Chinese veterinarians are hoping "panda porn" movies will turn on American-born panda Hua Mei. According a Xinhua News Agency article, it's believed that because the panda was born in captivitiy, she was never clued in to the mating game. An Adult Video News report claims that "besides the videos, Hua Mei has also visited a few 'sets,' live viewing of other panda couples mating." Link to AVN article (Thanks, Vann!)

A participant in the Something Awful forums posts photos of Dr.-Bronner's-soap-like signs she claims were created by a disturbed neighbor nicknamed Crazy Tammy.

"She's been gone from the neighborhood for about nine months now, hopefully getting the treatment she so sorely needed. From what I understand, and from what others have told me, Crazy Tammy is a textbook case of paranoid schizophrenia. We would have never known about her terrible mental problem if she hadn't advertised her insane views on giant sheets of cloth hung from her fence."
Link (via Warren)

Some Smart Drug enthusiasts I knew in the cyberdelic early 90s raved about the cognitive effects of the nutrient choline. A new study at Duke University Medical Center seems to support their claims. In the study, pregnant rats were given three to four times their normal intake of choline. Apparently, their offspring boasted bigger neurons that fired faster and for longer than the control group.

According to a New Scientist article, "behavioural studies have shown giving choline to pregnant rats improves learning and memory in their offspring." This latest study though "is the first time anyone has shown that prenatal choline supplementation actually changes the anatomy and physiology of single brain cells," one of the researchers said.

Still, another scientist adds, pregnant women should continue to avoid certain foods like liver, swordfish, and tuna that are rich in choline but may be bad news for other reasons.

Time to belly up to the Smart Bar? Link

Internet telephony startup Skype today announced a $19 million investment through DFJ. The VoIP provider was founded by creators of P2P network Kazaa. Skype plans to use some of that cash to buy hundreds of thousands of minutes per month from major telcos, and provide them in turn to its own customers. Link

Aside from being an HDTV and digital cinema entrepreneur, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, and the star of a new "Apprentice"-like TV show on ABC in which he hands out $1M to strangers, Mark Cuban is now a blogger. Weblogsinc founder Jason Calacanis is on something of a roll -- rumor has it he's launching several additional celeblogs soon. Link to Mark Cuban's new blog. Link to more Cuban news from John Battelle's blog today.

Joi Ito reports that Angle Grinder Man is back and in full effect. The British homegrown hero wanders the streets of London clad in gold lame caped crusader getup, freeing illegally parked cars of parking enforcement security boots.

Or, as AGM himself would put it, "Angle-Grinder Man [is] the world's first wheel-clamp and speed camera vigilante cum subversive superhero philanthropist entertainer type personage. A big welcome to all good, decent, law-unabiding citizens. Godspeed to you and your four-wheeled, petrol-driven chariots."
Link to Angle Grinder Man's website (Caution: Not worksafe for villains or parking enforcement officers. Contains strong superpowers)

Actor Ron Perlman shoots pool and talks with the magazine FHM, while dressed as the comic world's favorite beast of the apocalypse. Hellboy the movie, directed by Guillermo del Toro, launches April 2. Link to interview, Link to the website for the comic that inspired it (thanks, J. Hurwitz!)

Fleshbot snickers,

Giggle if you will at this custom made, dildo-handled fishing rod (heh, "rod") currently on sale at eBay, but according to the item description it gets the job done just fine: "Not only did it perform well, it caught the most fish of any poles that day, AND I landed a 5 pound Whitefish with it!"

Link to eBay auction

The website of fashion designer Christiane Hultquist, whose work is produced under the label Christian Joy. She's the one who does those wacky art-graffiti-dresses for that chick from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs okay, okay, okay, lead singer Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (there you go, Alex).

With no formal training in fashion design, Christiane started creating one of a kind hand painted and hand sewn t-shirts decorated with slogans like "FU I'm Not Your Waitress." As well, she began to re-design old prom dresses giving them names like the "Carried Dress" with a creepy "hahahaha" written across a bloody red bodice and the "Ex Dress" with the names of ex-boyfriends in gold glitter.

Link (Thanks, Susannah!)

Clay Shirky's posted a fine rant on RELATIONSHIP, a controlled vocabulary of terms for describing personal relationships (i.e. friendOf, acquaintanceOf, parentOf, siblingOf, childOf, grandchildOf, spouseOf, enemyOf, antagonistOf, ambivalentOf, lostContactWith, knowsOf, wouldLikeToKnow, knowsInPassing, knowsByReputation, closeFriendOf, hasMet, worksWith, colleagueOf, collaboratesWith, employerOf, employedBy, mentorOf, apprenticeTo, livesWith, neighborOf, grandparentOf, lifePartnerOf, engagedTo, ancestorOf, descendantOf, participantIn, participant):

Take the relationship closePersonalFriendOf. The designers of this list somehow overlooked it, possibly on the grounds that it's tautological, and only of use on talk shows. ("Oh yes, Julia Roberts is a close personal friend of mine.") But it is nevertheless informative -- you would only use closePersonalFriendOf if the person in question was someone of relatively high fame or station.

In addition, anyone claiming to be a "close personal friend" of someone else is talking about a domain where a high degree of social interaction is the norm, e.g. show business. By extension, the seemingly oxymoronic friendYouDontLike is also a valid category, as anyone in highly social environments can tell you. (You often run into friendsYouDontLike at partiesYouHaveToGoTo.)

Link

A new camera lens from Philips designed for small, cheap imaging devices uses fluids to shape the lens for focusing. Just like your eye. Link (thanks, Bev!). Update: Grant says, "Engadget had a story earlier today about another company, Varioptic, which has already created a fluid, no moving parts lens. Engadget says, 'the two companies [Philips and Varioptic] are headed towards a legal showdown.'"

The Smoking Gun provides us with a 1958 FBI memo revealing that Bud Abbott was quite the porn aficionado, counting 1,500 movie reels in his collection. Of course, any films confiscated during a potential raid on a shady party Abbott was allegedly planning were to have been "submitted to the FBI Lab for examination and comparison purposes." I can hear the agents' conversation now: Who's on Top? No, Who is on the bottom! Link (Thanks, Vann!)

The MIT Physics Department held their first annual "Weird Fields" contest for students in an Electromagnetism I class to construct the "weirdest two-dimensional vector field from simple analytic functions." The students used a Field Mapping applet developed at the school to produce a mind-blowing variety of psychedelic visualizations. Link

Wired News reports on the American Museum of Natural History's ID Day, sort of an antiques roadshow of biology and anthropology where the public can have scientific "treasures" appraised.

"Previous Identification Day examinations have yielded a fossilized whale's jawbone, a rare green beetle bracelet from Brazil and a 5,000-year-old stone spear point. But most often the items are identified as tourist trinkets or valueless bits and pieces of bone and stone."

Link

Here are my running notes from Bruce Sterling's rant at SXSW:

This is a genius adminsitration for inspiring angry rhetoric.It's got a nice, interesting consistency. I like Rumsfeld, I dighis poetry. Job one in the Bush Admin is to get it spun: they'rean info-war-centric outfit. If you get it spun, you don't need toget it done.

Controlling the message is more important to them thancontrolling the underlying reality. It's a blatant part of theirideology. Their global climate change policy is in defiance ofthe laws of physics, it's Lysenkoism. The Union of ConcernedScientists has a page documenting the Bushies' Lysenkoism fromclimate change to on.

The science stuff is starting to blow back. The UCS isnonpartisan. It's like Stalin and Lysenko's faith-basedagriculture: the reason Soviet wheat fields have weeds is becausewheat is evolving into weeds. You didn't have to get the peasantsto weed the fields, you could just allege this. Scientists wereamazed and horrified. Soviet scientists who went abroad to talkabout chemistry and physics were confronted with a credibilitygap arising from this -- they had to admit that back home,politicians made up the laws of physics. So scientists defectedto Cornell.

Link

Social theorist Lego kits.Link (Thanks, Stevie!)

Jenny sez, "Would really appreciate help highlighting one public library's struggle against copyright law. All they want to do is show their staff in-service day video."

The presentation was a success and the audience seemed to really like the video! There were some whoops and hollars! Then we did questions and of course the discussion turned to copyright. Yes, we used ROL by Madonna with no clearance but it was as much fair use as it could be: not sold, distributed, or copied.

I told them we tried last year to reach out to Madonna's people and never got anywhere. I think this is a great idea for libraries to internally and externally market themselves -- hey Madonna... can you give me a minute of your time to chat about it?

Link

Click The Vote recently announced the launch of a petition in support of "an equitable, balanced and reasonable system for legal file sharing that promotes learning and rewards creators." The petition is now available online for people to sign at the ClickTheVote.org website.

Two new niche tech blogs launching from Jason Calacanis and crew: Playstation3 and XBox2.

Having just killed yet another pair of white iPod headphones, I'm in the market. This review of FutureSonic EARS headphones -- which integrate foam earplugs -- has me thinking.

It took me three or for uses to get used to inserting the EARS and fiddling with the EQ settings on my iPod and PowerBook. I listen to a lot of different kinds of music, but gravitate towards rock, funk/groove, and electronica the most and like a fair amount of bass in the mix (though not at the expense of the middle and high-end of the spectrum). The EQ settings on my iTunes and home stereo system boost the low and high ends while cutting a bit of the mid-range, and I usually keep my iPod's EQ set to "Rock" or "R & B." So I was pretty stunned to find that I was getting too much bass using the EARS with these settings. Switching the iPod over to "Treble Booster" wound up yielding the best results: Clear mid- and high-end response with plenty of undistorted bass to keep my head noddin'. I'm a drummer, so I need the thump of the bass drum clear and strong underneath the rest of the music.

Link (via Gizmodo)

Tom Coates has written an hilarious and insightful essay in which he attempts to rank his friends and their operating systems (!) on two axes: Elf/Dwarf and Ninja/Pirate. I'm digging the 2X2 graphs.

Think of some of the humble bloggers on my blogroll. Where would they live? Ben Hammersley has something of the pirate about him. This is not a restrained man of quiet honour, but a proud warrior of the sea -- hair flowing in the breeze. But his skills are more evenly tempered between the conceptual and the practical -- as best evidenced by his work on the schema for various syndication formats. His position is clear. Matt Jones is far closer to elf than dwarf, but as swashbuckling as a man can come. Not so Dan Hill, elven once more but evidencing the self-mastery and discipline of a true ninja.

Link

The idiot lawyers at the publisher of Michael Moore's "Stupid White Men" are going after the excellent Soft Skull Press for producing a book called "How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office" -- despite the fact the Moore himself is flattered by the reference. This is positively inexcusable in this era of "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them."

In November, HarperCollins wrote to the Brooklyn publisher, Soft Skull Press, demanding that the title be changed and stating that the similarities would cause "irreparable damage" to Mr. Moore and his book.

The ironies compound rather quickly at this point, even ignoring that a company built on free and unfettered expression appears to be, by implication, objecting when someone else engages in that. In sending the letter, HarperCollins was protecting a book it refused to publish for a time, defending an author it fought bitterly with, and, according to Mr. Moore, doing so without his knowledge.

Link (via Copyfight)

These Japanese paper Star Wars toys are really, really good -- I think these are my favorites in the genre. Link (Thanks, $SORRY_I_HAVE_LOST_TRACK_OF_WHO_SUGGESTED_THIS!)

This foldable, futuristic paper macho-gun is pretty cool. It's a replica of the M41-A Pulse Rifle from Aliens. Link (Thanks, Ryan!)

A Craigslister is willing to trade his iPod for an imaginary girlfriend to impress his visiting small-town parents. Too bad John Ritter is dead: this could be the plot for a Three's Company ironic Starsky-and-Hutch-style feature film.

I'm having my parents come visit me sometime in the next two weeks and have lied and told them I am dating someone I am in love with. You will only have to come to one dinner. In exchange for this I will buy you an IPOD - yes new - we walk into the store together and buy a new IPOD. Let me know if this interests you, and if you want to be in a loving relationship with all the benefits it brings ;-) I want to pretend we are totally in love. I am 24, swm, a grad student, italian-american, (not a guido), athletic build. Send pics and i will send you mine, note I check email basically every 3 hours. You should be in your 20's and athletic (great butt and legs are my main interest when I say athletic).

Link(via $MY_APOLOGIES_I_LOST_TRACK_OF_WHERE_I_FOUND_THIS)

Pepakura Desinger is an application that converts any 3D CAD model (Maya, Lightwave, DXF, etc) into a printable fold-and-glue paper model.Link(Thanks, Dan!)

NPR's Rick Kleffel broadcast a fantastic review of Eastern Standard Tribe yesterday, and he's posted the text on his site.

True to form, Doctorow peppers his novel with technology so palpable you want to order it up on the web. You'll probably get the chance. But technology is not the point here, merely a fascinating, convincing backdrop for the story. It's a really old story, actually -- boy meets girl. What follows is not unexpected, or even particularly new. What is unexpected, shocking even, is how smart Doctorow is when it comes to the human heart, and how well he's able to articulate it.

This novel feels whiz-bang modern, but Doctorow's prose uses the oldest trick in the book -- utterly direct simplicity. Even when he's explaining a sophisticated system of mobile music swapping, Doctorow comes off like a standup comedian. The insights he offers seem obvious, but only in retrospect. He seems smart because he makes the reader feel smart. When Doctorow talks, when Art argues, we just get it. There's nothing between the language and the meaning. The prose is funny, simple and straightforward. This is a no-bullshit book.

Link

NASA has its own line of paper model toys, including gingerbread templates for making your own edible Cassini rover.Link(Thanks, rcrain!)

A LiveJournaller has written a rap for Will Smith to perform in his starring role in the upcoming I, Robot movie -- it's about someone wrote a rap about the positronic three-laws-havin' robot underclass.

The robots are in town, you better hear that
They got laws, so you understand that

They can't hurt us, they must obey us
But to protect themselves, could they betray us?

They say the metal man, follow a higher plan
But are they right, or should we fight?
What is our plight?

Link(Thanks, Nat!)

Through a serindipitous google-accident, Stewart Butterfield has a lot of page-rank for the query, "IM Question Answerer," and as a result, people frequently IM him with random questions. He's started a new blog in which he posts transcripts of these Q&A sessions:

Colombiangel1213: do u think i could lokk in another site
sylloge: How old are you?
sylloge: Don't you get it?
sylloge: Google is a search engine ....
sylloge: You can find anything
sylloge: watch!
Colombiangel1213: ok
sylloge: http://www.google.com/search?q=hiking+and+mountains+and+stuff
sylloge: All about hiking and mountains and stuff
sylloge: See?
Colombiangel1213: ok clam down

Link

Inspired by the Gray Album and the Jay-Z Construction Kit, this guy has remixed Jay-Z's Black Album with Weezer's Blue Album, calling the result "Jay-Zeezer."

First I needed some sample material. Albums with colors in their names were definitely the way to go, so I started to make a list. How about REM's "Green?" Nah, not ironic enough. King Crimson's "Red?" No way! Everyone hates that prog rock shit. What about Weezer's "Blue Album?" It's really just named "Weezer", but everyone calls it by it's jacket color to distinguish it from the other one they released with the same name. With rap-esque lyrics like, "What's with these homies dissin' my girl?", it practically remixed itself. Paydirt. "Jay-Zeezer" was born.

Link(via MeFi)

Taggertrap is an emergency-lighting box that has an audio sensor tuned to the sound of a spraypaint can in action. When it detects nearby graffiti writers, it activates a silent alarm, ratting the taggers out to the cops.

The mobile unit (Stinger) is battery powered, augmented by solar energy and may be linked with other surveillance or communication equipment, including cell phones, pagers, or, in remote locations like national parks, by GPS. The fixed unit (Surveyor) may be linked with existing alarm systems.

Link (via JWZ)

Dan Gillmor has posted three more draft chapters from Making the News, his upcoming book on the way that the Internet and journalism are changing one another. This is a very good draft, but he wants to make it better, so he's soliciting your input on ways to improve it.

In April, 2001, Apple Computer's public-relations agency got a request from a blogger, Joe Clark, who wanted to interview someone inside the company about the Macintosh operating system. Clark had written for tech magazines, and his now-dormant NUblog (www.content.nu) was an increasingly popular site, but the PR agency didn't know this. Frustrated by the negative response, Clark posted the e-mail exchange on his site, which in turn prompted a cease-and-desist letter from the agency's regional vice president. The entire episode showed how fundamentally clueless Apple and its PR people were about a medium that was growing in importance.

To be fair, this was 2001, before weblogs were well-known. Clark was a relatively early player in what Azeem Azhar, a principal in 20six, a European weblog tool company, calls the "eBay-ization of media -- everyone can be a buyer and a seller." Others call it "nanopublishing" -- small sites, run by one or a very few people, focusing on a relatively narrow niche topic. Niche bloggers may lack the influence of a major publication. Some are what Azhar calls "a teenage boy who drives the mobile-phone purchase decisions of his group of teenage friends; or the London yoga practitioner who has 60 or 80 fellow yogi readers on his blog, and who influences their yoga-related purchasing."

Chapter 2 Link, Chapter 3 Link, Chapter 4 Link