steps" button in the Result pod.

Wolfram Alpha: Step By Step Math

(Thanks, Jamesbont!)