Is 92-year-old Donald Crowdis (former host of the Candadian TV program The Nature of Things) the world's oldest blogger? EVen if he isn't his blog is terrific. He's funny and astute. Here's an excerpt from a recent entry he wrote on cannibalism.

[T]he best food, or at least the best protein, is that which is most like our own. Of course, eating others of our kind gives rise to social problems, and is rare as a result, but it happens. In times past, among some of the Pacific Islands peoples, since a butchered human very much resembled a butchered pig, it was referred to as "long pig". I presume these cannibals ate only their enemies, not their family members, no matter how tasty they may have looked. Most of us have accepted that humans are precious in the sight of God, while ordinary pig, or "short pig", is OK nutrition.

Link

Amnesty International today criticized Pentagon plans to construct a massive legal complex at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. US taxpayers will foot the bill for this $75 - $125 million compound, due for completion by July of next year. From a Miami Herald article:

''Once again, the Defense Department seems to be operating in -- even constructing -- its own universe,'' said Larry Cox, executive director of the human rights project's U.S. division.

``The new rules for the proposed military commissions . . . have not been made public, and not a single charge has been filed under the new system. And yet the Pentagon wants to build a permanent homage to its failed experiment in second-class justice.''

The Defense Department has notified would-be contractors that it seeks a design and construction plan for a military commissions compound at the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba.

It would have two courtrooms; housing for up to 1,200 U.S. forces, lawyers, members of the news media and other visitors; a 100-car motor pool; an 800-person dining facility; conference and closed-circuit television facilities and a secure work space for classified material.

Link

As part of their 50th anniversary celebration, New Scientist published brief comments by more than 70 scientists about what the next fifty years may hold. Some of the writers include Paul Davies, Francis Collins, Peter Norvig, Susan Greenfield, Dan Dennett, Steven Weinberg, and dozens of others. From the intro:

In coming decades will we: discover that we are not alone in the universe? Unravel the physiological basis for consciousness? Routinely have false memories implanted in our minds? Begin to evolve in new directions? And will physicists finally hit upon a universal theory of everything? In fact, if the revelations of the last 50 years are anything to go on - the internet and the human genome for example - we probably have not even thought up the exciting advances that lay ahead of us.

Delve into those visions of the future by author in the story list of this special report, or navigate forecasts by topic...:

Life: Ageing, alien life, consciousness, ecology, embryology, environment, evolution, genetics, health, humans, language, neuroscience, oceans, psychology, sex and social science.

Space and technology: Artificial intelligence, communications, computing, cosmology, space and technology.

Physical sciences: Chemistry, energy, materials, maths and physics.

Link

The PS3 will not only boot Linux, but it contains an open bootloader that gives you pretty free rein in what you install on your box.

Installing an “Other OS" on PLAYSTATION3 requires two files. One is the “Other OS Installer” distributed by Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (which is called installer hereafter), and the other is the “Other OS boot loader” (called boot loader hereafter) provided by the third party.

The installer installs the boot loader of an "Other OS" on a boot‐loader‐dedicated storage area of PLAYSTATION3. Once the boot loader of an "Other OS" has been successfully installed, it automatically starts up instead of the PLAYSTATION3’s system software at every power on by selecting it as”Default System”in the menu of the PLAYSTATION3’s system software.

The installer installs only the boot loader of an "Other OS". It is assumed that any further installations, such as the installation of "Other OS" files on the built-in hard disk of PLAYSTATION3, are performed when the installed boot loader starts up. For more details, please contact the provider of the boot loader you are using.

Link (Thanks, Paul!)

Liz sez, "A bit of over-literalism from the UK Trading Standards people. Welsh Dragon Sausages have had to be renamed Welsh Dragon Pork Sausages, in case anyone buys them expecting them to be full of juicy dragon meat."

Jon Carthew, 45, who makes the sausages, said yesterday that he had not received any complaints about the absence of real dragon meat. He said: “I don’t think any of our customers believe that we use dragon meat in our sausages. We use the word because the dragon is synonymous with Wales.”

Link (Thanks, Liz!)

Cancer cells in a tumor evolve due to natural selection. They compete fiercely for reproductive space inside the tumor, changing strategies to beat out other cancer cells and to triumph over chemotherapy.

"A tumor cell population is constantly evolving through natural selection," says Carlo C. Maley, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Molecular and Cellular Oncogenesis Program at Wistar whose own research focuses on this area. He is senior author on the new review. "The mutations that benefit the survival and reproduction of cells in a tumor are the things that drive it towards malignancy.

"Evolution is also driving therapeutic resistance," Maley adds. "When you apply chemotherapy to a population of tumor cells, you're quite likely to have a resistant mutant somewhere in that population of billions or even trillions of cells. This is the central problem in oncology. The reason we haven't been able to cure cancer is that we're selecting for resistant tumor cells. When we spray a field with pesticide, we select for resistant pests. It's the same idea."

Link

If you get sued for file-sharing by the record industry, you can find yourself paying $750 per file in damages (the law allows a whopping $150,000 per file!). This Texas Law Review paper by J. Cam Barker examines this practice -- the wholesale price of downloadable music being in the $0.70/song range -- in light of the Constitution

In this paper, I argue that there is a constitutional right to not have a highly punitive statutory damage award stacked hundreds or thousands of times over for similar, low-reprehensibility misconduct. I point to the rationale behind criminal law's single-larceny doctrine, identify the concept of wholly proportionate reprehensibility, and use this to explain why the massive aggregation of statutory damage awards can violate substantive due process.

Link (via Recording Industry Vs the People)

Today marked the launch of Wesabe, a startup from O'Reilly Entrepreneur in Residence Marc Hedlund. I'm proud to have joined Wesabe's advisory board -- Marc's way sharp, and Wesabe's a damned cool idea. The service anonymizes your financial data and then compares it to others' and figures out ways that you can save money right away, and worked into it is a bunch of community stuff for people who are figuring out how to spend smarter. It's a little like Flickr for your money, or social Consumerist.

What does Wesabe do?
Wesabe is a community of people who share our experiences with our money so we can help each other make better financial decisions. We do this by aggregating and analyzing our community members' personal financial data, and showing tips — recommendations to get the most from our money. These tips and recommendations come from the collective wisdom of our entire community. When one of us figures out how to make a great decision, we all learn.

What makes your product unique?
As soon as you sign up with Wesabe, we show you ways to start saving money based on your actual spending. Existing software products do a good job of helping you figure out where your money went — as long as you keep them carefully maintained and updated every few days. They don't, however, help you figure out how to get more from your money, and they certainly don't help you get from a place of stress with your money to a place of control and better value.

Link

From an interview with novelist Zadie Smith on KCRW's Bookworm program:

But the problem with readers, the idea we’re given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, "I should sit here and I should be entertained." And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don’t know, who they probably couldn’t comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That’s the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It’s an old moral, but it’s completely true.

Link (via Michael Leddy's Orange Crate Art)

Nice gallery of photos of the $100 B1 laptop built by the One Laptop Per Child project. It's so cute I can't hardly stand it.

The proposed $100 machine will be a Linux-based, with a dual-mode display—both a full-color, transmissive DVD mode, and a second display option that is black and white reflective and sunlight-readable at 3× the resolution. The laptop will have a 500MHz processor and 128MB of DRAM, with 500MB of Flash memory; it will not have a hard disk, but it will have four USB ports. The laptops will have wireless broadband that, among other things, allows them to work as a mesh network; each laptop will be able to talk to its nearest neighbors, creating an ad hoc, local area network. The laptops will use innovative power (including wind-up) and will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data.

Link

The Gothic Garden Terrarium Kit -- a tabletop garden for the spooky in you:

No matter your stylistic preferences, it's difficult to keep it 100% black all the time. The folks at Dunecraft have created the Graveyard Gothic Garden Terrarium Kit, which lets you maintain your gothic sensibilities, but adds plants you can grow that bleed. (Yes, bleed.) Just add water and some sunlight, but don't worry-- despite their affinity for the light, you won't have to go out in the sun to enjoy this nifty indoor terrarium!

Link (via Wonderland)

Sample Trolls -- companies that steal copyrights from musicians and then threaten to sue everyone who ever sampled those musicians' work. The progenitor is a crook named Armen Boladian who forged George Clinton's signature on an assignment of copyright and has now become a one-man lawsuit factory who threatens legal action against the entire hip-hop world (avid Clinton samplers) unless they pay him tribute.

Bridgeport is an unwelcome addition to the music world: the "sample troll." Similar to its cousins the patent trolls, Bridgeport and companies like it hold portfolios of old rights (sometimes accumulated in dubious fashion) and use lawsuits to extort money from successful music artists for routine sampling, no matter how minimal or unnoticeable. The sample trolls have already leveraged their position into millions in settlements and court damages, but that's not the real problem. The trolls are turning copyright into the foe rather than the friend of musical innovation. They are bad for everyone in the industry—including the major labels. The sample trolls need to be stopped, either by Congress or by court rulings that establish sampling as a boon, not a burden, to creativity...

George Clinton is otherwise known as the King of Interplanetary Funk and, along with the late Rick James, the world's most famous funk musician. In the 1970s, Boladian and Bridgeport managed to seize most of the copyrights to Clinton's songs. How exactly they did so is highly disputed. However, in at least a few cases, Boladian assigned the copyrights to Bridgeport by writing a contract and then faking Clinton's signature (as described here). As Clinton put it in this interview, "he just stole 'em."

Link (via Deep Links)

Universal Music Group is suing NewsCorp's MySpace for copyright infringement. BB band manager John Battelle has the details at the Searchblog. He calls this breaking news the beginning of a "big poo-flinging goat rodeo." Link to Searchblog, Link to CBC News article

To quote Sigmund Freud: Sometimes a Dora Aquapet is just a Dora Aquapet. Link (Thanks, Vadinne!)

The Imaginary Foundation, creators of surreal streetwear including the double-label BoingBoing/IF t-shirt, have made ten mobile phone wallpaper designs available for free download. Stunning.
Link

Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractals, spoke last week to an audience at MIT gathered by the Molecular Frontiers Club. Mandelbrot focused his remarks on his recent efforts to seek out patterns in the NASDAQ. (Video of a 2001 lecture at MIT, where Mandelbrot touched on this subject, is available here.) The fractal nature of the market is the subject of Mandelbrot's latest popular book co-written with journalist Richard L. Hudson, titled "The (Mis) Behavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin And Reward." From the MIT News Office:

An unusual type of fractal that comes from a simple equation, the Mandelbrot Set (image at right) is popular outside of mathematics because of its aesthetic appeal and its complicated structure. No one has been able to prove the Mandelbrot Set is true, according to Mandelbrot. "But no one has been able to prove it's not true, either," he said, as large pictures of fractals filled the screen behind him.

Mandelbrot recently began to apply his knowledge of fractals to explain stock markets. "Markets, like oceans, have turbulence," he said. "Some days the change in markets is very small, and some days it moves in a huge leap. Only fractals can explain this kind of random change."

Link to MIT News Office article, Link to buy The (Mis)Behavior of Markets

Please enjoy this video of unclothed department store mannequins riding skateboards. Link

After Paul Boutin cured his blocked sinuses with one does of old-school Sudafed, he looked into the reason why it was taken from the shelves, and learned that Senator Diane Feinstein decided to make it harder to get as part of the PATRIOT act.

To buy original formula Sudafed, Wal-fed, or other pseudophedrine sinus medicine that actually works (not the new Sudafed PE), go to your supermarket or drugstore and look in the cold remedies sections where it used to be. They now have little fake boxes or cards you take to the pharmacist to say "I want one of these." The pharmacist checks your ID and you sign for it.

Why can't you buy Sudafed over the counter anymore?

The renewed USA PATRIOT Act signed into law in March includes a "Meth Act" aimed at reducing production of methamphetamines, which can be manufactured from pseudophedrine, aka Sudafed. That's why Sudafed changed their over-the-counter formula to Sudafed PE. You can still buy Sudafed original if you go to the pharmacist at Safeway or Walgreens. But you can only buy one box a day and three a month, and you need to present a photo ID and sign a log for the pharmacist. The idea is to keep meth dealers from buying Sudafed in quantity to cook it into methamphetamine. The bill was attached to the Patriot Act after co-authors Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Jim Talent (R-MO) were unable to get it passed by other means.

Maybe this will encourage people to harvest their own ephedra (aka ma huang / Mormon tea) and make their own decongestant medicine. Link

Update:

Several people have emailed to let me know they think that people who suffer from debilitating sinus headaches should stop whining and let the government do its job ridding the planet of drug abuse. (Because the government has a really good track record in the War or Drugs.) I disagree with these people.

For one thing, I'm one of those crazy (small l) libertarians who thinks drug laws, on the whole, hurt society more than they help society, so I don't like this law. It's a shame that some people ruin their lives and their families' lives by using meth and other drugs, but the innocent people killed by muggers who need money to buy expensive drugs, the enrichment of street gangs and organized crime rings that sell illegal drugs, the corruption of government officials who take bribes from smugglers, the people who are falsely arrested on trumped up drug charges, the people who are killed by crazed bounty hunters and police raiding the wrong houses, the seizure of property belonging to people who didn't know there were drugs on their property, and the imprisonment of non-violent drug users amount to a bigger problem, I think. I am in favor of abolishing all drug laws.

For another thing, the meth epidemic has been hyped out of proportion. Jack Shafer, editor of Slate, did a nice job debunking the meth epidemic myth last year.

Tons of comments in link below.

I thought the subway in Tokyo was crowded, but this video of a throng of unhappy people jammed in a Moscow subway is claustrophobic. Link

Patrick sez, "I am an attorney looking to write an article about copyright abuse. Having previously written an article debunking the idea that the Chicago Cubs can sue neighbors for looking into the game, I'd like to follow up with a more diverse group of improper copyright threats to explain what is and is not the law.

"As a constant reader of Boing Boing I know that you have quite a few stories about this kind of abuse come through your hands. If you would be willing to put my email up on Boing Boing for readers to submit their real world problems, I'd be in your debt." kulervo@yahoo.com

Ian sez, "Both English and Chinese versions of Wikipedia have been blocked once more. That didn't take long. It's times like this you wonder, is China's net nanny a manic-depressive?" Link (Thanks, Ian)

See also Jimmy Wales to Beijing: Wikipedia won't censor

Research published in Child Development suggests that little kids are pretty good at figuring out whether something they're told is true or just a fantasy:

In three studies, about 400 children ages 3 to 6 heard about something new and had to say whether they thought it was real or not. Some children heard the information defined in scientific terms ("Doctors use surnits to make medicine"), while others heard it defined in fantastical terms ("Fairies use hercs to make fairy dust"). The researchers found that children's ability to use contextual cues to determine whether the information is true develops significantly between the ages of 3 and 5.

Moreover, when new information is presented to children in a way that relates the information in a meaningful way to a familiar entity, they are more likely to use the contextual cues to make a decision about whether the new information is true than if the new information is simply associated with the entity.

Link

Elliott Malkin has memorialized his great-grandfather with something he calls Cemetery 2.0: a networked tombstone connected to a variety of serialized information resources about his life.

Cemetery 2.0 is a concept for a set of networked devices that connect burial sites to online memorials for the deceased. The prototype, at left, links Hyman Victor's gravestone in Chicago, to his surviving Internet presence, including his:

* Flickr Genealogical Repository
* Facebook Memorial Profile
* Pedigree Resource File (GEDCOM)
* Family Tree of the Jewish People entry (GEDCOM)

The Cemetery 2.0 device maintains a live satellite Internet connection. Visitors to the physical memorial can view related memorials on the device display, while visitors paying their respects at any of the online memorials will recognize that their browsing is associated directly with the actual burial site.

Link (via We Make Money Not Art)

The Washington ACLU is suing a library system over its use of SmartFilter's defective censorware. SmartFilter are the shakedown artists who blocked Boing Boing but offered to cut us a deal if we'd redesign our site to their specifications. Their overbroad, wildly inaccurate censorware is used by libraries in Eastern Washington to keep patrons from seeing naughty things -- including vast quantities of lawful material.

Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington, three library users and a nonprofit organization today brought suit to ensure that patrons of a library system in Eastern Washington have access to useful and lawful information on the Internet. The lawsuit challenges the library system's policy of using a restrictive Internet filter to bar access to information on its computers and of refusing to honor requests by adult patrons to temporarily disable the filter for sessions of uncensored reading and research. The suit was filed in U.S. District Court in Spokane. ...

The North Central Regional Library District (NCRL) operates 28 community libraries in Chelan, Douglas, Ferry, Grant, and Okanogan Counties. The NCRL has used a blocking software product called SmartFilter, Bess edition, manufactured by the California-based company Secure Computing Corporation, to filter Internet content on all public computers at its branch libraries. Bess blocks a very broad array of lawful information, and the NCRL has refused to unblock sites for patrons. ...

Libraries that receive funds for Internet access under two specific federal programs are required to have the ability to block minors from seeing "visual depictions" of sexual activity. But the U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted the law to mean that libraries should disable those filters upon the request of an adult. The ACLU believes that the NCRL filtering policy goes far beyond what is allowed under federal law.

Link (Thanks, Seth!)

See also BoingBoing banned in UAE, Qatar, elsewhere. Our response to net-censors: Get bent!

Yesterday, I blogged a story and video about a UCLA student who refused to show ID to campus cops at Powell Library. The cops responded by grabbing him and repeatedly tasering him as he writhed on the floor in handcuffs, screaming alternatively in outrage and for mercy. The cops threatened to taser other students who asked for their badge numbers.

Now the UCLA Acting Chancellor Norman Abrams has issued a mealy-mouthed statement defending his policy of requiring ID after 11PM (because anonymity becomes less constitutionally protected and more deadly after 2300h), essentially blaming the student for going to the library without his student card in his pocket. He says that compliance is critical for everyone's safety and well-being, presumably because failing to comply means that you'll be shackled and tortured by the campus police. It's like carrying garlic to protect you from vampires.

UCLA students should corner the Abrams every time he shows his face on campus and demand to see his papers. What a jerk.

University police are investigating an incident late last night in which police took a student into custody at Powell Library. Investigators are reviewing the incident and the officers' actions. The investigation and review will be thorough, vigorous and fair.

The safety of our campus community is of paramount importance to me. Routinely checking student identification after 11 p.m. at the campus library, which is open 24 hours, is a policy posted in the library that was enacted for the protection of our students. Compliance is critical for the safety and well-being of everyone.

Link, Link to Andy Sternberg's detailed post on the attack (Thanks, Glyn!)

Update: Jordan sez, "This is a link to the personal/job description of the acting chancellor, or should I say 'high chancellor.' This is a blurb from the last part of the page that explains quite well where this man is coming from. Prof. Abrams' most recent book, Anti-Terrorism and Criminal Enforcement, (2nd ed., 2005), also published in an abridged version, is the first casebook to deal comprehensively with the rapidly evolving field of anti-terrorism law and the criminal enforcement process. This book analyzes how that process is affected by the government's invocation of the concept of a 'war on terrorism.'"

Update 2: Brian sez, Tasered UCLA student gets high profile lawyer.

Attorney Stephen Yagman said he plans to file a federal civil rights lawsuit accusing the UCLA police of "brutal excessive force," as well as false arrest. The lawyer also provided the first public account of the Tuesday night incident at UCLA's Powell Library from the student, Mostafa Tabatabainejad, a 23-year-old senior.

The other shoe has dropped on a weird little deal between Microsoft and Novell over SUSE Linux last week. Microsoft gave Novell $440 million for SUSE support, and then Novell gave back $40 million to license Microsoft's bogus patent claims against Linux.

Now Microsoft's Chief Rageaholic Steve Ballmer has explained the deal: Novell's $40 million "payment" is an admission of guilt. Every Linux user who doesn't use SUSE (the only "licensed" Linux) is a patent infringer. All Linuxes except the ones that Microsoft blesses are illegal.

A key element of the agreement now appears to be Novell's US$40 million payment to Microsoft in exchange for the latter company's pledge not to sue SUSE Linux users over possible patent violations. Also protected are individuals and noncommercial open-source developers who create code and contribute to the SUSE Linux distribution, as well as developers who are paid to create code that goes into the distribution...

At the time, Microsoft officials, including Ballmer, were mum on whether the Linux kernel, which is governed by the General Public License and takes contributions from programmers all around the world, violated Microsoft's patents.

Ballmer was more open Thursday.

"Novell pays us some money for the right to tell customers that anybody who uses SUSE Linux is appropriately covered," Ballmer said. This "is important to us, because [otherwise] we believe every Linux customer basically has an undisclosed balance-sheet liability."

Link (Thanks, Carsten!)

John sez, "Greg Williams takes Wikipedia text and then makes funny, sharing-enabled comics out of them. The skunk one's my favorite." Link (Thanks, John!)

DJ sez, "The artist Jen Wang has posted a series of super-cute illustrations showing the pre-flight safety demo by stewards as a kind of dance performance." Link (Thanks, DJ Fadereu!)

Today in the Worth1000 photoshopping contest: fine art paintings in which one or more figures has been turned into a "ghost." Link

This German suitcase racecar game contains 2 meters of track that you can race two cars on (as well as a stopwatch for figuring out who won). Runs for 5 hours on a 9V battery and costs an ungodly €598.00. Link (via Red Ferret)

UK security experts have cracked the sooper sekure new UK biometric passports. It took 48 hours. With £174 worth of sniffer hardware, attackers can read all the personal information off of any of the three million new UK passports in circulation -- and if combined with demonstrated hacks for reading RFIDs at a distance, this could happen from across the room, or even farther. You can then clone the RFID and stick it in another passport (surprise! your identity is now owned by a terrorist!).

"If you can read the chip, then you can clone it," he says. "You could use this to clone a passport that would exploit the system to illegally enter another country." (We did not clone any of our passport chips on the assumption that to do so would be illegal.)

Grunwald adds: "The problems could get worse when they put fingerprint biometrics on to the passports. There are established ways of making forged fingerprints. In the future, the authorities would like to have automated border controls, and such forged fingerprints [stuck on to fingers] would probably fool them."

But what about facial recognition systems (your biometric passport contains precise measurements of key points on your face and head)? "Yes," says Grunwald, "but they are not yet in operation at airports and the technology throws up between 20 and 25% false negatives or false positives. It isn't reliable."

Link, Link to Bruce Sterling's blistering commentary (Thanks, Matt!)

The audio from Tuesday's night's standing-room-only lecture by EFF co-founders John Gilmore and John Perry Barlow at my USC lecture series is online (thanks to Mike Jones and Andy Sternberg for their yeoman duty!). Gilmore and Barlow are pioneering giants of cyberspace, having created many of the institutions and safeguarded many of the liberties we take for granted today. They gave a fantastic presentation on the founding of EFF and the early days of the fight for freedom online, and then answered more than an hour's worth of intense questions about the present-day fights.

A reminder that my next speaker is Xbox hacker Bunnie Huang, next Tuesday night at 7PM.

Link

Two readers have sent in great spoofs of the Zune ad campaign:

Deepsignal's Welcome to the Orgy ("Share music=get laid/but then the next morning the music you share is gone, just like a one night stand/DRM, it's like that empty feeling/it's ok. you weren't compatible anyway")

Appleeqlove's Welcome to the Social (bong hits and Zunes)

(Thanks, Ingo and Ivan!)

See also Weird screenshot of failed Zune install

Bits to Die For sells a line of stunning video-game inspired scarves with pixel-art from Lode Runner, Pong, Space Invaders, Defender and others. Link (via Wonderland)

Paramount and the MPAA are suing a company that pre-loads iPods with video from DVDs and then sells you both the original discs and the iPods. They claim that it is illegal to put DVDs on your iPod -- whether it's done in a store or your living room.

According to the suit, Load 'N Go sells both DVDs and iPods and loads the former onto the latter for customers who purchase both. The company then sends the iPod and the original DVDs to the customer. So the customer has purchased every DVD, and Load 'N Go just saves them the trouble of ripping the DVD. The movie studios' suit claims that this is illegal, because ripping a DVD (i.e., decrypting it and making a copy) is illegal under the DMCA. The suit also claims that this constitutes copyright infringement.

Although this lawsuit happens to be aimed at Load 'N Go, the DMCA theory in the complaint makes it crystal clear that the MPAA believes it is just as illegal for you to do the same thing for yourself at home. Apparently, Hollywood believes that you should have to re-purchase all your DVD movies a second time if you want to watch them on your iPod.

Link

This week's Weird America features DEVO founder Mark Mothersbaugh. It's a great video with Mothersbaugh reflecting on much of his career, from the birth of DEVO following the Kent State University shootings in 1970, to the meaning of Devolution, to his early mail art and recent Beautiful Mutant series of manipulated photos.
Link (via Laughing Squid)

I'm in Guatemala, researching some stories here. I'll be posting photos, video, and other notes from the road on a "reporter's notebook" blog at xeni.net/trek, and linking to clusters of that material from BoingBoing. Hello to you from Antigua, Guatemala -- where I can hear 400-year-old church bells ringing right now in the dark, along with night birds. The air smells like cooking fire smoke. Twin volcanoes of ash and water are sleeping soundly tonight (this is a good thing), and I will be in a few moments, too.

Image: The weeping virgin, at a 400+ year old church here in Antigua (2004, Xeni Jardin, under this CC license)

Our partners at Federated Media have a nifty holiday gift guide that has the best product reviews from the blogs it represents. If you're looking for shopping ideas, this is the place. For instance, check out Gareth Branwyn's review of Logitech's Freepulse wireless headphones. Link

Nintendo sent me a Wii last week. I'm not a big gamer, but I like playing the Gamecube and DS with my nine-year-old daughter, even though she always beats me. (I don't own a Playstation or XBox, and haven't really used either).

Nintendo games are marvelous — Super Mario Sunshine is my favorite. I love the world of Mario and his friends. My only problem with the games is the controller — I just can't make my fingers and thumbs move the right way, or fast enough, to be very good at most of the games, especially the competitive ones. My daughter beats the pants off me in Monkeyball. One time, after a particularly humiliating loss to her in MonkeyBall, she said, "I feel bad winning; it's like playing against a baby."

When the Wii arrived in its very Mac-like box, I didn't know what to make of the controller, other than to think that it looked like a big iPod Shuffle. I hooked the system up to the TV (which took all of 30 seconds) and realized that there was no cable to plug into the controller. It was wireless. If that wasn't cool enough, I soon learned that the way you moved the cursor on the TV screen was by waving the controller around. It was like using a laser pointer. What's more, the controller uses haptics (touch technology) to help you navigate. When the cursor goes over a button or icon, the controller produces a physical "bump" to help you navigate. It feels like magic. I love it.

The Wii cames with a sports game, and it makes great use of the controller. To play baseball, you hold the controller like a bat and swing it. A tiny speaker on the controller makes the sound of a ball hitting the bat, and the haptics let you feel the crack of the impact.

My favorite part of Wii Sports, though, is the boxing game. My daughter and I had created avatars that looked like us and we used these avatars to box with each other. We each held a controller in out fists and punched at the air, making our little avatars punch at the same time. When the bell rang, I started pummeling my daughter. Yes, it felt a little funny hitting a cute cartoon avatar of my daughter wearing glasses and pigtails, but after losing to her so many times in MonkeyBall, I wasn't going to let the fact that I was her father get in the way of my chance to get revenge. I pounded away furiously, sending a jab to her head that knocked her to the ground. The referee started counting, but she was out cold. I finally won a game against her! The simplicity and intuitiveness of the controller had leveled the playing field between my daughter and me. Her days of treating me like one of those TV commercial idiot dads were over.

"Hey, no fair!" she said. "You're bigger than me."

"Payback is a mother, honey," I said. "Wanna try again?" Link

A new understanding of the genetics of muscle metabolism and performance could eventually lead to new chemical methods for boosting your muscle power. The researchers at Dartmouth Medical School and Dartmouth College bred a mouse genetically engineered to express a particular enzyme related to muscle activity and were surprised by the rodent's superpowers. The research was published in the American Journal of Physiology: Endocrinology and Metabolism. From a Dartmouth Medical School news release:

Like a trained athlete, this mouse enjoyed increased capacity to exercise, manifested by its ability to run three times longer than a normal mouse before exhaustion. One particularly striking feature of the finding was the accumulation of muscle glycogen, the stored form of carbohydrates—what many athletes seek by "carbo-loading" before an event or ga