Merlin Mann's "43 Folders" blog is devoted to turning the advice in David Allen's amazing productivity book Getting Things Done into material that is suited to people who lead technological lifestyles (Getting Things Done barely mentions computers and doesn't have anything on stuff like hacking producivity with perl scripts).

But sometimes Merlin goes low-tech, as he did with his amazing post from last September on the "Hipster PDA" -- a bunch of index cards held together with a binder clip. Now he's extending the Hipster PDA with tips and tricks he's derived since then. It's great stuff -- Craig of Craigslist carries around old business cards in his shirt-pocket with notes to himself in tiny writing on the back of them. Hipster PDA is like that on steroids.

The Hipster PDA (Parietal Disgorgement Aid) is a fully extensible system for coordinating incoming and outgoing data for any aspect of your life and work. It scales brilliantly, degrades gracefully, supports optional categories and “beaming,” and is configurable to an unlimited number of options. Best of all, the Hipster PDA fits into your hip pocket and costs practically nothing to purchase and maintain. Let’s make one together.

Link

When the Tsunami hit India's Little Andaman island, Lakshmi Narain Roy whisked his family, including his pregnant wife, onto the family rickshaw and pedaled to higher ground. A few hours later, Namita Roy gave birth to a baby boy, three weeks premature. From a Reuters report:

"On Wednesday, we learned a Navy ship had come into the bay but the jetty was damaged and so with help from other locals I carried her and the baby on to a dinghy and took her out to the big ship at sea," (Roy said.)

Reaching Port Blair after a 7-hour journey Roy's wife was rushed to the local hospital where doctors immediately cleaned up her uterus and gave her some medicines.

"It was the doctors who suggested we name the boy Tsunami and we also liked the name and decided to call him that. After all it is a name everyone will instantly notice and remember."

Link (via Fortean Times)

BoingBoing buddy Wiley Wiggins says "First images of the Animated Philip K. Dick film A SCANNER DARKLY [directed by Rick Linklater]. I am not involved with this film (unfortunately), but I have seen about 20 minutes of it and it is the most incredible piece of animation I have ever seen."
Link to pics on AICN, link to Wiley's post.

BB reader Steve Portigal says,

Like the combination of several Richard Pryor plots (rewritten by William Gibson?) this escapee hangs out in an abandoned Circuit City... during which time he played hoops with a mini-basketball net and watched Spider-Man 2 on a DVD player. He also routed water from an adjacent Toys "R" Us and even installed a smoke detector.

Link to Seattle Times story (no reg) Link to Charlotte Observer (reg required)

Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson interviews Bill Gates at CES -- in part, about blogs and Microsoft's MSN Spaces.

Gizmodo: So would it be fair to say your idea with Spaces will be more hands-off? Since you're kind of giving the power of the individual to publish, you don't really care what they say?

Gates: No. There's always a tricky issue when you get into stolen material or pornography. The laws for online publishing the same as for print-based publishing, where if you're hosting certain types of things and somebody notifies you about that...

Gizmodo: So since it's sitting on your servers you want to be more careful of it.

Gates: No, there are rules about... if you get notified that it's stolen materials or pornography or things like that. Our policies are just related to what the laws are. The idea of the open empowerment—that's why we've always loved the PC. And there are many examples over the last several decades where the power of the PC to let people publish and communicate has made a huge difference in terms of people trying to control information flow. And that's why the PC is such a fantastic development.

Link (Thanks, Nathan, who comments here!)

Technorati's David Sifry says,

Technorati's developer contest winners have been announced! Winners included GovTrack, a site that tracks bills in congress and congresscritters, and what bloggers are saying about them, whitelabel.org, which transforms the BBC's news site to include links to wikipedia and bloggers links, PersonalDemocracy.com, which tracks what bloggers are saying about members of the US house and senate, and many more.

Link

Spotted on the politech list -- Declan says, "It's provocative and raises some of the hoary who's-a-journalist-and-can-get-creds issues that are becoming important again."

As two prominent Washington journalists struggle to avoid jail time over their refusal to disclose confidential sources, one of the biggest obstacles the reporters face is America's fastgrowing army of citizen Web loggers, or bloggers.

It’s not that the town criers of the online world are campaigning to send Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time Magazine to prison. Rather, it’s the bloggers' very existence that undercuts the journalists' legal defense.

On Wednesday, lawyers for Ms. Miller and Mr. Cooper are scheduled to appear before a federal appeals court in the capital to argue that reporters should have a legal privilege not to testify about their sources under most circumstances. A federal prosecutor investigating whether the White House leaked the name of a CIA operative, Valerie Plame, has asked the pair to appear before a grand jury to answer questions.They have refused.

The crux of the reporters' contention is that the public would be less well informed if journalists could not promise their sources confidentiality. However, the proliferation of blogs and bloggers could represent the Achilles' heel in this approach. If Ms. Miller and Mr. Cooper are entitled to claim special treatment in the courts, so too could hundreds of thousands of Americans who use the Internet to post comments about their views on current events.

Link

Museum security guard told a child to stop sketching paintings in a museum -- because they're copyrighted.

It is standard operating procedure for students of art to learn by example by sketching masterpieces in an art museum. A budding artist in Durham found that the time honored tradition was challenged while seeking inspiration at the Matisse, Picasso and the School of Paris: Masterpieces from the Baltimore Museum of Art exhibit in Raleigh.

Over the weekend at the North Carolina Museum of Art there were works by Matisse, Picasso, Monet, Degas and some Illanas. Julia Illana is a second grader who was visiting the popular exhibit there with her parents and was sketching the paintings in her notebook. "I love to draw in my notebook," Illana said.

Her sketch of Picasso's Woman with Bangs, which came out pretty good, and Matisse's Large Reclining Nude got the promising artist into trouble with museum security. A museum guard told Julia's parents that sketching was prohibited because the great masterpieces are copyright protected, a concept that young Julia did not understand until her mother explained the term.

Link (Thanks, Cowicide)

Author, photographer, and blogger Susannah Breslin (whose work I've posted about here often) is taking an unusual approach to the financing of her next book Porn Happy -- she's seeking patrons via blog.
Link. See also this newly-minted Susannah Breslin fansite: Link

The pool of unredeemed frequent-flier miles is the most voluminous currency in the world, worth more than the cash supply of dollars and pounds combined.

According to a new analysis by The Economist magazine, the global stock is worth more than $700bn (£370bn), more than all the US dollar bills in circulation, and streets ahead of Britain's £42bn of notes and coins...

A close look at the rules can expose unbeatable deals. A civil engineer from California, David Phillips, became known as the "pudding guy" after calculating that an offer of frequent flyer miles with food at his local supermarket yielded a remarkable return. He spent $3,000 on 12,000 Healthy Choice chocolate desserts and earned $25,000 worth of free flights, enough to pay for travel for the rest of his life.

Link

Circadiana is a new blog written by "Coturnix," who appears to be an academic studying sleep. Yesterday, Couturnix posted a wonderful, informative, lucid essay on the biological and social nature of sleep and how it interacts with technology. Technology -- the light bulb, in particular -- is a drug that exerts a powerful physical force on our sleep habits, one that we haven't yet figured out how to metabolize safely. Coturnix's piece is the most fascinating thing I've read on the subject -- and I did a ton of research on the subject for my novel Eastern Standard Tribe, but I wish I'd had this paper then.

A classical sociobiological just-so story posits that this kind of individual variation on the lark/owl continuum had an adaptive function, namely to ensure that at every time of night at least one member of the tribe was awake. Thus some stood guard early in the night, others late in the night, listening to the sounds of the jungle (or savannah, or whatever) while the midnight break is thought to have been used for copulating with whomever also happens to be awake at the time - this was before the social invention of sexual monogamy...

Pretending that sleep-need does not exist is also institutionalized. I am not talking just about night-shifts and rotating shifts (those will kill you), night flights, being available for communication 24/7, stores open 24/7, etc - those are part of a modern society, will not go away, and we just need to learn how to adjust. I am talking about the building standards. With a huge proportion of the population working at night, why do windows have no blinds? Some old manors do, but new buildings do not. Never. Some have fake blinds, just for show, screwed into the outside walls on the sides of windows, yet cannot be closed. There are no built-in black curtains, or roll-down wooden blinds. It is difficult to find such curtains in stores if one wants to install one. What is going on? I have never seen, heard, read about, or experienced another country in the world in which sleep is not sacred, and blinds are not an essential part of a house.

I see some striking parallels between the way this society treats sleep and the way it treats sex. Both are sinful activities, associated with one of the Seven Deadly Sins (Sloth and Lust). Both are associated with the most powerful biological needs. Both are supposed to be a taboo topic. Both are supposed to be done in private, at night, with a pretense that it is never actually happening. Education in sleep hygiene and sex hygiene are both slighted, one way or another (the former passively, the latter actively opposed). Both are thought to interfere with one's productivity - ah, the good old Protestant work ethic! Why are Avarice and Greed not treated the same way? Raking in money by selling mega-burgers is just fine, and a decent topic of conversation, even a point of pride. Why are we still allowing Puritan Calvinist way of thinking, coupled with capitalist creed, to still guide the way we live our lives, or even think about life. Sleeping, whether with someone or alone, is a basic human need, thus a basic human right. Neither really detracts from the workplace productivity - au contraire: well rested and well satisfied people are happy, energetic, enthusiastic and productive. It is sleep repressed people, along with the dour sex repressed people, who are the problem, making everyone nervous. How much longer are we going to hide under the covers?

Link

Here are 100 MP3 episodes of a kids' radio show that starred some of the cast of Lord of the Rings, downloadable as a Creative Commons licensed .torrent.

A good few years back, I was involved in a radio drama series for children - a 'Cartoon for Radio' called Ashley's Worlds. I've made the whole thing available as a bittorrent file.

If you're not sure what a bittorrent is, you should read the Wikipedia entry on the topic.

So - what do you need to know about Ashley's Worlds? It was originally established to entertain my son, Jake. He was a fair bit younger then - but he still enjoys the series now.

All the characters are cats - and, well... it'll make itself clear as it goes along.

The real Ashley was my cat, who sadly passed away last year.

Cast:
Craig Parker - Ashley
Carl Bland - Bishop
David Weatherley - Tobias
Belinda Todd - Tabitha
Merv Smith - The Strange Old Cat

I've registered Ashley's Worlds under a Creative Commons Licence so that people can be encouraged to listen to it without fear that they'll be breaking copyright by listening.

Link (Thanks, Andrew!)

SanDisk is shipping an SD memory card with a tiny hinge; fold it back to reveal a USB interface. Take the chip out of your camera and plug it straight into your laptop to move your pix over; carry your USB thumbdrive in your camera, not on your keychain. Link (Thanks, elNorm!)

Running Microsoft's new anti-spyware product will violate the Clickthrough LIcense on the spyware itself.

The license agreement on DirectRevenue's website states that those who have been inflicted with it "agree that you will not initiate, permit, authorize or assist any third party or application to remove the Software from your computer, or disrupt its operation or the operation of any other user." DirectRevenue's EULA also claims the right to reinstall itself if any third party software removes it. (Among the myriad spyware-related lawsuits going on, by the way, DirectRevenue is being sued by fellow adware vendor Avenue Media over the DirectRevenue software's penchant for deleting other spyware from users' systems.)

So it seemed to me that this poses something of a quandary for Microsoft. After all, the software EULA as we know it today is basically a Microsoft invention, and no other company has been as big a supporter of UCITA and other legal efforts to make sneakwrap licenses completely binding. So Microsoft isn't going to want to go around violating any other company's EULA, not even those of companies of whom they might not completely approve

Link (via Hack the Planet)

Marc Laidlaw points out this article from Sky and Telescope that has good information about the deadly laser pointers that terrorists have been using to knock aircraft filled with women and children right out of the sky. Oh, when will the horror end?

According to engineer Samuel M. Goldwasser, who maintains an extensive Web site about lasers called Sam's Laser FAQ, if you were to look directly into a laser-pointer beam from a mile away, it would appear as bright as a 100-watt bulb seen at a distance of less than 100 feet. Most people would find such a bright light very uncomfortable and would instinctively blink and/or turn away.

Link

Here's a page of amazing "drunk prank" photos -- pictures taken of passed out people who have been decorated by their supposed friends. Shown here, and incredible balancing act. (Some photos might not be safe for work.) Link (via cityrag)

Clay Shirky continues to just totally nail the questions of metadata, authority, and user-created content. Today's installment: why crappy, cheap, user-generated, uncontrolled metadata will win out over expensive, controlled, useful, professionally generated metadata:

Furthermore, users pollute controlled vocabularies, either because they misapply the words, or stretch them to uses the designers never imagined, or because the designers say "Oh, let's throw in an 'Other' category, as a fail-safe" which then balloons so far out of control that most of what gets filed gets filed in the junk drawer. Usenet blew up in exactly this fashion, where the 7 top-level controlled categories were extended to include an 8th, the 'alt.' hierarchy, which exploded and came to dwarf the entire, sanctioned corpus of groups.

The cost of finding your way through 60K photos tagged 'summer', when you can use other latent characteristics like 'who posted it?' and 'when did they post it?', is nothing compared to the cost of trying to design a controlled vocabulary and then force users to apply it evenly and universally.

This is something the 'well-designed metadata' crowd has never understood -- just because it's better to have well-designed metadata along one axis does not mean that it is better along all axes, and the axis of cost, in particular, will trump any other advantage as it grows larger. And the cost of tagging large systems rigorously is crippling, so fantasies of using controlled metadata in environments like Flickr are really fantasies of users suddenly deciding to become disciples of information architecture.

Link

The classic Atari 2600 game World of Adventure (a super-low-rez D&D-style game from the early gaming Cretaceous) has been turned into a level for Quake 3, with shining metallic polygons. Link (Thanks, Jhayne!)

Zed sez, "this guy is a full-time professional Halo player who looms so large in that world that when he took a vacation, Halo message boards were full of speculation as to what it all meant."

Over Thanksgiving, on Day Five Without Zyos, the message boards of the online world were abuzz with rumors. Zyos has quit. Zyos is playing under a different name. Zyos is dead. Five pages of this, growing more fevered as it went, until one of Zyos' handlers, one of the people in the business of "building Zyos' brand," logged on.

"Guys," he said. "Zyos is fine. He's just on vacation."

Link (Thanks, Zed!)

When Carla and I were publishing the long forgotten bOING bOING zine, we bought a bunch of these Mexican sodas called Boing! and brought them to a science fiction convention in Austin. I think it must have been 1991 or 1992. I don't know if I ever actually drank a bottle of the stuff.

Anyway, ADM of Thousand Robots has a page about tasting the soda. He wasn't a big fan.

I tried the Strawberry (Fresa) variety...at room temperature, which is inadvisable. It doesn't taste precisely like anything I've had before. The closest analogue I can come up with is Ruby Red grapefruit juice, but blander and less sour and simultaneouly -- at first -- less sweet. But then once the aftertaste wallops you with the sugar, you'll feel a bit like you've just strained a shot of thinly flavored water through a cup of sugar right into your mouth. Boing juice doesn't taste like strawberries. Or maybe it just tastes like old strawberries that have been sitting next to a pile of rotten bananas for a few weeks at a Mexican juice factory.

Link

We are having a contest! Design a banner that advertises Boing Boing. Indieclick will run several of our favorite submissions across the Indieclick network and will donate a SuicideGirls skatedeck (click thumbnail for enlargement) to the banner that does the best. Email your 468 x 60 gif file (with a one-time animation cycle) to me. You are free to use Boing Boing's logo in the banner, but the rest of the design has to be your own work. By the way, the deadline is Friday, January 14.

If you've ever been to Tokyo, you've probably seen and heard those strange vans with huge speakers driving around town, blasting some kind of recorded diatribe. They are propaganda vans operated by emperor-loving, Yakuza friendly right-wingers.

Juergen sez: "Every year on August 15th, Yakuza, Right Wing Groups and War Veterans gather at the controversal Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo to commemorate the end of the war and to worship the war dead. The Yasukuni Shrine has a special significance, because Japanese believe that once a soldier has been enshrined at Yasukuni he becomes a kami, or national deity. The kami at Yasukuni are thought to look over the nation and protect it just as they did when they died fighting for it. During World War II, soldiers believed the highest honor they could receive was death followed by enshrinement at Yasukuni. Soldiers had a saying "see you at Yasukuni", which meant they knew they were going to die, but they would meet again in death. Yasukuni Shrine is currently the home to the souls of more than 2.5 million Japanese war dead including fourteen convicted Class A war criminals. Link

Syndicated columnist Amy Alkon (aka Advice Goddess) is looking for Ithica-based bloggers to petition a newspaper publisher there from dropping her column.

If you read my column in Ithaca, and are a fan, here's some bad news: The publisher wants to drop it after getting complaints about a line I wrote -- "Sex isn't special." Here it is in the context of the column (entire text of the column here):

Where you go wrong is thinking sex is special. It isn’t. Monkeys have it, and not because somebody gave them flowers and expensive jewelry. But consider this: while your girlfriend was the antithesis of selective about the men she slept with (apparently, not only sowing her wild oats, but a soybean crop equivalent to that of mainland China’s), she appears quite picky about the man she relationships with.

Now, I have no problem with people writing in to say I'm wrong or immoral. In fact, I welcome dissent. Papers should, too. Instead, daily newspapers tend to bend over the moment three old ladies (or some church group) complains. I work very hard to tell the truth and present data-based answers in my column instead of taking the easy way out: simply rubberstamping the status quo. Sadly, many papers would rather foster docile readers than spirited discussion.

If you live in Ithaca (ONLY if you live in Ithaca and read me -- this has to be an honest reflection of reader opinion), and if you like my column and want to continue to see it in the paper, please call the publisher: Jim Fogler, President/Publisher (607) 274-9252 jfogler@ithaca.gannett.com

Link

I've been using David Kocher's Cyberduck FTP client for several months now. It's freeware for OS X and it is fabulous. All the other FTP clients I've used have been hard to learn and are confusing, but I've never had to look at the help file for Cyberduck. I don't even know if it has a help file. The bookmarking feature is well-implemented and I like being able to click on the BB Edit icon to edit any file on the server (yes, I know BB Edit lets you open files on servers, but sometimes I like to open them from Cyberduck.) If you are looking for a simple, power FTP client, check this out. Link

The Phantom Limb Phenomena conference will take place next weekend at Goldsmiths College in London. Apparently, the participants will make presentations on science, art, and culture as they relate to the phantom limb phenomena, a condition in which amputees experience the sensation of a limb that is no longer there. From the conference description:

Since its original description in 1866 by the Neurologist S. Mitchell, the phantom limb phenomena have attracted many scholars across a broad spectrum of fields. The phenomena describe the condition found in many amputees in which sensation of the removed limb persists. As such, it has served as a metaphor for many ideas in other fields beyond the scope of neurobiology and neuropsychology including philosophy, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, anthropology, literature, film and art. The purpose of this conference is three fold. First, it brings to the public’s attention this fascinating and significant medical problem. Second, it not only looks objectively at the way that these phenomena have stimulated interest across such a wide variety of fields but also shows how successful it is as a inter-disciplinary signifier; an issue important for both art and science initiatives.

Link (Thanks, Dr. Paulos!)

From BB "band manager" John Battelle's Searchblog:

"Via PVR Blog, I see that Videora, a BitTorrent RSS reader, has launched. Om noted it here. So why do we care? Well, I've long theorized that video over IP will come from the bottom up, as opposed to the top down, much as it has with blogs, and with music before that. This feels right along those lines."

Link (to Searchblog entry), Link (to Videora)

Researchers from the Korea Institute of Science and Technology claim that they have developed the world's smartest humanoid robot. According to engineer You Bum-Jae, the robot has more intelligence than other androids because its brains are housed outside its body in a server that handles all data processing and storage. From Agence Presse France:

When showed a 10,000 won ($10) bank note, it said: “That’s a 10,000 bank note that people would like to have.”

When asked about its name, it said: “I am sorry. I don’t have a name yet. Please give me one.”

Then it waved its hands, saying: “I will see you again next time when I will have become wiser.”

Link (Thanks, Big Friend Alderman!)

Neat, short art gallery from French site, Retroactif. Some of the art is probably not safe for work, the accompanying soundtrack's first 10 seconds are certainly not safe for work. Link

In my first issue this year of Lab Notes from UC Berkeley's College of Engineering:

* Engineering disasters

* Eyeing new ion beams

* Assembling nanomachines

* NASA's comet fly-by

Link

Phil sez, "Further to your 'Next-generation concrete' post, you might like this site... which includes an 11MB 187-page PDF of a brochure *packed* full of materials as just as intriguing: Biosteel, pervious concrete, Superblack, corrugated glass, rubber pavements/sidewalks, strawboard, conductive plastic, plasphalt, light-emitting glass, regenerative plastic..." 11MB PDF Link (Thanks, Phil!)

CoolGov uncovered this US Highway Administration document that explains the numbering scheme behind the US interstate highway system.

* Major interstates routes have a one or two digit number associated with them. North-south routes have odd numbers (I-5) while east-west roads have even numbers (I-10).

* Connecting interstate routes or beltway loops around urban areas have 3 digit numbers (the 101).

* To prevent duplication within a state, a progression of prefixes is used for the three-digit numbers. For example, if I-80 runs through three cities in a state, circumferential routes around these cities would be numbered as I-280, I-480, and I-680.

* There’s no set standard on exit numbering, but states generally use one of two systems: 1. Milepost numbering. The southern or western-most point on a given interstate begins the odometer at 0. If an exit is 6.5 miles from that point, it’s exit #6 and so forth.

2. Consecutive numbering. Again, starting at the western or southern-most point, each exit is given a number, starting with 1. When they have to shoehorn more exits in, they become #6A, #6B, etc…

Link (via Cool Gov)

LegalTorrent's Gary Lerhaupt sez, "It's video I captured from last nights Creative Commons 2nd anniversary party. The video runs 30 minutes highlighting the short but powerful lifetime of the Creative Commons, but the biggest highlight by far is Lessig closing it out. He takes on both BillBoard and BillGates for their recent FUD (if you can call it FUD). Hilarious." Torrent Link (Thanks, Gary!)

Update: Gary sez, "While I do only dabble in legal torrents and am a big fan of the LegalTorrents site, i'm not really affiliated with them. Maybe you could change it to 'Prodigem's Gary Lerhaupt'"

Back in the 80s, the music industry came up with its dumbest campaign up to that point: the campaign to convince their customers that taping vinyl, making mix tapes, sharing taped albums with friends, all of that, was a form of theft and would destroy music itself.

They put these "home taping is killing music" graphics on everything from stickers to the sleeves of LPs you bought in the shops. Home taping didn't kill nothin' (turned out to be no more deadly than P2P!).

The media geniuses at Downhill Battle have produced a great tee that recycles the HOME TAPING IS KILLING MUSIC slogan and gilds the lily with this tagline: AND IT'S FUN. I laughed till it hurt. Link (via Preshrunk)

Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, notes, "I'd like to point out that although a number of very large BitTorrent-based web sites have been taken down recently, downloads of BitTorrent have only gone down slightly. There's a widespread belief that BitTorrent is used almost exclusively for warez, probably a perception of people who themselves use it almost exclusively for warez, but that impression is simply untrue." Link (via Waxy)

A woman named Claudia is auctioning off a collection of 60 letters (186 pages) that surrealist science fiction author Philip K. Dick wrote to her over a span of nearly two decades. The starting bid of the eBay auction is $1,000.

"We corresponded between 1974 and 1981. For sale are all the letters he wrote me between 1974 and 1975, when I was writing a U.S. master's thesis about books he'd published a decade earlier, at a time when only the French accorded him critical respect and his first language editions had lapsed out of print: Originals of over 60 individual letters, 186 pages (all those he signed on the right side of the page).

The letters are about Valis and V.A.L.I.S. (because that's what he was writing then); they are also a linear chronology of his "long inner trip" in his own words (the drawing is what a dream instructed him to draw); they are also about Ubik and UBIK (because that's what I was writing about); they say what he wanted them to say."

Link (Thanks, Dave Gill!)

Japanese salon offers acrylic fingernails that look like old school iMacs. Link (Thanks, Hugh!)

A 1994 Air Force proposal seems to suggest that the most powerful weapons against the enemies of freedom might be bugs, rats, and horny homosexual men. Link to Defensetech post, and see also "Military Lab Proposed Gay-Aphrodisiac Chemical Weapon" (Link) at Russ Kick's Memory Hole. And how does the chemical make you feel? Link.

"Blake's Vomiting Didn't Seem Sincere to Witnesses" -- spotted twice: Link, and Linkerer.

I drew this little guy and am selling a Cafe Press messenger bag with him on it for $25. Link (Click on the image for enlargement.)

"Wondertoonel - Paintings by Mark Ryden, is a forty page catalog containing each of the thirty paintings in the Wondertoonel exhibition and is printed on heavy paper stock, enhanced with gold metallic ink on the interior pages and features gold foil embossing on the cover. Also includes artist and curator statements. The catalog measures 8 1/2" wide by 9" high. Price: $20" Link

Doron of WFMU sez: "WFMU, one of the nation's finest radio stations (and home to lots of boing-boing friendly music) has just launched podcast.wfmu.org. As you probably already know, some broadcast radio stations, BBC, NPR, WGBH have dabbled in podcasting, usually offering random clips or the odd talk show... WFMU is making seven of its shows available for podcast including three music shows.

"Two of the music shows (Antique Phonograph Music Program) and Thomas Edison's Attic consist of DJs hand-cranking old turntables to play cylinders and records dating from the 1880s to the 1920s and should hopefully fall under public domain while the third "Advanced D & D with Donna Summer" (aka Jason Forrest) plays breakcore and random CD-Rs from all over the place.

"The station would very much like to offer all of it's content for podcasting but like other people, we're a bit concerned about the legal ramifications. In any case, we're very excited to be offering our content in a way that allows listeners to hear our programs when and where they want to. hope you guys like it." Link

Some people in Kenya rescued a dehydrated baby hippo that had been separated from its herd. The released it into an enclosure in a sanctuary, and it ran over to a giant tortoise, and is now "inseparable" say officials.

"'When we released Owen into the enclosure, he lumbered to the tortoise which has a dark gray color similar to grown up hippos,' Sabine Baer, rehabilitation and ecosystems manager at the park, told Reuters."

Link

My fellow travelers -- feast on this fine assortment of Copyleft Flag desktops for your commie computers!
Link to one collection (Thanks, Ian), and link to another (Thanks, Toby), and Link to a convenient banner for pledging of allegiance (Thanks William v3.0), and some little teeny internet buttons: Link (Thanks, Matthew Bradley). Previous Boing Boing posts on Redmond's Red Scare: one, two.

Update: Boing Boing reader Ryan Schroeder says, "I had to have a Creative Commies shirt, so I threw that graphic up on Cafe Press. Figured others might want one as well. IMPORTANT: All prices are set to the base level, I'm not making a cent here. Cafepress is getting all of our money. If the people demand it I'll boost the prices by a buck or two and donate everything to the EFF." Link to Creative Commies t-shirts.

And reader Ken Mickles says, "Similar to Ryan Schroeder, I had to have a Creative Commons t-shirt for myself. But conveniently for me, I own a screen printing company. So if anyone else wants one, I put up a quick Paypal form and I'm selling them for $5 plus shipping. That's a fair bit cheaper than CafePress, and they should be way higher quality." Link.

I've received lots of email about my wife's catch-22 traffic ticket problem (in short, she is trying to pay the ticket but the court won't accept payment because the ticket hasn't been entered into the computer system yet. And the reason it hasn't been entered into the computer system, apparently, is because the officer who issued the ticket didn't enter the date in the date field).

I'd like to thank everyone who wrote to me about this. We got rid of the messages boards on Boing Boing over a year ago, and I'd kind of forgotten how nice and generous 99.9% of Boing Boing's readers are! It's inspiring and uplifting to get email from so many exellent people.

I thought you'd be interested to read the advice I've received about this so far. There are lots of ideas, but the four most common ones are:

1. Get a lawyer.

2. Get a cashier's check and pay the fine with it (sending it by certified mail).

3. Contact the officer who issued the ticket and ask him what the status of the ticket is.

4. Contest the ticket, because it is invalid with a date on it.

Our next steps: we are going to call a lawyer friend who has dealt with ticket problems before, and we are calling AAA, which apparently has a department that helps people deal with traffic tickets.

Here's one thing that might help (click on thumbnail for enlargement). When my wife went down to the court to attempt pay the ticket yesterday, the clerk gave her this "Proof of Appearance" statement. Hopefully, it'll convince the judge that we tried to take care of the matter.

Here is the email I've received so far. Link

UPDATE: We ended up WINNING! Here's the thrilling conclusion.

Science News has an interesting feature about the future of concrete. For example, Ductal is five times as strong as regular concrete, but it also bends a bit under heavy loads and shows "warning" cracks instead of failing in an instant. Agilia packs itself, negating the noisy and time-consuming process of passing a vibrating machine over it. And LiTraCon is the cool translucent stuff pictured here that I posted about last year. Link

A comics fan who thinks downloading comics is immoral posted a long rant to a message board, urging readers to shun comics-trading sites. The debate that follows has several excellent posts -- but the most interesting ones come from fanatical comics-buyers who download books they already own in hardcopy because it's a "good way to be able to go back and reread a book without running the risk of damaging it" and so forth.

The comics industry has been creaking and threatening collapse for as long as I've been reading funnybooks. One thing that's always frustrated me is the incomprehensible lag between the monthly books and the bound collections: if you wander into a bookstore and discover issues 1-5 of Y: The Last Man or Issues 1-5 of Fables (both stone brilliant; run, don't walk) and fall in love, why you can go on to pick up the subsequent collections, three or four books each in all. Now, say you've read up to issue 20 of Fables and you don't want to wait for the next collection to come out: you want to take the plunge and become a regular, monthly comics reader. You go down to your local comics store and say, "Please sell me issues 21 through the current issue of Fables, and put the current ish aside for me every month: I'm hooked!"

What usually happens is the comics person will say, "Sorry, we've got issue 25, which is the current one, and number 24, but that's it -- the older ones are out of print." In other words, you got on the Fables boat too late and you're not going to be able to catch up with the book in comics form without buying issues from collectors or off of eBay.

So here's a gedankenexperiment for ya: what if the DC and Marvel put all their funnybooks on the Web two months after they were shipped to the stores? My guess is that the kind of comics reader who downloads issues so that he won't be "running the risk of damaging" the hard-copy will continue to buy as many comics as ever.

But if you believe the comics industry, it's going broke selling to just the people who put their comics in mylar bags and stack them in hermetic vaults. Funnybooks need to attract a civilian audience who will dip their toes in from time to time, buy the occassional collection, read one or two books a month: it needs a LOT of those people.

The bound collections are a great way to hook new readers. They're retailed in regular book-stores, so they're visible to the kind of person who never goes into a Graphic Novelle Emporium. All that's missing is a way to turn collection readers into monthly-plus-collection readers. The Web could be that way. Scott McCloud has written some brilliant stuff about what a comic that's designed for the Web should look like, but here's the whole other way to use the Web to advance the comics biz: give old issues away to bridge the gap between customer acquisition and customer retention.

Here's at least one comics dealer who sees free downloads of comics driving his business:

This is a message from Derithian who for some reason newsarama wont let him post it......maybe I just need to restart but I'm to busy right now RUNNING A COMIC SHOP!

I am going to come out and say it; I am a member of the z-cult. Not only that I'm a forum mod. To say anything different would put what I say in a different light. I found the Cult about a month after it started. I hadn't read a comic in more than 5 years and hated it all. Comic books were for kids and stupid. Then I downloaded because someone told me I had to read something. So I read it. A month later I opened my own shop.

Not only did I open my own shop, I sell comics to foreign members of z-cult from my shop who are interested in buying books but aren't in areas where you can buy them. Interesting isn't it. You can say all you want that downloading hurts the industry when I have personally because of the cult put tens of thousands of dollars back into the industry. Not to mention I started my own comic development studio to publish local writers online.

Link (Thanks, Max!)

A group of shepherds on La Gomera in the Canary Islands communicate with each other by whistling. Now, researchers at the University of Washington say that functional magnetic resonance imaging reveals that the shepherds' brains process the whistled language, called the Silbo Gomero, in the same way spoken languages are processed. From a Reuters report:

When the whistlers listened to Silbo sentences, regions in the left side of their brain were activated, including areas linked to language production and comprehension, along with a region in the right hemisphere thought to be associated with linguistic processing....

The Silbo, which is thought to have been brought to the island by Berbers from North Africa, condenses Spanish into two vowels and four consonants.

Whistled languages are also used in Greece, Turkey, China and Mexico, according to (researcher David) Corina.

Link

Neuroscientists at CalTech are studying a woman (known as SM) who can look at a person and recognize when they're happy, sad, or angry. But she can't tell if someone looks frightened. The reasons they've uncovered could someday lead to new treatments for people with autism. From News@Nature:

The researchers were intrigued to find that SM totally avoided looking at people's eyes. She discerned her information simply from looking around the nose and mouth.

This was generally enough for her to identify emotions such as happiness or anger, where features such as a smile, or bared teeth, are important.

But wide eyes are a particularly important component of a fearful expression. Because SM was only looking at the nose and mouth, she did not notice the eyes and concluded that the person was feeling neutral.

"First you have to look at the eyes, and then the brain has to make use of that information to figure out it's fear," explains (researcher Ralph) Adolphs.

Link

This website presents a key to translating Starbusian pidgin Latin (want a mochalattamericanafrappaspressachino?) into English for coffee civilians.

Single Made with just one shot of espresso. This is the normal amount for all Tall-sized drinks except Mocha Valencias and Americanos.

Double Made with two shots. This is the normal amount for all Grande- and hot Venti-sized drinks except Mocha Valencias and Americanos. Also the normal amount for Tall-sized Mocha Valencias and Americanos.

Triple Made with three shots. This is the normal amount for Grande- and Venti-sized Mocha Valencias and Americanos. Also the normal amount for most iced Venti-sized drinks.

Quad Made with four shots. Hope you weren't planning on sleeping anytime soon.

Ristretto This is so rarely requested that even many baristas don't recognize it. A normal shot of espresso takes about twenty seconds to pull; a ristretto shot is stopped at fifteen seconds, making a slightly smaller, less bold shot.

Link (via Kottke)