For the next several weeks, I'm going to post my favorite entries from Boing Boing this year.

• Heir to dictator moves into $35 million Malibu home (Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue's is slated to take over his father's role as ruthless dictator of Equatorial Guinea.)

• Tijuana cops lose guns, get slingshots (While a corruption investigation is underway, they've replaced the guns all of the cops in tourist areas with slingshots and ball-bearings.)

• State of Massachusetts insists on calling ATHF ads "hoax devices" (The people of Boston should be clamoring for the resignation of the mayor and the head of the department of security for being the only city in the ten-city ad campaign that didn't notice the signs hanging in plain sight for two full weeks and then misidentifying them in a way that caused widespread panic.)

• Witch doctor orders death of Hollywood snow cone man (Article about snow cone vendor who was allegedly murdered by his girlfriend after a witch doctor told her the snow cone vendor had placed a curse on her.)

• Police officer who ejaculated on motorist found not guilty (Jury in Orange County finds Irvine police officer not guilty of three felony charges after he pulled over a female motorist and ejaculated on her sweater.)

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Looking back on 2007, part 1

IWantSandy is an email-based automated personal assistant that has just opened up for public signups. I've been using Sandy for a couple months now, and she's fast becoming indispensable for my life. All you do is CC your personal Sandy address on your mail and throw in keywords, like "Sandy, remember that this is the grocery list" or "Sandy, remind me to follow up on this with Fred on January 1, 2008" and the Sandybot will file away all your minutae for you. Sandy emails you with reminders (she can also communicate by Twitter/SMS). She can barf up all your remembers whenever you need them -- just tag your emails with the @-mark (for example @phonenumber @kids @kitchenrenovation @welding) and then ask her for all the items corresponding to a given tag.

The coolest thing about I Want Sandy is the "groupware" function -- if I CC you and Sandy on a message with a reminder, she'll remind both of us. No permissions, no groups, just CC in regular email. The service is free and live and open to all comers.

Sandy's a real Boing Boing-pal effort. It was invented by Rael Dornfest, the former CTO of O'Reilly Media, who (among other things) created the open-source blogging tool Blosxom and chaired the O'Reilly P2P and Emerging Tech conferences. Sandy herself is based on Tim O'Reilly's stellar personal assistant, also named Sandy. And bonus -- the little Sandy logo was designed by our own Mark Frauenfelder! The functionality in IWantSandy is really geared to personal-productivity freaks like me, who were inspired by books like Getting Things Done and the Life Hacks movement.

Link

(Disclosure: I am proud to serve on the advisory board for values of n, the company that produces I Want Sandy)

See also: Meet Sandy -- free email assistant

Several experimental Japanese "melody roads" have been deployed, whose cut grooves and bumps play distinctive songs through your car, but only when you drive slowly and carefully down them. This seems like a potentially useful bit of social engineering -- set the musical timing on a road at the safe speed, and combine that with timed traffic lights that reward you with a "green wave" if you stick to the limit, and you'd have a pretty good set of cues telling you how to travel at speed. Bobbie Johnson writes in the Guardian:

A team from the Hokkaido Industrial Research Institute has built a number of "melody roads", which use cars as tuning forks to play music as they travel.

The concept works by using grooves, which are cut at very specific intervals in the road surface. Just as travelling over small speed bumps or road markings can emit a rumbling tone throughout a vehicle, the melody road uses the spaces between to create different notes.

Depending on how far apart the grooves are, a car moving over them will produce a series of high or low notes, enabling cunning designers to create a distinct tune.

Link

The One Laptop Per Child project's "Give One Get One" sale started yesterday. For a limited time, anyone can buy one of the rugged, open little laptops for your own use, provided that you also pay for a second machine that will be donated to a kid in the developing world.

Between November 12 and November 26, OLPC is offering a Give One Get One program in the United States and Canada. During this time, you can donate the revolutionary XO laptop to a child in a developing nation, and also receive one for the child in your life in recognition of your contribution.

Link

See also: One Laptop Per Child machines for sale this Christmas: buy two, one goes to developing world

Above: Laugh Out Loud Cats meet flowcharts. Below, the most-commented Boing Boing posts of the past 7 days.

Bob Dylan warns of Cylon invasion (Cory)

New iPods reengineered to block synching with Linux (Cory)

Review of $35 Blackwing 602 pencil (Mark)

Magazine back issues on DVD (Mark)

Dr Who services planned for Welsh church (Cory)

Hidden bear in Toblerone logo (Mark)

Discovery paves way for gamma-ray annihilation lasers (Mark)

Capitol police attack, break leg of anti-war minister (video) (Mark)

French art from 1910 depicting the year 2000 (Pesco)

Magicians innovate without IP law (Pesco)

Blog about living in a van down by the river (Mark)

Artist will send 300 meter banana 50km above the earth (Mark)

Many scientists unhappy about Lucy tour (Pesco)

StopTheSpying: Tell the Dems to keep AT&T on the hook for NSA wiretapping (Cory)

Water leak in overhead apartment creates beautiful bump in ceiling (Mark)

Fake sunroof for car (Mark)

1966 prediction of home computer in 1999 (Video link updated) (Mark)

Here is a roundup of the posts our readers found most interesting this week, selected by volume of comments and permalink traffic:

RFID implants linked to animal tumors (Cory)

Erik Davis on watermarked promotional CDs (Pesco)

IT Crowd Season 2, Episode 3: Great anti-piracy PSA sendup (Cory)

Naomi Klein's Disaster Capitalism video: exploiting disasters for globalism (Cory)

Ice-free arctic in 23 years, and polar bear extinction? (Xeni)

How right digits affect perception of discounts (Mark)

Rolling Stone on "The Great Iraq Swindle" (Mark)

Bush's alien overlord peeks through window during speech (Mark)

Gnome puzzle from MAKE 11, illustrated by Roy Doty (Mark)

RIP: author Madeleine L’Engle (Xeni)

NASA could use a better slogan. Got one? (Xeni)

Southwest airlines: fashion police of the skies

Mass. State Treasurer detained at airport for carrying peaches (Mark)

Grooveshark -- DRM-free P2P music -- pays uploaders (Cory)

DoJ slams net neutrality, says all packets not created equal (Xeni)

Extreme cuisine: So what does it feel like to eat live octopus? (Xeni)

Mark Dery on Taco Bell (Mark)

Psychological "torture bible" published in 1961 reappears online (Xeni)

Photos of "anti-socials" (Mark)

Ronald Jenkees; Hello YouTubes, have you heard my SICK beats? (Xeni)

Steve Fossett (Xeni)

Cory's Guardian column explaining DRM's impossibility to non-geeks (Cory)

IT Crowd Season 2, Episode 2 -- keyboard-destroying nerd sitcom (Cory)

Bottled water forbidden at Seattle festival (Mark)

(Image from ucumari's polar bear set on Flickr. This wonderful photographer's IRL-name is Valerie, and she is a volunteer at the North Carolina zoo. )

Getting high with Richard Branson: Virgin America's virgin flight (Xeni)

Jay Kinney reviews Zeitgeist, the Movie (Mark)

Chart of presidential candidate's positions (Mark)

Two-word license agreement: "FUCK YOU!" (Cory)

Bad cops to wear Hello Kitty armbands (Pesco)

Rep. Bob Allen cites fear of black men, weather in oral sex arrest (Mark)

Great Happiness Space: doc film on Japan's "host bars." (Xeni)

Video game you control with piss (Cory)

Cartoons for HTTP error codes (Cory)

Google Video robs customers of the videos they "own" (Cory)

US tech firm behind massive new human-tracking system in China (Xeni)

Image: RedandJonny, from this BB post: Link.

EPIC LULZ: Video Link (from this short links roundup / XJ)

Cory's comic-con snapshots, and a voice post.

Ikea opens free hostel for shoppers who don't want to leave (Cory)

Guy who lost online trollfight drives 1300 miles, burns dude's trailer (Xeni)

Never get busted / surviving police encounters: one, two, three. (Mark)

ZOMG TERRISTS GONNA KILL US ALL ZOMG ZOMG ALERT LEVEL BLOODRED RUN RUN TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES MOISTURE BOMBS ZOMG! -- t-shirt. (Cory)

Songs for ice cream trucks (Pesco)

Gyp-hop MP3s (Xeni)

Vintage Planned Parenthood issue of Spider-Man comic (Pesco)

Animated flashlight film (those Sprint ads came from here) (Pesco)

Wireless power explained (Pesco)

Mull of Kintyre pornography test (Mark)

Wal Mart flip flops cause nasty chemical burn (Mark)

Secret list of buildings you can't photograph (Cory)

Fake ATM receipts for sale (Mark)

William Gibson explains why science fiction is about the present (Cory)

Steorn's "free energy" machine: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. (Mark)

Laptop typewriter mod (Xeni)

Mostly NSFW iPhone wallpapers: Coop, and Clayton James Cubitt. Also, unicorns! (Mark, Xeni)

Itsy-bitsy electric generators uses ambient vibes for input (Mark)

The Woz interviewed by RU Sirius (Pesco)

Wide variety of freaks running for US president (Pesco)

Kid in Malawi homebrews a windmill generator (Cory)

iPhone + EFF + ATT + NSA = funny photo (Xeni)

Sicko inspires grassroots action in Dallas cinema (Cory)

What it takes to bring you Fiji water (Xeni)

TED talks videos (Mark)

Stasi smell museum (Cory)

iPhone hacktivation: 1, 2 (Xeni)

Sicko inspires grassroots action in Dallas cinema (Cory)

Teddy bears turned inside-out: photo book by Kent Rogowski (Xeni)

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

Image: Mark Ryden, Corkey Ascending to the Heavens, 1994, 36 x 54”, from this post by Pesco about a 10 year anniversary exhibition at Merry Karnowsky Gallery in Los Angeles.

Cropped detail from "The Last Supper," by clarkbar6, courtesy iphonematters.com. Here's the large size so you can read all the funny txt, and the rollovers are pretty funny too (thanks, KN!).

iPhone posts:
1 :-( / 2 ;-) / 3 :-) / 4 :-/ / 5 :-x / 6 :-O / 7 :-P / 8 =-o / 9 :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D.

Google versus Michael Moore's "Sicko": one, two. (Cory)

GPL 3.0 ships (Cory)

Poking at Facebook privacy: one, two (Xeni)

Bong Hits 4 Jesus: one, two, three, four (Mark, Xeni)

Rule the web! one, two (Mark)

Mushrooms as insulation material (Pesco)

Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars (Pesco)

Peeking at the CIA's "family jewels" -- one, two, three (Pesco and Xeni)

Man thinks he is living inside Grand Theft Auto (Mark)

NYC to require $1MM in insurance and a permit to shoot video on public sidewalks (Cory)

Froot Loop straws (Mark)

Some people hated Michael Bay's "Transformers," while Joel Johnson declares himself "totally gay for robots fighting." (Xeni)

Airplane full of poop (Xeni)

Crustaceans chewing up Japanese island (Pesco)

Wikify the problem of ending corruption (Cory)

Itteh bitteh cheezborgers! (Cory)

The sippy cup terrorist secret agent mom, and TSA's weird "Mythbusters" denial.

Giant snake terrorizing Pennsylvania (Pesco)

Scans of old comic book ads, a screensaver, ad for paper spaceship, photo of the genuine article. (Mark)

Map shows how kids aren't allowed to roam around (Mark)

Video: Doze Green one-liner drawing (Pesco)

Taipei street-basket virtuoso throws 140 balls/minute (Mark)

Laugh Out Loud Cats: rediscovered short film (Xeni)

Pac Man Skull (Pesco)

Jamais Cascio on his new hearing aids (Pesco)

The Cosmoboy jacket (Pesco)

SciFi.com is going to nuke its fiction archive (Cory)

Cory's column on the origins of the copyright wars (Cory)

Mr. Wizard (1917-2007) (Pesco)

Cyber-walrus (Cory)

Creationist Archie comic (Mark)

EFF privacy attorney is a magnet for privacy invading street-searches (Cory)

Ice cream patent wars in the 1930s (Mark)

Sexual predators online - the real story (Cory)

White Stripes album sold on thumb drive (Mark)

Terrorists are stupid (Cory)

Flickr users in Germany and Asia complain of image censoring (Xeni)

(Image: Respectful LOLdaptation of a truly amazing photo by Paul Nicklen, as blogged in this BB post).

Pamela Low, Cap'n Crunch creator, RIP (Pesco)

Skytyping (Pesco)

Soviet arcade games: wonderfully horrible (Cory)

Science of forgetting (Pesco)

Laugh Out Loud Cats: more 1900s comics unearthed, and True historic origins of the Laugh Out Loud cats. (Xeni)

Things that don't look like what they're supposed to be: mutant Jesus candles (Mark), Johnny Depp cookies (Xeni), Popsicle plastic surgery (Mark), Turtle popsicle (Mark)

Bradbury denies free speech message in Fahrenheit 451 (Cory)

Do The Right Thing with Sesame Street Toys (Cory)

Realist archive project (Mark)

Google Street View: a cavalcade of reactions, gag pix, paranoid rants (Xeni)

Steampunk Star Trek (Cory)

Cat has camera on collar so we can see what he does (Mark)

Cory's book reviews: Rejuvenile, Execution Channel, Other Side (Cory)

Mark's new blog, call-in podcast, and book: Rule The Web (Mark)

Cory's Internet Filtering editorial for the Guardian (Cory)

YouTubes to make your Mexican grandmother cry (Xeni)

Tweety Bird popsicle doesn't look like Tweety Bird, and Bugs Bunny popsicle (Mark)

Best-ever case-study on free book downloads' impact on sales (Cory)

Amazing mystery of the new AACS key leak, and New AACS key leaks onto 'net (Cory)

How to snoop online (Mark)

Is this Nessie on video?, and Paula Zahn Now: Loren Coleman and Joe Nickell discuss Nessie video (Pesco)

The Great Google Street View Freakout of 2007: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. (Xeni)

The Great LiveJournal Strikethrough of 2007: 1, 2, 3 (Xeni)

Venezuela: Chavez vs. the media vs. Chavez. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. (Xeni)

Damien Hirst's Diamond Skull (Pesco)

Morphing history of female portraiture (Pesco)

New iTunes steals your ability to turn Apple music into iPod-friendly MP3s and EFF finds HUGE block of hidden info in new iTunes tracks (Cory)

Roswell plans UFO theme park (Pesco)

Xeni's snaps from Guatemala

BoingBoing names a Virgin America plane: "Unicorn Chaser" (Xeni)

HD-DVD re-cracked six days *before* it is patched (Cory)

Gibson on the Neuromancer movie rumor (Cory)

The Sopranos Meet The Hippies by Paul Krassner (Mark)

Stelarc, posthumanist and artist, implants "third ear" inside his arm (Xeni)

Neuros OSD: a set-top box that treats you like an owner (Cory)

Salvador Dali: What's my line? and TV commercials. (Mark, Pesco)

Dr. Strangelove scenes recreated with everyday stuff (Xeni)

Which troll-fighting techniques work (Cory)

New, searchable index of more than 5,000 vintage LA news photos (Xeni)

Elton and Betty White (Xeni)

Preschoolers asked: What happens when people get old? (Mark)

Bigfoot porn (Pesco)

Gerald Casale and V. Vale perform Mongoloid (Pesco)

Get Illuminated podcast #9 -- Adam "Ape Lad" Koford (Mark)

Stoned cop calls 911 fearing overdose on pot (Pesco)

Evicted: Berkeley's Shipyard maker community (Pesco)

Sam Kieth cover for comic of Cory's Anda's Game (Cory)

The Mystery of Mingering Mike: part 1, part 2, proto-post (Xeni)

Taking LOLcats way too seriously, and even more so. (Xeni)

EFF sues Uri Geller over DMCA takedown abuse (Cory)

Compendium of psychological curiosities (Pesco)

BoingBoingBoing podcast 12: Q-Burns Abstract Message (All of us)

Indian tsunami refugees and organlegging (Cory)

Liveblogging LA's Griffith Park Fire: one, two. (Xeni)

Open source copyright doc wants you to remix footage (Cory)

Video: high-voltage, high-altitude work (Xeni)

Iraq: Kurdish girl stoned to death, mob films it on cameraphones (Xeni)

Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus (Mark)

AACS vows to fight people who publish the key (Cory)

Maker Faire previews from May 1-5 (Pesco)

Digg users revolt over AACS key (Cory)

New AACS crack "can't be revoked" (Cory)

Faces of Guitar Heroes (Pesco)

Paul Krassner on Secret Bullshit (Mark)

Photo tour of lovably decrepit petting zoo in Los Angeles (Mark)

Japanese nihilist anarchist candidate video and edited versions (Mark)

Play Jane McGonigal's World Without Oil (Pesco)

LOLtrek (Xeni)

Bratton: LAPD attacks on reporters, protestors "worst in 37 years" (Xeni)

Coachella pt. 1: Björk's wild sound machines; report from the turf (Xeni)

Coachella pt. 2: hipsters, robots, ravers, steampunk, 122 bands (Xeni)

Coachella, pt. 3: plastic crunch, raver cruft, ghosts of desert past. (Xeni)

Telerobotic birdwatching (Pesco)

Potentially Earthlike planet discovered outside our solar system (Pesco)

Maker Faire Previews: 1, 2, 3 (Pesco)

Super Mario vs Psycho Crusher (Cory)

Cory's Little Brother reading (Cory)

Mayor of Boston bans Boing Boing (Cory)

Art by Todd Goldman that looks like other artists' work: 1, 2, 3 (Mark)

Get Illuminated Podcast episode 8: Comic Art Magazine (Mark)

Contest: imitate the CA Governor issuing a warning (Mark)

Posts on the Virginia Tech shooting: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 (Xeni)

Why the shootings mean we must support my politics (Cory)

URGENT! Europeans! Last chance to save Europe from worst copyright law in the world! (Cory)

Todd Goldman's lawyers sending nastygrams (Mark)

Mayor of Boston bans BoingBoing (Cory)

Metal detector posts: 1, 2, 3 (Mark)

Red square nebula (Pesco)

Meteorite smuggling in Mauritania (Pesco)

Voynich Manuscript: 1, 2, 3 (Mark)

Buddha Machine: spiritual, generative transistor radio (Cory)

America needs Boing Boing economics (Cory)

Cavalcade of homeowner holdouts (Mark)

Bruce Sterling video explains the future of cities (Cory)

Supporters work to free Egypt blogger Kareem (Xeni)

Ape Lad draws Jackhammer Jill as a hobo (Mark)

Heaven's Gate, ten years later (Pesco), LA Weekly on Heaven's Gate (Mark)

Nikola Tesla profiled by Mark Pilkington (Pesco)

Invasion of the Peeps (Xeni)

FBI: terrorists might drive school-buses, but they probably won't (Cory)

Sticker prototype for uppity bloggers (is there any other kind?), t-shirts (Xeni)

Lovecraft's 70th death-a-versary, Cthulhu adoration everywhere (Xeni)

David Gill reviews Philip K. Dick's new old novel (Pesco)

MAKE article about "antigravity" lifter killed (Mark)

700 sets of 700 drawings (Mark)

Kidnapped "Nun Bun" Resurfaces in Seattle (Xeni)

Time makes Reagan cry with Photoshop, interview (Mark)

Guatemala: Photos from indigenous protest of Bush visit (Xeni)

NPR: Google to purge some data to protect privacy (Xeni)

Pierre Matter's biomech-steampunk sculptures (Pesco)

Michael Crook apologizes to internet for DMCA abuse (Xeni)

SRL and Greg Leyh's Taser Cannon renamed after C&D (Pesco)

Squirrel menace posts: part 1, part 2 (Mark)

Alternate soundtrack to old '70s PSA for union workers (Mark)

Viacom: privacy-hating hypocrites (Cory)

BoingBoingBoing podcast 11: Noah Shachtman, Danger Room (all of us)

Boing Boing portrait: our obsessions, illustrated (Cory)

IMAGE: "Father and Son," shot in Amdo province, Tibet, by Raul Gutierrez (he and his wife have a beautiful new son of their own this week - congrats!). From this Feb. 26 BoingBoing post.

Darwin's "Origin of Species": free audiobook (Xeni)

NPR "Xeni Tech" - RIAA vs. college students, Gizmodo boycott (follow-ups: 1, 2, 3) (Xeni)

Finding Nemo at the sushi bar (Cory)

Video of failed-chute skydiver surviving 12,000 foot fall (Mark)

Rodney Ascher's short film about a freefalling parachutist (Pesco)

Second Life: John Edwards assaulted by poo-slinging communists (Xeni)

Tricking the social voting sites (Cory)

Loren Coleman: No bread, no blog (Pesco)

WaPo editorial on jailed Egyptian blogger, and US responsibility (Xeni)

Steampunk magazine (Cory)

Take a picture in Miami, go to jail (Mark)

Complete New Yorker Magazine on a USB hard drive (DRM crippled) (Mark)

Pop-up porn case update (Mark)

BoingBoingBoing podcast 10: Bonnie Burton, Star Wars fandom (all of us)

Generation labels from the Puritans to Gen Y (Cory)

Why DRM drives piracy (Cory)

Peru: report on links between unsafe sex and public 'net cafes (Xeni)

Moon Over Morocco podcast (Pesco)

Above: movie poster for the mid-'60s bedroom farce "Boeing Boeing," starring Tony Curtis and Jerry Lewis (Thanks, Andrew Tonkin).

Here are a bunch of recent Boeing Boeing posts we think are worth a second peep, in case you missed 'em.

Schneier on Vista (in)security (Cory)

China: new censorship protests against Google and Sina.com (Xeni)

Osama Team Hunger Force: ATHF terror freakout parody video (Xeni)

American Dime Museum closes, auctions oddities (Pesco)

Maltese Falcon swiped (Pesco)

Blu-Ray AND HD-DVD broken - processing keys extracted (Cory)

Songs of the Pogo (Cory)

Prosthetic mask makers of World War I (Pesco)

Parrot uses 950 words to converse with people (Mark)

Vintage tech devices that never existed (Mark)

Dating advice for men explained in electrical diagrams (Xeni)

Supremely excellent cat-playing-piano video (Xeni)

Gizmodo emeritus rips all gadget-sites a new one (Cory)

Mexican drug cartels taunt each other with YouTube videos (Xeni)

Anti-evolution, anti-semitic memo under legislator's name (Pesco)

Virtual drug gets you and your Second Life avatar high (Cory)

Maker Faire "auditions" in the SF Bay Area Saturday Feb 24 (Mark)

Reader comment: Brendan says,

Following today's link to the movie poster of the old 60s film version of 'Boeing Boeing', a stage revival of the original play has recently started in London. I'm quite sure it's a wonderful thing. Link

It wasn't all ATHF all the time on Boing Boing this week, even though it may have seemed that way. Here are our favorite posts from the last seven days.

• Disney's employee manual, 1943
• Snakes eat poisonous toads and collect their poison
• Horizontal gene transfer explains evolutionary jumps
• Interior shots of Putin's jet
• Inside organized credit-card fraud
• NPR Xeni Tech - Guatemala: digital archives may help find "disappeared."
• Amazing Hot Wheels video
• Boston LED terror scare: a message to the media

ReasonableAgreement.org - the anti-EULA (Cory)

Autistic person translates from her language (Cory)

Ray Harryhausen tribute site with lots of good clips (Mark)

Faux cocaine seduces the ladies: creepy '80s TV (Xeni)

Terrorist sympathizer Andy Griffith rails against Patriot Act (Xeni)

Mongolian death worm documentary online (Mark)

HOWTO isolate stem cells from a placenta at home (Pesco)

HOWTO photograph smoke (Pesco)

Mike Love's Geneaology of Influence (Pesco)

Big factory pig farms are some of America's worst polluters (Xeni)

Above: "Pac Man's secret," by Ape Lad.

Here are a bunch of BoingBoing posts from the past week that (a) people talked about or linked to a lot (b) we were particularly obsessed with.

BoingBoingBoing podcast 9: Matt Haughey of MeFi

Some Zune tracks are crippled with no-sharing flags

Feral woman found in Cambodia

Grand Canyon employees not "silenced" as PEER claimed

Mudflation: inflation in virtual worlds

Unicycle tank from 1933

Self-tuning portable RF jammer disguised as menthol cigs

A town called Fucking / A town called Feces

Government guide to destroying old Woodsy Owl costumes

Campaign to saved "world's weirdest creatures"

Two-person teledildonic rig

Xeni NYT op-ed from CES: Gadgets as Tyrants

Cory's new short story collection: OVERCLOCKED

Deathnote, cheerfully immoral Japanese comics serial (Cory)

Bezos's space ship revealed (Pesco)

Royal Mail delivers letter with no address, just a map (Cory)

Richard Newton, RIP (Pesco)

Video of fungus that grows out of insects (Mark)

PlayStation2 toaster (Pesco)

Cory interviewed, new book reviewed (Cory)

Every issue of MAD on one DVD-ROM (Mark)

Brazil orders YouTube shut down over celebrity sex video (Xeni)

The Secret Life of Machines on Google Video (Mark)

Media overestimates porn industry's girth, say indie producers (Xeni)

US military code will apply to contractors - and embed journos? (Xeni)

What were the most-clicked posts on BoingBoing this year? Ken Snider, BoingBoing's sysadmin extraordinaire, dug into the stats to find out. Between that and our keyword logs, one thing is clear -- we really need to be doing more posts about britney spears' naked mesothelioma ipod video lesbian kissing torrents.

While we don't currently have a reliable way to determine which items were in fact most read by human eyeballs (or cyclops kitten eyball, for that matter), Ken did calculate which permalink urls received the most traffic. Here they are:

Top visited permalinks in 2006 (Stories from 2006 only):

(1) StarForce threatens to sue Cory: Link (669,311)
(2) Adorable cyclops kitten: Link (305,773)
(3) NBC nastygrams YouTube over "Lazy Sunday": Link (191,513)
(4) Facebook prank on police: Link (165,773)
(5) Anti-copying malware installs itself with dozens of games: Link (154,139)
(6) Coldplay's new CD has rules: No MP3s, no DVD players, no car stereos: Link (147,720)
(7) Diet Coke + Mentos = Rapid Carbonic Geyser: Link (141,649)
(8) Rumsfeld resignation summarized in Mac OSX screenshot: Link (139,487)
(9) Stephen Colbert kicks ass at White House press corps dinner: Link (136,691)
(10) SNL Natalie Portman gangsta video, braindead NBC: "viral" = "borrowed": Link (122,316)

Top visited permalinks in 2006 (Stories from all years):

(1) Microsoft "Genuine Advantage" cracked in 24 hours: Link (1,176,966)
(2) StarForce threatens to sue Cory: Link (669,311)
(3) HOWTO get something posted to Boing Boing: Link (371,114)
(4) Five years' worth of Boing Boing posts in one file!: Link (315,143)
(5) Adorable cyclops kitten: Link (305,773)
(6) BoingBoing traffic stats are back: Link (304,182)
(7) NBC nastygrams YouTube over "Lazy Sunday": Link (191,513)
(8) Solving and creating captchas with free porn: Link (173,134)
(9) Facebook prank on police: Link (165,773)
(10) Boing Boing has a linking policy: Link (155,332)

Ken adds,

Some other interesting stats for 2006:

There were 53,356,288 requests for the main page

The various RSS/Atom feeds were served 144,949,688 times

There were 385,629 views of BB's "Defeating Censorware" page

Reader comments: Michael Mason says,

Below are a list of some early posts I found while perusing the archives:

Somebody is launching an encyclopedia: Link

First mention of Cory: Link

Mark disses Hunter S. Thompson: Link

Cory's first post: Link

Cory's First Haunted Mansion mention: Link

400 Visitors a day: Link

Pesco's First Post: Link

Welcome Xeni: Link

A reader writes, "A computer that uses strands of DNA to perform calculations has mastered the game tic-tac-toe."

Each well contains between 14 and 18 DNA logic gates. After a human player makes their move, MAYA-II responds through a DNA reaction. The strand outputted feeds into a series of other DNA logic gates that link the different wells. This results in a chemical reaction that generates a green fluorescent glow in the square MAYA-II selects as its next move. The strand also interacts with the remaining wells, priming them to respond appropriately to future moves.

"MAYA-II moves bio-computation up to the next level of power," says Joanne Macdonald, a researcher at Columbia University, who helped build the system. "It's similar to the invention of the first microchips with hundreds of logic gates."

Link

Keith sez, "This is something creepy just in time for Halloween! Back in Victorian times, it was, from what I understand, fairly common to prop up dead people and take their pictures; often times with their surviving family members." Link (Thanks, Keith!)

Disney won't license its characters to sugary food-products or those that contain trans-fats. They've also pledged to clean up the food in the parks -- and about time, too. Last time I was there, the only milk option for coffee was high-fructose corn-syrup-based CoffeeMate -- if you wanted real milk, you had to buy an entire pint (and they didn't have anything except full fat milk).

In a statement, Disney said it has outlined new guidelines for the foods it will allow to carry one of its licenses.

For instance, added sugar in those foods will not exceed 10 percent of calories for main and side dishes and 25 percent of calories for snacks. Total fat will not exceed 30 percent of calories for main and side dishes and 35 percent for snacks.

Disney has also pledged to eliminate artery-clogging trans fats from both the food served at its theme parks and in its licensed and promotional products.

Link (Thanks, Xeni!)

Dori had her cherished WEB GEEK California plate stolen off her car, presumably as a souvenir. It's a gargantuan pain to replace it, and she's hoping that someone in blogistan knows of its whereabouts, so she's offering a no-questions-asked return policy. Link

Creative Labs has "updated" two of its MP3 players in order to break their FM radio recorder features. If you bought your Creative device because it said, "Record FM radio!" on the box, you're shit outta luck now -- Creative just stole that value out from under your nose. Guess that means I'm not going to be buying anymore Creative devices.

Creative has released a firmware "update" for its Zen MicroPhoto and Zen Vision:M players, which adds Audible support and other minor fixes to the former, video zooming and language support to the latter, but removes FM recording functionality from both players.

Link (Thanks, Amy's Robot!)

ThinkGeek's carrying a line of simple, low-priced LED light-bulb replacements. They last ten years and draw one thirtieth of the power consumed by incandescents. I think the only downside here is that something that's this long-lived is bound to be obsolete long before it's burned-out. That's the green paradox: green manufacturers focus on long-lived tech because that's good for the landfills, but they also do such good R&D that the next generation of products is often miles better and miles longer-lived, which presents the dilemma of throwing away green technology before it's used up in order to replace it with wildly more efficient successor technologies. Link (via A Whole Lotta Nothing)

Back in August, I blogged the hilarious, handsome monster laptop sleeves from Barry's Farm, which make your computer look like it's been eaten by a Muppet. I bought one of these and I've been using it all week, and I love it -- even the TSA goons who shook me down in JFK on Sunday were moved to grin and joke by it.

Now Barry's Farm has introduce a whole range of monster laptop sleeves with the classic good looks of various fuzzy monsters from antiquity, including the wonderful Abominable Snowman from the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer cartoon pictured here. Link (Thanks, Barry!)

Reprodepot sells fabric that comes with a "license agreement" that prohibits you from making commercial goods out of the material. What this means, at the end of the day, is that they're not selling you anything at all -- instead, they're licensing the fabric to you, and it isn't your property, and you can't do with it what you want.

"Intellectual property" is a recent term-of-art, and historically, it's been about copyright as a metaphor for property. On the other hand, selling textiles has been around for millennia, and there's nothing metaphorical about your ability to truly own the shirt on your back.

In the name of preserving a muddy metaphor about property, we're increasingly willing to abandon real property. It's a kind of feudalism, wherein people who can lay some claim to "copyrightable expression" (whether it's a fabric design, the software in a car engine, or the movie on a DVD) are the only people in the world who get to possess real property, while we peons are stuck with being pathetic licensors whose only remedy, if we don't like the license terms on offer, is to try to find another feudal lord who'll cut us a better deal.

Ever wonder why your butcher, the kid who sewed your shoes, or the woman who picked your fruit can't get the same kind of deal? Why should screening a design on a bolt of fabric magically confer the right to turn what's obviously a sale into a non-negotiable license, but not doing back-breaking stoop-labor?

*Please note: This fabric can be purchased for personal sewing projects only. This print cannot be used for items made for resale.

Link (Thanks, Leontine!)

Update: Scott sez, "I'll just point out that the law is not on their side under the First Sale doctrine. See Precious Moments v. La Infantil, 971 F. Supp. 66 (D.P.R. 1997) (finding that first sale doctrine permitted defendant bedding manufacturer to utilize lawfully acquired fabrics imprinted with the plaintiff's copyrighted work). "

Update 2: Reprodepot have posted a response:

Years ago, we had had a problem with a few people making children's clothing with her fabric, and selling them on Ebay while using her company's name which was hurting her business. The text was posted specifically as a deterrent to those people.

We are very aware that we could never enforce such a rule and it was never intended to be taken as a threat of legal action or to be taken as a blanket rule for all of the products on our website. We have reworded the statement it so it is understood as a request (our initial intent), not a demand.

Asking people not to falsely advertise their products is sane and sensible (though it wouldn't be false advertising to say, "This was made from official Heather Ross fabric" if it was true). Asking people not to make commercial uses is also appropriate if that's what it is -- a request.

It's nice to hear that it was intended as a request, but that's not how it was worded. There's not much ambguity in "This print cannot be used for items made for resale." That's a requirement, not a request. A request might run more like the phrasing in the response, "The artist has asked us to ask you to use this for your personal projects and not for resale projects."

Over the morning, I've heard from readers who report similar language on fabric for sale at Wal-Mart and other retailers. The idea that you can sell someone something, but not really sell it, is pervasive. It's a subtle and widespread attack on property.

Norms are a good thing. Asking a dinner guest not to steal the silverware is fine. Locking down the spoons is anti-social.

I've been a fan of Reprodepot since Mark blogged them here in 2002. It's good to hear that they're clarifying the way they interact with their customers.

Update 3: Heather Ross has asked me to say that she doesn't enforce any policies limiting the reuse of fabric bearing her designs.

PCWorld's "History of Computers, As Seen in Old TV Ads" is an hilarious trip down memory lane -- I'm very fond of this Newton ad, which reminds me of just how much I fetishized those early PDAs. I wish they had the "I Adore My 64" ads, which contained the greatest rhyme, evar, "I write with it, create with it, I telecommunicate with it!" Link (via /.)

Gary attended the Big Fresno Fair and found a "Copyright-protected area" sign by a stall where a busker was selling the chance to have your picture taken with a bird. The idea was to use copyright law to stop you from taking your own pictures instead of buying them.

One of the side-effects of the entertainment industry's war on copying is that it's created a kind of folk-mythology about copyright being a kind of magic word you can invoke to put a fence around anything that you want to police. There's no such thing as a copyright-protected area -- it might be reasonable, if you're in the taking-pictures-of-kids-with-animals business, to take some steps to shut out the competition, but appropriating the extraordinary "author's monopoly" that is copyright is both lazy and dishonest.

Any businessperson has to contend with the realities of the world. Blacksmiths don't get to demand that we abandon the railroad and go back to riding horses they can shoe. Maybe it was once possible to take a studio photography business (where you could control who came in and hence set the rules about taking your own pictures) on the road with a county fair. But if your business depends on ensuring that your photons only enter the lens of your camera, then putting those photons in a public place is a bad idea.

You've either got to take the losses you get from amateur photographers, use norms ("Please don't take your own pictures without asking, I do this for a living") instead of threats, or get into another line of work. Inventing magical copyright protection for the patch of dirt where you pitched your tent is the wrong answer. Link (Thanks, Gary!)

Edward Lee is a talented photographer who specializes in shooting dramatic pix of toys poised for action. Link (Thanks, IZ Reloaded)

Wired News editor (and notorious reformed hacker) Kevin Poulsen has an article up today explaining how he wrote a script that ferreted out registered sex-offenders on MySpace, something the company has refused to do. Some of the offenders he found were just hanging out with their friends and families, but a few were actively soliciting sex from children -- his work led to the arrest of one such, Andrew Lubrano.

Poulsen's project appears aimed at producing some empirical data on whether pedophiles are using MySpace, and whether MySpace could effectively police their activity (Fox, who own MySpace, are lobbying for a law requiring sex offenders to register their email addresses to make this easier). But he evinces skepticality about whether this would be a particularly useful technique in the long term -- and I agree. This only works for so long as sex offenders use the names they were arrested under (or under Fox's proposal, it only works if they voluntarily obey the email registry law even as they set out to commit another crime). Presumably, if Fox was continuously combing its registry for known offenders, word would get around and the bad guys would assume aliases.

In May, I began an automated search of MySpace's membership rolls for 385,932 registered sex offenders in 46 states, mined from the Department of Justice's National Sex Offender Registry website -- a gateway to the state-run Megan's Law websites around the country. I searched on first and last names, limiting results to a five mile radius of the offender's registered ZIP code.

Wired News will publish the code under an open-source license later this week.

The code swept in a vast number of false or unverifiable matches. Working part time for several months, I sifted the data and manually compared photographs, ages and other data, until enhanced privacy features MySpace launched in June began frustrating the analysis.

Excluding a handful of obvious fakes, I confirmed 744 sex offenders with MySpace profiles, after an examination of about a third of the data. Of those, 497 are registered for sex crimes against children. In this group, six of them are listed as repeat offenders, though Lubrano's previous convictions were not in the registry, so this number may be low. At least 243 of the 497 have convictions in 2000 or later.

Link

Update: Jenn Shreve sez, "This is a follow-up to a piece I wrote for Wired News in May. In that article, I manually compared My Space pages to those in California's Megan's Law database, based on a suggestion from Alex Strand of MySpaceWatch.com.

Brazil in 1822: people walked around with monkeys sloths on their shoulders (why is the monkey sloth holding a stick in his mouth like that?) and kids ran around squirting some kind of liquid on well-dressed women carrying overloaded fruit baskets on their head (what kind of fluid and why did they squirt it?). See more engravings from the same series at the always-wonderful BibliOdyssey. Link

Reader comments: Jackson Pritt says:

Sloth, not Monkey! That's a sloth, not a monkey. Also the stick appears to be a truss being used to keep the sloth from clawing the man carrying. Given the way the other animals are presented in that engraving it seems pretty apparent that they're taking exotic animals to market for slaughter.

Bernardo Carvalho says:

The liquid the kid is squirting is water, and the tube is called a 'bisnaga'. It was a common carnival prank until the early 20th century. This PDF talks a little bit about it on the first paragraph, also about the works of Jean Baptiste Debret.

Grant Berger says:

These pictures are actually examples of traveler artists whose commissions from colonial governments sent them to Latin America in order to produce elaborate pictures depicting native life, flora, and fauna. Obviously, these were made before the advent of photography, and were the only way the colony's mother government would see the place. Most western stereotypes are derived from these paintings.

William Silva says:

The fluid is perfumed water, squirted for fun, in the carnival.

Axt von Feld says:

Well Jackson, you are right, that is a sloth in a truss. Those slim arms end with three very sharp, branch grasping talons (ouch!) hence the name ‘three toed sloth’.

But the part about taking them for slaughter, I must disagree. The others are carrying exotic birds and butterflies, which were probably be sold as specimens. The print’s description “Le retour des nègres d'un naturaliste” (The return of a naturalist’s negroes) also corroborates that.

It wouldn’t be kept alive if it were to be slaughtered.

About the other print: The well dressed woman is carrying various fruits in her basket, the only ones I can discern are a pumpkin and a pineapple (BTW not a Hawaiian fruit, it was discovered in Brazil). Her fancy clothing is part of a early “carnival” scene, take a look at the other figures, they are all masqueraded or painted! The kid is squirting a “bisnaga” which was probably full of scented water, a typical 1820´s Brazilian carnaval prank. For a fascinating discovery of Imperial Brazil, please take a (very pleasant) read at Patrick Wilcken's Empire Adrift, about the mind boggling escapade of the whole of Portugal royalty to Brazil (my beloved country), driven from Europe by Napoleon’s army in the 1808.

Irene Delse says:

Here's the translation from French in the pictures shown in that entry:

1) "Negro hunters coming back to town. A naturalist's Negros return."

The hunters are in fact the black servants of a naturalist bringing him rare animals and plants (birds, lizards, butterflies, a sloth...) to be studied and preserved or sometimes, like the sloth, kept alive in menageries.

2) "Scenes from the carnival" (above) "Cobblers. A seller of Atacaça" (below)

It's carnaval or mardi-gras. The prettily-dressed woman is selling fruit to the revellers (see the basket on her head). A man is caressing her face and taking off her mantle. The child squirting a liquid (probably water?) is playing tricks at the adults. Note that everybody has the face partly painted in yellow or white or is wearing a mask.

Gonzo Rangers has opened the doors to a mob shamefest on some guy who left voicemail for a woman he met through a dating service, demanding that she pay him $50 for dinner and drinks after she told him she didn't want a second date. The entry includes emails and voicemail recordings. This kind of thing -- publicly shaming a person for rude behavior by posting voice recordings, video, and photos on the Web -- is becoming very common -- sidekick thief, subway flasher, camera thief, subway puppy poo girl. Who needs law enforcement when you have a globally distributed mob ready to pounce on people who are accused of behaving badly? (Note: I was being sarcastic in this last sentence) Link

Reader comment: Adam says:

You forgot the "The Broken Laptop I sold on eBay Blog"

James says

Privacy should be a concern for everyone. My main concern when I see articles like these about mobs using public shaming and ostracism as a form of punishment for social misdemeanors makes me cringe. I can't help but think that at some point, someone will be wrongly victimized by one of these mobs and there will be no protection for them.

I speak from real-world experience with mob-mentality from when I was in high-school. I was constantly ostracized, threatened, and involved in altercations that landed me in the hospital or near death on several occassions. My only social crime? Being a punk in a sea of kids who were into hip-hop and gangs.

Already there are many victims of online shaming. This usually happens under the title of "cyber-bullying" to teenagers and I've yet to hear misplaced shamings in the adult world. However, as the Internet becomes more common place I believe it could become inevitable.

I can't imagine for what, but what if in the future you fell victim to one of these public shamings merely for behaving outside the accepted mob norm? Maybe you get drunk at a party with some co-workers and someone decides to initiate a public shaming of you for flirting with a colleague. Suddenly a personal situation that could be resolved between the parties actually involved becomes a public event and maybe it costs you your job. How could a person protect themselves from such an invasion of privacy?

Why have birds in Huntington Beach, California been flipping out over the last week? On Thursday, a pelican flew right through a car windshield (it lived). Meanwhile, the Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center picked up three birds that we're apparently acting confused and fielded calls about sixteen more. Turns out, these birds may have domoic acid poisoning, the same illness that may have caused the 1961 northern California bird invasion that inspired Hithcock. From the Los Angeles Times:

Although toxicology tests aren't complete (there are no bird breathalyzers), such behavior usually signals domoic acid poisoning from eating algae, said Lisa Birkle, assistant wildlife director at the Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center in Huntington Beach, which is caring for the pelicans...

According to news reports, thousands of befuddled birds rained down on Northern California towns in August 1961, slamming into buildings and even pecking eight humans...

Nobody is predicting a Hitchcockian invasion here, but Birkle urged Southern California residents to be on the lookout for pelicans acting disoriented or turning up in unusual locations.

Link (Thanks, Mark Pescovitz!)

UPDATE: Thanks to the readers who point out that The Birds was based on story by Daphne Du Maurier. However, Hitchcock apparently also drew inspiration from the 1961 invasion. Link to Santa Cruz Sentinel article

Developed in Turkey, India, and Iran in the 15th century, "zoomorphic calligraphy" is "not a matter of script metamorphosing into living forms which are also readable letters, but of using script to delineate such forms." That definition comes from a paper by Robert Hillenbrand, Professor of Islamic Art at the University of Edinburgh. This illustration, by Hassan Musa from Sudan, appeared in the 1994 book Mon Premier Dictionnaire Francais-Anglis Tout En Arabe. More info on the topic at BibliOdyssey.
Link

The Aymara, an indigenous group in the Andes highlands, have a concept of time that's opposite our own spatial metaphor. A new study by cognitive scientists explains how the Aymara consider the past to be ahead and the future behind them. According to the study, this is the first documented culture that seems not to have mapped time with the properties of space "as if (the future) were in front of ego and the past in back." From UCSD:

The linguistic evidence seems, on the surface, clear: The Aymara language recruits “nayra,” the basic word for “eye,” “front” or “sight,” to mean “past” and recruits “qhipa,” the basic word for “back” or “behind,” to mean “future.” So, for example, the expression “nayra mara” – which translates in meaning to “last year” – can be literally glossed as “front year..."

The Aymara, especially the elderly who didn’t command a grammatically correct Spanish, indicated space behind themselves when speaking of the future – by thumbing or waving over their shoulders – and indicated space in front of themselves when speaking of the past – by sweeping forward with their hands and arms, close to their bodies for now or the near past and farther out, to the full extent of the arm, for ancient times. In other words, they used gestures identical to the familiar ones – only exactly in reverse.

“These findings suggest that cognition of such everyday abstractions as time is at least partly a cultural phenomenon,” (University of California, San Diego professor Rafael) Nunez said. “That we construe time on a front-back axis, treating future and past as though they were locations ahead and behind, is strongly influenced by the way we move, by our dorsoventral morphology, by our frontal binocular vision, etc. Ultimately, had we been blob-ish amoeba-like creatures, we wouldn’t have had the means to create and bring forth these concepts.

“But the Aymara counter-example makes plain that there is room for cultural variation. With the same bodies – the same neuroanatomy, neurotransmitters and all – here we have a basic concept that is utterly different,” he said.

Link

UPDATE: Thanks to all the readers who pointed out that a similar concept is presented in Robert Pirsig's book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.