Phillip Torrone's article on Hack-a-Day explains how to trick out your iPod to get it to record audio really well, bypassing the crippling restrictions imposed by Apple:

apple cripples recording on an ipod so belkin and griffin then have to sell us add-on devices for over $50 that can only record at 8khz, which is all pretty shitty. apparently (the rumor is) apple does this so people don’t use their ipods to record stuff they think we shouldn’t, like concerts, whatever.

but don’t worry, there’s a way around it and you can record at high quality, all for free.

Link

Merlin Mann's 43 Folders weblog is a site where he's been chronicling his efforts to adapt the lessons of the stupendous productivity book Getting Things Done (I've bought and given away 10 copies since reading it earlier this year) to a technological workflow: in other words, he's porting suit productivity to geek lifestyles.

He's just posted part one of a roundup of his lessons learned from a year of pursuing the lessons of Getting Things Done (more to come tomorrow). It's really good stuff, and it's helped me make sense of my last decade's work.

In a previous life as a producer and project manager for some good-sized web projects, I once approached my work with a completely baseless optimism and sense of possibility that I had absolutely no business feeling--let alone foisting off on others as way to guide big projects. Especially given how extravagantly long-range I now realize most of those projects' aspirations really were. Yikes. Simpler times.

The reality is that projects change, and projects break; that's what they do. It's their job. The smaller your project is, and the shorter the distance there is between "here" and "there," the less likely you are to have to chuck it and start over for reasons you couldn't possibly have foreseen when you were knitting up them fancy GANTT charts for Q3/2007.

You know how it works with The Big Plan. Projects kick off, a series of heavy documents with 4-color covers is produced and distributed, everyone gets pumped for a week or two, and then somewhere, somehow, along the way, changes start to rain down, and the pretty, pretty plans for the next 3/6/9/12 months go completely to hell, often taking team morale and productivity right along with them. Say what you will about the volatility of go-go dotcoms and the nature of venture IT projects, but two bald facts won't wipe away: things always change, and Big Project Plans make great door stops.

Since picking up GTD, I've gotten more comfortable with employing informal, "back of the envelope" planning to derive very short-term goals and actions. Clients in particular seem to really like this. It helps them keep a handle on the tab, plus they all enjoy seeing one piece of the work rolling out every month or so. All without the need for endless commitments, rosaries, or finger crossing.

Link

LokiTorrent is a BitTorrent indexing site -- like the lamented Suprnova -- that has been threatened with legal action by the MPAA for telling people where to download torrent files that allow them to download video and other large data-objects. Unlike some of the other Torrent indexers that shut down last week, LokiTorrent is mounting a legal defense. They're trying to raise a legal defense fund of $30,000, and they've made $11,500 in the first 12 hours. Link (via /.)

Here's a great go-faster tip for Firefox, the free, rock-solid, secure browser from the Mozilla Foundation:

1.Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:

Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"

Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"

Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to "0". This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

If you're using a broadband connection you'll load pages MUCH faster now!

Link (Thanks, daede!)

Update: Ole sez, "Enabling pipelining in Firefox can speed up complex page retrievals, as you note, but it can also break Flash.  This is a Macromedia thing not a Firefox thing but that’s why the app defaults to pipelining disabled."

Update 2: Gav sez, "There are reasons why Firefox isn't configured like that out of the box. Asa at Mozilla.org explains why.

There's a big-city hustle that goes like this: a hustler comes up to offering to fence you some stolen big-ticket electronics item, still sealed in its box -- say, a video camera. You can heft that box all you like, but no opening the shrink-wrap, as that would lower the resale value. Once you give the crackhead $20 for this boss $1000 camera and tear off the shrinkwrap, you discover that you've just bought a brick in a camcorder box. Basically, it's what happens when you combine crackheads, a supply of fresh consumer electronics boxes, and a shrinkwrapping machine.

Here's a modern twist on an old favorite: buy a Powerbook for a double-sawbuck. What's in the black, sleek Powerbook box?

"A fake laptop made of gray garbage bag and cardboard, spray-painted platinum silver and finished with A HAND-PAINTED APPLE LOGO DONE IN WITE-OUT."

Oh, man, that's some Martha Stewartoid crackhead creativity. Link (via Making Light)

On his blog, John Perry Barlow writes about a serious accident that his daughter Amelia just survived -- and the sense of hope that, paradoxically, experiences like this can bring. Hope that transcends the personal, encompassing the global. Our best wishes for Amelia's safe and speedy recovery, Barlow. Link

In case you or your TiVo find yourself in front of the TV tonight (Wednesday, December 29), I'll be appearing on ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings in a segment about Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, whom ABC count among the "people of the year" from the tech world. Link. Local air times: Link

Update: Here's an archived video file of tonight's ABC News segment on Google, in WMV. Offers to convert or torrent welcomed with thanks. Link to 3.4 MB file (Many thanks, Mike Outmesguine!)

Wikinews just launched a Tsunami Help page to collect links to relief effort resources including aid agencies, missing and found people, confirmed deaths, news updates, and helpline numbers. The emergency database was created by contributors to the SEA-EAT (Tsunami Help) blog. (Thanks, Rohit). Link to related BoingBoing posts.

I've written about my favorite illustrator, the late Jim Flora, several times on Boing Boing. I'm happy to see that the New York Times has an article him, and his influence on today's artists.

"I came across his work in 1993," said Michael Bartalos, a San Francisco-based illustrator who was among the first to locate Flora. "Our styles were very similar - strangely similar, actually - but after I met him I was even more influenced." Among the other prominent artists and illustrators today who are strongly influenced by Flora's art are Tim Biskup, Gary Baseman, J. D. King and Melinda Beck, who all wrote appreciations for Mr. Chusid's book, each praising his effortlessly jazzy spirit. Gene Deitch, a contemporary of Flora's, admits that through the 40's and 50's he was "brazenly imitating his style."

Link (Thanks, Erin!)

Some of the indigenous ethnic communities on Andaman and Nicobar islands could be on the verge of extinction after the tsunami disaster.

The remote cluster of more than 550 islands, of which only about three dozen are inhabited, is home to six tribes of Mongoloid and African origin who have lived there for thousands of years. Many of these tribal people are semi-nomadic and subsist on hunting with spears, bows and arrows, and by fishing and gathering fruit and roots. They still cover themselves with tree bark or leaves.

"They are a vital link to our prehistoric past. If they are lost, India and the world lose a bit of their glorious heterogeneity," said Ajoy Bagchi, executive director of the People's Commission on Environment and Development, India, which has worked with tribal groups in the region for years.

"Even a small loss in any of these groups, barring the more numerous Nicobarese, could seriously endanger their survival. We need to immediately do a count on how many of them are alive."

Link. Previous BoingBoing posts: Link

The total number of dead is now believed to be more than 80,000, and rising. In some places, one in every four citizens have lost their lives. Many of the areas hit were extremely poor to begin with, and some 1/3 of the dead are children. Following up on previous BoingBoing posts about fundraising and relief efforts kick-started in the blogosphere:

Scott Hanselman proposes that Google allow bloggers that use AdSense to donate ad proceeds to tsunami relief. Link (Thanks, Peter Provost).

Andy Carvin at Digital Divide Network says, "In response to this week's devastating tsunami in the Indian Ocean, the Digital Divide Network has created an online community workspace on disaster relief and emergency preparedness: Link. The virtual community can be used for posting online resources, documents, news, and articles about tsunami relief efforts. Users also may take advantage of the site's Web bulletin board and post their own blog entries."

BoingBoing reader Andrew Falconer proposes that folks who've received holiday gift cards convert them into donations to a tsunami relief charity. "I've emailed Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Swapagift.com regarding gift card donations directly to tsunami relief charities. Amazon.com has already implemented the ability to donate via their One-Click system."

Reader J. Hahn says, "I am particularly impressed with Amazon.com's Red Cross donation counter that proves Americans are not 'stingy.' Also, as a Mac user, I was proud to go to the apple.com site and see not one product ad on their front page - just links to aid and donation sites, and Microsoft had not one mention of the disaster."

Previous BoingBoing posts: Link

Alex Steffen says,

Hey -- If, like me, you are a non-Indian, find reading Indian new sources valuable (especially during this disaster), but don't really know your lakh from your crore, and find the placement of commas in Indian numbers utterly baffling, this guide to the Indian numbering system will prove helpful: Term / Figure / No. of zeros / In words
lakh (lac) / 1,00,000/ 5 / Hundred Thousand
crore / 1,00,00,000/ 7 / Ten million
arab / 1,00,00,00,000/ 9 / 1 billion
kharab / 1,00,00,00,00,000 / 11 / 100 billion

Link to Wikipedia tutorial

Waxy.org has been collecting amateur video footage, here's a roundup post: Link. Punditguy has more: Link

Chris Holland says,

I've used prodigem to create torrents for the South Asia tsunami videos. The more people use this torrent, the faster everyone else will be able to download the videos. See also this page to make it easy for people to put an amazon donation badge on their sites.

Link

Previous BoingBoing posts: Link

Blogger and NBC combat correspondent Kevin Sites was in Southeast Asia on a break from reporting duties when the tsunami disaster took place. He's now in Thailand, reporting -- and back on the blog again, dispatching photos and first-person accounts. Snip:

One-hundred and fifty-nine pine coffins have been stacked in the garage -- many of them big enough to hold refrigerators -- built to accommodate the now bloated and rapidly decomposing bodies inside.

Thai soldiers, wearing surgical masks, race against time to arrest the process -- before the bodies become impossible to identify.

In a well-choreographed drill -- they use hammers to smash square blocks of dry ice, carrying the shards on sheets of plastic and dumping them inside the coffins with the remains. They work at a very high tempo -- almost as if they were trying to rescue the living -- rather than preserve the dead.

On the sides of the coffins are photographs of the deceased as they were found, special attention paid to jewelry or tattoos, anything that can help in identifying who they once were.

The pictures are grisly -- bruised, blackened, bodies misshapen from the ferocious force of an angry ocean and all that travels with it. Old, young, small, large, South Africans, Australians, Canadians, English, Thais –- all victims of the earth's unrest on a day when she seemed to have precious little mercy.

Link.(Photo: Coffins bearing digital photographs of the deceased. image: Kevin Sites.)

John Schwartz wrote an insightful piece for the New York Times this week about the role blogs play in covering and responding to the tsunami disaster. I was interviewed for the piece, but the people who really have something interesting and valuable to say are the ones over there, on the ground -- and the folks rolling up their geek sleeves to assist.

From relaying first-person accounts (like Sanjay/Morquendi's SMS reports in Sri Lanka), to kick-starting relief efforts (tsunamihelp.blogspot.com, and the Post-Tsunami Reconnect project), to questioning media coverage (Ethan Zuckerman's post about Myanmar), there's a lot going on here The amateur-shot image shown here ran in the NYT story. Snip:

"At sumankumar.com, Nanda Kishore, a contributor, offered photos and commentary from Chennai, India: 'Some drenched till their hips, some till their chest, some all over and some of them were so drenched that they had already stopped breathing. Men and women, old and young, all were running for lives. It was a horrible site to see. The relief workers could not attend to all the dead and all the alive. The dead were dropped and the half alive were carried to safety.' His postings included a photo of a body on a sidewalk with a buffalo walking by. 'It now seems prophetic," he wrote, "for according to the Hindu mythology, Lord Yama (the god of death) rides on a buffalo.'"

Link to story.
Fox News did a segment on this subject yesterday. I spoke with anchor Jon Scott about some of the blogosphere reports we've been pointing to from BoingBoing in recent days. Here are video clips of the Fox News segment: Real, Windows (Many thanks, Mike Outmesguine, for TiVoing and kindly hosting.)

There have been a number of related stories out in the past 24 hours in the Wall Street Journal (Link, sub required), Libération (France) (Link), the Inquirer (UK) (Link), and AP (Link). (Thanks to BB readers including Jean-Luc for pointers).

Previous BoingBoing posts: Link

Chris Anderson, the Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine, has responded to my blog-post in which I take issue with Wired's latest product-review magazine, which breathes hardly a mention of DRM even as it reviews devices that are all crapped up with studio-paranoia-generated restriction technology.

Chris takes a "middle ground" position that I've heard described as "radical centrism" -- his position is that the EFF's opposition to DRM is "idealistic" and that there is therefore a practical "reality" that is better suited to the world. I think it's a false dichotomy, and I'd like to have a little go at Chris's post here and see if I can show why:

Consumers want more content, easier-to-use technology, and cheaper prices. If some form of DRM encourages publishers, consumer electronics makers and retailers to release more, better and cheaper digital media and devices, that's not necessarily a bad thing. This is just being realistic: much as we might want it to be otherwise, content owners still call most of the shots. If a little protection allows them to throw their weight behind a lot of progress towards realizing the potential of digital media, consumers will see a net benefit.

This is the crux of the argument. It starts out by saying that DRM is protection. And protection makes Hollywood comfortable. And a comfortable Hollywood will release more material. And the more material there is, the cheaper it will get.

But all of those propositions are materially untrue. Start with "DRM is protection." DRM is not protection. There has never been a DRM-covered file that was kept off the Internet. Ever. DRM has never once in the history of the field kept a file from appearing online, or from being booted by organized crime pirates. Despite its rhetoric on this, Hollywood is perfectly aware of how bogus the DRM-is-protection claim is; any entertainment exec you put on this spot on this will retreat to a badly-thought-out mantra to the effect that "DRM is a speedbump, it's not meant to keep files off the Internet, it's meant to 'keep honest users honest.'" As Ed Felten has pointed out, keeping an honest user honest is like keeping a tall user tall. DRM may keep a naive user from buying a cheap DVD abroad and bringing it home, and it may make it possible to charge you for things that you used to get for free, like format-shifting, but it won't ever keep an honest user honest.

DRM isn't protection from piracy. DRM is protection from competition. If you believe that "much as we might want it to be otherwise, content owners still call most of the shots," then you believe that the guy who makes the record should get a veto over the design of the record player. That the film studios should be able to ban the VCR. That the recording industry should have been able to shove SDMI down all our throats and make MP3 disappear.

This is a profoundly ahistorical proposition. Never in the history of media from the dawn of the printing press right up to the invention of the DVD have we afforded this kind of privilege to incumbent rightsholders. Quite the contrary: at every turn, brave entrepreneurs have engaged in "piracy" of copyrighted works (through devices like the record player, radio, cable television and VCR) and kept at it until the law caught up with the technology.

It's different with the DVD. With the DVD, the electronics companies completely wimped out. They traded their customers to the studios for two packs of cigarettes, and the result has been a decade of stagnation in DVD players. There's no indication that movies are being released sooner or more cheaply on DVD than they were on VHS; and in fact, the release of movies on VHS was preceded by incredible, absurd hyperbole about the video-cassette's inevitable destruction of the film industry and the complete impossibility of a movie ever being released by a studio for viewing on your VCR.

If you believe that "content owners still call most of the shots" then you believe that the studios will make movies and just not release them, they will amass a great pile of unreleased material in their Hollywood vaults and sit before the doors, arms folded, glaring at the world until it arranges itself into a more accomodating configuration. It is ridiculous. DRM hasn't convinced the studios to put new material online -- the offerings that the studios have put online are a pathetic shadow of the material one can download from the P2P networks. The studios have all the DRM in the universe at their disposal, but they're not using it to bring new material to market.

Nope, they're using it to sell you the same crap for more money. Chris loves his Microsoft Media Center PC, "essentially a DVR on steroids" -- at least, he loves it so far. That's because he hasn't been bitten on the ass by it yet, like this guy, who bought a Media Center PC so that he could catch the Sopranos and burn them to DVD. When he bought the PC, it was capable of doing that. Halfway through the season, the studios reached into his living room and broke his PC, disabling the feature that allowed him to burn his Sopranos episodes to DVD. And if you got suckered into letting your cable company give you a "free" PVR, you've got a nasty shock coming this season: your episodes of Six Feet Under will delete themselves from your hard drive after two weeks, whether you've gotten around to watching them or not.

If you want to watch all the Sopranos or Six Feet Unders in a row at the end of the season, you'll have to do it on Pay Per View. You'll have to buy what you used to get for free: the right to record a show and watch it for as long as you'd like. You get less, you pay more. And the studios can change the rules of the game after you've bought the box and brought it home: the only way you can protect your investment is if you can somehow ensure that no studio executive decides to revoke one of the features you paid for back when the box was on the show-room floor. Remember, these are the same studio execs who are duking it out for the right to limit how long a pause button can work for.

Chris likes the iTunes Music Store, calling it a success, but it's got the same problems as the Media Center and all the other DRM devices. The record labels can demand that Apple selectively break your music player, removing features based on secret negotiations, long after you've made your purchases. Apple will even force "updates" on you that remove features that you've chosen to add to your device, shutting you out of listening to your own music on the player you shelled out good money for.

The problem is that once your device vendor sells you out to the studios, they're 0wned. The studios' protection racket lets them demand practically anything from a device vendor -- check out "selectable output control" for some truly heinous world-domination horseshit.

So, Chris, that's why I disagree with your "realistic" notion:

• There's no reason to believe that DRM makes more content available
• There's no reason to let the studios "call the shots" -- we haven't before this
• There's no reason to believe that DRM makes media cheaper, quite the contrary
• The features that make your "reasonable" DRM palatable to the market today can and are rescinded tomorrow

If I were in Chris's seat, I would be sure that every single review of a DRM device carried the following notice: WARNING: THIS DEVICE'S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD'S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE -- BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY'RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT'LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS. Link

Jim Leftwich writes about US Bunkers, which manufactures a nice little pod to cozy up in when the peak oil crisis-induced food, water, and energy riots commence. Load it up with plenty of guns, ammos, water, food, and antibiotics and ride out the catastrophe. Don't open the door until the population drops by 90 percent. Link

Strangely, amid massive loss of human life, there seems to be little or no dead wild animals in Sri Lanka. Snip:

Sri Lankan wildlife officials are stunned -- the worst tsunami in memory has killed around 22,000 people along the Indian Ocean island's coast, but they can't find any dead animals.

Link

The group responsible for tsunamihelp.blogspot.com have launched two new collaborative blogs: tsunami enquiry, with numbers for emergency help services in affected areas, and tsunami missing persons, which aims to assist people in connecting with loved ones.

Previous BoingBoing posts: Link

Backup Brain's Dori Smith obviously had fun eviscerating John Dvorak's latest anti-Macintosh diatribe. She points out glaring problems with Dvoraks first two sentences, which is all you need to know to realize that Dvorak's column is a joke.

Dvorak: "The Mac platform is essentially stagnant. That becomes obvious when you look at the declining market share numbers -- not from research firms, but from the W3C, which monitors online activity."

Smith: "[Those statistics] show that the number of Mac users online (or at least visiting the W3 Schools site) has gone from 1.8% in March 2003 to 2.3% in December 2003 to 2.7% in December 2004. But noting that the number is increasing would completely destroy Dvorak's premise, so he doesn't mention it." Link (Via Scoble)

Author and wireless geek Mike Outmesguine announces a disaster relief project aimed at bringing connectivity to tsunami victims cut off from communications services by the disaster.

I am working to organize a disaster relief effort to help those affected by the Indian Ocean tsunami. I'd like to send wireless equipment and expertise to damaged areas to help reconnect the people. I'm still working out the details and will update you as more develops. It will be organized with folks from the Southern California Wireless Users Group, SOCALWUG and other wireless groups that wish to participate. I started calling it the Post-Tsunami Reconnect.

Xeni Jardin mentioned the effort today on Fox News Channel during an interview about bloggers and the tsunami. I will have a video excerpt available soon. Here is a statement I sent to the Center for International Disaster Information about the effort:

"We are a Southern California based user community of experts and advocates of wireless data communications. Wireless community members supplied technical expertise and wireless equipment for the Florida hurricane relief efforts and to military personnel stationed in Iraq. We would like to organize, collect, and deliver wireless data equipment to disaster relief workers and others in the affected region to help maintain a high level of communication and internet access ability. We would also be able to send engineers into the area to help bring connections online."

For more information or to discuss a donation of funds, equipment, or your expertise, contact Mike Outmesguine by email "mo at wifi-toys.com" or voice: +1-818-889-9445 ext. 102

Link

Previous BoingBoing posts: Link

The massive undersea earthquake that caused the tsunami gave a boost to our planet's spin. As a result, days will be a fraction of a second shorter from now on.

Richard Gross, a geophysicist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, theorized that a shift of mass toward the Earth's center during the quake on Sunday caused the planet to spin 3 microseconds, or 3 millionths of a second, faster and to tilt about an inch on its axis.

Link

Rudy Rucker sez, "Here's an interesting blog entry about conotoxins, cellular automata, and the new drug Prialt."

So I’m going on about cellular automata all the time and you’re thinking, “Yes, but can CAs get me high?” I’ll say! Stephen Wolfram’s mascot is the textile coneshell, famous for having a one-dimensional CA wrapped around its shell.

Link (Thanks, Rudy!)

Patrick sez, "'A Book Of Five Strings' is another Creative Commons banjo book- you guys posted a link to my first CC project, 'The How and the Tao of Old Time Banjo' back in September. 'Five Strings' was released a few weeks ago and it's already selling pretty well. Going CC actually boosted sales for my first book so I figured I might as well do it again." Link (Thanks, Patrick!)

Hank sez, "Where ordinary mash-up mixes mix two or perhaps three songs, this mix is made up by appx 40 Beatles songs, with sometimes five different songs playing at the same time. A must hear!" I concur; this is mind-blowingly amazing. Man, all these Beatles mash-ups this year are really making me yearn for my old Beatles vinyl. I especially love the juxtaposition in this track of the old skiffle-Beatles with the later psychedelia. Soo-poib. 5MB MP3 Link (Thanks, Hank!)

PS: I am reasonably certain that this server will be shortly overwhelmed. If you've got a mirror, email me and I'll post a link to it. However, I have no such mirror, so if you find yourself unable to get a copy, don't look at me!

Update 1: Ian Clarke, the co-author of the awesome P2P tool Freenet, has graciously offered to distribute this file through Dijjer, his new (still pre-beta) P2P content distribution tool; here's the Dijjer Link

Update 2: Brian Arnold offers this more conventional mirror

Update 3: David Chin was good enough to make and seed this Torrent for the file (though I have my doubts about BitTorrent's efficacy with a file of a paltry five megabytes)

Update 4: Guillaume Champeau sends in these links you can use to get the file over P2P nets: eDonkey/eMule Link, Gnutella (Limewire, Bearshare, Shareaza...) Link

Update 5: Phil Nelson provides this old-fashioned Web mirror

Update 6: Jeroen Sangers also has a traditional Web mirror

Update 7: Andre Nantel invites us to consume her/his "20,000 megs of unused bandwidth for this month," via this link

Update 8: Doppeljr has this mirror on offer

Update 9: Matt Lyon has an archive for your downloading pleasure

Update 10: If a dijjer link isn't obscure enough, how about a Red Swoosh link, courtesy of Travis Kalanick?

Update 11: Scott Lawrence's mirror promises unlimited bandwidth!

Update 12: Everett Guerny provides another .edu mirror.

Benjamin sez, "I did a little digging into a few of the major charities mentioned on Google's page and on the tsunami blog, and have posted ratings and links from Charity Navigator, the Better Business Bureau, and the American Institute of Philanthropy for the top few." Link (Thanks, Benjamin!)

A new study from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center reports that women on birth control pills who are categorized by their body-mass index as overweight or obese are 60 to 70 percent more likely to get pregnant than "normal" weight women who also take the pill.

One possible explanation is increased metabolism. "The more a person weighs, the higher their basal metabolic rate, which can shorten the duration of a medication's effectiveness," she said. Another possibility is that the heavier a person is, the more liver enzymes they have to clear medications from the body, causing a drop in circulating blood levels of the drug. A third theory is based on the fact that the active ingredients in oral contraceptives – the hormones estrogen and progesterone – are stored in body fat. "The more fat a person has, the more likely the drug is sequestered, or trapped, in the fat instead of circulating in the bloodstream," (epidemiologist Victoria) Holt said.

Link

I love this video of Honda's new-and-improved Asimo robot running. He moves like a cute old man chasing a bus. From the press release:

"The combination of newly developed high-response hardware and the new Posture Control technology enables ASIMO to proactively bend or twist its torso to maintain its balance and prevent the problems of foot slippage and spinning in the air, which accompany movement at higher speeds. ASIMO is now capable of running at a speed of 3km/hour. In addition, walking speed has been increased from the previous 1.6 km/hour to 2.5 km/hour."

Link (Thanks, Matt!)

Gavin sez, "On Wednesday, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a documentary called 'Dicing with Dragons', which explored the origins of Dungeons and Dragons, including its introduction to the UK by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, authors of the Fighting Fantasy books and the founders of the current Colossus of non-electronic gaming, Games Workshop. The documentary also explores the literary inspirations for DnD material, including Tolkien, Robert E Howard and Michael Moorcock, and also the writers who've been inspired by it, like China Mieville. You can listen to the documentary in Real Audio format on the BBC's website. Great listening." Real Stream Link (Thanks, Gavin!)

Update: Daniel sez, "You might want to amend your article to say that the Steve Jackson interviewed is not the Steve Jackson of the famous RPG company Steve Jackson Games, makers of G.U.R.P.S., Toon, Ogre, Car Wars and other RPG classics along with the popular trading card game, Illuminati: New World Order."

Anonymous French guerilla artist Invader surreptitiously installs tile mosaics of classic video game characters in high-traffic spots all over Paris and other cities around the globe. In fact, I can see one from the window of my apartment! Now he's released a limited-edition sneaker with a space invader character raised in the tread, enabling the shoe to be used like a stamp. Each step in sand, mud, water, paint, wet tar, etc., leaves an imprint, scoring you points in the ongoing invasion. Link (via Cool Hunting)