Computer and behavioral scientists at the University at Buffalo are developing automated systems that track faces, voices, bodies and other biometrics against scientifically tested behavioral indicators to provide a numerical score of the likelihood that an individual may be about to commit a terrorist act.

"The goal is to identify the perpetrator in a security setting before he or she has the chance to carry out the attack," said Venu Govindaraju, Ph.D., professor of computer science and engineering in the UB School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Govindaraju is co-principal investigator on the project with Mark G. Frank, Ph.D., associate professor of communication in the UB College of Arts and Sciences.

(Photo credit: Phrenology1.jpg, a public domain image from Wikimedia Commons)

The function of the appendix seems related to the massive amount of bacteria populating the human digestive system, according to the study in the Journal of Theoretical Biology. There are more bacteria than human cells in the typical body. Most are good and help digest food.

But sometimes the flora of bacteria in the intestines die or are purged. Diseases such as cholera or amoebic dysentery would clear the gut of useful bacteria. The appendix's job is to reboot the digestive system in that case.

Main Points:

• A fast food restaurant called MFC combines the Chinese characters for McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken, crudely combining the menus of both chains.

• Our brave reporter tries a chicken burger and determines it is less tasty than what he could eat at McDonald’s.

• MFC’s homepage states it was started in America during the 1960s. However, when their reporter calls the company they are told it was founded in China 7 years ago.

• There is something that looks like a Beijing Olympics logo on their menu. However, their phone interview finds that MFC is not an official sponsor of the Olympic games.

• The best part of the report? MFC’s spokeswoman responds to their questioning with something along the lines of, “We don’t have any stores in Japan, so what’s your problem?”

The good news has already been widely disseminated: there are nearly 5000 Facebook applications, and the top applications have tens of millions of installs and millions of active users. The bad news, alas, is in our report: 87% of the usage goes to only 84 applications! Only 45 applications have more than 100,000 active users. This is a long tail marketplace with a vengeance -- but unfortunately, the economic models (for developers at least, though not for Facebook itself) all rely on getting into the very short head. Here's the distribution of active users among the top 200 developers. (Some developers have multiple popular applications.) As you can see, the drop-off is extremely steep.

Insanity is a common theme in my cartoons, as I said in my last post. Here's a whole lineup dedicated to the insane, with the main feature another Mighty Mouse brought to you by Ralph Bakshi.

This is the first time I ever got to do a cartoon about an insane character. When Ralph read the script he rejected it. (He rejected 2 out of every 3 stories we wrote, I think just to keep us on our toes. I said let me record the voices first. After he heard the cassette of Patrick Pinney playing a chemically deranged Petey Pate, Ralph said "I get it now. Make the Goddamn cahtoon. You're f*****in' crazy Johnny. You'll get us all fired. I love ya,"

It's 56 pages (eight of them color!) of sketches, spots and girlie art goodness, sandwiched between hand-silkscreened covers. It'll cost you just ten bucks.

OTW aims to provide a portal through which people live their daily lives by informed and ethical decision-making. The essence of which is achievable through self-education, self-empowerment, mechanisms of incentive and reward, and the provision of a “society” of concerned (and often disconnected) individuals. The future of OTW is to provide high quality channels with quality content, and to build into the framework personalization and participatory systems that will enhance social facilitation and movement.

OTW’s future direction is to facilitate a collective of socially, politically, ethically and environmentally aware individuals who are informed, networked, empowered, inspired, rewarded and responsible for the direction of their virtual and physical worlds.

Link, and related items: Valleywag, Information Week, NewTeeVee. (Thanks, Charles Ogilvie!)

Jim says:"Photographed this magazine in Helsinki. WtF stands for 'Welcome to Finland.'

"Not only is a magazine named "WtF" pretty funny, but cool fashion designer Minna Parikka is striking exactly the perfect corresponding pose on the cover." Link

OneCentNow is a campaign by the City of Toronto to get the federal government to return one cent of the national Goods and Services Tax to Toronto, which is struggling in the wake of decades of federal cuts in their budget-transfers.

Now the federal corporation that mints Canada's currency has sent the City of Toronto a bill for more than $47,000 for the use of the words "one cent" and the picture of a penny in the campaign's logo in a citywide public education effort.

The Royal Canadian Mint, a corporation of the federal government, has now demanded that the City of Toronto pay $47,680 for the public education campaign. Included in this amount is a request for $10,000 for the use of the words "one cent" in the campaign website address (www.onecentnow.ca) and the campaign email address (onecentnow@toronto.ca), and an additional $10,000 for the use of the words "one cent" in the campaign phone number (416-ONECENT). The remaining $27,680 has been assessed against the City for the use of the image of the Canadian penny in printed materials such as pins and posters. (The Mint has come to this amount by taking the total number of materials printed divided by the approximate population of Toronto, and then using a percentage of that number to arrive at a dollar figure.)

First, progressives will never achieve their goals as long as they are hostile toward and ignorant about the faith of 100 million of their own people who are born again Christians.

Second (and we know how difficult this is to believe) there is an incredibly large and beautiful social movement exploding among evangelicals right now that stands for nearly all of the same causes and goals that secular progressives do. Those goals include: eliminating poverty, saving the environment, promoting justice and equality along racial, gender and class lines and for immigrants--and even separation of church and state.

By learning to work together with "progressive" evangelicals, secular progressives will stand a better chance of achieving their goals and also learn an enormous amount from these remarkable people and their organizations that will help secular progressives strengthen their own movement.

Drive-by downloads and website hacking add a scary new element to the badware problem. It's no longer possible for a conscientious user to protect herself simply by staying away from the internet's more questionable areas like software piracy, pornography, drugs, and gambling. Any website, no matter how trusted, can be vulnerable to attack. Knitting sites, outdoor equipment retailers, and even Santa Claus's website can be compromised and made to infect users who simply visit a web page. This means the security-conscious user must find new ways to stay protected from badware. The first step to protecting yourself from badware is learning more about it, from common ways badware is distributed to new threats on the horizon. As new ways of distributing badware emerge, your best defense is keeping yourself up to date - from frequently updating the protective software you use on your computer, to keeping informed about new dangers so you will know how best to avoid them.

See also:
Lessig switches from copyright to corruption
Wikify the problem of ending corruption

Update: Pesco reminds me I blogged this one last year -- thought it looked familiar. You know what, though? I like this so much I don't care!

Sibu fancies his female keepers, especially blondes. That, the spokeswoman said, was common for orang-utans but Sibu has a fetish for tattoos, harking back to a heavily tattooed keeper who reared him.

Did I do anything wrong? When you buy an iPhone, Apple might argue that you've made an implicit promise to become an AT&T customer. But I did no such thing. I told the employees at the Apple Store that I wanted to unlock it, and at no stage of the purchasing process did I explicitly agree to be an AT&T customer. There was no sneakiness; I just did something they didn't like.

Meanwhile, lest we forget, I did just throw down more than $400 for this little toy. I'm no property-rights freak, but that iPhone is now my personal property, and that ought to stand for something. General Motors advises its customers to use "genuine parts," but it can't force you to buy gas from Exxon. Honda probably hates it when you put some crazy spoiler on your Civic, but no one says it's illegal or wrong.

The worst thing that you can say about me is that I've messed with Apple's right to run its business exactly the way it wants. But to my mind, that's not a right you get in the free market or in our legal system. Instead, Apple is facing trade-offs rightly beyond its control. When people unlock phones, Apple loses revenue it was hoping for, but also gains customers who would have never bought an iPhone in the first place. That's life.

A little Googling taught me that the bucket Ray is holding contains 105,000 calories and 11,200 grams of saturated fat. Not only that, but as the bucket proudly proclaims, it is preserved with BHA and propyl gallate, everyone’s favorite carcinogenic preservatives! It’s like an old bucket of paint toting it’s extraordinarily high lead content. Brilliant, ConAgra Foods!

NPR has an audio story abut Dory and his cheery chirpers.

New Yorkers are hearing things these days — and it is coming from the bushes.

It is the sound of concrete crickets, little devices created by artist Michael Dory that play bits of music and make cricket-like sounds. Dory hides small sound devices in containers around the city, similar to the way graffiti artists spray paint their art on walls without asking anyone's consent.

The crickets are just loud enough for passersby to hear. And like their namesake, the crickets stop chirping when the curious draw too close — thanks to motion sensors Dory installed in them.

Dory says the idea for the crickets came to him as he watched his lower eastside neighborhood change, becoming too expensive for the artists who lived there.

The concrete crickets, he says, are his way of keeping his voice in the neighborhood.

I hope he doesn't try this in Boston. The authorities there don't take kindly to electronic street art. Link

Recently [Josef] Stuefer and his colleagues were the first to demonstrate that clover plants warn each other via the network links if enemies are nearby. If one of the plants is attacked by caterpillars, the other members of the network are warned via an internal signal. Once warned, the intact plants strengthen their chemical and mechanical resistance so that they are less attractive for advancing caterpillars.

Random House is also working on a German translation of my second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, working with Michael Iwoleit, the translator who worked on Down and Out.

Many thanks to Johannes and Evelyn at Monochrom for their help in translating the oddball concepts like "Whuffie" and "Bitchun Society." Link

Unfortunately, China appears to have finally gotten wise to RSS as of late--reports have been popping up from our readers and around the web of not being able to access FeedBurner RSS feeds as early as August of this year. More recent reports tell us that the PSB appears to have extended this block to all incoming URLs that begin with "feeds," "rss," and "blog," thus rendering the RSS feeds from many sites--including ones that aren't blocked in China, such as Ars Technica--useles

In this edition of Boing Boing tv: first, an update on that Japanese pop tune about a "butt biting bug" (Oshiri Kajiri Mushi). Then, we explore advertisements that feature something that's never been unpopular - vajayjay. Video Link.

Brought to life by the mad scientists at MAKE magazine, this Sunday, October 7th, 2007 we’re offering a build-your-own Animatronic Ghost workshop. Combining a slow motor, a simple system of pulleys, and a deathly amount of fun (and almost as much electricity), this ghoul will be the “life” of your Halloween party. Along the way, you’ll learn the basics of working with motors and mechanisms.

This project (originally by Doug Ferguson) is featured in an article by Edwin Wise in the special halloween edition of MAKE, which you’ll receive as part of the class materials.

Cost of $150 will get you in the door and all materials needed. Class enrollment limit is 7 people, so sign up today!

Machine Project - 1200 D North Alvarado Street, Los Angeles, CA 90026 Link

Alex Jones' timely and hilarious post-apocalyptic comedy, CANNED PEACHES IN SYRUP places us in a seemingly absurd and inconvenient future, where water is scarce, the sun has gone crazy and love still survives. In a post-environmental apocalyptic future, the world is divided into two tribes of nomadic humans: Cannibals and Vegetarians. Can star-crossed lovers Rog (think Romeo as a cannibal) and Julie (think Juliet as a vegetarian) cross tribal lines?! Can Rog's taste for flesh be suppressed?! Can Julie deny her parents' "meat is murder" mantra?! And, who exactly is Blind Bastard? A lone can of peaches in syrup holds their fate...and the fate of all mankind...

See also:
The Great (Wrong) Star Wars Movie Line of 2005 t-shirt
Che/Star Wars Stormtrooper shirt
Stylized Star Wars line-art tees

The more than 200 photographs—most taken by scientists from submersibles and ROVs, some shot for the book—show just how head-shakingly bizarre life can be. The scientists who discovered the creatures were apparently as amused as we are, giving them names such as gulper eel, droopy sea pen, squarenose helmetfish, ping-pong tree sponge, Gorgon's head and googly-eyed glass squid.

Nouvian herself made two dives in a submersible, to 3,200 feet. The first thing she noticed, she says, was that "it's very slow. You can tell that all their laws are different."

[Douglas Smith of the University of California, San Diego] and UCSD colleague Dorian Raymer ran a series of homespun experiments in which they dropped a string into a box and tumbled it for 10 seconds (one revolution per second). They repeated the string-dropping more than 3,000 times varying the length and stiffness of the string, box size and tumbling speed.

Digital photos and video of the tumbling strings revealed: Strings shorter than 1.5 feet (.46 meters) didn't form knots; the likelihood of knotting sharply increased as string length went from 1.5 feet to 5 feet (.46 meters to 1.5 meters); and beyond this length, knotting probability leveled off.

While there is no magical knot buster, Smith advised what all sailors, cowboys, electricians, sewers and knitters know: to avoid tangles, keep a cord or string tied in a coil so it can't move.

Cambridge police arrested Thomas Gannon, 38, Monday night after they served an unrelated trespassing and larceny warrant at his Plymouth Street home. Detectives performing a routine safety sweep discovered the 123 stolen meters under beds, in closets and under blankets, said Cambridge police spokesman Frank Pasquarello.

(Above image is a thumbnail of a photo by Angela Rowlings)

Link

A fantastic and slightly disturbing series of pinhole photography taken from inside the mouth.

State Rep. Matthew Barrett was giving a civics lesson Tuesday when he inserted a data memory stick into the school computer and the projected image of a topless woman appeared instead of the graphics presentation he had downloaded.

Police interviewed Barrett and school officials and seized the data memory stick and the computer to determine where the image came from, a state highway patrol spokesman said.

...

"I have no idea where these came from," the Democrat said.

This is an article from one of Canada's national newspapers The Globe and Mail about it..."

The city policy, created this summer, states that "the use of the totem images in any form requires approval from the City of Duncan." Applicants have to complete a form detailing how totem pole images will be used. After living in China for three years, and seeing how personal rights were violated, Mr. Langevin, who designs learning materials and is well-versed in copyright law, gets a little "touchy" when excessive rules, such as the totem policy, are enacted. "It borders on extortion," he said.

Here are a bunch of nice photos of the totem poles on Flickr. (Shown above, a thumbnail of Josky_TW's beautiful photo which captures four of the totem poles.) Link

Delhi University Systematics Biologist S. D. Biju and his colleagues have found this new frog, India’s smallest land vertebrate, in the Western Ghats of Kerala, a mountainous region in the western portion of India.

The humid rainforests of the Western Ghats are the perfect habitat for these nocturnal frogs, which enjoy making mating calls from under leaf litter and among the roots of ferns during the monsoon months.

SPECTRUM: You, Frederick Durant, and Ernst Stuhlinger were all in Barcelona at an International Astronautical Federation meeting on 4 October 1957. What was your reaction when you got the news about Sputnik?

CLARKE: Although I had been writing and speaking about space travel for years, I still have vivid memories of exactly when I heard the news. I was in Barcelona for the 8th International Astronautical Congress. We had already retired to our hotel rooms after a busy day of presentations by the time the news broke. I was awakened by reporters seeking an authoritative comment on the Soviet achievement. Our theories and speculations had suddenly become reality!

For the next few days, the Barcelona Congress became the scene of much animated discussion about what the United States could do to regain some of its scientific prestige. While manned spaceflight and Moon landings were widely speculated about, many still harboured doubts about an American lead in space. One delegate, noticing that there were 23 American and five Soviet papers at the Congress, remarked that while the Americans talked a lot about spaceflight, the Russians just went ahead and did it!...

SPECTRUM: A lot of what was achieved at the beginning of the Space Age—from Sputnik to the first landing on the moon—was spurred on by the rivalry that was the Cold War. Without that competition, do you think the human impetus to reach for space has slowed somewhat?

CLARKE: Launching Sputnik and landing humans on the Moon were all political decisions, not scientific ones, although scientists and engineers played a lead role in implementing those decisions. (I have only recently learned, from his long-time secretary Carol Rosin, that Wernher von Braun used my 1952 book, The Exploration of Space, to convince President Kennedy that it was possible to go to the Moon.) As William Sims Bainbridge pointed out in his 1976 book, The Spaceflight Revolution: A Sociological Study, space travel is a technological mutation that should not really have arrived until the 21st century. But thanks to the ambition and genius of von Braun and Sergei Korolev, and their influence upon individuals as disparate as Kennedy and Khrushchev, the Moon—like the South Pole—was reached half a century ahead of time.

I hope that nations can at last see better reasons for exploring space, and that future decisions would be informed by intelligence and reason, not the macho-nationalism that fuelled the early Space Race.

Every person in the UK who agrees to share a small portion of their home broadband connection will be able to share the connection of any other member. Anyone joining in will be able to use those FON hotspots across the world and all the new BT FON hotspots free of charge.

From the very beginning, all of you, Foneros, believed in the concept of sharing and in people's ability to build something important that would benefit everyone. BT is one of the most important telcos and ISPs in the world, so with BT FON those beliefs have proved to be well-founded!

See also:
Free WiFi routers from FON for 10,000 Americans
Spanish ISP wants its customers to share WiFi

NPD: What will Slashdot look like in 2017?

RM: If I win, hopefully mostly the same, except maybe a little more interactive and comprehensive. I hope that we're talking about the same types of things, but 10 years more advanced. I hope that the same level of conversation is taking place. And I hope that they keep letting me do it.

NPD: What do you mean by "win", what happens if you "lose", and if so, do you think you'd just start over again with a new site?

RM: Well, my job is often balancing the economic realities with the desires of the users. There's a lot to that- advertisers want X, sales/marketing wants Y, readers want Z, and I have a certain budget, a certain number of engineer man hours, and only so many clock cycles of DB time.

If I lose, it means Slashdot no longer is able to be an independent voice on the Internet, and it is instead overrun by commercial interests. And at that point I'd probably leave. I don't know if I'd consider starting over again. It's a lot of work, and to have done this at the level I have, it would be anti-climactic personally to start over at zero unless I could find something worth doing it. Like a truckload of cash, or some sort of really interesting challenge to make it mentally worth trying. But quite honestly, Slashdot is interesting and on most days satisfying -- starting over again would suuuuck. The first time around was 20-hour days for many years!

Now that I'm living in London again, I find myself flying through Heathrow a lot, which has all the charm of a colonoscopy and all the comfort of being trapped in a cargo container. The lines are like something out of the ninth pit of hell, especially in the Virgin terminal, and the rules about carry-ons and so forth keep getting more and more inhospitable.

God, I hope that this means that I can look forward to a more pleasant aviation experience.

"BAA has failed to manage security queueing and queue times to avoid unacceptable delays to passengers, crew and flights, and have not furthered the reasonable interests of the users of Heathrow and Gatwick," a report by the Competition Commission said...

The commission statement contained severe financial implications for Ferrovial, which throw into doubt the refinancing of the £9.3bn debt the Spanish group took on when it bought BAA for £10.3bn last year. The commission backed CAA proposals to slash BAA's return on capital at its two biggest airports, which led Ferrovial to warn that refinancing plans "might not be able to be implemented as envisaged".

A new episode of Boing Boing tv is now up -- Trailers from Hell and Discount Lobotomies, plus a unicorn chaser of Ape Lad drawing cartoon monkeys. Link to video.

Update: Flo pointed out this youtube of 22 terabytes' worth of Maxtor hard drives being knocked over, domino-style. It's pretty hot.

See also:
MC Router, "queen of nerdcore," just got this new tattoo.
Nerd tattoo gallery
Zelda tattoo of all time
Fan-art tattoo gallery
Pac Man ass tattoo
Super Mario sleeve tattoo

Update: From the comments, Cyberscythe sez, "The phrase 'Leave Luck to Heaven' is a paraphrase of the meaning of the word Nintendo."

Clifford Woolf and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School have now discovered a way of blocking just the pain neurons using capsaicin - the active ingredient in chilli peppers - along with a version of lignocaine that can't diffuse through cell membranes unassisted.

Capsaicin activates the TRPV1 receptor on pain neurons. This in turn opens up a channel on the neurons' membrane, allowing the lignocaine to pass though. The drug then gets to work blocking the sodium channels. In tests on rats the drug combination completely blocked pain without affecting motor function or other senses (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature06191).

See also: Thai food sparks terror alert in London

New 10″ editions of artists such as Audrey Kawasaki, Travis Louie, Jeremy Fish, CRAOLA, Chet Zar, Kathy Olivas, Anthony Ausgang, and Friends With You will take on new the forms of cyclops, mermaids, centaurs, minotaurs, cyborgs, and sirens. The artists’ human form will morph with their painted surrealities into mythical hybrids of figurative form. The small, circus creature sculptures will be installed in a carnival-curio-shop-like atmosphere in the gallery.

The long-awaited Wired Magazine / PBS television lovechild "Wired Science" debuted tonight -- here's a clip with host Chris Hardwick, who many Boing Boing readers will know as half of the comedy duo Hard 'n' Phirm (here's a previous BB post about an anatomically-correct valentine song they did, LOL). Hardwick is awesome, he's a wonderful host. Video Link.

From Wired Science executive producer Melanie Cornwell (she's from the Wired Mag side of the project):

WIRED Science is the first new prime-time series on PBS in 5 years. Hosted by the most excellent Chris Hardwick, Kamala Lopez, and Ziya Tong, the show translates Wired Magazine to television. In the premier episode, Wired contributing editor Josh Davis reports on the botnet attack that took out much of Estonia's online infrastructure this past spring (Davis simultaneously reported this story for the magazine and Wired Science in Tallin and Moscow); Tong tests software from the MIT Media Lab that is designed to help kids with Asperger's Syndrome do something the rest of us take for granted-- read emotions on people's faces; Wired senior editor Adam Rogers goes in search of chemistry and ends up needing to be decontaminated at the aptly named United Nuclear in New Mexico; plus we'll see a RoboDoc performing cardiac surgery at UCLA-- fascinating but definitely not for the squeamish. There are also studio segments, including Hardwick bringing 'What's Inside' from the mag hilariously to life; a demo of Photosynth software; and a chat with Paul Kedrosky, a VC who's in the more-than-highly speculative business of moving science out of labs and into markets.

Below, Adam Rogers prepares to demonstrate dangerous toy chemistry sets.

New York Times reporter John Schwartz has an amazing piece online today, I understand he's been working on it for a half a year or so. The story is about guy who owns his own Sputnik -- or, more precisely, one of the spares built before the initial launch. He bought it during the 1990's post-Soviet fire sale. There's a nice multimedia slideshowmajig along with the article.

So, OMG you'll never guess who the Sputnik owner is. Oh that's right, I put it in the headline for this post. Dude. It's Richard LORD BRITISH Garriott, the creator of Ultima and a very serious space-stuff collector.

Link to "Texas Man Linked to Past and Future of Space Exploration by Sputnik and Soyuz."

The story by Schwartz comes out in the same week as Sputnik's 50th anniversary, and on the same day as a related piece from Robert Pearlman, at CollectSpace.com. Don't miss the entire "10-famous-Sputniks countdown" feature on that site: Link. Image by Will Van Overbeek for the NYT.

"The magnetic field or magnetic direction may be perceived as a dark or light spot which lies upon the normal visual field of the bird," Heyers said, "and which, of course, changes when the bird turns its head..."

"An animal that has to migrate over great distances needs to have both a compass and a map," said Cordula Mora, a biologist who recently completed her postdoctoral research at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Mora's work suggests that birds may use magnetic crystals in their beaks to sense the intensity of the magnetic field and thus glean information on their physical location.

I own and operate a comic book shop in San Jose, CA which was recently voted best comic shop in Silicon Valley. I write free comic retailing software and I also run an online graphic novel store called ComicBookShelf.com .

The recent teacher ousting over Eightball #22 was a real wakeup call that there is a lot of work to do on making the public understand what a vital and important artform comics can be. A world where an educator loses their job for recommending Dan Clowes is a world I don't want to live in!

That's just one of the reasons I'm proud to announce that ComicBookShelf.com will donate 5% of every online sale to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund which supports comics-related first amendment cases.

We're also donating an additional 5% to the Hero Initiative which helps get financial help to golden age comic artists who never made any royalties from their priceless creations.

Furthermore, until the end of October 2007 we will double the donation to both organizations, meaning 20% of every sale will go to these worthy organizations.

Shipping is always free anywhere in the US and we support Google checkout for safe and secure payment processing. We carry a wide array of books and our open source bookstore recommendation algorithms let you rate books and get recommendations. Kind of like Netflix does, but for graphic novels.

A pot of burning chilli sparked fears of a biological terror attack in central London. Firefighters wearing protective breathing apparatus were called to D'Arblay Street, Soho, after reports of noxious smoke filling the air. Police closed off three roads and evacuated homes following the alert. Specialist crews broke down the door to the Thai Cottage restaurant at 1900 BST on Monday where they discovered the source - a 9lb pot of chillies. The restaurant had been preparing Nam Prik Pao, a red-hot Thai dip which uses extra-hot chillies which are deliberately burnt.

Includes video. Link

Hang the leaders of the Conservative Movement on the wall in your office, home, or dorm! Young America's Foundation is excited to offer our latest breakthrough poster that brings together the strongest leaders and advocates of the Conservative Movement in a unique group photo! This is the only poster of its kind that includes these twelve conservative luminaries: John Ashcroft, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Robert Novak, Ward Connerly, Dinesh D’Souza, Walter Williams and many more.

Get your *free conservative VIP poster here... while supplies last!

*You pay only shipping and handling! [[$7]]

I am a photographic archivist and while brainstorming ideas for National Archives Month (October) exhibits, I jokingly suggested "Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century." My boss let me run with it, and I created a daily mustache blog with the digital images I gathered from our collections here at the University of Kentucky.

From the package copy:

Two-Layer Butt Allows 'Diarrhea" to Flow without a Mess!

Althea Merback knits 1/144 scale outfits that can fit on a dime. Link

As of July 27th, 2006 I have had nine "encounters" with bats in my house the last five years ... and the score so far is "Alek-9, Bats-0" ... although 7 of the bats were "returned" back outside ... so it's possible I've had some repeat visitors. I wish I knew why/where these guys are coming from, but I really wish those pesky critters would stay outside and eat the bugs. BTW, if you have bats in your house, the first thing you should do is go get your digital camera (like I do! ;-) ... and then close the doors so they are confined to that room - then deal with 'em!

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Alek Komarnitsky's tele-operated Christmas light display
• Hoax Christmas Lights Webcam up for charity auction
• Peach wasps devouring their namesake fruit

The Spin Punk station consists of handpicked songs representing the most influential punk music spanning three decades and is the musical counterpart to Spin's punk coverage. The issue includes an article chronicling the rise of punk, explosive interviews with the Sex Pistols' Johnny Rotten and the Clash's Mick Jones, a definitive timeline of punk in 1977, and much more.

“Participants engage in a collective act of writing space through the use of light as a virtual writing machine onto ephemeral plumes of smoke,” explain Minimaforms. In other words, onlookers can text messages which are then displayed using light projected into plumes of smoke. Their texts “are fed through dynamic coding that recognizes, archives and plays back a real time visualization. This visualization is then grafted onto trajectories of smoke that form a dynamic ephemeral field that is affected by all external forces in the space of performance. Through turbulence the smoke writes or erases the grafting of the inputted text.”

The WSJ has an article abut the trouble Wal-Mart is facing, because competitors are offering Wal-Mart's low prices along with better quality merchandise, better service, and more convenience.

The most interesting part, however, was this video showing the way Wal-Mart has spread across the country like a microbe culture in a petri dish.

Today, though, Wal-Mart's influence over the retail universe is slipping. In fact, the industry's titan is scrambling to keep up with swifter rivals that are redefining the business all around it. It can still disrupt prices, as it did last year by cutting some generic prescriptions to $4. But success is no longer guaranteed.

Rival retailers lured Americans away from Wal-Mart's low-price promise by offering greater convenience, more selection, higher quality, or better service. Amid the country's growing affluence, Wal-Mart has struggled to overhaul its down-market, politically incorrect image while other discounters pitched themselves as more upscale and more palatable alternatives. The Internet has changed shoppers' preferences and eroded the commanding influence Wal-Mart had over its suppliers.

Take email: Endless engineer-hours are poured into stopping spam, but virtually no attention is paid to our interaction with our non-spam messages. Our mailer may strive to learn from our ratings what is and is not spam, but it expends practically no effort on figuring out which of the non-spam emails are important and which ones can be safely ignored, dropped into archival folders, or deleted unread.

For example, I'm forever getting cc'd on busy threads by well-meaning colleagues who want to loop me in on some discussion in which I have little interest. Maybe the initial group invitation to a dinner (that I'll be out of town for) was something I needed to see, but now that I've declined, I really don't need to read the 300+ messages that follow debating the best place to eat.

The Zune Marketplace is officially adding DRM-free music support, launching with over a million DRM-free MP3 tracks. As we mentioned earlier, other details (like which labels, whether there is a DRM-free upgrade path is for users who've bought music with DRM, price differences, etc.) are not yet known.

You insert the nail inside the guide tube. Position the tube where you want the nail to be. The large top makes it much easier to manage a hammer slamming down on it. It also protects your precious and very useful fingers. Once the nail is pushed in, simply repeat the process. Your nail will always go in straight and square into its intended target. Brilliant I say.

In the comics, Tintin is a young Belgian reporter and world traveler who is aided in his adventures by his faithful dog Snowy. He later was joined by such colorful characters as Captain Haddock, Professor Cuthbert Calculus and bumbling detectives Thomson and Thompson.

Kathleen Kennedy is serving as producer on the three feature films, which will be made using performance-capture technology and produced in digital 3-D. Jackson and Spielberg are each directing an installment, with the helmer of the third movie to be determined.

See also:
Exclamations used by Tintin's Captain Haddock
To watch: "Tintin and I" PBS doc on Hergé, Tue. July 11.
Drunk Astronaut Hall of Fame: Tintin's Capt. Haddock did it first.

The next line of questioning was how many suits the RIAA has filed so far. Pariser estimated the number at a "few thousand." "More like 20,000," suggested Toder. "That's probably an overstatement," Pariser replied. She then made perhaps the most startling comment of the day. Saying that the record labels have spent "millions" on the lawsuits, she then said that "we've lost money on this program."

The RIAA's settlement amounts are typically in the neighborhood of $3,000-$4,000 for those who settle once they receive a letter from the music industry. On the other side of the balance sheet is the amount of money paid to SafeNet (formerly MediaSentry) to conduct its investigations, and the cash spent on the RIAA's legal team and on local counsel to help with the various cases. As Pariser admitted under oath today, the entire campaign is a money pit.

Ubisoft have a series of games about to come out for girls. Entitled "Imagine", there's a spark of hope .. but it turns out that the series is going to primarily consist of shopping, fashion, animals and babies. Oh yes. But the worst bit about this is, not really the fact that there are going to be shopping games - WoW is at least 40% shopping, frankly - or fashion games (ditto), but that Ubisoft seem to think that this is only what girls like:

Those games were really designed for young girls who are just looking for fun games and ways to explore their favorite hobbies... From what we've seen, [the girls] didn't mention anything about being a police officer.

Research is a funny thing. If you say to someone, what's your favourite food, they'll list three things they love. If you then say, you didn't list chocolate cake, don't you like chocolate cake? They'll say, oh SURE! I love chocolate cake! I just didn't realise you were asking about chocolate cake. If young girls only like shopping, fashion and babies, then they wouldn't like Ratchet and Clank. Or Mario Kart. Or Dance Dance Revolution. Or Wii Sports. Or Pokemon.

Link

See also: Non-hypothetic ideas about women in gaming

We're excited to share something new with you today -- Boing Boing tv. The idea is simple. Explore the same kind of stuff we've been obsessing about since Boing Boing began nearly 20 years ago, only explore it now in daily video. Five days a week, and short: under 5 minutes each.

Here is episode 1: Video Link.

For the first few weeks, much of what you'll see will be produced in-studio, but we also plan to do stuff out in the world, and all over the world.

Boing Boing co-founder Mark Frauenfelder and I are co-hosting the first few weeks of Boing Boing tv, but expect to see the other Boing Boing and Boing Boing Gadgets editors, too -- Pesco, Cory, Joel -- along with familiar characters whose work and eccentricities have been chronicled here before.

And: you. We also welcome video produced by you, our community, our audience, our internet-friends, and we're working out exactly that might fit in the mix (we'd love to hear your thoughts on that).

We're exploring different ways of producing this, and plan to publish a mix of faster-moving "internet zeitgeist" stories with material that remains of interest for a long time. Some lighthearted, other stories less so. In other words, a variety of material pretty much like you find on the blog.

This is not the result of a business plan, or a corporate focus group. We promise no huffy manifestos about Taking Down The Networks with A New Television Paradigm, no breathless hyperbole about Reinventing Citizen Journalism With the Disintermediation of Long Tail Postmodernist Blogonomics -- gah!

We just want to have fun and explore interesting things with you. But, y'know, now with video, because video allows you to explore stuff that text, photos, and audio -- all the things we've experimented with so far -- do not.

We don't intend to take ourselves too seriously. And we're not trying to be TV. Same old Boing Boing, but with talkies.

We hope you like it and find it worth your time to watch and participate, as you, our community, do with Boing Boing the blog. We hope you'll talk with us in the comments (or through your own video, if you wish) about what you'd like us to explore, though Boing Boing tv, next.

Link Discuss FTW!

TECH NOTE: RSS feed and the ability to subscribe via iTunes will be live ASAP.

THANKS: heartfelt gratitude to colleagues and friends without whom this would have remained vapor: Michel Wayne, Chris Kimbell, Jacob Riskin, and all of our production partners at the newly-launched Santa Monica-based studio DECA; all of our sponsorship, marketing, and tech partners at Federated Media (John Battelle, Jason Weisberger, Neil Chase, Ken Snider, Jonathan Schreiber, Ivan Kanevski, Chas Edwards, Bernie Albers, Andre Torrez, and Samantha Kahn, among others); George Ruiz and Nick Khan at International Creative Management (ICM reps BBtv); Brian Walsh at Castfire; the unfairly talented writer and producer Nihar Patel (he was once Xeni's producer at NPR, before that he worked at ABC Nightline, now he's part of the BBtv team), Scott Crawford of Scenic Route Pictures (shoot and post production), Tom Kendall and team at oftheworld.tv (BBtv title animation), and Kai Vermehr and all the folks at eboy who created the BBtv cowboy monster critter.

And thank you, dear viewer, for stopping by.

NEWS: Link to story in the LA Times. Link to Valleywag item. Link to Wired News blog post. Link to Laughing Squid. Link to Warren Ellis' blog. Link to Digg.

Update: From the comments: Matt sez, "I like to top mine off with a marshmallows for extra high 3D monster sculpturing."

A computed tomography (CT) scan from a 33-year-old Chinese woman being examined for thyroid disease provided the raw data for Fung's rendering. He stacked together 182 thin CT "slices" to create a 3D image looking upward at the sinuses from underneath the head.

Fung chose to use the patient's CT images for his rendering, he remembers, because "[she had] a very straight nasal septum and wavy maxillary sinuses; … the anatomy was exceptionally beautiful," he says.

Police are on the trail of a shadowy figure who has been dumping giant carved stone heads on village doorsteps at dead of night. "Some people think it's a curse - but we have no idea who we might have offended. One woman claims there's a link to werewolves."

Naomi Klein has just published a controversial best seller entitled The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In it she defines shock doctrine as “the use of public disorientation following massive collective shocks—wars, terrorist attacks, natural disasters—to push through highly unpopular economic shock therapy.”

The metaphor of “shock” is important because her thesis stems from a contention that what works on a person also works on a nation. Think 9/11 and fear-induced politics that have eroded some of the fundamentals of what we knew as American democracy. To peer into her thinking, check out the short film by Alfonso Cuaron, who made Y Tu Mama Tambien and Children of Men. Klein was hoping he’d send her a quote for the book jacket, but instead he assembled a team of artists and this short film. Sweet indeed.

While the over-the-top camp of Waters' films still holds up, the writer-director admits that the "mainstreaming" of gay culture in recent years has made it harder to be shocking. "I had more fun when it was illegal to be gay," says Waters, who adds that he's also "anti-separatist." "I don't want to get married and I don't want to go into the army and all that stuff, though I understand people's right to want that. I am for gay trouble. I like gay troublemakers. I am most gay when I am in a voting booth...."

The talk is titled, 'Protecting the University from Copyright Bullies,' and specifically addresses the question of the role of a university who receives a pre-litigation letter for an IP address accusing illegal file sharing.

I found it to be a pleasantly candid discussion that takes on entry-level questions as well as some of the more complex problems surrounding this issue." Link

Michael Townsend, 36, said he and seven other artists built the apartment in a 750-square-foot loft in the parking garage four years ago and lived there for up to three weeks at a time while documenting mall life.

The apartment included a sectional sofa and love seat, coffee and breakfast tables, chairs, lamps, rugs, paintings, a hutch filled with china, a waffle iron, TV and Sony Playstation 2 -- although a burglar broke in and stole the Playstation last spring, Townsend said. The artists built a cinderblock wall and nondescript utility door to keep the loft hidden from the outside world.

There was no running water -- instead they used the mall bathrooms.

Model 1: But if quantum mechanics isn’t physics in the usual sense — if it’s not about matter, or energy, or waves — then what is it about?

Model 2: Well, from my perspective, it’s about information, probabilities, and observables, and how they relate to each other.

Model 1: That’s interesting!

But if quantum mechanics isn’t physics in the usual sense — if it’s not about matter, or energy, or waves, or particles — then what is it about? From my perspective, it’s about information and probabilities and observables, and how they relate to each other.

Now, several sites have been contacted by an AT&T rep who has said that while AT&T's terms of service allow them to do this, they won't -- they'll only cut you off if you're looking at child porn or advocating race-violence.

Whatever.

If AT&T sincerely doesn't ever intend on cutting you off for criticizing them, they can amend their terms of service to say exactly that. It's not as though the legalese came off a mountain on two stone tablets and changing them counts as blasphemy.

AT&T's representatives can issue statements that say that they'll only cut you off if you turn out to be Josef Mengele, blogging from behind your secret identity in the Argentine campos, but unless they actually put it in writing, it means exactly squat. They wouldn't get you to "agree" to their Terms of Service if they didn't envision a time when they might use them. Link

The Star Wars Rube Goldberg project from physics class. Our teacher loved Star Wars -- sporting his lightsaber in class now and then and answering any question you can fathom -- but now we are out of high school and we do have lives so this will probably never happen again. But it was fun.

Here's the gimmick: Halting State opens when a virtual bank in a distributed, multiplayer world is robbed by a horde of orcs who march in and clean it out of all its prestige items and other loot, a direct frontal assault on the game-economy's integrity. The losses run to millions, which triggers an insurance audit -- led by Elaine, who's not only a forensic accountant, but also a sword-swinging LARPer who likes her espionage alternate reality games. She contracts with Jack, an extraordinary gamespace hacker who's just been made redundant from his Edinburgh gaming company, to serve as her native guide, and finds herself working alongside of Sue, a lesbian mom detective-sergeant with the Edinburgh Polis who has been called to the scene with a report of a "robbery" and is now duty-bound to pursue the matter in compliance with the tenets set out in the ISO 9000 binder for police-stations.

I've been following Halting State since Charlie and I sat in a coffee shop in the Strand in London about five years ago and talked about a novel about a "multimillion dollar heist in gamespace." It's a sticky idea, and one that a lot of us are going to end up playing with over the years -- but it's also clearly one that Charlie has had an indecent amount of fun playing with. This is his tightest-plotted novel to date, a detective story with a million perfectly meshed moving parts, and a hundred magnificent surprises that had me gasping and shouting YES (to the general alarm of the guy in the next seat on my airplane).

This is the apotheosis of Stross -- a book chock-a-block with great ten-minutes-from-now technology (big hunks of the plot hinge on anonymized digicash, onion-routers, FreeNet crypto, and GNU Radio), RPG humor straight off Phil Foglio's old Dragon Magazine strip, and an impassioned series of valentines to Edinburgh, Charlie's adopted hometown.

Blend an Iain Banks thriller with a copy of Count Zero, throw in the Tokyo Games Show and a Bourne movie (and possibly a Bourne shell) and you've got something approximating Halting State. This is a book that will change the way you see the way the world works. Link

• Aaron Adding Machines: Anachrofantastic

• 30-Year "Betavoltaic" Battery Hoax

• Indoor Grass Planters (A.K.A. "Fancy Pots")

• Blowing Out the Dust: Afternoon Edition

• Nebo Hands-Free Work Light

• Suzuki's Tonka-like X-HEAD Concept Truck

• Pink Shotgun from Remington

• Phone Rental in Japan?

• I'm Loving Team Fortress 2

• James Randi Calls Out Audiophile: I'm Sure the Crickets Will Sound Fantastic

• The Case of the Creeping DVD Recorder

• Refrigerators with Built-In Beverage Dispensers

• Evander Holyfield Real Deal Grill

• Odd Propeller-Driven Vehicles

Viacom and others want hosting companies and online service providers to preemptively evaluate all the material that their users put online, holding it to ensure that it doesn't infringe copyright before they release it.

This notion is impractical in the extreme, for at least two reasons. First, an exhaustive list of copyrighted works would be unimaginably huge, as every single creative work is copyrighted from the instant that it is created and "fixed in a tangible medium".

Second, even if such a list did exist, it would be trivial to defeat, simply by introducing small changes to the infringing copies, as spammers do with the text of their messages in order to evade spam filters.

In fact, the spam wars have some important lessons to teach us here. Like copyrighted works, spams are infinitely varied and more are being created every second. Any company that could identify spam messages -- including permutations and variations on existing spams -- could write its own ticket to untold billions.

Start making the pack!
This is that hard part. Study all the plans over and over. The motherboard is made from 1/8" thick board and is bolted to the ALICE pack frame. The spacer is made from blue foam as are the gearboxes, Ion arm and bumper- this speeds things up dramatically and really cuts down the weight of the pack. The cyclotron is made from MDF rings and 1/8" thick board. I ended up using flashlight refelectors with red LED's in them for the cylotron lights. The lenses were made from translucent plastic folders.

The powercell is made from 1/8" thick board and is held in place with screws, making it easy to remove for battery access. I used another plastic folder (blue) to make the powecell lense. I made the gun hook from a piece of 1/8" thick aluminum sheet but a lot of people use a Dixie cup dispenser hook. I machined my own knobs and Ion knob but many people use stacked washers for the Ion knob. The N-filter was made from a can.

The trick to working with foam is to finish it properly or paint will melt it. Once your foam is cut to shape sand it lightly and smooth all the surfaces with a lightweight spackling paste. Then cover it with Minwax Polycrylic sealer. This will allow you to paint it with good old black spray paint. It will also make the foam a little tougher.

The Joker: Smiling, and its evil cousin, the grin. I've read entire chapters where characters do nothing but smile and grin at each other, as though they're living in the Treehouse of Horror Simpson's vignette where Bart has mental powers like the kid in the Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life" and everyone has to keep on a happy face...

# Don't open the airlock! Another thing that bugs me is a scene that seems to take place in a vacuum. No sense of time, place, no indication that anyone has a history or is concerned with anything other than what's on the protagonist's mind that very second. Please, establish a time and place, even if it's just "midnight at the oasis," before or as you start the action! And remember, everyone in the story has problems of their own.

RUN-DMC appeared on the PBS children's television show "Reading Rainbow" in the mid-'80s, and this is the result. Video Link. Jam Master Jay R.I.P! (thanks, Will)

Naturally, I started with the cheap one, a new outfit called Sunday ( www.asksunday.com). For $29 a month, the assistants at Sunday would do 30 tasks for me.

The rules were simple: Each task could take no more than 30 minutes, and each had to be something that could be accomplished, ahem, at a distance: These assistants, I learned later, are mostly in India.

The assistance-at-a-distance model ruled a lot of things out. The assistants could not pick up my dry cleaning or go stand in line to mail a package.

But I was surprised at how much they could do. Once I had registered at the website, I uploaded some personal data, such as my frequent-flier account numbers, and the names and phone numbers of my dentist, hairdresser and doctor. If I wanted an assistant to make purchases on my behalf, I could also load credit-card information in encrypted form.

Sitting on my couch at 1 a.m., I dashed off a flurry of requests via e-mail:

* Contact all my frequent-flier airlines and inform them that I had recently changed my last name and wanted my accounts updated.

* Schedule a teeth cleaning for sometime in the next few weeks, any time before 9 a.m.

* Make an appointment for a haircut.

* Find out how much an airline ticket to Las Vegas would cost on Labor Day weekend.

Within 30 minutes, there was an e-mail in my in box saying that my requests were being processed. By noon the next day, the folks at Sunday had sent a list of flight options, a confirmed dental appointment and a date for my haircut.

There was a snag on the frequent-flier accounts: The assistant found out that only I could change the name. But thoughtfully he had prepared a list of what each of seven airlines required in the way of documentation and where to send my requests.

Quickly accomplishedWow, three and a half things knocked off my list before noon. And it had cost me only $4!

An adult-store owner had asked the justices to throw out the law as an unconstitutional intrusion into the privacy of the bedroom. But the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal, leaving intact a lower court ruling that upheld the law.

Sherri Williams, owner of Pleasures stores in Huntsville and Decatur, said she was disappointed, but plans to sue again on First Amendment free speech grounds.

“My motto has been they are going to have to pry this vibrator from my cold, dead hand. I refuse to give up,” she said.

Alabama’s anti-obscenity law, enacted in 1998, bans the distribution of “any device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs for anything of pecuniary value.”

I spent a half hour speed-dialing Google's new phone directory service, 800-GOOG-411. The verdict? Google's speech-recognition and geo-mapping algorithms outperformed Verizon and AT&T's humans this afternoon. GOOG-411 figured out that "Dover-Foxcroft" was a town in Maine rather than bouncing me to an operator. It deduced that "H H Brown Shoes" meant a store in nearby Dexter. It let me talk with my mouth full. But the service makes an irritatingly un-Googly first impression on callers.

Merlin also shares a few other useful "Guerrilla Office Tactics" on his blog, 43 Folders. Link

The group’s analyses have shown that the explanation may lie within the nature of the water’s structure. Initially, the bridge forms due to electrostatic charges on the surface of the water. The electric field then concentrates inside the water, arranging the water molecules to form a highly ordered microstructure. This microstructure remains stable, keeping the bridge intact.

Featuring a life-sized replica of the Apollo 11 moon lander, mission control, and NASA’s uniform room, all customized to his personal specifications using ordinary hardware store materials (including weaponry and hard-liquor delivery systems), the enormous display was the must-see big bang that announced LA’s fall art season.

For more than a decade Sachs has pondered the homespun technical ingenuity and romance with the unknown that brought America the Apollo program. Experimenting with models of varying scale ( Lunar Module (1:18), 1999; Crawler, 2003) has culminated in the realization of his own life-size SPACE PROGRAM. Pirating the milestone in collective memory when man took his first walk on the moon, Sachs reconstructs its key components, built to scale his way. By recollecting this historic event as a custom-made experience from the free domain of public imagination, he renders it totally in and of our time, charged by a vigorous artistic idiom that is ambivalent to the core. In a new twist on his shameless cannibalizing of corporate identity, Sachs now has the giants of high-style branding – Nike, Prada, and the like – working for him to produce items (lab coats, space boots) for the detailed inventory of his funky space odyssey.

The brain is basically a wrinkled bag of skin, filled with warm water, veins, and thought muscles. Think of it as a kind of modified heart, only with a mind, or brain.

Kokogiak has a Flickr gallery with scans from two different editions of Richard Scarry's The Best Word Book Ever. The 1963 edition has references to Native Americans, a "pretty stewardess," "brave hero," and old-fashioned gender roles that were changed in the 1991 edition.

I can understand the reasons for many of the changes, but some of the alterations are for the worse, if you ask me. Much of Scarry's absurdist humor, which gives his work appeals to adults as well as kids, has ben expunged from the more recent edition. For instance, on the page about fire fighters saving people from a burning building, a cat jumping from the window was labeled "jumping gentleman." In the 1991 edition, the label is removed. And the "beautiful screaming lady" was changed to "cat in danger." That's no fun.

The example shown above is even more unfortunate. The earlier version says the bear cub "comes promptly when he is called to breakfast." My four-year-old daughter enjoyed this and it really did inspire her come to the dinner table when we called her. The new version says "He goes to the kitchen to eat his breakfast." What is that supposed to teach a kid?

Fortunately, you can buy the 1963 edition used on Amazon. Link

Many of the problems of the copyright system come from copyright in the wrong hands. When copyrights get accumulated into large stockpiles, bad things often happen, things that often aren't in the interests of authors.

Too often authors and other creators end up giving away their copyrights when they don't need to. The point of our site, keepyourcopyrights.org, is to educate lawyers and non-lawyers on what to expect. We have collected actual contracts with dangerous language to teach people what to look out for.

Paolo Pedercini is a mad bastard, and the McDonald's game is his sharp, procedural satire of how fast food is a corrupt industry by necessity. The game is set up so that you cannot win without compromising. Try it, you'll see. While you can maintain mild growth without using hormones or genetically modified crops, your bosses will not be satisfied. To really succeed, you have to employ what some might call "unnatural" means, though at Corporate, they call it "McFriendly growth measures".

The game is drawn with a crazy flair, the blood splattered happy meal at the title screen should be some indication. There are subtle touches, like the joint perpetually hung out the mouth of a marketer, or the fact that some of your customers are men with beards wearing skirts -- a byproduct of the randomly combinatorial nature of the character generation system. Watching the constant flow of people getting their trays, then walking off, is sickly hypnotic; it's the core pulse of the game's system, where the commodities turn into cash and complete the play loop, and its also an abstraction of something that is going on all over the world, many times a second. The illustrations and writing are pretty on-point as well (hint: before you bulldoze the Amazonian village to plant more GMO soy, start a "McDonald's for the Third World" campaign).

Many mediaeval miniatures of St. John of Patmos demonstrate the importance of ink: they portray the Devil attempting to steal the saint’s precious ink. In the Middle Ages, two kinds of black ink were generally used: carbon ink (a suspension of carbon, water and gum) and iron-gall ink (obtained from oak galls). Carbon ink was used as early as 2500 BC whereas iron-gall ink was used from the 3rd century AD onwards, by individuals such as Leonardo da Vinci, Johann Sebastian Bach, Rembrandt van Rijn and Vincent van Gogh. According to recent research, traces of iron-gall ink have been found on the Dead Sea scrolls and on the lost Gospel of Judas.

The reaction that forms the ink pigment was not used in the ancient world to produce ink, but it was known: in his Naturalis Historia (Natural History), Pliny the Elder (23 AD - 79 AD) describes how to distinguish verdigris...used to process leather, from the cheaper copperas...with which it was often adulterated. He writes:

“ …The fraud may be detected using a leaf of papyrus which has been steeped in an infusion of nut-galls: it immediately turns black when adulterated verdigris is applied …”.

Although he could see the transformation, he did not understand it. Now, we know that this ancient test relies on the reaction between the ferrous cation (iron(II)) and gallotannic acid that is at the root of the iron-gall ink preparation.

Wood said he was livid when he got the request from Whisnant.

"He's making a freak show out of it," Wood said. "He wants to go on 'The Tonight Show' and he wants to sell it to the National Enquirer and call Ripley's Believe It Or Not. He wants to put money in his pocket with this thing."

After meeting with a lawyer this weekend, Whisnant decided his best move was to convince Wood to share custody.

The results will feed into the scientific study of a phenomenon called global dimming, which is caused by air pollution blocking sunlight. Some experts believe this has acted as a brake on global warming, and that climate change could accelerate as air pollution from industry is reduced.

Professor (Christos) Zerefos and his team looked at natural global dimming caused by volcanoes, the results of which can be severe. The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 threw out so much material that it triggered the notorious "year without a summer", which caused widespread failure of harvests across Europe, resulting in famine and economic collapse.

The team found 181 artists who had painted sunsets between 1500 and 1900. The 554 pictures included works by Rubens, Rembrandt, Gainsborough and Hogarth. They used a computer to work out the relative amounts of red and green in each picture, along the horizon. Sunlight scattered by airborne particles appears more red than green, so the reddest sunsets indicate the dirtiest skies. The researchers found most pictures with the highest red/green ratios were painted in the three years following a documented eruption.

Disney said the service will no longer be available after December 31, but it might offer some of the specially designed software and applications through another wireless operator.

See also: Disney to launch mobile phone service with Sprint

Update: I had been told by a sales rep that Disney mobiles let you see pen-trace data on your kids' calls, but Scott Forbes of Disney Mobile tells me that this isn't true.

In Postsingular, a mad scientist creates a race of nants -- nanites -- that digest the planet and turn it into a computational simulation of Earth, called Vearth. However, an autistic child memorizes a long string of numbers that poisons the nants and causes them to reverse themselves (luckily, they're engaged in reversible computation) and put the planet back. That's the setup.

Some time later, another race of benign nanos are released on the earth, the Orphids. Orphids are mezzoscale computers that organize themselves into an intelligent global network, tapping into every human brain and giving people access to outboard cognition facilities, so that anyone can drop out, tune in, and become hyperintelligent. The orphidnetters are haunted by spooks from a parallel dimension, who seek to prevent them from using the smarts of the orphidnet to develop interdimensional travel.

The novel continues in this vein for some 300 pages, each one funnier and weirder than the last. Rucker retired from teaching at UC Santa Cruz San Jose a few years back and he's been writing his ass off ever since. UCSC's SJSU loss is science fiction's gain. Link

See also:
Rudy Rucker's paintings
FLURB: Rudy Rucker's new literary zine
Rudy Rucker's science fiction webzine Flurb #2 is out
Get Illuminated podcast #3 with Rudy Rucker
Rudy Rucker explains how to get high on cellular automata
Jack Black to star in movie adaptation of Rudy Rucker novel
Rudy Rucker and Rudy Rucker, Jr. short story
Rucker's transrealist 16th-Cen painter novel -- w00t!

Update: Phil sez, "Rudy taught at San Jose State University. Some people are sensitive about these alma mater issues. It's still UCSC's loss. "

Nokia's N-series phones are designed to run third-party code, and Nokia encourages users to mod their phones (though, of course, Nokia's phones all come with a software switch that allows mobile companies to lock them to a single carrier). I've been seriously considering buying an N95, as I'm in the market for a new smartphone (my old N93 -- a giant hunk of junk to begin with -- is about to die). I've heard good things about the phone, except for battery life, which is apparently a real problem.

The other phones I'm thinking of are the Neonode (looks good, but I can't find one to play with and that's a lot of money to spend on a phone I haven't actually seen), or possibly an old StarTAK with a shoulder-holster (!). I missed my chance to get an Open Moko. Anyone got a phone they love? Especially something that'll synch reliably with my Evolution calendar?

Or better yet, does anyone have a phone that I can just load an .ics and .vcard file onto? I don't really care about synching this info -- I just want to carry the data around on a portable device.

Weigh in in the comment thread! Link (via Gizmodo)

"Condoms are not sure because I know that there are two countries in Europe, they are making condoms with the virus on purpose," he alleged, refusing to name the countries.

"They want to finish with the African people. This is the programme. They want to colonise until up to now. If we are not careful we will finish in one century's time."

The profile gets into depth on Allen's background -- junkie, mental patient, trainer, consultant, bestselling author; stuff I'd never known.

Allen's practical suggestions on how to turn thoughts into reality sharply distinguish him from his predecessors. His advice is so simple as to appear simpleminded. He insists that nothing should ever appear on a to-do list that is not a specific, concrete action expressed at the most practical level of detail. Do not write "set up a meeting," for instance. Instead, write "call to set up a meeting." "If you just say you are going to set up the meeting," he says, "then that leaves a question open: How are you going to do it? Are you going to call? Are you going to email? It's like having a monkey on your back that won't shut up." Allen's voice shifts into a more taunting register. "How are you going to do it? How are you going to do it? Somebody shut up the monkey!"

The difference between issuing an invitation by email and issuing it over the phone seems perversely minuscule. But in practice, as Allen points out, the question of how to communicate is often freighted with unarticulated anxieties. His mandate to resolve apparently trivial issues serves as a kind of research tool, bringing to light aspects of work that are otherwise felt only as vague concerns. And when it is difficult to find a simple physical action that can advance a project, it is a sign that the project may be unrealistic or even impossible. This is an excellent thing to know in advance.

Sweet fancy Moses this is awesome!* BB reader Daniel says,

Radiohead has just announced the details for their new album, In Rainbows.

They're only selling it through their website (at least for now), and for the digital download version, they're letting listeners pick their own price for the album - it's literally a donation-based product.

Obviously this is sparking confusion among many, but the only help the website provides are the words "It's up to you."

No details on the download file format. Does anyone out there know? DRM-free? MP3s? What bitrate, what quality?

I just bought my copy (download, though I'll probably go back and buy the boxed set, too). I got wonky html on the purchase confirmation screen indicating some code glurbles going on at the online store -- not sure if my transaction actually took. Perhaps the shop's overloaded right now, announcement just went live.

This is major, and it's such a slap in the record industry's face. An unsigned superband, treating loyal fans and customers like loyal fans and customers instead of thieves -- what a revolutionary concept.

In related news, the band is dismissing a hoax website that duped fans this weekend:

The site -- www.radioheadlp7.com -- launched on Friday with a countdown timer due to reach zero on Saturday morning. It claimed it would be making a big announcement about the band. Fans speculated the "Creep" hitmakers were planning to reveal details about their next album. But a spokesperson for the band has called the Web site a "hoax" and "nothing to do with Radiohead."

Update: More on the band's unusual indie sales approach in these news and blog reports: Green Plastic (fansite online since 1997) Billboard, Idolatr, FQMB.

But Bob Lefsetz, as usual, sums it up best:

It's not like Radiohead's living in a different world. But they're playing by a different rule book. One that says the money flows from the music, that people have to believe in you, that you've got to treat them right.

Shit, you can barely get a ticket to a Radiohead show. The venues aren't big and the demand is incredible. They're doing it all wrong, don't they see?? Well, obviously they don't.

This is big news. This says the major labels are fucked. Untrustworthy with a worthless business model. Radiohead doesn't seem to care if the music is free. Not that they believe it will be. Because believers will give you ALL THEIR MONEY!

This is the industry's worst nightmare. Superstar band, THE superstar band, forging ahead by its own wits. Proving that others can too. And they will.

SRL founder Mark Pauline says:

Good news. Todd is with Alex and Amy and is responding to Alex's voice with hand pressure. Eyes open a bit. Resting again now. See Todd's blog for details!

Want to help? Todd's friends and family are collecting donations to help with Blair's considerable medical expenses, you can help out by PayPal if you're so moved: Link (donations go in care of Susan Maunu). I know lots of Boing Boing readers (myself included) have attended many an SRL show without paying a single dime. Now's a chance to give back some of the love, guys.

Previously on Boing Boing: