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David Pescovitz at 10:55 am • 
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Etsy.com announced the winners of its 2007 costume contest. I was honored to be one of the judges in the "General Awesomeness" category. Here's the first place winner, Sweetestpea's robot costume, complete with an LED (low-tech entertainment display) that can be hot-swapped with different hand-cut messages. More than 500 crafters entered. Congrats to everyone!
David Pescovitz at 10:45 am • •
Southern California New York police will soon begin field testing this "pistol cam" that mounts to the barrel of a service revolver pistol. Cameras that mount on guns are not new, but this particular model will be deployed for tests over the next few months within the Orange County's sheriff's emergency service team and the Newburgh Police Department. According to WREX-TV, the president of the city of Newburgh's police union doubts that the officers will be happy about the new system. I fear looking at YouTube once the street finds its own use for these things.
David Pescovitz at 10:31 am • •
The details of his study of negotiation options with Iran are classified, but Bueno de Mesquita says that the broad outline is that there is nothing the United States can do to prevent Iran from pursuing nuclear energy for civilian power generation. The more aggressively the U.S. responds to Iran, he says, the more likely it is that Iran will develop nuclear weapons. The upshot of the study, Bueno de Mesquita argues, is that the international community needs to find out if there is a way to monitor civilian nuclear energy projects in Iran thoroughly enough to ensure that Iran is not developing weapons.Link to Science News, Link to GOOD Magazine
One of his most famous past predictions also concerned Iran. In 1984, the model predicted that when Ayatollah Khomeini died, an ayatollah named Hojatolislam Khameini and a little-known cleric named Hasheimi Rafsanjani would rise to succeed Khomeini as leaders of Iran. At the time, most experts considered that outcome exceedingly unlikely, since Khomeini had designated a different person as his successor. But in fact, when Khomeini died five years later, Rafsanjani and Khameini succeeded him.
Bueno de Mesquita says he also predicted that Andropov would succeed Brezhnev long before experts considered it likely. He foresaw that China would reclaim Hong Kong 12 years before it happened, and he predicted that France would narrowly pass the European Union's Maastricht Treaty.
Former CIA analyst Stanley Feder says that he has used Bueno de Mesquita's model well over a thousand times since the early 1980s to make predictions about specific policies. Like others, he has found it to be more than 90 percent accurate.
David Pescovitz at 10:14 am • •
A first aid team called to the scene soon cleared up the confusion. Police told the man to remove his make-up after which he was allowed to continue his journey.Link (via Fortean Times)
Cory Doctorow at 6:52 am • •
See also: HOWTO: Make a bat-person costume out of an old umbrella
Cory Doctorow at 12:42 am • •
The punchline on today's Jack of All Blades web-comic riffs off my fave xkcd episode -- the one where I'm outed for my practice of blogging from a hot-air balloon while wearing goggles and a red cape.
Link
(Thanks, Joe!)
See also:
Geeky comic strip uses Cory as the punchline
Cory Doctorow cosplayers at the XKCD picnic
Update: From the comments, "Cory (A Different One)"'s revelation that this was his Hallowe'en costume!
Cory Doctorow at 11:49 pm • •
MP4 Link, Inside the Magic podcast (Thanks, Kirby!)
Ricky at Inside the Magic has a video of Disney's Haunted Halloween Parade at Tokyo Disneyland.All of the floats have Haunted Mansion themes - even obscure stuff like the Rolly Crump designed overstuffed easy chair with the face worked into the design. Another float has the Ballroom's Organ as the major design element. The Knight from just outside the endless hallway is represented by 4 cast members. The bride is a chipmunk character. Another float has a giant representation of the skeletal arm with a trowel bricking himself into his own tomb.
A phalanx of Haunted Mansion maids leads the parade. Ghosts from the Mickey Mouse cartoon "Lonesome Ghosts" pepper the entire parade.
The song that accompanies the parade is called "One More Ghost" in reference to the need to find that 1000th ghost that the Mansion needs.
The show stop at the end of the parade features the Japanese Ghost Host voice with various riffs off of the Grim Grinning Ghosts theme.
Cory Doctorow at 11:40 pm • •
Cory Doctorow at 11:37 pm • •
Cory Doctorow at 11:35 pm • •
See also: Balloon-dog anatomy
Mark Frauenfelder at 1:43 pm • •
I just found out that Chris Anderson, Wired's editor-in-chief, has been doing the same thing.
He's also published his long, long list of banned flacks. Good for him.
I've had it. I get more than 300 emails a day and my problem isn't spam (Cloudmark Desktop solves that nicely), it's PR people. Lazy flacks send press releases to the Editor in Chief of Wired because they can't be bothered to find out who on my staff, if anyone, might actually be interested in what they're pitching.Link (Thanks, Barry!)Everything else gets banned on first abuse. The following is just the last month's list of people and companies who have been added to my Outlook blocked list. All of them have sent me something inappropriate at some point in the past 30 days. Many of them sent press releases; others just added me to a distribution list without asking. If their address gets harvested by spammers by being published here, so be it--turnabout is fair play.
There is no getting off this list. If you're on it and have something appropriate to say to me, use a different email address.
David Pescovitz at 12:59 pm • •
"The Maharishi told me during that 1968 visit that I should build a university in Edinburgh. I went to my room and drew a beautiful dome-shaped place of learning," he said Friday...Link (Thanks, Jess Hemerly!)
Donovan and Lynch, Oscar-nominated director of "Blue Velvet," "Mullholland Dr." and "The Elephant Man," are part of a tour to promote transcendental meditation as a means of reducing violence, crime and stress in schools and colleges...
"For a country the size of Scotland it would take only 250 students meditating to protect Scotland from its enemies and to bring peace, to stop violence and drug abuse," Lynch said. "That is just a byproduct of the students meditating together."
David Pescovitz at 12:49 pm • •
Production has wrapped on the film adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel Radio Free Albemuth. The 10th movie adaptation of a PKD story, the indy movie was directed by John Alan Simon and stars Alanis Morisette. According to Simon, the total shoot took just 24 days and "the entire budget of the picture was less than the majors spend on catering." David Gill has more news over at the Total Dick-Head blog including promise of an interview with the director.
Mark Frauenfelder at 12:35 pm • •
Unfortunately, the internet is bloated with the hot air of these amateur journalists. Despite the size of their readership, even the A-List bloggers have no formal journalistic training. And, in fact, much of the real news their blogs contain has been lifted from (or aggregated from) the very news organizations they aim to replace.It is not surprising then that these prominent bloggers have no professional training in the collection of news. After all, who needs a degree in journalism to post a hyperlink on a Web site? Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, for example, the founder of Daily Kos, a left-leaning site, came to political blogging via the technology industry and the military.
Kos responds by listing his education and professional background as a journalist, which anyone with access to the Internet can easily discover for themselves.
Moulitsas earned two bachelor degrees at Northern Illinois University (1992-96), with majors in Philosophy, Journalism, and Political Science and a minor in German.Link (Thanks, Gary!)After a hitch serving as an artillery fire director at the headquarters for a missile battery, he attended Northern Illinois University, winning dual degrees and majoring in philosophy, political science and journalism and minoring in German.
From there, it was on to Boston University, where he earned his law degree.
“I knew in law school that I never wanted to be a lawyer. It was a way to kill three years of my life,” he offered with a smile.
He could have become a reporter–there was a job offer from the Associated Press–and he did freelance for three years for the Chicago Tribune, “but I decided I didn’t want to live vicariously through other people’s lives.”
