A real-life implementation of the evergreen arcade game Tetris was obtained by optically trapping 42 glass microspheres (1 μm diameter) in a 25 μm x 20 μm sized field under a microscope. Their positions are then steered with a computer.
The generation of multiple traps, as well as the computer-steering, is accomplished by the use of acousto-optic deflectors: devices that tune the deflection of a laser beam that have very fast response.

When I ask the Marines if they've seen anything weird, they laugh sheepishly, looking at each other. Finally, Sgt. Josh Westbrook, who sports a forearm tattoo of flaming baby heads, steps up. "They know they're being watched," he explains, "so they'll stare at you, and while they stare at you, they'll, uh, masturbate."

According to these Marines, they don't just pleasure themselves to freak out the snipers, but also to embarrass the female Army guards in the camp's interior. The weirdness doesn't end there. They've also eaten their toiletries and urinated on equipment. "The other day," says Westbrook, "one of the guys tried to do a naked cartwheel." In the most bizarre twist, Lance Corporal Devin Klebaur says a few have also been known to "put toothpaste in their ass." "What's the purpose?" I ask. "I'm not sure," he says, puzzled.

A couple of mad rocket scientists are selling a liquid-fueled rocket motor. "Build the world's fastest rocket car!" (and star in your own urban myth?)

1. How to be Electroclash. Don't know what Electroclash is yet? Retro subculture trend du jour that's all about vocoders, Giorgio Moroder, methadone, safety pins, glitz, space invaders, Pac-Man, leatherette, 80's porno, robots, robots robots. And the '80s film classic: Liquid Sky, image at left.

2. How to Dance Goth. Put your (black-fingernailed) hands up in the air, and wave 'em like ya just don't care.

3. The glamorous and highly competitive world of cat dancing."The question to ask is not 'Will my cat dance with me?' but rather 'Will I dance with my cat?' "

4. How To Be a Cribster: Preparing yourself to be on the MTV show Cribs. Excerpt: "You don't eat, sleep or have sex, you 'Get your eat/sleep/f*ck on.'... Things are not shiny. They are blinged out. ... They are not friends. They are 'dawgz.'... You may own any or all existing video game systems other than a Nintendo, which is for beeyotches and kids. However, you may only own NFL or NBA themed video games. (No one has ever said 'This is where I get my flight simulation on.')"

Discuss (Thanks, Frank!)

Manhattan federal Judge Laura Taylor Swain surprised Mattel with a preliminary finding this week that ruled in favour of the doll because she found it wasn't "a market substitute for Barbie dolls".

"To the court's knowledge, there is no Mattel line of 'S&M Barbie,'" Judge Taylor Swain said.

Like the movie, Debbie the musical isn't terribly hardcore. Its attitude toward sex is lighthearted, even a little earnest; there's none of the straightforward, stick-it-in candor that's become so rampant in today's culture. (This is a musical that's still making banana jokes, people.) One sex scene is peformed using well-choreographed dry-humping. A brief threesome takes place only in silhouette. There's a cutesy dance number using some flipping dildos, and one character nearly gets caught in flagrante delicto with a candlestick. I may be wrong, but I don't think I heard a single coarse word in Debbie's book, unless you count a "cock" or two. The cast is as pretty and effervescent as a page plucked from an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog — especially Debbie herself, who is played by Sherie Rene Scott. Everyone has nice hair and teeth, they smile all the time and they're happy as hell, and why not? They're in a porno musical that they can actually invite their parents to.

Exactly what the 15,000 Kenyans told Gothe in the survey, done in conjunction with Germany's KfW development agency, remains a trade secret. But he's happy to talk about the result: a vanilla-scented, golden brown condom he says people in sub-Saharan Africa are more likely to use -- which is the whole point of the project.

"Sometimes it's more intelligent to think about the social and cultural adaptation of the product -- for example, the color, the lubrication, the smell, the packaging," said the tousle-haired, jeans-clad 33-year-old.

Standard white latex just didn't do much for his African testers, it turns out.

"Why is the condom gold? Because gold means something very valuable," he said. "Why should a condom be white in this region?"

Link Discuss

In late May, for example, the satirical online magazine hosted a Web poll asking readers to vote whether Tunisia was a republic, a kingdom, a zoo or a prison.

Yahyaoui also openly discussed a tourist boycott of Tunisia in protest of the country’s human rights record -- a particularly touchy subject for the regime as tourism is a key sector of the Tunisian economy and one that has already been hit hard in the past year in the aftermath of 9/11.

Yahyaoui’s downfall, however, was probably his publishing of an online article, actually a letter by his uncle, Mokhtar Yahyaoui, a former judge, saying the Tunisian judiciary showed a total lack of independence.

THE INTELLIGENT UNIVERSE: RAY KURZWEIL
The universe has been set up in an exquisitely specific way so that evolution could produce the people that are sitting here today and we could use our intelligence to talk about the universe. We see a formidable power in the ability to use our minds and the tools we've created to gather evidence, to use our inferential abilities to develop theories, to test the theories, and to understand the universe at increasingly precise levels. Video (REAL)

THE EMOTION UNIVERSE: MARVIN MINSKY
To say that the universe exists is silly, because it says that the universe is one of the things in the universe. So there's something wrong with questions like, "What caused the Universe to exist? Video (REAL)

While defence experts said the incident could herald a new era of robotic warfare, international lawyers debated the legal implications of the surprising turn in US strategy: killing specific individuals in countries where there is no war.

"To have a drone that engages and kills people, that is quite a threshold to cross," Clifford Beal, editor of Jane's Defence Weekly, told Reuters.

"This is the beginning of robotic warfare. There is underlying tension in the military about using it. The CIA does not have any qualms. This is really the first success story of this system."

The Predator drone said to have carried out the attack has a range of 400 miles and would not necessarily have been launched in Yemen.

Me: So what happens next?

Headhunter: Well, standard procedure for them is to have two interviews. The first is a simple get-to-know-you. It's all personality, to see if you fit with the rest of the team. They're strong on personality. That'll be the easy one.

Me: I take it that the second interview is the technical one.

Headhunter: Probably not "technical" in the way you're thinking. The second interview is an hour-long presenation. You make one in front if the president and some higher-ups.

Me: An hour?

Headhunter: Well, it depends. The Q&A sessions could go long. I think one presentation took up three hours with the Q&A.

Me: Uh, do I get a budget for this presentation, or do I recoup my time costs by selling a "Joey's Interview: Behind the Magic" TV special?

Blue got another image boost in the 1960s, when McIntosh Labs, a top-of-the-line stereo components maker in Binghamton, N.Y., hired University of Michigan researchers to find out what color of light is most visible to middle-age males, the company's core demographic. Blue, they said, and McIntosh began putting blue-tinted faceplates on its pricey units.

Eventually blue's associations with quality filtered down from obsessed audiophiles to ordinary electronics buyers. "Consumers associate blue light with high-end gear," confirms Ray Weikel, the Logitech director of product marketing responsible for putting blue lights in the company's computer speakers. "Our engineers lusted after blue LEDs for a long time," he says.

The leader of the London-based Iraqi National Congress, Ahmed Chalabi, has met executives of three US oil multinationals to negotiate the carve-up of Iraq's massive oil reserves post-Saddam.

Disclosure of the meetings in October in Washington - confirmed by an INC spokesman - comes as Lord Browne, the head of BP, has warned that British oil companies have been squeezed out of post-war Iraq even before the first shot has been fired in any US-led land invasion.

Microsoft's FUD attacks on open source have not only failed, they have backfired strongly enough to show up in Microsoft's own market research as a problem.

This means we don't need to put a lot of energy into anti-FUD defending the open-source way of doing things. Indications are we've won that battle -- effort should now go elsewhere.

We must control service. We cannot allow our resources to be sprited away. We have a legislative mandate and a financial requirement...

You're not going to see books and newspapers transmitted in the next twenty years.

The "ballot box", for lack of a better term, is an approximatly 8 inch by 10 inch LCD screen, placed the long way, and leaning at about a 45 degree angle. Beneath the box and to the right is a "card holder", which was at best a bad place. I'm 5'10", and I didn't see it until I stepped back for a second to find where the card went. On first impression I was expecting a swipe-card situation. But it's a smart card, with a chip inside of it: it writes your choices to the card, so it's got to hold onto it. Not the worst, but mentionable.

On finding the location for the card, I stuck it in... and got nothing for a few seconds. A sticker on the top read to stick it in until the green light goes on. The green light is beneath the card's slot - so you can't see it until it goes in. Icky. Place it on top so people can see it.

I read of reports where people were slipping it beneath the slot, in the space between the slot and the box. I didn't experience the problem... but the elderly woman next to me did have problems placing the card into the box. Couldn't lean over and watch to find out what the problem was, though: that's polling places for you.

A real-life superhero in New York, who goes by the nom du mask "Terrifica," patrols the streets and bars to save young women from would-be seducers. "'I protect the single girl living in the big city,' says Terrifica, sporting blond Brunhild wig with a golden mask and a matching Valkyrie bra. 'I do this because women are weak. They are easily manipulated, and they need to be protected from themselves and most certainly from men and their ill intentions toward them.'" She draws explicit parallels between her own psychology and Batman's. She even has an arch-nemesis, a man who dresses in velvet and calls himself Fantastico.

Fort Sam Houston is a prime candidate for wireless networks. The San Antonio installation is home to the commanders of the Army's medical systems and supports various military training services, including battle simulation. Because other tactical groups often conduct tests at the site, a network may be installed for a week, a few months or even a year.

On top of this, the base has 18,000 computer users and houses a number of older buildings, so running high-speed copper or fiber wiring is expensive, impractical and sometimes impossible.

Wireless local-area networks based on the popular 802.11 standards emerged as the best way to expand the base's network last year because of the easy setup and breakdown, and the minimal disruption to the existing infrastructure.

However, such an approach is not as secure as its wired counterparts, something other government agencies have discovered the hard way.

John was/is also a protopunk when it comes to music. Check out his MP3.com page, which has some wonderful raw songs from his 1978 Portland punk band, Sadonation. They're on heavy rotation on my iTunes player. Link Discuss

The short book, scheduled for release later this year, may help Buzz Aldrin travel more peacefully. As blogged here previously, on September 9 the 72-year-old astronaut punched out a particularly aggressive Apollo-doubter who confronted him at a Beverly Hills speaking engagement. Bart Sibrel, who produced a film questioning the Apollo missions, demanded that Aldrin swear on a stack of bibles he had in fact walked on the moon, and pursued Aldrin down the street calling him a "thief, liar, and a coward."

NASA also recently published this web site with point-by-point counterclaims to Apollo hoax allegations.

Link Discuss

Bruegel was a sixteenth-century painter whose works have fascinated Rucker for years. As he writes in the 65,000 words' worth of mind-blowing book-notes on his site:

Encyclopedia Pictures: These are also called Wimmelbilder, for "teeming figure picture". The perspective trick is that [Foote, p. 147] "he appears to move his vantage point progressively higher as the picture recedes...In addition, he usually painted these background figures larger than they would appear under normal rules of perspective." I think another way of thinking of this is that he paints it as if he were inside a Hollow Earth, with the distant landscape bending up to rise high, so that you are effectively looking down at it. Maybe B. did go into the Hollow Earth!

In the aftermath of 9/11, the government announced in October 2001 that it would spend $9.5 million on new counter-terrorism initiatives and $12 million on an emergency preparedness strategy. It then added another $9 million to this budget a week after its initial announcement. The expenditures will include:

* $2.5 million a year, as well as a special one-time amount of $1.4 million, to improve the intelligence-gathering capabilities of Criminal Intelligence Service Ontario;

* $1 million per year and 8 new officers to expand the mandate of the new provincial Repeat Offender Parole Enforcement squad to include targeting individuals who are illegally in the province;

* $600,000 to develop specialized capacities at the Centre for Forensic Sciences, including DNA testing on a larger scale than previously carried out.

The government also passed the Vital Statistics Statute Law Amendment Act to increase the security of vital documents such as birth certificates. The amendments were given Royal Assent in the legislature on December 5, 2001. They increase the flexibility of the Registrar-General to alter registration procedures, and bestow greater discretion to be able to collect and disclose information for verification purposes or investigation of possible improprieties.

A cassette tape lets you know when it's dying.

It starts to give off the sound of music that would be played by a very small band in a suitcase, and then it sounds like that suitcase is inside another suitcase. It sounds like the singer is wearing little socks on his teeth. Consonants go away. Dolby Noise Reduction technology gives up, and if you didn't know what "Sussudio" meant in the summer of 1985, then there's no hope of knowing now, not when you pop in the cassette version.

Everything unspools.

Tonight you are feeling faithful anyhow. There's a tape in you trying to get out, and you feel like doing it the old way. You will stay home, by yourself, have a drink, and turn your attention to the bulky components stacked like artifacts in homage to bachelorhood. With the teak-colored stereo speakers large enough to rest your beer upon.

All the important cords are jacked into the tape deck.

Obsessing into the small hours, pulling record sleeves from the shelves, the LED display pulsing into the red zone when you record. You can nudge the knobs toward more bass. High bias, normal bias, basically you're just biased. You are very careful, like a doctor on the verge on the sheer genius.

(Or: madness.)

Novella: "The Bird Catcher" by S.P. Somtow

Short Story: "Queen for a Day" by Albert E. Cowdrey

Anthology: The Museum of Horrors, Dennis Etchison, ed.

Collection: Skin Folk by Nalo Hopkinson

Artist: Allen Koszowski

i replied to this message using my standard .Sig, which included my mobile number. my mobile number also lives on my homepage. i have had it there for years... it has allowed old friends to find me again, journalists to contact me and the occasional frightened GERD sufferer to reach out and look for help. as such, i don't intend to take it down, even in light of ian's abuse. some people will believe that i am asking for this, or deserve it somehow for allowing someone access to my phone number. i am not, and i don't. what ian is doing is still far outweighed by the benefits of be an open and available person, and he isn't going to force me to change that.

since then ian has called me as often 5-10 times a day. the conversations vary between fairly normal discussion of music or ian's marriage wildly abusive cussing and screaming, often within minutes. also, he cc's me in on mails that are generally about things and to people i have no knowledge of. sometimes, he scares me a little. but he is in britain and he has also reassured me that all of his threats are metaphorical rather than physical and he intends to have his day in court with me or my husband or both, rather than to harm me directly in some way.

i find it odd that he focuses on me so much. i don't why he does.

Who will he sue now? For starters, schools with food contracts that provide sugary and fatty food, and fast-food companies in general. His argument: Many food companies have neglected to inform consumers about just how bad their products are, have made misleading health claims about them and, worst of all, have exerted enormous pressure on their most gullible audience -- children. Eventually, he predicts, the states could sue to recover the billions they spend on obesity-related diseases (diabetes, strokes), and then the companies could settle, presumably for oodles of money, like the tobacco companies did.

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For a $250 entry fee, you can enter an essay contest/raffle to win a used-book store in Roseburg, OR. Owner wants store to go to a good home. She's received only half of the 2000 entries she was hoping for, so she's extended the deadline another three months. My friend Ed notes that the Internet allows "odd-but-theoretically-efficient" economic models, like raffles, to work on a large scale even for someone in a small town in Oregon.

"Unfortunately, we were storing it in our off-site storage facility, which is not climate-controlled, so the collection would have been disintegrating year by year."

Leggott says most of the classic items in the collection can still be found in the university's library. "For example, the first-edition books that were there, like the Dune, the Herbert books, the Asimov, Edward Rice Burroughs – they would all be available still today in other editions."

Leggott says Curry did leave the university about 4,000 hard cover books from the collection.

In the decree, the Panamanian government requires "that within 5 days of publication, all ISPs will block the 24 UDP ports used for VoIP and any other that could be used in the future (which could end up being all UDP ports)," according to a reporter and computer consultant there, and that "the ISPs will block in their firewall or main router and in all their Border routers that connect with other autonomous systems."

This "unequivocally decrees that all routers, including those not carrying traffic from Panama, but that might be traversing Panama, have the 24 UDP ports blocked."

The significance of the government action affects areas far beyond that nation. Due to its geographical location, numerous undersea cables connect in the country, making it a substantial hub for international IP traffic.

What Panama is doing is asking for the Internet to be redesigned and rearchitected in order to inflict a policy that relates to competition. The result is not the Internet.

It is important for the IAB and IETF to point out to the government of Panama that the service they are asking to be deployed is NOT the Internet. It violates the Internet standards, by incorporating an end-to-end protocol into the routers between adminstrative domains.

Link Discuss

"The Barbie® Fashion Model Collection unveils its first-ever African-American Silkstone doll, the fifth Lingerie Barbie doll. Barbie doll exudes a flirtatious attitude in her heavenly merry widow bustier ensemble accented with intricate lace and matching peekaboo peignoir. Ages 14 and up. Limited Edition."

Smart Mobs are the Slashdot effect applied to the meatspace zeitgeist. A squillion like-minded souls who don't know each other and will never meet pop out of the transmetropolitan brickface and break the white-noise balance of atomic viewpoints to speak with one voice, roaring a righteous YES or an adamant NO without organizers, without leaders, without manifestoes or forethought.

Enabled by close-to-hand, invisbly-ubiquitous tech -- the Internet, mobile phones, two-way pagers, blogs, the Web, WiFi -- they turn meme into deed. Howard walks us through the thousand facets of the Smart Mob non-movement, from Finnish wireless augmented reality gamers to the tried-and-true Japanese schoolgirl speed-tribes to earnest anti-Globalist Starbucks-smashers. We meet mystified (and sometimes delighted) (and always delightful) suits from Nokia and Japanese diversified zaibatsus and other bastions of traditional authority, who are watching their Frankenstein Monster take its first lumbering steps across the world.

Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), H.R.2281

1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) flooded American technology with punishing legal action, jailing scientists and destroying companies. The DMCA's "anti-circumvention" provisions have trumped the First Amendment and have given copyright holders a whip hand over every use of the material they sell to their customers.

Communications Decency Act (CDA), S.314/ H.R.1004

1995's Communications Decency Act turned the Internet into a First-Amendment-Free zone. Speech that would be absolutely protected in the "real world" was criminalized if transmitted over the Internet. After a protracted court battle, a Philadelphia Federal Court zapped this buggy code, declaring the CDA un-Constitutional.

Child Online Protection Act (COPA, "CDA II"), S. 1482, H.R. 3783

After the defeat of CDA, anti-freedom groups and their lawmakers launched a second salvo, COPA. COPA was a narrower attack than CDA, limiting itself to websites hosted by commercial entities, but no less un-Constitutional. The courts stopped COPA dead in its tracks, but today, the Supreme Court is deliberating over whether to unleash COPA on America.

Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA, "The Hollings Bill"), S.2048

This virulent Trojan Horse, written by Senator Ernest "Fritz" Hollings and friends appears to be a law that promotes technology, but it carries a deadly payload. Under this proposed law, technologists will have to come to film and movie studios on bent knee and beg for permission to ship new hardware and software. The film and music companies who worked to ban every innovative technology from the player piano to Marconi's radio to the VCR and the Internet itself would be in charge of all future innovation in America.

P2P Piracy Prevention Bill ("Berman P2P bill"), H.R.5211

Representative Howard Berman's (D-Cal.) P2P Bill opens a hole in the security of the American judicial system. Under this proposal, copyright holders are free to take illegal countermeasures against any member of the public whom they believe to be engaged in copyright infringement. A law that lets a group of people break the law sounds like an oxymoron, but it's worse than that: by affording a "right of revenge" to movie and music companies, Berman's code legalizes vigilanteism, stripping law-enforcement agencies of the ability to police attacks on Internet users.

CIPA, H.R. 4577

CIPA is a denial-of-service attack on schools, libraries and children. Under CIPA, schools and libraries that receive certain Federal funds are required by law to censor the Web, using filters provided by snake-oil salesmen that raise the cost of providing Internet access to kids while spuriously blocking informative sites that carry information that appears in our schools' mandatory curriculum.

...181 paragraphs; 3482 words; and 22411 characters. However even mentioning this is probably in violation of the text."

Stepping in next on the Guestblog is Clay Shirky, who I first met at the first O'Reilly P2P conference. He gave a to-the-barricades-comrades keynote that had the audience stomping and howling. He's promised to fill the sidebar with links to tasty old forgotten rants from the dawn of the Web. Link Discuss