Update: BB reader Tokumei sez:

The action figures on sale at the Daft Punk site are not in fact robots at all! They're actually characters from the anime Interstella 5555: 5ecrets of the 5tellar 5tar 5ystem, which uses the Daft Punk record "Discovery" for the soundtrack. The first four chapters from the movie were also released individually as music videos.

Snip from story:

The little white house in Oakwood doesn't look like a shrine. But step through the door and into Michael Pilmer's world. Gaze in awe at the massive autographed poster of Devo above the dining room table, the authentic Devo concert costumes, the Devo pins and shirts and ephemera carefully arrayed throughout the house.

Yes, here in Raleigh, half a block from Oakwood Cemetery, is the planet's biggest collection of artifacts from the band best known for the 1980 hit "Whip It."

"It's the ADD that keeps me going, I guess," says Pilmer, 38, a tall, lanky redhead (it's dyed) in a homemade T-shirt with Mickey Mouse sitting on a toilet. "I'm definitely kind of obsessive, so I just figured I would channel that into one thing."

Update: BB reader James Allenspach says:

The story makes passing mention of Implied Regurgitation, a sticker art project that Michael devised which is sort of like the Andre the Giant/OBEY sticker project, except that instead of a scary Andre head Michael's stickers are word balloons that say "I threw up."

Update: Brian sez, "the video is actually from DC shoes."

"What Richman, and now Corbis/Gates, control includes "full persona usage, consisting of name, voice, signature and image (photo, illustration, animation and/or look-alike)." Dead or alive.

"And guess whose personas Gates now controls: Boris Karloff, Rod Serling, the Marx Brothers, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Isaac Asimov and yes, Bucky Fuller.

"As far as I know, this is the first time an image licensing company has integrated with a personality licensing company." Link (Thanks, Rick!)

This comes out of last fall's "Development Agenda," where India, Brazil, Argentina and other developing countries held WIPO's feet to the fire and demanded that it adopt a formal policy to act like any other UN agency: that is, to promote humanitarian goals, not higher levels of copyright restrictions.

In the interim, it's been clear that WIPO and the rich countries it has traditionally served aren't exactly thrilled about this -- for one thing, they stabbed the public interest groups in the back and arranged to lock nearly all of them out of the room.

With the meeting about to start, the national delegations have started to produce documents describing their proposals. Mexico -- captive state that it is -- has produced an embarrassment of a document calling for more copyright to save development. The US has produced an even dumber document saying that the solution to development is to assign developing nations "buddies" from the developed world to show them the ropes. The UK's document says that they think this stuff is important but aren't willing to do anything about it.

Shining out like a single rose on top of a mountain of crap is a 12,000-word detailed analysis by fourteen nations ("the friends of development"), explain exactly what they mean when they talk about facilitating development.

Jamie Love's done a great analysis of the proposals, with a scorecard on which buzzwords the different papers use, and how often they use them:

USA
All words 3059
Abuse 0
Access 3
Access to knowledge: 0
Anticompetitive 0
Consumer 0
Doha Declaration on the TRIPS 0
Education 6
Exceptions 0
Human Rights 0
Limitations 0
Market failure 0
Monopoly 0
Open source: 0
Poverty: 0
Public Health 0

Update: Richard sez, "we gave the phone a call on The Gadget Show news podcast this week and spoke to Caroline, an Aussie who made the trip just to stand in the line for over a month."

A year ago, I got to see the musical performed at a workshop at Toronto's Poor Alex Theatre and it was fantastic: funny, catchy, engrossing, with a really authentic sixties-kitsch feel: like Hair at 30,000 feet, with seasonings of Jesus Christ, Superstar and Germaine Greer.

The play's going to Actor's Equity Showcase production this summer, and Suzy's launched a website for it that includes MP3s/MIDIs of all the songs from the production, as well as synopses and background material on the era.

Plane Crazy is set during an explosive time in history: The intersection between the dawn of the Jet Age, the introduction of the Pill, the genesis of the modern Feminist Movement, and the Golden Age of Advertising.

Stewardesses represented the first-wave shock troops in a changing world. This was an exclusive sorority of women who had freedom. Freedom to travel wherever they wanted. Freedom to have sex with whomever they wanted. And freedom to have a career without needing the support of a man.

Alas, men were not as quick to adapt. Most guys were interested in a woman who was a cross between Betty Crocker and Betty Page - they didn't want a Betty Friedan. Society itself, as typified by the advertising industry, was also slow to adapt.

Weirdly, this 19th century song is still in copyright in France, and a French filmmaker has just been fined about $1300 for letting a character in one of his films whistle the tune (you can hear a very modern synth-pop take on the tune courtesy of Maxx Klaxon here).

The irony factor here is much deeper than, say, the irony surrounded JibJab's appropriation of Woody Guthrie's This Land. Guthrie was a socialist, sure, but the Internationale is a call to arms to abolish private property, eliminate international borders, and throw off your chains and rise up to smash the state. Hard to imagine that the long-dead creator of that song is having his wishes honored by French collecting societies shaking down people who make use of it for cash.

The 19th-century revolutionary hymn was written by Eugene Pottier in 1871 and set to music by another Frenchman, Pierre Degeyter, in 1888...

Under French law, "The Internationale" won't fall into the public domain until 2014 — 70 years of post-mortem protection plus extra time to cover the world war. Degeyter died in 1932....

[The film] hardly paid its own way, opening briefly in a single Paris theater and selling just 203 tickets, Le Monde reported.

Over the past couple of days MusicAlly has run several tests, during which we were able to download and stream simultaneously from four separate computers across two separate Internet connections for good stretches of time. Our findings so far suggest this situation is the same whether we use a trial account, a paid-for credit card account or the £14.95 Napster To Go service. By comparison, several other Internet subscription services, including Real's Rhapsody, log the first user out automatically if a second user logs in using the same username and password.

Arguably the fact that one of the subsequent users could order one of Napster's paid-for permanent downloads, thus adding a charge to the original user's card, provides a small disincentive against sharing usernames and passwords. But Napster requires users to insert their credit card security number before making a major purchase, such as the upgrade from the £9.95 service to Napster To Go. What's more, the credit card numbers themselves are not exposed on the accounts page, so there's no danger of having your card details ripped off by someone with whom you're sharing the music service.

Disneyland's coasters have been falling to pieces, killing people, and going down for multi-year unscheduled maintenance ever since an ex-McKinsey consultant was put in charge of the park and heavily slashed the preventative maintenance regime while firing the park's most senior operators, many of whom had run the one-of-a-kind rides since the day they opened and were familiar with their many quirks.

This move is in marked contrast to the stuff that Disney got up to in Florida, where they essentially bought an entire township (actually, an "improvement district" which is like a town but more autonomous) so that they could write their own building code (among other reasons). The building code they wrote let them build things like fiberglass castles, which are not in the usual town codes -- and the castles and other structures they built have stood the test of time.

But in Disneyland, it seems to me that they're pushing for the right to remain negligent, not the right to innovate beyond the imagination embodied in a construction code.

Richard Derevan, a lawyer for Disney, told the justices that under the higher standard of care, "something could always be safer. The ride could be slower, the curves less sharp, the hills less steep. The ride may lose its purpose for being."

The case involves a claim filed by the estate of Cristina Moreno, a tourist from Spain who visited Disneyland in Anaheim on her honeymoon in 2000. Her family says she suffered a brain hemorrhage after riding the Indiana Jones Adventure, which simulates an off-road jeep ride. She died a few months later.

We all curse the patent office for granting patents on things which we find obvious, but they don't always mess up.

The courts have denied Smucker's a patent on what appear to be little uncooked peanut belly and jelly raviolli analogues.

I love the almost aggrieved tone of the Smucker's rep:

"A spokeswoman from Smucker couldn't immediately be reached for comment Friday. In a statement released earlier, the company said it had purchased "a unique idea for making an everyday item more convenient" and made a significant investment in a "unique manufacturing process" for making the product."

Right...because PB&J has always been a problem in daily life. She did not add 'and I want a pony.' Link

Recent releases of Rocky & Bullwinkle, Woody Woodpecker, Tom & Jerry and Looney Tunes have all been marred by DVNR technology. This is not a new problem and DVNR has ruined many cartoon releases since the early-'90s, but it's been angering a lot of cartoon fans in the online community recently. The post has links to other articles and discussions of DVNR and cartoons.
Link

I read your post about the elvi listing and thought you might want to know I have a bit a strange little site where I have collected over 100 autographed photos from various Elvis imps all over the world. It is the Hall of Kings at www.biboland.com.

Sadly, my favorite is no longer performing -- Miss Cybelvis Monroe. She was a professional Marilyn Monroe impersonator who did Marilyn impersonating Elvis. I even had the chance to accompany her on ukulele at one gig. Great stuff, hysterical. She gave it all up to pursue an art career (Link).

My collection all began with El Vez, one of the best Elvis "interpreters". PS: I love Boing Boing and try to read it every day.

Previously on BB: Database of Elvis Impersonators

Boing Boing reader Patrick O'Neill says:

Sorry to be a pedantic dick about it, but the real fake genitive plural of "Elvis" is "Elvum". Back formations are tricky that way.

The experience of humor is similar to the “ah-ha” moment of two things coming together. For humor, two things have to come together to produce the experience of laughter. Normal and abnormal; these things reconciled in a moment, and usually it’s a normal situation violated in some way that we can tolerate. You have to have something normal that becomes abnormal, or something that looks abnormal and then become normal.

So, normal: there’s a guy on the phone, saying “No, Thursday’s out. How about never - is never good for you?” Everything is normal - the office, the syntax of politeness - and yet the message is rude. We have a violation where we have a normal situation.

So everything must be done to increase energy efficiency and decarbonize energy production. Kyoto accords, radical conservation in energy transmission and use, wind energy, solar energy, passive solar, hydroelectric energy, biomass, the whole gamut. But add them all up and it’s still only a fraction of enough. Massive carbon “sequestration” (extraction) from the atmosphere, perhaps via biotech, is a widely held hope, but it’s just a hope. The only technology ready to fill the gap and stop the carbon dioxide loading of the atmosphere is nuclear power.

Nuclear certainly has problems—accidents, waste storage, high construction costs, and the possible use of its fuel in weapons. It also has advantages besides the overwhelming one of being atmospherically clean. The industry is mature, with a half-century of experience and ever improved engineering behind it. Problematic early reactors like the ones at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl can be supplanted by new, smaller-scale, meltdown-proof reactors like the ones that use the pebble-bed design. Nuclear power plants are very high yield, with low-cost fuel. Finally, they offer the best avenue to a “hydrogen economy,” combining high energy and high heat in one place for optimal hydrogen generation.

The storage of radioactive waste is a surmountable problem (see “A New Vision for Nuclear Waste,” December 2004). Many reactors now have fields of dry-storage casks nearby. Those casks are transportable. It would be prudent to move them into well-guarded centralized locations. Many nations address the waste storage problem by reprocessing their spent fuel, but that has the side effect of producing material that can be used in weapons. One solution would be a global supplier of reactor fuel, which takes back spent fuel from customers around the world for reprocessing. That’s the kind of idea that can go from “Impractical!” to “Necessary!” in a season, depending on world events.

The project will consist of 46 titles spanning the entire writing career of the legendary SF author. The Virginia Edition will contain all of Heinlein's novels and short stories; all of his nonfiction titles; several volumes of his letters and personal correspondence; and the vast majority of his interviews, social commentaries, speeches and articles, the site reported.

* Simulating You: Digital doppelgangers for medical applications

* Hunting for Black Gold: Arming wild-catters with 3D ultrasound

* Community Water Works: Cheap water purification for developing nations

John McMillan, manager of the state fire investigations unit, said the pressure wave from the blast was powerful enough to lift the roof off the building.

"The restaurant owner has used the principle that if you use twice the soap, you get your hands twice as clean," Mr McMillan said. "He's just overdone it....This (cockroach bomb) is a good product, but this incident shows if you don't read the manufacturer's instructions, there can be very serious consequences."

web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

Yahoo will dedicate a significant number of servers in one of its Asian facilities for hosting Wikimedia's free content websites. (..) Yahoo!'s donation is a gesture of support for the charitable goals of the Wikimedia Foundation, and does not imply any ownership of the content. Yahoo! does not expect Wikimedia to host advertisements in return for this support. As of April 7, Yahoo! will also test the integration of Wikipedia content in its French-language Yahoo! Search shortcuts (Link), to be followed by other languages to accommodate users in Asia, Latin America, Europe, and the U.S.

There they were, 11 college students, lined up like some alien species before a curious group of about 50 college and university librarians. One University of Minnesota student had a bagful of electronics with him: iPod, PalmPilot, cell phone. He was bright, opinionated, well-spoken. And when was the last time he was in the U's library? "Last year," he said. The collective intake of breath nearly turned the room into a vacuum. What's a university librarian to do with this generation of college students?

In one of the kickoff sessions of the national conference of the Association of College and Research Libraries, the group spent seven hours Thursday at the Minneapolis Convention Center puzzling over the habits of the so-called millennial generation. Confident, sophisticated, tolerant and practical, they are "Internet natives" who are more likely to use Google to research a paper than go to the library. Accustomed to getting information at the click of a mouse button, they are impatient with the slower, word-based searches and single-use computers that many libraries use.

Hi, we were hoping that BoingBoing readers would be perfect for a research project we at the Institute for the Future are starting. We're creating a history of video games, not just with input from experts (we'll use some of course) but primarily using a lot of real players' experiences with the role of video games in their lives. Since we're a non-profit a lot of our work goes public; this history map and the future forecasts we create from it will go on our web site when we're done. Thanks!

Catholic monks living on an island off the coast of Wales have flown in a satellite dish to watch the Pope's funeral.

* "remove references and links to sites or services that do not respect the copyrights of rights holders".'

* "require subscribers to consent in advance to the disclosure of their identity in response to a reasonable complaint of intellectual property infringement by an established right holder defence organisation or by right holder(s) whose intellectual property is being infringed"'

* terminate contracts of recidivist'

* implement instant messaging to communicate with infringers'

* implement filtering technologies to block sites that are 'substantially dedicated to illegal file sharing or download services.'

* voluntarily store data for copyright enforcement...

"To enforce terms of service that prohibit a subscriber from operating a server, or from consuming excessive amounts of bandwidth where such consumption is a good indicator of infringing activities."

"We want one last level of review to get to a stable branch," said Wales. Wikipedia volunteers will also double-check articles to ensure there is no plagiarism or copyright violation.

"We already have a strong policy against plagiarism and copyright violation, but we'll be reading through things again and making sure everything's confirmed," said Wales.

The second petition is signed by several hundred people, Mr. Speaker, from both Burnaby--New-Westminster and throughout Canada, and focuses on the Copyright act. Petitioners want this house to maintain the balance between the rights of the public and the rights of the creators. They demand that the government not extend the term of copyright, and preserve all existing users' rights to ensure a vibrant public domain. The petitioners also call upon parliament to ensure that users are recognized as interested parties and are meaningfully consulted about any proposed changes to the copyright act.

Dr. Patrick Ball is a leading innovator in applying scientific measurement to human rights. He directs the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) at Benetech (www.benetech.org), a nonprofit organization that combines the impact of technological solutions with the social entrepreneurship business model to help disadvantaged communities. He served as the catalyst behind two open source software tools for the human rights community, "Martus" and "Analyzer," which aid in the secure storage and analysis of data on human rights violations. He will be accepting his award from East Timor.

Edward Felten is a professor of Computer Science at Princeton University whose research interests include computer security and technology law and policy. He brings these scholarly interests to his work as an activist. In 2001, Felten and EFF sued the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) in a case challenging the constitutionality of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Felten is also author of "Freedom to Tinker" (www.freedom-to-tinker.com), a highly regarded weblog exploring the ways government and industry attempt to limit technological innovation and what activists can do about it.

Mitch Kapor is President and Chair of the Open Source Applications Foundation (www.osafoundation.org), a nonprofit organization he founded in 2001 to promote the development and acceptance of high-quality application software developed and distributed using open source methods and licenses. He is widely known as founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the "killer app" that made the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980's. In 1990 he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation and served as its chairman until 1994.

The bad news is that in many cases, there is no legal means of redress if you've been fired for blogging. While your right to free speech is protected by the First Amendment, this protection does not shield you from the consequences of what you say. The First Amendment protects speech from being censored by the government; it does not regulate what private parties (such as most employers) do. In states with "at will" employment laws like California, employers can fire you at any time, for any reason. And no state has laws that specifically protect bloggers from discrimination, on the job or otherwise.

One way to make sure your blog doesn't earn you a pink slip is to make sure that you write about certain protected topics. Most states have laws designed to prevent employers from firing people who talk openly about their politics outside of work, for example. Be warned that laws like this do vary widely from state to state, and many are untested when it comes to blogging.

Lawrence Lessig spoke at the FlashForward conference last night in San Francisco. In his talk, title The Cost of Copy Right, he stressed to the Flash designers and developers the necessity of a culture of sharing. While the Flash community has actually been a very open community, sharing content and source, the Flash Player does not provide an easy or standard way for Flash content developers to allow viewers to download their source code (Flash files are separate from their source).

So, I have put together a simple ActionScript library for Flash that allows Flash content creators to easily allow anyone to download the source to their content by right clicking on that content. I have also added a context menu item that allows a distribution license to be specified. Finally, in a nod to Mr Lessig, I have released it all under a Creative Commons license. More info here and a screen shot here.

Isaac Mao is one of China's best known bloggers, and part of our Global Voices posse. He posted a funny and provocative post on April Fools day - it read in part, "Isaac Mao was exiled to Siberia... what do you want to visit now?" and linked to various funny net memes.

Evidently, the Chinese internet censors didn't think it was too funny. Either because of the April Fools' joke - which got a lot of traffic - or a diagram Isaac recently posted, illustrating how he believed the Chinese firewall works, his site has been blocked by his ISP, probably under pressure from Chinese internet censors. Isaac's a wonderfully funny guy and has reassured readers on his backup site - which he helpfully titles "Not IsaacMao.com" - that he sees the situation as a great way to learn about internet censorship in China. GV and others have offered him hosting in the US, but he says he'd prefer to continue hosting in China so he can understand more about how filtering and censorship are working.

The inspiration for CRAZIEST came one day while I was listening to Bookworm with Michael Silverblatt on KCRW (my local NPR station). I am an NPR junkie. I feel lonely when I don’t have it on in my car or streaming out of my computer speakers. Anyway, his guest was Myla Goldberg, who wrote "The Bee Season." I thought, if spelling bee champions are weird, Scrabble players are at least as weird. I began to explore people who build “thought castles” ­ people who take thinking too far. What would make someone need to create her own order? Who would that person be that would have such a strong need for magical thinking?

Update: BB reader Chad says:

The baby in the photo (Josie Robson) just happens to be the first baby born on Flickr: Link. Now she is the first baby seen reaching for a faux rabbit on Flickr... the distinctions keep piling up. (she and her mommies are my roommates)

BB reader David says,

Check out the comic I made out of those incredible baby pictures: Link

UPDATE: Carrie says: "Mark asks on his post about the McDonald's ad whether it's real or fake. It's real. The ad campaign was for McDonald's in Austria and was conducted by the agency CCP Heye." See this and here.

UPDATE: Mark says: "Check out this painting by Casey Weldon [nsfw -- Mark] for more mcdonald's baby-suckling action!!

In 1979 a secret unit was established by the most gifted minds within the US Army. Defying all known accepted military practice - and indeed, the laws of physics - they believed that a soldier could adopt the cloak of invisibility, pass cleanly through walls and, perhaps most chillingly, kill goats just by staring at them. Entrusted with defending America from all known adversaries, they were the First Earth Battalion. And they really weren't joking. What's more, they're back and fighting the War on Terror. 'The men who stare at goats' reveals extraordinary - and very nutty - national secrets at the core of George W Bush's War on Terror.

"There's a pair of Goth-looking ladies caught on security camera who are believed to be the theives. Could you guys help spread the word to your readers to help ID these people?"
Link

The Multipurpose Security and Surveillance Mission Platform (MSSMP), flown from 1992 to 1998, used a ducted fan and a 50 hp engine to "cruise at speeds of up to 80 knots, for up to three hours, with a ceiling of 8,000 feet," according to Helicopters.com. Weighing at 250 pounds with a diameter of six feet, the MSSMP was meant to "provide a rapidly deployable, extended-range surveillance capability for a variety of operations and missions, including: fire control, force protection, tactical security, support to counterdrug and border patrol operations, signal/communications relays, detection and assessment of barriers (i.e., mine fields, tank traps), remote assessment of suspected contaminated areas (i.e., chemical, biological, and nuclear), and even resupply of small quantities of critical items," its makers at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center say. (These are the same wizards of robotics that put together the ultra-intimidating Robart III guard drone.)

The music group was able to choose from six tapes that featured soft, slow music. These included one tape of Chinese folk music and five that had been found effective for reducing postoperative pain in research conducted by (Case Western Resever University nursing professor Marion) Good.

Good, one of the country's leading researchers of drug-free methods to reduce postoperative pain, has found in previous studies that the combination of relaxation and music relieved postoperative abdominal pain significantly more than painkillers.

Elizabeth Boukis, spokeswoman for Sony Electronics, says the work is speculative. "There were not any experiments done," she says. "This particular patent was a prophetic invention. It was based on an inspiration that this may someday be the direction that technology will take us."

2. How do I make one?
Start by loosen up your muscles. Then we recommend using one of two techniques: Prrr or Shaken.
- To Prrr you hold your lips together and say 'prrrr', just like a horse on a sweet summer day.
- To Shakit you just shake your face from side to side and let those cheeks fly free.
Sometimes you drool, but thats perfectly normal...

4. Does it hurt?
After a couple of hard shakes you can indeed feel a bit dizzy or drowsy. If so, just wait for a minute, then start again.

Guy Smiley has a huge & rather odd resume. Among the shows he's hosted are one in which a baby has to pick out its grandmother among an old lady and a mustachioed man & dog with wigs on, one in which all the correct answers are "Triangle," & the "Here Is Your Life" series of reunion specials. Anyone & anything, from an oak tree to Forgetful Jones had their own "Here Is Your Life" special, but my favorite was the one for Sneaker, an old, worn out, red Chuck Taylor lost in the back of a closet until the day Guy Smiley decided he deserved a tribute. Sneaker was visited by his designer, his shoemaker, his owner (represented by her bare feet & legs rolled up like she's expecting a flood in her closet), & his left counterpart (who was bought by a sculptor & bronzed as part of an abstract statue).

In the end, Sneaker found himself lonely after reliving his memories, & wasn't looking forward to an eternity at the back of the closet. That's when Oscar shows up & offers to add Righty to his rotten sneaker collection... but not before he receives a complimentary memory book & official Guy Smiley ankle bracelet!

Sneaker makes the list mostly because gutting the soles of my old Chucks & gluing two halves of a ping pong ball onto the tongue is on my eternal to-do list.

• a panel called "Cyberliberties and the World of Tomorrow - Science Fiction Authors on the Future of Computers, Freedom, and Privacy" with David Brin and Eileen Gunn, Thursday April 14 at 4:15PM
• at EFF's Pioneer Awards at the Sci Fi Museum, 7:00PM on Wednesday, April 13th.
• reading/speech/signing with David Brin on Tuesday April 12th, 7-9PM, JBL Theater, located adjacent to Sci Fi Museum in EMP, 325 5th Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 (free)

Update: Here it is in HTML (Thanks, Jordan!); and ASCII (Thanks, Sid!).

Jamster is the U.S. name of Jamba, a German mobile content provider that VeriSign acquired in June 2004. VeriSign is no stranger to consumer wrath. T-Mobile USA and Cingular Wireless are also named on the suit, presumedly because they allow Jamster to bill for "free" services.

Jamster advertises on TV and other media that mobile customers can get a free ringtone if they send a text message to the number displayed on the ad. In fact, those who sent the text message got multiple messages back notifying them that content was available for download, according to the complaint. The customers had to pay for all those messages (premium SMS).

"Readers are invited to send in pictures of campaigning politicians, election snaps, and the like to our Flickr gallery. The best will be posted to the blog, but we're going to exhibit all of them. The first use of Flickr by a national newspaper? I think so." Link (Thanks, Ben!)

It has always been the case that I work better when I am under deadline. So once the concept turned into something I was actually doing, I started cranking out material. I tidied up my half-finished logo, and e-mailed it to Jim. Rose suggested I recruit a Web designer friend of ours, Debby, into the project. I knew she'd be an asset, but it hadn't occurred to me how much of an asset she would be until I told her, "Yeah, I don't really know what to do with the jackhammer girl" and she turned around and made her a sleeping girl, complete with animated snoring.

I learned a lot about Photoshop last month. Many of the ad parodies were mine, and making some of them required me to learn new skills (like, I had to make most of the background of the Slep ad transparent when dropping in a new background image, so I wouldn't need to worry about the logo alignment changing; this is something I would not have had any clue about a month ago, so I felt pret-ty smooth about it). It took me several tries to tweak the Suicide Girls logo into something sufficiently studious. Using the logo from the actual BoingBoing ad didn't work, because it was too small for me to modify well enough. So I took the logo from the main Suicide Girls page instead, cropping the hair and adding glasses and a shirt, and left the logo a little larger than usual in the finished ad, the better for people to see the modifications

They demand an up-front deposit, so make R300 000 in just the first month The syndicate, which is highly organised, monitors all the empty buildings around the inner city. It then sends in bus-loads of armed gangs into vacant buildings, threaten guards with firearms, then starts renting rooms out at between R500 and R600 a month.

They collect rent for six to eight months knowing that the legal system is slow and, by the time the owners obtain eviction orders, they have enjoyed the benefits of the rents. They then simply walk away, leaving the tenants on the streets.

Now Crutcher Dunnavant has created a speed-reader that runs on Java-capable mobile phones, which makes sense: the screen on a handy is just the right size to show one word at a time. You can install any book on it, though it comes with my Eastern Standard Tribe. Link (Thanks, Crutcher!)

Update: The phone-based speed-reader from Crutcher allows you to import your own next, and now this! Trevor sez, " I've made it easy for people to put their own texts into a speed reader applet, should you meet people who would like to do so. People don't need to know Java, and there is an included example HTML file for easy cutting and pasting into a blog. Oh, and the source code is GPL'ed and included, of course."

NTT believes there are many uses for RedTacton beyond being a replacement for certain Bluetooth or IR applications. It could for example, be used as a kind of RFID. When you touch a door handle at a secure facility, the RedTacton transceiver would look at the ID number stored in the mobile device in your pocket and decide whether or not to let you in. Or a bottle of medicine might sound an alarm if you are not the person to whom the pills have been prescribed.

As a curious crowd gathered at the entrance to Central Park at Fifth Avenue and 60th Street, a team of riggers, steelworkers and Japanese art world figures went into action. Slowly, step by step, a crane operator started moving a pair of psychedelic-yellow fiberglass elephants into place.

When the mother and baby pachyderms came to rest on their lime green steel bases, their trunks beckoning toward a statue of William Tecumseh Sherman just across the way at the Plaza Hotel, an inconspicuous woman in a purple knit hat, ripped blue jeans and woolly brown jacket began proudly posing in front of the sculptures. She was Chinatsu Ban, 31, the creator of the public art sculpture, which is graced by a pile of pink, green and purple dung decorated with hearts. (Photo by Librado Romero/NYT.)

If The Theory of Everything sounds similar to another one of my favorite radio programs, This American Life, well, it is -- but it's a little quirkier and appeals to my interests even more, and I really like the sound of Benjamen's voice. Load up your MP3 player and enjoy. Link

Previously on BB: The Cuban Revolution, South African villages to get digital cinema network, and Ireland's movie theaters to convert within a year?
Image: this is not a digital cinema projector. It's an ad for the Kinetoscope, a home theater system designed by Thomas Edison ca. 1912 which used 22mm film. (via the wonderful 100 years of Film Sizes)

A live web cast will join the various Yuri’s Night parties around the globe that are happening at concurrent times. First observed in 2000, Yuri’s Night occurs annually on April 12, marking the anniversaries of Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s first spaceflight in 1961 and the first space shuttle mission 20 years later. Each year, a series of space-themed parties, dinners and educational events are held around the world to mark these historic achievements. Organized by the non-profit Space Generation Foundation, Yuri’s Night combines popular music, science, and art to introduce teens and young adults to the thrill of space.

Previously on BB: $10 raffle for a trip to Zero G, James Cameron's new 3D film Aliens of the Deep, and Zero G -- Xeni's Wired News and NPR reports.

* Berkeley's Star Planet Hunter: Geoffrey Marcy's search for other Earths

* Tiny Test Tubes and Nanoscale Membranes: Building blocks for longer-lasting batteries and supersensitive poison detectors

* Yosemite Then and Now: Tracing the path of a century-old wildlife survey

"It's actually pretty clear in the city ordinance that there are exemptions for dance and theater and artistic merits, but the law also clearly states that the exemption does not apply to adult businesses," said police spokeswoman Lynn Hightower. "If it were an art studio and models were actually posing, that would be one thing. But these women weren't posing, they were dancing."

More incredibly, lifestyle centers do all the things that urban planners have promoted for years as ways of counteracting sprawl: squeeze more into less space, combine a mix of activities, and employ a fine-grained street grid to create a public realm—a "sidewalk ballet," in Jane Jacobs' alluring phrase. The irony is almost too perfect: Malls are now being designed to resemble the downtown commercial districts they replaced. What sweet vindication for urban sophisticates!

Not quite. Lifestyle centers are privately owned space, carefully insulated from the messiness of public life. Desert Ridge, for example, has a rigorous code of conduct, posted beneath its store directory. The list of forbidden activities includes "non-commercial expressive activity"—not to mention "excessive staring" and "taking photos, video or audio recording of any store, product, employee, customer or officer." "Photos of shopping party with shopping center décor, as a backdrop," however, are permitted.

10. Guruji knows what's best for you
While we acknowledge the possibility that a real true guru could know what's best for you, s/he'd also know it's best to let you decide for yourself. Gurus who pretend to know what's best for all their devotees are fooling themselves as much as they are their disciples...

4. Guruji has no desires
This is based in the most pervasive of the occluding expectations, that desire somehow prevents self-realization. Desire is merely the way the body responds to conditions. The guru may (or may not) be over sex, but when they want a Twinkie, they go get a Twinkie.

Young chimps "play pant" as they mischievously chase and tickle each other.

And when rats play, they make chirps which some scientists associate with positive emotional feelings.

When rats are tickled in a playful way, they become socially bonded to humans and are rapidly conditioned to seek tickles, the US neuroscientist explains in Science.

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the most influential public service content provider in the world, has been behind the project from the start and is using the Creative Commons ideology as a lynchpin for its core digital project, the Creative Archive. Beyond this, institutions such as OfCom, Research Councils U.K., JISC, the Museums Libraries and Archives Council, The National Health Service, and the British Library are all making mention of CC in policy documents mapping the future dissemination of knowledge and culture. It may just represent good timing, but Lawrence Lessig's thinking has emerged as a framework for a country looking to maintain its lead role as a global content provider in the digital age.

By contrast, the commercial creative industries have raised the kind of misinformed objections to Creative Commons that will be tiresomely familiar to those engaged in the IP debate in the States. Although, during his research, Tsiavos received a warm welcome from many of the U.K.'s copyright revenue collecting societies, themselves keen to modernise practice for the digital age, the music business press in particular have been incredibly skeptical about the value of Creative Commons. Key concerns voiced have been that Creative Commons somehow undermines traditional copyright protection, that through taking part in what is in the U.K. a novel "registration process," creators may unwittingly give away their rights irrevocably, and also, in a wonderfully pitched recursive argument, that signing a CC licence could result in musicians being discounted by a music business hostile to CC. For the time being at least, the idea that, as Tsiavos puts it, "commons are not against markets; they only create new ones" appears to be falling on deaf ears.

The social factors inherent in selling large-sized clothes to teens are really complicated (when a group of girls goes shopping together, do the skinny girls join their heavier friends at the Torrid?) and the article does a good job of turning them up, including a coda about whether a plus-size fashion botique encourages obesity ("You don't lose weight by tough love, whether from your mother or your local clothing store. It's a personal choice, and a difficult choice -- and if I can't do it for myself, I'm not going to do it for the Gap.")

For some girls, even one piece of clothing can mean the difference between enjoying a party and hiding in a corner, or not going at all. Erica Santiago, a 17-year-old with orange-streaked hair, giant rave pants, and zipper-pull earrings, was shopping recently in Torrid's Staten Island store. While fielding calls on her pink cellphone, Erica, who says she feels "really comfortable" with herself at about 185 pounds, described the thrill of finding a trendy bathing suit that fit. "Before, I wouldn't even dare try them on. I would just guess, get home, have them not fit, and then return them," she says, noting that those that did fit were hideous. If forced to go near the water, she'd wear a T-shirt over whatever abomination she'd settled for. At Torrid, however, she found a suit she loves, black with star-shaped studs near the neck. She's now done away with the coverups, she says. "I feel more confident -- really good. It feels great to be able to go to a pool party and actually wear a bathing suit." (Torrid also does big business at prom time and Halloween.)...

But here's the problem with shopping online -- and off -- for teens, though: For many of them, shopping is inherently, or at least ideally, a group event. "Girls especially are incredibly social about shopping," says Callender of Teenage Research. When they shop online, they miss potential hangout time with their friends. But when they shop in an actual store, one that's not wall-to-wall plus sizes, it sucks. "I typically avoid certain stores because the people that work or shop there make me feel uncomfortable, says Savannah Rios, 16, of Las Vegas (who wears size 14 to 16). "There have been a few times where I'll be at a store and I'll ask for my size and they give me a weird look and tell me they don't have it. It's frustrating." But at Torrid, she says, "You feel comfortable when you're in there because you don't have girls looking at you weird because you're not a size zero."

Update: Megan sez, "I worked at Torrid for over a year from July of 03 to September of 04. From the time I started, I could tell they were trying to change the store. I had know it to be the perfect store for me, a plus sized girl into alternative types of dress. I could leave that store easily spending $200. It was a great alternative to lane bryant's, stuffy middle age clothing. As the time passed when I was working there, You could tell they were changing the style, saying they were trying to open the store to all women and girls, and that they would still have clothes for us alternative girls. This was a crock of shit. By the time I left, the sign and bags had changed to pink instead of the old black and red. The clothes were all pinks, turquoise and pastels. They had used hot topic's plus sized patrons to bring torrid to life, then tossed them to the way side once the store had taken off. The only problem with this was the fact that they alienated their base clientele, and were not bringing in enough "normal" people. We rarely made sales our quotas after the change. Now that torrid has changed, I once again struggle to find clothes I love, and have to settle with clothes I can stand."

...[Y]ou do need to let the 1st PSP completely load into the game, and then only can you remove the game to place it into the second unit. Now on the second unit go to ad-hoc mode and find the server that is already started. Enter the game, which means load it, and now you can remove the disc if you wish to add a third or fourth unit into the game.

The vast majority of South Africa's 40-million people have never been to the cinema, kept away by the legacy of apartheid, poverty and language barriers. But the nation's exhibs are hoping to change that by using the indigenous filmmaking along with digital technology to connect to the missing multitudes (...)

Starting in September, Shout Africa will roll out 20 digital cinemas around the country where facilities are most lacking, to make the movies affordable and accessible. Shout Africa chief executive Lance Samuels says that for local producers, these cinemas will provide another distribution outlet as well as the opportunity to build new audiences.

Locally produced films in indigenous languages and English will be shown alongside foreign features, with subtitles in the vernacular language of the region of the cinema.Besides the usual popcorn and soft drinks, popular traditional township foods such as maize porridge, spicy sausages, samp (hominy), mealies (corn on the cob) and fried chicken will be on sale to help make the d-cinema experience more African.

Samuels says d-cinemas will be located in revamped township community centers to create a quality experience, including comfortable chairs, high quality digital projection and state of the art surround sound. And, hoping to seal the deal, prices will be much lower than at urban multiplexes.

Here's more info on the "Shout Africa" d-cinema initiative, Link, by way of Sithengi -- a company that promotes the South African television and film industry.

Link to Variety story (paid sub required, but the story seems to be largely cribbed from the Sithengi press release anyway... )

Previously on BB: The Cuban Revolution, and Ireland's movie theaters to convert within a year?

Update John Horner says: ]

Do we really believe that the vast majority of South Africans have *never* been to the cinema? I find that very hard to believe, and the press release from Sithengi doesn't say that either, it says 'The majority of our nation has never had an opportunity to make use of accessible and economical cinemas' which is far from the same thing.

I lived for a year in Sudan, one of the poorest countries in the world, which makes South Africa look like Paris France, but everyone still went to the cinema ... for certain values of "cinema" of course. It was a sheet against a wall in a building with no roof but I say it counts!

I think the people at Variety have extrapolated hugely, bringing in that 'legacy of apartheid' crap themselves and making some rather strange, not to say patronising, first-world assumptions.

The $300 kit, which is already starting to go on sale at RadioShack retail stores, has wheels, spin motors, gears, a programmable microcontroller, servos, a radio receiver, a 6-channel radio transmitter, and tons of Erector-set style hardware for building robots. I like the fact that you are encouraged to cut and bend the metal structural pieces to build you bots. They'll be selling sensors and effectors in the coming months, and the platform will be open enough that lead users will be able to develop and sell aftermarket sensors and components for it.

I want to find out what my garage roboticist buddy, Gareth Branwyn thinks of Vex. I'm going to ask him to write about it for Make.
Link

I will help you to feel a complete women from head to toe. I am looking for girls/women to have free sex from any where any age. Only for babes want to have alternate harmony. First I am not sure if you going to get this mail. In case, if you do I would like to say Hello first. I am decent working man. I am very open-minded looking for a open minded person. I am looking for a person who is understanding and likes to explore the fantasy of life.

Have you ever wanted to explore your fantasy? Have you ever thought about having a wild erotic experience of wilderness? This is only for woman seeking erotic experience head to toe and feel the aroma of life. This change is to fulfill your inner desire & feel complete women. Explore the unsaid of life. Please have an open mind. I would prefer you to mail me. If you desire some thing that you want to experience, please write to sgr_nes@yahoo.com.

I will surely come over to your dreamland.

"It's expensive, but worth every penny," Anita Thompson said. "I'd like to have several explosions. He loved explosions."

She said planning for the fist has been guided by a video of Thompson and longtime illustrator-collaborator Ralph Steadman, recorded in the late 1970s when they visited a Hollywood funeral home and began mapping out the cannon scheme.

I just returned to the Maya highlands from Naha, in the Lacandon jungle. 24 hours ago I was watching young Lacandones struggling to dock their dugout cayuco, a transport technology now being forgotten after thousands of years of Maya navigation. 48 hours ago I promised a traditional elder and his son both VHS and DVD copies of my footage of them from 25 years ago, then went to see the incense burner gods in Antonio's temple, and visit his jungle milpa to pick up maize from the corn crib.

(...) Yes there is leveling, but I have to believe there are still sharp divides, between two places a 6 hour drive apart, or between two neighborhoods in New York. Managing this frontier will occupy many of us in the next years. What interests me is the persistence of culture and cultural differences through these world-flattening phases. It happened here to the Maya in the Spanish conquest, the exploitation of the jungles, and the diffusion of roads and communication. But the old ways remain embedded in the new. Remix on a global scale.

Image: Dave interviews a group of indigenous girls near a historic site (link to full-size pic).

Previously on Boing Boing: Guatemala -- Xeni's snapshots, Guatemala: street vendor kids on Pacific coast,

Conrad Sykes, 16, created a Web site that bypassed the district's Internet content filter, which was hampering student research, the student said. Sykes said he did this so students could access research sites - but it also allowed students to visit adult sites or others that the school district intends to screen out. Sykes' site was so successful that many Spokane Public School students - and people from as far away as Alabama and Pennsylvania - used it thousands of times between Dec. 14 and Feb. 22.

Sykes was even asked by his computer teacher, Wes Marburger, to make a presentation to other classes on the number of visitors to his Web site. The district filter is called Bess, and a dog is in the logo.

In the end, Sykes was suspended for two days in February for violating school computer use policies. His teacher was given a written reprimand and removed from teaching computer classes. The state Office of Professional Practices is now investigating and could potentially take away Marburger's teaching certificate.

My colleagues and I in the Sociology department at Columbia University are doing an experiment about pop music which might be interesting to your readers. If they participate they will have a chance to discover and download new music for free.

After listening to the music of Britney Spears, we became interested in why some musicians become superstars while other seemingly similar musicians don't. To understand this process better, we decided to find out how people form their musical tastes. We have created a website where people can listen to, rate, and download songs by cool, up-and-coming artists. All the downloads are free and legal so the site is a great place to find new music, help support emerging artists, and help out science -- all at the same time.

Once the research is completed we hope to be able to shed light not just on the popularity of music, but also on the popularity of other cultural objects like books, movies, and works of art.

...news, live performances, short-form shows and music videos directly to your PC at broadband speeds. MTV Overdrive offers tons of exclusive content and lets you choose how you want to watch- that's the "hybrid" part. You can watch it like TV or jump to your favorite segments like DVD. You can watch entire shows like video-on-demand or you can build your own playlist.

Unfortunately, the service is hamstrung by DRM features which effectively cockblock all Mac users.

"The videos on MTV Overdrive are encoded in Microsoft Windows Media 10 format to insure the maximum possible video quality. In order to offer you a broad selection of full-length music videos on-demand and free of charge, MTV Overdrive uses Windows Digital Rights Management (DRM) to protect the videos from unauthorized re-distribution. Unfortunately, Microsoft's Windows Media Player Plug-in for Macintosh does not currently support DRM. When DRM support becomes available for Macintosh, MTV Overdrive will work to support Macintosh."

Another buzzkill: Firefox isn't supported, IE is mandatory. But perhaps worst of all is this happy fun morsel from the privacy policy:

If you are a registered user, you also acknowledge, understand and hereby agree that you are giving us your consent to track your activities (...)

Last month I visited Dharamsala, India, home of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan Government in Exile, and thousands of Tibetan refugees. It was there I met local bad boy, Lobsang Wangyal, founder of the Miss Tibet contest. Lobsang is a cross between Sergei Diaghilev and Jim Morrison, with a little Bert Parks thrown in for good measure.

When I first heard about the Miss Tibet contest I thought someone was pulling my leg. Tibetan society is charming but conservative, and the thought of Tibetan hotties mincing down the catwalk in their skimp challenged all credibility. But it turns out to be true. So true, in fact, that it's managed to work the Chinese government into a lather. The current Miss Tibet, Tashi Yangchen, was entered into the Miss Tourism world pageant held in Zimbabwe this past February. When the Chinese got wind of it they demanded Miss Tibet be thrown out of the competition, since China had invaded and occupied Tibet since 1950 and declared it to be non-existent and part of China. Since that time approximately 1.2 million Tibetans have been killed by the Chinese army, but who's counting?

At any rate, Tashi got chucked from the competition but exited with a lot of class. This year's Miss Tibet contest will be held in October in Dharamsala, India. The region is home to some of the world's best hiking and most striking natural beauty. I'm planning on making the trek and supporting the pageant, which BTW could use some sponsors. Any rich, liberal Buddhists out there?

Update: Stuart Sands says Tibetans are not an uptight people:

There was a comment in the piece on the Miss Tibet Pageant that stated “Tibetan society is charming but conservative”. While not an expert, I have spent some time in Tibet proper (as opposed to Tibetan communities in exile in India) and was surprised (at first) at the bawdiness and rawness of some of the humor, shared by men and women equally. They did and said things in public that I would think twice about doing here. It is certainly a charming culture and definitely there are conservative aspects to it, but, from what I witnessed, it is also an “earthy” culture and not prudish.

In 1932, there were an estimated 150 pinball-machine makers worldwide ... Although sales have remained stable at about 10,000 units a year, the coin-op business has been on a downward trajectory for years. As recently as the early 1990s, the industry churned out more than 100,000 machines annually.

Tony Troiano grimaced as he was lifted off the floor by giant fishhooks pierced through the skin on his shoulders. Within minutes, he started to spin, swing his feet and declare the painful experience "the greatest thing" ever. "I was on Cloud Nine," the Wethersfield, Connecticut teenager said as he joined fellow body suspension practitioners at an annual convention over the weekend. "It was euphoric. It was spiritual. I'd do it again today if I wasn't so sore."

Update: Shannon Larratt says, "There are hundreds of photos of the event there for people who want more." Link. Thanks for hooking us up, Shannon!

Update: Dan points us to a Podcast feed from Quirks as well.

The industrious kids at MIT are raffling off a trip to Ft Lauderdale to ride Zero-G's 727 microgravity jet. The organizer is a member of Zero G Corp.'s flight crew. Everyone always tells him they wish they could fly in zero gravity, too -- so he created a raffle so that one of them could!

Included in the prize: airfare (based on a R/T to the takeoff site in Ft. Lauderdale on Song airlines from Boston), and hotel. The raffle is need-not-be-present-to-win so anyone in the US can enter. Drawing will held on Saturday April 9th [extended] on April 16th. The organizer is Stephen Steiner, an MIT Grad Student in Material Science and an Aerogel genius. He can be reached at ssteiner [at] transuranium.com.

Previously on BB: James Cameron's new 3D film Aliens of the Deep, and Zero G -- Xeni's Wired News and NPR reports. Image: Xeni on a Zero G flight during which Loretta was a crew member (shot by Jim Campbell)

In just a single serving, you'll experience a wide array of textures. Without getting too gross, it's because the disease is more advanced in some kernels than others. One bite might be kinda chewy, while the next might burst in your mouth like a black pus-filled blister.

UPDATE: Patricio López says: "Just one small correction to your last Boing Boing post, the name of the dish is huitlacoche not cuitlacoche." Wikipedia Link

UPDATE: David says: "Your Update/Correction to the Cuitlacoche/Huitlacoche is not right. Both spellings are accepted....just check out the pictures of the two cans shown in The Sneeze's post.

"Furthermore, even the wikipedia entry lists cuitlacoche as an alternate spelling."

UPDATE: David Gallardo says: "That's an unfair slur against Mexican cuisine! AFAIK, nobody eats huitlacoche whole & plain like that. It's actually quite delicious (and not at all disgusting) as part of a properly prepared dish, esp. when matched with chile poblano & fresh cheese or cream. My favorite recipes are a huitlacoche soup (sopa de huitlacoche) and crepes (crepas de huitlacoche). It's certainly no worse than Chinese cloud ears & such.

"Now, if you want to talk about disgusting Mexican food, this guy should look into some of the other pre-Columbian food that is still popular in south & southcentral Mexico, the stuff involving various grubs & insects..."

UPDATE: Steve from The Sneeze responds: "David, my apologies to Mexican cuisine. I usually love most of it, but as a straight ingredient I just didn't enjoy the flavor of the Huitlacoche. As far as properly prepared dishes go: the Goya can appears to have it simply wrapped in a tortilla, where I probably still wouldn't enjoy it.  Let's consider it my loss.  Now where can I find those grubs? :)"

Being the green gal that I am, but not wishing to sacrifice my own health for the planet (sorry, earth, just being honest), I decided just to re-use the flimsy plastic water bottles for as long as I could. I was happy with this solution for quite some time, until I learned the horrible truth: HARMFUL BACTERIA! Yes, with each refreshing sip I was backwashing germs into my water and providing them with a warm, wet place to grow.

So I did what any bacteria-fearing primate would do and bought a nice, reusable Nalgene bottle. Boy oh boy, nothing makes you look or feel more like a tree-hugging, mushroom hunting nature girl than one of those bright, hard plastic bottles! Until it comes out that Nalgene gives you BRAIN DAMAGE! Yes, Bisphenol A, used to make Nalgene bottles and other hard plastic projects, apparently seeps into the body and can, in certain doses, mess with the function of the brain. (I’m paraphrasing/exaggerating and not everybody agrees, so look it up.) I could almost dismiss the fear as environmentalist fear mongering, but it turns out that California legislators take the threat seriously enough to consider banning it in children’s products.

(The bride's) father, Stephen, said: "It was very impressive. They float away slowly and create quite a stir. It was very good."

But he admitted that when the wedding was being planned no one considered the reaction the display might have caused.

"I hadn't even thought about it," Mr Lye said. Admitting that the lanterns could have been seen by unsuspecting people as possible UFOs, he said: "They did cluster in the night sky."

Lecture 1: Technology will Determine the Future of the Human Race

Lecture 2: Collaboration

Lecture 3: Innovation and Management

Lecture 4: Nanotechnology and Nanoscience

Lecture 5: Risk and Responsibility

Update: The Reith Lectures will be available as MP3s (including podcasts) -- yay!

Update: Dominic sez, "there's a very entertaining story by M.K. Hobson in SciFi.com's Fiction archive by the name of 'Hell Notes'. It's about a Chinese restaurant that caters to the dead who pay, of course, in Hell Notes."

Update 2: Alvin sez, "Today - April 5, HK time - happens to be the Qing Ming festival, the public holiday when families visit cemetaries to pay their respects. Burnt offerings don't end with money - entire paper-and-cardboard houses, cars (Mercedes seem especially popular), clothes - even laptop computers are burned in traditional funerals as offerings to the dead. Unfortunately I can't send along photos as 1) I don't have any and 2) there's some degree of superstition surrounding keeping (and, I suspect, photographing) them."

Update 3: Derryl sez, "don't forget that Maureen McHugh also wrote a similar story, which won the World Fantasy Award, called 'Ancestor Money.'"

Update 4: Yimay Yang sez,

I just got back from a visit to Taiwan and my family visited a lot of relatives' graves and burned a lot of money and paper houses. I have a few photos on Flickr and attached more photos on the paper house including a car, motorcycle and friends that we burned for my uncle who recently passed.

Update 5: Weizhong Yang sez, "I would like to tell you a joke about this tradition. It happened about half year ago in Taiwan. An grandfather heard about there was a famous Taiwanese star published her new album, then he asked his grandson to buy a copy. His grandson had buy a compact disk and he thought that he did not need to buy another one, he could just use his compact disk recorder to copy this album to another writable disk. Then the grandson told his grandfather, 'Well, I will burn a copy for you.' The grandfather felt extraordinary angry, because in his mind, 'burning something for him' means cursing him to go to hell!"

"Micro-organisms called black-pigmented bacteria (BPB) such as Porphyromonas gingivalis and Prevotella intermedia have been implicated in the initiation and progression of gum disease," says Soukos. Blue light kills these bacteria because it is absorbed by specific chemical compounds within the bacteria - called iron-porphyrins - causing a cascade of reactions fatal to the organism...

Bacteria in the pure culture were killed in seconds, whereas bacteria in the plaque samples were killed selectively. Those containing iron-porphyrins were most affected - a beneficial result as it is iron-porphyrins that help bacteria in harming the gums. It is the acidic environment produced by the harmful bugs that results in tooth decay.

* The choice of the next pope--one of the most influential leaders in the world (spiritual leadership and influence over about 1 billion people)--is one of the least transparent processes around...

* Now suppose someone built (a) a wiki to pool information about the candidates and (b) an online and SMS feedback system to register the global point of view.

* If such a thing were to happen would this be a good thing for (a) the Roman Catholic church, (b) for the Christian community, (c) for the world?

Update: Stephane sez, "Since 1274, and the Ubi Periculum rule, cardinals are fed one meal a day during the election, and only bread and water if they haven't decided after 5 days. They are held in complete seclusion and the recent Universi Dominici Gregis regulation forbids access to newspapers, radio or television. I guess blogging towards/from the conclave is not an option either."

Update 2: Dan sez, "the story was true -- in the 13th century. The rules were put in place because the intrigue surrounding the elections had become so intense that the church went without a pope (horrors!) for three years. However, while the major principle behind the rules still obtains -- isolation of the cardinals to prevent outside interference in their choice -- the rules themselves have been repeatedly amended and the conditions under which the electors meet and vote are not nearly as harsh as described. In fact, JP2 had a new domicile built for the cardinals to make sure their conditions during the next election conclave (from Latin: "cum," with, and "clavis," key; a place that may be securely closed)."

% telnet time.nist.gov 78
Trying 192.43.244.18...
Connected to time.nist.gov.
Escape character is '^]'.

P: P: My name is Patsy: and my husband's name is Paul:
We come from Pittsburgh: and we sell Peaches::
880-223-821-266-590-908-785
$ 0 875 3000 8 1 0 0
Connection closed by foreign host.

Update: Ethan sez, "That non-standard port on the US time server is actually the long forgotten Finger protocol. On Linux or Mac, type finger root@192.43.244.18"

Update 2: Dave sez, "From this document, it looks like this is simply an automated monitoring tool used by the adminstrators of the time service to check on the status of the servers. If you look for the list of servers given, you can finger some (but not all) of them and get the same info.

"In particular, the second number of the second groupings appears simply to be a second count, though what the rest of the numbers mean is unclear. It's possible that the CIA is sending encryption keys to its spies this way, but it seems unlikely. A few of the numbers in the first grouping barely change at all over repeated pings, which would make it extremely poor key material generator."

Update 3: Matthew points out a NIST employee's explanation of the codes:

Let me explain what you are seeing.
1. The first text is a pseudo-random text designed to confuse automated search engines (note the strategic colons). There are 16 poems and they are sent in a random sequence. The text is derived from a jump-rope game and has no special meaning.

2. The remaining digits provide internal information on the operation of the server and are used for automated remote monitoring. All NIST servers do this.

3. Most of the digits relate to complicated internal parameters. However, the first 3 values after the $ sign are easy to explain the first is the overall state of the server (0=ok,>0=various failures) the second is the time since the server was last calibrated (in sec), and the third is the nominal interval between calibrations (in sec) the remaining parameters have to do with the internal clock control of the system.

All we did was register a forum (which has now been taken down by the service provider, but we have a backup) and fill it with fictional posts by fictional Toothing ’sceners. A week later, we had what appeared to be a vibrant UK Toothing community all ready to roll, and I sent the link off to Gizmodo, a gadget blog. They reported it (you can see that first story here, with a credit at the end to ‘S’, my super-subtle pseudonym). Everyone else linked to / blogged / ripped off their story. Things started to roll, and we became a ludicrous, implausible meme. In turn, that brought Real People to our forum. Others created forums for their localities - Sweden, Denmark, Italy, whatever.

A few days later, the print media requests started coming. We kept a record at the start of where we were mentioned, but there were soon too many to record in full. There are hundreds of tiny anecdotes, though. I had to write Penthouse-letters-page style sexual adventure stories for a full page article and interview in The Telegraph.

"...In Kuwait bluetooth for dating and such is standard. Anytime you enter a coffee shop or restaurant etc you turn on bluetooth start searching and message random people looking for reactions. Once you know who it is and you start up a conversation via bluetooth texting. This could lead to nothing dating or some other encounters later. This has been happening in Kuwait since the first bluetooth enabled Nokia phone with the notes options."

When using the simulator, the student palpates virtual objects representing the bovine reproductive tract, receiving feedback from a PHANToM haptic device (inside a fibreglass model of a cow), while the teacher follows the student’s actions on the monitor and gives instruction.

UPDATE: Jim says: Who needs a plastic cow simulator? I'll see your cow simulator and raise you one fistula: at Cornell, they have real, living cows with holes in 'em.
Link

UPDATE: Camilo Salas says: "I'm from Chile. Something so stupid as the Chilean Ufology show the park-walker alien picture in all the media here. After a while we discovered that the deep space visitor was only a dog. You can see the picture here, and then check the links at the right column for the step-by-step process."

Earthcore is the first-ever podcast novel. From the site: "EarthCore is the world's first podcast-only novel: you can't find it in stores, you can't download the full audio, and the only way to find out what happens is to subscribe to the podcast. This novel is a cross between episodic modern-action fare like "24" and classic sci-fi movies like Predator and Starship Troopers."

So far, the prologue and the first five chapters have been released and my wife and I are hooked. Even if you aren't into podcasts, it's still a free (and very good) audiobook!

This reminded me of the time I met Hoffman. It was around 1985 or 1986, when Carla and I went to a 1960s conference in San Francisco. (Tom Robbins, Timothy Leary, Paul Krassner, and so on, were there. We went mainly to see Leary.)

Some reporter from a paper up in Marin or Sonoma spotted us and decided to write an article about us -- still not sure why. Anyway, he insisted on introducing us to Abbie Hoffman, who was there. I think he had recently come out of hiding. I hate meeting famous people in situations like this, and I wasn't looking forward to meeting but Carla and I meekly went along at the reporter's insistence. Hoffman was standing in the lobby, looking very grumpy. We were introduced, and he gruffly shook our hands, but avoided eye contact. He then announced to us, without looking at any of us, that he needed to find a payphone to get the score to a ball game, because he had money riding on the outcome. He walked away without saying anything else.

I don't blame him for not wanting to be bothered, but I learned something. To this day, when I have the opportunity to meet a famous person, I almost always decline. I usually don't have anything to say to them and they don't have anything to say to me.
Link (via WFMU's Beware of the Blog)

Hidden below the town, situated on 9 levels, reaching 327 m deep Wieliczka underground is nearly 300 km of galleries and 3000 chambers. 3,5 km route 64-135 m below ground level is available for tourists. Magnificent chapels, captivating underground lakes, original tools and equipment, traces of mining works give the comprehension about people's fight against the elements, their work, passion and beliefs. Wieliczka miners left lots of salt carvings and murals. After the sightseeing, tourists can rest in the chamber complex 125 m underground where they can find souvenir shops, restaurant and a post office.

The book is titled Blind Shrike. It's not a rotten book, I think. In fact, it's a pretty traditional fantasy quest, just one that, to me, makes sense in George W. Bush's America. The hero of the story is on a quest for his own lost ignorance and innocence. He really doesn't want to know too much because, as many of us have learned, too much information is a soul-sucking pain in the ass. In the book you'll also find magic and monsters, angels and demons, magical swords and forbidden books. And blimps. Every fantasy novel should have at least one blimp.

So, with a last blurt of carnival barking, I now give you Blind Shrike. You might like it or you might hate it. I hope that you download it and enjoy it. But if you don't, tough. It's free. Don't write me any stupid emails. Instead, go write your own damned book.

Cyberpunk is one of the older staples of role-playing (indeed, it was GURPS Cyberpunk that was just to justify the Secret Service's raid on Steve Jackson Games and the subsequent seizure of SJG's BBS and all its emails -- which led to the formation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which provided legal assistance to argue for the privacy of the SJG customers whose emails the Secret Service wanted introduced into evidence), but for all my engagement with the genre as a literary form, I've never played any of the cyberpunk RPGs. My RPGing days are long behind me, leaving me with nothing more than good memories and a lingering fondness for polyhedral dice and painted lead miniatures.

If Ex Machina is anything to judge by, this is an RPG genre with major potential for engrossing play. Of course, net.heads have been writing collaborative cyberpunk fiction for years, at least as far back as alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo. As a genre, cyberpunk has the kind of potential for wish-fulfillment and adventure that appeals to a lot of us, and it's a short step from daydreaming about embedded neural interfaces, reflex augmentation, and dystopian gang-wars to playing them out in collaborative gaming experiences.

Ex Machina starts with a surprisingly erudite and comprehensive -- yet very accessible -- essay on the literary history of cyberpunk, a kind of annotated bibliography of the genre's roots from Brunner to Gibson to Stephenson to Vinge to the new generation -- me, Stross, others. The authors run down the major thematic trends in the field and the way that the stories that we've told can be turned into gaming fodder.

Following that is an adapted version of the rules, which seem perfectly serviceable to my (admittedly out-of-practice) eye. Most interesting to me here are the essays of advice for players and game-masters about how to behave like cyberpunk antiheroes and how to guide players through this process. The authors touch on some of the ways that a game master (GM) can use contemporary technology (WiFi laptops around the gaming table; email, SMS and IM between games) to enhance the game.

The rules then take apart all the themes in every flavor of cyberpunk, post-cyberpunk, SIngularity and what-have-you fiction and expose their formulaic roots, literally reducing them to numerical expressions of, for example, the comparative bad-assness of Hiro Protagonist's Metaverse bike and Molly Mirrorshades's retracting claws. It made me a little squeamish, seeing it all turned into quantities and formulae like that, but then I got to the meat of the book: the scenarios.

The last 200 pages of this 350-page book are taken up with four incredibly, fetishistically detailed scenarios for cyberpunk worlds that GMs can take their players through. These scenarios read like the bibles for collaboratively written TV series (incredibly good collaboratively written TV series, miles better than any of the sf I've seen on TV, by and large). In a sense, they are: they are intended to provide GMs with all the background they need to constrict a series of episodic adventures that they engage their players' imaginations in gritty, dystopian shenanigans.

The scenarios include rich background material, character biographies of the major powers in each world, science and technology notes, some timelines, gadgets, sociopolitical notes, and all manner of sidebars that will doubtless serve as invaluable aid to GMs who are setting up campaigns.

The authors may have reduced cyberpunk to numeric formulae, but they've also shown how those formulae can be used to generate original, compelling, surprising sf.

I hung up my dice a long time ago -- the world just got too busy for me to commit to trying to intersect with others' schedules and availability. This game looks fun enough to tempt me out of retirement. Link

Update: Clint sez, "The entire dX rules system used in the Ex Machina book (Tri-Stat) is being offered in PDF form for free by the publisher in an attempt to build awareness. The free pdf link appears in the right column. You can also buy the book, nicely printed and bound, for the relatively cheap price of $10 (Amazon for $9)."

Update 2: Nelson sez, "Those who are interested in purchasing Ex Machina in either its dead-tree or PDF forms, should be aware that there is also a D20 version (as well as a dX version). D20 is a more baroque system than dX (or even GURPS). I wouldn't recommend it to beginners. Saying that, the D20 book has all the same essay material that the dX book does." Neslon sez, "Oops, looks like I jumped the gun: the D20 version is still in production (it takes time to recrunch the numbers from one system to another). But it will have the same essay material, 'cos that's how GoO do their crossover books."

Not only do they get something like twenty-five songs (MP3s) in the most recent Salon Music Mix and archived December 2004 mix, but they can download a new song (MP3) every weekday with Audiofile (which has an RSS feed), and there's a bunch of archived stuff too, some in MP3 format.

True, some of these free downloads are not exclusive to Salon, but Salon selects good tunes to give its members. I don't have the time to scan a billion free song sites and MP3 blogs; Salon performs the filtering.

Robomaid is a low tech, very cheap version of Roomba cleaner.  It doesn't clean rugs, but has done a great job on our wood, tile, and stone floors.   The design is wonderful in its elegance: a powered ball propelling a sweeping "hat".  Like Roomba it cleans along walls, under tables and desks, and in corners where it would be difficult to clean otherwise.  It uses no intelligence, so it randomly changes direction, but is surprisingly thorough.  Especially since I don't care how long it takes.

In this traditional model, a user’s only role is to have needs, which manufacturers then identify and fill by designing and producing new products. The manufacturer-centric model does fit some fields and conditions. However, a growing body of empirical work shows that users are the first to develop many and perhaps most new industrial and consumer products. Further, the contribution of users is growing steadily larger as a result of continuing advances in computer and communications capabilities.

You can download the entire book at no charge from von Hippel's site.
Link

UPDATE: Peggy Salz of TheFeature interviewed Eric von Hippel today.

TheFeature: In your book, you talk mostly about product development. How do you know the lead-user approach can also create breakthrough services?

Von Hippel: A field study involving a major Swedish mobile telecoms company recently tested this and produced some surprising results. These researchers adopted the "toolkit innovation method" and supplied a sample of university students tools to develop their own services. Compared to the services generated by professional developers the students' services were by far more novel, creative and cutting-edge.

For example, one girl was frustrated because she was unable to find an apartment. She cleverly developed a mobile alert service that would contact her phone every time the university web site posted an ad for an apartment that fit her requirements. This insight can obviously become the basis for a suite of mobile alert services.
Link

Mules, lowered by rope down the narrow shaft into the mine, were used in the early mining operations. Once down in the mines, they stayed there until they died.

Workers decended in a two-level elevator in which six men pressed face-to-face during the long ride down.

Getting equipment down into the massive cavern provided many problems. Pickup trucks, jeeps and large trucks had to be cut up or disassembled and lowered down the shaft piece by piece, to be reassembled in shop areas below. Large dump truck tires too big for the shaft had to be compressed and bound before they would fit down the opening.

In a 1925 Detroit News article, miner Joel Payton told about his salt mine job. "The only dirty part of this job is going down to work," Mr. Payton explained.

To help students understand electromagnetic force fields, Professor of Physics John Belcher and colleagues at the MIT Center for Educational Computer Initiatives developed a computer applet into which students put the mathematical expressions that describe a given field. "It then pops out a visual representation of what the field looks like," he said.

UPDATE: Mike Ward says: "I checked our somewhat better copy of that cover you thumbnailed and think that that dial-phone looking thing is an old-fashioned microphone. In any case it has eight holes, not enough for a dial phone."

Jones is one of 85 children in an at-home study trying the popular Dance Dance Revolution video game to boost their activity. The study is being done by West Virginia's public employees insurance group in hopes it will lead to better health and lower costs.

Jones lost about 10 pounds by changing his diet. Now, after two weeks playing the game, he has lost another 10.

"The true painter," artist Salvador Dalí once said, "must be able, with the most usual things, to have the most unusual ideas." Born in 1904 in the province of Catalonia in northeastern Spain, Dalí spent much of his life promoting himself and shocking the world. He relished courting the masses, and he was probably better known, especially in the United States, than any other 20th-century painter, including fellow Spaniard Pablo Picasso. His love of sensation and flair for publicity quickly made him, in one scholar's words, "Surrealism's most exotic and prominent figure." Diffidence was not in his vocabulary. "Compared to Velázquez, I am nothing," he said in 1960, "but compared to contemporary painters, I am the most big genius of modern time"...

"The only difference between a madman and myself," he once wrote, "is that I am not mad!"

Hla Htay, 40, a relative of a Yangon Zoological Gardens staffer and a mother of three including a seven-month-old baby, stepped in when she learned the cubs needed breast milk to survive.

"I felt sorry for them so I decided to feed them before their teeth grow," she told the (Myanmar Times).

Update Abby sez, "Just spoke to a nice guy in line named Elliot. He's 21 and got laid off from his job in January, so he's got the time to hang out in line. He says there is a site that's going up today, www.liningup.net that will have webcams and whatnot. The deal is, you sign up whenever you're in line, and the amount of time you spend in line determines your number in line when it opens. Right now, it's 46 days away. When I said goodbye, he said, 'Bye, and may the force be with you.' BTW, they know they are on Boing Boing, and are mightily stoked about it!"

Update 2: Wow, they're lining up at the wrong theatre!. Koganuts and Sean Bonner both point out this post from blogging.la: "The liningup.net folks have finally confirmed that the film is not opening at Grauman's. It will be interesting to find out what happens next."

Update 3: Mike conducted a phone interview with a line-sitter:

What did you think of the first two movies in the series?

Eh. The first two left something to be desired. But I think that third one is going to be definitely fulfilling.

Now Viacom is piloting video ads -- with audio -- on flat panel displays on the tube escalators. Given how many stickers, blobs of strategically placed chewing gum, and markered-over bon mots you see on the paper ads, this seems an extraordinarily expensive proposition. Yet it does open up the possibility of some pretty cool little films that are optimized to be played in a series of diagonally placed screens to a moving audience. It remains to be seen whether any of the advertisers will rise to it, or whether we'll just get shorter TV commercials.

In a few weeks, Viacom Outdoor plans to start installing 66 screens in the London Underground that are essentially video posters with changing text and animated images. The animated signs are made of liquid crystals that realign under electrical stimulation.

The parallels between the squatter story and the copyfight are fascinating. Last month, I gave a talk at a Berkeley law class and one of the students pointed out that when we talk about orphan works and the problem of discovering who has the right to authorize the use of old or obscure creative works, we treat this as a major difference between "intellectual property" and real property; but in the developing world, the ownership of physical land is anything but clear-cut; where you have squatters who've been sold deeds to their land by unscrupulous bureaucrats in exchange for votes, or where politicos have issued deeds to their cronies selling title to land that has been occupied for decades, or squatters who are granted title to their land, but who then have to resolve whether the squatter whose home is on the ground floor gets the title, or whether it's the squatter who's built her dwelling on the roof; or where you have squatters who've built and then rented out their squats to tenants who've occupied them for years -- who owns that land?

All real-estate begins as "squatting." Most of the Bay Area's title deeds represent claims filed by squatters during the gold rush. At some point, every titled parcel of land belonged to no one, but was then fenced in and declared property.

Neuwirth's crusade in Shadow Cities is to prove that squatter cities are often better than the alternative: that many are safe, clean, and provide better housing for millions of economically marginal people than the state could provide. His evocative tours of the beehive-productive squatter cities in Brazil are very convincing -- though his admission that the law-and-order of these cities derives from the iron discipline of ultraviolent drug-dealing gangsters detracts a little from the idyllic picture. There you have marginal commerce and construction that enables workers to improve their lives and the lives of their families and neighbors. Particularly heartening are his descriptions of "savings circles" organized by women to pool small sums of money in a mutual aid society, and of the tentative -- but wildly successful -- gestures by cable operators and power and water authorities to run professionally installed utilities to squatter homes.

As heartening as these are, Neuwirth is also careful to let us in on the problems of shantytown life. Not crime and filth (it is his thesis that shanty towns are cleaner and safer than the low-income housing that would be the alternative, and he has stats going back for centuries to back this up, including the tenement cholera epidemic in NYC that all but skipped past the squatter city in Central Park) -- but corruption, boondoggles, and unintended consequences of poorly thought-through state-imposed improvements. From the donated ambulance that's too wide to fit down the shantytown lanes to the water pipes laid but never connected and eventually dug up for scrap to the efforts to replace shanties with high-rises that end up being unaffordable to the shanty-dwellers; Neuwirth's accounts of incompetence, venality and greed are maddening.

The question at the center of Neuwirth's book is not whether squatting is illegal (it is, of course), but whether it should be. He's looking to discover whether the prohibition of squatting (rather than a limited accommodation of squatting as a recognition that these people have to live somewhere) leads to more problems than it solves.

As I read it, I kept coming back to the questions I keep on asking of rightsholder organizations, questions like:

What's the way to go from suing your customers by the thousands to turning them back into customers again?

Is it really socially beneficial to set up a world where network neutrality and privacy are sacrificed to protect your rights? Should universities really have to wiretap their whole network just to keep from being sued out of existence by you?

Does it really benefit artists to live in a world where 80 percent of recorded music isn't available for sale because no one can figure out who owns it?

Does it benefit creation to declare remixing, mashing up, and sampling illegal? Are the people who make those works creators, too?

This is the sort of conundrum that Neuwirth is after resolving. The squatters are illegal, but what's the alternative? Why were anti-squatting laws passed, and have they fulfilled their objectives? Neuwirth is a powerful advocate for the rationality of permitting squatting. It's not only made me re-think my position on real property, but on "intellectual property" as well. Link

There are a number of interesting proposals for this, including deploying an army of GPS-wielding geohackers, and buying up Russian satellite photos of London. Check out this squib from last January's NTK:

London's geowanking fraternity have come up with an intriguing proposition. With a grand's worth of Russian 1-meter resolution satellite pics, they believe they can stitch together an entirely free, redistributable vector database of the capital, freed from the shackles of the Ordnance Survey's restrictive copyrights, and thus open to all manner of GPL-style repurposing.

* When: Thurs April 14th 2005, 7-9pm

* Where: Stanhope Centre, Marble Arch, London. [WWW]Directions

* Who can attend: public. Registration is optional but useful so please notify us if you can via okforums-info@okfn.org.

* Speakers: Steve Coast of openstreetmap.org; Roger Longhorn (geodata policy expert); Giles Lane of urbantapestries.net; Jo Walsh of mappinghacks.com

That, I think, is a pretty good way of marketing to new families. It doesn't compromise privacy, it gives them something they need, and it doesn't force them or lock them in. It's informative, useful, and respectful (provided that the marketing makes it clear that there's no medical endorsement of these products).

Compare that to this: a service that sneakily gets moms to agree to a "free baby photo" while they're signing all their necessary medical forms on the morning of their delivery. The company that takes the picture then sells your contact info to anyone who'll buy it.

On the morning of the delivery, the nurse hands a sheaf of forms to the mother-to-be. Buried within is a release form offering a free portrait of the new baby. Mom is wired to three different machines, having her pulse and blood pressure measured automatically while two others sensors detect uterine contractions and the baby’s heart rate and another chattering electromechanical behemoth plots a seismograph of both...

...[T]he photo enterprise is run by a third party, Growing Family. They’ll shoot a picture of your munchkin, in exchange for his or her name and birthdate and your full name and address...

Growing Family will use your information from time to time to promote additional products, services, rewards and special offers from Growing Family Network and its select Network Partners.

Update: Andrea sez, "The free baby photos are worse even than that -- they also aren't free. That was me, drugged up after the birth of my daughter, still got an IV in, filling out a stack of paperwork with the free photo release in the middle. Then six weeks later I got a bill for $50 from the photographer! Fortunately they backed down very quickly when I called to complain."

The World will consist of between 250 to 300 smaller private artifical islands divided into four categories - private homes, estate homes, dream resorts, and community islands. Each island will range from 250,000 to 900,000 square feet in size, with 50 to 100 metres of water between each island. The development is to cover an area of 9 kilometers in length and 6 kilometers in width, surrounded by an oval shaped breakwater. The only means of transportation between the islands will be by marine transport.

Update: Pablo sez, "here is the official page. At that website you may download a PDF file of every island (country). E.g., United Kingdom."

Update 2: Sam sez, "My friend in Dubai told me that Rod Stewart had purchased the island representing Britain in the 'World' development."

Update 3: Chris DiBona points out that this version of "The World" has no Israel

First, you need to get and install PyGopherd. It's fairly simple, just download it and follow the instructions in the manual to install it, then configure a directory for it to serve. I told it to serve ~/public_html/gopher/ but any directory will do.

Then, download feedparser, html2text and this script of my own design to create text files from an RSS feed. Set the output directory to the same one that your gopher server is using, set the RSS feed to your RSS feed and you're more or less done. For extra fun, put the script in a cron job so that it will keep updating with new items. If you do that, you'll also need to rm the old files (which really should be done in my script, but see the part above about this being a hack that needed to work in a couple hours).

There's plenty of room for improvement. For instance you could write a Python script for PyGopherd to parse the RSS feeds, which would cut down on all sorts of problems and be useful to literally tens of people.

Watching these videos made my pulse quicken and my body jerk from side to side as the players executed virtuoso rocket-jumps and precision target-shooting of monsters as they lurched around corners. Link (Thanks, Drew!)

I'd happily pay $10 a month (and lock in for a year, a la the original eMusic) for an unlimited sub to Folkways. It's so eclectic and at times uneven that it cries out for a taster's-menu approach to its wares, where you can sample just about anything. And my guess is that they'd sell a lot of one year subs that would pay out more than the subscribers would spend on a track-by-track basis (all-you-can-eat menus are cash cows, as AOL and others have discovered by going from metered service to flat rate).

But this is still fantastic news: no DRM, royalties to artists, and an incredible catalog of materials. Link (Thanks, Henry!)

Update: Jen points out that this is a dupe of Xeni's post from last month -- I'm gonna leave it up for the stuff on flat-rate pricing, but be sure to catch Xeni's post and the excellent comments she updated with.

I rode along with a real-life Verizon Wireless tester. He wasn't as pretty as the actor on TV, but probably way smarter. Included at the bottom is a sample of the audio they use to test the network, it's real wacky stuff.

Now with his players about to ship, he's looking to get a sense of how many orders he'll likely get, so he's soliciting non-binding "reservations" for dispensers. I imagine this'll help him raise capital and sort out his order size.

I know I want one of these -- I've wanted one since the first time he mentioned them -- so I've reserved one. If you plan on getting one, you should fill in the form, too. Link (via Make Blog)

The second example is Boing Boing's post about a high-school principal who "banned blogging" because it "isn't educational". Part of the blame lies with the source story at the Rutland Herald whose over-eager sub-editors misleadingly headlined the story "High school bans blogging". In fact the school banned a single website and the principal simply issued a sensible warning about children weblogging -- as with any activity online, kids should be careful with the information they make public.

But Boing Boing got carried away with the newspaper's headline, repeating it in theirs even though a cursory read of the newspaper article reveals that no one "banned blogging". The newspaper claims the principal doesn't think blogging is educational, and Cory could certainly have criticised him for this alone, although it would make for a less dramatic post. The repetition of the lie about the principal banning blogging, rather than his apparent opinion, is possibly also what prompted a reader to suggest people should email the principal to complain.

"Charlie was teetering on the precipice of transhumanism for the whole last year," said his friend and collaborator Cory Doctorow. "His lifestyle and cerebral/neurological capabilities had been ramped up through intensive ideation and selective smart-drug use to an exquisite pitch just short of the Singularity. When he laid his hands on that sweet, sweet hunk of hardware, it provided the critical mass of complexification necessary to tip him over fully into the Extropian ideal condition."

The resulting state-change brought total en-bobblement to an area of several cubic miles surrounding the store where Stross made his climactic purchase. It is presumed that the newly born ineffable deity once known as Stross is localized within the stasis-sphere, but authorities differ over containment theories.

Mack Reed of LAVoice sez:

Here's an early, detailed report (2:38 a.m. last night) complete with plenty of pix and silent video shot with a clear view from the roof. Sad that the audio on my Olympus usually-still digicam malfunctioned, but the clips are crisp and slender (max 5kb) adn they do have a sort of dreamlike quality.

I recorded audio, and interviewed cast and robot crew. Stay tuned for a report!