Cory Doctorow:
Pink Tentacle describes the practice of growing giant rice-paddy illustrations "by growing a little purple and yellow-leafed kodaimai rice along with their local green-leafed tsugaru-roman variety." There's a fantastic gallery of these illustrations, ranging from "36 Views of Mount Fuji" to various demons, gods and traditional illustrations, as well as the Mona Lisa. Link (Thanks, Karen!)

Cory Doctorow: British designer Jennifer Collier makes all manner of impractical garments out of unlikely material (a dress made from teabags!). What got me was this miniature dress sewn from vintage letters and envelopes. Link (via Craft)

Cory Doctorow: Bruce Sterling is blogging as Harvey Feldspar, a free-wheeling, globe-trotting geoblogger from the year 2017. There's a ton of eyeball-kicks here, vividly imagined and sharply critical visions of what a world built out of objects that know their location in space and time would look like. Look on the page for the material about Feldspar's Congressional testimony about the obsolescence of passports and the rise of the European cell-phone-based border crossings (and don't miss the trenchant commentary on the notional Berlin geohacker scene of 2017!).

The US should do what the Japanese do: track every foreigner's mobile. If he does anything freaky, jump on him.

"But Mr. Feldspar, suppose this international criminal doesn't carry a mobile?" demanded representative Chuck Kingston (R-Alabama). It would have been rude to point out the obvious. So I didn't. But look, just between you and me: Anybody without a mobile is not any kind of danger to society. He's a pitiful derelict. Because he's got no phone. Duh.

He also has no email, voicemail, pager, chat client, or gaming platform. And probably no maps, guidebooks, Web browser, video player, music player, or radio. No transit tickets, payment system, biometric ID, environmental safety sensor, or Breathalyzer. No alarm clock, camera, laser scanner, navigator, pedometer, flashlight, remote control, or hi-def projector. No house key, office key, car key... Are you still with me? If you don't have a mobile, the modern world is a seething jungle crisscrossed by electric fences crowned with barbed wire. A guy without a mobile is beyond derelict. He's a nonperson.

I didn't say any of that to the politicians. They don't want to be taught things by bloggers in public. They consider it an act of enmity.

Link

javipas writes "Despite all the controversy about Wikipedia's work model, no one can argue the potential of a project that has so effectively demonstrated the usefulness of the 'wisdom of crowds' concept. And that wisdom has detected a large number of mistakes in one of the most revered founts of human knowledge, the Encyclopedias Britannica. Among the wrong information collected on this page are the name at birth of Bill Clinton and the definition of the NP problems in mathematics."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I just noticed something really useful on the iPhone. If you click the Recents option in the Phone app you’ll see a list of recent outgoing, incoming, and missed calls. If you don’t recognize a number, tap the little blue arrow to go to the info page for that number. Below the number you’ll see the physical location of the number based on the area code.

That’s just plain thoughtful! I just love stuff like that. The little details that make you go “Ah ha!”

I didn’t recognize a call from 574 so I tapped the arrow and found out it was from South Bend, IN.

Mark Frauenfelder: From Wikipedia:

The Mull of Kintyre test was an unofficial guideline said to have been used by the British Board of Film Classification in the United Kingdom to decide whether an image of a man's penis could be shown.

The BBFC would not permit the general release of a film or video if it depicted a phallus erect to the point that the angle it made from the vertical (the "angle of the dangle" as it was often known) was larger than that of the Mull of Kintyre, Argyll and Bute, on maps of Scotland.

Link (Via Sexoteric)

Computers have been beating humans at chess for a long time now, and just recently a group of scientists announced that they had developed an invincible checkers computer. But getting a computer to excel at poker has been something of a challenge. Whereas in chess and checkers, all of the necessary information is available to the computer for it to compute, in poker the players are dealing with imperfect information. Thus, good poker players often rely on feel and intuition, which are weak spots for machines. But computers are getting better, and starting today, a new poker-playing computer will square off against two poker pros in a contest to determine whether this bastion of human superiority is bound to fall. The program's developers have come up with a clever method to minimize the role of luck, as the computer will play two separate games simultaneously against the pros. The exact same cards will be dealt in each game, but in one game, the human will receive the cards that the computer got in the other game, and vice versa. In the end, the winner will be determined by combining the humans' chips and comparing them to what the computer has. Obviously, one contest won't be enough to give a definitive answer on this question, but if the computer does well, it will indicate that certain traits, like intuition, can actually be programmed to some extent.

In today's NYTimes (registration required), Paul Krugman's op-ed piece lays out in simple terms the statistical power shift in the online economy among Europe, Japan, and the US. This shift has been discussed here for some time, but it's good to see it coming to the attention of a wider audience. Quoting: "As recently as 2001, the percentage of the population with high-speed access in Japan and Germany was only half that in the United States. In France it was less than a quarter. By the end of 2006, however, all three countries had more broadband subscribers per 100 people than we did... [W]hen the Bush administration put Michael Powell in charge of the FCC, the digital robber barons were basically set free to do whatever they liked. As a result, there's little competition in U.S. broadband — if you're lucky, you have a choice between the services offered by the local cable monopoly and the local phone monopoly. The price is high and the service is poor, but there's nowhere else to go."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mark Frauenfelder:
(Click on thumbnails for enlargement)

The wonderfully talented Amanda Visell has a new art book, called Popping Through Pictures. In Amanda's world, children play with nanny robots and hide under their covers from closet-dwelling beasties, animals sit on the porch and play old timey music, and elephants happily swallow English double decker buses.

Her use of gouache (opaque water color paint) brings to mind the whimsical work of Disney concept artist Mary Blair.

She'll be at the ComiCon in San Diego, signing copies of her book and selling her "What did I eat? -- Ephunt" set which includes a unique hand painted sculpture and print, in a limited edition of 25 for $300.

Visit her at the Munky King booth #4639 Friday and Saturday 11-12, and at the Baby Tattoo booth #601 Friday at 4.

$16.50 at Amazon.com

Thanks for all the great advice on configuring Apache on the Mac. After wading through all the options, many of which included mastering system options that I don't care about, and have nothing to do with the problem I want to solve, I decided to give MAMP a try, and so far so good. It's doing what I want to do, without having to enable root access.

Cory Doctorow: Mary Lou Jepsen, CTO of the One Laptop Per Child Foundation, has announced that the foundation may sell its ruggedized "$100" laptops in the developed world next Christmas, marking them up to either $350 or $525. When I first heard about the OLPC, I immediately said, "I'll buy three for a developing country if I can buy one more for myself" (once I got to play with one, I grew even more convinced that I wanted this!). I think that the high pricetag might turn people off, though -- instead, they should market this as "Buy three OLPCs for kids in poor nations, and we'll sell you one for your own use." That would be a killer Christmas gift.

The One Laptop Per Child Foundation's rugged XO laptop could initially sell for just $350, or twice its production cost, although the group is also considering a $525 price tag, said OLPC chief technology officer Mary Lou Jepsen.

If the XO laptop does make its way onto the market this year, it could surprise personal computer makers who have already spent months planning their strategy for the 2007 holiday season.

Link (Thanks, Wayan!)

Cory Doctorow: John sez, "An armed gang of four kidnapped one of the world's top RPG gamers after one criminal's girlfriend lured him into a fake date using Orkut, Google's social network. After sequestering him in Sao Paulo, they held a gun against the victim's head for five hours to get his password, which they wanted to sell for $8,000. And yes, the story gets even better."

According to the police, the captive is the world leader in GunBound, a turn-based RPG-style multiplayer online game. Developed in South Korea, in this artillery game you get more experience points, offensive and defensive capabilities depending on your skills during battle, as well as money to buy more weapons, armor and all kinds of gear for your multiple avatars. You can only play with one of your avatars each time, but all of them belong to a single account.

The game looks to be quite popular, so the four gangsters decided they could make some quick cash if they kidnapped him to steal his user. Their plan: use one of the criminal's girlfriends, called Tamires, to get him into a date using Google's online social network Orkut, which is also extremely popular in Brazil. After contacting and seducing him, she told the GunBound wizard to meet her in a shopping mall.

Link

Paul Talbot writes "The independent record label Labrador Records has been giving away a 68 track free MP3 sampler to promote their summer material. However, they couldn't cope with the demand. Rather than withdraw the downloads, they've chosen to use a mirror service and are actually asking people to put the content on thepiratebay.org." Yes, there are certainly more independent labels who are learning to embrace file sharing as a great promotional tool, but it's nice to see one clearly finding value in using The Pirate Bay and asking more people to help out. It would certainly go against the RIAA's claims that The Pirate Bay and similar services have no legitimate reason for being in business.

Cory Doctorow: Furni, makers of a DIY digital clock kit, are running a contest to design the coolest possible clock with it. You can either buy a real kit, or download and print out a paper dummy version. Link (via Watchismo)

Cory Doctorow:
Statetris is a Flash-based Tetris played with falling US states. Get 'em into the right spot or the US will overflow into Canada and everyone gets socialized medicine! Link (via Neatorama)

Klaidas sends us word of BBC coverage of action on privacy by the top four search sites. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Ask have introduced plans to reduce the data they store and how long they store it. From the article: "The rush to improve privacy policies was started by Google in March when it announced it would start deleting the final parts of the individual address it collects from each user's computer after 18 months... Microsoft is expected to make a similar announcement to separate the identifying address and other data from searches after 18 months. The information will be held for longer if users request it. Yahoo said it would delete identifying addresses and cookies after 13 months... Ask is taking the most radical step by unveiling plans for a tool called AskEraser which, it claims, will let people tune whether data is gathered about them on a search-by-search basis."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cory Doctorow: EFF's Derek Slater sez, "Major copyright holders are backing a legislative proposal to make colleges do their dirty work. The Higher Education Act is supposed to make going to college more affordable, but, under a last-minute amendment, certain schools would risk losing federal funding for student aid if they don't divert funds away from education and toward policing corporate copyrighted content on their campus network. Twenty-five schools will annually be singled out, required to police their students with 'technology-based deterrents' (read: network surveillance technologies), and forced to provide evidence to the Secretary of Education about their efforts to stop file sharing. This amendment may come up for a vote tomorrow or later this week, so please call your Senators now using EFF's Action Center." (Thanks, Derek!)