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)