Shown here: A Twinkie radiation research subject (left) next to a control Twinkie (right) immediately after the conclusion of an experiment.

This New Haven Register piece looks at the security and privacy issues surrounding a police "gun" that automatically scans licence plates. It's an example of "wholesale surveillance" -- something only possible with modern computer technology -- and as such requires new thinking about privacy protection. Link

This San Jose Mercury News essay discusses how the tighter U.S. immigration policies affect foreign students and professors at U.S. universities, and how that in turn affects security. The more we isolate U.S. academia from the rest of the world, the more technological progress suffers. Link

Link to cartoon, and Link to related BoingBoing posts on Zero-G Corporation's parabolic joyrides. (Thanks, Rob O)

"...the man went to a Staples store to buy a box of the Bic pens that were specifically cited as the break-in tool. He pulled the ink cartridge out of a pen and widened one end of the barrel slightly by scraping it with his pocket knife, just like a Web site instructed.

 “I had run home for lunch and was in a hurry,” he said. “Within 30 seconds, I was into the safe with that pen.”

"As police radios, television signals, distant storms, and other radio transmissions alter what Haque calls the "local hertzian culture," the cloud flickers in response... Of course, calling a particular phone alters the "hertzian topography" in that region of the balloon cloud, affecting its glow. "You can enter into something like a conversation with the cloud," Haque says."

On their website, the band says:

"Music and sex go very well together. For proof, just take a look at the video for the Persian Rugs' new single 'Be A Woman'. The band and director Todd Sheldrick have created the perfect setting for the band's 60's Punk-inspired Primal Rock: strippers and cavemen collide in a 21st Century psychedelic garden of eden. (...) The Rugs got in touch with famed 60's director Russ Meyer, the maker of such films as 'Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!'and Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls' (the latter a direct influence on the Austin Powers movies) and asked for permission to incorporate footage from one of his cult classics, 'Mondo Topless', into their new filmclip. Russ asked to hear the song first, [and] loved it (...)

Link to "Be a Woman" *.asx video in low and hi-res, contains megadoses of kitsch nudity (and shots of vintage '60s electronic equipment). How did those ladies make their humongous breasts do that stuff on rhythm? Weighed down by all that eyeliner, no less?

Update: Reader Rob says, "If you have a fink installation on your mac, you can install asfrecorder from fink unstable packages and record the Russ Meyer/Hoodoo Gurus--Persian Rugs thing."

It is a cliche to note that receiving an award conveys an honour upon its recipient, but this is a stupendous honour and I would be remiss if I failed to tell you all how mightily chuffed I am. I am deeply sorry that I am not able to be there tonight: I am with you in spirit.

The list of people who deserve to be thanked for this is long indeed: the friends and colleagues; the fans and readers; the editors and critics; the collaborators and the writers who inspired me -- and the jury, them too! My most sincere thanks to all of you.

No writer is an island, no idea is original, no effort is a solo effort. We stand upon the shoulders of giants, we collaborate with our colleagues and with the immortal words of our dead literary ancestors. Literature -- indeed, all human endeavor -- is dignified and uplifted through collaboration and cooperation. We sit atop a great erected infrastructure of human invention and effort, all of it embodied in the bricks and boards that surround us, and, most importantly, in the traditional knowledge that allows each generation to improve upon the bricks and boards of the last one.

The writer is engaged in dialog with the world and with posterity. Our words go on to form a layer of the substrate of human creation. Those who tell us that our words, our art and our posterity are best served with strong locks and high fences are *not on our side*. No writer could pen a single word but for the rich humus of public domain effort with which we garden our notions and conceits.

So thank you all, and thanks most of all to our ancestors, the bringers of fire and the inventors of the wheel, the Judith Merrils and the Phyllis Gotleibs, the Gilgameshes and the golems, the Turings and the Teslas. Thanks to the brave pirates who continue to preserve our posterity in the face of outrageous insult to creation. Thanks to the readers and to you all.

In order to help teachers bring their classes to Second Life, Linden Lab donates accounts for each student, as well as an acre of land in the metaverse for the teacher and students to work and build on. Afterward, anyone wishing to stay a member can do so at half price.

To date, in addition to Delwiche and Beamish, professors from San Francisco State University, the Rochester Institute of Technology and Vassar College have used Second Life in their courses.

All 1,230 regular season games originally slated for the 2004-2005 NHL season will be played, with results of each video game match-up available to fans who tune-in daily to "Sweat." Up-to-the-minute scores, stats, teams and player profiles will be online at www.g4techtv.com.

In 2000, due to the popularity of political masks, BuyCostumes.com began publishing statistics on each Presidential Candidate's mask sales. It was soon apparent that the mask sales were as good a resource as the polls being published by major national media groups. Seeing the similarities, BuyCostumes.com then looked into some data on political mask sales in election years. Not only did they ask five different mask manufacturers, they also spoke with 12 national stores about their sales history all the way back to 1980. Their findings were astounding and right every time....

The 'StarWars Trilogy DVD' (video/movie DVD) has an 'Extra Special Features Disc'. If you try to launch this on your Xbox it will automaticly update your dashboard ... NO confirmation will be asked. The bonus disc has extra features including a documentary on the star wars saga, footage from the making of all three films and a preview demo of the new 'StarWars Battlefront' Xbox game (that's why there's a default.xbe, dashupdate.xbe and update.xbe on the disc).

This information can be important for some people with older bioses (booting xboxdash.xbe), people using exploits or simply those who don't want their dash upgraded.

"Perhaps the most intriguing finding, though, was in a comparison patient whose urine was used during the training phase. All the dogs unequivocally identified that urine as a cancer case, even though screening tests before the experiment had shown no cancer. Doctors conducted more detailed tests on the patient and found a life-threatening tumor in the right kidney."

"I love you [rev.eng]" is divided into four investigative areas - political, cultural, technical and historical - and focuses on the controversial positions of security experts and hackers, of net artists and programmers, of literature experts and code poets...

What can visitors to the "I love you [rev.eng]" exhibition expect?

- Force computers to crash with "Sasser" or "Suicide"
- Experience a global virus outbreak in real time via a 3D world
- View security concepts and methods for preventing global network attacks
- Witness computer viruses as works of art like "biennale.py" and "The Lovers"
- See films by hackers on their subculture
- Learn about programming languages as the material for contemporary poetry
- Juxtapose experimental literature and code poetry

PANORAMA EPHEMERA (2004, 89:35 min., color and black and white) is a collage of sequences drawn from a wide variety of ephemeral (industrial, advertising, educational and amateur) films, touring the conflicted landscapes of twentieth-century America. The films' often-skewed visions construct an American history filled with horror and hope, unreeling in familiar and unexpected ways.

PANORAMA EPHEMERA focuses on familiar and mythical activities and images in America (1626-1978). Many creatures and substances that we hardly notice because we feel so used to them take center stage, including pigs, corn, water, telephones, fire, and rice. At first resembling a compilation, it soon reveals itself as a journey through the American landscape over time, and the story begins to emerge between the sequences. Link, Torrent Download Link

This site contains theatrical trailers for feature films. What, another movie trailer site? Well, this is a special one -- SabuCat Productions specializes in collecting, preserving and distributing high-quality 35mm materials, and the trailers in this collection are unlike anything you're likely to see online. Top titles: "5000 Fingers of Dr. T," "Amazing Transparent Man," "Conquest of Space," and of course "Attack of the 50-Foot Woman." Link

Growing collection of educational films originally targeting so-called "GenXers." Like Prelinger Archives films on the same site, but made for younger audiences in the Open Classroom era. Memorable titles: "Last Prom," "Why Doesn't Cathy Eat Breakfast," and "If Mirrors Could Speak: Self-Image Film." Link

Strange Horizons is a Hugo-nominated online speculative fiction magazine that pays pro rates for fiction. We've published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry every week for the past four years, and other material (including art) a couple of times a month. Almost everything we've ever published is still available for free in our archives, including the wildly popular April Fools article about Installing Linux on a Dead Badger, as well as our Author Focus week on Cory.

We're funded entirely by donations; most of our budget goes to paying for the material we publish, 'cause all 30 of our staff members are volunteers. We're currently in the middle of our twice-annual fund drive -- the model is a lot like public radio, except that we don't interrupt our content to ask for money. We're a 501(c)(3) literary nonprofit, so if you pay taxes in the US, your donation is tax-deductible. We'll take donations in any amount; I'd love to see the magazine funded entirely by hundreds of $5-$10 donations. A donation of any size gets you a chance to win one of our fund drive prizes. Larger donations get you a spiffy membership card and other premiums.

So if you'd like to stop by and help us out, we'd appreciate it. But even if you don't want to donate, come take a look at the magazine. Enjoy!

"In the late 1980s, the Russians tried to develop their own Space Shuttle. Well, actually -- one even ended up flying into space just one time -- Buran. After this flight, the hangar where it was housed in Baikonur collapsed and destroyed the craft.

"This is an online photo gallery of Buran 002, another prototype that was sold to an Australian businessman named David Hammer. During the Olympic Games in Sydney, the prototype was part of an exhibition. Then it was sold to a company in Singapore, and was shipped to Bahrain, where it became stranded somewhere in the desert.

"Eventually it was sold to a German museum, and will soon be shipped one last time -- to become part of an exhibition. Some things are still working, as you can see from the photos in this online image gallery. Guess I'll have make a visit to this museum when the shuttle has arrived!"

# "War is a dangerous place."
# "Karyn is a West Texas girl, just like me."
# "Rarely is the question asked, is our children learning."

Hal Robins (in the guise of Pedale) has discovered--and the very amusing, detailed drawings he's put in this slim volume from North Atlantic Books illustrate--that while the mysterious appearance of Unknown Socks in your drier (and the mysterious disappearance of the socks you expected to find) may be  conventionally explained, deeper, darker explanations can be found by looking farther than the interior of the drier mechanism: “It has long been thought that life  must also exist on other planets. These life forms most likely have appendages for the purpose of locomotion. It follows then that such beings have a practical need to keep these appendages warm, hence alien footwear. . .As we employ rebellious machines, which from time to time  squirt our stockings into the abyss of space, so do they. And as we receive theirs, it follows that their sock drawers must also receive ours. Even as you read these lines (relativistically speaking), some alien eye or eyes, perhaps set in chitinous, horny lids, are perplexedly scanning one of a pair of argyles which you lost last Tuesday. Some unthinkable thing may be fingering, with its spatulate claws, in the reddish light of a giant sun, a missing unit of your support hose...”

UPDATE: Simone sez: "Lovely to see Hal's book boingboinged. . .you might also let your readers know that the utterly stupendous Ask Dr. Hal Show can be see every single solitary week (except when they don't feel like it) at the Odeon Bar at Mission and Valencia (yes they do) in San Francisco.

Hal and Chicken sit up onstage and are bombarded with sealed envelopes containing questions from the audience. Chicken opens and reads the question, and Hal answers the question in his inimitable Hal way.

If the necessary honorarium included with the question is sufficient, the audience is treated to a Bardic Recitation of Hal's Choice. Once someone gave fifty buck and Hal recited, in its entirety, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, from memory, with all the voices, bringing the bar to a shrieking collapse upon his completion.

Anyhow the show is every wednesday around Nineish pm at The Odeon Bar; On the First Wednesday of every month Chicken gets the bus out and we all go bowling after the show. We pretty much just load the entire bar into the bus and take off for Daly City. It's great.

Suspicion of these callers led me to Google for answers, and I wasn't too surprised by what I found. While some of these calls are outright scams, the other, more "legitimate" callers do little to nothing for the groups they claim to represent--in most cases, the telemarketing company working on behalf of a police charity give as little as 15% of the "take" to the charity.

Below are some links I found of interest. I also ran accross the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement site’s page that warns specifically about fraudulent charitable organizations: "They also call claiming to represent police or firefighter organizations. They typically ask victims for donations to help police officers buy equipment or to assist families of officers disabled or killed in the line of duty." Link

Additional links:
The Attorney General's site concerning charity telemarketing (Includes a list of what the caller must/can do according to law).

The FTC site concerning charities (Includes information on how to check up on an organization before you donate).

Old-time professional wrestling fans nostalgic for the days when camp was king and characters like Junkyard Dog and Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka ruled the squared circle have a whole new set of heroes to cheer for -- on the Kaiju Big Battel wrestling circuit. Think of Kaiju Big Battel as the horrific spawn of Japanese monster movies and the WWF ("Kaiju" means "monster" in Japanese). It's a tongue-firmly-in-cheek contest of "athletes" wearing patently silly costumes, looking to give their opponent a solid (and likely pre-ordained) smackdown.

In the mythology of Kaiju, the matches are part of the balance of the universe, where earthly forces of good counter evil creatures invading our planet, bent on world domination. Or something like that... Day to Day technology contributor Xeni Jardin recently infiltrated this underground wrestling circuit, filled with far-out science-fiction characters with names like Silver Potato, Gomi Man and Louden Noxious. She was witness to the coming-out party of Kaiju's rising star: Dr. Cube, a "human-genius-turned-quasi-monster" who, with his evil army, continues his quest for world domination.

"I've never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry. And I'm going to be blunt and plain: If one ever looks at me like that, I'm going to kill him and tell God he died."

Link to Business Week article. But Newsday wins the best hed award: Twinkies Maker Out of Dough. (Thanks, Jim OConnor)

Update: Reader Kate says, "I read your post on the bankruptcy of the Interstate Bakeries, alluding to the fact that Twinkies have now met their end. But Chapter 11 bankruptcy is not about ending a company or specific product lines, but rather re-organizing a companies debts (Link to explanation). Although its possible that twinkies, ho-ho's and hostess pies may be gone in the near future, it is just as likely that they will remain. So in short, reports of Twinkies death have been greatly exaggerated."

Staci Kramer agrees. "It's not RIP quite yet. The company is reorganizing -- not liquidating -- and, according to the same Business Week article mentioned in your post, 'Interstate spokeswoman Maya Pogoda says the outfit plans to continue operating the rest of its bakeries and distribution centers.' I just don't want to write off Twinkies and other delicacies like orange Hostess cup cakes and Devil Dogs too soon. It would tilt the time-space contiuum."

And reader Stephen A. Kupiec says, "Twinkies have an infinite shelf life! They cannot die! Whoever speaketh of Twinkies shall remember that he but seemeth dead, he sleeps, and yet he does not sleep, he has died and yet he is not dead, asleep and dead though he is, he shall rise again. Again it should be shown that

That is not dead which can eternal lie,
and with strange aeons even death may die."

"AFTER CONSIDERABLE AND SOMETIMES ANIMATED IN-HOUSE DISCUSSION OF THE DEMISE OF IVAN...IN THE MIDST OF A LOW-PRESSURE AND SURFACE FRONTAL SYSTEM OVER THE EASTERN UNITED STATES...THE NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER HAS DECIDED TO CALL THE TROPICAL CYCLONE NOW OVER THE GULF OF MEXICO TROPICAL DEPRESSION IVAN. WHILE DEBATE WILL SURELY CONTINUE HERE AND ELSEWHERE...THIS DECISION WAS BASED PRIMARILY ON THE REASONABLE CONTINUITY OBSERVED IN THE ANALYSIS OF THE SURFACE AND LOW-LEVEL CIRCULATION."

We've been up since 3am--waiting for Hilla SWAT. It's now 4:30. Despite their annoyance--the Force Recon squad from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit seems extremely patient--at least around Kuni Takahashi, a photographer for the Chicago Tribune and me. Instead they look at their watches--bullshit each other about their individual depravities--like masturbating in sweat socks. Typical life details at a military FOB or forward operating base in Iraq.

These marines at FOB Kalsu still sleep in tents, shit in porta-johns, live in the dirt. This is no Camp Victory green zone paradise with guys chilling in air-conditioned trailers and eating at the Bob Hope Dining Facility--a zeppelin hangar of a building just down the road from Baghdad International Airport. Everyone here has heard the stories--or maybe, been on a convoy through the green zone, briefly glimpsed the way that other half lives. They piss and moan about it--but don't denounce its existence. They are, after all, Americans--it's about aspirations--still believing that hard work and perseverance may someday get you to the Promised Land.

If Snoop does indeed show up with "Space Shizzle One," as one Farkster creatively visualizes here, well -- goodbye planet earth. Look for me on the mothership, baby, for I will be gone.

Link (thanks, Susan Kitchens)

California file sharers who trade songs or films without providing an e- mail address will be guilty of a misdemeanor, under the first-in-the-nation measure that could make it easier for law enforcement to track down people who illegally download copyrighted material. The bill is the latest attempt by film and music trade associations to combat the hard-to-police use of file-sharing software.

The signing was hailed by the bill's sponsor, the Motion Picture Association of America, whose president, Dan Glickman, noted in a statement that Schwarzenegger had "a unique understanding of the powerful impact of piracy.'' The governor remains a member of the Screen Actors Guild, which supported the bill.

The shift from reliance on its proprietary format will begin with flash memory-based players, the electronics giant said, but plans are still being finalized on how and when products will add MP3 support. CNET News.com affiliate ZDNet France first reported of the change in Sony's strategy for the European market. U.S. representatives said the company is making similar plans here.

Humanity faces a global crisis in the governance of knowledge, technology and culture. The crisis is manifest in many ways.

* Without access to essential medicines, millions suffer and die;

* Morally repugnant inequality of access to education, knowledge and technology undermines development and social cohesion;

* Anticompetitive practices in the knowledge economy impose enormous costs on consumers and retard innovation;

* Authors, artists and inventors face mounting barriers to follow-on innovation;

* Concentrated ownership and control of knowledge, technology, biological resources and culture harm development, diversity and democratic institutions;

* Technological measures designed to enforce intellectual property rights in digital environments threaten core exceptions in copyright laws for disabled persons, libraries, educators, authors and consumers, and undermine privacy and freedom;

* Key mechanisms to compensate and support creative individuals and communities are unfair to both creative persons and consumers;

* Private interests misappropriate social and public goods, and lock up the public domain.

The discovery could also explain why some people are more susceptible to addiction -- they may have a morphine deficiency.

"All of a sudden," Stefano said, "(morphine-deficient individuals) take this compound (and) it really makes them feel not only good but normal."

The researchers trained the rats to search for human odour by stimulating the reward centre when it found its target smell. Once the rats were trained, they were set to forage for the target smell, while electrodes recorded their neural activity patterns. This allowed researchers to identify the brainwave patterns associated with finding that smell. They were also able to train the rats to sniff out the explosives TNT and RDX – key after terrorist attacks that may leave buildings harbouring unexploded bombs.

Monkeys have invaded government ministries in New Delhi, ridden elevators and climbed along windowsills. Monkeys slapped students inside a girls school in a south Bengal suburb. A gang of monkeys in the city of Chandigarh ripped up lawns, broke flowerpots and yanked sheets off beds.

Some monkeys, mostly loners, have bitten people, injuring and even killing small children.

"Monkeys are very furious," said Ujagar Singh, the Patiala district spokesman.

By reiterating their anti-bot and anti-collusion rules, and by claiming to have mysterious enforcement mechanisms, online casinos may be able to stem the tide of cheating for a while. But eventually, bots and collusion will become the norm, and lone human players will be driven out of all but the lowest stakes games.

But there is another strategy. An online casino could encourage bots, and even set up bots-only games. The game would then become not a human vs. human card game but a human vs. human battle between bot designers for geekly mastery. I'll bet there are plenty of programmers out there who would like to give it a try.

Spam went ballistic starting in 2002. You could see it growing in 2001, but 2002 was when it really took off.

The premise is somewhat familiar now. Take a hopelessly modern family and stick them in the past, as authenticated by historians, and make them live with only the tools and resources available centuries ago. In this case, the modern Americans are sent to live in the summer of 1628, on a forested island off of Maine. Their task: build a new world colony that can both survive and pay back its investors in England. ... Cameras record every detail as the pudgy newcomers scrounge for food, learn how to farm Indian corn and build with the most rudimentary tools, all the while wearing appropriate clothes, slowly starving, and assuming appropriate roles such as indentured servants with astounding ease. Who knew how easy devolution was?

Some timeless quotes from "Faster, Pussycat!":

(The climatic finale)
Linda: I killed her - like she was an animal! Like she was nothing!
Kirk: She was nothing - nothing human!

(Billie throws Rosie a can of beer to calm her down.)
Bille: Here Rosie baby, pop the top before you blow your own!

Tommie: What's the point?
Varla: It's of no return, and you've reached it!

(thanks also to Caines, Jean-Luc, and others who suggested).

If a comic gets onstage and tells his audience "I am not a comedian," he'd better say something important -- or really damn funny. Lenny Bruce -- the hepcat who took his act from L.A. strip clubs to Carnegie Hall, redefining stand-up in the process -- did both. Now, nearly 40 years after a fatal drug overdose, a dizzyingly complete six-CD collection of his trailblazing routines has been released.

"Lenny Bruce: Let the Buyer Beware" spans his career from his promising first performance in 1948 to the ravings of a haunted, hunted man the day before his death in 1966. The warts-and-all portrait includes hours of previously unreleased material and chronicles Bruce as he tilts against hypocrisy ("Censorship on the Steve Allen Show"), racism ("How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties") and religion ("Religions, Inc.").

Since you've been covering the commercial zero-G flights of late, you might be interested in John Carmack's comments on his flight yesterday (with various Armadillo & ID people). Only a Usenet post, unfortunately, with a couple of linked pictures; but still interesting (and jealousy-inducing, damnit)

"A couple of us were doing low gravity judo throws, and I took a shot at the worlds first flying armbar in zero gravity (didn't work out too well)." (I dare not imagine...)

"I wanted to let you know that thanks to that post, Amy now has my 60" plasma screen in her studio. And in October, I'll be bringing it up to Boston so she can show her piece at a gallery there.

So, Go Internet!

I also wanted to point you towards Art Answers, a website I started after my initial meeting with Amy. While I can't lend every artist in the world my equipment, I can try to help them get the information they need. My dream is that one day Art Answers will have a storefront with reference libraries, on-staff experts, and a tool lending library. In the meantime, people can email or call with their art creation questions, and I'll try to get them answers."

The research showed that wood framing used 17 percent less energy than steel construction for a typical house built in Minnesota, and 16 percent less energy than a house using concrete construction in Atlanta. And in these two examples, the use of wood had 26-31 percent less global warming potential...The growth of wood in renewable forests works to "sequester" and remove carbon from the atmosphere, and fewer carbon emissions are created in the processing needed to produce wood products than their steel and concrete counterparts.

"Soviet scientists considered the Moon to be a very good place for a strategic headquarters as nuclear strikes on its surface would lose most of their destructive force. As the moon has no atmosphere, no shockwave could spread there and the radioactive dust would immediately fall out back on the surface without an atmosphere to carry it.

The designer also said that the USA had also developed a lunar base project and the Soviet scientists had been aware of these plans."

* Flipping the Switch on Cancer: Improving the effectiveness of Cancer drugs one molecule at a time.
* Think Molecularly, Act Globally: Studying the atmosphere from a converted spy plane.
* Quantum Computing's Magnetic Attraction: A new spin on magnetic atoms.
* The secret history of Vitamin B-12

Professor Lawrence Lessig, Stanford University Law School

12-2pm Monday 4 October 2004

Edward Lewis Theatre, Windeyer Building, UCL, Cleveland Street, London W1

Molecules of a simple sugar, glycolaldehyde, were detected in a cloud of gas and dust called Sagittarius B2 about 26,000 light years away.

Observations indicated large quantities of the sugar frozen to a temperature only a few degrees above absolute zero, the point at which all molecular movement stops.

We lied to you. In the golden 80s and 90s we told you micropayments and content protection would work; that you would be able to charge minuscule amounts of money whenever someone listened to your music or watched your movie. We told you untruths which we well knew would never work - after all, we would've never used them ourselves. Instead, we wrote things like Kazaa and Gnutella, and all other evil P2P applications to get the stuff free.

We told you these things so that you would finance the things we really wanted to build, not the things that you wanted to be built. We knew all along that DRM schemes do not work, and we knew that whatever we create can be broken by us. We don't care anymore, because your money made us bigger than you.

Look at us: every year, we churn out more computer games than your entire industry is worth. You know how we do it? We like our customers. We don't treat them like potential criminals, and try to make our products do less. We invent new things like online role-playing -games, where the money does not come from duplication of bits (which cannot be stopped, regardless of your DRM scheme) but from providing experiences that the people want.

We saw that you were old and weak. So we took advantage of it: told you things that you wanted to hear so we could kick you in the head in twenty years. Some of us told you that the future is going to be interactive - what did you do? You started to think how to make interactive movies (CD-I, anyone?), which is not what it really means, while we wrote games and tried to understand the new mediums, not how to bolt it on onto old things.

We lied to you. And we apologize for that, but it was for the greater good. So we're not the least bit sorry.

Signed: The Computer Industry

Fun Furde says, "The Gravity is equal parts cute and creepy. Cute because it's sort of like a pet that's happy to see you when you come home. Creepy because it's a lamp that moves by itself! No idea if they're actually going to make this or how much it will cost if they do. Or how they keep the lightbulb from smashing when it hits the ground."

Link.

A plane bound for Washington from London was diverted to Maine on Tuesday after passenger Yusuf Islam - formerly known as pop singer Cat Stevens - showed up on a U.S. watch list, federal officials said. One official said Islam, 56, was identified by the Advanced Passenger Information System, which requires airlines to send passenger information to U.S. Customs and Border Protection's National Targeting Center. TSA was then contacted and requested that the plane land at the nearest airport, the official said.

In their experiments, the researchers presented the subjects with either blue or yellow squares. One color was associated with a mild electric shock. Using this method, the subjects acquired a fear of the colored square associated with the shock.

Phelps's team then extinguished the fear response by presenting the colored square associated with the shock, first with a gradually reduced shock and then with no shock at all.

There's another article about Virgil Partch (aka "VIP"), a delightfully wacky cartoonist from the 40s and 50s. If you look closely at the hands on VIP's characters, you'll notice that they have more than five fingers. Sometimes they have as many as 12 fingers on a hand! He did this because he used to work at Disney, where he was forced to draw four-fingered characters. The extras fingers were his way of evening the score.

The price of Comic Art is $9, which is a good deal, because it's glossy color throughout. Link

UPDATE: Aaron sez: In response to Mark's post on Comic Art #6 where he mentioned never seeing a photo of Seth, I figured I'd point him over to the NYTimes article from July 11th. Along with a great interview of Seth, Joe Sacco, Chester Brown, Adrian Tomine, and Art Spiegelman, there's a nice photo of them all together. Seth is in the top right of the photo. Link

One problem, for instance, is that when a paper like Publishers Weekly does a spread on the graphic novel, they need to justify it with some advertising. And who can afford that kind of ad? DC of course, so the image of the latest Batman paperback will dominate the page, and any blather we spout about the serious intent of the graphic novel will be somewhat wasted.

Monster Island is a 60 chapter serial novel published to mobile phones under Creative Commons license by David Wellington (an indie author) about a Zombie Apocalypse in New York City. Monster Nation, the second novel in the trilogy, will be available in September 2004.

UPDATE: Jef sez: [Here's] the full webpage for David Wellington's "Monster Island". The mobile phone serial concept is dandy, but the winksite pages contain very little content per click, which is necessary for mobiles, but frustrating if you want to read it online or cut/paste to upload to a PDA.

UPDATE: David Harper of Winksite sez: "Great point about reading Monster Island from the desktop. Let me explain a bit on what is going on. When you point your browser to Monster Island (http://winksite.com/monster/island) you are presented with a version appropriate for your mobile phone or PDA. The version that pops up when you enter that address from a PC is intended to emulate/demo the mobile experience. We certainly would not expect or suggest anyone to read the novel from their desktop in that manner.

The mobile version of Monster Nation, the prequel to Island just launched today at http://winksite.com/monster/nation and can be reached from your desktop at http://www.brokentype.com/nation/. Chapters are posted every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Over the next couple of weeks feeds of each of the novels will be made available for syndication. In addition, as each novel in the trilogy is completed, a downloadable PDF version will be made available under Creative Commons license.

"The blogosphere giveth, and the blogosphere taketh away. UPS got wind that I had one of their shirts, and they called and want it back. Here's my description of the first call. And here's my explanation today of why I'm giving it back.

[F]or one moment, I'd like you to perform an exercise in selective attention. Forget every other consideration — even though they're fair and important considerations — and see if you can acknowledge that a world in which everyone has free access to every work of creativity in the world is a better world. Imagine your children could listen to any song ever created anywhere. What a blessing that would be!

...We publish stuff that gets its meaning and its reality by being read, viewed or heard. An unpublished novel is about as meaningful and real as an imaginary novel. It needs its readers to be. But readers aren't passive consumers. We reimagine the book, we complete the vision of the book. Readers appropriate works, make them their own. Listeners and viewers, too. In making a work public, artists enter into partnership with their audience. The work succeeds insofar as the audience makes it their own, takes it up, understands it within their own unpredictable circumstances. It leaves the artist's hands and enters our lives. And that's not a betrayal of the work. That's its success. It succeeds insofar as we hum it, quote it, appropriate it so thoroughly that we no longer remember where the phrase came from. That's artistic success, although it's a branding failure.

The Toronto Globe and Mail has totally re-jigged their web site.

1) You need to register to see just about anything

2) Worse: From a quick glance, most of the feature writing, editorials, columns, etc now requires a *paid* subscription. They want $14.95/month for access to this. Even if you already subscribe to the print edition, they want you to pony up an extra $6.95 a month for full access to the web site.

The International Herald Tribune reported on September 20th that "the Pentagon has begun restricting international access to the official Web site intended to help overseas absentee voters cast ballots." Pentagon spokeswoman Lieutenant Colonel Ellen Krenke confirmed that a number of Internet service providers worldwide had been blacklisted "to thwart hackers." Such measures are generally recognized to be ineffective against hackers while blocking legitimate users.

Apparently, the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) website is now blocked to civilians overseas trying to find out how to obtain absentee ballots in at least 25 countries--including Japan, France, Great Britain, and Spain--although military personnel overseas have other mechanisms for requesting absentee ballots.

The theme for this year's ETech is "Remix," encompassing those nexus points of iterative hacking and large ideas that have a way of transforming technology:

* The phone has become a platform, moving beyond mere voice to smart mobile sensor—and back to phone again, by way of voice-over-IP.

* Geolocation, once the provenance of government and geologist, provides a sense of "there" and facilitates ad hoc group forming with feet in both the virtual and physical worlds.

* Peer-to-peer brought us the concept of the average PC as "the dark matter of the Internet," even more applicable to the mobile devices in our pockets. These devices, networked in a mesh, are starting to behave more like colony creatures than stand-alone devices.

* The grand unimaginative vision of web services as B2B EDI replacement has given way to recombinant data services and syndicated e-commerce for the rest of us.

* Geeks with screwdrivers are risking "letting the magic out" of their computers, game consoles, and other assorted gadgets, discovering instead that there's even more magic to be had when you've taken the screws out.

* I'm the evening's guest at the British Science Fiction Association meeting in London, this Wednesday, 5:30 - (The Star Tavern, 6 Belgrave Mews West, London, SW1X 8HT, 020 7235 3019)

* I'm a speaker at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology WWW@10 conference in Terre Haute Indiana, Sept 30 - Oct 2

From the "Explaining Barbeque to the World" desk at the State Deparment Bureau of International Information Programs: BBQ is a "method of cooking meat very slowly over coals was adopted by the early European settlers in North America and called barbecue. When it is done, the tender meat is chopped or shredded, topped with sauce that varies from region to region, and often made into a sandwich with a soft roll and some cole slaw. As with so many cooking methods, there is great debate among purists over what constitutes real barbecue, but none over its stature as a delicious and uniquely American dish."

A considerable number of folks invited to use the phone said they didn't know the phone numbers of any of their friends. Today, many people keep all numbers in their cell phone's address book, and never dial the numbers directly. Many of them called their own voice mails since they knew at least that number, and often exclaimed in amazement at just that. (Alas, many of the voice mails they left themselves will have been somewhat garbled due to the internet traffic issues.)

"When observing real surfaces in the natural environment the visual information that specifies near and far points varies when we change viewing direction," he said.

"When we observe a picture on the wall, on the other hand, the visual information that defines near and far points is unaffected by viewing direction. Still, we interpret this perceptually as if it were a real object. That is why the eyes appear to follow you as you change your viewing direction."

Todd said people may be surprised by this phenomenon because of the unique perceptual aspects of viewing a picture. We perceive the object depicted in a painting as a surface in 3-dimensional space, but we also perceive that the painting itself is a 2-dimensional surface that is hanging on the wall.

"Unfortunately, to read the article you need to register." Reg Req'd Link, use "feeshfeeshfeesh@hotmail.com/feeshfeesh" (Thanks, Becky!)

This is a segment of a larger piece, the working title of which has been "Ambient Misinformation about Publishing and Writing, and the Cultivation of the Reader Mind: A Rant I Didn't Get to Deliver at Noreascon." It has occurred to me that I could write about this one for a very long time without exhausting the subject.

Certain words and phrases are like little genetic markers for scammers. Here's a non-exhaustive list, non-exhaustively explained:

1. "Giving new writers a chance." Also: "Helping new writers."

While agents and publishers frequently do just this thing, they don't talk about it in those terms. For them, it's always a specific new book, a specific new author. Making judgements about which book and which writer they're going to work with is the heart of their job. When you hear someone talking in an indiscriminately general fashion about giving a chance to new writers, there's something wrong.

Same goes for "helping new writers." There might be legitimate projects aimed at helping new writers as a class, but the business they're in isn't agenting or publishing.

"Inside the engine, the acoustic pressure is high enough to pop your eardrums," (Northrop Grumman researcher Mike) Petach told New Scientist. "It's louder than a thunderclap." He adds that the sound does not escape the engine, so the device could be used to produce electricity for submarines, which must glide undetected beneath the ocean's surface.

Link to blog post with pointer to full size image. Mwuhuhahahahaaaaaaa.

This is a cellphone message left by the guy where he starts ranting and raving. Swearing and telling Tim he's going to go crazy if Tim doesn't call.

A minor version of Winnebago man. Nice bit of swearing with a London accent. Link (NSFW unless you are wearing headphones.)

(I'd take the three kings building over a Gehry "crushed beer can" any day.) Link

Take up the challenge of "Petals Around the Rose". Also read what happened when Bill Gates was introduced to Petals Around the Rose in June 1977. How he tackled this brain teaser is an interesting insight into the man at the helm of Microsoft.

Here's a good description of Flora's style (from the back cover of the book):

Vintage music buffs have long been bedazzled by bizarre, cartoonish album covers tagged with the signature "Flora." In the 1940s and '50s, James (Jim) Flora designed dozens of diabolic cover illustrations, many for Columbia and RCA Victor jazz artists. His designs pulsed with angular hepcats bearing funnel-tapered noses and shark-fin chins, who fingered cockeyed pianos and honked lollipop-hued horns. In the background, geometric doo-dads floated willy-nilly like a kindergarten toy room gone anti-gravitational. He wreaked havoc with the laws of physics, conjuring up flying musicians, levitating instruments, and wobbly dimensional perspectives. Yet Flora's wondrous, childlike exuberance was subverted by a sinister tinge of the grotesque. As Flora confessed in a 1998 interview, "I got away with murder, didn't I?"

Fantagraphics also published a book by one of my other main influences, Gene Deitch, called The Cat on a Hot Thin Groove. He did the covers for a jazz fanzine in the 1940s, called The Record Changer. In the '60s, Deitch was the art director for UPA, the cartoon studio that produced Gerald McBoingBoing. ABout 10 years ago I had the pleasure of visiting Deitch in his San Francisco home (He lives most of the year in Prague). He drew a great picture of his jazz character, The Cat, for me and presented it to me. I interviewed him for the print edition of bOING bOING, but I never got around to transcribing the tape. I hope I still have it.

One of my other big influences, Disney Artist Mary Blair, got her own book this year too! (Illustrator Bob Staake has a couple of pages with Blair's art.)

Now, all I need to round out my library of illustrator-gods are books about the work of Tom Oreb and Ed Benedict.

My favorite Buzz thing-- aside from the time he busted that guy in the chops for asking him if the moon landings were fake-- was when Letterman was sending him out and about in the world for a while. He went to the daytime emmys in his astronaut suit and did red carpet interviews.

Which would go like this:

Buzz: Hi there! Who are you?
Soap Star: I'm Mr. Soap Star, and I'm nominated for best hooha in a thingy.
Buzz: That's great. I walked on the moon.
(very awkward silence)

Besides being a bloodless approach to an otherwise messy job, the digitally preserved bodies of the Virtopsy Project have the added benefit of permanency. “Murder victims have the unfortunate habit of decomposing,” Thali notes.

When you hear the phrase avant-garde 1)You flip through your intellectual file folder looking for examples (Dada, 12-tone music, modern dance, underground films, the Beats, theater of the absurd, electronic music).

2) You experience a certain dread. (You ask yourself if you are the only one in the gallery not getting the artist's joke, or worry that you can't finish that book said to challenge narrative conventions so boldly.)

3)You rage, "Where's the vision today, the energy?" You think back longingly. Paris, 1913: Diaghilev's Ballets Russes hurl Stravinksy's "Rite of Spring" at a shocked public. New York in the 1940's: Bird, Diz and Monk lead the charge for the music that would be known as bop. The 1960's and 70's: lofts, galleries, parks and churches shelter free jazz, new music and every kind of performance. What does it take to bring artists together to make brave new works?

I've felt each, and I'm about to start writing about the avant-garde in occasional essays and pieces of criticism. Which brings up another question: If an avant-garde is written about in a major newspaper like this one, doesn't that prove that it has moved to the culture's prosperous Midtown?

"It's always better to see what's what. For the materials, chemical and nano sciences, you want to see what is going on at the atomic scale--how atoms bond and how things work."

The Wikimedia Foundation announced today the creation of the one millionth article in Wikipedia, its project to create a free, open-content, online encyclopedia (Wikipedia.org (http://en.wikipedia.org)). Started in January 2001, Wikipedia is currently both the world's largest encyclopedia and its fastest-growing, with articles under active development in over 100 languages. Nearly 2,500 new articles are added to Wikipedia each day, along with ten times that number of updates to existing articles.

The guy riding in the truck's elevator was muscular and lean, very dark. He was wearing a trucker cap and cowboy boots, jeans and a mesh shirt that showed off his muscles. In a friendlier context I would have pegged him as a gay bodybuilder doing an ironic take on NASCAR fandom. But alongside the other two, he looked more like one of the many hopefuls sent down by central casting to try out for the part of THUG #3 in a hip new thriller.

On Monday Sept. 13th at around 2pm the building that houses the afro-punk offices was set on fire. Apparently, the first floor failing clothing store owner, in an act of desperation, set a phone book on fire and took a little walk. Meanwhile Afro-Punk's director James Spooner was two flights up discussing his upcoming panel on music as a tool for black liberation with a colleague. "We heard the bell ringing and a lot of screaming and yelling" says James. The guilty store owner, alerted James and his friend of the blaze below. Thinking quickly James ran back into the office unplugged his Mac tower, which houses the documentary and hobbled down the stairs through the smoke and flames . "Man, maybe it was stupid, but this film has effected too many people for it to all end here, let the rest burn, I had to save it!"

Luckily fire fighters acted quickly on the scene and were able to stabilize the fire. Flames never reached our office but the NYFD destroyed the place trying to make sure the fire wasn't in the walls or ceiling.

After the smoke literally cleared they were allowed back up to access the damage. All in all it could have been worse. The Afro-Punk computers and camera are still working, the 200 hours of footage afro-punk was cut from seems to be okay and the work for our next film is safe. We did lose some furniture, a monitor and some vcrs from our dubbing station, but most tragic, we lost our donated office space.

"Sex, violence, and cauliflower abounds!", says Jason, who tells us the film is "Performed by vegetables -- In the tradition of BEN-HUR. See a potato as it was meant to be seen, 15 feet tall!"

It's screening at fests all over the place over the next couple of months, including September dates in SF and LA. You can also download production stills and other goodies on the project's website. I haven't seen it, but it sounds great. And low-carb. Billy Dee Williams does voiceover for the "handsomest of all bell peppers." The production notes crack me up.

"We shot the Senate Plaza with a handful of real olives then digitally expanded the scene to a cast of thousands. True to the spirit of 1950s cinema, we racially profiled our extras. Green olives play soldiers, black olives play slaves, and the citizens are Greek olives."

Link to Oedipus The Movie. (also spotted on Calacanis' blog earlier this year)

Perhaps an alternate approach might be the last lines of Radiohead's Exit Music (For a Film). Link

This is the site of the pro-amendment 37 campaign in Colorado. The amendment would require utilities in CO to purchase a percentage of their electricity from renewable sources, getting to 10 percent by 2015. The utilities are, of course, very opposed to it. It may be that the only way for non-CO residents to legally contribute to the campaign is through the cafepress shop they have and buy a t-shirt. But, IANAL, so I really don't know that.

"We're excited about this - we're a company of roughly three people so this feels like a way that we can actually help. I don't know what kind of response we're going to get to it yet, but who can predict? We're preparing for anything!" Link (Thanks, Kevin!)

But I consider that the matter of defining what is real -- that is a serious topic, even a vital topic. And in there somewhere is the other topic, the definition of the authentic human. Because the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans -- as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. My two topics are really one topic; they unite at this point. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland. You can have the Pirate Ride or the Lincoln Simulacrum or Mr. Toad's Wild Ride -- you can have all of them, but none is true.

In my writing I got so interested in fakes that I finally came up with the concept of fake fakes. For example, in Disneyland there are fake birds worked by electric motors which emit caws and shrieks as you pass by them. Suppose some night all of us sneaked into the park with real birds and substituted them for the artificial ones. Imagine the horror the Disneyland officials would feel when they discovered the cruel hoax. Real birds! And perhaps someday even real hippos and lions. Consternation. The park being cunningly transmuted from the unreal to the real, by sinister forces. For instance, suppose the Matterhorn turned into a genuine snow-covered mountain? What if the entire place, by a miracle of God's power and wisdom, was changed, in a moment, in the blink of an eye, into something incorruptible? They would have to close down