JM sez, "Death Cab for Cutie Guitarist Chris Walla had a hard drive containing his next album confiscated at the US-Canada border for no apparent reason by the Department of Homeland Security. Wow, for some reason that doesn't make me feel like my homeland is secure - when art is blindly confiscated by authority figures."

"It's a true story. Barsuk [Records, which is putting out the record] had hired a courier — who does international stuff all the time and who they had used before — to bring [the album] back from Canada, where I was working on it. And he got to the border and he had all his paperwork and it was all cool, only they turned him away, and they confiscated the drive and gave it to the computer-forensics division of our Homeland Security-type people," sighed Walla, who has produced nearly all Death Cab's output, as well as records by the Decemberists, Hot Hot Heat, Nada Surf, Tegan and Sara and others. "And now I couldn't even venture a guess as to where it is, or what it's doing there. I mean, I can't just call their customer-service center and ask about my drive. There's nothing I can do. I don't know if we can hire an attorney ... is there a black-hole attorney? You can't take a black hole to court."

Link (Thanks, JM!)

Update: Looks like the DHS has been trying to return the confiscated hard drive but can't reach the courier service.

A Japanese designer has proposed that women alone could walk in greater safety (though, in reality, Japanese crime levels are in decline, despite national anxiety to the contrary) by disguising themselves as vending machines:

Deftly, Ms. Tsukioka, a 29-year-old experimental fashion designer, lifted a flap on her skirt to reveal a large sheet of cloth printed in bright red with a soft drink logo partly visible. By holding the sheet open and stepping to the side of the road, she showed how a woman walking alone could elude pursuers — by disguising herself as a vending machine.

The wearer hides behind the sheet, printed with an actual-size photo of a vending machine. Ms. Tsukioka’s clothing is still in development, but she already has several versions, including one that unfolds from a kimono and a deluxe model with four sides for more complete camouflaging.

Link (Thanks, MeaningOfLife!)

In the wake of yesterday's revelation that AP had discovered secret, anti-BitTorrent software running on Comcast's network, a followup story explaining the clever detective work the AP did in rooting out this little shenanigan:

An AP reporter attempted to download, using file-sharing program BitTorrent, a copy of the King James Bible from two computers in the Philadelphia and San Francisco areas, both of which were connected to the Internet through Comcast cable modems.

We picked the Bible for the test because it's not protected by copyright and the file is a convenient size.

In two out of three tries, the transfer was blocked. In the third, the transfer started only after a 10-minute delay. When we tried to upload files that were in demand by a wider number of BitTorrent users, those connections were also blocked.

Not all Comcast-connected computers appear to be affected, however. In a test with a third Comcast-connected computer in the Boston area, we were unable to test with the Bible, apparently due to an unrelated error. When we attempted to upload a more widely disseminated file, there was no evidence of blocking.

Link (via Isen)

Update: And check out thehilarious stupid lies that Comcast Interactive's president told Information Week!

In honor of today's 40th anniversary of the famed Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot footage, here's a sneak peek at more evidence: a t-shirt design from Gama-Go's spring/summer 2008 line. Apparently, Tim Biskup's Yeti hangs out at Bluff Creek too!
Link to Gama-Go, "Yeti Sighting" shirt not available until next year (Thanks, Chris Edmundson!)
Link to "In Celebration of Bigfoot's Patty" at Cryptomundo

Previously on BB:
• Famous Bigfoot film: 40th anniversary Link

JK Rowling has taken Albus Dumbledore -- the wizard father-figure of her Harry Potter books -- out of the (broom) closet, stating that she always thought of him as gay:

Speaking at Carnegie Hall on Friday night in her first U.S. tour in seven years, Rowling confirmed what some fans had always suspected -- that she "always thought Dumbledore was gay," reported entertainment Web site E! Online.

Rowling said Dumbledore fell in love with the charming wizard Gellert Grindelwald but when Grindelwald turned out to be more interested in the dark arts than good, Dumbledore was "terribly let down" and went on to destroy his rival.

That love, she said, was Dumbledore's "great tragedy."

"Falling in love can blind us to an extent," she said.

The audience reportedly fell silent after the admission -- then erupted into applause.

Link (via Making Light)

Update: The LOLcats are all over this one (Thanks, Xeni!)

Glyn sez,

Children are being tracked by micro-chips embedded in their uniforms in a trial at a secondary school.

The devices are used to monitor pupils' movements and register their arrival in class on the teacher's computer. Supply teachers can also be alerted if a student is likely to misbehave.

The chip connects with teachers' computers to show a photograph of the pupil, data about academic performance and whether he or she is in the correct classroom.

Link (Thanks, Glyn!)

With Guy Fawkes day looming, how about a little V for Vendetta cosplay? Brian Chan folded this origami Guy Fawkes/V for Vendetta mask out of a single, uncut sheet of paper. Link (via Neatorama)

Radiohead's "groundbreaking" decision to let fans choose what price to pay for 160 Kbps MP3s of "In Rainbows" was just a promotional tactic to boost CD sales, according to the band’s management.

If we didn’t believe that when people hear the music they will want to buy the CD, then we wouldn’t do what we are doing,’ Bryce Edge of Courtyard Management told Music Week, the UK’s industry magazine.

Link to Idolatr item, via Warren Ellis. Meanwhile, over at Wired's music blog, Eliot Van Buskirk is tracking down the sales numbers. Nothing definitive yet, but estimates are that the act pulled in $6-$10 million on initial sales.

The Seminal estimates that Radiohead sold about $10 million-worth of albums as of 10/12, assuming that their source was correct that approximately 1.2 million people downloaded the album from the site, and that the average price paid per album was $8 (we heard that number too, but also heard that a later, more accurate average was $5, which would result in $6 million in revenue instead).

Link

Update: this post has since gathered a lively round of comments (90 and counting). I've contributed to the debate in the following spots: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

Claire sez, "Maybe I've seen one too many horror movies already this year, but I'm totally into the idea of a Hallowe'en cupcake that bleeds when you bite into it. Especially since they bleed cherry filling (actual blood would probably put me right off cupcakes)."

I baked my cupcakes, used the cupcake-filling technique I used on my devil's food cupcakes to fill the cakes up with pureed cherry pie filling (canned or homemade) and topped them off with white icing to best accentuate the red bite marks. I made the marks using a skewer dipped in leftover cherry filling, making sure to leave a clear impression of a fang bite, rather than just a red streak on top of the cake.

Link (Thanks, Claire!)

Ribofunk science fiction writer Paul Di Filippo rounds up the big picture on transgenic plants and animals for Contract Pharma magazine:

Meanwhile, at GTC Biotherapeutics in Framingham, MA, goats seem to be the ideal solution to that company's particular quest. And certainly this choice of caprine platform has paid off enormously; GTC can now boast a historical milestone with the release of "ATryn®, our recombinant form of human antithrombin, the first transgenically produced protein to be approved anywhere in the world, having recently been approved by the European Commission for the prophylactic treatment of deep vein thrombosis in patients with hereditary antithrombin deficiencies that are undergoing surgical procedures," according to a company statement.

Link (Thanks, Paul!)

These wildly impractical bookcases from the Dutch firm of Sloom and Slordig are nevertheless awe-inspiringly weird. The idea of having an entire wall lined with them is weirdly compelling. Link, Additional photos: 1, 2 (via Cribcandy)

The wonderful Amy Crehore is showing us how she creates a painting, day-by-day.

Here is my first attempt at color for my "Honeybee" painting. I usually try to block in the background first. The green grass and tent. Then, I move on to the figures, keeping in mind that I want to set up a pattern of harmonious color moving throughout the whole painting to connect all of the components. Here, I have chosen a limited palette of sap green mixed with indian yellow, plus some olive green, raw umber, white and cobalt blue. I painted the shadow areas of the girl with a mixture of cadmium red light and sap green. I used white paint (Permalba) mixed with indian yellow for her skin highlights and then blended it to produce the color that you see here. I am painting "wet on wet".

Steps 1 and 2 | Step 3

Mister Jalopy, a professional amateur and shade tree mechanic, wrote a wonderful essay about Maker Faire, which took place in San Mateo last May. (There's another Maker Faire in Austin this weekend).

At Maker Faire, you can have a dozen epiphanies in a Saturday. Then Sunday comes and you can have dozen more. Dedicated individuals of similarly clumsy talents come together and point out what went right and what went less-than-right with their projects. As a stark comparison to professional life, where mistakes are hidden, the amateurs just roll their eyes and laugh as they tell you where they got it all wrong. The hardiest of laughter is reserved for those situations where personal injury was narrowly avoided due to dumb luck.

Smug in your DIY ethos, you meet Phil Ross, see his jaw dropping sculptures of nature captured, and feel the ground turn to quicksand as you realize you lost the plot. Epiphany #1 of 12, or an hour into Maker Faire.

To do Phil a grave disservice, I will paraphrase a bit about the content of his sculptures. As seen above, there is a plant that is being kept alive by the benevolence of a machine. Not thriving, just surviving, as light and air are meted out in increments sufficient to sustain life but not so great as to allow the plant to flourish. The LEDs and aquarium bubbler are controlled by timers, so who is the evil overlord? The computer? The software? Phil?

Link

I enjoy contemplating Daniel Pinchbeck's McKenna-like ideas about the nature of time and human consciousness. I don't buy everything he's saying, but still appreciate much of what he has to offer.

Here's a video he created that presents the concepts in his latest book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Apocalypse fever in New York Magazine
• Profile of psychedelic author Daniel Pinchbeck
• Profile of psychedelic author Daniel Pinchbeck

John Brockman's Edge "World Question Center" and the Seprentine Gallery in London debuted a new collaborative project where they asked dozens of smart people--scientists, authors, big thinkers--this question: "What is your formula? Your Equation? Your Algorithm?" People like Craig Venter, Keith Devlin, Freeman Dyson, Drew Endy, Brian Eno, and Douglas Rushkoff answered. The collected responses, like Edge itself, blur the line between science, art, and culture. (Above, Rudy Rucker and Marvin Minsky's responses.) From John's introduction:

I recently paid a visit to the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens, London to see Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, a long-time friend with whom I have a mutual connection: we both worked closely with the late James Lee Byars, the conceptual artist who, in 1971, implemented "The World Question Center" as a work of conceptual art.

The walls of Obrist's office were covered with single pages of size A4 paper on which artists, writers, scientists had responded to his question: "What Is Your Formula?" Among the pieces were formulas by quantum physicist David Deutsch, artist and musician Brian Eno, architect Rem Koolhaas, and fractal mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot.

Within minutes we had hatched an Edge-Serpentine collaboration for a "World Question Center" project, to debut on Edge during the annual Serpentine Gallery Experiment Marathon, the weekend of October 13-14. The plan was to further the reach of Obrist's question by asking for responses from the science-minded Edge community, thus complementing the rich array of formulas already assembled by the Serpentine from distinguished artists such as Marina Abramovic, Matthew Barney, Louise Bourgeois, Gilbert & George, and Rosemarie Trockel.

Link

Goth outfitter Venom & Booties sells mohwak toupees. Available in a dozen colors, the £55 kit includes a hand-made mohawk and the "secret formula" to attach it securely to your pate. And no, they don't seem to be kidding. From the product page:

After 20 years of rock'n'roll'n'gin the surviving gothic-punk is rather thin (on top). But thanks to our secret formula your mohawk can be instantly regenerated...

Our hand made mohawks are designed to look perfectly realistic and stay that way all day and all night, using techniques from special FX film make up to bond to your head!

Link (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)

Two reasons to watch today's episode of Boing Boing tv:

The military industrial complex can be fun! Tanks-A-Lot in England rents tanks for corporate events, and sexy time events, too. And Mark built a robot that violates none of Asimov's laws of robotics.

Video Link.

BB Gadgets maestro Joel Johnson ruined my morning today by sending this clip of a recent Van Halen concert, featuring a "Jump" train wreck. Apparently, the pre-recorded synth parts were accidentally played back at a 48k bitrate instead of 44.1k. The result is a dissonant mess. From RW370:

Eddie tries to transpose on the fly and match the wildly fucked up keyboards but the great thing there is the difference in pitch is non-musical - about 1.5 semitones sharp. So there’s no frets he can choose to fix the problem!

Link

Azamar says:

I was googling around trying to figure out a system to lock up my pot so I wouldn't be tempted for a while, but to have it become available automatically after a set period of time.

I ended up stumbling into the subculture of chastity belt fetishists, people who derive pleasure from locking themselves up in high tech chastity belts and giving the keys to some person or machine that has power over them.

The site timelock.rules.it has a program [Timelock, $20] that allows someone to use encryption to lock themselves up for a set or random amount of time, or even to send the key to their chastity belt over the internet to a trusted "keyholder".

Following is a quote from the site:

The keyholder has set the Hide Timer option so you have no idea how much time has been set. You feel the fear and the anxiety, but, with trembling fingers, you close the lock. Your fate is now entirely in the hands of your keyholder. Only they know how much time has been set. Only they know the lockword, which may grant you early release. The need to touch yourself is already overwhelming but there is nothing you can do about it. All is as it should be.

...

It doesn't just stop with the keyholder generating a remote key. They can also generate update keys that will modify what's happening with the encryption. They can reward or punish by decreasing or increasing the time remaining. They can mess with your head by changing the display. There is plenty of room for your keyholder to be evil and teasing and totally controlling. But, then again, isn't that what you want?

Link

Essay by Jasmina Tešanović
photos by Dobrivoje Dejanovic

Is there anything more macabre, stupid and campy in the modern political confusion than a nationalist Serbian Nazi?

During an antifascist rally in Novi Sad, Northern Serbia, a group of neonazis attacked us with stones, pieces of woods and tear gas. Their own rally had been prohibited in the very last minute by the minister of police, although the local mayor, a radical right winged woman, didn’t much mind it.

Only when Nazis from all the neighboring countries started flocking in across the Serbian borders did it became clear that Nazi rallies are not a great urban tourist policy.

Shimone says:

My buddy (the yo-yo impresario Doctor Popular) posted this mystery object on his blog.

From the page: The mystery object is made out of brass and belonged to Rachel's grandmother. It has an arm with three joints and a collapsible tripod stand. When fully collapsed it makes a flat 3" x 4" square.

As mentioned before this is an heirloom piece, but Rachel has never been able to figure out what it was originally intended for, as a matter of fact I'm only making the assumption that the three pieces on the bottom are even intended as a stand. For all I know the pointed end could plug into something.

Link

In Stanton, Deleware on Monday, a sizzling hot 16-inch piece of metal fell from the sky and tore through a parked SUV;s roof "like butter." The Federal Aviation Administration examined the object and spokesperson Jim Peters claims that it's not part of an airplane. From The News Journal:

It came with a boom that one witness told Mill Creek Fire Company Chief James Howell sounded like an explosion.

The SUV's owner, Susan Wilson, said she was in the drugstore. When she returned to her car, she found ash and debris on the driver's seat and a gaping hole in the roof.

Link (via Fortean Times)

BB reader Derek points us to the snapshot above, and says "The state of political action at Yale today. I'm afraid this is serious. The text chalked on the sidewalk in front of Yale's main library says it all: 'Smores for Darfur, All You Can Eat $2.'"

In presumably unrelated news, Richard Stallman visits the Yale Political Union, hijinks ensue. Link.

People are filesharing the new Radiohead album anyway. Link. Many fans are irked about the MP3 compression rate: Link. Lefsetz has a righteous rant about that issue and others which cause many to believe the band kind of blew it here: Link. Idolatr concurs: Link. Anyway, here are some fan-made alternative album covers for "In Rainbows": Link.

Historical ecology: Yucatan jungles are actually feral Mayan gardens. Link.

Here's a music video from the late '90s featuring human/robot interspecies sex. NSFW, animated. Link.

John White, the photographer who claims ownership of the "O RLY owl" photo, is mad at webcomic artist Jeffrey Rowland, for adapting that now-ubiquitous internet meme as part of an "internet ouijah board." Link.

Silver-and-blue nudibranch (undersea critter) is about the size of a quarter and attacks Portuguese men-of-war. Looks like an overeager Dallas Cowboys fan. Link.

San Fernando Valley guy triumphs over gridlock freeway traffic by kayaking to work 52 miles downstream on the L.A. River. Link.

Andy Riley, who has been chronicling "bunny suicides" for years online, has a new book out. Link to preview.

Portfolio, the relatively new biz mag from Conde Nast, has a story out on YouTube vs. Porn Valley. Link. Susannah Breslin has a post about it here: Link.

"Two elephants at the Chiang Mai Night Safari have died from flatulence, possibly from eating insecticide-contaminated grass, veterinarians said." Link.

Greepeace uses Google Maps to track hunted whales: Link.

Ape Lad draws the 300th Laugh Out Loud cat episode. Itz a thing of byooty. Let me show u it. Link.

(Thanks, Keith Putnam, Dave Walsh, Dennis, Andrew, Alexis, Marilyn Terrell, Gabrielle, Geo Lobo, Domi, Partha, Susannah Breslin, Henrik)

In June of 2004 Matthew Jones of Brooklyn was standing in Times Square, talking with friends. Police arrested him for it. More than three years later, he is fighting the charge.

In the prosecution’s view, it appears, the innocent do not dawdle. According to the original complaint against Mr. Jones, the officer “observed defendant along with a number of other individuals standing around” on a public sidewalk in June 2004. Mr. Jones was “not moving, and that as a result of defendants’ behavior, numerous pedestrians in the area had to walk around defendants.”

Mr. Jones refused to move when asked, said the officer, Momen Attia, and then tried to run away. When Officer Attia tried to handcuff him, he “flailed his arms,” earning a second charge for resisting arrest.

After spending the night in jail, Mr. Jones contested the main charge and asked that it be dismissed. When the judge demurred, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor violation the next day and received no further sentence. But he soon filed an appeal, arguing that there had been no basis for the arrest in the first place.

The New York Times visited Times Square and noted several people standing around: "a man eating clams out of a Styrofoam container; two men smoking cigarettes together; a man waiting for a woman to finish a phone call; a guy looking at a map; a young woman sending a text message; two men handing out tour brochures; and a family of five, including an infant in a stroller, who stopped to look at the brochures." No one was arrested. Link (Thanks, Michael!)

I-Mockery will generate 1970's monster sticker versions of any word you care to enter. Link

Tomorrow is the 40th anniversary of the famous Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot footage, taken at Bluff Creek, California. Over the last four decades, the short shaky film has ignited countless young people's interest in cryptozoology and strange phenomena, including my own. As Loren Coleman suggests over at Cryptomundo, let's take just a moment to shelve preconceived notions and rumors, put "belief" and "disbelief" back in the province of religion where they belong, and just appreciate the curiosity of the clip. Link

Col-BUSTED? Comedian Truth-to-power-speaker Stephen Colbert is trying to get his name listed on the presidential ballot in his home state of South Carolina. Radar reports that if he succeeds, the existence of his television show, and the airtime Colbert gets on it as host, would amount to a violation of FEC laws.

Link. (thanks, David Cho)

Farhad Manjoo of Salon says,

The AP has a good scoop today. It found that Comcast directly intervenes in communication between two peers on a P2P network, closing down connections on BitTorrent, Gnutella and other systems.

Snip from that AP story:

Comcast's technology kicks in, though not consistently, when one BitTorrent user attempts to share a complete file with another user. Each PC gets a message invisible to the user that looks like it comes from the other computer, telling it to stop communicating. But neither message originated from the other computer — it comes from Comcast. If it were a telephone conversation, it would be like the operator breaking into the conversation, telling each talker in the voice of the other: "Sorry, I have to hang up. Good bye."

Link

Emma Larkin (a pseudonym) is the author of the book Finding George Orwell in Burma, and she recently returned from a couple of weeks in that country. She is now blogging on the Penguin USA website (that's her publisher) about the ongoing, violent crackdown by the military regime. Larkin has previously written about the state's brutal response to peaceful protests by Buddhist monks, and attempts to block information about human rights violations by blocking internet access.

Snip from today's post:

As soon as the protests had been violently quashed by the army, the regime set about making everything look normal again. At the UN General Assembly, the Burmese junta’s Foreign Minister, Nyan Win, even went so far as to declare, “Normalcy has now returned to Myanmar [Burma].”

But Rangoon felt to me like a movie set. I imagined an invisible director ordering a cluster of fruit vendors to set up their stalls at the edge of a market, calling for a crowd of pedestrians to surge across a busy street, and hanging billboard advertisements for the latest cinema releases.

On my first day in Rangoon I telephoned an old friend who had a merry greeting: “Welcome to my wonderful country where nothing has just happened!” Later that same day I bumped into another friend who was visibly agitated by events: “Everyone is just pretending,” she told me.

Things might look normal on the surface but, in the diary I kept while I was there, the adjectives I used to describe the moods of the various people I spoke to are repeated over and over again: angry, scared, depressed, angry, scared, depressed, angry, scared, depressed…

Link to full text of post. (Thanks, Sarah Odio)

Noah Shachtman at Wired's Danger Room blog writes,

[A]dvanced military weapons are essentially robotic -- picking targets out automatically, slewing into position, and waiting only for a human to pull the trigger.  Most of the time.  Once in a while, though, these machines start firing mysteriously on their own.  The South African National Defence Force "is probing whether a software glitch led to an antiaircraft cannon malfunction that killed nine soldiers and seriously injured 14 others during a shooting exercise on Friday."

Link.

More terrifying news on that blog about our bloodthirsty borg overlords:

* Video: Robo-Weapon's Scary Twist
* Roomba-Maker Unveils Kill-Bot
* New Armed Robot Groomed for War
* Navy Plots Unmanned, Heavily-Armed Fleet

Derek says: "This woman probably isn't eligible for a Darwin award, but there's a macabre irony to the thought of someone igniting the oxygen tank keeping her alive because she was smoking. It's even worse because, according to the article, this is the second time she's done it." Link

Lulu says: New Times owners arrested for publishing a story about a grand jury investigation in which they (the newspaper) are asked to provide (among other things) Web addresses, shopping habits and information about what Internet sites readers visited before logging onto the New Times.

The alternative weekly newspaper, in its cover story, said the subpoena was part of an investigation orchestrated to get back at its reporters and the critical stories they wrote of County Attorney Andrew Thomas' political ally Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

The scope of the subpoena is unusually broad: It not only demands information from the reporters but also information about all the online readers of the publication since Jan.1, 2004, including their Internet domain names and browsers and what other Web sites they visited before reading New Times.

Outside the jail this morning, New Times editor Rick Barrs told assembled media that the arrests had been an attack by Thomas' attorney.

"They're trying to muzzle us," Barrs said. "This is retaliation against us. And it's not just retaliation against us, it's retaliation against the press."

Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Sheriff Joe Arpaio -- the Dr. Mengele of the American Penal System
• American Idol for prisoners
• Maricopa County Sheriff's Department burn down a house and kill puppy over traffic citations

Alex says: "[Here's a New York Times] article describing the capture of the previously mentioned [suspected] pedophile whose pictures of sexual abuse with minors featured his face swirled. As detailed on Boing Boing, the decoding is actually a relatively simple photoshop process, but the NYTimes interestingly calls it a "virtuoso act of electronic decoding"!

The suspect, Christopher Paul Neil, 32, was caught after Interpol issued an unusual international appeal based on some 200 Internet pictures that showed the faceless man sexually abusing boys in Vietnam and Cambodia. Interpol said the man had abused a dozen boys in those countries, some as young as 6.

The Thai police said they had employed some high-tech unscrambling of their own, tracing Mr. Neil to a location outside Bangkok through the cellphone calls of a friend who was in contact with him.

Officials said Mr. Neil, who had been teaching English in Thailand, Vietnam and South Korea, would be prosecuted here and then extradited to his home nation, Canada, where a recent law allows prosecution for sex crimes committed abroad.

Link

"God's Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion" is the new book from Brother Guy Consolmagno, who is, in no particular order, a scientist, a Jesuit, a science fiction geek, an MIT alum and a Vatican Astronomer. Obviously, religion is a central part of Brother Guy's life, but so is technology, rationalism and science.

God's Mechanics is a relgionist's explanation of his faith, in terms aimed at showing techies how one of their own can simultaneously believe in supernatural phenomena and practice rigorous, materialistic science. The most interesting part of the book is an amateur ethnography of geek faithful, in which Brother Guy schleps up and down Rte 101 between San Francisco and San Jose, interviewing engineers, scientists and programmers about their practice of faith. Their answers surprise Guy (and they surprised me, too) with their variety and distinctiveness. There doesn't seem to be a single way, or even a small cluster of ways that technologists square up their religion with their science.

For my part, I'm a second-generation atheist. I think that our experience of the numinous is both undeniable and entirely biological: the state of spiritual peace is the result of tickling some evolved center of our brain, a bit of neurology that conferred a survival advantage on our ancestors whose numinous hallucinations of a higher order in the universe drove them to catch more antelopes, eat better, and have more babies. I have no need of, nor interest in a supernatural god or a supernatural universe.

But I'm not so blinkered that I believe all religionists to be deluded fools. There's clearly some serious value that smart, ethical people derive from participation in spiritualism and even organized religion. Brother Guy's exegesis on faith as a systematic way of organizing and exploring the human experience of the numinous was fascinating to me. It is is a thoroughgoing, charming, quick-paced trip through a wide variety of personal experiences of spirituality and religion.

The only place where this book lacks is in its exploration of atheism as an alternative to religion. Brother Guy delves deeply into the reason for faith, but skims lightly over the reason for its absence. At times, it seems like he's addressing straw men from my side, not our strongest argument. This is the beginning of a discussion, but it's not the whole discussion. Link

See also:
Vatican astronomer on ETs
SETI@Vatican

Update: Some great comments in this thread, especially Tom's note on Bayesian stats and faith: "We live at the beginning of the Age of Bayes, in the sense that the Bayesian understanding of probability and explanation is gaining ground on other views, and will probably supplant them at the end of the day. This is important because Bayesian reasoning makes it clear that 'faith' is synonymous with 'incoherent' in a precise sense."

German manufacturers Optimal Media Production claim that their new VinylDisc is a hybrid CD/vinyl album that will play in an optical drive or on a turntable: "The VinylDisc is a combination audio CD and special record. It consists of two attached layers. The silver layer contains digital audio information, while the black upper layer can be played on every record player." Link (via Make)

TwistedTwee does a line of baby pants with the faces of prominent British politicians on them. When I have a daughter, she will be pleased to crap all over Margaret Thatcher. Link (via Babygadget)

Keith sez, "In the spirit of Hallowe'en, please enjoy these pictures of an edible sculpture made for a pumpkin carving party. It's a morbidly delicious scene of a psychotic, axe-wielding gingerbread man going on a rampage in a pumpkin patch, leaving a trail of blood and carnage in his wake... all edible, sugary, and vegan of course!" Link (Thanks, Keith!)

UglyShyla on Craftster made this handsome little custom zombie wedding cake topper: "A zombie portrait wedding cake topper I did for my friend Rebecca's wedding cake. She wanted a topper of her and her groom with her eating his brains,so I did just that." Link (via Wonderland)

Here's a great tip from Consumerist: airlines' cargo-tracking websites often give the real explanation for flight delays on their passenger jets. The next time your flight gets delayed, try looking up the story on the airline's cargo site and see if the problem is the airline's fault (mechanical failures and so on), and then use that as evidence to get refunds/miles/tickets out of the airline.

It can be hard to get a straight answer out of airlines sometime about the real reason a flight is delayed. For some reason, though, they're more straight up about their packages than their passengers. See, the airlines have special cargo websites which are supposed to be for people tracking packages they're shipping through the airline. Here's the cargo sites for some of the major carriers...

AmericanAirlines
Continental
Delta
NWA
Southwest
United
USAirways

Link

Bill Gibson gave this interview to Tyee Magazine at the end of his long and hard book-tour for Spook Country, his latest (and, I think, best) novel -- a book about spies, cold war artifacts, art, and the future's failures. The interview has many grace notes -- especially the material about terrorism and futurism.

"The slot in culture that I'm most closely associated with is one in which charlatans declare that they know the future. My job is to sit near that slot and when people approach me I say: 'Only charlatans say they really know the future.' I sit near the tent where they give out bullshit and offer people a different sort of dialogue. My role is to raise questions."

Link (Thanks, Lisa!)

See also:
William Gibson's Spook Country
BoingBoingBoing #15: William Gibson
William Gibson WashPo interview "one of the best ever"
William Gibson on writing in the age of Google

Wendi sez, "Seen at Uwajimaya, the big Japanese superstore in Seattle -- Unix Ware, glass bowls with a Tupperware-like plastic lid." Link (Thanks, Wendi!)

Vosges Haut-Chocolate offers a milk chocolate bar laced with smoked Applewood bacon bits. From the product description:

Crisp, buttery, compulsively irresistible bacon and milk chocolate combination has long been a favorite of mine. I started playing with this combination at the tender age of six while eating chocolate chip pancakes drenched in maple syrup. Beside my chocolate-laden cakes laid three strips of fried bacon, just barely touching a sweet pool of maple syrup. Just a bite of the bacon was too salty and yearned for the sweet kiss of chocolate syrup. In retrospect, perhaps this was a turning point, for on that plate something magical happened: the beginnings of a combination so ethereal and delicious that it would haunt my thoughts until I found the medium to express it--chocolate.

Link (Thanks, Jason Tester!)

Jesse Brown from CBC Radio's SearchEngine sez, "This week's Search Engine is a special episode that may be of particular interest to BoingBoing readers. It's entirely devoted to the political and cultural impact of video games in China. We cover the gamut: anti-gaming laws, 'internet addiction' paranoia, propaganda games by the state, and the most thoughtful documentary about gold-farming I've yet heard." MP3 Link, Podcast feed SearchEngine homepage

(Disclosure: I am a paid columnist for SearchEngine)

For just over $1,000, GlamGuns will sell you this super-custom Hello Kitty AK-47 assault rifle. Comes with hand-crocheted shoulder-stock muffler. Link (via Neatorama)

Viacom has announced that it's going to post the entire eight-year Daily Show archive, with advertising, to the web, and include with it a bunch of community and mash-up features. This is great news -- but can Viacom deliver a service that's 0.25% as good as YouTube (whom they're suing for $1 billion)? Given that, as of this moment, I can't get the Viacom site to serve me any video, the signs are not hopeful.

Viacom's decision to post its entire archive--while fighting YouTube in the courts--sets the scene for a battle between the established media players and their high profile entertainment brands against the user generated content sites, most notable YouTube.

Link (via /.)

Blogger Hasan Mubarak of Metroblogging Lahore in Pakistan says:

There have been two bomb blasts in a motorcade that was carrying ex-PM Benazir Bhutto as she returned to Pakistan after 8 years.

Related blog posts on the metroblogging sites for Karachi and Lahore: 1, 2, 3, 4. (thanks, Sean Bonner)

Salon's Andrew Leonard pieces together the story of Asian Kung-Fu Generation, a mega-band whose success owes much to anime and video-game soundtracks, YouTube bootlegs, fan-subbed cartoons, and assorted global teenage weirdness that points to a future that might be more futuristic than any of us contemplated:

Then again, kids these days are exposed to Asian Kung-Fu Generation in ways that go beyond your typical CD or digital download. According to Wikipedia, Asian Kung-Fu Generation songs are featured in Nintendo and Konami musical games, as movie themes, and grace the credit sequences for half a dozen anime shows, including "the second opening" for "Naruto" and "the fourth opening" for "Fullmetal Alchemist."

Let us pause now to consider the awesome brilliance of the title "Fullmetal Alchemist."

Second opening? Fourth opening? In Japan, I learned, anime television shows not only feature different songs playing over both the opening and closing credits, but swap in new songs as many as four times per season.

Once upon a time, a rock band played local clubs, got a record deal, released a single, made an album. Today's up-and-comers license their tunes to video games, movies, cartoons and, of course, commercials.

Link (Thanks, Andrew!)

(Photo credit: ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION, a Creative Commons ShareAlike photo from Hibino's Flickr stream)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Danny O'Brien sez,

News broke last night that Democrat senators were going to cave to the White House's demand for ful retroactive immunity to US phone companies who broke the law and allowed the authorities to conduct warrantless wiretapping on their customers.

Now presidential candidate Chris Dodd has declared he will put a senatorial "hold" on any bill that includes immunity.

That freezes consideration of the bill in the senate. Dodd is expected to come under heavy pressure to back down, and the battle to ram telco amnesty in the House of Representatives will get even more forceful. Call your reps now and tell them to take a stand with Dodd.

Link (Thanks, Danny!)

See also: EFF to Dems: don't let AT&T off the hook for illegal spying!

Carl sez,

Boing Boing readers may remember the headline from two weeks ago which read "Guerrilla librarians free the $86k Library of Congress copyright database."

"A couple of weeks ago, we wrote to Marybeth Peters, the Register of U.S. Copyrights, to ask why the copyright database had a copyright, and why it cost $86,000. On Friday, the Library of Congress blogged the issue, and dismissed the whole thing as a 'blogospheric brouhaha.' Well, the Library of Commerce can diss our distinguished signatories all they want, but lucky thing is these are all public records, and we're making all 21 million of them available for download."

Well, we just received a nice letter from the Copyright Office saying that what we did is A-OK and it is just fine to harvest their records. In a phone call, the Register of Copyrights said she was happy their database was reaching new audiences. We'll continue to spider that database, and have just added a nice RSS feed of the latest copyright additions.

Link (Thanks, Carl!)