Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things

Transcription

A DIRECTORY OF WONDERFUL THINGS
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Thursday, January 31, 2002
Are you tired of lameass pseudorandom numbers? For around $500, you can
get honest-to-god true random numbers with this black box that samples
thermal electronic noise and spits out ones and zeros at a rate of 50,000 bits a
second. (If you can't afford it, you can buy a CD-ROM with random numbers
for around $50.) Link Discuss
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 16:54 permanent link to this entry
A casino with monsters! That's how Tim Mitchell of the wonderful
Mooslessness blog describes the new massive multiplayer game, Project
Entropia.
Project Entropia will have a real economy system that allows
you as a user to exchange real life money into PED (Project
Entropia Dollars) and then back into a real currency again.
Project Entropia will be free of charge with no monthly costs.
Woohoo! My novel is finally out! Click here to
download the book for free, and find out how
you can buy the dead-tree edition!
8-21-03: Read the Island Chronicle
Dispatches at LA WEEKLY.
Link Discuss
I added several new designs and
items to the Boing Boing store.
Link Discuss
Mark and Carla are in the South Pacific! Read
and see all about it on The Island Chronicles
Visit Mark Frauenfelder's Mad Professor site!
Discuss
http://boingboing.net/2002_01_01_archive.html (1 von 104)8/26/2003 11:58:46 PM
I usually don't post ukulele related stuff
here (I save it for my ukulelia blog), but I
profiled ex-British Invasion popstar Ian
Whitcomb for the LA Weekly and he's
such a character I figured some of you
would be interested. Link Discuss
SARS Digital Folk Art Archives
The Guestbar!
Open source docs on demand. DOSSIER is a company that sifts through and
makes sense of the avalanche of documentation for open source projects like
FreeBSD, then prints and binds a hardcopy book of these docs to your
specifications and ships it to you. Link Discuss (Thanks, Paul!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:10 permanent link to this entry
Copy-protected CDs revealed. This tech article deconstructs, in detail, the
protections applied to music CDs that are "protected" (i.e. broken) with Cactus
Data Shield, like Universal's Fast and the Furious disc, and describes how you
can use off-the-shelf software to read and copy these discs on your PC, so you
can make mix discs and backups, and so you can move your music to your
hard-drive and MP3 player. Link Discuss (Thanks, Fred!)
Wednesday, January 30, 2002
Twisted kids' book Photoshopping. The
mad geniuses at Something Awful have
been up to it again -- this time, they're
competitively warping the covers of
beloved children's books. Hey, isn't it
about the one-year anniversary of All
Your Base? Link Discuss
A descent into madness, via soccer. A British couple were driven slowly but
surely mad by neighborhood kids who used the side of their house for
goalposts in their pickup football games, thump-thump-thumping the ball
against their wall around the clock for years. It ended in tragedy yesterday
when the husband stabbed the father of one of the kids in the chest, killing
him.
"Each time we complained the children replied with foul and
A tiny, guest-edited blog!
Steve G. Steinberg has
been hacking since high
school. As "Frank
Drake," he was one of the
original members of the
infamous Legion of Doom. After
studying computer science at UC
Berkeley, he spent a few unhappy
months hacking for The Man,
specifically KPMG's penetration
testing group. Steve now works with
a New York-based hedge fund where
he acts as both a trendspotter and
developer. In between, he was an
editor and writer at Wired magazine,
where he penned the definitive
"Netheads vs. Bellheads" article, and
wrote the Innovations column for the
Los Angeles Times.
look out
There were only two or three really
talented hackers in the late-1980s.
The rest of us were too amazed -agape, gibbering about what we saw
-- to really be able to focus. What
made being a hacker, and I'm using
the word just to refer to people who
broke into computers illegally, so
singular at the time was our view of
the territory ahead.
Engineers at the regional phone
companies occasionally got a
glimpse-- they ran some of the
largest data networks around, had
their switching centers online, and, if
they so desired, could hop from NPA
to NPA without ever touching terra
abusive language and sang out, 'We shall not be moved'. The
overall effect of the thumping football was to ruin our marriage.
We are still married - just - legally."
Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)
The biggest sex-scandal you never heard of. Chu Mei-Feng is a Taiwanese
politician whose sex life was documented and then made famous with a
hidden pinhole camera that recorded her having sex with a married
businessman. The video became an Internet sensation and rocked the Far
East's psyche last week, even as the Taiwanese government tried to stop its
distribution. The scandal continues as the identity of the secret taper is debated
and the existence of more secret video is speculated on. Evan at the Daze
Reader has put together a great overview of the event. Link Discuss (Thanks,
Evan!)
SEC: Financial hoaxters. In an effort to wise consumers up to the dangers of
investing, the SEC has produced a series of hoax pages shilling for capitalseeking startups. Consumers who try to invest are sent "Gotcha" messages
telling them to be more careful in the future. Link Discuss (Thanks, Higgins!)
Mutant corn takes over Mexican village. A rural Mexican village is being
overrun by an illegal strain of GM corn that is growing everywhere -- from the
cracks in the sidewalk to people's gardens. The corn is very high-yeild and fastgrowing, but is susceptible to frequent blights that have been wiping out
cultivated stalks before they are harvested. Link Discuss (via New World
Disorder)
Universal radio in your PC. GNU Radio is an open-source software-defined
radio project. Used in conjunction with minimal hardware, GNU Radio can
use your PC to tune and output cellular, FM, and TV signals. Such a tuner
could be used in conjuction with codec software for decoding HDTV, satellite
and other "protected" signals, which is gonna make it awfully hard to make
any kind of security measures on new broadcast technologies stick. Link
Discuss (Thanks, Fred!)
A racing game for your spreadsheet. Who knew that Excel had such wicked
Easter Eggs? Link Discuss (via Fojo)
A rights-management solution in search of a problem. MediaSignature is a
firma. But most of their view was
blocked: telco engineers only saw the
systems they had direct responsibility
for, and they had no sense of what
was going on outside the insular Bell
companies. (And they sure as hell
couldn't elbow their way onto a
LMOS system back East and patch
one of the binaries in place to turn a
line test utility into a remote wiretap,
just so a dozen hackers could call a 1800 conference system and listen to a
rap star's home phone. For example.)
The early residents of ARPAnet also
had a fuzzy view of the embryonic
Net but, frankly, they were a tad..
slow. Yes, they helped invent the
internet; they believed in the free
flow of information, in email, and
FTP. But they were academics and
military bureaucrats. In our
estimation, they knew as much about
the Net as our parents knew about
sex. ARPAnet was a profoundly
provincial place; they had neither the
imagination nor ethical lapses
required to spelunk through the wider
network and see what was to come.
In short, to be a hacker in the late
1980s was to know something
profound about the nature and degree
of connectedness before everyone
else. But I want to add a much more
outrageous postscript: today, an
equally singular and premonitory
view is coming into focus at a few of
the edgier hedge funds on wall street.
I'm not trying to claim equivalence-hedge funds are by no means "the
new Legion Of Doom" (although
they certainly seem to be the bad-guy
of choice among op-ed writers these
days). And I can only provide the
most oblique support: investment
firms are notoriously private so I
don't know how many are headed in
the same direction, and the actual
details of the direction are just too
dry to give here.
But the gist: we have all heard that
companies from Wal-Mart to
Cheescake Factory rely on
sophisticated data mining to run their
network-attached filter aimed at ISPs. In the MediaSignature box is a database
of known copyrighted song "fingerprints." All traffic into or out of the ISP
passes through the MediaSignature, and when a transfer of a song is identified,
MediaSignature generates a fingerprint from the song-in-transit and compares
it to the list of known fingerprints; if the song appears on the blacklist, the filetransfer is stopped. In other words, an ISP with one of these boxes installed
will know about every song every one of its users transfers, and will terminate
the downloads of any copyrighted songs, or pop up a browser window offering
to sell the track in question through a "legitimate" vendor.
business. Every customer is analyzed
43 different ways until They know
what you will buy before even you
do. Even ignoring the enormous gap
between rhetoric and reality, these
algorithms are at best myopic. Like
the idealized model used in
undergraduate physics -- no gravity,
no friction -- these companies
imagine their business in isolation.
It's unclear whether the process of generating the fingerprint database is a
copyright violation in and of itself, but MediaSignature sidesteps the issue by
charging labels for the privilege of adding their songs to its database.
But money flows through a network
with thousands of significant nodes-to partners, from customers, away
from competitors. The airline
industry has come the closest to this
kind of holistic analysis, thanks to
their penchant for collusion.
What is clear is that ISPs don't need this technology. Under the DMCA, the
ISPs are "safe harbors" -- common carriers who have limited liability for the
traffic that passes over their wires. If you break the law over your ISP's
bandwidth, you're liable, they aren't.
But as soon as an ISP start buying and installing equipment that attempts to
regulate their users' activities, it is making a tacit admission that it can and
should continue to do so; it surrenders its Safe Harbor protections, and so must
continue to purchase and install ever-more-baroque and privacy-invading
technology to show that it is taking reasonable steps to police its users.
We each of us pay our ISPs hundreds of dollars every year to provide a service
to us -- we're their customers, not the media companies. Let's hope that our
ISPs keep that fact in mind as companies like MediaSignature make their
pitches. Link Discuss (Thanks, Fred!)
John Ashcroft believes calico cats are signs of the Devil, according to this
November column by financial guru Andrew Tobias. Link Discuss
Muggers who rip off cellphones in the UK will face sentences of 18 months to
five years for their troubles. Opponents of the new law point out that it costs
27,000 pounds a year to keep a mugger in jail, and a stolen cellphone can be
deactivated for the price of a 10p phonecall from a callbox. Over 1,000,000
cellphones were stolen in the UK last year. Link Discuss
But right now the only people who
really want to see how all the pieces
fit together -- to datamine entire
industries, economies -- are on wall
street. Coincidently, the web has
already made many businesses so
transparent that an outsider can know
almost as much as management.
Surely, with enough determination.. a
lot of bandwidth, some fast
computers... somebody will build the
first detailed map.. a topography of
money flows.. to see what's next.
s.
According to AdWeek, T-Mobile just
launched an anime ad campaign that
was conceived by Itsuro Kawasaki
(director of Ghost in the Shell) and
stars a hacker on the lam. God
damn-- phone companies used to
persecute hackers, not romanticize
them!
Discuss
posted by steve steinberg at 6:12
PM | permalink
Amazing geek how-to documents a recipe for building a sub-$6,000 terabyte
storage array (or, as the how-to calls it, "Your local Library of Congress.")
This is the kind of stuff that archive.org and Google do, building giant,
redundant arrays out of consumer hardware whose reliability at the individual
drive/computer level is quite low, but whose reliability in aggregate is
stunning. It's another example of how a bottom-up, redundant approach to
problem-solving is cheaper, more flexible and more reliable than centralized,
top-down approaches. Link Discuss (via /.)
lathin' haven
My lathe finally arrived, like some
sort of time-machine on a pallet.
Anarchist popstars Chumbawumba got $100,000 for the use of one of their
tracks in a GM commercial. They've donated the filthy lucre to watchdog/
activist organizations that will use it to monitor, document, criticize and
publicize GM's labor practices. Link Discuss
Here's a cool gadget: The Extendit Cat5-1000 is a pair of boxes. One plugs
into the monitor and USB port of your computer, the other plugs into a
monitor and whatever USB devices you want to use, and between them you
can string up to 250 feet of Cat-5 Ethernet cable. It's been a couple years since
I was last a sysadmin, but boy, it sure woulda made my life easier if I could
have remotely connected monitors and keyboards to machines using the
networking wire built into the walls. Link Discuss (via MacNN)
Downtown Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, is almost entirely wired
with Gigabit Ethernet, built around a mesh of fibre lines that have been pulled
along the city's trolleycar right-of-ways. Businesses have enough bandwidth
for VoIP, videoconfernecing and Internet access with more to spare. The
network uses low-cost Debian Linux boxen for mail and other services.
Anyone know what it takes to get a visa to move to EnZed? Link Discuss
(via /.)
I've been busy getting it hooked up,
figuring out the dials, and lingering
over the long 'aaayyy' when I
pronounce lathe -- a disturbingly
frequent occurrence these days.
It's a completely manual, totally
analog, high-precision piece of
machinery. (Pardon me, I'm a bit
besotted.)
s.
Discuss
PM | permalink
maps, unconnected.
Amazing story of a Bay Area social worker who scored a fantastic real estate
deal ($261K for a two-story, four-bedroom, finished basement, terraced back
yard with multiple decks, with a view no less) by buying a former S&M
dungeon whose previous owner had been sent to prison for torching his lover.
Perhaps it was the floor-to-ceiling mirrors and orange shag
carpet that greeted you at the entrance. Or the urine-colored tiles
that covered the stairs and the living room, whose floors slanted
toward a drain in the middle of the room. Or the black-felted
bedroom with its glow-in-the-dark-crucifix platform bed,
perfectly angled for whipping. Or perhaps it was the meth lab,
or the pot-growing sun room. Or the "dungeon" in the basement
where five years before the former owner had fatally torched his
lover.
Or perhaps it was the small things, like the five-gallon can of
lubricant, or the collection of penis stretchers, the trapeze, the
electronic enema, the little hole allowing someone in the kitchen
to watch people in the basement, the names of Satan's helpers
spray-painted on walls or the hawk droppings that caked the
surfaces of the upstairs bedrooms.
Link Discuss (Thanks, Zed!)
I've made maps to show the
evolution of technical debates and
maps to reveal the shape of a nascent
peer-to-peer network. I've mapped
the flows of deposits between bank
branches in northern New Jersey, the
density of radio signals in San
Francisco, and the psychoacoustic
space of MIDI files.
None of them ever got me where I
wanted to go.
I enumerate these maps because,
chances are, you've done the same.
Someday I'll write a history of
people's efforts to "fly through" data,
to turn digital information into - if
not the territory, certainly a map. It's
been a popular pastime at least since
the 1960s, with maps of computer
networks and financial information
particularly flush genres.
The grifter who used forgery, lies and other fraud to steal the sex.com domain
from its original owner and build it into a multimillion-dollar porn empire
claims that he can't pay the court-ordered $65,000,000 settlment owed to his
victim because to do so would cause him to starve to death while giving every
cent he earns to the injured party.
"Just how is the defendant expected to live? How is the
defendant expected to purchase the necessities of life, such as
toilet paper, food, clothes and etc.?" Cohen wrote, in the selfauthored filing. He compared the court order to a "death
warrant" and said it was issued "in violation of the defendant's
constitutional rights."
In addition to sentencing him to death, Cohen claims that the
court is also sentencing him to a life of involuntary servitude
under Gary Kremen, the would-be recipient of the judgment.
"It's saying for the rest of my life that everything I own must go
to Gary Kremen," Cohen said. He claims in his filing that the
judge's ruling has turned him into a slave, in violation of the
13th Amendment of the United States Constitution, which
abolished slavery.
Link Discuss
The current War Against Silence music-zine opens with a lovely reminiscence
of "Space: 1999."
And Space: 1999 was never intended as academic futurism, so
critiquing its vision of a future we're now past is a wildly
pedantic exercise, but part of the reason I'm still going to watch
the rest of the episodes is that they depict a simultaneously misextrapolated and poignantly naive idea of the future that has
become basically unrecoverable in the two and a half decades
since. The technological errors are the most blatant, of course.
The moonbase has a single computer (called "Computer", the
way you call a stray cat "Kitty" and then get stuck with it),
which has the expressive intelligence of a middle-school math
teacher and the analytical power of a small toaster oven. Every
device and instrument on the base has a special-purpose userinterface, most of which consist of rows upon identical rows of
unlabeled buttons, which lends any effort to operate one while
on camera the approximate verisimilitude of a four-year-old
steering a chair around using a frisbee. The abundant CRTs are
apparently only capable of transmitting video feeds or
oscilloscope waves, so all actual important data output is
produced on little scraps of calculator tape, which technicians
are forever tearing off and puzzling over as if they've just been
I once read an interview (now lost)
with a Dutch scholar responsible for
some of the preceeding decade's best
work in mapping information. He
mournfully explained his theory of
why these maps never "worked", and
why they never could. The theory
seemed true but unimportant; the fact
that the interview took place in the
middle of his career is what stuck in
my mind. Why the compunction to
map?
In The Power Of Maps Dennis
Woods points out there is plenty of
evidence that maps "work",
especially if your objective is to
slaughter a distant indigenous
civilization. This is the power of
maps: they eliminate the advantage
of local knowledge. You don't need a
trail guide when you have GPS.
Residency lose its power.
If I can't expound on ludicrous
theories in the BoingBoing guest
blog, where can I? Here's mine:
people keep trying to map
information spaces because they
want to .. not kill, expose... The hand
of god-- whatever. Because maybe,
with a good enough map.. more
detail.. higher resolution.. sub-meter
accuracy! Who knows! Like one of
those old spirit photographs ...
Revealed you fucker.
s.
Discuss
PM | permalink
my biotech adventure
Recently, I decided to sequence my
DNA in my spare time. "How hard
can it be," I figured. "There must be a
machine on eBay that does all the
work." Besides, for my masters thesis
in computer science I had applied
numerical modeling techniques to
studying sea urchin embryos. I was
cross-disciplinary, god damn it.
issued a receipt for the last line they spoke. All doors, despite
having intricate control-panels on the wall beside them, are
opened and closed using what appear to be Sears-surplus
television remote-controls, which in close-ups turn out to have
telephone keypads that do not contain zeroes. The feet of the
space-suits seem to be Converse All-Stars with the logos
scratched off...
Link Discuss (Thanks, Fred!)
Tuesday, January 29, 2002
Dick Cheney, pornographer?
For Gerard Van der Leun, it was an unusual meeting. Mr. Van
der Leun, vice president for Internet ventures at the General
Media Corporation, was approached last year by Enron, at the
time an energy-trading company little known outside the
financial pages. The Enron visitors proposed an agreement to
provide video on demand to consumers through a high- speed
connection, using programming from General Media. Mr. Van
der Leun said he was surprised, since Enron, a company in
conservative Texas, did not seem a likely partner with General
Media, which owns Penthouse magazine. Mainstream
companies like Enron, he said, are generally wary of teaming
with players in the sex-video market: "If someone goes to porn,"
he said, "they're desperate."
Link Discuss
Remember Kay Hammond, the British tech entrepreneur who was too busy to
go through the messy business of courtship in order to find a husband and so
decided to put her hand in marriage up for auction? Well, she's found her
bidder/husband, an anonymous fellow who bid over 250,000 pounds. LinK
Discuss (Thanks, Amanda!)
I had no idea what I was getting
myself into. Biotech protocols are
more like cooking than engineering.
The problems started with buying the
reagents. Perhaps I should have
recognized that these chemical kits
shared the same rhetoric as
household cleaning agents -everything is easy, nothing requires
scrubbing -- but I was still naive.
Besides, Qiagen refused to sell their
products to me which of course only
increased my desire. (I was able to
buy them through a distributor
instead.)
The next setback was the gear. In
almost every endeavor you can count
on the Germans for some sexy, easily
fetishized equipment. But biotech
tools are universally ugly: clunky bits
of hygienic plastic, a neon racing
stripe constitutes their aesthetic. I
found only a few exceptions worth
buying. The Finnipipettes aren't
terrible, the Biofuge centrifuge
actually boasts a very nice 1960s
Olivetti look, and Millipore's water
purification equipment at least tries.
I'll spare you the rest of equipment -just try to find a PCR machine that
doesn't look like it should be
dispensing frozen drinks -- but the
piece de resistance (functionalitywise) was a Visible Genetics
OpenGene sequencing system I
picked up on eBay for $500. Retailed
for 40 grand before the company got
acquired out of bankruptcy.
Doug Kaye has written a great whitepaper on "swarming" P2P content
distribution systems, where a file's availbility in a network increases as a
function of its demand -- if traditional client-server is a Tragedy of the
Commons where the most valuable resources' availablity dwindles away to
zero, P2P CDNs are a Commons where the sheep shit grass, where the act of
consuming a resource actually increases its availability. Here's the PDF of
Doug's paper -- nice work, Doug! Link Discuss
This guy has got a working TCP/IP stack running in a robotic Lego brick, and
Which brings me to the final
dénouement: pulling out the
protocol's instructions, pipette in
hand. Immediately, I was overcome
with the same terror that cookbooks
instill in me. "Mix gently," the
instructions began. Gently? How
about a RPM on that, please?
Newtons per cubic mm? Something?
"Aspirate until clear", it continued.
Clear like "totally transparent", or
clear like "I can see the DNA goop"?
I stumbled along, undoubtedly
compounding errors at each step.
thinks he's got enough capacity left over to compile and install a little bitty
Webserver. Wow! Link Discuss (via /.)
iPass, an 802.11 networking company, is footing the bill to install free WiFi
networking in a bunch of airports (Twin Cities, Newark, JFK, LaGuardia and
Detroit Metro, with more to come). Another nail in Mobile$tar's coffin! Link
Discuss (Thanks, Erik!)
US Patent #6,293,874. User-Operated Amusement
Aparatus For Kicking the User's Buttocks. Link Discuss
(Thanks, Matt!)
Stunning gallery of clocks made from
Nixie tubes ("These neon-filled numeric
displays, also known as 'numicators',
consist of an outer mesh anode, with ten
cathodes (or 11/12 with decimal point/
points) shaped to form numbers. They
were popular in the 1960s and early 70s
when the first logic ICs became available,
the 7441 or 74141 TTL devices often
being used as a driver, and can still sometimes be seen in old electronic test
equipment.") Link Discuss (Thanks, Rob!)
Google slams pop-up ads.
If you are experiencing pop-ups generated by one of these
malicious programs, you may want to remove the pop-up
program from your computer. One program that attempts to
detect and to uninstall pop-up programs is available at http://
download.cnet.com/downloads/0-10106-108-63806.html. We
have no relationship with the individuals who created this
software and cannot vouch for it ourselves.
If you feel you were deceived when you installed a program that
creates pop-ups, you may want to take action. The Federal
Trade Commission (FTC) handles complaints about deceptive
or unfair business practices. To file a complaint, visit: http://
www.ftc.gov/ and click on "File a Complaint Online", call 1877-FTC-HELP
Incubation, rehydrate, hybridization
-- "until warm", "as appropriate", "if
needed". "If we applied this
'scientific' methodology to, say,
bridge building," I kept telling
myself, "we'd all be dead." And no
wonder we still haven't really
finished sequencing the human
genome-- I've met fucking alchemists
who depend on less hokum.
With a little tweaking on the
OpeneGene machine -- did I mention
it uses a proprietary protocol? And
that the software is written for
NextStep? -- I finally got my DNA
results. And while the results would
indicate that I'm from Mars, I now
feel strongly that biologists are
equally extraterrestrial.
s.
Discuss
PM | permalink
Farewell!
How swiftly comes the end, snaking
through the chaos of daily life,
tiptoeing in the silence of night. I've
had terrific fun posting to
Boingboing, transforming daily
conversations with myself into
something public and tangible. I'd
planned to post a few more things,
but spent this past weekend traveling,
attending two weddings, and
generally burning myself out with
liquor and song. With a little
recovery time, I could have gone on
posting for some time; indeed, I am
weighing the pros and cons putting a
small blog on my soon-to-beredesigned Web site. Alas, for now,
other obligations and the cyclical
nature of the guest bar require I say
my farewells! If you miss me, I've
got a piece coming out on death and tshirts in Slate later this week (I'm
told), and will be maintaining my
Live Journal and posting my
redesigned Web site soon. If not,
then adieu!
Link Discuss
Thanks, David, Xeni, Cory, and Mark
Excellent collection of "Versus" remixes (like the Public Enemy Versus
Dexy's Midnight Runners" MP3 I posted here a couple weeks ago. Michael
Jackson versus Eminem! Link Discuss (via Grabbing Sand)
Discuss
posted by Jenn Shreve at 9:15 AM |
permalink
Lawrence Livermore labs has banned WiFi, citing security concerns. Link
Discuss
"Sea of Green"
Drug cultures--which in my mind
includes the people that made 'em,
sell 'em, do 'em, and bust 'em-generate so many interesting slang
words and phrases. The need for
euphemism on the one side and
punchy PR on the other necessitate
this, I suppose. While reading my
daily emailed Sonoma Sheriff News
Update, I encountered a phrase I
hadn't heard before: "Task Force
agents located two indoor growing
rooms containing a total of 90
growing marijuana plants. The plants
ranged from 6 inches to 4 feet in
heighth, in various stages of growth.
This style of operation is described as
a 'Sea of Green' operation. Meaning
the operation makes it possible to
continually harvest marijuana on a
regular production cycle." sic, sic
Good (but small) bubblegum comic archive, "Existential Pud." I love the
blotchy blue ink. Link Discuss
From the guy who brought you "Get Your
War On," it's "Get Your Enron On!" Link
Discuss
Sea of Green. It has the ring of a
vacation brochure hawking paradise,
doesn’t' it? Having done some
poking around, it looks like the
phrase "Sea of Green" originated
with growers, but what I really like is
to imagine a burly sheriff saying,
"Yup yup. What we've got here is yer
standard Sea Of Green operation.
Book 'em, boys."
This Salon article by Tom McNichol
includes some hilarious if unreal
drug vocabulary, as does this
fascinating dictionary of slang,
compiled by my friend Mark Frey,
who teaches high school here in
Oakland.
I started subscribing to the Sonoma
Sheriff news on the recommendation
of my wonderful friend Colin Berry,
Just a quick note to say that last night our monthly visitor tally climbed over
100,000 -- more than we've ever gotten before. Thanks for reading, folks. Link
Discuss
who lives in Sonoma County. I also
wrote a description of this
wonderfully bizarre region of
Northern California in my Live
Journal.
Thanks, Colin B!
The Meeting Pot is a wireless coffee-pot that pings your co-workers and
friends when you brew a fresh pot, creating an impromptu meetingspace.
Discuss
posted by Jenn Shreve at 10:49 AM
Community building in coffee break rooms is important in
modern offices. Simply the aroma of coffee evokes
togetherness.
| permalink
The Meeting Pot attempts to distribute this sense of awareness.
When the coffee maker is turned on, it transmits the aroma to
remote locations.
My HMO adventure!
Link Discuss (Thanks, Tyler!)
A 15-year-old in Washington state was charged with "Possession of Drug
Paraphenalia" when a narc-dog pointed out his locker and a search turned up
three film cannisters he used for fishing tackle. One of the cannisters
contained a micro-smidge of something green that tested positive for THC, but
wasn't in sufficient quantity to provide a basis for a drug-charge. Only one
problem: Simply possessing drug paraphenalia isn't a crime in Washington
state -- as the 15-year-old found out when he started looking around online.
He took over his own case and fought it all the way to the State Supreme
Court -- and won.
Judge Baker, apparently irritated at the prosecution's inability to
outsmart a minor in her court, reportedly stated to Joshua,
"Don't laugh when you leave this courtroom, thinking you have
beat the system because you have looked these things up
yourself. We are going to get you down the road."
Link Discuss (via Fark)
An EU environmental reg that took effect on Jan 1 makes it illegal to toss
away ozone-depleting refrigerator/freezer foam, so Britons have taken to
dumping their disused fridges in empty fields.
Residents say unsightly dumps of old appliances have sprouted
across the land since people began secretly abandoning them in
fields after European environmental regulations took effect on
Jan. 1, making it illegal to discard the ozone-depleting foam
insulation from fridges and freezers.
Dramatic reenactment of actual
conversation this morning:
Jenn Yes, hello. I'm trying to make
an emergency appointment with a
dermatologist.
Receptionist Dr. Whosiwhats doesn't
have an opening until, hmmmm, it
looks like, next month.
Jenn If I have flesh-eating bacteria, I
will be dead by next month. Are you
sure there isn't anything sooner?
Receptionist Maybe you should try
another doctor.
Jenn Click.
Ever since reading a harrowing upall-night description of Necrotising
Fasciitis (a.k.a. flesh-eating bacteria)
in Atul Gawande's excellent read,
"Complications: A Surgeon's Notes
on an Imperfect Science," I've longed
for an opportunity to invoke its
name. Today that moment came.
(Incidentally, I do not suspect I have
the virus, but have learned that being
hysterical often results in getting
rapid appointments with otherwise
intransigent HMO doctors. While I
may not be dead in a month, I'm sure
as hell not going to play with a rash
for that length of time. In fact, I'm off
to my appointment now. Huzzah!)
Discuss
| permalink
Link Discuss
Art on the Scale of the Pyramids
The kidnapper who took a WSJ reporter is demanding better treatment for the
PoWs unlawful combatants at Camp X-Ray, over email from his
kidnapperguy@hotmail.com account. Link Discuss (via K5)
Black and White -- which I had a fair bit of fun playing on my Toshiba laptop
until the game abruptly stopped working -- is being released for OSX and
OS9. I think I'll give it another try... Link Discuss
Monday, January 28, 2002
Stephen King claims he's run out of ideas and is retiring from writing. Holy
moly.
It may not be for a while (two or three years), but King seems to
know his final book is on the drawing boards. As he outlined to
the TIMES, this year will bring a book of short stories and the
long delayed FROM A BUICK EIGHT (which he discussed in
his non-fiction book ON WRITING) and then he's on to write
the last three books in the DARK TOWER series. He hopes to
finish the TOWER novels within a year. Then?
"Then that's it. I'm done," he says. "Done writing books... You
get to a point where you get to the edges of a room, and you can
go back and go where you've been, and basically recycle stuff.
I've seen it in my own work. People when they read BUICK
EIGHT are going to think CHRISTINE. It's about a car that's
not normal, OK? You say, 'I've said the things that I have to say,
that are new and fresh and interesting to people.' Then you have
a choice. You can either continue to go on, or say I left when I
was still on top of my game. I left when I was still holding the
ball, instead of it holding me."
Ireland is putting up the world's largest offshore wind-farm, which'll crank out
520 megawatts, juice enough for 500,000 homes. Good to see that some
countries are taking the Kyoto Accord seriously. Link Discuss (Thanks,
Trash!)
The EverQuest economy.
I can't imagine that many young
artists today--who seem preoccupied
with the more ephemeral aspects of
our technology- and media-saturated
society--will dream up something as
big as James Turrell's Roden Crater,
none-the-less find the stamina and
means to carry through with it.
During a recent lecture in the Bay
Area, Turrell stated (and I
paraphrase) that more artists need to
be thinking on the scale of the
Egyptian Pyramids. Turrell practices
what he preaches. According to the
Web site, Roden Crater is "a natural
cinder volcano situated on the
southwestern edge of the Painted
Desert in northern Arizona. Since
1972, with grants from Dia Art
Foundation, the Guggenheim
Foundation, and the National
Endowment for the Arts, James
Turrell has been planning to
transform the crater into a large-scale
artwork, that relates, through the
medium of light, to the universe of
the surrounding sky, land, and
culture." It's due to open to the public
in 2005; the wait is bloody torture.
Aside from permanence and scale,
what appeals about Turrell's work is
it cannot just be looked at; it has to
be experienced--preferably alone and
over a relatively long period of time
(similar to the Lightning Field
described in an earlier post). His
piece, Gasworks, which I viewed
several years ago in Scottsdale,
Arizona, requires that one visitor at a
time be inserted into an ball (which
looks part medical and part alien) and
be subjected to flashes of light for at
least 10 minutes (please forgive: my
memory of the actual time is fuzzy).
Isolated within this orb, the viewer
loses all depth perception, while the
imagination creates patterns and
shapes that simply aren't there. Every
experience of the piece is unique and
nearly impossible to convey. In
another piece, you enter a dark room
where you sit in a meditative state for
a set period of time (again, about 10
minutes). A sliver of gray light
Based on a review of thousands of completed auctions for
"EverQuest" items and in-game currency, Castronova concluded
that players earn an average wage of $3.42 for every hour they
play the game and collectively produce annual gross "exports"
of more than $5 million.
Link Discuss
Reason #359 I'm glad to be a freelancer: Ronald W. Castle Sr., a 54-year-old
supervisor with the Onondaga County (N.Y.) social services department, was
arrested for masturbating on his co-worker's telephones and coffee mugs. Link
Discuss
The new Palm i705 handheld features an "always on" wireless
Internet connection. It costs $450 plus $40 a month for unlimited
Internet use. Link Discuss
Tom Tomorrow, the political activist/cartoonist who draws "This Modern
World," has a blog. While This Modern World is occassionally obvious and
overly didactic, the same messages in prose form seem positively punchy on
the blog. This is going into my daily list.
We've got wealthy executives making off with millions while
their investors and employees get the shaft, a laughably
hamfisted parable of class warfare and corporate excess--except
that it's true. Ken Lay might as well be wearing a top hat and a
monocle, lighting cigars with hundred dollar bills...
And soon, we'll have sex. As the London Telegraph reports this
morning, "Enron was a company in love with itself. Office
affairs were rampant, divorce among senior executives an
epidemic, and stories of couples steaming up glass-walled
offices after late-night meetings were the talk of Houston."
Villainy, fraud, sex, death and a stonewalling White House. You
think this thing is just going to blow over?
Excuse me while I wipe the tears of laughter from my eyes.
Link Discuss (via A Whole Lotta Nothing)
visible in the back of the darkened
space immediately grabs your
attention and toys with your
imagination for the entirety of the
piece. Is it there, or did you create it?
You're never quite sure. When in the
crater of the volcano, the shape of the
sky is said to change. In other words,
you or, more accurately, your
perception determines something so
seemingly permanent as the shape of
a sky. This revelation isn't projected
at the person viewing the artwork, it
naturally arises out of his or her
experience of it.
Turrell uses scientific research and
applications to create experiences
that are deeply personal, organic, and
even religious. I study his work to
inform my fiction writing, which
aspires to have a similar effect on
readers (and boy am I a long ways
away from succeeding). This
weekend I'll be viewing a Turrell
exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery,
on the campus of the University of
Washington, where I went to college.
I'm so excited!
Discuss
Thanks, Alan!
| permalink
Happy Birthday To Meeeeee!
Today I am 30 years old.
I distinctly remember when my mom
turned 30. She was rather upset by it.
I must have picked up on her
feelings, because I liked to announce
her age to complete strangers in a
dramatic, singsong voice. "I'm 5 and
my mom is thirteeeeee!" Then I'd
watch her squirm. What terrible
power a saucy 5-year-old can wield.
Jason Kottke is donating all of his Amazon Affiliate money -- $275 or so this
According to a recent article in the
New York Times Style section,
turning 30 is "no longer apocalyptic";
it's the "new 22!" I shudder to agree
quarter -- to the EFF. Good on ya, Jason! Link Discuss
White Stripes' new music video is made of animated
Lego and is totally mesmerizing. Link Discuss
(Thanks, Matt!)
Air Canada -- Canada's national airline, which has been bailed out by the
taxpayers again and again, has been granted permission to snap up its
competitors and then been bailed out again by the taxpayers, that Air Canada
-- has announced that it's going to trim and otherwise ass-ify it's frequent flier
program, taking the biggest dump of all on the super-duper-tuper gold fliers (i.
e., me). God, Air Canada sucks. Link Discuss
Sunday, January 27, 2002
Unbelievable names portal, with links to lists of every conceivable kind of
name: Female hippie names, Jamaican bus names, unpopular American
names, cheese names, Finnish name pronunciation guides -- I am in heaven.
with the Style section, but it's kind of
true. Thanks to birth control pills and
medical technology that now lets you
have kids safely later, the 20s have
become a kind of extended
adolescence. One has bills to pay,
sure, a career to built, maybe, but
there's no longer huge pressure to
quickly acquire a mortgage, kids,
husband, and so on.
Hit 30, though, and the pressure one
used to feel in one's 20s is suddenly
very real. A number of books,
academic studies, and news reports
are fueling a backlash movement that
claims it's a mistake for women to
put careers before having kids; the
costs have been tremendous in terms
of fertility treatments, disabled
children, to say nothing of the toll a
bouncing child has on the aging
woman's body. As one study author
put it: "Modern women may have
gone too far, trading off so much to
amass resources that they have lost
the long-term game--evolutionary
survival of their descendants." Holy
shit! I better breed now. The
evolutionary survival of my
descendants is at stake!
Jamaican Bus Names
Illustrious Rat Fink
Iron Teeth
Flying Bomb
Retaliator
Professional Boops
Popsickle
Intersepter
Do I feel the pressure to make babies,
buy a house, and finally be a
grownup? Hell yes, I feel the
pressure. Today, however, I’m going
to celebrate like I'm 22 again, minus
about four Cosmopolitans, staying up
too late, chain smoking . . .
Thanks, Mom! (For having me, that
is.)
Link Discuss (via MeFi)
Discuss
| permalink
Zeropaid is a great P2P and file-trading portal with links to the current official
and third-party servient apps for a whole whack of networks (Hotline,
Carracho, Gnutella, Kazaa, etc), as well as good P2P/sharing news. Link
Discuss (Thanks, Charles!)
Vanity Image Search
Patrick writes: "Presented by guggenheim.com, a
really cool history of the motorcycle with a kickass
flash presentation and including audio commentary by
the likes of Dennis Hopper (providing commentary
for the Harley Davidson chopper his castmate Peter
Fonda rode in Easy Rider) and plenty of detailed
looks at various historical bikes." This really does kick ass. Link Discuss
Hilarious gallery of rejected iMac designs. 1/28,
10AM: Fixed the link Link Discuss (Thanks,
Joey!)
I Googled my image, and this was
the first thing that popped up! It's a
mortuary instructor that I interviewed
for Salon back in 1999. The Alan
Rapp I found on Google Image looks
nothing like my husband, and since
when is David Pescovitz a skinny
woman on a workout machine?
Mindbogglingly cool toy raygun site, with thousands of
photos, along with critical essays and histories of rayguns
and accessories through history. Link Discuss (Thanks,
Patrick!)
This is a very fun way to kill time.
Discuss
posted by Jenn Shreve at 9:37 AM |
permalink
Guestbar Archives
Nice glossary of spook lingo:
BACKSTOP -- an arrangement between two persons for the
express purpose of substantiating a cover story or alibi.
Boing Boing Boutique
BAG JOB -- surreptitious entry, break and enter.
BETTY BUREAU -- FBI slang for a female support person
who has worked for the FBI her entire career.
BIOGRAPHICAL LEVERAGE -- blackmail info.
Link Discuss (Thanks, Ken!)
Good Germ Baseball Jersey: $21.95. (More
items inside)
Mailing lists
Jeff Baham, who, as "Chef Mayhem" is the brains behind doombuggies.org
(the Web's greatest Haunted Mansion tribute site) and eBay's best Haunted
Mansion tchotchke supplier, has a blog! It's really great, too.
your email
Join Sign up to
receive every Boing Boing post by email.
Also heard from an ex-imagineer, and he had a couple
interesting comments...
"...since the big layoffs at WDI (they are literally shutting the
place down, selling off the tools in all the warehouses, firing
people who have been there 20 years, etc.), I'm pretty much
frustrated with the theme park industry. There just isn't the sort
of money and quality (with the exception of the Tokyo
DisneySea stuff I did) being spent any more."
Join Sign up for
your email
infrequent news from Boing Boing.
Join Mark's art mail list.
Join
your email
The Ukulele Weblog.
"But I was very pleasantly surprised with the "Nightmare"
rehab. It was very well done! It made me a little upset, though because I pitched a whole Nightmare dark ride to go in
Fantasyland up at WDI about 4 years ago... The people who
make those decisions told me "We will probably never do
something like that." Of course, people in the parade dept. down
at Disneyland were given carte blanche! Yes - WDI had almost
nothing to do with the Nightmare rehab. Even the Jack figure
was built down at the park, not MAPO (traditionally the
manufacturing arm of Imagineering). It's kind of sad - it feels
like Imagineering (at least how it is supposed to function) is not
going to be around much longer...."
Link Discuss
Ashcroft is sick of semi-nude classic WPA
sculptures showing up in the background of his
media events, so he's ordered massive draperies to
cover the statues' chestular appendages while he's
running his mouth. Link Discuss (via Fark)
Having trouble importing your Eudora mailboxes into OSX's Mail.app?
Eudora Mailbox Cleaner is a freeware app that munges your Eudora files for
better import. Link Discuss
Great gallery of homemade and converted
MAME consoles. Link Discuss (Thanks,
Patrick!)
MARK'S COMICS
Guru.com comics
Digital Living comics
Illustration portfolio
Search BB w/Google
WWW
Boing Boing
BEST BLOGS
Irregular Orbit
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Factovision
randomWalks
Subterranean Notes
Oddball Comic Book of the Day
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stevenberlinjohnson.com
Howard Lovy's NanoBot
Key West, the famously tolerant tourist
mecca, is up in arms over wild chickens.
Many of the fowl are overly aggressive
gamecocks escaped from cockfighting pits
(an aggressive rooster is a scary goddamned
animal, too), while others are just wild birds.
The 2000 birds wander the streets, block traffic, attack people and crap
everywhere, prompting the city to begin an initiative to move about 1,000 of
the chickens to egg-farms on the mainland, over howls of protests from
chicken-loving Key Westians. Link Discuss (Thanks, Michael!)
Jaw-dropping gallery of covers from Italian pulp
novels. For sale. Wow wow wow. They sure ain't cheap,
though. Link Discuss (Thanks, Enrico!)
Women: Can't master the art of peeing standing up?
Try a disposable mechanical assist with the Freshette.
Kate sez: "Having used it myself for a few years I can
vouch for its convenience. By the by, the women in
my family all refer to it as the pee-nice, rather than
the 'Freshette.'" Link Discuss (Thanks, Kate!)
Really sweet gallery of vintage Atari
industrial concept illustrations. Link
Discuss (Thanks, Jens!)
This LOTR parody -- made by splicing together footage from Casablanca and
(I think) other classic films -- is wonderfully executed and pretty damned
funny, but at nearly nine minutes long, the joke kinda drags on and on.
18.5MB Quicktime file. Link Discuss (Thanks, Chris!)
PictoPlasma is a gallery of thousands of "character" illustrations from
logomarks, campaigns and products. Unfortunately, it has one of the most
confusing, poorly made interfaces I've ever had the misfortune of using
(unlabelled buttons whose labels only appear on rollover, no hotlinks in the
text, no statusbar or locationbar), and so even through the work is really cool,
the design makes it hard to spend a lot of time playing with it. Link Discuss
(Thanks, Lisa!)
MAME -- Multiple Arcade
Machine Emulator -- is a giant,
distributed OSS project to
emulate on our computers the
video-games we grew up playing
at arcades. The problem is that
most of these games aren't realy
as much fun without joysticks,
trackballs, and big pushbuttons.
Brad King's Wired News story
about the creator of MAME talks
about the growing craze for building big, standup consoles with every
imaginable control up front and a kick-ass networked PC inside. Link Discuss
Saturday, January 26, 2002
Marvellous high-science-weirdness from Jaron Lanier: He's proposing to
encode all human writing as DNA and splice that DNA as true-breeding
information into the genes of the notoriously hardy cockroach. In a million
years, when our descendents are slowly rising from the rubble of the coming
apocalypse, the giant killer cockroaches that they slay for their suppers will
contain all the libraries of the world. Paging Brewster Kahle! Link Discuss
(via The Schism Matrix, thanks, Derek!)
Down but not beaten: Boing Boing is back after a 28-hour downtime. The #$%
^& ISP that services our cage took our line down for "routine maintenance"
that went blooie and kept us offline for a day and change. Argh. Discuss
NY Times' "Enron for Dummies"
To keep its mystique alive and its stock price growing, it set up
partnerships where it could bury its losses, or generate
imaginary revenues. Here's one of the more audacious
examples, pieced together by The Wall Street Journal: Enron
invested a bunch of money in a joint venture with Blockbuster
to rent out movies online. The deal flopped eight months later.
But in the meantime Enron had secretly set up a partnership
with a Canadian bank. The bank essentially lent Enron $115
million in exchange for Enron's profits from the movie venture
over its first 10 years. The Blockbuster deal never made a
penny, but Enron counted the Canadian loan as a nice, fat profit.
Link Discuss
Friday, January 25, 2002
Afterslash makes Slashdot manageable by collecting each day's stories and top
five comments on a single page. Link Discuss (via MeFi)
After an eBay seller bilked a group of buyers out of $150,000 on bogus laptop
sales, the rip-ees formed a collective vigilante squad and tracked down the
scamster using online tools to collect and organize their intel, which included
the seller's mother's phone number, his alternate addresses, etc. Some of 'em
have gotten refunds, but may are still out big bucks. Link Discuss (via MeFi)
Singapore has a grossology museum.
Visitors can challenge their sense of smell and learn about odorcausing bacteria by sniffing unmarked bottles containing mouth,
foot, anus and armpit scents.
Link Discuss
A Woman’s Guide to Peeing While Standing Up Link Discuss
Bizarre logo on the CIA's website.
Link Discuss
A big collection of abridged movie script parodies. Read the one for A.I. Link
Discuss
Funny: "ENRON CEO QUITS TO JOIN NIGERIAN FIRM, ASKS YOUR
ASSISTANCE, BANK ACCOUNT NUMBER Lagos, Nigeria - Saying he
had found a venue more worthy of his talents, Kenneth Lay resigned today as
chairman of Enron to join a Nigerian government ministry which needs your
confidential assistance in the transferring of offshore funds into a new
company of Nigeria that will provide incredible profit on paper by the trading
of energy." Link Discuss
New evidence suggests that the Biblical tyrant King Herod didn't die of the
clap, but rather of gangrene of the genitals. Ewww. Link Discuss (Thanks,
Chris!)
Bruce Schneier and Adam Schostack of Zero Knowledge have penned a
wonderful, balanced whitepaper laying out a security map for Microsoft's
Trustworthy Computing initiative, spelling out, piece by piece, the root causes
of the security problems in MSFT products, and a roadmap for mitigating
them in the future.
Originally, e-mail was text only, and e-mail viruses were
impossible. Microsoft changed that by having its mail clients
automatically execute commands embedded in e-mail. This
paved the way for e-mail viruses, like Melissa and LoveBug,
that automatically spread to people in the victims' address
books. Microsoft must reverse the security damage by removing
this functionality from its e-mail clients, and from many other of
its products. This rigid separation of data from code needs to be
applied to all products.
Microsoft has compounded the problem by blurring the
distinction between the desktop and the Internet. This has led to
numerous security vulnerabilities, based on different pieces of
the operating system using system resources differently.
Microsoft should revisit these design decisions...
Office: Macros should not be stored in Office documents.
Macros should be stored separately, as templates, which should
not be openable as documents. The programs should provide a
visual interface that walks the user through what the macros do,
and should provide limitations of what macros not signed by a
corporate IT department can do.
Internet Explorer: IE should support a complete separation of
data and control. Java and JavaScript should be modified so
they cannot use external programs in arbitrary ways. ActiveX
should eliminate all controls that are marked "safe for
scripting."
E-mail: E-mail applications should not support scripting. (At the
very least, they should stop supporting it by default.) E-mail
scripts should be attached as a separate MIME attachment.
There should be limitations of what macros not signed by a
corporate IT department can do.
Link Discuss (via /.)
American Talibert
Found online: Jim Henson's Crossfire: Bert faces treason charges for his
association with ObL. Old net.memes never die. Link Discuss (Thanks,
scourge!)
Bosses need help
A study of help-desks has uncovered the unstartling fact that bosses -managers, supervisors and other members of the pointy-haired cohort -account for a disproportionate volume of tech-support calls.
It's also worth noting that board level users are far more likely
to to acquire expensive mobile computing toys without having
any real mission-critical need for them, and hence the
motivation to master them properly; which is what the field
force is likely to do.
Link Discuss
.NET for Mac users
This is a terrific, no-hype technical overview of MSFT's .NET technology
specifically targetted at Mac users.
C#
Pronounced "C sharp", the goal of this C-ish language is to
bring modern programming concepts to a simple, elegant
language rather than forcing software developers to master the
disaster that is C++.
Although James Gosling (the inventor of Java) thinks that C#
isn't, my opinion is that Sun should've stuck with their original
feeling — panic. While Sun has racanted on promises to
relinquish control of Java to standards bodies, C# is already an
ECMA standard. By 2010, I predict that Java will be an alsoran.
Microsoft will be using C# for more and more of their own
product development, including future versions of Office.
C# is to .NET as Objective-C is to Cocoa.
Link Discuss
Russian prison amnesty
Russia's overcrowded prisons are regularily emptied by crime- or
circumstance-dependent general amnesties, the most recent of which was an
amnesty for all incarcerated mothers.
According to Justice Ministry figures published last November
and quoted by Interfax news agency, 493 children under the age
of three live in Russian prisons.
Link Discuss (Thanks, Nat!)
Red baiting, 21st-century style
Dubya fired 500 unionized workers in the United States Attorneys' offices,
Interpol's U.S. branch, the Criminal Division, the National Drug Intelligence
Center, and the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, on the grounds that
unionized workers would not be "consistent with national security
requirements and considerations." Hey, I guess Red-baiting is back. Link
Discuss (Thanks, Nat!)
Websense has pardoned Boing Boing -- no longer are we classified as a porn
site in their filter database. Now, bring on the PORN!
Thank you for writing to Websense.
The site you submitted has been reviewed and the master
database has been modified so that it will be correctly filtered
under the category of Information Technology. The site was
accidentally miscategorized when it was initially entered into
our database. This update will be available in the next database
published.
Discuss
Defaced website gallery
Nice gallery of mirrors of hacker-defaced websites. It's kinda disappointing
how unimaginative the defacements are. Link Discuss (Thanks, Patrick!)
Scopes Monkey Senator
The Scopes Monkey Sentaor, Sen. Hochstatter of the Washington State
Senate, is pushing a bill that would make it illegal to teach evolution in the
uppermost Pac Northwest.
(8) The legislature finds that the teaching of the theory of
evolution in the common schools of the state of Washington is
repugnant to the principles of the Declaration of Independence
and thereby unconstitutional and unlawful.
(9) All textbooks and curriculum that teach the theory of
evolution shall be removed from the public schools forthwith
and replaced with textbooks and curriculum that teach the selfevident truth of creation.
RIP, Peter Gzowski
RIP, Peter Gzowski, the king of Canadian radio. I grew up listening to
Gzowski's Morningside every day. I'm going to miss him. Link Discuss
(Thanks, Amanda!)
Dave Stewart is a 78 record collector fanatic, and he's transferred 188
Hawaiian songs from 1925-1938 onto a single MP3 CD, called "Waikiki is
Good Enough for Me." Over nine hours of music for $20! If you like old
timey, tin pan alley, steel guitar, ukulele, hot jazz music, you've got to get it.
Link Discuss
The cult of Enron? Link Discuss
New Scientist article about an email experiment that tests psycholigist Stanley
Milgram's hypothesis that everyone is connected to everyone else by six or
fewer degrees of separation. Link Discuss
Afghani refugees ignored, POWs take the limelight
A Kiwi editorial blasts Australians and the international community for their
failure to address the plight of the noncombantant refugees starving
themselves to death in camps in the Australian desert while wringing their
hands at the treatment of captured fighters in Cuba.
Neville Roach, chairman of the Council for Multicultural
Australia, said: "Every time a humanitarian issue is raised in
relation to asylum-seekers, their deviousness and criminal intent
is proclaimed.
"The way that the government has handled these issues has
given comfort to the prejudiced side of human nature.
Compassion seems to have been thrown out of the door."
Minolta's new teensy digital camera
David Pogue reviews Minolta's teensy high-powered digital camera in the
NYT:
At 3.3 by 2.8 by 0.8 inches, it's smaller than a 10-slice stack of
Kraft American Cheese slices. This is a big deal: you can
actually carry it in a shirt pocket.
It's impossible to overstate the importance of this thing's
flatness. You can forget you have it with you. During the
holidays, a significant limb of the Pogue family tree came to our
house (at one point, 16 people). I whipped out the camera and
snapped away whenever I saw something worth snapping.
Every so often, I hooked up the camera to a laptop running Mac
OS X that I left on a coffee table.
Link Discuss (Thanks, Michael!)
Free Winona t-shirts
$15 "Free Winona" t-shirts are the new hot fashion statement in LA, as postironic beautiful people take up the cause of everyone's favorite kleptomaniac
hottie. Link Discuss (Thanks, Boogah!)
The other green meat
A new GM strain of Spinach/Pig hybrid pork has been invented by Japanese
scientists, promising low-fat treyfe and high-iron haram in the Brave New
World of the Other Green Meat. Link Discuss (Thanks, Nat!)
Nanowalkers: Teensy, high-accuracy robots from MIT
This new MIT microrobotics project sounds really cool: Nanowalkers are
"fully autonomous and are being designed to make nearly 10,000 movements
per second. They will be able to move in three dimensions, with precision as
much as 10 million times better than current assembly robots." Discuss Link
(via Meerkat)
Satanistic Potter prompts Penn police boycott
A Pennsylvania police department refused to direct traffic at a YMCA fun-run
to protest the Y's use of Harry Potter books in their children's reading
programs. The problem? Harry Potter promotes witchcraft and hence
Satanism. Link Discuss
The 555 directory
555, the exchange used by authors and filmmakers when they want to avoid
subjecting some luckless bastard floods of phonecalls from the kinds of cranks
who see a number of TV and immediately reach for their phones, has gotten
its own directory:
555-2735 Warren Ratliff The Pelican Brief
555-2960 Adam's Ribs M*A*S*H
Link Discuss (via Memepool)
Who's got the best merchandise? We do!
Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later: Boing Boing is finally up for a
Blogging award, in the category of "Best Merchandise." Weird. Link Discuss
Applescript used as low-jack on iMac
A stolen iMac is recovered by k-rad AppleScript hacking. The machine in
question had a copy of the screen-sharing Timbuktu app installed, along with
Timbuktu's DynDNS-like nameservice, which meant that the iMac's owner
could locate and take control of the machine whenever it was dialled up to the
Internet. This is a wonderful account of his battle to get his machine back. At
first, he flirts with erasing his machine's drive remotely, but ultimately he
solves it in an even sharper way, by reconfiguring the AOL client on the iMac
to dial his home number, which gave him a caller ID trace through which he
eventually recovered his computer. Link Discuss (via /.)
Osmonds light Olympic torch
A Utah Olympics means many things, including an all-Osmond torch-lighting.
Link Discuss (Thanks, Amanda!)
Artist-blessed Gnutella
Furthurnet is a cross-platform P2P file-sharing network built on the Gnutella
protocols, populated primarily by MP3s that community-minded arists have
licensed for free distribution. Link Discuss (Thanks, Fred!)
iSwipe: Multi-protocol file-sharing tool
iSwipe is a multiprotocol file-sharing app for OSX that searches for and
retrives files from Hotline, Gnutella, OpenNap, and ftp servers. Currently,
there are over 30,000,000 files available through it. Cool! Link Discuss
(Thanks, Fred!)
Good LA Weekly article about lowbrow
art. Link Discuss
Googlewhacking
Googlewhacking is a new net.sport -- the idea is to find a pair of common
words, like "schadenfreude carburetor" that appear together on only one page
in Google's index. Fun! Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)
Banned!
Boing Boing is
banned by
Websense -- if your
employer uses
Websense to filter
the Internet, this is
what you're gonna
see. Woo hoo, we've
hit the bigtime! Link
Discuss (Thanks,
Suzanne!)
Our own David Pescovitz gets written up in the San Francisco Chronicle
about a Reality Check retrospective he hosted. Link Discuss
Poe's stranger
Every year, on the anniversary of Poe's death, a mysterious stranger shows up
at his grave and lays some cognac and roses on it.
A black-clad man arrived at 2:59 a.m. Friday, marking the poet's
birthday with the traditional graveside tribute: three red roses
and a half bottle of cognac. Only this and nothing more.
It is a rite that has been carried out by a mysterious stranger
every Jan. 19 since 1949, a century after Poe drank himself to
death in Baltimore at age 40.
Fancy Food Show
Wired News rounds up their picks from the Fancy Food Show:
Faster foam: For latte lovers who can't stand the pressure of
steaming milk, there's a solution. The aerolatte looks like an
electric toothbrush, but with a whisk head instead of a brush.
Zap a mug of milk with the gadget for 10 seconds and presto!
Foam for your morning drink.
Link Discuss
My birthday's coming in a mere six
months -- start saving up for one of
these beautiful, $1000 life-size King
Tut mummycase-cum-hinged-shelving
units today. Want. Link Discuss
NYT: "Emerging from an early retirement he began more than a decade ago,
Stephen Wozniak, one of Silicon Valley's legendary computer designers, has
caught start-up fever and is forming a company to develop consumer products
based on wireless and global positioning satellite technologies." Link Discuss
This is the site about the Getty exhibition David and I went to last Friday
(where we saw the chess-playing robot). Be sure to check out the video of the
trapeze automation, Antonio Diavolo. Link Discuss (Thanks, David!)
Air Canada is trying to hunt down the high-mileage flyers behind érrorplan, a
movement founded by Air Canada super-duper-gold customers to call the
quasi-monopoly on its crappy, brain-damaged service (I once got off a
Montreal-Toronto bizclass flight to discover that all off the "Priority" baggage
had been lost in transit!). The érrorplanners are papering AC lounges around
the world with their fliers and hosting a great little site for collecting and
sharing horror-stories. Link Discuss (via MeFi)
Scientific American article about how the DMCA act is screwing things up for
computer hobbyists, traditionally a great font of innovation:
AiboPet [handle of the hobbyist] violated that copyright when
he cracked the robot's source code to reverse-engineer software
that allows Aibo owners to teach their pets to dance, speak,
obey wireless commands and share the color video that serves
as their vision, among other things. None of the programs are
usable without Sony hardware and software. They earned
AiboPet no money. He never revealed the encryption code or
the program he used to defeat it. Still, because the DMCA
makes it illegal to break any encrypted digital code, AiboPet's
actions made him a criminal. The fun began when Sony decided
to treat him like one.
Link Discuss
Check out this amazing high-tech
custom-car interior (as the site sez, "It's
like a Radio Shack exploded in there").
Wow! Link Discuss (via MeFi)
Are you a US citizen disgruntled with with Microsoft settlement? Here's your
chance to speak out before the settlment is finalized. Link Discuss (Thanks,
Jamais!)
Apple's released a technote on the new G4 iMac, with lots of lovely details on
the guts and bolts. Link Discuss (via Blogaritaville)
Woz has started up a mysterious new business that will apparently use small,
low-cost GPS bugs that keep track of everyday objects. Link Discuss (via /.)
AT&T is getting out of the 1-900 business. They're not saying why, but it may
have something to do with the overwhelming popularity of 900 services for
phone-sex, psychics and other unsavory uses, and the concomittant chargebacks and fly-by-nights. Link Discuss
A German firm announces low-cost fuel-cells that fit in laptops.
Recharging the battery will only involve replacing the liquid
fuel and won't require shutting down the computer. "The content
of our prototype cartridge holds 120 ml methanol and generates
about 150 Wh -- enough to power a 15W notebook computer for
10 hours," Stefener explained.
Link Discuss
Italian fascists use Lord of the Rings -- the book and the film -- to promote
their message of "physical strength, leadership and integrity." Link Discuss
(Thanks, Nat)
Italian teenaged girls are collapsing after touring a museum display featuring
Egyptian mummies; "The Mummy's Curse" is blamed. Link Discuss (Thanks,
Nat)
Want a cheap apartment in San Francisco's precious Noe Valley? Want a
boyfriend? This guy can supply both!
I decided this place was feeling just too big so I thought I would
look for a roommate and then I remembered that I was looking
for a girlfriend too so why don't I just throw all my eggs in one
basket and go for the whole Shibang. Kittenkaboodle. Ball of
wax. Whatever. This might sound nuts but I bet there is some
lovely woman out there saying to herself, " GOD I wish I could
find a good man... with a full size refrigerator and new tile in
the bathroom."
Link Discuss (via EvHead)
The first generation of XP users are about to experience MSFT's loving caress
in the form of complete lockdown of their systems if they don't fill in a
registration form (above and beyond the registration process XP users went
through when they serialize their OS installation). This lockdown makes it
nearly impossible to recover your data, and can't be removed if your
computer's network settings have any problems. Link Discuss (via Interesting
People)
The Pope says the Internet is OK, but only if the world's governments take all
the nasty porn and stuff offline.
"The Internet offers extensive knowledge, but it does not teach
values and when values are disregarded, our very humanity is
demeaned," he said, adding that the system focused people's
attention on an "almost unending flood of information."
"Yet human beings have a vital need for time and inner quiet to
ponder and examine life and its mysteries," he said.
"Understanding and wisdom are the fruit of a contemplative eye
upon the world, and do not come from a mere accumulation of
facts, no matter how interesting."
Link Discuss (via Interesting People)
The latest distributed computing app -- help find a cure for thrax with your
screensaver. It's underwritten by MSFT and Intel, so Macs and Lin boxen
aren't welcome. Link Discuss (via Interesting People)
Further to yesterday's vac-toilet incident: Gruesome JAMA account of a
woman who got sealed to a flushed vacuum toilet, only to have her small
intestine sucked out of her body. Link Discuss (Thanks, Cam!)
Dead inkjet printers -- there's a nigh-infinite volume of 'em (I know I've got a
couple-three scattered around the world). These guys decided to dispose of
their dead printer in a permanent fashion: by dropping it repeatedly off a
parking garage, (inspired by the brilliant fax-machine-beat-down from Office
Space) photographing the results. Link Discuss (Thanks, poq!)
I'm a sucker for these "Awful Actress and Celebrity Photos." Anyone
know where I can find more?Link Discuss
Yay! A new Rudy Rucker novel is excerpted in Infinite Matrix. Link Discuss
Jason Salisbury of Atom Grid meets the actress who jammed with Spock in
the "hippie episode" of Star Trek. Link Discuss
Cloud 9, a British ISP, has tired of continuous hacker-launched Denial-ofService attacks and has ceased operations. Launching a DDoS attack iks
trivial; defending against one is nigh-impossible. This bodes rather ill for the
future. Link Discuss (via /.)
I've linked to this before (it was the first link I ever posted
here), but it bears repeating. My pal Roger Wood is a
goddamned genius. He's an assemblage sculptor who makes
these marvellous, whimsical, beautiful clocks-as-sculptures.
I was over at Roger's studio last night, looking around at his
latest work, and boy, is he ever good. What's more, he's
better -- every time I drop by Roger's place, I see works that
are more controlled, more witty, more charming than ever.
He's 60 years old, and he's just hitting his stride. He should
be rich and famous. But he's not. He's just barely scraping
by, just barely making rent, no matter how hard he works at
it, he just can't get a break. He trucks his stuff to crafts fairs
in the US, places it in chic stores in Toronto, holds open houses and gallery
shows, but frustratingly, he has yet to achieve the kind of fame and
recognition he so richly deserves. He should be a hip, Hollyweird fad; a SoHo
must-have; a cult favorite and the subject of a New York Time magazine pullout. It's so frustrating.
So, spread the word. Do you know a gallery owner, a set-dresser, a high-end
decorator or a personal shopper? Pass out Roger's URL. Even if you don't,
send Roger a note letting him know how great his stuff is. He's paid his dues,
and he deserves a break. Link Discuss
One of ObL's 53 siblings registered the international trademark for
"Binladin" (he spells his name differently) a year ago, but says that he won't
use it. Link Discuss
Superbowl ads, like Herman Miller chairs, have come to be symbolic of
dotcom excess and empty suits. Is it any wonder, then, that there are
Superbowl ad-slots going begging, with the event only two weeks away? Link
Discuss (via Fark)
Common sense is creeping into the Georgia State legislature, where a
sweeping zero-tolerance-for-weapons-in-schools bill has resulted in
discplinary action being taken against students who bring such potentially
dangerous items as a Tweety Bird keychain fob to school. Now, Georgia
lawmakers are trying to modify "zero tolerance" to include "common sense."
Marable also brought up the case of a Georgia Eagle Scout who
returned to school from a weekend expedition with a broken ax
in his car. The ax was discovered during a random search of the
car, and the boy was punished, Marable said.
"He had no history of an intent to do harm and yet he had been
treated as if he had brought a gun onto campus," he said. "We've
had many cases along that line."
Brewster Kahle explains the inner workings of the Internet Wayback Machine
on the O'Reilly Network.
What's amazing to me is the fact that the hardware is free. For
doing things even in the hundreds of terabytes, it costs in the
hundreds of thousands of dollars. When you talk to most people
in IT departments, they spend a couple hundred thousand
dollars just on a CPU, much less a terabyte of disk storage. You
buy from EMC a terabyte for maybe $300,000. That's just the
storage for 1 TB. We can buy 100 TBs with 250 CPUs to work
on it, all on a high-speed switch with redundancy built in.
Something has changed by using these modern constructs that
are heavily used at Google, Hotmail, here, Transmeta. There's a
whole sector of companies that are more cost-constrained than
say, banks, that just buy Oracle and Sun and EMC.
Link Discuss (via EvHead)
Peggy Lee, my first great crush, died yesterday at 81. You
could do a lot worse than to get the free 100-track
subscrption from eMusic and download a couple albums'
worth of her lovely music. Link Discuss
"My Flamboyant Grandson," a new sf short story by George "Civilwarland in
Bad Decline" Saunders in the current New Yorker.
Then one day I had a revelation. If the lad likes to sing and
dance, I thought, why not expose him to the finest singing and
dancing there is? So I called 1-800-CULTURE, got our
Promissory Voucher in the mail, and on Teddy's birthday we
took the train down to New York.
Link Discuss (Thanks, Dan!)
Soviet motherhood medals ("Order of Mother-Heroine,"
"Order of Maternal Glory") available for sale. These put
me in mind of the scary gold-plated paper-doll-children
necklaces that my grandmother (and her friends in the
retirement community in Ft Lauderdale) wears, their
hands soldered together, one for every grandchild, the
names and DOB of each child engraved in the backs of
their gilded avatars. Link Discuss (via Memepool)
A woman's bum was vacuum sealed to an airplane toilet when she flushed
while sitting. Nat sez "She should have farted." Link Discuss (Thanks, Nat!)
Women in a blind study were found to have an instinctive attraction to men
who smelled like their fathers. LinkDiscuss
I review the Xircom Palm m500 802.11 module in the new ish of Mindjack:
802.11 isn't just a technology, it's a movement, an ad-hoc world
of open base-stations around the world. Just haul out your
802.11-equipped device and start hunting about for a network. If
you're in a major city, chances are you'll find one before you go
a block. Forget 3G and Blackberry and all those other pale
imitations of connectivity: community wireless is the real shit:
fast, unmetered, insecure and out of control.
Link Discuss
A company is shipping an external Dual-USB iBook
charger that juices two batteries to full charge in 2.5h.
Want! Link Discuss
Celestia is the most beautiful planetarium app I've ever seen. I downloaded it a
half hour ago and I've been zooming around the galaxy with OSX ever since.
Wonderful, lovely shareware. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jamais!)
Street-gangs in Orange County have formed gameclans and have taken to
hanging out in late-night Internet cafés during intense frag-parties, which often
break up into real, violent gang wars. Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)
Hitler's relatives, naturalized Americans living under assumed names, have
agreed to a tell-all book.
He decided, therefore, to travel to Germany and make full use of
the Hitler family connections. His father and uncle helped him
find work but the young William Patrick thought that he
deserved something better than the book-keeping jobs he was
given. He eventually fell foul of his uncle when he suggested
that if he wasn't found something more befitting a member of
the Fuhrer's family, he would go public with rumours that the
Nazi leader's grandfather was an Austrian Jew.
This prompted an ultimatum by Hitler: William Patrick was
ordered to renounce his British citizenship and take a senior
position in the Third Reich. The young man instead chose to
flee from Germany. It was now 1939 and he received a cold
welcome in London, so he left England with his mother for a
lecture tour of America on the subject of "My Uncle Adolf".
Marc Laidlaw writes "Infinite Matrix is excerpting Rudy Rucker's new book
starting today."
The people of Flat Matthewsboro were nearly as tall as me.
Each had two arms, two legs, and a head; they were like
silhouettes, like animated Egyptian hieroglyphs. Their heads
had an eye on either side and the slit of a mouth on top, with the
mouth nestled right into the hair. The eyes were flat gleaming
triangles, and the fronts of their eyes bulged. Their flat skins
wrapped around their edges like rinds on slices of salami. Their
clothes were stringy wrappers outside their skins, like threads of
icing on the rims of gingerbread men and women
LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Marc!)
A contributor to a subway afficiandos' mailing list fantasizes about riding the
train to heaven:
The conductor announces that the next stop will be Heaven. The
distance from the Brighton tracks through the sky to the Heaven
station is the longest distance between any two stations on the
ride. It is about as long as Dekalb Ave. to Canal Street over the
bridge, would be.
Link Discuss (Thanks, Hal!)
Review of a biography of Typhoid Mary.
How can we know what it was like to be a poor, immigrant,
middle-aged, single woman trying to support herself while
keeping one step ahead of public health officials and the police,
taking jobs as a cook in private homes and always leaving when
typhoid fever broke out, as it almost inevitably did? Anthony
Bourdain, author of Typhoid Mary, An Urban Historical
attempts to provide as clear a picture of Mary as the scant
historical record, supplemented by his personal experience,
allows.
Link Discuss
A company that makes fraud-detection systems for banks and phone
companies says it has a program that can analyze email to determine whether
or not it is truthful. Link Discuss
John Fanzine is a funny, beautifully
designed Brit Webzine. Link
Discuss
Step-by-step instructions for connecting a surplus PrimeStar satellite mini-dish
to an 802.11 base-station for use as an external, high-gain antenna.
Things You Will Need:
1. A Primestar dish. (You may use any old dish, but if it is
bigger than the Primestar the gain will be higher, and it may not
be within the Federal Communications Commission rules for
use within the United States.)
2. A juice can (about 4 inches in diameter and at least 8 inches
long)
Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)
Mari-Chan is a Japanese artist who has created a
marvellous pantheon of disturbing cartoon
iconography, twisted mutations of Sanrio and other
characters that are both amusing and thoughtprovoking. Link Discuss
It turns out that Japanese copyright law does make provision for fair use
quotations for criticism and reporting! So much for the Online Fanart
Protection league's wholesale demand for permission before quoting.
(Quotations) Article 32. (1) It shall be permissible to make
quotations from a work already made public, provided that their
making is compatible with fair practice and their extent does not
exceed that justified by purposes such as news reporting,
criticism or research.
(2) It shall also be permissible for the press or other periodicals
to reproduce informatory, investigatory or statistical data,
reports and other works of similar character which have been
prepared by organs of the State or local public entities or
independent administrative organs for the purpose of public
information and which have been made public under their
authorship, provided that the reproduction thereof is not
expressly prohibited.
Link Discuss (Thanks, evang!)
We are two! It has been two years since the Boing Boing blog's first post:
Street Tech Reviews and news for gadget-lovers and propeller
heads of all stripes.
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 14:07
On a related note, it has been one year, one week and one day since I joined
Boing Boing:
Hey, Mark made me a guest editor! Those junk rockets were
damned cool -- how about a junk clock to accompany them?
posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:52
We've had a lot of fun making Boing Boing, lemme tell ya. Your suggestions,
lively feedback, patience and enthusiasm are always great to come home to.
Link Discuss
DynCorp, the US Defense contractor recently nailed for trade in teenaged
slavegirls in Bosnia, is also up to its armpits in the drug-trade in Columbia,
where they are assisting the DoD in, ahem, eliminating the drug trade. So, the
military liberates Bosnia and DynCorp enslaves it; the DoD tries to end the
coca and heroin trade in Columbia and DynCorp props it back up again. With
contractors like that, who needs terrorists? Link Discuss (Thanks, Andrew!)
Virgin is launching a cellular SMS service for the express purpose of flirting (i.
e., sending explicitly sexual messages). Link Discuss (via Meerkat)
A Slashdot poster who misspells the same way as the Anthrax mailer got a
visit from the FBI recently -- they'd read his Slashdot posts after they were
featured on America's Most Wanted (!) and decided to pay him a visit. Link
Discuss
The story of Tijuana's accidental zoo: As Mexican officials confiscate exotic
animals from would-be smugglers and put them to pasture in one of the city's
largest park, the park itself has slowly but surely become a zoo, complete with
lions, tigers and exotic reptiles. LinkDiscuss
Operating an online casinos may be wildly profitable, but it doesn't matter a
whit if you can't get the credit-card companies to approve your transactions.
Link Discuss
A new airbag-vest for motorcycle riders inflates within 30
milliseconds of impact. The vest's accelerometers are
hooked into a black box that buffers two seconds' worth of
data, so that the moments leading up to a crash can be
analyzed in hindsight. Snow Crash, anyone? Link Discuss
Tolkien fans are the latest opressed minority in Kazahkstan. They like to go
off into the woods dressed as Middle-Earthlings and have weekend-long
Tolkienfests. The local secret police take a dim view.
Victims of the crackdown have been beaten and detained for up
to three days without charge, according to a report by the
Institute for War and Peace Reporting. One victim, the leader of
a well-known punk rock band, was forced to squat in a tiny jail
cell that was half-filled with water...
The most frequent form of harassment is less severe, said a
Tolkienist, who spoke on condition of anonymity. She said
Tolkien enthusiasts were stopped in the street and ordered to
remove their costumes and surrender their rubber axes and
home-made wooden swords. The threat of a three-day detention
on charges of carrying a concealed weapon is used to extract a
bribe of up to $A8, a large sum by the standards of Kazakhstan.
Lord of the Rings, the abridged version:
IAN HOLM
There you are, you sage old wizard!
They smoke from IAN MCKELLEN'S PIPE.
IAN HOLM (CONT'D)
Ah, Ian, you truly have the finest
weed in Middle Earth.
Heh.
IAN MCKELLEN
Both of our names are Ian.
IAN HOLM
Holy shit! You're right!
IAN HOLM falls backwards, laughing hysterically.
IAN HOLM (CONT'D)
Dude! Every time I laugh, I think
it's my lung trying to escape a
little bit. Maybe that's what
laughing is. Lungs use humor to
trick us into letting them escape.
Whoa.
IAN MCKELLEN
Holy shit dude, you're so fucked
up.
IAN HOLM
Oh, wanna see something cool? This
will totally trip you out.
IAN slips on the RING OF POWER and turns invisible.
IAN HOLM (CONT'D)
(invisible)
Whoa, where'd I go? Where'd I go?
Ha ha!
(removing the ring)
Isn't that awesome?
New World Disorder's a blog with great stuff! I wish their descriptions were a
little less terse, though. Link Discuss
An Indian magician-turned-politician is enlisting an army of hundreds of
fellow stage-prestidigitators to hypnotize and entertain voters in his election
campaign. Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)
Stray fighting dogs are interbreeding with dingos in the Australian bush and
producing a race of giant super-dogs that are terrorizing the countryside. Link
Discuss (via New World Disorder)
A whistle-blower who was fired after he described the actions of employees
and execs at DynCorp, his estwhile employer and a US military contractor in
Bosnia, has been vindicated in a sting operation. The whistle-blower was
concerned that DynCorp's representatives were trading in human flesh, namely
young teenaged girls who were bought and sold as sex slaves. So much for
liberating them, huh? Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)
The new generation of hobos are still hopping freighters and riding the rails,
but now they're using the Net to plan rides and trade notes about railyard bulls.
He enjoys partying in new towns and running into other trainhoppers and hobos. But most of all, Snyder enjoys the views. Of
all the places he has seen, Oregon is the most scenic to travel by
freight train, he says.
"Hobos call a boxcar a wide-screen TV," says Snyder, dressed
in a dusty pair of black overalls and layers of sweatshirts and
jackets. "I just like traveling. That's why I do it."
Snyder is a full-time train-hopper, but he knows of people who
pay $200 to ride the rails with someone experienced and college
students who train-hop on summer breaks.
Phoenix airport security detained and questioned Gen. Joseph J. Foss -- a
retired Marine Corps General, former Governor of South Dakota and former
president of the NRA -- for 45 minutes. The problem is that he was carrying
his Medal of Honor, which was awarded to him by FDR for shooting down 26
enemy planes in the South Pacific (facts attested to by the inscription on the
back of the medal). Foss is one of about 140 surviving recipients of the Medal
of Honor. Foss was nonplussed by the incident, and called for common sense
in addition to heightened security. Jeez. Just: Jeez. Link Discuss
Twelve years of regular visits from Jehova's Winesses drove this woman clear
over the edge -- so she went down to the local Kingdom Hall during Sunday
services and started pounding on the door, hollering out offers of free
magazines. Link Discuss (via MegoSteve)
When selling a lamp on eBay becomes a descent into madness.
I WOULD LIKE TO ADD THAT I HAVE SPENT 11.00
ALREADY TO LIST THIS LIGHT , IF IT DOESNT SELL
THIS ROUND IM SETTING IT ON FIRE AND RUNNING IT
OVER WITH A TRUCK..THEN POSTING IT AS FOR FREE
ON EBAY ..HOWS THAT FOR SELLING! YOU EBAY
ANTAGINSTS COULD NOT POSSIBLY SAY SOMEONE
HAS THE LIGHT CHEEPER THEN ! HOW'S THAT STRIKE
YA MR PRICE CHECKER ....HE HE HE HE HE HE MABE
NEXT WEEK SOME ONE WILL EMAIL SAYING THERE
GRANDFATHER HAS ONE HE'S GIVING AWAY MABE
SO....OR MABE ILL HAVE LUCKY DEAD BEAT
EBAYERS PICK A NUMBER AND THEN GIVE IT TO THE
JERKOFF WITH THE CLOSEEST NUMBER ....NO BETTER
YET SINCE I ALREADY SPENT 11.00 LISTING IT ILL
JUST ASK FOR MY LISTING FEE BACK HOWS THAT A
NEW LIGHT WITH EXTRA LENSES FOR 11.00 AND ILL
PAY SHIPPING ..WHAT A DEAL ......
Link Discuss (via MegoSteve)
Some PDFs from the Aussie government describe the immigration morass.
Link, Link Discuss (Thanks, Nat!)
Refugees in Australia are on a hunger-strike to protest their indefinite
detention there. To make the point more forcefully, they've sewed their lips
shut.
Some background reading on the Australian immigration department's site
tells the history: Boat-people -- refugees washing up on the shores of Australia
-- got a very good break in the 70s, when they were mostly Vietnamese. But as
time went by, public pressure convinced the Australian government to more
thoroughly investigate claims before granting refugee status to new arrivals.
Seems like a good enough idea -- there was speculation that Khmer Rouge war
criminals and other mass-murderers were arriving as poor displaced people -but over the years the Australian refugee system has clotted up, so that new
arrivals -- including women and children -- are indefinitely detained in remote
walled quaratines that are little more than jails.
Any Australians in the readership want to comment? Link Discuss (Thanks,
Nat!)
Rodgers Townsend, an ad agency, created this very clever and very funny
commercial for an "Ad-Man" action figure, with lots of snotty digs at the biz.
Animal rights activists are concerned that Snow Dogs, Disney's new movie
about Siberian Huskies, will create a Husky fad that will end in tragedy -- as
happened with Dalmation puppies after 101 Dalmations. Link Discuss
(Thanks, Amanda!)
Japanese Copyright law has no provision for fair-use. That means that it's
illegal in Japan to excerpt copyrighted works, even if for discussion or
criticism, without the rights-holder's permission. A group of Japanese fan
artists have created a campaign to educate foreigners about this unusual law,
and to get non-Japanese to remove fan art that has been posted without
permission, regardless of the circumstances. I understand that there are
cultural differences at play here, but it seems to me that putting rightsholders
in charge of the discussions of their works is a bad idea -- I don't understand
how fair and honest criticism can function without the ability to excerpt
without permission.
Many foreigners think that they are not "stealing" because of the
credit, but the Japanese authors, WE prohibit reusing without
permission, so that will be same as stealing TO US. So if you
want to use Japanese fanarts, why don't you just follow
Japanese's rules?
Link Discuss
My pal Bill Shunn's excellent story, "Dance of the Yellow-Breasted Luddites,"
is on the preliminary Nebula ballot -- and on the Web! Read it here: Link
Discuss
Philips is threatening to ship CD burners that can copy "copy-protected" CDs,
and hang the legal consequences of engaging in circumvention.
[The] protection system is not a protection system as such, but
simply a mechanism for stopping the playback of music. This
interesting claim allows him to contend that the protection
systems are not covered by the Digital Millenium Copyright
Act, and lays the ground for the mother of all sue-fests with the
number of large and rich companies who are most certainly not
going to agree with him.
Link Discuss
RoadWired -- who make some of my favorite hightech laptop bags and other travel accessories -- are
trying out a new line, the APS Bags. APS bags are
padded sleeves, suitable to be carried as
shoulderbags or used as inserts in larger bags. The
APS bags are wonders of craftsmanship and
forethought: RoadWired has lined them with a BellLabs-developed space-program fabric that magically wicks away moisture,
mitigating corrosion in your laptop's sensitive clock crystal, keyboard contacts
and other components. It has a corrugated plastic bumper on its underside that
prevents the wince-evoking clunk that you hear whenever you set your latptop
bag down on a hard surface, and it's got heavy-duty zippers that gasket shut to
keep out dust and crap. I got to play with a prototype of one of these while it
was in development, and I really loved it -- it was the perfect way to protect
my iBook before throwing it into a larger courier bag. RoadWired is also
shipping PDA and media version of the APS case -- collect the whole set!
Link Discuss
Good comprehensive guide to cereal advertising mascots through the ages.
Unfortunately, every page has a dumbass MIDI soundtrack accompanying it.
Nothing like the goddamned Beetlejuice soundtrack, arranged for Casiotone
and toy piano, mixiing itself into my MP3 of Django Reinhardt doing
Honeysuckle Rose. What's worse is there's no way to switch it off, short of
turning off music in my browser. Link Discuss (Thanks, Kate!)
Funny page of Japanese Engrish. Link Discuss (Thanks, Sandro Larson!)
David Pescovitz and I just got back from an evening at the Getty Center where
Lawrence Weschler interviewed magician and magic historian Ricky Jay. Jay
told a lot of great stories about old magicians despite the lousy questions and
cues thrown his way by Weschler (author of Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of
Wonders, a book about The Museum of Jurassic Technology). The highlight
of the evening was a demonstration of the chess playing automaton, a handcranked robot that played chess against a volunteer from the audience (David
was selected to go on stage as a "referee.") Here's a description of the
automaton from James Randi's site. The one we saw didn't have a human
stuffed inside the cabinet. Either it was remotely controlled or a confederate
was called up to play against the automaton. If anyone else was at the show,
I'd love to hear your theory of how it worked. Link Discuss
AOL to buy RedHat? Holy crap! Link Discuss (via /.)
Check out Jef "Acme.com" Pozkanzer's awesome
"Pencil Thing" sculpture! Link Discuss (Thanks,
magdalen!
Who owns Pooh? The heirs of a literary agent who bought the merch rights to
Winnie the Pooh from AA Milne in the 30s are gaining legal ground against
Disney, who they claim owe them $200 million plus. The courts were
unimpressed that Disney had destroyed several boxes of documents including
one labelled "Winnie the Pooh -- Legal Problems." Link Discuss (Thanks,
Amanda!)
Help ridicule virus hysteria! Vmyths is holding the annual Computer Virus
Hysteria Awards: nominate in a variety of categories:
Best government fearmonger
Given to the person or agency that exudes hysteria
Best corporate fearmonger
Given to the person or company that exudes hysteria
Best quotation
Given for the pithy comment that exudes hysteria
Best news event
Given for the breaking story that exudes hysteria
Link Discuss (via NTK)
The SF Chronicle is bringing Zippy the Pinhead back, in response to massive
reader outcry. Stefan notes that "to provide karmic balance, 'Family Circus' is
coming back too." Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)
Here's an offensively hysterical article about war-driving and open 802.11
networks. The author implicitly discounts the possibility that base-station
owners are leaving their network unsecured in order to provide a service to the
community at large -- just as SMTP hosts were largely "unsecured" in the
early days of the Internet, a time-space with many parallels to today's nascent
wireless movement. Link Discuss (via Interesting People)
Celebrities photoshopped into Goth splendor! Mmmm, goth Olsen Twins!
Link Discuss (Thanks, Jamais!)
This looks like a great OSX utility:
Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) is a cloning utility developed with
AppleScript Studio. The purpose of CCC is to assist you in
copying your entire Mac OS X installation from one partition to
another as easily as possible. Contrary to some misinformation,
it is possible to clone your startup volume without Disk Warrior,
Retrospect, or any commercial product -- the tools you need are
already installed with Mac OS X! CCC puts a friendly interface
on these tools to make cloning easy.
Link Discuss
Japanese website
with pictures of
unusual ukuleles.
(Thanks, Gary!)
Link Discuss
Jenny sez: "Look, BUST is just about the best damn women's magazine to
come out in the last 10 years. Their publisher folded in October, but they're
still coming out with their spring issue as planned. They need peope to
subscribe or renew their subscriptions now! They just gave me an illustration
assignment, and I want to see it published!! You can renew subscriptions on
their website. thanks." I've just poked around some of BUST's back numbers
and this is really nice stuff -- like vintage Sassy for grown-ups. Link Discuss
(Thanks, Jenny!)
The OpenAP project ("All Your Base Stations Are Belong To Us") is a
community effort to write Linux-based firmware for various 802.11-basestations, rendering them more flexible and configurable than previous, and
stripping away the dependence on hardware vendors for better software to run
on their gear. Neat! Link Discuss (via /.)
Disgruntled Housewife is a great zine-style site, chock-a-block with beautiful
design and sharp, witty prose:
* Even the most continental man loves creepy suburban food.
Keep Velveeta and ground beef on hand. If your man's a snob,
give your June Cleaver cassaroles fancy names. He'll gobble
them up.
* Despite their packaging charm, canned meat products are to
be avoided. Spam is for laughing at, not for eating.
* Anything good is better with bacon. (Thanks, Christopher!)
* Butter, butter, butter!
Link Discuss (Thanks, Kate)
Tasteless-but-funny classic post from Craig's List:
Where can we get an abortion for our pedigree dog? Our lovely
Pedigreed Minature Poodle was violated by our neighbors
Golden Retriever.
Link Discuss (Thanks, Kate)
The new digital TV standard may make home taping with off-the-shelf gear
impossible, and the DMCA may make rolling your own gear illegal. The EFF
reports on the upcoming TV-pocalypse. Link Discuss (via /.)
Robert Reed, the actor who played Mike Brady, has been excised from all new
Brady Bunch memoribilia. The Washington Post investigates the story and is
stonewalled by the studio, and so speculates that this comes down to the fact
that Reed was gay and died of AIDS, and hence has been expurgated, Trotskystyle, from the official Stalinist Brady brand. but gets the real story from the
managers of Reed's estate -- they've chosen to remember the actor in other
ways. (Thanks for catching my blunder, Erik -- I changed coasts last night and
I'm really jetlaggy) Link Discuss (Thanks, Rick!)
Episode Heaven is a terrific downloadable-TV directory, with links to dozens
of sites that host Real, DivX and MPEG versions of great shows like
Futurama, the Simpsons, Ali G and South Park. Link Discuss (Thanks,
Yaron!)
CodeCon is a P2P event for hackers, not suits. It's running Feb 15-17 at the
DNA Lounge, the San Francisco club owned by jwz, legendary ex-Netscapehacker-cum-Club-Owner. Cool, open-source P2P projects -- like BitTorrent
and Peek-a-Booty -- will be demoed and hackers will get the chance to chat
with one another about their ongoing work.
Topics which won't be found at CodeCon include:
* SET and other white elephant, unimplemented standards
* Philosophy of X.509 and PKI or other top-down, irrelevant
standards
* Digital Rights Management and other other technologies
which impair individual liberty
* Mathematical cryptography lacking practical implementation
* Political debate about key escrow
* Vendor sales pitches for closed-source, feature-crippled
libraries
* Enterprise security architectures with no relevance to the
public Internet
My pal George Scriban has a blog, and I had to find out about it from Dave
Winer's site! Damn you, George! Seriously, though -- George is one of the
best industry analysts I know. He's cogent, comprehensive and has a sense of
humor.
there's something galling about the legal pissing contest
between Akamai and Digital Island (now a unit of Cable &
Wireless, plc). both companies are arguing that they should be
in a position to claim ownership of the most basic technologies
behind physically-based content delivery networks: two-level
DNS, and adaptive routing to a cache based on traffic
conditions. two networks enter, one network leaves.
i doubt there was ever a better reason to replace these guys with
P2P content distribution. take a look at these presentations from
O'Reilly P2P 2001in Washington, DC.
Link Discuss (via Scripting News)
How to diaper a monkey. The parents of the kid born with the tail need to talk
to this lady. Link Discuss (Thanks, Kip!)
The title just about says it all: "How to diaper a monkey." Link Discuss
(Thanks, Kip!)
Suddenly Everything Sucks: funny Microsoft billboard liberation. Link
Discuss (Thanks, Bruce Ellis!)
Remember David McOwen, the guy who got charged with numerous counts
of hacking for installing distributed.net -- a client for a distributed computing
project to brute-force solutions to cryptosystems -- on the university
computers he was the sysadmin for while they were sitting idle over the Xmas
break? He's gotten off with a slap on the wrist.
Under the terms of the deal, announced today, McOwen will
receive one year of probation for each criminal count, to run
concurrently, make restitution of $2100, and perform 80 hours
of community service unrelated to computers or technology.
McOwen will have no felony or misdemeanor record under
Georgia's First Offender Act.
A software developer working on a PhD in English Lit is publishing his
dissertation on Emily Dickinson, along with scans and text of Dickinson's
letters, hyperlinked and semantically identified with XML, as an "open
source" work of scholarly research.
My dissertation project will be an electronic edition of a body of
Emily Dickinson's correspondence. For the most part, I'm
writing the software for the edition myself from the ground up,
and I intend to release it all as Free Software under the GNU
General Public License (GPL) when I'm finished. For
components I don't write, such as the operating system, Web
server and database system, I will choose Free/Open Source
options whenever available
The secret diaries of Aragon.
Day Four:
Stuck on mountain with Hobbits. Boromir really annoying.
Not King yet.
Day Six:
Orcs killed: none. Disappointing. Stubble update: I look rugged
and manly. Yes!
Keep wanting to drop-kick Gimli. Holding myself back. Still
not King.
Day Ten:
Sorry no entries lately. V. dark in Mines of Moria. Big Baelrog.
Not King today either.
Link Discuss (Thanks Steve!)
Tangible evidence of the danger of keeping goofy exotic pets: a Detroit
Delaware man was killed and eaten by his monitor lizards. Link Discuss
(Thanks, Amanda!)
Not only did the egomaniacal multi-millionaire Ralph Nader (darling of the
trial lawyer lobbyists) screw up the election, but apparently he's a big liar too.
Link Discuss
Two years ago Timothy Lee turned down an offer to sell the cool.com domain
name for $8 million in cash and $30 million in stock. Today, he can't find
anyone willing to pay a fraction of that for the name. Link Discuss
As the economy circles the drain, big biz loses its sense of humor and fair
play, and starts to muscle struggling tech magazines who run
uncomplimentary stories, threating to pull advertising unless the blows are
softened. All too often, the result is a kind of corporate-utopic stroke-off, with
magazines running feel-good features in an effort to keep their few remaining
advertisers in the pipe. Link Discuss (via Interesting People)
A Musilm baby born with a tail in India is being hailed
as the reincarnation of the Hindu monkey-god
Hanuman. Link Discuss (Thanks, John!
New silicon materials research has demonstrated a means of making silicon
into a low-yeild explosive. The New Scientist speculates on the security and
countermeasures uses of such materials -- your cellphone, once identified as
stolen, could smolder itself into uselessness (triggered by the cell network) or
go bang after warning any nearby theives and bystanders to get clear. Laptops
with Internet or radio-based low-jacks could cook their drives and
components, and downed spyplanes could cook their seekrit mind-control rays
into crapola. Link Discuss (Thanks, Bill!)
Number portability makes it possible for consumers to change cellular
providers without losing their cellphone number. This makes it possible for
consumers to change providers when service gets crappy or the prices go up.
In other words, number portability keeps carriers honest. Which is why we
don't have it, despite the fact that number portability was supposed to be
universal as of 2.5 years ago, by law. Instead of implementing it, mobile
carriers have dragged their heels, and now they're petitioning to have the
requirement eliminated. Bastards. Link Discuss (via Interesting People)
Nice tribute to the music of the Follin brothers, who scored and recorded the
groovy, catchy, high-energy soundtracks for Commodore 64 (and other
system) games. Unfortunately, the music is in strange formats (.SID and .
NSF), but it should be easy to find a freeware MP3 converter. Link Discuss
(Thanks, H0L!)
Nice utility page that automatically detects spyware in your Windows
Explorer browser, and generates instructions for removing it. I dunno if it
works, 'cause I'm Mr. OSX these days. Link Discuss (Thanks, Higgins!)
I've avoided The Pretzel until now, since most of the stuff I've seen has been
kinda obvious and unfunny. But this rewriting of Beck's Devil's Haircut
("Devil's Pretzel") tickles my Allan-Sherman-primed funnybone.
Something's wrong 'cause my windpipe's closing
chest feels like it's near exploding
earphoned bully boys walking other places
Spot & Barney staring, Nipper faces
Link Discuss (Thanks, Lia!)
With Apple ripping and killing the envelope on the PC form-factor front, it's
no surprise that other vendors are doing the same. Here's Intel's gallery of
"Concept PCs" with all kindsa not-so-crazy form factors: Hey, look, it's a box!
On its side! With a bulge! Or it's a miniature Vegas hotel! Or it's a toilet seat!
These remind me of SGI's lame-ass experiments in whacky form-factors in the
early 90s. Link Discuss (Thanks, Dan!)
Enron employees, former and current, are making extra cash by selling off
instantaneously ironic items from their estrwhile employer, such as the Enron
Risk Management Manual, the Enron Code of Ethics book, and the Enron
"Vision and Values" crystal paperweight. Link Discuss (via MeFi)
This supersite covers every scandal, ethics violation, lie and broken promise
by Shrub and his cronies and Cabinet. Link Discuss (Thanks, Nat!)
A plaque erected to honor James Earl Jones for his
contribution to Black America has a fatal typo: it thanks
James Earl Ray (the man who shot MLK) for "keeping
the dream alive." Duh. Link Discuss (Thanks, Dana and
TimmyT!)
Stefan sez: "'Third Culture' impresario John Brockman occasionally asks his
sci-lit braintrust deep questions. This time he's asked them to come up with the
questions. An interesting and wide-ranging assortment, ranging from 'Are
space and time fundamental concepts or are they approximations to other,
more subtle, ideas that still await our discovery?' to 'Why do we
decorate?' (Brian Eno)." This is good, meaty stuff, and there's days of reading
here. Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)
Continuing the novelty music theme: Here's a nice mix of a groovy Beck tune
crossed with AC/DC's Highway to Hell. Link Discuss (Thanks, Bill!)
LA Times article on outsider music.
Barely able to tune their instruments, let alone play them, the
Shaggs' drumming sounded "like a peg-leg stumbling through a
field of bald Uniroyals," rock critic Lester Bangs once wrote.
Link Discuss
Got an Aiport Base Station and a Windows box? Up until now, you've had to
use cranky, Java-based configurators to set up and run your Airport. No more:
Apple just released a Windows-based configurator for their excllent Airport
Base Stations. Link Discuss (Thanks, jerry!)
Zachary sez: "In the vein of Public Enemy vs. Dexy's Midnight Runners,
someone has mixed Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit with Destiny's Child's
Bootylicious -- though you more or less get the whole song/remix here." I
dunno. This is good, but in more of a Superfreak/Can't Touch This way. Link
Discuss (Thanks, Zachary!)
Toshiba's announced 10GB and 20GB version of the teeny, fast drive that
Apple put in the iPod -- can a 20GB iPod be far behind? Discuss Link
First-person account of a dotcom CEO who sold his company, cashed out and
went to work at McDonald's for a while to see what life was like on $12k/year.
4. nobody thanked me. i worked hard. i got paid peanuts. i
even ate mcdonald's food during my break (deducted from my
pay). it was intense: the cash register was complex, people
want their food NOW, the lines get deep, the mcflurry must be
made just right. i was trying hard and i was doing an ok job.
now, i've been the leader/manager for most of my life. i've had
plenty of crap jobs, but i've been the boss for the past few
years. i faithfully read my fast company magazine and my
harvard business review. i've been taught countless times the
value of a leader/manager showing appreciation for people's
effort. however, my instinct has often been that showing
appreciation really isn't too necessary for good people. they just
take pride in a job well done --- and, anyway, they can read my
mind and see the appreciation. well, from day 1 at mcdonald's, i
was yearning for someone there to say "thanks". even a "you're
doing ok" would suffice. but, no. neither management
experience -- nor reading about management --- teaches this
lesson as well as being an under-appreciated employee.
Whoopee! Twelve new downloadable Wallace and Grommit one-minute
shorts will be released soon! Link Discuss (Thanks, Amanda!)
Unprintable Zagat's outtakes:
Why eat here when you can take the vegetables from the
garbage can?
The only thing authentic about this joint is the heartburn and the
check
I get sick from the food every time. At least it has consistency
Food tastes like socks
Waitresses trained by Joseph Stalin
The cockroaches are more energetic than the management
The Bronx Zoo with Food
Link Discuss (via Other Than Linguistics)
Here's a collection of strange recipes -- included are both recipes with exotic
ingredients (cow udders, moose noses) and kids' recipes for thinks that look
gross (Cheez-Wiz based "Boogers on a stick"). These kinda remind me of PJ
O'Rourke's account from Holidays in Hell, of being taken out for glasses of
cobra blood in Singapore: "You're probably wondering what cobra blood
tastes like. Well, it tastes like chicken -- blood."
LOCUST BISQUE
1 gallon locust shells
2 onions, roughly chopped
1 clove garlic, chopped
1 celery stalk
2 carrotsÂ
1/2 tsp. powdered mace
salt and pepper to taste
1 cup whipping cream
Link Discuss (Thanks, Kate!)
The Toronto Star asks us to pity Mayor Mel "The Chimp" Lastman's poor
handlers, who are charged with the Herculean task of babysitting the city's
infantile, grandstanding, wick-dipping, lying, evil troll of a mayor, 24/7, lest
he go off and befriend more mass-murdering heroin runners in full glare of the
cameras' lights. Link Discuss (Thanks, Amanda!)
Sci American rounds up the dumbest patents ever -- 3D pie-charts, training
manuals, focus groups. Link Discuss (via /.)
I yearn to own one of these amazing 802.11 testers. About the size of a Coleco
Football game (thanks, Rael!), the Locust is a handheld GPS/802.11-analyzer
with a serial interface and a compact-flash slot. Wander the streets with one of
these in your hands and you'll pinpoint (and log!) the location, strength, SSID,
and direction of every 802.11 base-station you come in range of. This thing
will be indispensible once I start putting up semi-legal high-powered antennae
to give my Airport base-station enough range to reach me anywhere in the city
limits... The page has screenshots of a Win32 app that it comes with, but I got
to playw ith a nice OSX version of their software last week at MacWorld.
Link Discuss
This. Is. Amazing. David Friedman has engaged in one of the most thorough
acts of alternate history I've ever seen. He's invented an animated TV show
about Bill and Hillary Clinton -- The Adventures of L'il Bill and Hil and
Friends -- that ran for eight seasons. He's produced episode guides, a
collectibles pricing guide, fan art...A complete mythology for this show that
never was. Link Discuss
Well, the Current Situation must be officially over, 'cause air rage is back.
Link Discuss (Thanks Pat!)
The new iMac fits real nice in the Pixar logo, doesn't it? Link Discuss
(Thanks, Mike!)
Story of the XXXChuch, a ministry devoted to stamping out porn. The
ministry rented out a booth at the AVN tradeshow, the adult version of CES
where the pornaratti meet and greet. Link Discuss (Thanks, Rich!)
The latest Japanese beverage craze is here! VAAM is made from "hornet
juice," a fluid secreted by young hornets and consumed by older hornets as a
natural go-faster-juice.
The women's marathon winner at the Sydney Olympics has
revealed the secretof her success --- she drank the stomach
juices of giant, killer hornets that fly 100km a day at up to 25
km/hour. Naoko Takahashi, aged 28, from Japan, consumed the
hornet juice during training and the race itself after scientists
discovered that it had astonishing powers to boost human
stamina.
LInk Discuss (Thanks, Elias!)
This is one bizarre gig: A guy in Lubbock, TX has taken on the task of
cleaning up four dump-trucks' worth of pennies that were recovered with
steamshovels from the wreckage of a US Mint truck. The pennies are mixed
up with road-dirt, soil and other crud, and need to be separated, cleaned and
prepped to be put back into circulation.
"I hope we can find somebody to take them in bulk rather than
having to roll all of them" into 50-cent packs, he said.
Somewhere between food porn, foodie-ism and extreme eating is
ChowHound, a lyrical journal devoted to food and eating.
There are tons of loose olives, but not more so (or better quality)
than other "tons of olives" places you know. In fact, let me
emphasize: this is NOT a gourmet store. It's on a separate
playing field from places like Sahadi, Zabar's, Gourmet Garage.
This isn't a foodie Shangri-la for the crustiest bread, the
plumpest carrots, the most artisinal cheeses. There are OTHER
stores for that sort of thing. There's no food porn, no spotlit
exquisiteness whatsoever. This is about packaged stuff. It's the
holy land of packaged products. Not elite brands, not fancy
gourmet items. There are a lot of terrific olive oils at even more
terrific prices, but none come in particularly pretty bottles. This
is the most diverse, most surprising, most scarily well-thought
out and lovingly selected gigantic collection of international
(and local) packaged foods you've never heard of all in one
place. Kozy Shack analogs of every culture. Vegemite is
stocked here sans irony.
Link Discuss (Thanks, Kate!)
BootCD is an OSX utility that creates a bootable CDROM for your Mac.
About time! Link Discuss
National Guardsmen on airport duty are being equipped with BlackBerry twoway pagers from which they can query sensitive governmental files on
suspected terrorists. Guess this means improved BlackBerry coverage in the
terminals. Link Discuss
In Finland, your speeding fines are tied to your income -- neat idea. Not fun,
though, if you're a senior Nokia exec who got a $100,000 fine for racing your
Harley down a residential street, then took a huge pay-cut when your stockoptions were revalued post-bust. Yikes! Link Discuss (via Interesting People)
Handspring's signed a deal with mm02, a giant European telco. Treo phones
are gonna be spread all over Europe -- lucky bastids. I got to play with a Treo
last week at IDEO design, and man, that is one sweet phone/PDA; the first
such that I'd consider owning. Link Discuss
Apple's corporate counsel -- a pack of utter
goons, it appears -- have been sicced on the
poor schmucks at the Church of Satan. They've
repeatedly nastygrammed the Satanist's
webmaster, demanding that he take down his
"Made with Macintosh" banner and the "Think
Different" parody with Anton LaVey that had
run. The Satanists say that they're just freethinkin' iconoclasts who made their site with a
Mac, and they wanna tell the world about it.
Why the hell is Apple dicking around with this
crap? Link Discuss (Thanks Andrew!)
Collected Usenet writings from "Tae, the paramedic from hell." These stories
are incredibly grotesque but equally compelling. Just not while you're eating.
Upon arrival, my partner and I walked up a flight of stairs to a
teenager's room. A male of about 13 - 15 years old, was hanging
from the ceiling. He had been dead for at least a couple of
hours. The physical signs? Incontinence of the bladder, a lightblue tinge to his extremities - positive Smurf-sign, both orbits of
his eyes were bulging forward, his tongue was out - and quite
blue. What was interesting to note was the distension of some of
the large veins on his forehead, and the petechiae over his face.
Petechiae are small reddish-spots that occur when capillaries
burst under the skin - usually due to a increase in pressure.
Link Discuss (via Making Light)
Wonderful gallery of bootleg action figures. Link Discuss
(via MeFi)
Great Dan Gillmor editorial describing how Google has devalued oncehttp://boingboing.net/2002_01_01_archive.html (56 von 104)8/26/2003 11:58:47 PM
precious domain names. Free, fast and accurate, Google's made it possible to
immediately locate just about anything online, far more reliably than was
possible by punching in random domain-names. The result is that owning
_____.com is no longer as important as it once was.
The most interesting from a domain-name point of view is this:
With the rise of search tools that unerringly bring you to the
page you want, the need for a highly specific domain name -one that a casual Web user would be able to guess -- has
practically disappeared.
Adobe's threatening to discontinue Asian-language versions of its software if
the Chinese don't do something about software piracy. This seems pretty
shortsighted, as it almost guarantees that the number of legit copies of Adobe
apps in use in China will drop to zero. Link Discuss
Holy freaking crap. As of Friday, every piece of luggage on every plane in
America will have to be screened for explosives. However, there is virtually
no infrastructure in place to do the screening. Be prepared for fantasticbordering-on-comical delays. I'm flying SF-Toronto on Thursday, and the
back other way on Tuesday. I'll let you know how it goes. Urp.
In a meeting with the Chicago Sun-Times editorial board last
week, American Airlines Chairman and CEO Donald Carty said
the airline is "trying to cobble together a series of things without
bringing down the system" but declined to give away details.
Carty said on the first couple of days "as many as 5 percent" of
flights might be slightly delayed. "We may run into trouble if it
is a bad weather day. You could have a rough time."
Each of the screening options has drawbacks.
The explosive detection machines, which use a combination of
X-ray and CAT-scan technology, have an up to 20 percent false
alarm rate. They're also expensive--costing about $1 million
apiece--and there are only 160 of them nationwide.
Manual inspections are slow and open to human error.
Matching bags to passengers won't deter suicide bombers.
Bomb-sniffing dogs, while highly accurate, can't work for long
periods without a break. And there are only about 175 FAAcertified dogs nationwide.
Link Discuss (via Plastic)
Vernor Vinge -- proto-cyberpunk, computer scientist -- wrote this wonderful
whitepaper on the "Singularity," whereupon post-humans become too
intelligent to interact with the meatpeople who preceded them.
Another symptom of progress toward the Singularity: ideas
themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most radical
will quickly become commonplace. When I began writing
science fiction in the middle '60s, it seemed very easy to find
ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural
consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen
months. (Of course, this could just be me losing my imagination
as I get old, but I see the effect in others too.) Like the shock in
a compressible flow, the Singularity moves closer as we
accelerate through the critical speed.
Link Discuss (Thanks, Roy!)
The Guestbar's back! This week, it's Charlie Stross. Charlie's a hell of a
science fiction writer, a fantastic tech journo (specializing in the world of
Open Source and Free Software) a mad Englishman and a resident of
Scotland. Link Discuss
Here's an excellent, searchable gallery of Disney clip-art. Link
Discuss (Thanks, Bob!)
Interesting -- if irresponsible -- speculation that the e-book industry could be
saved by JK Rowling publishing Harry Potter five exclusively in ebook
format. Rowling's already got a huge ebook following if the popularity of the
hand-scanned and OCRed bootleg editions are any anything to judge by.
What if Rowling turned her back on the notoriously screwy
publishing industry and, like Dylan, went electric? In a business
so economically farpotshket that even Scholastic hasn't shown a
recent consistent profit -- this despite the biggest market share
of any publisher since Gutenberg -- what if Rowling inked an
exclusive deal with Random, or the Rocket E-Book people, or
any other e-publisher who hasn't already gone belly up?
Link Discuss (Thanks, Amanda!)
The kraken wakes! A Scottish
fisherman's dredged up a rare giant
squid. These things are enormous and
no one has ever seen one alive. The
beak on this thing was powerful enough
to sever steel cables. Link Discuss (via
Meerkat)
Here's a cool idea for preserving your iPod's screen: use half a Write-Right,
the popular screen-protecting stickers for Palms and other PDAs. What is it
about a cool new gadget that brings out the Martha Stewart impulse in nerds?
Link Discuss
A Japanese prof claims he invented the Segway -- fifteen years ago. Link
Discuss
Wonderful downloadable MP3s of e.e. cummings reading his poetry on Salon
today. Their audio section really kicks ass -- I wish they'd refresh it more
often. Link Discuss
Futurefeedforward's outdone itself this week, with the best lede in its history.
June 3, 2046
Nanocelebrities Dance on Head of Pin
CAMBRIDGE--Researchers at the MIT Media Lab announced
Friday the successful construction of a nano-scale "boy band"
capable of performing complex, synchronized dance routines on
the head of a pin. "Creating [the band] was part of a larger, longterm effort here at the Lab to humanize nano-scale user
interfaces," notes Professor Ambrose Stone, director of the
research team. "[The band] will act as goodwill ambassadors
from the world of ubiquitous [nano-electro-mechanical
devices]."
Link Discuss
Korea is switching 120,000 civil servants from Windows to Linux, and has
announced an anticipated savings of 80 percent in the bargain. Link Discuss
A Dutch priest, having noticed the Christian allegory in JK Rowling's novels,
is holding Harry Potter-themed masses for kids.
The priest from Haren, however, told the Haagse Courant
newspaper: "The story of Harry Potter starts with an alternative
reading of the story of the three kings, there is a speaking snake
and, like Jesus, Harry Potter was a very obedient boy.
Link Discuss
New bandage technology will heal persistent wounds -- bedsores and other
uclers -- faster. The bandages are lined with the injured person's own cultured
skin cells, which stimulates growth.
The key to the technique is a coating which cells can attach to
and grow on, but which releases the cells after the disc is
applied to the wound. The CellTran team has adapted the
process used to coat the inside of drinks cartons to deposit a thin
film of an acrylic acid polymer onto their discs. The polymer
remains intact in a growth medium but dissolves when applied
to wounds.
Link Discuss
Fantastic history of the EFF from the LA Times. The reporter does a great job,
getting quotes from many of the founders, covering the current activities, and
talking to the EFF's current brilliant staff.
Later Gilmore smiles when he is asked if he thinks the EFF's
work is more vital than ever before. No, not really, he says.
"What we've been doing has been needed all along. You always
need the Constitution. Right?"
You know those cost-of-virus stats, Nimbda cost n billion, CodeRed cost x
billion, and so on? Ever wonder how those numbers are generated? They're
made up. Wired News covers the story of Computer Economics, a firm
charged with producing numbers-by-rectum.
"We're starting to hear reports from people, stating that they
know for a fact that their co-workers are opening viruses to get
a 'vacation day.'" Erbschloe said sometimes it's a deliberate act
of sabotage because employees hate their job, or they just want
to knock the network offline so that they can relax for a day.
Link Discuss
Mel "Dingbat Mayor of Toronto" Lastman's done it again. Just as Toronto's
law enforcement machine was gearing up for the largest-ever in-city gathering
of Hell's Angels, Dipshit Mel was heading down to the bars to get his picture
took shaking hands with an outlaw biker. This is the same gang that recently
wound up a war in Quebec that killed 160 people, including elementary school
students. This is the same gang that runs guns, hard drugs and prostitutes in
and out of Toronto. Nice going, Mel. Hope your competition plasters that pic
on every one of her campaign flyers come re-election time. Link Discuss
(Thanks, Amanda!)
The problem with education today is TV and video games, not chronic
underfunding, says the Shrub. Link Discuss (via Meerkat)
Terry Pratchett's Bromeliad trilogy (Truckers, Diggers, Wings) is being
adapted for CGI-based film by the director of Shrek! Pratchett gets a million
bucks for the rights, but, more importantly, he gets an assload of exposure in
the USA, where no one appears to have heard of him, despite the fact that 10%
of all books sold in the UK are written by him. Link Discuss (Thanks,
Amanda!)
Brad Templeton speculates on post-human intelligence.
To upload a mind it is necessary only to understand the lower
level workings of the brain enough to recreate them in another
medium. One need not understand much about the higher level
activities which bring about conscious and intelligent thought.
Just as a hardware engineer can build a computer which can
play chess knowing only about how transistors and logic gates
work. The chess software she simply copies. To build a real AI
requires that we actually either understand how intelligence
works -- which we are not close to doing, or perhaps that we
understand its mid-level functions and create something we can
turn intelligent by raising it over the course of many years, just
as we do with our own babies.
However, the uploading scenario presents a rather disturbing
conclusion. The first super-beings may not be based on humans
at all, but instead may be apes.
In the course of modern science, it is always the case that we
experiment with animals first, years before we attempt anything
on people. It's the ethical way, and in many cases the only legal
way. As such, as we develop the technology to scan or convert
an existing brain into an artificial form, we'll try this first on
animals. We'll start with lower ones, and then work up to our
closest relatives, the chimpanzee and bonobo.
Link Discuss (Thanks, Jamais!)
The Washington Post has run a four-part series chronicling the rise and fall of
Michael Saylor, a dotcom entrepreneur who founded a data-mining company
called MicroStrategy whose stock went from $300/share to $4. Saylor's story
is one of monumental hubris, excess and shady accounting -- he was fond of
telling his employees that they could "bend reality through strength of will."
It's funny, you keep hearing about these dotcom billionaires who were brung
low by their own hubris and the crashing economy, but most of the dotcom
entrepreneurs I know -- yerstruly included -- lived modest lives in small
apartments, worked tirelessly to bring cool shit to the world, hired and
nurtured oddball autodidactic wunderkinds with marvellous ideas and strange
attitudes that would previously have relegated them to academe or nontechnical work. They spent real money on stuff like comfortable chairs, shithot computers and bandwidth, not limos, blow and lavish parties. They drew
modest salaries and put their personal lives, health, and families on hold while
chasing the dream of changing the world -- not of getting fantastically
wealthy.
And along the way, the dotcoms made some great stuff happen. People who
never would have joined the distributed conversation of the Internet have
signed on in droves, lured by strange and often hyperinflated marketing
campaigns; a generation of kids logged in and got skilled in the strange,
packet-switching arts; my grandmother's boyfriend got a computer and learned
to use it so that he could day-trade.
Yes, any number of these "revolutionary" startups crashed and burned, but
three out of four new businesses have always failed in the first couple years.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people got a fast and thorough
education in entrepreneurship, technology, and, most importantly, userexperience. To my mind, the thing that most characterized the dotcom boom
was the shift in perception that held that when something's absence frustrates
you, you should go out and build it; when something sucks, you should
improve it.
Hurrah, then, for the dotcoms and their hubris. Hurrah for the notion that we
can all of us learn to write the code that guides our culture and our lives.
Hurrah for hard work and risk-taking. Hurrah for a willingness to change the
world. Link Link Link Link Discuss (Thanks, Jason!)
Matthew was lucky enough to spend the week at CES. His favorite toy was the
Hiptop. He sez:
Unlimted GPRS web/data/email,instant messages/chat with
multiple people, & it's a 3 freq. GSM phone ( $200 for phone+
$30/month service,)
I'm willing to bet that this is going to blast past the Blackberry/
Rim and will earn the ultimate tech accolade: banning from high
school classrooms. The unlimited data is going to seriously fuck
with the phone guys.
Love the design! The screen flips out and changes the screen
orientation! Feels awesome in your hand! Comes with a camera
for mailing photos.
Link Discuss
Borland, a software vendor, has taken bad user-licenses to new heights. Their
latest license grants them permission to enter and audit your premises on 24h
notice, with you bearing the cost if they discover a more than five percent
discrepancy between the licenses you've purchased and the number of
installations present. The license also requires you to waive your right to a
jury trial, forever, in the event of a license dispute. Nice. All this and you are
paying them. Link Discuss (via Interesting People)
Gallery of beatiful, but poorly scanned antique playing cards.
Actually, the scans seem pretty good, but the site's maintainer
has increased the size of the JPEGS with the height and width
attributes, which has created a lot of uggle. Link Discuss
(Thanks, Mena!)
Maya Angelou is writing Hallmark cards. (Ms. Angelou also wrote the current
Hall of the Presidents show at Walt Disney World)
"I have yellow pads all over the place," she says. She
remembers reducing five pages to "The wise woman wishes to
be no one's enemy, the wise woman refuses to be anyone's
victim."
Email postcards based on the wonderful
covers of Jonathan Carrol's equally
wonderful novels. Link Discuss (via
Cloudmonkey)
An Optigan with two discs for sale on Craig's List -- only $175! (The Optigan
is this crazy old Mattel organ that optically reads music and plays it back in
extreme lo-fi) Link Discuss (Thanks, spingo!)
I just got the go-ahead on a collection of my short stories from Four Walls/
Eight Windows press! Now, I need a title. I've come up with a few:
●
●
●
●
●
●
●
Tough Jellybean
Craphound and Other Stories
The Short Stories of Cory Doctorow
Ragtime (kidding, kidding)
Boing!
Enthusiasm for the Devil
Whacked
None of these make me jump up and down with delight. Do you have any
suggestions? I'll put together a (non-binding!) poll once I've got a good pool of
possibilities. New: An autographed copy and an acknowledgement in the book
if you come up with the winning title -- good suggestion, druidbros! Discuss
ReplayPC is an open-source PVR application for Windows, Linux, and OS X.
I'm not clear on whether this is meant to stand alone, tied to a video-capturecard, or whether it's meant to work in concert with a ReplayTV unit to rip the
contents of the drive to DivX or a similar format so you can take your favorite
shows along with you on your laptop. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jet!)
Here's a Python script for pluralizing English nouns with 99% accuracy:
samePlural = (lambda word: word in ('sheep', 'deer', 'fish',
'moose', 'aircraft', 'series', 'haiku', 'scissors'),
lambda word: word)
alwaysAddS = (lambda word: word in ('delf', 'pelf', 'human',
'roman', 'lowlife'),
Link Discuss
YEAH! Disney's making a film based on the Haunted Mansion. Woo! Booyah! Hell yeah! (Let's just pray it doesn't stink-o the way that the Tower of
Terror movie with -- shudder -- Steve Gutenberg did). Also in the works: a
Country Bear Jamboree movie and a Bruckheimer (!) flick about The Pirates
of the Carribean. Link Discuss (Thanks, vemene!)
Philips, who hold the patents on CD-audio, are making noises to the effect that
since CD copy-protection breaks the standard they've established, they will
withhold certification of copy-protected discs. In other words, copy-protected
CDs will no longer officially be classed as CDs, but rather as round bits of
shiny plastic of dubious utility. A fair summation if you ask me. The original
story's in German, but here's a Babelfish translation. Link Discuss (via /.)
eMusic's posted three full albums' worth of MP3s by Klezmer geniuses "The
Flying Bulgar Klezmer Band." You can sign up for the free 100-track/30-day
trial now and download 'em at about 100k/sec. For my money, this is some of
the finest Yiddische music ever recorded. Link Discuss
Check out this amazing Flash-based animated clock! I want to project this on
my bedroom wall, 24/7. Link Discuss (via EvHead)
Great InformationWeek story about OpenCola Folders:
OpenCola Ltd. wants to cut through the information glut of peerto-peer networking. As the company's founder Cory Doctorow
puts it, the key is "discovering the things we don't know we
don't know." He's not stuttering but identifying a real problem
with information searches--it's tough to ask for something until
you know it exists.
Link Discuss (Thanks, Scott!)
Bill Gates dressed up as Harry Potter to deliver his CES keynote. Link Discuss
(via NTK)
The new generation of super-coasters exert g-forces in excess of 6.5, which
some doctors warn is sufficient to induce brain damage. Ah, the lengths we go
to to tittilate a jaded public. Link Discuss (Thanks, Adingdong!)
A quasi-defunct dotcom is doing a reverse-takeover deal with the worldfamous NYC peeler-club Scores to take the titty bar public and expand it into
a giant, national chain. Link Discuss (via Fark)
Good review of XPlay, the tool that lets you use your iPod with your
Windows box. Link Discuss (via /.)
Wow! This is an outstanding pictorial history of the defunct and disappeared
rides at Walt Disney World, put together by a former cast-member who's got
tons of pix of the insides of the old favorites like "If You Had Wings." Link
Discuss (Thanks, Charles!)
Even though the SadMind Linux worm has been around since last May, I've
never heard of it -- the crazy thing about it is that it uses infected Linux hosts
to trash Microsoft IIS server. Link Discuss (Thanks, Patrick!)
The popunder/popup ad-killer site is awesome. Just click through the links on
this page and you'll opt out of half a dozen of the biggest popup/popunder sites
on the Internet. Kick ass! Link Discuss (Thanks, Raffi!)
Photos of the PodMate, a device that you plug into your iPod
to turn it into a universal remote. Link Discuss
MeshNetworks, a kick-ass 802.11-style wireless relaying network based on
demilitarized tech, has received aen experimental spectrum license from the
FCC to continue live testing. Woo! Link Discuss (via Interesting People)
Google's launched a current news-headline service, one that automatically
associates multiple versions of the same story from different news-sources.
Link Discuss
Nice Dan Simmons interview. I particularily like his approach to genreswitching (Have I mentioned here yet that I started work on my third novel, a
giant, weird-ass fantasy thing called "A Stranger Comes to Town, a Stranger
Leaves Town," just after Xmas? I'm 10,000 words or so into it, and it's totally
different from my past two SF novels)
I promised myself more than 20 years ago that if I were ever
lucky enough to write full time and continue to be published,
that I would write what I wanted to write, enjoy creating
different types of novels in different fields of literature just as I
enjoy reading such a wide variety of quality fiction. This is a
nightmare for publishers. They are quite right to assume -assume hell, they know -- that any writer who becomes a
bestselling author does so by defining his or her audience and
then sticking with them. Readers are human -- they like what
they like and they feel abandoned when a writer whom they've
championed moves away from what they like to read. It's a form
of betrayal and I understand the anger when a friendly reader
asks me -- "When is the next Hyperion novel coming out?" and
I respond "Never." But a writer who responds primarily to
readers' imperatives has already sold his soul. I've been lucky
that whenever one publisher gives up on me -- gives up on me
hammering away at one type of book until we achieve bestseller
status -- another publisher gives me the benefit of the doubt.
A new compression tool promises to shrink data by a factor of 100
(previously, information science wonks held that the best compression
possible was ten to one, based on research by Bell Labs's Dr. Claude
Shannon). This promises to squeeze a CD's worth of text into 640k -- less than
half a floppy. The New Scientist thinks its credible, too. Link Discuss
(Thanks, Higgins!)
A personal edition of Maya -- the premiere digital-imagery generation tool,
used for effects in Star Wars and other big-budg flicks -- is being released as a
free learning tool for non-commercial uses. The commercial version goes for
$7500! Link Discuss
Awesome pictorial history of ICBMs and their bases. Link Discuss (Thanks,
John!)
Dumpster divers in San Jose retreive hundreds of European cardboard boxes,
stamp them with "box #__ of 93 - please ask your neighbor for details BiTNET b0x Project (c)2001." Hilarity ensues. Link Discuss (Thanks,
Higgins!)
Got a DirectTV dish? You can get a DirecTiVo mark II -- skinny, fast,
network-ready and sexy as hell -- for FIFTY BUCKS. Woo! Gak -- I really
screwed this up. See the Discuss link for more. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jet!)
Fine downloadable Country and Western covers of Pink Floyd classics from
Luther Wright and the Wrongs. Don't miss the jaw-harp and cattle-calls in
"The Wall!" Link Discuss (Thanks, Nat!)
Nice homebrew iPod car-mount in a Mustang. Link Discuss (via iPodHacks)
Norweigan cops have arrested Jon Johansen, the 18-year-old kid who cracked
the DVD Content Scrambling System, so that he could watch DVDs on his
Linux box. This is revolting. Link Discuss
Forget TiVo remotes! I want remote-controlled DNA!
Tagging strands of DNA with tiny gold particles could allow
scientists to switch genes on and off inside the body by remote
control. The method could be used to tell cells when to produce
specific proteins, such as insulin.
Link Discuss (Thanks, Derek!)
Good article from The Ephemera Society
of America about Victorian-era goldfish
trading cards. Look at how beautiful the
designs were back in those days! What
happened? Link Discuss
Who needs HamsterDance when you've got iMacDance?
Link Discuss (Thanks, Lally!)
Punk baby clothes! Link Discuss
(Thanks, Michael!)
"Strategic Wakeup for Power Napping." The Jetlog 24x7 PowerNapping
Springboard Module is a Visor plugin with a button and a set of headphones.
As long as your hand is on the button, the headphones are silent; once your
hand slips off, the cans start beeping until you wake up. The idea is to allow
napping without REM sleep, compliant with NASA's Fatigue
Countermeasures Program. Link Discuss (Thanks, ronks!)
Teresa's got a nice explication of non-mathematical cryptanalysis on her
wonderful blog today:
This confirms a principle taught me by my friend who used to
do this sort of thing professionally, back when he was working
for his uncle. He says that there are five basic kinds of
cryptanalysis, and that under real-world conditions,
The strong-arm mathematical kind takes a far distant back seat
to the faster, more reliable, and more effective kinds; to wit:
a) checkbook cryptanalysis
b) black bag cryptanalysis
c) rubber hose cryptanalysis
d) dumbshit cryptanalysis
As he explained it to me, checkbook cryptanalysis is where you
pay someone in the target organization to give you the keys. It's
the the commonest and most effective method. Black bag
cryptanalysis is where you break in and steal the code key, or
(as in the case of Mr. Scarfo) plant a bug that makes more
sophisticated codebreaking unnecessary. Rubber hose
cryptanalysis is where you get hold of someone who knows the
key and beat or otherwise torture him-or-her into Telling All.
Dumbshit cryptanalysis is what happens when a guy in the
organization absentmindedly leaves the code key in the pocket
of the trousers he sends to the dry cleaner. Planting a very
sympathetic barmaid in the guy's favorite bar probably counts as
dumbshit cryptanalysis too.
Link Discuss
British cops are being asked to save money by curtailing the use of their
beloved electric kettles. I say, send 'em all to a Rainbow Gathering and teach
'em to make "sun tea." Link Discuss
Today on "Tom the Dancing Bug:" The John Ashcroft Players present Our
Bill of Rights. Link Discuss
FLOW is an amazing, psychotropic Flash presentation from hoogerbrugge.
com, the people who gave us "Modern Living." Link Discuss (Thanks, Marc!)
Nice Sci American piece: "Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial
intelligence is indistinguishable from God."
Ergo, the probability that an ETI only slightly more advanced
than we are will make contact is virtually nil. If we ever do find
an ETI, it will be as though a million-year-old Homo erectus
were dropped into the 21st century, given a computer and cell
phone and instructed to communicate with us. The ETI would
be to us as we would be to this early hominid--godlike.
Link Discuss (Thanks, Dave!)
4500+ people have signed this online petition: "Peter Jackson to Write and
Direct Star Wars Episode III"
We hereby, the undersigned, in spirit of our raped childhood's,
ask that George Lucas give over his reign as director and writer
of Episode III to one Peter Jackson. To allow complete control
of all necessary story lines and dialogue for Peter Jackson to
make a film as he sees fit.
Link Discuss (Thanks, Elias!)
This is the funniest goddamned track I've ever heard -- Public Enemy Versus
Dexy's Midnight Runners. Like the poetry of Emily Dickinson as sung to the
tune of the Gilligan's Island theme, but way more rocking. Link Discuss
(Thanks, Kev!)
Delicious gallery of the world's airlines'
barf bags. Link Discuss (via On Lisa
Rein's Radar)
How do you improve the miserable diets of tots in the industrialized world?
Give them mobile phones, so they'll spend all their pocket-money on prepaid
cellular cards instead of sweets.
Mobile phones quell sweet tooth: The food industry in Britain is
blaming cell phone use for declining chocolate sales.
Simon Mowbray from the trade magazine The Grocer told The
Sunday Telegraph chocolate sales have fallen from $3.9 billion
to $3.7 billion because youngsters are spending more money on
mobile phones than on candy.
"Children are walking into news agents, and instead of buying a
Mars bar they are scrabbling together enough change to buy a Â
£5 ($7.20) top-up card so they can keep using their mobiles,"
lamented Mowbray.
Link Discuss
The Rio Riot MP3 player has a 20 Gbyte hard drive, and can hold 5,000
songs. Link Discuss
Great Kevin Kelly editorial: "The Web Runs on Love, Not Greed."
As the Internet continues to expand in volume and diversity
without interruption, only a relatively small percent of its total
mass will be money-making. The rest will be created and
maintained out of passion, enthusiasm, a sense of civic
obligation, or simply on the faith that it may later provide some
economic use. High-profile portal sites like Yahoo and AOL
will continue to consolidate and demand our attention (and
maybe make some money), while millions of smaller sites and
hundreds of millions of users do the heavy work of creating
content that is used and linked. These will be paid entirely in the
gift economy.
Will we ever appreciate this web woven out of love and greed
for the fabulous miracle it is? Perhaps as more of the world wins
access to it, and more of our books, and movies, and history are
added, we will come to see it as a dream come true, a collective
dream created by people like you and me, sharing what they
love. Who would have guessed that at the end of a harrowing
year, the heart of this gift and miracle already beats?
Link Discuss
CDBaby is a cool online CD store that takes a $4 cut from every disc and
passes the remainder onto the artist: $8-$10 per disc versus the $1 an artist
with a label can expect to receive. The store is paying out a million bucks a
year to indie artists, and sales are rising. Unfortunately, I can't order any of the
intriguing-sounding discs in their catalog because: 1) I don't know where I'm
going to end up living in a month or so, so I don't want to take a chance on
having the disc shipped to me; 2) they only make downloadable available as
Real streams, which I can't play under OSX. Link Discuss
The heirs of the Three Stooges fortune have successfully sued a t-shirt maker
over the unauthorized use of the Howards' likenesses.
"The claims of celebrities, especially dead celebrities, are eating
into the First Amendment," said Barnett, who teaches at the
University of California at Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law.
Link Discuss (Thanks, Gary!)
Ilana's trying to come up with popculture charity auction items, like the ones
that Robin Hood have sold off for big bucks in the past:
1) You, Gwyneth and Madonna at Deepak Chopra's exclusive
resort for 1 week taking various courses, meals, therapies
together.
2) Private hockey lesson with Wayne Gretsky
3) Party for 25 children on the set of Jurassic Park
4) Dinner with U-2
Can you come up with some? Post to the Discuss link! Link Discuss
Great gallery of the works of collage artist
Stephen Kroninger. Link Discuss (Thanks,
Christopher!)
Here's a directory of GIFs of
letters from Elvis, wherein he
offers his services to Nixon as a
secret G-Man who could rat out
the counterculture and his fellow
rock-n-rollers. Link Discuss
(Thanks, Adingdong!)
Some weird-ass search-engine-spammer has associated Denise's name with
porn by spoofing Google with fake pages with her content that link through to
sex sites. Link Discuss
23 Myths About the Internet. Fabulous. Some of my faves:
Myth: As the Internet becomes less technology-oriented and
more culturally-oriented, those with humanities and business
backgrounds shall have advantages over those with
technological backgrounds.
Fact: As the Internet intertwines technology, business, and the
humanities, without a firm grounding in technology, one can no
longer fully understand business nor the humanities.
Myth: The Open Source movement is about socialistically or
communistically sharing source code, with elite administrators
and Wall Street bankers ultimately calling the shots.
Fact: The Open Source movement is about individuals
following an aesthetic in creating elegant software which works,
wherein administrators must harbor the deepest respect for
individuality and freedom.
Myth: First movers had the advantage when it came to building
viable businesses on the Internet.
Fact: True originality can take its time, as long as the execution
is brilliant.
Myth: The content worlds (publishing, music, etc.) shall be
revolutionized by corporations leveraging the Internet.
Fact: The world of content shall be revolutionized by
individuals leveraging the internet. The intrinsic beauty of the
Internet is that a central bureaucracy of middlemen has no
practical function, and on the Net, the poetry must serve the
people rather than the traditional bureaucratic prejudices.
Link Discuss (via K5)
A Canadian court upheld the use in evidence of DNA obtained by giving a
murder suspect a stick of gum to chew. Coming soon to a "Law and Order:
Criminal Intent" near you! Link Discuss
JUAN GARCIA ESQUIVEL (1918-2002) Link
Discuss
Great article on the economics of intellectual property, using algebraic
economics.
The purpose of copyright is to increase social gain. It does this
by:
1. Providing protection from piracy so that producers have
improved odds of getting producer surplus.
2. Expire so that the works that are produced maximize their
social gain by becoming free after a certain amount of time.
Unfortunately copyright law is doing the second purpose pretty
poorly. The 95 year time limit in the United States is far too
long to maximize social gain. After 95 years very very few
works still have social gain left to be gained by the freedom.
Also there is no requirement that the full source code be
provided at the expiration of the copyright. This means that for
a piece of software it will take 95 years to get freedoms 0 and 2,
and freedoms 1 and 3 will never happen unless the publisher
wishes them to.
Link Discuss
Ashcroft or Tailgunner Joe McCarthy -- take the quiz and see if you can tell
the difference between one and the other. I didn't do so hot, myself.
3. there have been a few voices who have criticized. Some have
sought to condemn us with faulty facts or without facts at all.
Others have simply rushed to judgment, almost eagerly
assuming the worst of their government before they've had a
chance to understand it at its best.
__ McCarthy | __ Ashcroft
Kick-ass Ninja enthusiast site.
Ninjas can kill anyone they want!Â Ninjas cut off heads ALL
the time and don't even think twice about it.Â These guys are
so crazy and awesome that they flip out ALL the time.Â I heard
that there was this ninja who was eating at a diner.Â And when
some dude dropped a spoon the ninja killed the whole town.Â
My friend Mark said that he saw a ninja totally uppercut some
kid just because the kid opened a window.
And that's what I call REAL Ultimate Power!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Crazy uses for Coca-Cola.
Got The Trots?? Keran from New Zealand wanted to share this
Coke tip with us; "While living in Papua New Guinea as a child,
my father and I got a bad case of the trots. (As you often do in
3rd world countries). We went to the Doctor, and he told us the
most effective treatment would be to get a 2ltr bottle of coke,
take the top off and let it go flat, and up to room temperature,
then drink 1 glass every couple of hours. BINGO... all fixed up
inside!" Thanks Keran... I won't be going out of the country
with out a supply of Coca Cola!!
Link Discuss (Thanks, Mark!)
Woo hoo! After a long hiatus, Marc Laidlaw's writing SF again, and you can
read his latest story, "Sleepy Joe," on Inifnite Matrix for free. It's a treat, and
Marc's a wonderful, wonderful writer. I still think about Dad's Nuke, his first
novel, every couple weeks, even though I last read it when I was a teenager.
Link Discuss
TiVo announces the next gen of PVRs. I am sporting major technowood.
-- Up to 60 hours of recording time without the hassles of
videotape
-- Sleeker dimensions of 15" width by 11.5" depth by 3" height
for convenient fit in home entertainment systems
-- As with all TiVo standalone units, the TiVo DVR Series2 is
compatible with and connects easily to virtually every television
model available. It also works with VCRs, TV antennas, cable
systems, and satellite systems.
-- Improved patented remote control that allows for easy
program recording as well as control of multiple TiVo's in the
home.
-- Enhanced graphics engine
-- 2 USB expansion ports to connect to peripheral devices like
digital cameras, network adaptors, MP3 and CD players, etc.
-- Ready to run multiple entertainment services such as digital
music, digital photos, video party games and broadband videoon-demand.
(Emphasis mine)) Link Discuss (Thanks, Jet!)
Ted Nelson's Ur-hypertext project Xanadu is open-source and online. Link
Discuss (via Scripting News)
The cluelessness deepens:
Cory Doctorow,
Thank you for removing the powerpoint presentation from your
website. Now I must ask that you remove my name and the
name of the hotel from your website as you do not have
permission to use either.
Thank you,
Joseph Crosby
Link Discuss
Watson is the coolest OS X app I've seen in ages. It's Ur-client for Web
services, with pluggable modules -- including Zip Code and Stocks lookup,
eBay tracking, phone numbers, movie listings, und zo weiter. The individual
UI-panes for each service are beautifully and intelligently laid out and
realized. Go download it! (Or, go buy a nice Mac, install OS X on it, and
download it!) Link Discuss
I had a good laugh after reading "Bernard Shifman Is A Moron Spammer." Be
sure to listen to the voice mail messages that Shifman leaves. He gets madder
and madder with each one! Link Discuss
Security Staff at Reagan Airport forced a seputgenerian Congressman to strip
to his underwear, refusing to believe that the thing that was ringing the
magnetometer was his artificial hip. Link Discuss (via Interesting People)
An unexploded British WWII bomb was discovered underneath Albert Speer's
Nazi Olympics Stadium in Berlin. Link Discuss
One of the new Euro coins lands on heads more often than tails. Link Discuss
Wired News's Leander Kahney reviews iPhoto, Apple's new "iTunes for
pictures." I imported my 4,000 image library to iPhoto yesterday (which took
a lot of manual work and time), and discovered that with 4,000 pics, iPhoto
grinds to a sluggish and ugly pace, even on my iBook 600, running 10.1.2
with 640 MB of RAM. Can't wait for version 1.1 to ship! Link Discuss
Charities, having examined the cost of refurbing and using obsolete computers
donated by well-meaning patrons, have started to turn away junk machines.
"It's not uncommon that a nonprofit gets a donation, finds out
that the computer is not going to work for them, then they're
stuck with the cost of recycling the computer. It can end up
hurting them," said Joan Fanning, executive director of NPower,
which provides low-cost, onsite IT support and training to
nonprofits.
Link Discuss
More info on the Mira, MSFT's new kick-ass wireless monitor/remote-control
device. I love the name of this thing: Spanish for "look" and a false cognate
for "mirror." Nice. Link Discuss
Just happened upon this nice quote from "God's Debris," Scott Adams new
novel (which is by turns frustrating and wonderful). It's a Socratic dialogue
between a courier and an old man:
"Think about this," [the old man] continued. "As we speak,
engineers are building the Internet to link every part of the
world in much the same way as a fetus develops a central
nervous system. Virtually no one questions the desirability of
the Internet. It seems that humans are born with the instinct to
create it and embrace it. The instinct of beavers is to build dams;
the instinct of humans is to build communication systems."
"I don't think instinct is makis us build the Internet. I think
people are trying to make money off it. It's just capitalism," I
replied.
"Capitalism is only part of it," he countered. "In the 1990s
investors threw money at any Internet company that asked for it.
Economics went out the window. Rationality can't explain our
obsession with the Intneret. The need to build the Internet
comes from something inside us, something programmed,
something we can't resist.
Link Discuss
Nice style-guide from The Guardian. Link Discuss (Thanks, Matthew!)
Prostitutes invade Tokyo Disneyland
A reporter for the magazine arranges to meet one of the girls at
Disneyland, recognizing her instantly by the Mickey Mouse ears
she had promised to wear. He pays the girl 50,000 yen for a
four-hour session, three hours of which are spent indulging in
the Magic Kingdom's pleasures.
The couple promptly head off to Space Mountain, one of the
amusement park's most popular rides, and the action begins. The
young, wicked witch tells the reporter he's free to touch her
wherever he likes while they're on the ride. Their fun ends with
the woman in the process of rousing the reporter's sleeping
beauty, but Shukan Jitsuwa doesn't mention whether it's a
dumbo or mini.
Link Discuss
My friend Yuichi in Japan sent me this link to a motherlode of fantastic
Japanese GIF animations. Wow! Link Discuss (Thanks, Yuichi!)
Geez:
Dear Webhost,
Please provide written authorization, either electronic or hard
copy, for use of the Powerpoint Presentation titled "Yours is a
very bad Hotel".
Thank you,
Joseph Crosby
General Manager
DoubleTree Club Hotel Houston
Discuss
The results are in -- over 200 of you voted, and I've
tabulated the results on this page. Thanks for the votes!
Link Discuss
Napster's CEO has gone to Congress to press for compulsory licenses for
downloadable music, so that the big labels would be forced to allow their
competitors to distribute music online for a set fee. Link Discuss
Wil McCarthy speculates on the physics of the One Ring.
The real power of the One Ring comes from its ability to
command the other rings, and so enslave the elvish and
dwarvish and human rulers of ancient Middle-earth. This is
actually very easy to arrange: the Ring is simply the master
node of a wireless network, and is able to send commands and
receive telemetry from the other rings, including their locations
and the spoken words of the people around them. The reverse is
not true: the One Ring sends out no telemetry, and obeys no
commands. It can't be tracked at all unless it is used, and even
then its location cannot be determined except in vague
geographic terms. Also, since this network is known to operate
over thousands of miles, across many mountain ranges and
such, it must have a satellite relay. This is supported by the fact
that Gollum, who kept and used the ring in an underground lair
for hundreds of years, was not detected. The satellite(s) also
presumably play a role in tracking the other rings' locations,
which is one of the specific powers called out in Sauron's
campaign slogan.
Link Discuss (Thanks, Jamais!
Here's some extremely surreal Usenet spam:
So you like to comprehend a computer housemaid ? Do you like
to own a blue soldier ? Today , SHIELD gives you the answer .
SHIELD is a computerize gas kitchen which is controlled
automatically and intelligently. It is a world wide invention , is a
new generation of the gas kitchen.. What is the benefits that
SHIELD brings to us ? Firstly , it will relieve you out of the
kitchen ,you shouldn't be in when you cook the food .Second ,it
solved the problem that the food would be burned ,the soup be
out and the gas be leaked .And it will make your family safer
and healthier .Do you want to understand much more merits
about SHIELD?
Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)
Nice Toronto Star profile fo a woman who writes hypertext kids' books. Link
Discuss (Thanks, Amanda!
A TiVo hacker has connected his PVR to his PC, and is publishing the
contents and schedule from his TiVo on the Web. Link Discuss (Thanks,
Dan!)
Forced by public outcry to abandon the practice of selling euthanized strays
for rendering at a pet-food company, St Louis shelters are now sending the
dead animals to landfills. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jon!)
Good Salon piece on Michael Moore's fight to get HarperCollins to sell his
latest book, which is critical of Bush and other political figures. They had 'em
printed and warehoused just before 9/11, and after the Current Situation
metastasized, they asked him if he wanted to add a chapter dealing with it. He
agreed, but then Harper asked him to start removing chapters as well, and pay
half the cost of reprinting besides. "They wanted me to censor myself and then
pay for the right to censor myself!" Link Discuss
Terrific story about the Unix hackers who preserved the early days of Usenet
-- the basis for Google's new archive. Link Discuss
What to do with those pretty
cardboard boxes your Macs came
in? Why, make a sofa out of 'em!
Link Discuss
Canadians can't keep a secret. Time Canada's site
has put their new ish online, including a feature
story on Apple's new machine. Time's gonna be in
so much trouble.
If the new iMac functions as well as it's
supposed to, it will simplify your digital life
like no other machine can. You can buy a PC
with a flat-panel display and a built-in DVD
burner for around $1,800, the same as the equivalent iMac. But
it won't work as well. In part, that's because Apple gives away a
number of core programs (iTunes, iMovie, iDVD and, starting
this week, iPhoto) that allow you to control your creative life.
They do what other PC software does. But they do it better.
Apple's secret, which doubtless comes from Jobs' early flirtation
with Zen Buddhism, is knowing what to leave out,
understanding that in the complex world of computers, less is
way more.
For instance, iPhoto, a program for handling those digital
pictures, is superior to anything else out there for the amateur.
How? When you connect your camera to the iMac, archiving
pictures happens automatically-the pictures are uploaded and
organized by "roll" and archived together as thumbnail images
laid out on one endlessly scrolling digital contact sheet. A slider
on the side of the contact sheet lets you instantly enlarge and
examine hundreds of pictures at a glance, the better to find the
one you're hunting for. This works far better than the PC
alternative, which would have you manually labeling each
picture you archive ("Joe at the Beach") or accepting a
meaningless default name, like A2393745. (Best feature of the
new program: point-and-click together a 10-page photo album
of your favorite pics, pay $30 and an online publisher will print
and mail you your own hardcover book.)
Link Discuss (Thanks, Joey and Noel!)
The new iMac. Link Discuss(Thanks, Noel!)
Common Dream is running a snotty, funny list of ten things do do while you're
waiting for high-alert to lower.
7. Ignore nonsense talk about how the government is taking
away civil liberties. The government is doing what it must in
this time of emergency. It is seizing power to better protect you
and our way of life. Attorney General John Ashcroft has
thoughtfully explained all of this in detail.
Nat writes, "The New York Times reports on life under Afghanistan's
warlords. Women don't have to wear veils now, but with commanders stealing
food from the poor to sell to western journalists in hotels, the people of
Afghanistan can't be very thankful to America for their 'liberation.'" Link
Discuss (Thanks, Nat!)
The SF Chronicle is dropping Zippy the Pinhead, the
fantastic surrealist comic strip, from its pages. You
can help bring Zippy back!
Editors listen to readers---especially via
SNAIL-MAIL. Here's how you, the loyal S.F.
Chronicle Zippy fans, can help bring Zippy
back to the comics pages. WRITE (yes, on
paper, the medium which editors pay most
attention to):
Mi-ai Parrish, Associate Editor
S.F. Chronicle
901 Mission St.
San Francisco CA 94103
Link Discuss (Thanks, Robert!)
Lovely and stylish duct-tape wallets. Link
Discuss (Thanks, BoMo!)
This gives me the fear: Rubber duckies with celebrity heads,
including James Brown, Carmen Miranda, and Babe Ruth. Link
Discuss (Thanks, Steve!)
The NYT is reporting on the proliferation of branded
consumer goods in the Islamic world that sport ObL's
likeness. Link Discuss (Thanks, Steve!)
The iPodBay is a homebrew solution that lets you synch
and charge your iPod by shoving it in a slot in the front of
your Mac. Link Discuss
My publisher's asked me to send them an author photo
to use in publicity/book-jackets/etc on my upcoming
novel, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom."
Richard Kadrey was kind enough to snap some
portraits yesterday, and now I can't choose which one
to send in. I've built a little survey where you can rate
my top 16 -- I'd love to get your feedback! (BTW, if
anyone out there has a recco for a good hosted survey script, please lemme
know -- this is just an ugly mailto form whose output I'm manually
aggregating in Excel). Link Discuss
Amusing gallery of
potential banners to go
on the Apple homepage
as they wind up the
hype machine for
Monday's announcement. Link Discuss (Thanks, Chris!)
Sheriff Joe Arpaio -- the Dr. Mengele of the American Penal System -- has
foisted a new indignity on the prisoners in his charge. Now, you can watch
live streaming Webcams from inside the jail, in exchange for your
demographic info (see, it's revenue-positive!), and thrill to prison-rape,
beatings and humiliation.
This is a real life transmission of the Maricopa County Sheriff's
Office Madison Street Jail. Instances of violence or sexually
inappropriate behavior by detainees during the booking process
may occur. Viewer discretion is advised. This is a jail not a
simulation. The persons in this transmission are either
employees of Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, other police
agencies in Maricopa County or arrestees. Under the United
States and Arizona Constitution a person is innocent until
proven guilty in a court of law.
(Sure was nice of 'em to remind us of that innocent-until-proven-guilty stuff,
huh?) Link Discuss (Thanks, Patrick!)
Nice gallery of rotten vintage comicbook ads. Link Discuss (via Fark)
Check out this fantastically weird Japanese animated GIF showing two
salarymen going Mortal Kombat on each other. Link Discuss
Karl Schroeder delves into the science behind the novel and noteworthy spacetravel tech he's invented for his forthcoming book, Permanence. Permanence
literally floored me -- I picked up the manuscript, started reading it on my way
out the door, and found myself, hours later, sitting cross-legged on the floor by
the door, still reading. The science behind Karl's stories is wonderful.
The Schroeder cycler is initially accelerated from the Earth or a
colony star to some percentage of lightspeed. The velocity
would be determined by how long the cycler can survive the
battering of hard radiation at speed, and also by the turning
radius required by its course. Once in motion, we leave the
cycler in motion. It uses a combination of Lorentz Force turning
and gravitational slingshot (if feasible) to alter its trajectory so
that it passes by a number of stars in succession, finally
returning to Earth to begin the cycle again. Even at half
lightspeed, a typical cycler might take a century or more to
make such a grand circuit of local interstellar space; however, if
new cyclers are being launched every few years, there could
eventually be more than enough of them to supply all the traffic
that the solar system can afford to send out.
Link Discuss
Winnipeg has banned smoking in places were children are present. Coffee
Time donuts franchisees have responded by banning children.
For Ms. Jonasson, the idea that a place dedicated to jelly-filled
confections would allow parents with children to use only the
drive-through window is insulting.
"I will never come back here," she said outside the store. "There
are plenty of places in this town where I can buy coffee with my
kids -- and they're smoke-free, too."
But inside the Coffee Time, smokers puffed away, unrestrained
and happy. "Viva la Coffee Time," one puffer shouted.
Link Discuss
Castro's OK with Taliban soldiers being stashed on Cuba. Link Discuss
Someone is auctioning off a pint of melted snow from the big Buffalo blizzard
last week.
I've run out of places to shovel it to, so I decided to part with
some of it by selling it to you! It will be shipped USPS priority
mail for $7.50 in a glass canning jar.
Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)
Fantastic directory of whitepapers on the subject of Terrorism, Nonlinearity &
Complex Adaptive Systems. There are days worth of reading on this page.
Link Discuss (via Obedo)
Neat little H2G2 entry on feral children through history. Link Discuss (via
Obedo)
Great article about obsesseive Mac fans who make incredibly detailed
cardboard models of their machines while waiting for Apple to ship the real
deal. When I was living in rural northern Costa Rica, someone sent me the
Apple fliers for the new Quadras, and I drew up detailed plans to build one out
of scrap lumber. I never actually built it, though. I guess I'm more of a
conceptual artist. Link Discuss
I just lost an hour of my life playing with this wireframe animation studio, in
which you manipulate a fascinating, detailed human form. Link Discuss
(Thanks, Dennis)
Fuji has developed a 3GB floppy -- was The Steve premature in removing
floppy drives from Macs? Link Discuss
The Multinational Monitor's published its list of the ten worst corporations of
2001. Who knew that Sara Lee had killed 21 people with bad hot-dogs? Link
Discuss (via K5)
Rep. Rick Boucher sent a letter off to the RIAA this week asking them to
consider that they may be breaking the law with their latest copy-protection
tech:
"I am particularly concerned that some of these technologies
may prevent or inhibit consumer home-recording using
recorders and media covered by the" Audio Home Recording
Act (AHRA), Boucher wrote. "Any deliberate change to a CD
by a content owner that makes (the allowed personal copies) no
longer possible would appear to violate the content owner's
obligations."
Link Discuss
Price Edward Island makes seatbelts for dogs mandatory. Stephen King was
nearly killed by a distracted driver who was trying to keep his dog out of a
cooler full of meat. Link Discuss (Thanks, Michael)
Bush Watch is a news-site for people with an abiding mistrust of the
President.
The Bush Justice Department induced the president to sign an
order asserting executive privilege over its "deliberative
documents" that would inform the public of answers to
questions like: Why did Justice decline to indict an F.B.I.
supervisor who admitted taking money from Flemmi's gang?
Why did Justice help defend a hit man in California who killed
a man while in the witness protection program?... Is the White
House counsel explaining to the president the scope of the
powers being asserted in his ill-advised orders? "Executive
privilege" was restricted by the Supreme Court in the Nixon
case and further circumscribed by the courts in Clinton's frantic
attempts to place himself above the law. Why is Bush, so early
in his term and with little to hide, going down this road to upset
our system of checks and balances? Maybe it's hubris;
popularity breeds contempt. When you're sailing up there
around 90 percent, your advisers tell you that wartime is the
perfect time to put those Congressional pipsqueaks of both
parties in their place. Maybe it's ultra-cleverness; by wrapping
the latest self-levitation in the mantle of protecting a former
administration's reputation, you dream of winning liberals'
support. It's another mistake that will come home to haunt the
Bush presidency. Call me Cassandra, but history will not look
kindly on those who let ends justify means -- and let helpful
hoodlums get away with murder. --William Safire
Ever since Reagan shut down the Office of Technology Assessment in
retribution for their thumbs-down on the wishful-thinking science behind Star
Wars, US lawmakers have had no systematic way of educating themselves on
scientific matters, and have made bad laws and policies as a result. Now
there's a movement afoot to bring back the OTA and a semblance of
rationality to the collisions of laws and science (maybe they'll even kick the
USPTO in the ass!).
"On anthrax they'll listen to an expert. On cloning they won't,"
he said.
"I think your basic beliefs override [scientific knowledge] and
on those issues [such as cloning], scientists are divided down
the middle," explains Rep. Ralph Hall (D-Texas), ranking
member of the House Science Committee, who is often
considered more conservative than his Republican counterpart
Boehlert.
But for those issues that do require a basic background of
science, OTA supporters see it as the best solution.
"In the search for new information, [lawmakers] already have
contacts with people," Guston said. "They put together a hearing
that shows the same perspectives, even if they're varying
perspectives, of the people that put together the hearing."
Holt sees his colleagues' lack of scientific knowledge as a
reflection of a nationwide problem.
"The way science is talked about at most schools," he said, "is
that science is for scientists, and everyone else stays away from
it.
"The result is that we have a citizenry that turns away from
science. So do their representatives."
The WTC's architect was a favorite of the Saudi royal family and the leading
edge of modern Islamic architecture. A Slate article traces the Islamic
significance of the Twin Towers.
Yamasaki received the World Trade Center commission the
year after the Dhahran Airport was completed. Yamasaki
described its plaza as "a mecca, a great relief from the narrow
streets and sidewalks of the surrounding Wall Street area." True
to his word, Yamasaki replicated the plan of Mecca's courtyard
by creating a vast delineated square, isolated from the city's
bustle by low colonnaded structures and capped by two
enormous, perfectly square towers—minarets, really.
Yamasaki's courtyard mimicked Mecca's assemblage of holy
sites—the Qa'ba (a cube) containing the sacred stone, what
some believe is the burial site of Hagar and Ishmael, and the
holy spring—by including several sculptural features, including
a fountain, and he anchored the composition in a radial circular
pattern, similar to Mecca's.
Tourists are invading Antarctica, threatening its fragile ecosystem. Scientists
and governments are pushing for the creation of an "Antarctic Code" that
would limit tourist activities in the UN World Heritage site.
"We're also seeing more and more adventure tourism. There's
jet-skiing, iceberg-climbing, marathons, even surfing. It will
push tourism into more and more pristine areas.
"We do not want to see areas around Antarctica becoming like
parts of Mount Everest, with waste lying around every corner,"
he added.
A Finnish SF magazine has done a special on Canadian science fiction writers.
If you savvy Suomi, check out the interviews with and stories by Peter Watts
and Doug Smith. Link Discuss (Thanks, Doug!)
Bell Canada's ExpressVu satellite service now comes with a TiVo-style
personal video recorder -- Canadians, rejoice! Does anyone have any detail on
whose tech they're using for the PVR? (Broken website -- follow the link
below, then click "Ontario") Link Discuss (Thanks, paulbel!)
iPod PDA: A software company will relase an iPod application that lets you
store,retreive and manipulate PIM-type info (addresses, calendar, notes, etc)
on your iPod. They store all this stuff as MP3s, filling the ID3 tags with all the
info, and leaving the songfile part empty -- this idea's been around since the
iPod first shipped, but these guys are going a couple steps farther.
Panorama iPod Organizer doesn't require any special software
to be installed on the iPod. Instead, the cleverly designed utility
simply exports the data as tiny MP3 files that are compatible
with iTunes (the audio tracks themselves are silent). The iPod is
synced to the Mac, all of the contact info is automatically
transferred to the iPod. Worried about Panorama iPod Organizer
gobbling up too much storage space on your iPod? Fear not -ProVUE said that 1,000 contacts will use less than 0.1 percent
of the space on the iPod's hard disk drive.
Link Discuss (via Meerkat)
More patent absurdity.
[This] is a patent recently issued for a multi-threaded name
server.
It is absurd enough to issue the patent, since the idea of multithreading a name server to improve response should be
painfully obvious to anyone "skilled in the art" and if it's
obvious it can't be patented.
Interestingly, the patent specifically references BIND Version 8
(BIND is the name server that most of the internet uses to map
domain names to addresses) and says that it could be improved
if multi threaded (an amazing intuitive leap that most
undergraduates should be able to make, much less "skilled"
practitioners).
What make this the prize winner for "you've got to be kidding"
is that BIND Version 9 IS multi threaded AND it was released
BEFORE the patent application was filed.
If the applicant and examiner knew about BIND 8 as it was
referenced in the application, how could they possibly have
ignored version 9 which is a working implementation of what
the patent claims to have invented that was available before the
application was filed.
They might be able to claim ignorance had they not referenced
BIND 8, but since they did it is unconscionable that they
granted the patent ignoring the obvious prior art of BIND 9.
Another example of how the patent office is out of control.
Slashdot reported yesterday on a small Vancouver company that is claiming to
have a viable patent on RSS and RDF, the system by which Internet sites
describe and syndicate their content. I assumed that that it was just bluster,
since the patent itself is so clearly bullshit -- invalidating prior art has been
published at least ten years ago, three years before these goons filed their
notice-to-extort patent application. But it appears that I was wrong. These
guys have hired a gang of sleazy IP bounty hunters who've already sent
dunning letters to O'Reilly, Dave Winer and others. If these guys get their
way, newsisfree, Meerkat, and other fantastically useful sites, services and
tools will be killed by punitive licensing fees, and a vital, thriving Internet
technology will die. Again, what a nice job the USPTO is doing in stimulating
innovation. Link Discuss (Thanks, Rael!)
Bikini Masterpiece Theatre. Video of saucy outtakes from the works of
Shakespeare delivered by semi-naked women in bikinis. First Naked News,
now this. Link Discuss (Thanks, Tom!)
A US District court has ruled that Indianapolis's ban on violent arcade games
is unconstitutional, and ordered the city to pay the video game industry
$318,000 in court costs. I always knew the Consititution was good for
something! Link Discuss (via /.)
Whet's a lovely new e-zine, mostly fiction, with a slick Flash UI and nice,
clean design. The stories are mighty fine, too! Link Discuss
Dave sez: "On2 is Open Sourcing their 'personal video recorder' software. This
was the guts behind the video email product that they killed last year. I guess
they've decided to let the public finish the job. Combined with P2P this could
be oh so cool, if the right people ran with it.
"PS. I checked out the download site, and the 'personal recorder' is not
available yet. But their opensource codec is there, so its worth a visit. Best
ever compression for QT. Really." Link Discuss
Great Moments in Cereology: Check out this marvellous
gallery of human-generated crop-circles. Link Discuss (via
Nutlog)
Here's a novel usage for SMS: Kiwis are receiving short messages on their
mobile phones to warn them of the UV index at different locations in New
Zealand, in order to avoid sunburn as they go about their daily round in the
punishing antipodean summer. Link Discuss (via Meerkat)
EFF co-founder John Gilmore rails against the licensing regime that the IFPI
(the quaintly named "International Federation of the Phonographic Industry,"
which the international equivalent of the RIAA) is attempting to impose on the
world. The scheme would require every CD burned to bear the serial number
of the burner that made it, so it would be traceable back to its author. Gilmore
lionizes the Ukraine for its resistance to the regime.
The equipment and blanks for pressing CD's are the musical
equivalent of printing presses and blank paper for written
works. In order to 'prevent' the 'piracy' of musical 'books', here's
the direct translation of what the IFPI demanded of the Ukraine,
and what the US Government spent years trying to force down
the Ukranians' throats:
* close down and prosecute printing plants that have been
involved in high volume printing
* seize and destroy all private property accused of copyright
violation
* carry out regular and unannounced inspections of printers
* introduce and enforce strict paper production control
regulations, includling the compulsory use of identification
watermarks in the printing machinery, and control of trade in
printers and blank paper
* introduce new 'protection' laws for foreign record companies,
and appropriate criminal penalties for copyright "and related
rights" infringement
Link Discuss (via Meerkat)
A hockey-dad who beat his ten-year-old son's coach to death after he refused
to limit roughhousing during practice ("That's what hockey is all about") goes
on trial. Link Discuss
Pay for ads! CabTV is the most recent step towards bladerunnerdom. Toronto
cabs are being outfitted with the giant TV sets that flick on when the meter's
running, looping a continuous eight-minute reel of ads. Passengers can turn
down the sound, but the only way to switch off the picture is to put your boot
through it. Which I may have to do. Link Discuss
A man who's been on the run for 20 years, ever since he assassinated a former
Iranian diplomat, made the critical mistake of appearing in a docudrama about
Afghanistan. Of course, when Kandahar was made last year, it was just an
obscure festival-circuit "little film," but now it's a boffo smash hit, and even
the Shrub's requested a private showing. With all this exposure, it was only a
matter of time before the assassin was identified. Link Discuss
Bill's going to demo a new wireless monitor called the AirPanel at CES. It's a
flatpanel display that you can lift off its desktop stand and carry around with
you, so you can watch DVDs and console windows as you move from room to
room. Link Discuss (via Raelity Bytes)
Cisco is demonstrating Ethernet-over-barbed-wire, battery-jumper-cables, and
lamp cords. Too cool. Link Discuss
The US Military is planning to stash Afghani POWs in Cuba. Link Discuss
Maybe Apple's planning on a joint venture with Nintendo to sell a
MacGameCube? Link Discuss (Thanks, Phil!)
Joey writes, "This web page will make you think your Windows system's been
hacked by showing you what looks like a n up-to-the-minute screenshot of
your current drive's contents. The trick is a combo of a misleading filename
extension and the <iframe> tag." Now, go fool your friends! Link Discuss
(Thanks, Joey!)
Is this what Apple's going to announce on Monday? It's a scan of the cover of
the MacWorld press book, showing a flat-panel display with a stylus laying
across it. Doesn't look anything like an iWalk. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jamais!)
The Brunching Shuttlecocks' Geek Heirarchy is hilarious. At the top are
Science Fiction Writers (ahem), who consider themselves less geeky than
Science Fiction Fans, who consider themselves less geeky than Anime Fans,
Gamers, Heinlein Fans and Fanfic Writers, and so on, down to "People Who
Write Erotic Versions of Star Trek, Where All the Characters are Furries, Like
Kirk is an Ocelot or Something, and They Put a Furry Version of Themselves
in as the Star of the Story." Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)
Found Magazine catalogs and showcases the
best found objects its readers and editors
turn in: photos, tapes, electronics, notes, etc.
Link Discuss (via Memepool)
A jerk who decided to get rid of his fiancée's hated Arab-American boss by
making up fairy-tales connecting him to the 9/11 terrorists has been given a 21month sentence.
Prosecutors requested Barresi be given more than the normal
six-month sentence for such violations because of the
"heightened anti-Arab sentiment."
Barresi told federal authorities right after the attacks that on
Sept. 7, his fiancee's boss told him that he could "not wait for
you Americans to blow up and die," authorities said.
Link Discuss
Here's a misleading story from the BBC, claiming that the Internet has shrunk.
What's actually happened is that a bunch of people who hysterically registered
gobs of domains in 1999/2000 in the hopes of getting rich off domainspeculation have let them domains lapse. The number of pages, users, bits
transferred, IPs in use, and hosts (both routable and non-routable) is of course
up. Link Discuss
IBM is buying up discarded obsolete desktop and laptop PCs, running them
through a "disassembly line," and recycling whatever parts it can scavenge.
Link Discuss
The British Natural History Museum's dinosaur browser lets you find and
learn about dinos by name, shape, or period. Sort lists of dinos by family,
period, etc, and automatically retreive commercial artwork and library
database entries from the detail view. Endless hours of dino-fun! Link Discuss
(Thanks, Tom!)
Behind the Music that Sucks. Bill writes "This site has numerous animations
which 'explain' why a list (try one) of popular recording artists suck. VERY
funny. And not for little kiddies or those easily offended!" This is some hella
funny stuff. Link Discuss (Thanks, Bill)
Space Age Pop has extensive notes on the composers, artists, track-selections
and liner-note mavens of the golden age of bachelor-pad music.
Like pulp fiction, liner notes may one day come to be
appreciated as works of literature. And when they do, it's certain
that Stan Cornyn will be viewed as the Jim Thompson of liner
notes. He's already scored at least one scholarly article ("The
Composition of Celebrity: Sinatra as Text in the Liner Notes of
Stan Cornyn," Gilbert L. Gigliotti, in Frank Sinatra & Popular
Culture: Essays on an American Icon, Len Mustazza, Ed.,
Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1998).
Link Discuss
Rael speculates on what Apple's really going to unveil on Monday.
A flat panel, in size somewhere between a Palm and and that of
my 12.1" diagonal iBook display. As for brains, we're not
talking TabletPC here; just enough to power a remote desktop
client a la X/VNC/Timbuktu. OS X and something Graffiti-ish.
802.11b wireless networking provides the link between the iPad
(yes, I said iPad) and any networked Macintosh -- whether a
peer-to-peer ad hoc network or Internet away.
Link Discuss
Justin Hall spent New Year's Eve in
Tokyo Disneyland! He's written a
somewhat purple account of the night -especially cool is the story of Japanese
teenagers sacked out in the foyers of the
rides and the aisles of the restaurants,
trying to stay warm through the overnight
stay in the park.
What happens when you invite tens of thousands of people to an
all-night DisneyLand party? They turn TomorrowLand Terrace
into a vagrant-packed encampment where all floors and free
spaces are stuffed with the unseemly sleeping.
Against the walls, people had claimed spots to sit up asleep,
with their heads on their knees. People actually eating some of
the burger and fry fare formed another row or two in front of
them. When they finished they stayed where they were,
contorted into some sort of acceptable form of non-physical
contact with those around them, and slept as best they could on
aged colored carpet trod on by millions before them. All this as
space-age sound-effects muzak versions of space-themed songs
played. I heard Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun" played by a
series of whangs and whoops and whizzles as though I were
surrounded by Casio synthesizers having a family reunion. In
Seattle.
Link Discuss (Thanks, Steve!)
Ecstasy labs in Australia are turning out Harry Potter brand E's. Link Discuss
(via Fark)
Here's the MacSlash iWalk thread, with some convincing arguments
suggesting that the iWalk is a hoax:
Still01
* FCC Tags, etc. but no Serial Number? Prototypes have big
"NOT FCC APPROVED" Stickers, and Final products have
Serial Numbers
* It's in Germany. The speaker says "Simply Amazing" in the
turnaround.mov in German. There is a European power plug in
the desk. The site is German(Just get a 404 error). Prototype
units don't leave the US of A.
* An Audio In port? No New Mac has Audio In...what would
you need this for? Recording? It might be useful, but why not an
actual built-in Mic?
Still02
What is that middle port supposed to be? It resembles a Palm
sync port, in size anyway, but that's what firewire(or gigawire)
would do, sync and charge.
Link Discuss
Here's a mirror of the iWalk videos. Link Discuss
Remember the iWalk, Apple's rumored
PDA that surfaced just before the iPod
shipped? It's back. Apple's been
running some hot teaser-on-teaser
action on their homepage for the past
week, leading up to MacWorld San
Francisco on Monday, and now
SpyMac has put up a site with stills
and videos showing the iWalk in
action. The pictures show a device
somewhere between the size of an iPaq
and a Newton, with a Firewire and headphone jack, a jog-wheel, and a stylus.
The videos depict an OSX-like boot screen, hot 90-degree rotation of the
workspace (a la the Newton 2100) and handwriting recognition. The site is
heavily slashdotted, so you may have to hit your reload button a couple
hundred times to load it.
Sent to us by a source close to spymac.com, below you will find
exclusive pictures and three quicktime movies of the iWalk.
Some points we should make:
The case appears to be leather, but this has not been confirmed
by us .
The unit is designed to work for both left and right handed
people. Below, you will see a video showing the "jog-wheel"
being turned, apparently this is the method used to switch
between left and right-handed orientations.
On the top of the unit are the following ports: audio-out, audioin, "unknown port," firewire. On the bottom there is: IRDA and
the power switch.
Link Discuss (Thanks, Matthew!)
In Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson describes the conundrum of children's
pyjamas: "You can have 'em flame-retardant or non-carcinogenic, but not
both." A similar hard choice has emerged in the results of cancer researchers
at Baylor College in Houston, who've figured out how to restrict cancers in labmice, with the unfortunate side-effect of prematurely aging the specimens.
The upshot seems to be that you can choose to be cancer-free or long-lived,
but not both. Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)
Excellent small portfolio of Hank Ketchum's non-Dennis the Menace work.
(Ketchum was a big influence on Love & Rockets' Jaime Hernandez.) Link
Discuss
Bastards. "A secret group of developed nations conspired to limit the
effectiveness of the UN's first conference on the environment, held in
Stockholm in 1972. The existence of this cabal, known as the Brussels group,
is revealed in 30-year-old British government records that were kept secret
until this week." Link Discuss
Fine craftsmanship and dubious taste
are exhibited in this pipe
memorializing the destruction of the
World Trade Center Towers. Link
Discuss (Thanks, Marc!)
Dozens of mistakes and continuity problems with LOTR:
In the scene where Sam and Frodo are in the field with the
scarecrow, you can plainly see a car cruising past in the
distance, from right to left.
Idea-a-Day is a fun web site where people send in ideas for inventions. I
subscribe to the mailing list so I don't have to check the site every day.
Design flip-flops or beach shoes that leave obscene (or
otherwise) words or images imprinted in the sand. The more
offensive the messages, the more popular the footwear will
prove with the holidaying youth on foreign sands.
Link Discuss
Joey writes "Esoteric Fandom: A site devoted to Becky (Otto's ex-fiancée)
from The Simpsons, who was voiced by Parker Posey and appeared in only
one episode." Link Discuss (Thanks, Joey!)
Save Unicom! Chip Rosenthal registered Unicom.com twelve years ago.
Unicom, Inc., registered the trademark five years ago. Being a big corporation
with money to waste (apparently), the idiots at Unicom, Inc., have take it upon
themselves to sue poor Chip for -- get this -- cybersquatting, even though his
domain was registered seven years before Unicom, Inc. registered their
trademark. Head on over to Chip's site, kick him a couple bucks over Paypal
for his defense, sign the guestbook and have a wry chuckle at the lameness of
the Internet Carpetbaggers at Unicom, Inc. Don't miss Chip's lawyer's letter
back to Unicom's goons for a marvellous example of setting someone to
rights. Link Discuss (via Fark)
Nearly 100,000 lawless off-road racers congregate on the dunes near San
Diego and pelt cops who try to calm them down with rocks.
"It's a real mess down there," a Forest Service ranger said. "We
don't want to send any officers down there because we can't be
sure they'd be safe." ...
"We've put this in the frame of a forest fire or a natural
disaster," said Roger Scott, a spokesman for the National Park
Service...
Link Discuss
Alleged Christians in New Mexico rang in the
New Year by burning Harry Potter books,
Shakespeare, Cosmo, and the Lord of the
Rings. Protestors came out to give 'em whatfor:
"I spent 27 years in the military so they could burn books," said
Alamogordo resident Mike Kizer, who stood with the protesters.
"They're doing what they believe is right, and we're doing what
we believe is right."
"I served in the Persian Gulf ... I don't need this Nazi garbage in
my country," said Lincoln County resident Alfonso Lucero.
Tempers ran hot and indignation was evident through shouts
and picket signs. Signs bore allusions that ran the gamut from
the Nazis, the Taliban and Osama bin Laden to Fahrenheit 451
and used car salesmen.
Link Discuss
Remember the fantastic Map of Springfield I posted a couple weeks back?
Here's the map's creators' site, with an equally fantastic Springfield Yellow
(heh) Pages. Link Discuss
Step-by-step, lavishly illustrated dollar-bill origami,
including spiders, specs, rings, and, of course, t-shirts.
Link Discuss (via Aparna)
Part two of "The Spiders," e-sheep's brilliant science fiction comic about
Afghanistan, is up. It is fantastic and chilling and wildly imaginative and
inspiring. Link Discuss (via MeFi)
Rael's come up with a brilliant aphorism to describe the value of "found"
metadata over explicitly produced metadata:
"Metadata is the vapour trail we leave behind, not
something we construct"
Link Discuss
Fantastic collection of
free fonts based on
movies, TV shows,
foodstuffs, autos, videogames and so on. Link Discuss (via Aparna)
The Massachusetts State Lotto's winning numbers last night were 2-0-0-2.
The Swiftpull is the coolest corkscrew ever
invented. It is a joy to hold, a miracle to use,
and a strong incentive to alcoholism. Link
Discuss
The Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society is devoted to
challenging and reforming parochial government.
Practical Goals
●
●
●
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To create a network of secularists and freethinkers in
Islamic countries.
To establish a women’s network to provide mutual
support and to highlight the plight and the achievements
of women in Islamic societies.
To report on recent research findings on the origins of
Islam and the Koran.
To provide an alternative source of information and
comment for the media on Islamic issues.
To publicise acts of terror and oppression.
To honor the memory and promote the work and thought
of those martyred in the cause of freedom of expression.
To attract writers, academics, politicians and activists as
members of the Institute and as contributors to the
debate.
To establish a database of books, articles and news
reports, an annotated bibliography of texts of interest,
and a suggested reading list.
To seek funding for Institute activities, including the
translation of important texts.
To publish a web-based newsletter: "Secular Islam."
Link Discuss
Grim and vivid account of beggars and charity in Mumbai.
A small hand takes mine. A tiny three-year-old half-naked boy
with a bowl hair cut and his trousers hanging off wants
something. I offer him 20 rupees and am astonished when he
pushes it back at me. He quietly says 'Milk powder'. What?
'Milk powder'. His sister needs it. 'Where can we get it?' 'Here...'
He drags me to a street stall. A tin with 60 servings is 250
rupees, about £4, way beyond the pockets of most of the people
here who need it. In case you are interested, in case you want to
boycott them for the rest of your life, the splendid manufacturer
of this product is Nestle.
Of course I buy the stuff for the heartbreaking boy and inside
my stomach churns. A girl arrives and our Liverpool friends buy
her the same. I give the boy the powder and he hugs it like a toy.
We ask him his sister's name. 'Shika. She will grow big.' We go
to a bar and try not to weep for this awful place which has made
it necessary for that wee boy to understand the difference
between 20 rupees and milk powder. We absolutely f**king
hate it here. A friend emails to say that when she went to
Mumbai, she cowered in her room and wept.
Link Discuss (Thanks, Static!)
RIP Science Fiction writer Jack Haldeman. Damn. From a listserv:
This from Jack's daughter Lori, via Jane Yolen:
Jack Carroll Haldeman, II -- December 11, 1941 - January 1,
2002.
Brother. Father. Husband. Friend.
True to form, he chose a moment when nobody was looking at
him-- he always did cringe at being the center of attention. He
went peacefully, as the family was sitting around him, telling
jokes and laughing.
The URL given is down. The link below is to the Google archive: Link
Discuss
The Boing Boing year in review. Have a peek at the Excel spreadsheet linked
below for charts, stats and loads of time-wasting goodness!
Month Visitors Links
Month Visitors Links
Jan
33,011
81
Feb
13,877
72
Mar
17,521
103
Apr
25,562
225
May
35,765
282
Jun
33,408
198
Jul
33,661
209
Aug
45,754
284
Sep
44,570
277
Oct
63,156
349
Nov
54,270
277
Dec
76,395
359
Link Discuss
archives

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things

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