• Xeni on CNN International re: Apple's announcements

• Atlas Glugged – Would you kindly look at this scene from Bioshock rendered in LEGO?

• Axel Fail – Adding a laser to spinning top? Bad. Making the top play the theme from Beverly Hills Cop? Way worse.

• Who Blows the Blowers? – Breathalyzer software tested, found to be pretty awful.

• Wachowski Siblings – Matrix co-creator Larry Wachowski rumored to complete sex change, now "Lana"

• 2k Games Continues to Bungle Bioshock Launch

• Apple iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store, iPod Nano, Classic, and Touch Announced

• Apple "Beat Goes On" Event Sabbatical

• MADA Caimes Guitar Body Made from Hemp

• SLP Survival Knife with Flashlight and Firestarter

• Doggie Dooley Turns Pet Waste into Lawn Food

• Video: Yamaha's Grid Sequencer "Tenori On" Launches in London

• Venturi Fetish Almost on the Street

• Spy Sunglasses Take Another Stab at Hidden Video

• SteriPEN Reviewed in the Field (Verdict: Still Alive!)

• Foleo Folded: Palm Kills Ill-Conceived Notebook Before Birth

• Getting Warmer: Using Heat to Guide via GPS

• Eva Solo Smiley Bowl

• Messiah Darklite DVD Remote for Playstation 3

• Morning Tech Deals Highlights

I'm coming to Beijing, China next week and I'll be stopping in at the Beijing Bookworm to give a talk on China, the Information Economy and copyright -- and I'll be reading a little never-before-seen new fiction while I'm there. Hope to see you!

When: Wednesday 12th September 7.30pm
Where: The Bookworm, Building 4, Nan Sanlitun Road, Chao Yang District, Beijing, 100000, P.R. China, (010) 6586 9507, books@beijingbookworm.com

Link

On Gaming With Baby, photos of a baby mobile converted to a Super Mario mobile with "an old mobile, 550 cord, some card stock, a printer, and a general sense of boredom." Link (via Gamelife)

Becky Stern's paintings recreate "particularly attractive" Web-based CAPTCHAs in acrylic. Link (via Craft)

The Homeless World Cup is pretty much what it sounds like: homeless people all over the world organize soccer/football/futeball teams, then come together for a long championship, with thousands of people attending some of the best football you'll see all year. The act of organizing a football team and participating it appears to be tonic for many of the problems facing homeless people, with more than 70 percent of the participants getting off the streets in the process of forming and honing their teams. The Cup is now sponsoring street-soccer leagues for homeless people all over the world as a way of making the event work all year round. Link

Mayer Brenner sez,

A four-volume fantasy series I wrote (The Dance of Gods) was published by DAW between 1987 and 1992. While the books acquired a small group of ardent devotees, they did not, shall we say, distinguish themselves in the marketplace. The books themselves, however, were in many respects more suited to how the world of fantasy has evolved today than the world they faced on initial publication. My hope now is to land them some fresh attention that may, with luck, get them back into print. I've been posting the books on my website where I'm making them available under Creative Content license as a free download. Since Cory, in particular, has posted a number of BoingBoing items on published SFF writers taking this same approach (e.g. Lew Shiner), I'm hoping my venture may warrant your notice as well.

The stories take an approach to magic more suited to engineers or programmers than mystics; more procedure-based than object-oriented, perhaps, but communing with nature is usually the last thing on these practitioners' minds. For that matter, I'm not sure the combination of magic-code hackers, molecular nanotech, and network-mediated consensual reality of the gods is something that could ever be summarized on a back-of-the-book blurb...

One of the most recent blurbs they've received, however, is:

"Ya gotta love a series with a hero named 'Maximillian the Vaguely Disreputable'. READ THIS SERIES, shouts your FAQmaker, it's fast and furious, and fun, and I want the author to make enough money that he keeps writing fantasies." - Amy Sheldon, The Recommended Fantasy Author List

Link (Thanks, Mayer!)

Hombre sin nombre tells Boing Boing:

If you were to begin researching interrogation, interviewing, and brainwashing techniques, you would eventually notice that one particular interesting-sounding volume appears over and over again in the relevant bibliographies: something called The Manipulation of Human Behavior, published in 1961 [by John Wiley & Sons].

Based on the compelling title and the fact that just about every publication in the subject area cites it, you would then probably try to seek it out for yourself--only to discover that it has never been reprinted.

Then you'd find out a bit more: the book is a compilation of seven research reports, and funded at least in large part by the United States government. You can even track down the table of contents online, and your jaw may drop when you read the chapter titles:

* The Physiological State of the Interrogation Subject as it Affects Brain Function
* The Effects of Reduced Environmental Stimulation on Human Behavior: A Review
* The Use of Drugs in Interrogation
* Physiological Responses as a Means of Evaluating Information
* The Potential Uses of Hypnosis in Interrogation
* The Experimental Investigation of Interpersonal Influence
* Countermanipulation through Malingering

These articles were written by the people who were paid by the US government, mostly in the 1950s, to research brainwashing and interrogation techniques by giving people drugs, placing them under sensory deprivation, hypnotizing them, etc. etc. Many of these experiments essentially involve torture and are likely to be widely regarded as highly unethical. This is fundamental research, and if there was any followup research done, it has not yet been published for public consumption.

This book is of enormous historical importance, and yet is largely unavailable. If you live in the United States, this is some of what your government was up to in the fifties. I doubt that their funding of these ideas stopped with the publication of this volume.

Link to copy of the complete text.

This book was referenced in a popular post from 2006 on the political blog Daily Kos: Link to "Frankenstein's Children: Modern Torture's Scientific Bible."

It's also available in scanned form on Questia.com, but I find that website a total pain in the butt to use.

Amazon shows a few used copies if you're so inclined.

I've been following the blog of Guatemala-based photojournalist Jaime (James) Rodríguez in recent months, and just spent some time with one recent entry about the rural village of Rabinal, where "one of the most atrocious cases of human extermination prompted by so-called economic development" occurred 25 years ago. This July, a group of human rights activists from Mexico, Canada, and the US visited Rabinal to better understand and aid that community's ongoing search for justice and reconciliation.

What I find so moving about Rodríguez' work is the sense of closeness with these places, and these people, that permeates each shot. These are not abstractions, they of individuals and families and homes. They are not past tense, and we're connected to them in ways we might not realize. Work like his makes these stories a little harder for the world to ignore. Snip:

Nicolas Chen, a survivor from Rio Negro, often visits the museum where a number of his murdered relatives’ photographs are on display. Here, Mr. Chen caresses the photograph of his daughter, Marta Julia Chen Osorio, where the caption reads: “She was murdered when her gestation period was about to be completed. The soldiers, acting as medics, induced a forced cesarean with machetes. The assailants, who wanted to see how a child grows inside a mother’s womb, accomplished their feat. How is it possible that someone can take the life of defenseless human beings so unjustly?!”

Link to "The Chixoy Hydro-electrical Dam and Genocide in Río Negro." See also these recent entries on his blog (some of which include video from related documentaries in progress): The People of Nueva Linda; Nueva Linda: Along the Side of the Road (video link here); We Are Not Squatters, We Are Natives of Guatemala.

Note: he publishes everything in both Spanish and English -- I'm linking to the English versions here, but pick your flavor as you wish.

Daniel says "If anyone ever asks you for the definition of irony, you can show them this photo I took about a mile from my apartment." Link