This youngster toured the world with his Game Boy in hand. Here he is in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem, touching the Game Boy to the Stone of Unction, allegedly where Jesus's body was prepared for burial. Visitors often rub things on the stone to pick up some of the, er, magic. Judging by the little fellow's devilish grin, I'd bet he's not a believer.
Link to Cybjorg's "Game Boy Around the World" set on Flickr (Thanks, Jason Tester!)

Regarding last week's post on publishing's relationship to "okaysellers," Tor Editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden adds, "What Teresa was trying to get at, and she’s absolutely right, is that while book publishing may be greatly driven by our need for bestsellers, in the same way that many American policies are “driven by” our national need for easy access to petroleum, we don’t in fact spend every second of every day wandering around in a frenzy obsessing about bestsellers, any more than everyone in America spends all their time invading Middle Eastern countries or grovelling at the gas pump. When the Wall Street Journal writes that “publishing is becoming a winner-takes-all contest” and says that “when a book doesn’t sell right away, the large chains sweep it into the back room, making space for the next aspirant,” they’re grossly misrepresenting how most of book publishing works. We may be driven by a need to have some books that “bestsell,” but our daily life is far from dominated by work on bestsellers to the exclusion of all else. To the contrary, smart publishers know that publishing is more like gardening than it’s like factory-farming; if you want giant successes, you’d better have a whole lot of little experiments going all at the same time. We need bestsellers. But we don’t spend all of our time on them, and we don’t sweep non-bestselling books (or their authors) off to the glue factory. We need all the other books as well. Because you never know." Link

My friend Kim Plowright created these amazing anatomically correct skins for avatars in the virtual world Second Life. Link

Lifelike is an online episodic comic series written by Iranian expat Dara Naraghi. Lifelike's stories are short, sweet slices-of-life, sometimes with twist endings, each drawn by a different but equally talented artist. There are so many different visual styles here, and Naraghi is such a versatile storyteller, that they barely seem to be part of the same series, but there's something that links them together, a great storyteller's sensibility. From hard-boiled noir crime to war memoirs to sweet, sentimental stories, Lifelike has the feel of a great comics anthology, like Drawn and Quarterly or World War III. Link (Thanks, Dara!)

Last Tuesday, Revver co-founder Steven Starr gave a great talk on copy-friendly business models at my USC speaker series. Mark Smith of MoveDigital came and shot the talk in high-def and edited it down and uploaded it as a Quicktime file or a phone-friendly 3gp stream. Link (Thanks, Mark!)

See also Audio from Revver founder's talk on copy-friendly business models

On the Disney Blog, John Frost writes:

Charles Phoenix, known for his retro-postcard slide show events, has started offering 'walking tours' of Los Angeles. If you've ever seen or heard Phoenix's talk, you know that alone would be worth the price of admission. But Phoenix tops it off by drawing a multitude of parallels between Walt Disney's crown jewel themepark of Disneyland, and the icons of Southern California that played such a major part in the development of Walt Disney the man.

Link (Thanks, John!)

Retrothing has a great article on Red Raven records, which came with the cells of an animation printed on the LP label. You put a mirrored circus tent-topper over the spindle and watched the animation in its surfaces. I had one of these when I was a kid and I absolutely loved it.

These were cardboard children's records with the animation printed right onto the disc itself (later versions like the one above had the animation on the label of regular colored vinyl). The Red Raven included a little mirrored device that you pop onto the turntable's spindle that reflected the animation in such a way that while the record plays you get to see a little cartoon.

The effect is rather hypnotic (the mirrored device is an ersatz praxinoscope for all of you optics junkies), and a neat addition to the typical children's fare on the record itself. Sixteen Magic Mirror Movie records were released by Red Raven (making for 32 animations of course).

Link (Thanks, Adzoum!)

Synthtravels is a tour operator that arranges for guided visits to virtual worlds like World of Warcraft and Second Life, providing "native guides" for people who want to get the lay of the land.

Synthravels is the first organization to offer a complete guide service to all the people who want to make a tour in virtual worlds without knowing these new realities, even if they have never put their feet in these strange, synthetic grounds.

The tours and the destinations are chosen by the staff of Synthravels, composed by programmers, architects, experienced video gamers.

Link (via Futurismic)

This tacky monstrosity is the "Respecting Copyrights merit patch" that Los Angeles Boy Scouts can receive if they consent to being brainwashed by the MPAA's curriculum. Nice to see an organization in loco parentis shilling for a cartel of Fortune 100 companies. Link (Thanks Pawel!)

See also:
Boy Scouts shill for MPAA with copyright merit badge
Boy Scouts of America Concerned About Copyright

Update: There's some dispute as to what this is called. Clark sez, "The MPAA monstrosity is an activity patch or temporary insignia- these denote that a scout has participated in a special event or activity; a couple of common examples of activity patches are those issued to scouts who have attended a weekend camporee or a week at summer camp. Activity patches are simple tokens of recognition that are not vetted or controlled on a national level. Unlike merit Badges activity patches do not apply to a scout's advancement in rank."

Design shop Fitzsu has challenged several hot designers to create unique toy cars for a charity auction. The cars are all one-of-a-kind and they're really wonderful -- I'm totally loving this melted-wax car from Dalek. Link (Thanks, Mapletree7 and Justin!)

The talented folks at DaveFilms have produced a full-cast audiobook adaptation of my award-winning novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. They're transmitting it in ten parts, as a podcast -- part 1 just went live.

This is the second audio adaptation of Down and Out -- the podcaster Mark Forman read the book aloud on his podcast in August 2005.

I love the different adaptations of the book -- it's amazing to hear my words read by so many different people, with so many different choices about how to dramatize it. Often, the reading isn't how I heard it in my own head when I wrote it, which is cool -- it's wild to hear how your own words sound to someone else. Link to part 1 as MP3, Link to part 1 as streaming Quicktime, Podcast feed

Jay is disturbed to hear about the Los Angeles Boy Scouts offering a Merit Patch in copyright. He sez, "As a frequent reader of Boing Boing, a supporter of the EFF, and someone who plans on making a living as a future online communication technology consultant, I feel fairly informed about copyright issues. So myself and my roommate, another Eagle Scout, are in the process of acquiring the Merit Badge Handbook for this badge to review the requirements and information it presents. If it's as one-sided or erroneous as your post worries it will be, I'd like to get other current or former scouts to take part in a concerted effort to write the Los Angeles Area Council with our concerns.

"If you could update the post on Boing Boing with this e-mail address(BSACAC@gmail.com - Boy Scouts of America Concerned About Copyright), or pass it along to any other scouts that might contact you, I'd very much appreciate it. Not all scouts are religious bigots or industry shills. A lot changes between the time when you're a kid joining a group for fun, comraderie, and self-improvement, and when you're grown up and able to form your own views. I'd like to see the scouts improve where they can, and while some changes may be too big to hope for, I'll do everything I can to make sure they don't change for the worse. Help us out."

The Los Angeles Council of the Boy Scouts of America will offer rewards to Scouts who absorb a brainwashing regime written by the MPAA. The merit badge patch in "respecting copyright" will almost certainly not include any training on fair use, anything about the fact that the film industry is located in Hollywood because that was a safe-enough distance from Tom Edison that the its founders could infringe his patents with impunity; that record players, radios and VCRs were considered pirate technology until the law changed to accommodate them; or that the entertainment industry enriches itself without regard for creators, who are routinely sodomized through non-negotiable contracts and abusive royalty practices. I'm sure it won't mention the anti-competitive censorship masquerading as the Hollywood "rating" system, or the way that the studio cartel's copyright term extensions have doomed the majority of creative works to orphaned oblivion, since they remain in copyright, but have no visible owner and can't be brought back into circulation.

Bravo, Scouts -- letting an industry group brainwash the children in your charge is the only way you could sink lower than being mere religious bigots -- now you're religious bigots who shill for a cartel of Fortune 100 companies.

Boy Scouts in the Los Angeles area will now be able to earn a merit patch for learning about the evils of downloading pirated movies and music.

The patch shows a film reel, a music CD and the international copyright symbol, a "C" enclosed in a circle.

The movie industry has developed the curriculum.

"Working with the Boy Scouts of Los Angeles, we have a real opportunity to educate a new generation about how movies are made, why they are valuable, and hopefully change attitudes about intellectual property theft," Dan Glickman, chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, said Friday.

Link (Thanks, Kingkong, Cyrus, Jeffrey, Dolface, and Jdaisy!)

See also Boy Scout badge in Intellectual Property

Update: Liz sez, "Mel Horan of Garbage Island made up Photoshop versions of possible copyright merit badges several months ago, and I posted them on Sivacracy in connection with a story about the Hong Kong scouting program already policing piracy on the government's behalf. Check them out!"

Update 2: Ed sez, "The copyright merit badge is *not* sanctioned by the Boy Scouts of America. It's a local initiative by one group in LA. That's why they called it a "merit patch" instead of a "merit badge". The real list of BSA merit badges here here. The newest one is "Composite Materials"."

Update 3 Jay is disturbed to hear about the Los Angeles Boy Scouts offering a Merit Patch in copyright. He sez, "As a frequent reader of Boing Boing, a supporter of the EFF, and someone who plans on making a living as a future online communication technology consultant, I feel fairly informed about copyright issues. So myself and my roommate, another Eagle Scout, are in the process of acquiring the Merit Badge Handbook for this badge to review the requirements and information it presents. If it's as one-sided or erroneous as your post worries it will be, I'd like to get other current or former scouts to take part in a concerted effort to write the Los Angeles Area Council with our concerns.

"If you could update the post on Boing Boing with this e-mail address(BSACAC@gmail.com - Boy Scouts of America Concerned About Copyright), or pass it along to any other scouts that might contact you, I'd very much appreciate it. Not all scouts are religious bigots or industry shills. A lot changes between the time when you're a kid joining a group for fun, comraderie, and self-improvement, and when you're grown up and able to form your own views. I'd like to see the scouts improve where they can, and while some changes may be too big to hope for, I'll do everything I can to make sure they don't change for the worse. Help us out."

Update 4 This tacky monstrosity is the "Respecting Copyrights merit patch." (Thanks Pawel!)

In his latest paintblogging experiment, Coop created a neat time-lapse video from the still photos he shot while creating his latest artwork. I love watching a master in action. It makes creative work look magically effortless.
Link

A reader writes, "HauntedHotSauce.com offers Zombie-themed hot sauce products sealed in handmade cedar coffins. In addition to the hot sauce, each coffin comes stuffed with Spanish moss, a bloody toe-tag prop and a few novelty maggots thrown in for effect! There's a creepy fold-out paper mask on top of some of the larger bottles that can also be downloaded free from the site."

I'm a total hot sauce junkie. Remember those Tabasco ads where they asked celebs what they put Tabasco on, and Dan Ackroyd said, "Anything humanly possible?" That's me, too. I'd brush my teeth with hot-sauce if I could.

Combine sweaty pepper juice with gruesome packaging and you've got an unbeatable combination. I just ordered some. Link

A new survey suggests that six percent of adults experience bouts of compulsive buying that may "leave them saddled with debt, anxiety, and depression." And while it was previously thought that compulsive buying is a predominantly female condition, the recent research shows that it may be just as common in men. To collect the data, Stanford University psychiatrist Lorrin M. Koran interviewed more than 2,500 people over the phone. From Science News:

Compulsive buying, as defined by a high score on a tally of the cardinal signs, occurred in 6 percent of women and 5.5 percent of men, regardless of racial or ethnic background, Koran's group says. Compulsive buyers averaged 40 years of age, compared with 49 years for the other participants. A majority of compulsive buyers reported annual incomes under $50,000, whereas only 39 percent of the others reported incomes in that category.

Compulsive buyers reported having the same number of credit cards as other participants did. However, compulsive buyers tended to stretch credit card limits thin, often to within $100 of the maximum. Compulsive buyers also preferred to make minimum payments on credit card balances, regardless of their annual incomes.

Yesterday, the Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online officially launched, bringing 50,000 pages of searchable text and 40,000 images to the public for free. Presented by the University of Cambridge and other collaborators, the site currently contains only half of what will be available by 2009. Seen here, a diagram from the Origin of Species.

From the Origin of Species:

'It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working'

'When the views entertained in this volume on the origin of species, or when analogous views are generally admitted, we can dimly forsee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history.'

Link

Check out this incredible gallery of over 1500 Italian pulp science fiction magazine covers, spanning 1952 to the present day. Link (Thanks, Spencer!)

Andrew MacPherson has founded a monthly Copynight in Hollywood, California. Copynights are monthly gatherings of copyfighters, activists, artists and others interested in copyright reform. This month's inuagural belly-of-the-beast Copynight is being held next Tuesday night.

# Fourth Tuesday of every month, 8 PM
# Barney's Beanery, 8447 Santa Monica Blvd (map)
# Hosted by Andy McPherson, hollywood (at) copynight.org

Link (Thanks, Andy!)

Video game economist Ed Castronova (whose back-of-the-envelope math on the GDP of Everquest's Norrath made a huge stir) has received a $240,000 MacArthur grant to fund the creation of a virtual world built on the works of Shakespeare:

"It's a historical Shakespeare play, so that means it's really easy for us to take all the sort of fantasy stuff like knights in shining armor and peasants and woodworkers...and we can just really fit right into 'Richard III' right away."

But "Arden" has a more serious goal than just letting gamers cavort around in an Elizabethan playground.

Castronova likens "Arden" to a "petri dish" where he and other researchers can conduct ongoing social-science experiments. He said the idea is similar to a biologist running multiple versions of an experiment, each with slight variations in conditions, to see how those conditions affect the outcome.

"Now we have this technology for making little pocket societies and we can do different governments, different economies, different social norms in the different environments," he said, "and see how it affects the things we care about, like equality and justice and growth and efficiency."...

He said one of the more unique elements of "Arden" is that the game will be seeded with Shakespearean texts, many of which will be the most valuable treasure players can find.

"If you collect the 'To be or not be' speech and then take it to a lore master or to a skilled bard, he can then apply the magic to your broad sword or you (could) utilize the magic in a battle situation to give you this massive (advantage)," Castronova explained. "So there (will be) this intensive competition to get the best speeches of Shakespeare in your play book.

"You've got to know your Shakespeare, but...if you do, collect these texts and you can just playfully kick butt the way wizards do."

Link (via Wonderland)

iGlow is a chemo-luminescent hair gel that makes your head glow -- perfect for Hallowe'en.

Just like Voltage, iGlow does not rely on UV, neon or black lights to create glow. Instead, it produces its own light! Tiny, microscopic particles in the gel come together in the mixing process to produce a bright colorful glow that can be seen in partial light and in the dark for several hours.

While iGlow is classified as a "temporary hair color" it does not actually color the hair cuticle. It "coats" the hair with color. The gel is the delivery medium for the luminescence (glow). As such it is safe for color-treated or bleached hair when used as directed.

Link (via Popgadget)

Wired News has released the source code for a program written by its editor Kevin Poulsen to catch pedophiles on MySpace by comparing MySpace profiles to registries of sex-offenders. Poulsen is a notorious reformed hacker who wrote the code to produce empirical data on the use of MySpace by sexual predators, though he acknowledges that the code only catches predators who use their real names, and that some sex offenders use the site for innocent purposes, to stay in touch with friends and family. The code is released under a BSD free software license:

Finding sex offenders on MySpace is a three-step process. First, you need the list of offenders. I put together the first script, scraperps.pl, in late April. From a list of ZIP codes, the program simply fills out the query form on the DOJ's registry, maxing out the query by running five ZIPs at a time. Then it stores the results -- name, ZIP, city, county, state -- in a database, within a table called `perps`.

My first run quickly got me temporarily blocked from the site. It turns out the DOJ server doesn't like you running a lot of queries back-to-back. When the ban was lifted (never let it be said that the Justice Department is unforgiving), I incorporated a 30-second pause between queries, which seemed to satisfy the server. That raised the run time to over 71 hours.

While that was under way, I went to work on screen-scraping MySpace. When you register for MySpace, you're prompted to provide your full name and your ZIP code. That information doesn't appear in your MySpace profile, which may help explain why so many offenders felt comfortable providing it. But MySpace's search engine lets you search by name, and restrict the results to within five miles of a particular ZIP code. That made it a natural match for the sex offender registry.

The MySpace scraper, myspacebot.pl, performs this search for every entry in `perps`, and loads the result into a table called `myspace`.

Link

See also: Wired News editor catches MySpace pedophile

Update: EPIC's Guilherme Roschke sez, "The code 'caught' lots of people, and it took human work to sort out who was a predator and who was not. "

Today on the Worth1000 photoshopping contest: Star Wars mashups. I am just loving the Gollum/Yoda pictured here. Link

Stephen Reed Industrial Design installed these Scrabble-tile-holder benches (with Scrabble tile pillows) in the offices of Bloomberg London. Want. Link (via Cribcandy)

Update: Jeremy sez, "I saw your Scrabble Furniture, and wanted to show you the work of my friend Josh Cyr, who has created his own Scrabble Coffee Table."

I dig this kooky-creepy devil inkwell up for auction on eBay. Current bid is $202.01. From the auction listing:

19th Century devil inkwell of handcarved wooden construction by a master craftsman. I believe this to be of European origin - Black Forest or Swiss. Quality of carving and fit of the lid are exceptional. Not a nick or chip or scratch. Original paint. Original well looks to be porcelain. Ink still on inner rim around well and lid shows honest wear. Total height is 4". Satisfaction guaranteed.

Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne Rauback!)

Union Products, manufacturer of the plastic pink flamingo, has ceased production of the quintessential kitsch icon. Apparently, the Leominster, Mass-based company was hit with financial woes, in part due to the increasing cost of plastic resin. Don Featherstone, who created the classic lawn ornament in 1957 during a countrywide epidemic of Florida fever, is still very much alive though and hoping some other company will crank out his creation. According to Wikipedia, every authentic flamingo is emblazoned with Featherstone's signature under its tail. From the South Florida Sun Sentinel (photo from Union Products):

"They think the pink flamingos could be extinct, and they think I will be extinct soon, too," (Featherstone) said. "It is sad that it is happening, but it may not be dead yet."

Featherstone and (Union Products president Dennis) Plante are hoping for a resurrection. Plante has been seeking another company to buy the molds. So far, two companies in the U.S. and one in Canada have expressed interest.

"I am hoping that someone will come forward and save the plastic pink flamingo from extinction," Plante said.

Link (Thanks, Paul Saffo!)

Glyph Jockey has kindly posted scans of an entire "Nancy and Sluggo" comic book from 1953, including the fun ads for fireworks, magic tricks, and BB rifles. This makes me very happy.
Link (Thanks, Coop!)

This week, three BB pals invade RU Sirius's MondoGlobo network podcasts. Violet Blue is the guest on the RU Sirius Show while Eddie Codel (GETV) and video artist Ryan Junell, organizer of the Webzine conference, chat up RU on the NeoFiles.
Link

The audio from Tuesday night's talk by Revver co-founder Steven Starr is online. Steve spoke as part of my USC speaker-series on copyright, freedom and technology and his talk was about Revver, a system that puts ads at the end of viral videos, which means that every time the videos are copied, their creators make more money. Steve's talk was great, and there was a rollicking, wide-ranging Q&A session afterwards.

Next Tuesday's speaker was to have been Jamie Love from the Consumer Project on Technology, but he's had to cancel due to a scheduling conflict with a diplomatic event. I will give his talk in his stead, about international development, copyright, and the Access to Knowledge movement. Link, Podcast feed

Democracy Player, the amazing, free, open Internet video player, has just released an important update, bringing tons of new features to the platform. Democracy lets you subscribe to channels of video that are downloaded quickly using Bittorrent. Getting video in channels means you don't have to remember to keep checking for new files, and Bittorrent means the files come down quickly and without costing the creator a fortune in bandwidth. There's a complementary tool, "Broadcast Machine," that makes it easy to publish your own video channel for Democracy and other players.

Democracy runs on Linux, Windows and the Mac, and is overseen by the nonprofit Participatory Culture Foundation. PCF director Nicholas Reville sez,

This version (0.9.1) has lots and lots of new features. The 3 biggest:

1. The interface is faster and more responsive.

2. You can make 'Search Channels' that automatically search a channel (rss feed) or a website like YouTube and download videos that match the search.

3. The Mac and Windows versions can now both search, save, and play flash video (such as YouTube or Google Video).

Link, Link to new feature list

(Disclosure: I am a proud member of the Board of Directors for the nonprofit Participatory Culture Foundation)

Undersound is a new project to distribute music around the London Underground trains. Users can upload songs from their collections to centralized distribution points, and download tracks left by other users. The system keeps tack of which tracks came from what station --this is a public-transit version of the "Traffic Napster" that appears in my novel, Eastern Standard Tribe.

undersound will be spatially distributed at individual stations and throughout the wider tube network. I can add music to the system at upload points in the ticket halls , and I can download tracks on the platforms. Architectural configuration of the stations affects my experience of contributing and downloading music as the proximal nature of the interaction with these situated points require s myself and other undersound users to congregate at certain locations within the station for the purpose of interacting with the system.

Each track in the undersound system will be tagged with its place of origin (the station where it was uploaded) and this information is visible as the track is being played. This may trigger memories and musings around my personal relationship to that place. Is there also a correlation between the flow of people around the tube network and the flow of music tracks around the undersound network? What might a sense of place for these digital artefacts be? Do they care about geographical location too or might their sense of place revolve around the quality and type of network and the technological devices they pass through?

Link (Thanks, Akshat and Dillo!)

The respected journal Far Eastern Economic Review has been banned in Singapore for publishing an article critical of Singapore's prime minister. The Review has published a stinging analysis of the legality of this action under Singaporean law, suggesting that the government is willing to invent laws for itself when it wants to suppress dissent:

The July article that started this most recent dispute with Singapore, “Singapore’s ‘Martyr,’ Chee Soon Juan,” sought to raise a similar question, only it focused on the methods used to silence the leader of the opposition Singapore Democratic Party. We put it to Mr. Chee himself, and he laid the blame squarely on the country’s founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, who now holds the title of “minister mentor.”

The ruthless suppression of dissent must be kept up, he said, because as long as Mr. Lee is alive, a new generation of leaders is unable to emerge and distance themselves from his record. Mr. Lee’s past actions, which have led to human rights abuses and statist management of the economy, haunt the government. Mr. Chee believes that is the true reason dissidents like himself are hounded: “If we had parliamentary debates where the opposition could pry and ask questions, I think he is actually afraid of something like that.”

After the article was published, we received letters from Davinder Singh, a lawyer for Mr. Lee and his son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, claiming that these sentiments and several other sections of the essay defamed the two men. Mr. Singh demanded apologies, removal of the article from our Web site, and an undertaking to pay damages and legal costs.

Link (Thanks, HY!)

Mike sez, "The National Trust, a British charity, held a competition to garden-growers across the country to grow the ugliest vegetable possible. This year's winner was Mrs. Hilary Nellist from Bedford with her parsnip from the deep. The contest seeks to promote organically grown fruit and vegetables. Some may not look good enough to end up on supermarket shelves, but they quite possibly taste better and are better for you. Look at the picture of the parsnip and tell me Cthulhu didn't have his hand in this one." Link (Thanks, Mike!)

(Photo thumbnail above taken from a larger picture credited to Hilary Nellist)

Tor editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden -- an expert on fiction publishing -- has written a great response to a Wall Street Journal article where the Journal asserts that publishing is a hit-driven, winner-take-all industry. She points out that this is far from the truth -- that publishing isn't driven by bestsellers, but by "okaysellers," and that bookstores are filled with these okaysellers.

What irritated me about the story was having the Wall Street Journal trot out the completely bogus standard paragraph about the state of publishing:

Much like Hollywood, book publishing is becoming a winner-takes-all contest. A publisher has to find a title with huge potential and single it out for special attention. If the book gets traction, the upside is limitless. If it fails, there’s a long way to fall. When a book doesn’t sell right away, the large chains sweep it into the back room, making space for the next aspirant. With 172,000 books published last year, shelf space is limited.

I think they’ve got that paragraph set up as a macro—and they’re not the only publication that uses it.

I’ve been hearing the “publishing is becoming a winner-take-all sweepstakes” riff since I started working in the industry. It’s not true, and it’s not becoming true. I suspect it’s generated by lazy news departments that can’t be bothered to take notice of books that aren’t blockbusters, and from this conclude that blockbusters are all that matters in publishing.

Bestsellers aren’t the whole of publishing. Every year, we publish a great many okaysellers. You guys buy them because they look interesting, or because a friend has recommended them, or because you liked another book by that author. Marketing push only goes so far.

Link

Update: Patrick Nielsen Hayden adds, "What Teresa was trying to get at, and she’s absolutely right, is that while book publishing may be greatly driven by our need for bestsellers, in the same way that many American policies are “driven by” our national need for easy access to petroleum, we don’t in fact spend every second of every day wandering around in a frenzy obsessing about bestsellers, any more than everyone in America spends all their time invading Middle Eastern countries or grovelling at the gas pump. When the Wall Street Journal writes that “publishing is becoming a winner-takes-all contest” and says that “when a book doesn’t sell right away, the large chains sweep it into the back room, making space for the next aspirant,” they’re grossly misrepresenting how most of book publishing works. We may be driven by a need to have some books that “bestsell,” but our daily life is far from dominated by work on bestsellers to the exclusion of all else. To the contrary, smart publishers know that publishing is more like gardening than it’s like factory-farming; if you want giant successes, you’d better have a whole lot of little experiments going all at the same time. We need bestsellers. But we don’t spend all of our time on them, and we don’t sweep non-bestselling books (or their authors) off to the glue factory. We need all the other books as well. Because you never know."

At "the f blog," former BB guestblogger Jenn Shreve has posted a an oddly engaging collection of "sorry I haven't posted in a while" excuses found on a wide assortment of blogs. Here are a few:

"I got promoted to an officer in my World of Warcraft guild "Trick Model" on Illidan."

"I've been honestly overwhelmed by trying to keep up with my two language courses"

"I forgot my password..."

"I've been busy shooting soccer teams."

"I've been very depressed since Ginger died."

"I was planning on working more on my chibi characters. "

Link

Ugly Overload (via Spluch) posted this beautiful portrait of a cute proboscis monkey. Text on the proboscis monkey from Blue Planet Biomes:

The proboscis monkey gets its name from its large, fleshy nose. Both males and females have the large noses. Female noses are not as large, although larger than most monkeys, and juveniles have small upturned noses. The male's are so large that they hang down over their mouths, reminding one of the old comic, Jimmy Durante. Sometimes they have to push it out of the way before putting something in their mouth. Their noses swell and turn red when they become excited or angry. They also make loud honking sounds as a warning when they sense danger, which make their noses stand out straight. The nose acts as a resonator when the monkey vocalizes.

Link to Ugly Overload, Link to Blue Planet Biomes page (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)

Computer scientists at New Zealand's Massey University are studying the mysterious low-frequency hums that have been reported in various places around the world. (It's sometimes referred to as the Taos Hum because many people in Taos, New Mexico claim to hear it.) Massey University professors Tom Moir and Fakhrul Alam began their research on "Unidentified Acoustic Phenomena" with a visit to the home of a Brown's Bay woman who said a hum she heard at home was sickening her. Moir and Alam couldn't detect the noise but are now expanding their efforts by talking with others who hear a hum. From a Massey University press release:

"The fact of the matter is that we do not yet have an answer even though there has been keen interest and plenty of speculation world wide on this phenomenon,” says Dr Moir.

“At this stage we believe there are two possible explanations. The hum could be a very low frequency sound that only some people can hear. Or, it could be that microwaves in the atmosphere trigger a hum like sound in the heads of some people that would not necessarily be heard by others or picked up by recording equipment.”

Link to Massey News Article, Link to Television New Zealand article

UPDATE: BB reader Gerard Hughes comments that it might be a little premature to speculate on a cause:

They left out the most important possibility--that there is no hum. Before speculating on what causes a phenomenon one should prove that it exists in the first place. There are a number of famous scientific self-deceptions when people thought they could see or hear things even though their instruments detected nothing. René Prosper Blondlot's "discovery" of N-Rays is one such example. He thought the rays made a calcium sulfide thread glow very faintly but it turned out that the researchers were just fooling themselves. Link

Last month, I posted about artist Annamarie Ho's art installation/performance piece, "Binlang Shi Shr," about Betel nut girls, the scantily-clad young girls who sell the stimulant from streetside booths in some Asian cities. (Background here.) The closing performance takes place this Saturday, October 21, from 2-5pm at the Amelie A. Wallace Gallery at SUNY College of Old Westbury in New York.

From the show program:

Ho simulates a vending stand of the sort that becomes, in effect, a free-standing display case, where the "betelnut beauties" function as commodified mannequins. She includes an example of the accompanying neon business signs often phrased to sound like the names of love hotels in East Asia. In Binlang Shi Shr (Betelnut Girls), Ho not only expresses a concern over the "entrapment" of women in sexual-economic exploitation, but also exoticizes this selling process, as an actor hired for the performance interacts with viewers like a betelnut girl. Ho assumes her role as a stand owner who monitors the girl's behavior. Bringing this simulating experience of betelnut girls to the space of the art gallery, Ho also raises a larger issue of what's being sold in contemporary commercial galleries, as she uses the actor and the performance piece as a means to sell her installation.

Link to Ho's "Binlang Shi Shr" site with images and video from the installation

Dan Howland of the excellent Journal of Ride Theory is presenting an excellent art-project at London's Dana Centre. He sez,

Brendan Walker has arranged for various people with an interest in rides, thrills, etc, to do brief presentations, then we bring out the telemetry equipment, which allows us to monitor facial expression, heart rate, breathing, etc, all in real time via Bluetooth, and we send some poor sucker on a fairground ride out in the Science Museum's back yard, while the audience watches. Then we let the audience outside to experience the ride themselves. We've actually been getting some interesting data -- it appears the subjects' heart rates are highest in anticipation of riding. It drops during the actual ride. Who knew? The release form for the riders is printed on a sick bag.

Link (Thanks, Dan!)

Bruce Schneier has a thought-provoking essay up about the nature of architecture and security, inspired by the gradual removal of the concrete "anti-bombing" bollards that were arrayed around buildings after 9/11. Schneier points out that whether or not the barricades are good security, they are at least removable security that can be taken away as the threat (or our understanding of it) changes. He contrasts this with "security" measures that are permanently integrated into architecture -- both technological and physical -- which we have to live with forever, even if it no longer protects us from any threat.

When Syracuse University built a new campus in the mid-1970s, the student protests of the late 1960s were fresh on everybody's mind. So the architects designed a college without the open greens of traditional college campuses. It's now 30 years later, but Syracuse University is stuck defending itself against an obsolete threat.

Similarly, hotel entries in Montreal were elevated above street level in the 1970s, in response to security worries about Quebecois separatists. Today the threat is gone, but those older hotels continue to be maddeningly difficult to navigate...

It's dangerously shortsighted to make architectural decisions based on the threat of the moment without regard to the long-term consequences of those decisions.

Concrete building barriers are an exception: They're removable. They started appearing in Washington, D.C., in 1983, after the truck bombing of the Marines barracks in Beirut. After 9/11, they were a sort of bizarre status symbol: They proved your building was important enough to deserve protection. In New York City alone, more than 50 buildings were protected in this fashion.

Link

Lisa Vollrath documents a beautiful book-binding art project: she took the cover off an old, falling-apart encyclopedia and filled it with wallpaper, art, photos, and other scrapbook sheets. Then she rebound it with wire and old rulers. It's gorgeous. Link (via Craft)

This enterprising crafter cross-stitched a cover for a Nintendo DS case that looks like a controller from an old Nintendo Entertainment System -- cross-stitch patterns are included. Link (Thanks, Ape Lad!)

Update: Margaret sez, "That DS case is needlepoint, not cross stitch! It's not your fault, the creator referred to it wrong as well. Cross stitch looks like little x's. Needlepoint purists would even call this plastic canvas rather than needlepoint."

Wendy Seltzer of the Chilling Effects project has done a comprehensive roundup of the unfair and undesirable language in the new Windows Vista license -- all the abusive crap you "agree" to when you give Microsoft your money. Upgrading to Vista is the start of an abusive relationship that could last for years.

4. Problem-solving prohibited. "You may not work around any technical limitations in the software." Microsoft might be referring to anticircumvention of technical protection measures here, but since it's often hard to tell the difference, from the user's perspective, between a TPM and a bug, this reads as a prohibition on user debugging and problem-solving. After all, down-rezzing, HD content or refusing to allow users to copy quotes from an e-book don't strike most people as wanted features. Can you work around a document's failure to save properly?

Link

Wired News rounds up its top-ten list of virtual goods for sale in the virtual world Second Life, from working yachts and space-ships to auto-translators and musical instruments.

5. Auto Emote
L$300

Now, your avatar can express facial emotions. Outy Banjo's script "shows your emotions based on what you type," with more than 300 different phrases that will automatically trigger expressions of anger, fear, laughter and more. Banjo, whose SL business is his full-time job, said his primary income comes from configurable scripts, but in only two months, the Auto Emote (SLurl) has become his best-selling item.

Link

Sun's Project Blackbox is a complete data-center built into a stackable shipping container. Just add electricity, bandwidth, and Uzi-toting goons and your mobile secure supercomputing center is ready to go anywhere the shipping lanes will carry it.

Project Blackbox is a prototype of the world's first virtualized datacenter--built into a shipping container and optimized to deliver extreme energy, space, and performance efficiencies.

Designed to address the needs of customers who are running out of space, power and cooling, Project Blackbox gives customers a glimpse into the fast, cost-effective datacenter deployments coming in the near future--where thinking out of the box means putting an IT infrastructure in a box.

Link (via Hack the Planet)

A Tokyo rail company has put footstep-powered generators under its ticket-vending machines; the tread of passengers generates electricity to power the machines. I've always loved the idea of little piezo generators that capture our ambient kinetic energy as we move through the world.

JR East's new experiment consists of energy-generators under ticket wickets, a milliwatt-tracking counter, and 700,000 daily commuters. For the next two months, the railway company will be using using the vibrations of human footsteps at Tokyo Station to generate up to 100 milliwatts per second per person that walks through. The idea is to be able to generate enough electricity to power the wickets themselves and their display panels regularly.

Link

This Japanese 15x microscope attaches to your mobile phone's strap-grommet, ready to enlarge any fiddly little thing you happen across on your daily round. Link (via Gizmodo)

If you've been paying attention, you already know that the TSA's No-Fly list and secondary screening lists are a joke, but even so, this excellent investigative piece from CBS News will blow your mind. The TSA's lists contain people who are dead. They contain the presidents of foreign countries. They contain incredibly common names like "Robert Johnson." These farcical lists are supposed to secure the skies, and the way they're supposed to do it is by denying air travel to thousands of innocent people (without catching a guilty person smart enough to use a fake ID). Even worse, because the gargantuan lists have to be widely circulated, the CIA won't allow the names of actual terrorist suspects to be added to them -- in other words, the No Fly lists only contain the names of people who aren't under any serious suspicion.

"We got a look at the No Fly List from March. And included on that list were 14 of the 19 September 11th hijackers. How do you explain that?" Kroft asks.

"Well, just because a person has died doesn't necessarily mean that their identity has died. People sometime carry the identities of people who have died," she says.

"What you are saying is that you have no information that this person is alive and poses a threat. It's just a name in the database," Kroft asks.

"In order fort the name to get in the data base there has to be information that they are a known suspected terrorist," Bucella says.

"So you are saying it's just a coincidence that there are 14 names in the computer that match the names of 9/11 terrorists. I mean, the people that are on the list have the same date of births as the people that were killed in the – that died in – the suicide bombers from 9/11. I mean, how do you account for that?" Kroft asks.

Bucella asked how recent this watch list was. When told it was from March, she said, "For some reason the agency might not necessarily want to have taken the name off the list. I can't explain that."

"Also on the list is Francois Genoud, who was a Nazi sympathizer and financier of Arab terrorism. Been dead for ten years," Kroft remarks.

Link (via Making Light)

Jonathan Lundqvist says,

I'm a Swedish researcher who recently returned from a month in Iran, where I was interviewing bloggers on their possible participation in a democratization process.

During my stay there I picked up a few issues of some western magazines at the university bookshop, and found to my surprise that they were censored by the Iranian regime!

They had simply gone through the magazines and used black ink and white stickers to cover up any offending material - most notably images, in both articles and advertisements, of women with a little less clothes than prescribed by local laws.

To make a long story short, I snapped some pictures of the censored pages and I just thought that it may be fun for you so see how western magazines look over there.

Link to the full text of his post, including lots of magazine page scans.

Top Image: "Wallpaper, Sept 2005. Louis Vitton advertisement. They redesigned the dress. The black [portion of the dress] is not supposed to be there."

Middle: "The Economist, Apr 16 2005, pp78-79. Two censored images in the Books and Arts section. One of Billie Holiday’s shoulders and the other is some kind of drawing. I’m very curious as to what lies beneath here. It must be of considerable danger, considering the dual use of ink and sticker."

Below: "This is part of the wrapping that the magazines came in. Nashravaran Journalistic Institute is the organization (agency?) that handles that censorship. They also stamp all magazines with a stamp upon inspection. It’s mind-boggling to think of the people whose work it is to sit there with a giant felt-tip pen and cover up skin all day long."

Bottom: here's the original LV ad in which Uma's bazoomas are unencumbered by black ink, as is their natural inclination.

BoingBoing reader Skot shot this photo at a market in Costa Rica: a line of cleaning supplies called "Terror." Oh, what dark, foreboding poetry lurks in those long-lasting pink suds. Do we use it to cleanse the world of terror, or does the war on terror wash our Constitution away? One wonders what might become of the foolish adventure traveler who attempts to fly back to the US with this stuff in their suitcase. Link to larger size.

Reader comment: Anonymous says,

Your article on the terror cleaner reminded me of an energy drink [called "Semtex"] that I first encountered while traveling through the former Czechoslovakia: Link. Here's a nice page about the history of [the explosive substance called] Semtex and its use in terror incidents: Link.

BoingBoing reader Brad Wilson found some t-shirts in a Hong Kong shopping mall emblazoned with such tech-themed English terms as "BLOGGER," "EMOTICON," and "FTP" -- definitions included. Link 1 and Link 2 to larger images.

Reader comment: Donald Tetto says, "Somebody's been using Wiktionary... Link."

A Canadian Tory Member of Parliament has been suspended from participating in Conservative caucus meetings for making critical remarks about his party on his blog:

Caucus chair Rahim Jaffer said Wednesday that Turner was ousted in part for critical comments made about the party on the blog that he has maintained on his website since the federal election last January.

"There have been different attacks at different times. We've got quite a significant record of them," Jaffer told reporters, adding that the posts included criticism of the prime minister.

Link (Thanks, John!)

Representatives from the Center for Technology and Society at Brazil's prestigious FGV School of Law were barred from entering a recording industry press conference.

Yesterday, IFPI (the international version of the RIAA) held a press-conference in Brazil to announce their massive new global lawsuit campaign, suing 8000 people in 17 countries.

The delegation of scholars and activists from the Center for Technology and Society had been accredited to attend, but when they arrived, they were not permitted in the room. Organizers claimed the room was full, but press representatives in the room say that there was plenty of room. IFPI wouldn't even give the professors copies of the press-release, saying they'd run out of them.

FGV has fielded a petition to the Brazilian National Congress decrying this. The Congress is considering changes to Brazil's copyright law, and this is the kind of shenanigans that the entertainment industry is running:

The IFPI, that represents the major recording companies in the world, held this morning a national (Brazilian) press release to officially inform that they are initiating a new round of court actions, this time in Brazil, against users of peer-to-peer networks, a system for downloading files, including music, through software like Soulseek, eMule etc.. They are spreading their court actions from the USA to Brazil.

FGV´s Centre for Technology and Society, under the A2K programme, has prepared a document clarifying the situation and proposing an amendment to the Brazilian copyright law in order to bring a balance to the discussion.

Since FGV was not allowed to enter the conference room, there being bodyguards walking around to intimidate our peaceful professors, they waited until the journalists and photographers were coming out of the room to speak to them and to deliver the document.

All of the journalists got very interested on the issue, and were surprised that FGV was barred from the meeting, despite having had its accreditation accepted.

Link (Obrigado, Pedro!)

You may know David Byrne as a musician, author, and PowerPoint experimenter, but he also thinks about and designs chairs:

"Why chairs? Well, they have arms and legs and vaguely human scale — and shape. They're people — they hold you, support you, elevate you or humble you. They're funny or elegant, funky or gorgeous, social or aloof. They're characters with lives and histories...aren't they?"

Byrne's "Furnishing the Self — Upholstering the Soul" is at Pace/MacGill Gallery gallery in New York through November 25. Details here. (Thanks, Danielle Spencer!)

Cursors That Kill is a great tee that makes it look like you're bleeding pixelated blood from wounds opened by GUI cursors that have pierced your chest. Link (Thanks, Mikelite!)

Fantagraphics, publishers of the greatest comix in the world by the likes of Daniel Clowes, Los Bros Hernandez, and Jim Woodring, is opening a store in Seattle, Washington! The Fantagraphics Mega Mart opens for business this Saturday. I think there should be A Fantagraphics Mega Mart in every town. From the Flog!:

We will really pull out all the stops beginning in November, with a grand opening in early December. What I can tell you now: The store will contain everything Fantagraphics has in print, including our soon-to-be-legendary damaged room, featuring discounted and often out-of-print books unavailable anywhere else. The space also has room for exhibitions, which we'll have more news about very soon.

Link

All you need to know about this link is that it contains video of shrimp on a treadmill, and that it is not the latest viral release from the band OK Go.

The shrimp treadmill, invented and built by [Pacific University biologist David Scholnick], allows researchers to measure the activity of an exercising shrimp for a set period of time at known speed and oxygen levels.

Link (Thanks, ScottG In NYC)

Built by David Glicksman, the "Device Patented Process Indicating Apparatus" is a stately ambient display that can be configured to represent almost any PC data, from security threat levels to real-time stock prices to keystrokes per minute to weather fluctuations. The analog dials can be controlled independently and the test tube is filled with Agar-based gel that glows at five present intensities. The red light on top can be programmed to flash "in extreme circumstances." It will apparently be available for sale "soon."

From The Device description:

• Made of fine, handcrafted cherry wood, with a brass inlay and a lacquered finish.
• Measures 14" wide, 8" tall, and 6" deep.
• Green felt on the base protects The Device and your desk from each other.
• A 3' cloth sheathed USB cable provides PC connectivity.

Link (via MAKE: Blog)

The largest record company in the world has initiated the first big-media lawsuit against video-sharing websites. Snip from Financial Times:

In separate lawsuits, Universal alleged that Grouper.com – recently acquired by Sony Pictures Entertainment – and Bolt.com had built up traffic by encouraging users to share music videos from its artists without their permission. In one incident, it claimed a video for the Mariah Carey song “Shake it Off” was viewed more than 50,000 times on Grouper without the company’s permission.

Link. (thanks, Glyn)

BB pal Steven Johnson's new book The Ghost Map will be published tomorrow. An account of an 1854 cholera outbreak on London's Broad Street, The Ghost Map is a magnificent combination of science thriller, cultural history, and celebration of cartography as a powerful tool to help us understand the dynamics of urban life. I'm halfway through the book and it's absolutely, er, engrossing. We're delighted that Steven will be our guest on next week's Boing Boing Boing podcast. From Steven's blog post that he wrote when he completed his manuscript:

In many ways, the story of Broad Street is all about the triumph of a certain kind of urbanism in the face of great adversity, the power of dense cities to create solutions to problems that they themselves have brought about. So many of the issues that define the modern world today -- the runaway growth of megacities, environmental crises, fears of apocalyptic epidemics, digital mapping, the need for clean water, urban terror, the rise of amateur expertise -- are there, in embryo, in the Broad Street outbreak.

So The Ghost Map is in part a disease thriller, with some genuinely spooky and unsettling narrative turns. But it also widens its focus to tell the history of London's sewer system, the evolutionary history of bacteria, the biological and cultural roots of the miasma theory, the bizarre waste management techniques of Victorian society, and so on. It is the story of ten days in London in 1854, but it's also an attempt to tell that story at three different scales of experience: from the point of view of the humans living through it, but also from the point of view of the cholera itself, and the city.

Link to buy The Ghost Map, Link to a video of Steven discussing the book, Link to his blog entry

Reuters: "The Kazakhstan central bank has misspelled the word “bank” on its new notes, officials said Wednesday." Link. (thanks, kingkong)

Senator Rick Santorum compares Iraq to "Lord of the Rings":

As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else. (...) It's being drawn to Iraq and it's not being drawn to the U.S. You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don't want the Eye to come back here to the United States.

Link (Thanks, Tim Grieve and many others)

Reader comment: Dan Armak says,

I thought you might want to post this explanation of what the Senator's allegory actually means for the benefit of readers who aren't familiar with LOTR.

In the LOTR, to draw the Eye away from Mordor, Gandalf and Aragorn led the army of Gondor to the Gates of Mordor to draw out Sauron's army and let Frodo sneak past them. This, they knew, was a suicidal move. As Gandalf said: "We must make ourselves the bait .... We must walk open-eyed into that trap, with courage, but small hope for ourselves." (Chapter IX, 'The Last Debate')

So the Senator is saying the US soldiers in Iraq are bait. They're there to die, just to keep terrorists' attention away from the US for a while.

Snip from a Reuters item:

Disaffected people living in the United States may develop radical ideologies and potentially violent skills over the internet and that could present the next major U.S. security threat, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said on Monday.

"We now have a capability of someone to radicalize themselves over the internet," Chertoff said on the sidelines of a meeting of International Association of the Chiefs of Police. "They can train themselves over the internet. They never have to necessarily go to the training camp or speak with anybody else and that diffusion of a combination of hatred and technical skills in things like bomb-making is a dangerous combination," Chertoff said. "Those are the kind of terrorists that we may not be able to detect with spies and satellites."

Chertoff pointed to the July 7, 2005 attacks on London's transit system, which killed 56 people, as an example a home-grown threat. To help gather intelligence on possible home-grown attackers, Chertoff said Homeland Security would deploy 20 field agents this fiscal year into "intelligence fusion centers," where they would work with local police agencies.

Link, and Link to t-shirt thumbnailed above. (Thanks, Erik)

Reader comment: Xopl says,

Not the first time:

"The hardest thing to determine is the purely domestic, self-motivated, self-initiating threat from the guy who never talks to anybody, just gets himself wound up over the Internet," Chertoff said.

Link. I'll see you all in jail.

Astronauts gave etiquette lessons and practical advice to potential space tourists attending this week's International Symposium for Personal Spaceflight in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Some of the the tips are obvious, like clean up the toilet after using it, don't be a window hog, and avoid looking directly at the sun. (Apparently, one space tourist burned his retina by staring into the sun through a magnifying camera lens). From New Scientist:

The space veterans also offered practical advice to save time and frustration in orbit. They suggested women with long hair might cut it if they are planning to be in space for more than a couple of days. On shuttle flights, some women with lengthy manes spend about one hour every three days carefully shampooing their hair, then dabbing it dry. This is time that could be spent looking out the window at Earth.

They also said duct tape proves useful for capturing dental floss or fingernail clippings that might otherwise float around the cabin and become a nuisance to other passengers.

Link

AllofMP3, the notorious Russian music-selling site, has lost its Visa account and says it will switch to giving away free, ad-supported music. The site claims that its activities are legal under Russian law. Though it may not be legal under other countries' laws for their citizens to download the music, AllOfMP3 says it has a blanket license to sell the music and no obligation to figure out what the laws are in each of its customers' jurisdictions.

The US Trade Representative has been threatening to scuttle Russia's entry into the World Trade Organization if they don't shut down AllOfMP3, but nobody in Russia seems to care much about WTO membership. Sitting on one of the world's largest oil reserves makes membership in the WTO somewhat moot -- Russia will always be able to find trading partners.

AllOfMP3's new proposed business-model is a little confused. They say that they will give away free music in some kind of DRM wrapper, and force you to watch ads before you listen. But they also say you'll be able to play the music on an iPod, if you buy uncrippled music for cash.

But it seems unlikely that they'll be able to ship a working DRM (an oxymoron), and I don't understand how they'll be able to sell you the "premium" iPod versions if they don't have a Visa account -- isn't that the whole problem to begin with?

The "ad-player" sounds suspiciously like the business model that Kazaa and other P2P companies retreated to after the P2P venture capital dried up in the face of music industry lawsuits -- a path that led straight to spyware.

AllofMP3 said Tuesday that as of Wednesday, its business model would move toward an ad-supported distribution of free content. The company, which previously charged about $1 an album, plans to offer consumers a new software program that allows them to download any song from the site for free. AllofMP3 claims to have a catalogue of hundreds of thousands of albums, increasing at a rate of 1,000 per month.

Users of the new service will only be able to listen to songs by using the AllofMP3 software, and the songs will be usable on just one computer at a time. The interface, called Music for the Masses, will initially be available for Microsoft Windows, with an Apple version arriving in several weeks, Mamotin said.

Consumers who wish to transfer their songs between computers or to a music device like an iPod or another MP3 player, will have to pay for the music.

The idea, Mamotin said, is to make the offering attractive enough to win new customers and build a big enough community to attract advertising.

Link (Thanks, AV!)

Update: Michael sez, "They seem to have a couple of different end-arounds; one is at AllTunes.com (apparently a partner) and the other is at http://www.xrost.biz/ -- prepaid cash cards of some description. I don't have a real hunger for music, but I do use AllofMP3.com a *lot* for my daughter's current interests. And the $25 I put on there last March goes a very long way indeed at 5 or 10 cents a track. I am considering doing an xrost card for next year's payments now, though. :-)"

Here's a fascinating interview with Bob Arno, a Vegas-based consultant who studies the techniques of pickpockets:

How do you track down pickpockets?
I stuff my wallet with paper and keep it in my pants pocket. Then I linger in prime tourist spots in foreign cities. Sooner or later, someone steals the wallet, and I try to steal it back.

Really?
Yeah. If I successfully steal the wallet back -- and I often do -- the thief is usually willing to share the latest techniques.

What's a classic ploy?
A pickpocket squirts mustard on you unawares. He approaches you, points at the stain and starts to clean it. While he distracts you with one hand, he robs you with his free hand.

Link (via Schneier)

This "Child Costume: Toilet" is deeply depressing disturbing. $49. From the product page:

Child Toilet costume is a very funny kids Halloween costume. A Child toilet costume is also perfect for every potty mouth kid. Use as a modern day Dunce cap. Young boys love this silly Toilet bowl Halloween costume. One size fits most kids size 7-12.

Link (Thanks, Jen Lum!)

The Congressional Joint Economic Committee has begun work on a framework for figuring whether and how to tax transactions involving virtual objects from video games and online worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft. This issue was predicted with spooky clarity in Julian Dibbell's excellent Play Money.

“There is a concern that the IRS might step forward with regulations that start taxing transactions that occur within virtual economies. This, I believe, would be a mistake,” Chairman Jim Saxton said today.

In response to this concern, the staff of the Joint Economic Committee has begun an examination of the public policy issues related to virtual economies. A virtual economy is defined as the universe of transactions that occur within an online community, such as Second Life or World of Warcraft. These transactions include the sale of goods and services and take place entirely within virtual economies; there is no real-world or physical exchange. However, a real-world value can often be assigned to such transactions using exchange rates or other methods.

Link, PDF link to Joint Economic Commitee release (Thanks, Mobius!)

Sony's new PlayStation 3 will come ready to run Linux, and now a company has announced that it'll actually ship a Linux for the PS3:

Terra Soft today announced that it will bring its Yellow Dog Linux v5.0 to Sony's forthcoming PlayStation 3. This news makes Sony's announcement of Linux support via the console 100% official and means that users will essentially be able to turn their gaming system into a fully-functioning computer, replete with whatever applications they feel like installing, be it for entertainment or business. According to Terra Soft's website, Yellow Dog Linux v5.0 will be available in mid-November for the PlayStation 3, and then a version for Apple PowerPC systems will follow shortly thereafter.

Following the company's standard release system, v5.0 will be made available in a three-phase product rollout. At launch, users of the company's YDL.net service (which comes at a cost) will be able to download the OS to their computer and burn a bootable disc for installation on the PlayStation 3. Two weeks later, the company will offer ready-made installation discs for purchase through the site. Two weeks after that, it will be made freely available on public mirrors. In short, if you're willing to wait one month after the system's release, you'll be able to download Linux for it for free.

Link (Thanks, Paul!)

This chair made from vintage suitcases looks like a million bucks. Link (via Neatorama)

Mertz sez, "The Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences, a small org promoting in-game filmmaking, announced today their nominated films for this year's Machinima Awards (also known as the 'Mackies'). Nominees include Strange Company's BloodSpell for Best Series, Male Restroom Etiquette for Best Writing and perennial favorite Red vs. Blue for Best Writing and Best Voice-Acting. The real surprise is The Adventures of Bill and John: Danger Attacks at Dawn, a machinima based in a flight sim, which leads the pack with 9 nominations. The Festival takes place on Saturday and Sunday, November 4 and 5 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, New York, with the awards ceremony on the Saturday night." Link (Thanks, Mertz!)

This skull and bones wood plaque, retrieved from an old Odd Fellows Lodge in Nebraska, is up for auction on eBay. Current bid is US$1,025. It drives me wild.

From the auction listing:

Rare beautiful example of fraternal art, this LARGE 16" inch wood plaque with the SKULL and Cross Bones emblazoned. Found in the long closed Pawnee City, Nebraska lodge. which was chartered in the 1870's... There is some paint loss but you know how rare these are!!!

Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne Rauback!)

Jay Leno tells the story of a three-wheeled car, built 70 years ago by a 17-year-old amateur mechanic. Leno now owns the car, and has painstakingly refurbished it.

He recalled that he asked his father for a car as he was about to graduate from high school in the early 1930s. But his dad replied that if he wanted a car, he should build one. So, 17-year-old Bob scrounged parts and made his own car. It was a little three-wheeled coupe powered by a 77.2-cu.-in. four-cylinder 1931 Indian motorcycle engine. Bob called it Philbert the Puddle Jumper. He and his brother, Edward, made headlines in local newspapers in the Northwest when they drove it on a 6000-plus-mile jaunt. He told me that he eventually racked up 150,000 miles on it.

Link

Snip from an article by James Glanz at the New York Times:

A team of Russian and American scientists said yesterday that it had created the heaviest element ever seen in a laboratory, a dab of matter that lasted for less than one-thousandth of a second but would add an entry at the farthest reaches of the periodic table and suggest that strange new elements may lie beyond.

By convention, the substance remains the Baby Doe of elements until its existence is confirmed at other laboratories. For now, the new substance will be principally known as element 118 for the number of protons in its nucleus, more than in any other element occurring naturally or produced in the laboratory.

Link, and Video of Mr. Glanz talking about the story. Image: Calcium, with 20 protons, being accelerated into Californium, with 98 protons. (Sabrina Fletcher and Thomas Tegge/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory).

Edward Gomez at sfgate.com blogs:

George W. Bush got what he wanted, ostensibly as a tool in his unfocused "war on terror": By signing into law the Military Commissions Act of 2006, Bush has made it legal for the C.I.A. to continue operating torture facilities in undisclosed, foreign countries, and for the writ of habeas corpus to be suspended for individuals who are designated "enemy combatants" against the U.S. (Designated by whom? That question remains unanswered.) The law also "establishes military tribunals that would allow some use of evidence obtained by coercion [that is, torture], but would give defendants access to classified evidence being used to convict them." (Reuters)

The provisions of Bush's new torture law mean that Americans have lost the key, constitutional right on which Anglo-American criminal law (and criminal-law procedures in true democracies in general) is founded; that's the basic right of an individual to know why he or she is being apprehended and detained. Now, technically, as in Stalin's Soviet Union, Hitler's Germany, Mao's China or Pol Pot's Cambodia, anyone labeled an "enemy combatant" - again, by whom; by Bush? - can be whisked away and never heard from again. That kind of authority, in the hands of corrupt or untruthful politicians, may or may not be an effective tool in some kind of "war on terror," but it certainly can be a useful tool when it comes to silencing their opponents.

Link

Nicholas DiFonzo is one of the world's leading experts on gossip. Well, at a meta-level. The Rochester Institute of Technology psychologist studies how gossip and rumors spread and the difference between the two. According to his bio, he's also been an expert witness in lawsuits surrounding the (false) rumors that Procter & Gamble was somehow involved in satanism. In a new academic book, titled Rumor Psychology, Difonzo and management professor Prashant Borida, present their findings on rumor propagation, the psychology of why people believe them, and how to manage the rumor mill in a company setting. According to their research, "most workplace rumors are 95 percent accurate." From an RIT press release:

“A rumor is what you do when you try to figure out the truth with other people,” DiFonzo says. “It’s collective sense making. The classic example is ‘I heard that…’”

Gossip, on the other hand, is sharing information with an agenda, he says. It could be for entertainment or to bond with another person or to reinforce a social norm. Gossip, which may be true, tends to have an edge.

“Gossip is more to do with social networks,” DiFonzo says. “A strong motivation we have as humans is to connect with a group.”

Link to press release, Link to buy the book

George Dyson, our guest for this week's edition of the Boing Boing Boing podcast (link to BB post with podcast audio urls and story background) shares another batch of documents from Project Orion.

This was America's abandoned plan to send nuclear bomb powered spaceships to other planets. Most of these documents have never before been published, and were classified for many years.

Images -- Above Left: Dyson explains, "This document is really provocative, it's from the Arabic edition of Project Orion, and includes this cutaway of a pulse unit that is still classified."

Above Right: Cutaway diagram of 10-m vehicle.

Lower Left: redacted USA version of the pulse cutaway diagram (the unredacted version in Arabic is shown above).

Link to complete set of scanned "Orion" documents, on Flickr.

Update: BoingBoing reader Samir M. Nassar emails a translation for the Arabic text (after the jump).

BB reader Ehsan says,

Thought it might be interesting for you: Iranian governemmt has sent a letter to all ADSL providers in Iran, to limit access of their users to bandwidth above 128kbps. Before this, many people used ADSL connections ranging from 64kbps to 2.0mbps.

The market was growing rapidly, and the current change has put ADSL providers in a tough siuation. Let alone poor users who have lost some basic access to this (semi-)free media.

As you know, filtering internet resources using censoring software like your favorite(!) SmartFilter and some in-house solutions is common practice in Iran. Apparently internet is one of the bad bad things which is not favored by IRI government.This is contrary to what I observed in the previous president's trend.

Since none of the news agencies in Iran has published the english version of this news yet, I have to refer to this only: Link.

Update: more in this wire service report: Link.

Roving gangs of big baboons are terrorizing suburbanites in Cape Town, South Africa, brazenly breaking into homes, cleaning out refrigerators, and shitting all over the place. Now, rival human groups have emerged, some wanting to protect the monkeys and others wanting to clear them out or kill them. From National Geographic:

"I have had them in my house several times, even while I was there. They simply brushed past me. I had to get out of the way," (said Joan Laing, co-chair of the ironically-named Welcome Glen Baboon-Free Neighbourhood Action Group.) "Even my husband got threatened by a baboon."

She insists that monitoring teams trying to keep the baboons at bay are not effective.

"These animals are quick. They can cross walls and roofs at speed. For two or three people to try to keep them away is impossible," she said.

"They move in a troop of about 30, and they are so wide apart that it is impossible to stop them slipping into built-up areas..."

The source of the problem is human encroachment into the baboons' historic habitat.

Link (via Fortean Times)

This hardware hacker was experimenting with liquid cooling for an old motherboard, immersing it in oil in a tin pan. Once that worked, he decided to heat the oil up and make french-fries in it, while playing Quake on the PC that was being slowly deep-fried along with the chips. It worked for a while, then the machine had to be rebooted (and it continued to work after that!)

Eventually, though, the strain of 120 degrees C ambient temperature and the load of Quake 3 caused the computer to overheat and crash. I rebooted it, and it loaded back into windows. Although Quake 3 still crashed when trying to play. At that point, the chips were ready. I turned off the heat and enjoyed my snack while I waited for the oil to cool so I could use the computer again.

Link (via Neatorama

In 1926, mystery writer Agatha Christie disappeared for eleven days. He car was discovered in a ditch off the side of the road. While she was later found living in a hotel in Harrogate, England under a different name, the reasons behind her vanishing and odd reappearance were never made clear. In a new biography titled The Finished Portrait, author Andrew Norman posits that Christie was in a "fugue state," a bizarre mental condition similar to amnesia where one assumes a new identity. From The Observer:

Norman, a former doctor, believes the novelist was in a fugue state, or, more technically, a psychogenic trance, a rare, deluded condition brought on by trauma or depression, which may also have led the writer and actor Stephen Fry to travel to Bruges in 1995 without leaving word with his friends or family.

'This kind of fugue state, which is much better understood these days, fits the symptoms that Christie showed during her stay in Harrogate,' said Norman.

In his book, The Finished Portrait, Norman says that her adoption of a new personality - she took the name Teresa Neele - and failure to recognise herself in newspaper photographs were signs that the novelist had fallen into a psychogenic amnesia after a period of depression. 'I believe she was suicidal,' said Norman. 'Her state of mind was very low and she writes about it later through the character of Celia in her autobiographical novel, Unfinished Portrait.'

Link

Agasi Vartanyan claims that he set a new world record for fasting, allegedly having gone 50 days with no food. Inspired by David Blaine, he had spent the time in a plastic cube on the Neva River near St. Petersburg, Russia. When he emerged, 23kg lighter than when he began the fast, Vartanyan yelled at reporters because nobody seemed to care about his stunt. From the Associated Press:

"I feel offended because my efforts did not attract much attention," the 46-year-old said. "Only local media wrote about it..."

A spokesperson, Lybov Kobzar, told reporters that Vartanyan drank about three litres of water a day. To pass the time, he watched TV, listened to the radio, and talked on his cellphone.

Link

A reader writes, "A computer that uses strands of DNA to perform calculations has mastered the game tic-tac-toe."

Each well contains between 14 and 18 DNA logic gates. After a human player makes their move, MAYA-II responds through a DNA reaction. The strand outputted feeds into a series of other DNA logic gates that link the different wells. This results in a chemical reaction that generates a green fluorescent glow in the square MAYA-II selects as its next move. The strand also interacts with the remaining wells, priming them to respond appropriately to future moves.

"MAYA-II moves bio-computation up to the next level of power," says Joanne Macdonald, a researcher at Columbia University, who helped build the system. "It's similar to the invention of the first microchips with hundreds of logic gates."

Link

Keith sez, "This is something creepy just in time for Halloween! Back in Victorian times, it was, from what I understand, fairly common to prop up dead people and take their pictures; often times with their surviving family members." Link (Thanks, Keith!)

My student Andy Sternberg has launched a great site today, "The Small Print Project," which looks to catalog all the "agreements" we find ourselves "consenting to" when we open a box, install a program, sign up for a service or visit a website. These "terms and conditions," "terms of use" and "end-user license agreements" do terrible violence to the noble agreement, backing us into arrangements that no sane individual would ever agree to. Sony's DRM made you promise to delete your music if your house burned down; Amazon Unbox lets them spy on your computer and shut down your videos if they don't like what they see. And it doesn't stop there. Think of the "agreements" on the back of your dry-cleaning tickets, on your plane tickets, in your credit-card statements, and your cellular phone contract.

Just last week, I had to cancel a speaking engagement at Disney Studios, whose speaker agreement includes a clause in which you promise never to use the word Disney again in an article or story without their written permission (!). This is apparently non-negotiable.

Real agreements usually reflect a negotiation among near-equals who sit down at a table and hammer out something that's mutually acceptable. Small print agreements shove some power-mad lawyer's idea for maximizing his benefit at your expense down your throat.

Andy's looking for your favorite small print -- bad and good -- for his catalog. Head over and submit the latest "agreement" you were asked to make. Link

Reminder for Angelenos! Tonight, Revver co-founder Steven Starr will speak at USC main campus as part of my "Set Top Cop" speaker series:

Revver is a company that helps video creators add commercials to their short films, which creates a situation where the more a video is copied, the better it is for the creator. this is in marked contrast to the Hollysaurs, who are still pursuing improbably businesses that only work if they can make the Internet worse at copying bits.

Steven's talk is part of my ongoing series of talks by copyright scholars, engineers, security experts, policy wonks and other people with interesting things to say about the copyright wars. We podcast every one, and they're attended by a really eclectic mix of artists, hackers, international development types -- even lawyers from major studios.

Steven's talk fits in by talking about new platforms for creativity that embrace the Internet's fundamental nature as a machine for copying bits fast and freely -- business models that don't try to change the world, but rather, capitalize on it.

Where: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, main campus, Annenberg School, Room 207

When: Tuesday, October 17, 2006, 7PM-9PM

Link

Disney won't license its characters to sugary food-products or those that contain trans-fats. They've also pledged to clean up the food in the parks -- and about time, too. Last time I was there, the only milk option for coffee was high-fructose corn-syrup-based CoffeeMate -- if you wanted real milk, you had to buy an entire pint (and they didn't have anything except full fat milk).

In a statement, Disney said it has outlined new guidelines for the foods it will allow to carry one of its licenses.

For instance, added sugar in those foods will not exceed 10 percent of calories for main and side dishes and 25 percent of calories for snacks. Total fat will not exceed 30 percent of calories for main and side dishes and 35 percent for snacks.

Disney has also pledged to eliminate artery-clogging trans fats from both the food served at its theme parks and in its licensed and promotional products.

Link (Thanks, Xeni!)

Dori had her cherished WEB GEEK California plate stolen off her car, presumably as a souvenir. It's a gargantuan pain to replace it, and she's hoping that someone in blogistan knows of its whereabouts, so she's offering a no-questions-asked return policy. Link

Creative Labs has "updated" two of its MP3 players in order to break their FM radio recorder features. If you bought your Creative device because it said, "Record FM radio!" on the box, you're shit outta luck now -- Creative just stole that value out from under your nose. Guess that means I'm not going to be buying anymore Creative devices.

Creative has released a firmware "update" for its Zen MicroPhoto and Zen Vision:M players, which adds Audible support and other minor fixes to the former, video zooming and language support to the latter, but removes FM recording functionality from both players.

Link (Thanks, Amy's Robot!)

Episode #5 of the Boing Boing Boing podcast is ready for downloading. Our guest this week is George Dyson, tech historian and author of books including "Project Orion," which chronicles America's now-aborted plans to send nuclear-powered spaceships to Mars and other planets. Excerpt:

[George Dyson]: "In a world where now you can't fly with a bottle of water, we were going to let these physicists fly with 3,000 nuclear bombs. We need to remember the freedom that we've lost. We've become the opposite of what we were trying to be."

During the podcast (total time: 39:38), Mark, Pesco and I talk with him about:

* Burger King's pot patties (starts at 0:45)
* The selfish part of your brain (3:26)
* Batman creator Bob Kane's comic swipes (6:17)
* Roy Lichtenstein's comic swipes (9:07)
* Open source nukes, Kim Jong Il set up U.S. the bomb (12:19)
* Project Orion: nuke-powered spaceships (16:48)
* What it's like to live in a treehouse, as George once did (25:53)
* How to pee in a baidarka, or Aleutian kayak (28:01)
* George's next book, "Barricelli's Universe." (29:10)

LISTEN:
Podcast (MP3), Podcast (.m4a, with chapters). Podcast Feed, Subscribe via iTunes, Direct MP3 Link (64K, 19MB), Direct MPEG-4 Link (20MB). About file formats: MP3 is the more commonly-used audio format for podcasts. MPEG-4 (MP4/AAC/m4a) includes support for chapters, embedded artwork, notes, and urls (iTunes-compatible).

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UNPUBLISHED "ORION" DOCS:
George shared with us some scans of never-before published, previously classified documents from Project Orion, and I've posted them to Flickr. They include letters to Project Orion scientists from officials at the US Defense Department and Air Force, and internal documents from General Atomics:

Link to photoset.

George's father, physicist Freeman Dyson, was among the project scientists; more on that in this essay George wrote for the current issue of Make.

He tells us a little more about his next book by email:

"Barricelli's Universe" will be a creation myth for the digital universe -- based on solid new documents, but leaving room for the imagination to fill things in. Now that we are 60 years out from the beginning, we can start trying to look ahead. With a nod to J. D. Bernal, who warned (in "The World, the Flesh, and the Devil") that “we are still too close to the birth of the universe to be certain about its death.”

UPDATE, 10/17 1PM PT: More documents uploaded to the photo set, details here.

MUSIC: The tune you hear in this podcast is by Q-Burns Abstract Message, aka producer and indie digital music entrepreneur Michael Donaldson -- who is featured today in this extremely cool Apple profile.

The song is his remix of "Angel Soup" by Cold Hands, recently released on vinyl and digital via Blunted Funk Records. Listen to the whole thing here, with info on where you can purchase his DRM-free music.

Update, 10AM PT: QBAM just posted a DJ mix to djsanonymous.org available for free download! Link to mix.

TECH NOTES: We recorded this podcast as a Skype conference call, and captured it with AudioHijack. The audio was later edited in Apple's Garage Band, after some help from Levelator. Special thanks to Leo Laporte for invaluable tech advice on how to tweak Skype for better audio quality, some of which is also archived here.

Reader comment: Mark Levitt says,

I was listening to the BoingBoingBoing podcast with George Dyson and it reminded me of the novel "Footfall". Written by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, it tells the story of an alien invasion and earth's struggle for survival.

The way the earthlings eventually win is to build a spaceship powered by exploding nuclear bombs underneath.

I always liked the story and the go into a fair bit of detail about how it would work. I never realised that someone actually tried to build one or even that Niven and Pournelle hadn't just made the whole idea up themselves.

Anyway, I loved listening to the podcast. Thanks!

ThinkGeek's carrying a line of simple, low-priced LED light-bulb replacements. They last ten years and draw one thirtieth of the power consumed by incandescents. I think the only downside here is that something that's this long-lived is bound to be obsolete long before it's burned-out. That's the green paradox: green manufacturers focus on long-lived tech because that's good for the landfills, but they also do such good R&D that the next generation of products is often miles better and miles longer-lived, which presents the dilemma of throwing away green technology before it's used up in order to replace it with wildly more efficient successor technologies. Link (via A Whole Lotta Nothing)

Back in August, I blogged the hilarious, handsome monster laptop sleeves from Barry's Farm, which make your computer look like it's been eaten by a Muppet. I bought one of these and I've been using it all week, and I love it -- even the TSA goons who shook me down in JFK on Sunday were moved to grin and joke by it.

Now Barry's Farm has introduce a whole range of monster laptop sleeves with the classic good looks of various fuzzy monsters from antiquity, including the wonderful Abominable Snowman from the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer cartoon pictured here. Link (Thanks, Barry!)

Reprodepot sells fabric that comes with a "license agreement" that prohibits you from making commercial goods out of the material. What this means, at the end of the day, is that they're not selling you anything at all -- instead, they're licensing the fabric to you, and it isn't your property, and you can't do with it what you want.

"Intellectual property" is a recent term-of-art, and historically, it's been about copyright as a metaphor for property. On the other hand, selling textiles has been around for millennia, and there's nothing metaphorical about your ability to truly own the shirt on your back.

In the name of preserving a muddy metaphor about property, we're increasingly willing to abandon real property. It's a kind of feudalism, wherein people who can lay some claim to "copyrightable expression" (whether it's a fabric design, the software in a car engine, or the movie on a DVD) are the only people in the world who get to possess real property, while we peons are stuck with being pathetic licensors whose only remedy, if we don't like the license terms on offer, is to try to find another feudal lord who'll cut us a better deal.

Ever wonder why your butcher, the kid who sewed your shoes, or the woman who picked your fruit can't get the same kind of deal? Why should screening a design on a bolt of fabric magically confer the right to turn what's obviously a sale into a non-negotiable license, but not doing back-breaking stoop-labor?

*Please note: This fabric can be purchased for personal sewing projects only. This print cannot be used for items made for resale.

Link (Thanks, Leontine!)

Update: Scott sez, "I'll just point out that the law is not on their side under the First Sale doctrine. See Precious Moments v. La Infantil, 971 F. Supp. 66 (D.P.R. 1997) (finding that first sale doctrine permitted defendant bedding manufacturer to utilize lawfully acquired fabrics imprinted with the plaintiff's copyrighted work). "

Update 2: Reprodepot have posted a response:

Years ago, we had had a problem with a few people making children's clothing with her fabric, and selling them on Ebay while using her company's name which was hurting her business. The text was posted specifically as a deterrent to those people.

We are very aware that we could never enforce such a rule and it was never intended to be taken as a threat of legal action or to be taken as a blanket rule for all of the products on our website. We have reworded the statement it so it is understood as a request (our initial intent), not a demand.

Asking people not to falsely advertise their products is sane and sensible (though it wouldn't be false advertising to say, "This was made from official Heather Ross fabric" if it was true). Asking people not to make commercial uses is also appropriate if that's what it is -- a request.

It's nice to hear that it was intended as a request, but that's not how it was worded. There's not much ambguity in "This print cannot be used for items made for resale." That's a requirement, not a request. A request might run more like the phrasing in the response, "The artist has asked us to ask you to use this for your personal projects and not for resale projects."

Over the morning, I've heard from readers who report similar language on fabric for sale at Wal-Mart and other retailers. The idea that you can sell someone something, but not really sell it, is pervasive. It's a subtle and widespread attack on property.

Norms are a good thing. Asking a dinner guest not to steal the silverware is fine. Locking down the spoons is anti-social.

I've been a fan of Reprodepot since Mark blogged them here in 2002. It's good to hear that they're clarifying the way they interact with their customers.

Update 3: Heather Ross has asked me to say that she doesn't enforce any policies limiting the reuse of fabric bearing her designs.

PCWorld's "History of Computers, As Seen in Old TV Ads" is an hilarious trip down memory lane -- I'm very fond of this Newton ad, which reminds me of just how much I fetishized those early PDAs. I wish they had the "I Adore My 64" ads, which contained the greatest rhyme, evar, "I write with it, create with it, I telecommunicate with it!" Link (via /.)

Mmmm, smell the leather. And get a load of that rack. Images from "Libraries," a book of photographs by Candida Höfer documenting the very lovely insides of great libraries around the world. Link (Thanks, Siege).

Link to a neon sign in Brooklyn that received a Goatse makeover (worksafe explanation) from BoingBoing reader Ben, who explains:

"My roommate Allyson and I were out in Park Slope, Brooklyn tonight and once again passed our favorite neon sign - Hot Bagels Open. (Indeed.) She had her camera so we snapped a pic of the gaping brightness, and rather than add the famous goatse hands digitally, I thought I'd give it the real life treatment."

Reader comment: Paul Michael Doherty says,

I can do SO much better than that. This photo was taken from a bagel store in downtown Copenhagen.

Stu Mark says,

With regard to your Bagel Goatse, I am reminded of the end gag of a Family Guy episode, which features the Family Guy gang as little kids, Our Gang-style. The end of the situation had Peter and Quagmire swearing off girls forever. Fast forward to the boys turned men, incredibly wealthy because they weren't distracted by the opposite sex. The last line is Peter saying, "I'm going to go microwave a bagel and have sex with it." and Quagmire responding "Butter's in the fridge."

BoingBoing reader Solon Brochado in Brazil writes,

Former US vice president Al Gore will be in Brazil this Tuesday, Oct. 17th, as a special guest at the award ceremony of "Prêmio Eco" (Eco Award), awarded by the American Chamber of Commerce to companies that "adopt socially responsible practices, generating a rich reflection on the development of the Enterpreneurial Citizenship concept and practices in Brazil".

After the awards ceremony, mr. Gore will deliver a speech on the "impact of climate changes caused by global warming". This link (in Portuguese, sorry) is for a release detailing the press credentialing process. The interesting part are the last two bulleted paragraphs, where it explains how the press will be removed from the premises before Mr. Gore's address, "due to copyright commitments with various international entities that contribute data and images used in Al Gore's presentation". Only invitees (and the American Chamber of Commerce's own press aides, of course) will be allowed to watch the presentation.

Am I wrong in finding it rather odd that a presentation that's been thoroughly mentioned in American press, based on a movie that's been screened worldwide, should be closed to the Brazilian press due to copyright issues of data that, I'm quite sure, must be public for quite some time now?

UPDATE: BoingBoing reader Pedro Pinheiro in Portugal offers a translation of the aforementioned Portuguese-language website, after the jump.

BoingBoing reader Kim in Houston, Texas says,

Last Friday night, a small music venue here in Houston (Walter's) was in the middle of a show when a cop walked in on a noise disturbance call (not unusual for Walters), and instead of talking with the management to turn down the music or shut down the show, walked straight up to the stage to tell the band to shut down. The band had no idea what was going on and asked why, at which time the cop tried to grab one of the musicians' guitar, and then slammed the musician to the ground... of course from that point on melee ensued, with at least three people being tasered by this cop, and several people being arrested. One of the kids tasered was a 14 year old kid who was there with his parents! One account states that the boy's father was also tasered.

Several accounts have published online: Link, video, more video, and another.

Local news reports have been almost exclusively based on the police reports, and say the cop was "attacked" by the band and audience and that he did the right thing. However the videos and first person accounts show something completely different.

THIS IS NOT OK. Cops cannot be allowed to just do whatever they want however they want (in this case almost instigating a riot), and that TASERS SHOULD ONLY BE USED IN SITUATIONS WHERE THE COP WOULD HAVE USED HIS GUN. Not just as a convenience. Just last week Houston cops killed a man using their tasers, and again, the question has to be asked, was that a situation where they would have previously used a gun? I would have hoped not.

Looks like metblogs in Houston has been covering this as well: Link.

Reader comments: Kim says,

Just a quick update. The city is having a public hearing on the Houston police officer vs. the band & audience incident today.

"Anyone interested in speaking at city council open session to address the police brutality that happened at Walter's last weekend needs to call 713 247 1840 and have 3 minutes set aside. It will be at 1:30pm . Please mention officer Gabriel Rodriguez's name and make strong note of the fact that he was chasing people with a taser which makes evident he was not threatened but rather being an aggressor."

COUNCIL CHAMBER - SECOND FLOOR - CITY HALL 901 BAGBY - HOUSTON, TEXAS

Christina says,

Link to another account, complete with multiple videos and photographs of the injustice of the HPD responding to a "noise violation."

Kim says:

I attended the public hearing yesterday, however there were somthing like 260 people signed up to speak to the City Council that day, the majority of which were there regarding the upcoming vote on a smoking ban. It was three hours or so before they got to the speakers regarding the incident at Walter's.

I had to leave before that, but if I remember correctly, between 8 and 10 people had signed up to speak, and when it was time to speak, I was told about 5 of the people signed up were still there. But I'm still impressed that people came out to speak.

A friend was watching the hearing online, and said that the Council actually seemed concerned with what the speakers were telling them. And he said that one of the council members who usually sides with the HPD looked very worried and concerned for speakers.

Thank you to those who stayed for speaking out!!

There is also an article on Pitchfork where the band playing (Two Gallants) speak out about what happened.

And there's a a new article in the Houston Chronicle regarding how this incident could hurt our music scene.

Google's headquarters in Mountain View, CA will soon become America's largest solar electric installation on a single corporate site, and one of the largest such projects in the world, according to solar power systems integrators EI Solutions.

The solar firm will build an installation at the Googleplex with a total capacity of 1.6 megawatts ("enough to supply 1,000 average California homes," according to EI's press release). Equipment will include 9,212 solar panels by Sharp Electronics, to be placed on rooftops and parking lot tops throughout Google's campus.

3D rendering: here, and EI Solutions will present these renderings at the Solar Power 2006 expo in San Jose this week.

Top image (full-size): Conceptual design of the planned solar installation, created using Google Earth and Sketch Up. Lower image: (full-size): Andrew Beebe of EI Solutions (L), with Google co-founder Sergey Brin (R).

The New York Times reports:

Lynne F. Stewart, the firebrand lawyer who was charged as a terrorist for helping a client in prison on terrorism charges to communicate with his followers, was sentenced today to 28 months in federal prison, far less than the 30 years the government had sought.

Prosecutors had argued that Ms. Stewart repeatedly flouted the law to aid the violent designs of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who was sentenced to life in prison after he was convicted in plots to blow up five New York landmarks and assassinate Egypt’s president. Ms. Stewart represented him at his 1995 trial.

Link. A statement on the website of the self-described "radical human rights attorney" compares her case to to historic legal cases of "Haymarket [and] Sacco/Vanzetti," and states that the 67-year old woman is "fighting breast cancer and has suffered the worst punishment —- she is no longer able to legally represent people in Court." Link. Here's the Wikipedia entry on Omar Abdel Rahman.

The OV-Watch is a $99 wristworn sensor that measures the salts in the wearer's sweat to identify when she's most fertile. From the product page:

Researchers in the late 50s and early 60s noted that numerous salts (chloride, sodium, potassium) in a woman's sweat fluctuated in relation to the menstrual cycle. Chloride levels are low at the start of the menstrual cycle and peak three times during the cycle (see graph below). Using a patented biosensor, OV-Watch detects a baseline chloride ion level for each woman and then accurately predicts ovulation based on the timing of the first peak. The OV-Watch detects the chloride surge 3 days prior to the estrogen surge, 4 days prior to the LH surge and 5 days prior to ovulation, making it an earlier predictor of ovulation than any other chemical surge during the month. During the clinical trials for FDA approval with Dr. Arthur Haney at Duke University, approximately 3 out of 4 women received the full 5 day notice of ovulation while only 1 in 6 women were given more than 12 to 24 hours notice with urine tests or LH kits.

Link (via Gizmodo and Medgadget)

When Matthias Wandel took an introductory music class in college, he was inspired to learn piano. He couldn't afford to buy a Casio keyboard to practice on, so instead he built his own pipe organ from scratch. He started by building two wooden pipes in his dad's workshop and mounted those on a vacuum cleaner motor as the pump. He had to insulate the motor in a foam-paced box to make the noise tolerable. Eventually, the vacuum motor burned out and he replaced it with a much more durable precision blower from a surplus auto part shop. From Wandel's build notes:

After the vacuum cleaner motor died, I was very lucky to find a 1/12'th Hp motor and precision blower at Princes Auto (A surplus store), for a grand total of $20. I used a scroundged O-ring as a belt, and adapted the paper feed pulley from an old teletype by sanding an indentation into it for the O-ring to run in. The pulley on the blower also needed modifications, so I removed the shaft and cut a groove for the O-ring into it on a metal lathe in the student machine shop at the University.

This combination I placed in the box I had built of 2" planks. The combination was so quiet that its noise became a total non-issue. At about the same time the real vacuum cleaner we were using in the house died, and I was able to reuse the bearings from that motor to fix our actual vacuum cleaner.

Link (via MAKE: Blog)

Many pro portrait photographers end a shoot by asking their subjects to jump into the air as a way to catch them at their "loosest." Latvian-American photographer Philippe Halsman, who shot more than 100 Life magazine photos, pioneered the technique in the 1950s. The new issue of Smithsonian honors Halsman's jumptastic images. (Seen here, Richard M. Nixon.) From the article:

In 1950, NBC television commissioned him to photograph its lineup of comedians, including Milton Berle, Red Skelton, Groucho Marx and a fast-rising duo named Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Halsman noticed that some of the comedians jumped spontaneously while staying in character, and it was unlikely that any of them jumped with more antic enthusiasm than Martin, a crooner and straight man, and Lewis, who gave countless 10-year-old boys a class clown they could look up to.

It may seem like a stretch to go from seeing funnymen jumping for joy to persuading, say, a Republican Quaker vice president to take the leap, but Halsman was always on a mission. ("One of our deepest urges is to find out what the other person is like," he wrote.) And like the true photojournalist he was, Halsman saw a jumpological truth in his near-perfect composition of Martin and Lewis.

Link

Are UFOs actually the devil's minions sent not from the stars above but the fires of hell below? Over a Fortean Times, Sheffield University folklorist David Clarke surveys this odd niche of ufology literature identifying ETs as demons or, if we're lucky, angels. From the article:

On the one hand there is a group of evangelicals – mainly Americans, such as Dr Billy Graham – who have said the UFO occupants may be angels sent by God to watch over us. The best-known exponent of this idea is the Presbyterian minister Rev Barry Downing, author of Flying Saucers and the Bible. Downing appears to be open minded about aliens as part of God’s creation and to look to the scriptures for evidence of early ET contacts.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are some members of the Christian Orthodox Church 1 who find it impossible to accept that there is any goodness in the elusive and contradictory nature of UFO behaviour. The most extreme expression of this view is that there can be no ETs because life on other planets is not mentioned in the Bible. It’s a point of view that leads its proponents to a further conclusion: if there are no aliens in the Bible and the UFO occupants aren’t angels, then UFOs can only be demonic in origin.

Link

Gary attended the Big Fresno Fair and found a "Copyright-protected area" sign by a stall where a busker was selling the chance to have your picture taken with a bird. The idea was to use copyright law to stop you from taking your own pictures instead of buying them.

One of the side-effects of the entertainment industry's war on copying is that it's created a kind of folk-mythology about copyright being a kind of magic word you can invoke to put a fence around anything that you want to police. There's no such thing as a copyright-protected area -- it might be reasonable, if you're in the taking-pictures-of-kids-with-animals business, to take some steps to shut out the competition, but appropriating the extraordinary "author's monopoly" that is copyright is both lazy and dishonest.

Any businessperson has to contend with the realities of the world. Blacksmiths don't get to demand that we abandon the railroad and go back to riding horses they can shoe. Maybe it was once possible to take a studio photography business (where you could control who came in and hence set the rules about taking your own pictures) on the road with a county fair. But if your business depends on ensuring that your photons only enter the lens of your camera, then putting those photons in a public place is a bad idea.

You've either got to take the losses you get from amateur photographers, use norms ("Please don't take your own pictures without asking, I do this for a living") instead of threats, or get into another line of work. Inventing magical copyright protection for the patch of dirt where you pitched your tent is the wrong answer. Link (Thanks, Gary!)

Edward Lee is a talented photographer who specializes in shooting dramatic pix of toys poised for action. Link (Thanks, IZ Reloaded)

Wired News editor (and notorious reformed hacker) Kevin Poulsen has an article up today explaining how he wrote a script that ferreted out registered sex-offenders on MySpace, something the company has refused to do. Some of the offenders he found were just hanging out with their friends and families, but a few were actively soliciting sex from children -- his work led to the arrest of one such, Andrew Lubrano.

Poulsen's project appears aimed at producing some empirical data on whether pedophiles are using MySpace, and whether MySpace could effectively police their activity (Fox, who own MySpace, are lobbying for a law requiring sex offenders to register their email addresses to make this easier). But he evinces skepticality about whether this would be a particularly useful technique in the long term -- and I agree. This only works for so long as sex offenders use the names they were arrested under (or under Fox's proposal, it only works if they voluntarily obey the email registry law even as they set out to commit another crime). Presumably, if Fox was continuously combing its registry for known offenders, word would get around and the bad guys would assume aliases.

In May, I began an automated search of MySpace's membership rolls for 385,932 registered sex offenders in 46 states, mined from the Department of Justice's National Sex Offender Registry website -- a gateway to the state-run Megan's Law websites around the country. I searched on first and last names, limiting results to a five mile radius of the offender's registered ZIP code.

Wired News will publish the code under an open-source license later this week.

The code swept in a vast number of false or unverifiable matches. Working part time for several months, I sifted the data and manually compared photographs, ages and other data, until enhanced privacy features MySpace launched in June began frustrating the analysis.

Excluding a handful of obvious fakes, I confirmed 744 sex offenders with MySpace profiles, after an examination of about a third of the data. Of those, 497 are registered for sex crimes against children. In this group, six of them are listed as repeat offenders, though Lubrano's previous convictions were not in the registry, so this number may be low. At least 243 of the 497 have convictions in 2000 or later.

Link

Update: Jenn Shreve sez, "This is a follow-up to a piece I wrote for Wired News in May. In that article, I manually compared My Space pages to those in California's Megan's Law database, based on a suggestion from Alex Strand of MySpaceWatch.com.

BoingBoing reader and Battlestar Galactica fan Matt Dukes says,

I turned 31 today, and we had my birthday party at my place. We didn't know if anybody was bringing cake, and we had 25 people coming, so we knew we had to make several. Naturally, I came up the only logical solution to the problem -- a fleet of Battlestar Galactica cakes!

When it was all said and done (5 hours later), we had the Galactica, the Pegasus, a Cylon Ressurection Ship, and cupcake squadrons of Vipers and Raiders (my personal favorite). We tried to make Cloud Nine, but, um, it blew up. :)

Here's a link to my Flickr photoset with the cakes in it. Hope you like it!

Like it? Matt, your Galacticakes are frakkin' awesome. Speaking of which, I spotted this t-shirt on blogging.la author Jay Bushman at a BSG premiere party a couple of weeks ago: Link (Thanks, Spencer Cross!)

Update: Here's a silly music video cobbled together by BSG fans: Link (Thanks, Craig!).

Reader comment: Sean McGettigan says, "This is a video I threw together using youtubed BSG footage, and of a friend of mine singing a tribute to the lovely Starbuck (Kara Thrace) of Battlestar Galactica: Link."

Serious BSG fan Jeff says,

"I plan to travel across Canada and try and convince the powers that be to hire me on Battlestar Galactica. I'm in Halifax (on the east coast) and BSG films in Vancouver (on the west coast), so I'm trying to scrape up money for a cross country trek, and then somehow get them to give me a role on the show when I get out there (anything will do!)."
Link to Jeff's website. Jeff: if you succeed in your valiant quest to make it to Vancouver, do try and make sure you arrive while the show is actually in production, not on hiatus or on a between-season break. :-)

On Friday, I posted about artist Paul Szauter's beautiful Maine Mystery Beast sideshow banner that was to be auctioned off this afternoon. I suggested that the winner might donate it to cryptozoologist Loren Coleman's International Cryptozoology Museum. Whaddayaknow! Journalist and blogger Rogier van Bakel won the banner and says he'll do just that. What a generous, wonderful act-of-cryptozoological-kindness. From Rogier's post:

Kids — who knows what goes through their minds. Earlier this week, when I was reading a children's tale to my four-year-old daughter, she stopped me halfway through the first chapter because it was "too scary." The book: Paddington Bear...

Today she surprised me again by immediately taking a shine to an acrylic-on-canvas sideshow banner I'd just bought at auction...

As a longtime Fortean and a fan of Fortean Times magazine, to which Coleman contributes (as have I), I found Pescovitz' request pretty compelling. So I do indeed plan to donate the banner to Coleman, for public display. Next time I make it to Portland, I'll pay his place a visit and drop off his prize.

For now, my daughter loves the painting and has it on loan in her room. Good thing it doesn't feature Paddington Bear, or she might not be able to sleep at night. Link

As soon as Rogier emailed me, I called Loren to tell him. "Loren, I have wonderful news. Guess what!" His half-joking response, "You found a Bigfoot!?!?" Ummm.... Sadly, no. But great news nonetheless! From Loren's email reply to Rogier:

Many, many thanks. I am overwhelmed with joy to hear it was picked up by someone that understands.

I've just finished reading Julian Dibbell's astounding Play Money, a gripping memoir of his year spent trying to earn his living buying and selling virtual artifacts in video-games.

Dibbell is a sharp writer and a sharp thinker, and the book is dense with ideas so skiffy and weird that it probably contains the germ of thirty science fiction novels (my story Anda's Game, about virtual Mexican sweatshops, was inspired by his original reportage of this phenomenon). Dibbell's charm is that he loves the game and loves gamers -- their trash-talking camaraderie, their furious grudges, the ticklish surreallity of an entrepreneurial strategy that needs to take account of where the scariest in-game monsters are, which arcane pseudo-medieval trades are likely to contain the largest quantity of exploitable, undiscovered bugs, and whether the IRS will class the in-game ore your bot mines for you as taxable (because it is like a prize on a game-show), or exempt (because it's imaginary) -- and whether the fact that you sell some of that ore for hard currency makes a difference.

Dibbell's quixotic journey (in one year, earn enough from in-game trading to truthfully report to the IRS that he's making more as a virtual-goods broker than he ever has as a freelance writer) is fascinating and terrible. His marriage collapses (he insists it's unrelated). His friends tell reporters that he's become gold-obsessed. He is ripped off by hackers in Malaysia and identity thieves of unknown origin. His teenaged mentors come to him for advice on their love lives or desperate to unload some gold for cash so that they can score some weed in time for their birthday.

The other brokers are the most fascinating part of the book -- some of them driven loons with dozens of computers in racks, some semi-anonymous Chinese "biotech executives" hoping to start a Chinese gamer-sweatshop with Dibbell as frontman. They're aggro teenagers or retired software engineers -- all of them doing this ineluctably weird and wonderful thing, turning games into bucks.

Games may exploit some deep evolutionary leftover that causes us to be mesmerized by the steady brain-reward from constrained tasks with measurable goals and the need to groom other primates to achieve them. Exploiting that seems a little -- well, mercenary. But perhaps the same can be said of all our trades: music, visual art, storytelling, these answer a human need that originally evolved to keep us in harmony with our fellow monkeys, or to keep us striving for better foraging ground, or to keep us in the running for prime mating opportunities. If turning a buck off of the compelling nature of play is cheap, is it any cheaper than turning a buck off the compulsion of a good story? Link

As you might have guessed, both Mark and I are big fans of Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy comic strips. However, I had never seen this excellent 1988 essay How To Read Nancy. It was written by Mark Newgarden, co-creator of the Garbage Pail Kids, and cartoonist Paul Karasik. Not only does it give a bit of insight into Bushmiller's brilliance, it's also a great, concise educational essay about visual storytelling through the analysis of a single strip.

From the essay (ignore the OCR type-os):

To say that Nancy is a simple gag strip about a simple-minded slot-nosed kid Is to miss the point completely. Nancv only appears to be simple at a casual glance. Like architect Mies Van Der Rohe, the simplicity is a carefully designed function of a complex amalgam of formal rules laid out by the designer. To look at Bushmiller as an architect is entirely appropriate, for Nancy is, in a sense, a blue print for a comic strip. Walls, floors, rocks, trees, Ice-cream cones, motion lines, midgets and principals are carefully positioned with no need for further embellishment. And they are laid out with one purpose in mind - to get the jag across. Minimallst? Formalist? Structurallst? Cartoonist!

"Gag it down" was Bushmiller's off-spoken credo and the gag was the raison d'etre of Nancy. Characterization, atmosphere, emotional depth, social comment, plot, internal consistency, and common sense are all merrily surrendered in Bushmiller's universe to the true function of a comic strip as he unrelentingly saw it: to provoke the "gag reflex" of his readership on a daily basis.

Link to PDF

Dig these dirty hippie halloween costumes, from Becca's "30 Days of Halloween Costumes" series on her No Smoking In The Skullcave blog.
Link (Thanks, Coop!)

Legendary game designer Chris Crawford has disclosed some information about his next big project, an interactive storytelling platform called Storytron.

I saw a demo of Storytron this weekend, given by sf writer Laura J Mixon (author of the early cyberpunk classic Glass Houses), who's working on the project. It seems like there's a lot of potential there -- it's basically an engine for describing autonomous game-AIs that exist to move a story forward. The toolkit is simpler than learning LISP, but harder than rolling up a quickie avatar in WoW -- the kind of thing you're going to have to care about before you get good enough to see much in the way of results. I think that code examples and libraries of user-created characters can make the hump a little shallower -- but this is a tool for storytelling, and there's no getting around the complexity of that task.

Mixon described her aha moment with the technology -- she'd defined some characters and set out to "play" or "solve" the story they inhabited. She happened upon these little automata, going about their daily round, and then watched slack-jawed as the two characters improved a totally spontaneous argument that made perfect sense in the context of the story she'd set out to "write" in her design, but which she had not anticipated, written, or hinted at. The game took on a life of its own and inserted some reasonably good dramatic fooforaw at just the right moment -- the computer was telling her the story.

Now, that's pretty cool.

CC: I will not claim that it is superior to conventional algorithmic notation. We simply won't know that until people start using it. I'm playing a hunch here. Perhaps the most useful observation is that we don't have to be locked into algebraic notation.

DDJ: How else does SWAT accommodate nontechnical types?

CC: The storybuilder does not get to create types. I create the types. And every [datatype] is color-coded: Booleans are black, actors are blue, quantifiers are purple. I think this is useful for amateur programmers. Another thing: Runtime errors are survivable. It happens by virtue of the design of the system that runtime errors only occur when we are considering an action or changing something, and when that happens, we say it poisons that calculation. This invokes a system called "Poison" that logs it for future reference. "Rehearsal," our testing feature, plays the storyworld one way, adjusts a random number, does a thousand passes, and then presents you with a statistical analysis. You had this many poisoned events. Looping cycles. Thread killers.

Link (via /.)

Paul E. Martens's story, "What Dead People Are Supposed to Do" appeared in last week's edition of the horror podcast Pseudopod (I'm just catching up with my podcasts after a week teaching the Viable Paradise science fiction writing workshop on Martha's Vineyard) and it's fantastic. Perfect for Hallowe'en.

Brad is a gormless single manager in a telemarketing firm whose father died in debt and was therefore revived and turned into a telemarketing zombie who works to pay off his credit card bills. Iris is Brad's ex, who is trying to make Brad understand that their relationship ended because Brad just doesn't care about anything. Spurred by a need to impress Iris and by the impending repayment of his father's debt (with concomitant switch-off) he decides to show his zombified father a good time.

It's funny, it's got heart, it's sick -- what more could you ask for?

My dad sits in his recliner. He doesn't talk, or eat, or breathe. He watches TV. He comes home from work and he watches TV. I don't know if he knows what's on, or if he cares. We sit in the dark and the light from the TV screen flickers on his already greenish skin, reflected light and shadows lending his face the only animation it's capable of. It looks unnatural, which, of course, it is.

But what is natural these days? Talking monkeys? Dogs that go shopping? Designer diseases? Crops that pick themselves? Gene-jockeys and bio-mechanics have tinkered with so many things that I've lost track. Maybe it's a good thing that there are still laws about what they can and can't do to people. People that aren't dead yet at least.

Iris said it was wrong of me to have Dad brought back from the dead to work off his debts. But I didn't ask him to run up the balances on all those credit cards. I think a son should be entitled to inherit something from his parents. Am I wrong?

Link, Podcast feed link

The MP3 players that McDonald's Japan is giving away in a Coke-sponsored contest reportedly come loaded with QQpass, a malware app that spies on you and sends your personal information to some anonymous hacker. Link

The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty (bus-ads with pictures of beautiful, but heavy, or old, or off-average models) has posted a video called Evolution. It depicts an attractive -- but blemished and drab -- model being prepped for a bill-board, from the makeup to the photoshop. It's a very effective short film.

Regrettably, it's a stupid Flash video without a pause button, volume control, or fast-forward/rewind buttons. Argh. What a dumb way to do advocacy. Link (via Plasticbag)

Update: Here's a Quicktime of the video. Thanks, Michael!