Over at Blogging.la, Ruth Waytz writes:

With a heavy heart I deliver the sad news that our friend Maila Nurmi, famous for her portrayal of Vampira, has passed at age 86. Maila passed away peacefully in her sleep at home. Funeral arrangements are pending legal steps as Maila had no relatives. Her friends are trying to get her a spot at Hollywood Forever Cemetery and will likely plan some sort of hearse procession for her.

Link.

Noah Shachtman at Wired's Danger Room blog writes,

It's not completely surprising that the Army wants to hire a band to tour its bases jn Afghanistan and Kuwait.  The armed services get all kinds of folks, to entertain the troops.  "But it's the way that they solicit for rock bands that makes the whole thing hilarious," Stephen Trimble notes. 

First, a summary of what the Army is seeking:

Professional Celebrity Rock Music Band, group not to exceed seven people for tour of FOB's [forward operating bases] in Kuwait and Afghanistan for February 4-13 2008. The band should be an active rock band, with a music genre consisting of Southern Rock, Pop Rock, Post-Grunge and Hard Rock. At least one member of the band should be recognizable as a professional celebrity. Protective military equipment, such as kevlar, body armour, eye and ear protection will be provided when the group is travelling on military rotary or fixed wing aircraft.

Oh, and it gets better. Link.

ride
cup
snack
laptop
safari
firefox
paper
name

CC-licensed image from Flickr user c h e e s e roc's photostream: Link.

Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!)

Snip from an article on AllAfrica.com:

"It is the Kenyan People Who Have Lost the Election," headlined Pambazuka News in its special Kenya election edition on January 3.

"But the real tragedy of Kenya," the editorial continued, is that the political conflict is not about alternative political programmes that could address ... landlessness, low wages, unemployment, lack of shelter, inadequate incomes, homelessness, etc. ... [instead] it boils down to a fight over who has access to the honey pot that is the state. ...[citizens] are reduced to being just being fodder for the pigs fighting over the trough."

Commentaries of particular interest from the U.S.include an op-ed in the Washington Post by Caroline Elkins, "What's Tearing Kenya Apart? History, for One Thing," a statement by Africa Action stating that U.S.-Kenya policy should support "robust democratic processes" rather than be defined by "a narrow agenda of the war on terror and international business", and a statement by the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars highlighting "the role of the U.S. government -- far from a neutral player -- both before and after the elections" and the danger that U.S. involvement will be biased by its close military relations with the Kenyan government..

More on current events in Kenya at AllAfrica.com: Link 1, Link 2, Link 3.

eldavojohn writes "The One Laptop Per Child Project plans to launch OLPC America in 2008 , to distribute the low-cost laptop computers originally intended for developing nations to needy students here in the United States. Nicholas Negroponte is quoted as saying, 'We are doing something patriotic, if you will, after all we are and there are poor children in America. The second thing we're doing is building a critical mass. The numbers are going to go up, people will make more software, it will steer a larger development community.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A special event for the release of the terrifically entertaining new Feral House book, The Hollywood Hellfire Club (with a beautiful cover by Drew Friedman), will be held on January 15 at The Silent Movie Theatre in Los Angeles at 8pm.

They made fans go crazy and censors apoplectic, spent fortunes faster than they made them, forged Rembrandts and hung them in major museums, went on trial for committing statutory rape with necrophiliac teenage girls, reinterpreted Hamlet as an incestuous mama’s boy, and swilled immeasurable quantities of spirits during week-long parties on wobbly yachts. They were “The Bundy Drive Boys,” and they made the Rat Pack look like Cub Scouts.

The last thing one might expect from the tony street north of Sunset Blvd. in Brentwood’s Bundy Drive would be a clan of obstreperous dipsomaniacs, but this was the '30s and '40s, when cocktail hour was a patriotic imperative, and the studio system was an autocratic lunacy to rebel against. (Well, some things never change.) This evening we’re celebrating the release of Feral House’s Hollywood’s Hellfire Club: The Misadventures of John Barrymore, W.C. Fields, Errol Flynn and ‘The Bundy Drive Boys’ by screening the amazing early talkie Svengali starring John Barrymore as the piercing-eyed hypnotic music master and Marian Marsh as the mesmerized underage beauty Trilby.

Also showing: W.C. Fields’ dirty short "The Dentist" and rare clips from Barrymore and Errol Flynn home movies. We’ll also be displaying original art by John Decker, the man who collaborated on a West Hollywood art gallery with Errol Flynn, drew the notorious Barrymore Death Bed Sketch, and whose forgeries now hang in museums across the country, including Harvard’s Fogg Museum. Authors Gregory William Mank, Charles Heard and Bill Nelson will be available to sign copies of their celebrated book. Tickets - $10

Link

Sample chapter 1 | Sample chapter 2

Web Goddess writes "The 2007 Darwin Award Winners have been announced. Precarious sex, squashed thieves, animals eradicated with electricity, the obligatory macho competition involving a train, and one computer (which survived.) But think twice before you read them. Do you really want to know about The Enema Within?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

nezmar writes "Noel Dellofano, who is part of the ZFS development team at Apple, has a post on Mac OS Forge announcing a late Christmas gift: he is making available binaries and source code, plus instructions, of the ZFS filesystem for Mac OS X."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In Atlantic v. Howell, the Phoenix, Arizona, case in which a defendant who has no legal representation has been battling the RIAA over its theory that merely 'making files available for distribution' is in and of itself a copyright infringement, Mr. Howell has received some help from an outside source. On the last day allowed for the filing of supplemental briefs, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed an amicus curiae brief agreeing with Mr. Howell, and refuting the RIAA's motion for summary judgment. The brief (PDF), which is recommended reading for anyone who wants to know what US copyright law really says, points out that 'contrary to Plaintiffs' arguments, an infringement of the distribution right requires the unauthorized, actual dissemination of copies of a copyrighted work.' This is the same case in which the RIAA claimed that Mr. Howell's MP3s, copied from his CDs, were themselves unlawful."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

holy_calamity writes "Proteins extracted from gelatin can dramatically improve the quality of ice cream by preventing the growth of ice crystals that ruin its texture. Perfect smooth ice cream has ice crystals around 20 microns in size, but slight thawing and refreezing makes them grow and ruins the mouth feel, making it gritty. The new proteins are similar to those in the blood of the snow flea, an insect able to keep active in sub-zero temperatures." Here are the abstract and the full article as published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dan sez, "Since you liked Chu Enoki's garbage city, you might like Chris Harvey's Mandala of Perfect Happiness, a sculpture made entirely from cheap plastic objects, many of them from 99 cent stores. Here are some pictures of it in my Flickr." Link (Thanks, Dan!)

SimCity has just been released as free software under the GPL version 3 license (though the name has been changed to Micropolis for trademark reasons; it was the original working title). This was precipitated by the inclusion of SimCity on the One Laptop Per Child XO machines, but no reason the kids should have all the fun. Can't wait to see the SimCity hacks that emerge now:

The "MicropolisCore" project includes the latest Micropolis (SimCity) source code, cleaned up and recast into C++ classes, integrated into Python, using the wonderful SWIG interface generator tool. It also includes a Cairo based TileEngine, and a cellular automata machine CellEngine, which are independent but can be plugged together, so the tile engine can display cellular automata cells as well as SimCity tiles, or any other application's tiles.

The key thing here is to peek inside the mind of the original Maxis programmers when they built it. Remember, this was back in the day when games had to fit inside of 640k so some "creative" programming techniques were employed. SimCity has been long a model used for urban planning and while it's just a game, there are a lot of business rules, ecosystem modeling, social dependencies, and other cool stuff going on in this codebase. It may not be pretty code but it's content sure is interesting to see.

In any case, it's out there for you to grab and have fun with. It was originally written in C and of course is old (created before 1983 which is ancient in Internet time). Don spent a lot of time cleaning the code up (including ANSIfying it, reformatting it, optimizing, and bullet-proofing it) as best he could. Don ported the Mac version of SimCity to SunOS Unix running the NeWS window system about 15 years ago, writing the user interface in PostScript. A year or so later he ported it to various versions of Unix running X-Windows, using the TCL/Tk scripting language and gui toolkit. Several years later when Linux became viable, it was fairly straightforward to port that code to Linux, and then to port that to the OLPC.

Link (via /.)

Tolkien writes "Source code for SimCity has been released under the GPLv3. For legal reasons the open source version was renamed Micropolis, which was apparently the original working title. The OLPC will also be getting a SimCity branded version that has been QA'ed by Electronic Arts. Some very cool changes have been made by Don Hopkins, who updated and ported what is now Micropolis. (Here is an earlier Slashdot discussion kicked off by a submission Don made.) Among other things, it has been revamped from the original C to using C++ with Python. Here is the page linking all the various source code versions. Happy hacking!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

mlimber writes "The Freakonomics blog has a post in which they asked six knowledgeable people, Is space exploration is worth the public cost? Their answers are generally in the affirmative and illuminating. For example David M. Livingston, host of The Space Show, said: 'Businesses were started and are now meeting payrolls, paying taxes, and sustaining economic growth because the founder was inspired by the early days of the manned space program, often decades after the program ended! This type of inspiration and motivation seems unique to the manned space program and, of late, to some of our robotic space missions.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

palegray.net noted a wired story about an industry trend towards watermarking and away from DRM. It says "With all of the Big Four record labels now jettisoning digital rights management, music fans have every reason to rejoice. But consumer advocates are singing a note of caution, as the music industry experiments with digital-watermarking technology as a DRM substitute. Watermarking offers copyright protection by letting a company track music that finds its way to illegal peer-to-peer networks. At its most precise, a watermark could encode a unique serial number that a music company could match to the original purchaser. So far, though, labels say they won't do that: Warner and EMI have not embraced watermarking at all, while Sony's and Universal's DRM-free lineups contain "anonymous" watermarks that won't trace to an individual." Here is a Technical discussion on AudioBox and PSU.edu's Abstract Index

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The "5-in-1 Office Tool" is basically a leatherman whose body has been replaced with a pocket calculator. It sports a stapler, scissors, measuring tape, and paper-clip holder. Link (via Dvice)

In fascinating article, the LA Times reports that as many as one million working-class people in China have been fleeced of their hard-earned savings in an ant farming pyramid scheme run by a company with close ties to the Chinese government.

These ants were far more than uninvited picnic guests, [investors] were told. When ground into a powder, they become an aphrodisiac, a kidney purifier and general cure-all, the Yilishen Tianxi Group declared. The ants would earn them a 30% annual return.

In reality, critics say, the ants apparently were little more than the bait for a vast pyramid scheme. Over an eight-year period, the company recruited as many as 1 million would-be ant farmers, collecting about $1.2 billion. In mid-December, it filed for bankruptcy.

...

The company hired as its spokesman Zhao Benshan, a famous comedian and actor who specializes in playing a hick. He has since dropped out of sight.

The boxes at the heart of the ant farming business are made of cardboard with a 2-inch-square plastic window and a small feeding hole framed so badly with duct tape that they look like the work of a careless teenager with a box cutter.

In return for their money, ant farmers were given the boxes, ants and a list of strict instructions: The ants need a spritz of water mixed with white sugar or honey at 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. every day. They should be fed cake and egg yolks every three to five days. And they should be kept indoors.

In return, the company would come and pick up dead dried ants every 74 days. Under no circumstances were the ant farmers to open their boxes and look inside, they were told, to ensure that the special Yilishen ants weren't mixed with inferior ants.

Link

GSGKT writes "Today's Washington Times runs a story about the increasing problem with space junk orbiting the earth. Debris from the anti-satellite missile test by the Chinese military last year threatens the integrity of more than 800 operating satellites, half of them belonging to the US. Two orbiting U.S. spacecraft were forced to change course to avoid being damaged soon after the incident. Air Force Brig. Gen. Ted Kresge, director of air, space and information operations at the Air Force Space Command in Colorado, estimates that "essentially (Chinese anti-satellite tests) increase the amount of space debris orbiting the Earth by about 20 percent", and the debris might threaten spacecraft for up to 100 years."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.