Part seven of the amazing machinima epic Bloodspell has just gone live. Bloodspell is a feature film made using the 3D engines from video games, allowing the animators to produce a slick 3D movie for peanuts. The latest edition is notable for including a protracted piss-take on the obnoxious copyright warnings shown before movies in British cinemas. In these warnings, an organization called "FACT" (Federation Against Copyright Theft) insinuates that you're probably a crook, asks you to snitch on your neighbor, lies about how copyright law works, and threatens to turn you over to the police if you point your cameraphone at the screen. The Bloodspell version is much, much better. Link (Thanks, Hugh!)

An anonymous optical disc R&D engineer wrote to me with news of CinemaNow's "Burn to DVD" system. This is the system that lets you burn a DVD from your downloaded CinemaNow Windows DRM videos.

The engineer recently reviewed the "Burn to DVD" specification and found that the system has been designed really badly -- so badly that it's likely that DVDs burned with CinemaNow are likely to fail in many commercial DVD players.

The system is based on the deliberate introduction of errors caused by Digital Sum Value (DSV), a sum that represents the ratio of land to pits on the surface of the DVD. The DVD spec notes the possibility of DSV errors and instructs implementers to take care to avoid them, as these errors can cause a host of problems with reading and playing discs.

My source notes that the introduction of DSV errors is indiscriminate and uncontrollable -- the multitude of possible combinations of DVD burners' chip-sets, blank media, and other variables means that any attempt to introduce DSV errors will produce unpredictable outcomes.

The engineer tried burning Burn-to-DVD discs with a variety of test-bench equipment and found that many of his burners failed entirely, and of those that succeeded, many produced unplayable, error-ridden discs.

For the "successful," marginally playable discs, the news is still bad, since those discs will already be at the limit of their players' error-correction threshold, so that minor scratches and dust would render them useless.

My source also believes that this technique infringes on several patents, including this one.

My source sums it up neatly in this outraged paragraph: "I'm against people being fleeced by this kind of crap. How can you sell someone content on media that is so heavily compromised, especially on a format that so heavily relies upon its error correction system to maintain playability? It's mind boggling!" (Thanks, anonymous engineer!)

Update: Tian sez, "Recently, my local news crew has tested out the service and found it to be crap. I have also wrote about the crappy service especially CinemaNow's Burn To DVD's DRM. Even though my local news crew was able to burn one DVD successfully, CinemaNow's "one copy only" DRM can be easily defeated."

Bill Pullman may play surrealist SF author Philip K. Dick in a new feature film called Panasonic directed by Matthew Wilder, best known for his '80s tune "Break My Stride." From Production Weekly (flash site, no permalinks) via Dark Horizons where the news was reposted:

The lines between reality and perception blur in this comic journey into the life and mind (literally!) of one of sci-fi's most brilliant authors. Paranoid conspiracies of the highest order, drug-fueled interdimensional shifts, and 1970's pop culture combine for the mind-bending adventure of the century.

Link (Thanks, Dave Gill!)

Senator Arlen Specter is rushing his Surveillance Bill through the Senate, hoping to get ahead of the outraged calls and emails from voters across the country who want to stop the never-ending expansion of Federal domestic surveillance powers over law-abiding citizens. Call your Senator right now and make sure that s/he knows that you don't want your government listening in on your phone-calls and reading your email -- it may be too late tomorrow. Link

Chad Vader, Day Shift Manager is a series of short films about a cyborg Sith Lord who runs the day-shift at a grocery store, creeping out the boss by calling him "Emperor," hitting on the checkout girl, and feuding with the night-shift manager. Sheer hilarity! Link, Part 2 (Thanks, Bonnie!)

Update: Aaron sez, "This is a Channel 101 series - not a youtube series."

Science magazine's Career Development section has an article about sleep deficit and the science of a good night's sleep. The sidebar is a list of the following tips from Dr. Robert Fayle, medical director of Park Plaza Hospital and Medical Center's Sleep Center. They're kind of obvious, but also easily forgotten.

* Sleep only as much as you need to feel refreshed the next day.
* Get up at the same time, 7 days a week.
* Exercise regularly.
* Make sure your bedroom is comfortable and free of disturbing light and noise.
* Make sure that your bedroom is at a comfortable temperature during the night.
* Eat regular meals and do not go to bed hungry.
* Avoid excessive fluids in the evening. Cut down on caffeine products.
* Avoid alcohol, especially in the evening.
* Smoking may disturb sleep.
* Don't take your problems to bed.
* Train yourself to use the bedroom only for sleeping and sexual activity.
* Do not TRY to fall asleep.
* Put the clock under the bed or turn it so that you cannot see it.
* Avoid taking naps.

Link (via Mind Hacks)

The wonderful Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society blog summarizes the longest-running scientific experiments. For example, the Pitch Drop Experiment at the University of Queensland has been running since 1927. From the description of that experiment (seen here):

The first Professor of Physics at the University of Queensland, Professor Thomas Parnell, began an experiment in 1927 to illustrate that everyday materials can exhibit quite surprising properties. The experiment demonstrates the fluidity and high viscosity of pitch, a derivative of tar once used for waterproofing boats. At room temperature pitch feels solid - even brittle - and can easily be shattered with a blow from a hammer (see the video clip below). It's quite amazing then, to see that pitch at room temperature is actually fluid!

In 1927 Professor Parnell heated a sample of pitch and poured it into a glass funnel with a sealed stem. Three years were allowed for the pitch to settle, and in 1930 the sealed stem was cut. From that date on the pitch has slowly dripped out of the funnel - so slowly that now, 72 years later, the eighth drop is only just about to fall.

The Athanasius Kircher post and reader comments point to several other unusual experiments that are even older. Link

The August issue of Scientific American takes a deep look at how experts--chess grandmasters, musicians, physicians--develop their ability to make the right decisions, so often, in an instant. A better understanding of how expertise is acquired might help educators teach more effectively. The article uses studies of chess grandmasters as a port-of-entry into this exploration of how experts are made not born. From Scientific American:

The history of human expertise begins with hunting, a skill that was crucial to the survival of our early ancestors. The mature hunter knows not only where the lion has been; he can also infer where it will go. Tracking skill increases, as repeated studies show, from childhood onward, rising in "a linear relationship, all the way out to the mid-30s, when it tops out," says John Bock, an anthropologist at California State University, Fullerton. It takes less time to train a brain surgeon.

Without a demonstrably immense superiority in skill over the novice, there can be no true experts, only laypeople with imposing credentials. Such, alas, are all too common. Rigorous studies in the past two decades have shown that professional stock pickers invest no more successfully than amateurs, that noted connoisseurs distinguish wines hardly better than yokels, and that highly credentialed psychiatric therapists help patients no more than colleagues with less advanced degrees. And even when expertise undoubtedly exists--as in, say, teaching or business management--it is often hard to measure, let alone explain.

Skill at chess, however, can be measured, broken into components, subjected to laboratory experiments and readily observed in its natural environment, the tournament hall. It is for those reasons that chess has served as the greatest single test bed for theories of thinking--the "Drosophila of cognitive science," as it has been called.

Link

UPDATE: And, from the new issue of Wired, here's Stephen Colbert's directions on how to "Be an Expert on Anything." Link

I just received volume #3 of the delightful Hi-Fructose art/pop/culture magazine and it's an absolute beauty. Inside, a conversation between Mark Ryden and Hi-Fructose founders Attaboy and Annie Owens, an interview with Jim Woodring, a remembrance of the legendary Marvin Glass (the toy designer behind Rockem Sockem Robots, Ricochet Racers, Astro Lite, Stay Alive, and a lot of other 1960s and 1970s fun), and much more. This issue also includes a special superbonus gift, a custom View-Master Reel of art toy photos by the amazing Brian McCarty. Receiving Hi-Fructose in the mail is like having a great pop surrealist gallery delivered right to your door. (At left, the cover of Volume #3 by Mark Ryden. At right, Brian McCarty's photo of Sam Flores's new vinyl figure Fatima.) Link

This morning, Vanity Fair Online posted some compelling audio to complement its story about about NORAD's response on the morning of September 11. Andrew Hearst, Vanity Fair's online editor, says: "The writer, Michael Bronner, based the piece on 30 hours of recordings from the NORAD control room that day -- recordings that have never been made public. For the online version of the piece, we've put up about 35 audio clips from the 9/11 NORAD tapes; the clips can be listened to one by one as you read through the piece. The audio functionality is pretty rudimentary, but it works. And it's an excellent and important story."

How did the U.S. Air Force respond on 9/11? Could it have shot down United 93, as conspiracy theorists claim? Obtaining 30 hours of never-before-released tapes from the control room of NORAD's Northeast headquarters, the author reconstructs the chaotic military history of that day—and the Pentagon's apparent attempt to cover it up.

Link

Men who are full are more attracted to skinny women; hungry men prefer heavier women.

They asked the men to rate how hungry they were on a scale of one to seven. Using these responses, the researchers selected 30 hungry and 31 satiated men to take part in the study.

The men were then asked to rate the attractiveness of 50 women of varying weights, all within a healthy range, who had been photographed wearing tight grey leotards and leggings.

The hungry men rated more of the heavier women as attractive than the men who were full up.

Link (via Kottke)

Steven "Everything Bad is Good for You" Johnson has had it with fake controversy articles about blogging that attack straw-men like "blogs will displace mainstream media" or "blogs are all about cats and angst." He's put together an excellent list of five things that aren't controversial about blogs, and suggests that "if you're writing an article or a blog post about this issue, and your argument revolves around one or more of these points -- and doesn't add anything else of substance -- STOP WRITING."

1. Mainstream, top-down, professional journalism will continue to play a vital role in covering news events, and in shaping our interpretation of those events, as it should.

2. Bloggers will grow increasingly adept at covering certain kinds of news events, but not all. They will play an increasingly important role in the interpretation of all kinds of news.

3. The majority of bloggers won't be concerned with traditional news at all.

4. Professional, edited journalism will have a much higher signal-to-noise ratio than blogging; examples of sloppy, offensive, factually incorrect, or tedious writing will be abundant in the blogosphere. But diamonds in that rough will be abundant as well.

5. Blogs -- like all modes of contemporary media -- are not historically unique; they draw upon and resemble a number of past traditions and forms, depending on their focus.

Link (via Kottke)

Lore "Brunching Shuttlecocks" Sjöberg, the humor columnist for Wired News, devotes this week's column to reviewing the summer's crop of movie tie-in breakfast cereals:

Superman Crunch
It's good to see Superman and Cap'n Crunch -- the two most powerful beings in the universe -- collaborating. Clearly they enjoyed working together, because this isn't just another damn boring cereal with unidentifiable marshmallows. No, this is regular, mouth-flaying Cap'n Crunch with red Superman insignias. OK, admittedly they don't have the actual "S" in the middle. And the low levels of quality control over on Crunch Island have resulted in the shapes looking like anything from a heart to the opening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but I give them points for trying. Even better, the cereal turns the milk blue. I have no idea how that works. The Superman symbols turn this kind of mottled, leprous purple, and the milk turns a lovely shade of blue, just like Aunt Beru used to make. And the flavor, well it tastes like Cap'n Crunch's Crunchberries, which is great, but at this point I'd take anything that would wash the taste of Ice Age 2 cereal out of my mouth.

Link

The AntiCraft is a goth/pagan crafting magazine; the current issue's theme is "danger." Link (Thanks, Savida!)

In Slate, Jack Shafer opines about the new "methamphetamine offender registries" that some states, including Tennessee and, later this year, Minnesota, are rolling out online. From Shafer's column:

What exactly will this punitive harassment accomplish? It certainly won't encourage meth offenders to assume a lawful place in society. Minnesota State Attorney General Mike Hatch, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party candidate for governor and no softie on the drug issue, considers the meth registry a referral service for users. "What better place to find a meth dealer than on an Internet Web site," Hatch said last week.

Link

Here's a gallery of shivs confiscated from a New Jersey prison 20 years ago:

The individual parts that make up a shiv tend to be everyday objects, innocent things furtively reconstituted as lethal weapons. Each design choice is essential, but what’s particularly notable is that shivs, at their core, are not so much evocations of minimalism as they are symbols of survivalism. A shiv is all about masked utility: it’s an innocuous object with improbably toxic intent (whether used to attack others or to protect oneself...).

Link (via We Make Money Not Art)

The most popular anti-virus programs -- Symantec, McAfee and Trend -- are the least effective, because new malware writers test their code against the best-used apps.

However, the actual reason why the top selling antivirus applications don't work is because malware authors are specifically testing their Trojans and viruses to make sure they can bypass these applications before releasing them in the wild.

"The most popular brands of antivirus on the market… have an 80 percent miss rate… So if you are running these pieces of software, eight out of 10 pieces of malicious code are going to get in," said Ingram.

Link (via Schneier)

Today on the Worth1000 photoshopping contest: adding snow to warm places. Christ, I wish Amazon would ship my swamp cooler already, I'm melting here. Link

In the Village Voice's Education Supplement, Rachel Aviv wrote a great short profile of Ronald Hoeflin, founder of four high IQ societies including the Top One Percent Society, One-in-a-Thousand Society, Prometheus Society, and Mega Society. From the article:

Hoeflin is fascinated by the idea of a "maximum human potential." Every afternoon, he goes to Wendy's in Hell's Kitchen and reads for several hours with a magnifying glass—he's legally blind—as preparation for his three-volume treatise, The Encyclopedia of Categories: A Theory of Categories and Unifying Paradigm for Philosophy With Over 1,000 Examples. He is kind, awkward, and modest, and tends to explain things with charts. When talking about his childhood, he goes to his bookshelf unprompted and offers the results of a personality test. "I should probably just show this to you," he says. "As you can see, I have this extreme sensitivity factor. So some things are really hard."

In college, Hoeflin joined Mensa, the largest IQ society, originally created after World War II as a forum for brilliant people to come up with political solutions. As more members joined, people became less preoccupied with world peace than with finding mates and doing puzzles. Hoeflin felt too shy for the group—on one occasion, he drove 50 miles for a meeting and then got nervous and turned around—and began associating with newer, more selective organizations.

Link