Kirby sez,

Ricky at Inside the Magic has a video of Disney's Haunted Halloween Parade at Tokyo Disneyland.

All of the floats have Haunted Mansion themes - even obscure stuff like the Rolly Crump designed overstuffed easy chair with the face worked into the design. Another float has the Ballroom's Organ as the major design element. The Knight from just outside the endless hallway is represented by 4 cast members. The bride is a chipmunk character. Another float has a giant representation of the skeletal arm with a trowel bricking himself into his own tomb.

A phalanx of Haunted Mansion maids leads the parade. Ghosts from the Mickey Mouse cartoon "Lonesome Ghosts" pepper the entire parade.

The song that accompanies the parade is called "One More Ghost" in reference to the need to find that 1000th ghost that the Mansion needs.

The show stop at the end of the parade features the Japanese Ghost Host voice with various riffs off of the Grim Grinning Ghosts theme.

MP4 Link, Inside the Magic podcast (Thanks, Kirby!)

Lauren sez, "Our kick-ass South African sci-fi kids' show, URBO: The Adventures of Pax Afrika has a special episode about the music industry and DRM technology, only in our universe, 'DRM' stands for the Don't Rip Monsters, who really do bite you on the ass if you dare to file-share." Link (Thanks, Lauren!)

Tim K sez, "I thought you'd enjoy seeing this set of Flickr pix I took at a Hollywood Day of the Dead festival: Bugs and the gang as Looney Tunes skeletons." Link (Thanks, Tim K!)

Flickr's Girlontherocks has made a grisly "inside out" wardrobe for her Blythe doll, garments that show the doll's notional internal organs -- it's the Visible Woman Blythe Doll! Link (via Craft)

See also: Balloon-dog anatomy

Here's a nice selection of paper doll "Hallowe'en costumes" inspired by Bob Dylan lyrics, courtesy of the Seattle Weekly. Link (via Neatorama)

For the past week or so, I've been blacklisting PR flacks from my email inbox. Anytime I get a press release that doesn't interest me, I add the domain name of the PR agency to my killfile list.

I just found out that Chris Anderson, Wired's editor-in-chief, has been doing the same thing.

He's also published his long, long list of banned flacks. Good for him.

I've had it. I get more than 300 emails a day and my problem isn't spam (Cloudmark Desktop solves that nicely), it's PR people. Lazy flacks send press releases to the Editor in Chief of Wired because they can't be bothered to find out who on my staff, if anyone, might actually be interested in what they're pitching.

Everything else gets banned on first abuse. The following is just the last month's list of people and companies who have been added to my Outlook blocked list. All of them have sent me something inappropriate at some point in the past 30 days. Many of them sent press releases; others just added me to a distribution list without asking. If their address gets harvested by spammers by being published here, so be it--turnabout is fair play.

There is no getting off this list. If you're on it and have something appropriate to say to me, use a different email address.

Link (Thanks, Barry!)

Donovan, singer of such fantastic 60s tunes as "Mellow Yellow" and "Sunshine Superman" is opening his own Donovan University in Scotland where students will all practice transcendental meditation. He's working on the idea with his surrealist film director pal David Lynch. From the Associated Press:

"The Maharishi told me during that 1968 visit that I should build a university in Edinburgh. I went to my room and drew a beautiful dome-shaped place of learning," he said Friday...

Donovan and Lynch, Oscar-nominated director of "Blue Velvet," "Mullholland Dr." and "The Elephant Man," are part of a tour to promote transcendental meditation as a means of reducing violence, crime and stress in schools and colleges...

"For a country the size of Scotland it would take only 250 students meditating to protect Scotland from its enemies and to bring peace, to stop violence and drug abuse," Lynch said. "That is just a byproduct of the students meditating together."

Link (Thanks, Jess Hemerly!)

Production has wrapped on the film adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel Radio Free Albemuth. The 10th movie adaptation of a PKD story, the indy movie was directed by John Alan Simon and stars Alanis Morisette. According to Simon, the total shoot took just 24 days and "the entire budget of the picture was less than the majors spend on catering." David Gill has more news over at the Total Dick-Head blog including promise of an interview with the director.
Link to Total Dick-Head, Link to buy the book Radio Free Albemuth

Professional amateur-hater Andrew Keen gets raked over the coals by Daily Kos' Markos Moulitsas Zuniga. On page 52 of Keen's silly book The Cult of the Amateur, Keen writes:

Unfortunately, the internet is bloated with the hot air of these amateur journalists. Despite the size of their readership, even the A-List bloggers have no formal journalistic training. And, in fact, much of the real news their blogs contain has been lifted from (or aggregated from) the very news organizations they aim to replace.

It is not surprising then that these prominent bloggers have no professional training in the collection of news. After all, who needs a degree in journalism to post a hyperlink on a Web site? Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, for example, the founder of Daily Kos, a left-leaning site, came to political blogging via the technology industry and the military.

Kos responds by listing his education and professional background as a journalist, which anyone with access to the Internet can easily discover for themselves.

Moulitsas earned two bachelor degrees at Northern Illinois University (1992-96), with majors in Philosophy, Journalism, and Political Science and a minor in German.

After a hitch serving as an artillery fire director at the headquarters for a missile battery, he attended Northern Illinois University, winning dual degrees and majoring in philosophy, political science and journalism and minoring in German.

From there, it was on to Boston University, where he earned his law degree.

“I knew in law school that I never wanted to be a lawyer. It was a way to kill three years of my life,” he offered with a smile.

He could have become a reporter—there was a job offer from the Associated Press—and he did freelance for three years for the Chicago Tribune, “but I decided I didn’t want to live vicariously through other people’s lives.”

Link (Thanks, Gary!)

Jay Leno will have The Sex Pistols and Ron Paul on this evening's Tonight Show. Link

Last night my daughter and I watched the Night Gallery episode about the killer doll from India and it freaked her out (in a good way).

I probably should get her this Living Dead Dolls pencil sharpener, which reminds me of the creepy killer doll from Night Gallery. (Aww shucks -- it's sold out.) Link

In 1971, anthropologist Dr. William Bass (seen above) founded the University of Tennessee's Forensic Anthropology Facility, aka the "Body Farm." On those three acres in Knoxville, dozens of lifeless human bodies lie in various states of decomposition in the name of science and education. Alan Bellows of Damn Interesting paid a visit. From the article, which is not for the squeamish:

From a short distance the male figure almost appeared to be napping among the hummingbirds and squirrels, draped as he was over the pebbled ground. But something about his peculiar pose evoked a sense of grim finality– the body language of the deceased...

The students knelt alongside the slumped form, seemingly untroubled by the acrid, syrupy tang of human decay which hung in the air. They remarked on the amount of decomposition that had become evident since their last visit, such as the sloughed skin and distended midsection. The insects which feasted upon the decommissioned man were of specific interest, prompting a number of photographs and note-jottings. After surveying the scene to their satisfaction, the students strolled across the glade to examine a considerably more decayed corpse in the trunk of an abandoned car. Their lack of alarm wasn't altogether surprising, for they were part of the organization responsible for dumping these corpses– along with dozens more– throughout the otherwise serene forest....

As the lifeless subjects are interred into the grisly forest hideaway, each is assigned an anonymous identification number. Some are situated to provide interesting decomposition vectors, while others are used to reconstruct specific circumstances for police investigations. At any given time, several dozen perished persons are scattered around the hillside within automobiles, cement vaults, suitcases, plastic bags, shallow graves, pools of water, or deposited directly upon the earth. Except when clothing is necessary for a particular study, cadavers are disrobed, and frequently certain factors such as fire and chemicals are introduced to measure their effects. Grad students and professors return periodically to check on the subjects' progress, with occasional visits from police officers or FBI agents undergoing training.

Link

Previously on BB:
• Vultures halt "body farms" plans Link
• Forensic anthropology in Glenn and Helen Show podcast Link

Ashley Highfield, the BBC's Director Future Media & Technology, has done an interview with the BBC Backstage podcast about the BBC's new DRM-based net-delivery system, iPlayer, which delivers a slim fraction of the functionality available to people who watch their TV over the air.

Highfield defends the company's DRM in an incoherent way, attacking straw-men ("The rightsholders need DRM to protect their rights" and "we need open source DRM, but that may be a contradiction in terms," "Rightsholders are scary," "We need a fictional technology that will let us insert ads but only when American eyeballs are present") but without addressing the really meaty questions.

The BBC broadcasts the entirety of its programming at the speed of light, in digital form, without DRM, to every corner of the UK. The net is flooded with every single show the BBC transmits. The BBC has previously stood up to rightsholders who insisted DRM (removing DRM from its satellite feeds, despite an entertainment industry boycott that lasted a year). Adding DRM to its downloads just makes the downloads suck, traps Britons into using Microsoft OSes, shuts out one in four license-paying households who don't have the right combination, bans open source -- but it has nothing to do with stopping infringing downloads.

What's more, the fictional technology Highfield cites as a prerequisite for dropping DRM is wildly improbable. It would require every single entity in the video "value chain" -- every player, every hosting site, every hardware company -- to sign on to always follow the BBC's "insert ad here" instruction, and the only way to force them to do that is...to add DRM.

When asked about the iPlayer's P2P system (which you can't switch off, meaning that once you download shows, they're available for other iPlayer users to download from you), Highfield says that the ISPs have sold "unlimited" broadband to their customers without expecting us to actually use the service without limits. They have a dishonest pitch for their technology, and Highfield essentially says, "Well, that's their problem."

I couldn't agree more -- and what's more, there's another group of companies that have made a dishonest pitch for technology: the rightsholders who say that DRM on the BBC's downloads will stop unauthorized distribution of their videos.

I like Highfield -- I know him personally and think he's smarter than this. I'd love to see him interviewed by someone who actually walked him through the real implications of what he's proposing here. Link, Link to Ben Laurie's rebuttal (Thanks, Glyn!)

See also:
BBC announces that it may NOT deliver Linux/Mac/older Windows version of iPlayer -- sorry, 25% of UK, no iPlayer for you!
Cory's column on DRM's Potemkin Village for the Guardian
BBC Trustees agree to let BBC infect Britain with DRM
BBC's online media now requires MSFT player, DRM
BBC picketed over use of Microsoft DRM
BBC recruits Microsoft DRM exec
Regulators order BBC Trust to meet with open source consortium over DRM player

Bernard Foing wrote an article for Astrobiology Magazine about how our Earth, its weather, and its life forms would be different without the influence of the Moon.

The eyesight of many mammals is sensitive to moonlight. The level of adaptation of night vision would be very different without the Moon. Many of these species have evolved in such a way that their night vision could work in even partial lunar illumination, because that’s when they are most active. But they can be more subjected to predators, too, so there is a balance between your ability to see and your ability not to be seen. The Moon has completely changed evolution in that aspect.

Human vision is so sensitive that we are almost able to work by the light of the Milky Way. The full Moon has more light than we need to see at night. For most of our history, we were hunting and fishing or doing agriculture, and we organized our lives by using the Moon. It determined the time for hunting, or the time where we could harvest. That’s why most of our calendars are based on the Moon.

Link (Via Daily Grail)

What's the difference between us and our chimpanzee cousins? Researchers studying traits that we share, like altruism and vengeance, and those we don't, like spite and most social learning skills, are shedding light on what it means to be human. The new issue of Smithsonian surveys several of these studies. From the article:

What makes us lucky bipeds human?

"The most important way to ask these really hard questions—is human altruism unique, is human spite unique, is human fairness unique—is to ask non-human animals," says Laurie Santos, director of the Comparative Cognition Laboratory at Yale University. This behavioral process of elimination defines humans as it progresses.

Since chimpanzees can't speak our language, researchers design experimental scenarios to detect the presence or absence of such traits.

Link

Previously on BB:
• Ape altruism Link

Barack Obama has promised that he will deliver a law mandating Net Neutrality if he's elected:

Affixing his signature to federal Net neutrality rules would be high on the list during his first year in the Oval Office, the junior senator from Illinois said during an interactive forum Monday afternoon with the popular contender put on by MTV and MySpace at Coe College in Iowa...

He went on to explain the issue briefly: "What you've been seeing is some lobbying that says that the servers and the various portals through which you're getting information over the Internet should be able to be gatekeepers and to charge different rates to different Web sites...so you could get much better quality from the Fox News site and you'd be getting rotten service from the mom and pop sites," he went on. "And that I think destroys one of the best things about the Internet--which is that there is this incredible equality there."

Link

Mark sez, "In the original Anaheim Disneyland it may be a Small World after all, but that world's inhabitants are getting bigger and heavier almost by the day, so much so that some of the rides may have to be re-engineered. This has already been scheduled for the Small World ride, which will be closed for almost a year beginning in January for retooling. When the ride finally reopens, the flume will be an inch or so deeper and the boats more buoyant, thus allowing for several hundred more pounds of capacity."

The Small World ride now must accommodate adults who frequently weigh north of 200 pounds, which it often cannot do. Increasingly, overweighted boats get to certain points in the ride and bottom out, becoming stuck in the flume.

Link (Thanks, Mark!)

NPR has an audio excerpt from Henry Petroski's latest book, The Toothpick: Technology and Culture.

For author Henry Petroski, the simplest of instruments — be it a pencil or a telephone keypad — can offer fascinating stories of engineering, design and cultural history.

Even toothpicks don't escape his inquisitive eye. His latest book explores the history of this seemingly mundane tool — and why picking our teeth is among mankind's oldest bad habits.

In The Toothpick, Petroski, who is a professor of civil engineering and history at Duke University, chronicles the instrument's odd and funny history, taking readers back to the time of the Neanderthals. Anthropologists have found evidence of grooves on fossilized teeth that resulted from rough-hewn toothpicks. Later, in ancient Rome, the emperor Nero entered a banquet hall with a silver toothpick lodged in his mouth.

Link (Thanks, Partha!)

Researchers found a clam off the coast of Iceland that's between 405 and 410 years old.

The mollusc, which is thought to have lurked beneath the waves until at least the age of 405, would have been a juvenile when Galileo picked up his first telescope, Hamlet was first staged and the gunpowder plot failed to blow up King James I.

The Arctica islandica clam was plucked from 80m-deep water by researchers at Bangor University in Wales, who were dredging the north Iceland shelf for the creatures. By studying their shells, the scientists hope to learn how the marine environment has changed in recent centuries.

The clam was alive when it was brought to the surface, but at that point, the researchers had no idea how old it was. Only after cutting through the shell and counting annual growth rings under a microscope did they date the mollusc to between 405 to 410 years old.

Scientists said it was a little tough, but "very tasty fried in butter and garlic." (Not really.) Link

Incredible sculptor Tessa Farmer collaborated with the London Natural History Museum's Entomology Department to unleash an army of tiny faeries on the museum's mounted insect and animal collection. The exhibition, titled Little Savages, runs until January 28. As part of the exhibit, Farmer, Sean Daniels, and my friend Mark Pilkington made a stop-motion film of the faeries' in the wild. Interesting, Farmer is the great granddaughter of fantastic fiction author Arthur Machen, a fact she only found out after developing her relationship with the faeries.



"They have their roots in Victorian fairies, who were quite mischievous and lived in natural habitats, often torturing animals," Farmer recently told The Guardian. "My fairies are more gory. Their ultimate ambition is to attack humans..."

Link to Mark Pilkington's Strange Attractor post
Link to Natural History Museum
Link to more of Farmer's work in a 2006 exhibit called Miniature Worlds