Fabulous Maker and rogue photographer Bre Pettis paid a visit to the Technisches museum and snapped their "30 Ways to Die of Electrocution" exhibit. I like the emphasis on urine and pranks in the list.

30 Ways to Die of Electrocution (via Geisha Asobi)

Sleeper hit game Katamari Damacy has rolled onto the iPhone in a slimmer yet tilt-sensitive form called I Love Katamari. According to our man Brandon Boyer at Boing Boing Offworld, it's still a ball of fun, managing to "recapture the harrowing anxiety of the originals." Full review on Offworld. Katamari rolls onto iPhone

Photographer Glen E. Friedman is best known for iconic images that captured the roots of three truly indigenous American pop cultures: skateboarding, American hardcore, and hip hop. Starting tonight, you can see all three represented at Shepard Fairey's (relatively new) gallery, Subliminal Projects, over in the Silverlake/Echo Park area of Los Angeles. Sean Bonner, who has worked with both Shep and Glen (and exhibited their work at a gallery he co-owned), says:

[Glen's] retrospective exhibition Idealist Propaganda will open at Shepard Fairey’s Subliminal Projects gallery. The gallery is located at 1331 W Sunset Blvd and the opening is at 8PM. It’s going to packed so I suggest getting there earlier rather than later if you can. I was there last night and got a sneak preview (as well as to help film and upcoming episode of BoingBoingTV about the show) and it’s breathtaking. Trust me, you don’t want to miss seeing all these photos in person.

I second that, and if anyone wants to make me really happy this holiday? Buy me like one of every print there, please. I cannot WAIT to share the BBtv episode(s) with you all. I don't want to spoil anything, so I'll stop there. But they're gonna be pretty special, and it was an honor and a total kick to tape them (thanks again, Glen, Shepard, and Sean).

More info: Glen E Friedman at Subliminal Projects this weekend (Los Angeles Metblogs).

Also: Several books of Glen E. Friedman's photography are available, and make killer holiday gifts.

PHOTO: Joseph "DJ Run" Simmons, Darryl "D.M.C." McDaniels, and Jason "Jam-Master Jay" Mizell, collectively known as RUN-DMC. Photographed by Glen E. Friedman in 1985. This image is in the Idealist show, and it's one of my favorites. Mizell was murdered in 2002. To date no one has been prosecuted for his death, despite much evidence and a room full of eyewitnesses.

BB bosom buddies COOP and Ruth have issued a new t-shirt featuring COOP's incredible interpretation of the lovely and talented Jackhammer Jill! This version is long-sleeved and printed on a dark gray American Apparel cotton shirt with the BB logo down the left sleeve. (The real shirt is darker than the mock-up pictured above.) Ruth says she'll do her darndest to ship them in time for the holidays but she can't promise. Only 69 of these shirts are available so act fast! Sizes small through XXL. COOP's long-sleeved Boing Boing t-shirt

Ed. Note: Boing Boing's current guestblogger Clay Shirky is the author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. He teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, where he works on the overlap of social and technological networks.

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Every now and again, I see a business doing something so sensible and so radical at the same time that I realize I'm seeing a little piece of the future. I had that feeling last week, after visiting my friend Scott Heiferman at Meetup.

On my way out after a meeting, Scott pulled me into a room by the elevators, where a couple of product people were watching a live webcam feed of someone using Meetup. Said user was having a hard time figuring out a new feature, and the product people, riveted, were taking notes. It was the simplest setup I'd ever seen for user feedback, and I asked Scott how often they did that sort of thing. "Every day" came the reply.

Every day. That's not user testing as a task to be checked off on the way to launch. That's learning from users as a way of life.

Andres Glusman and Karina van Schaardenburg designed Meetup's set-up to be simple and cheap: no dedicated room, no two-way mirrors, just a webcam and a volunteer. This goal is to look for obvious improvements continuously, rather than running outsourced, large-N testing every eighteen months. As important, these tests turn into live task lists, not archived reports. As Glusman describes the goal, it's "Have people who build stuff watch others use the stuff they build."

Mark Hurst, the user experience expert, talks about Tesla -- "time elapsed since labs attended" -- a measure of how long it's been since a company's decision-makers (not help desk) last saw a real user dealing with their product or service. Measured in days, Meetup approaches a Tesla of 1.

Glusman and van Schaardenburg have also made it possible to take Jacob Nielsen's user-testing advice -- "Test with five users" -- and add "...every week." Obstacles to getting real feedback are now mainly cultural, not technological; any business that isn't learning from their users doesn't want to learn from their users.

On my way down after seeing the user test, the woman I'd seen on the screen got onto the elevator, and I mentioned I'd seen her trying the new interface. "Oh", she said, surprised. "I didn't realize anyone was actually paying attention to me."

Hurst: Time elapsed since labs attended | Nielsen: Why You Only Need to Test With 5 Users

The McCain-Palin campaign fire-sale dumped a bunch of orphaned Blackberries, including at least one loaded with confidential personal numbers of important people, and a ton of internal campaign email. These were the people who were planning on running an entire country.

Blackberry phones at $20 a piece. There were only 10 left. All of the batteries had died. There were no chargers for sale. But people were snatching them up. So, we bought a couple.

And ended up with a lot more than we bargained for.

When we charged them up in the newsroom, we found one of the $20 Blackberry phones contained more than 50 phone numbers for people connected with the McCain-Palin campaign, as well as hundreds of emails from early September until a few days after election night.

We traced the Blackberry back to a staffer who worked for “Citizens for McCain,” a group of democrats who threw their support behind the Republican nominee. The emails contain an insider’s look at how grassroots operations work, full of scheduling questions and rallying cries for support.

But most of the numbers were private cell phones for campaign leaders, politicians, lobbyists and journalists.

We called some of the numbers.

“Somebody made a mistake,” one owner told us. “People’s numbers and addresses were supposed to be erased.”

“They should have wiped that stuff out,” another said. But he added, “Given the way the campaign was run, this is not a surprise.”

McCain Campaign Sells Info-Loaded Blackberry to FOX 5 Reporter (via Memex 1.1)

Mark sez, "A nice bit of copyright hypocrisy for you. It's a story on the BBC website about an upcoming broadcast of an episode of Dad's Army that was thought to have been lost. The original soundtrack had been erased by the BBC, but a radio presenter made his own recording of the episode and kept it for 30 years. The show's producers are thrilled to have found a good quality copy of the recording. The irony is that, as you know, UK law only allows 'home taping' for temporary 'time shifting'. Certainly not for creating a library of recordings lasting 30 years. With their DRM-encumbered iPlayer and other efforts to prevent 'copying', it's even less likely that there will be any duplicate discoveries 30 years from now."

'Lost' Dad's Army show back on TV (Thanks, Mark!)

A Swedish artist uses dividends from an "unethical" investment fund (money used to buy shares in an arms dealer, a tobacco company, an alcohol company, a pornography company, and a gambling company) to fund scholarships for artists. He calls the fund, "The Pål Hollender Foundation for Ethically or Aesthetically Offended Consumers of Culture."

Hollender’s foundation is itself the work of art, which is owned by the Malmö museum. Physically it consists of 13 boxes, where visitors can post their applications for a scholarship. A text on the wall outlines the foundation’s constitution. The money the scholarship holders receive is intended “to promote insight or further education among cultural consumers with respect to what is commonly thought of as respectable culture”. Applicants must sign a declaration stating that they feel or have felt offended either ethically or aesthetically by culture.

Swedish artist uses “unethical” cash to fund cultural scholarships (via We Make Money Not Art)

A couple years back, my friends Paul and James opened a pair of chocolate shops in London, Paul A Young Fine Chocolates, with one branch in the City and the other in Islington, in Camden Passage. Paul is a self-taught chocolatier whose truffles I'd been lucky enough to sample over the years, and James is a very sharp entrepreneur, technologist and activist, so I knew that whatever they made, it would be tasty.

But I didn't count on it being this good.

In a few short years, Paul A Young chocolates have won more awards than I can count, including the Academy of Chocolate's "Best New Chocolate Shop," "Best Dark Chocolate Truffle" and "Best Filled Chocolate," and so on -- and when I dropped in this week to buy the last of my Christmas presents, I discovered that the Observer and the Financial Times had both put Paul A Young on their list of the 10 best chocolates in the world. I'm pretty well travelled, and I've enjoyed some magnificent chocolate here and there, but I'm hard pressed to find a chocolate I find myself thinking about, dreaming of, tasting the phantom of, more than Paul's.

Here are a few of my favourites from the shop. First, the drinking chocolate -- a gently heated pot of molten Valrhona chocolate guarded by several jars of fine ground spice, ranging from chilis to ginger to cardamom, cinnamon, and many others. Get a cup and season to taste, stir, drink, fall unconscious. I'm also a great fan of Paul's chewy, rich brownies, which have the texture and color of good, loamy soil and the flavour of high-cacao artisanal chocolate adulterated with such additives as stem ginger.

But my favourites have to be the truffles -- they were special treats for my wife during her pregnancy and after her delivery, they're the gifts I give to friends come from out of town, they're the treats I go for on days when nothing seems to be going right. There are the "normal" truffles (for example, the gold-medal-winning Sea Salted Caramels have a hard, glossy dark shell that shatters in your mouth, revealing a slow, decadent slurp of salty caramel, or the Kalamansi truffles, with a centre of tangy tropical citrus), and the exotics -- truffles stuffed with Marmite, stilton, and other savouries that turn out to be extremely witty and improbable taste-combinations that are inevitably delicious in a way you never expected.

What's the catch? Well, they're kind of expensive -- especially if you're used to buying an assortment of milk chocolates at the grocery store. And they're also only available in person at the shops in London -- no mail order. Paul's chocolates are made fresh daily on the premises, without any preservatives of any kind, and they just don't travel (I've successfully brought abroad them in my hand luggage, but I wouldn't try to ship them as cargo or by mail). So this is a pleasure strictly reserved for Londoners and those who visit London.

It's this last part that's kept me from mentioning them here for so long -- it seems like a cheat to tell you how goddamned fantastic this stuff is and then announce that you can't have any. But it's the end of the holiday shopping season and plenty of you live in London. If you're looking for an extraordinary gift that comes from a local small business, won't clutter up the house after it's opened, and will certainly be warmly appreciated and fondly remembered, this is my top choice.

Oh, and Paul's hiring staff -- his business is doing very well, despite the crummy economy, and I can't think of a better place to work (except for the risk to your waistline!).

Paul A Young Fine Chocolates

Update: in the comments, James Cronin - Managing Director, Paul A Young Fine Chocolates, sez: "I'll brief the team in the morning that if anyone mentions that they read about us on Boing Boing they can have a free chocolate on me."

If you're giving someone an iPhone for Christmas or Hanukkah, you must also give that person a copy of iPhone Fully Loaded, 2nd Edition, by Chicago Sun Times columnist and MacBreak Weekly co-host Andy Ihnatko. I read the first edition when it came out, and the chapter on iTunes smart filters alone improved my experience with the iPhone.

The other chapters are also very useful. You'll learn the easiest way to get DVDs, internet videos, VHS tapes, broadcast TV episodes, podcasts, e-books, comics, songs from various sources, Office documents, and lots of other kinds of media onto an iPhone. You'll learn how to turn text files into audiobooks, and watch videos hosted on an online dropbox.

Even if you didn't have an iPhone, you could pick up a lot of useful computer and media tips here. As a bonus, Ihnatko's wry sense of humor makes the book a lot of fun to read.

iPhone Fully Loaded

Today on Offworld our weekend gaming edition sees us reaching out to all of you to keep us all together, with the launch of our Facebook page and its repository thread for keeping track of our XBLA/PSN/Steam names (note that we also have soft-launched a Twitter feed as well!).

Before that, we heard with relief that Double Fine's Brütal Legend would be published by the increasingly boutique EA, saw eBooks officially coming to the DS, and watched an Extra Hyper Korg DS-10 performance from the composers behind Ridge Racer and Chrono Trigger.

We also printed and folded an amazing Legend of Zelda papercraft Link hat (and hair [!]), watched ten minutes of Red Fly's upcoming Wii version of Ghostbusters, proved Scott McCloud right with a comparison of console avatars, and, finally, watched an episode of Grip Wrench, a new animated short series from Rex Crowle, the illustrator behind much of Media Molecule and LittleBigPlanet's CMYK design (who also knows how to make a damn fine unicorn).

The discussion about whether or not an unpowered vehicle can be made to go directly downwind faster than the wind (DWFTTW) is ongoing. I was reading the comments this morning, and came across a link to this intriguing video, titled "Under the ruler faster than the ruler." It's starting to make me think that a DWFTTW cart is feasible.

In the video, I was surprised to see which direction the big wheel turned when the ruler was run across the top. I'm also quite impressed that this fellow and others are making models to conduct experiment, instead of simply speculating. Hooray for amateur science!

As I've requested in previous posts on this subject, if you have something to contribute to the discussion boards, please refrain from insults and name-calling.

(Stereoscope photo from 1906)

A wealthy film director is spending £40 million to build an exact replica of the Taj Mahal in Bangladesh, but Indian officials are trying to block its constructing, claiming the Taj Mahal, which was completed in 1653 is protected by copyright.

For their part, Bangladeshi officials are incensed by suggestions that the Taj Mahal - which was built by the Emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, and completed in 1653 - is protected by some sort of copyright.

“I'm not sure what they are talking about,” one said. “Show me where it says that emulating a building like this can be illegal.”

To make his Taj, Mr Moni imported marble and granite from Italy and diamonds from Belgium to add to 160kg (350lb) of bronze. He hopes that his version of the mausoleum will attract tourists to Bangladesh, a country that is well off the beaten track for Western holidaymakers.

India is trying to block Bangladesh's copycat Taj Mahal

Pop surrealist David Stoupakis has a solo exhibition of his phantasmagoric paintings opening tomorrow, December 13, at Corey Helford Gallery in Culver City, California. Corey Helford Gallery has invited BB readers to preview the entire exhibition, titled "These Predicaments," at the link below. Seen above, "Soup" (oil on canvas, 36" x 72"). I wish I could see these gorgeous paintings in person! From the show description:

For his second solo exhibition at the Gallery, Stoupakis parlays his talent for the supernatural and macabre into dramatic narratives that reveal symbolic turning points and unexpected dilemmas. A delicate balance of childhood innocence and haunting imagery, the series of oil-on-panel paintings and graphite drawings recounts grim fairytales of the decadent and demure. Marking a new direction for the artist, Stoupakis employs a brighter color palette than before and will unveil his largest piece to date for the exhibition. The reception for “These Predicaments” takes place on Saturday, December 13, and the evening will include music scored by composer Geoff Gersh. Open to the public, the exhibition will be on view until December 31, 2008.

David Stoupakis Preview (username: preview, password: preview25)

Noah Shachtman over at WIRED's Danger Room blog has posted a pretty big exclusive. "A Defense Department project, supposedly designed to support U.S. troops, was used instead to channel millions of dollars to personal friends and allies of its chief," he tells Boing Boing. How much you wanna bet we see anything but impunity for the crooks in the outgoing administration responsible for this? Also, what are the underwear perverts doing in that photo above? No, not Rumsfeld, I mean the blue and red guys.

Anyway: here's a snip from Noah's post:

The "America Supports You," or ASY, program was led in a "questionable and unregulated manner," according to a Department of Defense Inspector General report, obtained by Danger Room. At least $9.2 million was "inappropriately transferred" by the project's managers. Much of that money served only to further promote ASY, instead of assisting servicemembers.

In 2004, the office of then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld set up ASY as a six-month effort to showcase the U.S. public's backing for the troops and their families. "If you're serving overseas, and you watch the mainstream media coverage, sometimes you can't tell if America knows you're there," one official overseeing the program says. America Supports You was seen as a way to counteract that sense.

In time, however, the program grew. Pro-troop rallies were organized. Special wristband and dog-tags were made. Special-edition comic books were printed up. Processions were held on the National Mall, on the 9/11 anniversary. Sesame Street characters were enlisted to make DVDs that encouraged families with young children to talk about overseas deployments. America Supports You became a kind of umbrella group for all sorts of charity-related work for servicemembers and military families.

Meanwhile, ASY began to spend millions -- not to help the troops, the Inspector General says, but to help itself.

Exclusive: Pentagon Pro-Troop Group Misspent Millions, Report Says (WIRED Danger Room)

A bipartisan Senate report concluded that decisions by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld were a "direct cause" of inhumane treatment of POWs.

The report, endorsed by Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee, is the most forceful denunciation to date of the role that Rumsfeld and other top officials played in the prisoner abuse scandals of the last five years.

The document also challenges assertions by senior Bush administration officials that the most egregious cases of prisoner mistreatment were isolated incidents of appalling conduct by U.S. troops.

"The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own," the report says.

Instead, the document says, a series of high-level decisions in the Bush administration "conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody."

Of course, the only thing that will happen as a result of this report is that President Bush will give Rummy a medal.

Rumsfeld blamed in detainee abuse scandals

The mysterious Director of surrealist thinktank and clothier Imaginary Foundation has a gallery show of oil paintings and sculptures opening tomorrow night, December 13, at SURU in Los Angeles. The opening night festivities will include music by DJ Nitedog and Darkhorse and a special live appearance by the Cosmic Drummer featured on the Imaginary Foundation's "Space Is The Place" t-shirt. The show is titled "I Dream, Therefore I Become," and will be the subject of Monday's episode of BBtv. Tune in, and turn on.
Imaginary Foundation gallery show

Earlier this week, I wrote about a teacher in Austin who threatened to report a local free-Linux-machines charity to the police because "there's no such thing as free software" and they had therefore deceived the student she caught distributing Linux disks in class.

The teacher has since had a long conversation with the gentleman from the free Linux project, which is called HeliOS, and he's published a long, mature, and insightful note about the peace he's made with her (in particular, he posted a graceful and heartful apology for some out-of-line remarks he made about the teaching profession and the US teachers' union). It's worth a read:

Karen seems to be a good teacher, and as she stated to me today, she has learned more about the tech world in a few days than she's learned in five years.

That's because she's trapped in a world of Windows. Most people are.

I have contacted the technology department of AISD and have discovered it has a rich technology environment that uses open source software in all aspects of instruction, operation, and administration. The District has over 36,000 desktop and laptop computers. While about 24,000 of those computers run some version of Windows, AISD is anything but a Windows shop. Their current standard teacher/student image includes both Open Office and Firefox on all Windows computers, and recently has added Open Office to the Apple OS image. Other open source software on both images include audacity and lame, and other Free Software such as Google Earth, iTunes, Adobe and many plug-ins. They also are members of the world community grid; their 36,000 computers are providing many hours of spare processing time (during the work day) to organizations trying to solve major world problems such as energy, cancer, and AIDS. Additionally, they are running more than 100 Linux servers.

Character-Assasinations-Ain't-Us (via /.)

If you get a chance, check out tonight's full moon. It will be closer to Earth than it's been since 1993 - 221,560 miles away, making it look 30 percent brighter and 14 percent larger than 2008's other full moons. The composite NASA photo above shows how different the size of the moon appears at perigee, the moon's closest point to the Earth, and apogee, its furthest position from us. From National Geographic:

"Typically we don't have the full moon phase and perigee (the position of an object at its least distance from Earth), coinciding at the same time, so that makes this event particularly special," said Ed Krupp, director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, California...

"While high tides happen each month when the sun, Earth, and the moon are aligned, there is going to be an enhanced effect, with the moon being the closest it's been in more than a decade," said Ben Burress, staff astronomer at the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, California.

Sky Show Tonight: Bigges, Brightest Full Moon of 2008

Dr. M. Russell Stein was a dentist in New York city who built models of human jaws, bridges, and ferris wheels out of toothpicks. The Feb 1940 issue of Popular Science has an article about his remarkable creations.

Toothpick engineering is dentist's hobby

A Hello Kitty-themed maternity and pediatric hospital has opened in Yuanlin, Taiwan. The small 30-bed facility is authorized by Sanrio. From Reuters (Christine Lu photo):

Director Tsai Tsung-chi said he hopes the white, mouthless cat that is one of the world's most recognisable characters will ease the pain and fear associated with childbirth and being admitted into hospital.

"I wish that everyone who comes here, mothers who suffer while giving birth and children who suffer from an illness, can get medical care while seeing these kitties and bring a smile to their faces, helping forget about discomfort and recover faster," he told Reuters.

"Hello baby! Hello Kitty welcomes Taiwan newborns" and photos (Thanks, Lindsay Tiemeyer!)

HarperCollins and Nintendo struck a deal to make your Nintendo DS a simple E-book reader. The 100 Classic Books Collection software loads up the game device with Project Gutenberg books. Brownlee has the details over at Boing Boing Offworld.
E-books come to the Nintendo DS

Bloomberg News filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Federal Reserve on November 7 to find out who is getting the $2 trillion in bailout money. The Federal Reserve told them to shove it.

The Fed responded Dec. 8, saying it’s allowed to withhold internal memos as well as information about trade secrets and commercial information.

...

“Notwithstanding calls for enhanced transparency, the Board must protect against the substantial, multiple harms that might result from disclosure,” Jennifer J. Johnson, the secretary for the Fed’s Board of Governors, said in a letter e-mailed to Bloomberg News.

“In its considered judgment and in view of current circumstances, it would be a dangerous step to release this otherwise confidential information,” she wrote.

You think Madoff's $50 billion fraud was something? He's a patzer compared to these guys.

Federal Reserve refuses to disclose the recipients of $2 trillion in emergency loans

Perhaps you missed an episode or two of Boing Boing's daily original video programming this week? Here's a recap, so you can watch while you pretend to be productive at work for what's left of this fine Friday.

♦ MONDAY: In our Weekly Update, we caught up with the people behind the BB post "Donate Your Used Digital Camera to LA's Skid Row Photo Club. BB readers donated used gadgets to the Skid Row Photo Club, and project participants join us from the heart of Skid Row. Then, we LOLled as Mark's chickens dance to Yakety Sax, and watched some gory splatterpunk claymation videos from Japan. WATCH IT. Here's a direct MP4 Link.

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♦ TUESDAY: In our weekly Boing Boing Gadgets Video feature, Joel reviewed the Philips Norelco Bodygroom ($50) a shaver for men. Strategic kitteh were deployed as figleafs to shield our viewers' eyes from inadvertently exposed people-parts. WATCH IT. Here's a direct MP4 link.

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♦ WEDNESDAY: Brandon Boyer, editor of Boing Boing Offworld, updated us on iPhone games and arty Wii avatars. WATCH IT. Here's a Direct MP4 Link.

♦ Also on Wednesday, we began a three-day commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in partnership with WITNESS. First episode: this video about the treatment of mentally disabled youth at a hospital in Paraguay, and proof of the power in video to stop human rights abuses. WATCH IT. Here's a Direct MP4 Link.

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♦ THURSDAY: I interviewed WITNESS digital archivist Grace Lile, and she spoke about the importance of preserving and making available video that documents human rights abuses -- here in the US, and around the world. WATCH IT. Here's a Direct MP4 Link.

♦ Also on Thursday, we aired a WITNESS video feature about the lives of child soldiers in the Congo, and a man who works to demobilize, rehabilitate, and protect them. WATCH IT. Here's a Direct MP4 Link.

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♦ FRIDAY, today -- we aired our final WITNESS feature in this week's series. This video told the story of a Mayan man who witnessed the Rio Negro Massacre in Guatemala. WATCH IT. Here's a Direct MP4 Link.

♦ And finally, today -- we ended the week with a Unicorn Chaser at a music festival, featuring our old pal from London, Russell Porter. WATCH IT. Here's a Direct MP4 Link.

Surrealist science fiction author Philip K. Dick's birthday is December 16. In celebration. Total Dick-Head blogger Dave Gill will be doing a two-hour radio tribute tonight, from 10pm-midnight PT, on Pirate Cat Radio. Tune in to 87.9 FM in the San Francisco Bay Area or listen online. Dave says:

The show's called Psionic Dehiscence and I'll be playing some interviews with PKD - old ones - not from beyond the grave, some John Dowland, hopefully the VALIS opera (if you have a copy of this please email me), some Sonic Youth, Flaming Lips, and other strange rock 'n rollers influenced by PKD. I even hope to have some interviews with some of PKD's friends and family (no names just yet). Maybe even some of PKD's old radio plays will find their way on the show. I promise lots of rarities, so fire up your satellite recorders, or load the transmission into your data player for later rebroadcast, but don't miss the satellite firing.

Somebody's Got a Birthday Coming (Total Dick-Head), Pirate Cat Radio (piratecatradio.com)

UPDATE: Here's a link to the archived MP3 of the show!

A new research study suggests that women are more likely to give their phone number to a man they don't know when they are most fertile. Psychologist Nicolas Guéguen of the University of South Brittany and his colleagues report their results in the scientific journal Biological Psychology. From New Scientist:

Guéguen is cautious in his interpretations, but the study seems to offer real-world behavioural support for studies showing that women are most receptive to advances when they are likely to get pregnant.

Hormones could play a role, as estradiol (a form of oestrogen) and progesterone levels wax and wane during a woman's cycle, and most birth control pills contain progesterone. But Guéguen worries that a woman's relationship status will confound such associations, since single women could be less likely to be on birth control.

Fertile women more open to corny chat-up lines

Vitra's "Workbay" looks like my kind of chair. At first glance, it appears to have been designed for top-heavy aliens who have evolved giant brains that make them resemble lollipop-headed Blythe-doll uberman -- which is pretty darned cool. Then it becomes apparent that this chair will effectively shield you from visual and auditory distractions, so that you can buckle down in a truly obsessive, single-minded focused way in front of your screen, and that's even cooler.

Workbay protects its users visually and acoustically thanks to the shape of its high backrest. It opens the possibility for users to distance themselves, even in busy environments, so as to be able to concentrate better with fewer disruptions.

Workbay (via Core77)

This not a fox but rather a rare albino raccoon that lives in the woods of Rockledge, Florida. A local woman has been lobbying for the zoo to capture it for its own protection.

Michelle Smurl, Brevard Zoo's director of animal programs, said the zoo is not at liberty to trap an adult animal that is thriving in the wild. She viewed photos of the animal and confirmed that it is a white raccoon.

"The raccoon looks healthy, and it looks like it's doing well," Smurl said. "I grew up with white squirrels up in New York, and I was worried that someone was going to shoot them."

Woman fears for albino raccoon's safety (via Fortean Times)

Kimberley sez, "XKCD is selling a number of the strips as signed prints for whatever amount you want to throw his way. Default is $15. He's calling it 'Radiohead style'".

Note on price: we get a lot of emails asking about donations. We like to send people something tangible for their money, so we're offering these prints Radiohead-style -- you can choose what to pay for them (above the default $15). If you want to donate money to the site but don't want a bunch of merch, just order a print or two and set your own price. Thanks!

A webstore of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. (Thanks, Kimberley!)

In 1961, a Cambridge don who'd taught navigation to cadets in WWII published an homage to Alice in Wonderland that used the book to illustrate concepts in navigation and geometry. The book, called "Navigation with Alice," was illustrated with fantastic replicas of the original Tenniel illos, recast to accompany the lessons (Anne Scarisbrick, the illustrator, was only 16 when she drew them!).

Frank Debenham was a Cambridge don who, during World War II found himself teaching navigation to young cadets, eager to learn but frustrated that the lack of materials meant that they could only learn principles in abstract terms without being able to properly put them into practice. To this end Debenham began to relate many of his teaching practises back to the varied characters in Alice in Wonderland, something he could be reasonably sure that cadets would have heard of, and if not, that they would be more likely to engage with, hence the book where we find Alice dancing Latitude Quadrilles with the Mock-Turtle, debating the markings on globes with the Dodo and learning about the use of altitude and horizons in a protracted smoking session with the Caterpillar.

Alice's Many Adventures - Part the Second (Thanks, Erik!)

A former Nasdaq chairman has been arrested for stealing over $50 billion through an elaborate Ponzi scheme run through his private investment fund -- he allegedly ripped off some clients to pay other clients, then recruited (and robbed) new clients to pay off the last round of losers. The Wall Street Journal says he was turned in by his sons.

In a separate criminal complaint, Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Theodore Cacioppi said Mr. Madoff's investment advisory business had "deceived investors by operating a securities business in which he traded and lost investor money, and then paid certain investors purported returns on investment with the principal received from other, different investors, which resulted in losses of approximately billions of dollars..."

The 70-year-old Mr. Madoff is the founder and primary owner of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC. The firm is primarily known for its business in market-making, or serving as the middleman between buyers and sellers of shares. But Mr. Madoff also oversaw an investment-advisory business that managed money for high-net-worth individuals, hedge funds and other institutions...

Both complaints say Mr. Madoff told his sons he believed losses from his fraud exceeded $50 billion. That figure couldn't be confirmed. But such a loss is plausible, had money been flowing in and out for years: At the beginning of 2008, according to the SEC filing, his operation had more than $17 billion under management.

Such a scheme would dwarf past Ponzi schemes. It would also be nearly five times larger than the accounting fraud that drove telecom company WorldCom into bankruptcy proceedings in 2002.

Top Broker Accused of $50 Billion Fraud (via Taplin)

(Image: Madoff.com)

American Toy & Invention is selling a construction kit that's really a destruction kit. The goal at the end is to implode the building you make. And then repeat. Brilliance. Joel has more over at Boing Boing Gadgets. "Advanced Engineering build implosion toy set"

Actor Daniel Hoevels was seriously injured on stage during a suicide scene in Friedrich Schiller's play Mary Stuart at Vienna's Burgtheater. The prop knife he used to slit his throat turned out to be real. Police are investigating whether it was an error or something more nefarious. The photo seen here is from a different performance. From The Guardian:

Daniel Hoevels, 30, slumped over with blood pouring from his neck while the audience broke into applause at the "special effect". Police are investigating whether the knife was a mistake or a murder plot. They are questioning the rest of the cast, and backstage hands with access to props; they will also carry out DNA tests....

The knife was reportedly bought at a local shop; one possibility is that the props staff forgot to blunt its blade. "The knife even still had the price tag on it," an investigator said.

"Actor slits his own throat as knife switch turns fiction into reality"

(Flash video embedded above, MP4 Link here.)

BBtv presents this week's Friday "Unicorn Chaser" -- the goofy truth behind Xeni and BBtv's UK music correspondent Russell Porter's reports from the SF Outside Lands music festival. Summer concert season is long gone, and the gaffer tape that once spelled "Boing Boing tv" on our tour bus has long since faded, along with our concert sunburns. So we figure it's safe to reveal how much dorking out took place between story tapings and band sessions. Besotted joyrides on stolen Segways, the snatching of sunglasses from complete strangers, and improvised pickup lines like "I'm the drummer from Radiohead. Really." Russell? You really are "special." We love you, man, and we miss "working" with you.

Free Flash game "Minotaur China Shop" is exactly what you think it is: You're the minotaur and if you break it, you buy it. Brandon has the details over at Boing Boing Offworld. "Minotaur China Shop, happiness in shattery"

Boston's GASP (Gallery Artists Studio Projects) is an experimental art gallery co-founded by María Magdalena Campos-Pons, an incredible Afro-Cuban artist whose rich work ranges from paintings to mixed media to large-scale Polaroid photography. Opening tomorrow, December 13, at GASP is an exhibition of self-taught emerging artists, including Consuelo Isaacson (who also curated the show), Michael Padnos, Alejandro Lazo, and my brother Mark Pescovitz. Besides being a fine art photographer, Mark moonlights as a transplant surgeon and professor of microbiology and immunology. As Isaacson says, Mark "travels extensively around the world for his medical practice. Along the way he takes pictures that capture the inner strength of the people that he meets, the beauty of the landscape that he encounters and the the essences of locality in the scenes he passes by." Above is Mark's "Blue Depth: Catedral de sal de Zipaquira," taken in Zipaquira, Colombia. Regarding Mystery and Beauty (GASP Gallery)

Scientists discovered a brain in northern England that is at least 2,000 years old. The brain was found inside the, er, skull of its owner at an archaeological site at York University.

They believe the skull, which was found on its own in a muddy pit, may have been a ritual offering.

Rachel Cubitt, who was taking part in the dig, described how she felt something move inside the cranium as she cleaned the soil-covered skull's outer surface. Peering through the base of the skull, she spotted an unusual yellow substance.

"Britan's oldest human brain unearthed"

(Flash video embedded above, MP4 Link here.)

Today is the final installment of Boing Boing tv's three-day special series in partnership with the video network WITNESS commemorating the 60th anniversary of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

In this episode: the story of Jesus Tecu Osorio, a Maya Achí man who witnessed one of the most horrific massacres of Guatemala's 36-year internal conflict, when he was a child -- and what he is doing to preserve the memory of victims, and the rights of survivors.

Here is a snip from the Wikipedia article about that massacre:

In 1978, in the face of civil war, the Guatemalan government proceeded with its economic development program, including the construction of the Chixoy hydroelectric dam. Financed in large part by the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank, the Chixoy Dam was built in Rabinal, a region of the department of Baja Verapaz historically populated by the Maya Achi. To complete construction, the government completed voluntary and forcible relocations of dam-affected communities from the fertile agricultural valleys to the much harsher surrounding highlands. When hundreds of residents refused to relocate, or returned after finding the conditions of resettlement villages were not what the government had promised, these men, women, and children were kidnapped, raped, and massacred by military officials. More than 440 Maya Achi were killed in the village of Río Negro alone, and the string of extra-judicial killings that claimed up to 5,000 lives between 1980 and 1982 became known as the Río Negro Massacres. The government officially declared the acts to be counterinsurgency activities.

This video is narrated by REM frontman Michael Stipe, and is presented with the music of composer Philip Glass. For more on WITNESS, and how they are using video to draw world attention to human rights abuses throughout the globe, visit the recently launched Witness HUB website.

Related: earlier here on Boing Boing, I shared a report I filed for National Public Radio about the group that conducted the exhumations mentioned in this WITNESS video. The Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala (FAFG) are technologists, anthropologists, and archaeologists who unearth these mass graves. They work to identify the dead and return the remains to their families for dignified reburial. The process begins with the hard work of the exhumation itself, but they also use DNA forensics and software they develop themselves, so they can identify a greater portion of the remains, and preserve evidence that could be used in criminal trials. FAFG staff routinely deal with death threats from those who do not support their work. Listen to "Group Works to Identify Remains in Guatemala ," and here is the entire NPR special series, "Guatemala: Unearthing the Future." (Image below: Xeni Jardin)

Ed. Note: Boing Boing's current guestblogger Clay Shirky is the author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. He teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, where he works on the overlap of social and technological networks.

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It is famously difficult to teach people to program, and CS lore says that there are simply people who get it and people who don't. Saeed Dehnadi and Richard Bornat, two computer instructors at Middlesex University in the UK, put that idea to the test, and ended up not with two kinds of people, but three.

They devised a basic aptitude test for first year students of computer programming, and then administered it on the first day of class, before the students had learned anything. (One of them maintains this was a mistake, the other claims it was planned.) The result was an almost perfect correlation between the results of the test and the student's subsequent performance.

The test asked simple questions about assignments (example shown in the image above.) The group tested broke down into three camps: people who answered the questions using different mental models for different questions, people who answered using a consistent model, and people who didn't answer the questions at all:

Told that there were three groups and how they were distinguished, but not told their relative sizes, we have found that computer scientists and other programmers have almost all predicted that the blank group would be more successful in the course exam than the others: “they had the sense to refuse to answer questions which they couldn’t understand” is a typical explanation. Non-programming social scientists, mathematicians and historians, given the same information, almost all pick the inconsistent group: “they show intelligence by picking methods to suit the problem” is the sort of thing they say. Very few, so far, have predicted that the consistent group would be the most successful. Remarkably, it is the consistent group, and almost exclusively the consistent group, that is successful.

Interestingly, this correlation is unrelated to correctness -- being consistently wrong in your mental model of how a computer works is better than being inconsistently right, because if you are consistently wrong, you only have to learn one thing to start being consistently right.

Dehnadi and Bornat's thesis is that the single biggest predictor of likely aptitude for programming is a deep comfort with meaninglessness:

To write a computer program you have to come to terms with this, to accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion. In the test the consistent group showed a pre-acceptance of this fact: they are capable of seeing mathematical calculation problems in terms of rules, and can follow those rules wheresoever they may lead. The inconsistent group, on the other hand, looks for meaning where it is not. The blank group knows that it is looking at meaninglessness, and refuses to deal with it.

(It will be interesting to see how long it will be in the comments before someone chimes in with the snake oil of the industry: "But method X/language Y is so intuitive that it solves this problem!" Dehnadi and Bornat's literature review should be required reading for this group.)

Dehnadi and Bornat's programming aptitude research

UPDATE: In the comments, Greebo points to research trying and failing to replicate the salience of consistency as a predictor, in a paper suggesting that "...the consistent group may actually contain two distinct subgroups, one that does much better than the inconsistent group, and one that does much worse." That paper is also interesting for its engagement with the larger issue of replication of experiments involving humans, as they were not able to fully replicate the research (self-selecting group, not given on first day of class, etc...) and use those issues as a platform for illustrating the difficulties with this kind of research generally.

On the Difficulty of Replicating Human Subjects Studies in Software Engineering

Glyn sez,

The UK Big Brother Awards are to recognise some of the people who have been trying to keep the monsters of state and corporate mass surveillance , snooping and control at bay.

The 2008 UK Big Brother Awards Roll of Honour

* Baroness Sarah Ludford MEP - one of the Liberal Democrat Members of the European Parliament whose Human Rights Committee has been trying to stem the onslaught of necessarily repressive legislation in the past few years.

* Phil Booth, the National Coordinator of the cross political party NO2ID Campaign -against the Database State. Phil was recently described as the "hardest man in NGO-world".

* Helen Wallace from GeneWatch UK, who did so much to help educate politicians and lawyers and the media about the counterproductive evil policy of keeping innocent people's DNA tissue samples and DNA profiles, seemingly for ever, This has been overturned in the very recent European Court of Human Rights judgement in the Marper case.

* Gareth Crossman - retiring Director of Policy at Liberty Human Rights

* Becky Hogge - retiring Executive Director of the Open Rights Group

* Rt. Hon. David Davis MP, the fomer Conservative Shadow Home Affairs spokesman, who was re-elected as the Member of Parliament for Haltemprice and Howden, on the principles of freedom and liberty.

The evil Big Brother Award was awarded simply to New Labour.

UK Big Brother Awards - boos for NuLabour, hurrahs for Sarah Ludford, Phil Booth, Helen Wallace, Gareth Crossman, Becky Hogge and David Davis (Thanks, Glyn!)

Kudos to Rob on Boing Boing Gadgets for spotting this flip-up bust of William Shakespeare that has a hidden switch inside that you can wire into your lights, garage door -- or alligator pit.

This is a bust of William Shakespeare which tilts back to reveal a remote control switch. See if you can remember where it came from—and hence why the makers believe they can get $315 a copy—before visiting the link!

This is not William Shakespeare's head Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

Last month, I wrote about the release of Jamie Boyle's The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind a new book by one of copyright's leading and most erudite scholars. I've just finished reading my review copy (you can get a free copy too -- the book is CC licensed and free to download) and I wanted to drop in a short review.

All my early excitement about this book's release was absolutely justified. This is a hell of a book. It starts with a thorough, charming, and extensive grounding in the history and contours of copyright, moving from the 17th century to the DMCA. This is familiar ground, but Boyle gives it new life with witty asides, novel comparisons and clear writing.

The second section of this book is where it really sings, though. This is the case studies, particularly the history of the "George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People," the scathing political rap spawned by outrage over FEMA's response to, and the press coverage of Katrina. Boyle traces the musicological history of this track all the way back to Ray Charles's appropriation of contemporary gospel compositions to invent soul music (over the howls of protest of the gospel singers he ripped off) to the changes wrought to hip-hop over bad US court judgements on sampling, to the legal safe harbors that allowed YouTube to flourish, giving a home to the fan videos for a political song (noting that Ben Franklin loved to rewrite the words to popular songs to make fun of political scandals) to the unmitigated hypocrisy exhibited by Jib-Jab when they used the DMCA to threaten one of the video-makers for sampling their own remix of Woody Guthrie's "This Land..." The point of this remarkable journey is to illustrate just how complicated and "unoriginal" the most original creativity is, how much even trail-blazing innovators rely on borrowing from other artists to invent their new creations.

Following on this are other case studies, including a marvellous report on the failure of the European "Database Right" -- a kind of copyright extended to facts in databases that was meant to spur investment and innovation, but instead crippled and shrivelled Europe's database industry.

From there, Boyle moves into solutions -- hacks around the law like Creative Commons and then a comprehensive, simple program for reforming copyright law to use empirical evidence to figure out when exclusive rights make for more vibrant creativity and when they stand in creativity's way, and to apportion (and adjust) copyright accordingly. He cites successful empirical studies and talks about how their methodologies could be adapted for wider use. He describes this as an "evidence-based" approach to copyright, one grounded on the goal of ensuring the most creativity, rather than the most reward for the creators that last year's copyright turned into winners.

Finally, Boyle returns to the theme that has dominated his career: the idea that copyright needs an "environmental movement" -- a unifying principle that ties together all the people who want to get a better, more balanced world of copyrights and patents and trademarks in the same way that the notion of "ecology" brought together people who cared about wildlife, about water quality, about smog, about the ozone layer, etc, together for the first time.

All told, you'd be hard pressed to find a book that better-balances accessibility with thoroughness, or one that carries so many constructive, reasonable, moderate and achievable proposals for making a system that will improve the lot of creators and the public everywhere.

The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, Download The Public Domain, The Public Domain on Amazon

Wagner James Au sez, "This is machinima of the Bogon Flux, a beautifully ugly, totally strange, self-assembling, self-destructing, steampunky city comprised of rusty pipes and metal chambers. It's located in the post-apocalyptic Wasteland area of Second Life, so the filmmaker used 'London 2026,' a customized version of SL's atmosphere renderer which literally turns the air into dusty sepia. (At least from the machinima maker's point of view.)"

Man, this is the first SL machinima I've seen that crosses the line from "extremely promising" to "Holy crap!"

Mescaline's View: Watch "Pipedream", and Get the WindLight Preset It Was Made In (Thanks, James!)

An FCC commissioner has stated that video game "addiction," especially to World of Warcraft, is a "leading cause" of college dropouts. (Nevermind that 90% of the people diagnosed with "video game addiction" don't have any such condition, even according to the crazily broad definition used by its proponents).

With the explosion of educational resources available online, one might think parents would be 100% pleased with the internet’s role in their children’s lives. But surveys show just the opposite: a late 2006 survey that showed 59% of parents think the internet has been a totally positive influence in their children’s lives-- down from 67% in 2004.

You might find it alarming that one of the top reasons for college drop-outs in the U.S. is online gaming addiction - such as World of Warcraft - which is played by 11 million individuals worldwide.

FCC Commissioner Terms WoW a Leading Cause of College Dropouts

As Eric Reynold of Fantagraphics says: "First Dave Stevens, then Forrest J. Ackerman, and now Bettie Page. 2008 has been a brutal year for some of the icons of my Southern California adolescence." (Thanks, MinTphresh)

Wired's Ryan Singel's done a great profile on Boing Boing pal Carl Malamud, the rogue archivist who's taking all the public material the government charges money to access and putting it on the web for free.

If you want to search federal court documents, it's not a problem. Just apply online for an account, and the government will issue you a user name and password.

Through the postal service.

And once you log in, the government's courthouse search engine known as Public Access to Court Electronic Records or PACER, will charge you 8 cents a page to read documents that are in the public domain — a fee that earned the federal judiciary $50 million in profits in 2006.

With its high cost and limited functionality, critics call the system an absurdity in the era of Google, blogs and Wikipedia, where information is free and bandwidth, disk space and processing power are nearly so.

"The PACER system is the most broken part of our federal legal mechanism," says Carl Malamud, who runs the nonprofit open-government group Public.Resource.Org ."They have a mainframe mentality."

Now Malamud is doing something about it. He's asking lawyers to donate their PACER documents one by one, which he then classifies and bundles into ZIP files published for free at his organization's website. The one-year-old effort has garnered him 20 percent of all the files on PACER, including all decisions from federal appeals courts over the last 50 years.

Online Rebel Publishes Millions of Dollars in U.S. Court Records for Free (Image: Carl Malamud, by Joi Ito, under a CC Attribution license

Apple's refused to allow an application called "Comic Reader" in the iTunes Store because they don't like the comic book it ships with -- effectively, they've gotten into the business of banning or approving literature. I bought a G1 instead of an iPhone because I believed that giving any company the right to decide what programs I can use (Apple uses DRM to prevent unapproved programs from running on the iPhone) would be a bad idea in theory and in practice. "Program" and "art" can sometimes be very close together, and whatever else Apple is, they're not qualified to judge which art I'm allowed to look at.

Who at Apple has been set up to vet material? Specifically, why was Murderdrome vetted as an application and not as a publication? Apple has a Books category in the App Store. That’s where Murderdrome should have been placed.

Apple Forfeits eBooks By Banning A Comic Book! (Thanks, Reid!)

Three year old Sam Spiteri of Caledon, Ontario can keep the miniature pony he uses in therapy for his spastic quadriplegic cerebral palsy. The local council's granted the family a zoning exception that trumps the complaints of the family's neighbours who complained of the smell (they also border a cow-pasture!).

Caledon councillor Annette Groves told the Post that the boy should be allowed to keep the therapy pony.

“While you have to enforce the rules, there are times when you have to use discretion and have to remember that you’re a human being and have to have some compassion,” she said.

“That would be the case in the case.”

Disabled boy can keep his pony, Caledon rules (Thanks, Alex and Christine!)

Tim Jones of the Electronic Frontier Foundation has some good commentary on the news that the MPAA has asked Obama to spy on the entire Internet, and to establish a system where being accused of copyright infringement would result in loss of your Internet connection (and your VoIP line, your access to your university, your lifeline to your parents in the old country, your means of participating in civic life, your means of fighting your parking ticket, etc etc etc). The MPAA also wants Obama to lean on other countries (notably Canada!) and force them to adopt US copyright laws.

Here, the MPAA is advocating for a number of things, the most problematic of which is a "three strikes" internet termination policy. This would require ISPs to terminate customers' internet accounts upon a rights-holder's repeat allegation of copyright ingfringement. This could be done potentially without any due process or judicial review. A three-strikes policy was recently adopted by legislation in France, where all ISPs are now banned from providing blacklisted citizens with internet access for up to one year.

Because three-strikes policies do not guarantee due process or judicial oversight of whether the accusations of copyright infringement are valid, they effectively grant the content industry the ability to exile any individual they want from the internet. Lest we forget, there is a history of innocents getting caught up in these anti-piracy dragnets. (Copyfighter Cory Doctorow has wondered what would happen if the MPAA's erroneous notices were subject to a similar three-strikes law.)

Thankfully, members of the European Parliament vehemently rejected these measures, resolving that "The cut of Internet access is a disproportionate measure regarding the objectives. It is a sanction with powerful effects, which could have profound repercussions in a society where access to the Internet is an imperative right for social inclusion." Let's hope the US government's decisions on this are as wise.

MPAA Asks Obama for More Copyright Surveillance of the Internet

Banana Derby is a "family show" in Greenville, South Carolina that stages races with monkey jockeys riding on dogs. For a fee, you can have them come to your next party or public event. Seen here is Bobo The Jockey Monkey riding on George the dog. George seems happy but I wonder about Bobo. Banana Derby (Thanks, Tara McGinley!)