The MPAA's excuse for this is that it's an alternative to government censorship of films, but as director Kirby Dick shows, it's wildly implausible that such censorship would be found constitutional. The MPAA system treats independents as second-class citizens, issuing gnomic pronouncements about a film's suitability, while treating the big studios that own the MPAA with more solicitude, lavishing editorial suggestions on directors who've come under the thumb of the big six.

This Film is Not Yet Rated makes a compelling case for MPAA ratings system as a form of institutionalized, homophobic puritanism. The ratings board is quite relaxed about violence, especially extreme, gory violence, but takes a dim view of sex, and won't tolerate sex out of the missionary position, nor gay sex of any kind, nor any suggestion of women getting real pleasure out of sex. It's an eye-opening look at America's hidden values, where you can take your kids to see bad guys gunned down by James Bond, but not a lightweight teen-comedy about lesbian girls sent away to anti-gay brainwashing camp.

The movie revolves around the mystery of the MPAA's ratings process. Kirby Dick hires a likable middle-aged lesbian private eye who stakes out the MPAA's LA headquarters, writing down license plate numbers and war-dialing the MPAA voicemail system until she gets the names and addresses of all the "parents" on the ratings committee, some of whom are childless, or with grown children.

He then submits his film for rating, and it receives a predictable NC-17 rating. As this is an indie film, the MPAA won't provide him with specifics about their decision. He asks to have his rating appealed, and is put through an Orwellian process whereby the arbitrators of his appeal (who unanimously vote against him) are kept secret from him. Here his private eye comes to the rescue again, revealing that the neutral arbitration committee includes executives from the major studios (who are presumably easier on their own products than on those of powerless indies), and, incredibly, two members of the clergy.

The most incredible thing about this film is the filmmakers that Dick interviews. The creators of Team America, Boys Don't Cry, Gunner Palace, Dirty Shame, But I'm A Cheerleader, Jersey Girl and other movies that received NC-17s from the MPAA recount the incredible heartbreak of slamming into the immovable wall of MPAA ratings. They talk about making movies that they hope will change the world. They talk about having hope snatched away from them by a little clique of oligarchs who control 95 percent of the films released in the US.

After watching this movie, I wanted to support these creators. I walked into a video-store across the way and bought Boys Don't Cry, a transgender teen who was raped and beaten to death; Gunner Palace, a documentary about life in the US military in Baghdad; A Dirty Shame, a gross-out sex-comedy from John Waters, one of my favorite filmmakers; and But I'm a Cheerleader, a lighthearted comedy about a sexually curious teenaged girl sent to an anti-gay rehabilitation camp.

They all look like great movies, and they didn't get the chance they deserved.

The movie's got a special treat for copyfighters -- a whole section on copyright and piracy, featuring an interview with Larry Lessig (the movie made the news recently when the MPAA revealed that it had made pirate copies of TFINYR to distribute to its executives). Link

Update: Here's the producer's blog -- thanks, KC!

A lot of people are upset about that, and the timing is somewhat sensitive. Just three months ago, an elephant at the LA Zoo named Gita died amid allegations of neglect. If the LA Zoo wasn't a hospitable environment for such an intelligent, wild critter, is a downtown warehouse full of Brangelina and chardonnay better?

The technicolor elephant lives on a private reserve in Southern California. The paint she's wearing doesn't hurt her, says her caretaker, and Nelly has appeared in a number of commercials and movies so she's "used to wearing makeup." Stil, others believe her inclusion is exploitative and abusive.

Blogging.la has more here on the controversy. There's an LA Times article here. Snip:

'I think it sends a very wrong message that abusing animals is not only OK, it's an art form,' said Ed Boks, general manager of Los Angeles Animal Services. 'We find it no longer acceptable to dye baby chicks at Easter, but it's OK to dye an elephant.' Boks found himself decrying the presence of the elephant in the exhibit even though his agency had issued the two permits necessary to have the elephant there - 'to my chagrin,' he said. He tried late Friday to revoke the permits on grounds of public safety.

'Some of the experts I've talked to have told me there's no way of predicting when an elephant will go berserk,' he said. 'We want to do what's right by the public and the animal.'

However, Boks would have to give five days' notice to revoke the permits. And in five days, the exhibit will be gone. It is to run today and Sunday from about noon to 8 p.m. 'This situation is causing the department to rethink its permitting procedures so there will be more scrutiny, so permits will not be issued for such frivolous abuse of animals in the future,' he said. Although people may be drawn for artistic reasons, he added, 'they don't understand what the animal is suffering. I think we're dealing with the psychology of an animal that needs to roam over large areas of land.'

Reader comments: Paul Mitchum says,

Where's Peter Sellers when you need him? Link.

Despite one photographer's poorly exposed (or deliberately adjusted) photos, Banksy's elephant is not pink - It's red and gold, painted to match the walls in another part of the show. We saw it entering the warehouse in the full light of day and it's definitely red.

I know people reference the "big pink elephant in the middle of the room", but the point of the installation is that the large elephant in the room has been painted to try to make it seem like part of the room, as if people wouldn't notice. Thanks for reporting on it - it was a great art show to see.

Last night I got a private tour of the Banksy show in Downtown LA. The elephant was probably either sleeping or working in the factory making ground corn, but I did spend some time and photograph nearly every piece in the show. Link.

The activists would have a fit over elephants in India.

Just a quick note of little consequence; but as a photog of 20+ years, I wanted to correct a comment. In one of the reader comments posted on boing boing regarding banksy's "pink" elephant, a reader replies:

Despite one photographer's poorly exposed (or deliberately adjusted) photos, Banksy's elephant is not pink - It's red and gold, painted to match the walls in another part of the show. We saw it entering the warehouse in the full light of day and it's definitely red.

The photographer (lucinda) didn't expose the image poorly, nor did she deliberately modify the color of the elephant; this is simply a matter of the image being shot indoors, without flash (because that probably would have freaked out the elephant) and likely in the evening. Tungsten lights (which includes most indoor lighting that involve bulbs and in this case the clearly-seen chandelier) illuminate at a color temperature which is actually quite yellow/orange to film (or in digital that is set to white balance as film). The human eye naturally adjusts for this and makes any indoor scene you view seem correctly colored, but film captures the scene as it actually is (including the true color of the light).

The only mistake the photog made was to not filter the image as they shot it or to correctly adjust it in post-processing. I applied the equivilent of #82 cooling filter (the filter that a knowlegable photographer or motion picture creator would use to compensate for shooting with tungsten lights), and as you can see (image below and attached) the elephant (as well as the rest of the scene) are more true to what you see/experience live: Red elephant, gold designs, white light. There is also a slight drop in saturation that is characteristic of the extra yellow shift of the light on film.

Truth is, most americans find a slight shift to the yellow more pleasing in photos due to the extra color saturation and overall warm "feeling" of the image (europeans tend to prefer a cooler color shift). But in this case it is just the photog not adjusting/filtering properly for the light. Its not incorrect exposure nor is it likely on purpose.

Okay - I understand that this is pretty tech-geeky; but it is an obvious mistake to any pro or experienced shooter, and I wanted to point it out.

Here's a picture of the elephant at Banksy's Barely Legal show today; as you can see -- no longer pink (or red).

Update: Todd sez, "I've got those AND Famous Monsters AND Castle of Frankenstein and several of the classic monster mags (as well as the Aurora model boxes, movie posters, and other stuff) ."

The band will re-package five of the best remixes in one CD, with proceeds going to charity.

The band has a new 13-song CD out, but had too many tracks for it and didn't want to toss the ones that didn't make the CD.

The 16 songs that didn't make it will be sold online. Consumers can download the songs, buy a deluxe CD package or get a USB stick containing all 29 songs.

"People will not often even listen to a record anymore. They might download the songs and just listen to it on shuffle with all your other music or a bunch of other bands they like," said Robertson.

That's not the end of the fan interaction. The band is also asking fans to download the song Wind It Up from the MySpace website and to film themselves playing along. Top performances will be mixed together for the actual video.

Those with artistic aspirations can also enter a T-shirt design competition, with the winner receiving more than $1,000 in prizes.

Update: Alas, the t-shirt design contest has expired! Thanks, Gen.

While some Jews, like Samuel Pallache, took up piracy in part to help make a better life for expelled Spanish Jews, Kritzler said others were motivated by revenge for the Inquisition.

One such pirate was Moses Cohen Henriques, who helped plan one of history's largest heists against Spain. In 1628, Henriques set sail with Dutch West India Co. Admiral Piet Hein, whose own hatred of Spain was fueled by four years spent as a galley slave aboard a Spanish ship. Henriques and Hein boarded Spanish ships off Cuba and seized shipments of New World gold and silver worth in today's dollars about the same as Disney's total box office for "Dead Man's Chest."

Henriques set up his own pirate island off the coast of Brazil afterward, and even though his role in the raid was disclosed during the Spanish Inquisition, he was never caught, Kritzler told The Journal.

Enter FreeCulture.org's Down with DRM video contest for a chance to win a Neuros OSD - a portable digital VCR!

FreeCulture.org wants you to make your own anti-drm video and upload it to any video-sharing site. Please tag your videos with "downwithdrm" and "dbdoct3" and send us a link. We'll then choose the 5 best videos and award the creators of each one a Neuros OSD (a $230 value). Preference will be given to videos licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA, BY, PD, or the Free Art license.

DefectiveByDesign.org will then run select videos on their website during the week of October 3rd as part of their DRM protests.

Awesom anti-DRM banners from Militant Geek

(Thanks, Fred and Laura!)

Microsoft is sending takedown notices to FairUse4WM hosters asserting that FairUse4WM violates Microsoft's copyright in Windows Media Player. This is an odd claim -- it may be that FairUse4WM is a DMCA violation because it circumvents Windows Media Player, but it's quite a stretch to say that it violates Microsoft's copyright.

The Microsoft FairUse4WM takedown notice doesn't actually purport to be a DMCA notice, but it follows the format and wording of a DMCA notice. DMCA notices shield ISPs from liability -- if you get a notice and abide by it, you aren't on the hook for any infringements committed by your customers.

This notice, though, does no such thing. It demands that you take down FairUse4WM, but doesn't offer any immunity from future prosecution in exchange (it may be that failure to abide by a notice like this could make things worse for you in court).

It's a strange strategy from Redmond: there's clearly no infringement of Microsoft's copyright here. Instead, the violation is of the notional "compatibility right" that the DMCA seems to create: a right to control whose software can interoperate with yours. Link (Thanks, Daniel!)

But by the end of the war, a joke could get you killed. A Berlin munitions worker, identified only as Marianne Elise K., was convicted of undermining the war effort "through spiteful remarks" and executed in 1944 for telling this one:

Hitler and Göring are standing on top of Berlin's radio tower. Hitler says he wants to do something to cheer up the people of Berlin. "Why don't you just jump?" suggests Göring...

"Two Jews are about to be shot. Suddenly the order comes to hang them instead. One says to the other "You see, they're running out of bullets..."

Such jokes told by Jews were a form of mutual encouragement, an expression of the will to survive. "Even the blackest Jewish humor expresses a defiant will, as if the joke teller wanted to say: I'm laughing, so I'm still alive," says Herzog.

Update: Linoma Beach, halfway between Lincoln and Omaha, Nebraska, sports one of these -- thanks, Willa!

There currently isn't a way to sniff out what you are sending, so we wrap it all up in DRM. We can’t tell if you are sending a song from a known band or your own home recording so we default to the safety of encoding.

Update: More on Medioloper

WSJ: In 2003, he met a ceramics scholar for lunch and they wound up talking about Royal Copenhagen's 1880s dinner patterns, and how they often featured bears, ducks or birds. Mr. Cohen said, "You know, I think I'd like to see a hippo on one of those."

He scrounged for antique etchings of hippos but eventually decided to go all out and hire photographer Sarah Galbraith to document the names and faces of nearly every hippo in captivity -- she ultimately traveled to 101 zoos in 33 countries, including Vietnam, South Africa, Australia and Sri Lanka. (She has chronicled her trips in a blog, "Joined at the Hippo: The story of traveling the world, one hippo at a time.")

Back home in Oyster Bay, N.Y., Mr. Cohen sifted through 3,000 images and sent his favorites to Royal Copenhagen, which hadn't received a commission of this scale in at least a century. He asked for the hippos to be painted on the company's renowned Flora Danica pattern -- also found in the collection of Denmark's Queen Margrethe II -- with enough teacups and dinner plates to serve a five-course meal for 18. The 231-year-old porcelain company has about 25 artisans who can paint the pattern for regular, five-person place settings (cost: about $6,000). But because of the scale of this commission, the company called in semi-retired master Jørgen Nielsen to do the entire set. (Mr. Cohen says he doesn't plan to sell the collection, or eat off it.)

MISTER JALOPY: Naturally, an effort like this must suffer questions of whether $400,000 was worth it and the inevitable comparison to real estate soon follow. Of course it was fucking worth it. $400,000 is a rounding error when purchasing an impressionist painting that adds no value to the world; it merely transfers bragging rights. It wasn't $400k charged by a private equity fund for management costs incurred while splitting up a venerable family company, it was spent hiring a photographer, painters and one of the five remaining porcelain companies that can still execute such a noble effort. There are valid discussions about distribution of wealth, but this is not one of them.

A roundup of fun little stuff at the end of a long work week:

# Discuss your smoking habits in Arabic: Link (Thanks, Hugo).

# Are you ready to have my thang in your mouth? Link to a short video clip from Dateline NBC. (via Defamer)

# Hot new flooring trend in Canada? Dead women at the bottom of a staircase, courtesy of the Red Cross Link (thanks, Seth).

# How They Found Pussy (totally work-safe): Link.

# Prosthetic fuzzy-mommy-hands for prematurely born babies, with the scent of a parent: Link.

# 1975 Star Trek promotional flyer from Toys R Us: Link (thanks Scott).

# Papercraft Polaroid camera: Link.

# Happy 10th birthday, Disinfo.com! (Thanks, Denis)

# Vintage tobacco ads: Link (thanks, IZ Reloaded).

# WTC in mid-'70s cigarette ad from Playboy Magazine: Link (Thanks, Dan)

# Baby's first Modernist Alphabet Flashcards: Link

# The Princess and the Processor: Norwegian reality show setup involving smart computer and dumb blonde. "I can't understand the computer language they are talking." Link (Thanks, Andrew)

# Guerilla wedding at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC: Link (thanks HeyTomK)

# And BoingBoing reader HornCologne says,

"Following the long and successful career of the Kraftwerk remix as the ring-tone on my cell, I present you ... Boing Boing Woop, remixed from that Danish rap song you posted yesterday. BTW, I love the part in the song where the guy sings blah-blah-blah-dont-understand-anything-in-Danish SEXY ASS blahblah.' It totally reminds me of Channel 9 from the BBC's Fast Show."

Previous installments of BoingBoing Omakase Links:
Post-holiday bluesnixer roundup

Warren Ellis writes,

[A] random person I spotted in Transylvania two minutes after the grid went back up earlier today. In her eyes, you can make out part of an error message, denoting that a graphic or script from her customised “avatar” or representative form in Second Life is missing. It means that the system, that’s been crashing and hiccuping constantly since an upgrade on Wednesday, is failing to find and/or process the entirety of her body. Elsewhere, I’ve seen people wearing that message over swathes of their skin, projected there by the system.

The girl with error-message eyes.

Link to snapshots from "art terrorist" Banksy's LA show this weekend. (thanks yevgeniy)

Apparently the word "dishes" is a federal trademark, and the Brooklyn restaurant "Little Dishes" was sued, renaming themselves "Little D Eatery". Quote from the owner: "As a new small business, we did not have the resources to fight to keep the ‘Dishes’ part of our name..." Link. More (but not really): Link.

I can't figure out how to direct link to TESS results, but the serial number for this registration is 75440805. Here's one link.

Although I agree that it was stupid to allow registration of a single generalized common word as a trademark in the first place, once that's done the trademark stands. If the mark was held by a company selling dinnerware it might be different, but the original mark for "Dishes" is also for a NY restaurant. Therefore there might be some reasonable basis for confusion. Bobby Flay would probably have a case against anyone opening a "Mesa 'anything'" restaurant, but not an art gallery for similar reasons.

Secret Headquarters is pleased to announce an art opening with the lovely and talented JOHNNY RYAN.

Johnny first developed his hilarious drawings in the self-published title Angry Youth Comix. Now published by Fantagraphics Books, Ryan's AYC has become the international bastion of lowbrow humor cartooning. Ryan's utterly unpretentious taboo-tackling is an infectious bombardment of political incorrectness.

JOHNNY RYAN CRASHES and BURNS
@ Secret Headquarters
Friday September 15th, 8pm-10pm
Secret Headquarters
3817 W Sunset Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90026
323-666-2228 (phone)

Earlier this week, I posted an item about a weird experiment at Los Alamos National Laboratory in which she-bees were trained to stick out their tongues when they smell explosives. BoingBoing reader Cliff Van Eaton happens to be a bee expert, and he lives in Papamoa, New Zealand. He's so knowledgeable, he sounds like he has degrees in bees! He's going to school us on bees now:

It isn't very often that honey bees make an appearance on Boing Boing, but when they do it's great since they're something I more or less know something about. I've been a professional apiculturalist (advisor to beekeepers on bee disease control, pollination and honey production) for 30 years. Here's a book on a particularly nasty disease of honey bees I co-wrote, edited and produced: (Link).

A couple of points of nomenclature and clarification:

1. A well-trained honey bee scientist wouldn't spell the name "honeybee", even though you'll find it mistakenly spelled this way in a number of dictionaries (as well as on the MS spell checker), and even in Wikipedia. The biological convention is that the name of an insect is separated into two words when the insect is what the name implies. So "honey bee" is separated into two words, since its a bee that collects honey, whereas "butterfly" is one word since it isn't a fly that produces butter.

2. The scientific name for the western hive bee pictured [in the BoingBoing post about the Los Alamos experiment] is Apis mellifera. The genus (first name of the two) is always capitalised, whereas the species name (the second of the two) isn't. And I'd bet dollars to donuts that the bee in the picture is actually an Italian honey bee, aka Apis mellifera ligustica.

3. Worker honey bees live more than a couple of weeks, even during the height of the summer. They actually live about six weeks, but only forage actively outside the hive in the last two weeks of their life. They don't die of old age per se. They just don't come back to the hive one day when their wings wear out and they can no longer achieve lift off. During the winter, when honey bees cluster within the hive and don't forage, they can live for up to 5 months.

4. Worker honey bees aren't only female by genetic composition (i.e., diploids), they also have rudimentary ovaries. The comment in this post says they have "no functioning genital organs". I'm not sure what "genital organs" means in this case (both queens and workers have vaginal orifices), but suffice to say worker honey bees do have reproductive organs that are capable of laying eggs, and this often happens when a hive loses its queen. What they can't generally do, however, is produce fertilised (i.e., diploid) eggs, since they don't mate with drones, and also don't have a spermatheca (a sac present in queen bees that retains the sperm obtained during mating flights).

Once again, thanks to you and your mates for doing Boing Boing. I really appreciate all the work you put in.

Image: A bee at the Del Mar fairgrounds, collecting pollen. Photographer: Jon Sullivan (via this Wikipedia entry).

Man, I tell you, I love bees!

Previously: Los Alamos Lab trains bees to stick out tongues at bombs

Update: Whoah, Steve Jurvetson shot more bee porn! Link to full-size.

Reader comment: Bryan William Jones of the University of Utah School of Medicine says, "

More bee porn can be seen here.

More bee porn from Northern Ireland.

Still more bee porn. I took this picture of a lovely little bee in one of my mom's sunflowers in El Mirage, AZ. Link.

At the risk of overloading on bee porn, here is a shot I took in Mendocino County, CA: Link.

Mariana sends a comic about bee porn: Link.

Image: The Jobby Roger, an excellent sticker for pirates who use Macs. If you attach one to yours, your computer will look like this, and you will look like this.

Web Zen Home, Store (Thanks Frank!)

Reader comment: Aija says,

Here is a pattern for pirate arrrrr!gyle handknit socks (pic link, pdf chart)

As you may know, International Talk like a Pirate Day is coming up on September 19. In honor of this important holiday, LoadingReadyRun has created a vintage classroom film reel to instruct the less nautically inclined among us in proper pirate speech. Video link.

The movie that Paul Saunders linked to gets one thing dead wrong: 'avast' has a specific meaning, viz. to cease, stop, or stay. Thus, the phrase "Avast, ye scurvy dogs" means something a lot more like "Nobody move, nobody get hurt" than "What up, homes". Perhaps this will be the year that we can avast the misuse of 'avast'.

BoingBoing reader Sven de Marothy writes,

Thanks for pointing out that interesting exhibition on WWI facial reconstruction/prosthetics.

As a note, given the tech-savvy nature of BoingBoing, it might be worth mentioning what's probably the most well-known patient of such procedures (given the readership).

Namely Gaston Julia, the father of the famous Julia set fractal, who quite literally had his nose shot off in WWI.

Most of the work he is now so famous for was performed during the period while he was in hospital having his face put back together, as best they could. However, he ended up wearing a patch covering (what had been) his nose for the rest of his life. Bio (with pic): Link.

He refused a discharge for his injury. Luckily for mathematics and fractal-lovers, the war was over by the time he'd recovered. So he published the results and the rest is history, as they say.

(It seems his military courage didn't go unrewarded though - in the picture at the linked bio, it looks like he's wearing a Légion d'honneur - France's highest honor.)

Previously: Project Facade: Post WWI surgical facial reconstruction

Cruel 2 B Kind is designed to be played anywhere in public, by 10 to 200+ simultaneous players, anywhere in the world there's cell phone coverage.

I know what you're thinking: Why benevolent assassination? What's wrong with the good, old-fashioned violent kind? :) (like Street Wars, for example) Well, with the trend lately to move games of assassination to more public spaces and to include more diverse social networks, and as governments start to issue warnings to game organizers that their actions will be potentially construed as terrorist threats (this happened in London last month!) it seemed necessary to start rethinking what players are doing. As the magic circle of the game starts to encompass more people and places, we thought it would be a good idea to trade the water balloons and Nerf guns for interactions that create a more interesting social effect on both players and bystanders.

The really exciting thing about it, though, is that we also made it to be the world's first open/public pervasive game. As you probably realize alread, most big pervasive games are either commerical, or proprietary (only the makers can run it), or don't have sufficient technological infrastructure to make it easy for ordinary folks (i.e., non-programmers) to run it where they live. So we set out to make a pervasive game that was 1) easy for people who aren't hard-core gamers to understand and get excited about and 2) completely free and non-commerical 3) possible for anyone to run. You just sign up for a date and time and tell us where you're running it, and we set up a registration page for your players, and the game runs automatically on that time and date. All the organizers have to do is gather players, and all the players have to do is show up! Then, we're funneling back feedback from the local organizers to increase our database of game weapons (which are all random acts of kindness you perform on suspected targets).

We're world premiering in New York City Saturday September 23 at the Come Out and Play Festival, but we've already run two awesome playtests in San Francisco. And we've already got people signed up to run their own Cruel 2 B Kind games everywhere from Los Angeles to suburban Illinois, London to Dublin, and I'll hopefully be doing games in Delhi, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

Anderson presents the material in beautifully composed comic-book style pages, using a variety of hand-lettering styles to organize the material on each page. It's clear that Anderson spent ages planning, writing, and illustrating The Curtis Creek Manifesto, because I can't imagine it being any better. All 17 reviewers on Amazon seem to agree, because every one of them give it 5-stars.

After reading the book, I was excited to track down Sheridan Anderson to see if he might be able to contribute something the magazine I edit, Make. There's precious little about him online, but I finally found a 2004 article from the LA Times about him. He died in 1984 at the ago of 47.

He claimed four names. He favored black hats and a flowing cape and considered himself "one of the last Edwardians." He died 20 years ago at age 47, leaving only the most cryptic biographical clues in his work.

Looking like a Renaissance Faire bouncer, the author stares out at readers from an opening page, mustache bristling, hair tousled, perhaps from jousting. His chin rests on a hand and the eyes blaze in ferocious thought.

As for the man behind the pen, "he was big. Probably close to 300 pounds…. Always dressed in black, and had that black hat and big black cape," recalls Amato's sister, Lorraine Guelker.

"He came to our home once," says Amato. "My wife was cooking two roasts, with the idea that we would have one the next day. I brought out a bottle of Scotch. He pretty much put away the whole bottle before dinner. And then he polished off one of the pork roasts. Voracious appetites."

MidCurrent has another good article about him. Link

Update:

Kevin Kelly reviewed this book a while ago, and included a few sample pages. Link

Reader comment:

Phred182 says: I recommended the late William Nealy on Metafilter a while back.

His books on mountain biking, kayaking, and the outdoors are superb: like riding/rafting with a more experienced buddy. The format is very similar to Anderson's work, with detailed instruction on repair, riding, and maintenance techniques--suffused throughout with a self-deprectaing wit that is clearly the product of experience and thought.

A great place to start is Mountain Bike! A Manual of Beginning to Advanced Technique.

Full catalog available on Amazon here or directly from the publusher, Menasha Ridge Press.

I knit a pair of converse shoes. I'd had this idea for aaages, but just recently conned someone into giving me an old pair. I cut off all the fabric, save for about a 1/4 inch along all the edges, and knit pieces to sew in place. They didn't take a very long time to make- the hardest part was sewing everything together. Ugh! I think the effort was worth it, and they're actually really strong. I played a game of baseball in them the other day, and they've held up just fine!

This is a stark example of DRM under the DMCA giving customers a raw deal. Buying DRMed media means you're locked into the limited array of devices that vendors say you can use. You have to rebuy your preexisting DRMed media collection if you want to use it on the Zune. And you'll have to do that over and over again whenever a new, incompatible device with innovative features blows existing players out of the water. Access to MP3s and non-DRMed formats creates the only bridge between these isolated islands of limited devices...

In an interview with Engadget, Microsoft Zune architect J Allard pointed out that Zune has sufficient video format support, in part because there's "Lots of DVD ripping software out there that encodes to those formats, so the most popular formats out there, whether it's MPEG-4 or H.264, we'll support those." Gee, he isn't suggesting that his business model benefits from customers using tools like DeCSS or Handbrake to evade the DRM on DVDs, right? Especially since Microsoft is furiously trying to squash the FairUse4WM tool, that would seem rather hypocritical.

Not everyone is happy with the choice. Robert Mitchell, a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, said it seemed "a little silly" to give a permanent name based on a controversy that will blow over in time.

Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society, said you can't please everyone.

If "the IAU named Mars today, there would be all kinds of politically correct arguments" over naming a planet after the god of war, Friedman said.

The IAU also took Brown's suggestion for the name of Eris' tiny moon, Dysnomia. In Greek mythology, Dysnomia is Eris' daughter, the goddess of lawlessness.

McGonigal argues that alternate-reality games use network technologies--e-mail, websites, Internet chat rooms, text messages, and phone calls--to construct new types of communities whose "collective intelligence" lets them solve problems no member could solve alone. In 2005, she and the I Love Bees team won the Game Developers Choice Awards' Innovation Award and the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences' Webby Award.

McGonigal has continued working with 42 Entertainment. In 2005 she developed Tombstone Hold 'Em, part of a 2005 promotion for Activision's game Gun; crowds congregated in historic cemeteries to play poker using tombstones instead of cards. Such novel uses of public spaces are another way she engages players. Her own work as a game designer is fed by watching players interpret the missions she designs: "They always think of far more interesting things than anything I could imagine."

Until now, the location was a closely-held secret, but Sean Bonner has the scoop:

"As promised, on the day of the opening (tonight) Banksy revealed the location of his 'Barely Legal' exhibition which will be showing all weekend in Los Angeles. The location is a warehouse downtown on Hunter Street, which is aparently off Santa Fe and near the freeway."

I buy a lot of stuff from Amazon. A lot. I won't ever be buying one of these movies. Amazon has a great and well-deserved reputation for amazing customer service. The rare occasions where I've gotten a lemon or ordered the wrong product from Amazon, I've been treated like royalty, with Amazon making every possible accommodation to help me out. Their Look Inside feature and the used goods marketplaces are a tremendous boon to me.

The difference between Amazon and Amazon Unbox is like night and day. When you sign onto Unbox, you sign away all the amazing customer rights that Amazon itself is so careful to protect. Amazon Unbox takes away your privacy and every conceivable consumer right you have, and then tells you that the goods you buy from them don't belong to you, and they can take them away from you at any time, or change the deal you get from them without any appeal by you.

Amazon Unbox's user agreement isn't just galling for its evilness -- it's also commercially suicidal. No sane person will agree to this. Amazon Unbox user agreement is only a couple femtometers more dignified than being traded to another inmate for a couple packs of cigarettes.

Click below for a blow-by-blow analysis of the crummy deal you get from Amazon Unbox:

Far-right politicians criticized France soccer players Lilian Thuram and Patrick Vieira for inviting evicted squatters to watch Wednesday's European Championship qualifying game against Italy.

About 200 squatters — mostly illegal immigrants — have lived in a gymnasium south of Paris after being evicted from an abandoned university dormitory on Aug. 17.

The current favourite seems to be that ISPs should be forced to monitor all exchanges of data and charge customers when a copyright work is spotted. When I asked how the spread of encryption could possibly be compatible with this scheme, they airily replied that only paedophiles use that technology and we would all be better off if it was banned. They obviously don't know that the US government already tried extremely hard to do this over about 25 years, and failed.

A
Aardvark! Abecedarians! Aborigine! Addle-pated lumps of anthracite! Anachronisms! Anacoluthons! Anthracite! Anthropithecus! Anthropophagus! Arabian Nightmare! Artichokes! Autocrats! Aztecs! [13]

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Baboons! Baby-snatchers! Bagpipers! Bald-headed budgerigar! Bandits! Bashi-bazouks! Bath-tub Admiral! Beast! Belemnite! Billions of billious barbecued blue blistering barnacles! Billions of Bilious Blue Blistering Barnacles! Billions of Blue Blistering Barnacles! Black beetles! Black Marketers! Blackamoor! Blackbird! Blackguards! Blistering Barnacles! Blistereing blundering birdbrain! Bloodsuckers! Blue blistering barnacles! Blue Blistering Bell-Bottomed Balderdash! Blunderbuss! Bodysnatcher! Bootlegger! Borgia! Bougainvillea! Brat! Breathalyser! Brigands! Brutes! Bucaneers! Bully! Butcher! [33]

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Cachinnating cockatoo! Cannibals! Carpetsellers! Caterpillars! Centipede! Cercopithecus! Coelcanth! Colocynths! Corsair! Cowards! Crabapples! Crooks! Cushion footed quadrupeds! Cyclotron! [14]

(Image thumbnail from a larger picture on "Tim und Struppi zum 75. Geburtstag")

At a glance it looks like an ordinary silver Zippo lighter, but it is really a camera. Just flip up the cover and press a button...that’s it. Yah, it sounds kind of creepy but it is really cool.

Update: See also TSA doesn't allow Zippo camera case past security

Update: Here's a Flickr set of Mike's Photoshop beard efforts.

"The heightened security restrictions on the airlines made the journey back from New York interesting, as I refused to be parted from the manuscript of book seven," Rowling wrote. "A large part of it is handwritten, and there was no copy of anything I had done while in the U.S." Eventually, she added, "They let me take it on, thankfully, bound up in elastic bands."

Rowling said she was still considering two possible titles for the last of the boy wizard's adventures.

OMG! Water Bombs!! There are liquid bombs and you can already buy them the internets.

Some terrorist front called Larrys is selling Water Grenades AND Water Bombs! And the water bombs even come in a pack of 200!

Do you have any idea how much terror you could spread with that? They even sell launchers for taking out freedom lovers at a distance.

Hopscotch – One American supermarket chain hit upon the idea of drawing a hopscotch in the aisle next to the children’s cereal in order to make the children play and thus pin Mum & Dad to a point where the children could hassle them for treats....

Order Of Price- Shops will often be laid out in order of price with the most expensive items being encountered at the beginning of your visit and the cheapest at the end. This is done to play on our sense of comparison, we are much more likely to spend money on accessories etc if we have just agreed to buy an expensive item, as in comparison they will seem cheaper than had we encountered them first...

Tiles – Supermarkets used to have a trick placing slightly smaller tiles on the floor in the more expensive aisles of the shop. When a customer entered on of these aisles their trolley would click faster making them think they were travelling faster and thereby subconsciously slow down and spend more time in that aisle.

The FBI and Joint Terrorism Task force are hosting a conference in Kansas City, Missouri, with an unusual theme: "Agroterrorism." Not "aggro" as in, "Osama totally aggro'd out on that infidel," but agro, like crops.

Oh, there's some tiny-font mumbo jumbo on the website about "devoting increased time and attention to specific topics related to the prevention, detection and mitigation of an intentional attack against the food supply," but I know what this is really about: Genetically modified foods rising up to eat their masters.

Hybrid cornstalks will fly through the sky in the form of spears, like something Carl Sandberg might write on a bad acid trip. Zucchinis will become zukillers, squash will squash us, and frankenshrooms will shroud entire cities in clouds of toxic spores.

Speakers include Republican senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, who chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and sits on the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry; Federal Bureau of Investigation Deputy Director John Pistole; USDA secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns; and DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff.

The truth and the arugula are out there. Link, and here's the conference agenda.

Noah Shachtman wrote a related piece a while back for Wired News: Keeping Cows Safe From Terrorism.

Reader comment: Sean Bonner says, "This doesn't surprise me at all, you know tomatoes are water based!"

Chris S. Davis says,

I was wondering if you'd seen last month that the FDA had given the go-ahead for a Baltimore, MD company named Intralytix, Inc., approval to have six different strains of live viruses sprayed on foods, such as deli meats, hot dogs (anything cooked in processing, but not cooked after purchase) to combat Listeria monocytogenes, a rare bacteria affecting only 2500 people a year. Those 2500 people consists of pregnant women, small children and elderly people with supressed immune systems.

The viruses are supposed to invade the bacterial cell, replicate until the cell bursts killing the bacteria. In the process, it'll create endotoxins, which could cause numerous possible allergic reactions, like asthma, autoimmune deficiencies, etc. The "testing" trials were based off one type of animal testing and four types of human testing. But those tests were not relevant to this type of application that was given approval.

Of course, the consumer will be "notified" by the requirement of packaging having the term "bacteriophage preparation" on it. Now how many consumers would even think twice on that term, let alone know what it means.

No one, not even the FDA, can guarantee the safety of this process and certainly there's no way of telling the long term and short term effects, this could have on our bodies. We all know viruses and bacteria can mutate. So what if, the virus mutates into something "less friendly" or starts attacking the friendly bacteria in our bodies that aid in our digestion?

In learning about Intralytix, the CEO, said they already have a deal with a multi-national company and would NOT disclose the name of said company. Not to mention that Joe Verrazano, seeded money to SteelCloud, a company who just received a 3.4 billlion dollar contract with the DOD.

Intralytix also has two other applications waiting approval of the FDA to spray for E.Coli and Salmonella. Oh boy, can you imagine the cocktail we'll be eating? And if people start getting sick, the lovely pharmaceutical companies will gladly sell some miracle drug to treat it.

But, hey, who needs terrorists in Iraq, when we have bureaucratic government organizations like the FDA, to do the work for them?

he flight attendants are now pointing out the emergency exits. This is the part of the announcement that you might want to pay attention to. So stop your sudoku for a minute and listen: knowing in advance where the exits are makes a dramatic difference to your chances of survival if we have to evacuate the aircraft. Also, please keep your seat belt fastened when seated, even if the seat-belt light is not illuminated. This is to protect you from the risk of clear-air turbulence, a rare but extremely nasty form of disturbance that can cause severe injury. Imagine the heavy food trolleys jumping into the air and bashing into the overhead lockers, and you will have some idea of how nasty it can be. We don't want to scare you. Still, keep that seat belt fastened all the same.

Your life-jacket can be found under your seat, but please do not remove it now. In fact, do not bother to look for it at all. In the event of a landing on water, an unprecedented miracle will have occurred, because in the history of aviation the number of wide-bodied aircraft that have made successful landings on water is zero. This aircraft is equipped with inflatable slides that detach to form life rafts, not that it makes any difference. Please remove high-heeled shoes before using the slides. We might as well add that space helmets and anti-gravity belts should also be removed, since even to mention the use of the slides as rafts is to enter the realm of science fiction.

Update: Joe sez, "The Economist magazine claims that no one has survived a water landing. The good folks at Wikipedia have extensive documentation to prove that the Economist is wrong."

"V for Vendetta is a poorly paced and spectacularly disjointed rehash of Orwellian themes."

Yes, that's right. Your hotelling neighbors HATE typing in their credit card numbers into an auth screen that messes up their DHCP. So offer them an alternative. When they call you, tell them you only accept cash and give them a unique Login and PW.

You can create up to 10 unique user accounts with an enterprise grade router called the TGMB8000. Armed with an EVDO Verizon Wireless or Sprint Card, and a 3g Router, you are a mobile wifi hotspot purveyor.

Yes, this violates your term of service. Yes, If Verizon caught you, they'd cancel your account. BUT nice part is that if they cancel YOUR account, no $175 termination fee! In anycase, it's all natted so your evdo 3g internet access provider would know what you were up to. So you can just ignore the sentence above in blue.

The link below goes to a long interview with Paul Buckley, the Penguin art director who set this up. Link to part one of interview, Link to part two of interview (Thanks, Alicatte!)

Send

Mr Pinto, from Belo Horizonte, said: "It is a pretty easy way to make money.

"I can pop my eyes out four centimetres each, it is a gift from God, I feel blessed."

In the October Popular Science, veteran aviation journo Bill Sweetman writes about secret airplanes he believes might be under development at the Air Force's remote Groom Lake test facility in Nevada, a.k.a. Area 51. Sweetman describes three demonstrators unveiled in recent years -- the Northrop Grumman Tacit Blue and Boeing Bird of Prey manned stealth planes and the Lockheed Martin Polecat drone -- but insists these are just consolation prizes offered up by a military that is keeping its major black airplane programs under wraps.

Not that he has a ton of proof. "Hint[s]" and guesswork, mostly. The new construction at Groom Lake must mean something, he figures. And then there are those "obvious... significant gaps in the military’s known aviation arsenal -- gaps that the Pentagon can reasonably be assumed to be actively, if quietly, trying to fill."

It's a strange series of calculations to make. The perceived holes -- high-speed, penetrating reconnaissance and long-range, stealthy strike -- are fairly well plugged up, at least until 2020. And the proposed gap-fillers are some of aviation history's more discredited flops and boogeymen.

When the Levees Broke, Spike Lee's powerful 4-hour HBO documentary on the human disaster surrounding Hurricane Katrina, has shown up online. Ajit at ticklebooth blog writes,

This film is Lee’s best non-fiction work and the best Katrina related film I have seen. The film goes to the very roots of the Katrina disaster (the man-made one) following the trails of race, Louisiana oil and politics.

The entire film comes in 26 parts [see ticklebooth for a long list of links, some of which appear to be changing]. Also check out this montage submitted by a user: When the Levees Broke. Another doc by Spike on the Gore and Bush 2000 Election aptly titled We Wuz Robbed

Reader comment: Michael Cicconi says,

I found a couple of .torrents on mininova. I'm just downloading them now, so I'm not positive they're legit, but I have no reason to suspect otherwise. one, two.

Artist Paddy Hartley with the collaboration Dr Andrew Bamji and Dr Ian Thompson is creating one of the most fascinating exhibitions to date. Project Facade is an artistical rendition of facial reconstruction surgical techniques on veterans of the First World War, by means of military uniforms summarizing all the medical history and procedure applied on the servicemen. Be aware that some links in the website can lead to some strong images that can impress your most sensitive readers.

For your Italian users' reading pleasure, I've written an introduction to the exhibition and a brief history of reconstructive surgery on my blog: Link.

I wrote and drew those sketches around 1975 and I'm so tickled to know that people still find them helpful today. It started as a slide presentation for my boss to show at the Disney meeting in Frankfurt. It went over so well that he asked me to expand on it when he returned. They printed 2000 copies and mailed it to all the Disney offices. My friend John Pomeroy asked for some to give to the animators at the studio. that was the time when the animation training program was going on. Frank Thomas saw it and used it for an animation class he was teaching at the Screen Cartoonists Guild. That's how some sketches wound up in the book that he and Ollie wrote, "The Illusion of Life".

Events allegedly planned to recruit students to the Republican Party at the University of Michigan have both Republicans and Democrats across the nation stunned. Morgan Wilkins, an independent contractor hired by the College Republican National Committee to recruit students to the party, was described as planning events such as "Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day" and "Fun with Guns Day," in an article written Tuesday by The Michigan Daily.

"Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day" would involve volunteers posing as illegal immigrants and hiding on campus while students try to find them for prizes. For the "Fun with Guns" activity, students would shoot cardboard cutouts of Democratic leaders with BB or paintball guns.

I called the Air Force, and asked about the nonlethal weapons story, and what was actually said. I received a transcript of that portion of the interview, which was apparently taken out of context in the AP article. I've posted the actual transcript here.

Previously: Air Force chief says beta test weapons on US citizens

September 15 marks the 90th anniversary of the first use of a tank in warfare. On this day in 1916, British tanks advanced toward German positions in the Battle of the Somme. Here's more at the Sydney Morning Herald, and source article at the BBC.

Woop! Uh-huh. Boing Boing. Woop! Uh-huh.

Here is a cached copy of his blog (warning: loud Goth music auto-loads), and here are photo portraits in which he poses with various weapons. A photoshopped gravestone he posted on his blog reads, "Lived fast died young. Left a mangled corpse" (image link).

One of his favorite online games was the free role-playing game Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, according to his blog. Danny "Columbin" Ledonne, the maker of that game, has posted a statement here.

Gill's last journal entry on vampirefreaks.com was dated September 13, 2006, 10:41:am -- precisely 2 hours before he is believed to have fired the first bullets at Dawson College, where a total of 19 people were shot. The gunman was shot dead by police. The "mood indicator" tag on Gills final journal entry from that morning read:

Mood: No mood :(

Posthumous online footprints like this often show up after highly-publicized violent crimes, and I usually don't post them. It seems morbid, like turning a killer into an online celebrity. But it's so strange to see what this self-obsessed sociopath documented of his life (he took tons of online quizzes, and dug Dave Chappelle, South Park, Conan O'Brien, and The Daily Show). So strange and troubling to see all the "rock on!" comments people wrote next to snaps he posted of himself preening with a CX4 Storm Semi-Automatic Carbine.

Here's a related NYT story: Link.

Previously: Gunman opens fire at Montreal's Dawson College

Reader comment: Jeremy Clarke says,

I randomly checked a page of the archives of Gill's journal and found this post in which he worries about CSIS (Canadian CIA) and RCMP officers reading blogs on the VampireFreak site and arresting people for posting photos of themselves with guns, death threats etc.

He then encourages posters to post such things as private entries (assumedly similar to the LJ functionality where only people who are friends within the system can read it). This makes me suspect that there may be more or many more posts written solely for those he knew on the site, as well as implying that the strange Dave Chapelle final post could be intentionally misleading.

9) Evidence?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by eldavojohn

I hear a lot that the RIAA has the weakest evidence ever in these cases. Such as screen shots of dynamic IP addresses - http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/13747 - taken from Kazaa. How the hell do judges across this country uphold these cases with such lack of concrete evidence? I mean, give me five minutes in photoshop and I'll make you a "screenshot" of Kazaa with www.whitehouse.gov's IP address listed over and over on it. Can't an expert witness cause this evidence to be thrown out quickly?

Beckerman:

I've tried, eldavojohn, I've tried. Look at our court papers in Motown v. Does 1-149. The judge didn't want to hear a word I was saying. You are absolutely correct that the entire underpinning of each case is a joke. An astute judge would laugh them out of court, as the Netherlands and Canadian courts have done.

If you're reading this, there's a good chance that you love music, you love blogs, and you especially love watching YouTube clips of Steven Seagal warbling old blues songs. And because you love all those things, we're also willing to bet that you think music blogs are the best thing to ever happen to rock-and-pop nutcases such as yourselves since, well, ever.

And we at Idolator are here to tell you that you've been had.

Like Vioxx and the Patriot Act, music blogs were supposed to improve our lives: At a time when only a handful of carefully manicured acts could sleaze their way into the top 10, the music blogosphere was going to serve as the great equalizer, deflating the MTV-assisted hype machines and giving the asleep-at-the-wheel music mags a run for their ad money. They were as DIY as the zine movement and as musically savvy as the college-radio jockeys of the '80s. Finally, the power was in the hands of the people--very nerdy people, mind you, but they were a lot better than the record execs whose biggest claim to fame was discovering Crazy Town.

For a while, it seemed to be working--without Internet support, it's doubtful that bands like Cold War Kids or Clap Your Hands Say Yeah would have ascended so quickly. But in the last year, the music-blog netherworld has become as homogenized and indistinguishable as the record labels themselves.

Speaking in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, Thomas Barnett, assistant attorney general at the DOJ’s antitrust division, warned that forcing companies to reveal their intellectual property stifles innovation. He used Apple as an example, in a nod to growing discontent in Europe regarding the way that music purchased from iTunes is tied to the iPod.

"The poster child for (user-generated media) sites are MySpace and YouTube," said Morris, according to a transcript obtained by Reuters. "We believe these new businesses are copyright infringers and owe us tens of millions of dollars."

He added, "How we deal with these companies will be revealed shortly."

“These laws require telephone companies and internet service providers to spy on all customers, logging their movements, their telephone calls, their emails, and their internet access, and to store that information for up to three years. This information can then be accessed without any court order or other adequate safeguard. We believe that this is a breach of fundamental rights. We have written to the Government raising our concerns but, as they have failed to take any action, we are now forced to start legal proceedings.”

“Accordingly, we have now launched a legal challenge to the Irish government’s power to pass these laws. We say that it is contrary to the Irish Constitution as well as Irish and European Data Protection laws.”

“We also challenge the claim that the European Commission and Parliament had the power to enact the Data Retention Directive. We say that this kind of mass surveillance is a breach of Human Rights, as recognised in the European Convention on Human Rights and the EU Charter on Fundamental Rights which all EU member states have endorsed.”

Update: Neal sez, "NEOLOFIGHT! Glogging is already underway by the acolytes of Steve Mann - blogging from cyborg headgear is to keep a 'glog'. That definition will probably (hopefully) outlive the the one you mention."

Today, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston launches the first Creative Commons-licensed online program from an art museum. The classical music podcast The Concert is licensed under Creative Commons' "Share Music" license, and features unreleased recordings of master musicians and emerging young artists playing masterpieces of the classical repertoire by Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, and others to come.

The podcast has also given birth to a related project undertaken by the museum to build an extensive online classical music library, with all tracks licensed under a "Share Music" license. The digital library provides a new resource online for classical music lovers, students, teachers, scholars, and anyone worldwide interested in hearing and learning more about classical music. The library includes artist and composer bios, with links for more information elsewhere on the web.

A glitch in the XCP DRM technology meant that anti-spyware features in AOL's Safety and Security Centre software and PestPatrol software could have tried to disable the CD-ROM's configuration.

The bug has been found by Texas attorney general's office who have been testing the XCP copy-protection technology as part of the state's lawsuit against Sony.

Joshua Micah Marshall, of Talking Points Memo, points out that Google has hired a DC lobbyist firm with a reputation for being good at courting Republicans, which makes sense, given that the GOP is the party in power.

But DCI, the lobbyists on Google's payroll, have a long history of using deceptive and slimy tactics to achieve the ends commissioned by their clients, who've used DCI's dirty tricks to fight Social Security, and DCI even hired the guy behind the notorious lying scumbag group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

I think that I probably share more than 80 percent of Google's legislative goals -- goals like a neutral Internet, a lawful book-search service, limitation of liability for search-engines, cachers, etc -- but my biggest and most important legislative goal is an America where open democracy, and not lies, push-polls, and sleaze dominate the political process.

It may seem like fighting the bad guys without resorting to scumbag tactics is fighting with one hand tied behind our backs. But we have an advantage that the other side lacks: we want what's good for America, the Internet and the world. The other side wants to line its pockets and give power to its cronies. They need astroturf to make that look like a populist agenda.

We don't need to lie to make our agenda seem populist and unselfish.

DCI, if you're not familiar with them, is an interlocking group of companies which is the phony seed bed for most noxious astroturf organizing and general bamboozlement in contemporary politics.

Update: An ex-lobbyist writes:

I think it's important to be clear that the issue is not with who DCI lobbies for (whether we agree with them or not) but rather the tactics they have used, and continue to. There's a good overview here.

Among other things, DCI invented "journo-lobbyists" in the form of "Tech Central Station." A site that purports to have news from sponsors who happen to be DCI clients, it's actually a front for DCI itself, which was disclosed only after being exposed by press in 2003: "The two organizations, Confessore explained, "share most of the same owners, some staff, and even the same suite of offices in downtown Washington, a block off K Street." It will be interesting to see what TCS thinks about Google these days... look, here's an article from yesterday on invasive privacy practices, which Google is getting dinged on, but the article is all about Amazon and Sony. This is classic shithead lobbyist strategy, to take the attack and distribute it to your client's competitors. You can imagine the long-term effects.

DCI's fingers extend very far into the world, in a way that make you sound paranoid if you actually start to look at fingerprints. A personal favorite is that one of the journalists directly on the DCI journo-lobbyist payroll, Michael J Totten is also the Politics Editor of Suicide Girls (not sure if he still is). That's how far DCI's payroll extends. Totten's political notes on Suicide Girls, for example, never specified that he receives paychecks from DCI.

You can subscribe to a podcast of all the USC Public Diplomacy talks that I'm hosting here -- upcoming speakers include Toshiba's Michael Ayers, EFF's Fred von Lohmann and Seth Schoen, Wendy Seltzer of ChillingEffects, Revver's Steven Starr, Xbox hacker Bunnie Huang, Bruce Sterling, Bruce Schneier, Jamie Love from the Consumer Project on Technology, and the grand finale, a triple-header from EFF founders John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, and Mitch Kapor! Link

Update: Rob sez, "The squirrel-lamp business is alive and well!!"

TO ENTERTAIN friends and neighbors in a New York apartment house, a group of professional radio performers operates a unique basement "broadcasting" station. Every Friday and Sunday evening, led by Les Paul and Earnie Newton, they go on the air from their homemade soundproof studio near the furnace room. Programs go to all the apartments through a two-wire ground and aerial system which had been built into the structure and previously never used. The control room is in a closet on the second floor. Frequently, "big-name" musicians drop in to lend a hand, and guest announcers whose voices are heard regularly on nation-wide hook-ups have fun taking turns at the basement microphone. Even "Static," the apartment-house cat, occasionally goes on the air with amplified purrs and meows.

Revver's got a great toolsuite for creators and viewers, and to my eye, the videos look better than YouTube's or Google Videos, and a great collection of social gizmos to help you find the best stuff on the site. The extensive API invites you to remix the site to your heart's content -- unsurprising, given that one of Revver's founders is Ian Clarke, the co-creator of Freenet.

With the 1.0 launch, Revver substantially updates the creator tools, API support, and adds a Flash player and playlists. They've also ironed out a lot of bugs and added a ton of fit-and-finish to the service. This is good stuff. Link

Changeling is a fairy tale, hewing to the ancient conventions of the fairy story even as it conducts an erudite, engrossing lesson on the world's mythologies and narrative conventions. The likable, mischievous Neef is disobedient, and ends up in the hottest of water, which she escapes through her cleverness and her exhaustive knowledge of folklore (Delia Sherman is herself an accomplished folklorist).

There's so much to love about this book -- Sherman's incorporation of the contemporary with the timeless is both seamless and endlessly amusing (Neef draws on her knowledge of such stories as "Little Red Baseball Cap" and "The Twelve Dancing Debutantes" and "Jack and the Extension Ladder"). You have to see the fairy version of the Metropolitan Museum for yourself -- and the Dragon of Wall Street!

Part of the power of fairy tales is their ability to transform our own world into a place of everyday magic. Some of that power is lost when we tell the stories of our middle-ages forebears, set in the world they inhabited. If the kids in your life are hooked on fairy tales but sticking to Bros Grimm and co, they're missing something -- the galvanizing wonder of the familiar transmuted into the fantastic.

Changeling is the book to fix all that. From Sherman's magnificent handling of Asperger's Syndrome in fairy-land to the clever puzzles and challenges that Neef overcomes, this story is fast-paced, and weird in an intensely recognizable way. Link

Users maintain the data, but unlike Wikipedia, they don't do it for love here -- they do it to score points, so they can download more contacts. Michael Arrington of Techcrunch says it ought to be illegal, and breaks an implied social contract -- nobody expects that when they hand someone a business card, this personal data will end up on a searchable, publicly-accessible website. Researcher danah boyd says it's an icky but expected evolution from sites like MySpace, Plaxo, LinkedIn, and Friendster, and says people tend to react negatively to services like this because we want control over how reachable we are, and don't like to think of friends or colleagues as numeric "points" to be cashed in.

Listen to the story here after 12pm PT (in streaming Real and WM), or hear it on your local NPR affiliate. "Xeni Tech" archives here.

Honeybees are doing more than just making honey. Laboratory scientists studied honeybees and developed a platform to use the bees in detecting explosives... The team achieved its original goal of evaluating the proposed sensor platform and technology and greatly improved understanding of the platform’s specificity and detection technology. It studied protein expressions and isolated genetic and physiological differences in individual bee olfaction characteristics. The team studied structural units in the bees’ antennae and identified biochemical and molecular mechanisms that could account for differences in the insects’ training capabilities and retention capacities. The team also used Pavlovian training techniques that trigger a physical response to the smell of specific explosives.

Creating a controlled environment in which they could accurately determine the bees’ capabilities, the team demonstrated that the bees’ natural reaction to food — a proboscis extension reflex (PER) in which they stick out their tongues — could be used to record an unambiguous response to scent. The bees responded with a PER when they were exposed to explosive vapors. This paradigm has been tested many times in both laboratory and field settings and is a viable alternative to using dogs or elaborate hardware to detect explosives at low concentrations.

Image: Steve Jurvetson shot this amazing macro photo. This bee is not one of the explosive-sniffing bees involved in the Los Alamos study, but he she is sticking out his her tongue. There are many more wonderful photos in Steve Jurvetson's photo stream, and unlike bomb-bees, Steve is not known for sticking out his tongue. (thanks, Andy)

Reader comment: Grant Gould says,

The bee in question is sticking out _her_ tongue -- she's by all appearances a worker bee of species apis melifera, and workers are all female. The sex of bees has long been a source of contention, as the workers have no functioning genital organs. Aristotle, for instance, "proved" that worker bees are male (they can sting, and nature wouldn't arm a female with such a weapon), but alas for him these days we have genetics. Drone bees are haploid (only one of each chromosome, like algae) whereas queen bees are diploid (two of each chromosome, like us). Workers are diploid, and so female.

Justin says,

I know it is hard to believe but DARPA has been researching the use of bees to find explosives since at least 2001. I used to work at Southwest Research Institute, where they conducted this research until approximately 2004. Outside my office building, there was a a large (1 acre) green mesh facility known as the "DARPA tent," where the bees were trained to look for explosive residues. One time some of the bees got loose, and the entire facility got a global e-mail telling us not to bother the trained insects if they were encountered. If you look on google maps, you can still see the tent posts where it used to be. Google Maps Link: Link. Southwest Research Institute: Link. Research Paper mentioning the Bee work at SwRI: Link.

Isn't the problem here that they need to train the bees -- and that honeybees have a fairly short lifetime (unlike explosive-sniffing dogs, for example)? How much time is required to train the bees, and how much useful sniffing life-expectancy do they have after training? From this website: "A worker's life expectancy is only several weeks during the active summer months. However, they can live for many months during the relatively inactive winter period."

Ian Roberts says,

Bob Michaelson suggested that the short lifespan of a bee would be problematic in training. Luckily the training is very quick - you give them a sample smell and then feed them some sugar water. You only need to repeat this around three times for the bee to associate the smell at which point they stick their tongue out every time they smell it.

Update: Nothing new under the sun, it appears: Cheney as Che T-Shirt, thanks Karl!

The settlement falls far short of the mark that was hit by the US settlement in the suit, and what's more, a critical piece of the settlement, a mysterious document called "Exhibit C," was never published.

Now Michael Geist has obtained and published a copy of Exhibit C, in which a Sony BMG VP named Christine J. Prudham spun a bunch of excuses to explain why Canadians weren't entitled to the same relief that our American cousins received.

I have now obtained a copy of Exhibit C, which is an affidavit from Christine J. Prudham, Vice President, Legal and Business Affairs of Sony BMG Canada (Prudham is the same person who appeared today at the Copyright Board discussing how Sony BMG Canada released just 16 new Canadian records last year). The affidavit seeks to explain why Sony BMG Canada believes it is appropriate to grant Canadian consumers fewer rights than their U.S. counterparts. While there is the suggestion that Canadians would benefit indirectly from a U.S. injunction, the heart of the argument revolves around a series of copyright-related arguments that are utterly without merit. First, Prudham expresses concern that copyright is a federal matter and that the class action is being heard by a provincial court. This makes no sense - there is concurrent jurisdiction over copyrights (the Robertson v. Thompson copyright case currently before the Supreme Court originated in provincial court) but, more importantly, the case isn't about copyright but rather consumer protection, contractual issues, and privacy.

Second, Prudham argues that there is currently a "legal vacuum around TPMs in Canada", concluding that "Sony BMG Canada is not willing to potentially prejudice itself by agreeing to the Injunctive Provisions in the Canadian Agreement." This argument is simply embarrassing - there is no legal vacuum around TPMs in Canada. While Canada does not have anti-circumvention legislation, this is not a legal vacuum and is in no way relevant to this consumer class action lawsuit. The prejudice that Prudham refers to is not legal prejudice, but rather the "political prejudice" that will arise when Sony appears before a parliamentary committee discussing anti-circumvention legislation and is asked about the $25 million settlement arising from the rootkit fiasco and the fact that the company is subject to a potential injunction over the use of the technologies that it is seeking to protect.

Update: Thanks to Amos for the great Sony/Nosy logo remix!

Update 2: EFF also has a critique of the Canadian settlement -- thanks, Derek!

Typically carriages which no longer serve the travelling public are taken to pieces, the metals separated and the various parts disposed of, some into landfill. In the past there has been little demand for reusing them by converting them into unusual work or play spaces but Tom Foxcroft, who has set up Village Underground and approached Tube Lines about recycling carriages, has identified a use which benefits the environment and community.

Jeff Diehl: So Joel, are you suggesting that people should stop pursuing the details of various kinds of possible conspiracy?

Joel Schalit: What makes this situation in my opinion different from others that have preceded it, is that public grappling with the secrecy issue on the part of 9/11 conspiracy proponents has superceded what should be the primary concern of citizens -- the fact that the state is not subject to any kind of popular or democratic control in this country.

Our current exhibition features three quilts with functional images from PET and fMRI scanning, and an anatomically accurate knitted brain...

Techniques used include quilting, applique, embroidery, beadwork, knitting, and crotcheting.

Materials include fabric, yarn, metallic threads, electronic components such as magnetic core memory, wire, zippers, and beads.

British authorities aren’t sure what to make of the artist who is creating graffiti by cleaning the grime of urban life. The Leeds City Council has been considering what to do with Moose. "I’m waiting for the kind of Monty Python court case where exhibit A is a pot of cleaning fluid and exhibit B is a pair of my old socks," he jokes.

THE BLAB! SHOW
Copro/Nason Gallery
September 23, 2006
Bergamot Station
2525 Michigan Avenue #T 5
Santa Monica, CA 90404

I like the packaging even more than the products. The company seems to be stuck in the 1940s, when men wore hats and belonged to secret societies with ridiculous Oriental names, and kids kept wooden slingshots in their back pockets and could play pranks on the neighborhood beat cop without being tasered and sent to a correctional camp.

This book, called Life of the Party, with an introduction by cartoonist Chris Ware, is a terrific visual history of this curious living fossil of a company. You can buy it right from the S.S. Adams website. Link

Eyewitnesses say they saw a tall skinny man, wearing a black trenchcoat and a mohawk haircut, walk into the cafeteria carrying a large gun. He apparently fired several shots...

Montreal police confirm that there is at least one suspect they say has been "neutralised." Television images showed police officers dragging a bloody body out of the main doors of the building.

Update: Montreal Metroblogging has a first-hand account of the shootings.

In her profile, Toothpastery/Joanna notes "For the most part, I'm probably just objectifying toothpaste in an unhealthy way. These images are methodically captured, lovingly hand-tagged and uploaded daily. This is more boring for me than it is for you," and "These images are not licensed though Creative Commons for a damn good reason." Link (Thanks, Better Living Through Miles!)

Michael is the chair of the "Business Group" for AACS, the technology that controls users of Blu-Ray and DVD-HD.

Your home and life are increasingly full of devices that seek to control, rather than enable you, and Michael is part of the negotiations for how those devices will function. As the representative of a technology company, he usually bats for the user, but we're still getting devices with more and more restrictions.

Michael has generously agreed to speak to my class and then give a public lecture, and I'm really grateful to him for it. He's always been candid, reasonable and level-headed in the DRM negotiations I worked with him at, and even when we've come down on opposite sides of the debate, I've been impressed with his honesty and flexibility.

When: September 19, 7PM-9PM
University of Southern California, Annenberg School, 3502 Watt Way
Room 207

Send your manuscripts to the address below, and follow them up with an electronic submission to tess11@edgewebsite.com. When formatting your electronic manuscript, adhere to the excellent formatting guidelines set out for submissions to Strange Horizons.

Tesseracts Eleven
Attention: Series Editors
c/o Tesseracts Eleven Submissions,
P.O. Box 1714,
Calgary, Alberta, T2P 2L7
Canada

When it comes to retail customers for information goods — readers, listeners, watchers — this whole license abstraction falls flat. No one wants to believe that the book he's brought home is only partly his, and subject to the terms of a license set out on the flyleaf. You'd be a flaming jackass if you showed up at a con and insisted that your book may not be read aloud, nor photocopied in part and marked up for a writers' workshop, nor made the subject of a piece of fan-fiction.

At the office, you might get a sweet deal on a coffee machine on the promise that you'll use a certain brand of coffee, and even sign off on a deal to let the coffee company check in on this from time to time. But no one does this at home. We instinctively and rightly recoil from the idea that our personal, private dealings in our homes should be subject to oversight from some company from whom we've bought something. We bought it. It's ours. Even when we rent things, like cars, we recoil from the idea that Hertz might track our movements, or stick a camera in the steering wheel.

When the Internet and the PC made it possible to sell a lot of purely digital "goods" — software, music, movies and books delivered as pure digits over the wire, without a physical good changing hands, the copyright lawyers groped about for a way to take account of this. It's in the nature of a computer that it copies what you put on it. A computer is said to be working, and of high quality, in direct proportion to the degree to which it swiftly and accurately copies the information that it is presented with.

Sonia had always assumed she’d be the sort of widow who wore tidy black suits and babbled to an engraved granite stone. Where would she go to leave the roses? Or tend to the weeds? Leaning against John and Anne’s floor-to-ceiling window, which looked out over the Bay from its perch in the green Berkeley hills, Sonia felt the stem of her wine glass slip ever so slightly between her fingers and clutched it more tightly. On the other hand, it wouldn’t do to spend her remaining days chained to a box of rotting flesh and porous bones. She pressed her cheek against the glass and felt the sun’s warmth pass through it. She’d known since the beginning this day would arrive and still it had come as a shock.

That morning his skin had been cold and damp like risen dough. The air above his lips and nostrils, cool and still. She had jerked away, as though death were a sudden rustling in the bushes, a snake slithering in the corner of her eye. A callous response, she’d silently scolded, though Seymour wouldn’t have agreed. She pictured him hinging upright at the waist, opening his eyes, and saying with a wry smile, “Instincts, my sweet pea. It is only natural and wise for the living to fear the dead.” But no such thing occurred. Instead, she had placed her head on his silent chest and hastily split apart his purple eyelids to make absolutely certain nobody was home. Her question answered, she took his stiff hand and ran his fingers through her short, black hair. She kissed his face and wiped her tears off of his cheeks.

When satellites are launched into orbit, they often have surplus cargo space, John explained, certainly enough for a crate of ashes. Once they reached their destination, Seymour and his fellow travelers would circle the planet for a year or so before plunging back into earth’s atmosphere, at which point they would be eviscerated once more in a sudden flash of fire. That’s good, Sonia thought. Her husband had of late railed against earthlings polluting the sky with their high-tech debris, as if ruining their own planet hadn’t been enough. Besides, space had always been his first love.

"Copyright infringement occurs whenever someone makes a copy of any copyrighted work - songs, videos, software, cartoons, photographs, stories, novels - without purchasing that copy from the copyright owner or obtaining permission some other way."

This is simply untrue - if it's true, we should lock the library doors and arrest any professor who turns up with handouts or anyone who forwards an e-mail. Copyright infringement occurs when you make an unlawful copy of a copyrighted work. But oftentimes when you copy in the course of scholarship, you make a copy in accordance with the law.

See also:
USC's bizarre, non-legal copyright policy
Universities put Hollywood ahead of students

A selected group of professional mounts of insect tongues. These have been chosen to show a variety of feeding methods. Included are an opaque mount of a Hummingbird Hawk Moth tongue, those of Bee, Butterfly, Fly and the proboscis of a Blowfly. The most delicate is that of the Cricket, which has been beautifully arranged. Microscopic examination shows many interesting details.

This paper presents a fully independent security study of a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine, including its hardware and software. We obtained the machine from a private party. Analysis of the machine, in light of real election procedures, shows that it is vulnerable to extremely serious attacks. For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities--a voting-machine virus. We have constructed working demonstrations of these attacks in our lab. Mitigating these threats will require changes to the voting machine's hardware and software and the adoption of more rigorous election procedures.

EFF has done amazing work in fighting Diebold at standards bodies, in courts, and in the press, working to ensure that American elections aren't overturned by bad code and greed.

Link, Link to EFF's Online Policy Group v. Diebold, Inc. case notes (Thanks, Chris!)

(Nat's mother) Sompol said she hopes the excessive hair will start to fall out when Nat becomes an adult, as has reportedly happened with other Ambras syndrome patients.

If it doesn't, Nat's parents said they will reconsider Siriraj Hospital's offer to provide free laser treatments.

Despite Nat's unusual appearance, her classmates, teachers and doting parents have thus far provided a loving and accepting environment that has produced a self-confident and sometimes naughty 6-year-old.

"My friends don't tease me, but I like to play tricks on them sometimes," Nat told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

Nat's mother, however, acknowledged that sometimes the older children in school teased Nat by calling her "monkey face."

The Agreement reads:

I believe citizens have a right to know what their Members of Congress does every day.

Starting with the next Congress, I promise to publish my daily official work schedule on the Internet, within 24 hours of the end of every work day. I will include all matters relating to my role as a Member of Congress. I will include all meetings with constituents, other Members, and lobbyists, listed by name. (In rare cases I will withhold the names of constituents whose privacy must be protected.) I will also include all fundraising events. Events will be listed whether Congress is in session or not, and whether I am in Washington, traveling, or in my district.

Update: Dan sez, "I wanted to point out that at both of the government contracting companies I worked at because of government reporting requirements we were to fill out our time sheets within 24 hours. There were audits in place and the company faced penalties were certain standards not met. What's good for the goose is good for the gander."

But the Egyptian-born academic got a rude awakening June 20 when a consular official, without explanation, stamped "canceled'' on his temporary visa and refused to issue another visa. Instead, Salama said, he was fingerprinted, questioned and told he could not return to the United States until he received security clearance...

Salama, 38, began teaching at San Francisco State a year ago. He arrived in the United States seven years ago, has an American wife and two children, and received his doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

"Many of those affected describe their voices as being a positive influence in their lives, comforting or inspiring them as they go about their daily business," (says researcher Aylish Campbell.)...

The team believes that external factors such as a person's life experiences and beliefs may be the key to these differences: for example, the presence of childhood trauma or negative beliefs about themselves could have an affect.

"If a person is struggling to overcome a trauma or views themselves as worthless or vulnerable, or other people as aggressive, they may be more likely to interpret their voices as harmful, hostile or powerful," said Aylish.

"Conversely, a person who has had more positive life experiences and formed more healthy beliefs about themselves and other people might develop a more positive view of their voices.

It's a major relief that the Blair government's wizards have finally managed to counter the evil Al-Quaeda sorcerers who changed the laws of physics to make drinking water into an airplane-endangering substance. And to think it only cost the British economy a couple hundred million quid in lost travel revenues, and merely inconvenienced millions of travelers and only resulted in tens of thousands of lost computers carrying billions of vital, confidential documents.

Regrettably, moving up the bust of the hair-gel bombers before they'd bought plane tickets or acquired passports in order to give the US State Department a good press-op means that we'll probably never be able to bust the people who financed them and masterminded the attack. But fighting terrorism is more than actually busting terrorists: it's also about getting the right press when Joe Lieberman loses a primary.

Heck of a job, Tony.

Larger bags will be allowed along with some liquids - such as toiletries, including toothpaste.

These items may have to be placed in plastic bags so they can be easily examined at security.

Musical instruments will also be allowed on board again, after professional musicians complained the measures were hindering them.

The houses -- going for $550,000 to $850,000 -- will feature gabled roofs with faux-straw thatch made from thin strands of PVC that promotional literature says "is essentially windproof, rainproof, fireproof and guaranteed not to discolor."

Meyers has taken the liberty of renaming an irrigation canal next to The Shire as Brandywine Brook. He's happy to show off two Hobbit holes otherwise known as storage sheds.

Update: Rick sez, "This made me think of a development in Davis CA, where all the street names were taken from Tolkien. Some background: Village homes, completed in 1981, is considered the grandady of "green" developments, with comunity-building design and energy-efficient archicture."

Update: Xeni points out that these photos are excerpted from a forthcoming book, Pink Box: Inside Japan's Sex Clubs, by photographer Joan Sinclair, which comes in a PVC slipcase.

Update 2: Here's the book's official site, with upcoming launch parties in San Francisco, LA and NYC.

Zimmet, an expert on diabetes at Monash University in Australia, said that overweight people now outnumber the undernourished. The World Health Organization's estimates agree: globally, there are one billion overweight adults, and 300 million of them are obese; in contrast, about 800 million do not have enough to eat. Today obesity is a problem mainly in rich countries, but the WHO estimates that by 2010 the developing world will have more than caught up.

Last spring someone affixed a hand-written sign to a lightpost at the intersection of Fellowship Road and Church Street. I thought to myself “I better get a picture of that before it gets taken down, there’s no way the town’s going to leave that up there.” I never did take that picture, and the never did take down the sign. It stayed all through the winter, even after the writing had faded away. This spring the sign was upgraded to a laminated computer print out. It was obvious that the sign was here to stay.

Update: Mauricio sez, "This story reminded me of Richard Ankrom, here in LA, who dressed as a department of transportation worker and scaled the Harbor Freeway to install a 5 Freeway exit sign back in 2002. I was directly (positively) effected by his work, during my commute from USC to Burbank."

The artist built and installed the directions to help motorists make a smooth transition from the Harbor Freeway to northbound Interstate 5, located near downtown.

By plastering the "North 5" moniker on the existing sign, Ankrom not only followed state specifications but also showed that art can make a difference.

"The experts are saying that Mr. Ankrom did a fantastic job," conceded Caltrans spokeswoman Jeanne Bonfilio. "They thought it was an internal job."

"2 weeks ago, Ankrom himself posted a youtube documentary called 'Guerrilla Public Service' showing him adding the sign on the 5 freeway. His contractor truck labeled 'Aesthetic De Construciton' is pretty darn classy."

Update 2: Ryan sez, "When I was a kid a distressed parent in my neighborhood installed private-label stop signs (the kind you find in parking lots or on private roads in housing developments) at an intersection near my house. When the newly founded city of Pinecrest, FL took over the responsibility of maintaining street signs (formerly a county job) they replaced all the weathered, damaged signs around town. The original private-label stop signs were replaced with official ones and now it's part of the city records that stop signs should be at that location."

1. Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL XT
2. NIKON D50
3. Canon EOS 350D DIGITAL
4. Canon EOS 20D
5. NIKON D70
6. NIKON D70s
7. Canon PowerShot S2 IS
8. Canon EOS 30D
9. Sony CYBERSHOT
10. Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL

Update: Michael and Cassidy point out "the Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL XT and CANON EOS 350D DIGITAL are one in the same camera: The first moniker is used for the US market, the latter for Europe."

Update 2: Ananthanarayanan question's the author's assumption that all Sony Cybershot pictures were taken with different cameraphones: "I have a Sony Cybershot DSC-H2 and have a handful of pictures up on Flickr. I went to my Flickr page to check on my own pictures. And I found that the EXIF data as stored by Flickr do mention the exact camera model, i.e. Sony DSC H2. So was this data analyzed and all Sony camera data points just merged into one set to make sure it made the top 10? Are we missing something here?"

Update 3: Tim sez, "Flagrantdisregard (which host numerous Flickr toys) has had a link for a WEEKLY posting of Flickr's camera ranks for a while now. You can go deeper and even see graphs!"

The Madrid show is using the body mass index or BMI -- based on weight and height -- to measure models. It has turned away 30 percent of women who took part in the previous event. Medics will be on hand at the Sept. 18-22 show to check models.

"The restrictions could be quite a shock to the fashion world at the beginning, but I'm sure it's important as far as health is concerned," said Leonor Perez Pita, director of Madrid's show, also known as the Pasarela Cibeles.

She admitted she had been smoking marijuana with her son since he was 11 and said she had also smoked with two of his friends, ages 17 and 18.

They sat in rows on a gymnasium floor, twirling their pigtails and tugging their Pokeman sweatshirts as Dudas warned them not to steal music on the Internet. The crowd of second- through fifth-graders at Westwood Elementary School in Bloomington was well-prepared for the visit, having earlier watched an anti-piracy video provided by the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Theft of intellectual property, on the Internet and elsewhere, costs U.S. businesses as much as $250 billion a year, Dudas said.

"You wouldn't take a CD off the shelf without paying for it," Dudas said, pretending to hide a CD inside his suit coat. "And you shouldn't get music on the Internet without paying for it."

John Coulthart, whose past design hijinks include the "Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases," has created this delightfully modern Tarot deck: Link. (thanks, Jeff VanderMeer)

I am a U.S. Federal employee. According to Congressional Appropriations Bill H.R. 4818, P.L. 108-477, Section 111 all U.S. Federal Employess must be provided with training material on the U.S. Constitution.

While a noble effort by our government, this translates to mandatory training which most employees don't enjoy. However, I respect our government's most important document greatly and looked forward to performing this training. Upon reading the "What does it mean" section on the first amendment, I was shocked to find someone's gross misinterpretation of our freedom of speech, to quote:

"The first ten amendments comprise the Bill of Rights. The first amendment protects religious freedom by prohibiting the establishment of an official or exclusive church or sect. Free speech and free press are protected, although they can be limited for reasons of defamation, obscenity, and certain forms of state censorship, especially during wartime. The freedom of assembly and petition also covers marching, picketing and pamphleteering."

I know that laws provide for the censorship of free speech and the people in our country allow these laws to continue to exist, but the constitution provides for no such censorship and I am appalled that my training implies that it does. Is this propaganda, an error of a zealous employee creating the training material, or my nit-picks?

Reader comment: Seva Batkin says,

I believe that James is actually incorrect in his interpretation. You have to consider that in US, the Bill of Rights is absolute as it provides olny rights/freedoms, but no limitations on them. (This is in contrast to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms which provides freedoms in s. 2, but limitations s. 1). As such, the courts in US had been tasked with interpreting what exactly is a scope of each freedom. Afterall, if freedom of speech includes ALL speech, then laws which prohibit hate speech, defamation, etc., would be clearly unconstitutional and thus invalid. Therefore, US courts, following the common law tradition of "revealing" law, ruled that the freedom of speech simply doesn't INCLUDE hate speech, defamation, etc.

If you compare this to the Charter, the courts here ruled that the freedoms are absolute, but the limitation is justified under s. 1

About:

Every-time you access an open wifi network at a conference or hotel there is probably some script kiddie running a program called EtherPEG that captures all the images going across the network and reassembles them into a sort of artful collage. This website is a very low-tech hack to keep a bit of privacy where it belongs...

The instant you came to this website a copy of the infamous Goatse image was loaded into a 1 pixel by 1 pixel image tag that will be sent across the network to anyone who cares to sniff the packets. It automatically reloads every 60 seconds for as long as you care to stick around. You don't have to see it but it's there. Oh yes indeed it's there. So if you by chance hear a groan come from someone somewhere in the audience of the convention you're sitting at at this very moment just know GoatsePEG is at work for YOU!

Reader comment: Tom says,

Has anyone spotted the excellent ASCII art alternate content for non-supporting browsers hiding away in the HTML source for http://goatsepeg.com ?

Mars Hill wrests future converts searching for identity and purpose from the dominion of available sex and drugs that still make post-grunge Seattle a countercultural destination. Driscoll promises his followers they don't have to reprogram their iTunes catalog along with their beliefs -- culture from outside the Christian fold isn't just tolerated here, it's cherished. Hipster culture is what sweetens the proverbial Kool-Aid, which parishioners here seem to gulp by the gallon. This is a land where housewives cradle babies in tattooed arms, where young men balance responsibilities as breadwinners in their families and lead guitarists in their local rock bands, and where biblical orthodoxy rules as strictly as in Hasidism or Opus Dei...

In today's sermon on Genesis, chapter 37, Snoop Dogg, the man who penned the memorable lyric, "Now watch me slap ya ass with dicks, bitch," plays a supporting role. Driscoll conjures Joseph's famous coat by showing an image of Snoop in the coat he wore to play a pimp in "Starsky and Hutch." "The next time you read Genesis, think of Snoop," he chuckles.

Update: Calvin sez, "Man, it's crazy to see you blogging about Mars Hill.  I went there when the church had only a couple of hundred members, back in '96, '97.  I lived in a community house with other Christians, some of who went to that church, and they brought me along.  I went for a few years, but ended up rejecting fundamentalist Christianity and leaving the church. Community houses for single young adults is one of the successful strategies of the Mars Hill movement, btw.  It's also quite convenient for hooking them up into not-so-single baby producing couples, and I saw plenty of that.  Lots of parties, wine and beer, live music, stimulating conversation; they were genuinely cool people, and cared deeply for each other.

"I really, really loved the community, but hated the doctrine.  Biblical infallibility is an ugly thing, especially when combined with a literal interpretation.  Yes, Mars Hill has a beautiful community to offer, but you must drink the koolade to be accepted. I'm glad I left, though I still miss it.  There is too much going on in the world to be blind.  I wrote more on my blog."

"If we're not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation. (Because) if I hit somebody with a nonlethal weapon and they claim that it injured them in a way that was not intended, I think that I would be vilified in the world press."

Matt Foremski, the son of ex-Financial Times reporter Tom Foremski who runs Silicon Valley Watcher, cracked the case with help from MySpace and Google cache. Matt published his investigation and findings at LG15.com, and his dad posted recaps on his blog. Young Mr. Foremski wrote:

I was surfing the article on Lonelygirl15 on TMZ.com when I came across a comment that linked to a private MySpace page that was allegedly that of the actress who plays Lonelygirl15. As the profile was set to “private,” there was no real info one could glean from the page. However, when I queried Google for that particular MySpace user name, “jeessss426,” I found a Google cache from the page a few months ago when it was still public.

A lot of the details of the girl’s background clicked for me: She was an actress from a small city in New Zealand who had moved to Burbank recently to act. The name on the profile was “Jessica Rose.” When next I happened to query Google image search for “Jessica Rose New Zealand” I was instantly rewarded with two cached thumbnail photos of Lonelygirl15, a.k.a. Jessica Rose, from a New Zealand talent agency that had since removed the full size versions. A later search on Yahoo on “jeessss426” also turned up a whole load of pictures from her probably forgotten ImageShack account.

Previously: LonelyGirl15 is a filmmakers' project?

Update: The jig is officially up. Looks like both the LAT and NYT had to abide by a 7PM PT embargo or something, because at 7PM promptly, twin tell-alls emerged with more details.

Richard Rushfield and Clare Hoffman at the LA Times scored an exclusive interview with LG15's creators: Link, and this New York Times story by Tom Zeller and Virginia Heffernan has a lovely ending:

The series, which Mr. Flinders and Mr. Beckett plan to continue on a site overseen by them, may play differently with fans now that they know for sure that Bree is an actress. Part of the appeal of the series was that the serious-minded, literate Bree offered an unbeatable fantasy: a beautiful girl who techy guys had something in common with.

On learning that Ms. Rose was an actress whose interests, unlike the scientific and religious issues that fascinated Bree, ran to parties and posing, one fan wrote, “Very cute, but she’s really not into Feynmann and Jared Diamond! (I’m heart-broken ...But a wonderful actress, had me fooled into thinking she was a geek like me.)”

This appears to be the school jessica rose attended in new zealand. I note that modeling comments were made before the LG15 was made. And here is a google image search of new zealand web sites for jessica rose.

There are a number of factors involved in what is rapidly becoming a "buyer's market", according to drugs counsellors. The decreasing purity of some drugs is one reason for the fall in prices, as dealers import drugs and then adulterate them with other, cheaper chemicals in an attempt to hang on to their profit margins.

Another more fundamental reason for the steady drop in prices is that traffickers are flooding Britain with illegal drugs, because demand has increased.

Each kit was tested 10 times for each drink and drug or placebo combination. The results show that with one of the kits, a drug was correctly detected in only 69 per cent of tests. Researchers also found that the sensitivity of the kits was affected by the type of drink in which they were tested. The ability of one kit to identify the presence of drugs in beer was poor, with a sensitivity of 37 per cent...

The report says it is important drink spiking be put in context: "The most comprehensive UK-based study reported that only 21 of the 1,014 alleged drug-facilitated sexual assault cases were attributed to involuntary ingestion of a drug." This included three cases where the drug was ecstasy, which reduces inhibition, but does not induce sedation.

While President Bush and other Republican politicians spent the day exploiting the memory of those we lost five years ago, the nation overlooked a grim milestone: More Americans have now died in Iraq than died on 9/11. Iraq didn't attack us on that day, and our misguided policy there has now taken more American lives than Al Qaeda.

Here are the numbers: 3,015 Americans have died in Iraq as of September 9.

2,666 of these were military deaths and 349 were civilians.

This story, in today's Guardian, is just mind-blowing. The common sleeping pill zolpidem, sold in the US under the name Ambien, can reverse serious brain damage and wake up patients in persistent vegetative states!

The hospital ward sister, Lucy Hughes, was periodically concerned that involuntary spasms in Louis's left arm, that resulted in him tearing at his mattress, might be a sign that deep inside he might be uncomfortable. In 1999, five years after Louis's accident, she suggested to Sienie that the family's GP, Dr Wally Nel, be asked to prescribe a sedative. Nel prescribed Stilnox, the brand name in South Africa for zolpidem. "I crushed it up and gave it to him in a bottle with a soft drink," Sienie recalls. "He couldn't swallow properly then, but I helped him and sat at his bedside. After about 25 minutes, I heard him making a sound like 'mmm'. He hadn't made a sound for five years.

"Then he turned his head in my direction. I said, 'Louis, can you hear me?' And he said, 'Yes.' I said, 'Say hello, Louis', and he said, 'Hello, mummy.' I couldn't believe it. I just cried and cried."

Zolpidem seems to work on PVS patients about 60% of the time, and is effective in the treatment of other brain injuries. Parts of the brain considered "dead" because of zero activity (but not deterioration or necrosis) return to life. It's not a cure -- the pill must be taken on an ongoing basis -- but it is a nearly-miraculous treatment.

As wonderful as this is, the legal and ethical implications are unsettling. Will people who have "pulled the plug" on loved ones in persistent vegetative states in recent years read this news with the horrible realization that the now-dead partner or relative might have been saved with a $5 pill? Could a lawyer for family members opposed to the termination of care for a PVS patient sue the family members who chose to do so, and win?

Trials are set to begin in the next few months in South Africa. The original discover of zolpidem, Sanofi-Aventis, has chosen *not* to participate -- no doubt because the drug is no longer controlled by a patent.

[Pinchbeck] took it for the first time about ten years ago in downtown Manhattan with a California shaman introduced to him by the poet Michael Brownstein; Pinchbeck wore Depends and a blindfold, and kept a plastic vomit bucket by his head.

...

Vocal proponents of alternate realities, like Sting and Oliver Stone, have been open about their experiments with ayahuasca, and in the hipster circles where ayahuasca has taken root, many people are making weeklong trips to Peru, which cost about $600 without airfare and include about four ayahuasca ceremonies. It's a kind of Merry Tripster scene, with guided shamanic journeys to Peru, Colombia and Hawaii available nearly monthly with shamans like a white-turbaned, middle-aged female guru from L.A. who channels a spirit called "the Mother," and with whom Pinchbeck has a close relationship. Bimonthly ceremonies are offered in upstate New York under the auspices of a Catholic-spiritist church. Participants must wear white; men and women sit on either side of the room, banned from interacting. In his role as a "wizard in the realm of ideas," as he calls himself, Pinchbeck has also provided the stuff to visitors in his apartment. "Daniel hovered over me on the couch, asking, 'Have you seen the face of God yet?' " says one who has partaken.

Update:

Daniel Pinchbeck has written a couple of responses to the profile (here and here):

The article, despite its five-page length, is impressively shallow, almost ignoring the ideas in my new book entirely, to concentrate on semi-salacious details of my personal life. I learnt, to my surprise, that I have “buck teeth,” and some undefined similarity to Austin Powers. The article has that seamy tabloid vibe of scandal, sin, and shadowy disgrace. Perhaps the best thing about it is the Matt Mahurin illustration of me facing myself as forked-tongue serpent [shown here].

The most frustrating aspect of the piece is the impression I get, while reading it, that most of my ideas (as well as salient details of my life) were carefully, almost meticulously, distorted or disconnected from each other so that they would seem unfounded and insignificant. There were crucial aspects of my thesis in “2012” that Vanessa seemed unable to understand – for instance, I explained to her over and over again the Calleman model which reveals the Mayan Calendar as a precision timing device for the development of consciousness on Earth, from more than 16 billion years ago to 2012, in a nine-stage process that accelerates by factors of twenty in relation to linear time. Clearly, she was too busy seeking out quotes from disaffected former lovers to follow such an argument.

I loved the idea behind the Pong Clock and I've wanted to make my own watch for a while now... combine those two things, and I've got a start at the Pong Watch. This is just an electrical prototype - the hard part will be making the watch case and then squeezing all the electronics in there. The display is a small (1.2") 96x64 yellow-and-white OLED display. OLEDs are neat because only consume power proportional to the number of pixels that are turned on -- for a game like pong, that's a relatively small 1-2% of the display, so the power requirements are pretty small. Plus, the high contrast looks great with a game like this. I haven't worked out the power budget in detail yet, but hopefully I can get a day's use out of the watch, and then recharge the battery each night. The charger would also automatically set the time, so there will be no need for buttons on the watch.

Mr. Hoiberg: ...We want our articles to be correct before they are published. We stand behind our process, based on trained editors and fact-checkers, more than 4,000 experts, and sound writing. Our model works well. Wikipedia is very different, but nothing in their model suggests we should change what we do.

Mr. Wales: Fitting words for an epitaph…

Ten years in the Valley, and all Murray Swain had to show for it was a spare tire, a bald patch, and a life that was friendless and empty and maggoty-rotten. His only ever California friend, Liam, had dwindled from a tubbaguts programmer-shaped potato to a living skeleton on his death-bed the year before, herpes blooms run riot over his skin and bones in the absence of any immunoresponse. The memorial service featured a framed photo of Liam at his graduation, his body was donated for medical science.

Liam's death really screwed things up for Murray. He'd gone into one of those clinical depression spirals that eventually afflicted all the aging bright young coders he'd known during his life in tech. He'd get misty in the morning over his second cup of coffee and by the midafternoon blood-sugar crash, he'd be weeping silently in his cubicle, clattering nonsensically at the keys to disguise the