1 Reclaim the term ‘hacker’. If you tinker with electronics, you are a hacker. If you use things in more ways than intended by the manufacturer, you are a hacker. If you build things out of strange, unexpected parts, you are a hacker. Reclaim the term.

2 Violating a license agreement is not theft.

3 All corporations are not on your side.

4 Keep in touch with everyone you can vote for and make sure you know where they stand on the issues you care about.

5 More importantly, make sure they know where you stand on the issues you care about.

Under the rose-and-peach of a northern sunrise, the town's mountie found Amaruq looting his own library of its books.

Ross watched as Amaruq defiantly heaved another heavy cardboard box into the back of his truck. Then he sauntered over to peer through the door. "Enlarging your collection?"

Amaruq scowled at him. "They're throwing out the books today. After the legislature voted to close the place I did a book sale. Nobody wanted to buy them. I couldn't just sit there and let it happen. Couldn't sleep."

Ross stared at the canary-yellow band of light on the horizon. Then he grinned at Amaruq. "I could say, 'everything's on-line now' so what's the loss?"

Amaruq just shook his head. "We were the only library for two hundred kilometers. Where will the community meet? --And don't say, 'on-line.'"

Ross shook his head and walked up the wooden steps. "I said I could say that. But I won't. What I was going to say was, need some help?"

Amaruq grinned at him. By the light of a canary-yellow band of sky they emptied the contents of the little library of Bell's Lake.

The smartest strategy, they say, is for the sophisticated consumer to choose the service with the most hidden charges and highest add-on prices, but then avoid paying those added costs. “The sophisticated consumer takes advantage of that,” Mr. Gabaix said. “The naïve pay all the fees.”

For example, you see an offer for a room at Nontransparent Hotel for $75 (which costs the hotel $100 to provide). The guy checking in behind you also rents a room, but will rack up $70 in fees from the minibar, the phone and garage parking (all of which cost the hotel $20 to provide). You, on the other hand, were not tempted by the minibar, used your cellphone for calls and took public transportation to the hotel. The other guy subsidized your room.

Reader comment: Robert says:

Since I just read the study, let me add my $0.02. It seems somebody along the chain to boingboing missed the main point of it - most economic theories predict that the hotel without hidden costs would benefit from making its opponents maneuverings public. Instead, it turns out they're better off adding hidden costs themselves.

That shatters the whole myth of the 'rational consumer', a core assumption of econ theories. Then again, if you look at spam and realize that there must be some people buying the offered goods, you knew that already ;)

Washington Post "Security Fix" blogger Brian Krebs reports that Steven Rambam, whose company Pallorium Inc. touts itself as the "largest privately held online investigative service" in America, was arrested today by FBI agents just as he was about to lead a panel discussion at HOPE in NYC. Snip:

Rambam's fellow panelists said four men clad in dark blue FBI jackets quietly entered the auditorium, asked Rambam if he had any weapons on him, and then escorted him out the door along with his laptop and other equipment that contained the PowerPoint slides that were to make up the bulk of his scheduled two-hour presentation.

"If you know Steve then you know he's very flamoyant, and at first I thought it was just PR, you know?" said Kelly Riddle, a private investigator from San Antonio who was to speak alongside Rambam. "So, they asked him to step out in the hallway, placed the handcuffs on him and started to lead him off."

Rambam was going to discuss how he dug up -- in just 4.5 hours of searching private and public databases -- more than 500 pages worth of data on HOPE attendee Rick Dakan, who agreed to be the guinea pig for the project.

Link. No one, including HOPE organizers, has published further details on the arrest at this time.

Reader comment: BoingBoing reader ylbissop, emailing us from the conference where Mr. Rambam was arrested, says:

As I sit here waiting for the engineers of the Grafitti panel at HOPE I decided to look around and saw the post about Steven Rambam. Seems whisper down the lane has changed the story since Emmanuel told it before the mentioned panel today. According to Emmanuel, Steve was arrested as soon as the Palltech seminar was over, not immediately before. Emmanuel spoke to us before the panel entitled "Privacy is dead: Get over it." The Palltech seminar was in the same hotel but on a different floor and as far as I know the FBI has left us hackers alone, only going after the aforementioned private investigator. "Privacy is dead: Get over it" went on as scheduled without Rambam and was great. cheers from hope!

Update, 11PM ET: Krebs at the WP got in touch with an FBI spokesperson in the agency's New York field office, who confirmed they had:

...executed one arrest warrant without incident at around 4 p.m. ET today at the Hotel Pennsylvania where HOPE Six is behind held. The FBI agent said the agency would not release any more information about the arrest, and that the information was sealed until Monday when Rambam is expected to make an initial appearance in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. I've got a call in to his attorney and will update this post if I hear anything new. The scuttlebutt here at the conference is that Rambam may have located someone who was in the FBI's witness protection program, but I have not been able to verify that rumor at all.

A little side note on Rambam: He is the friend of Richard "Kinky" Friedman, the funny country singer who wrote "They Ain't Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore," and is running as an independent for Governor of Texas this year. Rambam is also a repeat character in Friedman's mystery novel series, where all of Kinky's friends are fictionalized.

ScatterChat is a HACKTIVIST WEAPON designed to allow non-technical human rights activists and political dissidents to communicate securely and anonymously while operating in hostile territory. It is also useful in corporate settings, or in other situations where privacy is desired.

It is a secure instant messaging client (based upon the Gaim software) that provides end-to-end encryption, integrated onion-routing with Tor, secure file transfers, and easy-to-read documentation.

Only people with top-secret security clearances could read her musings, which were posted on Intelink, the intelligence community's classified intranet. Writing as Covert Communications, CC for short, she opined in her online journal on such national security conundrums as stagflation, the war of ideas in the Middle East and -- in her most popular post -- bad food in the CIA cafeteria.

But the hundreds of blog readers who responded to her irreverent entries with titles such as "Morale Equals Food" won't be joining her ever again.

On July 13, after she posted her views on torture and the Geneva Conventions, her blog was taken down and her security badge was revoked. On Monday, Axsmith was terminated by her employer, BAE Systems, which was helping the CIA test software.

As a traveler in the classified blogosphere, Axsmith was not alone. Hundreds of blog posts appear on Intelink. The CIA says blogs and other electronic tools are used by people working on the same issue to exchange information and ideas.

It's not just that, Brian. Think about this technology. The experiment's been successful beyond anyone's expectations. Spyware fittings for registered offenders will no doubt go into effect next year. But why stop there? Can you imagine having a therapist, a financial counselor, a social secretary, a nutritionist and personal trainer at your beck and call twenty- four hours a day? You'd like to get rid of that spare tire, right? We could help you. Really."

Hayes shivers, though the climate inside the car is perfectly controlled. "Sure," he says. "And I could have the whole world watching everything I do, for the rest of my life."

I saw Vinod Khosla give a very similar speech this month. It's technical, but technical solutions are supposed to be technical. Now that I've heard the speech twice, this is actually starting to sound like a rational plan to me. It might, conceivably, actually work. It can't stop us from getting slammed with a series of city-wrecking Katrinas, but it might avert a scenario that's all Katrina, all the time.

About 90 per cent of Polecat is made of composite materials with much of that material made by rapid prototyping.

"The entire Polecat airframe was constructed using low-cost rapid prototyping materials and methods," says Frank Mauro, director of UAV systems at the Skunk Works.

WN: How does the lack of editors affect webcomics?

McCloud: I always think of Spiderman's "With great power comes great responsibility."

When you're free of editorial control, you owe it to yourself to obtain feedback from friends and readers. Some take those criticisms to heart and incorporate it into their work, and some ignore them.

WN: Is it difficult to separate the quality webcomics from those of lesser worth when there are literally thousands of them?

McCloud: The good work floats to the top really quickly. If a comic comes out on the scene and it's really knock-out brilliant, the community is pretty good about getting the word about good newcomers. (The challenge is) finding the one that evolves and becomes better: You'll check it out and it wasn't very good. Then you'll check it out three years later and realize it's become pretty good.

Democracy is produced by the Participatory Culture Foundation, the same activists behind Downhill Battle (remember the Christmas when they sent a lump of coal to the RIAA for every $100 donated to EFF?). They're now registered as a charity, taking donations to pay programmers to improve the user-interface behind Democracy.

Democracy is made by combining the popular open source program VLC with a free RSS reader and a free BitTorrent client -- so you can subscribe to any channel of video and it will be pulled down cooperatively with all the other subscribers, and played right there regardless of the video format.

The new version plays on Windows, MacOS and Linux, and, while still in beta, is far more stable and robust. If you want to live on the edge, you can also sign up to test the next version. Link (Disclosure: I am a proud member of the Participatory Culture Foundation's Board of Directors)

Frank is just beginning to understand what is meant by the phrase "Catch you later". He hopes not. In any event, he has learned an important lesson.

India ink on paper, image size 9" x 5", 2005. Price $250

Join the OpenLab and Make Your Mark on the Public Domain
Eyebeam is now accepting applications for the next round of R&D Fellows in the R&D OpenLab. We are looking for hardware and software hackers, techno arts-and-craftsters, and new types of open source makers to come to New York City and develop experimental creative technologies and media. The OpenLab represents an opportunity for selected individuals to work in a state-of-the-art digital fabrication laboratory, to collaborate with a range of talented technologists and artists from diverse and hybrid backgrounds, to gain international exposure for innovative work and to directly enrich the global DIY community, free culture and the public domain. Join past OpenLab Fellows and projects like MintyBoost, OGLE (OpenGLExtractor), SlashLinks, LED Throwies, Contagious Media and FundRace and make your mark on the Public Domain.

The project has heated up considerably. Behold the 700 Hoboes Project, a beautifully designed site that archives the current drawings and offers new features, such as semantic classification of the hoboes.

Daniel and Sarah Drucker worked to semantically classify 125 of the 700 Hoboes, and are now hoping that others will pitch in after their example to help with the rest. With this semantic information available, viewers at e-hobo.com would be able to view just hoboes with hats, or with missing body parts, or who are named anacronistically.

Superman advertisement.
Tour de Goatse (three handed!)
Flickr downtime Goatse contest entry
AOL member retention goatse graphic (I think the hands were added on after the fact)
Intentional Goatse T shirt

Reader comments:

Keith says:

I couldn't help but notice the flickr downtime goatse. Note that I did one as well, but I was more creative with mine. It's a double-goatse. The one you have posted didn't exactly follow the rules. The image had 2 circles.

God bless Boing Boing for doing more than anybody for populating the Goatse meme into the mainstream conciousness -- though the mainstream conciousness will never be able to acknowlege the goatsiliciousness of this fact.

I wanted to pass on a link to some goatse bumper stickers Bumperactive developed a while back. We did something pretty innovative, I think, which is create special "cut-out" stickers with a hollow oval in the center, which is being "gripped" by the receiver. The idea is, you can use the stickers to guerilla goatse anything.

Also, there's Condi/Goatse '08. Which is on my car at the moment, in fact.

This one is a little far-fetched, but as you wrote, "you can't help but see Goatse again and again"...

Here's a pic of "Mr. Sprinkles," the Goatse'd clown of sugar showers. Every time I see him in the kitchen I think of you and ... I finally had to open my vault of Goatse goodness.

Reader comment: moon_custafer says:

You can use this to evoke the photography of the 1840s, when the exposure time was too long for passers-by to register! (as seen in the following photo of Nelson's Column under construction.

Designed for release from a hover craft, and similar to the propeller-like maple seed, the one-bladed NAV should rotate in flight while a camera on board provides a "stable forward view and transmit images back to a small, hand-held display. "The NAV should be equipped with a chemical rocket to power it 1,100 yards, yet it should weigh only 0.07 ounces.

Like all themeparks, it is both crappy and great. We pick a day when we know that it’ll be dead and quiet and we work our way through a series of over-designed shows that feature Hello Kitty and her pals vanquishing various forces of evil, sitting amongst impassive audiences who are urged “Let’s Dancing!!” by overexcited performers. We hug various people (Men? Women? Children? Who knows) dressed in furry Sanrio mascot suits. We eat a Hello Kitty bun. We visit Kitty’s house, where everything is shaped like her head. We nod and smile and bow at female Sanrio staffers who talk to everybody in creepy baby voices.

21 july 2006
i am at home in sin el fil
thinking of evan
prisoner in a house
playing playstation all day long
alone
and asking everyday: why can't i go see farid / yasmina / simon / etc.
what can i answer?

Alright, I'll admit it. I'm scared. About half an hour ago there was a series of nearby explosions without the warning of a siren. So far, this is the most scared I've been. So far, I've counted on the sirens to at least warn us.

[My] parents live in a north-facing apartment. Meaning, an apartment facing Lebanon, where the rockets are coming from. Without a siren, we're very exposed as there is pretty much only the corridor that can serve as an inner room, as futile as it may sound. My heart doesn't stop racing and I have that bitter fear taste in my mouth.

Slowly, my other family members are leaving the north, heading south of Haifa. There is no relief and no quiet. I'm trying to calm my racing heart, and maybe writing about this helps. Not sure.

Earlier this morning there was a siren and one distant boom after the siren. This time - no siren and a series of nearby booms. At the same time we just heard of massive casualties in Lebanon and I want to cry for them and for us, but I must stay strong or I'll crumple.

[Donny Johnson] orders his supplies from the prison commissary once a month. The M&M’s are 60 cents a pack, and he gets 10 packs at a time. He puts from one to five of the candies in each of the jelly containers, drizzles a little water in and later fishes out the chocolate cores, leaving liquid of various colors, which get stronger if they sit for a couple of days.

He has tried other candy, but there are perils. “It’s the same process with Skittles,” he said, “but I end up eating them all.”

Sometimes he experiments with other materials. “Grape Kool-Aid in red M&M color makes a kind of purple,” he wrote in a letter to a reporter not long ago. “Coffee mixed with yellow makes a light brown. Tropical punch Kool-Aid granules can be made into a syrup and used as a paint wash of sorts. But it’s a bear to work with and it’s super-sticky and it never dries.”

And there are frustrations. “If lint gets in a piece, I feel like screaming,” he wrote.

The black light hippie Mickey shirt
And the "Hey Iran" Mickey, giving the finger to the Ayatollah, circa 1980:
Link (Thanks, Siva!)

CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox averaged 20.8 million viewers during the average prime-time minute last week, according to Nielsen Media Research. That sunk below the previous record, set during the last week of July in 2005.

The "creation science evangelism" founder faced off with a judge in a Florida courtroom this week, and...

Neither he nor his wife and co-defendant, Jo, wanted to enter a traditional plea of guilty or not guilty. The Hovinds question the court's right to try them. They consider themselves missionaries exempt from taxes to a government that, incidentally, is providing them with attorneys.

But Magistrate Miles Davis wanted them to enter pleas just as any other citizen would. "If they don't wish to enter a plea, I'll enter one for them," Davis said.When asked by the prosecutor to list his residence, Kent Hovind said he lives in "the church of Jesus Christ ... located all over the world."

(...) Then, Hovind offered another wrinkle. "I would like to plead subornation of false muster," he said, announcing a defense I haven't heard in 30 years of hanging around courtrooms. The precedent is not good. A man in the state of Washington tried a similar defense a few years ago, claiming he was a "citizen of heaven" and not subject to state laws. But a court there ruled that when in Washington, do as Washington law requires, and found him guilty.

Link. False muster! Good to know. If I'm ever busted for these many years of live baby-eating (don't tell anyone, please), I'll tell the judge I'm a "citizen of blogosphere" and see how far this gets me. (Thanks, rusty)

Previously: Dr. Dino arrested for unpaid taxes

Simmer Down Sprinter is a two player, sit-down, arcade style video game I designed and programmed in which players compete to move runners around a track. The game is controlled by player’s bio-feedback. The more relaxed the player becomes, the faster the runner moves around the track. Essentially it is a game of competitive relaxation.

star trek camelot
sims torture
all your snakes
compupromo
mac system 7
rsg-tac compression
nada
unicode chart
ipod war
dance voldo dance

And image above: "found" 1960s computer photos, discovered by BoingBoing reader Aria who works in the same site where beehived she-nerds once swept unplunged data center floors decades before. Here's her post about finding the images, and this post show that specific part of the datacenter. Says Aria, "It seems the she-nerd has been replaced by a storagetek silo!"

Web Zen Home, Store (Thanks Frank!)

Reader comment: Super-observant BoingBoing reader Ranjit Bhatnagar says,

Look more closely at the photo of the beehived she-nerd. She's not sweeping the floor - she's going at it with a rubber plunger. Clearly her primitive internet has clogged tubes!

The person in the picture is lifting panels which comprise a "fake floor" (sort of like a false bottom of a suitcase) under which power and network cables can be run without being tripped over by visitors to the room. It's a common data center feature.

In one of the Web Zen: geeknerd zen photos you posted, the woman in the computer server room (as someone has already said) is using a special tool to pull up the floor tiles. This allows access to the computer network and power wiring, which ran under the floor in old server rooms.

What I have to add is that this photo is one of many that were hanging in the big server rooms at NASA - Ames Research Center in Palo Alto, California. (Most of the photos on the walls at NASA were from NASA, not from outside sources, so I expect the woman in the photo is working in the same room I used to work in. But I have no evidence of that.) I used to be a system admin there in the late 80's, and there were a bunch of groovy photos like this one, poster-sized and mounted, on the walls of the tech building. There was also an old Cray (with built-in bench seating) in a plexiglass display, and a really old 3' x 3' transistor array from a very early computer also on display.

Nasa Ames has its own “city” of Moffett Field. Check it out at: Link. And Nasa Ames and Moffett Field are usually identified with Mountain View, not Palo Alto – just ask everyone working at the Mountain View companies like Mercury Interactive, Symantec and Verisign across 101 from Moffett Field.

So: stuff like Slide.com, RockYou.com, and YouTube’s Flash video wrappers will no longer be able to link back to the sites if the user is using Flash 9. Generally adoption for Flash isn’t that quick — but since all users with Flash 8 currently have broken MySpace video/audio players, you can expect that to have somewhat of an effect on the adoption rate (i.e.: skyrocket).

MySpace can say all they want about wanting to protect users, but really this is about them protecting their advertising dollars. The barnacle-like secondary market sites will have to find increasingly creative techniques to launch Flash-based content within the site if they want it to spread virally.

This is actually quite wily on the part of MySpace. And it’s going to be interesting to see how much influence they have on the adoption rates of Flash 9… I wonder if they have a formal partnership with Macromedia/Adobe.

Expect a LOT MORE moves like this from MySpace. I’m aware of a few I can’t talk about that I know will have huge impacts on secondary market sites. If you work for a startup whose entire business plan depends on mooching off MySpace’s user base, you guys might want to consider diversifying your revenue streams.

Reader comment: Kevin Khandjian says,

The article you linked to fails to mention that a myspace XSS worm that spread like crazy using flash. The allowNetworking attribute talked about in the article will not block flash from pages like youtube, but it will be able to stop external flash from. without this attribute, flash is always allowed to change the containing window's location, and able to force users onto any page.

The allowNetworking attribute being set to internal will block this from happening, but as it appears, html links inside of flash will still be legal. This means that while some people will have to make some changes in order to keep the exact functionality, no functionality should be lost.

There is a description of what the tag itself does here, and a description of the recent XSS hack and how it worked here.

You might want to mention the plight of Linux users who are now left in an even worse position; having only had a Flash 7 player available for Linux they now have to wait until at least 2007 until a Flash 9 player is released for them, which leaves myself and probably many others unable to watch many Flash 8 based videos, and currently a lack of sound on YouTube videos. At best, there's always synch issues between audio/video.

Link to Flash Player's product manager's blog on their promised Flash 9 for Linux plans (though they also promised a Flash 8 player which never turned up) and this link for some blogged comments by a guy who knows more about it than I do. .

Earlier today on BoingBoing, I pointed to discussions around the blogosphere about YouTube's newly updated Terms & Conditions. As Eliot Van Buskirk wrote on the Wired News music blog "Listening Post," the new policy appears to give YouTube more rights over user-uploaded content than before. Link to post, with some insightful comments, both pro and con, from readers. I asked Jason Schultz of the EFF what he thought of the news, and he tells BB:

Your commenters are pretty much correct. YouTube wants to CYA itself in case it flows into new formats with old videos, e.g., cell phone downloads. They don't want to have to go back and relicense all the content in new mediums. And its also true that simply yanking the video will cut off all their rights, which is a powerful weapon to keep them in check.

When the Billy Bragg folks complained about MySpace, it was basically over the same issue, so now that MySpace has responded with some clarity, it might behoove YouTube to do the same.

One thing they could say is that any reproductions, distributions, derivatives, etc. that they make of your work would not be sold separately as a distinct product. This would keep them from burning CDs or DVDs and the like.

The blog ban is NOT over. What happened was that the Indian government clarified the ban to Indian ISPs which had blanket banned the top-level domains (eg, blogspot.com). My blog is #2 on the list, and still banned. Here is the Indian Department of Telecom's official press release of today which clarifies: Link. Excerpt:

The Department of Telecom (DoT) has instructed all the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the country to block only the specified website/webpages on the parent website . The DoT, in its letter issued to all the ISPs has mentioned that it had come to notice that in some cases the parent website had been blocked in contravention to what was stated in its earlier order dated 13th July 2006 whereby it ordered the ISPs to block certain websites/webpages .

As such the DoT has now directed all the ISPs to strictly comply with the order dated 13th July 2006 and provide unhindered access to Internet except for the websites/webpages which have been specifically mentioned in its orders issued from time to time.

The DoT has further sought explanation from the erring ISPs as to why action be not taken against them for blocking unintended websites/webpages.

Since my website is at the center of the controversy, and specifically targetted by the Indian government, I hope you can stand with me in solidarity.

Like a creeping fog, DRM smothers more and more media in its clammy embrace, but the sun still shines down on isolated patches of the landscape. This isn't always due to the decisions of corporate executives; often it's the work of hackers who devote considerable skill to cracking the digital locks that guard everything from DVDs to e-books. Their reasons are complicated and range from the philosophical to the criminal, but their goals are the same: no more DRM.

"I expected someone much less human," says (psychologist Lyn Fry, an expert on feral children and) the first non-Ukrainian expert to meet Oxana. "I'd heard stories that she could fly off the handle, that she was very unco-operative, that she was socially inept, but she did everything I asked of her.

"Her language is odd. She speaks flatly as though it's an order. There is no cadence or rhythm or music to her speech, no inflection or tone. But she has a sense of humour. She likes to be the centre of attention, to make people laugh. Showing off is quite a surprising skill when you consider her background. In the film, Miss Malaya looks unco-ordinated and tomboyish. When she walks, you notice her strange stomping gait and swinging shoulders, the intermittent squint and misshapen teeth. Like a dog with a bone, her first instinct is to hide anything she is given. She is only 1.52 metres tall but when she fools about with her friends, pushing and shoving, there is a palpable air of menace and brute strength. The oddest thing is how little attention she pays to her pet mongrel. "Sometimes, she pushed it away," says Ms Fry. "She was much more orientated to people."

Rev. Philip Wilde, a pastor at Zion Lutheran Church in nearby Bristol, said he views the markings as a coincidence of nature.

"Obviously it's there because God wanted it to be that way," said Wilde, who has not seen the gator. "But I don't see any special message in that."

"TO BUY (quickly): water / coffee / batteries / chocolate / ink / candles (a big stock) / canned food / bread / picon cheese / toilet paper / radio powered by batteries / matches / black felt pens / rolling paper / milk (still consumable." From comic artist/musician/blogger Mazen Kerbaj, who has decided not to evacuate, and is holed up in Beirut with family and loved ones. Link to this one, and there are many more incredible drawings in his flickr stream -- like Evacuation Blues, and this one. Previous BB post on his work here.

The Washington D.C.-based (Humane Society) argues that Internet sales of the magazines violate the federal Animal Welfare Act, which bars use of mail or other means of interstate commerce to promote animal fighting, unless it's performed outside the United States.

"That's their claim, and we don't agree with their claim, so we're going to continue to make these titles available," Amazon.com spokeswoman Patty Smith said Tuesday afternoon. "It's up to the customer to determine what they feel is appropriate for them to purchase."

Previously:
Update on India bans blogs: bloggers want answers
Update on India censoring blogs
Indian gov blocks Blogspot, Typepad, Geocities blogs

The only people [DRM] adds value to are the technology companies who are interested in locking consumers to a particular technology platform.

I reversed the plate image so you can read the text. Link (Thanks, Seth!)

Reader comments:

Sass says:

More 7-up creepiness. I saw your link to the 7-UP ad endorsing feeding it to babies, and it reminded me of something I came across the other day. The Gallery Of Regrettable Food has a link to an old promo "cookbook" of recipes using 7-UP. This cookbook is rife with that same theme of 7-UP being "pure" and "wholesome" and meant for the whole family -- the description makes it sound like you're drinking holy water, not carbonated sugar!

Not sure if this is the appropriate place to comment, but in the original soda-fountain-as-drug-delivery days, 7-up originally had lithium in it and had a tag line of

"takes the Ouch out of Grouch" which kinda always left me thinking 'and what? leaves you with Grrrrrrrrrrrr'
(Image from vintage 7-Up Flickr Pool. (Thanks, Paula!)

Got that dancing feeling on the inside of me.

* * *

This is the busiest I've ever seen this website in a few years! I have been having rapture dreams and I can't believe that this is really it! We are on the edge of eternity!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

* * *

Whoa! I can sure feel the glory bumps after reading this thread!

* * *

I too am soooo excited!! I get goose bumps, literally, when I watch what's going on in the M.E.!! And Watcherboy, you were so right when saying it was quite a day yesterday, in the world news, and I add in local news here in the Boston area!! Tunnel ceiling collapsed on a car and killed a woman of faith, and we had the most terrifying storms I have ever seen here!! But, yes, oh happy day, like in your screen name , it is most indeed a time to be happy and excited, right there with ya!!

The company, Arthur Price, said it was the first to design such a set, intended for use by business-class customers, replacing plastic cutlery. The knives, forks and spoons have been created to specifications based on new British Department for Transport guidelines that have their origin in security concerns.

The knives have a rounded rather than a sharp end and measure no longer than 2.36 inches, or 6 centimeters, while the forks have prongs no longer than half that.

Hershey's milk chocolate almond bar, 6 oz 25 mg
Espresso, 1-oz shot 40 mg
Brewed tea, 8-oz cup 50 mg
Coca-Cola, 20-oz bottle 57 mg
Red Bull energy drink, 8.3-oz can 80 mg
Excedrin pain reliever, 2 tablets 130 mg
Brewed coffee, 12-oz cup 200 mg
Mountain Dew, 64-oz Double Big Gulp 294 mg

Link to PDF of NatGeo article about caffeine

Psuedonymous blogger and CIA software contractor "Econo-Girl" wrote a post criticizing interrogation techniques she said amounted to torture -- and she says she was soon fired for it. The blog was not publicly accessible, but posted in an intranet of sorts which is only available to intelligence community members with a high level of security clearance, according to Econo-Girl. Here's the problem post:

Waterboarding is Torture, and Torture is Wrong

Not to mention ineffective. Econo-Girl has serious doubts as to whether European lives were saved. Econo-Girl's purpose in writing this blog is to start a dialog on the Geneva Convention, since it now applies to the Department of Defense again. Guess it's not quaint anymore, eh?

Over the next few weeks, Econo-Girl would like to post articles about the Geneva Convention, like its origin and major provisions. Legal analysis is not the magic some would have you believe. If the grunts and paper pushers are knowledgeable, the anti-torture infrastructure will be strengthened.

The above post is a recreation of a post that got me fired from the CIA. It is not exact, but covers the main points as best I remember them. I had a blog called Covert Communications on a kind of classified Internet. I wrote a version of the above post and classified it so that only Americans with clearances could read it. You couldn't even get to the blog if you had less than a Top Secret and above clearance anyway.

Another purpose of the blog post was to start a dialog on interogation techniques with the people who are asked to do the interogating. It was to be a public education campaign, of sorts. I was going to do the research on my own time and type in the results when I got to work. I never spent more than 15 minutes writing any of my posts.

Shayna Silverstein and her friends jumped into expensive taxis and sped from Beirut to Damascus, preferring to dodge bombs and bribe border officials rather than wait for the U.S. government to evacuate them. (...)

Mandy Terc, 28, couldn't wait. Last week, the Chicago native kept checking the Web site of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut for information about evacuations. But there were no updates, she said. So, she decided Saturday to join Silverstein and six other Americans fleeing Lebanon.

The trip from Beirut to Damascus normally cost $10. They each paid $200 and piled into a gray Mercedes taxi that sped to the border. "We had to put our faith in our taxi driver," Terc said. "We were very nervous."

They passed an area that had been bombed only an hour earlier. "You could smell it in the air," Silverstein said. They took back roads, avoiding any possible military targets, until finally reaching the Syrian border, where hundreds of other people were trying to flee Lebanon.

Reader comment: anonymous says,

A grandfather describes how his 16-year-old granddaughter finessed her way (and her little sister's) onto a Greek war ship and out of war-torn Lebanon. Link (Scroll down to the post titled 'Hope Springs Internal...' then scroll back up to the second half of 'Little Doug Wins a Town... And an Update on the Girls' for the happy conclusion.)

Listen to a six-minute ambient, improvisational music piece he performed -- accompanied by the sound of falling bombs. "Starry Night" -- Audio link, alternate MP3 link, more links.

Cropped above: "Family Tree," here's the full-size: Link. "This is not a political blog," writes Mazen, and he continues:

for the israeli musicians, painters, writers, thinkers, intellectuals and for all the israeli in israel and around the world who sent us supportive emails and comments,

we know you are here.
we know you are hearing us.
we know you are hearing the bombs getting down on civilians and kids.
kids from lebanon.
kids from israel.
kids from al over the world.

we know that like us, you feel ashamed.

we know you are not a lot.

but we shall meet one day.
when our people will wake up.
in 10.000 years.

BoingBoing reader Andy Carvin writes,

Watching all the coverage of the fighting in Lebanon this week, i was curious to know exactly the scale of the distances involved between northern Israel and Beirut. I'd been to the region before but not where the fighting was going on. So I decided to take a screenshot of the war zone from Google Maps and overlay it with a map of part of the northeast US, using the same scale for both images. The result is this short video. Once you've downloaded the video, slide the scrubber back and forth so you can see the two maps overlap each other. For Americans who are used to countries being thousands of miles wide, it's quite astonishing to realize what a compact area of land is affected by the fighting. For example, the distance between Haifa and Beirut isn't much difference than the distance between Providence, Rhode Island and Lowell, Massachusetts.

Reader comment: Edward West says,

I enjoyed Andy Carvin's video of the Middle East being overlayed with the Northeast US, but, being a native Californian, it didn't give me a visceral sense for the scale, not really grokking how far Boston is from Providence. So I overlayed a screenshot of his map on a map of the Bay Area at the same scale. It's a little bit jumbled with the three areas all on top of eachother, but (I think) interesting nonetheless. Link.

Following up on Bush's unsolicited shoulder smoosh of German chancellor Merkel yesterday, Michael Shaughnessy says,

I can only imagine what Chancellor Merkel was thinking and it can't be positive. While 'personal space' is less than what you have in the US, Germans still have social tabus on touching, especially in such a public forum as the G8 summit. Germans may be obsessed with shaking hands, but it is a very brief shake. Even family members will shake hands with each other. Touching of this sort is for -very- close friends in private. At least this produced yet another cool German word: "Blitz-Massage."

Here is an excerpt from an etiquette guide for Germany, interesting and funny stuff: Link.

Bush's "Liebes-Attacke" looks more like the Vulcan nerve pinch to me: Link.

Previously:
Bush "gropes" Germany's (female) chancellor Merkel

Reader comment: #!chris says,

Hello from old Europe. As a German I must say that Bush meeting Merkel naked in the sauna would be inappropriate because of the lack of seriousness, but _way_ less offensive for her. It's not so much offensive in a sexual way but more in a sexist and arrogant way - at least this is how it is perceived by most (!= all) people I talked to. He decides to cross her physical borders without asking for her consent or without being in a context that implies consent. However, this might be just one of the many cultural misunderstandings you get used to working internationally. Though - I never got a spontaneous massage by any business contact from US yet :-)

With regard to your posting at Boing Boing, isn't the legal term for what Bush did to the German Chancellor "assault & battery"? Although I do understand that those in power are above the law, I think it's always helpful to remember what they might be arrested for in a real democracy, don't you? [smirk]

Adam Garcia says,

I was listening to the excellent podcast of the world by pri (Link) and at ten minutes into the show he went into a story about Angela Merkel doing a weekly podcast to explain her policies to the citizens of Germany. The local bloggers went nuts! According to the show "Germany has practically no tradition of political humor using video images of politicians". Check out this funny video of the blogger remixed version.

Nandan, an Indian blogger filed an application under Right to Information Act 2005 seeking the government to explain:

"My RTI Application was filed to find out why a blanket block has taken place for Blogspot.com, Typepad.com and Geocities.com. You can find a step by step guide to filing an RTI application (specifically for this ban) here."

The irony is the Government takes one month to reply and then can deny an answer quoting 'National Security' as a reason.

BoingBoing reader Ace Bhattacharjya writes, "I'm a member of the South Asian Journalists' Association. Please see this clarification from A.R. Ghanashyam, Deputy Consul General, New York (many of you met him at this week at the SAJA Convention and know him through his earlier work as the consul in charge of dealing with the press here)."

From: A.R.Ghanashyam [dcg@indiacgny.org]
Subject: Blog Issue in India

July 19, 2006

Dear Sree:

Reference our discussions and correspondence on the issue of blocking of blogs in India, we had taken up the matter with the authorities concerned in the Department of Telecommunications in the Government of India and the facts are as under:

A two-page write up containing extremely derogatory references to Islam and the holy prophet which had the potential to inflame religious sensitivities in India and create serious law and order problems in the country appeared in a blog facilitated by well known search engines. The matter was immediately taken note of by our CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) and the Department of Telecommunications (DOT) was informed of it. The DOT took up the matter forthwith with the search engines and instructions were also issued to all Internet providers to block the two impertinent pages. Because of a technological error, the Internet providers went beyond what was expected of them which in turn resulted in the unfortunate blocking of all blogs. Department of Telecommunications have now clarified the issue and the error is being rectified and it is expected that normalcy in respect of blogs will soon be restored.

This is for your information.

A.R. Ghanashyam
Deputy Consul General
New York

Hob Gadling says,

Rediff is reporting that India's blog blockade will end in 48 hours. According to a spokesperson of the Internet Service Providers Association of India, the block happened as some ISPs misunderstood the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) notice and blocked entire blog domains instead of individual blogs. Ironically, the report lists the individual sites blocked thus attracting more attention towards them.

Just read your Update post on Blogspot ban in India. This newspaper article examines each of those blogs and exposes the inept and ham-handed way in which the censorship was carried out. Almost all of the blogs or rather the content in those blogs have nothing to do with national security of India. I guess India too has their share of Ted Stevens who have scant knowledge of the Internet and to make it worse, they lack reading skills as well. Dang! I am pissed as hell.

RU SIRIUS: You went through the fifties, and you went through the Nixon years, and you’ve been through George W. Which was the worst?

PAUL KRASSNER: These are the worst times I’ve ever lived in. But I’m sure the crusades weren’t that much fun.

Reader comments:

Mike Bishop says:

The fish with human teeth is most likely a sheepshead. We have these all over the place in West Palm Beach where I live. They'll freak you out the first time you catch one and see those human-looking teeth. Check out this article and photo, taken by someone in Texas interestingly enough.

Brett Burton says:

Contrary to what Mike Bishop said, I don't think the fish is a sheepshead. it looks a lot more like a pacu, which is what the article said. Here's a good image of a pacu.

You'll notice that the pacu's face is wider and only the bottom teeth are visible, just like fish found in Texas.

Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman says:

Yes, this is a pacu (Piaractus brachypomus). As a strange but infrequent member of the exotic pet fish trade, the pacu, like the piranha, are sometimes dumped in ponds and similar locations. Articles about "piranhas" in the neighborhood stream or swimming hole are an annual exercise for those of us that watch such matters closely, to separate the truly unusual (a sighting of a Lake Monster) from the mundane (another pacu or piranha caught).

It is easy to google (pacu teeth) several photos that look like the one posted, and see a comparable pix here

The media is calling them "human teeth" but they only appear that way. They are, however, merely pacu teeth, which have a Homo sapiens molar-like appearance to human reporters.

A cluster of special nerve cells called cerebellar granule cells, growing in culture. These cells naturally gather together, and when placed in a culture dish covered in a particular protein, they start sending out long projections (yellow/green) as they would in the developing brain.

Reader comments:

Aaron says:

I saw your caffine post and it reminded me that according to the Erowid drug information site, the L.D. 50 for caffeine (the amount that is lethal for 50% of a test population) is between one and four grams. So, according to the link you posted, a single grande coffee at Starbucks is just over half of the bottom of that range. It's also worth noting that they list anything over 400mg as a "heavy" dose.

John says:

Rule of thumb for coffee and caffeine: the darker the roast, hotter the water and faster the water goes through the coffee, the lower the caffeine. Hence, espresso is generally the lowest caffeinated (real, non-decaf) coffee drink you can get.

Also, some recent studies have shown that the caffeine in a cup of coffee can vary wildly from cup to cup, even from the same pot. Well, this last bit of info I learned recently from the interweb, so it may be bogus.

Rigel says:

LD50s are typically computed from animal models, which may or may [not] vary in their extensibility to human data.

Also, not just is that 550mg figure very likely completely wrong, but the variability in caffeine content in a cup of brewed coffee is HUGE, as shown in this paper.

Sean says:

I too question the original site but I also question the Erowid source. Using the rat LD50 data from Erowid I get:

e.g. a 150lb person 150lbs = 68.04kg

68.0388555kg * 192mg/kg of body weight = 13,063.4603mg

or about 13 grams, not 1-4.

I know this is using rats and the method of administration is not mentioned so from wikipedia:

The minimum lethal dose of caffeine ever reported is 3,200 mg, administered intravenously. The LD50 of caffeine is estimated between 13 and 19 grams for oral administration for an average adult.

So a person would have to drink over 100 cups of coffee within a small time span to reach the LD50. That reminds me of the Futurama episode "300 big boys".

Date: March 3, 2033
From: Tally Stern
To: Mark Johnson
Subject: last try

Okay, so I Googled you last night even though I promised I wouldn't. But you haven't emailed in a week so I figured all bets were off.

Why didn't you just tell me you were 75? I mean, it's not like I'm looking for a serious relationship now, anyway. When you didn't know your way around campus I guessed you were an over-40, anyway. And I'm open-minded. I mean, my parents probably wouldn't want me going out with someone older than them. Or than their parents, probably. But they just don't get it. With nano, it's just a number, right?

I should've figured it out when I saw those White Stripes songs in your playlist. But lots of people my age listen to oldies, too. I mean, people really rocked back then, too. They had war and everything to think about.

Or is it me? Just write back, okay? Don't discriminate because of my age. You wouldn't have wanted me to fake it, would you? Besides, I've got to learn, somehow, don't I?

Here is why Bush's position is a joke: Thousands and thousands of embryos are destroyed every year in fertility clinics. They are created in petri dishes as part of fertility treatments like IVF; then they are discarded. If Bush and his administration truly believe that destroying an embryo is a kind of murder, they shouldn't be wasting their time arguing about research funding: They should immediately shut down every fertility clinic in the country, arrest the doctors and staff who operate them, and charge all the wannabe parents who have been wantonly slaughtering legions of the unborn. But of course they'll never do such a thing. (Nor, to be absolutely clear, do I think they should.) Bush could not care less about this issue except as far as it helps burnish his pro-life credentials among his "base."

Part Two, Lunch: The best of the three parts, in which an inattentive waiter forces two diners to partake in lunch without food. They eat everything on their table - the flowers, the tablecloth, their plates, their clothes, and in a nod to Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush, their shoes. But it doesn't stop there.

* The most distinguishing characteristic of bloggers is their youth. More than half (54%) of bloggers are under the age of 30. Like the internet population in general, however, bloggers are evenly divided between men and women, and more than half live in the suburbs. Another third live in urban areas and a scant 13% live in rural regions.

* Another distinguishing characteristic is that bloggers are less likely to be white than the general internet population. Sixty percent of bloggers are white, 11% are African American, 19% are English-speaking Hispanic and 10% identify as some other race. By contrast, 74% of internet users are white, 9% are African American, 11% are English-speaking Hispanic and 6% identify as some other race...

* 55% of bloggers blog under a pseudonym, and 46% blog under their own name.

* 84% of bloggers describe their blog as either a “hobby” or just “something I do, but not something I spend a lot of time on.”

* 59% of bloggers spend just one or two hours per week tending their blog. One in ten bloggers spend ten or more hours per week on their blog.

At first, that sounds anything but spectacular. It seems as if the Microsoft musician or the freelance musician commissioned by Microsoft used the Sony-made software " Sound Forge " (formerly Sonic) in its 4.5 version. Sound Forge is a tool for professionals and enables users to create WAV, AIFF, MP3 and other music files priced at $400.

On its face, all that's not unusual: Microsoft uses professional software. Who would've thought? But wait a minute, who or what is "DeepzOne"?

Bingo!

DeepzOne is (or at least was) member of the Warez group Radium that had specialized on cracking music software. Along with a person using the alias "Sandor," he was also co-founder of this group, which was established in 1997( see in this interview ). In addition, it was DeepzOne who started circulating the cracked 4.5 version of Sound Forge a few years ago.

Mr Smith said last night the brochure was written for a Christian audience and outlined the biblical philosophy of child punishment. Many Christians did not want to see smacking banned as that would take away parental authority, but he conceded the brochure would appear as "total nonsense" to non-Christians.

Here is the story. The book.

Join us in the Egyptian Courtyard for a Royal Southern Californian-style Luau between a double feature of island adventures exotic musical entertainment from King Kukelele and his Friki Tikis There will also be Tiki vendors and other special surprises in the courtyard from 1:00 PM till we shut it down.

Tiki Vendors to include: Tiki Tony, Adrift Clothing, Crazy Al's Bone Productions, "Dumb Angel" Magazine authors Dominic Priore and Brian Chidister, Tiki Diablo, Falling Cocos, Coconut Kids Clothing,Tiki Farm and the American Cinematheque selling posters from our fabulous collection!

Separate ticket prices for the films. Or enjoy just the luau and the music, or buy a ticket which includes all the films and the luau. For movies, General: $12.00, Sr/Students: $10.00, AC Member: $9.00 Luau Dinner Only: $15.00 or Movies & Luau: General: $25.00, Sr/Student: $23.00 and Member: $22.00.

INSIDE:
3 Spike episodes
3 never been seen episodes
9 half hours total cartoon product.

Naked girls (by the # 1 cute girl artist-Katie Rice)
The 3 Things
Ralph Bakshi animated
First on screen live animated birth

Lots of supplemental material:
I introduce each cartoon and tell you the back story of how we came up with it. I even thrust my groin a couple times.

Meet the cartoonists-Eddie, Katie, Luke, Vincent, Annmarie, Steve (of Asifa Archives fame!) and Eric Goddamn Bauza himself!

A rare personal appearance by Dave Feiss (creator of Cow and Chicken)

Weird Al live justifies the existence of the set!

Animatics
background paintings
model sheets
storyboards

Update: Creede sez, "Just a quick note from a guy who takes the bus to Microsoft on a regular basis. I haven't done an in-depth survey to confirm that this is the case, but it certainly seems like those OpenOffice ads *only appear on bus routes specifically going to the Microsoft campus.*"

To play the record the handle needs to be turned in a clockwise direction at a steady 331/3 rpm. The paper cone then acts as a pick up and amplifies the sound enough to make it audible.

Update: Here's the inspiration for this

Up till now we had one-way interaction: the game play depends on the movement of the animals. But if we want somewhat more intelligent game play, the animals should also react to the actions within the game. It is possible to attract or repel an animal with stimuli such as sound, vibration, temperature, pheromones, light, electricity and smell. In nature, vibration of the ground warns crickets for an approaching predator. We chose to use this behaviour to stimulate the crickets in the game. We divided the floor of the maze into six parts, each with a motor attached underneath that vibrates when switched on. When the crickets should chase Pac-Man, we switch on the motors furthest away from his location in the maze, so the crickets will flee in his direction. When Pac-Man eats a power-up, the crickets are supposed to run away from him, so we then vibrate the part of the floor that contains Pac-Man’s position.

"Entering the meeting room, as relayed by a Russian television camera, Bush headed directly behind the chancellor, reached out and, placing both hands on the collar of her gold jacket, gave her a short massage just below the neck. She smiled."

IANAFRE (I am not a facial recognition expert), but that doesn't look like much of a smile to me, or a happy hand-gesture following. What odd manners the leader of the Western world has. Link (Thanks, Stefan Jones)

Reader comment: Alex Steffen says,

There's video on this page that makes it clear how inappropriate it was... the Germans are calling it a "Liebes-Attacke"

I don't know the whole story behind these images, but they say a lot on their own. Here, some Israeli girls have apparently been told to "sign" bombs directed at Lebanon, writing messages like "from Israel with love." Link (via lawrenceofcyberia and thismodernworld) Update: That link keeps crashing my browser. Here are better links, to the source of these photos: one, two, and another. Caption, via AP, "Israeli girls write messages on a shell at a heavy artillery position near Kiryat Shmona, in northern Israel, next to the Lebanese border, Monday, July 17, 2006." AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner.

Reader comment: Chris Maytag says,

In your boingboing post "Image of the day: children send messages on missiles", the objects in the picture are alternately referred to as "missiles", "bombs" and "shells". These are three very different terms, and it's worth keeping things straight.

A "missile" is a projectile, powered during flight by either solid of liquid-fueled engines, with a weaponized payload of some kind (example: SCUDs, 'Katyushas'). A "bomb" is a weapon dropped from an aircraft or other airborne platform and guided by ballistics alone or a combination of ballistics and fin-based guidance (example: JDAMs, unguided 500lb mk82 bomb).

A "shell" is essentially a bullet. It is fired from a tube (cannon, howitzer or mortar) il it either hits a target or explodes due to to one of a variety of triggers (flight time, position, etc). Contents of shells range from pure metal (as in an early, simple cannonball) to explosives (as in the high explosive and shaped-charge shells generaly used by tanks) to advanced anti-personnel munitions, which explode and release smaller objects (much like a shotgun shell releases 'shot').

Why is this worth paying attention to? Because there's enough misinformation in the MSM already. By the way, the objects being signed by the Israeli girls appear to be 155mm howitzer or tank shells.

The Getty caption I have seen for an image similar to this (ie of the same girls) reads: "Israeli girls write messages in Hebrew on shells ready to be fire by mobile artillery unit toward Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon 17 July 2006"

I assume this means they are tank shells. I disagree with Chris Maytag: I don't think it matters what sort of weapon these are. The fact is, they are deadly weapons intended to kill and maim, and they are being signed by children. I fail to see how anyone can justify this, even if they support the right of the Israeli state to carry out these attacks.

This is no different to the images of Palestinian toddlers dressed as pretend suicide bombers.

This unfortunate 'photo op' has taken on a life of its own, with the meme that bloodthirsty Israeli children are sending a message of destruction to their Lebanese neighbors. Neither the hebrew or english says anything like "From Israel with Love". I can make out "Nazrala with.. from Israel", which I assume might be "[To] Nazrala with [love] from Israel". From the little I can make out, all the messages in hebrew are similarly addressed to Nasrala.

Perhaps a bit pedantic, but a missile is of course anything which pursues a trajectory - as in being thrown, fired etc, so journalists or subs who pick that one word to describe gun projectiles, freefall bombs and ballistic rockets with warheads are not being unreasonable in their use of English...

And of course the one thing that a shell is not is pure metal. The distinction was between a cannonball, and a projectile made to be fired from a gun which was merely a shell containing something - gunpowder to start with.

One effect of removal of foreign nationals from the Lebanon is that there will be less hindrance on random bombardment of it with whatever anyone chooses to project, not that I'm not pleased to see HMS Gloucester hauling our citizens out of Beirut or that I wouldn't have discovered an appointment elsewhere if I'd been in the target zone myself.

Update 2: Here's a related post at The Guardian, with more background on the circumstances under which the images were taken. (thanks, Dave)

The Flickr stream for blog/online newsletter "Arabist" (maintained by Issandr El Amrani, a journalist in Cairo) is filling up with photos taken on the ground in bombed-out areas of Lebanon. Link to stream, includes extremely disturbing, explicit images of burnt corpses. Image: a destroyed home; residents were evidently reading the Quran when the bombs hit. (Thanks, Sassan)

Link to video (anyone have a better version? YouTube craps up the strobe effect that makes this video so visually interesting), here's a related post on elastico, and here's a previous BB post about Cunningham. (thanks, Susannah Breslin!)

Update: here's a way better quality video link, and lo, ye shall find alternate video links here in better quality than the YouTube url. Apparently, Cunningham first hooked up with the band via MySpace. (Thanks, Katzenjammer and James Battersby!)

Reader comment: David Stein says,

The movie clip via the alternate link is in Quicktime, and the standard Quicktime plugin that plays the clip will allow you to - gulp! - step through any part of the video frame-by-frame. I am a big believer in the "less is more" theory of horror, but many of the frames in this clip are even *more* macabre and horrifying!

So my friend Sean pointed me to this one graf on a guy's blog which may just be the awesomest flavor description snippet of all time -- despite the fact that it's not a food review but a personal account of an appendectomy. Bad News Hughes, a blogger fond of generous pottymouthery, has just had his appendix out. He wakes up:

As dawn broke it was once again time to have more fluids dripped into me, while other were sucked out. I woke up with a hard-on, which was a good sign. Not that I was expecting them to chop off my dick, but, you know... Accidents happen... They gave me some sugar-free raspberry Jell-O, and let me tell you — your ass goes a solid 24 without food and that goddamn sugar-free raspberry Jell-O is like having Osama Bin Flavor crash a plane full of celebration into your mouth.

Insurgent, militia and terrorist attacks continued unabated in many parts of Iraq, especially in Baghdad and in the central and western regions, with an increasing sectarian connotation. A total of 5,818 civilians were reportedly killed and at least 5,762 wounded during May and June 2006.(1) Killings, kidnappings and torture remain widespread. Fear resulting from these and other crimes continued to increase internal displacement and outflows of Iraqis to neighbouring countries. The negative effect of violence on professional categories, targeted by sectarian and criminal violence or displaced as a result, coupled with inadequate provision of basic services, also affected the level of education and health care received by the population. Women, children and vulnerable groups, such as minorities, internally displaced and disabled persons continue to be directly affected by the violence and the ongoing impunity for human rights violations. Organized crime and corruption have persistently added to the overall insecurity.

A chance to what? To make it with the delectably curvy woman shown here? On the contrary! She's says "I'll tell you how to gain pounds quick!" See, this woman digs skinny guys. She likes to help them become big and strong.

The moral of the story: no matter your phenotype, there's someone out there ready to love you for who you are (or for what they might be able to mold you into becoming). From the archives of Modern Mechanix blog.

Thousands of Americans whose vacations and business trips to Lebanon have degenerated with sickening speed into stints in a battle zone remained stranded here under Israeli bombardment Monday, their frustration and anger mounting because the U.S. government hasn't gotten them out faster.

Waiting around Beirut with bags packed and fingers crossed, U.S. citizens derided the embassy for busy phone lines, a lack of information and gnawing uncertainty over when and whether they will get out. Hundreds were expected to be shipped to Cyprus today, but how long the full evacuation will take remains uncertain.

Previously: U.S. gov't billing citizens for evacuation from Beirut

There are areas in several countries that have been left at low resolution at the request of the countries affected for security purposes. Since the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea [N Korea] is a secretive state that does not have regular contact with the rest of the world, they have not requested any areas to be excluded.

Over at the Chennai (India) metblog, Nancy Gandhi writes:

According to a report on NDTV 24X7, an Indian news channel, the Indian government's clampdown on blogsites (and some websites) is NOT connected to the recent blasts in Mumbai, but is an effort to curb the propagation of religious extremism on the Net. If that's true, the ban may not be lifted any time soon. The Indian government, however, has yet to issue an official statement on the subject.

If it's not clear from what has been said so far, the Indian ban applies to ALL blogs from these sites, not just those originating in India: ALL blogspot, typepad, geocities blogs worldwide. If you have a blog from one of these providers anywhere in the world, I cannot read you.

It's odd that we can still post to our own blogs, and read the blogs that we have had the foresight to subscribe to through RSS. These loopholes may be closed soon, if this is to be a long-term policy. The list of blocked sites includes:

• hinduunity.org
• hinduhumanrights.org
• princesskimberley.com
• bloodspot.com
• dalitstan.org
• clickatell.com
• blogspot.com
• geocities.com
• typepad.com

I attempt to investigate my own imagination and explore the boundaries between the everyday and the subconscious or metaphysical worlds of fantasy. I am interested in how science tries to explain or make sense of the world and the way in which we place our trust in what we consider to be fact.

Ben's ability to navigate in his sightless world is, say experts, extraordinary. "His skills are rare," says Dan Kish, a blind psychologist and leading teacher of echomobility among the blind. "Ben pushes the limits of human perception."

Kish has taught echolocation to scores of blind people as a supplement to more traditional methods, such as walking with a cane or a guide dog, but only a handful of people in the world use echolocation alone to get around, according to the American Foundation for the Blind...

Ben learned how to read Braille and walk with a cane, but when he was 3, he also began teaching himself echolocation, something he picked up by tossing objects and making clicking sounds to find them. His sense of hearing, teachers noticed, was exceptional. "One time a CD fell off his desk and I was reaching for it when he said, 'Nah, I got it,'" says Kalli Carvalho, his language arts instructor. "He went right to it. Didn't feel around. He just knew where it was because he heard where it hit." Haase took walks with Ben to help him practice locating objects. "I said, 'Okay, my car is the third car parked down the street. Tell me when we get there,' " she says. "As we pass the first vehicle, he says, 'There's the first car. Actually, a truck.' And it was a pickup. He could tell the difference."

Dr Toby Howard said: "This system has been designed to overcome the many pitfalls evident in previous studies which could easily be manipulated by participants to produce an effect which looks like telepathy but is not.

"By creating a virtual environment we are creating a completely objective environment which makes it impossible for participants to leave signals or even unconscious clues as to which object they have chosen."

In the meantime, I have a bunch of new works (including Leopold and his majestic fur pom pom hat) at Lineage Gallery in Philly and a mad march hare for the "Hair" show at Lisa Sette Gallery. Link

I'm so excited to see him doing this great story on the net -- I'm going to devour it as soon as I post this.

I didn't always live here. And by here, I do not mean the La Brea Tar Pits, where I am writing this down in a notebook--I mean Los Angeles. When I was a little kid I lived in Chicago.

On Wilshire Boulevard, in Los Angeles, there is a restaurant shaped like a hat. It is called The Brown Derby, and that's what it looks like--one of those derby hats, with the round top, and the little brim all around. There is a sign outside that says, "Eat in the Hat." And people do. I knew about this because I saw pictures in Look Magazine. The pictures showed the restaurant, the "Eat in the Hat" sign, and two movie stars--I think it was Bette Davis and Laird Cregar--inside the hat, eating cheeseburgers. They were eating cheeseburgers with knives and forks! This was interesting too. I had only found out about cheeseburgers a short time before--and had only actually eaten two of them. I did not know that some people eat them with knives and forks, but I thought of them as grown-up and sophisticated food, even before learning that movie stars ate them.

Anyway, when I read about the Brown Derby and saw the pictures, it became one of my life's ambitions to eat there.

* mostly young and male, especially those who visit technology-related sites.
* very active in their use of the sites.
* looking for "a fix of unique, informative fun."
* and "filling in the blanks" left by traditional news sources.
* sharing what they know.
* looking for and finding multiple perspectives.

Wikipedia gets it wrong all the time. So do bloggers. But then, so do newspapers, magazines, TV and radio. The interesting thing about systems isn't how they perform when they're working to specification, it's what happens when they fail.

Blogs, Wikipedia, and other online media fail gracefully indeed. When a newspaper gets a story wrong, it can take 24 hours to get a correction out – if it corrects it at all. There's no ready way to link criticism of a newspaper article with the article itself. Certainly, you can't make the edits yourself.

But if you find an error in a Wikipedia entry, you can fix it yourself. You can join the discussion about whether a blogger got it wrong. Automated tools like Technorati link together all the different blogs discussing the same topic, turning them into a conversation.

Durable means that it will withstand the rigors of dining on foods which exert greater levels of force on the cutlery, such as hard ice cream, stabbing carrots onto a fork, etc. Durable has no relationship with biodegradable - they are completely independent characteristics. Wood is biodegradable, but people build homes which are 'durable', lasting hundreds of years. However, allow the wood to become moist and dry rot sets in, i.e. moisture, heat, and microorganisms, also known as biodegradation.

David Bentley, Solexa’s chief scientist, said that the company’s DNA sequencing machine had already decoded several bacterial genomes and that he was planning to sequence a human genome — that of an anonymous man from the Yoruba people of Nigeria. An African genome was chosen because there is greater genetic diversity in African populations, Dr. Bentley said.

The demand for whole genome sequencing is a long way off, in Dr. Bentley’s view, but not so distant that it is too early to think about the consequences of generating such information. He advocates that two people should control access to a person’s genome sequence — the patient and the physician.

Why not the patient alone? Dr. Bentley said genomes would be so difficult to analyze correctly that interpretation should stay within the medical profession. Otherwise, freelance services will spring up, offering to predict whether a person will get heart disease or their age of death. This potential for misinformation “would have a huge adverse impact on the medical use of genetic information,” Dr. Bentley said.

The idea behind Bix is neat -- a combination of American Idol and YouTube's lip syncing madness. Basically, anyone can set up a contest -- karaoke, lip-syncing, beauty, whatever (I suggested magic routines and Mike seemed to like that idea). People can enter that contest (sometimes paying a required entry fee, which will be split between the contest winner, the contest creator, and Bix) and use their webcam to record their performance. Bix has licensed the use of lyrics and music from the record companies, which I'm sure is costing quite a bit of money.

One thing I'm interested in is seeing what happens when bands perform original music on Bix. If Bix (or something like it) really takes off, then bands who win "best original song" contests will have a built-in audience to buy their music. And who needs the record industry to press CDs or make deals with iTunes then? Bix and the artists could simply sell the music as MP3s right from the site. Sure, parts of the music industry probably won't ever go away, especially publishing. But the parts that involves making bands and making CDs are going to have to learn from these new experiments if they want to be around in the next five years.

Om Malik has more to say on the business of Bix. Link

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Esq.:

"A Los Angeles video news service sued YouTube Inc. on Friday in federal court for allowing its users to upload copyrighted video footage onto the popular Web site, including the beating of trucker Reginald Denny during the 1992 riots."

More on the Los Angeles New Service and the man behind it, Mr. Tur, can be found on Wikipedia.

For an analysis of why YouTube should win this case, take a look at my article two weeks ago on YouTube and copyright law.

The transparent fiber-webs could even enable huge computer screens to be activated with beams of light instead of the touch of a finger. "We could use light to enhance interaction with computers and even gaming systems," said Professor Yoel Fink of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Research Lab of Electronics, leader of the team. "It's intriguing--the idea of touching with light..."

The human eye, digital and film cameras, and even the Hubble space telescope rely on lenses and detector surfaces (like the retina) to create images. But while these systems deliver excellent images, they are constrained by their size, weight, fragility and limited field of view.

In contrast, the fiber webs are flexible and lightweight. Plus, a fiber web in the shape of a sphere can sense the entire volume of space around it, according to Fink.

"When you're looking at something with your eyes, there's a particular direction you're looking in," says Ayman Abouraddy a research scientist in Fink's lab. "The field of view is defined around that direction. Depending on the lens, you may be able to capture a certain field of view around that direction, but that's it. Until now, most every optical system was limited by an optical axis or direction."

Q: I think that no matter what party you belong to, whether you are Republican, Democrat, anything, you look at the film and you think that this is somebody who is an honorable guy, a good guy, a guy who's obviously a family man and whose family loves him. You get this really complete picture of the guy.

SJ: Yeah. As I said, I didn't know anything about him and I went in just wanting to know who he is, and by the end of the day I felt that they were a really solid family and I really liked them. I think that Al and Tipper have to be good people and good parents to have created a family that's so solid. They look out for each other, and you can feel it. I mean, it's really obvious when you're around a dysfunctional family and it's also obvious when you're around a really functional family.

Image is of Tipper Gore standing next to a nude self-portrait she painted when she was pregnant. That's my kind of first lady. Link | Direct link to Unseen Al Gore Campaign Video.

* ask me about my conspiracy theory
* admit that goth is ridiculous
* you LIVE in that head?
* thou shalt not torture
* write shit down
* tastes like wiccan
* more orgasms fewer kids
* marxists get crazy laid
* Now that you've conquered Iraq, why don't you schmucks move there.
* assume this phone is tapped
* LINUX is the answer
* cheer up, emo kid
* mosh clockwise
* Do not buy anything from any bake sale that the air force may hold to buy a bomber, because those bombs will kill people.

One of Andrew Sullivan's readers, an American in Beirut, reported to Sullivan that the U.S. government's offer to evacuate Americans to protect them from the Israeli blitz comes with a price tag: "They are finally getting everything together today, but they dropped a little surprise: they are going to be billing us for giving us emergency transport to Cyprus, and then basically dropping us off on our own to get commercial flights back to the US. Most other goverrnments evacuating people here are actually flying them back to their home country without cost. But not the USG."

Update: Thomas says,

I googled around some on the government billing evacuees from Beirut and found confirmation in the "legitimate" press:

"In statements e-mailed to Americans in Lebanon and posted on the embassy's Web site, the State Department has stressed "that the U.S. government does not provide no-cost transportation but does have the authority to provide repatriation loans to those in financial need. For the portion of your trip directly handled by the U.S. Government we will ask you to sign a promissory note and we will bill you at a later date.""

(Biggify Jets and Trix)

I don't want to slam today's talented and hard working cereal-box designers because I'm sure that they would love to come up with designs that are as elegant and appealing at Bradfield's. It's not the fault of illustrators that many modern packages are hideous. The blame goes to the brand managers at cereal companies who think they are art directors but have no artistic taste.

Look at this sad example of how a fantastic character and a logo can be utterly ruined:

(Biggify Trix)

The leering, brain-damaged rabbit looks frightening.

Dan Goodsell of A Sampler of Things has a nice write-up on Bradfield.

I sent [Bradfield] an email to see if he had worked on any kids food. Well he wrote back and told me that he had worked on the General Mills cereal boxes of the early 60's! He had worked on Kix, Trix, Wheaties, Jets and did the fronts for many of the signature boxes of the time. WOW.

He also did some work on Mr Bubble and some Pillsbury projects. One other great thing he did was all the spot illustraions for the Bisquick Cookbook in 1964. It is amazing to see all the creativity and skill he poured into this book so I scanned a few of my favorites.

Roger continues to paint and many of his great kids book from the 1960's & 1970's are now being republished. It is great to think that his incredible artwork will be enjoyed by many generations to come.

This is a a late 1970s advertisement for Iran Air, the nation's airliner.

It's interesting because this ad was created before the 1979 Islamic revolution, when Iran and the United States were strong allies.

Maybe they should use Woody Norris' LRAD to beam the sound into the center of the park, which would break the eardrums of the miscreants, yet allow the law-abiding citizens to slumber without having to resort to uncomfortable ear-plugs or stupor-inducing barbiturates.

From the San Diego Union-Tribune:

LRAD, or Long-Range Acoustic Device, [was designed] for military use as a hailing and warning device, Putnam said.

The disk-shaped transmitter can emit an ear-splitting warning noise akin to a fire alarm as well as jackhammer-like pulses that can travel nearly two-thirds of a mile. At the limit of its range, the sound produced by the LRAD, is roughly 95 decibels – equivalent to standing a few feet away from a speeding subway train or chain saw.

Kathryn Cramer says,

Extrapolating from last night's bombing of Afula, I exptrapolated Hezbollah's new bombing reach in Google Earth (with a little help from Photoshop), assuming Hezbollah are shooting their rockets from south Lebanon. Bill Rogelio at the Counterterrorism blog has an excellent discussion of the implications of this new development.

India's Department of Telecommunications (DoT) passed an order to ISPs Friday to block several websites. The list is confidential. Indian ISPs have been slowly coming into compliance. SpectraNet, MTNL, Reliance, and as of Monday afternoon, Airtel. State-backed BSNL and VSNL have not started yet but likely will soon. The known list of blocked domains is *.blogspot.com, *.typepad.com and geocities.com/*.

Yes folks, the Indian government has decided to censor blogs and refused to explain why. This morning Shivam Vij managed to talk to Dr Gulshan Rai, director of CERT-IN, the only body authorised to issue directives to ISPs. His response: "Somebody must have asked for some sites to be blocked. What is your problem?"

If any Boing Boing readers in India find several sites inaccessible today, please call your ISP and demand to know why. If you can help, please join the coordinating group: Link.

Manish adds,

The block is still spreading through Indian ISPs. This recalls Pakistan's Blogspot ban during the Danish cartoon controversy and India's Yahoo Groups ban in '03 to shut down a separatist forum.

The plot gets thicker and thicker as more bloggers are getting alerted to the fact that an increasing number of Indian ISP's are banning blogspot and typepad blogs and geocities.com. Several detailed posts on this, with regular updates here: withinandwithout.com, Conversations with Dina, and Travel Tales from India.

There's a wiki here: Link. We're treading with a little caution before we go whole-hog at the government. There is a possibility that it is a mistake - where a directive from the government on a few blogs might have been misrepresented by ISP's here - who have blocked the entire sites.

Amit Agarwal has some tips on how Indian bloggers can circumvent the ban on Blogspot here: Link. More here: Link.

An Indian political blog is reporting that the ban was initiated by the Indian intelligence service to stop terrorism: Link. According totheir source, the terrorists are using blogs to communicate. Not only is this useless (because the terrorists can simply use proxies), it's akin to shutting off the country's telephone service because terrorists talk to each other through phones.

Indian Censorship can easily be bypassed when using TorPark. It's a no-install version of Firefox that uses the Tor Network for communication. This should also work in China and other countries that filter the web.

Vijay says,

I am not yet facing any of the blocking effects as reported by several Indian bloggers. I have noticed a certain pattern here. The blocking seems to be affecting city users while rural netizens have been spared of this curb for now. I have mentioned this in detail here.

Link to a vacation snapshot by BoingBoing reader Hanan Cohen. Heaven knows what happens if you eat a double-dip cone with a scoop of each.

Reader comment: Allen Pike says,

Xeni's photo of "Viagra ice cream" looks like gelato actually. Here in Vancouver I often visit a gelato place with 218 flavours, including this one. Viagra gelato tastes like sour lemonade, and is preferable to other available flavours such as balsamic vinegar.

I’ve been to the same gelati place in Vancouver a number of times. I got curious so after trying it I did ask them about it, and they admitted to me that it’s basically Limoncello gelati dyed blue. I took a quick snapshot of the gelati tub there as well, which you can find here: Link.

And for the curious Vancouverites, the establishment in question can be found downtown Vancouver on Denman st.

Randall Park directed this lowbrow, cheeseball comic short and performs the role of Dr. Miracles: a medical provider who has a most NSFW method for curing what ails the worst-off patients in an urban hospital. Think "E.R." meets bad 1970s porno. Link (Thanks, Jason Wishnow!)