Today on Boing Boing tv, surreal shorts about food and drink, in a two-part showcase of works from filmmaker Stefan Nadelman.

First, "Food Fight," a stop-animation piece that provides an abridged history of war, told through the foods of the countries in conflict. (Ed.: the original work has been edited for time, and captions have been added to assist the history-impaired).

Next, "My Dog Impersonating Orson Welles," in which a pooch clutches a bottle of champagne, and attempts to form sentences.

Link to BBtv post with discussion and downloadable video.

I'll be blogging from TED 2008 this year, held in beautiful Monterey CA. I drove up from Los Angeles and snapped a few photos along the way.

BLT and homemade minestrone soup was the $7.45 Wednesday lunch special at Ellen's Pancake house, a sparking clean and good cafe in Buellton, CA (a little town 140 miles north of Los Angeles). The workers are friendly and the place is filled with locals. Ellen's is much better than Anderson's Pea Soup across the street where I usually robotically-yet-regretfully eat when I'm passing through.

More photos at my Flickr account: Link

Yesterday's rally in Nashville to stop a new copyright bill that would put the expense of policing the movie industry's business model onto universities was a success -- the bill has been stalled and won't be reconsidered for ten days. Now it's time to get mobilized:

Just in the past few days we found out about this Bill they are trying to pass in the TN State Senate. SB3974, sponsored by Sen. Tim Burchett, forces any institution of “higher learning” to monitor all public university students and expel any who access copyrighted content. Since nearly everyone will access some kind of “copyrighted” content online - they will be forced to expel thousands of students from any public university!

Here’s the plan:

[1] Meet up with us next Wednesday (March 5th) to go to Nashville and protest! (5:00 AM - March 5th) we will have a bus - we will leave at 5AM in Knoxville (meet at COPYSHOP).

Gather at 8AM (if you can get there by yourself) on the corner of 6th and Union St in Nashville!

[2] NOW Email the Senators:
sen.tim.burchett@legislature.state.tn.us
sen.jamie.woodson@legislature.state.tn.us
sen.rusty.crowe@legislature.state.tn.us

Link, Link to video of Sen. Tim Burchett joking that the MPAA promised him that Matthew Mcconaughey would play him in a biopic

Jacob sez, "I'd like to pass on a nice practical attack against the Chip and Pin system used in most of the world Saar Drimer, Steven J. Murdoch and Ross Anderson, researchers at the University of Cambridge, have shown how to compromise supposedly tamper-proof Chip and PIN terminals. With a paperclip, off the shelf electronics, and basic technical skills, fraudsters can capture card details and PINs, then create counterfeit cards. The full results of the team are published their academic paper and were featured on BBC Newsnight." Link (Thanks, Jake!)

Republican former South Dakota lieutenant governor and potential Senate candidate Steve Kirby made his fortune running a scandal-wracked business that harvested collagen from corpses donated for medical research and using it for cosmetic products and penis-enlargements:

Collagenesis specialized in processing donated skin off cadavers into cosmetic surgery products, and was subject to a blistering five-part investigative series by the Orange County Register beginning on April 17, 2000. “Burn victims lie waiting in hospitals as nurses scour the country for skin to cover their wounds, even though skin is in plentiful supply for plastic surgeons,” read the lede of the Register report. “The skin they need to save their lives is being used instead for procedures that could wait: supporting bladders, erasing laugh lines and enlarging penises.”..

Kirby’s niche industry had proven financially lucrative. Collagenesis could take the skin off one cadaver and convert it into $36,000 of a gel injected to smooth wrinkles and inflate lips. Its lone competitor, a firm called LifeCell, estimated its potential revenues from such skin at $200 million a year — 10 times what it would earn if it focused on life-saving burn applications instead of cosmetic surgery.

Link (via Making Light)

Bob Bjarke likes the fortune he got in his cookie (from a recent dinner at Papajin in Chicago) so much he created a website called www.thebestfortunecookieever.com to show it off.

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Dumpster filled with fortune cookies
• Fortune-cookie writer has been blocked for a decade

Wired has gotten hold of an incredibly disturbing set of photos from the US torture crimes at Abu Ghraib. Does anyone really believe that this was just a couple of rogue operators? If I wanted to reduce the number of jihadis in the world, I'd start by making sure that stuff like this didn't happen -- I can think of no better recruiting boost for Al Quaeda than prisons like Abu Ghraib.

As an expert witness in the defense of an Abu Ghraib guard who was court-martialed, psychologist Philip Zimbardo had access to many of the images of abuse that were taken by the guards themselves. For a presentation at the TED conference in Monterey, California, Zimbardo assembled some of these pictures into a short video. Wired.com obtained the video from Zimbardo's talk, and is publishing some of the stills from that video here. Many of the images are explicit and gruesome, depicting nudity, degradation, simulated sex acts and guards posing with decaying corpses. Viewer discretion is advised.

Link

The Surveillance Light is a floor-lamp whose three poseable heads are built into the chassis of CCTV cameras. You could be incredibly sneaky and put actual webcams into the housings as well. Link (via Gizmodo)

Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel prize-winner in economics, says the Iraq war has cost $3 trillion so far. According to the Guardian, "three trillion could have fixed America's social security problem for half a century."

Some time in 2005, Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, who also served as an economic adviser under Clinton, noted that the official Congressional Budget Office estimate for the cost of the war so far was of the order of $500bn. The figure was so low, they didn't believe it, and decided to investigate. The paper they wrote together, and published in January 2006, revised the figure sharply upwards, to between $1 and $2 trillion. Even that, Stiglitz says now, was deliberately conservative: "We didn't want to sound outlandish."

So what did the Republicans say? "They had two reactions," Stiglitz says wearily. "One was Bush saying, 'We don't go to war on the calculations of green eye-shaded accountants or economists.' And our response was, 'No, you don't decide to fight a response to Pearl Harbour on the basis of that, but when there's a war of choice, you at least use it to make sure your timing is right, that you've done the preparation. And you really ought to do the calculations to see if there are alternative ways that are more effective at getting your objectives. The second criticism - which we admit - was that we only look at the costs, not the benefits. Now, we couldn't see any benefits. From our point of view we weren't sure what those were."

Link (Thanks, Robert!)

Not sure what's going on over at Twitter, but when I attempt to access the site, each new refresh logs me in as some other seemingly random user, generates a seemingly random series of users I'm not "following," and the top post shown says something about a tiny penis, and following a hack, no matter how many refreshes I hit. (shrugs). Screengrab.

Frankie says:

Our Japanese photographer Julie just sent us a couple of photos from Wonderfestival (the event where Takashi Murakami debuted ca 10 years ago): some beautiful wood carved manga statues!

Link

coondoggie writes "Even with its increased hiring estimates of 1,200 patent examiners each year for the next 5 years, the US Patent and Trademark Office patent application backlog is expected to increase to over 1.3 million at the end of fiscal year 2011 the Government Accounting Office reported today. The USPTO has also estimated that if it were able to hire 2,000 patent examiners per year in fiscal year 2007 and each of the next 5 years, the backlog would continue to increase by about 260,000 applications, to 953,643 at the end of fiscal year 2011, the GAO said. Despite its recent increases in hiring, the agency has acknowledged that it cannot hire its way out of the backlog and is now focused on slowing the growth of the backlog instead of reducing it. This too is but one of the goals of the Patent Reform Act currently making the rounds in the US Senate."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

coondoggie writes "Even with its increased hiring estimates of 1,200 patent examiners each year for the next 5 years, the US Patent and Trademark Office patent application backlog is expected to increase to over 1.3 million at the end of fiscal year 2011 the Government Accounting Office reported today. The USPTO has also estimated that if it were able to hire 2,000 patent examiners per year in fiscal year 2007 and each of the next 5 years, the backlog would continue to increase by about 260,000 applications, to 953,643 at the end of fiscal year 2011, the GAO said. Despite its recent increases in hiring, the agency has acknowledged that it cannot hire its way out of the backlog and is now focused on slowing the growth of the backlog instead of reducing it. This too is but one of the goals of the Patent Reform Act currently making the rounds in the US Senate."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Northern California and the EFF have filed a motion to intervene in a lawsuit that led a federal district judge to order the shutdown of Wikileaks.org, according to this ACLU press release.

The motion is on behalf of organizations and individuals that have accessed and used documents on the Wikileaks.org website in their work and want to continue to be able to do so.

“The court’s order shuts down and locks up the domain name Wikileaks.org permanently, effectively interfering with the public’s ability to access the materials on the website as easily as possible,” said Aden Fine, senior staff attorney with the ACLU First Amendment Working Group. “The public has a right to receive information and ideas, especially ones concerning the public interest. This injunction ignores that vital First Amendment principle.”

The Wikileaks website was established to allow participants to anonymously disclose documents of public interest, including materials discussing such issues of national importance as U.S. Army operations at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, human rights abuses in China, and political corruption in Kenya. Earlier this month, Judge Jeffrey White of the Northern District of California ordered domain registrar Dynadot, LLC to shut down the domain name Wikileaks.org based on allegations that a former employee of Swiss Bank Julius Baer posted documents on the website that highlighted the bank’s dealings in the Cayman Islands.

(thanks, Ravi Garla)

Previously on BB:

California judge shuts down wikileaks

Andrew Huff realizes that l33tspeak could be applied to hex values and shares the results (via). #

A few weeks ago, we discussed why the idea of a P2P venture capital firm didn't make much sense. Having lots of people invest is the same thing as going public -- and doing that requires complying with all sorts of SEC regulations. Simply opening up shop and asking lots of people to invest is bound to cause problems. Apparently, that's not stopping some folks. Wired has an article about how the founder of Powerset (the massively hyped up search engine startup that hasn't even launched yet) has moved on to try to start a new venture capital firm that would take small investments from many people and use those funds to invest in "greentech" investments. This is a little different than the P2P VC firm that we talked about, and actually seems to resemble something from the dot com bubble: a company called meVC, that allowed the public to invest money, which was then invested in startups. Of course, the folks at meVC at least realized that soliciting funds from the public meant going public itself first, so as not to run afoul of SEC regulations. Even then, things didn't work out so well. From the sound of things, it's not clear that the guy behind this new effort even realizes that, as described, the fund itself is probably very much in violation of SEC rules, but I'm sure the SEC will be kind enough to inform him pretty quickly if he moves forward with those plans.

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Heh. (thanks Aaron).