According to director of the Northern branch of the All-Russian research institute of hunting economy and fur farming Vladimir Korepanov, some of the footsteps belong to a bear, and some of them remind those of Primates and Ursidae simultaneously. Local residents have already made molds of the footprints.

What kind of animal belongs to these footprints? In general, tracks with these kinds of “claw-marks” indicate a bear (”Ursidae” in the Russian article) versus a primate. But these imprints look strange, having a length and shape similar to that of a human but with extremely triangular clawmarks (unknown in primates). These new tracks could be created fakes, of course. No known or previously found Yeti footprint tracks match these. What do these mystery footprints from Arkhangelsk look like to you?

In the tech world, we have a bad tendency to view the concept of "private" as a single bit that is either 0 or 1. Either it's exposed or not. When companies make a decision to make data visible in a more "efficient" manner, there is often a panic. And the term "privacy" is often invoked. Think back to when Deja made Usenet searchable. The term is also invoked when companies provide new information to you based on the data you had previously given it. Think back to the shock over Gmail's content-based ad delivery. Neither of these are about privacy in the bit sense but they ARE about privacy in a different sense.

Privacy is not simply about the state of an inanimate object or set of bytes; it is about the sense of vulnerability that an individual experiences. When people feel exposed or invaded, there's a privacy issue.

What happened with Facebook was not about a change in the bit state - it was about people feeling icky. It made people felt icky for different reasons - some felt it for the exposure while others felt it for the invasion. Let me explain.

The Broadcast Treaty is an attempt to force the world's governments to give a new right to broadcasters, a right to control the use of works they don't own. The Broadcast Right will allow broadcasters to stop you from copying or re-using the programs they transmit, even if those programs are in the public domain, Creative Commons licensed or composed of uncopyrightable facts.

Fair use doesn't apply to the broadcast right. It will have its own rules for fair use, separate from copyright. You'll have to pay your lawyer twice, once to make sure you've got a fair copyright use, and again to make sure you've got a fair broadcast right use. And you might get sued twice -- once for violating copyright and again for broadcast right violations.

Worse yet, they want this to apply to the Internet. A few US corporations -- Microsoft, Yahoo -- have hijacked the US position on the Broadcast Treaty and now the US is using every trick in the book to get the world's governments (who roundly reject the idea) to create a "webcasting right" at the same time as the broadcast right.

This is deadly to podcasters. The webcasting right will break podcasters' ability to quote and re-use each others' work (even CC-licensed works), and other video found on the net. It will allow podcast-hosting companies like Yahoo to tell people how they can use your podcasts, even if you want to permit retransmissions. And it will hurt organizations that are tying to find novel ways to use podcasts, like

The webcasting stuff has been "narrowed" to try to make it apply only to "professional" webcasts and not podcasts, but this is a short-sighted view of the future of podcasting. The term podcasting was only coined 20-some months ago. The idea that we can predict what a podcast will look like tomorrow is ridiculous -- it's like designing a copyright for printed books ten seconds before the photocopier comes along and changes everything.

Luckily, the webcasting stuff is on the ropes. Mark Cuban, who founded Yahoo's Broadcast.com, has signed onto an open letter from 20 technology organizations that reject the webcasting right. Last week, dozens of companies, libraries and public interest groups signed an open letter rejecting the treaty altogether.

Now it's the podcasters' turn. EFF has created an open letter on behalf of podcasters everywhere, rejecting the webcasting right. WIPO is supposed to be making treaties that protect creators. We podcasters are the Internet's native creators. WIPO has no business trying to break the Internet so that it is better-suited to the business-models of yesterday's broadcasters.

If you are a podcaster -- or better yet, a podcasting organization -- sign onto this letter now! It will be presented Monday morning to the WIPO committee that's creating the Broadcast Treaty in Geneva. This is your best-ever chance to be heard.

Link

This is a good goal, but the paper falls far of the mark, by omitting any mention of DRM 'renewability" (the ability of a DRM vendor to take away rights you got when you bought your media or device), open source (which is antithetical to DRM), and Creative Commons (which can't be used in connection with DRM).

I've written an open letter to the CDT staffers listed as contacts on the paper, going into detail on these subjects:

All new DRMs are being designed to be "renewable." The Sony PSP was repeatedly patched to force users to  stop running their own software on their devices. BluRay and HD-DVD are both built around a "renewability" system that can shut down devices. The Broadcast Flag ruling provided for renewability to disable consumers' property on the grounds that if someone, somewhere figured out how to use a DVD burner to circumvent the flag, all innocent users of that burner should be punished to get at the guilty. This week, Microsoft issued its fastest-ever OS patch to remove a DRM crack that users applied in order to make lawful uses of the content they owned.

What kind of disclosure is sufficient here? What constitutes transparency? "This device will do the follow five things and restrict your from the following eight things. However, at any time in the future, without your consent, a secret commercial body with closed membership and meetings may shut down any of this device's features, with no appeal."

A couple hours later, the only noise in the place was when one of the half-dozen guys sitting around would look up and ask, "Hey, who's got page 41 of Down and Out?" It was... well, I'm not sure I can express how weird it was. These are men who aren't normally readers, much less consumers of slightly wacky science fiction, and they're now getting impatient with each other to finish chapters so they can find out what happens next.

It's starting to change the very *tone* of where I work on the ship, six hours on and six hours off: instead of the ever-present three B's of talk to pass in the time in the plant -- beer, babes, and bodily functions -- it's discussions of which novel (or short, since we've now got printouts of every piece of fiction on craphound.com stuffed into a file cabinet) we liked best, and why, and what makes this stuff cool, and where can we get more like it, and even starting to talk about the copyfight, and why that's important.

Lost Girls tells the story of the adult selves of Alice from Alice in Wonderland, Wendy from Peter Pan, and Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, who find themselves guests at a little Austrian hotel at the brink of World War I. The three become lovers, and retell their fairy-tale origin-stories, showing how each might be an allegory for a much darker, pornographic life-history.

This is a remarkable trilogy. It's by turns filthier than a Penthouse Letter, erotic as Anais Nin, and beautiful and provocative as the best of graphic novels. The fine artwork and writing are beautifully matched, even seeming at times to vie for attention -- each trying to outdo the other for virtuosity.

The meta-story of the three heroines of Lost Girls is fascinating. JM Barrie, author of Peter Pan, suffered such terrible emotional abuse as a boy that he developed something called "psychogenic dwarfism," which caused him never to go through puberty. Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), took chaste-but-creepy photos of naked little girls. L Frank Baum based Dorothy on a downtrodden and abused girl he met as a Kansas schoolteacher. (see update below) Previous authors have made the link between these girls, their authors, and the buried dark erotic sub-currents in their stories -- see, for example, Geoff Ryman's World Fantasy Award-winning novel WAS, about L Frank Baum and Dorothy.

But as fine as those attempts have been, none can touch Lost Girls for unflinching, unabashed depraved eros. This book wallows in the porn that Victorians like Dodgson and Barrie could only drop frustrated hints at, transgressing every boundary of taste and sense, plunging the reader into something steamy, uncomfortable, and beautiful.

One final note about the physical object -- this is a fantastically well-designed and well-made artifact. The three oversized volumes, their slipcase, and their dustjackets are handsome, solid, and well-thought through. This would make the kind of gift that causes jaws to drop. Link (Thanks, Olga!)

Previously: Alan Moore's erotic "Lost Girls" and Peter Pan copyright woes

Update: Check out this interview that sexologist Susie Bright conducted with Moore and Gebbie -- and the accompanying Flickr set.

Update 2: Eric sez, "There is absolutely no truth to the story of Baum basing Dorothy on an abused student he met when he was a teacher. This is an incident that was created entirely for the novel 'Was'."

...[H]ave you heard about SpiralFrog yet? It's Universal Music's attempt to deal with the new world of music, and it seems downright bizarre to me. Basically, they're saying you can have all this music for free, but you can only keep it on your computer and one other device. That kind of maniacal need for control is what will be the death of major labels. If they continue to stop people from listening to music in the way they want it, people will continue to make other choices. I think that labels need to stop the restrictive and manipulative use of DRM, and, frankly, we should legalize P2P, and have it properly licensed from the ISP level (sure, the ISPs will complain, but, let them complain).

Now, it’s time to get rid of the logo by firmly rubbing it with the sugar. I made a video just to show how strong you can be with it. The main concern is actually not that you scratch the casing but that you scratch off the tape.

This actually takes a long time until you actually see results. It is easiest to use the corners of the sugar cubes. As they provide more control. It is easiest to scratch with one hand and hold the phone steady with the other. (it should just come naturally)

My friend Hutch was with me when I snapped this photo of an unfortunately-translated travel agency sign in Lhasa, Tibet. Hutch found some other translation beauties elsewhere along his travels in China, and says,

The term "Chinglish" generally refers to poor translations from Chinese to English. Humorous examples can be found on several web sites, which post photos of signs and printed materials found in China, or product packaging from China. Recently the Chinese government has begun a campaign to eliminate Chinglish. From an article in the London Telegraph:

Beijing has launched a campaign to wipe out "Chinglish", a version of English that results in weird and largely incomprehensible phrases. The "language mandarins" of Beijing have decided that Chinglish is a blight on China's modernising pretensions and must be obliterated before the city hosts the Olympic Games in 2008.

The targets of the campaign range from the nonsensical to the charming. A road sign on the Avenue of Eternal Peace, for instance, advised: "To Take Notice of Safe; The Slippery are Very Crafty", a warning that the pavement was slippery.

A sign in a Beijing park reads: "Little grass is smiling slightly, Please walk on pavement." At a Chinese eatery near the British embassy, diners can choose "bean curd with feeling" or "special fumed fish".

There are times when Chinglish communicates a message well, if a little quaintly. Signs at railway stations, for example, often state: "Take very good caution over pocket pickers." The reason for the abundance of such convoluted phrases is that Chinese is a difficult language to translate literally into English - or vice versa.

[...] The Beijing Tourism Bureau has established a hotline for reporting signs and other public messages that do not read correctly and has received many telephone calls and emails. Li Honghai, the city official in charge of the campaign, said: "Linguistic perfection is becoming increasingly important with the rise in the number of foreigners flowing into the city."

Last June I spent most of a two hour layover in Beijing on a wild taxi ride to stores near the airport, trying to find a charger for my camera battery. While running up the escalator in a department store I spotted some classic examples of Chinglish on the signs that indicated which departments were on each floor. My favorites were:

"Thing on bed"

"Take a picture - clap for the remembe"

and

"Fuck the fresh fruit and vegetable"

Unfortunately, I didn't get photos. But I had a GPS receiver with me, so I know the location of the store!

Here's my lazyweb request:

Are you now, or will you soon be in Beijing? Do you have a GPS receiver? Do you have a camera (with a charged battery)? Will you please get photos of those signs? From in front of the terminal we drove due north. We then turned right to go east along the perimeter of the airport. We stopped near:

N 40' 07.773"
E 116" 38.763"
Datum WGS 84 (Garmin default)

The store was on the northwest corner. You can email the photos to me at chinglish@hutchfx.com. I'll post them and submit the link to boingboing. Or you can post them and submit your link here.

One of the cartoonists, the very talented xadrian, created a photo mosaic of Hodgman using hundreds of the hobo drawings. Link (More about the 700 Hoboes project here, and the master list here)

If you're at USC and you want to be a part of this, please attend the inaugural meeting:

Where: University of Southern California, Annenberg School, West Lobby
When: Monday, September 11, 6:30PM
Who: Students, faculty, fellows and affiliates of the University of Southern California

Link

I read Leary's autobiography,Flashbacks, in the early 80s and enjoyed it, but learned it was full of what Leary called "Irish facts," which are like real facts, only better. Higgs' book appears to be much more accurate, delivering a warts-and-all-story about an infinitely fascinating and inspiring human being. Higgs decided to write the book after he stumbled across a lost archive of Leary's papers, diaries, and letters that a friend had accumulated but never read.

Note: I Have America Surrounded includes a few photos of the principle characters in Leary's life, but if you want more, check out the Russian Leary site, leary.ru, as well as this image gallery, both of which have hundreds of pictures.

Link to MP3 File | Link to Archive.org page

I was a consultant on the Science of Spying exhibition and had an amazing time with it -- they've assembled a terrific gang of creatives and were really pursuing a grand exhibition that would help kids understand what it means to be under surveillance.

We're looking for ideas that are provocative, plausible (could happen), credible (can be explained) and easily communicable to 8-12 year olds in a museum context. The ideas should be submitted as sketches rather than detailed designs because selected concepts will be developed by leading designers for exhibition. Auger-Loizeau, Dunne & Raby, El Ultimo Grito, Noam Toran, Onkar Singh Kular, and Troika have all agreed to take part.

The superior temporal sulcus is involved in processing very basic behavioural actions, whereas the prefrontal cortex is involved in more complex functions such as processing how decisions affect others. So the research implies that "teenagers are less able to understand the consequences of their actions", says Blakemore.

In (one) experiment, Blakemore asked 112 participants (aged from 8 to 37) to make decisions about other people’s welfare and timed how long it took them to respond. The questions included: "How would your friend feel if she wasn’t invited to your party?"

She found that the response time got shorter as the participants got older, suggesting that the older people found it easier to put themselves in other people's shoes.

Blakemore suggests that both findings might be explained by an evolutionary mechanism in which the development of the brains of adolescents takes precedence over its performance. “You don’t need to be on a par with other people because you are looked after until reproductive age. Only then do you need to start to take into account other people’s perspectives.”

The mashups were released by the fictitious band "The Beachles," as part of a notional album called Sgt. Petsounds, and they were a kind of noise-rock experiment in mixing up the two seminal albums (both albums are known for their own use of "found sound" and mashup techniques).

Clayton Counts produced the album for some DJ friends of his, and was not commercially compensated for his efforts (Counts has recently relocated to look after sick relatives and is broke, lacking even a telephone). It's idiotically inconceivable that anyone who hears Sgt Petsounds will decide that they've got all the Sgt Pepper's they need, and decide not to buy the Beatles' original as a consequence. No economic harm could possibly arise to EMI as a result of the existence of this album, which was favorably reported in USA Today and other major news outlets.

This follows a pattern set by EMI of indiscriminate censorship of people who do to the Beatles what the Beatles did to the artists who inspired them. First EMI tried to crush DJ Danger Mouse's incredible "Grey Album" (the White Album plus Jay-Z's Black Album), then they took down djBC's Beastles (The Beatles plus the Beastie Boys) and now they're coming after The Beachles.

Copyright is supposed to protect expression and encourage creativity. EMI is using copyright to suppress both. They are censors and thugs. Link

Most everyone in 2505 is a mouth-breathing lout, barely capable of forming a sentence. They've elected as president the guy who seems cool to them, a loudmouthed porn-star wrestler (unfailingly funny Terry Crews, the dad from "Everybody Hates Chris"). They pass their days consuming, defecating, fornicating and gawking at anything that goes boom. Then consuming some more. And because they don't know any better, they've let themselves be co-opted by corporate marketers, taking brands ("Frito") for names and wearing disposable clothes covered with ads.

Like "Office Space," this movie has a lurching plot -- utterly average Joe feels like a brainiac in the dumbed-down dystopia -- but rich humor in the little details. Keep your eyes open for the Costco as big as a city (complete with monorail), the trashed White House littered with empties, and the grimy vending machines that malfunction and ruin your life.

Update: NPR's Day to Day did a great story on this: Link to NPR page, MP3 Link

It’s been nearly five years since 9/11, but it seems like a lifetime. Certainly, a lifetime’s worth of events for America and the world — elections and insurgencies, hurricanes and tsunamis, attacks and threats of attack — have unfolded with such speed that it can be hard to sort through, or even recall, everything of consequence. The chart below is an attempt, admittedly selective and incomplete, to survey the first five years of our post-9/11 world — a world that is certainly new, though not always brave.

After the jump: The BoingBoing email Q&A with ForBiddeN.

Her Wikipedia profile describes Christine Dolce as an "allegedly 24-year-old former Orange County cosmetologist." Vanity Fair meowed that she had "a housepainter's flair for eyeshadow." But a million of her closest "friends" on MySpace know her as ForBiddeN (though not everyone there is so kind), and today she debuts in the dead-tree pages of Playboy Magazine.

I attended her launch party in Hollywood this week with online social networking researcher danah boyd (here's her polaroid). Hijinks ensued. Here's a snip from a story and polaroid photo gallery I filed for Wired News.

ForBiddeN is here in the flesh, pouting in platform heels on a white leather banquette beneath the DJ booth, surrounded by a bevy of similarly surgically-enhanced babes.

"Much love, kisses, bites, chokes, hand shakes, milk shakes, butt shakes, whatever you like... to you all!!! :o)," Ms. Dolce bids her fans on MySpace, "Love u all ‹3."

In person, things are different.

I step forward to snap a Polaroid. She shrugs and says something I can't hear over the Bee Gees trance remix. I snap the pic, but a towering security guard grabs the photo as the camera spits it out. "Go away!" he screams. "No more pictures. You! Get out of here, go, go! Now!"

And that's where the similarities between MySpace and this Hollywood club end. Online, self-styled narcissists practically beg you to take their picture. Here, the successful ones hire beefy bodyguards to keep snappers away.

On the other side of town, danah and I met up with Sean Bonner and Caryn Coleman to witness a different kind of internet-cheesecake event. At Club Dragonfly, Suicide Girls launched their Fall 2006 burlesque tour.

Inside, Paris Hilton shot digital snaps of a fake Paris Hilton (there's redundancy for you) on stage being beat up by Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson. Then, she drove her new Mercedes away from the event with Rod Stewart's daughter inside using her special lane-weaving drive-fu, and LAPD promptly booked her for her first-ever DUI.

Here's Sean's account: Link. Here's danah's account: Link.

Hilton's DVD release party (for the straight-to-anything-but-theaters box office bomb "Bottoms Up") took place last night at Club Cabana in Hollywood, presumably the fuzz let her out in time to attend. BTW I think the whole Banksy/Danger Mouse/Gnarls Barkley unauthorized remix thing is an evil corporate astroturf viral campaign. Aren't Paris and Dangermouse signed to the same record label? But then, I thought Ahmadinejad's blog was fake, so what do I know.

Below: BoingBoing's email interview with Christine Dolce, aka ForBiddeN.

Conservationists were yesterday still deciding whether to keep the 90kg snake in a zoo or release it back into the wild...

In October last year, a 3.6m python came off second best in Everglades National Park in Florida.

The snake, which tried to swallow a 1.8m alligator whole, exploded, said scientists who found the gory remains.

Arnold: "A good pinball game gets into your mind with the strategy, and will take you to where you think you've got the game beat and, next thing you know, you're screwed. That's a good mindfuck."

Hippy: "If you're standing here, going -- (Hippy clacks the flipper buttons mindlessly) -- and winning the game other than making any type of judgement calls, or figuring out what to do ... if that's your idea of pinball, you're a dumb motherfucker."

Arnold: "This is commercial equipment. It's not art. These are old, tired street whores that belong out in the alley with their legs in the air and their slots open, ready to make money. That's what they *do*. They don't sit in somebody's rec room."

Arnold: "There isn't a person who walks in here that doesn't go, "Holy Shit!" I remember that! They'll be walking along this row and all of a sudden they'll stop and have this wave of pure nostalgia. This stuff is still in your mind somewhere, and when you see it, you just this wave of 'Holy Shit! There it is! I remember! I squeezed my first titty on a girl standing next to that game!"

Arnold: "With the video games, we stop at 8-bit machines. And no kung-fu video games. Those are anti-social bullshit."

The four men, all gang members, wrapped their phones and accessories in plastic and inserted them into their rectums "far enough to reach their intestines," Ramon Arevalo, director of the maximum security Zacatecoluca prison, said.

Arevalo said the ruse was discovered during X-ray examinations following six weeks of investigations.

Update: Salvadorean Assphone Enigma Solved! Sascha says

It’s a cheap-ass (so to speak) VK530, which is sold by the Salvadoran cellular provider Telemovil’s Tigo brand. Check it out all cleaned up here. You can get a less X-rayed view of it 15 seconds into the Reuters story video. Of course, I’m the cell phone reviewer for PC Magazine, so it’s sort of my job to know these things. Check out my review of a much sexier device, the new RIM Pearl (I can’t figure out how to make that joke, but come on, it’s there), here.

The Section 115 Reform Act ("S1RA") is back, and its provisions smashing Internet fair use are as bad as ever. Among many subtle, dangerous changes to copyright law, the bill implies that licenses from copyright holders are needed for every digital copy made in the transmission of digital media -- including cached copies on servers or on your hard drive, and even temporary copies in RAM. The bill is coming up for a key vote in the next two weeks.

Take action now by visiting EFF's action center and help stop S1RA. More info on the bill here.

Apparently a fair number of attendees of an Australian Government-sponsored conference on climate change, because someone booked strippers as entertainment.

It was meant to very tongue-in-cheek (a woman covered in balloons which were meant to be popped). Strangely, being an Australian, it seems a very Australian thing to do - that being that it sat somewhere between bad taste and quite comical.

New book by photographer Chris Jordan. 100% of proceeds from the gallery sales and book sales are donated to Gulf Coast survivors. Image: "Welcome to the New Louis Armstrong School, Ninth Ward neighborhood." Snip from Jordan's introduction:

This series, photographed in New Orleans in November and December of 2005, portrays the cost of Hurricane Katrina on a personal scale. Although the subjects are quite different from those in my earlier Intolerable Beauty series, this project is motivated by the same concerns about our runaway consumerism.

There is evidence to suggest that Katrina was not an entirely natural event like an earthquake or tsunami. The 2005 hurricane season's extraordinary severity can be linked to global warming, which America contributes to in disproportionate measure through our extravagant consumer and industrial practices. Never before have the cumulative effects of our consumerism become so powerfully focused into a visible form, like the sun's rays narrowed through a magnifying glass. Almost 300,000 Americans lost everything they owned in the Katrina disaster. The question in my mind is whether we are all responsible in some degree.

On August 10, after his family was refused a home loan, an Arcata man was mortified to find the phrase “son of Saddam Hussein” included on his credit report. “I looked at it and couldn’t believe my eyes!” Said the Arcata man who asked that only his middle name, Hassan, be divulged.

The routine credit check, pulled by the Arcata family’s prospective mortgage company, lists the alleged alias under the section titled “Borrower Bureau Alert Information:” “HASSAN ALIASES: AL-TIKRITI, ALI SADDAM HU.S.SEIN DOB: 1980 ALT (ALTERNATE) DOB: 1983; POB: IRAQ; NATL: IRAQI; SON OF SADDAM HU.S.SEIN AL-TIKRITI…”

A partial name match to the individual listed on the Arcata man’s credit report, “Hassan” is the man’s middle name, but any likeness to the description of Hussein’s son ends there.

(...) According to Shirin Sinnar from the San Francisco branch of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, credit bureaus are listing the names of known terrorists on the credit reports of unsuspecting everyday, average citizens across the country. Sinnar indicated the names are harvested from the U.S. Treasury Watchlist by credit bureaus and other financial institutions.

“The credit reporting agencies are now scanning this list and putting watchlist information on the reports even if it’s a partial match,” said Sinnar.

Andrew Kantor ordered nine towel sets from Amazon -- 9 bath towels and 9 face towels. Inexplicably, Amazon sent this simple order in 18 separate boxes, all of which arrived on the same day.

Andrew's wife commented, “Good thing I didn’t get the washcloths, too.” Link

The audio is poor, but I caught a few: Pork eggroll on a stick. Chocolate covered nut bar on a stick. Shrimp toast on a stick. Deep fried Milky Way candy bar on a stick. Porcupine meatballs on a stick. Teriyaki ostrich on a stick. Pancake with sausage on a stick.

Shown here: the Jurassic dog, a giant corn dog on a stick. Link

Wired News contributor Lore Sjöberg had a funny piece up this week about "Blogs and their ultimate perfect entry." BoingBoing did not escape the laserfire of his funnywrath. Snip:

- Boing Boing: Crocheted replica of subway map cracks DRM on collection of old video games.

- FARK: Drunk frat boy in Florida has sex with underage donkey, sues Strong Bad for negligence. Still no cure for overused in-jokes.

- Slashdot: AMD, SCO patent MP3 over TCP/IP, sue ATI, EA. Microsoft probably responsible somehow.

Reader comment: Dale Cruse, Publisher, BIG BOTTOM, says:

LOVED the recent Ultimate Blog Post link. Unfortunately the article forgot a rather obvious one. Dooce.com: "My daughter Leta poops with the fire of a thousand suns."

Here's a roundup of some recent posts on the "reporter's notebook" blog I'm maintaining from a recent trip to Tibet and India.

* Tibetan comix folktale and snaps of Qinghai/Lhasa railway

* Cisco donates gear for Tibetan WiFi summit in Dharamshala

* Establishment 22: elite Indian military unit with Tibetan soldiers

* Tibet photos from a pal we linked with in Lhasa

* UN report calls for developing nation backbones

* Tibetan human rights NGO sues China for genocide

Images: Above, a screen from Nic Bonmarino's Tibetan folktale comix. Below, a shot of Lhasa's Jokhang temple, from the Barkhor square, during a full moon night. Shot by Robert Hutchins.

Devotees in Bombay celebrated a Hindu festival earlier this week by immersing colorful Ganesh statues in the Arabian Sea at night. The next morning, the tide brought them back. It was a surreal scene.

origami fortune teller
magic eight ball
firewheel
i ching
zentences
oblique strategies
oblique strategies widget
beyond the valley of the dolls tarot
moodstats

Web Zen Home, Store (Thanks Frank!)

But not everyone has such fond feelings. BoingBoing reader cool Mike says.

You guys are nuts.Come on a flying spaghetti monster?Look there is no such thing as a flying spaghetti monster.God created the world.This is only a jloke.Come on.A flying spaghetti monster/Flying spaghetti monster my butt.You should read the bible,pray,and go to a church.Come on.Have you ever even seen it.

Let me answer that question for you NO!HAVE YOU!YOU SHOULDN'T BELIVE ABOUT EVOLUTION OR OTHER FALSE gods OR FALSE PROPHETS OR EVEN THE MAN WHO FIRST TOLD YOU ABOUT THIS.THAT MAN IS A LIAR. HE JUST DID THAT SO SCHOOLS SHOULDN'TTEACH ABOUT THE ONE AND ONLY ALL POWERFUL, ALL KNOWING, ALMIGHTY GOD AND HIS SON JESUS.lISTEN GOD SACRIFIED HIS ONE AND ONLY SON TO SAVE US ALL.YOU GUYS NEED TO READ THE HOLY BIBLE.IT TEACHES US EVERYTHINNG AND IT DOESN'T LIE LIKE THAT MAN.gUYS WHAT I AM SAYING IS NOT A JOKE IT IS THE TRUTH.PLEASE READ THE HOLY BIBLE.THIS IS VERY TRUE.IN THE BIBLE IT SAYS THAT JESUS WIIL COME BACK.HE WILL COME BACK AND HE WILL TAKE US TO BE JUDGED.AND I TELL I READ T HIS FROM THE BIBLE IF YOUR NAME IS NOT IN THE BOOK OF LIFE YOU WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO COME INTO HEAVEN.YOU NEED TO READ THE HOLY BIBLE NOT PRAISE A STUPID FALSE THING ABOUT A flying spaghetti monster that does not exist.That man is a liar.Who has ever seen a flying spaghetti monster.

Stop praising,singing,loving,serving,and adoring that thing, that piece of trash,that thing that was made up and doesn't even exist, when you should be praising,singing,loving,serving and adoring the HOLY THE ONE AND ONLY GOD.Please belive me.

Well, he wasn't at DragonCon this past weekend. We had at least 4 "Jesus" (Jesi?) walking about...not including an ever awsome "Buddy Christ" and only one true Flying Spaghetti Monster. If only "Cool" Mike had been touched by his noodley appendage like I have been, he might see things differently. JPEG link.

Each keychain has a secret - they contain real games. Plug in the included 6 foot cable (on a battery powered reel) into the keychain and your TV , and you really can enjoy the games of yesteryear. Yes, you read that right: these keychains contain real Atari games, and are fully playable!

Here's how the games break down:

* Joystick 1 - Asteroids and Millipede
* Joystick 2 - Centipede and Yar's Revenge
* Paddle - Pong, Breakout, and Warlords

Nevertheless, women from across the country flocked to the bank, desperate for the chance to mother a child borne of super-sperm from ubermensch geniuses. Plotz's book begins with his coverage of the sperm bank on Slate, and then moves on to the incredible journey that was spawned by the popularity of his stories.

For years, Plotz traipsed across the country, tracking down donors, reciepients and offspring of the bank, and as he tells their stories, he reveals himself to be a gifted and insightful storyteller. He is unflinching in exposing their flaws, generous in showcasing their virtues. There are "superkids" whose lives are unraveling, others who shine -- and parents with motives from venal to enlightened. The donors, too, run a gamut, from feckless liars whose only genius is as con-artists, to gentle and generous souls who long to meet their offspring.

Genius Factory showcases how good narrative nonfiction can be -- I don't really much care about sperm donors or sperm banks, but I cared about the people in this book. Plotz even managed the admirable trick of inspiring a single quantum of sympathy for the lunatic founder of the bank, who ran his affairs with such feckless idiocy that there's really no excusing him. Link

Lowes has a horrible user-gen campaign going, called "Blow us away with your hurricane memories." They almost wistfully run through the old hits: "What about Diane, Betsy, Hugo, Charley, Dennis, Wilma … and who could forget Katrina!" Then they ask for specific types of memories, including hurricane humor.

"Those guys are saying Paul Frank is not a person," says the designer, whose given name is Paul Frank Sunich. "I hear they're all wearing T-shirts that say 'We Are Paul Frank.' Well, you're Paul Frank Industries. You're not Paul Frank. When that started to get blurred, that's when the problems started to happen." It's hard to imagine mistaking anyone else for Frank, with his thinning brown hair, lantern chin, hipster sideburns, and Popeye-esque anchor tattoos on each forearm. And yet the question "Who is Paul Frank?" is at the root of everything that's happening between him and his former partners.

As our population ages and needs more care, there will be fewer young people to provide it. But don’t expect to fill the personnel gap with humanoid robotic nurses, say a majority of the more than 700 IEEE Fellows surveyed in a joint study by the Institute for the Future (IFTF) and IEEE Spectrum.

The survey was conducted earlier this year to learn what developments IEEE Fellows expect in science and technology in the next 10 to 50 years. They ought to foresee such things better than most, because they have so much to do with bringing them about.

What other bubbles did the Fellows burst? Forget about being chauffeured to work by your car; the Fellows doubt that autonomous, self-driving cars will be in full commercial production anytime soon. And though they say Moore’s Law will someday finally yield to the laws of physics, slowing the increase in computer performance, the IEEE Fellows don’t expect to get around the problem by using quantum weirdness to perform calculations at fabulous speeds. Seventy-eight percent of respondents doubt that a commercial quantum computer will reach the market in the next 50 years. In short, the future is taking longer than expected to arrive.

“We tend to overestimate the impact of a technology in the short run and underestimate it in the long run,” observed former IFTF president Roy Amara years ago. The IEEE Fellows seemed to agree. On the whole, the Fellows turned out to be a down-to-earth bunch—no space elevators in most of their forecasts—and they were quick to dispel future hype while eager to ground their forecasts in state-of-the-art engineering.

A few were uncomfortable making forecasts, arguing that science and technology are unpredictable. At IFTF, we wholeheartedly agree. Trying to predict specific events and timing is best left to astrologers. Instead, our researchers in Palo Alto, Calif., look for signals—events, developments, projects, investments, and expert opinions, like those provided by this ­survey—that, taken together, give indications of key trends. Observed as a complex ecology, these signals reveal where these developments may be taking us.

The survey identified five themes that we believe are the main arteries of science and technology over the next 50 years: “Computation and Bandwidth to Burn” involves the shift of computing power and network connectivity from scarcity to utter abundance; “Sensory Transformation” hints at what happens when, as Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, puts it, “things start to think”; “Lightweight Infrastructure” is precisely the opposite of the railways, fiber-optic networks, centralized power distribution, and other massively expensive and complicated projects of the 20th century; “Small World” is what happens when nanotechnology starts to get real and is integrated with microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and biosystems; and finally, “Extending Biology” is what results when a broad array of technologies, from genetic engineering to bioinformatics, are applied to create new life forms and reshape existing ones.

The backers of the “shadow government” camp have many issues that they believe were not addressed by the authorities in investigating the attacks; the backers of the “Bin Laden-did-it” camp have questions of their own. Both sides have accused the other of perpetrating wild conspiracy theories and hoaxes upon the public, so we thought we’d provide an open examination and critique of the major points, especially given recent polls that show 42% of Americans suspect the government had a hand in causing the destruction of the Twin Towers.

Joel Schalit, a Managing Editor for Tikkun Magazine, will be representing those who are skeptical about the “conspriracy theories.” Fred Burks, who served as a foreign language interpreter for top officials in many countries, including Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, will be representing the “pro-conspiracy” view...

RU Sirius was the co-publisher and editor-in-chief of the legendary cyberpunk magazine Mondo 2000 in the early 1990s. Since then he has written eight books including “Counterculture Through The Ages” and “Design For Dying” with Timothy Leary.

Sirius will host the panel along with RU Sirius Show co-host Jeff Diehl. Other show cast members include Diana Brown and Steve Robles.

Founders Lawrence Toms, 38, from Rhondda and Lez Paylor, 38, from Caerphilly, said they had been keen to develop an idea which would create a manufacturing company which would be uniquely Welsh and could produce a product that foreign imports could not compete with.

They also wanted to set up a low-tech company with minimal capital which was also environmentally friendly...

The company's plant at a former quarry building at Aberllefenni near the Centre for Alternative Technology near Machynlleth will be able to produce one to two tonnes of paper a year.

Parents want their kids to excel in school, and they've heard about the illegal use of stimulants such as Ritalin and Adderall for "academic doping." Hoping to obtain the drugs legally, they pressure pediatricians for them. Some even request the drugs after openly admitting they don't believe their child has ADHD....

“I spoke with [some] colleagues the other day and they mentioned three cases recently where parents blatantly asked for the medication so that their children would perform better in school, yet there were no other indications that the child had ADHD,” says Dr. Nick Yates, a pediatrician and director of medical ethics for Mercy Hospital in Buffalo, N.Y.

Academic doping — using these stimulant prescriptions in an effort to enhance focus, concentration and mental stamina — first started on college campuses, especially Ivy League and exclusive, competitive schools. Now, the problem is filtering down to secondary schools, Yates says, and more parents are playing a role in obtaining prescription ADHD medication for their teenagers.

As a novelist who is uninterested in replicating "reality" but who is interested in plausibility and verisimilitude, I look for the organizing principles of real cities and for the kinds of bizarre juxtapositions that occur within them. Then I take what I need to be consistent with whatever fantastical city I'm creating. For example, there is a layering effect in many great cities. You don't just see one style or period of architecture. You might also see planning in one section of a city and utter chaos in another. The lesson behind seeing a modern skyscraper next to a 17th century cathedral is one that many fabulists do not internalize and, as a result, their settings are too homogenous.

Of course, that kind of layering will work for some readers - and other readers will want continuity. Even if they live in a place like that - a baroque, layered, very busy, confused place - even if, say, they're holding the novel as they walk down the street in London [laughter] - they just don't get it. So you have to be careful how you do that. In the novel I'm working on now, I'll be able to do much more layering because much more time will have passed. It's set 500 or 1000 years after the events in City of Saints and Shriek. Though I don't actually refer to specific architectural styles, or to a kind of macro-vision of buildings in the Ambergris universe; I just allude to things.

PIERCE: You also seem to have a lot of love for Satanic imagery and work that some would easily describe as sacrilegious. In fact in an interview you said that Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey deemed you and your wife Satanists and ordained you both priests. In the interview you said that Satanists believe that man's true nature is an animal. Don't they believe that our true nature is also an evil one?

COOP: I am a member of the Church, and have lots of friends in the organization. "Evil" is a construct designed by organized religion to brainwash man into denial of his true nature, to trade fun hedonism for pious hypocrisy. The only real evil is denial of your true nature.

I see Dr. LaVey's Satanic philosophy as way to rid yourself of all the negative bullshit and guilt of religion, while keeping the interesting stuff, like using ritual and ceremony as mind-focusing psychodrama. I attended the 6/6/06 Black Mass here in L.A. this year, and it was an incredible experience. I felt charged up with inspiration afterwards, all without having to give credit to some skinny whiner on a cross.

"Due to these three Lousy Dirty Stinkers you're eating off paper instead of my grass mats." -- Trader Vic, Oakland.

These proxies are programs that help protect your privacy when using the Internet by disguising the origin of your requests. They're often used by people in oppressive regimes (like China, where Google censors its search results to appease the totalitarian government), or by people whose school, work, hotel or home networks are blocked by censorware.

They're also best practices for anyone worried about NSA wiretaps and PATRIOT ACT fishing-expedition warrants served to investigate your browsing activity.

"We're sorry...

... but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now.

We'll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we'll see you again on Google."

Update:: Many have written in to say that Google does this whenever a proxy sends too many requests, in order to prevent scraping by bots. I'm sure this is true, but at this moment, every proxy I've tried is blocked -- possibly because some monstrous bot has made use of all of them.

But that doesn't change the essential point: Google is fighting bots by compromising its users' privacy -- the countermeasure is a form of punishing the innocent to get at the guilty.

But running the latest Microsoft patch -- which was hustled out the door well ahead of patch Tuesday -- actually took away functionality from your machine, by breaking a program called FairUse4WM, which let you export your Windows Media files to competitors' formats.

Now, this isn't a "vulnerability" in the normal sense of the word: digital rights management is not a feature that users want. Being able to remove copy protection is a good thing for some users, and completely irrelevant for everyone else. No user is ever going to say: "Oh no. I can now play the music I bought for my computer in my car. I must install a patch so I can't do that anymore."

But to Microsoft, this vulnerability is a big deal. It affects the company's relationship with major record labels. It affects the company's product offerings. It affects the company's bottom line. Fixing this "vulnerability" is in the company's best interest; never mind the customer.

So Microsoft wasted no time; it issued a patch three days after learning about the hack. There's no month-long wait for copyright holders who rely on Microsoft's DRM.

Copyrights

Hitler Has Only Got One Ball
Can anonymously written folk songs be copyrighted? What if the anonymous author sues Wikipedia? Or his son? Such a serious controversy on such a serious article can only be settled by a soul-scarring delving into international copyright law, which fails to convince an obstinately irascible user out to impugn Wikipedia's credibility.

The creator of this 2004 video has turned on "God mode" so that the rocket blasts don't hurt, and then showed what a rocket-jumper with serious mad skillz can do when unleashed on the more imaginative Quake III maps.

There's something almost laugh-out-loud funny about the combination of Matrix-style editing and novel, precise rocket-jump moves. Even if you're not a Quake player (I'm not, particularly, though I live with a retired member of the UK national Quake team) this is every bit as engrossing as any parkour video or Olympic demonstration sport. Link (via Wonderland)

These technologies aren't fit for government use, for a number of reasons. Today, for example, whistle-blowers in government can take official documents that show malfeasance to an ombudsman or the press or their boss. Under the NZ proposal, they'll have to take their request for leaking sensitive information to a Ministry of DRM that will evaluate their request and determine whether to allow the disclosure. Even if you believe that such a Ministry would be efficient, honest, and even-handed, there's an undeniable chilling-effect inherent in having to approach a government ministry before releasing material that's damaging to the government.

Other problems abound, but the gravest is the harm to open source. Open source technology is technology that can be understood, modified, improved and re-published by its user. This methodology has produced the best server OS on the planet (GNU/Linux), the best browser (Firefox), the best mail-server, web-server, video-player, and so on. It's critical to security research, to development strategies for poor countries and rich, for education and for democracy.

But open source and DRM can't peacefully co-exist. As I wrote on Monday:

DRM relies on its owners not knowing how it works and not being able to change how it works. If I give you a song that can only be played on five computers, it defeats the point if you can change that to 50,000 computers. But the point of open source is that it is better for society, individuals, and competition if anyone who cares to can discover how her tools work, improve those tools, and publish her improvements.

This is nonsense. Yes, with trusted computing, you could have a DRM program where the source was available, but which would refuse to run if you changed it, but to say that that makes DRM safe for open source is to miss the point entirely.

Open source works not merely because the source is published. Critical to open source is the ability to modify, improve and republish the tools you use. Under the scheme described by the nameless government apparat quoted above, open source authors would need a separate license to modify, improve, and republish open source tools.

But that's just proprietary software by another name: by that definition, Microsoft Windows is open source, since you can theoretically get a license from Microsoft to modify and re-publish its products. The point of open source is that no further permission is ever needed to make open source tools better. The NZ proposal is one in which improvements can only ever come with permission from DRM consortia, which are universally -- to a one -- dominated by American companies.

It would be a terrible betrayal for NZ to adopt a policy where its NZ programmers needed to seek permission from American companies in order to make tools that read, manipulated, and made available documents produced the NZ government, at NZ taxpayers' expense. Link

Bruce breaks down a newly released analysis of Justice Department records conducted by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). Snip:

This is absolutely essential reading for anyone interested in how the U.S. is prosecuting terrorism. Put aside the rhetoric and the posturing; this is what is actually happening.

Among the key findings about the year-by-year enforcement trends in the period were the following:

• In the twelve months immediately after 9/11, the prosecution of individuals the government classified as international terrorists surged sharply higher than in the previous year. But timely data show that five years later, in the latest available period, the total number of these prosecutions has returned to roughly what they were just before the attacks. Given the widely accepted belief that the threat of terrorism in all parts of the world is much larger today than it was six or seven years ago, the extent of the recent decline in prosecutions is unexpected. See Figure 1 and supporting table.

• Federal prosecutors by law and custom are authorized to decline cases that are brought to them for prosecution by the investigative agencies. And over the years the prosecutors have used this power to weed out matters that for one reason or another they felt should be dropped. For international terrorism the declination rate has been high, especially in recent years. In fact, timely data show that in the first eight months of FY 2006 the assistant U.S. Attorneys rejected slightly more than nine out of ten of the referrals. Given the assumption that the investigation of international terrorism must be the single most important target area for the FBI and other agencies, the turn-down rate is hard to understand. See Figure 2 and supporting table.

• The typical sentences recently imposed on individuals considered to be international terrorists are not impressive. For all those convicted as a result of cases initiated in the two years after 9//11, for example, the median sentence -- half got more and half got less-- was 28 days. For those referrals that came in more recently -- through May 31, 2006 -- the median sentence was 20 days. For cases started in the two year period before the 9/11 attack, the typical sentence was much longer, 41 months. See Figure 3.

Each pack includes candy scabs and 5 plastic bandages which are stickable just like a real bandage. A plastic compartment on the bandage opens to reveal a pressed dextrose candy scab. Open the compartment, lick the candy, and reseal for licking later!

The government has stifled the media, either blocking, shutting or surreptitiously taking over newspapers there for the past few years. I had an email exchange with freelance Zimbabwean reporter Frank Chikowore, who talks about being jailed in 2005 for filming police beating street vendors, and asks for Western media outlets to help employ journalists there.

"Unfortunately blogging is still very unpopular in Zimbabwe and most African countries. Of course the use of the Internet has enabled journalists to transmit their news and information to their readers and listeners but the cost of doing so is very [high] considering that several journalists are not gainfully employed and they live by the grace of God.

In fact, journalists have been reduced to beggars in Zimbabwe. Journalists now use pseudonyms as the government continues with its onslaught against independent journalists. The cost of registering as a foreign correspondent has become inhibitive for journalists to register -- hence they prefer using pseudonyms."

As Xeni points out, what better day to shoot doves than 9/11?

"Basically, I tried to figure the best way to get cell reception for in-car, multi-phone homes, and single phone apartments," Mike explains.

Link to the blog post, and here's the PopSci article.

21-year-old artist Chuck Anderson of Chicago just released a new book of his work, along with a new website and collection of prints for sale. "A dollar of every book sale will be donated to a Humane Society in Chicago to support the prevention of cruelty towards animals and supporting those animals needing care in the shelter," Anderson tells BoingBoing. You may have seen some of his commercial work in campaigns for Nike, Sony, and Reebok, and he recently did this nifty illustration of "a guy who hangs out with atoms" for WIRED magazine. Direct link to shop for prints and books.

"In the 2006 midterms, Senators Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Rick Santorum (R-PA), both running for re-election, have raised the most money of any candidate in their respective parties. Here are the NASCAR-style uniforms they would wear if companies were proud of their political donations, and if running for senate required a flame-retardant suit." Link.

Morgan from GOOD says the magazine's inaugural issue, in which this piece appears, also includes "Pictures from the Border Film Project and New Yorker writer James Surowiecki on America's place in the world [and] profiles of Jimmy Wales, Amanda Congdon, and Peter Diamandis of the X-Prize, among others. Most importantly, when you subscribe to the magazine, we give your entire $20 subscription fee to one of our 12 partner organizations, one of which is Creative Commons."

Reader comment: Steven Luscher says,

Arrrgh!!! GOOD Magazine Subscriptions are not available in Canada! I just had to get my frustration out on this one: GOOD looks like a magazine right up my alley, but they don't offer subscriptions outside the US. Plegh...

You *can* subscribe in Canada! It's a new offering for us which is why it isn't yet enabled on our site. For now, e-mail info(at)goodmagazine.com to get a subscription in Canada. Also, come to our launch parties! There's one in New York and one in Los Angeles. For $20 you get a year's worth of GOOD, a donation to one of our non-profit partners and free drinks all night. More here.

Good Magazine seems great, but it made me remember the first time I heard the concept/joke for a political Nascar-style suit: Barry Levinson. (It was a few years ago, when he was giving a talkback about "Wag the Dog".) In fact, in his upcoming film, "Man of the Year", Robin Williams character uses it again. (Here's the trailer with the joke in it.)

Great find, but the idea has deep and fun roots. My friend and sometime co-author Nancy Watzman wrote up the idea for the Christian Science Monitor back in 1996 -- "If Politicians, Like Athletes, Wore Logos."

And we got the Nation to do a fully realized cartoon of Gore and Bush in Nascar suits back in the summer of 2000. Alas, they don't appear to have that image in their online archive.

Comedian Bill Maher wore such a suit, festooned with corporate logos, at his appearance at Arianna Huffington's Shadow Convention, alongside the 2000 Democratic convention in L.A. He looked quite snazzy in it.

Five people are currently imprisoned in Vietnam for having expressed democratic views on the Internet. Contrary to the claims of the Vietnamese authorities, none of them is a terrorist, criminal or spy. These men have been punished for using the Internet to publicly express their disagreement with the political line of the sole party. They are non-violent democrats.

Vietnam will shortly become a member of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and it has also been chosen to host the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in November. We consider that a normalisation of diplomatic relations with this country and its integration into the world economy should be linked to concrete progress in the field of human rights.

RSF has posted a number of updates today on other cases of alleged government repression against journalists and bloggers. Here's an update on "continuing judicial harassment of Iranian journalists," here is an item about a feared press crackdown in the African nation of Burundi, another about an editor held by authorities in Cameroon, the editor of a paper in Sudan has been kidnapped and murdered, and there are reports of "censorship and seizures in runup to general elections" in Brazil.

The last captive thylacine died in the Hobart Zoo on September 7, 1936. Today in Australia, the day is now known as “Threatened Species Day.” Ten years ago it was known as “National Thylacine Day.”

The last thylacine was captured in 1924, with its mother and siblings, in Florentine Valley, Tasmania. In 1933, this last thylacine, a female, was sold to the Hobart Zoo. (Whether or not it was ever named “Benjamin” is a subject of much debate.) The world’s last captive then died in that zoo three years later. In the same year, 1936, or in 1938, by some accounts, the Tasmanian tiger was added to the list of Protected Wildlife. Finally, 50 years after the death of the last captive, in 1986, the thylacine was declared extinct by international standards.

But sightings in the wild persist. Do they live today out in the forest bush of Tasmania (almost 400 sightings), on mainland Australia (over 4000 sightings), or in the rainforests of New Guinea (a handful)?

Reader comment: D'oh! Thylacines aren't felines, they're thylacines! Bruce Wright says,

Felines are

Animalia - Chordata - Mammalia - Carnivora - Felidae

Thylacines are

Animalia - Chordata - Mammalia - Marsupialia - Dasyuromorphia - Thylacinidae

Here's some photos of thylacines.

The thylacine was able to open its mouth to an unbelievable extent, as you can see in one of the videos (film number 5) at this site, a labor of love by a thylacine expert.

I made a cardboard box upright bass using scrap oak flooring as the neck, and i made a pickup by breaking away the plastic casing of a Radio Shack Science Project Buzzer, and strings are weed whacker twine and the tuners are faucet-spiggots.

U.S. District Court Magistrate Charles Binder released Louai Othman, 23, his brother Adham Othman, 21, and their cousin Maruan Muhareb, 18, all of Mesquite, Texas, after a preliminary hearing.

The three were arrested Aug. 11 after buying large numbers of prepaid cell phones at a Wal-Mart store in rural Caro, about 80 miles north of Detroit. Michigan charges against the men were thrown out last month.

"I guess their ordeal is done," said defense lawyer Abed Ayoub of Dearborn, who represents the three men.

Previously: Cellphone terror detainees: not guilty, just inconveniently brown

Donald Shoup, professor at UCLA, will be speaking about his book "The High Price of Free Parking" at U.C. Berkeley on Friday. Shoup estimates "the cost of all parking spaces in the U.S. exceeds the value of all cars and may even exceed the value of all roads." He also contends that the cost of free parking gets passed on to all consumers, including the poorest of society. His talk is bound get people thinking about our addiction to free parking and car-oriented politics.

Reader comment:

Kendra says:

I saw your post about Donald Shoup's "High Cost of Free Parking."

His talk is being sponsored by TRANSOC -- the Graduate Student organization for the Institute of Transportation Studies. There is a reception before hand, "Cookie Hour", hosted by TRANSOC and the ITS Library. It'll be at 412 McLaughlin Hall from 3:30-4:00. People mingle about talking about transrpotation and eat home baked cookies, brownies, and cupcakes.

I work for the library and am baking vegan cupcakes for the event. It was weird to see it on boing boing.

I just can’t believe in this day and age that anyone would think, "let’s keep it confidential, but put on our website." I found some VERY interesting info I probably wasn’t supposed to see.

The Relativity Group in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics of the University of Cambridge is looking for a recent graduate to fill an assistant position from December 2006.

The Head of the Group is Professor Stephen Hawking who is disabled and communicates using a computer system and speech synthesiser. If you were accepted for the post you would be responsible for maintaining and improving this computer system as well as other pieces of support equipment. You would help him to prepare and deliver seminars and public lectures and assist with scientific papers. You would also accompany Professor Hawking on his many travels and assist other members of the group.

Flexibility, stamina and a confident and caring personality, together with a valid driving licence, are essential for this demanding job.

Mark and I discuss how to create DNA samples in your own backyard, what makes a sexy cartoon sexy, and how to stage an effective subversion at your next airport security checkpoint.

I also asked Mark what is up with zombie libidos, and even though he is shy, I think he is the only person on the planet who can answer that with certainty.

Brand Recognition
New paintings and drawings by Coop
September 9 - October 7, 2006
Sixspace
5803 Washington Blvd
Culver City, CA

This QuickTime video is 40MB, and contains adult language and images, so be careful about watching this at work. Link

Since newborns cannot see their own faces, they rely on watching adults to learn facial expressions, and mimicry is thought to be crucial to the development of a mother-infant relationship.

Particular brain cells – called “mirror neurons” – fire in a human infant when it watches an adult expression and copies it. Similar mirror neurons "light up" when rhesus monkeys watch another animal perform an action and when they copy that action. This similarity suggests a common brain pathway for imitation in humans and monkeys.

A battery of researchers have found four-legged chickens are not unheard of but Poultry Industry Association executive director Mike Brooks said they were as rare as hens' teeth and were something he had heard of but never seen.

Other four-legged chickens had been reported in Romania and Saudi Arabia.

Hamilton vet Keith Houston said in the Dickey's chick case, stem cells in the egg had divided into four instead of two, meaning an extra pair of legs.

Update: Greentrench sez, "I don`t think it's a photoshop as I snapped a pic of one near the fish processing factory here in Mochimune Japan."

Update: Mykle sez, "People might be interested in the artist Dan Ladd who's been making incredibly detailed moulded gourd sculptures for years."

Some parents are uneasy with having their children's fingerprints scanned, and wonder about how well the information is secured. "It may be perfectly secure, but my daughter is a minor and I understand that supposedly the kids have the option to not have their prints scanned, but that's not being articulated to my daughter," said Hal Storey, who's daughter is a 10th grader at Rome High.

Reader comment: Greg Whitehead says,

The biometric finger scanner technology that I'm aware of doesn't actually record anything like a fingerprint that could be used to identify you by latent prints.

This comment is adding to the problem, which is that normal people are being asked to accept onerous privacy-invading technologies, and they are living in a world which increasingly takes that acceptance for granted. There are other problems with the comment, such as the fact that it comes from Joe Random Reader whose fingerprint technology credentials we don't know, and the fact that he bafflingly refers to the ability to link to "latent" fingerprints as though that is the only threat. Although I lean toward the Scott McNealy camp: "You have no privacy, get over it" I don't think it's necessary or right to force this thinking onto children. Giving them an opt-out that makes them into social black sheep in their school environment is also not a good option.

Greg Whitehead's comments are extremely misleading. He is correct that fingerprint scanners do not generally store an image that can be used to reconstruct an entire fingerprint. They do, however, store a hash value which is based on the image of the fingerprint. So now, someone with a database of unidentified full prints need only need run this hash algorithm before they can use the records on file in this situation to positively identify you. And that's the best-case scenario, assuming that you trust the manufacturers of the (presumably closed-source) device to implement a proper one-way, collision-free hash.

If it stores enough information to match your fingerprint against the stored information, then it also stores enough information to match a latent print against that information. They system may not initially be set up to do so, but you could either extract the information from it or, as they demonstrated on mythbusters, use the latent print to build a fake finger.

My first thought when I saw this story was how often are they going to clean this thing. It seems to be a great way to spread disease around a school, have everyone touch the same surface right before eating. It would probably be more sanitary to have them lick a toilet seat (a toilet seat is actually quite clean, as demonstrated by Penn&Teller on the Bullshit! episode Safety Hysteria, and I think on Mythbusters too).

Already available are peaches with Daisy Duck and Goofy stickers, and table grapes packaged in Mickey and Minnie Mouse boxes. Organic apples with Winnie the Pooh -- the mascot for Disney Garden organic selections -- are due out sometime in September...

Denise Hanisee, 60, said her 9-year-old granddaughter gets the most excited in aisles with hot chocolate and candy. She believes that enthusiasm could carry over to Disney-branded fruit because she loves Mickey Mouse and his cartoon companions.

"AdWords customers can develop their own mobile advertisements and marketing campaigns, and can set daily budgets, establish scheduled marketing messages and pay only when consumers click the ad or call the business."

Link to article. Nothing on the Google corporate site about this yet, tho, and I haven't been able to confirm yet by testing the service myself. (Thanks, Hal Bringman, via unwired)

A gallery of work by photojournalist David Burnett. Shown here: scene in the Lower 9th Ward, an area which suffered much of the damage from the collapsed levees after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Link to image collection. (Thanks, Clayton James Cubitt)

The 10 Web segments, each just a few minutes long and viewable on devices ranging from iPods to laptops to desktops to full-size television sets, feature characters from the television show. And they have the same dark feel of broadcast episodes of “Galactica,” a post-apocalyptic survival tale of humans on the run after their home planets have been destroyed.

The mini-episodes will go online, one at a time, on Tuesday and Thursday nights until “Galactica’s” season premiere on Oct. 6. They focus on two soldiers in a new city built by humans fleeing Cylons, a race of machines that has wiped out human civilization elsewhere.

Looks like the Times got one detail wrong: the BSG webisodes are only available on the network's "Sci Fi Pulse" -- a Flash-based broadband site. They're not made available for viewing on iPods due to legal restrictions, according to a SciFi spokesperson. Of course, determined and tech-savvy users could certainly hack the content for that purpose if they really wanted to.

It was hoped that the computer might contain information which might shed more light on the decision of Priklopil, 44, to snatch Ms Kampusch, when she was aged 10, in March 1998. However, Major General Gerhard Lang of the Federal Criminal Investigations Bureau, told reporters the computer would complicate investigators' efforts to transfer files for closer examination.

There are emulators available which can make a modern PC capable of running Commodore 64 programmes but Maj Gen Lang said it would be difficult to transmit the data from Priklopil's machine to a modern computer "without loss".

Priklopil killed himself by jumping in front of a train within hours of the escape of Ms Kampusch, now aged 18, on August 23 this year. He had mostly kept her in a tiny, secret, windowless room under his garage at his house, in suburban Strasshof, just north-east of Vienna.

Reader comment: Gordon reminds us that...

You can NOT store files on a C64. The C64's brain is contained within the Keyboard, but it's data storage was done solely on 5.25" floppys and cartridges plugged into the back. There is no hard drive, so taking the C64 will do the police zero good.

... but you can still store files on floppy disks, which police could still use if they confiscated them (the article didn't say). There were also external hard drives made for the C64, just google for "CMD HD."

One of the major formats for Commodore storage was standard cassette tapes using the Datasette drive. The cops could have actually taken the CPU but set aside the data stored on innocuous looking tapes....

I am a C64 junky; with its silky ability to do textmap rotation and the ubercool analog synth sounds with an insane dynamic frequency range under the ease of the SID. But on top all that with the ease of 8 bit assembly code running at a lightning quick 10Mhz. Anywhos, the Star Commander allows one to transfer files from PC to C64's 1541 disk drive, it just requires a little homebrew XE1541 cable that connects your PC's parallel port to the serial port on the back of the C64.

Jinkster's comment has a typo: the C64 didn't run at a "lightning quick 10Mhz", it ran at a 1Mhz. Which was still lightning quick, at least to the nine-year old me. (To prevent another followup, the processor speed was actually slightly less or more than 1Mhz depending on if you had a PAL or NTSC version...) But if this series of followups proves anything, it's that there are still plenty of C64 nerds who would be willing and able to help the authorities.

The C64 could also run at 2MHZ in "fast" mode, but the screen would blank out until it went back to "slow" mode. How many geeks are digging through their attics and basements to find their old commodore now?

Download links are here (thanks, Viper Fantastic)

In related news -- today's edition of the ABC News webcast includes an Onioneque item: History of Bling: Liberace to Ghostface. "It's the imaginary sound a diamond makes when it sparkles," says the correspondent, with a straight face.

With this new technology (as well as new advances with GPUs [Graphics Processing Units]), we will likely be able to attain performance on the 100 gigaflop scale per computer. With about 10,000 such machines, we would be able to achieve performance on the petaflop scale. With software from Sony, the PlayStation 3 will now be able to contribute to the Folding@Home project, pushing Folding@Home a major step forward...

The PS3 client will also support some advanced visualization features. While the Cell microprocessor does most of the calculation processing of the simulation, the graphic chip of the PLAYSTATION 3 system (the RSX) displays the actual folding process in real-time using new technologies such as HDR and ISO surface rendering. It is possible to navigate the 3D space of the molecule using the interactive controller of the PS3, allowing us to look at the protein from different angles in real-time.

Although many people have taken it upon themselves to post photos of the Boneyard on Flickr and other photo-sharing websites, we ask that no one do so. We are an educational facility first and foremost - and therefore do not allow stock photography. Photos that are uploaded to sites such as Flickr are not copy protected, and therefore are able to be lifted and used by unscrupulous people. As a result, we are trying to limit the number of images from our collection that are hosted on the web.

* WEAR: hardware, horsie, farm, jungle, and dinosaur jewelry by Nicola Vruwink of Los Angeles. (thanks Luke Burbank)

* EAT/SLEEP: "Bib sheets" you sleep in. When you wake up, tie them around your neck for in-bed noshing. (via)

* LISTEN: Balkan Beatbox, from Brooklyn. Eastern European + dub + breakbeats + Mediterranean party vibe.

* READ: DieselSweeties in the dead-tree papers. Creator R. Stevens just inked a deal with funnies syndicator United Features Syndicate. (thanks hutch)

* LISTEN: The new Nokia 8800 Sirocco futurephone comes pre-programmed with sounds by Brian Eno. (via pho list)

* READ: New textfiles book from Cult of the Dead Cow: The Book of Cao. Like this. Buy here.

* EAT: Vosges ice cream, ships overnight anywhere in the US via FedEx in a box of dry ice. Sampled it and loved it. Extreme lush flavor combos. Chipotle/Cinnamon/Chocolate; Curry/Coconut; Pandan leaf (Nilla wafers meets pine nut), Australian Wattleseed (sort of hazelnutty). Sounds scary, tastes yummy and approachable enough that my 87-year-old Italian foodie neighbor said "s'aright. i like. is good." Goes great with her pistachio cake, which, alas, is not available online. (thanks Ruth)

* EXPLODE: New "carbonated" and "energy" candies by Jones Soda. If mentos + coke = rapid carbonic geyser, what do all three Jones products together produce? Worth a try. (thanks Luke)

* WATCH: World 3D Film Expo at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, September 8-13. Guaranteed to be free from anaglyph (red-blue).

* LISTEN: New funktronica tracks by Q-Burns Abstract Message. Among them: "Alexander East - Breathe Again (Q-Burns Abstract Message Remix)." The selekta explains, "A remix I've recently finished... contains an appearance by New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin on vocals." MP3 Link to this track; more free beats by Q-Burns here.

This week on NeoFiles, RU Sirius interviews Lee Lusted, one of the inventors of the bio-muse, a device that plays music by sending biological signals directly from the person to the computer. And on The RU Sirius Show, they kick back with the psychedelic rock band Turn Me On Dead Man.

The wolves were produced in Quanzhou, China, from January to June of 2006. The commissioned local workshop in Cai’s hometown specializes in manufacturing remarkable, life-sized replicas of animals. First, small clay models were created as movement studies, out of which Cai subsequently developed Head On’s artist editions of cast resin wolves. However, the realistic and lifelike 99 wolves that grew out of these models and drawings possess no literal remnants of wolves: they are fabricated from painted sheepskins and stuffed with hay and metal wires, with plastic lending contour to their faces and marbles for eyes.

"It was insulting at first, but now I'm just sad," Goldstein said. "The Bible says Jesus was a Jew, but no one wants Jesus painted as a Jew."

The hospital issued a statement Monday saying its officials respect people of all faiths and acknowledge "an artist's right to express their personal beliefs through their work."

But it said they have "an obligation to determine what is appropriate for our diverse patient population, and our healing environment."

To prepare the bacterial-propulsion units, the team used a strain of the fast-crawling bacterium Mycoplasma mobile that was genetically engineered to crawl only on a carpet of certain proteins, including one called fetuin. The researchers laid down fetuin within the circular groove and coated the rotor with a protein called streptavidin.

The scientists then coated the micrometer-long, pear-shaped bacteria with a solution containing biotin, a vitamin that readily binds to streptavidin.

The team released the treated bacteria into the grooves in a way that sent them mostly in one direction around the circle. As the microbes passed each of a rotor's supporting ridges, their biotin-treated cell membranes clung to the streptavidin coating, causing tugs on the tabs and thereby turning the rotor.

The train was travelling at about 20 kph when the driver saw the woman lying down between the rails, said acting police Sergeant Mike Lawton of North Island's Feilding police.

The driver was unable to stop the train before it went over the woman, he said.

"By the time he stopped the train and walked back down the line, she popped out from under the third wagon," he added.

The Vlad Taltos books tell the story of a human assassin in a magic, Zelazny-esque world where animal-like, near-immortal faerie folk are the dominant political and economic force. Humans (called "Easterners") live in ghettos and are used as peasants, cannon fodder, and punching-bags. Vlad starts out in the first novel, Jhereg, as a kitchen-boy who finds better employment as an enforcer for an organized crime syndicate, loving the work because it lets him beat up Dragaerans.

As the series progresses (it's up to book 10 now), Vlad rises to become a crime-boss, then a force in the empire, then an exile. Brust uses this rise and fall to show us his extraordinary grasp of the subtleties of the economics and social factors underpinning feudal states, stripping away the whitewash that lurks behind the Shire, Arthur and his knights, and every other narrative of noble kings and willing peasants.

With Dzur, we have something of a return to the classic Vlad Taltos book -- Vlad, lately returned from exile, is wanted by the entire Jhereg (the crime syndicate) and must execute a plan to save himself and his ex-wife from its grasp, but without the benefit of his old gang and influence. Vlad's approach to this is cunning, surprising, and buckles a crapload of swash.

Brust's books are so charming and witty, it's impossible not to love them. The snappy dialog is worthy of Chandler, while the framing devices (in Dzur, every chapter begins with a steamy, pornographic description of another course in a legendary meal) are an exuberant celebration of the depth of Brust's imaginary world.

Dzur shows you what heroic fantasy can be, when it is original and clever. Instead of the denatured extruded fantasy product that you normally find in ten-book series of fat, meandering novels, Dzur manages to stay fresh and snappy and terribly likable, even after all these volumes. Link

Under the Broadcast Treaty, fair use, Creative Commons and the public domain would be trumped by the "broadcast right," which would be owned by the broadcaster of works. If you got a copy of a work over the air or over the Web that copyright would let you use (because it was in the public domain, because it was factual, or even because the creator had granted you permission), you'd still need to seek permission from the "caster," who would get a 50-year monopoly over the re-use of copies of the works it transmitted.

The proposal to extend this to the Web could put YouTube, Google Video, and innovative podcaster services out of business, by banning or restricting the way that these companies re-use each others' materials. And if you're a podcaster accustomed to lifting other podcasters' material and pasting it into your podcasts, you'll need permission from the company that hosts the podcasts, not just permission from the creator.

The Webcasting provision has been underwritten by Yahoo and Microsoft, whose advocates at the UN work tirelessly to keep the US on-track in pushing the rest of the world to taking it on board. The rest of the world doesn't want Webcasting, but it keeps sneaking back into the treaty, over howls of protests from artists and major governments.

Now some of Yahoo and Microsoft's competitors have woken up to the fact that they're about to get their lunches eaten for them and have signed onto a letter asking the USPTO to quit handing their doom to a couple of companies.

The letter's signatories are wonderful, ranging from AT&T and Verizon to Yale, to Dell and Intel, and library associations from the medical librarians to the law librarians and more. Also on the list are TiVo, EFF, Panasonic, H-P, the US musicians' managers, and many others.

Home and personal networking. Under the current draft of the treaty, the broad scope of the proposed rights, combined with proposed additional rights regarding technological protection measures (TPMs) in connection with these rights, raises questions about whether “casters” would gain the ability to control signals in the home or personal network environment. Such control is without precedent and would interfere with the rollout of broadband and home and personal networking services and limit the development of innovative devices that provide home and personal networking functionality. Accordingly, the treaty should include a provision excluding coverage of fixations, transmissions or retransmissions across a home or personal network. Further, we should note that many of our group believe that TPM provisions are inappropriate in connection with this treaty and should be excluded from the treaty entirely.

Update: Public Knowledge founder Gigi Sohn posted her notes from today's USPTO meeting between the letter's signatories and the National Association of Broadcasters:

[NAB Senior Associate General Counsel Ben Ivins] then accused those of us who think that the US delegation should not be making US laws overseas of essentially being xenophobes who are pushing the US view of broadcasting and copyright on the rest of the world. Funny, I thought the US delegation usually pushing the US view of the world in trade and WIPO negotiations.

The ACP - Anti Caching Protection from Onlinelib allows webcasters to protected their Content with a DRM - Digital Rights Management System. Basic System is the VCS - Video Communication Server from Onlinelib.

They suggest that DRM vendors should be forced to disclose all the workings of their DRMs, limit the way that their DRMs communicate with the rest of the world, work even when the Internet is down or the vendor's gone out of business, and so on.

They also call for the creation of a Ministry of DRM that keeps keys and master documents for everything the government puts under DRM, and suggests that this ministry should police all DRM use within government.

One thing that's notable by its absence is any discussion of DRM and open source. While New Zealand's official policy is to encourage the use of open source in government, the consultation (which was fed by MIcrosoft, HP and IBM) makes no mention of the disastrous impact of DRM on open source.

DRM relies on its owners not knowing how it works and not being able to change how it works. If I give you a song that can only be played on five computers, it defeats the point if you can change that to 50,000 computers. But the point of open source is that it is better for society, individuals, and competition if anyone who cares to can discover how her tools work, improve those tools, and publish her improvements.

By deciding that it will accept DRM over its threshold -- instead of using traditional proven security and open standards -- the New Zealand government is setting up a situation where New Zealanders and NZ businesses will have to license software from foreign software companies before they can do business with government.

If you're an NZ programmer and want to make software to help your neighbors work with the documents that your government publishes, getting into the DRM will require you to close your source, license secrets from foreign DRM vendors, and submit to a "compliance" system that makes sure your work meets the business-priorities of foreign companies. Link (Thanks, Steve!)

A seemingly better proposal comes from CMEC, which represents Canada's education ministries: they say that Canadian copyright should be rewritten to carve out a new exception for schools' educational use of the Web.

But Geist shows that this latter proposal comes with lots of potential for harm. If schools need an exception to copyright to look at the Web, what does that say about uses of the Web in businesses, homes, libraries, home tutoring outfits, and elsewhere? Surely reading and studying published documents should be lawful for everyone, not just schools.

Another risk is that the US entertainment companies' reps in Canada will use this "generous loosening" of copyright law as the basis for a Canadian version of the DMCA, the US law that has sent researchers to jail and let the entertainment companies invent new private copyright laws that you can't violate without being sued.

Geist has been tracking this Canadian DMCA proposal with his 30 days of DRM series, an exhaustive look at the Canadian DMCA proposal and the harm it will bring down if the Tories pass it as they have promised to do. Link (Thanks, Michael!)

For celebrating my membership at Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFEurope) and for distributing GNU/Linux Ubuntu CD's I asked my girlfriend to sew a Gnu costume.

She did a very nice piece and we have taken some pictures in the savannah greenhouse of the botanic garden of Zurich in Switzerland. The Link shows the pictures. Soon we'll use the costume for distributing GNU/Linux in the hall of the train station of Zurich.

Link to pictures of the costume. Link of the artist Nathalie Bissig who sewed the costume. And here is the Fellowship of FSFE.

Über-nationalist, right-wing extremists in Germany wanted to attract horny youth to their xenophobic cause with a new teen-oriented magazine. To promote it, they created an ad with an Aryan babe and copy which read "GERMAN IS HOT!" -- but oops, she's Czech, and the photo was apparently nicked from a net-porn site. Snip from Der Spiegel:

After first angering advertisers who felt they had been duped into supporting a xenophobic student magazine named Objektiv, the right-wing bigots are now accused of stealing pictures used in the 24-page publication.

Ironically, the photo in question is of an attractive blond in a tank top and short skirt next to the slogan: "German is Hot!" But in an embarrassing faux pas for the German nationalists, it now it turns out that the Teutonic hottie is actually a Czech lingerie model. So much for offering a "free-patriotic point of view," as was supposedly the remit of the less-than-objective Objektiv.

According to Internet Web site operator DutchTeenCash, the right-wing extremists behind Objektiv failed to pay for the photo of the girl -- a 20-year-old student from the Czech Republic known online as "Jaimy" -- raising the possibility of legal action. "We've handed this over to our lawyers and will likely go to court," a spokesman for the company said, explaining that they had been unable to reach Objektiv's backers, the "Bürgerbewegung Pro Köln" (Citizen Initiative for Cologne), to discuss copyright infringement.

Reader comment: Ralph says,

The racists don't learn: After their copyright infringement with the Czech girl (hot, but not German ;-)), they did it again. They grabbed an image from a book for teaching children German and put their slogan on it again. Unfortunately, the image was 'borrowed' from "Das Franken-Antiquariat" (bookstore for really old stuff) without their knowledge... Link

the spiegel.de story you linked is more or less a ripoff of an article from the spreeblick-blog: Link. malte from spreeblick did all the research and got out with the story, spiegel.de ripped the story off without any credit a few days later. they put a credit to spreeblick.com into the german article after johnny from spreeblick called spiegel.de. now, obviously, they omitted spreeblicks/maltes credit in the english version again. Link to background on the ripoff.

what felix said is correct.

we discovered the illegal use of the pic of the softporn model: Link

when spiegel wrote about it, they didn't mention us but corrected their article and gave credit to spreeblick after we kindly asked them to: Link

the new pic in "Objektiv" of a book: Link

is stolen from another website, too (the scan is the same, look closely at the artefacts): Link

we wrote about that, too: Link.

and donated, with the pic in the Spreeblick article last mentioned, some balls to the "pro cologne"-organization. :)

I'm no historian, but if I remember my WWII history correctly, Hitler and the Nazis considered Czechoslovakia (at least part of it, the Sudetenland), as part of Germany, at least that was their excuse for invading (along with "protecting" a German minority there). This led to the appeasement by Chamberlain which our insane defense secretary referred to the other day.

I'm not saying this view is correct, and certainly the Nazis' rationale for invasion were craven, but I wonder whether the nutbags who put this mag together would even care that the model was Czech. They might even still consider her "Aryan", based, as such judgements are, wholly on superficialities. Maybe there's even an agenda--a coded message--in using a pic of a Czech model and calling her German?

Link

(Photos by Bruce Sterling)

Ohrid, Macedonia -- August 31, 2006
by Jasmina Tesanovic

Again a long trip by bus, to Macedonia this time, the town of Struga on Lake Ohrid.

Thirty Women in Black and a young bus driver. It is his first drive, he is cautious and it is a good thing too, because he saves the lives of several reckless fools in the narrow mountain roads where the speeding fines exceed those in Los Angeles but slow down nobody.

We stop several times, for "a piss and a smoke." We have no local money, Macedonian denars, but we do have one dollar bills. A beer for a dollar, a piss for a dollar? The first one is cheap, the second tremendously expensive for such a rich natural environment with so few people.

This used to be my own country, and my heart still leaps at the beauty of these Yugoslav mountains. Only at the last moment did remember that I had to take my passport to Macedonia. America's Colorado was never this green. My ever-skeptical American friend says: it's pretty here, but I've seen prettier.

Still, Lake Ohrid is astounding even him. He says: this is ridiculously pretty. Green reeds are swaying on the wind and the waves are climbing the shore below our room. The glossy local postcards look dull compared to reality.

An Orthodox monastery stands next to our hotel on the lake. A sign says: in 1942 an illegal Communist meeting was held here. Tito's red star is still on the monastery and the nuns are proud of it. They also make an excellent brandy. My American friend asks how Macedonian-Orthodox nuns could also be revolutionary Marxist atheists. I have no explanation. Nobody is perfect, especially in Balkan history.

Now, new scholarship and transatlantic detective work have solved the puzzle of who they were and where their forced journey across the Atlantic Ocean began.

The slaves were herded onto a Portuguese slave ship in Angola, in Southwest Africa. The ship was seized by British pirates on the high seas -- not brought to Virginia after a period of time in the Caribbean. The slaves represented one ethnic group, not many, as historians first believed.

Reader comment: Anonymous says,

Slaves were present in North America a bit earlier than the 1600s, but south of the current U.S. border. This site describes results from a recent archaeological project in Campeche, Mexico that uncovered the remains of African slaves who were brought to Mexico during the 1500s. They were identified by the chemical composition of their teeth which reflects the geology of the area where you grow up, which in their case was West Africa.

When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site -- the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it's the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.

And when you think about it, this makes perfect sense. Writing an encyclopedia is hard. To do anywhere near a decent job, you have to know a great deal of information about an incredibly wide variety of subjects. Writing so much text is difficult, but doing all the background research seems impossible.

On the other hand, everyone has a bunch of obscure things that, for one reason or another, they've come to know well. So they share them, clicking the edit link and adding a paragraph or two to Wikipedia. At the same time, a small number of people have become particularly involved in Wikipedia itself, learning its policies and special syntax, and spending their time tweaking the contributions of everybody else.

Other encyclopedias work similarly, just on a much smaller scale: a large group of people write articles on topics they know well, while a small staff formats them into a single work. This second group is clearly very important -- it's thanks to them encyclopedias have a consistent look and tone -- but it's a severe exaggeration to say that they wrote the encyclopedia. One imagines the people running Britannica worry more about their contributors than their formatters.

Update: Here's a Flickr-set for swing-jumping -- thanks, Brian!

John Brockman, the New York Film Festival's 25-year-old coordinator of a special events program on independent cinema in the United States, plugging into the switched-on "expanded cinema" world in which a film is not just a movie, but an Experience, an Event, an Environment.

This is a humming electronic world, in which multiple films, tapes, amplifiers, kinetic sculpture, lights and live dancers or actors are combined to Involve Audiences in a Total Theater Experience.

Unlike Happenings, which often involve audiences in complicated relationships with plastics, bottles, sacks, ropes and other objects, Intermedia Kinetic Experiences permit audiences simply to sit, stand, walk or lie down and allow their senses to be Saturated by Media.

No Way Out: "You can't escape from an Intermedia Kinetic Environments the way you can from a play or any art form that reaches you through language," says Brockman.
Link. Much respect, Mr. Brockman. Much respect.

Reader comment: Loren Coleman says,

Over at Cryptomundo, I've written a blog about how Steve Irwin has been involved with cryptozoological pursuits: Link.

Melbourne's newpaper 'The Age' has several stories on its front page detailing the highly unusual death of Steve Irwin. Steve was diving in far north Queensland off Port Douglas in the Great Barrier Reef. He was stabbed in the heart by the barb of a giant stingray - a freakish incident itself and unheard off. Stingrays are known as non-aggressive and docile creatures, curious of humans, often interacting with scuba divers and rarely prone to attack. Only two other deaths by stingray have ever been reported in the world. Had Steve been pierced in the leg or elsewhere - he would have survived. His death was unprecedented.

A co-worker of mine who volunteers at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago and majored in marine biology found this paper. Sadly I can't send along the full document but it looks as though Mr. Irwin's type of injury is extremely fatal though thankfully rare.

Medical Journal of Australia: Notable Cases Survivor of a stingray injury to the heart Beatrix F Weiss, Hugh D Wolfenden (MJA 2001; 175: 33-34)

Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Prince of Wales Hospital, Sydney, NSW. weissbx@usa.net

Injuries to the extremities from stingray barbs are not uncommon along the Australian seaboard. Cardiac injuries from stingray barbs are rare, even worldwide, and all but one have been fatal. We report a survivor of a cardiac injury caused by a stingray barb. Penetration of a body cavity by a stingray barb requires early surgical referral and management.

PMID: 11476200 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

As you could imagine people have spent time creating they're own tribute videos for "The Crocodile Hunter". Here you will find all the latest videos updated from all the main video websites including Youtube, Google video and Myspace. Link

This Myspace band, The Lexiconographers, has a tribute song about The Crocodile Hunter. Link.

(In the article, Crawford) wonders if a decline in the use of tools has made us "more passive and more dependent. And indeed, there are fewer occasions for the kind of spiritedness that is called forth when we take things in hand for ourselves, whether to fix them or to make them." Crawford adds: ” So perhaps the time is ripe for reconsideration of an ideal that has fallen out of favor: manual competence, and the stance it entails toward the built, material world." At Make, we couldn't agree more.

Crawford, who left a job in a "think-tank" to become a bike mechnanic, traces the history of shop class in America back to the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, which was meant to meet both vocational and general education requirements. Even from the outset, it seemed designed to create a path from school to the assembly line for the lower class, creating an artificial divide between "white collar" and "blue collar" that separated thinking from doing, which is just wrong.

Nazi agents relayed sensitive military information using the dots and dashes of Morse code incorporated in the drawings.

British secret service officials were aware of the ruse and issued censors with a code-breaking guide to intercept them.

The book...included an example of a code hidden in a drawing of three young models.

"Heavy reinforcements for the enemy expected hourly," reads a message disguised as a decorative pattern in the stitching of their gowns, hats and blouses.

The driver was in Brent when the youth spat in his face. He took a sample of the saliva using a sterile swab. Police then tested it and found a match on the national DNA database.

The 17-year-old was arrested yesterday and held for questioning- He may face a charge of causing a public nuisance or actual bodily harm.

Some 2,500 kits - containing two swabs, gloves and an evidence bag - have been given to drivers and other transport workers whose routes take them through Brent.

Update: Wayne sez, "Scottish bus drivers have had 'spit kits' for just this problem since sometime in 2004. The first conviction was 17 year-old Scott Morrison, a racist yob, in October 2004. In Scotland, train conductors and traffic cops also carry the 'spit kits' to collect and identify the unwanted expectorations of the unruly public."

His spokeswoman said he had tampered with the CDs in branches of HMV and Virgin as well as independent record stores.

He visited cities including Bristol, Brighton, Birmingham, Newcastle, Glasgow and London, she added.

A spokesman for HMV said the chain had recovered seven CDs from two Brighton shops but was unaware that other locations were affected...

A spokesman for Virgin Megastores said staff were searching for affected CDs but it was proving hard to find them all.

"I have to take my hat off - it's a very good stunt," he added.

Update: Here's the pix! (Thanks, Robert, Scott, Xeni and others!)

Update 2: Here's the remix tracks from the disc, and here's the video that accompanies the prank -- thanks, Rene and Nick!

If tobacco companies are consciously boosting nicotine yields, by what strange logic would they also trim them some years? Could it be that 1) the methodology behind the Massachusetts results isn't consistent; or 2) the mix of cigarette brands tested changes sufficiently from year to year to alter average nicotine yields?

The tobacco industry knows that tobacco consumers adapt their smoking techniques to extract the dose of nicotine they crave. If that's the case, what incentive do they have to boost nicotine yields? Wouldn't it be in their interests to produce low-nicotine cigarettes in hopes that smokers purchase and consume more of them in their pursuit of nicotine?

This picture of a type of mushroom called Sulphur Shelf (also known as Laetiporus sulphureous, chicken of the woods, the chicken mushroom and the chicken fungus) resembles that of human intestines.

Despite its look, it is actually edible with a taste quite similar to lemony chicken. However, it should only be eaten when young. And one should always only try a small amount the first time. This is due to the fact that approximately half of the population is allergic to this kind of mushroom.

It can be found mainly on wounds of trees, mostly oak, yew, cherry wood, sweet chestnut and willow and comes back year after year from late spring to early autumn.

Boy! It's Keen A REAL METAL RAPID FIRING "G-BOY" REPEATING CAP PISTOL

$1.95 (Gun Only)
Box of 5 rolls caps 7 Boxes . . . $1.00

RAPID FIRING!
LOOKS LIKE A REAL "45
ACTUALLY SMOKES ON FIRING HAS LOUD EXPLOSIVE REPORT

It's a real thriller. Yes! Looks and feels like the Automatic "45's" carried by our Army Officer . . . It's made of strong lightweight aluminum . . . with a plastic "Pearl" handle. It's easy to reload. Any boy would gladly give his entire allowance for one of these.

Mrs Greening-Jackson, who sits on the board of several charities, said: "I was absolutely furious. The young man said, 'Sorry, you're over 70. It's company policy. We don't sign anyone up who is over 70.'

"Later a young lady said company policy is that anyone over 70 might not understand the contract. She said, 'If you would be prepared to go to the shop in town and take a younger member of your family we might give you a contract.'

"I have just completed a visa form to go to Russia. Last year we did one for walking the Wall in China and here is this person saying I would not be able to understand a basic form - and it was basic. It is pure ageism.

"Somebody has decided when you turn 70 you lose a lot of your mind. I find this is ridiculous."

If you buy the latest Bob Dylan album from the iTunes Music Store, be prepared to lose four of the tracks when you burn it to CD. Four of the tracks on "Modern Times," which is only sold with the whole album on the iTMS, are only made available as video files, and iTunes isn't designed to allow you to burn the audio portion of a video when you burn your CD.

The CD version of "Modern Times" comes as a 14-track 10-track (the Amazon listing for this disc is incorrect) disc that includes the audio of the four iTunes videos; also included with the CD is a DVD carrying the four videos. In other words, if you buy the packaged good, you get the audio and the videos for the final four songs, if you buy the iTunes Store version, you only get the un-burnable videos for them.

The iTunes experience is lauded for its consistency and fairness, and for the ease with which iTunes customers can convert their purchased songs into MP3s. But this is a dramatic failure of the consistency, clarity and ease of iTunes.

First, when you attempt to burn the album (with the video-files, which are only distinguished from the audio-files by a small, obscure grey icon) to CD, the iTunes error message says only that the files "cannot be burned to an audio CD," which led Kim Cameron, an experienced computer user and IT executive, to conclude that the files were locked -- an error stating that these were video files would have been clearer.

Second, the whole Modern Times package defeats the simplicity of the iTunes pricing model -- $0.99/track for any track. While the $14 price-tag gets you 14 "tracks," it's not possible to buy singles from the disc and get the videos as well, nor is there any discount for buying the whole CD instead of a tack-by-track purchase. And since four of the tracks are not "music" in the sense of being burnable and rippable, you're really paying more on a per-track basis. Remember the outcry when Edgar Bronfman, Jr threatened to raise the cost of some iTunes songs and lower the cost of others? Here we have a similar kind of differential pricing sneaking in via the back-door.

Finally, here's a way in which buying iTunes tracks creates real long-term lock-in to iTunes and iPods: since iTunes videos are locked to the Apple platform, and since the only way to get any of Modern Times through iTMS is to pay for these videos, Apple and Dylan are slyly adding some lock-in to the user experience without any explicit statement about it.

Apple could make this much better by offering both the videos and the audio, or by patching iTunes to allow for burning of the audio portion of videos. But better still would be to turn off the DRM altogether. There's another way to get Modern Times and burn it to a CD: you can buy it from AllOfMP3.com, a service of disputed legality, for a fraction of Apple's pricing. Or you can download it from a P2P network. Apple's offering costs more and does less than its competitors'. How can this possibly be good business-sense?

Well, there is one way. By providing crippleware files, Apple makes it harder to switch to a competing portable player. And by giving Apple permission to cripple his music, Bob Dylan makes it harder for his fans to change to a competing service, which in turn makes it harder for Dylan to re-negotiate his own deal with Apple. Let's hope that Apple's interests and Bob Dylan's interests remain identical forever, then, for his sake. Link

Update: Amazon's track listing for the deluxe CD erroneously listed the CD as coming with 14 music tracks; however, it appears that only 10 tracks come on the CD, and the rest come on a bonus DVD as videos.

For Dylan and Sony, it's an interesting approach to the music: it makes the "album" into a less-separable package that loses value when converted to MP3. Apple's strategy of using a proprietary video DRM for its digital-only version of the disc goes beyond "adding value," though -- as noted above, the new value comes with new lock-in, since the videos get tethered to iTunes, while the music could be exported by being burned and re-ripped as MP3s.