The tomato, which is about 10 centimeters in diameter and weighs about 150 grams, is of the regular "Momotaro" variety, but is about three times the normal size. It was harvested in Yawata from a field owned by 61-year-old farmer Kiyoshi Ueda.

The "alternative ice cream" offered to animals instead of their usual fare has been a big hit with large cats, apes and wolves, Zurich Zoo said in a statement. "The ice cream should at least offer the animals a temporary way to cool down," it said.

Can background music make you smarter?
The more you can concentrate with background noise, the more it strengthens the brain. Isaac Asimov used to set his typewriter up in stores and other loud places to work. His claim was that you get really good at writing when you’re in a crowd. You want to be energized by that background noise, rather than distracted.

Apparently Philadelphia Police arrested Neftaly Cruz after he took a photo of them arresting a suspected drug dealer. One of Cruz's neighbors gave this recap.

""He opened up the gate and Neffy was coming down and he went up to Neffy, pulled him down, had Neffy on the car and was telling him, 'You should have just went in the house and minded your own business instead of trying to take pictures off your picture phone,'" said Gerrell Martin."

Our ability to photograph the police should be unquestioned. Without it things like the Rodney King incident might never see the light of day. If this occured as Cruz, his family, and neighbors allege, this is a clear abuse of police power and those resposible should be disciplined for this action.

...In time to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the novel's publication, the version of ``On the Road" that Kerouac wrote on the scroll will be published next year in book form for the first time, said John Sampas of Lowell, the executor of the writer's literary estate and the brother of his third wife, Stella. It will include some sections that had been cut from the novel because of references to sex or drugs...

The scroll contains numerous passages that were edited out of the book and uses the original names of characters who were closely modeled on friends of Kerouac, including fellow writers William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg...

It remains to be seen exactly how (publisher Viking Penguin) will present the original Kerouac story, which was typed as one freewheeling, single-spaced paragraph. Eager to write freely and continuously, without pausing to pull finished pages from his typewriter and insert new ones, Kerouac typed instead on 12-foot rolls of paper that he later Scotch-taped together, Sampas said...

Some specialists say they prefer the unedited version, which features a different first sentence than the published novel, as well as a more abrupt ending.

BoingBoing reader Ross Nelson says,

A student who threw a cake at Norway's Finance Minister is being charged with committing "a crime against the Norwegian Constitution" and could get up to 15 years in prison. No word on the penalty for flinging a pie without a license.

One of the government's star witnesses, Al Benton, a high-ranking Brotherhood defector, testified that he stabbed a victim through the throat after receiving a smuggled order from Bingham, who was incarcerated 1,700 miles away at the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colo. Benton testified that the order was written in invisible ink, which came into view when held over a flame. (...)

By the government's account, Brotherhood leaders ran the gang's far-reaching network by adapting ingeniously to the tight surveillance conditions in maximum-security lockups. To transmit messages, the gang employed an elaborate system of codes and cryptograms — including a 400-year-old binary alphabet system devised by Sir Francis Bacon — as well as more prosaic jailhouse ruses, such as slipping notes in mop handles and under recreation yard rocks.

Jurors learned about the gang's reading list, which included Nietzsche, Machiavelli and Sun Tzu's "The Art of War." They learned how to make knives from the shaved-off sliver of a light fixture. And with a cast of eccentric criminal witnesses, they witnessed strange, tangential exchanges, as when defense attorney Michael White cross-examined Chris Risk, who said he robbed banks to protest the treatment of American Indians.

Dear Mark -

I am part of the PR team working with Sony on the launch of the Reader (PRS-500) ebook reading device.

As I am sure you are aware, a great deal of information and misinformation has been floating around the internet about the product since its announcement at CES in January 2005.

To help clear up some of the confusion, we would like to offer you and your readers an opportunity to speak with Sony directly about the Reader to dispel some of the myth that has surrounded its rollout.

As a first step, we would like to suggest compiling questions from your readers about the device. I will then share them directly with a senior member of Sony’s product team for response. Hopefully, if all works well, we can work together to separate fact from fiction about the Reader.

I am a huge fan of reading eBooks on my Palm (I've spent hundreds of dollars at ereader.com, and read lots of free books from manybooks.net) and I would love to have an eInk device that isn't DRMed up the wazoo. The fact that Sony wants to talk to potential customers is a positive step. Link

Following up on a string of recent reports that Dell laptop batteries may sometimes self-immolate without warning, BoingBoing reader Humphrey Cheung says, "One of our forum posters has a story and pictures of a burnt Dell laptop. He also has pictures of the smoke covered office, fire trucks and the burnt battery." Link.

I'm no expert on this stuff, but as a former Dell bitter victim owner and user (now a happy Mac convert) I have a hunch this is because everything Dell is made in Hell.

Reader commentses: several follow after the jump....

Advances in imaging technology between 1989 and 2003 have focused on improving image quality; however, there has been a small but progressively increasing number of radiology reports described as "limited by body habitus."

According to US magazine Time, Israel has been targeting SMS text messages at local officials in southern Lebanon, urging them to move north of the Litani river before Israeli military operations intensified. On Friday, residents of southern Lebanon reported receiving recorded messages on their mobile phones from an unknown caller. The speaker identified himself as an Israeli and warned people in the area to leave their homes and head north.

We went to Beirut to film a TV show about the city's newly vibrant culinary and cultural scene. Then the bombs started falling, and we could only stand on the barricades of our hotel balcony and watch it all disappear -- again.

From where I'm sitting, poolside, I can see the airport burning -- the last of the jet fuel cooking off like a dying can of sterno. There's a large, black plume of smoke coming from the South of the city -- just over the rise, where the most recent airstrikes have been targeting the Shiite neighborhoods and what are, presumably, Hezbollah-associated structures. My camera crew and I missed it the first time they hit the airport. Slept right through it. Woke up in our snug hotel sheets to the news that we wouldn't be making television in Beirut (not the show we came to do anyway), and that we wouldn't be getting out of here anytime soon.

Any hopes of runway repair followed by a flight out disappeared two nights ago, when we watched from the balcony of my hotel room as missiles, fired from off shore, twinkled brightly for a few long seconds in the air, then dropped in lazy parabolic arcs onto the fuel tanks.

The Chinese site based in the very remote Huangyangtan region, appears to be a small-scale model of a piece of territory complete with snow-topped mountains, streams and valleys. The find, recorded by a German member of a Google Earth community site, has triggered speculation that the site might have a military purpose.

Singer-songwriter Guy Clark is our cover story. Inside are interviews with Bill Collings of Collings Guitars, Bob Taylor (on his new R. Taylor guitars), banjo legend Wade Mainer and much, much more. It’ll show up in most stores around the first week of August.

(The ebook is 130 pages long, and I skimmed it just now. It looks fantastic! -- Mark)

Revolver wasn't so much released as it leaked out over the course of some weeks.

Firstly, there was the advance guard – a hot-of-the presses Revolver sessions single, “Paperback Writer” backed with “Rain”, released in the USA in May and shortly afterwards, on June 10th, in the UK. Here was Revolver in microcosm – a kind of trailer for the LP – with compressed bass, backwards vocals, Indian influences, Beach Boys inspired vocals, LSDinspired imagery, and heavily treated vocals. Their last single, released almost six months earlier, had been a double A-side with the folky, earthy “We Can Work It Out” and straight-up plastic soul tune “Day Tripper”. Whilst it can be hard to see the dividing line between Rubber Soul and Revolver, it seems fairly clear cut when you listen to those singles in succession.

Joe Firmage: I did have an unusual experience one morning at my home in Los Gatos. It was either a visitor, a vision, or a bad potato.

A good ending is important in a movie, and Chris Null and his crew at Film Critic have put together a fun list of the Top 50 Movie Endings of All Time. (As you might expect, it has spoilers in it, so if you haven't seen one of the movies, read the entry for it at your own peril.)

13. Citizen Kane (1941) - Well, we kind of have to put this one on the list, don't we? One of the earliest examples of don't-spill-the-secret endings and also I've-been-robbed anti-climax, that little wooden sled explains everything and explains nothing about Charles Foster Kane, but it's the elusive piece of the jigsaw that drives one of the greatest movies ever made.

"The old world of media faces an invasion from another planet. The horror. The horror." Created by Michael Markman, Peter Hirshberg, and Bob Kalsey. Link to video, and here's the maker's blog post about it. (thanks, mediamonger!)

BoingBoing reader and roaming couture trendspotter Hal Bringman was in Paris this week, and noticed a line of Blackwater-branded clothing and accessories promoted at one store.

For the sniper in your life who has everything -- ok, everything *but* a spiffy men's polo emblazoned with the logo of the world's most renowned mercenary machine.

Link to another photo, and another, and another, and another. The sign on the door promises "Security of the future."

"The store's name is Multiforma - Scanner, Security & Auto (self) Defense located in the Gallerie des Arcades/Boutiques, Paris," says Hal. "How can the company that is our government's hired rent-an-assassin -- er, I mean security force for emergencies/disasters be in a position to now be exploiting this as a brand worldwide?"

Reader comment: Rob Walker says,

Those who don't want to to paris can get a blackwater tactical polo for $30 right off their web site. In the Pro Shop... Also slings, holsters, shot glasses, etc. Even an xmas ornament.

The German movie industry's campaign to scare people from illegally copying movies and other copyrighted material ("Hart aber gerecht", translates to something like "tough but just") has experienced a real blow to its public image, again.

The image put forward by the campaign strongly contrasts with the supposed level of technical knowledge within the organization as well as their webhosters: for a period of about 21 hours the server's DocumentRoot was open to the public. Everyone interested could peek at (drastic, if not hilarious) anti-piracy campaign videos, server logfiles and such. German blogs already have been eager to analyse and comment.

Most delicate is the matter of eCards, though: the website offers a service to send "scary postcards" with campaign motives to people you chose - without any kind of sender oder receiver verification (no opt-in, which is de facto illegal in Germany). And of course, all the addresses used and texts sent via the card service since April 2006 were logged in cleartext, and have already attracted some considerable attention. ;-)

Needless to say there is no privacy disclaimer at all on the website...

Reader comment: Chris says,

Equally disturbing is the " 8 used & new available from $6.66" Used.....??? Though one must assume that is a selling point for some. And maybe the price drove others to study A Child's Bible Armageddon in repentance.

"It is common knowledge that a child will play for hours with an empty cardboard box, a paper bag or a stick. Thus, the tribunal is of the view that amusement alone does not make an object a toy for the purpose of tariff classification," the federal body wrote in a decision made public this month...

Mr. Morton argued that people display figures of the 1930s cartoon character Betty Boop to signal they're different. A customer who "otherwise may be very prim and proper may have a Betty Boop mini bell jar [figurine] sitting on their desk just to convey that there is a wild side there," he told the CITT.

Similarly, Franklin Mint argued that customers display various "Mood Dragons" on their desks to signal how they are feeling. "Like if 'Grouchy' is out, you know not to approach them that day or if a happy [dragon] is out, then you know that it is okay," Mr. Morton said.

Direct download link of Cingular docs: Page 1, Page 2, Page 3

If it was not clear a year or two ago, when the skull motif cropped up on battered Herman-Melville-meets-Edgar-Allan-Poe T-shirts made by Rogues Gallery, on costly cashmere sweaters by Lucien Pellat-Finet, on the perforated uppers of the wingtips made by the men’s wear line Barker Black, it is now. What only recently seemed clever and stylish — I’m wearing a skull! I’m baaaaad! — has shifted into overdrive, if not overkill.

Beyond the sea of skull wear — belts, T-shirts, ties — there are umbrellas, sneakers, swimsuits, packing tape, party lights, even a skull-branded line of hand tools. One company has made a skull toilet brush and caddy (with a molded-plastic femur bone for a handle). This summer Damien Hirst announced that he will make a life-size skull, cast in platinum and adorned with 8,000 diamonds.

If it seems harmless, well, there you have it. With the full force of the American consumer marketing establishment behind it, the skull has lost virtually all of its fearsome outsider meaning. It has become the Happy Face of the 2000’s. When the mid-1980’s proto-Goth group the Ministry sang “Every Day Is Halloween,” this was not quite what they had in mind.

"I take him to be wholly a Brute, tho' in the formation of the Body, and in the Sensitive or Brutal Soul, it may be, more resembling a Man, than any other Animal; so that in this Chain of the Creation, as an intermediate Link between an Ape and a Man, I would place our Pygmie."

It was discovered that the girls had been using the mothballs as a recreational drug when doctors found a bag of mothballs stashed in her room while she was being treated at the Hospital of Timone in Marseille.

Both girls had been "bagging" - inhaling mothball fumes - after encouragement from classmates.

The twin who was sickest had also been chewing half a mothball a day for two months.

She continued her habit in hospital because she did not think her symptoms were linked to the mothballs.

Boing Boing is blessed with a fine sysadmin indeed: Ken Snider, the extrodinary gentleman who keeps our machines online through slashdottings, DOS attacks, (my) idiotic posting of large media files, and the tribulations and vagaries of a data-center. He's one of Boing Boing's vital "fifth Beatles," a guy who makes all this possible, every single day.

Sincere and bottomless thanks Ken, and happy Sysadmins Day to you and every other admin who's toiled under the desks and in the crawlspaces of the world. Link

Cory's podcast story "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth": Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

Update: The UK Unix Users' Group has a great homage to sysadmins in the style of Gilbert and Sullivan. Likewise, Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie performed a classic sysadmin song at the ThinkHDI Conference in Vegas at 2005. (Thanks, Miss Cellania and Sam!)

"National surveys reveal that of those Canadians spending less on music products, by far the largest single reason cited was downloading/file sharing/CD burning."

Leaving aside the fact that all of the above may be lawful, a more recent CRIA commissioned study by Pollara actually arrived at different conclusions. As I documented last March, when asked why they were spending less on music, survey respondents cited price (16%), nothing of interest (14%), lack of time (13%), downloading (10%), collection is big enough (9%), don't buy (7%), listen to radio (7%), change in tastes (6%), no CD player (3%), have an MP3 player (2%), lack of opportunity to buy (2%), watch more tv (2%), age (1%), only buy what I like (1%).

Steve Bryant of eWeek.com's Google Watch site says,

I was searching about in public court docs and found a warrant from last month that shows the feds searched Google. The doc relates a fascinating story about a dude in West Virginia who sent hate mail to the NAACP via Gmail, and how the FBI caught him. Very CSI: Mountain View. A cautionary tale for all the playah hatahs out there.

The recovered records included the offending e-mail, registration information, session timestamps, and originating IP addresses for amgonow@gmail.com.

That e-mail address was used by a Randall C. Ashby II to send threatening speech from Weston, West Virginia to the Washington Bureau of the NAACP on May 22,2006. That act was a violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 875c (Interstate Communication of a Threat). The email read:

You are no match for our numbers and our power. We will come out of the night and rise from the dirt to murder you in your sleep. Meet us on 6/6/06 to seal your fate. The end is at hand, accept your place at the foot of the true masters throne. The kingdom of god is for naught, Hell will rule the earth soon enough. We will meet you at the center of sin, Washington on June 6th or you can hide and die like the insignificant mortals you are. Christ is Dead.

According to court records, there is currently no legal action against Google pending in this matter. Google did not immediately return a request for comment. However, documents obtained by Google Watch shed light on a fascinating tail of digital sleuthing.

Reader comment: Steve Bryant's post is interesting for a number of reasons, one of which being the sleuthing trail it traces. But it's worth pointing out that these kinds of requests from federal investigators are not uncommon, and this is not the first time Google has received one. BoingBoing reader SleepNoMore says,

I'm an attorney in New York, and this sort of thing happens quite frequently, in both civil and criminal actions. Civil parties can subpoena Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo for gmail, hotmail, or yahoo email account information, including any and all emails sent from a specific email address. As this practice is legally acceptable for civil actions, it would certainly seem reasonable to allow such requests (via valid search warrants) in the context of criminal cases involving real threats of violence or otherwise. Of course, defense attorneys can and do frequently challenge such requests and confidentiality and/or protective orders are often required before information is released. But this is certainly nothing new or surprising in the legal realm - Google and Microsoft must receive thousands of similar search warrants and subpoenas each day and likely have a separate legal department for dealing with such requests.

Blogger and Wired Magazine editor Mark McClusky, whose wife Kristen is also a blogger, writes,

Kristen and I were talking about the blogging thing the other day, and realized that the single best promotional opportunity is the cute little baby we have. After a little design work, here's what we came up with. What father could resist? Grab your own at Cafe Press.

Reader comment: Marty says,

I thought the other 'thing' needed a t-shirt too. Link.

Over the past couple of years, the issue of Internet governance has become a hot topic. Currently, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is responsible for parceling out IP addresses and domain names. In turn, ICANN operates under the auspices of the US Commerce Department, an arrangement that doesn't sit too well with parts of Europe, the UN, and many developing nations.

Contrary to some reports, things are not about to change. After a meeting at the Commerce Department, Acting Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information, John M.R. Kneuer, said that the existing arrangement was likely to continue, at least for another year. "There certainly are still strong arguments that there's more work to be done," said Kneuer.

Reader comment: Ntwiga says,

A key component behind to maintaining control of the net's root zone file was a letter that Condoleezza Rice sent in her capacity as Secretary of State to the EU through Jack Straw, the UK's Foreign Secretary. The content of the letter basically boiled down to telling the EU that almost everything else was negotiable but control the root zone file was not.

Another interesting development is the Burr Proposal: a private plan to "to outline a practical, concrete pathway for eliminating one of the most important sources of contention in the ICANN debate - the United States’ retained, exclusive, and unilateral authority over the Internet’s authoritative root."

A pdf outlining this plan can be found at this link.

Boingboing pal Jacob Appelbaum spotted the shirts at HOPE earlier this week, and shared them here on BoingBoing.

Cheebs says,

I just wanted to point out to everybody that these t-shirts were hand-made by the Prometheus Radio Project. They were creating the shirts and giving them out for small donations as a fundraiser towards future "barnraisings", more info here. I bought one myself and looking forward to having most of my female (and possibly male) friends wanting one too. Oh and some of them also say on the back (as far as I can remember since mine does not have it): "Senator Stevens: Don't tie my tubes."

I heard it was their first try at making tees this way and they did an excellent job. They sold out of men's shirts and most women's shirts. As a side note, this year's HOPE had the highest percentage of women I've yet seen at a super-fun con.

"I think just for the sake of sanity we're going to limit to silver, shiny charcoal, or shiny pink on black or pink shirts, and men's and women's cuts, of course.

(...) We are going to sell them to fundraise for some incredible media activism and digital divide groups here in Philadelphia, so your bucks go to unclogging the IntarTubes for all. We are also going to release the silk screen design for diy'ing so you can have your own geekerly silk screening party in your town, on your porch, or in your basement."

...PLA is said to decompose into carbon dioxide and water in a “controlled composting environment” in fewer than 90 days. What’s a controlled composting environment? Not your backyard bin, pit or tumbling barrel. It’s a large facility where compost—essentially, plant scraps being digested by microbes into fertilizer—reaches 140 degrees for ten consecutive days. So, yes, as PLA advocates say, corn plastic is “biodegradable.” But in reality very few consumers have access to the sort of composting facilities that can make that happen. (PLA manufacturer) NatureWorks has identified 113 such facilities nationwide—some handle industrial food-processing waste or yard trimmings, others are college or prison operations—but only about a quarter of them accept residential foodscraps collected by municipalities...

Wild Oats accepts used PLA containers in half of its 80 stores. “We mix the PLA with produce and scraps from our juice bars and deliver it to an industrial composting facility,” says the company’s Tuitele. But at the Wild Oats stores that don’t take back PLA, customers are on their own, and they can’t be blamed if they feel deceived by PLA containers stamped “compostable.” (The president of compost research lab Woods End, Will) Brinton, who has done extensive testing of PLA, says such containers are “unchanged” after six months in a home composting operation. For that reason, he considers the Wild Oats stamp, and their in-store signage touting PLA’s compostability, to be false advertising.

Wal-Mart’s (VP of private brands and product development Matt) Kistler says the company isn’t about to take back used PLA for composting. “We’re not in the business of collecting garbage,” he says. “How do we get states and municipalities to set up composting systems? That is the million-dollar question. It’s not our role to tell government what to do. There is money to be made in the recycling business. As we develop packaging that can be recycled and composted, the industry will be developed.”

Update: I forgot that I posted something about this in 2004.

Martijn says:

I've been thinking about your soy sauce from human hair entry on boingboing.net, and I just don't think it makes sense. I don't believe it.

I'm not a chemist, but throwing in some chemical addititives to make something that tastes like soy sauce doesn't seem to likely to me.

And I'm not an economist, but the cost of collecting human hair in sufficient quantity to process it industrially compared to just growing soy doesn't seem plausible to me. Who would produce a fake foodstuff when it's more *expensive*?

This also reminds me of the earlier boingboing entry on the "faked eggs" which is implausible for the same two reasons.

In addition, both articles on such fake products are hosted on the same site and are written by the same author: Alexander Tse-Yan Lee.

Link 1

Link 2

Perhaps this is a form of nefarious propaganda from one food producint company against another. I'm not sure: to me though this has the right symptoms of a crackpot at work...

I believe that James Randi is narrating. Link

Reader comment: Old Scot says:

You are correct; the narration is by James Randi. Here is a YouTube link to an extended discussion of Uri by Randi that I found quite interesting, which includes the Johnny Carson episode at the end of the 8 minute piece, and includes explanations of how the tricks could be performed. Link

“He belongs to the family of Ribbonfish,” (Seaside Aquarium's Tiffany) Boothe said. “There are four other species of Ribbonfish along our coast, but the King-of-the-Salmon is the largest; growing up to and possibly exceeding six feet. This one measured almost exactly 6 feet. They can be found down as far as 1600 feet from Alaska to Baja and along the Coast of Chile.”

(Seaside Aquarium manager Keith) Chandler said this was the first time he’d ever seen this in his 27 years of marine science career. He said he did not know what conditions could’ve brought the creature up this far above its normal environment.

Coop says:

This show always seemed to be playing on the local PBS affiliate when I was a kid. It's oddly hypnotic. The quiet tone and gentle cadence of Bob's voice, the rhythmic whakkity-wak of the brush on the easel, that giant palette, and most of all, the 'fro.

Sweet Fancy Moses, what a 'fro. It's something to which all great artists should aspire, I think.

Reader comment:

Jim Rosenberg says: Bob Ross Lives - in a Virginia office park. As a freelance reporter for Marketplace in 2003, I profiled Bob Ross Inc., which is housed in an office park near Dulles Airport, outside Washington. "Most people don't know Bob is dead," says one of the owners. Page link for the broadcast. Listen to the full piece (it's damn funny).

Now that the popularity of downloading has made physical manufacturing and distribution no longer necessary, the next generation of artists will not need to surrender all of their rights in order to get their music into the marketplace. It is therefore crucial that they understand, from the moment that they first post music on the internet, the importance of retaining their long term right to exploit the material that they create. This is doubly important on a networking site where many of the songs posted will be by unsigned artists. Ownership of the rights to such material is somewhat ambiguous. Thats why I hope that the groundbreaking decision of MySpace to come down on the side of the artists rights will be followed throughout the industry.

I also welcome the new wording of the terms and conditions in which MySpace clarify exactly why they require specific rights and how they intend to use them. Again, I hope more sites follow the lead of MySpace in ensuring the use of clear and transparent language in contracts. The last thing any of us wants to see is a situation in which everyone posting a song on the site has to have a lawyer sitting next to them.

Update: Freddie Freelance sez, "These are also available from shop.com from $6."

I got enough feedback and general interest to start a print run of The Pig and the Box, and I'm finally taking proper orders for the thing. $12.99 (+shipping) gets you a really slick dead tree version, so you can damage your children away from the computer.

Also, if you're so inclined, I've got a Fundable.org action set up to free the rights to the Pig (switching from CC-NC-SA to CC-SA) if 100 people buy a signed copy of the book for $20.

Half of all profits go to Oxfam.

And finally (this is the coolest part): there are now 7 translations of the book, donated by selfless volunteers around the world, free to download. Oh, and a movie is underway in Germany as well. Ah, the wonders of liberally-licensed media...

The follow-up book, The Crow Who Could Fly (about patent abuse) is due in the next week or so, once my server's bandwidth limit resets in August :)

I was privileged to teach Clarion last year, and to be invited to join the Board of the nonprofit, charitable Clarion Foundation, which oversees the administration of Clarion. This year's instructor lineup includes Samuel Delany, Michael Swanwick, Nancy Kress, Joe and Gay Haldeman (pictured left), Holly Black, Kelly Link, Tobias Buckell and Jim Hines.

Reading Clarion journals is a great way to get a flavor of the workshop and a peek inside the extraordinary learning process that takes place there. Link to Clarion East journals, Link to Clarion West journals (Thanks, Alex!)

If you're interested in a signed, inscribed copy of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town or my collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More, you can call (888.893.4008), fax (415.824.8543), or email your order to the store, and they'll get me to sign copies with your inscription. There is no charge for media-mail shipping within the continental US.

Priority mail in the US is $6.00 (that’s delivery within three days or so). International will be Global Priority for $10 to Canada or $12 elsewhere.

Books will ship after the Worldcon, in late August. Link

Chris says, "The segment also features Israeli blogger Eugene from 'Live from an Israeli Bunker,' and Samar Mazloum who blogs from the Bakaar valley." Link.

Illustration from Kerbaj: "of paris i said that it doesn't have a sky but rather a neutral grey stain / and of the new yorkers that they cannot see the sky because of the heighth of their ambition / and of london's sky that it is manufactured from flying cotton / where are you blue sky of beirut? "

"Each coffin represents a single person killed in the on-going conflict between Israel and Lebanon.

Current Figures:

Israel: 51

UN: 4

Lebanon: 405"

Link to Moiz Syed's map illustrating the proportionality of death in the conflict (thumbnail at left is cropped, and does not reflect the current ratio).

Moiz tells BoingBoing, "A guy named Jonathan made a visualization of American versus the Iraqi casualties in response to my Israel/Lebanese page, here."

(thanks, Inoue Taiji and Moiz)

The settlement (...) concludes years of litigation against a company that studios and labels claim was responsible for massive copyright infringement. Kazaa, like Napster before it, had been emblematic of music and film piracy to computer users worldwide.

Under the terms of the settlement, Kazaa will introduce filtering technologies to ensure that users can no longer share copyrighted music, film or software files. Sharman will also pay $115 million to the recording industry, according to sources familiar with the negotiations. Future payments to the film and software industries may be forthcoming.

Reader comment: Derek Dohler of Washington University in St. Louis says, "This is a minor point, but the St. Louis blackouts were caused by an intense thunderstorm, rather than excessive heat. It's arguable (and probable) that the thunderstorm itself was caused by several days of high temperatures, but it wasn't a direct "heat blackout" as implied."

photos: Bruce Sterling

Cameron, Louisiana, July 2006

Used to be a town
by Jasmina Tesanovic

We just missed a twister. We saw its black cloud in the sky, lit by lightning. In Louisiana, some miles after Cameron, a small tornado has toppled trees into the road. Police blocked the highway, workers cleaned the branches away and cool people sat on the porches, watching it all happen. Mostly old people. Why do people stay in disaster sites, living under the volcano? Why do they watch?

We enter the tourist center at the border of Louisiana. We want to go to Holly Beach, we say. Holly Beach isn't there any more, says the clerk, politely smiling.

But yes, the road to Holly Beach still exists. We see this: tall trees snapped in half, house-trailers blown by the hurricane, landing in the most improbable places, upside down. Dead cars strewn like corpses, rusting anywhere, mangled as if crushed by specialized machines. Wind-shredded American flags. Where beach-houses once stood there are only bare poles. Instead of churches, there are the statues of saints... The trees which survived the storm have weird wind-tattered shapes. New leaves are growing out of their trunks.

Marshlands stretch all around us. My American friend is devastated. He laments loudly: the future belongs to this indestructible marsh-grass.

This remarkable display device consists of fifty water-wave generators surrounding a cylindrical tank 5 feet wide and a foot deep. The wave generators move vertically to produce cylindrical waves. These "pixels" are about 4 inches in diameter and 1.5 inches in height; these form lines and shapes. The AMOEBA device can form all of the roman alphabet, as well as some kanji characters.

Update: this story was blogged a few days earlier by the SciFi Tech blog: Link.

Greenpeace responded by carving a giant 'X' crop circle into one of the genetically engineered corn fields the courts say can no longer be Google-mapped.

"Greenpeace France complied with, but will likely appeal, the censorship order," Brian Fitzgerald of Greenpeace tells BoingBoing, "And Greenpeace International is now hosting the map from its servers in Amsterdam."

Link

We all love monkeys, especially the younger, cheekier ones who are so much fun and always full of life. Deeply sensitive and very bright, they are always alert and interested in their surroundings even when they are thoroughly engaged in conversation and chatter. Monkeys know how to be funny and provocative, how to amuse and entertain with their sparkling wit and that famous monkey magic. They are honest, imaginative, motivated individuals, and can easily sympathise with other animals so even the most shy creatures open up to them.

Dabble collects metadata detailing the location, authoring, licensing information, and user-generated tags associated with hundreds of thousands of short video clips. Users visiting Dabble will see a search box allowing them to do a simple keyword search for online video clips. Their results, including both amateur and professional video, will be pulled from hosting sites all over the web. Users can then begin to collect their favorite web videos, adding new videos to their collection at will as they surf other websites.

Already, hundreds of hosting sites exist where users can upload their own videos to the web and thousands of independent sites. Dabble solves the problem of navigating through all these videos, no matter where they are hosted.

The researchers found that the electrical spike patterns differed between cell types. For example, the larger, brisk cells fired many spikes per second and their response was highly reproducible. In contrast, the smaller, sluggish cells fired fewer spikes per second and their responses were less reproducible.

But, what's the relationship between these spikes and information being sent? "It's the combinations and patterns of spikes that are sending the information. The patterns have various meanings," says co-author Vijay Balasubramanian, PhD, Professor of Physics at Penn. "We quantify the patterns and work out how much information they convey, measured in bits per second."

Calculating the proportions of each cell type in the retina, the team estimated that about 100,000 guinea pig ganglion cells transmit about 875,000 bits of information per second. Because sluggish cells are more numerous, they account for most of the information. With about 1,000,000 ganglion cells, the human retina would transmit data at roughly the rate of an Ethernet connection, or 10 million bits per second.

On flickr there is a photoset called ycantpark which is all about how bad people park in the Yahoo! lot...there is a whole set of bad parking jobs taken by employees...

Here are a couple of my favs.

Reader comment:

Anonymous says:

The article link pointed to the ycantpark user's page, which looks to have not been updated in a while. If you search by the 'ycantpark' tag, there's many more.

Chef Robert Gadsby in LA is doing an "Outlaw Dinner" which is kind of crappy since none of the food are actually illegal. Here's a list of actually illegal foods including fugu, raw cheese, ortolan and, awesomely, a mellified man, a manmade dish popular in ancient Arabia. According to Mary Roach, author of Stiff, men 70-80 years old, on death’s doorstep anyway, would cease to eat food, instead partaking solely of honey. Pretty soon, they would be mellified, that is, “he excretes honey (the urine and feces are entirely honey).” Soon he dies and is placed in a honey-filled coffin which is then sealed for 100 years. At the end of the 100 years, the goop is eaten up.

Dave Ng says:

We consider this an online mystery, and a blogging experiment of sorts. Essentially, we have presented five seemingly unrelated clues (three images, one video, and the start of a novel) that should effectively converge to a solution we have in mind, and we've been inviting readers to postulate and hypothesize on what that answer could be.

What's interesting is that, so far, the conjecture produced has been pretty intriguing, with rational linkages that suggest the answer to be as varied as Jamaica's Independence Day, the year 1962, Minister Koizumi, the number 42, evolutionary theory, and James Joyce. This happened with our limited readership, so we were basically curious to see what would happen if 100s or even 1000s of folks participated. It could really boggle the mind to see such a collective response, or we suppose it could also fall flat -- but we are curious nevertheless.

In some respects, we've treated it as a blogging carnival, except that there is no theme, or rather the point is, to figure out the theme. This, we think, is a first, much like an experiment - being science types, we like experiments.

Dave's collaborator, Benjamin Cohen, says:

"Puzzle Fantastica #1: Fish-Cow-Elvis" began surreptitiously, lurking at the sidebar of The World's Fair blog. It then, from the watchful gaze of visitors, came into light as something to be addressed. There was a puzzle being revealed, but we dared not step closer. We left that to you. The puzzle was soon bigger than us, and so we stood back and offered the rest of it for the world. There was more, and a few more clues have made their way into visibility. What is the puzzle? What is it a puzzle of? What did a fish, a food-factory cow, and an Elvis cover mean? And of the video and the novel's beginning?

Fire away. The solution, which indeed exists, has yet to be revealed.

First posting was here (where we teasingly warned: "do not click unless you are of reasonable intelligence").

Follow-up clue (a video clip) came here.

So-called Final Clue was dropped here.

With follow-up commentary and an explicit update here.

There *is* a solution -- many early contributors thought we were simply toying with them, which is not true. And although I say this from the comfort of one who knows the answer, it's actually not as complicated, in answer form at least, as many have suspected. We've had a lot of very fascinating approaches to solving it, and many good and laudable attempts, but nothing that's nailed it yet.

This pic may look like the set of Tron or Logan's Run, or some futuristic mall, but it's actually a close-up of the giant machinery inside Japan's High Energy Accelerator Research Organization. It's just one of the amazing images in a piece on PingMag called "Joe Nishizawa: Japan’s Underground Photography." All the images are from a book of Nishizawa's photographs, called Deep Inside, which explores the inner (and under) workings of Japan through photos and deep captions. Think of it as UNDER street tech.

Reader comment: Matthew says: "The photo in this item is from KEK ("Japan's High Energy Accelerator Research Organization", as you say), which is not in Tokyo. It's it Tskuba, about 40 miles north east of Tokyo, more or less the middle of nowhere. I spent a week there in college, installing code for controlling high voltage power supplies for the Belle detector project."

Some of the folks over at scienceblogs.com have come together with some children's book suggestions that once appealed or currently appeal to their science sensibilities. As well, a few children's book authors add their recommendations to the mix. In total, you get a pretty decent library of books to collect for that kid who aims to be a scientist one day.

Reader comment: Dsmamsil says:

Neogaf has a discussion about the software and where someone actually used it to make a meal.

It appears the software sold over 100,000 units its first two days of release.

This is a link to a youtubed Japanese commerical for the software.

On the plus side, he is wearing a hard hat. Also, if you look carefully at the boulder’s 4 o’clock, you’ll see a plastic drink bottle propped on another rock, so he is also staying hydrated. And maybe that boulder is actually 20 feet long, so that’s just the tip sticking out. Yeah, that’s it.

"I got in my car, turned it on and couldn't figure out why it would not b-u-d-g-e from park. I then realized that everything that could light up on the dash, was, and that there was something wrong."

"One of the most important temples in South India has decided on a new plan to market its religious services.

"Starting some time in the next few weeks the Meenakshi Temple in Madurai will begin offering E-poojas for people who can't make it to the temple for pilgrimage. How's that for mixing religion and technology?"

Link to Scott's blog post, in which he adds: "For an additional fee prasadam, eatable sugar coated blessings, can be mailed anywhere in the globe."

Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that this early report is right -- that Microsoft is, in fact, going to make an offer to all iTunes users to replicate their libraries of iTunes, FairPlay-protected music on the new Zune service at no added cost to the users. There are several questions of fact that leap to mind. Did Microsoft obtain the licensing rights to all of the music that is for sale on iTunes? If not, there will be some iTunes music that is not portable to the new service. Will copyright holders be getting the same amount from Microsoft, when their songs are re-purchased on behalf of migrating iTunes users, as they will get when a user makes a normal purchase of the same track in the Zune system? The copyright holders have a substantial incentive to offer Microsoft a discount on this kind of "buy out" mass purchasing. As Ed pointed out to me, it is unlikely that users would otherwise choose to re-purchase all of their music, at full price, out of their own pockets simply in order to be able to move from iTunes to Zune. By discounting their tracks to enable migration to a new service, the copyright holders would be helping create a second viable mass platform for online music sales -- a move that would, in the long run, probably increase their sales.

The Terminal DOOM demo is a DOOM3 port - of sorts - of the Classic DOOM source as originally released in 1997. The playable demo is available for Windows and Linux, and supports all shareware and retail versions of DOOM. You will have to have the retail version of DOOM3 installed, and you will have to apply the version 1.3 patch to be able to run the Terminal DOOM demo. Once you applied the new patch, download the demo here from the mirror kindly provided by Ryan Gordon.

Since 2001, Rubbersidewalks has been grinding thousands of old tires into crumbs, adding chemical binders and baking the material into sidewalk sections that weigh less than 11 pounds a square foot, or a quarter of the weight of concrete. The panels are available in two shades of gray and a terra cotta orange.

Many of the squares have been installed in areas where damage from tree roots, weather and snow removal have required sidewalk replacement or major repairs every three years, said Lindsay Smith, founder and president of Rubbersidewalks. Rubber sidewalks are expected to last at least seven years, Smith said...

The panels are firmer than a running track or a rubberized playground, but far more resilient than concrete.

Missouri Public Service Commissioners Robert Clayton and Steve Gaw, state utility regulators, had served subpoenas to AT&T Missouri and its affiliates in June amid speculation over their involvement with the National Security Agency. The government's civil suit, submitted by the U.S. Department of Justice to a district court in Missouri, said the state officials' attempts to obtain the information from AT&T and its affiliates were invalid.

And in related news: again citing national security concerns, a federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit aimed at blocking AT&T from surrendering customer telephone records to the government.

"The court is persuaded that requiring AT&T to confirm or deny whether it has disclosed large quantities of telephone records to the federal government could give adversaries of this country valuable insight into the government's intelligence activities," U.S. District Judge Matthew F. Kennelly said.

Wired News has an story about the increasing accessibility of LPR (License Plate Recognition) technology. This is the same technology US Customs uses to track vehicles entering the country. (For a brief overview of the technology, see this DHS article) The potential privacy implications are scary. Even if LPR systems remain out of your next-door neighbour's price range, do you really want ChoicePoint and its ilk corellating your credit history and shopping patterns with precise information on where you drive?

That statement was repeatedly cited last winter by NASA climate scientist James Hansen, who said he was being threatened by political appointees for speaking about the dangers posed by greenhouse gas emissions. But NASA officials told The New York Times the elimination of the phrase that was used by Hansen was "pure coincidence."

Inspired by marshmallow shooters, this air-powered tampon gun turns your feminine hygiene products into high-flying projectiles. Have a shootout between rival tampon brands, or use it as a fun alternative to paintball. The tampon shooter has a range of 10 to 20 feet depending on your ammo and lung capacity. The matching bandolier lets you carry a full “clip” (i.e., box) of 20 tampons, so you’ll never be caught short in the heat of battle.

They are Menino's latest idea for keeping the city litter-free: solar-powered, self-compacting trash receptacles. Delivering a rant about overstuffed trash cans, while trying to scrape gum off the bottom of his shoe at a Downtown Crossing unveiling, Menino described the virtues of the new devices. They need emptying only once or twice a day, not the 15 or more sanitation worker visits required by some downtown trash cans. They don't spill. They smell less. And, they hold some 150 gallons of trash, about five times more than a standard city receptacle.

Players will instead use a Visa mock debit card to keep track of how much they win or lose.

It is inserted into an electronic machine where the banker taps in cardholders' earnings and payments.

Parker said replacing of cash with plastic showed the game was moving with the times.

In a tradition set by Cory Doctorow and Lawrence Lessig, this Thursday technology journalist Julian Dibbell will appear in Second Life as an avatar named "Julian Dibbell" to autograph copies of *Play Money*, his latest book about making a real living by harvesting gold in Ultima Online.

Going one more meta step, Julian is also *selling* virtual copies of *Play Money* for Linden Dollars, the official currency of the online world. In other words: on behalf of Julian Dibbell, "Julian Dibbell" is selling *Play Money* for play money.

A COUPLE of sardine and salmon cans, a few bits of brass and several pieces of wood are all the materials that are needed to assemble an experimental but very practical picture transmitter and receiver.

Two of each of the cans will be needed. The salmon cans should be of the small or half can size and the end that has been opened should be replaced by soldering in water tight, a new disc of tin.

BoingBoing reader Andy Carvin says

The American Library Association's Washington office is reporting that the House of Representatives will likely vote on the so-called DOPA Act [today, Wednesday July 26]. DOPA, the Deleting Online Predators Act, would force schools and libraries receiving federal Internet subsidies to block all interactive websites, including blogs, bulletin boards, email lists and online social network. It's an absurd reaction to the anti-MySpace hype that's been dominating the media in recent months, and threatens to make the Internet completely useless as an educational tool. Schools already have the ability to block inappropriate websites, and they should be the ones determining which sites are educationally relevant.

Here is a closeup of the troops. Note the crude methods I was forced to resort to in these early days. The fluorescent post-it strips are to indicate different terrain types.

After some initial testing, I decided it would be easier to construct my own hexes, and with a pair of scissors and some construction paper, produced the map below on a Sunday afternoon. Note that the game is still set in the modern era, with oil still being used as a resource and A&A pieces representing the units. However, the hexes were extremely light and floated all over the table and were a real pain to keep together.

Why: We love animation and we just know you do too. We're proud of Odd Job Jack and we've put lots of work into our show. Our art deserves to live beyond broadcast and who better to give a free gift to than the entire planet?

When: Every Monday during our 13 episode broadcast we will release a new set of files. First episode air July 22nd. The torrent will be available the following Monday.

Phoenix, Arizona (Sky Harbor Airport - PHX):

* Gate A-17: on the pole near the bank of payphones (2 outlets)
* Gate A-18: on the pole near the women's restroom (2 outlets) -- chair close by!
* Gate A-18: on the wall about half way up (2 outlets) -- above bank of chairs!
* Gate A-19: under the arrival/departure televisions (2 outlets)
* Gate A-20: on the pole near the Gate A20 sign (2 outlets)

The iPod is the number one music player in the world. iTunes is the number one digital music store in the world. Customers don't seem to care if there are restrictions on the media Steve Jobs sells them -- though you'd be hard pressed to find someone who values those restrictions. No Apple customer woke up this morning wishing for a way to do less with her music.

But there's one restriction that's so obvious it never gets mentioned. This restriction does a lot of harm to Apple's suppliers in the music industry.

That obvious restriction: No one but Apple is allowed to make players for iTunes Music Store songs, and no one but Apple can sell you proprietary file-format music that will play on the iPod.

Top-secret blogger Christine Axsmith was fired on July 13 from her BAE Systems job testing CIA software. Why? She posted her opinion that "torture is wrong" to her classified blog, after reading a newspaper report saying the CIA plans to following the Geneva Conventions again (after the Supreme Court forced them to). This was beyond the pale for the CIA "seventh floor" (top management), who apparently ordered her fired. Her unclassified blog, Econo-Girl, is starting a longer discussion of torture. Bloggers who think she's been wronged can donate to her at PayPal account caxsmith@aol.com; I've started the pot with a $1000 "attagirl".

Previous installments: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

After a long and intense campaign, we've convinced one of our favorite designer friends Ben Benjamin to come teach a one day design workshop. Ben is a man of many talents, but may be best known for his endearingly confusing and confusingly endearing website, superbad.com. "Wait" you say "Wasn't that in the 2000 Whitney Biennial"? Yes. Yes it was.

If you’re not a designer but are sometimes called upon to design things, this class is for you. We’ll walk through a typical design process and along the way we’ll learn some basic tips and tricks, design strategies, and some broad design principles. The goal is not so much that you will become a good designer in one day, but more that you will learn how to avoid some of bad design’s biggest traps.

Verily, this class will surely be the phlogiston that fuels your ascension to dizzinging heights of fame and success.

August 5th, Saturday. 10am to 5pm (lunch break from 12-1). $65

As always space is limited, sign up early to avoid disappointment.

PBS is the new Clear Channel. The hypocrites at PBS Sprout Kids have fired their host Melanie Martinez over two short films she made SEVEN YEARS AGO that spoof PSAs [called "Technical Virgin"] about teen abstinence. Someone posted the films on a website (though we couldn't find them, they sound funny) and PBS was worried about her moral authority as their host of programming for 2- to 5-year-olds. What did they think would happen - our 4-year-old might find the films while trolling the Internet?!?

Here are the videos (1) and (2). They are really funny, but NSFW. | Statement from PBS

Grammar rant: George says:

You quoted some text using the word "trolling" in a piece on BB today. "our 4-year-old might find the films while trolling the Internet?!?"

I know it was not your text, but really I am very tired of seeing this nonsensical usage and would welcome its regular correction before it gets out of hand.

A troll is ... well a troll. So 'trolling' makes no real sense. I am 100% convinced that this usage began when someone correctly used the word 'trawling' in a proper context and some under-educated (not even enough to think to check) thought it sounded like trolling and ... well that's how s**t happens. I have yet to see a usage of the word 'trolling' where 'trawling' would not have fitted perfectly (and more to the point, correctly, I believe).

Grammar rant rant: Andy Keck says:

I want to rant about George's grammar rant. Specifically, George says:

A troll is ... well a troll. So 'trolling' makes no real sense. I am 100% convinced that this usage began when someone correctly used the word 'trawling' in a proper context and some under-educated (not even enough to think to check) thought it sounded like trolling and ... well that's how s**t happens. I have yet to see a usage of the word 'trolling' where 'trawling' would not have fitted perfectly (and more to the point, correctly, I believe).

I do not believe that George has a firm grasp on his fishing terminology. Here's the entry for troll from the Merriam-Webster site:

troll
One entry found for troll.
Main Entry: 1troll
Pronunciation: 'trOl
Function: verb
Etymology: Middle English, probably from Anglo-French *troiller, *troller; akin to Anglo-French troil, trolle winch
transitive verb
1 : to cause to move round and round : ROLL
2 a : to sing the parts of (as a round or catch) in succession b : to sing loudly c : to celebrate in song
3 a : to fish for by trolling b : to fish by trolling in c : to pull through the water in trolling d : to search in or at ; also : PROWL
intransitive verb
1 : to move around : RAMBLE
2 a : to fish by trailing a lure or baited hook from a moving boat b : SEARCH, LOOK ; also : PROWL
3 : to sing or play in a jovial manner
4 : to speak rapidly
- troll·er noun

Note that both transitive entry #3 and intransitive entry #2 express the idea that he claims to be incorrect. Trolling is correct.

To correct George who is "tired" of your incorrect and under-educated usage of the word "troll," actually it comes from the fishing term. Fishermen using this method drag either numerous lines or a specially made bucket filled with bait behind a slow moving boat, enticing the fish in large numbers. So it's similar in usage as to "surfing" the web. Maybe now that he was "tired" for no reason, he'll have the energy to find something more productive to do with his time, like looking it up.

A duck and a hen on a farm outside Söderköping have found each other. The duck is now a foster-father to five chickens.

Annika Stenbäck and Peter Andersson, who live at the farm, tell the daily Norrköpings Tidningar about the love birds.

The birds started dating already last summer, after the duck accidentally drowned his mate during lovemaking. However, the duck didn't spend much time in mourning before starting to date the hen instead.

Soon, the hen started laying and brooding, but as the eggs were not fertilized, they never hatched.

"So we fetched some fertilized eggs from our old hens at my parents-in-law. She got six chickens, but one has died," says Annika Stenbäck.

During the entire brooding period the duck kept a nervous watch by the hen's side.

"And since the chickens were hatched he hasn't left her side," says Annika Stenbäck to Norrköpings Tidningar.

Reader comment: Raul Gutierrez (the photographer) says:

If you liked my photo of the Xinjiang medicine man’s stand you linked on boing boing today, you might also also dig this one and this one. I have a terrible image somewhere (not online) of a chinese medine man in Xining with a stand full of bear and tiger feet.

Though [30-year-old software developer Shawn Hogan] expects to incur more than $100,000 in legal fees, he thinks it’s a small price to pay to challenge the MPAA’s tactics. “They’re completely abusing the system,” Hogan says. “I would spend well into the millions on this.”

Q: I have potato bugs in my vegetable garden. How can I rid myself of these pesky critters?
A: Drench your entire yard with gasoline and set it ablaze. Once the fire has burned itself out and the ground has cooled, cultivate the soil to a depth of seven feet, saturate the area with battery acid and top the surface with gasoline. After a few minutes, most of the surviving potato bugs, now irritated, will burrow up for air. Set the yard on fire again, and let it burn itself out. The remaining bugs should be crisped. Add water. Only then, and only maybe, will you rid yourself of potato bugs.

POTATO BUGS AS PETS?

As most species of potato bug are good climbers and can gnaw through 12-gauge steel mesh, a tight fitting lid is required made of a good quality 16-grade galvanized sheet steel with nail holes (no bigger) to allow for air flow. The walls of the cage should be galvanized steel backed with 5/8" plywood, carefully mitered at corners and reinforced with L brackets to prevent escape. Wood screws are preferred over nails for assembly, as potato bugs have been known to ram against the walls until the nails eventually loosen from the wood and work free, compromising the integrity of the structure, and allowing the creatures to infest your house and lay eggs in your ear canal or anus.

Two people who knew Kay told The Star-Ledger of Newark that the hand, which Kay nicknamed "Freddy," was a gift from a medical student who frequented an all-nude juice bar where she dances.

Kay's mother, Patricia Ann Kay, told the newspaper that her daughter bought the skulls from a mail order catalog. She said her daughter has always been fascinated with the macabre, and when she was a girl she collected animal skulls and snake skeletons.

"She has a flair for the dramatic," Patricia Ann Kay said. "I have never tried to stop my children from doing whatever they want. As long as they are happy, aren't hurting anyone, and it's keeping them out of the poor house."

How does arborsculpture differ from bonsai or topiary?
Arborsculpture is the art of shaping tree trunks to create art and functional items through bending, grafting, pruning, and multiple planting. Bonsai is the art of miniaturizing trees. Some of bonsai's basic techniques, such as bending branches and pruning, are similar to arborsculpture. Topiary was originally defined as ornamental gardening, so you could say, to be technical, that arborsculpture is a branch of topiary, but the word topiary is more commonly used to describe the shaping of foliage. In that sense, topiary is almost the opposite of arborsculpture in that you're only trimming the foliage, whereas in arborsculpture, you're only working with the trunk. Of the various tree arts, arborsculpture is most closely related to espalier, a technique that began in France as a way to grow quality fruit in small areas, like inside castle courtyards. They'd grow fruit trees up against the wall and shape the branches so that they were evenly spaced and parallel, maximizing the amount of fresh air to each piece of fruit. I like to say that arborsculpture is like espalier on acid.

In a letter to fans last year, Doohan's widow, Wende, said the actor would have "given almost anything to be able to actually go into space".

"He finally gets his wish, I can't think of a more fitting send-off than having some of his fans attend this, his final journey," she said.

The flights have been arranged by Texas company Space Services, which previously sent the ashes of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and 1960s drug guru Timothy Leary into space.

Calling Krispy Kreme a donut shop is like calling a Boeing plant a workshop. The Krispy Kreme in Northgate is like the other Krispy Kreme locations I have visited, a small factory with an assembly line that rolls fresh donuts from the cooking area to the counter, where they are go on trays for display. The interior is bright green and white and there is a lot of space pabetween the counter and the booths, even taking into account the display stands of Krispy Kreme paraphernalia. The service is friendly and efficient, and we place our donuts in the back seat and head to the next shop.

I should mention that we have no way of tasting the donuts simultaneously under ideal conditions, so we will put all of them at a disadvantage. Each donut will sit in the back of our car, drying out and warming or cooling to about 80 degrees until it reaches the cool shade of our kitchen.

Six friends spruced up in fake blood and tattered clothing were arrested in downtown Minneapolis on suspicion of toting "simulated weapons of mass destruction." Police said the group were allegedly carrying bags with wires sticking out, making it look like a bomb, while meandering and dancing to music as part of a "zombie dance party" Saturday night. "They were arrested for behavior that was suspicious and disturbing," said Lt. Gregory Reinhardt, a police spokesman. Police also said the group was uncooperative and intimidated people with their "ghoulish" makeup.

Update: Xopl says:

Local MPLS paper the Star Tribune has an article on the zombie arrests. Apparently the arrest reasoning is a bit weak considering they had the zombies walk to the precinct without searching them. If they really thought there was any chance that the backpacks contained bombs, I don't think they would have done that.

The two original officers didn't appear to think the backpacks were bombs, said Kibby, who said she had a messenger bag. They weren't searched until after they arrived at the First Precinct, where she said several officers appeared to be making fun of them, she said.The two original officers didn't appear to think the backpacks were bombs, said Kibby, who said she had a messenger bag. They weren't searched until after they arrived at the First Precinct, where she said several officers appeared to be making fun of them, she said.

There is also a dicussion on MN Speak.

(Monash University psychiatry professor) David Copolov: We think of voices maybe as a distortion of auditory memories, we have memories of things that we've heard and things that have been said to us and it's our current conceptualisation that these voices are replayed, but in a very real sense of auditory memories and a distortion of these auditory memories feeding in to the regions of the brain that process hearing.

(show host) Lynne Malcolm: So could you tell me a little bit more about what we know about what happens in the brain with auditory hallucinations?

David Copolov: Well a series of studies by our group and others has shown that during hallucinations there are regions of the brain that become active. And those regions commonly involve the regions of the brain, the temporal lobe under the temple that are associated with the processing of normal sounds. So it's as if the brain is being tricked, or the person is being tricked into believing that these voices are actually occurring because there's spontaneous activation of these hearing regions of the brain. There is also activation of regions of the brain, especially the hippocampu,s that are associated with the processing of memory, which is why we believe it's a combination of reactivation of memories with the false perception of external or internal voices.

Have you heard of phantom limb syndrome, where a person who might have had an amputation can feel their arm or leg even though the leg has been amputated? It's the part of the brain that is deprived of input from that region of the body, the brain responds to a lack of input by activity. So in hallucinations, auditory hallucinations, even though we've shown that there are subtle abnormalities of the hearing brain but not deafness as such, the evidence is that those base line abnormalities actually give rise to spontaneous eruptions within the dysfunctional hearing brain that then gives rise to this experience of hearing voices.

"Do these reports have real life impacts on the people who are identified as potential terrorists?" 7NEWS Investigator Tony Kovaleski asked.

"Absolutely," a federal air marshal replied.

7NEWS obtained an internal Homeland Security document defining an SDR as a report designed to identify terrorist surveillance activity.

"When you see a decision like this, for these reports, who loses here?" Kovaleski asked.

"The people we're supposed to protect -- the American public," an air marshal said.

What kind of impact would it have for a flying individual to be named in an SDR?

"That could have serious impact ... They could be placed on a watch list. They could wind up on databases that identify them as potential terrorists or a threat to an aircraft. It could be very serious," said Don Strange, a former agent in charge of air marshals in Atlanta. He lost his job attempting to change policies inside the agency.

The complaint, available here as a PDF, charges Rombom with obstruction of justice and with witness tampering, alleging that in April 2006 Rombom impersonated a federal investigator at the request of a client who had hired him to locate a government informant who was central to the client's money-laundering indictment in 2003.

Rombom is a licensed private investigator and founder of Pallorium Inc., which bills itself as the largest privately held online private investigation service in the United States. The government charges that Rombom unlawfully interfered with an ongoing case prosecutors filed against Albert Santoro, a former Brooklyn assistant district attorney who was indicted in Jan. 2003 with one count of money-laundering (prosecutors have accused Santoro of agreeing to launder $100,000 in cash for drug dealers and claiming he knew how to stymie money-laundering investigations); The complaint says Santoro hired Rombom to locate one of the government's confidential informants, whom Santoro has publicly accused of entrapment.

(...) Rombom appeared in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York yesterday and was released on his own recognizance. He is scheduled to appear again on Aug. 7. The Washington Post print edition today carries a brief story that draws from this update and reporting from the last two blog posts.

"The fish all of a sudden changed direction and jumped. The fish made a leap and Ian just happened to be in the way," (Ian's father) Alan Card said.

The younger fisherman managed to struggle free while his father cut the line and helped his son get back into their boat, the Challenger.

Reader comments:

Jennifer Forman Orth, Ph.D., Invasive Plant Ecologist, UMass Boston Department of Biology says:

"What's that Bug?" is good, but I'm a die-hard BugGuide.net fan myself. In fact, I used it to confirm that your photo is of a Jerusalem cricket, NOT a potato beetle!

BugGuide also has a very active community and does IDs.

Jim says:

The Jerusalem Cricket is indeed also known as a "Potato Bug" (there are also other bugs known as Potato Bugs, but it isn't incorrect as she implied). Jerusalem Crickets are also known by another name that's even cooler - "Children Of The Earth."

Jennifer responds:

Sorry about the common name mixup (note "beetle" vs. "bug"). But most importantly, I did not mean to disparage "What's That Bug?"!!!! I just wrongly assumed you had made a typo..uh, not that I am disparaging you either. Anyway, I like "What's That Bug?" but BugGuide is an amazing repository in a class by itself.

On several occasions, the cops had to intervene to rein in the monstrous eater. Once college students took sweet revenge on a restaurateur with Rappai’s help. He took an “unlimited meals” coupon and emptied the day’s food -- three buckets full of rice, one bucket of fish curry and 10 kg cooked meat -- in no time. Finally, law-enforcers had to be called in to end his sumptuous feast.

A Nintendo spokeperson says: "In the U.S., the reported number of small cosmetic cracks in the plastic hinge of DS Lite systems represents less than 0.02 percent of the total units sold. This cosmetic issue in no way impacts the gameplay or integrity of the DS Lite. Nintendo stands behind the quality of our products and encourages DS Lite owners to contact our Customer Service Department if they are not happy with the functionality of their systems."

Update: Nintendo will fix cracked DSs for no charge: Link

Rolling 10d10, I consistently got one or two successes, night after night, game after game, for two months straight. It wasn’t just hacking rolls, of course — those were just the most dramatically shitty rolls, since they were made with such a huge pool.

These dice, in other words, aren’t just bad. They’re projectile-vomiting, masturbating-with-a-crucifix, possessed-by-the-Devil bad.

Now the creator of Electroplankton, Toshio Iwai, has a new handheld electronic instrument for Yamaha called the Tenori-On. It's beautiful looking.

Currently in the prototype phase, it consists of a 16 by 16 grid of LED buttons within a square aluminium frame about the same size as a lightpen tablet, and also contains two in-built speakers.

Holding this frame in one hand, Iwai demonstrated how the Tenori-On worked during the opening evening of last weekend's Futuresonic electronic musical festival in Manchester.

Each of Tenori-On's LED buttons can either be lightly strummed, sort of like a harp, or alternatively pressed down, whereby each button lights up. Musical notes are triggered by a regular line of light that moves from left to right, much like the sweeping line in PSP game Lumines.

Reader comment: Olly Farshi says:

Quick update for you on the Electroplankton/Toshio Iwai talk at Futuresonic. A friend of mine, Maria Stukoff (a Media artist) also attended the talk with me, she made a recording of Toshio's Tenori-On performance (which was fantastic!) on her mobile. You can check out the video over here.

We were treated as terrorists at first. When we first went, one by one, into the room with the interrogating officer they used that line about "America is at war, and Canada may not take that seriously..." and "since 9-11, we take these things seriously." Then they realized that we were not making any money doing what we do, and that we were more naïve than anything else. Some of the other guards even told us that the whole thing was bullshit, and that it was overzealous and a waste of paperwork.

The decision to deport and ban us from the US was made entirely by officer Kurt Tennat, the supervising officer. He said he had consulted his supervisor by phone, but we don't know for sure. No court proceedings, no legalities, no chance.

Reader comment: Michael Sider says:

Bands travelling from the U.S. to Canada often have had similar experiences, even long before 9-11. I brought many U.S. bands to Vancouver in the early 90's and they were mercilessly hassled, often turned back to the U.S. We kept trying to determine what exactly the rules were, but every response was different. We managed to contact someone high up in Canadian Immigration through a friend of a friend, and their response was that the laws are intentionally ambiguous so that it is up to the discretion of individual border guards whether ANYONE crosses the border, and no recourse if you don't like their conclusion. One trick that often worked was if the band told the border guards that they were coming to Canada to record (helps to have someone in Canada willing to confirm the story), as this means they are going to be spending money in Canada rather than earning it... may work for bands going to the U.S. as well, don't know.

Last night around 7:00 pm Terri came home and was walking around her yard looking at her flower garden. She noticed an animal acting very strangely, since it was running around in circles, plus falling down. She tried to chase it away, which caused the "Ground Hog" to attack her and it gave her a bite on the leg.

She then called me, and I drove over bringing my shotgun with. When I arrived the "Hog" advanced towards me like it was going to attack, so I sent him to a better place.

We then packed up the "Hog" and took off for the emergency room. We first went to *** clinic, where they cleaned the wound and then sent us to M____ Hospital.

I believe that Terri was the first ground hog attack that they had there, and really didn't believe that it was a ground hog until I showed they the animal, then they were believers!

So Terri had to start the rabies shots, until they find out if the hog was infected with them. The hog had to be dropped off at the Health Dept for testing, and the results won't be available until maybe Monday or later.

It also could be that the animal was drunk, from eating fermented berries? The health dept seemed to like that idea, since Hogs are low risk animals for rabies. I'm hoping that it will turn out to be the answer! It turned out to be a long evening, since we got home around 12:00 last night.

THE tool for the job if you're uprooting alien and invasive plants such as French broom and Scotch broom. Those plants, like other invasives, tend to form aggressive monoculture areas that drive out local biodiversity, and they often make dense undergrowth fire hazards. Ripping them out is a kind of joy -- a fine workout, more productive in every way than a couple hours at the gym.

Built like a cast-iron frying pan, the Weed Wrench is a seriously macho tool. Its fierce jaws grip the miscreant plant or small tree by the throat (base of stem), and big leverage yanks it bodily out of the ground. If you get the smallest (mini) and the largest Weed Wrenches, you've got everything covered up to 2 inch diameter (beyond that, use a saw).

Reader comments:

Pamela says:

With regard to the Weed Wrench, our favorite new gardening tool is the Flame Weeder.

It's got its roots in organic gardening (no herbicides!) and it provides a great deal of satisfaction, too!

Kevin Kelly of Cool Tools says: "Yes, we do weed torches as well." Link

Bill Fletcher says: "That weed flamer you linked to is no longer available. Try this one." Link

The device works by transmitting UV radiation at a surface, causing any chemicals to release their "spectral fingerprints." It's a form of spectroscopy. When a chemical is exposed to UV radiation and releases its signature, the meth gun picks that up, CDEX scientists said.

This allows the meth gun to instantly scan for meth on a surface.

"We see this as an investigative aid," Foster said. "If I had been ingesting cocaine and then wiped it off, this unit would be able to identify the cocaine on that table or on my clothes..." The devices being field-tested will test only for meth, but the mass-produced devices will test for meth, cocaine, marijuana, heroin and peroxide-based explosives — which are similar chemically to meth, company officials said.

The problem is that light traveling through a mass of blond hair is not only reflected off the surfaces of the hairs, but passes through the hairs and emerges in a diffused form, from there to be reflected and transmitted some more.

The only method that can render this perfectly is "path-tracing," in which the computer works backward from each pixel of the image, calculating the path of each ray of light back to the original light source. Since this require hours of calculations, computer artists resort to approximations. "People do something reasonable for one bounce and then assume it reflects diffusely," Marschner explained. In other words, he said, they assume that hair is opaque. "In light-colored hair it's important to keep track of the hair-to-hair scattering," he said.

Marschner and (grad student Jonathan) Moon's algorithm begins by tracing rays from the light source into the hair, using some approximations of the scattering and producing a map of where photons of light can be found throughout the volume of hair. Then it traces a ray from each pixel of the image to a point in the hair and looks at the map to decide how much light should be available there.

This NY Post item caught my eye - YouTube was the toast of Herb Allen's Sun Valley conference, and therefore is now worth $1 billion. I don't buy it. I don't think the founders are smoking this shit, I think the media is - at least I hope that's how it is. Why? Simple really. While YouTube is an amazing service, with extraordinary uptake, its core content is mostly copyrighted material. (I make this statement after being told as much by two very senior folks at major media companies who have studied content patterns on YouTube.)

Now, folks who own copyrights are waking up to the power of letting their copyrighted content flourish on YouTube, but that particular worm has not turned - content companies are very, very wary of letting this genie out of the bottle.

So who might buy YouTube? A major entertainment company, like the ones mentioned in the Post piece? No way. That's buying a lawsuit or ten - if Time Warner bought YouTube, how long do you think it'd be before competitors sued to get their copyrighted stuff off TW's new service? And once that stuff is cleared off (YouTube does make a point of taking down copyrighted material when asked, but policing that massive service is not exactly a hand-rolled affair), what is YouTube worth then?

Previously on BoingBoing:
- YouTube's new policy...
- More on YouTube's controversial new terms and conditions

A spacecraft taking off from a private West Texas spaceport being bankrolled and developed by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos would take off vertically, but unlike NASA's space shuttle would also land vertically, according to an environmental study that offers a glimpse into the secretive plans.

The craft would hit an altitude of about 325,000 feet — or almost 62 miles — before descending and restarting its engine for a "precision vertical powered landing on the landing pad" in sparsely populated Culberson County, about 125 miles east of El Paso.

California is facing rolling blackouts today [Ed note: AGAIN] as everyone returns to work from the blistering weekend. The California Independent Service Operator, which manages the state power grid, says people turning on “computers, coffee machines and fax machines” (what, no swamp coolers?) could potentially max out the available supply.

Reader comment: Oh, all right. Dave Stolte says,

A swamp cooler is one of those window-mounted air-conditioning boxes that pulls hot air through a water-filled cooling system.

Actually this isn’t really true. Most swamp coolers are placed on the flat roofs throughout the southwest. They can be installed on the side of the building but they certainly are not installed in windows. Here’s an article at Wikipedia.

The AGP is a five-day window period during which a newly registered domain name can be deleted/ dropped with full refund of registration fee. AGP was introduced to provide a mechanism for Registrars and registrants to correct mistakes, reverse fraudulent registrations. Registrars involved in kiting scam, register thousands of domains against the large amount of money they deposit with Registry. Domains registered are usually the expired ones, which have been indexed by search engine giants like Google, Yahoo etc. Appreciable volume of type-in-traffic is received for these domains, which have now been parked, to generate revenue. Domain Parking presents viable option for domainers to generate revenue from their unused domains, by hosting a single page web site with paid advertisement links. Clicks from visitors to such sites, generates money for the domainer.

Continuous partial attention describes how many of us use our attention today. It is different from multi-tasking. The two are differentiated by the impulse that motivates them. When we multi-task, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient. We're often doing things that are automatic, that require very little cognitive processing. We give the same priority to much of what we do when we multi-task -- we file and copy papers, talk on the phone, eat lunch -- we get as many things done at one time as we possibly can in order to make more time for ourselves and in order to be more efficient and more productive.

To pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention -- CONTINUOUSLY. It is motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network. Another way of saying this is that we want to connect and be connected. We want to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter.

We pay continuous partial attention in an effort NOT TO MISS ANYTHING. It is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, any place behavior that involves an artificial sense of constant crisis. We are always in high alert when we pay continuous partial attention. This artificial sense of constant crisis is more typical of continuous partial attention than it is of multi-tasking.

"The Bush administration is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel, which requested the expedited shipment last week after beginning its air campaign against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, American officials said Friday." Link

Update: Here's the MP3 Link, courtesy of Eric, Alex, Darien, Ian, Jim, Michael, Mike, David, John and Dona! Thanks, folks!

Update 2: Lee's posted a torrent of the file, too.

Update: Rakka sez, "I've been making these types of cakes and other video game related things for a while. Here's my Flickr set.

The letters reveal how Einstein lost most of his Nobel Prize money in bad bond investments on Wall Street, and provide details of how he was showered with affection and gifts by his many mistresses...

He became involved with Elsa, a cousin, in 1912 when he was still married to his first wife Mileva, a fellow scientist with whom he had two boys, Hans Albert and Eduard. Before he and Mileva married, they had a daughter, Lieserl, who was given up for adoption.

In 1919, Einstein divorced Mileva and married Elsa, but within four years he was in love with Bette Neumann, his secretary who was also the young niece of one of his friends. Many more liaisons followed.

The letters reveal that a beautiful Berlin socialite named Ethel Michanowski followed him to Oxford, only to discover that he was involved with a third woman.