This looks pretty cool -- Leonardo Faoro, a medical resident at Mayo Clinic, has set up a message board to answer questions that people with cancer have.Link

Here's a neat little JavaScript counter:

These images are from a Huckleberry Hound book. The backgrounds are great! Link (Via PCL LinkDump)

By using various data, mobile, and VoIP services, Glenn Fleishman is going to save about $130 a month in data/telecom charges.

One reason we could make this switch is that I moved my $25 per month unlimited Vonage service home. We'll move Lynn's business line--about $60 per month--using number portability to ring on the Vonage line, so that won't increase costs there and will save us about $55 per month. We'll shift the $20 to $25 in long-distance calls we were making on our landline to Vonage, saving that much per month.

Link

Former BB guest blogger Johannes Grenzfurthner says:

"One of the non-robotic projects of Roboexotica is online now. It's called 'special forces'. We co-operated with Loka Daun (she was part of the artist-in-residence programme) and set up some short stories about a very special bio-squad and their deadly business."

It's sickeningly sweet and deliciously frightening. Link

Lots of photographs documenting the liberation of Fallujah. (graphic) Link (Thanks, Emeka!)

It's common for people living in Europe to buy computer hardware in the US where prices are lower and the Euro is strong. Just don't try it with the new iMacs. An article in today's International Herald Tribune points out that the G5 iMacs sold in the US are strictly 100-110 volt, unlike every other Apple machine on the market with the exception of the eMac. Plug a new iMac into a standard 220-240 European outlet without a transformer and your motherboard will fry. From the IHT article:

It was a sudden, unexpected and little publicized change for Apple...

I asked Apple why and have not received an answer. Postings on Internet discussion boards are thick with speculation. The most likely reason is that limiting the reach of U.S. and Japanese computers is meant to help preserve European sales, where PC sales are relatively strong but the economy is weak. A company also gains if its revenue is in a more valuable currency than the one its costs are in.

Link (Thanks, DMD!)

Cluster balloonist John Ninomiya has a Web site archiving his high-flying adventures:

"Five years ago, I decided to fulfill a childhood dream by learning to fly with a cluster of large helium balloons. I have made twenty-three helium cluster balloon flights since that time. All of them have been among my most magical flying experiences... With half a dozen pilots worldwide, cluster ballooning remains something between an extreme sport and a personal eccentricity..."

Link (via Slashdot)

The Associated Press found what appear to be new photos of Iraqi prisoner abuse by US military personnel -- by Googling for them, then paying 29 cents a copy for reprints through on-line photo sharing service smugmug.com. The images appear to date from May 2003, which may make them the earliest evidence of such alleged abuse. Snip:

[The AP] reporter found more than 40 of the pictures among hundreds in an album posted on a commercial photo-sharing Web site by a woman who said her husband brought them from Iraq after his tour of duty. It is unclear who took the pictures, which the Navy said it was investigating after the AP furnished copies to get comment for this story.

These and other photos found by the AP appear to show the immediate aftermath of raids on civilian homes. One man is lying on his back with a boot on his chest. A mug shot shows a man with an automatic weapon pointed at his head and a gloved thumb jabbed into his throat. In many photos, faces have been blacked out. What appears to be blood drips from the heads of some. A family huddles in a room in one photo and others show debris and upturned furniture.

(...) The images were found through the online search engine Google. The same search today leads to the Smugmug.com Web page, which now prompts the user for a password. Nine scenes from the SEAL camp remain in Google's archived version of the page. "I think it's fair to assume that it would be very hard for most consumers to know all the ways the search engines can discover Web pages," said Smugmug spokesman Chris MacAskill. Before the site was password protected, the AP purchased reprints for 29 cents each.

Link to AP news story, and link to the smugmug.com photosharing site (the images referenced are no longer publicly accessible through that photo-sharing website). The AP report says:

Nine scenes from the SEAL camp remain in Google's archived version of the page.

Any 1337 BoingBoing readers who sleuth the url for Google's cache of the smugmug gallery in question are invited to let us know.

Update: More images said to be from the smugmug gallery in question are published here: Link (Thanks, pemdasi) And the Spanish newspaper El Mundo has also published a selection of those photos. Link (Thanks, nv1962)

Note that we have made our traffic stats available in the left column. Link

Warren Baelen sez: "I was [at the Computer History Museum] the other night for a memorial to Ken Iverson who recently passed away. He was the designer/inventor of several languages including APL and J. Ken was a great mathematician and computer pioneer and they had a nice tribute to him. But before the memorial I got to take the walking tour.

What I thought BB readers may want to know about is this "viewable storage" tour. It features some computers that you would expect to see at a computer history museum, including an Apple I signed by Wozniak, a piece of the Eniac, but it also has some other really cool things such as a complete Johniac, an IBM 7030 "Strech", a few Cray machines. One computer that stood out in my mind was an IBM radar analysis computer -- features included: *light pen/gun, *circular radar console, *built-in phone (rotary of course), *cigarette lighter and ashtray.

Yes, a cigarette lighter and ashtray -- because watching radar of Russian bombers must have been really boring. I enclosed a picture of the computer with ashtray (which appears on the left hand side -- rotary phone on right). Apparently this machine was obsolete when it was deployed because the USSR switched to using ICBMs and this machine was built for tracking bombers in the Artic circle -- however it wasn't declassified until the 1980s because the Russians didn't know what its capabilities were. As my father put it, 'sometimes a blinking light is just a blinking light.'"

Guess we'll have to find something new to blog about:

[T]he Internet [Ed. note -- Read: BoingBoing] has been abuzz about an alleged hack into Target's Web operations, where its online store site appeared to offer items for sale that one wouldn't normally expect to find at the mainstream retailer. When customers typed "marijuana" into the search feature of Target's Web site, books and CDs about marijuana appeared that Target wouldn't want to sell. Worse--at least for Target--books, CDs and DVDs related to sex and drugs appeared when other words were entered.

"When a guest logs on to Target.com and searches for a particular word, that search includes Amazon.com's millions of books, music and (movie) titles," Target said in its statement. "Target.com is currently working with Amazon.com to suppress certain titles from the Amazon.com catalog from appearing on the Target.com web site."

Link to News.com story, and link to related BoingBoing posts about Target selling anal massage, more anal massage, blowjobs, crack, MDMA, and marijuana. That was quite some inventory! (thanks Steve)

My friend Todd Lappin recently returned from a trip to Tokyo and Kyoto, and he has uploaded his excellent photographs on Flickr. Link

This robot stereo and loudspeaker system is beautiful. Link

Tom sez: "Who needs an electronic nose to sniff out buried landmines? The Belgians prefer African giant pouched rats. And no, the rats do not get blown to bits."

The idea of using rats for the detection of landmines came up through a search for a cheap and efficient mine detector tool, which would be able to detect both metal and plastic landmines.

"Added bonus: the rats can detect tuberculosis from sputum samples!!" Link

Pop your way to a state of bliss with Virtual Bubble Wrap. Link (Thanks, Stefan!)

UPDATE: Here's a Palm OS version.

Lisa Rein has transcribed the the complete Countdown With Keith Olbermann interviews last week with Jesse Jackson and Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell about the controversy surrounding the vote count. Video available too. Link (to Blackwell) Link (to Jackson)

Camille Utterback's Shaken artwork is a tiny video screen embedded inside a snow globe. From the artist's statement:

"In the Shaken object, the physical gesture of shaking the device initiates the objects response of being 'shaken'. This object consists of a snow globe with an embedded LCD screen and tilt sensor. The more the user shakes the object, the more momentum is added to a video of a woman shaking out of control. Future versions of this piece will incorporate video clips which evoke a first person depiction of being shaken or disorientated."

Link (via Near, Near Future)

Maverick German anatomist Gunther von Hagens is the inventor of "plastination," a process by which the body and fat in a corpse is replaced with a polymer. His surreal work is currently on display in Los Angeles. Now, von Hagens is preparing to plastinate a giant squid in his Heidelberg laboratory. From a New Scientist article:

To research the project, von Hagens visited (Auckland, New Zealand squid expert Steve) O’Shea in October to study some much smaller species such as arrow squid. “We dissected a number of ‘sacrificial’ squid,” says O’Shea. This week, O’Shea sent a mature female giant squid, measuring about 10 metres including tentacles, and a mature male, just under 7 metres, to Heidelberg.

Link

Howard Lovy of the NanoBot has written a great article for Tech Central Station about a new animation project to educate the public about molecular nanotechnology. The project was spearheaded by molecular nanotech pioneer Eric Drexler and the Foresight Institute.

John Burch, who runs Lizard Fire Studios in Austin, Texas, says he fully expects his animation to be ridiculed by those who believe that he's merely producing a fanciful cartoon. That's OK, he says. Throw potshots at it. But while the argument rages over what is not possible, somebody had to "put this stake in the ground" and make the first move toward creating "a clear image of what we think is possible.....

"I want to make this thing happen," Burch says. "Everybody I know has medical problems that could be fixed or improved through technology based on this machine. There's too much pain in this world to just sit here and watch it."

Where would he like to see it shown? "I think most anyplace where it's not ridiculed will be a good place."

Link

UPDATE: And yes, we're aware that Tech Central Station is a, well, problematic publication. But it's still a good article.

Earlier today, I posted comments from a BoingBoing reader about the fact that MSN Spaces, Microsoft's new blogging tool, censors certain words you might try to include in a blog title or url. If you can't speak freely on a blog, what's the point of having one? This demanded a full investigation.

Using my existing MSN Passport account, I attempted to create a number of blogs, one after the other. The results of which titles passed and which were banned may surprise you -- or at least generate a few Beavis-and-Butthead snorkles. Each of the linked test-titles in this BoingBoing post points to to an actual, unmodified screenshot of the corresponding test blog I created (or was denied the ability to create) using MSN Search.

(1) BoingBoing's readers said the title "Corporate Whore" was censored. My attempt at "Corporate Whore Chronicles" met the same result, but "Corporate Prostitute Chronicles" worked fine. Hooray for synonyms with more syllables!

(2) I figured anything in the original list of seven dirty words banned by the FCC would be off-limits: shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. Most of that proved to be true, as did other potent cusswords which would likely cause license problems for a television or radio station. But a test blog titled "Tits for Tats" passed without incident. Off to a good start, with no unneccesarily broad language policing. Chalk one up for MSN Spaces!

(3) More good news. "World of Poop" is just fine. And the rather racy "Butt Sex is Awesome" made it through, as did the overtly naughty "Dick, Balls, Boobies, Goddammit." The test blog titled "My Craptacular Life" was free to do its bloggy thing, unhindered by prudish vocabulary cops. Even "Internet Explorer is Crappy" was welcomed with open arms. Now that's free speech!

(4) Uh-oh. My attempt to create an MSN Spaces blog called "Pornography and The Law" is met with rude red text advising me to can the profanity. So, if I were a law student who wanted to start a blog about the history of obscenity law in the United States, I'd be shit out of luck.

(5) Very bad news for fans of Russian literature. The blog title "Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov" is deemed inappropriate, as are any titles I try to create with the 1955 book's name.

(6) You may recall our previously-approved blog title, "Butt Sex is Awesome." That name was fine, but MSN Spaces puts the kibosh on "Anal Health for People who Think Buttsex is Awesome" ("anal" was the problem word here; "buttsex," "butt-sex," and "butt sex" all passed MS-muster.)

(7) "Smoking Crack: A How-To Guide For Teens." This wholesome little morsel, suggested by my NPR "Day to Day" producer Steve Proffitt, also made the grade.

The conclusion? A mixed bag of results that manages to do what most attempts to automate censorship do -- make fools of the censors.

Richard sez: "I noticed that recently you've blogged several vintage-things sites -- the commie cartoon, the sci-fi book covers, that old diary, etc. All very cool, and I think you should add one more site to the list --€“ "emails" from the last century!

"Someone found a huge box of old postcards (1898-1922) in an antique shop. Not all that unusual, but what made them interesting was that they were all sent between members of the same (huge) family. Their finder is now scanning them in, transcribing them, and sticking them online.

"It's the best of all possible things: you get to pry into the personal lives of strangers, see cool, old pictures (like a wall covered in skulls and London before the tourists arrived), as well as getting a rare glimpse into the past. As far as I can tell, these people used their postcards like we used email -– the post was so good the cards (and their reply) could arrive the same day." Link

I received this Cingular brochure in the mail today. The girl on the cover seems to be amused that a tiny hand is growing out of her shoulder. (click image for enlargement.)

BoingBoing reader and accidental sex-spam-sleuth Alias observes:

"Because GMail (and other popular email clients these days) blocks images by default, porn spammers have now begun to use 1980s style ASCII art in order to get their message across.

This textfile contains one simple example, with the words HOT GIRLS in big letters - it cunningly gets past spam filters by not containing any actual words in the body text. As its content is only apparent to humans, it will be tricky to catch by any filters - as long as the whitespace remains intact, the actual text can just be any random garbage. In theory, every spam email could be totally unique.

I confidently expect to see a renaissance in erotic ASCII art in the coming months, until someone figures out how to filter out this type of spam..."

Reader Xopl replies,

"Well, ASCII text spam messages are actually pretty easy to filter. You just render the text, and then use technology similar to an OCR to see if it spells anything. Now, if they start doing actual ascii-porn images... that's difficult. But frankly, I'm not sure I'd mind."

Link to spam-specimen (*.txt)

This reminds me of one of my favorite books in childhood.

Having failed to quell months of escalating unrest in three southern provinces by force, Thailand's unorthodox prime minister is hoping plane loads of origami peace bombs will defuse the tension.

Thaksin Shinawatra has urged all 63 million Thais to make at least one paper bird in the next fortnight so they can be dropped on the three restive provinces on December 5 as a sign of goodwill to mark King Bhumibol Adulyadej's birthday...

Link (thanks Alex Rosen)

Tim sez: "I saw your post today about the haptic arm wrestling stations. I work at The Tech in San Jose and thought I'd send along a couple photos of our stations, including one showing the videoconferencing and progress meters. We just opened our NetPl@net gallery and this is one of the

most popular exhibits in the gallery. We've had to make several repairs since the opening since kids absolutely love beating the hell out of it, so we're looking into ways to better reinforce its mechanical parts."

BoingBoing reader Tom Biro writes:

If you're not familiar with what went down in the last week with regard to Jason Kottke's blog, then here's a quick refresher. Kottke had pointed out details he was given about Ken Jennings' eventual demise on the television game show "Jeopardy," and much speculation took place on blogs and in the public eye that he would lose sometime this year. Then, a few days ago, Kottke posted audio and a description of what happened in the "final" show for Jennings. A few days later, he was contacted by Sony and asked to first remove the audio and then the printed description. Various print outlets, including the Washington Post were apparently not told to do the same. (Or are at least not saying/doing so)

Thursday morning, Kottke wrote this post, where he stated that "Things may be a little quieter around here in the short term as I deal with some stuff going on in the real world....I can't say too much about it (soon perhaps), but it sure has had a chilling effect on my enthusiasm for continuing to maintain kottke.org."

The concern here is that a blogger could, even if s/he were *correctly/legally* doing something, be sued and lose the case, purely for financial reasons. Is this right?

No. It most certainly isn't. Link to Kottke's post. IFILM has a copy of the video here, and here's a torrent Link (thanks alfie). For the KenJen-obsessed, here's more fodder. Jeff Jarvis proposes a "Bloggers Legal Defense Society" -- Link.

Updated. Today, Microsoft launches their free hosted blogging platform, spaces.msn.com. What effect the service will have on Blogger, TypePad, Userland, and the like is, predictably, a subject of great debate. The service is free, and seems aimed squarely at home users. BoingBoing reader alfie checks the W3 validator site and says, "MSN Spaces seems to be completely ignoring markup standards. Well done chaps." Link. Reader Christopher Carfi hosts a discussion about the launch on his blog, here.

Reader Paul Pellerito says, "MSN Spaces User asciident notes that at the bottom of every MSN Space is (c)2004 Microsoft Corporation. And according to their terms of use:

For materials you post or otherwise provide to Microsoft related to the MSN Web Sites (a "Submission"), you grant Microsoft permission to (1) use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate and reformat your Submission, each in connection with the MSN Web Sites, and (2) sublicense these rights, to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law. Microsoft will not pay you for your Submission."

"Makes me wanna yell STOP! Soylent green is people!"

Wired News story, Forbes coverage, and here is the Microsoft press release.

Peter Orosz says:

MSN Spaces, Microsoft's new blogging service, censors stuff! We're all gonna die! This is a screencap taken by a friend of mine who apparently tried to register at MSN Spaces. His blog's description reads "A Corporate Whore", which the service promptly bounced. Yikes!

Link

On this wonderful little blog, a young man in Bordeaux, France sketches his way through life in a series of moleskine journals. He scans the results, and posts them online for all to see. Simple things like this bring me endless delight in the power of the web. It's a microscope. It's a telescope. Its lens captures a field of infinitely varying depth. Link to Beleg's moleskine online, Link to his main blaugue, and link to the Wandering Moleskine Project.

In today's Wired News, a gadget shopping guide I pulled together, in which everything was selected for mobility. Battery-powered holiday travel delay coping mechanisms.

For geeks, the most telling signs of seasonal reality have nothing to do with a crisp chill in the smog, the scent of tofurkey roasting in the microwave or that scraping sound a super-sized fir makes when you're cramming it through the front door of your nano-apartment.No. The sure sign it's time to move out of holiday denial and into holiday acceptance is the sight of all those fresh gadgets jamming shelves at the mall.

Electronic healing starts when you admit you are powerless over your problem -- deciding which gizmos to buy, either for your loved ones or yourself. To kick-start your journey of techno-recovery, consider these goodies, all of which can fit handily into a single carry-on bag (we've even picked that out for you).

Link

This one really nails it. Frank Rich on the new red-state-panderin' mood washing over mainstream media at the moment. Some interesting thoughts on the role of blogs.

[N]etwork news still counts. The idea, largely but not exclusively fomented by the right, that TV news might somehow soon be supplanted by blogging as a mass medium may remain a populist fantasy until Americans are able to receive blogs by iPod. (At which point they become talk radio.) The dense text in the best blogs often requires as much of a reader's time and concentration as high-end print journalism, itself facing declining circulation. Since blogging doesn't generate big (if any) profits, there's no budget for its "citizen reporters" to reliably blanket catastrophic and far-flung breaking news. (There are no bloggers among the 36 journalists thus far killed in the Iraq war.) Bloggers can fact-check documents (as in the Rather case), opine, organize, talk back, leak early exit polls and publish multimedia outings of the seemingly endless supply of closeted gay Republican officials. But if bloggers are actually doing front-line reporting rather than commenting upon the news in a danger zone like Falluja, chances are that they are underwritten by a day job on the payroll of a major news organization.

Kevin Sites, the freelance TV cameraman who caught a marine shooting an apparently unarmed Iraqi prisoner in a mosque, is one such blogger. Mr. Sites is an embedded journalist currently in the employ of NBC News. To NBC's credit, it ran Mr. Sites's mid-November report, on a newscast in which Mr. Williams was then subbing for Mr. Brokaw, and handled it in exemplary fashion. Mr. Sites avoided any snap judgment pending the Marines' own investigation of the shooting, cautioning that a war zone is "rife with uncertainty and confusion." But loud voices in red America, especially on blogs, wanted him silenced anyway. On right-wing sites like freerepublic.com Mr. Sites was branded an "anti-war activist" (which he is not), a traitor and an "enemy combatant." Mr. Sites's own blog, touted by Mr. Williams on the air, was full of messages from the relatives of marines profusely thanking the cameraman for bringing them news of their sons in Iraq. That communal message board has since been shut down because of the death threats by other Americans against Mr. Sites.

Link (Thank you, J. Muller)

Following up on earlier BoingBoing posts (one, two) about controversial military recruitment tactics: a 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals ruling this week will allow colleges and universities to ban military recruiters from their campuses.

The government has been using a ten year old federal law called the Solomon Amendment which "requires law schools to express a message that is incompatible with their educational objectives.

Link to military.com story, Link to Washington Post coverage. Link to PDF of decision, including the 30 page dissenting opinion. (Thanks, PJ)

BoingBoing reader Mark Miller says,

"For anyone who has actually received such a pre-recorded call from the US Army, and is not on the Do Not Call List, such action is already illegal in it of itself, I discovered. Here's a link to the federal code that prohibits this activity. Personally, I plan to take civil action against the US Army. I encourage anyone else who has received such a call to do the same.

Link

BoingBoing reader Brian Hagner, a student at University of Denver's Sturm College of Law, responds:

Mr. Miller claims the section of the US Code that is linked prohibits the automated phone calls by the US Army to be illegal. I believe if he had thoroughly read the exemptions listed under section (2) (B) of the linked section of the code, he would see that the Commission holds broad discretionary powers to exclude such automated calls from being held illegal under the code. It is well with in reason for the Commission to find a) that the US Army calls are not specifically of a commercial nature, or b) if they are deemed to be commercial calls, they do not infringe on the privacy rights of the recipients, and do not include unsolicited advertisement. While it seems obvious that these calls are advertisements, its entirely likely that they are ruled not to be advertisements, but rather fall into another category due to the nature of the US Army and the inherent necessity of recruiting people to our nation’s defense.

I enjoy reading the postings on BoingBoing, but just thought it unwise to encourage people to file suit against the US Army based on an incomplete reading of the US Code.

I enjoy reading the postings on BoingBoing, but just thought it unwise to encourage people to file suit against the US Army based on an incomplete reading of the US Code.

Reader Douglas Barnes (also a law student, but at the University of Texas School of Law) counters:

At the risk of turning BoingBoing into a legal debating club, I have to point out that Brian Hagner has misread the statute. He also neglected to check the implementing regulations to determine whether the hypothetical exemptions he suggests were implemented (for the reasons below, they weren't, but it's always good to check anyhow).

The ban on automated calls to cell phones is in 47 U.S.C. 227(b)(1)(A). At 227(b)(2)(B), it allows regulatory exemptions to 227(b)(1)(B). You'll notice they put a helpful forward pointer in 227(b)(1)(B) "or is exempted by rule or order by the Commission under paragraph (2)(B)."

There is another exemption, 227(b)(2)(C), which allows a regulatory exemption for calls "calls to a telephone number assigned to a cellular telephone service that are not charged to the called party . . ." More interestingly, there are sovereign immunity and related issues to work through, which I will spare the readers of BoingBoing.

And Mr. Hagner replies:

Douglas Barnes is absolutely correct in that the calls to cell phones are prohibited. I did not realize that the discussion was about calls to cell phones because the previous posts did not specify. After looking further, I realize that Mr. Barnes’s blog mentioned cell phones, but that was not specified any where else. I assumed we were talking about automated calls to phones in general.

BoingBoing reader Darren writes,

I saw your post on Worlds AIDS Day. Coincidentally, I just posted on a great CBC radio documentary about the church's role in HIV/AIDS in South Africa. It's called 'Milk and Honey, Vaseline and Prayer'. Collectively, the Christian churchs' approach to managing HIV/AIDS is shameful. The Anglicans are the only church to offer condoms to parishioners, and even they seemed to do it reticently. The documentary's title refers to the most common approach to the disease.

Link to documentary and Link to Darren's blog post.

BoingBoing reader Lee Kin Mun says, "Hi, I was amused to read about the umbilical cord story you posted, and just want to point out that while gross to most Western audiences, it is a very common practice in Asian communities. We Chinese do it too (yes, even in metropolitan Singapore), like my blog friend Huileng. My wife has the umbilical cord stump of my secondborn son (but not our firstborn daughter, we forgot) too. Personally, I think keeping the umbilical cord stump is way less gross than the eating of placentas (which I am told, tastes like liver).

Link to a post on Huileng's blog about umbilical cord cultural norms.

This scientific paper was published two years ago, but I missed it. It may be an oldie, but it's a goodie. Computer scientist Markus Kuhn demonstrated a way to read CRT computer monitors at a distance using a photosensor, even if you're not facing the screen.

An image is created on the CRT surface by varying the electron beam intensity for each pixel. The room in which the CRT is located is partially illuminated by the pixels. As a result, the light in the room becomes a measure for the electron beam current. In particular, there is a little invisible ultrafast flash each time the electron beam refreshes a bright pixel that is surrounded by dark pixels on its left and right.

So if you measure the brightness of a wall in this room with a very fast photosensor, and feed the result in another monitor that receives the exact same synchronization signals for steering its electron beam, you get to see an image like this (after using a mathematical signal processing technique--ed.)

Link (Thanks, Ken!)

Cereality is a sit-down restaurant that serves up custom blends of brand-name breakfast cereals and toppings. The second Cereality location just opened on the University of Pennsylvania campus. From an Associated Press report:

Between bites of hot oatmeal with cranberries and almonds, Penn junior Alpha Mengistu, 20, said Cereality offered more than a quick carb- and sugar-load."> Between bites of hot oatmeal with cranberries and almonds, Penn junior Alpha Mengistu, 20, said Cereality offered more than a quick carb- and sugar-load.

"I think this would be a good place for a date," she said. "You could learn a lot about a person by what cereal they choose."

Link

In my latest issue of Lab Notes, research from UC Berkeley's College of Engineering:

* Listening for extraterrestrials

* A class on Lego Mindstorms robots

* Composites for satellite engineering

Link

The Center for Disease Control offers two free sets of disease trading cards to download in PDF form. Each card has photos and information about diseases that the CDC studies, from Anthrax to the West Nile Virus. Link (via MetaFilter)

Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917) was voted the most influential artwork of the 20th century by 500 artworld big shots in Great Britain. Link

BB reader Jake sez: "It's interesting to note this vindication of Cory's prediction that intellectual property right law makes certain things too costly for poorer countries to use. The head of Brazil's AIDS program told the BBC today that the only way his group can continue its fight is by breaking the hold on anti-AIDS patents." Link to news story.

If you can't remember, maybe it's time for an update. World AIDS Day -- today -- is as good a day as any to get an HIV test, and the web provides a number of search tools for finding free, anonymous testing near you (as well as AIDS education and safer-sex support). More options than ever are out there.

For instance, where I live here in LA, one organization offers free, quick oral testing (no blood! no needles!) in trailers that drive up to areas near nightclubs and shopping districts. The test strips taste sorta gross (in a pepto-bismol-meets-spackle kind of way), but you're sent off in a few minutes packing free candy, condoms, and the empowerment that knowledge brings. Wherever you are, periodic testing and a commitment to practicing responsible sex are a good thing. Link to HIV testing resource website maintained by the US CDC, Link to resources at stopaids.org, Link to test facility search resources at AIDSHealth.org.

A correspondent from Australian Personal Computer Magazine is live-blogging the Sharman networks trial in Sydney. He describes it as "the world’s-biggest-copyright-case for the Internet’s most-downloaded-program-in-history." Link to Day 2, Link to Day 1. (via pho)

In today's NYT, an interesting feature about China's animation industry -- which, like virtually everything else there, appears to be growing fast. Talent that has until now served mostly as outsourced labor for American TV and film projects won't remain nameless for long, as a string of new features are readied for release.

Seen from outside, there is nary a hint of the Magic Kingdom about this ambitious young animation studio nestled amid magnolias and palms on the campus of Shenzhen University. A glimpse inside one specially secured building, accessible only with a smart ID card that one swipes through a reader to gain entry and move about inside, soon gives up the game. The first clues are the Hollywood posters that hang from nearly every wall: "Star Wars," "Godzilla," "The Lost World," "The Matrix," "End of Days." Down one hallway, heavily air-conditioned computer rooms hum with the kind of processing power one might find in a high-tech laboratory. The giveaway is the army of artist-students slouched over their flat-screen monitors in one dimly lighted production room after another, drawing thousands of pictures for feature-length films.

Early next year, Global Digital Creations Holdings, a fledgling animation studio that has mostly labored in anonymity, is aiming for the big time with the worldwide release of its first 3-D feature film, "Thru the Moebius Strip," a science-fiction adventure about a determined boy's time travel to another galaxy to rescue his stranded father.

Link

Nifty Corgi Toys art gallery. Link (Thanks, Todd!!

Matt Browning sez: "This is a followup for the Haptic entry by Mark yesterday. I wanted to point out a Haptic Arm Wrestling League that just launched in 6 science museums, including the New York Hall of Science in Queens, the Tech Museum in San Jose, and the Imaginarium in Alaska. I developed the software and co-developed the electronics for this, and after 4 months, i still get a big smile watching the kids (and adults) use it for the first time.

Features include:
* live video and audio feeds of your opponent
* left handed person can wrestle a right handed person
* safety (for the kids) balenced with realistic (for the adults) arm movements
* a statistics League - showing the locations with the top winning percentages
* RFID bracelet activation (only for the Tech Museum) that allows museum visitors to go home after the museum visit and enter their ID into the website, providing screenshots of them and their opponent while they were playing." Link

UPDATE: Joe sez: "It's always good to see real life catching up with sci-fi. I can't have been the only person who saw this post and immediately thought of Alan Moore's 80's epic "The Ballad of Halo Jones." Her cabinmate on the spaceship Clara Pandy, where they were working as stewardesses, the 7 foot tall Toy Molto, was forever playing an armwrestling machine and wrecking it. Here is a picture of Toy having just returned from the stores with a new stronger arm for the poor machine. It would be nice to see this groundbreaking graphic novel brought to the attention of modern readers, as it is easily as good as anything produced since (IMHO)."

Video of last Friday's ABC World News Tonight segment about Firefox (in which I was a participant) is now online.

Link to WMV (~15MB), and Link to Real (~9MB). If anyone's moved to torrentify or convert to other formats, well, be my geek guest.

(Thanks much to JP and Mike O. for TiVoing, and big thanks to Leonard for hosting.)

Update: Brian provides two torrents. Link to WMV torrent, Link to Real torrent. Thanks, Brian!

Fleshbot says:

Shu Lea Cheang's online art project mixes random porn images grabbed from the web while displaying the number of Africans who died of AIDS since you started connecting. Porn is all about fantasy -- but if there was ever a time to remember that certain realities still affect all of us (especially the adult industry), it's today. Get educated, get involved, and do what you can to make observing World AIDS Day every December 1 a thing of the past.

Link (NSFW)

Bad news for the internet, bad news for culture, bad news for the liberty of ideas. In an era of shrinking funds for schools and bricks-and-mortar libraries, a federal judge rules against efforts to open access to knowledge on the 'net.

The case, Kahle v. Ashcroft, pitted two archive groups -- the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library, and the Prelinger Archives, which preserves films -- against the U.S. Justice Department. The archivists argued that four copyright laws are collectively keeping people from gaining access to "orphan" works: out-of-print books, old films, and academic articles that have little or no commercial value. The laws that the archivists fault are the Copyright Act of 1976, the Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988, the Copyright Renewal Act of 1992, and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. A central part of the archivists' argument is that laws granting copyright protection to all works, even those for which the creators have not sought protection, have radically altered the "traditional contours of copyright."

Link to SF Chron story. And snip from John Borland's coverage on CNET:

Kahle said Wednesday that the decision would be appealed, and that they had always planned to fight the primary battle in the appellate courts. The court had not directly addressed what he said was the primary thrust of the case--a change in laws to automatically renew copyrights, instead of requiring copyright holders to reregister, he said.

"The key component of the district court ruling is that the judge did not consider the main aspect of this case, which is the changing of the contour of copyright law from opt in to opt out," Kahle said. "That has dramatically changed what's under copyright, and even more ominously, changes the nature of what can be put on the Internet."

Link to CNET story. Link to court's decision in PDF format. Link to a related /. thread.

Big news in Pennsylvania today, after reports of many bureaucratic challenges -- Philadelphia has reached an agreement with Verizon that will allow the city to offer free WiFi as a sort of public utility. Free like liberty, free like beer?

Philadelphia's plans are the most ambitious of any major U.S. city to provide free or cheap high-speed wireless to all residents. Lawyers for the city and Verizon, the city's local telephone company, found common ground Tuesday in discussions with the governor's office, said Luz Cardenas, a spokeswoman for Philadelphia Mayor John F. Street.

Link.

But don't start cheering too soon, counters BoingBoing reader Mike:

While Philly's WiFi plan looks like it will go ahead as planned, that's only because PA Gov. Ed Rendell negotiated with Verizon to get their permission. The bill that Rendell just signed into law is just as bad as ever -- it was written by corporate lobbyists and gives telco monopolies the right to veto municipal plans to provide broadband services. Philadelphians will get their WiFi only because we raised a ruckus about it, but other cities in Pennsylvania are out of luck. This is a bad deal and a bad precedent.

Link to the full text of Mike's critique.

And BB reader Chris Holland says:

Philly citizens are about to unwittingly foot the bill for higher-priced broadband while jeopardizing their Municipal WiFi project, courtesy of telco-lobby-sponsored Pennsylvania House Bill 30. Om Malik is rounding-up analysis from Esme Vos and Harold Feld. The WSJ also offers a similar perspective. Slashdot also picked-up this story from Macworld.