Raph Koster, an sf writer and game developer who works on Sony's MMORPGs, has posted a long, brilliant rumination on civil liberties in gamespace.

Therefore this document holds the following truths to be self-evident: That avatars are the manifestation of actual people in an online medium, and that their utterances, actions, thoughts, and emotions should be considered to be as valid as the utterances, actions, thoughts, and emotions of people in any other forum, venue, location, or space. That the well-established rights of man approved by the National Assembly of France on August 26th of 1789 do therefore apply to avatars in full measure saving only the aspects of said rights that do not pertain in a virtual space or which must be abrogated in order to ensure the continued existence of the space in question. That by the act of affirming membership in the community within the virtual space, the avatars form a social contract with the community, forming a populace which may and must self-affirm and self-impose rights and concomitant restrictions upon their behavior. That the nature of virtual spaces is such that there must, by physical law, always be a higher power or administrator who maintains the space and has complete power over all participants, but who is undeniably part of the community formed within the space and who must therefore take action in accord with that which benefits the space as well as the participants, and who therefore also has the rights of avatars and may have other rights as well. That the ease of moving between virtual spaces and the potential transience of the community do not limit or reduce the level of emotional and social involvement that avatars may have with the community, and that therefore the ease of moving between virtual spaces and the potential transience of the community do not in any way limit, curtail, or remove these rights from avatars on the alleged grounds that avatars can always simply leave.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Raph!)

Cryptographer Daniel Bernstein, an associate prof at UIC, is fed up with the grasping patent-policy at the university, so he's gone on work-to-rule, adhering to the letter of the law:

The invention is a Soap Saver Dish. The Soap Saver Dish is a plastic holder for soap. It has several prongs reaching up out of a tray. Soap can sit on top of the prongs, while soapy water collects in the tray. The prongs reach higher than the edge of the tray, so that water collected in the tray does not touch the soap.

Link Discuss (via Salad With Steve)

A Southern Baptist guide to converting Unitarians:

Secular humanists are basically atheists who deny the very existence of a personal living God. Therefore, arguments for the existence of God prepare the UUA heart for evangelism. It is very difficult to apply John 3:16 to the life of someone who rejects the very existence of a God who loves the world so much that He gave His only begotten Son. There are several compelling arguments for the existence of God, but space does not permit us to look carefully at them here. The two most common evidences for the existence of God are the very existence of the universe itself, and the intricate design of the universe. These arguments are called the cosmological and the teleological arguments respectively. Basically, the cosmological argument argues for God on the basis of the presence of the universe. If there is a universe, then there must have been a Universe Maker, God. The teleological argument argues for God on the basis of the design of the universe. If the universe looks like it has been designed, then there must have been a Universe Designer, God. Please consult the appropriate FAITH training materials that dedicate sessions to apologetic arguments for the existence of God.

Link Discuss (via Ambiguous)

H. Nizam Din and Sons is a mail-order, ecommerce refugee supply house. Tents. Pots. Porta-sans. Blankets. Water-purifiers. I am agog. Link Discuss (Thanks, evilsofa!)

Geek couture provocateur Ken Courtney, whose web site featuring cheeky "I fucked [celebrity name here]" t-shirts were blogged in this previous BoingBoing post, is reportedly being sued by Gisele Bundchen. According to this recent story in the Italian paper Il Nuovo (in Italian), the supermodel is suing the Brooklyn-based designer and entrepreneur over a shirt in his collection that says, "I fucked Gisele." Link to Hintmag story, Discuss

This 1" scale-model 1960s boys' bedroom is scrumptiously obsessively fantastic. The details are just wild:

The room is electrified with an overhead light and a working "Buck Rogers" desk lamp. It matches the Buck Rogers toy chest at the foot of the captain's bed. The chocolate lab wallpaper is a fabric remnant I found at my flea last year. The carpet is a buff wall-to-wall. Baseboards and cornices are stained in a dark early American. Scott has already begun a life-long hobby of as you can see from his movie poster collection...

The 1" Batmobile is patterned after the one from the 1966 TV series...as was the original Aurora Model kit of that year. The original Batmobile was built by a custom car specialist/designer named George Barris. In 1955 an experimental car called the Lincoln Futura made quite a splash on the auto show circuit. Barris bought that very car and is the one he was commissioned to customize by the Batman TV show's producers. He tricked it out, painted it black, added exhast pipes behind the passenger seats and gave it it's sleek "Bat" look. The mini in my setting is a MicroMachine of the Lincoln Futura. I customized it to look like the Barris Batmobile. It is actually a tad larger than a real scale one would be as the Aurora model is only 6" long..but it was so close, I had to use it :) Plus, it was fun to do my mini auto customizing job! :)

Link Discuss (via Memepool)

Web gallery of simple, funky, cool, tag-artwork from a pair of Madrid-based street artists named Nuria and Eltono. Features snapshots of the pair's art-attacks captured in cities throughout Europe. Link Discuss

My story, "The Road Calls Me Dear," which has been languishing with various semi-dormant publishers for about eight years now, is finally in print! It's part of a really cool anthology of road stories, called "The Mammoth Book of Tales of the Road," which includes Kerouac, John Kessel, Steinbeck, Hunter S. Thompson and others. I just got my contributor's copy, and it's a swell doorstopper of a book.

Within a month of my taking over, the river Junque had provided me with a whole new wardrobe. I sold off anything that didn't fit, and what was left might have been tailored for me. It was pretty mismatched, coming from all over the world, bright and shiny and with designer labels. If I wanted to, and I did, I could wear a new high-fashion outfit every day. The only thing that stayed constant was the big jacket; I'd pulled it out of the river thinking it was a joke or something. But no, it was an exquisitely tailored blue sharkskin sports coat that was made for a man at least seven foot tall, and as big around as a beer keg. I had to roll up the sleeves, and the tails hung down almost to my knees, but I liked it anyway. The pockets were big.

Then it was time to open up. I dragged the sandwich board out to the river-bank and propped it up so that it faced the road: MR CORNUCOPIA'S BAZAAR OF EXQUISITE JUNQUE IS OPEN FOR BUSINESS!!! TOYS! CLOTHES! ELECTRONICS! GIMCRACK AND GEWGAW SUPPLIER TO THE STARS! BY APPOINTMENT TO HIS EXALTED MAJESTY, THE KING OF ZAÏRE! I didn't know that Zaïre had a King, but it didn't matter; I liked the sound of it.

Link Discuss

Whoopee! The trailer for the forthcoming Haunted Mansion movie is online. Unfortunately, it's a really low-quality streaming Real file, but damn, I am so all-over excited! Link Discuss (via Doombuggies)

Tesco in the UK is shipping a credit-card with a built-in breathalyzer -- they characterize it as a card that tells you, "Don't spend any more money, you're far too drunk." Link Discuss (via Ben Hammersley)

The video from yesterday's standing-room-only conference at MIT on Spam-busting has been converted to a series of Real video-files. Oliver Schmelzle has posted timecode-indices for the different speakers, so you can jump right to the talk you want to hear:

Session 1

0:00:30, Teodor Zlatanov, spam.el Maintainer, "Gnus vs. Spam"
0:10:00, Bill Yerazunis, MERL, "Sparse Binary Polynomial Hash Message Filtering and The CRM114 Discriminator"
0:32:30, Jason Rennie, MIT AI Lab, "Adaptive Spam Filtering"
0:52:00, John Graham-Cumming, POPFile, "The Spammers' Compendium"

Link Discuss (Thanks, Oliver!)

The BBC is reporting that Danger's Sidekick hiptop will debut in Europe in Summer, 2003 with a color screen (!!!), improved web browser, and upgraded phone design. No word yet on whether or not the new features will become available for US users around the same time as the Europe launch.

In related news, Danger won mad props this week at the Wired Magazine Rave Awards in San Francisco (where Cory and I were both in the house). PR blurb on their award here.

Link Discuss

Earlier this month, several hundred people gathered in the Latvian capital city of Riga for the debut of the Latvian national "Flying mobile" championship. Amid freezing temps, phone-tossers hurled old phones as far as possible, competing for a prize vacation valued at US$1K. The fourth world championships take place in Finland this August. Apparently, the world record for mobile phone throwing is 218.9 feet, set (appropriately) using a Nokia 5110 mobile phone. Link Discuss

Slow-motion weight-training -- 20 minutes a week of slow weight-lifting -- is gaining Atkins-like momentum. It's more medical apostasy, the notion that replacing the trendy, virtuous cardio workouts that very few people have the grit or time for with a silver-bullet, high-speed alternative that gets great visible results fast.

"Muscles are like an investment in the bank, earning you money," Mr. Cruise said. "Fat is like a job you go to and once you leave, it stops paying. Once you get off that treadmill, you stop burning calories, whereas muscle keeps burning all day long..."

"By moving heavy weights at a slow pace, you eliminate any momentum that might help get the weights up faster and make it easier on the muscle," said Mr. Hahn, who owns Serious Strength, a gym on the Upper West Side.

Link Discuss (via Gawker)

Lessig has proposed a smart and sharp answer to the Supremes' ruling that Congress can go on extending copyright for as long as they'd like. Since the Court held that only two percent of copyrighted works are still earning revenue, that ruling means that 98 percent of copyrighted material is going to be excluded from the public domain, even though it's doing no good for anyone in its legal strongbox. So Larry proposes a kind of tax on copyrighted works: after 50 years in copyright, rights-holders would have to pay $1/year to keep their works in copyright. The proposal allows for rights-holders to deduct this $1 from any payments they make to the IRS for earnings on their works -- really, this only asks that rights holders whose works are not earning anything for them to pay a nominal sum to indicate that they still wish to hold fast to their copyrights. After three years of nonpayment, it is assumed that the creator is finished earning money from her work and it passes into the public domain. With a simple book-keeping change, this proposal can make the 98 percent of creative works that languish, unpublished, unavailable, even unattributed in many cases, to be given back to our common culture.

What should I do if I like this idea?

Three things: First, you should write your Congressman or Congresswoman about it now. Second, you should send money to organizations that support the idea. Check here for a list, or paypal to free.mickey@foobox.com. And third, you should talk about it, best in weblog space, but anywhere would be great. This will only happen if people push Congress to do something about it.

Link Discuss

Adam "TidBITS" Engst and Glenn "WiFi Networking News" Fleishman have put together a great article that looks at the new 802.11g equipment, which interoperates with older WiFi gear, but can also support new, cheap wireless cards at 500% of WiFi speeds. The most interesting part, for me, was this info about multipath:

One of 802.11g's big advantages over 802.11b is that it better handles the inevitable signal reflection. Radio signals bounce off different pieces of matter--floors, metal, even the air around you--at different angles and speeds. A receiver must reconcile all the different reflections of the same signal that arrive at slightly different times into a single set of data. 802.11g (like 802.11a) slices up the spectrum in a way that enables receivers to handle these reflections in a simpler but more effective way than 802.11b.

There've been many contexts in which I've seen bad multipath scatter -- it's evidenced when you run an application like MacStumbler and see dozens of instances of the same network -- usually on crowded trade-show floors with lots of booths or in offices with twisty corridors. It really kicks the hell out of WiFi signal: this is pretty encouraging. Also interesting is this sidebar on 802.11a, which I'd always dismissed as a failure due to its incompatibility with older WiFi gear:

Because 802.11a has 12 distinct channels that can be used without interference in the same place, it offers an advantage for scenarios in which avoiding interference is important. Likewise, the four channels reserved in the upper end of the 5 GHz band for 802.11a outdoor, point-to-point use can employ higher power levels, which may provide a better throughput than 802.11g in the same circumstances.

Link Discuss (via Apple Airport Weblog)

Erik from InfoAnarchy is starting a worldwide movement to call for reform on copyright terms.

Everyone except for lobbyists and corrupt congress-critters understands that this is insane. This is therefore an excellent cause to rally around and to test our political power. This is something that we can actually agree to change! No matter where we stand on copyright per se, no matter where we live, we should all join forces and fight insane copyright terms, world-wide.

Link Discuss

More on the grim pathology of trash-houses. I get shivers just reading this:

Inside, flashed up in the projector's illuminating beam, is a baby's crib coated in gray mold. Beneath it, scattered across the carpeted floor, are boxes of breakfast cereal--Wheaties, Life--and a pile of snagged lingerie. "Conception," Staffenson says, nodding at the next slide, "believe it or not, occurred here," on a stained mattress covered over with crumpled newspapers. "This was the home of a young couple who'd left the farm. The husband couldn't make it there--this was the late '80s and the economy was pretty rough for some. They came down to the city and he couldn't get work. She was 16, 17 maybe, pregnant, and just couldn't keep up with things. This is the toilet"--click--"past full, spilling over, so they just shut the door and started using a bucket in the kitchen. The nurse who drove out to the house went in the backyard and puked before she called me."

We spend another hour in the dark, tracking cases whose addresses no longer matter much. The particulars inside, after a while, appear like set objects in a series of still-lifes: the industrial strength garbage bags, the spoiled food, the buckets, the stacks of newspapers. Broken glass and a toddler with bleeding feet. Wrung-out diapers drying on a radiator. Kerosene lamps. Captain Crunch. Fly-paper. Aluminum cans. Cat litter trays made from detergent boxes. Coke cartons. TV Guide. The Eggert house, with a hide-a-bed buried four feet deep in trash, its sheets still on. The kitchen of another house where a 70-year-old man, living alone, was found in the middle of winter frozen to death, surrounded by junk mail and pet-food cans, with his feet stuck in the oven.

Link Discuss (via Making Light)

Teresa Nielsen Hayden has put together an amazing, comprehensive post about squalor and animal collecting: the so-called "cat ladies" and garbage people. The stories are incredible, the syndrome pervasive. People across the country accumulate hundreds of animals, or fill their bathtubs with feces, or stack newspapers to the ceiling in room after room until their homes are uninhabilitable. Sometimes, these places end up so far gone that they have to be bulldozed after their owners die or are institutionalized.

To me, the most striking feature of the animal hoarder's psychology is their state of complete and utter denial. This is not your usual "Your father never did that, you don't understand what he was going through, and why do you insist on only remembering the bad things?" kind of denial. This is world-class craziness. Hoarders insist there's no problem, the house is just a little messy, and their critters are fine--even when the feces are literally a foot deep, animals are dropping dead and other animals are cannibalizing them, or the poor beasts have chronic infections that leave them with masses of scar tissue instead of eyes. If it weren't real, it would be unbelievable:

Irene Holmes, a District Attorney who has assisted in the prosecution of a number of collector cases throughout the United States, ... states that collectors have a "death grip on denial." She gives the example of a woman who was shown a photograph of one of the dogs that was seized from her care. The photo shows a Weimaraner, so starved from lack of food that it was literally shedding its intestines and rectum. Holmes relates that when the woman who owned the dog looked at the photo, her only comment was "I guess it did seem a little ill."

Their recidivism rate is close to 100%.

Link Discuss

Hundreds of thousands of protestors will gather in cities across the country to speak out against war in Iraq today:

Becker said people from 220 cities nationwide have committed to attending the demonstrations, which are slated to begin on Washington's National Mall at 11 a.m. EST.

Demonstrators will converge at the Capitol and march to the Washington Navy Yard, a military installation in Southeast Washington.

In San Francisco, California, where organizers predicted a turnout of about 50,000 protesters, the day's events begin at 11 a.m. (2 p.m. EST) with a march from the waterfront down Market Street in the heart of the city to the Civic Center.

Link Discuss

Susannah "Reverse Cowgirl" Breslin -- author, comixxx artist, digerati hottie, and recently vacated BoingBoing guestblogger -- will be reading in LA this Sunday night. I'll be there, and look forward to seeing some Angeleno BoingBoing readers in the house! Susannah sez:

"this Sunday evening, the 19th, i will be reading my fiction at Spoken Interludes Vanguard. that's at the Tempest Supper Club, located at 7323 Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles. the buffet dinner, likely served sans burgers and weiners, begins at 6pm and the reading itself starts at 7:15pm. it costs $25 whole smackers to get in. fellow fiction readers include Tori Morsell, Dan Roberts, Eve Wood, Hal Ackerman, and Dani Klein.

i will be reading Hey Doll. i may or may not be saying the word 'penis.'"

Link Discuss

Dennis has embarked on a project to chronicle the journeys of the SpaceBrothers, inflatable aliens that pop up all over the world:

I decided to do this in furtherance of my belief that the best thing about the Web is THE UPLOADS, not the downloads. It's the =users= contributions that make this medium so much more than a fat pipe for more Hollywood "product." The stories and pictures we have online are funny and scary, cute and puzzling -- especially since mystery inflatable aliens are turning up in places we never sent them! They highlight the diverse creative approaches that highlight the special qualities of the Web.

Link Discuss

Scientists at Los Alamos have been storing their plutonium-tainted waste in a steel pre-fab building. The Nuke Cops are pretty pissed, and just wait till OSHA hears about it.

"Although there were no immediate radiological consequences, unanticipated events (could) have caused unanalyzed and significant exposures to workers and to the public," Linton Brooks, the acting chief of the National Nuclear Security Administration, wrote in December in a letter to then-Lab director John Browne.

"PF-185 basically provides a weather-shield and airborne monitoring, but little high wind, missile, or seismic protection," Dr. Charles Keilers, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board's representative at Los Alamos, wrote in a memo to colleagues. "Many of (PF-185's) containers (would likely) fail in a fire."

Link Discuss (via Defense Tech)

Hill Rats and Congresscritters have become completely addicted to their Crackberries: the Research In Motion Blackberry wireless email devices (I tossed mine into the trash last year -- they're crap, especially as compared to the SideKick).

The problem is that RIM, a Canadian company, has been convicted of infringing on a bullshit patent held by an American competitor. Ironically, RIM's own bullshit patent ("small QWERTY keyboards") has been used to extort money from Palm and Handspring.

The chief administrator of the House of Representatives has asked RIM and its Yankee competitor to settle up nice and quiet, lest they deprive the gubmint's net-addled stress-feeders of their always-on email appliances.

Eagen wrote that Congress has invested nearly $6 million in BlackBerry technology, including issuing 3,000 of the black, wireless handsets, in part because of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Eagen's worry stems from a federal court jury verdict in November that the BlackBerry infringed on patents held by NTP Inc., an Arlington holding company...

"This is a sorry state of affairs," Wallace said. "The U.S. Congress is defending the continued use of foreign technology that is determined to be operating unlawfully." He has told Congress that he would not seek to shut BlackBerry down until a suitable alternative was in place.

Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

(1) Strindberg and helium
(2) Recursive (dramamine recommended)
(3) Maltese dog goes under the sea and swims with fish
(4) Ballad of Bilbo Baggins, performed by Leonard Nimoy
(5) Celebriducks
(6) Dream Anatomy
(7) Mona Lisa
(8) and a classic: Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Link Discuss (Thanks, Frank!)
(flame-retardant disclaimer: some of the items in weekly Web Zen roundups may have appeared previously on BoingBoing.)

Read Seattle Post-Intelligencer aerospace reporter James Wallace's review, filed yesterday while on the Lufthansa 747 that was the first commercial jetliner to use Boeing's "Connexion" WiFi service.

Link (via IP)

Update: Frank Boosman writes:

The report on this on NPR's Marketplace the other night was cool. The reporter recorded his report as an MP3 and uploaded it during the flight. The encoding at this link is low-grade, but on the radio, the report sounded fine. According to the host, the report was a 4.7MB MP3 file that took 17 minutes to upload, which implies an upload speed of 37.8 kbit/s -- not too bad considering how many journalists on the inaugural flight must have been using that link simultaneously."

Discuss

From Thursday's New York Times:

Artists naturally deserve to hold a property interest in their work, and so do the corporate owners of copyright. But the public has an equally strong interest in seeing copyright lapse after a time, returning works to the public domain -- the great democratic seedbed of artistic creation -- where they can be used without paying royalties.

In effect, the Supreme Court's decision makes it likely that we are seeing the beginning of the end of public domain and the birth of copyright perpetuity. Public domain has been a grand experiment, one that should not be allowed to die. The ability to draw freely on the entire creative output of humanity is one of the reasons we live in a time of such fruitful creative ferment.

Link (registration required) Discuss (Thanks, JP!)

It's a good week in writing-land for me. A week after my first novel came out, it's had nearly 50,000 downloads. Yesterday, Salon published my WiFiSciFi story, Liberation Spectrum. Now, my editor has sent me this comp of the early design for the cover of my next novel, "Eastern Standard Tribe," which is tentatively scheduled for next fall. You can read an excerpt of the book that Mindjack published last year, while I was working on it (there's also a Wired article I wrote on the subject), or just admire the brilliant cover design which the award-winning art-director at Tor, Irene Gallo, put together. Link Discuss

I'm being interviewed about Mad Professor on Inkwell.vue, a Well discussion board that is open to the public. Please feel free to drop in and ask a question! Link Discuss

Following up on yesterday's post about an online London walk-a-logue, Scott from Ideo sends this link to a similar guide for Barcelona. Unlike the London guide, this one lacks links -- but allows you to spin around in the photos to view alternate angles. Most nifty.

Link Discuss

NTK reports that the Stand's efforts to get Britons to tell their MPs off about the proposed mandatory ID card is working:

When you left us last Friday: Lord Falconer, minister in charge of ID cards, was claiming that his consultation was showing a 2:1 majority in favour of them. By Monday, thanks to your mails via stand.org.uk, the ratio must have been more like 2:1 against. At time of writing, with over 4000 new responses in one week, we'd estimate it's now something like 80% anti, 20% pro. David Blunkett, who was tipped to announce growing public support for the project at a conference on Wednesday, instead talked of cabinet splits, and "not wanting a revolution" over the proposals. Isn't it always a surprise when you log in to check your inbox after the weekend?

Link Discuss

Howie Choset, engineer and robotics researcher at Carnegie Mellon, is part of a team developing "snakebots" with funding from the US Navy's Office of Naval Research. Potential applications for the serpentine robots range from engine maintenance to bomb disarming to disaster rescue. Snip from National Geographic story:

Snake-like robots already exist in rudimentary forms. But Choset's creations push the envelope. Small and very strong by design, Choset's snakebots measure just five centimeters (two inches) in diameter. The use of beveled gears around their circumference, allows the serpentine robots many more degrees of movement than conventional robots--including the ability to move efficiently in three-dimensional space. Choset's machines use complex mathematical algorithms that enable them to autonomously sense and respond to obstacles and variations they encounter while navigating across landscapes.

Living snakes move by cyclic forms of locomotion, or "gaits." Adapting these gaits to the mechanical snake enables it to maneuver effectively through three-dimensional terrain. Choset's current snakebot prototype is constructed from many separate pieces connected with hinges. Eventually, the device will look much like a real snake, with a smooth surface "skin" possibly made of piezoelectric polymer materials that hold special electrical properties. This skin would help to propel the snakebot by expanding and contracting as it is alternately charged with electric current. The resulting motion, which would resemble that of a real snake, would help the snakebot move safely in cluttered spaces.

Check out the "Snake Robot Projects" page on the website for the university's Sensor Based Planning Lab. Choset's personal homepage is here.

Link to National Geographic story, Discuss

So, what do we call this? VacBotMod? Not sure, but check out this terrific site with pics and step-by-step documentation: two 'bot-deconstructivists' reverse engineer the Roomba vacuum robot:

"Our first attempt yielded vaulable information about the internals of the Roomba. It is evident that iRobot's engineers have gone through a great deal of effort to minimize the cost in order to make the Roomba affordable. We shall have 802.11b controlled robots roving around any day now."

Link Discuss

The Motion Picture Association of America's Copy Protection Technical Working Group -- the same people who gave us mandatory DVD use-control systems and proposed the dread broadcast flag mandate -- have struck a new working group to "plug the analog hole." This group is working to make it impossible to digitize an analog signal without a copyright-holder's permission, which means that, for example, politicians could transmit campaign-promise speeches that you can't record to hold them to later.

The group, called the Analog Reconversion Discussion Group (ARDG -- pronounced "Argh!") is hewing to the secretive principles that kept the Broadcast Flag negotiation out of the public eye. The press may not attend its meetings or sit in on its phone calls. However, anyone not working for the press with $100 and a plane ticket to LAX may attend the meetings and report on their proceedings.

So EFF has started a new blog to chronicle the negotiation, called "Cruelty to Analog." The blog will be updated with reports from each of the ARDG's meetings, its draft documents and position papers -- all the news that's fit to blog. These people are engaged in a horse-trading exercise with your fair-use and free-speech rights. If you can't make it to LA for the monthly meeting, shouldn't you at least be keeping track of what they're doing to your rights? Link Discuss

My colleague Seth Schoen has written a three-line script that turns a GNU/Linux box with a WiFi card into a Theremin.

This means that the 802.11 card can function as a rough proximity sensor for your hand. This evening I realized that that means you can make a wireless card into a sort of poor man's theremin -- you just need to map the signal strength to a tone, play the tone, and move your hand. You'll be able to play several discrete pitches or scales, although with much less precision than a real theremin.

I wrote a three-line shell script which implements this idea (using Linux setterm, all on a beta test version of the LNX-BBC, it so happens), and later improved it a little bit with a small C program which wraps the Linux KIOCSOUND ioctl. It works just fine -- you can easily bring the tone up and down by moving your hand back and forth. That's a lot of fun. The most obvious problem is the discreteness of the whole thing. A real theremin is plainly an analog device. (The analogy is between the pitch level and the position of your hand.) This system is very obviously quantized, at best like someone playing a poor piano scale (and it's distorted sine waves rather than piano strings with their nice harmonics).

Link Discuss

Play-by-mail games, a long tradition among chess and D&D wonks, have migrated to email, crossing over with strategy video games along the way. Greg Costikyan reviews Laser Squad Nemesis, a wicked-sounding play-by-email game on his blog.

Laser Squad Nemesis is a free download. With the download, you get three training scenarios. But to play the game for real, you must "subscribe," at the rate of $25 for six months of unlimited play. When playing, you use the client software to plan your moves, then submit them to the server, via email. You have one opponent; when the server receives both your and your opponent's moves, it resolves them, and sends off a file with the new gamestate, also via email. You receive the file, "replay" the turn to see what your opponent did, and what happened during the last turn--and plot your next turn's moves.

In other words, you might wind up playing a turn a day--or a turn every fifteen minutes or so, depending on how frequently your opponent submits moves, and how frequently you want to do so.

Each player controls a squad of futuristic ground troopers-- human space marines, Mechs, or Spawn (with additional races to come). Each "turn" represents ten seconds of realtime. You plan your moves by selecting troopers, telling them where to go, and ordering them to fire at a particular target, at any target that appears in view, or just to lay down opportunity fire in case an opponent appears. You can "test" your move, seeing what your men do--and whether, say, they get in each others way, or whether you actually can get a grenade through that window from this angle. Indeed, to play effectively, you need to test your move several times and refine it, until you have a well-coordinated plan of attack

Link Discuss (via Robot Wisdom)

Microsoft SmartPhone users have discovered a means to install their own software on their phones, sidestepping the telcos' absolute control over what their bought-and-paid-for devices may and may not do. Orange, the phone company, has issued a "patch" that makes it impossible to install your own stuff on your own phone, and they're characterizing it as a "security update." Link Discuss

UC Berkeley is throwing a Digital Rights Management conference Feb 27 to Mar 1. While there have been numerous DRM conferences held, they've all taken the rosy view that DRM is good, useful and lawful technology. The Berkeley conference pulls together critics and advocates and actually attempts to hammer out some kind of common understanding. I'm really looking forward to it.

Music is being released on copy-protected CDs, movies on encrypted and region-encoded DVDs, and Congress is considering the mandate of technological protection for digital television. The next generation of information distribution will be defined by the purchase of rights to receive digital content for a set of defined and controlled uses. Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems are the technological measures built into the hardware or software of home computers, digital televisions, stereo equipment, and portable devices in order to manage the relationships between users and protected expression. As technological solutions increasingly interact and even supersede the laws of intellectual property, privacy, and contract law, it is imperative for everyone from lawyers, technologists, and policy-makers to artists and consumers to keep up with the changes.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Eddan!)

Wil Wheaton has just auditioned for a role in "I, Robot," the film-adaptation! Link Discuss

My buddy Todd Lappin visited an airplane scrapyard in Mirage, CA, and took some killer digital photos. Enjoy! Link Discuss

Paul sez, "Matthew has photographed and inventoried everything in his house, and presents it to you in a BeOS-esque wireframe format. Obsessive... but exactly what the web is for." Link Discuss (Thanks, Paul!)

The weekly television industry zine Lost Remote features a TV and convergence-related buzzword-tracking section, where these new words have recently appeared:

ANTICIPOINTMENT (n) What viewers experience when you fall short of their expectations after over-promoting a story or show.

INGEST (v) To file raw or feed video into a server. "Quick, ingest that tape!"

PREEMPTNITION (n) The feeling you have when you realize the story you've worked on for a week is about to get bumped from the show.

BINGO (n) When an aircraft reaches the point of having to return to refuel. "We're 10 minutes from bingo," radioed the chopper pilot to the assignment desk.

Link to their entire list of TV jargon to date, Discuss

Someone calling him/herself "scarlet pimpernel" bcc'd this to me:

Did you know the difference between "Patriot" and Traitor" is just two letters? Not surprisingly, those letters are "PR". Here are some examples:

We know that Saddam Hussein has Anthrax, as well as botulism and bubonic plague, because the Reagan Administration GAVE him the starter cultures. The emissary on that mission? None other than Donald Rumsfeld. Don't believe me? Type "Rumsfeld" + "Anthrax" + "Iraq" into your search engine.

Boy that Dick Cheney sure is a patriotic guy - he'd never give aid and support to our enemies, right? Think again. As CEO of Halliburton, he went around the UN embargo by using foreign subsidiaries Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll-Dresser Pump to rebuild Saddam Hussein's oil infrastructure just three years ago. Not only did he seek to do business with Mr. Hitler-with-a-bigger-mustache, he actually broke the law for the privilege! Estimates of the deal vary from between 23 and 78 million dollars, but Cheney's take amounted to approximately thirty pieces of silver (adjusted for inflation from 33 A.D.) Need proof? Type "Halliburton" + "Iraq" into your search engine.

Admiral John Poindexter, recently put in charge of going over your e-mails and credit card receipts, is a convicted felon who sold Stinger missiles to the Iranians, used the profits to fund an international terrorist organization, and then lied to congress about it. Along with the Stinger missiles, Poindexter also delivered to the Ayatollah a Bible and a key-shaped cake. Go ahead and and call us democrats as unpatriotic as you like, at least we didn't bake any cakes for the Ayatollah.

Too young to remember this? Keywords are "Poindexter" + "Iran".

Worried that you or a loved one may have to serve in the Persian Gulf? Take a tip from the President: "George Bush" + "AWOL"

To put all this in perspective, remember that Bill Clinton was hounded for six and a half years by the GOP over a two-bit Arkansas land deal where he actually lost money. Throughout his presidency, Bill Clinton was accused of practically every crime in the book except the one he was actually guilty of: not being a member of the Republican Party.

Let's face it, if any of these clowns had been democrats, the GOP wouldn't be putting them into high office, they'd be putting them to death. For their own sake, please encourage your local democratic party representatives to grow a spine. Quickly. Failing that, here's some advice from Billy Bragg: "Start your own revolution and cut out the middleman."

Discuss

New Scientist reports that the world's first truly artificial organism has been engineered by researchers at California's Scripps Institute, using "stolen" genes from other bacteria and from the sperm whale.

The bacterium makes an amino acid that no other organism uses to build proteins. The work is being hailed as "a very great accomplishment" and the technique promises to open unique avenues for manufacturing drugs.

Amino acids are the fundamental building blocks of life, making up the proteins which constitute all living cells. The DNA of every organism on Earth contains three-letter codes, known as codons, for 20 such amino acids. Now, a team led by Peter Schultz of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla has managed to coax E. coli bacteria to produce a 21st amino acid and use it to make a protein, using only natural food sources such as sugar and water.

Link Discuss

Richard sez:

Here's an idea so obvious you wonder why it hasn't already happened: areas of London have been photographed from street level, and the streets reconstructed and indexed on a map. Now, when you're looking for that bar you can't remember the name of, by the map shop, around the corner from the deli, you can actually find it by trawling this site. Oh, and you can usually link to their website from here too.

Link Discuss

The Boston Globe published an interesting piece this week about transcranial magnetic stimulation ("TMS"), a scientific technique to stimulate or sedate the electrical the brain's electrical activity by directing a powerful magnetic field inside the skull.

Invented in 1985, modern-day magnetic stimulators charge up to a whopping 3,000 volts and produce peak currents of up to 8,000 amps - powers similar to those of a small nuclear reactor. That pulse of current flowing from a capacitor into a hand-held coil creates a magnetic field outside the patient's head. The field painlessly induces a current inside the brain, affecting the electrical activity that is the basis for all it does.

The promise of TMS as a scientific tool seems similarly powerful. And it has generated a range of intriguing practical effects as well, from improving attention to combating depression, that have been published in reputable, peer-reviewed journals.

''From the point of view of cognitive neuroscience - understanding how brain activity relates to behavior - it is, in a way, a dream come true for all of us, because it provides a way to create our own patients, as it were,'' said [Dr. Alvaro] Pascual-Leone, director of the Laboratory for Magnetic Brain Stimulation at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. ''You can create a very transient disruption of the brain. For a few milliseconds, it is as if those cells were not there. So you are able to ask questions about what role a particular brain part plays in a particular behavior.''

Link to Boston Globe story, Link to more background on TMS, Discuss (via strangelove)

The International Network for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain say bananas are in danger of becoming extinct because they are sterile clones of "naturally mutant wild bananas discovered by early farmers as much as 10,000 years ago," and therefore highly susceptible to a couple of nasty fungal diseases. Their solution? Genetic engineering. Link Discuss

I was thinking about buying one of those new 5.8 GHz phones, until I read Mike Langberg's piece in the San Jose Mercury News.

There is nothing inherently superior in 5.8 GHz to the older 2.4 GHz or 900 megahertz (MHz) cordless phones. The range isn't greater, the clarity isn't enhanced and there's no added support for special features.

Link Discuss

A rural agricultural university in poverty-stricken Bangladesh has replaced its slow, expensive and unreliable dialup Internet connection with a high-speed fixed wireless link.

"In the future, we hope to provide low-cost connections to local hospitals, schools and non-profits groups as well," he says...

Mr Rahman says the wireless technology will be hugely beneficial for the people who live in rural areas and on remote islands that have no telephone facilities.

Link Discuss

Frozen CPU is shipping a $19 5.25"-bay dashboard cigarette lighter module for your PC tower case. Link Discuss (via Geisha Asobi)

Lufthansa is testing an in-flight WiFi program that gives fliers between DC and Frankfurt high-speed Internet access in the air. God, I so badly want this. Link Discuss (via /.)

The author of iCommune, a playlist-sharing plugin for iTunes, has gotten a nastygram from Apple, and he's ceased development and discontinued availability. Thanks, Apple, for making my computer less functional.

Uh oh... I just received a "Notice of Breach and Termination of License" letter from Apple, stating that I violated my license to the Device Plug-in API which iCommune uses. For the time being, I'm making the download unavailable, while I try to sort things out with Apple. Sorry about this folks. Any good lawyers in the house?

Link Discuss (via FA:OSX)

Larry Lessig's insomnia last night led him to post a fiery post-game analysis of yesterday's terrible Supreme Court ruling, which cheated our public domain to protect copyright. He focuses on the fact that many of the Supremes have espoused the view that their role is to protect the Constitution from Congress's excesses, but that the Justices seem to be picking and choosing which parts of the Constitution matter.

One friend offered a reason in an email of condolence. Those 5, he said, save their activism for issues they think important. They apply their principle to causes they think important. Protecting states is a cause they think important. Protecting the public domain is not.

By what right? By what g.d. right? These five justices have all the right in the world to have their own principled way of interpreting the constitution. Long before this case, I had written many many pages trying to explain the principle I thought inherent in the decisions of these five justices. I have spent many hours insisting on the same to ever-skeptical students. But by what right do these 5 get to pick and choose the parts of the constitution to which their principles will apply?

This sounds so amazingly naive, I know. But I have spent my career staring down the charge of naive, insisting on something more. Think the poster on the X-Files -- "I want to believe" -- but with the Supreme Court, not UFOs, in the background. Yet here I am, more than a decade into my job, just where most of my professors insisted I should have been more than a decade ago.

Link Discuss

Last week, I shipped a novel with an open source license. This week, Salon is running my open spectrum novellette, "Liberation Spectrum," a story about the wireless commons and what it could mean for sovereignty, entrepreneurship, and politics. I wrote this for a workshop last fall at Bruce Sterling's place in Austin, and got some great criticism -- thanks to everyone who helped make this a better peice.

Akwesahsne was just the sort of woods that the CogRad gear thrived in. Within a week, the entire rez would be unwired at 500 megabits/second, enough connectivity to move whatever data they could find a use for. The Warriors were resentful at first, but they came around.

Lee-Daniel went out with a crew that Elaine was leading, up on the northern border of the Sovereign. She had two junior surveyors with her, all of them loaded with positioning gear that tied in to Galileo, the European GPS network -- the Galileo gear cost a fortune, but they'd found that their American GPS kit often mysteriously stopped working when they were working on projects in the territorial USA. They'd ordered the Euro stuff from a bunch of anti-globalization activists who'd found that the same thing happened in any city hosting an economic summit. Europeans were more likely to treat infrastructure as sacrosanct, while the U.S. was only too happy to monkey with GPS for tactical reasons. The Series A man hated the expense of the Galileo gear, hated paying off crusty-punk Starbucks-smashers for critical tools, hated the optics of looking like a bunch of anarchists instead of a spunky start-up.

The surveyors and the Warriors kept their distance as they set out, one Warrior leading and one bringing up the rear. Elaine called for a break every five or ten minutes to check her location against the map and to hammer down an RF beacon that would serve to measure the drop-off over the terrain as they hiked. She used binox with an integrated laserpointer to check the distance and clarity to remote points, and a squealing handheld brick of oscilloscope gear to measure the crossover of the other beacons on the hill. All the while, she muttered down her cellphone's headpiece with the other crews, making sure they weren't overlapping or diverging too widely, keeping everything squared with the maps on her screens and in her head.

The woods had a high canopy, which was good news. When they started out, they'd focused on getting above the leaf line, since leaves badly scattered RF signals, but they'd ended up with networks that were only reachable by people who were twenty feet off the ground. They'd blown a fortune downlinking the relays to ground-level stations with omnidirectional antennae.

But then Lee-Daniel had had a brainstorm -- build the network below the leaf line. Heavy canopy starved out any foliage that grew below the treetops, leaving a clear line of sight (modulo the tree trunks, which were largely RF transparent) on the forest floor. That pushed CogRad from a theoretical project to a real success.

Link Discuss

Dan Gillmor has filed a special column, telling us all what we lost with the Supreme Court's rejection of Eldred:

Who got robbed? You did. I did.

Who won? Endlessly greedy media barons will now collect billions from works that should have long since entered the public domain.

Like public lands and the oceans, the public domain is controlled by no one -- a situation that infuriates people who believe that nothing can have value unless some person or corporation owns it. The public domain is the pool of knowledge from which new art and scholarship have arisen over the centuries.

The Constitution talks about granting rights to creators of ''science and useful arts'' but only for limited periods. After that, the works can be used freely by anyone.

Walt Disney understood the value of the public domain, and used it precisely as other great artists had done. He updated an out-of-copyright character to create Mickey Mouse, for example, and launched an empire.

Link Discuss

Andy has brilliantly remixed an old Mickey cartoon-strip (a fair use), to form a commentary on the Eldred decision. Link Discuss (Thanks, Andy!)

Lux sez: "I cobbled together a few politically satirical images about the Eldred case which we will be running for the next few days. Feel free to re-use and distribute!" Link Discuss (Thanks, Lux!)

Spider Robinson's classic story about infinite copyright, "Melancholy Elephants," is online for free, courtesy of Baen Books. Fitting that we read it today:

"Good answer," she said. "Remember that. But for all present-day intents and purposes, you might as well say that art is a little over 15,600 years old. That's the age of the oldest surviving artwork, the cave paintings at Lascaux. Doubtless the cave-painters sang, and danced, and even told stories—but these arts left no record more durable than the memory of a man. Perhaps it was the story tellers who next learned how to preserve their art. Countless more generations would pass before a workable method of musical notation was devised and standardized. Dancers only learned in the last few centuries how to leave even the most rudimentary record of their art.

"The racial memory of our species has been getting longer since Lascaux. The biggest single improvement came with the invention of writing: our memory-span went from a few generations to as many as the Bible has been around. But it took a massive effort to sustain a memory that long: it was difficult to hand-copy manuscripts faster than barbarians, plagues, or other natural disasters could destroy them. The obvious solution was the printing press: to make and disseminate so many copies of a manuscript or art work that some would survive any catastrophe.

"But with the printing press a new idea was born. Art was suddenly mass-marketable, and there was money in it. Writers decided that they should own the right to copy their work. The notion of copyright was waiting to be born.

"Then in the last hundred and fifty years came the largest quantum jumps in human racial memory. Recording technologies. Visual: photography, film, video, Xerox, holo. Audio: low-fi, hi-fi, stereo, and digital. Then computers, the ultimate in information storage. Each of these technologies generated new art forms, and new ways of preserving the ancient art forms. And each required a reassessment of the idea of copyright.

"You know the system we have now, unchanged since the mid-twentieth-century. Copyright ceases to exist fifty years after the death of the copyright holder. But the size of the human race has increased drastically since the 1900s—and so has the average human lifespan. Most people in developed nations now expect to live to be a hundred and twenty; you yourself are considerably older. And so, naturally, S. '896 now seeks to extend copyright into perpetuity."

"Well," the senator interrupted, "what is wrong with that? Should a man's work cease to be his simply because he has neglected to keep on breathing? Mrs. Martin, you yourself will be wealthy all your life if that bill passes. Do you truly wish to give away your late husband's genius?"

Link Discuss

Great video and audio captures of last night's Michael Moore appearance on The Daily Show. Link Discuss

Pho list co-founder, meme-generator, and BoingBoing friend Jim Griffin appears on the PBS show NOW with Bill Moyers on January 17, 2002 at 9p.m. E.T./P.T. Check local listings here. This edition of Moyers' weekly program will tackle the digital future of intellectual property and the present debate pitting private control against public domain.

Public libraries embody the American ideal that anybody can read, watch or listen to just about anything they want to. With publications and broadcasting delivered free by the Internet directly to homes, is the information revolution making libraries obsolete? As more people can access this content, the copyright owners -- in many cases large corporate publishing entities -- are looking for ways to charge fees. A growing chorus of lawyers, librarians, and educators fear the implications of losing free access to information for everyone. "Our information and communication infrastructure is so central to everything we do," says former American Library Association president Nancy Kranich. "But what's really underlying that is the free flow of ideas which is essential to democracy." Jim Griffin, president of the music company Cherry Lane Digital adds, "...Eleanor Roosevelt dreamed of a world of libraries where we could borrow any book we wanted to read, any movie we wanted to watch, any record we wanted to listen to..equalizing access to knowledge is one of the hallmarks of a civilized society."

Link Discuss

Dan sez, "Today seemed like an appropriate time for this link to Digimarc's 'Plugging the Analog Hole' presentation. In it, Digimarc describes how 'hackers are like sheep' who will steal digital content unless all future devices use digital watermarking techniques (like the ones Digimarc develops) and all analog outputs are removed. Say goodbye to works like GNN's S-11 Redux if that ever happens." Link Discuss (Thanks, Dan Z!)

Representatives Boucher and Doolittle have introduced a bill, the DMCRA, that mitigates some of the worst elements of the current copyright regime, especially in the DMCA. They've been met with a hail of FUD and scare-mongering. This page explains in detail why the copyright absolutists' arguments are so flawed.

Opponents of the DMCRA argue that if we allow circumvention to make noninfringing use, it will make it easier to circumvent the same technologies for infringing use. This argument ignores the obvious: If copyright holders limit their technologies to the prevention of infringing use, then no one will need to "pick the lock" in order to make noninfringing use. Consider timed-out copied, for example. It is never infringement to listen to a sound recording an infinite number of times. It is never infringement to rent lawfully made copies infinite times. An access control technology that times out a lawfully made copy so that the lawful owner or lawful renter of that copy has to pay the copyright holder to gain access is the same as a technology allowing copyright holders to charge a toll to cross the Brooklyn Bridge. It is ludicrous for the illicit toll-collector to argue that if people can learn how to cross the Brooklyn Bridge without paying the illicit toll, then legitimate toll collectors will be at risk.

Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

Black and white snapshot gallery of discarded Christmas trees. Link Discuss (Thanks, Spencer!)

The ACLU has just released a new report: "Bigger Monster, Weaker Chains: The Growth of an American Surveillance Society." On Dave Farber's list today, Barry Steinhardt writes:

This report grew out of our sense here at the ACLU that in order to make progress on the privacy issue, we have to shift the terms of the debate. When viewed in isolation, many new privacy invasions seem harmless to many Americans, who don't see why they should care that (for example) someone is recording the date and time that they drive through a tollbooth. To understand the privacy issue one has to look at the big picture to understand that each new piece of information collected about us, no matter how seemingly harmless, is increasingly being added together with thousands of other data points to create an extremely intrusive, high-resolution picture of our lives.

The need to shift the terms of the debate on privacy to focus more on the big picture was made a lot easier by the breaking of the story of the Pentagon/Poindexter Total Information Awareness program and that story has provided the perfect opportunity to try to spark a broader discussion of how we are going to handle all the intrusive new technologies that are being developed, and what we are going to let this country turn into.

Link Discuss (via IP list)

A new book on astrobiology is out from a pair of American scientists, and it pegs the end of all life on earth at 500 million years from now. Co-authors Donald Brownlee Peter Ward describe the countdown to our imminent doom in The Life and Death Of Planet Earth, saying this should encourage humans to stop doing such a lame job of caring for the planet. AFP story snip:

"They said that when compared to a 24 hour clock, the planet is currently at 4:30 am after about 4.5 billion years of existence. At 5:00 am, the University of Washington professors write, animal and vegetable life will end after one billion years on Earth. By 8:00 am, the oceans will have vaporised and at midday, after 12 billion years, the Earth will have been absorbed by the Sun. By that time, the Sun will have become huge, destroyed any sign of the human presence and dispersed atoms and molecules across space.

'The disappearance of our planet is still 7.5 billion years away, but people really should consider the fate of our world and have a realistic understanding of where we are going,' said Brownlee."

Link Discuss

"a Vancouver, Wash., family discovered that the toy they unsuspectingly attached to their son's crib utters the words "I hate you" amid the rhythmic ocean sounds designed to lull the baby asleep." Link Discuss (Thanks, Jeremy!)

The Supremes' Eldred opinions are online. Majority, 136k PDF; Stevens' dissent, 132k PDF; Breyer's dissent, 136k PDF Discuss (Thanks, Bryant!)

The next Harry Potter novel will be on shelves in June. It will be in the public domain -- where the legends and stories that gave Rowling her inspiration are -- 95 70 years after her death, at least in the USA. Link Discuss

This AP wire reports that we lost Eldred, 7-2. That's the Supreme Court case that Larry Lessig argued to establish the principle that the continuous extension of copyright at the expense of the public domain is unconstitutional. This blog will be wearing a black arm-band for the next day in mourning for our shared cultural heritage, as the Library of Alexandria burns anew. Link Discuss (Thanks, Gnat!)

Roger Williams has put his unpublished sf novel, "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect," online under a share-freely license. I've just read the first chapter, and it looks pretty good! Link Discuss (Thanks, Rusty!)

Paul sez, "Major fun for map geeks and anybody else who appreciates beautiful printed work: a collection of over 2000 USGS topographic maps dating from the 1880s to the 1950s. The collection was started by a railroad and map nut from New Hampshire who traveled from library to library with a scanner and a laptop; later, the University of New Hampshire and other kindred spirits helped expand the collection to cover all of New England (for the geographically impaired, that would be Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island). It now also includes New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland, and parts of Virginia, West Virginia, and Ohio. I suspect that if word gets out to enough potential volunteers it will eventually cover the entire country. Great desktop picture material!" Link Discuss (Thanks, Paul!)

The O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference -- April 22-25 in Santa Clara -- is open for registration. This is an absolutely fantastic conference, one that I'm proud to sit on the organizing committee for, and last year's was the stuff of legend. Sign up now! Link Discuss

bOING bOING friend Lisa Palac is teaching a sex-writing workshop at Esalen this month! Here's what Lisa has to say:

"It's my first time teaching this class on the West Coast. I've taught it several times at the Omega Institute in upstate New York, and it has always been a pretty amazing experience for everyone involved.The workshop is for writers of all levels who have a sexual story to tell. Other creative writing classes often make you feel like a big weirdo for wanting to explicitly discuss and explore your sexual life. In my class, of course, such topics provide the foundation and we build from there. Through writing, reading and discussion, we'll spend the week working toward a more complete essay, focusing on both craft and content. You might end up with a stand-alone piece, or a chapter of a larger memoir. Then again, maybe what you're left with is simply the experience of doing the kind of writing you've always wanted to do against a backdrop of one of most beautiful places on earth."

Getting Naked: Writing Sexual Essay and Memoir takes place January 26-31. Link Discuss

After interviewing 1000 people about what makes them happy, researchers say they have come up with a formula for happiness. Happiness = P + (5xE) + (3xH) E stands for Existence and relates to health, financial stability and friendships.

And H represents Higher Order needs, and covers self-esteem, expectations, ambitions and sense of humour. Link Discuss

This is old, but I just saw it: A Washingon Monthly Article about the "Wisdom of Ann Coulter." She's one funny lady!

"[Clinton] masturbates in the sinks."---Rivera Live 8/2/99

"God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, 'Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours.'"---Hannity & Colmes, 6/20/01

The "backbone of the Democratic Party" is a "typical fat, implacable welfare recipient"---syndicated column 10/29/99

To a disabled Vietnam vet: "People like you caused us to lose that war."---MSNBC

Link Discuss (Via Die Puny Humans)

This guy writes about how he can single-handedly change the nature of entire traffic jams by altering the way he drives.

Once upon a time, years ago, I was driving through a number of stop/go traffic waves on I-520 at rush hour in Seattle. I decided to try something. On a day when I immediately started hitting the usual "waves" of stopped traffic, I decided to drive slow. Rather than repeatedly rushing ahead with everyone else, only to come to a halt, I decided to try to drive at the average speed of the traffic. I let a huge gap open up ahead of me, and timed things so I was arriving at the next "stop-wave" just as the last red brakelights were turning off ahead of me. It certainly felt weird to have that huge empty space ahead of me, but I knew I was driving no slower than anyone else. Sometimes I hit it just right and never had to touch the brakes at all, but sometimes I was too fast or slow. There were many "waves" that evening, and this gave me many opportunities to improve my skill as I drove along.

I kept this up for maybe half an hour while approaching the city. Finally I happened to glance at my rearview mirror. There was an interesting sight.

It was dusk, the headlights were on, and I was going down a long hill to the bridges. I had a view of miles of highway behind me. In the other lane I could see maybe five of the traffic stop-waves. But in the lane behind me, for miles, TOTALLY UNIFORM DISTRIBUTION. I hadn't realized it, but by driving at the average speed, my car had been "eating" traffic waves. Everyone ahead of me was caught in the stop/go cycle, while everyone behind me was forced to go at a nice smooth 35MPH or so. My single tiny car had erased miles and miles of stop-and-go traffic. Just one single "lubricant atom" had a profound effect on the turbulent particle flow within the entire "tube."

Link Discuss

Who let Dr. Funkenstein loose in the snackfood factory? DailyCandy reports:

"Back in the day, athletes hogged the Wheaties box. In the hip-hop era, there's a better way to get your snack on. Time to represent. The marketing geniuses at Universal Records have created Rapsnacks, slapping their artists (Nelly, Master P, and Lil Romeo, among others) where they've never bling-blinged before: on snack bags. (Making Chester Cheetah look like a punk-ass bitch.)

Bar-B-Quing with My Honey and Red Hot Cheddar potato chips are not for carb-obsessed lightweights, but they sure do pack serious flava -- double meaning intended. Yes, yes, y'all. On the serious tip, Rapsnacks are printed with positive messages like Stay in School and Respect Your Elders. Addictive? Maybe. Just don't call us when you find yourself on the mike raving about your love for Back on the Ranch."

Shown at left: Master-P platinum barbecue chips. Boo-ya!

Link Discuss

Geoffrey sez, "I've put together a collection of stories and journal entries in the spirit of comic book year-end annuals; I call it the Geoffrey Litwack 2002 Annual, and it's free to distribute thanks to a Creative Commons license." Link Discuss (Thanks, Geoffrey!)

The town of Soap Lake, WA, is building a 60' lava lamp to promote tourism. Link Discuss (Thanks, Zed!)

The late-model dual-USB iBooks have the technical capacity to do "monitor spanning" -- plugging in an external display and showing different windows on each screen -- but they ship with the feature disabled. Not coincidentally, the higher-end Titanium laptops have this feature and use it as a selling-point. Anyway, a little judicious hackery-pokery will turn it on in your icebook, and "Hello, monitor-spanning!" Link Discuss (via Raelity Bytes)

A tiki-themed, four-apartment rental building is opening soon in downtown LA. Link Discuss (Thanks, Chris!)

Hong Kong health-clubs have banned the use of camera-phones in locker rooms. Link Discuss (Thanks, Bryan!)

A ZDnet UK columnist found himself stranded in the Scottish Highlands over the holidays after a skiing accident. No problem -- he had a brand new, sexy Microsoft-powered mobile phone. However, the MSFT interface is so tortuous that he nearly froze to death while trying to figure out how to get the device to turn its radio on.

The next time I looked at the phone it appeared to have turned itself off -- so I tried switching it on again. When it eventually came to life I could not get it to dial -- a closer examination revealed the legend 'Radio off' displayed very legibly on the SPV's excellent screen. No amount of menu searching let me find anything that would turn the phone's radio back on. At this point I remember making a few comments about the dubiousness of Bill Gates' parentage. I eventually managed to flag down a passing skier who let me use her Nokia phone (which switched on immediately) to call for help. Later analysis revealed that the problem arose because of the SPV's implementation of the ON/OFF button. It needs to be depressed for a couple of seconds to function as an on/off switch. If pressed and released briefly it summons a 'QuickList' menu -- where one of the items lets you turn the radio -- presumably to let you watch movies on the thing when airborne on something more reliable than two planks of wood.

Link Discuss (via Oblomovka)

The RIAA is reportedly changing its tune on the Hollings Bill, legislation that would require new technologies to be approved by entertainment companies before they were allowed into the marketplace. The WSJ is reporting that they've joined Intel and the Business Software Alliance in opposing the bill.

The UK Inquirer's coverage of this suggests that Intel opposes this kind of thing generally, but while Intel's senior management team has been quite critical of technology mandates, Intel itself has been an active agitant for and ringleader of the Broadcast Flag issue, and their efforts have been instrumental to bringing this terrible idea -- which accomplishes the same ends as the Hollings Bill -- to the FCC, WIPO and Congress. Link Discuss

You've all applied for your refund from the RIAA, right? Well, SendItToTheEFF is a project to coordinate a big <nelson>haha</nelson> to the music industry by encouraging people to donate their refunds from the cartel to the EFF and make a note to that effect on the the checks. Link Discuss (Thanks, Dav!)

Ain't It Cool News is featuring leaked concept art from the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Link Discuss

Brilliantly, seditiously remixed State of the Union address video. (6.9MB QuickTime) Discuss (via Joho the Blog)

Artbots is back, with autonomous vengeance! The second annual international "ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show" happens at EYEBEAM Gallery in Chelsea, NYC in mid-July. Deadline for entries is March 1st. Gentlemen (and ladies), start your bots. Snip from the project website:

"Artbots is the international art exhibition for robotic art and art-making robots. No firm rules exist on the types of work that can be submitted; if you think it's a robot and you think it's making art, then it's an art-making robot. About fifteen submissions will be selected for participation in the show. The show will run for two days (saturday and sunday) with all artists in attendence. Selected works will remain installed during the rest of the week as part of EYEBEAM's summer robotics festivities."

Visit the archive site for last year's show here. At left: The audience interacts with "Roving Walter Walter" at last year's show, by mxHz.org (lahaag and chip.kali). Link Discuss

Karl sez: "I just posted an article and some scans on my site from a pile of old Mechanix Illustrated magazines I got from my father. These are the articles I grew up with: flying cars, nuking the arctic to moderate the weather, space platforms, etc. etc. The one I've been unable to locate so far is the 'Robots in your home by 1965!' piece, which I used to have but have mislaid." Link Discuss (Thanks, Karl!)

Cuboro is a system of 5cm^3 stacking wooden blocks with channels and dropouts that you use to make marble-runs. This looks like a lot of fun. Link Discuss (Thanks, Rainer!)

David Weinberger has hilariously deconstructed a drug=terrorism PSA, uncovering its roots as a parable for Bush the Elder's stern oversight of the coked-up Prez.

...we see a young-ish businessman having a meal in a fancy restaurant with another businessman in the next generation up. The young man thinks the relationship between drugs and terrorism is "very complex." The older man sighs Gore-ishly and lowers his eyelids in exasperation, as if he's talking to a slow-witted child. He patiently explains in one-syllable words how drugs and terrorism are connected. The younger man gets a Jeff Spicoli look as he processes the information and then concedes defeat...

Rich, callow, shallow, stupid, drug-using young businessman? Hmm, I wonder who that could be. And he's being advised by a man his father's age who patiently explains what his position should be? Lemme think, lemme think! And the young man changes his mind on an issue of international importance within 5 seconds?

Link Discuss (via JOHO the blog)

Nice collection of GI Joe public service announcements dubbed over with slightly raunchy, bizarre vocals. Link Discuss (Thanks, BB!)

A 16 year old boy has won a science fair prize by turning in a 780,000-line broswer called XWEBS that benchmarks 400% faster than competing browsers. Link Discuss (Thanks, Zed!)

Michael sez: "Kramerbooks, a bookstore/eatery just off Dupont Circle in Washington DC, is selling a new coffee drink, the Trent Lotte: A glass of black coffee, and a glass of steamed milk, in separate but equal portions." Link Discuss (Thanks, Michael!)

Check out this creepy, improbable Vichy-nerd screed from someone who claims to have seized control over the Internet at the behest of the RIAA:

It took us about a month to develop the complex hydra, and another month to bring it up to the standards of excellence that the RIAA demanded of us. In the end, we submitted them what is perhaps the most sophisticated tool for compromising millions of computers in moments.

Our system works by first infecting a single host. It then fingerprints a connecting host on the p2p network via passive traffic analysis, and determines what the best possible method of infection for that host would be. Then, the proper search results are sent back to the "victim" (not the hard-working artists who p2p technology rapes, and the RIAA protects). The user will then (hopefully) download the infected media file off the RIAA server, and later play it on their own machine.

When the player is exploited, a few things happen. First, all p2p-serving software on the machine is infected, which will allow it to infect other hosts on the p2p network. Next, all media on the machine is cataloged, and the full list is sent back to the RIAA headquarters (through specially crafted requests over the p2p networks), where it is added to their records and stored until a later time, when it can be used as evidence in criminal proceedings against those criminals who think it's OK to break the law.

Our software worked better than even we hoped, and current reports indicate that nearly 95% of all p2p-participating hosts are now infected with the software that we developed for the RIAA.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

Dan Gillmor's column yesterday sounds a note of hope -- after seeing all the very cool devices on the floor at CES, devices that pay "lip service to the cartel's wish for absolute control over how copyrighted material may be used," he concludes that, "tomorrow is not on the side of the copyright control freaks." I share some of his optimism, but, as I wrote to him:

A good point to reflect on is that since any anti-copying tech can be broken by technically sophisticated users (if by no other means than by redigitizing the cleartext output from analog AV outputs), anti-copying measures *can't* stop "piracy." These measures won't slow down organized gangs of Ukranian counterfeiters, or even college dormnet traders. The *only* people these measures are proof against is average, non-sharing users. IOW, these measures only effect legit uses -- like making a copy for the car, cottage or kids' room -- and have no effect on sharing.

What shakes out of this is that the nods made by CE companies to Hollywood are still supremely anti-customer. They will *not* slow down "piracy," but they will enforce the entertainment companies' desire to force their honest users to buy the same product again and again, rather than format- or space-shifting.

Link Discuss

"A doctor whose prototype suicide machine was seized as he left his native Australia to attend a euthanasia conference says his U.S. supporters will help him rebuild the device." Like Kevorkian's second-generation suicide machine, this machine kills you with carbon monoxide. But while the Kevorkian contraption required compressed carbon monoxide (hard to get and tough to transport), this prototype creates the killer gas on demand. Link Discuss

Andrew is a forecaster, design strategist and author, working at the intersection of culture, creativity, technology, and futures research. He's the lead partner of Z + Partners, a forecasting and design company. He also edits the Z + Blog, which tracks the future of design, branding, sustainability, and other emerging issues. His most recent project was editing The Catalog of Tomorrow, a book that examines more than ninety critical future trends and technologies, and explores how they will shape our lives, our society and our planet in the next 20 years. Discuss

A new rule in Bend, OR, bans spitting, smoking or stinking on buses:

The regulations ban anyone who "emanates a grossly repulsive odor that is unavoidable by other Bend Extended Area Transit customers" from being in the bus station or on a bus.

Link Discuss

Dasher is like a video-game for rapid text-entry without a keyboard. The animation on this link does a better job of explaining it than I can. The idea is that you tap the first letter, then all the legal letters that could follow it zoom up under your stylus. Choose one of those and the legal follow-ons zoom up, and so on. Looks really fast. Link Discuss (Thanks, Matthew!)

The WiFi sniffer is a credit-card-sized device that detects nearby WiFi signal, sparing you the pain and embarassment of hauling around your laptop. Wishlist: distinguish between open and closed nets, allow for an external antenna, log with GPS co-ords, check for DHCP leases and attempt to route a packet on every detected network. Still, it's cool enough that I'd buy one. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jong!)

Antipolygraph.org is a site devoted to debunking the idea that polygraphs can actually detect lies.

On this website, you will learn that polygraph "testing" is:

* Theoretically unsound and is not a valid diagnostic technique.

* Entirely dependent on the polygrapher lying to and deceiving the examinee.

* Biased against the truthful, resulting in many honest and law-abiding people being falsely accused each year.

* Easily beaten. The common notion that only sociopaths can beat the lie detector is nothing more than a myth. In fact, simple-to-learn techniques enable anyone to beat polygraph "tests." A full explanation of how to perform these techniques is provided in chapter four of The Lie Behind the Lie Detector.

Link Discuss (Thanks, George!)

Danger has launched Hiplog, a site that makes it easier for HipTop (phone, PDA, camera, browsers, etc) users to "moblog" -- blog on the go. This sounds like a tremendous idea, except the bottom of ever post reads: "Copyright 2002 Danger, Inc. All rights reserved." As Dav Colemant so eloquently puts it:

This is what I think of your terms of agreement [pictured].

I prefer to retain copyright on everything I produce, and give it away as I see fit (most likely through a Creative Commons license or donation to the public domain).

Link Discuss (via EvHead)

Southern California-based Evolution Robotics announced several new developments last week during CES, one of which is a new navigation technology it claims is cheap enough to bring robots to the mass market. Story snip:

"Evolution Robotics said its ['visual simultaneous localisation and mapping,' or VSLAM] technology that lets a robot determine its position relative to its environment is based on wheel sensors and a Web cam that cost less than $50. That's a fraction of the cost of current robot navigation systems relying on laser range finders, which can cost $5,000, the company said. The company asserts that its relatively inexpensive system 'will result in a new generation of products that were previously inconceivable.'"

Evolution also announced that toymaker giant Bandai will license its software platform to develop a new personal robot product modeled on the popular "Doraemon" character. Other Bandai toys include Power Rangers, Tamagotchi, Gundam and Digimon. The cat-like robot will be developed by 2005 and targeted as an "edutainment" personal 'bot for families in Japan and Asia. Link Discuss

My pal and former Silicon Alley Reporter Magazine colleague Wendy Mitchell's new book is out! New York City's Best Dive Bars: Drinking and Diving in the Five Boroughs is now available online at Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble.com or igpub.com. Why should you buy it? Wendy sez:

(1) The book features bar histories, drinking stories, and more, not just some "Zagat-like" quotes that "all sound the same." And some very cool photos.
(2) Couldn't the alcoholics in your life use a nice present?
(3) There's a chance I've written about YOU in the book, so you'd better read it to make sure.
(4) Because I may need the money to buy myself a new liver. Link Discuss

Combining Play-Doh playsets and soft cheese makes for amazing, formed Pikachu hors d'oeuvres.

The Hasbro company manufactures a device for extruding Play Doh (TM) into two piece molds in a variety of forms. Approximately 20 CC of an extrudable dough-like material is placed in a cylinder, and a lever piston forces the material into a two-piece mold. (see illustration 1)

While the proprietary material Play-Doh (TM) is the intended substance for this device, the researchers experimented with a variety of cheesy comestibles, with the intent of creating an attractive and unusual party appetizer.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Scott!)

Terrific gallery of old UK TV test-cards. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jeff!)

They've broken ground on Hong Kong Disneyland. Let's hope that none of the in situ subterranean unexploded WWWII ordinance goes off! Link Discuss (Thanks, Slowhand!)

If you attended last year's World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, California, or pre-registered to attend this year's convention in Toronto, you're eligible to nominate people, stories and books for the 2003 Hugo Awards. (Shameless plug: my stories 0wnz0red and Jury Service are both eligible in the Novella category) Link (64k PDF) Discuss (Thanks, Derryl!)