Trenchant commentary on surveillance from webcomic Boy on a Stick and Slither -- have a look at other comics in the series for more. Boy on a Stick and Slither (Thanks, R!)

JD sez, "While reading through a couple of old magazines I bought at a garage sale, I fell in love with the ads. The art and the ad copy are wonderful. Because I run a personal finance site, that's the focus of my post, but really these are fun for just about anyone. Special fun: the 1904 magazine features ads for horse carriages, but by 1909 the ads are for automobiles." Marvelous Magazine Ads from 1904 (Thanks, JD!)

Matt sez, "One of my favorite writers, Caitlin R. Kiernan, was the subject of verbal abuse, profanity and homophobic remarks from some sort of security guard when she and her companion went to visit H.P. Lovecraft's grave. The guard attempted to make them delete all of the photographs they had taken, despite the absence of any policy forbidding it. Are cameras like catnip for abusive, power-mad rent-a-cops now?"

Basic story: Caitlin and her friend have been visiting the grave for a decade or so, paying respects quietly, as do many people. It's one of the most photographed stones in the world. The graveyard's policies, listed on its website, do not prohibit photos. The security was incredibly abusive and jerky. Just another skirmish in the war against photography, as the brave security guards of the world prevent the theft of photons from our poor, helpless inanimate objects.

As Spooky was getting into the car, I finally looked him in the eye and said the only thing I said during the entire encounter (which elapsed over the space of maybe three or four minutes, start to finish, at the most). I pointed a finger at the man and, very quietly, I said, "You will be reported." He screamed, "You do that, you piece of shit!." This is the only time I got a clear look at the man. He was white, late middle-aged, seemed to have about three-days worth of beard (salt and pepper), and spoke with a heavy regional accent (don't ask which one). I am fairly certain that he had been drinking, and he may have been intoxicated. He certainly acted like a belligerent drunkard.

"...stains on the carpet and stains on the scenery..." (Thanks, Matt!)

(Image: H.P. Lovecraft's grave a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike photo from StrangeInterlude's Flickr stream)

Electronic Frontier Foundation designer Hugh D'Andrade sez, "I did a 'live-painting' last Friday at a gallery -- a mural-sized cartoon depicting the goings-on inside the "secret room" at AT&T's Folsom Street facility. My EFF co-workers created a time-lapse video with an awesome ska soundtrack!" The Secret Room: EFF Designer's Cartoon on Illegal Spying (Thanks, Hugh!)

Burglary suspect James Prevatt III, hunkered down for three days in a Maryland motel with his girlfriend, has threatened to shoot a robot that has kindly been bringing them burgers, pizza, soda, and cigarettes. The above headline screenshot is from CNN. Man threatens robot (CNN)

Starting in a few hours is Outside Lands, a massive three-day music festival in San Francisco featuring a pretty insane line-up of great artists like Radiohead, Beck, Tom Petty, Devendra Banhart, M. Ward, Wilco, and dozens of others. (Boing Boing TV is on the scene so stay tuned!) Also debuting at Outside Lands is CrowdFire, a central social media hub for people at the concert and beyond to upload relevant photos, videos, blog posts, and audio and share it with everyone else. I'm proud to say that CrowdFire was created by BB's band manager John Battelle and his team at Federated Media! The way I see it, CrowdFire aims to create a cultural commons that bridges the real and virtual world, and the artists and audience. In the end, it should result in a living collective memory surrounding the event. Congrats John and FM! Participate at Crowdfire

My friend Joe Hutsko contacted with the intriguing offer to serialize his novel, The Deal, on Boing Boing. I jumped at the chance. I read The Deal when it first came out in 1999 and loved the thrilling story about a Apple-like company's undertaking to create an iPhone-like device.

Here's a link to Chapter 12 as a PDF or a text file. (Here's chapter 1 and an introduction to the book, and here are the previous chapters)

To buy a paperback copy of the book, visit JOEyGADGET or purchase directly from Amazon.

Our pals at GOOD created a fascinating interactive infographic documenting "history's greatest journeys," including trips from travelers like Amelia Earhart, Ken Kesey, Columbus, and Jack Kerouac. Notably absent though is Albert Hoffman's bicycle ride. Good traces the most famous trips in history (Good Magazine)

O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference is my favorite geek confab of the year. The presenters aren't usually celebrity types but just supersmart nrrrds making fascinating tech and thinking about the impact of innovation on our lives. I'm really excited to be on the program committee again this year. The Call for Participation is now open and we're looking for big ideas across a huge spectrum of tech/culture, from materials science and synthetic biology to nomadism and sustainable life. From the ETech 2009 site:

Living, Reinvented: The Technology of Abundance and Constraints

We live in two worlds: one filled with abundance and the other with constraints. Each has its own favorite—or essential to survival—inventions and directions. Each has been deeply affected by technology.

The abundant world has access to the Internet and other educational tools, to the latest advances in medicine, to culinary choices from around the globe, and up until recently, access to "plenty of" energy. This abundance can lead to waste since most everyday objects are easier and cheaper to replace than fix. But sometimes this excess can lead to creation—a reinvention of waste—as we see in the pages of Make magazine.

The constrained world has to make do with what's available. Why scrimp and sacrifice for a computer when most people have mobile phones with an SMS server that can do the job just fine? With limited food, water, fuel, medicine, it's the people and their ideas that are often the cheapest part of the equation. Their technology looks to collaboration and connection with fewer resources—almost the opposite of the industrialized world which seeks to make each individual as effective as possible.

What technologies cross the divide? How do the two interact and cross-pollinate? On the surface, they wouldn't seem to overlap, but on deeper examination, inhabitants of both worlds learn from each other constantly.

Here are some areas at the intersection of abundance and constraint we'll be exploring at the 2009 edition of ETech, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference:

* City Tech
* Materials & Mechanics
* Personalized Healthcare
* Mobile & The Web
* Geek Family
* Synthetic Biology
* Nomadism & Shedworking
* Sustainable Life
* Life Hacking & Information Overload

ETech 2009 Call for Participation (O'Reilly)

Boing Boing tv is live and in full effect at the Outside Lands Music and Arts fest in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. The gates haven't opened yet as I type this, but when they do, more than 150,000 people are expected to pour in over three days to see bands like Radiohead, Beck, Wilco, Primus, Tom Petty, Manu Chao, Black Keys, Ben Harper, and dozens of others, plus some cool tech-art experiments we'll be digging into.

I'm here with our UK-based music correspondent Russell Porter, and the entire BBtv crew over the next 4 days. We're posting this episode from inside a giant rock star tour bus *very* generously loaned to us by friends of the blog.

We ran around yesterday in a golf cart with the guy who created Outside Lands, Rick Farman of Superfly Productions. We spoke with him for this episode about the idea behind this festival, and what it takes to put together something this huge and complex. Events like this are a virtual world of sorts -- only with lots of real live breathing humans.

We're parked about 100 feet away from the main stage. It feels strange to be so close to something so big before the gates open. All night long, production vehicles and golf carts full of loading guys buzzed around. Right now, there's an eerie quiet before the opening chords explode. This is going to be fun.

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Link to Boing Boing tv episode with discussion, downloadable video, and podcast subscription instructions.

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Tech notes: the tall eucalyptus trees next to our bus (this is a gorgeous park, remember!) are blocking our satellite dish, so no WiFi in the bus right now -- instead, we're jacked into EVDO cards on MacBooks, on which BBtv editor Wes and segment producer Derek edited this piece last night. I'm pleasantly surprised at upload speeds on this card (it's a Verizon Rev-A). Stay tuned for more video from the BBtv bus at Outside Lands!

(special thanks to Wayne and Bre for use of their magic bus; air travel generously provided by Virgin America.)

Related Boing Boing tv episodes:

* Primus: Xeni interviews Les and Ler (music)
* Kaki King, guitar hero: performance, interview with Xeni (music)
* BB Gadgets' Joel at Outside Lands: Crowdfire deconstructed
* Carney at Outside Lands - a "Boing Boing tv Bus Session." (music)
* Steel Pulse founder David Hinds at Outside Lands (music)

Artist Tom Giesler created a wonderful series of anatomical charts. This one is titled "The Spirit of Sharing."
Tom Giesler's "My Anatomy" (tomgiesler.com, thanks Greg Long!)

I took this photo of a nonexistent public phone at San Francisco's Moscone Convention Center. As the sign says, the phone is apparently out of order.

L.A. street artist Buff Monster has a new solo show opening tomorrow night, Saturday 8/23, at the Corey Helford Gallery in Culver City, CA. I dig his superflat, anime-inspired, Pepto-dripping paintings. Click on the images above to see the work larger. From the show description:

Inspired by Japanese fine art, pop culture, and anime, Buff Monster paints his trademark imagery in Superfl at style, blending pink, black, and metallic silver shapes into an array of squirting scenes. Moving in a more technical direction, the series of paintings will be executed on custom birch panels in an assortment of sizes. A new limited-edition signed and num- bered serigraph will be released on opening night. Open to the public, the reception for “The Sweetest Thing” will take place on Saturday, August 23 from 7 to 10pm and will be on view until September 2, 2008.

Inspired by heavy metal, porn, kaiju, Japanese kawai culture, and ice cream, Buff Monster is known for changing the land- scapes of Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Barcelona with his iconic Buff Monster character. Born and raised in Hawaii, Buff Monster moved to Los Angeles and attended the University of Southern California where he earned degrees in Fine Art and Business Administration by day and postered the streets with his hand-screened posters by night.

Corey Helford Gallery, Buff Monster site

Joanna Ebenstein of the fantastically curious Morbid Anatomy blog recently created an exhibition of her photographs of medical museums around the world. Now, Joanna is seeking to photograph private collections of medical oddities. From her post:

For my next project, I would like to photograph similar types of curiosities, ephemera, and artifacts, but in this case only those residing in private rather than public collections. If any of you out there have collections that you think might be of interest, or know of anyone else who might, I would love to hear from you. All leads appreciated! All locations considered!

Seeking medical curiosities (Morbid Anatomy)

Eduardo Mercer's just produced a Brazilian Portuguese fan-translation of my story Printcrime -- making five translations in total (as well as two audio adaptations, a mini-comic and some wicked 3D fan-art). For a 700 word story, it's sure attracted a lot of attention and fan activity!

Os tiras destruiram a impressora do meu pai quando eu tinha oito anos. Eu me lembro do cheiro quente de rolopack no microondas, do olhar de concentração furiosa do papi enquanto ele a enchia de geleca fresca e da sensação de recém tirado do forno dos objetos que saíam dela.

Os tiras entraram brandindo os cacetetes, um deles lendo o mandato através de um megafone. Um dos clientes do papi tinha vendido ele. A polícia pagou em drogas de alto nível - anabolizantes, suplementos de memória, aceleradores metabólicos. O tipo de coisa que custa uma fortuna na farmácia; o tipo de coisa que você pode imprimir em casa, se não se importar com o risco da sua cozinha se encher de corpos grandes e musculosos com cacetetes balançando no ar acertando tudo e todos em seu caminho.

Printcrime - Copie esta história

Slate's Farhad Manjoo has some great tips for outsmarting the greedy, lying sensor in your printer that wants you to change the super-expensive cartridge before the ink runs out:

This guy had also suspected that his Brother was lying to him, and he'd discovered a way to force it to fess up. Brother's toner cartridges have a sensor built into them; OppressedPrinterUser found that covering the sensor with a small piece of dark electrical tape tricked the printer into thinking he'd installed a new cartridge. I followed his instructions, and my printer began to work. At least eight months have passed. I've printed hundreds of pages since, and the text still hasn't begun to fade. On FixYourOwnPrinter.com, many Brother owners have written in to thank OppressedPrinterUser for his hack. One guy says that after covering the sensor, he printed 1,800 more pages before his toner finally ran out.

Take That, Stupid Printer! (Thanks, Matt!)

Oh, I really like the look of Secrets of the Mouse, an insider guide to Disneyland:

Secrets of the Mouse is a unique look at Disneyland Park in Anaheim, CA. It presents a view of the park from a behind-the-scenes perspective, with information about the hidden secrets and inside jokes scattered throughout Disneyland.

It is intended to be a look at the magic behind the magic of Disneyland, and will give the reader a greater appreciation for the incredible efforts and innovations that create the Disneyland experience. If seeing how a magic trick works spoils the fun for you, then you might want to try another guide. However, if you find yourself asking “How do they do that?” when you see an oncoming boulder in Indiana Jones or translucent ghosts in the Haunted Mansion, this guide is here to satisfy your curiosity.

Secrets of the Mouse, Buy it on Amazon (Thanks, Akma!)

Ah, Britain: the UK government lost four million citizens' person information last year and they're getting worse, not better. Of course, as soon as they force us all to carry biometric cards that link and log all our personal information, this problem will surely be solved? After all the answer to the difficulty of managing data is to just shovel more data in the hopper, by the shedload, and make sure that the kind of data grows ever-more sensitive and important. Right? Right?

The U.K. government has lost the personal information of up to four million citizens in one year alone... And the trend has not stopped - in the latest revelation, HM Revenue Customs, which infamously lost the details of 25 million child benefits claimants last November on two unencrypted discs, experienced 1,993 data breaches between 1 October last year and 24 June.

UK gov't loses personal data on 4M people in one year (via /.)

Carbohydrates don't just screw up your blood-sugar: they release free radicals that kill appetite-suppressing cells. The research is from a Nature article by Dr Zane Andrews, a neuroendocrinologist with Monash University's Department of Physiology.

"The more carbs and sugars you eat, the more your appetite-control cells are damaged, and potentially you consume more," Dr Andrews said.

Dr Andrews said the attack on appetite suppressing cells creates a cellular imbalance between our need to eat and the message to the brain to stop eating.

"People in the age group of 25 to 50 are most at risk. The neurons that tell people in the crucial age range not to over-eat are being killed-off.

Killer Carbs: Scientist Finds Key To Overeating As We Age

A good week for young adult science fiction! John Scalzi's long-awaited debut YA novel, Zoe's Tale, has just hit shelves. This is a young-adult story in the popular and thrilling Old Man's War universe, and it's got all the heart and smarts I've come to expect from Scalzi. Run, don't walk, and get another copy for your kids while you're at it!

In the touching fourth novel set in the Old Man's War universe, Scalzi revisits the events of 2007's The Last Colony from the perspective of Zoë, adopted daughter of previous protagonists Jane Sagan and John Perry. Jane and John are drafted to help found the new human colony of Roanoke, struggling against a manipulative and deceitful homeworld government, native werewolf-like creatures and a league of aliens intent on preventing all space expansion and willing to eradicate the colony if needed. Meanwhile, teenage Zoë focuses more on her poetic boyfriend, Enzo; her sarcastic best friend, Gretchen; and her bodyguards, a pair of aliens from a race called the Obin who worship and protect Zoë because of a scientific breakthrough made by her late biological father.

Zoe's Tale

See also:
* Forever War with better sex, Starship Troopers without the lectures: Old Man's War
* Sequel to Scalzi's Old Man's War: The Ghost Brigades

Sudarshan sez, "The Tamil language, widely spoken in the state of Tamil Nadu in south India, has a large body of pulp fiction. But it hasn't been available to non-Tamil speakers, until now. A new publishing house, Blaft translated a bunch of these stories and published an representative anthology of the stuff. I loved the book myself when I read it (I raved about it on my blog). The book has gone on to be one of the big successes of the year in India, and they're thinking of bringing out a sequel, and similar anthologies for pulp in other languages. " The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction (Thanks, Sudarshan!)

Sean O sez, "Slim Gaillard was a jazz musician/vocalist popular during the late-30s/early-50s. He popularized a 'Hipster's Argot' called 'Vout' which is present in lots of his recordings. These scans are from a promotional leaflet that compile the various words of Slim's dialect. So don't be a bringer-down and get mell-o-roonie, gate." That's strictly solid jack, let me lay a couple gas-meters on you. A babadiy be a babidy ba a babbidy boobie.

If you haven't heard Slim Gaillard's music (as heard in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, no less), go get some and have your lid flipped Vout-O-Reenee Dictionary (Thanks, Sean O!)

The LA Times's Joseph Menn has a great, well-researched feature article on the history of the copyright for the image of Mickey Mouse as portrayed in the earliest Disney cartoons -- and the theory that Disney made mistakes early on with its copyright registration, placing images of that specific Mickey (not the Mickey we know today) in the public domain. Prominent legal scholars like Peter Jaszi agree, but who will shell out the millions in legal fees to prove it? After all, the company's already threatened legal action against law-students who publish papers investigating the question!

Brown went searching for flawed formalities -- and found one. It was on the title card at the beginning of a "Steamboat Willie" cartoon that had just been rereleased on a 1993 LaserDisc honoring Mickey's 65th birthday. It said in full:

"Disney Cartoons
Present
A Mickey Mouse
Sound Cartoon
Steamboat Willie
A Walt Disney Comic
By Ub Iwerks
Recorded by Cinephone Powers System
Copyright MCMXXIX."

[...]

The authoritative legal treatise "Nimmer on Copyright" says that a copyright is void if multiple names create uncertainty, and courts have agreed. In 1961, a federal judge in Massachusetts cited the "accompanied by" rule in throwing out a copyright claim by newspaper cartoonist Art Moger. Moger's name was included in the title above his panels, but the name of another artist ran inside the boxes.

Disney's rights to young Mickey Mouse may be wrong (Thanks, Xeni!)

Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle) has a new novel coming out in just a couple weeks -- Anathem. Some of us here at Boing Boing have been following this one with much obsession. Here's a sneak copy of an abridged glossary of neologisms and language-bending goodies from the book. My favorite Stephensonism here is "bulshytt," which doesn't mean exactly what you think it might.

PDF Link to preview glossary for Neal Stephenson's Anathem.

I dropped in at the Tor Books offices today and spotted this fantastic new edition of Harry Harrison's novel Make Room! Make Room! (better known for the film based on it, Soylent Green). Now that's a hell of a good-lookin' book. Make Room! Make Room!

Flickr user Brittnybadger has a drop-dead gorgeous set of disassembled household appliances, saying, "this was my senior thesis project at the hartford art school this past year...i took apart used cooking/cleaning appliances, and arranged their interior parts very systematically on a white sheet of bristol board. my intention was to explore the hidden "brains" of these appliances; allowing us to view these everyday objects from a new perspective." disassembled household appliances (via Kottke)

Geeky gag cartoon from 1961. (Note the "oscillyscope" on the workbench.) Oscilloscope Humor

Clayton, California Mayor Gregg Manning is punishing two little kids for taking the initiative to sell their own garden produce from a card table in front of their house.

Manning ordered police to raid their operation because the neighborhood isn't zoned for commerce, and because it constituted an imaginary traffic hazard.

Clayton Mayor Gregg Manning ... wonders what Katie and Sabrina might do with that produce stand if the zoning laws weren't enforced.

"They may start out with a little card-table and selling a couple of things, but then who is to say what else they have. Is all the produce made there, do they make it themselves? Are they going to have eggs and chickens for sale next," said Manning.

Eggs and chickens? The horror.

Young girls fight produce stand closure (via Reason)

I took my family to a free (and terrific!) The Knack concert in Woodland Hills, Californian on Sunday, and used my digital camera to take a crappy video of the band performing my favorite song of theirs, "Good Girls Don't." Silent Porn Star wrote a wonderful essay about what the song meant to her when she used to listen to it in high school in 1978.

I'm no music expert, so I wouldn't even try to discuss "their sound" and it's place in Music History; but The Knack holds a very important place in my music history.

You see, like most high school girls in 1978, I ran out and bought My Sharona. First, it was the 45 single (for you young pups, that's a smaller vinyl recording played at a faster speed); but as soon as it was released, I went to Get The Knack (that's the LP, dearies). And when Good Girls Don't hit the airwaves, well, things changed.

In that flushing-heat sort of way.

Read the rest of the essay here: Good Girls Don't

Tom Vanderbilt of the The Wilson Quarterly profiles the recently-departed traffic engineer, Hans Monderman, of the "less is more" school of traffic control.
Vanderbilt is the author of the Freakonomics-style book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us).

In the last few years, however, one traffic engineer did achieve a measure of global celebrity, known, if not exactly by name, then by his ideas. His name was Hans Monderman. The idea that made Monderman, who died of cancer in January at the age of 62, most famous is that traditional traffic safety ­infra­structure—­warning signs, traffic lights, metal railings, curbs, painted lines, speed bumps, and so ­on—­is not only often unnecessary, but can endanger those it is meant to protect.

As I drove with Monderman through the northern Dutch province of Friesland several years ago, he repeatedly pointed out offending traffic signs. “Do you really think that no one would perceive there is a bridge over there?” he might ask, about a sign warning that a bridge was ahead. “Why explain it?” He would follow with a characteristic maxim: “When you treat people like idiots, they’ll behave like idiots.” Eventually he drove me to Makkinga, a small village at whose entrance stood a single sign. It welcomed visitors, noted a 30 kilometer-per-hour speed limit, then added: “Free of Traffic Signs.” This was Monderman humor at its finest: a traffic sign announcing the absence of traffic ­signs.

The Traffic Guru (Thanks, Barry!)

Chainsaw Maid is a creepy, extremely gory, and well-made claymation zombie movie.

If you enjoyed it, here's more. (Thanks, Johnny Ryan!)

At Global Nerdy, Joey deVilla comments on Microsoft's decision to use Jerry Seinfeld as its new spokesman. The best part of Joey's post is the collection of YouTube videos of celebrity computer endorsements over the last 25 years.

Above, Bill Cosby pretending to be excited about a $100 rebate for the TI 99/4.

Seinfeld and Celebrity Computer Endorsements

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A representative of Students for a Free Tibet tells Boing Boing that 6 American bloggers and pro-Tibet activists who went missing in Beijing for days after being detained by authorities have re-appeared -- and that authorities have given them a sentence of ten days in jail each for "upsetting public order."

The names of the missing bloggers/vloggers and activists presumed to have been those jailed:

- James Powderly (Graffitti Research Lab )
- Brian Conley (Alive In Baghdad blog)
- Jeffrey Rae
- Jeff Goldin
- Michael Liss
- Tom Grant

Details on SFT website, with statements from that group alleging recent extra-judicial executions and detentions of ethnic Tibetan protesters inside Tibet:

A Tibetan nun named Sonam Yungzom is reported to have been shot while shouting slogans in Kardze town, eastern Tibet (now part of Sichuan province) on August 10th. One source says she yelled out: “There are no human rights in China, there is brutal oppression in Tibet, still the Olympics go on in China.” She was hit by five to six bullets and then her body was thrown in a vehicle and taken away.

Snip from a news article about the jailed protesters in Beijing:

In a brief faxed statement, the city police information department said "Thomas" and five other foreigners had been apprehended on Tuesday for "upsetting public order", without identifying the six people any further.

"Beijing police decided to give the six 10 days of administrative detention," the faxed statement said.

Administrative detention is a punishment that can be meted out by Chinese police without having to go through the courts. Students For a Free Tibet said it assumed the six were American pro-Tibet activists who police detained in Beijing on Tuesday.

"These young men were in Beijing to amplify Tibetan voices calling for freedom and human rights and the right of all people to freedom of expression," Students For a Free Tibet executive director Lhadon Tethong said.

Six foreigners given 10 days' detention: Beijing police (Agence-France Presse). (Thanks, NF)

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Previously on Boing Boing blog:
* Beijing update: New detentions, 6 US protesters missing, Tibetan protesters in Tibet reportedly shot dead.
* Beijing: "Alive in Baghdad" videoblogger among US citizens detained in pro-Tibet protests
* Beijing: Five US activists detained after lighting up "Free Tibet" LED Throwies banner near Olympics site
* GRL's James Powderly detained in Beijing for planning pro-Tibet "L.A.S.E.R. Stencil" art protest

Related episodes of Boing Boing tv:
* BBtv WORLD (Tibet): Inside Lhasa
* Vlog (Xeni): Tibet report - monks forced to participate in staged videos.
* Vlog (Xeni): Tibet's uprising and the internet

Klaus Pierre, a French/German actor-waiter-whatever, aspires against all odds to become America's next great action hero. Today, in the final chapter of our observational documentary of this Hollywood hopeful, we witness his final challenge -- the American immigration system. His green card has run out, and that is a dilemma no amount of drop-kicks or ninja-punches can solve. Goodbye Klaus. Auf wiedersehn or whatever. Ciao. See you on the laptop screen.

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Link to Boing Boing tv blog post with discussion, downloadable video, and podcast subscription instructions.

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Previous Klaus Pierre episodes on BBtv:

• Klaus Pierre, French-German Action Hero, works out.
• Klaus Pierre: Big Party
• Klaus Pierre: Super Pretty Action Hero Star
• Klaus Pierre: The Beach
• Klaus Pierre: Red Carpet Botox Dreams
• Klaus Pierre: Pirate Musical of Epic Fail
• Klaus Pierre: Savate
• Klaus Pierre: Coffee Shop.
• Klaus Pierre: Swordfighting
• Point Break and heartbreak

Clive Thompson looks at the latest iteration of the Weight Watchers online tool and concludes that the program has turned into an RPG:

Think about it. As with an RPG, you roll a virtual character, manage your inventory and resources, and try to achieve a goal. Weight Watchers' points function precisely like hit points; each bite of food does damage until you've used up your daily amount, so you sleep and start all over again. Play well and you level up -- by losing weight! And the more you play it, the more you discover interesting combinations of the rules that aren't apparent at first. Hey, if I eat a fruit-granola breakfast and an egg-and-romaine lunch, I'll have enough points to survive a greasy hamburger dinner for a treat!

Even the Weight Watchers web tool is amazingly gamelike. It has the poke-around-and-see-what-happens elegance you see in really good RPG game screens. Accidentally snack on a candy bar and ruin your meal plan for the day? No worries: Just go into the database and see what spells -- whoops, I mean foods -- you can still use with your remaining points.

And those 35 extra points you get every week? They're like a special buff or potion -- a last-ditch save when you're on the ropes.

Fun Way to Lose Weight: Turn Dieting Into an RPG (via Wonderland)

Thomas sez, "Misterchen has created some clever shirts that say 'Made in USA' in Chinese." Made In The USA Tee (Thanks, Thomas!)

Microsoft's new data-centres are comprised of entire sealed shipping containers that are slotted into racks and left to run until a critical mass of their processor units have failed, then are swapped out.

Starting with a Chicago-area facility due to open later this year, Microsoft will use an approach in which servers arrive at the data center in a sealed container, already networked together and ready to go. The container itself is then hooked up to power, networking, and air conditioning.

"The trucks back 'em in, rack 'em, and stack 'em," Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie told CNET News. And the containers remain sealed, Ozzie said. Once a certain number of servers in the container have failed, it will be pulled out and sent back to the manufacturer and a new container loaded in.

Microsoft's data centers growing by the truckload (via Beyond the Beyond)

With the McCain campaign smearing Dungeons and Dragons players, Wired's Threat Level blog is asking its readers to come up with character descriptions or Monster Manual blurbs for McCain:

1st Level Fighter / 14th Level Aristocrat by (+5, Troll)

His stat block is STR 12, INT 9, WIS 9, DEX 9, CON 10, CHR 14, adjusting for age. His Bluff skill is maxed, but he has just one rank in Knowledge (Religion) and no ranks in Knowledge (Economics). He was only a fighter for a short time, but he brags about those days to anyone who doesn't intentionally fail their Listen check. He managed to charm an aristocratic lass into marriage to make his fortune, though he had to leave his first wife to do so.

Overlord McCainnister the Brute by Sam

This perennially battle-weary creature thrives on animosity and fear; it wields a Fox Cloak of Deception with a +10 stun against nearby intelligent creatures. Sporting long, tentacled arms, its impressive reach gives it a +5 luck in debates. Sadly, this creature is rarely found in the wild; it is usually paired as a familiar to the Horn-toothed Lobbyist.

John McCain Campaign Takes a +3 Vorpal Blade to Dungeons & Dragons Players

See also: McCain staffer slams Dungeons and Dragons players

This is a fantastic Maya Angelou quote:

I’ve learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way he or she handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights.

I'd give myself a 7/10 on the luggage thing, a 9/10 on the rain, and a 5/10 on the lights. Lots of room for improvement. MALZ WERLD (via Kottke)

Random House is asking some of its authors of young adult books to sign contracts with "morality clauses" that allow the publisher to take back your advance and cancel your book if you're caught doing anything that "damages your reputation as a person suitable to work with or be associated with children, and consequently the market for or value of the work is seriously diminished." For the record, Random House Audio published my young adult novel Little Brother and did not request this clause.

An email arrives from the Society of Author's Children's Writers And Illustrators Group. Apparently, a well-established, enormous publishing house has decided to insert the following clause into its standard contract for children's books: "If you act or behave in a way which damages your reputation as a person suitable to work with or be associated with children, and consequently the market for or value of the work is seriously diminished, and we may (at our option) take any of the following actions: Delay publication / Renegotiate advance / Terminate the agreement."

Children's writers, don't misbehave (via Out of Ambit)

Here's a striking image from the Aug, 1931 issue of Modern Mechanix; an elaborate cigarette umbrella that keeps a clown's smoke safe from seltzer attacks.

MANY are the inventions devised to insure a dry smoke, but it has remained for a clown appearing with a circus in England to solve the problem. An umbrella over the smoke keeps off water and a spigot drains off excess moisture.

No More Rain-Soaked Cigarettes! (Aug, 1931)

Gary sez, "Pool is a Creative Commons licensed social media project being developed by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. It's a place to share your creative work with the Pool community and ABC producers - upload music, photos, videos, documentaries, interviews, animations and more. It's a collaborative space where audiences become makers." Pool (Thanks, Gary!)

Marilyn sez, "Pual Nicklen's amazing underwater photos of sailfish are a stunning series of seriously bizarre-looking sailfish attacking a school of sardines as big as an elephant." In the Whirl (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Chris sez, "Canadian indie artist, and co-host of the CBC radio show Under The Covers, Danny Michel has made the individual tracks from his most recent album available on the web. The raw tracks are provided in a number of formats, ranging from relatively low quality MP3s, up to CD quality WAV files. Danny invites his audience to do their own remixes of the tunes from the album." Danny Michel “Feather, Fur & Fin” Remix (Thanks, Chris!)

Geologist Maria Brumm makes a compelling case for considering ice-cream to be a sort of igneous rock:

Ice cream is an igneous rock. You begin with a liquid slurry containing a hodgepodge of chemicals, and by bringing it below its freezing point, you create something solid - or at least solid-ish. Good ice cream or sorbet needs a little give, a bit of liquid remaining between ice crystals so that you can comfortably dig into it with a spoon. This is what it looks like: [A scanning electron microscope image of ice cream. The ice crystals and air bubbles are separated by sugar solution From Clarke, 2003, "The Physics of Ice Cream" Physics Education 38 (3)]

Compare that to a thin section of glassy lava from the Pacific Northwest: [Small, separated mineral crystals in a glassy groundmass]

Much like igneous rocks, the same liquid mix can turn out very differently depending on what happens while it is freezing. The goal of most ice cream and sorbet is to have a smooth and creamy texture, which would be ruined by the presence of large ice crystals. To achieve this, you want to cool your ice cream so quickly that the crystals don't have time to grow, and keep the mixture stirred up while it freezes. There's a lot of energy involved in the transition from liquid to solid water, and a home ice cream maker can't do the heat transfer quickly enough to keep the ice crystals small, so you have to sit there and turn the crank until your arm is sore while the mixture slowly freezes (or invest in a fancier machine that will do the stirring for you).

The Igneous Petrology of Ice Cream (Thanks, Marilyn!)

These newlyweds know how to party. They were tasered and arrested at their raucous wedding reception, and two days later they were tasered and arrested again.

(Photo by Kacper Skowron/For the Sun-Times)

"The short version of the story is they didn't want to quit their partying," said Mike Sepic, Berrien County, Mich., chief assistant prosecutor. "If you put this in the class of wedding receptions gone bad, I guess this would take the cake."

And the story didn't end after the reception. Two nights later, the bride and groom were again arrested in Michigan -- and again shocked by a stun gun -- after struggling with police investigating a noise complaint, Sepic said. The groom was charged with pushing his new wife down during that incident, but the charge was later dropped as part of a plea bargain, Sepic said.

Newlyweds are Tasered, arrested at reception melee, and again two days later (suntimes.com) (via For Your Entertainment)

A quick update on previous BB posts (one, two, three) about American tech-artists and activists detained for pro-Tibet protests in Beijing. A Students for a Free Tibet spokesperson tells Boing Boing:

Everyone listed here is still missing.

- James Powderly
- Brian Conley
- Jeffrey Rae
- Jeff Goldin
- Michael Liss
- Tom Grant

They were all working in Beijing in different ways, as citizen journalists and activists. My opinion at this point is they are being held longer than other detained activists because they all had much more gear - macbooks, eee pc's, HD video cameras, digital SLR cams... standard stuff in most places, but I can imagine it raises a lot of eyebrows to the authorities in China, especially when related to protests and Tibet.

We are in active touch with the US Embassy in Bejing the the US State Department... the big deadline we are just hitting 48 hours right now, so 24 hours left until the 3 day mark.

The activists who deployed the LED banner have all already been sent home, arriving in JFK right about now.

And below, word of additional, new detentions of a Tibetan-German activist and two others from the United States. Snip from SFT announcement:

Beijing – After intense surveillance by up to 50 plainclothes police, a Tibetan-German man and two pro-Tibet activists protested tonight near the Bird’s Nest stadium. The three raised their fists in the air, unfurled a Tibetan flag, and called out “Free Tibet” at approximately 12:05 am Beijing time. A fourth Tibet activist who observed the protest was detained by police at the scene. The four were taken away in a police vehicle and their whereabouts are unknown.

The four are Tibetan-German Florien Norbu Gyanatshang, 30, American Jeremy Wells, 38, American John Watterberg, 30, and Briton Mandie McKeown, 41.

“Against all odds, a Tibetan has once again raised our outlawed national flag in Beijing tonight,” said Lhadon Tethong, the Tibetan-Canadian Executive Director of Students for a Free Tibet. “This action symbolises the determination and steadfast commitment of the Tibetan people and our supporters from around the world to achieve freedom and justice for six million Tibetans living under the brutal rule of the Chinese government.”

Tibetans and Tibet supporters have defied the best efforts of the Chinese authorities to silence all voices of dissent during the Olympic Games, staging eight protests in Beijing over the past two weeks. The protests have ranged from technically-challenging banner hangs to a dramatic “die-in” at Tiananmen Square. Surveillance efforts by Chinese authorities increased dramatically over the past few days.

“The Chinese government is petrified of these peaceful acts of defiance simply because they represent the true feelings of Tibetans inside Tibet,” said Tenzin Dorjee, Deputy Director of Students for a Free Tibet. “Our protests are a reminder to the world of the tragic reality of the Chinese government’s illegitimate occupation of Tibet and the urgent need for the Chinese leadership to seek a resolution with the Tibetan people.”

Lhadon Tethong, director of Students for a Free Tibet, quoted in this New York Times article:

[Tethong] said she was more concerned with the plight of protesters in Tibet. In recent days, she said, at least three people have reportedly been killed in the city of Ganzi after protesting on the street. She said one woman, Dolma Yungzom, was shot five or six times point blank after she unfurled a banner, though Ms. Tethong provided no evidence.

Watch video updates on FT08tv.

Previously on Boing Boing blog:
* Beijing: "Alive in Baghdad" videoblogger among US citizens detained in pro-Tibet protests
* Beijing: Five US activists detained after lighting up "Free Tibet" LED Throwies banner near Olympics site
* GRL's James Powderly detained in Beijing for planning pro-Tibet "L.A.S.E.R. Stencil" art protest

Related episodes of Boing Boing tv:
* BBtv WORLD (Tibet): Inside Lhasa
* Vlog (Xeni): Tibet report - monks forced to participate in staged videos.
* Vlog (Xeni): Tibet's uprising and the internet

This gentleman likes to watch videos while he drives at night. He places his iPhone on his car's dashboard and watches the reflection on the windshield.

He wears a headset while he watches, but usually with just one ear bud inserted "so that I can hear the traffic and whatnot."

'It's great — I can watch my stuff while I'm driving' (Book of Joe)

MAKE: founder Dale Dougherty went to the California State Fair where he snapped the photo above. Dale writes:

Here is one of my favorite sights, a "green" truck in the Farm area. It's an old truck covered in grass with vegetables and flowers growing in the flat bed. Talk about a raised bed! Think how the yards of rural America could be transformed once rusty wrecks become warm and fuzzy, like something out of a Pixar movie.

Grass-covered truck (Makezine.com)

Drake Bennett of the Boston Globe wrote an article on the various ways con men gain their marks' trust, including body language, verbal language, and facial expressions.

When deciding who to trust, the research suggests, people use shortcuts. For example, they look at faces. According to recent work by Nikolaas Oosterhof and Alexander Todorov of Princeton's psychology department, we form our first opinions of someone's trustworthiness through a quick physiognomic snapshot. By studying people's reactions to a range of artificially-generated faces, Oosterhof and Todorov were able to identify a set of features that seemed to engender trust. Working from those findings, they were able to create a continuum: faces with high inner eyebrows and pronounced cheekbones struck people as trustworthy, faces with low inner eyebrows and shallow cheekbones untrustworthy.

In a paper published in June, they suggested that our unconscious bias is a byproduct of more adaptive instincts: the features that make a face strike us as trustworthy, if exaggerated, make a face look happy - with arching inner eyebrows and upturned mouths - and an exaggerated "untrustworthy" face looks angry - with a furrowed brow and frown. In this argument, people with "trustworthy" faces simply have, by the luck of the genetic draw, faces that look a little more cheerful to us.

Just as in other cognitive shorthands, we make these judgments quickly and unconsciously - and as a result, Oosterhof and Todorov point out, we can severely and immediately misjudge people. In reality, of course, cheekbone shape and eyebrow arc have no relationship with honesty.

Judging trustworthiness in the face (via Mind Hacks)