JeffBell at #10 is right: This study seems to have a reasonably sensible design. There's a phone strapped to everybody's head, and that phone is sometimes on and sometimes off. The computer running the experiment knows when it is on or off; nobody else knows.

(Presuming, of course, that the experiment was being run correctly and there wasn't some as-yet-unknown factor that gave it away... Does the phone change temperature as it changes modes? Does the surrounding air change temperature? Is the phone completely silent in all modes? Does the phone not interfere with the EEG equipment itself? Some of these questions are probably addressed in the existing studies; the rest will hopefully be covered by the inevitable follow-up studies.)

"Khan left early for a job interview with the European Space Agency."

See if you can spot the subtle flaw in this simulation of the "psychological issues" of living in a small can, nine weightless months away from home. :)

"Quantum teleportation" is an embarrassingly awful technical term. It actively misleads and confuses every single person who hears it. As if quantum mechanics weren't confusing enough already!

Thank you so much for the link to "Gisele Kerozene". I saw it in some animation festival in the late eighties and have remembered it ever since, but had no idea what it was called or who made it.

Youtube is awesome.

I wonder why these films are so shaky and handheld-looking -- not just for the actors (that's rather easy to explain) but for the backgrounds as well? Would one of those Make Magazine-style $10 Stedicams improve matters? Or, you know, a dolly? (Not that films like this ever have the budget for that...) Or is it an aesthetic choice? It could be that having the camera shake a bit helps to obscure the fact that the actors are mysteriously... jumpy from frame to frame, and that therefore it actually makes the whole thing look better.

Um, by "March 3", do you really mean "September 7"? Because that's what all the links seem to say. :)

This was a great Mission Impossible episode back in the 1960s. Except that the tiny guy in the suitcase was a master safecracker, and the bus was a vault at some expensive Swiss hotel for spies, or something.

As a banjo player I find this extremely interesting.

Of course, trying to get a banjo into perfect tune may cause the robot to start smoking and blow up, like on Star Trek.

Hawth at #4: Sure, it's true that this is probably a stupid mistake made by a lowly intern at Fox. Sure, it's true that in a just world we would be inclined to give that intern a break and forgive Fox for ripping off someone's pic without compensation or attribution.

The problem is that this doctrine doesn't extend both ways. We happen to know -- to pick just one example -- that if you are a 19-year-old who uses her digital camera to sample 20 seconds of the Transformers movie, you will not be forgiven for your stupid rookie mistake. You will be taken to court by the county prosecutor and forced to plead guilty to a misdemeanor.

That particular case didn't involve Fox, as far as I know. But Fox condones such legal action, if only by being part of the MPAA.

If Fox is willing to agree that sampling their material and posting it on Youtube is legal, then I think the company might be forgiven their innocent mistake in this case. But if Fox insists on continuing to promote an insane legal standard of caution for reused material, they need to be held to that same standard. Otherwise we end up in a world where rich, well-lawyered companies copy whatever they want at the cost of the occasional apology when their "mistakes" get noticed... while poor citizens are sued, extorted, or criminalized for the very same behavior.

In all seriousness: Eno is a decent choice because the challenge of the job is to gain the respect and the attention of the *politicians*. Compared to making an MP understand Bittorrent, talking to kids is (pardon the expression) child's play. Especially for a guy who is a legendary *producer*, a job which involves a lot of communication with other artists.

I would expect Eno to deploy a small army of younger, better connected front-line operatives who will mingle with the youth and find out what's going on. (i.e. "he will read a lot of Facebooks and exchange emails with danah boyd".) Eno's own job will be to translate their mysterious mutterings into language that the clueless pols can understand.

John at #2: "What if we're black" is a very good question indeed. This "free gifts" idea is a tailor-made excuse for "randomly" pulling people over for no reason.

"I don't pull people over for driving while black! I just happen to find that black people really like coffee!"

Starbucks will put a stop to this in a nanosecond once they find out. No company on this Earth, except perhaps weapons companies, wants their product associated with the cop that just pulled you over.