If they unknowingly attempt to run an MSNBC-style sting on these 10-year-old pedophile poseurs, by enlisting an agent to engage them in incriminating sexual conversation, could the agent be collared for sexual conduct with a minor?

I always thought that would make a great South Park episode.

I guess this was never answered: the figure that Jet Jaguar replaced on the original shirt appears to be Megalon (Jet Jaguar's primary antagonist). Megalon is an arthropod, not a robot. The star-shaped antenna and Chrylser building arms in the silhouette are a dead giveaway.

I thought #45 was a spider droid from Clone Wars, but I see I was mistaken.

Also, I am stylin' in my new black WeRobot tee. ;)

Best. Government response. Ever.

Scott: The President does a great deal, including vetoing and signing legislation, suggesting laws and programs to congress, appointing justices and ambassadors, signing treaties, etc. The Executive branch is supposed to be coequal with the Judicial and the Legislative branches, though many think the Executive has been taking on excessive powers in the last decade or so. There's really not much parallel with the royal family — very little gets done in Washington without his say-so.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_of_the_United_States_of_America#Duties_and_powers

Ken:

"8 years old" was not when Obama knew him; it's how old Obama was when Ayers was engaging in criminal activity. Ayers was indeed a violent 60s radical (who never actually injured anyone, FYI) who has since become a respected figure in Chicago — friend of the mayor, Distinguished Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, &c. And, yep, Obama is acquainted with him, as is everybody involved in the school systems of Chicago. (Bill Clinton pardoned two Weather Undergrounders, too, if that matters to you.)

Concerning Dr. Wright:

Of course, if you watch the full sermon, you'll see that Wright was quoting US Ambassador Edward Peck in a Fox interview when he spoke of "chickens coming home to roost". It was not and is not an extreme position, but Wright had the bad grace to express it in an angry way, and the bad grace to do so while black.

Dr. Wright is an amazing man. He holds some dumbass views, I agree, but he founded one of the first AIDS ministries in Chicago's South Side, started a singles night for gays and lesbians in his congregation (against pressure from his more conservative members), welcomed German visitors to Trinity by giving a portion of his sermon in German (he speaks six languages), assisted in heart surgery on President Lyndon Johnson (and was commended twice by that President), earned a PhD and a stack of honorary doctorates, and has devoted thirty years of his life to doing God's work in Chicago. Yes, he's sometime angry and intemperate and blustrous, but this white boy holds him in high regard in spite of it.

It is, frankly, intellectually dishonest to judge a thirty-year career based on thirty seconds of soundbites. I encourage everyone to watch a full sermon or two, and watch the testimonials from parishoners (white and black) who tell us how welcoming and accepting Trinity has been. Wright's gotten railroaded by a press that doesn't like looking fairly at unpopular opinions.

But perhaps I snarked too soon: the article I linked to says, "Applications for silver nanocrystals include as an anti-microbial, anti-biotic and anti-fungal agent when incorporated in coatings, nanofiber, first aid bandages, plastics, soap and textiles, in treatment of certain viruses, in self cleaning fabrics, as conductive filler and in nanowire and certain catalyst applications." I still would expect it to function only in a suspension or in an ablative environment, but I guess this isn't as obviously dumb as it first seemed.

I hadn't heard of "nano-silvers" before, so I did a little Googling. They are, as you might expect, very tiny particles of silver, and they do indeed appear to have an antibacterial effect — when they're used as part of a filtration system. I'm not at all sure what the nano-silvers embedded in the skin of this hook are supposed to do; it seems a bit like embedding poison pellets in the concrete foundation of your building in hopes of keeping the rats out of the basement. It looks to me like colloidal silver with a new name.

Did we learn nothing from Pat Benatar? Stop using hedgehogs as a weapon!

Does anybody else want to lift the belly-cushion to see if it's anatomically correct?

I think the issue here is not that the prof so loves his words that he doesn't want people copying them; it's that he wants people to stop buying lecture notes, and thinks he's found a legal way to do so. People who buy other people's notes are not just doing themselves a disservice (by getting a watered-down and filtered education), but they're doing a disservice to the rest of the class by not being there to participate in discussions.

The tenth picture, of the sea star surrounded by brittle stars, is stunning. It looks like a 16th-century fresco of the night sky.

To be fair, they appear to be a Thai company (at least, there's Thai lettering on the sign on their "Who We Are" page), and the website does not give the impression that they are native English speakers — "PlanToys is meticulous from selecting material to manufacturing process and also has special projects to encourage the building of a supportive environment and social contribution."

#1: Addressed in the article, Foobar: "Eventually every episode and clip will be available everywhere in the world. There is a tangle of contracts that Comedy Central has with different cable companies and territories that are preventing us from that right now. But hopefully it won't be long."

Arman: Thanks for the info! I was trying to decide whether it would be funnier if "Costa Carbo" was intentional or not; now I know! :)

He's got a point. Wouldn't we all rather watch Casta Carbo?

As Kyle said, $100K is the high end for average professors' salaries — they usually start out around $35K. That's after six or seven years of grad school, with an $18K/year stipend if they're lucky.

The trouble with selling important fossils to collectors is that it makes it much harder to study them. Capitalism 1) drives the prices up and 2) funnels important finds into private collections where nobody can do anything with them. (I'm ignoring the armed thugs who loot archaeological sites in search of cash-and-carry treasures to sell, which are generally damaged in the process.) If you think, as I do, that scientific research is a positive good, then you won't want the tools of that research kept away from scientists.

Nowhere does it say the fossil has been articulated, or even excavated — there are no pictures of the articulated skeleton (apart from the clip art), and the description describes museum visitors watching "preparators and volunteers as they exposed the bones to prepare them to make casts and molds". I think this is a collection of fossils in situ, and a merely "nearly complete" one at that, which makes the image a bit deceptive.

Yeah! Cory should promote himself on his own website!

Oh, wait...

Just in time for Oscar night!

You do that too, Mark? Many's the time I'll be in the grocery store and say, "Oh, shoot, we forgot to add peanut butter to the list." A moment later, with peanut butter in hand, my sweetie says, "What are you writing?" I say, "Peanut butter." While she's laughing at me, I cross it off.

A treadmill could be built that would blow out the tires and ground the plane that way, but there's no way to generate enough rolling friction in airplane wheels to stop an ordinary plane moving forward without damaging it. If you get to specify the plane and the treadmill, though, I agree that it's possible — a tiny model plane on a bumpy treadmill moving at 500mph would not take off, for instance.

However, you run into the chicken-and-egg problem I mentioned above (in which the treadmill can't start until the plane moves incrementally forward, but any forward motion breaks the problem).

Your approach can lead to an interesting investigation of physics principles, though — I don't think it's uninteresting, just interesting to a smaller percentage of people. :)

The difference between cars and planes that is illustrated by the original problem is this: cars move forward because they push against the ground, and planes move forward because they push against the air. If the ground moves underneath a car, it will affect its forward movement; if it moves underneath an airplane, it won't (to any significant degree). That, in a nutshell, is the "Aha!" moment the original puzzle gives people; therein lies its value. It may seem trivial to you, but I've participated in quite a few conversations where getting to that revelation was a long uphill battle, and in the end satisfying for that very reason.

I'm not sure I understand your analysis: if a plane and a car are both moving forward at 100mph on the same treadmill, and the treadmill suddenly spins into motion going 100mph in the opposite direction, the plane won't be significantly affected, but the car, after some transitional skidding, will end up not moving at all relative to the outside world; that seems pretty different to me. If, on the other hand, they're both moving at 100mph (wrt the outside world) while the treadmill spins beneath them, the car's speedometer will say 200mph, and the plane's will say 100mph. The car will be burning fuel at the 200mph rate, while the plane will be burning fuel at the 100mph rate. Again, that seems like a significant difference.

I don't think the "super-treadmill" interpretation has an "Aha!" moment; nor is it a physically possible system, which makes it inherently less interesting for me. It's also not the original question, as I've said before; a little research should demonstrate that.

The image is a JPEG, and I think the compression diminishes the illusion a little. The squares in question aren't one color — they're patchworks of pixels, and some pixels of the "yellow" squares on the right are in fact a warmer gray than the "blue" pixels on the left.

That said, it's a very powerful illusion. I verified it by snipping a little rectangle from one of the "blue" squares on the left and dragging it next to one of the "yellow" ones on the right, and I'd've sworn that the little clipping changed colors as I dragged it across the boundary. I swiped it back and forth a few times, and it sure looked like it was flipping from blue to yellow and back.

I'll quote a much wiser man than me, Cecil Adams, on why the "speed of the wheels" formulation is broken:

As you point out, one problem here is the wording of the question. Your version straightforwardly states that the conveyor moves backward at the same rate that the plane moves forward. If the plane's forward speed is 100 miles per hour, the conveyor rolls 100 MPH backward, and the wheels rotate at 200 MPH. Assuming you've got Indy-car-quality tires and wheel bearings, no problem. However, some versions put matters this way: "The conveyer belt is designed to exactly match the speed of the wheels at any given time, moving in the opposite direction of rotation." This language leads to a paradox: If the plane moves forward at 5 MPH, then its wheels will do likewise, and the treadmill will go 5 MPH backward. But if the treadmill is going 5 MPH backward, then the wheels are really turning 10 MPH forward. But if the wheels are going 10 MPH forward . . . Soon the foolish have persuaded themselves that the treadmill must operate at infinite speed. Nonsense. The question thus stated asks the impossible -- simply put, that A = A + 5 -- and so cannot be framed in this way. Everything clear now? Maybe not. But believe this: The plane takes off.

Cecil's article is linked to from the original BoingBoing post.

Enginerd: Calling people idiots doesn't help your case.

You can tell that the post is not the original question because there's a link from BoingBoing to the Times, and a link from the Times to the Straight Dope, and a discussion there that pre-hashes everything we've discussed here about the wording of the problem.

The original question is more interesting to me because it illustrates real-world differences between cars and planes, and because it operates on the assumption of a testable, real-world conveyor belt. It leads to interesting conversations, and a very satisfying "Aha!" moment when people catch on. For that reason, I think it makes an excellent brainteaser, and I have observed it doing its job (very well) in the wild.

The "super-treadmill" version, which postulates a treadmill that can somehow hold an airplane in place, falls apart on many levels: the "super-treadmill" is impossible to build (or conceive of building), it's unnecessary for the puzzle (magic glue would work as well), it leads to endless nit-picking discussions of the precise wording used in the puzzle (which is ambiguous on at least three axes), it creates a chicken-and-egg problem (since the wheels and treadmill can't start moving until there is forward motion, but the question forbids forward motion), and it reduces the problem to "If a plane can't move (for some reason), can it take off?" — which is trivial. There's no "Aha!" moment when you figure out that a treadmill and a wheel moving at the same speed, without slipping, result in no forward motion; it's an "Eh" moment. "So what?" your puzzle-audience says.

I fully agree with you that it is possible to read the problem, as stated, and come to the conclusion that there is some sort of magic treadmill involved that can exactly match itself to the rotation of the wheels, and eat up all of the thrust the airplane's engines can produce, through bearing friction or something. Once I've come to that conclusion, though, I say, "That's not very interesting — what is the question really asking?" and move on to a better way to phrase the puzzle, so I can have what I consider to be the more interesting discussion.

Enginerd: it should be obvious that the posted question is not the original, since it either makes no sense or is trivial. (As someone on the Straight Dope board said, the question becomes "Consider a wheel and belt such that no forward movement is mathematically possible. Will there ever be forward movement?") Now, if we're talking about cars, it makes perfect sense — the conveyor matching the speed of the wheels means the car doesn't move. For airplanes, the question is ambiguous at best, broken at worst.

Even so, the majority of commenters here, in the original Boing Boing post, in the New York Times blog entry, and in the Straight Dope message board it got the puzzle from, managed to puzzle out the intent of the question, rather than focusing on the specific words (which are, after all, ambiguous — where on the wheels is the "speed" measured?). "Will a plane on a treadmill take off if the treadmill moves backwards at the speed the plane would ordinarily, without the treadmill, move forwards?" That's the conversation most of us are having.

I call the BoingBoing version a corruption because it spawns multiple interpretations, and while it's obvious to me what is meant it splits people into entrenched argument camps over them. Follow the link to the Pogue blog, and follow the link from his blog to the Straight Dope board it came from, and you will see that the wording issue was hashed out, at great length, over two years ago. (I recommend reading that Straight Dope thread, since it recapitulates everything discussed here, often more clearly.)

Enginerd, there are two ways around that "contradiction" you point out:

1) The wheels can skid. Imagine, for a moment, that the wheels are locked, but are made of a slippery substance. (This is basically equivalent to a ski-plane landing on ice.) Then, if the plane is moving forward at 80mph, depending on your interpretation, either a) every point on the wheels is moving forward ("speed of the wheels" = 80mph), in which case the belt will move backwards at -80mph (and have no effect), or b) the wheels are not spinning ("speed of the wheels" = 0), so the conveyor is not moving at all. This skidding effect will be present, but less pronounced, in regular wheels, particularly if the conveyor belt is whizzing past at googlysquat mph, so it is indeed possible for the plane to move forward while the belt matches "the speed of the wheels".

2) (And this is the real answer:) The "speed of the wheels" phrase is a corruption of the original question, which asks what would happen if the conveyor rolled backward at the expected forward speed of the plane. If the engines at throttle setting X usually push the plane up to 80mph, then the belt will roll backwards at 80mph. The "speed of the wheels" is a bad specification of an uninteresting problem — as you yourself point out, the wording of the problem, if you ignore skidding, limits the situation to the trivial case. It might as well be, "A plane is nosing up against the White Cliffs of Dover. Can it take off?" That's not a good puzzle.

I think you're focusing too closely on the specific words a NYT reporter chose to describe a widespread puzzle, and ignoring the intent of the problem.

Enginerd, you seem to be missing a pretty fundamental flaw in your analysis: rolling friction does not increase with velocity. It depends only on the weight of the plane (or wagon) and the material of the tires and treadmill. Whether the treadmill is crawling at 5mph or zipping along at 50mph, the force required to hold your red wagon in place is the same. The force will only increase 1) if the oil in the bearings heats up and begins to break down, or 2) if irregularities in the treadmill actually strike the wheels at high speed, causing them to jerk about and apply a momentary impulse to the wagon, or 3) if the tires blow out. Rolling friction is not a reasonable way to hold an airplane in place, even if we postulate a magic treadmill.

There is another flaw: in your interpretation of the problem, the moment the plane's engines overcome the static friction of the wheels, the treadmill will instantly accelerate to whatever ungodly speed is necessary to create enough rolling friction to stop the plane (or, realistically, to blow out the tires). All of the force to rotate the wheels, all of their angular momentum, comes from the treadmill. There's a chicken and egg problem here — what it causing the treadmill to accelerate? The wheels rolling. But what is causing the wheels to roll? The acceleration of the treadmill. Since (as you posit) the plane isn't moving in the slightest, the wheels are only spinning because the treadmill is, and vice versa.

In your comment above, you say, "a plane or a car with wings could both take off" in the Mythbusters version of the experiment, which leads me to believe you haven't quite gotten the question here. If you stick wings on a car and set it to rolling on a treadmill at 80mph, the treadmill will roll backwards at -80mph, and the car will be stationary at 0mph: it won't take off. If you set a plane on the treadmill and push the throttle to 80mph (or whatever throttle setting would ordinarily translate to 80mph), the treadmill will roll backwards at -80mph, and the plane will zip forward normally at 80mph, with the wheels spinning as if it were moving at 160mph. That's the difference, and that's what the question is examining: the fact that planes don't push against the ground, so treadmills don't affect them.

The "super-accelerating treadmill" question, which somehow uses rolling friction (which is constant) to hold a plane in place against the power of the engines, is broken: as soon as the plane moves forward the merest fraction of a micron, the conditions of the question (as you interpret them) fall apart. It also has nothing to do with our real-world understanding of planes or treadmills; it posits a treadmill going crazy, like a belt sander, trying to hold a plane stationary by rubbing madly against the bottoms of its free-spinning wheels. That's a ludicrous image. It's not an interesting question, and it's overspecified — you could do the same with glue, or by setting the plane's brakes. The treadmill, in that interpretation, is a red herring. Isn't it more likely that the super-treadmill interpretation is a corruption of the original, which is more interesting, and makes sense in the real world?

Also, you're being very rude. I understand you're frustrated, but I wish you wouldn't.

So that's what a baby copyfighter looks like. Congratulations, sir!

Enginerd, the original question does indeed posit that the treadmill matches the plane's forward speed — or, more precisely, the forward speed that it would have had without the treadmill. The "matching the speed of the wheels" wording is a corruption of the original, inserted to avoid the kind of circumlocution I used in the last sentence.

The original may seem like a trivial question to you, but it was sufficient to generate vast quantities of pointless internet debate, with both engineers and pilots on the wrong side of the issue. People think about cars on treadmills, and try to apply that to planes; the lightbulb moment when they realize that they operate entirely differently is the point of the original question, and for many perfectly intelligent people getting there is worth the price of admission.

The "super-accelerating treadmill" is not as interesting a puzzle, and breaks down upon examination. Yes, if you postulate a magic treadmill that somehow can hold the plane in place, it won't take off; that's not the intent of the original question, and as a physics puzzle it has serious flaws. (For one thing, rolling friction does not increase with speed, as you seem to be suggesting. It would only increase once the grease in the bearings began to break down, at which point you've got bigger problems.)

To Keith, re: Courier for manuscripts:

Partly I'm sure it's just what they're used to — any editor who's been in the business more than twenty years cut their teeth on typewritten manuscripts, which were (obviously) monospaced, so they find them easier to read, annotate, etc. Obviously, you should send them whatever they ask for. That standard is slowly changing; there are a lot of places that don't mind Times nowadays.

There are good reasons for wanting a monospaced font, though — it makes it easy to calculate page counts, for one thing. A line of 12-pt. Courier is always going to have about the same number of characters, and each page will have about the same number of lines, modulo paragraph ends and dialogue; editors have quick-and-dirty formulae they use to turn a manuscript into a published book in their heads. Courier also leaves plenty of space for edits — if you leave out a leter, there's enough room to mark it in Courier, whereas Times likes to eat up white space.

I'm sure (the apparently evil) TNH can shed more light than I can — I cribbed the bulk of this post from what she and other editors have posted online, on Usenet and other places.

As of 3PM February 1st, the one on Brattle in Harvard Square is gone. (That's the one seen beside a Victorinox Swiss Army knife logo in the photo.) A few silver brackets mark its former location.

I believe it was attached to a roll-up loading door, which might not have been the optimal location.

Chainring, your last sentence is entirely correct. However, a treadmill has no good way to stop a plane moving relative to the air.

DCulberson @125:

You might want to re-read my answer — I agree with you! The plane will take off, just as someone wearing roller skates on a treadmill will move forward if they pull themselves forward using a rope.

I find it helps to use Noen's treadmill and rope example, but with an important difference: picture yourself wearing rollerskates on one of those long airport treadmills. There's a rope tied to the wall far ahead of you, and your only means of forward motion is to pull yourself along using the rope. Unfortunately, the treadmill exactly matches your speed in the opposite direction. O noes! What will you do?!

Well, obviously, you'll pull yourself off the treadmill using the rope. If you're hauling yourself forward at 1 m/s, the treadmill will roll backward at 1 m/s, and your roller skate wheels will be freely spinning at 2 m/s. Your forward motion won't be significantly impaired by the treadmill, since roller skate wheel bearings are a crappy way to transmit frictional force to your body, and that's all the treadmill can do. In the same way, the plane engines, pushing against the air, won't be much bothered by the treadmill — that's the point of the puzzle, to demonstrate that cars and planes are sometimes different in counterintuitive ways.

Alas, the wording on the puzzle has gotten a little munged up, saying that the treadmill matches the wheel speed. That doesn't make a lot of sense — you need to imagine some sort of magic treadmill, since the tiniest forward motion will immediately result in an infinite-speed treadmill and a lot of melted airplane wheels. If the wheel speed exactly matches the treadmill speed at all times, forward motion is thereby defined to be impossible — not a very interesting puzzle, and not something that makes a lot of real-world sense re: treadmills.

Hrm. Acrobat can read them, but I'm getting white text on white in both Preview and the Firefox plugin I use for PDFs.

Making your own dough is easy-peasy. Here's the recipe I use:

Pour a packet of yeast into 1 1/3 cups of warm water. Let it dissolve. Add about 3.5 cups of flour, 2 Tbsp. olive oil, 1 Tbsp. honey, 1 tsp. salt, and maybe some dried oregano or red pepper flakes. Mix with a wooden spoon, then knead by hand for ten minutes until it's elastic. If it's too sticky, add up to half a cup more flour whlie you're kneading.

Divide it in half — this recipe makes two pizzas. Let the dough balls rise in a warm place for about an hour and a half, covered with plastic or a damp towel, then punch them down and let them sit for ten minutes before pressing them into rounds. Brush with olive oil and top however you like. (I discovered this summer that leftover black bean burrito filling makes a really good pizza, with grated cheddar and fresh cilantro.)

Bake at 475° for twelve minutes. For best results, preheat a baking stone while the dough is rising, then slide the topped pizza onto the hot stone — that seals the bottom of the crust for you. You'll want to dust whatever you're sliding it off of with corn meal, lest it get stuck.

Talia, I think the idea is that you're better off throwing yourself on people if you are unhealthily thin, not that it's better to be unhealthily thin in general.

I'm pretty active on the Apple forums (I'm one of the top-rated users in the iTunes for Mac forum), and I've only seen threads deleted if they contained 1) profanity/flaming or 2) instructions on circumventing DRM (particularly "How do I get a DVD onto my iPod?"). This isn't to say they never delete threads for other reasons — I'm sure the mods there make mistakes and get bugs up their butts like the rest of us — but I've never seen even intense complaining get deleted simply for criticizing Apple.

Is that "Magic Sand"? I had a bottle of that stuff when I was ten or so. It's great for making underwater sandcastles!

No, Darth Shelby — I'm pretty sure turning the Aunt Jemima icon on its head results in delicious syrup on my pancakes. I see neither pancakes nor syrup in this photo.

Stefan Jones: I believe that "original Superball" is 1 11/16" diameter, presumably to reduce the choking risk. The Superballs I remember (and the kind my cat likes to roll under the bookcases) are under an inch in diameter. Details here.

*lightbulb moment* That's why it was so damn hard to find another Superball for my cat to play with! She loves the one I had lying around from twenty years ago, but it keeps rolling under things and getting lost.

Takuan@98:

Better yet, try to hold an intelligent conversation about a popular YouTube video in the comments. That's a great illustration of what it's like to communicate in a fully unfettered medium — and of the paradox that freedom to say whatever you want sometimes diminishes the ability to communicate.

TNH@54 said, "That's why I'm here."

Yep — as I said @7, I don't think killfiles are all that useful in a moderated forum. But the hue and cry about censorship and Orwellian tactics sounds much the same to my ears, whether it arises over moderation or killfiles.

Someone let Gene Wolfe know they've invented fuligin.

This idea that intellectual honesty and freedom of speech demand that we read and absorb and refute every opposing viewpoint, no matter how puerile, insulting, or irrelevant, is very democratizing — very "internetty" — but ultimately, in a real world of finite free time, it's just not worth the payoff. Sometimes, you decide you just don't want to read what someone writes anymore, because you don't want to waste your time.

Oddly enough, the trolls and drive-by quippers fly into a tizzy whenever the concept of killfiles is floated, because they know they're not contributing anything of value to the conversation, and are desperately afraid that people will acquire the tools to ignore them. Trolls feed on attention; anything that comes between them and their captive audience is, obviously, a jackbooted Orwellian censorship tactic.

Santa@23: Okay...want to expand on that? As it stands, your statement, while quite possibly true, has little bearing on the discussion, because a content filter isn't a tool for censorship.

Do you read every comment on every BoingBoing post? If not, are you "censoring" the people whose posts you skip? Or are you making a reasoned guess that the posts you skip probably won't interest you?

Relax, folks. Killfiles have been around longer than HTML. Next you'll be telling me I'm censoring Proctor & Gamble by fast-forwarding past the commercials on my DVR....

Santa: It's not censorship to limit what you read, any more than unfriending someone on LiveJournal is censorship. Killfiles have a long and glorious history on Usenet. I didn't like to use them, but sometimes, for certain individuals (and subject lines), it became clear that their "contributions" would never justify the time spent skimming their posts. Free speech and diversity of opinion are fabulous things, but sometimes you need a filter for the pure noise, for the people who aren't even trying to hold a real conversation.

That said, I'm not sure how useful the concept is on a moderated forum, like BoingBoing's. But if people want to use it, it's a fine tool to have.

Nekura: You're in luck! Parts: the Clonus Horror was just released as part of the 12th box set.

DIVXBruce: I've got the Master Ninja Theme Song as my ringtone. Best song ever recorded.

Dargaud: Sounds like you might've seen a fan-made project. About 50 episodes have been released on DVD; you might want to give one another shot. (I recommend Pod People. It stinks!)

RyanH has it — an encyclopedia or concordance is absolutely legal, unless it includes large blocks of verbatim pulls from the work. If that's the case, and the quotes exceed a fair use determination, then there could be legal trouble.

That said, I took a look at a few Lexicon entries, and I didn't see anything that looked like a copy-and-paste. Rowling seems to be opposed not to text quotes in particular but to the idea of an unauthorized guide in general, which, at least under US law, probably isn't a supportable position. (In the UK, who knows? Not me.) There have been unauthorized guides to Star Trek, Star Wars, and everything else fandom has cared about for the last fifty years, so Rowling has an uphill battle. If she wins, it'll be a significant change in the interpretation of the law.

Mickey: Or, perhaps, over-Uzi?

Lizardman: well, that's a troubling free speech issue for some people, too. Certainly it's come up here at BoingBoing before.

Santa's Knee's comment that "what starts in the head, ends in the hand" can (and has) been used to justify all sorts of censorship. Don't like horror movies or violent video games? That's a great reason to ban them.

While I agree that the motto was probably not a great idea, Twig has a point here — people make inappropriate jokes all the time. The cut-up who suggested this motto probably never expected it to go beyond the other 42 graduates in his class. I could certainly see a small graduating class of MDs choosing a motto like "Supplying funeral homes since 1945" — if they figured it would cause a few chuckles at the party that night and then be forgotten. It's gallows humor; without more context, it's hard to pass judgment.

Insofar as she was escorted home, I expect she wasn't homeless.

That's not to say our "ignore the homeless" system is a good one, Noen. From a purely economic standpoint, it costs more in emergency room care and arrests to deal with the folks on the street than it would to provide inexpensive housing for every homeless person in America.

Sae: The 2007 data only covers the first half of 2007, according to the site.

RealCatholicMen wrote, "Frankly, the consistent exaggerations made by the left ruin their credibility."

Good point, RCM. Thank God for the right-wing blogs, which never exaggerate nothin'.

CKD wrote, "No, the transparent "STOP" signs on the label would be normally oriented unless you were looking at the sticky side of the label."

Oh, I see! That does make sense, then — the stop signs mark the thing that used to be secured with the tape to tell people that it was removed, and mark the tape as well so it can't be re-used.

Nick: I'd call a pacifistic philosophy as strong as yours (and mine) hardcore pacifism, yes, but I don't want to quibble over labels. If you're saying that justifications for war always sound a little mad to you, then I can get behind that, but there are so many people who aren't pacifists that I can't get up to "stark raving mad" just for advocating war in a particular fantasy circumstance.

Sabik wrote, "I suspect that (a) the point of the stop signs is that they're then missing from the label (ie, it's left with transparent "stop" signs)..."

It's a good theory, but I take issue with it: the stop signs left on the label would be backwards. The primary purpose would be the one that left you with readable stop signs, yes?

("Harrumph! This label says 'POTS'. Were you using it to label your cookware, young man?")

Nick:

I believe Absimiliard was saying that there are, theoretically speaking, causes that would be worth going to war for, even if the death toll would be six million US lives, particularly if it were the only way to save millions more. Like, "Dr. Xanadu is going to destroy the earth with his black hole machine! We have to stop him!" "Well, okay, but casualty estimates are six million." What do you say to that? I think that position is hard to call "stark raving mad", unless you're a hard-core pacifist. (I am, actually, but never mind that — I'm just trying to clarify the point here.)

I believe it's more of a tamper-evident seal — removing it leaves those blue stop sign patterns behind. I might speculate that it's not so much terrorist-proofing as a way for them to be sure no meddling kids have taken the extinguishers out for a joy ride that might leave them dangerously depleted...although the half-dozen residue prints that are already there seem to confuse the issue. A single set of blue stop signs would seem to communicate "Hey, someone was here monkeying around" pretty effectively.

Tom,

I only saw a couple of "food purist" statements here, and nobody saying anything about "unimaginable harm". If you were including me as a proselytizer, you should know that I eat plenty of meat myself — I just brought home some nice thin-sliced capicola and a string of linguiça, actually. There's a big gap between rabid veganism and accepting that red meat brings with it measurable risks.

If we want to talk about what's harming discourse in this country, I'd lay a lot of it at the feet of the false dichotomy, and there's a nice big one in your post: the world is divided into goofy "nutritional purists" and people "who realize that there is overwhelming data that the diet optimum for humans is enormously broad," with no room for people who hold reasonable opinions between the poles.

Noen: Prevention was where I found the info; follow the links to see where the data came from. The sources (both of the earlier study and the larger one refuting it) seemed pretty reputable.

Dragonet2 said, "if humans were that sensitive to animal flesh products we'd be extinct." I don't think anyone here said that undercooked meat causes human heads to explode on contact. But there are, statistically speaking, health risks inherent in consuming undercooked meat. It's a great way to transmit E. coli, salmonella, trichinosis, and a host of other nasties.

Wastrel: Thanks very much for the links!

Maplecheese et al.:

I remember reading that undercooked meat, because it bears more of a resemblance to your body, brings with it a higher risk of autoimmune trouble, but I can't give you a citation; it's just something that was floating around in my brain, and I may have misremembered the details. Here's a related quote from Prevention magazine, though:

"They found that among 264 subjects, those who averaged 2 or more ounces of red meat every day had almost double the [rheumatoid arthritis] risk of those eating less than an ounce a day. Red meat contains a lot of collagen, which may activate antibodies in people susceptible to the disease. Those antibodies are thought to trigger RA--an autoimmune disorder in which your body attacks itself, breaking down collagen in joints."

[link]

Does cooking break down collagen? If so, that may have been what I was remembering, though it was later refuted in a larger study (http://www.mskreport.com/articles.cfm?ArticleID=1199). Googling [red meat autoimmune] will provide a number of other links, some better than others. I'm certainly happy to admit I misremembered, but I wouldn't go so far as to say "it's so out there that nobody has BOTHERED to refute it" — clearly, someone has spent a lot of money refuting that particular red meat-autoimmune link.

Danegeld said, "Eating rare meat doesn't cause autoimmune disease ... the other carnivores on the planet do without cooking entirely & they're none the worse for it." Actually, Danegeld, wild animals die from horrible diseases all the time. Leaving aside the contentious autoimmune issue, carnivores certainly ingest a lot of nasty bacteria and parasites when they eat raw meat, which we eliminate through cooking. It's not immediately or invariably fatal, obviously but raw meat does carry health risks, which are statistically reflected in carnivore lifespans.

Calyth: As I understand it, once you have antibodies that target a certain kind of animal cell, it's fairly easy for them to mutate into antibodies for the equivalent cell in your own body — most of the cell-targeting design work has been done at that point. This happens when you eat rare meat: you develop antibodies that are good at recognizing raw cow muscle tissue. Eventually, a few of them may develop mutations that turn them against your own raw muscle tissue, and you end up with problems. This is (one reason) why eating rare meat is considered unhealthy.

Flying Dutchman:

For modern exhibitions, you're absolutely right. Often the work of a living artist, even in a museum that usually permits photography, will be displayed in a no-photo zone. The artist (usually) holds the copyright, and it's within his or her rights to forbid copying.

Most art, though, is not covered by copyright. Anything from 1923 or earlier is in the public domain, with some exceptions, so copyright concerns don't apply. (Certainly Greek vase-painters don't retain their copyright!) In those cases, the museums that forbid photography do so on the grounds that they're private property. And they're within their rights to do that, too — you can tell me not to make noise in your restaurant as well, or kick me out for not yodelling the Star Spangled Banner for that matter — but it seems a bit mercenary to some people. Museums, they would say, should be more interested in exposing people to art than making a buck, and should therefore welcome (non-flash) photography.

Camera flashes do put out a pretty intense packet of energy (albeit for a very brief time); it wouldn't surprise me if thousands of flashes a day had a nasty effect on 400-year-old pigments. Certainly six months in direct sunlight will wreak havoc on most modern pigments; is a constant barrage of flashes over the course of decades likely to do less damage?

But there's another very good reason to forbid flash photography in museums: it's hard to appreciate art in any kind of serenity with flashes flashing every few seconds. If we're voting, I'm in favor of the no flashes/no cell phones rule in museums (other than the kid-oriented ones).

At the Harvard museums (as I learned a few weeks ago), camera passes are available for free, but you first need to sign a form stating you won't use your flash. It seemed reasonable to me, particularly since my camera has an anti-shake feature built in that allows me to get pretty good shots in low light.

Nex: As I understand it, it's legal to use writable media to make a backup of copyrighted material, for your own personal use, but passing them on to others is a no-no in the US.

The legal decisions on all this are kind of a rats' nest, but I think you'd be fine lending a VHS copy of a show to your colleague, but in trouble if you kept your own VHS copy and gave him or her a duplicate (where "trouble" = "nothing will happen to you, but it's technically illegal"). If you end up with two copies in the possession of two people, it's illegal (again, as I understand it). Showing your copy to a roomful of people might get you into trouble for a different reason (it might be a "public performance") — though there are extensions to fair use for educational purposes.

(If the Betamax suit had gone the other way, even making backups and time-shifting might be illegal today — and of course the DMCA has made it illegal to back up anything with DRM.)

I don't really understand the justification of the surcharge on blank media, unless it's to compensate the media companies for lost revenues due to illegal copying. Certainly it didn't mean to imply that copying CDs for your buddies is legal. Anyway, I'm pretty sure the surcharge is no longer applied to most newer blank media (like DVD-Rs), and was only ever applied to so-called "music" CD-Rs, which were really just regular CD-Rs that cost more (and perhaps worked in those stereo component CD burners?).

Vik: There are third-party applications (like Senuti) that work very well for copying music from the iPod's database to your computer. It's a great way of restoring your data after a crash.

Nex: It is indeed illegal to copy a copyrighted MP3 from a device owned by one person to a device owned by another. If you're saying "Hey, listen to this" while you're standing right there, and delete the file immediately afterward, nobody is likely to care. But if you leave a copy of a copyrighted MP3 on your buddy's iPod or computer when you leave, then you've broken a law that existed long before the DMCA.

Copying it from a device you own to another device you own may be illegal, in some hair-splitting sense, but nobody will ever be prosecuted for it — that's how iPods work normally.

Porn For Creative Souls, there is a park on top. The photo caption in the original article reads, "The new accordian shaped building will feature a roof garden," which you can see in the photo.

Aw, bugger — it did it to my comment, too. It should have read:

I was wondering why I was seeing a lot of sentence fragments here (including in the original post, which ends "Variants include <4 is just brilliant." Firefox is turning the less than-slash-three emoticon into the start of an HTML tag, which isn't closed until the next greater-than sign.

Wacky.

I was wondering why I was seeing a lot of sentence fragments here (including in the original post, which ends "Variants include

Wacky.

One quick response to the AMPTP open letter linked to above, which says:

The AMPTP has offered to pay writers a percentage of the revenues the producer receives from licensing streamed content on the Internet. However, the Writers Guild is asking that writers get a percentage of what the Internet site owners receive in advertising revenues connected with the streaming content, even if producers are getting none of that money themselves.

On the face of it, this sounds pretty reasonable — until you realize that the "Internet site owner" streaming content produced by NBC is...NBC. As I understand it, the studio can license a show to itself for a penny, cheerfully pay the writers their percentage of that penny, then earn a million dollars in ad sales by streaming that video on their own website.

Of course it's not a "fundamental right" that all writers should get paid residuals, and no WGA member would say so. Work-for-hire, in which the writer gets paid a flat fee, is a standard contractual agreement, and that can work out just fine for everyone concerned.

What the WGA does is exchange part of that up-front fee for a share of future profits. If the work they help to create does well, they get more money; they're taking a risk based on the quality of their work. Sure, they could negotiate a different system that didn't pay residuals — but then they'd be entitled to a larger up-front fee, just like an employee that receives stock options as part of their employment package would be entitled to a higher salary if those stock options were taken away. Residuals tie payment to quality — or, at least, popularity — and thus act as a goad to better work (again, much like stock options, or a share in a co-op).

Internet distribution is going to eat away at TV rebroadcasts (the major source of residuals) and DVD sales (a minor source of residuals), for the simple reason that the internet and the TV are heading toward unification. My digital set-top box already isn't all that different from a computer with a hard drive, browser, and cable modem; in ten years, I doubt there'll be a distinction. As that process progresses, the balance will tip away from the writers; they'll be paid less in the future than they are now, even if the number of eyeballs watching their shows remains the same. Tying residuals to internet viewing is a way of automatically counterbalancing the scales — as eyeballs move away from traditional TV sets and to the internet, writers will continue to be paid as they are now. Does that really seem unfair?

I was told (by my cousin, who was a waitress at the time) that it was rude to leave awkward amounts of change as a tip. Tipping $2.83 to round your bill up to $10.00 is convenient for the cutomer, but do waitrons want to count out pennies and nickels at the end of the night? Or is this something I've been worrying needlessly about for the last fifteen years?

Here's a very thorough blog entry on the controversy: http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/03/hockey-stick-is-broken.html

I'm not going to speak to the specifics of climateaudit.org; I see a lot of scare quotes and biased rhetoric like "This genuflection towards global warming..." which ring warning (or warming) bells for me, but Wikipedia and the associated discussion pages can probably do a better job giving you a summary ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_McIntyre and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy ).

But I would like to address the idea that he "appears to be backing up his theories with data, tests, and reports." Anyone can post tables of data and pretty graphs that look "good enough", and it's been a known tactic of right-leaning anti-science sites to produce enough "science" to convince the average Joe that their sites have real weight. A typical reader (and I'm including myself in that category) doesn't have the tools to make a real judgment. It takes close analysis by experts in the field, who aren't biased by the name or affiliation attached to the data. This is why we have peer review — the people who are best qualified to review the data do so — and why scientific questions are rarely settled in the popular press.

As far as I could tell, McIntyre's data has not been peer-reviewed, and he holds no advanced degree; he seems to be trying to hold a scientific debate in the wrong venue.

They got the caption wrong. Their "highly intelligent and wealthy Eloi" is a Morlock, played by Jeremy Irons. Their photos illustrate the differences between Morlocks...and Morlocks.

I'm calling shenanigans, based on the following:

1) The clinic in Hungary does not open until 1/8/08.

2) Dr. Lajos Nagy is supposedly performing this operation in New York right now (on "over 1,000 ears"), but I can find no evidence of a Lajos Nagy practicing in NY.

3) If the pairs of sample photos were really taken four weeks apart, I'll eat any of my various hats.

4) The header images are stock photos: compare this to this stock image.

5) About 2/3 of the original content on the site is devoted to the ear-pointing technique; the many other services Dr. Nagy provides get barely a paragraph apiece.

Sorry, wanna-be Spocks and Elronds; this is a hoax.

Creepy? HOW CAN YOU NOT WANT ONE?

Woodja woodja woo, little spider squirrel!

I want to see it wrap its acorns up in little silk bundles.

Garrett:

A bit off the point here, but according to both Gaiman and Pratchett many (if not most) of the sillier bits of Good Omens were written by Gaiman, and many of the darker bits were written by Pratchett. (I believe I remember Gaiman saying he'd enjoyed having the chance to exercise the sillier side of his brain.) If you spent a week excising the bits you thought were "drivel", you'd most likely end up with a book that had a higher Pratchett-to-Gaiman ratio than the published version.

David B:

That little wrench icon next to your name takes people to your homepage — or would, if you included "http://" before the URL in your profile. (You can click the link beside my name to get to mine, for instance.) You don't need to include the URL as part of your signature — and it is considered bad form to do so.

The picture on the left looks a lot like a Muppet staring directly at the camera. It took me a moment to see that it was a person in profile.

However, I'm right there with ya on the warrantless wiretapping. Grar.

Stefan: That would be a joke. Jeff's Ambergris stories and novels are populated, some might say unhealthily so, with an extravagant assortment of freshwater squid: the Swollen Mantle Squid, the Stockton Disabled Squid, the Saphant Arse Squid, the Cyclopedic Swelling Squid, and so on.

DCulberson: A little off the point, but it's sometimes possible to do quite a bit of harm by telling everyone about the "sex offender" who's moved into your neighborhood. Those registries include a lot of harmless people — people who took a whiz in an alley at 3AM and got cited for indecent exposure, for instance. Not that I particularly want drunken alley-whizzers in my neighborhood, but handing out photos of the "sex offender" would amount to unfair fearmongering. Without caution and judgment, the sex offenders registries become a good way to slaughter someone's reputation for a minor offense. Lumping rapists and pedophiles and public urinators and back-seat sex-crazy teens together under one banner seems a bit silly to me.

(Even informing people about real, convicted molesters may lead to vigilantism and ostracism without making kids any safer. But that's a more contentious point.)

"The Vatican has actually been commercializing various bits and pieces of its heritage for some time now."

Well, yes. Since the fourth century or so.

That's a good point, Tubesoda, but what if I want to bequeath my MP3 collection to my fiancée when I die? I can't legally do so under these terms — she'd have to wipe them off my hard drive.

TNH wrote: "Sorry about that. It's useful for clarifying which bits of one comment pertain to which bits of another."

Ack — I wasn't referring to anyone in particular! Point-by-point replies can certainly be useful; I didn't mean to disparage them. What I meant to disparage, because I find it exhausting, is the technique of responding, one by one, to the individual sentences of an argument without addressing the whole, of burying your opponent beneath an avalanche of cavils and nested quote strings. Arguments like that grow like kudzu, because every paragraph of response offers a half-dozen places for quibbles to take root. Point-by-point quoting is a characteristic of such a debate, but it's not something I've seen anyone doing here.

Phasor, I checked over the comments, and I didn't see anyone here suggesting she should have been allowed to run and scream in the terminal. Nobody called her a "meek, innocent victim" — everyone here seems to agree that there should have been an official response. The questions surround what happened to her in custody, not whether she should have been apprehended in the first place. I'm not sure who you're responding to.

One thing I might suggest the cops should have done: watched her more closely. The article says they checked on her every 15 minutes; that seems insufficient for someone behaving as irrationally as she'd been.

My favorite was one of those hanging supermarket aisle markers, listing that aisle's items in two vertical columns of text, which I saw in Ann Arbor some years ago. The left and right sides read:

BABY NEEDS
DIAPERS

INFANTS WEAR
BABY FOOD

In my experience (on the aforementioned mailing lists, plus Usenet and so on), debates do tend to drown out other conversations. Someone who might have a small, casual comment to make might refrain from doing so because they don't want to spend the time rigorously debate-proofing it. On the internet, the response to such people tends to be "Suck it up!" or something similarly helpful; I personally prefer a less adversarial conversation experience.

This is not to say debates should never happen on BoingBoing — I'm really just opposed to a certain kind of clinical, line-by-line, back-and-forth dissecting of posts that characterizes one type of online debate, and which always seems to end in incivility. I have strong opinions about some things posted to BoingBoing, and hope to be able to keep discussing them!

Nick: absolutely! Debate is a great way to explore issues. But, as you say, a proper debate is "structured and encourages precision" — it has rules, which must be enforced by someone. If I go past my allotted time in a debate, I get cut off. If I use an ad hominem attack, I'm docked points. (I'm presuming here — I've never actually been in a debate club.)

In other words, a debate is, of necessity, more restrictive than a conversation. It requires the presence of a moderator, or everyone involved has to agree to abide by the same set of rules from the outset. That's hard to achieve on the internet, and it doesn't sound like it's the atmosphere I want to see on BoingBoing. I can't imagine it would make those who want a free range any happier.

My college SF-n-weirdness club (SWIL) has continued to stay in contact since graduation, largely through mailing lists. We have one called Chit-chat, and one called Debate, because we found that the two don't coexist particularly well. This isn't to say that one is good and one is bad — just that we've had to decide to keep them separate.

I should point out again that "Fuck that noise" was only what I noticed; it may not have had any effect on the moderation, and I don't think Teresa has mentioned it. Speaking only for myself, I'm still not sure how I could interpret it otherwise — what does "noise" refer to, if not the words someone wrote? Is it a colloquialism? Words are the closest thing to "noise" we have here, so I think that's the obvious first interpretation.

But Tim's been quite pleasant since then, and Tim and Teresa seem to agree — if I misinterpreted one thing he said, I have no trouble calling it a bygone.

JB: Conversation shouldn't be a contest. Somehow, on the internet, it always turns out that way, but none of the many good conversations I've had in my life have felt like contests. They've involved building on what other people have said, listening carefully, assuming good faith, developing ideas jointly. A contest is something one person can win only if another loses; in a conversation, if I may be Hallmark for a moment, everyone can win.

JB: If I recall correctly, the concern with voting is that people will game the system. IMO, voting systems encourage people to take sides, and further the (ubiquitous-on-the-internet) notion that conversation is a contest. A particularly apt putdown might gather a lot of votes, for instance, which would vindicate one subset of readers and make others smolder. A line is thus drawn.

If there must be a line, I'd prefer to see it drawn between "civil people who are contributing to the conversation" and "everybody else", with the latter category becoming vanishingly small over time. I don't have faith that that's the line any voting system would draw, because too many people egg on incivility. It takes a person.

Capt. Tim wrote, "i guess. but i'm on a lot of forums and i rarely encounter the idea that if you're critical to something someone posts you're critical of them."

"Fuck that noise" is not a reasonable criticism. It's crude, dismissive, combative, and insulting. If you were having dinner at my house and you said "Fuck that noise" in response to something I said, I would not, unless we were on very good terms, invite you back. This is not because I object to disagreement — if you said "Actually, I disagree..." or "That's flat-out wrong, and here's why..." it could lead to a fine discussion. You might even say "Fuck that show" if we were disagreeing about the quality of Heroes this season. But "Fuck that noise"? There, you're saying my words don't merit a response — they're just noise.

Teresa has stated she doesn't censor, block, de-publish, or disemvowel dissenting opinions or criticisms. (I myself frequently disagree with Cory D. about copyfighting.) But she does (apparently) object to incivility and personal attacks, which is a stance I frankly support. If you want your posts to appear as you wrote them, adopt a reasonable tone. I'd advise against opening with "Fuck that noise," unless the post happened to be about a horrible buzzing noise that's driven people in your town from their homes.

Again, I'm not empowered to speak for BoingBoing, or Teresa, or anybody involved here. But this much seems obvious to me.

Tim: I'm not privy to the internal decision-making processes of BoingBoing, but until I read your post just now I was dead certain that "Fuck that noise" referred to Xeni's post. I'm happy to believe it was just a misunderstanding, but I can also see how Teresa and/or Xeni would interpret it as hostile, either to Xeni or to another poster in the thread.

I suspect the AT&T clause exists to permit them to shut down cockfighting fan sites and pedophilia blogs — i.e., things that might get other people to complain, "How dare you host this on your servers?!" — rather than stifle customer dissent. IANAL, but that seems plausible to me, since MySpace and SixApart just went through similar, and very public, shakedowns.

Captain Tim, your "non-confrontational" statement that got edited opened with "Fuck that noise." See the disconnect?

You can tell Poweroid isn't a troll by the way his sig link doesn't send people to goatse.

No, wait.

Leonidas:

I think that any post that begins with "Fuck that noise," as Capt. Tim's did, is waving a big ol' "Moderate me please!" flag. That's not a marker of reasoned discourse.

I happen to agree with Teresa that it's all but impossible to have a good conversation on the internet without some form of top-down moderation. I watched Usenet founder and sink under the weight of trolls in the late 90s; since then, I've seen social protocols sprout up all over the internet that promote the same kind of brash, confrontational, line-by-line nitpicky discourse that sank Usenet — social protocols that elevate one kind of "survival of the fittest" discourse at the expense of all others, and at the expense of the commerce of ideas. In large part, I've given up conducting discussions in comment threads, because, without moderation, they veer off into personal attacks and rhetorical tricks, into a zone where conversation is a contest, and that's worth neither my time nor my emotional investment. But it doesn't really matter what I think about moderation — the fact is, the BoingBoingers feel it's important, and this is their space.

You say, I particularly like the bit where she says she doesn't edit content, she only removes the vowels. Delicious! Teresa draws a distinction between changing or removing semantic content and altering the appearance of a post. I think that distinction was probably clear to you, and your deliberate disingenuousness is one signifier of the sort of discourse you feel more at home with.

In the thread you link to, Teresa admits that the moderation system is still on its shakedown cruise; naturally, there will be problems. She seemed surprised that people found it hard to read disemvowelled posts, for instance. But I know she's a well-intentioned and wise person who's doing her best when faced with a herculean task that I wouldn't touch with your fingers; you should ask yourself: Is snarkily comparing her methods to Chinese oppressors going to help or hurt, in the long run?

Again, it is important for us (particularly Bricology) to remember that she was not attempting to fly — she had stepped into the airport to ask a question at the info desk. She was there to collect an arriving friend, and was threatened when she was outside the airport on a traffic island.

If she was not attempting to fly, why was she any more dangerous in the airport than she was on the subway? Or should we have pointed guns at her there, too?

JTG: What's wrong with, "Excuse me miss, could you show me what that blinking thing is?" You know — the way they respond to laptops.

[Edit: My last post should have read "Mass police have a history [...]," not TSA. I don't think TSA was at all involved here.]

Jacob Davis: That's exactly the point. If a bomb can look like a laptop or an electronic art project or a pair of shoes, why single out this particular bit of electronics? Wouldn't a real terrorist, say, wear the blinking electronics under the hoodie? And not ask a question at the information desk before leaving the airport?

It might be possible to point at any single instance and say, "Okay, sure, that's a legitimate mistake." But TSA has a history of this, and the ratio of false alarms to real threats is skyrocketing. Is "Ack, it blinks!" really a good enough reason to point a machine gun at a nineteen-year-old girl? At what point do we start examining their methods? At what point does the disconnect between "youthful misjudgment about a pretty bit of soldering" and "armed response" merit a reaction? Does a college kid need to be gunned down before we say, "Oh, hey, wait, hold on"?

You can tell me, "That guy's got some mean dogs in the park, and they're not on a chain. Don't go in there carrying meat, or if you've recently been working with meat, or really with any food at all." And maybe it would indeed be unwise to go into the park holding a ham sandwich. But that shouldn't stop us from asking, "Why are the dogs so mean? Why aren't they on a leash? Why am I in danger when I'm not doing anything wrong?"

It's possible for more than one person to be wrong in a situation. In this situation, one side has the authority and the guns.

To BoingBoing in general: I'm in Boston. Is there any way I can help this girl out, or show my support?

A point that may have been overlooked: she wasn't trying to pass through security and get on a plane. She was there to meet someone on an arriving plane, and asked someone at the info desk for information. The machine guns came out while she was waiting on a traffic island outside the airport.

I asked my mom about her shoe-painting technique, since I thought folks might be interested in making their own. This was her reply:

I just paint them with acrylic paints (any will do, I use either liquitex or a cheaper type Delta Ceramcoat available at craft stores, but for either you need to add some "textile medium" to help it stick to the fabric (Delta Ceramcoat or Josannia (sp?) makes one). Also try to remove some of the sizing out of the sneaker fabric first (scrub with a washcloth or something). Use a "Sharpie" or permanent marker for fine detail. Be careful to not paint TOO thickly or it will crack upon wearing. Also the paint should be thin enough to soak into and attach to the fabric but not so thin as to run or bleed. I often need to do a couple of coats of some colors for good coverage. Guess people could seal them with a spray finish but I haven't tried that--Blair matte spray finish or even scotchguard should work well! Good luck!

Feel free to spread her technique to other blogs or whatnot — I'll add that testing your technique on the underside of the tongue might be a good idea! I can testify that this technique should result in a paint job that will outlast the seams on the shoes — I have some she made me about twenty years ago on which the paint, while faded, looks a lot better than the semidetached soles.

Aha! I was going to sing the praises of the Mirado Black Warrior myself, but somebody beat me to it. It's the best "cheap" pencil I've found. I've encountered a little trouble with weak erasers, though — I've had two or three nearly-new erasers break off at the collar while erasing. But I love their smooth dark lines and gold-foil lettering!

Andrewtee:

My god! It's like a giant Annette Funicello tripped and smashed through the ceiling of their house.

In Borges's library, Grimmelman tells us, "All possible books already exist; no further incentive is required to bring them into being." This, he says, is why the concept of copyright is meaningless in the Library of Babel — which makes good sense, within the context of the story. (Indeed, I'm not sure how a writer could be compensated for adding even a new book to an infinite library, given that nobody would ever find it.)

He then, problematically, goes on to extend it to the real world, where he claims "the information production problem has been solved." But as Robster points out, the internet is not infinite, and (I hope) we have not yet produced all the books we need to. The "information-consuming public" is not "properly the sole beneficiary of information policy" — we still need the tradeoff. His points about search engines are quite good, but for copyright the analogy breaks down in a pretty obvious way.

I agree, Geno! The goal is to make sure that all of the information the recipient needs is easily accessible (and, secondarily, to send a concise and appealing email). Burying that information in a nested >>>> avalanche isn't going to save your recipient any time. Better to selectively quote the salient details, and snip the salutations and .sigs, sez me.

(The exception comes if you're writing to someone who requires a bit trail of the entire correspondence for legal or other reasons, but that's presumably not usually the case.)

...just hand-waving and dark muttering about a mythological future when book-lovers give up their printed books for electronic book-readers...

It looks to me like there's a bit of hand-waving on both sides — neither side has the "controlled, quantitative data" to do much more. Cory does have a bit more data, since he's (laudably and audibly!) jumped with both feet into the experiment, but...well, always in motion, the future is.

It's this "mythological" future that's the sticking point for me — it just doesn't seem that mythological. I can't quite convince myself that nobody's gonna come out with an iTunes for books in ten or five or two years that suddenly makes reading books on-screen really popular, and paper books the domain of fogeys. (ObSF: Rainbows End.) There was a time in the not-too-distant past when LPs were fetish objects, too — they offered that slightly musty vinyl smell, the slippery tactile bliss of the disk slipping free of the tissue paper sleeve, the coy little hiccup of noise when needle met groove. While I'd love to believe books will always need bookshelves and fingers to turn their pages, I can't quite subscribe to their permanence, and any argument that rests thereon.

(Unrelatedly, the gray boingboing logo at the top of the page has a tiny yellow line above the final "g". Dunno if that was mentioned in the mega-thread about the redesign.)

Indeed, he previously created a system called "Shades of Grey" that is supposed to ruin the ebook downloading experience by poisoning the Internet with corrupted copies of ebooks. He convinced SFWA to appropriate funds from its operating capital to patent this idea, on the basis that publishers would pay SFWA to use it to make science fiction ebooks less attractive to readers (I don't understand the logic of this either).

The logic seems pretty clear — by devaluing illegitimate copies of ebooks in relation to authorized copies, I expect he hoped to make authorized copies more attractive to users. The same thing has been used to destabilize rival currencies — by releasing a lot of counterfeit coins stamped with your competitors' mint mark, your own coins increase in relative value.

Content providers who release free content often do the same thing — you get a degraded version for free (a small image, a lossy audio file) and a snazzy version if you pay. Burt was presumably trying to come up with a way to degrade the free versions that had been released without the consent of the authors. I don't know if it worked — I wouldn't expect it to, since it could be defeated by user reliability ratings of downloadables — but the logic seems easy to follow, and suggesting he did it to "make science fiction ebooks less attractive to readers" seems to be an oversimplification.

Mightn't it be the other way 'round — that couples who are less focused on traditional gender roles are more likely to cohabit? My sweetie and I have been living together for ten years, and are planning to be wed next summer — I doubt the housework division will suddenly skew.