Up for auction on Disney's eBay zone: an original prop "gladiator tunic" from the movie Tron (also for sale, original, 1950s Mousketeer jackets! (1, 2) Link Discuss

SUV's aren't only hard on the environment, they're also dangerous to their owners, to other drivers, and to their owners' kids. Not to mention the whole, "I'm changing the climate -- ask me how!" factor.

Part of the reason for the high kill rate is that cars offer very little protection against an SUV hitting them from the side--not because of the weight, but because of the design. When a car is hit from the side by another car, the victim is 6.6 times as likely to die as the aggressor. But if the aggressor is an SUV, the car driver's relative chance of dying rises to 30 to 1, because the hood of an SUV is so high off the ground. Rather than hitting the reinforced doors of a car with its bumper, an SUV will slam into more vulnerable areas and strike a car driver in the head or chest, where injuries are more life-threatening. But before you get an SUV just for defensive purposes, think again. Any safety gains that might accrue are cancelled out by the high risk of rollover deaths, which usually don't involve other cars.

Ironically, SUVs are particularly dangerous for children, whose safety is often the rationale for buying them in the first place. Because these beasts are so big and hard to see around (and often equipped with dark-tinted glass that's illegal in cars), SUV drivers have a troubling tendency to run over their own kids. Just recently, in October, a wealthy Long Island doctor made headlines after he ran over and killed his two-year-old in the driveway with his BMW X5. He told police he thought he'd hit the curb.

Link Discuss (via Ambiguous)

Fascinating paper by copyright scholar Neal Netanel on compulsory licenses and P2P. The idea is that P2P nets are themselves valuable, but imperiled by copyright law, whose purpose is to make work available to the public, but which often fails in this regard. In order to compensate artists and promote use of file-sharing, Netanel proposes that ISPs pay a small fee per connection that is passed on to an ASCAP-like collecting society. The collecting society uses part of the money to search the web, to seek out Nielsen-family-like volunteers and to monitor sharing networks, and uses the data gleaned to disperse the rest to artists. Under this scheme, artists get paid, P2P nets flourish, ISPs have a much more valuable commodity to sell, and there's a strong impetus to develop ever-better file-sharing nets.

It sounds like a kinda far-out idea, but it's not all that different from the compulsory license that saved radio over 50 years ago, when broadcasters were expected to seek out licenses for each and every song they played, something too expensive to realistically undertake. The advent of compulsories -- which were not without their own problems, to be sure -- saved radio by requiring that broadcasters pay into a kitty which would be paid out to the artists whose music was discovered through statistically valid random sampling of the airwaves. Link (788k PDF) Discuss

EFF filed its comments on the hateful Broadcast Flag -- a proposal to turn over a veto over new general-purpose digital media technology to Hollywood studios, the same companies that tried to outlaw the VCR -- yesterday. The FCC got over 2,000 comments on the issue, most strongly opposing it. There's a reply-comment period that opens today and closes mid-January; hope you folks will all think about contributing between now and then (watch this space for more).

The value of any new technology is in large part derived from unanticipated, innovative uses, uses that spring up as the widest possible variety of technologists and end-users tinker, modify, and experiment to discover remarkable ways of extracting new value unimagined even by the technology's inventors. The explosive growth of technologies such as the Internet, the cellular phone and the automobile is characterized by a Cambrian explosion of innovation in each case. From the drive-in theater to telephone dating to Internet-based auctions, innovation has been a principal driver of consumer adoption of a new technology.

Innovation flourishes in the absence of stricture. Hot-rodders and overclockers both rely on open hardware to tweak their equipment for maximum performance, and even an average driver would balk at the notion of purchasing an automobile whose hood was welded shut. A broadcast flag mandate, particularly if it includes tamper-resistance requirements, effectively welds shut the hood of every DTV device. It insists that only authorized parties may peek at the works of any given DTV device, and requires that interoperability be subject to the prior consent of vendors who may have reason to discriminate against new market entrants. In this regime, which BPDG co-chair Andy Setos of Fox Studios described as an "orderly marketplace," competition is replaced by gentlemen's agreements between self-interested parties who seek (in the case of the entertainment companies) to control private use of DTV programming and (in the case of the technology companies whose protection technologies are chosen) to shut out their competitors.

In the absence of a broadcast flag mandate, all an innovator needs to know to build a novel DTV device is what she can find in publiclyavailable materials. She need not beg permission of a favored vendor for some exotic copy-control system nor submit to a private license agreement governing the scope of her use of that system. She need not add superfluous tamper-resistance measures that seek to prevent end-users from modifying her invention or lock out service-centers from performing minor repairs.

The broadcast flag proposal turns all this on its head. An innovator in a broadcast flag mandate world needs to build her technology to interact not with a simple MPEG file, but with a proprietary system whose only documentation and tools exist at the sufferance of a private licensor. She is bound not only by the strictures of the art and science, but by any conditions that the licensors with whom she must treat choose to burden her with. She can not rely on free/open source software -- which encourages end-user modification -- for critical components.

Link (200k PDF) Discuss

The rules of cricket explained: the pie metaphor is great.

Right. So the guy from the other team is called a "bowler" and he's trying to knock your pies down before you can eat them. He throws with an overhand motion, releasing the ball before he steps into the crease, usually bouncing the ball on the ground to make it harder for the pie-eater to pick up. To protect your pies, you have a bat, and when he throws the ball, you swing the bat and try to swat the ball away. If you hit it, you and the other pie-eater switch places and then you can eat one of his pies.

Link Discuss (via Kottke)

Great photo-documentary of a "human-powered" house-move, accomplished in the icy winter on trailer-bikes. Link Discuss (Thanks, Joe!)

2600 Magazine reports that an amateur photographer in Denver was busted for taking too many pictures of the cop-zoo surrounding the hotel when Dick Cheney was staying. The cops busted him, seized his camera, called him names and accused him of being a terrorist. Then they refused to turn over his camera or an arrest report when he was released. Link Discuss (Thanks, Michael!)

Jon Johansen, the Norweigan teenager who helped crack the crypto on DVDs so that he could watch out-of-region disks on his PC, is facing charges on Monday in Norway. I asked a lawyer-friend about this today: if Norgeigan law doesn't have the "anti-circumvention" stuff that the American DMCA has, what has Jon been charged with? It turns out that the MPAA insisted that Jon be prosecuted and that the best the Norweigan prosecutors could come up with is a statute forbidding intruding on a computer, so they charged him with hacking his own PC. Link Discuss

Japanese researchers have set the record for calculated digits of Pi, turning in over one trillion post-decimal numbers. Link Discuss (Thanks, Scott!)

High-freakin-larious abidged retelling of Beowulf in the style of Mexican fotonovelas, with speech-ballooned photos of celebs, politicos and other public figures. Link Discuss (Thanks, Eli the Bearded!)

Richard sez: "Theo Jansen has developed staggeringly beautiful machines that walk when powered by gusts of wind. Created to be 'art that evolves', he's now working on a way to store the energy to provide power when there is no wind. He likens this to muscles." Link Discuss (Thanks, Rich!)

I wrote an article for Small Times magazine about a couple of nanotechnology-related talks given at the fifth annual Alcor Extreme Life Extension conference in Newport Beach. Link Discuss

Stunning footage of optical camouflage technology at the university of Tokyo, where retroreflectors are used to capture the visual behind an object and LCDs paint it on the front. I'm not clear if this is actual footage of the tech in motion, or just video FX -- either way, it's croggling. Link Discuss (Thanks, Chris!)

Attention Canadian science fiction authors! Bakka Books is doing a second commemorative anthology to coincide with the World Science Fiction Convention in Toronto next fall. Edited by Claude Lalumiere, who used to run Nebula books in Montreal, "Open Space: New Canadian Fantastic Fiction" is open to original submissions from Canadians and residents of Canada. Link Discuss (Thanks, Nalo!)

A spammer whose gleeful interview -- where he revelled in the money pouring in from spamming -- was Slashdotted is now drowning in catalogs and other junkmail. Slashdotters have submitted his name to every direct marketer on earch.

"They've signed me up for every advertising campaign and mailing list there is," he told me. "These people are out of their minds. They're harassing me..."

"Several tons of snail mail spam every day might just annoy him as much as his spam annoys me," wrote one of the anti-spammers.

Link Discuss (via Plastic)

Consultants working for the Department of Homeland Security have announced that the Feds view open WiFi as a means of abetting terrorists, and say that they will compel the open wireless operators will have to close off their nets.

Homeland Security is putting people in place who will be in a position to say, 'If you're going to get broken into ... we're going to start regulating.'

Y'know, when I moved to this country, the Bill of Rights seemed immutable. There was a Constitutionally guaranteed right to anonymous speech, written in by the anonymous authors of the Federalist Papers, who went on to found this nation. But who needs a Constitution if you've got homeland security? Link Discuss

Karl Auerbach, the netizen who took on ICANN (the organization that governs the Internet's domain names) after he was elected to the board of directors and denied access to ICANN's financial, has given a great interview to Richard Koman at the O'Reilly Network:

Since when has efficiency of ICANN been an important goal? ICANN has been the most inefficient organization in the world; it's only created seven top-level domains in its four years of existence. And it only had elected members for half of that period, and only a partially elected membership. ICANN doesn't need efficiency; it needs to examine itself and discover, for example, that its staff is utterly out of control. Stuart Lynn in Shanghai got up and announced to the world that ICANN is going to have three new top-level domains of the sponsored type. Who decided that's what we need or that we need only three of them? Stuart Lynn did. He didn't consult with the community yet he declared the future business landscape of the Internet. He decided who is going to be on the main street of the Internet and who is going to be forced into the back alley. That's not a decision that arose out of elections and non-elections; that arose out of the fact that ICANN has an irresponsible staff that doesn't account to the board, much less to the public, and the board doesn't do anything about it. Insubordination is rife throughout ICANN and the board simply chooses to be powerless and not do anything about it. Elections are a non sequiteur. They have nothing to do with this issue.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Richard!)

Anil sez: "the former Project Rainbow has yielded Cometa, a joint effort by Intel, IBM Global Services, and AT&T to get 20k to 50k WiFi hotspots launched across the country, putting one within 5 minutes of everyone in a major metropolitan market. The best part? The CEO's name is 'Larry Brilliant.' I kid you not." Link Discuss (Thanks, Anil!)

I'll be doing a live chat on December 10th at 6:30PM Pacific/9:30PM Eastern on SciFi.com, with science fiction writers Geoff Landis and Wil McCarthy. The topic is ON THE CUTTING EDGE: two rocket scientists and a computer expert discuss what it's like to work on write on SF's cutting edge. We're up right after Marina Sitris, "Deanna Troi" from Star Trek: TNG. Link Discuss

What better way to say, "Irradiate your prezzies before unwrapping" than giving an Xmas package containing a talking Shrub doll that says things like "Freedom will be defended" and "I come from Texas?" Hmmm: talking Bush... Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

Evidence is mounting to suggest that bread -- not chocolate -- causes pimples.

That is the theory of a team led by Loren Cordain, an evolutionary biologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Highly processed breads and cereals are easily digested. The resulting flood of sugars makes the body produce high levels of insulin and insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1).

This in turn leads to an excess of male hormones. These encourage pores in the skin to ooze large amounts of sebum, the greasy goop that acne-promoting bacteria love. IGF-1 also encourages skin cells called keratinocytes to multiply, a hallmark of acne, the team say in a paper that will appear in the December issue of Archives of Dermatology.

Link Discuss

Check out the exceedingly swell cover-art for the Bakka Anthology, a book of short stories by writers -- including me -- who worked at Bakka Books in Toronto over the past 30 years. Reminder: the launch party is December 19th in Toronto at 7PM, and there are only 400 copies signed by all the authors (I signed all goddamned 400 of them last week!). Link Discuss

Jim sez: "Check this out! Squaredancing with old-timey tractors! I used to drive one that looked just like these! I still want one really bad. To drive around Palo Alto and all. It would be so much cooler than all the Ferarris and Lamborghinis."

The video clip is great! Link Discuss

Woman kills self at an "off-beat Berlin arts center," visitors think it is performance art. Link Discuss (Thanks, Gareth!)

John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the EFF, list several reasons why it's a good idea to join the EFF:

Thomas Pynchon on bad acid couldn't dream up the paranoid nightmares now pouring out of Washington.

Today we learn that the CIA has been given authority to kill any American citizen who is *suspected* of terrorism. Say again? You mean they *all* have a license to kill? And not just the other, but us. Summarily. Without trial. Yikes.

Then there is John Poindexter's new Information Awareness Office - about which I have much more to say in my next screed - which is being extended authorization to combine and data-mine every database, commercial or public, in a massive search for evil-doers and behavioral patterns that match up with evil-doing. Records of your buying habits, your medical problems, the books you take out of the library, your driving skills, your telephone calls are all available to the Government without a warrant or a suspect.

The Pentagon is working on a new version of Internet protocols called eDNA that would render digital anonymity impossible. (I'll write more about this in my next spam as well.)

The Homeland Security Administration is being given a 150 billion dollars, 170,000 employees and few legal constraints to become a massive internal surveillance force with vastly streamlined access to your electronic records.

Meanwhile, the Content Industry is working on redesigning the architecture of both the Internet and your computer so that they - and anyone else who might be interested - will be able to see what's on your computer and control what can pass between it and any other digital devices.

Fair use, the ability to share information with your friends, indeed - the very right to know - is being criminalized. With these legally ordained control methods, it becomes trivially easy to stop the flow of dissent since it might contain copyrighted material.

The bats of Facism have left the cave. Against this cloud of leather-winged horrors, there are few organized forces of opposition.

But the Electronic Frontier Foundation is there. Indeed, we're practically all that's there.

In a country where the corporations just bought the most expensive and incumbent Congress in history, few are standing up for the rights of the individual.

But the Electronic Frontier Foundation is still defending your tattered liberties.

I suspect you feel scared, hopeless, and impotent against this anti-patriotic betrayal of American principles. You can't register your opposition. They ignore your demonstrations. You could send them a letter, but the White House no longer opens mail because it might contain anthrax. E-mails are utterly irrelevant to the them.

Much of what is being decreed is profoundly unconstitutional. But nothing is unconstitutional until someone has proven it so in court. Someone has to be willing to plead the case for liberty. This is what EFF does. And we need to do it before the Judiciary has been completely subverted by Bush/Ashcroft appointees. In 18 months it may be too late.

This is why I believe it is very important right now that you join the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I would say that even if I hadn't help start the thing. There just isn't anything else like us out there. Without our technically sophisticated interventions, the Internet will become the most penetrating and through surveillance tool ever conceived. Click right here -> www.eff.org <- right now and join.

Discuss

Great NYT article about the compelling work of multimedia artist Gillian Wearing, whose tough-to-watch video work called Trauma is now on display at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art. Screenshot from the video at left. Excerpt:

"In one of the video's eight short scenes, a middle-aged woman sits before the camera, her face obscured by a shiny plastic mask of a sad-faced child and a blatantly synthetic wig. It is a laughable disguise, but her words are not funny. In a pained, quiet voice, the woman recounts being molested by her grandfather as a young girl every Sunday for several years, an ordeal that ceased only with his death.

The mask alters the revelation in a fascinating way, both buffering and intensifying its dreadfulness, creating the conflicting desire to hang on every word while also pulling back to decipher the visual power and artifice of the scene. The mask is delicately tactful, yet deadening. It respects the speaker's need for privacy, yet it executes a weird, surreal transformation, turning the speaker into a kind of freak... Yet the masks' crude but effective magic can trigger hope and giddy delight, feelings that often signal the presence of good art.

In these days of reality television and confessional talk shows, when Family Feud is played for real, Ms. Wearing has managed to do something new with the ever-volatile combination of people and cameras. Making a few easily discernible technical adjustments or adding accessories, she separates voices from faces, souls from bodies, inner thoughts from outward appearances in a process of masquerade, ventriloquism and displacement, drawing the viewer into a complex emotional web. At her best she slips rather raw chunks of real life into pristine envelopes clearly marked 'art' while keeping both hands on the table."

Link to museum web site, Link to NYT article (registration required) Discuss (Thanks, Reverse Cowgirl!)

Danny's posted liveblogging notes from Sky "Boingo" Dayton's keynote at 802.11 Planet yesterday:

Survey says: 97% of travelling businessmen would alter their plans to gravitate to high-speed access (high-speed access is more important to them than wireless access)...

Dayton compares it to early days of ISPs ("Nobody knew who was their customer and who was their competition"). Back then, everybody tried to do everything - owning the wires, the network, and the brands. Eventually each company concentrated in one area - end users are AOL, MSN, networks are UUNET etc, wires are the telcos. (Hmmm. Has this happened in broadband yet?)

Link Discuss

Recent radiotherapy patients who ride the New York subway systems are tripping the Geiger counters, resulting in humiliating anti-dirty-bomb strip searches.

They said they called New York's terrorism task force for advice and were told that doctors should give patients letters describing the isotope used, its dose and date of treatment. Such letters should also include doctors' phone numbers to allow police to verify the information, the physicians said they were told...

Patients may choose to avoid public transportation to escape the problem, the doctors said.

Last night, at AA Gate 49 at JFK airport, I was told that the seats that the waiting passengers were sitting in would have to be vacated "for safety," which translated into: "In the past 15 months, we have yet to come up with a better place to perform random anal probes than the only seats at this end of the terminal, so you will all have to stand for the next ninety minutes." I was also told that I couldn't sit on the floor against the wall, "for safety." I feel safer already. Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

The Canadian Supreme Court has ruled that the "Harvard Mouse" -- a mouse bred at Harvard for susceptibility to cancer for use in lab trials -- cannot be patented. Link Discuss (Thanks, Craig!)

Ed Felten's got a new solution to the copyright problem: just ask. Ask and ask and ask.

When companies make silly overreaching claims about the extent of their copyrights, don't just ignore them. Call them and ask for exceptions. Call WalMart and ask permission to tell your friends about their prices. (WalMart told FatWallet's ISP that that's infringement.) Call Turner Broadcasting and ask permission to fast-forward through the commercials in their shows. (Turner Broadcasting CEO Jamie Kellner told Cableworld that commercial skipping is illegal.) Call Adobe and ask permission to read their e-book of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to your kid. (One of Adobe's licenses prohibited this.)

Link Discuss (Thanks, Paul!)

Congresscritters are sick of hearing from their constituents, so they're shutting down or obscuring their email addresses and replacing them with forms that route the mail to god-knows-where. Of course, physical mail and Congress don't get along -- that's thraxpanik for you -- and their fax machines are usually out of paper. Link Discuss

Wonderful gallery of obscure and humorous LP covers, with some MP3 samples. Link Discuss (Thanks, Rupert!)

Pocket-size DNA detectors, globally-distributed storage for billions of users, and injectable bioengineered band-aids for broken hearts... all in this issue of Lab Notes, my research digest from UC Berkeley's College of Engineering. Please take a peek! Link Discuss

The Reverse Cowgirl writes:

It appears that, as we speak, 8,000 male members of the U.S. Navy are descending upon the girlie bars of Hong Kong in search of strippers named Suzie Wong. and, in doing so, they may be inadvertently setting themselves up for a possible terrorist attack by members of the no-no notorious Big Al's al Qaeda striptease terrorist posse.

my god, are not even titty bars sacred anymore? to what has this world come? a Hong Kongian deputy commissioner of police says they've beefed up local patrols, but, more importantly... his name is Dick Lee.

Link Discuss

Stefan sez:

The genome for the mouse is being published on several websites on Thursday. Here's you chance to get in on the ground floor of creating Red, White & Green Xmas mice, plump savory eatin'-mice, and freakish radiotelepathic hive-mice with gestalt minds and a overpowering urge to dominate mankind.

Link (NYT, registration required) Discuss

Gorgeous underwater QTVR pano's. Navigate in a full circle, or vertically.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jens!)

Scientists at a Pennsylvania State University lab are developing ways to use sound waves to chill food. Research is sponsored by Ben and Jerry's ice cream!

They have produced a sonic fridge that converts very loud sounds to directly cool a fridge containing ice cream. The researchers hope that their work will end reliance on gases that can contribute to global warming [and] have exploited the fact that sound waves travel by compressing and expanding the gas that they are generated in. (...)

Humans feel pain when they hear sounds of 120 decibels, a level typically reached next to the speakers at a rock concert. The sounds pumped through the Penn State fridge reach 173 dB, tens of thousands of times more intense than any rock concert. Sounds of 165 dB would cause a person's hair to catch fire from the frictional heating caused by air undergoing such intense compression and expansion.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Si!)

Hollywood trades are reporting that Will Smith may star in a film adaptation of Isaac Asimov's classic sci-fi book series "I, Robot." Alex Proyas ("Dark City") is slated to direct the Twentieth Century Fox project.

Production is scheduled to begin in the spring, with John Davis, Lawrence Mark and Topher Dow producing. Adapted by Jeff Vintar, "Robot" revolves around a society in which robots function alongside human beings in a servile capacity and are both harmless and helpful. The story line centers on a technophobic police officer (Smith) who is called in to investigate a murder that he believes was committed by a robot and uncovers a giant conspiracy.

Link to Hollywood Reporter story, paid subscription required. Link to People magazine story. Discuss

Last spring, Charlie Stross and I co-wrote a story called "Jury Service," an extremely gonzo post-Singularity story whose writing was more fun than any other story I've ever written. Charlie and I pitched the manuscript back and forth to one another in 500-1000 word chunks, each time trying to top the other. We have very little "meta" communication -- just sent the story around and rewrote what we had, then added our own bits. I can remember chuckling so loudly while considering what I would do with Charlie's latest challenge in an airport lounge that the security guard came by to ask if everything was all right.

Stross is amazingly fun to write with. We've put together another story since and will be writing some short shorts as soon as both of us can take a break from our novels for a couple weeks.

"Jury Service" will be published in four pieces -- it's 21,000 words in all! -- on scifi.com, weekly through the month of December. The first chunk went live this morning. I think that this is one of the most entertaining pieces I've ever worked on, kind of Rucker-meets-Stephenson-meets-William S. Burroughs. Hope you like it.

Two days later, Huw's waiting with his bicycle and a large backpack on a soccer field in a valley outside Monmouth. It has rained overnight, and the field is muddy. A couple of large crows sit on the rusting goal-post, regarding him curiously. There are one or two other people slouching around the departure area dispiritedly. Airports just haven't been the same since the end of the jet age.

Huw tries to scratch the side of his nose, irritably. Fucking Sandra, he thinks again as he pokes at the opaque spidergoat silk of his biohazard burka. He'd gone round to remonstrate with her after work the other day, only to find that her house had turned into a size two thousand Timberland hiking boot and the homeowner herself had decided to winter in Fukuyama this year. A net search would probably find her but he wasn't prepared to expose himself to any more viruses this week. One was quite enough—especially after he discovered that the matching trefoil brand on his shoulder glowed in the dark.

A low rumble rattles the goal post and disturbs the crows as a cloud-shadow slides across the pitch. Huw looks up, and up, and up—his eyes can't quite take in what he's seeing. That's got to be more than a kilometer long! he realizes. The engine note rises as the huge catamaran airship jinks and wobbles sideways towards the far end of the pitch and engages its station-keeping motors, then begins to unreel an elevator car the size of a shipping container.

"Attention, passengers now waiting for flight FL-052 to North Africa and stations in the Middle East, please prepare for boarding. This means you." Huw nearly jumps out of his skin as one of the customs crows lands heavily on his shoulder. "You listening, mate?"

"Yes, yes, I'm listening." Huw shrugs and tries to keep one eye on the big bird. "Over there, huh?"

"Boarding will commence through lift bzzt gurgle four in five minutes. Even-numbered passengers first." The crow flaps heavily towards the huge, rusting shipping container as it lands in the muddy field with a clang. "All aboard!" it squawks raucously.

Link Discuss

PBS's companion site for its Frontline: Merchants of Cool program is brilliant. It's full of interviews, supplemental footage, documentation about media conglomeration, and more resources that flesh ou the story of the trendmakers who find our best ideas, repackage them, and sell them back to us. Link Discuss (Thanks, Gatfishing!)

Pre-order Ben Hammersley's "Content Syndication with RSS," an O'Reilly book that introduces, demystifies and explains RSS for Web developers who want to use XML to syndicate the material on their sites. Ben is such an amazingly swell blogger, and a wonderful author and journalist -- this one's going on my Xmas list. Link Discuss

Finally, an OSX/Airport-compatible app that cracks WEP, the craptacular "security" in 802.11b wireless communication. Download and install, grab some packets and watch as the WEP password is sucked out of the bitstream. Link Discuss (via /.)

Danny is busily building out his algorithm describing, from beginning to end, the process for washing dishes. I imagine that this is an exercise to clarify his own thinking, but it could sure come in handy if he were to ever, i.e., invent an anthropomorphic robot that was, i.e., water-proof.

The Current Item and the Queued Item are both washed. This involves completing a series of acts. The item has not been cleaned unless all of these acts have been completed. Some acts may be performed on a Queued Item, some acts may be performed on the Current Item, some may be performed on both. Acts vary according to the item. Acts should follow the order in which they are listed.

Cutlery
1. Dipped and shaken under basin water - Queued, Current
2. Areas of uncleanliness observed - Queued, Current
3. Unclean areas scrubbed clean - Current
4. Re-dipped - Current
5. Rinsed under cold tap - Current

Pots, Pans, Cups, Mugs
1. Dipped and shaken under basin water - Queued, Current 2. Areas of uncleanliness observed - Queued, Current
3. Handle (if any) of item scoured - Current
4. Outside bottom of item scoured - Current
5. Outside sides of item scoured - Current
6. Inside bottom and sides of item scoured - Current
7. Remaining unclean areas scrubbed clean - Current
8. Re-dipped - Current
9. Rinsed under cold tap - Current

Link Discuss (via Oblomovka)

The phone-jacks in your home output free, unmetered electricity, around the clock. "Telco Powered Products" charge themselves gratis off your extensions: laterns, razors, car-starters and more (er, including a vibrator). Link Discuss (Thanks, Chris!)

The Disney corporation's IT department has banned all PDAs except RIM Blackberries (ugh) and Compaq iPaqs (I'm assuming that installing *nix on your iPaq is out). Link Discuss

Thomas sez: "J.K. Rowling is auctioning off a card containing 93 random words from the fifth Harry Potter novel (with the proceeds benefitting children's literacy). A fan site has made itself into a non-profit corporation for the occasion, hoping that, if all its readers make a small donation, then perhaps they can collectively win the card and post the 93 words to their site, while simultaneously supporting a charitable cause." Link Discuss (Thanks, Thomas!)

Finland's Supreme Court has held that taxi drivers must pay royalties for music played in their cars while they're chauffeuring passengers -- even radio songs. Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

Seth "crypto-activist" Finkelstein has written a great piece on the current process to reform the hateful Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which EFF published today. Called "How To Win (DMCA) Exemptions and Influence Policy," Seth's essay leays out the hows and whys of advocating for changes to the DMCA:

For example, consider censorware blacklists. The "use case" is research, investigation, and so, regarding what censorware in fact has on the blacklists. But the "class of works" is "compilations consisting of lists of websites blocked by filtering software applications".

So don't talk about fair-use as a principle in itself. Rather, focus on practical problems affecting a specific "class of works", as in perhaps "public domain works released on CSS-protected DVD disks".

This is not a situation where quantity (whether votes or money) is the key aspect. Rather, it's a case where a detailed, well-constructed, presentation can have an effect. And this is why an ordinary person can make a difference here. Better, if done properly, the requirements can even play into a technical person's strengths in formulating an argument which needs to meet certain specifications. It's just critical to keep in mind that this concerns empirical effects, not ideological axioms.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Fred!)

We live in an age of wonders:

Infant rats are being decapitated and their heads grafted onto the thighs of adults by researchers in Japan.

If kept cool while the blood flow is stopped, a transplanted brain can develop as normal for at least three weeks, and the mouth of the head will move, as if it is trying to drink milk, the team reports.

(Undying gratitude to the first person to find a pic and post the URL to the QuickTopic!) Link Discuss (Thanks, Andrew!)

More Homeland Security Act madness: The Pentagon now requires public high schools to turn over the names of their students for recruiting-purposes. Schools that fail to comply are de-funded. Link Discuss (Thanks, Scott!)

Now that Buy Nothing Day is over, it's time to melt some plastic. When you cash that fat check you're getting from the investment deal with Mobutu Sese Seko's widow, don't spend it all on one website. Instead, consider the following geek luxuries for your holiday shopping list. (pricerange key: $ = starts at around a hundred bucks, $$$$ = at least one G.)

(1) Catrina Gregory jewelry: hot metal for men and women. Silver, gold, and platinum. My fave: double happiness knuckle ring, at left. ($-$$$$) UPDATE: bOINGbOING readers who order on or before Friday, Dec. 5th receive an exclusive 25% off! To get the discount, you must contact Catrina directly via e-mail, cg [at] catrinagregory.com. Cool!

(2) Christian Dior iPod case: Excessive and essential. Hedi Slimane designed this sleek leather case for the world's coolest portable digital music device. Buy online at colette.fr or dior.com. ($$)

(3) Zero-Halliburton laptop cases: Drop 'em from a plane, loaded, and your notebook would probably survive. Durable, functional, sexy. ($$$)

(4) Casio Elixim Digital Camera: Adorably anorexic digital camera. Very pocket-sized. ($$)

(5) Paintings by Miltos Manetas: Still-lifes of laptops, joysticks, or neurotic heaps of cables and routers. Manetas is a visionary. His large-scale works on canvas will change the way you feel about technology and your relationship to it. This one hangs in my room. This is another favorite, and so is the one depicting two Playstations PlayStation and N64 controllers as Madonna and Child (shown at left).($$$$)

Discuss

Robotics Institute scientists at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) are creating a child-friendly, toy version of the Mars Rover.

The researchers hope to release a consumer-ready product within two years, and hope to keep the price below $500 per bot:

"If we can make a robot that is inexpensive enough that people can actually afford it, and we can put it in the real world, kids will have available a new tool for creativity,"[said Illah Nourbakhsh, assistant professor of robotics at CMU]."We want a robot that is expressive enough and interesting enough to play with."

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cypherpunk writes:

This article describes FatWallet's response to the use of the DMCA to force the site to take down a posting giving advance information about "Black Friday" (day after Thanksgiving) sale pricing. Under the DMCA, frivolous or false assertions of copyright infringement can be punished by having to pay the legal fees used to contest the claims. FatWallet is proceeding under the terms of the DMCA to sue the companies which made it take down the price information.

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Stefan sez:

A last-minute amendment to the Homeland Security bill is going to make it tough to buy and transport the larger model rocket motors.

The new restrictions are intended to keep Ammonium Percholorate, a powerful oxidizer, out of the hands of terrorists. But the AP in "composite" rocket motors is bound up in a rubbery mixture that's a pain to ignite, much less make go boom."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)

John Gilmore is calling for an early demonstration of how bad convicted felon Poindexter's Total Information Awareness campaign will be. This demonstration will consist of the compiling of as much personal, lawfully obtained info as we can about John M. and Linda Poindexter of 10 Barrington Fare, Rockville, MD, 20850, +1 301 424 6613.

It would be good to have an early public demonstration of just how bad life could become for such targeted citizens. While ratfink's system is probably not working yet, and a large part of it is classified, much of it can be manually simulated for demonstration purposes. Public records can be manually searched and then posted to the net by people who happen to be looking there for something else. Many Internet public records search sites also exist; try searching for "People finder". (Matt Smith at matt.smith@sfweekly.com has offered to "publish anything that readers can convincingly claim to have obtained legally".) Photographs and videos of the target, their house, car, family, and associates, can be made and circulated to demonstrate facial recognition techniques.

Employees at various businesses and organizations such as airlines, credit card authorizers, rental-car agencies, shops, gyms, schools, tollbooths, garbage services, banks, taxis, honest civil servants and police officers, and restaurants could demonstrate denial of service to such targeted people. A simple "We won't serve YOUR KIND OF PEOPLE" would do, as was practiced on black people for many decades. More subtle forms of denial of service are possible, such as "You've been 'randomly' selected as a security risk, I'll have to insist that [some degrading thing happen to you]". Or merely, "I can't seem to get this credit card to work, sir, and those twenties certainly look counterfeit to me."

Those with access to DMV and criminal records databases, credit card records, telephone bills, tax records, birth and death and marriage records, medical records, and similar personally identifiable databases could combine their information publicly to assist in the demonstration. This is how TIA is intended to work -- the government would get privileged access to all these databases, access that the rest of us do not normally have. But some of us have access to various of these databases today, and can demonstrate how the TIA system might work.

Link Discuss (via Aaron Swartz)

The Brunching Shuttlecocks scores again with an automated, madlibs-based Alanis Morissette lyrics generator:

I Think family members are gonna drive us all crazy
And laptops make me feel like a child
I Think gadgets will eventually be the downfall of civilization
But what can you do? I said what can you do?

Like a black rain, beating down on me
Like a Shelley line, which won't let go of my brain
Like Winona's ass, it is in my head
Blame it on myself
Blame it on myself
Blame it on myself

Link Discuss (Thanks, Kate!)

Scan of a 1970s article describing the construction of one of the earliest IBM computer-centric, purpose-built campus. Amazing to read the breathless, radical descriptions of what is recognizable, even at 30 years' distance, as a humble cube-farm.

There were apparent contradictions in some of the expressed requirements and preferences:

* a desire for individual offices, and also a need to accomodate open planning

* a desire for individually customized work spaces, an also a need for aggregate work areas and flexibility for future change;

* a requirement for closely grouped work areas near central services, also a desire for a sense of small scale and identity;

* a need to provide major centralized services fro 2000 people, and also a strong desire for an informal, noninstitutional setting.

Link (3.2MB PDF) Discuss (Thanks, Eli the Bearded!)

Britons are evading fuel taxes by running their diesel vehicles on biodiesel: cooking oil. HM's taxman has responded by commissioning a squad of "chipper" detectors who cruise the roads, sniffing for diesels that smell like fry-traps. Link Discuss (Thanks, Michael!)

Toronto's Bakka Books is one of the oldest science fiction bookstores in the world, open since 1972. More than just a traditional center for sf readers, Bakka has also been home to many writers who worked behind the counter over the years. To celebrate Bakka's 30th anniversary, all we writers who worked there have written original short stories for the BAKKANTHOLOGY, a limited-edition anthology signed by all of its contributors. The launch party is on December 19th, and you can buy your copy at the store or by mail-order.

Contents:

Forward by Spider Robinson
Introduction by Mark Askwith
Bakka history by Kristen Pederson Chew
Afterword by John Rose

And BRAND-NEW STORIES by:

Robert J. Sawyer
Tanya Huff
Fiona Patton
Michelle Sagara West
Tara Tallan
Cory Doctorow
Nalo Hopkinson
Chris Szego
Ed Greenwood

Link Discuss

Scientific American has assembled a list of more than 30 low-cost, nerd-friendly Xmas gifts.

Aged Well
Fossils, skulls, and large insects are among the offerings at Maxilla and Mandible online. When we looked, for instance, the 350 million-year-old fossil trilobite was a steal at $56. Also available was a modern wildebeast skull with graceful black horns ($360), and an impressive specimen of a giant scorpion ($100). Prices and offerings vary...

Titanic Coal
Need to fill stockings for bad children, large and small? Well, for a mere $21.95 you can give them a piece of coal from the engine room of the most famous shipwreck, the sinking of the Titanic. Each lump comes with a certificate of authenticity...

Test-tube Spice Rack
For the chemist-cum-cook, this set of glass test tubes in a matching silver rack makes it easy to brew up just about anything in the kitchen. Cork stoppers keep spices fresh.

Link Discuss (via Robot Wisdom)

An Austrian electrician has created a robot that tattoos humans. But would you trust your butt to a tattooing 'bot? The inventor says:

"It was a hard job because the only person I could test it on was myself which was painful but a good incentive to get it right as soon as possible.... He's an artist of course so he always decides what design the person is going to get, they can't choose. But I haven't had any complaints yet."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Beau!)

Interesting Op/Ed in today's LA Times by actor, director, and longtime solar power advocate Robert Redford.

"The Bush administration's energy policy to date -- a military garrison in the Middle East and drilling for more oil in the Arctic and other fragile habitats -- is costly, dangerous and self- defeating... The benefits of switching to a mostly pollution-free economy would be considerable, and the costs of failing to do so would be steep. Prolonging our dependence on fossil fuels would guarantee homeland insecurity. If you are worried about getting oil from an unstable Persian Gulf, consider the alternatives: Indonesia, Nigeria, Uzbekistan.

If we want energy security, then we have to reduce our appetite for fossil fuels. There's no other way. Other issues may crowd the headlines, but this is our fundamental challenge ...American rooftops can be the Persian Gulf of solar energy... wind and solar power generate less than 2 percent of U.S. power. We can do better."

Link Discuss

For the last couple of months, volunteers living in Amsterdam have been wearing GPS units which track their movements around town. The data was used to create a road map of the city. Link Discuss (Thanks, Kevin!)

John Ashcroft, sworn to uphold all of the laws of the land, is urging government employees to violate the Freedom of Information Act.

Last October, the Justice Department cited the Sept. 11 attacks in a memo to federal FOIA officers that stated, "When you carefully consider FOIA requests and decide to withhold records, in whole or in part, you can be assured that the Department of Justice will defend your decisions."

That memo superseded Attorney General Janet Reno's memo of 1993 that told FOIA officers to presume government documents are public. Citing the D.C. Circuit opinion Hemenway v. Hughes, Reno urged care to make sure that the government "is not unduly limiting the records found responsive to those requests."

Link Discuss (via Dan Gillmor)

In belated commemoration of Buy Nothing Day, we offer this supplemental installment of weekly Web Zen. Don't spend a cent. Say it with Found Crap.

(1) Thriftdeluxe: A non-commercial DIY zine offering "easy and cheap but damn cool projects that anyone can make by following our simple instructions." Cheese grater lamp! Coca-Cola vase! Melted vinyl record bowl!

(2) Project Dole: Two Swedish guys decorate an apartment with nothing but banana boxes.

(3) Mini-itx.com: Recycling, deconstructing, reconstructing, and generally funkifying the humble PC. What happens when you cross a motherboard with the Mothership? Stuff happens. Like the PC-in-a-toaster (left).

Discuss (Thanks, Frank!)

New federal laws intended to close borders to would-be terrorists are making life tougher than it already is for international performing artists and promoters:

Organizers of cultural events in the Bay Area and across the nation say they're being forced to cancel and change scheduled acts, squeezing the groups financially and depriving audiences of seeing acclaimed singers, filmmakers and other luminaries from foreign countries.

Last weekend, the Afro-Cuban All Stars, one of Cuba's most famous musical acts, was scheduled to perform in Berkeley in front of sold-out audiences. But the new visa policy prevented them from entering the United States.

Other recent cancellations include the Cuban-Haitian group Desandan, which was supposed to play at La Pena Cultural Center in Berkeley; Cuba's Los Van Van, which had been scheduled to perform at this month's San Francisco Jazz Festival; Cuban jazz pianist Chucho Valdes, who couldn't attend the Latin Grammy Awards in September; and the Whirling Dervishes of Syria, who had to miss their scheduled performance at the L.A. World Festival of Sacred Music in September.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Ned!)

Bev sez:

"Viktor & Rolf's Fall collection uses chromakey blue to portray immateriality.

The video image of the clothing on the big video screen that accompanied the catwalk showed mapped imagery in place of the chromakey blue areas on the clothing."

[ What's chromakey? In television production, it's a way of digitally electronically (thanks, Dan!) inserting an image produced by one camera into an image produced by another.

A solid color background--chromakey blue or green, for instance--is placed behind the subject to be shot and inserted through an effects generator. --XJ]

Link to photos Discuss

A nationwide mobile network is under development, and the country's first 'Net cafe is online and operational:

[New Zealand telecom company Argent Networks] will develop a billing system for the GSM mobile network set up in June by the Afghan Wireless Communications Company, a joint venture between US company Telephone Systems International and the Afghan Ministry of Communications.

Back from Kabul after closing the deal with AWCC, Argent chief executive Chris Jones said demand for mobile phones had skyrocketed as Afghans adjusted to a life free of oppressive Taleban rule.

"There's chaos at the Ministry of Communications, with people queuing for phones and recharge cards. There's a concentration of expats, but Afghan demand is big in comparison." he said.

Afghanistan's telecoms infrastructure has been shattered by years of war, so communications are having to be built from the ground up. Wireless technology is the cheapest and easiest means of connecting the country to the outside world.

Jones said mobile phones in Afghanistan connected to cell sites which in turn linked to one of two satellites being used by AWCC. Under the deal, Argent will extend its billing platform for wireless internet services which are planned for Kabul and other main centres.

The first internet cafe has gone live at the Intercontinental Hotel. The former Islamic administration run by the Taleban banned the internet, but exiled Afghans have been active in maintaining online communities. Afghanistan has no postal service to send monthly telephone bills, so the new wave of mobile users buy pre-paid calling cards to get connected.

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Remember to Link and Think today.

Link and Think is an observance of World AIDS Day in the personal web publishing communities. The project involves hundreds of webloggers, journalers, diarists and other personal website publishers, each linking to resources about HIV/AIDS or publishing personal stories about how the AIDS pandemic has affected them.

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Those who sacrifice liberty in the service of security deserve neither.

The Bush administration is developing a parallel legal system in which terrorism suspects -- U.S. citizens and noncitizens alike -- may be investigated, jailed, interrogated, tried and punished without legal protections guaranteed by the ordinary system, lawyers inside and outside the government say...

For example, under authority it already has or is asserting in court cases, the administration, with approval of the special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, could order a clandestine search of a U.S. citizen's home and, based on the information gathered, secretly declare the citizen an enemy combatant, to be held indefinitely at a U.S. military base. Courts would have very limited authority to second-guess the detention, to the extent that they were aware of it.

Link Discuss (via Interesting People)

Implosion World hosts a 12-minute short film featuring great buildings and bridges getting blowed up real good. Link Discuss (Thanks, Steve!)

University of Oklahoma Chemical Physicists have stored a one kilobit bitmap on a single molecule.

The researchers fired an electromagnetic pulse containing 1024 different radio frequencies close to 400 megahertz at the molecule. Each frequency either had amplitude, representing a "1", or did not, representing or a "0". This imprinted the information on the molecule.

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