First blogged on BoingBoing here in 2004.

* 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.

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

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 ;)

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."

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

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.

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.

Reader comment: Neil says,

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

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.

"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.

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.

"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)

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

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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..."

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.

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).

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

Web Zen Home, Store (Thanks Frank!)

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.

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

(Photo "Fornino" from Flickr user Slice)

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!)

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.

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.

* 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 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

Link. (Thanks, Carabassa)

Reader comment: Summer Smith says,

I bought an egg cuber as pictured from Sur La Table a year ago as a gift for a crazy friend. Looks like it's no longer available (at least it's not online), but here's a place from which you can have one shipped: Link.

To quote the friend: "I've found yet another way to categorize people - those who say 'Cool!' when they see a cubic hard-boiled egg, and those who say 'Uh, why?'. I'm glad to be in the former category, as are my friends. I've also learned that many of my co-workers are in the latter."

BTW, the MAKE magazine blog recently featured an Egg Cuber: Link.

Have an eggstraordinary day!

this is just an ebay auction for the 'kubikou' egg cuber you have posted.

square boiled egg? nah, try star/teddy bear/hello kitty boiled eggs. Technically, you can make boiled egg into any shape if you have the mold. Molded egg is quite normal in bento making world, cos it's cute! I'd think that square egg is pretty boring compared to those :D. Link

Not that common in the states, but my grandma used to have one and she used to tease me unmercifully about how I never understood how only she could get cubed eggs. "I get them from square chickens, and only my favorite gransdon is worth the trouble." (my Hungarian is rusty, but I think that's what I remember her saying.)

I'm sure someone else has mentioned the Gillygaloo, a legenday bird which laid cubical eggs -- and with good reason. As Jorge Luis Borges recalled in "The Book of Imaginary Beings":

The Gillygaloo nested on the slopes of Paul Bunyan's famed Pyramid Forty, laying square eggs to keep them from rolling down the steep incline and breaking. These eggs were coveted by lumberjacks, who hard-boiled them and used them as dice.

Link

This month's Journal of Applied Ecology reports that over-production of frankincense is having a deleterious affect on the viability of resin-producing trees in Eritrea.

Tapping frankincense causes the Boswellia trees to use up their carbohydrates replenishing their resin, instead of growing the flowers, fruits and seeds of their reproductive systems, according to Science Daily. The Christmas spirit herein forces natural selection, and the Boswellia forests may not be fit enough for the task.

A highly superior being from another part of the galaxy presents you with two boxes, one open and one closed. In the open box there is a thousand-dollar bill. In the closed box there is either one million dollars or there is nothing. You are to choose between taking both boxes or taking the closed box only. But there's a catch.

The being claims that he is able to predict what any human being will decide to do. If he predicted you would take only the closed box, then he placed a million dollars in it. But if he predicted you would take both boxes, he left the closed box empty. Furthermore, he has run this experiment with 999 people before, and has been right every time.

What do you do?

On the one hand, the evidence is fairly obvious that if you choose to take only the closed box you will get one million dollars, whereas if you take both boxes you get only a measly thousand. You'd be stupid to take both boxes.

On the other hand, at the time you make your decision, the closed box already is empty or else contains a million dollars. Either way, if you take both boxes you get a thousand dollars more than if you take the closed box only.

"And by the way, I did eat it," Lisko said. "It was tasty."

Reader comment: glamajamma says,

I am actually in Wisconsin and read about the 7-legged deer over lunch. I was very disappointed on the number of pictures on the subject, so I have been Googling like crazy for more pictures. This link is a more disturbing picture and the comments hints to the deer being a hermaphrodite. The following links may or not be deer deformities, they could just be good camera angles. Link 1, Link 2

Daniel Rubenstein says,

Here are more pictures of the mutated deer.

We are calling her Se-venison.

This is from the Fon Du Lac Reporter.

Look at the linked-to photos closely. In all but the official photos from the news story, it is clear that there are two deer in the photograph. In the first photo of the snowy woods, there is another deer behind the "six-legged" deer. You can see its tummy. In the second photograph of the field, the second deer is standing parallel to the first and its head is concealed, giving it the appearance of being "long." In the third photograph, the extra legs which appear to be attached to the deer are actually those of a baby deer's. Look at the location they are in, and this becomes more plausible than extra legs growing in that spot. Do not believe everything you see.

A group dedicated to photos of people playing the Nintendo Wii has been formed on Flickr, and the results are pretty hilarious.

Half of the fun with the Wii is watching others while they are playing the Wii. Many of the photos consist of what you might expect, young gamers in awkward poses -- laughing, making odd facial expressions, and having a lot of fun while making a total fool of themselves.

The surprise is the photos of people you wouldn't necessarily expect to see, like Michael T. Gilbert's photo of his dad playing Wii Sports Bowling [ shown here ]. They tell an entirely different story, and likely one Nintendo had hoped would come to fruition with the Wii.

However, a stallion that escaped from an Edmonton farm two weeks ago, may be part Quagga.

[Patricia] O’Neil bought Zebastian seven years ago at an auction near Innisfail, thinking he was a hybrid horse. When Zebastian fathered a foal, O’Neil said she sent his DNA for testing at the University of Phoenix. She said Zebastian has the DNA markers of a quagga zebra, a species that has been extinct for more than 100 years.

What: Creative Commons Turns Four!
When: Friday, December 15, 2006, 9pm-11pm
Where: The island of Kula (direct teleport here)

The party is actually a celebration of CC's 4th year in business, and along with Second Life, it's going to be held in San Francisco, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Lisbon, Portugal, and New York City. If you can make any of those, see this Creative Commons listing, for details on getting an invite.