William "B. Baltimore" Brown sez: "I know and love fulchau. I found her upon the debut of the $1 shop in my locale. When I went back for more they were gone. My artistic goal was to create a Fulchau choir for the top of my bass amp and wire them to glow with sound vibrations. I'm currently collecting strange dolls to revive that vision. That is unless I encounter fulchau again." Link Discuss

David Reevely points out an article that suggests that yesterday's Ontario court ruling that seemingly nullified Canada's anti-marijuana possession laws does not mean that pot is actually legal in Canada:

"Of course, the precedent is in Ontario, but anybody arguing a case in B.C. would have to give a reason why the ruling wouldn't work here," said Chris Bennett, a spokesman for the B.C. Marijuana Party...

Leaving the issue to the courts allows the government to escape political pressure from the American administration, which is taking a hard line on drugs, Oscapella said. "This may be the way the government is happy to see things go, given the pressure from the United States."

McAllister cautioned the door has not been opened for Ontarians to smoke pot with impunity.

"I doubt the police will stop charging people for the moment, so that anybody is still subject to being arrested for marijuana possession. Also, it's still an offence to traffick marijuana or to grow it," he said.

Link Discuss (Thanks, David!)

Penn Jillette, nerd squillionairre and fearless bad-boy magician, had a bad experience with Las Vegas airport security, where a security guard grabbed his crotch during a frisking without asking permission. Penn, who knows his rights, told the guard that unless he asks first, grabbing a person's groin is assault. The guard told him, basically, that he doesn't have any rights once he's in the security checkpoint, and shut up. So Penn asked him to call the cops so that he could press assault charges. What follows is a tragicomedy for the twenty-first century, in which various airport personnel insist that poor Penn will be late for his flight if he doesn't back off of this pressing charges business, and a Las Vegas cop (who's an enormous Penn and Teller fan) tells them, Penn's right, you committed assualt, and Penn stoically insists that he won't mind missing his flight, since he can always catch a later one.

The punchline is a call from a PR person at the airport who offers to ensure that he gets VIP treatment from now on whenever he flies out of Vegas.

I explained the problem. "Do you allow your crotch to be grabbed without being asked?" I didn't exaggerate, I said that there was nothing sexual, I wasn't hurt, and it wasn't my genitals. I just said it was wrong. She said "Well, your feedback is really important because most people are afraid of us..."

She said, "Well, you know a LOT about this." I said, "Well, it's not really the right word, but freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I'll spend to find out how to get people more of it."

She said, "Well, the airport is very important to all of our incomes and we don't want bad press. It'll hurt everyone, but you have to do what you think is right. But, if you give me your itinerary every time you fly, I'll be at the airport with you and we can make sure it's very pleasant for you."

I have no idea what this means, does it mean that they have a special area where all the friskers are topless showgirls, "We have nothing to hide, do you?" I have no idea. She pushes me for the next time I'm flying. I tell her I'm flying to Chicago around 2 on Sunday, if she wants to get that security guy there to sneer at me. She says, she'll be there, and it'll be very easy for me. I have no idea what this means...

Link Discuss (Thanks, Joe!)

Matt sez, "NYT article about a self-tuning piano that works by heating and cooling the strings. Cool detail: the inventor is a regular at rec.music.makers.piano, and posted there while working on the design. There's also a more detailed article about the system here." Link Discuss (Thanks, Matt!)

LazyWeb is a notion that comes -- as far as I know -- from the same smarty-pants Britons who gave us warchalking, i.e., Matt Jones, Matt Webb (thanks, Webb!), Ben Hammersley, et al. The idea of LazyWeb is that one has an interesting idea for a web-project (say, a tool that scrapes every blog listed on the weblogs.com updates page, finds Amazon wishlists links, and then produces a list of the top-ten-most-wanted blogger books) and you just, sorta, throw it out there, and wait to see if someone does it. Now, the LazyWeb has a site that stores and syndicates all the LazyWeb notions. Looking for something to do while you wait for the economy to bounce back? Have a browse on the LazyWeb and see what looks like fun.

On January 4, 2003 02:59 AM, Planet P has invoked the Lazyweb with the entry "Space-Time Blog Stamping": Creating a master, internet-wide meta-data index to search for blogs/data based on GPS location, date, time and keywords.

Link Discuss (via Blackbelt Jones)

Jamie Zawinski, the nerd-turned-club-owner who cashed out his Netscape shares at the right time and opened bought (thanks, Stacy) a bar in San Francisco called the DNA Lounge, is continuing his tradition of journalling the trials and tribulations of owning a bar. Previous editions have included stills from his webcams showing drunken louts pissing on the building and even a nice series of shots of a guy walking towards a cam, reaching up and stealing it.

The latest installments covers the problems of having hippie bands perform on New Year's Eve, angry neighbors who tear down the rooftop wireless Internet dish, and the hassles of getting audio to stream correctly from the club.

We have, by the way, been getting more visits from undercover (presumably) DEA agents soliciting illegal acts from our staff. I understand this is because the DEA recently got a massive budget increase to fight the Demon Drug Extacy, so now they've got the budget to start sending people out to harass nightclub staff every night. Your tax dollars at work.

Link Discuss (via JWZ's LiveJournal)

If the Eldred v. Ashcroft Supreme Court case to throw out the latest copyright extension is ruled unconstituional, the song "Happy Birthday" will enter the public domain. That means that all the TGIFriday's-style theme restaurants can finally ditch their alarmingly sucky birthday songs -- sung by the staff to get around having to get the ASCAP performance license necessary to lawfully perform "Happy Birthday" in public -- and go back to the old standard. Link Discuss

Larry Lessig reports that Japan's new copyright law, in addition to extending the term of movie copyrights from 50 to 70 years (Larry describes the impetus to do this as the "bogus harmonization argument"), will also presume that everyone is an infringer until proven innocent:

"Plaintiffs in lawsuits defending their copyrights often have difficulty submitting evidence that offenders have infringed upon their rights. So the government aims to shift the burden of proof to the defendants, requiring them to prove that they have produced and marketed their products without violating the plaintiffs' rights."

Link Discuss

Great clip of a Daily Show satirical segment entitled, "So You're Living in a Police State!" Link (22MB QuickTime) Discuss (via On Lisa Rein's Radar)

The owner of a 400-year-old pub in Oxfordshire went berzerk on New Year's Eve after his staff refused to serve him an after-hours drink. He found a "JCB digger" (context makes it clear that this is some kind of heavy earth-moving machine) and demolished the building -- the staff had to run for their lives.

"The staff refused to serve him," said drinker Simon Jones, who was seeing in the new year at the pub when the whole building shook. "They were closing up, and when they told him, he became abusive. It looks like he has decided to give up a pub trade and go into the demolition business." Another villager said: "It's always the same when he gets drunk, but he must have been really bladdered to trash his business."

Link Discuss (via Neil Gaiman)

Check out this amazing, mutli-page gallery of spiffy old cowgirl pinups. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jim!)

1. sculpture (example shown above)
2. more sculpture
3. math
4. punk rock
5. camelot

Link Discuss (Thanks, Frank!)

Cool project recently launched by Canadian visual artist Isabelle Devos:

"In airports around the world, security personnel are now asking many travellers to take a photo to prove their camera is not a bomb... Devos is collecting these photographs for an international art project. While there have been many changes in our sense of security, this one may be the only one that is being documented; a record being produced by travellers on their journey.

Devos wants to know what people choose to take a photo of under these circumstances. With only seconds to consider, is it the security personnel, a friend, their luggage, the floor or something else that they choose to take a snapshot of? From these collected photos she'll develop an art piece that will address the cultural and social patterns within the images, giving a record of one seemingly insignificant detail in our ever changing world."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Dave!)

I received an email informing me that a google search for "fulchau" (an Chinese-made doll head on the end of a flashlight I bought at a bargain store for $1) yields just one hit (to a story I wrote for bOING bOING). How can this be?

Dear Mark:

My sister Susan forwarded your article to me regarding your trip to the 99 cent store in the "North Valley" and I just had to take a moment to write. As my sister is relatively new to the Internet, she takes great pleasure in typing various family names into her search engine (my name, for instance, brought up the "save Karyn" site). For whatever reason she decided to put in the word "fulchau" and yours was the only link attached to it. Oddly enough, my sister bought her first fulchau at an official 99 cent store here in Whittier, located about 20 miles east of Los Angeles. She originally bought it intending to give me just the head so I could then attach it to the antenna of my car (what I actually wanted was a real Barbie head, but couldn't bring myself to destroy one of my beloved dolls). I'm not sure when it was that she decided that these toys were such a treasure, but she almost immediately went back and bought each and every one that they had in stock. It was the Christmas of 1993 when at my parents house she presented it to me. I have photos chronically it's arrival, our family's inspection of the toy and final realization of what a truly bizarre find Susan had discovered. The final photo shows us literally in tears as we realized the silly thing needed batteries although we still weren't sure what exactly the batteries would make it do. Fulchau has made a place in our family, often showing up at white elephant exchanges, other times marking an important birthday or anniversary. Most of the fulchau (I wonder if there is a plural for the word fulchau) remain still "bagged" as we feel they are worth more with the name and directions (or should I say ORDERS) to have fun. Susan and I have often wondered if anyone else had known the joys of fulchau and are both pleased to see that not only have you discovered her, but you remember how to spell her name. God bless you and fulchau everywhere.

Link Discuss

Bush's quick fix for the rotten job market: kill the Labor Department program that tracks mass layoffs. Link Discuss

An Ontario judge has ruled that Canada's laws prohibiting marijuana possession are invalid.

Unlike recent cases in which chronically ill defendants persuaded judges to give them access to marijuana, the teenager did not argue that he has an ailment. He used a legal opening created in 2000, when an Ontario Court of Appeal judge ruled Canada's marijuana-possession law invalid because it did not allow Terry Parker, an epileptic, and other chronically ill people to smoke it to lessen their symptoms.

The judge, however, delayed that ruling's effect for one year in hope that the government would introduce a medicinal-marijuana law. But the government did not. Instead, the cabinet issued regulations for access to medicinal marijuana one day before the year-long grace period ended.

Link Discuss (via Electrolite)

My friend Dana has begun a blog, "User Not Found," to document the ways in which online communities memorialize members who have died in the real world:

Keeping accounts/screennames active serves as a way to memorialize a user without making a large fuss. Sometimes a system admin will opt to change the user's profile, if such a thing is available, to reflect some on the user's involvement with the community and express thoughtful sentiments or quotes. This way, when other users look at these profiles, they are both gently informed of the passing and can personally reflect on their relationship with the deceased. This also prevents future users from unwittingly using the same screenname, which would cause undue confusion and continued grief for people who were close with the person who died. Keeping accounts alive is a thoughtful way to remember a user without making a big, public spectacle of the person's death and allows other users to cope with the loss in a more private, personal manner.

Link Discuss

Attention, SoCal Boingers: my friend Richard Metzger, co-founder of disinfo.com, will be signing copies of his new book, Disinformation: The Interviews, and showing scenes from his TV series of the same name. If you come, draw a green dot on the back of your hand, so we can recognize one another. Link Discuss

Another great public interview on the WELL's public Inkwell conference starts today: Bruce Sterling is being interviewed about his new book, "Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next 50 Years," which is a fantastic read that puts previous attempts at this kind of futurism, [cough Toffler cough] to shame:

I knew a long time ago that when the turn of the millennium came around I would be a middle-aged guy. I promised myself I would take some time off then and try to re-educate myself so I wouldn't THINK SO MUCH like a middle-aged guy.

Unfortunately, I can't make myself think like a young guy, because I know too much and I've lost so much physical vitality, but on the other hand, after writing this book TOMORROW NOW, I think about the future like a middle-aged guy who is VERY, VERY ENGAGED.

Link Discuss

A slideshow gallery (also downloadable) of the works of Harvey Kurtzman, best known as the creator of Mad. I was totally unfamiliar with his really early superhero stuff, so this was a real treat for me. Link Discuss (Thanks, Marc!)

A 19-year-old author of a self-published epic fantasy novel has successfully promoted his book into a worldwide publishing deal reportedly worth $500k.

This young author became one of the latest graduates of the difficult world of self-publishing to climb into the major publisher big leagues. World rights to Paolini's "Eragon" and its two unwritten sequels were sold recently to the youth division of one of the country's most prestigious houses, Alfred A. Knopf, in a deal reportedly worth more than $500,000...

The young author, who recently turned 19, has now learned far more than just to sound like a big-time author. He has learned about the draining grind of book promotion, with more than 70 appearances around the country during 2002, from elementary schools to bookstores. And he has also learned the power of persistence, to keep slogging away through good times and bad.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Vera!)

Ellen Datlow is being interviewed by Jack Womack in the WELL's public Inkwell conference. Ellen is a legendary science fiction editor: as fiction editor for Omni, she presided over the first (and, so far, the only) sf market that circulated over a million copies a month; her Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Anthologies (co-edited with Terri Windling) are brilliant tours of trends in top-rate fantasy; her other anthology projects, like the ground-breaking Alien Sex, are classics decades after their publication. Today, she edits scifi.com's fiction section (where Jury Service, the novella I co-wrote with Charlie Stross, was serialized last month), for which she took home last year's best editor Hugo Award, breaking Gardner "Asimov's" Dozois's seven-year streak -- a streak that was last broken by Kristine Kathryn Rusch after six consecutive Dozois wins.

Womack, of course, is a brilliant dystopian sf writer whose wild, caffeinated prose makes his stories of the collapse of the world into barbarism chillingly real.

The best way to procure short stories from those who have gone on to write (goddamn!) novels is to catch them at the right time--maybe when they're having trouble with the novel they're writing....or when they've just finished a tough one and they need a break.

It's difficult to codify what I look for in a story--but there must be something about the story that _moves_ me in some way. That makes an impression. Competent writing is a must, great writing is a joy to behold but I'd also like there to be a point to the story. I look for a freshness in the telling, an unusual point of view or venue. There are so many components that come together in the decision to buy a story. I try to be honest with writers who I work with. If I think they can deal with straightforward criticism I'll give it (and if I think it'll help the specific story). I'm probably more critical if I like the work--otherwise I wouldn't bother. I'd just give the story a brush-off rejection.

There are the occasional stories that on second/third/fourth look didn't hold up and I've very occasionally bought a story that I didn't think was up to snuff that I was pressured to buy for one reason or another. But I've never published a story I was embarrassed to have published.

Link Discuss

DivX -- the highly compressed video format used on many file-sharing nets and websites -- is notoriously hard to get running under OS X. Thankfully, the folks at the Bay Area Anime club (which uses DivX files to circulate "fansubs," foriegn DVD captures with fan-generated subtitles) have produced an excellent primer on getting the format to play on Mac OS X. Link Discuss (via MacSlash)

Will's just discovered that his copy of Intuit TurboTax and discovered that the software locks itself to his CPU and he's hopping mad.

Why is Intuit requiring TurboTax customers to activate their software?
We're money-hungry morons who seek to alienate our loyal customer base.

How does Product Activation work?
Consider this analogy: it's like you bought a book that is licensed to a single lamp. You can read the book under that lamp, but if you go to a different room, you'll have to take the lamp with you. If your dog knocks over the lamp, you'll have to buy a new copy of the book. If you want to give your brother-in-law your book when you're done reading it, you'll have to give him the lamp, too. If you need to put a new bulb in the lamp, you'll probably be able to read the book, but no guarantees

How do I benefit from this approach?
(sound of guilty whistling).

How does Product Activation protect customer privacy?
Trust us. We use magic fairy words.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Will!)

Clive sez: "Unbelievably compelling reading: A database of all toy-product recalls, including blow-by-blow explanations of the physical damage the toys can do. You can search by toy name, manufacturer, or, most grimly, the type of "problem with toy" you want to find. Here's a taste -- from the recall of the "Galoob Sky Dancers" toys:"

PROBLEM WITH TOY: The hard plastic Sky Dancers® dolls can fly rapidly in unpredictable directions, and can hit and injure both children and adults. Galoob® has received 170 reports of the dolls striking children and adults resulting in 150 reports of injuries. They include eye injuries, including scratched corneas and incidents of temporary blindness, broken teeth, a mild concussion, a broken rib, and facial lacerations that required stitches.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Clive!))

Kenyans turned out in record numbers for their most recent elections, described by one Kenyan thus: "this time we have had a fair election with the highest number of voters turning out to vote." The amazing turnout was created by a network of activists who coordinated with cellphones and SMS, smartmobbing the polls.

1. Planning - Political strategists came up with huge databases of their supporters with cell phone numbers and let the dynamics of networking at grassroots level take effect. In other words, because of this instrument, people who had not met before could contact each other and assist wherever they could. The youth manning the polling stations could call for support incase of any hitches.

2. Campaigning - The use of sms (short messaging service) was intense and balanced for the leading presidential candidates. Kenya has more than one million mobile phones users outstripping by far fixed lines subscribers and a message to one cell phone number can reach at least 4 people.

3. Results Diseminination - As soon as votes are counted even in the remotest areas, results can easily be accessed immediately as opposed to previous elections where people had to wait for ballot boxes to be transported to key counting points and it is believed rigging used to happen during the trasportation.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Howard!)

Wired News observes that the RIAA's site has been hacked six times in the past six months, and speculates that this indicates that the recording industry -- which is so fired-up about the Internet -- doesn't really understand technology very well.

"The flaws that people are exploiting to access their site are elementary security issues and there's no excuse for an organization that purports to understand the dark side of the Internet to leave such gaping holes in their own network infrastructure..."

Ferrell and others predicted that if the RIAA escalates its anti-piracy efforts, the organization's site will be completely knocked off the Internet.

"The RIAA honestly has no idea what they're up against. They will be toast the first time they try to shut down a P2P network being used by any serious black hats," Ferrell said...

"Hey, don't you think they should have noticed that press release urging people to have sex with barnyard animals by now?" one chat participant asked, several hours after the bogus press releases first hit the RIAA site.

Link Discuss

Quinn's written a great little thoughtful blog-entry addressing the question of whether the developing world would be better off with Internet connections or food and medicine, and quite rightly points out that food and medicine start off as information.

we can do this the hard way or the easy way. we can send doctors in and pay them, equipment in and support it. we can split the difference and send them thousands of little packets of ORS with strawberry or grape flavoring. or, we can send in the net, and they only have to get through to the information once. when the doctors are gone because funding was cut and the packets have all run out, the net connection can even go away, but when their kid's gone all pale and can't hold down their unicef wafer, they're remember how to make ORS.

Clean Water - 1 liter - 5 cupfuls (each cup about 200 ml.)
One level teaspoon of salt
Eight level teaspoons of sugar

and that's it. that's why they are hungry for our books and our communications. they suspect that we have something stashed behind the drought grains and the tossed off t-shirts that is much better, and we do.

Link Discuss

The Samsung SGH-T700 is a "Ladies' Phone" that comes with a calorie counter and a biorhythm monitor, and looks like a compact. Link Discuss (via Schism Matrix)

Great article explains the connection between Jews and Chinese food, and why Jews didn't go for Italian the same way. I remember that the only take-out allowed in my grandmother's house was Chinese, but only if we ate it off paper plates in the back-yard.

"According to the Jewish calendar, the year is 5749. According to the Chinese calendar, the year is 4687. That means for 1,062 years, the Jews went without Chinese food..."

Three themes predominate. First, Chinese food is unkosher and therefore non-Jewish. But because of the specific ways that Chinese food is prepared and served, immigrant Jews and their children found Chinese food to be more attractive and less threatening than other non-Jewish or treyf food. Chinese food was what we term "safe treyf." Chinese restaurant food used some ingredients that were familiar to Eastern European Jews. Chinese cuisine also does not mix milk and meat; indeed it doesn't use dairy products at all. In addition, anti-Semitism, anti-Chinese racism, and the low position of the Chinese in American society also (perhaps paradoxically) made Jews feel safe and comfortable in Chinese restaurants.

Second, Jews construed Chinese restaurant food as cosmopolitan. For Jews in New York, eating in Chinese restaurants signified that one was not a provincial or parochial Eastern European Jew, not a "greenhorn" or hick. In New York City, immigrant Jews, and especially their children and grand-children, regarded Chinese food as sophisticated and urbane.

Third, by the second and third generation, Jews identified eating this kind of non-Jewish food -- Chinese restaurant food -- as something that modern American Jews, and especially New York Jews, did together. "Eating Chinese" became a New York Jewish custom, a part of daily life and self-identity for millions of New York Jews.

Link Discuss (via Making Light)

Patrick Nielsen Hayden -- blogger, senior editor for Tor Books -- announces on his blog this morning that,

...I really did make a publication offer, on behalf of Tor Books, to a writer named John Scalzi for a science fiction novel he had serialized on his web journal. And he very graciously accepted.

Link Discuss

Many thanks to John Escobedo for the animated gif of Boing Boing's mascot, Jackhammer Jill! (She stops drilling after 10 cycles.) Link Discuss

With a $99 Siemens SpeedStream Powerline Wi-Fi gateway and a regular powerline gateway, you can plug your DSL modem or gateway into a wall-socket, and then connect the Powerline WiFi gateway into any other socket and provide Internet service to it. So, if you want to put a WiFi access-point on your roof for your neighbors but your DSL modem is in your living room on the first floor, you can spare yourself the hassle of running an Ethernet wire up the staircases with one of these. WSJ subscriber Link Link to Glenn Fleishmann's summary of the story Discuss

JS, an "English-major who never made it past Netscape," is stymied by the future. The net baffles her/him, even though he understands that it is important and good and worthy. S/He wants to know how to become schooled in matters Internet, how to gain the intuition and understanding needed to evaluate what s/he does and what s/he might do. Any advice for him/her?

I send unencrypted emails from major providers. My website is for crap. I use bellsouth dialup for chrissakes...

The question remains- what should I do? Well, the only thing to do is to just keep shuffling along, sustain my idiotic fantasies of somehow being like the Oracle in the Matrix [you know- trapped in the Matrix but helping and communicating with those in the real world], but that seems kind of dumb.

Is it possible to become a net person? Can these things be learned? Is there some rudimentary level of capability that would enable me to step ashore? I am asking you.

Link Discuss

Lee Felsenstein -- creator of the Osborne PC,introducer of Steve Jobs to Steve Wozniak (thanks, Andy), moderator of the Homebrew Computer Club --is making history again. He has developed bicycle-powered, portable, Linux-based ruggedized WiFi boxes that are connecting refugee villages in Laos to the Internet and to each other.

Felsenstein has just put the finishing touches to his first prototype machine for the project. It doesn't look much like the modern American PC. Powered by bicycle, with ruggedised insides usually found inside industrial factory computers, the Jhai PC boasts a dot-matrix printer based on a 20-year old design, a screen bought from an ex-surplus reseller, and an aerial the size of a satellite dish hanging from a 20-inch coax lead. Its software is the free Linux operating system, converted into the local languages by volunteers and smooshed into a microprocessor too slow to run the latest Windows...

And it has to be practical. By the end of the year, Felsenstein's Jhai PCs will be shipped off to five Laos refugee villages, deep in the rice-growing hills of the region. Currently, the villages have no electricity, telephones or good roads between them. The PC's wireless link will connect the villages by WiFi to each other, and the telephone system.

Farmers will be able to monitor the price of crops in the town markets, negotiate group purchases with the other villages, and make business deals without having to spend days travelling away from the farm. And families will be able to make direct contact for the first time with the Laotian Diaspora - relatives who've left the war-torn area to earn money in the capital of the country, and beyond.

There's a hitch, though. The paltry $25,000 that Lee needs to accomplish this miracle won't come through from the granting agencies until after the rainy season, too late to do the installations (you try humping gear around rural Laos in a typhoon) He's raising money (Paypal link, mention "Remote IT" in the donation) from the Internet to make the project a reality. Here's what your cash gets you:

* $10 20 lbs. shipping costs
* $25 Keyboard
* $50 Headset
* $75 Antenna
* $100 Battery
* $250 Bicycle Powered Generator
* $450 CPU or Mountain Top Solar Panel
* $850 Base Station
* $1,000 One RT US-Laos Trip for One Technical Consultant
* $1,500 One Complete Jhai Computer
* $2,500 One Complete Village Set-up
* $3,000 Relay Station
* $25,000 The Full 5 Village System

Once you've made your donation, blog this. This kind of project is the future of the world, a way to connect everyone to everyone, a way to make knowledge as free as the air. I just kicked in $100, the amount I spent on the weekend on a Linksys WET-11 wireless bridge so I could put my laser-printer in a different room without tripping on the Ethernet cable. I have a feeling that the $100 I gave to Lee will be a much better investment in the long run. Link Discuss (Thanks, Danny!)

The NYT wrings its hands on behalf of university teachers whose WiFi-equipped classrooms are filled with students who are IMming, emailing, and surfing rather than listening. Oh, boo hoo. When I was a university student (dropped out of four schools!), there were profs to whom you listened with rapt attention and profs with whom you marked time, listening with half an ear for material that seemed likely to end up on a final. I suspect it was ever thus. I speak at universities all the time, and I actually use the degree to which my audience is digging into their laptops to guage whether I'm covering a topic well or losing the crowd. Profs who bore their students and blame laptops don't get a lot of sympathy from me -- if you can't convince a room full of young people who've committed to a lifetime of debt in order to cram their heads with useful knowledge and skills to pay attention, it's time to re-evaluate your material and methods.

A young man looked at sports photos while a woman checked out baby photos that just arrived in her e-mailbox.

The screens provide a silent commentary on the teacher's attention-grabbing skills. The moment he loses the thread, or fumbles with his own laptop to use its calculator, screens flip from classroom business to leisure. Students dash off e-mail notes and send instant messages. A young man who is chewing gum shows an amusing e-mail message to the woman next to him, and then switches over to read the online edition of The Wall Street Journal.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Scott!)

One of my holiday projects has been to listen to -- and rate, in iTunes -- all the music I've picked up in the past several months. The big winner so far is the "All Girl Summer Fun Band," which Heath turned me on to last month in Boston. Jangly girl-pop with naive-charming lyrics like "My boyfriend works real late/And he won't spend his make/Won't even buy me cheap cheap cake" make me feel warm and nostalgic. The AGSFB site has four tracks for download -- give 'em a listen. Link Discuss

The Smoking Gun has posted a gallery of 2002's best mug-shots. As MeFi points out, the gritty Diane Arbus verité of Calvin Klein ads has converged almost completely with mug shots -- they're eerily similar to fashion shoots. Link Discuss (via MeFi)

Tyco's crooked, grifting CEO is even more of a hypocritical scumbag than you may have suspected.

In the same year he allegedly began stealing up to $600 million from Tyco International Ltd., former chief executive Dennis Kozlowski urged a judge to throw the book at an employee who had embezzled a fraction of that amount from a subsidiary.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Link!)

Derek sez, "It's 2003! What's your resolution? Read other people's and post your own..." Mine are: write more, mope less, stop feeding the trolls, finish all the unfinished projects. Link Discuss (Thanks, Derek!)

Matthew "MeFi" Haughey has just launched his latest project: Ticketstubs.org. You're invited to scan ticket stubs from events and places and tell the story that goes with it.

Most jazz greats rose to fame in the 50s, and are well into their 70s today. I've seen dozens of jazz concerts since those two nights and know full well how lucky I was to catch several amazing musicians before their passing. Joe Williams, Milt Jackson, and Ray Brown each played and are now gone. The show featured some reminiscing about Ellington, and a lot of renditions of his tunes, but what I most remember was being in awe all night, as one great after another came onstage to jam. There were solos, small bands, big bands, and full orchestras. I wish I still had my program tucked away somewhere so I could name-drop everyone I saw. There wasn't a single bad performance all night, not a single dropped note or missed key.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Matt!)

Alena sez, "Former speechwriter for Bill Clinton builds ship in his garage out of 165,321 corks (yes, corks) and sails a 17 day journey through Portugal." Link Discuss (Thanks, Alena!)

As is traditional around these parts, here's this year's stats for Boing Boing's posts and visitors. It's been a really good year for us. We posted 3,650 links (exactly 10 a day on average) and served 2,345,032 pageviews.

	2001	2002
Pageviews	476,950	2,345,032
Posts	2,716	3,650

Link (40K Excel file) Discuss

Lisa Rein's been posting more video from the Creative Commons launch. This week, she's uploaded talks by Brewster Kahle, Aaron Swartz, Craig "craigslist" Newmark, and Glenn Otis Brown. Discuss

Michigan's Lake Superior State University has issued their list of banned words for 2003:

WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION -- Used more and more (and just too much according to James of Canberra, Australia) as a card that trumps all forms of aggression. In danger of becoming a push-button buzzword. Many nominators point out that any weapon, used effectively, does a lot of destruction. "A few thousand machetes in the hands of an army in Africa can lead to mass genocide," writes Howard Stacy of Atlanta, Georgia. Jack Newman of Cypress, Texas, often hears the hybrid, "wepuhmadistricshun." "Over-used, over-wrought." Michelle Gill, Chicago, Illinois.

MAKE NO MISTAKE ABOUT IT -- Nominated by many, including Angela Wood of Anchorage, Alaska, for over-use since the 2000 election. "Generally used instead of 'don't underestimate' or 'understand,'" says John O'Connell of San Jose, California. Are listeners really going to mistake what the questioner is saying? "Who's mistaken, anyway?" asks Barb Keller of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan.

HOMELAND SECURITY -- A new and improved buzzword. With billions of dollars at stake, perhaps "national security" is just plain blase. "What happened to the Department of Defense?" asks Rick Miller of Champaign, Illinois.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jeff!)

The NYT covers the stories of the massive layoffs at Verizon just before Christmas, layoffs ordered by two executives who took home almost $40,000,000 in compensation while losing $500,000,000 for their company.

"We were laid off, effective immediately," he said. " `Merry Christmas, thanks for working at ground zero and breathing the dust. . . .' They told us we were heroes and used the pictures of us at ground zero to sell themselves. Now we're out."

Link Discuss (via Interesting People)

Another Easter-egg: how to put your iPod into debug mode.

Just 'restart' your iPod (press and hold the 'menu' and 'play/pause') and when the Apple comes up, press and hold the 'back', 'select' and 'next' buttons (all 3 buttons in the center row).

Link Discuss

Step-by-step instructions for switching on the hidden 30-second skip feature in your TiVo. Like the man says: "Once you begin using this feature, you'll wonder how you ever lived without it." Link Discuss

Great quote on community wireless and netstumbing from a prominent legal scholar:

Jennifer Granick, director of Stanford University's Center for Internet and Society, sees the unauthorized use of open wireless connections as moral and legal.

A practicing lawyer and lecturer at the Stanford Law School, Granick said considering unauthorized wireless use a terrorist act amounts to idiocy.

Link Discuss (via Warchalking.org)

Referer Risk:

Every visitor who clicks on the image on your site will conquer a piece of land (2° by 2°) for your domain name. All territory your site has conquered is in the same colour on the world map.

The amount of land your site has conquered determines the position of your site in the high score list. Note: completely occupied countries count double!

Link Discuss (via MeFi)

Po Bronson's long piece in this month's Fast Company (adapted from a book-length project) reviews the question, "What Should I Do With My Life?" as answered by many people in many walks of life. A good question to think about on New Year's Day. Certainly one that I often ask myself, especially when coming off of a week-long holiday of lots of joyous blogging, work on two novels, a new novella and an anthology, reading, going to the movies, haunting the coffee shops, seeing friends.

The ruling assumption is that money is the shortest route to freedom. Absurdly, that strategy is cast as the "practical approach." But in truth, the opposite is true. The shortest route to the good life involves building the confidence that you can live happily within your means ( whatever the means provided by the choices that are truly acceptable to you turn out to be ). It's scary to imagine living on less. But embracing your dreams is surprisingly liberating. Instilled with a sense of purpose, your spending habits naturally reorganize, because you discover that you need less.

This is an extremely threatening conclusion. It suggests that the vast majority of us aren't just putting our dreams on ice -- we're killing them.

Link Discuss (via CamWorld)

Happy New Year! BoingBoing readers, you're the first to see this breathtaking full-screen panorama of Times Square ringing in 2003, photographed last night by award-winning photog Jook Leung.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Hans!)

Fun site with examples of odd words.

According to Craig Rowland, Scrabble in North America recognizes five words which, if spelled over two triple-word score squares, and with a premium-scoring tile on the double-letter score square, will award the player 392 points on a single play. These five words are: OXAZEPAM, BEZIQUES, CAZIQUES, MEZQUITS, and MEZQUITE.

John Chew says that OXYPHENBUTAZONE is the highest-scoring word known under American tournament Scrabble rules (OSPD+MWCD). It can score 1778 under suitably contrived circumstances listed and credited in the Scrabble FAQ.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Gary!)

The mummy's curse has been proven false by statistical research into the lifespan of grave-robbers:

Mark Nelson, an epidemiology and preventive medicine scholar at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia conducted the study.

He found the average life expectancy of those exposed was 70 years, compared to 75 years for those who weren't.

But if you dig deeper, the age difference disappears.

"If you take into account the differences in age and the differences in gender balance, then there was no statistical significant difference between the two groups," Nelson told CBC Radio's As It Happens.

Link Discuss

"Librarian X" is apparently an insider at the Library of Congress who is mad as hell. S/he has lots of consipracy theories, primarily revolving around James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, who, apparently, is an ex-CIA spook. I'm not clear on how credible Librarian X's samizdata is, given the lack of documentation in support of the claims on the "Deep in the Stacks" website, but it sure makes for interesting conspiracy-theory readings.

This collection was acquired prior to World War I. This is--or was--a rather impressive private library of over 80,000 volumes. This was quite a collection, not just literary but scientific as well. In essence, this collection showed the intellectual achievement of Russia. So impressive was this collection that a Russian Who's Who visited and read the books, including Lenin. Part of the promise during purchase was that the collection would remain intact. Well, with over 70,000 volumes still to go it looks like this will never happen. The other problem is that Billington put a non-citizen (a federal security violation) in charge of processing this collection. A further problem is that his Russian was far too limited, the cause of the resultant disaster. A number of alert rare book dealers, recognizing the Yudin stamp, called the Library when they were offered for sale. Billington insists these are "duplicates," even though evidence given the IG shows otherwise. Since there are, according to Billington, no thefts at the Library of Congress these Yudin books will remain on the open market. If you think the FBI, Congress or Library managers are interested in retrieving these books, well...you need to go back and read the rest of this website.

Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

Ur-geek-turned-club-owner JWZ reports back from the anthropological intersection of interface cruft and old people:

...I recently got my mom a new computer.

She had been using a truly ancient Mac for a long time, and nothing worked any more. She wasn't able to get any version of Netscape newer than 2.0 installed on it, and she wasn't able to enable her ISP's spam-blocking feature, because it used an SSL page, and her copy of Netscape's root cert had long since expired. Faced with the prospects of either trying to explain this to her, or update the cert myself, I just bought her a new iMac with OSX.

She's aghast at the idea that this perfectly good computer is totally obsolete, only six years later. As well she should be. But, oh well, it is...

So today she proudly told me that she'd gotten it all figured out. She said, ``now I just always save everything to `Desktop' and then I can see where it is: once I save it, I drag it to the right folder!''

Now, that's just... so wrong. But hey, she made it work. Go mom.

Link Discuss

Mafia is this fiendish game that has completely eaten fandom, turning science fiction conventions into all-night gaming sessions. In the game, players compete to lie effectively to one another and collude to carry out the sham. It's a game of alliances, betrayal, and dissembling, and I've stayed the hell away from it on the sensible grounds that it appears to be a black hole whence I shall never return.

Jonathan Lethem is a genre writer who has crossed over, more or less, into NYC literary society, and he's brought Mafia with him, with predictable results:

These days, if you’re looking for a bunch of New York writers, magazine editors and publishing types on a Friday night, track down Mr. Lethem, who has become a kind of mob boss among an ever-growing salon of poker-faced literati obsessed by the spiky parlor game they call Mafia. There’s no money involved, everyone stays clothed, and the alcohol intake is surprisingly moderate—but to witness Mr. Lethem’s disciples in the throes of their favorite game is to know that the stakes run high.

"People got so upset," said Ms. Schappell, "stalking around and screaming: ‘I can’t believe you don’t believe me! How come you don’t believe me?’"

On that evening, Ms. Jackson ended up trusting Mr. Lethem, but she shouldn’t have: He was lying his face off, and everyone knew it. But Ms. Jackson was swayed. "He gets excited about pleading his case," she said, explaining why she trusted him. "My knowledge of his character worked against me, because I had too many ways to interpret his signs. And it confused me."

Link Discuss (via Gawker)

Einstein's General Theory of Relativity lucidly explained -- using only words of four letters or less.

Get a load of this. We have Bert and Dana. Take a bus, and put Bert on the bus. The bus goes down the road. Dana, she sits here, on the side of the road. He's in the bus and she's on her ass. And now take a rock off of the moon, and let it fall at them. It hits the air and cuts in two. The two bits burn, and then land just as Bert and Dana are side by side. One hits the dirt up the road a ways, and one hits down the road a ways. Dana sees each rock at the same time, but Bert sees one rock and then sees the next rock. Now: if Bert and Dana both see Dana as the one who is "at rest", they both will say that the two bits came down at the same time. Dana will say, "I am 'at rest', and I saw them both land at the same time, so they both did, in fact, land at the same time." And Bert will say, "I move away from the rock down the road, so when I add that fact in, I can see that if I were 'at rest', I'd have seen both land at the same time. So it must be the case that they did land at the same time." Okay, but what if Bert and Dana now see Bert as the one who is "at rest"? Eh? You get to pick who is "at rest" and who isn't, no? So make Bert be "at rest". Now Bert will say, "I am 'at rest', so the one up the road beat the one down the road, on the way to the dirt, just the way I saw it." And Dana will say, "I saw them land at the same time, but I move away from the rock up the road, so when I add that fact in, I can see that the rock up the road must have beat the one down the road."

Link Discuss (via Electrolite)

The Russian inquiry into whether the Harry Potter novels promote religious hatred has concluded that they don't.

An investigation was launched after claims the books "contained signs of religious extremism".

There were also claims they were "drawing students into religious groups of a Satanic type".

Svetlana Petrenko, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor's office, said they had found no basis for opening a criminal case.

Link Discuss

As the world's vintners move away from natural cork -- which some claim is responsible for "corking" spoilage of up to four percent of all wine -- to synthetic stoppers, animal conservationists are sounding alarm bells about the future of the endangered species that thrive in cork orchards.

Two wildlife species, the Iberian lynx and the Iberian imperial eagle, are both seriously endangered, but can survive within cork oak forests. If the forests suffer, the outlook for these native animals will also worsen.

WWF estimates the Iberian lynx population has decreased some 90 percent in the past 15 years and population estimates range from 1,000 to only 150. It is the most threatened carnivore in Europe.

Link Discuss

Tastes like chicken? Britain's Channel 4 is defending a show in which Chinese performance artist Zhu Yu appears to nosh on a dead baby, describing it a "thought-provoking film about extreme art in China." News excerpt:

"[In the] documentary... [he] shows off photographs of himself washing a dead stillborn baby in a sink and putting its dismembered parts in his mouth. Politicians and media critics have condemned the plans but the Broadcasting Standards Commission said it could not address a program before it was shown.

Zhu is also shown having a piece of his own body grafted onto a pig. He describes his work as expressing his Christian faith, saying: 'Jesus is always related to death, blood, wounds, etc.'"

This older Taipei Times article covers previous works by Mr. Yu Zhu (Thanks, Hutch!), including the smash hit shows Maneater and Canned human brains: "Zhu admitted that the meat obtained from the bodies tasted bad, and said he had vomited several times while eating it. However, he said, he had to do so 'for art's sake.' " Here is more background on the pig-skin-graft performance art piece, a snapshot of which is shown at left.

Link to news story, Discuss

FlyGuy is an utterly enchanting little Flash app. In it, you are a pudgy salaryman who flys through an amazing, Hypercard-like monochrome line art fantasyland, sailing through the sky, through space, and eventually landing up in a tropical paradise where the monkey dances the hula all night long. Playing with this app made me feel like Tuttle in Brazil, having a dream of flying. Link Discuss

Maciej sez "This is a page of wacky/disturbing Polish wall posters from the early 1950's. The posters have been reissued in Poland as a campy, popular kind of retro calendar; I've scanned in some of the stranger ones, with translated captions." Link Discuss (Thanks, Maciej!)

Cool, aggro-hipster thong designs straight outta Chicago and now available online.

Link Discuss (via Nipporn)

Paul Bissex writes:

Labels and info from pre-prohibition over-the-counter psychotropics. Cocaine tooth drops, benzedrine inhalers -- fun for the whole family!

Link Discuss

Nice jargon watch site. Today's term: dark biology: scientific research related to biological weapons. Link Discuss (Thanks, Kevin!)

Wired News reports that number portability will finally come to cellular customers next year. The cell companies have been dragging their heels on this for years now -- and no wonder: any industry so hostile to its customers naturally fears anything that makes it easier for customers to sever their ties with them. Ironically, the mobile telcos have cited the already high amount of churn in their business as evidence that number portability is unnecessary: "See? Our customers hate us so much today that they are willing to reprint all their business cards every six months with a new cellular number: what makes you think that they need to have that pain eased for them?" It's possible that number portability will ramp up cellular churn to the point where one or two of these companies actually get a customer-service clue and emerge as winners. I'd sign up in a hot second for any cellular company whose motto was: "We're less horrible than a root canal with a cold chisel." Link Discuss

AP is reporting a significant development in the case involving webmaster Matthew Pavlovich, who republished DVD-cracking deCSS code on his website:

The Supreme Court has temporarily intervened in a fight over DVD copying, and the justices could eventually use the case to decide how easy it will be for people to post software on the Internet that helps others copy movies. More broadly, the case against a webmaster whose site offered a program to break DVD security codes could resolve how people can be sued for what they put online.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor granted a stay last week to a group that licenses DVD encryption software to the motion picture industry, giving the court time to collect more arguments. She requested filings by later this week. The group has spent three years trying to stop illegal copying. The case puts the court in the middle of a cyberspace legal boundary fight: Where can lawsuits involving the World Wide Web be filed?

UPDATE: Lisa Rein sez: "I've made the Pavlovich Legal Decision available in non-PDF (web-friendly HTML) formats, here."

Link to AP story, Background on EFF.org, Discuss (Thanks, Scott!)

The payphone is the twenty-first century horse-trough. It's a quaint artifact, more often employed by dope dealers than upstanding cits, who are expected to commit their action-at-a-distance through mobile handsets. The payphone has been dwindling away on this continent, from Bell South's announced shutdown of 143,000 payphones to Bell Canada's recent annoucement that it will be turning its armored public phones into public WiFi hotspots. Even COCOTs -- private, high-cost payphones that merchants install in remote places for a captive audience -- are being supplanted by cellphones. WashPo runs down the continuing demise of the coin-op telephone:

"At first it was fun, because you'd put in a new phone and you'd generate revenue right away of $600 a month," said Castro, a manager and 11-year veteran at Robin Technologies Inc. in Rockville. Castro empties the coin bin of the dead pay phone, which now averages only $2.50 a day.

There is an indignity to the way pay phones go. They are covered with detritus -- an empty 750-milliliter bottle of cheap red wine, a wet pack of Marlboro Lights and discarded phone cards. The shiny base of the pay phone shells degrade to a mottled magenta. "Unfortunately, what happens is people urinate on them and they corrode," Castro said.

Link Discuss (via Lawmeme)

Andy sez: "The RIAA is being hijacked, as we speak. I just wrote about this on my site, with all relevant links." Link Discuss

The 22-year-old business school graduate and e-commerce entrepreneur known as the "Jumping Beans King" has been ordered by Singaporean agriculture officials to recall thousands of the beans he sold online. Story snip:

William Tan was told to recall the beans he had been selling as novelty pets because the moth larvae inside that make them jump pose an ecological threat, said Cheng Lee Ching, a spokeswoman for Singapore's Agri-food Veterinary Authority, or AVA. The penalty for importing jumping beans into the tightly controlled city-state is a fine of 10,000 Singapore dollars (US$5,760) or three years imprisonment.

"I'm very disappointed because the market potential for this was huge, but everything came to a sudden death," said Tan, who said he was not aware of the ban. "I marketed it as a pet, a nice little thing you can carry around and play with," he said.

Link Discuss

Speaking of deadly machines: the new trailer for Terminator III is chock full of aggro-robot glamor. Movie hits theaters in July, 2003. Link (QuickTime) Discuss

Wiley sez, "Alt-X publishing has just put up my first free e-book of short story-blobs, Solarcon-6."

Green metal fingernails of the mommy-robot awake larvae at 9:00 am with digital alarm-clock eyes and grubs begin feeding, still in the dark since they do not yet have eyes and the mommy robot sees by infrared. Heat signatures of the larvae show their gender and age as they slurp regurgitated protein with soft translucent mandibles. The retarded boy got his back cursed in a game of tug-o-war and now his skin is rotting at such a young age, he looks so becoming in his safety helmet... The secrets of Mexican cooking so close at hand. A man with iron-straight pant-legs like PVC pipes cuts names from roll-call sheets. He is an island of dignity in a hive of rotting, mutated children and grubs.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Wiley!)

Anybody got photos? China's state-run news agency is reporting that a group of Beijing scientists have created a 5.18-foot, 167-pound robot that can perform T'ai Chi, the traditional Chinese martial art of "shadow boxing."

The robot named BHR-1 passed appraisal on Saturday as a major project for the Beijing University of Science and Engineering under China's High and New Technology Research and Development Program...BHR-1 had 32 joints from head to foot which made it move properly, said Professor Li Kejie, chief scientist in charge of the project at the university. It can walk with 33cm steps at a speed of 1kph, he said. The robot is able to walk and play tai chi and can also sense changing ground levels and balance itself, Li said.

Li added that this type of robot would be able to take over some dangerous jobs from humans.

Such as, what, bodyguard? Personal yakuza? Robot-assassin?

Link, and another Link from Xinhua News Agency in China. Discuss

The annual forward-thinking music summit known to regulars as "FOMC" will return to the nation's capital in just five days. What other industry gathering brings together artists as diverse as Joan Jett, Ian MacKaye (Fugazi, fmr. Minor Threat), Vernon Reed, Doug E. Fresh, Bob Mould (fmr. Husker Du), Patti Smith and Lester Chambers (Chambers Bros.)? In addition to their participation in the three-day dialogue--covering everything from compulsory licenses to P2P filesharing to copy-protected CDs--many artists will also perform free concerts at the Kennedy Center on Saturday and Sunday evenings. FOMC co-founder Brian Zisk writes:

"No longer will corporate media and big money frame the terms of the discussion as we draw together the strongest voices in the Internet and independent music community to reframe these questions with a clear-eyed focus on the interests of the artists."

The non-profit Future of Music Coalition is putting on the third annual Future of Music Policy Summit in Washington D.C. January 5-7. It's a forum where those whose lives have impact on musicians come together to discuss the future, present and past, in front of hundreds of those who this debate most impacts, musicians themselves. It helps set the legislative agenda regarding issues which will affect musicians for the upcoming year.

Senators, Congressmen, FCC Commissioners, Copyright Office officials, Technology Folks, Consumer Advocates, Publishers, Label Folks, Academics, Reporters, Music Lovers, and many others will be coming together, as well as hundreds of musicians... Hope to see you there!

Link Discuss

Amazing story of an ex-MarineNavy-man (thanks, Stefan!) whose son was beaten to death by Nazi skinheads while waiting for a cab outside of a bar they'd been ejected from. The father has assembled a private army of ex-Marines, PIs and bouncers from his nightclubs and is hunting down the men who killed his son, confronting them and turning them over to the cops.

Ten days ago, he caught his first. After two months of working the phones, huddling with private investigators, directing his squad of ex-Marines and security guards from the Arizona nightclubs he owns, Cole Sr. tracked down Chris Whitley, a 24-year-old white supremacist.

Through go-betweens, Cole Sr. sent Whitley an ominous message: Surrender or face a father's wrath.

So, days before Christmas, in a bizarre confrontation, Whitley met with Cole Sr. at a Phoenix coffee shop.

"It was one of the hardest and strangest things I've done in my life," Cole Sr. says. The grief-stricken father sat directly across from his son's suspected killer, whose face and head are covered with tattoos.

Link Discuss

Clay Shirky's written up some findings from a brainstorming session he hosted in NYC last month that I attended. The meeting was a face-to-face affair, but virtually every attendee had a laptop with an WiFi card, and Clay set up a web-based chat for us to play with while we talked. A giant display at the front of the room showing the running chatter, and it created a really dense dialog that was very fun and productive.

Group conversations are exercises in managing interruptions. When someone is speaking, the listeners are often balancing the pressure to be polite with a desire to interrupt, whether to add material, correct or contradict the speaker, or introduce an entirely new theme. These interruptions are often tangential, and can lead to still more interruptions or follow-up comments by still other listeners. Furthermore, conversations that proceed by interruption are governed by the people best at interrupting. People who are shy, polite, or like to take a moment to compose their thoughts before speaking are at a disadvantage.

Even with these downsides, however, the tangents can be quite valuable, so if an absolute "no interrupt" rule were enforced, at least some material of general interest would be lost, and the frustration level among the participants consigned solely to passive listening would rise considerably.

The chat room undid these effects, because participants could add to the conversation without interrupting, and the group could pursue tangential material in the chat room while listening in the real room. It was remarkable how much easier it was for the speaker to finish a complex thought without being cut off. And because chat participants had no way of interrupting one another in the chat room, even people not given to speaking out loud could participate. Indeed, one of our most active participants contributed a considerable amount of high-quality observation and annotation while saying almost nothing out loud for two days.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Clay!)

Ten reasons why 2003 should be the year that we all switch to secure computing alternatives:

* The use of Web bugs is up 500%. Switch to a free browser such as Mozilla that can be configured to expire all cookies when you close your browser and refuse all cookies coming from domains other than the one you're visiting.

* Windows XP is full of security holes that make life easier for those who would snoop on you. Time to get off the Microsoft bandwagon and switch to Linux, FreeBSD, or Mac OS-X. God knows what horrors the NSA will stick into the next version of Windows.

* Unrelated lawsuits. Get sued or get arrested for one thing, have your computer impounded, who knows what other questionable things might be found? Remember: It's not whether you're innocent or guilty, it's whether the district attorney can make a jury believe that you're guilty.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Zed!)

Cellular Telephone companies in Washinton generated more consumer complaints than any other industry in the state.

"What really roped me in was the fact that I could cancel anytime" during a three-month "free trial" period, Aberg recalled. "I came to find that just was not the case at all."

In her complaint to the attorney general, Aberg noted that after becoming disillusioned with the service, she tried on numerous occasions to cancel before the trial period was over.

But she "could not get through because I was repeatedly put on hold for OVER 45 minutes. I then submitted e-mails to Qwest to request the phones be deactivated well within the allotted time period," Aberg said in her complaint.

Link Discuss

Brilliant, hilarious, masterful re-envisioning of the classic Rider-Waite tarot deck -- populated with Peanuts characters. Features Peppermint Pattie as the Empress, Lucy as High Priestess, Linus as the Hierophant, and Charlie Brown in a variety of roles throughout both the Major and Minor Arcana. The artist Valerian pleads online, "Don't sue me," and offers this explanation of the offbeat project:

An absurd, heretical, really cool view of an ancient ritual of divination... This is a joke. Six-year-old suburban kids enacting adult emotions and situations, breaking them down and magnifying them into hilarious crumbs of childhood experience... ­ tragedy, pain, and measured triumph. With children as protagonists and innocent humor as the disarming tool, the emotions are simplified and magnified (as are the physical features of each cartoon drawing) and the exchanges between the children become both an ironic parody of adult emotions, and an impossibly close and meditative study of them.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Matt!) (via Journalista)

A new study scheduled for release Monday reveals that more Americans than ever before now use the 'Net to obtain info on government services, shopping, and healthcare. The Pew Internet and American Life Project report goes even further, stating that "abundant evidence [exists] that the Internet is now the primary means by which many people get key information." Or, to compress all 17 pages to one short blurb: "Most expect to find key information online, most find the information they seek, many now turn to the Internet first."

Excerpt:

With over 60 percent of Americans now having Internet access and 40 percent of Americans having been online for more than three years, the Internet has become a mainstream information tool. Its popularity and dependability have raised all Americans' expectations about the information and services available online. When they are thinking about health care information, services from government agencies, news, and commerce, about two-thirds of all Americans say that they expect to be able to find such information on the Web. Internet users are more likely than non-users to have high expectations of what will be available online, and yet even 40 percent of people who are not Internet users say they expect the Web to have information and services in these essential online arenas.

For information or services from a government agency, 65 percent of all Americans expect the Web to have that information. (...) in the realm of electronic commerce, 63 percent of all Americans expect that a business will have a Web site that gives them information about a product they are considering buying. (...) For news, 69 percent of Americans expect to be able to find reliable, up-to-date news online. (...) For health care information, 67percent of Americans expect that they can find reliable information about health or medical conditions online. (...)

When it comes to personal information, the story is different. Only 31percent of Americans expect to be able to find reliable information about someone online; 35 percent of Internet users say this and 25 percent of non-users say this. However, 58 percent of Internet users say they expect to be able to reach someone via email.

Link to study summary, Link to study homepage, Download complete report (PDF), Discuss

The bloggers at Silflay Hraka are following up on the "Coffee, Tea, or Should We Feel Your Pregnant Wife's Breasts Before Throwing You in a Cell at the Airport and Then Lying About Why We Put You There?" that swept through Blogistan last week. They've gotten some pretty generic responses from the Portland airport cops, an offer from a law prof to take on the guy's case, and lots more. Link, Link Discuss (Thanks Mitch!)

An excerpt from a letter Jimi Hendrix sent his father in 1965:

Nowadays people don't want you to sing good. They want you to sing sloppy and have a good beat to your songs. That's what angle I'm going to shoot for. That's where the money is. So just in case about three or four months from now you might hear a record by me which sounds terrible, don't feel ashamed, just wait until the money rolls in because every day people are singing worse and worse on purpose and the public buys more and more records.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Scott!)