After a public outcry, AMC re-hired him, with back-pay.

AMC spokesman Zach Baze, based in Kansas City, Mo., said the company does not comment on personnel matters.

In a letter to Trombadore, an AMC Theatres attorney, Kelly W. Schemenauer, wrote: "AMC does value the contribution made by military veterans, including Mr. Smith. As an employer, AMC also has employee wardrobe standards, and we strive to treat each employee equally with respect to such standards."...

Every year, his family postpones Thanksgiving to the following weekend so he can work that day — one of the busiest for movie theaters — and fellow employees can have the day off with their families.

"I'm from a generation that grew out of the Depression. When you have a job, you make damn sure to hold on to it. People come around every day looking for work," said Smith, who has been working since he was 14 years old and delivered beer on his bicycle, using 15 cents from his paycheck for movie tickets. "When I had a job, I did what I was supposed to do and a little extra."

I once stood watch for an hour over a mid-20th-century dentist chair, curvilinear and powder blue, while I waited for Roger Wood, the mad clock-maker, to show up and take it away for conversion into clocks. It's the craphound's code: you've gotta get the junque for your buds. Link (via Make Blog)

Update: Leonard sez, "Use the Nightly Tester Tools extension to get around those silly version issues. Obviously if the extensions are actually broken you'll have issues, but almost everything I have works even on the FF3 trunk builds (I run 40-50 extensions)."

Adam also suggests "You might want to try the MR Tech Local Install extension for forcing extensions to work with Bon Echo Alpha - I've haven't tried it w/the latest Bon Echo Alpha, but it worked really well for Bon Echo Alpha a month or two back."

(Click on thumbnails for enlargement) The guitar was originally made in 1974 or 1975 and I've had it since maybe 1983. The finish was in terrible shape, so I stripped it in a fit of youthful exuberance, intending to refinish it in red, and promptly lost interest in the project. In 1993 Dan Clowes and Peter Bagge were at a local comic store and I had the idea of letting them doodle on the guitar. When I got to the store, there was a huge line of fanboys with comics to sign so Peter and Dan were limiting each person to just a signature and maybe a dedication, but absolutely no sketches. When I plunked down the guitar and asked them if they would draw on it, they seemed to be really excited about the idea because they spent about 30 minutes doodling on it. The drawing of Mickey Rat on the back was done by Robert Armstrong in 1998. The great thing about Armstrong's drawing style is that his musical instruments are always anatomically correct. The guitar Mickey is waving around is clearly a 1959 version of the Flying V, for example. I had a clear pickguard made for it so the drawings would show through. The pickups are custom Seymour Duncans. One of these days I'll finish putting it together.

I also didn’t think about Boing Boing as a travel guide until Sarah King served up this Boing Boing-inspired lens. Sarah indicates that Boing Boing can be a useful tool for backpackers, expatriates and other geeks on the go.

After being asked by Muslim leaders in Kenya, Kenya's National Museum had offered to take custody of the fish and preserve it for the country's heritage.

The reported theft followed numerous attempts by locals and Muslim scholars to buy the mysterious fish.

An official at the fisheries department in Mombasa said someone had even offered to pay as much as $150.

When a person's life is in danger, a phenomenon known as 'time-dilation' can occur. This is when, during a car crash for example, time seems to slow down or become frozen.

In these cases the body's internal clock speeds up when facing a potential catastrophe, so that it can take in more information more quickly and function more effectively in an emergency.

This is also a phenomenon actively sought by elite sportspeople, when they get 'in the zone'.

They put Victoria Falls in a huge room (or a scale creation of it) pumping 60,000 gallons of water over the edge per minute! But it came to a sad end, due to nearby "depraved" activities (at the fair).

It's part revealing profile (Gore is as smart as you'd guess, a Macintosh / Treo freak who creates his Keynote presentations himself, and a passionate, caring, positive, and funny person) and part hair-raising report on the astonishing changes our planet is undergoing as a result of massive increases in carbon dixode in recent decades. The two parts are woven together in a way that makes for a riveting, unforgettable movie.

I especially like the fact that the film offers a way out of the frightening path we're taking. There's plenty to be scared about, but with smart (and expensive) work, Gore believes we can reverse global warming.

Naturally, Big Oil is not happy about this film and has started attacking the facts presented in the film. Link |Trailer

Fucked 'suit (Beta .2)

Legal Wars of the New Economy

A Web 2.0 opinion site revealing the new economy of sue or be sued. Created in the spirit of FuckedCompany, FuckedSuit covers the web this second time around, and the NEW way of doing business - via attorneys.

This site is 100% lawsuit opinion and humor. Your opinion, my opinion, everyones opinion!

Jaime Hernandez (co-creator of Love and Rockets) told me that Wiseman was a big influence on him and his brother Gilbert. Link

Can BOMBAenergy explode?
Yes, but only inside the body and with a positive effect on your energy levels. The bottle, itself, cannot explode.

(link to photo by Jay Blakesburg) [Mickey] Hart also remembered one New Year's Eve when he thought he might be too high to play. Ramrod solved the problem by strapping Hart to his drum stool with gaffer's tape. Hart recalled another show in San Jose with Big Brother and the Holding Company, where the starter's cannon the band used to punctuate the drum solo of "St. Stephen's" went off early.

"I looked back," Hart said. "His face was on fire. He'd lost his eyebrows. You could smell his flesh. And he was hurrying to reload the cannon in time. That was the end of the cannons."

Ryan Froerer, Century 21: "As we approached the door, there were beer boxes, all the way up to the ceiling."

Inside, he took just a few snapshots to document the scene. Beer cans by the tens of thousands. Mountains of cans burying the furniture. The water and heat were shut off, apparently on purpose by the tenant, who evidently drank Coors Light beer exclusively for the eight years he lived there.

The South Central Farm, which is believed to be the largest urban community garden in the United States, will disappear shortly unless members of the public lend a helping hand. Created by the City of Los Angeles after the 1992 Rodney King uprising, the 14-acre farm in South Central Los Angeles, offers plots of land that 350 low-income families use to grow their own food. The City of Los Angeles sold the land it to a developer in a backroom deal.

The farmers held off bulldozers by legal action, but the developer recently received approval from the court to evict them. The Trust for Public Land, a national, nonprofit, land conservation organization that is working to save the farm, has until Monday, May 22, 2006, to raise approximately $10 million to purchase the land. They are part of the way there, but need several million more.

In January 2006, there were approximately 2370 music torrents posted. By estimating that each music file is 5 megs, we can estimate the number of infringements as the number of downloads multiplied by the estimated number of songs. I ran my program, and when I saw the results I was shocked! Using those figures, there were approximately 76,272,931 infringements caused by the torrents posted in January! Using the RIAA's value of $150,000 per infringement, the total cost to the music industry was $11,440,939,650,000!

The viewers at zefrank.com/theshow are attempting to create the first Earth sandwich in history: when two pieces of bread are simultaneously placed on opposite sides of the globe.

The original call to action can be found here.

This Stone Golem was constructed using about 5 foam mattresses, over 50 sticks of hot melt glue, and 8 cans of grey and black spray paint. The foam is glued in large thick sheets (approx 20cm thick) to a fabric bodysuit, and the deep cracks are carved into the foam surface. The bodysuit has a zip up the back to allow the wearer to enter it, and the zip is concealed by abutting foam. The soles of the feet are made of corflute that has been sliced in half to expose corrugations that act as grip. The arms are about twice the length of the wearer's arms, and act as swinging weapons made entirely of soft foam. The golem took about 100 hours of work to construct, between 3 people. On its first appearance, the Stone Golem sent twenty bold adventurers into a hasty retreat without so much as touching them.

Bruce predicts there will be 3 main phases of ARPHID art practice, and a window of opportunity lasting about 7 years before ARPHID fades into obscurity.

-The first phase he says will be the magic stage/the Mellies stage involving 'Jarking' - putting the chips into objects without people knowing to come up with sometimes freaky/magic-like interactions.

-The Second phase will be a detournement (like Nancy Nisbit work) marked by an increased awareness of ARPHID by trying to make some Bohemian kick-back, trying to build scandals out of it exploiting the sinister aspects of the technology.

-During the third phase, ARPHID will have reached a degree of maturity.

Bruce also predicts that there will be a sex scandal involving Oyster Cards in the next 18 months. Predict the present old sci-fi writers tricks, possibly some similar dirty tricks activity along these lines. Jealous (politician) husband/wife plants on partner, hacks card establish airing spouse is somewhere not meant to be etc

Update: Dave sez, "The New Statesman's got a podcast of his (more broadly themed) London talk and Q&A from earlier in the week."

Gor books still have a huge following, despite being out of print for some years. When I worked at a science fiction bookstore, we had lots of customers with standing orders for used copies of the missing numbers from the 26-book series. The books were a little stilted and wooden, but they were chock-full of BDSM sex stuff. One customer told me that he bought the books for the sex, and didn't really care much that the writing was clunky -- he said it was still miles better than the average porn novel.

The 29-year-old woman is said to have voluntarily attended the sect after finding out about it over the internet.

She later contacted a friend in United States, who then contacted the police, saying she wanted to leave but couldn't as she had burnt her passport and return ticket.

But a police spokesman said upon arriving at the premises they did not find any evidence of "criminal offences".

The Supreme Court ruled earlier this week that injunctions shouldn't be rubberstamped for patent cases. They specifically singled out business-method patents that are litigated by those who have no stake in producing the product or offering the service; i.e., patent trolls. (There are some legitimate non-business-method patents pursued in ths manner. They don't get much press beyond the variable windshield-wiper case that has been underway for 50 years in various venues and appeals.)

What this means is that patent trolls will be less likely to hold their victims for ransom through injunction unless the patentholder can demonstrate that they meet a four-part test, already in use for other injunctions involving equity, which is hard for a non-producer to meet. Even if a patentholder wins at trial, the defendent could file an appeal and still have injunctions in abeyence.

The Supreme Court's majority opinion written by Clarence Thomas describes the four-part test. (It's in PDF form from the link.) In essence, a plaintiff has to show irreparable harm, that mere money or other remedies when at trial aren't enough, that there is an imbalance in hardships against the plaintiff, and that a permanent injunction wouldn't harm the public interest. (IANAL.)

I wrote one of Amazon.com's patents (but did not invent it), and I've followed the business-model debate for years. I believe it is possible this decision will decimate the market for patent-trolling because it will be much less likely to obtain a settlement beforehand to avoid an injunction that would disrupt the defendant's business.

This unique compilation of cinematic slowness will pull the audience through a molasses-tinged warp of catastrophic visual and audio beauty.

Stop and smell the roses! Leap into that k-hole! Feel spellbound by your own navel! Celebrate a savory moment... its the human way! Remember when you were a kid and you could stare at ants crawling around for hours, or just space out and look at the ceiling or the patterns on the floor? SLOMO VIDEO is a recreation of that meditative place in the present. It is a video experience that isn't afraid to put a 78 record on at 33 1/3rd and kick back in a beanbag to ponder the mysteries of space and time.

The different noises made by dogs have been identified as grunts, whines, yelps, screams, howls, growls, coughs, barks, tooth snapping and panting.

While this cacophony might sound overwhelming to the untrained ear, dog owners will learn whether the sounds mean that their pet wants a walk, a wee or a fresh can of food.

Apparent meanings can include a friendly greeting, an invitation to play, a signal of distress or defence. Other noises indicate that the animal is under threat, submissive, wanting contact, attention seeking or contact seeking

“In 1913 I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn,” (Marcel Duchamp) wrote, describing the construction he called Bicycle Wheel, a precursor of both kinetic and conceptual art. In 1916, German writer Hugo Ball, who had taken refuge from the war in neutral Switzerland, reflected on the state of contemporary art: “The image of the human form is gradually disappearing from the painting of these times and all objects appear only in fragments....The next step is for poetry to decide to do away with language.”

..Two calls seem to be the only sounds in the putty-nosed monkey's repertoire. Researchers had observed that the monkeys sometimes use these calls in an apparently non-meaningful way: to yell at a fellow monkey, for example, without communicating a specific message.

But now zoologists have realized that at least one combination of these sounds has its own distinct meaning: up to three pyows followed by up to four hacks seems to mean 'let's move on'. This call sequence is given both in response to the presence of predators or simply as a sign to head for new terrain.

"Whenever a male gave these sequences the group would move on and leave," says Klaus Zuberbühler of the University of St Andrews, UK, who carried out the research in Nigeria's Gashaka Gumti National Park with his colleague Kate Arnold.

You wrote about my "Sita Sings the Blues" animation last year on BoingBoing. Just lettin' you know I recently posted another clip publicly - using the Internet Archive as a host, and a Creative Commons license.

Trippy YouTube cartoon of “Love is All,” featuring a psychedelic children’s song performed by Elf/Rainbow/Black Sabbath singer, Ronnie James Dio.

Apparently, Deep Purple’s Roger Glover wrote a record’s worth of songs based on “The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast,” a 19th C. poem about a party for small animals and their insect friends (the poem had recently been made into a children’s book in 1973). Other contributors to the Glover record included members of Roxy Music and future Whitesnake, David Coverdale. (You can still buy the CD on Amazon.)

Although a full-length animated feature Glover had planned never saw the light of day, this animated short gives a taste of the Fleischer-esque trippiness it might have begat a generation of stoners and midnight movie fans. The song is totally catchy, too.

The one thing that stands out the most (besides plenty of mustachioed men) in the just-released trailer for Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center" is the prominent billboard for another Paramount property: 2001's "Zoolander."

Fuller’s Utopian vision extended beyond [geodesic domes as] homes. In 1933, he built a prototype Dymaxian Car, a highly efficient vehicle that seated 11, reached 120 miles per hour, got 30 miles per gallon (unheard of at the time) and did it all on only 3 wheels. It was 20 feet long, but barely needed more space than that to do a full 180 degree turn. Sadly, an accident at the 1933 World’s Fair prompted investors to abandon the project, and the car never passed the prototype stage. It’s a shame it never went any further in development. It’s hard not to imagine how automobiles would be different today. For the current exhibit, the Noguchi museum has brought together models, pictures, and video footage of the car in action.

Reader comment: J. Tony says, Regarding your Boing Boing notice today mentioning Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Car...

The last known prototype of the 3 that were built can be seen at the National Automobile Museum in Reno, Nevada. Their page on the Dymaxion can be seen here. I'm not much of a car nut, but this is one of the best, coolest museums anywhere, with more one-of-a-kind cars than you'd ever imagine (including my favorite, the Phantom Corsair and several Big Daddy Roth cars). Link.

Update: Dan created these motivational postcards modelled on my favorite catchphrase from the geek sit-com The IT Crowd.

Q: Where did I leave my keys?
A: Inside pocket of your gray jacket (it's hanging in the front closet).

Q: What should I get my wife for her birthday?
A: Blue sundress from Calypso, size 12. Also note that she likes to have her toes licked.

Q: Is now a good time to buy Google?
A: Unfortunately, due to strict federal laws NSA cannot provide stock tips.

Q: Can I substitute margarine for butter in my Toll House cookie recipe?
A: We know that you've been smoking pot.

Q: What should I have for dinner?
A: You've been eating a lot of Chinese and pizza -- how about some Turkish?

Got a robot? Wanna mingle with the likes of Phil Toronne? Wanna show the world your stuff? Wired magazine picked RoboGames as one of the Top Ten Best Geek Fests in America. This is the last week to register for RoboGames. Teams are coming from 20 different countries to compete in 50 different events - combat, sumo, robo-one, robot soccer, robot hockey, and many more. If you've just a got a cool robot that doesn't fit into any particular event, register it in the "Best of Show", which lets anyone compete (even Phil.) The actual event in June 16-18 in San Francisco.

- FIRE FIGHTING: Robots that can find and put out fires.
- 3KG SUMO: This is your best chance to meet foreign builders - Singapore, Mexico, Japan.
- BALANCER RACE: Got a two-wheeled balancing robot? Bring it out!
- ROBO-ONE (ROBONOVAS!): If you've got a RoboNova, you compete for free!
- BIPED RACE: Bring out those walkers - compete in the race and robo-one.
- HEXAPOD CHALLENGE: The only event in America just for 6-legged bots.
- BEAM SPEEDER/PHOTOVORE: Anyone can build a BEAM bot for $5 in an hour.
- MIROSOT: There must be more 5:5 soccer teams out there - let's see you compete in SF.
- BEST OF SHOW: This is everyone's chance to shine. Any bot you can imagine can compete - it doesn't have to fit into any particular rule-set!

IFC has a webcam (Windows Media Player) with a 24-hour-a-day live feed of the Cannes red carpet (with surreally clear audio) for the duration of the festival -- it's manned during some of the bigger premieres and zooms in for a clearer look of the back of, say, Tom Hank's "Da Vinci" hairdo.

Snip: "A bird flitted around the cabin of a JetBlue airplane Tuesday before being caught, said Todd Burke, a JetBlue spokesman. Two African parrots were sneaked aboard a flight from Puerto Rico by a passenger who hid them in a small cardboard box, which he shoved in a carry-on bag and sneaked through security, Burke said." Link to news story, and here's Parrots on a Plane. (thanks, Cowicide)

Throughout the history of the Disneyland Haunted Mansion, there have been many refurbishments. Some of these have been to update effects, some have been to fix items that were getting constant wear from guest interaction. In 1995, the Haunted Mansion was given a nice new hearse, updated attic popups, a broken down piano and the Ghost Host again told us that the ghosts on the corridor are having trouble getting through.

In the foyer however, the woodwork wainscoting on the walls was raised. Originally it was perhaps two feet off of the ground. By this being within a guests footrange, people could easily raise one foot and rest on it. This however was not a good idea. It caused much wear and tear on the woodwork. What could Disney do? They couldn't remove the wainscoting, it just wouldn't be thematically pleasing. So, Disney took the existing woodwork and added more! The current Disneyland Foyer woodwork extends probably four to five feet above the floor.

Update: AV sez, "If I am not mistaken (and I might be) that type of dance is called "Lindy Hop" and those two dancers are Al Minns and Leon James."

Update 2: A reader writes, "This one is Big Apple rather than Charleston/Lindy Hop."

Update 3: Laurence (and many others) sez, "The dance they are doing is, in fact, the Charleston."

Update 4: Terry sez, "Contemporary swing dancers sometimes dance 20's Charleston and Balboa to hip hop. Those styles also go great with bhangra. If you're interested in swing dance footage, there's over 30GB of vintage and contemporary swing dancing clips at dans.poy.no."

Snell: "The biggest change with this keyboard is its look. Previous Apple laptops have featured keyboards with keys that are wide at the base, but narrower at the top. As a result, even though there are fairly large spaces between the square areas where your fingers contact the keys, there are only tiny gaps down at the base of the keys."

Farivar: "[The 13-inch] MacBook fits quite nicely into the Booq PowerSleeve12—only sticking out a little bit, but not enough to prevent the bag from closing. The extra resolution is quite nice too, as it allows me to have a good-sized browser window while keeping an instant message client open on the side."

If you are interested in learning cartooning, this is the opportunity of a lifetime.

Here's a method to easily check your copies. Remember this word: PROPORTION

Part of what makes a character look like who it is, is its proportions. MANY characters can have the same construction, but they have different proportions-like Elmer Fudd and Coal Black and Peter Pan and Pinnochio-all those folks are the exact same construction! -THEY ARE MADE UP OF THE SAME TYPES OF FORMS-A BIG ROUND CRANIUM AND A SMALL BABY JAW.

1) Bring your drawings into Photoshop.
2) Bring Preston's drawings that you copied into the same Photoshop file.
3) Re-size the Preston drawings to match the size of yours.
4) Put the drawings next to each other.
5) Make notes of how your drawing differs from Preston's
6) Make a copy of the Preston drawing and lay it on top of yours on a layer
7) Make the layer transparent so you can see through it to yours.
8) Make more notes on where yours differs from Preston's.
9) Redraw your copy, this time trying to fix the mistakes you found.

This fella's copy is pretty good, so there isn't a lot to correct. Some other artists are less accurate.

It's four tracks by two cuban singers - Celia Cruz and Celio Gonzalez. I think I found it at the flea market at Brick Lane in London's East End back in the 80's. I was immediately drawn to the wonderful kitsch photo on the sleeve. The vinyl itself is rather badly warped and only the two inner tracks on each side will play properly. Thankfully they are both really excellent examples of Cha Cha and Mambo and well worth the 50p or whatever it was I paid for it.

Reader comment: Doran says:

Regarding the warped Cha Cha and Mambo record. Here are a couple of techniques I've used when dealing with warped vinyl. I've used all these with varying degrees of success. In all cases I've done it so I could get one good copy, which I would use in the future (ie. I didn't use these techniques to play the vinyl every time). Also note, I probably wouldn't recommend these techniques with a really expensive turntable and stylus, though they never messed up mine.

1. Try weighting down the stylus with one or two pennies. Or perhaps a nickel (which weighs about 5 grams).

2. Place the vinyl onto a hard surface (eg. table top), between two sheets of clean paper (not the sleeve, since it sometimes has stickyness), and then place a heavy, flat weight on top for 15 minutes or so (I'd use an unabridged dictionary). While the vinyl usually has enough physical memory that it'll ultimately re-warp, it's possible to flatten things out long enough to record one copy.

3. Drizzle a bunch of distilled water all over the surface of the vinyl (avoiding the label). While I usually used this to reduce pops and clicks from scratches, the added dampening from the water would sometimes be enough to hold the needle in the groove on warped records.

4. Lastly, play it at a lower speed, so the needle doesn't jump, then process the recording to shorten the time and raise the pitch. While I did this a couple of times, it was back in the early 80's before I had a digital processor, so restoring the sound in the end wasn't so easy, though I could get close.

Your dolls are very darkly erotic; definitely not children's toys! Is the doll's sexuality an important part of their attraction for you?

The eroticism is definitely a significant element that has to be present in every doll. I suppose that says something about my personally, I’m just not sure what. It was present in all my dolls. I remember when I was, maybe six or so, I saw a picture of a painting of a beautiful naked woman in a magazine. It was explicit. I cut it out and made a doll out of it. One day my grandma discovered it. She was confiscated and destroyed with disdain. I was made feel very ashamed. I grieved for her.

The dolls are more anatomically correct than your average Barbie doll; why was it important to include detailed genitalia?

It’s compulsory. Most of the dolls, both, Fine Art and children’s dolls, though try to imitate human form, are sterilized through a complete removal of sex organs. It’s as if they need to be cleansed of all their sinful humanity. I find this deliberate denial of the essence of life to be ignorant and appalling. I don’t know why there is so much fear and shame associated with human sexuality. Every Barbie needs to have a vagina. Every Ken needs a penis. I think it’s time the dolls leave the realm of tea parties and innocence and address some important issues.

She said that she was a children's librarian in 1940 and got the idea to write kids' books when some boys at the library complained that they couldn't find any books "about kids like us." So she sat down and started writing stories about the kids she had had gotten to know at the library.

My daughter is now reading Beverly Cleary books. I flipped through them and was disgusted to see that the books do not use Louis Darling's darling illustrations. Instead, the publisher is using looser, more cartoony illustrations that have none of the charm or humor of Darling's work. I wish NPR would have asked Mrs. Cleary what she thought of this depressing switcharoo. Link

Update: See also this great Katamari Damacy pillow -- thanks, lex10!

If all else fails, if family members can't find her living will or can't face the responsibility of ending life-sustaining measures, she said, then doctors will know her wishes by simply reading the tiny words that are tattooed over her sternum.

"I probably should have had it dated, too," she said.

As it was, the first time she entered Gary's Professional Tattooing Studio, the employee balked, saying he wasn't sure it would be ethical.

"I said, 'OK, but you get these druggies and drunks in here and you do it. Do I look lucid or not?' " she remembered.

The employee still demurred. Shop owner Gary Lietz said he, too, was reluctant, but eventually gave in. Wohlford even talked him into a senior citizen discount.

Former AT&T technician Mark Klein is the key witness in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's class-action lawsuit against the company, which alleges that AT&T illegally cooperated in an illegal National Security Agency domestic-surveillance program.

In this recently surfaced statement, Klein details his discovery of an alleged surveillance operation in an AT&T office in San Francisco, and offers his interpretation of company documents that he believes support his case.

For its part, AT&T is asking a federal judge to keep those documents out of court, and to order the EFF to return them to the company. Here Wired News presents Klein's statement in its entirety, along with select pages from the AT&T documents.

Update: Jet sez, "The judge rejected AT&T's motion to remove the documents from the public record!"

1. any proposed copyright reforms will prioritize privacy protection by including a full privacy consultation and a full privacy impact assessment with the introduction of any copyright reform bill;

2. any proposed anti-circumvention provisions will create no negative privacy impact; and

3. any proposed copyright reforms will include pro-active privacy protections that, for example, enshrine the rights of Canadians to access and enjoy copyright works anonymously and in private.

Today, the Brennan Center for Justice released “Internet Filters: A Public Policy Report,” a detailed survey of tests and studies documenting how the widespread use of filters limits the free exchange of ideas necessary in a healthy democracy. The report shows that filters are an unreliable and inefficient means of preventing children from viewing material that their parents find offensive. Some filters censor political and other information, casting a net far wider than is necessary for any legitimate goal.

As a result of the “Children’s Internet Protection Act,” or “CIPA,” passed in 2000, filters are now required in most schools and libraries – for adults and minors alike. Yet because filters must, by necessity, search the web for potentially objectionable sites using “keyword” identification, they both “overblock” (censoring sites that are not objectionable) and “underblock” (failing to identify pornography or other material targeted by their various blocking categories).

“Internet Filters” updates and expands upon an earlier survey published by the Brennan Center’s Free Expression Policy Project (FEPP) in 2001. The new report describes the effects of CIPA and the deceptiveness of manufacturers’ claims to have improved the accuracy of filters with sophisticated “artificial intelligence” techniques. It then describes nearly 100 tests and studies up through 2006, with hundreds of examples of both deliberate and accidental overblocking.

For instance, one filtering program, SurfWatch, blocked the University of Kansas’s Archie R. Dykes Medical Library website upon detecting the word “dykes.” Cyber Patrol blocked a Knights of Columbus site and a site for aspiring dentists when set to block only “sexually explicit” materials. SmartFilter blocked the Declaration of Independence, Shakespeare’s complete plays, Moby Dick, and Marijuana: Facts for Teens, a brochure published by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Inducement isn't just for pirates anymore: In the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling in MGM v. Grokster, EFF warned that the newly minted "inducement" weapon would not be reserved for "bad actors," but would also be leveled against legitimate innovators building the next generation of fair use technologies. Sure enough, the complaint accuses XM of inducement based on the following statements in promotional materials: "Hear It, Click It, Save It!," "[XM] delivers new music to you everyday and lets you choose tracks to create your own custom playlists," "record with the touch of a button," and "store up to 50 hours of XM." Not exactly a pirate's "ahoy," is it?

One of the most pernicious problems facing Americans now and into the future is adult and childhood obesity. While the war on obesity must be fought on many fronts, education of both parents and children is one important approach. These standard ceramic dinner plates are "decorated" with nutritional information including caloric content of hundreds of food items; average metabolic rates varying by age, gender, weight, and activity level; and typical caloric expenditure for numerous physical activities.

"We brought it in alive and we released it alive," Arostegui told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. "That to me is what made the catch very special..."

He fought the fish for one hour, and at one point the shark opened its jaws and attacked (Capt. Ralph) Delph's 29-foot boat.

"He could have eaten half of me or even all of me in one bite," said Arostegui, who stands at 5 feet tall.

(It's) an early morning binocular object this week -- and may offer a terrific meteor shower next week. What's interesting about it is that it has been breaking up over the last few years, and this year it is a appearing as a string of fragments. Not naked eye, but good bino viewing.

Update: XY sez,

In the Citizenship and Immigration Services' "Guide to Naturalization" (the official guide on becoming a citizen), the same omission is made in the sample civics questions (on page 64 in document):

80. Name one right or freedom guaranteed by the first amendment.

The rights of freedom:
- Of speech,
- Of religion,
- Of assembly and,
- To petition the Government

So either the flashcards come from the same source, or there's some kind of mini-conspiracy...

As Clay Shirky has noted, the pre-Internet world was one of "select, then publish." That is to say, some editor out there looked through a lot of material, picked the stuff she thought you'd want to see and then put it in front of you.

The Internet world is one of "publish, then select." Anyone can put up a blog, publish a feed, post to Usenet, or stick something on a message-board. Your job is to figure out which of those things are interesting to you and ignore the rest.

"Publish, then select" is a lot messier than "select, then publish." But it's also a lot more satisfying, if you can keep up. After all, the editor of a magazine, newspaper, or TV show has to please a lot more people than you, so her selections are never going to be exactly what you want -- for example, your local newscast might give 10 minutes over to sports every night, and only cover MMORPGs when someone starves to death playing World of Warcraft. You might prefer the inverse: lots of WoW coverage, and only fatal NASCAR crashes and hot Olympians on the sports-side.

There are lots of places to go for posts about MMORPGs -- this is one of them. But we publish about a lot of subjects. It's only one in fifty posts that is relevant to MMOs here, so if that's all you care about, there's no point in signing up for our feed.

Or maybe there's a Boing Boing author you don't care for -- it's not a big deal to hit the spacebar when his posts come up, but wouldn't it be nice if you could just filter that on your screen in the first place?

The beauty of this kind of filtering -- eliminating posts that do or don't contain certain words, or that have certain authors -- makes it possible to cast your selection net a lot wider than you would otherwise. I've got hundreds of feeds I read in my RSS reader, but at that volume, there's a lot more than I can actually read in depth. Adding machine-filters would harness a computer's perfect ability to detect the keywords I hate or love, rather than offloading the job of word-searching onto my human brain.

Computers are great at fetishistically counting things, finding things, and comparing things. Humans are good at understanding things. I can understand that certain keywords should never show up in my RSS reader, while others should always show up. It's about time that my computer can be instructed to do the grunt work of checking to make sure that the stuff I know I hate and the stuff I know I love go into the right hoppers.

Every now and again, someone sends us a peevish note saying, "I'm bored of your posts on $SUBJECT, you should stop posting about it." There's no chance we'll ever honor one of these requests, because Boing Boing isn't a select-then-publish site -- no one here is trying to figure out what you like and publish that and only that. Instead, Boing Boing is part of your universe of raw material for your own personal publish-then-select decisions. We publish the stuff we care about and you're welcome to read as much or as little of it as you want. Bored of goatse? Hate anagram subway maps? Not interested in ukes or yetis? That's cool -- just skip it.

The problem is that skipping it is hard -- and it should be automatic. More than three quarters of Boing Boing readers read the site via RSS, and it's a crime that their readers don't include the killfiles and filters that have been standard in email and Usenet readers for decades. I've used several readers and only a very few of them include any sort of even rudimentary filtering.

So it's great to see FeedRinse live and running -- and I can't wait for feedreader authors to get the hint and make this standard. Link (via PlasticBag)

The FBI acknowledged late Monday that it is increasingly seeking reporters' phone records in leak investigations.

"It used to be very hard and complicated to do this, but it no longer is in the Bush administration," said a senior federal official.

The Department of Justice says it secretly sought phone records and other documents of 3,501 people last year under a provision of the Patriot Act that does not require judicial oversight. The records were obtained with the use of what are known as National Security Letters, which can be signed by an FBI agent and are only for use in terrorism cases. The letters require telephone companies to keep secret even the existence of the request for records.

Grammy-winning songwriter Dave Alvin talks about the man behind his song "Everett Ruess." Born in Los Angeles in 1914, Ruess was an artist, poet and wanderer who spent most of his short life exploring the wilderness of the West.

Last question: There's another flood. You are in a rescue boat. You arrive at a rooftop to find Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie. There's only room for one in the boat. Who do you take?

Landrieu: They both get left.

Nagin: I give them the boat and get on the roof and wait for the helicopter.

There are a couple of different ways to look at this. There's the romantic way, right? The romantic way is that we want to have the Internet as the wild frontier for entrepreneurship, and that's a strong case. There's also the liberal free speech argument, which says we want the Internet to be a level playing field so a variety of voices can enter the public sphere. That's a fairly strong argument. But then you've got the economic argument, which is those of us who write checks every month to these companies, we want to be able to know that we are getting decent service for what we're paying. If my broadband company next week starts dialing down my Skype speed so Skype doesn't work as well for me, I might not even know it or notice it for a long time, until Skype starts frustrating me, and out of frustration, I'm just going to pick up my old phone and dial India the old-fashioned way and just pay for it because I know the call's going to go through. That's the sort of frustration and opacity we might start seeing on the Internet. So it is a service question, a competition question, an economic development question, a consumer question. And it really is dollars and cents.

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When you search from the main navigation bar, you'll be looking through the titles, tags & descriptions of all the photos on Flickr. You'll see that you can zero in on your photos or photos from one of your contacts too, and sort the results in a few different ways on the search results page.

Scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland and at the University of Nebraska report in today's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they have discovered hollow molecular structures made of pure gold -- golden buckyballs.

Carbon buckyballs, hollow spheres made of 60 carbon atoms and named for the geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller, were discovered in the early 1980s. Originally known as buckminsterfullerenes (today, technically, just as fullerenes), buckyballs became the third known natural form of pure carbon after diamond and graphite.

In today's report, Lai-Sheng Wang, a national lab scientist and professor of physics at Washington State University, said his team appears to have created the first metallic version of the buckyball.

Cat mewing

Danish: miav
Dutch: miauw
English: meow
Finnish: miau
French: miaou
German: miau
Greek: miaou
Hebrew: miyau
Hungarian: miau
Italian: miau
Japanese: nyan nyan/nyaa nyaa
Russian: miyau
Spanish: miao
Swedish: mjan mjan
Turkish: miyav
Urdu: meow

Update: Elias sez, "This is from the DRAE (Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy), where you can see that the sound of the cat in Spanish is not 'miao' but 'miau'."

Update 2: Anders sez, "The Swedish entry for how a cat sounds is also wrong, and should be 'Mjau, mjau.'"

This is a high-end "astronomer's watch", but I bet most astronomers could not afford it. It also has some puzzling features (why do you need the information about Sirius and Arcturus?). It's nice, it's fancy, but for the cost of a PalmOS PDA plus under $100.00, I could outfit you with enough astronomical freeware/shareware to do everything this does and more (except look as beautiful).

[T]he iPod is not currently configured as a text reader, so we've done our best to work around the device's limitations. (Here's hoping Apple will make its cash cow more text-friendly in future releases.) That said, I've been testing the TP textcast for several weeks now, and I find it very easy to use. Plus, I love that Today's Papers just shows up in my iPod automatically each day.

Here's a little more detail on how the textcast works: The text is actually contained in a 15-minute audio file. (It's 15 minutes of silence, which is how we make the file so small.) Play the file as you would any other podcast, and then hit the iPod's center button two or three times until you reach the description field, which contains the full TP text. You can scroll through the text using the iPod's scroll wheel.

On Tuesday, federal probation officer Michael Sipe filed a notice of violation in a Northern California court accusing Lamo of refusing to submit a blood sample, in violation of Sipe's instructions and a 2-year-old federal law.

"He reported to the probation office as instructed; however, he refused to provide a blood sample for DNA testing, in violation of the general condition of supervision requiring compliance with federal law," the filing reads.

COMIC WRITING TOOL This was made for me by this guy Tim Biskup. If I’m stuck for an idea I just give it a roll and it tells me what I should do. [Johnny Ryan]

Why have I gone overboard with these old tools? Well, for a perversely curious person with advanced packrat syndrome, such as myself, there is no greater joy than discovering some new thing to collect. Serial numbers and model names to remember, history to uncover, objects to covet, these are truly the things that make life worth living.

Central to the effort will be the use of advanced software technologies, elements of which IBM intends to contribute to the open-source community, that are designed to help share information on disease outbreaks electronically and use it to predict how diseases will spread.

Among the technologies that will be used is a software framework IBM developed to allow electronic health information to be more easily shared and mined for trends, such as the outbreak of disease. Called the Interoperable Healthcare Information Infrastructure (IHII), the technology is designed to improve communication and collaboration among medical professionals and researchers by helping them collect and share health data. IBM will expand the role of IHII to include public health issues, responding to global calls for pandemic preparedness by facilitating the sharing of clinical data among medical facilities, laboratories and public health agencies.