Excellent electronic music composer Kim Cascone points us to a new article about the Global Consciousness Project, an always, er, thought-provoking scientific experiment to determine whether digital random number generators located around the world can be affected by human consciousness alone. From the RedNova article:

The machine apparently sensed the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre four hours before they happened - but in the fevered mood of conspiracy theories of the time, the claims were swiftly knocked back by sceptics. But last December, it also appeared to forewarn of the Asian tsunami just before the deep sea earthquake that precipitated the epic tragedy.

Now, even the doubters are acknowledging that here is a small box with apparently inexplicable powers.

'It's Earth-shattering stuff,' says Dr Roger Nelson, emeritus researcher at Princeton University in the United States, who is heading the research project behind the 'black box' phenomenon.

'We're very early on in the process of trying to figure out what's going on here. At the moment we're stabbing in the dark.' Dr Nelson's investigations, called the Global Consciousness Project, were originally hosted by Princeton University and are centred on one of the most extraordinary experiments of all time. Its aim is to detect whether all of humanity shares a single subconscious mind that we can all tap into without realising.

Link

UPDATE: Thanks to all the BB readers who emailed to express their skepticism about the Global Consciousness Project. For example, Shannon Larratt points to this 2002 article from the Skeptic Report that critiques some of the "global consciousness" speculations. Link

A Softer World is a blog that features a weekly fictional letter to a big corporation in response to a job posting. This week's letter: a cop offers his services to the RIAA.

So I laid it on thick. "Son, we're human beings, the same as you are. You can't paint a whole group of people with one big brush. I became a cop because I wanted to help. I wanted to make my father proud. He died in the line, trying to save a woman from a gang of attackers, and I..." this is when I start to cry.

He had no idea what to do. He put his hand on my shoulder, and I cried harder. Eventually I managed to pull him into a hug. While he was nervously patting me on the back, I stuck my finger in my mouth and got it real wet with spit. Then I stuck it in his ear and gave him the nastiest wet-willy anyone has ever given anyone.

He was like "WHAT" and I was laughing, man, because who would ever believe him?

"A police officer gave me a wet willy!" wouldn't last a minute in court. And people would think twice about pirating music if it called down the wrath of the RIAA in the form of crooked police officers grabbing them outside their schools or daycares and giving them painful and embarassing wet willies. Think about that.

Link (Thanks, Fred!)

My UK banker is Citibank UK, from whom I've had nothing but trouble. Setting up an account with them was like pulling teeth, despite my existing accounts with Citibank in Canada and the USA. Then it turned out that Citibank UK won't allow Paypal transfers in and out of their accounts. Now comes this ridiculous "security measure" -- a DHTML-based "screen keyboard" with which you are required to enter your password when you login to their online banking system, and then every time you do any transaction thereafter. This is supposed to guard against keyloggers, by ensuring that your password isn't entered via your actual keyboard.

This is broken for many reasons. Here are a few:

* Citibank UK online spawns a small window all its own, regardless of the size of your screen. This window is too small to accommodate both the little toy keyboard and the login screen, so that the keyboard is always overtop of some key piece of information. Here you can see it almost completely obscuring the Login button. It would be reasonable for Citibank to let me choose the size of my online banking window, but if they've decided that I'm not old enough to make that kind of decision for myself, the least they could do is not throw unnecessary interface clutter at me.

* The DHTML keyboard doesn't work in some browsers. In Safari, all but the last row of keys is offscreen, with no way to move the keyboard.

* By not allowing me to use my keyboard to enter my password, the system precludes my using long, impossible-to-guess (and impossible-to-remember) passwords that I store in an encrypted password locker. Instead, I have to choose a much weaker, human-memorable password.

* Finally, this thing can't possibly be usable by blind people or people with physical disabilities that make fine mouse-movements difficult. The fact that you need to use their toy keyboard every time you complete a transaction makes this doubly/triply obnoxious.

Having gone through the legendary bullshit involved in opening a bank account in the UK, I'm loathe to try to terminate my Citibank account in favor of another UK banker, but if they keep on reducing the usability of their Internet service, I might just brave it. 112K JPEG Link

Update: Emmet adds, "One of the way this little on-screen keyboard make the password less secure is that it do not seems to allow for mixed case passwords nor it allow to enter accented letters. This mean that the actual key space is greatly reduced and will make guessing password easier."

Update 2: Joe sez, "Typing a password on a keyboard is secure because it's very difficult to observe the movements of ten fingers at the same time. Following a single mouse pointer on the screen is much easier. I suspect that the rate of key logging attacks is much lower than rate of observed password attacks."

Update 3: Brian points out that Bermuda's Butterfield Direct has an even more abusive toy keyboard, requiring you to enter both your login and password with it, and masking every character as you type it. Kevin adds, "To make matters worse, if you have to type/click a double character (such as 'ss') in Bermuda's Butterfield Direct, the second click will produce two characters ('sss') if you click too quickly.  Because the characters are masked, you can almost never catch this activity and are consequently told by the website that your username or password is incorrect."

Update 4: Kelly sez, "I have similar so-called security frustrations with my ING Direct savings bank account. They have this similarly tedious and user unfriendly design for their PIN code entry. It is an on-screen numerical keyboard, with the numbers randomly assigned to each key. Thus, instead of the top line being 7 8 9 it might well be 4 9 0."

Alice acquired a Swap Magic device for her British PS2 so that she could play the US version of Katamari Damacy (Swap Magic also lets you play PS2 games that have been backed up to CD or DVD, as well as a host of other enhancements that PS2's DRM seeks to block). The Swap Magic device comes with hilariously bad documentation, so Alice has posted a step-by-step HOWTO.

Swap Magic arrived with no fuss, thankyou ESKent; your name and site are not glamorous, but you are true to your delivery word. It arrived with 2 discs (CD version and DVD version), plus the slide tool and an entertaining and not particularly helpful instruction sheet ("If it broke up, don't be frustrated - a little super glue can turn around the situation").

Most importantly though, the one instruction you really need - which way to jam the slidetool into the machine - isn't mentioned. After half an hour of wiggling, one broken-off tray cover (damnit), it all suddenly clicked. Then I played Katamari Damacy for approximately three hours solid, so I am serene.

Link

Linky is my all-time favorite Mozilla plugin (also works in Firefox and Thunderbird). When you right-click with Linky installed, you get a sub-menu that lets you open a range of selected links in tabs, or all image links in one tab, text-links in tabs, download all links, and so forth. This is great for multipart Web-articles, where the pages are all linked like so: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 -- just select all the page links, and Linky them open in new tabs so they're all preloaded in tabs in your browser. Also fantastic for image galleries -- expand a up to 99 thumbnails into their own tabs that you can click through quickly (even better when the links are straight to images, as Linky can lay them all out on one page for fast scrolling). Link

This week's Onion features a laugh-out-loud piss-take on the sappy "Love Coupons" that we're encouraged to exchange on Valentine's Day. (Also notable in this week's Onion, What do you think of lifting the ban on in-flight cellphones?: "What an ideal marriage of the Wright Brothers and Alexander Graham Bell. And Kafka. And Pavlov. And Mengele.") Link

Dieter sez, "Coca-Cola is not only first among sugar-waters, but first among promoting global capitalism. Archive.org has a wonderful video from 1955 of Coke promoting its presence in the Phillipines. There's shots of 'local culture' and disturbing montages of the industries that have popped up surrounding Coke in the Orient."

This then is the story of refreshement, of Coca-Cola a quality product, pure and wholesome. A story of a friendly product, delicious and refreshing. A story of partners in progress with all Philippine industry providing employment for thousands of people in many industries, contributing to the progress of the country, and in the future as it always does, Coca-Cola will continue to bring more pleasure, more enjoyment to more people everywhere and Coca-Cola is everywhere in the Philippines.

Link (Thanks, Dieter!)

Salon today features an excellent feature on HP Lovecraft, the florid, love-him-or-hate-him cult horror writer. The article does a great job of explaining why Lovecraft fans adore him, and how those same traits repulse his detractors.

Perhaps the most curious thing about Lovecraft is that much of what aficionados love about his work is exactly those things his detractors list as faults. Take, for example, the fact that while Lovecraft is usually described as a forefather of modern horror fiction, his stories are, to put it bluntly, not very scary. Wilson complained, with perfect justification, that Lovecraft ladled on the frightful adjectives and adverbs when describing -- or even just hinting at -- the nightmarish realizations that typically confront his protagonist at a tale's climax. In "The Lurking Fear," the narrator, recounting his sensations as he is about to discover something awful, explains, "I felt the strangling tendrils of a cancerous horror whose roots reached into illimitable pasts and fathomless abysms of the night that broods beyond time."

Lovecraft's narrators routinely rave about the "hideous," "monstrous" and "blasphemous" nature of their revelations. Wilson went on, again quite reasonably, to observe, "Surely one of the primary rules for writing an effective tale of horror is never to use any of these words -- especially if you are going, at the end, to produce an invisible whistling octopus." That octopus crack is a particularly low blow, since the most celebrated of Lovecraft's stories and novels partake of what has been dubbed the Cthulhu Mythos, an alternative mythology involving an enormous and malevolent being whose tentacled head resembles a cephalopod.

Link (requires reg or that you sit through an ad)

Dartmouth students kicked off their Winter Carnival with this 55-foot high pirate ship made from ice. Link (via Fark)

The first computer hackers started out as railway hackers, members of the MIT "Tech Model Railway Club," monkeying around with model trains and the gates that controlled them (this is wonderfully documented in Steven Levy's classic Hackers: Heros fo the Computer Revolution, in passages like this: "The other faction centered on the Signals and Power Subcommittee of the club, and it cared far more about what went on under the layout. This was The System, which worked something like a collaboration between Rube Goldberg and Wemher von Braun, and it was constantly being improved, revamped, perfected, and sometimes "gronked" in club jargon, screwed up. S&P people were obsessed with the way The System worked, its increasing complexities, how any change you made would affect other parts, and how you could put those relationships between the parts to optimal use.").

So it is only fitting that a group of art-hackers in Vienna's Museumsquartier should build a functional Turing machine out of model railway tracks -- a calculating engine whose motive force is a scaled-down locomotive.

Scale trains have existed for almost as long as their archetypes, which were developed for the purposes of traffic, transportation and trade. Economy and commerce have also been the underlying motivations for the invention of computers, calculators and artificial brains.

Allowing ourselves to fleetingly believe in an earlier historical miscalculation that "... Computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1 1/2 tons." (Popular Mechanics, March 1949), we decided to put some hundred tons of scaled steel together in order to build these calculating protozoa. The operating system of this reckoning worm is the ultimate universal calculator, the Turingmachine, and is able to calculate whatever is capable of being calculated. One just would have to continue building to see where this may lead...

Link (via MemeMachineGo)

An enterprising game hacker has made the first homebrew game for the Nintendo DS: a clone of Tetris. Link (via Waxy)

South Londoners' trash-cans are getting sensor-implants that snitch them out to the Council for their wastefulness.

Residents of Croydon, south London, have been told that the microchips being inserted into their new wheely bins may well be adapted so that the council can judge whether they are producing too much rubbish.

If the technology suggests that they are, errant residents may be visited by officials bearing advice on how they might "manage their rubbish more effectively".

Link (via We Make Money Not Art)

A reader writes, "This web site has pictures from the Apollo moon landings and stitched them together to create panoramic views. Use your mouse to navigate. Also, use the pull down menu to see panoramic views of scenes from around the world. You can scroll right and left, and sometimes up and down." Link

Hate was one of my favorite comics books. Written and drawn by Peter Bagge and published by Fantagraphics beginning in 1990, the best storyline in Hate was the continuing adventures of Buddy Bradley, a lazy, grumpy, believable post-adolescent living with a variety of even sadder-sack roommates and masochistic, psychotic girlfriends in Seattle. The stories had captivating plots and characters and after reading an issue, I was hungry for more.

If you've never read Hate before, you're in for a treat. Fantagraphics has just issued a 336-page anthology of all the Buddy stories from Hate. You can buy it on Amazon for $10.17, which is the steal of the century. Link

Apropos of Cory's post yesterday about Afri-Cola, my Parisian pal Alex Boucherot of AEIOU and Fluctuat sends us this menu listing a few of France's "special colas."

It all started with Mecca Cola, an ideology-driven cola which gives 20% of its net profits to charities (10% going to Palestinian charities). There's been quite a big controversy here, as some people thought the money was going in some unsafe hands... Rumors... Still, the copied-Coke has even be copied! (beware of couterfeits, hahaha!)

After this first attempt, which had quite a big success, everybody wanted to make his own ideology-driven cola. Hm. Fair traders (Beuk Cola done out of brown sugar from Costa Rica), but mainly a lot of regionalists, surfing on the "militant cola" wave:

- Breizh Cola from Brittany
- Corsica Cola for Corsica
- Chtila, the cola for the North of France

...and a few more coming in & out.

Boing Boing trivia: Years ago, our own Cory Doctorow manufactured an "ideology-driven" drink called OpenCola as a promotional item for the P2P company of the same name that he co-founded. A pre-Creative Commons project, the OpenCola recipe was made freely available online under a GNU General Public License.

UPDATE: It's not French fizz, but Christopher Null points us to Salaam Cola, canned by a Californian company that gives 15% of its profits to "organizations that spread peace." Link

Mary Blair worked as a concept artist for Walt Disney studios. Her work is a lot different from other Disney artists, who didn't stray as far from realism as she did. It's a little surprising that Walt Disney loved Blair's work so much, but he did. It's a good thing that he did, because Blair was one of the best things ever to happen to Disney Studios. Take a look at her concept sketches for the South Seas part of "It's a Small World," from 1965 or so. Link

I don't know where One Man Safari gets his incredible photos, but this one, of a wistful elderly gentleman wearing silver makeup and a roller derby helmet with pieces of a toy radio glued to it, is typical of the treasures you'll find here.
Link

I enjoyed reading the comments about this poorly designed warning label.

Warning: children might be reading one book hiding inside another.

Danger! Ejection Seat! Literacy rules.

Warning! If you sit on top of a big cushion, be sure to read the dictionary first.

Warning, giant punctuation block may fall on child seat unless you chant the "i" spell from the grimore.

It warns those who cannot read that they must read the manual.

Link

The MPAA's new catchphrase "You can click, but you can't hide" is a remix of the famous phrase "You can run, but you can't hide," which was re-popularized by intellectual property abolishionist and EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow in a song he wrote for the Grateful Dead. He might have gotten it from The Road Warrior. The original phrase seems to have come from the boxer Joe Louis.

So there you have it: the MPAA has ripped, mixed and burned a phrase out of the cultural commons -- they appropriated it, reversed the meaning it had been imbued with by its copyfighting popularizer, and put it out there, not even bothering to credit Lewis or Barlow. Sly old MPAA.

We can run,
But we can't hide from it.
Of all possible worlds,
We only got one:
We gotta to ride on it.
Whatever we've done,
We'll never get far from what we leave behind,
Baby, we can run, run, run, but we can't hide.
Oh no, we can't hide.

Link (Thanks, Paula!)

Update: Gwen points out that Flock of Seagulls's debut album contains the phrase.

Update 2: Swamp Thing adds this article from 2000 that actually contains the phrase, "You can click, but you can't hide."

Update 3: BUT YOU STILL SUCK graphic from Neil's World

Update 4: Amy sez, "in Hunter S. Thompson's classic 1971 novel 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas', Hunter's character has a paranoid vision that references the phrase."

Teri sez, "Analog Science Fiction Magazine has a new feature, 'The Science Behind the Story', which allows their science ficiton authors to talk a bit about the realities behind the speculative fiction they've written. Currently they have a feature by Carl Frederick, author of December's 'The Fruitcake Genome' that has some pretty cool sounding music used in the story and developed by a computer's analysis of the drosophila genome available for download."

But the story was written after I finished a computer program to generate 'music' from parts of the fruit fly genome. I used the output of the program as input to a music synthesizer and was frankly 'blown away' when I listened to the music. It, to me at least, sounds 'composed'--and good! I called the piece, 'The Little March of the Fruit Flies'. You can click and download this file to hear an MP3 of it. I'd be very interested to hear what people think of it. Maybe any non-random data stream would make music--I don't know. Or maybe there's something intrinsic to the genome that makes it 'musical'.

As for why I wrote this program: From my years of examining squiggles on chart recorders--trying to pull signals from noise, I got the notion that the eye, while great for two and three-dimensional pattern detection, is far inferior to the ear for finding one-dimensional patterns. And from my vantage point of being one of the world's most dreadful violinists, I thought that music might be the right paradigm for an examination of one-dimensional information streams. Arguably, the genome is the most important linear information stream on the planet--so I decided to write a computer program to translate DNA sequences to musical notes.

Link (Thanks, Teri!)

Yesterday, I posted this news about the Motion Picture Association of America's shutdown of sites including lokitorrent.com. Actually, the MPAA did not shut down the webservers, per se -- it replaced site contents with this notice, which read in part, "YOU CAN CLICK, BUT YOU CAN'T HIDE."

A number of readers wrote in to point out that Gina Trapani, editor of the new Gawker property Lifehacker (whose launch was backed by a $25K sponsorship from Sony) picked up the Boing Boing story with a different approach. In her Lifehacker post "Don't Steal, You'll Get Caught," Trapani wrote:

"Moral of the story? Things you do on the internet are never anonymous. So if you steal, you can get caught."

To which BB reader Ian Clarke, founder of anonymous filesharing system Freenet, replied:

She is talking complete rubbish. Even trivial precautions, such as using Tor or Freenet, render users completely anonymous for all practical purposes. Unlike Tor and Freenet, BitTorrent was never designed to provide any anonymity for its users, so nothing about this latest news comes as a surprise to anyone that knows the first thing about P2P architectures. And don't even get me started on her use of the work "steal" to describe copyright infringement - its like using the phrase "road rape" to describe jaywalking.

Reader Zack took issue with the post, too -- here's a snip from his reply:

you can click but you cannot hide? puh-leeze! if there's one thing that's become quite clear it's that hackers are pretty good at hiding...i knew that [Lifehacker.com's] "sponsored by Sony" thing wasn't good news. they've covered the MPAA's take down of lowkee as "did you dare to take on the Man? guess you better prepare for some unwanted Man-love, then." they're also pitching "hacks" that come from such dodgy underground sources as Microsoft. lifehacker's brilliant advice? set your windows updates to automatic.

Link to previous Boing Boing post, link to Lifehacker post.

Those big-breasted, devil-babe temptresses from underground artist Coop are evidently leading some fans straight into the hoosgau. Coop tells Boing Boing, with a heaping helping of his trademark irony, "Dig this shit! I'm a posterboy for the first amendment!"

Stickers on a Clovis man’s car portray cartoon images of bare-breasted female devils in sexually compromising positions. And the images have caught the attention of Clovis police. Officials have charged 31-year-old Dean Young, the owner of a yellow Ford Focus displaying the images, with distribution of sexually oriented materials to minors. The charge is a misdemeanor carrying a maximum punishment of 364 days in jail and $1,000 fine. Young is scheduled to appear in magistrate court on the charges in the next few weeks.

Young in turn has notified the American Civil Liberties Union, which is considering representing Young; an ACLU spokesman said Young’s First Amendment rights may have been violated. Officials at the ACLU said they’ve never seen the stickers — one on each side of the car near the rear window, each about 4 by 6 inches wide — but based on the police report said they doubt the stickers violate the law.

“I’ve never heard of anyone getting a ticket for a sticker on a car,” said Peter Simonson, executive director of the ACLU of New Mexico. “Unless the stickers are directly and immediately inciting people to violence — that’s the only way the Supreme Court has said that free speech can be somehow limited.”

The image shown here is the exact image Mr. Young placed on his car in the form of a sticker. Link to full-size.

When asked for comment, Coop tells Boing Boing, "I just feel bad for this poor dude. He's a waiter at Shakey's or some shit, and now he's gotta deal with this. We're gonna try to see if we can help him out with this. Lawyers have been called. On the plus side, I might move to Clovis, since they have clearly eliminated all serious crime in the city, and the police are free to waste time on stupid shit like this." Link to news story, Link to Coop website

Previously: Coop iPod skins, and snapshots from Coop gallery show in LA

Update: The ACLU says: "We are actively looking into this matter and expect to have a special response as soon as possible." (thanks, Ruth Waytz!)

Howard sez, "This is startling, geeky, powerful, and scary: a prof at Stanford has found that by morphing 40% of your face into the face of a political figure, you are MORE likely to be persuaded to agree with that political figure." Link (Thanks, Howard!)

This "water purifying straw" (£8) uses a column of iodine resin to kill viruses and bacteria as you drink from it. Link (via Red Ferret Review)

Tamu sez, "There is a contest on fps for people to get the chance to win 1 of 2 signed Ray Harryhausen Early Years Collection 2-disc DVD sets. Fps was originally a print magazine in the 1990s, it became a website in early 2003 and is devoted to all aspects of animation - animation, DIY, voice acting - in all its forms - independent, studio-driven, 2D, 3D, European, Japanese, everything goes." Link (Thanks, Tamu!)

Created by Dutch designers Niels Van Eljk and Miriam Van der Lubbe, the Soft Stove is a functioning wood-burning stove fabricated from nonflammable fabric. Currently on display at the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art, Soft Stove is part of the designers' Underdogma series, "a selection of products in which the designers question 11 dogmas in design on 11 products." Link (via Near, Near Future)

Matthew David Brozik recounts the story of Karl, whose fingerprints have "expired."

Karl mentioned to me that he’d gotten a letter from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services regarding his application for a visa for his wife, who lives in China. I gathered that a naturalized citizen applying for a visa for an alien must have his fingerprints on file with USCIS. Current fingerprints. USCIS had written to advise Karl that his fingerprints on file had expired.

Karl held up his hands to me and asked, “What expire? Fingerprints don’t expire!”

Link (Thanks, Yankee Fog!)

After the MPAA shut down the Lokitorrent site (Xeni's post from yesterday), they hijacked the domain and put up a snotty note that included the phrase "You can click, but you can't hide." Now, a Slashdot poster has come up with some rip-snortin' alternatives for the MPAA to use in connection with its next domainjacking:

"Guys don't make passes at girls who click torrents."
"You can lead a horse to water, but you better not click that torrent!"
"Click on a torrent, break your mama's back."
"What would Jesus Do? Not click on torrents, you betcha!"
"I wouldn't click on a torrent if it were the last torrent on earth."

Link

Sebastian sez, "The guy reported above as being 'jailed for using a non-standard browser' has now been charged."

Daniel James Cuthbert, 28, of Whitechapel in East London has been charged with one offence under section one of the Computer Misuse Act following an unauthorised attempt to access the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) website on New Year's Eve.

The alleged hack was detected immediately and the Metropolitan Police notified, which led to the arrest of Cuthbert on 20 January where he was bailed while police examined computer equipment seized during a search of his home.

Link (Thanks, Sebastian!)

Here's an update on the ridiculous story about Chicago shaking down photographers who take pictures of a sculpture in the Millennium Park, a park that cost the Chicago taxpayers $250 million:

After a considerable amount of speculation on the Web about the copyright on Millennium Park, the Reader's Ben Joravsky offers some explanation in this week's paper as to why security guards are targeting photographers snapping pictures of the Bean and other sculptures in the Park. The city has a license agreement with the artists to be the sole authorized seller of merchandise with Millennium Park images, and that's why they've been targeting professional photographers in the park and stores trying to sell notecards with Bean images on them. The business about the security guards claiming that the whole park was copyrighted? Apparently it's a result of some overly zealous legal language given to security guards to hand out to commercial photographers who want to sell Millennium Park images.

But this doesn't explain anything: if this is just the security guards, why then does the press director for the park answer inquiries about it so: "The copyrights for the enhancements in Millennium Park are owned by the artist who created them. As such, anyone reproducing the works, especially for commercial purposes, needs the permission of that artist."

Someone's lying. Link (Thanks, Kyle!)

Update: Fuzzy sez, "I think it might be worth your while to read Ben's actual article, rather than just the Gapers Block summary, so I've scanned it in and put it on Flickr: page 1, page 2." "

There has been a successful trial of an aerosol testosterone spray for women with low sex-drives. It does, in fact, make some substantial fraction of its users horny. The side-effect is that it increases hair growth.

The spray delivers testosterone and a substance to ensure the hormone is held in the skin and absorbed over 24 hours - similar to the way sunscreen remains on the skin.

Link

Flickr turns one year old today. It has been only a year since Ludicorp launched their astonishingly great image-sharing site. They have continuously innovated since launchdate, adding great, useful, intuitive features -- slideshows, RSS feeds, photo-annotation, Creative Commons, tags, and more every day -- that make this better and better all the time. On top of that, their generous API has attracted scores of developers who have built an amazing variety of add-ons for the service. It's hard to believe that all this happened in just one year! I can't wait to see what this coming year has in store for Flickr. Link (Disclaimer: I am a proud advisor to Flickr's parent company, Ludicorp)

Further to yesterday's post about the on-again/off-again European software patents fight, this news: The Dutch Parliament has voted to reject software patents! The FFII has a petition for you to sign -- get every European you know to go to it now, and we might just kill this. Link (Thanks, Rik!)

A lonely lifeguard in Sydney, Australia has moved into a plastic bubble in the middle of a shopping mall in the hopes of attracting a mate in time for Valentine's Day. No word on whether he'll bring the bubble out on his date.

The stunt, set up by an internet dating agency, appeared to be working. Luke said he had already received about 100 emails from prospective Valentines.

"It's like anything, you get some really nice people and some really weird people ... but there are three or four that stand out that I have responded to," he said.

Luke's bubble was furnished with an armchair, a table with a bowl of fruit on it and a laptop computer.

Link (via Fark)

Viennese net.artists Monochrom were chosen to represent Austria at an international arts festival in Sao Paolo, but rather than go as themselves, they pulled off a magificent hoax:

...we decided to send Georg Paul Thomann to Brazil. Who is Georg Paul Thomann? He is a fictitious 57-year-old Austrian avant-garde artist. We wrote his complete biography (around one hundred pages) and asked fellow artists, writers and pop theorists to write articles about his life and work, which were published as the catalogue of the exhibition. It took the media quite a long time to actually figure out the whole art-avatar maneuver. The Thomann biography grew to be an amusing overview of pop, art and intellectual history during the past four decades ­with fictitious guest appearances from people like William Gibson, Peter Handke or Alan Jenkins.

Once there, they set up their booth for Georg Paul Thomann art and acted as his assistants, telling all that Herr Thomann was feeling tempramental and sulking in his hotel room. Then, when Taiwan's nameplate was taken down at the behest of the Chinese delegate, the Monochromers hunted down letters from other countries' signs -- an A from Austria, a T from Tobago, etc, and reinstated it. It was taken down again and again, and they kept on canvassing the show for more letters, eventually resorting to tactics like breaking Canada's D in half and butterflying it out into a W. Link

Google has offered to host Wikipedia -- what a bunch of mensches those googloids are!

Google Inc. has made a proposal to host some of the content of the Wikimedia projects.

The terms of the offer are currently being discussed by the board. The developer committee has been informed of some of the details via email. A private IRC meeting with Google is planned for March, 2005.

Please note that this agreement does not mean there is any requirement for us to include advertising on the site.

More details will be put here when the offer is allowed to be made public.

Link (via Waxy)

This video spoof of a Rocky "training montage" is so stupidly funny and over the top that I love it. The best part is that it goes on and on. And to set the mood, here's Sylvester Stallone on the "Gonna Fly Now" training montage from the first Rocky film:

The training montage was something that I had been building toward for six months. I knew I would have to do what every fighter must to get himself in peak condition, but I wanted to do it in even a more exaggerated form.

Link (Thanks, Professor Cupcake)

I usually don't pay much mind to "desert island" lists, but M. Ace of Irregular Orbit has impeccable taste, and his selection is one I would be happy to take with me on a long trip to nowhere.

The Velvet Underground and Nico (Verve) A common choice, I know, but there it is. The original primer of anti-rock rock (or something like that), this includes balanced helpings of all the sides of their sound, from the grindy to the pretty to the droney to the damaged. You can always find at least one song on here that fits your mood of the moment. And if you buy a copy, you will start a band. It's a fact.

Help! - The Beatles (Parlophone) This album falls on the trailing edge of their original Beatlemania phase and the beginning of their brief folk-rock/art-pop phase (a phase I wish had lasted a little longer before they went pepperdelic). A nice place to be. I'll have an extra helping of Rickenbacker 12-string jangle, please.

Rumble! The Best of Link Wray (Rhino) Link Wray is the man who showed us how to operate an electric guitar like a switchblade. His sharp rock 'n' roll instrumentals still sound brand new.

Link

Popular BitTorrent hub Lokitorrent was 0wnz0red today by the Motion Picture Association of America. Here's a screengrab of the MPAA warning that now greets lokitorrent.com visitors.

The site's operator gave into the MPAA despite vowing to fight the studios with other people's money. "The operator of that site, Edward Webber, agreed to not only pay a substantial settlement with even greater financial penalties for any further such actions, but by Court Order must provide the MPAA with access to and copies of all logs and server data related to his illegal BitTorrent activities, which will provide a roadmap to others who have used LokiTorrent to engage in illegal activities," the MPAA said in a statement.

LokiTorrent had been one of the only major BitTorrent hubs to stay up and running after the MPAA sent out a flood of lawsuits. The hubs serve as meeting grounds for file-traders looking to pick up software, music, movies and other content. LokiTorrent had raised more than $40,000 from its fan base to help its legal battle against the MPAA. It's unclear if that money went straight to the MPAA. LokiTorrent has not responded to a request for comment.

Link to Register story, Link to John Borland's coverage on CNET, link to scan of original cease-and-desist notice issued to Lokitorrent by attorneys representing the MPAA.

Update: Looks like a similar fate has befallen torrentstop.com. Many Boing Boing readers wrote in today to express dismay at the MPAA's decision to replace shuttered filesharing sites with their own content. Reader Brad Clarke says, "Taking down a site is one thing but putting up their own content has GOT to be illegal. He's to hoping they finally went too far."

See also this related discussion thread on Slyck: Link

Here is the MPAA's press release announcing the lokitorrent shutdown: Link (MSword doc)

I know what this BBC News headline really means. But when I read it, my brain fills with visions of overly large persons hurling their bodies toward a circular form comprised of erectile dysfunction pills and canned meat product. Link (thanks Tyson)

When I was in town a few months ago, I visited the site where the $2.7 billion Wynn Las Vegas uber-resort is currently under construction. I'm told the thing is already sold out for many months to come, despite the fact that it doesn't open 'til late Spring. Snip:

But when its doors open in April, the Wynn Las Vegas will have one unique feature that few visitors are likely to notice--high-tech betting chips designed to deter counterfeiting, card-counting and other bad behavior.

The fancy new chips look just like regular ones, only they contain radio devices that signal secret serial numbers. Special equipment linked to the casino's computer systems and placed throughout the property will identify legitimate chips and detect fakes, said Rick Doptis, vice president of table games for the Wynn.

Link to News.com story. (via unwired, thanks Hal)

SCI FI Channel has ordered a second season of Battlestar Galactica, now midway through its first season of 13 episodes. Link to SciFi network announcement. And how totally cool was it to see Richard Hatch appear as "Zarich" on the episode that aired earlier this week? Link to Hatch's first-hand account of his long-awaited return to BSG.
Previously on Boing Boing: Wired: Fans Battle TV Over Galactica, Fans Can Be So Cruel, BSG becomes a series, Wired: Alien Sex! Bombs! Robots! Pathos!.

Spaceballs, Mel Brooks' zany 1987 "Star Wars" spoof, will be remade into an animated television series. I'm not sure if this is a good thing, or a bad thing. Trivia note: the tagline for Spaceballs the movie? May the schwartz be with you.
Link to comingsoon.net's rehashing of this subscribers-only Variety report. Link to press release.

An gallery of disturbing "tickling fetish" themed anime, with odd anime versions of the Scooby Doo girls. Relatively tame; nudity consists of a few demure nipple slips at best. But the notion that someone out there on the internet is getting off on this stuff is unnverving in the extreme.
Link (Thanks, Mystery Dude).

MAKE magazine's weblog is live, and it's being run by Phillip Torrone of Flash Enabled. Soon, Phillip will start putting his Make podcasts up on the blog (he's working on number four). Link

Biologists at UC Berkeley and the University of Texas Medical Branch have discovered that when some tropical ant species fall out of a tree, they have the ability to glide and actively direct their descent to land at the base of the trunk they fell from. From the press release (with cool video):

(Researcher Stephen) Yanoviak's earlier observations (in Peru) combined with the videotaped tests in Panama established that the ants basically reorient their bodies so their hind legs and abdomen point toward the tree, and use their head-up fall through the air to take them feet-first toward the trunk. How they land is still a mystery, but evidently claws on their back legs act like grappling hooks to snag the trunk and hang on.

"When they drop, they often glide away from the trunk, then turn and come in backwards," (Berkeley biologist Robert) Dudley said. "Their 180-degree turns are pretty dramatic in the absence of wings."

Link

Walt Disney Treasures Tomorrowland: Disney in Space and Beyond, a 2 DVD set, is a huge treat on multiple levels. Ward Kimball's animation in the 1950s space episodes is stunning, and I have been taking screengrabs* of the cartoons to save in my swipe file. (Click thumbnails for enlargement.)

The scientific explanations of spaceflight by rocket luminaries like Werner von Braun are well presented, and they make use of little rocket models that are so neat I would consider killing someone to get my hands on them.

I highly recommend the other Walt Disney Treasure series DVDs, too. They're 2 DVD sets in metal cases and they represent the cream of Disney animation and television. Most of them have over three hours worth of material on them, and I think they're a bargain. I have Silly Symphonies, Black and White Mickey Mouse, Color Mickey, and several others. My 7-year-old and I watch them over and over again. The only one I don't really recommend is the Goofy set, because they skipped the really early black and white stuff (from the Clarabelle Cow and Horace Horsecollar era) and included a lot of the weak "no-ears" Goofy cartoons. I can't deal with a Goofy speaking in a clipped British accent. It's even worse than when Snoopy became bipedal.)

*Mac OS X doesn't let you take screen grabs when you are running the DVD Player. I'm not going to waste keystrokes comment on the idiocy of this other than to say you can screen grab to your heart's content if you play DVDs using the open source VLC media player.

UPDATE: David wrote about this DVD for BB last year! Link

UPDATE 2:". . . they make use of little rocket models that are so neat I would consider killing someone to get my hands on them." Stefan sez: "No need for that young man!" (you can buy the model kits here and here)

"I built the 'Lunar Lander' and have started pre-painting the 'Space Taxi.' The 1940s space men listed here were the subject of an essay by William Gibson. I gave him a couple from my set at a signing."

UPDATE 3: A reader sez: "I find DVD Capture to be useful with Apple's DVD player."

The Poseidon will be a five-star, $1500/night seabottom resort that you enter via a tunnel, whose internal pressure will be kept at one atmosphere. The suites will be equipped with spotlights and fish-feeders to keep the show going. The whole thing will be submerged at 50' under the sea off Eleuthera Island in the Bahamas. Link (via We Make Money Not Art)

Last week, I posted about Tammy Jean Warner, a Texas woman charged indicted for killing her husband with a sherry enema. Her defense was that he frequently enjoyed sherry enemas. The Houston Chronicle has an update to the freaky story, complete with a photo of the late gentleman's hardware.

"It all started back when he was a child," Warner said. "His mother used to give him enemas all the time, and he started to depend on them all the time."

She said he paid $1,000 to study colonics at a school and corresponded with other enema users on the Internet. Not all of his enemas involved liquor, she said.

"He did coffee enemas, he did Castile soap, Ivory soap," she said. "He had enema recipes."

Link (Thanks, c-lo!)

This website sells $60 replicas of the 1949 Bell Black phone in black, silver and white. Alas, they've lamely replaced the rotary dial with ergonomically tortured push-buttons arranged in a ring. Would it be so hard to build a rotary dial that generated touch-tones? Link (via Red Ferret Review)