Reader Don says,

Chuck Lorre, creator of "Dharma & Greg" and co-creator of "Two and a Half Men" has been putting vanity cards with messages at the end of his episodes since the first Dharma & Greg. Since they're on the screen only for one second at the end of the episode you've got to pause very precisely or go to his website to read them. They range from sublime to jejune but this week's takes a swipe at network censors who made him cut down a scene showing a woman's naked back, complaining that they "are perfectly at ease with graphically detailed autopsy scenes that show female corpses being carved up" and are "more comfortable showing a dead naked body than a live one." Two and a Half Men runs on the same network as the three CSI series.

Link

Nick Kanas, the "father of space psychology," studies the mental effects of space flight and long periods of isolation on astronauts. From Inside Bay Area:

In the 1980s the kind of "long-duration" space missions (Kansas had) written about were beginning to happen. The Russians had the space station Mir in orbit and American astronauts were on board for lengthy visits.

These were trying situations. "Most anybody can get along with any body for a week or two," Kanas observes. But longer stays in cramped conditions with no real opportunity for escape are different. Kanas used questionnaires completed on board to discern issues of tension, cohesion and "displacement," the tendency to redirect anger at others. For the cosmonauts and astronauts that was often the ground control.

Kanas looked for what crews at Antarctic research stations call the "third-quarter syndrome." Halfway through any stressful stint, it becomes more difficult to keep anger and resentment at bay. "Think about being with the same person for six months and you don't have a way out," Kanas says. "The groups become less cohesive as time goes on."

Link (via MindHacks), and more on Kanas in this 2002 NASA article.

My latest article for TheFeature is about 3D displays for mobile devices, no glasses required:

In 1953, moviegoers experienced a new dimension in fear, or at least campy horror, with the release of House of Wax. The Vincent Price shockfest was the first 3D feature produced by a major film studio. Unfortunately though, director André de Toth couldn't fully enjoy his own creation. The 3D illusion depended on binocular vision, but de Toth only had one eye.

In some ways today, we're all faced with the same problem. Mobile devices are now equipped with 3D graphics chips to bring a heightened sense of realism to the small screen. Videogame designers are cranking out dazzling 3D experiences that will soon put the playpower of a console in our pockets. The rub, though, is that the vast majority of our displays are stranded in flatland.

"Most games and many other applications are written in 3D although the final image is shown in 2D," says Ian Thompson, director of business development at Sharp Laboratories of Europe. "In nature humans see the world in 3D and yet we have become accustomed to seeing flat images"

That may be true today, but researchers in many laboratories, including Sharp's, have their eyes set on the next generation of 3D technology. If mobile displays are necessarily limited by length and width, the only option is to increase their depth. And unlike the 3D movies of yesterday (and even today), the new 3D displays don't require any special eyewear.

Link

NY Post has an item about a prank played on Express Scripts, a prescription drug program company that's being sued for $100 million by New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, "who claims the firm inflated the cost of generic drugs, pocketed rebates intended for customers and sold patient information." Express Scripts was throwing a dance party at the Phoenix Hard Rock Cafe as part of a drug company conference:

Between songs, someone handed the lead singer of the Starlight Band a note. "I have an announcement. It's someone's birthday today, Eliot Spitzer," the clueless frontman said. "Where is Eliot?" The place went silent. Express Scripts executives started rushing to the stage and someone yelled, "He's in goddamn New York." But too late — the band had launched into a version of "Happy birthday, dear Eliot." One witness said, "It was the funniest thing I ever saw."

Link (Thanks, Kevin!)

On NPR's Talk of The Nation yesterday -- talk about the future of filmmaking and P2P tech.

It's been a long time since movies were only available in theaters. But now there are movies on demand over cable TV; compressed films in digital files; and DVDs in the mail. Technology is changing how we watch movies, and it may even change what we watch. We examine the future of movies Chris Anderson, editor in chief, Wired magazine Reed Hastings, CEO, Netflix Dean Garfield, legal affairs director, Motion Picture Association of America.

Link (Thanks, Karl J. Smith)

Boing Boing reader and radio producer Adam Burke did a nifty story for NPR's Morning Edition about a restaurant in Zurich, Switzerland called the Blind Cow. Diners eat in complete darkness and are served by blind waitresses. "It's an extraordinary experience that I really loved," says Adam. Link.

Reader Anne Kinner says,

As soon as I saw this Boing Boing post, I remembered a video that I watched about Berlin in preparation for my trip there which featured a similar restaurant. I tracked it down through Google and found an article from the Financial Times (Link). The article states that the first Unsicht ("invisible bar") opened in Cologne in 2001. There seems to be quite a bit of info Google wise and is incredibly interesting. It seems, from articles and the video I watched, that the goal is trying to make people concentrate on the flavor, the texture, and the experience of food. Perhaps hinges on the concept that if you lose one sense, another will be heightened.

Reader Bruno says,

Update to the "eating without seeing story": the "Dans le Noir" restaurant in Paris exists since 1999, and is the "father" of Zurich's Blind Cow: Link

Reader Jed says:

Here is a review of a "dark dining" restaurant in Melbourne, Australia, that also touches on the history of "dark dining" -- Link.

Siva sends this note from Bangalore's Lawrence Liang: "The World Intellectual Property Organization, as a part of their pedagogic mission, have been bringing out a series of comics on Copyright, TM and patent.

"A few of us at Alternative Law Forum have been working a response to these comics, and we have now finished version 1.0 of the response to the Copyright Comic and are working on a response to TM and Patent Comics.What we have done is basically use the base comics to create a counter story, by changing the dialogues in the blurbs and adding images etc, in other words a remixed version of the WIPO Comics. Hope you enjoy it, and anyone interested in making changes to it, helping with the next versions on patent TM etc please feel free to contact the ALF. Link (Thanks, Siva and Donna!)

As part of National Science Week, the UK is setting up a scale model of the solar system.

The scale of 1 to 15 million reduces the distance between the Earth and the Sun to about 10km (6 miles).

All the models have 1m diameters. "If the sizes were also scaled, the Sun would be almost 100m across with Pluto about the size of a melon," said John Thomson, education consultant to the project.

Link (Thanks, Barney!)

Kim Cooper says: "One of the most popular features we've run recently in Scram (a journal of unpopular culture) was John Trubee's interview with Carl Franzoni, the mail order penis pump salesman who dropped out to lead a troup of tripped out psychedelic dancers on the Sunset Strip. Carl & co. toured with the Byrds and Mothers of Invention, and that's Carl Zappa's singing about when he warns, on Freak Out"

"Mister America walk on by your schools that do not teach
Mister America walk on by the minds that won't be reached
Mister America try to hide the emptiness that's you inside
When once you find the way you lied
And all the corny tricks you tried
Will not forestall the rising tide of HUNGRY FREAKS, DADDY!"

"Well, Carl Franzoni has agreed to be our new advice columnist! "Ask A Hungry Freak" is your chance to get real, freaky love or career advice, not from some dried up old dame or sarky homosexual, but from a red-blooded American freak who has spent four decades perfecting the art of living free." Link

An Idaho high school student was busted after anonymously delivering semen-frosted brownies to a fellow student. Why would he do such a thing? Revenge never tasted so sweet. From the Associated Press:

(Police) said the 17-year-old Coeur d'Alene High School student was upset after a prank in which the other student put peanut butter in his cheese sandwich days before. He told a school resource officer that "he hated peanut butter and it made him more mad than he could explain," according to the police report.

Link (Thanks, Jess Hemerly!)

Great jargon-watch term: "rehabilitainment" (games used in rehabilitation programs).

Namco has also begun working on "barrier-free entertainment," meaning entertainment products for helping elderly and physically impaired people. Namco's first "rehabilitainment" ("rehabilitation + entertainment") product is the TalkingAid, a vocal keyboard. Taskagi expects the company to expand into the educational space.

Link

News excerpt about mad monkeys attacking children in Assam.

"They hide in trees and swoop on unsuspecting children loitering about in the temple premises or walking by, clawing them and even sucking a bit of blood," said Bani Kumar Sharma, a priest at the Kamakhya temple in Assam state.

Link

Boing Boing exists to help you waste otherwise productive time, and in that spirit: filmwise offers a terrible game where you have to guess a movie's title based on just one still in which all of the people have been photoshoppically removed. Someone cut and pasted some of the items from filmwise.com's online feature and dumped them in this .xls file. Enter the answer in a blank text box in this form, and you get a "TRUE" or "FALSE" response. Consensus seems to be that #63 doesn't work because the puzzle's creators entered a typo. In addition to spelling, things like articles ("the xxx" vs. "xxx") and punctuation ("xxx's" vs. "xxxs") matter - and aren't always quite right. But other than that... it's tough, and maddening.
Link to related feature on filmwise.com, Link to Microsoft Excel file download (Thanks, W!) Spoiler alert -- Link to cheat sheet with all the answers. (thanks, gregg)

Monday night, I attended an excellent UC Berkeley lecture by David Byrne about his passion for the PowerPoint presentation software. (Previous posts on Byrne's Powerpoint here and here, including an interview by Xeni! More background at Wired and NPR.) Surprise guests included PowerPoint creators Dennis Austin and Bob Gaskins, both of whom seemed to get a kick out of the presentation. Watching Byrne's twitchy motions from the front-row kinda made me jumpy though. The event was part of BB pal Ken Goldberg's Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium lecture series. My friend Bonnie Powell has a great play-by-play of the evening at the UC Berkeley NewsCenter with photos by the always-amazing Bart Nagel.

"There's a lot of criticism of PowerPoint" — for encouraging users to do things in a particular way and discouraging them from other things, such as putting more than seven bullet points on a slide, he acknowledged. "But if you can't edit it down to seven, maybe you should think about talking about something else." PowerPoint restricts users no more than any other communication platform, he asserted, including a pencil: "When you pick up a pencil you know what you're getting — you don't think, 'I wish this could write in a million colors.'"...

Ultimately, Byrne said, he just enjoyed playing with the program, and continues to do so. "I made a presentation recently that was just colored slides fading in and out, like a rainbow. I put this gospel music to it — it was this wonderful, uplifting celebration," he said. "Who knew? Sometimes you only find out what's in there when you take everything out."

Link

This article is an excellent primer on sending good emails, and on good habits for managing emails. I receive a LOT of mail, at least a thousand emails that I'm expected to read, file, respond to, or do something about, every day. A lot of the email that just falls off my radar is stuff from strangers that is too hard to respond to or too hard to make easy sense of. This article reflects the kinds of things I try to do when I send email out to busy strangers and ask for their attention, and is the kind of guidelines that would make my life a lot easier.

You're probably sending e-mail because you're deep in thought about something. Your reader is too, only they're deep in thought about something else. Even worse, in a multi-person conversation, messages and replies may arrive out of order. And no, it doesn't help to include the entire past conversation when you reply; it's rude to force someone else to wade through ten screens of messages because you're too lazy to give them context. So, start off your messages with enough context to orient your reader.

BAD E-MAIL:
To: Billy Franklin
From: Robert Payne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Please bring contributions to the charity drive

Yes, apples are definitely the answer.

GOOD E-MAIL:
To: Billy Franklin
From: Robert Payne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Please bring contributions to the charity drive.

You asked if we want apple pie. Yes, apples are definitely the answer.

Link (Thanks, Cindy!)

Twice a week, the nonprofit People's Grocery sends its Mobile Market to a neighborhood in West Oakland where fresh produce and healthy food is nowhere to be found. I wish the Mobile Market existed when I lived there during the 1990s. There's only one supermarket to serve a community of 30,000 and it's a wreck. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

(The Mobile Market is) cleverly designed so that, when it's parked by the side of the road with its ramp extended, it is a fully stocked but very tiny natural foods store. In addition to the sumptuously fresh organic produce, the Mobile Market carries a little bit of all the basics you'd expect to find in any upscale food store. A row of bulk hoppers dispenses organic cereals underneath a small shelf of skin-care potions. A little glass-fronted fridge entices shoppers with juice blends and natural sodas, and a shelf of organic treats near the entrance gives kids who visit the Mobile Market with their parents something to linger over.

In operation for almost two years, the Mobile Market has become part of the fabric of the community. Shoppers greet one another as though they were in the neighborhood grocery store, not a vibrant purple-and-orange van decorated with hip-hop lettering and pumping out beats (solar powered, I learned later) from its roof....

The Mobile Market is able to make inroads in the community in large part because it offers these healthy foods at a low price. The People's Grocery receives significant discounts from Mountain People's Distributors -- one of the nation's largest organic-food distributors -- so food in the Mobile Market is sold at wholesale prices. This means that, for the 160 families that shop at the Mobile Market each week, a healthful organic diet costs no more than a menu of ramen and Ho-Hos from the liquor store.

Link (Thanks, Mark Riedy!)

The Israeli Army won't let you work in a sensitive position if you play Dungeons and Dragons:

IDF does not approve of this unusual hobby and prevents D&D players from being considered for sensitive army positions by labeling them with low security clearance.

"We have discovered that some of them are simply detached from reality," a security source told Ynet.

Game enthusiasts are aware of their problematic image in the army and prefer to maintain their anonymity. Many of them are from the former Soviet Union, where the game is very popular...

"These people have a tendency to be influenced by external factors which could cloud their judgment, a military official says. "They may be detached from reality or have a weak personality - elements which lower a person's security clearance, allowing them to serve in the army, but not in sensitive positions."

Link (via Schneier)

AV sez, "George Atkinson, the man who opened the first video rental store in the 70's has died at 69. To start his rental business, Mr. Atkinson bought 50 movies that had recently been made available on video, including 'The French Connection,' 'The Sound of Music' and 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.' He then advertised their availability for rental in a one-inch ad in The Los Angeles Times. Customers arrived in droves and willingly paid the $10-a-day rental fee. (Only the wealthy could afford the $1,000 that VCR's cost then.)"

Of course, back in those days most of the studios were embroiled in a lawsuit against Sony for selling VCRs, which they viewed as tools for infringement, and they were all swearing up and down that they would never release their movies on video. it took brains and guts to open a video store that rented out Hollywood movies at a time when Hollywood was swearing enmity to the VCR and proposing to have it banned by law. Link (Thanks, AV!)

In Madrid, they're honoring the anniversary of the March 11 train-bombing with a summit on Democracy, Security and Terrorism. Dan Gillmor is there, in a working group on terrorism and the Internet, and they've drafted a fantastic set prinxiples for the Internet in the age of terrorism, click the link for the whole thing and a message-board where you can discuss it.

I. The Internet is a foundation of democratic society in the 21st century, because the core values of the Internet and democracy are so closely aligned.

1. The Internet is fundamentally about openness, participation, and freedom of expression for all -- increasing the diversity and reach of information and ideas.

2. The Internet allows people to communicate and collaborate across borders and belief systems.

3. The Internet unites families and cultures in diaspora; it connects people, helping them to form civil societies.

4. The Internet can foster economic development by connecting people to information and markets.

5. The Internet introduces new ideas and views to those who may be isolated and prone to political violence.

6. The Internet is neither above nor below the law. The same legal principles that apply in the physical world also apply to human activities conducted over the Internet.

Link

Update: Bill Thompson points us to "the Atocha workshop tomorrow, in the station -- where Joi and Dan will be talking again, and Meeting on March 11 -- giving people around the world a chance to remember victims of terror and talk about what's happening in Madrid - including the role of the Internet!"

Creative Commons-based music label Magnatunes has struck a deal with a USB thumb-drive vendor to pre-load their drives with ten albums' worth of Magnatunes music. Europe's 50-year copyright term on performances means that we're going to see a lot more of this. As the early Elvis and Beatles recordings enter the public domain, I expect that European hard-drive and music-player vendors will just start bundling in all the public domain music in the world with every purchase.

Online record label Magnatune and Samsung spinoff Hana Micron today launch TunePlug-a reusable USB Flash Drive that will feature 10 complete albums from 10 leading Magnatune artists as MP3 files. The newest way to distribute music, TunePlug offers consumers a simple way to experience emerging music on an easy-to-use, transferable information device.

Link

Deborah Pierce -- former EFF attorney and now Executive Director of PrivacyActivism -- got a look at her ChoicePoint file and discovered it to be riddled with errors and full of disturbingly personal information. MSNBC reports that ChoicePoint's attitude toward fixing those errors is basically that you just can't.

What first caught Pierce's eye, she said, was a heading titled "possible Texas criminal history." A short paragraph suggested additional, "manual" research, because three Texas court records had been found that might be connected to her. "A manual search on PIERCE D.S." is recommended, it said.

Pierce says she's only visited Texas twice briefly, and never had any trouble with the law there.

"But if I was applying for a job, and there were other candidates, and this was on my record, the company would obviously go for another person," she said. "It raises a question in your mind."

Link