EFF's Fred von Lohmann explains with a great deal of clarity and precision why MediaFire is out of its mind to send legal threats over a Firefox plugin, SkipScreen, that auto-clicks through its ad-screens. It comes down to this: your browser is your browser, and you can auto-click, rewrite, block, display or manipulate what shows up on your screen as much as you like and it's no one's business but your own.
Yes, Boing Boing is ad-supported and yes, SkipScreen is an ad-blocker. So what? We're not dumb enough to think that just because we've decided to earn our living from ads means that you have to give up your rights to control what's on your screen. That's what principle is: what you believe in even when it's not convenient.
MediaFire's arguments to the contrary are entirely misguided. First, they suggest that SkipScreen somehow lets users "steal bandwidth." That's wrong on the facts: SkipScreen just automates the exact process that the user would otherwise have to do themselves in order download a file. No "extra downloads," no additional bandwidth for MediaFire. Second, MediaFire argues that the use of SkipScreen violates MediaFire's "acceptable use policy." That's wrong on the law: users who follow a link to a MediaFire download never click-through or otherwise agree to any "acceptable use policy," so there's no contract here that prohibits a user from using whatever browser she likes (including whatever plug-ins she likes) to download a file.
Sure, MediaFire probably would prefer that we all sit, transfixed, while they display ads for us, just like certain Hollywood executives wish we would never leave the couch or hit FFWD when commercials run during our favorite TV shows, and certain websites wish they could ban Firefox ad-blockers. Fortunately, there's nothing in the law that says that by simply visiting a website, I give up the right to control my desktop.
Randy Farmer's short essay "The Dollhouse Mafia, or 'Don't Display Negative Karma'" explores the well-known problem in reputation systems in which users abandon accounts that get negative feedback, and shows just how bad the consequences of this design can turn out to be.
That feature was fine as far as it went, but unlike other social networks, The Sims Online allowed users to declare other users untrustworthy too. The face of an untrustworthy user appeared circled in bright red among all the trustworthy faces in a user's hub.
It didn't take long for a group calling itself the Sims Mafia to figure out how to use this mechanic to shake down new users when they arrived in the game. The dialog would go something like this:
"Hi! I see from your hub that you're new to the area. Give me all your Simoleans or my friends and I will make it impossible to rent a house."
"What are you talking about?"
"I'm a member of the Sims Mafia, and we will all mark you as untrustworthy, turning your hub solid red (with no more room for green), and no one will play with you. You have five minutes to comply. If you think I'm kidding, look at your hub-three of us have already marked you red. Don't worry, we'll turn it green when you pay..."
If you think this is a fun game, think again-a typical response to this shakedown was for the user to decide that the game wasn't worth $10 a month. Playing dollhouse doesn't usually involve gangsters.
Dave sez, "I'm an American who blogs about life in New Delhi. I recently published an essay about 'jugaad': the semi-untranslatable practice and philosophy of jerry-rigging that is one of the prides of India. Once you look for jugaad in India, you see it everywhere: water pumps converted into cars, wrappers converted into rope, and so on.
This essay also explores the broader implications of a culture that embraces jugaad. Jugaad is how so many people can survive with such stoic patience in conditions that would drive Americans like me crazy. "
No two jugaad vehicles are the same, because each one is an improvised solution using unlikely parts. These vehicles are the purest representation of this spirit of ingenuity, and everyone we spoke to swelled with pride at India's capacity for jugaad. "We are like that only," my boss Murali would tell me when describing solutions to situations that would send most goras scurrying for the nearest five-star hotel.
The variety of solutions to seemingly intractable problems we saw supported this patriotic esteem: motorcycles chopped in half and welded to carts to create centaur goods haulers. The way families would fit mother, father, and three kids onto a single scooter. The clever repurposing of used water bottles as cooking oil containers. Rope spun from discarded foil packets. Cricket wickets made from precariously balanced stacks of rocks. And, as Anurag sardonically pointed out in a political statement I don't understand but assume to be insightfully hilarious, Atal Bihari Vajpayee's government: a duct-taped coalition of thirteen political parties.
As one blogger put it when describing those diesel water pump trucks, "these vehicles reflect the true spirit of innovation in rural India."
Shawn sez, "The British Columbia Civil Liberties Association is aiding two activists in suing the City of Vancouver over a 2010 Olympic bylaw which may encroach on free speech and violate Canada's Charter of Rights."
With David Eby of The B.C. Civil Liberties Association representing them, Chris Shaw, a UBC professor of ophthalmology, neuroscientist (and Vancouver Observer blogger), and The Olympic Resistance Network's Alissa Westergard-Thorp,announced this morning that they have filed a statement of claim against the City of Vancouver in the Supreme Court of BC. Their lawsuit challenges the constitutionality of an Olympic bylaw limiting free speech during the 2010 Winter Games that was passed by council in July, Eby told reporters this morning.
The BBCLA, with plaintiffs Shaw and Westergard-Thorp, claim their rights to free speech and freedom of movement will be denied once the Winter Games by-laws passed by city council take effect. They say the bylaws, commonly referred to as the omnibus bylaws, will infringe their Charter rights and are unconstitutional....
The bylaw includes a passage entitled "prohibitions regarding city land," which includes a clause that will almost surely trigger a Charter of Rights and Freedoms challenge. Clause 4B makes it illegal during the Winter Games without authorization to:
"(a) bring onto city land any
(i) weapon,
(ii) object, including any rock, stick, or glass or metal bottle useable as a weapon, except for crutches or a cane that a person who is elderly or disabled uses as a mobility aid,
(iii) large object, including any bag, or luggage that exceeds 23 x 40 x 55 centimetres;
(iv) voice amplification equipment including any megaphone,
(v) motorized vehicle, except for a motorized wheel chair or scooter that a person who is elderly or disabled uses as a mobility aid,
(vi) anything that makes noise that interferes with the enjoyment of entertainment on city land by other persons,
(vii) distribute any advertising material or install or carry any sign unless licensed to do so by the city."
Protest signs usually are made using sticks, often are larger than subsection (iii) allows (as are puppets and other protest devices), demonstrations almost always employ megaphones or other voice amplification devices, and can well "interfere with the enjoyment" of the Olympic spectacle by who chose to be so offended. Protesters often pass out leaflets as well. Thus, any of the dozens of protests I've attended over the last few years would easily be in violation of five of seven subsections.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's law that grants him immunity from prosecution has been overturned. Berlusconi, a media tycoon who uses his control over the press to stay in office (I've met dozens of Italian activists who uttered the improbable phrase, "Thank God for Rupert Murdoch, Berlusconi can't bully him," which should give you an idea of what sort of person he is), passed the immunity law, arguing that he couldn't govern effectively if he could be sued or criminally prosecuted for wrongdoing. Several pending lawsuits will now go forward.
The appeal to the Constitutional Court was launched by prosecutors including those from the Mills case.
They contended that immunity put Mr Berlusconi above the law and needed to be reversed.
Mr Berlusconi argued that immunity allowed him to govern without being "distracted" by the judiciary.
This is the second time Italy's highest court has thrown out Mr Berlusconi's bid for immunity, after an earlier attempt in 2004 failed.
Of the Constitutional Court's 15 members, five are selected by the president, five by the judiciary, and five by parliament.
They voted 9-6 to in favour of lifting Mr Berlusconi's immunity, the BBC's Duncan Kennedy says from Rome.
Go Senator Al! Al Franken successfully introduced legislation that denies federal contracts to companies that have policies -- anywhere in the world -- that punish employees for complaining about rape or discrimination on the job. This is in response to a KBR/Halliburton employee in Iraq who was drugged and gang-raped by co-workers and denied justice or even medical treatment, then locked in a storage container for 24 hours and told that she'd lose her job if she left the country to get medical help. She was also prohibited from suing or seeking criminal justice because her Halliburton contract forbade seeking any justice apart from private arbitration.
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) tried to block the amendment, saying that it was a "a political attack directed at Halliburton." Franken replied, "This amendment does not single out a single contractor. This amendment would defund any contractor that refuses to give a victim of rape their day in court."
Sessions' brave defense of the right of private companies to deny justice to drugged and gang-raped employees should not be forgotten. Truly, the man is a model of moral principle.
[Franken]: "The constitution gives everybody the right to due process of law ... And today, defense contractors are using fine print in their contracts do deny women like Jamie Leigh Jones their day in court. ... The victims of rape and discrimination deserve their day in court [and] Congress plainly has the constitutional power to make that happen..."
Appearing with Franken after the vote, an elated Jones expressed her deep appreciation. "It means the world to me," she said of the amendment's passage. "It means that every tear shed to go public and repeat my story over and over again to make a difference for other women was worth it."
This video of an elephant giving birth gets a little intense at the moment of actual delivery and immediately thereafter, but it also made my heart swell in my chest. There is something just goddamned wonderful about mammal and avian reproduction (insects and bacteria not so much), and it's not just the insanely awesome sight of the baby elephant clambering to its feet and grinning like a holy fool.
Not sure what the narration's like (it's 5AM here in London and everyone's asleep, so I'm on mute), but the visuals are a strong and healing tonic.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
Italian scientist Luigi Garlaschelli recreated the Shroud of Turin, supporting his claim that the artifact is a fake and not the cloth that laid on the body of Jesus Christ before his burial. Believers claim that the image on the cloth is the miraculous Holy Face of Jesus. Garlaschelli will present his research and the, er, Shroud of Luigi, at the Italian Committee for the Investigation of Claims on the Paranormal's conference. This whole thing makes me want a Shroud of Turin blanket. I didn't find one of those, but this golf towel is kinda nifty! Anyway, from CNN:
Luigi Garlaschelli created a copy of the shroud by wrapping a specially woven cloth over one of his students, painting it with pigment, baking it in an oven (which he called a "shroud machine") for several hours, then washing it...
"Basically the Shroud of Turin has some strange properties and characteristics that they say cannot be reproduced by human hands," he told CNN by phone from Italy, where he is a professor of organic chemistry at the University of Pavia.
"For example, the image is superficial and has no pigment, it looks so lifelike and so on, and therefore they say it cannot have been done by an artist."
His research shows the pigment may simply have worn off the cloth over the centuries since it was first "discovered" in 1355, but impurities in the pigment etched an image into the fibers of the cloth, leaving behind the ghostly picture that remains today.
"The procedure is very simple. The artist took this sheet and put it over one of his assistants," he said.
BB pal Gareth Branwyn has a really cool post up over at Make about the "lost knowledge" of cable lacing. This method of cable management preceded zipties, and was used in "the telecom industry, aerospace, marine applications, and elsewhere," he says. Gar's post includes some wonderful detail photos, and notes from readers explaining how it works. Impulselabs sez:
The bundling is done with a technique called "cable lacing". A series of knots and stitches from a continuous piece of wax impregnated cotton or twine are used to bundle cables together. It takes some practice, but it'll outperform zipties in that it won't crush the insulative jackets on wiring and that it's not going to shift axially on you if it's loose. Likewise, my bundles have a rectangular cross section. Zipties can't conform and keep bundle shapes other than ellipses.
Scientists at NASA say they've figured out a way to extract water from moondust, using the same old ordinary microwave ovens you and I use to extract "lunch" from frozen pizza-bricks:
"We believe we can use microwave heating to cause the water ice in a lunar permafrost layer to sublimate - that is, turn into water vapor. The water vapor can be collected and then condensed into liquid water. "Best of all, microwave extraction can be done on the spot. And it requires no excavation -- no heavy equipment for drilling into the hard-frozen lunar surface."
Okay, so New York is supposed to be the city of big commerce, literary culture, and high art - no room here for woo-woo spirituality, the odor of patchouli, or anyone who capitalizes words like Light or Truth. Well, actually not. This Sunday, October 11th I'll be conducting a walking tour of occult New York -- and hopefully giving participants a new way of seeing the city: As a once-upon-a-time laboratory for alternative spiritual ideas, which it helped to export to the rest of the world back before there was a New Age. Here are a few of the historic sights - familiar and obscure - we'll be viewing...
UPDATE: The server for the Science-Based Medicine blog is now back online, so the link in this story does work now. Hooray!
It seems like just yesterday we were all freaking out together about the discovery of H1N1. And now, here we are at flu season and our little pandemic is all grown up. In the meantime, there's been a lot of good work done on clearing up the questions surrounding this illness, but misinformation still abounds.
If you, or a loved one, are suffering from flu confusion, I prescribe this handy primer on the basics. Written by Dr. Joseph Albietz, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Colorado, Denver, and The Children's Hospital, it starts at the very beginning (seriously, the first question is, "What is Influenza?") and provides a great overview of the flu in general, and H1N1 in particular.
Even if you feel like you've successfully graduated from Flu 101, there's a lot of great higher-level discussion and Q&A going on in the comments of this post. Enjoy, and happy learning!
JWZ found this description of a button on the remote for his new projector: "If the picture size is compressed or enlarged by using the 16:9 aspect ratio when the projector is used for profitable purpose or in the presence of an audience (for example, in a coffee shop or at a hotel etc.), it may infringe the rights of the copyright owner of the original picture."
All that from one little button! Who knew that Congress passed a special 16:9 = piracy bill?
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
Toward the Sentient City is a new exhibition in New York that explores the broad theme of urban computing, where sensors, mobile devices, pervasive wireless, and the GeoWeb intersect with city streets. The exhibit runs until November 7 at the Architectural League of New York. While it seems like one of those "you had to be there" experiences, the Web site has a ton of detailed information about the five fascinating and provocative projects commissioned for the show. There are also nearly a dozen other existing works identified by the show's curators, including BB pal Eric Paulos's Citizen Science research. Here are summaries of the five new pieces, from a University of Buffalo press release:
• "Too Smart City" is a set of three street furniture pieces that come to life with embedded intelligence and robotic systems. The Smart Bench (image above), for instance, is described by its creators as "a gorgeous two seater that recognizes vagrancy and is capable of lifting people up and dumping them."
• "Amphibious Architecture" presents two networks of floating interactive tubes, installed in sites in the East River and the Bronx River, that house a range of sensors below water and an array of lights above water (image above). The sensors monitor water quality, presence of fish and human interest in the river ecosystem. The lights respond to the sensors and create feedback loops between humans, fish and their shared environment. An SMS interface allows citizens to text-message the fish, to receive real-time information about the river and to contribute to a display of collective interest in the environment.
• "Natural Fuse" harnesses the carbon-sinking capabilities of plants to create a city-wide network of devices that act as both electric outlets and resources that offset CO2 generated in the production of electricity.
• "Trash Tank" focuses on how pervasive technologies can expose the challenges of waste management and sustainability. The project uses hundreds of small, smart, location-aware tags, a first step towards the deployment of smart-dust -- networks of tiny, locatable and addressable micro-electromechanical systems. These tags are attached to different types of trash so that these items can be followed through the city's waste management system, revealing the final journey of our everyday objects in a series of real-time visualizations.
• "Breakout!" (co-created by my IFTF colleague Anthony Townsend -dp) uses three sets of special tools to explore the dynamic possibilities of a single question: what if the entire city was your office? Drawing inspiration from the shared office spaces of the co-working movement, "Breakout!" creates alternative venues for collaborative work outside of traditional office buildings by injecting lightweight versions of essential office infrastructure into urban public spaces.
D sez, "Meekssandygirl on Etsy sells these lovely, simple, crocheted vampire bite necklaces. She also crochets eyeball necklaces . . . I guess for those customers who prefer the zombie look."
I'm a contributing editor here at Boing Boing. I also have a blog (TokyoMango), a book (Urawaza), and I freelance for Wired, Make, the NY Times Magazine, PRI's Studio360, etc. I'm @tokyomango on Twitter.
This mini-dress sold on Etsy looks just like a pair of 3D glasses. The seller marked it as a Halloween item, but I think it's actually kind of cute for everyday wear... maybe?
3D glasses dress
Wil Wheaton's Dungeon-Mastering a pair of Dungeon Delves (45-minute speed-dungeons) at RinCon next weekend in Tucson, at $50/head to benefit Child's Play, a charity that sends toys, games, books and cash to sick kids. Sounds like a blast!
First, some history: Way back in the olden days, when 8 bits were enough to blow your mind on a 13-inch television and digital watches were a pretty neat idea, the concept of the Dungeon Delve was born. It's pretty straightforward: a group of players and a Dungeon Master sit down together, and the players have 45 minutes or so to make it through the end of a short dungeon, while the Dungeon Master does his best to kill them. The delve ends when the players defeat the final boss (or solve the final puzzle, or something like that), the time limit is reached, or the players all die horrible but noble and heroic deaths.
It's different from the collaborative storytelling experience that we experience in my regular D&D games, but it's still a hell of a lot of fun, and the time limit makes it perfect for running at conventions.
When I was visiting BoingBoing last spring, I told y'all about some research being done by Lewis Ziska from the USDA and Jackie Mohan from the University of Georgia on how poison ivy responds to rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. (Answer: In a way that kind of sucks for people.)
What I didn't tell you was how the scientists figured out that CO2 makes ivy grow incredibly fast, and problematically poisonous. While some of the evidence comes from controlled studies done in a tidy, little lab, there's more to it than that.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
University of Missouri engineers are building a nuclear battery the size of a penny. Their aim is to develop a long-lasting power source for tiny sensors, actuators, and labs-on-a-chip. While nuclear batteries sound, er, problematic, they're actually relatively common in larger form factors to power pacemakers and instruments aboard space vehicles. From MU News Bureau:
(Professor Jae Kown's) innovation is not only in the battery’s size, but also in its semiconductor. Kwon’s battery uses a liquid semiconductor rather than a solid semiconductor.
“The critical part of using a radioactive battery is that when you harvest the energy, part of the radiation energy can damage the lattice structure of the solid semiconductor,” Kwon said. “By using a liquid semiconductor, we believe we can minimize that problem.”
In the future, they hope to increase the battery’s power, shrink its size and try with various other materials. Kwon said that the battery could be thinner than the thickness of human hair.
"It", in this case, referring to "The Right Stuff". Brandon Keim at Wired Science had a great post yesterday about attempts by NASA contractors to get women into the space program during the late 1950s. The (ultimately unsuccessful) charge was led by Randy Lovelace--the doctor responsible for putting together health tests for astronaut hopefuls during the original Mercury 7 selection process--and Donald Flickinger--an Air Force general. Flickinger founded the Women in Space Earliest program in 1959, Keim writes...
But the Air Force canned it before testing even started, prompting Lovelace to start the Woman in Space Program.
Nineteen women enrolled in WISP, undergoing the same grueling tests administered to the male Mercury astronauts. Thirteen of them -- later dubbed the Mercury 13 -- passed "with no medical reservations," a higher graduation rate than the first male class. The top four women scored as highly as any of the men
It's pretty fascinating stuff, I just wish Keim had included more biographical information on the women involved. Unlike the male astronaut candidates, they couldn't have come from the Air Force (and 1959 seems a little late for women who'd been with the WAC in World War II to be in prime physical condition), and yet, the women were trained, experienced pilots. There's some great stories fluttering in the shadows around this piece. I, for one, would love to know more.*
*Read: I would kill to interview one of these women. If you, your mom, or your grandma were involved, email me. Seriously.
Jordan sez, "The IOC, believing that it owns the photos in your shoebox, sent a takedown notice to Richard Giles, AWIA member and rather good photographer. I took notice, as we in Vancouver are about to play host to the 2010 Winter Games. It will be impossible to point your camera at anything in this tiny city without catching some Olympic logo or other."
I hope that the IOC is aware that it's about to show up in one of the most media-savvy towns in the world, and that trying to stop private citizens from posting "unauthorized" photos will be nothing short of a fool's errand. This sort of hostility towards Olympic fans is both wasteful and pointless. Does the IOC not understand why people go to the Olympic Games? (Hint: to come home with once-in-a-lifetime memories. This includes things like... photos) If the IOC has trouble understanding what the Internet does, they can probably find someone to ask. My own consulting rate is quite reasonable.
The Olympics may be the most overrated, corrupt, bullying institution we have on an international level (exempting corporations and organized crime syndicates).
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
Mother Jones shared the joy of "One Nation Under God," an epic religious painting by contemporary artist Jon McNaughton. You can scroll over the painting to ID the various folks, ranging from historical figures to symbolic characters such as the "Liberal News Reporter" who embodies how "most of the media today are biased towards the left and try to shape the thinking and actions of Americans in that direction." My favorite is the "Professor" gripping his copy of "Origin of Species." According to McNaughton, the Professor "represents the liberal lefts control of our educational system." Hidden in the shadows is none other than... Satan! "One Nation Under God" by Jon McNaughton
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
A friend once told me that famed astronomer and noted head Carl Sagan wrote notes from his high self to his sober self to trust in his stoned revelations. I haven't confirmed that, but Sagan was definitely into the wacky tobaccy. In 1969, Sagan contributed a piece about his marijuana use for the book "Marihuana Reconsidered." Sagan wrote under the pseudonym of Mr. X, but he was later confirmed as the author.
From Marihuana Reconsidered:
I do not consider myself a religious person in the usual sense, but there is a religious aspect to some highs. The heightened sensitivity in all areas gives me a feeling of communion with my surroundings, both animate and inanimate. Sometimes a kind of existential perception of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the hypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow men. And at other times, there is a different sense of the absurd, a playful and whimsical awareness. Both of these senses of the absurd can be communicated, and some of the most rewarding highs I've had have been in sharing talk and perceptions and humor. Cannabis brings us an awareness that we spend a lifetime being trained to overlook and forget and put out of our minds. A sense of what the world is really like can be maddening; cannabis has brought me some feelings for what it is like to be crazy, and how we use that word 'crazy' to avoid thinking about things that are too painful for us. In the Soviet Union political dissidents are routinely placed in insane asylums. The same kind of thing, a little more subtle perhaps, occurs here: 'did you hear what Lenny Bruce said yesterday? He must be crazy.' When high on cannabis I discovered that there's somebody inside in those people we call mad.
When I'm high I can penetrate into the past, recall childhood memories, friends, relatives, playthings, streets, smells, sounds, and tastes from a vanished era. I can reconstruct the actual occurrences in childhood events only half understood at the time. Many but not all my cannabis trips have somewhere in them a symbolism significant to me which I won't attempt to describe here, a kind of mandala embossed on the high. Free-associating to this mandala, both visually and as plays on words, has produced a very rich array of insights.
Earlier this week I remarked on Twitter how much I enjoyed Stanley Kubrik's 1956 movie about a race track heist, The Killing. Jack Shafer replied, "Okay, now you're ready for Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer). It will change your life."
I checked Netflix and learned that Detour isn't available there. But I remembered that archive.org has a large collection of public domain movies, so I looked there and lo and behold, they had it. I downloaded the highest resolution version watched it. The quality was quite good, aside from a couple of wobbly parts and a second of missing dialogue.
Detour
Jack steered me straight. This 1946 black-and-white film is as grim, hard-boiled, and twisty as any film noir title I've ever seen. Al (Tom Neal) plays a talented pianist stuck in cheap joint in New York. He's got an attitude to match the atmosphere (when a patron gives him a ten-dollar tip after he plays an insanely complex piece, he remarks that it's just "a piece of paper crawling with germs.")
Naturally, Al falls for the house singer, but she won't marry him because he doesn't have enough money. When she goes to Hollywood to try to become an actress, Al quits his job and starts hitchhiking across the country to be with her. He doesn't know it, but when a flashy loudmouth in a big car picks him up, Al's fate is sealed. Ann Savage, playing a femme fatale who seethes with bitter poison, is a show stealer.
It turns out that Archive.org has a collection of 43 film noir titles. If you've seen any of them, I'd appreciate it if you added your recommendations in the comments.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
New research from the Netherlands explores a placebo effect around high-definition TV. Of course, HD does look sharper, but the mind apparently can easily be tricked into thinking that regular TV is HD. From New Scientist (Wikimedia Commons image):
Sixty people in turn were shown the same video clip on the same television. Half were told to expect clearer, sharper pictures thanks to HD technology: an impression backed up by posters, flyers and the presence of an extra-thick cable connected to the screen. The other half were told to expect a normal DVD image.
Questionnaires revealed that the people who had been led to expect HD reported seeing higher-quality images. "Participants were unable to discriminate properly between digital and high-definition signals," says Lidwien van de Wijngaert at the University of Twente in Enschede, the Netherlands, who carried out the study with colleagues from Utrecht University...
The results of the experiment might have been different had it taken place in North America, though, where conventional television uses the NTSC instead of the PAL technical standard. Picture quality is lower with NTSC, "so the difference compared with HD is much larger than for Europeans", says van de Wijngaert.
When I saw this picture last summer on the Awkward Family Photos blog, I had to know where it came from. Most of the commenters were convinced the answer was "a really freaky, messed-up hippie family." But one intrepid denizen of the Interwebs offered a better explanation.
In reality, these hand-knit people suits--made from angora--are the work of artist Anna Maltz. She makes them in the aforementioned "natural" version, but also in muppet-esque blue, mermaid, and Superman styles. Then she takes photos of people wearing the suits.
This video from San Francisco's KQED takes you along on one of Maltz's shoots.
And, if that's not enough to make her completely awesome, in 2004 Maltz apparently wrote an essay about her work called "Don't Be the Bunny." "Urinetown" references = +1000!
The short version? "Enchanted by a pixie, a child called Yorick enters a magical kingdom, but when Yorick returns he finds his world ravaged by time." The video is set in a hand-drawn pen-and-ink world inspired by Edward Gorey, animated in a "paper cut-out" style.
Take a bite out of this, bitch. A mere $25,000 apiece! The very same cupcake art cars I zoomed around in for this Boing Boing TV episode are now offered for sale at upscale (and econopocalypse-beleaguered) retailer Neiman Marcus. Congrats to Lisa Pongrace and her fellow designers and builders bakers. Customized Cupcake Car(thanks, Susannah Breslin)
Well, Natasja Capelle, a freelance designer, has detouched the image to restore the model to something like a healthy, well-proportioned stature. Want to play along? Make your own detouched image, post a link in the comments. The best images will receive (possibly) a legal threat from Ralph Lauren and an entirely virtual but nevertheless highly valuable appreciative ovation from all over the world.
(Re)cycler is the sequel to Lauren McLaughlin's fantastic debut YA novel, Cycler, an sf story about Jill McTeague, a high-school senior who turns into a boy for four days every month. Like Cycler, (Re)cycler is a smart, sensitive story about gender, sex and sexuality, leavened with a lot of wit and sass.
(Re)cycler picks up where Cycler left off, with Jill and her two best friends leaving small town Massachusetts for parts elsewhere. Jill lands in Brooklyn with her pal Ramie (who is also dating her male alter-ego, Jack) and commences to come of age in a setting that is frightening, dangerous, exciting and exotic.
Both Jack and Jill's voices are carried off fantastically in this story, coming across as confused but confident, and both characters grow in ways that are unexpected and extremely satisfying.
There's plenty of YA literature that treats sexuality as a problem to structure a morality play, but McLaughlin transcends cliche, and delivers instead a book that is sexy, smart, surprising and fun, without skimping on the hard emotional stuff.
Eileen Gunn sez, "Michael Swanwick and I have dragged steampunk kicking and screaming out of the Victorian era, slapped it about a bit and tossed it, still writhing, into an Art Deco cityscape. Tor.com editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden described our story, Zeppelin City as "a stew of Metropolis, King Kong, Brazil, and the Critique of the Gotha Programme" and has published it as part of Tor.com's Steampunk Month. Michael and I worked on this story for so long that-- well, suffice it to say, as Michael does, that when we started it, the technology was cutting edge. Is it really steampunk? You decide. The fabulous illustration for the story, by Benjamin Carre, totally captures the cityscape with autogyro and zeppelin."
GOOD's executive compensation infographic shows the compensation levels of the business world's top execs, with the number of minimum wage earners each super-suit's take-home pay would support.
The appeal to the Constitutional Court was launched by prosecutors including those from the Mills case.
Luigi Garlaschelli created a copy of the shroud by wrapping a specially woven cloth over one of his students, painting it with pigment, baking it in an oven (which he called a "shroud machine") for several hours, then washing it...
, my book about the future of energy in the United States, will be published April 10th.
This mini-dress sold on 
(Professor Jae Kown's) innovation is not only in the battery’s size, but also in its semiconductor. Kwon’s battery uses a liquid semiconductor rather than a solid semiconductor.
When I saw this picture last summer on the 
