The Anchorage Aces, a bankrupt minor-league hockey team, is up for sale on eBay.

Within hours of its second listing, the minor league team had received four offers on the Internet auction site, including a $2 million offer.

The West Coast Hockey League franchise filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last month. The team is more than $2 million in debt and owes more than 100 creditors. Last season, the Aces finished with a league-worst 19-44 record.

Link Discuss

RIP, Arthur (Spud) Melin, inventor of the Frisbee and the Hula-Hoop.

"No sensation has ever swept the country like the Hula Hoop," author Richard Johnson wrote in his book American Fads. "(It) remains the standard against which all national crazes are measured."

Melin and Knerr started with slingshots and named their mail-order company after the sound a slingshot made when its projectile struck a target. They branched into other sporting goods, including pellet guns, crossbows and daggers.

They added toys in 1955, when building inspector Fred Morrison sold them a plastic flying disc he had developed after watching Yale University students toss pie tins. Wham-O began selling the disc they called the Pluto Platter two years later before modifying it and renaming it the Frisbee.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Amanda!)

Nanotube pistons, tangible interfaces, and the invention of the mouse... all in my latest issue of Lab Notes: Research from the UC Berkeley College of Engineering! Link Discuss

Fellow wunderkammer-keeper Denise Czaja sent me this link to ultra-surreal flower prints by Dr. John Robert Thornton (circa 18th century). As Denise says, "the painting style of the flowers reminds me of Mark Ryden!" Link Discuss (Thanks, Denise!)

John Cage's 4'33", a lengthy silent track on composition from one of his avant-garde albums performances (thanks, Mark), constitutes an original work for copyright purposes. This means that other composers who include silent tracks have made a derivative work from Cage's silence. Cage's representatives have served producer Mike Batt with a legal nastygram asserting that he infringed on Cage's copyright with his 60-second silent track on the latest Planets album.

As my mother said when I told her, 'which part of the silence are they claiming you nicked?'.

Link Discuss (via MeFi)

Austrian driver nearly killed by a cow that fell 15' off an overpass just as the car was passing through it. Cow does not survive. Link Discuss (Thanks, Gary!)

Kevin Kelly (not this Kevin Kelly, this Kevin Kelly) wrote to tell us about the site he maintains at PublicRadioFan.com. Kevin's site has a massive and comprehensive guide to audio on hundreds of public radio sites around the world, with direct links to the audio streams, program home-pages and station sites. You can search by programming type, time and location. A little XML-RPC-fu and this could be the basis for a globe-spanning public-radio TiVo. Link Discuss (Thanks, Kevin!)

Amazing and inflammatory gallery of remixed wartime propaganda posters. I chose this one in honor of Canada Day. Link Discuss (Thanks, Mark!)

It all started with Raverporn's photo of two young women in lingerie, one spanking the other with an O'Reilly perl book. Joey, a legendary perl-hater, struck back with a photo of his own butt getting whacked with a Lisp book that Dan left behind when he moved to SF and went to work for the Vipul's Razor crowd. Now, Coderman adds his own contribution: a savage C++ book spanking. If only my HyperCard books weren't three thousand miles distant, I'd add my own contribution to the canon, yes I would. Link (perl), Link (Lisp), Link (C++) Discuss (via Ben Hammersley)

A hiker stranded in the Andes thought he would die, but then his cellular rang. It was a telemarketer calling to get him to top up his pre-paid plan. The telemarketer got emergency services on the line and called the hiker at regular intervals to make sure he didn't lose consciousness from hypothermia. When the hiker's battery died, he put it in the snow to cool it off and it came back to life. The article doesn't say why he didn't just call 911 to begin with. Link Discuss

Dog News: Weird, inspiring dog tales. I have never seen this many dog-related snippets in one place. I'm not a dog person, but who can resist a headline like "Man quits day job to pick up dog poop all day long" and "Prozac hailed as potential cure for aggressive dogs?" Link Discuss

Meg sez: "The Breast Cancer site is having trouble getting enough people to click on it daily to meet their quota of donating at least one free mammogram a day to an underprivileged woman. It takes less than a minute to go to their site and click on 'Fund Free Mammograms' for free (pink window in the middle). (There is nothing to sign up for and no cost to you.) The corporate sponsors/advertisers use the number of daily visits to donate a mammogram in exchange for advertising."

I dug around on Snopes and the About.com Urban Legends database and it appears that these folks are on the up-and-up. I think it's a rotten idea to publicize this with a chain letter (the original note asks you to tell ten friends and ask them to do the same), but the principle is sound. I just went and did my clicks; if you like this idea, why don't you do it, too? Link Discuss (Thanks, Meg!)

Sterling's sent out the text of the speech he gave this week to the CRA Conference on Grand Research Challenges in Computer Science and Engineering in DC. Mostly, it's about ubiquitous computing, a subject near and dear to my utility-fogged heart, and that stuff is extremely choice, in high Sterling style:

I don't need a "smart" package or an "agent" package. I don't much want to "talk" to a package. I don't want a package tugging my sleeve, stalking me, or selfishly begging for attention and commitment. If a package really wants to please me and earn my respect, it needs to tell me three basic things: What is it? (It's the very thing I ordered, hopefully). Where is it? (It's on its way at location x). And what condition it is in? (It's functional, workable, unbroken, good to go). The shipping company already needs to know these three things for their own convenience. So they might as well tell me, too. So I don't have to swallow my ubicomp like castor oil. My ubicomp arrives in a subtle way, as a kind of value-added service.

So the object arrives in my possession with the ubicomp attached. It's a tracking tag. When I sign for that object, I keep the tracking tag. It's mine now. Ho ho ho!

Let's say that it's something I'm really anxious to have: it's a highly evolved mousetrap. The mice in my house are driving me nuts, because I'm a programmer. I eat nothing but take-out Szechuan food, and everything in my house is fatally disordered.

Luckily my new, computer-designed mousetrap quickly and horribly slaughters all my mice. Not one vermin is left alive. That's great service, but now I'm anxious to get rid of it. I really don't need a super-mousetrap attracting attention, if I get lucky and a hot date comes over to help me play "The Sims."

Given that I'm a congenital slob, of course the mice soon return. But by then, I've already forgotten my mousetrap. Out of sight, out of mind. I paid a lot of money for it, but I already forgot where I put it.

This is just the opening of a long, funny and thought-provoking riff on what a smart environment means, and it's very good indeed.

But Bruce opens with something that I think is dead-wrong, retrograde -- something that he talked about during our joint keynote at SXSW, that I've been thinking about ever since.

The computer is a gizmo, and it's a great gizmo, but it's not an ultimate gizmo. Computer science has been the slave of metaphysics ever since Alan Turing invented the Turing Test, but a computer is not a metaphysical entity. It's not free of objective reality. Its bits are bits of atoms. The only ultimate gizmo is a clock. The clock never stops ticking. The clock has been ticking for the computer for quite a while.

It's not just that the pace of basic innovation has slowed in your field, although it has. It's not just that computers have lost the lipstick of their geek gadget romance, although they have. That which was accomplished in the 1980s and 1990s is under attack. There is a backlash.

This ought to be obvious to anybody who uses the Internet. All you need to do is examine your email. Where is Al Gore's idealistic, civilized Information Superhighway? It's a red-light district. A crooked flea market. A nest of spies. An infowar battlefield. That is the state of cyberspace 2002. There are fire sales on every block. It has anything but grandeur. It's decadent and sinister.

I've had the same email address for 13 years, and I'm not budging. That's where I staked my little claim on the electronic frontier, and by gum, I remember the Alamo and I ain't a-goin' to go. Therefore, my email in 2002 is full of 419 fraudsters from Nigeria. And unsolicited porn ads. And a galaxy of farfetched medical scams from malignant, unlicensed quacks peddling Viagra and growth hormone. With unreadable, unicode, collateral bomb-damage from the gigantic spam mills in China, Korea, Thailand and Taiwan.

I think Bruce is way off base here. The computer isn't a gizmo -- a particular computer may be a gizmo, but the computer is a universal machine. It's Turing's (or Von Neumann's) marvellous insight made real: it is as important to assisted cognition as the written word is. The fact that Universal Machines were constrained by their relative lack of power made it seem as though there was fundamental innovation taking place when machines got faster and smaller, but that was an illusion. Depending on your PoV, the innovation took place in Turing's day and stopped, or it has been continuous ever since, but the drop off Bruce describes just didn't happen.

The Internet is an insight as key as the computer. The Internet is a system for connecting anything to anything else. It is the sum total of millions of gentle-persons' agreements to follow some basic protocol, but beyond that, it is nothing more than a design philosophy.

There's a convenient way of visualizing the net: a cluster of thick "backbone" trunk-lines mated to one another with core-routers, ramifying into ever-finer pipes, down to the whiskers of copper that joins the "core" to the "edge" over the "last mile."

Like Newtonian physics, this is so much bullshit. Occassionally useful, but still: so much bullshit. The fundamental rule of the Internet is that any two points can talk to one another -- the end-to-end principle. What's more, anyone can join up, attach a computer to the network without securing permission from a central authority, and once connected, can talk to anyone else. The Internet's role in our world is to connect any two points. There is no "last mile" of the Internet, only millions (and soon, billions) of first miles.

The Internet isn't shaped like a tree. It's shaped like a bush that's contorted into Klein-bottle topology, a continuous plane whose every edge is mated to another edge.

On the Internet, we exchange messages with one another: please send me this file; please search for this record in your database, please display this file in your browser-window.

On the Internet your right to swing your fist never stops, because it only hits my nose if I execute the "hit your nose" instruction you sent me. On the Internet, it's my responsibility to decide whose instructions I want to execute.

Mozilla was designed for use by people who live on the net. It was written by people who live on the net. And because it was designed by the net/for the net, it has excellent features that would never make it into a technology designed by someone who gave a festering shit about "business models." Chief among these is the ability to right-click on any banner ad and select "block images from this server" from a pop-up menu. A little judicious right-clicking on the sites you visit most frequently and the Web is transformed in a kind of anarcho-utopoic marketing-free-zone. Where a decade ago, Mozilla's coders might have been publishing zines like AdBusters, today they're simply busting the ads.

This works because I can tell my browser to simply ignore the directives in the files that some Web server has provided me with. Those directives aren't orders, they're suggestions.

If Bruce is buried in spam, it's not because there are too many criminals sending out dumb come-ons; it's because Bruce has decided to execute the directives those criminals have sent his way. I don't execute those directives. I use Vipul's Razor and SpamAssassin; my inbox has virtually no spam in it (despite the 500-700 spams sent my way every day) because I take part in a collaborative filter, enabled by the network that lets anyone to talk to anyone else, which allows us all to aggregate unnoticeable wisps of effort that tracts the untractable. Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)

Time-Warner Cable is sending nastygrams to subscribers that have been snitched out for running open wireless access. The letter says that sharing your connection -- no matter what the circumstances -- is forbidden (I guess I won't plug in the next time I visit a neighbor's house, huh?), and throws a bunch of scare-tactic language about the possibility of an open WLAN being used to commit a crime, leaving you on the hook. Interestingly enough, the letter doesn't allege that anyone is actually using the subscriber's connection except the subscriber, just that someone might. It would be interesting to see what would happen if someone were to push on this and force Time-Warner to prove that anyone other than the owner had made use of the connection.

I hope that 802.11a mesh-networks without any connection to an ISP (other than at a major network interchange like MAE West) take off soon, and put these fools out of commission. The closer you get to MAE West, the cheaper bandwidth is, and when you're actually at a major interchange, the bandwidth isn't metered at all -- your only recurring cost is rack-space and service charges.

Meanwhile, it's time for wibos to continue their exodus from clue-free ISPs that frown on making best use of your pipe and switch to wireless-friendly ISPs. In San Francisco, Earthlink DSL allows wireless sharing, as does meer.net and Speakeasy. It costs a couple grand to acquire and connect a broadband customer; ISPs that try to keep broadband customers from enjoying the use of their links are going to find themselves in a pile of Northpoint-grade financial fertilizer.

Any other wireless-friendly ISPs? Post in the Discuss link. Link Discuss (via 802.11b Networking News)

The State of Utah's CIO writes that he plans to implement warchalking marks in and around his official buildings to alert state employees to the presence of wireless networks.

I'm the CIO of the State of Utah. We network over 250 buildings for 22,000 employees. We're also in the planning phase of deploying Wi-Fi access points at places where cops hang out so they can connect to the net during their shift (they use CDPD for low bandwidth ops, but need a high bandwidth option sometimes). In this kind of environment, warchalking has some important uses beyond finding a free net. I'm hoping to use th warchalking icons to alert employees to the existence of wireless nets in conference rooms and other places.

Link Discuss (via Let's Warchalk!)

Tim "O'Reilly" O'Reilly (heh) has written a hell of an editorial by way of introduction to the festivities at the upcoming O'Reilly Open Source convention in San Diego (which I will have to miss this year, as I'll be taking some much-needed vacation time then in Toronto and tying up some loose ends). Tim talks about the current state-of-the-industry, the fallacies that led up to the great crash and the enduring truths that survived it. Most of all, he addresses the ongoing clash between free software/open source advocates and the proprietary software world, as epitomized by the most recent, rotten FUD from Microsoft and their sock-puppet analysts.

The willingness to make scurrilous accusations ("open source might facilitate efforts to disrupt or sabotage electronic commerce, air-traffic control or even sensitive surveillance systems") is symptomatic of the disregard for the truth afflicting corporate America these days. The willingness to harness misinformation as a tool of corporate strategy springs from the same corporate "me first at all costs" mentality that led us to the Enron debacle. Just as Enron thought it was appropriate business practice to manipulate the California energy markets to raise its profits, Microsoft seeks to influence public policy to raise the costs of software and prohibit government support for a low-cost alternative.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Sara!)

Bruce Sterling points out these amazing Japan-based French interactive artists. This is pure high-weirdness cyberpunk g0ld. Link Discuss (via Schism Matrix)

802.11a cards drop to $70 after rebate. 802.11a is about 1600 percent faster than 802.11b (WiFi) and the chipsets are plummeting in price. At these speeds, 802.11a is well suited to home entertainment appllication (think of a TV that streams video and audio off a home server that you can set up anywhere by velcroing it to a wall) and more importantly, to providing point-to-point "wireless backbone" connections to build out alternative infrastructure to hang 802.11b "downlinks" off of.

This could drive the cost of WiFi cards down so low that they start selling 'em in blister-packs of 10 at the WalGreen's. Link Discuss (via Werblog)

The Boombox Museum is a wonderful pictorial history of the personal stereo, from the paleolithic 70s to the golden 80s and the decadent and declining 90s. Link Discuss (Thanks, Steve!)

Wired News follows up on NPR's linking policy:

Examples of such "inappropriate" links include "certain kinds of commercial linking," [an NPR spokesperson] said.

"For example, if Salon.com writes a story about NPR and links to us, that would be fine," because the online magazine wouldn't be using the NPR link for its commercial benefit. "But what wouldn't be fine is if someone sets up a business to link to us and profit from that" -- for example, if someone sets up an online "radio station" whose main content was NPR's programs.

Funny, last time I checked, Salon was a commercial organization. Well, at least NASDAQ thinks so. Maybe NPR thinks than unprofitable is the same as noncommercial? Link Discuss

Here's an excellent lay summary of the legal issues surrounding links and frames:

Whether meta-sites like TotalNEWS "recast" original works depends on the manner in which "work" is defined. Consider, for example, two computers with monitors A and B. Both machines are running identical browser programs. The browser on Monitor A is displaying the Cable News Network ("CNN") home page and Monitor B is displaying the TotalNEWS site with the CNN page in its browsing window. The two displays reveal two significantly different appearances. The CNN page fills Monitor A’s entire browser display and has the words "cnn.com" in the "Location Window."151 The same page occupies a slightly smaller window on Monitor B and is bordered by two other narrow Web pages (the TotalNEWS ad and navigational frames), and displays a different URL ("www.totalnews.com"). If the "work" is what appears on the screen, then one could conclude that the original CNN display has been transformed by making it a component of a new creation and TotalNEWS has violated CNN’s copyright.

The objection to this "what you see is what you copyright" approach to meta-sites is that the authorship of the target page has not in fact been altered. Monitor B’s browser is displaying three works, not one. The screen is neatly trifurcated to allow viewing of multiple Web pages, each of which can be properly thought of as containing an "original work of authorship." Two of the pages are created by TotalNEWS, and the third and largest by CNN. Despite the interactivity of the navigational and browsing frames, there is no suggestion that they form one document. Two of the frames are stationary, while the third can be substituted at will, and all three are physically divided by the borders of the frames.152

Link Discuss (Thanks, Stan!)

If you're a Canadian in the Bay Area, don't forget that there's a Canada Day party tonight at Kelly's Mission Rock in China Basin. I'm gonna try to make it. Link Discuss

The DMCA Index: Harper's-style index of DMCA factoids:

1. Amount Cornell University Library pays for subscription to "Journal of Applied Polymer Science": $12,495.00

2. Amount charged to University Libraries for subscription to "Journal of Economic Studies": $13.40/page

3. Number of people who find the $13.40 per page ironic: 3 out of 4

4. Number of Project Gutenberg Etexts converted by voluteers: 3,551

5. Current "Cost" per Etext based on 3,481 texts: $2.87 per text

6. Number of Scientists worldwide boycotting Corporate Science Journals beginning September 2001: 26,000

7. Number of college and research institutions "Declaring Independence" by publishing themselves: 200

8. Number of days DMCA arrestee Dmitry Sklyarov spent in jail: 13

9. Number of jails he spent them in: 4

10. Amount charged to taxpayers for those 13 days: $4,000

Link Discuss (Thanks, Fiona!)

The Guardian is running a multiple choice quiz to test your knowledge of Philip K. Dick. I only scored 6 out of 10. Link Discuss (Thanks, Tom!)

Teresa Nielsen Hayden's Evil Overlord Plot Generator for writers who need to get some action into their works has been automated. Follow the link below to get a kind of I Ching reading for your sf story, ideas and elements and restrictions that come together to spur your plot. I just can't stop hitting reload.

I figured that if I could teach the students some low cheap tricks for coming up with plots, it would give them something to work with while Jim was teaching them how to do it for real. Unfortunately, I later mislaid all my notes except for the introduction, so I'm not sure what I told them.

Here's the introduction: "Plot is what maintains a decent separation between the front cover and the back cover of a book. Story is what gives the readers the incentive to read all the pages in order. Plot is a literary convention. Story is a force of nature. And now that we've got that out of the way..."

I recall telling them some basic moves, like how you can get away with hokey crap a lot better if the story's moving fast and other cool things are happening, and how you can make two or three half-baked ideas look deceptively substantial by using them in combination. I fear I may have told them--this is like remembering what you said last night at the party--that it counts as originality if you try to do an outright imitation of some other writer but get it so wrong that no one can tell that's what you were trying to do.

Link Discuss (via Making Light)

Tor Books -- the largest science fiction publisher in the world -- is looking for student interns. Tor's offices are at near (thanks, Patrick!) the top of the Flatiron building in midtown Manhattan, a beautiful turn-of-the-century skyscraper, and their offices are a-burst with wonderful books, mad editors, itinerant copyeditors, and some of the greatest sf writers in the world stopping by for a free lunch. If I was a student in New York, voom, I'd be there like a shot. Link Discuss

Yoz "Internet Yiddish" Grahame (who insists that he is a far-less-than-excellent geek) has whipped up a little Web app that takes the specifics of a wireless access point as parameters and spits out a printable PDF of the wibo warchalking mark for it. Here's the one for mine. (Matt Jones adds that the back end for this was written by Dean Hall, credit where credit is due). Link Discuss

I usually save my ukulele-related posts for my uke blog, but this clip is too good not to share with the boingers. See what you non-uke players are missing out on? Link Discuss

Glenn Fleishman nails what's wrong with Infoworld's latest howler on why open WiFi is doomed.

The column completely misses the point of why community networks (or freenets as he describes them) exist at all: because people want them to, not as tools for business. Any business use is incidental to the notion of ubiquitous, free access. They are acts of will. Because they are communities of interest, the notion that they don't serve a business audience has no impact on their growth or utility.

Here's some of what Ephraim Schwartz wrote in Infoworld:

"If you need a presentation from your office and you had access the day before on Folsom and 10th Street [in San Francisco] and it's not there the next day, you are hosed," Pereyra said.

The point is, to get value from a Wi-Fi network, it must be reliable.

And here's a little pre-refutation from an old O'Reilly column I wrote:

Even as cable modem companies are knocking hundreds of thousands of subscribers offline, untethered forced-leisure gangs are committing random acts of senseless wirelessness, armed with cheap-like-borscht 802.11b cards and antennae made from washers, hot glue, and Pringles cans.

The Community Wireless movement is a fantastic example of how something unreliable can be cool, useful, self-sustaining, and utterly devoid of revenue potential. Wireless ISPs like Mobilestar charge a small fortune for network access at airport lounges and Starbucks in a handful of cities, and are still going broke, while a ride in a taxi through midtown Manhattan with an iBook will yield a new open network at every stoplight. Mobilestar's $60/month gets you a service that is only slightly better than what a mass of public-spirited (or security-impaired) WiFi users have accomplished without even trying. It's just too damned expensive to provide the kind of reliability that stress-feeding mobile execs demand. Meanwhile, the cranky, kludgey world of open 802.11 base-stations gains ground every day. It'll never be good enough for people who use phrases like "mission-critical," but it'll be just fine for the rest of us.

Link Discuss

Triptych: Tetris with complex physics. Link Discuss (Thanks, JJZ!)

This Sunday, the Berkeley Physics Department is auctioning off its old junk, including:

A reflecting galvanometer covered in Bakelite that's as heavy as a lead brick.

A four-foot long demonstration slide rule.

A Portable Precision Potentiometer.

Brass spectrometers.

This is just a warm up for a much larger auction to be held at the end of July. Link Discuss (via Oblomovka)

I hate those door-to-door magazine salespeople, especially the ones from American Community Services. They are as pushy as hell, and the prices are a rip-off. (Here's an article about some of the crimes commited by ACS agents.) When some magazine scamster came to a town in New Jersey, residents started posting warnings about him on the town bulletin board. He showed up at someone's door and before he could start his spiel, the homeowner asked him if he was "Mr. Williams." It freaked this guy out and he skipped town. Link Discuss (Thanks, Derek!)

I've posted my letter to NPR's ombudsman about their new linking policy. If you're thinking of writing a letter to NPR, here's a model you can follow if you want:

However, NPR is a respected news-agency. When it takes the position that permission to link can be extended and revoked, it creates a climate of uncertainty among NPR's audience who use the Web. NPR is failing its commitment to journalistic ethics in promoting this harmful myth. It is misleading its stakeholders and betraying their trust in NPR's integrity.

Those audience members who understand the true facts of linking lose respect daily for NPR. Those who do not are led farther and farther astray by a trusted source of information.

You owe your listeners and readers better than this. NPR should immediately withdraw this policy in its entirety and formally retract any statements that implied the necessity of permission before linking, and so serve its journalistic mission.

Link Discuss

NPR has revised its linking "policy." The revision seems like an improvement, but it's not -- it's just as bad as it ever was. NPR still maintains that people who link to NPR's site require permission -- the new policy merely conditionally grants that permission.

I'll say it again: The most harmful lie you can tell about the Web is that permission is a prerequisite for linking. There is no copyright interest in controlling how people reference your work.

The most ironic thing about this is that NPR maintains that the rationale for it is to maintain "the highest journalistic ethics and standards." Journalism is about telling the comprehensive and accurate truth. Here we have NPR knowingly promulgating a destructive myth, something not borne out by copyright law or practice.

People who respect NPR's journalistic integrity may be duped into believing this harmful lie (as was one friend who emailed me to tell me that NPR wouldn't have this policy if there wasn't some debate about whether there's a copyright interest in links). If they succeed in convincing their audience that there's an interest in controlling links, we don't have any basis for the Web.

I'm sending fresh mail to Jeffrey Dvorkin, NPR's ombudsman, to tell him what I think of this. I recommend that you do the same. I will also be withholding my donation from NPR until this policy is reversed. Much as I hold public radio dear, NPR's policy has the potential to irreparably damage the Web. I would give up a thousand NPRs for the WWW.

NPR encourages and permits links to content on NPR Web sites. However, NPR is an organization committed to the highest journalistic ethics and standards and to independent, noncommercial journalism, both in fact and appearance. Therefore, the linking should not (a) suggest that NPR promotes or endorses any third party's causes, ideas, Web sites, products or services, or (b) use NPR content for inappropriate commercial purposes. We reserve the right to withdraw permission for any link.

Once again, let's have a look at that:

• Therefore, the linking should not (a) suggest that NPR promotes or endorses any third party's causes, ideas, Web sites, products or services
  You don't need a link policy to acheive this end. Someone who makes a fraudulent misrepresentation is committing a crime; your policy is irrelevant to the remedies you could seek in such an instance.
• (b) use NPR content for inappropriate commercial purposes.
  Again, you don't need a policy for this. There are illegal commercial uses of NPR's programming; if someone breaks the law, the presence of this policy won't matter. As to "inappropriate" uses, who gets to define inappropriate? There are plenty of unauthorized, even impolite uses that are lawful. Prohibiting "inappropriate" uses is nonsensical, prohibiting unlawful uses is redundant.
• We reserve the right to withdraw permission for any link.
  You can't withdraw that which you did not extend. I don't need your permission to link to your site. The absence or presence of your permission is irrelevant. There is no intellectual property interest in controlling the contexts in which your work may be referenced.

Link Discuss

Excellent gallery of robot sculpture made from junk. Check out the working handmade pop guns, priced from $300 to $500. Link Discuss (Thanks, Kevin!)

Washington Post article about modafinil, a new drug that kills the urge to sleep. (Personally, I love sleeping.)

In trials on healthy people like Army helicopter pilots, modafinil has allowed humans to stay up safely for almost two days while remaining practically as focused, alert, and capable of dealing with complex problems as the well-rested. Then, after a good eight hours' sleep, they can get up and do it again -- for another 40 hours, before finally catching up on their sleep.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Kevin!)

Amazing -- slow loading -- map shows the known and speculative connections between spammers and the ISPs that support their mailing and product-marketing. Link Discuss (via /.)

Fantastic, exhaustive, well-written, well-researched history of Apple at apple-history.com.

Announced in September 1989, The Mac Portable was Apple's first attempt at a more easily portable Macintosh. It had a bay for a 3.5" half-height drive, and could support up to two Super Drives. Reaction to the Portable was poor. It was clunky, slow, had no expansion capabilities, and its active matrix screen (later backlit) made it incredibly expensive. It sold for $6,500.

I lay my degenerating disc and chronic shoulder-pain at the tiny rubber feet of this computer. Link Discuss (via Raelity Bytes)

Movable Type launches TrackBack, a framework to allow weblogs to ping each other when one blog references another. The idea is that when, say, a Boing Boing entry links to, say, a Scripting News entry, that Scripting News will get a ping that gives it the URL of the referencing Boing Boing post. So in addition to the Discuss link at the end of the story, Scripting could also have a link to page with all the blog entries that have picked up that link. Meta-tools like Daypop can scour these pages and build meme-charts, showing the interconnectedness of all blogs.

So Ben and Mena have released TrackBack -- an event which reminds me of the release of the Blogger API -- and now it remains to be seen if other blog-software vendors/authors will integrate TrackBack support on their own tools. I know that TrackBack sounds like an amazing tool for Boing Boing; I hope that Ev thinks well enough of it to incorporate it into Blogger. Link Discuss (via Aaron)

Matt Jones did an excellent interview with MPR's Future Tense yesterday about warchalking -- the practice of drawing hobo runes on sidewalks to indicate the presence of wireless connectivity nearby. Here's an MP3 of the interview. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jon!)

While you might have been enjoying the wonder of Mozilla's popup-ad-blocker, pity the poor AOL user. The version of Netscape 7 that AOL users are provided with has had the preference item that allows for popup-bocking disabled by the AOL/Time-Warner/Netscape mothership.

No sweat. Hack a couple of lines into your preferences file and Netscape 7 will block popups just as well as Mozilla!

Make a backup of pref.js. Edit pref.js with a text editor and insert one of the following (don't insert the expanations after the line of code):

user_pref("capability.policy.default.Window.open","noAccess"); -- will cut off all popup windows

user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_load", true); -- will cut off popup windows only when a page is loading

user_pref("browser.block.target_new_window", true); -- will "override popping up new windows on target=anything"

Save prefs.js and restart Netscape 7.0 PR1. You could try each one of these and see which works the best for you.

Link Discuss (Thanks, cel4145!)

Meetup: a new service where you indicate your interests and your location, automatically locate other people local to you with similar interests, vote on a place to hang out and actually, you know, meet up. As an Internet shut-in with a permanent computer-tan, I'm a little leery of meeting up with actual raw biomass in meatspace, but I suppose that there's some reason to hang out in real-life. Link Discuss (Thanks, Scott!)

The NYT reports on Detroit's only first-run theatre. Detroit is the model of a doughnut city (empty core, thriving suburbs), a Jane Jacobs nightmare town, and there's something about a major urban center with only one movie-house that epitomizes doughtnut-ness.

"I don't know if companies are afraid to invest in the city," said John Jennings, 38, a fourth-grade teacher sent by children to refill a popcorn tub during "Scooby-Doo."

"Thankfully, these owners were brave enough to invest," Mr. Jennings continued. "A one million population city should have at least six theaters. I think that was the number before the riots. And we should have some minority-owned theaters."

Link Discuss

The Inquirer reports that mobile radio signals are being jammed at the site of the G8 summit in Alberta (to stop terrorists from using cellphones) and speculates that the Mounties will also block 2.4Ghz emissions. More alarming is the speculation that the Pope's visit to Toronto at the end of July will evoke the same countermeasure. Blocking cellular and WiFi in the largest city in the country for a whole week is just Not On. Link Discuss

Amazon has come to Canada. I can't figure out if this is good news or bad news. After all, Canadian bookselling has been demolished by big-box retailers -- the Chapters/Indigo monolith. Chapters/Indigo started strong, opening stores that were big, airy, kept amazing hours (7AM to 11PM!), stocked millions of SKUs, and hired great people who were really knowledgeable -- not to mention offering deep-dish discounts on new releases. But it went sour. Chapters consolidated its national distribution, bought out competing distributors, and became a vertical, virtual monopoly.

Independent retailers were forced to buy books from their biggest competitor, who engaged in all manner of anti-competitive practices (Chapters' distribution arm had the exclusive on Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, and every store in the country -- except for Chapters stores -- was given an out-of-stock message when they tried to order it. Indie retailers ended up buying the book from Chapters retail outlets at the 30 percent new-book-discount to stock their shelves, putting money in their competitors' pockets). Indigo and Chapters merged, the number of SKUs plummeted, the prices went up, the hours were foreshortened.

The last time I was in Toronto, I stopped into the big Indigo and big Chapters at Bay at Bloor. They had empty shelves, minimal staffing, and the cluster of indie bookstores that had thrived in that neighborhood were starving.

Meanwhile, Chapters/Indigo has taken to paying its bills with returned merchandise (sometimes reordering the same books on the same day, a favorite dodge of the mega-bookstore), or not at all. Some American publishers now regard the Canadian market as a bad credit risk; fewer copies are shipped, the terms are tighter and nastier. A friend in the trade tells me that her credit-limit has been reduced to one dollar: she has to pay in advance for every book she orders -- that means that she doesn't take flyers on new titles that she thinks might take off; she just can't afford the risk.

Say what you will about Amazon and its relationship to indie stores, but its presence in Canada can't be any worse than what Chapters/Indigo did to the market. Perhaps a little competition will kick soil over Chapters' coffin.

I hear that Amazon.ca is in business with Canada Post. With luck this means that Canada Post will revise its goony package-delivery policies (when I lived in Toronto, they wouldn't even attempt package delivery to my place; instead, you'd have to go to the distant post office and queue up to get your books). And of course, by keeping the sales that formerly went to Amazon.com inside of Canada, it will repatriate (some of) the book-buying dollars that used to head south of the border. At least the money will go to Canadian distributors for Canadian editions. Link Discuss

We were offline for a couple hours this evening. Not sure why, but we're back! Discuss

Snowcrash -- the Swedish design firm -- is chock full o' super-leet Swedish design. It's like Ikea for people with an unlimited budget. Link Discuss (Thanks, Matthew!)

Was WorldCom a pyramid scheme? This essay suggests that it was:

Here's how the Pyramid worked, step by step:

1. WorldCom reports great results in the carriers' carrier market.
2. New entrants raise money, pointing to WorldCom's revenue and stock price
3. These entrants buy Dark Fiber from WorldCom, as they play Telecom Monopoly to build out their global networks
4. WorldCom reports improved fundamentals -- driving its stock price up further.

Then the cycle repeats itself:

1. More entrants raise money, using WorldCom's highflying stock price to justify raising more money at higher valuations in the private and public markets. WorldCom raises money too.
2. New entrants build out their own networks with all the capital they've raised
3. Everyone buys excess dark fiber capacity from each other.
4. Everyone's fundamentals and valuation improves, for a time...

Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

Dan Gillmore responded to my comments about corporate corrupting on his blog:

If financial corruption is this deep in the system, rational investors -- the people without whom markets will collapse -- will get out and stay out. And if that happens, the economy will go into a depression.

As I said, some of these slime who've ripped off their investors, employees and communities must go to jail. Then we need laws, with teeth, that deal with this situation.

George W. Bush said today he was outraged to hear of WorldCom's fraud. Nice to hear this sentiment -- but come on.

Here's my response:

Here's the thing. Everyone I know assumes that the Enron people will do minimal time and pay substantial -- but not destructive -- fines. Further, they assume that Enron's crooks have their money squirreled away in secret accounts. No matter how they're punished, their children will go to Ivy League schools without debt while the children of the shareholders and taxpayers they raped will be lucky to have a roof over their heads. No matter how they're punished, they'll someday walk out of minimum-security white-collar jail and put on a suit worth more than everything in my apartment put together and go out for a meal worth twice as much on their private Caribbean island while the people they screwed go hungry.

What's justice for these people? What's an effective deterrent? Life in prison? 50 years? Penury? Scarlet letters?

Link Discuss

TV Guide reports that John K. is busy making a new series of Ren & Stimpy cartoons! He hates TV executives (see my interview with him) so it'll be interesting to see what happens. Link Discuss

I did a TV appearance yesterday on TechTV's "The Screen-Savers" about NPR's linking policy. Computer problems conspired to keep me from blogging this before it aired, unfortunately. Link Discuss

Dan Gillmor blasts the corporate crooks whose transgressions fill today's newscasts, greedy bastards who milked billions from their companies, betraying their shareholders. Dan thinks they're aberrant, and that their worst sin is making investors believe that there's no way for the little guy to win. I wonder how aberrant they are -- these aren't fly-by-night operators; the perps in these billion-dollar, economy-destroying felonies are seasoned CEOs and CFOs, people who come from the ranks of Big Five consulting firms and out of world-renowned B-schools. These crooks are the kinds of talking hairpieces that VCs like to parachute into startups to get them ready for IPO; they're the kinds of back-slapping cap-toothed glad-handers who know how to talk to the investment bankers. Some days, I believe that the only way to get to the top of a venture-funded or public company is to check your morals at the door.

Rational people are starting to assume something that isn't necessarily true. They're becoming convinced that the system is hopelessly, irrevocably rigged against everyday investors by a corrupt cadre of insiders in boardrooms and on Wall Street, willfully assisted by regulators and elected officials who are either corrupt themselves or simply blind.

None of this excuses the greed that turned many of those currently rational people into greedmongers themselves. Every financial bubble brings out the sharks, and the smaller fish tend to swim en masse into the killing zone.

Link Discuss

Kinder Suprise Eggs -- chocolate eggs with tiny do-it-yourself toys inside -- are banned in the US as a choking hazard. Kinder-fans have therefore had to rely on smuggled eggs retailed in "ethnic" grocery stores or on friends returning from abroad. The Internet, though, has managed to put Kinderfetishists in direct touch with suppliers abroad, letting them score their sweet sweet contraband without leaving their seats.

Jim MacKenzie began selling the eggs here six months ago via his kinder-eggs .com site and says he lives "comfortably" off his U.S. profits. He won't say what those are but says he has 3,600 customers in his e-mail address book, and has sent as many as 100 cases a day -- 2,400 eggs a day -- in cases priced at $22.95. (Fundraisers get a break: $19 a case). Mr. MacKenzie, a Canadian from Delta, British Columbia, hires extra help at Christmas and Easter to do packing.

In Heidelberg, Germany, where the eggs are known as Kinder Uberraschung, or children's surprise, Linda Oldaker began shipping to the U.S. a year ago, taking orders via her Web site. Ms. Oldaker won't disclose U.S. sales, but she says she had five e-mail orders from the U.S. over a recent two-day period, including one for eight dozen. One day recently, the eBay auction site listed 74 people offering Kinder items, including 200 eggs available for shipping from "our video and convenience store just north of the New York State border."

Link Discuss (via Oblomovka)

Nice Wired News story about the rise of alterna-porn, medium-core erotica starring punk/goth/raver women. These sites are small, cheap, non-exploitative, profitable and a (comparatively) huge hit with women. The models look like real (pierced, tattooed) people, and members visit as much for the chat and the model-blogs as for the photos. I was at a party at Richard Kadrey's place a couple months back and a bunch of the Suicide Girls models were there; they seemed like pretty sharp technology-fetishists, indie filmmakers, photographers, writers. Link Discuss

Inspiring story of an anti-spam activist who sues spammers for fraud and similar in small-claims courts, collects default judgements, and sends collection agencies after the spammers. The column's author calls for 1,000 volunteers to do the same, putting a powerful chill into the hears of spammers. Link Discuss (Thanks, Glen!)

Lord Buckley -- my all-time fave jazz-poet and hipster loony (tied with Slim Gaillard) -- is the subject of a new biography! Salon's got an in-depth review. I tried to find you-all some MP3s, but no dice. Take my word for it, Buckley was a mad genius. You've gotta hear his hipster version of "The Raven:"

'Twas a real drug midnight,
dreary,
I was goofing weak and weary,
over many a freakish volume of
forgotten score.

When suddenly I dug a tapping,
as if some cat were gently riffing,
knocking rhythm at my sweet pad's door

And don't get me started on his condensed ooroonie biographies of Einstein, Jesus and the Marquis de Sade, or his sound-poem about a train-wreck, or his fabulous a-capella song, "His Majesty, The Policeman." Link Discuss

Disney is rumored to be building a third theme-park in Anaheim, with a Mayan theme.

After nearly two years, we've received a new update regarding the use of the new property down Harbor Street. Our source claims to have been convinced that the current approved project for the property will indeed be a highly themed water park themed after the six main continents of the world. The South American area may feature a Mayan temple adorned with six waterslides, two of which will be the near vertical dive type down the side of the temple. In Europe you'll have slides built into a Swiss Castle, and Asia will feature the Great Wall of China that will somehow house the lazy river. More on this as we find out.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Amanda!)

The Clay Brothers have built a six-foot model rocket that looks like a giant crayon. Gumby is the astronaut. Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)

BlogToaster: A web-service that spims your MSN Messenger account every time your favorite blogs update. Link Discuss (Thanks, schnick!)

First in-the-wild wibo warchalking. Link Discuss

New jargon, courtesy of the freshly borned warchalking movement: "Wibo." A wireless hobo. Link Discuss (via Warchalking)

Inexplicable Japanese musical asciimation of kittens that morph into penises. Helloooooo kitty! Link Discuss (via Desultory Engine)

The proliferation of cheap toy robot-dogs means a bottomless source of parts and ideas for robot hackers. This site has extensive information on transforming robot-dogs into a variety of things, including a semi-autonomous gamma-radiation detector.

The first operation was performed on the Megabyte II, aka, the Radio Control Mega Byte Cyber Watch Dog by Wow Wee International Ltd. [US$39.99] A radioactivity sensor [GeigerMuller Counter Kit; US$60] was fitted in his nose; a new brain [pic microprocessors] was transplanted into his spinal region. The new brain overides the Wow Wee program and MegaByte II now functions as gamma source radiation detector. His path is now defined by radiation concentration gradients. Watch video of MegaByte II successfully locating the source of radiation in a domestic fire alarm. rtsp://milhouse.cat.nyu.edu/docidog1.rm ; rtsp://milhouse.cat.nyu.edu/docidog2.rm See further adaptations and features refer to the DogReport

Matt Jones is live-blogging a demo/talk by the author, with even more high-robot weirdness:

* "the robotic genre of cinematography": a whole subclass of films where you see lab floors from a vantage point about 8 inches high - most famous example: mars sourjouner films

* Doing things like robotic dogs that illustrate the invisbile is about democratising and making widespread the "scientific method". Peer-review in pub lic. Allows people to ask questions of those who are making assertions and policy about the environments: "hey what are those dogs doing" "what do those cloned trees mean" etc. start a diaolgue rather than receiving wisdom.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Matt!)

Scientist discovers new "kitten-sized" monkey species in the Brazilian rain-forest. Under Brazilian law, landholders who dedicate parts of their property to serving as a wildlife conservancy can get tax breaks. As an added incentive, the monkey-discoverer is offering to name any new species he discovers after landholders who help preserve the jungle. Link Discuss (Thanks, Amanda!)

James "Chaos" Gleick talks about the phase-change of life in the online age.

Something happened starting 10 years ago that was really exceptional. The speed of change of technology is different now. It's qualitatively different. It's disturbing. We can't always appreciate that because our memories are unreliable. Our attention spans seem to be shorter. We all feel this.

But something very much like it happened a century ago, when the world suddenly got electricity and telephones, and underwent a sudden and dramatic change in the size and topology of the globe. So, it's happened before...

It's still slightly surprising to people to remember that as recently as 1994 most people not only didn't have e-mail, but they didn't really know what e-mail was, and it didn't occur to them that they were ever going to have it.

I remember it all vividly, because I started an Internet company in the summer of 1993. And I remember talking to my friends about it, and people thought I was nuts.

I would talk to lawyers, and I would say: I think it's possible that in a while, maybe in a few decades, every law firm will be able to send e-mail, just as now they use the fax machine. And my lawyer friends would roll their eyes and humor me.

Every profession operates differently now, because the online world exists. Every profession, and it's still just getting started.

Link Discuss

British? Online? Concerned about privacy? Danny O'Brien's compiled an excellent (and witty) guide to who can request what information from your ISP, now online on the STAND site:

To avoid this, the police and the ISPs (and indeed the phone companies and post office) use a form called a S29(3). Here is an example form (it's called a 28(3) there. Long, dull story.).

The S29(3) is one of those documents that you'll find either incredibly disturbing, or strangely reassuring. It's pretty good at ensuring that both sides cover their arses while understanding that they're about to do something fairly serious and potentially damaging to both sides. On the other hand, it shows ISPs and the police in a tacit arrangement to share customer data. (for a more detailed and sympathetic look at how ISPs handle this, have a peek at the London INternet eXchanges' Best Current Practice on User Privacy. It has a reasonably full description of the procedures, as well as much advice on how users can still preserve their privacy).

As we've said, ISP's don't have to respond to S29(3)s. If they don't, there's a good chance that the police will get Very Irritated, and may mutter something about Obstructing Justice. If they're serious, they could then go out an get a court order anyway. Police caught like this have been known to get warrants to seize whole racks of ISP servers, so from the point of view of the ISP, this is to be avoided. Most ISPs play along - but they have been known to say no if the police request is insanely disproportionate.

Link Discuss (via Oblomovka)

Merlin's launched an amazing new service: VerisignOff. The idea is to compile detailed instructions and tutorials explaining how to switch Verisign/Network Solutions to any other registrar, on the sensible grounds that Verisign's domain-name business is run by a pack of incompetent, evil shitheels who will sell your bought-and-paid-for domain to any zhlub who faxes in a bogus registration address and leave you to twist in the wind. Got any suggestions for switching? Contact Merlin -- this is a project worth contributing to. One more stone on the path to putting Verisign to death. Link Discuss

WiredBots: simple toolkits for making AIM and MSN Messenger IM bots. Link Discuss

This amazing recent study of broadband adoption shows that content is irrelevant to the broadband experience. Broadband uses crave the ability to contribute to the Internet's distributed conversation and want nothing more than end-to-end connectivity.

The online surfing patterns of high-speed users reveal two values that policymakers, industry leaders, and the public should bear in mind:

1. An open Internet is appealing to broadband users. As habitual posters of content, broadband users seem to desire the widest reach for what they share with the online world. As frequent searchers for information using their always-on connection, broadband users seek out the greatest range of sources to satisfy their thirst for information. Walling off portions of the Internet, which some regulatory proposals may permit, is anathema to how broadband users behave.

2. Broadband users value fast upload speeds as well as fast download speeds. They not only show this by their predilection to create content, but also by their extensive file-sharing habits.

(Warning: 212k PDF) Link Discuss (Thanks, Will!)

Matt Jones, inventor of "war-chalking" -- hobo-runes that WiFi activists chalk on the sidewalk when they encouter a wireless netwok -- proposes a set of simple symbols.

I'd like to point out that while I haven't invented anything quite so fabulous as war-chalking, I did come up with the blogger gang-sign. Hold out your left hand, palm up, then grab your left forearm and make a moue of pain as you massage away invisible RSI cramps -- dude, you're throwing signs! Link Discuss (Thanks, Matt!)

In his latest PC Magazine column, columnist John Dvorak (shown on left) calls me a "goofy looking schlub." That pretty much nails it. I only wish he'd gotten my first name right:

"Then there's the spike-haired Mike Frauenfelder (if that is, indeed, his real name). This guy looks as if he wants to wash a camel with cream cheese. Maybe if he tucked in his shirt he would be more respectable. Anyway, he says using the PC is like being stuck in a bad relationship. Yes, well, perhaps he should be a Mac user if he associates relationships with computers."

Link Discuss

eboy is the name of a small group of German illustrators. They have a new 500+ page, all-color book, which looks amazing, if these samples are any indication. Link Discuss

In order to stimulate lagging broadband growth in the UK, ISPs are signing up "content providers." Jeez:

"For us, the interesting thing is that everything in broadband has been focusing on speed," says Russell Craig, One.Tel spokesman, "but what we're trying to focus on is content as well. After you have gotten your emails faster, speed is sort of 'So what?', but if you can provide things like big music names, then that's going to drive broadband. MTV is the biggest name in music broadcasting so we really think this is a new stage of broadband."

What a load of tripe. You want to know why broadband isn't growing in the UK? How about the fact that getting a DSL line lit up takes three days of solid phone-calls, twenty hours of tech support, and requires you to familiarize yourself with ridiculous, unnecessary technologies like PPPoE and PPPoA (shudder) -- technologies that even the tech-support people at the ISP are unlikely to understand (and that probably will require three firmware updates and $200 worth of long-distance tech-support calls before your router or wireless access-point will get online). Even then, it'll be six weeks before they get to it.

There's this pervasive myth that what broadband adoption really needs is to be attractive to a kind of slug-like couch potato who needs a compelling reason to spend this month's Twinkie-and-Budweiser budget on data services. A "consumer" that, in William Gibson's words is

"... best visualized a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth..., no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections."

Half the geeks I know don't have broadband. These are the people who know exactly why a high-speed Internet connection is worth $50 a month but don't fancy half-a-season of "customer service" hell and inpenetrable "business-model" crapola before they get hooked up, not to mention the continuous threat of disconnection for engaging in forbidden activities like running a personal server or a P2P app. Link Discuss (Thanks, Matt!)

Is it the end of the world? How to tell? The Rapture index keeps a running total of Revelations-style events and lets you see at a glance how close we are to the End-Times:

1 False Christs 3
2 Occult 4
3 Satanism 1
4 Unemployment 3
5 Inflation 1
6 Interest Rates 1
7 The Economy 3
8 Oil Supply/Price 3-1
9 Debt and Trade 5
10 Financial unrest 3-1
11 Leadership 3-1
12 Drug abuse 2
13 Apostasy 5
14 Supernatural 1
15 Moral Standards 5
16 Anti-Christian 5
17 Crime Rate 3

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jenny!)

PriceWaterhouseCoopers have a new brand, "Monday," and accordingly, they've registered introducingmonday.com. They neglected to register introducingmonday.co.uk, and so some anonymous Briton has registered the URL and has put up an high-larious and childish animated taunt. Link Discuss (Thanks, Chas!)

Yamaha has shipped a new CD burner that can write images directly on the substrate, using unoccupied sectors. Link Discuss (via /.)

eBay is offering health-insurance to people who make their living selling junk online. Link Discuss

Ubiquitous computing and machine learning are globbed together to make an effective treatment for Alzheimer's patients, who carry around a little location-sensitive, environment aware pager that memorizes their schedules and gives them little reminders when they blow their buffers. I could use one of these right now. This reminds me of the "Famuluses," electronic familiars from Ian McDonald's indescribably brilliant novel "Out on Blue Six." They're also reminiscent of the tattoos on the lead character in Memento. There's something really compelling about the idea of a predictive day-timer. "People who did this activity also did this activity" -- Amazon recommendations for real life. Link Discuss

Ted Chiang's collection of short stories, "Stories of Your Life and Others," is out. Ted is a national treasure. He writes one story every million years or so, but each of those stories is a goddamned jewel. He's won two Nebula awards (I was at one of the Neb banquets where he received an award, though he wasn't, and sat at a table filled with three or four of Ted's agents; that's right, three or four of Ted's agents. The guy's never written a novel, has no plans to, but just in case, there's a whole queue of agents ready to represent him). He's sold a short-story collection -- this collection -- to Tor, even though he has no novel planned; an occurrence that's basically unheard of. I'd be jealous if he wasn't such an amazing, humble, decent guy -- check out his bio from the jacket-flap: "Ted Chiang lives near Seattle, Washington." If I could write as well as Ted, I'd be (even more) insufferable.

So even if you're the kind of person who waits for the paperback, even if you're the kind of person who doesn't read short stories (which is basically everyone except short-story writers, it seems), this is the book you need to make an exception for. If you've read all of Ted's stories -- that's not a very large number of stories, so it's quite possible that you have -- buy this book so that you can read the original story, "Liking What You See: A Documentary." It's worth the price of admission.

I can't say enough wonderful things about Ted. Tor used to have his fantastic story, "72 Letters" online on their site, but they've since take it down. Luckily, we have the Wayback Machine, so you can still read it. Give it a shot and ask yourself why you don't own an entire book full of Ted's stories. Link Discuss

Salon has a tribute to Talking Heads' second album, "More Songs About Buildings and Food." I ripped that CD to MP3 the last time I was in Toronto (where all my music is, more or less) and so I put it on while I read this. The article's bang-on right about this album; it's brilliant.

The album's juxtapositions can make you laugh. In "Warning Sign," Byrne poses a funny/pathetic/scary seduction that sounds like Arnold Horshack copping "Love Boat" come-ons. "Take it easy, baby, take it easy/ It's a natural thing and you have to relax/ I've got money now, I've got money now/ C'mon baby, C'mon baby!" He makes his move like a sweaty question mark. You can imagine the target of his desire backing toward the door thinking, "Oh ... my ... God."

While all that's going on, the music sounds as though it's being sucked into a jet engine. It's one of many Brian Eno moments. The intrepid producer and electronic-music pioneer, in his first collaboration with the Heads, blows an otherworldly breeze, playing with time and space, everything zooming backwards and forwards, coming together and flying apart. The partnership between Byrne and Eno which began here would continue through the Heads album "Remain in Light" as well as the Byrne-Eno side project "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts," the music sinking deeper and deeper into pure, pseudo-tribal rhythm.

Link Discuss

For four dollars, you can buy a copy of the Bill of Rights printed on sheet-metal. Why would you want a copy of the Bill of Rights printed on sheet metal? Here's why:

The next time you travel by air, take the Security Edition of the Bill of Rights along with you. When asked to empty your pockets, proudly toss the Bill of Rights in the plastic bin.

You need to get used to offering up the bill of rights for inspection and government workers need to get used to deciding if you'll be allowed to keep the Bill of Rights with you when you travel.

Link Discuss (via Made in the Dark)

Denise sez: "This artist/scientist? (I don't know, it's in German) took a petri dish of photosensitive bacteria and projected a negative image of a partially submerged submarine on it. The bacteria moved to the light areas of the image forming this." Link Discuss (Thanks, Denise!)

Slashdot reports that Xiph (the Vorbis people) is creating a BSD-licensed version of On2's video codec. For those of you who aren't free software or AV geeks, that means that the people who make a patent-free, royalty free file-format for audio have adopted a killer video format under the same terms. If this acheives acceptance in the field, it will likely kill the brutal patent-royalties associated with MPEG4 and other proprietary formats. Link Discuss

DoCoMo launches $16/month 802.11b service at nine locations in Tokyo -- I wonder if there's any competition there from free community wireless initiatives? Link Discuss (via Interesting People)

Loads of news about Walt Disney World from the Orlando Sentinel. For starters, Disney's tagging its "bottomless mugs" with RFID chips so that they can't be resold or reused during multiple visits.

More importantly, though: My beloved Carousel of Progress is reopening! The Carousel debuted at the 1964 World's Fair and is a testiment to the goofy astro-futurism of its day. The themesong that the Sherman Brothers wrote for it, "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow," could be the Official Extropian Anthem ("There's a great big beautiful tomorrow, shining at the end of every day, there's a great big beautiful tomorrow, and tomorrow's just a dream away"). Link Discuss (Thanks, Amanda!)