For today's edition of the NPR radio program "Day to Day:

The Screen Actors' Guild has rejected a work agreement with the video game industry -- but its sister union, AFTRA, has accepted. I talk with host Alex Chadwick about the contentious relationships between both unions and game publishers, and the debate over whether voice actors are entitled to a share of electronic game profits. What will SAG's rejection mean for actors? What effect will the dispute have on next year's crop of games?

Link to archived audio. Link to more archived "Xeni Tech" segments on NPR. (Special thanks to Wil Wheaton and Lazlow)

Previously on Boing Boing: SAG nixes video game work contract, SAG/AFTRA video game strike on the way for Hollywood?, Strike Looms Against Game Makers, Game biz coders want fatter paychecks, too

UPDATED: Not so fast. The Screen Actors Guild just issued this surprise announcement:

SAG President Melissa Gilbert and National Executive Director/CEO Greg Hessinger will convene a special meeting of the national board on Wednesday, June 29, to consider the tentative Interactive Media Agreement with video game companies that was rejected this past Tuesday by SAG’s National Executive Committee.

“When the NEC rejected the tentative contract earlier this week, we said we’d explore all our remaining options,” said Hessinger. “Since then, we have received feedback from enough of our membership to conclude that this matter must be brought before the full board for its consideration.”

The previous three-year agreement with video game companies expired this past May 13 after several months of bargaining with the companies. Over the course of the subsequent weeks, SAG issued a strike referendum to its affected members, before reaching a tentative agreement on June 8, which is set to expire next Thursday, June 30. The American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, which negotiated jointly with SAG, approved the agreement last week and it will go into effect for their members on July 1, 2005.

Charles Platt says: "Few people outside of the military-industrial complex know the name 'Bennie Schriever,' but it's quite likely that if he hadn't been in the right office of the Pentagon at the right time, Soviet missiles would still be based in Cuba and the United States would have been a distant second in the race to the Moon. One can even argue that the Soviet Union would have had such an advantage in its strategic arsenal during the 1960s, the United States would have been unable to maintain a balance of power and would have been at a hopeless disadvantage during the mad years of Kennedy/Khrushchev brinkmanship.

Schriever was the primary architect of U.S. strategic capability, for better or worse. He was a radical force in government at a time when intercontinental ballistic missiles seemed farfetched and manned spaceflight was a fantasy. He died on June 20th yet no obituaries have appeared in any general-interest publications. A well-balanced tribute is here: Link

During the late 1980s in my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio, there was a cool band called Dock Ellis. Their music was good but I liked their name even better. Dock Ellis was a player for the Pittsburgh Pirates who in 1970 pitched a no-hitter while tripping balls on LSD. The Dallas Observer just profiled Ellis and retold the psychedelic sports tale of the century:

Thirty-five years ago, on June 12, 1970, Pittsburgh Pirate and future Texas Rangers pitcher Dock Ellis found himself in the Los Angeles home of a childhood friend named Al Rambo. Two days earlier, he'd flown with the Pirates to San Diego for a four-game series with the Padres. He immediately rented a car and drove to L.A. to see Rambo and his girlfriend Mitzi. The next 12 hours were a fog of conversation, screwdrivers, marijuana, and, for Ellis, amphetamines. He went to sleep in the early morning, woke up sometime after noon and immediately took a dose of Purple Haze acid. Ellis would frequently drop acid on off days and weekends; he had a room in his basement christened "The Dungeon," in which he'd lock himself and listen to Jimi Hendrix or Iron Butterfly "for days."

A bit later, how long exactly he can't recall, he came across Mitzi flipping through a newspaper. She scanned for a moment, then noticed something.

"Dock," she said. "You're supposed to pitch today."

Ellis focused his mind. No. Friday. He wasn't pitching until Friday. He was sure.

"Baby," she replied. "It is Friday. You slept through Thursday."

Link

They call her "Chatty."

Fantasies about chatting up legendary figures have come closer to reality in Japan where researchers have developed a mannequin with a built-in projector that can resemble a face of one's choice. The life-size, made-to-order (...) mannequin [has] a face that is an empty screen until turned on to play DVD images from inside the body. If one is in the mood for conversation, sound can come from a separate speaker. "It is a device that can show a person's face, looks and mouth movements," said the developer, Ishikawa Optics and Arts Corp. of Tokyo. "It forms realistic images as if he or she were really talking to you."

Link to news item. (via Warren Ellis)

Los del Fleshbot dicen:

While porn producers (and audiences) in the US have been gearing up for the new 2257 regulations that go into effect next week, fans of Japanese erotic art have an additional thing to worry about: a Tokyo court upheld a conviction yesterday against a publisher found guilty of distributing a comic title found to be obscene in what Japan Today calls “the first major case in some 20 years in Japan to focus on printed pornographic material”. Better stock up on all those tentacle porn hentai while you still can, folks.

Link

The New Yorker is selling a limited edition set of 8 DVDs containing every page of the magazine from its inception in February 1925 to February 2005: "from full-color covers to spot drawings, from poetry to Profiles, from cartoons to advertisements -- on reader friendly and highly searchable DVDs." It'll be available in September, and will run on Windows and Macs.
Link (via Darren Barefoot)

I can hear it now: "Nonono, we weren't sleeping together -- just a routine system backup." Snip from a press release for a short-range networking technology demo that took place at a research institute in SoKo (not the first time this sort of thing has been demoed, despite what the press release claims).

Digital Human Body Communication was first unveiled to the public. It is also called as BAN(Body Area Network), as it handles communication between devices using the human body as a medium.

Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) said that although only a small amount of data, such as information on a name card, can be transmitted at the moment because the data transmission speed is just to be 2.4Kbps, the speed will be improved to 1MB within the yearend.

ETRI explained that BAN can be utilized in numerous ways, such as touch based authentification service, electronic payment service, e-business card service, and touch based advertisement service.

Link (Thanks, Brian Baglow, via unwired)

The Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists created a fun Flash site where you can visually collage body parts from an assortment of animals like alligators, ring-tailed lemurs, and muskellunges. The gallery displays some great virtual taxidermic mash-ups. Seen here is Bryan's "Finger Sucker." Link

Thanks so much to all of you who submit links to Boing Boing! Remember, if you'd like to turn us on to something, please use the "suggest a site" form linked to at the top of this page instead of emailing us directly. We read every suggestion submitted using the form! We really appreciate your help in growing the cabinet of curiosities that is Boing Boing. Thanks again! Link

Cameron says: "In the 1890's the US government would use the 5th Amendment and eminent domain to seize the native american lands for 'public good' and give them to the railroad companies to build on.

"Today the Supreme Court ruled in favor of loosening this law and extending the definition of 'publlic good' allowing local governments to seize private property for private companies to build on.

"Yet another example of corporate gentrification with those who cannot afford proper protection susceptible having their homes condemned and seized. This is one of the few times I actually agree with Justice Scalia and Thomas." (Me, too. -- Mark) Link

John Scalzi explains how to get around the Flag Burning amendment: by desecrating flags that are similar but not identical to the real US flag. (Scalzi says: "Please note I don't encourage flag-burning. However, I don't encourage banning flag-burning more.")

An American Flag? Hardly. It has only 49 stars! There's a circle where a star should be. Certainly an American Flag had 49 stars, but it didn't look like this (it looked like this).The true 49-star flag would likely be covered by the Amendment, but this one, not so much. Use it for kindling!

Link

Dan says: "The Transportation Security Administration confiscated this man's folding Audi car key ($300 replacement cost) at Dallas/Ft. Worth. They claimed it was a 'switchblade.' If he hadn't had a spare key, he would have been stuck upon arriving with no car keys." (I have the same type of key for my car, and have brought it on planes dozens of times with no problem. -- Mark)
Link

Former pro-football player turned minister Rosey Grier wrote a book in 1973 called "Needlepoint for Men." Designs in the book feature sports equipment, explosives, hunting dogs, Samurai warriors -- macho stuff. Here's a Flickr gallery of some scans from the book.
Link (thanks, Garth!)

"City Hideout" is a foldable metal box that you can quickly set up and sit inside whenever you want to temporarily stop dealing with people. When deployed, the box looks like ordinary equipment housing found on city sidewalks. The vents in the box allow you to see the world outside without being seen yourself.
Link (Thanks, Clive!)

"The Microgram Bulletin" is a monthly web-based newsletter published by the Drug Enforcement Administration. The April 2005 edition has a short item about 17 bricks of cocaine that were intercepted by the DEA in Nogales, AZ. Upon inspection, agents discovered a surprise inside the cocaine:

[E]ach brick was also found to contain a second, internal brick, wrapped in brown tape and cellophane, which contained an unknown, compressed, tan colored powder. Analysis of the white powder confirmed 85 percent cocaine hydrochloride adulterated with caffeine, while analysis of the tan powder indicated a mixture of 72 percent heroin hydrochloride and 7.2 percent cocaine hydrochloride. This is the first submission of heroin mini-bricks inside cocaine bricks to the Laboratory.

The DEA believes the smugglers hid the heroin inside the coke to "deceive mid-level transporters, who charge higher rates for heroin shipments versus cocaine shipments." Link (Thanks, Amy!)

An android embodiment of surrealist SF author Philip K. Dick will be demonstrated at Wired's NextFest this weekend in Chicago. The Dick bot is a collaboration between Hanson Robotics Inc, the FedEx Institute of Technology's Institute for Intelligent Systems, the Automation and Robotics Research Institute at UTA, and Dick's friend Paul Williams. From the Hanson Robotics overview:

The robot will portray Dick in both form and intellect through an artificial-intelligence-driven personality. The hardware will manipulate Hanson's proprietary lifelike skin material to affect extremely realistic expressions with very low power. Cameras in the eyes will allow the robot to perceive people's identity and behavior through advanced machine vision and biometric-identification software. The robot will track faces, perceive facial expressions, and recognize people from the crowd (family, friends, celebrities, etc).

The visual data will be fused with some of the best speech recognition software, advanced natural language processing, and speech synthesis in the world. All of this will run in sync with Hanson Robotics' highly expressive robot face to emulate a full human-conversational system.

IIS will create the artificial intelligence personality of the robot by mathematically deriving it from Dick's life and works in a manner very similar to that described by Dick himself in his book We Can Build You (published in 1964).

Link (Thanks, Dave Gill!)

The zombie flick Land of the Dead opens in theaters tomorrow, and the LA Times interviews its maker, George Romero, who made Night of the Living Dead 37 years ago. Land of the Dead is his fourth zombie movie, and like all his movies, it's loaded with social criticism (which, in my opinion, is what zombie movies are all about.)

"Night" evoked Vietnam-era bloodshed and, with its black male lead trapped in a farmhouse, echoed civil rights hysteria. "Dawn" poked fun at soul-deadening consumerism. And "Day" addressed ethics in science. With "Land," Romero tackles issues of safety and boundaries, showing a community fortifying itself against a murderous horde while its wealthiest keep alive class divisions separating them from the powerless.

"It's the folly of saying, 'Everything's OK, don't worry about it,' " says Romero, who wrote "Land" before the events of Sept. 11. Its focus then was about "ignoring social ills, setting up a synthetic sense of comfort."

He says he didn't have to tweak it much to reflect new fears of terrorism. When told that it's hard not to think of Iraq watching an armored car of trigger-happy humans roll through a zombiefied suburb shooting anything they see, Romero smiles. "That's one of the things I put in there afterward."

Link

For TheFeature.com, I interviewed John Poisson, former head of Sony's mobile media research and design groups. Poisson is now focused on how cameraphones could revolutionize photography and communication -- if people would only start using them more. He and human-computer interaction researchers Chris Beckmann and Scott Lederer are developing cameraphone software and services they hope will get the world snapping and sharing.

TheFeature: What have you learned over the course of your research?
Poisson: People think of the cameraphone as a more convenient tool for digital photography, an extension of the digital camera. That's missing the mark. The mobile phone is a communications device. The minute you attach a camera to that, and give people the ability to share the content that they're creating in real time, the dynamic changes significantly.

TheFeature: Aren't providers already developing applications to take advantage of that shift?
Poisson: Well, we have things like the ability to moblog, to publish pictures to a blog, which is not necessarily the most relevant model to consumers. Those tools are developed by people who understand blogging and apply it in their daily lives. But it ignores the trend that we and Mimi Ito and others are seeing as part of the evolution of photography. If you look at the way people have (historically) used cameras, it started off with portraiture and photographs of record -- formalized photographs with a capital "P." Then as the technology evolved, we had this notion of something called a snapshot, which is much more informal. People could take a higher number of pictures with not so much concern over composition. It was more about capturing an experience than photographing something. The limit of that path was the Polaroid. It was about taking the picture and sharing it instantly. What we have today is the ability to create today is a kind of distributed digital manifestation of that process.

Link

Scientists report that a single neuron in your brain responds when you see a specific person. The controversial notion is sometimes jokingly called the "grandmother cell," meaning that your brain has one cell that recognizes your grandmother. Cal Tech computational neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga and his colleagues suggest that this may not be too far from the truth. In a series of recent experiments, they showed subjects a series of snapshots of animals, buildings, objects, and celebrities. The subjects were epileptics who had already been implanted with sensors to monitor brain-cell activity. From News@Nature.com:

Various pictures of Jennifer Aniston elicited a response in a single neuron inside the medial temporal lobe of another patient. Interestingly, images of her with her former husband Brad Pitt did not sway this cell, the authors of the paper report...

Quian Quiroga also found that a lone neuron in one subject responded selectively to various pictures of the actress Halle Berry - as well as drawings of her and her name written down. Other cells were found to respond to images of characters in The Simpsons or members of The Beatles.

The team thinks that these brain cells probably respond to a range of different items, but that this limited study didn't include all the various pictures that might make a particular cell light up.

Link