Found in this morning's Flickr RSS photostream of pix of graffiti, a three-storey building in Montreal covered in a beautiful blue anime mural. Link
Update: Andre sez: "Today's Flick image image is not the only anime-inspired mural in Montreal. Check out this one."

The only accessory you need for Talk Like A Pirate Day, September 19. The site's creator, Grant Henninger, says:

"Let me present t' you t' iPatch! It really has no purpose, but it was a fun site t' build. Hope people get a good harty-har-har out o' it."

Arrrrrrrrrr!

I'm stopping at my local 99-cent store today. As reported in Cartoon Brew:

Rivaling Fleischer studios with their abstract rubber-hose animation style and hot jazz musical scores, the RKO Van Beuren Tom & Jerry cartoons (1931-1933) have become classics for their sheer surrealism. Currently in distribution at 99 Cents Only Stores is one of the greatest bargains I've ever seen: a dvd of nine Van Beuren TOM & JERRY cartoons! That's 11 cents per cartoon! And if that's not enough for you, it comes with a free 10 minute phone card inside the package!!

(Semi-related aside: Many moons ago, I wrote about a trip to the 99-Cent Only store for the print edition of bOING bOING) Link

Here's a fun way to look at a bunch of old stereoscope pictures without the stereoscope. The images are blinked. Move the mouse up to increase the blink rate. Link (Thanks, Mark!)

Stephen Holden of the NY Times reviews Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which opens this weekend nationwide.

If nothing else, "Sky Captain" is a landmark in computer-generated imagery. Its actors cavort through an entirely synthetic, computerized retro-styled future world that fuses Art Deco, Futurism, Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" and the spirit of the 1939 World's Fair into an all-purpose eve-of-World-War-II environment extrapolated into a science fiction limbo. Its cheerfully ominous scenario of a planet invaded by robots that systematically set about stripping the earth of its natural resources resonates in any number of ways without seeming strident or promoting a political agenda.

But the visual elegance of the movie, which opens today nationwide, comes at a price. If its ethereal evocation of a pulp fiction future-past eclipses almost any other sci-fi franchise in subtlety and imagination, its shadowy washed-out color is a far cry from the robust hues of a movie like "Raiders of the Lost Ark." The monochromatic variations on sepia keep the actors and their adventures at a refined aesthetic distance, and the bleached, tinted face of Mr. Law is simply not as real a screen presence as the ruddy, flesh-and-blood Harrison Ford. At times the film is hard to see. And as the action accelerates, the wonder of its visual concept starts giving way to sci-fi cliches.

Link

Over a thousand pounds of pig flesh processed at a Sioux Center meatpacking facility was recalled over fears that a missing microchip could be embedded in the meat.

The Sioux-Preme Packing Co. recalled 110 pork shoulder butts -- about 1,100 pounds of meat -- that could contain the metal devices used to measure scientific data in hogs.

Pass the tofurkey, please. Link

Speaking of energy and excess: The International CXT, short for Commercial Extreme Truck, can haul six tons of dirt and tow a 20-ton yacht at the same time. It's 9 feet high, 8 feet wide, 21 feet long, and weighs 15,000 pounds. Ergo, about 2 feet taller x 4 feet longer than the honkin' Hummer H2. Which, btw, it could tow along with that yacht, if need be. I'm using the word "need" loosely here.

"International built the CXT to make a bold statement," said Rob Swim of International Truck and Engine Corporation in a prepared statement announcing the CXT's launch. Exactly what statement would that be?

Link to CXT debut site, and Link to press release announcing launch.

BoingBoing reader George W. Maschke says,

Saving Energy Without Derision (5 mb PDF) is a new (and free) e-book by former Sandia National Laboratories senior scientist Dr. Alan P. Zelicoff. This book is intended to be a real-world, no-nonsense, thoroughly documented collection of easy-to-implement recommendations to help the average thoughtful person to pick the "low-hanging fruit" of conservation and renewable energy. The author is after the easy 75% of actions we can all take (but almost uniformly ignore) that most certainly make a difference in energy costs (after all that's what most people care about) and adjuring a bit of unnecessary adverse impact on the environment (which a few folks actually think is important beyond the mere dollar valuation).

The author (who welcomes comments at zalan8587@qwest.net) intends to continuously update the book (consistent with readership interest) and address many new topics. For example, next on his list is an analysis of the economics and scientific basis of fuel-cell vehicles powered by hydrogen. (Bottom line, he maintains, is that it's a cruel hoax and energy disaster, and far less useful than, for example, heavy hybrid automobiles that get about 50 - 60 miles on an electric charge alone -- which accounts for more than 85% of driving in the US and elsewhere on a daily basis -- and which are available now.)

Link Looks like the link's overloaded with traffic for the time being, but a short preview is available for d/l here.

Newsweek's Brian Braiker interviews T. Coraghessan Boyle (image: AP), author of The Inner Circle. The interview is a terrific read, and I really can't wait to read the book.

Like Boyle's "The Road to Wellville," "Circle" is a fictionalized account of a historic figure. Instead of John Harvey Kellogg, Boyle this time tackles Alfred C. Kinsey, the Indiana University professor who jump-started the sexual revolution with the 1948 publication of "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male." The novel is narrated by John Milk, a naive researcher at the center of Professor Kinsey's, or "Prok's," inner circle. Kinsey -- who would have abhorred the euphemism "adult film" -- proposes that poets have had 2,000 years to tell us about romance and love, and now science ought to tell us about the physiology of sex, without regard to emotional content. (Kinsey is also the subject of an upcoming biopic starring Liam Neeson.)

And boy, is the professor ever interested in sex. He charms his researchers into bed, encourages them all to swap wives and generally get it on as much as possible -- all in the name of science, of course. Because the intent behind the sex is clinical, the steady stream of graphic episodes in the novel becomes numbing, unsexy and, well, clinical. But things get sticky when Milk, a married man with a bit of a Stockholm syndrome infatuation for his mentor, fails to disentangle his emotions. Milk is in love with Kinsey. He's in love with Kinsey's wife. And he's in love with his own wife, Iris. In the end, the novel is a meditation on family, on marriage, love and sexuality.

Link

So cool. BoingBoing reader Inder says,

I want to let boingboingers know that WanderPort will be providing a free wi-fi network at the launch of SpaceShipOne for the Ansari X-Prize in the Mojave Desert September 29th through to the second launch. If any bloggers are attending the launch and want to have a mac address pass-through to make sure they can file, just send us an email info@wanderport.com and we'll make sure they can get their blogs posted. We'll also be providing a few WISIP phones for free North America phone calls.

Link to Ansari X-Prize home.

Following up on yesterday's post about an apparent bit of political humor on the Harvard Primate Neuroscience Lab's website, one BoingBoing reader wrote in to tell us that a relative worked at the lab -- and confirmed that indeed, the chimp-to-Dubya morph was no accident. Also, BoingBoing reader Chris Holland says:

That "image" at the top-right corner actually is a scaled-down display of a bigger quicktime movie ... for a more dramatic effect. Now if I could only dig out that morphing I did when I was a kid of Claudia Schiffer and Cindy Crawford.

Link to chimp-Bush-mov. Whoahhhh. If anyone has the url for a chimp-to-Dubya-to-Claudia-to-Cindy morph mov, dude -- send it to us before Fleshbot gets their greedy (and well-lubed) little hands on it.

BoingBoing reader Prodigal Tom says, "This is a fascinating article about deaf and totally neglected children in Nicaragua inventing their own sign language. I was also psyched because I learned there is an actual job called a psycholinguist! There's also a great point about how the language has evolved, so the younger members have a slightly different version than the originators." Link to Reuters synopsis, and Link to Science Magazine article, which appears to be available only to paid subscribers. (Thanks also to Mike Oliveri and others who pointed us to this item)

Update: BoingBoing reader jd says, "This story is a fascinating one - but it originally hit the mainstream media world back in 1999 in the New York Times. Here's the story (featuring Noam Chomsky, as well!) -- A Linguistic Big Bang (Link)."

Update 2: Reader Paul Camp of the Spelman College Department of Physics in Georgia says,

Yet another update: this story is way older than either of your current sources. I remember reading about it in The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by MIT psycholinguist Stephen Pinker (which you and everyone else should read), published in 1994.

In fact, Pinker makes a case that this mechanism is how pidgins become creoles generally. Pidgins are work languages without significant grammatical structure, created by adults who speak different native languages. But children have a critical developmental period when they are learning language and imposing what appear to be innate grammatical structures on the language-like things in their environment (Chomsky's Universal Grammar). Pinker describes several examples of the process, including the Nicaraguan children as well as American Sign Language, and several verbal creoles.

My friend Barnaby Whitfield is a pastel artist in New York City. He's listed in the prestigious White Columns Curated Artist Registry and is represented by the 31GRAND gallery in Brooklyn. Barnaby's work is incredibly beautiful and deeply twisted. I'm proud to know him. Link

Harvard scientists report that Rembrandt may have suffered from stereoblindness. The neurobiologists believe that many of Rembrandt's self-portraits show his eyes focused assymetrically. From the New England Journal of Medicine:

Stereopsis is an important cue for depth perception, yet it can be a hindrance to an artist trying to depict a three-dimensional scene on a flat surface. Art teachers often instruct students to close one eye in order to flatten what they see. Therefore, stereoblindness might not be a handicap — and might even be an asset — for some artists.

Link (to Boston Globe article)

Last night, we visited the Palais de Tokyo to see the work of Wang Du, a Chinese artist living in Paris. Du creates massive sculptures and installations that manipulate and deconstruct mass media and pop culture imagery. In "Oarribeancom," surreal graphics from a Japanese erotic Web site are recreated in a collection of much larger-than-life resin models like the one pictured here. (Click on the photo for a larger version.) Link

Spencer sez: Tognazzini has a great column up from July about what he calls "The Worst Interface Ever":

For $1500, you can equip your luxury car with a genuine self-destruct switch. Once it’s in place, you must remember to flip it whenever you shift from driving your car to not driving your car. Forget once or do it wrong, and your engine and transmission will self-destruct. “

Ah, a fictitious switch,” you say, but no, it is all too real and all too destructive.

The switch is hidden under the hood, where you cannot visually inspect it. To increase the sport, it's not only left unlabeled as to function, its two positions are unlabeled, too— -- make a mistake and, boom!, no more engine.

Link

In today's Wired News, a report I filed on my experience in zero gravity earlier this week. Also, on today's edition of the NPR show "Day to Day," I speak with host Noah Adams and share sounds from the weightless joyride. In space, no one can hear you squeal.

Image: floating with other passengers, including Dr. Buzz Aldrin and Zero Gravity Corporation founder Dr. Peter Diamandis, on board G-Force One. Shot by Jim Campbell.

Link to Wired News story.

Link to NPR Day to Day: "Zero Gravity Flight" audio and images.

More images: Alan M. Ladwig, former NASA Assoc. Admininstrator, now COO of Zero-G Corp, coaches me and others into weightless backflips -- Link (image: Jim Campbell). Passengers assume seated pose during the heavy-g "pullup" period prior to a weightless parabola -- Link. (XJ) NASA astronaut and space celebrity Dr. Buzz Aldrin is superman -- Link. (JC) Dr. Aldrin hovers -- Link. (JC) Flight attendant and CalTech researcher Loretta Hidalgo gives pre-flight emergency safety instructions -- Link. (XJ) "G-Force One" in hangar before liftoff -- Link. (XJ) Interviewing passengers for NPR while floating -- Link. (JC) Landing after a parabola, guided by Mr. Ladwig. -- Link. (JC) ABC News reporter Judy Muller levitates, while Dr. Aldrin flies -- Link. (JC) Xeni flies -- Link. (JC) Floating with Dr. Aldrin -- Link. (JC) Dr. Peter Diamandis, Zero G Corporation founder, greets passengers exiting "G-Force One" -- Link. (JC)

Link to previous BoingBoing posts -- "Xeni flies zero-g." For the record, I did not blow donuts.

BoingBoing pal and former guestbar resident Todd Lappin says, "FYI, comrades... the 2004 Art Car Fest will be in the Bay Area this weekend. On display outside the San Jose Museum of Art on Saturday, then parading on the streets of Berkeley on Sunday." Link

talk like a pirate day
pirate info
pirate bath 1
pirates and pivateers
capn crimson
which pirate are you?
spooneye! the card game
pirate bath 2
pirates of the bahamas
pirate flags
pirates of penzance
pirate supplies
yar! pirate zen 2003
and for a limited time...
david byrne's pirates
(this will disappear on 09.20.04)
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

The Wired Magazine / Creative Commons benefit concert with David Byrne and Gilberto Gil happens next Tuesday at Town Hall in NYC. It appears that tickets are still available, and it looks like it's going to be an awesome event. For those (like me) who can't make it to NYC then, a live webcat will be offered on September 21st, 8pm EST. Link to webcast info, Link to event info, and link to ticket site.

BoingBoing reader micah says,

On Monday, September 13th the Nasa indigenous people of Colombia launched a big three-day march. Included in the march is a low-power FM radio station, broadcast from a radiocicleta (an adapted bicycle equipped with a radio transmitter and antenna that will accompany the march). The signal will be picked up along the route by different indigenous community radio stations and then streamed on the internet. It is likely no coincidence that on Friday Septemer 4, the indigenous community station Radio Nasa was shut down by the government of Colombian president Alvaro Uribe. The indigenous groups, composing tens of thousands of people are marching to protest against the war, neoliberalism, the FTAA, and constitutional counterreforms planned by the government. The Colombian Indymedia has ongoing coverage of the event.

Link

Dallas Mavs and HDNet owner Mark Cuban has an interesting blog entry today on the future of DVDs and PVRs:

I love looking for ways to screw up conventional wisdom. Right now in the entertainment world, the conventional wisdom is that both sides on the HD DVD vs Blue Ray DVD will battle it out and a standard for HD on DVD will emerge. No one is trying to rush to a compromise because the big media companies want to squeeze as much money as they possibly can out the current DVD business cycle.

Good. The longer it takes, the less chance any format of DVD has of having a place in the future of home entertainment. Don’t look now, but the price and size of hard drives have fallen like a rock, while capacities have soared, with no slowdown in site.

Which leads to the question — What is the best way to distribute content? DVDs which will be limited in capacity to 9.4gbs on a single DVD for another year, and then after that 50gbs on a single disk for years to come after that, or rewritable media that can hold 2gb already in a device half the size of a pen, or in a hard drive that can hold 200GBs plus in a drive the size of your cell phone?

Link

BoingBoing reader Theron says, "Somebody's at Harvard's having a little fun at George W.'s expense. Check out the Bush to monkey morph in the top right. No idea if this is a subtle hack, or really the Harvard PCNL having some fun." Link

This stunning photo of ferris wheels at Odaiba, Tokyo came into my RSS reader today via my Flickr Tokyo photo watchlist. Gibsonoid and pretty-shiny! Link

SpamShirt is a service that will print and mail you a custom t-shirt with a subject line from a spam message on it -- this is the one I just ordered. You can also add your own favorite spam subjects if you care to. This is so awesomely perverse. Link (Thanks, Kevin!)

In March, a savant in England recited π from memory to more than 22,000 decimal places. Still, he wasn't even halfway to the world record set by a Japanese man in 1995. This article in Plus magazine describes how these amazing memory feats are accomplished and how to improve your own remembrance of numbers past.

"Like most people, you have probably had the odd experience of smelling, say, an old piece of furniture and being reminded of something that happened to you in the distant past. Smell has a particularly strong connection with memory, perhaps because the part of the brain that deals with smell is close to the hippocampus, which is where it is believed long term memories are formed. If you deliberately surround yourself with a particular smell when trying to memorise something, that smell is likely to help trigger the memory later when you need to recall it."

Link (via Reality Carnival)

The TSA has decided that it will catch more terrorists by giving airport screeners the authority to maul your crotch.

Currently, they concentrate mostly on arms and legs. Now, they'll be able to pat other areas if they look suspicious. TSA spokeswoman Yolanda Clark would not elaborate, citing security.

Link

How do animals walk without falling over? A multi-university research effort led by UC Berkeley will try to answer that question by studying a small robot that imitates cockroach locomotion. Berkeley biologist Robert Full's insights into animal movement have informed the design of other robots as well, including the wall-climbing Mecho-Gecko. By simultaneously studying the cockroach-bot and various insects, the researchers hope to identify the muscular and neural networks that result in the whole-body motion of a wide range of animals, including humans.

"The robot has to operate in the real world, like the animal does, so we can use it for testing hypotheses," Full said. "We know, for example, that the body's center of mass bounces along like a pogo stick, which is embodied in the robot, but we don't know how its parts - its legs, feet, actuators or muscles - sum up to give that remarkably general pattern of movement. Now we can ask questions like, 'What if you had a more compliant leg? What if you had two joints in that leg, what does that give you versus one joint?'"

Link

A friend working at the Toronto Film Festival has this scoop: "At the Toronto International Film Festival each film gets two screenings. The highly anticipated action film Kung Fu Hustle by Stephen Chow from China screened last night Sept 15th, and was supposed to get its re-screening today. However, the distributers: Sony/Columbia Pictures Film Production Asia/Beijing Film Studio of China Film Group Coorporation/Huayi Brothers & Taihe Film Investment Co. Ltd./The Star Overseas Ltd., did not feel that security was adequate and did not like the number of digital cameras etc in the audience. Audience members are allowed to bring cameras/recorders into the screenings to record the talk backs with the stars and directors that go on before and after the film. Feeling this was too risky Sony pulled the film's second screening, this is unheard of at the festival. The official reason from The Festival Staff is that the print was damaged in the first screening, could not be repaired and was un-showable . All tickets for the cancelled screening had to be refunded. The public does not know about the cover up. This kind of corporate paranoia is very bad, if distributors get all freaked out about possible bootlegs what will happen to the festival?" Link (Thanks, Anonymous Tipster!)

A reader writes, "Many in the industry have been saddened to learn that David C. Sutherland III, one of the first well-known TSR artists, has a terminal illness. An auction of Sutherland's gaming collection is currently being held on Ebay to help pay for his medical bills and supplement his estate for his remaining family. From the original Monster Manual and Dungeon Master's Guide to the incredible castle map in the original Ravenloft module, and a fair amount of game development besides, many gamers are sure to be familiar and fond of Sutherland's works. Have a look at the auction and see some of the gaming treasures you have a chance to bid on, and help the Sutherland family out at the same time." Link

Here's the first-person account of a summer student intern at Walt Disney World who got the killer assignment of working at the Haunted Mansion (what a dream gig!):

I hated being told I wasn’t scary. I hated being made fun of for my deep Southern accent. I hated the fact that I was a southern happy blonde with pigtails stuck in a dark damp Mansion. Then I gave it a chance. I realized I was lucky to have such a highly coveted position. I slowly let myself fall into the role and was thrilled the first time I actually scared a guest. I learned that many of my fellow cast members weren’t as rude and sarcastic as they seemed, they just really took pride in their job. And I found my spot in the Mansion crew. I was the one that lost children were taken to because I was probably the least scary. I was the one that parents turned to for an encouraging word to convince their children to try the ride. The first time a six year old boy came running out of the Mansion with a huge smile to give me a hug before getting back on the ride, I finally felt like I had a place at the Mansion.

Link (via The Disney Blog)

Here is Johnny's guitar solo on the Ramones' "I Wanna Be Sedated":

E-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-|-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-|0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0|-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
B—————————————————|—————————————————|—————————————————|——————————————
G—————————————————|—————————————————|—————————————————|——————————————
D—————————————————|—————————————————|—————————————————|——————————————
A—————————————————|—————————————————|—————————————————|——————————————
E—————————————————|—————————————————|—————————————————|——————————————

(Via Crooked Timber)

My short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More, won the Sunburst Award for the best Canadian sf book of the year. There's a ceremony commemorating the event on the 23d of September in Toronto, at the Merril Collection. I (really!) wish I could be there, but I'm committed to speaking at a UN meeting on Free/Open Source Software in Geneva on that day, so Karl Schroeder, the brilliant author of Permanence and Ventus, will accept on my behalf.

SUNBURST AWARD CEREMONY
September 23, 2004  7-9pm
Merrill Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy, Lilian H. Smith Branch of the Toronto Public Library
239 College Street, 3rd Floor, Toronto
for more info: (416) 393-7748
The event is open to the public and free of charge. Refreshments will be served.

Link (Thanks Peter!)

Comic book and book publisher Fantagraphics is an international treasure. I love their books and comics, and I love their production values. On those days that I feel that life is not worth living, I remember that Fantagraphics exists and I cheer up tremendously.

...Fantagraphics is more like Sub Pop—a well-known, highly regarded, but still relatively small publisher, most of whose best sellers wouldn't sell enough to stay on a major label for more than an album or two. For Fantagraphics, being put in charge of The Complete Peanuts is akin to Sub Pop being handed the Beatles' master tapes for reissue. And Fantagraphics has done the strip right, with gorgeous design (the art director is Palookaville artist Seth, aka Gregory Gallant, whose style was deeply influenced by Schulz) and ambitious outlay (Fantagraphics is planning two a year for the next 12 and a half years, 25 volumes covering 50 years of weekly strips, including Sundays).

Link (Thanks, Kirsten!)

It's been years since I lived in Toronto (near my grandparents), and consequently, it's been years since I've celebrated Rosh Hashanah -- the Jewish New Year that rang in last night. Maybe that's why it took me a minute to get the punchline of this screamingly funny Rosh Hashanah cartoon -- and why I laughed so hard once I did. Link (via AccordionGuy)

43 Folders writes about a great little bookmarklet maker that lets you request the book you're looking at on Amazon.com from your local library.

I’ve combed through my Amazon wishlist over the past month and have been able to find almost 20 books I was going to buy—all of which have since been shuttled from SF’s many branch libraries to the cozy little outpost just beyond my front yard.

Link

Link

NASA scientists are developing a laser link from Mars to Earth that's ten times faster than current radio frequency systems. According to an article in New Scientist, the laser will transmit up to 30 million bits per second at a lower power and mass compared to traditional wireless approaches.

"That leap in capacity is due to the different wavelengths of light carrying the data. The laser will use infrared light with a wavelength of 1.06 microns, which is thousands of times shorter than radio waves. Since all light travels at the same speed through space, shorter wavelengths carry more information in the same time."

Of course, clouds present a problem for optical communications. The beam will also be a few hundred kilometers wide and very faint by the time it reaches Earth, making the signal tricky to pick up. Still, a fully-functional system is expected to make a trip to the Red Planet in 2009 on board the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter. Maybe Xeni can ride along too. Link

First used centuries ago to treat battlefield wounds, maggots are proving to be a useful treatment to prevent post-operative infections. Maggot debridement therapy (MDT) calls for maggot dressing to be applied to wounds twice a week for up to 72 hours each time. From the press release about a recent study on MDT in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases:

"Debridement, or the removal of contaminated tissue to expose healthy tissue, can be done surgically. However, maggots that have been disinfected during the egg stage so that they don’t carry bacteria into the wound have their advantages. The larvae preferentially consume dead tissue (steering clear of live), they excrete an antibacterial agent, and they stimulate wound healing--all factors that could be linked to the lower occurrence of infection in maggot-treated wounds."

Link

My latest article for TheFeature is about the Urban Pollution Project, a big research effort in the UK that uses bike-mounted carbon monoxide sensors and bluejacking to rate the air we breathe.

"Mobile sensors that are geographically tracked could... give a broad and dense picture of how pollution affects urban spaces and the people within them," says Urban Pollution investigator Anthony Steed, a computer science researcher at the University College London. "If you have several hundred or thousand sensors, you could give them to commuters and they'd make a map of the city's pollution."

Link

Scientists may have identified a region of the brain instrumental in the creation of dreams. Neurologists at the University Hospital of Zurich studied a 73-year-old woman who suffered a stroke in her occipital lobe, known to be the brain's vision processing center. The patient predictably lost her sight for a few days, but she also lost the ability to dream. Link

ID Software allowed a gaming magazine to publish some screenshots from Quake 4 -- here's the scans. Link (via Waxy)

Earthlink has released a new file-sharing tool based on SIP, the protocol underlying Voice Over IP and other systems for peer-to-peer connectivity. What's coolest about this is the manifesto they posted along with it:

EarthLink believes an open Internet is a good Internet. An open Internet means users have full end-to-end connectivity to say to each other whatever it is they say, be that voice, video, or other data exchanges, without the help of mediating servers in the middle whenever possible. We believe that if peer-to-peer flourishes, the Internet flourishes. SIPshare helps spread the word that SIP is more than a powerful voice over IP enabler --- much more. SIP is a protocol that enables peer-to-peer in a standards-based way.

Link (Thanks, Clay!)

AdBusters is suing Canadian broadcasters for refusing to air their anti-ad ads.

Activists concerned with almost every social issue -- from the environment, worker rights, electoral politics . . . you name it – have had their messages rejected by media corporations. If you walked into your local television station today and tried to buy 30-seconds of airtime, you would likely get the same response we continually get. Boiled down, the refrain goes something like this: We will not accept your money. We will not accept your messages. We're in the business to sell ads, not spread your ideas.

Link (via Waxy)

Dave sez, "Deutsche Welle, a government-funded radio and television network that broadcasts mainly for German expatriates and Germany enthusiasts, added Klingon to the 30+ languages on its site, in celebration of the site's 10th anniversary (in Earth years). 'The dialogue of cultures does not end at the edge of our solar system,' Deutsche Welle director Erik Bettermann said in a statement." Link (Thanks, Dave!)

Remember dreaming you could fly? It's exactly like that.

Before you move into weightlessness, between parabolas, g-force is about double what it is on earth. Suddenly you're 300 pounds, and it pushes your hair to your skull to your spine to your tail to the floor and the meat on your body is suddenly stone. They tell you not to look back, to keep your head still and aligned when the pressure starts. Anything to avoid vertigo, because where there's vertigo there's vomiting.

Waiting, your face becomes newly dense. You're a chipmunk carrying cheeks full of bullets. Your blood strains. Your veins are streams carrying too much silt.

And then, when the weight is worst, the invisible hands cramming your spine into the plane's padded floor lose interest and lift away. What was concrete becomes cotton. The hands reach beneath you, and lift you up into nothing, and you float. And all there is to do when this happens for the very first time is to laugh. Because it's impossible. Because it's unnatural.

But the joke in your bones is that it feels perfectly natural, like all your life you were intended to float. After all, just before you came into the world, that's what you were doing in liquid. And when your life ends and you leave, there you are again, becoming vapor. Breaking down from matter to dust to air. Floating.

Last week, a friend said, "You'll tell children and grandchildren when you're old, over and over again. Your family will be totally sick of you explaining how awesome this felt the first time." He was only half right. The grandchildren won't need my explanation. They'll know it better than I do now. These zero-g joyrides will seem as crude and dated to them as Model T Fords or ink-ribbon typewriters are for us. They'll be floating plenty.

As I sit here, I can still feel it in my body. It comes in waves. I want to hit "post," shut the application, close the laptop lid. Then bend my knees a little and shove off, push up into the air above my desk. Do the superman. Do a backflip. Bust a "crouching tiger hidden dragon" move, karate-chop martian foes mid-air. And float away into bed. It's natural now, and will remain that way forever. I miss it already.

Images: (1) A weightless photo from today (Link to full-size). (2) Floating with Dr. Buzz Aldrin in a zero gravity moment during today's preview flight. While we crouched on the floor waiting for that parabola to hit, Dr. Aldrin, one of the first two humans to touch the moon, told me that today was the first time he'd experienced weightlessness since having felt "the real thing in space" -- not counting scuba diving, which he does often because he gets homesick for floating. (Link to full-size image). Both images courtesy of Jim Campbell, Aero News Network.

Previous BB posts: 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

Also: here's the Zero Gravity Corporation's patent listing for "A system and method is provided for rapidly reconfiguring a jet aircraft from a cargo or passenger configuration into a parabolic flight configuration." Link (Thanks, Jason)

Paul sez: "Handy advice (from one of those airline folders in the back of the seat) on what to do if your Tajik Air flight is hijacked. Apparently, it has a great deal to do with fondling space aliens, mutant airplane doors that eat people, but definitely not drinking. I'm guessing from the pictures. Last few lines of each section are in English. Sort of. Do not express you angry, do not wipe in voice, our cough. Close your eyes and do not stir them. "Link

Here's the first issue of the Make email newsletter. I'm the magazine's editor-in-chief. To sign up for the email newsletter go here.

=======================

MAKE NEWSLETTER 01

September 14, 2004

http://make.oreilly.com

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Thanks for signing up for the Make newsletter! Since announcing the magazine at the O'Reilly ETech Conference in Portland in July, we've been busy creating the first issue, which will be published in January. We've also received many suggestions about how we can make Make a great magazine.

There's still time for you to give us your input. We want Make to be a reader-created magazine, and if you're interested, here are some ways you can join us in the creation of the world's greatest technology-project magazine:

1. THE MAKE WORKSHOP. Imagine somebody took all your tools away and handed you a $100 gift certificate that you could spend on hardware at Home Depot and Fry's. What are the essential things you'd buy? Now, up the price to $300 -- what would you outfit your workshop with? How about $750?

2. WHAT ARE YOU USING THESE DAYS? In each issue of Make, we'll run reviews of stuff. We're not interested in assigning things to be reviewed. We're interested in hearing about the things you already use and love. Tell us about your favorite new (or old!) tool, magazine, book, instructional video, gadget, web site, etc. in a 300-word email. If we decide to run it, we'll pay you.

3. PROJECTS. Do you have an idea for a technology-related project? It doesn't matter if it's large or small. Tell us about it. If we like it, we'll ask you to write it.

4. WHAT IS THE NAME OF THIS NEWSLETTER? Finally, we need a name for this newsletter! Please send us your suggestion by Tuesday, Sept. 21. The winner will get a book of his or her choice from the O'Reilly Hacks Series (http://hacks.oreilly.com).

Thanks, and we'll see you in January!

Mark Frauenfelder

Make Editor-in-Chief

markf@oreilly.com

Becky sez: "Plumbing the depths, in terms of profiting from 9/11's victims: these people are selling coins made with silver they say they got from Ground Zero. I guess they couldn't get their hands on any human remains to use."

The silver used in each gleaming dollar coin is from Ground Zero! You see, when the Twin Towers fell on September 11, 2001, a bank vault full of .999 Pure Silver bars was buried under hundreds of tons of debris. After months of salvage work, many of the bars were found. Now, the same silver that was reclaimed from the destruction has been used to create the magnificent 2004 “Freedom Tower” Silver Dollar.

On its website, National Collector's Mint asks: "How many would you like to order today?" Here's the company's email address so you can answer that question. Link

UPDATE: Here's a link to a Daily Show segment about this coin. (Thanks, Dan!)

Here's an article I wrote for TheFeature about plans to put magnetic sensors in mobile phones as navigation aids.

The most exciting mobile application for magnetic sensors is the capability to map an online "Yellow Pages" on top of the real world, allowing users to point their phones in the direction of a building or other public area and get information about it. For example, say you're driving down the street and see a bookstore you'd like to visit later. You could simply point your phone at the store and press a button on your phone, sending the GPS coordinates and direction information to a service that returns the operating hours and additional information about the store, along with a coupon for 10% off your purchase. If you point it at a restaurant, you could get the Zagat rating, the menu and the opportunity to make a reservation.

Link

Charles Benton took some kite aerial photos of foo camp this year. Link

Amazing FBI photo gallery (89 pages in PDF format) of concealable weapons. The item to the left is a knife and handcuff key disguised as a regular door key. Link (Via the must-read Crypto-Gram)

The interviews from the awesome anti-Fox documentary Outfoxed have been released under a Creative Commons license, for you to remix. Here's the .torrent: Torrent Link (via Lessig)

It's time again for the annual ArtBots Robot Talent Show in New York City, September 17, 18, and 19. Orchestrated by Dorkbot founder Douglas Repetto, Mark Tribe of Rhizome.org, and Hunter College film/media professor Mary Flanagan , the free ArtBots show will feature 20 artists and groups from seven countries (including Leonel Moura's ink pen-wielding ArtSBot, left).

"The show celebrates the strange and wonderful collision of shifty artists, disgraced engineers, high/low/no tech hackers, rogue scientists, beauty school dropouts, backyard pyros, and industrial espionage that has come to define the emerging field of robotic art. Participants include robots that sketch, carve, float, wiggle, hum, ring, grow, wander, and sing, as well a number of works the form and function of which are not yet well understood"

Link

For forty years, people passing through this narrow alley in San Luis Obispo, California have stuck their chewing gum on the walls. A pleasant stroll through Bubblegum Alley followed by a night at the Madonna Inn sounds like a perfect SLO vacation to me. Link (via RealityCarnival)

The UK Consumers' Association is petitioning government to do something about the fact that Apple gouges UK customers, charging them far more than their US counterparts.

The CA has written to the UK Office of Fair Trading (OFT) explaining the situation and highlighting that the current position is possibly in breach of European law. Under Euro law all consumers in all member states should enjoy the same benefits that the single market brings - it's like if citizens in Seattle had to pay more for their iTunes music than the rest of America. Clearly with a differential between iTunes UK (79p, 1.15 Eu) and Germany & France (0.99 Eu, 67.7p UK) there is not a level playing field. Those UK citizens who understand that they can use either the French or German sites to order directly on find they are charged the UK price if they are not able to supply as an address in either of these countries.

Although the CA campaign is focused on iTunes, perhaps because of the mainstream press attention it has attracted, Apple are not the only service overcharging UK consumers. The differential on Napster UK is even greater when comparing UK pricing at 99p (1.44 Eu) against 99c Eu (67.7p UK). This becomes even more distorted when US prices are used as a comparison 99c US = (55.4p). Clearly albums bought on the services multiply the differential by a factor of 10 as the albums cost ten times a much as single tracks.

Link (Thanks, Simon!)

Alice is starting to really get somewhere in Star Wars Galaxies, but she's on the horns of a dilemma. She was a Brit early adopter who joined the original US server, and amassed a some moderate game-wealth -- but found the game to be high-latency and sparsely populated because so many of the American players were asleep when she was online. Now SWG is offering to relocate her to the European server -- which will be faster and better-populated -- but she has to leave her game-wealth behind.

[T]he SOE team are now offering account transfers - as a premium purchase. 30 bucks to move your character to a different server, but all assets (my bike!!) would remain behind. So I could move to a European server and have better luck at finding people awake, or I could stay in the US and play with the hardcore.

Link

Update: From the above-referenced post's message-board, "Hi, saw the post on boingboing and showed it to my Husband who plays onthe Infinity server. He says the SOE trade forums regularly have people who are willing to swap credits between servers, if that's any help!" How cool.

In about 12 hours, I'll be heading into freefall. Before I go, some sage advice for first-time weightless flyers from BoingBoing pal David Rich, a researcher at the UC Berkeley Microgravity Combustion Labs. WTF are Microgravity Combusion Labs? Glad you asked. David says,

"The focus of our work is flammability behavior of materials that could be used for the construction of space craft or facilities on the moon or Mars. We generally look at composite materials like carbon fiber or fiberglass since these have seen increased usage in spacecraft design owing to their high strength and light weight. Unfortunately these materials burn more readily than metals. They also have different burning behavior in zero gravity than on the ground. For these reasons, an understanding of their behavior under conditions found in space craft is important. [Research missions aboard the NASA KC-135 "vomit comet'] allow us to simulate those conditions for short periods and gain some understanding of material flammability behavior. I've been on two previous campaigns and I'm scheduled for an aditional set of flights in October. We are scheduled to send this project up on the ISS in 2007."

And for those about to float, David says:

"Sit with your back against one wall of the aircraft with your head completely motionless for the first few parabolas. Each time you enter the low gravity period you will float up the side of the aircraft so have something to grab and stabilize yourself. Many people find the 2g pullup period to be the nausiating part so continue staring at the opposite side of the aircraft well into the pullup period.

After a few of those you can start moving around but no sudden head movements especially during the pullup. Try not to get your head into an orientation of looking at your feet or above your head, and no rapid head movements.

NASA provides participants with Scopolomine (an anti-nausea medication) and Pseudoephedrine (a stimulant to combat drowsiness resulting from the Scopolomine). I took more than the flight MD's recomended on the first day to play it safe. I strongly suggest you take these medications.

Some frequent fliers eat ginger snaps on the morning of the flight. I ate a light breakfast of yogurt and granola with green tea and that seemed to keep my stomach calm.

If you get sick, don't get discouraged, just sit against the wall for a few more parabolas until you feel better. If you really have a problem, they will get you back to a seat and things should improve. Above all, don't get too stressed about the prospect of getting sick, being relaxed is very helpful."

While the combo of Scopalamine and Dexedrine are a popular measure against "protein loss" (we're talking spacespeak for heave, hurl, keck, lose it, puke, regurgitate, retch, ruminate, spew, spit up, throw up, upchuck), I'm not taking any scopedex speedballs tomorrow morning. In part, because Zero-G Corp.'s "adventure travel" flights seem to focus more on creature comfort -- they're designed for maximum fun, in contrast with the NASA flights, which function more as research missions. It's my understanding that the parabolas will be shorter in duration, and fewer in number (15-20, instead of 30-40) than on the KC-135 flights. These and other factors may reduce the likelihood of lost lunch. Then again, maybe not.

But instead of amphetamines and belladona derivatives (not that there's anything wrong with 'em) I'll be packing ginger chewing gum at the recommendation of NPR "Day to Day" host Noah Adams, and a fist full of Jolly Ranchers I received from the elderly Italian lady who lives next door. She said they always calm her stomach mid-flight. I think she's been holding out on me. All along, I had her pegged as a mild-mannered, arugula-growing, opera-loving, pistachio-cake-baking WWII refugee from Palermo. Secretly, lo these many years, she's been logging those frequent zero-G flyer miles behind my back. That's the thing about experienced space-travelers (Swift Float Veterans for Truth?) -- you just never know. Until they hit you with the secret handshake.

Finally, a moment of sigfile zen. Snipped from the contrails of David Rich's emails:

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Walden, 1854.

Image: 1957 ad for "Rid-Jid" ironing tables -- Link to more background on the ad.

Previous "Xeni Flies Zero-G" posts: 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

Mark Hurst says,

"If i'm not mistaken, this handheld electronic toy -- Scannerz Commander -- uses everyday bar codes as inputs to create a tribe of monsters for the user to play with/against. If that's right, very inventive toy..."

Link Update: BoingBoing reader Rob Greene says, "It seems very reminiscent of a toy I had about 10 years ago called Barcode Battler. Maybe they've improved on it, as I seem to remember I had an awfully hard time getting anything to scan properly. You can read about it here: Link."

Reader Geoffrey Litwack points to this alternate url for Barcode Battlers (Link), Thomas Williams finds another (Link), and John Harris points to yet another (Link), and adds -- "The Monster Rancher games for Playstation (if memory serves, I may have gotten the title wrong) use a similar technique by reading audio CDs and using those as raw data for similar game purposes." Dave says, "Skannerz were here in the US 5 or 6 years ago: I bought one at the local supermart/department store. You can still find the toys on eBay (link)."

Before I first blogged that I'd be heading up on tomorrow's west coast launch of the Zero-G adventure flights, I had no idea so many friends, acquaintances, and BoingBoing readers were already weightless oldtimers -- they'd had similar experiences on board NASA's "vomit comet," which is not offered as a commercial service to the public. Discovering this has been kind of cool. It's like learning that all of these people walking around in your life have some secret extraterrestrial superpower they'd never shared with you before. I feel like I'm about to be initiated into their clandestine little fez-wearing society or something. One of those veterans of freefall was Wired Magazine editor Adam Rogers, who says,

"I flew the Vomit Comet at Johnson Space Center a few years ago. I vomited. But it was supercool. Unsolicited advice: remember the Ender lesson. In a weightless environment, down is whichever way your feet are pointed at the time. Don't orient off the floor of the plane. That way lies upchuck."

And reader Kenny says,

"Penn Jillette (of Penn & Teller) wrote a good account of taking a ride on a vomit comet with Billy Gibbons (from ZZ Top)." Link to Learning to Fly, Strip, and Vomit on a 727

Previous "Xeni Flies Zero-G" posts: 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

BoingBoing pal Jonno, who lives and works in New Orleans, phonecams us this mobile snapshot of a lunch spot in the hurricane path. The blue plate special today? Po'boys and bravado.

Over at Bike Forums, some guy posted a video clip showing how he opened his Kryptonite U-Lock with a plastic ball point pen. Uproar ensues on the board. Link (Direct link to movie clip, and here's another movie with a different lock.) (Thanks, xavii!)

The Discovery Channel's got a cool web-slide-show up highlighting the world's 10 Best Bathrooms. Gosh, but I've got to pee. Link (via ftrain)

Dan Hunter's written a really interesting academic paper bent on refuting the notion that the copyright-reform movement is Marxist, and in showing that there are Marxist tendencies in the free/open source software movement.

The Marxist-Lessigist movement has provided the signal benefit of identifying theproblems that occur with the relentless expansion of intellectual property interests. Without muscular social welfarist protection of the public domain intellectualproperty industries will never voluntarily reduce their expansionary claims. As we've witnessed time and time again, intellectual property rights-holders have always soughtwider property grants, longer terms, and stronger enforcement mechanisms. And these additional private interests are almost always extracted from the public.72 Wesimply cannot expect those who are granted property interests to reduce their entitlements to accord with social policy. Yet without such limitations the expansionof intellectual property must eventually lead to a kind of intellectual and cultural paralysis. There was once a libertarian political theorist called Andrew Galambos,whose philosophy revolved around property, especially intellectual property.73 He represents the logical endpoint of intellectual property expansion. Galambos thoughtit wrong to use anyone's ideas without permission and compensation: he believed, for example, that the inventor of the wheel was due a royalty on every automobile sold.74He presented lectures advocating this (and other libertarian ideas) and demanded that his listeners promise that they would never use "his" ideas without his permission. Asone commentator mused, this may be why you've never heard of him.

Link

Danny "Evil" O'Brien has written an hilarious column in (mock) celebration of the world's most evil geeks:

How do you work out who the movers and shakers are in the free software hacking world? For most of them, there's no income to be appraised, there's no stock market valuation to watch. What value can you give to these contributors, who work without care of reward, except maybe all those groupies hanging out at the stage door of the Sourceforge ftp servers?

Well, I guess you could review their software or something. Sadly, I suffer from a debilitating illness (which I shall not mention here) that tragically precludes me from doing actual research. So, instead, I have decided to evaluate those involved in our so-called industry in terms of what we all, I think, see it as.

Link

The Creative Commons project has launched a new license today for poor countries: the Developing Nations license allows "copyright holders to invite a wide range of royalty-free uses of their work in developing nations while retaining their full copyright in the developed world." Link

Hot on the heels of Michael Eisner announcing that he wouldn't resign from Disney for two more years, Roy Disney and Stanley Gold have written a blistering open letter to the Disney Board, calling for Eisner's nuts on a platter:

Michael Eisner's announcement that he intends to remain CEO for the next two years forces you to make a critical decision. Will you choose to let the Company drift for two more years - allowing the pall Mr. Eisner has cast to continue to drive the most talented and creative people away from Disney, erode the morale of current employees, and prevent the Company from attracting the strong, dynamic, and creative leader it needs? Or will you reject Mr. Eisner's brazen attempt to usurp your responsibilities as directors by stage-managing the appointment of his anointed successor and instead tangibly show your commitment to best corporate practices by immediately initiating an expeditious and broad search for a world-class CEO?

We understand and appreciate the difficult position in which Mr. Eisner has once again placed you. As those instrumental in bringing both Michael Eisner and Frank Wells to Disney in 1984, we know how close some of you are to him personally. But there is no acceptable solution that includes Mr. Eisner's continued leadership at Disney for the next two years - let alone any longer than that. Regardless of whether he serves in a diminished capacity during the next two years as a "lame duck" or continues to manage the Company, the changes necessary to restore Disney's luster will simply not be made.

Link (Thanks Bill!)

Ben Rosenbaum is one of the best new sf writers in the field. Last weekend at the WorldCon, he came up with the idea of finding a conversion function for Erdos numbers (the numeral scietists use to count the number of peer-review paper co-authors between them and Paul Erdos) and Bacon numbers (the number of movies between any actor's co-stars and an actor who co-starred with Kevin Bacon). Here's the answer:

As it turns out, the preliminary work has already been done. Brian Greene, for instance, has an Erdös number of 3, and a Bacon number of 2. Thus, my proposed conversion function (allowing edges in the unified Bacon-Erdös graph to represent two people either appearing together in a movie or coauthoring a paper) is as follows:

Finding: an actor with a Bacon number of N has, at most, a Baconized Erdös number of N+5. Similarly, an academic with an Erdös number of M has, at most, an Erdösinated Bacon number of M + 5.

(My initial lines of research, proposing to go through Dolph Lundgren or Natalie Portman, would surely have yielded much less powerful results.)

The emphasis of previous Bacon-Erdös research, however, has not been on unification, but rather on those individuals with authentic claims to both direct Erdös numbers, through actual academic coauthorship and to direct Bacon numbers through actual screen acting. Thus the canonical Bacon-Erdös number is the sum of an individual's separately earned Erdös number and Bacon number, and this --we learn -- is what is devoutly to be sought. The aforementioned Brian Greene and Dave Bayer are tied for the world-record lowest Bacon-Erdös sum of 5.

Link

I've written here before about the BBC's Creative Archive project, an ambitious undertaking meant to put everything in the BBC's vaults (we're talking about stuff from the earliest days of radio up to Dr Who and so on) online, with a Creative Commons license allowing Britons to download, trade and remix the TV shows they paid for with their TV tax.

I just wrote some testimony on EFF's behalf for the governmental committee that's reviewing the BBC's charter, urging them to adopt the BBC's request for a mandate to produce the Archive:

It's the dawn of a "creative nation" -- a Britain which, like many other countries around the globe, makes use of the new tools to actively participate in media, a nation of recasters and reworkers, folk artists and appreciators of folk art.

The raw material of that creative nation need not be British. Substantial parts of it will not be: Britain is a land of many cultures, and the fusion of the art and culture of other lands is a progressive step in Britain's ongoing multiculturalism.

But what if *none* of the materials of this new British folk culture is, indeed, British? What if the creative nation relies upon material from abroad as the raw ingredients for the popular new medium?

Link

Meg Hourihan, the co-founder of Pyra, the company that invented Blogger, has retired from technology to become a chef:

So last night I ended my sabbatical and began my new career doing something I've always felt passionate about: cooking. I'm working in the kitchen of a restaurant called Fifty-Six Union (mentioned at the bottom of thisFeasting on Nantucket article) here on Nantucket. Yesterday at 3 PM I put on my black chef's clogs, my black pants and white t-shirt, pulled my Red Sox cap over my hair and got to work peeling and deveining shrimp. Seven hours later, sweatily scrubbing the kitchen floors, I was still smiling.

I've learned a lot this summer during my sabbatical but it all can be summarized in three words: follow your heart.

Link

Graye sez: "These days, GMail invitations are ubiquitous, and people like me are starting to get annoyed with people offering to give away invites. Well, some folks over at Isnoop.net have went and designed an automatic GMail invite spooler.

"People with available invites send them to the spooler's address (gmail@isnoop.net), and it automatically adds them to an available pool. People who need addresses can then get invites from this pool, as necessary.

"It's a good place to dump those excess invites, and anybody who needs a GMail invite can pick one up there, easily. Saves time for everybody, really." Link

Last year, I linked to an Orange County Weekly article about David Woodard, an eccentric artist and musician in Lon Angeles. A friend of William S. Burroughs, Woodard handcrafts Dreamachines, the hallucinogenic flicker device invented by Bryion Gysin and Ian Sommerville and popularized by WSB. New World Disorder has republished an interview with Woodard that first appeared last year in the UK magazine Headpress:

"In college, I found the Dreamachine would cure my own writer's block. When I mentioned this to Burroughs, he concurred. That is the extent of what I know about his use of the machine for that purpose. In 1997, when we were both living in Lawrence, Burroughs tended to use his two Dreamachines together as a postprandial ritual along with a marijuana cigarette. He would write the following morning.

I think the Dreamachine's most distinctive property is its (potentially insidious) subtlety. The machine is similar to absinthe, in that both create a residual language-oriented delirium of which the user tends not to be aware. Fortunately light pulses do not yield the additional effect of Syphilis-like rotted brain stem."

Link

Capsula Mundi is a design for a biodegradable coffin made from starch plastic that holds the deceased in a fetal position. The stunning artwork was created by Italian designers Anna Citelli and Raoul Bretzel:

"Capsula Mundi is planted in the earth like a seed. Above it, to signal the presence of occupied space, is a shallow concave circle dug out of the ground. In the center of which, a tree is planted, the essence of it chosen in life by the dead one, the care of this tree is the responsibility of everyone. The aim is ecological burial, literally a more natural way to decay.

The cemetery will, then, acquire a new look. No longer the overpopulated urban environment with congested architecture, it will be a natural one in contact with the earth, enveloping expansive areas, entire hills consecrated to the cult of the dead. Summarizing, it is a different landscape devoted to the worship of our ancestry: a sacred forest."

Link (via Aeiou)

Update: BB reader Jacob Schnickel points out the striking similarity between the Capsula Mundii and Frida Kahlo's painting of Luther Burbank. (Link)

Come on -- you saw this one coming. BoingBoing pal and resident Obscure Smut Scout Vann Hall says,

"I'd been holding off on sending this in hopes someone else would beat me to it -- right now it looks as if my most enduring legacy will be as "the person most-often thanked on BoingBoing entries having to do with sex" -- but to no avail. There's an adult title from 1999 -- "The Uranus Experiment: Part 2," from Private -- that included a brief scene filmed in zero-G, supposedly onboard what had previously been a Soviet counterpart to the Comet. It also received a somewhat tongue-in-cheek (he says, somewhat tongue-in-cheek) nomination for the 2000 Nebula Awards, which led to the following coverage: Link 1, Link 2."

BoingBoing reader Gary says,

"I assume, of course, that when Xeni has completed her mission she will want to purchase all of the official Zero G swag. I particularly like the Break the Law t-shirt: Link. Not to be confused with this Think Geek T-shirt that the rest of us poor folks will have to make do with: Link."

Reader Chris says,

"I wanted to point out that there is a less expensive way to experience the feeling of a parabolic flight. go and rent a helicopter. you should be able to get a seat small one (like the R22 or R44) for 75-150 bucks. ask the pilot to gain speed and climb at the same time, then after 30 seconds to push it down. you will be lifted out of your seat for a good second, if done right. nowhere near a parabolic flight (where you will be weightless for much longer) but it's the feeling alright."

And on today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day" show, I speak with host Alex Chadwick about all of the weird pieces of zero-g-prep advice that well-meaning friends and neighbors offer when they hear you're about to float on a weightless commercial joyride. Link to archived audio for today's program, available after 12pm PT.
Previous "Xeni Flies Zero-G" posts: 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

"Born to be unwired"? Motorola and Italian design firm Momodesign teamed up to create a Bluetooth-enabled motorcycle helmet. Something about the combination of bluetooth and motorcycles sounds really scary. Snip from the press release:

Built on the award-winning design of Motorola's popular HS810, the wireless helmet headset is the latest addition to Motorola's leading portfolio of stylish and innovative Bluetooth products. (...) The helmet is stylish and open-faced, its design draws inspiration from air force pilots helmets, with anti-scratch visor and carbon fibre details for fashion conscious people with a modern approach to travel and city life. Whether chatting to friends or work, the Motorola / MOMODESIGN helmet means riders will no longer get tangled up in awkward wires getting on and off their bikes. Taking and making calls is easy as all functions (answer, end, redial, voice dial and volume) can be made from the cover on the helmet. An essential accessory for urbanites who demand to stay in touch at all times, whether in the car, on a bike, in the office or at home. The Motorola / MOMODESIGN helmet offers you seamless communication due to the unique headset module. There need be no break in the conversation when you get off the bike -- just remove the headset module from the helmet, attach it to the neck loop and continue talking -- no one will even know you've changed location!

Link

BoingBoing reader Becky Hogge says,

Here's my report of a UK media event last night where the CEO of M&C Saatchi discussed publicity campaigns to promote the anti-piracy message and sunk his teeth into a couple of current campaigns, recently blogged on BoingBoing. The communications guy from the BPI was there to debate possible campaigns with PR and press people . He had the crowd in fits of nervous laughter as he admitted the US lawsuit against a twelve year-old filesharer "was not a bad thing".

Link

New York City is making $126 million in a deal to sell Snapple in public schools, and now -- the state of Illinois is considering licensing the rights to its name on an official state beverage. Why stop there? "The Big Apple" shouldn't be the only metropolis with a snack food nickname. Maybe Illinois should be, like, the "fruit roll-up" state. Link

Mark Taaffe is the funniest, most engaging auctioneer I've ever met (he appears in thin veneer in my story Craphound). His old weekly junk auctions in Toronto were a high-point in my life there -- the bargains were incredible, matched only by Mark's florid description of his wares. Now he's back at it, with a really promising-looking estate auction in Toronto next Saturday (dig those lists of lots!):

Saturday, September 18, 11 A.M.

26 Bernice Ave., Sunnylea

(off Prince Edward Dr., south of Bloor, Etobicoke)

Large contents/estate auction for Mr. Eric Belzar, 50 year resident at this address. Antique furniture, numerous collectibles, vintage tools, taxidermy items, etc.

Furniture to include 9 pc. walnut dining room set c. 1930, incl. china cabinet and buffet, in good cond.; Stanley upright quarter sawn oak piano, good cond.; nice old tea trolley w. glass insert tray; waterfall/classic glazed china cabinet; 9 well maple filing cabinet; armoire door; grain painted organ stool; rock maple platform rocker; 1960s moderne black vinyl and zebra stripe couch and chair w. end tables; cloverleaf walnut occasional table and other small occasional tables; kitchen table and chairs, orig. vinyl, formica top; mission style desk; oak bureau w. mirror and harp; oak lamp table; beveled hall mirror w. cast iron hooks; lg. oak beveled mirror, old; 2 refinished 9 pane mirrors, pine frames; 1920s wall clock; pr. Spanish revival table lamps w. lustres; deco area rug; also double garage packed w. complete and partial furniture items, legs, tops, chairs, and handyman specials.

Collectibles to include vintage Scot. canvas hip waders; German military helmet; Kilman's Red tricolour neon bar sign; vintage scrap books 1945; rustic oil by Etobicoke artist D. Staffin; spelter elk statue; moose hoof ashtray; 2 sets antelope horns; stuffed baby crocodile; powder horn; veterinary syringe; some vintage fishing lures and bow hunting accessories; cheese barrel; a few vintage radios; lg. 10 gallon glass lab quality carboyle; brass printers rule w. agate points; Vict. ornate sheaf clip; vintage tins, cigar boxes, bottle, crates, etc.; beer steins; asst. glass, china, serving pieces incl. iris and herringbone bowl; some cutlery; 2 Vict. ewers, terra cotta w. enamel transfers and the other pewter mounted lid; 2 nice log cabin quilts, other linens, textiles, drapings; carved animals and wildlife themed décor; household and kitchen items, box lots of knick-knacks and great flea market stuff.

Tools to include 14" General band saw; 2 bench vices, 1 XL; hand held electric grinder and reciprocal sander; 6 vintage block and steel planes; Stanley USA line level and #71 ½ plane (partial?); tons of hand tools, all sorts; crate of natural burls; asst. vintage hardware. Tons more still to be sorted and pulled out of shadowy corners! Also free kittens to good homes!

A full contents sale, high end stuff and tons of box lots too! House sold, no agents please. Terms: cash only. Auctioneer: Mark Taaffe. Inquiries 416-998-5992.

Update: Amber sez: "just thought I'd point out that in your auction blog post, you mention 2x that the sale will be happening on Sunday, but then in the actual 'clipping' of the auction article, it says Saturday the 18th."

Creative genius and zero-gravity veteran Matt Fraction says,

This is gonna be like prom in your brain.

Like, one of those things you're never, ever gonna forget. You'll tell your kids about it and describe it to people you meet for the rest of your life.

I went to Space Camp. Shut up. I rocked that flight suit, goddammit. Anyway. So, you get -- or got, i dunno if they do it any more -- to sit in this weirdo chair device that looked like a giant C-clamp. [Ed. note: The consumer-oriented space joyride I'll be taking on Wednesday includes no such device; the Zero-G Corporation sells an entertainment/adventure travel experience different than the research-oriented NASA space camp Matt attended.] So you sit in the C-Clamp, with the bottom curl of the C running between your legs like a saddle, and the curve of the C at your back. The top and back of the C were connected to the ceiling by bungee cords and an elaborate weight and pulley system. Now, the bungees were connected to some sort of wheel-strut-track thing thing, like the cars on a roller coaster track, only the track was bolted to the ceiling. And the track went straight forward for about 10, 20 yards or something. Got it?

Okay, so, the important part was the weights. See, the weights, when in cooperation with the bungees, would replicate moon gravity on your body which, if my geek remains on, is 1/6 earth weight? Something like that. So, you'd walk-hop the length of the track in moon-weight with earth muscles. You could leap 15, 20 feet straight into the air and control your fall back down, span yards with every step, and basically kick it Armstrong style until it was the next kid's turn.

It was unlike anything I've ever experienced. It's one of those things that i'm just gonna take with me to my grave, probably the closest I'll ever come to space, in its dippy space camp way, you know?

Anyway. Ever since -- and it's been 15 years now -- my dreams are plagued with strange gravity situations, somewhere between flight and swimming, all because of those five little minutes in that tourist's chair. In my dreams i'm a whirlygig, i'm a helicopter, i have invisible bungee cords connected to god and I can move like superman.

It happens a lot, and my life, waking and sleeping, feels richer and stranger and better because of it.

My fingers are, like, triple-crossed for you. And, hey, not *everyone* throws up on the vomit comet. Oh, and If you want to be, like, totally hardcore, you should bring an iPod (or whatever mp3doohickey you have) and listen to the Ramones. In ZERO-G!

Previous "Xeni Flies Zero-G" posts: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

A new type of lens may make blurry phonecam snapshots a thing of the past:

A specially shaped camera lens and processing method to ensure images are always in focus has been developed. Physicist Dr Andy Harvey said it was a "simple system with a simple lens" which uses an optical encoder so that no information in images is lost. Developed primarily for military night vision cameras, the technology could find its way into camera phones.

Link (thanks, Siege)

As my colleague Cory blogged last week, Tuesday September 14 is "Save Betamax National Call-in Day."

Why Save Betamax? The short version: We're organizing a call-in day to Congress on September 14 to oppose new legislation that would undermine the Betamax decision (INDUCE Act). Here's why: The Betamax VCR died more than 15 years ago, but the Supreme Court decision that made the Betamax and all other VCRs legal lived on. In Sony vs. Universal (known as the Betamax decision) the Court ruled that because VCRs have legitimate uses, the technology is legal—even if some people use it to copy movies. Of course, the movie industry was lucky it lost the case against VCRs, because home video soon became Hollywood's largest source of revenue. And the freedom to use and develop new technology that was protected by the Betamax decision set the stage for the incredible growth in computer technology we've seen in the last few decades.

Link

BoingBoing reader Don Whiteside says,

Today, author Warren Ellis' blog has what he calls a "One-day DPH rent-party" looking for donations to cover bandwidth costs. It's a little essay that any fan of his Transmetropolitan will recognize as being written by his alter-ego, Spider Jerusalem. It's a thinly disguised bit about Kerry and flat-out hysterical. Dunno if a non-Transmet fan will find it as awesome -- but if they do, they should go get the graphic novels.

Link

BoingBoing reader Peter says,

"I was reading about your upcoming adventure with considerable envy when I realized i'd seen something similar in june or so and sure enough, a Hungarian online mag has a first-person account of such a flight right here in budapest. a 20-year old soviet-built Antonov 2 plane is used for the stunt, apparently flown by one of hungary's top fighter pilots (this part is not clear). it's all in hungarian but check out the pictures. it's groovy."

Link

Update: Péter Kelemen says, "Well, the pilot is Gyula VÁRI (former squadron leader), the article says nothing about him being one of Hungary's top fighter pilot. But he is the President of the Hungarian Aeronautical Association. (Link). The flight itself is about 20 minutes in 1000-3000m altitude while having 10-12 weightlessness-sessions of 7-10 sec each. G changes between 0-3 during the flight."

Previous "Xeni Flies Zero-G" posts: 4, 3, 2, 1.

During the "iPod Beemer" episode I did last week on the NPR show "Day to Day," I played a couple examples of the kinds of tunes you could rock out to in your iPodified BMW convertible -- one of them was "Early in the Morning," by legendary '80s R+B icons The Gap Band. During that episode, host Noah Adams inadvertently dissed the Gap Band. When he heard that segment air, my D2D colleague Brian Unger vowed to settle the score of funk: he challenged Mr. Adams to a duel, and here is the result. Listen to Brian's segment "Don't Diss The Gap Band" -- Link

Update: BoingBoing reader Mike Ransom of Tulsa Oklahoma says, "The GAP Band was named after three streets here in Tulsa: Greenwood, Archer and Pine. That's the same Greenwood and Archer mentioned in the archetypical Bob Wills Western Swing tune, "Take Me Back To Tulsa". Here's a further bit of trivia about one of those streets -- Link. The story above is done in the style of Paul Harvey, a Tulsa native. Here is a morph I did of Paul Harvey from his high school yearbook picture -- Link."

More Gap Band trivia, including the Greenwood, Archer, and Pine reference (an historic black business and commerce hub in Tulsa) here: Link

BoingBoing reader Greg says, "One thing I think your readers may find interesting is that the GAP band isn't named after just any three streets in Tulsa, but the center of what was once called "The Black Wall Street". In the 1910's it was one of the most affluent African-American communities in the country. In 1921, it was also the location of one of the worst acts of violence in American history. While dubbed the Tulsa "race riots", they more closely resemble a military assault. Here's a post I wrote about it: link

Here's a picture of a young George Bush slugging a rugby opponent in the face. That's a cool sneer the young Bush has. With that sneer, he could have gotten the part of a juvenile delinquent in a 1950s teen exploitation movie.

The president's smirk no longer gives me the entertainment value it once did. He needs to come up with some new facial expressions or else people are going to tire of him.

Cheney's sneer is good, however.

Cheney also has, as one reporter so aptly described it, a "quizzical grin." His facial expressions are so good I'm thinking of voting for Bush/Cheney, so I can see them on TV for another four years. So far, Kerry and Edwards have only displayed fake smiles. They aren't very funny.

Link

Score one for John Gilmore, who is suing the Justice Department because it has secret laws requiring people to show ID when flying on a commercial domestic plane. Ashcroft tried to file a secret brief to keep the secret law a secret, but the court said no secrets allowed.

Bill sez: "The 9th Circuit US Court of Appeals rejected a Department of Justice attempt to file a secret brief in Gilmore vs. Ashcroft, a case that involves secret law.

"In a one page order, the Court denied DOJ's motion asking the Court's permission to file their arguments in secret, allowing only the judges to read their full brief. A DOJ motion to suspend the briefing schedule was similarly denied." Link (Here are previous BB posts on the subject)

Gilles Nicolet, a photographer for National Geographic borrowed some old elephant husks from the Tanzania Department of Wildlife, and then had hunters pose with them as if they'd be taken from a freshly fallen elephant. He was busted after observant readers noticed ID numbers on one of the tusks. It turns out some of his other photos were staged, too.

(It makes you wonder if this story, by the same photographer, is a tale tale: "French photographer Gilles Nicolet reports that angry bees penetrated his protective, modern gear and stung him on the nose, lips and forehead, and left two stingers in the eye he was using to peer through the viewfinder of his camera.") Link (Thanks, Eye-Imagine!)

The LA Times has a wonderful obituary for a bit actor named Steve Wayne (Bedtime for Bonzo, Dragnet, Cisco Kid), who died at the age of 84. For the last quarter century of his life, Wayne was monomaniacally focused on tearing down fliers that were posted on walls and buildings.

Over the last two decades, Wayne tore down thousands of illegal fliers tacked on fences, traffic lights and utility poles. His quest was endless, like trying to wipe out gnats one swat at a time...

He began climbing up poles and clawing at the unwanted ads with a garden rake, or going after them while perched on the hood of a moving car with an accomplice at the wheel. But as fast as he tore them down, new ones would replace them...

In 1980 he was so upset by the proliferation of handbills for the Roxy, Troubadour and Whiskey a Go Go nightclubs that he spray-painted "Keep L.A. Clean" on the outsides of the famous establishments. He was arrested on suspicion of malicious vandalism, a charge that could have brought jail time and a steep fine...

He kept at it nearly up to the day he died, stopping to rip down signs "even when coming home from his chemo appointments," his daughter, Cathy Wayne, said in an interview.

Link

BB pal Eric Paulos has work in Passage of Mirage, a group exhibition opening tomorrow night (9/14) at Manhattan's Chelsea Art Museum. Paulos and the Experimental Interaction Unit will debut Limelight, an ambient display that illuminates our culture's anxieties about terrorism, disaster, and other potentially-catastrophic threats.

"Limelight is a personal tactical system that removes the burden of anxiety associated with our continuous worry of emerging global and local threatening conditions. Using a collection of embedded sensors, local measurements of radioactivity and RF signals are continuously scanned for hostile patterns. Similarly, remote precursors of threats such as the appearance and frequency of specific keywords and discussions by various military, news, and independent sources are continuously monitored. The collected data is carefully analyzed and summarized as a visual output where various threats are mapped across a spectrum of illumined and pulsing colors."

Link

Amazon's put up their sell-page for my next novel, "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town," offering a 32% discount off the cover-price of $24.95 ($16.97 in total). The book's out in Februrary, and coincidentally, I just a couple hours ago overnighted the final version of the manuscript to my editor in NYC.

Someone Comes to Town is longest thing I've ever written -- longer than Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Eastern Standard Tribe put together. It's a kind of "Little, Big"-meets-"Crypotonomicon" story, a contemporary fantasy about free, unlicensed wireless networking, set in Toronto's bohemian Kensington Market.

I'm going to be posting the full text of this one under a Creative Commons license again when the time comes, and I've got some beautiful supplementary artwork to go with the gorgeous Dave McKean cover; McKean provided five digital paintings to Irene Gallo, Tor's brilliant, award-winning art director, and he's kindly granted me permission to use them all on the book's website when I ship it.

In the meantime, there's an excerpt or two online already. Enjoy! Link

The Space Moot Court is an annual "moot court" (a theoretical exercise in which real lawyers and judges debate a fake issue to see where we're at) held to debate potential future issues in space-law. It's judged by the three sitting Judges of the International Court of Justice. Link (Thanks, Denise!)

The mayor of the Dutch town Spaarnwoude has invited a herd of cattle to graze in a nature reserve to deter people from having too much splendor in the grass:

"Visitors experience great annoyance from people having sex in public, and apparently the presence of the cows turns people off having sex," she said.

Most people, anyway. Link

The Guardian reports that the old Pioneer 10 and 11 probes are being subtly tugged around by mysterious forces as they hurtle beyond our solar system.

"Some researchers say unseen 'dark matter' may permeate the universe and that this is affecting the Pioneers' passage. Others say flaws in our understanding of the laws of gravity best explain the crafts' wayward behaviour."

And still others suggest that the probes' weird trajectories may just be the result of gas leaking from the fuel tanks. Link

I just got back from O'Reilly Media's annual foo camp, held in Sebastopol, California. I met a lot of people I knew only by name, and saw old friends I hadn't seen in years. Some of the people brought interesting projects with them to share. Here are some pictures I took. Link

Will they have one of these on board Wednesday's flight? As your trusty spaceblogger, I vow to phonecam it for you if they do. Zero-G Corporation's commercial weightless flights are intended for fun, unlike the NASA KC-135 flights, for which the primary purpose tends to be research. At $3000 +/- per ticket, discriminating fans of weightlessness should expect all mod cons. Link to Zero-Gravity Toilet Instructions, from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Previous "Xeni Flies Zero-G" posts: 3, 2, 1.

Check out the cover of this week's TIME. (Insert Beavisoid laugh) If you're unfamiliar with the term "goatse" -- it is the very definition of NSFW. A particularly abhorrent image which has become a sort of sick internet in-joke over the years. Search Google and ye shall find. But only if you're prepared for irreversible eyeball scarification. Or, for an eyeball- and work-safe answer, try wikipedia's entry.

Link to TIME Magazine's goatse tribute cover. Larger image here. (Thanks, Brad, and Boogah)

A disturbing new online art short from LA-based blogger, performance artist, and filmmaker Kitty Bukkake. Begins like a laudanum-induced Christina Aguilera karaoke hallucination, then u-turns into Carrie meets Karen Finley meets a back-alley psychosexual nightmare. Link, non-worksafe to the max.

New York Times reporter John Schwartz took a flight on NASA's zero-gravity "vomit comet" earlier this year, and wrote a terrific first-person piece about his experience. You have to pay $2.95 to read it at nytimes.com, but I found a helpful site in Turkey that coughs up the complete text gratis. Yay for Turkish websites!

For the first few parabolas, I did as the flight surgeon, Dr. James Locke, told me. Lie back in my seat with the seat belt unbuckled, holding the ends. When the plane rounded the top of the first curve, I felt a momentary dropping in the pit of my stomach and then gravity simply went away. I floated up from the seat. Thirty seconds later, my body pressed down against the seat once again, but with twice the normal weight as we slammed upward.

After growing used to the sensations through a few cycles, I pushed out of the seat and floated toward the ceiling, grabbing the canvas straps along the wall to move around. Dr. Locke told me that I was bouncing around a little too tentatively.

"Try the Superman move!" he said, stretching out his arms in an imitation of comic-book flight. I did, and gave a gentle kick against the wall and sailed to the other wall, slower than a speeding bullet, but nonetheless fulfilling childhood desires I had forgotten I had.

Link to John Schwartz: "Mild-Mannered Reporter Gets a Superman Moment." Link to full-size image from this gallery of space-themed children's publications from 1961-1974.

T minus 72 hours to liftoff. Previous posts: Link to part 2, and Link to part 1. Speaking of Turkey, Bruce Sterling says: Link.

In Wired News, a report on Thursday's recommendation by copyright officials that US law be amended so that companies that rely on copyright infringement to make a profit can be held liable for their actions.

The U.S. Copyright Office delivered its recommendations to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which had asked for advice in developing proper language for the proposed Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act (SB2560). The initial version of the bill, which would hold technology companies liable if they make products that encourage people to infringe copyrights, generated a firestorm of criticism from technology and consumer groups alike.

But while the copyright office -- which released its recommendations publicly on Friday -- clearly made a good-faith effort to address the concerns of the music and movie industries, technology companies and consumers, critics said the bill would take copyright law in a dangerous direction.

"The copyright office is now suggesting the exploration of a new and radically unprecedented approach to copyright law," said Bob Schwartz, counsel for the Consumer Electronics Association and the Home Recording Rights Coalition. "It would not require that a defendant in a copyright suit have any knowledge of infringing conduct, any relationship with a particular infringer or any intent to commit a violation of the law."

Link

In North Korea earlier this week: an explosion, a giant crater, and a "peculiar cloud." Both the South Korean government and the US government say they don't believe North Korea conducted a nuclear test.

The event took place on the day of North Korea's most important national holiday. September 9, 1948, is the day on which the Democratic People's Republic of Korea was founded.

President Bush and his top advisers have received intelligence reports in recent days describing a confusing series of actions by North Korea that some experts believe could indicate the country is preparing to conduct its first test explosion of a nuclear weapon, according to senior officials with access to the intelligence.

While the indications were viewed as serious enough to warrant a warning to the White House, American intelligence agencies appear divided about the significance of the new North Korean actions, much as they were about the evidence concerning Iraq's alleged weapons stockpiles.

Some analysts in agencies that were the most cautious about the Iraq findings have cautioned that they do not believe the activity detected in North Korea in the past three weeks is necessarily the harbinger of a test. A senior scientist who assesses nuclear intelligence says the new evidence "is not conclusive," but is potentially worrisome.

Link to Reuters report, reg-free Link to New York Times story

Update: News reports are now saying the blast may have been related to a dam-building project, or some similar public work.

Remember those in-theater MPAA ads blogged here, here and here on BoingBoing? Boondocks lampoons them this week. Link (Thanks, Patricio!)

Tom sez, "I took some photos at Boeing Surplus today. It's a store that Boeing operates in Kent, Washington, about twenty minutes south of Seattle. They sell all sorts of weird and strange stuff, from gear used in the construction of jet liners to office chairs to old employee nameplates. Photos and cameras are strictly prohibited, so I was lucky to make it out with these photos that give a small sense of the place." Link (Thanks, Tom!)

Thomas Hawk sez, "Recently REM's Peter Buck was reported to have given iPods full of music (probably around 10,000 tracks, if really full) to every single person who worked on REMs latest album, even reportedly engineers who he had only known a few weeks."

While Stipe and Mills have developed other interests in their adult life beyond the band and music, Buck hasn't. He recently filled up the iPods of everyone who worked on REM's new album with songs that he thought they might like - and considering iPods can take up to 10,000 songs, this was a Herculean feat of downloading. "He's become obsessed with it," says Stipe. "He has done this for everyone who worked on our new record, including the engineers, who he had only known for a couple of weeks. What's interesting is to discover what he thinks we should be listening to. Mike got entire albums by Miles Davis, for example, while I only got the greatest hits. It must have taken him weeks, but he really isn't interested in anything apart from his family and music," adds Mills. "He reads books, and plays music, and hangs out with his family. That's it. So he loves the iPod because it gives him a chance to go through thousands of records that he hasn't played for the last 20 years.

Link (Thanks, Thomas!)