Link (Thanks, Toni!)

I've never raised money, never done a multi-million-dollar project, never had to deal with investors. But television is a powerful force - a powerful medium. A very strong flavor to bring into the recipe.

But it's also *last* century's big medium. It's not the best platform for a participatory media movement. And so the priorities of the project, understandably, shifted to the priorities of TV: looking cool, creating an aspirational culture, and so on.

On the first broadcast day, one of the hosts said it all: "send us your tapes, and if we think it's cool and relevant, we'll put it on the air." If *they* think so. Because they're the arbiters of cool and relevant. And who are "they"? Former programming executives from other TV stations.

I like Al Gore, and I like most of the people I know who are over at Current. They are well-meaning, and they are not dumb. But cable television is not the place to launch the great interactive media experiment for the 21st Century. The great cable TV revolution already happened with CNN and MTV. Those were the watershed cable innovations, along with payTV channels like HBO. It already happened.

The "next big thing" in media will not happen on TV - or at least not primarily on TV. It will happen on or through the Internet. The great possibility here was that Al Gore's vision and the goodwill his presence generated could have been enough to surmount the challenges of making a new kind of media. He had my vote, as well as my promise of support. Yes, there were a great many of us who were willing to work for free to help create a participatory mediaspace. That's how the Internet culture of which we're all a part really developed in the first place.

In the middle of my slightly insane two sleepless days at OSCON, I got an email from the New York Times asking me to write an op ed. They wanted me to write about my thoughts about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the bombing. They said the deadline was Friday. "You mean next Friday?" "No, the day after tomorrow." "Oh."

My mind was full of open source and the future of the Internet. The atomic bomb and World War II were definitely not on my mind. It would be an interesting challenge and it's not every day that the New York Times asks you to do an op ed, so I accepted. (...) The story will run in the New York Times on Sunday in the Op Ed section.

This magazine is not designed to be a scientific documentation of synaesthesia however, I think it would be foolish to not give information concerning various research projects. Syn is designed to explore the ways people experience synaesthesia, the main bulk of the magazing consists of interviews/profile pages detailing individuals with synaesthesia. There are also features such as "The colour of orange," letters pages and an additional explorative imagery poster pack...

One thing you may be intrigued to know is that I'm unfortunately not a synaesthete!

This sort of electrical stimulation is known as galvanic vestibular stimulation, or GVS. When a weak DC current is delivered to the mastoid behind your ear, your body responds by shifting your balance toward the anode. The stronger the current, the more powerful its pull. If it is strong enough, it not only throws you off balance but alters the course of your movement....

The most persuasive commercial applications of (NTT researcher Taro) Maeda's GVS device will most likely be in gaming; researchers put together a crude virtual racing game to demonstrate how GVS heightened the perception of centrifugal force as users watch the car wind its way around the track on a video screen. Manabu Sakurai, NTT's marketing manager, says the company is currently investigating whether or not gamers would be interested in the device. Flight simulators are another area of interest.

"Many people talk about that," Sakurai explained. "Because GVS causes you to feel the same kinds of motion as a large-scale flight simulator, it could be a much simpler and more cost-effective way to train people."

I tried the GVS at SIGGRAPH's Emerging Technologies area on Monday. The researchers are hoping it will take off in gaming, but after only five minutes of use I had a strong metallic taste (like licking the contacts of a 9-volt battery -- one of the rituals of childhood) in my mouth, and had a very weird headache -- a pulsating blunt feeling in the middle of my head -- for about three hours afterwards. That's just after five minutes of use; most of my video game excursions involve 2-3 hours of trying to destroy my friends. I can't imagine how terrible my head would hurt after hours of that.

They gave us a survey afterwards and the answers from previous survey recipients were visible -- it looked as if none of us had a very pleasant experience. Being zapped in the head and falling over was interesting, but it is not the same sensation as feeling like you are leaning to the right or left.

Sixty years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Editor & Publisher releases an extensive account of the U.S. government's cover-up of Japanese and U.S. military film footage of the Hiroshima bombing's aftermath. Some of the footage will air on television for the first time Saturday night (on the paid-sub Sundance Channel).

In the weeks following the atomic attacks on Japan almost 60 years ago, and then for decades afterward, the United States engaged in airtight suppression of all film shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings. This included footage shot by U.S. military crews and Japanese newsreel teams. In addition, for many years all but a handful of newspaper photographs were seized or prohibited. The public did not see any of the newsreel footage for 25 years, and the U.S. military film remained hidden for nearly four decades. (...)

Six weeks ago, E&P broke the story that articles written by famed Chicago Daily News war correspondent George Weller about the effects of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki were finally published, in Japan, almost six decades after they had been spiked by U.S. officials. This drew national attention, but suppressing film footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was even more significant, as this country rushed into the nuclear age with its citizens having neither a true understanding of the effects of the bomb on human beings, nor why the atomic attacks drew condemnation around the world. (...)

The color U.S. military footage would remain hidden until the early 1980s, and has never been fully aired. It rests today at the National Archives in College Park, Md., in the form of 90,000 feet of raw footage labeled #342 USAF.

Portions of the previously hidden footage were used to create the documentary film Original Child Bomb, directed by Carey Schonegevel. Screenshot from trailer, above.

The movie's television premiere takes place on the Sundance Channel tonight, with two other films related to nuclear technology, in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the first nuclear bombings. Airtimes according to the Sundance Channel website:

Saturday at 8 p.m.
Tuesday at 4:30 p.m.
Aug. 14 at 3:30 p.m.
Aug. 19 at 2 p.m.
Aug. 24 at noon.

I wonder if any of the tens of thousands of feet of raw footage -- or the documentary -- will end up in free access online, perhaps at Internet Archive (or on Bittorrent) soon? Certainly seems like the kind of information that belongs out there, for the millions of us who don't have access to this paid cable service. (Thanks, sid)

Update: There's some confusion about how much of this footage is "first to air," and this WaPo article has more (along with details about the footage -- it sounds incredible).

After the footage was quietly declassified in 1973, bits of it were used for the first time in the seminal 1974 British television history series "The World at War," according to Mark Meader, archive specialist in the motion picture division of the National Archives. Portions showed up in Japanese documentaries, on anniversaries of the bombings and in a 1983 U.S. documentary called "Dark Circle." "Then it would disappear again.

"It gets 'rediscovered' every decade or so," says Meader. "It's on 16-millimeter film, which means it can't really be used at good quality in large-screen motion pictures (...) People hear it's been classified, they don't remember hearing about it and they always think it's never been seen before."

Image (AP): A U.S. Army Signal Corps still photo captures the destruction in Hiroshima.

In an online gallery hosted on the servers of Lewis And Clark College in Oregon, there are several categories of images: places, people, and personal belongings.

Watch.

[Owner] Kengo Futagawa (59 at the time) was crossing the Kannon Bridge (1,600 meters from the hypocenter) by bicycle on his way to do fire prevention work.

He jumped into the river, terribly burned. He returned home, but died on August 22, 1945.

Mr. Osamu Kataoka. Age: 45; occupation: university professor; family: wife. At that time -- age: 13; at school (800 meters from the hypocenter); father and elder brother died; mother and two elder sisters injured.

"I ran to the edge of the pool. What did I see there? A drowned classmate, who was burned all over. Another classmate was trying to put out a fire on a friend's clothes with his own spouting blood." (written at age 17)

Link to gallery home.

After the study group meeting at City Hall, I visited our family grave. I took a look at where my name will at some point be etched as the 19th family head of the Ito family. I took the opportunity to grill my uncle a bit more about the specifics of our history since I'll be the custodian of this information at some point. (...)

As always, staring at the place on the gravestone where my name will be etched along with all of the previous family members makes me feel like a mere blip in history and is humbling and strange.

For "retail clothing stores at physical locations and online," and the following types of goods:

Bathing suits, blazers, blouses, boots, bras, briefs, camisoles, caps, coats, dresses, gloves, hats, jackets, jeans, jumpsuits, leotards, neckties, nightgowns, overalls, pajamas, pants, pantyhose, raincoats, robes, sandals, shirts, shoes, shortalls, shorts, skirts, slippers, slips, socks, stockings, suits, sweaters, sweatpants, sweatshirts, T-shirts, tights, tuxedos, vests and warm-up suits

Link (Thanks, Jim)

The local press in the mainly Buddhist nation has been in a frenzy in recent weeks over the sudden spread of pornographic images by phone after the mother of a pop singer spotted a photograph of her daughter sent to a phone.

While the government is powerless to monitor what images people are sending to each other by phone, Minister of Women's Affairs Ung Kantha Phavy told a press briefing that it should shut down indecent websites.

We "ask the government to block Internet ISPs which are used to transfer pornographic images, show sex sites and chat sites," she said, speaking after talks with legislators and non-government organisations on pornography.

The Supreme Court of Montana ruled last month that police could conduct a warrantless "trash dive" into the trash cans in the alley behind the home of a man named Darrell Pelvit. The cops discovered pseudoephedrine boxes -- a solvent with uses including the manufacture of methamphetamine -- and Pelvit eventually ended up in prison.

Pelvit's attorney argued that his client had a reasonable expectation of privacy in his trash, but the court rejected the argument and said the trash was, well, meant to be thrown away.

What's remarkable is the concurring opinion of Montana Supreme Court Justice James C. Nelson, who reluctantly went along with his colleagues but warned that George Orwell's 1984 had arrived. We reproduce his concurring opinion in full...

Reader comment: semirrahge disagrees with technical details cited:

The original article stated: "The cops discovered evidence of pseudoephedrine and Naptha -- a solvent with uses including the manufacture of methamphetamine -- and Pelvit eventually ended up in prison." When you [quoted] Declan McCullagh's paraphrase [of] the article, the Naptha was left out and what remained was a completely incorrect statement.

The original article is horribly constructed, so this is understandable. I just thought I'd point the error out for your edification. Naptha is an aromatic hydrocarbon distilled from petroleum. It is a medium-grade solvent, and is also used in wick-type lighters like the world-famous Zippo Pseudoephedrine (pseudoephedrine hydrochloride) the chemical name of Sudafed, which is an OTC nasal decongestant. The drug is closely related to the amphetamine branch of chemicals, and in many cases has excitatory effects similar to those drugs.

Naptha is used ON pseudoephedrine to break it down in preparation for cooking. Pseudoephedrine is not the solvent.

If the cast may be familiar from Ghost World, the format is strikingly different. Clowes explores a different style for each character's story, going from full colour to black and white, from simple line drawings to more complex shading and colouring.

"A typical American comic is something you can read while you're standing in line waiting to buy it," he says. "You get to the end and you're like, why am I actually spending money on this?" He took his inspiration from elsewhere, "looking in the Sunday newspapers and thinking how great to see all these different styles sharing the same page. What came before was like a black-and-white movie and this is like a Technicolor movie," he says. "It's a break in my career, I really just had to do it."

In 2003 Fantagraphics published a book about the making of the comic book and the inevitable lawsuit that followed, called The Pirates and the Mouse: Disney's War Against the Counterculture.

Warning -- the characters deal illicit drugs and have sex with each other in this comic. Link (via Drawn!)

Reader comment: Rodrigo says: "Issue 2 of this comic has also been uploaded here."

Japan's Eirin, the name commonly used for the Administration Commission of Motion Picture Code of Ethics, has traditionally taken a hard line against the display of reproductive organs on celluloid, requiring moviemakers to blot them out of view by using a digital mosaic. Renowned director Nagisa Oshima, who was at the helm for "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence," was involved in a decades long battle with Eirin over the depiction of genitalia in his controversial 1976 flick "In the Realm of the Senses." Oshima claimed the famously revealing movie was art, but Eirin insisted it was pornographic and censors sliced through the movie. Even when given a re-run in Japanese theaters five years ago, Eirin still make adjustments to 15 parts of the movie.

The closest genitalia have come to being screened publicly in Japan was the briefest of glimpses of a male member that pops up when two football players clash in Oliver Stone's "Any Given Sunday" in 1999. But, with the Japanese premiere in late August of "Kinsey," local moviegoers will get their first unadulterated glimpse of both male and female reproductive organs.

These images, taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft, show a patch of water ice sitting on the floor of an unnamed crater near the Martian north pole.

The crater is 35 kilometres wide and has a maximum depth of approximately 2 kilometres beneath the crater rim. The circular patch of bright material located at the centre of the crater is residual water ice.

Wearable Environmental Information Networks of Japan, or WIN, showed several notable designs, including Report-the-World, a get-up designed for future stealth journalists. A retro trench coat hides 10 hidden cameras for capturing 360-degree panoramic images. The front pocket holds a small computer, a ring-embedded speaker transmits location-based audio instructions, and a head-mounted display is stylishly encrusted with Swarovski crystals, like an electric tiara.

WIN also demonstrated Dog @ Watch for children. The plushy-form device for the wrist hides a GPS sensor, a cell phone for voice-dialing parents and an alarm sensor to monitor the wearer's safety.

Kirsten McCall, a 9-year-old model, acknowledged the value of safety features to "protect against bad guy kidnappers," but was more excited about other potential features.

"I'd like a jacket that has a TV on the sleeve, so I can watch shows all day -- but mostly, I want clothes that do my homework for me."

Link to NPR "Day to Day" segment, audio online after 12PM PT.

Image: "Cyborg Host" Isa Gordon, shot by Jeff Koga.

And blogger Jonah Brucker-Cohen did a writeup here: Link. Mack Reed at LAVoice has more general SIGGRAPH coverage: Link.

If this stuff floats your boat, you should check out the 21F mailing list for more discussion about wearable technology and future couture. Among the group's members are people from companies who participated in this week's show, including sponsor Charmed Technology.

A month after four explosions killed more than 50 people in London, a folk theatre group in the eastern Indian city of Calcutta is putting finishing touches to a production based on the attacks. The play, London Burning, is a reinvention of jatra, a centuries-old travelling theatre tradition hugely popular in villages in the region.

Indian epics and mythological tales have traditionally been the staple fodder for jatra. Jatra usually consists of four-hour-long, high-energy plays featuring loud music, harsh lighting and extravagant props played out on giant stages under open skies.

But groups like the Digbijoy Opera - one of Calcutta's 55-odd jatra troupes - believe that plays based on "sensational breaking news" are now a bigger draw with rural audiences.

Update: An anonymous reader says,

My friend Todd is the safety engineer that certified that camera for use about a year ago. NASA sent a couple of them up to snap photos of the shuttle as it approaced the ISS. It is a Kodak DCS 760. I just thought it'd be appropriate to tell you what it is. He's sent some amazing photos taken with that camera.

I recently listened to the tour for one small art museum, and you know what I noticed? I noticed how often the soporific tour guide told me to notice things in the paintings. Notice the loitering group of men. Notice the light coming from the side. Notice the clown's cheekbones. OK, I've noticed. Now what? Wake me when you get to the juicy stuff.

Museums, historical sites, and the companies that produce their audio tours aren't completely honest with you. They can't very well say things like "critics think this work is terrifically overrated, but we keep it on the wall because we sell a thousand posters of it a day," or "we know this sketch looks profoundly boring, but here's why it's the most interesting thing you'll see all day," or "we only hang this painting here because old Mrs. Dimbledumble wouldn't have donated the new East Wing otherwise."

They can't say things like that, but we can.

Using discarded construction material and their own spare cash, a group of skaters and their pals constructed a skate park under a freeway in West Oakland. This is an area with a distinct lack of kid-friendly activities but plenty of gang-related activities. The park has turned into a safe place for the kids to hang out and skate in a notoriously bad part of town.

Now Caltrans, in preparation for a construction project, has sealed the area off and is threatening to tear the skate park down. Caltrans is, understandably, concerned about liability since the park is on their property. However, there must be some way of preventing the destruction of this self-driven community project.

Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, the City Council President, and now CA Sen. Boxer have weighed in on the issue in support of the park, but Caltrans is known for acting unilaterally when it comes to their projects (the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge debacle comes to mind). With these politicians already behind the project, I'm not sure what else can be done, but I do know it would be a cryin' shame if this shining example of a community working to better itself were to be torn down.

Update: The Man unclenched!

Caltrans agreed today to spare an illegal skate park under an Oakland freeway and work with skaters, community members and city officials to have another agency or group oversee the concrete structure.

According to the newspaper, the guide recommends that if lethal force is needed to stop someone who fits a certain behavioral profile, the officer should "aim for the head." The intent is to kill the suspect instantly so the person could not set off a bomb if one is strapped to the person's chest, the newspaper said. Among signs to look for listed in the police organization's behavioral profile are wearing a heavy coat in warm weather, carrying a backpack with protrusions or visible wires, nervousness, excessive sweating or an unwillingness to make eye contact, the Post said.

Update: Security analyst Bruce Schneier blogs a few thoughts on the matter here: Link (Thanks, Ken)

Reader Max Mitchell says,

The people proposing the idea of shooting suspected suicide bombers in the head have obviously never watched any modern thriller/action movie. What if suicide bombers build their devices to go off if the bomber's heartbeat stops? We've seen it time and time again in films -- "try and remove this bomb and it will explode".

There's also the possibility of those types of bombs being used to send people out as proxy bombers (as the IRA did, holding people's family hostage and sending them out in a car packed with explosives to a military checkpoint).

Reader Max Mitchell is describing a kill switch. They are actually far simpler to build than the heart-monitor device Max describes. Anyone who has used a standard push-lawnmower has used a kill switch. It's that bar you have to press, which shuts off the motor when you let go. All your suicide bomber needs to do is make a switch for his detonator that he has to hold down continuously -- when he lets go, the bomb detonates. I think this is an actual, real-world technique, and it obviously makes shooting bombers in the head a completely idiotic idea.

Actually, for a lawnmower it is called a "kill switch" because it kills the devices. For an e.g., bomb, it's called a "deadman switch" because rather than shutting the device off, it activates the device. Link

Setting aside the possibility of incorrectly identifying a terrorist that Bruce Schneier has already covered pretty well, a shoot-to-kill policy has the benefit of preventing the explosion in the case where no such switch is installed and is neither better nor worse when such a device exists.

The readers you quote who seem to have spent too much time learning their "tradecraft" from Hollywood are also ignoring the actual practicalities of such a device. The bomb needs to be armed before the switch has any effect and the easiest way to implement such a switch is to have a simple two-state button on a wire: press and hold to arm bomb, release to detonate.

No one is going to send their bomber out with such a switch already activated, the chance of premature detonation before the bomber reaches the target is too large (another potential side-effect of a shoot-to-kill policy is that increasing the prevalence of such switches increases the complexity of the bomb and also marginally raises the probability of a premature detonation.)

If the bomber is intercepted before reaching the target the shoot-to-kill policy also has the benefit of increasing the probability that the police can prevent the bomber from arming the device, rendering the dead man's switch useless.

This defense of shoot-to-kill policies by "setting aside the possibility of incorrectly identifying a terrorist" is like praising deficit spending by setting aside the possible harm of running enormous deficits. In response to the question of who might "send their bomber out with such a switch already activated", I would venture to guess, "anyone sending a bomber into an area where police are known to shoot to kill."

Police with shoot-to-kill orders are currently 0 for 1 in identifying actual terrorists in high-pressure situations, and an understandably jumpy cop may interpret innocent hands suddenly raised in surrender as a terrorist releasing a deadman switch. But let's set all that aside: I would like to know what shot-to-killed ratio of "correctly identified terrorists" to dead civilians this reader believes would establish an acceptable baseline for keeping the public safe. 10:1? Or 1:10?

A US tech consultant says technology in the new version will fuzz protected digital content unless it is viewed on a monitor which has High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP).

Stephen Speicher, who writes a weekly column for the tech blog engadget, said: "If you're one of those rare people whose display is equipped with HDCP, you're fine. However, in the world of computers, such users are few and far between."

And in related news:

An Austrian hacker earned the dubious distinction of writing what are thought to be the first known viruses for Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Vista operating system. Written in July, the viruses take advantage of a new command shell, code-named Monad, that is included in the Windows Vista beta code.

Update: Here's a Slashdot thread -- "because of the possible virus threat that targets Monad the shell will not be included in Windows Vista."

Martey Dodoo says, "There's a post on the Microsoft Security Response Center blog now, refuting the Slashdot article (Link). The Slashdot article has already been updated."

"My co-worker Alan Bean opened the box. Something moved. He jumped; and he looked in again and there was five kittens," (Country Home Products employee Deb) Peters said. "Three black ones, a gray one and one that looked like a Siamese."

Country Home employees dashed to the nearby Vergennes Animal Hospital and returned with bottles of kitten formula, which the kittens devoured.

The 3-week-old kittens were taken to Addison County Humane Society in Middlebury, where they met Hazel, a black domestic cat whose kittens had just been weaned. Hazel is a now a surrogate mother to the kittens...

Ettore Zuccato, from the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan, Italy, and colleagues tested a new tool to measure a cocaine residue called benzoylecgonine (BE), present in flowing river and sewage waters because it is excreted in the urine of cocaine users. The residue is a by-product of metabolism in the human body, and cannot be produced by other means. The researchers measured the levels of BE in the river Po and in the sewage water of medium-sized Italian cities. Their results show that the Po, the largest Italian river, with five million people living in its vicinity, steadily carried the equivalent of about 4 kg of cocaine per day.

One of the people I interviewed for the story was pioneering blogger Cameron Barret, who started his weblog in 1997.

Cameron and his twin brother are now trying to get on the reality TV show Amazing Race, and he's got a website he hopes will get him enough attention to land the gig. Their angle is that they'll be the "blogging twins" of the show. Good luck!
Link

If it's not urgent, don't send it until after the 15th. If it's urgent and related to EFF, email Ren Bucholz, and if it's urgent and related to writing, email my agent's assistant, Ann Behar. If you've got a Boing Boing suggestion, please don't ever email it to me, ever! Use the suggest a site form.

PS: Regarding the thing about Apple not using Trusted Computing -- nothing new here. It remains: Apple's currently shipping a dev OS that talks to the Intel trusted computing hardware. As I wrote, if Apple ships a commercial version of the OS with this in, it will be very bad.

From the folks at Metroblogging Boston:

Continential has a Wi-Fi antenna at their frequent flyer lounge and it lets people get free Wi-Fi at Logan. This, of course, pisses off the folks at Logan who want you to fork up dough to access their pay as you surf network.

The folks on the Boston WAG list have a petition going around which will hopefully bug the FCC enough that we can get what we want! More in the extended entry, English bad today, need more coffee.

Continental Airlines is fighting for their right to offer free WiFi (info below) at Boston's Logan Airport.

To support free WiFi at Logan Airport and to prevent a chilling precedent in FCC policy, please submit a public comment to the FCC. This PDF has instructions for submitting comments, both by e-mail and snail mail.

In response to what happened at Defcon to Michael Lynn, EFF Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl has penned a little ditty about the need to defend freedom:

Lawyers, Geeks, and Money (With apologies to Warren Zevon).

Well, I hacked into the Cisco
The way I always do
How was I to know They’d call in CCIPS, too

I was talking at Black Hat
I took a little risk
Send lawyers, geeks, and money.
Jen, get me out of this

I'm the innocent bystander
Somehow I got stuck
Between the feds and Cisco
And I'm down on my luck
And I'm down on my luck
And I'm down on my luck

Now I'm pwned by the injuntion
I'm a desperate geek
Send lawyers, geeks, and money.
A hacker up the creek

Send lawyers, geeks, and money.

Adds Kurt, "Any relationship between this post and real life is merely coincidental. After all, who would really try to suppress open and honest discussion about a security flaw through legal action?"

1) Try to summarize the main idea or theme in a single paragraph. As Einstein once said, unless a theory has a simple underlying picture that the layman can understand, the theory is probably worthless...

2) If you have a serious proposal for a new physical theory, submit it to a physics journal, just as Physical Review D or Nuclear Physics B. There, it will get the referee and serious attention that it deserves.

3) Remember that your theory will receive more credibility if your theory builds on top of previous theories, rather than making claims like “Einstein was wrong!”

Varnish Fine Art currently has show up featuring the amazing works of Polish sculptor Stanislav Szukalski (the show, entitled “The Self-Born: Stanislav Szukalski”, runs through September 16th). This is the first large-scale exhibition of his work in 5 years and features many of his sculptures, drawings and photographs. Some of the pieces look like a cross between the Industrial Revolution and the Aztec Empire, and are really stunning. Last Friday I shot some photos of the Stanislav Szukalski show which was up during the Hi Fructose Release Party.

Last Gasp has published three books on Stanislav Szukalski (Behold!!! The Protong, Szukalski: Inner Portraits and Struggle: The Art of Szukalski), all of which will be available at the opening on July 30th.

Snuppy is the second coup this year for the Seoul researchers. In May, (Woo Suk) Hwang's lab announced that it had created cloned human embryos and extracted stem cells from them. The dog project is separate, and its goal, Dr. Hwang explained in an e-mail message, is to use dogs to study the causes and treatment of human diseases.

Dogs have long been used to study human diseases. Rabies, in fact, was first discovered in dogs, insulin was discovered in dogs, and the first open heart surgery was in dogs. Eventually, the team hopes to make dog embryonic stem cells and test them in the animals as treatments...

Until dog cloning becomes a lot more efficient, few people will be able to afford to clone their pets. Mr. Hawthorne estimated that it would cost more than $1 million to repeat what the South Koreans have done.

The market among dog owners might not be much, in any case. Apart from ethical issues, (Chicago-Kent College of Law bioethicist Nigel) Cameron said, dogs are like family members. "My dog is now deceased," he said. "But I wouldn't want to clone Charlie. It would be disrespectful to Charlie and to Charlie II."

Martin, one of the MyADSL organizers, reports:

MyADSL submitted a record 466 complaints to the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA), the regulator of telecommunications and the broadcasting sectors.

ICASA has put forward quite a number of recommendation based on our complaints and 3 days of public hearings that followed this. Just read the news headlines on our homepage to see the fallout: "ICASA ADSL report causes a media stir that reaches the JSE", "Icasa plays hardball with Telkom over ADSL threat", "PRICES UNDER PRESSURE", "Telkom must stop their bully-boy tactics", etc..

Obviously Telkom is furious. The monopoly that boasted a profit of R6.8 billion stands to lose millions in revenue.

"Then you add in (that) you got sick on strawberry ice cream. You want them to think about the getting sick aspect of the experience," Loftus said.

Then the volunteers were asked to describe what may have happened -- for instance, eating strawberry ice cream at a birthday party and becoming ill.

"Most of our subjects came up with a belief that this had happened as opposed to developing an actual memory," Loftus said.

The second thing that will be free is a complete curriculum (in all languages) from Kindergarten through the University level. There are several projects underway to make this a reality, including our own Wikibooks project, but of course this is a much bigger job than the encyclopedia, and it will take much longer.

In the long run, it will be very difficult for proprietary textbook publishers to compete with freely licensed alternatives. An open project with dozens of professors adapting and refining a textbook on a particular subject will be a very difficult thing for a proprietary publisher to compete with. The point is: there are a huge number of people who are qualified to write these books, and the tools are being created to leave them to do that.

How about confronting a pillar of fat collected from plastic surgery clinics, a horse’s skin blown up like a balloon, or a foetus grafted onto a seagull swimming in formaldehyde? Far from stereotypical propaganda posters or traditional silk prints, a major exhibition in Switzerland’s capital tackles preconceptions and provides a snapshot of China’s contemporary art scene over the past quarter century, its political undercurrent and its challenge to a host of taboos...

Sigg’s passion began in the late 1970s, and his 1,200-work collection is an unrivaled record of the flowering of China’s art scene. Chinese artists began breaking taboos after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, following almost three decades of isolation from international trends, when their work was meant to serve the interests of the people — and the Communist Party.

Crayons and pencils are ok, but they look like a baby did them sometimes.

I'm good at pens. I can do really good pen drawings.

I'm just learning to read so my Dad is helping me. He types what I say and makes sure it is spelled good.

A lot of people liked this picture a lot. Do you know what it is?

I'll tell you. It's a T-rex coming down to bite you up! See the teeth?

A blogger who goes by the handle "Sciatica" found this Al Jaffee comic from a 1975 issue of Mad that is almost exactly the same idea as WeiWei He, Chuan Shi and Wen Ying Lu's "Dog Poo Spray."
Link

A lot of people asked Rick if he had art lithos of his photos available for sale. He took the hint and has started to offer large, limited-edition prints of his bugs for sale via PayPal. (NB: Rick is also a talented and prolific science fiction and fantasy illustrator whose paintings and drawings grace many of the finer books at your local bookseller) Link

"When I go into meetings at the big studios, I try to hide the fact that I love movies," Ray Bradbury told an audience of filmmakers at the Directors Guild of America's yearly Digital Day event this weekend.

"You, too, have to disguise the fact that you love making movies.... If you revealed it to them, you'd never get paid."

Addressing an overflow crowd of more than 600 at the guild-members-only gathering, the 85-year-old author admitted to being a voracious film fan since childhood -- so much so that he keeps a TV set in his home tuned in to classic movies all day. Bradbury's name appears in more than 50 years' worth of writing credits for movies including It Came From Outer Space, Fahrenheit 451, and the big-screen adaptation of Moby Dick for director John Huston. But he expresses little love for some of Hollywood's more recent big-budget blockbusters.

"I hope we start making better films," he said, acknowledging that some of his own midcentury favorites might seem silly to audiences today.

"We've been making a lot of lousy ones lately. But I'm writing an article called 'Better Silly Than Stupid,' and anyone who's seen Van Helsing knows what I'm talking about."

I will actively support those people who, on behalf of all of us*, refuse to register for an ID card, and I pledge to pay at least £20 into a fighting fund for them but only if 50,000 other people will too.

Do you want to hear what Bill Hicks thinks of the current "Persian Gulf Distraction" and Baby Bush in the Whitehouse? How about The Simpsons performing Macbeth? The people behind "Going Underground," London Underground parody from last year? Or Nirivan's Smells Like Teen Spirit from the Great British Ukelele Orchestra. Then you need to be at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Bit not everyone can be there - especially when the theatres sell out the 100 or so tickets for each performance. What you need is someone getting interviews with the performers, the news about the Fringe, a moblog and reviews website... in short you need The Podcast Network's Edinburgh Fringe Podcast. Ewan Spence and his reporters are going to be spending all of August to provide you all with a free daily podcast from the biggest Festival in the world.

While typically (and ultimately) associated with economics, the concept of externalities applies rather well to technology: web services are a purposeful version of the scrapeability of web based services and applications; media in digital form is inherently hackable and repurposeable (just ask the music industry); Wifi base stations provide much more than Internet connectivity--they provide a sense of locality, group, and (through their limited reach) space; Bluetooth-enabled phones, PDAs, and computers broadcast globally unique identifiers.

Affordances, usually associated with human-computer interaction, industrial design, and environmental psychology, is here seen as the flipside of externalities: one person's externality is another's affordance. Web services provide an affordance for hooking in to Amazon's business process (not to mention Amazon being it's own biggest user); Ajax style interaction with a web application's data affords a peek at the underlying data structure and associated atomic actions; whether and how one exposes the internal workings of a piece of consumer hardware can mean the difference between a TiVo and a WebTV.

* How does one identify one's own externalities and turn them to one's own advantage? Open the door to customers and downstream developers and resellers?

* What has been noticable this last year is the unintentional affordances, the serendipitous design decisions that turn products into platforms. For example, Google Maps was quickly turned into a web component by a world of programmers hungry for a visual display of geographic information. Google went with it, and built the API into the second release of their Javascript maps system. What are some other examples?

* Where are the affordances guiding interaction of data and services between realms? For example, if you use Bloglines, del.icio.us, and have a Movable Type blog, you have separate systems to blog, tag, and email any page you find interesting. How do you tie these disparate fragments together? Despite their great potential, RSS, trackbacks, and permalinks haven't yielded much more than expected ties; where are the unintended (aside from spam, that is) uses?

* Wifi changes the usage of public and private spaces. Coffee shops aren't just throwing in free wifi, but are changing the very buildings (power, spaces, group areas, meeting spots, etc.). With these physical changes to provide computer affordances come changes in social affordances. Where are the next nexus points of the social and virtual?

The craftrobo site features a library of downloadable patterns with novelties like robots, and dinosaurs, but the real fun begins in the box & bags section, where kids can download and print out their very own candy-colored “suspicious container” for anonymous deposit at their local train station. yay!

* Cell phones as environmental sensors

* Optimizing ad sales on Google

* Nanohacking semiconductors

While some elevators require a key, others can be put into "Express" mode by pressing the "Door Close" and "Floor" buttons at the same time. This sweeps the car to the floor of your choice and avoids stops at any other floor.

3. A gatekeeper: Everyone involved will have a different take on the material. Either set direction and vet all contributions yourself, or appoint *one* person to do so - preferably a good listener.

4. Honesty: Ensure everyone understands up front the rights they're assigning you, and their compensation (if any). Be candid about why you want things done one way and not another. Tell everyone basically everything, short of betraying confidences or making someone in the group look bad. Brace yourself for corresponding honesty in return.

The Brighton and Rottingdean Seashore Elecric Railway, the so-called Daddy Longlegs railway, was built in 1896. This was a proposal by Magnus Volk for a railway that ran along on rails underneath the sea for about 50 to 100 yards offshore, from where his existing electric railway finished all the way to Rottingdean, where it was connected to a pier. The tramcar ran on stilts that were about 24 feet above the sea bed.

The single car, called the Pioneer, was essentially an open deck, above which was an inside car which was quite luxurious and had leather upholstered seats. Above this was an outside deck with slatted seating, rather like you'll find on a liner. The power lines then came down from above that.

Update: Opps. Already blogged this last July.

Make has a detailed HOWTO for creating Librie books from digital texts that are free from this DRM, and will stay readable forever.

In this HOW TO we're going to use a PC (Windows XP) to convert text files to the Sony ebook format. This is the first in a series of articles, mostly because of the new demand for these devices and content for them.

Ingredient for this HOW TO:

* Sony Librie
* PC (Virtual PC on a Mac works, sorta). There are also other tools (see end of this HOW TO)...
* Memory Stick, not needed- but helpful
* Ebooks (txt files, pdfs, etc..)

Discuss the nature of books, the idea of a book and what can be done with books, both as concept and as object.

Date/Time: Sunday, 5PM
Location: Fan Lounge, at the Moat House. (apparently, real ale is on tap here)

OpenNet Initiative has done a report on the incident showing that by blocking that IP address Telus not only blocked access to the union's sites, but also to "an engineering company; a breast cancer fundraising site; an alternative medicine site based in Australia; and a Colorado based electronic recycling company," as well as more than 760 other domains.

Link (Thanks, Michael!)

Update: Site is down. email me if you've got a mirror. Back up -- don't send me email!

* Technorati is tracking about 900,000 blog posts created every day

* That's about 10.4 blog posts per second, on average

* Median time from posting to inclusion in the Technorati index is under 5 minutes

* Significant increases in posting volume are due to increased mainstream use of easy hosted tools as well as simple posting interfaces like post-from-IM and moblogging tools

* Weekends tend to be slower posting days by about 5-10% of the weekly averages

* During the day, posting tends to peak between the hours of 7AM and noon Pacific time (10AM - 3PM Eastern time)

* Worldwide news events cause ripples through the blogosphere - not only in search volume, but also in posting volume

The bodies of the dead Nigerian villagers had not yet grown cold when the Nigerian navy captain presented Chevron with a bill: 15,000 naira, or $165 for responding to ``attacks from Opia village against security agents.''

Within 24 hours Chevron paid up. It would be years before the San Ramon-based energy company would acknowledge the role it played in the destruction of Opia and another small village called Ikenyan in Nigeria's oil-rich delta in January 1999.

After buying the car, von Zehle quickly noticed it had a few of those "extras" for which some car buyers pay thousands extra.

"One of the neat things, aside from the fact it's armored, is it has microphones that allow you to hear people talking outside the car and loudspeakers so you can talk back to them," von Zehle said. "It also had a pretty neat crowd-control device."

Although he had to dismantle it, the "crowd-control device" consisted of a series of pipes that would shoot out flames from the side of the car.

Future work will be required to understand how MDMA was able to ameliorate the symptoms of Parkinson's in these mice and to assess the toxicity of MDMA and related compounds in greater detail in the future. However, this study opens the door to a search for compounds related to ecstasy, which may provide a more effective treatment in the later stages of the disease - and hopefully allow patients to perform the simple functions of everyday life independently again.

"As I looked down, all I seen was eyes and teeth," he said. "It drilled me right in the chest. It felt like a missile or a sledgehammer. I said to myself, 'Lord, if it's your will, let it be done.'"

Reader comment:Rufus says: "You probably get a lot of mail, however you got it a bit wrong about the needlefish. The long scar wasn't inflicted by the fish. that was a laparotomy scar. The surgeons would have opened him up to explore his abdomen for bowel damage or haemorrhage. The fish probably made a tiny hole underneath the square gauze bandage. "...eviscerated...from groin to breastbone" was fairly implausible, especially seeing as the scar is razor straight, except where it dodges around his umbilicus (belly button)."

Gelf magazine contacted Gillette and got the lowdown.

Gelf was immediately on the lookout for a hoax. After all, the man who posted the photos, Todd Lappin, is the founder of Telstar Logistics, a company that was set up solely so that Lappin could park his van in unloading zones in busy parts of San Francisco. (He goes into more detail here.) But Lappin’s follow-up replies to commenters seemed too earnest to be false—“And oddly, I've also been overcome with cravings to watch Oprah,” he tacked on to a reply to an inquiry as to the silky-smooth state of his legs—so Gelf turned its investigation towards The Gillette Company.

The spaceship was crashing, but, more importantly, John and Greta were having sex in it.

Previously: Carburetor breast fantasy wins award

It cannot be the taste, since most people cannot tell the difference in a blind tasting. Much bottled water is, in any case, derived from municipal water supplies, though it is sometimes filtered, or has additional minerals added to it.

Nor is there any health or nutritional benefit to drinking bottled water over tap water. In one study, published in The Archives of Family Medicine, researchers compared bottled water with tap water from Cleveland, and found that nearly a quarter of the samples of bottled water had significantly higher levels of bacteria. The scientists concluded that "use of bottled water on the assumption of purity can be misguided." Another study carried out at the University of Geneva found that bottled water was no better from a nutritional point of view than ordinary tap water.

Admittedly, both kinds of water suffer from occasional contamination problems, but tap water is more stringently monitored and tightly regulated than bottled water. New York City tap water, for example, was tested 430,600 times during 2004 alone.

Scott Shulman, a television photographer, said he raced to a pet store parking lot in West Hollywood last year after a tower hooked up his daughter's car when she went to a nearby automated teller machine instead of directly into the pet store.

Mr. Shulman blocked the tow truck with his car. The truck driver called a second truck to tow Mr. Shulman's car; Mr. Shulman called the sheriff's office.

"It was like the O.K. Corral," Mr. Shulman said. "I don't own any guns or anything, but I can see where this could get ugly." His daughter's car was released.

It turns out Xeni knows Scott Shulman, so I called him and asked him for the details. He kindly shared his story with me.

About a year ago, Scott and his wife were driving around the Venice area of Los Angeles on a Sunday morning when he got a frantic phone call from his daughter. She told him that she had driven to a mini-mall to shop at her favorite pet store, located in the mini-mall. She'd parked in the mini-mall lot. (Scott told me that there were only one or two other cars in the lot at the time, and that the lot has about 100 parking spaces. So the lot was almost empty.)

After parking, Scott's daughter walked to the ATM, which was adjacent to the mini-mall. After a 90-second stop at the ATM to get cash to spend at the pet store, she returned to the parking lot to find that her car was hitched to a tow truck. The driver had been hiding around the corner, waiting for an opportunity like this.

Scott's daughter pleaded with the tow truck driver to speak with her father on the phone, and the driver finally agreed. He said he'd "drop the car" if Scott came immediately with $200, cash only. "I'm ready to pull out," he warned. Scott was about four miles away and he told the driver to wait, and he drove as quickly as he could to the mini-mall.

"When I got there," says Scott, "the first thing I did was block him in with my car. I told him, 'I'm not moving until you drop my daughter's car.'" The driver was unhappy about this, and warned Scott that he'd called another tow truck to haul away Scott's car unless he moved his car out of the way immediately. Scott told the driver that he was going to call the Sheriff, which he did.

Twenty minutes later, says Scott, two "very nice" deputies arrived and assessed the situation. They told Scott that they'd had a lot of trouble with this particular towing company, but could not order the driver to drop the car, because the lot was private property.

Around this time, the owner of the towing company showed up. He, too, refused to drop the car, even when the owner of the pet store came out and requested that they drop it.

By now, Scott's daughter's car had been held captive for an hour and a half. The deputies told Scott that they would happily appear in court to testify on his behalf against the towing company, and that Scott would very likely win a quadruple damages judgment (about $800). At this point, the tow truck driver angrily called it quits and dropped the car.

That week, Scott called the West Hollywood City Council and learned that towing companies are required by law to accept credit cards, even though most of them insist on cash (imagine how many people would dispute the credit charges from a towing company!) and that they cannot charge more than the police garage charges (around $130).

Lesson? Do everything you legally can to keep the tow truck driver from driving away with your car. You just might win.

Reader comment: Tara says: NOTE: this is not legal advice, but... One other requirement (at least in CA) is that the owner of the property give consent for each specific tow (and not just generally to tow vehicles) and be present at the time of towing. See California Civil Code Sec. § 22658. The property owner must also display "in plain view at all entrances to the property, a sign not less than 17 by 22 inches in size, with lettering not less than one inch in height, prohibiting public parking and indicating that vehicles will be removed at the owner's expense, and containing the telephone number of the local traffic law enforcement agency."

If a towing company violates these provisions (or any of the other requirements of § 22658), you should totally sue in small claims court! You can get quadruple the amount the shady company charged you.

Update:Here's a transcript from a KCET segment about crooked towing companies.

Sam Louie>> Police say not only do some companies illegally take your car, they also overcharge you. In Los Angeles, a tow and one day's storage should be around $120, but many companies try to tack on extra fees especially during nights and on weekends.

Tamar Galatzan>> A lot of these predatory tow companies have added all these additional, you know, storage fees, key fees, after-hours fees, opening the gate fee, all sorts of things which they claim they're allowed to because that's not mentioned in the state law.

Sam Louie>> But as of this year, Galatzan says there is new legislation tow truck companies must follow. By law, tow companies can tow your car from a private lot only after you've parked there for more than one hour. They must also have written permission from a property owner or manager who must be present at the time of the tow. Galatzan believes that this will cut down on the majority of the illegal tows and, for those who defy the law, they'll face prosecution as several have in previous cases.

Tamar Galatzan>> In both cases, there was a lengthy amount of jail time or Caltrans picking up garbage at the side of the freeway. The owners were put on probation. They had to pay restitution, in one case, fifteen thousand dollars to the victims that we had just identified of these predatory tows.

Reader comment: I went with my coworker to get his car that was towed from our office parking lot (Walnut Creek, CA) during the night (he didn't have his parking decal -- he didn't know we needed parking decals. The property owner never told us nor issued us parking decals). We knew about needing consent from the property owner and so requested to see it. The guy there told us that they had a general consent form that covered any towing they did at this property. He wouldn't show us any paperwork on this. We called the police and they confirmed that a property owner can, indeed, give general consent to a towing company to remove cars from their lot(s). The police also told us that the towing company has no obligation to show car owners any paperwork regarding a consent agreement between them and the property owner. If you read section "L" of the previously mentioned Civil Code:

"(l) (1) A towing company shall not remove or commence the removal of a vehicle from private property without first obtaining written authorization from the property owner or lessee, or an employee or agent thereof, who shall be present at the time of removal. General authorization to remove or commence removal of a vehicle at the towing company's discretion shall not be delegated to a towing company or its affiliates except in the case of a vehicle unlawfully parked within 15 feet of a fire hydrant or in a fire lane, or in a manner which interferes with any entrance to, or exit from, the private property."

According to the (Jerusalem Post), The Holy Phallus is an extended monologue touching on rape, passion, handicaps, homosexuality and loneliness...

"At the end of shows people come and tell me, 'Wow what a great penis you are.' I take that as a compliment now," Cohen told the Jerusalem Post.

Written on Valentine's Day, 1987, that first letter wasn't the usual sort of fawning fan mail. There was one reference to liking the way Ogre looked; the rest was about herself. Penned, in part, during a ceramics class, the letter introduced Siana as a "senior at an extremely boring high school." She told him she was so bored she wanted to scream. She said she hated school and that her mother hated her. She told him that her grandparents died and that her stomach hurt. She said she wanted to be a journalist and travel to England, that she liked art and looking "really gothic and artsy." It was, in a word, rambling, but the letter was also pure, lucid and engaging.

Without receiving any response, Siana wrote Ogre again 12 days later, and again the day after that, and two days after that, and so on. He wrote her back only once — two months to the day after she wrote her first letter.

What he wrote isn't included in the book, per Ogre's request, but a journal entry indicates he wanted to meet her. A month later, they met backstage at a Skinny Puppy show, where Ogre told Siana her letters were "fascinating and very creative" and encouraged her to "keep 'em coming."

And so she continued writing letters that were increasingly personal, suicidal and oftentimes decorated with drawings made from her blood, using a calligraphy pen she dipped in her wounds.

In the early 1980s, Chorvinsky devoted endless hours categorizing the data collection of the International Fortean Organization, while running his commercial bookstore, Dream Wizards, in suburban Rockville, Maryland. (He) founded and became the editor of Strange Magazine in 1987. His magazine reflected Chorvinsky's journey in Fortean investigations, at first publishing detailed overview articles on phenomena, but then slowly moving to more skeptical and debunking articles on cryptozoological and unexplained subjects, as well as the occasional sympathetic pieces...

One of Mark Chorvinsky's favorite Charles Fort quotations was from New Lands: "There is not a physicist in the world who can perceive when a parlor magician palms off playing-cards."

The Car Whisperer (is) a tool that lets somebody with a Linux laptop and a directional antenna send audio to nearby cars with Bluetooth handsfree systems that aren’t being used. Many built-in systems use just a standard, widely known passkey as the only form of authentication that’s needed. While some people see that as a security risk, it’s merely an invitation to invade a passing car’s stereo and ask the driver how he manages to steer with his head stuck where the sun don’t shine.

As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual.

Ideal to keep in the trunk of your car or in a first aid kit, etc. Uses a Lithium CR123 battery that has a 10 year shelf-life and won't leak in harsh temperatures. Features 7 user-selectable flash patterns, including Coast Guard "SOS" Morse code for rescue and solid-on (lantern) mode for use as a lantern or power-fail light. LED colors: red, amber/yellow, blue, green, white, and infrared (IR). Outer shell (housing) color options: yellow, orange, yellow-green, and olive drab (OD).

If the passenger is a suicide bomber who realises the wand has found something, the guard might not have enough time to pull out handcuffs or a gun. So the new wand will have a hidden secret - a transformer which steps the detector's battery power up to 100 kilovolts and feeds it to disguised metal electrodes at the end of the wand.

If the wand gives a silent warning of explosives, the guard can then subtly slide the pads onto the passenger's neck or hands and press a shock button. The patent reassures that the effect is "temporary and reversible".

So an innocent traveller who "happened to have a significant amount of metal on his person or happened to treat explosives legally" should wake up shaken but unharmed.

Nutzwerk is a software company (they make "SafeSurf" among other products) who advocate for software patents.

Nutzwerk sent a bogus takedown notice to Teamware, who host the DNS for FFII.org, and got them to remove the DNS record for FFII.org. FFII is now seeking a new host, but in the meantime, the bogus threats of Nutzwerk, combined with Teamware's careless cowardice, means that a pro-software-patent lobbyist has used the law to silence its critics:

This afternoon, Nutzwerk's lawyers sent a letter threatening Teamware with a preliminary injunction based on a page where we reported about the preliminary injunction handed down by the Hamburg District Court for Nutzwerk on June 28th. Our report of course couldn't avoid quoting some of the 8 sentences forbidden by that court. Moreover, Nutzwerk pointed to some forbidden sentences in some automatically-generated PDF files, which had not been updated (and which are rarely read, because they are assumed to be identical to the HTML pages, just formatted for printing).

Update: AV sez, "There's a constant battle between the skaters and the installers - they actually rent power equipment and grind the stuff off!"

They're not bluffing. Skateboarders routinely conduct guerrilla missions to remove what they call "Nazi knobs" from their favorite skate spots. They use saws and power tools, and sometimes cellular phones to connect the demolisher to the lookout.

"One dude cuts and one dude's watching and one dude is ready to run with the generator," said Rob Dyrdek, a professional skateboarder who admits to removing Skatestoppers. "It's pretty ridiculous."

Once, while Loarie was installing Skatestoppers at a school in Orange County, a young skateboarder walked up to say he'd be back to tear them out over the weekend. Later, Loarie said, the Skatestoppers had been hacked off and human feces smeared across the wall. Three weeks later, Loarie installed a new kind of Skatestopper with an experimental anchoring system.

In one application (WO 2005/015989 to be precise) Monsanto is describing very general methods of crossbreeding and selection, using artificial insemination and other breeding methods which are already in use. The main "invention" is nothing more than a particular combination of these elements designed to speed up the breeding cycle for selected traits, in order to make the animals more commercially profitable. (Monsanto chirps gleefully about lower fat content and higher nutritional value. But we've looked and we couldn't find any "Philanthropic altruism" line item in their annual reports, despite the fact that it's an omnipresent factor in their advertising.)

According to Then, "I couldn't belive this. I've been reviewing patents for 10 years and I had to read this three times. Monsanto isn't just seeking a patent for the method, they are seeking a patent on the actual pigs which are bred from this method. It's an astoundingly broad and dangerous claim."

Back in April, BoingBoing reported on old radium baths and radon mine soaks. Apparently, they're still around and have been upgraded with free high-speed wireless internet access.

The Free Enterprise Radon Health Mine in Boulder, Montana boasts: "A proven modality for those seeking a complement or alternative to current methods of disease symptom management of immune system disorders -- to ease or eliminate chronic pain and to break reliance on pharmaceuticals."

They go on to list a ton of diseases and conditions that Radon cures. My favorite is: "Effects on neuro-transmitting and thinking systems through increase of key enzymes and hormones." The Mine Motel has eight units. Pets welcome. No smoking though; it's a carcinogen.

Previously on Boing Boing:
Past tense health tech: radium baths, radon mine soaks

Link

The [local] Islamic affairs department had put them on the wanted list for being involved in teachings deviant to Islamic beliefs. (...) Ayah Pin was declared an apostate for leaving Islam and had spent 11 months in jail in 2001 for his activities.

Previously: Malaysian teapot cult in hot water

Orlando International Airport is in the midst of a 'security experiment'. For a fee of about US$80.00 a year you can submit yourself to a biometric scan (fingerprint and iris data will be taken) and well as a personal Homeland Security 'threat assessment'.

If you are determined not to be a danger to society then you will receive a credit card sized ID with a computer chip containing all of your biometric information. For the length of your 'membership', you will be allowed to circumvent the long security lines in favor of a much shorter access line. You will be asked to present your card to a machine that will match it to a fingerprint and/or iris scan.

This system is called CLEAR. It's only being tested in Orlando right now but is supposedly going to spread to other airports around the country.

As part of my weird job [Ed. note: famous globetrotting techno deejay] I fly in and out of Orlando at least once a week. The regular security lines are filled with families and screaming kids leaving from their Disney vacations. I have to admit, this VIP line would save me time and be much less of a headache. However, the idea of a collection of biometric information combined with a personal threat assessment is a scary one. The libertarian in me is fighting with my desire for quick and easy travel.

Reader comment: Jon Feldman says,

This sounds like an expansion of DHS's registered traveler program. They are piloting the program via three or four contractors in several airports - I'm part of EDS's Boston pilot at the American Airlines terminal. Each contractor seems to have different rules about how much it costs and how the system actually works. In boston the registration, biometric scans, background check and parking during the registration were free. In the end the pilot program is a bit of a bust - basically it bumps you to near the front of the frequent flyer line with a stamp on your ticket indicating you are less of a threat. In my experience it didn't provide any material advantage to just getting in the frequent flyer line.

I noticed you posted an article submitted to you about the airport in Florida which collects biometric data. It may surprise you to know that the Amsterdam airport (Schiphol) has been providing a similar service since 2002/2003. Iris-data is collected and stored onto a chipcard. The service is privacy-concern-aware, as the data which is collected is ONLY stored onto the card (I believe Dutch law prohibits companies storing information such as irisscans). Upon renewing my card (once every 3 years or so) you have to go back to have your eye re-scanned and imprinted upon a new card. For me, it's pure heaven - not only does it allow you to shortcut security and customs lines, you also get special parking spots close to the terminal and can use business-class check in for a number of airlines. My monday-morning-commute was shortened from 2.5 hours house-to-plane to 1 hour house-to-plane (especially because I didn't have to be early to be sure I was in time) once I started using it. When the system is broken (happened twice, so far) you get the ultra-elitarian-treatment: a security guard recognises your card, escorts you to the front of the line and shoves the hour-long queue of mere mortals aside for you. I just love the comfort too much to allow my but-shouldn't-customs-be-a-public-service-and-therefore-equal-too-all-attitude to get in the way.

For more information - check out www.privium.com.

It's EUR 99 a year for biometric immigration, EUR 120 for the full package.

In 2000 the INS launched a similar program called INSPASS which was available free to any US citizen or valid visa holder that traveled outside the US more than three times per year. INSPASS was available at seven US airports (including SFO, Miami, Kennedy, and O'Hare) and used a biometric hand geometry scanner and a striped photo ID card. Like the Orlando program, you had to submit to fingerprints and photos to get the pass.

I remember the officer at INS office at SFO, after looking at the quality of the fingerprint image he took, proudly telling me I better be careful not to get in trouble because the quality of my prints was excellent. Duly noted.

It was great being able to skip the horrific custom lines at SFO. Unfortunately, the INS canceled the INSPASS program a couple years later, apparently because they were too expensive to maintain. See this Wired story: Link.

Interestingness creates a daily map (with the usual Flickr clean and easy user interface) of the most interesting photos posted to Flickr, as determined by an algorithm that considers how many users have added the photo to their favorites, how many have commented on it, and what the explicit and implicit relations are between the viewers and the poster (so that getting your wedding photo favorited by 300 attendees doesn't embarrassingly vault it to the front of Flickr's page for the day).

Clustering is a major improvement to Flickr's "tagging" feature, whose main failing to date has been the ambiguity in tags -- some people tag photos of bushes with "bush," others tag pictures of the President with "bush." Clustering to the rescue -- it automatically finds the congruences in tags and groups them according to the discovered relationships, so "cute" gets broken in to "cute kittens," "cute puppies," "cute babies" and "cute smiles."

This is brilliant stuff -- I can tell already that I'm going to lose a lot of productive hours to playing with it. Link (Thanks, Stewart!)

* Technorati was tracking over 14.2 Million weblogs, and over 1.3 billion links in July 2005

* The blogosphere continues to double about every 5.5 months

* A new blog is created about every second, there are over 80,000 created daily

* About 55% of all blogs are active, and that has remained a consistent statistic for at least a year

* About 13% of all blogs are updated at least weekly

Copyfighters aren’t saying that information should be free. We are saying that as consumers of media (film, television, software, literature, etc.) we have certain rights that we would like to protect. One of these rights is Fair Use. Fair Use means that you can reuse copyrighted work without permission as long as you are commenting on it, or copying/parodying the original. Fair Use is what allows you to quote song lyrics when writing a review of a new CD. Another right is First Sale. First Sale means that when you buy something, you own it and are thus entitled to sell it to someone else. First Sale is what allows you to buy a book, read it, then sell it on half.com for someone else to enjoy.

Most of all, we simply want the right to use the products we buy in the way that we see fit. We don’t want to be sued by a manufacturer for opening up a product to see how it works or sued by a media company for moving a file from one device to another. We believe that when we buy a CD, we should be able to convert it to another format to play on another device. We shouldn’t have to pay again to turn it into a ring tone.

Katinka Matson creates large-scale photographs of living things with digital flatbed scanners. An exhibit of her work called "Spiders" just opened in Munich. Snip from review in Suddeutsche Zeitung (Germany's largest newspaper):

The flower images by the New York artist are different for their exactness and completeness: the surreal aura of her pictures come from their enormous clarity.

Reader comment: Boing Boing reader Sharon says,

I used to work for espn.com, in the NBA sector, one floor down from the soccernet boys. Trust me, this in no way was unintentional. Those guys are sick, twisted, witty, brilliant, etc. I'm sure they laughed all night long and didn't think it was unfortunate.

When I decided to place the entire text (...) on the Internet, it was suggested to me that this could cut into the sales of the printed version. However, experience has shown that, in the publishing business, making a book available on the Internet only stimulates sales of the actual book! Another mystery.

Hey, unicorns!

Lit agent Ted Weinstein says,

Also of similar interest, and online for years BEFORE it was published as a book, is my client Bob Carrol's Skeptic's Dictionary

It all started when I wanted to hear Dinah Washington's version of Drinking Again. And I hate buying iTunes songs as I know the DRM will eventually bite me in the ass. De-authorizing. Phooey. And why spend $13 on a CD when you could build a wildly complicated mega machine to digitize records? This is what passes for logic at Hooptyrides.

Inside that $15 Farnsworth radio cabinet is a Sansui tuner, a replacement Panasonic turntable, a Griffin AirShark, an 8 port USB hub, a cheap-o LCD panel, a Griffin iMic, a Griffin Powermate, a Logitech wireless keyboard transmitter, a power strip, a Griffin AirClick, a Sony bookshelf speaker, a Mac Mini and enough patch cables to encircle the world 7 times.

This paper steam engine is based on his cad drawing of a Riches and Watts nominal 2 ½ horsepower vertical A-frame double acting simple slide-valve steam engine circa 1870-75. The original engine was used to drive a water pump to irrigate the fields of Norfolk. If this model had a scale, it would be roughly 1:19. I had to double the size of the eccentric and strap in order to make it buildable. Everything else is close to scale, but changed in design and apprearance because, well, paper isn't iron.

Everything will work on this engine, the flywheel turns, there really is a slide valve in the valve chest, the piston works, the cranks and the connecting rods, eccentric and strap all work if built carefully. This is the first version available. I am hoping that if you download it and build it, you will give me feedback, and help me to inprove the buildability, and correct any errors in the model. The final model stands about 12 inches high. I hope you have as much fun building it as I had designing it.

"Assuming a non-Hollerith encoding with eight bits per column, and an MP3 file encoded at 128kbps CBR, there would be 36,864 cards in that deck, and the card reader would need a throughput of 205 cards per second. It might be wise to include an 8-column sequence number, however, so that a misordered deck can be repaired by a card sorter; with 72 data columns per card, the total is precisely 40,960 cards (40K cards), requiring a 228 card/second throughput." The 21 boxes of cards needed would by 5 feet 9 inches tall. That such a huge leap in technology is well within living memory astonishes Y.

To avoid any legal threats, the fans have pledged not to distribute their efforts to any third parties...

The "Harry in German" internet club is plastered with messages from members praising the idea. One member, Starlight, said: "My best friend thought translating some HP would be a good way to practise my English."

But it is not only students who have contributed to the patchwork translation. A 50-year-old mechanic said he took part to "prevent the brain from rusting"...

Spokeswoman Katrin Hogrebe told German news portal Netzeitung: "We would not cast judgment if we were talking about a group of people translating together in their kitchen."

She added that any violation of copyright laws would be legally acted upon.

I travel in the kinds of circles where many people use GNU/Linux on their computers -- and not only use it, but actually call it GNU/Linux instead of just "Linux," in the fashion called for by Richard Stallman. Some of these people give me grief over the fact that I use Mac OS X instead of GNU/Linux on my Powerbook, because the MacOS is proprietary.

I've been an Apple user since 1979. I've owned dozens -- probably more than a hundred -- Macintoshes. When I worked in the private sector, I used to write purchase orders for about a quarter-million dollars' worth of Apple hardware every year. I've stuck with the machines over the years because the fit-and-finish of the OS and the generally kick-ass hardware made them the best choice for me. I've converted innumerable people to the Mac (most recently I got my grandmother's octogenarian boyfriend to pick up a Mac Mini, which he loves). Hell, I even bought half a dozen Newtons over the years.

When my free software companions give me grief over this, I tell them that I'm using an OS built on a free flavor of Unix, and that most of the apps I use are likewise free -- such as Firefox, my terminal app, etc.

Here's the important part though: when I use apps that aren't free, like Apple's Mail.app, BBEdit, NetNewsWire, etc, I do so comfortable in the fact that they save their data-files in free formats, open file-formats that can be read by free or proprietary applications. That means that I always retain the power to switch apps when I need to. That means that if the vendor changes their policy in a way that is incongruent with my needs, or if they go out of business, or if they treat me badly, I can always go across the street to another vendor, or to a free software project, and switch. This acts as a check against abusive behavior on the vendors' part and it is, I believe, partly responsible for the quality and pricing of their offerings.

The Trusted Computing people say that they intend on Trusted Computing being used to stop the unauthorized distribution of music, but none of them has ever refuted the Darknet paper, where several of Trusted Computing's inventors explain that Trusted Computing isn't fit to this purpose.

The point of Trusted Computing is to make it hard -- impossible, if you believe the snake-oil salesmen from the Trusted Computing world -- to open a document in a player other than the one that wrote it in the first place, unless the application vendor authorizes it. It's like a blender that will only chop the food that Cuisinart says you're allowed to chop. It's like a car that will only take the brand of gas that Ford will let you fill it with. It's like a web-site that you can only load in the browser that the author intended it to be seen in.

What this means is that "open formats" is no longer meaningful. An application can write documents in "open formats" but use Trusted Computing to prevent competing applications from reading them. Apple may never implement this in their own apps (though I'll be shocked silly if it isn't used in iTunes and the DVD player), but Trusted Computing in the kernel is like a rifle on the mantelpiece: if it's present in act one, it'll go off by act three.

It means that the price of being a Mac user will be eternal vigilance: you'll need to know that your apps not only write to exportable formats, but that they also allow those exported files to be read by competing apps. That they eschew those measures that would lock you in and prevent you from giving your business to someone else. I'm pretty sure that apps like BBEdit and NetNewsWire won't lock me out, as their authors are personally known to me to be wonderful, generous, honorable people. But personally familiarizing yourself with the authors of all the software you use doesn't scale.

So that means that if Apple carries on down this path, I'm going to exercise my market power and switch away, and, for the first time since 1979, I won't use an Apple product as my main computer. I may even have my tattoo removed.

My data is my life, and I won't keep it in a strongbox that someone else has the keys for.

* We've discovered that the Rosetta kernel uses TCPA/TPM DRM. Some parts of the GUI like ATSServer are still not native to x86 - meaning that Rosetta is required by the GUI, which in turn requires TPM. See the forum topic here.

* After much careful analysis of the files from the new Intel-based Macs, it would appear that SSE3 enabled processors are required to run the GUI. We are still testing this theory, though - nothing has been proven conclusively. Check out this forum thread for evidence and discussion.

* Check out some of our members' earliest work - using Darwin and the "mactel" leak.

Update: Another CC licensed recent CD

Four young amateur radio operators from Ohio were again dubbed world champs of long-distance wireless networking at the annual DefCon WiFi Shootout. These guys more than doubled the 55.1 mile record they set last year. Way to go!

SoCalWug co-founder Frank Keeney says,

All day Friday and through the night Team PAD braved rain, lightning and winds over 30 mph to setup and test their equipment at their mountaintop base outside of Las Vegas, Nevada. On Saturday July 30 at 11am they successfully made a 125 mile link using 802.11b and ran network applications with their remote team in the mountains West of St. George, Utah.

Mike Outmesguine adds,

This possibly qualifies them for a new Guiness record as well.

Frank's company provided the Wi-Fi gear to Team PAD. He tells me they used the VCom 325hp+ PCMCIA cards running at a built-in power of 300 mw on each end of the link. The cards were connected to one 12 foot and one 10 foot diameter satellite dish (see photo) on each side of the link. The computers they used were running Linux. And their link quality was so fantastic that they got 12 ms ping times, ran ssh shell commands, and even used vnc remote desktop.

He also said that Team PAD may use the same gear to attempt smashing our old Bluetooth record of 1.08 miles.

Occupants peer out through prison-window Lexan portals. "It’s so ugly! It's just a big mobile tripod for the camera," Casey says.

Update: Novak is one of several artists who create the stipple art portraits for WSJ. Others include: Thaddeus Chambers, Nancy Januzzi, Hai Knafo, and Rachel Pak. There may be others, as well.

Update: Nolui Novak says: Thank you very much for mentioning my work in your blog.

However, I would also appreciate if you could make some corrections.

I'm not sure how you got an impression that I'm the only person doing the hedcuts at the Journal. It would be pretty impossible for one person to cover such a large volume of art needed on daily basis (it takes on average around 5 hours to do one hedcut).

Full time illustrators are Hai Knafo, Nancy Januzzi, Laura Levy and me. We also use a number of freelance illustrators (4 to be exact) trained in this technique when needed.

Thaddeus and Rachel are both Journal employees, but don't have anything to do with our department.

Is there any truth that if you choke on the candy Peeps, that it hardens in your throat and even with the heimlich maneuver you can't be saved and you die? Let us know.

My younger sis heard: in order for a cologne/perfume/fragrance to be compatible to one's body chemistry, spray a sample and then lick it. If the taste stings the tongue, it is not suitable; no sting — it's a good match. Please advise before I test the handful of colognes I've been using!

HOW CAN I GET THE SUCTION BROKE WHEN THE CONTACT IS STUCK TO EYE

On a related note, Damon Wallace continues to add to his amazing collection of fan illustrations of scenes from my novel, including Alan's tiny thumb, Marci in the family cave, a sketch of Davey and a wicked-creepy Davey attack on Alan. These illos are just gobsmackingly wonderful.

HL: [Audience member] Jarod Godel asks, "A lot of the backstory and universe in Someome Comes To Town was left open; was this done on purpose, trying to encourage fan fiction to fill in those gaps?

CD: Not to encourage fan fiction per se, but the human imagination has a lot higher polygon-count than prose could ever have. Leaving most of the world in shadow lets readers fill in very high rez pictures where you don't have the throughput in the printed page. That said, if fan fiction emerged that filled that in, I'd be mightily chuffed.