Interstate 43 in Mosel, Wisconsin was closed for two hours Thursday while authorities cleaned up 40 tons of cow guts and bones. The beef byproduct spilled from Ryan Engle's truck when he swerved and tipped over his semi. According to the Associate Press report, Engle was messing with his MP3 player instead of paying attention to the road. Link (Thanks, Lindsay Tiemeyer!)

If there was any doubt that the 2008 election season would be the tech-heaviest ever, Illinois senator Barack Obama's campaign kickoff speech this morning put that to rest.

He decried the lack of "computers in schools" in the first couple of minutes of the speech, proposed "using technology to cut the bureaucracy" in the nation's health care system, and he called for fatter pipes: "Let's lay down broadband lines through the heart of inner cities and rural towns all across America."

Obama is among several candidates to announce their campaigns by way of internet videos -- Clinton and Richardson did, too. While those three are dems, new uses of online social media and tech-centric speechifying won't be limited to that party, of course. For instance, you can now "poke" Mitt Romney on Facebook.

And the internet fundraising race is on early. Romney's site is reported to have netted nearly $1.5 million in campaign donations in just the first month of this year.

I wonder if there's a plan in mind behind Obama's "lay down broadband" idea. Would this be a federally-funded project? No details yet, and I wouldn't hold my breath.

This is the season for promises, not specifics.

Link to speech coverage, here's the full text of the speech.

Your comments after the jump.

Robin Newberry says:

The Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance seeks to defend equal marriage in this state by challenging the Washington Supreme Court’s ruling on Andersen v. King County. This decision, given in July 2006, declared that a “legitimate state interest” allows the Legislature to limit marriage to those couples able to have and raise children together. Because of this “legitimate state interest,” it is permissible to bar same-sex couples from legal marriage.

The way we are challenging Andersen is unusual: using the initiative, we are working to put the Court’s ruling into law. We will do this through three initiatives. The first would make procreation a requirement for legal marriage. The second would prohibit divorce or legal separation when there are children. The third would make the act of having a child together the legal equivalent of a marriage ceremony.

... If passed by Washington voters, the Defense of Marriage Initiative would:

add the phrase, “who are capable of having children with one another” to the legal definition of marriage;

require that couples married in Washington file proof of procreation within three years of the date of marriage or have their marriage automatically annulled;

require that couples married out of state file proof of procreation within three years of the date of marriage or have their marriage classed as "unrecognized;"

establish a process for filing proof of procreation; and

make it a criminal act for people in an unrecognized marriage to receive marriage benefits.

Link

Farhad Manjoo says:

I'm not sure if this is a serious solicitation, an odd scam, or some kind of parody of the news business, but an "author and physics researcher" is selling (for $3.5 million) a flash drive that he claims contains "fact-based verifiable research that details the evidence for a major newly discovered national political-religious controversy in the United States."

What is this controversy? Of course, he can't say, but he promises it'll be good -- it involves secret religious texts, would affect the standing of some U.S. politicians, and could decide the 2008 presidential race!

Link

Reader comment:

John Parman says:

This is very funny to read. I got a hit on this while in a conference call with a group of agents repping religion authors this week. It seems like he has approached a lot of people to sell this story. But, really, $3.5 million? I personally think the story is either: A) The planned April meeting between a group of American faith leaders with Ayatollah Khameni of Iran in Oslo, which may or may not result in a deal regarding religious freedom and nuclear power; or B) The much-discussed rebellion by middle-of-the-road evangelicals from the GOP because of concern over environmental and social justice issues and a general softening of the GOP's ability to rally the religious faithful - the expectation may be that the GOP will lose the middle-road evangelical vote if it continues to play up life sexual orientation issues. My thoughts, of course. I personally hope he writes a book, because I'll get that for free!

mapletree7 says:

1966 board game for girls allows them to play at the careers open to women: ballet dancer, actress, model, teacher, nurse, airline hostess.

Link

Monster says:

Monsters with Records is an art show fund raiser for the Echo Park Animal Alliance. It's tonight at Sea Level records, 1716 Sunset Blvd. in Echo Park. Come out and meet the monsters, find one you like and take one home!

Link

Jeff Trexler says:

I just came across a 1962 Peanuts cartoon that captures the problem with calling the Mooninite ads a hoax. In this strip, Linus screams for help after seeing what he thinks is a queen snake. Lucy points out that it is actually a branch. Linus's response, addressed to the branch: "I suppose you think you're smart pretending you're a queen snake."

Link

A Boing Boing reader says:

This is like Whack-a-mole but you have to take out the suspicious Mooninite devices by clicking them with your mouse.

"More Than a Feeling" plays highspeed as the evil Mooninite signs yell, "Chowdah", "Tom Brady" "Fenway Pahk" "Wicked Pissa" etc. mocking all that Bostonians hold sacred.

When finished you get rated by haircut.

Good times.

Link

Abhay says

This is a clip on a St. Louis TV show called "In Your Interest." They filmed five minutes of footage about eagles, but when they were cutting it, the wind ruined, like, more than half their tape. So the camera guy wrote this South Park-esque song about Eagles to compensate for all the missed time. It's truly wonderful and Eagles are Awesome!

Link

APR says: "Just what the headline says; the head of the Cartoon Network is resigning over the Aqua Teen Hunger Force mess.

This is insane. This guy is quitting his job (under pressure from above?) over a stupid, stupid, media-created fiasco." Link

Update:

Slate reports on the City of Boston's fuzzy math used to calculate Cartoon Network's restitution payment:

It's not exactly scientific. The attorney general calculated the number by asking for a cost estimate from each of the eight government entities that were affected by the hysteria. These included three cities—Boston, Somerville, and Cambridge—as well as the Boston's public transportation system; the Massachusetts Port Authority, Highway Department, and State Police; and the U.S. Coast Guard. The responses included some neat, round numbers (like the $200,000 billed by the state police), as well as figures that were a bit more specific (like the $13,157 request from the highway department). Together, the expenditures totaled $578,766, but the attorney general's agreement with Turner included another $421,234 in "additional restitution funds," divided proportionally among the claimants. That conveniently put the total value of the prank at $1 million even. (Turner's payment included another $1 million in "goodwill" money for the Department of Homeland Security.)

Link

Aranjuez prision in Spain has 36 cells for families. The special section of the prison includes a nursery and a playground. (AP Photo: Bernat Armangue) Link (Via Neatorama)

For the price of a stamp, Carl Griffith's Oregon Trail will mail you a 150+-year-old sourdough starter culture that was brought west by a pioneer ancestor:

All I know is that it started west in 1847 from Missouri. I would guess with the family of Dr. John Savage as one of his daughters (my great grandmother) was the cook. It came on west and settled near Salem Or. Doc. Savage’s daughter met and married my great grand father on the trail and they had 10 children. It was passed on to me though my parents when they passed away. I am 76 years old so that was some time ago. I first learned to use the starter in a basque sheep camp when I was 10 years old as we were setting up a homestead on the Steens Mountains in southeastern Oregon. A campfire has no oven, so the bread was baked in a Dutch Oven in a hole in the ground in which we had built a fire, placed the oven, scraped in the coals from around the rim, and covered with dirt for several hours. I used it later making bread in a chuck wagon on several cattle drives - again in southeastern Oregon.

Link (via Making Light)

Update: Mike sez, "Sourdoughs International has a great collection of sourdough starters from some of the oldest bakeries in the world. I'm not much of a sourdough fan, myself, but I love the romance of the sourdough descriptions on their site. Alas, not as free as your pioneer starter."

The Watchismo blog has a great history of pre-quartz electrical watches, focusing on these wacky early Swiss watches with two huge external battery compartments:

This is the 1960 Landeron 4750, the first Swiss-electric movement. As you can see by the component diagram below, these were not simple watches like the inanimate battery powered Quartz of today. I'm featuring one of the more unique versions of this watch, the 'Montre à Couilles', as detailed in Pieter Doensen's book, built as a demonstration model with two externally cased battery compartments.

Link

See also:
History of slide-rule wristwatches
Early days of plastic watches Mechanical "LED watch" from 1970
History of calculator watches
Steampunk watch
Belt-drive watch
Watch guts of great beauty
All-plastic watch movement from the 70s
Awesome, impractical, expensive watch

From Dave Farber's Interesting People mailing list, Ethan Ackerman writes: "The SANS blog has a nice summary of an innovative exploit in MS Vista's speech recognition implementation - a malicious audio file can be used to give user-level control. It does so not in the usual buffer overflow or misleading header corruptions, but by actual voice recognition of spoken scripting commands. Playing a sound file featuring spoken commands to open a malicious website." Link

Plustek's new OpticBook 3600 is a low-cost scanner optimized for scanning books -- it has a little shelf-thing at the edge that makes it easier to get the book flatter, and some kind of "Shadow Elimination Element" to correct for the distortion and shadow cast by the hump of the book at the spine. Link (via Gizmodo)

Update: Charles sez, "I bought this scanner a year ago for my site Modern Mechanix and I have been in love with it ever since. I got it after a frustrating couple of weeks trying to scan magazines on my old ScanJet 4400. It is by far the fastest scanner I've ever used. Full color pages at 300 dpi take around 5 seconds. Scanning a 70 year old magazine that's has printing all the way to the inner margin with a really tight biding is still a pain in the ass, but without the glass flush to the edge of the scanner it would be nearly impossible."

José Rafael Zullo has translated my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, into Brazilian Portuguese, using the Creative Commons license to make a free and freely reusable version of the text in his language. This is so cool. Link

The annual DIY Convention is taking place in Los Angeles this weekend -- "Do it yourself in film, music, and books." I'll be among the speakers today (2:30pm, at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood): Link.

Heather sez, "My friends and I have been regularly attending iPod Monday every week at the Lift in downtown Des Moines, Iowa for two years, where patrons create 15-minute playlists based on a theme (updated weekly at ipodmonday.com) and hook them up to the bar's speaker system. This week, Apple sent a cease-and-desist letter to Clint Curtis, the event's creator. Why they've decided to do this now is still unknown, since Curtis not only asked Apple's permission before starting iPod Monday, but he's also been sending Apple weekly updates with no response from them until now."

Please, fanboys, don't send me dumb notes averring that Apple's failure to police this use of its mark will lead to the end of its ability to stop manufacturers from producing rival MP3 players and calling them iPods. That's a fairy tale that trademark lawyers tell their kids when they want to reassure them that they'll have a healthy college fund. Courts don't declare trademarks generic because they're used descriptively to describe an actual use of the actual product. Link

Christie sez, "The Science Fiction and Fantasy Database at Texas A&M recently reached 75,000 entries:"

Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Database is an inclusive tool, designed to cover all aspects of science fiction, fantasy, horror, supernatural and weird fiction. History, criticism, commentary, fan writings and some reviews are all included, although book reviews are left to Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Review Index at this time. Science Fiction generates the largest number of entries, followed by fantasy and horror in that order.

Link (Thanks, Christie!)

Goatsestickers sells, well, stickers of the hands of the infamous "GOATSE" man, suitable for putting alongside the edges of any round design or object in your life for sheer net.hilarity. Link, Wikipedia's safe-for-work Goatse page

See also:
Goatse iPod case Captain Copyright commits goatse, unattributed trademark use
Goatse tribute page
Proud owner poses with GOATSE license plate
Goatse fights for your WiFi privacy: GOATSEPEG
Flickr set of people seeing Goatse photo for the first time
Unintentionally Goatse-esque finger ring
Goatse Valentine
GOATSE t-shirt in the NYT
Goatse polo shirt
Goatse t-shirt design
Carousel Goatse
Goatses in the media
Hidden Goatse in Unreal Tournament 2004
Cthulhu meets Goatse
I Goatse'd Ron Jeremy
Goatse.cx taken offline
Goatse casemod
Persistence-of-vision bike spoke Goatse
GOATEA.cx
(Thanks, Greg!)

EFF is collecting reports on innocent videos that were censored off the net by Viacom's legal attack on YouTube last week. The entertainment company sent over 100,000 indiscriminate takedown notices to YouTube, resulting in the disappearance of countless personal, noninfringing videos and untold fair use videos. They're looking for the kind of takedown that can be used as part of a legal action against Viacom. To help publicize the campaign to youtubers who've been attacked by Viacom, EFF has created a little YouTube video of its own.

If they are making these kinds of blatant mistakes, who can tell how many fair uses of Viacom content they also targeted in their 100,000 takedowns? Hundreds? Thousands? If Viacom made a clear mistake and your clip contains no content from Viacom-owned copyrighted works, sending a simple DMCA counter-notice to YouTube may be enough to do the job. But if you're attempting to make a fair use of Viacom's works, it may make more sense to go to court to assert your rights. More information about your options is available at the Fair Use Network.

Has your video been removed from YouTube based on a bogus Viacom takedown? If so, contact information@eff.org --we may be able to help you directly or help find another lawyer who can. In this situation, as in so many others, EFF will work to make sure that copyright claims don't squelch free speech.

Link

Archaeologists in Italy discovered a pair of 5000-6000 year old skeletons embracing.

The pair, almost certainly a man and a woman, are thought to have died young as their teeth were mostly intact, said chief archaeologist Elena Menotti...

"It's an extraordinary case," said Ms Menotti. "There has not been a double burial found in the Neolithic period, much less two people hugging - and they really are hugging," she told Reuters news agency.

Flint tools, including arrowheads and a knife, were also found alongside the couple.

Link (Thanks, Merdian!)

This week's Gizmocafe video editorial feature, "Tunnel Vision," tells the story of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, the two crippled high-def formats, and explains why we all lose if either one of them wins.

It was a smart strategy to get your format ahead of the other guy. But where does that leave the consumer? Average Joes like us who want to do the coolest stuff possible with a true next generation disc format are liable to be left off the BDA’s innovation train. The BDA’s unwillingness to support Vista features like Mandatory Managed Copy and iHD seems to be for no other reason than it wants to oppose Microsoft (which supports HD DVD).

Link (via Gizmodo)

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an amazing story by a brave prof, Paul Cesarini, who got leaned on by his university's IT department to stop using Tor, the anonymizing network tool. They even wanted him to stop teaching it. Cesarini stuck to his guns -- and won.

My visitors next produced page after page of logs detailing my apparent use of Tor. While I couldn't dispute most of the details in the logs, they seemed inaccurate. For example, the technician said I had been using Tor earlier that morning. In fact, I had been at Wal-Mart that morning looking for a good deal on an HDTV; I had reached my office only about five minutes earlier.

More important, the logs did not prove any wrongdoing on my part. All they demonstrated was that I, like thousands of others around the world, had installed and infrequently used Tor. In my case, of course, there was no wrongdoing.

Nonetheless, my visitors made two requests: that I stop using Tor, and that I avoid covering it in class.

Having been on the administrative end of academic technology, I appreciate the difficulties facing the information-technology staff. No one pats you on the back if nothing goes wrong, but if something does — if a virus or worm sweeps through the campus's network infrastructure, or someone hijacks some computers to churn out spam — you are off everyone's Christmas-card list. The last thing my former colleagues needed was some smarmy faculty member spouting off about academic freedom and threatening to demonstrate Tor to 100-plus students each semester.

Their job is to protect the network that allows me to do my job: to teach classes that are mostly or entirely online, and to conduct research. If they weren't here as the first or even only line of defense against the unscrupulous elements of our technological society, my university would cease to function. It's as simple as that.

Link (via /.)

The Graffiti Research Lab has developed a "laser-tag" system to project images onto buildings and other public surfaces.

I love the smell of stimulated radiation in the morning.

Last night @ 2200 hours, the GRL laser-tag system went online and fully operational. The laser tag system status is GO and we are calling all writers in the Netherlands to please report to Rotterdam most riki-tik for training and deployment. The GRL will be turning over control of the system to writers, protesters, artists and the citizens of Rotterdam from the 7th to the 10th of February, starting each night around 1600 hours at the KPN building in Rotterdam. If you’ve ever wanted to catch a 20-story high tag with a laser beam, WE WANT YOU!

Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Graffiti Research Lab's video of Maker Faire
• Make cheap magnetic LEDs for fun graffiti projects
• LED Throwies at Maker Faire
• Share an inflatable studio with artist Huong Ngo

MIT researchers are using bubbles to do computation on "labs-on-a-chip." The novel processor is a microfluidic chip containing a network of hair-thin plumbing pipes with nanofliters of fluid pumped through them. The architecture enables the presence or absence of a bubble to represent a single bit of information. Professor Neil Gershenfeld and his colleagues used nitrogen bubbles in water, but apparently oil and water and other fluids that don't mix would also be fine. From the MIT News Office:

Controlling chemical reactions will likely be a primary application for the chips, according to the researchers. It will be possible to create large-scale microfluidic systems such as chemical memories, which store thousands of reagents on a chip (similar to data storage), using counters to dispense exact amounts and logic circuits to deliver them to specific destinations.

Other applications include combinatorial synthesis of many compositions at the same time, programmable print heads that can deposit a range of functional materials, and sorting biological cells.

The speed of operation is about 1,000 times slower than a typical electronic microprocessor, but 100 times faster than the external valves and control systems used in existing microfluidic chips. Gershenfeld and Prakash anticipate that its invention will allow existing circuit designs (and designers) to work in the domain of microfluidics.

Link

From the site description at kids-in-mind.com:

We enable adults to determine whether a movie is appropriate for them or their children, according to their own criteria. Unlike the MPAA we do not assign an inscrutable rating based on age, but 3 objective ratings for SEX/NUDITY, VIOLENCE/GORE & PROFANITY on a scale of 0 to 10. We also explain in detail why a film rates high or low in a specific category, and we include instances of SUBSTANCE USE, a list of DISCUSSION TOPICS that may elicit questions from kids and MESSAGES the film conveys. Again, unlike the MPAA, we do not make age-specific recommendations. Since our system is based on objective standards, not the viewer's age or the artistic merits of a film, we enable adults to determine whether a movie is appropriate for their children according to their own criteria.

Link (Thanks, Sean Bonner!)

Previously on BB:

This Film is Not Rated - must-see doc about MPAA ratings

Matt Stone's memo to MPAA censors

Reader comment: Keith Ryan says,

In the UK, the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) uses a "Consumer Advice" system that is by far the most honest, dead-on reviewing system ever - if only because it prevents you from wasting time on films that promise non-stop fun, horror or action. A few examples:

ROCKY BALBOA:
What the ads say: "The greatest underdog story of our time...is back for one final round"
What the BBFC says: "Contains infrequent moderate boxing violence"
VERDICT: This boxing movie doesn't include much boxing.

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE III
What the ads say: "Pushes your pulse rate past the danger zone"
What the BBFC says: "Contains moderate action violence"
VERDICT: Don't believe the hype

SAW III
What the ads say: "Suffering, You Haven't Seen Anything Yet"
What the BBFC says: "Contains very strong bloody violence and gore"
VERDICT: Does what it says on the tin.

See? Now you never need to rely on ads, critics or any other rating system – the BBFC has it all under control.

Yahoo this week debuted a new service called Pipes. Here's the official description:

Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.

Take BoingBoing, for example. You might enjoy one author's work, and find another not to your liking. Pipes provides an easy way to only read specific author(s), and filter out all other posts. Or, if the only subject you're interested in here is Disneyphilia, or ukeleles, or cat macros, or nanotechnology -- or you can't stand any of those, but like other stuff here -- Pipes provides easy ways to filter in or out particular content.

I'm sure other people could come up with far more interesting BoingBoing-related examples, and those are really pretty crude ideas of what this thing's capable of. Here's something else: the most popular Pipe right now is called New York Times through Flickr...

This Pipe takes the New York Times homepage, passes it thru Content Analysis and uses the keywords to find Photos at Flickr.

That's pretty badass.

Reactions from a number of internet-thinkers are very positive. Tim O'Reilly has an extensive post about why he likes Pipes, and he sees it as a manifestation of ideas that have been circulating for some time now:

[It] is a milestone in the history of the internet. It's a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output. Yahoo! describes it as "an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator" that allows you to "create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant." While it's still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone.

Before I get into the details of what it is and how it works, I want to give a little background on why I'm so excited. This is something I've been waiting nearly ten years for.

Read the whole post here -- it's a good one, and provides much to chew on: Link.

In this special 3-minute-long episode of 24, agent Jack Bauer tracks down the members of the deadly Aqua Teen Hunger Force in order to stop the LED Lite Brites from blowing up. Link

A Boing Boing reader says:

The Secret Government lives! A [90-minute] 1987 Bill Moyers report on the thinking, methods and powerful figures behind extralegal military operations and secret support in Iran, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Laos/Cambodia, Chile, and even domestic surveillance and infiltration within the US, since the beginning of the cold war, resulting in a secret national security regime recently posted Google Video provides some key background and insight to the extremely similar situation going on around Iraq and the "War on Terror" right now. Includes some familiar characters to us today.

(You can skip past that painful Jackson Browne music video at the beginning there...)

"We've turned the war powers of the United States over to... well we're never really sure who, or what they're doing, or what it costs, or who is paying for it. The one thing we are sure of is that this largely secret global war, carried on with less and less accountability to democratic institutions, has become a way of life. And now we are faced with a question brand new in our history: Can we have the permanent warfare state, and democracy too?"

"How does it happen that to be anticommunist we become antidemocratic? As if we have to subvert our society to save it? ... The powers claimed by presidents for national security have become the controlling wheel of government..."

"...In the bunker of the White House, the men who serve the president put loyalty above analysis, and judgement yields to obedience..."

Seem like a familiar problem?

Link

In The New Atlantis, Robert Zubrin explains why Bush's $6 billion hydrogen-as-energy program is "bad science, bad economics, and bad public policy."

Hydrogen, after all, is “the most common element in the universe,” as Secretary Abraham pointed out. Since it is so plentiful, surely President Bush must be right when he promises it will be cheap. And when you use it, the waste product will be nothing but water—“environmental pollution will no longer be a concern.” Hydrogen will be abundant, cheap, and clean. Why settle for anything less?

Unfortunately, it’s all pure bunk. To get serious about energy policy, America needs to abandon, once and for all, the false promise of the hydrogen age...

Hydrogen is only a source of energy if it can be taken in its pure form and reacted with another chemical, such as oxygen. But all the hydrogen on Earth, except that in hydrocarbons, has already been oxidized, so none of it is available as fuel. If you want to get plentiful unbound hydrogen, the closest place it can be found is on the surface of the Sun; mining this hydrogen supply would be quite a trick. After the Sun, the next closest source of free hydrogen would be the atmosphere of Jupiter...

So if we put aside the spectacularly improbable prospect of fueling our planet with extraterrestrial hydrogen imports, the only way to get free hydrogen on Earth is to make it. The trouble is that making hydrogen requires more energy than the hydrogen so produced can provide. Hydrogen, therefore, is not a source of energy. It simply is a carrier of energy. And it is, as we shall see, an extremely poor one.

Link

Reader comment:

Ian says:

Zubrin's arguments against hydrogen are accurate and the sooner we bury the false hope the better. However, his advocation of manufactured hydrocarbons as fuel is equally preposterous: none reduce CO2 emissions by a single molecule. The real crisis is not peak oil, but climate change. Additionally, each method of hydrocarbon production has its own demons (e.g., corn-derived ethanol and the post from earlier today, environmental issues of coal mining, continued natural gas dependence, etc.) The future must run on energy derived from sources that do not pump CO2 into the atmosphere: nuclear, hydro, wind, geo... and of these, only nuclear has the scalability and proven performance to adequately supply the majority of the world's energy with today's technology. With respect to personal transport, battery technology is reaching the point where relatively affordable EVs will be able to provide the majority of people's needs (GM Volt, Tesla Roadster.)

Two neat small companies are selling my art in the form of prints. Thumbtack Press makes gallery quality prints on heavy bright white stock, using archival inks. Wallhogs makes giant sized vinyl posters that stick to walls in a non-destructive way. I got a large vinyl poster of Stump Dance (shown above) and stuck it on the wall of my daughter's room. It's really cool.

In 1989, US Psy Ops troops blared odd songs like "Shut Uppa You Face" and "These Boots Are Made For Walking" "Voodoo Child" and "I Fought The Law" at Manuel Noriega's compound as an effort to induce surrender. The same kind of "acoustic bombardment" occurred at Waco and is reportedly used during POW interrogations too. According to this BBC News article, tunes from Sesame Street, Barney, and Metallica were popular Psy Ops picks in Iraq. Here's a paper on the subject by New York University music professor Suzanne Cusick that was published last year in Revista Transcultural de Música. Last week, the Society for Ethnomusicology published a position statement "against the use of music as torture." From their document:

The U.S. government and its military and diplomatic agencies has used music as an instrument of abuse since 2001, particularly through the implementation of programs of torture in both covert and overt detention centers as part of the war on terror.

The Society for Ethnomusicology
* calls for full disclosure of U.S. government-sanctioned and funded programs that design the means of delivering music as torture;
* condemns the use of music as an instrument of torture; and
* demands that the United States government and its agencies cease using music as an instrument of physical and psychological torture.

Link

Previously on BB:
• Eminem and Dr. Dre used for torture? Link
• The Men Who Stare At Goats Link

UPDATE: Joe Dolce, who wrote the excellent song Shaddap You Face, emailed me and said he had never heard that his song had been used in the Noriega situation. I swear I remember reading or seeing that in news reports at the time, but I did a bit of Nexis digging and couldn't find mention of it. However, according to a Washington Times article from December 29, 1989, the US Army Special Operations Forces' Panama playlist did include:

'Beat it' by Michael Jackson
'You're No Good' by Linda Rondstadt
'Nowhere to Run' by The Marvelettes
'Voodoo Child' by Jimi Hendrix
'I Fought the Law' by Bobby Fuller Four

And a post at WFMU's Beware of the Blog lists Nazareth's "Hair of the Dog," Ann Peebles's "Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down," "Judgement Day" by The Pretty Things, and "Bruce Cockburn's "If I Had A Rocket Launcher" as part of the mix.

Edmund C. Arnold, known to many as "the Father of Modern Newspaper Design," died last week. The designer, journalist and educator was born in 1913. "If you look at a newspaper today, you are looking at his work," says an anonymous BB contributor. Designers talk about his legacy here: Link.

BoingBoing reader Kevin says,

With Rupert Murdoch fessing up on trying to influence U.S. Iraq War policy and the spectacle of the Scooter Libby trial, this PBS series on MSM under fire looks worth Tivo-ing:

In more than 80 interviews with key figures in the print, broadcast and electronic media, and with unequaled, behind-the-scenes access to some of today's most important news organizations, FRONTLINE correspondent Lowell Bergman examines the challenges facing the mainstream news media and the media's reaction in News War ...

In this four-hour special, Bergman traces the recent history of American journalism, from the Nixon administration's attacks on the media to the post-Watergate popularity of the press, to new obstacles presented by the war on terror to changing economics in the media business and the Internet.

There's a pretty decent online component to the series as well, in preview mode now.

Link