Britain is full of license-plate cameras, cameras used to send you tickets if you're caught speeding, or driving in the bus-lane, or entering London's "congestion-charge zone" without paying the daily fee for driving in central London. And because of Chekhov's first law of narrative ("a gun on the mantelpiece in act one will go off by act three"), the police have decided to also use these cameras as a surveillance tool, to "catch terrorists" (and other bad guys). So any police officer can add any license number to the database of "people of interest" and every time that license plate passes a camera, the local police force will receive an urgent alert, and can pull over the car, detain the driver, and search the car and its passengers under the Terrorism Act.

And, of course, police officers are less than discriminating about who they add to this list. For example, "Catt, 50, and her 84-year-old father, John" were added to the list because a police officer noticed their van at three protest demonstrations. And now Catt and John get pulled over by the police and searched as terrorists.

Environmental activists tend to be pretty forgiving of license-plate cameras, because they're a critical piece of congestion-charge systems that charge people money for driving instead of using public transit. This kind of regressive tax (the £10 charge in London is a pittance and no disincentive to the wealthy, and is crippling to the marginal and the poor) is also much beloved by the law-and-economics crowd, who assume that rational consumers will all be equally disincentivized by a little friction in the system.

But congestion charges require license plate cameras, and license plate cameras are an enormous piece of artillery to hand to the world's police, who are increasingly pants-wettingly afraid of any sort of public protest -- including environmental protests. I support reducing driving as much as the next green, but environmental change will require lots of protest, and that protest will get exponentially harder with the growth of the traffic cameras that are absolutely integral to congestion charge schemes.

The two anti-war campaigners were not the only law-abiding protesters being monitored on the roads. Officers have been told they can place "markers" against the vehicles of anyone who attends demonstrations using the national ANPR data centre in Hendon, north London, which stores information on car journeys for up to five years.

Senior officers have been instructed to "fully and strategically exploit" the database, which allows police to mark vehicles with potentially useful inform-ation such as drink-driving convictions.

The use of the ANPR database to flag-up vehicles belonging to protesters has resulted in peaceful campaigners being repeatedly stopped and searched.

Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act reveal Kent and Essex police deployed mobile ANPR "interceptor teams" on roads surrounding the protest against the Kingsnorth power station, in Kent, last year.

Activists repeatedly stopped and searched as police officers 'mark' cars (via Beyond the Beyond)

(Image: control, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike photo from Secret London's photo stream)

Parents, romantic partners and roommates of America: I am not encouraging your child, partner or person you share living space with to do this. At least, not in your good microwave. They should buy their own for this sort of thing. And for the love of Pete, they should wear protective eye covering.

I am so very serious about the protective eye coverings.

(Thanks, Greg Laden!)

Thumbnail image courtesy Flickr user sah5515, via CC.

Vadim Ponorovsky, the owner of the restaurant Paradou in trendy Park Slope Manhattan's meat-packing district, sent his employees an email in which he called them "lazy motherfuckers" because they failed to extract enough email addresses from their customers (he has a spam list and he makes it his servers' duty to get email addresses out of diners). Ponorovsky went on to call his employees "fucking lazy disrespectful assholes," "fucking children," and said, "Effective immediately, any server or host who fails to collect at least 20 emails per week, will be fined $100. Anyone failing to collect at least 20 emails for two weeks in a month will be fired immediately. No matter what. No matter who you are."

He also threatened to fire his entire staff, saying, "I have absolutely no respect for any of you," and "Go find another place to work."

And now, he's sent along a followup to the trade press, saying that this is just the way he talks, that "if you talked to anyone who ever worked for me, I could say without any sense of self-aggrandizement that they'd say I was the best boss they've worked for." In support of this he cites the fact that he's never missed payroll (e.g., he pays his employees the wages they earn), that he lets them work for him again after their vacations, and that they get to eat for free at the restaurant where they work.

He also declares himself to be a Reaganite and villifies anyone who disagrees with his treatment of his employees, who can only become wealthy if he gets rich first, through the magic of "trickle-down."

"If my staff has the ability for self-reflection and seeing the big picture, they should ask, 'Why would one of us fuck the rest of us so badly by damaging our ability to make money?" Ponorvosky says. "The first casualties of this will be the people who all of these protesters are 'defending.' No thought is given to 'the trickle-down,' to use Ronald Reagan's favorite expression." As for the people who are vowing to shut Paradou down, Ponorvsky says, "These people have no sense of rightness or goodness."

Paradou Owner Says Tirade Against Staff Was a Restaurateur's 'Howl'

Restaurant Owner's Email to Staff Belongs in Tyrant Hall of Fame

(via Making Light)

(Image: New York City - Paradou Brunch, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike image)

Designer Michiel Cornelissen laser-sintered stainless-steel crucifix has screwdriver bits cut into each tip, turning it into a screwdriver that repels vampires.

a bit cross (via Make)

Muji's going to start selling hole-punches that knock out patterns that can be threaded between two Lego bricks. They go on sale in a week, and open up many possibilities for crafty Lego extensions.

LEGO for MUJI Paper and Block Sets (via Make)

This looks like a truly useless, and depressingly ugly device for cracking eggs (which this TV commercial would like you to believe is a big problem).

Gary says:

I’m reading the latest Thomas Pynchon book, Inherent Vice, and he makes reference to this song.

It’s like Tiny Tim is tripping on acid, entertaining children, and predicting global warming — all at once.

Coming soon to a science fiction plot near you: with the right software, a plain-jane webcam can be a 3D scanner. It's a project from Qi Pan, a PhD candidate at Cambridge University Engineering Department.

ProFORMA: Probabilistic Feature-based On-line Rapid Model Acquisition (via Futurismic)

Michael Wolf took 100 photos of people living in Hong Kong's oldest public housing estate. Each flat is 100 square feet. Almost every room has the same kind of metal bunk bed. They almost all have a TV, electric fan, and rice cooker.

I looked at all 100 photos. Here's the creepiest room. Here's the most cluttered room. Here's the tidiest room. Here's the most spartan room.

Michael Wolf 100 x 100 (Thanks, Lookforthewoman!)

Matt Logue says: I just completed a self-published book depicting an uninhabited Los Angeles, and it got an honorable mention in the photography.book.now competition at blurb.com!  The photos were made over a period of 4 years, beginning in 2005, at a variety of locations around LA.

Empty Los Angeles

An after-Thanksgiving treat for the whole family...

Scrooge has no honor, nor any courage. Can three ghosts help him to become the true warrior he ought to be in time to save Tiny Tim from a horrible fate? Performed in the Original Klingon with English Supertitles, and narrative analysis from The Vulcan Institute of Cultural Anthropology.

Playing November 27 through December 13 at Minneapolis' Mixed Blood Theater. No really, this is for serious.

(Thanks Joel!)

As a little kid, I used to think electrical substations would make really awesome jungle gyms. This video helpfully demonstrates why 5-year-old Maggie was an idiot.

This is the Eldorado Substation near Boulder City, Nevada. What you're seeing: A substation like this one is connected to long-distance transmission lines and electricity has to be very high voltage to travel on those. The substation "steps up" the voltage so the electricity can travel. Everything at a substation is hot, in that shock the bejeezus out of you sense. So that maintenance can be done, substations are built with switching functions that allow you to disconnect and reconnect various parts of the system in modular sort of way. The big, crazy spark in this video happened when some of the switching mechanisms failed. The Arcs 'n Sparks page at Stoneridge Engineering explains what happened next...

Marginal Revolution posted the following excerpt from Jeremy Taylor's book titled Not a Chimp: The Hunt to Find the Genes that Make Us Human.

I think we have to start thinking about the idea that humans in the last 30, 40, or 50,000 years have been domesticating ourselves.  If we're following the bonobo or dog pattern, we're moving toward a form of ourselves with more and more juvenile behavior.  And the amazing thing once you start thinking in those terms is that you realize that we're still moving fast.  I think that current evidence is that we're in the middle of an evolutionary event in which tooth size is falling, jaw size is falling, brain size is falling, and it's quite reasonable to imagine that we're continuing to tame ourselves.  The way it's happening is the way it's probably happened since we became permanently settled in villages, 20 or 30,000 years ago, or before.

Jeremy Taylor's brain is not yet too small to notice that our brains are becoming smaller

(CC-licensed image by Flickr user laverrue)

Gregory Glass is a disease ecologist -- he studies the relationship between pathogens and hosts. A professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Glass's laboratory is Baltimore's urban underbelly, where he hangs out with beefy sewer rats. Apparently, Baltimore is a hotbed of rat research. I wonder if Glass has encountered any Rat Kings. From Smithsonian:

Glass has been following the secret lives of wild Norway rats – otherwise known as brown rats, wharf rats, or, most evocatively, sewer rats -- for more than two decades now, but Baltimore has been a national hotspot for rat studies for well over half a century. The research push began during World War II, when thousands of troops in the South Pacific came down with the rat-carried tsutsugamushi disease, and the Allies also feared that the Germans and Japanese would release rats to spread the plague...

Glass – who started off studying cotton rats in the Midwest – traps the animals with peanut butter baits and monitors the diseases they carry. (Hantavirus, once known as Korean hemorrhagic fever, and leptospirosis – which can cause liver and kidney failure – are of particular concern.) Lately he’s been interested in cat-rat interactions. Cats, he and his colleagues have noticed, are rather ineffectual rat assassins: they catch mainly medium-sized rodents, when they catch any at all. This predation pattern may actually have adverse effects on human health: some of the deceased mid-sized rats are already immune to harmful diseases, while the bumper crops of babies that replace them are all vulnerable to infection. Thus a higher proportion of the population ends up actively carrying the diseases at any given time.

"Crawling Around with Baltimore Street Rats"

Last month, I wrote about a Japanese husband who confessed to his wife that he had a virtual girlfriend, a character from an addictive Nintendo DS game called Love Plus. Now, another man is planning to hold a wedding ceremony with his Love Plus girlfriend this coming Sunday. The man, who calls himself SAL9000, was so in love with Nene Anegasaki that he decided to marry her and take her on a honeymoon to Guam. Of course, this means that he literally just took his Nintendo DS to Guam... while there, he took photos, livecast their adventures on popular video-sharing site Nico Nico Douga, and documented their adventures using the augmented reality iPhone app Sekai Camera. In any case, the guy plans on having a public reception in Tokyo this Sunday. It will be livecast on Nico Nico Douga, but in case you miss it, we'll be bringing you an update early next week. Stay tuned!

via IT Media News (Japanese)

[Click for larger image.] I was lucky enough to see Black Flag play live a number of times in the '80s, around the time Glen E. Friedman shot the photo that graces this book's cover. I was an underage teen sneaking into grownup punk clubs, high on moshpit fumes (and, truth be told, lots else). The band, and that subculture that surrounded them, changed my life.

Spray Paint the Walls: The Story of Black Flag explores the history of one of the most important bands, if not the most important, in American punk history.

Snip from observations by writer Joe Carducci, who was long associated with SST Records (some links added):

"[The book is] very well reported and assembled by Brit music writer Stevie Chick, author of the better of the recent Sonic Youth books. Neither Greg Ginn nor Henry Rollins sat for interviews but their voices are included from earlier interviews, and more importantly Chuck Dukowski spoke to Chick - a first I believe. The story, laid out from the band's earliest practices in 1976 to its end ten years later, makes a far more dramatic book than the usual shelf-fillers with their stretch to make the empty stories of various chart-toppers sound exciting and crucial and against the odds. "

Spray Paint the Walls: The Story of Black Flag (Amazon, book comes out later this month)

Here's a related post on photographer Glen E. Friedman's blog.

You may also be interested in some of Carducci's own writings on the subject of music and fandom.

Cake Wrecks has a gallery of horrendous cakes with a Big Bird theme. To be fair, it seems really difficult to decorate a cake to look like Big Bird, what with that long beak of his.

Big Bird cakes disasters

Cal Newport, a post-doc at MIT who writes the blog Study Hacks, has an interesting method of getting important work done. He calls it "fixed-schedule productivity."

The idea, in a nutshell, is this: "Fix your ideal schedule, then work backwards to make everything fit — ruthlessly culling obligations, turning people down, becoming hard to reach, and shedding marginally useful tasks along the way."

Newport works between 8:30 and 5:30 on weekdays only, yet he gets a lot done:

This past summer, for example, I completed my PhD in computer science at MIT. Simultaneous with writing my dissertation I finished the manuscript for my third book, which was handed in a month after my PhD defense and will be published by Random House in the summer of 2010. During this past year, I also managed to maintain my blog, Study Hacks, which enjoys over 50,000 unique visitors a month, and publish over a half-dozen peer-reviewed academic papers.

Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You To Be Rich wrote about Newport and a few other people who use similar techniques to get a lot of meaningful work accomplished in 40 hours a week or less.

I think they are onto something -- ever since I had kids (which gave me fewer hours in the day to work, and also put a start and end time on my day) I've been much more productive.

Time management: How an MIT postdoc writes 3 books, a PhD defense, and 6+ peer-reviewed papers — and finishes by 5:30pm