What is it about romance novel cover art that makes it seem almost inherently laughable? Is it the airbrushed paintings of lust disguised as love, depicted through perpetually heaving chests (both male and female) on impossibly fit bodies? Or the dashing-but-flaccid titles that sound almost computer generated?

Longmire (”The Internet’s leading source of wasted pixels”) has spent many long hours re-inventing the romance novel (or at least the covers), with hilarious results. “Lord of the Hissy Fit” and “I’m About To Let One” top the charts.

Thanks Paul

At long last, added a Terms of Service document to the Birdhouse signup process. Wanted to keep legalese out of it as much as possible, and common sense in. What I ended up with was cobbled together from multiple sources (all of which I found to be in wide usage), with my own modifications plus contributions on Harassment and Background Processes from mneptok.

Lunatics are preparing to storm the asylum:

Norm Olson, senior adviser to the Michigan militia and pastor of a strong right-to-life church in Wolverine, said Tuesday he had put together an unarmed coalition of state militias that were prepared to storm the Florida hospice where Terri Schiavo has been left to die, and take her to a safe house.

Olson said he needed only the OK from Schiavo’s father, Robert Schindler, either directly or through his attorney David Gibbs, to put the plan, called “Operation Resurrection,” into action on Sunday.

See also: 22 Things We Learned from the Terri Schiavo Case

Have recently noticed a huge uptick in the amount of non-English (especially Chinese) spam, which slips through the SpamAssasin nets much more readily than English spam (at least it does in most Western SA setups; not sure how different things are for, say, Chinese hosts).

Turns out you can tell SpamAssassin to give higher ratings to messages written in languages other than those you’ve explicitly sanctioned. Higher ratings mean more likelihood of messages getting tossed to /dev/null or saved in a junk box. In your local.cf or user_prefs, just add:

ok_languages en de la th sv

(e.g.) to accept messages in English, German, Latin, Thai, and Swedish. Full list of language codes here. Works a treat.

Excellent synopsis of what secular humanism is and is not. The descriptor must be one of the most-misused, misconstrued, poorly understood terms ever swung by the tail.

4. Secular humanism worships humankind.
The idea that “humanists replace God with Man” seems to arise from a tendency among many Christians to assume that other religions and worldviews have a structure and content that parallels Christianity. So, since “Christians” worship Christ, humanists must worship humans. But secular humanism is not a religion and humanists don’t worship anything. We are far too realistic to worship humanity. While we recognize that all human beings have the potential to do good, we also realize that the potential exists for acts of great evil. Humanity’s constant challenge is to understand itself and improve itself.

Bhutan, which is famous for, among other things, sheltering its people from TV (until 1999) is drafting its first constitution. For a country that has shunned most technology and been fairly repressive of free speech, it’s interesting to see that they’ve put their draft constitution online in PDF form, and are taking public comments.

The impression I got of Bhutan after watching a documentary a while ago was that the country was a paradox - repressive yes, but the people were happy in a way that the film makers described as untarnished — the Luddite approach had an Amish aspect, intended to keep life simple and pure. The government was repressive, but the documentarian commented repeatedly that the people seemed exceptionally joyous and warm (albeit hungry for information from the outside).

From Article 9, this makes me smile:

The State shall strive to promote those circumstances that will enable the successful pursuit of Gross National Happiness.

Orville Schell with more on the GNH and the introduction of technology to Bhutan.

Palace of Fine Arts today with friends and kids to a matinee performance by Senegal’s inimitable Orchestra Baobab. The SF Jazz Festival this year is hosting a few daytime performances on the side to give families/children a chance to absorb high-frequency good vibrations — a brilliant idea, and Baobab was a perfect fit. Deeply grooving, musically accessible, culturally significant, and totally jamming. Amelia bum-rushed the stage with a hundred other tots and was clapping and dancing. Wonderful afternoon.

Senegal is a country with a rich musical heritage and one of the most vibrant pop music scenes on the african continent. Its music today is dominated by one main sound - the breathtaking rhythms of Mbalax, the music of the Wolof people in the north of the country. But it was not always so. In the 1970s the style that filled Senegal’s airwaves was a fusion of Afro-Cuban elements with various local sounds drawn from Senegal’s diverse cultural traditions. And the undisputed masters of this fusion were the legendary Orchestra Baobab.

Other noteworthy music stuff:

Tom Waits’ most cherished albums of all time. Waits on John Lurie:

Get the first record, The Lounge Lizards. You know, John’s one of those people, if you walk into a field with him, he’ll pick up an old pipe and start to play it, and get a really good sound out of it. He’s very musical, works with the best musicians, but never go fishing with him.

And run, don’t walk, to try and digest Unknown Hinson — the craziest side-burned, snaggletoothed s.o.b. ever to wield a country rock guitar and shoot a pistol at the same time. The videos left me breathless.

“Don’t bite the lips … that kiss you
I don’t want … to say it … again.”

Thanks Mal and Mike

They’ve probably been doing it for milennia, but the behavior was never documented until recently. Octopuses occasionally stroll around the ocean floor on two legs, tucking the other six up under them into a ball (videos at site). UC Berkeley researcher Chrissy Huffard: “This is the first underwater bipedal locomotion I know of, and the first example of hydrostatic bipedal movement.”

An El Cerrito neighbor builds basses and guitars from junkyard parts. “Cycle Pole” and “Venus de Moto” employ motorcycle gas tanks as bodies. “Flying VW” uses hubcaps as resonators, and incorporates the artist’s wisdom teeth as control knobs. “Frankenbass” incorporates a tailpipe as part of its design. Inspiring. Need to check these guys out one of these nights.

The flood of media attention on the Schiavo case could leave you thinking America is deeply divided on the right-to-die issue, and on the question of whether government intervention is appropriate. But:

… a 2003 Fox News poll found just 2 percent of Americans think the government should decide this type of right-to-die issue … And in the past week, an overwhelming majority — 87 percent — of Americans polled by ABC News and the Washington Post said that if they were in the same state as Terri Schiavo, they too would want their feeding tube removed.

For a change, America is united, not divided. But you’d never guess that from watching the evening news.

Via Liberaltopia, The New Radicals:

“Republicans and conservatives are no longer the fiscally conservative party they once were.”:

1789-1981 985 billion in cumulative debt
2004 - 985 billion in debt in one year alone.

Source in video

Of course that statistic doesn’t cover the whole picture, leaving out details for the years 1982-2003. For example, how did the national debt fare under Clinton?

Clinton stopped the bleeding in just three years and then dropped the debt from 67% to 57% in his last five years.

Playing soccer at the park with Miles, we stop to rest, lie on our backs looking at the sky. An airplane flies overhead.

“Where do you think that airplane is going, Miles?”

“To Habitot and Mocha, Daddy.”

Earlier in the day…

“What should we have for dinner?”
“Cookies.”
“Where did you get the idea that we have cookies?”
“From an old magazine.”

(This last was a reference to a line from one of his books, Wegman’s Surprise Party, in which dogs get party ideas by studying old magazines, but it knocked our socks off that he recalled and applied it.)

On our occasional trips to the local Asian supermarket, I always enjoy discovering some new, hard-to-believe-it’s-real foodstuff to bring home. Last week I found Greenmax brand “Pai Ku Grain Powder,” which I thought would be a sort of tea, but is actually a sort of soupy, slightly chalky energy drink. The list of ingredients were too intriguing to pass up, including purple yam, ginseng, snow lotus, pearl (?), spinach, black sesame, seaweed, bitter melon, lily bulb, ginkgo nut, and… caterpillar fungus. There are actually about 50 ingredients total. Didn’t know whether the label was referring to a fungus that grows on caterpillars, or a variety of fungus nick-named “caterpillar.” Turns out:

Spores of Cordyceps sinensis grow inside the caterpillars filling the caterpillar with filaments (hyphae). When the caterpillar dies the fungus produces a stalked fruiting body that produces spores. The spores are spread in the wind to the next generation of caterpillars. Uninfected caterpillars pupate into relatively large primitive moths. Today the most common way to prepare the caterpillar fungus is to stuff a duck with the caterpillar fungus then after boiling the duck in hot water, patients drink the liquid. Some consider the benefits to be similar to those of another valuable Chinese tonic, ginseng.

There were dozens of brands of this stuff, so apparently it’s pretty popular. After an initial period of adjustment it’s actually not bad, and the energy/clarity it yields is noticeable. Not sure I’m ready to give up coffee for it just yet though.

In order to respond to Birdhouse customers who want an answer to the question: “Why are you enforcing comment registration on Movable Type weblogs? Have you really exhausted all other options?,” I’ve put together this Brief History of Our Battle With Comment Spammers to summarize what we’ve done in the past, why it hasn’t worked, and why we think comment registration is our only remaining recourse.
(more…)

I’ve had it with Movable Type comment spam blitzkriegs dropping available server CPU to 0 and broadsiding web and mail services. Last night we endured a comment spam attack so severe it knocked out the mail server overnight. If you’ve followed this space for a while, you know I’ve tried virtually every trick and upgrade at my disposal to deal with the problem. But it just keeps getting worse.

A few minutes ago, I switched this weblog to a comment-registration-required system. I know this will discourage a percentage (probably a good percentage) of casual comments, and that’s a bummer. But TypeKey registration is trivially easy, and your registration will work at any TypeKey-enabled blog on the internet.

I’ve also just announced the new comment registration policy on status.birdhouse and to the owners of our four most intensive MT users.

My hatred of spammers is boundless and bottomless.

My office mate — Photojournalism/Ethics professor Ken Light — speaks to the Sacramento Bee about the recent Newsweek cover depicting Martha Stewart’s head on a model’s body. Newsweek has apologized for the “photo illustration,” but that’s not the point. When nothing in the “illustration” tells you that it’s an illustration, i.e. when it’s 100% photo-realistic, when the fact that it’s a collage and not a photo is stated only on page 3 in the fine print where no one looks, when a publication like Newsweek is intentionally lying with photographic images and trying to pawn it off as if no big deal, we have a problem. Light:

A publication like Newsweek should be telling the truth, from the cover to the last page.

Has the rise of Firefox and the ire of web developers finally sunk in for the IE development team? We already know that IE7 will be released before Longhorn, probably in response to Firefox’s popularity. Now it’s starting to sound like IE7 may actually attempt some semblance of W3C standards compliance:

Without making any promises, leaders in the IE development team suggest that after years of inaction on World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards problems, Microsoft will finally clean up its act. … Developers’ concerns about standards and feature support in the current version of IE are reflected in the browser team’s current to-do list.

Microsoft listening to their customers? Imagine that! If true, a lot of web developers jobs are about to get a whole lot easier.

Confirmation for all of the “backpack journalism” and “newspapers are dying, time to learn new media” curriculum we’ve been pushing at the J-School:

Apple today launched its Mobile Field Editing Solution : Bundled DV camera, PowerBook, FinalCut, etc.

Apple technology is the platform of choice for the Broadcast Journalism industry. Whether you are a student of journalism, videography, or both…

And Leonard Apcar, editor-in-chief of NYTimes.com “… If one is looking into a career as a reporter, it is vital to learn HTML as well as … Flash, which allows for multimedia presentations.”

Rather than writing their own code, Harvard and a bunch of other well-funded business schools outsourced the job of creating an online application system to a firm called ApplyYourself. The firm did such a craptastic job of coding even the most basic security into their application that students soon discovered they could learn the status of their application simply by sticking their name onto the end of the URL.

You’d think that would be bad for ApplyYourself, and it probably is. But guess who it’s worse for? Every student who got curious and tried the URL “hacking” trick is being denied admission. So: Strike one against Harvard for hiring a lame development firm. Strike two against Harvard for punishing students for their own security holes. Strike three goes to students who failed to learn from Curious George that curiosity can only lead to trouble. It’s not like the students broke into the system — they walked in through the side door. And without malicious intent or consequences.

Thanks Rob

Big week at the J-School next week. Integrated with multimedia training sessions for mid-career journalists, we’ll be hosting and webcasting nine separate public talks on various issues in new media and multimedia (March 21 - 25).

Featured speakers are Noah Glass of Odeo and Audioblogger; Andria Ruben McCool of Keyhole; Regina McCombs of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune; Bill Gannon of Yahoo!; Craig Newmark of craigslist; Amy Hill of the Center for Digital Storytelling; Terry Moore of the Orange County Register; Mary Miller of the Exploratorium, and Rob Curley of the Lawrence Journal-World. Each presentation is free and open to the public, and no RSVP is necessary.

If you catch nothing else, watch Rob Curley’s presentation — the Lawrence Journal-World blows much larger, better-funded publications out of the water with the level of energy and creativity that goes into their “new media” news and community projects.

As for the term, “new media,” I’m ready for it to go away anytime now (new to whom?), though it still serves as a good umbrella term to distinguish integrated media/database packages from traditional media sources.

After a singularly frustrating day, some of the best news I’ve heard in months: San Francisco Superior Court judge Richard Kramer ruling that “the state’s 28-year-old law defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman is arbitrary and unfair.”

“No rational purpose exists for limiting marriage in this state to opposite-sex partners.”

Well, duh. I’ve been begging someone to give me a rational, non-faith-based reason why a government should care about the sex of marriage partners for months, and still haven’t heard one.

A discriminatory law “cannot be justified simply because such constitutional violation has become traditional,” Kramer said. He said the same argument was made and rejected in 1948, when the California Supreme Court became the first in the nation to strike down a state ban on interracial marriage.

It’s a great day for humans, though we should be sober enough to realize that the ruling could be struck down in the future.

What I don’t get is where the “activist judges” epithet comes from. Is it not the role of a judge to interpret law when existing laws or constitutions leave it unclear? Kramer is not making laws, nor is his analysis of the constitution out of bounds with reason. Yes, the people voted in Prop. 22 that marriage was to be opposite-sex. But Prop. 22 is unconstitutional. The people enacted a law that goes against a more fundamental law of the land. Judge Kramer is not being “activist” — he’s making clear that the people must change the constitution if that’s what they want — they can’t simply enact laws that contravene it. Where exactly is the “activism” here?

One small step at a time. Someday we’ll wonder why this ever seemed controversial.

“We report, you decide” says Fox.

Salon:

In covering the Iraq war last year, 73 percent of the stories on Fox News included the opinions of the anchors and journalists reporting them, a new study says. By contrast, 29 percent of the war reports on MSNBC and 2 percent of those on CNN included the journalists’ own views. … In a 617-page report, the group also found that ‘Fox is more deeply sourced than its rivals,’ while CNN is ‘the least transparent about its sources of the three cable channels, but more likely to present multiple points of view.’ The project defines opinion as views that are not attributed to others.

Yeah, that left-dominated media sure skews the news.

Enthusiastic about iPhoto 5’s ability to handle RAW images from digital cameras, Amy shot a short roll in RAW, only to find that iPhoto 5 refused to import them. Eh? I probably should have known this, but it turns out that RAW (known as NEF in many Nikon cameras) is not a file format as such, but a representation of the actual bits coming directly off the image sensor, with no in-camera processing whatsoever. Because image sensors are different from camera to camera, so is the layout of the raw data. So not only do RAW formats differ from one manufacturer to another, but even from camera to camera by the same manufacturer. In fact, the RAW “format” sometimes changes within a single product line! iPhoto’s list of supported cameras (lower right of that page) shows that iPhoto supports the PowerShot G5, but not the PowerShot G2, which we have.

The idea of RAW is that the photographer gets a “digital negative” — the most possible data available for post-processing and archival purposes. The downside is that image manipulation applications need to know the specifics of the data layout on the CCD to be able to do anything meaningful with the images. To overcome this compatibility problem, some cameras do perform a minimal amount of processing on the image before storage (e.g. “RAW+JPEG”).

So why don’t cameras simply support one of the many uncompressed image formats available — say, TGA or BMP or uncompressed TIFF? No data loss or compression would be necessary, and the application-level compatibility issues would go away.

Photoshop supports RAW for a wide range of cameras, and there’s the dcraw.c library for Linux, which supports some 87 cameras — so the code is out there and we can expect to see better iPhoto RAW support in the future (hopefully there’s a RAW plugin architecture at work here). But it bugs me that application vendors should even have to worry about this kind of thing. I’m sure insiders can come up with all kinds of historical and technical explanations for how we got to this point, but it’s a classic example of an industry working at cross-purposes to itself.

For NPR, Adam Burke has a nice piece on a restaurant in Zurich, Switzerland called the Blind Cow. “Diners eat in complete darkness and are served by blind waitresses.”

… and during a toast, he hits her in the head with a wine glass …

But it actually sounds like a fascinating experience. It would be interesting to see how the sense of taste was affected/enhanced by the diminution of visual input. Wondered while I listened whether the chefs put much energy into presentation (appearance) of the food. And whether anyone has ever snapped on the lights in a panic, or out of habit, and how the diners would react.

via BoingBoing

Hell-bent on destroying the earth? We’re not talking about erasing humanity here, but gen-u-ine vaporization of all earth particles. There are ways.

The Earth was built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you’ve had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.

Scientific summaries are offered on the feasibility of techniques such as harnessing the untapped power of the vacuum, throwing chunks of earth into space via space elevators, consumption by an army of von Neumann machines, and other awe-inspiring technologies. Some methods require no more equipment than a simple light bulb — others require elaborate constructions: “You will need: a big heavy rock, something with a bit of a swing to it… perhaps Mars.”

The most promising method? Near-infinite patience.

via Strata Lucida