I wonder how much it cost back in 1901. I imagine that, adjusted for inflation, it might well have cost more than a modern compact fluorescent.

One of these would've come in handy just an hour ago, when I needed a place to hang my umbrella while picking up a few things in the produce aisle.

Hey, how are boobies coping with the climate shift?

I first saw the headline last night on one of the big aggregator sites -- Reddit or Digg -- and the word "tits" had been replaced with a string of asterisks.

It seems she's playing a male bug in most of these films. So it's transgendered bug porn!

I'm not enough of a spice-head to go for spraying capsaicin directly on my food, but my girlfriend sometimes mocks me for how much Sriracha I use.

Scott, how on Earth is Cory "advocating against science"?

Having this on a track sounds like a pretty good way to give the hamster the illusion of running around in a larger space while still keeping him in one room and out from underfoot.

Abejita, maybe it's a sign that I'm getting old, but I have almost no idea what you're saying. "Caturday"? "The chans"? "/b/"?

Nobody Special -- What are you looking to do by commenting here?

If you wanted your question about the packaging answered, wouldn't you have been better off just asking that, and not telling Jason that he "seem[s] to be" an asshole?

Keep in mind that he doesn't actually owe you an answer. You're a total stranger to him. It's up to him whether he feels like answering you, or ignoring you, or just deciding that he's sick of the conversation and not coming back here.

By asking him to spend his time answering your question, you're essentially asking him for a favor. Keep that in mind when you write, and you'll probably get better results.

Hope they get out of the way before that big red ball crushes 'em.

Spoon, you'll never get Stein to pay attention to your pretty charts, because he's not interested in actual reasoned debate. That's why he's claiming that science leads to the Holocaust.

That's also why he sticks "this is just an opinion" in the middle of his claim -- so that when someone rightly becomes outraged over Stein's outrageous nonsense, Stein can say "Hey, man, why get so angry over an opinion?". His whole argument is a set of nested rhetorical dodges of this kind. It's pure propaganda.

Rukasu, "lame"? Man, your life must be a non-stop hall of wonders if this is lame to you.

Hey, Smonkey, some of us haven't been to Burning Man and haven't see these sculptures before.

Beyond his contributions as a writer, Moorcock also deserves credit for helping start the New Wave movement in science fiction, as editor of New Worlds magazine in the '60s.

Tecumseh #13 -- Even if the country you're living in now is free and open, it may not always stay that way, or you may not be living there forever.

Scraps #12, are you aware that the parenthetical you're complaining about was written by Susannah Breslin (and is part of the quoted text), not Xeni?

Anyway, you're right, the Feministing sentence uses common words of easily-understood (or looked-up) meaning. I've seen true pseudo-academic bafflegab, and that wasn't it.

Maybe someone could mod one of those 3-D printers to output cheese instead of plastic (or whatever it is they actually use).

When my mom was a kid, about eight or so, in Munich, Germany, my grandfather used to send her down to get him a beer, and she'd sip the foam off while carrying the mug up the stairs back to the apartment. She grew up fine, no developmental problems.

(This was after WW2, so I don't get to end with a punchline about the modern US making the Nazis look sensible.)

Doesn't count as what? Oh, my last paragraph? Hm. Nah, I'd have to say it doesn't. It's not like the mitzvot include arguing for creationism. By so arguing, he's not taking upon himself a duty specifically assigned to the Children of Israel.

I'm not engaging with Evidence myself because I spent a whole lotta time doing that kinda thing ten to fifteen years ago, and burned out on it.

TNH, the doctrine that the 613 mitzvot are meant just for the Jews is a traditional Jewish one. It's elaborated in the Talmud, of course, but plain reading of certain Biblical passages also supports it. For example:

"Then Moses went up to God, and the LORD called to him from the mountain and said, 'This is what you are to say to the house of Jacob and what you are to tell the people of Israel: "You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself. Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you [a] will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation." These are the words you are to speak to the Israelites.'" (Exodus 19:3-6 NIV)

"Surely it is you who love the people; all the holy ones are in your hand. At your feet they all bow down, and from you receive instruction, the law that Moses gave us, the possession of the assembly of Jacob." (Deuteronomy 33:3-4 NIV)

So Evidence is under no obligation to explain why he doesn't follow kashrut or shatnetz, so long as he doesn't go around complaining about men lying with other men or suffering a witch to live.

Ow, he really should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque.

Aw, Jim Henley was all over this topic two years ago.

Studded, for her pleasure.

The early portions of the video show us what the usual environment for a Tuymans painting is: A blank white museum wall, with the painting usually having an entire wall to itself. Lots of neutral visual space to isolate the painting from any distracting stimuli.

One way of looking at this "experiment" is to blame Tuymans' painting style. His paintings tend to be monochromatic and fuzzy. There's not much that would draw your attention to them in a cluttered, visually noisy environment. They need the visual isolation of a museum wall to stand out.

If you'd had a graffiti artist paint a mural, you might have gotten more people noticing it.

Rosethornn, Animal Farm is an allegory of the Communist revolution and its aftermath, Stalin's takeover of the revolutionary government. What Orwell did was take the events of history, swap animals and farm symbols for the real-world people and events, and tie them together into a story. The farm stands for Russia, Napoleon the pig stands for Stalin, Snowball for Trotsky, Boxer the horse for the working class, etc.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, on the other hand, is not an allegory, it's an extrapolation. Orwell took the worst aspects of the politics he saw around him and extrapolated them into the future. Airstrip One isn't a metaphor for England, it's what Orwell feared England might literally turn into. Big Brother somewhat resembles Josef Stalin, but he doesn't stand for him.

Likewise for Little Brother. The DHS of that novel is a (pretty plausible) extrapolation into the near future of the modern-day DHS. It's not metaphoric. It doesn't stand for anything but itself. Cory isn't using metaphor to criticize the DHS, he's just straight-out criticizing the DHS.

AnthonyBeret -- Racist abuse of whom? Surely you meant to write "Roma", no?

KevinK, I've read Little Brother. It's set in the future. It doesn't say explicitly who the president is, or what party controls the White House. So why are you making accusations of Bush-bashing?

Yankeeknowhow, why do you bother to comment here? All you've been doing is complaining. If you don't like BoingBoing, don't read it.

KevinK, when I was a kid, conservatives used to talk about how important it was to keep government small and manageable. They used to point at the USSR and talk about how the Soviet government spied on its citizens and required them to present identity papers to travel within the country. The conservatives of my youth worried that the USA might one day become like the USSR.

When I look at our Department of Homeland Security, I see just the sort of thing those conservatives were complaining about. They wouldn't have described Little Brother as "anti-conservative".

Yankeeknowhow, this tired old world needs all the goddamn Cory Doctorow fiction it can get.

MattyD, it means you should try signing out of BoingBoing, and then signing back in. There's a bug that's been causing that problem, and the programmers think they've got it solved, but it might still be biting people who are using an old sign-in cookie.

You mean the Divine is present everywhere and in everything, except for drugs? How do you explain that?

What, were you unaware that the US government had acquired the Keys to the Kingdom of Heaven, and thereby the power to bind and loose? What else could explain traditionalist Catholics like Antonin Scalia and Dinesh d'Souza paying more heed to GW Bush than to their own pope?

As to how this happened, well, I can only guess, but I figure Mario Scaramella passed the Keys along to the CIA with the yellowcake papers, though he may have held onto them long enough to transubstantiate sushi into polonium-210 during a visit to London in 2006.

The Mitrokhin Commission has linked Scaramella to Mehmet Ali Agca; clearly the 1981 assassination attempt on JP2 was just a distraction.

It's tempting to dismiss this as the first move in some kind of Spanish Prisoner scam, but then I remember that Wendy and Richard Pini (of Elfquest fame) met this way, through the letter column of Silver Surfer.

For a while, when I was living in Jersey City, there was a small local restaurant that specialized in grilled cheese sandwiches. Didn't do quite enough business to survive, but man, it was good while it lasted.

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Cowboy BeBop yet. Spaceships + western motif + the coolest soundtrack in all of anime.

While Star Trek was originally described as "Wagon Train in space", that doesn't really sum it up. For one thing, you had the three-way political tension among the Federation, the Klingons, and the Romulans, which resembled the 20th century Cold War far more than it did the conflicts between the Native Americans and the European settlers. For another, you had those encounters with monsters and petulant space gods, which were more like something out of Greek mythology.

Check out Thomas Jefferson's PDA!

I want to go out and buy a bunch of chopped meat now, just so I can do this.

Even though I don't think there's room in my freezer to lay it out flat.

Daniel Dennett's 1991 book Consciousness Explained mentioned some experimental results showing something along these lines. I don't remember when the experiments took place.

Anyway, it's nice to see new research with new technologies verifying those earlier results. I don't remember the gap being as long as seven seconds, though. Wow.

Did you mean this:
Fisheye Quake

How about this revision of copyright law?

We create two forms of copyright, greater and lesser. Greater copyright works just like modern copyright: If someone wants to publish something you own the rights to, you can negotiate any amount of money you want, or even just refuse if you don't like the guy.

Lesser copyright is something like the musicians mechanical license: Anyone who wants to can publish copies or make derivative works, with the license owner having no right of refusal, but they have to pay the owner a fee determined by a mechanical formula.

When you first create/publish a work, it's automatically covered under greater copyright, pretty much just like now. Anything published prior to, say, 2010 is considered to have been first published in 2010, to grandfather in the people who haven't been keeping track of their publication dates because you don't have to under current law.

Every twenty years after first publication, you have to fill out a form with the copyright bureau, or the work falls into lesser copyright. If that happens, you can re-assert greater copyright later on by filling out a form, but any copies or derivative works published during the lapse are still considered covered under lesser copyright.

When you die, all your copyrights immediately fall into lesser copyright, non-renewable. Twenty years after your death, they all escape into the public domain.

So under this plan, if there's an orphaned work you want to bring back into print, you can. If you can establish that the author's been dead for 20+ years, go ahead, it's public domain. If you can't establish that, but it's been 20+ years since the work was last registered for major copyright, go ahead and publish, just stick the mechanical license fee in an escrow account in case the author or heirs turn up.

I expect the size and style of it are more an indulgence than a necessity, since ever so many people scrape by on just a single nazi-togged dominatrix.

Huh! In my day, we'd have to scrape pennies all year to barely afford a single aged harridan whacking us with a broom while dressed in a hand-me-down squadrista outfit. Nazis, cor, we use ter dream of Nazis!

I think the Professor's inventions on Gilligan's Island could lend themselves to their own steampunk-like aesthetic. Bamboopunk? Cocopunk? Nutpunk?

Asuffield, did you ever see the 1984 movie Starman? In it, an alien deduces traffic rules from watching an American drive: "Red light stop, green light go, yellow light go very fast."

I'm a guy, and I use teaspoons too. I guess Thad's mouth must be unusually large.

What a great article.

When I was growing up -- in the '70s, in the Bronx -- I was allowed (encouraged!) to walk to the library, half a mile away. Which doesn't sound like much, but there wasn't much else worth getting to in walking distance.

When we went upstate for the summer, I used to walk to town all the time to see movies, or buy comics, or visit that library. A mile or so, I think.

I don't think my young niece and nephew are going to have that same freedom. My mother freaks out when I remind her of the things she allowed me and my sister to do. She's somehow become convinced that things are more dangerous, despite all the statistic to the contrary. I think it's television news that does it. Anything bad happens to a (white) kid anywhere in the country, and it's all over the news immediately. Child abductions peaked in the '80s, but I guess the news didn't focus on it as much then.

Anyone else think the Steampunk Han Solo is being played by Eddie Izzard? ("It's the ship that made the Kessel Run -- covered in bees!")

No, Asscore5003, but you seem to be one of those people who think that telling an author authors a blog that you like that you think he's "retarded" is somehow an appropriate social interaction. Very special.

I've been occasionally getting the "Text entered was wrong" message for the past few days. I figured somebody's plugged in an error-correcting modem somewhere along the line.

I was using Safari 3.0.3 on MacOS X 10.4.10, till last night when I upgraded to Safari 3.1 and OSX 10.4.11. Haven't seen the error message since the upgrade, but it's been less than a day.

Clearly the baby was the mastermind behind the operation. Why else steal candy?

I'd seen these puppets before, but the couch is new to me. Great addition to the line.

Wow, check out his paintings!

When I saw "cattle heads containing prohibited materials", my first thought was that the cows had knowledge of classified information.

What people are talking about here is Processing, an open-source programming language for visual effects.

RyanH, @#6 -- I dunno. I've got a friend who's Canadian, works in the role-playing game industry. Since the US market for RPGs is so much bigger than the Canadian market, he gets most of his income in US$, but has to pay his rent and bills and buy his groceries with CAN$.

Actually, there's one bit where the streets don't connect -- Rhode Island Ave doesn't reach all the way to Washington Circle. But the rest of it is all good.

It's DC's weird streets layout -- a radial pattern overlaid on a grid -- that makes this kind of thing possible. You an probably find all sorts of weird patterns in there. Great fodder for supernatural conspiracy thriller writers!

Tom, the high end of the sex industry charges a lot. The women at the Emperor's Club (patronized by former NY governor Eliot Spitzer) charge $1000/hour each at the low end, but some go up to $5500/hour. So five of them for five hours would start at $25k.

And then when a security goon tries to stop you from shooting pictures in a public place, you can scare him off with the camera.

Yeah, source for the story itself is the BBC, but the quote comes from the blogger, Adrian Short. Not only is our fictional tourist named "Bogus", but she complains that the font on the magnet is "not sodding Arial", which should set off at least three warning bells in the reader's head.

Then it is without fail announced as "French Dip with Au Jus".

Oh, surely not without fail, Noen. I have, occasionally, seen it promoted as "French Dip with Au Jus sauce".

The way she's holding the magazine, it's like she's trying to block the robot's hideous visage from her field of view.

Keep in mind that the music is usually one of the last things added to a movie. Often it hasn't been done yet at the time a trailer is released. That's why you sometimes see trailers with generic placeholder music, or classical or pop tunes, or music from an earlier movie from the same studio. (If I remember right, the early trailers for James and the Giant Peach used music from The Nightmare Before Christmas.) It's possible that Sabbath's "Iron Man" won't actually be used in the Iron Man movie.

I've got pretty high hopes for the movie. Favreau's not only a long-time comics fan, but he's also interested in character and dialog. Swingers looks like it was pretty good practice for writing Tony Stark.

Scottfree -- "Colombia" is the South American country. "Columbia" is the nickname for the USA.

Buddy66, it depends. If Treepour's right, the apparent paradox described in the post arises out of the vagueness with which the situation is described. Whereas some paradoxes, like Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, arise in systems where terms are very sharply defined.

Seen X-Nuts (featuring Good ol' Charlie Xavier)?

But Cholling, if the post had followed traditional scholastic practice and been titled "What did Leonardo look like?", we'd have gotten a dozen smart-ass comments about how he looks like a big turtle with a blue mask.

Man, there are a lot of great prints on that page. I wish I'd known about it earlier, because a lot of my favorites are out of print.

And I noticed at my comics shop last week that there's now a paperback edition of Crane's The Clouds Above.

Aw, Buddy, don't be like that!

Nerdkiller, the article quotes people who had reactions. You don't even have to follow the link, just look at the section Cory quoted.

David (#7), I sometimes sit with my laptop on my lap for an hour or more, no problem. My secret: I wear pants.

"LUV" "HĀT"

Remember the Jeff Gannon scandal a few years ago? When it turned out that the GW Bush white house gave daily press passes to a male gay prostitute who worked for a fake right-wing news website as a fake journalist?

Not long after that, I saw a story suggesting that Reagan and GHW Bush administrations -- Poppy Bush, not baby Bush -- may have had embarrassing links to an underaged gay prostitution ring in DC. The Washington Times ran a front-page story about it in 29 June 1989, but didn't really follow up on it. Some bloggers, as I recall, suggested that maybe this was Rev Moon blackmailing his way into respectability.

But it frightened riders on a B train near the Seventh Avenue stop on Thursday.

They don't say which Seventh Avenue stop, though. According to Gothamist it was the one in Brooklyn, which I use all the time.

Inverse Square, Jason Walker, what's your problem? I've been reading BoingBoing for years, and Cory's been making these sorts of post -- Here's some odd thing some guy just did -- all along. This isn't unusual. What's new is that he's got a relationship with the source. Would you rather he didn't disclose it?

Alexander Kjerulf wrote a blog post a couple of years ago that's been pretty widely linked, called "Top 5 reasons why 'The Customer Is Always Right' is wrong". His point is that a wise business won't cater to abusive, complaining customers, and has to be willing to write some customers off. Doing otherwise encourages abrasive customers, and makes employees miserable, which makes the employees worse at their jobs, resulting in (among other things) worse customer service.

His points apply to comments at BoingBoing. Think of the readers/commenters as the customers, and the Boingers as the employees. To some extent, commenters can be thought of as employees too (metaphorically speaking -- don't write in asking for a paycheck), if their entertaining comments lead to an environment which attracts more readers and commenters.

Abusive commenters, on the other hand, poison the environment. They demoralize the Boingers, and drive off more reasonable commenters.

Jeblis #402: Honestly I've never seen a mod get so angry.

That wasn't angry. I've seen Teresa angry.

TNH #160: Some believe that moderators must stand apart from the community

I believe Lazarus Long held this view.

CS Loser, you might want to familiarize yourself with the concept of the common carrier, a business entity that provides some sort of service (usually transportation or communication) without discrimination. There are legal benefits and responsibilities involved with being a common carrier. AT&T claims common carrier status, while BoingBoing does not. That's why BoingBoing can delete or censor comments for whatever reasons it sees fit, while AT&T can't.

Comments complaining about how boring the post is are nearly always, themselves, boring. In order to keep these self-referential comments from bootstrapping themselves into computerized sapience and spreading their boringness throughout the Known Net, they have to be deleted.

Wurp, there are other online bookstores. How do you feel about Barnes & Noble or Powell's? If you're looking for used books, American Book Exchange is a search interface to an international network of used bookstores.

Teresa, Niven's been reactionary for a while. Oath of Fealty was published just over a quarter-century ago, when he was in his mid-40s.

There's also a maternity goods shop called "Boing Boing" at the intersection of Sixth Ave and Union St in the Park Slope region of Brooklyn, NY.

I'm troubled by the spread of software-licensing ideas into the physical-object world. Right here, we can see BB commenters who've internalized the arguments of software vendors to the point of applying those ideas to physical books.

There is no license to read. If a burglar breaks into your home and reads some of your books, they've committed breaking-and-entry, but the authors of those books don't get to bring extra charges against the burglar for unlicensed reading.

Copyright is the right to make copies. When you buy a book, you own it, but the government limits your right to make copies of it. You can pass it around to your friends without consulting the author. In fact, even if the copyright notice in the front of the book claimed the purchaser wasn't allowed to lend the book out to friends or resell it, that claim wouldn't be supported by law.

What's changed by the e-book world is that there's no physical object being sold, and the book is a trivially-copied computer file. The content is no longer bound up in a physical object. This creates all sorts of complications that are still being worked out, but that doesn't mean we should take the legal obstructions that software vendors have created and retroactively apply them to the old, pre-computer world. There is no implied license to read when you buy a book.

The actual reason that many nations passed laws outlawing massive outdoor DDT spraying was the mosquitoes were starting to develop resistance. Much of Carson's Silent Spring is devoted to this topic.

The new pro-DDT, anti-Carson movement is the brainchild of right-wing economic propagandist Roger Bate, who also works for tobacco companies trying to minimize public awareness of health problems caused by smoking. His group, Africa Fighting Malaria was founded to try to disrupt World Health Organization efforts to discourage smoking in developing countries by painting WHO as an enemy of public health.

Awesome. I've still got my early Elfquest collections from high school.

It was actually the third indie comic book, however. Elfquest started in 1978, so it was preceded by Dave Sim's Cerebus (1977) and Jack Katz's The First Kingdom (1975).

It'll be "homicide robot" when Fox reports it.

Moon, if he got into trouble for that, than Turtledove would catch trouble from Poul Anderson's heirs, because the Time Patrol stories have the same premise.

This has come up before. SF authors pillage each others' ideas constantly. It's part of what makes SF fun to read, seeing the links among various authors' work.

Upyoursix, if you want people to take your arguments seriously, you're not acting like it.

I haven't really been paying much attention to the Tibet story. I'm willing to believe that Xeni and/or the western news media have important details wrong. It happens -- people screw up sometimes. Both bloggers and mainstream news agencies occasionally get stories wrong.

But you haven't made your case. You haven't provided links to sources that back up your version of events. And to make matters worse, you started off by accusing Xeni of being a propagandist.

(And no, those photos you linked to don't count as sources. They show dead bodies and a damaged bus, but there's no context. I can't tell how the damage was done, or by who.)

To keep the ship from capsizing we just need to bolt a submarine to the keel.

Huh. The glass-blowing thing totally never occurred to me. Still, I took a glass-blowing class once in college, and as I recall, you don't generally knock a piece out all on a single lungful. (But then, I really sucked at it. Wound up dropping the class.)

Takuan #40 -- Outward, and bouncing off any hard edges, losing energy all the while until they're subsumed into the medium through which they were propagating.

Teresa, that sounds a bit shenaniganny to me. The implication, I take it, is that wine bottle are standardized around the volume it takes to hold an amount of wine one can drink in one long swallow without having to stop and breathe, right?

But there's no reason to assume that the rate at which a human being uses up the oxygen in his lungs is the same as the rate at which a volume of wine will pour down that same human's throat. Especially since the pouring rate of the wine will be constrained by things like the diameter of the bottleneck and the drinker's throat. And by the drinker's experience at chugging, which will vary greatly across a population of drinkers.

Zuzu, BoingBoing is hardly an obscure blog. Of course the TSA's bloggers read it.

David Carroll, there were knock-off versions of King Lear that took Shakespeare's play and stuck a happy ending on. (The original version of the story ended happily. Shakespeare gave his version a twist tragic ending, and I guess a lot of people couldn't stand it.)

And of course the gospels are Torah fanfic, with Jesus as a Mary Sue.

You'd think they'd've at least put two more circles above the scanner, as ears.

Sure, Noen. There's sound on Earth, right? And the planet Earth is in space, right? Therefore, sound in space.

Now, certainly sound doesn't propagate through a vacuum, and movies that show it doing so are being scientifically inaccurate. But that's not the same as saying "there's no sound in space".

You're probably familiar with situations where you get shown an establishing shot and hear dialog over the shot which you wouldn't normally be able to hear from the position you're looking from.

Like, say, there's a shot of the exterior of the White House shot from Pennsylvania Avenue, and you hear someone saying "Mister President, we've got a situation!" You wouldn't be able to hear someone speaking inside the building from the spot where the camera is, but you readily accept, as a common movie and TV convention, that the place where your eyes seem to be is not always the same location as the place where your ears seem to be.

Another example would be seeing the starship Enterprise go by, and hearing Captain Kirk recording the log. Even though the vacuum of space separates Kirk from the supposed camera position, we still hear him speaking, and nobody complains.

Why, then, shouldn't the audience be given audio cues of engine noise as a spaceship goes by? Why shouldn't we hear the phaser banks firing as if our ears were inside the ship, even though our eyes are outside it?

Except, Bricology, that most of the people making those comments were Westerners. Their complaints are part of the Western liberal ideal of free speech in support of the Western liberal ideal of individuality. Asking them to refrain from those complaints is an attempt to impose another culture's values upon them. Ironic, hmmm?

Furthermore, the comments in this thread have no power to alter the behavior of Kazuo Umezu and his neighbors. These commenters have no power to make the imposition you claim they've been making.

What's that, Zuzu? I can't hear you, I'm covered in bees!

Trying to impose the Western value of public freedoms of expression upon Japan is really just cultural imperialism from an inferior empire.

What are you talking about, Bricology? I thought Kazuo Umezu was Japanese. Is he a Westerner, imposing his alien values upon an adopted country?

Besides, there is so sound in space.

Mignon, yes, actually, some comics publishers do still print a higher Canadian price on their covers. A Canadian friend of mine, on a recent trip to NYC, went round to comics shops buying up lots of stuff that cost ~25% more at home.

Looking around for an example (which is tough, because I no longer buy many mainstream comics), the third volume of DMZ, published a few months ago by Vertigo (an imprint of DC) has a cover price of $12.99 US, $15.99 CAN. I don't know if the fourth volume (which came out yesterday, but I didn't buy it) does the same.

If fossils weren't for sale, where would museums get them?

Hold on a minute! You're misunderstanding the number. 900,000 isn't the number of suspected terrorists, it's the number of names on the list. Some (many, even) of those names are held by more than one person.

Some of those records aren't even full names. Some just have an initial instead of a name, like "E KENNEDY". So you can get hassled if your last name is Kennedy and your first is Edward, or Elizabeth, or Emma. So that list of 900,000 records covers more than a million people.

What Yamara said. Though the image is described as a five-frame animation, the animated version has nine frames, all sharing the same background. Just putting the actual pot on a spinning wheel, you wouldn't get anything nearly as clean-looking.

"The guy at the headshop"? Kyle, Xeni has (if I'm reading the post correctly) been to Tibet and seen it for herself. So had the tourists who taped that video.

Your comments on Tibet's situation aren't going to come off as reasonable if you surround them with the dismissive implication that everyone else interested in the topic is ignorant.

Gobo, I can't speak for anyone else, but as someone who hasn't played Bully, but has seen commercials for it, I was also (until now) under the impression that the game involves playing a bully and bullying other kids.

Certainly someone calling for a game to be banned has an obligation to find out what it's actually about, either by playing it or by reading reliable reviews. But the marketing for the game is also to blame if people who haven't played it misunderstand it.

Spellgage, I'm guessing you're not aware that Stross contributed to the Fiend Folio.

Has anyone ever seen Mark Frauenfelder and Merlin Mann together?

My gullet. Let me show you it.

Tom, Charlie Stross recently summarized an article from The Economist that comes to the exact opposite conclusions, and has statistics to back it up.

The article is about a World Bank study that looked at the time it took for various inventions to become widely adopted (defined as being used by 80% of countries). Railways and telephones took about 120 years. Radio and airplanes took about 60 years. CAT scans, the Internet, and mobile phones took about 20 years.

Zikman, that looks like Minion. The designer has mixed letters from the regular and small-caps versions of the font.

I love how, in #15, Anangbhai projects his own anti-interventionist position onto Setharian, who actually holds the opposite position.

Setharian, Iraq and Rawanda are not the same case. In Rawanda, people who support intervention are arguing that we should have intervened to stop genocide as it was occurring. People who use the 1988 al-Anfal Campaign justify the 2003 invasion were advocating intervening to punish genocide 15 years after the fact. Preventing an action is not the same as punishing it afterwards. Someone can hold different opinions on the two cases without being logically inconsistent.

There's also the case of effectiveness. I haven't read much on Rwanda, so I don't know if UN intervention would have actually worked. It's pretty clear to me that our intervention in Iraq has done more damage than Saddam's continued presence would have. If you believe that the practical outcome of intervention is likely to be different in two cases then it's also not logically inconsistent to hold different opinions on the cases.

The anchor pillow is my favorite part!

While Horn & Hardart is gone, an old building-side sign for it is still visible from the window of the office where I used to work, on Seventh Ave between 37th and 38th Streets. I wish I'd snapped a photo of it when I had the chance.

They've got a Batgirl instead of a Batman. She's third from the left in that photo up above.

Edt and Mycophage, I think you've both forgotten the degree to which all artists borrow/steal from each other, and specifically in the field of written SF, how a small body of authors is writing for a small body of fans, who (up till the 1980s or so) were all assumed to be well-read in the field. Haldeman wrote The Forever War as a response to Heinlein's Starship Troopers, and expected most of his readers to have also read the earlier book. I'm sure Scalzi expected a good number of his readers to be familar with the Heinlein and Haldeman books.

This stuff goes on all the time in SF. Roger Zelazny's Amber books were inspired by Philip Jose Farmer's World of Tiers series, which itself drew upon the works of William Blake. Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun took inspiration from Jack Vance's The Dying Earth.

When I played this, I would try to pick deaths that rhymed with the characters' names or descriptions. It seemed appropriate.

Wait, Theophrastus, as I understand it, the House refused to pass the bill. Therefore, the "Protect America Act" has expired, and the proposed new bill into which the Senate put telecom immunity has not been passed.

Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world....

I don't understand this at all. WHAT is the purpose?

Orwell said it sixty years ago: "We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power."

A rat king figures in Alan Moore's and Ian Gibson's SF comic, The Ballad of Halo Jones.

Congratulations, Cory and family!

Aw, what a cute round little Muppet face she's got!

I kinda wish my parents had named me "Fibonacci Nautilus", but I already get enough people misspelling and mispronouncing "Avram".

People who think that's phallic should check out the Mull of Kintyre in Scotland, which is so phallic it became the basis for an unofficial British Board of Film Classification rule about the depiction of male genitals.

Count me as one of the people tickled to see a post about a game I've been playing for over a decade.

When I worked at a game company, we talked about "social games" and "gamer games". The latter were games with strategic depth; the former were more casual, better suited to being played by and with players with a wide range of ability, and generally shorter.

Fluxx falls towards the social end of the spectrum, but it's a geeky social game, thick with meta-rules that change the game environment from turn to turn.

The game club I play with is into gamer games -- when Peurto Rico was new we would have two or three games of it running simultaneously -- but Fluxx is a perennial favorite for the times when we want something light.

Robert B, you're telling us that the Empire State Building emits waves that jam up car alarms?!

The question in that case is not how to stop this from happening in midtown, but rather how do we blanket the whole city with this stuff?

Takuan -- Kiki's Delivery Service? Are you sure you don't mean Laputa (Castle in the Sky)?

If you like that, you might also like Mechaton by Vincent Baker. It's a tabletop mecha wargame where you build your pieces out of Lego.

As you know, Teresa, the Chinese were blogging with Movable Type back in the 11th century.