British police confirmed Saturday that they had raided a series of Internet cafes in their investigation into an alleged plot to blow up as many as 10 trans-Atlantic aircraft.

There was no confirmation of any arrests in the raids in London, Birmingham and the Thames Valley region, west of the capital. The raids came as links to suspected terror operatives in Pakistan -- possibly connected to al Qaeda -- were emerging Saturday as key elements of the investigation.

Suspects in the UK received a coded message from Pakistan to "attack now" as authorities there closed in on them, security sources have told CNN.

Officers swooped on Asian Spice in Wokingham Road, taking away hard drives and the café’s main server at around 3.30pm. The raid lasted around two to three hours. Saleem Cheema, aged 52, manager of Asian Spice, which also serves food, said: “We were out the back when they [the police] just came barging in.

“They showed their badges. Three of them were in uniform, the other three were in suits. They said, ‘We are from the Flying Squad and we are here under the Terrorism Act, we have got a warrant to search the place’, which they did.

“They have taken six hard drives and my main server. I was scared. I’m laughing now but at the time you get panicky. Somebody must have done something here on the net.”

Speaking of CNN, a reader email there indicates that if you're gellin', you're no longer flyin'.

I was not allowed to board a plane from Fresno to [San Francisco] yesterday (August 10) because my shoe insole was supposedly made of "gel".

Ragui Michael
San Francisco

3. Plaintiffs do not believe it appropriate to discuss a resolution of the case with the family so close to Mr. Scantlebury’s passing. Plaintiffs therefore request a stay of 60 days to allow the family additional time to grieve.

4. In the event the parties do not reach a resolution with Mr. Scantlebury’s estate or the other family members involved, Plaintiffs anticipate amending the complaint following depositions of members of Mr. Scantlebury’s family.

Update: Pyrogenique sez, "At E3, anyone who went to Will Wright’s presentation on Spore saw 3D printouts of Spore creatures lovingly displayed in the presentation room. You'll be able to order color 3D models of the creatures and buildings you create in the game. Obviously the release of this game will bring with it the end of Western civilization."

"I can assure the people of California that we're doing everything to keep them safe and to return our airports to normal operations as quickly as possible," he said. "We need the public's help and their patience."

I see.

Link (via Making Light)

Update: Sharon sez, "the Governator may have done that, but the city of Oakland has decided this is a political ploy and has turned down the offer of National Guardswomen & men for the Oakland Airport. Glad I live here in Oakland."

* Hands Off the Internet
* TV4US
* NetCompetition.org
* The Future... Faster
* Video Access Alliance

"Maybe you should let BB readers know, as a public service.

"What's also interesting here is that the web and the blogosphere (right and left) have been all over this notion for some time -- just Google 'August 22, 2006' with 'Iran' and see for yourself -- and the notion has been marginalized for being considered in electronic media. But now that the WSJ gets involved the story gains steam."

What is the significance of Aug. 22? This year, Aug. 22 corresponds, in the Islamic calendar, to the 27th day of the month of Rajab of the year 1427. This, by tradition, is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to "the farthest mosque," usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back (c.f., Koran XVII.1). This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world. It is far from certain that Mr. Ahmadinejad plans any such cataclysmic events precisely for Aug. 22. But it would be wise to bear the possibility in mind.

A passage from the Ayatollah Khomeini, quoted in an 11th-grade Iranian schoolbook, is revealing. "I am decisively announcing to the whole world that if the world-devourers [i.e., the infidel powers] wish to stand against our religion, we will stand against their whole world and will not cease until the annihilation of all them. Either we all become free, or we will go to the greater freedom which is martyrdom. Either we shake one another's hands in joy at the victory of Islam in the world, or all of us will turn to eternal life and martyrdom. In both cases, victory and success are ours."

In this context, mutual assured destruction, the deterrent that worked so well during the Cold War, would have no meaning. At the end of time, there will be general destruction anyway. What will matter will be the final destination of the dead--hell for the infidels, and heaven for the believers. For people with this mindset, MAD is not a constraint; it is an inducement.

Vincent Bautista, Sony's product manager for data storage, told CNET.com.au that due to copy protection issues and lagging software development, the drive will only play user-recorded high-definition content from a digital camcorder, and not commercial movies released under the BD format.

Bautista says that one of two reasons for this is the fact that commercial content is encrypted with High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP), which can only be decrypted using a HDCP-compliant graphics card that offers DVI or HDMI connections. Since there are currently no PCs for sale offering graphics chips that support HDCP, this isn't yet possible.

Update: I misread the original article; it's Sony's drives, not Playstations, that won't play Blu-Rays.

It seems to me like our glorious leaders are pretty good at setting out the "minor inconveniences" that the rest of us have to put up with, but when was the last time you heard of any of them enduring the same measures?

Now, GW Bush may say, "But I'm no terrorist! Why shouldn't I be able to bring my hip-flask onto Air Force One with me?" But I'm no terrorist either. I don't see why the man should be exempt from his own rules. If it's sauce for the goose, it's sauce for the butcher.

These people tell us that these are the necessary austerity measures in the extraordinary times. If FDR told us to fast on Wednesdays and turn our furnaces off on Fridays to help the war effort, I’d expect him to do the same, even if he had a bunker full of canned goods and his own private free energy heater. As far as I can tell, 100 percent of the "security measures" to "fight terrorism" apply to 0 percent of the people who makes those decisions.

Update: Via Randomness blog, the Not a Terrorist card. Probably about as effective at stopping terrorists as CAPPS II.

"Andrew Sullivan has an interesting take on [this], derived from Ron Suskind's recent book One-Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11, (which is, it's worth pointing out, generally and scathingly critical of the Bush administration):

Why liquids? What were these weapons? One possibility is hydrogen cyanide. Ron Suskind's book revealed the terrorist breakthrough in a device called a "mubtakkar" that can be easily concealed in a carry-on bag and once detonated, kills everyone in a confined space within minutes. It's a variant of the Zyklon B innovated by the Nazis.

"Takeaway: just because TSA staff are incompetently dumping passenger liquids in public doesn't mean there's not a legit concern here."

From the Wikipedia entry on Mubtakkar:

The mubtakkar is described as a small binary chemical device that would generate large amounts of hydrogen cyanide gas, which could potentially kill hundreds in an enclosed space. The components contained in two separate containers would not be lethal to humans if individually released, so these bombs can be assembled, stored, and transported without appreciable danger. However, when the device is put into operation it releases large quantities of a lethal gas.

Machinima movies are made by creating custom characters and levels in 3D video games, then moving the characters around, recording screen-movies, and adding in audio afterward. Link (Thanks, Paul!)

Please, Hollywood, I know you and I don't get along, but I'd consider it a personal favor if you could make the film version not suck!

Star Wars' Hayden Christensen will star in Jumper, Regency Enterprises' big-budget SF thriller being directed by Doug Liman, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Regency has partnered with 20th Century Fox to finance the production, which sources told the trade paper is budgeted in the $100 million range.

See also: Reflex: brilliant, page-turning sequel to Jumper (Thanks, Owen!)

This led us to hypothesize that Wikimedia’s template language had becoming Turing complete (the technical jargon for a full-powered programming language). We started digging and eventually were rewarded with recursive template substitution, which appears, at least at first glance, to be sufficient to implement the lambda calculus, and thereby perform as a Turing complete functional language. Hence, Wikimedia proves the Strong interpretation of Greenspun’s Tenth Rule: any sufficiently advanced system will contain a functional programming language. (Which, by the way, it appears I’ll have to Wikialize once I’m done this post…)

Since at least 1986, the FBI has been tracking down U.S.-based terrorists who fraudulently redeem Sunday newspaper grocery coupons to fund attacks. During the trial of the men who bombed the World Trade Center in 1992, investigators claimed that U.S.-based cells had raised $100 million by processing coupons through stores they owned in New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia. According to one report, about $500 million worth of the $3.8 billion in coupons distributed each year are redeemed fraudulently. For more details, see Ben Johnson Jacobson's 1998 testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committiee on Terrorism and Technology.

In 2006 Jacobson wrote us with an update: "Coupons are still a means of financial support for terror cells operating within the U.S. This has been demonstrated over the past few years by various arrests of terrorist sympathizers within the U.S. who have used grocery coupons to finance their activities."

Wreaks Q. Blurt 1910-2006

Wreaks Q. Blurt was born in Boise, Idaho in 1910. Possibly the unluckiest man in the whole of the state he went from mishap to mishap with alarming regularity. At high school he was riding his skateboard when he hit a stray yak that had escaped from the city zoo. Much to the amazement of his friends Wreaks did his first ever 360 with the yak’s help. It would have been an unheard of 720 had it not been for the flagpole. His teeth shot out with great velocity, a wisdom tooth breaking a window of the school, while an incisor ending up in the school mascot Pinky.

His wedding ceremony to Cynthia Snodgrass ran the whole range of calamities. Cynthia fainted at the altar, Wreaks fell into the cake, his aunty fell over dancing and showed her knickers and the horse hired for them to ride off into the sunset bolted. This was all good news for Wreaks’ brother, the lucky one of the family, who ended up minted after selling the video footage to You’ve Been Framed for a Blurt special.

Wreaks’ death came as a result of a drive-by shouting, a problem that is the scourge of Boise nowadays. A red Chevy cruised slowly alongside him one day, the teenagers inside started shouting insults on the way. Wreaks was so startled at this that he ran straight onto the railway lines. Luckily for him there was no train coming. However in his relief at realising this he failed to see the herd of stampeding buffalo.

I was pleased to see your entry showing the little figurine that was deposited on the Moon. There are also various medallions and souvenirs which have been placed by the various Apollo astronauts.

Perhaps the most poignant personal artifact left on the lunar surface was a Polaroid photograph, deposited by Charlie Duke on Apollo 16. According to NASA the picture was "taken by Loudy Benjamin, is shrink-wrapped and contains a message on the back which reads 'This is the family of Astronaut Duke from Planet Earth. Landed on the Moon, April 1972.' Underneath the message are the signatures of his wife and kids. (NASA Photo AS16-117-18841.)"

Reader comment: Karl adds:

Markus Mehring has an essay on this photo at Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, along with a rectifed closeup version of the picture. And here's Duke's photo in context with the other photos on the same Hasselblad roll.

Here's a fun little project I concocted this evening that might be fun for other flickrers/cartoonists/people with too much time on their hands to try. I drew and colored an alphabet over the space of an hour. It's kinda challenging.

Saturday, AUGUST 12, 11am-6pm
@ Meltdown Comics
7522 W Sunset Blvd. (btw LaBrea & Fairfax)
Los Angeles, CA 90029
ph: 323-851-7223

Link

Dave and Ben at the World's Fair say:

In short, the conjecture put forth so far has been amazing. Who would have thought that the 5 clues would provide such a bevy of conjecture, with adjectives that range from surreal, elaborate, tidy, silly, ingenius, and confusing? We've had about 200 contributions and near 10,000 folks pass through for a look see, and we are suitably impressed.

So impressed, that we felt the conjecture needed to be shown graphically, and presented as what we think is intellectually and aesthetically something beautiful to look at.

Except that the answer still hasn't been found. And in truth, we also seek some guidance on our next move. Perhap we can even leave a small clue right here at boingboing.net -- that is just to say that "If you get it, you'll know you got it."

Whiplash the Cowboy monkey is truly a fan favorite, he is an international star and a true cowboy. He is an 18 yr old Capuchin Monkey and he is one of the biggest little monkeys in the world. Whiplash has been riding since he was two yrs old and has been a part of our family since he was born. Whiplash travels the country herding up wild Barbados sheep at rodeos and special events. His riding ability is unmatched and his herding skills unchallenged but Whiplash never misses a chance to show his monkey heritage as he rides the dog he will pull the saddle from side to side and even hang off to one side mimicking an Indian hideaway.

Reader comment:

Matt says:

Whiplash the Cowboy Monkey appears in commercials for the Taco John's restaurant chain. Here is one on YouTube.

Many Tibetan refugees, including the Dalai Lama himself, settled in northern India after communist China invaded what it considered to be part of its territory beginning in 1950.

For years, Tibet has been a difficult place to get to for most Westerners, because of visa restrictions -- though these rules may soon be eased to facilitate tourism, according to a recent announcement by a communist party leader in Tibet. And tourists to Lhasa, the capital and ancient heart of Tibetan Buddhism, might find two very different cities.

Inside what's known as the Tibetan Quarter, the timeless rituals of faith unfold. At the ornate, massive Jokhang Temple in the heart of the quarter, visitors are greeted with the sights and sounds of prostrating pilgrims. They stretch flat on the ground, then rise up, palms clasped in prayer. The stone beneath is polished smooth from centuries of this devotional gesture. The towering Potala Palace, the Dalai Lama's former residence, dominates the horizon.

But just a short rickshaw drive away, a different world unfolds. Outside the Tibetan Quarter, Lhasa feels more like a modern Chinese city, full of blasting electronic music and looped recordings of shop-barkers, beckoning shoppers to come in and spend. The pace of change has never been faster than in the last decade.

New posts on the "reporter's notebook" blog for this project:
China may abolish travel permit requirement for Tibet

Image: A young Tibetan woman outside the Jokhang temple on the eve of Saga Dawa, the annual religious festival honoring the birth of Buddha. 2006, Xeni Jardin.

Previously:

Part 1: The Gaddi People of Dharamsala

Part 2: Connecting Tibet's Exile Community Via the Web

Part 3: A Wireless Network for 'Little Lhasa'

(special thanks to Rob Sachs and Alicia Montgomery, my producer and editor at NPR "Day to Day;" to Hutch; but most of all -- to Dr. M.X. Quetzalkanbalam, who graciously allowed me to accompany him on his trek, who conceived of this project, directed it, and made it all possible.)

The report, published on Wednesday, caused a row in India's lower house, where MPs from across the political spectrum brandished its findings as reason enough to ban the sale of Coca-Cola and Pepsi. "These companies are playing with the lives of millions and we can't ignore such warnings any more," said Vijay Kumar Malhotra, from the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, which staged a walkout over the issue .

It is not the first time Coca-Cola and Pepsi have found themselves mired in controversy in India. They are regular whipping boys for politicians who regard Western food products as a threat to Indian heritage, although sceptics suggest that their opposition has more to do with the companies' virtual monopoly of the market than genuinely held feelings of cultural protectionism.

The only piece of art on the moon (depending, we suppose, on one’s definition of art) is a 3"-tall aluminum sculpture titled "Fallen Astronaut." It was created by Belgian artist Paul Van Hoeydonck and installed by Apollo 15 astronaut David Scott, along with a plaque bearing the names of the 14 astronauts and cosmonauts who died in the service of space exploration.

In 1972, against the crew and NASA's wishes, Van Hoeydonck created 950 signed replicas of "Fallen Astronaut" and sold them for $750 a piece.

Reader comment: Liz Coster says:

This isn’t a panda, but a Yamanba lady! From wikipedia:

Yamanba (ヤマンバ?) sometimes written as "yamamba", is a fashion trend among Japanese young women. Starting with the bleached white hair and heavy tan of the ganguro girl, the yamanba adds white lipstick, white eye makeup, and sometimes brightly colored contacts, plastic clothing, and inappropriate accessories. Some yamanba wear stuffed animals as decorations, talk with a slurred speech, and enjoy shiny neon or dayglo colors. Some say that the result is a caricature of a blond Caucasian woman. The male equivalents are called "Center Guys".

The term yamanba comes from a mountain hag, known as Yama-uba, whom the fashion is thought to resemble.

In order to accomplish this, Microsoft has implemented many characteristics of the original Palladium model (now known as NGSCB) that has received a significant amount of criticism over the past several years.

While this is a noble effort, these new security technologies have a serious side effect. This side effect is that nobody, with the exception of Microsoft, can make changes to certain components of the Windows kernel. The PatchGuard functionality restricts any software that may be attempting to make extensions to the Vista kernel (even those attempting to do so for legitimate reasons). This includes techniques that are commonplace today such as system service dispatch table (SSDT) hooking and interrupt dispatch table (IDT) hooking to name a few.

Another disturbing side effect of this technology is that while legitimate security vendors can no longer make extensions to the Vista kernel (any attempt to circumvent these security features may only work temporarily), researchers and attackers can, and have, already found ways to disable and work around PatchGuard.

As a result of constant, semi-religious immersion in the works of J. G. Ballard and the early acquisition of a pilot's license, I have been fascinated, nay, obsessed with plane crashes for many years. Iowa hotelier/pilot Jay Honeck has built one of the freshest and best plane crash video repositories on the Web. Pilots worldwide vie to send him unusual and awful aviation accident vids.

Some people -- like the notorious Crashman and his Crash Groupies -- now take this questionable obsession to the next level and make music vids out of the oddly hypnotic crashes. Examples: YOU'RE GONNA MISS ME and HEAD OVER HEELS.

So CNN is reporting: "Because the plot involved taking liquid explosives aboard planes in carry-ons, passengers at all U.S. and British airports, and those boarding U.S.-bound flights at other international airports, are banned from taking any liquids onto planes."

And then they have the photo of the TSA guy dumping a tub of confiscated possibly explosive liquids into a garbage can in a crowd of people.

Figure that shit out for me.

Reader comments:

Gabe says

And check out this article from Asheville, NC. "Maya Leoni, who is held by Angela Perez, cries as her mother, A.J. Leoni, pours the last of her drink into the receptacle while in line for the security checkpoint at the Asheville Regional Airport."

POUR IT INTO A RECEPTACLE? Don't you think that some of these potentially explosive liquids might be more dangerous when, I don't know, mixed in a big vat in the middle of an airport?

Christ, why don't they just have people put their liquids into a big bonfire?

Drawing on [...] case studies, other research, and comments made by a cross-section of scholars, lawyers, librarians, and educators who participated in two day-long workshops organized as part of the project, the following emerged as the most significant copyright-related obstacles to educational uses of copyrighted material:

* Unclear or inadequate copyright law relating to crucial provisions such as fair use and educational use;

* Extensive adoption of "digital rights management" technology to lock up content;

* Practical difficulties obtaining rights to use content when licenses are necessary;

* Undue caution by gatekeepers such as publishers or educational administrators.

Update: Robotech Master sends in a link to a page about Dyar's tunneling habit:

During the 1920s Dyar's most peculiar hobby came to light. When a truck fell into a labyrinth of tunnels near Dyar's old home in 1924, newspaper speculation attributed these to World War I spy nests, Civil War trysts, and mad scientists. Eventually Dyar accepted responsibility for the tunnels and similar works behind his new home, saying he found relaxation in digging underground. The brick-walled tunnels extended for hundreds of feet and measured six by six feet.

Update 2: Charlie sends a pointer to "Baldasare Forestiere's incredible monument to industry and unrequited love near Fresno. It's got live trees bearing seven kinds of fruit with just their tops sticking out of the ground (providing natural air conditioning through leaf aspiration), a ball room, a glass-bottomed underground swimming pool, and numerous other marvels all built and excavated by a single man (derisively called the 'Mole Man' by locals) using simple hand tools between 1908 and 1946."

Update 3: Roninspoon sez, "I remembered a History Channel show I'd seen a few years ago called Secret Passages of the Cold War. One of the structures is featured was the home of Kenley Snyder. A business professor at Trinity Western University, he spent most of his free time for most of 30 years building a very elaborate, large, and professional quality bomb shelter under his home. He did all the digging and construction by himself and by hand. Apparently the house is now for sale."

Within the third of the ten files of user search queries AOL mistakenly released (user-ct-test-collection-03), there's a poem of sorts. Between May 7 and May 31 of this year, AOL user 23187425 submitted a series of more than 8,200 queries with no evident intention of finding anything - only a handful of the entries are paired with a search results URL. Rather, the author's series of queries forms a stream-of-consciousness soliloquy.

Whether it's fact or fiction, confession or invention, the search monologue is strangely compelling. It's a uniquely temporal literary form in that the server time stamps make the passage of time integral to the storytelling. It could be the beginning of a new genre of writing, or simply an aberation. But it does beg further explanation. What circumstances prompted the author to converse thus with AOL's search engine?

you come forward 2006-05-07 03:05:19

start to stay off 2006-05-07 03:06:04

i have had trouble 2006-05-07 03:06:41

time to move on 2006-05-07 03:07:16

all over with 2006-05-07 03:07:59

joe stop that 2006-05-07 03:08:36

i can move on 2006-05-07 03:09:32

give you my time in person 2006-05-07 03:10:07

never find a gain 2006-05-07 03:10:47

i want change 2006-05-07 03:11:15

know who iam 2006-05-07 03:11:55

curse have been broken 2006-05-07 03:12:30

told shawn lawn mow burn up 2006-05-07 03:13:50

burn up 2006-05-07 03:14:14

was his i deal 2006-05-07 03:15:13

i would have told him 2006-05-07 03:15:46

to kill him too 2006-05-07 03:16:18

It's doubtful user 23187425 ever intended these queries for publication. But AOL's decision to make the data available, despite subsequently removing the files, seems to render the issue of privacy moot. The files remain available online at sites like dontdelete.com. Having looked over the entries and found nothing really damning or invasive, I feel comfortable republishing this one user's queries.

I made two alterations to the list of user 23187425's queries to improve legibility: I added 10 spaces between the search term(s) and the time stamp, and I added blank lines to separate the queries by day. Let me know what you think.

CNN: "Terrorists planned to use MP3 players and energy drinks to blow up as many as 10 jetliners bound for the United States, authorities said Thursday. A senior congressional source said it's believed the plotters planned to mix a 'British version of Gatorade' with a gel-like substance to make an explosive that they would possibly trigger with an MP3 player or cell phone." Link
Previously:

Who the fuck brought this motherfucking beverage onto this motherfucking plane?

First, you have to create a new gamer profile and make it an Xbox Live "Silver" membership. It's free to create that new profile since the "Silver" membership is free, but there is a heck of a lot of data entry for contact information, not to mention the fact you need to give it an email address and password so it can sign on - just like a real profile. The representatives on the phone will tell you it doesn't matter what email address you give it, but from experience I know they send account notices and such to that email address, so it should probably be legitimate. Of course, that means if you don't have your own domain and/or can't figure out how to set up email address forwarding then you'll need to create a new, dummy Hotmail account or something. Super convenient.

Once you have the dummy gamer profile set up, Microsoft will credit that account with enough credits to go in and re-purchase all of the games you previously had unlocked. Getting that credit to come through takes eight-to-ten business days.

Inside the Gyuto Ramoche temple in the northern Indian city of Dharamsala, the scene is timeless, seemingly centuries old: Rows of scarlet-robed young monks from Tibet, hunched over prayer scrolls in mediation.

But outside, an antenna sits on a rooftop not far away. It's one of 30 connection points in a wireless network that's bringing the Internet to this remote region where communication technology has been expensive, unreliable and hard to come by -- until now.

The monks in meditation over those scrolls are a key inspiration for creating the wireless network. They are refugees from Tibet and part of a community of hundreds of thousands of refugees. Web access promises better communication, a path to preserve Tibetan culture and a way to tell their stories to the outside world.

Image: Inside a Gaddi family's barn on a hilltop, Phuntsok Dorjee (left) and another technician (whose name I don't have) set a solar-powered battery into place. 2006, Xeni Jardin.

Previously:

Part 1: The Gaddi People of Dharamsala

Part 2: Connecting Tibet's Exile Community Via the Web

And on the "reporter's notebook" blog associated with the series, a few new posts:

# China: Internet Companies Aid Censorship

# Dharamshala: "holy place"

# Economic tensions in Dharamshala

Give us a place to stand
And a place to grow
And call this land Ontario
A place to live.
For you and me
With hopes as high
As the tallest tree
Give us a land of lakes
and a land of snow
And we will build Ontario
A place to stand, a place to grow
Ontari-ari-ari-o !

The driver who endured the toughest commute over the old Wilson Bridge soon will get payback: Later this month, he or she will trigger detonation charges that will cut and bring down a nearly half-mile stretch of elevated steel girders that supported the old bridge over Jones Point Park in Alexandria, Virginia.

John Rollwagen, a colleague for many years, tells the story of a French scientist who visited Cray's home in Chippewa Falls. Asked what were the secrets of his success, Cray said "Well, we have elves here, and they help me". Cray subsequently showed his visitor a tunnel he had built under his house, explaining that when he reached an impasse in his computer design, he would retire to the tunnel to dig. "While I'm digging in the tunnel, the elves will often come to me with solutions to my problem", he said.

Update: Mr Bali Hai sez, "I worked for Cray Research from 1984-1996, and I can tell you that the story of him tunneling under his house is largely a fabrication made up by John Rollwagen to enhance Seymour's reputation as a quirky, visionary genius (which he was, but not because he was digging tunnels under his house). What actually transpired involved Seymour having some excavation work done on his basement by contractors. As far as I know, none of them were elves. Rollwagen also took an incident where Seymour burned a sailboat at his lake house and turned it into a mythic tale of Cray building a new sailboat every year, then burning it so he could design and build a new one the following year."

Update: Colin sez,

The makers of the In-Lock make some pretty bold claims. First of all, the stake looks like it is less than 12 inches long with screw threads that are only about 3 inches in diameter. It really would not take much effort to overcome the "physics" that they claim secures into the ground. Along those same lines, they claim that "physics" prevents the screw from being turned because a chain runs through the stake. Well, this would only be true if your chain were either extremely stiff or so short that the stake was right up against the bike wheel. Otherwise, you could certainly turn the stake at least 180 degrees in either direction, more than enough to get you started in championing their indominatable "physics".

Update 2 David sez, "How it should work: The bar you use for leverage to put the screw in the ground should also be a stake. After putting in the screw, you put the stake through a hole on the side of the screw's head and into the ground, then lock the stake in place (relative to the screw) with a regular lock."

Update 3: Phil sez, "Have two of those suckers. Screw them into the ground 2 feet apart, with the open eyes facing each other. Run a 3-foot long eyebolt through both eyes; padlock the eyebolt to one of the eyes so that the bolt is now locked through both anchors and can't be removed. Lock bikes anywhere along the eyebolt between the anchors. With the eyebolt through both anchors, neither one will turn."

The point of terrorism is to make us afraid. The UK response to a foiled plot is to create an unspecified period during which fliers are arbitrarily deprived of iPods, novels and dignity.

If this is a good idea now, then why won't it still be a good idea in a year? A decade? After all, terrorist plots will always exist in potentia (can you prove that no terrorist plots are hatching at this moment?) Until they handcuff us all nude to our seats and dart us with tranquilizers, there will always be the possibility that a passenger will do something naughty on a plane (even then, who knows how much semtex and roofing nails a bad guy could hide in his colon?).

I flew from the UK to the US about fifty times in the past 36 months. Speaking as someone who's neck would be on the line if a terrorist got onto a plane, I'd take my chances with the iPods and novels and dignity. Link (via Plastic Bag)

Update: The TSA has also prohibited liquids on flights -- thanks, druidbros.

Update 2: Kelaine sez, "The Canadian transport authority just announced that they were also following the no liquids policy! WTF? I'm in Paris right now and flying uber-cheap Zoom back to Alberta. Zoom makes you pay for extra on-board beverages. I always take two bottles of water with me for trans-Atlantic flights."

Update 3: Wise words from the Hello World blog: "I’m sure they didn’t catch these guys in Britain because one of them was trying to sneak baby formula onto a plane–they caught him through the standard channels of surveillance and investigation that are both more effective and less obtrusive than these constant checkpoints and useless regulations. There are tons of things going on behind the scenes to which we in the public aren’t privy, and although those mostly-secret actions have their own issues at least they aren’t essentially public relation moves."

Update 4: Dan sez, "From the Gatwick airport web page today:

"In brief: Hand baggage restrictions are in place; Passengers will be handsearched; Footwear and all items (including pushchairs and walking aids) must be x-ray screened; Liquids will be removed from the passenger."

Update 5:
Despite the obvious risks (choking, stabbing, tripping), the Transport Security Agency has declined to ban toy Transformer robots from flights originating in America. Liquids are still prohibited, though (no spittin'!) -- thanks, Dave!

Update 6: Jason Gill sez, "I am in the Atlanta airport as I write this; security is a zoo today with many around me complaining of hour long waits. Not only are liquid drinks prohibited, but we were checked for anything even semi-liquid. My girlfriend had to discard lipgloss, lotion, etc. We were told that even deoderant is prohibited and a recording played every few minutes at the gate warns that shampoo and toothpaste are banned. The overpriced perfume/lotion/makeup store is humorously still open past the security checkpoint, but TSA overlords are performing random bag searches and body pat-downs in the gate area.

"As I sit waiting for my turn to board now, a prerecorded announcement informed me that there would be no meal service but that 'Delta always welcomes its passengers to bring their own food and beverages aboard.' Hah."

Update 7: Ze Frank has an amazing episode of The Show up already, devoted to commentary on this.

Update 8: Mark sez, "One more for you: A passenger was told to unwrap her banana at Dulles today.  Seriously."

This guy has been digging huge tunnels under his house in London, and beyond to the neighbours house and under the road, for 45 years and the council are stepping in to fill them with concrete. Nobody's quite sure how far they stretch but in 2001 the pavement collapsed and you could see a few tunnels veering off underground. He's certainly got down to the water table. Mad story.

Reader comment: Derrick Schneider says:

There's an old book by Mick Jackson, called The Underground Man, about an old duke building tunnels under his estate (or having them built; can't quite remember). Perhaps it's an English affliction, though hopefully your guy doesn't go the same route as The Underground Man, who, if memory serves, ends the book with a self-trepanation (yeee).

From the Amazon.com write-up:

Through a fictional journal, Jackson constructs a portrait of William John Cavendish-Bentinck-Scott, fifth Duke of Portland (d. 1879), a prodigious eccentric best known for the elaborate network of tunnels he built beneath his estate. The duke is portrayed as a repressed hypochondriac, an old man morbidly curious about the workings of his body and mind. During the months encompassed by the novel, he grows increasingly obsessed with the fleeting bits of memory that intrude upon his ruminations and hint at some horrific, long-buried secret. A prime example of the psychological bent of the contemporary British neo-Gothic novel, this first novel from a British filmmaker and teacher of creative writing explores the darker fringes of consciousness. A subdued, though peculiarly compelling, tale. -- Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, Mass.

I read the ("Death of Garfield?") post a couple of days ago and was intrigued because I was scheduled to have a business meeting with Jim Davis in just a couple of days (I work for Hallmark). Well, I had that meeting at Paws (Davis' company) yesterday and I used the opportunity to ask him just exactly what he had in mind when he wrote those strips. The answer was simple. He was not inspired by any cartoon (though I could certainly see why the other commenter might believe so). Garfield is NOT dead, nor is he starving to death (Jim actually laughed loudly when I suggested these theories). It was simply a week before Halloween and Jim wanted to do something legitimately scary, as opposed to Halloween-scary. "Ghosts aren't scary..." he told me before explaining that before writing the strips he went around to everyone he knew and asked them what truly scared them. The answer he got most often was "being alone" or "dying alone". Just that simple.

I mentioned the post to Jim and he seemed tickled. I told him that I intended to set the record straight and he seemed fine with it. As a matter of fact he was unaware of the many internet-circulated theories about the strips (it took him a moment to even understand which strips I was talking about).

I have to admit that I am more than a little thrilled to have had the opportunity to address (and resolve) something that so many are speculating about. A rare opportunity indeed...

Reader comment: Army of Darkness says:

Pretty old in the Spanish side of the net... People still wonder if it was real or not. The story behind this was that someone found the frog in the "canónigos" (I don't know the English name for this vegetable) bag he bought and was trying to sue the company Florette SA. This company is known for sometimes letting these amphibians make their ways into the salad bags, usually dead unlike this one.

If this is a fake then it's not just a photoshopped image since there was a youtube video where you could see the frog breathing and moving inside the bag, that was unfortunately deleted by the user.

Proof: Spanish blog page that still links to the no-longer-available video, letting you see only a random frame before clicking the play button.

Even though users' screennames have been replaced by unique ID numbers to hide their identity, you can learn a lot about the person from their searches, and maybe even find out who they are.

Look what Declan McCullough learned about AOL user 2708:

Whoever wrote that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned had clearly never experienced the Internet. For a three-month period, AOL user 2708, apparently a resident of the greater Boston area, was searching for little else.

Her search terms suggest that she signed up her ex-boyfriend for Columbia House CDs, articles on "gay life," and Christian literature--while shopping for women's Harley Davidson boots. User 2708's ex apparently lives in New Hampshire:

• revenge tactics
• the woman's book of revenge
• dirty tricks for chicks
• voice changer
• how to humiliate someone
• bill me pay later for cd's
• scams to play on people
• how to get revenge on an old lover
• i hate my ex boyfriend
• how to really make someone hurt for the pain they caused to someone else
• columbia house
• advice from women who have seeked revenge on old lovers
• makehimsuffer.com
• how to say goodbye hurtfully
• how to report child neglect in the state of new hampshire
• free articles on gay life that can be mailed to me
• free christian things
• free gay magazines
• free angry stuff to send to an ex lover
• how to permanently delete information from your hard drive
• makehimpay.net
• women's harley davidson boots
• www.match.com
• the worst thing to send someone via email
• thong dancewear
• locatecell.com
• what can i do to an old lover for revenge
• mean revenge tactics
• death records in hampstead new hampshire

If you search on "2708" you can sort of piece together this person's unfortunate life story during the last several months. Link

Reader comments:

Paul Boutin says:

To see all of anyone AOL user's searches in the Splunk index, click on the AOL-assigned ID number at the very start of the entry. Splunk returns all matching searches, sorted in reverse chronological order.

To plot search results, click "Show Events by Time."

The typeahead in the search box is fun, too. You can see that 622 searches for "boingboing" are in the index.

Kevin says:

Heres a New York times article detailing an AOL user that was tracked down by reporters after AOL released 3 months of search engine data by 657,000 users assinged "anonymous" numbers. It makes me feel good they found a nice old lady at the end of it all. I guess they steered clear of tracking down the guy searching for various types of pornography over and over -- would not have made such a heart warming piece. I think we all knew this process was / is possible, but its nice to be reminded.

We’re pretty big fans of MAKE (in both print and blog format), so we were stoked to hear about their new Tools-N-Tips section which consists of “tools and tips that MAKE authors and fellow readers love the most,” all of which come from their massive list of writers, contributors, and readers. They’re also going to publish a bi-weekly newsletter featuring the best of the tools and tips submitted recently. We’re going to sign up, and we suggest that you do as well.

A variety of explanations for the spurt and its source are emerging. One theory, according to several Web developers and analysts, is that spammers are seeking to thwart spam filters by confusing them. Spammers sometimes embed passages of this type of story text, also known as "hashbusting text," throughout their spam message in a bid to pass as legitimate email. (Spam filters may classify certain mail as spam if its combination of words and phrases deviates too widely from those typically found in legitimate email.) By sending spam consisting only of this story text, they are hoping that users will report it as spam, throw the filters off and make them less able to catch malicious spam later on, according to this theory.

Others, arguing that most spam filters are far too advanced to be thrown off by this technique, posit a different explanation. Richi Jennings, an email security analyst at Ferris Research, a San Francisco-based market-research firm, says the "empty spam" is most likely caused by a communication failure between the server originating the spam and the infected computers sending it.

Most spam is first sent by a host server and then modified and pushed out by virus-infected computers known as zombies. If the host and the zombies aren't communicating, either because the host has been shut down or as a result of some software glitch, the zombies could be sending blank emails with the "hashbusting text" tagged on, he argues. The likelihood of both possibilities is increasing, he says, as Internet companies remove spam servers from the network.

I recently completed an illustration for MAKE Vol 7 that required an image of a dollar bill (shown here; click here for enlargement). Ironically, the purpose of the illustration was to show people how to detect counterfeit money, not how to make counterfeit money. I wonder if this will assuage the concerns expressed by the caller?

I had no problem using Photoshop to scan the dollar bill and paste it into Adobe Illustrator, but I'm glad Deke figured out a workaround to help other illustrators who use currency in their art and photography.

Here, for your enjoyment, is the voice mail. The gentleman's language is colorful, so be careful listening to it at work. Link

Reader comment:

Matt H says:

I fear that you may have a torrent of angry voice mails, all complaining about the subversive, seditious nature of your posts. All in hopes of getting a few minutes of fame for coming up with angry responses. Maybe this is the next big "Web 2.0 Killer App," a service that records your voice, extracts phonemes, and then uses RSS, a Bayesian filter, and a light sprinkling of AI to construct an angry response. It then scans the DNS registration for the site to find a phone number and uses the PSTN relay found with many VoIP services to dial up the listed office phone number to deliver the complaint.

You've tweaked the pink boys. Well done, Sir! Well Done!

The most disturbing aspect of the Captain Copyright advertising campaign is the targeting of children with propaganda-style tools. Advertising Standards Canada, a self-regulating trade association, reminds us that advertising to children is illegal in Quebec and its Canadian Code of Advertising Standards provides guidelines for the rest of Canada. It explicitly states that exploiting children's credulity, lack of experience or sense of loyalty is forbidden. As an entity mandated by law, Access Copyright should be held to the highest standards of accuracy and should carefully reconsider Captain Copyright in light of the Code.

CLA believes that any copyright advocacy initiative intended to be used directly by children or in the classroom by teachers should be developed, if required, by the institutions which represent the education community, like the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada, the Canadian Teachers' Federation, and with the library community. Captain Copyright is a unilateral initiative on the part of Access Copyright and reflects its own perception, not the broader Canadian perspective.

Now Dave Zatz reports that his TiVo has refused to store his recording of a 37-year-old movie on Fox, giving him 24 hours to watch it before it expires.

No law required TiVo to take this functionality away from its customers. Indeed, it's arguable that when you bought your pre-Macrovision TiVo, you bought a machine that could record anything aired, and that by changing the deal so that now you can only record some things, TiVo has broken its contract with you. Link (Thanks, Thomas!)

When the Dalai Lama fled Chinese rule of Tibet in 1959, he found refuge just across the western border in India. Waves of refugees followed their spiritual leader out of the once-isolated kingdom when India provided them with land. Today, nearly 50 years after that first exodus, more than 100,000 people of Tibetan heritage live in the area. The Dalai Lama and leaders of the Tibetan government-in-exile now call the northern village of Dharamsala their home.

Even though two full generations of Tibetans have grown up outside their native land, the Tibetan community is still very close-knit, and many still harbor dreams of returning to a country free of Chinese domination -- something unlikely to happen any time soon.

But with the help of some technology experts from the West, the Tibetan community in India hopes to get the word out about their cause via the viral grapevine that is the Internet. It's an enormous challenge. Electricity, phones and Internet access are expensive and hard to come by. Phone lines can go down for days at a time, leaving the region cut off from the world. But there's an effort under way to change that, and to teach young Tibetan refugees about computers and the Web.

And over at xeni.net/trek I've posted a few new items on the related "reporter's notebook" blog from this project:

* Corrected by a monkey: the meaning of "rinpoche."

* Gear notes: my sound recording equipment

* Biker gangs of the Tibetan plateau: nomads on motorcycles

* Tibetan photojournalist Lobsang Wangyal

* Tigga, please: wannabe gangsta-ism among Tibetan refugee teens

Previously: Hacking the Himalayas, Part 1.

Under the direction of a computer savvy crime boss, the thieves collected credit card numbers from an unscrupulus gas station attendant in London and uploaded the electronic information to the magnetic strips on the back of phone cards. Then they caught a flight to India.

Since the Indian ATMs only had single point verification the gang was able to exploit the technology gap all across Tamil Nadu and netted a neat sum. They would have gotten away with it, too. The police didn't have a clue it was happening, and it was only when an unusually attentive security guard posted outside an ATM noticed a man withdrawing cash from multiple cards in succession that he was able to tip off the cops.

Update: Peter sez, "No emailing took place; the fake cards were made in the UK (apparently using phone cards), and then the thieves flew to India with the cards.

"The criminals are Sri Lankan, but the withdrawals all took place in India (Tamil Nadu is a state in southern India; since the criminals are Sri Lankan, I'd guess they're Sri Lankan Tamils, who could operate more easily in Tamil Nadu than could Sinhalese Sri Lankans)."

Update: Steve sez, "This reminds me of a great motel/trailer park in Bisbee, AZ, where all the rooms you can rent are old trailers, some Airstream, some other brands. I stayed there once and it was a great experience. Inexpensive too. It's called the Shady Dell."

The person being sued may have never shared a file, or logged on to a P2P network. They haven't been convicted of any crime involving copyright protected material, nor have they been charged with one. They've simply been sued in a "civil" action. In the United States, anyone can sue anyone else for anything at any time. It's quite possible (and maybe even more likely than not) that these average people didn't violate anyone's copyright.

In any event, the burden of proof for a civil suit is much lower than that of a criminal prosecution. There is no possible way that anyone who has been sued by the RIAA could be convicted of any crime with the evidence the RIAA collects.

RU SIRIUS: What's funny about open source or Web 2.0?

HEATHER GOLD: I call it that because I let the audience participate in the live shows that I do… I thought, what if I didn't write all the jokes? What if I'm not the only funny person? Because I was doing this Internet roast during the dot-com boom where I was making fun of stuff at SXSW and people in the audience were hilarious. I was doing some joke like… "Anybody else here have repetitive stress industry?" And it was like, "We can't raise our hands."

My wife is beneficiary of a trust administered by a reputable bank in New York. Today someone from the bank called seeking information that (she said) was required by the Patriot Act. Well...

Where, I was asked, did the money in the trust come from?

As the bank knows, I said, the trust was established by my wife's mother, Mrs G.

Where did Mrs G get that money? I explained that she inherited it from her mother, Mrs B.

Where did Mrs B get money? From her husband, who pre-deceased her.

Where did Mr B get the money? I said I thought he was a stock broker but wasn't sure. Should I ask my wife? No, that's good enough information, thanks very much. And my caller went away, satisfied.

I can understand that the government could be interested if someone now shows up with a large sum of money. Did that money come from some sort of illegal enterprise. However, Mr B. my wife's grandfather, died in 1953, 53 years ago. Of what possible use could it be to the government to know how he made his money, particularly if (apparently) it's not important if I answered correctly?

Moreover, how much taxpayer money is spent gathering such information?

I found your post on the bank calling a man about his wife's trust fund rather ironic, considering that Bush's granddaddy, Prescott was in charge of a company called 'Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation' that was run by slave labor from Auschwitz during the German occupation of the area. He was put in charge of managing the company and even a portion of the slave labor after Union Banking bought the company from Fritz Thyssen, who was worried about it being destroyed by the Allies. When the Allies released seized assets of CSSC due to the death of Thyssen, all American shareholders quietly sold their shares. Prescott made 1.5 million dollars off of this, and George H.W. Bush, his son, put it into a blind trust fund. Today, that money is worth around 15 million bucks, a good portion of the Bush estate's value.

I wonder what he would say if a bank called up and asked the president about this under the Patriot Act.

We're doing two events with Make Magazine this weekend, a launch party on Saturday for the Backyard Biology issue, and a USB hacking workshop on Sunday. We hope to see you there.

Make Magazine Issue #7 (Backyard Biology) Launch Party
Saturday August 12, 8pm
Machine Project
1200 D North Alvarado Street, Los Angeles

Lately when we tell people about the classes at Machine Project, they say, “Oh, like Make Magazine“. So we’ve decided to embrace the confusion and host a launch party for the new issue of Make. Jed Berk will be there to talk about autonomous flocking behaviour in robotic blimps, Make editor Mark Frauenfelder will be there to introduce the new issue and chat with you about general makery, and Issue 7 (Back Yard Biology) will be there for you to peruse and purchase, which includes an article on making a home mushroom growing lab by our friend Phil Ross. Link

USB power supply hacking 101 - Sunday August 13th 1pm - 4pm

Speaking of classes, Sunday we will be leading a workshop on USB power supply hacking. Based on two articles in the new issue of Make by Erica Sadun, we will go over how USB power works, how to make a USB powered fan (or other small device), and how to make a 9v battery powered usb charger. Then we’ll plug the USB fan into the USB charger and your head will explode. Along the way we’ll explore some basic laws of electricity and learn how to solder. All materials and a copy of the new issue of Make Magazine #7 included. $75.

We expect this class will fill rapidly. If there is sufficient demand we will offer another session in the morning from 9-12. Registration and more information link.

I've tried several different ways to play my computer's MP3s on speakers around the house, but each one fell short in some significant way. Either the wireless range was too short, or it interfered with my WiFi, or the system's controls and interface were so clunky that it was too much of a hassle to use.

Experiencing the Sonos after struggling with these other systems for years was astonishingly pleasant. Finally, somebody has done digital music right. Sonos is a beautiful system that matches Apple's products in terms of slickness and ease-of-use. I got the Sonos ZP80, a package that comes with with two ZonePlayers — white cubes that are approximately the size of a Mac Mini. These can be connected into any stereo, radio, or home theater system. The ZonePlayers don't require an AC adapter — the power supply is built in, so all you have to do is plug the ZonePlayer into the wall. One ZonePlayer must be directly connected to your home router, but the other ZonePlayers can communicate with the system wirelessly. (There is a way to use Sonos completely wirelessly, but it's an unsupported feature.) You can use up to 32 ZonePlayers on one network.

The controller looks and acts a lot like an iPod, with a 3.5-inch full color display and a touch wheel. It has a motion detector, so it comes to life when you pick it up, and a light sensor to illuminate the buttons when it's dark. Even with these energy-saving features, the battery life isn't great. I have to recharge the remote controller every two or three days, but that's a small price to pay for having complete control of your home music system in your hand.

I've set up several wireless networks over the years, and each time, I got snagged on some arcane configuration detail that had me running to Google for help. Not so with the Sonos. I installed the Sonos software on an old eMac I keep running in the laundry room. (Sonos works with Mac and Windows). The software slurped up all the MP3s on the machine as well as the iTunes playlists. (Sonos can't play songs purchased from the iTunes music store, because Apple does not allow other hardware makers to decode the DRM it uses to scrambles the songs with. No matter -- I don't buy songs from the iTunes music store because I don't like being prevented from playing my music on non-Apple players. People are nuts to buy music from the iTunes store, if you ask me.)

I attached one of the ZonePlayers to my Ethernet router and pressed two buttons on it. The Sonos software recognized it and prompted me to give it a name (I chose "TV Room"). I attached the other ZonePlayer to my home stereo system, pressed the buttons, and Sonos asked me to give it a name ("Living Room"). I also got a ZonePlayer 100, which has a built-in 50W amplifier, and a pair of speakers, and I put that in the kitchen and called that zone "Kitchen."

I was expecting that there'd be more to the set-up process, but that was it. I didn't need to consult the manual to use the controller because the interface, controls, and display are very well-thought out. It's very easy to select any one of the three zones and start playing music. You can have different playlists going in different zones, or you can link zones together to play the from the same queue. You can control the volume of each Zone separately, or all at once.

You can play Internet radio with Sonos, and add stations that aren't already on its list. It also plays Rhapsody if you have a subscription. I don't, but I'm considering it now. I'm also considering getting a 500 GB NAS hard drive to store the music that the Sonos system plays.

My wife usually complains when I introduce a new technology into our lives. This is the first thing since TiVo that she really digs. My daughters like it, too -- I have a playlist for my seven-year-old and one for my three-year-old. I'm listening to as much music as I did when I was in college. Sonos really has brought back music into my life. Link

Part one of the four-part radio series is The Gaddi People of Dharamsala. This nomadic Hindu tribe has lived in the shadows of the Himalayas in Northern India for generations. Before Tibetan refugees and Western tourists arrived, they were the dominant ethnic group -- but as development looms, their culture is changing. Link to archived radio segment, and here's a direct link to photo slideshow with an original composition by Gaddi folksinger Sunil Rana (Flash with sound)

I put together a "reporter's notebook" blog around the project at xeni.net/trek (here's the RSS feed). I'll be posting links to each of the radio, print, video, and online reports I'm filing from the trip. I'll continue following these stories here after the reports from my trip have all aired. But I'll also post the scribbled footnotes that didn't make it in.

Video, snapshots, audio snippets, branches of these stories you just can't cram into 7 on-air minutes. The little daily details that comprise life on the road -- including HOWTO production info, and reviews of the production hardware and software I tested out on the road from Apple, Canon, Skype, Inmarsat, Palm, and other tech gear providers.

Images: (Xeni Jardin, 2006).

Top -- Gaddi women singing prayers as they climb a rocky path to the shrine in Kanyara village, Himachal Pradesh, India. Middle -- A Gaddi child seeks rest in mom's arms, while women pray to the local goddess of slate. Bottom -- A Gaddi woman in ceremonial dress paints holy symbols on river rocks.

I shot these photos and most others along the trip with a Canon 5D, and a 24-70 2.8L USM and 70-300 4.5-5.6 DO IS USM lenses. Images were later sorted, tweaked, and prepped with Apple's terrific photo content management app, Aperture. More on that later!

(Special thanks to my NPR producer Rob Sachs, and my editor Alicia Montgomery).

Saturday night, shortly after that oxalic acid rant, I think I started cracking up. If ever there were a reason not to work alone in lab, this is it. I was standing in front of the rotovap watching the toluene crawl over, ie watching paint dry, when I started idly picking my ear. A huge chunk of wax came out. I stared at the gooey mass and wondered to myself what’s in there?

I had a vague recollection of a 5.08 lecture about the biosynthesis of cholesterol from squalene, and how the latter is a major component of earwax. There’s at least one way to test that hypothesis. I had NMR time anyway so I figured what the hell. I scoped all 36 milligrams of my waxy secretion into a test tube and took it up in CDCl3. I was expecting it to go into solution freely, but there was a mass of material that wouldn’t dissolve even with sonication[1]. So I filtered it through Celite and ran 16 scans on the 400 (vide supra)[2].

Did I ever say it? I am the son of Sluggo, who carelessly wasted the best of his dew kissed days, and who looked neither forward nor back, choosing instead to lovingly know each day platonically and lay down with every dusk and know it carnally.

Sluggo, whose gaze fell when they passed the hat. Sluggo, for whom every cooling pie was a gift from God. Sluggo, the enemy of effort, the opposite of opposition.

「モノ」を作り出すテクノロジーが現在のPCと同じように安価に手に入り、専門的な知識がなくても自分の作りたいものを容易に作ることができる時代が近づいています。オープンソースがソフトウェアの世界を変えたように、「工業の個人化」と「ハードウェアハッキング可能な機器の普及」によって変わるテクノロジーと私たちとの関係を伝えるのが『Make』です（英語版は季刊誌として発行されていますが、日本語版は英語版を再構成した書籍シリーズとして刊行されます）。その中心をなすのは実際に手を動かして楽しむ「プロジェクト」の紹介。安価な材料や中古製品を利用して、実用的な「モノ」を作る方法をステップバイステップで解説します。他に、先進的な取り組みを行っている研究者のインタビューや、ガレージで生み出されるユニークなガジェットを紹介するコラム、ティム・オライリーをはじめ充実した執筆陣のエッセイなど読み物記事も豊富に掲載しています。洗練された誌面デザインも特徴です。日本語版Vol.1のプロジェクトでは「凧にカメラをぶら下げて空中撮影を行う方法」「ビデオデッキを改造して猫の給餌機を作る方法」「水道管で作るカメラスタビライザー」などを取り上げます

There's an interesting piece in the Riverside (CA) Press-Enterprise about a woman who got her house toilet papered and decided to hunt down the culprits. She didn't want to involve the police, reasoning that they had better things to do, so she took the following steps:

* She canvassed local stores to see which one had a run on toilet paper.

* She then got the manager of the store to show her surveillance videos, allowing her to see the personalized letterman's jacket of one of the purchasers, as well as the license plate of the vehicle they got into.

* Finally, she used a high school yearbook (matched to the school based on the letterman's jacket) and online databases to get the names, phone numbers and addresses of all the teens spotted in the store tapes.

To me, this is a bit more than a "talker" feature. One takeaway, IMHO, is that we're pretty far down the road to sheepdom when average citizens start thinking "well, everything's monitored all the time anyway - let's see if I can make use of that."

Reader comments:

Garrett says:

I saw the story you posted on BB about the tp detective. I think you're being a little bit selective in what you posted there. The full story lists how it wasn't just an innocent tp incident, the woman's cars were vandalized, her lawn fixtures damaged and her lawn ruined with dog food and flour. The kids she tracked down are facing felony charges, and I know from bitter experience that means they did hundreds of dollars in real, not just tp damages. Don't you think, taking that into account, it's a bit more clear why she persued this matter with such vigor? Portraying it as just a tp'ed house makes her actions look alot more extreme.

Roger Krueger says:

Here's another busted-by-grocery-store-video story, some teens building dry-ice bombs.

Update: Val Smith sez, "One thing to note is that offensive computing is a new group of its own, which is affiliated with cdc. I am the founder of offensive computing."

In the course of a contract dispute, the city of Hoboken had police escort the Robotic employees from the premises just a few days before the contract between both parties was set to expire. What the city didn't understand or perhaps concern itself with, is that they sent the company packing with its manuals and the intellectual property rights to the software that made the giant robotic parking structure work...

When it's working, the robotic garage is a wonder. It allows twice the parking of a traditional ramp garage, says Robotic's Clarke. "If you back off and look at this, you are looking at elevator technology."

"Wonkavator" might be more apt. The lifts act independently of each other, and move in many directions, instead of just up and down. Every entry/exit station can accommodate 40 cars per hour, and every space is essentially a separate machine acting cooperatively. As the lot is used, it learns when particular cars tend to be picked up and dropped off and shuffles its load to optimize pickup time.

Update: Kip sez, "Here's an hourlong radio version by the Theatre Guild, available as a free download sample ('The first one's free!') at OTRcat.com (Old Time Radio Catalog, presumably)."

Michael of Catalogue of Ships wrote: "[I]t's all true. Even the part about the customer service guys chasing a woman through the airport to try to steal her cell phone. Yes, USAir, or US Airways, or America West or whatever the heck they call themselves these days actually aggressively attack their customers when they cannot help them." Link

In The Exodus Decoded, a 90-minute documentary that will be shown in America this month, Cameron and Simcha Jacobovici, the Canadian film producer, claim a volcanic eruption on the Greek archipelago of Santorini triggered a chain of natural catastrophes recorded in the Bible as the 10 plagues that God visited upon Egypt as punishment for enslaving the Jews.

Cameron believes the parting of the Red Sea may have been a tsunami that destroyed the pharaoh’s army as it pursued the escaping Jews. The documentary claims the episode occurred not at the Red Sea but at the smaller Sea of Reeds, a marshy area at the northern end of the Gulf of Suez. An underwater earthquake may have released poisonous gases that turned the waters red.

Operating on the surface means that SCOUTs can take advantage of such technology as wireless Internet and global positioning systems (GPS), which don't work underwater. Researchers are thus free to focus on fine-tuning other necessary robot functions, such as navigation -- all with the goal of creating a team that works so seamlessly that a lot of communication isn't necessary.

"In order to be effective with robots in the water, you'd best not have a plan that relies on a lot of communication," (MIT research engineer Joseph) Curcio said. "To be effective with a fleet of vehicles and have them do something intelligent, what you really need to do is have the software be so robust that communication between the vehicles can be kept to a minimum."

Italian for "Two Heads", the instrument is made from aluminum, wood, drum heads, and contains piezo pickups.

The Due Capi was invented and created by Oliver DiCicco of the group Mobius Operandi.

9:13 -- Scoped out a few square inches of squatting turf near the media entrance on third floor. Open laptop. Waiting for doors to open. Tom Neumayr, iPod product manager at Apple, warns me about a "giant whooshing sound" and subsequent aftershock when hordes of developers pour in to grab seats. Engadget and Gizmodo dudes are around, too, and they're already posting with tons of pics: Eng, Giz.

9:31 -- a few rows up, Steve Jobs chatting with Applefolk. He's wearing... wait for it!... a black long-sleeved tee, and jeans.

9:45 -- The Whoosh.

10:00 -- WWDC-tailored video clip of Mac/PC guys. "PC" tells all developers present at WWDC to go home, get in touch with their inner poets, please stop developing.

Jobs: Over 4200 registered attendees today. Lots of developers here -- 1 developer for ever four attendees. Glass-walled Apple store in NYC one of over 100, 17 million visitors in stores last quarter. Those buying Macs, 50% are new to Mac. 3/4 of macs shipped last quarter were intel-based. 12% marketshare for notebooks, doubled from January to June, 2006.

10:04 -- Jobs: "The Power Mac is going to fade into history."

10:09 -- Phil Schiller: Brand new Mac Pro. Quad Xeon 64-bit workstation. Starts shipping today.

Will be based on intel Xeon chipset. Also known as woodcrest. Core 2 micro-architecture. up to 3ghz, 4mb shared 12 cache, all dual core. For high-end customers who want it, 64-bit. Big performance per watt. Every Mac Pro will have two of them -- quad Xeons. (much orgasmic ooooohing in audience). 2.1x faster than quad g5. Twice as fast as the machine it replaces. 1.6x faster on specfp floating point. Xcode runs 1.8 times faster on new Mac Pro. Dual 1.33 Ghz front-side buses, delivering 21 GB/s. Memory: up to 16GB memory. Twice as wide as powermac g5 and faster. Less cooling systems, we gain lots of space, so four hard drive bays can fit. (entire audience just came, more orgasmic screams). More front I/O, too. Four PCI express slots. Doublewide graphics slot. Inside the box, all is new. New drive carrier so you can insert up to four drives, they snap right in place, no tools required. (applause). Price comparison to similarly configured Dell workstation (Dell Precision 690): Mac Pro comes out to about $1K cheaper. Price for Mac Pro is..... $2499.

(Live notes continue)...

The bottom line is, terrorism doesn't kill many people. Even in Israel, you're four times more likely to die in a car wreck than as a result of a terrorist attack. In the USA, you need to be more worried about lightning strikes than terrorism. The point of terrorism is to create terror, and by cynically convincing us that our very countries are at risk from terrorism, our politicians have delivered utter victory to the terrorists: we are terrified.

Much of the current alarm is generated from the knowledge that many of today's terrorists simply want to kill, and kill more or less randomly, for revenge or as an act of what they take to be The shock and tragedy of September 11 does demand a focused and dedicated program to confront international terrorism and to attempt to prevent a repeat. But it seems sensible to suggest that part of this reaction should include an effort by politicians, officials, and the media to inform the public reasonably and realistically about the terrorist context instead of playing into the hands of terrorists by frightening the public. What is needed, as one statistician suggests, is some sort of convincing, coherent, informed, and nuanced answer to a central question: "How worried should I be?" Instead, the message the nation has received so far is, as a Homeland Security official put (or caricatured) it, "Be scared; be very, very scared -- but go on with your lives." Such messages have led many people to develop what Leif Wenar of the University of Sheffield has aptly labeled "a false sense of insecurity."

Update: Tom Maxwell, author of this song sez, "Ken Mosher and myself are former Squirrel Nut Zippers. The band no longer exists, and its name is owned by a candy company that might not look kindly on political content. We did the song as Maxwell/Mosher and not as the Zips."

As the title suggest, there's plenty of information about the history of the phenomenon of panopticism and its representation in art. Various aspects of surveillance are also decorticated and analysed in a book that counts over 650 pages: surveillance and everyday life, surveillance and pleasure, subversions, punishment, etc. A series of art works illustrate each aspect. The projects mentioned are from artists like Bruce Naumann, Rem Koolhaas, the Bureau of Inverse Technology, Julia Scher, Pierre Huyghe, Jenny Marketou, Diller+Scofidio, Sophie Calle, Marko Peljhan, etc. Of course it's always exciting to see a great collection of big names, but it might make you feel uneasy to read that so many artists have been worried by the escalade of surveillance and social control over the past few years. The sensation becomes even more disturbing when you realize how fast reality can catch up with art. For example, the harmless plush toys and house plants of Danish artists Niels Bonde's was working on as early as 1995 have their equivalent on the market.

"When the video revolution began we instantly saw the opportunity to experiment and explore a new form of expression to enhance the musical experience. Second Life is the future right now, offering endless possibilities for artists."

Rhodes said he hoped the Duran Duran community would help develop the island into a "fully functional, futuristic utopia".

He said the band was "thrilled to become citizens of Second Life".

Update: Mary sez, "The radio show I used to produce has been doing some neat stuff in Second Life for the past couple of days -- Howard Rheingold is speaking tonight and Kurt Vonnegut is tomorrow. (Suzanne Vega played a concert last week.) The lectures will also be available in QuickTime and Shoutcast format."

Once a printer was under his control, O'Connor said he would be able to use it to map an organization's internal network--a situation that could help stage further attacks. The breach gave him access to any of the information printed, copied or faxed from the device. He could also change the internal job counter--which can reduce, or increase, a company's bill if the device is leased, he said.

The printer break-in also enables a number of practical jokes, such as sending print and scan jobs to arbitrary workers' desktops, O'Connor said. Also, devices could be programmed to include, for example, an image of a paper clip on every print, fax or copy, ultimately driving office staffers to take the machine apart looking for the paper clip.

Update: Dimitr sez, "I have worked a lot with HP MFP devices and they have a really good checklist of how to secure various aspects of their devices."

Reader comment: Tom Radcliffe says:

I've gotta tell you, the website linked on Boing Boing about how to make a homopolar motor in 30 seconds is false. It actually took me 92 seconds from reading the blog to having a spinning motor (most of which, I admit, was taken up in finding, cutting and stripping the wire.) Weirdly, I've had a drywall screw sitting on my kitchen counter for a few weeks, so that part was easy.

This is by far the coolest do-it-yerself project I've ever seen -- I've known about homopolar motors for a long time, but never thought it would be this easy to build one.

Many thanks!

# Give & receive: Every time you give someone a book, you earn a point and can get any book you want from anyone else at BookMooch. Once you've read a book, you can keep it forever or put it back into BookMooch for someone else, as you wish.

# No cost: there is no cost to join or use this web site: your only cost is mailing your books to others.

# Points for entering books: you receive a tenth-of-a-point for every book you type into our system, and one point each time you give a book away. In order to keep receiving books, you need to give away at least one book for every two you receive.

# Help charities: you can also give your points to charities we work with, such as children's hospitals (so a sick kid can get a free book delivered to their bed), Library fund, African literacy, or to us to thank us for running this web site .

Hewlett and Packard need a ride. William Schockley and other Silicon Valley founders need a ride too. Plywood cutouts of them are hitchhiking across the country. Thirty years ago artist Jim Pallas made a plywood hitchhiker and sent it to his gallery by putting it on the side of the road with instructions taped to its back. Through the generosity of random good Samaritans who felt compelled to stop and load the artwork into their trunks the plywood hitchhiker made it all the way across the US in time for the gallery's opening. Now Pallas has made a new set of hitchhikers, all based on the founders of Silicon Valley, but this time they contain an embedded GPS unit. You can follow their course on Google maps as they hitchhike to the ZeroOne electronic arts festival in San Jose this month.

This afternoon I watched Williamed Shockley start his journey in front of the Any Mountain store on Saratoga Ave in San Jose. Shockley was a fanatic mountain climber, and begins his journey from this mountain gear store. He has a lot of baggage in his hitchhiking cutout portrait. Besides being the co-inventor of the transistor and semiconductor, he was also carries the baggage of being an advocate of eugenics. However his baggage for this trip is primarily virtual in painted wood. But he still needs a ride. Artist Julie Newdoll put him on the sidewalk near the bus stop at 1600 Saratoga Ave, in front the parking lot at Any Mountain outdoor store. When we left him at 2 pm Sunday August 6, he was still there with his thumb out.

You can follow his progress on the Ylem site, through an elegant hack by Julie's husband Mario Wolczko. Wolczko, an engineer at Sun, hacked up a $50 disposal cell phone to act as a low-cost GPS signal generator. The phone is padded with insulation foam, hooked up to an external deep battery, and its data is sent through Accutracking and the location of the hitchhiker rendered on Google maps. It's a pure genius hack; instructions are found on the engineering page of the hitchhikers site. I can imagine many other art objects infused with this cheap GPS node, creating a network of mobile geo-caches.

In the meantime, you can track the progress of other plywood hitchhikers as they meander across the US by selecting their names on the site. Robert Noyce is staring out on a pig farm in Michigan, Fred Terman begins at MIT. Who knows if they'll arrive in time? If you are in their neighborhood and headed west, give 'em a ride. But not all the way. Jim Pallas very creatively provides motivation for maximizing the number of rides and adventures a hitchhiker should get. As the gurus say, the journey is the destination.

Previously: SRL in San Jose on Aug 11 at Zero One art fest

I'm pretty sure they're producing all of this in Dharamshala, India, known to many as "Little Tibet." This is the small town at the foot of the Himalayas where the Dalai Lama and the CTA are based.

Teachings and public announcements from the Dalai Lama will also be broadcast at Tibet Online. The site offers video in multiple, DRM-free, no-charge formats. Early reports indicate the streams are accessible from various points inside Tibet, but that seems likely short-lived due to internet censorship practices of Chinese authorities. Link to the internet TV site, and here is an announcement by the prime minister, or Kalon Tripa, of the CTA. (Thanks, oxblood ruffin, and Om, who blogged about it here.)

I recently spent a month in "Little Tibet" and Tibet, PRC, working on a series of stories about how the internet is changing life for Tibetans. Radio stories will air on the NPR News program "Day to Day" this week, related reports will be released at Wired News, and I'll be joining CNN International host Kristie LuStout to share video from the trip there.

Joe Francis, the founder of the "Girls Gone Wild" empire, is humiliating me. He has my face pressed against the hood of a car, my arms twisted hard behind my back. He's pushing himself against me, shouting: "This is what they did to me in Panama City!"

It's after 3 a.m. and we're in a parking lot on the outskirts of Chicago. Electronic music is buzzing from the nightclub across the street, mixing easily with the laughter of the guys who are watching this, this me-pinned-and-helpless thing.

Francis isn't laughing.

He has turned on me, and I don't know why. He's going on and on about Panama City Beach, the spring break spot in northern Florida where Bay County sheriff's deputies arrested him three years ago on charges of racketeering, drug trafficking and promoting the sexual performance of a child. As he yells, I wonder if this is a flashback, or if he's punishing me for being the only blond in sight who's not wearing a thong. This much is certain: He's got at least 80 pounds on me and I'm thinking he's about to break my left arm. My eyes start to stream tears.

This is not what I anticipated when I signed up for a tour of Joe Francis' world. I've been with him nonstop since early afternoon, listening as he teases employees, flying on his private jet, eating fast food and watching young women hurl themselves against his 6-foot-2-inch frame, declaring, "We want to go wild!"

Reader comment: Kent Williams says,

While you can't blame a traffic accident on GGW, well... Either just before or just after the events in Chicago described in the LATimes article, the Girls Gone Wild bus collided with a man on a bycycle. As far as I know, the guy is still in the hospital, but the GGW bus left town as soon as the police let them. Link to news story.

There are many lovely old maps of Los Angeles in this Library of Congress web-exhibition: Link. But none surpass the obsessively illustrated genius of "Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciúncula," by Joseph Jacinto Mora. To really appreciate the detail, you have to download the full resolution version (4.5MB) Link. But here's a lower res for starters -- and you can click and zoom for detail: Link. A short bio of Mora is here: Link. Top that, Google Earth. (thanks, Jim)

David Byrne on "Jesus Camp," a new documentary film about the indoctrination of young Americans into an intensely politicized form of evangelical Christianity.

There were some perfect sound bites — at one point Pastor Fischer instructs the little ones that they should be willing to die for Christ, and the little ones obediently agree. She may even use the word martyr, which has a shocking echo in the Middle East. I can see future suicide bombers for Jesus — the next step will be learning to fly planes into buildings. Of course, the grownups would say, “Oh no, we’re not like them” — but they admit that the principal difference is simply that “We’re right.”

In another scene a cardboard cutout of George W. Bush, with his trademark smirking smile, is brought out and the children are urged to identify — many of the little ones come forward and reverently touch his cardboard hands.

I kept saying to myself, “O.K., these are the Christian version of the Madrassas (those Islamic religious instructional schools in Pakistan and elsewhere, often financed by Saudi oil money)...so both sides are pretty much equally sick, there’s a balance." (Although it must be said the Madrassas provide some regular education and literacy where no other option is available, they do community work that is non-religious...and they take in aimless troubled youth.)

Link (Thanks, Dan)

Short, sensual little Quicktime movies in which a bemicrophoned model dons a piece of haute couture, allowing you to hear the signature crinkles and swooshes of each garment. Link (warning: contains breasts). My favorite sounds are the tinkly glass-crackles from the Swarovski crystal beaded top by Gilles Deacon. (thanks, Susannah Breslin)

The convicted murderer whose postcard-sized "M&M paintings" we've blogged here on BoingBoing is being disciplined by prison officials for running an unauthorized business out of his Pelican Bay cell. He made these paintings with ink leached from M&Ms and brushes bound from his own hair. He's in maximum security already, doing life. Now he's busted for... selling art. Link (Thanks, John)