Here’s a picture of some alley or back of a house somewhere. In order to get the full effect, you have to really examine the picture. In particular, look at the mattress and the rubber hose on the floor…is this a drug den? Who knows? Is that a person in the doorway, reaching for something on the floor? Who knows? But, if you wait at least 30 seconds, the creepiness will reveal itself.

The New Scientist has a Marijuana Special Report that covers Decriminalization, Addictiveness and affects on memory.

<q>Most people think of marijuana users as dreamers with the attention span of a gnat and no memory worth the name. Wrong. The picture emerging from psychology labs is that there is at most a kernel of truth in this stereotype, while some studies find no evidence of even subtle mental impairment in heavy users. And even those that do are open to a range of interpretations —... [More]

Sometimes, you just can’t tell. This quiz, called Playboy.com’s Breast Test II was received via email and converted to web format (to avoid sending around an Excel document).

The claimed average number correct is about 12.5, but a small (12 people) sampling of friends averaged much higher at ~17.1. On average, women (10, 17, 19,19,19,19) scored 17.17 and men (16,16,17,17,18,18) scored 17. However, women had a median score of 19 and men still scored 17. Men win for consistency, but women seem... [More]

Some of you may remember the Flash animation of a martial arts movie in 2D (Xiao Xiao I?). The latest in the series is Xiao Xiao 7 and is in 3D with considerably higher production values. The shootout near the end is pretty amazing.

The home page for this Flash artist also has an interactive game that is another, ‘how the heck is that done in Flash?’ kind of game. It’s also in 3D and follows the TimeCop style of gameplay. The whole page is in some non-Western character set, but the game is... [More]

The reviews of Black Hawk Down seem to be uniformly good. The film purports to document the downing of a helicopter (or two?) during the U.S. invasion intervention aid effort in Somalia in 1993. The movie begs research because Hollywood covering such a story, especially now with the word “terrorist” as ready to spring from the mouths of officials as “communist” was from Joe McCarthy’s, seems ripe for misinterpretation, if not deliberate obfuscation of fact. Also, recent reports indicate that,... [More]

Are you delegating enough? Think again…

A brand-new application has arrived for earthli.com. earthli Recipes lets users publish, print, sort and comment on recipes.

Here’s an interesting use of Flash animation to make a new style of digital clock. Check out the Industrious Clock by Yugo Nakamura.

Alternet published The Day Ashcroft Foiled the FOIA about one of the more disturbing actions of the U.S. Attorney General. On October 12th, 2001:

<q>In a memo that slipped beneath the political radar, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft vigorously urged federal agencies to resist most Freedom of Information Act requests made by American citizens. … When coupled with President Bush’s Nov. 1 executive order that allows him to seal all presidential records since 1980, the effect is positively... [More]

Dmitry Sklyarov has escaped sacrifice on the altar of the DMCA. He is the programmer for the Russian software firm Elcomsoft that cracked the pitiful copy-protection on the Adobe E-Book Reader in order to allow users to make backups of books they bought. After an initial outcry, Adobe dropped the case, but the U.S. Attorney’s office pursued the first case to prosecute for violating the DMCA.

He was eventually released 5 months later and spent the holidays at home, in Russia. However, the O’Reilly... [More]

Mark Morford has a new article, Everyday Mundane Warmongering… talking about how easy it is to forget that there’s a war going on. The bombing continues in Afghanistan (and Iraq). The Phillipines has edged out Somalia, Iraq and Yemen as the next likely target of American attack. Apparently, the increase in military funding there wasn’t sufficient to hold back the rebels, so away we go.

<q>So now we simply forget about the war, accept its nagging everpresence, like getting used to a bad... [More]

This is “topical” humor, so it could go in Current Events, but let’s leave that as dour and depressing as possible. AlterNet has Bush’s First Year: A Quiz by Daniel Kurtzman. It’s a 23 question quiz about events in the U.S.‘s first year under the second Bush. It’s hard to get them all correct.

Since he published the quiz as text-only and gave the answer key at the end, I’ve produced an interactive version that grades the test for you afterwards. It’s the same quiz, so I highly recommend using... [More]

Plastic.com has a discussion called The Power of a Good Myth referring to a Yahoo News article called Facts Find Sept. 11 Myths Misleading. The article touches on the interesting phenomenon of “if you say it, it’s true” kind of myths that crop up.

For example:

<q>After Sept. 11, says Laura Bush, divorce is down, weddings are up and “families have come together.‘’ … In fact, fewer folks are taking vows and more are splitting up, says the available data, and hounds are twice as likely as... [More]

Cryptome published Coming Soon: Hollywood Versus the Internet recently, detailing the players involved in the Hollings bill (also called the SSSCA), which has been submitted to Congress. The bill basically involves making it a felony to produce an information device that does not have government-approved hardware DRM (Digital Rights Management) built into it.

A few years ago, Napster scared the hell out of the recording industry and Hollywood is moving to ensure that they get a jump on the... [More]

SatireWire announced that a Surprise Settlement Evenly Splits Microsoft… into two pieces, but not separated into ‘operating systems’ and ‘applications’, as previously proposed, but into ‘software’ and ‘patches’.

<q>Critics immediately charged that the settlement — which overrides a previous agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice — does nothing to diminish Microsoft’s standing as the world’s most powerful software company. But industry analysts argued that providing patches for... [More]

CNN has Gates Orders ‘Trustworthy Computing’ announcing yet another Microsoft initiative that claims to put user’s security concerns first. After the spate of problems reported in Microsoft software (Windows Update, Windows Media Player, numerous IE security holes and the UP&P XP hole), its not surprising to see Gates himself come forward to say he’s going to put a stop to it. But is it more than just lip service this time? Probably not.

Counterpane’s latest Crypto-Gram (January 15, 2002)... [More]

The Chicago Sun Times reports in New bag checks to begin Friday that “each of the 3.8 million pieces of checked luggage on U.S. domestic flights every day will have to be screened for explosives”.

Unfortunately, with only 2 days to go, there is no indication yet of what the actual implementation of this bag-check is going to be. One of the proposed methods involves using expensive bomb-screening machines that are in extremely short supply. Couple the new law requiring that each bag be checked... [More]

Tom Turnipseed writes A Creeping Collapse in Credibility… for CounterPunch about the Bush administration’s entanglements in oil policy. Dick Cheney is especially suspect, since:

<q> … [He] was then CEO of Haliburton Corporation, a pipeline services vendor based in Texas. Gushed Cheney in 1998, “I can’t think of a time when we’ve had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian. It’s almost as if the opportunities have arisen overnight. The good Lord... [More]

Mark Morford writes Supersizing Your Afterlife about the death of Wendy’s founder, Dave Thomas.

<q>Because isn’t it funny in a sad and ironic sort of way how we as a culture wouldn’t care much to openly weep over the diligent and hard-working (and long- dead) founders of say, Philip Morris or Dow Chemical, but when it’s a gentle old fatherly type who’s on TV all the time espousing tasty foodstuffs that just so happen to inflict millions and kill thousands and it’s all couched in homespun... [More]

Oz has added over 30 new (old) pictures to his Autobiography album. There are a lot of pictures from his early years.

There are over 130 new pictures in Kath & Marco’s Switzerland 2001 album. There are albums for Pilatus, San Bernardino, Ermes’ Family Trip, Werner & Ekhlas’ House and the 1st of August.

MNFTIU is back with 4 more pages of getting your war on. The link is to page 3, but pages 4-6 are available at the top of the page. On page 4, you’ll find such gems as:

<q>Man! I like a good stiff Operation Enduring Freedom as much as the next guy, but I’ve reached my limits of understanding! All of a sudden my fucking mailman is a Hero on the Front Lines in the War Against Terror? My daughter wants to sell cookies to help the people my nephew’s been sent to fucking bomb? I’m supposed to help... [More]

Common Dreams published New Turbine Can Extract Energy from Flowing Water. Alexander Gorlov, who worked on the Aswan Dam in Egypt is currently testing the new design that could provide a cheaper, less invasive form of hydro-power than that provided by dams.

<q> … Gorlov’s turbines have other advantages, proponents say: When they generate electricity, you can’t see them, you can’t hear them, and they’re virtually disruption-free.</q>
 

Have you ever seen those ASCII pictures that look like they took forever to create? There’s a tool called MosASCII that makes it easy to construct them in HTML, in full color.

I made the earthli globe into ASCII art. It’s easy.

In other ASCII art news, The Register reports in Ever wanted to see Star Wars in Telnet? that a “whacked Dutch hardware geek” called Sten has converted Star Wars into 13,935 frames of Telnet action. As the title of the article suggests, you simply must check it out if... [More]

Security Focus ran a longish article called Lamo’s Adventures in WorldCom about a lone 20 year old hacker who finds holes in corporate web sites not by hacking, but just by looking for them. He has no home and often spends all night in a Kinko’s with his old laptop jacked into a free connection. He doesn’t take advantage of the information he finds and, once he’s finished, usually turns it over to the company he ransacked, along with a map of all of the holes in their Net.

Bruce Sterling, a science fiction writer, gave an interesting talk recently about the state of cryptography today. He talks about what we all thought the net would be like today and how it’s ended up where it is. Where did all of that ‘geeks’ will rule the world stuff go? Well, he says:

“So where are these imaginary earthshaking geek outlaws who laugh in derision at mere government? Well, they do exist, and they’re in Redmond. The big time in modern outlaw geekdom is definitely Microsoft. ... [More]”

For those who’ve ever struggled to determine what pixels per inch actually means when applied to the real world, the thread DPI: TRUTH OR LIE? at TalkGraphics provides many answers.

The basic gist is that when you store a graphic in Photoshop, it asks for the Pixels per Inch for the graphic. If this graphic will never be printed or does not need to retain its crispness when printed, this number does not matter at all. With an increasing amount of content created exclusively for the web, the... [More]

The most complete history of UseNet, an enormous news archive has been resurrected and indexed at Google Groups. The announcement mentions the historical aspects of this archive:

<q>We are compiling some especially memorable articles and threads in the timeline below. For example, read Tim Berners-Lee’s announcement of what became the World Wide Web or Linus Torvalds’ post about his “pet project”.</q>

In case you thought the U.S. would be too busy fighting the war on terror to continue the war on drugs, think again. The war on drugs was fought all through the war on communism, after all. The Bush administration (U.S.) recently appointed a new drug czar to take on the responsibilities of the war on drugs. The choice of John Walters indicates no end in sight for treating drug use as a moral issue and treating it with punishment. Mother Jones published America’s Lonely Drug War on Dec 14, 2001,... [More]

Mo’ Money

ArabNews reports that at the end of November, the US Congress helps itself to hefty raise.

“Congress does have a history of being generous to itself: In 1975, the annual congressional salary was $44,600. In 1990, it was $97,500. As of January 2002, that salary will jump to $157,105. Simply put, their salary has increased 48 percent in the last decade, and increased 13 percent since 1999, according to the Congress Disbursing Office?s Quarterly Report.”

I presume that’s for the bang-up... [More]