SpamStockTracker tracks how much money you'd lose if you actually followed the pump-and-dump "stock tips" you get in your spam: Link (via O'Reilly Radar)

Andy "Waxy" Baio's software project, Upcoming (for planning events without all the obnoxious business-modely crap of eVite and the like) has been acquired by Yahoo -- congrats Waxy!

Between this and the NetNewsWire announcement, this is a great day for acquisitions news! From Upcoming's original launch post:

My new site has launched! Upcoming.org is a collaborative event calendar, where anyone can add the music/sports/arts/film/drama events they're going to, find out who's going to the same events, and browse the event listings of other people with similar tastes. After adding events to your list, you can use the generated RSS feeds to list them on your own weblog. By adding people to your friends list, you can track your friend's events as they add them (also available via RSS).

Link

Alaska Airlines is promoting the Alaska fishing industry with a "Salmon Thirty Salmon" -- a Boeing 737 painted with a gigantic fish. I think more jetliners need cool airbrushed van-art. Link (Thanks, Joe!)

Update: Approx ten million people wrote in to point out that this painting cost half-a-mil and was paid for out of tax dollars. Now you know.

Last month I blogged about an ebook publisher called Memletics that had put together a really silly DRM system that output your personally identifying information (including credit-card info) on every page of the PDFs they sold you to discourage you from indiscriminately sharing the book.

This is a visibly bad idea, and once the publisher heard from its readers and EFF, they came up with a much, much better system for accomplishing the same end: putting a unique number on every page of each book that they can use to forensically track copies discovered online, but that don't undermine user-privacy or rights like the right to loan or re-sell your books.

Well-done to Memletics for finding a compromise that does the right thing:

We're pleased to report that in response to our post explaining how this form of "DRM" threatens people's privacy, the publisher has now changed his policy. He says that he's sorry he ever used this method, and will no longer be printing personal information in Memletics books. Instead, he will print a unique serial number in each book. That way, if a book winds up on a filesharing network, he can track who released it. But he won't be putting his customers at risk of identity theft if they share their books with friends or make fair use copies.

For ebook publishers concerned about infringement of digital works, this should be an industry best practice going forward. It protects privacy and promotes fair use, but also gives publishers a way to track people who distribute infringing copies. The system is hardly foolproof, of course. Somebody could buy the book from its original owner and distribute it. Marking strategies are, in general, a weak form of security. However, the serial number solution is a more sensitive and sensible approach for publishers worried about infringement, and EFF applauds Memletics' decision to go forward with it.

Link

Mark Kriegsman sez, "A renegade programmer collective (of which I am a member) has ported the recently-open-sourced 'Quake 3 Arena' to the smallest platform yet: PocketPC. At 5 FPS, playing over a GPRS connection, you're not about to win any fragfests, but hey-- what else are Windows CE phones good for, anyway?" Link (Thanks, Mark!)

The Winchester Mystery House is one of my absolute favorite Bay Area tourist-attractions. Built by the widow of the Winchester rifle fortune, the old barn house had over 800 rooms added and removed over several decades in a crazed bid to confuse the ghosts of dead Indians slain by Winchester rifles whom the widow believed to be haunting her.

On this blog a (former?) Winchester Mystery House tour guide posts dozens and dozens of photos from inside and outside the house, including a bunch of off-limits stuff I'd never seen before (check out this room full of heads from a now-retired wax-museum!). The comment-boards on the posts are full of cool minutiae about the Mystery House, too. Link (Thanks, Brandon!)

Update: A reader points out that there's loads more Winchester Mystery House pix on Flickr.

I'm a committed user of NetNewsWire, a feedreader for the Mac that's got a clean, easy-to-use UI and is pretty responsive. The author of NNW, Brent Simmons, has been really excellent about following up on bug reports, something that has really given me ongoing confidence in the app.

Now NewsGator, a company that makes a Windows-based feedreader of the same name, has purchased Brent's company, Ranchero Software and hired Brent to go on developing NNW. This has got to be great news for all concerned -- Brent gets a little dough and more support to go on developing his great tools, Newsgator gets to add a badly needed Mac app to its lineup.

Congrats Brent! Looking forward to lots more NetNewsWire updates -- this is the app that lets me drink straight from the Internet firehose and I couldn't live without it. Link (Thanks, Mike and Daniel!)

Hard to say what I like so much about these glowing bathtubs and sinks, illuminated from within by colored lights. I think it's that they are basically full-sized bathroom fixtures designed with the same novelty aesthetic as a point-of-sale gewgaw like a flashlight-compass that's also a Pez dispenser. It takes a lot of guts to manufacture a tchotchke that weighs hundreds of pounds, takes up half a bathroom, and glows popsicle green. Link (via Popgadget)

Wednesday night in San Francisco, a crowd of very fortunate people will gather to hear three great minds speak in public together -- for the first time ever.

Freeman Dyson, Esther Dyson, and George Dyson (shown above, L-R) will be the guests of The Long Now Foundation, in a talk called "The Difficulty of Looking Far Ahead." The event is sold out, but die-hards, persist: there might just be a last-minute space or two. Starts at 7pm at Fort Mason. If any Boing Boing readers are lucky enough to be present, we hope you'll take notes, blog 'em, and drop us a url. Link.

An army sergeant walked into a Tucson bank and handed the teller a note that said he had a bomb in his mouth. Things went badly for the would-be robber and he ended up on his knees handcuffed to a pole with a robot probing his mouth for a bomb. There was no bomb.
Link (via Distractech)

The wild cool sounds continue on BB patron freak RU Sirius's MondoGlobo podcasting network. RU sayeth:

The latest RU Sirius Show features interviews with Beth Lisick (author of Everybody Into The Pool) and with my Counterculture Through The Ages book (just out in paperback) co-author Dan Joy.

Lisa Rein continues to do her Songs From The Commons show, featuring songs from Creative Commons and talk about the same.

Our most recent show, Blue Herring, features John Sanchez, famous for advising people about investing in Apple stock... advising people about investing in Apple stock... and generally shooting the shit.

Link

The Mind Molester is a small device that emits a high pitched beep every three minutes (kind of like a cell phone with low batteries. If you plant it under a piece of furniture, it is hard to find. I'm tempted to plant one of these things in the house of a neighbor who keeps me up with late parties.

This devious little device is designed for one sole purpose…..to drive people insane! And That is Just what this little device did.

The Mind Molester In Action: I decided to first plant it in the Living room right behind the tv so its sound would distinctly interupt anyone’s viewing expierience as well as be masked by the tv sound. The first beep came 5 minutes after I planted it followed by the 3 minute interval of beeps that come once it sets into its sequence. For the first few beeps I got nothing. But then people started asking what that beeping was. Next thing I knew I was watching them rummage through the room looking for it. They dug out the couch and chairs, opened the drawers and everything. Alls I could do was try not to laugh. It was quite amusing. And so for a few hours I left it there and drove everyone nuts. They never could locate the source of the beeping. The 3 minute interval that I at first thought was too long was perfect. Just enough to get their attention and just when they give up the search it’d come back and aggrivate them. I loved it!.

Link (via Random Good Stuff)

Excellent collection of mind bending Dr. Strange black light posters from the early 70s.
Link (via Bubble Gum Fink)

The LP of the week on Basic Hip is "Music from Outer Space" (Frank Comstock, 1962), with some nice theremin sounds. I love the cover. Even with the Cold War heating up, the early 1960s were optimistic times.
Link (via PCL Linkdump)

Stefan Jones says: A proposed bill (PDF of text here) by Indiana Republicans would limit assisted reproduction services to people who have a "Gestational Certificate."

"It's probably not a surprise that only married heterosexuals would qualify, but the other information the bill suggests be collected reads like something from Eugenics manual:

Sec. 12.

(a) Before intended parents may commence assisted reproduction, the intended parents shall obtain an assessment from a licensed child placing agency in the intended parents' state of residence.

(b) The assessment must follow the normal practice for assessments in a domestic infant adoption procedure and must include the following information:

(1) The intended parents' purpose for the assisted reproduction.

(2) The fertility history of the intended parents, including the pregnancy history and response to pregnancy losses of the woman.

(3) An acknowledgment by the intended parents that the child may not be the biological child of at least one (1) of the intended parents depending on the type of artificial reproduction procedure used.

(4) A list of the intended parents' family and friend support system.

(5) A plan for sharing any known genetic information with the child.

(6) Personal information about each intended parent, including the following:

(A) Family of origin.

(B) Values.

(C) Relationships.

(D) Education.

(E) Employment and income.

(F) Hobbies and talents.

(G) Physical description, including the general health of the individual.

(H) Birth verification.

(I) Personality description, including the strengths and weaknesses of each intended parent.

"If this passes, expect follow-up legislation that bans turkey basters." Link

Here's a lovely time-lapse photograph of the recent solar eclipse, shot by Nils van der Burg in Madrid. He explains, "What you see is the form of the sun when the moon was passing in front of it, then the shadow of the moon is reflected through the leaves of the trees." Link
(thanks, John Parres)

Update: Here's a video clip of the scene, cool! Link

Reader comment: Tom Radcliffe says,

The solar eclipse photos are very cool. The projection of images by leaves in this way is an example of a natural pin-hole camera. The small gaps between the leaves act as "pinholes" in the sense that they are very much smaller than the distance to the ground (and very very much smaller than the distance to the sun!)

Reader comment: M. Merrick says:

Just a little correction: The photograph is not a time-lapse photography. In fact, it probably had a fairly quick shutter speed in order to catch the light cast through the trees without the blur of them moving in the breeze. It's still a neat-o eclipse photo though!

Reader comment: Terry Karney replies:

I just wanted to clarify M. Merrick's comment. Time lapse photography can have high shutter speeds. Time lapse is the use of multiple photographs, seperated in time, of the same object; to show changes in the object. The ones most of us are familiar with are series (often in films) of plants growing, or butterflies emerging.

Reader comment:

Wow! Clearly, Spain was the place to be if you wanted to see this solar eclipse in its maximum beauty.

Boing Boing reader Enrique in Madrid shot the photo here and below, and says,

Just to show you it was an amazingly common effect during the eclipse I posted some pics. And just another photographic comment: its true that it is not a time-lapse photo, but anyway the shutter speed could not be very fast... there´s not much light during an eclipse!!. (anyway no problem with the breeze, there wasn´t any at the moment).

The problem with previous cameras-in-a-pill is that once you swallowed it, the doctors couldn't control its movement during endoscopy procedures. Researchers at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa, Italy have built a one-half inch long teleoperated pill outfitted with pincer-like clamps. (They outline the invention in the current issue of Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering. Link)

From New Scientist:

These (clamps) help prevent the device slipping on mucus in the intestine as it moves along, but are too small to damage the soft tissues, says Menciassi. The capsule can park at any site of interest by releasing a clamp with two 5-millimetre-long jaws, each with teeth. These grab onto the gut wall tightly enough to resist the muscular pulsations trying to push the device along.

Link to New Scientist article, Link to previous post about a swallowable robot from Carnegie Mellon

Milky seas, large areas of seawater that glow white blue with bioluminescent bacteria, have been part of mariner tales for centuries. Researchers from the Naval Research Laboratory have now located the first ever photographs of a milky sea, snapped by the US Defense Meteorological Satellite Program off the Somali coast in 1995. According to Science News, this particular milky sea was the size of Connecticut.
Link

UPDATE: Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute scientist Steve Haddock, one of the authors on the milky seas study, sends this very cool image. He says, "I also wanted to clarify that the light produced by the bacteria is actually blue, not white. It is white in the graphic because of the monochromatic sensor we used, and it can appear white to the eye because the rods in our eye (used for night vision) don't discriminate color." Steve also points us to a longer BBC News article about the research.
Link

UPDATE: Steve Haddock sends a link to a more recent UCSB page with much more information on this topic. Link

Photographer and train junkie Scott Lothes is traveling in China, seeking out the history of steam trains in that country, and snapping lots of photos. He's been having some technical probs blogging from inside China, because the blog service he uses appears to be blocked with government 'net filters. Troubleshooting blog-format minutiae on the road is extra tough right now because, Scott explains:

It's rather hard to be certain when the screen is in Mandarin (traveling too light and cheap for a laptop, so I rely on 'net cafes -- always a unique social experience). In the meantime, here's a photo for Boing Boing -- it's actually of a steam train in China and not [the one BB's been posting of] a diesel train in West Virginia!

Heh! Thanks Scott, and here's a full-size version of that photo: Link. (Thanks, Kevin Scanlon and Dory Adams!)

Previously:
Blogging China's elusive steam trains

Reader comment: Nick says,

Some friends and i were channel surfing one day and came across the "China Adventure" episode of 'trains and locomotives' on the RFDTV channel. Basically, all we saw were scenes of steam locomotives rolling across the middle of nowhere in China with no captions and very little commentary; however, we were captured for a good half hour before realizing that we were still watching a train on tv. This is a link to buy the dvd for anyone who wishes they could join Scott Lothes in China. Link

Following up on yesterday's crap-o news that KCRW-FM in LA dropped the NPR program "Day to Day" (I'm the show's regular tech contributor), Boing Boing reader Andrew says:

Even as KCRW abandons "Day to Day", KQED-FM in San Francisco and Sacramento has added it to the schedule. It begins today (October 3) at 11 pm PDT.

Link. That's awesome news!, but -- boy, the timeslot sure sucks. Dunno about you, but 11pm weeknights is reserved for a special man in my life. ‹le sigh›.

Regarding KCRW's deletion of Day to Day from its lineup, some BoingBoing readers wrote in to complain that all publicly available e-mail addresses for feedback on the KCRW.com website either bounce back, or send back auto-replies indicating that nobody can respond to your e-mail, but would you please send money for a pledge drive that happened in August. Boing Boing friend and intrepid sleuth Shawn Sites says:

When I called KCRW about the three emails not working, they gave me jennifer.ferro@kcrw.org to send it to and that one didn't get returned.

Reader Justin asks,

Considering that Day to Day is produced in LA, I'm surprised KCRW pulled it. I assume they're still planning on producing it there?

"Day to Day" is made in LA, but was never produced at KCRW to begin with. The program is produced in the studios of NPR West, in Culver City. And among the more than 100 stations nationwide that carry it, KPCC in LA still airs "Day to Day" at 9am weekdays.

From the, er, "All-Ages Kirk/Spok Archive" comes this stunning artwork by Anki. The title is "Cosmic Bath."
Link to larger version (Thanks, Robert Cook!)

You know, I could really use a photo of Darth Vader strangling Elmo right about now: Link. The image comes from a weekly photo caption contest on starwars.com that features images gathered from fan events and Lucasfilm archives.
(Thanks, Bonnie Burton!)

Reader comment: Joshua Kidd says,

Chewbacca has been making the rounds lately. Here's a pic of him throwing out the first pitch at fenway park. Link

Previously: Moment of vintage Star Wars zen -- Chewie on drums.

When I was a kid, getting stuck in quicksand was a fun imaginary fear. Then the 1980s happened and quicksand went the way of mirrored sunglasses and In Search Of... In this weeks issue of the scientific journal Nature, researchers look at how quicksand swallows people, or rather doesn't. From today's New York Times:

Hit with sudden force from, say, a hapless victim, the quicksand gel turns to liquid. Then salt causes clay particles to stick to one another instead of the sand grains, with the result that a victim ends up surrounded by densely packed sand.

The force needed to pull out a person immersed in quicksand is about the same needed to lift a car, (University of Amsterdam physicist Daniel) Bonn said. The trick for escaping is to slowly wiggle the feet and legs, allowing water to flow in.

Link to NYT article, Link to more info in News@Nature (Thanks, DMD!)

Boing Boing reader pekingduck says,

As a resident of Guangzhou, China, and a dog owner, would you please consider helping me to get the word out about the mass/forced culling of pet dogs by the Guangzhou govt. I wrote a post about this barbaric and officially-sanctioned government policy: "Guangzhou pet dogs beaten to death by government teams"

Link

These Dutch houses are designed to float if the ground they sit on gets flooded, rising with the tidewater. Regine at WMMNA has a great post on the burgeoning amphibious house movement. Link

Lighted bedroom slippers are a damned clever use for LED technology. However, these suffer from a distinct lack of bunny-ears. Link (via Popgadget)

Nick sez, "The Daily Show is to be shown in the UK (albeit on a one day delay, maybe while they FedEx the tapes!) on new digital station More4, starting next Monday." Link (Thanks, Nick!)

About a month ago, a friend of mine took a job with a secretive Marc Andreesen startup called 24 Hour Laundry and then refused to tell anyone what the company did. Today, 24 Hour Laundry has launched its (first?) product, Ning, which is a toolkit for building your own social software apps. It looks pretty cool -- a platform for making little throwaway or highly specialized web-stuff.

I really like its emphasis on cloning others' projects and then tweaking them to suit your own needs. It really reminds me of the old days of the Web, when you'd see something cool, View Source on the page to get how it was accomplished, paste it into your own page, and tweak it to your heart's content. That's how everyone learned to do everything, and it made for a fast revolution.

As all the cool stuff has migrated to the back-end, the View Source method has become less and less useful. This brings that all back -- I hope.

Ning is a free online service (or, as we like to call it, a Playground) for people to build and run social applications. Social "apps" are web applications that enable anyone to match, transact, and communicate with other people.

Our goal with Ning is to see what happens when you open things up and make it easy to create, share, and discover new social apps. These might include for any city, your own take on Craigslist...for any passion, your own take on Match.com...for any interest, your own take on Zagat...for any event, your own take on Flickr...for any school, your own take on the Facebook...for any topic, your own take on del.icio.us...for any mammal, your own take on Hot or Not or Kitten War.

You choose the app, decide for whom it's most relevant, create the categories, define the features, choose the language - or just clone an app that's already up and running on Ning - and be on your way.

Link (via Waxy!)

Gopal Hadar is an Indian man who was badly malnourished as a child, which led to a hormone imbalance that left him emaciated all his life. His career has been covering his body in charcoal in order to look like a living skeleton and travel from town to town, pretending to be a ghost and scaring children as a sort of precautionary entertainer. Most of the money he earns he spends on hemp, which he is "addicted" to smoking.

"Wherever I go children call me 'Uncle Ghost' and peep at me through windows," a smiling Haldar said. "Women and children are even scared of going out at night in case they meet me."

His friend Sunil Chakraborty helps him perform on candle-lit stages in Sunderban villages yet to be reached by electricity and where people prefer to confine themselves in their homes after sundown.

He says it takes him only 10 to 15 minutes to do his makeup and transform his emaciated self into a ghost-like creature -- mainly by painting his sunken face, protruding ribs and skeletal limbs with soot.

Link (Thanks, Alex!)

The hated Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) makes it a crime to tell people how to get around the locks on digital works. This indiscriminate legislation means that all kinds of public-interest reverse-engineering is off-limits to the public -- for example, hacking open the list of banned sites in censorware packages that are mandated for use in public libraries, in order to determine whether our tax-dollars are being wisely spent.

The US Copyright Office is holding its third set of hearings on anticircumvention exceptions. This is something you -- and everyone you know -- can participate in, submitting written petitions for exemptions for personal backup; for fair use remixing, criticism, and education; for providing assistive information to disabled people, etc.

EFF Pioneer Award Winner Seth Finkelstein has written a citizen's guide to petitioning the Copyright Office on this subject, which you can read here.

There's a common view of technical people, that participation in government falls somewhere between functionally useless and morally perverse. It's easy to deride the clueless congresscreatures, and take comfort in an idea of building an uncensorable realm located in some other dimension. And it's not encouraging to be one letter in a pile of mail to a Senator, or a few dollars versus the economic clout of copyright industries. But not all aspects of influencing government are so one-sided and unbalanced.

To begin with, making a submission in this DMCA rulemaking process is comparatively easy. Whatever gains are made, are won at a trivially small cost. This is a matter of drafting a letter, with some thought and detail. It's not a multi-million dollar lobbying campaign. It's not a lawsuit which drains someone's life. It's not anyone going to jail. Rather, it's essentially drafting a letter, the same commitment as happens every single day on so many mailing-lists and weblogs.

But unlike letters to congressional offices, these public comments are truly read by the people who make the policy. That is in fact one of the most astonishing aspects visible in the text of the earlier rulemaking results. The policy-maker may not have agreed with the arguments, may in fact have dismissed them; but there's enough referencing and mention of the reasons for the results so as to make it clear that the viewpoints of the public were heard. And this consideration doesn't even require a large bribe, I mean, campaign contribution. Not all parts of the government are equally inaccessible. It turns out these policy-making determinations are surprisingly amenable to informed citizens making a difference.

Link (Thanks, Seth!)

Here's a cheap trick to help your bot pass a Turing Test: have it imitate the person it's trying to fool -- turns out we believe things that act like us.

Participants in the study listened to an argument given by an artificial agent that either mimicked the listeners' head movements at a four second delay or repeated the movements of another participant. Those listeners who were mimicked viewed their agents as more persuasive and likable than those who listened to agents that did not mimic them.

"In addition, participants interacting with mimicking agents on average did not turn their heads such that the agents was outside of their view," researchers Jeremy N. Bailenson and Nick Yee state. At times, those not being mimicked did turn their heads away. The researchers also found that although participants knew they were being spoken to be a nonhuman agent, most did not notice the mimicry.

Link