First blogged on BoingBoing here in 2004.

CNN is running a series called "Welcome to the Future," about technology innovations in 2006 and what's ahead. I joined CNN host Miles O'Brien to explore some of that, including:

* A voice translation gadget for troops in Iraq. Background: See this previous BB post.

* Pros and cons of fingerprint scanners and other biometric authentication devices for home and enterprise computer users. Background: see this Bruce Schneier essay.

* Second Life. I fall off a virtual cliff and lose both legs (which grow back), then shop for goth miniskirts, then we teleport to Tibet.

For the record, Mr. O'Brien is super 1337. He flies planes (the ones made of atoms), knows everything there is to know about space, pwns in games I suck at (there are many), and cruises through VPNs with the greatest of ease. Seriously, he is one of the smartest science/technology reporters I've ever met. I'm a huge fan, and so not worthy.

The show airs a bunch of times, here's the schedule (I think, but check local listings):

Saturday, December 16th: 6am, 3pm

Saturday, December 23rd: 7pm, 11pm

Sunday, December 24th: 2am, 6am, 2pm, 7pm, 11pm, 2am

Reader comment: Veni Markovski says,

Bruce is missing a key point in fingerprint reader security: yes, one can steal your fingerprint, but the question is which one of the 10 fingers you are using? 9 of them can still give you access to the database/open doors / start your car / etc., but at the same time could trigger a silent alarm to the security center / 911 / etc that either someone has stolen your finger prints, or they've cut your fingers, or they are forcing you against your will. So, in other words, there's always more than one way to approach a problem ;)

Come to the huge Bazaar Bizarre craft fair at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on Saturday, December 16, 2006. Carla Sinclair (editor-in-chief of CRAFT) and I (editor-in-chief of MAKE) will be there to say hello. I think I'll bring my silkscreen setup and screen gremlins on people's clothes and other stuff. Link

One devotee of the Flying Spaghetti monster paints an homage in holiday bulbs: "For the eyes, I took a set of 140 mini-lights, disabled two of the colors, used electrical tape to make them into bundles and wired them into the sockets. The eyes can blink and fade in different patterns." Link (thanks, Geoffrey Kidd)

The Sheboygan Press is asking its readers to help explain this unusual photograph taken in the 19th century.

In the photo, a dead horse lies in the street, roped off with string tied to stakes in the dirt road. A man in a top hat, bow tie and jacket sits on top of the horse, and people in the background are standing still, looking toward the camera.

"I always just assumed it was taken as a joke or something like that," said Bill Wangemann, Sheboygan city historian. "I was never able to find out anything about it. What the story behind that (picture) is, I don't have the foggiest notion."

Link

I silkscreened a red gremlin on the covers of these 64-page, 9cm x 14cm Moleskine Cahier notebooks. You can buy one for $6 postpaid (US only). This edition is limited to 100 signed and numbered copies. (Click image for enlargement.)

SOLD OUT! Thanks to everyone for ordering these! I hope to sell a new design soon. -- Mark

The "War on Terror" board game looks like a lot of fun.

Everyone starts the game as an Empire, with a couple of free villages and they can settle anywhere in the world. Although peaceful (we had to ban fighting in the first round) the 'politics' of the game already start to form, depending on what oil is discovered and how 'aggressive' the initial settlement choice is.

Send secret messages; fund terrorism; make deals; renege on deals; wage war; expand your empire; forge secret alliances; fund regime changes; kidnap politicians; be the terrorists

Empires then spread over the planet grabbing all available land, searching for the best oil and the most strategic borders. Some go for towns and cities, other spend their cash on extra empire cards, building up their political options. Maybe, if they're lucky, they'll get an early nuke.

Link (Thanks, Mason!)

Bibliodyssey, a site devoted to rare old books and materia obscura, is one of my favorite blogs. Each page-load is like a peek into the most treasured recesses of an eccentric book-hoarder's stash. I have a tiny attention span and an aversion to collecting too many objects, so for me it's a dream come true. Here's a snip from today's entry, "La Très Sainte Trinosophie," which includes some pages of cool old magic code I don't understand:

The 'Cosmic Master of the Age of Aquarius' and mysterious adept, the Count de Saint-Germain, allegedly died in 1784. He was a spy, virtuoso violinist, diplomat, friend at the Court of Louis XV, adventurer and was said to be able to transform iron into gold. A veritable procession of people have claimed to be the still living Count de Saint-Germain since 1784.

"During the centuries after his death, numerous myths, legends and speculations have surfaced. He has been attributed with occult practices like snake charming and ventriloquism. There are stories about an affair between him and Madame de Pompadour. Other legends report that he was immortal, the Wandering Jew, an alchemist with the elixir of life, a Rosicrucian or an ousted king, a bastard of Queen Maria Anna of Spain, that he prophesied the French Revolution. Casanova called him the violinist Catlini. Count Cagliostro was rumored to be his pupil."

Either the Count de Saint-Germain or Cagliostro is considered to be the author of 'La Très Sainte Trinosophie' (The Most Holy Three-fold Wisdom), from the latter half of the 18th century. It has been called "the rarest of occult manuscripts"¹ and the only surviving copy is owned by the library in Troyes, France.

Link to full text of blog post, with lots of big juicy page scans of the illustrations inside this book.

Reader comment: Neil says,

It's worth pointing out that de Saint-Germain appears prominently in Neal Stephenson's lovely "Quicksilver".

Anne Stewart says,

If Saint-Germain sightings are of interest, it's also worth noting that he's all over Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum."

Link 1, Link 2.

Snip from wemakemoneynotart:

"The Ravezooka is a musical weapon that shoots powerful "hardcore" sounds based on your target's distance from the instrument. Squeezing the trigger handle initiates sound and a beam of light. As the user moves the Ravezooka around, the frequency range being played changes based on the distance of the person or object in front of the instrument. The closer the target, the lower the frequency range."

Link to wwmna blog entry.

The Ravezooka was created by Benedetta Piantella Simeonidis and Lesley Flanigan. Here's their project page, and you can hear it in action at New York University's Winter Interactive Telecommunications Program show on December 17 and 18.

Shay says,

I've recently found and scanned some pages from a 168-pages, 24 years old DEC sales booklet. Some of the photos are just hilarious, and some of the features touted (teleconferences, no-screws HD installation) are still being used to sell PCs today.

Link.

Snip from the Wired News blog 27B Stroke 6:

Columbus, Ohio police just spent about $120,000 in federal homeland security grant money to buy 40 cellular-enabled fingerprint scanners which will allow officers to run a fingerprint of a suspect against 250,000 prints in the city's fingerprint database, according to the Associated Press. The department says the Rapid Identification Terminal (wi-fi enabled!) will cut down on crime since officers will no longer have to route a suspected criminal to the central office, where fingerprinting can take up to an hour. This doesn't replace that procedure but let's officers find out if the person they've stopped has outstanding warrants or may be lying about his or her identity.

Link

Mike Libby on the inspiration for his mechanical insect creations:

"One day I found a dead intact beetle. I then located an old wristwatch, thinking of how the beetle also operated and looked like a little mechanical device and so decided to combine the two. After some time dissecting the beetle and outfitting it with watch parts and gears, I had a convincing little cybernetic sculpture. I soon made many more with other found insects and have been exploring and developing the theme ever since."

Link (Thanks, Sass)

The winners of the previously-Boinged NPR Holiday crafts contest have been announced: Link.

Carla Sinclair (Craft) and Phil Torrone (Make) were among the judges. At left, Julie Jackson's winning homage to Stephen Colbert and his word of the year, truthiness.

Reader comment: Julie Jackson, creator of the winning entry, shares news of how the pint-sized Stephen is celebrating the NPR Craft Contest win. "He and his little 'elf friends' won't shut up about it." Link

BB pal Bonnie of Lucasfilm says,

The work of several Star Wars veterans (including VFX supervisor John Knoll) is being showcased in a special website just launched to explore the mind-blowing visual effects of this past summer's "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest." Interactive clips at this new site allow you to peel back layers of animation to see what ILM had to start with before transforming actors wearing tracking markers into astonishingly real characters.

Link. Image: screengrab detail from the very cool "Real or ILM?" section of the site.

hi! monkey! is one of the internet's gentler souls -- if pixelated puppets can be said to have souls. The sweet-natured simian ("i'm small, i'm terry cloth, and i think i have a nice personality!") stars in a click-by-click cooking meditation on how to make a really fine holiday fruitcake. Link, very child-friendly. There is no ironic "gotcha" here, just a puppet baking a cake.

More: monkey cooking latkes, hannukah celebration, christmas stuff, and... hmmmm... a visit with the truthiness elf, winner of the NPR holiday crafts contest.

I like this advertisement for dead tree books. Click the image to see the whole thing.
Link (Thanks, Jason Tester!)

BB reader Paul sez,

A board-gaming colleague of mine created, played, and I beleive subsequently ate, a full gingerbread version of the popular, and oft-expanded tile-laying game "Carcassonne". She has published the details including how long it took and llinks to lots of photos...the little gingerbread "meeples" are the best!

Link to blog entry with links to photos and HOWTO infoz. Here's background on the game.

Jon Power points to more coverage on boardgamegeek and says,

Boardgamegeek.com is the centre of the board game universe and a few minutes on there will convert almost everybody away from horrid Monopoly and back into fun games like Carc. My club in York is called Beyond Monopoly!, we'll be meeting tomorrow to play German games all day. German style board games are the future. We go to Essen each year to join 150,000 boardgamers at the biggest show in the world. 4 days of board games in massive exhibition halls, it's unbelievable.

Cuban journalist Guillermo Fariñas, who conducted a six-month hunger strike for uncensored Internet access for all in his country, has received the 2006 Reporters Without Borders "Cyber-Dissident" press freedom prize.

Guillermo Fariñas, "El coco", head of the independent news agency Cubanacán Press, began a hunger strike in February 2006 to demand the right for all Cubans to have access to a "free Internet". The authorities hospitalised him and put him on a drip to try to end his campaign, which was widely covered in the international media.

After he had spent several months in intensive care suffering from kidney and heart problems, the authorities told Guillermo Fariñas he could have "limited" access to the Internet. He refused, explaining that he could not honourably exercise his profession as a journalist by looking only at news and information which had been filtered by the government.

"El coco" only ended his hunger strike on 31 August after a brush with death and the loss of 15 kilos. He is continuing his work at Cubanacán and has become one of the leading voices among Cuban opposition journalists. He also still keeps the foreign media up to date with human rights violations in his country and in particular passes on information about intimidation and harassment of independent reporters. Cubanacán, founded in 2003, is the leading news agency of the new generation of Cuban journalists. None of its 17 reporters has the right to use the Internet or fax to send articles abroad. Their reports are mostly filed from public telephones. Since telecommunications charges are very high, the calls are mostly placed by collect.

And The two other nominees were:

Habib Saleh. Syria President Bashar al-Assad has made Syria into one of the worst ‘black holes’ in the Internet. He has set up systematic filtering of online opposition publications and sent his political police to mercilessly track down dissidents and independent journalists expressing themselves online. Writer and businessman Habib Saleh, 59, has paid the price of this systematic repression. On 29 May 2005, he was arrested at his office in Tartus, 130 kilometres north of Damascus. He was sentenced to three years in prison at the end of an unfair trial at which he was accused of “spreading lies” on the Internet.

Yang Zili, China. Computer technician Yang Zili was sentenced on 28 May 2003 to eight years in prison for “subversion”. His “crime” was to post articles on his website lib.126.com, "the garden of Yang Zili’s ideas", in which he wrote about his support for political liberalism, criticised the crackdown on the spiritual movement Falungong and condemned the economic woes of China’s peasants.

Link

Cyrus Farivar blogs,

Apple France and French ISP Orange are hooking up to provide French consumers with a rented MacBook and 1 Mbps DSL for €60 ($79.50) a month. That works out to about €2 a day. (You can upgrade to 8 Mbps DSL for an additional €5 per month.)

The catch is that you have to sign up for three years, but that includes three years of Apple Care.

Louis-Pierre Wenes, executive director of France Telecom’s domestic operations compared this deal to getting a €150 rebate on the price of a MacBook (€1099) plus an additional two years of AppleCare (€319) — in that €35 that pays for the computer x 36 months = €1260. However, M. Wenes didn’t explain what happens at the end of the three-year deal. (There also appears to be a rent-to-buy option, but it’s unclear how that works out.)

Link

BB reader Jabber says,

This is a story about a massive duck passing (at least 2000 have kicked the bucket so far) in Idaho. Experts aren't sure what is causing the die-off, but they are pretty sure that this is not H5N1. Their theory? Probably a bacteria. However, the main reason I submit the link? On page two of the story is the following text: "...They said it was unclear why a similar outbreak had never before occurred in Idaho. SIMILAR EVENT IN IOWA LAST YEAR. On Wednesday, officials outfitted with protective gear were gathering hundreds of mallard carcasses..."

Link

Reader comment: Neil says,

CNN is reporting that the mallard die-off was caused by fungus growing on moldy grain like the earlier Iowa incident.

Tune in, turn on, doom out: Mateusz Pozar says,

Seeing as everybody is full of christmas cheer, glee and misery, i thought i'd add to that. I've put together 2400 christmas tracks into one 75 minute mix. 8 seconds of each song is spliced onto one of four tracks, with each track filtered according to frequency. It's not easy listening, and a friend of mine actually copied it because "i already feel like shit, so maybe with this i'll come out on the other side". (paraphrasing a bit here).

Link. Get into the spirit of misery! Woe, woe, woe.

magic pony
suck uk
imaginary foundation
dna11
breath capture
facial feature stickers
i heart guts
we heart prints
process indicator
greggo magnets
the small object
the poster list

Shamelessly self-promoting bonus links: The BoingBoing t-shirt store, and the BB Digital Emporium.

Web Zen Home, Store (Thanks Frank!)

I'm digging the new designs from surrealist clothier Imaginary Foundation, creators of the first in the artist series of Boing Boing t-shirts. The shirt seen here was inspired by Carl Sagan's profound insight that "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."
Link

UK scientists have gained insight into the genetics of pain by studying a now-deceased teenage Fakir in Pakistan who could stab himself and perform other seemingly hurtful acts without wincing. After the boy died by jumping off a roof because he wasn't in tune with his own physical limitations, the researchers looked at his extended family and discovered that they too were entirely pain-free. Identifying the genetic mutation that leads to this odd condition could someday lead to new painkillers. From News@Nature:

The researchers studied six of his relatives, aged between 4 and 14 years. All had suffered many cuts and bruises, and injuries to lips and tongue caused by biting themselves; several had fractured bones without noticing.

This shows the importance of pain for our health and survival, notes Geoffrey Woods of the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, UK, who led the study. "Pain is there for a jolly good reason — it stops us damaging ourselves," he says. For example, the pain from a broken arm or sprained ankle encourages us to rest that body part while it recovers.

The children in the study had no such safety check, causing them to be both graceless and reckless. "One girl was continually knocked down in the playground and just didn't mind at all," Woods says...

The SCN9A gene encodes a 'sodium channel': one of the structures that allows electrical charge to flow into nerve cells, triggering a signal, the researchers explain. Without this particular type of sodium channel, the brain does not receive any signal that the body has encountered a pain-causing stimulus.

Link

I'm heading out for a couple weeks' holidays now -- back on January 2. Taking a cue from danah boyd, I'm discarding all the mail that comes in between now and then; that way I won't come back from hols with a million emails shouting for my attention and harshing my mellow. It's a good way of managing holiday away-time, keeping work from creeping into downtime -- I'm seeing it more and more.

Of course, the rest of the gang will still be here. If you want to submit a Boing Boing suggestion, use the form. I just delete Boing Boing suggestions I get by email, anyway, so this is always the right thing to do, no exceptions, ever, period.

If you want to talk to someone about doing business with Boing Boing, visit FM Publishing.

If you're looking to talk to someone about licensing some of my stories or novels, or commissioning a speech, article or whatnot, contact my agent, Russell Galen.

Have a great holiday, everyone! See you in 07!

Cory

Jargon watch: "Pizza upskirt" -- a photo of a pizza slice's crust, shot from beneath (coined for this photo). Used in SliceNY.com, a pizza-fancier's online community. Link (via Kottke)

(Photo "Fornino" from Flickr user Slice)

The Hannibal Deuce Plus is a monster bad-ass set-top box. Built on a Ubuntu Linux box with the incredible Mythtv tivoing software, it does all the things that the other companies lack the courage to try. It'll rip and store your DVDs, it'll Torrent videos off the net and store them, it'll skip commercials and grab your pictures off your camera's memory card and organize them for you. It's got WiFi and Ethernet, and can run multiple tuner-cards if you want to record shows off of more than one channel at a time. Link (via Red Ferret)

This Vianney Halter Antiqua watch appears to have sprung from the pages of a Victorian scientific romance. No doubt it costs more than god, and it leaves me frustrated that all the cheap knock-offs are of standard, slightly grotty, all-look-same status watches. What this world needs is some forgers with a little style. Link

Self-inking pixellated Mario and Luigi stamps from ThinkGeek -- at $2.99, a steal. I have a feeling that these would be a little like Tobasco, the unbearable temptation to put them on everything within reach. Link (via Wonderland)

This vintage console TV and hi-fi is reportedly of German origin. Don't you wish that all your electronics came on a chassis like this? Link (via Neatorama)

This little fella has a brush on his head for sweeping out your keyboard, but it comes cleverly concealed beneath and enormous Pulp Fiction-esque afro. Other figures in the series: salaryman, punk, rockabilly. Link (via Tokyomango)

Bill Gates gave a weird interview about DRM to a group of bloggers yesterday, admitting that putting anti-copying technology into media makes it worse. He concluded by advising everyone to just skip the DRM on music by buying CDs and ripping them (presumably as opposed to buying your music from the new Microsoft Zune music store, which sells thoroughly crippled tunes).

Gates said that no one is satisfied with the current state of DRM, which “causes too much pain for legitmate buyers” while trying to distinguish between legal and illegal uses. He says no one has done it right, yet. There are “huge problems” with DRM, he says, and “we need more flexible models, such as the ability to “buy an artist out for life” (not sure what he means). He also criticized DRM schemes that try to install intelligence in each copy so that it is device specific.

His short term advice: “People should just buy a cd and rip it. You are legal then.” Link (Thanks to everyone who suggested this link!)

In this video, film director Michel Gondry appears to solve a Rubik's Cube with his feet.
Link (Thanks, Coop!)

The cover story of Science News this week is about psychopaths, defined in the article as those pleasant individuals who "lack a conscience and are incapable of experiencing empathy, guilt, or loyalty." (On the cover, Ted Bundy.) From the article:

Psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley wrote The Mask of Sanity (1941, Mosby), a classic textbook on psychopathy. Cleckley portrayed psychopaths as superficially charming, intelligent people who don't feel deep emotions and lie about almost everything because they neither understand nor care about others...

Although psychiatrists don't currently label psychopathy as a formal personality disorder, a wave of new research has yielded insights into how psychopaths think and suggested biological and temperamental roots of this condition.

These findings have not only sparked debate among researchers but also attracted widespread interest among lawyers and judges. Courts in the United States and other countries increasingly rely on psychopathy measures to make sentencing judgments. New studies suggest that being labeled a psychopath increases the likelihood that an offender will be locked up indefinitely or even executed.

Link

Boston University marine biologist Jelle Atema has made progress converting sharks to "remote control" so that they could be outfitted with sensors and sent on spying machines. In a project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Atema implanted sharks with electrical stimulators that trick their brains into smelling food. Using the stimulators, he was able to "steer" the sharks around a tank. From Boston University's Alumni e-Newsletter where a video demonstration can be seen:

For decades, the navy has used dolphins and sea lions to patrol harbors, salvage expensive hardware, and locate potential sea mines. Indeed, mounting chemical, auditory, or visual sensors on a shark is the easy part. The challenge is finding a way to steer sharks over long distances. Over millions of years, sharks have evolved to pursue one particular target of opportunity — lunch — and military commanders would need a way to override that instinct in order to dispatch their shark spies to areas of strategic interest...

The military has since made the research classified, and it is now run out of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, R.I. But Atema is seeking new funding sources to continue his work on sharks, with potential civilian applications in mind — such as tracking fish populations, changes in ocean temperatures, or chemical spills.

Link (via Defense Tech)

I'm back from an assignment in Guatemala, going through gigs of footage on hard drives, and scribbled story notes on frayed, coffestained moleskine pages. I'm sorting through everything on a road blog (xeni.net/trek). Emails and comments I received from readers during the trip guided me to story ideas I wouldn't have known about otherwise, and assisted me immeasurably. Here's a roundup of recent journal entries.

* Video: Market report. Quick walk through the mercado central in Antigua, Guatemala, shot on an Altoids-sized camera. Link to 1:11 video (in Flash or Quicktime).

* Travel haiku: homesick fading battery.

* United Fruit Company promotional video, 1950. Bizarre promo film produced by the United Fruit Company just four years before a CIA-backed coup protected that firm's interests in Guatemala by overthrowing democratically-elected leader Jacobo Arbenz. If the company's foreign policy ambitions had a name: Bananifest Destiny.

* Internet video on CIA role in 1954 coup. Various documentary clips found on YouTube, Google Video, and archive.org which relate to the 1954 US-backed coup. Guest cameo by Richard Nixon.

* Is "Apocalypto" Racist? The actual title of the essay was "Is 'Apocalypto' Pornography," but IMO that gives perfectly respectable porn a bad name. (via Tom Zeller/NYT/The Lede).

* Art in response to "femicides". Over 2,000 women were murdered in Guatemala from 2001 through March, 2006. More recent stats show that 600 women died in 2006 alone. While I was in Guatemala, I interviewed government officials and human rights workers about this -- thousands of women demonstrated in the capital one day. These crimes are often sexualized and extremely violent, with signs of rape, torture, mutilation or dismemberment. A Mexican-American artist in the Bay Area has launched an interactive art project in response.

* Vintage video about evil volcano near Antigua. Sensationalist '30s newsreel about indigenous people who live at the foot of the "volcano of water" near Antigua, Guatemala. It's strange to see this for three reasons: one, I woke up to this same volcano outside of my window every morning while I stayed in Antigua. Two, the smarmy narrator refers to Mayan people as "human mules," and in other offensive terms. Three, the scenes of daily life in this video don't look much different from life today in Guatemala's more rural communities.

Previous BoingBoing roundups from xeni.net/trek - Guatemala: Link. Videos: Link.

I must have been six or seven years old when I first came across Roy Doty's illustrations in a pile of old Popular Science magazines from the 1960s. Doty's "Wordless Workshop" comics featured a pipe-smoking dad who solved common household problems with ingenious but easy-to-make devices.

I instantly became a fan of his elegant, light-hearted, clear-as-a-bell drawings, and whenever I found old copy of PopSci at a garage sale or used book store, I'd tear through it until I found his two-page cartoon, which he started doing in the early 1950s.

A couple of years ago, I learned that Roy was still actively drawing, for magazines and books. I immediately emailed him and asked him to become the illustrator for MAKE magazine's puzzle page, called Aha! (in homage to another hero of mine, Martin Gardner, who wrote two books I treasure: Aha! Insight and Aha! Gotcha, now available in one volume). Roy was happy to oblige, and has illustrated the column ever since. I can't tell you how exciting it is to get the faxes with his rough sketches for the column. Of course, he needs no art direction; he knows exactly how to illustrate the puzzles.

Every year, Roy sends out whimsical Christmas cards, and this year's is a masterpiece -- a Mousetrap / Rube Goldberg-style holiday celebration machine. Link