The New Yorker's "Drug War Bulletins" are sure to boil your blood: a man who died for want of a liver transplant because the hospital insisted he needed "drug treatment" for his medical marijuana use; a suburban San Diego housewife who will spend the next 20 years in jail because she was peripherally involved in a heroin deal while she was in college in 1975; and a pulmonologist who'd been favored by the drug warriors until his giant, well-funded, unreproachable study concluded that pot didn't give you lung cancer, and who is now a pariah whose research conclusions have been boycotted by the press.

The War on Some Drugs is as unwinnable and destructive as all the other wars on abstract nouns. Who needs terrorists to rip America apart when you've got drug warriors killing off, imprisioning and shunning its innocents?

.In Seattle, a fifty-six-year old man died last Thursday after being refused a liver transplant because he had followed his doctor’s recommendation to use marijuana to ease the symptoms of hepatitis C. From the Associated Press story:

His death came a week after a doctor told him a University of Washington Medical Center committee had again denied him a spot on the liver transplant list. The team had previously told him it would not consider placing him on the list until he completed a 60-day drug-treatment class…

The Virginia-based United Network for Organ Sharing, which oversees the nation’s transplant system, leaves it to individual hospitals to develop criteria for transplant candidates.

At some, people who use “illicit substances”—including medical marijuana, even in the dozen states that allow it—are automatically rejected. At others, patients are given a chance to reapply if they stay clean for six months.

The cruelty and stupidity of this beggars belief. This patient did not need “drug treatment.” He was already undergoing drug treatment. Nor did he need to get “clean.” He was already clean. It’s the drug war that’s dirty. (H/t: John Leone.)

Link (via Making Light)

You know how the mobile carriers charge you a couple cents to SMS a few characters' worth of text over their network? When you add it up, you're paying about a zillion bucks a meg for that traffic -- seriously! A space scientist from Leicester has calculated that SMS data is four times more expensive than receiving data from the Hubble space telescope.

He worked out the cost of obtaining a megabyte of data from Hubble – and compared that with the 5p cost of sending a text.

He said: “The bottom line is texting is at least 4 times more expensive than transmitting data from Hubble, and is likely to be substantially more than that.

“The maximum size for a text message is 160 characters, which takes 140 bytes because there are only 7 bits per character in the text messaging system, and we assume the average price for a text message is 5p. There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that's 1 million/140 = 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte. At 5p each, that's £374.49 per MB - or about 4.4 times more expensive than the ‘most pessimistic’ estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs.”

Dr Bannister said it had been difficult to work out exactly how much Hubble data transmission costs. So he contacted NASA who gave him a firm figure of £8.85 per megabyte (MB) for the transmission of data from HST to the Earth.

Link (via Consumerist)

Fractal 23, from New York's Takeshi Miyakawa Design, might just be the coolest chest of drawers I've ever seen. Link (via DVice)

Man Babies is a bizarre blog that has nothing but photos of dads whose heads have been swapped with their kids' . Link

Brian McConnell says:

The Worldwide Lexicon is a community translation system that enables a website's readers to translate to the languages they speak. We're beta testing a multilingual blogging service, Der Mundo.

You can find Boing Boing at boingboing.dermundo.com where you can view, edit and score translations, and help make Boing Boing accessible to everyone who speaks your language. Der Mundo translates new posts using machine translation services, after which readers can edit or replace these rough translations to improve them. Der Mundo guesses which languages you speak based on your browser preferences, and tries to display articles in your language first. It falls back to the original text if a translation has not been posted yet.

Readers can score translations via a simple five star rating scale, and can edit existing translations by clicking on a pencil icon adjacent to each item. Readers can contribute translations by clicking on English --> ____ links below each article headline. This will take you to a web editor where you can create or edit a translation, as well as view the revision history.

WWL is an open source project, and is developing a suite of tools to enable websites and blogs to go multilingual, using a combination of machine translation, volunteers (readers) and professional translators. The project's goal is to eliminate the language barrier for interesting content by making it easy for people to form translation communities and services around topics, websites or languages. They will be releasing a professional translation hub, under the New BSD license, in early summer. If you're interested in contributing code to the project, or in helping localize the interface to more languages, contact Brian McConnell (brian@worldwidelexicon.org)

Link

Keeping track of my expenses was one of my resolutions this year. I've been using a terrific web-based application called PearBudget to help me keep my promise to myself. PearBudget is streamlined, lightweight, and elegant, and because it's web-based, I can use my iPhone to enter receipts as soon as I get them.

I asked Charlie, the co-creator of PearBudget, to explain why he and his partner Sarah made PearBudget.

At the core of our wanting to make PearBudget was that we wanted simple control over our finances.

Quicken and other more advanced accounting programs are overkill for the simple task of tracking your expenses and making a budget. Financial services that automate everything don't compel you to actively reconsider your spending habits. We wanted to be in control, but we didn't want to be overwhelmed. We designed PearBudget to ride that line.

Our background isn't in programming or banking, but in information design — Sarah's a map designer; Charlie's a typesetter and occasional web designer. So our interest in developing a better financial tool had a lot to do with creating a simple presentation of the user's information, and with giving the user a good experience developing and keeping a budget.

It's a truly beautiful app. You can try it for 30 days for free; after that it's $3 a month. Link

(Click on image for enlargement) The latest city to meet the perfect pixel placers at eBoy is Los Angeles, my beloved home. Link

DesignObserver's put together a great book/slideshow/Flickr group of beautiful table of contents pages from various books:

In this book, we have gathered together thirty Table of Contents pages from our personal collections. On the surface, the selection may elude standard organizational conceits: why a design collection that also includes poetry and fiction? Why Philip Larkin and not Billy Collins, Ayn Rand and not Philip Roth, Paul Rand and not Jan Tschichold? Like “next” itself, there’s no intentional logic or over-arching plan: we just found these examples engaging, the discrepancies between them even more so.

Some readers will appreciate their typographic form, while others will see further strategies at work — informational, strategic, philosophical, literary. There are odd, even anachronistic cultural references, gestures that date these books in a manner oddly soothing. They remind us that what we will be has, by its very nature, a great deal to do with where we’ve been — and that there is no future without a past.

Link (via Kottke)

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Joel spotted this gallery of modular data-centers built into shipping containers -- talk about two great tastes that taste great together. Hard to imagine a more iconic use of 21st century technologies:

Royal Pingdom has a few images from the inside of portable data centers, the sort used by Sun and Google to drop massive computing power anywhere they can send a shipping container. I would like to hang a hammock inside and make one my new nest.

Link, Discuss this post on Boing Boing Gadgets

Partha sez, "Popularly known the food joint for the destitute, this 'restaurant' on railway tracks has been running for the last 51 years at the southern division of Sealdah Station in north Kolkata, India, using up the space around a couple of unused tracks, even as trains whiz past on other platforms nearby. Run today by 40-year-old Fatima Bibi, who took over the business from her mother Nur Banu at the age of 11, this joint boasts of a faithful clientele of beggars, pickpockets, platform dwellers, porters and drug addicts, who troop in for leftover and stale food at rock bottom prices."

"We hardly earn Rs.25 a day. Surely, we can't afford to spend more than Rs.5 a day on lunch and dinner. Here we can eat to the fullest for Rs.3, that's what matters. Whether the food is leftover or slightly rotting, we don't care," said Chanchal, a beggar at the station.

Some customers have just a bowlful of boiled rice water available for 50 paisa.

However, Fatima manages to make about Rs.800 a day from her "hotel". But just as there are no free lunches in this world, it seems there are no free businesses either - not a day passes without Fatima giving bribes to the railway police.

"Every day I have to pay the police personnel Rs.100 to allow me run my business peacefully. But policemen are like chameleons. On strict days they just kick my customers and me out of the tracks. However we don't give up. These tracks are ours and the next day we are back to our old place again," said Fatima.

Link (Thanks, Partha!)

Here's the latest installment in Instructables' series of HOWTOs inspired by my young adult novel Little Brother, which tells the story of young people who use homebrew technology to restore their civil liberties after a police crackdown on terrorism.

This week's installment: What to do if the police stop you.

1. What you say to the police is always important. What you say can be used against you, and it can give the police an excuse to arrest you, especially if you badmouth a police officer.

2. You must show your driver's license and registration when stopped in a car. Otherwise, you don't have to answer any questions if you are detained or arrested, with one important exception. The police may ask for your name if you have been properly detained, and you can be arrested in some states for refusing to give it. If you reasonably fear that your name is incriminating, you can claim the right to remain silent, which may be a defense in case you are arrested anyway.

3. You do not have to consent to any search of yourself, your car or your house. If you DO consent to a search, it can affect your rights later in court. If the police say they have a search warrant, ASK TO SEE IT.

4. Do not interfere with, or obstruct the police, as you you can be arrested for it.

Link

Canada -- like much of the Commonwealth -- has a bizarre para-copyright system called "Crown Copyright" that allows the government to restrict and charge for the use of documents created at taxpayer expense. Not only is Canada's Crown Copyright system a gigantic boondoggle (annual revenue: $7,000; annual cost of administration: $200,000), but it turns out the system is administered in such a way as to censor criticism of the government:

For example, an educational institution request to reproduce a photo of a Snowbird airplane was denied on the grounds that the photo was to be used for an article raising questions about the safety of the program. Similarly, a request to reproduce a screen capture of the NEXUS cross-border program with the U.S. was declined since it was to be used in an article that would not portray the program in a favourable light. Although it seems unlikely that crown copyright authorization was needed to use these images, the government's decision to deny permission smacks of censorship and misuse of Canadian copyright law.

Given the significant costs associated with a program that does more harm than good and that appears susceptible to political manipulation, any new copyright reform should eliminate crown copyright and adopt in its place a presumption that government materials belong to the public domain to be freely used without prior permission or compensation.

Link

Livejournal's Snuffykin followed the plans in Craft magazine to replace the uppers on her worn-out shoes with knitted versions. The newly remade Converse kick all kinds of ass.

The shoe part:
* I cut the uppers and tongues off of Champion flat tops, then put several layers of gesso on the surfaces to whiten them up. I finished this with a few coats of matte sealer.

* Heavy duty yarn is hard to find. I found it at Joann Fabrics, finally. * Since the Champion shoe material was leather and not fabric like Converse, a sewing needle didn't go through easily. I used a bookbinding awl to punch holes through the layers of leather around the sole before sewing. Still, it was tricky.
* The Champion heel was shorter than the Converse heel, so I seamed the pieces rising above short heel.
* Running out of time, I sewed using running stitch, which actually holds up.

The results:
The shoes are wearable, walkable, but floppy. Partly because the heel is too short. I could have just followed the instructions for a size 8 for a more snug fit. They're messy looking, due to my rush to finish, but I'm not going to change a thing. I never wore those shoes anymore, but now they're just for special occasions. :)

Link (via Craft)

Graham sez, "tpimovies.com user Serpento has created this catchy little ditty out of nothing more than samples of firearms discharging in Call Of Duty 4. Personally, my favorite part is when the 'Empty Clip' sound is used as the bridge in the middle." And, naturally, the video is all machinima. Link (Thanks, Graham!)

John Paul sez, "My sister Wendy went to Jamaica to make a music video for Gnarls Barkley. I've always found it fascinating how she listens to songs and just fantasizes about what imagery or story goes with the music, and then struggles to make the video happen in an incredibly short time frame and on a tight budget. This video is maybe her finest. The imagery comes out of her head, partly inspired by a trip we made to Africa, partly inspired by Jamaican dance hall glory.

"Filming in Jamaica is worth it, and the dancers are not the only amazing Jamaicans behind the video. The local crew worked themselves silly to make this happen." Link (Thanks, John Paul!)

UK fringe culture magazine Bizarre recently paid a visit to the studio of BB pal COOP. The online version of the great article, by Maki, features Mark Berry's terrific photos of COOP in his natural habitat. From Bizarre:

“LA is the fertile crescent of hot rodding,” (COOP) says, his eyes twinkling. “It’s still big here, really alive.

The neat thing is that the history of the hot rodding scene is still relatively recent, so all the first- and second-generation guys are still here, still walking around and driving the incredible cars they built.

One of the things that appeals to me as an artist is that the whole essence of hot rodding is taking a mass-produced item, pulling it apart, then rebuilding it and making it better.You’re making it into an individual statement – and that’s art. “I have many friends who work as automotive painters, who build cars professionally. I look at their work, and I think they’re incredible artists.

Link

Watch this officer try to catch several men jumping out of a van. (via Arbroath)

Comedy writer and Army Man publisher Jack Handy wrote a great "Shouts & Murmurs" in the most recent the New Yorker. Here's a small sample:

The plow with the four-leaf clover symbolizes the luck of the farmer.

The quicksand represents the travails of life. The hand sticking out of it is so you know it’s quicksand and not just a dirty spot on the flag.

The bat stands for eternal life, through our lord Dracula.

The sheaf of wheat symbolizes the bounty of the land, and the hope that soon more things will come in sheaves.

The parrot represents the need to communicate, even if it’s only squawks.

The tin of paprika stands for paprika, a spice I hope to learn more about.

Boing Boing challenge: draw Jack's flag. Link

Today on Boing Boing Gadgets we saw mugshots of the dumbest thieves in New York State, foresaw the return of crappy Tiger-style LCD games, and played with a frightening WowWee Chatterbot. John converted a houseplant's meaningless biometric readings into—appropriately enough—twitter posts; Joel lost a few extra pounds on a novelty velocipede, and Rob donned a useless anti-cellphone radiation suit. JVC and Kenwood gazed lovingly into one another's eyes. We also looked at a GUI-based music video; a transparent Eee hardcase; a phone of little use to onanists; an iPod file squirter; a gallery of shipping containter data centers; a scammy fuel-injection gizmo that outsmarts at least one Florida NBC affiliate; and AT&T screwing its own customers. We learned about Japanese cigarette vending machines, the fears of Thai children, everything there is to know about bicycles, and how to turn corpses into a syrupy fecal sludge. Don't forget the adjustable hot sauce.

There were reviews, too, of Bruton's Solaris 52 solar and Solo 15 battery and Lenovo's x300 ultra-thin notebook. There's one thing we won't be reviewing any time soon, however: a portable gaming console from Apple.

Japanese gravestone company Ishinokoe is selling tombstones emblazoned with barcodes, specifically QR codes that can be scanned with a mobile phone camera. Scanning the code brings up a Web site on the phone's browser with photos, text, and videos of the deceased individual. The company can add a QR code to an existing stone for around 200,000 yen (US$2000). From KOFU:

"Tombstones change with the ages," said Ishinokoe president Yoshitsugu Fukazawa. "If my grandfather who started the company could see this, he'd probably be really surprised."

The company developed the tombstones together with an IT firm in Tokyo. In addition to images of the deceased, people can view a greeting from the chief mourner at the funeral and browse through the guest book. They can also make entries using their cell phones.

Link (Thanks, Paul Saffo!)

Previously on BB:
• Hello Kitty tombstone Link
• Leota's new animated tombstone Link
• Graveyard Game: walk around until you die Link

Complexity theory pioneer Stuart Kauffman, author of the fantastic At Home In The Universe, has a new book out called Reinventing The Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion. According to Kauffman, who is also a theoretical biologist, the universe is so beautifully complex, incredible, and full of wonder, that we might consider thinking of it as "God." He summarizes his argument in the current New Scientist. From Kauffman's essay:

...The unfolding of the universe - biotic, and perhaps abiotic too - appears to be partially beyond natural law. In its place is a ceaseless creativity, with no supernatural creator. If, as a result of this creativity, we cannot know what will happen, then reason, the Enlightenment's highest human virtue, is an insufficient guide to living our lives. We must use reason, emotion, intuition, all that our evolution has brought us. But that means understanding our full humanity: we need Einstein and Shakespeare in the same room.

Shall we use the "God" word? We do not have to, yet it is still our most powerful invented symbol. Our sense of God has evolved from Yahweh in the desert some 4500 years ago, a jealous, law-giving warrior God, to the God of love that Jesus taught. How many versions have people worshipped in the past 100,000 years?

Yet what is more awesome: to believe that God created everything in six days, or to believe that the biosphere came into being on its own, with no creator, and partially lawlessly? I find the latter proposition so stunning, so worthy of awe and respect, that I am happy to accept this natural creativity in the universe as a reinvention of "God".

Link to New Scientist, Link to buy Reinventing The Sacred, Link to Kauffman's 2006 Edge essay "Beyond Reductionism"

Here's a sexist ad for Dacron slacks from 1970. The copy reads:

Though she was a tiger lady, our hero didn’t have to fire a shot to floor her. After one look at his Mr. Leggs slacks, she was ready to have him walk all over her. That noble styling sure soothes the savage heart! If you’d like your own doll-to-doll carpeting, hunt up a pair of these he-man Mr. Leggs slacks. Such as our new automatic wash wear blend of 65% “Dacron®” and 35% rayon–incomparably wrinkle-resistant. About $12.95 at plush-carpeted stores.

Which reminds me: when does season 2 of Mad Men start? Link

Mikey Sklar and Wendy Tremaine moved to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico a couple of years ago and have been "recklessly experimenting" with various systems for living off the grid. They've been powering their house with photovoltaic cells, and this graph Mikey found makes it clear that they've moved to the right place.

Today my PV solar panels must have been working extra hard. They produced 14.7kWhrs that is the absolute maximum they are supposed to be able to produce in my region based on the average latitude angle. When I scoped out the system I had been thinking about a 5 hour peak sunlight day. We are really much more like 7.2 peak hours of sunlight a day (this time of year). This chart might help. You can see what a total waste it is to buy and install PV solar panels anywhere outside of the southwest.

Link (Canada's Discovery Channel profiled Mikey a couple of months ago. Here's the YouTube.)

New research shows that young children think their peers who wear glasses are smarter and more honest. Optometry researchers at Ohio State University surveyed kids between 6 and 10 years old. From OSU Research News:

...The survey (also) suggested that children don’t tend to judge the attractiveness of their peers who wear glasses when asked about their appearance, potential as a playmate or likely athletic abilities...

On average, two thirds of the participating children said they thought that kids wearing glasses looked smarter than kids not wearing glasses. And 57 percent of the participants said they thought kids with glasses appeared to be more honest. Both kids with and without glasses thought other kids wearing glasses looked smarter.

Walline said the findings suggest that media portrayals associating spectacles with intelligence may be reinforcing a stereotype that even young children accept.

Link

School officials refused Marche Taylor admittance to her senior prom because they felt her custom dress was inappropriate. Apparently, voices got raised and Taylor was escorted from the hotel in handcuffs. My friend Lisa Mumbach said a similar thing happened to her friend in high school, but her friend left before the fuzz were called in. From the Dallas Morning News:

Even after offering to provide more cover, Ms. Taylor was denied access. So she demanded her money back.

Eventually, Ms. Taylor said, someone called police. Officers showed up, handcuffed her and escorted her out. A photographer snapped a photo of Ms. Taylor, in handcuffs, being led out of the hotel.

Link to article and video

Seen here is a picture postcard of an execution that took place in 1916 during the Mexican Revolution. Over at Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog, William Nericcio links to a gallery of such images and comments on the notion of "camera as gun" and an "optics of war." Nericcio explores the idea in greater depth in his book, Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America.

Link to Tex[t]-Mex post, Link to gallery of Mexican Revolution Photo Postcards (Thanks, Mark Dery!)

Previously on BB:
• Leica rifle camera Link

Dale Davis, 78, of Alta, Iowa, bowled a perfect 300 last weekend. He's legally blind. From the Storm Lake Times:

“It was quite a thrill,” Davis said of the achievement. “When I got to the tenth frame, I said ‘Lord, let me throw three more good balls..."

“I can’t see the lane or the pins and have a heck of a time finding my ball sometimes,” Davis said with a laugh of his bowling skills. “I can kinda see the dots on the floor to know where I start. After that, I rely on my hearing and other people to tell me what’s going on.”

When he doesn’t throw a strike, fellow bowlers like Century Lanes owner and good friend Clem Ledoux tell Davis what pins are still standing. The blind bowler then finds his bearings with the dots on the lane, approaches and hurls his next shot.

Link

Justin Hall and Merci Hammon's networked browser-game PMOG (Passively Multiplayer Online Game) just launched after a solid beta period. The idea is to encourage people to be more adventurous and smarter when they browse the web, by awarding points for different kinds of Internet activity (for example, awarding bonuses for looking at Wikipedia history pages, comparing search results across different engines, or installing Firefox). The networked play also allows players to create their own missions and quests, and to lay traps for other players. All in all, it's great fun, and a genuinely novel way at looking at Internet literacy.

Justin sez,

PMOG is a steamy Victorian metagame about being online. The game gives its players tools to leave treasure or traps on any website, and to make guided web missions for other players. PMOG stands for Passively Multiplayer Online Game, which means you earn resources and unlock rewards just by surfing. Players in PMOG can hide the game, pause the game, or erase their histories at any time; we encourage people to experiment with and take control of their data trails. PMOG is the first MMO in Firefox , a 220k extension to enhance your browsing pleasure. PMOG players who regularly read BoingBoing get a "Bounce Bounce" badge

Link (Thanks, Justin!)

(Disclosure: I am proud to serve on PMOG's advisory board)

Xeni visits the offices of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and speaks with Jake Appelbaum and Bill Paul, two of the authors of a security research paper that shows how your computer's memory can be tricked into revealing data you thought was safely encrypted, and out of the reach of others.

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion and downloadable video.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

One method involves using a can of compressed air to quickly cool the memory chip, but freezing the target isn't the only way to lull it into submission -- Paul shows us how to use an iPod or a USB thumb drive to do the same thing. These methods have been shown to defeat three popular disk encryption products commonly used to protect data on laptops: BitLocker (Windows Vista), FileVault (MacOS X), and dm-crypt (Linux).

Here's the entire text of the report draft, released earlier this year: Lest We Remember: Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys . Authors: J. Alex Halderman, Seth D. Schoen, Nadia Heninger, William Clarkson, William Paul, Joseph A. Calandrino, Ariel J. Feldman, Jacob Appelbaum, and Edward W. Felten.

The team plan to research additional software tools and a final version of their report at Usenix Security Symposium in July/August.

Special thanks to Seth Schoen and Peter Eckersley of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The Black Oven, a blog devoted to gloomy baking ("Immaculate confections succumbed to northern darkness") presents us with this fabulous recipe for Black Metal Cupcakes:

Le Petit Gateau du Les Legions Noire - Traditional cupcakes inspired by untraditional black metal

In a perfect world everything would be as stark and void of color as these cupcakes. They are baneful in their absolute disdain for your tastelessness, and are true misanthropes as far as baked goods go.

Link (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Donya has shipped this four-port USB hub in the shape of the Emergency Exit ped -- I'm charmed by the little USB icon on his little briefcase (Hey! I thought you weren't supposed to try to take anything with you when you evacuated!). Looks like you'll have to go to Japan to buy one (for now). Link

Microsoft is aggressively pushing a new low-cost version of its operating system intended for use with "ultra low cost PCs," competing with Linux on machines like the Eee and the One Laptop Per Child XO. However, Microsoft isn't willing to sell the low-cost license to any ULPC -- rather, the company has set out onerous conditions governing the maximum spec of these machines: 10.2" screens and no more than 80GB of storage, and no touch screens allowed.

Microsoft is trying to distort the market for cheap, tiny laptops by setting up artificial incentives to manufacturers to limit the power and capability of their lowest-cost units -- even if a vendor can figure out how to put more storage, a bigger screen, or a touchscreen into its machines, Microsoft doesn't want it there, and they'll punish any vendor that tries by refusing to license XP Home Edition on the same preferential terms that lower-spec machines get.

The key term here ls "Ultra Low Cost" -- note that this is not the same as "Ultra Low Spec. The primary market for these super-cheap machines are kids and poor people, and they'll be the collateral damage in Microsoft's crusade. If Microsoft wants to set up a licensing program for low cost machines, then cost should be the limiting factor, not power.

But this isn't entirely bad news: at least this latest move provides incentive to vendors to continue to bundle GNU/Linux, not Windows, on their machines. After all, Linux isn't just cheap, it's free, and no one's going to slap you around for figuring out how to deliver more power and a better machine. Link

The Vermont Eco Builder blog documents its project to make a kitchen floor from a patchwork of Marmoleum ends, rescuing them from a landfill. The effect is just lovely. Link (via Neatorama)