Anil Dash tells BoingBoing, "Vox is a fun place for sharing with the people you care about, with a ton of features and functionality. We plug into everybody out there, whether it's the Google kids with YouTube or our Yahoo friends at Flickr. And of course Amazon, but that's less sexy and Web 2.0 compliant. :)" Link.
Sixapart launches Vox, new social media-stuff sharing service
Anil Dash tells BoingBoing, "Vox is a fun place for sharing with the people you care about, with a ton of features and functionality. We plug into everybody out there, whether it's the Google kids with YouTube or our Yahoo friends at Flickr. And of course Amazon, but that's less sexy and Web 2.0 compliant. :)" Link.
Firefox 2 config tweaks
Gina Trapani at Lifehacker has a great roundup of helpful tweaks you can make to the best browser on the planet, which just got bester: Link. Don't forget the 1000+ add-ons available for Firefox, too. (via Laughing Squid)
Engineering prof teaches image processing with BB photo
BoingBoing reader Richard Alan Peters is Assistant Director of the Center for Intelligent Systems at Vanderbilt University School of Engineering. He teaches two courses there about image processing. Not long ago, he asked us for permission to use a group photo of the BoingBoing crew shot by Bart Nagel in a lecture slide about the mathematics of image manipulation. Nagel kindly obliged, and professor Peters in turn said,
I've decided that I'd like to make the .ppt lectures for "EECE-253, Image Processing" and "EECE-254 Computer Vision" freely available with a Creative Commons license that requires only that I get cited for their use. Do you know where a good place would be to make them available?Thanks, Dr. Peters! Alas, Mark didn't fit on the math donut. Slides, large size: one, two. In the photo, L-R: Mark, David, John, Cory, Xeni.Here is a link to the slides from the intro lecture from my course, EECE/CS Image Processing (Vanderbilt University, Fall 2006).
I'm happy to make all of them available, but they are pretty large (e.g., this one is 16MB). I might be able to get enough webspace at Vanderbilt to put them up for public access, but I don't have it right now. Right now the whole set totals out at 340MB.
I used Bart Nagel's photo on pages 32 and 33 of this lecture. They are also in the lecture on the Fourier Transform. The slides look best and display best if viewed in full-screen mode with Adobe Acrobat (hit control-l that's little ell).
Happy birthday, Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso was born on October 25, 1881. Thumbnail below: a photo of the artist and his son, shot by Robert Capa. BoingBoing reader Roberto Greco says,
More on "nervio" and ultracute moments caught in photographs.This photo [also] relates to a specific application of the [Spanish] word "nervio". Shortly after meeting my wife, she introduced me to the nuanced meaning that the Spanish word nervio had acquired in the lexicon of her family. As used in their Chilean home, the word could be defined as a feeling of such intense affection that one trembles or grits his teeth with restraint so as not to harm the object of his affection. I have heard others allude to the sensation in seemingly bizarre phrases such as, “It’s so cute [that] I want to squeeze it to death.”
L.A. hospitals dump patients on Skid Row
Los Angeles residents concerned about the sprawling human dumping ground that is Skid Row have long suspected that some hospitals routinely drop off patients there -- eject them from a van, dazed or drugged and sometimes still wearing hospital gowns, left to wander the streets and fend for themselves. This week, reports have surfaced which confirm those suspicions.
Over at blogging.la, Sean Bonner says,
On Monday LA Voice linked to this LA Times story stating that LAPD officials had photographed and videotaped ambulances from Los Angeles Metropolitan Medical Center allegedly dumping five people on skid row over the weekend and were calling it a major break. Since then both NPR and CNN have jumped on the story. What's worse is that of the 5 cases from this weekend, at least one of them was not even homeless and other reported they did not want to be taken to Skid Row. From CNN:Link. Photo (large size) by Matthew Logelin. (thanks B)In one case, a man dropped off at Skid Row was in fact not homeless, said Smith, the LAPD captain. A police officer took him home and the man's family was "outraged," he said."Not only did they not know that he was discharged, but the fact that he had been brought to Skid Row instead of being brought home was what further outraged that family," Smith said at a news conference Tuesday.
Reader comment: Bob says,
From Christine Pelisek's article in the LAWEEKLY, The Scourge of Skid Row: "Skid Row staph, or, more technically, a strain of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus that is sickening dozens of police officers, firefighters, health-care workers and homeless people."
Video the Vote
Videothevote.org asks you to "[Stop] voter suppression, by observing the vote and sharing the results on Election Day." Snip from manifesto:
Link to videothevote.org. Link to video PSA for the project.In 2000 and 2004, problems plagued the polls in different parts of the country: long lines, eligible voters turned away, voter intimidation, misallocation and malfunctioning of voting equipment. They were underreported on Election Day. Days and weeks later, a more complete picture of voter disenfranchisement emerged -- but it was too late. The elections were over and the media had moved on. Starting this election, citizen journalists -- people like you and I -- will document problems as they occur. We'll play them online, spread word through blogs and partner websites, doing our part to make sure the full story of our elections is told.
Previously:
Legal guide for bloggers covering US Election Day
Fleishman: Hacking the vote with absenteeism?
Glenn Fleishman says,
I don't think I've seen this mentioned on BoingBoing at all, but there's a very funny way to avoid the Diebold and related machines and have a paper trail. Vote absentee. In most states, there's no requirement to state that you will be physically incapable of reaching a polling place. More than 50 percent of King County (Seattle's county) voters now vote absentee. The county proposes eliminating all but a few polling places in about two to three years, which would also produce a relatively large savings.Reader comment: BB reader Mark (who, in his not-to-be-disclosed real life gig, knows a thing or two about the topic) says:There's two outcomes from this.
First, a paper trail is established for ballots. Ballots are still machine processed, but there's a paper, hand-marked backup. This defeats voting machines or tabulators that are programmed to cheat as long as a recount is required. In Washington State, a losing party may ask for a recount, and they are not required to pay if the recount changes the outcome or results in a change of more than certain percentage. This happened in our last gubernatorial election.
Secondly, it does establish one point of entry -- albeit heavily secured -- in which state-controlled malefactors could tamper with ballots. However, tampering with massive enough numbers of paper ballots over long periods of time involving sometimes hundreds of vote counters is a substantially more difficult problem than reprogramming weakly protected voting systems.
When I visited my polling place -- I haven't switched to absentee yet -- for the primaries several weeks ago, a poll worker said I could use a computer voting system, or a fill-in-the-bubble sheet. I opted for the latter. He said, "I don't blame you."
I don't know what every county does with absentee voting, but it's a very interesting analog response to a digital problem. Let's hack the vote by moving backwards to a more reliable paper trail, that has a long, long history of operation and thus is more transparent to abuse because of the many, many working parts involved. Absentee voting would also have solved the problems of disenfranchisement and intimidation in Ohio. I didn't hear any reports about absentee ballots being destroyed, stolen, or miscounted. (Perhaps that's the next strategy.)
Another benefit: the jurisdictions I’m familiar with typically don’t even open absentee ballots until after Election Day. If enough people vote absentee, it will let all the (insufferably hot) air out of the election night TV specials, which have become a bloated parody of kill-the-viewers-with-graphics sports coverage. There is something bizarrely attractive about the prospect of reverting to an electoral system not based on instant info-gratification.Pat Race says,
Many people are turning to absentee voting as a way to skirt the issues with electronic voting but absentee voting eliminates many of the securities of the secret ballot and introduces a lot of room for fraud and coercion.Matt Blank says,In nursing homes many people get "assistance" with absentee voting. An employer or controlling spouse could also easily interfere with the secrecy of an absentee vote.
I think since we already have a system with such limited secrecy we should eliminate the problems with electronic voting and give each voter a reciept or verification number so they can immediately go online and check to see that their vote was registered correctly?
Keep the curtains in place and make sure the law prohibits people from demanding your verification number and it will be the same level of secrecy as absentee voting with a much more reliable overall return. Link.
Just some more info on this matter: If you live in some counties in Utah you can register to have your ballot mailed to your house a week before the election whenever you are eligible to vote (this includes general and primary elections). It's not really absentee, but more of an early voting automation thing. More info at Link, and Link.
Borat = Mahir 2.0, but ees niiiice.
I am reluctantly, belatedly, but now utterly psyched about "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan". When I first saw the schtick, all I could think was: he's lifting this from Mahir "WELCOME TO MY HOME PAGE! I KISS YOU!" Çağrı, (shaking his hand at the 2000 Webbies remains one of the most awesome moments of my life) .
But all that's changed now. And between Borat's MySpace hijinks, the tons and tons of looks-like-homemade promo videos... this is the first big-studio movie that seems like it's nailing online viral promotion perfectly. How smart was Fox? MySpace, which Fox bought for $580 million, doing online street promotion for Borat, a Fox property... this is no "Snakes on a Plane" accident.
The first four minutes of the Borat movie are now online. I scour YouTube daily for new Borat junk, but I'm sure there's tons of other stuff I haven't seen yet: Link. Kazakhstan, I surrender.
Hollywood, four words: Borat/Mahir buddy flick.
(Thanks, Wayne Correia and Sean Bonner and Kathy Bakken)
Update: Defamer has an item today about Fox scaling back the number of US theaters screening Borat from 2000 to 800: Link. Contains the brilliant term, "neon-benutslinged." Points to this LA Times article, which reads in part:
Despite the slimmed-down release, "Borat" is almost certain to make money for Fox given that its production budget was a modest $17 million. Edward Douglas, who writes a box-office column for ComingSoon.net, said he expected "Borat" to open at $8 million to $9 million and ultimately gross $50 million.And Sean Bonner says there's an item in the new Wired about the Borat/Mahir connection: page 88, 3/4 page, QA with Mahir by Steven Leckart. Apparently Mahir is trying to sue "Borat" creator Sacha Baron Cohen over the matter:
WIRED: In the moc-doc, Borat is a globe trotting journalist, Are you also a man of letters?Reader comment: Dave Krooshof says,Cagri: I do journalism as a freelancer sometimes. I go travel sometimes and take pictures video-write, meet people for documentary.
WIRED: Borat's signature is his mustache, didn't you rock it first?
Cagri: I start first grow mustache, 10 or 15 years ago. Sometimes I been no mustache. I am male and mustache shows a male mature.
We were invited [Ed. note: Dave, I believe you mean "invitated"] to the pre-screening of the movie.Amos Kleiman says,I went to have a good time with my fellow bloggers, but I did not like the Borat role. I mistook it for making fun of Kazakhs, like so many other people do.
But the movie made me change my opinion 180 degrees. Borat confronts, and when you think he goes to far, he goes futher, trespassing social borders. And then futher. This is social horror. There were moments I was watching through my fingers, like I watched "The Blob" as a kid. And in the and it's very clear that the rednecks do think like Borat does. But they are real, Borat is a character.
This movie is a much more shocking portrait of the American society then Michael Moore's movie about Flint, MI. The Kazakhs need not worry. The joke is not on them.
To make matters "worse" all the Kazakh / gibberish spoken by Borat on the four minute preview is actually Hebrew. I wonder how that will go down...Particularly interesting because the majority religion in Kazakhstan is Muslim.
Reader Kyle Goetz says,
I just thought it was interesting that on the map in the first 4 minutes of the movie that shows where Kazakhstan is has all proper Russian (you can easily see "MOCKBA" which is "MOSCOW" written in Russian Cyrillic), but the "Cyrillic" label for Kazakhstan is gibberish (says something like KFYFLYEFI). And then I noticed that Φ occurs many times in the "word." Someone used a Cyrillic font in Word or something and typed "kazakstan." In this font (some faux Cyrillic font), K=K, a=Φ, z=Я, k=л, s=ы, t=Е, and n=й.Jesse Thorn from The Sound of Young America says,
Sacha Baron Cohen, who plays Borat, is an observent jew whose mother was born and raised in Israel. While in character, he often keeps notes and interview questions in Hebrew for his reference, with the idea that it's extremely unlikely that his marks will recognize the language as anything other than Kazakh. Or whatever they speak in Kazakhstan.Pearse says,
Simon Baron-Cohen is Sacha'sbrothercousin and one of the leading authorities on Autism and also how the male brain differs from the female. I wonder does Sacha read his books :) Link.
Three-year-old gets stuck inside vending machine
A three-year-old boy crawled through a vending machine's dispensing tube in order to get a Spongebob Squarepants doll. Firefighters were called to the scene. They handed the boy a screwdriver and he was able to free himself. Smart kid. The photo of the boy is priceless. Link (Thanks, Phil!)
Reader comment:
Max says:
Enjoyed your post about the kid stuck in the vending machine. It appears to be something of a trend, in fact. Check out the hilarious photos.1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Audio CD of answering machine recordings picked up in thrift stores
Jacob Smigel's "Eavesdrop: A Wealth of Found Sound is a collection of anonymous recordings found at thrift stores, yard sales, and in trash bins over the past four years. These unaltered tracks come from audio or micro-cassettes, 8-Tracks and home-recorded records. Many of the clips are segments from audio diaries, tape-letters, the sound of road trips, fights, crying, family moments, telephone conversations/messages, or the amusements of children or the mentally handicapped."
It costs $10 for the CD.
Here are some samples:
Hamburger Hamlet Two LA socialites tell all regarding a restaurant chain called Hamburger Hamlet.
Trailer Couple An old man forces conversation while learning to use a tape deck. He has no idea the way his conversation interacts with the music he is recording over.
BETA Video An awkward conversation, with pleasant pop culture references.
Midget-eating lion story is fake
I was fooled by the BBC midget-eating lion story. It's a hoax. Link
Legal guide for bloggers covering US Election Day
Lauren Gelman at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society says,
Link. Image courtesy of CreatureCantina, and has absolutely nothing to do with the Stanford project.Lots of bloggers are planning to cover the 2006 general elections on November 7. But what are the legal issues that you need to understand?
Such as: Can you be in the voting area except to vote? (Not in Delaware) Can you ask people how they voted? (Not within 50 ft of polling place in Rhode Island). Can you take photos? (In CA it is illegal to photograph, videotape or otherwise record a voter entering or leaving a polling place). And so on.
Student Fellows at Stanford University Law School's Center for Internet and Society will be answering those kinds of questions and more in coming days. Do you have one? Ask it here. We'll compile and publish a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), and post it before the election.
Please note that some election laws vary from state to state. We ask you to tell us your state so we can answer the questions based on the laws of your state. We will also try to answer the question for other states as time permits.
MPAA MyMovieMuse: sleazy push-polls on copyright
The MPAA continues to slide sleazy push-polls into its "MyMovieMuse" service, which is nominally a service where you can give feedback about the kinds of movies you want to see. The latest is a newsletter announcing that "86% of you feel that creative ideas are property, just like furniture," stuck in among banalities like "Who's your favorite movie monster" and "Top grossing box office for September." MattyMatt rebuts:
# If creative ideas are owned like physical objects, just like furniture, can I buy them at Ikea? And is it expensive for me to think of new ideas, because I have to pay for thought-materials and thought-warehouses and thought-customer-service?Link (Thanks, MattyMatt!)# If people should be compensated for their creative works, and creative works are the same as ideas, why isn't anyone paying me for all the ideas that I have every day?
# If selling a painting on eBay makes an artist feel violated, does Sotheby's make them feel REALLY violated?
# If "good stories" are what brought up box office numbers this year, why is that movie list's mean RottenTomatoes score only 59.4%? (54%, 77%, 57%, 24%, 76%, 57%, 75%, 72%, 31%, and 71%, respectively.)
See also: MPAA's "MyMovieMuse" survey reveals interesting plot twist
Pica syndrome sufferers eat non-foods
Pica is a very strange and rare psychological disorder that causes an appetite for soil, coal, paper, or other traditionally non-food items. Last month, Dewi Evans, 61, of South Wales, died during surgery to recover a screw, a pen top, magnet, and loose change from his bowels. Pegged on the sad death of Evans, The Guardian published a report on pica syndrome. From the article:
In 2002, a 62-year-old French man with a history of mental illness went to hospital complaining of stomach pains. An x-ray showed he had swallowed five kilograms of coins, necklaces and needles; his stomach was so heavy it had been forced down between his hips. He died after an operation to remove the objects. In 2000, Edward Cope, a 33-year-old man with autism from Manchester, died from complications after swallowing 10 buttons, a drawing pin, pieces of chain and bone and a large amount of black foam rubber...Link
In one American study, 25% of patients in psychiatric care were found to have pica and it appeared in 60% of people with autism (pica tends to be a symptom of something else rather than a disorder in itself).
There are two main types of the condition, says O'Brien. "Food pica, where what a person eats is edible but is not prepared for eating - for instance, I have had patients who would eat a catering-sized tin of coffee powder or gorge on marmalade or potato peelings - and non-food pica, where people eat anything else. Once it starts, it can be difficult to control."
Worst video game titles of all time
The guys at Gamerevolution.com have compiled a list of "50 Worst Game Names Ever." Specs included:
* All games must have been wide releases for legitimate, popular platforms.
* We tried to avoid games heavy on the Engrish. Translation errors are just too easy.
* So are educational games and porn.
Those limitations didn't stop them from hitting pure kitsch paydirt. Three of the best: "Booby Kids," "Nuts & Milk," and "Awesome Possum Kicks Dr. Machino's Butt!" Link.
Heh, notice who made the game shown at left? (thanks, Liz Upton)
Reader comment: Alberto Gaitan says,
I can't believe they left out the 1982 Arcadia classic for the Atari 2600, "Communist Mutants from Space"! Okay, maybe cuz it's pretty awesome.
Spooky Hallowe'en mix-disc
Katya Oddio, who put together last year's world-beating Hallowe'en mix-disc sez, "You folks enjoyed our last collection. This time they are all originals contributed by artists via the web, AND they are all scary songs. Hope you have fun with it!"
Link (Thanks, Katya!)
Halloween is meant to be scary, right? Year after year we dust off the old, silly, novelty records. While they are fun, they not at all frightening. Oddio Overplay put the challenge to musical artists the world over to create Halloween music that is "frightening, damaging and disturbing." No "Monster Mash," instead creepy soundtracks to a fiendish Halloween. They succeeded with CALLING ALL FIENDS, two hours of original music. Some of these pieces will creep you right out of your skin!
Basic programming for artificial life experimenters
In this week's Get Illuminated podcast with Rudy Rucker, we talked about the good old days of using BASIC to write programs to experiment with chaos and artificial life. I remember going through Rudy's manual for James Gliek's Chaos: The Software and using Rudy's descriptions of how his programs worked to write my own versions using QuickBASIC. I also liked A.K. Dewdney's "Computer Recreation" columns from Scientic American, his book The Magic Machine, and his long defunct newsletter Algorithm (I'm sorry I no longer have my back issues).
In the podcast, I asked Rudy why it's not as popular as it once was to do recreational programming. His answer was along the lines of "The Web sort of killed it." I think he's right.
But I got an encouraging note from a Boing Boing reader named Wendell, who says:
The mention of QuickBasic and the like toward the end caught my attention since I've enjoyed playing around with BASIC flavors since the 80s. There still exists a hobbyist scene for several modern flavors, including some with easy-to-use 3D graphics. Blitz3D and BlitzMax are my own choices, though DarkBasic also has a following. While the main emphasis is on making "mainstream" games with them, it's certainly easy to do weird (i.e. more-interesting) 2D & 3D things with them.
Here's some of Rudy's software: Link
MSIE sends a cake to Firefox
Microsoft's Internet Explorer team sent a congratulatory cake to the Firefox team on the occasion of the launch of Firefox 2.
Link
(Thanks, Alex!)
Update: Ivan sez, ""but did they include the recipe?!""
Update 2:
Fred sez, "The IE-team cake looked suspicious, what with the irregular white and
black marks. The conspiracy theorist in me made me think about Morse
code. I saw in the comments on the original blog that some people had
looked at it and that there is no obvious morse code there. I
couldn't be bothered to write a perl script to parse it depending on
the starting place and direction of the message (cw or ccw), but it
sure looks like some kind of message. I see, starting top left going
cw, 'S E S / A T / (D:N:B) (U:V:A) / T N' I assume that someone else
could properly decode this, so I suggest sending this as a challenge
to all the would-be cryptographers and lovers of codes. What message
has the IE-team hidden in the icing on the Firefox cake?"
Digital Freedom Project from EFF, CEA and others
The Digital Freedom campaign is a new joint project from EFF, Public Knowledge, the Consumer Electronics Association and the Media Access Project:
Digital technology enables literally anyone and everyone to be a creator, an innovator or an artist -- to produce music, to create cutting-edge videos and photos, and to share their creative work. Digital technology empowers individuals to enjoy these new works when, where, and how they want, and to participate in the artistic process. These are basic freedoms that must be protected and nurtured.Link (via Deep Links)The Digital Freedom campaign is dedicated to defending the rights of students, artists, innovators, and consumers to create and make lawful use of new technologies free of unreasonable government restrictions and without fear of costly and abusive lawsuits.
HOWTO make mechanized Dalek-o-lantern
The Evil Mad Scientist Labs folks have got a killer set of plans up for a mechanized rolling, aiming Dalek built out of a pumpkin:
LinkFinal touches: The "eye" and two "ears" are pieces of carrot. Instead of the toilet plunger and paint rollers that the originals had, I used a hand-mixer beater paddle and a candy thermometer. I think that they both work pretty well. Overall, however, the shape is almost too round to be recognized as a Dalek. But, we are somewhat constrained by the shape of the pumpkin. With a bit of work, you could make a pretty good R2D2 by the same method. I hope someone else does that because I'm not planning to. =)
Now: Pimp your Dalek! Add one of those blinky lights that indicates when its talking. Download some Dalek voices, and put them inside the pumpkin with a speaker. The possibilities are endless!
Origin myth of the Haunted Mansion read by Black Widow Bride
Doombuggies, the world's awesomest Haunted Mansion fan-site, has dredged up the original storyline for the Haunted Mansion, produced during the planning stages of the ride. They got Kat Cressida, the voice-over artist who plays the "Black Widow bride" in the newest revision to the Mansion's attic scene, to narrate it. The file goes live on Hallowe'en, but I just heard a preview of it and it's fantastic.
The mythic, haunting history of Disneyland's Haunted Mansion will finally be told by voice talent Kat Cressida, the artist whose performance as the gothic "Black Widow Bride" was added in early 2006 to the Disneyland version of the Haunted Mansion attraction as part of park-wide enhancements made to the attractions during Disneyland's 50th anniversary festivities.Link (Thanks, Jeff!)Disney aficionados will be pleased to hear that this is the first time that a telling of the "backstory" from the Haunted Mansion is presented being based on the story as it was told by the WED Enterprises "Imagineers" themselves back in the earliest days of the attraction's existence. For decades, Haunted Mansion fans have told tales and myths of the Mansion's storied history, with little more than anecdotal evidence to back their claims. Cressida's telling of the story will be pulled directly from her childhood conversations with her father, who worked with Disneyland's PR Department, and also worked directly with the original Imagineers who created this famed attraction.
Burning Man 06 photos
Neil Guy, Burning Man photographer extraordinaire, has posted his striking 2006 pix. Link (Thanks, Neil!)
See also Burning Man photos from 1998 on
Firefly LED lid for nalgene lanterns
I've been playing with a demo unit of the Firefly, a battery-powered LED lid for a standard nalgene bottle that turns it into a glowing lantern. It's simple and reliable, and if you fill your bottle with water, it casts a soft, peaceful light. I hung it on my balcony and it looks great out there.
Link
(Thanks, John!)
This Week in Law excellent cyberlaw podcast
I just listened to the first episode of the new cyberlaw podcast This Week in Law, hosted by the excellent lawblogger Denise Howell. Denise hosts a panel of lawyers and scholars who review the week's cyberlaw news, with commentary from a weekly rotating guest (the first episode features ex-Napster CEO, copyfighter Hank Barry). I've subscribed to this feed and I'm looking forward to future programs. TWIL is a sister podcast to the pioneering This Week in Tech podcast.
Link# Before Universal Music Group announced a deal to give YouTube users the right to incorporate works from its catalog in the material they upload, its CEO Doug Morris accused YouTube, MySpace and others of owing tens of millions of dollars in copyright damages. (Though the Google acquisition has gotten YouTube off the hook, the same can't be said for defendants Grouper and Bolt.)
# Some who have sued YouTube for infringement have indicated they intend to challenge its eligibility for the DMCA's safe harbor on the ground YouTube is not a service provider within the meaning of the Act.
# EFF's Fred von Lohmann discusses the DMCA and YouTube.
# Lawyer "Ron from DC's" YouTube video looks at the Tur v. YouTube case.
# TechCrunch turned out to be right that Warner Music Group's deal with YouTube was a sign of things to come.
# Creative Commons: symptom or solution?
Brit boomers compaign against mandatory retirement
Stephen sez, "I work for a not-for-profit membership organisation called Heyday and we're taking the UK government to court over the Mandatory Retirement Age policy (MRA). Employers in the UK can sack anyone once they reach 65 years of age, no questions asked/reasons given. So we've put together this tongue-in-cheek image as part of our online campaign - Churchill was 65 when he became prime minister in 1940, Mandela 75 when he received the Nobel prize."
Link
(Thanks, Stephen!)
Walking Dead: scary, engrossing zombie comic
I just finished reading the first five collections of the ongoing comic series The Walking Dead, by Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore, and I now I can't wait for the seventh collection to come out.
The Walking Dead is a zombie adventure serial about the survivors of a plague of walking, flesh-eating dead. All the usual zombie movie stuff applies -- lots of gore, you get bit and you die and then come back, hordes of creepy shamblers are everywhere.
What distinguishes this series is its characters, who are likable and deeply flawed people who are being unmade along with the world. Each character is stretched to the breaking point, turned into a monster, and then just enough of them are brought back from moral ruin to give you hope for the rest.
The pacing is incredible. I read five volumes in a day -- I couldn't stop. This was one of those books that kept me up until three in the morning, and then left me all spooked out when I finally switched off the lights.
Scary, fun, and gripping -- who can ask for anything more. I'll be reading this one through all the way to the end. Link
(I picked up The Walking Dead on recommendation from badass comics store Secret Headquarters, which is definitely worth a visit if you live in LA)
Scott Adams hacks his brain to restore his speech
Dilbert creator Scott Adams lost the ability to speak 18 months ago. He has something called Spasmodic Dysphonia. His doctor told him that nobody with this condition has ever regained the ability to speak.
But yesterday, Adams reported that he hacked his brain and can speak again!
The day before yesterday, while helping on a homework assignment, I noticed I could speak perfectly in rhyme. Rhyme was a context I hadn’t considered. A poem isn’t singing and it isn’t regular talking. But for some reason the context is just different enough from normal speech that my brain handled it fine.Link (Thanks, Cyrus Farivar!)Jack be nimble, Jack be quick.
Jack jumped over the candlestick.I repeated it dozens of times, partly because I could. It was effortless, even though it was similar to regular speech. I enjoyed repeating it, hearing the sound of my own voice working almost flawlessly. I longed for that sound, and the memory of normal speech. Perhaps the rhyme took me back to my own childhood too. Or maybe it’s just plain catchy. I enjoyed repeating it more than I should have. Then something happened.
My brain remapped.
My speech returned.
Here's an aerial shot of a mountain in Canada that resembles and Indian listening to an iPod.
Reader comment:
Cowboy hats made from beer cases
This eBay seller makes cowboys hats out of "wetboard" beer cases for $15.