A roundup of festive crap sent in to BoingBoing by you, dear readers:

• Evil Christmas Carols (audio). How beautiful! With "sinister" key changes to minor, they sound menacing, like soundtracks to silent movies about damsels in distress on Christmas eve.
• Weird nativity in FL retirement community, above (WTF? Raelians?)
• Scientific formula for blink-free holiday group photos
• War on Moisture: TSA bans snowglobes on planes
• Top 10 DIY Christmas trees
• $600 upside-down Christmas tree
• Flickr pool: your strangest holiday ornament
• Roombas singing Christmas carols (video)
• Rankin-Bass Santa + Rudolph rescued (previous BB post)
• 101 Classic Christmas Videos

• Gingerbread Katmari Damacy (above)
• Video: horribly Bad Star Wars Christmas: part 1, part 2
• Ultraviolent Star Trek holiday office diorama
• Baby Jesus kidnapped, returns with snapshots
• A Very Cthulhu Christmas (audio)
• More Ctholhiday cheer: Scary Solstice (audio)
• sf-themed holiday story collection (+ 2, 3, 4, 5)

• Newtonmas crafts (above): holiday tree topper, costume
• Iranian political asylum applicant mom jailed in NC after applying for permit to sell street art (BB reader Pembdasi, who submitted this item, says, "I am her half-brother. I just found out about this today, the day before Christmas Eve. Merry Christmas I suppose.")
• Silent choir sings "Silent Night" in sign language
• Retro ads: shopping mall Santas arriving by copter, parachute
• Zanta, holiday cult figure in Toronto. Here's more.
• Boymongoose: 12 days of Christmas, Indian-style (video). Re-blogged by popular demand -- everyone I've showed this to in person squeals, then emails it to 20 people. About: Link, and you can buy the boy-band's "Christmas in Asia Minor" album online, in CD or download form: Link. Includes such classic carol faves as "Hark the Herald, Angel Singh," and "We Are Wishing You A Merry Christmas."

(Thanks and happy hols, Huw Bowen, Rob Nachbar, Tim Shore, Dave Topping, Mark Vadnais, John/Disney Blog, Scott, Wil, Justin, Human, Mark Wu, Paul Campbell, Tay, Tobias, Robn, Stef, Jacob Appelbaum, and Santa's Helper!)

Lee says: "CNN ran a fascinating little story on 12/22/06 about a 'mystery stone' found in New Hampshire. No one seems to know what the carvings on the stone mean, how it was made, or even who might have made the artifact. I Googled to find out more about the item, and came up with this site from the New Hampshire Historical Society, who has possession of the stone." Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Mystery of the Bayer Stone Head

Scott says: "there's no denying it anymore." Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Photos of extinct long-horse
• Long horse on Wikipedia
• Balinese long horse

Link to image gallery, more media including audio, video, and text reports here: Link.

Link. (Thanks Raian)

Snip from CNET News.com story:

U.S. District Judge Sam Lindsay in the northern district of Texas granted a preliminary injunction against Robert Davis, who operated Supercrosslive.com and had been providing direct links to the live audiocasts of motorcycle racing events. Lindsay ruled last week that "the link Davis provides on his Web site is not a 'fair use' of copyright material" and ordered him to cease linking directly to streaming audio files.

Link (Thanks, Scott)

pea hix says,

here's some of my favorite shitteos called "asdf." i guess the main thing that ties all these films together is that the people that posted them thought so little of their work that they just titled them by hitting the four "home position" keys under their left hand- pretty much the default "word" you type when you have nothing at all to say but you have to fill in a text box anyway.

Link, and related Wikipedia entry on asdf: Link.

"Gov. Jeb Bush's official portrait unveiled at the governor's mansion shows him in his office standing next to a picture of his family with his trustworthy BlackBerry." Link. (Thanks, Andrew Breitbart!)

Researchers exploring the so-called "Dark Web" analyzed 86 websites from groups labeled as terrorist orgs by the US government, using data mining software. In a report titled "Analyzing Terror Campaigns on the Internet," a team of tech and culture experts from several US universities compared them to 92 US state and federal government websites. The researchers determined that the government sites lagged behind in advanced web technologies. In short, they said, the terrorist groups demonstrated greater sophistication in their use of Web 2.0 tools.

I filed a story about that report for today's edition of the NPR News program "Day to Day," and spoke to one of the authors, Dr. Jialun Qin of the Univ. of Mass., Lowell. Does he believe the American government is losing a "war of websites" against terrorist organizations in the Middle East? Well, not exactly. Snip from transcript of Qin's comments:

According to some studies, the US government is the best in the world in terms of using the internet to communicate with the general public. So it's not a problem of the government, really -- the government is doing a pretty good job. The problem is that the terrorists are learning very fast, they're taking advantage of a lot of different new technologies including the internet. The US government has to improve its usage of internet. The terrorists surprised us.

Some of the groups are even doing e-commerce, Qin said -- selling t-shirts, CDs, even comics for kids or modded video games on the internet to generate income.

Also in the segment: James Ellis of the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, a nonprofit group in Oklahoma City funded by the Department of Homeland Security. I asked him if he believed the government should be doing more to shut down these sites, as some have argued -- significantly, the report states that some portion of the activity ends up being hosted on servers inside the United States at one point or another. Ellis said:

It's more complicated than people realize. The information is transient. When you shut down a site, it doesn't go away, that community doesn't go away. In some cases, it can be more helpful to leave a site intact so you can monitor the activity, and watch it over time... watch them develop as indicators and warnings. It's like cutting off the head of a Hydra -- it's just going to pop up somewhere else.

• ARCHIVED AUDIO LINK, with pointers on where to read the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies report online.

Image: Left, a web graphic on one of the sites in the report. The poster depicts Abu Mus’ab Zarqawi, and the text says "Emir Zarqawi, may God save him. Eagle of Iraq, volcano of Jihad, and the beheader." Right, the NPR segment includes audio from the Al-Anbar website, which offers "holy war" hymns in an audio section.

Also on today's edition of "Day to Day," an amazing interview my colleage Neal Carruth put together -- this one is truly a must-listen:

Sunni Insurgents Launch TV Channel
Sunni insurgents in Iraq are running a 24-hour television channel, called Al Zawraa. The channel shows attacks on Americans and Shiites, as well as violence committed by Shiite militias. Saad Qasim, a translator in NPR's Baghdad Bureau, talks with Alex Chadwick.

• ARCHIVED AUDIO LINK for that segment.

"People Doing Stuff" is a site that automatically inserts a random name and verb into Google Image Finder each time you hit reload. The resulting image sets always have something interesting in them. Here's a cool picture that showed up in a search for "victor wanders." Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Photographs from the Arkansas State Prison 1915-1937
• Japanese cosplay photos
• Photographs of pregnant animals

CNN has a video of a live giant squid sighting, a very rare event. The researchers tried to capture the squid, but it died.

A Japanese research team has succeeded in filming a giant squid live -- possibly for the first time -- and says the elusive creatures may be more plentiful than previously believed, a researcher said Friday.

The research team, led by Tsunemi Kubodera, videotaped the giant squid at the surface as they captured it off the Ogasawara Islands south of Tokyo earlier this month. The squid, which measured about 24-feet long, died while it was being caught.

"We believe this is the first time anyone has successfully filmed a giant squid that was alive," said Kubodera, a researcher with Japan's National Science Museum. "Now that we know where to find them, we think we can be more successful at studying them in the future."

Link

Related BB posts:
• Unusual photo of large squid in parking lot
• Giant squid caught on film for first time
• Squid biomass exceeds human biomass
• More squid posts on Boing Boing

I think the object of this Japanese game show is to pay attention to what the scantily clad young woman is cooking and not to the scantily clad young woman. Link

Related: Boing Boing video picks for 2006

Reader comment:

Brian says:

Regarding the "Japanese game show features food prepared by scantily clad cooks", it is a popular weekly　variety show known as Pu-Sma. The show has two hosts, Yusuke Santa-Maria and Tsuyoshi Kusanagi (of the pop group SMAP), additionally each episode will include two or more celebrity guests that will join in on the fun.

Yusuke is well-known for his passion of all things "Ero", so the show often exhibits scantily clad young women in one situation or another.

Each episode features a different competiton that takes place between the two hosts and their special guests. If the competition involves the purchase of something, the loser of the competition must pay for whatever items were used during that particular episode. The expensess can easily get into thousands of dollars that come directly from the losing team's wallets.

This full page ad from an old issue of Boy's Life recommends BB rifles as an ideal gift for kids between the ages of 7 to 17. I hope mom and dad got real rifles. Link

Inspired by Mark's limited-edition gremlin Moleskines, Jake von Slatt created a magnificent collection of journals with etched brass covers made using an electrolytic etching process. Gareth Branwyn, who wrote a profile of Jake for an upcoming issue of MAKE:, has the details over at Street Tech. Link

Related BB posts:
• Gremlin Moleskine notebook Link
• Le moleskine blog Link
• Moleskine stops a bullet, saves man's life (It was a joke) Link

What's not to love about this photo of two happy pots on a stovetop, whose facial features are made of reflections from bottle caps, pieces of spaghetti, and the stove's burners? Link

Related: Interesting perceptual illusion with faces | Mr Angry and Mrs Calm optical illusion | Excellent purple dot illusion | Optical illusion's effects last overnight | More illusions on Boing Boing

New Zealand surgeon Peter Walker missed his flight from Queenstown back to Christchurch after Qantas Airways staff noticed his suitcase was bleeding. Apparently his baggage contained a plastic bag loaded with bloody operating gowns, a towel, and surgical instruments. After Walker sealed his sack inside a plastic airline bag he was permitted to catch a later flight. From the New Zealand Press Association:

(Local medical officer of health Dr. Derek) Bell intends to refer the incident to the Medical Council because of the potential for injuries to bag-handling staff from sharp objects inside the bag, and the risk of exposure to blood and body fluids.

Mr Walker said the instruments were safely inside steel trays and he always asked patients beforehand if they had infectious conditions such as Aids or hepatitis. He declined to disclose what operation he performed at the Queenstown Medical Centre.

Link (Thanks, Vann Hall!)

Arista, Warner, Capitol, UMG, and other record labels are taking legal action against the long-troubled Russian digital music site AllofMp3.com. Earlier this year, a statement from a US government trade representative pegged the site as being an even higher-volume digital music distributor than iTunes. Tom Zeller at the NYT's "The Lede" blog reports,

Started in 2000, the Web service, which charged just pennies per song and roughly $1 for an album, established its legality by claiming that it complies with Russian copyright laws, and that it distributes royalties through, and is licensed to sell its music by something called the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society.

Of course, that body was not officially recognized outside the country, and the legality of the business plan was hotly debated even inside Russia, but while that was being sorted out, the service grew to become what the United States Commerce Department called the world’s highest-volume distributor of online music.

The service quickly began suffering death by a thousand cuts this year — with Visa and Mastercard refusing to process payments for AllofMp3’s parent company, Mediaservices, earlier this year. Then last month, Russian authorities agreed to move to shut down the music service, after the United States gently suggested that such a clear and constant violation of international copyright standards could hold up Russia’s acceptance in the World Trade Organization.

Link.

Previously on BoingBoing:

• AllOfMP3 loses Visa account, switching to ad-supported
• US Trade Representative bends Russia over on copyright
• Is it legal to buy songs from Russian MP3 sites?
• USA: Russia can't enter WTO unless it shuts down AllofMP3
• Russian MP3 site given thumbs up by investigators
• Archived BoingBoing posts about AllofMP3.com

Last week's edition of the New York Times included an odd item about NBC latenight host Conan O'Brien doing an on-air bit about a hypothetical fetish site called hornymanatee.com. But, the NYT reported:

There was only one problem: as of the taping of that show, which concluded at 6:30 p.m., no such site existed. Which presented an immediate quandary for NBC: If a viewer were somehow to acquire the license to use that Internet domain name, then put something inappropriate on the site, the network could potentially be held liable for appearing to promote it. In a pre-emptive strike inspired as much by the regulations of the Federal Communications Commission as by the laws of comedy, NBC bought the license to hornymanatee.com, for $159, after the taping of the Dec. 4 show but before it was broadcast.

Conan being Conan, he and the late-night team soon built out and launched a bogus porn site at that address, all about horny manatees. Radar Magazine ran a followup item, pointing out that...

There are no FCC regulations that required NBC to buy the domain. "We have no regulations dealing with URLs," says David Fiske, an FCC spokesman. "I don't know what they're talking about, frankly."

"Yeah, the Times overstated that a bit!" wrote Marc Liepis, a spokesman for the show, in an e-mail, explaining that NBC has a policy of registering domain names mentioned on-air not to comply with regulations but "to prevent others from registering sites that our talent mention, then trading off our intellectual property."

Who cares. What BoingBoing readers no doubt want to know is -- finally, finally there is an online home for hot manatee-on-manatee action: Link.

Reader comment: Glenn Fleishman says,

"NBC bought the license to hornymanatee.com, for $159," More importantly -- "bought the license," what are we in the 1950s dot com world or something? Did they buy the license for all the internets? Where they smoking the drugs when they paid the $159?

John Brownlee from Wired blog Table of Malcontents says

According to Conan O'Brien, they licensed it for 10 years for $159, which isn't great but ain't too shabby. We posted a video clip of Conan explaining the whole thing here: Link

BoingBoing buddy Gareth Branwyn says,

...And Andy Samdberg was on Late Night last night and attempted to converge the very viral "Dick in a Box" SNL Digital Short with HornyManatee.com by showing "Fan Art" he'd done of him and the Manatee with their dicks in festive, gift-wrapped boxes.

Here's the link to "Dick in a Box" (Link), though postings of which appear to be disappearing from YouTube as we speak, even though Samberg said last night that NBC had sent it to YouTube. Not THIS again...

Oscar says

NBC does in fact have an official YouTube account, under which they posted the uncensored version of Dick in a Box, among other things. So maybe they only half-understand how this viral video business works. Link.

Previous BoingBoing posts on NBC's adventures in viral video: Link.

Cityrag has compiled video links for a list of The 50 Greatest Cartoons as voted on by the animation industry in 1994. Here's an excerpt:

1. What's Opera, Doc? (1957)
2. Duck Amuck (1953)
3. The Band Concert (1935)
4. Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century (1953)
5. One Froggy Evening (1956)

The complete list is here, and it's absolutely awesome: Link.

At Cryptomundo, Loren Coleman posted a wonderfully weird list of his "Top Ten Creepy Fossil Finds of 2006." From his post:

1. Volaticotherium antiquus - Ancient Gliding Beast.

Discovered in Mongolia, this little half a pound squirrel-like animal is a whole new order of animals. It is a mammal that glided 70 million years before any other mammals—and maybe before birds flew.

Link to Cryptomundo

Related BB posts:
• Two-headed fossil Link
• Cryptomundo on the Hobbits Link
• Own your own Hobbit skull model Link

Quinn Norton files a report from the Global Voices Online conference in New Delhi, India, where about 100 bloggers from more than 25 countries gathered last weekend:

Exciting things happen when dedicated bloggers from around the world meet for the first time. For Briton Rachel Rawlins, being introduced to Tunisian exile Sami Ben Gharbia was the chance to meet a personal hero.

Gharbia is the creator of the Tunisian Prison Map -- an idea inspired by a New York Times interactive map charting murder locations in New York City. Gharbia turned the concept on its head: Instead of showing government figures on crime, he'd display where his former government was behaving criminally, imprisoning political dissidents for daring to speak out.

When you click on a place-mark on Gharbia's Google Maps mashup, a pop-up reveals details, stories and videos of prisoners and their families. The map is compelling and provocative, and it's one more reason Gharbia, who now lives in the Hague, says he can't go home.

The site is "the best advocacy tool I've ever seen anywhere," gushes Rawlins, managing editor of Global Voices Online, an international citizens' media group that held its second annual summit in India's bustling capital last weekend.

Link

Link to flickr slideshow. Coming up next on BoingBoing: Watch paint dry! (thanks el Brente)

Barbara Rushkoff is now blogging at Babble, the new urban parenting site launched by Nerve.com founder Rufus Griscom. I've gotten a kick out of Barbara's brilliant wit, nerdy irreverence, and comforting honesty since the days of her print 'zine Plotz. (Her book Jewish Holiday Fun For You! is a high-larious holiday gift.) As a new dad, I'm looking forward to following Barbara's parenting adventures on her Babble blog, "A Girl Grows In Brooklyn." From a recent post:

From where I stand, in the middle of Park Slope, I’m almost urban, not quite suburban, and alls I can say that the farthest thing on my mind is trying to be cool.

Here's the thing. I remember when Mamie was 6 months old I went out and spent $32 on a Sex Pistols t-shirt for her. Here I was imposing my youth on her, like my punk days would show everyone how cool my kid was. How cool I was. So can I tell you how stupid I felt when nannies at the local playground would look at me and ask me about the shirt.

”Well, it’s this band that I used to love.”

I didn't mention that the only time I listen to Never Mind The Bullocks these days is when I clean the house. Punk rock man, yeah. (Isn't John Lydon like 60 now anyway?) But saying that sentence I realized the shirt had nothing to do with my kid, and everything to do with me trying to show everyone what kind of parent I was trying to be. Which is so wrong.

Link

A bunch of griefers in Second Life staged a members-only metaverse assault on "virtual real estate tycoon" Anshe Chung yesterday, during a staged SL event with CNET reporter Daniel Terdiman. A torrent of pixelated male genitals rained upon the victim, whose offline name is Ailin Graef.

Steve Hutcheon of the Sydney Morning Herald filed a comprehensive report of the incident here and tells BoingBoing, "If you can't visualize it, see this YouTube clip: Link Google Video Link." Snip from Steve's report:

"She is very popular, and some people don't like her," said CNET reporter Daniel Terdiman, whose Second Life avatar (online persona), GreeterDan Godel, was interviewing Anshe at the time of the attack.

"She's made a lot of money, and is one of the most prominent of all Second Life residents. So to some people, some griefers, that makes her a target."

Griefers are so-called because they create grief. Their antics are designed to interrupt proceedings in virtual worlds and games usually for no other reason than because they can.

Attacks like the one launched against Anshe are triggered by a program code that generates self-replicating objects.

Much like email spam, these "griefspawn" attacks can chew up system resources and slowing down performance. They can sometimes even trigger network crashes.

Daniel Terdiman's transcript is here: Link

BoingBoing reader Paul Camp says,

Daniel Engber, Slate Magazine's Explainer in Residence, has posted a list of submitted but unanswered questions from the preceding year. Many are truly unhinged, such as the one from a guy with apparent connections in Nigeria seeking advice on how to fence gold and gems. Mr. Engber has unwisely promised to answer the one that gets the most votes. Given the demonstrated ability of boing boing readers to bring web servers to their knees, I'm thinking this is a battle we can win.

Link. Here's a sample of the items up for voting:

# Given the exchange and dispersion of matter, how likely is it/how often do we inhale/consume and/or incorporate into our own protein structure molecules that were once in some historical figure, say Abraham Lincoln?

# Lasers are now powerful and small (at least I think they are), so why don't our troops carry laser guns?

#I have been pondering this situation for as long as I can remember (maybe age 7-8) and it drives me nuts. It makes me feel like my head will implode if I think any harder. Is the universe infinite? It must end somewhere. But when it ends... there must be something on the other side... right?

# If a group of passengers on a hijacked plane wanted to, could they bring a plane down by all of them using their cell phones at the same time?

# Can you tell me how long it will take if you eat rat poison to see if it is going to affect you? Please e-mail me back. Because my niece ate some.

# Hi. I just wanted to know if our eyeballs roll back when we are sleeping (or closed) or do they shake? Or...

# PYGMIES: How/when/where/still in existence/do we mate with them?

Reader comment: Anonymous says,

Greg from The Talent Show has already taken a pass as explaining most of the "Unexplained Explainer" questions. A sample :

"If we taught animals to talk, how would that affect the world?"

There would be more vegetarians, but we'd get definitive proof that cows are complete dumbasses.

"What would happen to the stock market if a meteor impacted the earth? What would happen to the global markets and the U.S. market? Say a meteor hits inside U.S. borders and takes out two states."

The insurance industry would crash, but the U.S. government would bail them out. Unfortunately the same won't be done for the millions of refugees created by the meteor strike. But at least the trillions of dollars wasted on the "war against meteors" will create a few more jobs, right? Also, we *must* abolish the death tax.

Link

Tom Mathews says,

I think I know the answers to two of the questions. If you don't read anything else, check out the Stavatti's TIS-1 proposal. The future is now (or, at least, coming soon).

For "breathing in other people", I read an article in (I believe) Science News around 1993. I've forgotten the specifics, and I've tried to track it down on the web, but have been unable to. It involved statistical modeling of gaseous dispersion in the atmosphere, and found a single exhalation would disperse after several hundred years. I believe the example they used was that, in every breath you take, you're breathing in Napoleon's last breath. Now it isn't protein or particulate matter, but it does give an upper bound to the answer.

For the Laser Rifle, check out Stavatti's Tactical Infantry System-1. It's a proposal submitted to the US Army for a gasdynamic laser lethal at over 1000 meters and up to 170 bursts/minute. Lethal lasers with a fast recharge and long life require a lot of energy, so you usually end up talking nuclear. Section VI of the proposal covers the challenges and risks to laser weapons... mainly that of cheaply producing large quantities of Polonium-210 (currently produced only in microgram quantities, and extremely lethal). It's interesting to note that Po-210 is the same thing that the assassin used on Mr. Litvinenko.

The military is also researching non-lethal laser weapons (dazzlers), but that's a touchy area, as blinding weapons are banned by the Geneva convention. The workaround is in Article 3, which states that it's ok to blind as long as that's not the purpose: "Blinding as an incidental or collateral effect of the legitimate military employment of laser systems, including laser systems used against optical equipment, is not covered by the prohibition of this Protocol."

Dever says,

BB reader Tom Matthews mentioned the Stavatti TIS-1 and gave a brief description of it under "The Unexplained Explainer". I'm writing to provide you guys with the actual PDF from the company who "makes it" -- PDF Link.

Salvador Rodríguez says,

Another one of the unexplainables, explained. Current theoretical physics indicate the the universe is finite. Let's start with an obvious example:

Is the Earth infinite? Obviously, no. However, if you are a creature tat only moves along the surface of Earth, you might go on endlessly and end up where you started, since the earth is curved. For a two dimensional being the Earth might seem infinite, though it is not. You need to break through a third dimension and fly out to space to really understand that the Earth is finite.

This happens to us when thinking of the Universe. If we think in three dimensions, then the Universe seems infinite to us. However, if we understand that space-time is a third dimension and that the universe is curved along this dimension, we might understand that we might travel endlessly through the Universe only to end up on the other side. If we were to travel through space-time, we might very well find ourselves outside our Universe.

As to the second part of the question, the string of theories (pun intended) is so long we're better off letting the physicist duke it out for a while.

Scott Willoughby says,

We here at Drivl couldn't resist answering Slate Magazine's 40 Unanswerable questions. Link

Paul Camp, of the Spelman College Department of Physics, says,

OK, what I actually had in mind was forcing Engber to address a question that was clearly unanswerable, but this is good too.

Since my academic background is in relativity and cosmology, though, I have to address the "finiteness of the universe" comment. Drawing an analogy to the surface of the Earth is pretty good as far as it goes. Essentially, you let two spatial dimensions represent space, suppressing the third because it has to do duty representing time. Pursuing that analogy, in a closed spacetime the "direction toward the center of the Earth" is playing the role of time and the center of the expansion is the big bang event. That is a rather roundabout way of saying that there is no spatial center just as there is no center to the surface of the Earth ("Mediterranean" notwithstanding).

However, the comment that current belief is that the universe is finite is no longer operational. As of the last 5 years or so, with highly refined measurements of the distances to very distance galaxies, we actually detect that the expansion rate of the universe is accelerating due to the presence of dark energy. This necessarily implies that the universe is open and the whole idea of a spherical topology is moot. Not only that, but it means that the universe has always been infinitely big and is expanding only in the sense that the curvature is changing.

This whole discussion revolves around a misunderstanding of what the big bang theory actually says. People think of it like they think of a normal explosion -- there is space, and somewhere in it a big boom occurs, and from the boom stuff goes flying out into the existing space. Doesn't work that way.

The stuff (galaxies, etc.) is not flying anywhere. To be more precise, the local motion of any particular bit of stuff is approximately zero. You only see relative motion on cosmological distances, not locally, but that is because the space in between the stuff is changing. The stuff is only going along for the ride.

So a more accurate, if puzzling, picture is that, open or closed, the entire universe has always been full of stuff. The big bang did not happen at some center and stuff is flying out. No, the big bang happened everywhere, all at once, and nothing "flew out." Rather, the geometry of the spacetime in which the stuff exists began to change. Things get further apart because there is more and more space being created between the things, not because the things are flying in any particular direction. Think of it like a bunch of paper clips connecting rubber bands together. If you stretch the rubber bands, the paper clips get further apart, but not because they actually moved around on the rubber bands. The paper clips (galaxies) stayed put. It was the rubber bands (geometry) that changed.

There. Maybe I can work for Slate.

Pink Tentacle links to a slew of amazing wildlife illustrations drawn by Kurimoto Tanshuu (1756-1834) during the Edo period in Japan.
Link (Thanks, John Alderman!)

The study of a rare genetic disease that speeds up the aging process may lead scientists to ways to extend human lifespans. Erasmus Medical Center geneticists Jan Hoeijmaker and his colleagues examined DNA from a boy who suffered from XPF-progeroid syndrome, a condition that caused him to die of "old age" at just 15. From Scientific American:

The teen's illness... when replicated in mice, allowed an international team of researchers to answer a fundamental question in the science of aging: Do we get old due to the accumulation of damage over our lifetimes or due to the genetic blueprint we inherit?

"What we say is [that] both are valid and that, in particular, damage to DNA contributes to aging," says Jan Hoeijmakers, a geneticist at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and lead author of the study, which comprised teams from four different institutions in Europe and the U.S. "Damage accumulates ... but it is modulated by your genetic makeup. If you have better repair and/or slower metabolism, you age slower..."

The researchers compared the activity of thousands of genes in the liver of a 15-day-old mutant mouse to those in a normal mouse who lived two and a half years. The result? "The rapidly aging mice switched their activity from growth to maintenance and repair, up-regulating cellular defenses and down-regulating respiration and metabolism," Hoeijmakers says. "This also occurs upon natural aging, and if you [could] switch to this 'survival' mode early in life, you would live longer."

Link

These illustrations are some of the incredible lettrines and adornments found on a late 15th century illuminated score for love songs called "Chansons d'Amour." The medieval French manuscript is parchment, 17.5cm x 12 cm.
Link (via BibliOdyssey)

As I type this, a 99%-unclothed Naomi Campbell (okay, she's wearing shoes) is posing for photographer Nick Knight, who is using a 3D body scanning device to capture her likeness digitally in a warehouse somewhere. You can watch the whole supermodel camgirl stunt online: QuickTime stream link. It's live now (12:20pm ET), not sure how long they'll continue. Susannah Breslin, who points us to this spectacle, says "I can't tell if this will be interesting or not. Maybe if she hits someone with a phone." Link to project home page.

Update, 12:57pm ET: Ms. Campbell's not on set anymore, and the scanners aren't active -- but here are some low-res screengrabs from the video stream, so you can get an idea of how they set up the shoot (worksafeness: one of them contains blurry, pixelated, waist-up nudity): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

The model stood on a small circular platform, and scanners were perched mid-torso level on mobile, mechanical arms. I'm not sure where the resulting photos will be shown, but it looked really cool. There's a technical credit on the project website for the scanning technology -- "Kev Stenning at Rapido3D." Here's that company's website: Link. Would be interesting to know the resolution at which they're scanning for this shoot, and more tech specifics about the devices they're using.

Reader comment: Brem says,

The scanning system they are using is a set of Full Body scanners from InSpeck, a company I worked for, incidently: Link. Here is the product details: Link. It appears those actual cameras are 1.3 Megapixels. There are 4 cameras on two columns and the subject usually takes 50-80% of the image. So in theory: 1.3 x 4 x 0.8 = approx 4.2 Million polygons, but with sampling and polygonal reduction, it would come to aroudn 1 M polygons or less, depending on the needs.

Michael Calanan says (@1:50pm ET),

They've started 3D scanning again, here's a snapshot of the QT feed: JPG Link JPG Link 2.

Bob Klepfer says,

Your story gave me a most startling deja vu---remember "Looker"? (Ed. Note: Michael Crichton wrote that one.) Definitely a favorite for adolescent boys, at least. Now just be on the lookout for something to "happen" to the models so they don't have to pay them fees.

Andrew says: "For the aspiring nuke-triggering president on your list. Pity they didn't call it Project Strangelove, but I guess licensing the name cost too much. I like the kid sweating in anticipation. Probably looked even better on the storyboard." (In all fairness, the commercial says it's launching a satellite into orbit.) Link

Related: 1960s TV commercial for V-RROOM! tricycle noise-maker | Creepy Crawlers TV commercial | Mr. Machine toy robot TV commercial

The RU Sirius Show celebrates Christmas this year by having Brian Flemming, the director of the atheist documentary film, "The God Who Wasn't There," on the show to talk about his "Blasphemy Challenge" and his "War On Christmas." And then they play a bunch of hilarious Christmas songs by the likes of Leonard Nimoy, Root Boy Slim, the cast of Bonanza, and Elvis Presley. (A text version of the interview is up at 10 Zen Monkeys.)

BRIAN FLEMMING: The early Christians, the very first Christians, did not believe in a human Jesus... If you look at the beginning of Christianity...nobody was mentioning Bethlehem or Jerusalem as the place where he was crucified. Basically, nothing that you and I would call the story of Jesus was told then. He was a savior who lived up in another realm. He had died and had risen back up to be with his father. All of this took place in an upper realm, not down on earth. Bit by bit, they added historical details.

Link

Tim Onosko says: When I left Disney (and after that, Universal), my wife and I produced a feature documentary about old Las Vegas lounge performers -- entertainers for whom show business was a job of incredibly long hours (eight hours a night, 45 minutes on stage, 15 minutes off, six nights a week) in very hazardous working conditions, the Vegas casinos. It's called "LOST VEGAS: The Lounge Era."

The lives these performers led were predictably ones of booze, broads and hanging with guys (like Sinatra, the Rat Pack) who made much more money than these second and third bananas. They owed the casinos for the gambling losses, and constantly hoped that a big break would make them instantly famous. Our film profiles a group of these guys, and a woman named Fay McKay, a talented jazz singer who became known for her boozy comic parody of "The Twelve Days of Christmas."

Our film played the CineVegas festival in 2005, and is finally having its first theatrical play date at the famous Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, on January 8. We're waiting on whether IFC and/or Starz Cinema Channel are going to pick it up for cable showings. We're also looking for a distributor for DVD release.

Fay McKay is still alive and living in the desert, in obscurity. It would sure be nice for lots of people to see her do her famous comedy bit. Since it's the season, we've uploaded Fay's bit to YouTube. By the way, the actor/sleight-of-hand genius/show biz historian Ricky Jay is our film's narrator. Link

A number of news organizations will argue tomorrow that AT&T should publicly disclose documents that relate to its alleged participation in the government's warrantless domestic surveillance program:

Wired News -- joined by the San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, San Jose Mercury News and Bloomberg News -- is seeking documents and statements provided by former AT&T technician Mark Klein about the government spy program. AT&T says the pages contain corporate trade secrets. At 2 p.m. Thursday, both sides will make oral arguments before U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker in San Francisco.

Wired News attorney Timothy Alger believes it's unlikely that genuine trade secrets are at issue, but argues that even if they are, the public interest in the case trumps trade-secret protections.

"Even if there are trade-secrets interests, that interest has to yield to the paramount public interest in what the court is deciding," Alger said. "People should know if their phones are being tapped into by AT&T on behalf of the government."

Link to Wired News item by Ryan Singel.

Related posts on BoingBoing include:

• EFF suing AT&T for helping NSA illegally spy on Americans
• AT&T built warrantless wiretap rooms for the NSA
• AT&T retrofits privacy policy: your data is not yours
• Wired News publishes damning docs from EFF vs AT&T
• More archived BB posts on AT&T

32 journalists died in Iraq this year, making 2006 the most deadly year for press in any one country ever monitored by press advocacy group Committee to Protect Journalists. Snip from announcement:

In most cases, such as the killing of Atwar Bahjat, one of the best-known television reporters in the Arab world, insurgents specifically targeted journalists to be murdered, CPJ found in a new analysis. Worldwide, CPJ found 55 journalists were killed in direct connection to their work in 2006, and it is investigating another 27 deaths to determine whether they were work-related. Detailed accounts of each case are posted on CPJ’s Web site. The figures reflect increases from 2005, when 47 journalists were killed in direct relation to their work, while 17 others died in circumstances in which the link to their profession was not clear. CPJ, founded in 1981, compiles and analyzes journalist deaths each year.

Afghanistan and the Philippines, with three deaths apiece, were the next most dangerous datelines in 2006. Russia, Mexico, Pakistan, and Colombia each saw two journalists killed. All are traditionally dangerous countries for the press, CPJ research shows.

Link

Reader comment: Mandy Hearne says,

I would add the death of David Rosenbaum to the list of unconfirmed deaths. The tactic of letting a person die of untreated wounds is not unfamiliar in the history of the US (see Assata Shakur's story, for example). A series of 'failures of the system' is a highly effective means of murder, it is neat and completely deniable.

And when telling the story to a friend from Turkey, who studied at a fairly "Leftist" university and is aware of the killings of journalists there, said that had David Rosenbaum's death happened in Turkey, there would be no doubt it was murder by the government. I think that the US has a history it has to own up to in the death, potential murder, of David Rosenbaum. Funny that the 'murderer' turned himself in: "Asked why Hamlin turned himself in, Morris said, "Stranger things have happened." Hamlin told police he would show them where he hid the weapon, Morris said."

Links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Sony BMG this week settled a lawsuit brought by California and Texas over the infamous XCP "anti-piracy" spyware trojan. The media giant got off with a slap on the wrist for the long-running rootkit debacle, which affected nearly 5 million CDs -- Sony will pay a total of $1.5 million to the states, and a smaller sum in customer refunds.

Customers in both states can file a claim with Sony BMG to receive refunds of up to $175. State officials estimate some 450,000 compact discs carrying the XCP software were sold in California, while about 130,000 were sold in Texas. Customers have 180 days to file claims, which must include a description of how their computer was harmed and documentation of repair expenses. Some who used certain antispyware software to remove the programs installed by the Sony BMG CDs ended up with a glitch that disabled their CD-ROM drives.

As part of the settlements, Sony BMG also agreed not to distribute any compact discs loaded with any copy-protection software that hinders computer users from easily locating it or removing it from their computers. The record company also agreed to improve its disclosure practices.

Link to AP story. Link to previous BoingBoing coverage. (Thanks, ultranaut)

The BBC today announced that it will make hundreds of episodes of various shows available via BitTorrent, using high-def file-sharing software service from tech company Azureus.

Azureus is best known for developing a BitTorrent client, or program, that allows large media files to be easily shared over the internet. The program has been downloaded more than 130 million times. Earlier this month the company launched a video sharing site similar to YouTube, codenamed Zudeo. The site allows users to upload and view content. However, in contrast to most video sharing sites, Zudeo offers high definition videos. Users must also download a program to access and upload content.

The new deal means that users of the software will be able to download high-quality versions of BBC programmes, including Red Dwarf, Doctor Who and the League of Gentleman. Classic series such as Fawlty Towers will also be available through a BBC "channel".

Link

Reader comment: Mathew says,

Unfortunately, the BBC content they are planning to distribute via BitTorrent is going to be DRMed, so the announcement is a lot less interesting than it at first seems: Link.

50,000 copies of the climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth which were rejected by the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) after apparent pressure from Exxon and oil industry advocates are now offered free of charge to teachers via Participate.net.

The giveaway ends January 18, or when the DVDs run out. The website is the social activism arm of Participant Productions, the company behind this film and others including Good Night, and Good Luck, North Country, and Syriana. Teachers can request a copy at this link.

Random trivia snippet: I went to a cool Current.tv event hosted by Al Gore last week in Los Angeles, and at one point Gore told the audience that Inconvenient Truth should have been named "Kill Al Volume 1," because the producers pretty much worked him to death to make and promote the movie. (Thanks, odiyya)

Reader comment: Brent the Closet Geek says,

The guys who run the dating site HotOrNot apparently donated some $25,000 dollars to help get the movie for teachers: Link.

Science be praised! Two female Komodo dragons at two different zoos have self-fertilized eggs in isolation -- with no help from a Komo-dude.

Other reptile species reproduce asexually in a process known as parthenogenesis. But Flora’s virginal conception, and that of another Komodo dragon earlier this year at the London Zoo, are the first time it has been documented in a Komodo dragon.

Link. Twin immaculate conceptions. The eggs are expected to hatch around Christmas. The new messiah is a lizard? (Thanks, Aira)

Reader comment: Anonymous pedant says,

Strictly speaking, the miraculous pregnancies of the two komodo dragons aren't immaculate conceptions, unless you meant to imply the dragon fetuses aren't tainted by original sin. (The argument could be made that all komodo pregnancies are immaculate conceptions, so to speak.) Virginal conception is perhaps a closer term, I'd imagine, though I can't vouch for these two particular dragons' virtue. I have recently heard this mistake referred to snarkily as the "immaculate misconception."

Adam says,

Surely, you're aware of one of the greatest internet memes of all time: Raptor Jesus. He went extinct for your sins! Link.

Ntwiga says,

The London Zoo which also had a "virgin birth" with one of its komodo dragons this April seems to think that the dragons are able to store sperm and use it when conditions for reproduction are optimal. Link.

Rick Prelinger says,

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is funding the Internet Archive to scan rare, unusual and culturally significant books and artworks at a bunch of major institutions, including the Boston Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Getty Research Institute. The grant comes out of Sloan's concern that commercial entities are becoming the default repositories of the world's cultural heritage, and that the restrictions corporations impose on access to the works they display don't serve the public good.

"'You are talking about the fruits of our civilization and culture. You want to keep it open and certainly don't want any company to enclose it,' said Doron Weber, program director of public understanding of science and technology for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation."

Link

UPDATE:

The profoundly tasteless US-soldier-stuffed-piñata blogged yesterday on BoingBoing is no longer offered for sale at the Oriental Trading Company website.

Sorry, you'll just have to go find supplies for your jihadi slumber party somewhere else.

Link (Thanks, Breitbart!)

Reader comments:

Appalled anonymous reader says,

So it's tasteless to beat the piñata if it's soldiers, but totally ok if it's a donkey, or a butterfly?

Outraged blogger bbum screams,

Why no horror at the reindeer pinata, the (not nearly as realistic) fighter jet pinata, the Dora pinata, or the space shuttle pinata?

BB reader Dave K. demands equal rights for piñatas:

How about this video I found on YouTube about a guy trying to extract revenge on the piñata who killed his father? Kind of... Lynchian. Or something. Link.

Cultural critic Mark Dery and I have overlapping interests in subjects that, as once defined by Mark Frauenfelder's young daughter Sarina, are "creepy, interesting, and real." Mark Dery's take on such matters is often filled with wonderfully obscure references to history, culture, and philosophy that, more often than not, are news to me. That's one of the reasons I like reading his essays and books so much. When I finish one, I always have a great list of links and juxtapositions to follow up on. Once, I asked Mark to list of some of his personal favorite books. Two years later, he's come through. And I'm grateful. His essay "Unpacking My Library" is a veritable wunderkammer of printed matter. I already treasure several of the titles he mentions, like JG Ballard: Quotes, Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body, Cabinet of Natural Curiosities, and The Nutshell Library of Unexplained Death. But most of his selections will quickly move to the top of my reading queue.

From Dery's post:

2. Albertus Seba: Cabinet of Natural Curiosities---The Complete Plates in Colour, 1734-1765, edited by Dr. Irmgard Musch. Another breathtaking wonderbook from the German publisher Taschen. From the Amazon blurb: "In 1731, after decades of collecting, Seba commissioned illustrations of each and every specimen [in his wonder closet] and arranged the publication of a four-volume catalog detailing his entire collection---from strange and exotic plants to snakes, frogs, crocodiles, shellfish, corals, insects, butterflies and more, as well as fantastic beasts, such as a hydra and a dragon. [These] illustrations, often mixing plants and animals in a single plate, were unusual even for the time. Many of the stranger and more peculiar creatures from Seba's collection, some of which are now extinct, were as curious to those in Seba's day as they are to us now. This reproduction is taken from a rare, hand-colored original." Once seen, never forgotten, these hand-painted dream photographs from the Baroque capture, with stunning vivdness, the aesthetic of wonder...

5. Losing Our Heads: Beheadings in Literature and Culture by Regina Janes. The fact that there's an entire book devoted to this subject gives meaning to my life, and almost convinces me there's a god...

9. The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators by Gordon Grice. A mordant masterpiece, in which the author invents a genre all his own: Nature Gothic. The chapter titles---"Tarantula," "Recluse," "Mantid," "Black Widow," "Rattlesnake"---tell it all. Fascinated by the alien ways of the nonhuman world, Grice combines the sardonic deadpan of noir fiction with the best naturalists' unsentimental scrutiny of animal behavior and a rural midwesterner's applied knowledge of the predator-prey relationship. A Jean-Henri Fabre for literati who drive pickups with rifle racks.

Link

Lily-livered lawyers for the RIAA are wussing out on the war against Patti Santangelo, mother of five in New York, who says she never downloaded a single pirated tune. Way to crap out on justice, recording industry. Instead of dropping the lawsuit, you pansies should have dropped that mom into a tank of live piranhas to pay for her crime of not having ever downloaded illicit MP3s. Link, here's another. (Thanks, stephanie)

Update: Great news! The RIAA won't cut and run in the War On Santangelo after all -- now they're going after her children:

[T]hey began investigating her children, ultimately filing suit against the kids after getting the daughter and a neighbor to admit to using Kazaa under oath.

Today the RIAA dropped the lawsuit against Santangelo herself, though Santangelo's first lawyer Ray Beckerman confirms for us the suit against her children now moves forward -- after her first battle drained the family coffers.

Holiday cheer-drenched Link (Thanks, Rich Kulawiec)

A Japanese man who survived three weeks in the outdoors without food or water by falling into a state similar to hibernation -- he was subsequently rescued and appears to have suffered no lasting ill effects.

Mitsutaka Uchikoshi had almost no pulse, his organs had all but shut down and his body temperature was 71 degrees Fahrenheit or about 21.6 Celsius when he was discovered on Rokko mountain in late October, said doctors who treated him at the nearby Kobe City General Hospital. He had been missing for 24 days.

"On the second day, the sun was out, I was in a field, and I felt very comfortable. That's my last memory," Uchikoshi, 35, told reporters Tuesday before returning home from hospital. "I must have fallen asleep after that."

Link

BB reader Therese says,

Here is yet one more idiotic copyright issue that I am absolutely outraged by. I have just returned from taking my sons to have their photo taken with the mall Santa. Every year I take them, and I choose the least expensive photo package, so that I can then buy a CD with their picture on it. They won't let you just buy the disk. The picture packages begin at $13.99, and then the CD is an extra $6.99.

Fine. But this year, there's an additional item you can purchase: A Copyright Release for an extra $15.99! You don't have to buy it, but I suppose the implication is that if you use the photo of your child with Santa without buying it, they can come after you?

They also offer a package for $24.99 wherein you receive a 5x7, a CD and a copyright release. So, that's still more expensive than just going for Package A + a CD.

Frankly, I'm outraged by this. And tempted to see what happens if, you know, I decided to post the pictures of my sons on a personal website not having purchased the copyright release of my own children.

Link to the website for the company that runs the santa mall photo service Therese used.

Reader comment: Shaun says,

…Claus Clause? :P

Joe says,

I was recently visiting my grandmother in Springfield, Illinois. She is 87 years old. She asked me if I could make a copy of a picture of my grandfather and her. She said Kinko's wouldn't make copies of it. She said they wouldn't copy it because it was a picture taken by Olan Mills Studio and it would violate copyright laws. The picture was taken in 1959.

Bart says,

This whole copyright issue is out of control, but to post every single complaint just weakens the stance of abuse. I use to work in a photo development section of a big box retailer. It's common to turn down professional photos unless you have a copyright release this is nothing new. In fact it was the most problematic part of the job, because customers didn't understand it. I'd like to also mention I've got pictures from the 20's with notes on them saying copies are prohibited.

Ryan Forrestal says,

Bart is right, but i don't think he explained the issue well enough. and given the trouble those of us who work/used to work in photo labs have with customers who want prints of professional images it might be nice to get it all out there.

photography copyright works this way; whoever takes the photo (and there by possesses the negs or original digital files) owns the copyright. most cases this is the photog, in the cast of photo studios (like with santa land) its the studio. this isn't a clever copyright trick to make more money, its just how the law works automatically to protect the creators of those images. that said, this makes it technically illegal for you and those guys down at the photo mat to copy (not distribute) those images without permission (copyright release) or proof of ownership (negs). now this is a big problem because the studios and photogs in question seldom explain this to their customers before hand, so when people go to get extra copies they get confused and angry at the lab guys.

photogs and studios are not in the business of taking photos for money, they sell prints (or rights to make prints). its how they make money. so many studios wont actually give out releases because it means the money for those extra copies goes to some one else instead of them. other places will sell you the negatives along with the prints or charge a fee for a release , and the best places will just give you a release and send you on your way. the fee is simply to offset the cost of loss business. this stuff has been going on for decades and is nothing new.

all thats different with this santa photo story is that they studio in question is advertising the release instead of waiting for people to come to them. i suspect there are two reasons for this. 1 disclosure: like i said these studios seldom if ever clearly state whats going on in regards to copyright (there will be a small sign or fine print paragraph somewheres but little else). by listing the release along with its price as part of a package people will ask what it is and then get a clear explanation (hopefully). 2. to prevent angry phone calls. every mall photo studio i've ever set foot in has a line of people waiting to yell at them because they can't make prints. if you explain up front, this is less likely to happen.

in short this situation is actually a step forward, now the customer knows what the legal situation is and can deal with it without insane amounts of frustration.

Roger Mercer says,

In Ryan's comment, he said: "all thats different with this santa photo story is that they studio in question is advertising the release instead of waiting for people to come to them"

but I see another, very important difference. They are double dipping by asking to be paid separately for the CD and for the release. What on earth are you buying when you pay them for the CD if not the right to use the file(s) contained on it? If they intend for you not to make copies from the CD, why are they even selling it without a release? Ryan says that if you show up at Photomat with the negatives, it implies that you have purchased the right to make copies. Well, if I show up with the image file that I legitimately purchased from the photographer/studio, I expect that I have paid for that same right to copy. The problem for the photofinisher, of course, is that they can't easily tell the difference between a legitimately obtained image file and one that came from a scan of a print.

Tinfoil says,

When I recently hired a photog to take some pics of my human spawn, I was somewhat disappointed that, while I would receive a CD with digital copies, they weren't quality digital copies even though the fellow used some description of exotic Cannon cam. When I asked why he had brought forth many of the same arguments that were brought up here. Fair, I suppose. He has the right to is opinion and I have the right to believe he's wrong.

When I mentioned that $600+ was pretty much all that they were going to milk me for and that if I needed more copies I could very well scan them and reprint them, he was shocked. Shocked I say.

My rational is this: When I hire a contractor to do up some custom coding for me, that code is mine and I can do with it whatever I please. I paid for it, so I can open-source it or print it on toilet paper. Whatever. When I hire a contractor to do some stuff to my house, there are no stipulations on what I can and can't do on the kitchen counter. It's mine.

In my view, the photog is a contractor that I have hired to produce something for me. The fruits of the labour I paid the photog for are mine and mine alone. Well, perhaps they belong to the child, but until she pays off her staggering debts, they belong to me. Diapers are expensive, yo.

This view is not popular amongst the photog friends of mine, even though they do understand the logic.

Tor sez

Tinfoil's comment is correct, to a certain extent. However, under copyright law, there is a difference between someone who creates a copyrighted work for you as an employee and one who does so as an independent contractor. It comes under the Work for Hire section of copyright law. As an employee, anything you create automatically has the copyright assigned to the employer. As an independent contractor, it is assigned to the independent contractor, unless there is a written agreement that the copyright is assigned to the employer (along with several other conditions, but that's the relevant one here).

So what Tinfoil should have done when hiring his photographer is have him sign an agreement which stated that copyright is assigned to Tinfoil, and he is entitled to hi-res copies of the images. But Tinfoil neglected to do so. So while his logic is fine, it doesn't mesh with the current state of copyright law. And unlike some areas, he had the ability to mitigate that problem, by finding a photographer who was willing to sign over those rights.

Craig Chambers says,

I just wanted to point out the other side to this debate (though I am sure it is in the minority here).

Most people are looking at this in the view that they paid the photographer to take pictures and therefore they should own the rights to the images for the money they paid. I think however that it should be looked at differently. By charging you per print the photographer is potentially saving you money. A photographer, like everybody else in the world is trying to make a living at a job. They have set up their business plan so that they make a certain salary. Now the photographer has two choices, they can either a) Charge you a flat rate to take photos and give you the copyright or b) charge you less money to take the photos and then charge extra for your for prints. The advantage to paying for prints is that you only have to pay for what you use. If you only need a couple of prints then it doesn’t cost you a lot. If you do what a lot of prints then it costs you more. If the photographer was to charge a flat rate for the images then even if you didn’t want a lot of images you would still be paying a high dollar amount. It’s kind of like watching a DVD. I can either buy the movie if I think I want to watch it a lot, or I can just rent it which saves me money if I only want to see it one or two times. Renting is cheaper but has more limitations. (not a perfect analogy I know)

Keep in mind that often both of these options are already available with photography as was the case with the original article. The complaints seem to stem from the fact that the purchaser, in effect, can’t own the DVD for the rental price.

We live in a free market and believe me, there are no shortages of photographers these days that would be happy to take your picture. If you don’t like the deal one person is giving you then go find someone who’s deal you like better. Just remember to balance quality and price. With photography entering the age of digitization and access to the tools becoming more available, prices will fall and the market will get more competitive, just like the markets that entered the digital age before them. But remember that with increased access. Access is good in that it allows otherwise talented people who were unable to enter a field before the ability to do great work but with it also comes a lot of untalented people and in general you still get what you pay for. Writers, designers, editors, and now photographers have undergone this transition for both better and worse, but mostly for the better. But that is another conversation for another time.

Ross Evertson says,

Most advertising photographers make their money based on usage, not their time. In addition to that, most will not (and should not) ever give up the rights to their images. The photographers fee will basically be a calculation based on the medium, region, size and other factors. One photograph could be worth $2,000 or $20,000 depending on how it will be used. And as I said, once that time is up the photographer gets to do whatever he/she would like to with the image, including sometimes relicensing it to the same client. Most savvy clients know that they are not paying for the time, but just for the rights to use the image. This is, in addition to stock, one of the only ways to make passive income as a photographer.

I can't blame "service photographers" (portrait studios, etc) for thinking the same way, the only difference is their clients are not as educated about both the law and what should be considered a good practice for the photographer.

As a formerly LA-based photographer now in Denver I found that most clients want to pay a day rate and retain all rights to the images, not necessarily because they want to screw me, but that is the market that has been set up for photographers here, by my predecessors.

So instead of taking blow after blow to my ego, as well as accepting checks that barely cover my expenses, I work as a designer.

I created a page of all the video clips I've written about for the last couple of years. There are some real gems in here -- TV weathermen losing their minds, 250,000 superballs bouncing down a steep street in San Francisco, British soldiers dosed with LSD, a giant centipede eating a mouse, the demolition video of famous Polynesian supper club, forced laughter from a yogi, a happy computer animation of what might happen if a big meteor hits Earth, a girl with pickle phobia video, naked people attaching themselves to trees in Colombia, an adorable turtle that stands on hind legs, great old punk videos, and much more. Link

A grandmother passing through security at LAX on Saturday put her one-month-old grandson through the x-ray machine. According to the Los Angeles Times, a TSA screener "noticed the outline of a baby" on the display and quickly reversed the conveyor built. The baby was taken to a hospital and fortunately received a clean bill of health. From the article:

Officials, who declined to release the 56-year-old woman's name, said she spoke Spanish and apparently did not understand English.

She initially didn't want the baby transported to a hospital, but security officials called paramedics and insisted that the child be examined by a doctor...

"Rather than focus on the radiation dose, which is a small amount, we need to focus on why this happened, so it doesn't happen again," said Dr. James Borgstede, a diagnostic radiologist at Penrose-St. Francis Health Systems in Colorado Springs, Colo., and president of the American College of Radiology. "Human beings weren't meant to go through those things."

In the several seconds the baby spent in the machine, the doctor added, he was exposed to as much radiation as he would naturally get from cosmic rays — or high energy from outer space — in a day.

Link (Thanks, Jennifer Lum!)

Scientists believe that this may be the first two-headed reptile fossil ever discovered. The fossil, found in northeastern China, is a choristoderan, an aquatic reptile common 144 to 65 million years ago. The fossil is presented in the current issue of the UK Royal Society's scientific journal Biology Letters. From the BBC News:

"To my knowledge, it is the only record of a vertebrate fossil showing that kind of malformation," Dr Buffetaut, director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, France told BBC

"Living animals like this are known. But if you compare the number of reptiles born with two heads with the total number of reptiles born, it is very small.

"So the chances of finding a fossil like this are extremely low."

Link

The second issue of Rudy Rucker's webzine, Flurb, has stories by Anders, Laidlaw, Kadrey, Rucker, Shirley, and Stross.

So here we go with a new issue of FLURB. I was waiting till I had gotten around to writing a story that would be just about impossible to commercially market, and now I think I've done it. It's liberating to know that FLURB is there for such a demented and counter-cultural tale as "The Third Bomb."

And now I'm also able print Charlie Anders's bisexual romp, "One Door Closes," Charles Stross's curious artifact from the future, "Message in a Time Capsule," Marc Laidlaw's caustic "Open Open Letter."

I may siphon in a couple more stories later this month or early in January, after taking some time off for the holidays.

For now: beware of sea cucumbers, garage door openers, sneezing, hipster publishers, and ... the space demons!

Link

For the last 18 months, I contributed to a project at the Institute for the Future where we took a broad look at how science and technology might progress over the next fifty years. A half-century is a very long time, so it was a particularly challenging and exciting project for all of us. The IFTF Delta Scan was supported by the Horizon Scanning Centre of the United Kingdom's Office of Science and Innovation. One of the outcomes is an online forum of 100 outlook pages exploring a wide range of scientific disciplines and technologies, from dark energy to climate change to technologies of cooperation to ecosystem modeling to programmable materials. Last night, the forecast forum was opened to the public. We hope you enjoy it and participate in the conversation by leaving comments on the outlooks.

From The Guardian's coverage of the project:

Piles of rubbish clutter the streets of the new urban sprawls. In overloaded hospitals, patients lie in corridors, victims of a pandemic. Water prices have rocketed, and temperatures have nosedived with a premature slowing of the Gulf stream.

Welcome to dystopian Britain, a thoroughly miserable snapshot of the country's woes come the middle of the 21st century. While the bleak scenario might seem unlikely at present, Sir David King, the government's chief science adviser, is urging policy-makers not to be complacent. A bleak future will only be avoided if they understand the threats and what new technologies might come to the rescue.

Professor King, a Cambridge chemist, decided more than 18 months ago that government departments needed to ensure their future policies were scientifically better informed. He set up two reviews, which have just been completed. One charted trends likely to affect Britain in the next 50 years or so. The other picked out emerging scientific and technological breakthroughs that will help shape that future. Link

From the Financial Times:

Chinese astronauts walk on the moon, the world has splintered into currency blocs after an international exchange rate shock, and even robots have the vote.

It sounds like the exaggerated vision - utopian or distopian according to taste - of a parlour futurologist. But these scenarios of what life might be like around the middle of the century have emerged from 270 rigorously researched papers commissioned by the government that together purport to be the world's most extensive look into the future.

The Horizon Scan covers a vast range of science and technology, politics, economics and society - from internet crime to robotics, banking to the computer-brain interface, stem cell research to "grey power" in an ageing population.

And it is intended to do far more than feed a human curiosity about what life may be like for our children or grandchildren. Sir David King, the government's chief scientist, argues horizon scanning will have a powerful influence on policy-making - and not only in Whitehall. "Although it was designed as a tool for government, I believe it will also have a broader use across the private sector," he adds. Link

Link to the Delta Scan: The Future of Science and Technology, 2005-2055