I'm going to be in Boston next week for a gig as an MIT artist-in-residence, a bunch of meetings, some public talks and Boskone, the northeastern regional science fiction convention, where I'm going to be a special guest. I hope to see you there! Here are the public events I'll be at:

Monday, February 13, 2006, 5PM
Down and Out at MIT: An Evening with Cory Doctorow
MIT Bartos Theater (E15), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139
Sponsored by MIT Comparative Media Studies, MIT Office of the Arts

Wednesday, February 15, 2006, 6PM
Set Top Cop: Hollywood's Secret War on Your Living Room
Harvard Emerson Hall, Rm 105
Sponsored by Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Computer Society, Harvard FreeCulture

Thursday, February 16, Noon
0WNED -- How Hollywood Plans on Making the Future Subservient to the Past
Olin Auditorium, Olin College, Needham, MA

Friday, February 17, 2006 - Sunday Feb 19, numerous panels, readings, signings and lecutres at Boskone.

Link

TokyoFlash's latest amazing Japanese watch uses clever mirrors to make the time appear to stretch off into infinity:

Have you ever looked into the vanity mirror, to see your own reflection many times over? Well, this watch projects the same image. By using mirrors, the electroluminescent coated hands and dots reflect over and over again in an Infinitive manner. Not only that, when pressing the button the Black light sets the watch aglow. Quite a unique concept.

Link

Chris sez, "My girlfriend found this photo album album full of 80-90's old school punk rockers. It paints a picture of the Philadelphia Punk scene then." He's researched the band featured in the pics (Circle of Shit) and posted the photos as a Flickr set. Link (Thanks, Chris!)

Toronto will host the 2007 World Horror Convention, an annual, roving convention for the horror fiction industry and its fans. The chair in 2007 will be my friend Amanda Foubister, and she's been signing on a steady stream of excellent guests of honor for the event -- authors Michael Marshall Smith, Nancy Kilpatrick and artist John Picacio so far. The con runs March 29-April 1, 2007 in Toronto -- this is the first time a World Horror Con has been held outside of the US. Link

This page has instructions for cooking "poached scrambled eggs" -- scrambled eggs cooked atop boiling water. Teflon pans can are thought by some to be incredibly toxic when their coating flakes off into the food being prepared in them, so many chefs are switching back to cast iron, copper and other safer materials. However, if you're accustomed to perfect nonstick-pan omelets, it can be hard to get your eggs cleanly out of a normal pan. This simple method uses a cushion of boiling water to cook fluffy, moist scrambled eggs without any cleanup mess or burning wreckage:

Next, beat the eggs with a fork, but don't add salt. (The grains of salt will tear the structure of the eggs, causing them to disintegrate on contact with the water.) Let a covered pot filled with about four inches of water come to a low boil over moderate heat, then remove the cover, add a little salt and stir the water in a clockwise motion. After you've created a mini-whirlpool, gently pour the eggs into the moving liquid, which will allow them to set suspended in the water rather than sink to the bottom of the pot, where they would stick... After saying a quick prayer and adding the eggs, cover the pot and count to 20. Almost instantly the eggs will change from translucent to opaque and float to the surface in gossamer ribbons. This all happens very quickly, and by the time you lift the lid, they should be completely cooked.

Link (via Joshua)

Update: The toxicity of ingested Teflon is disputed by Dupont.

Update 2: Tim sez, "Though DuPont may dispute health effects, they agreed last week to a voluntary phase-out of these Teflon chemicals. My organization has been leading the fight on Teflon, propelled mostly by internal DuPont documents we obtained that show that they were fully aware of potential health effects after workers at a facility that makes Teflon had children with serious birth defects. The problem with the Teflon chemical is that it has been classified by the government as a "Likely Human Carcinogen," it *never* breaks down in the environment, and it has been found in the blood of 99% of newborns in a recent independent Johns Hopkins University study. We found the same thing in our own 'BodyBurden' study where we looked for 400+ industrial chemicals in newborn cord blood."

Today's Worth1000 photoshopping contest challenges contestants to modify photos of normal people to give them the big eyes and misshapen faces of characters in manga (Japanese comics). This is a popular challenge with the Worth1000 set -- they've produced dozens and dozens of entries for today's contest. Link

Britain's Royal College of nurses has proposed that mentally disturbed people who cut themselves when they are anxious should be given sterile blades and counseling on how to cut themselves safely. Cutters are a common phenomenon: predominantly people who cut their arms, bellies and legs with razors in order to numb themselves to their mental distress.

Emergency rooms see cutters who have gone too deep or given themselves infections, something that the nurses' association likens to HIV spread from dirty needles. The College is saying, in essence, that it can't prevent cutters from cutting, but it can prevent secondary harm arising from deep cuts and infection:

"My instinct is that it is better to sit with the patient and talk to them while they are self-harming. We should definitely give advice on safer parts of the body to cut. It could get to the stage where we could have a discussion with the patient about how deep the cuts were going to be and how many."

Every year 170,000 people attend hospital accident-and-emergency departments after deliberately harming themselves. A proportion of these do so on a regular basis, sometimes over decades. Many do so to release stress or cope with traumatic events or depression.

Maria Church, mother of Charlotte Church, the Welsh singer, recently revealed she has been self-harming for 17 years. When Maria Church is depressed she cuts her arms and stomach with kitchen knives and razors. She says the harm releases her unbearable tension. Dame Kelly Holmes said she went through two months of self-harming a year before her double gold win in the 2004 Olympics. She cut herself after injuries threatened to ruin her career.

Link (via JWZ)

Graham Linehan, the stone freaking genius behind Father Ted (literally the funniest TV show I've ever watched -- sitcom about disgraced priests living on a remote Irish island) has created a TV show about sysadmins called "The IT Crowd." I was lucky enough to do some small consulting on the show and EFF was even invited to provide stickers to decorate the set with.

I've been drooling to watch the show for months now. Channel 4 UK, the show's network, did this incredibly visionary thing: they put the first two episodes online two weeks before the show aired to drum up buzz for the show. And having done this visionary thing, they completely screwed it up by only making the shows available as streaming Windows Media files, which I can never get to play right on a Mac (Microsoft has stopped updating its Windows Media Player for the Mac, and never shipped one for Linux; VLC and Mplayer aren't very good at playing Windows formats, especially when streamed). Basically, they made this show available on the Internet to drum up a buzz, then took extreme countermeasures to prevent a sizable portion of its intended audience from watching it. I spent about four hours over the past two weeks trying to find a way to watch this video so I could write about it here.

Luckily, the show has been ripped and put online already. I started Torrenting it from links found on The Pirate Bay yesterday (thanks for the tip, Jamie!), and now Digg links to a blog-post with links to dozens of torrents, streams and direct download sites. Link (via Digg)

Update: Thanks to everyone who pointed out that Flip4Mac can decode some Windows Media files. Unfortunately, it didn't work for these files for me."

Six Degrees of Wikipedia will trace the interlinking path between any two Wikipedia entries. Here's how llamas are connected to the video-game Counter Strike:

Llamas
Llama
1800
January 26
Cameron Bright
Counter Strike

Link (via Oblomovka)

This website generates entirely plausible titles for entirely unlikable fat extruded fantasy novels:

Childrenِ Childِ and Crown
Crown and Illusion
Crystal and Fate
Dark's Light
El-Anash's Citadel
God of the War Queen
Heart and Power
Herald of Fate
Lonian's Children
Maidenِ Fireِ and Crown
Scourge and Glory
Secret and Illusion

Link (via Making Light)

Police officers in Orlando, FL says a man found lodged in a convenience store oven vent had intended to burgle the business. Lonnie Shields, 37, "was banged up and crunched up and uncomfortable from being in that pipe for about six hours."
Link (via Peculiarosities)

Yann Arthus-Bertrand's photographs of farm critters and their human keepers are amazing. Images like this and this make me want to go eat some soy products for dinner. NSFW udders! Also what is up with this bovine badonkadonk?

Link to photo collection, with extra-large jpegs kindly provided for use as computer wallpaper. (Thanks, Brad)

Update: The badonkadonk in question most likely belongs to a breed called Belgian Blue. It's a genetic mutant that's banned in some countries, according to this Wikipedia entry. But best of all -- Belgian Blues are also known as MONSTER COWS. (Thanks, JN and JumpSuit Boy)

Reader comment: Bill Hannahs says,

I had to look up badonkadonk, since I live in Wisconsin, and it's not exactly that. For one thing it's a male and the other thing is that that is not 'jiggle' but rather all muscle! The bull is a breed known as the Belgian Blue which has a trippy double muscle gene that makes it super strong. The same effect is found in some humans. Most recently a german track star gave birth to a son who was described as a 'muscular infant'. Research into the phenomenon is giving Muscular Dystrophy researchers new hope with gene therapy. Link

The blog Life Outta Context has celebrated its fifth birthday today by posting a nice video remix of the Sprint "Sticking It to the Man" commercial, with blogs substituted for mobile phones. Link (Thanks, Jeff!)

A Finnish casemodder built a functional PC inside a 1.5l Ballantine's whisky bottle, having a glass-cutter punch out the panels for him. The specs are "Intel P3 733EB processor, a 256MB notebook RAM, a 40GB notebook HDD and finally a 60W mini-ITX PSU," and he built it at night and in the office because his newborn son demanded his attention during the other periods. Link (via /.)

In today's Washington Post, a piece by Yuki Noguchi about the recent sneaky edits of numerous Wikipedia entries by congresscritters and/or their peons. Snip:

This is what passes for an extreme makeover in Washington: A summer intern for seven-term Rep. Martin T. Meehan (D-Mass.) altered the congressman's profile on the Wikipedia Web site to remove an old promise that he would limit his service to four terms. Someone doctored Sen. Robert C. Byrd's (D-W.Va.) profile on the site to list his age as 180. (He is 88.) An erroneous entry for Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) claimed that he "was voted the most annoying senator by his peers in Congress."

Last week, Wikipedia temporarily blocked certain Capitol Hill Web addresses from altering any entries in the otherwise wide-open forum.

(...) Washington has posed a special problem for Wikipedia, which is monitored by 800 to 1,000 active editor-volunteers. In the recent flare-up, a community of Wikipedia editors read a story in the Lowell Sun newspaper in which staffers for Meehan acknowledged replacing an entry on him with more flattering verbiage. That prompted last week's Capitol Hill Wikipedia blackout; all computers connected to servers at the House of Representatives, identified by a numerical Web address, were denied access.

Link.

Call me blonde, but here's what I still don't understand: Meehan's summer intern wasn't the only congressional staffer editing their bosses' (or possibly their own) Wikipedia entries in a less-than-transparent, non-NPOV way. So has anyone (investigating journos, or Wikipedians) tried tracing those "certain" IP addresses or conducting other forensics to see who else behaved badly?

Reader comment: Andrew Gray says,

The problem is that the IP in question for most of the "famous" edits was 143.231.249.141 - this resolves to housegate10.house.gov, and is, I believe, a proxy through which huge chunks of the House's traffic passes. My understanding is that Meehan got identified because someone guessed it was his office - the edits to his page were pretty clear whitewashing - and they owned up when challenged; any other congressman would be much trickier to pick out.

There's a detailed study of all the IPs identified as House or Senate here, which might be of interest, but again it doesn't seem easy to identify individuals for sure.

Snip from a Boston Globe op-ed by Michael Socolow:

Like most soldiers, many combat journalists are young and have few family commitments. It is with the arrival of marriage and children that many journalists are forced to decide whether risking one's life is justified. This can lead to tension within news organizations; editorial assignments carry the risk of becoming life-and-death decisions. ABC News recently lost a lawsuit in Britain when correspondent Richard Gizbert alleged his contract was not renewed because he refused a ''voluntary" assignment to Iraq. Gizbert, a seasoned war reporter, is no coward. He informed his superiors that family responsibilities changed his willingness to accept the work. Shortly thereafter he was let go.

Gizbert's prudence, however, is not a virtue prized among war reporters. The job requires accepting enormous risk and living life as a gamble. So why do so many volunteer? One explanation rarely surfaces in this discussion. That's the powerful, almost narcotic pull of experiencing life at its most intense. In the war zone, senses are primed, awareness is heightened, and profound bonds of friendship are indelibly formed. Sharing drinks and stories of narrow escapes, the combat journalist finds a community supportive of the addictive adrenaline habit that infects them all.

Link to The glamour of war (via Romenesko)

On WFMU's blog, Station Manager Ken says,

In 1966, a toy company in Newark, New Jersey released a children's record called Batman and Robin to cash in on the popular Adam West TV series of the same name. The music on the LP was credited to "The Sensational Guitars of Dan and Dale," but in fact the band was one of the greatest uncredited session combos of all time, including the core of Sun Ra's Arkestra and Al Kooper's Blues Project. To keep the music licensing fees to a minimum, all the tracks were based on public domain items like Chopin's Polonaise Op. 53, the horn theme from Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony and the love theme from Romeo and Juliet, and generic rock riffs. It's all instrumental, with the exception of Robin's Theme (MP3), featuring an uncredited vocalist who I hope some reader will be able identify. More info on the Italian boot reissue of this record here and here.

Link to blog post with MP3 links. (Thanks, karramarro)

Previously on BB: Disney's Pink Elephants remixed a la Sun Ra

Reader comment: Jay James says,

Apparently Frank Zappa did some uncredited work there as well. I recall Dr Demento speaking about this at some length about 20 years ago during a b’cast of his show on the Armed Forces Radio network when I was living in Alaska.

Reader comment: Paul Sonnenberg of Austin, TX says,

Wonderful CD version available at Amazon: Link. Well worth it if they're still packaging it in the beautiful cardboard gatefold with wordless Batman panes on the interior. Singer not identified in the liner notes.

Link (Thanks, Shane!)

Previously:
Video: drag 5,000 blow-up dolls to the Rose Bowl

In a recent post on Blogging.la, contributor Will Campbell documents recent shooting deaths in his neighborhood, maps them, and links them to media coverage.

"I live in an area of Los Angeles where trashcans urge us to love one another [and] obituaries are scrawled in spraypaint on the steps of public stairways," writes Will, "So while I'm no native to these streets I'm no newcomer either(...) [T]here have been several [murders] in my immediate vicinity since I moved here in August of 2004. The most recent one was Tuesday evening."

Link to Will's post, which includes a photoset of phonecam snaps taken during a walk around the 'hood with his dog.

A vegan who picketed a ham store was surveilled by a Homeland Security spook, who arrested her for taking down his license-plate number. Tax-dollars well-spent. Nation well-defended. Once every person with a nonstandard dietary preference has been imprisoned, I'm sure we'll be able to leave our shoes on in the airport again.

An undercover DeKalb County Homeland Security detective was assigned to conduct surveillance of the protest and the protestors, and take the photographs. The detective arrested Childs and another protester after he saw Childs approach him and write down, on a piece of paper, the license plate number of his unmarked government car.

"They told me if I didn't give over the piece of paper I would go to jail and I refused and I went to jail, and the piece of paper was taken away from me at the jail and the officer who transferred me said that was why I was arrested," Childs said on Wednesday...

"We believe that spying on American citizens for no good reason is fundamentally un-American, that it's not the place of the goverment or the best use of resources to spy on its own citizens and we want it to stop. We want the spies in our government to pack their bags, close up their notebooks, take their cameras home and not engage in the spying anymore," Gerald Weber of the ACLU of Georgia said during a news conference.

Link (Thanks, Saundra!)

Click here to join the ACLU, Click here to join EFF