officer: Where do you live? Where do you live? You have to tell me where you live, what your name is, or anything like that.

tester: For a complaint? I mean, like, if I have --

officer: Are you on medications?

tester: Why would you ask me something like that?

officer: Because you're not answering any of my questions.

tester: Am I on medications?

officer: I asked you. It's a free country. I can ask you that.

tester: Okay, you're right.

officer: So you're not going to tell me who you are, you're not going to tell me what the problem is.You're not going to identify yourself.

tester: All I asked you was, like, how do I contact --

officer: You said you have a complaint. You say my officers are acting in an inappropriate manner.

officer: So leave now. Leave now. Leave now.

Update: Alex sez, "The Lauderhill cop who was shown intimidating an individual looking to file a police complaint on hidden camera took the news station to court to stop the story from airing."

Update 2: Lee sez, "The Police Complaint Center exists to help citizens file complaints against officers and departments -- an important service, as police officers are supposed to be serving the public."

I grew up riding the TTC, and the map is burned into my subconscious. It's part of every Torontonian's experience of the city, a part of the cultural fabric. Culture gets remixed -- that's what happens with it. Trademark is supposed to protect rightsholders from competitors who use their marks to confuse the public in the course of commerce. No one who saw RobotJohnny's genius map would have confused it for a second with a real TTC map and sent him a subway token. The TTC's legal bullying here is completely needless -- they face no risk and no loss from letting their riders make turn the map into their own personal remix.

Torontonians go to bat for the TTC all the time, shouting at the province and the feds to beef up funding. We've put up with the disruption of the Sheppard Subway, we've lived through the years when they couldn't even get the platform clocks to work. Where the hell do they get off wasting legal fees threatening bloggers for producing noncommercial humourous, harmless remixes? Link (Thanks, RobotJohnny!)

Copenhagen:

Baltimore (I):

Baltimore (II):

(Thanks, Benny, Henrik, Mike, Shiny, Mishhkin and Daen!)

See also: London Anagram Tube Map, Toronto Anagram Subway Map, Amsterdam Anagram Metro Map, Chicago Regional Transit Authority Anagram Map, Maps for Manhattan, Oslo, Boston and Atlanta, Vienna U-Bahn Anagram Map, DC Metro Anagram Map, Stockholm Transit Anagram Map, LA Red Line Anagram Map, Maps for Cleveland, St Louis (x2), BART, and Singapore

Link, Subscribe to Podcast

Update: The MP3 was corrupted. There's a new one that's been uploaded and I'm just waiting for some post-processing before I link to it again -- sorry! OK, it's fixed!

An anonymous BoingBoing reader in the United Arab Emirates says,

And its finally happened... I knew the day was not far.... :(

The sole ISP in this country, which happens to be owned by the government has blocked boingboing.net Apparently boingboing is disseminating information that is " inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political and moral values of the United Arab Emirates. " See attached/hotlinked screenshot.

Please email me so if you post this on boingboing, so I can VPN to the office back home and read about this on boingboing... Till then I guess am stuck with fark.com which am sure is next. :(

PS - Please remove all personally identifiable information from the screenshot, cause I don't want to end up in jail. Yes they do put people in jail for attempting/bypassing their proxy.

Link to full-size screenshot.

They're pretty good at controlling internet ports. As a reminder, they appear destined to control America's physical ports as well.

Earlier this week, many dozens of readers emailed to inform us that BoingBoing had suddenly become no longer viewable at their place of employment -- government sites and corporate sites around the world. We understand that this is due to the fact that the makers of the SmartFilter software, which is used by governments and private sector customers, just added BoingBoing to a category occupied mostly by porn sites. We have contacted Secure Computing, the makers of Smartfilter and are attempting to help them correct their error. We will post an update on BoingBoing soon.

My experience in the early-mid 90s teaches me that part of the purpose of setting the production standards of early CD-ROMs absurdly high was to promote corporate authorship over individual authorship with the idea that digital products could be authored like film and TV, not like books, thus empowering the executive level and disempowering the actual creators, or rather reconfiguring relations such that executives become part of the creative "team."

Now computers are being sold that allow individuals, and small groups of individuals, to produce works to very high production standards on very low budgets. This also threatens the rise of corporate authorship. So watermark-style DRM may do very little to prevent the "piracy" about which the big media corporations are up in arms, it may be the killer app of corporate authorship.

Me, I'm grabbing the DRM-free version from the Mininova torrent linked below (it's coming in fast, too with 30 peers in the mesh) and I can't wait. For the past six weeks, the new IT Crowd episode has been the highlight of my week -- I've always loved nerdy comedy (Real Genius! Sneakers!) and The IT Crowd gets so much right about being a sysadmin (I job I held down in a previous life), and is wicked funny into the bargain (no surprise, since Graham Linehan was previously responsible for Father Ted, an Irish a sitcom about degenerate Irish priests that has made me laugh so hard I thought I was going to be sick).

It says here that my copy will arrive in 25 minutes. Come on, progress-bar, move!

The arrival of Jen's "lady time of the month" has unexpected consequences for the office. Jen's in a bad mood, Moss feels weird, Roy bursts into tears, and even Richmond's been feeling gloomy. The only cure is to have a big girly night out with scented candles and Dirty Dancing saves the day, before cutting a rug at the office party...

Update: Watched it, loved it, howled with laughter and pounded the table and wept. Christ, this show is the best thing ever.

Update 2: Episode 6 is up on YouTube -- thanks, Tian!

It features Moss saying "Hello?" after some dramatic music and then cuts into a few recognizable bars of the show's themesong. This is my new ringtone -- so long, Louis Jordan's "Stone Cold Dead in the Market," hello "The IT Crowd!" Link (Thanks, Steve!)

Unfortunately, as with previous shows, Channel 4 has once again locked the show up with DRM, presented it only as streaming Windows files, and has used crude IP filtering to restrict playback to the UK only.

You can always circumvent this by just downloading the torrent that inevitably goes live within minutes of the show going up on the site -- no geographic restrictions and no DRM, thank you very much.

But if you'd prefer to stream it from Channel 4 with DRM (and if your computer will actually play it back) (mine won't!), and you're outside of the UK, Tian has written up a tremendous HOWTO explaining the best way to get the show online:

1. In Firefox, under Tools, select Options...

2. Under General, click on Connection Settings...

3. Type in "83.100.217.53" in HTTP Proxy field, "80" in Port field, and check Use this proxy server for all protocols.

4. Click OK to return to browser screen and enjoy the show.

Update: Messi sez, "please advise people to remove the HTTP proxy entry when they finished downloading the episode from C4. This unknown proxy may collect passwords and other stuff. Thanks!"

Congress is considering a bill to "plug the analog hole," that is, to prevent the use of recording equipment for capturing digital programs while they're been played back (one outcome of this is that you couldn't video your child's first step if he was taking it in the living-room with the TV playing in the shot).

The proposal is to use a "watermark" called VEIL, based on secret technology, and to require all people who build recorders to include VEIL detectors that can shut off the recorder if it appears that it's recording a watermarked program.

Felten is one of the world's leading experts on why watermarking fails, having led the effort to defeat the most ambitious, expensive watermarking system to date, the Secure Digital Music Initiative. In this article, "How Watermarks Fail," he talks about the ways that attackers can circumvent watermarks, in plain language that even I can understand:

[W]atermarks tend to be defeated if an adversary can get his hands on a watermarked file, and the same file without the watermark. By comparing the two, the adversary can determine where the watermark lives, which is usually sufficient to remove the watermark from other files. Alex used this method in deciphering the MediaMax watermark (as described in our Sony CD DRM paper), and my colleagues and I used it also in analyzing the SDMI watermarks back in 2000.

Almost as powerful as a Rosetta Stone attack is a comparison attack, where the adversary does not have an unwatermarked file, but does have the same file with several different watermarks in it. Any place where two of the files differ is a place where watermark information lives. Given several marked files, an attacker can locate all or most of the places the watermark is hidden, which is again the first step in removing the watermark.

Cleveland::

St Louis (I):

St Louis (II):

BART:

Singapore LTA:

(See this alternate Singapore map as well)

(Thanks, Billy, Rob, Fred, Peter, and Jesse!)

See also: London Anagram Tube Map, Toronto Anagram Subway Map, Amsterdam Anagram Metro Map, Chicago Regional Transit Authority Anagram Map, Maps for Manhattan, Oslo, Boston and Atlanta, Vienna U-Bahn Anagram Map, DC Metro Anagram Map, Stockholm Transit Anagram Map, LA Red Line Anagram Map

Update: Michael's produced an alternate map of the Singapore system

This is the best yearbook I have ever seen. A man who knows that we like photos and letters gave us a box of ephemera from an art/architecture student from the late 1960s-70s. Included was this Rice yearbook from 1970. I have scanned a few of the pages so you can get an idea what it contains. Apparently they set up a photobooth in their school in 1969 and asked students to pose. Those photobooths were then used as the yearbook images.

Thanks to Kevin at Consumatron.com for sending me this link to a fabulously ridiculous story about a company - Gem Plumbing and Heating - hiring "Fun University" to help them make their boring workplace more fun.

No, it has nothing to do with the work at hand, but completely extraneous bouts of silliness, as in: "About 100 cans of silly string were placed around the building, and when employees got their hands on them, this building just exploded. It was an absolute blast."

As I try to explain in the "follow the fun" chapter of Get Back in the Box, efforts like this are really stupid, and actually defeat the whole point. By making the "fun" at work extraneous - external and unrelated - to the boring and dull work that people are actually doing, it only exacerbates the problem. It's like giving kids dessert as a "reward" for finishing the main part of the meal. Why do they need a reward? Because the main meal tastes terrible!

The reward just reinforces the notion that the work itself is not fun.

But more often, readers instead email links to goatse-related flotsam and dotcom jetsam.

Here's a roundup of some of the recent sightings; all of these are more funny/weird than explicit/NSFW.
* Charles of dcist.com saw goatse on the opera stage:

This is a review I wrote of a performance by the Kirov Opera at the Kennedy Center here in Washington. I think that the Internet omnipresence of that dreaded goatse.cx image has done things to my brain. I may or may not be seeing it in the set backdrop pictured in the image at the top of the review. I made a point about this in my review, but you can tell me if I'm just seeing things that aren't there. What it looks like to me, in the backdrop of the Grail altar in this production of "Parsifal," is something quite like the dreaded goatse image. There is no reason for that sphincter-like hole to be there either. This staging was used first in 1997, however, so the similarity is unintentional, if it is indeed there.

Got this on my (ambivalent adjective) web clips on gmail today. Maybe I'm just dirty but i immediately flashed goatse. Quote of the Day - Oliver Wendell Holmes - "One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions."

Link to book cover. Despite the unfortunate reference, it's hard to imagine what the heck they were thinking.

Took this shot on the Prague subway system. I don't speak/read Czech, but since you have to push a button on the inside door to exit the tram, this sign might be trying to indicate that. Link to jpeg.

Yes, that's right, Goatse candy - with a creme center. Link

In the 1970's—after cardboard cartons had replaced wooden crates—beautifully printed labels that had long been stored in packing houses were being sold as collectors' items at the flea markets Sakoguchi frequented. He was attracted by the familiar orange crate label format, and started using it in a series of small paintings.

Just as the actual labels had depicted a wide variety of subjects—Sakoguchi's paintings sampled events, issues and attitudes of modern culture. He produced several hundred orange crate label paintings (1974 - 1981) before moving on to other projects.

In 1994, Sakoguchi revisited the orange crate label format, and has continued the series.

* Footage of the Apollo 11 mission, and the first person to step on the moon: Link.
* From 1894, "Carmencita - Spanish Dance" -- one of the oldest films at the archives: Link (screengrab at left).
* A representative selection of U.S. government newsreels, documenting World War II, 1941-45: Link. 
* NASA documentaries on spaceflight: Link. 
* Films from the 1930s, that document the history and establishment of a nationwide system of national and state parks. /
* Early footage of Native American life, the Boulder Dam, water and wind erosion in America, Civilian Conservation Corps workers, and the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority.
* From 1970, a motion picture documenting recreational programs for inner city youth: Link

Reader comment: Josh sez

Here are direct links to the torrent. Pirate Bay (Link) Torrent File (Link)

You mentioned that "Toy Story Requiem" was only available in wmv format... well, there's quicktime versions available here: one, two, three.

Boing Boing pal Scott Beale says:

Here are some photos I shot in the Visible Storage area of the amazing Computer History Museum in Mountain View California, which has a huge collection of computers going back to the dawn of the computer age. It included computers like UNIVAC, Digital Equipment PDP and Cray Supercomputers, components from SAGE and computers from Control Data, Philco, Fairchild, IBM, Altair and many more.

Yahoo Music chief Dave Goldberg raised eyebrows Thursday at the Music 2.0 conference in Los Angeles with a proposal rarely heard from executives at large digital music services: Record labels should try selling music online without copy protection.

Yes, Abe Vigoda is still alive (as of this posting). In fact, he's celebrating his 85th birthday today - more than 20 years after people magazine mistakenly reported his death. Well, there's no need to endlessly question his mortality any longer. Just download the "Abe Vigoda status" extension for Firefox to keep tabs on whether or not he's still alive.

Keeping in the spirit of the occassion: Link

Reporters Without Borders reports that the communications division of Uganda's government has imposed "mandatory filtering" against a Ugandan news radio station's website. The case is the first known incident of government censorship of the internet in Uganda, and occurred days before presidential and parliamentary elections on February 23rd.

The Radio Katwe news website (Link) accepts contributions from Internet-users and posts content that is extremely critical of the government. Just before it was censored, it had attacked the accumulation of wealth by the family of President Yoweri Museveni.

(...) All the country's Internet Service Providers (ISPs), MTN, UTL, Africaonline, Spacenet and Busnet have made the site inaccessible. UCC officials justified the decision, saying that Radio Katwe "was spreading rumours" and damaging the country's "security and harmony".

Local ISPs filtered the site by blocking its IP address (the identity number of its server that hosts it on the Internet). According to a test carried out by Nart Villeneuve, head of research at Toronto University (Link), they at the same time blocked nearly 700 other sites hosted by the same server, which is based in the USA. States.

On its home page, Radio Katwe advises the use of tools such as guardster.com or proxify.com to get round the censorship imposed by the authorities.

While I agree that the censorship in the case of Radio Katwe is a bad idea, there have been other occasions in Africa (specifically Rwanda) where censorship or jamming of "hate radio" might have caused the tragic events there to play out differently. Radio, like any medium, is simply a tool that is imbued with positive or negative influence by its creator, More here on radio's role in the Rwanda Genocide: Link

Just amazing, the extremes some botanists go to in their horticultural enthusiasm. Sometimes when I read stuff like this, I pretend that tulips or orchids are illegal, and I imagine sneaky little elderly ladies constructing elaborate stealth-growing facilities -- all to feed their insatiable flower joneses. I'm not a marijuana smoker or an orchid-obsessive, but I think outlawing either plant makes about as much sense. Snip:

This was underneath a house in a cave. The entrance was through a secret hydraulic door in the garage that led to a concrete ramp that went about 50 yards into the ground. Inside the cave was living quarters and a secret escape hatch that led you through a tunnel that exited via another hydraulic door that opened up a rock on the outside. It was very elaborate. The set up allowed them to harvest every 60 days which resulted in multi-million dollar sales. One of the guys busted was living in a house on the water in FL and had a nice yacht. One of the agents here in Nashville worked on this for 5 years before the warrant was finally served in December.

Reader comment: Kyle Wayman sez,

Maybe I'm crazy, but I think this may be a hoax. The only sites I find (albeit with just a quick google) referencing this all just link to the cellular.co.za site you linked to. Watching the video, I don't understand how all four rounds are supposed to shoot out of the antenna without the top half of the phone sliding over to line each one up - it's not as if it's a revolver. Granted, I'm not a gunsmith, but maybe another reader is? Can someone verify how this would work, or debunk it?

I remember seeing this elsewhere a few years ago... I want to say I saw it on Bruce Schneier's blog but I'm not certain. Regarding the shooting out the antenna thing, I'm fairly sure the article is just poorly written. If you watch the video closely you can see slight muzzle blasts along the top end of the phone, which appear to be moving towards the camera. From the images of the gun and the description of how it fires (pressing the different keys oriented behind where the bullets are), I'm almost certain that it's feasible that it's real and the article just slipped up.

It's not a hoax, and the bullets do not all fire from the antenna. There are four separate barrels, one for each bullet (these also correspond to the trigger buttons). If you watch the video carefully, you can see that the bullets exit from the four different chambers.

The recent posting on BB about the Cell Phone Guns certainly reflects reality, and was a big "be afraid" blurb back in the immediate post-9/11 days. In fact, the truth behind these weapons is backed up by Snopes as well. As to the firing mechanism: All four rounds are not discharged through the 'antenna' as the previous commenter seems to have suggested. There are four *separate* barrels, muzzles, firing pins, and triggers involved in this really rather crude, and primitive firearm, and the bullets simply penetrate the thin plastic top of the phone when exiting the muzzle of each barrel. This weapon is designed for very close proximity firing, and is not accurate at any distance beyond a couple meters.

I haven't looked at the video, but I wouldn't naturally assume that the antenna is the barrel. I'm no gun nut, but stealthy 22's can barely have a barrel at all, they are usually meant for close range self defense. In either case, one could be loading a small magazine such as 9mms have in their grip, via those holes. The weird bit is, if you are needing to stealthily shoot someone in self defense, how likely is it that the attacker is going to allow you to go for even your cell phone?

the device looks like a simple "pepperbox" type derringer. 4 chambers 4 firing pins, 4 barrells. anyone looking at the top of the phone could tell something is amiss, there will be 4 big holes in the top of the phone, and the antenna will be hollow. not to mention the thing looks like ronco made it for sale to the after 3AM TV watching set.

If you watch the video closely, the puffs of smoke from 2nd through 4th shots don't come from the area of the antenna. Rather, they seem to originate from further down the phone body, in line with the other bullets, indicating there are four barrels along the top. Having handeled quite a few guns of various makes and models in my life, I see nothing to indicate this would not work.

BoingBoing readers, be on the lookout for stolen hi-tech art!

Sunbrothers, my buddies in Richmond, Ca. (outside of San Francisco) make some of the coolest hi-tech solar-powered art you've even seen.

If you go to Burning Man like I do, you may have been fortunate enough to see some of their art up-close and personal.

Martin Bricelj describes his Pornogobelin project as an "attempt at reviving an all but forgotten bourgeois pheonomenon of centuries past. By combining traditional techniques (needlepoint) and traditional motifs (erotica) the author approcahes in a fresh and playful way the aesthetics of the digital format, which is these days largely utilized for dissemination of pornography on the web.”

Spotted in this post on Fleshbot, where you'll find more background on the project. (some links in this post contain needlepoint nudity).

Boing Boing reader Phill Kennedy says,

Xeni, where are you when you are needed??? Boing Boing had the guy drinking kids' urine, then they had the shrunken head thing. Where is that Unicorn chaser when we need it most?? Is there some kind of "Xeni" "bat signal" we can turn on in emergencies??

When Elvis and Pennings go to the beach, they always play fetch. Standing at the water's edge, Pennings throws a tennis ball out into the waves, and Elvis eagerly retrieves it. When Pennings throws the ball at an angle to the shoreline, Elvis has several options. He can run along the beach until he is directly opposite the ball, then swim out to get it. Or he can plunge into the water right away and swim all the way to the ball. What happens most the time, however, is that Elvis runs part of the way along the beach, then swims out to the ball.

Depending on the dog's running and swimming speeds, the strategy that Elvis follows appears to minimize the time that it takes to get to the ball. Indeed, Pennings found by experiment that Elvis performs in a way that closely matches a calculus-based mathematical model of the situation.

I stumbled on this website by way of blogging.la yesterday: Family Watchdog is a site that promises to display the names, home addresses, mugshots and other data for convicted sex offenders near any given geographical location in the US. The site also offers a notification service -- get alerts when a convicted sex offender moves near your home.

I entered my home address, and was thoroughly creeped out to see lots of little red, yellow, and green squares nearby. Each sqare represents the home address of a convicted sex offender, and each color indicates conviction type (rape, sex acts against minors under 14, sexual battery, kidnapping with intent to rape).

The creepiest thing of all, though, is seeing their faces: there are mugshots in each convict's pop-up window. Websites like this bring up all kinds of complex privacy arguments, and the consequences of potential errors. Wrong names, addresses or photos could happen, no system is perfect -- not to mention possible wrongful convictions. Some argue that sites like this encourage vigilanteism and create risks for wrongfully accused or databased people; others argue they promote a false sense of security awareness (what about the rapist next door who isn't in this website's database?)

But right now I'm just stuck on the immediate, visceral, ick factor. You plug in "Starbucks" to Google Maps, you get little red dots on a map that show you where to buy a frappucino. Enter a search here, and instead you'll see these men (and women)'s faces and criminal records.

Link

Reader comment: Jonathan Martin says,

It's interesting to note that (at least in my state) there's a higher concentration of "dots" in lower income areas. That says one of the following:

- sex criminals are more likely poorer
- poorer people are more likely to be sex criminals
- that richer people get away away with it (i.e.: hire better lawyers)
- that richer victims are less likely to report crimes, poorer more likely
- the higher concentration could be caused my denser population in those areas
- or none of the above

I'm certainly not suggesting a correlation between income and crime, just an observation.

Thanks a ton. Me and my mom were checking offenders around our house, and we ran across a picture of a guy who asked out my mom to go on a date just a few hours before. He was convicted for rape. You possibly saved my mom for posting it, so I thank you.

I'd just like to point out that certain states do not share/store the addresses of sex offenders. This would include Nevada, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Boy do I love my home state, Pennsylvania.

Don't get too creeped out. In many states, including Florida, the law is so broad as to get you listed as a sex offender for urinating in public. Do it in an area where you even might be in view of children and you'll get the "offense against children" mark.

Drunken college kids doing a drive-by mooning? If convicted of indecent exposure, they get the same. You'll notice most (if not all?) sex offense criminal records don't bother to state the crime committed.

Here is a news story about a woman who puts a sex offender sign on the wrong house. It is illegal to harass these convicted sex offenders. The privacy issues are very complicated. Megan's Law is tricky because we all know how corrupt our legal system is with racist police and judges. It is supposedly a common frame-up for police to plant child porn on drug dealers' computers so they can send them away for longer. Link to story.

Although Family Watchdog (a great service!) does not currently include offenders from Pennsylvania, the state does provide public access to the registered sex offenders database at the Megan's Law website. While it doesn't provide a nifty interactive map, it is searchable by county, city, ZIP code, name and alias, and also includes creepy mugshots.

Be aware that if you read the fine print of the source data for sex offender database, (in Californina at least), you find that the make no assurances that the data is correct. Sex offenders move, and the database of their registered address commonly is out of date with their actual address. This was the case for the address of the house next door to my own house for several months last year. Also, there have been reports, when the parent is the molestor of their own child, [and still resides with the child], that the address listed is actually the address where the child victim lives. In such cases, publicly listing the address is clearly wrong.

Vis a vis Family Watchdog, Spokane apparently outdoes most of the rest of the US (including nearby cities) for child molesters and serial killers. No idea why.

I ran the only convicted sex offender I know through this site -- and his name's not listed. So I ran his address -- and no, he's not there. Lives equidistant between two schools, he's got a history of sex acts with minors, but he's not on the list. I have other problems with this site (many, many problems, which I'm trying to write up in something like a coherent format now), but this is the main one. It reads as though it's all you need to keep your family safe -- but obviously it's not.

We decided to try a round of 9mm Ball because that is most commonly used in the Sandbox.

Notice how it flattened out the ball.

One of the most famous parts of our museum is our collection (of) real shrunken heads. No, we can't sell them, but we do have a close fascimile. These goatskin shrunken heads are handmade in Ecuador only for us.They are made of boiled goatskin that has been formed by hand and shaved to simulate the human hair left on a real shrunken head.These have been very popular for re-sale on the internet - now you can buy them direct from the source.

A spokesman for the Foreign Office, which oversees MI6, said: "The settlement offers were made to the government on behalf of the three claimants which, on legal advice, and in the particular circumstances of these cases, the government thinks it appropriate to accept..."

The research was carried out after British and American governments thought the Soviet Union had developed a "truth drug" which could compel spies and servicemen to yield up important secrets.

MI6 scientists decided to test LSD, the closest thing they thought they had to a truth drug, on volunteers to see how they reacted.

Update: Here's Van Gogh's Almond Blossom as a cake, masterfully rendered by Abbie!

Update: Here's an alternate LA map with the Orange line,

Update 2: Here's another one -- thanks, Gregg!)

See also: London Anagram Tube Map, Toronto Anagram Subway Map, Amsterdam Anagram Metro Map, Chicago Regional Transit Authority Anagram Map, Maps for Manhattan, Oslo, Boston and Atlanta, Vienna U-Bahn Anagram Map, DC Metro Anagram Map, Stockholm Transit Anagram Map

See also: London Anagram Tube Map, Toronto Anagram Subway Map, Amsterdam Anagram Metro Map, Chicago Regional Transit Authority Anagram Map, Maps for Manhattan, Oslo, Boston and Atlanta, Vienna U-Bahn Anagram Map, DC Metro Anagram Map

"Listening to his describe it, it's like listening to a crack or cocaine addict. He's addicted to children's urine," said a police officer.

Police said Patton goes to family restaurants and movie theaters and waits for boys in a bathroom stall. Investigators said he shuts off the water to the child-level urinal and puts a cup in the bottom.

Patton allegedly told police that he leaves the stall after the child leaves.

"He goes back and retrieves the cup and drinks the urine," Fithen said.

Police said Patton told them it makes him sick, but that it's almost spiritual to him. He allegedly added, "I like it because it makes me closer to them -- like I'm drinking their youth."

See also: London Anagram Tube Map, Toronto Anagram Subway Map, Amsterdam Anagram Metro Map, Chicago Regional Transit Authority Anagram Map, Maps for Manhattan, Oslo, Boston and Atlanta, Vienna U-Bahn Anagram Map

The internal logs of at least 40 Sequoia touch-screen voting machines reveal that votes were time and date-stamped as cast two weeks before the election, sometimes in the middle of the night...

Dozens of voting machines were turned off during the middle of the election while the polls were open. Machine # 6359 in precinct 1036 was powered down 128 times during the election.

Cn y pst wtht vwls?

´s ´s chtng t´ ´s´ ´pstrph´s?

Knd of lks lk Cthlh´ spkng, dsn´t t?

N snw hr, snny ´´tsd´. Hw´s th wthr, whr y r?

My brn lrdy strtd hrtng, frm wrtng lk ths.

Hv y fnd th hddn vwl yt?

See also: London Anagram Tube Map, Toronto Anagram Subway Map, Amsterdam Anagram Metro Map, Chicago Regional Transit Authority Anagram Map, Maps for Manhattan, Oslo, Boston and Atlanta

Altanta anagram map:

Olso anagram map:

Boston Orange Line Anagram Map:

(See this alternate, more complete version) (See also this alternate Boston map) (See also this Boston map)

New York "1" Line Anagram station-names:

27
97
68
69
130
101
611
521
371
451
751
861
811
911
Damn Tyck Trees.

See also: London Anagram Tube Map, Toronto Anagram Subway Map, Amsterdam Anagram Metro Map, Chicago Regional Transit Authority Anagram Map

Update: Dlin sez, "I made this anagram map of Boston's transit system, the T, last night. This one includes all lines of the T except the silver line, which isn't a 'real' rail line anyway."

Update 2: Michael sez, "Here's a complete Boston MBTA subway (and some commuter rail) map with all stop names anagrammed. How can you not love a system where one line ends in Bootleg Clones and the airport is now Proletarian Annotation Girl?"

Update 3: Michele sez, "I finally finished my Boston MBTA anagram map -- all lines are anagrammed, including the Silver Line and Commuter Rail (even the destinations at the end of the lines, and the map Legend)."

It's The Matrix meets Alice in Wonderland meets The Da Vinci Code in one of the most unusual concepts we've ever seen at Insound. If it wasn't insanely compelling, we wouldn't divert our attention from music to sell it. Is it a game? Is it a story? Is it a series of interlinked puzzles spanning mysterious websites, cryptic phone calls, stray emails, hidden messages and live events in random cities around the world? We're not entirely sure to be honest...some call it an Alternate Reality Game. Others describe it as interactive fiction. Videogame geeks call it a real life MMO.

Created by a range of leading designers and illustrators, the Perplex City puzzle cards range in difficulty from the fun and easy to the captivatingly complex. There are beautifully crafted riddles, origami challenges, pop culture trivia, logical mindbenders, 3D mazes, Egyptian hieroglyphs and much, much more. These cards are the entryway into the world of Perplex City and contain information and clues essential to unraveling the mystery and finding the missing Cube.

Glaucoma Hymn
Glaucoma, Glaucoma, Glaucoma
Constricting vision slowly
Halted by progress of science
Vision of a world united
Beyond all science knowing

Link to archived audio for "Google Case Puts Focus on Web Thumbnail Photos," and Link to PDF of court ruling.

Previously on Boing Boing:
Judge rules against Google in court case over porn thumbnails

Reader comment: Jason Schultz says,

Worth noting also that it's taken Apple about three years to sell a billion songs, which is a drop in the bucket compared to CD sales and especially compared to P2P traffic, even today. So while this is nice for Apple, it's still not showing signs of replacing the existing music distribution mechanisms.

Read this item and the comment by Jason that this was after three years. While it is correct, it should be remembered that it took iTunes 27 months to record its first 500 million sales and only 7 months to do the second 500 million. Its growth is looking like becoming exponential.

It's also worth noting that iTunes is providing the consumer with much better service than CD distributors, by allowing a la carte delivery of the product. When we hear a song we like, we no longer drive to our local music stores and pay upwards of $12 to purchase a CD full of other songs we may or may not enjoy. Instead, we hop online and pay a dollar for the specific product we want to purchase.

It may take a little time, and there will certainly always be those who hold out against purely digitized media (we all have friends who listen to nothing if its not cut into vinyl); but eventually, as long as online content distributors continue to provide the consumer with exactly what they want at a fair price, CD sales will decline to the point where they are no longer the primary distribution mechanism. The record companies may whine and snivel, but it's not like we don't expect that from them anyway.

From the vantage point of the United States, the program is remarkable: You simply would never encounter such a brazen denunciation of religious faith on this country's airwaves, because the outcry from the religious right would be deafening. Dawkins's narration drips with contempt; as he goes about his rounds, it's as if he can hardly restrain himself from shouting, "I'm surrounded by IDIOTS!" The smoke coming out of his ears leaves a trail behind him wherever he goes.

In the seven-and-a-half minute clip linked through the image below, Dawkins visits Colorado Springs to attend a sermon by an influential but proudly ignorant pastor. In a conversation with Dawkins after the sermon, the pastor likens the event to a rock concert. Dawkins suggests that it was more akin to a Nuremberg rally —- a comparison that the pastor appears to be too uneducated and ignorant to be offended by.

Reader comment: Richardsays:

I actually saw this program in the UK, and the particular part you mention in that clip is superb to see.

The Pastor doesn't really get upset onscreen, afterwards he apparently came up to the crew in the car park and told them to get off his land because he had called his worshippers animals. That's a reference to Dawkins saying that we're descended from apes!

There are some amazingly good scenes, and very strong arguments. From my little write up of it there are a few links to some essays he's written which are even more powerful. The essay about religion and human guided missiles is very tough going. You've got to admire him.

All the windows were blown out, the vehicle doors were bent towards the outside and the roof was pushed about a foot higher than normal. [The occupants said] that they were taking a balloon to a Super Bowl party -- a balloon filled with acetylene, a very explosive gas used in welding -- so they could blow up the balloon while celebrating. However, on the drive, the balloon rolled across the back seat, possibly causing static electricity, and igniting the gas, causing it to explode.The couple said a passer-by gave them a ride home. Deputies called in an ambulance, who took the couple to Swedish Medical Center for possible shrapnel wounds and broken eardrums. Norman Frey, 46, faces a charge of possession, use, or removal of explosives or incendiary devices. He faces two to six years in prison.

Today’s lawsuits mark the first time the MPAA is taking action against sites that enable users of Newsgroups to easily find and download illegal content. Newsgroups are electronic bulletin boards which in recent years have become a major source of pirated content as users are able to attach movie, music and games files to their messages. The following is a list of the sites being sued by the MPAA and its member companies.

Isohunt.com, BTHub.com and TorrentBox.com: These related Torrent sites facilitate downloads of over 140,000 content items, including popular movies and television shows such as Wedding Crashers, Lost and Desperate Housewives.

TorrentSpy.com is the world’s most-visited site for obtaining infringing content using Torrent software. The site offers over 160,000 content items including 27,182 movies, 21,130 TV shows and over 45,000 music items.

NiteShadow.com has over 24,000 registered members and offers over 1,000 science-fiction TV and movie content including Battlestar Galactica, Quantum Leap, Sliders, Stargate, Babylon 5 and multiple Star Trek series.

eDonkey: Ed2k-It.com is a leading eDonkey site, with over 46,000 registered site members. eDonkey sites provide easy one-click access to specific content items on their peer-to-peer network.

Newsgroups: NZB-Zone.com, BinNews.com and DVDRs.net are membership-based websites that enable users of Newsgroups to initiate easy downloads of infringing content. NZB-Zone offers over 3.3 million files, including Star Wars Episode III, Wedding Crashers, Chronicles of Narnia, 40 Year-Old Virgin and King Kong; BinNews.com offers files for over 3,000 movies; and DVDRs.net has over 37,000 members.

Reader comment: Gary says,

Just thought I would say that NZB-Zone.com, BinNews.com and DVDRs.net do not contain any files other than 'maps' or nzbs to files already posted on usenet. This is even less direct than torrents as you have to pay a private provider for usenet access to begin with.

It's also the good fortune of the gang that one of the boys nearly drowns in a swimming accident, because it gives their chaperone, the kindly "Uncle Ed" ("one of those rare men who take a great interest in boys and their affairs") a chance to demonstrate the art of artificial respiration on the unconscious boy.

My favorite part of the book is when the gang forms a secret society with a club pin in the shape of a beetle.

The only other charm our secret club afforded was the wearing of a mysterious club pin. It was a silver beetle, with the letter G engraved on the head and the letter B on the body, while down the center of the back was the letter I (see Fig. 187). In public we called ourselves the G. I. B.'s, but it was only the initiated members who knew that these letters were to be read backward, and, with the beetle on which they were engraved, signified the "Big Bugs." Of course, we had some secret signs and signals, a secret hand grasp, a peculiar whistle as a warning to run [used, perhaps, whenever Uncle Ed began to take too great an interest in the boys? -- M] another meaning "lie still," and a third signifying "all is well."

Reader comment: Jared Buck says:

Just a comment about the Scientific American Boy book you linked to in
yesterday's Boing Boing -

Project Gutenberg does books in many diffeent genres, and among those are old issues of magazines such as Scientific American.  I have done a number of books for PG's Distributed Proofreaders, and if your readers would be interested in seeing what issues of the magazine we have done, I would ask them to look here. Search under "Scientific American" in the title field. We already have issues from the early 1890s and I myself am trying to work on an issue on SA that will eventually become a PG etext.

Glad you could give PG a little shout-out!

Jared Buck
Project Gutenberg Volunteer

I felt somewhat unnerved at being held responsible for the disintegration of the UK anti-piracy system. Who would have thought giving away software could cause such difficulties?

However, given that the free software movement is unlikely collectively to decide to go proprietary in order to make her life easier, I had another go, using examples like Linux and the OpenOffice office suite to show that it's not just Firefox which is throwing a spanner in the works.

She then asked me to identify myself, so that she could confirm that I was authorised to speak for the Mozilla Foundation on this matter. I wondered if she was imagining nefarious copyright-infringing street traders taking a few moments off from shouting about the price of bananas to pop into an internet cafe, crack a router and intercept her e-mail.

The amazing Los Angeles artist Mark Ryden will be featured in (and on the cover of) volume 3 of Hi-Fructose magazine (coming out this summer). This issue will also feature Chris Ware, Jim Woodring and a bunch of other great stuff, plus it is shipping with a special Viewmaster Photo Reel featuring photos from Brian McCarty.

See also: London Anagram Tube Map, Toronto Anagram Subway Map, Amsterdam Anagram Metro Map

Update: Matt sez, "James Lileks is doing a very similar thing on his page. He's got loads of cards, and is posting them by state, updating once a week."

Update 2: Yorkie sez, "The Great Postcard Hunt has been collecting and cataloging interesting vintage postcard scenes from around the world, then recreating them with equivalent modern day views. It's effectively a combination of treasure hunt and photo safari, except all the hard preparation work has already been done."

Update 3: Humuhumu sez, "Here's an amazing collection of vintage Hawaiian hotel room postcards."

I fixed it. My way. The original switch was a two-part affair, the main switch turning on the high-voltage guts with a second smaller switch turning on the tuner. These are not normal switches that you can go to Maplin and pick up, so I did the next best thing - picked up generic, science-lab looking switches and mounted them on the side. To complete the look, I've added labels printed on my Dymo: "POWER" and "LAUNCH".

The first two volumes of the Feline Wizards trilogy drew a sizable audience, but not enough to convince Diane's publisher to pay her to write book three. Over the years, an anxious audience has demanded a conclusion to the series, so back in December, Diane posted an open question to her blog: would her readers support her if she finished the trilogy without a publisher?

The answer's been a resounding yes -- one reader's even gone so far as to offer a $1,000 matching grant to Diane toward the completion of the book.

I'll be blogging this experiment as it unfolds -- check back here for notice when the first chapter goes live.

A lot of the people who mailed me knew about, and mentioned, Lawrence Watt-Evans' celebrated approach to his own version of this problem, in which he "serially" self-published his Ethshar novel The Spriggan Mirror, posting a chapter every time the PayPal donations from interested readers reached a certain point. (And afterwards, his book found a publisher, too.)

That particular business model had been on my mind for a good while. Certainly it has an honorable and ancient cultural precedent in the storyteller who unrolls his or her mat in the marketplace and tells just enough story to get your interest...then shakes the bowl in front of him/her, and waits for enough coins to jingle in it to warrant a continuation. But at the end of the day, when you start a project like this, the question is always going to be: is there going to be enough interest to see it finished? Yes, I want to tell this story -- there are characters in The Big Meow who I've been wanting to write for a long time. And at the same time, what goes on in my household is still a business, about which I have to be fairly hardheaded if it's not to flounder in the face of present market conditions

I will start off with this image of a ballon seller posing in front of King Arthurs carousel in Fantasyland. Image is an original slide with the date of 7-55 written on the back. Great posed shot with the wild balloons that are pre-Mickey Mouse design. I love the sunglasses and the circle skirt. This balloon seller was definitely prior to Disney actually hiring and training employees. He looks like one very scary clown!

However, I was wrong. On February 3, I ran a retraction after an insider at The Register tipped me off that "Bonhomie" was a pseudonym for another long-time Register contributor.

Now the FFWD blog has made a compelling case that Bonhomie Snoutintroff is the pen-name of Thomas C Greene, a long-standing Register contributor who used several near-identical passages in a 2001 article in The Reg.

I wrote to Greene to ask him if he was Snoutintroff. Here's part of our exchange:

CD: Did you write the Bonhomie column about EFF? If not, did the writer who did so use your lines with or without your permission?

TG: I don't like to be cagey, but if i am bonhomie, then i should prefer to leave it unconfirmed so that the nom de guerre isn't a total giveaway, whereas if a contributor to the Reg had, say, flattered me by imitating a phrase of mine here and there, then i would handle that directly, and not embarrass the fellow in public.

So it's a bit of a no-win item, as you can see.

I find it puzzling that there is such interest in learning the author's identity, since the piece is obviously not straight news. Bonhomie's byline should make that abundantly clear.

Now, if it were straight news, and it became controversial, we would certainly handle it in a more formal and forthcoming manner. But questioning the EFF item strikes me as very much like questioning this one: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/01/bush_twins_volunteer/ .

I would add that many writers and journos use pseudonyms occasionally, and enjoy it for what it is: a chance to write in a voice not one's own. It can be useful creatively sometimes, or it can simply be a welcome break from the routine. Sometimes, journos contribute to competing publications, and often prefer to do so pseudonymously. At the Reg we've had several pseudonymous submissions from known tech journos who would prefer not to advertise where they work. I've published articles elsewhere myself, sometimes under my name, and sometimes under a nom de guerre.

There's really nothing sinister to it; it's a common practice, actually.

* Investigate ICARUS, the Department of Housing’s anti-filesharing software, and invite students into a public debate for the first time

* Work with the university to establish guidelines for the use of specialized proprietary software in classes, so students won’t be stung by expensive class software that they can’t re-sell

The public interest groups continue to subversively write down what's going on and publish it, something that WIPO's Secretariat once described as "abusing WIPO's hospitality" -- normally, the Secretariat would release a report six months after the fact, once everyone quoted in it had the chance to revise the report of what they'd said. EFF and others publish their account of the WIPO deliberations daily -- twice a day, when it's going hot and heavy -- and it gets slashdotted, read by delegates' bosses in their capitols, and distributed. It has a genuinely disruptive effect on the orderly dividing-and-conquering of the world that's underway there.

Technologically, it's dead simple: the public interest groups make an ad-hoc WiFi network, open up the group-editing program SubEthaEdit, and collectively write down as much of what's being said as they can keep up with, along with explanatory text.

EFF's just posted its Day 2 notes from the meeting, and they're fascinating. Check out all these developing nations coming to accord on how to protect their interests, and then the US and its states like Mexico (which follows the US's lead all the time at WIPO) just poo-pooing the whole thing as too complicated to even consider. Shameless -- and on display for everyone to see. Hilariously, the US continues to argue that the best way to protect developing countries is to put up a website explaining how great more copyright and patent laws are.

Chile had actually put forward three suggestions, but it was the proposal for WIPO to undertake a study of the value of "a rich and accessible public domain" that drew comments from a slew of Member States, the Committee Chair and public interest non-governmental organizations. And rightly so. As Chile's proposal notes, the public domain is essential for ensuring access to knowledge, and provides the foundation for technological innovation.

Intellectual property rights are supposed to promote the same goals, but you'd never know it from the comments of some participants who seemed to fundamentally misunderstand the essential relationship between IP and the public domain. Apparently under the mistaken impression that the public domain is the opposite of intellectual property, these participants claimed that the proposal was outside WIPO's mandate.

Each braid is represented as multiple copies of a “Y” shaped plait. In each iteration, the plait is copied, and a transformation is applied. The series of transformed copies creates the braid. In the above example, we can see the original style at top right, and a series of braid simulations, each composed of plait copies that are successively scaled down, rotated, and translated (reflection is only applied to whole braids, as in the case where one side of the head is a mirror image of the other). One of the interesting research outcomes was that our students discovered which parameters need to remain the same and which would be changed in order to produce the entire series of braids (that is, how to iterate the iterations).

Utilizing two coupled optical interferometers, nested within a third, Kwiat's team succeeded in counterfactually searching a four-element database using Grover's quantum search algorithm. "By placing our photon in a quantum superposition of running and not running the search algorithm, we obtained information about the answer even when the photon did not run the search algorithm," said graduate student Onur Hosten, lead author of the Nature paper. "We also showed theoretically how to obtain the answer without ever running the algorithm, by using a 'chained Zeno' effect."

Through clever use of beam splitters and both constructive and destructive interference, the researchers can put each photon in a superposition of taking two paths. Although a photon can occupy multiple places simultaneously, it can only make an actual appearance at one location. Its presence defines its path, and that can, in a very strange way, negate the need for the search algorithm to run.

"In a sense, it is the possibility that the algorithm could run which prevents the algorithm from running," Kwiat said. "That is at the heart of quantum interrogation schemes, and to my mind, quantum mechanics doesn't get any more mysterious than this."

NASA spokesperson John Bluck explains,

For the first time, objects 'evolved by computers' will be launched into space in March 2006, if all goes to plan. The objects are antennas mounted on three small NASA satellites.

Earlier, 80 personal computers, running artificial intelligence software, quickly 'evolved' the design of the small space antennas at NASA Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley.

Like a friendly, non-biological form of the Borg Collective of science fiction fame, 80 personal computers, using artificial intelligence (AI), have combined their silicon brains to quickly design a tiny, advanced space antenna.

If all goes well, three of these computer-designed space antennas will begin their trip into space in March 2006, when an L-1011 aircraft will take off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The airplane will drop a Pegasus XL rocket into the sky high above the Pacific Ocean. The rocket will ignite and carry three small Space Technology (ST5) satellites into orbit.

Each satellite will be equipped with a strange-looking, computer-designed space antenna. Although they resemble bent paperclips, the antennas are highly efficient, according to scientists.

During the onset of his disease at 57, Wain continued to paint, draw and sketch cats, but the focus changed from fanciful situations, to focus on the cats themselves.

Characteristic changes in the art began to occur, changes common to schizophrenic artists. Jagged lines of bright color began emanating from his feline subjects. The outlines of the cats became sever and spiky, and their outlines persisted well throughout the sketches, as if they were throwing off energy.

Soon the cats became abstracted, seeming now to be made up of hundreds of small repetitive shapes, coming together in a clashing jangles of color that transform the cat into something resembling an Eastern diety.

The abstraction continued, the cats now being seen as made up by small repeating patterns, almost fractal in nature. Until finally they ceased to resemble cats at all, and became the ultimate abstraction, an indistinct form made up by near symmetrical repeating patterns.

The dramatically satisfying idea that these beautiful pieces reflect Wain's ongoing descent into schizophrenia is most likely untrue. In his biography of Wain, The Man Who Drew Cats (as far as I know this is the only biography of the artist), Rodney Dale shows that Dr Walter Maclay, a collector of art by mental patients, found the images and arranged them, arbitrarily (some are unsigned and all are undated), into an order that suggested the progression of Wain's madness...

Says Dale: "Assembling what little factual knowledge we have on Dr Maclay's eight paintings, there is clearly no justification for regarding them as more than samples of Louis Wain's art at different times. Wain experimented with patterns and cats, and even quite late in life was still producing conventional cat pictures..."

The kaleidoscopic cats, and other fine examples of art by sufferers from schizophrenia, depression and other mental illnesses, are on display at the Bethlehem hospital archive and gallery in Beckenhem, Kent (just south of London) which is well worth a visit. You can also pick up fantastic Louis Wain mugs, as well as postcards! They have a site here.

"We're investigating as to who was actually driving," said Sgt. Philip Brooks of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department today. "His (Eriksson's) story has inconsistencies that need to be cleared up...

Officials are trying to determine whether (Eriksson) is the noted Swedish game designer whose firm, perhaps not surprisingly, was involved with car-racing themed video games....

Eriksson "had a .09 blood-alcohol level, but if he's a passenger, that's OK," Brooks said. "But he had a bloody lip, and only the air bag on the driver's side had blood on it. The passenger-side air bag did not. My Scooby-Doo detectives are looking closely into that.

"Maybe the 'driver' had a friend who picked him up. Maybe he thumbed a ride," the sergeant added. "Maybe he was a ghost."

Every print from Thumbtack Press is a gallery quality print on heavy bright white stock. We use only archival inks utilizing a professional 8-color process. The final print is trimmed to size and protected in an acid-free polyurethane cover before shipment in a board-backed, water resistant envelope.

Frank Van Zant's vision was sparked when he heard the prophecy of a medicine woman: "In the final days there shall rise up a place called Thunder Mountain." She also told him that only those who lived at Thunder Mountain would survive the coming apocalypse. Van Zant wasted no time; he changed his name to Chief Rolling Thunder Mountain, moved his family to the desert in Imlay, Nevada, and began to build his monument.

At age 69 Van Zant committed suicide because he had finally completed his masterpiece.

The Chair is made with drawing paper, as the paper is being "drawn upon", the size of the front cylinder increases and thus follows the child's growth!- age 2-7 Years. Clean paper is transferred from the back cylinder to the front simply by rolling the front cylinder backwards. The amount of paper is approx. 500 meters, which means that the paper can be changed twice a week for 5 years.

The first ones to talk to the government about this were the car manufacturers, and they convinced the government to enforce a rule that used cars have to go to the technical inspection after 3 years, and this is a costly matter since a check costs between 1500 and 3500 EUR. Once you're in the system, you have to get your car checked every 2 years, and once your car is 10 years old, you need to go there every year. This is a reson why the Japanese change cars quite fast, usually before the car is 3 years old. Important aspect is that you have no control whatsoever on the cost of possible repairs, because after the technical check, the car is driven to the garage and they do the repairs that the technical check asked them to do, you just get the bill with your car. A very nice rip-off... and this system is being envied by a lot of other domains, like the electronics domain at this moment. So from April 1st 2006, ALL electronic products sold in Japan before 2001 will be prohibited from the 2nd hand market! This means that for example a PC like the Vaio U1 (PCG-U1) will be soon not vailable on the Japanese market anymore, since it was sold in April 2002... and you still have about a month to get a Vaio C1! It also seems that a 5 yeas old product (made after 2001) will Face the same problem in the futur.

Update: Lots of you have written in to point out this site, which purports to debunk this article. However, if you read it, you'll see that in the guise of "protecting consumers," this Japanese law will limit the resale of used goods to giant retailers that presently make all their money from new goods, while shutting out user-to-user sales of electronics, pawn shops, market stalls, charity shops, etc. In other words: the sale of used goods will be at the discretion of the companies that stand to lose the most from the sale of used goods.

It actually began as a doodle that got out of control. I took the copy and layout pretty much verbatim from an old black and white ad, but just substituted my own images and and made some minor changes to the text. Then I rendered the whole thing out in 2 colours. Blame me if you want for all the crappy lettering and crooked lines, but remember: I did this without a ruler!

If you are stuck behind a Boing Boing-proof firewall, you might be able to access Boing Boing using this link: http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=en|en&u=www.boingboing.net

This clever little trick from Google Hacks allows you to access restricted web sites using Google language tools service as a proxy.

Reader comment: Adjam says:

I used that 'Google proxy' method to bypass our sysadmin's paranoid web restrictions all the time two years ago!

He would block it though, so instead of using google.co.uk /translate?langpair=en|en&u=www.somthing.com i would use google.co.jp or google.co.fr. And he was so incompetent that every now and then he'd just reset all the web restrictions without realizing it and I could use .co.uk again.

Reader comment: Charles says:

I'm not sure who said boingboing is blocked from Argonne, but I know I check your site daily and it's not blocked. It's a big lab - maybe someone's department has a local firewall setup. It's definitely not labwide.

Reader comment: Scott says:

I think my app Bitty should be able to get through to blocked content, for example here's boingboing.

I just released a new version. Here's boingboing in Bitty as a Google personalized home page module:

1) Go to: http://www.google.com/ig/

2) Click "Add Content" in the top-left corner

3) Look for "Create a Section" at the bottom of the new left-hand sidebar, and copy/paste this URL

4) Click OK at the prompt

Reader comment: Brian says:

Don't know if this is just a coincidence but.. BoingBoing was blocked at Prudential starting today. Noticed this morning when I went for my daily fix!

Reader comment:A reader says:

Regarding the bypass of firewalls you suggested to be able to read Boingboing if it is blocked…

I thought you should know this method is very popular here in China to bypass government filters. Google Translate doesn’t work, but lesser-known translators (like, say, http://www.worldlingo.com) work perfectly. It doesn’t work for Google Translate and Babelfish, though… I think the Chinese government is wise to this and banned these sites.

"Whatever your opinion of personal firearms ownership, Cory was completely within his rights to defend himself and his young daughter against an intruder who failed to declare his identity, and who did not have a warrant. Please consider signing the petition to the governor of Mississippi for a pardon for Mr. Maye."

Both the liberal and conservative press are up in arms about this. Here's a Fox News column with more details.

That Cory Maye is even in prison is an appalling failure of Mississippi's criminal justice system. Police had no reason to be in his home that night, much less to break down his door. His case is just the latest in a series of tragic consequences resulting from the overuse of paramilitary tactics when police serve drug warrants.

But it's the details of Cory Maye's case that make it particularly compelling:

Cory Maye had no prior criminal record. He had no history of violence. Police found one gram of ashen marijuana in Maye's apartment (that's about a sixth of a teabag's worth). There was no "large stash," and Cory Maye was no drug dealer. In fact, Maye's name appeared nowhere on the search warrant, only his address and the phrase "persons unknown."

Adults with authority control the home, the school, and most activity spaces. Teens are told where to be, what to do and how to do it. Because teens feel a lack of control at home, many don't see it as their private space.

To them, private space is youth space and it is primarily found in the interstices of controlled space. These are the places where youth gather to hang out amongst friends and make public or controlled spaces their own. Bedrooms with closed doors, for example.

Adult public spaces are typically controlled spaces for teens. Their public space is where peers gather en masse; this is where presentation of self really matters. It may be viewable to adults, but it is really peers that matter.

Teens have increasingly less access to public space. Classic 1950s hang out locations like the roller rink and burger joint are disappearing while malls and 7/11s are banning teens unaccompanied by parents. Hanging out around the neighborhood or in the woods has been deemed unsafe for fear of predators, drug dealers and abductors. Teens who go home after school while their parents are still working are expected to stay home and teens are mostly allowed to only gather at friends' homes when their parents are present.

U.S. District Judge A. Howard Matz found Google directly infringed on copyrights held by Perfect 10, a Beverly Hills publisher. He said the free availability of the photos on Google could harm Perfect 10's efforts to sell thumbnail, or small, versions of its photos as downloads to cell phones.

``The court reaches this conclusion despite the enormous public benefit that search engines such as Google provide,'' Matz wrote in a 47-page order filed Friday. If upheld, the judge's ruling could affect Yahoo and other Internet companies whose image searches display thumbnails of copyrighted pictures. The judge ordered Google and Perfect 10 to submit by March 8 wording for a preliminary injunction barring the use of the thumbnail images.

Perfect 10 publishes the adult magazine ``Perfect 10'' and operates a subscription Web site that claims to feature ``the world's most beautiful natural women.'' Google's image search displays thumbnail images when people submit a query on a particular subject. The tiny pictures are stored on Google's servers but when a person clicks on the image, he is taken to the original source of the full-sized image. Google's creation and display of the Perfect 10 thumbnail images ``likely do not fall within the fair use exemption,'' Matz wrote, citing a legal standard that allows for limited use of copyrighted works, such as for criticism, comment, news reporting or teaching.

Mole traps are another area of the hobby that have interested me off and on in the past few years. Unlike the mouse and rat traps, the mole traps are not nearly as popular of a collectible and thus the prices have remained fairly reasonable.

I blogged the map last week -- it was one of the funniest and most creative re-uses of the familiar map I'd ever seen. The London Tube Map is part of the culture of London, a genius work of information design that is as familiar to a Londoner as the familiar pub designs and the black cabs. Like all culture, it's subject to being remixed by playful citizens and artists.

No one made money from the anagram map (in fact, serving a big PDF to lots of people can cost a lot of money). Instead, we Londoners shared the map on a noncommercial basis the same way you would any clever joke or song or poster about the world around you. It's shameful for Transport for London to have abused UK trademark law to engage in rank censorship. It should celebrate the creativity of its riders, not punish it. Link (Thanks, Jamie!)

Update: Thomas sez, "A bunch of remixed Tube maps have been collected in one place. This includes a jpegified version of the anagram map."

Update 2: Greywulf is hosting another mirror of the map.

I described Scalzi's Old Man's War as "The Forever War with better sex, Starship Troopers without the lectures." It's the tale of a war fought in space by soldiers who are picked from Earth's elderly population and rehabilitated into superhuman fighting machines using secret technology, never to return to earth.

The Ghost Brigades continues in the same vein, with the story of the Special Forces of the space military, genetically engineered superhumans who fight to defend a planet they've never visited and never will. Scalzi's special gift for action scenes that vibrate and human interaction that can bring a belly laugh or tears is sharp and clear here.

John's an all-round good guy, a beloved AOL moderator and a bestselling humorist whose Uncle John's Bathroom Reader sell by the truckload. He's one of the strongest new voices in science fiction and it's a treat to have a new book from him in hand. Link

The Camera has 2 Memory chips, with over 300 pictures dating back to January 2005. Most of the pictures are family pics showing a young child playing, and some more recent ones include a new baby. There are a few movies on the chips, with Spanish being the spoken language. But, we are not sure if its Spanish from Spain or Latin America. 2 of the location shots on the camera can be found HERE and HERE

"All I'm saying is while the jury's out on this one, I'm not going to put in place what is potential chronic exposure for our students," he said. "Admittedly that's highest around the locations of the antenna sites and the wireless hotspots, but those are the places people tend to gravitate to because they get the best reception."

Um, how about mobile phones, 2.4GHz walkie-talkies and microwaves, dude? Link (Thanks, Richard!)

No one will say how VEIL works, though. As Ed Felten discovered: if you contact the VEIL people and ask for an explanation of how their magic watermarking tech works, they'll charge you $10,000, make you sign a non-disclosure, and then refuse to tell you how the encoding works anyway (they will explain decoding though).

Any technology whose workings are a secret isn't fit to be considered for a legal mandate (I don't think legal mandates on technology are a good idea, period, of course). Kathryn's turned her extraordinary talent to picking apart the company that makes VEIL and its founders, and I can't wait to see what she turns up:

This secrecy screams SCAM to me, and regular readers of this space know that I have been finding certain kinds of secrecy and scams entertaining of late. So I'm taking a look. Koplar Communications International, home of VEIL technology, seems to be a real company with a real address and real execs and all that (unlike certain companies I've lately looked into). But the response Freedom to Tinker got to their inquiry is just wrong wrong wrong. And in my experience, when you find something like that and start picking at the threads, things get interesting pretty quickly.

The protest will take place Saturday, February 25th at noon at the Tower Records Store on South Street. It will continue into early afternoon. Free Culture wants to inform consumers of their fair use rights and warn them about the DRM threat.

"We need to get the word out about fair use rights," said co-founder Luke Smith. "No one wants to buy a broken record; if you're not allowed to put it on your iPod, what exactly are you paying for? We want record companies to replace crippled CDs and pay for the damage they cause to their customers machines. We also want to drive the message home: you can't do this anymore, because we're watching you."

Mike Tems:
Broken-hearted I'll wander
Broken-hearted I'll remain
Since my bonny lightbulb man
In the wars he was slain...

Nigel Gatherer:
First when I cam tae the toon
They ca'd me young and bonnie
But noo they've changed the bulb
Ca' me the lightbulb's honey.

In its 1947 strategy plan, the advertising agency strongly emphasized a psychological approach. "We are dealing with a problem in mass psychology. We seek to ... strengthen the tradition of the diamond engagement ring -- to make it a psychological necessity capable of competing successfully at the retail level with utility goods and services...." It defined as its target audience "some 70 million people 15 years and over whose opinion we hope to influence in support of our objectives." N. W. Ayer outlined a subtle program that included arranging for lecturers to visit high schools across the country. "All of these lectures revolve around the diamond engagement ring, and are reaching thousands of girls in their assemblies, classes and informal meetings in our leading educational institutions," the agency explained in a memorandum to De Beers. The agency had organized, in 1946, a weekly service called "Hollywood Personalities," which provided 125 leading newspapers with descriptions of the diamonds worn by movie stars. And it continued its efforts to encourage news coverage of celebrities displaying diamond rings as symbols of romantic involvement. In 1947, the agency commissioned a series of portraits of "engaged socialites." The idea was to create prestigious "role models" for the poorer middle-class wage-earners. The advertising agency explained, in its 1948 strategy paper, "We spread the word of diamonds worn by stars of screen and stage, by wives and daughters of political leaders, by any woman who can make the grocer's wife and the mechanic's sweetheart say 'I wish I had what she has.'"

When Carla and I started the print zine bOING bOING in 1988, one of our primary inspirations was a countercultural newsletter called The Realist. Founded in 1958, The Realist published nonfiction and satirical pieces side by side, leaving it up to the reader to decide which was which.

The publisher and editor of The Realist, Paul Krassner, specialized in goring sacred cows. The most infamous piece he ran in his newsletter was a two page drawing by Wally Wood called "The Disneyland Memorial Orgy," which commemorated the death of Walt Disney by depicting all the popular Disney Characters having sex outside the gates of the Magic Kingdom. You can see a color reproduction of the poster, which Paul is selling, on his website.

When Life magazine profiled Krassner in the 1960s, describing him as a "social rebel," the FBI sent the magazine a poison pen letter that said. "To classify Krassner as a social rebel is far too cute. He's a nut, a raving, unconfined nut." True to Krassner's pranksterish form, he used that description in the title of one of his books, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut : Misadventures in Counter-Culture.

I don't know of anyone who has had as many weird experiences as Paul. Besides being the co-founder of the Youth International Party, also known as the Yippies, along with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, Paul is famous for gaving Groucho Marx his first acid trip, writing for Mad, being publisher of Larry Flynt's Hustler in the late 1970s, and editing Lenny Bruce's autobiography.

Today, at age 73, he's as busy as ever, writing columns for several publications and regularly blogging on the Huffington Post. I spoke with Paul on February 20, 2006. Link

Democracy has been available in beta for the Mac for months, but as of today, Windows users can play along too (the Linux player is just a little ways behind).

The experience of Democracy is great. Fire it up, pick some channels, and leave it running. Flip to it whenever you want to watch your video -- it's as easy as turning on a TV, but you can recommend the videos you like to your friends, make channels of them and save them.

What's more, you can hack the player, the publisher, all of it -- it's all free, open source software that's ready for your code contributions.

Democracy strikes the same balance that great free software tools like Firefox achieve: an elegant, simple tool for everyone to use; a powerful, active developer community that anyone can hack in. Link (Disclosure: I am proud to serve as a volunteer on the Board of Directors for the Participatory Culture Foundation, the nonprofit that created Democracy)

From writer and filmmaker Jasmina Tesanovic (politicalidiot at yahoo.com), who has been traveling in the same mountains where the accused war criminal was just captured may or may not have been arrested. Nobody seems to know exactly what's going on, wildly conflicting reports are circulating. Jasmina writes from Belgrade:

When Bad Guys become Good Guys

Today the " Good" Guy of the Scorpion Srebrenica trial finally spoke out: I shot the six Muslim men, I am guilty before God and you will decide, from the special court for war crimes, if I am guilty for you too. I obeyed the orders... Others, the "Bad" guys at the same trial, are in denial.

At this hour, B92 and some other media are unofficially reporting that General Ratko Mladic in charge of Srebrenica action is being arrested, but the Serbian official government is in denial. Only a few hours ago, the special adviser of president of president Kostunica said he knew nothing, except that it is imminent.

"A lot of people come to see real live scientists — some of whom are extremely famous and prominent — and see how their brains work," said Dr. John Cohen, a professor of immunology at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center and the founder of the Denver Café Scientifique. "People don't often get a chance to do that. Some come to ask questions, others are content to listen."

The Denver Café Scientifique was established in 2003 and is the largest in the country to date, drawing about 150 people (cafescicolorado.org). The topics vary from sleep to interstellar communication to Higgs bosons to nanotechnology, and they attract people of all ages and all occupations.

"Who would have thought you'd have standing room only at a geek event?" Dr. Cohen asked. He said he first read about science cafes in 1999 when they were catching on in England. "It just sounded like so much fun," he said. "I saw it as a reminder of the peripatetic philosophers who wandered the Agora in Athens." He imagined them, he continued, "stopping every so often to refresh themselves with a mug of wine from the local sellers."

(Chief Justice John) Roberts said that the Bush administration had not met its burden under a federal religious freedom law to show that it could ban "the sect's sincere religious practice."

The chief justice had also been skeptical of the government's position in the case last fall, suggesting that the administration was demanding too much, a "zero tolerance approach."

"The shoe includes a compass, a flashlight because people cross at night, and inside is included also some Tylenol painkillers because many people get injured during crossing," Werthein says...

An Aztec eagle is embroidered on the heel. On the toe is the American eagle found on the US quarter, to represent the American dream the migrants are chasing.

A map - printed on the shoe's removable insole - shows the most popular illegal routes from Tijuana into San Diego.

An estimated 72,000 biscuits, including digestives, chocolate digestives, rich tea, hobnobs, caramels and fruit shortcake, will be used during the week-long project.

Mr Dong has also built biscuit cities in Beijing, Chongqing, Shanghai and Paris.

Update: James took a great set of photos of biscuit city before it was eaten.

The Digicomp is a plastic mechanical computer from the 1960s. It offered three bits of tabletop computing, back in an age where corded telephones were considered high-tech. The machine arrived in kit form; your first task was to assemble the jumble of tubes, rods, and elastic bands into something that resembles a Jetson's parking garage. Once complete, it's a fantastic hands-on way to teach Boolean algebra and binary numbers.

In recent days, gazillions of BoingBoing readers (I lost count after one bazillion) sent in emails like this:

Google isn't just censoring in China. If you are in the United States, you can't see certain videos on Google Video. I stumbled across this Iraq footage (Link, alternate link, and another) on video.google.com, described as: "Detonation of Improvised Explosive Device used against Coalition forces. We found this one before they could use it against us." Too bad Google won't let me watch it. For whatever reason, the site reports that "This video is not playable in your country." If I were to upload the same file to YouTube or Revver I can see it, and the video doesn't contain sexual content or copyrighted stuff from a news organization or anything. Why is Google censoring these videos?

Video uploaders, using Google Video's 'Advanced Options' feature, can choose to blacklist countries. In this case the uploader blacklisted the US and only the US. When uploading the video the content owner set a preference not to show this content to users in the US.

Reader comment: Jeff says,

Xeni's comments that "bazillions" of Boing Boing readers have submitted links regarding Google's censorship of Iraq videos reminded me of a Bush joke I heard recently (although the joke itself is probably not recent). Link

At stake is the "webcasting provision" of the "Broadcasters' Treaty" underway at WIPO, the UN agency that handles copyrights, patents and the like. The Webcasting provision would make it illegal to retransmit Creative Commons licensed works (as well as public domain works, uncopyrightable works like those made by the US government, etc) without permission of the person who hosts them. In other words, it will no longer be enough to know that the author of the work wants you to share it -- you'll also need permission from the company that hosts and distributes the files.

The treaty wil eliminate fair use for all Internet audio/video casts, by creating a different set of rules for what's fair and what isn't when it comes to casters than when it comes to copyright holders. You'll have to negotiate two separate, contradictory "fair use" systems whenever it comes time to making a podcast.

At the UN, the US consistently argues that this is a popular idea. They've been put up to advancing it by an org called DIMA that's a front for Microsoft and Yahoo, who like the idea of being Internet audio/video gatekeepers.

I've delivered a letter to the UN signed by 20 tech companies that oppose the inclusion of webcasting in the Broadcast Treaty. The copies of the letter were stolen from the literature table and put in the trashcans in the toilets. Repeatedly.

I questioned Mary-Beth Peters, the US Register of Copyrights, about the Webcasting treaty during the Q&A after her panel at a conference at UNC last November. To everyone's surprise, she admitted that the US's position that this is a fundamentally popular idea was a lie:

[7:20]...I think the most controversial piece is the scope of the right that's being created. The position that the US took is well, if you're going to give that type of a right to a broadcaster -- theft of a signal -- then you should look at all people who are similarily situated, including webcasters. Now, that has been totally rejected by the rest of the world."

Credit: The University of North Carolina and UNC-TV for the video capture and TJ Ward for digizing it.

This price is much more reasonable that the copies made from silicon, which have cost $2000 each. (image seen here -ed.) Bone Clones skulls are custom formulated, high grade, polyurethane resin, which simulates the subtle delicacy of natural bone, yet are extremely durable and resist breakage and chipping...

If you are interested in purchasing a Hobbit (Homo floresiensis) replica skull, they are not even in the Bone Clones catalogue yet. But you can obtain them right now by mentioning Cryptomundo, and using “Part Number BH-033″ to order them.

…On February 3, 2006, Judge Punch heard testimony in the case. Jeff entered into evidence 16 exhibits taken from the Internet, 12 of which are photographs of the SubGenius event, X-Day. Kohl has never attended X-Day and is not in any of the pictures. Rachel is depicted in many of these photos, often wearing skimpy costumes or completely nude, while participating in X-Day and Detroit Devival events.

The judge, allegedly a very strict Catholic, became outraged at the photos of the X-Day parody of Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ — especially the photo where Jesus [Steve Bevilacqua] is wearing clown makeup and carrying a crucifix with a pool-noodle dollar sign on it while being beaten by a crowd of SubGenii, including a topless woman with a “dildo”.

…Judge Punch lost his temper completely, and began to shout abuse at Rachel, calling her a “pervert,” “mentally ill,” “lying,” and a participant in “sex orgies.” The judge ordered that Rachel is to have absolutely no contact with her son, not even in writing, because he felt the pictures of X-Day performance art were evidence enough to suspect “severe mental illness”…

The remarkable admission came at the tail end of an event held at the UNC Law School on November 2, 2005, when Mary-Beth Peters, the Register of Copyrights, and a panel of copyright scholars, lawyers and bureaucrats convened to deliberate copyright in public.

Peters can be heard making the statement one minutes and eight seconds into the video linked below:

[1:08] We've certainly lengthened the term [of copyright] perhaps -- I won't even say perhaps -- too long a term. I think it is too long. I think that was probably a big mistake, but one that Congress can make."

Credit: The University of North Carolina and UNC-TV for the video capture and TJ Ward for digizing it.

Update: Hirmes sends us a link to a mirror.

The artistic move is simple, cover the front in Tiggeriffic Orange - a color from the Mickey Mouse series, easily purchased from Home Depot. Every board, every door, every window, is caked in Tiggeriffic Orange. We paint the facades of abandoned houses whose most striking feature are their derelict appearance.

Update: Gooch sez, "Tyree Guyton just spoke at UM Feb. 9th about his work with the long running Heidelburg Project, were he paints and decorates abandoned houses and areas in Detroit and has been since 1986."

The actors who star in movie The Road to Guantánamo were questioned by police at Luton airport under anti-terrorism legislation, it has emerged. The men, who play British inmates at the detention camp, were returning from the Berlin Film Festival where the movie won a Silver Bear award. One of the actors, Rizwan Ahmed, said a police officer asked him if he intended to make any more "political" films.

Link to BBC story, Link to Guardian UK story, Link to IMDB listing, Link to screening details from Berlin filmfest website.

Image (Reuters): Guantánamo actors (from left) Waqar Siddiqui, Rizwan Ahmed and Arfman Usman with Michael Winterbottom and detainee Rhuhel Ahmed. (Thanks, Christopher and Alastair)

Reader comment: Christopher says,

I though it would be a good idea if your readers were made aware of the website addresses to forms with which to email the leaders of the UK political parties, many of whom regularly partake in the same activy during their "party political broadcasts". These are: number10.gov.uk, conservatives.com, libdems.org.uk. I would suggest that as many people as possible emailed the leaders to inform them of their "crimes" and possible arrest if they wish to continue to star in them. I have already emailed Tony Blair (Labour leader), David Cameron (Conservative leader) and the Liberal Democrats (I don't think they have a leader, yet) about the matter.

BB reader Rob says,

As a follow up to the item you posted about NBC nastygramming YouTube: this link is to an NYT review of an episode of A&E's Biography where they followed SNL behind the scenes for a whole week. I thought this might be interesting to you because I saw this episode and I remember distictly (about 95% sure) that they show Jimmy Fallon writing out one of his sketches on an iMac. Therefore, NBC's decision to nastygram YouTube would prevent even their own staff from easily accessing their clips. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find that clip of the show or a mention of their use of Macs anywhere. Maybe one of your other readers might have taped it or bought the DVD from A&E (link)?

Previously on Boing Boing:
NBC nastygrams YouTube over "Lazy Sunday"

Reader comment: Cris in Dallas says,

A week or so ago Steve Martin hosted the show...one of the running gags was a competition between Martin and actor Alec Baldwin over who would hold the record for hosting SNL the most times...in the middle of the show Steve Martin went to Lorne Michaels to demand more money, when he walked in on Michaels, he was busy playing "Snood" on a 15" Aluminum Powerbook. Besides we know that the Lonley Island guys use macs exlusively to produce all their own work, as well as SNL's digital shorts.

A few years back, I used to work the company that provided Macintosh technical support to the SNL staff. They were indeed using quite a few Macs at the time. I doubt that this has changed in the years since. Nick Burns could probably make the YouTube videos play on their Macs. MOOOOVE!

"We have been contacted by Macrovision, who claims this violates their property and are threatening to sue us if we don't remove the links to it. We are checking with our legal advisors to find out what our options are. -VersionTracker Editors"

Q: You call yourself a forecaster. Some people call you a futurist. Is there a difference?
A: People who call themselves futurists don't have a sense of history of the term. It dates back to the early 1900s. Tied into fascism, these guys would have parties and go hang out and stroke the streamlined lines of new cars. I think of futurists as people who have a particular attitude about the future. They're advocates for a certain kind of outcome. As a forecaster I am something very different. I am a professional bystander. I have opinions about the future, of course. But my whole posture is to be detached and to identify what I think will happen and not allow my judgments of what should happen to get involved.

Lorelei says,

I found this photo in 2003 at Urban Ore, an awesome salvage, recycling, and reuse resource in Berkeley, CA. I was looking through their section of old photographs and found a couple of 8"x10" B&W prints of women in a data center. The only identifying info I could find on them was the typewritten "MISS COMPUTER 1973" label. Sadly, i have no idea where this picture was taken.

Reader comment: Dave says,

I could be wrong, but I think the woman in the photograph titled Miss Computer 1973 is Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper. She was a pioneer in computer science who invented the assembler and helped develop COBOL (more info at this link). I met her in the 1970s at the University of Rhode Island and the lady in the photo sure looks a lot like her. She was brilliant and her lecture helped inspire my budding interest in computer science.

Update: The woman in this photo is not Grace Hopper.

Reader comment: Jay says,

My guess is it is not MISS Computer as in a beautiful woman, but M.I.S.S. Computer as in a form of Materials Inventory Support System. The photo is of the computer system and the woman just happens to be standing there.

Here are The Marimba Ponies, who operate internationally without the crutch of conductor or sheet music, bouncing and prancing rhythmically in order to foster international goodwill, doing Sabre Dance. The Marimba Ponies are aged four through twelve, at which point they are forcibly retired from the marimba business and offered gainful employment dodging lizards with the J-Pop girl group Morning Musume.

You may know that the organization behind the Academy Awards is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences -- but we don't often hear much about the "sciences" part.

On one night each year, that all changes when AMPAS hands out its Technical and Scientific Awards for devices, formulas and discoveries that change the way movies are made. This year's edition took place inside the Beverly Hilton's International ballroom, where the Oscars will unfold in two weeks -- but this fête was way geekier than the one happening on March 5.

I filed a radio report for NPR here (streaming audio in Win and Real), and a writeup for Wired News here.

Complete list of 2006 winners, including lifetime achievement honorees, here.

Image (courtesy AMPAS): host Rachel McAdams (Wedding Crashers, Red Eye, etc) was the only hot starlet in the house -- pretty much everyone else was a nerd. She's surrounded by Technical and Scientific Academy Award winners in this photo.

Oh, and this didn't make it into either report, but the pre-ceremonies entertainment consisted of a ventriloquist from Branson who did jokes about poop and chihuahuas (in an awful Speedy Gonzales accent). Then he stuck black wigs on two Academy bigwigs, and did Motown ventriloquist karaoke. Everyone at my table but the eight-year-old girl was cringing. You know profit margins in Hollywood aren't what they used to be when...

Update: Scott Kirsner has a terrific report in Salon, and here's his cinematech blog post with more.

This weekend, I blogged the story of Judith, who lost her camera while on holiday on Hawaii, and of the unnamed Canadian family that found it, but refuses to return it because doing so would upset their son, who has grown attached to it.

Shortly after that post, I got an email from someone who claimed his name was "Don Deveny," purportedly a Canadian Barrister of a sort called "Queen's Counsel." "Deveny" implied that the post was illegal and that I was liable for making it.

However, I don't believe that "Deveny" is a lawyer. For one thing, he can't spell "lawyer." For another, he doesn't know the difference between "libel" and "slander." He can't even spell "counsel."

I have contacted all of the law societies in Canada that license barristers to practice. None of them have any record of "Deveny," nor does the Canadian Law List. No one under that name is listed in any Canadian phone directory as a practicing attorney.

This is illegal. Falsely presenting oneself as a lawyer is a violation of provincial laws like Ontario's Law Society Act. As Lisa Hall, Acting Manager, Communications and Public Affairs for the Law Society of Upper Canada explained to me, "We could prosecute him on the basis of the Act. If he's trying to practice law, that's quite something. On conviction he'd be liable to a fine of not more than $10,000."

What's more, "Deveny" has even offered to represent other people that Boing Boing has written about, adding a new offence. Click the "More..." link below for a complete record of our correspondence, including the headers on his emails.

Las week I reported on how Apple had invoked the loathsome Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to censor legitimate technical investigation into the means by which its customers can increase the utility of its products.

The proprietors of the site have reinstated their message-boards, but in order to minimize further legal liability from the corporate giant, they've opted to prohibit any links to a site run by a user called Maxxuss, who has written patches that enable new uses of Apple's products.

Maxxuss doesn't stand accused of distributing copies of Apple's materials, nor of telling people how to get copies of their products. By all accounts, he was written his own, original software that owners of Mac OS X can use to extend the usefulness of their property (of course, people who've downloaded Apple's software without paying for it can also take advantage of this, but it's a principle in law and civil society that we shouldn't punish the innocent to get at the guilty).

The proprietors of the site note that Maxxuss is a valuable contributor to the technical discourse on the functioning of Apple's products, that his site has much that is of "news value," but to avoid the risks associated with Apple's legal threats, they've opted to institute the indiscriminate ban on links to his site.

Our first-class moderating staff has helped ensure that direct links to any patches are not allowed. We have in the past linked to the homepage of Maxxuss - but not to the offending 10.4.4 patches - in the interest of news, but we've removed those links just in case.

Freeze a can of shaving cream and then peel the can away from the cream. Put the canless cream into someone's car. Let the oven-like heat from the car's sitting in the sun defrost the shaving cream. 2 cans will fill an entire car. (Coulter C. Henry, Jr.)...

Try taking a ping-pong ball and poking a small hole in it. The hole has to be tangent to the sphere of the ball. When poking the hole use a pin and the pin should be almost flat agianst the ball. Basiclly you want a hole in the side of the ball that will cause the ball to spin. Submerge this ball into the liquid nitrogen and let it fill up. Place the ball on a table and watch it spin. As the nitrogen goes back to a gas it will rush out the hole and presto!! It's pretty cool. If it does not spin try placing your hand on it to warm it to get it started.

James Stewart Blackton was a "Lightning Sketch Artist" in Vaudeville billed as "The Komikal Kartoonist". Inspired by Thomas Edison's recent invention of moving pictures, Blackton teamed with Albert E. Smith to form the first movie studio, Biograph Films.

Smith and Blackton created what were then called "Trick Films"... the camera was stopped for a moment while the scene was changed, making things magically appear and disappear; images dissolved from one to another; and shots were double exposed to create ghostly images. In 1900, Blackton experimented with putting his lightning sketch act on film in a movie called "The Enchanted Drawing", but it was in March of 1906 when he made his most important breakthrough. In a trick film titled "Humorous Phases of Funny Faces" Blackton created what is regarded as the first American animated film.

Unlike a lot of other watch complications, the repeater is a bit mysterious, having most of its mechanism hidden under the dial. And so I thought it would be interesting to present an article on the subject of repeaters, particularly the minute repeater...

Striking watches, repeaters, were developed prior to electricity when checking the time during the night wasn’t as easy as turning on a light bulb or looking at the illuminated electric clock. And during some of those long Sunday church services many a man was known to reach into his pocket, cradle his repeater in his hand, and count the hours and minutes until he was free to go fishing, drinking with his buddies at the pub, or visit his mistress!

(Seen here, a) Vacheron Constantin minute repeater wristwatch movement, topless. The minute repeater strikes the hours, quarter hours, and minutes, on two gongs, each with a different pitch. Yes, there are exceptions to this two-gong rule, but they are very rare.

BIOWAR FOR DUMMIES:
How hard is it to build your own weapon of mass destruction? We take a crash course in supervirus engineering to find out.

Anthrax. Smallpox. Ebola. For thriller writers and policy crusaders, biological warfare was a standard what-if scenario long before anyone mailed anthrax to government and media offices in 2001. Pentagon war games like Dark Winter, held just before 9/11, and this year’s Atlantic Storm suggested that terrorists could unleash germs with the killing power of a nuclear weapon.

Scientists, though, have always been skeptical. Only massive, state-sponsored programs—not terrorist cells or lone kooks—pose a plausible threat, they say. As the head of the Federation of American Scientists working group on bioweapons put it in a 2002 Los Angeles Times op-ed: “A significant bioterror attack today would require the support of a national program to succeed.”

Or not. A few months ago, Roger Brent, a geneticist who runs a California biotech firm, sent me an unpublished paper in which he wrote that genetically engineered bioweapons developed by small teams are a bigger threat than suitcase nukes.

Brent is one of a growing number of researchers who believe that a bioterrorist wouldn’t need a team of virologists and state funding. He says advances in DNA-hacking technology have reached the point where an evil lab assistant with the right resources could do the job.

Reader comment: Liz Mackenzie-Barrett says,

Before everyone starts sending them books, I found the following on their website: “Many caring people have contacted us to offer donations of books for our damaged libraries. While we much appreciate any offers of assistance, the best way to help NOPL at this early stage of our rebuilding process is to donate funds” -- Link

Reader comment: Jordan Pietzsch says,

There is a non-profit group that does work related to this. The organization's name is First Book and they setup the "Book Relief" program as an immediate response to Hurricane Katrina. The program is still in place and they are still accepting contributions (in fact, they only accept contributions, not actual books). They distribute 1 book for every 50 cents they receive - and the money goes directly to shipping and warehouse costs, so they aren't making any money off of this. So far they have sent thousands of books to families affected by the Gulf Coast hurricanes, with more distributions in the works. These books go directly to the children, not a library - and the kids get to keep the books forever, no strings attached. (Full Disclosure: I work with First Book and have been involved in the Book Relief program.) If you are interested, you can find out more about First Book and Book Relief at these sites: www.firstbook.org, and www.bookrelief.org

Reader comment: NOLA resident Shannon Ellery Hubbell says,

Thanks for calling attention to the New Orleans public libraries! I just wanted to point you in the direction of the website for the Cita Dennis Hubbell branch (hubbelllibrary.org... yes, three L's in the middle)...

Reader comment: BenBuckley says,

Ms. Hubbell called your readers' attention to one of NoLa's public libraries. I'd like, if I might, to call BoingBoing readers' attention to NoLa's first re-opened lending library, the all-volunteer, collectively run Iron Rail Bookstore and Library. Long before any of the public libraries had even started to clean up, The Iron Rail had re-opened its doors and was lending books to residents and relief workers alike.

Reader comment: KC says,

Here is the blog of a public librarian in NOLA who was one of the few to be able to still staff a library: Link

Dell Inc. are suing me for using my own name. My friends are helping me out over a summons I recieved from Lovells, the law firm representing Dell. I can't afford the legal fees, let alone the headache -- and I find the whole scenario disturbing. My friends are doing a great job, and I have recieved words of encouragement from all over the world.

Reader comment: Grant says,

The story about the guy named Dell (in Spain) being sued by Dell France is very fishy. A court in France does not have jurisdation over domain names. That is controlled by the Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers and domain name disputes are handled by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Arbitration and Mediation Center. You can read the FAQs here.

Reader comment: Nigel Pond says,

While your reader Grant is correct that a French court does not have jurisdation over the registration of domain names, French courts do have jurisdiction over alleged infringements of trademarks registered in France and any other alleged violation of French law by the owner of a domain name. So it is perfectly possible that Dell (US) could be suing French for the claims alleged.

I don't know if you've noticed or if someone has reported this already but the feedburner counter on the left of boingboing currently reads 1337 K readers. lol

This is in response to a Seattle Post Intelligencer article reporting that Hurtt wants to install surveillance video cameras "in apartment complexes, downtown streets, shopping malls and even private homes."

"I know a lot of people are concerned about Big Brother, but my response to that is, if you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?" he was quoted as saying. Link

Reader comment: Bear says: "I think it should be fairly easy to nab Mr. Hurtt committing a crime, as I believe it is still a city statute in Houston that one must make a 360-degree survey of any car one intends to start to verify that no children are under the vehicle or threatened by it. If you post this, hopefully someone can come up with verification and other bizarre laws in this city that it should be easy to observe him breaking.:

Long story short, as I head into a two-week Toronto workshop of a revised PLANE CRAZY I am still juggling all three -- book, music and lyrics. I am very lucky to be able to "test" the changes that I made coming out of NYMF so quickly. And I am particularly lucky to be doing it in a school setting where I can focus on the work itself through a fairly luxurious rehearsal process, and not be freaked about the "performance" deadline.

The Sheridan College musical theater program is the premier musical theatre school in Canada and is devoted to the development of new musicals. Part of this is very practical because the students benefit through exposure to the process of workshopping a new work -- working with a writer, getting new pages constantly, and originating a role.

Working with this cast and the wonderful director Marc Richard I am continuing to evolve the piece as we rehearse because I feel free to experiment. For example, I came into the rehearsal process with two new songs, and I've just added a third new song! As I work with Marc, I'm discovering new things in my own work! Very cool.

Bandai is releasing the "Neko Nyanbou" in Japan sometime in April. So what is it? Well, these are fake cat paws with claws that can be controlled by a small switch hidden in the "handle". Why on earth would you use these? To scratch your bac