It is safe to say that our primate ancestors and the early humans they begot never picked out sparkly snowflake paper, wrote up a missive about Og and Jane's many achievements in the last cycle and handed out copies to all their friends, relations and hunt/gather coworkers.

But, according to anthropologist Robin Dunbar, Ph.D., the social relationships that were forged during the dawn of humanity still influence everything from Christmas card lists to Facebook networks. I saw Dunbar lecture at the 2008 Nobel Conference in Minnesota, and called him recently to find out more. Dunbar, head of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oxford, says the size of the human neocortex puts a limit on the size of our social networks--a limit that can be seen in examples throughout history.

I received an e-mail from Sal9000, the man who married his video game girlfriend on Sunday. Here's a translation of the letter he sent me, along with some photos:

Dear Ms. Katayama,

Thank you very much for watching our wedding ceremony online. Because of your blog post, we received some comments from what appeared to be international viewers, and we were very happy about that.

I had heard before the groom is very busy during a Japanese wedding, but this was much more than I expected!

Video: YouTube, MP4 download, or Dotsub (subtitles)

UPDATE: Interview with the groom!

On Sunday, a man named Sal9000 married the love of his life. Her name is Nene Anegasaki, and she lives inside of a Nintendo DS video game called Love Plus. The wedding took place during a Make: Japan meet-up held at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. In attendance were a live audience, an MC, the bride's virtual video game girlfriend — who made a speech — and a real human priest.

The event was livecast on Nico Nico Douga, a popular video sharing web site that I wrote about in Wired Magazine back in 2008. (Watch this clip of hot shot Wired folks making total fools of themselves on Nico Nico Douga.)

Nico Nico Douga is home to thousands of video projects by anonymous users — mashups of original art, pop music, anime, and web memes that only an insider to Japanese web geek culture can completely decipher. Sal9000 is an active member of the Nico Nico Douga community, so it was important to him that his offbeat wedding ceremony was broadcast on the site. The footage seen here of Sal and Nene tying the knot between real and virtual is a highly imaginative, multimedia project orchestrated by a guy determined to officiate his devotion to his video game, and to pay homage to the otaku subculture that nurtures this type of creativity. Enjoy!

The true magic of LittleBigPlanet -- the PS3 debut from former Lionhead designers at then upstart Media Molecule -- wasn't fully understood until the game was in our collective hands for some time after its initial release.

What was then (mis-)understood as the videogame that would let us design our own videogames turned out to be one level abstracted from that. LittleBigPlanet had no intention of letting us faithfully recreate Mario's World 1-1 or Sonic's Green Hill Zone with pixel precision. Instead, what it does is take us back to the childhoods where we built those levels -- and every other bit of the world around us -- with the only materials we had at the time: markerpens, cardboard, felt and stickers.

And that's precisely what gives the game -- still continuing to grow and evolve both on the backs of its dedicated community (last reported to have created some 1.3 million levels) and through updates from MM themselves (their upcoming water pack has caused more excitement over a ubiquitous liquid than anyone imagined) -- its peerless charm.

That's not to discount the brilliance of its digital puppetry -- turning your tiny plush avatar into something you actually embody rather than simply propel forward -- or the delicate balance of its 'co-opertition' (as you attempt to hinder your friends' race toward score bubbles as evenly as you beg for their help). But it's the naive and innocent joy inherent in a game that's at heart about the arbitrary rules of the real-world games we created as kids ('you can only walk on the couch cushions, the floor is made of lava') as it is about its own crafted experience that's made it a modern classic.

So, in celebration of its recent first birthday, and its even Littler debut on the PlayStation Portable, below is a collection of the concepts and sketches (happily provided by its relaunched community site) that trace how the game's little pan-planet were cut-out constructed.

Have you ever considered cloning your dog? I have. Ruby is so cute and sweet, but she probably won't be around a decade from now. Since I don't know how to find her family and she can't have babies, maybe it's the only way possible to keep a part of her near me forever.

I contacted RNL Biostar, a Maryland-based company that has successfully cloned several dogs already, to find out how exactly it would work. The company's director of strategic planning, Jin Han Hong, broke it down to me as four main steps:

1. The vet obtains small samplings of skin and fat tissue. The tissue samples are placed in separate containers with sterile saline and antibiotics, then shipped in a Styrofoam box with pre-frozen ice bags overnight to RNL's lab in Maryland.

2. RNL does a feasibility check, which takes one to three weeks. Researchers isolate stem cells from the tissue and attempt to culture them into millions of cells. If this works, the living cells are cryopreserved in liquid nitrogen at -196 degrees celsius — this allows them to be preserved for shipment overseas or for long periods of time, usually 15+ years.

True story: A small college in the Midwest wanted to put up a wind turbine on their campus. The school, being on top of a hill in the middle of the prairie, had enough wind to produce upwards of 3/4 of their needed electricity, so the project made good sense. But when it came time to talk to the people living nearby, the school ran into some opposition. In particular, from a farmer who thought the noise and appearance of the wind turbine would lower property values.

The punchline: He was a pig farmer.*

The point here is not that irony is funny. (Although, it totally is.) Instead, this is about the cultural role that farmer represents. NIMBY--Not In My Backyard--is traditionally defined as what happens when people are, generally, in favor of something, but don't want the necessary infrastructure built anywhere they can see it. Bacon is delicious, but you don't want to live next door to a pig farm. Sustainable energy is great, but you don't want a wind turbine mucking up your views.

It's really easy to write off any opposition that gets labeled as NIMBY. After all, infrastructure has to be built somewhere, and everywhere is somebody's backyard. Therefore, NIMBYists are selfish twits who can't see beyond their own nose. But the truth, as per usual, is more complicated. Thanks to wind power projects, and the supposedly NIMBY reactions against them, political and social scientists are learning what we really talk about when we talk about NIMBY. Their discoveries could have wide-reaching implications, both for how we understand public opposition to infrastructure projects--and for how we respond to it and get what needs to be built built.

Note for city dwellers and others who don't get the joke: Large pig farms are generally smelly, considered unattractive, and tend to lower property values.

In Japan, we eat soy all the time. For breakfast we have rice with natto and miso soup with tofu; for dinner we pop edamame into our mouths in between chopsticks-full of vegetables sauteed in soy sauce. I always assumed it was good for you, until I came to California and my health-conscious American friend told me that soy was actually really bad for you. So which is it?

Here's what we know about soy: unprocessed, it's a great source of digestible protein and has tons of vitamin B, calcium, and folate — all things that are good for you. It also contains isoflavones, and here's where things get tricky. Some studies prove that isoflavones are beneficial, while others have shown that it promotes breast and prostate cancer. Soy has also been called out as an agent of brain cell aging and thyroid dysfunction, too.

In her recent book The Jungle Effect, San Francisco-based physician Daphne Miller — who studied low cancer rates in Okinawa extensively — writes:

While Okinawans take in over 80 percent of their soy in a relatively unprocessed form as tofu, edamame, soy flour, soy milk, or miso, people in the United States eat a similiar percentage of their soy in a processed form. Our soy foods are heated, mashed, and denatured to create a vast array of substances ranging from Tofurky to fillers for tuna fish to ice-cream sandwiches... while whole foods offer valuable protection, concentrated or denatured derivatives of these foods are having the opposite effect.

The bottom line, at least for now, seems to be that good soy prevent cancer and bad soy might promote cancer. Good soy = tofu, soy sauce, miso, natto, edamame. Bad soy = soy protein powder, energy bars made with soy, fake hot dogs, tofurky.

A lot of Western people think natto — fermented soy bean — is gross because of it's gooey texture and stinky smell, but it's one of my favorite things to eat for breakfast. It's filled with protein and great for a post-workout snack, too. If you're still iffy about it, why not combine the foreign with the familiar and cook some natto spaghetti? The slippery texture of the pasta cuts the gooeyness a little, and in my opinion this is a gentle way to ease natto into your culinary life.

Every installment of Taste Test will explore recipes, the science, and some history behind a specific food item.

Images via Jasja Dekker's Flickr and Gaku's Flickr

It's a sure sign it's gearing up to the holidays when the games start pouring in thick and fast, and this week saw the high profile release of two just as highly-anticipated (and by all accounts excellent) sequels: the renaissance stealth of Assassin's Creed II to the dirty Delta zombie-slaughter of Left 4 Dead 2, but there's one return that's captured more of my time than all the above.

The British government has brought down its long-awaited Digital Economy Bill, and it's perfectly useless and terrible. It consists almost entirely of penalties for people who do things that upset the entertainment industry (including the "three-strikes" rule that allows your entire family to be cut off from the net if anyone who lives in your house is accused of copyright infringement, without proof or evidence or trial), as well as a plan to beat the hell out of the video-game industry with a new, even dumber rating system (why is it acceptable for the government to declare that some forms of artwork have to be mandatorily labelled as to their suitability for kids? And why is it only some media? Why not paintings? Why not novels? Why not modern dance or ballet or opera?).

So it's bad. £50,000 fines if someone in your house is accused of filesharing. A duty on ISPs to spy on all their customers in case they find something that would help the record or film industry sue them (ISPs who refuse to cooperate can be fined £250,000).

But that's just for starters. The real meat is in the story we broke yesterday: Peter Mandelson, the unelected Business Secretary, would have to power to make up as many new penalties and enforcement systems as he likes. And he says he's planning to appoint private militias financed by rightsholder groups who will have the power to kick you off the internet, spy on your use of the network, demand the removal of files or the blocking of websites, and Mandelson will have the power to invent any penalty, including jail time, for any transgression he deems you are guilty of. And of course, Mandelson's successor in the next government would also have this power.

What isn't in there? Anything about stimulating the actual digital economy. Nothing about ensuring that broadband is cheap, fast and neutral. Nothing about getting Britain's poorest connected to the net. Nothing about ensuring that copyright rules get out of the way of entrepreneurship and the freedom to create new things. Nothing to ensure that schoolkids get the best tools in the world to create with, and can freely use the publicly funded media -- BBC, Channel 4, BFI, Arts Council grantees -- to make new media and so grow up to turn Britain into a powerhouse of tech-savvy creators.

Lobby organisation The Open Rights Group is urging people to contact their MP to oppose the plans.

"This plan won't stop copyright infringement and with a simple accusation could see you and your family disconnected from the internet - unable to engage in everyday activities like shopping and socialising," it said.

The government will also introduce age ratings on all boxed video games aimed at children aged 12 or over.

There is, however, little detail in the bill on how the government will stimulate broadband infrastructure.

Government lays out digital plans (Thanks, Lee!)

A source close to the British Labour Government has just given me reliable information about the most radical copyright proposal I've ever seen.

Secretary of State Peter Mandelson is planning to introduce changes to the Digital Economy Bill now under debate in Parliament. These changes will give the Secretary of State (Mandelson -- or his successor in the next government) the power to make "secondary legislation" (legislation that is passed without debate) to amend the provisions of Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (1988).

What that means is that an unelected official would have the power to do anything without Parliamentary oversight or debate, provided it was done in the name of protecting copyright. Mandelson elaborates on this, giving three reasons for his proposal:

1. The Secretary of State would get the power to create new remedies for online infringements (for example, he could create jail terms for file-sharing, or create a "three-strikes" plan that costs entire families their internet access if any member stands accused of infringement)

2. The Secretary of State would get the power to create procedures to "confer rights" for the purposes of protecting rightsholders from online infringement. (for example, record labels and movie studios can be given investigative and enforcement powers that allow them to compel ISPs, libraries, companies and schools to turn over personal information about Internet users, and to order those companies to disconnect users, remove websites, block URLs, etc)

3. The Secretary of State would get the power to "impose such duties, powers or functions on any person as may be specified in connection with facilitating online infringement" (for example, ISPs could be forced to spy on their users, or to have copyright lawyers examine every piece of user-generated content before it goes live; also, copyright "militias" can be formed with the power to police copyright on the web)

Mandelson is also gunning for sites like YouSendIt and other services that allow you to easily transfer large files back and forth privately (I use YouSendIt to send podcasts back and forth to my sound-editor during production). Like Viacom, he's hoping to force them to turn off any feature that allows users to keep their uploads private, since privacy flags can be used to keep infringing files out of sight of copyright enforcers.

This is as bad as I've ever seen, folks. It's a declaration of war by the entertainment industry and their captured regulators against the principles of free speech, privacy, freedom of assembly, the presumption of innocence, and competition.

This proposal creates the office of Pirate-Finder General, with unlimited power to appoint militias who are above the law, who can pry into every corner of your life, who can disconnect you from your family, job, education and government, who can fine you or put you in jail.

More to follow, I'm sure, once Open Rights Group and other activist organizations get working on this. In the meantime, tell every Briton you know. If we can't stop this, it's beginning of the end for the net in Britain.

I'll give you a hint: It has absolutely nothing to do with Star Trek, Star Wars or Dr. Who. (To my knowledge. Fanboy schooling commences anon.)

More commonly called Freeth's Nephroid (which makes it sound less like a tentacled devourer of souls and more like a little boy's pet monster), it's actually a special plane curve--which is also not as weird and confusing as it sounds. Yeah, we're talkin' about a math thing today. (This was always my "B" subject, so feel free to let me know if I'm being wrong on the Internet. Again, fanboy schooling commences anon.) Onward to knowledge...

Pictured: Not the Nephroid of Freeth. Courtesy Flickr user cole24, via CC

Jacques Vallee is a computer scientist, partner in a venture capital firm, and author of more than 20 books, including Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers, The Invisible College, and The Network Revolution.

When it was revealed that the U.S. resorted to torture to extract information from prisoners, many people my age must have had a very somber thought for the thousands of young Americans who had given their lives on the beaches of Normandy in a brave effort to rid the world of governments that engaged in such shameful practices. Two other thoughts flashed to mind: the stupidity of giving up the high moral ground at a time when the U.S. had earned so much goodwill thanks to its stand on democracy and human rights; and the pointlessness of such interrogations, often stated by our military experts, since the victims will generally admit to anything in order to stop the pain.

My friend, French Résistance leader Jacques Bergier, who was tortured multiple times by the Gestapo, made the ludicrous "confession" that his network planned to invade Corsica. In reality they were looking for heavy water and for Werner von Braun's rocket base.

As a child of World War Two who remembers its limitless horrors, my revulsion at the practices of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib was so great that it took me a while to realize the more positive implications: if our henchmen used waterboarding, a practice so primitive it placed us in the same hateful historical imagery as the caves of the Inquisition and the cellars of the Nazi, this can only mean that all the fancy interrogation drugs developed in classified labs in the 60s and 70s have failed: there is no truth serum. We should be relieved about that.

Watch video: Download MP4, YouTube, subtitles at Dotsub.

Boing Boing Video proudly debuts a new piece from the "great god almighty could it get any more awesome?" N.A.S.A. music project, this one from two personal music heroes: Tom Waits, and Kool Keith. The track is called Spacious Thoughts, and you can pick it up on the project's debut album, Spirit of Apollo (Amazon link.)

NASA, short for "North America South America," is a music collaboration project assembled by Squeak E. Clean (aka Sam Spiegel, brother of film director Spike Jonze) and DJ Zegon (Ze Gonzales, professional skateboarder).

The music video embedded above was created by Montreal-based Fluorescent Hill, and I asked collaborators Mark Lomond and Johanne Ste-Marie a few questions about how all that crazy magic came together. Below, and after the jump, are their replies.

BB: Tell me a little about Fluorescent Hill? Who are you guys, where are you, what do you do?

Fluorescent Hill: Well, we're a very small collective of artists, basically myself (mark lomond) and johanne ste-marie. we started working together while in school here in Montreal, along with some other friends. So we've been together for almost eight years. We do design, illustration, animation, live action, basically anything artistic, but with a primary focus on film.

BB: How did the NASA video project come together, and what were your first thoughts when you learned what track and what musical artists would be involved?

Fluorescent Hill: We got an email one day describing the entire NASA project, the musicians involved the visual artists involved and it just blew our minds. As soon as I saw the list of musicians, deep in my brain I already was hoping to work on the Kool Keith and Tom Waits collab. They're two artists that I go way back to my early tape buying days with. So when we finally got on the phone, and they said it was this track "Spacious Thoughts" a small peice of my brain exploded. Then when they sent the track I was absolutely just ecstatic.

Photo: Mag3737

Michael Fricklas, Viacom's General Counsel, gave a lecture to a Yale Law class in which he confessed that suing people for copyright infringement felt "like terrorism." He says that this was bad strategy on the entertainment industry's part, as was "bad" DRM.

That's the good part -- an admission that suing customers is bad news. But lest you think that Fricklas has learned anything from this experience, consider the rest of his talk.

Photo: Mikael Altemark

Plogue's Chipsounds recreates the audio produced by eight vintage computer systems. The designers claim that it's the most accurate emulator yet, letting artists make authentic old-school tunes with the latest music-making software.

"Chip music sounds like nothing else," said David Viens, who co-founded the Canadian developer in 2000. "It boasts a totally separate sonic spectrum than the other forms of electronic music. It brings back fond memories."

Mimicking vintage hardware like the AY-3-8910 (arcade games), POKEY (Atari 400/800) and the legendary MOS Technology SID (Commodore 64), Chipsounds plugs into apps such as Logic Pro and GarageBand. According to the blurb, musicians can even use the same "abusive" technical tricks that gave the original machines a creative lifespan far beyond their commercial shelf lives.

"When I say there is no water crisis, you must be wondering, 'Is this guy talking to his hat?'" That's how Asit Biswas led off his speech last month at the 2009 Nobel Conference. And--oddly worded idiom aside--he was right. That's exactly what everyone was thinking.

The Conference--really a lecture series timed to coincide with the distribution of Nobel Prizes--brings Nobel winners and eminent researchers from around the world to Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota. All the lectures orbit a central theme. This year, it was water. Or, rather, the lack of water. Most of the speakers talked about the risk of losing this important resource--how we humans threaten our own water supply, how that puts us at risk for a whole mess of trouble, and how we might be able to tackle the global water crisis.

But that crisis is a myth, according to Biswas. He's the president of the Third World Centre for Water Management and winner of the 2006 Stockholm Water Prize, and he says that there's plenty of water to go around. Freaking out about water supply is pointless, he says. Worse, it wastes time and resources that could be used to fix the world's real problem--actually getting the water to the people.

To find out more about why Biswas thinks global institutions like the United Nations and the World Bank are dead wrong on water, I called him for a post-Nobel Conference interview.

Quebec has streamlined its H1N1 vaccination system by borrowing a trick from Disneyland's "Fastpass" queueing system. At Disneyland (and other Disney parks), busy rides have Fastpass ATMs at their queue-heads. Would-be riders insert their park-tickets and get a reservation stub in return, advising them to return later in the day in a one hour window (say, 1:15-2:15) (pro tip: Disney doesn't enforce the "expiry" time, only the "ripening" time, so you can go any time after 1:15, which means that you can collect Fastpasses all morning when the lines are short and use them all afternoon when the lines are long).

Quebec's health-care system is doing the same, banishing seven-plus-hour waits in favor of a quick, efficient system that allows people to return at a later time for very quick treatment.

Tony Benn, the great British politician, recently gave a CBC radio interview where he decried New Labour's approach to governance, saying that they'd stopped seeing themselves as the people's representatives and started seeing themselves as the people's managers. This is true around the world, I think -- Bush was the "CEO President" and Obama has appointed a "CTO" for America. Canada's Harper government clearly sees itself as running Canada, Inc. And, of course, China and Singapore's politburos are unabashed managers and make no real pretence to representing their populations.

And there are some benefits to a "management" approach -- this being one of them. Disney manages crowds like no one else. If you have crowds that need managing, take a notebook and a camera to Disney World for a week and come back with the solution to your problem.

But in the main, I'm a lot happier to be represented than managed. A CTO tries to maximize the profitability of technological deployments for highest return on investment; a Minister (or Secretary) of Technology would maximize the social benefits of technological deployments. A CEO tries to return maximum value to his shareholders; a President or Prime Minister tries to govern for maximum social justice and prosperity.

Every now and again, though, "management" and "representation" dovetail, and here's one of those places where it does. I want my representatives to manage the problem of getting us all vaccinated, and I'm happy to see them use the best tools for doing that, wherever they originate.

Lines are still forming at some vaccination centres, where people are queuing up early just to get their coupons. But officials say the system has been effective. At one vaccination centre in Montreal's Plateau Mont Royal district recently, nurses and health workers outnumbered people in line.

"The system is marvellous," said Johanne Spencer, who'd whisked through her vaccination. "You know what time you're going to have your turn and you know how long you'll have to wait. You don't waste three, four hours in line."

Montreal adopted the coupon system for all 17 vaccination centres across the city.

"Something had to be done," said Deborah Bonney, a spokeswoman for the Montreal-region health and social service agency. "At the beginning, we had no idea people were going to line up in the dark of the early morning in the cold. Confronted with the situation, the coupon system seemed to be the best option. It seems to have done the trick."

Quebec's Disney-inspired solution to flu-shot chaos (Thanks, Mom!)

(Image: Con FastPass ya habrías entrado, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike photo from jmerelo's Flickr stream)

On a scorching hot June day in northeastern Kenya, an hour west of the Kenyan-Somali border, Leila Chirayath Janah arrived at the Dabaab refugee settlement in an armed convoy. She was there on a mission: to connect jobless, displaced refugees to the rest of the world through legitimate Internet-based jobs.

Leila, 27, is the founder of Samasource, a non-profit organization reminiscent of a tech startup that outsources web-based jobs to women, youth, and refugees living in poverty in third world countries. I met her last month in the tiny office space she rents out in downtown San Francisco. She is tall and well-dressed, and has credentials that include Harvard, Stanford, and a fellowship with TED India. Her obsession with Africa started in her teens — when she was a senior in high school, she left LA to teach English to a class of 60 blind people in rural Ghana; a few years later she created an African Development Studies at Harvard, and a few years after that, she started working on Samasource.

For most, there will have been only one game released this week (and that most includes a number of major publishers, who, gun-shy from the competition, have pushed their own releases to Q1 of next year): Infinity Ward's return to the Modern Warfare franchise they laid down in 2007.

Modern Warfare 2 [Infinity Ward, PC/PS3/Xbox 360]

The developer has twice courted controversy in recent weeks, one for the very unfortunately devised viral video gag (for which IW has yet to offer a formal apology), and the second with early leaked video of what it surely intended as its most emotionally charged level -- a scene in which an agent embedded with an arms trafficker is present for a civilian massacre.

The Ruben's Tube: Proving that basic science concepts are more fun to learn when you add open flames since 1904. Want to build your own? There's an Instructables for that.

Thumbnail image courtesy Flickr user tom_adams, via CC.

I recently talked to Sony's Steve Haber, President of Digital Reading, about its flagship ebook reader. Named the "Daily Edition," it hits stores next month. Notwithstanding differences between each manufacturer's respective libraries, it offers all the best features of its main rival, the Kindle. But Sony says it offers one thing that Amazon won't: actual ownership of your books.

The story of Tim Langdell's relentless and darkly fascinating trademark fight against any and all users of the name 'Edge' has been quietly storming under the surface for the better part of this year.

In a nutshell: Langdell's Edge Games, a UK-based publisher in the earliest days of home computer games, has tirelessly struggled to maintain ownership over the word against any would-be competitor, regardless of discipline, growing more convoluted and ludicrous the farther down the rabbit hole you go (the Chaos Edge blog is the most damning at documenting just how bizarre it's become).

For nearly two decades, it seemed to work. Edge Games successfully struck settlements with movie and comic book companies, further strengthening his grip on the four-letter word, but then Langdell attempted to swat down what should have been his easiest target: tiny French indie developer Mobigame, and their iPhone debut, titled, of course, Edge (pictured left).

After successfully managing to get the game removed from the App Store, Langdell butted up against what could prove to be his downfall: the collective, unshakable 'might' of the indie game community, who've coalesced around the Mobigame struggle and mounted reams of evidence and circumstantial quotes about Langdell's business practices in his early days, seeking to shred the paper tiger and expose what little claim Edge Games has over the trademark.

Now with the legal might of no less than Electronic Arts behind them (who recently filed this scathing suit against Edge Games after Langdell seemed to be targeting EA's Mirror's Edge, using much of the evidence gathered by the indies), and with Edge Games now having successfully convinced Apple to remove Killer Edge Racing from the App Store, the indie community has served its latest sardonic volley against Langdell, rallying together to show support for 'the fallen' by incorporating the name into their own games.

Below, then, a gallery of all the participants' parodies. Whether the 'troll day' has any effect other than situation-awareness and to what end the community will take its efforts remains to be seen, but either way it's a heartening reminder of the size and solidarity of the indie games movement.

Each month, I pick a question from a current or former toddler and answer it on BoingBoing. If a toddler you know (or once were) has a pressing science-related concern, email me!

Anyone who's watched "Jurassic Park" (and, subsequently, thought up a velociraptor escape plan) knows there were meat-eating dinosaurs. Anyone who's had to talk a child (or themselves) down from a post-"Jurassic Park" nightmare knows that most dinosaurs ate plants. But Pbryden's 4-year-old wants to know whether any dinosaurs ate both.

That sounds like just the kind of thing velociraptors would do to trick you into complacency...

I got my Dell Mini10V in the mail yesterday. It's small and red and pretty, but I had one minor issue with my order. When I was personalizing my order online, it asked me if I wanted a 24WHr 3-cell battery or a 56WhHr 6-cell battery; the 6-cell was just $35 more, but had double the lifespan. I went with the 6-cell. As soon as I pulled it out of the box, though, I realized it was way too big to fit into my favorite bag. It was my fault; I had ordered the wrong thing. I called Dell's 1-800 number to see if they could process an exchange; it was the beginning of what turned out to be a baffling journey into the labyrinth of Dell's customer service phone line.

After a few minutes of hold music, I got through to a woman who told me I could return the 6-cell, get a refund, and then purchase the 3-cell separately. I wanted to ask her how much the refund would be for, but after telling me she'd email me a UPS label, she hastily thanked me for choosing Dell and then put me on hold so I could speak to a sales rep who would then sell me the 3-cell battery.

The sales rep was a soft-spoken woman named Jame. After asking me about three minutes of questions about what kind of laptop I had purchased and how, she told me I could buy a 3-cell battery for my Mini 10V for $129.99 + tax, how would I like to pay? Before I paid, I wanted to know how much I was going to get refunded for the 6-cell. She said it would be around $135, but she seemed unsure. I asked her to put me back on the phone with the person whom I had talked to about the refund so I could double check.

She refused. "I'd really like to sell you this battery first," she said.

I explained that I didn't want to pay $129.99+ for an extra battery for a $299 computer without knowing how much I'll get refunded for the one I was returning. She kept asking me why I wasn't buying the battery from her, and I repeatedly told her that it was because I wanted to confirm the return amount, and besides, I can buy it on Dell.com for the same price, free shipping, without spelling out my name, address, and credit card number over and over. Finally, she said:

"Ma'am, I didn't want it to come to this, but I'll tell you this, I want to make this sale. If you don't buy the battery, I won't get my commission."

Adam 'Atomic' Saltman's one-button action-opus Canabalt (covered earlier in a previous column) will likely go down as 2009's biggest viral surprise -- to no less even than Saltsman himself, who admitted at this year's Austin GDC Indie Games Fest to squandering and then scrambling to capitalize on the success the game near instantly saw (the first 120,000 players the game captured by its second day, and subsequent 650,000 by the week's end, saw none of the cross-indie/Twitter/iPhone port promotions subsequently rolled out as quickly as possible).

But there's almost no one in the industry that hasn't taken serious note of its acclaim and wondered what magic formula there might be hidden in its design that can be replicated elsewhere. And so -- in service to fans, would-be devs and established designers alike -- Saltsman has provided us with his sketches and notes, illustrating each leap to logical leap he made in finishing that first version.

Interestingly -- though maybe not so surprisingly, given that the game was created for the Experimental Gameplay's 'Bare Minimum' challenge -- the documents show a game more complex than what we eventually received, with its anonymous runner able to pull off sliding ducks on top of his now-singular jump, and 'edit' and 'profile' modes obviously stripped from the game (indeed, the entire game seems to now live inside what Saltsman originally had planned as a 'quick race' option).

And so, what follows is the necessarily brief notes and calculations for a necessarily brief production, neither any less worse off for it: let us know if you crack Saltsman's magic code.

[Canabalt fan art at top by Georgia 'garlicbug' Hurbgljjsa, via Pauli MadamLuna Kohberger's BBS, via Saltsman]

Guestblogger Arthur Goldwag is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books.

No, not really. But when I was a freshman in college in 1975, the Poli Sci 101 course that I took was Straussian and neo-conservative to its core. Kenyon College's political science department was (and still is--or at least it was three years ago, as this story in the far right wing journal Human Events confirms) an "oasis" of Straussian and conservative theory. The first text we read, as I recall, was Socrates "Apology." Most of us assumed that Socrates' persecutors were the bad guys, that freedom of thought was strictly good and the suppression of free speech categorically bad. But using Socrates' own mode of questioning, our teachers challenged our blandly liberal presuppositions. Precisely what's good about Democracy? Why shouldn't the state protect itself? Are we sure we understand what the Founders of our own country really meant when they wrote about "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?"

Douglas Rushkoff is the author of Life Inc., Coercion, the graphic novel Testament, and many other books.

I've written and even taught a whole lot about interactive narrative over the years, but rarely have the chance to play with this stuff. So last year, when a Canadian games company rang to see if I'd be interested in collaborating with them on developing stories for a giant, multi-dimensional gaming universe, I jumped. It was like I was being given the chance to live out Jack Kirby's dream of world-building with Robert Anton Wilson's vision of multiple and overlapping perspectives.

The early results are finally making it online as the preview of a graphic novel, which spills out into the trailhead of at least one Alternate Reality Game, and also comprises the back story of the coming videogame series. This is a big big universe - a giant war for the future of humanity, of course - with maybe one overall timeline but many different pathways through the material. So people might follow my characters through a series of graphic novels, and learn something about them that they can then use in the games, or an artifact they find in the game might help them decode something in the comics. And even the ARG that people are beginning to play right now - through which they are "finding the others," and forging coalitions with other gamers in their own parts of the world to solve certain challenges - is a set-up for the bigger game, where these larger groups will be responsible for various aspects of the coming war.

The object of the game right now is for the players to build the "Darknet," an alternative network through which a global resistance can operate, and people can begin to piece together why NASA scientists are being rounded up and what the hell happened over the skies in Los Angeles.

A man runs. He falls down. He struggles back onto his feet and he runs some more. It's a simple narrative. Even without much detail, you can understand what's going on. Pause the video, though, and the scene isn't nearly as clear. Movement makes up for the lack of other visual information. Your brain can read and understand a video at much lower resolution than it would need to make equal sense of a still frame.

Meet Jim Campbell, a former Silicon Valley engineer turned visual artist. Inspired by early Bell Labs experiments with pixelated images, and by his own engineering work with digital filters, Campbell makes art that toys with the human brain.

I was driving along the San Francisco waterfront one morning when a sign on a white tent in the Marina Green parking lot caught my eye. It said Reactt: The Only Real Boot Camp in San Francisco. I was curious, so I googled it when I got home.

Originally, the term "boot camp" referred to the training program military recruits go through before they're deployed. In the mid-2000s, boot camps for rehabilitating juveniles caused a media frenzy when a boy's tragic death was caught on camera.

These days, it has become a popular title for extreme fitness programs that start really early in the morning and command lots of repetitive hard core exercise under the watch of really buff instructors. Reactt is one of them, and since I've always wondered what being at boot camp might be like, I decided to try it out.

I just finished my podcast reading of my latest story, "Epoch," which Mark Shuttleworth commissioned for my upcoming short story collection/experiment, With a Little Help. It's the story of the sysadmin charged with shutting down the first and only functional AI, which no one can figure out a reason to save -- and it's the story of the AI's bid to save its own life by fixing the Unix 32-bit rollover problem.

The podcast is in eight parts -- I started reading it before I'd finished the story, so there's some minor inconsistencies that'll be fixed in the final cut. Next up I'll be reading "Martian Chronicles," my young adult story about free-market ideologues colonizing Mars, and the video games they play on the way to the Red Planet.

The doomed rogue AI is called BIGMAC and he is my responsibility. Not my responsibility as in "I am the creator of BIGMAC, responsible for his existence on this planet." That honor belongs to the long-departed Dr Shannon, one of the shining lights of the once great Sun-Oracle Institute for Advanced Studies, and he had been dead for years before I even started here as a lowly sysadmin.

No, BIGMAC is my responsibility as in, "I, Odell Vyphus, am the systems administrator responsible for his care, feeding and eventual euthanizing." Truth be told, I'd rather be Dr Shannon (except for the being dead part). I may be a lowly grunt, but I'm smart enough to know that being the Man Who Gave The World AI is better than being The Kid Who Killed It.

Not that anyone would care, really. 115 years after Mary Shelley first started humanity's hands wringing over the possibility that we would create a machine as smart as us but out of our control, Dr Shannon did it, and it turned out to be incredibly, utterly boring. BIGMAC played chess as well as the non-self-aware computers, but he could muster some passable trash-talk while he beat you. BIGMAC could trade banalities all day long with any Turing tester who wanted to waste a day chatting with an AI. BIGMAC could solve some pretty cool vision-system problems that had eluded us for a long time, and he wasn't a bad UI to a search engine, but the incremental benefit over non-self-aware vision systems and UIs was pretty slender. There just weren't any killer apps for AI.

MP3s: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Podcast feed

Channel 4's documentary-style drama, The Execution of Gary Glitter, imagines an alternative Britain that reintroduces the death penalty. Celebrity sex offender Paul Gadd—AKA glam rock star Gary Glitter—is re-tried for his crimes and hanged. It's a story about the moral quandary of capital punishment, generously garnished with the British media's obsession with pedophilia.

Guestblogger Arthur Goldwag is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books.

(CC-licensed photo on Flickr by 911conspiracy)

Forty-five years ago, Harpers magazine published Richard Hofstadter's essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." The occasion for the piece was the revenant conservatism that had driven Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign (the magazine hit the newsstands the month of the Johnson/Goldwater election), but it remains astonishingly apt. I cannot recommend it enough for anyone who wants to understand the mentalités of fringe political movements in the United States--from the Anti-Masons and Know Nothings in the first half of the 1800s, to McCarthyism, the Nation of Islam, and the Weathermen in the last century, to the Birthers and Truthers today.

You spend a lot of time online. Maybe it comes with the job. Maybe your idea of a perfect weekend is to be perched in front of your computer reading blogs, buying shit you don't need on Amazon, Tweeting and Facebooking, or surfing YouPorn. But at what point are you considered a bona fide Internet addict? To find out, I called up a psychologist and a fancy rehab center who specialize in this type of thing.

I must admit there was a part of me that went into reporting this story with a smirk. Internet addiction? Aren't we all Internet addicts to some extent? And then I talked to Coleen Moore of the Illinois Institute of Addiction Recovery, who told me that 20% of all addicts who check into the rehab center are there for Internet addiction. Some of them use drugs along with the Internet so they can stay awake and online longer, and others get urinary tract infections or wet themselves because they don't want to take bathroom breaks. Carpal tunnel and eye strain are only the tip of the iceberg. For some, Internet addiction is a very real psychological issue that calls for medical help.

Guestblogger Arthur Goldwag is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books.

On September 15, 2009, THE LOST SYMBOL came off press. Fans of THE DA VINCI CODE, with more than 80 million copies in print perhaps the bestselling novel of all time, were thrilled--they had been waiting for Dan Brown to write another book for six years. Random House, B&N, and Amazon were delighted; they moved more than a million copies in twenty four hours and another million copies by the end of the week; two months later, it still sits high atop the bestseller lists.

The Masons breathed a sigh of relief, because, even if Brown had sensationalized their secret rites and made them look a little silly (drinking wine out of skulls and all that--which come to think of it, is a lot less demeaning than donning fezzes and driving miniature cars in parades, which members of the Masonic fraternity called the Ancient Arab Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, better known as the Shriners, do right out in public), he portrayed them as men of reason, and implied that their ranks are still as crowded with the powerful and the wealthy -- Cabinet secretaries, plutocrats, Senators, Museum directors -- as they were two centuries ago, when they could count Goethe, Mozart, George Washington, Lafayette and Paul Revere among their members.

I was guardedly hopeful myself. With all those Masonic symbols on its cover, I figured that CULTS, CONSPIRACIES AND SECRET SOCIETIES stood a small chance of being captured by THE LOST SYMBOL's commercial gravity, much as a tiny planetesimal can get pulled into a gas giant's orbit. But happiest of all was Lynne McTaggart, the real-life author of THE FIELD and THE INTENTION EXPERIMENT, whose books and research in the field of Noetic Science are specifically cited in THE LOST SYMBOL's pages.

(Watch video: YouTube, Dotsub, or download MP4.)

A quick little goodie from Boing Boing Video. Last night, I sat in on a live recording session at Santa Monica's Village Studios with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, described as "African-American string band revivalists." They were amazing: I have never been so emotionally moved by someone playing a musical jug (and banjos, fiddles, cow bones, and kazoos). Their performance was witnessed by a handful of music biz folks and oldtime music enthusiasts, and made me feel deeply homesick for Appalachia (I'm also craving cornbread and butterbeans today - there's a song for that).

The Chocolate Drops have a new record coming out in 2010, and Boing Boing will be all over it like gravy on grits. If you dig R. Crumb, Smithsonian Folkways recordings of pre-blues and pre-bluegrass banjo music, and love folks who bring new life to authentic American music, you will flip out.

So, the video above: after the Drops' performance and recording session ended, Dom Flemons (of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, seated in center in the video), Blind Boy Paxton (seated at left in the video), and Frank Fairfield (seated far right) sat down together and jammed pure, sweet magic for a spell. I wasn't prepared with a proper camera or crew, but I grabbed my iPhonetraption out of my pocket and got to shootin'. I hope you enjoy it as much as everyone in the room did. Pure magic, these guys.

Yesterday, a shooter opened fire on America's largest Army base, killing 13 and injuring many more. As of this morning, 27 people were still in the hospital. The alleged shooter, Maj. Hasan Nidal Malik, was at first reported dead. Since then, it's been confirmed that he survived and is in custody.

The media, obviously, has been all over this. But one reporter--and a journalism school buddy of mine--Amanda Kim Stairrett, knows Fort Hood and the impact this incident has had on the Base better than most. Amanda Kim is the military editor at the Killeen Daily Herald. Her office is just down the road from the Fort's main entrance and she's been covering military news for more than four years, since before she graduated college. Fort Hood is her beat and this community is a central part of her life.

I called Amanda Kim this morning to get her perspective on the shooting and its aftermath. In our interview, she talked about the confusion that followed the shooting, the history of violence at Fort Hood, the way media circus impacts soldiers' families, and why she won't do speculative reporting.

Though for die-hard RPG nuts it'll have been a red letter week with the release of Bioware's Dragon Age: Origins, it hasn't been enough to wean me off my daily regimen of pushing further into the Borderlands and compulsively playing through the two levels that make up the Left 4 Dead 2 demo (above, now fully released to the public) with each character, hoping for just one more scrap of rarely-triggered dialogue to more fully flesh out just who these characters are that I'll be spending most of the winter with.

But it's without any facetiousness that I admit that there's one game release this week that's particularly pricked my ear:

Image via Sandy Austin's Flickr

People always ask me what I like to do in Tokyo. What's fun? What's cool. Well here's my dirty secret. Most nights, I sit in my parents' living room and watch silly game shows while drinking green tea and eating persimmon.

Guido Núñez-Mujica, a 26-year-old Boing Boing reader in Venezuela who is an avid gamer, writes in with this extensive personal observation piece about a new law that widely criminalizes video games in the South American country. As you read the piece, please also bear in mind that publishing this sort of thing under one's full name is not done without personal risk.

These games are a cherished part of my life, they helped to shape my young mind, they gave me challenges and vastly improved my English, opening the door to a whole new world of literature, music and people from all around the world. What I have achieved, all my research, how I have been able to travel even though I'm always broke, the hard work I've done to convince people to fund a start up for cheap biotech for developing countries and regular folks, none of that would have been possible hadn't I learned English through video games.

Now, thanks to the tiny horizons of the cast of morons who govern me, thanks to the stupidity and ham-fisted authoritarianism of the local authorities, so beloved of so many liberals, my 7 year old brother's chances to do the same could be greatly impacted.

After the jump, Núñez-Mujica's essay in full.

As with my earlier column on the new vanguard and returning classic franchises that are keeping point and click adventures alive a decade or more past their prime, there's one other genre that all but the hardest-of-the-core and its tight-knit community itself seem to have forgotten: the text adventure.

It's a genre that -- if you grew up gaming -- probably makes up some of your earliest memories: my own definitely revolve around waiting impatiently for the TI99/4A's cassette deck to finish screeching its way through loading Scott Adams' Adventure series (now playable online here) and pondering the etymology of "pieces of eight", continuing through my teens to the unmistakably British worlds of Graham Cluely's Jacaranda Jim and Humbug (the games that first taught me the word 'whinge').

And it's a genre that certainly is flourishing deep in the underground at places like The IFDB, the IFWiki, the yearly IFComp(etition), and the tireless work of people like Emily Short, but it took an Indiecade finalist and an iPhone app to hook me back in, with a short-list of the top games to try included below the fold.

Yesterday morning, I had the pleasure of taking the 2010 Tesla Roadster Sport out on the town in Menlo Park, California. It's the latest from the eco-friendly, Silicon Valley-based super-fast all-electric-car company started by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk. I can't really afford one in my everyday life (this orange beauty retails at $150K), so I decided to test its street cred by taking it out to some classy American locales. There was drive-thru Jack in the Crack a few blocks from the Tesla showroom, so I decided to stop there for a cup of coffee.

From a slew of new brainwave toys and bionic monkeys to advanced brain scans and wireless neuro-implants that will soon enable paralyzed people to remotely operate computers with their minds, the gap in the human-machine interface is closing. But while mind-reading gets all the glory, other researchers are developing new amazing non-drug methods to control the brain as well. We've posted many times about zapping regions of the brain with magnetic pulses, called transcranial magnetic stimulation, to treat depression, boost creativity, or even improve reaction time. And brain "pacemakers" are increasingly common treatments for epilepsy, Parkinson's, and even depression. What's next? Mind control through sound and light.

Watch: MP4 download, YouTube, Dotsub (with captions/text translations).

In this episode of Boing Boing Video, we test-drive "Sarriugarteis (Odontochile) trilobiteis," also known as The Electrobite.

This trilobite-shaped DIY vehicle was created by "Oilpunk" enthusiasts Kyrsten Mate + Jon Sarriugarte, with help from fellow makers Amy Jenkins and Tansy Brooks.

Pesco previously blogged about the little bugger here -- it's even been to Burning Man, where it no doubt terrified some trippin' hippies.

With gaming's current trend toward the nostalgic taking us on Bit.Trips and Extreme invasions, and with indies giving us de-made versions of modern classics, it more or less follows logically that we'd eventually see the imageat top.

Recognize it? Likely not off the bat, but you'd be surprised what a little motion and original sound can do to a 15-pixel panorama. Below the fold, then, the answer to the riddle plus several handfuls more in the lowest-res high-res gallery you'll ever witness, courtesy UK animation group Alaskan Military School and their viral videos for just-completed British games festival GameCity.

"Medication" by Andrew Brandou, from his Jonestown paintings

Guestblogger Arthur Goldwag is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books.

Some people use the word "cult" as a pejorative, a catchall for sects whose beliefs and practices fall out of the mainstream of organized religion. I use the word as a social scientist or psychologist would, to denote a coercive or totalizing relationship between a dominating leader and his or her unhealthily dependent followers. As I wrote in Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies, "what makes a cult cultish is not so much what it espouses, but how much authority its leaders grant themselves--and how slavishly devoted to them its followers are."

WATCH: MP4 Download, YouTube, or Dotsub.

Boing Boing Video proudly presents "Man in the Sand," from Gordon Gano and the Ryans' new record "Under the Sun." Video directed by famed illustrator, photographer, and filmmaker Matt Mahurin. Read Cory's review of the album: Gordon "Violent Femmes" Gano's solo album "Under the Sun" is out!

In which I am inspired by a snarky comment on another blog.

My normal routine involves a fair amount of procrastination, but I tell myself that's OK (really), because sometimes it leads to work ideas. Like, a couple of months ago, when I was browsing through the Onion AV Club and stumbled over the headline, "By 2100 Everyone Will Be Part Duggar."

Naturally, my response was to wonder whether that might actually be true. After all, back in 2003, researchers figured out that 8 percent of all men living in central and east Asia--a huge proportion of the global population--are likely descendants of Mongol ruler/horde-leader Genghis Khan. I contacted some of the researchers involved in that project to find out whether we can project that kind of genetic impact forward in time as well.

Image courtesy TLC.

When I finished my first half-marathon last month, I experienced what it felt like to run on the ground for two hours. But what is it like to run in a gravity-reduced vacuum? When AlterG offered me the chance to demo their new "anti-gravity" treadmill, I couldn't resist. I jumped in my car and headed over to the gym at UCSF, down in the Mission Bay neighborhood of San Francisco.

A physical therapist named Chris gave me a rubber tube to wear over my running clothes. It looked like a cross between a wetsuit, a tire, and a tutu, and it had a giant zipper going across the top. He told me to step up onto the ramp and then zipped me into the giant rubber veil that covered what otherwise looked like a pretty ordinary treadmill.

The AlterG is no ordinary treadmill, though. It is a super fancy, super-expensive treadmill that isolates the lower body in a vacuum and literally takes off percentages of your body weight using technology developed by NASA. It's meant to help disabled, overweight, and injured people get a solid cardio workout without putting a strain on their limbs, but at this particular gym anybody can sign up to buy time on the machine in 30-minute increments. The AlterG uses air pressure to create the sensation of lost weight — the machine can reduce your body weight by up to 80%, making you feel like you're floating, flying, or bouncing on clouds.

Another fun experiment you can try at home! Although, given pigeons' tendency to carry disease, I'd recommend training a cat, spouse or younger sibling. The video, sadly, winks out right as the expert is being brought in to explain Skinner's research. So, instead, enjoy this explanation of the pigeon experiment and its practical value, courtesy PBS:

With pigeons, he developed the ideas of "operant conditioning" and "shaping behavior." Unlike Pavlov's "classical conditioning," where an existing behavior (salivating for food) is shaped by associating it with a new stimulus (ringing of a metronome), operant conditioning is the rewarding of a partial behavior or a random act that approaches the desired behavior. Operant conditioning can be used to shape behavior. If the goal is to have a pigeon turn in a circle to the left, a reward is given for any small movement to the left. When the pigeon catches on to that, the reward is given for larger movements to the left, and so on, until the pigeon has turned a complete circle before getting the reward. Skinner compared this learning with the way children learn to talk -- they are rewarded for making a sound that is sort of like a word until in fact they can say the word. Skinner believed other complicated tasks could be broken down in this way and taught. He even developed teaching machines so students could learn bit by bit, uncovering answers for an immediate "reward." They were quite popular for a while, but fell out of favor. Computer-based self-instruction uses many of the principles of Skinner's technique.

Image courtesy Flickr user foxypar4, under CC.

Weird headsets that read people's minds? It sounds like dystopian science fiction, but these gadgets (helped by a little old-fashioned muscle measurement) are set to be the holiday season's hot toys. The promised future, of mind games that lapse into punishing tension headaches, is finally upon us.

If you're old enough to remember the early 1980s, you'd be forgiven a degree of skepticism. Atari's Mindlink introduced the headband form factor and some of the tech seen in its modern counterparts, but didn't even get the chance to be a pioneering flop.