Tremendous amounts of time and effort go into developing characters for these online games, with no real way to capture these creations other than in-game screenshots. What we offer is the opportunity to immortalize your character forever in an original, personalized piece of professional artwork. From structured poses, to combat scenes, and even short story comic books, there are no limits to the artwork that can be created for you. Our MMOART Network features various alternative artwork styles and material options. Even the original hard copies can be yours to own!

Update: Here's the link to MMO Art! -- what I goof I was to forget it!

* The design tries really hard to Look Like the Future. Everyone is wearing these robe-and-cowl things (the women look like Bene Gesserit going clubbing). Chairs have been replaced by giant eggs. (Perhaps in the future people are hatched; the commercial doesn't go there, thankfully.)

* Absolutely ordinary human activities have been automated. People don't walk any more: instead, their chairs are pushed around by robots or something.

* More seriously, the commercial makes the classic mistake of positing vast technological changes, with no accompanying social changes. When you watch, notice that the pilots are all men, and the cabin crew is all female. This is something you see in lots of "home of the future" exhibits. Geoffrey Nunberg wrote about this (PDF) so eloquently, it should be called the Nunberg Error.

You'll be randomly paired with a partner who's online and using the feature. Over a 90-second period, you and your partner will be shown the same set of images and asked to provide as many labels as possible to describe each image you see. When your label matches your partner's label, you'll earn some points and move on to the next image until time runs out. After time expires, you can explore the images you've seen and the websites where those images were found. And we'll show you the points you've earned throughout the session.

Texas-based Christian Wrestling Federation boasts a board of eight preachers in addition to a core of dozen entertainers that use each match as a "tool" to entertain a crowd while preaching a religious moral.

Ultimate Christian Wrestling, based in Athens, Ga., features a glitzy show backed by pounding music and special effects. Funded by a host of local sponsors, the group attracts as many as 500 a show and headlines big-name wrestlers such as "Glacier," a former WCW star. Each wrestler for Ultimate Christian Wrestling is expected to live up to a code of conduct and must graduate from a wrestling academy before stepping in the ring...

It's a sharp contrast from Wrestling for Jesus, which trains its wrestlers at a rustic backyard ring near Burnettown, S.C., where chickens cluck angrily at each visitor. The wrestlers, many fresh out of high school, often sport tattoos and piercings that they say give them more credibility with the audience they try to reach.

Police believe Reviczky's most recent "tenants" forged his name on a power of attorney that purported to give a grandson named "Aaron Paul Reviczky" authority to sell the home on his behalf.

"I don't have a grandson named Aaron," Reviczky says. "I don't have any grandsons."

On May 15, "Aaron Paul Reviczky" sold the property on his behalf for $450,000 to a purchaser named Pegman Meleknia, who took out a mortgage of $337,500.

Update: Mark sez, "These are part of a Fallen Heroes pack which includes MC Hammer SB classics, Milli Vanilli Dunks, and Vanilla Ice Blazers."

Every year several drivers die on the all-or-nothing routes in pursuit of a week's worth of bragging rights and a small cash purse, but when the challenge gets heated the only acceptable stake is to risk the one appendage that separates humans from primates.

In Chennai there are several drag racing routes where local clubs of mechanics supe-up the two stroke engines and navigate their way at top speed through the city's confusing grid work of streets and alleys. One popular route is the journey from Elliot's beach to Mahibellipuram, 50 kilometers south. The driver I interviewed said that for a while in 2003 he was the local favorite as city's most skilled racer. He had won several races for small money in the last few weeks and was feeling unbeatable. Aiming to knock him down a few pegs, another racer offered to race him and put his thumb up on hid left hand up as stake. The loser would not only end up mutilated, but ostensibly never be able to drive a rickshaw again since it requires a thumb to work the clutch. He had a good lead in the final stretch of the run with the finish line in sight when the engine on his rickshaw overheated and died. His challenger sped past him and won his prize.

That evening he used the sickle shaped edge of a thengai kathi--a knife usually used to hack coconuts-- to chop off the thumb on his left hand.

Reader comment: Orangutans, gorillas, and howler monkeys who subscribe to BoingBoing's RSS feed all wanted to correct a goof in Scott's blog-post, but the bananas kept getting in the way of the keypad. On their behalf, Barry L. Ritholtz says,

Last I checked, primates had opposable thumbs. I'd imagine what Scott meant was non-primates -- then at worst he'd only be partially wrong -- raccoons, otters and other creatures with very thumb-like appendages. Lastly, other mammals do occasionally gnaw off a limb -- but that's a life-saving maneuver to escape a trap. I know of no other creature so prideful, foolish and misguided that they disfigure themselves as a matter of ego . . .

This item will remind all Roald Dahl fans of the terrific short story, "Man From the South," in which betting stakes are raised to finger-threatening levels. Highly recommended for illustrating how the innocent thrill-seeker's ego convinces itself to put flesh at risk.

The story was also adapted as an episode of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" with Peter Lorre in the title role: Link. Directed by Norman Lloyd (I was hoping Hitch might have directed it, but no).

"We have decided that we will use only free software for computer education in Kerala schools. We have implemented the Linux platform in high schools; it will be implemented in other schools step by step," Kerala Education Minister M A Baby told rediff.com.

He said an estimated 56,000 teachers in high schools are getting trained on the Linux platform. Here on, nearly 1.5 million students in the 2,650 government and government-aided high schools in the state will no longer use the Windows platform for computer education. Instead, they have switched over to the free GNU/Linux software.

With Molly Millions' "implanted" glasses, though, I could never dream up a sufficiently convincing way to imagine them being attached. Were they "implanted" in skin, muscle, bone, all of these? How would any of these impact on the mobility of her features? What would the seam between skin and mirror look like?

The character having emerged, very handily, in an early short story, when I hadn't been much concerned with this particular detail, and not having expected to see her again, I found myself, as more Molly narratives emerged, concerned by my inability to satisfactorily envision the way in which the damned things were attached. My solution to this, ongoing, was to keep the "camera" off that troubling little detail. To blur around it with language. The "mirrored implants" worked wonders for the character, in fact largely *were* the character, but there was never, really, any "really" there.

The quilt took several months to finish and uses several different techniques. On my end the hardest part of the process was creating a black and white image with simplified design elements. After that I created several different colour schemes (some with the intention of making the quilt "easier" to make) and eventually settled on one that was similar to the original design. The black and white outline was then transferred to an overhead transparency and enlarged. From there the pieces were made while I played the waiting game and received tantalizing email updates somewhat akin to a reverse ransom demand as I saw bits and pieces of Link come together rather than fall apart.

I have had it with the airport security checks. They make us remove more and more clothing, while letting us take less and less on board. Soon we'll be shelling out $1000 for the privilege of traveling naked in a three-foot caged pen. We won't be allowed to eat, drink, or pee during the flight. Communication will be prohibited, except for furtive glances with the flight attendants -- who, incidentally, will be robots with tasers.

(...) My question was this: are the security checks really any more effective? To find out, I decided to re-enact the classic scene from the 1974 [1984] movie This is Spinal Tap, where bassist Derek Smalls puts a foil-lined cucumber down his pants, which is picked up by the security wand. Only I decided to go one better, by putting a buzzing vibrator down my pants.

Update: Incidentally, a nearby thread on Hargrave's website leads us to the awesomest bad MySpace page ever. "This is what Liberace saw when he did cocaine," he says.

Web Zen Home, Store (Thanks Frank!)

As a follow-up to your story on disaster communications projects in New Orleans, Think New Orleans has been up almost a year and serves as a huge repository of community information and resources for New Orleans residents. It started as a wiki where hundreds of people, many who had never touched a mouse, came to look for lost relatives. The wiki is a collaborative effort by dozens of New Orleans bloggers and wiki editors also help get new people up and blogging so they can tell their stories.

Image (Clayton James Cubitt, (c) 2006). Mike Walters, 40, Fireman, Pearlington, MS. More.

BoingBoing reader Jeremiah Britt says,

Knowing how much you guys love the random, beautiful and bizarre ephemera of yesteryear, I scanned in the illustrations from the Big Little Book "The Man From U.N.C.L.E. - The Calcutta Affair". The poses are awkward, some of the panel art ridiculous and the captions surreal. It's especially amusing without the context of the text. Enjoy.

Reader comment: Blog-famed ephemera-herder and podcaster James Lileks says,

I have a small (53 pages) site on the glorious awfulness of Big Little Book illos; it's here: Link

The Man From UNCLE section begins here: Link

It's all much worse than that Flickr set suggested. Much worse.

* PROTECTION - NO ONE can edit, NO ONE can affect the public version

* SEMI-PROTECTION - all except new users and anons can edit, all except new users and anons can affect the public versions

* VERSION FLAGGING - ANYONE can edit, all except new users and anons can affect the public versions

As you can see, each step of this chain allows MORE people to do MORE things, rather than less. Each step of this chain is becoming MORE wiki, not LESS wiki.

The news media has an unfortunate temptation to follow a story arc that goes something like this. "Open editing is impossible. It worked for a little while at Wikipedia, but now even Wikipedia is admitting that it does not work, so they are closing off public editing step by step. This proves that our traditional model is best in the end."

The fact that this story arc has no relationship to the reality of changes in Wikipedia has not stopped them. I am hopeful that this post will catch enough attention that journalists will start to grasp the real revolution that is taking place here.

Current TV has the RVs and editing suites and satellite trucks here in Black Rock City, but John Graham and his team have been webcasting the burn for years on a shoestring budget. They're broadcasting live now and will be broadcasting the burn this Saturday night. Check it out.

The competing formats, Sony Corp.-backed (6758.T: Quote, NEWS, Research) Blu-ray and Toshiba Corp.-championed (6502.T: Quote, NEWS, Research) HD-DVD, aim to provide better picture quality and interactive features, but some early viewers have been underwhelmed.

"Neither format is selling well or at the level I had expected. I had expected early adopters to step up and other retailers have had the same experience," said Bjorn Dybdahl, president of San Antonio, Texas-based specialty store Bjorn's.

Apropos of this, Alice notes "I've had the security permissions to map the BBC's Television Centre for a while, but I haven't ever found anyone local to do it. If you're near London and a dab hand with the HL2 engine, plus you fancy mapping out the Blue Peter garden and other such luminous landmarks, drop me a line..." Link (via Wonderland)

“The voice, she told me to look on your tree,” she related in a Polish accent. “I come out and parked the car in the front and I look on the tree and I don’t see nothing.”

Filipertis said that Mary’s voice was very soft. “She said, ‘Look at your tree. I’m in three places,’ and she was in three places .... And I look in this branch and she was very clear.”

Three stubs of three branches had pictures on them...

It is the second time members of the family have seen a vision. Twins James Filipertis and Dorothy (Filipertis) Fitzgerald saw the Holy Family — Mary, Joseph and Jesus — in the sky on a clear night in 1960 when they were 7 years old.

Any homemade homage to the Star Trek universe, any snapshots of you with the stars, anything that shows your devotion to this one of a kind phenomenon: if we like it, we'll post it in a front page photo gallery on Thursday, Sept. 8.

We've set up a group on Flickr called Wired News: Star Trek Submissions. All you have to do is join the group and add appropriate photos. Please include a description of the photo and the name you want us to use when crediting the images. Alternatively, you can simply tag your photos with "wirednewsstartrek" and we'll be able to find your submission(s) that way.

Image: a still from one my favorite Star Trek episodes, "The Way to Eden." Here, Spock approaches some dirty hippies on their way to Burning Man, and asks them if their cupcake artcars are powered by bad trance music.

The upshot of all this is that Mothra is going to have to add a lot of tracheal tubes to maintain a sufficient oxygen supply. Of course, the more of its volume that is tracheal tubes, the less is biomass that needs oxygen, but this implies that although Mothra may be heavy (because it's big), its density is going to be very low--about the same as your average cotton ball.

This insight into Mothra's physiology eliminates two other problems. Although wearing one's skeleton on the outside has distinct mechanical advantages (as we'll see shortly), large insects are prone to a mode of failure called buckling. If Mothra had really been just a scaled-up moth, its legs would have collapsed when it landed. Second, Mothra's wings are in the same proportion to its body as the moths that bat their heads against the lights outside your door. Total lift generation is proportional to the area of the wings; if mass increased in proportion to volume, Mothra would have to walk home.

DANGEROUS Food
* Any liquid-based food products in packets, tubes, plastic or tin containers
* Pasta or any other foodstuffs in sauces, gravies or other liquids
* Jams and syrups
* Sauces
* Pastes
* Yoghurts
* Soups (carton or otherwise)
* Stews
* Curry

Safe Food
* Sandwiches
* Crisps
* Fruit
* Vegetables
* Other solid foods

However, marine biologist Rex Sadaba of the University of the Philippines Visayas isn't sold on using hair or chicken feathers, and says abundant materials such as straw may be better.

Sadaba said hair takes time to degrade, does not really absorb oil and may not be hygienic.

"I also don't agree with using feathers, because it stinks when it rots, and that will cause additional problems," he said.

The submissions we've received so far range in topic from video games, sports, record collecting, comic convention etiquette, love of Terminator, desert car racing, and boobs, to a jazz legend who disguised herself for decades as a man. There are a few stories about individual male friends who've made strong impressions on the artists, or had memorable, unique experiences.

Your story can be autobiographical, a tribute, or take any other clever approach you can think of. We're keeping the book light hearted and humorous, so no dramas about why your ex is the worst person ever. (Unless, of course, there are some really hilarious circumstances behind it.)

If you're interested in participating, please e-mail lulu@mkreed.com and let us know.

Just as a traditional Advent calendar counts down the days to Christmas, the Election Day Advent Calendar counts down the days up to Election Day. You’ll still get to open one little door each day, but instead of opening up to winter scenes, you’ll reveal key moments in the history of our electoral process, narrated by the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, Susan B. Anthony, and Jon Stewart.

The reason that HDMI is so expensive is that it has been designed to be that most proprietary of technologies, an anti-copying system. Sony customers are accustomed to paying giant premiums for consumables like cables and adapters and memory, thanks to Sony's addiction to deliberately introducing proprietary elements just to jack up prices (I learned this the hard way when I discovered that the power-brick for my $200 Sony speakers cost $150 to replace). But with HDMI and its Siamese twin HDCP, you get more than mere proprietary technology -- these technologies are under license from a body that claims to prevent copying by ensuring that no one makes a competitive compatible device.

A condition of licensing HDCP/HDMI is that your devices have to be built to resist user-modification, hardened against its owner. This is pretty perverse, like requiring cars to be built with the hoods securely welded shut, and while it's doomed to fail, it's an expensive failure. All that armor designed to protect Sony from its customers comes at a high price -- one that gets passed on to you.

So in addition to springing an extra hundred bucks for the high-def PS3, be prepared to part with anothe chunk for the pricey, useless over-engineering in that fancy wire.

Sony makes great game devices. The PSP, for example, turned out to be a hacker's dream-playground, and it immediately amassed a fantastic developer community who worked to make that hardware more valuable by adding functionality to it. But rather than welcoming all this free labor and publicity, Sony responded by adding countermeasures to prevent people from running the software of their choice on a PSP. There's a long tradition of this at Sony -- remember when they threatened to sue to the kid who figured out how to make his Aibo robot-dog dance?

No community gives more to vendors than gamers. They go back to the store to buy the latest and greatest hardware, they buy games, they buy t-shirts, they see terrible movie tie-ins, perform game-music with their school orchestras, make additional fan-levels for their favorite games, dress up as game characters, buy the comics and the toys. They evangelize games, form guilds and hold tournaments, read, live, watch, talk and breathe games.

But the console people have a hard time coming to grips with this. Practically any other industry would lop off an arm for this kind of devotion, but when it's someone tweaking their Sony consoles, Sony is so blinded by its fear of losing control of the ability to restrict games-publishing for its platform that it pushes these fans away.

The arms-race against gamers keeps on escalating, and Sony may be winning. They managed to patch the PSP often enough that the hackers largely moved on. Sony won -- people stopped paying attention to (and buying) PSPs.

What happens when the PS3 gets the same treatment? Will Sony keep fighting its customers? Link (via Digg)

Update: Dave sez, "Here's a company that sells HDMI cables for $4.49 for 3 foot to $15.49 for 9 foot. Quite affordable, actually, as long as you avoid the overpriced big-box store brands."

Where: USC Annenberg Center, room 207, 3502 Watt Way, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0281
When: Tuesday, September 5, 7PM-9PM

The event is free and open to the public. Hope to see you there!

Link

Hongfujin Precision Industry, which was exposed by two Chinese journalists for forcing overtime on its 200,000 strong staff, has been ordered to set up a union, which would be affiliated to the government's All-China Federation of Trade Unions.

According to the official Xinhua News Agency, China does not allow independent labour organising, but has been pushing companies with foreign investors to allow state-sanctioned labour groups.

See also:
Inside China's iPod sweat-shops
Apple does the right thing on iPod City factories
No unions in iPod City

But those mathematical representations are exactly what you need if you want to join up two fingerprint databases, like Disney's and the NSA's -- while the NSA may store photos of fingerprints, they work with hashes of them, using those mathematical representations to compare and sort prints. Saying that you only store the mathematical representations of a fingerprint is like saying that you only store the mathematical representations of a JPEG, not the actual paint, canvas and frame that it depicts. It's true, but it sure doesn't mean that you haven't captured something important.

Now that our national immune system has begun to attack us in a terrible anaphylactic spasm -- indiscriminate NSA wiretaps, meaningless TSA security theater, secret aviation rules and no-fly lists, "free speech zones," suspension of habeas corpus and all the rest -- it's absolutely irresponsible to gather this kind of information and leave it where the savage toddlers of the national security apparat might find it and wreak havoc with it.

For me, the worst part of this is that it conditions us to get used to being treated like crooks. If you were asked for a fingerprint when you bought a doughnut, you'd rightly leave the store. Why should an amusement park get a walk?

For years, Disney has recorded onto tickets the geometry and shape of visitors’ fingers to prevent ticket fraud or resale, as an alternative to time-consuming photo identification checks.

By the end of September, all of the geometry readers at Disney’s four Orlando theme parks, which attract tens of millions of visitors each year, will be replaced with machines that scan fingerprint information, according to industry experts familiar with the technology...

However, the use of this technology has riled privacy advocates, who believe Disney has not fully disclosed the purpose of its new system. There are no signs posted at the entrance detailing what information is being collected and how it is being used. Attendants at the entrance will explain the system, if asked.

But Disney's Prunty downplayed privacy issues, saying the scanned information is stored "independent of all of our other systems," and "the system purges it 30 days after the ticket expires or is fully utilized." Visitors who object to the readers can provide photo identification instead – although the option is not advertised at the park entrance...

Coney fears Disney could share the fingerprint information. "If they maintain that data, it can be used for anything," Coney said. "If law enforcement shows up, they can gain access to it." Disney's privacy policy says that it may disclose personal information when doing so can help "protect your safety or security."

Update: Paul sez, "Readers in Canada can pick up a Press-Bot at Mountain Equipment Co-op! MEC Product Number: 5011-315"

Update 2: Joe sez, "Gizmodo had an entry on how the threaded handle of the press-bot exactly matches the thread of most camera tripods. Combined with a filled nalgene bottle, the press-bot makes a perfect makeshift back-country camera tripod. I used this rig on a recent trip to New Zealand and it worked pretty well."

Update 3: Alison sez, "We've taken to using the Aerobie Aeropress when camping instead of cafetieres. Why? Because it's incredibly, hugely, easier to clean: you press out the grounds, then wipe the end of the plunger, and the press is ready to make more coffee. When camping, that's a real benefit."

Update 4: Irma sez, "here's a link on the possible connection between birth defects and the plastic used in Nalgene bottles.

The author credits Hermione Granger with 11 top exam results in the first hardback edition of book six, Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince.

But in book five — Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix — we are told she takes TEN examinations

* We want to be inclusive; we've been working hard to reach out to the sundry OS groups in Toronto and get them involved - and to introduce them to one another. In fact, I've been working hard to attend all the pub nights the various groups hold!

* We want to provide a focus for people looking to plug into projects like OLPC, Firefox, and Linux, and into groups like Creative Commons.

* We want to bridge the gap between content people (artists, writers, etc.) and developers.

* We want to make people aware of the larger OS issues like licensing and DRM.

U.S. military leaders in Baghdad have put out for bid a two-year, $20 million public relations contract that calls for extensive monitoring of U.S. and Middle Eastern media in an effort to promote more positive coverage of news from Iraq.

The contract calls for assembling a database of selected news stories and assessing their tone as part of a program to provide "public relations products" that would improve coverage of the military command's performance, according to a statement of work attached to the proposal.

Link to press release, here's a wire service report via NYT, and here's more at the NASA website.

Image: (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press) "NASA Deputy Associate Administrator for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate Doug Cooke, left, and Orion project manager Skip Hatfield today with a scale model of the Orion spacecraft."

Earthlings will have much cause for cheer if whatever Lockheed comes up with is half as funky as an earlier starship Orion from 40 years ago.

This one was celebrated with joyous frugging in the pre-Star-Trek "space opera" Raumpatrouille ("Space Patrol," 1965-1966). Previous BB posts mit dem kitschy videos: one, two.

Here's what the Orion looked like in that TV series:

Reader comment: Jay M. in Minneapolis says,

It's interesting that NASA has resurrected the "Orion" moniker for their latest moonshot. Before Apollo (and even before NASA was NASA) the US floated the idea of spaceships powered by atomic explosions. The idea was not only plausible, but on the drawing boards! It turned out to be not-so-popular, esp. in light of their incredible destructive power. Physicist Freeman Dyson was one of the scientists who worked on this project. His son George Dyson detailed the early exploits of the original Orion project in his book "Project Orion." Another good clearinghouse for Orion info: orion.ttsw.com

MW: Next week, I hope to lay out some immediate steps we can take to better protect our homeland and ensure that the resources we spent get real results...

Taking Nap [from the audience]: Governor, do you favor fixed timetable in Iraq? Over here!

HA: Save audience questions for the next event with the Governor, please!

MW: ... But I also think the fifth anniversary of 9-11 serves as an opportunity to challenge Americans to remember that sense of civic engagement we all felt in the aftermath of that tragic day. As I've said elsewhere, the fact that the President didn't call upon that spirit to take on some of the major issues, from our energy crisis to restoring America's stature in the world, was a missed opportunity.

"If consumers even know there's a DRM, what it is, and how it works, we've already failed" - Disney Executive.

Defeating DRM is all about awareness. The direct actions that we have taken are all about this. Whether it means protesting outside Apple Stores in Hazmat suits or getting HUGE press coverage for announcing the Bono petition (sign it now). Action gets attention, and creates space for debate. And as our friends at Disney recognize, if there is a debate, we will have won.

Clear your schedule for a world wide day of action against DRM. On Tuesday October 3rd we will all be taking action to raise the stakes and attempt to increase awareness to the threats of DRM - in a very significant way.

Submit your ideas now and by October 3rd we will be ready to make it happen. Tell us how you think we can, together, raise awareness to defeat DRM. We will award prizes for the best ideas.

Not only is there a new Bubble, but web geeks are happily celebrating the fact that they are in the middle of it.

Tonight, Thursday, August 31st, will be the first ever Bubble Thursday. The bubble bursting drinking will begin at 7pm at Dada in San Francisco.

I think someone should try to blow up a plane with a piece of ID, just to watch the TSA's mind implode.

BoingBoing reader Hamilton says,

During a "writing for the web" course I was taking, the professor did a Google search for "Untitled Document" to illustrate a point.

One of the first results was entitled "Where Babies Come From In Germany."

With a title like that how could I resist clicking further? What I found was one of the strangest picture books I have ever seen.

Reader comment: Brian Johnson says,

That German sex ed book for kids? I don't know if it was originally German or what, but I first discovered that book in the kids section of a book store in England. I was about 7 or 8 years old at the time and THAT book, weird illustrations and all, clued me in to EXACTLY how babies were conceived. I was stunned at the time. That was a revelation that obliterated the concept of "girl cooties".

One bit of text that stuck with me through the years was something along the lines that "when the man gets a loving feeling, his penis becomes big" and cue the "wokka-chikka wokka-chikka wow wow" music... What a weird blast from the past!

What a pity planetdan.net doesn't tell us where this book is coming from. The text is German, ok, but the visual style of the pictures (e.g. the flower-power VW Beetle) as well as some elements of the text suggest for me that this book is from the 1970s. If that is true, I guess, that explains why it is like it is. I mean, that's the time of Willy McBride and -- I don't know if it was translated, and I can't find scans on the net -- Günter Amendts book "Sexfront" (that's more or less the same as the scanned childrens book, only without the baby, and with real photos of naked adults and also naked kids, and more slang in the text ...). Born 1975, I find it quite difficult to image a society were books like those were accepted by the societal mainstream. Even if Germany is not as puritanistic as the USA are, as far as I know, someone who would write such books in such a style today would be looked at rather strange.

So, to cut it short: it would be great if BoingBoing could research from when the book the pictures are from really is, and what the context is.

It appears that it is originally Danish by Per Holm Kudsen. Here is a cite from WorldCat: The true story of how babies are made, by Per Holm Knudsen
* Type: English : Book Book : Juvenile audience
* Publisher: Chicago, Childrens Press [1973, ©1971]
* ISBN: 0516036408
* OCLC: 549281

photographer Will (not Willy!) McBride's extraordinary sex-ed book "Zeig Mal!" (Show Me!) had to be hidden when friends from my 1970's German neighborhood came around; yet if there's anything shocking about it, it's its honesty in focussing on the emotional intensity that should surely be highlighted in any sex-ed. the link is to an article (in German) relating the plight of McBride's book; it includes some of the (sadly NSFW) photos. PDF Link.

Lt. Col. Randall Holbrook travels just about everywhere with his wife Mary and their two sons, Justin, 14, and Logan, 5.

He’s quietly in the background on family outings to the grocery store, to restaurants, camping, even on Mary’s most recent visit to her gynecologist.

Randall has little to say because he’s a ‘‘Flat Daddy,’’ a two-dimensional foam board likeness from the waist up of the Maine Army National Guard officer from Hermon who was sent to Afghanistan in January with the 240th Engineer Group of Augusta.

Reader comment: George Murray says,

Can you think of anything more likely to royally fuck a kid up for life than a cardboard cutout of their father in a forced rictus grin? I mean, it would be like perpetually having that scary clown from Poltergeist following you everywhere. Look at the face of the kid on the left. That boy is headed into the arms of a soon-to-be-wealthy therapist. What happens when junior falls down and breaks his arm and flat daddy is still smiling? What happens when the kid spills grapejuice on flat daddy and flat daddy starts to warp and peel? What happens when flat daddy gets bent at the neck and his head starts to loll like overcooked asparagus? Soooo fuuuucked uuuup.

Burning Man 2006 is now in full swing and Current TV is on the Playa and have setup an online television station, TV Free Burning Man.

They have been shooting video, doing interviews and uploading a daily show from Black Rock City. They will be doing a live broadcast the burn on Saturday night (September 2nd) starting at 9pm PST/12am EST.

Image: "People's Hurricane Relief Katrina Anniversary March from the Industrial Canal in the Lower 9th Ward to Congo Square in Armstrong Park," 08-29-2006, by NOGoddess (via FixTheGulf.com).

Brian Oberkirch of the Slidell Hurricane Damage Blog shares news of two new disaster communications projects for which geek-minded volunteers are sought:

# Fix the Gulf

As we saw with the Slidell Hurricane Damage Blog, blogs can be efficient tools for gathering current local news and matching resources with needs. There is still a mountain of work to do in all the communities along the coast, and this new project aims to 1) keep the spotlight on the continued disaster, 2) identify specific local needs and match those with people who want to provide help and 3) spotlight other bloggers, videobloggers, podcasters and locals using these tools to spread the word.

I'm looking for editors in each of the affected towns who want to help me aggregate information and outreach for their areas. In addition to the blog, we have a wiki we'll use to let people post up their own links, requests, material, etc.

# HurricaneMind

When a storm comes, we all spend the week asking each other what we're going to do about it. "Are you leaving? Getting your supplies gathered to hunker down? Boarding up? Where you headed?" And so on. HurricaneMind takes that process and writes it large. The idea is to take the wisdom of crowds and apply it to hurricane prep. In addition to telling you what your neighbors are thinking, I'd like the app to map hotel room availability, gather current open evacuation routes, show you where plywood and other supplies are still available and aggregate news sources in one central spot.

I've started a blog and wiki to get a team together to help me build and launch this community service focused application here:

Love to hear from you if any of this strikes a chord. Don't forget about us down here.

[A]bout Mr. Rumsfeld’s other main assertion, that this country faces a "new type of fascism." As he was correct to remind us how a government that knew everything could get everything wrong, so too was he right when he said that - though probably not in the way he thought he meant it. This country faces a new type of fascism - indeed.

Although I presumptuously use his sign-off each night, in feeble tribute… I have utterly no claim to the words of the exemplary journalist Edward R. Murrow.

But never in the trial of a thousand years of writing could come close to matching how he phrased a warning to an earlier generation of us, at a time when other politicians thought they (and they alone) knew everything, and branded those who disagreed, "confused" or "immoral." Thus forgive me for reading Murrow in full:

"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty," he said, in 1954. "We must remember always that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear - one, of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of un-reason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men; Not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were - for the moment - unpopular."

WebCrow uses four techniques in parallel to find possible answers to a clue. Two involve looking for the clue or a near match in a database of solved crosswords or using a dictionary. Another uses rules known to work on a kind of Italian clue with two letter answers and the fourth technique is to search the internet.

WebCrow performs a search using key words extracted from the clue. It can usually find the answer by looking at the small previews that appear with the search engine results, but it can scan whole pages if necessary. Words of the right length that crop up most often in the results are taken to be possible answers...

Tony Veale works on software that can deal with human language at University College Dublin, Ireland, and watched WebCrow in action. He told New Scientist he was impressed. "It's part of a trend to use the web as a shallow source of human knowledge for artificial intelligence," he says.

The study, reported by the Boston Globe, found that 92 of 116 brands tested had higher nicotine yields in 2004 than in 1998, and 52 had increases of more than 10 percent.

Boxes of Doral lights, a low-tar brand made by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., had the biggest increase in yield, 36 percent. Some of this may have been the result of an increase in the total amount of tobacco put in that brand's cigarettes, one expert said.

The nicotine in Marlboro products, preferred by two-thirds of high school smokers, increased 12 percent. Kool lights increased 30 percent. Two-thirds of African American smokers use menthol brands.

It seems that skateboarding is now a topic of national importance.

If it is they certainly need to work on getting their facts straight. Here are a few highlights:

- “If (tricks are) executed well, fellow skaters will offer their most superlative compliment: “Dude, that stinks!”

- “…the impact cushioned by the kneepads and helmets virtually all skateboarders wear.”

- “Tight jeans are in “because they let you see your feet,”

The article also mentions, “Tee Cherry, an American Muslim, taking a few minutes to skateboard with his young son before heading off to afternoon prayers.” Is it a tad strange to call out a skate Dad as an American Muslim in an article created by the Bureau of International Information Programs or is it just us?

The editorial staff of USINFO were surprised by the feedback we received regarding the article "Skateboarding Grows from Casual Hobby to International Sport." We have removed the article from the web site and are determining how we can best present this increasingly popular American sport to interested readers worldwide.

A video called Transformational Government can no longer be viewed on the site, instead users get a box of red text stating: "This video has been removed at the request of copyright owner COI Television because its content was used without permission."

COI Television is actually part of the Cabinet Office and the further irony of the video being about transformational government was not lost on one critic.

A spokesman for independent body Public Sector Forums, told silicon.com: "The COI is part of the Cabinet Office. So it looks like the Cabinet Office's initiative has fallen at the first hurdle and ironically, it's thanks to a lack of joined-upness between parts of its own ministry."

Ian, it a YouTube video. That’s at www.youtube.com. Get them to take it down if it’s a violation of your IP and it will stop showing at crunchgear and the other sites.

And Ian, when you are done, please take the time to send your client, Apple, a similar email for posting basically the same material on their own site.

The Scream and Madonna were found in a "police action". "We are 100% certain they are the originals. The damage was much less than feared," police said.

Up to now the opening in the container has been large enough for hedgehogs to get their heads into for a lick of the left-over dessert -- a trap they have then been unable to withdraw from, so dying of starvation in untold numbers.

But from September 1, the wide-mouthed opening in the lid of the McFlurry containers will be reduced in size, making them too small for the sugar-loving animals to get their heads into.

Update: The McFlurry is dairy, not oil. Here's the ingredients (thanks, Matt!):

Vanilla Reduced Fat Ice Cream: Whole milk, sucrose, cream, nonfat milk solids, corn syrup solids, mono and diglycerides, guar gum, imitation vanilla flavor, carrageenan, cellulose gum, vitamin A palmitate. Contains milk ingredients. Mini M&M'S® Candies: Milk chocolate (sugar, chocolate, milk, cocoa butter, lactose, soy lecithin, salt, artificial flavors), sugar, less than 0.5%: coloring (includes yellow 5 lake, red 40 lake, blue 1 lake), cornstarch, corn syrup, dextrin. Contains milk and soybean ingredients. May contain peanuts.

By the late 1990s, Tarby and his team had discovered fumarase deficiency was occurring in the greatest concentration in the world among the fundamentalist Mormon polygamists of northern Arizona and southern Utah.

Of even greater concern was the fact that the recessive gene that triggers the disease was rapidly spreading to thousands of individuals living in the community because of decades of inbreeding...

Doctors and family members interviewed by New Times say up to 20 children from families in the polygamist community are currently afflicted with the condition that requires full-time attention from caregivers. Victims suffer a range of symptoms, including severe epileptic seizures, inability to walk or even sit upright, severe speech impediments, failure to grow at a normal rate, and tragic physical deformities.

"They are in terrible shape," says Dr. Kirk A. Aleck, director of the Pediatric Neurogenetics Center at St. Joseph's Hospital. Aleck is a geneticist who participated along with Tarby and others in the groundbreaking study of several polygamous families with fumarase deficiency in the late 1990s.

Update: Mike sez, "That inbred cult is (was?) led by Warren Jeffs, who just got picked up Tuesday by authorities during a routine traffic stop in Vegas-- with 'cell phones, laptop computers, wigs and more than $50,000 in cash when he was arrested.' Richard Abowitz, who's been covering the FLDS for some time, has been doing a great job tracking the story on his Las Vegas blog, the Moveable Buffet."

After a blistering set last night in Brooklyn, NY the band awoke this morning to find that the their trailer had been broken into and all of the gear has been taken.

J's Amma guitar, the mountain man guitar, Lou's Rickenbacker... EVERYTHING IS GONE. They are still taking inventory to see what else is gone but they were pretty much wiped out.

WE NEED YOUR HELP!!! Spread the word to everyone you know, every music store, pawn shop, club... anywhere you can think they may show up.

If you have ANY information let us know - management@jmascis.com.

Update: Andrew points out the entry for Dino Jr's kit on StolenGear.com, which helps bands recover their stolen stuff.

Update: Sputnik sez, "Where can I see this without getting my fool self electrocuted? As always, YouTube to the rescue!"

Update 2: Mike sez, "Years ago when I worked at Digital Equipment Corportation, this hilarious 'research paper' from DEC's Western Reseach Lab was widely circulated. Entitled Characterization of Organic Illumination Systems, it details arcing pickles and other assorted vegetables."

Update 3: Wayne sez, "I conducted this experiment years ago as my final high school chemistry project, trying to figure out why only one end of the pickle glows. I came to the same conclusions mentioned about the sodium, but was unable to figure out the polarization. Useless-knowledge.com makes reference to this scientific mystery of pickle polarization:"

Why does only one end of the pickle light up and glow? Look at the amazing electrical storm jumping through the pickle. (Results are best viewed in a dark room. This is better than Star Wars! Don’t worry the pickle will make all the light you need.) Unplug the pickle; reconnect the wires on the opposite side and it still only glows on one end. There is yet no definitive scientific answer to explain the polarization of a pickle connected to AC current.

Update 4: Dan sez, "Years ago, I figured out that if you buy one of those hot dog cookers that runs current through the meat to cook it, you could use it as a (somewhat) safe version of the glowing pickle lamp."

Update 5: Pat sez, "Penn and Teller cover the glowing pickle trick in the 1992 book How to Play with Your Food. It's a great resource for all kinds of food related mischief."

The settlement, which must still be approved by a Canadian court, features similar terms to those found in the U.S., including the right to cash compensation or music downloads. The settlement site features a full list of the affected CDs including Canadian artists such as Sloan, Our Lady Peace, and a Canadian Idol compilation.

See also: Sony anti-customer technology roundup and time-line

3 No American has died of old age since 1951.

4 That was the year the government eliminated that classification on death certificates.

5 The trigger of death, in all cases, is lack of oxygen. Its decline may prompt muscle spasms, or the "agonal phase," from the Greek word agon, or contest.

6 Within three days of death, the enzymes that once digested your dinner begin to eat you. Ruptured cells become food for living bacteria in the gut, which release enough noxious gas to bloat the body and force the eyes to bulge outward.

10 The vultures are now dying off after eating cattle carcasses dosed with diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory used to relieve fever in livestock.

He piloted the car into the data-center lot, badging in and peeling up a bleary eyelid to let the retinal scanner get a good look at his sleep-depped eyeball.

He stopped at the machine to get himself a guarana/modafinil power-bar and a cup of lethal robot-coffee in a spill-proof clean-room sippy-cup. He wolfed down the bar and sipped the coffee, then let the inner door read his hand-geometry and size him up for a moment. It sighed open and gusted the airlock’s load of positively pressurized air over him as he passed finally to the inner sanctum.

It was bedlam. The cages were designed to let two or three sysadmins maneuver around them at a time. Every other inch of cubic space was given over to humming racks of servers and routers and drives. Jammed among them were no fewer than twenty other sysadmins. It was a regular convention of black tee-shirts with inexplicable slogans, bellies overlapping belts with phones and multitools.

Normally it was practically freezing in the cage, but all those bodies were overheating the small, enclosed space. Five or six looked up and grimaced when he came through. Two greeted him by name. He threaded his belly through the press and the cages, toward the Ardent racks in the back of the room.

Podcast: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

Bag-lady syndrome plagues, puzzles and, in more extreme cases, paralyzes women who want to get a better grip on their financial lives, according to Olivia Mellan, the author of “The Advisor's Guide to Money Psychology” and a Washington, D.C., therapist who specializes in money psychology. Lily Tomlin, Gloria Steinem, Shirley MacLaine and Katie Couric all admit to having a bag lady in their anxiety closet.

"It cuts across women of all social groups; it's not like wealthy women don't have it," says Mellan. "Heiresses, women who have inherited wealth, have big bag-lady nightmares because they really feel like the money came to them magically and can leave them just as magically."

Tomohiro Yasui started crafting them in 1982, at age 11, because he couldn't bear the thought of playing with his precious store-bought bots – what if the paint chipped or an arm fell off?! So he used cardboard, scissors, wire, tape, and markers to construct his own durable automatons.

The very first track, "The Decider," is a groovy primer on how to turn math into music. Its bristling melody (.mp3) is derived from the Fibonacci sequence, an infinite series of integers that governs the structure of everything from pineapples to the Parthenon...

Returning to the realm of number theory, the tune "Further and In Between" is based on the cyclical number 142857. Like all cyclical numbers, this one has some very strange properties; for example, if you multiply it by 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6, you get the same digits in a different configuration (for example, 2 x 142857 = 285714).

The only question I have is whether the banks will be able to cash in on all those repossessed houses after the real-estate tumble, or will prices be so low that they also lose their shirts?

In order to get the $800,000 house he bought early last year in California's Silicon Valley, Joe got an "option ARM," an adjustable-rate loan that lets him choose from a variety of payments every month. The smallest payment included no principal and less than 100 percent of the interest due. The unpaid interest was tacked onto the principal, creating "negative amortization..."

The [lender's warning] letters contain hypothetical examples of what lay ahead. One is a California homeowner making only minimum payments on a $402,000 loan. The current full interest rate on the loan is 7.6 percent, but the borrower has been paying just $1,348.47, far less than what's needed to fully amortize the mortgage over its 30-year term. If the loan reset at today's rates, the full payment required would be $2,887.50 — more than double what the homeowner is currently paying.

(via Neatorama)

I'm just bummed that there isn't a matching suit. Link (Thanks, Theresa!)

Update: Heidi points out this other sock-monkey dress from the fair, with strategic monkeys.

Mark Warner’s avatar seems presidential, too—tall, stern, and statesman-like. And tomorrow at 12:30pm Second Life Time (i.e., PDT), in a public event sponsored by Forward Together and produced by Millions of Us, I’ll be interviewing him, in a brief conversation that’ll touch on national security, foreign policy, the Democratic Party-- and, of course, future plans for the Governor and his team in Second Life.

Mr Annies decided to act after receiving dozens of complaints from householders who were fed up with the piles of junk mail dropping through their letter boxes everyday.

So, hoping he may have the answer to their prayers, he delivered his own leaflet to residents in Barry, South Wales, explaining how they could opt out of getting mailshots known as 'door-to-door' items by filling out a form.

Update: Want to opt out of Royal Mail spam? Here's the form: PDF, DOC -- thanks, Paul!

All this makes me wonder why the Sysops who own these BBSes keep them running with such little traffic. Did they just forget to turn off their machines in 1998 as the Internet finally swept away the traditional US BBS scene? Did the old Sysops die and nobody noticed that the automated machines were still running, undetected, in a dusty back room somewhere? The possibilities are incredibly compelling; they really stir the imagination. That’s why finding such forgotten realms elicits a sense of discovery in me, like being an explorer discovering a long-lost temple in the overgrown jungles of Peru — all the more reason to give the old places a visit.

Link (Thanks, Jacques!)

Owing to the lack of recordings of Western music available in the USSR, people had to rely on records coming through Eastern Europe, where controls on records were less strict, or on the tiny influx of records from beyond the iron curtain. Such restrictions meant the number of recordings would remain small and precious. But enterprising young people with technical skills learned to duplicate records with a converted phonograph that would "press" a record using a very unusual material for the purpose; discarded x-ray plates. This material was both plentiful and cheap, and millions of duplications of Western and Soviet groups were made and distributed by an underground roentgenizdat, or x-ray press, which is akin to the samizdat that was the notorious tradition of self-publication among banned writers in the USSR. According to rock historian Troitsky, the one-sided x-ray disks costed about one to one and a half rubles each on the black market, and lasted only a few months, as opposed to around five rubles for a two-sided vinyl disk. By the late 50's, the officials knew about the roentgenizdat, and made it illegal in 1958. Officials took action to break up the largest ring in 1959, sending the leaders to prison, beginning an orginization by the Komsomol of "music patrols" that later undertook to curtail illegal music activity all over the country.

This story also appears in Kelly's Creative Commons-licensed collection Stranger Things Happen.

The girl detective's mother is missing.

The girl detective's mother has been missing for a long time.

The underworld.

Think of the underworld as the back of your closet, behind all those racks of clothes that you don't wear anymore. Things are always getting pushed back there and forgotten about. The underworld is full of things that you've forgotten about. Some of them, if only you could remember, you might want to take them back. Trips to the underworld are always very nostalgic. It's darker in there. The seasons don't match. Mostly people end up there by accident, or else because in the end there was nowhere else to go. Only heroes and girl detectives go to the underworld on purpose.

There are three kinds of food.

One is the food that your mother makes for you. One is the kind of food that you eat in restaurants. One is the kind of food that you eat in dreams. There's one other kind of food, but you can only get that in the underworld, and it's not really food. It's more like dancing.

The payphones in the gallery are wild, like this floating payphone in the middle of Lake Victoria in Uganda, solar-powered and GSM-networked. Link (via Street Use)

You won't see pics like this from Petersburg's subway: that's because the full-employment-scheme useless transit cops there fine you a hundred rubles if you use your camera in the Petersburg metro. They are indeed valiant guards of the transit authority's precious photons. Link (via Neatorama)

Traffic on the Sex and Shanghai blog has surged from 500 hits to more than 17,000, thanks to a swarm of castration threats, anti-British rants and attacks on women who sleep with foreigners. The author, who calls himself Chinabounder, introduces himself as a wastrel, "lacking in moral fibre, but coping with the situation". According to the posts, he is an English language teacher at a university...

The campaign against the blog was launched on Friday by Zhang Jiehai, professor of psychology in the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences under a post titled The Internet Hunt for an Immoral Foreigner. "I have something to tell Chinese men: please think about how these foreign trash have dallied with your sisters and made fun of your impotence," he wrote. "This piece of garbage must be found and kicked out of China!!!"

Update: Jane sez, "This a great example of chinavenging - a term I coined to describe the culture-specific practice of moralizing 'smart mobs' in China. Now that the Internet is increasingly constrained by local governments, it really makes sense to start talking about Web trends in site-specific terms."

Ad agency Grey Worldwide worked with the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) and the Ad Council to create a series of PSAs highlighting the need for Katrina surivors to reach out for help.

Depression and post-traumatic stress disorder are rampant throughout the survivor population.

They sent me down to photograph survivors. I spent a week in New Orleans and Mississippi. This is the first ad to come out.

Office staff are hacking into the department's computers, putting at risk the privacy of 40million people in Britain. The revelation undermines Government claims that sensitive information being collected for its controversial ID Cards scheme could not fall into criminal hands.

Okay, let's imagine you're, like, Mr Humble Government Clerk punter bedsit Weetabix-eater guy, and in front of you, every day, is the Brand New British Gigantic SuperAntiTerror ID Consolidated Database. If you're, like, Miss Moneypenny or something, maybe you're so rigidly disciplined that you never peek. But wouldn't you -- just as job one -- check out YOUR OWN entry in the giant Satanic Mill database? And after that, wouldn't you do Enid, in the cubicle down the hall? I mean, how could you not?

Reader comment: Blake says,

You may already be aware, but a very similar thing happened in Australia last week. (Link to story). About 20 Goverment Employment Office staff were sacked and around a 100 others resigned after they were found to be searching through the database illegally.

As part of a state grand-jury investigation over press leaks, the office of Pennsylvania's Attorney General has seized four hard drives from the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal. At issue is whether reporters at that paper were given access to a password-protected law enforcement website with nonpublic information on local crime incidents. The paper is accused of having used some of that information in news reports. Reporters may be charged with felony "computer hacking" if they accessed the website without permission from authorities.

Lancaster Newspapers did hand over the initial four hard drives. But today, there's news they've filed an emergency petition to block an order to turn over two more computers. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court will soon decide whether the news organization must sumbit the additional hard drives, as part of the ongoing probe of alleged illicit access to that restricted law enforcement website. Snip:

Lancaster Newspapers surrendered four of its computer hard drives in March after an earlier court battle, but balked at a more recent court order demanding two more computers. It was given a deadline of Aug. 25 to turn over the computers or face a fine of $1,000 a day, according to court documents.

The agreement marks a clear break with the Bush administration and puts California on a path to reducing its emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by an estimated 25 percent by 2020.

The bill still needs lawmakers' approval, but that appears likely, given that Democrats control the Legislature.

A British engineering firm has put together a high-performance hybrid version of BMW's Mini Cooper. The PML Mini QED has a top speed of 150 mph, a 0-60 mph time of 4.5 seconds. The car uses a small gasoline engine with four 160 horsepower electric motors — one on each wheel. The car has been designed to run for four hours of combined urban/extra urban driving, powered only by a battery and bank of ultra capacitors. The QED supports an all-electric range of 200-250 miles and has a total range of about 932 miles (1,500 km). For longer journeys at higher speeds, a small conventional internal combustion engine (ICE) is used to re-charge the battery. In this hybrid mode, fuel economies of up to 80mpg can be achieved.

Home Office minister Vernon Coaker said the government planned to make it an offence to own images featuring scenes of extreme sexual violence, following a year-long consultation on the issue. The action is a victory for the family of Jane Longhurst, a 31-year-old Brighton teacher murdered in 2003 by a man obsessed with viewing necrophilia Web sites, who have campaigned to block access to such material in the UK.

"My daughter Sue and myself are very pleased that after 30 months of intensive campaigning we have persuaded the government to take action against these horrific Internet sites, which can have such a corrupting influence and glorify extreme sexual violence," Longhurst's mother Liz told the BBC.

[A] spokesman for a BDSM group called criminalization of possession troubling. “The theory that people should be punished for viewing an image that simply involves the idea of sexuality with violence shows the proposal being made is to introduce a form of thought crime,” the spokesman said.

Director of the Libertarian Alliance Shaun Gabb said that extending the ban on possession of such content gives the police “inquisitorial powers to come in your house and see what you’ve got.”

The change in the law applies to England and Wales. Plans are underway to extend the law to Northern Ireland. The Scottish Executive is expected to announce its plans separately.

Image above -- shibari (worksafe definition) photos by Phillippe Boxis: NSFW link.

Reader comment: Tom says,

In a typical example of post hoc, ergo propter hoc, the British government has announced plans to ban violent pornography because one man who enjoyed it killed his girlfriend [a woman]. Last time I checked, killing people was still illegal, so why do we need a new rule outlawing fantasies?

What's actually been announced is the end result of a consultation process. Parliament is not in session, and there is as yet no Bill, never mind an Act passed into Law with Royal Assent. It will require seperate legislation in Scotland.

The report itself states that a bill will be brought before Parliament "when the legislative calendar allows", giving those who oppose it plenty of time to continue the campaign against this legislation.

"Starbuck, Lee, and the President come across some pylons and toasters in their search for home." Link to video starring three young fans of my favorite sf tv show, Battlestar Galactica. Shot in Quebec. (thanks, EmilyTheKid)

Every cellphone is tuned into multiple relay towers. The towers determine the phone's position twice a second when someone is talking and once every 30 seconds if the phone is idle. The towers send phone position information to the carrier's local computers where, for the most part, [engineer Ron Herman] says, "it falls on the floor and nobody pays any attention to it."

Atlanta-based IntelliOne probes that data stream and converts it into real-time traffic congestion reports. The reports detail the exact locations and extent of the congestion, and the average speed of traffic. "If there are 50 or 100 phones out on I-275 moving at 10 miles an hour in a 65 mph zone, there's a problem," Herman said.

There are no privacy issues. The IntelliOne probe taps a data stream, not the voice stream, so it can't listen in on calls. There also is an anonymity filter, so the system doesn't know whose phone it is tracking.

Reader comment: Michael Keukert in Aachen, Germany writes:

the previous issue of the German edition of MIT's "Technology Review" reports that such tests are being conducted in several areas of Germany for quite a while already. Germanys crowded network auf "Autobahn" is heavily affected by traffic jams, so a network of permanently mounted detectors have been installed. Data is also acquired by "floating car units", many of them put on the road by BMW. The research project tries to use the cellphone data to further detail the current traffic situation and to have an early warning for jams.

A little while ago I put together a little application on our phone system so that when a telemarketer calls in, I can transfer them to this extension and annoy the hell out of them. I thought about it a bit more and decided to make it a little more interesting, so I can get them to hold on the line as long as possible. Today I recorded a bunch of different voices sounding really interested in what a telemarketer would be offering. Have a listen (...) Once I gather enough calls, i'm gong to setup a little podcast of all the best calls from a fortnightly period. Enjoy!

Reader comment: Michael Natale says,

Funny idea that would work, but I don't think the call is real. That Indian accent sounds put on to me. [Ed. note: Right-o, it's totally fake.] These are a few years old but absolutely genuine: Link

WITH the aid of the "gnathograph," an instrument as mouth-filling as its name, a dentist's patients may now be assured of a perfect fit for artificial teeth. Fitted to the jaws as shown above, the new device registers the arrangement of the teeth and the direction of the "bite," to guide the dentist in straightening teeth or fitting inlays, crowns, bridges, and plates. Its inventor, Dr. Beverly B. McCollum of Los Angeles, Calif., demonstrates in the picture at the right how the instrument is then mounted for use in tooling a plate to just the right shape to give the most comfortable fit in the mouth.

[B]ack in 1999, in its Netflix-like heyday, Half.com was hot. And then it did something quite remarkable. As a publicity stunt, it bought a town — somewhere in Oregon — and renamed it. This news made the wire services, The New York Times and Wired Magazine.

So what ever happened to Half.com, Oregon, the first dot com city in the world?

Hargadon specializes in Linux thin clients for small businesses and schools. He likes to transform aging Windows networks into high-speed, low-cost, virus-free workstations by using existing PCs, sans hard drives, that act as dumb terminals. Hargadon has discovered that that kind of technology translates easily into community outreach. He started thinking about that as he watched the world's response to the Asian tsunami in 2004. "I wondered, what are people doing on those response teams and in the emergency shelters, and wouldn't it be nice if they could get Internet? I started playing around with some ideas and looking at different live CD versions of kiosk software."

When Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast in 2005, Hargadon decided to take his thin client knowledge and the live CD concept and do what he could. "I thought, let's see if we can make a difference." He went to the shelters and to local Red Cross agencies with his proposal: to provide the means for workers and victims to easily and securely access the 'Net. The agencies took him up on that offer.

Hargadon created the bootable CDs with Morphix Linux and a locked-down version of the Firefox browser. The system is configured to clear the cache when Firefox is closed or after five minutes of inactivity. Hargadon also creates custom portal sites for agencies that request the kiosk software.

One problem Hargadon encountered with the kiosks was that FEMA Web sites were not fully accessible with Firefox, so shelters had to have a Windows system available to access that agency's services online. Even so, he says, the kiosks were deployed "fairly widely" in hurricane-affected areas. This year, Hargadon created a custom CD for victims of Tropical Cyclone Larry, which hit Innisfail in Queensland, Australia..

I was asked by local people to paint something happy, to reflect the spirit of the community. Before starting I banged up a piece of explanatory text on the wall (...) It reads: "When Ramallah, in Palestine, is put under curfew by the Israeli Army, nobody goes outside for days. The streets look completely deserted. But from a tall building, if you look out over the city, you can sometimes see hundreds of many-coloured kites, flown from the roof-terraces by the children of Ramallah. The children you can see here are flying kites to celebrate the spirit of the people of Dahyeh. Some kites you can see are flying away. These are for the children who are no longer here; they are no longer held down to the Earth".

A team led by Eun-Su Yang of the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, analyzed 25 years of independent ozone observations at different altitudes in Earth's stratosphere, which lies between six and 31 miles above the surface. The observations were gathered from balloons, ground-based instruments, NASA and NOAA satellites.

The stratosphere is Earth's second lowest atmospheric layer. It contains approximately 90 percent of all atmospheric ozone. The researchers concluded the Earth's protective ozone layer outside of the polar regions stopped thinning around 1997. Ozone in these areas declined steadily from 1979 to 1997.

Reader comment: Steve Mallett says,

With threats of funding cuts and various other pressures put upon NASA it seems suspicious, though I hope it is indeed true, that NASA comes out supporting something that Republicans would like to see... that Al Gore is wrong.

The user comment you posted under the story "NASA: Data indicates Earth's ozone layer is on the mend" - is incorrect. It's been known for some time that the ozone layer is improving, a fact that Gore actually mentions in his documentary about global warming, a separate phenomenon.

In his movie "Inconvenient Truth" Gore points to the recovery of the ozone layer as a sign of hope that through policies, change is possible. And that now that we have made progess on the ozone layer we need to start working on carbon dioxide emmisions.

Shalom TV debuts today on cable providers in Pennsylvania and Delaware. "All during the month, Shalom TV features 50 hours of entertaining and educational telecasts on a VOD format with programming updated on a regular basis," reports Cynopsis.

HORNMASSIVE (2004) (Matt Hope) is a 2 Ton (4500 Lbs US), 3.5 M by 3.1 M by 4 M mobile 2000 watt steel and aluminuim horn sound system, all powered from a commercial 12” speaker driver. It functions as a mobile audio input station... (and is) designed to be the ultimate monophonic sound projector intended to catalyze social activities in multiple settings.

Cannibalism was practiced among prehistoric human beings, and it lingered into the 19th century in some isolated South Pacific cultures, notably in Fiji. But today the Korowai are among the very few tribes believed to eat human flesh. They live about 100 miles inland from the Arafura Sea, which is where Michael Rockefeller, a son of then-New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, disappeared in 1961 while collecting artifacts from another Papuan tribe; his body was never found. Most Korowai still live with little knowledge of the world beyond their homelands and frequently feud with one another. Some are said to kill and eat male witches they call khakhua...

After we eat a dinner of river fish and rice, Boas joins me in a hut and sits cross-legged on the thatched floor, his dark eyes reflecting the gleam from my flashlight, our only source of light. Using Kembaren as translator, he explains why the Korowai kill and eat their fellow tribesmen. It's because of the khakhua, which comes disguised as a relative or friend of a person he wants to kill. "The khakhua eats the victim's insides while he sleeps," Boas explains, "replacing them with fireplace ash so the victim does not know he's being eaten. The khakhua finally kills the person by shooting a magical arrow into his heart." When a clan member dies, his or her male relatives and friends seize and kill the khakhua. "Usually, the [dying] victim whispers to his relatives the name of the man he knows is the khakhua," Boas says. "He may be from the same or another treehouse."

I ask Boas whether the Korowai eat people for any other reason or eat the bodies of enemies they've killed in battle. "Of course not," he replies, giving me a funny look. "We don't eat humans, we only eat khakhua."

(Police Lieutenant John) Beyer pointed out that he, his police officers and the public use the backdoor entrance to the police station. The front door just off busy Grand Avenue is usually locked and not used.

"The only thing I can say is somebody has a sense of humor," Beyer said. "Now they'll read about it in the paper and say, 'Yeah, that was me...' "

But this isn't the first time marijuana has been discovered growing in a public place in Duluth. In 1990, a citizen pointed out to police that a 3-foot marijuana plant was growing in the northern corner of the Civic Center courtyard near City Hall.

“The main goal of the study was to identify the neural correlates of a mystical experience,” explained Beauregard. “This does not diminish the meaning and value of such an experience, and neither does it confirm or disconfirm the existence of God.

This study demonstrated that a dozen different regions of the brain are activated during a mystical experience. This type of research became very popular in the United States in the late 1990s. Some researchers went as far as suggesting the possibility of a specific brain region designed (italics mine--ed.) for communication with God. This latest research discredits such theories.

Another thing they don't tell you -- in fact, they don't tell you until the search at the gate: they won't let you bring a pen onto the plane. I only lost a ball-point pen which I'm pretty sure came from Tucows' office supply closet. Others were less fortunate; in the bin where confiscated pens were being collected, I saw a at least a dozen "executive" pens, including Crosses and Mont Blancs. If you're accustomed to carrying an expensive pen, do not take it with you!

Without pens, we had nothing with which to fill out the immigrations and customs forms required for international flights arriving at their first port of entry to the United States. We ended up -- all 172 of us -- sharing the chief flight attendant's pen, passing it from row to row.

The UK's Trunk Records are always unearthing and releasing strange, lost recording from the 20th Century, but their latest release, "Music For Biscuits" has the most incredible story behind it.

The tracks are all by Mike Sammes, backing singer and vocal arranger for almost everyone back in the 60's (Crosby, Sinatra, Bacharach, Streisand, The Beatles, Judy Garland...) and were mostly made for commercials. Apparently the one for tractors is especially good.

Mike's story does not end well however. He died almost completely alone after a long illness exacerbated by a fall. The master tapes were rescued from his house, which had already been ransacked, just days before the rest of his belongings were disposed of.

The development of technology has made sure Sweden and Europe stand before a fork in the road. The new technology offers fantastic possibilities to spread culture and knowledge all over the world with almost no costs. But it also makes way for the building of a society monitored at a level unheard of up until now.

In no time, the monitoring state has advanced its positions strongly in Sweden. This development threatens equality and safety before the law, and nothing indicates that it even adds to security. The Pirate Party believes this is the wrong way to go.

The right to privacy is a corner stone in an open and democratic society. Each and everyone has the right to respect for one’s own private and family life, one’s home and one’s correspondence. If the constitutional freedom of information is to be more than empty words on a paper, we much defend the right for protected private communication.

January 8, 1965: The Beach Boys enter the studio to record what will become their second number one hit, "Help Me Rhonda". Well into the session, a drunken Murry Wilson (Brian, Carl and Dennis' Dad) arrives and proceeds to commandeer the session with psychodrama, scat singing and weepy, abusive melodrama. The session tape captured it all, and versions of these tapes have been floating around bootlegs for years. The fact that the tapes survived is itself surprising - you can hear Brian and Murry fighting over the tape recorder controls at the 35:30 mark of the full version, Murry wanting to stop the recording, with Brian ultimately keeping the tape rolling.

Update: Star sez, "My friend Emily Geanacopoulos made a lovely video featuring the Beach Boys audio. it features handmade stick puppets of the Beach Boys hanging out in elaborate sets."

[A] simple photograph of my mom's Eden, one year on. She's sitting on the front porch of what will be her new home soon. It's risen on the foundation of the home Katrina destroyed, only steps away from her FEMA trailer, and every day she looks out the trailer window a thousand times at it, and her gold smile lights up, and she whispers "Thank you, Jesus."

It's been built by the sweat and love of volunteers from all over the country. From all walks of life they've come into the Gulf to help their brothers and sisters. Normal, average Americans, disgusted by their government's inaction, they've picked up hammers and done it themselves.

One day there's a moldering heap of rubble, the next day hippie volunteers from Burning Man bulldoze it and take it away. One day it's a flat slab of concrete, the next day a pre-fab home kit is delivered by One House At A Time and New Hope Construction. One day there's a jumble of materials, the next day a church group from Oregon shows up and builds the frame and shell. A little later a group from Pennsylvania shows up and paints it my mom's favorite shade of green, and puts a tin roof on so she can hear the rain fall at night. And not to be outdone, a group from Alabama comes over and sheet rocks the interior, then comes back and builds her a deck for good measure.

The ex-owners allege in arbitration claims that, among other things, the artist known for his dreamily luminous landscapes and street scenes used his Christian faith to persuade them to invest in the independently owned stores, which sell only Kinkade's work.

"They really knew how to bait the hook," said one former dealer who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the case. "They certainly used the Christian hook."

Kinkade has denied the allegations in the civil litigation.

Reader comment: Ethan says,

I was interested to read about the latest Kinkaid scandal... but was a bit taken back by this paragraph in the SF Chronicle (actually AP) story about it. Rachel Konrad wrote:

Critics -- including highbrow art aficionados, satirical bloggers and starving artists annoyed by Kinkade's marketing success -- snicker at his work. His paintings typically include tranquil scenes of country gardens, churches, streams and lighthouses in dewy morning light. Many contain images from Bible passages.

That kind of commentary seem appropriate a write doing, well, commentary... but it doesn't seem ok for what is purportedly a straight-ahead, hard news article. Frankly, the characterization of "starving artists" bugs me, but even more so the assertion that what they dislike about Kinkaid is his success. That seems especially odd implication coming at the end of an article outlining Kinkaid?s apparent fraudulent activities (could it be the fraud, not sappy art, that especially bothers people?).

Snip from MSNBC article:

"We had clear legal advice that publication in the U.K. might run afoul of their law," Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty said Tuesday. "It's a country that doesn't have the First Amendment, but it does have the free press. We felt we should respect their country's law."

Visitors who click on a link to the article, published Monday, instead got a notice explaining that British law "prohibits publication of prejudicial information about the defendants prior to trial." The blocked article reveals evidence authorities have in the alleged plot to use liquid explosives to down U.S. airliners over the Atlantic.

"On advice of legal counsel, this article is unavailable to readers of nytimes.com in Britain. This arises from the requirement in British law that prohibits publication of prejudicial information about the defendants prior to trial."

(Thanks, Larry Campbell, Chris, and Cyrus -- who has a new gig writing for Engadget, btw!)

In one study, Mr. De Vany and W. David Walls, an economist at the University of Calgary, took those factors into account. Looking across a sample of more than 2,000 movies exhibited between 1985 and 1996, they found that only seven actors and actresses -- Tom Hanks, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sandra Bullock, Jodie Foster, Jim Carrey, Barbra Streisand and Robin Williams -- had a positive impact on the box office, mostly in the first few weeks of a film's release.

In the same study, two directors, Steven Spielberg and Oliver Stone also pushed up a movie's revenue. But Winona Ryder, Sharon Stone and Val Kilmer were associated with a smaller box-office revenue. No other star had any statistically significant impact at all. So what are stars for? By helping a movie open -- attracting lots of people in to see a movie in the first few days before the buzz about whether it's good or bad is widely known -- stars can set a floor for revenues, said Mr. De Vany.

"Stars help to launch a film. They are meant as signals to create a big opening," he said. "But they can't make a film have legs."

The original 76 Ball is about as pleasing an object representing a gas company can be, and it strikes me as bizarre that the corporate powers that be think its a good idea to replace it with the new, flattened-ball-in-a-rectangle sign. It's uglier and more difficult to identify from a distance. I tell you, it's the same unfathomably dull minds at work here as the ones that have destroyed cereal box design. Link (Thanks, Todd!)

I was brought up at an early age reading comic books, as I grew older, I eventually found myself standing among thousands of people at the Rosemont Convention Center for Wizard World 1999. The cramped passageways, loud noises, and individuals from all over the world was my first encounter with a comic book convention. I saw fans handing out sketchbooks to artists and purchasing commissions for them to scribble something , an original work, for their collection. This intrigued me, that someone would take time out their schedule and actually draw something specifically for you. Something like this was much more personal than say an autograph or even purchasing artwork that has been published before. After the show ended, my desire to collect artwork continued to soar. While comic book conventions usually only occur once a year in a given city, it would become too costly to travel across the nation acquiring art. I needed to find a way to continue this throughout the year and to make it efficient to do this through the mail. There would be too great a risk to send out a sketchbook through the mail for fear of it becoming lost. I remembered seeing postcards with First Day stamps whereby syndicated cartoonists would autograph it along with putting a doodle of their most known character on it, then mailing it back to the person. So, I drew from this, along with my grandfather’s movie star autograph collection on index cards, and decided to mail a card along with the return postage to some illustrators to see if I received anything back...

The SpiralFrog service will be supported by online advertising, according to reports. Universal's participation is confirmed, and talks are under way with EMI and other music labels. I wonder exactly what kind of ads (how intrusive and time-engaging?), and what bitrate we're talking about -- really low-quality, or high enough that you'd actually *want* to listen?

Eliot Van Buskirk at Wired News has confirmed that the file format will be PlaysforSure-protected WMA (barf): Link.

Regular readers of this blog may recall Cory's post a few days ago with news that the Microsoft copy-protection scheme was unclimactically cracked: Link

Snip from Reuters report with more on today's launch news:

SpiralFrog, a new music download service, on Tuesday said it would make Vivendi's Universal Music Group's catalog available for free legal downloading in the United States and Canada.

The new advertising-supported service, due to launch later this year, joins the ranks of rivals battling for a piece of the digital music market in the shadow of Apple Computer Inc's dominant iTunes music store.

New York-based SpiralFrog said it would offer users of its free, Web-based service the ability to legally download music of Universal's roster, which includes U2, Gwen Stefani and The Roots.

Spiral Frog will offer a desktop downloader for Windows Media Files (no iPods!) that can be listened to on one PC and two portable devices. Here’s the kicker - you must log in to the Spiral Frog service at least once per month, and see their ads, or your files will stop playing!

The details aren’t fully set in stone, but it will be something like that. There will be links to third party sites of the record labels’ choosing if you’d like to buy your freedom to at least skip the ads.

Spiral Frog will also offer far more than just music, but also video and other digital content. The selling point here is that users will be able to access media legally, without the malware, bad network connections and pirate’s shame that comes from other online media sources.

Officer Phillip Short received a text message on his personal cell phone Thursday night regarding marijuana. He didn't recognize the phone number and didn't know who sent the message, so he decided not to respond.

The messages kept coming Friday and finally he decided to play along. Officer Short messaged the person back, setting up a meeting to do the drugs. "I said, yeah I remember who you are now and I have another sack if you want to buy it for half price, she said no I have plenty but you can help me smoke this one. I said okay can you come to Broken Arrow.”

"Virtual reality is showing significant promise for promoting faster and more complete rehabilitation, but the cost of many systems is still prohibitive for widespread deployment in outpatient clinics or patients' homes," said Grigore Burdea, professor of electrical and computer engineering and a noted inventor of virtual rehabilitation technology. "While it's essential to keep pursuing breakthrough technologies that will initially be costly, it's just as important that we find ways to make innovative treatments accessible to the many patients who need them..."

In one exercise, a patient attempts to wipe clean four vertical bars of "dirty" pixels that obscure a pleasant image on a computer display. The bars are erased in proportion to each finger's flexing motion, giving the patient immediate feedback on his or her performance. And in an exercise to promote finger flexing speed, a patient tries to make a fist quickly enough to "scare away" a butterfly flitting around on the screen.

The pinch of the game; the determining moment, the crucial point. "But the pinch of the game had not arrived yet..." P.6

Covert; used as a noun, means a hiding place "I then came out of my covert and went on..." P.37

Elbow relation; distant relation, like a cousin-in-law. P.60

Seasoning; drunkenness. "...some of our gentlemen officers, happening to stop at a tavern, or rather a sort of grogshop, took such a seasoning that two or three of them became "quite frisky"..." P.146

Gull; fool, trick. "...and the men seeing they could no longer gull the officers, gave up the business likewise." P.152

Gripe; noun, meaning a grasp, perhaps literally a pain in the bowels. Describing a bout of nightmares---"I recovered partly from the first attack, but before I could fully overcome it, it took a second gripe upon me more serious than the first." P.160

Along with the standard Ubuntu applications, Ubuntu Christian Edition includes the best available Christian software. The latest release contains GnomeSword, a top of the line Bible study program for Linux based on the Sword Project. There are several modules installed with GnomeSword including Bibles, Commentaries, and Dictionaries.

Ubuntu Christian Edition also includes fully integrated web content parental controls powered by Dansguardian. A graphical tool to adjust the parental control settings has also been developed specifically for Ubuntu Christian Edition. These features are truly what sets Ubuntu Christian Edition apart.

From the Washington Post:

Posted three weeks ago, the video describes what De Kort says are blind spots in the ship's security cameras, equipment that malfunctions in cold weather and other problems. "It may be very hard for you to believe that our government and the largest defense contractor in the world [are] capable of such alarming incompetence and can make ethical compromises as glaring as what I am going to describe." In response to De Kort's charges, a Coast Guard spokeswoman said the service has "taken the appropriate level of action." A spokeswoman for the contractors said the allegations were without merit.

Now that the video has made the news, the people who can so something about it are finally getting their butts in gear.

The video also has caught the eye of people in high places. De Kort's video has been covered by defense trade magazines, and yesterday, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), ranking Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee, wrote a letter to the Coast Guard asking for an answer to De Kort's "extremely distressing" allegations.

"I want to make sure that the product we paid for is a product that does not jeopardize our men and women in service," Thompson said.

Last, week, Dentara Rask -- a character in CCP's Eve Online massively multiplayer online world -- pulled off an impressive stunt. He ran a classic Ponzi scheme and walked off with 700 billion ISK (in game money, and quite a lot of it). Normally, this kind of in-game bravado would generate nothing but a confuse stare from someone not deep inside the Eve universe, and little more than scandal-of-the-week titillation and subsequent yawns there. But I believe this case is more interesting than that.

I believe Dentara Rask committed fraud.
I believe he owes the IRS a lot of money.

Admittedly these are bold statements likely stuffed with straw, but they have deep implications, and bear argument.

An IKEA spokesperson says that the appendage is actually the dog's leg. "It's that straightforward," she told CTV. "The picture is unfortunate, but we hope our customers will see past the image and see how fantastic the other 364 pages in the catalogue really are." Link (Thanks, Matthew!)

Wikipedia has hit the big time.

The massive user-generated and edited site is not only the biggest encyclopedia in the world, it's also gotten the attention of the media elite, been lampooned by the Onion and Comedy Central, and will come packaged with MIT's $100 laptop project.

But what are the lessons of Wikipedia and what bodes for the future of wikis beyond Wikipedia? Will open collaboration be the exception or the rule?

I'll be in Singapore, keynoting at the State of Play conference, just after New Year's, so I'll be able to check this out myself.

The official report released with the unfurling of the Intelligent Nation program pointed out that Singapore already had one public hot spot for every square kilometer at the end of last year. Communication between hot spots will be augmented by mesh networking, according to the Intelligent Nation report. Commercial WiMax--a wireless standard that allows signals to travel over longer distances than those using Wi-Fi--will begin in Singapore by the end of the year, said Chang.

The reef made a tremendous grinding noise. "Yaah!" it said. "Get lost. Sovereign territory!"

"All those fish," the woman said. Robbie had to stop himself from thinking of her as Janet. She was whomever was riding her now.

"Parrotfish," Robbie said. "They eat coral. I don't think they taste very good."

The woman hugged herself. "Are you sentient?" she asked.

"Yes," Robbie said. "And at your service, Asimov be blessed." His cameras spotted her eyes rolling, and that stung. He tried to keep his thoughts pious, though. The point of Asimovism wasn't to inspire gratitude in humans, it was to give purpose to the long, long life.

Podcast: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4

The Yes Men convinced the organizers of a major conference attended by contractors and government officials in charge of rebuilding N.O. that HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson would attend the conference. Once at the conference, Yes Man Andy Bichlbaum -- posing as Rene Oswin, a fake HUD official -- delivered a speech that asserted that HUD was wrong and that it would not actually demolish perfectly sound low income housing, as it was planning to do. The Yes Men were working with local N.O. activists who have built a tent city around the site that will be destroyed to make way for a gentrified neighborhood.

He's put up a database with over 7,800 literary metaphors for the mind in 18th century English lit, with more to come:

"Those raging storms of wrath That so bedym the eyes of thine intent"

"Only a few succeed in arriving at these reasons with the eye of the mind, and when one does arrive, insofar as is possible, the very one who arrives does not abide in them, but as it were the eye (of the mind) itself is beaten back and repelled."

"The World a Scene of murder'd Souls appears, / Interr'd in living Sepulchres, / And moved from Place to Place in walking Tombs."

McSweeney's has released a new book called Arboretum by David Byrne, described as a "collection of drawings/trees/maps." From the McSweeney's preview:

It's printed in a black-and-silver duotone for an uncanny graphite finish that preserves all the erasures and scribbles of the originals, its hard cover is wrapped in unassuming lunch-bag brown paper, and there's a 4-foot-long foldout explanatory guide.

Well, I guess they're a lot of things. Faux science, automatic writing, self-analysis, satire, and maybe even a serious attempt at finding connections where none were thought to exist.

They began a few years ago as instructions to myself in a little notebook—"draw an evolutionary tree on pleasure," or "draw a Venn diagram about relationships," for example. Mental maps of imaginary territory; typologies of wine descriptions, East Village clubs and bars, and medieval war machines. Maybe it was a sort of self-therapy that worked by allowing the hand to "say" what the voice could not.

Irrational logic—I've heard it called that. The application of logical scientific rigor and form to basically irrational premises. To proceed, carefully and deliberately, from nonsense, with a straight face, often arriving at a new kind of sense.

But how can nonsense ever emerge as sense? No matter how convoluted or folded, it will still always be nonsense, won't it?

About 200 people emailed me with their ideas on how this game was rigged. Today, one of Make's interns, Ty Nowotny, took the game apart and revealed its secret: a cylinder with damping material.

(Click on thumbnail for enlargement) When the carny wants to demonstrate how easy it is to throw a ball into the basket and have it drop through the hole, he reaches into the catching apron and pushes the green fabric tacked to the backboard, which makes the cylinder flush against the backboard. Then he tosses the ball into the basket. The cylinder absorbs the ball's energy, so the ball does not bounce out of the basket, but instead drops through the hole.

(Click on thumbnail for enlargement) The very act of throwing the ball against the backboard causes the damping cylinder drop away. Now, when it's the rube's turn, the ball bounces right out of the basket. Here's a photo of the game (the real name is a "Scissors Box") with the back panel removed, revealing the mechanism.

Here are two videos of the thing in action. The first one shows balls bouncing out of it like crazy; the second one shows how the mechanism operates. Video 1 | Video 2

Reader comment:

Mark, Richard says:

Re: "Now, when it's the rube's turn, the ball bounces right out of the basket."

A technology later perfected by Diebold.

Another mash-up album from djbc (who produced the excellent Philip Glass/Hip-Hop "Glassbreaks" album), this time featuring vocals from the Wu-Tang Clan over dixieland jazz tunes. It's a thing to hear. Online for free, and probably only until the cease-and-desist letter comes. Link, and a torrent for the file can be found here as well.

Pageview counts are as suseptible as hit counts to site design decisions that have nothing to do with actual usage. As Mike Davidson brilliantly analyzed in April, part of the reason MySpace drives such an amazing number of pageviews is because their site design is so terrible. As Mike writes: "Here's a sobering thought: If the operators of MySpace cleaned up the site and followed modern interface and web application principles tomorrow, here's what the graph would look like:

Read Ev's entire post here.

Sean Bonner did, and responds with a post observing that "MySpace Can Eat a Bag of Dick." And indeed they can, but it'll take them 20 times more clicks to accomplish the task.

Jean Jacques PERREY, resident of France, will play a live concert in San Francisco of "Happy Retro Moog Pop"! In the 60s, the 77-year-old composer produced some of the most amazingly inventive/humorous music ever collaged together with a razor blade and tape, on albums like The In Sound from Way Out! J-J Perrey's recent CD, Circus of Life, is one of the best recordings ever to grace our stereo system (every track is great).

Jean Jacques will play the Ondoline, accompanied by Dana Countryman. (Their new CD collaboration, The Happy ElectroPop Music Machine [Oglio Records], is scheduled for release on Sept 25, 2006.) This personal concert will be legendary and you will be glad you were there in an intimate setting--rabid fans of the music of Perrey and Kingsley should not miss this event!

(Link to full-size pic). Burners have their glow-in-the-dark hemp thongs in a bunch over an error in this San Francisco Chronicle article. The subject is a "pollution exchange" at Burning Man modeled after real-world projects like the Chicago Climate Exchange -- but here's the goof in "Burning Man Goes Green":

Encouraged by the resurgence of the green movement, the scientists are taking a hard look at all those sacred flaming temples, gas-powered scooters shaped like cupcakes, and hundreds of rumbling RVs that converge for a week on the dry Black Rock Desert lakebed. With an idea that would make Al Gore smile, the scientists have created Cooling Man, an online calculator that determines how many tons of greenhouse gases each of the 37,000 "burners" will produce with their art projects and community camps.

My dear editor,

I feel my muffin has been defiled. In Meridith May's August 26 article entitled "Burning Man Goes Green," she made a particularly distressing error (well, distressing to, at the very least, me and my fellow cupcake builders). Gas powered food? Ick. The motorized cupcakes and muffins are all electric, every delicious one of them, charged by solar panels back at camp. No gas. No varoom. None among us has a gas powered Burning Man art vehicle. (And as a matter of fact, my sweetie and co-inventor of the mobile muffins, converted his Honda Civic Del Sol into a fully electric vehicle years ago. He now works at Tesla Motors, the new company in San Carlos manufacturing a long range electric sports car.) Please remember to do your research even when writing about wacky art projects. Though I hope no one digs deep enough to discover that the furry toppings for the cupcakes were harvested from baby seals and stray kittens.

Greenly yours,
Lisa Pongrace
(Otherwise, I very much appreciated the article)

A Scientology rep asked me if I wanted anything and I told her I was there to see what the Church was up to. She insisted that The Citizens Commission on Human Rights wasn't a Scientology organization, but on further questioning she admitted that the organization had been founded by the Church and that the majority of its funding came from donations from Church members.

The exhibit was a nightmarish round of blaring video-screens playing the kind of ominous music that you hear on America's Most Wanted during the atrocity re-enactment, each screen competing with the others to fill the room with a cacophonous, stomach-churning gumbo of scary sound-effects. The visuals showed photos of Hitler (a favorite graphic emblem of the Church -- they used it to smear Time magazine after a critical piece appeared there) and atrocity photos. The Church's connection to the "Council" wasn't mentioned anywhere.

At the literature stand, there were a number of brochures on offer, including the one linked below, which encouraged readers to found astroturf blogs that copy-and-pasted information from the Council's own site in order to "get the word out." Astroturf is as astroturf does, I guess. Link to astroturf blog brochure, Link to video of exhibit, Link to my photos of the exhibit, Link to Wikipedia on CCHR

Jared Benedict is trying to get all the USGS public domain maps into the actual public domain so they are freely available for everyone to freely use. He's bought all the maps in digital form. Once he's recouped his costs they'll all be available via the Internet Archive.

Update: wrexen sez, "The map data has been freed and is making its slow journey to the safe harbors of the Internet Archive!"

I've had this tattoo since 1990, so you can imagine my surprise/delight on seeing the giant business card Menger Sponge (which I've learned I've always referred to incorrectly as a "Sierpinski Gasket") on boingboing.

The only thing I'd add to the description is the fact that when taken to the limit, the resulting sponge has infinite surface area (it would take an infinite amount of paint to cover it), but zero volume (it can't hold any paint). (Click on thumbnail for enlargement)

Reader comment:

Mark Allen of Machine Project says: "I put a couple images of it installed up on flickr if you're curious."

Jossip's Corynne Steindler says there's a bit of brouhaha over the NYT review:

The New York Times reviewed new movie Idlewild, and described [female lead] actress Paula Patton as "a beautiful singer" and "a lovely woman with a serviceable voice." Funny, since everyone who actually interviewed Ms. Patton on the red carpet was told that the voiceover was dubbed. Patton repeatedly told reporters ""I just wasn’t gifted with that talent for singing." Nice job, NYT!

To clean eating implements adequately, Hargreaves proposes a rigorous approach to washing in which backpackers would first fill each of three large bowls or buckets with about 5 liters (1 1/3 gallons) of clean water. Next, add 5 milliliters (1 teaspoon) of detergent to the first container and 10 ml (2 tsp) of 4-percent chlorine bleach (a common commercial preparation) to the second. To wash dishes and utensils, remove most food residues in the first bowl and, in the second, scrub the items until they are visibly clean. A quick rinse in the third bowl removes the odor of the cleaning chemicals...

By comparison, the methods that are currently most popular among expedition companies removed more than 99 percent of bacteria during the first step. But the quick rinses after that step failed to consistently remove remaining bacteria.

That's why Hargreaves and other wilderness-medicine experts recommend that campers adopt the new system.