[...I]t uses the HDCP chips ususally built into high definition displays, so that HDCP "protected" signal sources uncomplainingly deliver their signal to the boxes. They then convert them to RGBHV or unprotected DVI signals.

This means that HDCP sources like HDTV, HD DVD or Blu-ray Discs can be made to work with equipment using analog or "unprotected" DVI inputs.

c't reports that when testing the boxes, a LCD TV set without HDCP support displayed pictures in all modi and resolutions, from PAL/PAL Progressive to NTSC/NTSC Progressive and 1080p (1920 x 1080 pixels) without problems. The built in HDCP chips' labels had been removed, so that it was impossible to find out where they came from.

You'll need Gold, silver and bronze Fimo, a rolling pin, small circular cookie cutters, some sort of alphabet rubber stamp set, mythical themed rubber stamps or charms (I found these in the scrapbooking section), black acylic paint and gold acylic paint.

"My dining companions are boring."

Update: Here's an entire pool of images devoted to sparkler-photos on Flickr, as spotted by Aaron!

To kick-off EFF's forthcoming 15th Anniversary celebrations, we'll be holding a special BayFF exploring the legal issues surrounding blogging. The roundtable discussion will feature EFF Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl, local bloggers, and companies that create blogging tools.

Opsahl, who leads EFF's bloggers' rights campaign, is one of the attorneys representing online journalists in Apple v. Does, the case in which Apple Computer, Inc., is seeking to unmask the journalists' confidential sources for articles about a future Apple product.

7:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m., Tuesday, July 19, 2005

111 Minna Gallery
111 Minna Street
San Francisco, CA 94105
Tel: (415) 974-1719

Update: EFF attorney Kurl Opsahl (the lawyer leading the Bloggers' Rights project) sez, "You might want to also note that we just updated the Legal Guide for Bloggers, adding a chapter on labor law issues - covering blogging about the workplace, whistleblogging, worker's rights to organize via blogs."

"Apparently our thirst for novelty begins in the eye itself," says Markus Meister, the Jeff C. Tarr Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "Our eyes report the visual world to the brain, but not very faithfully. Instead, the retina creates a cartoonist's sketch of the visual scene, highlighting key features while suppressing the less interesting regions."

These findings provide evidence that the ultimate goal of the visual system is not simply to construct internally an exact reproduction of the external world, Meister and his colleagues write in Nature. Rather, the system seeks to extract from the onslaught of raw visual information the few bits of data that are relevant to behavior. This entails the discarding of signals that are less useful, and dynamic retinal adaptation provides a means of stripping from the visual stream predictable and therefore less newsworthy signals.

Capacities are said to be up to 5 mega bits and the stored data lasts for 6 months - the length of time it takes a fingernail to be completely replaced.

"I don't like carrying around a large number of cards, money and papers," (Yoshio) Hayasaki from Tokushima University told Optics.org. "I think that a key application will be personal authentication. Data stored in a fingernail can be used with biometrics, such as fingerprint authentication and intravenous authentication of the finger..."

Although the initial experiments have concentrated on small pieces of nail, the team is now developing a system that can write data to a fingernail which is still attached to a finger. "We will develop a femtosecond laser processing system that can record the data at the desired points with compensation for the movement of a finger," said Hayasaki.

"With so many top athletes in the water of Loch Ness at one time, we couldn't take the risk of one of them being attacked by Nessie," said David Hart of the (insurance) firm Nova International.

"The competitors will all be very psyched up and very driven, so there's going to be a lot of noise and a lot of splashing going on, just the sort of thing that might annoy a prehistoric lake monster. Or even worse, give it an appetite..."

Not everyone welcomes the insurance deal, though. The official Loch Ness Monster Fan Club took exception to the suggestion that Nessie would attack anyone - however much they splashed.

The club's chairman, Gary Campbell, said: "Everyone knows she is friendly; she has been present in the loch for centuries and never hurt a soul in all that time..."

How did I become interested in painting the haunted world? I trace it back to the summer of 1944, the year I turned eleven! That was when my aunt and uncle invited me to spend a month with them on a mid-western farm. I was a New York city kid, a budding artist even then, and to say I was excited at making the trip -- by myself!! -- on an overnight Pullman sleeper train to Battle Creek, Michigan, would be understating my feelings by quite a bit. Sleepless with excitement, I spent that night, nose pressed to the window, gazing out at moonlit farmlands, lonely houses lit by solitary lights, as we rolled past in the darkness. They're images I remember to this day, so it was only natural that I'd be drawn to painting the night.

Serious LARPers who love and promote the hobby (and have therefore kept White Wolf in business) often go to great personal expense to organize games: renting halls, making props, printing and photocopying materials, etc, and they ask their players to pay fees to recoup those costs -- indeed, it's hard to imagine LARPing as a viable hobby without this practice, since it would practically limit play to those willing to buy a pig in a poke by investing in their own props and such before they've played their first game.

These LARPing evangelists are being treated by White Wolf as infringers (though WW generously allows that the infringement might have been unintentional) and White Wolf requires that these pirates pay a fee to get legit.

When I was a kid playing RPGs in Toronto, I'd spend every Saturday at a rented hall in the Harbourfront complex, where every RPG imaginable was on offer. I paid a modest fee ($2?) to help cover the cost of the rental. If the organizers had had to get licenses from all the game publishers whose wares were in play at those events, it would have been impossible to manage.

I spent fortunes on gaming crap as a result of those Harbourfront games, pouring all my discretionary cash into the industry. The games I played the most were the games I spent the most money on. The way I got to play those games was by being introduced to them by GMs who were charging fees.

White Wolf is cutting its own throat, treating its super-recommender customers like thieves, and demanding that the entire world of LARPing rearrange itself to White Wolf's increased convenience and profitability. This isn't running a business, it's crybaby capitalism, the hysterical terror that someone, somewhere is turning a dime without cutting you in for a nickel. Nice going WW. See you on the scrapheap of history.

In brief, White Wolf is requesting that those who wish to charge players to play White Wolf games (beyond standard fees at a convention) obtain a license to do so from us. We request this both in order to ensure we can provide a consistent level of support and play experience to those fans looking to play our games and in order to protect our rights in terms of trademark and so forth. Yes, our games are meant to be played and we encourage everyone to do so — but charging players is stepping into a commercial arena and license agreements then come into play. Our vehicle for granting this license is membership in the Camarilla.

I do understand that there is going to be resistance to this policy. Many people have run or played in a wide variety of pay-for-play games (especially live-action games) using a White Wolf setting or system without any intention of infringing our rights. I hope that our efforts to support the various licensed games (listing on our website, promotion on mailing lists and in newsletters, promotional giveaways and prize support, etc.) will ultimately outweigh what may feel at first like an effort to stifle fan enthusiasm.

Update: Garrett points to a site where they are collecting instances of White Wolf advising people to charge for games, and to put up promotional materials:

Rearrange furniture, set up lighting and sound equipment if you have any and otherwise prepare the environment. If parts of the play area are going to represent different locations or be designated as out-of-game, make sure they are clearly marked so that players aren’t confused about where they are in-game. If you provide refreshments, make sure they are set up in a convenient location, and don’t feel shy about passing around the hat to offset the expense — most players will gladly chip in a few bucks to have drinks and snacks on hand for the game...

Unless you are running a private game or one with a limited number of players, don’t hesitate to advertise with flyers or other promotional materials, and be sure to tape up signs or have Narrators waiting to help make sure your players can find the game location.

On Tuesday, the canal surrounding the European Parliament's Strasbourg headquarters saw a mini-naval battle as a boat hired by the Campaign for Creativity, a pro-directive lobby group, was attacked by opponents of the legislation in canoes carrying banners reading "patents stifle creativity."

Austria's [MEP Eva] Lichtenberger said some of the lobbying violated Parliament's rules, and noted, for example, that the Campaign for Creativity failed to disclose the source of its funding.

More images from Londoners: Sean Bonner says, "Dan from the London Metblog just posted a bunch of photos he took yesterday: Link."

How soon till the proposed British National ID card is named as something that would have prevented today's bombings? And with all those CCTV cameras littered about London, where's the footage of the bombers? Is there none because the cameras weren't pervasive/invasive enough?

Reader comment: an anonymous reader says, "How long? Less than 24 hours:

But the home secretary said on balance he believed ID cards would help rather than hinder the ability to deal with particular terrorist threats. He also suggested that in future civil liberties might have to be curtailed.

Titles include:

"Colossus" by Mark Andrews - A knight's soul is trapped in a war machine's metal body, and faces a kingdom's evil paladin.
"Rose and Isabel" by Ted Mathot - A story of two sisters who join the American Civil War to save their three brothers.
"Afterworks" - an anthology of short stories by Simon Dunsdon, Robert Kondo, Nate Stanton, Max Brace, Kevin O'Brien, Sanjay Patel, Louis Gonzales and Jay Shuster. Story previews here.

Several other Pixar artists will be attending Comic Con, with their own booths. They include Ronnie Del Carmen with "Paper Biscuit 2.5 - Froggy's Lament"; Enrico Casarosa with "SketchCrawling"; and Jamie Baker with "Rocket Rabbit"

(Thanks, The Moth!)

Reader Comment -- SRP sez:

In the post about the Pixar artists' webcomics, you mentioned Enrico Casarosa's Sketchcrawl, but not his totally-awesome yakuza-poetry-thingie webcomic Haiku 5-7-5. He hasn't updated for a few months, but maaaybe he'll be more likely to start again if you link to it.

Danny Way, 2004 Skater of the Year, has chosen the Great Wall of China as the site of his latest feat of daring. He's going to jump the Wall on Saturday at 5 p.m. Beijing time.

See also this interesting item on his Defensetech blog today:

London: Panopticon Cracks
Londoners are seen on the city's vast amalgam of surveillance cameras an average of 300 times a day. Which means that the terrorists behind yesterday's bombings almost certainly knew they'd be caught on tape -- and went ahead with their attacks anyway.

I'm in Newark, New Jersey, in a small room dominated by a large conference table. There are no windows, and no sounds except for the whir of the ventilation system. "This is going to be great," says my host, Rutgers neuropsychologist Barry Komisaruk, grinning. A woman walks in with a large black duffel bag and shuts the door. "This is my graduate student Janice Breen," Komisaruk says. Breen opens the bag, unpacks a few electromechanical components, and begins to assemble them using a screwdriver.

"So what do you call this?" I ask. The device looks like a tampon attached to a hefty electric toothbrush, which is in turn wired to a box with a glowing red digital readout. "It's the, um, contraption," Breen answers distractedly, hunting for an outlet.

"Actually, it's called the calibrated vaginal stimulator," Komisaruk tells me. "It's a modified tampon attached to a transducer for measuring the force that women apply to the vaginal wall."

The tampon looks big enough to be in the supersize range and is connected at a 45-degree angle to the metal handle, which houses the transducer. Scores of women have inserted Breen's contraption into their vaginas (the tampons are disposed of after each use). As I fiddle with the tampon, the pressure from my fingers registers as a few grams of force.

"Women self-stimulate," Komisaruk explains, "and we use fMRIs to look at which parts of their brains respond." I stare at the instrument in my hands.

"Basically," Komisaruk concludes, "it's a dildo."

Update: Here's a US vendor, here's a cheaper UK vendor. (Thanks, John and MacZealot!)

Spyware researchers have noticed that the Windows antispyware application has downgraded Claria's Gator detections and changed the recommended action from 'quarantine' to 'ignore.'

Update: Damien sez: "Microsoft have not actually acquired Claria, but were simply rumoured to be in negotiations to do so."

Benjamin Smith III, 41, faces a pretrial hearing this month following his April arrest on charges of unauthorized access to a computer network, a third-degree felony. Police say Smith admitted using the Wi-Fi signal from the home of Richard Dinon, who had noticed Smith sitting in an SUV outside Dinon's house using a laptop computer.

Here's a dumb question for all you lawyerators out there: If the wireless access point / router used by the "theft victim" was shipped with open access as a default, couldn't the accused "wireless thief" sue the living crap out of its manufacturer?

"It is obvious that elements of the comet's orbit, and correspondingly the ephemeris, will change after the explosion, which interferes with my astrology work and distorts my horoscope," Izvestia Daily quoted astrologist Marina Bai as saying in legal documents submitted before Monday's collision.

Five A.M.: In the sultry depths of Rio de Janeiro’s Nova Holanda shantytown—or favela (pronounced fuh-VELL-luh)—more than 1,000 people are dancing in a narrow street. A wall of speakers stacked 15 feet high and 60 feet wide sends a dirty electro beat shuddering through the ground. On a tiny stage, MCs Juca and Paulinho* shout out the lyrics of their hit “24 Hours”: “Bullets into the Terceiro,” they say in chorus. “Shoot the snitch!” Suddenly the crackle of gunfire cuts through the bass: From the middle of the swaying crowd, someone is shooting into the air.

A sea of hands goes up: The men point their index fingers and cock their thumbs, waving imaginary guns over their heads. Other hands form into C and V shapes—the Rio gang sign of the Comando Vermelho, the “Red Command” drug faction that runs this favela. On the stage beside Juca and Paulhino stands a young man in his early 20s; he has a pencil moustache, wears an expensive blue T-shirt with a picture of a surfer on the front and is holding a sub-machine gun. He smiles with approval at the show.

An hour later, as the two MCs leave, the party is still going strong; Juca and Paulinho pass two teenage boys who are dancing together, waving their pistols in the air. Back in their car, Juca shrugs off the gunplay. Anyone brought up in the favela is used to the sound of guns, he says. “And anyway, if the guy shoots in the air, it means he likes the song.”

Reader Comment: dave wagz says,

re: "Extreme gangsta rap, Brazilian style", the first post here has a link to dj sujinho's 'i love baile funk' mix. Also, philly dj Diplo has a couple of great baile funk mixes, see: here.

Normally you can't swim in our pool until June because it's just to cold (68F - 75F). I like swimming in about 80F to 85F myself, if it's sunny and warm out. I created a prototype heater coil that seemed to work for its size. I then create a large heater coil out of 180 feet of copper tubing that connects to my pool pump using a garden hose and fits inside the grill. The hose runs from the pump through the grill heater coils and then into the pool. I heated my pool from 68F to 89.4F in 48 hours using 3.5 tanks of propane.

The device heats water 30 to 35 degrees at 3 to 4 gallons per minute flow. I find I get a 7 degree increase in my 8000 gallon pool for each 5 gallon tank of propane. Each tank will burn for about 13 to 15 hours on high. A pool cover is required...

The coils come out and the grill converts back to cooking in less then 3 minutes which includes cool-down and draining the coils.

It has emerged that certain models of Motorola mobile phones are already syncing with iTunes – enabling those phones to be loaded with iTunes tracks. When Apple posted the iTunes 4.9 update earlier this week the company focused on its Podcasting facilities, however, the update also included an instruction set entitled: iPod Phone Prefs.

Now it appears that certain Motorola phones are recognised by iTunes. An AppleInsider source revealed that when he connected his Motorola phone to his PowerBook iTunes 4.9 automatically launched and prompted him to transfer tracks to the phone.

It was over breakfast one February morning in 2001 that Tom Legare, a precocious but otherwise typical American teenager, learned from his mother that his real father "was a Nobel Prize winner." The man married to his mother for so many years, it turned out, was in fact not biologically related to him. Rather, another man was, presumably a "brilliant scientist" (name unknown) who had contributed to the Repository for Germinal Choice, a "genius" sperm bank founded by businessman Robert K. Graham in 1980. Thus Tom was one of a far-flung brood, since many other infertile couples -- like the Legares -- had availed themselves of this high-end gene pool.

Tom's existence really begins with Graham, an entrepreneur who had made a fortune in the eyeglass business only to turn his attention in the late 1970s to what were, for him anyway, grander and more noble pursuits. He hoped to save the human race from what he deemed a "genetic catastrophe."

An experiment in 'positive eugenics' -- using Nobelists to boost inherited IQ.

Reader Comment: sharky says,

Additional reference for the article on Chicago 'spycams' ... the linked site doesn't really explain what it's about, and I thought BoingBoingers might find it interesting to read a bit more about the technology.

Link to the newly-liberated "House of Cosbys" episode #1: "A cautionary tale about cloning Bill Cosby."
(thanks, Jeff Fries)

Reader Comment: Jeff Fries says,

I just wanted to note that, as articulated in the "Open Letter to Bill Cosby's Legal Team" on the Channel101.com main page, the series was brought back not because "said attorney unclenched" (as far as I know, he hasn't), but rather was brought back because site admin (and Channel101.com cofounder) Dan Harmon has "been led to believe that what feels right to me doesn't matter in the face of what I'm told are larger principles."

Correction: Reader Dan astutely says, "You called France the home of french-fries. French fries actually originated in Belgium." Oui, c'est vrai.

The Walt Disney Internet Group and Sprint have announced an agreement through which Disney will create a national U.S. wireless phone service specifically designed for families. The service, called Disney Mobile, will use the Sprint Nationwide PCS Network and is slated to launch next year. Disney Mobile plans to offer wireless voice service, exclusive handsets and a package of features and applications including a range of entertainment content for the family.

Smith's body was on the recliner, his feet crossed and a remote in his hand. He wore black and gold silk pajamas, slippers and a robe. A pack of cigarettes and a beer were at his side, while a high-definition TV played a continuous loop of Steelers highlights.

"I couldn't stop crying after looking at the Steeler blanket in his lap," said his sister, MaryAnn Nails, 58. "He loved football and nobody did (anything) until the game went off. It was just like he was at home."

Q These are so ace, who are the girls who made them?

A The girls identities must remain a secret (for now), but in the meantime, all I can tell you is they are 6 hot young things working in the adult industry here in the UK.

Despite being born a Welshman, Jon Langford (also known as a seminal musician as a member of The Mekons, The Waco Brothers, Pine Valley Cosmonauts, etc.) captures perfectly a sense of a forgotten American West in his paintings, strewn with bones, rusty tin, and faded bandanas. His rough portraits are scratched and sanded to further enhance a feeling of "old timey-ness". His paintings of faded icons of Americana (such as country western musical heroes Bob Wills, Johnny Cash, and Patsy Cline) are tributes to both the subject of the paintings, as well as autobiographical explorations. His subject and style combines “Outsider” sensibilities with a deft hand and sophisticated sense of musical history.

Emergency services were called to a building site in London after a passer-by spotted the 15-year-old girl curled up on top of a concrete counterweight high above the ground.

The teenager, who has not been named, had climbed up the crane and walked across a narrow metal beam while fast asleep during the incident, which happened on June 25.

It is believed the teenager had walked out unnoticed from her home near the site in Dulwich, southeast London.

The area I was in was an area that is inaccessible from the outside world. Blizzard actually built a wall in-game that blocks all travellers from going to this area. After looking at my map, I was PAST this wall! So I decided to look around and I saw some very weird things such as an extremely tall, skinny wall, and places where textures would just suddenly change. Check out the pictures! If you wanna contact me in-game, I'm on the Terenas server with the character name Ayoshen.

In a particularly brilliant addition, Falk has created a script which will enable Cory to autograph the Second Life edition his novel. To do that, readers just have to bring their copy of his book to the event, and set it on a small table in front of Cory. To autograph it, Cory simply has to mouse-click the book, which causes a digitized picture of his real signature (with author's dedication) to be superimposed on the cover. So signing the virtual edition of his book requires about as much effort as it does when he takes pen in hand to autograph the tree-based version.

Falk's attention to detail is staggering. To recreate the cover of the hardback edition he brought Caliandris Pendragon onto the project, to painstakingly create an avatar resembling its exotic young woman in blue jeans. (Caliandris' attention detail is also staggering: before fashioning a tribute to Dave McKean's cover art for Someone, she led the team that created Numbakulla, a tribute to fantastic adventure games like Myst and Riven. The Second Life game is still in operation, thanks to a dedicated fan base, some of whom actually offered to help subsidize the monthly server costs of the island it's based on.)

The European Parliament voted 648 to 14 to reject the Computer Implemented Inventions Directive.

The bill was reportedly rejected because, politicians said, it pleased no-one in its current form.

Responding to the rejection the European Commission said it would not draw up or submit any more versions of the original proposal.

Our culture no longer bothers to use words like appropriation or borrowing to describe those very activities. Today's audience isn't listening at all - it's participating. Indeed, audience is as antique a term as record, the one archaically passive, the other archaically physical. The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital.

Today, an endless, recombinant, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of creative product (another antique term?). To say that this poses a threat to the record industry is simply comic. The record industry, though it may not know it yet, has gone the way of the record. Instead, the recombinant (the bootleg, the remix, the mash-up) has become the characteristic pivot at the turn of our two centuries.

We live at a peculiar juncture, one in which the record (an object) and the recombinant (a process) still, however briefly, coexist. But there seems little doubt as to the direction things are going. The recombinant is manifest in forms as diverse as Alan Moore's graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, machinima generated with game engines (Quake, Doom, Halo), the whole metastasized library of Dean Scream remixes, genre-warping fan fiction from the universes of Star Trek or Buffy or (more satisfying by far) both at once, the JarJar-less Phantom Edit (sound of an audience voting with its fingers), brand-hybrid athletic shoes, gleefully transgressive logo jumping, and products like Kubrick figures, those Japanese collectibles that slyly masquerade as soulless corporate units yet are rescued from anonymity by the application of a thoughtfully aggressive "custom" paint job.

"Maybe I can fix it from here," he said. He could login to the UPS for the cage and reboot the routers. The UPS was in a different netblock, with its own independent routers on their own uninterruptable power-supplies.

Kelly was sitting up in bed now, an indistinct shape against the headboard. "In five years of marriage, you have never once been able to fix anything from here." This time she was wrong -- he fixed stuff from home all the time, but he did it discreetly and didn't make a fuss, so she didn't remember it. And she was right, too -- he had logs that showed that after 1AM, nothing could ever be fixed without driving out to the cage. Law of Infinite Universal Perversity -- AKA Felix's Law.

Five minutes later he was behind the wheel. He hadn't been able to fix it from home. The independent router's netblock was offline, too. The last time that had happened, some dumbfuck construction worker had driven a ditch-witch through the main conduit into the data-center and Felix had joined a cadre of fifty enraged sysadmins who'd stood atop the resulting pit for a week, screaming abuse at the poor bastards who labored 24-7 to splice ten thousand wires back together.

Where: Schuler Books and Music, Meridian Mall, 2820 Towne Center Blvd., Lansing, MI 48912, (517) 316-7495

When: Thursday, July 7, 7:30PM

Link

Update: I've just been notified that this is the Schuler's Books in Eastwood -- not the one in Meridian Mall!

Previously: Binary Manicure

Two Brooklyn teenagers were arrested early yesterday on charges that they robbed and killed a 15-year-old boy in the Farragut neighborhood when they stole his friend's iPod, the police said. The victim, Christopher Rose, was walking with three other boys late Saturday afternoon when a large group of teenagers approached them and demanded that they turn over the iPod that one of the boys was carrying, according to the police and witnesses. When the boys refused, one of the suspects began hitting them, said Kenneth, 15, who was with Christopher at the time of the attack. Then someone stabbed Christopher twice in the chest.

Reader comment: Colin says,

You might be interested in this article too: "Steve Jobs calls family of teenager killed for iPod"

I bought the brass knuckle handbag you cats mentioned on BB a while ago for my girlfriend... she just got arrested at Miami International Airport for having the brass knuckle handbag in her luggage...they considered it a "concealed weapon". After holding her for a few hours and some serious questioning (during which she was terrified), they took the bag BUT let her on the plane. She has to return in August for a Court date, the charges are unclear so far, but serious enough that she needs a lawyer.

I guess the Department of Homeland Security has a fashion police division now...we wouldn't want fundamentalist fashionistas boarding planes with clothes of questionable taste.

Perhaps she would have gotten different treatment if they didn't know that she had just attended one of her (Muslim) friend's wedding...or perhaps the handbag really is dangerous. Land of the free indeed.

Every Sunday on Mt-Royale Mount Royal in Montreal a group of mideaval revivalists get together and beat eachother with duct-taped weapons. Some of them put a lot of work into their outfits but they still come off as "D&D Nerds" so a group of self-proclaimed hipsters decided to attack them... as ZOMBIES!

Reader comment: Manuel Lanctot says,

It's Mount Royal, not Mt-Royale. Mt-Royal is the name of one of the streets leading to the Mount Royal.

Here's a write-up about the whole event, from one of the people participating as a zombie: Link

I could be mistaken, but those "D&Ders" you mention on Boing Boing are most likely Amtgard members.

Here's my flickr gallery for retro electronic games. There's also a picture in my photostream of a poster from a 1981 Tron video game contest.

Outwardly at least, the Letterman center adapts the simplicity of much of the post's architecture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Numerous neocolonial, Mission revival, and Georgian revival structures dot the old Army base, but the features that most people identify with the Presidio are the unadorned brick and milky clapboard facades, the red roofs, shallow eaves, and small-paned windows. The center has retained these elements, and not just to win the lease.

Unless you're an employee or a select visitor, though, you won't be enjoying the fitness center, day-care facilities, and three state-of-the-art screening theaters. (The sublease tenants can use the first two.) Most of us will experience the Letterman campus by way of the verdant Great Meadow, created by the venerable but unflagging landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, who designed the FDR Memorial in Washington, DC, the Levi's Plaza fountains and park below Telegraph Hill, and the newly refurbished Stern Grove, among many other projects in his long career. Lucas didn't turn to Halprin solely because he's a local legend, though. Halprin plans his environments the way Lucas does his films: down to the last detail, even if it is not immediately perceptible. Halprin selected the stones and all the flora here, which include blue oat and autumn moor grasses, Japanese maple, several kinds of gum trees and lilies, and other fruiting and flowering plants.

Halprin's projects are a concatenation of elements to engage both sight and hearing; his hallmark water components tend to fuse or smooth out the arrangements. At the Letterman center, the water originates on one of two artificial promontories positioned along "view corridors," each of which aligns with Bernard Maybeck's 1915 Palace of Fine Arts. From these "stony belvederes" (the archaic, pastoral names of Halprin's features reflect his romantic streak), a man-made creek runs down to a small lagoon, following a conceptual path that would flow all the way to the Palace's pond were Gorgas Avenue not in the way. Halprin himself designed the meadow's green lamps, benches, and a small iron pavilion with restrained geometric and floral detailing that subtly evokes the Victorian age. As for the modern day, you won't find any tacky design references to the Star Wars franchise or any Lucas logos or signs. The only nod to the empire is a statue of wizened little Yoda presiding over a fountain right outside the visitor's entrance.

"The claimant was taken to Lincoln hospital and was put on an electrocardiogram which might have suggested that he suffered a heart attack," (the judge stated.)

The judge said that Morphy Richards claimed Mr Danquah had interfered with the equipment with the help of a hidden device. "They say it was hidden in his underpants and that the claimant referred to this device as his 'electric underpants'.

"The defence included evidence from an eminent cardiologist who said that the results in the hospital were produced as a result of interference."

"This heralds a transition of therapeutic robotics from research to practice, similar to when computers went from being specialized number-crunchers for engineering and science to the ubiquitous consumer appliances for word-processing and presentation that we use today," said MIT Professor Neville Hogan, a principal investigator in the work who holds appointments in mechanical engineering and brain and cognitive sciences.

The people present will have an opportunity to be buried alive in a coffin for fifteen minutes. As a framework program there will be lectures about the history of the science of determining death and the medical cultural history of "buried alive". People buried alive not only populate the horror stories of past centuries, but also countless reports in specialized medical literature. The theme of unintentional resurrection by grave robbers also runs through forensic protocols. Even in the 19th century it was said that every tenth person was buried alive. No wonder that the fear of this fate was immense and led - especially in the German-speaking region - to all kinds of precautions to avoid it. Various death test methods were developed, for instance. "Security coffins" with bell pulls and air hoses were patented; mortuaries were built, in which corpses were left for days to natural decay.

Indie audiobook publisher TellTale Weekly has just released a free audio adaptation of one of the knockout stories from Link's collection, Most of My Friends Are Two-Thirds Water, a genuinely creepy horror story. Link

Date Created: circa 1937 Created by: George and Glenn McElroy

Used by: Valentine Vox (of Vox and Walters)

Special Features: Fright wig, stick out tongue, ears wiggle, winker, nose wiggles, eyes and eyebrows move, eyes cross, upper lip moves

Trivia:
1. Cecil Wigglenose is the only McElroy figure in the Vent Haven collection that is regularly used. He is demonstrated by museum staff during regular guided tours and during unguided convention tours.
2. In addition to Cecil Wigglenose, this figure has also gone by the name of "Jerry McGinty."
3. If you'd like to see this McElroy figure in action, you can view a short silent video of Cecil by visiting the multimedia section of the website or by clicking this (WMV) link: low bandwidth | high bandwidth
4. Valentine Vox (of Vox and Walters) died in 1943.
5. Valentine Vox is a stage name, taken from a series of 19th century novels by Henry Cockton about a mystery solving ventriloquist.
6. This figure has been repaired and maintained several times. The McElroys restored the figure in 1974.
7. Most recently, ventriloquist and Vent Haven advisor Jeff Dunham repaired a stuck left eyebrow on January 17, 2004.
8. The photo to the left and the video mentioned above were both made in 2003, before the Dunham repair mentioned above. The stuck left eyebrow is noticeable in both.
Link to Vent Haven, Link to Cincinnati Enquirer article about the museum (Thanks, Charles Pescovitz!)

The lead is typically implanted in a minimally invasive laparoscopic procedure. The distal end is contiguous with a surgical needle that is used to insert the lead through the musculature of the stomach wall. The needle is then cut from the lead and removed from the abdominal cavity.

The programmer consists of a computer connected to a small programming wand. It is used to check and, if necessary, change electrical values of the IGS before and after implantation. Communication is accomplished noninvasively via radio frequency signals.

Back in autumn 1986, while he was an optics-obsessed grad student, Mr. Travis had an idea that he called time multiplexing. Suppose you were to pass an image through a lens and open a shutter when it emerged to guide the image out at a precise angle. And suppose you could do that for 30 images a second through each of 10 angles. Like fanning out a deck of cards, you'd beam out 10 angles of your image so quickly that, no matter where the viewer was in relation to the screen, each of his eyes would see its own angle of live video. Voilà: natural 3-D.

The problem was speed. Movies need 24 frames per second to fool our brain into seeing motion. Video needs 30. Time multiplexing needed 300, and no device existed to deliver it, so Mr. Travis decided he'd just build one himself. "I thought it was a get-rich-quick scheme," he says with a chuckle. "I'd make my fortune and then decide what I really wanted to do in life." Instead, it followed the course of so many other high-tech eurekas: a long, painful succession of investors nibbling away at it, until the trail of licenses and sub-licenses reached from Europe to Asia to Los Angeles and Dan Mapes.

Anheuser-Busch is launching its caffeinated beer in the UK. BE (Beer With Extra) contains 5% alcohol, 60.4mg of caffeine, guarana, and ginseng. In the US, BE is sold as B-to-the-E (B^E). My sister-in-law Heather Sparks points out that there's also a caffeinated and taurine-laden malt liquor on sale in the US called Sparks (no relation). From the BBC:

Victoria Manning, research psychologist for Action on Addiction, added: "(The introduction of BE) concerns us because the combination of caffeine and beer will enable people to drink more because the caffeine will keep them awake longer."