David Pescovitz: Spiderman fan Andrew Farago was browsing in my favorite bookstore in the world, San Francisco's KAYO Books, when he stumbled upon a Planned Parenthood issue of The Amazing Spider-Man from the 1970s. Actually, the title page reads "Stan Lee presents: A Special Planet Parenthood Issue Of The Amazing Spider-Man" and it was distributed by Planned Parenthood Federation of America. The inside cover contains ads for Planned Parenthood booklets and the back pages include "the facts" about pregnancy, VD, homosexuality, etc. Thankfully, Andrew scanned and posted the whole comic.
Link (Thanks, COOP!)

David Pescovitz:
Takeshi Nagata and Kazue Monno made this wonderful animated film titled "Pika Pika 2007" by taking long-exposure photographs of people waving flashlights and stitching the photos together. You may also have seen their work in a recent Sprint television commercial. Link to Pika Pika 2007, Link to Sprint commercial (Thanks, Michelle Hlubinka!)

While comments filed with the FCC in support of the merger of satellite radio companies XM and Sirius outnumber those opposing it by nearly a four to one margin, they're not seen by many people to carry the same influence as those arguing against the merger. For instance, more than 70 Congressmen have told the heads of the FCC, DOJ and FTC that they should block the merger, and as stock pundit Jim Cramer points out, this has little to do with anything other than legislators' self-interest, since they don't want to upset local broadcasters in their constituencies. He adds that since XM and Sirius are up against such powerful opposition, they've had to go for broke, by announcing pricing plans that, if the merger's approved, could slice their average per-subscriber revenue. The plans offer consumers the ability to choose channels on an a la carte basis -- a move that looks like it's designed to appeal to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, for whom indecent programming is always an issue. At the outset of the merger announcement, Martin said that XM and Sirius would have to show that "consumers would clearly be better off with both more choice and affordable prices" before the FCC would approve the deal. These new plans would appear to deliver consumers more choices and control over the content they receive, and do so at lower prices. But it's still hard to see that being enough to overcome politicians' objections, fueled by the National Association of Broadcasters' clout.

ianare writes "Seagate plans to cease manufacturing IDE hard drives by the end of the year and will focus exclusively on SATA-based products. Seagate is the first major hard drive manufacturer to announce such plans, though others will likely follow suit. That's not to say support for the 21-year-old PATA standard is going to vanish overnight; similar to how ISA slots were available long after most of us had ditched our old ISA peripherals."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last December, the UK gov't had some folks draw up the so-called "Gowers Report" looking at the question of copyright extension. While the report wasn't great, it certainly did recommend against copyright extension. It appears that the folks in the gov't saw through the online petition many dead musicians signed asking the gov't to ignore the report. That is, the UK gov't has in fact rejected the idea of extending copyrights for performance royalties on songs, so that those recorded 50 years ago no longer have to pay the performers (though, they do still have to pay the songwriters, who have longer copyright protection). Some musicians are up in arms about this, but that's only because they seem to think that copyright is a type of welfare system to support artists based on a single performance they did 50 years ago. It's not. Copyright's sole purpose is to create incentives to have that content created. If the content was created, then clearly the deal that the copyright offered was sufficient. Extending the deal afterwards makes no sense and goes against the very idea of copyright. It's saying that a song that was performed and recorded 50 years ago needs new incentives to have been performed and recorded 50 years ago. It's nice to see (for one of the first times) a gov't finally reject that argument.

Xeni Jardin:

Here's a Reuters profile of Arizona Sky Village, a planned community for astronomy lovers in Arizona. Above, a building there shown with observatory dome. This is not the only such purpose-built community for stargazers; others include Deerlick Astronomy Village in Georgia and Chiefland Astronomy Village in neighboring Florida. Snip:

The communities are all located in remote areas far from flaring city lights that spoil views of the night sky. Residents abide by rules forbidding bright lights anywhere from dusk till dawn to preserve optimum viewing.

With its stable weather conditions, bone-dry air and isolated location, the Arizona Sky Village offers a near-perfect setting for astronomers, allowing them to see even faint objects like the swirling clouds of gas that make up nebulae and the spiral arms of far-off galaxies in transparent detail.

"It's ink-black, dead-dark, one of the darkest places in the country," says Gene Turner, an amateur astronomer and one of the project's developers.

"The Milky Way is so bright here, it's three-dimensional. In 1500 you could see it everywhere like this but now that's very rare," he said.

Link. (thanks, Jon)

An Anonymous Coward writes "US senators today made a bipartisan call for the universal implementation of filtering and monitoring technologies on the Internet in order to protect children. Their statement came at the end of a Senate hearing in which civil liberties groups were not invited."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Xeni Jardin: The final issue of Weekly World News is slated for August 3, 2007.

Lesbian Space Alien and Vegan Vampire Lady could not be reached for comment.

As you can see here, Bat Boy remains inconsolable.

SF Scope has more: Link 1, Link 2. WaPo: Link. Reuters: Link.

Xemu writes "Having fat friends makes you fat, researchers from Harvard Medical School and the University of California says after after examining 12,067 individuals and 38,611 of their relatives and friends. In same-sex friendships, people were 71 per cent more likely to put on weight if a friend of theirs became obese. "It's not that obese or non-obese people simply find other similar people to hang out with. Rather, there is a direct, causal relationship," says Harvard professor Nicholas Christakis."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Vonage has been having a rough go of it lately, so apparently the company has to take whatever small victories it can. A spokesman for the company recently bragged that it was responsible for the demise of Sunrocket, the #2 independent VoIP operator. In a sense, the company is correct in that the cutthroat price competition in this space is what killed Sunrocket. But Vonage is struggling itself for the same reasons. From a business model perspective, there wasn't much of a difference between Vonage and Sunrocket, except that Vonage seemed to spend way more on advertising. By going out of its way to highlight Sunrocket's woes, the company is pretty much reminding everyone that it's in the exact same boat.

Xeni Jardin:

Chris Jordan renders American consumer statistics as art. For instance: above, 426,000 cell phones, equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US every day. At left, an idea of what the 60 x 100" piece looks like from a distance; at right, detail view. I imagine they'd look amazing IRL.

We've blogged his work a number of times here on BoingBoing (1, 2), but here's a Link to a new interview with him, by Nicole Pasulka in The Morning News.

Xeni Jardin:

Above, a detail from a page in Athanasius Kircher's "Musurgia Universalis," printed in 1650. Snip from a post on Bibliodyssey:

A large part of the book is devoted to the history of instrumentation, including the anatomy of voice and hearing, and an extensive theory on acoustics entitled 'Magia Phonocamptica, sive de Echo', in which he described sound as 'the ape of light.'

Kircher professes the Boethian concept of musical harmonies' mathematical correspondences within the body, the heavens, and the natural world, and concludes with a discussion of the unheard music of the nine angelic choirs and the Holy Trinity. Kircher's research in music and acoustics led to many innovations and inventions, particularly in the area of amplification and sound design, which he would expand upon in his Phonurgia nova (Kempten 1673).

Other devices created the illusion of talking statuary, hydraulically powered mechanical music-playing automata, the aeolian harp (which was revived and venerated by the English romantic poets as a model of divine inspiration), the hearing aid, and the arca musarithmica: a primitive mechanical computer that would compose simple random compositions, as well as write messages in cipher, calculate the date of Easter in any year, and design fortifications.

Link to scanned pages and links to online copies of this work.

Previously on BoingBoing:

The Athanasius Kircher Society: " all things wondrous, curious, and esoteric"

Video from Kircher Society extravaganza

athloi writes "Researchers have made a computer program that learns to decode sounds from different languages in the same way that a baby does. The program will help to shed new light on how people learn to talk. It has already raised questions as to how much specific information about language is hard-wired into the brain."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Xeni Jardin: BB reader Doran says,

Los Angeles Times columnist Patrick Goldstein wrote an article suggesting it might be a good idea give away CDs inside the paper, instead of putting lots of advertising on Page One. The column got spiked by an associate editor, and the Times simply said Goldstein was "on assignment".

Link. More on Romenesko: Link.

David Pescovitz: New research suggests that when people have God or religion in mind, even subconsciously, they're more generous. According to a University of British Columbia study, participants who were subtly "primed" with religious concepts demonstrated more generosity than the control group. Interestingly, subjects who had identified themselves as non-religious weren't any less giving than believers. Also significant is that another group, primed instead with "civic responsibility" concepts, were as generous as the group primed with religious thoughts. From News@Nature:

"One idea that we seriously considered was that God, to those who believe, is a supernatural policing agent," says psychologist Azim Shariff...

"We can't compare the relative strengths of religion and civics, or draw tight analogies to real-world situations," says Shariff. "What we can do is identify that both concepts have substantial effects on prosocial behaviour."

Link

UPDATE: Howard Rheingold, who has done extensive research on cooperation for a project with Institute for the Future (IFTF), says:

David Sloan Wilson has written extensively about theory in this respect in "Darwin's Cathedral," and this research supports his hypothesis.

If you want to get into real detail, there's Henrich and Henrich's recent book, "Why Humans Cooperate" that details how cultural evolution works with groups: individual humans learn by imitation; when one member of a group makes a discovery that enhances survival value, and that discovery spreads through the group, the fitness of the group improves. Again, according to cultural evolution theory, religion is an example of a norm that is internalized by members of the group, thus reducing dramatically the cost of policing, that constrains individual behavior but improves group fitness.

Link to buy Darwin's Cathedral, Link to buy Why Humans Cooperate, Link to the Cooperation Commons, a collaboration between Howard Rheingold and IFTF

Xeni Jardin: From some Iranian newspaper via the BBC via the Washington Post, dubiously sourced, definitely implausible, but please dear god let this be true:

A few weeks ago, 14 squirrels equipped with espionage systems of foreign intelligence services were captured by [Iranian] intelligence forces along the country's borders.

These trained squirrels, each of which weighed just over 700 grams, were released on the borders of the country for intelligence and espionage purposes.

According to the announcement made by Iranian intelligence officials, alert police officials caught these squirrels before they could carry out any task.

Link (thanks Bonnie, photo: thanks BB reader Bob, don't know who shot this)

Update: Wired's Danger Room blog has more: Link. And while I'm at it, here's another post there about Pentagon researchers looking for "crystal balls" and electronic choose-your-own-adventure novels: Link. (thanks, Noah!)

BB reader Dappledthings asks,

Any connection to the death badgers we've apparently inflicted upon Iraq, do you think? Link.

Xeni Jardin: