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

From the Make blog. It looks kind of phony. Why does the guy need to be up so high? Link

RU Sirius and one of our favorite SubGenii, Hal Robins, mourn the decline of underground comix and mull over Subgenius lore on this week's RU Sirius Show. And RU has an inspiring discussion with NASA scientist Creon Levit about the near future of space exploration on NeoFiles. (Photo by Scott Beale) Link

How long would a Balinese long horse have to run on a rolamite before it turned into a unicorn? (Photo provided by Len Cullum)

Bao Xishun is 7 feet 9 inches tall, and as you might imagine, has very long arms to match his body. Those long arms of his were put to good use recently when he was called in by desperate veterinarians to reach into the stomachs of two dolphins and remove the plastic they had swallowed. Link

This neat Catalan gadget allows you to cook square boiled eggs. The device is called Kubikou, which translates from Catalan to "cubic-egg." Wish I knew where to buy 'em outside of Catalunya.

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!

Heidi says,

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

shari says,

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

Alexander says,

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.)

_why says,

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

Evolution meets Christmas. Frankincense is a fragrant tree resin with a long history in Christian ceremonies, and was one of the gifts said to have been presented by the three wise men. Eric Roston writes,

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.

Link to Eric's blog entry, and here's the Wikipedia entry on Boswellia trees and frankincense. Image above: the evolving tree in question.

Franz Kiekeben (who is a very funny cartoonist) does a nice job of describing Newcomb's Paradox, which I've enjoyed contemplating, on and off, for many years.

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.

What would you do? Please read the rest of Kiekeben's essay before offering your reasoning. Link

Wisconsin resident Richard Lisko shot and killed was driving in his truck and hit and killed a deer which had seven "crab-like" appendages and both male and female sex organs.

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

Link to story with creepy photo. Here's another local news report. (Thanks, Brook, and Bill Leslie)

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

(Ed. note: the news story appears to be real, but those linked-to photos may instead be relatives of the Long Horse.)

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.

Stephanie B. says,

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.

BoingBoing reader Mario Anima says,

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.

Link to Wii Motion photo pool.

This is an old photograph of a quagga, an African equine believed to have been extinct for about 100 years.

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.

More at Cryptomundo. Link

Last night's episode of Criminal Minds on CBS opened with a quote from my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town -- keen! 1.6MB QuickTime Link (Thanks to everyone who wrote in about this!)

An upcoming Second Life/First Life Creative Commons party will be held jointly in many real world cities and on Joi Ito's in-game island, with special guests Joi Ito, Larry Lessig, and Jimmy "Wikipedia" Wales.

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.

Link (Thanks, James!)