Alexander Malloy from Golden Robot Army sez, "Golden Robot Army is a rock and roll band in Seattle that gives away its music for free and writes songs about schadenfreude guilt and homeless drunks and zombies. The band will be touring and filming a short film in Japan in March of 2010 (Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya)."

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Matija Strlic and colleagues write in the ACS's Analytical Chemistry about "material degradomics," a techniques by which the odors emanating from old books are noninvasively analyzed to figure out which books are rotting and need preservation:
Matija Strlic and colleagues note in the new study that the familiar musty smell of an old book, as readers leaf through the pages, is the result of hundreds of so-called volatile organic compounds (VOCs) released into the air from the paper. Those substances hold clues to the paper's condition, they say. Conventional methods for analyzing library and archival materials involve removing samples of the document and then testing them with traditional laboratory equipment. But this approach destroys part of the document.

The new technique, called "material degradomics," analyzes the gases emitted by old books and documents without altering the documents themselves.

'Smell of Old Books' Offers Clues to Help Preserve Them

(Image: Books of the Past, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Lin Pernille ♥ Photography's photostream)

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Are terms-of-service enforceable?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Ed Bayley has written an excellent introductory white-paper on whether click-wrap, browse-wrap, and other online terms of service are enforceable:
In other words, it's not merely clicking the "I Agree" button that creates the legal contract. The issue turns on reasonable notice and opportunity to review--whether the placement of the terms and click-button afforded the user a reasonable opportunity to find and read the terms without much effort. In practice, the enforceability of each TOS implementation often falls on a sliding scale, depending on the degree of notice it provides the user. At one end, presentations that require the user, before clicking, to scroll to the bottom of a set of terms, or through an adjacent scroll box, guarantees the entirety of the TOS appears at least once, even if the user chooses to ignore it, and has been held to be enforceable. At the other end, by contrast, if a user must click on a hyperlink, or series of hyperlinks, to view the terms, the significance of clicking "I Agree" as showing assent diminishes, depending on the difficulty in actually finding the terms and whether a reasonable Internet User would have done so. Finally, in addition to the placement of terms, courts also consider the inclusion of conspicuous statements on websites that instruct users to read the TOS and inform them of the consequence of clicking "I Agree."...

Whereas courts have been willing to give clickwraps their blessing, attempts to legally bind users with browsewrap agreements have been more controversial. Unlike clickwrap agreements, browsewraps do not require a user to engage in any affirmative conduct, like clicking on a box, in order to show that they agree to a set of terms. Instead, websites with browsewrap agreements often purport to bind their users by passive conduct, unrelated to the TOS itself, like continuing to use the website or proceeding past its homepage.

The Clicks That Bind: Ways Users "Agree" to Online Terms of Service
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A woman who tried out her new pocket camera by video-recording a few minutes of her sister's surprise birthday party at a showing of "New Moon" has been charged with a felony -- "camcordering" a movie.

Penalties for camcordering have been ratcheting higher and higher (and have been introduced in international treaty negotiations, as well as in bilateral trade agreements with the US, which demands that its trading partners imprison people operating video recorders in cinemas). But the actual incidence of camcordered pirate DVDs is declining relative to "screeners" and other leaks from the industry itself.

The movie industry has turned into an alcoholic dad who beats up his family at the slightest transgression while ignoring his own gross failures -- blaming everything on external forces and refusing to confront its own problems.

Meanwhile, 22-year-old Samantha Tumpach spent two nights in jail for recording her friends singing "Happy Birthday" at a movie theater, for capturing less than four minutes of a feature film. She is charged with a felony and if convicted, could lose the right to vote, to work with children, to hold office, and to partake in full civil life.

And the movie industry's pitch to us remains, "Please stop pirating our discs, because if you don't stop, we may be driven out of business and then society would suffer from our absence."

Charged With Felony After Taping 4 Minutes Of "New Moon" (Thanks, Blaire!)

(Image: Camcordering, a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike photo from kowitz's photostream )

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Stormtrooper ballerina

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Here's a fascinating heat map showing the number of geotagged Wikipedia articles by country. It's a map of the "known unknowns" -- areas where there are likely to be many articles still to write.

Mapping the Geographies of Wikipedia Content

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Rumors of Apple buying cloud-based music service LaLa have circulated for some time. Tonight, news that the deal is all but done. NYT, Bloomberg. Make way for a downloadless iTunes?

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Oprah falls for a 4chan troll

Good thing Oprah quit that show, because 4Chan pwned it. I think this happened a couple years ago, but I'm just now seeing the video. Sorry, I'm lame and slow. "His group has over nine thousand penises, and they're all raping children." (thanks, Sean Bonner!)

Update: Among the many remixes this spawned, Pedobear techno.

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Tom Geisler's Inventions

Guestblogger Paul Spinrad is a freelance writer/editor, and is Projects Editor for MAKE magazine. He is the author of The VJ Book and The Re/Search Guide to Bodily Fluids, and was an early contributor to bOING bOING when it was an online zine. He lives in San Francisco.

geisler-clip I love Tom Geisler's art illustrations, which combine the life-improving spirit of chindogu with the obsessive precision of antique technical drawings (he's also a technical illustrator). Tom is working on a book, "Reduce. Reuse. Reinvent: Free Patents That Will Save Our Galaxy," and here's some material from it, including an hilarious series of pages that illustrate the inventor's personal history.

Reduce. Reuse. Reinvent.
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From the slippery slope department: A Brazilian senator has drafted a bill to criminalize the "import or distribution of offensive video games." The senator says he wants to "curb the manufacture, distribution, importation, trading, custody, and storage of video games that affect the customs and traditions of the people, their worship, creeds, religions, and symbols." (thanks, Guido!)

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American student Amanda Knox was found guilty of murder in Italy today, despite prosecutorial shenanigans and the lack of forensic evidence in a case where one would expect it to be abundant. If you're surprised, you may labor under a misapprehension or two about how things work in the land of my fathers.

Despite its wealth and nominal status, Italy's counterparts in Europe look at it with derision and dismay for the circuses of which the Knox case is but one more. Public life in Italy often evinces these pious but oddly inscrutable outcomes, produced with alarming regularity by legal and political institutions that are like cargo-cult copies of those possessed by other nations.

This example, however, may be easier to understand than most. The jurors wore Italian flags while the judge read their verdict.

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The Food and Drug Administration is holding up the delivery of MG Siegler's iMac because they apparently think it is an apple, not an Apple.

I don’t want to believe that either UPS or the U.S. Government are so stupid as to think that my Apple computer is actually an apple, but I can’t come up with any other explanation (and neither can people on Twitter). On my UPS tracking shipment screen right now all I see is “Exception” followed by a note that my iMac was held up in in Louisville, Kentucky because, “UPS HAS OBTAINED DOCUMENTATION AND SUBMITTED TO FOOD & DRUG ADMINISTRATION AND/OR DEPARTMENT OF AG/PPQ;AWAITING RESPONSE”
Dear FDA, Gimme My iMac
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Remember the Fit-PC2 we reviewed a while back? It's the only desktop PC smaller than a Mac Mini that's worth buying, and they just upgraded it.

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I'm really sorry I'm going to miss this Machine Project workshop on Wednesday, Dec 9th, in Los Angeles.
200912041502An after dark exploration of the sidewalk cracks around Machine Project for local medicinal plants, led by Nance Klehm. Get ready for the long winter dry, cold haul with simple knowledge on how to identify common wild plants that can be used in herbal remedies.

Nance Klehm is a radical ecologist, designer, urban forager, grower and teacher. Her solo and collaborative work focuses on creating participatory social ecologies in response to a direct experience of a place. She grows and forages much of her own food in a densely urban area. She actively composts food, landscape and human waste. She only uses a flush toilet when no other option is available. She designed and currently manages a large scale, closed-loop vermicompost project at a downtown homeless shelter where cafeteria food waste becomes 4 tons of worm castings a year which in turn is used as the soil that grows food to return to the cafeteria. More information on Nance can be found at her website.

Echo Park Medicinal Forage with Nance Klehm

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Radley Balko posted about a woman in Wayne County who broke no laws yet had to pay $1,400 to get her car back when police seized it "after they mistook Vaughn’s co-worker for a prostitute."

From a Detroit News article:

The Wayne County Sheriff’s Office, which helps run the prosecutor’s forfeiture unit, took in $8.69 million from civil seizures in 2007, more than four times the amount collected in 2001. The Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office gets up to 27 percent of that money.
Obama’s Justice Department supports state asset forfeiture laws, says Balko:
It’s worth noting that Obama’s Justice Department filed an amicus brief on behalf of the state in that case. They weren’t obligated to. Though the solicitor general’s office is charged with defending all federal laws, the law at issue in Alvarez is a state law, not a federal one. In fact, federal civil forfeiture laws are much friendlier to property owners. So you could make a decent case that the administration could have argued against the Illinois law. At the very least, it could have kept quiet. Instead, it argued that the state should retain the power to take property from people without ever charging a crime (and not necessarily kingpins—the Illinois law in question applies only to property valued at under $20,000), and keep that property for a year or more before affording the owner a chance to get it back.

Taking property from poor people without due process of law in order to enrich local police departments. Seems like the sort of thing Barack Obama might have fought to change in his days as a community organizer.

How police departs abuse asset forfeiture laws to steal money from poor people
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yulia_05.jpg Russia-born illustrator Yulia Brodskaya creates beautiful type treatments in delicately cut and curled three-dimensional paper sculptures. There's a gallery at Illusion360, and a more extensive one on her website. Stunning. (via Chris Watson)
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From the department of "most ridiculous newspaper corrections evah," this from the Washington Post: "A Nov. 26 article in the District edition of Local Living incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number." (Via Quinn)

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A 22-year-old medical student and blogger was arrested in Russia this week for "spreading rumors" about swine flu in the city of Saratov. He was charged with disseminating false information related to an act of terrorism. On Wednesday, he and other Russian bloggers discussed possibilities that authorities were concealing the extent of H1N1 fatalities and that the city may soon be quarantined. The next day, he was jailed.

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giveitaponder.jpg These television spots for LG Mobile featuring "Actors Studio" host James Lipton really get the Funny job done. Post with background over at Laughing Squid. The campaign site is here (warning: Flash, auto-load sound). There's an article about the purpose of the campaign here. I'm guessing they were created by the same agency that did "Subservient Chicken" for Burger King? I'm told the agency was Young and Rubicam.

Above, my favorite spot in the "Ponder" campaign, which includes a unicorn reference.

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Glamourpuss: The Enchanting World of Kitty Wigs

Swatch Humans love putting stuff on cats. There's stuffonmycat, there are image macros (LOLcats) with text on cats. Now, there's a new book about putting wigs on cats. The photos in this book are equal parts cute, funny, and creepy (in that "obsessive cat lady" way), and the combination is most enjoyab... more

Bulbdial: a clock whose "hands" are shadows cast by LEDs

Swatch David sez, "Almost two years ago, I came up with a concept for a 'Bulbdial' clock. Instead of physical hands, it has three shadows cast by a series of rotating lights indicating hours, seconds, and minutes. Nine months ago, Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories developed a working model using three ri... more

Astronaut-guided video tour of the International Space Station

Astronaut Michael Barratt (Expedition 20 Flight Engineer) walks you through the International Space Station in this 20-minute long HD video, which covers the entire 167 feet of the space station's pressurized modules. Barratts' commentary describes to Mission Control in Houston how equipment and ... more

Foot Fungus Cured With Socks

Self-experimenter Seth Roberts cured his foot fungus when he bought more socks. Anti-fungal medication didn't work. He wrote about this on his blog, and other people are reporting success with his more-socks cure. I remember reading on your blog about more socks as a cure for Athlete’s Foot and I h... more

Cocaine-stuffed chicken smuggled into US by Guatemalan man

Swatch This is your chicken on drugs. Wagner Mauricio Linares Aragon, a 32-year-old citizen of Guatemala, was arrested at Dulles Int'l. Airport when authorities discovered that the cooked chicken he brought with him on a flight from El Salvador was stuffed with about $4,000 worth of cocaine. Inside the... more

Documentary about the lives of four babies around the world

I can't wait for this documentary to come out! Everybody loves... Babies. This visually stunning new movie simultaneously follows four babies around the world - from first breath to first steps. From Mongolia to Namibia to San Francisco to Tokyo, Babies joyfully captures on film the earliest stag... more

Web design project from hell immortalized in cautionary webcomic

Swatch This instructional webcomic about a web design job gone horribly, eyestabbingly bad rings SO true. (via Glenn Fleishman)... more

Blackwater founder Erik Prince revealed as a CIA spy

Adam Ciralsky's Vanity Fair profile of Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater ("a company dogged by a grand-jury investigation, bribery accusations, and the voluntary-manslaughter trial of five ex-employees") reveals that Prince was a spy for the CIA while he was at the same time raking in over a bi... more

Book about extreme fashion subculture in The Congo

Gentlemen of Bacongo by photographer Daniele Tamagni, documents a subculture of slum-dwelling men in the Congo who dress in luxurious handmade suits. The movement, called Le Sape, combines French styles from their colonial roots and the individual's (often flamboyant) style. Le Sapeurs, as they'r... more

How to tell if you are being boring

Gretchen Rubin has a list of 8 clues that you are being boring. She says her list is "utterly unscientific" but I think she's right on. Most of them are obvious, but boring people seem unaware that they are boring. She also has a list of topics to avoid if you don't want to be a bore: 1. A dream. ... more

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