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Tuesday, November 30, 2004

Erotokitsch master: Boris Vallejo

Reflecting on the intergalactic love-art of Boris Vallejo, BoingBoing pal Siege opines:

"I recently stumbled across this online gallery of Boris Vallejo's paintings. A few days ago my mom had informed me that she had just scored an awesome calendar of his work, and snagged it for me, remembering that when I was a little kid I used to teach myself drawing with his paintings."

"Boris was the Botticelli of the trailer park. My dream (not yet dead) was to have a jacked-up molester van, regally decorated with massive Boris paintings airbrushed on the sides, accenting the tinted portholes and the silver tail-fin. I would blast Hot For Teacher as I cruised the parking lots, luring the Daisy Dukes into my mobile velvet-lined bachelor pad... I used to draw Boris art (along with the occasional Playboy centerfold) and sell them to the rich kids for $5-20 dollars each, priced according to the amount of nudity."

Link to the official Boris Vallejo website. Link to a ginormous gallery of work spanning multiple decades. And link to one of Siege's all-time fave Boris creations, which depicts a man-goat-loverdude ascending with his betrothed on an invisible hairway to Steven. This one is my favorite (alternate link). If you squint a little, it looks like the pattern on a Pucci dress.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:49:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Correction: RFID-chipped Mexican cop numbers overstated

Following up on this BoingBoing post from August, 2004:

News reports earlier this year indicated that 160 employees in the Mexican Attorney General's Office had been implanted with Verichip RFID devices. New information indicates that only 18 individuals received the device, said Katherine Albrecht, Founder and Director of CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering).

"Our concern is that dozens of news outlets have repeated the inflated number, which has reached the level of an urban legend," Albrecht observed. "I myself have repeated the erroneous figure in several media interviews, and I want to set the record straight."

Link to Allbrecht's statement and futher details.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:42:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Animation: My Neighbor's Wife

Link to Flash animated short (Thanks, Susannah)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:06:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Desktop wallpapers of cellular transmission towers

A collection of wireless transmission tower-themed desktop wallpapers: Link. See also this collection of wireless tower site snapshots, and this handy online search tool for locating a cell tower near you. (via SOCALWUG wireless tech listserv)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:02:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Karate chimp mpeg short

This movie's already made the rounds plenty of times. But in light of the Karate Kid moment we've been having here on BoingBoing, seems worth a mention. Link to mpeg short of a chimpanzee throwing karate kicks with a human partner. Link (Thanks Siege)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:48:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Math of Christmas Carols

BoingBoing reader Ben Dalton says,

"Brian Whitman, maker of eigenradio (which "plays only the most important frequencies, only the beats with the highest entropy") has released a happy holiday album automatically derived from the principal components of 'all christmas music'. Description, from his site: 'This season, as a present to friends worldwide, our system listened to as much Christmas music as it could handle. When it was done it synthesized these sixteen new timeless classics.' Great stuff."
Link, and Link to all of them compressed into a regularly updated .m3u audio stream (thanks Stevyile)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:36:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blinged-out baby umbilical cord gift atrocity

A company in South Korea will gold-plate your child's umbilical cord and frame it for display. Link (second image down on the page.) (Thanks, Isaac)

Reader Andrew says, "Koreans have been keeping umbilical cords for centuries (Link) and recently they have used umbilical cord to help a paralysed woman walk again (Link). There are other medical uses for the umbilical cords (Link). My Korean girlfriend says her mum still has her umbilical cord, and she's 23!"

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:33:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Update -- Darrin Perry: in memoriam

Earlier today, we posted word of the untimely passing of Darrin Perry, the former creative director whose career included work at both Wired Magazine and Sports Illustrated. Wired managing editor Blaise Zerega shares the following update for BoingBoing readers who may have known Mr. Perry:

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to the North Carolina School of the Arts, a place that allowed Darrin to first cultivate his passion and love of the arts. Or donate to the human rights campaign @ HRC.org an organization that was a voice for his beliefs. For the North Carolina school of the Arts please Note: "In Memory of Floyd Darrin Perry." Please make checks payable to: N.C.S.A. Foundation Inc., Mailing Address: N.C.S.A. Foundation Inc.. Attn: Sarah Turner, 1533 South Main Street, Winston Salem, NC 27127-2188, Tel: 336.770.1371, Email: turnes [at] ncarts.edu.

Link to a SF Chronicle story about Perry's redesign of Wired Magazine in 2002.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:38:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

US Army spamming students by phone, too

Following up on a previous BoingBoing post about the US Army sending e-mail recruitment spam to college students, Mark Miller sez:

I had previously mentioned the US Army spamming students at UT Austin. While they have done so again, even after being told that I wished no further e-mails, what has become even more bizarre is a call from +1 702-671-0040, by a pre-recorded Army Recruitment message. It gave the number for the local Army Recruitment Center here in Austin. When I called back, it noted that you could leave no messages, but to call the number stated in the message you received. Several other friends of mine have received such calls this evening.

The NPA-NXX lookup says this is a Las Vegas number.

What's even more disturbing is that my number is on the FCC's Do Not Call List.

If any reader on BoingBoing could shed some light on the new recruiting practices of the US Army, and perhaps the call center that they are calling out from, I would be appreciative.

Link. You're welcome to send replies to that question via the BoingBoing submission web-form.

Reader Douglas Barnes says,

I, too got automated phone spam from the Army today; when I called to complain in, er, rather strong language, instead of apologizing or promising not to do it again, the sergeant in charge threatened to "find [me] and beat the shit out of [me]." Not a great day for Army PR.

I'm assuming they got my info from UT. A recent Third Circuit case allows universities to kick military recruiters off campus (and, one assumes, to refuse to provide databases of student information). No sign that UT would even want to do this, much less go to court for the privilege. Link to blog entry with details.

Responding to the same thread, reader Bryan Shepherd -- also a UT-Austin student -- writes, "You posted a week or so back about the army recruiting practices here at UT-Austin, so I thought you might find this interesting as well. It's an email I just received via my UT account."

From:Hood, Charles R SGT USAREC [CHARLES.HOOD@usarec.army.mil]
Subject:Special Forces Opportunities

To whom it may concern,

I am offering you a once in a lifetime opportunity to become part of America's elite. If you are always challenging yourself, highly adept at problem solving, and relentless in pursuing your goals, then a spot in the Special Forces is for you. The Special Forces soldier also known as the Green Beret is highly skilled in such arts as SCUBA diving, Parachuting, and Foreign Languages. This training along with the best equipment is what makes them the best of the best. For a limited time, the Army will offer you the opportunity to attend Infantry Basic Training, Jump School, and Special Forces Assessment and Selection. This opportunity is normally reserved for soldiers who have served for a period of 2 to 3 years, but at this time, it is available you with out any special prerequisites. I highly encourage you to take the chance and become one of America's Elite. For more Information, contact SGT Hood @ (877) 524-0211.

SGT Hood, Charles R.
U.S. Army Recruiter
(877) 524-0211 Cell
(512) 472-7616

Reader Sarah Looney writes, "I blogged on this a while back. The spam emailed to students clearly states that they are recruiting for 'a non-deployable position.' Finding this strange, I followed up with the recruiter..." Link to more on Sarah's blog.

See also this Mother Jones article: "No Child Unrecruited". The Army now has access to public school records, thanks to the No Child Left Behind act. (thanks, karen)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:24:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Anti-porno iPod feature?

BoingBoing reader Brandon says,

There is a "bug" in the iPod Photo that randomly flashes photos from other albums into slideshows. [on Leander Kahney's Wired blog, "Cult of Mac,"] Keith Finch has suggested this might not be a bug, but rather an intentional measure to dissuade users from keeping "double secret 'Hot Butts'" albums on their iPods. The hypothetical situation he presents to support his case is good for a chuckle or two.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:15:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sony Adds MP3 Support

BB reader Morgan opines:

To paraphrase Cory, Sony has realized that their customers want to do more, not less, with their hardware. They're now offering firmware upgrades (at $20 per unit) for their portable digital music players that will allow them to play back non-DRM'ed MP3s. Previously, Sony customers were locked into using Sony's DRMeriffic ATRAC format. Their next generation of music players will have natively support MP3 playback.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:08:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Versace Barbie

I didn't know there was such a thing. Does she come with a (perfect) nose full of (plastic) coke? Link (Thanks CityRag)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:07:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Haptics: Can You Feel the Buzz?

My latest article for TheFeatures is about haptic interfaces, which send information to your skin.

At Nokia Research, Jukka Linjama and Topi Kaaresoja added a small acceleration sensor to a phone to create a Pong-like game that a user controls by tapping the phone either horizontally or vertically. The user gets feedback from different vibration patterns. In a paper presented at the NordiCHI human-computer interaction conference, they wrote that the synchronized combination of graphics and vibrations "creates a kind of a kinesthetic illusion of a soft ball being tapped and bouncing inside the device. In informal evaluations most users rated this illusion very natural, impressive, and enjoyable."

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:06:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New Netscape = Firefox / IE shotgun wedding?

BoingBoing reader boogah says,

Apparently Netscape isn't totally dead - AOL outsourced development of a new browser based on Firefox to Canadian firm Mercurial Communications. Normally I'd applaud something like this. Getting Firefox into the hands of the many is a good thing... But the fact that they're going to allow the user to switch their rendering engine from Mozilla developed Gecko to Internet Explorer's rendering engine seems a bit sinister. BTW: Ugly screenshots are available here.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:03:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

GuitarBot Strums Classics at Juilliard

BoingBoing reader Mia says,

Tonight at the high-falutin' Julliard School: the RoboRecitcal, an all-automata concert performance by a player piano (old school) and GuitarBot (new school). GuitarBot, "a stringed instrument that is designed to extend -- not simply duplicate -- the capabilities of a human musician," was created in 2000 by LEMUR (the League if Electronic Musical Urban Robots... no joke) and looks like it was designed by Dan Flavin. It will play a program featuring Bach, Mozart, and compositions by J. Brendan Anderson, the Julliard undergrad who coordinated the recital.

The Julliard link includes a discussion of the centuries-old history of musical composition for automata, based on the ideal of direct transmission of music from composer to listener, unsullied by those accident-prone humans.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:36:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Interesting traffic citation scam

Stefan Jones sez: Rob Cockerham takes a break from pranks, hijinks, tomfoolery, and bizarre eBay auctions to describe a new type of mail fraud: An authentic-looking letter claiming that the recipient's car was spotted exceeding the speed limit and demanding payment (by money order or cashier's check) of a fine. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:41:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Exploding lava lamp kills man

BB reader Poppy says, "A 24 year old man left a lava lamp on his stove, and it exploded. A shard of glass pieced his heart, killing him instantly. Link to story. This just a week after all the warnings over exploding cell phones. Link."

Reader Jeremy says, "I thought the story might be complete bull, but went right to the Kent Police Department site and found this press release. It has a little more information that the AP report." Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:47:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Casino cheater's blog

Interesting weblog run buy a retired casino cheater -- that is, a former casino dealer who cheated the casinos. He gets interesting email from fans of his book, American Roulette:

Read your book and took action. It was the most satisfying money I’ve ever received from a casino. It was a post-bet placement of a $5 dollar chip on number 33. I placed the chip between the 32 & 33. Like your book says it was to the dealers far left and I could see the ball falling into the 33 slot on the wheel. It’s not much fun working on your own but it was greatly satisfying.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:18:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

World Health Organization's bird flu warning: 100 million deaths

Matt Vine sez: Since yesterday, the rest of the world has been buzzing with news of the World Health Organization's warnings of a impending flu pandemic that could kill up to 100 million. These warnings are suspiciously missing from American news sites - we get things like "Godzilla honored with 'Walk of Fame' star" from CNN's front page." Link

UPDATE: Alex Rosen sez: "Well, the Times is carrying it, and has a much different spin than the submitter's. It sounds like off-the-cuff guestimates by one guy, not a prediction by WHO itself.

While the agency has previously said that the death toll would be from 2 million to 7 million people, Dr. Omi said the toll "may be more - 20 million or 50 million, or in the worst case, 100" million.

W.H.O. officials in Geneva said later that they had not received an advance copy of Dr. Omi's remarks and did not know the basis for his estimates and why he believed a pandemic was so likely.

"No one knows how many are likely to die in the next human influenza pandemic," or even when it will occur, said Dr. Klaus Stöhr, the agency's top influenza expert. "The numbers are all over the place."

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:47:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Darrin Perry: in memoriam

Kenn Brown says,

My friend and mentor Darrin Perry, former Creative Director of Wired Magazine , passed away over the holiday weekend. He was only 39 years old. I am devastated... it was three awesome years we spent collaborating first as professionals, and then as friends... and now its over. I will miss him. I will miss working with him. He had a significant impact on publications from Sports Illustrated to Wired.

Here is the obituary. There is a guest book for those who wish to leave their condolences. Link

Tim Jarrett says, "Perry led the 2002 redesign of Wired Magazine, which freshened the look and feel of the aging geek bible while making it more legible."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:28:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Karate Kid, The Musical

A musical for stage, based on the 80's cheeseball film classic The Karate Kid. Now playing at the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center in NYC. Somewhere, Ralph Macchio is crying. Link (Thanks, mediamelt)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:10:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tis the season to STICK IT TO THE MAN

BoingBoing reader Garth Johnson says,

"This is a lovely pamphlet that artist Packard Jennings distributed at his local mall. Packard is the human who brought us the 'fallen rapper' pez dispensers."

Link to art-pamphlet, and Link to other past work from Jennings.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:00:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bestial reality

Stay with me here: The British Office of Communications cleared Channel Five of any wrongdoing for airing an episode of reality TV show TheFarm in which David Beckham's ex-girlfriend gave a handjob to a pig.

From ABC News Online:

"The task performed by Rebecca Loos is one that occurs regularly on UK farms. It was properly supervised by a qualified veterinary surgeon and was carried out for a genuine purpose, to artificially inseminate the pigs on the 'celebrity farm'," the ruling said.

"We don't believe that the scene was degrading or harmful to the boar."

Link

UPDATE: BB reader Jamal Cole points out: "It should be noted that Beth Littleford masturbated a pig on the Daily Show way back when Craig Kilborn was hosting (~1998). She showed it pictures of Miss Piggy, and asked, 'Do you find this attractive?' I had always found her attractive until then..."

posted by David Pescovitz at 05:41:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Victorian Fax

This fax-by-telegraph machine was in operation at the New York Herald in 1900. From a Pearson's Magazine article published at the time:

"The equipment consists of two machines, almost identical in construction, the first being called the " transmitter," the second the " receiver." Each is provided with an eight-inch cylinder, which may be made to revolve by a delicate system of clockwork so finely regulated that both instruments work together to a nicety.

Above each cylinder rests a fine platinum needle, or stylus, not unlike the point in a telegraph key. A sheet of tin-foil, six inches by eight inches, ready to wrap round the transmitter's cylinder, and a sheet of ordinary carbon manifold-copying paper of the same dimensions, which, when placed between two sheets of blank paper, is to be wrapped round the receiver's cylinder--these complete the chief requirements."

Link (via MetaFilter)

posted by David Pescovitz at 05:20:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Etienne-Jules Marrey

The Musée d'Orsay has an exhibition of the mind-blowing photographs by physician and physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey, whose research in the 19th century led directly to the invention of the movie camera. The image at left is a 1901 shot of a smoke machine.

"Marey became interested in movement at an early stage of his career: the movement of blood as it circulated, the movements which controlled the beating of the heart, then those of the muscles and nerves. To improve his studies, he developed more and more precise recording instruments. Once had explained the internal movements of the body, Marey extended his investigations to the motion of the body as a whole: a walking human being, a flying dragonfly, a swimming ray, a falling cat..."

For those outside of Paris, "Movement In Light" is a stunning online exhibit of Marey's work from which the text above was taken. Link (via AEIOU: Excuse my French!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 05:03:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, November 29, 2004

Busty hentai mousepads

About $25 per ergonomic hentai mousepad, boobies included. Link (via Fleshbot)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:02:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DIY dodecahedron calendar, a la D-n-D dice

This 12-sided pentagon print-em-yourself calendar is a nifty gift idea for thrifty geeks. Dodeca-bitchin'! Link (Thanks, ritilan).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:57:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

McRorie the one-man bandstravaganza

McRorie Tait is a one-man, kilt-wearing, awesomely mulletted, electronic music phenom from Canada. His website describes him thusly:

"McRorie wears eight custom designed sensors on his shoes, four sensors on his chest, two midi keyboards on his hips, and sings lead vocals, harmonies, and solo instruments with his voice. McRorie coordinates the multiple parts of a musical composition: drums, bass, rhythm, vocals, and lead instruments -- TOTALLY LIVE."

Out of control cool. Plus his chest lights up like a robot and I think he also eats fire on stage while playing killer '80s cover songs with his feet. This is so cool it almost feels like a hoax. But I think it is real. Link to website with video clips, song downloads, and CD purchase details. (Thanks, Q-Burns).

UPDATE: BoingBoing reader Alexis says, "McRorie is legit - most of the footage in that clip IS from the 80's, that's why he's covering 80's songs. He appears in the clip on the now defunct Canadian talk show Dini Petty Show, several pieces are from Toronto news show City TV and part of the way through the clip he's seen with a very young Celine Dion before she hit mega-stardom."

Reader Matt McParland says, "I saw McRorie, the one man band, play live 4 or 5 years ago when his Canadian tour rolled through my hometown. His Canadian tour consisted of the man himself, two racks of MIDI-controlled effects and a few old Macs running wireframe screensavers for the light show. He played for about 20 people that night in a hole in the wall bar and we've been talking about it since!"

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:01:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Genetically engineered plants detect land mines by changing color

When the roots of these GMO flowers hit nitrogen dioxide (which leaches into the soil from buried land mines), the plant changes color. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:45:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Big head people in Tokyo stores

Giant headed people in Tokyo stores are a sign that Christmas is coming. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:41:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Did we mention that Target.com sells blowjobs, too?

Listed under "Entertainment" (as if we don't already know), but with no additional product details whatsoever: "blowjob." A steal at $9.99, but they take 4-8 weeks to come -- er, arrive. Link to item, Link to screenshot, and link to previous post about Target.com silliness. (Thanks, Jeff)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:13:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Spongebob Swipedpants

Burger King locations around the United States are reporting thefts of inflatable Spongebob Squarepants rooftop icons. The gigantic blow-up-Bobs commemorate the fast food chain's promo effort with a new animated film.

Similar SpongeBobs have disappeared from Burger Kings in at least two other states, including Minnesota, where a "kidnapper" asked for ransom - 10 Crabby Patties, fries and milkshakes. The note was signed by SpongeBob's cartoon nemesis, Plankton.

Link to one news story, and Link to another. (thanks, Stefan Jones)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:35:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Target.com sells crack and MDMA

First came the news that Target.com was selling "anal massage," then came their offer of "marijuana" for $25 -- now, they're rolling out the hard stuff. Here, the online retailer beckons you to come hither and buy Crack and MDMA. No wonder Target's spokesdog has those big red circles around his eyes! (thanks Gordon Bird, and Toddville Robins)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:56:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Xeni on NPR: gadgets, gadgets, gadgets!

On the NPR program "Day to Day" this week, I hit the streets with Alex Chadwick to try out a few new gadgets, including:

* A hand-held traffic reporting device called TrafficGauge ($80, thanks to Mike Outmesguine for turning me on to this one!)
* A multimedia gizmo called the DVXPod (shown here) that plays music, movies and television shows ($599)
* laptop bags made from spaceship parachutes (which have actually been up in space, $95-195).
* some awesome headphones from Sennheiser -- good noise-canceling headphones are a must for the DVXPod or other handheld media centers. Here's my favorite model, the HD 212Pro (about $90-120).
Link to archived audio for this program, Link to NPR Day to Day home.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:38:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Smiling not allowed in US passport photos

The unhappiest passports on earth:

[When taking a [photo of a person applying for a passport] "The subject's expression should be neutral (non-smiling) with both eyes open, and mouth closed. A smile with a closed jaw is allowed but is not preferred," according to the guidelines. ... Smiling "distorts other facial features, for example your eyes, so you're supposed to have a neutral expression. ... The most neutral face is the most desirable standard for any type of identification," said Angela Aggeler, spokeswoman for the State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs, which handles travel-document guidelines.

Link (Thanks, Maines!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:01:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sleaze SF paperback covers of yesteryear

Link (via Warren)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:34:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

CIA funding chat room spy tech research

Over at News.com, Declan McCullagh writes:

The CIA is quietly funding federal research into surveillance of Internet chat rooms as part of an effort to identify possible terrorists, newly released documents reveal.

In April 2003, the CIA agreed to fund a series of research projects that the documents indicate were intended to create "new capabilities to combat terrorism through advanced technology." One of those projects is research at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., devoted to automated monitoring and profiling of the behavior of chat-room users.

Link to story. One of the FOIA'd documents, via EPIC.org (PDF): Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:06:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Proto-pron for sale at Sotheby's

(Updated)
What may be the world's oldest existing piece of printed porn will be auctioned off next month, and is expected to sell for up to 65 thousand dollars.

"Sodom," penned in the mid-1670s, has been attributed to John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester and is described by auction house Sotheby's as a "closet drama rather than for the stage" with pornography "in almost every line." (...) The book centers on the decision made by a lustful King to "set the nation free" by allowing "buggary" to be "used thro' all the land" and then details the dire consequences.

Link to news item (Thanks, Sandy)

Here are the auction item details, including this amazing image, on Sothebys.com: Link. The work is both porn and protest:

Although in every sense, and in almost every line, pornographic (even though its humour sometimes recalls that in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata), the play has two primary purposes: one literary, the other political. One aim is the production of a hilarious burlesque of the then fashionable ‘heroic’ plays... Its other main aim, however, is to satirise uncompromisingly the court of Charles II – not only the notoriously lecherous Charles himself, with all his mistresses (“Thus, in the zenith of my lust I reign”), but also the venality of his courtiers, who are depicted as slavishly imitating him and indulging in the common state of moral and sexual anarchy.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:56:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

QTVR of Macy's Parade

A QTVR panorama of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade last week in New York City. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:27:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Alaskan blogger accused of mother's murder

A teen blogger in Alaska has been arrested for her mother's murder.

Rachelle Waterman had posted to an online journal dating back to February. In the journals, which she titled "My crappy life, the inside look of an insane person." She says she lives in Hell, Alaska, details conflicts with her mother and writes about a desire to commit violent acts against herself and others...

Link to copy of one of her final entries, posted Nov. 14 -- hours after law enforcement learned of the mom's reported death. In the entry, Waterman writes about a trip to Anchorage, and buying a new pair of boots. Link to Waterman's blog. Link to related post on glassdog. Link to news coverage. (Thanks, pollenatrix)

Here's Google's cache of contributions to a fantasy art site from the accused teen (now unavailable in original form). Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:10:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

1960s sex HOWTO manual from Japan

Scans from "Young People's Sex Manual: From Petting to XX," a mid-1960s era howto doc from Japan. Progresses from the fine art of handholding to paper cutout foreplay demos to an extravaganza of sex positions between a real woman and an artist's male wooden model. Link, also spotted on Fleshbot. (Thanks, Dave)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:56:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

India's first professional DJ academy

Reader Avi Solomon says,

"Indian DJ Nasha made a splash with his 'Nasha - Flute Fantasy' and continued to create many more great bollywood remixes. He has now opened the first professional DJ academy in India- keep them coming, man!"

Link to news story. Listen to a complete DJ Nasha session here(realplayer): Link. Nasha's set starts around 4:49 into that BBC ram link, after some banter with the show's host. It's a fine, fine session! Interview: Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:46:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Free music via French blog

Chryde says,

I founded a collective french music weblog with a mp3blog page. We made a compilation of musics we discovered on the web, by ourselves or via other mp3blogs. It's called Point D'ecoute (French for Listening post, a reference to a Mark Hansen Installation: Link

. All the tracks are taken from the bands' sites so it's 100% legal, like a mini Wired CD. 23 tracks, a lot from the US, but also Netherlands, France, Belgium, Austria, Sweden... You can download it here: Link We made it free to download, with a cover and all. At an event in Paris celebrating musical webzines, we burned it on demand: Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:44:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Songs of Sickness

Reader Dougal Campbell says,

The BoingBoing post about food safety tunes reminded of of something I heard on NPR a while back. Doctor Helen Davies at the University of Pennsylvania creates songs to help her students remember facts about microbiology. One of my favorite bits (song to the tune of the Beatles' "Yesterday"):

"Leprosy,
Bits and pieces falling off of me,
But it isn't the toxicity,
It's just neglect of injury.

Link to AMA News story, and there's another article here: Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:56:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Smart Cruise Control

A physicist at the University of Michigan has built a computer simulation to model how "adaptive cruise-control" technology in cars may affect traffic flow. The system would use radar to keep vehicles from getting too close to each other. From Science News:

Its advantage is that it can respond much more quickly and precisely than human drivers can to any change in speed. A vehicle using adaptive cruise control typically brakes sooner and more smoothly than one without the system.... Intriguingly, at an average speed of 67 miles per hour, if only one in five vehicles used adaptive cruise control, no traffic jams would form and traffic would generally flow freely. At lower concentrations, however, intermittent episodes of traffic congestion would still be an issue.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 06:42:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Handstanding Pandas

Some Pandas do handstands to mark their territory. The aim is to piss as high up a tree as possible. The higher the scent, the "more dominant" the signal. A new BBC Wildlife Magazine documentary captures this and other interesting bearhavior using camouflaged cameras and motion sensors. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 06:33:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ScienceMatters

Inside my latest issue of ScienceMatters@Berkeley:

* DNA devices for crime scenes... and Mars

* Chilling News About Glaciers

* The Toughest Shrimp Around

I hope you enjoy it! Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 06:23:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, November 28, 2004

Funky food safety tunes

BoingBoing reader Vidiot says,

Dr. Carl Winter of the UC-Davis Department of Food Science and Technology has been called the "Sinatra of salmonella" and the "Elvis of E. coli". He makes song parodies about food-safety issues. His website includes RA streams, PowerPoint presentations, and lyrics for such songs as "Fifty Ways to Eat Your Oysters", "I Sprayed It On The Grapevine", "Don't Get Sicky Wit It", and "Beware Of La Vaca Loca."

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:02:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Target.com sells "marijuana" -- for $25

Following up on an interminable string of previous BoingBoing posts about the fact that Target.com offered an item called "anal massage" for sale -- now, this breaking news flash. Target.com is selling "Marijuana," for $25.25, with free shipping available on orders of $30 or more. Link. In the event that cooler heads at Target prevail, sensibleerection.com saved this screencap: Link (Thanks to many readers who submitted this item, the first of whom was mikel)

BoingBoing reader Tim Windsor says,

On the Target Marijuana page, you can get the ISBN under "More Information." Plugging that into Amazon leads to this product page, where the kids are havin' some fun in the comments section.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:37:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pink Floyd's student choir sues

In one of the oddest music-related lawsuits in recent memory:

A group of former pupils at a London comprehensive school are poised to win thousands of pounds in unpaid royalties for singing on Pink Floyd's classic Another Brick In The Wall 25 years ago. The pupils from the 1979 fourthform music class at Islington Green School secretly recorded vocals after their teacher was approached by the band's management.

Now the 23 ex-pupils are suing for overdue session musician royalties, taking advantage of the Copyright Act 1997 to claim a percentage of the money from broadcasts. Music teacher Alun Renshaw took the 13- to 14-year-old pupils out of lessons by to the nearby Britannia Recording Studios in Islington to record - without the head's permission.

Link (Thanks, Josh, and thanks Glenn)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:11:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Destination Earth" (commie Martian cartoon at archive.org)

Joel sez: "The recent 'Funny old anti-Commie comic book' BB post reminded me of this. The Prelinger Archives at archive.org have quite a few anti-communist/pro-capitalist propaganda films. The most entertaining of these are the surprisingly large number of animated shorts, done in classic 1950s stylized animation. The one with the most amusing premise is 'Destination Earth' (This one is by the great Tom Oreb -- Mark) in which Mars is ruled by an evil communist dictator named Ogg (no relation to the Ogg Vorbis audio format). As if it weren't bad enough, they have another hideous problem -- not knowing anything about the essential technology of ... oil (out of sheer coincidence this film was sponsored by the petroleum industry). However, after sending a space scout to Earth they learn all about the benefits of oil and capitalism (though the economic treatise 'Competition: More for All') and immediately put an end to Ogg's tyranny by running off to the Martian countryside to drill oil wells in the spirit of free enterprise. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:01:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Funny old anti-Commie comic book update #1

Jose sez: Regarding the comic book entry: Awesome find. Was doing the same thing, substituting things in my head, and I had to remix some panels. With fairly obvious references, as well as to a story Xeni posted earlier. (click on thumbnails for enlargment.)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:45:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, November 27, 2004

Funny old anti-Commie comic book

Olli sez: "Just found this link to some really interesting anti-communist propaganda from the 1960's. It's a comic book that looks at what *COULD* happen to *YOU* if those evil commies get their hands on the USA. Endorsed by none other than J. Edgar Hoover himself!" Link (When I read it, I mentally swapped every instance of "communists" with "red-state republicans" and it was even more enjoyable -- Mark)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:50:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tree of Death

Cerbera odollam, a plant that grows in India and southeast Asia, is also known as the "suicide tree" because people munch it to kill themselves. Apparently, it's also used to rub out young wives who aren't well-liked by their in-laws. From New Scientist:

Although the kernels of the tree have a bitter taste, this can be disguised if they are crushed and mixed with spicy food. They contain a potent heart toxin called cerberin, similar in structure to digoxin, found in the foxglove.

Digoxin kills by blocking calcium ion channels in heart muscles, which disrupts the heartbeat. But while foxglove poisoning is well known to western toxicologists, (researcher Yvan) Gaillard says pathologists would not be able to identify Cerbera poisoning unless there is evidence the victim had eaten the plant. “It is the perfect murder,” he says.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 05:31:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Automatons in the NY Times

Today's New York Times has an article about the Murtogh D. Guinness Collection, four-hundred years of music boxes, proto-robots, and mechanical musical instruments recently acquired by the Morris Museum in New Jersey.

"Our sense of wonder is tweaked when we see, for example, a two-and-a-half-foot-high early-20th-century automaton with a little boy reaching for a jar of marmalade for his biscuit. As he reaches up, a door opens and the jar revolves, revealing the animated face of his scolding grandmother. A fly buzzes in the cabinet while a tiny mouse emerges from an apple.

In addition to the craft of it, this object, like virtually everything in the collection, is a piece of theater, an authentic historical performance: a time machine, if you will, visiting from the past."

Link (free site reg. required)

UPDATE: As BB reader Rob Iracane so kindly points out, the Morris Museum Web site has nice multimedia clips of the various machines in action. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 05:16:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, November 26, 2004

Tiny Humans update #7: battling palaeontologists

An Indonesian paleontologist is keeping the remains of the tiny humans away from other paleontologists. Let the paleontologist war begin!

They may be tiny, but the hobbits -- the extinct one-metre-high human species whose discovery rocked the palaeontology world last month - are provoking a giant barney among Australian and Indonesian scientists.

One of Indonesia's leading palaeontologists, Professor Teuku Jacob of Gadjah Mada University in Jakarta, has grabbed the hobbit remains and locked them away in his safe, refusing to let other scientists study them.

In addition, he rejected the widespread view that the hobbits are a separate human species, claiming they are a pygmy form of modern humans who suffered microcephaly, a disorder that produces a small brain.

The Australian scientists who dug up the bones of the hobbits, officially dubbed Homo floresiensis, have pleaded with Professor Jacob to return the bones as they may contain vital DNA clues as to their exact ancestry. The seven skeletons were found last year in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores by an Australian and Indonesian team.

Link (Previous tiny humans updates here.)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:26:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fluctuat's Excuse My French

Boing Boing's Paris liaison Alexandre Boucherot and his co-conspirators at Fluctuat.net have launched an English counterpart to their excellent AEIOU arts and culture blog. I for one am most grateful. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 12:09:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Xeni on ABC World News Tonight Friday: Firefox

Friday evening's edition of ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings includes a feature about Firefox and the open source movement, in which I'm a participant. Details and local air times: Link. Note: If you're on the east coast, the show may be pre-empted by football. And football has nothing to do with browsers.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:38:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jesus H Defy

In May, I posted news that Bletchley Park codebreakers had been called to an historic monument in Central England. Their mission was to crack an 18th century puzzle--the carved letters "D OUOSVAVV M"--that some believe contains a clue to the location of the Holy Grail. On Thursday, the codebreakers announced their preliminary findings. Right this way, please. Dan Brown will be signing autographs at the exit... Link (Thanks, Kev!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:36:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, November 25, 2004

Electronic Concubine

What's headless, limbless, vaguely turkey-shaped, has two breasts, three speeds, one vagina, and runs on a pair of double A batteries? The worst fucking laudanum-induced nightmare EVER, or the Concubine Masturbator sex gadget. Snip from website: "This multi-speed toy has it all! Made from a soft, realistic material, the concubine masturbator has perky breasts, hard nipples, and a ready and willing vagina." Visualize a decapitated (but stacked) quadruple amputee after multiple rounds of kitten bonsai, and you get what this looks like. Or, click here. Link Warning: NSFW and may induce goatse-like retina scarring. (Thanks Jonno)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:21:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fark photoshop contest: Cult of Mac

What if the Mac really were a cult? A photoshop contest at Fark illustrates the many possible answers. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:57:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Indian epic Ramayana as comic

Avi Solomon says, "Ramayana, the classic indian epic is online in 'graphic novel' form! (Link). This is part of the 'Amar Chitra Katha' series concieved by Anant Pai who was the pioneer in using comics to reintroduce India's mythological and historical treasures to it's alienated youth. More on Anant Pai (Link), and 'Amar Chitra Katha' website (Link)

BoingBoing reader Suresh Venkat says, "Many Indians of a certain age (myself included) grew up devouring Amar Chitra Katha (I had huge piles of them in my house, and in all probability still do at my parent's place in India). I didn't realize that they count as "graphic novels." I guess I was on the cutting edge even then. :) "

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:55:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pink Pistols

BoingBoing reader Shane says,

After seeing your posts (Links: 1, 2, 3) on JPFO and the Christian Guide To Small Arms (Link), I can't believe you left out the Pink Pistols, a web site which caters to the gay gun-owners' community.

The site features sections on gun safety, organizing chapters, and lobbying to other liberals about gun rights. I'm not a member of this organization, but I support them fully in their endeavor.

Also, I am a gun-toting, Texas dwelling libertarian, and I love boingboing.net--Even if I do disagree with a lot of the opinions here.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:53:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Coma cure: Doctor saves girl from rabies by "stopping" brain

BoingBoing reader Xopl says,

Driving home for Thanksgivings, I listed to an interview on Minnesota Public Radio with a Milwaukee, WI doctor who saved the life of a girl who had contracted rabies from a bat. The disease is known as having a 100% fatality rate if you do not receive a vaccine before symptoms show, but the girl's doctor didn't accept that and developed an entirely new way to treat the disease. Apparently, rabies causes the brain to attack the body, and that is what causes death. By putting the girl into a coma he managed to stop the brain from being able to do any damage while the girl's immune system defeated the virus. This is a reminder that sometimes the impossible is possible if you don't listen to those who tell you otherwise. The Associated Press is also covering the story, which can be read in any number of places.

Link

Reader Kim Brennan says,

Rabies is not 100% fatal (to humans) if you have shown symptoms, but all previous survival cases DID receive the vaccine after symptoms had shown. This was the first case of survival without the vaccine.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:16:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hula Hoop-ers crossing

BoingBoing reader Scott Doenges says, "I took this picture earlier this month in Utah's Arches National Park (Link to full-size). Upon close inspection it was clearly a transparent sticker somebody slapped onto the sign. A little Googling told me that these modified pedestrian crossing signs have been spotted all across the country. Here is another one from the D.C. area (Link).

Update D'oh! We've been had! By hula-hippies! Super Mike Lewis says, "When I saw the picture of the Hula-Hoop-ing street sign I thought you were linking to the band The String Cheese Incident. SCI is a bluegrass/rock/jazz jam band out of Colorado. There is real good chance it was a fan of their who stuck the sticker on that street sign." Link. BoingBoing reader Ariel says the band tosses 'em out to fans during shows. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:53:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Scent of a Cellphone

BB reader Russell Buckley says,

One type [of cell phone decoration] gives off a smell when the phone rings - choose from lemon, peach or even ramen noodles and curry. Mmmm, mine's a vindaloo. Yours for merely $10. Others consist of little figurines, bursting to go to the loo. And if you pull it (where??) it doesn't wait any more!

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:38:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Space Quilt

Todays Astronomy Picture of The Day from NASA is a quilt designed by a fan of Hubble Space Telescope photography. The 41 inch by 38 inch quilt was sewn by a woman named Judy Ross (wonder if there's any relation to the other Ross famous for sewing something that included stars?) The explanation on the APOD site includes links to the original images: Red Rectangle Nebula (Link), Eskimo Nebula (Link), Sleeping Beauty Galaxy (Link), V838 Monocerotis (Link), and Supernova remnant N49 (Link)
Link (Thanks, Scott Matthews)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:36:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bananaguard

"Are you fed up with bringing bananas to work or school only to find them bruised and squashed? This unique, patented device allows for the safe transport and storage of individual bananas letting you enjoy perfect bananas anytime, anywhere." Link (Thanks, Toby and Daniel)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:30:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Build your own ACE Satellite

Ivy says,

"This Advanced Composition Explorer [ACE] model was designed with the intermediate to advanced builder in mind.

What ACE does in layman's terms:

The Earth sits in a stream of accelerated particles coming in from the Sun, interstellar material, and galactic sources. The study of these energetic particles will broaden our understanding of the formation and evolution of the solar system, as well as the astrophysical processes involved. The Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) spacecraft, carrying six high-resolution sensors and three monitoring instruments, will sample low-energy particles of solar origin and high-energy galactic particles, with a collecting power 10 to 1000 times greater than past or planned experiments."

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:25:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wireless Research's Biggest Hurdle and Largest Opportunity

For my latest article at TheFeature, I interviewed Ramesh Rao, a director of the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology, who believes that he future potential of mobile technology won't truly be realized until the wireless spectrum's Tower of Babel is toppled.

"No system is designed around the assumption that there will be others in the neighborhood...The wireless world has largely been built around specific technologies that have industry consortiums and standards bodies behind them. So largely, every developer or provider takes the point of view that the world may have a choice, but in the end their system will be the one that's adopted. So we ask, what are the architectures, capabilities and services that can emerge if you set out to exploit the fact that you will have multiple systems surround you?"

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 03:04:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, November 24, 2004

Jews For Preservation of Firearms: bonus round

I thought of labeling this post "how to milk one website for every blog-inch it's worth," then thought better. But the Jews For The Preservation of Firearms Ownership website is a veritable html honeypot. Within, one finds ample abundance for not one, not two, but three BoingBoing posts (and counting).

Responding to the suggestion that Brasco the heavily-armed, pants-free, bespectacled Jewish Liberty Bear (tm) might be packin' his Hebrew hardware just for sport, BoingBoing reader Morgan Foust says:

"It's a pretty common misconception that most rabid gun owners own guns for hunting. They often don't (and I would know, I come from a family of gun-totin' survivalists). They own guns for self-defense at the very least, although more of them then you suspect honestly believe that the Democrats and the UN are plotting to take over the US with a 1984-style conspiracy and freedom's only hope are going to be gun-lovin' Americans fighting back, just like 1776 all over again. There's actually a Jewish explanation for this. Some Jews who own guns like to point to the Biblical/Tanakh Book of Esther, in which the Jewish population in Persia circa 450 or so BC arm themselves and repel an army led by a genocidal vizier. There are several verses describing the Jews kicking ass: 'And the Jews smote all their enemies with slaughter and destruction,' or 'the Jews slew five hundred men'."

And reader Cameron spotted another ammolicious goodie in the JFPO store: "They sell a one-of-a-kind pistol with the Bill of Rights on it... for the Jewish Dirty Harry types, I guess. What takes the cake: the $4,000 semiautomatic being sold to support the JPFO documentary film." Link.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:27:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bikini-Clad Breakfast Fun

It's kind of like Naked Lunch, only it's -- well, Scantily-clad Brunch. BoingBoing reader Will Oram says, "You may remember your entry on bikini babes throwing meat products at each other (Link to previous BoingBoing post). They're back...but with hot breakfast action!"

And there's nothing like a hot breakfast to get your day off to the right start. Link to low-res version, other higher rezes are here. If this floats your boat, may I also recommend Fleshbot's disturbingly huge archive of "Atkins Porn"and other culinary kink. Link.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:17:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

USB mince pies for Christmas

100% Christmas-compatible. "According to Christmas lore, eating a Mince Pie every day in the run up to Christmas will make for a happy year ahead...The USB Mince Pie combines the ease-of-use of USB technology with a super-accurate, faithful reproduction of a genuinely tasty Mince Pie." Link (Thanks, Alex)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:09:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pacers, Pistons b-ball brawl reimagined as Picasso's Guernica

On this odd fan tribute page for the Washington Wizards: a brilliant basketball-riot-themed Photoshop adaptation of Picasso's Guernica. Link (Thanks, Tony, and Doug)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:02:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How to Good-bye Depression buttclench therapy: update

Following up on our earlier BoingBoing post about Hiroyuki Nishigaki's book How to Good-Bye Depression: If You Constrict Anus 100 Times Everyday. Malarkey? or Effective Way?, reader Jeff says,

"Mr. Nishigaki has a jumbled AOL Members site for his book. Link.

Also, his old usenet postings are here: Link."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:58:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Online archive of Japanese TV ads

BoingBoing reader Lawrence sez:

I like to capture Japanese commercials, and these include a ton of tech and gadget commercials. My most recent crop includes ads for the PSP + DS, Olympus M:Robe media player, Canon printers and cameras, NTT cameraphones, computers and even a moving company that will offer a quote based on pictures you take with and email from your phone.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:57:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Boobs on CSPAN

And when I say "boobs," I am not making a perjorative reference to clue-impaired congresscritters. "Uncensored, unpixelated clips from the M-rated The Guy Game and Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude were shown to a bored looking audience (including Senators Joe Lieberman and Herb Kohl) as part of a National Institure for Media and the Family briefing on its annual MediaWise Video Game Report Card." Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:52:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

WP's gossip columnist almost led Iraq's army

Richard Leiby writes the "Reliable Source" column for the Washington Post. On Salon.com, he says: "Right after the fall of Baghdad, hundreds of desperate disbanded troops asked me -- a middle-aged journalist -- to give them jobs. That's when I knew everything was going terribly wrong... My very strange story ... never fails to amuse, bewilder and ultimately dishearten anyone who has ever wondered why combat that was supposed to end on May 1, 2003 -- you know, "Mission Accomplished" -- still rages with no end in sight." Link (via romanesko)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:47:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Flash gurus -- Creative Commons needs you

The Creative Commons folks are ISO a Flash/AfterEffects/Video design person. Says CC's Executive Director Glenn Otis Brown, "We'd like to produce a short, new animated/motion graphics film, and we need a great designer and/or animator to help us do so on a fairly tight deadline." Link to details.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:40:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blog Torrent

Dave sez: Downhill Battle has released Blog Torrent to the masses! Blog Torrent is software that makes it much easier to share and download files using the bittorrent protocol on your PHP-enabled web site.

Why does Blog Torrent matter?
Making it easy to blog large video files means that people can share their home movies the same way they share their photos or writings. It lets people create vast networks of truly peer-to-peer video content-- video that was made by individuals and shared with individuals, no bandwidth budget or distribution deal needed. Does this mean that we can do for television what blogs have done for news? Let's find out...

Why use Blog Torrent on your blog or website?
1. It lets you post video or other large files as easily as you post text.
2. Installing Blog Torrent is as easy as uploading a photo to your website or blog.
3. Blog Torrent is the one bittorrent tracker that won't confuse your users.
4. It publishes an RSS feed of all your torrents.

Link (via Waxy)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:55:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bioweapons (or bad sushi) damage politician's face

Anonymous sez: "Check out the pictures -- before & after -- of Viktor Yushchenko's face. He came down with a mysterious illness' (reportedly toxins from biological weapons, his detractors say he ate bad sushi) a couple of months ago. Doctors in Austria who treated him are under police protection. Meanwhile Yugoslavians Ukrainians are out protesting in the streets against his political opponents, who are accused of winning the election fraudulently. Truth is stranger than -- a fictional cold war spy novel." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:13:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Little shrimp tail leads to man's eventual death

Zach J sez: In what could only be called an advertisement for the upcoming film version of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, Yahoo News has a story of a Benihana chef who tossed a shrimp tail at a man, which caused the man to reflexively jerk his head away from the incoming projectile, resulting in a neck injury. The subsequent surgery for said neck injury failed, requiring a second surgery that ultimately lead to a fatal infection. So, in this litigious modern era, the man's family is naturally suing the Benihana chef for the untimely death. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:16:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Turkey has a Posse

BoingBoing reader Ethan says, "I received an email FWD from a friend this morning, asking everyone to choose vegetarian this Thanksgiving. My favorite line was, 'The turkey does not want its throat slit this year.'

Something about its dead-pan delivery (no pun intended) made me think 'The Turkey Has a Posse.'

So here's an image (to put on your own server) I made for the holidays if you want it.Happy Thanksgiving."

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:17:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Update: "Jews for Preservation of Firearms" greeting cards!

Following up on our previous post about Brasco (tm) the gun-toting, bespectacled Jewish Liberty bear -- don't miss these nifty greeting cards. Nothing says "I love you" like FIREARMS CAN BE FUN, or THE JAPANESE WANT YOUR GUNS. If you're stuck on what to send a young child in your family during the upcoming hols, this oughta do the trick! Link to Brasco(tm) Greeting Cards $11.95 per set of twelve cards.

Reader Paul Mitchum says,

"Sure, the JPFO have Brasco, but will they sell you a mascot costume so that Brasco himself can appear at educational events? No? :-)

Well, check out the NRA's Eddie Eagle. Of course, with great power comes great responsibility, so there are rules about how Eddie can be portrayed by whoever's inside the costume. Note that the NRA is saying that Eddie Eagle should not carry a gun (even a toy or prop), under penalty of civil lawsuit.

Brasco, meanwhile, is clearly ready to take out some punks, once he puts on his glasses."

But WWRD (what would a rabbi do)? BB reader Mike Schleif says,

According to Jewish law, hunting (for fun or sport) is actually not considered appropriate, so the jews for guns site seems odd. Here is a rabbinical explaination of Jewish views on gun use and hunting.

Link. Thanks, Mike, but I think Brasco makes it pretty clear he has bigger concerns.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:11:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, November 23, 2004

Sexual Tension

An online gallery of work from photographer Elyse Butler, documenting backstage life in Porn Valley. Some really incredible shots in here. So much "backstage on porn sets" photography approaches the industry with one of two unstated goals: glamorizing or maudlinizing. This work does neither, and it is all the more powerful as a result.

Image: "Porn Actress Nikki Hunter stretches in the dressing room before going out to do a re-enactment of a rape scene on a pool table. Hunter has been doing pornography for about two years and was a stripper previously for eight years. 'It's good money,' she says, 'Much better than just stripping... I'll make about a thousand just tonight.'"

Link, images are not porn but they're not worksafe either. (thanks, S, via jmcolberg)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:58:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership

Following up on this previous post, reader Ori Neidich says your slack-assed faithful BoingBoing editors "should point out to readers that gun fetishism isn't limited to just Christian Evangelicals." Uhh, puh-lease. As if we didn't know all about gun fetishism already. Anyway, he continues:

"I was reading your post about a Christian Guide to Small Arms [Ed. note: not that kind of small arms] and it reminded me of a site that my friends and I would visit for a hearty guffaw now and then. Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership.

What made it particularly hilarious were the regular columnists such as "Ask the Rabbi" where readers could submit various questions on firearms and religious law answered in one convenient place. Unfortunately, the site has recently become much more propagandistic and has less of the community feeling it did before Bush took office (I guess they are feeling defensive). But if you search through the articles you can still find some of the oldies-but-goodies including reviews of weapons they've taken out to test at the range and PDFs of targets that they make available as free downloads. Like this one (Ed. Note: Godwin's law alert).

Also, they have a coloring book for children that is absolutely hilarous -- Link (PDF). It features Brasco(TM) The Liberty Bear... 'great for introducing children to guns, freedom, and responsibility."

Link. And yes, dear reader, that image would be none other than Brasco the Jewish, gun-toting bear. In closing, I would like to point out that he is not wearing any pants. Thank you.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:57:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gay worm reams Italian Senate

The Italian senate's computer system was shut down today after an attack by a computer worm containing gay porn images. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:57:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pop art nouveau robot romance manga

Writing text for blog entries is hard work and I'm sleepy. What needs to be said about Yumiko Kayukawa's delicious pop manga art, beyond what you see here? Shown: Cat Robbot [sic] (Nekogata Robotto). Awesome. Link (Thanks, Mark Hurst).

Update: BoingBoing reader Shane adds, "We recently interviewed Yumiko on our site Crown Dozen, and she's super-sweet." Link to interview.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:55:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Psst! Electronic Art

Slate has a story about how the value of digital art is measured -- and the role of intellectual property law in that calculation:

[Eli] Sudbrack vaulted to art stardom with his contribution to last spring's Whitney Biennial -- a surreal full-room installation with a Brazilian-disco vibe that included images of drag queens, soft-core porn, and serial substance abuse. Traditionally, such installations are unique pieces. Those created by artists firmly inscribed in the artistic canon -- such as Joseph Kosuth, Richard Long, or Mona Hatoum -- might sell for $150,000 to $300,000. But Peres Projects broke the Whitney piece down into multiple units (somewhat like the suit, shirt, and shoes of an autumn ensemble in a Barneys window) and sold each individually. To reproduce the whole installation, a collector would have to buy one of each element, at a total cost of $150,000. The defining elements -- the installation's floor, walls, and ceilings -- were in an edition of three. But the five sculptures, priced at $5,000-$15,000, were in an edition of five while the $2,500 decals and $5,000 video were in an edition of 10. Thus, the total list price of products available from the Whitney show was $600,000, minimum. Such sums only matter, of course, if someone will pay them. But by the time Frieze opened barely seven months later, Peres Projects had sold every last item from the Whitney show.

Is this madness? That's debatable. But the sales model definitely reflects a fundamental change in how art can be produced and sold. Purely digital art -- sold as software or access to online environments -- has been creeping into the art market over the last decade, but it still remains very much marginalized.

Link (Thanks, Susannah)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:42:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Target Sells Anal Massage: coda

Following up on an interminable string of blather about the fact that Target.com sells an item called "anal massage," I would like to alert all shoppers to this book title -- also available on Target.com.

Hiroyuki Nishigaki:
How to Good-Bye Depression: If You Constrict Anus 100 Times Everyday. Malarkey? or Effective Way?

Aye, there's the rub. Link (Thanks, Nik Willmore)

Reader Chris Slatt adds, "The best part about that anus constriction book isn't that it is sold at Target.com -- it's the customer reviews at Amazon. The 2nd page in particular is quite amusing." Here's a pinch:

A wonderful treatise on depression and a valuable resource for anyone, I can personaly attest to Mr. Nishigaki's methods. By following his instructions implicitly, I have banished the dark clouds under which I suffered for years, and have integrated his practices completely into my life. Even as I sit and type this review I am busy constricting my anus and counting, 80,81,82,83....... ooops!

Link

Siege adds, "The legendary Goatse himself reviewed it." Link

BB reader Magnus confesses,

I actually purchased a copy of How to Goodbye Depression from Amazon a couple of years ago. The first part of the book is a collection of Usenet postings in which the author baffles a procession of posters with his anus-constricting theories. The second part constains more, erm, practical information.

The book manages to hover delicately on the knife-edge between wind-up and misguided sincerity; with everything given added semiotic slip by the Engrish in which it's written. The reader genuinely has no idea whether they're being laughed at, whether they're in on the joke, or whether there's even a joke at all.

I think it should be retitled Finnegan's Arse.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:34:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Turbospoke

Caution: this bicycle accessory may instantly tranform your 6-year-old child into a pint-sized Hell's Angel. Turbospoke is an attachment for the rear chain stay. Rember the old "playing card in your spokes" trick for making basdass noise on your badass bike? This is like that, only badasser. Link (thanks Marc)

Update: BB reader Matt Dowling says, "On an episode of the TV show Braniac in the UK, a kid wanted to know if he was faster or slower with the turbospoke attached to his bike. So they set up a little circuit for him to pedal around with the thing on/off. Realisticly it should slow him down, but the result was that he went faster with the thing on, and what they figured is that it was psychological in speeding him up (with the "vrooom" and all)."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:30:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

America's new anti-piracy czar

From The Hollywood Reporter:

Buried inside the massive $388 billion spending bill Congress approved during the weekend is a program that creates a federal copyright enforcement czar. Under the program, the president can appoint a copyright law enforcement officer whose job is to coordinate law enforcement efforts aimed at stopping international copyright infringement and to oversee a federal umbrella agency responsible for administering intellectual property law.

Intellectual property law enforcement is divided among a range of agencies including the Library of Congress, the Justice and State departments and the U.S. Trade Representative. It is hoped that designating a single overseer to coordinate copyright law enforcement will put some cohesion into the federal effort, said one Senate Appropriations Committee aide.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:28:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"What're You Lookin' At?!" anthology

Fantagraphics has published the What're You Lookin' At?! anthology, by Johnny Ryan. Featuring the collected stories from Angry Youth Comix, this 150-page black and white comic stars Loady McGee, a pimply faced troublemaker who behaves like Donald Duck might after drinking several bottles of fortified wine, and Sinus O'Gynus, the softheaded and sensitive "Patrick" to Loady's "Spongebob." The art and stories are like the very best comics a bored highschooler might draw during study hall. They're gross, immature, unkind, and crude. Fortunately, they're also hilarious, which makes them well worth reading. Last time Pesco was at my house he couldn't stop laughing at these stories. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:51:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Video of TV-B-Gone in action

Phillip Torrone sez: TV-B-Gone is a device that reports to turn off virtually all TVs, and so far in our tests, it's knocked out anything we've pointed at it. Of course that wasn't good enough, we're recording the IR signals and putting it on iPod with a sound to IR converter, that way we can play "tv off" all the time and turn off TVs wherever we go, always. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:11:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Exploding cellphones

According to this news article, there have been 83 incidents of spontaneously-exploding cellphones in the past two years. "If you're cramming more and more power in a small space, what you're making is a small bomb." Link (Thanks, Nick Douglas)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:44:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Praise the lord and pass the ammunition

Once an eBook and now a website, A Christian's Guide to Small Arms is described by author Gospel Plow as " a primer for the Christian who is beginning to reject the false theology that requires him to be a pacifistic patsy in the face of heathen hordes." Snip:

The most probable scenario that the Christian American, called to fight for God, family, and country, will be presented with is that of the guerrilla resistance. He will be facing an enemy occupational force that will have great superiority in materiel and organization. Outside sources of supply and instruction will not be likely. The wisest course in this situation is to choose weapons and tactics that minimize supply, training, and maintenance problems.

Link. Legal curiosity: the "copyright" page has a a few things (structurally) in common with a Creative Commons license. But Mr. Plow has elected to limit free distribution permissions to "Christian person[s], educational organization[s], fellowship[s], church[es], or militia[s]." (Thanks, Wayne Correia)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:02:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tinfoil beanie faux-Larouche protest -- more photos

Following up on this previous BoingBoing post, BoingBoing reader joshua c. bis sez, "Looks like there are a bunch of photos of the event: Link, and another Link. Here's a livejournal post from one of the participants -- Link. All by way of this "warning post" from the uw livejournal community, Link."

Signs like It's the PSYCHIC Economy, stupid!!! = nothing less than brilliance. Some *actual* LaRouche demonstrators -- who clearly had no warning the event was taking place -- were present, and utterly befuddled.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:24:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

50,000 comic book covers

Wow - a searchable database of 50,000 comic book covers. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:11:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Economic "armageddon" coming to a world near you

The chief economist at Morgan Stanley is 90% certain that the US economy is headed for disaster.

To finance its current account deficit with the rest of the world, he said, America has to import $2.6 billion in cash. Every working day.

That is an amazing 80 percent of the entire world's net savings.

Sustainable? Hardly.

Meanwhile, he notes that household debt is at record levels.

Twenty years ago the total debt of U.S. households was equal to half the size of the economy.

Today the figure is 85 percent.

Nearly half of new mortgage borrowing is at flexible interest rates, leaving borrowers much more vulnerable to rate hikes.

Americans are already spending a record share of disposable income paying their interest bills. And interest rates haven't even risen much yet.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:16:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tinfoil beanie hatted protestors out-Larouche Larouche

Some say the art of theater is dead. Some say the art of protest is dead. But theatrical unprotest art is alive and well. College student and BB reader John Duffell sez:

So yesterday I was out walking to class at the University of Washington when I came across a group of bizzaro Bizarros donning tinfoil hats and making outrageous statements. One was waving a sign that said "Build an escalator to mars"; another sign bore the sentence, "Dick Cheney is a salamander."

My first thought was that they were the often-seen-around-campus avid followers of Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr., perennial presidential candidate, perennial nutcase. "Holy living fuck," I thought, "These people are seriously getting out of control" -- and then I realized that they were MAKING FUN of the Larouche people. It was amazing. I was dumbstruck by the genius. The whole thing was practically a religious experience.

When class got out, I returned to the scene, and all that remained were a couple of leftover crazies standing at a Larouche table promising $100 to whomever could construct a cube twice the volume of another cube but with the same surface area. Honest to God, I'm still not sure if those were the false LaRouchites or the real mccoy.

Link to PDF of yesterday's edition of the U. of Washington's paper, and Link to The Daily Washington's home page.

And before you guffaw too loudly at those signs, remember -- some folks take the "escalator to Mars" thing very seriously. Link. And at least one lefty website purports to have evidence of a Cheney-reptile connection. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:52:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Krappy gifts

Webstore krappy.com is the "home of unpopular culture," offering kitsch/weird items such as the bubble wrap terrorist (shown here), Eye Spark Robot figurine, and the unforgettable Vietnamese Ear Cleaner (doubles as a torture instrument). The product blurbs are as entertaining as the goods themselves. Link (thanks, Mark Hurst)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:41:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dan Rather to resign from CBS

From an AP report:

Dan Rather, embattled anchor of the "CBS Evening News," announced today that he will step down in March, on the 24th anniversary of taking over the job from Walter Cronkite. The veteran anchor has been under fire in recent months for his role in a "60 Minutes Wednesday" story that questioned President Bush's service in the National Guard, which turned out to based on allegedly forged documents.

Rather, 73, said he will continue to work for CBS, as a correspondent for both editions of "60 Minutes." He made no mention of the National Guard story in announcing the change, saying he had agreed with CBS executives last summer that after the Nov. 2 election would be the right time to leave.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:01:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cory offline until Dec 12

I'm off for my first multi-week, fully offline holiday since 2001, and it's about time. I won't be answering any mail between now and December 12th. Here's some alternate contact info for while I'm away:

• If you've got a Boing Boing suggestion, you can (and should!) use the form. (My lovely and talented co-editors will be blogging as normal!)
• If you've got a business-related Boing Boing question, you can direct it to our business manager, John Battelle.
• If you've got a professional inquiry about my writing, you can contact Russ Galen, my literary agent.
• If you've got a question related to my work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, please direct it to my colleague Gwen Hinze.

Now, I've got a plane to catch! See you December 12th or so!

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:56:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jaws vs. The Dolphins

Reuters reports that a pod of dolphins protected swimmers from an attacking great white shark off the coast of New Zealand's North island:

"They started to herd us up, they pushed all four of us together by doing tight circles around us," (Rob) Howes told the New Zealand Press Association (NZPA).

Howes tried to drift away from the group, but two of the bigger dolphins herded him back just as he spotted a three-meter (nine feet) great white shark swimming towards the group.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:21:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Space shots

I just saw an exhibition in Paris of spectacular space images taken by photographic scientist-astronomer David Malin using the telescopes at the Anglo-Australian Observatory. The photographs were remarkable, but it was particularly strange and cool to see a collection of scientific work in a gallery setting just down the hall from an exhibit of Louise Bourgeois prints. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:16:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fake Lego burned to heat Finnish homes

A multi-ton shipment of Chinese fake Lego that was seized in Finland is being incinerated at a heating plant.

About ten tons of counterfeit Lego blocks were destroyed at the Kymeenlaakso waste processing plant in Anjalankoski on Thursday. The plastic will be mixed with other waste and burned at a district heating plant in Lahti...

Johannes Qvist, regional manager of Lego in Finland said that in addition to commercial considerations, the destruction was also a safety issue, as the pirated Legos do not comply with toy safety standards.

Link (Thanks, Matt!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:57:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Great moments in sports

Accompanying a Sports Illustrated article about the brawl at the recent Pacers-Pistons basketball game is this great chronology of "some fan confrontations with athletes and officials at pro sports events in the United States." Here's are a few of them:

April 19, 2003: An Oakland Athletics fan threw a cell phone at Texas Rangers outfielder Carl Everett....

Sept. 19, 2002: A father and son burst onto the field at Chicago's Comiskey Park and slammed Kansas City Royals first-base coach Tom Gamboa to the ground, punching and kicking him....

Nov. 24, 1999: Oakland Raiders were pelted with snowballs, some spiked with batteries, at Denver's Mile High Stadium. Charles Woodson allegedly threw a snowball that struck a female fan in the face, and Lincoln Kennedy went after a fan who hit him in the face with a snowball....

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:49:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, November 22, 2004

Disney turns movie screenings into search-and-harass ordeals

Disney's started confiscating movie viewers' cellphones and cameras, and subjecting them to roving patrols of ushers, and marring the prints with red identification dots at fifteen minute intervals.

After the screening I went to the table to collect my cell phone and handed them my ticket. The table had over 100 phones on it in the plastic bags. The geniuses they have working security couldn't find my phone after five minutes of searching so I looked myself and managed to find the ticket number in about 30 seconds. While I was waiting though I was able to enjoy this conversation between security and a well dressed agent type:

"Do you have your ticket sir?"

"You never gave me a ticket."

"Yes we did sir."

"I have another ID."

"I need your ticket sir."

"You never gave me a ticket"

"You'll have to wait till we are done here and then we'll try to find your phone."

In despair the agent person said "Why am I being punished for your mistakes?"

Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:44:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Copyrights are awarded without economic rationale

James Boyle, an amazing academic copyfighter, has written a positively brilliant column for the Financial Times on the crazy way that IP policy gets made -- without any evidence, without any followup. In particular, Boyle writes about database copyright, which Americans don't have and which Europeans do have -- and how the European database industry is atrophying under this punishing regime that allows companies to own collections of facts.

Are database rights necessary for a thriving database industry? The answer is a clear “no.” In the United States, the database industry has grown more than 25-fold since 1979 and - contrary to those who paint the Feist case as a revolution - for that entire period, in most of the United States, it was clear that unoriginal databases were not covered by copyright. The figures are even more interesting in the legal database market. The two major proponents of database protection in the United States are Reed Elsevier, the owner of Lexis, and Thomson Publishing, the owner of Westlaw. Fascinatingly, both companies made their key acquisitions in the US legal database market after the Feist decision, at which point no one could have thought unoriginal databases were copyrightable. This seems to be some evidence that they believe they could make money even without a database right. How? In the old-fashioned way: competing on features, accuracy, tied services, making users pay for entry to the database and so on.

If those companies believed there were profits to be made, they were right. Jason Gelman, one of our students, points out in a recent paper that Thomson’s Legal Regulatory division had a profit margin of over 26% for the first quarter of 2004. Reed Elsevier’s 2003 profit margin for LexisNexis was 22.8%. Both profit margins were significantly higher than the company average and both are earned primarily in the $6 billion US legal database market, a market which is thriving without strong intellectual property protection over databases. (First rule of thumb for regulators: when someone with a profit margin over 20% asks you for additional monopoly protection, pause before agreeing.)

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:16:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Color laser printers add hidden ID number to print-outs

Zach J sez: Colour laser printer manufacturers encode each printout with the printer's serial number so they can trace it back to you if you are counterfitting bills. They can trace it back to you for anything else as well. Oh, and you could of course hack this to give yourself a nice alibi. "Clearly it wasn't MY printer, look at the code!" How long have they been doing this? Why isn't it common knowledge? What other ways to track our lives have been implemented without a big announcement? Link

UPDATE: Anonymous sez: "The answer to the question of how long color laser copiers have been encoding their serial numbers onto their prints is: at least since 1995 or so.

"The Canon CLC 700 was introduced then and didn't come with the any discernible anti-counterfeiting features. The previous generations of the Canon CLC lines detected that they were being used to copy currency and put a blackish green cast over the output. The problem with the old system was that the detection was too sensitive and would trip on non-currency items and not detect the planned new currency designs.

"After a bit of looking (and some pointed questioning on behalf of our security-conscious customers) we found about the yellow-dot encoding, and sure enough, it's been on every color machine since.

"The reason you probably haven't heard much about it is because it (AFAIK) is only used by the Secret Service to trace counterfeit documents back to their source machines, and the Secret Service doesn't like to talk too much about means and methods."

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:00:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Werewolf and furry Bible-bashing

This website is dedicated to preaching the gospel to the "werewolf and furry community" so that they can have their souls saved even if they enjoy dressing up like giant animals or, possibly, believe themselves to be nonhuman.

Q: How can you be a dragon and a Christian at the same time?

A: Many shifters worry that they are so strange that they can never be accepted into the Body of Christ. That's not true and its not being fair to Christians. We Christians accept people from all walks of life. I'm proof of that.

I have been told that my shifter feelings are a lie from satan and that God has a plan for me in this human body. Well I don't know what that plan is, and as far as I can see, that divine plan will never see fruition because I feel too much like a loser to implement it.

So I need to be a dragon, a beautiful and powerful dragon that's fears not what men can say or do and attracts many followers. If I was a dragon, I could do so much good for this world because my self-confidence would return to me. I pray constantly to God to change me, and He tells me to wait.

If I can handle being a Christian, you can too, because I'm more f***** up than you are.

Link (via Making Light)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:09:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DIY gramophone build-notes and video

Back in the summer, Mark blogged this completely bad-ass Japanese build-your-own gramophone kit that could record and play back audio by etching it with a needle in a medium like a CD or a plastic disc. Adam got ahold of one and built it, posting his build-ntoes and video of the gramophone in action. Damn, it's cool. Link (Thanks, Adam!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:43:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NYT on Falluja shooting video response via blog

Following up yesterday's BB post about Kevin Sites' blog post on the Falluja shooting video: The New York Times covers Mr. Sites' response-via-blog today; it was the first time he'd issued a detailed statement about the events surrounding what was captured on tape, and the decisions that followed.

I am told that this is the first time the paper has based an entire story around a blog entry. Link. See also this North County Times op-ed. Link. Kevin Sites' "Open Letter to the Devil Dogs of the 3.1" -- Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:12:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ed Felten's lecture: "Rip, Mix, Burn, Sue" -- UPDATED

Ed Felten, the legendary engineer who led the team that broke the music industry's watermarking scheme and whom the music industry threatened with legal action if he presented his findings at a technical conference, has given an amazing lecture on copyright and technology as part of the Princeton President's Lecture series, called "Rip, Mix, Burn, Sue: Technology, Politics, and the Fight to Control Digital Media." It's a fantastic primer for geeks, lawyers and civilians on the copyfight. Link (Thanks, Michael!)

Update: Ed Felten sez, "The lecture is now available under a Creative Commons (non-commercial, share-alike) license. There's a page with license info and links to the lecture. At the moment it has the streams only, but I hope to add other formats as soon as I can. If anybody translates it into a different format, I would like to know so I can add a link to my page and/or redistribute the translation myself. [Note: Email Ed with your new formats, NOT Cory]

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:40:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pirates book reads like a mix of Monty Python and Hardy Boys

I've just finished Gideon Defoe's book "The Pirates! In an Adventure With Scientists," which is billed as "a Blackadder for the high seas." It's a very funny little hardcover -- about an hour's read, that tells a pirate adventure story in mock-kid's-book style that reads like a cross between Monty Python and the Hardy Boys. Great stocking stuffer!

'Listen, why don't I sing you a song?' said the Elephant Man, obviously desperate to try to change the subject. He even got up and did an ungainly jig as he sang,

I look like some ex-pe-ri-ment!
But please believe me I'm a proper gent!
I seem like a monster, but whatcha don't know is,
I got a scorching case of neurofibromatosis¹⁹

Jennifer and the pirate with a scarf gave up on getting a straight answer, and went off to search for any clues that might be evident at the other exhibits. But they had no more luck with the Man Who Could Eat A Bicycle, or the Lady Who Had Had Hiccups For Forty Years, or even with the Girl From Chesterfield Who Would Repeatedly Go Out With Idiots When She Could DO A Great Deal Better For Herself. The pea-soup fog was starting to make their eyes sting, so Jennifer and the pirate ducked inside a tent that was simply marked 'A Special Exhibit For The Ladies'. It didn't seem very special, it was just an empty and badly lit tent as far as the pirate with a scarf could make out.

¹⁹ Or possibly Proteus Syndrome. There is still some debate in medical circles. Contrary to popular belief, Michael Jackson never did purchase the Elephant Man's skeleton from the Royal Hospital. This is a good example of how you shouldn't believe everything that people tell you.

Link

Update: Ben sez, "The book's Pirate Captain hero has his own blog on Livejournal. According to the user info, the blog is 'a presentation of a ship's log discovered at a car boot sale in Botley, Oxfordshire in 1997' and is 'intended primarily for maritime historians and business leaders with an interest in inspirational management techniques'".

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:33:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Self-cleaning suit

Clemson University researchers are making headway toward the long-hyped notion of nanotech-outfitted, self-cleaning clothing. They've created a polymer film peppered with silver nanoparticles that enable water to pick up dirt as it rolls off the fabric. From a press release issued by the American Chemical Society:

“The coating doesn’t actually clean itself, but it does resist dirt much better than other fabric treatments,” explains research team member Phil Brown, Ph.D., a textile chemist with Clemson University in Clemson, S.C. “The concept is based on the lotus plant, whose leaves are well-known for their ability to ‘self-clean’ by repelling water and dirt. Likewise, when water is exposed to the treated fabric, the dirt will be carried away more easily. You will still need some water to rinse away dirt and stains, but cleaning will be quicker and less frequent.”

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 06:24:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Full-back HTML tattoo

Brad sez, "BMEZine.com's 'Geek Tattoo' section continues to amaze--here's an HTML-inspired backpiece." Link (Thanks, Brad!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:30:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Barbara Rushkoff's new book

My friend Barbara Rushkoff's brilliant 'zine Plotz, was a nerdy, hysterical, smart, honest, irreverent, and sometimes touching take on being Jewish in the modern world. Now, Barbara brings her Plotz perspective to Judaism's seemingly impenetrable holiday tradition in a new book. From imagined pages of TV Guide at Christmas "if Jews really did own the media," to the temporary shelters of Sukkot as advertised in a bizzaro world Sears catalog, "Jewish Holiday Fun...For You!" is a pop cultural tour-de-force of an historically unpopular culture. A perfect gift for under the Hanukkah Bush. From the introduction:

"We get to light menorah candles. Which means we get to play with fire. Sure, throwing tinsel on a tree is fun, but it's just not FIRE."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 03:36:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Superman is bad role model

Researchers at New York University and MIT have discovered that people with Superman on their mind are less likely than others to help people in need. The reason, the psychologists propose, is that the average person quickly realizes that there's no way they can compare to the Man of Steel. Priming the subjects in the study with thoughts of other, well, lesser superheroes did not have the same effect. For the study, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, students were asked to volunteer for a fake community service program after being cued to think about Superman or other superheroes. From a New Scientist article:

"Students who thought of Superman volunteered much less of their time than those who thought about other superheroes. Furthermore, Superman-primed subjects were significantly less likely to show up at a meeting for volunteers held three months after they were initially asked to participate."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:52:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lone gunmen?

On the 41st anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination, Glasgow video game company Traffic has released JFK Reloaded. A reconstruction of the scene and events around the Texas School Book Depository that tragic day, the game puts Oswald's rifle in the hands of players. From a Boston Herald article and Traffic's press release:

"We've created the game with the belief that Oswald was the only person that fired the shots on that day, although this recreation proves how immensely difficult his task was,'' (Traffic's Kirk) Ewing said.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:21:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, November 21, 2004

US peso circles the drain, may suck global economy down with it

With the US dollar circling the drain in the wake of unchecked defecit spending by the irresponsible Bush administration, the world economy is being disrupted. In China, people wiht hard currency assets are converting them from dollars to Yuan, with enormous bank-queues of those who are selling US currency as fast as they can (Cuba's gotten in on the act, trading its dollar assets for Yen and Euros).

So far, the dollar's slide to nine-year lows doesn't reflect panic. But some analysts say a run on the dollar is possible. And even an orderly drop could affect everything from mortgages to prices at Wal-Mart.

The good news for Americans: It's getting easier for manufacturers to sell products overseas, and more likely that tourists from Germany will flock to US National Parks.

But the downside could be significant. America, the world's leading importer of goods, is now buying them at higher prices. And if the dollar's dive makes foreign investors wary, US interest rates may have to rise to attract buyers of federal debt.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:09:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Indie label adopts Creative Commons licenses

Positron! Records, an independent label, has adopted Creative Commons for its releases!

Positron! Records is pleased to announce that our artists now have the option of releasing their works under Creative Commons licenses.

Unlike those who suffer from what we like to call "major label retardation," we here at Positron! have never believed it was bad thing for our supporters to share our music with their friends. The Creative Commons licenses we use legally allow you to share songs from these records on peer-to-peer networks. In addition, you can sample portions of these songs for use in your own compositions, whether they are mash-ups for your friends, or a commercial release. The only caveat is that the resulting work must be released under the same license. It is our way of both thumbing our nose at the ridiculous state of copyright law in this country, and letting you, our customer and supporter, know that you are not a criminal, but a trusted ally in the war against corporate stupidity.

Link (Thanks, Chris!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:03:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Internet "Hopkin" meme unravelled

Hopkin Green Frog is a complicated story. It begins with fliers posted around Seattle, seemingly drawn by a small child, asking for a lost pet frog called "Hopkin Green Frog" to be returned. The flier was plaintive, funny, and charming, and it began to circulate among photoshopping internet hipsters, who remixed its elements into various scenes from mundane and exotic world: the Hopkin Flier on a military briefing screen, surrounded by alert marines; angry demonstrators carrying WHO TOOK MY FROG? placards; the frog on a milk carton, etc -- if you're familiar with the All Your Base phenonmenon, you'll recognize this as an allied circumstance (we blogged this part already).

Mike from WhyBark lives in Seattle, and decided that this would be a cute piece for the local newspaper. He'd read on MeFi that Hopkin was actually a McDonald's toy, and he tracked down a new one for $5 on eBay. He called the number on the flier and repeatedly tried to make contact with Hopkin's owner's father. After many attempts, he got through, and got to the bottom of the Hokin Green Frog mystery.

Hopkin's bereaved owner is a 16-year-old autistic boy, who was very upset about the loss of his toy. According to his father, he's gotten over the loss of Hopkin and giving him a replacement Hokpin would be a bad idea, as it would re-open old wounds.

The person who drew the flier is a sixteen-year-old boy who suffers from autism. His father was unaware that his son may have made more than one batch of fliers (it appears that new fliers were hung in May of 2004). He did know about the loss of the frog and I believe that he knew about the first batch of fliers.

He also did not want me to give the frog to his son. He’s forgotten it, he told me. Bringing it up again will probably only bring up a bunch of bad memories.

He was quite unaware of the interest in the frog and the flier on the internet. He reiterated that he did not think it would be a good idea to show the sites to his son.

Link (Thanks, Mike!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:00:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kevin Sites responds on Falluja shooting video via his blog

Blogger and war correspondent Kevin Sites has issued his first detailed public statement on the Falluja shooting incident and its aftermath -- by way of his blog.

In the particular circumstance I was reporting, it bothered me that the Marine didn't seem to consider the other insurgents a threat -- the one very obviously moving under the blanket, or even the two next to me that were still breathing. I can't know what was in the mind of that Marine. He is the only one who does.

But observing all of this as an experienced war reporter who always bore in mind the dark perils of this conflict, even knowing the possibilities of mitigating circumstances -- it appeared to me very plainly that something was not right. According to Lt. Col Bob Miller, the rules of engagement in Falluja required soldiers or Marines to determine hostile intent before using deadly force. I was not watching from a hundred feet away. I was in the same room. Aside from breathing, I did not observe any movement at all.

Making sure you know the basis for my choices after the incident is as important to me as knowing how the incident went down. I did not in any way feel like I had captured some kind of "prize" video. In fact, I was heartsick. Immediately after the mosque incident, I told the unit's commanding officer what had happened. I shared the video with him, and its impact rippled all the way up the chain of command. Marine commanders immediately pledged their cooperation.

We all knew it was a complicated story, and if not handled responsibly, could have the potential to further inflame the volatile region. I offered to hold the tape until they had time to look into incident and begin an investigation -- providing me with information that would fill in some of the blanks.

For those who don't practice journalism as a profession, it may be difficult to understand why we must report stories like this at all -- especially if they seem to be aberrations, and not representative of the behavior or character of an organization as a whole. The answer is not an easy one.

In war, as in life, there are plenty of opportunities to see the full spectrum of good and evil that people are capable of. As journalists, it is our job is to report both -- though neither may be fully representative of those people on whom we're reporting. For example, acts of selfless heroism are likely to be as unique to a group as the darker deeds. But our coverage of these unique events, combined with the larger perspective - will allow the truth of that situation, in all of its complexities, to begin to emerge. That doesn't make the decision to report events like this one any easier. It has, for me, led to an agonizing struggle -- the proverbial long, dark night of the soul.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:06:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

René Cigler art show

Boing Boing pal (and bOING bOING cover artist) René Cigler has some new work in a group show at Track 16 Gallery in Santa Monica California. The pieces are sculpted characters with handmade everything. For a sneak peek check them out on her site. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:25:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

G-Cans: massive underground water system in Japan

Che sez: Tokyo is an impressive city above ground, but one of the most incredible things about this city is it's mind-bogglingly complex underground. The G-Cans Project is a massive project, begun 12 years ago, to build infrastructure for preventing overflow of the major rivers and waterways spidering the city (A serious problem for Tokyo during rainy-season and typhoon season). The underground waterway is the largest in the world and sports five 32m diameter, 65m deep concrete containment silos which are connected by 64 kilometers of tunnel sitting 50 meters beneath the surface.

The whole system is powered by 14000 horsepower turbines which can pump 200 tons of water a second into the large outlying edogawa river. I'm in the middle of playing Halflife2 right now and something like this looks like its straight out of the game or some sci-fi movie. This unbelievable gallery of photos however, is not CG, it is the real deal.

The site is all in Japanese, but if you click around the menus a bit, there are animations and diagrams of how the system works, and other interesting photos of the high-tech control center and turbine facilities. Supposedly the G-Cans project is also meant to be a tourist attraction, and can be visited for free. very cool. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:15:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More on modern pirates

After posting my entry about modern pirates who eavesdrop on satellite-based mobile phone calls, a couple of people have send in some amazing stuff about pirates.

Xeni sez: "Check out these photos Eric Pasquier took of the pirates. Link (Sample shown here)

"Also, see this related story which uses some of Pasquier's amazing pirate photos." Link

Chris O'Connor sez: "This is a lovely listing of all sorts of modern piratatical activity reporting for shipping companies and includes semi-detailed descriptions of pirate attacks." Link

Anonymous sez: "Fun story on piracy, but not entirely accurate. According to Dr. Peter Chalk, a piracy expert at the RAND Corporation, piracy in the Straits of the Moluccas does not usually end up in killing of the crew *unless* the crew resists. (Of course the situation may be different off Brazil or Africa.) Usually they're just put off the ship on a lifeboat and the ship and cargo are stolen. The ships sometimes get reused, and sometimes are simply set adrift after their cargoes are offloaded and resold. This piracy is far more common than we the public hear about. Dr. Chalk estimates that about 10% (or less) of ship hijackings are reported. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:35:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Clueless Pennsylvania senate says no to muni WiFi, but others say yes

Esme Vos of the exxxxcellentttt muniwireless.com newsletter, about community wireless and broadband projects, says:

The Pennsylvania Senate has just passed a bill that would limit the ability of municipalities to build alternative broadband networks and challenge the incumbent's (Verizon's) dominance of broadband in the state.

The bill is on the governor's desk and he is balking at signing it because of the restriction. People can contact him and urge him to veto it.

More information on the bill, and contact information for Pennsylvania's governor, are here: Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:06:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Girlmod

BoingBoing reader Brenda Vonahsen says,

"This company (Link) makes concept models, and in their spare time (I'm guessing) they makes large models like this one (Link) and (Link).

"If you look carefully in one of those links, you can see a power cord coming in to the model, and a monitor line coming out. Yes, it's a casemod. The monitor is external (on the left). Here's the making-of documentation (Link). Pretty imrpressive, however, they are not alone (Link)."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:03:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Let them eat cake!

Two seventh graders in Marietta, Georgia were arrested after serving yummy cornbread cake to their classmates. The cake was spiced with an expired prescription drug, bleach, clay, and tabasco sauce. From an Associated Press report:

"They took it into the cafeteria at lunch time and began passing it out to students, just whoever would take a piece," said Jay Dillon, spokesman for the Cobb County School District in suburban Atlanta.

Some of the students started vomiting after eating the cake Tuesday, officials said. Eleven students, mostly seventh graders, were treated at a hospital and released, Dillon said.

Link (via Fortean Times)

posted by David Pescovitz at 03:04:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Neal Stephenson's System of the World concludes the Baroque Trilogy

I've just finished the last page out of 2,700 in total in Neal Stephenson's amazing, astounding, frustrating, hysterically funny Baroque Trilogy. Finishing books that are this ambitious conveys a real sense of accomplishment on the reader, and not just because my shoulder will ache less for no longer being weighted down by several pounds of Stephenson in my bag.

The Baroque Cycle began with Quicksilver, which set up the story: Daniel Waterhouse, a distant ancestor of the lead character in Cryptonomicon, is the son of a revolutionary puritan in 17th Century England who escapes revolution, plague and fire in the company of Sir Isaac Newton and the founding fathers of Natural Philosophy, the rationalists who dissect dogs and swill mercury and invent science. His adventures in and out of London are set in motion by Enoch Root -- not an ancestor of Cryptonomicon's Enoch Root, it seems, but the actual Enoch Root, hundreds of years before Cryptonomicon's action. (Another major element here is the simultaneous invention of calculus by Leibniz and Newton)

The story picks up in The Confusion, where we get to spend a lot of time in the company of Bob and Jack Shaftoe (ancestors of Cryptonomicon's Bobby Shaftoe), who are engaged in swashbuckling, globe-spanning adventures that contain, among other things, the best swordfighting scenes I've read since The Princess Bride. At the center of all of this is the Duchess Eliza of Arcachon-Qwghlm, a distant ancestor of the Qwghlmers from Cryptonomicon.

Finally, the story concludes in volume three, The System of the World, which brings together all of these characters in London as they hurtle towards the fusion of the old system -- alchemy, superstition and regency -- fuses with the new -- money, rationalism, mercantilism.

The historicity of these books is borderline alarming. Stephenson has researched so many goddamned interesting factoids about pirates, the birth off the monetary system, natural philosophy, alchemy, the court of the Sun King, the functioning of London's ancient prisons, the nature of sewage disposal in early metropolises, and many other diverse subjects that you can practically open the books to any page and find five cool trivia questions to baffle your friends with on e.g. long plane trips.

The storylines are convoluted in the extreme: they twist and turn on themselves, surprising and delighting.

The characters are Stephenson's best: funny, likable, roguish, brilliant, and insightful, and they serve to illuminate his research, and almost never seem like an artifice for this purpose.

The books' strengths, however, are also their failings. They are slow in many places, bogged down in detail (especially the intrigues among the many royals), as though Stephenson was bent on conveying the sheer tedium of life in the 16th and 17th centuries. The convolutions in the plotlines veer back and forth between intriguing and confusing.

For all that, these books are like a good curry. They're mild and interesting when you first taste them, but after you've swallowed, they grow on you, spreading a warm fire throughout your digestive system, making beads of sweat appear on your forehead. Since finishing the first two books, I've been practically haunted by them. Ever time I spend money, or walk through London, or see a ship, or think about math and science, some snippet of those books springs to mind, a lens through which to reexamine my thinking and assumptions.

The System of the World is no less moving: even as I drew toward the conclusion, it was already working at me, making me think hard about the world around me. Though reading these books was, at times, a chore, it was a chore that paid off handsomely.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:58:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, November 20, 2004

Tech-support generation spends Thanksgiving patching for parents

Great Newsweek editorial defines the young adults of today as the "tech-support generation" who go home at Thanksgiving and patch their parents' operating systems and de-install their spyware. The related Slashdot thread catalogs the must-install apps, plugins and patches that you should bring home to the old folks to get them online.

Forget the generational tags you’ve already heard, like Gen X and Gen Y. We are the Tech-Support Generation. Our job is to troubleshoot the complex but imperfect technology that befuddle mom and dad, veterans of the rotary phone, the record player and the black-and-white cabinet television set. Next week, on our annual pilgrimage home, we’ll turn our Web-trained minds and joystick-conditioned fingers to the task of rescuing our parents from bleeding-edge technology on the blink.

Link (via Slashdot)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:12:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Congress nixes funds for new nukes

The Nuclear Calendar site reports:

Congress deleted all funds for new nuclear weapons in the omnibus appropriations bill, which passed the House of Representatives this afternoon. It is expected to pass the Senate shortly. This includes funds for the Robust Nuclear Earth penetrator, or nuclear bunker buster, and for the Advanced Concepts Initiative for new nuclear designs.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:46:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Plate-mod

Designer Sara Cihat creates really cool looking "rehabilitated dishware" out of finds from second-hand stores which are then cleaned up, re-screened, and glazed to new heights of hipster glory. She makes skulls, strippers, and guns look like the foundation for a great breakfast.

Link (via designsponge, thanks Susannah)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:04:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Target.com sells Anal Massage part deux

From time to time, I lean back in my tattered Aeron chair once rescued from a Bangalore call center's fetid dumpster, inhale deeply from a knockoff Cohiba, and mutter into a lukewarm can of Red Bull, "What a sophisticated, leet lot these BoingBoing readers are."

This is not one of those times.

Following up on a previous BoingBoing post about Target.com selling an item called "Anal Massage," dozens of you gleefully emailed to say you'd spent all night conducting googlevestigation, like so many anal-obsessed Philo Vances packing overheated routers in place of warm pistols. Here's some of the dirt you scraped from the undersides of your gumshoes. Perverts.

BB reader ADM says,

"Mystery solved: A little poking around in the item information for Target's"Anal Massage item reveals an ASIN. This is because Amazon and Target are business partners and ASINs are the unique identifiers used by Amazon. So if you go to Amazon and search for this item's ASIN (B0002KPIBO) you learn that (unfortunately) the item in question is not an actual anal massage, but rather an instructional DVD called "Anal Massage."

Says one reviewer: "It is appropriate for housewives, lovers, massage therapists and everyone interested in deepening the experience of relaxation and pleasure for themselves or for others. The DVD presents an easy to follow hands-on format that is comfortable for all types of viewers." Hands-on and comfortable!

Link.

Reader John Todd Larason says,

Target.com is run by Amazon.com, and shares large amounts of code & backend database info. If you take the target.com URL for that item and replace 'target' with 'amazon', (or just take the asin argument and use it directly, ie the url in this link), you get to Amazon's page for the item -- a DVD, "Anal Massage for Relaxation and Pleasure" by the New School of Erotic Touch.

jhartnett says, "More anal massage goodness! If you go to target.com home page and type "anal massage" in the search window you get these results. Seems to be a booming business. Link."

Reader Bob Jones (not THAT Bob Jones -- uh, I think) says, "Praise the Lord! It appears to be an "Adult Health" title, here's a review: Link." (NSFW warning: cover art depicts giant ass-crack with strategically-poised thumb).

Reader Neil Turner says, "Amazon even offers some 'used' Anal Massage you can buy. Link."

And finally, Music to Anal Massage By? Jeremy K. says, "Just thought I'd let you know, that in addition to the item on Target.com for the Anal Massage, they have a Uranus-Self Anal Massage for M music cd. Crazy stuff going on over there at Target! Link"

Nice work, sleuths. Now -- do me a favor. Don't let congress get wind of this, okay?

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:55:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Propeller sellers

BoingBoing friend Mara says,

"The band Guided by Voices put out an album in 1992 called Propeller, and each one had an original cover hand-created by the band and/or their friends. There were only 500 copies made, and one just sold for $6200. Here's a link to an article about the sale: Link."

And here's a guy who's trying to collect images of all 500 covers: Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:52:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Melodeo

A Seattle-based tech company is developing a music service for cellphones. Company execs hope the offering will one day trump Apple's iPod and iTunes in popularity.

Melodeo said yesterday that it has raised $9.5 million in venture capital to help develop and market the music player. Investors in the second round include GF Capital, Ignition Partners, Intel Capital and Voyager Capital. The company has raised $11.7 million to date.

The attraction of Melodeo is that it allows a user to search, buy and listen to music from a cellphone, rather than having to download the music on a computer and transfer it to another device. It does this quickly by loading a list of available tracks and artists on the user's cellphone. The user can then browse and connect to the wireless carrier's server only when a track is purchased.

Link (via unwired)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:40:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Patent app: personal stereo cellphone

Snip from a patent application developed for NEC:

In a cellular phone, stereophonic sound reproduction of music etc. is realized by using a microphone and a speaker of the cellular phone as stereophonic speakers. By the stereophonic sound reproduction function, radio broadcasting from FM stations, streaming sound from the Internet, etc. are reproduced by the cellular phone.

Link to " Cellular phone with high-quality sound reproduction capability " (via pho list)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:34:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Here come the chimeras

BoingBoing reader Cyrus Farivar says, "Life imitates art. We're making real chimeras now. Front page of the Washington Post."

In Minnesota, pigs are being born with human blood in their veins. In Nevada, there are sheep whose livers and hearts are largely human. In California, mice peer from their cages with human brain cells firing inside their skulls. These are not outcasts from "The Island of Dr. Moreau," the 1896 novel by H.G. Wells in which a rogue doctor develops creatures that are part animal and part human. They are real creations of real scientists, stretching the boundaries of stem cell research.

Biologists call these hybrid animals chimeras, after the mythical Greek creature with a lion's head, a goat's body and a serpent's tail. They are the products of experiments in which human stem cells were added to developing animal fetuses. Chimeras are allowing scientists to watch, for the first time, how nascent human cells and organs mature and interact -- not in the cold isolation of laboratory dishes but inside the bodies of living creatures. Some are already revealing deep secrets of human biology and pointing the way toward new medical treatments.

But with no federal guidelines in place, an awkward question hovers above the work: How human must a chimera be before more stringent research rules should kick in?

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:26:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Microsoft hearts Firefox?

BoingBoing reader Tom Christie says, "The Windows Marketplace site is advertising Firefox as making 'browsing more efficient than ever before.'" Link

But total killjoy and BB reader Oscar Bartos writes, "I know, disappointing. It's all on the disclaimer page:"

Disclaimer: Merchandise pictures and descriptions are provided by the manufacturers of the merchandise. Windows Marketplace is provided for informational purposes only, and Microsoft makes no representations or warranties, either expressed, implied or statutory, regarding the merchandise, manufacturers or compatibility of the merchandise available within. Information within Windows Marketplace is subject to change without notice. Actual end user compatibility may vary. The inclusion of a merchandise or manufacturer does not imply endorsement by Microsoft of the merchandise or manufacturer.

Link.

And BB reader TeleKawaru says, "It's also interesting to note that the screenshot for FireFox is displaying GMail and not Hotmail. =)"

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:23:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

educational zen coda: compulsion things

Following up on this week's edition of Web Zen -- education zen -- (Link, and related post), geek, dad, and technopundit Glenn Fleishman says, "You missed my recent scan of a badly translated manual. This sign means your duty as compulsion things." Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:05:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

War-auteurs

Snip from Michael Ignatieff's piece in this week's NYT Magazine :

"We now have the terrorist as film director. One man taken hostage recently in Iraq described, once released, how carefully his own appearance on video was staged, with the terrorists animatedly framing the shot: where the guns would point, what the backdrop should be, where he should kneel, what he should be scripted to say."

Link (Thanks, Slavin)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:34:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"educational zen" double take

Wasting valuable hours of her life that she will never get back, BoingBoing reader Brenda Vonahsen dove into our last edition of Web Zen ("educational zen") and found herself zenned out by one item in particular.

She says, "The 'Dragon Ballz toy' section of the Hall Of Technical Documantation Weirdness contains this prose:

WARNING: With appertain rotor of screw setting pre ceiling on the understanding that serew no weild. May wield two-faced, pressboard securing. weild pre to begin with wiping ceiling of bilge dasto.

# Prythee no sport with stingy or play asperity game. Winding finger have got bloodstream not walk. Throagh peril.

# Tad disport of time grown man tatelage.

# Till the cowcomes home.Weild toys damage,burn-in prythee wind to a close wield.

# Give attention to open/close toys,therefore take place peril.for instance slipup batteries wield result in the emission of heat rupture liquid.vent itseld prythee pay attention."

Brenda says, "I think that at some point whomever wrote this just gave up. The use of 'prythee' I find sort of cute and endearing."

Link. Plus, I love how instead of calling them "instructions," the document calls them "Ways and Means." Sounds like a House subcommittee.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:49:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Machine gun table

This curious c.1965 coffee table, weighing in at 200 pounds, is up for auction on eBay:

"The "box" is welded and riveted together to form a frame around a GIANT hand sculpted and hand welded machine gun. The look of the piece is very industrial. It is a stunning sculpture in person and will make an interesting addition to any style home or place of business from machine age to mid century modern."

It would go well, at least thematically, with the child's gun lamp I scored a couple of months ago. Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne)

posted by David Pescovitz at 04:34:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: educational zen

technical docs weirdness | wacky warning labels | warning signs | public info films | howtoons | cut away illustrations | hand shadows | throw cards | tricks of the trade | more tricks | what is that stuff | unwise microwave oven experiments | periodic table of funk | make friends on the telephone | what to do if the net is down | communication course #1 | how stuff works
Image: Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness/Aerial Smackage. web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:48:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hermit crabs get artificial shells from helping humans

BoingBoing reader Jayson Franklin says:

"This article describes an attempt to make artificial (plastic) 'shells' to be left on the beach for wild hermit crabs. 30% of hermit crabs have shells that are too small for them, and must often resort to using refuse for housing."
Link to The Hand Up Project: Attempting to Meet the New Needs of Natural Life-Forms

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:38:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pepsi Spice Me

BB reader Caines says,

"This guy is drinking noting but Pepsi Holiday Spice for 45 days (similar to the movie Super-Size Me, in which a man ate nothing but McDonald's food with frightening effects). He's keeping a blog to document the impact it is having on his body. Snip: 'I instantly started sneezing, which made me shit my pants and on top of the horror I got another bloody nose. Luckily no one was home when this happened."

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:30:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Target.com selling "anal massage"

WTF? Link to a Target ad which, as one BB reader says, is "offering Anal Massage, at 10% off, and free delivery. 4-8 week delivery lead time. This will probably disappear pretty quick."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:24:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Report: air inside Dutch churches is toxic

Snip from BBC News story:

Church air was found to be considerably higher in carcinogenic polycyclic hydrocarbons than air beside roads travelled by 45,000 vehicles daily. It also had levels of tiny solid pollutants (PM10s) up to 20 times the European limits.

Link (thanks, swirlingpuss, via, and thanks Armin).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:07:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, November 19, 2004

Everything Must Go.

"I could not help but notice all these robots fucking in the mini-mall..." From Hint Magazine, an animated homage to fashion designers Comme des Garçons, Junya Watanabe, Hermès, Cosmic Wonder and others. Images by illustrators Thomas Zeitlberger and Manu Burghart, with flash design by Midim, music by TV on the Radio. Link to Everything Must Go.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:58:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

WIPO notes from day three: democracy == ignoring dissent

Today at WIPO saw a flat-out disgraceful cooking of the deliberative process. The administrators of the meeting -- the chair and secretariat -- are pushing hard to make this treaty pass, even if no one wants it to. The solution to the deadlock is "regional meetings" in which countries that oppose the treaty can be isolated and arm-twisted into coming into line, and where few or no public-interest NGOs will be present. Some of the most populous countries in the world -- India and Brazil -- along with many others called for a better approach: any region that wants a meeting can have one, but the real action would be at an "inter-sessional meeting" held in Geneva, with all countries represented. Even though these countries presented a solution that would have given regional meetings to those who wanted them, the chair steadfastly refused to hear from them -- eventually, he used a straw poll to discard their proposal altogether, and then called it "democracy." (Oh, and even more of the public-interest group papers were stolen and trashed today)

India: Before the lunch break I pushed you more for the floor more than I normally would. The reason was that I had a dental appointment. I realize my ideas may not have been clearly conveyed because my speech may not have been clear. I hope my speech is a little clearer now. What I was suggesting was that Brazil's suggestions for open consultations inter-sessionally were an eminently sensible idea. I would have thought that given the open ended consultations are wider in scope and the fact that the differences that emerged in this meeting were essentially differences across regions, it would be more beneficial to have an inter-sessional meeting which is precisely what we are now engaged in. Some meeting like this that brings regions together in inter-sessional consultations. But I see that none of that has been reflected. And since we believe our conclusions are those of the committee rather than the conclusions of the chair, we would request you to show some indication that our contribution has not been entirely dismissed out of hand. Thank you.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:47:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tech companies tell WIPO: we don't want your "protection"

I've been in Geneva all week, fighting the Broadcast Treaty at the World Intellectual Property Organization. One of the least-supported provisions in the treaty is the "Webcaster's provision" which would allow people who transmit information on the Internet to control how anyone who receives it uses it -- even if it's Creative Commons licensed, or in the public domain, or not copyrightable. Microsoft and Yahoo's representatives have backed the US's call for this (America is the only country that wants this), essentially saying that they represent the whole tech industry on this.

This week we presented a letter from 20 technology companies and organizations that opposed the inclusion of Webcasting in the treaty -- among the signers were Mark Cuban (who founded Broadcast.com, and owns $500,000,000 in content), O'Reilly and Associates, and Salon.com. I made 300 copies of the letter and set out copies at one-hour intervals (setting out all my copies would have been a mistake, since someone was stealing all of the public-interest groups' papers and throwing them away in the bathroom garbage-cans).

It made a huge difference. After the letter got into the delegates' hands, the tenor of the debate really changed. Click the link to read the letter:

Briefly, we reject the Webcasting Provision for the following reasons:

1. The Internet depends on permission-free access. This is reflected in the exemptions in many countries' copyright laws for online and internet service providers. When authors or rights-holders' permission has been required for fixation, copying, retransmission or decoding in other situations, the negotiation of licenses from creators and copyright rights-holders have provided ample protection for all parties. Adding a new layer of intermediaries, over and above copyright holders, for the re-use of information on the Internet benefits no one -- save those intermediaries. If an Internet company has the rights to a work, or need not secure the rights to a work due to a limitation in copyright, or because the work is in the public domain, there is no rational reason to require that the company also seek the permission of a further intermediary whose sole creative contribution to the work is in making it available.

2. There is no demonstrable problem. Internet businesses are famously, legendarily well-capitalized from angels, venture capitalists, public markets, private investors, governments and every other source of capital imaginable. Proponents of webcasting rights have offered no credible evidence that the lack of legal protection for webcasting rights has precluded the establishment of any new Internet businesses. Indeed, the businesses most volubly calling for Webcasting protection are among the best-capitalized in the history of the world. There is no certainty of benefit here, but it *is* certain that the creation of a new psuedo-copyright will slow down adoption and innovation in Internet markets by requiring all content-related businesses to negotiate yet another layer of license agreements before they can offer new products or services to the public. The most likely result of introducing these new rights will be to skew the market; in practice it will provide financial assistance to incumbents who will be able to assure investors of their right to exclude their competitors and new entrants from the market. At the same time, it is likely to constrain, not increase, the creation of more information products for the public.

We do not desire the "protection" you offer us, nor do we believe it will benefit us.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:37:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Japanese cosplay photographs

Another excellent gallery from MasaMania of Japanese kids at play. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:44:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

EU won't use patented standards - CORRECTED

The EU has announced that it's not going to use patented software standards unless it gets an irrevocable royalty-free license to all the patents in the standard -- guess that means Windows is out!

European Commission's IDA (Interchange of Data between Administrations) Unit announced their definition of Open Standards, which require the "intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of (parts of) the standard to be made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis". It also calls for "no constraints on the re-use of the standard" to be imposed. The definition is part of the European Interoperability Framework just published at http://europa.eu.int/ida/servlets/Doc?id=18063

Among other speakers, Christian Hardy from the French ministry of finance presented the large migration of over 100 000 desktops to OpenOffice, the free software alternative to Microsoft Office, across the national French Administration. Rolf Theodor Schuster, CIO at the German Foreign Ministry presented a live demonstration of the fully open source desktop and server system that secures the global German embassy network.

Link (Thanks, Rishab!)

Update: Rishab sez, "note that the interoperability framework is not mandatory! but the volume of protests from e.g. COMPTIA indicates that it will be influential."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:55:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Congresscritters told "internet porn = heroin"

Conservative porn-prohibitionists addressing Congress yesterday compared online porn to heroin -- and urged lawmakers to fund studies about "porn addiction" and create a propaganda public health campaign warning of the dangers. Perhaps a surgeon general's warning for vibrators and videos is in order. All joking aside, how you feel about porn isn't as important here as how you feel about, in their words, "curbing" the internet and other forms of communication. It always starts in the name of the children, doesn't it?

Mary Anne Layden, co-director of a sexual trauma program at the University of Pennsylvania, said pornography's effect on the brain mirrors addiction to heroin or crack cocaine. She told of one patient, a business executive, who arrived at his office at 9 a.m. each day, logged onto Internet porn sites, and didn't log off until 5 p.m. Layden called for billboards and bus ads warning people to avoid pornography, strip clubs and prostitutes.

The panel discussion ranged from hardcore, violent pornography to audience complaints about a sexually suggestive promo that aired prior to this week's "Monday Night Football" game. Brownback, an outspoken Christian conservative who has championed efforts to curb indecency on television and the Internet, said the public is beginning to realize "they don't just have to take it." But he acknowledged the First Amendment right to free speech has limited congressional efforts.

Link. Just in case they're right, I urge you -- whatever you do -- to please, please not click on the Suicide Girls ad that appears to the right of this blog post. Like pot, it leads to (ahem) harder things. (thanks, JP)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:42:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Neuroscience of music

In the new issue of Scientific American, UC Irvine neurobiologist Norman Weinberger looks at how the brain processes music. Surveying the research in his and others' labs, Weinberger examines how our brain "retunes" itself to various kinds of musical input and how we've evolved our response to music.

"An imaging experiment in 2001 by Anne Blood and Zatorre of McGill sought to better specify the brain regions involved in emotional reactions to music. This study used mild emotional stimuli, those associated with people's reactions to musical consonance versus dissonance. Consonant musical intervals are generally those for which a simple ratio of frequencies exists between two tones. An example is middle C (about 260 hertz, or Hz) and middle G (about 390 Hz). Their ratio is 2:3, forming a pleasant-sounding "perfect fifth" interval when they are played simultaneously. In contrast, middle C and C sharp (about 277 Hz) have a "complex" ratio of about 8:9 and are considered unpleasant, having a "rough" sound.

What are the underlying brain mechanisms of that experience? PET (positron emission tomography) imaging conducted while subjects listened to consonant or dissonant chords showed that different localized brain regions were involved in the emotional reactions. Consonant chords activated the orbitofrontal area (part of the reward system) of the right hemisphere and also part of an area below the corpus callosum. In contrast, dissonant chords activated the right parahippocampal gyrus. Thus, at least two systems, each dealing with a different type of emotion, are at work when the brain processes emotions related to music. How the different patterns of activity in the auditory system might be specifically linked to these differentially reactive regions of the hemispheres remains to be discovered.

In the same year, Blood and Zatorre added a further clue to how music evokes pleasure. When they scanned the brains of musicians who had chills of euphoria when listening to music, they found that music activated some of the same reward systems that are stimulated by food, sex and addictive drugs."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:27:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bionic back

Disc error? Popular Science reports on the Charité Artificial Disc, a plastic replacement for one of two discs in the lower back. The Artificial Disc is expected to receive United States FDA approval by the end of the year.

“This is the first major breakthrough in back surgery since the 1940s,” says orthopedic surgeon Richard Guyer of the Texas Back Institute in Plano.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:07:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Prosthetic fin

Fuji, a 34-year-old dolphin at an aquarium at Okinawa, lost most of her tail fin to a disease that forced doctors to amputate. Tiremaker Bridgestone fabricated a $100k prosthetic fin for her. From the AFP:

The company has yet to receive any request for an artificial fin or leg for other animals but spokesman (Shinichi) Kobori said Bridgestone is open to such requests.

"We make tires; we specialize in foots of sort. If we see offers, we will consider them," he said.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:21:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Grey Video mirrors

I blogged the unbelievably awesome Grey Video the other day -- it's an amazing video mashup to accompany one of the tracks from DJ Danger Mouse's Grey Album. The site's gone down, but Waxy's got mirrors and torents and bears, oh my.

The official site is down, likely a result of popularity or legality, and I don't know if it's coming back. Until then, I'm going to mirror the high-quality Quicktime version.

Download: grey_video.mov (Quicktime, 22 MB)
BitTorrent: grey.torrent (thanks, Kyle!)

Also, Matt Haughey is mirroring it.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:07:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Record player needed for getting public domain discs online

Donate a record player and help digitize 30,000 records!

Hello, my friend has recently come into approximately 30,000 records(!) many of which are old enough as to be public domain, i.e. their copyrights are expired. He has offered to let me digitize them so that they may be distributed, to undermine the record companies and their patterns of rereleasing albums periodically in a "remastered" cd so that the copyrights never expire. I have the computer and software necessary to digitize these records (which include crazy rare ethnic and folk music, as well as odd "mood" atmospheric music), but need a record player with component outputs, ie a linelevel output, so that i can hook it up to my soundcard. I can afford a needle, I just need a decent record player. Help the world, give me the old record player in your garage. Recordings will be distributed on an ftp site and on peer to peer programs (people actually do use these for legitimate purposes!).

Link (Thanks, Paul!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:50:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, November 18, 2004

Pirates eavesdropping on satellite calls

I was looking at international long distance rates on Vonage, which are quite good (like 10 cents a minute to China), but was shocked to see that Inmarsat satellite calls are over $12 a minute! For fun, I did a search on Inmarsat and found this article about Inmarsat eavesdropping. Apparently, real pirates like to do this.

Pirates are the heroes of age-old adventure stories, but most of us forget that whole regions still depend on modern pirates. The coast around Malacca in Malaysia is such a spot, together with the Bay of Thailand and the Southern Chinese Sea. In South America the coast of Northern Brazil is another centre of pirate activity. On average every other day sees an attack, and whenever pirates strike they leave good manners at home. Typically all people on board of a ship are killed, unless they manage to escape with a rescue boat. Most pirates know in advance if the ship and its cargo is worth an attack, because they use state of the art equipment to monitor Inmarsat communications and even fax transmissions listing every single cargo item. Quite a substantial portion of Inmarsat reception units that are being sold in Germany or the United States are channelled to those regions where they are of invaluable service to modern age pirates. French journalist Eric Paquier managed to interview one pirate recently and when asked what pirates do with their victims he got the following response: 'We hang them upside down on one of the masts, then burn them alive and later eat their ears for dessert."

When is there going to be a movie about modern-day pirates? Link

UPDATE: Wes Phillips sez: "When there is, here's a really good novel they can use for a starting point."

UPDATE: Bill Berry sez: "That's a good idea: a movie about modern-day pirates. I'd see it.

I don't know if you remember the old 60s Hanna-Barbera show The Banana Splits, but they had a segment on the show that featured modern-day (er, 60s) pirates. If I remember correctly, they had modern boats and guns.

Danger Island. The show's main ongoing one live action serial. Directed by future Hollywood director Richard (Lethal Weapon) Donner, it centred on five people stranded on a remote jungle island: Doctor Hayden and his young daughter Lesley, Link (played by child actor Jan Micheal Vincent, later to play the character of Link in '80s TV series Airwolf), Morgan (who proved the muscles), and the silent native, Chongo. Together they faced deadly natives, pirates, landslides and earthquakes.

As Bingo says: "Oh-oh...Danger Island next!" Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:05:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hooters sues boobs-n-beer rival over copyright

Jason Schultz points us to the following surreal slice of news and says, "Boy, I'd love to hear the expert witness testimony in this trial!"

Hooters of America and a rival restaurant chain began arguing in federal court over who has rights to the concept of using scantily clad women to sell food and beer. Atlanta-based Hooters of America accuses Ker's WingHouse of Kissimmee of poaching the idea coined when it opened its first sports bar in Clearwater in 1983, Hooters lawyer Steve Hill said in opening statements Wednesday in Orlando.

"The evidence will show WingHouse has copied the Hooter girl almost from head to toe," Hill said. "For want of a better expression, the Hooter girl is our Ronald McDonald."

But Crawford Ker said he based his chain on Knockers, a failing restaurant with an all-female staff in Largo that he took over after retiring from the NFL, according to pretrial deposition.

Link. You can get a "taste" of the allegations made by Ker's WingHouse here: Link. Couldn't we just settle this with a round of topless onion dip wrestling and some free draft pitchers?

Update: IANAL, but a knowledgeable BB reader who is quite familiar with the law (and requests anonymity) says: "The title for this entry is a tad incorrect. At issue is not copyright, but rather - I am not making this up - 'trade dress.' See the not dissimilar discussion (sans décolletage) here."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:16:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Backups made simple with Super Duper

I've been burned by data loss before, so I know how important it is to back up my hard drive. The thing is, every back-up software I've tried has been a big hassle. They're all slow and complicated. As a result, I was lucky if I'd do a backup once a month, because I dreaded firing up the program and trying to figure out what to do. "Which checkboxes should I click?" "Which options should I select?"

On a lark, I searched Version Tracker for backup software and found a new program called Super Duper. It was getting excellent reviews there, so I decided to give it a try. And I love it! It's extremely simple to use, but very powerful. It's one of those great programs that seems to know exactly what you need, when you need it, without requiring you to do anything.

After the first back-up (I use a 200G Maxtor One-Touch drive), subsequent "smart backups" take just a few minutes. The backups are bootable - in fact, they're clones of the original.

Super Duper has made backing up painless. So painless that it's almost fun. I back up my eMac and my iBook daily now. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:41:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sirius names Mel Karmazin CEO

Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:43:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Copyright treaty laid bare: watch your governments make sausage!

This week is my bi-annual pilgrimage to Geneva, Switzerland, where I'm representing EFF at the negotiations over the "Broadcast Treaty" which lets people who send out shows claim a 50 year owenership over them, even if the shows are publi domain, copylefted, or of a non-copyrightable nature (like a C-SPAN broadcast). It requires signatories to protect DRM with laws that make it illegal to tell someone how to do more with his television. And there's even a proposed element ("the webcasting provision") that would bring this to the Web. This stuff is way bad news.

But we're part of the largest coalition of "public interest" groups in WIPO history. We're getting major face-time with the delegates and making a difference.

Here are some posts I've just made to EFF's Deep Links blog detailing what's going on:

Day one notes: One of the things were doing here is taking exhaustive notes on who says what, when, and what it means. We're providing the first-ever in-depth peek into how the treaties that will rule your life are getting made. On Day One, we saw the introduction of a brilliant proposal by Chile to set a minimum group of public rights under copyright -- like the right of the blind to turn books into Braille without permission or payment -- that would apply in every country, so that people cooperating on international education/research, archiving and disabled access projects could know that the stuff they sent to their collaborators was just as legal abroad as at home.

Statement on limitations and exceptions: I'm giving this statement tomorrow on the limitations and exceptions proposal: "It is in the nature of archiving, education and the provision of services to the disabled to be cooperative. Unlike commercial, competitive enterprises where labor may be replicated -- and charged for -- many times over; nonprofit public interest work to distribute a joint effort as widely as possible."

Day two notes: Day two was all about the Broadcast Treaty, and saw really tough debate on the Webcasting provision and the DRM stuff (WIPO calls DRM "TPMs" -- technological protection measures. Kinky!). Most notable, though, was that a saboteur took all of the literature set out by the public-interest groups and hid it/trashed it/threw it in the toilets.

Letter on stolen documents: Here's the letter we sent to the WIPO Secretariat (the administrative overseers) on our stolen literature.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:15:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Canada's DMCA: why is it a bad idea? -- UPDATED

On DigitalCopyright.ca, a good, sharp, short analysis of the pending Canadian version of the USA's rotten, hated, disastrous Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA):

1. Education – Canadian schools currently spend millions of dollars each year on copyright licenses to provide students with access to educational materials. The Supreme Court of Canada recently ruled that teachers, students and schools do not have to pay for certain uses of these materials (including research, private study, and certain classroom instruction). Contrary to the Court’s ruling and despite the millions of dollars schools already pay for copyright materials, the committee would require schools to divert millions of dollars more from education budgets – from students, schools and taxpayers - to pay for publicly available material on the Internet.

Link, En Francais (Thanks, Ian!)

Update: Ian sez, "they also have posted a open letter to the members of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, in reply to quotes seen in a Globe and Mail article."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:04:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Internet Archive pages are admissable into evidence

The Internet Archive contains billions of snapshots of web-pages on different days since 1996. Using its "Wayback Machine," you can get the archive to show you what any page looked like on a day when it was copied by the archive's crawler.

So it was only a matter of time before the a page from the Archive would be used in a court proceeding to prove something about some date in history. It's happened, and the court has admitted the Archive's pages into evidence.

Magistrate Judge Arlander Keys rejected Polska's assertion of hearsay, holding that the archived copies were not themselves statements susceptible to hearsay exclusion, since they merely showed what Polska had previously posted on its site. He also noted that, since Polska was seeking to suppress evidence of its own previous statements, the snapshots would not be barred even if they were hearsay. Over Polska's objection, Judge Keys accepted an affidavit from an Internet Archive employee as sufficient to authenticate the snapshots for admissibility.

Link (Thanks, Sean!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:01:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

R2-DJ tees

Damn, these "R2-DJ" tee-shirts are bad ass. Limited edition of 150, too! Link (Thanks, Derek!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:58:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cockroach-controlled mobile robot system in LA on Friday

On November 19th, 2004 8-10pm at Machine Project in Los Angeles, "Garnet Hertz will be showing his most recent prototype: a cockroach-controlled mobile robot system. The system uses a living Madagascan hissing cockroach atop a modified trackball to control a three-wheeled robot. Infrared sensors also provide navigation feedback to create a semi-intelligent system, with the cockroach as the CPU. This work will be framed within the contexts of intelligence, embodiment, artificial life, the history robotics, and Michael Jackson." Link (Thanks, Dan!)

UPDATE: Jenifer Tidwell sez: This is a scene right out of a 1993 SIGGRAPH animation piece called "Grinning Evil Death," about a giant robotic cockroach going down in defeat to a kid empowered by a cereal-box prize. In the climactic scene, the intrepid kid pulls the lid off the robot to find it powered by... a cockroach. Link 1, Link 2

UPDATE: Bill sez: "A friend of mine wrote to Garnet concerning the treatment of the cockroaches he uses in his robot. I was impressed with how well he treats the little guys and thought you might like to know. Here is his reply:"

I appreciate your comments, although I take some comfort in knowing that the cockroaches I use aren't in pain or even annoyed: they're a Madagascan Hissing species that hiss loudly when irritated.

The insects are only in the device for a few minutes at a time, and lead very normal lives otherwise.  I feed them organic lettuce and top-grade Purina dog food.

You should compare this to the way that insects are cut apart and routinely chopped to bits by standard scientific research (let alone the Orkin man).

All the best - and I actually appreciate your feedback.

Garnet

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:57:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hack your way out of writer’s block

Merlin Mann of 43 Folders has a great list of ways to break through writer's block.

Write crap - Accept that your first draft will suck, and just go with it. Finish something.

Unplug the router - Metafilter and Boing Boing aren’t helping you right now. Turn off the Interweb and close every application you don’t need. Consider creating a new user account on your computer with none of your familiar apps or configurations.

Write the middle - Stop whining over a perfect lead, and write the next part or the part after that. Write your favorite part. Write the cover letter or email you’ll send when it’s done.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:08:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

GPS and speech recognition help blind people using public transport

My latest article for TheFeature is about Noppa, a neat project in Finland to help blind people navigate through cities with the aid of GPS-enabled mobile phones.

The basic user components of Noppa are a mobile phone that's loaded with speech-recognition software and a Bluetooth GPS unit. The Bluetooth connection is used to get real-time bus and train data (the kind that appears on bus stop signs and train platforms to users know when their vehicle is about to arrive). The GPRS connection accesses a custom information server that manages route planning, guidance and speech recognition. The information server also accesses maps, weather information and municipal databases from the Internet. The speech-recognition software allows the user to make verbal requests, and the system uses speech synthesis to tell the user how to get to the correct bus stop or train station and tells him or her which vehicle to board.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:18:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Physicist, "activist scientist" Melba Phillips dies

BoingBoing reader Dano says, "She was a physicist in a time when women just didn't do that, and [her passing should be of interest to BoingBoing readers because of] what she did for the world community with regard to the Federation of American Scientists and anti-secrecy."

Physicist Melba Phillips, among the last of a vanishing generation of activist scientists who founded the Federation of American Scientists and fought the political battles of the early cold war, died last week. A 1947 policy statement on "military secrecy and security" that she co-authored for the FAS leadership complained that the personnel security practices of the Atomic Energy Commission were "extra-legal, arbitrary, and often subversive of every right of the individual in a democracy" ... FAS in its early years was sharply divided between liberal anticommunists, who eventually became dominant, and popular front liberals. Dr. Phillips was among the latter.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:06:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fair use enemas? Turd text in trademark tussle

You had me at "Use of our client's trademark to identify enema equipment in erotic fiction is likely to cause confusion." Link (via Fleshbot)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:01:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rolling (Electronic) Paper

My latest article for TheFeature is about the development of incredibly flexible displays for mobile devices:

"Flexible displays are a staple of science fiction. Imagine unrolling an electronic newspaper that’s automatically updated via the wireless Web. Or unfurling a screen stored in your location-enhanced mobile device so you can consult a digital map without squinting. These kinds of applications -- promised for more than a decade -- have almost become clichés of futurist hype. Indeed, as one reader of TheFeature points out in response to a flexible screen announcement by Philips, “Every industrial design student has some (mock-up) PDA with a roll-out display in their portfolio.” So why the hell can’t you buy one?"

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:14:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Psychology of Interrogation

New Scientist has a really intriguing and intense interview with Michael Koubi, the former chief interrogator for Israel's Shin Bet.

How do people behave when they are interrogated for the first time?
Every detainee behaves differently. It depends whether he's from the city or the village, or a Bedouin from the desert. It depends whether he's educated or not. Prison is unimaginably different to normal life. People behave in unexpected ways. People who talk tough in public often submit in interrogation.

I once interrogated a Bedouin who said nothing at all for a few days. He was a very tough man. During one session I was playing with a stick, and this idea came to me: I said to him, do you realise there's a snake hidden in the stick? And suddenly he became very afraid. He said he'd tell me anything. This man was used to dealing with snakes in the open, but in a cell it was a different matter.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 12:59:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A neat, neat, neat Christmas

Church leaders in Cambridge, England are madder than hell because David Vanian and Captain Sensible of seminal punk/goth band The Damned were invited to switch on the city's Christmas lights. From a BBC News report:

Reverend Dr Peter Graves, of Wesley Methodist Church in Cambridge, said: "We should not give a major function over to a group that goes out of its way to deny what Christmas is about. "

Er, presents? Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 12:30:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, November 17, 2004

Mark Cuban fined by NBA for blogging

Mark Cuban -- maverick television and sports executive and generous supporter of EFF -- has been fined by the NBA for blogging his criticism of the league's decision to hold its opening game on election night, the one night of the year when no one gave a rat's about basketball.

The NBA held its opening night on election night last Tuesday, a dumb move because Cuban thought (correctly, I might add) that the kickoff games would get zero TV coverage the day after the election. So Cuban decided to inform his readers of his opinion on his weblog, and the NBA fined him for this. That's right everyone, the NBA fined Mark Cuban because of a weblog entry he wrote.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:19:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

30 million public domain newspapers online

The National Endowment for the Arts Humanities is working to put 30 million newspapers online in digital format.

The first of what's expected to be 30 million digitized pages from papers published from 1836 through 1922 will be available in 2006.

"Anyone who's interested - teachers, students, historians, lawyers, politicians, even newspaper reporters - will be able to go to their computer at home or at work and at a click of a mouse get immediate, unfiltered access to the greatest source of our history," said Bruce Cole, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He announced the project in a speech at the National Press Club...

The National Endowment for the Humanities is working on the project with the Library of Congress, which has embarked on a broader project to preserve records of American newspapers dating from the late 1600s...

The span of the joint project is limited because type faces of printers used before 1836 are too difficult for optical scanners to read, and copyright restrictions are in force on papers published after 1923.

Link (via Whole Lotta Nothing)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:16:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ASCII war online short

War-themed ASCII / Flash hybrid animation. This has nothing to do with red and blue states, or Iraq. It has everything to do with WTFclouds, TTYLnukes, LMAOplanes, and German gothrock ennui kthxbi. clicky ROFL. (via MeFi)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:59:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mashup tools needed for civil disobedience

Phillip Torrone's issued a call-to-arms for citizen engineers to share their tips and techniques for creating mashups, so as to enable widespread civil disobedience. Click through for his contact details.

the solution to end this madness?

more mash ups. millions of them.

this is where you come in, i'm going start a how-to series on making your own mash ups, so if you make these, please drop a note on how you do it, what software you use and all that.

let's unleash a flood of millions of mash ups. with podcasting really taking off, p2p networks, mp3 players everywhere and the nature of music always wanting to be sample, mixed and heard it'll be hard to stop everyone turning on, tuning in and mashing up.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:45:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ze Frank's Communication Course #1

Mark Hurst sez: The world's only Ze Frank teaches us how to rethink e-mail communications. Genius. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:20:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

GTC Telecom long distance is a rotten company

What happened to GTC? It used to be a great cut-rate long distance company. Now they are about as good as monkeys in a dentist's office.

When I first signed up for GTC Telecom a couple of years ago, I was happy with the service. How can you complain about 2.9¢ long-distance with no monthly fees? And it was very easy to contact customer service by phone -- I never had to wait more than 30 seconds for a representative to get on the line.

But a few months ago, I started having problems with GTC. I got a call from a guy claiming to be from GTC who wanted me to give him my credit card number right there on the phone to pay a supposedly outstanding bill. It sounded suspicious, especially because I had signed up to pay my bill automatically through my bank account. So I told him I'd call GTC myself. When I called GTC, they told me that my bill was paid in full. Very strange. I got another call a week or so later, and then another. Each time, I called GTC back and learned that my account balance was zero.

Then suddenly, my long distance service stopped working. Whenever I tried to make a long distance call, I'd get a message saying "The number you dialed is no longer in service." Of course, that was untrue because the numbers I was trying to call were in service, and I could reach them with my mobile phone.

So I called GTC (1-800-486-4030) to see what was going on. I was put on hold, and listened to really bad on-hold music. Every five minutes a recording would come on, claiming, "the next available agent will be with you shortly." But no one ever helped me. After a half hour I gave up and hung up. I tried again several times that day and throughout the week. Same result -- nobody picked up the phone. Maybe everybody quit their jobs and went home. That would also explain why I couldn't make long distance calls.

In frustration, I sent an email to GTC Telecom informing them of the problem. No response. (Not even to this day). I finally switched to another cut rate carrier, ECG Long Distance, which has high ratings for customer service. They've been great.

Last week, ECG called me to let me know that I'd been slammed. Someone, without my consent, switched me from ECG to another carrier. I asked them who, and they told me that only my local carrier would know. So I called my local carrier and they told me it was Sprint. I called Sprint and they looked into it, and they told me that it wasn't actually Sprint that did the slamming, it was a company that rented Sprint's lines. Guess who? GTC.

I've been on hold with GTC since 8:45, listening to their awful new age music. It's now 9:42 and I'm about to hang up the phone and write a letter of complaint to the California Public Utility Commission and the FCC about these idiots. They have wasted a lot of my time and I hope they go out of business soon so nobody else will get suckered by them.

UPDATE: 1-700-555-4141 is a toll-free number you can dial to find out who your long distance carrier is. You'll get a recorded message telling you the name of your long distance company. It's a good idea to check it occasionally, to make sure you haven't been slammed.

UPDATE 8/22/05: Tanya says: "I just googled GTC and saw your link. This company must be run by baboons. As far as I knew, I ended their service 2 years ago after having similar company switch arounds and general roller coaster ridiculousness. Yesterday I got a letter from a collection agency saying I owe $55.92. I will attempt to call simian-central, but I am afraid, very afraid."

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:42:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

iPod with swapped guts on eBay

BB reader TeffDogg sez:

Somebody is eBaying an iPod whose guts have been swapped with the innards of what looks like a $2 miniature toy electric guitar. The auction pictures suggest that the iPod was working fine up until its transformation. Bidding is currently at five dollars. I wonder if this will get the Apple fans as angry as the guy who put an Athlon motherboard in a Mac G5 case?

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:00:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

I like you

I like you. I like you. I almost love you. Link to Flash animation. (Thanks JP)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:58:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

JM Barrie theme-park in a game

Players in the online world Second Life have built an astounding JM Barrie theme-park in-game. Wagner James Au writes,

From the Second Life residents who brought us 'Oz' comes 'Neverland', a 48 acre theme park devoted to the world and work of J.M. Barrie, on the 100th anniversary of his classic 'Peter Pan'. Featuring a painstakingly-realistic recreation of fin de siecle London (including a Jack the Ripper-haunted graveyard and a pub with a working dart board), Captain Hook's pirate armada (featuring self-firing cannons), and the Lost Boys' winding roller coaster. Last Friday's entry discussed the genesis of the project, and today's entry goes into the art, craft, and technology of the project-- along with asking the very pointed question, 'Why would a couple dozen talented people freely devote hundreds of hours working on a project that indirectly benefits a for-profit company?'

Link (Thanks, James!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:36:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

TiVo sells your fast-forward button to advertisers

TiVo has jumped another shark, adding a "feature" to its PVRs that few TiVo customers would have agreed to if they'd been given the choice. When you fast-forward with your TiVo, it will show you banner ads. That's right -- it shows you ads while you're skipping ads. As Matt Haughey puts it, they've "sold your fast-forward button to advertisers." Time to build a MythTV, before they are criminalized.

People get TiVos for different reasons, mostly it's for the time shifting nature, but the close second most loved feature has to be the ability to fast forward through ads. The advertising TiVo has added so far has been minimal impact. The commercial showcases that show up on your main menu aren't that bad and often have good ad shorts and information, but pushing that into the main TV watching interface seems like a spectacularly bad move. No longer are the ads an optional thing you can dig for more, they're soon going to be pushed in front of you when you use a key feature of the product.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:30:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Legal threats for linking to mashup

Waxy has been threatened with a alwsuit by Walt Disney (which holds the rights to Queen's music and trademarks) for linking to a site where you can download the stunningly good Night and the Hip-Hopera, a staggering mashup of Queen's music with basically everything. These are the links that got Waxy threatened:

01 - Precession.mp3
02 - See.mp3
03 - Live.mp3
04 - Bite.mp3
05 - Jazz.mp3
06 - Rock.mp3
07 - Love.mp3
08 - Fight.mp3
09 - Fuck.mp3
10 - Play.mp3
11 - Ride.mp3
12 - Sniff.mp3
13 - Ridicule.mp3
14 - Plan.mp3
15 - Break.mp3
16 - Listen.mp3
17 - Work.mp3
18 - Come.mp3
19 - Expose.mp3
20 - Jerk.mp3
21 - Save.mp3
22 - Stop.mp3
23 - Question.mp3

Here's what Waxy has to say about it:

The irony is that I'm not even hosting the files anymore... The links on my site are all redirected to someone else's server, and have been for weeks. At any rate, I'll be forced to remove the direct links by November 23.

As far as I know, I was the first person to put the DJ Dangermouse's Grey Album on the Web. Now, I see the suppression of artistic freedom again with the Kleptones album, which has always been freely-distributable and never made a dime. It's depressing to think that our horribly broken copyright law means that nobody can legally hear this album or create others like it.

The cease-and-desist is below. The album itself can still be downloaded from the mirrors on the official Kleptones site, but I'm not sure for how long. If anyone has any ideas for creative protest, now's the time.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:26:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Grey Video: Beatles/Jay-Zee VIDEO mashup will delight you

DJ Danger Mouse came to fame when he remixed the Beatles' "White Album" with Jay-Zee's "Black Album" and called the result the "Grey Album." EMI, who hold the Beatles' copyright, went nuts and threatened to sue anyone who hosted the MP3s. This led to Downhill Battle's Grey Tuesday protest.

The album is stone brilliant. It's at the top of my iTunes playlists and it's what I put on whenever I need a boost. It's made me dig out the White Album again and listen to it with fresh ears. I think it's the most important album of the 21st Century (to date, at least).

Now someone has made a video for one of the Grey Album tracks, "Encore," in which black and white Beatles footage (I'm guessing "A Hard Day's Night") and desaturated footage from a Jay-Zee performance are artfully combined with new footage and CGI (Ringo scratching! John breakdancing!) to make one of the funniest, coolest, and most illegal music videos I've ever seen. Go download it now before the lawsuits start. Link (Thanks, Michael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:17:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Japanese govt threats silence security researcher

A security expert who audited the Japanese National ID Card system and found it to be terribly designed and implemented was prevented from presenting his findings at a technology conference after the Japanese government intervened and threatened the conference organizers.

The Japanese government gave me two options.

1) Do not talk
2) Drastically change your slides to say what they want me to.

When I offered to not use slides at all and give my own opinion they told me that I would not be permitted to speak AT ALL. It is obvious to me that they did not have an issue with my slides or presentation. They were afraid that I would draw attention to problems in JUKI net. Soumushou thinks that they can hide from the issues. They think that if they keep people from speaking about the issues, it will go away. I thought I would be immune from such Japanese government pressures however I underestimated Soumushou's ability to manipulate those around me.

Link (Thanks, Gohsuke!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:16:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Smuggling via squid

Peruvian police seized 700 kilograms of cocaine that smugglers stuffed inside frozen giant squid for the journey to Mexico and the US. From BBC News:

"The drugs - worth about $17.5m - were sealed in several layers of plastic and other wrapping material and covered in pepper to divert sniffer dogs....

Interior Minister Javier Reategui said that police operations had uncovered a drug-trafficking organisation using a fish-exporting company."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:46:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Roboxotica 2004 in Vienna

Former BB guest blogger Johannes Grenzfurthner and his co-conspirators at the monochrom art/tech collective and Shifz are hosting their annual Roboxotica cocktail robotics festival starting this weekend. This year's theme is Beautiful Failure:

"Until recently, no attempts were made to publically discuss the role of cocktail robotics as an index for the integration of technological innovations into the human Lebensraum, or to document the increasing occurrence of radical hedonism in man-machine communication. Roboexotica is an attempt to fill this vacuum. A micro mechanical change of paradigm in the age of borderless capital...

Scientists, researchers, computer geeks and artists from all over the world participate to build cocktail robots and discuss about technological innovation, futurology and science fiction."

Roboxotica has been kind enough to host former BB guestblogger Karen Marcelo of Survival Research Laboratories/DorkbotSF and Dorkbot founder Douglas Repetto for the mechanical festivities. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 12:44:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, November 16, 2004

Tele-hunting

A ranch owner in Texas is setting up a Web site enabling hunters to telerobotically aim and fire a .22 rifle at animals on his ranch. From a Reuters report:

The idea came last year while viewing another Web site on which cameras posted in the wild are used to snap photos of animals.

"We were looking at a beautiful white-tail buck and my friend said 'If you just had a gun for that.' A little light bulb went off in my head," he said. Link

Of course, this system is not without precedence. In 1997, I joined Survival Research Laboratories' Mark Pauline and Eric Paulos at a Tokyo art gallery when they demonstrated a Web-based telepresence system to aim and fire their deadly Air Launcher machine at targets in San Francisco. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:40:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chess set made of wireless tech pieces-parts

I mean, as if chess weren't already geeky enough:

"Ingredients: 50 ohm BNC, SMA, and N terminators with various BNC, SMA, N, APC7, F, UHF connectors and inter-series adapters; or any other RF connectors you can find around the house. White gets nickel or stainless steel and black gets gold top pieces. p.s. Dad lost the first game."
Link, and don't miss the awesome living room tournament snapshot. Guaranteed to make any grown-up nerdchild feel homesick. (Thanks, Frank).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:34:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The emperor has no verbs

BoingBoing buddy Mike Outmesguine says,

This Reuters story doesn't "misunderestimate" the growing trend of Dilbert-esque corp-speak at the highest offices in the land. George Bush and Tony Blair are taken to task by author John Humphrys for their consistent use of verbless speech to avoid accountability and debate in political discourse and for pounding the meaning out of words like "freedom" and "democracy" through rampant repetition.

Linkify

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:27:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Xeni on NPR: new tech eye watches for in-theater camcorders

On the NPR program "Day to Day" this week, I report on new technology that movie industry officials hope will decrease the number of people using camcorders to make illegal copies of feature films. The "PirateEye" system flashes short pulses of light at the audience, then takes a digital snapshot of the area surrounding any object that appears to be a camcorder or pinhole camera. That area could include innocent audience members, as well as non-camera devices that set off a "false positive" -- and that could spark protest among privacy advocates.
Link to archived audio for this program, Link to NPR Day to Day home.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:33:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Moral values coming to a freeway sign near you (not)

Apparently, some people are taking this hoax/parody seriously:

John Hostettler, the Congressman representing the 8th district of Indiana, has been convinced by local religious groups to introduce legislation in the House that would change the name of an Interstate 69 extension to a more moral sounding number. There are plans to extend the interstate from Indianapolis through southwestern Indiana all the way through Texas into Mexico in the coming years. While most believe this highway will be good for the state’s economy, religious conservatives believe “I-69” sounds too risqué and want to change the interstate’s number.

Link to full text of parody. Twitterpated locals are flooding the poor congressman's office with calls, emails, faxes and the like. Link to non-parody news story. (Thanks, Brian)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:19:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

David Lee Roth, paramedic

Former Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth, he of the high-flyin' karate kicks, is training to be an emergency care provider in NYC.

Roth, 50, has been riding for several weeks with a New York ambulance crew in training to become a paramedic, The New York Post reported Tuesday. "I have been on over 200 individual rides now," said Roth. "Not once has anyone recognized me, which is perfect for me."

Link (Thanks, Sean)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:04:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MPAA fileswapper lawsuits begin

BoingBoing reader Aaman says,

The Motion Picture Association of America has filed the first wave of lawsuits against fileswappers and released a program to detect file sharing. The MPAA also announced it would make available a computer program that sniffs out movie and music files on a user's computer as well as any installed file sharing programs. The organization said the information detected by the free program would not be shared with it or any other body, but could be used to remove any "infringing movies or music files" and remove file sharing programs.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:47:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

To do in LA tonight: RES digital film screening

If you're in LA this evening, the RES monthly screening series is back at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood with videos for The Streets, UNKLE, The Faint, Gift of Gab, Swayzak... and new work by Spike Jonze for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Stylewar for Blues Explosion. Some directors will be in attendance. Post-screening afterparty populated by beautiful hipsters wearing important haircuts with whom you'll want to rub elbows (or other parts). Link to ticket purchase site.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:21:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rubberstamped money

Interesting gallery of money that has been rubberstamped with polictical messages.

The Latin motto DEO VINDICE means "God will vindicate us," or something to that effect. This was the motto of the by the Confederate States of America. You will, of course, have noticed the Confederate flag. It seems that someone still carries a grudge about the outcome of the Civil War, given that the stamp was situated to obscure President Lincoln's portrait. Specimen collected in Kerrville, Texas. Image courtesy of Susan W. and Allen M.

Link (Via Sensible Erection)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:35:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Girlfriend's Lap Pillow

Here's a almost-but-not-quite nonsensical interview with the Japanese creator of the Girlfriend's Lap Pillow. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:17:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bizarre black Lois Lane comic from the 70s

boogah sez: "Millionaire Playboy has unearthed a wonderfully absurd bit of comic book history: A comic book where [Superman's girlfriend] Lois Lane goes undercover as a black woman to get information for a story she's trying to do."

The story begins with Lois assigned to do a story on Metropolis's urban area that Lois refers to Little Africa. It seems that all black people refuse to submit to an interview done by Miss Whitey. Young children, old blind ladies, and even people on the street hate white people. With Superman's help Lois is placed inside the Plastimold and the Transformoflux Pack invented by Dahr-Nel, Kryptonian Surgeon. Apparently this machine is meant to change white people to black people. You have to wonder if Superman uses this machine often?

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:05:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Viewing all 68,647 New Yorker cartoons on your iPod

Kirk McElhearn sez: "What a great idea for the iPod photo (not the lowercase on the word 'photo', as per Apple's change today)! Using it to view cartoons! And not just any cartoons, but the 68,647 cartoons from the New Yorker, available on two CD-Roms with the new Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker book."

Why not use the iPod photo to view cartoons, especially those from the New Yorker? I recently wrote about The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker, which is a wonderful book containing some 2,000 cartoons from the New Yorker, but also with more than 68,000 cartoons - every one ever published in the magazine - on two CD-Roms.

So, Perceval's idea is this: why not view the New Yorker cartoons on the iPod photo? Great idea, if you ask me; much better than vacation pictures. The question is, however, can it be done? Are the graphics of the cartoons good enough to view on such a small screen? Are the captions readable?

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:53:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Scenes from Errol Morris' aborted project, The Movie Movie

Errol Morris's website is loaded with great stuff. On the front page right now is a clip featuring Donald Trump discussing Citizen Kane. (He seems not to know the alleged source of "rosebud," but no matter, he really does have some interesting things to say about the movie.)

The Movie Movie, an aborted project, is based on the idea of taking Donald Trump, Mikhail Gorbachev and others and putting them in the movies they most admire. Isn't it possible that in an alternative universe Donald Trump actually starred in Citizen Kane?

He's also got a bunch of never-before-seen Apple Switch TV commercials, including this one of me I watched for the first time just now. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:25:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Long Now Foundation seminars on MP3 (and ogg)

Here are a bunch of audio files of talks given at the Long Now Foundation. Speakers include Bruce Sterling, Brian Eno, and George Dyson. The suggested donation of $10 per talk is pretty darn steep. I'd say $10 for all the talks would be fair, but pay whatever you think. Link (Thanks, KK!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:57:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ceramic cup looks like paper coffee cup

This looks like a typical deli paper cup for coffee, but it's actually made of ceramic. $12 and it's yours. Link (Via Coolhunting)

UPDATE: Mia sez: "Another taste of New York- one-part good design and one part Marie Antoinette milking a cow." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:15:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Snoop Dog's new track debuts in-game

Snoop Dog's new single will debut in a game.

Snoop Dog, always on the cutting edge of music, games and porn, has set a new precedent for the ever-evil music business. His new single, Riders on the Storm, has debuted in Need For Speed Underground 2. The track, produced with the surviving members of The Doors, can only be heard if you buy the game (for now, at least). The article goes on to make the case for future collaborations between the two mediums. It’s a no-lose deal for the music industry, which is a big, old, fat loser. While gaming is a sexy redhead. Our emerging presence in the mainstream just keeps mounting. And, no, I don’t say that with naive glee — more like, worried awe. Hopefully the music biz culture won’t rub off.

Link (via Wonderland)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:27:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Adventure game responses to cursing

Something about text adventure games brings out the potty-mouth in me: LOOK UP. GO NORTH. GO WEST. SHIT. Here's a gallery of screengrabs of responses to cursing in classic text adventure games. Link (via Wonderland)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:26:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ceiling ponds made from plastic duck-butts

With these duck-undersides from TAP Plastics, you can create a "ceiling pond." It's apparently popular in dentist's offices. Link (Thanks, Ron!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:47:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

kidssmellbullsh*t.com

Tech advocacy group Downhill Battle launched two websites today

The first site -- www.kidssmellbullshit.com features a contest for kids to write a letter or submit a photo about the issue, which will then be sent to [The Business Software Alliance] and [The Motion Picture Association of America]. The winner will receive an iPod Mini. The second site - www.copyrightcurriculum.com - is a collaborative effort to write a public-interest curriculum for teachers that want to address these issues in their classrooms.

The move was to counter private sector and lobbying groups' partisan educational tools that are being forced into public schools. Teachers across the country who use the Weekly Reader in their classroom have been receiving installments of the BSA curriculum in the magazine since September 1st. In addition, the MPAA has hired Junior Achievement to teach a filesharing curriculum that drastically distorts the legal realities of the history of copyright and peer-to-peer filesharing. Kidssmellbullshit.com hosts a letter-writing and mash-up photo contest for school-aged children with the goal of sending a youth-based message to BSA and MPAA about the their thoughts on these new technologies. Other users are allowed to collaboratively edit, filter and mash-up the curriculum materials using the collaborative wiki system.

The second is a slightly more serious page called the Collaborative Copyright and Technology Law Curriculum . This one's for the grownups in the house who want to do some serious ass-whooping.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:40:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Theory of Fun PDF - UPDATED

I reivewed Raph Koster's brilliant Theory of Fun book (think of it as an Understanding Comics for games) here before, and now I'm delighted to see that Raph's posted a tremendous, graphic-rich picture-book in PDF format detailing the notions from the game. 4.7MB PDF Link Better 4.7MB PDF Link (via Wonderland)

Update: We killed a server with this one, there's a mirror of the file here

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:34:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Virgin Mary sandwich

Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich. Starting bid on eBay: $3000

"I made this sandwich 10 years ago, when I took a bite out of it, I saw a face looking up at me, It was Virgin Mary starring back at me, I was in total shock, I would like to point out there is no mold or disingration, The item has not been preserved or anything, It has been keep in a plastic case, not a special one that seals out air or potiental mold or bacteria, it is like a miracle, It has just preserved itself which in itself I consider a miracle, people ask me if I have had blessings since she has been in my home, I do feel I have, I have won $70,000 (total) on different occasions at the casino near by my house, I can show the recipts to the high bidder if they are interested..."

Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne!)

UPDATE: Here's an Associated Press article about eBay canceling the first auction of the sandwich because they thought the seller was joking. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:15:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Smoking fights depression?

Not really, but Yale psychiatrist Marina Picciotto reports that targeting the brain receptors for nicotine could cut down the time it takes antidepressants like Prozac and Zoloft to begin working.

"In this study in mice, she and her colleagues tested the action of antidepressants with and without mecamylamine, a noncompetitive antagonist (blocker) in nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs). In a separate study using knockout mice that lack these receptors, they found that the function of the nicotine receptor in the brain was an essential component of the therapeutic action of antidepressants."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:34:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Phone fetish

SmashMyPhone.com sells images and videos of models crushing cell phones with their feet. Beats crushing small animals, anyway.

This site is about trampling, crushing, and smashing telephones. Our models have no mercy and take proper care of the most hated piece of modern technology. We focus on telephones but will also smash other objects, including balloons and other items.

Link (via Fleshbot, and thanks to David Steinberg)

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:20:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fast forward

Entrants in the Recorderrace in Munich, Germany hack portable tape recorders into mobile vehicles powered by the tape transport motor. Pictured are last year's winners. The second international race takes place on December 12. From the rules:

• The technical principle of the tape recorder has to be preserved. Not allowed are additional drives of whatever source, but only the original devices. No additional energy storage is permitted.

• Only one recorder per vehicle may be used. The bundling of various recorders into one vehicle is not permitted.

• The removal of e.g. the cassette cap is permitted as long as main parts of the body are conserved.

• The vehicle has to be roadworthy for more than one race.

• Bodyworks, design, accessory or advertising is permitted with the exeption of: vivid pets are not allowed as drivers!

• Remote control is not permitted. The vehicle has to be able to drive (roughly) straight on a distance of 15 meters.

• The vehicle has to arrive as started i.e. no components may be left on track.

Link (via Near Near Future)

posted by David Pescovitz at 05:38:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, November 15, 2004

Stoplight turns red for speeders

The city of Pleasanton, California has come up with a funny way to punish speeders:

[The] city's traffic engineers have created a traffic signal with attitude. It senses when a speeder is approaching and metes out swift punishment. It doesn't write a ticket. It immediately turns from green to yellow to red.

Link (Via Paul Boutin)

UPDATE: Benjamin Leng sez: "In the small german town i grew up, we had one of those for years. A friend of mine found out that when you entered the town with a speed in excess of 160km/h (metric and proud of it), you could pass the light before it coud turn red. So the really bad speeders rushed through this town in a even more insane speed. Human irresponsibility beats well-meaning technology once again."

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:30:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thanks to idiots with credit cards, spam kingpins rake in $100,000's a month

From Tampa Bay Online's coverage of the spammer trial:

As one of the world's most prolific spammers, Jeremy Jaynes pumped out at least 10 million e-mails a day with the help of 16 high-speed lines, the kind of Internet capacity a 1,000-employee company would need. [..] In a typical month, prosecutors said during the trial, Jaynes might receive 10,000 to 17,000 credit card orders, thus making money on perhaps only one of every 30,000 e-mails he sent out. But he earned $40 a pop, and the undertaking was so vast that Jaynes could still pull in $400,000 to $750,000 a month, while spending perhaps $50,000 on bandwidth and other overhead, McGuire said. "When you're marketing to the world, there are enough idiots out there" who will be suckered in, McGuire said in an interview.

Link (Via LinkMachineGo)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:17:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Screencap of blogger Kevin Sites' report of Falluja prisoner shooting

A video grab of footage referenced in Kevin Sites' report for NBC News shows "a U.S. Marine pointing his assault rifle at a wounded insurgent inside a mosque just before gunfire was heard in Falluja, November 13, 2004... a U.S. Marine shot dead an unarmed and wounded Iraqi prisoner in the mosque." Link to image, Link to archived video and transcript of Kevin's report for NBC News, link to previous BoingBoing post, link to Kevin's blog.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:23:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blogger Kevin Sites reports on marine shooting unarmed Iraqi prisoner

On NBC News this evening, combat correpondent and blogger Kevin Sites reported on an incident in which a U.S. Marine shot dead an unarmed and wounded Iraqi prisoner in a mosque in Falluja.

The Iraqi was one of five wounded prisoners left in the mosque after Marines had fought their way in on Friday and Saturday. There was no immediate comment from the Pentagon on Monday's report... The pool report by NBC correspondent Kevin Sites said the mosque had been used by insurgents to attack U.S. forces, who stormed it and an adjacent building, killing 10 militants and wounding the five. Sites said the wounded had been left in the mosque for others to pick up and move to the rear for treatment. No reason was given why that had not happened.

A second group of Marines entered the mosque on Saturday after reports it had been reoccupied. Footage from the embedded television crew showed the five still in the mosque, although several appeared to be already close to death, Sites said. He said one Marine noticed one of the prisoners was still breathing.

A Marine can be heard saying on the pool footage provided to Reuters Television: "He's fucking faking he's dead. He faking he's fucking dead." "The Marine then raises his rifle and fires into the man's head. The pictures are too graphic for us to broadcast," Sites said. No images of the shooting were shown in the footage provided to Reuters.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:59:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Moment of zen: how to pack a fresh brain

Surreal site of the day: procedures for packing a fresh brain (yours?) for shipment to a brain bank. Re-posting this item, because I forgot to include the Link. Feel free to send fresh brains, I could use one. (Thanks, Susannah)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:50:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Potlatch: Bay Area literary sf con of great warmth and gusto

Potlatch is a West Coast science fiction convention that's one of the friendliest, most interesting cons I've ever attended. It's back in San Francisco this year, March 4-6, 2005 at the Ramada Plaza Hotel International. If I were in still living in the Bay Area, I'd be there for sure.

Potlatch is an all-volunteer, non-profit, literary convention for the readers and writers of speculative fiction. Proceeds benefit Clarion West, an intensive six-week workshop for writers preparing for professional careers in science fiction and fantasy.

At Potlatch, people talk to each other and participate in panel discussions about writing and reading speculative fiction. You'll find conversations at programming events, in Clarion-style writers workshops, in the consuite, in the halls, and in elevators. Never been to a Potlatch before? Get the feel of a Potlatch Panel by reading some of the transcripts of previous Potlatch panels.

Link (Thanks, Matt!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:25:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

John Balance, RIP

Composer John Balance, co-founder of Coil and member of seminal industrial music groups Psychic TV, 23 Skidoo, and Current 93 died on Saturday. Under the influence of alcohol at home, Balance fell from his first floor landing. He was rushed to the hospital and passed away soon after. He will be missed.

"I don't believe in destroying good mysteries or adding to bad reputations." --John Balance (1962-2004)

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:49:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Two-headed turtle

This beautiful two-headed tortoise was born two months ago in a British collector's incuabtor. From a BBC report:

(Owen John) Jones, 66, from Dorchester, said he had named the tortoise Solomon and Sheba as he was not sure what sex it was...

"Both heads eat and sometimes they start on the same piece of food and meet in the middle."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:28:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Graphic Novel Review on Seth's "Clyde Fans"

Joey Manley of Graphic Novel Review wrote a lengthy and very interesting review of cartoonist Seth's Clyde Fans.

In comics, as in any form of visual narrative, the "talking head" can be deadly when extended beyond a beat or two. Seth solves this problem by refusing to avoid it, by flaunting it, even, and taking it to the extreme: the first half of Clyde Fans: Book 1 consists of one older, heavyset gentleman, name of Abe Matchcard, a retired business owner and traveling salesman, talking to the reader — or not talking at all, just puttering around the house, brushing his teeth, then putting them in his mouth, lighting a cigar, etc., etc. — for about seventy pages.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:44:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Interview with Wilco's Jeff Tweedy: "Music is not a loaf of bread."

In today's Wired News, I interview Jeff Tweedy of the band Wilco about why he feels the record industry's attempts to stamp out filesharing are wrong. The band has a new CD out, A Ghost is Born, and a new book -- The Wilco Book -- with photos, art, essays and previously unreleased tracks on an accompanying CD (cover image shown here).

WN: What if the efforts to stop unauthorized music file sharing are successful? How would that change culture?

Tweedy: If they succeed, it will damage the culture and industry they say they're trying to save. What if there was a movement to shut down libraries because book publishers and authors were up in arms over the idea that people are reading books for free? It would send a message that books are only for the elite who can afford them.

Stop trying to treat music like it's a tennis shoe, something to be branded. If the music industry wants to save money, they should take a look at some of their six-figure executive expense accounts. All those lawsuits can't be cheap, either.

WN: How do you feel about efforts to control how music flows through the online world with digital rights management technologies?

Tweedy: A piece of art is not a loaf of bread. When someone steals a loaf of bread from the store, that's it. The loaf of bread is gone. When someone downloads a piece of music, it's just data until the listener puts that music back together with their own ears, their mind, their subjective experience. How they perceive your work changes your work. Treating your audience like thieves is absurd.

Link to Xeni's Wired News interview with Wilco.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:05:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How 'Dungeons' changed the world

Peter Bebergal has a wonderful op-ed in today's Boston Globe about the imagination-boosting power of Dungeons and Dragons.

To put it simply, Dungeons and Dragons reinvented the use of the imagination as a kid's best toy. The cliche of parents waxing nostalgic for their wooden toys and things "they had to make themselves" has now become my own. Looking around at my toddler's room full of trucks, trains, and Transformers, I want to cry out, "I created worlds with nothing more than a twenty-sided die!"

Dungeons and Dragons was a not a way out of the mainstream, as some parents feared and other kids suspected, but a way back into the realm of story-telling. This was what my friends and I were doing: creating narratives to make sense of feeling socially marginal. We were writing stories, grand in scope, with heroes, villains, and the entire zoology of mythical creatures.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:58:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mobile music confab in Miami this week

Hal Bringman reminds us that the annual Miami Mobile Music Conference starts on November 18, with "more than 400 music, carrier, handset and technology executives" discussing "music-based mobile entertainment and services." Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:44:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Is that an RFID in your Viagra, or are you just happy to see me?

BB reader Zach Lipton says,

The New York Times reports that the FDA and drug makers are going to begin using RFID tags on drugs, especially often-counterfitted drugs such as Viagra. Currently, the plan is to only tag the large bottles that pharmacists count out pills from, but the system could be expanded to cover individual retail containers of drugs once prices drop. At that point, you can have the wonderful experience of having your Viagra shout "Hi! I have Viagra in my bag!" every time you walk into a store. After 2007, the FDA may require mandatory RFID tagging of drugs in addition to the voluntary tagging scheme.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:38:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fox Network's $1.2M FCC fine based on inaccurate compaint data

BB reader Jim (jr) Roberts says,

Jeff Jarvis used the Freedom of Information Act to discover that the $1.2 million fine against the Fox Network for the long cancelled Married With Childred series Married By America was based on a grand total of 90 complaints, 88 of which were identical!

Link (and thanks, Wayne)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:34:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

LA photo show with large phonecam blowups from Steve Diet Goedde

Sean Bonner and Caryn Coleman, with whom I collaborated to produce the SENT phonecam art show, just launched a new show at their LA gallery sixspace this weekend. Most of the work in"Snapshot" was taken with conventional film and digital cameras -- but one of the participants, Steve Diet Goedde, contributed some beautiful work shot on a relatively low-quality consumer phonecam. What sets his work apart is that these phonecam shots were then blown up to very large-format prints. The end result is powerful and dream-like, and really brings to light the unusual way phonecams pixelate images.
Link to show home page, link to Sean's blog entry, and link to online preview of Steve Diet Goedde's contributions to the show.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:30:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jumbotron of your own

The University of Iowa's scoreboard, including Jumbotron, is on the auction block right now with a starting bid of just $10,000. Link (via Engadget)

posted by David Pescovitz at 05:26:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Absinthe Chocolate

Two great tastes... My wife just got me some Cioccolato all'assenzio, made by Pastiglie Leone. It's yummy dark chocolate flavored with absinthe. I also like the droopy, blissed-out illustration on the package. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 05:13:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, November 14, 2004

Cory's latest short story -- CC-licensed, on Salon, all about gaming

It's been a long time since I've written any short stories. I've been concentrating on novels and on nonfiction, and the blog, and the dayjob. But short stories are my first and best love: writing them is amazing mental exercise and I'm always pleased with the result.

Salon has just published a brand-new short story of mine, called "Anda's Game," which is a riff on the way that property-rights are coming to games, and on the bizarre spectacle of sweat-shops in which children are paid to play the game all day in order to generate eBay-able game-wealth. When I was a kid, there were arcade kings who would play up Gauntlet characters to maximum health and weapons and then sell their games to nearby players for a dollar or two -- netting them about $0.02 an hour -- but this is a very different proposition indeed.

There are a lot of firsts in this story:

• It's the first story I've written since moving to the UK, and the story is told from the point of view of an English girl
• It's the first in a series of stories I'm writing that riff on the titles of famous SF novels and stories (this one is a play on Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game" -- also coming are "I, Robot," "The Man Who Sold the Moon," "Jeffty is Five," and "True Names" -- this last with Ben Rosenbaum). This started as a response to Ray Bradbury's assertion that Michael Moore was a "thief" and a "horrible human being" for using the word "Fahrenheit" in the title of his last movie -- but now I'm just finding it fun to deconstruct the stories of the writers who came before me.
• It's the first story that Salon has ever published under a Creative Commons license -- which means that you can put it on a P2P network or email it to a friend without running afoul of the law.

I'm really proud of this one: I read it to an audience at the WorldCon last September and the response was really warm and enthusiastic. I hope you like it too:

"Get down," Lucy said in her headset. "I'm gonna use the BFG."

Every game had one -- the Big Friendly Gun, the generic term for the baddest-arse weapon in the world. Lucy had rented this one from the Clan armory for a small fortune in gold and Anda had laughed and called her paranoid, but now Anda helped Lucy set it up and thanked the gamegods for her foresight. It was a huge, demented flaming crossbow that fired five-metre bolts that exploded on impact. It was a beast to arm and a beast to aim, but they had a nice, dug-in position of their own at the bottom of the hill and it was there that they got the BFG set up, deployed, armed and ranged.

"Fire!" Lucy called, and the game did this amazing and cool animation that it rewarded you with whenever you loosed a bolt from the BFG, making the gamelight dim towards the sizzling bolt as though it were sucking the illumination out of the world as it arced up the hillside, trailing a comet-tail of sparks. The game played them a groan of dismay from their enemies, and then the bolt hit home with a crash that made her point-of-view vibrate like an earthquake. The roar in her headphones was deafening, and behind it she could hear Lucy on the voice-chat, cheering it on.

"Nuke 'em till they glow and shoot 'em in the dark! Yee-haw!" Lucy called, and Anda laughed and pounded her fist on the desk. Gobbets of former enemy sailed over the treeline dramatically, dripping hyper-red blood and ichor.

In her bedroom, Anda caressed the controller-pad and her avatar punched the air and did a little rugby victory dance that the All-Blacks had released as a limited edition promo after they won the World Cup.

Link

Update: Aaman's posted a great review of the story to his blog!

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:51:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bounty-raising for encrypted, private P2P software

Downhill Battle is one of the best, most effective group of copyfighters on the net, fast turning into a MoveOn for the P2P wars. They've just posted a fundraising campaign to raise a bounty for software authors who extend the "Gaim" encrypted instant messaging protocol -- which is Free Software licensed under the GNU General Public License -- to add filesharing to it. Doing so would make it nearly impossible for the recording and movie industries to run file-sharers who used the system to ground, effectively cloaking users' activities from the industry and from network administrators and ISPs who've been co-opted into enforcing copyright for entertainment companies. I just put $100 into the fund. This is an important piece of software and it needs to exist.

We propose an extension to the Gaim chat client that lets users do gnutella-style search & download filesharing, where search requests propagate out to trusted buddies, buddies of buddies, etc. This approach has several advantages. First, people will be more altruistic sharing with friends and won't be as worried about RIAA/MPAA lawsuits. At the same time, because they can share with friends-of-friends, and friends-of-friends-of-friends, they'll often be searching a very huge library. This software will be just as simple as an IM client, and it will be easy for people to invite friends (so it spreads virally). No other piece of filesharing software is this well positioned to become hugely popular with the average, not-so-knowledgeable, Windows user. As a bonus, it will convert many users to using the open-source and ad-free client Gaim--a good thing in itself. The immediate goal is creating a working version that is extremely simple but very modular and easy to modify or expand upon.

Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:40:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Daily Show clips from Nov 9

Lisa Rein has posted three clips from the November 9th episode of the Daily Show:

• Interview with Richard Branson
• Lewis Black on the New Republicans
• Ed Helms on martial law and impending elections in Iraq

39MB ZIP Link with Quicktime files (via On Lisa Rein's Radar)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:32:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dog Toy or Marital Aid?

A fun quiz. Although I'd argue that some of these devices could be dual purpose. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:49:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Unsecret Society

The Open Source Order of the Golden Dawn aims to make a century-old occult tradition of magick less, well, hidden:

"The revelation of the once-secret Hermetic symbols and philosophies that are the foundation of the Golden Dawn's system has long since occurred, yet we still see Lodges swearing their Aspirants to absolute secrecy with mighty oaths of death and destruction, if they dare to reveal to the uninitiated the "secret knowledge" which the uninitiated could buy cheaply at a used book store. We see no reason to follow this defunct and even harmful approach.

Instead, following the demonstrably advantageous practice of the Open Source Software movement, we build our Order on the sources of knowledge that are accessible to anyone. Our sources are already open; we simply affirm this obvious fact. We have no "secrets" to conceal, in particular those that have already been revealed. And in any case, the era of artificial secrecy is at an end. Ours is the Information Age, and we embrace it fully. Therefore we ordain and establish our order as the Open Source Order of the Golden Dawn."

Link (via MetaFilter)

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:39:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bloody chainsaw Nintendo controller

There's a chainsaw-shaped controller for the Nintendo GameCube, inteded for use with the new Resident Evil game. It's spattered with fake blood and emits chainsaw noises, but it also has all the buttons it needs to sub in for your regular GameCube controller. Link (Thanks, Jason!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:58:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

HOWTO: make a free TiVo-oid BitTorrent service

On Pealco.net, a recipe for automatically grabbing your favorite TV shows by BitTorrent as soon as they are put online -- the author calls it "something like Tivo, but free."

I’m bad at watching TV. I always miss my favorite shows like The West Wing and Enterprise. I can never remember when they’re on and when I do, they’re already three-quarters through. My solution thus far has been to go to Suprnova and download the torrent. This, of course, requires that I remember that to do that, and then I have to wait three hours. Wouldn’t it be better if the morning after the show aired a high quality copy of the show sat sitting on my hard drive waiting for me to watch it? The answer is yes, yes it would.

The are many solutions to this problem, but this is how I do it. Basically what’s happening is that the BT client checks an RSS feed for torrents that match certain criteria. When it detects those criteria, it begins to download the torrent. The result is something like TiVo, but free.

Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:54:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cigar review that made me laugh aloud

Ben Hammersley's blog is sponsored by a cigar company, and in exchange for their sponsorship, he occasionally reviews one of their stogies. But his reviews aren't standard cigar-mag fare: Ben's reviews are hairy-chested, gonzo-hyperbolic laugh-riots that make me wish I still smoked (at least cigars!).

Basically: fuck me, this is a good smoke. But it’s strong enough to stun a rabid ox, with a punch and a nicotine high like you’ve had your guts pulled clean with a loofah. All in all, then, rather pleasant. I smoked mine on a basically empty belly, and almost passed out. Powerful stuff.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:51:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RadioPod lets you auto-synch Internet radio with your iPod using RSS

Ben Hammersley has just released an app called RadioPod, which lets you automatically grab RSS feeds listing streamed audio from the Internet, convert the streams to MP3, and synch them to your iPod.

I’ve cobbled together a server app, RadioPod, to record streaming radio stations, convert them to MP3s, and then provide an RSS 2.0 feed for a PodCasting application to download and then throw into iTunes ready for my iPod. I’m using it for The Today Programme off BBC Radio 4 every morning. It’s jolly nice to walk the dogs and listen to James Naughtie.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:48:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Animation made from graffiti stencils all over town

An artist created a small animation of a robot walking, then rendered each frame as a stencil. Then s/he went around town and sprayed the stencil on walls, lamp-posts, etc, and photographed each one. When all the photos are played back in sequence, it creates the animation, but with a wildly flickering background of cityscapes that is absolutely wonderful to behold. Link (via Plastic Bag)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:47:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Badly behaved RSS readers gobble bandwidth

Glenn Fleishman has posted some analysis of the impact of RSS aggregators on his blogs' bandwidth use. A well-behaved aggregator should always check to see if the file it's after has been updated before it gets a copy of it, but lots of badly designed aggregators mindlessly pull the same file a couple times an hour (or more), and once you've got ten or a hundred thousand of these pointing at your RSS, going 24/7, it can get awfully expensive. Boing Boing's RSS stats are pretty scary too -- check out the log analysis.

I did a quick look at which aggregators represent the most traffic, and a very small number of users employing lwp-trivial, a perl-based HTTP query system, appear to be using over 10 percent of my RSS bandwidth! Time to fix their wagons, to be sure. It makes sense that various Mozilla browsers that have RSS support are using about 15 percent. NetNewsWire makes a very strong showing of 10 percent of usage lately.

Link (Thanks, Glenn!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:43:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

FCC thinks it has authority over PCs and everything that can play a show

Public Knowledge, EFF and others are suing the FCC, arguing that it doesn't have the authority to impose the Broadcast Flag rule. The Broadcast Flag says that anyone who makes a device to receive digital television signals has to get all its recording and output technologies approved by the FCC, and the FCC will withhold approval from all technologies save those that encrypt the shows and keep you from doing what you want with them.

Susan Crawford has posted some very cogent analysis of the FCC's position in the case -- the Commission is arguing that it doesn't just have jurisdiction over things for receiving shows -- it can regulate anything that can play a show that originates on cable or the airwaves.

The thing is, this rule doesn't merely affect TV receiving equipment. It affects everything that RECEIVES digital files from TV receiving equipment as well -- every device inside any home network. It affects the open-platform PC. It's a sweeping rule. And now FCC's jurisdiction to enact this rule is being argued in sweeping terms.

Why should we care about all of this? We should care because if the FCC has the power to act on anything that has something to do with communication, we have only the FCC's self-restraint to rely on when it comes to all internet communications. We should care because we want open platforms and open communications to continue. We should care because the future of the internet is at stake -- the FCC will use its "ancillary jurisdiction" to impose "social policies" on any services that use the internet protocol, and will point to its broadcast flag action as support for its jurisdictional claims.

Link (Thanks, David!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:37:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RIP, ODB

Rapper Ol' Dirty Bastard, a founding member of Wu Tang clan, has died. Link (thanks Sean)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:20:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, November 13, 2004

Web Zen: earworm zen

* wordspy: earworm
* badgers
* peanut butter jelly time
* lalala
* taters
* chocolate
* bounce the pudding
* llama
* weeeeee
* bananaphone
* spoken word bananaphone
* a cautionary tale
* maim that tune
* wikipedia: earworm
Image: It's peanut butter jelly time. web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:48:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cloth speakers

These bendable, foldable speakers from Mikasa Shoji Co. of Japan are made from cloth woven with copper wire, polyester fiber and magnets. When the cloth vibrates, sound is produced. Evidently, this isn't the first time someone's created cloth speakers -- but these sure look sweet. As if you could wear them around your neck, like a sonic choker. Link (thanks, Beverly)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:39:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Girl found inside pinata

Border officers inspection a car coming into the US from Mexico discovered a little girl stuffed into a Powerpuff Girls knockoff pinata.

"Officers began to take the piñatas out of the back seat, and one [of the several pinatas in the car] seemed to be much heavier than the others," said Vince Bond, a spokesman for U.S. Customs & Border Protection. "This one had a little girl of approximately 4 or 5 years of age inside it."

The girl's mother also was found, curled up inside the car's trunk, and the girl's brother, who is about 9 years old, was found underneath the collapsible back seat.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:31:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Copyfighter's book-fair in Montreal

Montreal is hosting The Salon du Livre Libre, a copyfighter's answer to the mainstream "Salon du livre de Montreal," 18 - 22 November 2004 at Cafe Utopik (522, rue Ste-Catherine est)

The Salon du Livre Libre, an open book fair organized by Cogitateurs Agitateurs will take place from the 18th to the 22nd of November at Cafe Utopik, from noon to 10PM each day. Organized in response to the Salon du livre de Montreal, the event will inform the public about media concentration, copyright law, small-scale publishing and Open Content. Visitors to the Salon will be able to read free and public domain books and download them to CD-ROM. In addition, there will be conferences and panel discussions on freedom of information in an age of media concentration and commoditized culture. A collection of theoretical and analytical works revolving around the issue of Intellectual Property regimes will be published for the occasion, as well as a collection of original artwork. Entrance and all activities are free of charge.

Link (Thanks, Robin!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:18:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Notebooks made from cheesy hardcovers

ExLibrisAnonymous is one of my favorite sources of cool junk from the Internet. They buy crappy library hardcover books of childrens' stories, teacher's manuals, and dull nonfiction titles, and spiral bind the front and back covers around a sheaf of blank white paper, throwing in some of the plates or pages from the original book in the middle. At $11 each with shipping, they're a great gift item. The store just posted a bunch of new "titles" today, and I bought six as Xmas gifts. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:25:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Daily Show clips from last week

Lisa Rein has posted four more clips from last week's Daily Show, a grab bag of Stewart and co's best bits: Fallujah Assualt, 13.1MB Mov Link, The Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol, 13.9MB Mov Link, Salem Mass reforming its witch-burning reputation, 22.8MB Mov Link, Lewis Black on the election result, 6.5MB Mov Link (via On Lisa Rein's Radar)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:17:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Save Tomorrowland!

The editors of SaveDisney have written an open letter to Matt Ouimet (President of Disneyland Resort) and Jay Rasulo (President of Walt Disney Theme Parks), calling on them to save the submarine ride and bring back Tomorrowland. After years of a Tomorrowland renovation turning Disneyland into the happiest construction site on earth, Tomorrowland is still moribund, boring -- a place where two of the main attractions are a video arcade and a down-at-the-heels second-rate Comdex trade-show-floor.

What was once a gleaming futuristic utopia -- with an amazing kinetic energy from its various transportation vehicles above, on and below the Earth's surface -- has become a rundown has-been-land due to the inadequately budgeted Tomorrowland '98 project that essentially stripped-bare what had been one of Disneyland's most popular areas...

The infrastructure for these marvels remains largely intact. What a shame it would be to pass on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to preserve Walt's 1959 wonders for future generations. Walt's fleet of submarines, once his pride and joy -- were built to last, and have survived to date. But the clock is ticking...

We at SaveDisney.com would like to support the restoration of Submarine Voyage -- whether its a retooling into a more-current Finding Nemo storyline, or a simple refreshing and rededication of the classic attraction.

Link (via The Disney Blog)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:13:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Aschroft: judges shouldn't uphold the Constitution

John Ashcroft, the former Attorney General of the United States of America, has given a public, blistering critique of judges who strike down the Bush administration's policies as unconstitutional.

"The danger I see here is that intrusive judicial oversight and second-guessing of presidential determinations in these critical areas can put at risk the very security of our nation in a time of war," Ashcroft said...

"Courts are not equipped to execute the law. They are not accountable to the people," Ashcroft said.

Link (via Lawgeek)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:09:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

World run by pirates photoshopping contest

Today's Worth1000 photoshopping contest is on a theme near to my heart: if pirates ran the world. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:05:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fighting spam shouldn't mean fighting free speech

My cow-orkers at EFF, Annalee Newitz and Cindy Cohn, have co-authored a brilliant white-paper on how spam-fighting is endangering the ability of nonprofit mailing-list operators to send email to people who ask for it.

MoveOn.org is a politically progressive organization that engages in online activism. For the most part, its work consists of sending out action alerts to its members via email lists. Often, these alerts will ask subscribers to send letters to their representatives about time-sensitive issues, or provide details about upcoming political events. Although people on the MoveOn.org email lists have specifically requested to receive these alerts, many large ISPs regularly block them because they assume bulk email is spam. As a result, concerned citizens do not receive timely news about political issues that they want. Often, MoveOn.org's staff doesn't discover that the mail isn't getting through for days or weeks, and even when it does, ISPs respond slowly to "unblock" requests or refuse to explain why email has been confiscated. Although ISPs may have the best of intentions, what we see in this scenario—one that is all too common—is free speech being chilled in the service of blocking spam.

In their zeal to stop spam, many organizations and companies are blocking the delivery of wanted messages, especially those sent through email lists. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that most blocking processes are not transparent to the email sender or recipient, and email users are generally given little or no control over which emails are blocked. Instead, system administrators, creators of spam-blocking tools, and ISPs all too often attempt to predict what mail a recipient does and does not want. As a result, email users rarely receive all legitimate messages sent to them.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:03:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BBC Micro emulator for the GBA

PocketBeeb is an emulator for the old BBC Microcomputer (yes, the British Broadcasting Corporation used to have Acorn manufacture a "public-service" PC for them, which in one reason why the UK has so many ass-kicking games programmers today), that runs on the Game Boy Advance. I loved this from the release notes: "Basic, Acorn DFSi, OS 1.2 roms (c) 1981 Acorn Computers Ltd. Used without permission... but then who would you ask?" Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:59:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RE/Search Television

Our friends at seminal underground publisher RE/Search are launching a television show on San Francisco public access! The premiere of "The Counter Culture Hour" with host V.Vale is tonight at 6:30pm (and every second Saturday of the month) on Access San Francisco, Channel 29.

"Now is your chance to see V. Vale interview Dirk Dirksen, Mabuhay Gardens impresario from 1974-1984--early punk rock! With rare photos and footage - mostly in the first ten minutes, so don't be late! Be ready to sit for an uninterrupted hour for this riveting show. Stay through the final segment: The Mutants on stage with Dirk at the Mabuhay circa 1978 starting their last public performance of 'Insect Lounge.'

Also includes a 'Counterculture Show-n-Tell' with Yoshi from Japan telling about his "incredibly strange book collection" --very 'amusing'""

Developed by Marian Wallace and Marian Wilde, the show is a work-in-progress that, with your help, could air all over the country. RE/Search says they "are looking into syndication to other areas and are interested in contact information for your town's public access station." Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 03:32:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Eat less, breathe more, lose weight

Professor Richard Muller, who teaches the famed "Physics for Presidents" course at UC Berkeley, wrote a column in this month's Technology Review about the physics of gluttony.

Let me address this issue by invoking another physics principle: conservation of mass. More specifically, let me talk about the conservation of carbon atoms. When you digest food, its carbon atoms enter your blood. Unless they are expelled from your body, they add to your weight. But here is the salient observation: the only effective way your body has to get rid of digested carbon is to combine it with oxygen to form carbon dioxide, and then expel it through your lungs. Unless you breathe out the carbon, you gain weight.

Here are some numbers, taken from books on exercise physiology. Fat, protein, and sugar all contain about 0.1 gram of carbon per food calorie consumed. So if you digest 2,000 calories of food (a typical daily diet for adults) then you take in about 200 grams of carbon. At rest, each breath exhales about 0.5 liter of air containing about 1 percent carbon, for about five milligrams per breath. After a day at 12 breaths per minute, you get rid of about 120 grams of carbon. That’s less than you ate, so you’ll gain weight.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 03:15:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, November 12, 2004

Dragon Optical Illusion

This little paper dragon is folded in such a way that when you turn it, it appears as though it is turning its head to face you. I guess it's like those negative busts at the Haunted Mansion. The video for this is neat. Link (via Sensible Erection)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:40:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Robodump 1.0 - an excellent prank

Kevin Kelm made a robot that looks like someone taking a dump. You can listen to the soundtrack at his site.

RoboDump is a robot. Sort of. And it poops. Sort of. Forever. A horrible, never-ending bowel movement complete with straining grunts, horrific gas, splashes, and pee sounds.

I snuck RoboDump into the men's room at the office. Unfortunately, today turned out to be the day of a board meeting. Whoops! It still went over well; the office was abuzz all morning with gossip about the guy in the bathroom. Several people theorized it was the CFO. The janitor commented to someone in the hallway that he wanted to clean the restroom but "this guy's been in there all morning."

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:05:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

High schoolers singing Dylan's "Masters of War" visited by Secret Service

Snip from ABC News story:

Parents and students say they are outraged and offended by a proposed band name and song scheduled for a high school talent show in Boulder this evening, but members of the band, named Coalition of the Willing, said the whole thing is being blown out of proportion. The students told ABC News affiliate KMGH-TV in Denver they are performing Bob Dylan's song "Masters of War" during the Boulder High School Talent Expose because they are Dylan fans. They said they want to express their views and show off their musical abilities.

But some students and adults who heard the band rehearse called a radio talk show Thursday morning, saying the song the band sang ended with a call for President Bush to die. Threatening the president is a federal crime, so the Secret Service was called to the school to investigate. Students in the band said they're just singing the lyrics and not inciting anyone to do anything.

The 1963 song ends with the lyrics: "You might say that I'm young. You might say I'm unlearned, but there's one thing I know, though I'm younger than you, even Jesus would never forgive what you do … And I hope that you die and your death'll come soon. I will follow your casket in the pale afternoon. And I'll watch while you're lowered down to your deathbed. And I'll stand o'er your grave 'til I'm sure that you're dead."

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:30:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Malcolm Gladwell talks about why opinions are often useless

New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell gave a talk at PopTech about a subject in his forthcoming book on human nature. This MP3 file has some great stuff in it about Herman-Miller's Aeron chair (which everyone hated when they first saw it but has gone on to become the best selling office chair and winner of lots of design awards) and Pepsi vs. Coke ("sip tests" are no good because people like sweeter drinks if they're having only a sip, but they prefer less sweet if they are drinking a whole can).

I thought the paradox of the triangle test Gladwell talks about is especially interesting. If you give a person two unmarked glasses, one containing Pepsi and the other containing Coke, they'll have an 80% change of being able to tell which is which. But if you introduce a third glass, containing either Coke or Pepsi, they odds that they'll be able to identify the odd drink is reduced to 33%, or chance.

Lots of excellent stuff in this half-hour talk. I can't wait for the book.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:26:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Legal train wreck

A Jeanette, Pennsylvania woman is suing Norfolk Southern railroad because a train hit her when she was walking along the tracks. Patricia M. Frankhouser suffered a broken finger, cuts, and pain. From Pittsburgh Live:

"Defendant's failure to warn plaintiff of the potential dangers negligently provided plaintiff with the belief she was safe in walking near the train tracks," the suit states.

The filing does not state why Frankhouser failed to hear the oncoming train and get out of the way.

(Thanks, Jessica Hemerly!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:10:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A new tech eye on in-theater piracy

Avast, ye plunderers! In the following story I filed for Wired News:

A Florida-based company called Trakstar came to Hollywood earlier this week to demo a new, two-part tech system they say is the solution to the illicit capture of movies in theaters. The system is comprised of two parts. First, a camcorder-spotting tool (which looks like Darth Vader's head) that automatically scans, detects, and photographs recording devices in the audience and warn security of their suspected presence. The second, an audio watermarking tool that creates an invisible sonic tag to lead law enforcement back to the original location, time, and date on which an ill-gotten movie file was obtained.

Because the system involves photographing audience members in the general vicinity of a suspected device -- and it can be triggered by "false positives" like camera-less cellphones -- the technology is likely to alarm privacy advocates. Critics point out that the system would need to be adopted by nearly all theater chains in order to have impact. And the system won't do anything to stop pre-release leaks that originate inside movie studios or post-production facilities themselves.

Some of the company's staff members have backgrounds in military and defense technology, and the PirateEye camcorder-detection system they built was derived from technology originally created for the Defense Department to detect sniper scopes and land mines in combat environments.

During the recent Hollywood demo, not all of the camcorders and pinhole devices planted by participants were spotted by PirateEye during the first demo attempt. Subsequent rounds appeared to locate all of the devices, but also caught more than one "false positive," including one participant's cell phone, which contained no camera, but a light-emitting display. Gladstone said future refinements to the system, which is still in development, would improve accuracy before commercial release.

But because the PirateEye system photographs the area near any object that triggers a positive response from the system -- and that area may include innocent audience members who simply happen to be seated next to the suspected device -- the technology will likely generate protest among privacy advocates.

Link to Wired News story

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:30:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kevin Sites: photoblogging Falluja

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:44:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Benoit Mandelbrot

New Scientists has an interview with Benoit Mandelbrot, the mathematician who coined the term fractal and indirectly turned on the public to self-similarity and chaos theory in nature. He turns 80 next week.

What is it like seeing the Mandelbrot set emblazoned on T-shirts and posters?
I'm delighted. I always felt that science as the preserve of people from Oxbridge or Ivy League universities - and not for the common mortal - was a very bad idea.

Even though most people view it as a beautiful image and ignore the underlying mathematics?
That's right. Yet there is nothing more to this than a simple iterative formula. It is so simple that most children can program their home computers to produce the Mandelbrot set.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 05:37:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Greetings, from prison!

In the UK, the Dorset Police is sending postcards from prison to convicted criminals. From the BBC News:

The initiative is designed to cut the number of house burglaries in the county by warning criminals of their fate if they re-offend. The message on the reverse of the cards reads: "If you don't want to end up here... stop offending!"

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 05:20:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Staged in-game murder photos

The White Room is a series of "photos" generated with the game Max Payne 2, documenting a staged in-game murder. Check it out: "By transforming the game environment into a ready-made urban studio space, the objects and interiors were altered using the in-game weapons with the gore from dead enemies being used to 'paint' the sets before being unceremoniously blasted out of view and the scene captured. The events implied never happened in the game, they are not representations of 'real-life' crimes nor are they illustrations of fictional crime stories. These are silent witnesses, containers demanding context, they are waiting places." Link (via Wonderland)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:18:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Back seat to the Hummer

The International Truck and Engine Corporation and the US Army are showing off the oxymoronically-named Smart Truck 3, the replacement for the Humvee. The beast weighs 3,000 pounds more than the H2 and is three inches taller and four feet longer. Amazingly though, it apparently guzzles less gas. From the Independent:

"The army also wants the vehicles to be marketed to other customers such as government agencies or regular Joes who only feel right using a stepladder to get behind thewheel.

The commercial version would not have the electronics designed to detect anthrax, the Kevlar armouring on the underside, the night-vision cameras and the 25-inch LCD touch-screen computer monitors."

Link (Thanks, David Steinberg!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 05:12:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Video from Cory's talk in Norway

I just gave a talk on European copyright threats to libraries, digital authors and academics at the Digital and Social conference in Bergen, Norway. Within minutes of my talk finishing, the video was online! Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:07:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Asimov's magazine on DRM, copyright and Creative Commons

My pal and mentor James Patrick Kelly is a Hugo-award-winning science fiction writer and the Internet columnist for Asimov's science fiction magazine. Last spring, we did a long interview about DRM, ebooks, Creative Commons and the future of reading and copyright. Jim has turned that conversation into a pair of excellent columns aimed at explaining this stuff to his lay audience, and the second one just hit the net and the newstands.

Are DRM schemes hurting my career? I suppose the answer depends on how one defines a career. Is my career the business model though which I earn the princely sums (not!) that I am paid to commit prose in public? Is my career the collection of all the sentences I have ever typed that have gone on to be published, either in ink or in digits, even if they are now out of print? Is it the size of my readership, even if many of you have just stumbled across my stuff here in the pages of Asimov’s? Or is it my reputation among readers who remember my work and would look for more Kelly stories if they weren’t too hard to acquire?

The way I see it, readers and rep are what really matter to a writer. Dollars should follow from a satisfied readership, although exactly how this happens in these times of technological and economic innovation is not immediately apparent, alas. I do believe that the net has irretrievably compromised twentieth-century notions of intellectual property and that no amount of DRM shenanigans is going to turn back the copyright clock.

Link (Thanks, Jim!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:22:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, November 11, 2004

Inexplicably weird NSFW website du jour

This website belonging to a self-proclaimed "sexual scientist" in Boca Raton reads like a schizoid cross between a Dr. Bronner's soap label and Dear Penthouse.

# "Welcome to the Orgasm & BrainWash Engineering Center where BrainWash is defined as an alternation of gene and enzyme expression in your 3 brains - the head, gut and pelvic cavity."
# "We have a complete orgasm solution for the loving couples under the heaven and on the earth, maybe under the earth too if they are alive."

Link. Don't miss the tinfoil-beanie-cap prosaic brilliance of this item in Dr. Lin's fuck-FAQ: "Vibrator - the Weapon of Mass Destruction or Pleasure?" Link. The good doctor also weighs in on such topics as animal copulation and electron sex. (via MeFi).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:20:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Rape of Nanking" author Iris Chang found dead

BoingBoing reader Brent says:

Iris Chang, the acclaimed author of The Rape of Nanking was found dead today of an apparent self inflicted gun-wound in Northern California. The importance of her book cannot be overstated, and it's a true loss. Rumors, of course, are already flying that it may not have been suicide, but murder because of her next book which looked at American forces in Bataan. Rumors of course are rumors, and she was known for suffering from depression.

Snip from San Jose Mercury News coverage:

[Ignatius Ding, a retired engineer and personal friend] remembers her study, the room where she wrote, as "being like a shrine," its walls festooned with photos of Nanking atrocities, maps and documents."She would sit in there and just look at all those photographs,'' Ding said. "She was like a zombie.'' (...) Chang also wrote Thread of the Silkworm, a 1995 book about a Chinese scientist who was deported and later went on to create China's missile and space program.

Link (reg required, or try this)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:40:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Futurephone-To-Podcast:

Warren Ellis says:

If you've got a podcast grabber like iPodder, aim it at this link. And you should grab a .3gp video, shot with the Nokia 7610 cameraphone, that I shot in North Beach, San Francisco a couple of weeks ago while waiting for Laurenn McCubbin to pick me up in her little chariot. .3gp is viewable in a current version of Quicktime -- older versions will probably call out for the .3gp plugin. Obviously, this isn't going to be much use if you have the iPodder-iTunes-iPod direct filling set up. But it illustrates how easily you can shoot video, dump it into a file and broadcast it.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:10:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Vending Machine Hamlet

Hie thee to a gumball machine!

Shakespeare probably didn't have a toy in mind for the title role when he penned his vengeful tale. But that was before a frustrated, 20-something actor decided it was time someone performed classical theater with a cast that can fit in a suitcase. Tiny Ninja Theater - now an international touring company - is presenting its latest production at Performance Space 122 (PS122) in Manhattan this month. "Hamlet" is the third major Shakespeare work the plastic cast has taken on, having already conquered "Macbeth" and "Romeo and Juliet" since its debut in 2000. A simple principle guides the troupe: "There are no small parts, only small actors."

"They don't complain, they're very hard workers," deadpans Mr. Weinstein on opening night, Oct. 28, after shedding the dark shirt and overalls he wears over street clothes for the performance. "Sometimes you can push them too hard. But they'll leave you in the lurch, too.... If I forget a line, they're not going to cue me, you know?
"

Link to CSM story, Link to Tiny Ninja Theater website (thanks Susannah!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:05:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Best sf site on the net spawns a novel

Futurefeedforward is the best science fiction site on the Internet. It consists of fictituous, humourous (and I do mean *humourous* -- side-splitting, in fact) news articles from the future. It's been on hiatus for far too long, but it's back, and there's now a Futurefeedforward novel in the works, which is the best news I've heard in ages. The author's posted the first chapter, which starts with a long and totally excellent parody of a software click-through license:

YOU ARE HEREBY GRANTED THE FOLLOWING RIGHTS:

* The right to read once, in its entirety, the BOOK.
* The right to store in any biological storage device a derivative work in the form of a personal memory or recollection of the BOOK and its contents.
* The right to advise others to purchase for themselves their own licenses for use of the BOOK.
* The right to repeat aloud, without the aid of technical means of amplification—including but not limited to megaphones, public address systems, streaming audio, and cupped hands—passages from the BOOK not to exceed three (3) consecutive sentences, or a total of eight (8) sentences.
* The right to a living wage and to a secondary and post-secondary education of modest quality.
* The right to purchase products not produced or manufactured by the COMPANY, including any products necessary to personal hygiene or nutrition, but excluding Big Mac brand sandwiches and any item fairly characterized as a "fresh wipe."
* The right to walk here and there for purposes such as you determine.

And it just gets better from there, as the story rockets forward in a scene that combines the best of Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and The Onion:

I wore a gray suit to my first deposition, a shapeless, off-the-rack sort of a number festooned with cargo pockets and illogical darts. 100% Worsted wooline. Summer weight. Hand stitched. 38 Regular. $49.95 at the GAP I passed on my way in. I left my old pants in the dressing room. They recycle them. Rebuild and recertify. That sort of thing. Pre-owned pants. I think they have that.

It took me longer than I expected to find the place. All of the exits seemed to be for an enchanted wood. 318b: Deerlick; 318c: Blue Mountain; 318d: Beaver Meadows. I was looking for Brosnan Parkway. It dead-ends into Fishglass just short of the exit. No sign. Nothing.

The place was in a strip mall: Denny's, Donut Star, Ringo's Modified Produce, Fantastic Wok. It was a Deposition Lounge. I've heard that On The Record has better food (fried finger waffles, little ginger pies), but the Lounge generally has plusher seats and the private rooms are quite a bit more reRecord is out in the Valley.

100K PDF Link (Thanks, Chris!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:21:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Strange curve of freedom vs terrorism

Kevin sez: No freedom and high freedom don't produce terrorists, but intermediate freedom does; more than poverty.

 "In the past, we heard people refer to the strong link between terrorism and poverty, but in fact when you look at the data, it's not there. This is true not only for events of international terrorism, as previous studies have shown, but perhaps more surprisingly also for the overall level of terrorism, both of domestic and of foreign origin," Abadie said.

 Instead, Abadie detected a peculiar relationship between the levels of political freedom a nation affords and the severity of terrorism. Though terrorism declined among nations with high levels of political freedom, it was the intermediate nations that seemed most vulnerable.

Like those with much political freedom, nations at the other extreme - with tightly controlled autocratic governments - also experienced low levels of terrorism.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:06:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Shaw is censoring Internet feeds and lying about it

When customers of Canada's Shaw Cable high-speed Internet service noticed that their filesharing activity had slowed down dramatically, they didn't know what to make of it. Calling the ISP didn't help: Shaw's tech support people swore that they were delivering all the packets they received from their customers, just as you'd expect. After all, who'd want an ISP that picked and chose which of your communications got through -- imagine if the phone company or the post office just silently threw away some of your messages based on secret criteria!

So the Shaw customers went to DSL Reports, a community site for posting about DSL and other high-speed providers, and they found that they were not alone and not imagining things. Lots of Shaw customers were getting really crummy performance out of their Internet connections.

Then someone claiming to be a Shaw insider posted an explanation: Shaw had secretly installed a packet-filter on its network that was using hidden rules to silently discard some of its customers' packets. And they'd instructed their tech people to lie about it when customers called in and asked.

It might have been a fake, but not long after, DSL Reports got a letter from Shaw's lawyers telling them that this was confidential info from a Shaw employee and that they'd be sued if they didn't take it offline, so it looks like its true (says DSL Reports, "Needless to say, we've never bent over for an ISP upset at bad publicity, or forked over anyones identity, and we're not about to start.")

Here's the facts, then:

1. Shaw is indiscriminately censoring its customers' Internet feeds. It's not blocking infringing files (hell, Shaw can't even know for certain what files are and aren't infringing for each customer), it's blocking protocols, applications used to transmit and receive tens, hundreds of millions of public-domain, copylefted and non-copyrightable works.
2. Shaw is lying about censoring its customers' Internet feeds.
3. Shaw is threatening to sue people who tell the world about its lies.

Are you a Shaw customer? Do you still want to be, in light of the above? Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:18:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Canada wants an Internet levy -- fight back!

Canada's efforts to update its copyright laws for the Internet continue apace -- you may remember three separate posts on this last week. Canada Heritage is now recommending an Internet "levy" that will go to a collecting society, on a grounds that everything on the Internet is copyrighted by someone, and the collecting society will gather money for them in exchange for your use of their material.

The problem here isn't really the levy -- blanket license fees, including levies, are actually not a bad way of solving some copyright problems -- but what you get in exchange for it. The levy here would cover all Internet users, including institutions that have the right to re-use work without permission or payment (like schools and libraries), and it won't confer any substantial rights upon you.

That means that even if you pay the levy for the use of copyrighted works on the Internet, you won't get the right to share music, or download movies, or use screenshots in your PowerPoint presentation. When a radio station pays a blanket license fee, it gets the right to play all the music ever recorded. When you pay your levy, you'll get virtually no rights at all -- except the right to get your ass sued off if someone decides that you're being naughty.

The standing committee on Canadian Heritage, which presented this recommendation along with several other potentially disastrous ideas, heard lots of learned, substantive testimony on why this is bad for Canada. It roundly ignored it all. The report that Heritage delivered is a one-sided smear against the Internet and a naked grab for a few giant copyright holders at the expense of new entrants to the market and the general public. The people responsible for this should be removed from their duties -- it's inexcusable.

If Canada is going to extract a levy from Canadians, then Canadians should get something in return: unlimited access to noncommercial, educational, and archival use of copyrighted works on the Internet. A levy without something in return is just an exercise in picking your pocket -- and you shouldn't stand for it. Sign the petition today.

The best answer to copyright reform has always been to maintain balance, the lawyers say. Society wants to maintain creative incentives, so laws are passed to protect creators; but society must also have access to those works to share in their knowledge.

"The danger of WIPO is that it threatens that balance," Mr. Geist said, "and replaces social rights with absolute rights."

There's also the potential for the recommendations to have a direct economic impact.

"The committee ignored solid evidence that the levy on blank CDs [meant to compensate artists for pirated content] would double as a result of the national treatment requirements of the WIPO treaties," Mr. Knopf said. "This could quickly cost Canadians more than $100-million annually.

"We could end up with the worst of all dystopian worlds," he added. "You could pay the levy on a CD and get sued anyway" over the disc's content.

Link (Thanks, Ian!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:50:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Grower robot

Translator II: Grower is a robot that draws green lines of "grass" on gallery walls at varying heights depending on the amount of carbon dioxide it senses in the room. From creator Sabrina Raaf's artist's statement:

"The metaphoric relation is that grass needs CO2 in nature to grow. Here, my simulated grass needs the breath of human visitors in order to thrive. The height of the 'grass' directly reflects on the human activity or traffic in the space. The more people that visit that space, the more amenable that space is to my machine’s ability to create. The relationship between Translator II: Grower, the space, and the public becomes a metabolic one - one of co-evolution. This piece makes visible how art institutions depend on their visitors to make them 'healthy' spaces for new art to evolve and flourish within."

Link (via Near Near Future)

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:45:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ronald McDonald goes pre-op

File under "only in Japan." Attractive womanoid clown sans clownface, pimping a hot hot barely legal sandwich sold in Japanese McDonaldses, or whatever the plural form is. Maybe the new McGrand Tomato would taste good with some Boo Bee Juice.

Link to online version of TV commercial, in windows media only. (via)

Update: Sweet mother of special sauce! There's an ambiguously gendered dude version, too. Oh-so-emo. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:45:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More double-entendre beverage brands

Apparently, people can't get enough of this sort of stuff. BoingBoing reader graham says, "saw this in an airport (spain i think)." Link to worksafe snapshot of "Lovejuice" drink stand. Link to previous BoingBoing post on this rapidly developing story.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:34:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

White phosphorous history

Following up on this previous BoingBoing post about reports that white phosphorous (WP) is among the weapons being used by US Marines in Falluja, reader Marty Busse says:

It has a long history of use as a weapon by the US military, and the legal issues around it are rather contentious.

The book A Higher Form of Killing, by Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman, contains a very small ref to use of WP in WWII, when there was a dispute about its use between the British and the US: the US was not bound by the Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare (which the British felt use of WP was prohibited by) and the British yielded to the US opinion. (The US didn't ratify that protocol until 1975, but with some reservations on the use of riot control agents: Link.) And this article refers to the current Geneva Protocol on Incendiary Weapons, which the US is not a party to: Link.

I recommend taking a look at A Higher Form of Killing, which contains all sorts of interesting information and a few very neat photos, including one of the massive apparatus used to create anthrax bombs during WWII. (It also contains a few rather gruesome photos.)

Link to book.

Image: White phosphorous rounds explode on enemy positions north of the Han River prior to U.N. offensive during March 1951. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:28:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

TV series for cellphones coming from Fox

Well, this sounds like a first. Twentieth Century Fox said yesterday it will create a unique series of one-minute dramatic shorts based on the TV show "24."The offering will be available exclusively to subscribers of a new high-speed wireless service offered by Vodafone (world's biggest mobile provider).

Vodafone will begin offering the one-minute epidosdes in January in the United Kingdom, coinciding with the start of the fourth season of the show on a satellite V service.

Link (via unwired, thanks richard)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:59:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ingesting insects

According to a new study from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), edible insects are an excellent source of nutrition for people in Central Africa where traditional proteins are at a premium.

For every 100 grams of dried caterpillars, there are about 53 grams of proteins, about 15 per cent of fat and about 17 per cent of carbohydrates, according to the study. The insects are also believed to have a higher proportion of protein and fat than beef and fish with a high energy value...

“Due to their high nutritional value in some regions, flour made from caterpillars is mixed to prepare pulp given to children to counter malnutrition,” said (FAO researcher Paul) Vantomme. “Contrary to what many may think, caterpillars are not considered an emergency food, but are an integral part of diet in many regions according to seasonal availability. They are consumed as a delicacy.”

Link (via Science Blog)

posted by David Pescovitz at 06:48:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Top of mind (control)

Technology Review interviewed bioethicist Paul Wolpe about neurotechnologies that enable you to interact with computers via your thoughts. (I posted a bit about brain implants a few weeks ago.) A professor of psychiatry, medical ethics, and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, Wolpe is also the chief of bioethics for NASA.

"A key issue is the implications of these technologies for personal privacy. If there are eventually technologies that externalize internal states, who has a right to access that information? And what about cases where that information could be taken against people’s will, or without their knowledge? Are we going to start implanting electrodes in the brains of the suspected terrorists in Guantánamo Bay? Certainly not yet—there’s nothing we could get out of that. But research is being funded by the Departments of Homeland Security and of Defense for things like lie detection technologies using functional MRI or near-infrared light. These technologies can be used coercively in a way polygraphs, for example, can’t. If you’re not willing to cooperate with a polygraph, there’s really nothing they can do. But you aren’t necessarily going to need to cooperate for some of these technologies; they can, theoretically, be used covertly. They may be used on suspected criminals or enemies of the state, or on you and me when we’re going through airports. Near-infrared technology may someday employ an undetectable spot of light on your forehead. Research on ways to take what used to be private thoughts and make them accessible will challenge our laws and our thinking about what privacy means."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 05:41:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, November 10, 2004

Free Tibet with a Creative Commons license

Crazy Yak sez, "We've been inspired to start putting out 'Free Tibet' -related content with Creative Commons licenses.. First up is a sound/image/word account from a recent visit to Tibet by me. Sadly, Tibet still isn't 'free' (politically or in day-to-day life), but it *is* a great model for perseverence of non-violent struggle and compassoin in the face of great adversity." Link (Thanks, Crazy Yak!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:45:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jeopardy winner wagers $1337

Amy's Robot sez, "Tonight was round 1 of the Jeopardy College Tournament. One of the contestants, Kermin from Carnegie Mellon University, had a commanding lead (well over $10K) going into Final Jeopardy. His final wager had Alex Trebek scratching his head, but Kermin was clearly sending a message to fellow computer nerds. His wager: $1337. For the uninitiated, in 'leetspeak' 1337 translates to 'leet' or 'elite.'" Link (Thanks, Amy's Robot!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:42:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pee Wee Herman has two more movies coming

Pee Wee Herman -- whose brilliant and seminal kids' TV show, Pee Wee's Playhouse, is out on DVD, hurrah! -- has announced that he's working on two more Pee Wee movies, one a sequel to Big Top Pee Wee, and the other a feature-length version of Pee Wee's Playhouse. As they say on the Intarwebs, "w00t!" Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:32:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New AG nominee: White House counsel who called Geneva Conventions "quaint"

White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, who once described the Geneva Convention as outdated and "quaint," may soon fill the post left vacant by John Ashcroft this week. Link to SF Chronicle article on the new nominee.

Mr. Gonzales effectively endorsed torture in America's "war on terrorism," as detailed in this Newsweek article:

As a means of pre-empting a repeat of 9/11, Bush, along with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft, signed off on a secret system of detention and interrogation that opened the door to such methods. It was an approach that they adopted to sidestep the historical safeguards of the Geneva Conventions, which protect the rights of detainees and prisoners of war. In doing so, they overrode the objections of Secretary of State Colin Powell and America's top military lawyers -- and they left underlings to sweat the details of what actually happened to prisoners in these lawless places. While no one deliberately authorized outright torture, these techniques entailed a systematic softening up of prisoners through isolation, privations, insults, threats and humiliation -- methods that the Red Cross concluded were "tantamount to torture."

Link. And the NY Times has this series of excerpts from Mr. Gonzales' legal writings: Link.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:57:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Update on nabbed Indymedia servers -- "criminal terrorism investigation" say feds

Salon has a new follow-up on the troubling tale of those Indymedia web servers reportedly confiscated by representatives of an as-yet-undisclosed government. Link .

In October, The EFF filed a motion to unseal the Seizure Order in a US District Court -- background Link. This update published on an indymedia site today includes the court's response to EFF's motion to unseal. Snip: "The U.S. government claims Indymedia hard drives were seized as part of an international 'criminal terrorism investigation,' and thus the U.S. District Court's gag order should be upheld." Link to full text of court's response.

Link to previous BB posts on the matter.

The Register has more: Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:28:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Double shot of double-entendre beverage brands

Thirsty? Depending on what floats your proverbial boat, perhaps a cockolada or a nice glass of Boo Bee Juice would hit the spot. The former is an adult-oriented beverage novelty resembling an anatomical part unique to male persons. The latter is an actual children's drink product with a snort-inducing name (no, it doesn't come in Tara Reid flavor). (thanks Fleshbot)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:10:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

White phosphorous among weapons used by Marines in Fallujah

In the San Francisco Chronicle:

"Usually we keep the gloves on," said Army Capt. Erik Krivda, of Gaithersburg, Md., the senior officer in charge of the 1st Infantry Division's Task Force 2-2 tactical operations command center. "For this operation, we took the gloves off."

Some artillery guns fired white phosphorous rounds that create a screen of fire that cannot be extinguished with water. Insurgents reported being attacked with a substance that melted their skin, a reaction consistent with white phosphorous burns. Kamal Hadeethi, a physician at a regional hospital, said, "The corpses of the mujahedeen which we received were burned, and some corpses were melted."

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:58:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

US Army recruitment spam?

BoingBoing reader Mark Miller says,

While not a site, I found it interesting while being a student at UT Austin, that the US Army recruiters have decided that spamming students is a viable means of recruitment. So desperate must they be to get people to fight in Iraq. I'm also disturbed by the apparently "Universities must turn over contact info to local army recruiting offices". I thought Selective Service covered people attempting to avoid the draft.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:49:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Video: tanks at anti-war protest, LA federal building

BB reader Adam Rakunas says,

"Indymedia has video of two tanks (well, LAV-25s, but who's gonna quibble with an armored cannon on Wilshire Boulevard?) at an anti-war protest outside the Federal Building in Westwood, CA. Whether the folks at the Army Reserve Center up the street at Federal got bored or the Police State is flexing its muscles, I dunno. Personally, I think these guys just knew that parking in Westwood is a bitch and borrowed the appropriate vehicle."

Link.

Update: BoingBoing reader Bob says, "I have photos of the armored personnel carriers in the streets of Westwood at the antiwar demo." Link

BB reader Rudy says, "I noticed a followup post on indymedia claiming to have run into the vehicles the next morning at a parade. The author goes to claim that the operators claimed to be at the protest and they arived there after getting lost." Whups.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:33:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Theo Van Gogh's "Submission" on IFILM

David Benjamin from ifilm.com says, "We have a copy of Theo Van Gogh's short film, Submission on our site. This is the film that inspired a Muslim man to kill him." Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:13:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Last of original Winamp/Nullsoft team departs

A sad bit of geek history today: the last members of the original team behind Winamp have departed AOL. Nullsoft would appear to be no more. The once-ubiquitous digital audio player -- which did indeed whip the llama's ass -- now appears destined for decline.

Winamp's demise comes as no surprise to those close to the company who say the software has been on life support since the resignation of Nullsoft founder and Winamp creator Justin Frankel last January.

The marriage of Nullsoft and AOL was always one of discontent. After AOL acquired the small company in 1999 for around $100 million, the young team of Winamp developers was assimilated into a strict corporate culture that begged for rebellion. Although Nullsoft was initially given a long leash by AOL, It wasn't long until the two ideologies collided.

Frankel and his team were accustomed to simply brainstorming ideas over coffee and bringing them to the masses without approval. So when Frankel and fellow Nullsoft developer Tom Pepper devised a decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing system, dubbed Gnutella, parent AOL was left in the dark.

Link to Betanews item. (thanks waldo)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:37:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thumb drive made from plastic thumb

Someone's fashioned a USB thumb drive out of a plastic thumb and is selling it on eBay. Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:10:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The creepy, creepy world of "reborn baby dolls"

Apparently, some people are immune to the "uncanny valley" syndrome.

Laura sez: "My husband Dan pointed this out. A search for 'reborn' in the eBay dolls category yields painstakingly refinished dolls made to look sometimes eerily like real babies. A few descriptions:"

Krystal was given her first bath inside and out to remove all original coloring.. Then I color washed her on the inside with a creamy mixture of acrylic paints to give her skin the right shading. She was then given layers of the right mixtures of oil coloring on her baby skin to make her the beautiful baby you see here.Then she was blushed to perfection. Not a fold nor wrinkle was missed.

Andrea has the 'BABY FAT' pellets as one of her key weighting ingredients. These new silicone based pellets make her even more realistic and add a whole new dimension to the feel of her body. The 'squish' factor is AWESOME!!

Link

UPDATE: Nick Madeira sez: "I thought the 'reborn' dolls were so disturbing, I had to check google, and found [this] link for an umbilical cord clip - they suggest you model an actual cord from clay."

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:29:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Story on Cobb County Creationism Case

Gary Peare sez: "I have a modest proposal regarding the following story:"

A federal trial began today in Atlanta over evolution disclaimers in Cobb County schools. A group of parents backed by the ACLU argue that the disclaimers in science biology textbooks are a government endorsement of religion.

"The county put stickers with the following text into the books:"

This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.

"So here's my proposal. Let's allow the religious right to paste their stickers in all the biology texts they want so long as they affix the following text to each and every one of their Bibles:"

"This book contains material on Judeo-Christian theology. Judeo-Christian theology offers insight into the origin and meaning of life and is the basis for several of the world's great religions. But it does not encompass the full range of religious beliefs held sacred by members of our diverse American society. Moreover, this material is based on ancient texts, and significant errors may have been introduced through subsequent translations and omissions. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:23:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MPAA scare-ads removed by polite letter to mall

Th0m sent a nice letter to the people who run his local mall in Dublin, Ohio, telling them that the big MPAA anti-piracy ads were offensive and got on his nerves, and they took 'em down!

The ads are tantamount to a legal threat to the general public about their property, and they do it opposite advertisements for children's movies. My response is that I do not want them to do that in my community, in the public space where I'm trying to live. I am an artist too, and just because they have a problem with free downloads, doesn't mean they can give the impression that people in *my* community can't download my copyrighted works for free.

It is not that I think that copyright infringement is justified. Rather, corporations are giving legitimate downloading and new internet-based media a bad name by claiming they are a victim of new technology.

Link (Thanks, Th0m!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:20:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

3D Nudes of silent-film star Harold Lloyd

Silent film star Harold Lloyd shot thousands of nude photos of Hollywood starlets, many of them in 3-D. His granddaughter has published a book of the photos, which comes with a Harold Lloyd-style pair of 3-D glasses to view these awesomely kitschy cheesecake shots. Link to OC Register story (try username ocusername, PW ocregister)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:18:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How a ballot-receipt should look - UPDATED

Wired Magazine's back-page each month features a photoshopped image that is meant to represent a telling found object from our future. They're often good, but this month's -- a receipt from a paper-trail-leaving voting machine -- is the best so far. Wow. Link

Update: Various of you wrote in on this, but Jacob put it most succinctly, "While it's nice that there's a paper trail, the format of the receipt implies that there is long-term tracking of how you've cast votes in the past, and some votes could be determined by examining the receipt (so much for the secret ballot). And the 'who's ahead data' would be just as unhelpful as exit polling data is on election day. Let's hope the vote tracking features of e-voting don't come to pass."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:31:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Online and public art to save a disappearing lake in California

BoingBoing reader Eli the Bearded says,

"The Lake Project is an art on billboards exhibition. A number of photos of Owens Lake, in southern California are put up on billboards in the San Francisco Bay Area. Owens Lake is an environmental disaster caused by overdrainage to quench the ceaseless thirst of Los Angeles. This site has images from the billboards in a flash animation and a number of links to information about Owens Lake."
Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:19:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Xeni on NPR: MPAA plans to sue movie downloaders

On the NPR program "Day to Day" this week, I speak with host Noah Adams about the MPAA's plans to begin suing individuals suspected of sharing copyrighted movies online. We speak with the MPAA's antipiracy director John Malcolm, and with Jason Schultz of the EFF about the planned lawsuits -- the first of which are expected to be filed next week. Link to archived audio for this program, Link to NPR Day to Day home.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:16:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: Audible Zen

let them sing it | nasa vlf receiver | aurachime | nitrada | whales | pitman | fish + wildlife | n.a.g. | looptracks | viragelic | rand()% | infinite wheel | Image: an "audible tweek" from NASA (Link). web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:02:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DefenseTech blog moves to new digs, gets spiffy makeover

My fellow Wired News contributor Noah Shachtman says:

After nearly two years of operating DefenseTech blog on my own, I've decided to team up with the fine folks at Military.com. I've been a daily visitor to Military.com for quite some time – no one rounds up defense-related news and views better. But I've always been jealous of the site's slick design, and its almost bottomless well of features. No longer. It feels good to join such a bad-ass crew.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:50:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Geek Graffitists protest NYC's anti-sticker legislation

BoingBoing reader Reevo says:

All City Council is a cool little project by Ni9e (the same guys who hijacked the USPS labels a while back) protesting the new anti-sticker graffiti legislation in New York City. The guys at Ni9e have taken the images of the New York City Council members are reproduced them onto US postal labels with ASCII art. From a distance they images just look like the faces of those involved in the legislation but on closer inspection the text actually reads out the legislation itself. They then plaster them around the area that each of the council offices are situated...cheeky! [via]

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:43:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

US druggists refuse to give out birth control because of "moral values"

A number of states have enacted (or may soon pass) laws that allow pharmacists to refuse to dispense birth control if their beliefs (read: fundamentalist Christian dogma) dictate otherwise.

"I was shocked," says [Juley] Lacey, 33, who was not able to get her prescription until the next day and missed taking one of her pills. "Their job is not to regulate what people take or do. It's just to fill the prescription that was ordered by my physician."

Some pharmacists, however, disagree and refuse on moral grounds to fill prescriptions for contraceptives. And states from Rhode Island to Washington have proposed laws that would protect such decisions. Mississippi enacted a sweeping statute that went into effect in July that allows health care providers, including pharmacists, to not participate in procedures that go against their conscience. South Dakota and Arkansas already had laws that protect a pharmacist's right to refuse to dispense medicines. Ten other states considered similar bills this year

Just in time for next season's hotly anticipated coathanger abortion fad. Welcome to Jesusistan. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:39:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gerald McBoing Boing coming to Cartoon Network

BoingBoing reader Larry says, "Jerry Beck's exellent site has info and pics of the proposed new Gerald McBoing Boing show being developed for Cartoon Network. Being your namesake and all I thought you might dig / run in horror." Link (Ed. Note: For the record, Mark didn't name the blog you're reading after that character, but that doesn't make this news any less cool!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:35:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, November 9, 2004

Video of Cory's iBiblio talk

Last February, I gave a talk on copyright at iBiblio/UNC Chapel Hill. They video'ed the proceedings and have now posted the footage for download. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:53:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

21st century googie: a house built around a cylinder

London is full of little houses called "two-up-and-two-downs" -- a kitchen and a sitting-room on the ground floor, and two bedrooms (and a bathroom) upstairs. Two rooms up, two rooms down. It's a kind of basic building-block of London housing.

This futuristic little six-metre-square house is a modern two-up-and-two-down, with four rooms contained in a revolving cylinder that maximises the efficiency of space. This is a wonderful twenty-frist century take on googie architecture, the kind of thing that has all the designy prettiness of an iMac and all the ephemeraility of a tailfin. Link (via Pirotcar)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:50:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ashcroft resigns, claiming credit for "extraordinary era of justice"

Attorney General John Ashcroft resigned today, claiming credit for "an extraordinary era of justice" in his resignation letter. Link to full text

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:45:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ex- CBS newsman: bloggers replacing journos like "parasite replacing dog"

Eric Engberg, a former CBS News correspondent in Washington, said:

The public is now assaulted by news and pretend-news from many directions, thanks to the now infamous "information superhighway." But the ability to transmit words, we learned during the Citizens Band radio fad of the 70's, does not mean that any knowledge is being passed along. One of the verdicts rendered by election night 2004 is that, given their lack of expertise, standards and, yes, humility, the chances of the bloggers replacing mainstream journalism are about as good as the parasite replacing the dog it fastens on.

Link (via politech)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:42:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Middle Finger Man update - enter Mark Cuban

Middle Finger Man (see previous BB entry) is about to become famous, whether he wants to or not. Brian Stucki sez: "I am the writer of Brian's Blog and the creator of the Middle Finger Man Video. I have had thousands of visits linked from your site for the video and have recieved hundreds of e-mails asking for more. I recently received an e-mail from Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and HDNet. He encouraged me to get HD footage of MFM and get it into him and his people. I have blogged about this and called upon the help of my readers. I was hoping you could post the update as well so I might be able to make this video to find out more of the MFM."

Go get 'em, Brian! Link

UPDATE: Here's a better picture of MFM, aka "Lt. Dan." Looks like he might be a yoga practitioner, judging by the way he sits. He also seems to be a jolly fellow. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:57:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New York Underground

Julia Solis is an urban archaeologist who explores the subterranean mysteries and ruins of New York City and other locales. For years, she's chronicled her adventures through photographic evidence and essays posted on her Dark Passage Web site. Now, Routledge has published New York Underground, a stunning monograph of Solis's journey into the underworld.

"Did alligators ever really live in New York's sewers? What's it like to explore the old aqueducts beneath the city? How many levels are beneath Grand Central Station? And how exactly did the pneumatic tube system that New York's post offices used to employ work? In this richly illustrated historical tour of New York's vast underground systems, Julia Solis answers all these questions and much, much more. New York Underground is timed to release in the centennial year of the city's subway system. It takes readers through ingenious criminal escape routes, abandoned subway stations, and dark crypts beneath lower Manhattan to expose the city's basic anatomy. While the city is justly famous for what lies aboveground, its underground passages are equally legendary, and tell us just as much about how the city works. "

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 04:02:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Best Buy tries to separate "angel" customers from "devils"

Fascinating Wall Street Journal article about Best Buy's campaign to get rid of the smartest 20% of it customers, and keep only the fools who are looser with their money.

Best Buy's angels are customers who boost profits at the consumer-electronics giant by snapping up high-definition televisions, portable electronics, and newly released DVDs without waiting for markdowns or rebates.

The devils are its worst customers. They buy products, apply for rebates, return the purchases, then buy them back at returned-merchandise discounts. They load up on "loss leaders," severely discounted merchandise designed to boost store traffic, then flip the goods at a profit on eBay. They slap down rock-bottom price quotes from Web sites and demand that Best Buy make good on its lowest-price pledge. "They can wreak enormous economic havoc," says Mr. Anderson.

Mr. Anderson's campaign against devil customers pits Best Buy against an underground of bargain-hungry shoppers intent on wringing every nickel of savings out of big retailers. At dozens of Web sites like FatWallet.com, SlickDeals.net and TechBargains.com, they trade electronic coupons and tips from former clerks and insiders, hoping to gain extra advantages against the stores.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:34:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Digital Accordion

Roland has announced a digital accordion. Can a digital ukulele be far behind?

PBM (Physical Behavior Modeling) enables true sound reproduction and dynamic expression.

Realistic tone and expressive simulations of a wide range of traditional accordions.

22 onboard Orchestral sounds and 7 Orchestral Bass sounds that can be mixed together with traditional accordion sounds.

Portable, lightweight and expandable via MIDI.

Expand creative possibilities and explore new performance options not achievable using traditional instruments.

The FR-7 is a complete, all-in-one model with powered speakers.

Link (Via dottocomu)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:23:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Octopussy

Manuel on Buffoonery posts this interesting series of pointers to tako pr0n.

Whybark got me going on Japanese octopus porn with this tip: famous ukiyo-e painter Hokusai's awabi fisher and octopus (c.1814). Fast-forward to 2001, when Masami Teraoka painted Sarah and Octopus/Seventh Heaven. Toshio Saeki's Octo-girl takes the classic tentacle porn for a spin.

A B-movie was made about Hokusai's life called Edo Porn. Here are images from the bizarre octopus sex scene. Check out the eyes on that thing--just like the painting!

What's up with the Japanese obsession with octopus sex? I'm still looking into it. Check the comments for the definitive guide. I did find this one strange story on Dr. Kilmarnock's Obscure World of Victorian Erotica: Tentacles of Desire: The Man who Loved Cephalapods. Look at that old pervert! It's me in 40 years!

For scientific posterity, here's some information on actual octopus sex, including a line drawing of hot hectocotylus/mantle cavity action. And here's the original octopus porn link that started it all.

Most of the links are not worksafe, duh. Regarding that last link (to hardcore images), ultra-observant BoingBoing reader Brian says, "Wow. They have a condom on the thing... and it's tentacles are tied up above her legs so as to give the illusion of life and intent. The thing is dead. That's not just octoporn... thats necroctoporn!" Link (Thanks, Susannah!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:55:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

HOWTO buy a sari/salwar kameez on eBay

Teresa Nielsen Hayden has discovered a whole crew of custom sari-manufacturers in India selling direct to the Western market -- hell, the global market -- with eBay. Because of eBay's rules, there's a weird polite fiction that they're selling you some cloth and throwing in the actual making of the garment as a kind of freebie, but this is a really cool maker-to-wearer business that's cutting out hundreds of intermediaries. Teresa's produced a guide to buying Indian garments these ways that's absolutely fascinating.

There are three signs to look for. First, if the listing says any size, it usually means they’re making clothing to order, but might mean they’re selling the same model in multiple sizes. Second, the accompanying photo shows, not finished garments, but two or three pieces of color-coordinated fabric wrapped around a dressmaker’s form. Not all bespoke-tailoring vendors do this, but all the vendors who do it are selling bespoke tailoring. The third and infallible sign is that they ask you for your measurements.

The base price for a made-to-order three-piece salwar kameez starts around $30 for something simple in a cotton or synthetic fabric, and goes up to the lower-middle three digits for wedding garments so dense with gold embroidery that they mess up flash photography. Shipping runs around $12-$25, so check before you bid.

Report on the experiment:

Using the proceeds of my CafePress t-shirt sales, I ordered three salwar kameez (kameezi? kameezes?) from three different vendors. Only one auction was contested. The average purchase price was $39.00.

All three purchases arrived within two weeks. All three fit. All three vendors misunderstood or ignored my request for elbow-length sleeves, but they all got the trousers right (nipped in at the ankle, with a small cuff).

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:12:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Exit-poll data: you can't debate the election without it

Lessig's posted a barn-burner of a blog entry on the fact that the wildly incongruous exit-poll data from the election hasn't been made public, which means that no one can really assess the allegations of wrongdoing at the polls.

I don't think there was a conspiracy to suppres the Bush vote, nor do I think Diebold stole the election for Bush -- but there are obvious puzzles that need to be resolved. First, there is Morris' point -- exit polls are just not that wrong. Second, there are the insanely inverted county votes in the many heavily Democratic counties in Florida that had their votes counted by optical scan (and tallied by Diebold machines among others). Why were the polls so bad? Why did Democrats in those counties overwhelmingly defect to the President while remaining "liberal" in their other votes?

These are questions of fact that can be answered, or at least understood, if the facts were known. The Exit Poll Consortium should enable that knowledge. It would be a relatively simple regression to map exit poll data against counties or precincts with suspect machines. More importantly, it would be relatively easy to isolate where, if anywhere, suspicion should be directed.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:44:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Winston Churchill's 104-year-old parrot is still alive and cursing

The parrot Winston Churchill bought in 1937 is still alive, and her voice sounds like Churchill's.

Her favourite sayings were "F*** Hitler" and "F*** the Nazis". And even today, 39 years after the great man's death, she can still be coaxed into repeating them with that unmistakable Churchillian inflection.

Link (via Growabrain)

UPDATE: Jason sez: This went round a while back, and turned out to be probably false.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:42:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nifty world clock design

This clock is built a little like a 12-sided Dungeons and Dragons die so you can set the time to match different parts of the world by orienting the name of a particular city face up. Link (via Cool Hunting)

UPDATE: Christopher Null sez: "I had one of those clocks. Was mega cool until the battery died -- and I find there's no way to replace it, had to toss it out.  Argh!

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:35:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jabberwocky in machine-transcription - UPDATED

Here's what happens if you recite Jabberwocky into IBM's ViaVoice dictation software.

'Was Berlin, and the slight the copes
Did jar in jumble in the Wade;
All Lindsay were the borrow groves,
And the mowed grass out grade.

"Be where the Jasper walk, my son!
The jaws that bike the clause that catch!
Be where the jejune bird, and shined
The from yes dander snatch!"

Link (Thanks, Doug!)

Update: Simon sez, "the ViaVoice production of Jabberwocky was created using version1.0.3 of the software and IBM are currently at version 10. Probably wouldn't do as badly/well if the current version were used."

Update #2: Cody sez, "I posted this blog entry a while back, featuring not one, not two, but three different versions of Jabberwocky as interpreted by voice recognition software. And then there was the version interpreted by handwriting recognition software...

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:05:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Flashy fish

Science News has an interesting article about the otherworldly colors and skin patterns of reef fish.

People can theorize till the cowfish come home about what they see on a reef, but what matters is what fish see, and that's been hard to determine.

Improvements in cameras and in equipment for analyzing light and color are now inspiring new approaches to approximating a fish-eye view of the reefs. Looking at the abundant coloration from a fishy perspective, the new work demonstrates that people can be quite wrong about what's showy and what's subtle. The old questions are giving way to more-sophisticated new ones. Colors aren't just a matter of either hiding or flaunting. It may be possible to whisper and shout at the same time.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:52:27 AM permalink |