Ape Lad has produced a series of sweet toons to illustrate the standardized HTTP error codes. Shown here is the toon for 415: Unsupported Media Type. Link (via Making Light)

Virgin America kicked off service in the United States today. As regular BB readers may recall, they kindly invited us to name one of the planes a while back.

I flew on a VA inaugural flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco just now ('California Dreaming' flight number VX0846) to check out the new service, and uploaded the iPhone snapshots you see here from the plane. More of them here: Link.

These planes are wired. There are two 110-volt power outlets for every three seats (1:1 ratio in first class), USB ports, two WiFi access points on board (front and rear, broadcasting SSIDs today, but not delivering connectivity yet pending regulatory approval), ethernet at every seat (which connects you to a planewide network -- mile high LAN parties, anyone?). EVDO is planned for transmitting data back to the ground (email, txting -- not active today, should be by early '08). I'm told AirCell will be providing the wireless connectivity.

My flight buddy today was Artur Bergman from O'Reilly Radar. His account of the inaugural flight is here: Link. He shot the chat UI snapshot here, more great snaps from Artur here: Link

So, in three words: Virgin America pwns. Here are ten reasons:

(1) Most comfortable coach I've experienced on any domestic carrier. Roomy, well-designed seats, nice leg room, seats sit at a pitch that maximizes stretch space.

(2) Obscenely comfy white leather seats (with "massage" feature) in first class. Pretty reasonable first class fares (I suppose they'll be higher later, but they're comparatively quite low right now).

(3) They're using open source software in every place possible. Linux galore. (Hey, how soon before there's a hack or prank, I wonder? If someone mile-high-goatses a VA plane, there's always a unicorn chaser in the fleet to soothe).

(4) In-flight, seat-to-seat chat. Tabbed, even! I think you can have like 3 or 4 threads open at once. Now you can bitch about babies crying or barf-inducing turbulence -- with emoticons! Or group chat around each TV channel (while you watch TV), or join topic-based chat rooms.

(5) Google Freakin' Maps. I heard details of more add-in features they're planning to integrate with the maps soon -- not bloggable yet, but when they're live, they'll be mindblowing.

(6) In-flight entertainment and info system has a super user-friendly GUI, and it's touchscreen! You can also use it to order food. For text input, there are little handheld qwerty keyboards that slide in and out of your armrest.

(7) Games. Including Doom. They're planning an open source game design competition, will feature winning games on the flights.

(8) In-flight text messaging and email are apparently on the way, as are pay-per-download music sales (mostly Virgin artists at launch, I'd guess).

(9) Movies are fairly recent ones you'd actually want to watch. Large selection of international fare for non-English-speaking passengers. Wide TV selections. You can get channels like IFC and Current in-flight. Music videos. Scan TV listings in a programming guide, see what's on when. You can set reminders for yourself for TV shows you want to catch.

(10) Some great internet content on the way. They're doing deals with internet video content producers and other video sources you'd never expect to see on a plane. They plan to have in-flight broadband in place next year (pending FAA approval) for even more frequent video content uploads. Incidentally, they have a smartly designed related method for system software updates. Many cool things about the IT design behind VA.

Much of the suck you're familiar with on other domestic airlines is absent, and there are a lot of nice little details that add up to a pleasant, smart experience. I kind of want to buy an all-you-can fly ticket, and just consider a seat here as a second home. Whoever called Virgin America "Airline 2.0" (Digg guys?) nailed it.

For instance: no harsh lighting. The cabin was softly lit on our daytime flight in purple and pink, the mood lighting is different at night. Cabin interior feels like a big happy iPod. White round plastic edges, metal surfaces and black mesh stowaway dividers. Sleek without feeling cold. Many white surfaces, now that I think of it, but you actually never see bright white -- it's all bathed in relaxing light. The feel isn't clinical or sterile, it's pleasantly mod.

Some simple spatial details are beautifully conceived. One of many small examples: those entertainment console box things that stick between your feet on other airlines, thieving precious legroom? They're under the floorboards here. Another example: there's a nice little ridge along the underside of those overhead compartments that serves as a grip, so you can pull yourself out of your seat to stand up.

As an aside, I understand that Virgin America design director Adam Wells is responsible for much of the environmental look and feel decisions, and the in-flight entertainment smarts are the domain of Charles Ogilvie.

The airline will be based out of San Francisco International Airport (SFO) -- international terminal, for now, don't understand exactly why. When we arrived at SFO this afternoon, Richard Branson, SF Mayor Gavin Newsom, Virgin America CEO Fred Reid, and others held a press conference. Newsom announced he was declaring today "Virgin America" day, and various landmarks around the city will be bathed in red light to commemorate.

I'm so sick of bad experiences lately on airlines like JetBlue and Southwest. I really hope the Virgin America experience two weeks, two months, or ten months from now is as great for all customers as it felt for invited guests on this launch day.

Previously on BB:

BoingBoing names a Virgin America plane: "Unicorn Chaser"

Jim Leftwich says:

You probably have seen the newly proposed Transbay Tower designs which were unveiled this week in San Francisco. The eventual chosen tower is set to be the tallest skyscraper on the West Coast.

The proposed towers have sparked a lot of discussion locally, both pro and con.

At first I liked the clean lines of the Pelli Clarke Pelli design, but then began to think that the Rogers Stirk Harbour entry showed much more promise.

I'd be swayed to that design, but it needs two crucial additions, one architectural/supernatural and one geological...

The tower is desperately wanting the flaming lidless Eye Of Sauron on top and they need to somehow get Mount Doomalpais (formerly Mount Tamalpais) ignited so that it spews lava nonstop and casts the proper orange glow of doom over the region.

I think everyone would agree that this is a compelling new vision for San Francisco:

Link

I'll be signing my book, Rule The Web, on Thursday, August 9 at the Barnes and Noble in Santa Monica. I hope to see you there!

Where & When
Thursday, August 9th, 7:30 PM
3rd Street Promenade
1201 3rd Street
Santa Monica, CA 90401
310-260-9110

Link

Reminder: Shows starts in 10 minutes (4 pm Pacific)

My guest on today's live call-in Rule the Web show (using the awesome BlogTalkRadio system) is Richard Giles, co-founder of Scouta, the online content recommendation system.

To listen to the show, visit BlogTalkRadio at 4pm Pacific Time today, August 8, 2007. If you want to ask Richard or me a question during the show, call us at (646) 915-8698. Link

Continuing our coverage of criminal Republican blowjobs this week, Glenn Murphy Jr., chairman of the Clark County Republican Party and president elect of the Young Republican National Federation resigned after news leaked that he is under investigation by the the Clark County Sheriff’s Department for "criminal deviate conduct," a felony. Basically, he is accused of giving a blowjob to a sleeping man who woke up and did not approve of what was taking place. Mr. Murphy insists the blowjob that he provided to the unnamed man was "consensual."

[A] 22-year-old man who claimed that on July 31, Murphy performed an unwanted sex act on him while the man slept in a relative’s Jeffersonville home.

Murphy, a 33-year-old Utica resident, has not been arrested nor has he been charged with a crime. A copy of the police report has been posted on an politically focused Internet site and another was provided to a reporter with The Evening News and The Tribune on Tuesday evening.

Larry Wilder, Murphy’s attorney, said Murphy is cooperating with police and Prosecutor Steve Stewart. Wilder said Murphy contends the sex act was consensual.

In 1998, a 21-year-old male filed a similar report with Clarksville police claiming Murphy attempted to perform a sex act on him while he was sleeping. Charges were never filed in that case.

Link Wonkette has the seedy details here.

In this video, Jean-Yves Blondeau straps into a Buggy Rollin (like a close-fitting suit of body armor covered in rollerblade wheels that let you skate on any part of your body) and races a 600cc motorcycle down a moutnainside. There's lots of freaky first-person PoV cuts along with aerials, and the net effect is probably about one-zillionth as terrifying as doing it in person, and it's still way scary. Link (via Geekologie)

The license agreement for a codec from hotelcode.com reads, simply, "FUCK YOU!"

End User License Agreements -- that boilerplate text you have to click through every time you turn around -- have a justified reputation for being abusive and one-sided. This EULA is just a little more to the point than most, saying in two words what many EULAs take several screens to say.

I still use the Reasonable Agreement EULA at the bottom of all my emails: "READ CAREFULLY. By reading this email, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer." Link (Thanks, Ben!)

I just read Matt Silady's heart-rending graphic novel The Homeless Channel, a visually stunning story about the rise of a 24-hour cable network devoted to homelessness in America.

The Homeless Channel is created by Darcy Shaw, whose schizophrenic sister is herself living on the streets. Shaw sells the channel to a huge media conglomerate on the basis of her gutsy ideas and sharp pitching skills, and fights furiously with the network to stay true to her vision.

The shows are imaginative and disturbing, including an overnight program that's just live camera feeds of homeless people on the streets, each hour sponsored by a different company -- and Darcy's struggles with the ethics of "sponsoring" homelessness are among the best parts of this book.

Silady is unflinching in his confrontation of the contradictions of homelessness, and that's what makes this book so fine. It's the kind of storytelling that is both thought-provoking and emotionally engaging. At the story's climax, I found myself misting over and wiping my eye.

Matt Silady, the author/illustrator, creates his layouts by photographing real people and places in the poses he needs for his panels, then converts the photos to line-art. The result is expressive and moody, with a firm line that says an awful lot with very little. Silady's site features a backstage view of how he does this neat trick.

Link

\

Ernie Bushmiller, creator of the beloved Nancy comic strip, was a tough act to follow. The artists who took over the strip after Bushmiller died in 1982 couldn't come close to capturing the sweetly painful simplicity and self-contained absurdism that Bushmiller faithfully injected into every Nancy strip. Nancy had become unreadable.

Little did I know that in 1994, a cartoonist named Ivan Brunetti was trying out for the job of writing and drawing Nancy. This 13-page story from a 1999 issue of Roctober magazine has an article by Brunetti, called "I Almost Drew Nancy."

Brunetti did not get the job, which is a crying shame, because the many samples that ran with the article reveal Brunetti to be supremely fitted for the job. The art and stories are fantastic -- I like them even better than Bushmiller's work! Link

Previously on madprofessor.net:
• Misery Love Comedy, by Ivan Brunetti

Previously on Boing Boing:
• How To Read Nancy
• The greatest Nancy panel ever drawn
• Sexiest Nancy panel ever?
• Nancy was one of my favorite comic strips
• Animated version of the "Greatest Nancy Panel Ever Drawn"
• Excellent Nancy panels
• Nancy and Sluggo comic book scan

English Russia says:

In Russian children toy stores have appeared strange Chinese dolls looking like a girl-doll but if fully undressed there can be something found that better would suit for a boy-doll.

People demand to ban those dolls from being sold on the territory of Russia and claim that it maybe done on purpose by some evil forces from outside of Russia in order to form a bad perception of female/male orientation from the early age.

Link

Update:

English Russia also reports that this snow sled made in Germany is causing upset in his country.

Reader comment:

Julie says:

That's a mini-bob! We had two of these growing up (I'm 45, this would have been 30+ years ago). I grew up in New Berlin, WI. My dad worked in packaging for Mead Containers in Milwaukee and often got samples to bring home. The mini-bobs were awesome - you could do great doughnuts on the way down the hill, and could easily pass the weenies on sleds and saucers. I'm not sure if they just never caught on or if they were outlawed. I never saw anyone else with one. They were fairly treacherous, actually, what with the ultra-hard plastic phallic symbol threatening to poke your eye out (or something).

My dad remembers:

"They were entries in a packaging contest. I don't remember who entered them. When we put those things on stage, we arranged them just so, and people would have to keep from laughing. I'd take you kids sledding, and no matter where you went with those things, people would look over and guffaw."

National School Boards Association (a nonprofit that represents 95,000 US school-board members) did a comprehensive study of students' experiences with the Internet, especially with social networking sites. They determined that the much-touted risk of online stalkers and predators was basically nonexistant (0.08 percent of students surveyed had ever gone to meet a stranger without parental permission). The best part is their recommendation to schools: stop fearing the Internet and embrace it as an incredible tool for instruction.

In light of these findings, they're recommending that school districts may want to "explore ways in which they could use social networking for educational purposes" — and reconsider some of their fears. It won't be the first time educators have feared a new technology, the study warns. "Many schools initially banned or restricted Internet use, only to ease up when the educational value of the Internet became clear. The same is likely to be the case with social networking.

"Safety policies remain important, as does teaching students about online safety and responsible online expression — but student may learn these lesson better while they're actually using social networking tools."

Social networking may be advantageous to students — and there could already be a double standard at work? 37% of districts say at least 90% of their staff are participating in online communities of their own — related to education — and 59% of districts said that at least half were participating. "These findings indicate that educators find value in social networking," the study notes, "and suggest that many already are comfortable and knowledgeable enough to use social networking for educational purposes with their students."

Link (via /.)

Update: Surya sez, "I was a Video Production teacher at a low-income public high school. I had been trying to find a way for my students to put their work online and critique each other's projects when YouTube appeared on the scene. We had a great 3 weeks of students excitedly posting up their projects, commenting and rating their classmates' videos and sharing their work with their friends via easy email links. Once our school's IT guy saw the surge in YouTube traffic, he reported it to Master Control downtown, who promptly banned the site via our WebSense filter."

Piss-Screen is a urine-stream-controlled video game. Bad news for the swollen-prostate crowd.

The Piss-Screen is a pressure-sensitive inlay for urinals, to play a game with your pee. The game is displayed on a screen above the urinal. We teamed up with bars across Frankfurt, and installed the Piss-Screen in the men's restrooms. We designed a driving game in the style of Need for Speed with the clue that people would have a terrible crash into the oncoming-traffic if their reaction was too slow. After the crash we placed the message: "Too pissed to drive? Take a Taxi instead! Call: 069-733030"

Link

Lenovo has announced that it will bundle Novell SUSE Linux with some of its Thinkpad laptops. Lenovo is the Chinese company that bought the Thinkpad business from IBM -- I've bought two Lenovo laptops to run Ubuntu on in the past year, a huge, high-powered T60p and a little X60 tablet, and I've been really happy with both machines. They run Ubuntu Linux really well, and they're solid as hell, putting up with a great deal of abuse. Lenovo even claims that their keyboards are water-proof (there are drainage holes on the underside of the computer that connect up with channels running from the keyboard). I haven't tried it yet, though.

I bought my last Lenovo from Emperor Linux, who charge a premium in exchange for pre-installing Linux and supporting it. The pre-installation wasn't much of anything, but the support has been drop-dead awesome -- if you need something fixed in your kernel, you can call them up, run a little script that gives them access to your machine, and they'll remotely login to it and fix it for you.

It's exciting to see Lenovo starting to supply Linux-loaded machines, but disappointing that they chose Novell as a partner. Novell teamed up with Microsoft in a weird deal to shield their Linux customers from Microsoft patent lawsuits. No one really thinks that Microsoft plans on suing companies that run Linux -- rather, this is a naked attempt to shake down Linux distributors for protection money by scaring big companies with nebulous threats about patent violations in Linux.

After that scuzzy little play, I have zero interest in giving Novell any support, money, or positive attention. So for now, I'll stick with Emperor.

The first ThinkPad being offered with SLED 10 pre-installed is the ThinkPad T60p, one of Lenovo's core business-oriented machines. It boasts an Intel CoreDuo 2GHz processor and can handle up to 2GB of memory. The graphics capability is nothing to sneeze at, either: the T60p has an ATI FireGL V5200. Lenovo will offer software and hardware support, but Novell will manage software updates. The company hasn’t announced any pricing details for the new machines.

Link

The call-for-proposals for the 2008 O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference has just gone up. ETECH is held each year in San Diego (the next one is March 3-6), and it is consistently the most invigorating, surprising and exciting event I attend every year. I've been on the conference jury since this was the O'Reilly Peer-to-Peer convention, back in 2000, and I'm very proud of the work we've done each year (I'm also excited to have Boing Boing's David Pescovitz on the jury with me!). This year we have a new chair, Brady Forrest, who has put together a dynamite CFP.

Boing Boing's readers do some of the most interesting stuff I've ever heard of, and ETECH often features presentations by people who read about the call-for-papers here. I hope you'll consider submitting something.

This year we'll be asking ourselves: where are some of the previously emerging technologies? It's been two years since a man got a neural implant to surf the web, but no one else has one yet. Virtual worlds have been multiplying since the '90s, but many of us have never had a productive meeting in one. And where are our jetpacks, anyway? How close are these and many other "futuristic" technologies to being viable here and now, and if they're still far away are there techniques and lessons we can learn from any progress they've made in recent years?

At the 2008 version of ETech, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, we'll take a wide-eyed look at the tech that's just arriving and cast a cynical one at some that have been emerging for too long. From robotics, health care, and space travel to gaming, finance, and art, we'll explore promising technologies that are just that--still promises--and renew our sense of wonder at the way technology is influencing and altering our everyday lives.

Do you have something that points the way to the future? O'Reilly Media invites technologists and strategists, CTOs and CIOs, technology evangelists and scouts, programmers and hackers, researchers and academics, artists and activists, business developers, and entrepreneurs to lead conference sessions and tutorials at ETech. Submit your proposal now.

Link

Voices for the Cure is a Lulu press anthology of science fiction stories published to benefit the American Diabetes Association. Many writers -- including me -- donated stories to the book (I gave them my story Craphound).

Some of the greatest voices in speculative fiction join forces in this one-of-a-kind anthology to benefit the American Diabetes Association. Join Robert J. Sawyer, Mike Resnick, Cory Doctorow, and others as a cop-for-hire solves a murder aboard a space station…a Chicano science fiction writer takes mind-blowing (literally!) ride through the Singularity…a third-rate superhero with useless powers finds a place to belong…an antique collector learns that one alien’s junk is mankind’s treasure…a geologist discovers that pretending to be a god isn’t all it’s cracked up to be…a journalist learns how to fend off zombies using Linux and a dead badger… All this and more await you in… Voices for the Cure: A Speculative Fiction Anthology to Benefit the American Diabetes Association

Link

Patrick Costello sez,

I am the author of several of CC-licensed music books including The How and the Tao of Old Time Banjo, A Book of Five Strings and The How and the Tao of Folk Guitar.

The Creative Commons concept has worked pretty well for us in terms of book sales over the last three years so I have decided to make my services as a music teach available under the same concept. I have posted a .pdf file on my blog stating that I am available for lessons or workshops on an expenses-only basis.

Right now there are groups in the UK and Australia working on setting up workshops - but I'm also hoping that we'll get some gigs closer to home.

Link

See also:
Old timey banjo instruction books released under a Creative Commons license
Teach Yourself Banjo book under CC license

Cathy Resmer created an audio slideshow about sculptor Jennifer Stocks-Dearborn's "memorial dolls."

It features Jennifer Stocks-Dearborn, a Jefforsonville sculptor who makes realistic clay babies for people whose infants have died. Her own daughter died of SIDS in 2000. Leon Thompson wrote a story about her for this week's paper, but I thought we could do more with the images of the dolls. Stocks-Dearborn refers to them as "creepy, naked babies," and they are indeed creepy. And also beautiful. And sad.

Link

Amazon is hosting a copy of the original book-proposal for William Gibson's superb new political intrigue and art novel Spook Country. I've never read the proposal for a book after reading the book -- it's nicely illuminating. It's also absolutely fascinating to see how the book morphed from idea to novel.

"Warchalker" is one of the more obscure and peculiar of the many warblogs and news-filters that sprang up on the Web in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Obscure because it generally offers little more than the apparent result of some news-junkie sitting in a basement, endlessly splicing in links to the latest-breaking from AP, Reuters or other standard sources. Peculiar because the thread of routine news is occasionally interrupted by some deeply strange dispatch from Warchalker himself -- as, for instance, his first-person account of the looting of the Baghdad museum, involving any number of international art-mercenaries and at least two supposedly extraterrestrial artifacts. Or his earlier report from a secret US facility in which a gifted "remote viewer" is sometimes able to describe, in minute quotidian detail but with a complete lack of imaginative understanding, the doings of the fugitive Osama -- though without being able to hear what OBL might be saying, or know where he is. "They're having that spicy lentil thing again... Now he's flossing his teeth... It looks like a room in a really bad motel in New Mexico, but there's no glass in the window, no television, and he keeps peeing into this hole in the floor..."

PDF Link (Thanks, Scot!)

See also:
William Gibson's Spook Country
William Gibson explains why science fiction is about the present
William Gibson on writing in the age of Google

According to CNN, the Yangtze River/Baiji Dolphin is extinct. Douglas "Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy" Adams wrote about the Baiji in his moving environmental book Last Chance to See. Daniel commemorated the Baiji's passing by re-keying the relevant passage from Last Chance.

`Well, it's worse than that, isn't it? Mark said. 'Dolphins rely on sound to see with.'

'All right, so it would be like a deaf man living in a discotheque.'

'Why?'

'All the stroboscopic lights and flares and mirrors and lasers and things. Constantly confusing information. After a day or two you'd become completely bewildered and disoriented and start to fall over the furniture.'

`Well, that's exactly what's happening, in fact. The dolphins are continually being hit by boats or mangled in their propellers or tangled in fishermen's nets. A dolphin's echolocation is usually good enough for it to find a small ring on the sea bed, so things must be pretty serious if it can't tell that it's about to be brained by a boat.

`Then, of course, there's all the sewage, the chemical and industrial waste and artificial fertiliser that's being washed into the Yangtze, poisoning the water and poisoning the fish.'

`So,' I said, 'what do you do if you are either half-blind, or half-deaf, living in a discotheque with a stroboscopic light show, where the sewers are overflowing, the ceiling and the fans keep crashing on your head and the food is bad?'

'I think I'd complain to the management.'

'They can't.'

Link (Thanks, Daniel!)

The BBC's Paul Merton recorded a great segment with Mr Woo, a rural Chinese farmer who taught himself to build fun kinetic robots. Woo's totally untrained, but his little electric bots are extremely sophisticated and often hilarious. Link (Thanks Ivan!)

Update: Andy sez, "That Mr Woo clip was taken not from the BBC but from the TV station 'Five' -- although Merton is best known for his work on the BBC."

I did a quick interview with Joystiq's Kevin Kelly about Blizzcon, the convention for players of Blizzard games like World of Warcraft. There was lots to like about the event, but at the end of the day, it sure felt like a chute for separating gamers from money. They had all kinds of strange, anti-fan policies, like not allowing in laptops and bags (though these weren't enforced at the door, despite dire warnings that they would be). Kevin also interviewed Alice Taylor from the Wonderland blog, who had plenty of smart things to say.

What fascinates you and / or bothers you about the MMORPG genre and fandom?

Fascinates: the amazing social stuff. Guilds, group raids, etc.

Bothers: the absence of the rule of law. Azeroth and Norarth might have two of the world's largest economies, but they're not nations. They're corporate fun-parks, governed by insane, abusive EULAs. Blizzard installs freakin' *spyware* on your PC -- they even sued fans who made their own game-server.

Link, Link to my Blizzcon photos

Viennese net-art pranksters Monochrom have created a world-writable timeline of future events that take place in science fiction literature. It includes countdowns to the critical fictional moments to come -- for example, as of this writing, the alien xenomorph will be discovered by USCSS Nostromo in 114 yrs 46 wks 5 days 11 hrs 24 mins 22 secs. Link (Thanks, Johannes)

Paperinside has a free, downloadable papercraft model of the Munsters' hot-rodded hearse. This looks like the kind of thing that I could easily lose an afternoon to. Link (Thanks, Dan!)

FreeCulture is calling for a boycott of the Regal Cinema chain until they back down on their prosecution of a moviegoer who recorded a short clip of a movie to show to a family member.

Regal Cinemas insists that it will prosecute a 19-year-old girl to the fullest extent of the law for shooting 20-seconds' worth of footage from Transformers with her pocket camera. She planned on sending the clip to her younger brother to encourage him to see the film. Regal got the police to haul her out of the cinema. She was terrified and now she faces a $2,500 fine. Link (Thanks, Fred!)

See also: Short links roundup

Glyn sez, "The latest BBC Backstage podcast features Jon Attard from the BBC and Becky Hogge from the Open Rights Group with with Ian Forester hosting the discussion, about a BBC archive of films and clips with metadata available to the public of video assets. Also discussing the issue of the public feeding remixed content back into the system, open standards, codecs and cross platform issues. They talk about how the public can feed into the design, and how they can add meta data to the content." Link (Thanks, Glynn!)

Red Pen, a crocheter on Crafster, posts the results of his project to crochet a handsome biker jacket out of black wool. The result is "bulky" and needs snaps and a belt (and epaulets!) to finish it, but this is a pretty rad extreme crochet project. Link (via Craft)

Would Cheney be so eager to bomb Iran if he knew Iranian children enjoyed Kool-Aid, just as he did in his youth after a hard day busting broncos on his daddy's ranch in Wyoming? Link

Announcer (who sounds like he's polished off a couple of hi-balls): "The name of the game is Ball Buster. It's a family game. Fun for children." And for adults it's exciting. You make strategic offensive and defensive movements. Then try to bust your opponents balls."

Soundtrack is a screwball version of "The Entertainer. The game must've come out at the same time as The Sting. Link

Reader comment:

Ninatuned says:

This was actually featured (or contained really) in a song entitled "Getting Ahead in the Lucrative Field of Artist Management" by James Lavelle and DJ Shadow - known at the time as UNKLE

A couple of years ago, Rudy Rucker posted an entry about the boy scout who tried to make a nuclear reactor in his garden shed. Years later, he's been caught again trying to do the same thing.

Now, it seems as if he has yet to learn his lesson, as he has been busted once again, this time for stealing smoke detectors in an effort to experiment with radioactive materials.

Link

Man sneaks monkey onto plane by hiding it under his hat. "On a flight from Fort Lauderdale, Florida to New York's LaGuardia airport, people around the man noticed that a marmoset - a fist-sized animal which normally lives in forest and eats fruit and insects - had emerged from underneath his hat and was perching on his ponytail, according to Alison Russell, a Spirit Airlines spokeswoman. 'Other passengers asked the man if he knew he had a monkey on him,' Russell said. The monkey spent the remainder of the flight in the man's seat and behaved well." (Photo of example marmoset by digiyesica) Link

Economist profiles Geoffrey Miller, evolutionary psychologist. "His idea is that the human brain is the anthropoid equivalent of the peacock's tail. In other words, it is an organ designed to attract the opposite sex." Link

Somebody needs to tell Rep. Bob Allen that in Houston, you can get out of a traffic ticket by giving the cop a blow job. "Houston Assistant Police Chief claims that trading oral sex in exchange for avoiding arrest for traffic warrants was a mutual agreement involving 'consent' by the motorist." Link

$90 gadget sniffs for tainted meat. Link

Video -- "probably one of the best TV series on psychology and neuroscience ever produced, the BBC's Brain Story, is available on public bittorrent servers for download." Link

Kevin Kelly explains how he saved 2% when he bought a house using Redfin. Link

Local news: four galaxies collide, five billion light-years from Earth. Link

The president of Students for a Free Tibet is in Beijing right now, exactly one year ahead of the 2008 Olympics, vlogging and blogging about Tibetan sovereignty and being a general pain in the ass to the Chinese government.

Lhadon Tethong's liveblogging experiment is incredibly ballsy or incredibly foolhardy, depending on how you look at it -- hard to imagine this lasting long before authorities arrest, extradite, or take some other action to stop the activity.

Apparently, she's already attracted a group of official government "escorts".

Link to "Beijing Wide Open" blog. Today's posts from her include an item about Canadian activists who were detained by authorities after placing a giant "Free Tibet" banner on the Great Wall of China. Their status and whereabouts are currently not known. (thanks, Oxblood and Nathan Freitas!)

UPDATE 1: several BoingBoing readers in Beijing write in to say that access to the blog is blocked there by 'net censorship.

UPDATE 2: Lhadon Tethong has been arrested, along with activists charged with placing the protest banner on the Great Wall.

UPDATE 3: Tethong and the other activists have been released: Link.