Snip: "The Greenland ice cap is melting so quickly that it is triggering earthquakes as pieces of ice several cubic kilometres in size break off." Link.

Science Daily reports that "the amount of the discount may be less important than the numerical value of the farthest right digit... The researchers show that 'right-digit effect' influences consumer perception of sale prices. When the right digits are small, people perceive the discount to be larger than when the right digits are large. In other words, an item on sale for $211 from the original price of $222 is thought to be a better deal than an item on sale for $188 from an original price of $199, even though both discounts are $11." Link (Via ComDig)

The Rolling Stone has a long article about the vast sums of taxpayer money pouring into the coffers of sleazy US contractors in Iraq -- and how that money isn't being used to make things better for anyone but the ultra-rich in the US.

In short, some $8.8 billion of the $12 billion proved impossible to find. "Who in their right mind would send 360 tons of cash into a war zone?" asked Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight Committee. "But that's exactly what our government did."

Because contractors were paid on cost-plus arrangements, they had a powerful incentive to spend to the hilt. The undisputed master of milking the system is KBR, the former Halliburton subsidiary so ubiquitous in Iraq that soldiers even encounter its customer-survey sheets in outhouses. The company has been exposed by whistle-blowers in numerous Senate hearings for everything from double-charging taxpayers for $617,000 worth of sodas to overcharging the government 600 percent for fuel shipments. When things went wrong, KBR simply scrapped expensive gear: The company dumped 50,000 pounds of nails in the desert because they were too short, and left the Army no choice but to set fire to a supply truck that had a flat tire. "They did not have the proper wrench to change the tire," an Iraq vet named Richard Murphy told investigators, "so the decision was made to torch the truck."

In perhaps the ultimate example of military capitalism, KBR reportedly ran convoys of empty trucks back and forth across the insurgent-laden desert, pointlessly risking the lives of soldiers and drivers so the company could charge the taxpayer for its phantom deliveries. Truckers for KBR, knowing full well that the trips were bullshit, derisively referred to their cargo as "sailboat fuel."

Link

Drumpants are the invention of a hacker called Odbol, "a set of pants that enable the wearer to produce drum sounds by hitting various parts of the pants with his hands. The wearer thusly becomes a cyborg musician, his body assuming the roles of both player and instrument, allowing for spontaneous electric hambone solos or even collaborations with other musicians in a band setting." Check out the videos for percussive thigh-slapping goodness. Link (via Engadget)

Brazil is set to adopt an American DRM system as mandatory for its national broadcast TV apparatus. This won't stop copying -- most of the foreign programs are broadcast without DRM in the USA and Europe, and will end up on the same Internet that Brazilians use. But it will create a system under which Brazil's culture and technology sector are subject to a veto by a foreign DRM consortium. After Brazil adopts DRM for its TV, local technology firms won't be able to build Brazilian TV equipment (including software for PC-based viewing) without paying license fees to (and getting permission from) the HDCP consortium. At the same time, Brazilian producers will only be able to offer their programs on the terms devised by a boardroom full of foreigners from rich, developed nations.

The entertainment companies haven't been able to get DRM mandates in the developed world. The US struck down the Broadcast Flag, Europe's proposal for its own version of the Broadcast Flag infection is stalled and may just die. Hollywood can't convince governments in the developed world to rewrite their broadcast policy to line their pockets, but they've managed to capture the government of a developing nation.

The Brazilian constitution demands that TV be "free and gratuitous" -- something that can't possibly be squared with a foreign-controlled DRM system that prevents saving, copying, and educational use of TV programs. Local activists are organizing -- if you're in Brazil, you need to get involved now.

In spite of all these arguments, the battle is being won by the broadcasters. There are only a few Ministries in Brazil who went public against the implementation of the DRM: the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Science & Technology, among others. Nevertheless, the almighty Ministry of Communications, led by Helio Costa - a former anchorman of the largest Brazilian broadcasting company (TV Globo) - totally supports the adoption of DRM...

Proprietary and expensive, HDCP system would make set-top boxes even more expensive than the "one hundred dollars" promised by Minister Helio Costa. Some recent estimates indicate that the set-top boxes might cost up to US$ 400 - and we are talking about a country in which 1/3 of the population have per capita incomes of less than US$90. Considering that more than 90% of the households have television sets, think about a television divide between those with and without access to digital television.

Link (Thanks, Pedro)

Designer Sasha Tseng (unlinkable Flash site here) has created this prototype toaster/notepad. Scribe your note on the tablet over the toaster, and it will burn the message into the bread. Link (via Cribcandy)

See also:
Transparent toaster "celebrates toasting"
ZUSE toaster "prints" low-res images
PlayStation2 toaster
Toaster burns skull-and-xbones into bread
Complicated, interesting "six-part" toaster

The Persian Puzzle Rug is made out of assemble-it-yourself water-cut rubber patterned after a traditional Persian rug. Each square meter of rug requires 1225 pieces -- and you can choose from monochrome or colored pieces. Link (via Cribcandy)

(Photo credit: Cropped thumbnail taken from a larger pic by Katrin Sonnleitner, found on Kidsmodern)

CRN Australia's piece on the economics of malicious software is fascinating. They assert that the days of intellectual curiosity-fuelled hacking are behind us and that today's botnetters and spyware creeps are all about the dough. However, competition seems to have crashed the price of some of the market's commodities, like infected PCs, which only generate a $0.30 payment to the infector. I wonder if botnet time itself has crashed -- with botmasters controlling botnets with tens of millions of PCs, you'd think it'd be pretty cheap to get ahold of ten or twenty thousand boxes to do some distributed computation or to zap that kid who just fragged you in Counter-Strike. I keep waiting to see spam for botnet time (apart from the spam offering to send spam, which, of course, is a kind of botnet rental) -- "GET A MILLION PCS FOR AN HOUR: ONLY $5!"

"There are programmers who are working for brokers, and the brokers are selling the malware to other criminals, who are then reselling the malware to other criminals," says Trend Micro's Parry. "When they capture a bunch of systems, they resell those systems to another criminal, and another criminal. The actual hacker types don't want to get their hands dirty with something that would actually send them to prison." Other groups build affiliate networks that tap into legitimate and semi-legitimate businesses. In a presentation at the Defcon hacking conference this year, Peter Gutmann of the University of Auckland's Department of Computer Science described networks in which businesses would pay affiliates up to 30 cents for each machine they infect with spyware or adware...

Other operations mirror legitimate software as a service providers. These "malware-as-a-service" providers rent out access to botnets or Web-based attack tools. Gutmann noted one example in which a Russian group rented out its malicious Website. A prospective buyer could get the 100 visitors for free, but then had to pay US$4 per 1,000 visitors up to 5,000, US$3.80 per 1000 up to 10000, and US$3.50 per 1,000 if they bought 10,000 or more. "Software rental is just another way to get money out of this market," says Oliver Friedrichs, Symantec's Director of Security Response. "It's common to see authors who write keyloggers and botnetworks, and then rent them out to people ultimately who may launch a phishing campaign or a spam campaign."

Link (via Beyond the Beyond)

Defense contractor Northrop Grumman has published a comic book promoting drones and "nintendo warfare" for kids. Special Ops 5: UAS STRIKES! tells the story of a group of pinned-down US soldiers who extricate themselves by invoking satellites, robots, and drones that chase of balaclava-clad swarthy terrorists. Link (via Danger Room)

Today on Wired's HOWTO wiki, advice on writing a perfect email. Practically speaking, this is about how to send a perfect email to a stranger (since your friends already love you, bad email habits and all). I get a lot of email from strangers -- invitations to speak or write for a site or magazine, interview requests, questions about Boing Boing, Creative Commons, or writing, that kind of thing. I try to answer as much as I can (I get to about 90 percent of it), but it's often the case that the emails are structured in a way that makes them especially hard to answer. This, in turn, has really changed how I compose my own email when initiating a correspondence. This HOWTO includes a lot of great advice -- things you can do to make sure your mail gets answered.

Getting a lot of responses asking, "What do you mean?" Context is your problem. When you're asking a question, anticipate any missing details that could cause an extended back-and-forth. Each time someone sends you a reply, you've gone to the back of that person's line. Do what you can to make your emails count the first time.

And for god's sake, have a subject line. One that makes sense. Some of the most important emails I've received didn't have a subject, and they almost fell through as a result. Don't waste that space with words like "Important" or "Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:". If the topic changes, change the subject line to match it. Remember that on recipients' screens, your subject competes with a large number of others for their attention.

Old-school email users have a tendency to trim everything out of the body of an email except their replies. Don't do this. For example, if you send me an invitation to speak at a conference and I ask what the topic is, you might reply with just the topic, snipping out all the details of the conference. If I've forgotten about your email by the time you reply, this means that I've got to go back through an enormous email archive to find your original message in order to figure out what you're talking about. Even if I remember, it means that I no longer have the details to hand. Don't trim email. Let it run long. It's the 21st century: an email with an extra 10k of old text at the bottom of it isn't going to swamp my mailer (the 20,000 daily spams are doing that very nicely, thank you).

Link

Jim says: "Jamais Cascio pointed out this CNN video of Bush giving a talk on subprime mortgages. Check out the alien behind the window in the background." [Above Bush's right shoulder]. Link

Over at gadgets.boingboing.net this afternoon: proof that the new iPod Nano is neither chocolate nor butter. I wrote a little table-side review of the new stuff Apple released this week. Link, Discuss.

Here's an example of Roy Doty's work in MAKE. (Click on thumbnail for enlargement) (The puzzle was selected by Michael H. Pryor.)

Point of Gnome Return

One hundred very smart garden gnomes are snatched from their homes by an evil wizard. He tells them he is going to line them all up in a row, and place red and blue hats on each of their heads. They won't be able to see the color of their own hats or anyone's behind them, but they will be able to see the hats of the gnomes in front of them. The wizard will start at the back of the line and ask each gnome to tell the color of his own hat. Each gnome can only answer either "red" or "blue." If he gives the wrong answer, he will be led off to work on the wizard's landscaping for the rest of eternity. If he answers correctly, he will be returned to his own garden. Then the wizard will move on to the next gnome in line.

All of the gnomes will be able to hear the answers of the gnomes behind them, but they will not know if they were led off to forced labor or if they answered correctly and were set free. The gnomes are allowed to consult and agree on a strategy beforehand (while the wizard listens in) but after being lined up, they will not be able to communicate in any other way besides their answer of "red" or "blue" (in other words, they won't be able to change the pitch of their voice or give any other clues to the other gnomes once they are in line and the hats are placed on their heads). What strategy should the gnomes use to maximize the total number of gnomes that will be set free? Hint: They can do pretty well, even if the wizard hears their plan and puts the hats on in such a way to thwart whatever idea they come up with.

Link

Above: Roy Doty's lllustration from Look magazine, April 15th, 1958.

It's illustrator Roy Doty's birthday! I first discovered Roy's wonderful work as a child, when I got my hands on a stack of 1950s issues of Popular Science and became obsessed with his "Wordless Workshop" comic strip.

A few years ago, I learned that Roy was still illustrating for books and magazines, with no sign of slowing down after a six-decade career. I contacted him about illustrating for MAKE magazine. He like the ideas, and now illustrates MAKE's puzzle page.

From The Complete Guide to Cartooning By Gene Byrnes, Grosset & Dunlap (1950):

"A crowd to Roy Doty isn't just a lot of people repeating themselves. It is a big and wonderful collection of individuals, each doing something different. The throng behind the radio announcer is worth studying for the variety of action portrayed, and for its pattern of beautiful linework."

Happy birthday, Roy!

Link

Reason magazine's August/September double issue is available online:

Read Peter Bagge's cover story/cartoon on gun control; features on Robert Heinlein, the regulation of lifesaving drugs, and post-Kelo legislation; as well as Nick Gillespie's Editor's Note, letters to the editor, citings, and much, much more!

Link

Snip from NYT obituary (urls added):

Madeleine L’Engle, who in writing more than 60 books, including childhood fables, religious meditations and science fiction, weaved emotional tapestries transcending genre and generation, died Thursday in Connecticut. She was 88.

Her death, of natural causes, was announced today by her publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Ms. L’Engle (pronounced LENG-el) was best known for her children’s classic, “A Wrinkle in Time,” which won the John Newbery Award as the best children’s book of 1963. By 2004, it had sold more than 6 million copies, was in its 67th printing and was still selling 15,000 copies a year.

Link (thanks, Marc Powell)

Here is the reason, and here is the source. (thanks, Dr. Tchock!)

- helsinki looks
- pre-pixelated tees
- gamer shirts
- oddica
- spreadshirt
- tie a tie
- chicken suit
- uniforms
- eco friendly bags
- wearable
- and the bride wore

Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!)

Image: "TV helmet," part of a series of sculptures made in the '60s by Walter Pichler, on we-make-money-not-art.

Space adventuress and newly-minted superblogger Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides (of Yuri's Night and Space Generation) wants to know if you can come up with a better slogan for NASA:

In early August, NASA internally released its latest marketing campaign, designed to show its relevance and value to the American people. Its new slogan? "NASA explores for answers that power our future." The campaign now seems to be aborted, but it did get me thinking, could we do any better? I am no marketing genius, but I think that we could. I mean North Face's has much more zing, "Never Stop Exploring." Even Dow Chemicals did better, "The Human Element."

Now, I know that NASA does not have the massive budget that these companies do to hire super star advertising execs. I also know that a lot of people at NASA put a lot of time and thought into this new campaign and so I don't want to criticize it without offering up some constructive alternatives. Therefore, I am turning to cyberspace and the power of crowdsourcing to come up with some alternatives to offer them. One of the issues they cite in their market research is a challenge being relevant to people 18-24. Maybe we could help. I will even throw in prizes.

The writer of the best slogan will get a DVD of the space movie of their choice, From the Earth to the Moon, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, etc and will be interviewed for a follow up posting on what it takes to engage the public with space. Other noteworthy submission will get other small space swag.

Link to the full text of Loretta's call to keyboards, and submissions should are due by Sept 28th. The Wired folks have created a new submissions tool, so go ahead and use that to plug in your ideas: Link

Someone on Second Life is offering "tiny, adorable baby unicorns that you can hold and cuddle... but they come with a price. You can only get them by having sex with an adult unicorn located at the bel Highland sim..."

NSFW images. Link (Thanks, Kris!)

"Reliability ...always upholding the highest standards for every detal."

Link (Thanks, Bruce!)

First, they came for our toothpaste. Now, our tank tops?

Kyla Ebbert, 23, was recently escorted off a Southwest Airlines flight by a male customer service supervisor for wearing the outfit shown in this photograph. The college student and Hooters waitress was later permitted to return to the plane and take her flight, but only after she put up a fuss and adjusted her outfit:

“I asked him what part of my outfit was offensive,” she said. “The shirt? The skirt? And he said, 'The whole thing.' ”

"Keith" asked her to go home, change and take a later flight. She refused, citing her appointment. The plane was ready to leave, so Keith relented. He had her pull up her tank top a bit, pull down her skirt a bit, and return to her seat.

In this San Diego Union Tribune column, a fashion critic and a writer were asked for their opinion on Ms. Ebbert's outfit, and the way she was treated by Southwest:

Pascual detected sexism in the way Ebbert was treated, wondering if a man would have been asked to change clothes. Do men dress inappropriately? “I see butt cracks, a lot of butt cracks,” she said.

In its letter, Southwest said “there were concerns about the revealing nature of her outfit.” I called Hollye Chacón, the Southwest customer relations representative who wrote the letter, to see if we were talking about the same outfit.

“What exactly was being revealed?” I asked. She said yesterday she'd call back, but never did. That's pretty revealing in itself.

Link. (thanks, Bruce Schneier!)

Update: Manolo the shoeblogger points us to Southwest's own response to this at their blog: Link. They link approvingly to the website of an MSNBC producer who had this to say:

At first, when she appeared on the set, it didn't seem like her outfit was so inappropriate. It was clear that her skirt was pretty short, but it didn't seem worthy of getting a lecture from a customer service representative on how to dress. But when she sat down, we learned just how short that skirt was -- when she flashed our national television audience. Yeah, that skirt was short.

Manolo says,

Many blogs have found the images from the 1970s of the Southwest flight attendants dressed like the Hooters girls. Here is the NPR link, and the very amusing post from Feministing. And the Manolo' s commentary on this entire brouhaha: one, two. Also, if you wish to be disgusted, check out what many young and silly Arizona women are wearing: one, two. Compared to this, Kyla Ebbert is Donna Reed.

Here's a statement from a group of Burning Man participants known as The Comfort & Joy Family, sent to Boing Boing by Kitten Calfee. Statement continues after the jump.

On the morning of Thursday, August 30th a young man from Colorado chose to end his life in the rafters of a public tent at the Comfort & Joy Burning Man theme camp.

Though he was unknown to us, in the wake of his passing we're learning from those who knew him that he was creative, kind, unconventional and smart, and that he was regarded with affection by many.

His final act, committed in solitude, has one lasting effect as it brings us together to mark his passing. To all who have offered our camp their sympathy and support during this time, thank you. To all who knew him, please accept our sincere condolences.

It is estimated that there was an one hour interval between the last visit to the tent by a camp member, and the discovery of the body by a second camp member. It is believed that the tent was unoccupied during this time, and that there were no witnesses to the suicide.

Eric says

This video shows a balancing robot moving with such fluidity and apparent emotion, that it almost seems alive.

Magnus Linderoth and Kristian Soltesz, students of Lunds University in Sweden, posted a video last winter of their "inverted pendulum" robot. I only found it recently because I saw a post in MAKE about double pendulums and searched for more in YouTube. The robot in the video tries desperately to keep a rod balanced in the air like a broomstick. As the researcher meddles with the robot, it responds with various tactics.

Link

Serial entrepreneur Michael Robertson, who founded the famously RIAA-sued MP3.com, shares some thoughts on a lawsuit filed this week by DivX against Universal Music Group. UMG is also in a tussle with the online video service Veoh, over similar issues.

Michael says:

Divx filed a pre-emptive lawsuit against UMG asking courts to affirm the legality of their Stage6 video hosting site. This is the second San Diego based company to engage media companies in court. The first was Veoh who also sued UMG. What does this mean? I would speculate the following:

- UMG must be sending out threatening demand letters to many companies.

- Tech companies are getting more savvy wih legal options and realizing the value of playing offense, not just defense.

- San Diego is building some institutional expertise. DivX was started by Jordan Greenhall, who worked at MP3.com in the early days. Other former MP3.com people are at DivX. One coincidence is that divx has occupied the last 2 office buildings that MP3.com used. They watched MP3's unsuccessful legal battles and maybe learned some things. Veoh was founded by Dmitry Shapiro, a friend of mine who is very smart.

Be interesting to watch this play out. I predict it won't be the "lamb to slaughter" that MP3.com was, for many reasons.

Link to DivX's press release today, with the headline "DivX Requests Federal Court Affirmation of DMCA Protection for Stage6." (via pho list, reposted with permission)

Two researchers at the University of St Andrews report that they have "worked out how to turn the normally 'sticky' quantum force of empty space from attraction to repulsion using a specially developed lens placed between two objects."

[T]he University of St Andrews team has created an 'incredible levitation effects’ by engineering the force of nature which normally causes objects to stick together.

Professor Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin, from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, have worked out a way of reversing this pheneomenon, known as the Casimir force, so that it repels instead of attracts.

Their discovery could ultimately lead to frictionless micro-machines with moving parts that levitate But they say that, in principle at least, the same effect could be used to levitate bigger objects too, even a person.

Link

Roxy Gloopstick says:

Massachusets State Treasurer Timothy P. Cahill and his family were detained at Logan Airport for over an hour when Customs officials discovered that one of his daughters was carrying contraband in the form of 3 peaches. Predictably, the agents were rude and unreasonable, and Cahill was told that he had to immediately pay a $300 fine or spend the night in jail. Could he appeal the fine? The officials wouldn't say.

To his enormous credit, Cahill didn't try to wiggle out of the situation by telling the officials that he was the Treasurer. He endured the process as any other citizen would. And now he's pissed.

Link

Michael says: "My friend Scott and I took our two daughters to the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in Kansas City last night. We thought the Clown and Horse rainbow colored snow cone brains on sale would be great Boing Boing material."

The Clown, The Horse

Steve sez,

I work for Grooveshark, a music service based out of Gainesville, Florida. The upshot is that we are offering free, unlimited streaming as well as DRM-Free tracks for download (at around .99 cents per track). Since we're doing this all over a peer to peer network a la Limewire, we have also decided to share a percentage of each sale with the people actually sharing the music. Thus, if you upload a song and someone downloads it from you part of the money goes to the copyright holder, part does to us and the rest is credited to your account.

We are really working to build grass roots support for this idea. we have gotten the interest of a ton of independent labels as well as some larger ones (Magnatunes/Naxos/Sheridan Square), and even though we're not out of California we have still managed to raise awareness with Angel Investors. We've released our BETA and the press release for it is going out later today, we want as many people to see the product as we possible can and your help would go a long way.

Link (Thanks, Steve!)

The company Ambient has demonstrated a motorized wheelchair that is controlled by subvocal speech. The individual thinks of a particular word and a sensor collar around the user's neck detects the electrical signals sent from his or her brain to the larynx muscles. The computer then matches those signal patterns to pre-programmed "words" used to control whatever apparatus the system is attached to, in this case a wheelchair. The approach is similar to the subvocal speech system recently demonstrated by NASA for future spacesuit communication devices. Engineers Michael Callahan and Thomas Coleman developed the Ambient technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. From New Scientist:

Callahan and Coleman say (the output from the device) can also be sent to a speech synthesiser, allowing a paralysed person to "speak" out loud. Recent refinements to the algorithms used may make it possible to interpret whole sentences thought out by the user. This could potentially restore near-normal speech to people who have not spoken for years, the researchers say.

Link to New Scientist article, Link to YouTube video

Previously on BB:
• NASA's silent speech system Link
• Subvocalization mic functional prototype Link

Our friends at Fortean Times have posted a bunch of new reader-submitted "simulacra photos." In Fortean terms, simulacra photos depict "spontaneous or natural figures or images. These can occur in nature as well as in the chance conjunction of artefacts." This cloudy face was snapped last winter with a phonecam in Sittingbourne, Kent, England. Link

Instructables contributor Jessyratfink posted plans to build this wonderful Barbie Doll Electric Chair. She writes:

This is a science fair project that I did in middle school and completely disgusted the entire female staff of Benton Middle. The purpose of this project is to show how the electric chair works and discuss basic electricity - currents and conductivity.

This is perhaps not the most politically correct science fair project, but it definitely gets attention. And although it is more based on presentation than science, most people find it very interesting to learn how an electric chair works.

Link