Flynews.org
Fri Jan 20 09:03:58 2006 News:
Xeni Jardin:Snip from a story written by Jill Carroll one year ago, for American Journalism Review. Carroll was abducted in Iraq on January 7, 2006, while working as a foreign correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor. Only a story of this enormity, with nothing less than America's global credibility, the stability of the Middle East and countless lives at stake, could be worth risking personal safety and financial solvency to cover it as a freelancer. (...) Covering the war gives journalists an opportunity to recall the noblest tenets of their profession and fulfill the public service role of journalism.The sense that I could do more good in the Middle East than in the U.S. drove me to move to Jordan six months before the war to learn as much about the region as possible before the fighting began. All I ever wanted to be was a foreign correspondent, so when I was laid off from my reporting assistant job at the Wall Street Journal in August 2002, it seemed the right time to try to make it happen. There was bound to be plenty of parachute journalism once the war started, and I didn't want to be a part of that.Idealistic, for sure, but I am not the only one. Link to full text.Previously: Carroll's blogger / journo pals continue to rally for her release
Xeni Jardin:Worksafe link. (worksafe explanation).
Cory Doctorow:Here's a HOWTO for converting a pinball machine's light-up playfield into an electrified coffee-table; the recipe calls for a beat-up playfield from a nonfunctional pinball machine, which is cool, since it avoids the guilt associated with decommissioning a glorious old pinball machine.Step 1 Materials ListHere are the materials you will need for this project1 pinball playfield2 side pieces of wood cut to fit2 end pieces of wood cut to fitMoulding to be used for the top to hold the glass onTempered glass cut to fitFour legs and hardware to attach6V batteryRocker switchScrews and nailsWood glueDrillLink(via Cribcandy)
Cory Doctorow:A radical right-wing group has compiled a black-list of progressive UCLA professors and it is offering a bounty of $100 to students who record their lectures; the group intends to use these lectures "expose" the professors as "radicals." The Bruin Alumni Association posted the offer of the bounty to its website; its finances reportedly come primarily from a $22,000 gift from to its founder, Andrew Jones. The move has spooked many of the group's advisors, three of whom have resigned in disgust. One of the resigners is hardly a stranger to extremist politics: former Republican congressman James Rogan was one of the ringleaders of the Clinton impeachment circus, but even he doesn't have the stomach for this.Jones told Reuters that he is out to "restore an atmosphere of respectful political discourse on campus" and says his efforts are aimed at academics who proselytize students from either side of the ideological spectrum, conservative or liberal."We are concerned solely with indoctrination, one-sided presentation of ideological controversies and unprofessional classroom behavior," Jones said on his Web site.Jones' site describes his campaign as "dedicated to exposing UCLA's most radical professors" and his list of the university's "worst of the worst" singles out only professors he says hold left-wing views.Link
Cory Doctorow:Google has rebuffed to an outrageous demand by BellSouth, in which the phone company proposed to charge Google for access to its customers. Bill Smith of Bell South told reporters that he wanted "to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc." Google has responded with an unequivocal no -- a flat refusal to pay blood-money to carriers to keep them from discriminating against its services. Honestly, what the hell is BellSouth thinking? The whole point of an ISP is that it delivers the same packets as every other ISP; anything else is substandard. There's only one Google, but T1s come and go.Google's Barry Schnitt told Paul in an email: "Google is not discussing sharing of the costs of broadband networks with any carrier. We believe consumers are already paying to support broadband access to the Internet through subscription fees and, as a result, consumers should have the freedom to use this connection without limitations."Link(via /.)
Cory Doctorow:A mysterious man appears at Edgar Allan Poe's grave every year on his birthday, January 19, and leaves flowers and cognac as a memorial. It's not known who he is, nor how he gets in, and every year his ceremony gets more difficult as crowds of gawkers crowd around the cemetary, hoping to catch and unmask him:"In letting people know about this tribute, I've been contributing to these people's desire to catch this guy," Jerome said. "It's such a touching tribute, and it's been disrupted by the actions of a few people trying to interfere and expose this guy."The cryptic visits began in 1949. Jerome has seen the ceremony every January 19 since 1976. Poe was born in 1809.Link
Xeni Jardin:58-year-old Wham-O Inc. -- the company behind such iconic American toys as Frisbee, Hula Hoop, Silly String, Hacky Sack and Slip 'N Slide -- has been acquired by an affiliate of Hong Kong toy distributor Cornerstone Overseas Investments Ltd. for an undisclosed sum. Link
Xeni Jardin:Update: Earlier today, I asked a Justice Department spokesperson which search engines other than Google received requests to provide search records. The answer: Yahoo, AOL, and MSN were also asked to supply search records information, and all complied. Google did not, and that is why the DoJ asked a federal judge on Wednesday to order the company to do so. Another fact to consider as you sift through news coverage: Justice is not requesting this data in the course of a criminal investigation, but in order to defend its argument that the Child Online Protection Act is constitutionally sound.It seems apparent that Google objected to the request not for privacy reasons, but on grounds that the request was too broad and burdensome. Privacy advocates I spoke to today, including attorney Sherwin Siy at EPIC, say while the DoJ's request would not identify individual users, the scope and nature of this request sets a troubling precedent. Today, they argue, only search strings and urls; tomorrow, perhaps, the IP addresses of all users who typed in "Osama Bin Laden." Update 2: Here are PDF copies of the documents filed on Jan. 18 by Justice Department attorneys in Gonzales v. Google, Inc.: Motion to Compel, Declaration of Joel McElvain, and Declaration of Philip Stark.Over at SearchEngineWatch, Danny Sullivan has an extensive and much-updated post about news that the Justice Department demanded search records data from Google....------Google has refused to comply with the subpoena. A motion has been filed this week by US Department Of Justice to force Google to hand over the data. In particular, the Bush administration wanted one million random web addresses and records of all Google searches for a one week period. The government apparently wants to estimate how much pornography shows up in the searches that children do. Here's a thought. If you want to measure how much porn is showing up in searches, try searching for it yourself rather than issuing privacy alarm sounding subpoenas. It would certainly be more accurate. Getting a list of all searches in one week definitely would let US federal government dig deep into the long tail of porn searches. But then again, the sheer amount of data would be overwhelming. Do you know every variation of a term someone might use, that you're going to dig out of the hundreds of millions of searches you'd get? Oh, and be sure you filter out all the automated queries coming in from rank checking tools, while you're add it. They won't skew the data at all, nope.95 Moreover, since the data is divorced from user info, you have no idea what searches are being done by children or not. In the end, you've asked for a lot of data that's not really going to help you estimate anything at all.He has since updated the post to reflect responses from other search engines on whether they, too, were asked to supply search data to the DoJ. According to Danny, Yahoo was asked and complied. MSN issed a statement which doesn't really answer the question, which suggests that they were asked and complied. Ask Jeeves was not asked. Danny writes, In fairness to Yahoo, which handed over information -- and MSN which likely did the same -- it is important to note that it is not just spin that no privacy issues were involved with this particular data. As I explained in the story, the information is completely divorced from any personally identifiable data.Link. Previously: Feds demand user data from Google: Battelle's analysisDoJ demands user search records from Google
David Pescovitz:The new Honda Civic UK commercial is based around a chorus who create all of the sound effects with their mouths. It's amazing. Hit the link to get to the Honda Civic page, skip the Flash intro, and then hit the "Watch" button. Link to Honda's site, Link directly to a mirror of the video (Thanks, Eric Paulos!)UPDATE: Thanks to Amy's Robot, here's the video as an iPod-compatible Mpeg4. Link
David Pescovitz:Carl Buell is a renowned paleo-wildlife illustrator who uses Photoshop to "paint" his masterpieces. (He posts about his process on his excellent blog, Olduvai George.) From an interview with Buell on Unscrewing The Inscrutable:DS: When did the prehistoric beast interest develop, and how did that proceed to the forensic reconstruction?Like most kids I was fascinated with dinosaurs, but I also liked real live animals to the point of being an empath. I spent every spare moment (and more) in the woods surrounding my grandfather's farm. Except for when I was playing baseball, I lived, breathed, and dreamed animals and the outdoors. Ned Colbert (from the American Museum of Natural History) and his wife wrote some wonderful books about prehistoric mammals and birds that I just ate up. I mostly drew modern creatures however, until I got the job as natural history illustrator for the New York State Museum in 1978. I was only there a short time (bad life decision) but that Mastodon mount in the old museum really added gas to the fire.Link (via Drawn!)
David Pescovitz:At Cryptomundo, Loren Coleman posts about a "re-discovery" of a species of the venemous waspfish. According to an article in the The Herald, the fish was caught in 1994 off the northern KawaZulu Natal coast of South Africa. It was stored in the collection of the SA Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity and recently identified by a visiting scientist. From the Cryptomundo post:One of my regular coelacanth correspondents, institute curator emeritus, Dr. Phil Heemstra, is quoted by the media as noting: "The discovery also signalled again how little we knew about the creatures of the deep sea..."As Charles Fort once wrote: "The sea is the best field for data."Link
Cory Doctorow:Kids in the Hall are the hilarious Canadian comedy troupe that disbanded some years ago. Now there's an upcoming mini-tour for which the troupe will reunite. Tavie sez, "Kids in the Hall are reuniting in February for 3 nights of shows at the Steve Allen Theatre, Feb 23, 24 and 25. They're doing no advertising, just word-of-mouth (or word-of-blog, see link ;) and have appointed me their little buzzing bee."Link(Thanks, Tavie!)
Cory Doctorow:Crazed Viennese net.artists Monochrom have a great new tee for sale (&Euro;18): I WAS A COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT IN A PREVIOUS LIFE.Link
Mark Frauenfelder:Farhad Manjoo says: "My Salon colleague Katharine Mieszkowski has written a wonderful article about what to me was a little-known phenomenon -- wealthy pet-owners who spend hundreds of dollars a month buying their dogs and cats raw meat. And not just any meat, but "but sustainable, antibiotic- and steroid-free meat and bones from cows, pigs and poultry raised and slaughtered on small farms." The raw feeders maintain that this is how pets are supposed to eat -- it's natural, since they're animals. But vets are skeptical of the practice, and say your pets might get sick." If you are a raw feeder who believes wolves do not consume the roughage in their ruminant prey's stomach, then you might feed your dogs meat and bones and no veggies. Depending on which breed of raw feeding is your fancy, Fido's menu can look very different. You might prepare a measured concoction of raw beef, pulped seasonal vegetables and nutritional supplements. Or you might go for the "whole prey" model and just throw a whole rabbit carcass in the backyard for the hungry mutt to tear apart. One approach is known as BARF, which can either stand for "Biologically Appropriate Raw Foods" or "Bones and Raw Food."...Yet it's the raw diets, not the kibble and canned ones, that vets have special concerns about. Dogs choke on the bones, they report, and suffer obstructions in their digestive tracts that require surgery. The FDA has taken note of the health risks posed for people who feed their pets raw meat, fearing they could contact salmonella and e-coli. With the practice growing in popularity, the agency has issued guidelines for companies marketing raw meat to pets: "FDA does not believe raw meat foods for animals are consistent with the goal of protecting the public from significant risks, particularly when such products are brought into the home and/or used to feed domestic pets."Link
Cory Doctorow:Sam Bulte, the Canadian Liberal Party MP who has been oouted for taking money from the same copyright industry whom she has rewarded with favorable lawmaking action, has threatened to sue Michael Geist, the law professor and blogger who outed her for her ethical missteps."I will not be silenced by zealots like Michael Geist and political opportunists like Peggy Nash who are making something out of nothing," she said, adding that she believes Mr. Geist's comments are nearing the point of being defamatory."I am not going to sue him before the election but dammit, watch me after the election."Link
Xeni Jardin:Jeff Tynes, friend and former colleague of abducted journalist Jill Carroll, says: There is a great deal of stress amongst friends and family today as Jill's deadline nears. Her mother has made a statement and given an interview to CNN, appealing for her release. Of particular note is the fact that -- over the last 24-36 hours -- four tremendously influential Iraqi and Sunni Muslim groups have come out with statements rejecting the kidnapping of journalists and calling for the release of Jill Carroll. One of these came from Adnan al-Dulaimi, the head of the Iraqi Accordance Front -- a Sunni political group with whom Jill was supposedly going to meet the day she was kidnapped. Some have suggested his involvement but his statement clearly condemns the act, saying he and his group would do everything possible to help Jill. Iraq's Muslims Scholars Association, a coterie of Sunni Islamic scholars, has also come out with a statement rejecting the abduction and that of all reporters. This combination of religious and political condemnation from within Iraq is very powerful, perhaps sending a message that will prevent this violent trend from continuing. And, most hopefully here, helping Jill's captors see that her release is in their interest as well as Jill's. Perhaps such a combined effort at condemnation from such influential groups signals an end to such deplorable actions. The U.S. military, however, has released a statement that contradicts some reports from the BBC and others that a quid pro quo with female Iraqi detainees for Jill was in the works. Natasha has the details here.And Salon has reprinted a post from Iraqi blogger Riverbend about Alan Ghazi, the slain interpreter who worked with Carroll: I read the news as a subtitle on TV. We haven't had an Internet connection for several days, so I couldn't really read about the details. All I knew was that a journalist had been abducted and that her Iraqi interpreter had been killed. He was shot in cold blood in Al-Adil district earlier this month, when they took Jill Carroll ... They say he didn't die immediately. It is said he lived long enough to talk to police and then he died. I found out very recently that the interpreter killed was a good friend -- Alan, of Alan's Melody, and I've spent the last two days crying. Everyone knew him as simply "Alan," or "Elin" as it is pronounced in Iraqi Arabic. Prior to the war, he owned a music shop in the best area in Baghdad, Al-Arasat. He sold some Arabic music and instrumental music, but he had his regular customers -- those Westernized Iraqis who craved foreign music. For those of us who listened to rock, adult alternative, jazz, etc., he had very few rivals. Link. Previous Boing Boing posts on Jill Carroll: Link.
Mark Frauenfelder:At Notes from the Technology Underground, Bill Gurstelle has a fascinating entry about the code words the government uses to report a nuclear attack.“PINNACLE/NUCFLASH” are the flagwords or header that presages an electronic transmission through the U.S. military's command and control structure that reports an actual or possible detonation of a nuclear weapon. Not only that, these code words mean that the explosion was not an accident and the risk of nuclear war is imminent.As one might expect, “PINNACLE/NUCFLASH” has the highest precedence in the OPREP-3 reporting structure. Men and women train for months, years, in order to be able to coolly and efficiently handle the communications that follow an OPREP-3 PINNACLE level flagword. There are several OPREP-3 code word designators with a chilling cold war/Tom Clancy/John Lecarre ring to them. None of these foreshadow good news.Link
Mark Frauenfelder:82-year-old caricaturist Bill "Weg" Green draw a sketch of the idiot who burgled him, and the cops used it to nab the criminal on the streets within fifteen minutes. Police ... were initially reluctant when Mr Green offered to draw the burglar."I thought (the drawing) might be a stick figure or something like that." [said Senior Constable Aaron Roche of Ringwood police.]Seconds later, Mr Green ... provided a detailed drawing of the burglar's face."It was amazing, the likeness was just fantastic," Senior Constable Roche said.I give extra points to Green for drawing a goofy grin on the burglar.Link (via Neatorama)
Xeni Jardin: Link to a honey-glazed and high-carb apparition of the Burning Man founder, who -- unlike Jesus and la Virgen de Guadalupe -- ain't even dead yet. Must be the Joe Rogan drops kicking in. (Thanks Wayne Correia!)
Xeni Jardin:In light of today's SJ Merc report that the Department of Justice has demanded user search records from Google, this excerpt from John Battelle's The Search seems worth reading again:As we move our data to the servers at Amazon.com, Hotmail.com,Yahoo.com, and Gmail.com, we are making an implicit bargain, onethat the public at large is either entirely content with, or, more likely,one that most have not taken much to heart.That bargain is this: we trust you to not do evil things with ourinformation. We trust that you will keep it secure, free from unlaw-ful government or private search and seizure, and under our controlat all times. We understand that you might use our data in aggregateto provide us better and more useful services, but we trust that youwill not identify individuals personally through our data, nor useour personal data in a manner that would violate our own sense ofprivacy and freedom.That’s a pretty large helping of trust we’re asking companies toladle onto their corporate plate. And I’m not sure either we or theyare entirely sure what to do with the implications of such a transfer.Just thinking about these implications makes a reasonable person’shead hurt. LinkPreviously: DoJ demands user search records from Google
Cory Doctorow:Escape Pod, the science fiction audiobook podcast, has just posted a 46-minute reading of my story Craphound, the first story of mine ever to be professionally published, back in 1998.The excellent reading is performed by The Sound of Young America's Jesse Thorn. Jesse is also the son of Lee Thorn, the co-founder of the amazing Jhai Project, which builds and installs ruggedized, bicycle-powered WiFi links in rural villages in the developing world.Craphound had wicked yard-sale karma, for a rotten, filthy alien bastard. He wastoo good at panning out the single grain of gold in a raging river ofuselessness for me not to like him -- respect him, anyway. But then he found thecowboy trunk. It was two months' rent to me and nothing but some squirrellyalien kitsch-fetish to Craphound.So I did the unthinkable. I violated the Code. I got into a bidding war with abuddy. Never let them tell you that women poison friendships: in my experience,wounds from women-fights heal quickly; fights over garbage leave nothing behindbut scorched earth.Craphound spotted the sign -- his karma, plus the goggles in his exoskeleton,gave him the advantage when we were doing 80 kmh on some stretch of back-highwayin cottage country. He was riding shotgun while I drove, and we had the radio onto the CBC's summer-Saturday programming: eight weekends with eight hours of oldradio dramas: "The Shadow," "Quiet Please," "Tom Mix," "The Crypt-Keeper" withBela Lugosi. It was hour three, and Bogey was phoning in his performance on aradio adaptation of _The African Queen_. I had the windows of the old truckrolled down so that I could smoke without fouling Craphound's breather. My armwas hanging out the window, the radio was booming, and Craphound said "Turnaround! Turn around, now, Jerry, now, turn around!"MP3 Link(Thanks, CrazyDave!)
Cory Doctorow:An investigative blogger has turned up damning facts about a US-expat-owned mercenary army operating in Haiti, and has published an account that includes spying and the undermining of democratic elections on the island.My friend Kathryn Cramer has written extensively on mercenary forces around the world and recently began to research and publish on Consultants Advisory Group (CAG), a US-expat-owned mercenary army operating in Haiti.She began to receive anonymous tips from inside Haiti, including a leaked UN PowerPoint presentation indicating that CAG was providing "covert surveillance" for MINISTAH, the UN agency operating Haiti.Representatives of the company contacted her to tell her that they had intercepted a call to her phone and secured the arrest of her informants in Haiti. Kathryn has posted the PowerPoint slides alongside her account, along with some good analysis pulling the whole story together.This is some of the most thoroughgoing blogger reporting I've ever seen; Cramer has delved into a story widely neglected in the professional press and has gotten astonishingly far with nothing more than a search engine, a telephone, and her own gumption.I got a query from someone in Haiti asking what I knew about a company called Consultants Advisory Group and if I had any idea of why they were following Top Cat Marine Security's sales leads. I looked into the matter of CAG, resulting in the post Consultants Advisory Group(TM) (CAG): A Security Company Born Every Minute? CAG had a domain name registered a week earlier (just about the time the US State Department issued Top Cat a cease and desist order) and CAG was using Melbourne IT's domain privacy service beloved of spammers and scammers. So I toasted them a bit to see what they had to say for themselves.A CAG representative, Valerie Sendecki, obediently appeared to try to discuss matters, requesting that we settle this as "ladies." The resulting exchange was pretty strange, but the general upshot was that CAG, ostensibly staffed with ex-military and ex-"agency" personnel, wished to remain unknown and inasmuch as it was known, it wished to be known as a "management consulting" company. It was founded by US ex-patriates and is registered in Panama. And, very specifically, CAG did not wish to be seen as either a private military company or as a security company. They claimed to be management consultants...Dr Sage requested I send to you this MINUSTAH document concerning the use of Mercenaries by the UN in Haiti. The TopCat Blancs are killing poor Haitians fleeing by sea from UN oppression in Cite-Soliel. The US spies called CAG are undermining the election process to prevent the popular election of Rene Preval and the return of President Aristide.Dr Sage is afraid that Comandante Sendecki of the US Navy is going to harm her for exposing this dispised behavior. She has been reassigned to Jeremie and has no acess to internet. This is her response to the abuse. She advices you to be very careful as they having eyes many and wishes you the best of luck.Link
Cory Doctorow:The Canadian Member of Parliament who takes campaign contributions from the copyright industries and gives back laws that serve their interests has been caught lying to her constituents on tape.Sam Bulte, the Liberal MP for Parkdale/High Park participated in an all-candidates meeting last week in which she was questioned about her morally dubious campaign financing. Listeners to the MP3 can hear her resopnse:"I am not taking money from special interest groups. As you know, you can look at my returns. All of my election returns are noted, they are transparent. Ninety percent of my donations came from individuals. Ten percent came from organizations or corporations. They are not hosting a fundraiser for me. A fundraiser is being held. Individuals are invited. Everyone is invited. It is self-funding. And yes, there will be artists there. It will be a celebation of my support for the arts community."Michael Geist's blog features a point-by-point takedown of these statements. Bulte does take lobbyists' money. She raised 57 percent of her campaign money from individuals, not the ninety percent she claims. Most incredible the claim that her fundraiser isn't being hosted by the entertainment industry is a bald, bold, easily disproved lie.Link
Cory Doctorow:This week, Candadian entertainment industry execs and famous musicians are holding a $250/plate fundraising dinner for Sam Bulte, a Member of Parliament who has worked for legislation favorable to their interests and proposes to do more of the same if re-elected. Margo Timmins, the frontwoman for Canadian indie-rock success story The Cowboy Junkies will perform.Joey "AccordionGuy" DeVilla traces the history of the band that made Margo Timmins famous: the band produced its breakout album for about $250 (the same sum that industry people will put into the pockets of their chosen lawmaker), and subsequently relied on mix-tapes and word of mouth to build its audience.But what Timmins and her ilk propose now is the indiscriminate prosecution of people who engage in the twenty-first century's equivalent of tape-trading: file-sharing. Having made herself rich and famous by using low-cost copying technology and fan-evangelism, Timmins proposes to help make laws that will prevent other bands from doing the same.The fundraiser for Sam Bulte being held tonight at the Drake Hotel will feature a performance by Margo Timmins. You may remember her band, The Cowboy Junkies, best known for their album, The Trinity Session. Recorded on a single microphone in the Church of the Holy Trinity for $250 (ironically, that's the per-plate price of admission to the fundraising dinner at which Margo is performing tonight), this album was originally released on a small label and got its buzz based on word-of-mouth and thousands of mix tapes that teenagers -- myself included -- made for each other.Back then, one way to declare your love (or at least infatuation) for a girl or guy was to make a "mix tape" of songs for her or him. If you were particularly creative, you'd embellish the tape with an artistic J-card (that's the cardboard liner that went into the cassette case -- here's an example). The important thing about a mix tape was that it let you say things that it provided a kind of indirection -- a way of saying things that you might not otherwise be able to say in a face-to-face conversation (instant messaging may be like that today).LinkUpdate: Adam sez, "the official Cowboy Junkies website hosts a forum specifically *for* trading bootlegs, and the Internet Archive hosts over 100 Cowboy Junkies live shows, along with a copy of their permission for them to be hosted.
Cory Doctorow:Michael Golembewski is a hardware hacking photographer who turns modified flatbed scanners into build homebrew, large-format digital cameras. His gallery of shots is lovely and eerie, and the build-notes for his cameras are fascinating.The scanner camera that I'm using right now uses the frame of an old Horseman 450L monorail 4x5 camera, which I purchased secondhand with the support of the Audi Design Foundation. The scanning back is an extensively modified Canon LIDE 20, from which I have reomved the lamp, pinhole lens assembly, and CIS sensor housing. I've made the scanner light-tight using duct tape and putty, covered with a hefty dose of black spraypaint. It might look crude, but it works very nicely. I've attached a modified lens board directly onto the scanner, so it can easily be connected to the Horseman. The lens board attachment holds the scanner optics at the same level as a ground glass plate. This allows me to compose and focus shots on the ground glass, instead of with preview scans - it's much faster. I have two lenses that I use with this model - a Kompur lens from 1915, and a found 8x10 enlarger lens.Link(via /.)
Cory Doctorow:The 11 year old girl who suggested the name "Pluto" for the newly discovered planet is now 87, and is the only person alive to have named a planet. BBC News has a lovely profile of Venetia Phair (née Burney), who named the ninth planet:On the morning of 14 March 1930, the young Venetia Burney was sitting down to breakfast in the dining room of the house in north Oxford where she lived with her grandfather Falconer Madan.Mr Madan, who was retired as librarian at the Bodleian Library, was with her reading The Times newspaper.When he got to an article on page 14 about the new planet's discovery, he remarked on it to Venetia."I can still visualise the table and the room, but I can remember very little about the conversation," Mrs Phair said.The article mentioned that the planet had not yet been named, prompting Venetia Burney to suggest her own.Mr Madan was so impressed with the name Pluto, he went straight to his friend Herbert Hall Turner, professor of astronomy at the University of Oxford, and one of the leaders in the worldwide effort to produce an astrographic chart. Link(via Neatorama)
Cory Doctorow:Today on the Worth1000 photoshop contest: misbegotten advertising, like this fictional advert for tourism in Las Vegas.Link
Xeni Jardin:Some cinema chains in America are refusing to show Steven Soderbergh's new movie Bubble because it's being released in a new way -- in theaters, on DVD, and via pay-per-view all at once. The film is the first in a series that Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner's distribution company 2929 Entertainment will release from Soderbergh in that manner. Snip from CBC news story: Bubble, a low-budget movie made with untried actors, is being sold on DVD and shown on cable TV the same day it debuts at the theatre. Theatre chains in more than 15 states have refused to show the film, saying Soderbergh's plan will take a big chunk out of their bottom line. "It's the biggest threat to the viability of the cinema industry today," John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theater Owners, said of the so-called "day and date" release strategy. If a high-profile Hollywood name like Soderbergh, director of Sex, Lies and Videotape, Erin Brockovich and Traffic, is trying simultaneous release, there is too great a danger of the strategy becoming acceptable to the mainstream, the group says.That would be the whole point, guys. As Soderbergh said a few months ago in Wired: Name any big-title movie that's come out in the last four years. It has been available in all formats on the day of release. It's called piracy. Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, Ocean's Eleven, and Ocean's Twelve - I saw them on Canal Street on opening day. Simultaneous release is already here. We're just trying to gain control over it.Link to CBC news item. (Thanks, Jeremy Gruman)Image: The director with doll parts at Bubble's premiere last week in Parkersburg, West Virginia -- the town in which it was filmed. (AP Photo/Parkersburg News & Sentinel, Jeff Baughan) Previously on Boing Boing:Trailer for Steven Soderbergh's BubbleXeni interviews Steven Soderbergh in WIREDSoderbergh and Cuban, Wagner's 2929: Let's break all the windows. Reader Comment: Reuben says, Boing Boing readers can contact their local theater chain's customer relations department, and ask them why they are not showing the movie. I contacted Century Theaters, as I live in the Bay Area; their phone number can be found here.
Xeni Jardin:On Good Morning Silicon Valley, John Paczkowski writes:If you don't regularly anonymize your Google cookie and purge your personalized search history, now might be a good time to start (then again, in this day and age, why bother?). The Department of Justice on Wednesday asked a federal judge to order Google to comply with a subpoena issued last year for search records stored in its databases. The DOJ argues that the information it has requested, which includes one million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from a one-week period, is essential to its upcoming defense of the constitutionality of the Child Online Protection Act. Google has so far refused to comply with the subpoena, saying the release of such information would violate the privacy of its users. "Google is not a party to this lawsuit, and the demand for the information is overreaching,'' Nicole Wong, an associate general counsel for Google, told The Mercury News. "[We plan to fight the government's effort] "vigorously.''Link (Thanks, Gern Blanston)
Cory Doctorow:New York's Evolution store specializes in natural history objects such as skulls and skeletons, fossils, minerals, antique anatomical charts and so on. The centerpiece of their inventory is a series of teaching-grade and museum-grade replica skulls of early hominids made from sturdy resin and plastic. I bought one of these today -- it was one of those things that you only realize that you've been looking for it all your life at the moment that you clap eyes on it. Pictured here, a teaching-grade replica of a Australopithecus africanus, a human ancestor that lived 3.3 million to 2.5 million years ago.Link
Links:
Laptop Computers
Psychic Medium
Belly Rings
Heel Pain
Medical Billing
Automotive Parts
Credit Check
Diamond Earrings
Used Autos
Certificate Of Deposit
Free Pop Up Blocker
Aloe Vera
Federal Grants
Shoulder Pain
Alcoholics Anonymous
Baby Cribs
Credit Card Debt
Disney Cruise
Eczema
Cheap Health Insurance
Penis Enlargement Pills Penis Enlargement Pills Natural Male Enlargement Natural Male Enlargement Penile Enlargement Penile Enlargement Penile Enlargement Devices Penile Enlargement Devices Penis Enlargement Penis Enlargement Penis Pump Penis Pump Penis Enlargement Samples Penis Enlargement Samples Pharmacy Discount Pharmacy Discount Corporate Holiday Gifts Corporate Holiday Gifts Online Pharmacies Medication Online Pharmacies Medication Male Enhancement Reviews Male Enhancement Reviews Enlarge Penis Enlarge Penis Discount Air Fares Discount Air Fares Penis Enlargement Penis Enlargement
2005 (c) Flynews.org