Wow. It's the "Boyfriend's Arm Pillow."
"It keeps holding me all the way through," [pillow user Suzuki] said in her home outside of Tokyo. "I think this is great because this does not betray me."

Bad: HR4077 Passed the House

OH DEAR:
"The INDUCE Act is just one part of a legislative full-court press by the major labels. We've been very focused on INDUCE, because it's the biggest threat, the broadest coalition opposes it, and it's the most realistically beatable.

But we just found out that HR 4077 passed in the House this afternoon. This major label dream-law would send people to jail for sharing 1,000 songs, or just one unreleased album. That's right, up to 5 years in jail for sharing one album. It passed on a voice vote, so you can't even go see if your Congressperson supported it-- their votes simply aren't on record. They'll send hundreds kids to jail as a favor to some corrupt industry but they won't put their names on it. Cowards.

It's a good thing we've now got The Internet's Most Accurate English-to-English Dictionary. I always wondered what the phrase, "I have got to go to the bathroom" meant. Translation: "I have got to go to the bathroom." Amazing!

breaking news

Bedding Officials Demand Thread Recount.
Morgan said his goal is not to condemn manufacturers with blanket statements, but to correct the snag.

"The idea that quality is based on thread count is not some old yarn—it's woven into the fabric of our society," Morgan said. "But the system for quality control is threadbare. It's coming apart at the seams. We can't pull the covers over our heads and ignore it any longer."

move over .jpg

Adobe offers new (free) Digital Negative format for archiving digital camera files.

It's good to be alive

Horrific photo of storm damage in Sweden.

stupid

Hey all you Buffy fans out there, it's Wiccan Barbie! Includes fun, potion-making accessories, including two mixes for making magic potions you can really drink.

oh

3-D models of M.C Escher's "impossible" drawings

Interesting article: A History Of Punctuation. Note the "interrobang."

'Smittens'

he's a fungi

Europe's biggest mushroom found. It covers roughly 86 acres.

I love this guy's name.

16 experts: What If Bush Wins

It's . . . Chocalypse Now.

Just in case

If you need any voting information, check out the Voters Information Guide for the upcoming 2004 US Election.

Can I hear me now?

A wristwatch phone that lets you listen by sticking a finger in your ear, an MP3 player that vibrates the bones in your skull to play music that only you can hear -- these are some of the products being developed using a technology called bone conduction that sends sound waves through the bones around the ear. Pretty neat.

More from Jimmy Swaggart:

"I'm trying to find the correct name for it ... this utter absolute, asinine, idiotic stupidity of men marrying men. ... I've never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry. And I'm gonna be blunt and plain; if one ever looks at me like that, I'm gonna kill him and tell God he died."

Way to love thy neighbor.

It's the Management Glossary. Let's do a 360 review of our action items at the all hands.

Photos from the war in Iraq.

last gmail post

Does anyone want a gmail account? I have 5 invites left, and nobody's buying them anymore. Just email me. If I run out, you can always request a free invite from the gmail invite spooler.

Oh, and this: Gallina is a hack that allows you to post your gmail emails as blog entries. Why, I have no idea.

Popular Science magazine names its third annual 'Brilliant 10,' a list of ten young scientists to watch.

latest from New Scientist

Fascinating: one day spacecrafts will be powered by loud sounds. 'Inside the engine, the acoustic pressure is high enough to pop your eardrums . . . it's louder than a thunderclap.'

"Free access to every work of creativity in the world is a better world"

David Weinberger, author of the brilliant and seminal Small Pieces Loosely Joined, has posted a draft of a great speech on copyright that he's giving at the World Economic Forum in NYC tomorrow.

from LIFE

100 Photographs that Changed the World

Exponential growth

Nate should like this one: If you could fold a piece of paper in half 100 times, it would be as tall as the radius of the known universe.

Fo' shizzle

What's the origin of izzle?

subverting the dominant paradigm, redux

"I would price the Mozilla Project to be worth well over $100,000,000 in equity/intellectual property."

(Huh?)

amazing video

Guy surfs incredibly huge wave, apparently from Hurricane Ivan.

Attention

If you are an out-of-state student, swingstatevoter.com will help you with the absentee voter process.

hmm

Great discussion on Ask MetaFilter concerning the history of scientific discovery:

How is it that people knew enough to build huge ships that could sail thousands of miles, navigating by the stars, and enough to engineer huge, ornate buildings that would outlive them by hundreds of years, but it took until the late 19th century to figure out that splashing a little alcohol in a wound, and on surgical instruments, could reduce infection? How could no one have discovered this? They had alcohol -- wouldn't you think just through blind luck or trial and error, over millions of incidents of wound treatment, they would have uncovered this? Why was "cleaning a wound" such a foreign concept to them? They cleaned clothes, floors, their own bodies, etc. but nobody noticed that a clean surgical environment had a salutory effect?

Not sure if I like this quote from the thread, though: "One of the first things said to me in my med school lectures was, "50% of what you're going to learn over the next four years is wrong. Unfortunately, we don't know which 50%."

10 days. 1,000,000 downloads.

It appears that Firefox is poised to become the numero uno Web browser. The folks at Spread Firefox are recording 790,000 downloads in only three days, which is pretty impressive. But considering that Mozilla's Firefox browser is clearly superior to Internet Explorer these numbers don't really surprise me at all. The only surprising thing is that Microsoft hasn't responded to this clear threat to its current internet monopoly.

Why internet music traders are not communists. by Dan Hunter

Wow. Headless chicken survives for 18 months.

amazing sidewalk chalk guy

I WILL DOMINATE YOU IN PAINTBALL. No, really.

Pointlessly huge SUV enters market, marks new period of gluttonous consumption of oil and resources.

critical update

How to give and receive criticism

Movie trailers for everyday life

This summer.
Two friends.
Pushed to the limit.
With time running out.
Can only blame themselves.
For not cleaning the lint trap.
Before putting their towels in the dryer.

via The Morning News

This is pretty cool: Space law moot court. Where else can you debate actual and potential interstellar legal issues?

nerves

Hoo boy. In two and a half hours I enter the lion's den, otherwise known as the school courtroom, to argue before "The Supreme Court of the United States" (really just eight professors) for the Moot Court Competition. I've been honing my arguments for two days, and last night I dreamed about the Constitution. It was chasing me, and I couldn't shake it. As soon as I'm done I have to construct arguments for the opposing side, to be given tomorrow. 12 minutes of pure hell. Wish me luck!

insert theme from "Jaws" here

Microsoft Sees Open-Source As Major Threat

Bushband

Bush wants everybody to have broadband access. Don't you just love an election year? It's like Christmas.

Broadband, also known as high-speed Internet access, has the potential to bring new services and products to American consumers and businesses, fostering innovation, investment, and job-producing economic growth. My Administration has long recognized the economic vitality that can result from broadband deployment and is working to create an environment to foster broadband deployment. All Americans should have affordable access to broadband technology by the year 2007.

Court: “Get a license or do not sample”

Lawrence Lessig offers some insight into the recent decision by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals that music sampling is piracy. Once again, he notes: life in the analog world is freer than life in the digital world.

heads up: good music

Hey folks, Mary Pat's dad has just cut a CD, and it's darn good. Pick up a copy of "Workin' on a Memory" here. Shake that bootie.

how I feel

Save Betamax

National Call-In Day to Congress in opposition of the Induce Act is September 14. Get on the horn.

"Thou shalt be everywhere and always the champion of the Right and the Good against Injustice and Evil."
via The Codes of Chivalry and Courtly Love

hah

more strategery

Bush: "We've got an issue in America. Too many good docs are getting out of business. Too many OB-GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country." (Here's the Reuters article.)

hero, redux

This is Aron Ralston's story, the guy who was rock climbing in Colorado and got pinned under a boulder and had to amputate his owm arm in order to escape. This man deserves to be alive.

Movie Combinations You'll Never See
Some of my favorites:
"A Hard Day's Night of the Living Dead" - The Fab Four must defend themselves against a horde of zombies assaulting the Royal Albert Hall.

My Fair Lady and the Tramp: Henry Higgins tries to turn a scruffy mutt into a champion showdog.

Dirty Dancing Rotten Scoundrels -- two con men compete to see which of them can turn a shy girl into a dance champion.

The Madness of King George of the Jungle -- the royal court goes bananas when His Majesty starts swinging from vines in a loincloth.

Clash of the Titanic -- Andromeda and her mother Cassiopea are taken on a cruise by Calibos (Billy Zane), but when Andromeda falls for a lower-class hunk instead, the Kraken rises from the deeps to destroy the ship.

ah McSweeney's

E-mail Addresses It Would Be Really Annoying to Give Out Over the Phone.

watch the little ball

Take back the web

For those of you who want to join the open source revolution (read: End the Microsoft monopoly!), this is a great article on how to make the switch to open source gradually. I currently use a non-Microsoft browser (Mozilla Firefox) and love it. Eventually I plan on switching to Linux. The article has several suggestions for alternatives to Microsoft's proprietary and omnipresent software. Here's another article on why you should switch to open source in the first place. Aaaaaaargh, says I...free culture now!

Other articles of note:
Governments should switch to open source

Korean government launches switch to open source

I want one.

Five things I’ll be doing while you’re at Burning Man

1. carefully stewarding my pallor
2. repeatedly watching Law & Order: Special Victims Unit on the TiVo
3. defecating indoors—copiously, often, and without queueing
4. not tongue-kissing a sweaty Java programmer in clown makeup named “Shanti”
5. wearing clothes—lots and lots of square, capitalist, heinous-body-covering clothes

When Nerds Protest

(link)