O'Reilly Media have taken a ton of criticism for attempting to enforce a service mark against a nonprofit group in Ireland that wanted to have "Web 2.0" conference. O'Reilly exec Dale Dougherty coined the term Web 2.0, and O'Reilly used it for a line of very successful conferences chaired by Boing Boing's business manager, John Battelle (I've been a speaker at Web 2.0 as well, and found the con to be an amazing, eye-opening experience).

The dispute seems to have been resolved amicably. O'Reilly has apologized for sending in lawyers against the con before speaking to them, and has granted the con permission to use "Web 2.0" in its name.

However, O'Reilly maintains that Web 2.0 is a service mark of their company when applied to conferences, and that other conferences that want to call themselves "Web 2.0" will have to get O'Reilly's permission -- they defend this as part of the sound business practice of defending a trademark.

Trademarks are intended to protect consumers by ensuring that goods and services aren't misleadingly labeled. A trademark holder, say, "Coke," gets the right to sue companies that use the word "Coke" in their products and services in a way that would lead the public to believe that Coke was behind them.

But trademarks aren't "property" -- they aren't words owned by companies. They're the ability to use the courts to protect a company's customers. That's a pretty good idea: the public deserves to be protected from misleading marketing.

The question is whether using "Web 2.0" in a conference name is misleading: will the average person who hears about a Web 2.0 event assume that it must be put on by O'Reilly, or will she assume that it's just an event about the Web 2.0 technology and business-practices that O'Reilly defined?

O'Reilly has an amazing, wonderful gift for popularizing hard ideas and for explaining abstruse technology in catchy ways. "Web 2.0" is only one of O'Reilly's many accomplishments, which started with the publication of the first user documentation for Unix, and has continued through many iterations of excellent, world-changing ideas and memes.

The downside of creating amazing, industry-shaking ideas is that they become embedded in the popular consciousness. While the digerati know that O'Reilly originated Web 2.0, the idea is so infectious that it's just become part of the fabric of the industry. One of the things that makes O'Reilly's ideas so great is that they go on to be part of the infrastructure, invisible and huge and powerful.

But that means that O'Reilly's ideas are also not uniquely associated with O'Reilly. When I hear "emerging technology," I think of more than the excellent "O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference" (even though I've volunteered for every ETECH programming jury so far). When I hear "Open Source," I think of more than the wonderful "O'Reilly Open Source Conferences" (where I've spoken on several occasions). And when I hear "Web 2.0," I think of more than the brilliant "O'Reilly Web 2.0 Conference."

Which is by way of saying that I'm not convinced that there is a trademark here. In O'Reilly's latest post about this, they quote my pal and colleague John Battelle saying "Remember, Web 2.0 is also about having a business that works. And not protecting your trademarks is simply bad business practice." But while that's true -- Boing Boing has on one occasion asked someone publishing a really similar blog also called "Boing Boing," with similar graphics, to consider changing its name -- it's not the whole story.

The O'Reilly Conferences' unique selling proposition is that they rewrite the rules of the industry and coalesce meaning out of the stew of ideas floating around the field. If you're going to name the next direction the world will take, you have to be prepared for the world to take that direction. Industry shifts become public property -- or rather, things that are privately controlled can't shift a diverse industry.

That means that O'Reilly needs to choose whether it's going to retain control the word "Web 2.0" for conferences, or retain control over the shifts that created the Web 2.0 phenomenon.

I think being able to call the shots is more important than being able to own those calls. Link

iRiver makes several digital music players that come loaded with an operating system that obeys Microsoft's crippling "Plays for Sure" specification -- which ensures that the device obeys big music companies instead of its owner. Hackers have fixed this for months by providing an unauthorized firmware for the device that turns it into a real MP3 player, and now the company has taken the hint and released an official version.

This is an object lesson in how DRM fails in the marketplace. iRiver's customers don't want DRM -- it makes their device less valuable. They want a device that obeys their wishes, and they're willing to void their warranties to get one.

iRiver can respond by locking down their devices further, but that's just declaring war on their customers. Instead, they did the smart thing and abandoned their Plays For Sure certification (which is meaningless, since Plays For Sure devices are notoriously incompatible in the field, prompting some former customers to call them "Plays For Shit"). They're giving their customers what they demand: legal devices that work as well as the company can make them. Link (Thanks, Brian!)

Apple has lost its bid to force websites to reveal the identity of their sources. Apple argued that because the websites weren't "real news agencies" they shouldn't be entitled to the protection that newspapers and other news-gatherers enjoy. This was pretty off-message from the "think different" company that has talked a big game about empowering average people to do extraordinary things.

Apple further argued that it had no means to discover the identities of its leaking employees save compelling the sites to reveal them. The courts rejected this too, saying first that Apple could get at those sources by investigating its employees, and wanted to get out of doing a dirty job by putting the sites on the spot. The court further elaborated on the public value of free speech, saying that free speech was more important than trade secrets.

This is new law, specifically that "the federal Stored Communications Act protects private e-mail from civil subpoenas" -- that means that ISPs and other entities who store email have the law on their side when people sue their customers.

EFF and its allies at cyber-law clinics argued this case, and it's an important win for bloggers and other citizen journalists who now know that the courts will give them the same respect afforded to big corporate news-gatherers.

The Sixth District Court of Appeals on Friday roundly rejected (.pdf) Apple's argument that the bloggers weren't acting as journalists when they posted internal document about future Apple products. "We decline the implicit invitation to embroil ourselves in questions of what constitutes 'legitimate journalis(m).' The shield law is intended to protect the gathering and dissemination of news, and that is what petitioners did here," the court wrote.

"Beyond casting aspersions on the legitimacy of petitioners’ enterprise, Apple offers no cogent reason to conclude that they fall outside the shield law’s protection."

Link (Thanks, Lauren and Anthony!)

This Mona Lisa, on exhibition in Beijing, is made of computer parts, and titled "Technology Smiling." Link (via Gizmodo) (photo excerpt from AP Photo/EyePress)

Alan Graham said my Aeropress coffee machine movie inspired him to make a movie of his favorite coffee machine in action, the Nespresso Esssenza C90. Link to movie | Link to review

In 1977, NASA launched two Voyager spacecraft to explore the outer planets of the solar system. (Seen here, Jupiter with Io and Europa as photographed by Voyager 1 on February 13, 1979. Link) Nearly three decades later, both probes are still sending data back home as they're hurtling toward the edge of our solar system. (Previous BB post about Voyager here.) Ed Stone has been the project scientist since the beginning. This week, he was interviewed on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Podcast. From the transcript:

Narrator: Okay, let me just go back a bit, and again, you have 30 years of these two amazing spacecraft. This is a tough question for you, I'm sure, but do you have some highlights you can rattle off, some of the most important things you've learned in that time or some of the most exciting discoveries for you.

Stone: Well, generally the most important thing we learned is how diverse the bodies of the solar system are. Each one is unique and that's because they've had a different history, different evolution. Jupiter, with it's great red spot is just the largest of dozens of giant hurricane-like storm systems. And two of Jupiter's moons, Io, has a 100 times more volcanic activity than Earth. Europa has an ice crust probably on the liquid water ocean. On to Saturn, we've found Saturn's rings are riddled with wakes from moons, which are orbiting inside the rings and outside the rings. And there is a moon there called Enceladus, which is the whitest, brightest object in the solar system and has a very fresh surface. And there's the moon Titan, which has an atmosphere in which liquid natural gas rains on the surface. On to Uranus, where we found the magnetic pole down near its equator, and we found a moon, although it was only 300 miles across, it's one of the most complex surfaces we've yet seen. And on to Neptune, the furthest planet from the sun that we've visited, yet it has the fastest winds, with the least energy from the sun to dry them, and its moon Triton, 40 degrees above absolute zero, yet we found geysers erupting from its polar ice cap.
Link (Thanks, Paul Saffo!)

Design firm Tjep created this wonderful "controlled collision of 7 tables" for an ad agency's conference room. From the description:

"This table will be at the center of different view points, cultures and motivations colliding with each other to form something new and powerful, this idea is symbolized in the colors and design of the table."

Link (via Sensory Impact)

Roq La Rue gallery is selling Giclee prints of this lovely Lori Earley oil painting, titled "The Wish." It's a limited edition of 100 signed and numbered. They're going for $600.
Link

This delightful image of an alien was found in an X-ray image of an ill duck at the International Bird Rescue Research Center in Coredlia, California. From the San Francisco Chronicle (photo by Carloa Avila Gonzalez):

The drake in question arrived at the center Sunday with a broken wing. Workers do not know how the mallard was injured, but it was clearly weak and emaciated. In an effort to pinpoint the trouble, Maria Travers, the assistant rehabilitation manager, took a radiograph image of the bird. She was stunned by what she saw.

"Look at this," she shouted. "It's an alien head!"

Holcomb admitted the strange image could have been an odd arrangement of grain in the stomach...

Link (Thanks to the many readers who submitted this one.)

Michael Stebbins, author of Sex, Drugs & DNA: Sciences Taboos Confronted, drops some political info about upcoming moves by Republican Senatorial titans Bill Frist and John McCain on this week’s RU Sirius Show.

Also, there’s an odd but interesting discussion of nano-biotechnology with Dr. Alan H. Goldstein, who writes about nanotech for Salon, on this week’s NeoFiles. Link

Here's a fun music video created by a woman who is a huge fan of the game Perplex City (Here's an earlier post about it)
Link| 23 more YouTube fan-made videos about Perplex City

A few month ago, I wrote about Anton Bogaty's excellent art. Today, he told me that he created a short animated film, called "Coburn," which you can see here.
Link

Deutsche Grammophon has been issuing classical music CDs with art work by well-known cartoonists. (Shown here, Handel by Jim Woodring). Link (thanks, Michael!)

The MySociety project has produced an incredible set of travel-time maps of the UK, showing the voyage-time using color shading (red for close, blue for far) and contour lines to indicate each hour's travel -- they compare the overall travel time for going from A to B by rail and car and cab. They're laying an open geodata-bank for use in correlating house prices to travel times, cost-to-time, and generating realtime web-services. Link (via Oblomovka)

The OpenBusiness project (an academic venture that I'm an advisor to) has started an open forum to discuss what constitutes an "open" business practice, and they're seeking your input:

Yet, thinking practically, MySpace – one of the best known ‘open’ platforms for sharing content and information - recently changed its copyright policy following acquisition by Murdoch. Today everything which is uploaded to the site, your pictures, movies and recordings belongs, legally at least, to them. This position is clearly in opposition to some of the benefits sought by loosening intellectual property restrictions. The definition of ‘open’ also depends, in this regard, on encouraging communities which are sustainable.

There is also another aspect of how “Openess” changes the way business operates: Big industrial organisational models which were made for the era of mass-media and mass-production make no sense anymore. An online record label run by a staff of three can perform similar functions to a big record label run by hundreds of people. New organizational forms, new management styles and cultural norms are emerging, as well as new revenue models. But are these businesses more ethical, because they can re-distribute more, or radically reduce the costs of publishing making access to educational resources much cheaper?

Link

Michael sez, "The Ottawa Citizen runs a new column of mine that reports on an unreleased recent Canadian Heritage commissioned study on the economic impact of the copyright industries. The study, obtained under an access to information request, is damaging to Heritage's own positions as it contradicts many of their claims on copyright matters. For example, it finds that Canada leads the US in "copyright industry" growth despite the abscence of DMCA-style legislation. Moreover, contrary to claims that the music industry has been declining, it finds that the industry in Canada has experienced steady growth since 1999 (which it seeks to downplay by cautioning that "the findings should be treated with caution")." Link (Thanks, Michael!)

The New York College of Health Professionals, a holistic health school, is launching a line of clothing that they claim enables the wearer to easily self-administer accupressure. Apparently, the wearer only need press on small seeds sewn into the clothing at specific points. The new clothing brand is called MyChi. From a press release:

"Imagine it’s the ninth inning, the score tied, you are one run up but bases are loaded with no outs. I wouldn’t want to be the pitcher," says Lisa Pamintuan, who years ago played at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open and is now President of New York College, the 25-year-old pioneering institution of Holistic Health (www.nycollege.edu). "However, hopefully, our baseball cap will make situations like this a little easier. All athletes look for ways to enhance their performance, whether on the field or the tennis court. I wish I had worn this line of clothing when I was playing at Wimbledon as a 16-year-old. I would have been able to press the acupressure points in the clothing, like my sweatbands, and I would have been able to be either energized when I was tired, or relaxed when it was a tight match..."

"We are moving forward to the market, but our primary business is in offering undergraduate and graduate degree programs, not selling clothing. We are hoping that companies like Nike, Reebok, Champion, Russell, Adidas and other major sportswear companies will see the value of the College’s technologies," says Lisa Pamintuan.

Link (via Medgadget, thanks Jason Tester!)

Two papers (count 'em, two!) in this week's issue of Science describe the possibility and theoretical method to construct cloaking devices. (No demo devices as of yet.) Imperial College London physicist Sir John Pendry and his colleagues describe an approach based on metamaterials that could bend electromagnetic radiation, including light around an object. (Link to paper abstract.) Meanwhile, Ulf Leonhardt of the University of St. Andrews, writes about using metamaterials in "a general recipe for the design of media that create perfect invisibility within the accuracy of geometrical optics." (Link to paper abstract.) From National Geographic News:

Invented six years ago, the man-made (metamaterials) are embedded with networks of exceptionally tiny metal wires and loops.

The structures refract, or bend, different types of electromagnetic radiation—such as radar, microwaves, or visible light—in ways natural substances can't.

"[Metamaterials] have the power to control light in an unprecedented way," said Sir John Pendry, a theoretical physicist at England's Imperial College London.

"They can actually keep it out of a volume of space, but they can do so without you noticing that there's been a local disturbance in the light..."

So far researchers have only developed metamaterials that divert radar and microwaves—rather than light waves, which are the key to invisibility.

While that's good news for Air Force generals who want to conceal warplanes, it's bad news for wannabe wizards hoping for a magic cloak.

Link to National Geographic News article, Link to BBC News report (Thanks, Paul Saffo!)

Peder Burgaard of Denmark's Innovation Lab has been working with us at the Institute for the Future for the last few months. Now, Peder has started blogging at We Make Money Not Art. His first post is about the presentation that Larry Smarr, Director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), gave at IFTF's Technology Horizons Spring Exchange that took place this week. The subject of Smarr's talk was super high-definition telepresence and bandwidth to burn. Link

Blogger and BB pal Quinn Norton was also in attendance and posting her impressions of the Exchange at Ambiguous.org. Link

And IFTF researcher Alex Pang's thoughts on Smarr's talk are here on IFTF's Future Now blog. Link

Print-on-demand publisher Lulu.com has done a study on the lifespan of best-sellers and concluded that the number of weeks a book stays on the bestseller list has fallen to one-seventh of the average 40 years ago. This means that more books are becoming best-sellers, but that best-sellerdom means less in terms of revenue expectations. It's a pretty long-tail-ish conclusion: success is a lot more niche and small-s than it was back in the heyday of blockbusters. On the plus side, the physical costs associated with book-publishing are also way down, making smaller print runs viable, and Internet-era retailers like Amazon can sell millions of different titles.

The findings of the 50-year study are announced as America's book trade gathers in Washington for Book Expo (May 18-21), its largest annual get-together, while the movie of "The Da Vinci Code," the mother of all recent bestsellers, goes on worldwide release (May 19). The study was conducted by Lulu.com (www.lulu.com), the world's fastest-growing source of print-on-demand books.

The average number of weeks that a new No. 1 bestseller stayed top of the hardback fiction section of the New York Times Bestseller List has fallen from 5.5 in the 1990s, 14 in the 1970s and 22 in the 1960s to barely a fortnight last year -- according to the study of the half-century from 1956-2005.

In the 1960s, fewer than three novels reached No. 1 in an average year; last year, 23 did.

"The blockbuster novel is heading the way of the mayfly," says Bob Young, CEO of Lulu.com, referring to the famously short-lived insect.

Link (via Collision Detection)

Jeremiah Palacek, a painter in the Czech Republic, paints beautiful oils of scenes out of video games and sells them online via his blog and eBay. Link (via Collision Detection)

Here's a glossary of onomatopoeiac sound-effects used in Japanese comics and what they mean. Lots of interesting, nonintuitive definitions here:

Gunya = sudden mental realization

guon = the sound of a dryer. For the sound of a washing machine, see goun

guooo = a roar. Can be a fire sound, often used for Hiei's fire attacks (Cf. bo, goooo, po)

gura = stagger, move shakily (see also zuru)

guri = to give noogies

Link (Thanks, Betsy!)

Mitchell L Silverman, an attorney in Hollywood, Florida, was so outraged by the story of University of Florida cops leaning on a grad student who published fiction on his LiveJournal recounting a murder that he's filed an official request with the U Fla police for copies of all the police notes on the file. The cops have a legal obligation to disclose these records under state law.

Philip Sandifer is the U Fla grad student in Gainesville from whom the campus police demanded DNA and fingerprints. Sandifer had published a short story about a murderer who cites his crimes in a letter to the Special Forces as qualifications for a job with them. The cops' rationale was that even if it was fiction, you can't be too safe, and besides, they didn't think that English students should be writing about murder.

It looks like the original complaint came from people whom Sandifer had argued with over Wikipedia -- a message-board for disgruntled Wikipedians contains a discussion of Sandifer's story and the mischief that could be had by complaining the university about it, noting, "it wouldn't take much to put him in a position where he either decides to leave Wikipedia or decides that he doesn't need a Ph.D. after all." Sandifer told the police about this, but they continued to pressure him for DNA samples, threatening to obtain them from his garbage if he refused to comply.

The U Fla police refused to speak with me, and (via a university spokesman) denied asking for Sandifer's prints and DNA and condemning his writing -- but Sandifer's story is corroborated by his advisor, Sid Dobrin, who was present during one of their interviews with him.

Silverman is acting on his own in this request for documents -- he's not Sandifer's attorney. He's just an outraged Floridan who wants to know why the cops in his state are policing fiction. Link

Kids in the UK have co-opted an annoying noise sold to retailers as teenager-repellent and turned it into a ringtone.

Mosquito is a high-pitched sound "audible only to teenagers" sold by Britain's Compound Security. It is sold to shopkeepers to use as a teenager repellent -- the idea is to play it loudly in and around shops and "chase away those annoying teenagers!!!"

The kids have reportedly converted the high-pitched noise and turned it into a ringtone, which, being inaudible to grownups, can then be used to receive texts and calls in class without alerting teachers.

This is either a magnificent hoax or just plain magnificent -- either way, I love this Little Brother Watches Back parable.

Schoolchildren have recorded the sound, which they named Teen Buzz, and spread it from phone to phone via text messages and Bluetooth technology.

Now they can receive calls and texts during lessons without teachers having the faintest idea what is going on.

A secondary school teacher in Cardiff said: 'All the kids were laughing about something, but I didn't know what. They know phones must be turned off during school. They could all hear somebody's phone ringing but I couldn't hear a thing.

Link (Thanks, Seth and WIll!)

Update: JS sez, "Considering that such high tones are virtually unattainable for the cell-phone loudspeakers I find the story highly suspect. Besides, the sound used as a ringtone would be compressed in some way (maybe not in the newer models, but would all kids have them?), further reducing the possibility that such high frequency content is preserved. I did little research and found this link where cell-phone audio capabilities are presented in detail. According to them the cell-phone's piezoelectric speaker caps its frequency response about at 10khz, while the Teen Buzz plays at 18khz to 20khz."

I had similar doubts -- which suggests that these kids have done something even more subversive than creating an adult-proof ringtone: they've convinced adults that there's an inaudible sound that they can all hear.

Update 2: James sez, "I found this article about the mosquito system. It includes a link to an MP3 of the sound. I'm 18 and I can hear it, but neither my mom nor my step dad (both in their 50's) could distinguish the sound. It's worth noting that my step dad is a country music singer who has a very well trained ear. Since the sound carries over to MP3, and most new phones can play MP3s as ringtones, it would seem likely that students could use the mosquito sound as an adult proof ringer."

Update 3: Gregory sez, "Here's a data sheet for a piezoelectric speaker for cell phones, and shows frequency response measured out to 20kHz. The link that JS found did not say that frequencies above 10kHz were unattainable, but said "The frequency response of piezoelectric speakers is similar to small geometry moving coil speakers up to ~10 KHz bandwidth." As you can see by the data sheet at the URL listed above, small piezoelectric speakers are quite capable of being driven at frequencies above 20kHz. In fact, piezoelectric speakers are commonly used as tweeters in some sound systems; high frequencies are easy, it's the lows that give small speakers problems. A far more important question is the frequency response of the amplifiers that are driving the cell phone speakers. Amplifiers are typically band-limited to reduce noise and increase stability. What is the band limit for the phones in question?"

Update 3: Tony sez, "I've just had a look at 'Mosquito'. It's recorded at a low level, a sort of 'European siren', switching between two high tones at 2Hz. There are some giggles & rumble present (cells would probably not pass these audibly), but the high tones measure around 15,000 to 17,000 Hz. Interested geezers should pitch-shift the sound down an octave. That's exactly the same range as old TV flybacks used to emit ... which I *used* to be able to hear walking by someone's house."

Tom DeLay is grasping at straws in his legal defense of his official corrution: his campaign cited a Stephen Colbert bit as evidence of his innocence. The segment is an interview with Robert "Outfoxed" Greenwald, whose latest film is called "The Big Buy: Tom DeLay’s Stolen Congress." DeLay's legal defense fund cited Colbert's interview in a fundraising letter, under the heading "Colbert Cracks Real Story on Motivations Behind the Movie." They're featuring the video on their website, too.

Of course, Stephen Colbert is a comedian whose brilliant schtick is to pretend to be the sort of neanderthal right-wing talk-show host who would apologize for Tom DeLay, something he became incredibly famous for after his blistering White House Press Corps dinner speech where he roasted the President (that speech is presently the top selling audiobook in the iTunes Music Store).

With the savvy displayed here, it seems a foregone conclusion that DeLay's defense isn't going to keep him out of jail. Link (Thanks, Mike and Doug!)

Tomorrow is Towel Day, a day of remembrance for Douglas Adams, author of the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy. Observe it by carrying a towel all day. Link (Thanks, Jeff!)

Here's a link to the 1976 edition of the standard operating procedures for Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean.

My favorite Disney-geek reading is the old operating-procedure manuals for the rides. These docs are all one-of-a-kind Rube Goldberg machines, intended to be operated by large crews of semi-skilled, lightly trained individuals who spend 8-12 hours per day loading the richest children on Earth into modified threshing machines. Therefore, the manuals tend to be wonderfully lucid and down-to-earth, the Hemingway of documentation. Link (via The Disney Blog)

Update: Here's the Haunted Mansion manual from 1975 -- thanks, Tom! Cory

Lore Sjöberg continues to write laugh-aloud-funny columns in Wired News -- this one is about the great, useless technology that crowds the dashboards of rental cars. I've never owned a car, so pretty much every ride I've ever piloted has been a hertzmobile, and I love getting all those knobs and buttons to endanger myself with:

Satellite radio is very dangerous, because I'm really not qualified to make aesthetic decisions at 70 mph. It generally takes me three near misses to give up and go with the station that most resembles my own record collection. It's nice to know that at least one other person, or perhaps algorithm, out there likes "One Night in Bangkok."

Rental cars these days also have buttons all over the steering wheel, which makes me very happy. This is because like all rational, mature adults, I want to be Speed Racer. All I need is a child and his chimp in the trunk and I'm ready to rock. It's not precisely totally 100 percent the same, though, because Speed's buttons transformed the car into a boat and launched a robot homing pigeon, while my buttons engage cruise control. In all honesty, I'm about 400 times more likely to use cruise control as I am to need a robot pigeon, but it would be nice to have both.

I think the point of having the buttons on the steering wheel is that it's supposed to be safer, but it's actually more dangerous for the first 15 minutes, because that's when I'm experimenting. I'm pressing all the buttons to see what they do. I'd make a terrible James Bond. Two minutes after I pulled into traffic the streets would be covered in oil slicks and smoke screens, and I'd be trailing a grappling hook.

Link

Y2Y is an ambitious project to create safe freeway crossings for animals from the Yukon to Yellowstone, in the form of overpasses and underpasses designed to lure animals into crossing away from traffic. That's good news for animals -- who are dying in increasing numbers from traffic fatalities -- and good news for drivers. As Clive Thompson reports, "slamming into an enormous black bear at 60 miles an hour is kinetically equivalent to driving into a brick wall."

Their goal is not just a wolf pack surviving here and there, or a few scattered grizzly bears or elk or bighorn sheep, but a landscape in which animals can thrive, roaming and reproducing widely and avoiding the genetic perils of small populations trapped in shrinking habitats.

When the researchers write up their findings for scientific journals, they call this goal "functional connectivity," said Michael Proctor, a zoologist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Alberta. He calls it "sex across the highway."

Link (via Collission Detection)

Ben of the Institute for the Future of the Book writes in about his latest project, "an open online book from Hacker Manifesto author McKenzie Wark entitled GAM3R 7H30RY (gamer theory). The subject: video games (as allegories of the world we live in).

"GAM3R 7H30RY 1.1 is an experiment in networked publishing. The Institute designed a web site that would enable McKenzie to engage with readers before the book is fully cooked, to see how a larger conversation might impact its development. Each individual paragraph has its own comment stream allowing for fine-grained response to the text. There's also a free-fire discussion forum where people can start their own conversations about the meaning of games and the propositions ventured in the book. It's all published under a CC license.

"All in all, an envelope-pushing endeavor, in both form and content. Eventually, GAM3R 7H30RY will be published by a conventional press, but between now and then we're trying to investigate new creative strategies in the peer-to-peer environment. We call this a 'networked book' — the book as social software. We're hoping to spark discussion about that as well."

Link (Thanks, Ben!)

Michael sez, "The Canadian Federation of Students, which represents more than 500,000 university and college students across Canada, has released a public letter to Ministers Oda and Bernier on copyright reform. The CFS identifies five issues of concern."

* Anti-circumvention legislation - the CFS recognizes the dangers associated with DRM and argues that if the government is to legislate in the area, that it adopt a minimalist approach

* ISP liabiliity - the CFS supports the "notice and notice" approach

* Fair use - the CFS calls for an expansion of fair dealing toward a U.S. style fair use system

* Digital Loans and Learning - the CFS advocates for provisions that support the use of the network without the additional burdens imposed by Bill C-60 that would have turned librarians into digital locksmiths

* Statutory Damages - the CFS wants the statutory damages reformed so that educators and students are not forced into settlements due to risk of enormous liability arising from the statutory damages provisions

Link (Thanks, Michael!)

BMW has commissioned four short stories that feature their cars and produced audiobooks of them, which are available as free, non-DRMed MP3s on their site (you do have to give them an unverified email address to get access, though). Presently, they're featuring stories by Don Winslow, James Flint, Simon Kernick and Karin Slaughter. Link (Thanks, Tim!)

I've just posted the first of three installments of the podcast of my story The Super-Man and the Bugout, a superhero story that asks what would have happened if Kal-el had landed in suburban Toronto and been raised by an old Jewish couple. It's the conclusion of the triad of stories comprised by Shadow of the Mothaship and Home Again, Home Again, about the Canadian response to the invasion of benevolent Scientologist aliens.

Link, Podcast feed

Tim Eldred's indie comic book Grease Monkey -- a great, funny space adventure comic -- has been collected by Tor and has just hit the shelves. Grease Monkey is the story of a post-alien-invasion space-station where crack pilots drill ceaselessly to train for the rematch with the aliens -- like Ender's Game, but wicked funny.

The Barbarian squadron are the all-woman leaders of the fleet, thanks in no small part to their mechanic Mac, who is an uplifted gibbon (part of a tribe of sentient apes that mixes with human society). The story is told from the PoV of Robin, Mac's young assistant, who is taken under Mac's hairy arm and treated to a crash-course in beating the system.

It's got space-battles, human-gorilla political clashes, and military humor: part Catch 22, part Planet of the Apes, and charming as hell. This is one of the rare fine comics that is a truly satisfying read for adults, but which contains nothing too racy for the average precocious twelve-year-old (said twelve-year-old will surely love this as much as her parents, by the way).

Kitchen Sink press published the first couple issues of this, but regrettably cancelled it. Eldred finished the series anyway, it being the sort of thing that you have to finish writing once you get started, and with the Tor edition, we get to read the whole story. Link

Update: Jim points out that the author's site has the first chapter up for free.

Kazaa is suing P2P news-site P2Pnet for libel over a comment left by a poster reprinted from a post on one of P2Pnet's message-boards. This is about as bogus as it comes -- real crybaby stuff, wah, someone said something nasty about me, I'll sue the site on which it appears -- and P2PNet deserves better. They're raising funds for their defense, and I'll pitch in a hundred bucks once it's live. Kazaa should know better -- this is an embarrassment to the company, far more damning than anything that could possibly have been said about them on the board itself. Link (via Recording Industry vs the People)

Update: An anonymous reader points out that the post was subsequently reprinted in the body of a P2Pnet article -- but I don't buy it. If allegation is false, correct it. This kind of libel suit is the last refuge of the coward, for people who don't believe that the answer to bad speech is more speech.

Brian sez, "They Might Be Giants is offering up a few ringtones for purchase. The first two are amusing, but the third in particular is great, and is titled 'Call connected thru the NSA', with lyrics as follows:"

"Call connected through the NSA/Complete transmission through the NSA/Suspending your rights through the duration of the permanent war"

"It is sung rather pleasantly and has some nice piano accompaniment with the lyrics. It's available as a $1.50 purchase (through xingtone.com), but there is also a direct link to the freely-provided MP3 for those who prefer to make their own ringtones or who'd just like to use this as, say, a connecting sound for an IM client or an 'Email received' alert, etc." Link, Direct MP3 link

Since reading Greg Critser's Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World, I've regarded high-fructose corn syrup as a kind of toxic waste, present in an unbelievable amount of processed/packaged food. But as with all issues related to commerce and obesity, HFCS is a controversial subject, with woo-woo UFOlogist pseudoscientists on both sides inventing virtues or flaws with HFCS.

This Accidental Hedonist post does a pretty good job of digging into the reputable research on HFCS and concludes that avoiding this stuff (if you can) is a pretty good idea. I'm game: the last time I binged on sweet food laden with HFCS, I found myself miserable, tired, and hung-over for days afterwards.

The one part of the HFCS debate which bugs me is the one that surrounds personal responsibility in regard to sugar intake. According to "An Omnivore's Dilemma", HFCS has not replaced sugar consumption in the US, it has merely added to it. In other words, not only are we consuming the same amount of sugars we did 20 years ago, we've added HFCS consumption on top of it. Before we can say "HFCS causes obesity", we have to be honest with ourselves and say "Too much sweeteners cause obesity", because the consumption of both absolutely plays into our weight gains.

It'd be nice to restrict HFCS intake, if it wasn't for the fact that it's in more foods than many people realize. From ketchups to soups to even cough syrups, HFCS has been made a staple of the processed food revolution. Avoiding HFCS has been made a difficult proposition that many people, including myself, are too undisciplined to address on a daily basis.

In addressing the above e-mails, it should be said that banning HFCS is an unlikely possibility, at least not until we recognize our own culpability in its consumption. But its excessive usage needs to be addressed and reduced. I would love to see food processors explain their addiction to the stuff, and in the process of this confrontation, we find out just how bad (or not) the stuff is for people.

Link (via the all-new, all-food Megnut)

The Nike+ running shoes contain a pedometer accelerometer sensor and a wireless transmitter that talks to a receiver you plug into your iPod Nano. You program your workout routine (and music) into your Nano, and it collaborates with the sensor to deliver messages like "two miles to go" to your headphones as you go, and tracks your workout for upload to your PC's fitness-tracking app. I'm no runner, but I'm fascinated to see what the hardware hackers make of a wireless sensor that connects to the most popular portable player on the market. Link (via Warren Ellis)

Neil Gaiman and Wired's Adam Rogers have a brief editorial on the "Myth of Superman" in this month's Wired Magazine -- always fascinating to see Gaiman (whose Sandman comics are very far from traditional underwear pervert super-funnybooks) tackling the subject of underwear-pervdom's number-one icon:

What’s important, though, is how Superman uses these powers. Compared to most A-list comic characters, he has almost no memorable villains. Think of Batman, locked in eternal combat with nocturnal freaks like the Joker – or Spider-Man, battling megalomaniacal weirdos like Dr. Octopus. For Superman, there’s pretty much only bitter, bald Lex Luthor, forever being reinvented by writers and artists in an effort to make him a worthy foe. Superman’s true enemies are disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes, jet planes tumbling from the sky, enormous meteors that would crush cities. Superman stands between humanity and a capricious universe.

Link

A blogger spent a morning on the NYC subway, making simple demographic notes on who rides, when -- fascinating stuff:

3:00-4:00 AM: Drunks of all sorts, club kids, and winos. Late night workers, busboys, getting off their shifts. Only a handful of people per car. 6:1 male/female ratio.

4:00-5:00 AM: Transit workers changing shifts. Maybe 6 people per car. All male.

5:00 AM - 6:00 AM: Blue-collar laborers, minorities, immigrants. Half the car is asleep. Maybe 20 or 25 people per car. 9:1 male/female ratio.

6:00 AM - 7:00 AM: Construction workers, blue-collar laborers, hospital workers. 75% of seats in car are taken. 7:3 male/female ratio.

Link (via Kottke)

Protestors from the Free Software Foundation's excellent Defective By Design anti-DRM campaign staged a surprise demonstration yesterday at Seattle's WinHEC conference, disrupting Bill Gates's keynote. The demonstrators swarmed the entrance to the conference center in bright yellow hazmat (hazardous material) suits as attendees filed in to see Gates describe the new DRM features in Vista, the next Windows operating system. The message was that adding technologies designed to restrict the freedom of computer owners turned our beloved PCs into hazardous materials -- technology that harms us instead of making our lives better.

Defective By Design promises lots more grassroots activism, street theater, and direct action against DRM.

Brown's case is simple: the computers, high-definition screens, phones, music players and video players that are currently being sold are "defective by design". These products don't respect the user's right to make private copies of their digital media. These devices make no provision that would allow art, literature, music or film to ever fall into the public domain. Effectively, the media purchased for these devices does not belong to the user -- rather, the networking of these DRM'd devices means that as the user watches a film, reads an e-book or switches channels on their HDTV, their habits can be recorded and actions monitored. The result is that over time, DRM technology will negate, if not completely eliminate, the rights of the individual.

"In any other industry, such limitations or invasions would be considered major flaws. A media player that restricts what you can play is like a car that you won't let you steer," said Brown. "Products containing DRM are defective -- only, unlike other products, these defects are deliberately created by an industry that has long stopped caring about us."

Link, Flickr Photos (Thanks, John and Henri!)

Texas Rep Lamar Smith has introduced a bill to clear the way for the re-use of "orphan works" whose authors are unknown or unlocatable. This wasn't a big problem until 1976, when the US changed its rules and did away with copyright registration, so that everyone who created anything got an automatic lifetime-plus-decades copyright on it, from the lowliest napkin doodle to the most trivial Usenet post. This created the present situation where, according to the Supreme Court in Eldred v Ashcroft, 98 percent of the works in copyright are orphan works, and liable to disappear long before their copyrights expire.

The bill looks like a pretty good compromise, but the devil is in the details -- it requires petitioners to undertake "best practice" searches for missing copyright holders, but leaves those best practices up to the Copyright Office. Depending on the procedure established, this could either be the savior of American cultural history, or its downfall.

"The orphan works issue arises when someone who wants to use a copyrighted work cannot find the owner, no matter how diligently they search," said Chairman Smith. "The owner may have moved several times, died, or in the case of businesses, changed their name or gone bankrupt."

"For example, a local civic association may want to include old photographs from the local library archive in their monthly newsletter, but there are no identifying marks on the photo," explained Smith. "Under current law, the civic association must locate the owner to ask permission and in many cases may not be able to find the owner. Under the Orphan Works Act, they could follow guidelines posted by the Copyright Office as a show of due diligence to reduce the threat of litigation for simply doing the right thing."

The Orphan Works Act is the product of over 20 hours of negotiations among various interested parties and the Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property, chaired by Smith. It incorporates language from a year-long study conducted by the United States Copyright Office.

Link

A dragon-like dinosaur unearthed in South Dakota has been named "Dracorex hogwartsia" (Dragon King of Hogwarts) with the help of a group of kids at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis. The name has received the blessing of JK Rowling, who says it will give her more cred with her "science-loving family."

The newly described horny-headed dinosaur Dracorex hogwartsia lived about 66 million years ago in South Dakota, just a million years short of the extinction of all dinosaurs. But its flat, almost storybook-style dragon head has overturned everything paleontologists thought they knew about the dome-head dinos called pachycephalosaurs.

Link (Thanks, Daisy!)

"Brothel badges" were pornographic (by Victorian standards, anyway) badges that parodied the "pilgrim badges" sold at shrines to religious pilgrims in earlier times. Historic Games sells replicas of the badges for $6/each, noting that historians differ on whether they were naughty Mardi Gras souvenirs or brothel tokens. Of this badge, "Lady," the site notes that it's a "lady... off on pilgrimage, carrying a pilgrim's staff with a phallus-shaped head, and carrying a rosary. Similar badges were popular in the Low Countries from the 13th through the 16th centuries." Link (Thanks, Chateau Bizarre!)

Update: A reader sez, "These are suspiciously similar to the badges made by a friend of mine at Fettered Cock."

Update 2: Charles from Historic Games confirms that they're the same thing -- Fettered Cock is his supplier.

I allow comments on my other blog, Mad Professor, but I have set it up so that I get to review each comment before I release it to be posted. In the last few months, I've been getting some weird comments like this:

IP Address: 66.81.23.78

Name: Courtney Gidts
Email Address: eastcoast@microsoft.com
URL:
Comments:
I've managed to save up roughly $16804 in my bank account, but I'm not sure if I should buy a house or not. Do you think the market is stable or do you think that home prices will decrease by a lot?

Note that there's no URL, so how can this be profitable for the spammer? Is it part of a larger scheme? The number (in this case, $16804) is different each time. Is it a code number used by spies?

I googled "Do you think the market is stable or do you think that home prices will decrease by a lot?" and it returned 13,300 results. Most of them were from sites that allowed these weird comments to go through (example). I also found that Peter Kaminski has been getting the same type of comments and is just as mystified as I am. What's going on? Link

The photo on this page is made up of tiny photos. Click on the photo to zoom in. More tiny photos. Forever. Link

Grow a square watermelon by putting it into a box. If my wife and I have another baby, we'll see if we can grow a square kid. Link

Yesterday I wrote about Swapatorium's excellent estate sale score of old photos. Today, she wrote a little more about the sale. Included in the photo albums are a bunch of pictures of Darien and Kuna Indians taken in the 1940s.

It was the cleanest and most organized sale I have ever seen. Not a speck of dust and odor free. Even the old photos have no hint of smell so they were stored well over the years. Turns out the dad was a dentist and the mom a nurse. Maybe that’s why the place seemed sterile. I learned that they traveled all over the world and during the war, were stationed in Panama. I have amazing photos from there, as well as fantastic dental images. I have only gone through a fraction of the images, so no telling what I will find. Apart from the photos, we also purchased some cool old things like toys, a painting, old watches, decorative glass, vintage fabrics, and numerous other objects. We completely stuffed our vehicle. We had to go to the ATM so we left the ladies to price our goods while we were gone. When we came back, I heard the calculator going for at least a couple of minutes while she added our massive pile. Nothing was priced, so there was no telling what the amount would be. When she told us, I was shocked! She practically gave us the stuff, literally! She told us to make an offer for all the photos and we gave her a very fair price which was a bit padded to make up for the other items. I think she was very happy with our offer. To give you an example, we purchased a fabulous 1930’s lamp which was $1.50 and all the old toys for $1. Not $1 each, but a buck for all. They just wanted to clean everything out. It really was one of those once in a lifetime sales. The fun doesn’t end there because this sale did not include the items in the house. This was just for the things in the garage. They are having another sale in a few months for the rest of the household. They have our phone number and they said they will call us. You can bet we will be there early!

Link

MIT researchers have developed a portable Seeing Machine, a system that could aid some blind people by projecting images directly onto the retina of the eye. Project leader Elizabeth Goldring first conceived of the device ten years ago when she was blind in both eyes due to hemorrhages in her retinas. (Surgery has since enabled her to see with one eye.) A physician examined Goldring with a scanning laser opthalmoscope (SLO), a $100,000 diagnostic medical device that uses a laser to project an image on the retina and detect damage. The Seeing Machine is based on similar technology but the prototype cost just $4,000. (The image here depicts Goldring looking at "an image she created to approximate what she sees when she looks through her seeing machine at an image of a staircase.") From MIT News Office:

Recently the machine received positive feedback from 10 visually challenged people with a range of causes for their vision loss who tested it in a pilot clinical trial...

Participants used the machine to view 10 examples of Goldring's visual language. A majority -- six -- interpreted all 10 "word-images" correctly. "They responded really well to the visual language," Goldring said. "One woman told me she would love to see recipes written that way."

They also used the machine to navigate through a virtual environment, raising the potential for "previewing" unfamiliar buildings a person wants to visit...

All of the participants reported that the machine "may have the potential to assist their mobility in unfamiliar environments," according to the Optometry article. Concluded Goldring: "A couple of them said they'd tried every seeing aid available (magnifying devices, etc.), and this was by far the best, even in this rough, rough shape."

Link

Prosopagnosia is the scientific term for faceblindness. As Beware of the Blog's Iowa Firecracker describes it, "for some reason, my fusiform gyrus isn’t hooked up properly and I can’t recognize human faces." He She goes on to mention that she has been interviewed for an upcoming documentary about this rare condition, and that she met another faceblind for the first time, a guy named Glenn, who administers an email list for faceblind people.

I was really nervous about it, but it turned out to be okay. Whether it’s because he’s the list admin, or because he lives in Boston where prosopagnosiacs go to get studied by Scientists and Experts at Harvard, Glenn has met plenty of other faceblind folks, so it wasn’t a big deal for him. That helped me calm down a little. Mostly I just wanted to thank Glenn in person for running the faceblind list, because I like knowing there are some other people out there who see the world a little bit the way I do. I like knowing they have the same problems I do at parties, and they don’t see any point in having photos of their loved ones around, and they call people who aren’t faceblind NTs (for Neuro Typicals). I like getting recommendations for movies based on the fact that they have characters I’ll be able to identify all the way through the story. (“Chronicles of Narnia” got good marks for that.)

So Glenn and I met in a coffee shop, and drank some coffee, and he was very nice and a very interesting guy. When I try to remember what he looked like, I think of a sea captain on an old whaling vessel, I guess because of his facial hair or because of what he was wearing that day, and I wonder what he remembers of me.

Link

SmartFilter has added Worth1000, the photoshopping competition site, to its hit-list of sites that can be censored by its customers (who include several repressive governments that use SmartFilter's carelessly constructed blacklists to filter their entire countries). They've listed Worth1000 as "tasteless/gross." How delightfully arbitrary. Link (Thanks, Toby!)

Update: And now they've reversed it. Capricious and arbitrary and unpredictable! Just the traits we love in our self-appointed universal media censors. I wonder what they do when the person who needs to complain about a miscategorization is a political dissident in one of the repressive countries SmartFilter takes money from?

This youtube is an astounding three-minute domino run constructed out of books, swords, corpses, silver balls and many other props in the 3D game The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. This has been done in other 3D worlds (such as Second Life), but this one is particularly nice. Link (via Waxy)

Gareth says: How freakin' deep geek are these!? I found them on Lady Ada's wonderful site (which you have to check out if you haven't already -- she has lots of cool DIY projects there). When she asked Todd about the grid of solder pads in the lower right, he said: "That's the prototyping area." On the back it says "electronic design & embedded systems." I MUST have a card like this! Link

Gary says: "The Oakland Scottish Rite building has a full battery of solar panels on the roof. Now they have a link to a page where you can watch they system’s performance in real time."

When I checked at 10:30am PT, the panels were producing 31 kW, and the building was consuming only 23.2 kW, which means the Scottish Rite building's meter was running backwards. Link

Alex Steffen of WorldChanging says: "Given that An Inconvenient Truth opens this week, and that it appears that the president just acknowledged that climate change is real, and that there's been an uptick of "climate skeptics" leaving disruptive, if not downright trolling comments on environmental and science blogs recently, we thought it would be useful to come up with a way of signaling that the debate is really over on these subjects, and its time to move on."

So WorldChanging has started a discussion about developing "a page which can become shorthand in blog comment threads and online discussions for 'we've already gone over this,' a sort of RTFM message for climate change science." Link

In the new issue of Oxford American magazine, writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus immerses himself in the Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting. At this upscale gathering, connoisseurs rate the subtleties of various bottled waters. It's a delightful premise for a feature story, and Lewis-Kraus handles it masterfully. From the article:

Europeans drink water for what’s in it, for its minerality, while Americans tend to drink water for what’s not in it. As water commutes through the earth’s crust, it “acquires a personality” or “develops a style.” Magnesium might give water one particular flavor, while potassium—which Arthur pronounces “botazhium”—might give it a different flavor. Silica can make a water feel silky. The Japanese like young water, water that has not spent years streaming through geological filters like aquifers. One can be trained to be more perceptive about water. One really can be trained to be more perceptive about water. The results vary little from year to year, which lends some credence to these proceedings.

On the tables in front of us are pink “trial” judging sheets. Across the top run a series of boxes for water numbers, and down the side is the set of criteria we’ll be using....

Overall Impressions is scored out of fourteen points, which makes the total available points for each entrant an eyebrow-raising forty-nine. The fourteen-point scale is provided to us on an attached sheet. It was developed by a food scientist at UC Berkeley named William Bruvold. In the ’60s, he pioneered experiments in the acceptability levels of total dissolved solids in water, and he used his students as subjects; he incrementally increased the turbidity of the sample until the water came to resemble Turkish coffee and his students refused to drink it.

Link

Kids across America have made a sport out of evading the censorware that restricts which websites they're allowed to visit, handily outsmarting their IT departments and the indiscriminate filters that block whole swathes of the Web, including sites vital to the common curriculum, in the name of keeping them from seeing boobies.

Ryan had apparently set up a so-called Web proxy from his home computer so that when he was at school, he could direct requests for banned sites like MySpace through a Web address at home, thereby tricking the school's filter. (Web, or CGI, proxies can be Web sites or applications that allow users to access other sites through them.)

"I eventually tracked down the (Internet Protocol) address, so that it doesn't work for him anymore," said Don Wolff, tech coordinator in the Phoenix-Talent School District, adding that Ryan didn't face disciplinary action. "It's against our acceptable-use policy, but he's not going to quit trying, (and this way) we can keep learning."

"This is a hot new trend among kids for getting around Web filters," Wolff said.

Link (Thanks, Mike!)

Pete sez, "These are the first available pictures of the working prototype of the $100 laptop from MIT. Now working under the One Laptop Per Child heading, today was the first public showing of the machine. Link (Thanks, Pete!)

Bing Bang Boing was a genius 1970s board-game where players laid out trampolines, funnels, spirals, elevators and other apparatus and then released marbles through the run you'd built. The effect is basically Mousetrap with bouncing, and it features heavily in the kids' toys cartoons I blogged this morning.

Rob, a blogger, recreated Bing Bang Boing for his kids with balloon-and-peanut-can trampolines and other props, and has details on how he did it, along with a video of the toy in action. Link (Thanks, hexmonkey!)

Today's Worth1000 photoshopping contest revisits my absolutely favorite theme: putting horror-movie/monster themes into classic fine art. I was utterly torn on whether to include the Girl With a Pearl Earring Meets Nosferatu pictured here or the equally awesome Mona Lisa Ringu mashup. Link

This blog post traces the history of "the first computer game," a tic-tac-toe implementation programmed in 1952 on Cambridge University's EDSAC mainframe -- the post includes URLs for an EDSAC emulator.

OXO, a revolution in entertainment, that featured amazing 35*16 pixel graphics, and was actually a version of tic-tac-toe, played by dialing (on an typically 50s phone-dial) your input and facing a simple but decent AI. The first video game's creator was (as is usual in these cases) a PhD student: A.S. Douglas. It seems his thesis was on human-computer interaction.

Link

CBS is launching a web/TV game this autumn that requires players to monitor programs and commercials to win up to $2 million in prizes. The network has taken this on as part of the challenge of getting viewers to watch ads in an era of PVRs with commercial-skipping capability. ABC has done something similar during the commercials for Lost.

It's great to see the networks applying some creativity to the problem of surviving technological change -- it's a welcome switch from their tactic to date, which is whining in court about the big bad PVR makers who naughtily allow viewers to control what's on their own TVs.

NBC's popular sitcom "The Office," for example, put together fake public-service announcements that mimic NBC's own "The More You Know," a series of PSAs featuring actors, writers and directors delivering the messages. Because "The Office" PSAs so closely resembled actual PSAs, viewers did not realize they were fake until the announcement series took a bizarre, humorous turn. The fake PSAs also can be viewed for free on "The Office" Web site. An ad streams silently next to the video while you watch it.

In this case, an advertiser who places a spot next to the online version of the PSA can claim at least one advantage over the advertisers flanking the same PSA on television. Thanks to online tracking software, it's relatively easy to obtain demographic information on the viewers who click on the online PSA video, while the television advertisers flanking the same PSA during a commercial break have much less precise information about who was reached. The ANA/Forrester report found that 97 percent of advertisers wanted better measurement of audience viewership for actual commercials, not just a TV program ratings system.

Link

Hollywood studios and some CE manufacturers have reportedly entered into an informal agreement to hold off on using the "image constraint token" in HDMI DRM until 2010 or 2012. The image constraint token is a flag in a video signal that instructs receivers, DVD players and other high-definition sources to "down-rez" their output to a low-definition signal when connecting to an "untrusted" screen or other sink.

The effect is that if your screen or recorder isn't blessed by Hollywood, they can limit the video they send to it to a low-resolution image. Manufacturers who want the full signal have to enter into the HDMI license agreement and agree to cripple their hardware in lots of ways -- and have to promise not to make their equipment compatible with anyone else's, unless they, too, agree to cripple their hardware.

HDMI doesn't come cheap. The PS3 is shipping in two versions: an HDMI version for $600 and a non-HDMI one for $500. If you try to play a "image constraint token" video on your non-HDMI PS3, you'll get a purposely downgraded picture.

Of course, no customer wants this. It's crazy to think that there are manufacturers out there who are devoting engineering resources to purposely degrading the quality of their products. Especially since there's very little HDMI equipment in the field today -- chances are the high-def screen you have in your house today is plugged into a PC, and isn't HDMI-ready at all. No reason not to use these cheap, plentiful screens with high-def players, except for the cartel's insistence that you shouldn't.

The agreement to stay away from the image constraint token for four or six years is a way to get around this. If the DRM is kept switched off for the first 4-6 years, there's an opportunity to lure people into accepting it -- to buy into devices, media, players, screens, storage and other components with HDMI crippleware within, but inactive.

This is a classic Manchurian Candidate strategy. These devices behave like normal gear until the studios pull the trigger, then they turn on you. The studios talk a big game about wanting to operate in a free market, but then you get stuff like this: back-room deals, restraint of trade, and attempts to subvert the market by fooling customers into buying crippled kit.

The conundrum isn't apparently lost on the consumer electronics industry or Hollywood. According to German-language Spiegel Online, there is reportedly a behind-the-scenes, unofficial agreement between Hollywood and some consumer electronics manufacturers, including Microsoft and Sony, not to use ICT until 2010, or possibly even 2012. Without providing more details, the report suggests that Hollywood isn't exactly happy with the situation, and could very well renege on the agreement, such that it is. But the agreement is there nonetheless, presumably to help the industry transition to HDMI. This could explain why the very same studios that pushed for HDMI and ICT have recently announced that they would not use it for the time being.

The report's claims could also shed some light on two of the more baffling consumer electronics moves as of late. Sony stunned onlookers when it announced that the low-end PlayStation 3, which will retail for US$499, will not have HDMI. This put Sony in the awkward position of downplaying HDMI as a "must have" feature for a next-generation optical disc player. Kaz Hirai, CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America, sidestepped the lack of HDMI by painting it as a high-end standard that wouldn't be aesthetically appreciated by many consumers.

Link (via /.)

Walter R. Tschinkel, from the Department of Biological Science at Florida State University pours orthodontal plaster down ant holes, and creates perfect molds of the topology of the inside of an ant-colony. These are lovely sculptural pieces -- someone should mass produce them. Link (Thanks, Numlok)

Earlier this month, I blogged a video caught off a Japanese news-show that documented the pilgrimage of a group of Japan-obssessed geeks to Tokyo to revel in American-style "otaku" obsession. We get so much pleasure out of odd cultural moves from Japanese nerd-dom, so it's great to see Western nerd culture go under a Japanese microscope.

Here's a followup video on the same subject, this time with English subtitles. As Gavin from TVinJapan sez, "it does a really nice job of explaining some of how the Japanese feel about these Americans that are obsessed with Japanese culture." Link (Thanks, Gavin!)

Update: Jenn sez, "American otaku aren`t the only ones that Japanese tv follows with interest. This video (mainly Chinese footage dubbed over with Japanese), a segment from a panel show, follows the equally fascinating story of Chinese otaku. (part two)

"The video starts with footage of anti-Japan rallies in China, followed by polls on how the Chinese feel about the Japanese (more than 60% say they `hate` Japan). Then they ask the same respondents what country`s animation they like best, and surprisingly more than 60% say they prefer Japanese anime to Western (28%) or Chinese (11%). The segment covers the phenomenonal popularity of Japanese manga in China, as well as otaku attending a cosplay convention in China, focusing on a high school student whose parents berate her for not only having such a hobby but it being Japanese.

This Wists thumbnail site is dedicated to collecting links to sites displaying automata, from clockworks to electronics. Right now, they're showing replicas of the Mechanical Turk, a small hand-cranked storm-scene in a porcelain cup, an automata orchestra, hand-cranked monkey automata (in fezzes, natch), and historical accounts of Victorian steam-driven human automata. Link (via Kottke)

Daniels Woodland sells amazing, custom-built treehouses that resemble toontown dwellings, with curved and sagging rooflines and crazy, angular windows. The houses stand 14' high and are perched atop a giant, chainsaw-hollowed log. The net effect is straight out of a Max Fleischer cartoon.

Each tree house is built in two main pieces: the playhouse and the log. The playhouse is made from cedar or ship lapped pine siding. The log is a real, old fallen tree that we hollow out using a chainsaw! To get into the playhouse, simply enter the door in the hollow log, climb up the ladder in the center of the log and pull yourself through the trap door in the floor of the playhouse. Kids or no kids, this tree house is an incredible addition to any landscape!

Link (Thanks, Justine!)

Someone has uploaded a 7 minute reel of amazing 1970s toy commercials -- for Bing Bang Boing, SSP Pee Wees, SSP racers, Smash Up Derby, Screen-a-Show, Slip n' Slide/Water Wiggle, Bug Out!, Screech, and Masterpiece. These are commercials from an era of cheap plastic and no advertising-to-kids regulation, and as a result, the toys look incredibly fun, even today. Plus who knew buying fine art at auction could be fun for seven-year-olds? Link (Thanks, Piranhaboy!)

Designer Gabriel Wiese has produced this armchair made from recycled wine-corks -- it must smell amazing. Link (via Cribcandy)

Metafilter Matt has recreated the Star Wars Kid video using a MacBook and a piece of software called MacSaber, which makes lightsaber noises as you swing your motion-sensor-equipped laptop around. The result is nothing short of genius.

I went for accuracy, combing my hair down, putting on tight khakis and a striped tight shirt, and following his first set of movements.

Link

Here's an interesting collection of gun and ammo advertisements from 1950s issues of Boy's Life. My father had a gun as a kid, and so did all the kids in the neighborhood where he grew up. Times have changed. Link

The three prongs in this bowl prevent your dog from eating too fast by forcing him to poke his snout gingerly into the chow. Link

Here's a sharp looking papercraft pinhole camera you can download, cut, and build. It's a design that was published in a 1979 issue of "ABC mladých techniků a přírodovědců" ("An ABC of Young Technicians and Natural Scientists") and translated for digital download by the Linatree photo printer and virtual gallery.
Link (Thanks, Peder Burgaard!)

John Kricfalusi and Katie Rice are going to exhibit and sell their work at Every Picture Tells A Story in Santa Monica this Sunday. After the show, watch a bunched of BANNED John K cartoons at the theater across the street. Link

I have two comments about these photos of balloons from a 1932 (or thereabouts) Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. One, Swapatorium seems to find once-in-a-lifetime troves of fascinating ephemera on a daily basis. Two, no one can deny that the parade balloons in 1932 were much cooler than the ones they have now. Link

WFMU's Beware of the Blog found a video of a yogi teaching a laughing exercise. Try it. "Don't feel shy!" Link

Roq La Rue gallery in Seattle has a terrific two-man show going on right now, featuring the work of Travis Louie and Robert Craig.

Travis Louie’s hypnotic “portraiture” is compelling for its blend of the hyper realistic with the blatantly surreal. Fantastical creatures gaze out from paintings so technically refined (using transparent layers of acrylic paint over a tight graphite drawing on a smooth flat surface) that they look uncannily like old photographs. Adding to the discomfiting presence these animal like characters have are the human expressions- even if the creature in the paintings looks a bit bizarre, it also looks spookily familiar as well.

Robert Craig creates Technicolor dreamscapes where toys, deities, skeletons, and advertising archetypes intermingle and cavort under bright blue skies. Inspired by everything from Michelangelo, Dali, Norman Rockwell, and Rick Griffin to the images on a box of pancake mix, Craig defiantly refuses to raise one influence as loftier than the other, in fact states that while he cites as influence old sci-fi movies, cartoons, his own childhood, Hindu art, LSD, the catholic church, and the death of his daughter, “My paintings have no inherent, intentional meaning because I don't believe that life has any inherent meaning...it just is. I have no great wisdom, moral messages or cosmic profundity to impart in my work. I feel that would only detract from it. Like watching a great movie and a commercial butts in. 'Shut up and paint!' Sez I.”

Link

David Roberts, staff writer for Grist Magazine read my review of An Inconvenient Truth and comments:

As you're already aware, Al Gore's new movie on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, is being released this week. It should come as no surprise that it's bringing the wingnuts out of the woodwork.

A few weeks ago I did an interview with Gore about the movie. He shared some insights on how it was made and the strategies he uses to get past people's ignorance and apathy. Last week, the Cato Institute's Patrick Michaels appeared on FOX's Hannity & That Other Guy. He lifted a quote from the interview out of context, twisted its meaning, and used it to smear Gore. I wrote to FOX and Michaels to correct the record. (See also Media Matters and News Hounds.) Suffice to say, Michaels has not retracted or apologized.

That was merely dishonest. For a layer of parody-defying hilarity on top of the dishonesty, check out the new ads from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an industry-funded "think" tank. They honestly look like something straight out of Saturday Night Live. Tag line: "Carbon dioxide. They call it pollution. We call it life."

Seriously.

(Check Sphere for more reaction to the ads.)

And finally, for readers who would like to see the slideshow on which Gore's movie is based (way more interesting than it sounds!), I tell them where to find video of it here.

Over at Cryptomundo, Loren Coleman writes about the latest controversy surrounding Homo floresiensis, the "hobbits" whose bones were discovered in Indonesia in 2004. (Link to previous BB posts about the hobbits.) Is Homo floresiensis really an extinct species or just the skull of Homo sapiens with a genetic disorder called microcephaly? Background on the controversy in this New York Times article. At Cryptomundo, Coleman quotes conversations he had with Peter Brown, one of the researchers behind the hobbit discovery. From the post:

Reacting strongly to the latest round of attacks on Homo floresiensis being conducted more in the media than in reasoned reality, Peter Brown, one of the primary researchers of the new species has told Cryptomundo: “Some people see exactly what they want to see, for a variety of reasons.”

Distracters, the media, and the debunkers in this current onslaught against the discovery are completely ignoring the evidence of the possibly nine Homo floresiensis individuals discovered at the site, says Brown. “There are no modern humans with the postcranial dimensions of Homo floresiensis and the second mandible is well outside the range of human variation,” Brown told Cryptomundo.

Link

From WFMU, A Zip-A-Dee-Do-Dah-A-Thon of covers of the classic tune as performed by Doris Day, Bing Crosby, Dionne Warwick, the Jackson 5, Steve Miller, and a couple dozen more. Listen via RealAudio or download the MP3. My, oh, my, what a wonderful day.
Link (Thanks, Vann Hall!)

UPDATE: BB reader John Cook points out the interesting backstory of the flamewar filled with accusations of racism that led to Stephin Merritt's Zip-A-Dee-Do-Dah-A-Thon. Link to NYT article, Link to Slate article

Lost Found Art is a design firm that puts together collections of unusual and interesting items--antique industrial pulleys, ray guns, valve knobs, fishing spears, etc.--and sells them as custom installations. Seen here, Art Deco inspired microphones, $2,800, and children's antique baseball gloves, $1,800.
Link (Thanks, Lindsay Tiemeyer!)

Britain's Inflate sells and rents gigantic inflatable structures, ranging from a small "office in a box" to gigantic pavilions. Link (via Cribcandy)

The university police at Gainesville's University of Florida have targeted a graduate student in the English program over his publication of a piece of horror fiction on his LiveJournal. The police have repeatedly visited the student and demanded that he submit his fingerprints and DNA to them so that they can compare the fictional murder he described in his story to evidence from any similar unsolved murders.

Philip Sandifer is a graduate student in U. Fla's English program, and keeps a personal creative writing journal called "Pulp Decameron," where he posts very short stories in the styles of various pulp genres. The stories are released under a Creative Commons license. One story, I am Ready to Serve My Country, is a first-person account of a murderer who executes two victims before applying to the military.

On May 12, detective Sanders of the University of Florida police left him a voicemail asking him to contact her. This began a series of meetings and calls with the University Police in which detectives repeatedly pressured him to allow them to fingerprint him, so that they could compare his prints to evidence from unsolved murders. They cited his publication of the horror fiction as the reason.

I spotted the story on Sandifer's LiveJournal last week and rang the university police. I spoke to Detective Sanders, but she declined to give any comment on the case, referring me to Lt. Sharkey, the Department's press-relations officer. I left several messages for Lt. Sharkey, without receiving a call back.

However, on May 18, Sandifer posted an update to his LiveJournal, stating that the police had met with him and his faculty advisors, Kenneth Kidd and Sid Dobrin, and the police had told him that "a journalist from the UK" was asking about his story. They advised him that he'd better turn over his DNA and fingerprints before the story broke. They also questioned Sandifer's advisors as to whether their students should be writing material like Sandifer's.

The WMD is a custom-built PC whose case resembles a shiny, hollywoodized terrorist bomb, straight out of a Bond flick. Bit-Tech has the incredibly detailed, lavish write-up of the build. The attention to detail is really remarkable. Link (via Digg)

Security guru Bruce Schneier's April fools challenge to come up with "movie plot security threats" continues to bear fruit. Schneier's readers keep on posting new, implausible threats to national security that the Department of Homeland Security can include in its nothing-is-too-implausible countermeasures:

Several teams could base themselves in western US states like Arizona, New Mexico, Montana, etc during summer, and wait for dryest and hottest part where forests are at their period of least amount of moisture in the fuels (wood, shrubs, grasses).

All that would be required for that is just easily made incendiary devices, tossed out a window of a moving car. If a series of teams did that simultaneously, and each one did multiple fires in one day, many large fires could be created in each state, quickly overwhelming wildland firefighting crews.

And in order to ground aerial firefighting planes and helos, either unguided rockets, or even a real SA-7/14 type missile to actually hit one of them. USFS will immediately order all firefighting aircraft to not fly.

Firefighting crews could be attacked, by means such as shooting, bombing their vehicles or firecamps.

Link

Britain's Somerset Willow Company sells biodegradable, handsome wicker coffins. Beats interring your loved ones in tropical hardwoods, toxic anodized aluminum, or depleted uranium (I made up the last one). Link (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

M Otis Beard sent us this site he built documenting his trip to The World Landscape Park near the capital of Sichuan in China. The World Landscape Park -- or as he calls it, Disgraceland, PRC -- is a failed amusement park that sits rotting on an unremarkable street-corner, filled with architectural marvels, concrete trees, a giant crucifix, and many other amusements.

Once upon a time in a land called Xi Pu, just west of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province in the People's Republic of China, there was a tourist theme park... The World Landscape Park. As a business venture it failed, and today the park lies abandoned and decaying. Personally, I think it's a lot more interesting this way than it could ever possibly have been when it was open.

Link (Thanks, Otis!)

Fans of the awesome video game Katamari Damacy ran last weekend's Bay to Breakers footrace in San Francisco dressed as characters from the game, pushing a giant katamari ball dotted with funny San Francisco symbols, from Frank Chu's notorious "Zagnatronic Galaxies" sign to oversized martini glasses. The photos from the race make it clear that these cats were the best thing on legs this year. Link (Thanks, Heather!)

Update: Katie B, one of the Katamari crew, sends in this Flickr set, and this LiveJournal for the effort.

Salon's Farhad Manjoo has a long feature today about new, net-based peer-to-peer loan services. These services, like prosper.com, encourage borrowers to post personal accounts of their financial situations -- the kind of material that doesn't show up on a credit report, like the fact that you accumulated your debt going through school and are about to graduate into a good job -- and then allows individuals to act as lenders by putting small sums together in a syndicate to make the loan. So if you want $5,000, you might get it from 50 people who share your interest over three years. Interest rates are also determined between lenders and borrowers, and are much lower than the predatory high-risk rates charged by credit cards and payday loan centers (which can charge a whopping 521 percent API).

Lenders are encouraged to diversify their loans, spreading out their investment in $50-or-up chunks that are spread among borrowers with different risk profiles. The sites report that their default rate is no worse than a credit-card company's, even though they make loans at lower rates to high-risk individuals.

Early in May, Bulck put up a request for a loan of $2,800, offering an interest rate to lenders of 13.9 percent. "This loan is probably the hardest thing I have had to ask for in a very long time, and I appreciate your help," his listing began. Bulck went on to describe his situation. He receives financial aid, he said, but his next disbursement doesn't come until August, and he'd have a hard time until then. But he assured possible lenders that his future looked bright. He's in his last year of school, and he expects to find a job soon. "I don't anticipate any problems paying this loan back," he wrote.

Despite his assurances, a risk-averse investor would have found much to be wary of in Bulck's listing. His chosen field of study is creative writing, not a major known for the swiftness with which it places graduates in steady employment. There's a more basic problem, which is whether you can trust him. Bulck posted a photograph -- he's seated at a desk, writing, a cat perched nearby -- and though he looks decent enough, it would have been impossible for any lenders to know for sure that Bulck was really a student due to get a financial aid check in August, and was not, instead, just practicing his creative writing to get some quick cash.

As it happened, people believed Bulck's story, and he got his loan. But that's not the case with everyone. Lending money on Prosper is no different from lending money in real life -- it's possible, and some might say likely, that some people aren't who they say they are, and that they won't pay you back. Prosper is explicit with lenders about this risk, and it advises people to get around it by diversifying. If you have $5,000 to invest in Prosper, the site encourages you to spread your money among many people. Every loan on Prosper lasts for three years (borrowers face no penalty for paying the loan early). If you give $50 to 100 people who have a credit grade of C, chances are that over the course of three years, some people -- about three, according to Experian -- will default on their loans. But if you get a 14 percent return on your money from those who do pay you back, you'll make more than $1,000 on your $5,000 investment, enough to cover your losses.

Link

This little Javascript library -- reflect.js -- lets you add reflections to the images on your site. Comes as a standalone or a Wordpress plugin. Link (via Digg)

Williams-Sonoma sells a Bundt cake pan in the shape of a sand-castle so that you can prepare baked goods that double as miniature spongy fortresses. Link (via Cribcandy)

Instructables's 01 watch is a DIY binary watch where you solder on the LEDs and program the chip with a flexible firmware that includes "a voltage meter, binary counter, club mode and time display. The watch is fully programmable. Future firmware upgrades will include: stopwatch/timer, alarm, bicycle speedometer/odometer, data logging, and an advanced configuration menu." They briefly mention the possibility of a watch that displays the seconds since Unix epoch, which is what I really want, especially if it can do so in hex. Link (via Make Blog)

The Swallowtail is a new Tokyo cafe in which subservient men dressed like butlers wait on the clientele of women in their 20s and 30s. This is an inversion of the Tokyo "maid cafes" where young geeky men go to be waited on by lavishly attentive women in maid costumes. Men in butler costumes is a theme in women's "Boys' Love" manga, which features attractive young men's homoerotic relationships:

The Swallowtail coffee house in Tokyo’s Ikebukuro district is decked out like an English manor house, with customers subserviently greeted with a “Welcome home, Madam.” A concept that may seem a little odd, but it’s one that appears to have a ready-made audience, Emiko Sakamaki, the woman behind the eatery, explaining, “When I visited a ‘maid cafe’ last year, I thought there should be a cafe with a similar concept for women. And I saw people post some messages on the Internet that they wanted such a butler cafe. I thought the cafe could be accepted.” And accepted it has been, with tables being fully booked until May 12, the management asking customers to make reservations online to guarantee themselves a table.

Link (via Fark)

Max sez, "We've created a site dedicated to doing every single one of the dozen some-odd monster make-up designs created by horror make-up legend Dick Smith in his 1965 'Famous Monsters of Filmland'-published 'Dick Smith's Do-It-Yourself Monster Make-Up. The book was meant for children, and so many of the designs suggest using everyday household items, such as bread crumbs and Karo syrup, but the results are eye-popping, thanks to Dick Smith's genius for horror make-up. Max and Courtney document every step of the process with photographs, and then offer a short movie to demonstrate what the make-up looks like in action. So far we have created a Boris Karloff-style mummy, weird skin textures made with liquid latex and bread crumbs (!), Collodion scars, and a Ed 'Big Daddy' Roth-style bug eyed dragstrip monster called a 'Weird-Oh.'"

STEP ONE: Paint liquid latex on your face and stick bread crumbs to it
It's a good idea to have a plate or a pie tin below you to catch spare crumbs that will fall of your face.

STEP TWO: Add more latex and breadcrumbs
At this point, you can really build up the facial features with the latex and bread crumbs. Be careful around the eyebrows and hairline, as liquid latex can tug quite a bit when it comes off. Let each layer dry before you add a new one. If you don't want a texture that is quite so thick, Dick Smith suggests using cracker meal.

Link (Thanks, Max!)

Recently, I started making my own sauerkraut, which is much better tasting than store bought. There have been stories suggesting that fermented foods like kimchi and sauerkraut are good for your immune system. (Here's a BBC story about claims that kimchi may cure bird flu.) So this article about Kimchi in the LA Times caught my eye. The Chinese World Journal of Gastroenterology recently ran a report titled "Kimchi and Soybean Pastes Are Risk Factors of Gastric Cancer."

The researchers, all South Korean, report that kimchi and other spicy and fermented foods could be linked to the most common cancer among Koreans. Rates of gastric cancer among Koreans and Japanese are 10 times higher than in the United States.

"We found that if you were a very, very heavy eater of kimchi, you had a 50% higher risk of getting stomach cancer," said Kim Heon of the department of preventive medicine at Chungbuk National University and one of the authors. "It is not that kimchi is not a healthy food — it is a healthy food, but in excessive quantities there are risk factors."

It could be that the danger of kimchi might be from the large amount of salt in it, "which could combine with red pepper to form a carcinogen."

In any case, I'm not going to stop making sauerkraut. I don't use much salt when I make it anyway. Link

Dubaidave visited Alexandria in Egypt and discovered a run-down kiddee park called Fantazyland: the United Ride of Fantasy. He lavishly documented it in photos and prose at the link below. It seems like a remarkably awful place -- derelict themeparks are possibly the greatest things in the world; you just can't beat 'em for scoobydooid spooky atmosphere, kitsch and phantasmagoric wickedness.

I had heard that there was a kiddie credit at a place called Fantazy Land but could not find anyone who had been there. Anyway We finally found the park and it was the worst run park I have ever been to.

On the net I had found that the entry fee was 7 Egyptian Pounds, around $1.50. However when I got there they said it was 13 Pounds. I went back to the car as or whole group was going to go in, but when we got back to the pay window it was now 30 Pounds each, Anyway, I decided to go in on my own to get some photos.

One thing to note was that when I paid my 30 Pounds I was actually given 3 tickets with 10 Pounds written on them, something tells me I was ripped off.

Link (Thanks, Shalaby!)