A Hollywood producer has been charged after allegedly taking $5.5m (£3.3m) from investors for a TV drama he said was backed by US President George Bush.

The US attorney’s office alleges Joseph Medawar, 43, collected money from investors for two years but spent the majority of it on himself. It said Mr Medawar had falsely claimed the White House had endorsed the proposed series, called DHS.

More than 70 investors, including churches, had invested money in the series on the basis that DHS - Department of Homeland Security - had been personally approved by Mr Bush…

Saying his drama had the blessing of President Bush and others in Washington, D.C., Joseph M. Medawar quickly found plenty of backers for the show — one that he promised would be followed by a reality-based series titled "Fighting Terrorism Together."

But on Friday, in an ending that might have been foretold by anyone with a healthy skepticism of the Hollywood pitch, Medawar was arrested by FBI and IRS agents on charges that he bilked at least 70 investors — many of them from local churches — out of more than $5.5 million. Virtually all of the money, according to authorities, went to a lavish lifestyle that included luxury cars, shopping sprees, fancy dinners and $40,000-a-month in rent for a Beverly Hills mansion.

(...) The plans, he said, called for shooting 26 episodesand distributing it in 137 overseas markets. Assured that government involvement would make the show a hit, investors were urged to buy stock in Medawar's production company before he took it public.

Mr. Medawar is listed on this website as a producer and co-chairman of Steeple Entertainment. His co-chairman has also been charged. (via Warren Ellis)

David Zatz, a TiVo owner, decided to cancel his TiVo service. After all, he'd bought a device that could record all shows, not one that could record all shows save those that some paranoid Hollywood exec, overzealous broadcaster, or fumble-fingered technician gave him permission to record. TiVo had broken his device and he didn't want to keep using it.

But when he looked up canceling his TiVo, he found out that under the terms of his "agreement" with TiVo (e.g., the crap he clicked through when get got set up), he was obliged to pay a $150 "early cancellation" fee.

DRM ass-kissers talk a lot about how DRM is a "contract" -- someone offers you content in exchange for you waiving your rights to record, or time-shift, or format shift, or archive, or use on your Mac, or whatever.

But it's a funny kind of contract that is renegotiated at the whim of one side, who can unilaterally change the deal whenever he feels like it, and which you can't get out of if you decide that the new deal isn't one that you like (of course, every iTunes user whose iTunes tracks have been downgraded by an iTunes patch knows this already -- Apple won't give you back your $0.99 even when they decide to take away some of the value you paid for when you put your money down). Link (Thanks, David!)

* The Houston Chronicle's Rita blog includes a post that points out one benefit of hybrid cars.

As vehicles ran out of gas during the Houston exodus (aka biggest traffic jam ever), one Chronicle employee who drove a Prius completed the 30 hour, 170 mile trek on three-quarters a tank of gas.

Other happy hybrid owners who didn't have to stop for gas or turn off their A/C weigh in: "My folks drove to Austin from League City in their lexus hybrid and 21 hours of driving later still had 1/8 tank of gas left - plus they had my 87yr old grandfather with them and ran the air conditioner all day unlike most people who ran out of gas. 3 cheers for the hybrid!" Link

* Amid the largest concentration of oil refineries in the US, not a drop of gas for those who needed it: Link. Most refineries in the area appear to have been spared: Link.

* Oh, let's just nuke the hurricanes into submission:

The federal government's hurricane modification program was called Project Stormfury. The idea was raised during the Eisenhower administration after several major storms hit the East Coast in the mid-1950s, killing 749 people and causing billions in damages. But it wasn't until 1961 that initial tests were conducted on Hurricane Esther with a Navy plane releasing silver iodide crystals. Some reports indicate winds were reduced by 10 percent to 30 percent.

During Stormfury, scientists also seeded hurricanes in 1963, 1969 and 1971 over the open Atlantic Ocean far from land. Researchers dropped silver iodide, a substance that serves as an effective ice nuclei, into clouds just outside of the hurricane's eyewall. The idea was that a new ring of clouds would form around the artificial ice nuclei. The new clouds were supposed to change rain patterns and form a new eyewall that would collapse the old one. The reformed hurricane would spin more slowly and be less dangerous.

(...) Project Stormfury was abandoned in the 1980s after spending hundreds of millions of dollars. Other storm modification methods that have been suggested include cooling the tropical ocean with icebergs and spreading particles or films over the ocean surface to inhibit storms from evaporating heat from the sea. Occasionally, somebody suggests detonating a nuclear weapon to shatter a storm.

Reader comment: Jon Power says,

I was interested in the cloud seeding story to reduce the storm damage. Did you know that in the UK in 1952, a notorious flash flood washed away an entire village called Lynmouth. It's now thought that the summer storm was caused by secret government experiments in cloud seeding. Link. Don't mess with nature...

The DVD set that Mark reviews here includes an episode called “Eyes in Outer Space.” It features an extended dramatic sequence showing a future America’s corps of weather engineers at work. Working from a cavernous control room, they employ cloud-seeding robot aircraft and giant weather-modification towers to create a high-pressure system to divert a developing storm away from shore. In a nod to the law of unattended consequences, their efforts cause some nasty rain storms... which they clear up with more modifications.

Apparently the "nuke a hurricane" question comes up often enough for the government to have referenced it in an NOAA FAQ.

* Last year, photographer Siege spent his life's savings on a trailer for his mom (above) and 13-year-old brother in Louisiana. Katrina destroyed their trailer home, and ate their belongings. Siege returned to Louisiana with his girlfriend to help them recover. He took this snapshot of his mom on Monday, September 12, and writes:

My mom was feeling very hopeful through all this. Then we met with FEMA this morning. After two hours waiting in line for it's cold bureaucratic embrace, her hope started to flicker.

This is what it looks like when poor people have lost it all, and are told to get in line. Which line? Did you fill out that form? I hear they suspended the vouchers. Who do I call for shelter? Call this 800 number to get your number. But sir, I don't have a phone. Go to this website to get a number. But sir, I don't have a computer, or a home to put it in, or a phone to connect it to.

Link to another snapshot of Siege's mom with a shotgun; she sustained injuries on her face and legs while attempting to make her way through hazardous hurricane debris.

* Snip from a Human Rights Watch statement alleging that authorities abandoned up to 600 prisoners in New Orleans to drown in their cells during Hurricane Katrina.

[T]hey had no food or water from the inmates' last meal over the weekend of August 27-28 until they were evacuated on Thursday, September 1. By Monday, August 29, the generators had died, leaving them without lights and sealed in without air circulation. The toilets backed up, creating an unbearable stench. “They left us to die there,” Dan Bright, an Orleans Parish Prison inmate told Human Rights Watch at Rapides Parish Prison, where he was sent after the evacuation.

As the water began rising on the first floor, prisoners became anxious and then desperate. Some of the inmates were able to force open their cell doors, helped by inmates held in the common area. All of them, however, remained trapped in the locked facility.

“The water started rising, it was getting to here,” said Earrand Kelly, an inmate from Templeman III, as he pointed at his neck. “We was calling down to the guys in the cells under us, talking to them every couple of minutes. They were crying, they were scared. The one that I was cool with, he was saying ‘I'm scared. I feel like I'm about to drown.' He was crying.” Some inmates from Templeman III have said they saw bodies floating in the floodwaters as they were evacuated from the prison. A number of inmates told Human Rights Watch that they were not able to get everyone out from their cells.

(...) Many of the men held at jail had been arrested for offenses like criminal trespass, public drunkenness or disorderly conduct. Many had not even been brought before a judge and charged, much less been convicted.

* "Experts Say Faulty Levees Caused Much of Flooding: Louisiana's top hurricane experts have rejected the official explanations for the floodwall collapses that inundated much of New Orleans, concluding that Hurricane Katrina's storm surges were much smaller than authorities have suggested and that the city's flood- protection system should have kept most of the city dry." Link to WaPo story.

* Snip from a Jeremy Scahill article in The Nation -- "Blackwater Down":

The men from Blackwater USA arrived in New Orleans right after Katrina hit. The company known for its private security work guarding senior US diplomats in Iraq beat the federal government and most aid organizations to the scene in another devastated Gulf. About 150 heavily armed Blackwater troops dressed in full battle gear spread out into the chaos of New Orleans.

Officially, the company boasted of its forces "join[ing] the hurricane relief effort." But its men on the ground told a different story.

* Snip from a Naomi Klein article in The Nation, "Purging the Poor" --

Outside the 2,000-bed temporary shelter in Baton Rouge's River Center, a Church of Scientology band is performing a version of Bill Withers's classic "Use Me"--a refreshingly honest choice. "If it feels this good getting used," the Scientology singer belts out, "just keep on using me until you use me up."

Ten-year-old Nyler, lying face down on a massage table, has pretty much the same attitude. She is not quite sure why the nice lady in the yellow SCIENTOLOGY VOLUNTEER MINISTER T-shirt wants to rub her back, but "it feels so good," she tells me, so who really cares? I ask Nyler if this is her first massage. "Assist!" hisses the volunteer minister, correcting my Scientology lingo. Nyler shakes her head no; since fleeing New Orleans after a tree fell on her house, she has visited this tent many times, becoming something of an assist-aholic. "I have nerves," she explains in a blissed-out massage voice. "I have what you call nervousness."

Wearing a donated pink T-shirt with an age-inappropriate slogan ("It's the hidden little Tiki spot where the island boys are hot, hot, hot"), Nyler tells me what she is nervous about. "I think New Orleans might not ever get fixed back." "Why not?" I ask, a little surprised to be discussing reconstruction politics with a preteen in pigtails. "Because the people who know how to fix broken houses are all gone."

* "Louisiana's wetland and land losses (which also include barrier island erosion) can be principally contributed to human settlement in Louisiana's low-lying and active floodplains and deltas, and the subsequent need to build levees to protect these settlements from river, rainfall and coastal flooding." Link

* Snip from LA Weekly about an event in Los Angeles this weekend about the photo book Sacred -- New Orleans Funerary Grounds:

The photos in Sacred: New Orleans Funerary Grounds are the last images taken of the city's cemeteries before Hurricane Katrina swept in.

Photographer Elizabeth Huston -- who was married in one of the graveyards -- happened to be in New Orleans, finalizing the shots for her book, just one week before disaster struck. Once the pinnacle of creepy-beautiful Southern Gothic, the moss-covered tombstones will never again be seen in their original pre-deluge incarnation. We mourn the loss of the living. Now we mourn the loss of the dead. Sacred is a memento mori twice over.

Huston presents Sacred: New Orleans Funerary Grounds at Dark Delicacies, 4213 W. Burbank Blvd., Burbank; Sat., Sept. 24, 7 p.m. (818) 556-6660. Due to the tragedy of Hurrican Katrina, all proceeds from this book will be donated to the American Red Cross, for recovery efforts. In the coming moths, as the city begins to heal, all proceeds will be also donated to Habitat For Humanity as well as the New Orleans based Charity, Save Our Cemeteries.

* Scientific American: " According to the analysis, the number of Category 4 and Category 5 hurricanes has almost doubled in the past 35 years." Link

* For those who are attending the Webzine conference in San Franciso this weekend, Jacob Appelbaum will be speaking today: Link. Boing Boing has featured Jacob's blogging and photos from NOLA in recent weeks. Update: Jacob says,

Thanks to the Internet Archive I’ve now found a permenent home for the photos and videos I’ve planned to release for some time. I’ve gone ahead and uploaded both JPEG images and Canon cr2 RAW files. (...) I’d like people to put them to use in the wikipedia, into books, into their art projects, public benefits or anything that suits your fancy. You don’t have to contact me for use even if it’s commercial. I don’t want your money, give it to the The Internet Archive or the EFF.

(thanks, Elegant Variation, Ned Sublette, Iam Serious)

Update: Brand sez, "I've been running a Shoutcast stream for the last half a year, where I feature Sci-Fi/Horror radio stuff, including all of the entries in that podcast, and other writers like Lovecraft and Asimov."

Update: Here's a commercial supplier of coin-op lobster game/vending-machines (courtesy Daniel Drucker)

WIPO's "Treaty on the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations" is protection, all right: a protection racket for middlemen in the TV and Internet worlds.

If adopted, the WIPO treaty will give broadcasters copyright-like control over the content of their broadcasts, even when they have no copyright in what they show. A TV channel broadcasting your Creative Commons-licensed movie could legally demand that no one record or redistribute it - and sue anyone who does. And TV companies could use their new rights to go after TiVo or MythTV for daring to let you skip advertisements or record programs in DRM-free formats.

If that wasn't bad enough, the US contingent at WIPO is pushing to have the treaty expanded to cover the Net. That means that anyone who feeds your "sound and images" through a web server would have a right to meddle with what you do with the webcast simply because they serve as the middleman between you and the creator.

John Naughton of the London Observer called the treaty "a control freak's charter." Mark Cuban, Tim O'Reilly, and 18 other Net experts called its webcasting provisions "unnecessary," and "likely to constrain, not increase, the creation of more information products for the public."

And yet, the US WIPO representatives are still pushing for it to go forward.

We don't think they are working in the best interests of the American public, nor do they have any sort of mandate to create new "rights" for middlement to be used to restrict what ordinary Americans can do with their media. We think that the Library of Congress and the US Patent and Trademark Office should invite formal public comment on what they're doing to our networks, and Congress should hold public hearings so that the audience can have its voice heard.

Write to Congress and remind them that it's government's job to protect all of us, not just the broadcasting industry.

Before going to lunch at Nick's, a tiny cafe near Chinatown, which has the tastiest ham to have crossed by discerning palette, I was giving a tour of Coop's spacious studio. I'll post a full report here soon, but wanted to share this photo of Coop standing before a small fraction of his Japanese toy collection housed in the loft of the studio. Outside of the Small World attraction at Disneyland, I've never seen so many enchanting figurines in the same place.
Link to Coop's blog

So we've decided to hole up in Algiers, hoping that Rita will not hit us directly. We do intend to bug out if the storm track changes drastically, but for now it appears the direct hit will still be heading to Texas.

It is possible that the Mississippi will flood the levees in Jefferson Parish, or top the levees here in Orleans Parish to flood the streets. If that happens, historically we should expect about 3 feet of water. Our houses are elevated enough that they should stay dry at 3-4 feet.

Joel continues:

FEMA, last I talked to them today, is taking off. The Red Cross left yesterday. The National Guard is pulling out of Algiers to head to Gretna, which worries some of us who aren't quite sure that the NOPD in the area are looking out for us. I'm not an anti-authoritarian-type, really, but these local cops haven't been paid since before Katrina. The Natl. Guard officer I spoke to today said he's a cop in another state and is worried about the behavior of the NOPD. We asked them to stick around and keep an eye on us, but they said we were on our own.

I really think we'll be fine. The Common Ground group is fully of dirty hippies and the like, but the last thing they're trying to do is antagonize the authorities. In fact, FEMA, the Natl. Guard, and the volunteer public service workers from out of state have all been very great to the Common Ground workers, doing a pretty good job appraising us of the overall pictures (or what little bits they know about).

We may try to deploy some of our resources to Texas if we think we can do any good, but right now I've made a commitment to the people of Algiers and New Orleans and I'm going to try to stay here to help them. If the levees break again north of the river (or even south), I'm not sure what sort of response there will be.

Instant message; Joel and Jake continued

Radio Free NOLA

Strange fruit

Wardriving occupied New Orleans on 9/11

Bloggers Joel and Jake visit NOLA for geek aid

Blackwater gets carte blanche

Katrina account of Malik Rahim: "This is criminal.... genocide."

It's really simple. It's because DRM is *designed* to break compatibility.

The whole point of DRM is *restrictions*. The point of all previous audio formats was compatability. CDs play on any CD player. Cassettes play or record on any cassette player. Neither one cares what you do with the audio that comes out. By contrast, DRM is designed to prevent the audio from coming out in any way that the oligopoly objects to. And they even keep changing the rules as they discover new things that annoy them. ...Rather than calling for everybody to implement DRM, which would be uniformly terrible for most musicians, most equipment makers, and all consumers, you should be calling for nobody to buy DRM. We can't stop them from building it — there's no law against companies selling painful products. The only cure is education — of their customers.

Update: Jeremy sez, "I completely agree with John and have seen the evidence of this behaviour by consumers working. I used to be employed by a record label, Centaur Entertainment (www.centaurmusic.com), who began putting Macromedia Macrovision DRM on their discs. This lasted about a year. While they did have the policy of sending a consumer a non-DRM disc at request, all the complaints just got to be too much of a hassle and they stopped using DRM completely because of those complaints."

1. T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 1962

2. J. Joyce, Ulysses. 1922

3. N. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. 1957

4. L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

5. N. Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. 1965

6. M. Foucault, The Order of Things. 1966

7. J. Derrida, Of Grammatology

8. R. Barthes, S/Z. 1970

9. M. Heidegger, Being and Time. 1927

10. E.R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. 1948

If the diver sees an undeterred shark and swims fast to get away – a natural reaction, one suspects – the suit generates much higher voltages and stronger fields.

If the shark still fails to get the message and bites the suit, it gets a shock in the mouth and – hopefully – gives up for the day.

"On the Web, Internet slang is convenient and satisfying, but the mainstream media have a responsibility to guide proper and legal language usage," the Shanghai Morning Post quoted city official Xia Xiurong as saying.

Internet chat and instant messaging are hugely popular with China's increasingly computer-literate youth, who employ an ad-hoc vocabulary of invented, abbreviated and borrowed terms such as "MM," meaning girl, "PK," or player killer, for one's competitor, "konglong" or dinosaur for an unattractive woman.

"Lady Sasquatch is your dream girl only bigger and hairier," she writes, "and she might eat you if you don't look out."

Mitchell's latest she-creatures are a departure from her earlier fun-fur pinups, sporting snouts and fangs, and baring their multiple teats and fur-rimmed genitalia with daunting (or hilarious, depending on your sensibility) vitality. In one wall hanging, a symphony of reds, a woolly she-creature bays at the moon.In another wall piece, worked up in oranges and golds, a Sasquatch giantess takes a licking from her nude female cohort, who is buried face-first in her lap. "These images were originally made by men for men," she says, referring to her soft-porn sources. "As a straight woman, you are not supposed to see them, and, as a dyke, I'm sure as shit not supposed to see them. I wanted to take those images back, to take the shame away..."

On the hair front, Mitchell says enlightenment came with an issue of Penthouse back in the eighties, when she was a teen camp counsellor in the Ontario woods. "We were definitely in Sasquatch land, there," she remembers with a laugh. "I remember all the boys drove into town to get the new issue with Madonna in it. . . . And I remember she had armpit hair."

Hawkes is responsible for one of the more divertingly notorious tales of Ernest Gallo. She tells of him driving through the streets of the inner-city, eventually pulling up to a stranger on a street corner. According to Hawkes, Gallo called out the lyrics to one of his jingles "What's the word?" As the tale would have it, the man immediately called back the correct answer: "Thunderbird!"

Hawkes' tale is partially corroborated by at least one online source, a former Gallo salesman who recalled handing the drink out to Native Americans who were just being released from jail -- "to get the brand started." "Wino Samplings," as this former employee calls the practice of passing out free samples to hard drinkers, "used to be widespread."

Update: For reviews of fortified wines, see Bumwine (Courtesy Adam Thornton)

Update: Jacob sez, "you need to see this review of a Turkish film called '3 Dev Adam' that he appeared in. Not only did he fight side-by-side with Captain America, but they were fighting Spider-Man. Yes, you read that right, Spider-Man is evil in this film and instead of slinging webs, he carries a switchblade and hides in tee-pees. I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried! See the photos for yourself."

Update: Cesar sez, "This is a Flickr set I've just created with the Spanish text (poorly) translated into English using the notes feature, I'm sure it will be helpful to some people and to better understand the story in that wonderful piece. I wasted roughly 3 hours of my employer's time in the process."

Update: See also Andre the Giant is So Passe stickers, courtesy Jason Sturgill.

This site includes a Google hack that combines Google Maps with hurricane tracking data, for a comprehensive view of Rita's activities: Link

Kathryn Cramer says,

Try this with that GoogleMaps plot of Hurricane Rita. First, shift to the satellite view, and then zoom in on the area of the map where Rita shifted from a Category 4 to a Category 5 and back again. You can see that the shift corresponds to the level of the sea floor.

Here's a story on Defensetech about drone aircraft tracking hurricanes: Link

Houston TV Station KHOU is reporting Rita updates on a blog which may become their primary distribution means if things get rough. Includes MP3 audio and text story summaries. Link

Boing Boing reader oboreruhito says,

The newspaper I work for in Lake Charles, La., in the path of Hurricane Rita, has shifted operations to blogspot, since everyone who can update our usual site has evacuated. They will be updating as news occurs and as long as they have power. Lake Charles, located about 15-20 miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico, is expecting to see quite a bit of flooding from the storm surge, and more from the rains; everything south of I-10 will experience flooding, and areas 8 feet above sea level and lower are expected to be underwater for at least some time. The waterways around here feed into the gulf, and the storm surge alone will cause most of them to crest. I know the focus is on the Texas coast, but we're expecting to get quite a bit of damage and 100+ mph winds ourselves.

The group site Houston metblog also has frequent first-person updates: Link

BB reader Justin says,

Here is the Galveston, TX 61 St Fishing Pier Internal Security Camera. iSeeCamera Client, live video feed, 50 yards offshore inside the bait shop on the pier. We do not expect the pier nor the webcams to survive. Link

Welcome to our experiment in citizen journalism. The bloggers who are posting here live in various parts of the city, and they will be posting their experiences as Hurricane Rita approaches and moves through the area. Bloggers here are posting on their own and are solely responsible for the content of their blogs.

Here's the latest NOAA advisory, and more will be here.

(Thanks, Mark Simmonds, Michael Slavitch, Mark Tyndall)

New Orleans native Leo McGovern is best known for running a cool monthly zine called Antigravity, promoting NOLA's alt-music scene, and producing a twice yearly event called NO[DIY] that sheds light on the work of indie creatives. He and his loved ones lost pretty much everything to Katrina. He's blogging about it now. Above, a "before" snapshot taken just as he was evacuating; below, what he returned to.

Snip:

To say words cannot describe a situation like this is just wrong. The easiest thing to say is that it's fucked up. Demolished. Destroyed. Catastrophic. Cataclysmic. Some words may seem overbearing, but when you're standing there looking at all your possessions scattered about like Neptune flailed about your house, no situation can seem worse. It makes you wonder whether it'd be easier if a tornado simply hit the house and flung everything to another city. At least then you don't have to walk on things that used to be on bookshelves.

Seeing my comics strewn about was the hardest. I've never been a mint freak, meaning I didn't really care if my comics were in the best condition. If I could read them, that was the important thing. I do have a theory about books though. They're like furniture. You buy a book to read just like you buy a couch to sit on. Sure, the book or couch will be messed up eventually, but you like to keep it in the best condition possible for as long as possible. To see my books in the worst condition they could ever be in, and to walk on them, seemed preposterous.

(...) I took exactly one comic from my house. I happened to have a TRANSMETROPOLITAN #1 in a hard case hanging on the wall, and it was above the water line. That was the one comic I took, out of all the others that lay on the ground there. I took some of the posters, too, and some action figures that were above the walkway. One comic.

After we took what we could, we decided to go explore.

Here's that comic. Here's the guy who wrote it.

You can wear a jacket with "Fuck The Draft" on the back into a court of law, but, according to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, don't even think about swearing loudly at any TSA officials who make you miss your plane.

Today, the Court ruled that TSA can arrest and fine you for swearing loudly and belligerently while you're being searched at the airport security check because it "interferes" with the TSA's job.  The court rejected any First Amendment right to free speech, claiming that while asking a "good-faith question" with profanity in it or even "grumbling" with profanity would not be enough for a fine, the conduct here somehow constituted more.

Specifically, the court ruled:

Petitioner’s conduct in this case, however, cannot be characterized as simply asking a good-faith question while using profanities or as grumbling about not being allowed to walk back through the metal detector or the delay in being hand-wanded.

Rather, Petitioner interfered with the screener in the performance of his duties by actively engaging the screener with loud and belligerent conduct, and, after being asked not to use profanities, by exclaiming that the screener should be in a different line of work, that he should live in a bubble, and that it was a free country in which he could say what he pleased.

Due to the escalating loud and belligerent nature of Petitioner’s conduct directed at the screener, the screener needed to shut down his line and call over his supervisor. Thus, Petitioner’s conduct interfered with the screener’s duty to both thoroughly screen passengers and to do so in an efficient manner.

Is this really a justifiable difference? So its okay to ask the TSA "Why the fuck do I have to take my shoes off?" but not to tell them they live in a bubble or that this is a free country?

[Hiro] turns off all of the techno-shit in his goggles. All it does is confuse him; he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it's happening to him. Very post-modern. Time to get immersed in Reality, like all the people around him.

The airliner circled Southern California for hours, crippled by a faulty landing gear, while inside its cabin 140 passengers watched their own life-and-death drama unfolding on live television. [...] [Pia] Varma, 23, and other passengers said the plane's monitors carried live DirectTV broadcasts on the plane's problems until just a few minutes before landing at Los Angeles International Airport.

Now David Barzelay, a US law-student has put together an equivalent guide for US shoppers:

First of all, when purchasing, it is of use to mention to the salesman specifically what you want the product to do. I worked at Circuit City selling computers for a summer and some holidays, and I know how those salesman usually work. They can generally be cajoled into making nearly any kind of promise whatever, because they (rightly) think they'll never be held accountable. So, if you say specifically, "I don't want to have to buy another computer for three years or so at least," and the salesman says, "Oh, you won't. This computer will last about that long or longer," you now have a promise from the seller. If he says, "Sure, your wireless internet connection will work all the way across your house," that's an enforceable promise. Try to elicit these kinds of statements, since they really get at a promise that the product is "fit for the specific purposes" for which you are purchasing the computer (or other product). Take note of any other specific promises the salesman makes, because those promises will generally be enforceable. Write them down, quoting as closely as possible, and assign a time and date to them. Note that, though you are writing them down, salesman will almost never be willing to sign anything agreeing they made those statements. Don't even try.

Update: Joreg wrote to the manufacturer and these bags aren't in production (dammit).

Update 2: The manufacturer wrote to me and said, it is indeed in production (w00t).

Bloggers need to be anonymous when they are putting out information that risks their safety. The cyber-police are watching and have become expert at tracking down "trouble- makers." This handbook gives advice on how to post material without revealing who you are ("How to blog anonymously," by Ethan Zuckerman). It's best of course to have the technical skills to be anonymous online, but following a few simple rules can sometimes do the trick. This advice is of course not for those (terrorists, racketeers or pedophiles) who use the Internet to commit crimes. The handbook is simply to help bloggers encountering opposition because of what they write to maintain their freedom of expression. However, the main problem for a blogger, even under a repressive regime, isn't security. It's about getting the blog known, finding an audience. A blog without any readers won't worry the powers-that-be, but what's the point of it? This handbook makes technical suggestions to make sure a blog gets picked up by the major search-engines (the article by Olivier Andrieu), and gives some more "journalistic" tips about this ("What really makes a blog shine," by Mark Glaser).

Some bloggers face the problem of filtering. Most authoritarian regimes now have the technical means to censor the Internet. In Cuba or Vietnam, you won't be able to access websites that criticise the government or expose corruption or talk about human rights abuses. So-called "illegal" and "subversive" content is automatically blocked by filters. But all bloggers need free access to all sites and to the blogosphere or the content of their blogs will become irrelevant.

I'm a newborn bunny, one of a unique species of intelligent, smart objects. I'm 23 cm tall, I wriggle my ears, I sing, I talk and my body lights up and pulsates with hundreds of colours. Thanks to Wi-Fi technology, I'm always connected to the Internet. Oh, and I'll only set you back 95 €.

Thanks to me, your friends and family will have a totally new way of keeping in touch: through the web, text messages, their phone or email… plenty of different ways to send you messages, music, MP3 files that I'll read out to you… or sing out, or even dance. Your friends will no longer be confined to the depths of your computer or phone: they'll come alive in your home, in the noble guise of a rabbit.

Vanuatan entrepreneur Tony Deamer has adapted his fleet of rental cars to run on coconut oil, a plentiful local commodity. Unlike with many biofuels, coconut oil doens't need to be transesterized - mixed with sodium hydroxide and alcohol to change its chemical composition - to run in a diesel engine. Filtered and warmed to temperatures about 25C, coconut oil is a better than satisfactory substitute for "mineral diesel" - it burns more slowly, which produces more even pressure on engine pistons, reducing engine wear, and lubricates the engine more effectively. Deamer runs most of his vehicles on a mixture of 85% coconut oil and 15% kerosene, but has demonstrated that modified diesel engines run filtered coconut oil quite happily.

Most of my software had been tested in my room with the small turret. To test outside, we had to drag my huge (and ancient) 1.5ghz, 512meg RDRAM computer to the backyard. Most of the testing involved me directing my little brother in front of the turret, him getting shot, and then running away. Polo shirts, not surprisingly, offer very little protection from BB's that are prone to leaving little welts. When I originally wrote the software, I added code so it would use the Microsoft speech API to say "Freeze" and offer various instructions to a target that it had acquired. At the end of 5 seconds, if the target moved 20 pixels in either direction, it would fire. The speech synthesizer was too much for my computer and it would stutter, entirely missing (rather important) commands and freezing the computer up. I'm sure multithreading will help with this particular problem, but for testing we turned off the speech synthesizer and left on the delayed firing that waited until the target moved.

In the time-honoured fashion, they then rang the number and heard the tell-tale sound of internal phone action. In this case, however, Brandus had not gone for the relatively-simple vaginal option, but rather the less convenient back passage route.

It did her no good. Back at the station, a strip search quickly retrieved the offending item...

One question remains: what then happened to the phone? ...Its owner subsequently accepted it back.

Officer (Madalin) Taranu explained: "The station doctor extracted the phone and we sprayed it with disinfectant."

A monitor then registers the quantity of luminescence and estimates the number of microbes. The scientists say they have synthesised the enzyme required to cause the luminescence. They have also produced analysis sets based on the technique.

They have established a company called Lumtech to market their method, according to Informnauka, Russia's science news agency.

I am currently in the Heights in Houston, which is at the highest elevation in the city; about 50 to 60 feet above sea level. I'm still not sure if I'll evacuate. If not, I'll be at Fitzgerald's on White Oak Drive, which is a very strongly built building that has weathered several strong hurricanes and has never flooded. I will make a final decision this evening. In any case, I will try to be back as soon as possible to provide any assistance I can to my neighbors, many of whom are going to ride it out in their homes or in substantial buildings in the area. I will provide reports and pictures when and where I can.

I will have my computers (including a laptop) and my wireless networking gear and I am willing to provide wireless service wherever I can get power and internet. If you know anybody that has an electricity generator and/or satellite or wifi gear in the area, please get them in touch with me and we can work on providing internet services.

Local news stations report that TXDOT (Texas Department of Transportation) is opening inbound lanes to outbound traffic on I-45 North now, and Highway 290 West and I-10 West later. Traffic is now moving at a crawl when it moves at all and some people have run out of gas after having been on the road for 12 to 24 hours. There is now almost no gas left anywhere in the city. Thankfully, I was able to fill my tank last night. Emergency workers are doing what they can to reach those stranded people and move them to emergency shelter or at least give them a little gas to get them a few more miles down the highway.

If you are being evacuated from your home due to hurricane Rita and need a place to stay, please visit HurricaneHousing.org or call 1-800-638-4559.

Right now, there are over 265,000 spaces being offered to evacuees all over the country. We estimate that between 15,000 and 30,000 hurricane Katrina evacuees have already found temporary housing through the site.

By all reports, hurricane Rita threatens to be devastating—and after Katrina, we'd hate to see anyone take a chance staying in the path of the storm for lack of another place to go. If you're in the affected area and need a safe place to stay, please take advantage of this resource. (...)

-– Noah, Justin, Carrie, Micayla and the MoveOn.org Civic Action Team
Wednesday, September 21st, 2005

"Now, we need to understand that listening to music on your computer is an extra privilege. Normally people listen to music on their car or through their home stereos", says Kyyrae and continues; "If you are a Linux or Mac user, you should consider purchasing a regular CD player."

Digital File Check helps to remove or block any of the unwanted "file-sharing" programmes commonly used to distribute copyrighted files illegally. It also allows the user to delete copyrighted music and video files from the "shared folders" of the computer from where they are commonly swapped illegally on the internet.

Digital File Check has been developed by IFPI, representing the recording industry worldwide, in conjunction with the Motion Picture Association, representing the film industry. DFC will be available online and on CD over the coming months in countries including Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the UK.

John Kennedy, Chairman and CEO of IFPI said: "Digital File Check is an educational tool aimed at making life easier for people who want to enjoy music responsibly and legally on the internet, or who want their families, friends and colleagues to do so.

The Regency TR-1 transistor radio, made in 1954, had a decent claim to be a genuine piece of innovation, however. It was, by popular agreement, the world's first commercially sold transistor pocket radio.

Small enough to hold in your hand, and powered by batteries, it came in a variety of delicious colours, including green, pearlescent blue, lavender, white and red.

The device went on sale just in time for hip young gadget freaks to hear Elvis Presley singing That's All Right - recognised by many as the moment at which rock'n'roll was born.

The TR-1 was marketed under the slogan "See it! Hear it! Get it!"

He was released the next day, but his computers were not returned, nor was his record expunged.

Mery's "crime" was carrying a "bulky" backpack (e.g., a laptop bag), wearing an "unseasonably warm" coat (it was one of the coldest July days on record), and "avoiding the police" (he was looking at an SMS on his phone when he went through the turnstiles and so didn't make eye-contact with the officers there).

There is not one single piece of evidence to suggest that Mery is a terrorist, and yet the tools of his livelihood and all his personal data are now squirreled away in a police evidence locker -- the police haven't even given him an inventory or receipt for all the goods they stole.

This isn't an anti-terror investigation, it's a mugging. And it could happen to you. Hell, if it happened to me, I'd probably just be deported, since I'm only an immigrant, and not a citizen.

If you don't want to get mugged by the coppers whose salary you pay, write to your MP and city councillors about David's plight. I just sent a note with much of this post and some additional text to mine:

This is institutionalised theft masquerading as anti-terror investigation. It makes Londoners less safe because it deprives us of the certainty that the police are taking sensible measures to protect us against terrorism, and because it instills the fear that the copper in the tube is a mugger in waiting, who might at any moment swoop in and confiscate thousands of pounds' worth of kit and insert us into the criminal justice system.

Update: David sez, "I was not denied counsel. I chose not get a solicitor while at the station. This was probably a mistake (not used to be in such situations), but it was entirely my choice."

# Your contract is with the seller, NOT the manufacturer. If (say) you buy a Toshiba laptop from PC World and it goes wrong, don't be fobbed off by PC World telling you to get the manufacturer to repair it under warrenty. Legally, PC World MUST deal with the problem.

# Goods must be fit for purpose, including any purpose you specifically mention to the seller. Fit for purpose is a great phrase - always use it, as it oftens triggers escalation to the next level of service. They must also be "of reasonable quality" which is another great phrase to quote at people.

# You have the right to reject faulty goods and obtain a refund, replacement, or repair. This is up to a "reasonable" time, but reasonable is not defined in law as it depends on circumstances. For example, if you buy a new laptop but don't use the wireless networking, only to find six months later when you first try it that it doesn't work, you're perfectly entitled to reject the goods and ask for a replacement. EVEN IF YOU SIGN AN ACCEPTANCE NOTE, YOU DON'T LOSE YOUR RIGHTS.

Astoria Federal Savings 800-ASTORIA When you hear the womans voice press zero. Will transfer right away to a human.

Bank of America 800-900-9000 Hit zero twice, after menu choices play

Bank One 877-226-5663 Press 0 thru the options to get a live person

Chase 800-CHASE24 Hit five, pause, then hit one, four, star, zero

CIBC 800-465-2422 Enter card# and pin, then press 0

CitiBank 800-374-9700 Zero

He's also a tremendous reader. Periodically, Jim goes into a studio and records himself giving spellbinding readings of his stories, which he then releases gratis on the Web, under a Creative Commons license, with a tipjar for donations to pay for more studio time.

Jim has just posted three more stories: "The Edge of Nowhere," "Barry Westphal Crashes The Singularity" and "Proof of the Existence of God (And an Afterlife)." I'm downloading them right now, because these have to be the very next thing I listen to! Link

When: Sunday, October 2nd, 2005 at 5:00 PM
Where: EFF Headquarters in San Francisco, 454 Shotwell Street, 94110

Mark your calendars! EFF is 15 years old this year, and we are going to celebrate! We're having an anniversary bash at our San Francisco headquarters on Shotwell Street on Sunday, October 2nd, 2005. The party starts at 5 p.m.

Join us for delicious Mexican food and drinks from Pancho Villa, hear a special address from our founders, John Perry Barlow and John Gilmore, taste our special 3D cake, and enjoy both the grooves of Gypsy Jazz from the Zegnotronic Rocket Society, and the hypnotic beats of DJ Ripley and Kid Kameleon.

Our celebration is free of charge and open to anyone, so bring your friends and family. We look forward to celebrating with you!

Please let us know you're coming so we don't run out of food and libations! Send an email to rsvp@eff.org, or call 415-436-9333 x129.

EFF's office is located at 454 Shotwell Street and is BART accessible. Take BART to 16th and Mission, walk to 19th street and take a left, and take another left on Shotwell Street, three blocks down. We are located between 18th and 19th on Shotwell.

A three-day interactive Doctors Without Borders exhibit lets New Yorkers in on the misery at a simulated refugee camp in Central Park, complete with temporary housing, a heath care clinic and a food distribution center. Visitors will be able to taste emergency food used to combat malnutrition, learn how basic sanitation is essential to survival, and hear refugees' stories.

Update: Geoff sez, "I made a complete jackass of myself today because I dragged 68 11th graders to see the MSF/DWB Refugee Camp in Central Park today, only to find out that the thing never went up--it was canceled..."

That philosophy paid off earlier this year, when the group announced its first product, a smart rope that displays information about its state in real time. The rope, which can be cut and generally used like normal rope, has a display out the end that tells how much load it's carrying and even how frayed it is. It's expected to be on the shelves of Home Depot in about six months.

Other current projects include a laser location system for emergency first responders, a tablet PC and camera that overlays data on the real world for utility workers, a molding machine that creates prescription lenses in minutes for a few dollars -- and those are projects they can talk about. More half-made prototypes point to projects sealed under nondisclosure agreements.

This morning on the NPR News program Day to Day, I spoke with host Noah Adams about the legal battle Google has on its hands -- from some angry writers.

As blogged here on Boing Boing yesterday, the Authors Guild lawsuit claims that Google's effort to make books searchable and findable on the Internet violates copyright law.

Link to NPR "Writers Sue Google.com over Book Search" segment (airs nationwide, and audio will be archived online after 12PM Pacific / 3PM Eastern)
Previously on Boing Boing:

Authors Guild sues Google over print program

Reader comment: Tony Sanfilippo says,

I don't think you're telling the whole story here. I'm the Tony Sanfilippo quoted in the AP story and who also appears in Google Print's FAQ here.

I have fully embraced Google Print for publishers, even wrote a study delivered at BEA and AAUP about using the Long Tail and Google Print to find new markets for scholarship, but this is entirely different.

Google Print for Libraries has two pretty major flaws. One being giving a digital copy of all of our works to the participating libraries where they will then most likely be used in e-course reserves without any compensation to ether author or publisher. University Libraries have an awful track record at compensating for e-course reserves and post our content frequently without any restrictions or security.

The second being Google will be profiting (through GoogleAds) on this content again without compensating the authors or publishers. Fair use should exclude commercial use. Even Creative Commons licenses (which I grant to my flikr account) gives you that option.

If we expect the production of good scholarship to be a viable, it has to be paid for somehow. I work hard to keep the price of our books as low as possible because I understand accessibility is directly related to cost, but until someone is willing to completely sponsor our work, we must protect our ability to break even.

Two quick points:

1) Fair use has always included commercial use. It's a myth that you have to be non-commercial to succeed in being a fair user. 2 Live Crew won a fair use case against Roy Orbison in 1994 by *selling* parodies of their "Pretty Woman" cover. Connectix beat back Sony in 2001 with a fair use defense to protect their Playstation emulator, even though they had to make hundreds of copies of the Sony Playstation operating system to do it. The bottom line with fair use is not whether you are commercial or not but whether you are creating new "transformative" uses of works instead of merely substituting your copies for the original. Here, there is no real argument that anyone is foregoing purchase of a book to use Google Print.

2) If University Libraries are violating copyright with e-reserve copies, then the Author's Guild should sue them and not blame Google. The reason they don't is because that would pit them against educational institutions and librarians, a much harder target to go after, at least in the public eye.

1. "University Libraries have an awful track record at compensating for e-course reserves and post our content frequently without any restrictions or security."

Universities already have a broad exemption to copyright under fair use doctrine. That they compensate authors at ALL for photocopying and web-posting excerpts from copyrighted represents a good-faith compromise, not a failure. And as to "restrictions" -- damned right universities don't use DRM!

2. "The second being Google will be profiting (through GoogleAds) on this content again without compensating the authors or publishers.

Fair use should exclude commercial use. Even Creative Commons licenses (which I grant to my flikr account) gives you that option."

Fair use does NOT require noncommercial use! 2Live Crew's Pretty Woman knockoff was a top-ten commercially released single that was still a fair use of the Johnny Cash Roy Orbison lick.

CC licenses may allow restriction of commercial use, but CC licenses are subordinate to fair use itself (as is stated in the second clause of every CC license). There's nothing in a CC license or the publication of a book that prevents commercial re-use per se (I'm sure that Tony's press's commercial books are themselves filled with fair use quotations).

3. "If we expect the production of good scholarship to be a viable, it has to be paid for somehow."

For starters, Google Print won't take a penny away from a publisher: what publishers are complaining about is that Google's figured out a way to make money from books and isn't proposing to cut them in for a share, but they're treating this new money that Google's making as though it comes out of their end.

As to supporting scholarship, how about our state-supported University system, then? Oh, and the new sales generated by Google Print? Both of these go a long way to supporting scholarship without requiring that universities be denied access to searachble indices of their own bought-and-paid-for collections.

4. "Google Print for Libraries has two pretty major flaws. One being giving a digital copy of all of our works to the participating libraries where they will then most likely be used in e-course reserves without any compensation to ether author or publisher."

If you support scholarship, how can you reject giving UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES searchable digital indices to their own collections because some of them might use them in a way that undermines your bottom line?

The police broke the law when they used a restricted database to obtain information on the journalist (who, much to the dismay of the police, had a clean record). The police were also unsuccessful in their attempt to bust the journalist.

Now the police are saying they were only doing their duty to serve and protect... themselves, that is. Link

Reader comment: Sneaver says: "Regarding your post about Edmonton cops targeting journalists who criticize them, it's much worse than that. The cops have also targetted others who dare to speak out against them or fight back, e.g. one of the leading defence lawyers who has spoken out against police corruption and dirty tricks has repeatedly had his privacy invaded and been subjected to a smear campaign. Here are a couple of relevant links: here and here.

"Our city has lost several police chiefs in the last few years, in large part to all the scandals and corruption within the police force. It's sad how things have got so out of control here."

Some researchers are so impressed by the depth and power of strong language that they are using it as a peephole into the architecture of the brain, as a means of probing the tangled, cryptic bonds between the newer, "higher" regions of the brain in charge of intellect, reason and planning, and the older, more "bestial" neural neighborhoods that give birth to our emotions...

...Investigators have examined the physiology of cursing, how our senses and reflexes react to the sound or sight of an obscene word. They have determined that hearing a curse elicits a literal rise out of people. When electrodermal wires are placed on people's arms and fingertips to study their skin conductance patterns and the subjects then hear a few obscenities spoken clearly and firmly, participants show signs of instant arousal.

Their skin conductance patterns spike, the hairs on their arms rise, their pulse quickens, and their breathing becomes shallow.

Interestingly, said Kate Burridge, a professor of linguistics at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, a similar reaction occurs among university students and others who pride themselves on being educated when they listen to bad grammar or slang expressions that they regard as irritating, illiterate or déclassé.

"People can feel very passionate about language," she said, "as though it were a cherished artifact that must be protected at all cost against the depravities of barbarians and lexical aliens." Link

"It's true we don't remember anything anymore, but we don't need to," said Hawkins, the co-founder of Palm Computing and author of a book called "On Intelligence."

"We might one day sit around and reminisce about having to remember phone numbers, but it's not a bad thing. It frees us up to think about other things. The brain has a limited capacity, if you give it high-level tools, it will work on high-level problems," he said...

People feared the invention of the printing press because it would cause people to rely on books for their memory. Today, memory is more irrelevant than ever, argue some academics.

"What's important is your ability to use what you know well. There are people who are walking encyclopedias, but they make a mess of their lives. Getting a 100 percent on a written driving test doesn't mean you can drive," said Robert Sternberg, dean of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University and a professor of psychology.

The stack was ported to the Web, and Gareth unveiled it today. From his introdcutory essay, written in 1991:

"CYBERPUNK." Is it a literary genre? Is it marketing hype? Is it the latest style in the culture industry? Is it the apotheosis of post-modernism? As Dieter, the German nihilo-art snob on Saturday Night Live would say: "Your questions have become tiresome." Regardless of what it is or isn't, Cyberpunk (also called "Techno-culture" or "New Edge" culture) has become a cultural phenomenon which bears looking into.

For a multiplicity of reasons, it has, in hardy memetic fashion, taken on a life of its own. This stack is an attempt at holding up, for further examination, some of the more interesting strains of this curious cultural mutation.

As we move deeper into the 1990's, Techno-culture has become "important." In the tunnels of the underground, in the halls of academe, and in pop culture, people are talking about C-punk, taking it seriously. What these people are talking about has little to do with Cyberpunk as a literary movement. Those SF-ers who proclaim that "Cyberpunk is dead," are probably right. As far as literature goes. To the current generation of users, Cyberpunk is synonymous with the hacker underground, non-Luddite forms of anarchy, and the strategy (borrowed from C-punk lit) of extrapolating "20 minutes into the future." Cyberpunk has come to mean simply the grafting of high-technology onto underground, street, and avant pop culture.

Lu Chen, UC Berkeley
UC Berkeley neurobiologist Lu Chen believes that one of the best ways to learn about the brain is to build one of its key components. She and her colleagues are exploring how synapses form between neurons to make the circuits of the nervous system. Their approach is to identify the fewest ingredients necessary to create a synapse, mix them together in a "test tube" of non-neuronal cells, and let biology do the rest. Link

Michael Manga, UC Berkeley
The hulking steel volcano simulator in UC Berkeley professor Michael Manga's laboratory is a far cry from the baking soda-and-vinegar science fair projects of our youth. Of course, that's to be expected. What's unusual is that Manga, a professor of earth and planetary science, is trying to answer the same question posed by the quintessential science class experiment: Why do volcanoes erupt? Link

I filed a report for the NPR News program Day to Day on the latest in non-lethal acoustic weapons -- electronic devices that use sound to disperse crowds, "gain compliance," or beam spoken messages for long distances in areas where normal communications systems do not function.

Earlier this month I attended a demo of these technologies hosted by the LA Sheriff's department at Edwards Air Force Base in the California desert.

Here is a photo of one such device being used by military police in New Orleans, outside of the Superdome in post-Katrina flooding. This is the LRAD, or long-range acoustic device, made by American Technology Corporation. More photos of sonic devices from ATC and HPV Technologies, some of which are being used by authorities in New Orleans, are here.

The NPR report "Focused Sound 'Laser' for Crowd Control" airs today, and you can also listen to it here online (after 12PM PT/3PM ET). I believe they're podcasting these now, too, in addition to offering Real and Windows streams.

At 445PM Pacific / 745PM Eastern, I'll be a guest on CNN International to talk with Techwatch host Kristie LuStout about how the devices are being used in Iraq and other war zones, and why law enforcement agencies throughout the US are considering using them here in the States.

Previously on Boing Boing:

Wired News story "Sonic 'Lasers' Head to Flood Zone"

Reported presence of long-range acoustic device (LRAD) at protests

Copyright terms have been continually extended since they were passed into English law by the Statute of Queen Anne. As these monopoly rights have grown, so the public domain has shrunk, greatly reducing our access to creative works, condemning vast quantities of our culture to obscurity and disappearance, and limiting the opportunities for future creators to build upon the works of the past. The 14+14 campaign has a simple goal: to restore a balance long lost by returning copyright to its original term as laid down in the Statute of 14 years with the option of a 14 year renewal.

The "consent form" says that this surgery is so novel and its risks so unknown that doctors don't think informed consent is even possible.

Here is what it tells potential patients:

Your face will be removed and replaced with one donated from a cadaver, matched for tissue type, age, sex and skin color. Surgery should last 8 to 10 hours; the hospital stay, 10 to 14 days.

Complications could include infections that turn your new face black and require a second transplant or reconstruction with skin grafts. Drugs to prevent rejection will be needed lifelong, and they raise the risk of kidney damage and cancer.

After the transplant you might feel remorse, disappointment, or grief or guilt toward the donor. The clinic will try to shield your identity, but the press likely will discover it.

The clinic will cover costs for the first patient; nothing about others has been decided.

Another form tells donor families that the person receiving the face will not resemble their dead loved one. The recipient should look similar to how he or she did before the injury because the new skin goes on existing bone and muscle, which give a face its shape.

As a participant you would be asked individually to spend up to one hour in the specially constructed chamber. Participation may involve periods of exposure to infrasound and/or magnetic fields. You may experience mildly unusual sensations and will be asked to keep a record of these.

"Infrasound" is sound at frequencies below approx. 20Hz, which is generally too low for humans to perceive as sound. The magnetic fields will be generated by electromagnetic coils and will be similar to those generated naturally by the Earth. The levels used in the experiment will be at or below levels detected in the natural environment. These too will generally not be perceptible on a conscious level and are well under ICNIRP guidelines for health and safety.

In some cases, participants will be exposed to neither phenomena, though these participants will not be informed of this until the end of the experiment. In these cases, participants will be given an opportunity to experience the space with all phenomena active, though the results will not be included in the dataset.

There are naturally questions regarding whether these phenomena arise out of existing natural and manmade constructions: power stations, draughty windows, leaking pipes. The project proposed here does not attempt to explain how the phenomena arise, or even how they give rise to haunted perceptions. Rather, the project focuses on how the psychology of human perception gives rise to the construction of space.

The third ethical moment I investigate is crisis. As the number of developers in the Debian project has grown from one dozen to nearly one thousand, punctuated crises routinely emerge around particularly contested issues: matters of project transparency, internal and external communication, size, openness, the nature of authority within the project, the role of non-free packages, and the licensing of Debian. Many of these crises have an acute phase in which debate erupts on several media all at once: mailing lists, IRC conversation, and blog entries. While the debate during these periods can be congenial, measured, rational, and sometimes peppered with jokes, its tone can also be passionate and uncharitable, sometimes downright vicious.

During these moments, we find that while developers may share a common ethical ground, they often disagree about the implementation of its principles. Though the content of these debates certainly matters (and will be discussed to some extent), my primary focus is on the productive affective stance that these crises induce. I argue these are moments of assessment, in which people turn their attentive, ethical being toward an unfolding situation and engage in very difficult questions. In this mode, passions are animated and values are challenged and sometimes reformulated. Crises can be evaluated as moments of ethical production in terms of not only their functional outcomes but also their ability to move people to reflexively articulate their ideals—an important condition of possibility for further action. Such dialogical and conflicted debate reflects the active engagement of participants who renew and sometimes alter their ethical commitments. Thus, crisis can be vital to establishing and reestablishing the importance of normative precepts.

According to asahi.com, Kyoto Seika University created the first school of Cartoon & Comic Art in Japan in 2000. That was the beginning. This spring, additional three universities created similar schools and courses for students to study manga, anime and games.

Osaka University of Art recently created Character Creative Arts Department. The dean of the department is comic artist Kazuo Koike and at least two of the 23 professors are well-known comic artists (Go Nagai who created Mazinger Z, Devil Man, Harenchi Gakuen, etc. and Machiko Satonaka who created Ariesu no Otome, Asunaro Zaka, etc.).

This April, Takara Zoukei University created School of Media Contents with a focus on movies, animation, and games. Professor Reiji Matsumoto is a well-known comic artist who created Space Battleship Yamato, Galaxy Express 999, etc. He recently did some anime work for French band Daftpunk.

Finally Otemae University recently created a manga and animation course. Monkey Punch is a professor there.

The Authors Guild on Tuesday filed a class action lawsuit against search engine Google, alleging that its scanning and digitizing of library books constitutes a "massive" copyright infringement.

As part of its Google Print Library Project, the company is working to scan all or parts of the book collections of the University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University, the New York Public Library and Oxford University and make those texts searchable on Google.

"This is a plain and brazen violation of copyright law," Nick Taylor, president of the New York-based Authors Guild, said in a statement. "It's not up to Google or anyone other than the authors, the rightful owners of these copyrights, to decide whether and how their works will be copied."

UPDATE: 850PM PT, Google's response:

The Google Print program respects copyright. We regret that this group has chosen litigation to try to stop a program that will make books and the information within them more discoverable to the world. Google Print directly benefits authors and publishers by increasing awareness of and sales of the books in the program. And, if they choose, authors and publishers can exclude books from the program if they don't want their material included. Copyrighted books are indexed to create an electronic card catalog and only small portions of the books are shown unless the content owner gives permission to show more.

UPDATE : 930PM PT, A more detailed response from Susan Wojcicki, the vice president in charge of Google's Print Library Project:

Google doesn't show even a single page to users who find copyrighted books through this program (unless the copyright holder gives us permission to show more). At most we show only a brief snippet of text where their search term appears, along with basic bibliographic information and several links to online booksellers and libraries.

Here’s what an in-copyright book scanned from a library looks like on Google Print: Google respects copyright. The use we make of all the books we scan through the Library Project is fully consistent with both the fair use doctrine under U.S. copyright law and the principles underlying copyright law itself, which allow everything from parodies to excerpts in book reviews. (Here's an article by one of the many legal scholars who have weighed in on Google Print.)

Just as Google helps you find sites you might not have found any other way by indexing the full text of web pages, Google Print, like an electronic card catalog, indexes book content to help users find, and perhaps buy, books. This ability to introduce millions of users to millions of titles can only expand the market for authors’ books, which is precisely what copyright law is intended to foster.

UPDATE: 11PM PT -- Fred von Lohmann of the EFF says, "I believe Google has a strong fair use defense here." His point-by-point case analysis is here: Link

UPDATE: Xeni's report for NPR News is here.

The MP3 blog Aurgasm has posted an MP3-annotated musical history of New Orleans. Among the featured artists are NOLA natives The Dixie Cups, Lee Dorsey, and Sidney Bechet, whose 1932 rendition of Gershwin's Summertime (MP3 link) is guaranteed to break your heart.

Link to post, which includes nearly a dozen music files, as well as a comprehensive set of links to Katrina-related MP3 roundups on other music blogs.

Image, from the US National Weather Service photo library: The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, shot March 27 on a highway between Mounds, Illinois, and Cairo Illinois. Here are more NOAA photos from the 1927 flood which defined an earlier era of New Orleans history: Link

Left: Mark Fox Original Logo: Source: 'The New American Logo' - Pg. 133 (ISBN: 0-942604-34-2). Right: LogoWorks.com design for Dutton Auto Body Shop. Link (thanks, John!)

I agree -- WTF? So much for ordering one of these. Link (Thanks, Chris!)

Update: Lots of people have written in with various theories about this DRM. Some say that it's just that it honors usage states set in flash media. Others say it's a Microsoft WMA/WMV license. Others say it's to restrict the copying of certain commercial games.

But DRM licenses typically come with at least two requirements that would make this device a deal breaker for me:

1. Resistance to user modification. This means that parts of the hardware and software are designed to be off-limits to the API, resistant to reverse-engineering, and not easily removable or replaceable.

2. Responsive to system renawability messages (SRMs). SRMs are messages that disable or cripple features in your device after you get it home, in order to restrict the functionality you've already paid for. Like when they reduced the number of times you can burn a playlist in iTunes, or when TiVo was "updated" with a new version of Macrovision that makes it possible for broadcasters to delete the shows you record.

Until someone can tell me on a non-speculative basis what modification-resistance and renewability measures are in place on this thing, you can bet that I'll never shell out my dough for one.

Update 2: Clarification from the UK distributor: "Gamepark Korea don't understand English very well and have used the term 'DRM' without realising its impact in the West and its accociation with corporate evil."

What is black metal? There are as many definitions as there are demons in Satan's subterranean condo. And like those hot-and-bothered helldwellers, Black Metal afficionados are a contentious lot -- sometimes even murdering one other over who is and isn't true to the genre.

Wikipedia offers this definition, while this e-mail argument between two self-described Dark Lords provides another.

Musical characteristics include superfast guitars and shrieky, bummed-out vocals. Fashion characteristics include spiky shin guards, medieval accessories (swords, chains), and generous use of corpse paint.

But as the comparative graphic above shows, identification can be tricky. At left, Dani (image link) from the band Cradle of Filth is wearing lots of corpse paint. He is Totally Black Metal. At right, Louie the pug (image link) --who is owned by television news producer Jeremy Blacklow from a Certain News Network -- is not one bit Black Metal, despite facial markings that strongly resemble corpse paint.

This is tough, I know. Let's try it again.

At left, the Totally Black Metal band Dimmu Borgir, including a bald guy in a hat (image link). At right, Louie again -- (image link). Yes, he is wearing a hat, but he is still Not Black Metal. When they wake up in the morning, Dimmu Borgir raise lead chalices to their lips and drink smoothies blended from the blood and brains of their vanquished enemies. When he wakes up in the morning, Louie the pug eats either lamb-and-rice Science Diet or a sock.

For further study, I direct you to this Link for the TOP 10 MOST RIDICULOUS BLACK METAL PICS OF ALL TIME.

(Thanks, Sean Bonner, Jeremy Blacklow, David Pescovitz, and someone else whose email I deleted)

Reader comment: lupinstel says,

For a more true explanation and history I recommend the book "Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground" (Amazon link). Many dumb arguments have been had over what is "true" black metal and what is not. And like so many other styles of music, black metal can incorporate and be incorporated into parallel genres, thus making things more confusing. P.S. Viking or folk metal is better!

I am reminded of this old chestnut. It has instructions on how to make your own Black Metal band, including making up unpronounceable names, creating unreadable band logos, and never ever having a sense of humor. Link

Reader comment: Chuck says: "I can't describe how pathetic it feels to know this, but 'Egghead Jr' wasn't Foghorn Leghorn's son -- he was the offspring of Prissy, the 'Widder Hen' and some unknown rooster.

Foghorn just got sucked into entertainng the kid while trying to get into Prissy's good graces (and more importantly, her house, which was a lot warmer than Foghorns' shack, and the weather was getting cold.)

Boing Boing reader Paul says,

I live in Slidell, Louisiana. Since we came through the hurricane relatively intact, my wife has been volunteering with Noah's Wish, a non-profit organization that rescues and shelters animals in disasters. I spent an evening with her at the shelter, and took some photos that help to describe the wonderful work they are doing.

This website offers a bunch of nifty vintage Bollywood movie posters in a variety of forms: as poster reprints, as handpainted oil paintings on canvas, and as t-shirts. Link (Thanks, DJ Carlito!)

Previously:
Custom-painted Bollywood posters

Reader Comment: Abas Halai says,

Actually The Hot Spot is a Pakistani website and majority, if not all of those posters are from the Lollywood Film Industry (Lahore, Pakistan). The Hot Spot primarily started out as an ice cream shop in the capital of the country, Islamabad, the store was decorated with movie posters of classic cult b-movies from Pakistan and India. Now they review literally hundreds to thousands of alternative indy films, hollywood blockbusters to bollywood big names to lollywood flops with titles such as "Haseena Atom Bomb", "Don" and "Black Cat & Lady Boss".

More info about the store is located on the website.

They've also spawned some of the best ice cream and dessert shops all over the country which are decorated with thousands of alternative movie posters from all over the world.

I am a 70s bollywood fan and as far as the site pages go, all posters are from Bollywood films (Inspector Vinod is a very hindu name which will never be used to describe a hero in a Pakistani film!). But of course, they do not seem to be authentic posters as far as the artwork goes. Most of them may have been painted in Pakistan for all you care, but the posters are of Bollywood movies (Have seen 30% of them I think!).

The heavy reliance on illustrations makes the World look old-timey, but, once you accept the conventions of the period, the pictures take on a three-dimensional quality that rivals the finest modern photography and reproduction. There's something fantastically real to me about this Aug. 13, 1911, World magazine cover illustration of man-meets-beast in "The Submarine's Encounter—Whales!"

The resourcefulness, the community of hot rodders, the pushing the envelope, the ten things tried that didn't work out for every one that did, the outlaw spirit, the scrappy attitude and the fearlessness. It was so much more punk rock than punk rock ever was.

(...)

I will never be anything but a spectator to jazz and baseball. Sure, I could learn to play the trumpet but I will never be able to participate at a meaningful level. And playing on a softball team would never scratch the surface of the complexity of the baseball diamond and how the physics of that space has kept the game much the same as it always was.

But I will be able to build a pretty decent hotrod. And have the same joys of mechanical ingenuity and hair raising wire wheel thrills that the dry lakers enjoyed. In twenty years, I may build a truly great hot rod. More likely than my reaching the level of Ellington or Babe Ruth.

Eight agents, a supervisor and support staff will be responsible for gathering evidence on "manufacturers and purveyors" of porn -- not "child porn," we're talking about the kind that features consenting adults, and is purchased by consenting adults.

Snip from WaPo article:

Early last month, the bureau's Washington Field Office began recruiting for a new anti-obscenity squad. Attached to the job posting was a July 29 Electronic Communication from FBI headquarters to all 56 field offices, describing the initiative as "one of the top priorities" of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and, by extension, of "the Director." That would be FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III...

"I guess this means we've won the war on terror," said one exasperated FBI agent, speaking on the condition of anonymity because poking fun at headquarters is not regarded as career-enhancing. "We must not need any more resources for espionage."

It's not a commercial venture, just a labor of love -- and there's a lot to love. Great posts on contemporary afropop, juju, reggae, all things Fela, and vintage highlife, including this wonderful item about Ghanaian bandleader E.T. Mensah, known as the King of Highlife throughout English-speaking Africa some fifty years ago.

"If you were out dancing in Lagos or Accra in the 1950s and early 60s, highlife music is what the band was most likely playing," reads this post, "It was a music of the times – it reflected the optimism and hope individuals had in a the early days of self rule. You can hear this in the light-hearted themes and uplifting sounds."

When you listen to this MP3 of E.T. Mensah and his Tempos Band doing their midcentury hit, “All For You,” it's hard not to feel a little more upbeat than before you clicked.
Link (Thanks, DJ Carlito!)

Underground art master Coop opens his studio to us via blog, and gives a step-by-step "making of" tour for this painting of a hot babe with a strategically placed Atari 2600 joystick. Moments like these make me want to open all the windows in my office and scream, "I love the internets!" until my voice goes hoarse. But that, of course, is when the police tend to show up. Link

Previously:

Paint by blog with Coop

Paint by blog with Coop, part 2

What's scary is how easy it is for even a novice to steal this information. He says he bought a $39 card reader at a local retail store and plugged it into his laptop's USB port. Now when he scans a card, the device inputs the data directly into an open Excel or Word document.

I asked Wallace how often he finds his personal data on the cards. "Certain chains have that information [on their cards]. I've noticed it on three different chains," he says. While he declined to name specific hotels, he says the most recent incident occurred in June at a resort. In that hotel the magnetic strip yielded his credit card information, street address and full name.

Update: Snopes says it's a myth (Thanks, Leslie!)

Hollywood argues -- or at least strongly implies -- that technology companies could stop copyright infringement if they wanted to, but have chosen not to do so. I have often wondered whether Hollywood really believes this, or whether the claim is just a ploy to gain political advantage.

Such a ploy might be very effective if it worked. Imagine that you somehow convinced policymakers that the auto industry could make cars that operated with no energy source at all. You could then demand that the auto industry make all sorts of concessions in energy policy, and you could continue to criticize them for foot-dragging no matter how much they did.

If you were using this ploy, the dumbest thing you could do is to set up your own "Perpetual Motion Labs" to develop no-energy-source cars. Your lab would fail, of course, and its failure would demonstrate that your argument was bogus all along. You would only set up the lab if you thought that perpetual-motion cars were pretty easy to build.

Which brings us to the movie industry's announcement, yesterday, that they will set up "MovieLabs", a $30 million research effort to develop effective anti-copying technologies. The only sensible explanation for this move is that Hollywood really believes that there are easily-discovered anti-copying technologies that the technology industry has failed to find.

It can play games. It can play your Movies. It can play your music. It can view photos. It can read Ebooks. It runs on just 2 AA batteries - And it can do all this in the palm of your hand or on your TV screen.

It runs the free Linux operating system. This means a whole world of Games, Utilities and Emulators are at your disposal. Quake, Doom, SNES, Megadrive, MAME, Media players and Applications to name just a few.

It's powerful - Two 200mhz CPU's with 64meg of RAM, custom graphics hardware and decoding chips. Takes SD cards and has 64M of NAND memory. Plenty to play with. One of the most powerful and advanced handhelds today.

It's cheap. Just £124.99.

It's open. You want to develop your own games for the GP2X? Go right ahead. The SDK is included with the system free. Not since the days of the Amiga has a system been so easy to develop for, commercially and for fun.

The GP2X isn't just another wannabe be Gameboy. Its a whole different design. A whole new idea for a handheld games system.

But wait, we're not new to the scene. Heard of the GP32? An accidental experiment in an open source handheld that went right. Some 30,000 units were sold worldwide, mostly in the UK and parts of Europe. The machine has an astonishing following. The GP2X is the successor.

Update: Jason sez, "It's available in the US as a pre-order for $189.99 + shipping."

Update 2: Whoops -- according to the official site, this thing is crippled with DRM. So much for buying one of these, ever.

Update 3: Clarification from the UK distributor: "Gamepark Korea don't understand English very well and have used the term 'DRM' without realising its impact in the West and its accociation with corporate evil."

I did more little experiments varying the number of pills per day. The results kept indicating the pills were useless. One day I ran low on pills, so I started to be more careful about using the cream, which I considered useless. My acne suddenly improved two or three days later. It was cause and effect (speaking of delayed causality). You could just look at the time series -- one number per day, the count of new pimples -- and see this. Just once, if I remember correctly, I stopped using the cream. Two or three days later, my acne got worse. I resumed the cream. Two or three days later, my acne got better. :-)!

That was even better than learning that something was useless. Consistent use of the cream helped a lot. Over the next several years, I only made two further advances. First, I found that a Vitamin B pill helped, probably a multi-B pill. Second, based on the idea of a two- or three-day latency, I discovered that certain foods caused pimples. If my acne suddenly got worse, I tried to remember what I had eaten two or three days earlier. Diet Pepsi and pizza were the main culprits. Taking all this together, I reduced my acne about 90%. Then, as predicted, it faded away.

We're presently in the midst of a third intellectual revolution. The first came with Newton: the planets obey physical laws. The second came with Darwin: biology obeys genetic laws. In today’s third revolution, were coming to realize that even minds and societies emerge from interacting laws that can be regarded as computations. Everything is a computation.

Does this, then, mean that the world is dull? Far from it. The naturally occurring computations that surround us are richly complex. A tree's growth, the changes in the weather, the flow of daily news, a person's ever-changing moods --- all of these computations share the crucial property of being gnarly. Although lawlike and deterministic, gnarly computations are --- and this is a key point --- inherently unpredictable. The world's mystery is preserved.

Mixing together anecdotes, graphics, and fables, Rucker teases out the implications of his new worldview, which he calls "universal automatism." His analysis reveals startling aspects of the everyday world, touching upon such topics as chaos, the internet, fame, free will, and the pursuit of happiness. More than a popular science book, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul is a philosophical entertainment that teaches us how to enjoy our daily lives to the fullest possible extent.

Update: Here are more photos, including some "before" shots from the PTL coffee table book that "PTL Partners" received with their $1000 lifetime partnerships. Courtesy of Ace Pryhill.

"One entry under 'War is Peace': 'According to the Bush administration, the Duelfer report which conclusively showed that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq actually justifies the war in Iraq.' "If that's not doublethink, I don't know what is!" Link (Thanks, Tracy!)

Merlin Mann and I have been talking for a long time about what makes an easily answered email, and he's written up a fantastic primer on writing good emails, especially emails to colleagues and strangers. This is the kind of thing I want to see printed as a pamphlet and handed out on busy street-corners: if ten percent of it were taken to heart by ten percent of the email-sending world, humanity would be immeasurably benefitted.

You can make it even easier for your recipient to immediately understand why you've sent them an email and to quickly determine what kind of response or action it requires. Compose a great "Subject:" line that hits the high points or summarizes the thrust of the message. Avoid "Hi," "One more thing...," or "FYI," in favor of typing a short summary of the most important points in the message:

* Lunch resched to Friday @ 1pm
* Reminder: Monday is "St. Bono's Day"--no classes
* REQ: Resend Larry Tate zip file?
* HELP: Can you defrag my C drive?
* Thanks for the new liver--works great!

In fact, if you're relating just a single fact or asking one question in your email, consider using just the subject line to relate your message. As I've mentioned before, in some organizations, such emails are identified by adding (EOM)--for end of message--at the end of the Subject line. This lets recipients see that the whole message is right there in the subject without clicking to the view the (non-existent) body. This is highly appreciated by people who receive a large volume of mail, since it lets them do a quick triage on your message without needing to conduct a full examination.

Sadly, good email subjects have become something of a lost art, especially among more recent additions to the Interweb. It's a pity, because you're far more likely to get a favorable response from a busy person when they can quickly grok your message.

Update: AV has confirmed that this drive uses a 1" microdrive, not Flash -- thanks, AV!

An iconographic antismoking pro-smoking etiquette campaign from JT Tobacco of Japan. Link (Thanks, I am Dali)

Correction: Adriaan Tijsseling of Ecto fame says, "This is actually NOT an anti-smoking campaign. JT just promotes proper smoking behavior and is one of the biggest tabacco companies in Japan. They're scum."

Reader comment: Greg Lara says, "JT is owned by the Japanese government. (They are a major shareholder.) That would seem to present a conflict of interest, if the number one job of government is to ensure the safety of the populace."

Previously: Moment of goatse artse

With a goal of jump-starting the town's economy, the festival was originally a way to capitalize on the "Mecca of history and genealogy," in the area, said Hilda Austin, executive director for the Mason County Area Chamber of Commerce.

Sisters Melanie Dudding and Kathy Jeffers of Pomeroy, Ohio, along with mother Shirley Simmons, returned to the festival out of intrigue. The sisters remember hearing the story of the Mothman growing up.

"I remember as a child, it frightened me to death," Dudding said. "We are all interested in things like this, and we really want to see the Mothman but never have. It seems like only people who really don't want to see him do, but we really want to see him."

"Kurzweil presents compelling, and highly visual, proof of the accuracy of the idea for describing events in the past and present (where "Moore's Law" of accelerating computer technology is the most familiar version of the idea for most people).  In his brand new book, THE SINGULARITY IS NEAR: WHEN HUMANS TRANSCEND BIOLOGY, Kurzweil spells out how hyper-acceleration of technology is likely to play out in the next few decades and beyond.  (He even sets a date for the Singularity: 2045--- when a normal trillion dollars worth of worldwide computer intelligence will be a billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today).

"Ray Kurzweil, 'Kurzweil's Law,' 7pm (doors open), Friday, September 23, Herbst Theater (at San Francisco Civic Center).  The lecture starts promptly at 7:30pm.  Admission is free ($10 donation very welcome, not required).  Kurzweil will sign books after the talk. Link

A college student (Venetia Stevenson), with an interest in witchcraft, travels to a foggy, spooky town in Massachusetts and meets with the owner of the Raven's Inn, Mrs. Newless (Patricia Jessel). Mrs. Newless is in fact a 268-year old witch, who sold her soul to the devil to regain her life after being burned at the stake. Christopher Lee plays Stevenson's helpful history teacher who along with the town is controlled by the evil witch. When Stevenson's brother and boyfriend arrive in town to find the missing woman, they discover evil and disgusting happenings going on. (1960, b&w)

Horror Hotel is a brilliant movie saddled with an unfortunate title. You may have heard this movie referred to as City of the Dead, which isn't much better, but once you get past the campy title, you are in for a real treat.

Water, Canola Oil, Modified Food Starch, Tomato Paste, Maltodextrin, Contains 2% or less of: Avocado Powder, Dehydrated Onion, Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Garlic Powder, Bell Pepper, Spices, Whey Protein Concentrate, Salt, Natural and Artificial Flavors, Worchestershire Sauce Powder (Corn Syrup Solids, Salt, Caramel Color, Garlic, Sugar, Spices, Soy Sauce Solids [Naturally Fermented Wheat and Soybeans, Salt, Maltodextrin, Caramel Color], Tamarind, Natural Flavors), Citric Acid, Chili Pepper, Lemon Juice Concentrate, Lime Juice Solids, Sugar, Glucono- Delta-Lactone, Xanthan Gum, Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate, DATEM, Lactic Acid, Monosodium Glutamate, Yellow #5 & Blue #1.

George's guts. Not much to him. I expect the "real" George to have something similar inside him too.

Okay. I missed the ball last time Mark let loose, so here's a doublestrength dose: not only is this an image of a unicorn, it's a screengrab from Bladerunner, and is therefore imbued with extra-pretty healing powers. Link to fullsize, and source.

Previously: one, two.

Reader comment: Gavin Brown says,

OK, this is really nerdy, but I can tell you that the unicorn scene in Blade Runner has some history.

The scene was originally filmed as a dream sequence for Blade Runner, but the original cinematic cut of the film dropped the scene (and added the voice-over, and so on). Scott then re-used it in Legend (with Tom Cruise). Then, when he released the Director's Cut of Blade Runner, it went back in. So that sequence appears in two different Ridley Scott movies.

As well as this, if you look at the graphics on the dashboard of Gaff's patrol car, you can also see computer graphics that were originally used in Alien. So obviously Ridley doesn't like to waste good material!

Just wanted to let you know that the reader comment from Gavin Brown is incorrect.

The unicorn segment was an outtake from the original footage discarded by Ridley Scott in 1982. It was "rediscovered" in London's Rank film vault during the last minute scramble to produce a Director's Cut of Blade Runner that the director would actually endorse (Scott threatened to publicly disown the version Warner Brothers had prepared - a version without the unicorn!). This was in August of 1992. Legend opened in 1985. No shared unicorn footage.

Source: FUTURE NOIR: The Making of Blade Runner by Paul M. Sammon

I thought I might add that the Unicorn you featured is rumored to be evidence that Harrison Ford's character in Blade Runner is actually a replicant as well. The following is the reasoning behind this:

In theory the Tyrell Corporation which manufactures replicants implants memories into the minds of its replicants because the intelligent robots are led to believe they are real humans with pasts. The police tracking these replicants have access to the files of memories placed in each replicant's mind, which is why Deckard can list the memories of his replicant love interest when he is trying to prove to her that she is a replicant.

The Unicorn sequence serves no narrative purpose whatsoever.

You see a shot of Deckard playing a single note on the piano and looking reflective and then the shot of the running unicorn. End of sequence. At the end of the film when Deckard and his love interest are making a get away, he finds an origami unicorn on the floor of his hall.

Origami creatures were the signature of his police partner who was always sidling about on screen looking like he knew something. His police partner would not only have known that Deckard was a replicant if he was one, but would have access to the files of memories implanted in his mind (like the Unicorn.) As Deckard examines the origami unicorn, there is an echo of his police partner's last line:

"It's too bad she [the replicant love interest] can't live, but then again who really does?"

Hence the conclusion that Deckard is, in fact a replicant, as evidenced by the use of the unicorn.

Ridley Scott has been trying to get a completely new version of Blade Runner released with new footage, but has been having a hell of a time with the rights. I wrote a piece for our local paper on it here: Link

In the documentary On the Edge of Blade Runner, film writer and interviewer Mark Kermode asks Scott directly if Deckard is a replicant and he answers simply 'Yes.' One of the other clues is that in a couple of scenes, such as the one between Deckard and Rachel in the kitchen of his apartment, the same technique is used to make the pupils of his eyes flash as appears elsewhere (see Roy on the roof). Link

Cymothoa exigua, a crustacean, is the only known parasite that effectively replaces a body organ. It makes its home in the mouth of a fish, where it drains blood from the tongue until it withers and dies. It attaches itself to the remaining stub and the fish is actually able to utilize it as a replacement tongue to draw in and manipulate food, which the parasite shares.

Reader comment: Mark McGrouther, Fish Collection Manager, Australian Museum says: "I enjoyed the Boing-Boing Tongue-eating bug entry.  I'm a little late, but you might be interested to add a link to the Australian Museum page, which shows some interesting pics of these little blighters." I like the photo with two tongue-eating bugs in one fish's mouth!

Image: Ronald McDonald appears to have lost his home in the storm, too. BB reader David Brown says, "My girlfriend is in Biloxi doing relief work with HandsonUSA, and a young photographer accompanied a trip she took with some nurses trip to East Biloxi to give folks tetanus shots -- those too poor to evacuate, some whose cars were washed away by Katrina. All they have left are half-destroyed houses; no way to get to relief supplies, so some relief must come to them." Link

It’s September 13th and things have started to move here in New Orleans. Much of the water has dropped in the heavily flooded poorer neighborhoods, and most buildings appear to have been searched for survivors. Finding the dead will be time consuming, it requires breaking into some homes, and many have extra security, steel bars and doors.

Since the arrival of thousands of police, it’s felt like an armed camp, but that seems to have diminished as military commanders have ordered troops to shoulder their assault rifles, remove the ammo clips, or store their M-16’s out of view. It makes a difference. The local and federal cops that traveled here have partially disarmed as well. It’s probably to the disappointment of some officers who really enjoyed brandishing a shotgun or semi-automatic handgun at a stranger - such as a black male.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the local constable on the Crystal City Connection (a bridge on US 90) for increasing my heart-rate about 400% last week. We were approaching a check-point and apparently he mistook 2 carloads of exhausted network news crews in late model rental cars for Bloods and Crips exporting jewelry or looted expensive electronics. After brandishing his sidearm for several moments and a lecture about driving too fast (?????) we were free to depart the area.

The change is instantly noticeable late at night. Last night, as we drove a good portion of the city around 10pm, there were virtually none of these local cops….the ones that drove in from places like Deerfield Township, Ohio or Douglas County, Colorado. The streets are much calmer. There’s a logical explanation for the transformation. Carnival Cruise Lines has brought in what looks like a large party ship, and it is open only (as I understand it) to visiting cops, official workers or local cops who’ve lost their homes. We should all appreciate the charity shown to the N.O. cops, most of whom have lost houses and even family members. But, it must be some scene on board, what with all that great food, beer, and maybe even a little bit of Las Vegas style entertainment. It’s keeping almost all of them off the street after sundown, so there is definitely something doing. You do see NYPD patrolling fairly late, they have 300 officers and from the moment they got here, they’ve been serious about doing a good job. It’s must be a cathartic assignment - 9/11 and all.

I drove much of the Ninth ward yesterday. It was a sobering view of poverty in the inner city. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be sitting in the Astrodome having watched the flood waters inundate this sad portion of a great American city. I honestly don’t know what the authorities will decide to do, or what they should do. There are so many pathetic little shacks with a putrid water line nearly up to the roof. The saddest thing for the former residents would be to see it all gentrified - rebuilt….just not for them. Where are all the General Marshalls when we need them?

I spent a lot of time yesterday with the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin. I just don’t know what to make of this guy. I don’t know anything about him, but I do know that he has done a complete turnaround from his previous and well publicized criticism of our dear Administration. To hear him talk today - he is George W’s biggest fan. You are not going to hear one nasty word come out of his mouth as pertains to Mr. Bush. He wants to see his city rebuilt…..and they have hit him over the head with one big-ass shovel…….

The streets are New Orleans are largely secured by the National Guard and active duty troops. The have taken control and they are good. They know what to do and they are respectful and efficient. The soldiers have an almost familial charm about them - as though every single one could be your kid, or your neighbor’s. Even before my weeks in Iraq, I’ve always admired their professionalism and the seriousness with which they approach any task.

Yesterday, I met the army captain in charge of a huge part of the downtown area. He’s 82nd Airborne - a quiet, charming and seemingly well educated young officer. When he talks, you can sense his awe for the suffering that occurred in his operational area which includes the Superdome and the Convention Center. We talked for a while, and he is seriously troubled by what has transpired here. He can’t reconcile the violence and inhumanity that took place in those buildings. There were armed bands of gang-bangers snatching victims in the hallway and bringing them back to Hall “E” to be raped or even killed. His task now is to remove debris, mountains of it, and sanitize the facility, which is being done by crews in white moon-suits. Many of his troops are just back from Iraq, and some of them have told me that they find this assignment more disturbing than what they endured in that sad part of the world. From what I’ve seen, we should be proud of these guys. They are our sons and daughters and they are doing what they are paid to do. And we don’t pay them much to do it.

I was also impressed with one part of FEMA that definitely works. There are existing contracts between FEMA and various larger fire departments to provide urban search and swift water rescue teams to respond to disasters such as this one. These firefighters have been working non-stop saving lives since they got here. Initially, they used boats, but now move house to house by foot. They were some of the first to respond to N.O., flown in by the Air Force. The Army, Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard chopper crews, should also be recognized for the relentless task of plucking victims from their homes. If the system fell apart, it was by no fault of these first responders. We should remember that the bulk of the criticism has not been about their lack of response, but the shear lack of planning. Just like corporate America, if police or fire resources are squandered, blame the management.

Once again, I made the mistake of watching television, this time CNN. Paula Zahn was interviewing a California Highway Patrol captain describing the disaster scene in the French Quarter. It must have been tough duty wandering those dangerous narrow streets searching for all those starving, dehydrated survivors…..NOT!!! The French Quarter is substantially intact, almost no flooding, minor looting, and lots of residents hanging around, sweeping the streets, drinking, and even a few playing music. That didn’t stop Paula from asking the tough questions. “How many people did you encounter today in your search for survivors?”….. The captain said the number was around 30.

What he didn’t tell you is that these are some of the luckiest residents in New Orleans. This was purely an opportunity for him to appear on network television and make it appear that they are doing something worthwhile, worth the tens of thousands of dollars we are paying him and his large group of colleagues to be here. It was a great way for him to wave the flag and show the public and his superiors, that they are doing something. The only problem is that it was deceptive -- and ultimately, dishonest.

And then there is Fox News. Man, do I even want to go here. It’s as though the hurricane was just another round of WWF Smackdown. When I watch Fox, I always feel as if they are describing some sporting event. The reporter I watched should be sent back to elementary school under some provision of “No child left behind”. In his standup, he used words that don’t even exist…. “hurricanic” or something like that. His hair was great though, that sort of bad-boy flippy frosty kind of thing - like the guy on Extreme Home Makeover which I’d like to point out, is entertainment. I turned it off, feeling as if I was a participant in something that was nearly disrespectful to the dead.

I think that I will be out of here tomorrow afternoon. You can really burn out covering something like this. I hope that if you have gotten anything out of what I’ve written, it is to scrutinize where you get your information. Even great newspapers like the New York Times have been known to make things up. It’s a tough dilemma, one I whine about all the time. We all see things through different eyes.

I don’t claim to be an exclusive source of accurate information, I’m just writing about what I’ve seen. Someone else might see what I’ve seen in a completely different light. I do regret that since I won’t be here - I won’t know what is true or truly distorted or what’s pretend. Quite the dilemma. Goodbye New Orleans….hello NPR.

Previously:

A cameraman's journal in NOLA

A TV cameraman's diary, part two.

The kings of culture jamming are now running WordPress. Link (thanks, jake appelbaum)

My Uncle Israel Chideya was missing for a while, lost in the maelstrom of post-Katrina evacuations from New Orleans. Well, we found him. He is good...and mad. Here's just a snippet of what he told me.

He had bought a multi-unit apartment complex in the french quarter. He didn't evauate for the hurricane, but did once the levee broke and the floodwaters started rising. He and twenty thousand other folks ended up at the convention center, and he spent five datys in the place where (like the Superdome) children were raped, people were murdered, and even the elderly were harassed. "Elderly people from nursing homes were dumped at the Convention Center in their diapers." And another thing pissed him off: although some of the elderly were dying and the children were getting sick, the first people evacuated were the prisoners. "I don't have anything against people who are incarcerated," he said, "But they should have taken the sick, the elderly, and children first."

Uncle Israel took two elderly couples under his wing. One couple was blind. He shephereded them through the evacuation. They were taken by bus to Baton Rouge, then loaded onto military transport planes at the airport.

They werent told where they were going, but ended up in San Antonio, Texas. They were taken to the coliseum and the American Center, all of the evacuees. My uncle was worried about a repeat of the Convention Center fiasco. And then he noticed something. "All of a sudden we don't see any white people," he said. All of the white evacuees had mysteriously disappeared.

He asked a volunteering priest what had happened. The priest told him that local hotels were being paid to take evacuees. The white evacuees were told about the hotels. The black ones, says my uncle, were not.

* Richard, a NOLA blogger, returns home briefly to assess damage and hopes to find his cat Lola alive:

I look around and see that there's not much damage. Some more small trees and shrubs are down in my neighbor's yard. A handful of my potted plants have died. I walk back to the kitchen to get my duffel bag and start packing.

Then I see her: a long, low lump stretched across a side table. I take a step toward her and call out "Lola?", but she doesn't respond.

The pieces quickly fall into place: during the storm, the door to the study slammed shut, trapping her in the back of the house for nearly three weeks, a few crucial feet away from bowls of food and a tap that's still dripping. Lola's eyes are slits, green and lifeless. I call her name again, stroke her back, but nothing.

Without thinking, I say, "I'm sorry." I keep repeating it: "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

* Sascha Meinrath, volunteer tech aid coordinator with CUwireless, has this update for Boing Boing readers on some post-Katrina reconnect projects:

My friend Michael Maranda (President of the Association for Community Networks) summed up the lessons learned better than anyone I've heard thus far:

"The storm makes the case for distributed capacity/expertise to deploy networks throughout society... From voluntary/community and government sectors as well as business. Mobilization of volunteers for every aspect... From direct help to communications and database development and support presents a challenge... Existing structures don't know how best to open a space for such involvement. I know this is not what is understood as general definition of infrastructure, let alone critical infrastructure, but I believe we have the opportunity to redefine 'critical infrastructure' to include human systems and coordination of volunteer resources and talents."

Where the ad-hoc coalitions of Community Wireless Networkers excelled was in mobilizing quickly, integrating rapidly into chaotic conditions, and setting up infrastructures that meet the needs of the people involved. Whether it's setting up a computer cluster at the Houston Astrodome or creating a community built and operated telecom center in Algiers, the looseknit coalition of Community Wireless Networking groups has proven to be an effective force for bringing telecommunications infrastructure to the marginalized and ignored.

Over the next few days, plans include upgrading the LPFM Radio Station in Algiers, connect 25 shelters in the Bay St. Louis area, and shipping 2600 pounds of phones and computers to Response Teams in and around the disaster area.

* Intel donates 2300 laptops to the Red Cross and 150 wireless access points for first responders and disaster victims: Link

(thanks, Jonno, doug humphrey / Wayne's list, Lloyd Rodenbaugh )

The billboard is made of 12,148 aluminium pegs, varying in length from 1mm to 27mm. Each different length peg creates a different sized shadow. The different sized shadows create a greyscale image of a woman sunbathing, when the sun comes out.

In January 2000, Bohrman left an earlier stint at CNN for Pseudo, which was known at the time for surreal, Warholian mega-parties that defined the Silicon Alley scene.

"The party stuff was interesting, but what lasted is that we defined a new form of participatory programming that fused TV and internet," Bohrman told Wired News. "That's what I brought back with me when I returned."

(...) Newly appointed CNN President Jonathan Klein, who joined the network that same month, later asked Bohrman to help him revamp the network's daytime roster with those election-season tech lessons in mind.

"OK, let's bring on the bloggers," Bohrman recalled thinking at the time. "But what became apparent after a few of those is that putting bloggers on TV to talk about bloggers blogging on blogs doesn't work. The whole reason they're blogging is because they're not on TV. I said OK, gimme a week, and I'll come up with something."

On Thursday I will fly to China where I will roam the countryside in search of the elusive "huoche" (hwoah-chuh, train, literally, "fire wagon" -- steam train). (...)

(Thanks, Dory Adams and Kevin Scanlon!)

The Art and Politics of Netporn is the first major international conference on netporn criticism. It will present multiple perspectives on our growing immersion in pornographic web-based media. A second aim of the conference is to discuss the potential of art and critical research in times of heightened information surveillance, filtering and censorship. The selected research presentations and art projects regard netporn as complex networks, with impact and growth, just as industries and/or indie media operations. Conference presenters will address the 'schizo' climate of hype and censorship, focusing on the ethics and aesthetics of digital media environments and (female and male) activities such as blogging, webcamming, chatting, p2p porn, live journals, confession boards, mailing lists and zines.

Described as "a traveling medicine show without any cure," The Art of Bleeding is Dr. A.P. Ridenour's (a.k.a. Rev. Al) actionist- comedy safety exhibition, using performance, film projection, live music, medical nonsense narratives and "managed accidents" to explore themes more productively addressed via common sense. While the jargon is all retro health and safety-education material, the culty fetishism is more J.G. Ballard than CPR. A rotating cast of zany, sexy nurses (including one volatile Kitty Diggins) and the mascot/ ambulance driver, Abram the Safety Ape, invite audience participation. In the L.A. film premiere of Burningangel.com's spoof on H.P. Lovecraft's Re-Animator, Joanna Angel and cast appear live to introduce The Re-Penetrator. Expect XXX zombie action onscreen, and more sexy antics off.

The six major Hollywood studios, hoping to gain more control over their technological destiny, have agreed to jointly finance a multimillion-dollar research laboratory to speed the development of new ways to foil movie pirates.

The new nonprofit consortium is to be called Motion Picture Laboratories Inc. - MovieLabs for short - and will begin operation later this year. According to Hollywood executives involved in its establishment, MovieLabs will have a budget of more than $30 million for its first two years. The idea arose out of Hollywood's contention that the consumer electronics and information technology industries are not investing heavily or quickly enough in piracy-fighting technology.

The lab is modeled after CableLabs, which since 1988 has spearheaded pivotal innovations in the cable television industry - hastening the adoption of fiber optics, cable modems, telephony and digital video

(Thanks, Roland Dobbins, whose sigfile aptly quotes Doug Gwyn: "UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.")

Free Culture UK will hold their first national membership meeting at the World Summit on Free Information Infrastructures, Limehouse Town Hall, London, at 5.30pm Saturday 1st October. The meeting will cover the innovative Public Domain Burn campaign, the 14+14 copyright term reduction campaign and how to spread Creative Commons in the UK. The event is open to all and will help decide the direction of the next year's campaigning.

Free Culture UK is a grassroots movement that supports an open, participatory culture. It was founded this summer with two aims:

1. to promote and empower creativity through social, legal and political means; and
2. to oppose those who would restrict our creative freedom.

Local groups are already running successful projects such as Remix Reading, Remix Brighton, Loca Records, CNUK and Liquid Culture.

Rufus Pollock, a member of Free Culture UK, said "with six local groups [Birmingham, Brighton, Deptford, Exeter, Leeds and Reading] already running, this is a network ready to make a real difference. Congress will give anyone interested in culture and creativity a chance to decide what our grassroots movement campaigns on over the next year, including how we promote Creative Commons and the Public Domain, and what sort of copyright system we lobby for."

Anyone planning to attend should add their name to the wiki page.

In this week's installment, Andrea goes on assignment to Hollywood, Florida, where she meets Lester and Perry, a pair of tech-freaks who live in a junkyard where they remix dead high-tech toys into one-of-a-kind works of art:

Perry set Boogie Woogie Elmo down on a workbench and worked a miniature USB cable into his chest cavity. The other end terminated with a PDA with a small rubberized photovoltaic cell on the front.

"This thing is running InstallParty -- it can recognize any hardware and build and install a Linux distro on it without human intervention. They used a ton of different suppliers for the BWE, so every one is a little different, depending on who was offering the cheapest parts the day it was built. InstallParty doesn't care, though: one click and away it goes." The PDA was doing all kinds of funny dances on its screen, montages of playful photoshopping of public figures matted into historical fine art.

"All done. Now, have a look -- this is a Linux computer with some of the most advanced robotics ever engineered. No sweatshop stuff, either, see this? The solder is too precise to be done by hand -- that's because it's from India. If it was from Malaysia, you'd see all kinds of wobble in the solder: that means that tiny, clever hands were used to create it, which means that somewhere in the device's karmic history, there's a sweatshop full of crippled children inhaling solder fumes until they keel over and are dumped in a ditch. This is the good stuff.

"So we have this karmically clean robot with infinitely malleable computation and a bunch of robotic capabilities. I've turned these things into wall-climbing monkeys; I've modded them for a woman from the University of Miami at the Jackson Memorial who used their capability to ape human motions in physiotherapy programs with nerve-damage cases. But the best thing I've done with them so far is the Distributed Boogie Woogie Elmo Motor Vehicle Operation Cluster. Come on," he said, and took off deeper into the barn's depths.

Update: Zoolander points out these birch-covered keyboards from near Ekaterinburg in the Urals (near Siberia), as well.

Using the new software with a 1-megapixel camera held at least 20centimetres away, an A4 sized page takes about 3 to 5 seconds to scan. This produces between 21 and 35 images which the software merges together to extract the text and record any images.

"The goal of our research is to enable mobile phones to be used as portable faxes or scanners that can be used any time," an NEC spokesman told New Scientist.

But the concern now is that this technology will catapult the publishing industry into a copyright furore similar to that which has gripped the recording industry in recent years.

Update: A reader sez, "Distributed Proofreaders is celebrating 'Talk Like a Pirate Day' as 'Proof Like a Pirate Day':"

"This 'ere site provides a web-based method o' easin' th' proofreadin' work associated wi' th' digitization o' Public Domain books into Project Gut'nberg e-books. By divvying up th' work into individual pages many fine, feisty swashbucklers can be attacking th' same book at th' same time. This significantly speeds up th' proofreading/e-book booty-creation process."

* Evolution Schmevolution (all segments)
* Bush at the United Nations
* Lewis Black on Intelligent Design
* What Me Sorry? Bush Apologizes
* Roberts' Confirmation Hearings
* Interview with Kurt Vonnegut on his recent book A Man Without A Country
* Interview with Chris Mooney author of the Republican Attack on Science
And all of the past Katrina coverage

Update: Angstron sez, "I'm sure I'm the umpteenth person to point out - that's not a replica, /it's the real thing./ The seller gets questioned & gives verification. Here's an old magazine image that I geekily compared, 'cos I'm not so trusting.

"If somehow this activity was to somehow been pinned to me, it was somehow done so fraudulently," she says. "There is no way it came from my household.

"I have the least expensive computer system you can buy from Dell. The type you order off television for $499.00. It was purchased in the summer of 2002 and has the smallest hard drive they make. I have no cd writer on it and the cd-rom that I do have, does not even work correctly.

"I live alone with my 8-year-old daughter (who would have been seven at the time the alleged occurrence took place). I am a single mom who is disabled and unable to work. I live on Social Security disability and struggle to support my daughter and myself. If I am put in a position where I need to defend myself regarding this situation, it would create extreme financial hardship on me. I have no money and did not do what is being said. I also must admit that all this stuff that has been occurring with this whole ordeal has triggered my medical condition to flare lately.

"I have always been against music downloading. In fact, I have been a member of BMG's music club for quite some time and I purchase my music either from there or from Target. When I first got my computer set up almost three years ago, I had a friend set it up for me since I did not know how to do it. She had put Kaaza Lite on there and told me what it was. I never used it and had no interest in doing so. I deleted it since I had no use for it. Even though I deleted it correctly, as is recommended by Microsoft, Mr. Eilers has told me it can hide out in my system and play without me knowing about it. I have done a total check of my computer and it is no where on there.