I was working on the CBS lot in Studio City around sunset today. I had a digital camera with a few minutes and megabytes to kill, so I took some quickie snapshots of abandoned TV sets. Everything you see here is life-sized, but fake (not unlike my city). The trees are painted on drywall, the houses are 3 feet deep, even the ivy is two-dimensional. Vacant studio lots emit a strange kind of sorrow and character that's not there when they're full of bodies. Like flat sketches that pop off the page when liberated from their daily human cargo. After actors depart and crews go home, the lots wake up to live moody, secret little dream lives we don't know about. LA is full of promises and lies. Here, even the studio sets lie to you about being inanimate. Link

Glenn Fleishman sez: "Sid Steward is a PDF guru that I've turned to in the past to bookmark and clean up my electronic books. He forwarded a link to a site he's created where he has the 9/11 Commission's report optimized for faster download, and including bookmarks and other PDF add-ons. His site offers a fast full text search of the PDF with links that will open the file and hit those bookmarks." Link

Michael Syravong thought he'd pulled a fast one on Washington's Department of Licensing when he got a license-plate that read "GOTMILF." He told the department that MILF stands for "Manual Inline Lift Fluctuator," But eventually, bluenoses who are somehow familiar with the true meaning of the acronym (Google it for the not-safe-for-work answer), complained to the department and Syravong lost his plates. Link (Thanks, Eric!)

I wrote a piece for TheFeature about "spintronics" -- nanotechnology-based storage that is going to show up in products as early as next year.

Spintronics is a field of nanotechnology that uses the directional spin of electrons to indicate the "1s" and "0s" of binary computation...MRAM, short for Magneto Resistive Random Access Memory, is the furthest along of several nascent spintronics nanotechnologies. MRAM is likely to play a major role in portable memory in the upcoming years, because it combines many of the benefits (and very few of the disadvantages) of hard drives, flash memory, SRAM and DRAM.

Link

KITT (Knight Industry Two Thousand), from the 1980s TV series Knight Rider, is up for auction on eBay. Apparently this was one of the tricked-out 1983 Trans Ams actually used in the show:

"After being released from its film duties, KITT found its way into the show circuit by promoting many Budweiser World of Wheels car shows for a number of years. After its tour of duty, the car was in need of restoration and in 2001 the owner approached Mark Scrivani of Mark's Custom Kits to restore the vehicle. The original, futuristic dash built by universal would only illuminate and was not intended to be functional; the owner commissioned Scrivani to make the dash fully functional, thus, the various non-functioning consoles were removed, cleaned up and made functional with pushable buttons, sound and visual effects. The dash received fully operational gauges and instruments, as well as an in-car camera tied into one of the two dash-mounted LCD monitors. The other monitor is wired into a trunk-mounted VCR for running and viewing tapes for future car show use. The original scanner mounted in the front of the vehicle was restored and functions properly. The scanner sound effect is also added to external speakers so it can be heard while the scanner is running. Besides the original Universal registration, the car comes with the original stamped steel "KNIGHT" license plate..."

William Daniels not included. Link (Thanks, Alan Rapp!)

She's no Natasha the Walking Monkey, but Faith the Amazing Biped Dog certainly has an impressive gait. Faith was born with just one front leg and it was on backwards. A vet graciously removed the dying limb and, with help from her family, Faith has overcome her handicap: "Even though Faith has this defect we taught her to stand, hop, and eventually walk on her two back legs, like a human." Link

Still losing sleep over fears that Osama bin Laden's kin were forced to suffer in commercial coach class when they flew out of the US a week after 9/11? Today's Washington Post should make you feel better:

At least 13 relatives of Osama bin Laden, accompanied by bodyguards and associates, were allowed to leave the United States on a chartered flight eight days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to a passenger manifest released yesterday. One passenger, Omar Awad bin Laden, a nephew of the al Qaeda leader, had been investigated by the FBI because he had lived with Abdullah bin Laden, a leader of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, which the FBI suspected of being a terrorist organization.

The passenger list was made public by Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), who obtained the manifest from officials at Boston's Logan International Airport. Lautenberg's office was given the document in recent weeks and released it before today's issuance of the final report of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. Although much was already known about the "bin Laden flight," Lautenberg provided additional details, including the information that the plane, a 727 owned by DB Air and operated by Ryan International, began its flight in Los Angeles and made stops in Orlando, Dulles International Airport and Boston before continuing to Gander, Newfoundland; Paris; Geneva; and Jiddah, Saudi Arabia. The aircraft, tail number N521DB, has been chartered frequently by the White House for the press corps traveling with President Bush. (...)

"The Saudi Embassy offered to pay more money if our crew had a concern," [Ron Ryan of Ryan International] said. But he said all were reassured because "the FBI and Secret Service were heavily involved. They were in abundance every place we were."

Link

Update: BoingBoing reader Ken says, "Here's the aircraft's website run by the charter company. They fled in style. Link"
[Ed: image above grabbed from this online photo tour of transcontinental luxury service model N521DB, described on charter company DB Air's website as a "club room in the sky." ]

And Vidiot says, "Besides the White House press corps and the bin Ladens, N521DB has also flown Fleetwood Mac, the Rolling Stones, and the Baltimore Orioles...here are pix of it at various airports: Link"

From the author of Galactic Civilizations I and II:

"So don't talk to me about piracy. It's not the pirates that have ripped us off of hundreds of thousands in lost royalties. It's been "Real businesses" doing that thank you very much. The position of royalty eating parasite has already been taken."...

"So yea, tell me again how I need to put some dongle or whatever on my game to keep 15 year olds from pirating? When our contract with publishers forces them to wear a shock collar that I can press a button to shock them if royalties aren't paid on time then we'll talk about forcing customers to deal with massive copy protection. But it's not the pirates I worry about."

Link (Thanks, -d!)

A Softer World is an enigmatic weekly three-panel comic strip made of artfully arranged photos and bits of text. Link (Thanks, Bob!)

A Laughing Place message-board poster ran into Marty Sklar, the head of Disney Imagineering, at Disneyland's Tiki Room, and had a conversation about the upcoming Tiki Room refurb:

We talked briefly about The Tiki Room, about John Hench and Rolly Crump, and he confirmed the rehab, the roof being in particularly bad shape, and that the birds need a pretty extensive rehab.

'They used to bring the birds up to Imagineering and we'd refurbish them. Now, they do them here, and not often enough,' he said.

The Cast Member who introduced the show did an excellent job, she just did the spiel with enthusiasm and professionalism.

As we were walking out, I walked past Marty Sklar and he said 'It's still a good show isn't it?'

Link (via The Disney Blog)

Great Terra Nova post on the new round of VC funding received by Massive Incorporated, which does in-game product-placement and ads:

** you hack monster for 80pts of damage
** you hack monster for 100pts of damage
>monster: did you know you can get 'monster' discounts at QuickieMart
** you hack monster for 10pts of damage
* you have killed monster
* you gain 1000XP
>would you like to convert these to 1 QuickieMart loyalty point (Y/N)

Link

Suw Charman has written an excellent article for the Guardian on my pal Koleman Strumpf's empirical, quantitative research on the effect of downloading on record sales (he concluded that it doesn't really have one), and the music industry's content-free bluster in reply.

"We consider it a very flawed study," says Matt Phillips, a BPI spokesperson. Both the BPI and the International Federation for the Phonographic Industries (IFPI) have criticised the study for including the Christmas period when people are buying CDs as gifts.

"It's very straightforward to address these kinds of criticisms," says Strumpf. "We got rid of the Christmas season and just looked at the first half of our data. We still find the same effect."...

"Over the period 1999 to 2003, DVD prices fell by 25% and the price of players fell in the US from over $1,000 to almost nothing," says Strumpf. "At the same time, CD prices went up by 10%. Combined DVD and VHS tape sales went up by 500m, while CD sales fell by 200m, so a possible explanation is that people were spending on DVDs instead of CDs."

Link (Thanks, Suw!)

Matt sez: "story about how some company has developed food packs for the us army that can be rehydrated with urine. It's supposed to reduce the amount of water(and therefore weight) they need to carry." The pouch has a filter that removes almost all the toxins from the urine. Link

Controlled Demolition Incorporated is a family-owned company that demolishes bridges, buildings, missiles, and other structures around the world. Their Web site features a breathtaking video of the orchestrated collapse of the Seattle Kingdome. Company head Mark Loizeaux was recently interviewed by New Scientist:

"It has to be the right job in the first place, the right explosive, the right pattern of laying the charges, and sometimes, which sounds odd, the right repairs to bring it down as we want, so no one or no other structure is harmed. And by differentially controlling the velocity of failure in different parts of the structure, you can make it walk, you can make it spin, you can make it dance."

Link

An image of Jesus was spotted in a tinted window at a Cole Hardware store in Rio Grande Valley, Texas.

"I go to church whenever I get a chance, but I'm not a spiritual person. I do believe, especially now," a resident said after seeing the window.

Link

UPDATE: Satirista says "What's downright high-larious is that when I visited the link to Local6 news to get the full story, I clicked on the right-hand link 'click here for a larger image...' thinking I was going to see a bigger Jesus, and this is the page that came up."