Here's a free, secure Cybiko chat app that implements A5, a streaming clock-controlled feedback cipher using 3 LFSRs, in only 5.6k of code, and makes your 900MHz instant messaging sessions less sniffable. LinkDiscuss (Thanks brucee!)

The Stinkymeat project at thespark.com: If you are eating, skip this. TheSpark documents what happens when you put three different meats (steak, ground beef and hot-dogs) on a plate for 19 days under the broiling sun. This is like those projects we did in grade three where we let various objects rot in glass jars and documented their dessication. Only TheSpark uses his unwitting neighbor's back yard instead of a jar, and documents the "progress" of the stinkymeat with more wit than Mr Denchasi's grade three class at Crestview Public School mustered.

As for the meat itself - I am speechless. I brought my stirring utensil with me, fully prepared to churn the goop in full circular motions. Instead, I found that it resisted all my attempts.

It has somehow become a singular solid object. The picture above demonstrates its elasticity. It reminds me of fake rubber vomit. This gives me horrible ideas and makes me wish I had enemies.

I can only hope this strange state is permanent, but I feel it will revert to gelatin as it ages.

If the experiment was over, and I had gloves on, I'd be tempted to see if I could use it as a meat frisbee.

LinkDiscuss (Thanks, John!)

What's dumber than driving while drunk? How about driving while talking on a cellphone while drunk? Or dumber still: driving while drunk, while talking on a cellphone, holding the cellphone in your left hand, because you have no right arm. One-armed man arrested for blowing through a red while drunk and talking on his phone.LinkDiscuss (via Meerkat)

Boong-Ga Boong-Ga is a popular new Japanese cabinet video-game. The cabinet has the hindquarters of a bent-over mannequin sticking out of its front. Gameplay consists of prodding the mannequin's buttocks with a special outsized plastic finger while your opponents whimper and grimace onscreen. The more skilled your bottom-poking, the more virility points you score. A testimonial to your rumpular studliness is printed on a bit of cardboard at the end of the game for you to show to others.

"On the other hand, it depends on the individual. I think there are a lot of young boys who can play a game like (Boong-ga, Boong-ga), and know that it's not appropriate to go out into public and start pinching and poking people."

Jack Morin, author of a sex manual, Anal Pleasure and Health, agreed. "Obsessions generally occur in response to intense prohibitions, which give the forbidden object heightened significance," he said. "The prohibitions work both ways. They encourage some people to 'tune out' the forbidden area or activity, while others get obsessed about it. Sometimes you see both reactions within the same person -- and perhaps within the same culture as well."

Link Discuss

The Feebs're doing their bit to help beat cops identify domestic terrorists, with an alarming flyer that identifies the following as warning signs of domestic terrorism:

Common Law Movement Proponents

• Fictitious license plates
• No license plates
• Fictitious drivers license
• No drivers license
• Refuse to identify themselves
• Request authority for stop
• Make numerous references to US Constitution

(Empahasis added)

Link Discuss

The Brits are having a domestic Game Show Crisis -- three people were arrested this week, amid speculation that they had cheated the UK edition of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?"

A police inquiry began in September into an episode of the popular show in which Ingram won 1 million pounds, or $1.41 million.

The episode was not broadcast, and Ingram's check was withheld because of the suspected cheating. News reports suggested that someone in the audience relayed to him correct answers to questions by coughing.

LinkDiscuss

Why bother with a Linux PDA? Because you can play Quake on it, that's why. Link Discuss (via /.)

Are you so filled with postmodern self-loathing that the thought of wiping your own ass grosses you out? The "Bottom Buddy" -- a new wiping aid with a tulip-shaped grip and a tip that's rounded for comfort -- will do it for you. LinkDiscuss (via Meerkat)

Joey's blog is carrying the story of how he and his roommates (including an infosec guru who shoulda known better!) got roocked twice by a conman who knocked on their door. Funny stuff, with an object lesson thrown in.

Dan and I each gave him forty bucks, and he gave us his phone number and even offered to let us hang on to a Macintosh computer as a guarantee that he would come back and pay. I felt a little guilty about not getting to know all my neighbours and told him it would be all right -- the phone number would be sufficient. It was only after he left that I got the sinking we got rooked.

Dan said that he got the feeling too, but he kept mum and watched for me to make my move -- when he saw me lend him the money, he did the same.

He never came back. Dan went on at length about how he'd "fucking kill" Sean if he ever dared to show his face in the neighbourhood again.

Here's Joey's story: Link, and here's the mea culpa from the aforementioned infosec guru: Link Discuss (Thanks, Joey!)

Patrick sez: "This is just too sweet. Little flash games that load fast, look pretty and are fun and relaxing to play. Nicely done shockwave and a model of efficiency (they're small files). Just check 'em out. Happy Thanksgiving!"LinkDiscuss

Surprise.com is a deluxe version of Amazon's ListMania. Surprise creates gift-categories ("Caffeine Fiend," "Gadgeteer," "Former Midwesterner," etc) and invites readers to suggest appropriate gifts for each category, along with URLs where they may be purchased. LinkDiscuss (via Kottke)

Patrick at Electrolite's home with a cold today, which means that we lucky readers get tons of excellent political bloggage! Feel better soon, Patrick, but keep on blogging at speed, please. (I feel a pang of guilt here, since hanging out with his wife and me on a Long Island beach at 4AM the other day to catch the Leonids can't have helped that cold at all)LinkDiscuss

Utility kilts! So, say you're secure enough in your masculinity to wear the Scottish Skirt, but you're hampered by the lack of places to stash your phone, PDA, multitool, paperback, wallet, pager, change, lighter, cigs, cigar-cutter, utlity knife, Cybiko, 802.11 card, digital camera, maglite and multidriver set? Worry no more: The Utility Kilt is the unholy offspring of a kilt and cargo pants. Link Discuss (Thanks, Tim!)

The Infinite Matrix, an infinitely cool (heh, I made a funny) online sf zine that folded after one ish is back! And BoingBoing played no small part in that renaissance: When the first ish of IM went online, with a blog from Bruce Sterling, short fiction from a string of Hugo winners, and a lovely lookenfeel, we ran a link to it, which got picked up and propagated to Wired News, /., and elsewhere. The publicity was sufficient to attract a sponsor for more issues, and the new one is terrific. Also, Eileen Gunn, IM's editor, will be excerpting a big hunk of "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom," my first novel, which Tor will publish next fall.

Most of my focus in the past few months has gone into getting stories and columnists for the magazine, rather than figuring out how to make money. So here's what you can look forward to:

* Schism Matrix, Bruce Sterling's daily weblog
* This Week in History, compiled daily by Terry Bisson
* Scores, book reviews by John Clute
* ViperWire, nanotales by Richard Kadrey
* The Smoke, a serial by Simon Ings
* The Runcible Ansible, a weekly column of wit and miscellany by David Langford
* A monthly short story, including a newly discovered story by the great fantasist Avram Davidson
* Monthly excerpts from significant upcoming novels, including, in this issue, Kathleen Ann Goonan's Light Music, due next June from Harper-Collins Eos, and in December, Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, due next Fall from Tor.

Link Discuss

A new gravity map of the Earth reveals that India is subject to one percent less gravity than anywhere else.LinkDiscuss

"Gadget burnout" threatens to ruin Christmas sales.

"We are all becoming our own personal IT managers... This is what burns people out. The utility of the device is hidden deep inside, behind a bunch of confusing software that differs on every device. You, as a consumer, can't leverage what you learn."

Link Discuss

Julia Magnet reviews Osama bin Laden's terrorist training video.

Until I sat down to watch a two-hour Al Qa'eda recruitment video, made just six months before the September 11 attacks, I had no idea that the champion of anti-Americanism had hijacked our Hollywood gimmicks and television tricks. Far more likely, I thought, that he'd produce a dreary display of militant fundamentalism: lots of ranting against America and Saudi Arabia, with some macho gun-play thrown in for show.

What I actually saw was far more worrying: Osama bin Laden beating us at our own media game. With devilish cunning, he has plugged into the MTV generation - and it's clear he knows how to reach us. I have spent all day humming militant Islamic songs. And I am a Jewish twenty-something from New York.

Link Discuss

Rumors of Photoshop for OS X's release at MacWorld Expo in San Francisco next January.LinkDiscuss

Heartwarming news from Adventures in Crime and Space, the Austin genre bookstore that was in danger of folding (Link) last month:

Hello! Scott Cupp here again. Recently I wrote a letter that was among the hardest things I had ever had to do in my life. I told you of the plight that Adventures in Crime and Space was facing as a result of the changing economic scene and the terrorist attacks. I am happy to report that science fiction and fantasy and mystery fans across the world have responded in exceptional fashion. We met our goal of $6,000, which allowed us to continue operating. We went way past that goal thanks to your response.

LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Rh Baby!)

The Eloquent Blotter contains witty and odd reports from police blotters.

1:41 p.m. Did that woman who tried to return the sack of coffee to the Sunny Brae supermarket steal it or not? Either way, no refund was given.

LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Jason!)

Welcome to our new Guestbar Blogger, Matthew Hawn!Discuss

A think-tank wonk has come up with an entomology-derived heirarchy of hackerdom. It's pretty funny, actually:

Professionals Hakus Superior
This nuisance has the characteristics of both Hakus Hakus and Scriptus Infanti. Hakus Superiors are normally highly skilled but do not like to show off, unlike Hakus Hakus. They can often disguise themselves as a company insider, business intelligence agent or even HR professionals. They become more dangerous when organised into groups. Hakus Superior is a stealthy killer: one bite kills.

LinkDiscuss (via Meerkat)

Found-art-du-jour: Cher Guevara. Discuss

Time Magazine's running a "Best Inventions of 2001" roundup. My favorite: The Fuel-Cell Bike.

Electric bikes have never been cool. After all, what self-respecting rider would let a battery do all the work? But fuel-cell technology, which uses pollution-free hydrogen gas to generate an electric current, could ignite electric-bike sales. The first prototype, from Italian bikemaker Aprilia, stores compressed hydrogen in a 2-liter metal canister housed in the frame. With a top speed of 20 m.p.h., the bike won't win the Tour de France. But it weighs 20% less than regular electrics and travels twice as far, about 43 miles, before it needs more gas. Now that's cool.

LinkDiscuss

Larry "People Versus" Flynt wants to send Hustler reporters to Afghanistan, but the Defense Department sez no, so he's suing.LinkDiscuss (via On Lisa Rein's Radar)

Vivendi (Universal's parent company) announces plans to build a full-on music-trading network that will support itself with advertising instead of subscriptions. Let's all party like it's 1999!LinkDiscuss

Michael Skakel, "a nephew of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, is charged with the 1975 murder of Martha Moxley, a neighbor who was beaten to death with a golf club." He's 41 years old, but wants to be tried as a juvenille. Link Discuss

A Belgian inventor claims to have invented a compression program that can stuff 20 DVDs onto a single CD. Link Discuss

The New York Observer profiles '70s songwriter Paul Williams.

“When I got sober, I weighed 187,” he said. “I weigh 137 now. When I’d run out of cocaine, I’d eat everything. I was a serious cocaine addict, and then all the empty calories in vodka.” How bad did things get? Bad enough that he wrote the songs for The Muppet Christmas Carol while on drugs.

Link Discuss

Hoax²: The Times of London spazzed out yesterday when it was revealed the Taliban left detailed plans for building a nuke behind in home in Kabul when they took to the hills. What the Times (and, presumably, the Taliban) didn't know is that the plans were a joke, a gag from The Annals of Improbable Research.LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Derryl!)

Mail-order sheep (real, actual sheep), just in time for the holidays. E-commerce has found its niche at last.LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Dave!)

Screenshots of old GUIs: Win, Mac, Lin and assorted.LinkDiscuss

A company promises to release software "within a couple of weeks" that makes iPod Windows-compatible. Link Discuss

"Beyond Contact," an O'Reilly book, is a serious study of the means by which humanity and aliens may be able to communicate, both up close and at lightspeed-laggy distances.

Monochromatic (single color) light is the signature of an artificial device. Naturally occurring light emitted by a star will always blur across many colors. The yellow-white light we see from our sun is actually a composite of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet light (plus ultraviolet and infrared light, which we cannot see). When we look at the sum of these colors together, the light is white. The laws of blackbody radiation, which we discussed previously as a way to measure temperature, govern this pattern.

By understanding these natural patterns, it is possible to engineer artificial signals that stand out against them; lasers are perfect tools for this. We can use lasers to generate an extremely strong and focused source of light tuned to a very precise wavelength (color). We can also use lasers to transmit extremely brief, but bright, pulses of light. The trick is to generate obviously artificial signals that stand out against the type of light normally emitted by a star.

Knowing how starlight usually behaves, it is possible to build an artificial beacon that, while it is weak compared to a star as a whole, shines brightly at a specific color or for very brief periods of time. The receiving party can then look for evidence of this type of artificial signal by splitting the light into thousands of individual colors, or by measuring the intensity of the light during very short (billionths of a second) timeframes.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Tim!)

"They Fight Crime:" an hilarious comic-book themed madlibs Website. Here's some sample output:

He's an ungodly amnesiac sorceror haunted by memories of 'Nam. She's a high-kicking mute bounty hunter descended from a line of powerful witches. They fight crime!

He's a gun-slinging flyboy dwarf from a doomed world. She's a sarcastic snooty bounty hunter with an evil twin sister. They fight crime!

He's an all-American shark-wrestling gentleman spy moving from town to town, helping folk in trouble. She's a ditzy psychic mercenary on her way to prison for a murder she didn't commit. They fight crime!

Link Discuss (Thanks, Patrick!)

Here are some screenshots (soon to be replaced by an interactive demo) of an incredible prototype interface for networked and stand-alone filesystems, called Looking Glass. The UI is built around the idea of an infinite plane of infinite resolution, on which bitmapped representations of every document in the system are arranged by their creators. You nagivate the system by scrolling in three dimensions (left/right, up/down, and zoom in/out) and by passing around rectangle coordinates that define a selection area on someone's Looking Glass. The demo I saw of this earlier this month just blew me away -- I can't wait until they put it online; the screenshots really don't do it justice. Link Discuss (Thanks, Rael!)

A whole whack of old-school emulators, ported to OS X, released today:

• Frodo: Commodore 64 emulator
• Arnold: CPC+ emulator
• Neopocott: Neo Geo Pocket Color emulator
• TEO: Thomson TO8 emulator
• RockNES: Nintendo Entertainment System emulator
• Jum52: Atari 5200 emulator
• Generator: Sega Genesis emulator
• MO5: Thomson MO5 emulator
• Boycott Advance: Gameboy Advance emulator
• O2Em Odyssey^2 emulator
• Modeler: Sega Arcade emulator
• Oric: Oric 1/Oric Atmos emulator
• SMS+: Sega Master Syster and Sega Game Gear emulator
• Handy: Atari Lynx emulator
• fMSX: MSX emulator
• TGEmu: NEC PC engine emulator

Discuss

The History of Interlibrary Loan is a parable for the development of P2P filetrading, right down to the legal battles, iconoclasts, standards wars and so on. I saw Daniel Chudnov of MIT Libraries present on this subject earlier this month at the O'Reilly P2P conference, and it's mind-boggling stuff. Here are his slides from the presentation.LinkDiscuss

Here's a neat proposal for an anti-search tool, a standard way of telling a search engine what your page is not about -- for example, we get tons of people coming to BoingBoing who've searched for "Nike Boing" on Google. These people are looking for nike.com, not this blog. With this proposal, we could add a meta tag to the page that says, basically, "This page is not about Nike." I wonder, though: I think that there's something marvellous about serendipity in search results (the Google link for us on a "nike boing" search reads "Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things: ... Monday, November 20, 2000. Nike TV commercial makes fun of disabled people," and I think that people see that and think, "Hmm, a directory of wonderful things -- gotta check that out."). I also worry about the legal implications of anti-search terms. If this were adopted, then Nike's lawyers may very well send us a nastygram demanding that we add metadata to stop our page coming up on searches for "nike." LinkDiscuss (via /.)

The real Tourist Guy is not a Brazilian business-man, but rather a Hungarian. Apparently. The strangest thing about this story is that it implies that a Brazilian business-man decided to impersonate Tourist Guy. Whacky.LinkDiscuss

R.U. Sirius, the founding editor-in-chief of three of my favorite magazines, High Frontiers, Reality Hackers, and Mondo 2000, has started a new magazine, called The Thresher. It looks great. Link Discuss

This gadget is the best way I've seen to play your MP3s through your car stereo. It's a little, battery-powered FM radio transmitter. Plug it into the speaker jack of any device (MP3 player, laptop, Casiotone, drum-machine, dictaphone, cellphone), tune it to an unused FM station, then tune any nearby FM radios to the same station and your device plays through your radio!LinkDiscuss

Dig these awesome homemade Afghani sat dishes, made from flattened paint-tins. LinkDiscuss (via Robot Wisdom)

Make your own ANSI-standard warning signs! This site lets you pick the graphics from a range of standards-defined warning-icons, enter accompanying text, and generate a printable PDF or order your own high-wear metal signage with your design on it. This is full of extremely evil and highly fun potential. Link Discuss (Thanks, Erik!)

Novelty tune jackpot! "Song-Poems" are songs whose lyrics were written by amateur poets, who then paid music-houses to set the poem to music, get up a studio session and record the poem. There's a great album of this stuff, called "I Died Today," and here at the American Song-Poem Music Archive, you can download dozens (hundreds?) of song-poem MP3s with titles like "Love Can Strike You In The Strangest Places," "Rockin' Little Eskimo," and "The Lottery Freak."LinkDiscuss (via MegoSteve)

American Science and Surplus is a classic, a decades-old tradition for denizens of the midwest and the catalog-obsessed (Toronto's Active Surplus is a pale imitation of AS&S's glory). The store sells everything, so long as it's cheap, and the product-descriptions on their website is by turns inspiring and hilarious.

Imprecision Tools 
Your writer spent over $20 a year ago for a 21 piece set of small tools: (5) end wrenches size 4mm to 6mm, (2) phillips screwdrivers #0 and #1, (6) slot screwdrivers 0.9mm to 3.5mm, (5) socket wrenches 3 mm to 5 mm, and (3) allen/hex head drivers, 1.5 mm to 2.5 mm. He was disappointed in the quality, particularly when one of the end wrenches broke on the second use. Now you can be disappointed for a fraction of the cost. We offer an "exact" Chinese copy of the set for a mere $5.00. It looks worse than it is. You can clean the burs off the socket wrenches, and although the steel is soft, it will be fine for light duty. The sample has (2) 4 mm wrenches and no 5 mm. We have no idea if similar errors occur in the other sets. So you pay your money and take your chances. We will accept returns if you don't get (21) pieces, but not for poor quality or count problems such as those described here. 32077 MINI PRECIS. TOOL SET $2.75 / EACH (was $5.00)

Batman Filmstrip
Not the kind you watch. The kind you wear. It's an 18" long plastic tie made of clear camera film with the batman logo repeating. Wear it around your collar with the elastic strip. Looks good with most capes. 30734 BATMAN TIE $0.50 / EACH (was $1.00)

Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

Walt Disney World has been wired for wireless! A Disney IT exec reveals that the Park has been seeded with some 200 802.11b base-stations, which are used primarily to offer credit-card approval to kiosks and ice-cream wagons.

(Aside: Boy, I sure hope they aren't relying on on WEP for security there, even if it is 128-bit; they'd better be working tunneled through SSH or similar)

They're also using WiFi to put census machines at the foot of the gangplanks of their cruise-ships during landfalls. When a passanger debarks, she swipes her room-key as she steps off the gangplank. When it's anchors a-weigh, the ship's captain knows exactly which passengers he's abandoning to starve on a deserted pleasure-island (or, conversely, who he needs to hang around for).

(Aside Mark II: Yes, they could put the machine at the top of the gangplank without wireless. That wouldn't be as cool. That is all)

Of course, all this tasty WiFi bandwidth is reserved for the private use of Disney's castmembers. Disney's worried that by offering Internet service to their guests, they'll end up with a park full of porn-downloading geeks hogging the old-people benches and crawling around looking for an AC outlet.

Speaking of, here in NYC, I've been going nuts with my iBook's wireless link and the MobileStar service at Starbuck's. There's basically a Stinkbuck's on every block in Manhattan, and I have yet to successfully resist the temptation to whip out my iBook as I walk past each and check my mail. There's a baseline of caffeine consumption expected from those who tie up tables inside, so I've been avoiding that except when my battery runs down and I need an AC outlet -- even so, I've been consuming on the order of 60 ounces of caffeinated beverage every day since I got here.

I may have to switch to the proliferate community wireless networks, if only to spare my stomach lining. Right now, I'm logged into someone named "Deb"'s AirPort base-station, which is connected to a RoadRunner cable modem and running firmware V3.64. This Deb person is presumably within 300' of my cousin's flat on the 11th floor of an apartment building at 27th and Lex. I assume it's in one of the line-of-sight apartment buildings, since I only get signal when I'm sitting near my cousin's window, and not at all on the ground or in the living room. Thanks, Deb, who and where ever you are.

(Aside Mark III: On the cab-ride in from Penn Station last week, I was able to log in to a different 802.11 network at each red light and check my mail) Link Discuss (Thanks, Raphael!)

Larry Ellison has declared his new mail-server "unbreakable." He doesn't specify why he believes this is so, but does hint that it has something to do with Oracle server storing all the mail in a big Oracle database. OK, I understand why that's profitable, but unbreakable? This ZDNet editorial predicts ruination in Larry's future as hackers take up his gauntlet.LinkDiscuss (via Meerkat)

Middle-aged Brit balloon-hobbyists are building a record-breaking, skyscraper-sized helium balloon and will fly to the edge of the Earth's atmosphere this summer, wearing ex-Sov spacesuits and big, silly grins.LinkDiscuss

Douglas Adams' widow has retreived the manuscript for the sixth and final Hitchhiker's novel from the dead author's harddrive, and we can expect to see A Salmon of Doubt on the shelves in about a year.

"We have pored over Douglas's hard drive. There were so many different versions of the novel.

"He would take it and then revise it repeatedly so there were many files.

"As soon as he wrote anything he would say, 'Oh, God that's terrible'. He was a very, very self-critical author and so had a lot of trouble writing. He was a perfectionist."

LinkDiscuss (via /.)

Jenn Shreve explores the culture of rasterbation, interviewing inveterate Photoshoppers and getting some nice quotes on the urge to bit-twiddle.

"Some people can see a message. Myself, I do it because it's fun and because I like to take these pictures of celebrities, stand them on their head, and satirize what I see to be a trend in society that I'm not really fond of: that people need to change themselves to be beautiful," Webb said...

"That picture of the World Trade Center man: People love hoaxes like that and love being able to create the hoax themselves. That sort of thing really takes off when you have the power to create that and send it around to your friends," Muchnick said.

LinkDiscuss

Internet-based businesses are fantastic at organizing their catalogs, warehouses and customer-relations, but they have a lot to learn about packing for shipment. This Wired News story explains why Amazon ships you a single CD in a box big enough to hold twenty of 'em, and what it costs etailers who use outsized packaging and fill up the empty space with bubblewrap or ghost-turds.LinkDiscuss

Christian Analysis of American Culture has a white paper on the alleged subtexts of Disney cartoons. This is tinfoil-underwear lunacy of the first water.

I, as many did, grew up with Mickey, Donald, Goofey and a whole parade of other Disney characters. Each provided a wholesome, fun-filled experience. Now I have to be concerned whether Mickey will kiss Donald on the mouth or do other things associated with gender perversity and distortion. And I now have to be concerned even about the subliminal homosexual expressions made on video tape covers from Disney. What kind of further destruction can Disney do? How is it we as consumers have lain idle for so long that a long-trusted giant of wholesome family entertainment has become a destroyer of proper, Bible-based gender identity? And they do it almost invisibly - invisibly at least to the children who develop character from that which they observe; invisible to their at-the-moment understanding, but not invisible to their long-term character development!

LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Matthew!

Stupid Google tricks! If you want to find terrible poetry in a hurry, search for "peotry." Link Discuss (Thanks, PNH and TNH!)

A talented speech therapist attended a science fiction convention with her sister, a longtime fan. The therapist observed something very like a fannish accent, a mode of discourse and a suite of physiological characteristics that are unique to fandom. After spending some time studying this phenomenon, the therapist returned to the convention to report on her findings. Here's a fascinating Usenet thread discussing the presentation -- are fans speciating?

We also speak in larger word groupings between breaths. This does notnecessarily mean that we speak faster; we just pause for a shorter timebetween words -- except where there is punctuation. She pointed out thatwhen Teresa Nielsen Hayden said she came from Mesa, Arizona, Teresa actuallypronounced the comma by putting a slightly longer pause there, while mostmundanes would simply run the words together. Mundanes slur a lot ofconsonents that we pronounce individually. We use punctuation in our spokenutterances. Sometimes we even footnote.

What we say in those large word groupings is also different. We tend to usecomplete sentences, and complex sentence structure. When we pause, or say"uh", it tends to be towards the beginning of a statement, as we formulatethe complete thought. The "idea" or "information" portion of a statement isparamount; emotional reassurance, the little social noises (mm-hmm) arereduced or omitted. We get to the heart of what we want to say -- ifsomeone asks us how to do something we tell them, not leading up to itgently with "have you tried doing it this way?"

LinkDiscuss (Thanks, PNH and TNH!)

Bruce Schneier isn't just a cypherpunk god, he's also an inveterate foodie. The restaurant guides he and Karen Cooper write are good enough to garner Hugo nominations, and chock full of fantastic foodie obsessiveness. I've never read any document quite like this one, in fact.LinkDiscuss (Thanks, PNH and TNH!)

Tired of having your cigars crumple in your pockets? Why not invest in a milspec, high-impact safety yellow plastic "armored humidor?" If only it were TEMPEST-hardened...LinkDiscuss