"From the front to the back, as pages turn; Reading is a real fresh way to learn."

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)

Los Angeles Times staff writer Julie M. Makinen explored different types of personal assistants that can be hired over the Web, reporting on the pros and cons of each.

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!

Link

GordonUnleashed says: "Talk about sex toys is once again the buzz around Alabama. The United States Supreme Court refused to hear the Alabama sex toy case, ending a nine year battle for the right to keep and bear (well, more accurately, purchase) sex toys in the state. Sherri Williams provided the money quote in this AP article:"

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.”

Link

Paul Boutin says: "While everyone else is pontificating on what the GOOG-411 billboards around the country must mean, I called the number a few dozen times during lunch to test it. I think of Cory every time it answers -- not with a hello but with 'Calls recorded for quality.'"

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.

Link

If you get too many press releases emailed to you, try Merlin Mann's trick of creating a filter that diverts or deletes emails containing the string "For Immediate Release." I just found 11,000 messages in my mail with that string in it.

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

Physicist Elmar Fuchs and his colleagues from Graz University of Technology are investigating why water, when exposed to high voltages, forms this strange liquid bridge as the liquid moves from one beaker to another. They published their research in the Jouranl of Physics D: Applied Physics. The water bridge was cylindrical with a diameter of 1 to 3 mm and spanned as much as 25 mm. From PhysOrg.com:

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.

Link to Physorg article, Link to the scientific paper (Thanks, Sean Ness!)

Artist Tom Sachs says that "Going to the moon was the best art project of the twentieth century." So he made it into an art installation. Space Program, on view for another two weeks at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, is an incredibly detailed recreation (and reimagination) of a lunar module, control room, astronaut suits, and the moonshot experience. Tom even wore the classic 60s NASA scientist "uniform" of a short-sleeved white dress shirt and tie. Supertouch and BB pal Tim Biskup were at the preview a couple of weeks ago where they were thrilled by a full performance and demonstration of the exhibit. From Supertouch:

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.

From the Gagosian Gallery press release:

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.

Link to Supertouch post, Link to Gagosian gallery

Previously on BB:
• Couture sculpture mashups Link

Look Around You is a BBC program that parodies educational TV from the 70s and 80s. This episode about the brain is especially funny.

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.

Link (Via Eye of the Goof)

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

My pal Tim Wu, a copyfighting attorney and law prof, is working on a new project to help authors retain control over their copyrights instead of assigning them to publishers, academic institutions, and other organizations, to stop copyrights from piling up into huge stockpiles controlled by greedy dinosaurs like the RIAA.

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.

Link (Thanks, Tim!)

Here's a video that shows how to make a fake wound with bubblegum and makeup. Link (Thanks, sacha!)

Today's review on the video-game review site "Play This Thing" is of a twisted and funny parody of life at McDonald's called McDonald's Video Game:

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).

Link

The new issue of the journal Science In Schools presents an interesting project on how to make iron-gall ink, the same ink used by da Vinci, Bach, van Gogh, and countless medieval monks. The author of the project, Gianluca Farusi, and his chemistry students used a recipe written by Pietro Canepario in 1619 and published in his book De atramentis cuiuscumque generis (All Kinds of Ink). The ingredients consist of acorn galls, water, ferrous sulphate, and gum arabic. From the project page:

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.

Link (via Eastern Blot)

Three years ago, John Wood's leg was amputated after it was injured in a plane crash. He kept the leg and dried it so it could be someday buried with him. Eventually the limb ended up in a barbecue smoker in a storage facility. After Wood stopped paying rent on the storage space, the items were sold off. Shannon Whisnant of Maiden, North Carolina bought the smoker and, unknowingly, the desiccated limb. This week, Wood is coming to Maiden to pick up the leg but Whisnant wants to keep it. From McClatchy Newspapers:

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.

Link (Thanks, Carlo Longino!)

Apple's old "Here's to the Crazy Ones" ad celebrates mavericks who broke the rules and challenged old institutions. iPhone hackers, frustrated by Apple's prohibition on third-party iPhone apps (and Apple's attack on unlocked phones in the form of an "update" that renders unlocked phones unusable), have remixed the ad, to celebrate the crazy iPhone hackers who dared to break the rules and write software to run on their phones. Link (via O'Reilly Radar)

Researchers are studying the painted sunsets by artists like Turner, Rembrandt, and Rubens to get a sense of how volcanic eruptions may have impacted global warming. The National Observatory of Athens scientists look at the colors the old masters used in their depictions to suss out the amount of volcanic ash was in the atmosphere. The historical data will then help populate computer simulations of global warming. From The Guardian:

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.

Link

Joel on Boing Boing Gadgets just spotted this Splat dish-rack concept designed by Jill Davis: "Two pieces of plastic clip together to create a place to dry your pots and pans, then pack flat for easy storage when finished." Smart -- I don't have room for a dishrack in my tiny place in London, and something like this would be a treat. Link, Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

Disney has killed off its mobile phone service, which had the creepy "feature" of allowing parents to track their kids' movements and surveil their conversations. Apparently, they weren't able to scare enough parents into putting telephonic prisoner-anklets onto their kids.

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.

Link (via Ypulse)

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.

Rudy Rucker's new novel Postsingular is pure Rucker: a dope-addled exploration of the way-out fringes of string theory and the quantum universe that distorts the possible into the most improbable contortions.

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 is plastering NYC (and elsewhere?) with cheeky ads taking aim at Apple's locked iPhones. Not only does Apple prohibit installing third-party apps on the iPhone, but some users who modded their phones discovered that Apple's latest "update" actually bricked their phones, rendering them useless (and Apple says that modding your phone voids your warranty).

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)

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Joel has a great post on a "self-assembling robot chair" that, while, impractical, sure is promising for those of us who are heartily sick of Ikea's little hex-wrenches. Link, Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

Maputo Archbishop Francisco Chimoio, the head of the Catholic Church in Mozambique, has been spreading fatal lies about condoms and anti-virals: he claims that condoms and life-saving drugs have been infected with HIV in order to kill Africans.

"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."

Link (via Making Light)

The ElmoSapien project shows you how to eviscerate an Elmo handpuppet and stretch its skin taut over a RoboSapien robot, load an Elmo "personality" into the robot, and terrorize the neighborhood children. Link (via IZ Reloaded)

I wear cufflinks approximately 0.6 times/year, but even so, I'm tempted by these Dalek cufflinks. Do you think I could wear them with a t-shirt? Link (via Wonderland)

This month's Wired has a long profile on David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, a productivity book whose cultlike adherents (myself included) are incredibly passionate about. Since reading GTD two or three years ago, I've modelled my whole productivity regime around its advice, particularly the list of pending actions from other people, which has saved me more time and money than anything I've done before -- I've stopped losing projects and gigs because I thought someone else was looking after it and they thought I was.

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.

Link

Ecko's got a new line of Star Wars-inspired clothes -- it's all pretty OK, except for this Boba Fett hoodie, which is soo-poib! Link (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)