Some folks I know are working on a documentary film about six Sierra Leonean musicians who escaped the horrors of the war there and now live at a refugee camp in the Republic of Guinea. They formed a band called the Refugee All-Stars. The trailer looks great. I hope they can find the resources to finish the film! (Flash and Quicktime required for this site.) Link Discuss

French reporters on their way to cover the E3 conference in LA were held for 24+ hours by US immigration officials, repeatedly body-searched and then kicked out of the country and sent back to France. Link Discuss (Thanks, Unseelie!)

A "wireless tazer" was demoed at the German European Symposium on Non-Lethal Weapons -- it uses a schpritz of vapour as a conductive medium for its shocks.

The Plasma-Taser will not need any wires because it fires an aerosol spray towards the target, which creates a conductive channel for a shock current, claims Rheinmetall. The company refused to comment on exactly how the weapon works, but it says the aerosol material is non-toxic.

Link Discuss

Aaron Swartz is proposing to start a new, peer-reviewed ezine called "The Annals of Planet Hacking," which will be a text version of CodeCon, in which hackers present detailed, informally written piecesa about their latest hacks. Link Discuss

Gibson's latest blog entry is a speech to the Director's Guild to America, and is a very dense and inspiring piece on the past and future of narrative arts.

But I need to diverge here into another industry, one that's already and even more fully feeling the historical impact of the digital: music. Prior to the technology of audio recording, there was relatively little one could do to make serious money with music. Musicians could perform for money, and the printing press had given rise to an industry in sheet music, but great fame, and wealth, tended to be a matter of patronage. The medium of the commercial audio recording changed that, and created industry predicated on an inherent technological monopoly of the means of production. Ordinary citizens could neither make nor manufacture audio recordings. That monopoly has now ended. Some futurists, looking at the individual musician's role in the realm of the digital, have suggested that we are in fact heading for a new version of the previous situation, one in which patronage (likely corporate, and non-profit) will eventually become a musician's only potential ticket to relative fame and wealth. The window, then, in which one could become the Beatles, occupy that sort of market position, is seen to have been technologically determined. And technologically finite. The means of production, reproduction and distribution of recorded music, are today entirely digital, and thus are in the hands of whoever might desire them. We get them for free, often without asking for them, as inbuilt peripherals. I bring music up, here, and the impact the digital is having on it, mainly as an example of the unpredictable nature of technologically driven change. It may well be that the digital will eventually negate the underlying business-model of popular musical stardom entirely. If this happens, it will be a change which absolutely no one intended, and few anticipated, and not the result of any one emergent technology, but of a complex interaction between several. You can see the difference if you compare the music industry's initial outcry against "home taping" with the situation today.

Update: Turns out Xeni helped organize this event, and she took pictures.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)

Interesting report on facial attractiveness from German universities. Includes lots of surreal morphed faces.

For female faces, it could be shown that babyface attributes - such as large, round eyes, a large domed forehead and small, short nose and chin lead to a rise in attractiveness values. Only very few (9.5%) of the test subjects found the original adult faces most attractive. Most of the test subjects (90.5%) preferred faces with 10%-50% the proportions of the babyface scheme. This means: Even the most attractive female faces can become more attractive when their proportions are altered towards more babyfaceness. It needs to be explicitly stated, however, that not only male, but also female test subjects found babyface pictures more attractive, and we could not observe any inherent preference of babyfaced pictures in our male test subjects. Again, it is surprising that the most attractive faces do not even exist in reality.

Link Discuss

Award winning water fountain appears to run uphill, actually an optical illusion. Link Discuss

A BoingBoing pal living in Beijing sends this surreal bit of local news involving rural SMS rumors, SARS, and talking babies.

The ideas stemmed from a rumor about a baby who purportedly spoke immediately after birth and said firecrackers and "green bean soup" could prevent infection, said an official at Anhui Provincial Public Security Bureau.

Hundreds of thousands of people in the province, including the capital, Hefei, received the rumor via text messages on their cell phones, the official said.

Different variations of the story, told in areas as far-flung as Guangdong and the northern region of Inner Mongolia, say the baby said the soup had to be consumed by midnight on May 7 and that he died after delivering the message, according to newspapers.

The rumor caused sales of mung beans and firecrackers to skyrocket in Guangdong, Fujian and Guizhou.

Update: Link to Beijing-based AP correspondent Audra Ang's story. Discuss (Thanks, John)