I've been opening my bananas stem-side first all my life. On Friday, David showed me how monkeys open bananas. They pinch them on the other end. Boy, it's a lot easier. I'll never open a banana the dumb way again.

Reader comment: Kevin says: "I learned this genius monkey technique a few years ago and it was a defining moment in my life. An added bonus is that the stem end of the banana pops out easily once you've eaten down that far."

Pesco comment: All the credit goes to Sean Ness who taught me the trick on Friday.

Reader comment: Adam says: "This is an article written for Slate.com by my college economics professor - Steven Landsburg. He attempts to use economics to explain why people peel bananas differently than monkeys. It might be an interesting follow up to your recent post about peeling bananas."

Reader comment: Steve has a video that shows how bananas can be split into three longitudinal pieces.

I've linked to the wonderful work of sculptor Jessica Joslin in the past. She sent the following note to me today (Click on thumbnails for enlargement) :

"Happy" is the first of the beasts that was made to commemorate a specific pet, using it's actual bones.

Happy was a cranky old dachschund, who had belonged to a couple of my collectors, about 10 years ago.

They found his skeleton while wandering in a vacant lot, where their former home used to be. They had the bones stored in a closet, until they told me about it...

Link

The robots of Survival Research Laboratories have landed in Chinatown, and they're ready to down your liver with a nice chianti. Here, Treo snapshot of several disassembled Sneaky Soldiers inside the Chung King Road where tonight's gallery show takes place.

The event is a fundraiser for SRL. Some 'bots and parts are available for sale, as are luscious large-scale photographic prints from past performances (also shown in this phonecam snap). And unlike the machines, photo prints do not eat oil and belch flame. Link to event info.

Previously on Boing Boing: Xeni Tech on NPR: SRL's robotic mayhem

EFF has put up an Action Center item for writing directly to your US Senator about the proposal to turn every entertainment technology over to the FCC to be regulated to ensure that it doesn't unduly disrupt Hollywood's business-model:

I am writing to you as a constituent, a consumer, and technology user to express my deep concern about the broadcast flag and audio flag - two wide-reaching governmental technology mandates that are being placed before your committee on behalf of the entertainment industry.

The proposed language for these flags would give the FCC new and far-reaching powers to control not just digital TV and radio, but how all digital media is handled on digital networks.

Such controls on the market aren't fair to consumers, who would have to pay extra or beg for "authorization" for rights that they traditioanlly have legally possessed. Tech mandates such as these will seriously cripple the promise of emerging media. New American technology companies will need to spend months asking permission to innovate from entrenched interests among the studio and record labels, which would have every incentive to impede progress.

And for what? These flags are, by the entertainment industry's own admission, the merest speed-bumps to serious infringers. Illegal copies of both audio and video will be made and distributed on the networks. Only private, legitimate, uses and bold new innovative technologies will be extinguished by the proposals.

Please stand up against these unparalleled and pre-emptive regulations on new media, our public airwaves, and America's multi-billion dollar technology industry. Please oppose the broadcast and audio flags, and vote against the Digital Content Protection Act if it appears before the Senate Commerce Committee.

Link

Hey, New Yorkers: my friend Patrick Nielsen Hayden (co-editor of the kickass Making Light blog) is having a CD launch party for his band Whisperado this coming Wednesday:

[T]his coming Wednesday we'll be throwing a CD release party downstairs at the Cornelia Street Cafe in conjunction with fearless leader Jon Sobel's monthly "Soul of the Blues" event.

Opening at 8:30 will be singer-songwriter Melissa Mulligan, followed by Bostonite Adam Payne (warning: link plays sound). We'll take the stage around 10 PM, and we hope to see you there.

The Cornelia Street Cafe is at 29 Cornelia Street, between Bleecker and West 4th in the heart of the West Village. Cover charge will be $10, which (assuming we get our advance box from the plant in time) will include a copy of our six-song CD Some Other Place, soon to be available on CD Baby, the iTunes Music Store, and directly from this weblog, among other fine retail channels. Watch this space. Okay, you can stop watching this space.

Link

The ivory skull handle on this rosewood walking cane is quite amazing. Circa 1900, the skull was hand-carved from ivory. Apparently, the hinges allow the top of the skull to open up for storage. The auction estimate is US$2000-$3000.
Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne Rauback!)

Update: Here's EFF's action-center item for writing to your Senator about this.

The Senate has introduced the "Digital Content Protection Act of 2006," a bill that will create "Broadcast Flags" for all digital radio and television, leading to FCC oversight of all new digital media technologies from iPods and PSPs to TVs and DVD recorders.

Under the DCPA proposal, digital media technologies would be restricted to using technologies that had been certified by the FCC as being not unduly disruptive to entertainment industry business-models.

There are two things to be certain of this century:

1. Everything that can be expressed as bits will be expressed as bits

2. Bits will only get easier to copy

The entertainment companies are convinced that their businesses depend on copy-proof bits. This is ridiculous: there's no such thing, there never will be.

Governments that try to protect businesses that demand copy-proof bits are like governments that try to protect businesses on the sides of volcanoes, who demand an immediate end to business-disrupting lava.

If the current entertainment companies can't or won't adapt to a world of bits, that's too bad. Let them die, and let new businesses that thrive in the new technological reality take their place. If you can't stand the heat, get off the volcano.

Back in the mainframe days, IBM made its money by giving away computers below cost and then charging a bundle for keyboards and printers. Hitachi killed the mainframe business by introducing cheap peripherals for IBM mainframes.

Killing mainframes didn't kill computers: it made them better. IBM was forced to get into the minicomputer business, which led to the personal computer.

If computer industry complaints got the same attention as the entertainment crybabies get from lawmakers, there'd be 10,000 computers total in the world, running punchcards, with three companies making modest sums servicing them and shipping a new model every three years.

Hollywood's crybaby capitalists accuse us of being "communists" with one breath, and in the next, they go begging to Congress to turn the FCC into device czars who keep the market from being disrupted by innovation.

Andy Setos, the Fox executive who invented the Broadcast Flag, once told me that his objective was "a well-mannered marketplace." The entertainment industry's version of a planned economy is bad policy.

Send a strong signal to your lawmaker: if you break my TV, radio, and computer, I will campaign tirelessly for anyone who will promise to throw you out of office and undo your deeds.

Watch this space for opportunities to write to your Senator and send this message. Link (Thanks, Alex!)

Update Jami sez, "The author of the new bill to break our televisions, computers, and mp3 players, Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon, has been paid tens of thousands of dollars to do it. The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) has been lobbying hard for the sole ability to decide how hard it's gonna be for us to listen to an mp3. The NAB has thrown nearly $250,000 at Republican candidates this year alone. NAB's money stuck to Gordon Smith."

Update: Here's EFF's action-center item for writing to your Senator about this.

Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists has posted the US National Security Agency's guide to Sanitizing Word and PDF docs.

Section 2: Procedures to Sanitize a Word Document
The following steps were tested with MS Word 2000 and Acrobat 5.0 and 6.0. Other recent versions should work similarly. While time-consuming, these steps give the highest confidence that sensitive information is not hidden in the released document. Copying the text and images into a blank document is a good way to manually review a sensitive document, since sections can be copied over one at a time as they are reviewed.

668K PDF Link (Thanks, Jack!)

I'm speaking about science fiction and Europe's Broadcast Flag at the Stitch and Split culture event in Antwerp, Belgium next Tuesday:

American entertainment companies say they're fighting piracy, but they're going at it by punishing the innocent to get at the guilty. A pan-European digital-television restrictions proposal will turn the studios from companies that can control copying of movies into companies that can control the design of all DTV devices, that get to define how big your family is allowed to be, that get to take away all the rights you get under copyright law and sell them back to you, one painful, expensive dribble at a time. It's not really a business plan: more like a urinary tract infection. Europe's coming Broadcast Flag will ban open source for DTV, break the devices in your living room, and turn you into a truly captive audience. Get your torch and pitchfork, for this genuinely sucks -- and you shouldn't take it lying down!

Link

MusicBrainz, the free music metadata service, has inked a its first commercial deal, with a social networking service in Spain. MusicBrainz provides an alternative to Gracenote's CDDB (which collected titles and track-names for millions of CDs from the public and then locked it all away behind a paywall with restrictive licensing terms), that is free for use and administered by a charitable nonprofit (I sit on MusicBrainz's Board of Directors).

To sustain itself, MusicBrainz offers a low-cost commercial, high-reliability service to companies that want to get access to its data in realtime (the same data-sets are made available after a slight delay).

The MusicBrainz platform is built on Free/Open Source Software, and there's an active community of developers for it; the MetaBrainz charity takes donations from grateful users of the service -- thus volunteer efforts are sustaining an important alternative in a market that is presently dominated by a single, bullying player.

Linkara is a social networking site similar to Friendster here in the US. However, Linkara goes far beyond what Friendster has done and offers its users to connect on their interests in books, movies, and now music. Users can search for music/books/movies, rate them and find other people who share similar tastes.

Link (Thanks, David!)

David Byrne, the former frontman for Talking Heads (and one of my musical heroes), has published a call to boycott DRM CDs, citing the Sony DRM fiasco. Sony-BMG has been embroiled in a multi-million-dollar scandal over its use of copy-restriction technologies that covertly spy on users, compromise the security of their computers, and render their machines unstable.

So, first they start off suing their customers, and now they are maliciously making it hard for their customers to even listen to music, and they will cripple your music and media player to boot. These guys deserve to go out of business, they obviously don't love music, and they don't understand their own customers. They must have a deathwish or be run by....who? FEMA? Rumsfeld? Bin Laden?

Link (Thanks, David K!)

The Slanket is a polar-fleece blanket with integrated, outsized sleeves that let you eat popcorn, work the remote, or hold your phone while remaining safely shrouded in blankie. Link (via Cribcandy)

A Boing Boing reader has produced PRO-USER ZEALOT stickers that make fun of the Canadian Liberal Party Member of Parliament's denunciation of "pro-user zealots and Electronic Frontier Foundation members" at an all-candidates meeting.

Sam Bulte, whose last term in office was marked by the introduction of extremist copyright proposals that mirror the US system's failures, made the denunciation after she was asked if she would turn away funding from the entertainment companies she would be in charge of regulating should she win the election.

People support me because they support my voice for the artist and I will not allow Michael Geist, pro-user zealots and Electronic Frontier Foundation members to intimidate me into silence my voice.

Link (Thanks, Brad!)

Seed Magazine, my hands-down favorite science magazine, has launched a network of topical science blogs, covering the leading edge of science and culture. Topics include:

• Adventures in Ethics and Science
• Aetiology
• Afarensis
• Cognitive Daily
• Deltoid
• Dispatches from the Culture Wars
• Evolgen
• Gene Expression
• The Intersection
• Living the Scientific Life
• No Se Nada Commentary
• Pharyngula
• Stranger Fruit
• Uncertain Principles

These are going straight into my RSS reader. Link (Thanks, Luke!)

These colorful papercraft sushi morsels are made all the cooler by the tiny words tiled on them. Print the PDFs, cut them out and glue them together -- there's even a paper mechanical sushi plate that spins around when you turn its handle. Link (via Paper Forest)

When I get a cold, I immediately reach for the Zicam. As I've stated before, I consider it a cure for the common cold.

Today, Matrixx, makers of Zicam agreed to pay $12 million to settle a class action suit filed by 300 people who claim Zicam permanently damaged their sense of smell.

Matrixx has long insisted that Zicam does not cause anosmia:

Matrixx asserted that any research linking nasal products containing zinc to the onset of anosmia were erroneous because the compound found in the 1930s products was concentrated zinc sulfate as opposed to the zinc gluconate found in Zicam. Zinc sulfate “is a mineral salt that reacts with water to produce a strong acid (sulfuric acid) and zinc oxide,” while “zinc gluconate is a weak organic salt that dissolves to form positively charged zinc ions and negatively charged gluconate – a naturally occurring, non-toxic compound found in all human tissue.”

In 2004, Matrixx issued a press release claiming that studies have show Zicam to be effective in reducing cold symptoms without affectting sense of smell.

In no clinical trial of intranasal zinc gluconate gel products has there been a single report of lost or diminished olfactory function (sense of smell). Rather, the safety and efficacy of zinc gluconate for the treatment of symptoms related to the common cold have been well established in two double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized clinical trials. In fact, in neither study were there any reports of anosmia related to the use of this compound. The overall incidence of adverse events associated with zinc gluconate was extremely low, with no statistically significant difference between the adverse event rates for the treated and placebo subsets.

A multitude of environmental and biologic influences are known to affect the sense of smell. Chief among them is the common cold. As a result, the population most likely to use cold remedy products is already at increased risk of developing anosmia. Other common causes of olfactory dysfunction include age, nasal and sinus infections, head trauma, anatomical obstructions, and environmental irritants.

I don't know if Zicam causes anosmia or not, but my sense of smell is fine and I've used the stuff for years. If Zicam gets taken off the market, I plan to get together with other Zicam fans and start homebrewing the stuff. Link

Worksafe Link, worksafe explanation. (Thanks, Jim Flanagan!)

On today's edition of the NPR News program Day to Day, I spoke with host Alex Chadwick about the Bush administration's request that a federal judge force Google to provide records of what its users search for online. It is believed the Justice Department's goal is to collect data to support the Child Online Protection Act, a law the administration believes would help block minors' access to online pornography. Link to audio.

Link to "Xeni Tech" archives on Day to Day.

Yesterday, I asked Justice Department spokesperson Charles Miller which search companies other than Google the administration sought search data from, back in 2005. Mr. Miller said that in addition to Google -- which has refused to provide the requested information -- AOL, Yahoo, and MSN were also asked, and those three companies complied. Andrew Weinstein, Vice President of Corporate Communications at America Online, tells Boing Boing:

I saw in your posting that the DOJ is indicating that AOL complied with their subpoena for user search records last fall. That is not accurate.

We did receive a subpoena from the DOJ last fall, but we did not comply with the requests made in that subpoena. Instead, we gave them a list of aggregate and anonymous search terms that did not include any results nor any personally-identifiable information.

That same type of anonymous search data is commonly used by AOL and every other major search engine for features like our "Hot Searches" box and "top searches" features, and there are absolutely no privacy implications with sharing it. (Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Watch has a whole page of all of the public places you can find that same type of data. What People Search For - Most Popular Keywords )

In short, it's not hard to find, and it was not what the DOJ originally requested.

Search Engine Watch editor Danny Sullivan replies,

I'm not buying it! They keep going on about not giving personal info -- but they weren't asked for that. They were asked for terms, and they gave terms, so they complied at least partially.

Link

Previously:
DoJ search requests: Google said no; Yahoo, AOL, MSN yes.
DoJ demands user search records from Google

 

London's Science Learning Centre surveyed 11,000 adolescents about their opinion of science and scientists. The results they've reported so far are a bummer. Meanwhile, the numbers of 16-18 year-olds taking physics, chemistry, and math A-level courses have dropped big time over the last 15 years. From the BBC News:

Around 70% of the 11-15 year olds questioned said they did not picture scientists as "normal young and attractive men and women"...

They found around 80% of pupils thought scientists did "very important work" and 70% thought they worked "creatively and imaginatively". Only 40% said they agreed that scientists did "boring and repetitive work".

Over three quarters of the respondents thought scientists were "really brainy people".

Among those who said they would not like to be scientists, reasons included: "Because you would constantly be depressed and tired and not have time for family", and "because they all wear big glasses and white coats and I am female".

Link

UPDATE: Chris Null of Filmcritic.com writes that the BBC News had a similar article two weeks ago telling "a much funnier story, in which researchers asked children to draw a picture of a scientist: 80 to 90% of the kids draw the prototypical 'mad scientist,' 'with wild hair, lab coat, staring eyes, coke-bottle glasses, a withered hand; in some cases they've even written the word 'MAD' with an arrow pointing at the scientist.'" Link

A new study from the UK's Health Protection Agency, the largest of its kind, debunks the association between cellphone use and brain tumors. (Note that some scientists warn that any long-term health effects may not yet be visible.) The latest conclusions came from interviews with 966 people with tumors and 1716 "apparently healthy" individuals. From New Scientist:

The study did find an association between the location of a tumour and side of the head that patients said they most often used to make calls. But when the team considered handedness – which correlates to the side of the head to which cellphones are most commonly held – there was no link.

In light of the overall study results the researchers believe the association was an anomaly – they suggest these patients most probably misremembered their cellphone usage, in an effort to explain the tumour.

Link

I absolutely love looking through artists' sketchbooks. The informal drawings of a great illustrator can be an excellent way to see the world through her or his eyes. Tom Judd's Everyday drawing project, consisting of a page a day for a year, is mind-blowing. (His new project is called Once-A-Week and that week's drawing will be auctioned every Saturday on eBay.) From his description of Everyday:

365 PAGES AGO I HAD A VERY SILLY IDEA. Draw a page everyday for one year. Each day I spent around 1 hour on the page, sometimes more, sometimes less. There was never any planning or preparation, I would just go at it whenever I had a spare moment in my day and had something I needed to write or draw. Some of the drawings are observational and some are just plain weird. Monsters and things seem to crop up a lot (robots too). I have no explanation for this and don't really care because its my book and I drew what ever I wanted on that particular day.

Link (via Drawn!)

Culture critic Mark Dery has posted his funny, short, sharp take on the Dada-esque poetry that emerges from spammers' attempts to beat filters by throwing random words in the email. From Mark's blog post:

...If Marcel Duchamp had lived to read spam, the man who nonchalantly proclaimed snowshovels and hatracks "found" sculptures would surely have edited a Library of America anthology of spam, the signature genre of our times (not to mention our only truly new literary form, one written increasingly by machines). Printed, as always, on acid-free paper and set in Galliard type, bound in the finest binding cloth, and topped off with a ribbon marker, the better to mark memorable passages, such a volume would be grist for a million dissertation mills:

automat see ammonia try petrifaction in capistrano
be mosaic !
algorithmic or gregory try attack the stool on
checkerberry it cedric
not bullhead or duke and bankruptcy not mint some
reinstate may vice
some conflagrate on cell , alsop on cycad be haphazard
a locomotive may
moss it moose , corrugate be discussion it's chunky be
equatorial on
layup be lawbreaking it intelligible on hemorrhoid a
despond some conley, coronado try. Not, go here...

Link

Snip from a story written by Jill Carroll one year ago, for American Journalism Review. Carroll was abducted in Iraq on January 7, 2006, while working as a foreign correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor.

Only a story of this enormity, with nothing less than America's global credibility, the stability of the Middle East and countless lives at stake, could be worth risking personal safety and financial solvency to cover it as a freelancer. (...) Covering the war gives journalists an opportunity to recall the noblest tenets of their profession and fulfill the public service role of journalism.

The sense that I could do more good in the Middle East than in the U.S. drove me to move to Jordan six months before the war to learn as much about the region as possible before the fighting began. All I ever wanted to be was a foreign correspondent, so when I was laid off from my reporting assistant job at the Wall Street Journal in August 2002, it seemed the right time to try to make it happen. There was bound to be plenty of parachute journalism once the war started, and I didn't want to be a part of that.

Idealistic, for sure, but I am not the only one.

Link to full text.

Previously:
Carroll's blogger / journo pals continue to rally for her release

Worksafe link. (worksafe explanation).

Here's a HOWTO for converting a pinball machine's light-up playfield into an electrified coffee-table; the recipe calls for a beat-up playfield from a nonfunctional pinball machine, which is cool, since it avoids the guilt associated with decommissioning a glorious old pinball machine.

Step 1 Materials List

Here are the materials you will need for this project

1 pinball playfield
2 side pieces of wood cut to fit
2 end pieces of wood cut to fit
Moulding to be used for the top to hold the glass on
Tempered glass cut to fit
Four legs and hardware to attach
6V battery
Rocker switch
Screws and nails
Wood glue
Drill

Link (via Cribcandy)

A radical right-wing group has compiled a black-list of progressive UCLA professors and it is offering a bounty of $100 to students who record their lectures; the group intends to use these lectures "expose" the professors as "radicals." The Bruin Alumni Association posted the offer of the bounty to its website; its finances reportedly come primarily from a $22,000 gift from to its founder, Andrew Jones. The move has spooked many of the group's advisors, three of whom have resigned in disgust. One of the resigners is hardly a stranger to extremist politics: former Republican congressman James Rogan was one of the ringleaders of the Clinton impeachment circus, but even he doesn't have the stomach for this.

Jones told Reuters that he is out to "restore an atmosphere of respectful political discourse on campus" and says his efforts are aimed at academics who proselytize students from either side of the ideological spectrum, conservative or liberal.

"We are concerned solely with indoctrination, one-sided presentation of ideological controversies and unprofessional classroom behavior," Jones said on his Web site.

Jones' site describes his campaign as "dedicated to exposing UCLA's most radical professors" and his list of the university's "worst of the worst" singles out only professors he says hold left-wing views.

Link

Google has rebuffed to an outrageous demand by BellSouth, in which the phone company proposed to charge Google for access to its customers. Bill Smith of Bell South told reporters that he wanted "to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc." Google has responded with an unequivocal no -- a flat refusal to pay blood-money to carriers to keep them from discriminating against its services. Honestly, what the hell is BellSouth thinking? The whole point of an ISP is that it delivers the same packets as every other ISP; anything else is substandard. There's only one Google, but T1s come and go.

Google's Barry Schnitt told Paul in an email: "Google is not discussing sharing of the costs of broadband networks with any carrier. We believe consumers are already paying to support broadband access to the Internet through subscription fees and, as a result, consumers should have the freedom to use this connection without limitations."

Link (via /.)

A mysterious man appears at Edgar Allan Poe's grave every year on his birthday, January 19, and leaves flowers and cognac as a memorial. It's not known who he is, nor how he gets in, and every year his ceremony gets more difficult as crowds of gawkers crowd around the cemetary, hoping to catch and unmask him:

"In letting people know about this tribute, I've been contributing to these people's desire to catch this guy," Jerome said. "It's such a touching tribute, and it's been disrupted by the actions of a few people trying to interfere and expose this guy."

The cryptic visits began in 1949. Jerome has seen the ceremony every January 19 since 1976. Poe was born in 1809.

Link

58-year-old Wham-O Inc. -- the company behind such iconic American toys as Frisbee, Hula Hoop, Silly String, Hacky Sack and Slip 'N Slide -- has been acquired by an affiliate of Hong Kong toy distributor Cornerstone Overseas Investments Ltd. for an undisclosed sum. Link

Update: Earlier today, I asked a Justice Department spokesperson which search engines other than Google received requests to provide search records. The answer: Yahoo, AOL, and MSN were also asked to supply search records information, and all complied. Google did not, and that is why the DoJ asked a federal judge on Wednesday to order the company to do so.

Another fact to consider as you sift through news coverage: Justice is not requesting this data in the course of a criminal investigation, but in order to defend its argument that the Child Online Protection Act is constitutionally sound.

It seems apparent that Google objected to the request not for privacy reasons, but on grounds that the request was too broad and burdensome. Privacy advocates I spoke to today, including attorney Sherwin Siy at EPIC, say while the DoJ's request would not identify individual users, the scope and nature of this request sets a troubling precedent. Today, they argue, only search strings and urls; tomorrow, perhaps, the IP addresses of all users who typed in "Osama Bin Laden."

Update 2: Here are PDF copies of the documents filed on Jan. 18 by Justice Department attorneys in Gonzales v. Google, Inc.: Motion to Compel, Declaration of Joel McElvain, and Declaration of Philip Stark.

Update 4: An AOL spokesperson disputes the Justice Department's statement that it complied with records request. More here.

Over at SearchEngineWatch, Danny Sullivan has an extensive and much-updated post about news that the Justice Department demanded search records data from Google....

---

------

Google has refused to comply with the subpoena. A motion has been filed this week by US Department Of Justice to force Google to hand over the data. In particular, the Bush administration wanted one million random web addresses and records of all Google searches for a one week period. The government apparently wants to estimate how much pornography shows up in the searches that children do. Here's a thought. If you want to measure how much porn is showing up in searches, try searching for it yourself rather than issuing privacy alarm sounding subpoenas. It would certainly be more accurate.

Getting a list of all searches in one week definitely would let US federal government dig deep into the long tail of porn searches. But then again, the sheer amount of data would be overwhelming. Do you know every variation of a term someone might use, that you're going to dig out of the hundreds of millions of searches you'd get? Oh, and be sure you filter out all the automated queries coming in from rank checking tools, while you're add it. They won't skew the data at all, nope.95

Moreover, since the data is divorced from user info, you have no idea what searches are being done by children or not. In the end, you've asked for a lot of data that's not really going to help you estimate anything at all.

He has since updated the post to reflect responses from other search engines on whether they, too, were asked to supply search data to the DoJ. According to Danny, Yahoo was asked and complied. MSN issed a statement which doesn't really answer the question, which suggests that they were asked and complied. Ask Jeeves was not asked.

Danny writes,

In fairness to Yahoo, which handed over information -- and MSN which likely did the same -- it is important to note that it is not just spin that no privacy issues were involved with this particular data. As I explained in the story, the information is completely divorced from any personally identifiable data.

Link.

Previously:
Feds demand user data from Google: Battelle's analysis
DoJ demands user search records from Google

The new Honda Civic UK commercial is based around a chorus who create all of the sound effects with their mouths. It's amazing. Hit the link to get to the Honda Civic page, skip the Flash intro, and then hit the "Watch" button. Link to Honda's site, Link directly to a mirror of the video (Thanks, Eric Paulos!)

UPDATE: Thanks to Amy's Robot, here's the video as an iPod-compatible Mpeg4. Link

Carl Buell is a renowned paleo-wildlife illustrator who uses Photoshop to "paint" his masterpieces. (He posts about his process on his excellent blog, Olduvai George.) From an interview with Buell on Unscrewing The Inscrutable:

DS: When did the prehistoric beast interest develop, and how did that proceed to the forensic reconstruction?

Like most kids I was fascinated with dinosaurs, but I also liked real live animals to the point of being an empath. I spent every spare moment (and more) in the woods surrounding my grandfather's farm. Except for when I was playing baseball, I lived, breathed, and dreamed animals and the outdoors. Ned Colbert (from the American Museum of Natural History) and his wife wrote some wonderful books about prehistoric mammals and birds that I just ate up.

I mostly drew modern creatures however, until I got the job as natural history illustrator for the New York State Museum in 1978. I was only there a short time (bad life decision) but that Mastodon mount in the old museum really added gas to the fire.

Link (via Drawn!)

At Cryptomundo, Loren Coleman posts about a "re-discovery" of a species of the venemous waspfish. According to an article in the The Herald, the fish was caught in 1994 off the northern KawaZulu Natal coast of South Africa. It was stored in the collection of the SA Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity and recently identified by a visiting scientist. From the Cryptomundo post:

One of my regular coelacanth correspondents, institute curator emeritus, Dr. Phil Heemstra, is quoted by the media as noting: "The discovery also signalled again how little we knew about the creatures of the deep sea..."

As Charles Fort once wrote: "The sea is the best field for data."

Link

Kids in the Hall are the hilarious Canadian comedy troupe that disbanded some years ago. Now there's an upcoming mini-tour for which the troupe will reunite. Tavie sez, "Kids in the Hall are reuniting in February for 3 nights of shows at the Steve Allen Theatre, Feb 23, 24 and 25. They're doing no advertising, just word-of-mouth (or word-of-blog, see link ;) and have appointed me their little buzzing bee." Link (Thanks, Tavie!)

Crazed Viennese net.artists Monochrom have a great new tee for sale (&Euro;18): I WAS A COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT IN A PREVIOUS LIFE. Link

Farhad Manjoo says: "My Salon colleague Katharine Mieszkowski has written a wonderful article about what to me was a little-known phenomenon -- wealthy pet-owners who spend hundreds of dollars a month buying their dogs and cats raw meat. And not just any meat, but "but sustainable, antibiotic- and steroid-free meat and bones from cows, pigs and poultry raised and slaughtered on small farms." The raw feeders maintain that this is how pets are supposed to eat -- it's natural, since they're animals. But vets are skeptical of the practice, and say your pets might get sick."

If you are a raw feeder who believes wolves do not consume the roughage in their ruminant prey's stomach, then you might feed your dogs meat and bones and no veggies. Depending on which breed of raw feeding is your fancy, Fido's menu can look very different. You might prepare a measured concoction of raw beef, pulped seasonal vegetables and nutritional supplements. Or you might go for the "whole prey" model and just throw a whole rabbit carcass in the backyard for the hungry mutt to tear apart. One approach is known as BARF, which can either stand for "Biologically Appropriate Raw Foods" or "Bones and Raw Food."

...Yet it's the raw diets, not the kibble and canned ones, that vets have special concerns about. Dogs choke on the bones, they report, and suffer obstructions in their digestive tracts that require surgery. The FDA has taken note of the health risks posed for people who feed their pets raw meat, fearing they could contact salmonella and e-coli. With the practice growing in popularity, the agency has issued guidelines for companies marketing raw meat to pets: "FDA does not believe raw meat foods for animals are consistent with the goal of protecting the public from significant risks, particularly when such products are brought into the home and/or used to feed domestic pets."

Link

Sam Bulte, the Canadian Liberal Party MP who has been oouted for taking money from the same copyright industry whom she has rewarded with favorable lawmaking action, has threatened to sue Michael Geist, the law professor and blogger who outed her for her ethical missteps.

"I will not be silenced by zealots like Michael Geist and political opportunists like Peggy Nash who are making something out of nothing," she said, adding that she believes Mr. Geist's comments are nearing the point of being defamatory.

"I am not going to sue him before the election but dammit, watch me after the election."

Link

Jeff Tynes, friend and former colleague of abducted journalist Jill Carroll, says:

There is a great deal of stress amongst friends and family today as Jill's deadline nears. Her mother has made a statement and given an interview to CNN, appealing for her release.

Of particular note is the fact that -- over the last 24-36 hours -- four tremendously influential Iraqi and Sunni Muslim groups have come out with statements rejecting the kidnapping of journalists and calling for the release of Jill Carroll.

One of these came from Adnan al-Dulaimi, the head of the Iraqi Accordance Front -- a Sunni political group with whom Jill was supposedly going to meet the day she was kidnapped. Some have suggested his involvement but his statement clearly condemns the act, saying he and his group would do everything possible to help Jill.

Iraq's Muslims Scholars Association, a coterie of Sunni Islamic scholars, has also come out with a statement rejecting the abduction and that of all reporters. This combination of religious and political condemnation from within Iraq is very powerful, perhaps sending a message that will prevent this violent trend from continuing. And, most hopefully here, helping Jill's captors see that her release is in their interest as well as Jill's. Perhaps such a combined effort at condemnation from such influential groups signals an end to such deplorable actions.

The U.S. military, however, has released a statement that contradicts some reports from the BBC and others that a quid pro quo with female Iraqi detainees for Jill was in the works.

Natasha has the details here.

And Salon has reprinted a post from Iraqi blogger Riverbend about Alan Ghazi, the slain interpreter who worked with Carroll:

I read the news as a subtitle on TV. We haven't had an Internet connection for several days, so I couldn't really read about the details. All I knew was that a journalist had been abducted and that her Iraqi interpreter had been killed. He was shot in cold blood in Al-Adil district earlier this month, when they took Jill Carroll ... They say he didn't die immediately. It is said he lived long enough to talk to police and then he died. I found out very recently that the interpreter killed was a good friend -- Alan, of Alan's Melody, and I've spent the last two days crying.

Everyone knew him as simply "Alan," or "Elin" as it is pronounced in Iraqi Arabic. Prior to the war, he owned a music shop in the best area in Baghdad, Al-Arasat. He sold some Arabic music and instrumental music, but he had his regular customers -- those Westernized Iraqis who craved foreign music. For those of us who listened to rock, adult alternative, jazz, etc., he had very few rivals.

Link.

Previous Boing Boing posts on Jill Carroll: Link.

At Notes from the Technology Underground, Bill Gurstelle has a fascinating entry about the code words the government uses to report a nuclear attack.

“PINNACLE/NUCFLASH” are the flagwords or header that presages an electronic transmission through the U.S. military's command and control structure that reports an actual or possible detonation of a nuclear weapon. Not only that, these code words mean that the explosion was not an accident and the risk of nuclear war is imminent.

As one might expect, “PINNACLE/NUCFLASH” has the highest precedence in the OPREP-3 reporting structure. Men and women train for months, years, in order to be able to coolly and efficiently handle the communications that follow an OPREP-3 PINNACLE level flagword. There are several OPREP-3 code word designators with a chilling cold war/Tom Clancy/John Lecarre ring to them. None of these foreshadow good news.

Link

82-year-old caricaturist Bill "Weg" Green draw a sketch of the idiot who burgled him, and the cops used it to nab the criminal on the streets within fifteen minutes.

Police ... were initially reluctant when Mr Green offered to draw the burglar. "I thought (the drawing) might be a stick figure or something like that." [said Senior Constable Aaron Roche of Ringwood police.] Seconds later, Mr Green ... provided a detailed drawing of the burglar's face. "It was amazing, the likeness was just fantastic," Senior Constable Roche said.

I give extra points to Green for drawing a goofy grin on the burglar. Link (via Neatorama)

Link to a honey-glazed and high-carb apparition of the Burning Man founder, who -- unlike Jesus and la Virgen de Guadalupe -- ain't even dead yet. Must be the Joe Rogan drops kicking in. (Thanks Wayne Correia!)

In light of today's SJ Merc report that the Department of Justice has demanded user search records from Google, this excerpt from John Battelle's The Search seems worth reading again:

As we move our data to the servers at Amazon.com, Hotmail.com, Yahoo.com, and Gmail.com, we are making an implicit bargain, one that the public at large is either entirely content with, or, more likely, one that most have not taken much to heart.

That bargain is this: we trust you to not do evil things with our information. We trust that you will keep it secure, free from unlaw- ful government or private search and seizure, and under our control at all times. We understand that you might use our data in aggregate to provide us better and more useful services, but we trust that you will not identify individuals personally through our data, nor use our personal data in a manner that would violate our own sense of privacy and freedom.

That’s a pretty large helping of trust we’re asking companies to ladle onto their corporate plate. And I’m not sure either we or they are entirely sure what to do with the implications of such a transfer. Just thinking about these implications makes a reasonable person’s head hurt.

Link

Previously: DoJ demands user search records from Google

Escape Pod, the science fiction audiobook podcast, has just posted a 46-minute reading of my story Craphound, the first story of mine ever to be professionally published, back in 1998.

The excellent reading is performed by The Sound of Young America's Jesse Thorn. Jesse is also the son of Lee Thorn, the co-founder of the amazing Jhai Project, which builds and installs ruggedized, bicycle-powered WiFi links in rural villages in the developing world.

Craphound had wicked yard-sale karma, for a rotten, filthy alien bastard. He was too good at panning out the single grain of gold in a raging river of uselessness for me not to like him -- respect him, anyway. But then he found the cowboy trunk. It was two months' rent to me and nothing but some squirrelly alien kitsch-fetish to Craphound.

So I did the unthinkable. I violated the Code. I got into a bidding war with a buddy. Never let them tell you that women poison friendships: in my experience, wounds from women-fights heal quickly; fights over garbage leave nothing behind but scorched earth.

Craphound spotted the sign -- his karma, plus the goggles in his exoskeleton, gave him the advantage when we were doing 80 kmh on some stretch of back-highway in cottage country. He was riding shotgun while I drove, and we had the radio on to the CBC's summer-Saturday programming: eight weekends with eight hours of old radio dramas: "The Shadow," "Quiet Please," "Tom Mix," "The Crypt-Keeper" with Bela Lugosi. It was hour three, and Bogey was phoning in his performance on a radio adaptation of _The African Queen_. I had the windows of the old truck rolled down so that I could smoke without fouling Craphound's breather. My arm was hanging out the window, the radio was booming, and Craphound said "Turn around! Turn around, now, Jerry, now, turn around!"

MP3 Link (Thanks, CrazyDave!)

An investigative blogger has turned up damning facts about a US-expat-owned mercenary army operating in Haiti, and has published an account that includes spying and the undermining of democratic elections on the island.

My friend Kathryn Cramer has written extensively on mercenary forces around the world and recently began to research and publish on Consultants Advisory Group (CAG), a US-expat-owned mercenary army operating in Haiti.

She began to receive anonymous tips from inside Haiti, including a leaked UN PowerPoint presentation indicating that CAG was providing "covert surveillance" for MINISTAH, the UN agency operating Haiti.

Representatives of the company contacted her to tell her that they had intercepted a call to her phone and secured the arrest of her informants in Haiti. Kathryn has posted the PowerPoint slides alongside her account, along with some good analysis pulling the whole story together.

This is some of the most thoroughgoing blogger reporting I've ever seen; Cramer has delved into a story widely neglected in the professional press and has gotten astonishingly far with nothing more than a search engine, a telephone, and her own gumption.

I got a query from someone in Haiti asking what I knew about a company called Consultants Advisory Group and if I had any idea of why they were following Top Cat Marine Security's sales leads. I looked into the matter of CAG, resulting in the post Consultants Advisory Group(TM) (CAG): A Security Company Born Every Minute? CAG had a domain name registered a week earlier (just about the time the US State Department issued Top Cat a cease and desist order) and CAG was using Melbourne IT's domain privacy service beloved of spammers and scammers. So I toasted them a bit to see what they had to say for themselves.

A CAG representative, Valerie Sendecki, obediently appeared to try to discuss matters, requesting that we settle this as "ladies." The resulting exchange was pretty strange, but the general upshot was that CAG, ostensibly staffed with ex-military and ex-"agency" personnel, wished to remain unknown and inasmuch as it was known, it wished to be known as a "management consulting" company. It was founded by US ex-patriates and is registered in Panama. And, very specifically, CAG did not wish to be seen as either a private military company or as a security company. They claimed to be management consultants...

Dr Sage requested I send to you this MINUSTAH document concerning the use of Mercenaries by the UN in Haiti. The TopCat Blancs are killing poor Haitians fleeing by sea from UN oppression in Cite-Soliel. The US spies called CAG are undermining the election process to prevent the popular election of Rene Preval and the return of President Aristide.

Dr Sage is afraid that Comandante Sendecki of the US Navy is going to harm her for exposing this dispised behavior. She has been reassigned to Jeremie and has no acess to internet. This is her response to the abuse. She advices you to be very careful as they having eyes many and wishes you the best of luck.

Link

The Canadian Member of Parliament who takes campaign contributions from the copyright industries and gives back laws that serve their interests has been caught lying to her constituents on tape.

Sam Bulte, the Liberal MP for Parkdale/High Park participated in an all-candidates meeting last week in which she was questioned about her morally dubious campaign financing. Listeners to the MP3 can hear her resopnse:

"I am not taking money from special interest groups. As you know, you can look at my returns. All of my election returns are noted, they are transparent. Ninety percent of my donations came from individuals. Ten percent came from organizations or corporations. They are not hosting a fundraiser for me. A fundraiser is being held. Individuals are invited. Everyone is invited. It is self-funding. And yes, there will be artists there. It will be a celebation of my support for the arts community."

Michael Geist's blog features a point-by-point takedown of these statements. Bulte does take lobbyists' money. She raised 57 percent of her campaign money from individuals, not the ninety percent she claims. Most incredible the claim that her fundraiser isn't being hosted by the entertainment industry is a bald, bold, easily disproved lie. Link

This week, Candadian entertainment industry execs and famous musicians are holding a $250/plate fundraising dinner for Sam Bulte, a Member of Parliament who has worked for legislation favorable to their interests and proposes to do more of the same if re-elected. Margo Timmins, the frontwoman for Canadian indie-rock success story The Cowboy Junkies will perform.

Joey "AccordionGuy" DeVilla traces the history of the band that made Margo Timmins famous: the band produced its breakout album for about $250 (the same sum that industry people will put into the pockets of their chosen lawmaker), and subsequently relied on mix-tapes and word of mouth to build its audience.

But what Timmins and her ilk propose now is the indiscriminate prosecution of people who engage in the twenty-first century's equivalent of tape-trading: file-sharing. Having made herself rich and famous by using low-cost copying technology and fan-evangelism, Timmins proposes to help make laws that will prevent other bands from doing the same.

The fundraiser for Sam Bulte being held tonight at the Drake Hotel will feature a performance by Margo Timmins. You may remember her band, The Cowboy Junkies, best known for their album, The Trinity Session. Recorded on a single microphone in the Church of the Holy Trinity for $250 (ironically, that's the per-plate price of admission to the fundraising dinner at which Margo is performing tonight), this album was originally released on a small label and got its buzz based on word-of-mouth and thousands of mix tapes that teenagers -- myself included -- made for each other.

Back then, one way to declare your love (or at least infatuation) for a girl or guy was to make a "mix tape" of songs for her or him. If you were particularly creative, you'd embellish the tape with an artistic J-card (that's the cardboard liner that went into the cassette case -- here's an example). The important thing about a mix tape was that it let you say things that it provided a kind of indirection -- a way of saying things that you might not otherwise be able to say in a face-to-face conversation (instant messaging may be like that today).

Link

Update: Adam sez, "the official Cowboy Junkies website hosts a forum specifically *for* trading bootlegs, and the Internet Archive hosts over 100 Cowboy Junkies live shows, along with a copy of their permission for them to be hosted.

Michael Golembewski is a hardware hacking photographer who turns modified flatbed scanners into build homebrew, large-format digital cameras. His gallery of shots is lovely and eerie, and the build-notes for his cameras are fascinating.

The scanner camera that I'm using right now uses the frame of an old Horseman 450L monorail 4x5 camera, which I purchased secondhand with the support of the Audi Design Foundation. The scanning back is an extensively modified Canon LIDE 20, from which I have reomved the lamp, pinhole lens assembly, and CIS sensor housing. I've made the scanner light-tight using duct tape and putty, covered with a hefty dose of black spraypaint. It might look crude, but it works very nicely. I've attached a modified lens board directly onto the scanner, so it can easily be connected to the Horseman. The lens board attachment holds the scanner optics at the same level as a ground glass plate. This allows me to compose and focus shots on the ground glass, instead of with preview scans - it's much faster. I have two lenses that I use with this model - a Kompur lens from 1915, and a found 8x10 enlarger lens.

Link (via /.)

The 11 year old girl who suggested the name "Pluto" for the newly discovered planet is now 87, and is the only person alive to have named a planet. BBC News has a lovely profile of Venetia Phair (née Burney), who named the ninth planet:

On the morning of 14 March 1930, the young Venetia Burney was sitting down to breakfast in the dining room of the house in north Oxford where she lived with her grandfather Falconer Madan.

Mr Madan, who was retired as librarian at the Bodleian Library, was with her reading The Times newspaper.

When he got to an article on page 14 about the new planet's discovery, he remarked on it to Venetia.

"I can still visualise the table and the room, but I can remember very little about the conversation," Mrs Phair said.

The article mentioned that the planet had not yet been named, prompting Venetia Burney to suggest her own.

Mr Madan was so impressed with the name Pluto, he went straight to his friend Herbert Hall Turner, professor of astronomy at the University of Oxford, and one of the leaders in the worldwide effort to produce an astrographic chart.

Link (via Neatorama)

Today on the Worth1000 photoshop contest: misbegotten advertising, like this fictional advert for tourism in Las Vegas. Link