Objects have power, they are invested with meaning and purpose by their makers. They carry with them stories of past use, past users, and often a history we, as their temporary custodians, can only guess at. This point becomes ever more poignant in the face of our capitalist/consumerist culture. We throw so much stuff away. Cool stuff....

I wish to examine and re-contextualize found objects and materials, to invest them with new life, and to sanctify - or at least acknowledge their presence in the world. Or perhaps, more accurately, to acknowledge my presence as these materials’ temporary curator, archivist and re-purposer. My aim is to turn the lowest form of human productivity, trash, into the highest, art - a kind of modern alchemy.

...Many cell phone cameras have their lens at funny angles so someone has to actually hold the phone in order to take the picture. It’s hard to rest them on a table or fencepost to take the shot.

Cellpod easily connects with the popular “belt-clips” that are in use today. That standard button that hooks the phone to your belt snaps directly into the Cellpod. Many of the leather cases that people purchase to cover their phones have these “buttons” built in. It takes just a few seconds to attach. When you are done there is a quick release. If you don’t use a case or belt clip, an attachable button comes in the box to allow it to work with Cellpod.

The Second Lifers made a special effort to make me welcome, holding a design competition to create an in-game edition of my new book, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (which included a replica cover made by creating an in-game avatar that looked like the girl on the cover's brilliant Dave McKean painting, posing it, and taking screenshots).

They also roped a Second Lifer, lilith Pendragon, into creating a custom avatar for me that looks pretty eerily lifelike (I logged in for a bit last night and made it do funky disco moves that required a lot more coordination that the real-life me could ever muster).

Second Life's in-game reporter, Hamlet Linden, has run a fascinating interview with lilith, who apparently has a whole in-gmae business creating custom avatars for players:

So lilith's Cory Doctorow joins an esteemed list of her celebrity tributes which also include Frieda Kahlo and Shirley Manson of Garbage (lilith most often wears her Ms. Manson, on herself). Her Cory is so exacting, I initially assumed she'd created a custom skin of him in Photoshop. But as she tells it, she brought Doctorow into this world "just using the [default avatar creation] sliders and looking at his pic. Then I made all the clothes in Photoshop."

She did have a challenge recreating Cory's skull-hugging haircut, however.

"I tried to do his hair with prims to get the flat top, but it just looked horrid, and I'm not patient," she says. "Made a hair texture for his head, similar to how I did the corn rows for Snoop, and tweaked the hair sliders to make a little stick up in front."

Now, it so happens that prankster and copyfighter Kembrew McLeod registered a trademark in the phrase "freedom of expression" years ago, and has been writing ironic cease-and-desist letters to entities who use it, and even wrote a book with that title.

The outcome is inevitable: Kembrew and co have sent a cease and desist to Stoller for his infringement on their exclusive rights to "freedom of expression" -- said letter is full of dark, Orwellian hilarity. I sure hope that Stoller takes crayon in hand and responds -- it would be fun to find more excuses to mock him.

In the course of policing FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION, we at FESC (consisting of the websites freedomofexpression.us, freedomofexpression.org, freedom-of-expression.org, and freedom-of-expression.com) have learned of your infringement, which can be found at this URL: http://www.rentamark.com/e-marks/E-I/e-i.html.

We are troubled by (1) your unrestrained use of FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION and (2) the fact that you have offered to license this phrase to third parties without permission. After all, not just anybody can utilize FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION, and it is clear that your use of this phrase constitutes unfair competition and a blurring and tarnishing of this federally registered mark.

FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION will be substantially and irreparably damaged should this infringement continue. We, therefore, demand that Rentamark.com immediately cease and desist using FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION within five days. We eagerly await your response.

The goal of the Artist-in-Residence Program at SF Recycling & Disposal, Inc. is to use art to inspire people to recycle more and conserve natural resources. The company provides selected local artists with the opportunity to create art using materials they gather from San Francisco's refuse. This includes 24 hour access to a well-equipped studio, a monthly stipend, and an exhibit at the end of their residency, but artists seem most excited about having 24 hour access to the materials.

"Many artists find and recycle materials in their art, but no one else has this much material to pick from," says Program Director Paul Fresina.

The 2,000-square-foot art studio is located at SF Recycling & Disposal, Inc.'s Solid Waste Transfer and Recycling Center. The 44-acre site is where most of San Francisco's garbage and recyclables are temporarily dumped before going to a landfill or recycling plant. Recyclable items are sorted before being shipped to recycling plants and manufacturing facilities.

Throughout a residency, each artist talks to young students and adult tour groups about the experience of turning trash into treasures. At the conclusion of their residency, the company holds a reception to show the artist's work and invites the public. Many pieces of art from the program are exhibited in office building entries and public spaces in San Francisco. Many artists have made a permanent piece for the sculpture garden adjacent to the SF Recycling & Disposal, Inc. Transfer Station and the garden is a key stop for students on recycling tours.

Reader comment:Tyler Campbell says: "Another way to save straws is to cut them so they fit under the cap while still attached. Even though the straw is much shorter, it still shoots straight. That way you can leave them on all the time."

Reader comment: noahpoah says: "In response to Mark's (Mr. Frauenfelder's) recent post on WD-40, I thought I'd mention that WD-40 isn't technically a lubricant, it's made to prevent corrosion and/or degrease. WD stands for Water Dispersal, and 40 comes from the fact that it was the 40th formula they tried that finally worked. The provided link tells about the history of Water Dispersal 40."

Update: WD-40 has its own solution to the lost straw problem -- the Smart Straw, which is a hinged cap that lets you spray through the straw or directly through the nozzle.

Reader comment: Dan DeFrances says: "By God, it really is a wheelchair, and a spiffy one at that."

"When Frank Olson's wife died, his children had Frank Olson exhumed so that he could be moved to the same cemetery. They took that opportunity to have an autopsy performed, which concluded that Olsen was struck in the head before falling to his death in New York, suggesting homicide.

"The apology and payout to the Olson family from the Ford administration to settle the lawsuit brought by the family was supposedly at to the urging of Cheney and Rumsfeld (yes, the same ones). Because the death was related to classified information, they argued, the government would not be able to mount a defense to the lawsuit.

"Gottleib had taken Olson to New York to try to help him recover from his changed state. But there were few psychiatric professionals with clearance to know what had been done to him. So while in New York, Gottleib also took him to meet a magician named Mullholland, hoping the illusionist could do a few tricks to cheer him up. Mullholland knew a bit about MK-ULTRA. He wrote a sleight-of-hand book for the CIA as part of an MK-ULTRA subproject. The book primarily focuses on teaching operatives how to drug people without there knowledge. The book itself is still classified.

"You mentioned that Gottleib picked victims in the seedy parts of San Francisco, but, in fact, he also worked in one of the nicer neighborhoods of the city by the bay. There is a duplex on 225 Chestnut Street, up on Telegraph hill, that was rented under the assumed name Morgan Hall. The CIA set it up like a brothel. They bribed prostitutes (with drugs) to bring their clients up where they were drugged unwittingly and then observed. (The prostitutes were 'paid' with drugs, and the clients were drugged unwittingly.) The same apartment was also used by the DEA for sting operations on drug dealers."

Reader comment: Duncan says: "The documentary Crazy Rulers of the World, by the journalist Jon Ronson suggests an alternative explanation to Frank Olson's death. Ronson interviewed one of Olson's colleagues who said that Olson was aware he had been dosed, was laughing about it and that it had no ill effects. There was no autopsy done on Olson's corpse when he was buried, but Olson's son had the body exhumed and examined. Forensic study suggested that Olson had received a blow to the back of the head, possibly from a gun butt, before he fell to his death. Olson's son also notes that his fathers melancholia and death came shortly after visits to Europe and there is evidence to suggest that he was party to the torture and killing of Cold War detainees. It is suggested a crisis of conscience caused his distress and eventual assassination by his CIA colleagues concerned about his loyalty."

Reader comment: Jamie says: "This article from Counter Punch details even more despicable and creepy research projects that Gottlieb was part of. It even mentions the suspicious circumstances of Gottleib's own death:"

Gottlieb's passing came at a convenient time for the CIA, just as several new trials involving victims of its experiments were being brought. Those who had talked to Gottlieb in the past few years say that the chemist believed that the Agency was trying to make him the fall guy for the entire program. Some speculate that Gottlieb may have been ready to spill the goods on a wide range of CIA programs.

Reader comment: Anonymous says: "After reading about Gottileb and the CIA using LSD, I was reminded of an article I saved about Gottileb's division that I read in Spin magazine in March of 1994. I found a copy of the article listed on the Frank Olson site (the home page of which was submitted by a reader, but this article itself is not easily found by navigating the site) It details information from Ike Feldman, an operative that worked under George White who was drafted by Gottileb - and what they did, as well as further information about Gottileb and how he ran his group." Link

Previously: EFF legal guide for bloggers, EFF Blogger Legal Guide in your trousers

Previously, Afghan goat-mod: dead critter polo

You can't ignore a seven-foot-tall turd. That's Christianne Wilhelmson's take on Mr. Floatie, who has become a fixture at Victoria-area events. The program co-ordinator with the Georgia Strait Alliance says the chocolate bar-shaped mascot is responsible for renewed debate about what Victoria should do with its sewage.

Most people were tired of hearing about the issue, which the alliance has been pushing for more than a decade, but Wilhelmson said Mr. Floatie's recent appearances have changed that. "He has managed to raise the issue back to the level where people are talking about it again," she said. However, Wilhelmson's enthusiasm is not shared by Denise Blackwell of the Capital Regional District, who thinks Mr. Floatie is a childish waste of time.

Mr. Floatie is the mascot for People Opposed to Outfall Pollution, or POOP. Organizer James Skwarok, who also wears the mascot suit, said Mr. Floatie has been an invaluable tool.

The robots were developed after the United Arab Emirates Camel Racing Association banned the use of jockeys under the age of 16 in March 2004. The age limit for jockeys was increased to 18 in July 2005....

An unnamed Swiss company has reportedly been paid $1.3m to develop the robotic jockeys, which are sold for around $5500 each. The first trials involving the riders took place in April 2005.

The remote-controlled riders have mechanical legs for balancing or leaning and mechanical arms for pulling on their camel's reins.

Previously on Boing Boing: Morse Texter

Reader comment: Patrick Joseph McNamara says,

Canada has had a gradated system in place for some time. It's possible for an individual to get their basic ham radio license without the need for Morse. However, they are limited in what ranges they can use.

Paul Wood says:

The US has had code-free licenses for quite some time. Technician class hams can use VHF / UHF frequencies, and add HF frequencies once they pass the morse code test. Link

Update: Some folks have reported problems accessing the MP3s today. Reader Josh Berezin says,

It looks like the Philip Glass / Hip Hop mp3s are moving... I pasted the *.mp3 part of the URL into the base url of the site, like this and they seem to be there, though the links themselves don't reflect that yet.

Kaldi's has a Starbucks-like logo and Starbucks-like décor, and its workers wear Starbucks-like green aprons. At the bar, there are Starbucks-like "short" and "tall" coffee options, although Kaldi's sticks exclusively to Ethiopia's coffee varieties, while the real Starbucks includes Ethiopia's premium beans among many other offerings.

"I've always loved Starbucks, the ambiance of it," said Tseday Asrat, the proprietor of Kaldi's, fessing up to the obvious inspiration behind her year-old business. "So we created our own version of it here."

Kaldi's is by no means the only pretender around here. The latest hotel to go up near the airport is a "Marriot," another knockoff that uses only one "t" but has the exact same typeface in its sign as the J. W. Marriott hotel chain. There is a 7-11 convenience store here, as well, which has no connection to the 7-Elevens on so many corners back in America. The copycats are evidence of the financial success that many Ethiopians are attaining in the United States and of the desire of many of them to invest some of their wealth back home.

This is some funny, funny video. Link (Thanks, Jeremy!)

Update: Here's the official version, courtesy of Pam Wain.

“The Maddest Mad Scientist” The CIA’s Dr. Sidney Gottlieb

On a warm autumn evening in Paris in 1952, a 25-year-old, up-and-coming American artist named Stanley Glickman was enjoying a coffee at his favorite haunt, the Café Dome in Montparnasse. Perhaps he spent the moment thinking of his Canadian girlfriend who was touring Europe at the time, or of the painting he’d completed that was hanging in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In any case, Glickman’s musings were interrupted when an acquaintance approached him and invited him to have a drink across the street at the Café Select. He accepted. There, the artist and his companion were joined by an unfamiliar group of Americans. Dressed in unfashionably straight-laced clothing, the strangers espoused political beliefs that were highly disagreeable to Glickman. After hours of hotly contested debate, the artist decided to pay his part of the bill and go home, but one of the strangers—a man with a clubfoot—insisted on buying him a drink as a way to make up for their argument. Instead of calling over the waiter who’d been serving drinks to the party all evening, the clubfooted man went to the bar himself and bought a Chartreuse for Glickman.

Before he even finished his cocktail, Glickman began to feel “funny.” The walls appeared to move, the electric lights in the café were ringed with halos, and wine bottles seemed to levitate on Glickman’s silent behest. Another member of the party told Glickman that he was now capable of “performing miracles.”

Unbeknownst to Glickman, the clubfooted man had spiked his drink with LSD. The aftereffects of the acid trip sent him into a lifelong tailspin of psychosis, electroshock therapy, and terrifying hallucinations. He had no idea what had happened to him—this was 1952, at least a decade before most people had even heard of the drug. His social life was destroyed. He never had another romantic relationship (he told his Canadian girlfriend to leave him before he ruined her life). He took on a series of odd jobs, including cleaning furniture at a secondhand store. Glickman, who once had a promising future in the arts, never painted again.

Who was the mysterious poisoner? In all likelihood, it was Sidney Gottlieb, a man who dosed many other unsuspecting people with powerful hallucinogenic drugs during the 1950s. Infiltrating the seedier neighborhoods of San Francisco and New York, he poisoned prostitutes and their customers just to see what would happen.

The authorities were aware of Gottlieb’s activities but did nothing to stop him. That may seem strange, until you learn that the man was an authority himself. For 22 years, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb ran the technical services division of the CIA and oversaw the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program, an illegal drug and mind-control campaign launched during the height of Cold War paranoia. In addition to developing poison darts and toxic handkerchiefs for assassinating leaders of Communist governments, Dr. Gottlieb ran clandestine drug experiments on unsuspecting U.S. citizens. (It’s not known exactly how many people were dosed, because in 1973 the director of the CIA, Richard Helms, ordered almost all records pertaining to MK-ULTRA to be destroyed.)

Gottlieb typically selected prisoners, poor people, petty criminals, and the mentally ill for his test subjects, since they were the least likely to be taken seriously should they have the temerity to complain about being drugged without their knowledge or consent by an upper-echelon federal official. (In all fairness, Gottlieb also enjoyed slipping mind-altering drugs into the drinks of his fellow CIA cronies, just for grins.) MK-ULTRA also ran tests on “willing” volunteers, like the seven people in Kentucky who were given LSD for 77 days in a row.

It’s not known how many lives were ruined as a result of Gottlieb’s hallucinogenic high jinks, but there’s at least one documented case of a death resulting from his experiments. In 1953, at a U.S. Army research retreat at the Deep Creek Lodge in western Maryland, Gottlieb spiked after-dinner drinks with LSD without letting his fellow diners in on the joke. Frank Olson, a 43-year-old germ warfare researcher, became very disturbed by the experience. When he returned home, his wife and three children could hardly recognize the formerly jovial husband and father. They didn’t have much of a chance to get to know this chemically transformed man, because nine days later, he jumped to his death from a 13-story window.

While some might call this murder, you have to remember that Dr. Gottlieb was acting in the interest of national security. In fact, during the 1977 Senate hearing on CIA abuses, Gottlieb told the committee that dosing unsuspecting human guinea pigs with drugs was justified. “Harsh as it may sound in retrospect,” he testified, “it was felt that in an issue where national survival might be concerned, such a procedure and such a risk was a reasonable one to take.”

Give credit to Gottlieb for being smart enough to work for an organization that would not only allow him to poison and murder people with such aplomb, but would also protect him from the consequences awaiting any other sociopath. Olson’s widow fought years of heartrending legal battles until Congress agreed to award her $750,000 in exchange for releasing the CIA from liability. Glickman never received compensation for his unwilling role as a drug test subject. In fact, after he died in 1992, his sister sued the government. Despite the evidence against Gottlieb, the jury ruled against her. As for Gottlieb, he enjoyed his final years indulging his passions for folk dancing and goat breeding on his farm not far from CIA headquarters in Reston, Virginia. He died in 1999 at the age of 80. While his family refused to disclose the cause his death, it’s not likely that he died as the result of a drug-induced suicidal jump from a hotel window. Link

Reader comment: ScottG in NYC says: "Mark - thanks for the mention of the Frank Olson case. Every student in America should have Orwell's 1984 and this site put up by his family on their required reading list. At the risk of sounding like a dinosaur (which I'm certainly not), I think Springsteen put it best: 'blind faith in your leaders can get you killed.' Sadly, Frank is (non)living proof... :(" Frank Olson Legacy Project

Reader comment:eli says: "You might also might to check out GNN's NewsVideo The Most Dangerous Game: 'The Most Dangerous Game traces the history of top-secret CIA mind control operation MK-ULTRA: from the covert importation of NAZI scientists at the end of WWII, to the illegal brainwashing experiments conducted on the patients of world famous psychiatric researcher, Dr. Ewen Cameron -- cut to the pulsing hypnotica of Mitchell Akiyama.'" Link

7 Money Mantras for a Richer Life by Michelle Singletary is a recent all-purpose financial book. I was ready to dismiss it for the absolute stupidity of mantra number one (stupidity in its phrasing, not in its advice), but after reading the book, I have to admit its advice is solid. It features: 


Mantra #1: "If it's on your ass, it's not an asset." If you can wear it, it's not an investment. Also, something is riding your ass (such as a high house payment), it's not an asset.


Mantra #2: "Is this a need or a want?" This is a question Kris has been trying to get me to ask myself for years.


Mantra #3: "Sweat the small stuff." Do worry about the small expenses; they add up.


Mantra #4: "Cash is better than credit." There is almost no reason to carry a credit card.


Mantra #5: "Keep it simple." With money, avoid anything that seems complicated. If you don't understand it, avoid it. You'll probably lose money.


Mantra #6: "Priorities lead to prosperity." Determine what's important to you, and pursue that with your time and money.


Mantra #7: "Enough is enough." Don't overconsume. Recognize when you have fulfilled your needs and your wants.

After a number of years I felt that the model companies had produced everything they could. In order to keep Hawk moving forward I came up with a new concept. I did some way-out thinking, drew some sketches, and proceeded to create rough models, using wire armature, balsa, marble dust, sculpting putty, and miscellaneous kit parts. The results? Digger,a dragster; Davey, a cyclist; and the unproduced General Fritzgruber Luftwaffle in his Sturmgrupen Eindecker, an airplane pilot. I presented these to the people at Hawk in 1963. They took one look and said, 'Let's produce them.' They asked me what I called my creations, and I told them 'Weird-ohs.' The name stuck, and Hawk prepared them for the annual model kit manufacturers' convention held in the fall of 1963 at the Sherman Hotel in Chicago. "Hawk presented five or six different Weird-ohs at the convention, and the models were the hit of the show. They went off like gangbusters! I heard that they wrote orders for 246,000 kits in a few days. The factory had to go into overtime to fill all the orders. The kits were on the shelves by November."

Reader comment: Allen Varney says: I wrote a 1997 column for a magazine about non-sports trading cards that describes the set of Weird-Ohs bubblegum cards Fleer issued in 1966:

"Pedestrian" figures in two senses, the crudely sketched and flatly colored Weird-Ohs cards lag far behind Roth's work and a later imitator, Donruss's popular 'Odd Rods' series (1969-73). The Weird-Ohs really lose the race with their back copy, tedious stream-of-consciousness paragraphs that taunt and demean their subjects. Take drag-racer Digger: "Sometimes this idiotic jack rabbit ends up tailing his own dragster. Trouble is, he needs a tune up between the ears. It's probably much safer for us pedestrians this way (card #54)." "Us pedestrians?" Try saying that at a custom car show!

"A doctoral student in mathematics named Dan Bernstein has been told by the government that if he publishes a computer program he wrote on the Internet he could go to jail as an arms dealer."

"What does the computer program do, John?" I responded. "Does it blow things up? Take planes out of the sky? Reveal the location of warships at sea?"

"No, it just lets you keep messages secret. It's an encryption program. Without it, your email messages are just like a postcard, open for anyone to read," he replied.

"Sounds like a First Amendment problem to me," I said, despite not knowing what encryption was, or ever having sent an email message.

"Me too. Want to take the case with EFF?"

In many children's books--contrary to what parents tell their children about the meaning of appearances--physical ugliness signifies its moral equivalent. Dahl takes this to an extreme, describing his villains' repulsive attributes with brio: Mr. Hazell's "great, glistening, beery face . . . as pink as a ham," in "Danny, the Champion of the World" (1975); Aunt Sponge's resemblance to "a great white soggy overboiled cabbage"; the "grizzly old grunion of a grandma" in "George's Marvelous Medicine" (1981)--the one Dahl book I find irredeemably sour--who has "a small puckered-up mouth, like a dog's bottom." Dahl shared with George Orwell an acute sense of why small children often see adults as unsightly or intimidating. "Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looking upward, and few faces are at their best when seen from below," Orwell wrote. Dahl once said that adults should get down on their knees for a week, in order to remember what it's like to live in a world in which the people with all the power literally loom over you.

We still call them marshmallows, but there's no marsh mallow in them anymore. Candy made with honey and thickened with sap from the root of the marsh mallow (Athea officinalis) plant was savored in ancient Egypt. Marsh mallow, the plant, grows to be two to four feet tall. It has gray-green leaves and pink flowers. Not surprisingly, it grows in marshes and is related to other "mallow" plants, such as the rose mallow, the apricot mallow, and the common mallow.

Up until the mid-1800s, marshmallow candy made in the United States contained marsh mallow sap as a thickener. Today's recipes use gelatin (made from animal bones and hides) instead of the sap. Mostly, though, marshmallows are made of corn syrup or sugar. Gum arabic (made from acacia trees) serves as a "foam stabilizer." Flavoring is also added.

Update: Michael sez, "I would like to point out that the basic ingredient of a banana split is from New Guinea, not Malaysia:

Indeed, new evidence arising from archaeological and palaeoenvironmental studies at Kuk Swamp in the Western Highlands Province suggests a very long history of banana cultivation in Papua New Guinea dating back to at least 7000 years ago and possibly as long ago as 10 000 years (Denham et al. 2003). This is the longest record for banana cultivation in the world.

First, take a headless calf or goat. Gut the creature, remove its legs at the knee and, for additional girth, stuff it with sand. Then toughen the carcass by soaking it in cold water for twenty-four hours. Collect two teams of horses and riders. Draw a circle on the ground and place the goat inside. You are now ready to play Afghanistan’s national sport, buzkashi.

Remember, everything goes better with buzkashi (see page fifteen). (thanks, S)

Reader Comment: Nathan B. says,

I thought I'd mention that everybody's favorite Reagan-era hero, Rambo, played a rousing game of buzkashi in Rambo III. Amazon link.

Snip from Variety:

Bootleg tapes and discs have a long history at comicbook and sci-fi conventions, where fans often look for copies of old cartoons and foreign productions that aren't sold legitimately in the U.S.

But mixed in with obscure titles at Comic-Con were numerous pirated movies that are or shortly will be available.

A scan of three booths selling bootleg discs at Comic-Con revealed titles including "Star Wars," "Star Trek: Voyager," "Veronica Mars" and the new "Battlestar Galactica."

Image: One of many scanned sources of amusement available in the Crappy Boodleg DVD Covers photo pool. The tagline on this super-crappy bootleg of Blade (misspelled and crackerized as "Blake") is not the actual tagline of the movie. It's the beginning of a disclaimer from paperfilms.com, which ends in "we may terminate your account."

Reader Comment: Kyle Goetz says,

I saw the post made about the Japanese cell phone advertisement with Darth Vader, and just had to share the pictures I took at the au gallery in Harajuku two weeks ago. The three I put up are a higher quality photo of the previous poster's Darth Vader, a Pimping Yoda, and a ginormous Darth Vader drape, for lack of a better term. Currently, they are front page at my blog but the individual pictures' postings are: Darth Vader and Schoolgirls, Yoda Pimping, and Huge Vader Poster thing

Jean Snow says,

Here is a scan of the magazine version of the ad (found in Tokyo Walker): Link

Indian police forced around 200 people caught watching pornography to do sit-ups in public to shame them and keep them away from theaters that illegally screen smutty movies. The Hindustan Times reported Monday that police stopped the screening of a pornographic movie at a cinema in Balasore district in the eastern state of Orissa and made audience members -- some as young as 17 -- do 10 sit-ups each at a public square, watched by onlookers. The police made the all-male group vow not to watch pornography again. To make matters worse for the embarrassed teenagers who were caught, police called their parents to watch them doing sit-ups.

Fleshbot has related items on Indian MMS porn and phonecam smut scandals.

Pete Ashdown says: "Hello boingboing. Longtime reader, first time submitter. Somewhere in my misty memory, I remember riding to a rave with a boingboing editor while I was in SF, but sadly that is all I remember. Anyhoo, I'm currently the sole Democratic challenger to Senator Orrin "MPAA/RIAA" Hatch in Utah. I founded the first ISP in Utah, XMission, in 1993, and have been a net.denizen since 1987."
Link

Link, click on the top right thumbnail, then select "details" to see the thighbone accessory. Or just clickez ici. Photos: Marcio Madeira. (Thanks, Susannah)
Reader Comment: Paula K. Wirth says,

This reminds me of Tim Burton's upcoming movie Corpse Bride (poster here, some movie info here). Perhaps this is a trend. I prefer it to froofy princess-like white numbers, myself.

Image: among the snapshots beginning to appear around the web, this photo of people on the streets walking home now in London (rather than using public transport). Another flickr set here, related tags include London and bomb. Right now, those tags return a large number of images depicting people in London at work or home, wearily gathered around televisions tuned to live news coverage. And, this.
8:20am PT, officials state one confirmed casualty, no deaths.

CNN, 8:22am PT, Christiane Amanpour interviewing a terrorism expert on the street in London: "What kind of people are these, who can't get four devices to work properly?"

Blogs where you'll see local "citizen reports" include the London Metblog. The Guardian newsblog is following. Wikipedia has an entry here. Snip from that (developing) entry:

Unconfirmed reports stated that three separate incidents involving "dummy explosions", using only detonators, had occurred at Shepherd's Bush, Warren Street and Oval underground stations, leading to the closure and evacuation of the related tube lines (BBC). Other reports have speculated that complete bombs were used, but that the detonators failed to work correctly. It is reported that one person, who carried the bomb, has been injured at Warren Street, and a man was seen running from one of the Tubes after the explosion. One report also suggests that it was a nail bomb that exploded in Warren Street.

Reader comment: Anonymous says,

Just popped up in the New York Times: in the wake of the London bombings (but, they say, not because of them) MTA and NYPD to begin searching commuters at random. Link

Everyone agrees that the bird that appears on the tape is either an ivory-billed woodpecker or a pileated woodpecker, a slightly smaller bird that is relatively common. Both species have a mix of white and black plumage. However, the ivory-billed woodpecker has a white trailing edge to its wings while the pileated woodpecker has a black trailing edge.

The team that conducted the original search for the bird ran extensive tests, including recreating the scene captured in video using flapping, hand-held models of the two types of woodpecker. They concluded that the plumage patterns seen in the grainy image could only be that of the ivory-billed woodpecker.

The authors of the new paper disagree.

Only extended scientific discussion - or new pictures of the bird from additional searches - will determine whose view will prevail. Another intensive scientific search of the region is scheduled to begin in November, Cornell officials said.

"The people who originally announced this thoroughly believe they got an ivory-billed woodpecker," (Yale ornithologist Mark) Robbins said in an interview...

John W. Fitzpatrick, the co-leader of the search for the bird and director of the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology, said it was normal for scientists to disagree about evidence of this sort, especially because in this case the video in question was "pretty crummy."

But he said that extensive analysis was done and redone to eliminate the possibility that the bird was a pileated woodpecker.

Although he has taken a visible role in the effort, (Dan) Hicks (who pushed for the exhibit and offered to pay for it) said he was only one of 300 people interested in bringing the creationist exhibit to the zoo. Following Thursday's vote, Hicks said those 300 would have to decide what to do next but there would be appeals to the mayor.

In the meantime, the zoo continues to have a representation of a Hindu god, a globe sculpture that promotes pantheism and a Maasai display that contains the equivalent of posting Scripture, Hicks said. Presenting this material represented an affront to the majority Christian population of Tulsa, he said.

"There must be something very special about the Genesis account for opponents to fight so hard to suppress those words," Hicks said.

Snip from New York Times story:

In her red multilayered skirt, white pumps and gold-laced shawl, the traditional dress of the Aymara people, Ana Polonia Choque might well be preparing for a night of folk dancing or, perhaps, a religious festival. But as Carmen Rosa, master of the ring and winner of 100 bone-crunching bouts in Bolivia's colorful wrestling circuit, she is actually dressing for a night of mayhem.

With loyal fans screaming out her name, she climbs the corner ropes high above the ring, bounces once for momentum and flies high, arms outstretched for maximum effect. To the crowd's delight, the dive flattens her adversary, María Remedios Condori, better known as Julia la Paceña (Julia from La Paz).

This, ladies and gentlemen, is "lucha libre," Bolivia's version of the wacky, tacky wrestling extravaganzas better known as World Wrestling Entertainment in the United States and Triple A in Mexico, which serve as a loose model. But there are no light shows, packed arenas or million-dollar showmen.

He had not run for very long before he realized the two cops were only pacing him. They could see something he could not. With each frantic step a sense of dread nagged at him. The more calm and calculating they were, the further behind he left his common sense, and his panic ratcheted up. As he ran, the black and white radio car glided silently along behind like a predatory whale.

Consequently, the Vancouver-based (Raincoast Books) may save nearly 30,000 trees, according a study by Markets Initiative, a coalition of environmental groups, including Greenpeace Canada and the Sierra Club.

Raincoast isn't the only publisher seeking to put a green tint on the wildly popular Potter books. Publishers from Germany, Italy, Britain, and Israel also comitted to printing Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince on large percentages of recycled paper and/or "ancient forest friendly" paper.

With the bulk of the machine in my driveway, I raced back down the street in the Country Squire and there was a grizzled alcoholic pawing the Captian Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy backglass. I excused myself as I pushed past him and loaded the head in the back of the wagon. A tired old wino is match for my pinball desires. He said, 'Ok, you can have that, but I am taking this!' as he thumped his hand on a shit brown file cabinet. Whatever, pruno.

These little babies are true miracles of nature.  They have the same parents as Stevie our no eyed mascot. They are truly unique in every way. They are smart and adapt quickly.  They aren't shy either, when they hear your voice they become excited just like any seeing turtle does.  The one thing they need help with until they are use to their surroundings is feeding and as smart as these little fellows are it won't take long for them to get adapted to your feeding schedule.  So if you have the time and love for a special needs turtle, order one of these little gems today and enjoy them for a lifetime.

Reader comment: Stefan says: Blind turtles aren't the only mutant animals you can buy. There's a strain of mice available with an inherited neurological defect that causes them to spaz out and spin around as they walk. These "Dancing Mice" were once sold through the Johnson Smith novelty catalog! Link

The Entertainment Software Rating Board has rescinded their rating for GTA:SA and is advising retailers to stop selling it. Take-Two, Rockstar's parent company, has stopped production of the game until it can produce a non-"Hot Coffee" version, and it may start disappearing from store shelves by the end of the day. The overblown witchhunt seemed comical until it began to succeed...

Reader comment: Bonnie adds,

Rockstar's parent, Take Two Interactive, also admitted for the first time Wednesday that the sex scenes had been built into the retail game -- not just the PC version but also those written for Xbox and PlayStation2 consoles.

The phrase is associated with the race riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles in 1965. Onlookers started chanting it after police arrested a young man for drunken driving. The confrontation triggered six days of rioting, resulting in more than 30 deaths, 1,000 injuries and devastating fire damage to the neighborhood...

"It's not about violence, but the hot sauce will remind people of the rebellion in Watts and how the slogan came about," (original party member David) Hilliard said. "But this is an emphasis on using some of the revenue used by our hot sauce to educate."

Profits from the merchandise will support literacy programs, Hilliard said.

Oh, and he also uses a variation of his technique to move a pole barn by himeself over 300 feet! Link

They foresee two possible outcomes: if they can demonstrate that porn physically "damages " the brain, that might open the floodgates for "big tobacco"-style lawsuits against porn publishers and distributors; second, and more insidiously, if porn can be shown to "subvert cognition " and affect the parts of the brain involved in reasoning and speech, then "these toxic media should be legally outlawed, as is all other toxic waste, and eliminated from our societal structure." Link

Unfortunately, (Reisman's) self-published paper The Psychopharmacology of Pictorial Pornography Restructuring Brain, Mind & Memory & Subverting Freedom of Speech (PDF) is highly selective when reviewing the published neuroscience research.

Many of her arguments are based on one-reference claims, and some only on what she calls "extensive documentation". One unmentioned implication is the fact that, if sexual arousal from pornography causes 'brain damage', then so will real-life sex!

The first Swanson TV Dinner turkey with corn bread dressing and gravy, sweet potatoes and buttered peas sold for about $1 apiece and could be cooked in 25 minutes at 425 degrees.

"We had the TV screen and the knobs pictured on the package. That was the real start of marketing," [Gerry] Thomas said. Ten million dinners were sold in the first year of national distribution.

Reader comment: Mike Ransom says,

I recognize that scan of a TV dinner as one I did for my site a few years ago (the dinner was tasty, too.) The Swanson TV dinner has a Tulsa radio connection: Link.

"Meet Frank.

He's posing with his prototype, which converts a useless fire hydrant into a lovely sidewalk shower.

Respect."

Link to full-size image shot by Siege in Brooklyn.
There's a related post on his Nerve.com blog (sadly, cockblocks all but registered Nerve subscribers).

Reader comment: Warning, do not try this in your 'hood. Roland is among the more sober Boing Boing readers who write in to party-poop this celebrated hydrant hack:

Yes, fire hydrants are TOTALLY useless. It's not like they're used for, oh, I don't know, putting out fires and saving peoples' lives or anything. And it's not like sticking extra crap onto the valves (or whatever it is they have) might prevent firefighters from properly accessing the hydrants and end up killing people trapped in burning buildings. *rolls eyes* Encouraging people to fuck around with important, life-saving equipment is hardly what I expect from you guys.

Reader Leontine Greenberg adds:

About that fire hydrant thing - supposedly if you go to the local fire station, you can get a "sprinkler cap" to put on the hydrant. Totally legal and non-dangerous: Link

How Can I Get The Fire Department To Turn On A Fire Hydrant For Neighborhood Children On A Hot Summer's Day?
You can contact your local firehouse or police precinct. Hydrants can only be opened when used in conjunction with an approved Sprinkler Cap. Only firefighters are permitted to open a fire hydrant. Link.

Just a quick note on your fire hydrants hack post. I'm a civil engineer in Spain and I've been designing water supply networks for the last few years. While I'm clueless regarding the US regulations, most municipalities may have strict policies regarding these things (for obvious reasons), so you can easily get fined if you get caught fooling around with it. Furthermore, depending on the network pressure (typical values being something in between 10-80 psi), you can get a sudden blast which can easily knock you off (for good) if you fail to manipulate the hose coupling properly. Some hydrants (wet barrel types) are permanently pressurized so they are bound to deliver this behaviour. Additional info can be found on NFPA's or AWWA's regulations and standards. Link

Here is what the FDNY-approved sprinkler cap spray looks like: image link. They also will give you a blue NYPD police barrier to block parking and traffic near the hydrant, so the kiddies don't get run over by passing cars. And here's what the illegal spray looks like at full blast, focused with a soup can. It shot far enough to hit passersby on the bridge.

Security staffs in Tokyo theaters are confiscating the video cameras of anyone caught trying to use them to record a movie on the screen, the Tokyo daily Yomiuri Shimbun reported today (Wednesday).

Moreover, the newspaper reported, notices warning patrons that filming inside a theater is banned are being posted in Tokyo theaters, and the major Japanese film distributors have cooperated to produce an animated short film that is being screened throughout the country showing a girl shedding tears that turn into skulls, as an announcer says, 'Films are stolen, and so are impressive moments. Precious things are being tainted.'

Reader comment: Boing Boing reader pmk says,

I've tried to take pics of this thing twice now, but neither has come out. It's not anime, which makes it all the more freaky. It's a shot of a young woman's face, looking inexplicably sad, with a scary voiceover. About halfway through the shot, she starts crying BLACK TEARS. At the end, the whole kit and kaboodle morphs into a cartoon skull.

Reader fishyswaz adds,

This isn't the particular film clip you are looking for, but here is another anti-piracy spot that is showing on TV: Link to mpeg. And here is the link for information on the actress (Mitsuki Tanimura) of the spot running in the theater (with pic).

I can't find a capture of the actual film but the spot runs like (from memory so it may not be exact):

closeup of actress' face on black background with sad music.
actress voiceover: "Our (deep) emotions are being stolen"
actress cries black tears (like ink...) the tear drop into a into black water with film superimposed, as the water ripples a skull appears.
the film burns (melts), the antipiracy campaign logo appears and title read by announcer
accress voiceover of catchphrase: "I don't watch or buy" [pirated movies]
the catchphrase and criminal warning are displayed.

Next time I go to the theater, I'll see if I can't capture it on my cameraphone.

Oh, and don't forget. If you have a Moon Day party tonight (with Tang, Moon Pies, and telescopes), share your snapshots here!

Previously on Boing Boing:
Have a Moon Day party Wed 7/20/05, share snapshots!
Google's zoomable Moon-explorer

An example:
16 Years of Alcohol

Daily Star: "Trainspotting meets A Clockwork Orange!"

Actual line: "This glum, violent drama about a Scottish thug ruined by drink is written and pretentiously directed by Richard Jobson whose approach — Trainspotting meets A Clockwork Orange — is bad enough to drive you to drink in no time." Link

Deciding that I mustn't be the last member of New York's illustrious glitterati to show off the exploits of a recent Milan shopping spree at Asia de Cuba, the Philippe Starck-designed Cuban-Asian fusion hot spot, I ventured into the certifiably buzzing mise en scène last week with high expectations and a Prada suit with a custom-sized neck hole and an extra interior pocket for my colostomy bag.

I have to admit, though, once my personal nurse Greg mashed the ginger and chili red-snapper frittatas into a paste fine enough to fit through my rubber feeding hose, I came to the immediate conclusion that Asia de Cuba indeed deserves its reputation as more of a glorified fashion catwalk than a serious dining mecca. These were far from the fragrant and exciting frittatas of coastal Cuba, which I remember fondly from my early childhood days spent at the Havana Experimental Clinic for Severe Combined Immunodeficiency Disorder.

Two scientists sent me email about this.

Dr. Paul J. Camp from the Department of Physics at Spelman College in Atlanta, GA emailed me with the following:

What Einstein could not have known at the time is that there is one interaction that does not decrease with distance. The color interaction, which holds quarks together inside particles such as protons and neutrons, vanishes as quark separation goes to zero and gets stronger the further apart the quarks are. This is called "asymptotic freedom" and its discovery won a Nobel prize last year for Frank Wilczek and Davids Gross and Politzer. The bulk of their work was done in the 1970's.

This is why you can't observe a free quark. As you push them further and further apart, trying to separate one out, you eventually add enough energy to create more quarks which immediately bind to each other. So instead of free quarks, you just get more hadrons. Leakage of the color interaction is what is responsible for the strong force, but Einstein could not have known that since he died in 1955. His stated reason was therefore partly wrong, but his conclusion is still valid. Psi forces only appear in poorly controlled experiments.

Actually the strong force increases with distance. That's why you can't pull protons apart into their constituent quarks. (If you dump in enough energy to pry one out, it'll go into creating a quark-antiquark pair with the new quark taking the place of the old one -- all you've done is create a meson.) Basically, the difference between it and electromagnetism in this respect is that electromagnetic waves (photons) are not charged, whereas "strong-force waves" (gluons) are indeed colored (the strong force version of charge).

Therefore, psi-forces are real, and denying them was Einstein's biggest blunder.

Despite "hating speaking in public," Lynch, 59, says he decided "to stop being quiet" about his passion for the 47-year-old Hindu chanting technique after observing the sad state of education in U.S. schools.

Today's students "are even more stressed out. Their schools are hellholes," he goes on. "They're getting pathetic educations. They're not going forward with full decks of cards."

Students who meditate, he says, "will start shining like a bright, shiny penny, and their anxieties will go away. By diving within, they will attain a field of pure consciousness, pure bliss, creativity, intelligence, dynamic peace. You enliven the field, and every day it gets better. Negativity recedes."

"In a truly bizarre twist on the life of Jesus, the town has two large crosses in a small, out of the way park - one for Jesus, who is supposedly buried there, and one for Isukiri, his brother.

"It turns out, according to local lore, it was Jesus' brother who was crucified so that Jesus could escape and move to Japan, where he lived for many years.

"One reason there aren't many Christians in Japan is that they suffered terrible persecution. Many retreated to this remote corner, where they lived and Japanified their savior. In the process, they kind of stripped out the central idea of the religion, the resurrection.

"A good summary is in this Fortean Times story."
Link (Thanks for the image of Sanders Claus, Rob Carrol!)

Update: In 2003, Joi Ito wrote about Christmas in Japan.

Did you know that Japanese families will be lining up in front of Kentucky Fried Chickens today to get their chicken for Christmas? I DO know where this comes from. When my friend Shin, introduced KFC to Japan, the ad campaign showed wealthy American families all eating friend chicken for their holiday feast. KFC was marketed as an upscale food of the privileged in America. This triggered a tradition in Japan for families to eat friend chicken on Christmas.

Reader comment: Pat says: Between 1-2% of Japanese consider themselves Christian. The other 98% don't know much about the religion (thankfully!) except a vague relationship to Christmas: a bright, fun holiday for kids and lovers. There is next to zilch awareness of Easter. It probably came down to trying to find a sellable angle for a movie that had virtually no appeal at the Japanese box office. (Which, may I remind you, is the #1 overseas market for US films.)

Another Japanese Christmas 'tradition' is the ubiquitous strawberry shortcake, which Japanese believe graces every Christian's table on said day, to go with the Kentucky Fried Chicken. A single woman of 26 used to be considered past her 'sale date' (like a Christmas cake on Dec 26), and so a new pejorative entered the language.

Update: Gabriel sends us direct links to the Mac download, and the Mac instructions download

Tiffiniy Cheng from DHB says,

The Participatory Culture Foundation is having a design contest for our open source RSS reader for video/video player with cash prizes up to $1300. We're offering:

-$1000 for the main interface design

-$300 for an icon or logo

-You can even win $200 for being the person who referred the winner to the site (we'll ask them how they heard about the contest).

Thompson said people will eventually get beyond any queasy feelings about having a chip implanted.

"It will prevent babies from being picked up by the wrong people in a maternity ward and make sure people in nursing homes don't walk away," Thompson said.

So far, about 7,000 chips for people have been sold, with about 2,000 implanted worldwide, said Scott R. Silverman, chairman and chief executive of Applied Digital, which owns VeriChip.

Once Thompson gets chipped, chances are it won't help him in an emergency. Only two hospitals - Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston - read the chips, Silverman said.

No worries, said Rebecca Harmon, a spokeswoman for the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.

"We can always take him to the vet school," she said.

Curiously enough, when Einstein was asked, years later, about his beliefs in the telepathic experiments of Dr JB Rhine, then studying parapsychology at Duke University, he stressed his scepticism in strictly scientific terms. All of Rhine's experiments had reported that psi-forces did not decline with distance, unlike the four known forces of nature - gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force. "This suggests to me a very strong indication that a non-recognised source of systematic errors may have been involved," Einstein wrote.

A pear is just a pear, except when it is also a laser-coded information delivery system with advanced security clearance. And that is what pears - not to mention organic apples, waxy cucumbers and delicate peaches - are becoming in some supermarkets around the country. A new technology being used by produce distributors employs lasers to tattoo fruits and vegetables with their names, identifying numbers, countries of origin and other information that helps speed distribution. The marks are burned onto the outer layer of the skin and are visible to discerning consumers and befuddled cashiers alike.

It appears that some advertising company was asked by a Tokyo distributor to do a special ad for Christmas for the Passion of the Christ DVD. Apparently nobody who was actually Christian got to review the ad before it was posted for thousands of people to see on their way home for Christmas Eve.

Reader comment: Dave Gallardo says: "The whole thing with sects in a foreign land & collision of cultures is pretty interesting. I remember being approached by a Chinese Christian in Xian, (there's some irony there, I suppose), who didn't seem to have very firm grasp of his apparently new-found faith.

Anyway, I thought you might enjoy this story that Brad Warner, author of Hardcore Zen, and a Buddhist teacher who lived in Japan for many years tells about a debate he witnessed between Japanese Hare Krishnas & Japanese Jehovah's witnesses: Link

Reader comment: Tian says: "My sister has been living in japan working for a pharmaceutical firm for over ten years now. She said the Japanese celebrates Christmas by eating KFC chicken. Apparently the resemblance between Colonel Sanders and Santa Klaus has mislead them to believe the Jolly St. Nick would jump down the chimney with buckets of delicious fried chicken.

what the hell, all you white people look alike.

Reader comment: Jenne says: "It looks like the text on the poster says 'Christ was killed; Christmas was born.' Which isn't exactly what they told us in Sunday school, but hey."

Reader comment:Rich pav says: "Yes, the ad looks silly if you don't understand Japanese. It's a juxtaposition of the Japanese interpretation of the meaning of Christmas and its true meaning. A looser translation of the copy would be, "Christ's death gave birth to Chrismas. Learn about the unknown truth here."

The story of Christ is completely unknown in Japan. How else can you market a DVD about it in a country that associates the date commorating the violent and tragic death of a major religious figure with fried chicken, pretty decorations and sex in a love hotel? Imagine someone renting The Passion expecting a typical Christmas movie. Woah.

For what it's worth, I do a podcast/videocast where I try to show what Japan is really like instead of more of the same old, "Look how quirky those funny little Japanese people are."

Reader comment: Brent says: Just thought I'd point out that the reason the Japanese go to KFC during Christmas isn't because Colonel Sanders looks like Santa. While it's true that it's a strange practice, this one falls on the PR Machine. When KFC was first introduced to Japan in 1970, they ran advertisements saying that KFC was what all Americans ate during Christmas. Since the holiday itself was a relatively new concept to the Japanese, KFC was able to make a connection right from the get-go. Years passed pressing the same idea, and now it's tradition. Yes, they DO put Col. Sanders in a Santa Suit come Christmas time, but I'm pretty sure i've seen that stateside too.

Reader comment: Bruce says: Christ was supposedly BORN on Christmas Day, and resurrected on Easter Sunday. All your commentators on this post, and the ad copy writers, appear to think Christmas celebrates Christ's death. What's up with that?

(Of course, the current date of Christmas is definitely not on the actual day the historical Christ was probably born, but who's counting? Also, there's a lot of weird evolution of both celebrations, the dates, etc., but that doesn't change the fact of the modern interpretation.)

"God rest ye merry gentlement,
Let nothing ye dismay.
Remember Christ our Saviour
was born on Christmas Day."

Doesn't anyone remember their carols?

I've been working at EFF since 2002. These three and a half years have been humbling and inspiring. Watching EFF's supporters hammer Congress, the FCC, and corporations with millions of impassioned and imaginative emails, mob the streets in front of Adobe after they had a programmer locked up for embarrassing them by showing up their DRM, create hilarious and savage programs and pranks -- it's been an education and a half and a half again.

We've won some stupendous victories. My first day on the job was attending the inaugural meeting of the Broadcast Flag negotiations. At the time, we had no idea how we would fight the Broadcast Flag -- we could barely understand what it was -- save that it would seek to put all digital television technology, including PCs, under the thumbs of the Hollywood studios. Two years later, "Broadcast Flag" is a household word (in geekier households), the Broadcast Flag is dead in the USA, and we'll strangle it in its crib in Europe. The best part of this fight was all the other groups we worked with -- like Public Knowledge, who led the legal effort, the Free Software Foundation, the AMerican Library Association, and so forth. It's one thing to be a lone voice, another entirely to be part of an honest-to-God movement.

EFF has doubled in size and funding every 18 months since I joined, following a kind of activist Moore's Law. Attorneys General like Ashcroft and Gonzales and industry bullies like the RIAA and MPAA are in a perverse way the best friends a group like EFF could ask for. Insane acts like wiretapping libraries and busting children for downloading make the case for EFF more eloquently than I ever could.

The next twenty years will be the policy years. Technology has given us the capability to do practically anything we can imagine with networks -- digitize every book, connect every person, break every cartel, enable every voice to be heard and safeguard the posterity of every moment of human creativity. The question now isn't "Can we?" it's "Will we?"

Or, more to the point, "Will they let us?"

This is a game of metaphors. EFF was founded to argue that the emails traded by Steve Jackson Games's customers were more like letters or phone-calls than like conversations in a park, and so the police should get a warrant before reading them. The coppers and EFF traded metaphors before a judge, and in the end, the judge liked our metaphor better -- and that's why the Man needs a warrant before snooping on your email (or he did, anyway, until the Homeland Security Enhancement Act shredded the Constitution).

The Internet is too big to be contained by metaphors, though. In the end, the Internet isn't like postal mail, or a phone call, or a city, or a highway, or a company, or a civilization. The Internet is like the Internet -- anything less is too constraining to contain its huge, astonishing potential.

If the Internet is to realize its potential, to be like the Internet and like nothing else, it will need defenders like EFF. I couldn't ask for a better cause.

EFF's 15th anniversary is being marked with a "Blog-a-Thon," with actual prizes. Check it out:

We want to hear about your "click moment" — the very first step you to took to stand up for your digital rights -- whether it was blogging about an issue you care about, participating in a demonstration, writing your representatives, or getting involved with EFF. As a thank you, we've enlisted an independent panel of judges to choose from among your posts for "Most Inspirational," "Most Humorous," and "Best Overall." At the end of the Blog-a-thon, we'll announce the names of the three bloggers with the best posts on our website and in our weekly newsletter, EFFector. We'll also publish the three best posts on our site and send the authors a blogging "kit" as an extra thank you: an EFF bloggers' rights T-shirt, special EFF-branded blogger pajama pants, a pound of coffee, and a pair of fuzzy slippers.

This Wednesday marks the thirty-sixth anniversary of mankind's greatest peacetime achievement, landing two human beings safely on the moon, before returning them safely to earth.

We're going to mark the occasion at our home with friends, Tang, cake and Moon Pies (if we can get Moon Pies). We'll also set up a telescope. We'd love it if you could join us.

If you can't come, please remember to look up at the moon this Wednesday night and think about how unlikely it is that once, long ago, humans set foot there.

Sure, of course, I seriously believe it should be a national holiday and encourage everyone everywhere to reflect for a moment what we did "for all mankind".

We've been doing Moon Day celebrations of some sort or another since 1993; that year we re-enacted the descent from the lander to the surface of the moon on the front lawn of Griffith Observatory, with a foil-covered ladder and a boom box. Of course it was totally without permits or permission.

Another year I stood with some friends at the intersection of Hollywood & Vine (where the Apollo Astronauts have their names on the walk of fame) and passed out Tang to tourists and waved signs that said "Make Moon Day a Holiday" and "Honk if You've Been to the Moon."

Image: Buzz Aldrin poses on the Moon allowing Neil Armstrong to photograph both of them using the visor's reflection.

"Via Google translate: 'The thorn crotch (it points and) [ the crime prevention supplies ]'"
Link

Reader comment: William Van Hecke says: "The 'thorn crotch' is actually called a 'sasumata,' and dates back to the Edo period. The idea is not so much to carry it around with you, but to have it on hand in case someone threatens your home or place of business. Think of it as a less aggressive version of the baseball bat (or shotgun) some of us westerners keep around. Link

Reader comment: Justin says: The so-called Thorn Crotch is actually a tool present in all elementary schools and (as far as I know) many if not all junior high schools in Japan. There are regular teacher and student training exercises that we've roughly translated as "the scary man drill." A scary man with a fake knife runs in to a given classroom, students shriek and run for cover, and a designated student runs to get a teacher with the scary man device. Then they chase each other around until the scary man gets pinned against a wall.

Reader comment: Kyle Goetz says: In case any readers are interested, I translated the Sasumata ad you posted on Boing Boing. Link

Here's an example of parts Elfman didn't use (from the song for Augustus Gloop):

However long this pig might live,
We're positive he'd never give
Even the smallest bit of fun
Or happiness to anyone.

[snip]

So what we do in cases such
As this, we use the gentle touch,
And carefully we take the brat
And turn him into something that

Will give great pleasure to us all --
A doll, for instance, or a ball,
Or marbles or a rocking horse.

Here's a box someone built based on Shannon's idea. When you push a red knob on the box, the lid opens and a hand comes out and pulls the knob, causing the lid to close. There's a video of the box in action on the site.
Link (thanks, TK!)

The first REG (Random Event Generator) that researchers used produced high-frequency random noise. Researchers attached circuitry to the device to translate the noise into ones and zeroes. Each participant, following a prerecorded protocol, developed an intention in her or his mind to have the generator alternately spew out more ones, then more zeroes, and then do nothing at all.

The effects were small, but measurable. Since then, the same results have occurred with other experiments, such as one involving a pendulum connected to a computer-controlled mechanism. When the machine releases the pendulum to swing from a set position, participants focus on changing the rate at which the pendulum slows to a stop...

What does all of this mean?

No one knows. Both (institute of Noetic Sciences researcher Dean) Radin and (Princeton professor emeritus Robert) Jahn say that just because there is a correlation between the intent of the participant and the machine's actions doesn't mean one causes the other.

"There is an inference (that the two are related) but no direct evidence," Radin said.

Radin said the phenomenon could be similar to quantum entanglement -- what Einstein referred to as "spooky action at a distance" -- in which two particles separated from each other appear to connect without any apparent form of communication.

The central module also features large, triple-glazed picture windows; researchers living at several of Antarctica's 82 existing stations have complained of depression brought on by living in dark, cramped quarters, often completely buried by snow.

Much of the modules' structure will be prefabricated, meaning the modules will be quick and easy to assemble in the harsh Antarctic conditions. "From arriving at the site to getting a weatherproof base will take just 35 days," says Peter Ayres, a member of the Faber Maunsell team.

The station will also feature solar panels for summer use, along with the aviation fuel traditionally used to power remote buildings in freezing climates. Power requirements are far greater in summer, when the station will house a crew of 52 people, as opposed to winter, when just 16 (roughly half of them scientists) will live there.

A senior Army officer said that the ammunition crisis was "shambolic" and came at the worst possible time for the Army.

He said: "There is nothing more dispiriting than soldiers having to go on exercise and shout 'bang, bang' because there is not enough blank ammunition. Any benefit from the exercise will be lost because soldiers just won't take it seriously. Why should soldiers who are being sent to Iraq, where their lives will be endangered, be forced to shout 'bang' in training because someone in the Ministry of Defence can't do basic arithmetic? It's a disgrace."

People with "Kluver-Bucy Syndrome" try to put anything they can get their hands on into their mouths and will "typically attempt to have sexual intercourse with it."

People with "Capgras' Syndrome" think everyone around them is an impostor. They feel like they are living in a real life version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

People with "Cotard's Syndrome" believe they are dead -- walking corpses. "The French physician Charles Bonnet described a lady who insisted of dressing in a death shroud and being put in a coffin. She demanded to be buried and when refused, remained in her coffin until she died several weeks later."

People with "Fregoli Syndrome" see everyone around them as the same person. It must be like seeing the Oompa Loompas in Burton's Willy Wonka Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which were all played by the same actor. Link (via Spitting Image)

An open group of international non-governmental organizations, governments, scholars, acticists and individuals has been planning the treaty for some months now and we've finally got a web-site where all of our work is being documented and published, with calls to action and other ways to get involved. Anyone can register and add material to the site.

In an October 15 speech, the Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), Jonathan Dudas, vowed that the U.S. government will "fight" proposals that aim to "fundamentally change the WIPO charter and philosophy" away from its current focus on the promotion of intellectual property.

In his keynote remarks at the Annual Meeting of the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA--a 15,000-member U.S. bar association comprised primarily of intellectual property lawyers) Dudas stated emphatically that "our current system and international norms are properly balanced". In a not-so-oblique reference to recent discussions at WIPO of a 'Development Agenda,' Dudas derided efforts to encourage WIPO to take a more balanced approach to intellectual property as part of a "strategy to water down intellectual property protection" that is "even worse" than efforts to increase PCT application fees.

My housemate and I are not known for under-engineering, or even adequate-engineering things, and this is another example of our finest over-engineering.

Inside is a skeleton made from 18mm MDF with curved ribs, approximately 30-40mm thick to make the basic circular shape. It was made airtight from the inside using fibre glass matting, then the gaps between the ribs was filled with chopped glass fibres and resin. A skin was then made on the outside from ply wood. It resembled a large onion at this point, not quite the plan!

The large onion was basically round but needed to be rounder.. So the plywood was covered in fibre glass - it's worth noting this is when we learned that power sanding fibre glass whilst wearing a T-Shirt was not our best idea, all the tiny glass fibres stick in your arms, hair, clothes etc. Safety first kids, goggles, breathing masks and overalls!

The whole surface was covered in car body filler, and sanded... and sanded, then we sanded it some more. It really is properly round and nice and smooth. The equatorial trench was then cut out using a router.

The last step was to paint it, it's two shades of grey, with a black equatorial trench and little white dots speccled over the surface to represent the lights. For further visual enhancement the speaker surround is a piece of polished aluminium.

When designer Jason Santa Maria put his portfolio online he wasn't expecting to get a Cease and Desist letter from a former employer citing clauses from his contract and demanding that he remove any references to them, including all images, from his site. Jason had fallen foul of his old Work for Hire contract which transferred ownership of all rights in his designs to the company he worked for. It meant that the only legal way he could use his designs in his portfolio was to obtain express permission from the rights owner, his former employer, or challenge the restriction in court.

"I wasn't entirely aware of the ramifications when I signed," Jason admits. "I was young and inexperienced. Most design shops accept that people will use the work they do in their public portfolios, but because you are now able to have a body of work on your website which can be accessible by anyone at anytime, I think you will see an increase in situations like this. Information is so readily available that you can't assume people aren't looking and, more importantly, aren't taking notice.

* Seeing Space: Telescopes that take the twinkle out of stars.

* Sweet Bioscience: A cell's sugary landscape could help diagnose cancer.

* Signaling Brain Cells: Making synapses from the fewest possible ingredients.

1. HOLIDAY INN: CAMBODIA - Martha & the Vandellas "Heatwave" vs The Dead Kennedys "Holiday In Cambodia" and plenty of thrift-store record sound bytes

2. BOP DON'T RUN- The Ramones "Blitzkreig Bop" vs The Ventures "Walk Don't Run"

3. TRICKY WIPEOUT - Run-DMC "It's Tricky" vs The Surfaris "Wipeout"

4. SWEET CALIFORNIA GIRL O' MINE - The Beach Boys "California Girls," The Beastie Boys "Brass Monkey," Guns n Roses: "Sweet Child O' Mine," intro-The Surf Coasters, beach movie bits

Update: Site's down. Send me links to working mirrors and I'll post 'em.

Update 2: It's back up again!

Microsoft is Germany. They did some pretty evil things a while back but you don't remember the details, you just know that you really hate them. Even though they're really no worse than any other large corporpation/country, you can't help but distrust them permanently because, well, you always have.

Yahoo is Japan. It had an economic crisis that almost destroyed it and it plays too nice with all of the other evil empires, supporting the most evil endeavors. It hasn't really innovated for a while, but it tries to improve on known products to support average people. It's currently trying to sell culture in the form of animated cutesy iconic images which you kinda like and kinda despise.

Google is the United States. It has never seen trouble on home turf. It is arrogant and loved by the elite. You know you're supposed to respect them for being better than everyone else, because they think they are, but you actually kinda resent them for being so rich and powerful. Yet, you really like their cool toys.

Where's the British EFF?

Does the UK need a membership digital rights organisation? And if so, what cool-sounding acronyms haven't already been taken?

Where: The Reynolds Building, St. Dunstan's Road, Hammersmith, W6 8RP (nearest tube stations: Hammersmith and Barons Court)

When: Saturday, 23 July, 11AM-6:45PM

£5 to attend -- tickets are sold out, but cancellation tickets will be available at the door.

Few outside the world of serious pinball maniacs would recognize Christensen's name, but I consider him a major influence on my own work, despite the fact that I only learned his name less than a decade ago. I grew up in the seventies, and I can distinctly remember playing machines designed by Christensen, and being mesmerized by the blinking tableaus of lowbrow decadence, images filled with lots of in-jokes, eyeball kicks and a heaping helping of big-boobed sexy girls that tantalized my adolescent libido.

This guy is upset about the new Daily Show Studio, particularly the fact that the couch is no longer there. So he's written a blog called "Bring Back the Couch."

BoingBoing readers whose interest in the Manhattan Project has been piqued by your Simnuke posts will find hours of Cold War-era atomic bomb-related footage in the Prelinger Archive at the Internet Archive.

They've got lots of propaganda films like the hilarious Duck and Cover, and the horrifying My Japan. There are also official government test films, like Operation Crossroads (better known as the tests on Bikini Atoll) and Operation Cue, which features tests conducted at the Nevada Test Site in 1955.

Previously on Boing Boing:
Xeni on NPR -- SIMNUKE: Having a Blast in the Nevada Desert
Xeni headed to Simnuke
Simnuke snapshots

Reader comment: Nick James says,

I couldn't let your post on Boing Boing go by without pointing out 1954's amusing "The House in the Middle," a documercial sponsored by the National Paint, Varnish and Lacquer Association, of course, claiming that a clean house with a fresh coat of paint will save your house and family from a nuclear blast.

I wrote an essay on bomb shelter culture in the US a couple years ago, which I've made available, in case anyone's interested:Link. There seem to be a fair number of readers with a thing for Cold War culture, so I thought I'd share. A number of my sources for the paper were the safety films now featured on Boing Boing.

You neglected to mention the most fun factoid about Duck and Cover -- that Mia Farrow was the Duck and Cover kid.

This is the story of a girl from a small city in Pakistan who became the youngest Certified Microsoft Expert at age 9. She met Bill Gates last week and asked him why he doesn't hire people her age. Gates has also said he will go and stay at her home in Pakistan. It's a charming story, and may go some way toward defusing stereotypes about Pakistan and its people (of whom I am one).

Reader comment: Seb Flyte says,

As this ZDNet article points out, it might not be that simple... India claims to have an eight-year-old MCP. "According to a Channel News Asia report, the youngest every MCP is India's Mridul Seth, who is said to have gained the qualification at age eight in November 2004."

Anonymous snarkypants says,

More than anything else, I think these anecdotes are quite illuminating in regards to the actual value of Microsoft's technical certifications -- i.e., they're so easy to obtain, even nine-year-olds can do it.

Abbas Halai says,

There has been a website following up with this little girl at Pak Technology News at Link and Link

The group blog Sepia Mutiny blogged last year about the world's youngest certified geek, Mridul Seth who lives in Bangalore. He achieved this feat in spite of having a severe physical deformity.

Reader Comment: Chris Zable says,

Poaching, or any other environmental selection pressure, does not cause DNA to mutate. Environmental forces such as poaching favor particular gene variants (in this instance, apparently a gene already present in the gene pool, not a new mutation), causing them to become more prevalent. Hoping for more cool bio postings!

It's fun to note that people used to believe in inheriting acquired traits, aka Lamarckism (named for a French biologist who championed the idea: Link. It was disproven by August Weismann, who cut off the tails of rats successively for many generations, but discovered that their children still had tails (what do you know?) Link. Nonetheless, my mother says she remembers, going to school in the fifties, being told that because of the automobile humans would eventually be born without legs. Wwouldn't we still need them to press the accelerator? Weird!

I hate to disagree with your commentors. Enough violence is done to the elephant while harvesting the tusks that the elephant often dies even if the poacher does not take the short-cut of killing the animal first.

Dead animals don't have sex and elephants without tusks aren't targeted by ivory hunters. This means that the tuskless elephants have greater opportunity at reproduction (less competion from dead tusked elephants) and father more elephants (they're around longer to have more sex), thus increasing the prevalence of the tuskless mutation. So it's not Lamarkism, just basic natural selection at work.

Interestingly, one of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology's lecture series this year was on "Evolutionary Biology as a Medium," at which this very phenomenon was explored through human history. The link for the write-up of that lecture is here: Link

One reason for the phenomenon was that these birds were increasingly common in the urban environment, even the relatively shy jay, (Schneider) said. "There is food and an increasing amount of green space in modern cities."

The birds were simply adapting to their environment in imitating human sounds in what he termed an "evolutionary playground."

"Some Girls" seeks the spirit of the Smiths' songs by transforming them. The arrangements are not for rock band, but for string quartet with electronics. Morrissey's heartsick legato croon is reassigned to four women and two men, who deliver anything from keening, primal unaccompanied wails to swing-era harmonies. The Smiths' lyrics were proudly defenseless and unguarded: "I know I'm unlovable/ You don't have to tell me." Yet the staging doesn't wrap them in obvious scenarios. The show is an allusive, surreal, ever-mutating fantasia on love and sex, family and control, violence and death.

The women take on archetypal roles as a child, a young woman and a mother; there's also a red-headed diva. An older and younger man are like a father and grown son; and there's a young boy on video, at first isolated and frightened, but eventually smiling and stepping into the light. They interact in love and rage, but there is no simple story. The younger man, Garrie Harvey, sings, "I am human and I want to be loved" while dressed as a rabbit; the girlish Katie Brayben is at various times a cellist, a trapeze artist and a gunslinger.

On July 6, 1945 at 5:29AM Mountain War Time, the Trinity test took place -- a plutonium bomb nicknamed "gadget" was detonated. On July 16, 2005, at around the same time, SIMNUKE took place. About 400 gallons of gasoline and biodiesel (converted restaurant grease --- some batches smelled like egg rolls, other tanks like tacos) burned in less than 20 seconds. Propelled by liquid nitrogen, the mixture was blown by giant fans into a column of flame to simulate the look and feel of a nuclear explosion.

This was only 1/10,000 the power of the 19-kiloton test in 1945. But organizers say the point was to recreate the essence of what the real thing felt like. If more people sense this personally and physically, their logic goes, more will better understand the power and destructive reality of nuclear weapons. In 1945, there was one such bomb in the world. Today, there are about 30,000.

The vibe surrounding the event was a little like a nuke-themed Burning Man. Lots of el-wire, body paint, downbeat techno, and colorful surreality in the white alkaline dust. The desert scene at night before the dawn blast was a mellow chillfest. But for the socially-conscious geeks behind SIMNUKE who've been toiling on the project for three years, this was about something much more serious than a playa party.

Link to NPR "Day to Day" radio feature, with pictures, videos, and background on both SIMNUKE and the Trinity tests which marked the culmination of the Manhattan Project. Archived show audio will be available after 12PM Pacific/3PM ET.

Very special thanks to my NPR producer Robert Sachs, to video director/cinematographer Jeff Porter, to Sasha Magee, Michael Williams, Daniel Terdiman -- and to the Paiute lady at the reservation gas station near Pyramid Lake who helped us when we got lost on bumpy dirt backroads.

Previously on Boing Boing: Xeni headed to Simnuke, and Simnuke snapshots.

Reuters photos here, Flickr pool here, Xeni's snaps here, video clip here. SIMNUKE team member Kiki says,

I am not a pacifist. I do believe violence is sometimes necessary -- especially when dealing with those who only understand violence. But the bomb is not an appropriate weapon for war. It is simply not a weapon that can be used against an army. It is too large. It is a weapon that is used against a civilian population only. For that reason, it should be banned globally. A raw human feeling of the weapon we wield -- and the sorrowful impact it has -- is necessary for making decisions on how to use it. That is the essence of SimNuke.

I strongly recommend you look for Barefoot Gen and read it. It is a manga (a Japanese graphic novel) which you can find in any good comicbook store. Art Spiegelman (who wrote Maus) wrote the introduction to American readers. Barefoot Gen is the foundation for my views on war. It is *necessary* for all citizens to read, IMHO.

I also suggest The Making of the Atomic Bomb, a gripping book describing the drama of the Manhattan Project, from the discovery of the atom, through the epilogue of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I could not put it down through all 800 pages. [SIMNUKE founder Camron Assadi, aka] Teiwaz and [fellow team member Scott Bartlett, aka] Sparky each said it was because I gave that book to them to read that sparked their collaborative brainstorming on the idea of SimNuke so many months ago.

Reader comments: Jodi says,

To go along with the Trinity anniversary: this site has pictures and video of many of the above ground nuclear tests done after WWII, not to mention other great stuff. It's in the "news and publications" section, and then you can go to photo library, or video. My favorite: I've always been a fan of Priscilla (6/24/57).

Ilkka Poutanen says,

While on the subject, you might want to consider mentioning Trinity and Beyond, a great documentary about the history of nuclear weapon development. The visuals and audio in this movie are just amazing, and really communicate the incomprehensible power of these devices that we wield and, it sometimes seems, have all but forgotten about.

Reader comment: Boing Boing pal W. Vann Hall points to more photos from the show: Link

Image: At around 3:15am Saturday July 16, Dave Bayer of the Simnuke production team is hurriedly scraping ice off a large nitrogen tank. As nitrogen leaves this tank, and travels by hose to propel fuel in the fuel tanks, a condensation effect occurs, and ice forms. This is bad, because it slows down the nitrogen flow, making it harder to fill all the fuel tanks on time for the scheduled 5:29AM blast.

Link to Xeni's Simnuke set (also contains a few shots taken by others including Daniel Terdiman of Wired News), and link to the group photo pool where others are posting their images.

Previously: Xeni headed to Simnuke

Update: photographs from SIMNUKE participant William Francis, including the image below, are here.

Boing Boing reader Allen Knutson says:

You didn't mention the condensation on the hose itself, which is much more impressive. First the hose looks wet, then looks dry, then looks wet again. Why?

*spoiler*

First water condenses on it. Then water freezes on it. Then *oxygen* condenses on it. After a while the oxygen can even pool enough to drip off. Drip, drip.

(It's not cold enough to freeze oxygen, or, of course, condense nitrogen.)

Maybe you've seen these. Robert Longo's exquisite and indelible drawings of the early detonations. The first chapter in this history. Link 1, Link 2, Link 3.

Tom Arey says,

A group of amateur radio operators commemorated the Trinity tests at the original test site by way of a special events station. Link. Also, a lot more information on the Trinity event can be found at the White Sands Missile Range Site: Link.

(Ed Note: link also has details on an "open house" event which took place at the range site on July 16 to commemorate the 60-year anniversary.)

UPDATE: Dave Bayer, the SIMNUKEr shown in the photo at the top of this post, says:

Slight correction (as I was probably not the easiest person to get to talk to in the desert): The large tank has liquid nitrogen in it. We stored pressurized gaseous nitrogen in the fuel tanks to later propel the fuel (doing so with liquid nitrogen would be very dangerous with the tanks and fittings in use due to the extreme cold and its effects on rubber and steel). Liquid nitrogen sits at about -193C in that tank. To evaporate the liquid nitrogen and warm the resulting vapor, the dewar (the nifty stainless steel tank covered in snow in the photo) has coils close to the surface to pull in heat from the surrounding environment. The layer of frost slows heat transfer into those coils which reduces the rate at which we can pull warmed vapor out of the dewar. Not enough heat and too high a flow rate results in very cold vapor or even liquid being drawn from the vapor port on the dewar.

Once the ice was scraped, there was a cascade of fog around the dewar like opening a refrigerator /freezer door on a humid day.

Ok, probably too much information (but I am a little anal about information seeing as one part of this wass an educational project) which can/should be distilled and condensed to something like: As gaseous nitrogen leaves this tank to be stored to propel the fuel later, the boiling of liquid nitrogen chills the outside of the tank causing a condensation effect. This is bad because it slows the flow rate at which the nitrogen can safely be pulled from the tank, making it harder to fill all the ...