Internet Law: The year in review.

Steven Den Beste has written an excellent essay on North Korea. The best line is probably this comment from one of his readers:

"It's Mordor! It's a technological Mordor!" A real-life Mordor with a million orcs with AK-47s. And forging a nuclear 'Ring of Power'.

Yikes.

Lots of juicy information about Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.

The internet pornography catburglar has apparently been caught.

To sleep, perchance to dream: The Economist warns that we're not getting enough sleep.

The proposals for the World Trade Center reconstruction project are now available online. I must confess that I'm not particularly enthused by any of the finalists.

Top ten spam subject lines of the year. Yup, I've seen them all. (Via Techdirt.)

The Terminator 3 movie trailer. "She'll be back..." (Via Madville.)

It's easy for bloggers to get sued.

The US military is conducting research on ways to allow soldiers to function for 7 days straight without sleep. Methods being studied include both pharmacological and non-pharmacological.

Rat-Bot: The robot that runs on rat brain cells. (Via Boing Boing.)

"Guns and Freedom": A terrific blog post from Rachel Lucas.

High tech toilet sends elderly aunt to the ER. (Via Obscure Store.)

The arms race between telemarketers and anti-telemarketing technology continues to escalate.

Senate TV network shows porno movie.

The NY Times talks nanotech.

"Virtual world will run on real cash"

If you want to become a fake psychic, you need to master the art of "cold reading". (Via Linkfilter.)

"High school student earns an 'A' in hacking". With the school's permission. By lowering his GPA from 4.0 to 1.9.

Can Google prosper and still maintain their moral principles?

Still doing your Christmas shopping? Here are more geek toys.

Administrative note: Posting may be a bit light for the next couple of days.

Eric Raymond has written a terrific essay on courage.

Only in America... (Via Volokh Conspiracy.)

Man survives for a week on Taco Bell sauce. (Via Aberrant News.)

HUD (Department of Housing and Urban Development) is ambivalent about being portrayed on television as a cash cow for the Mafia (ala The Sopranos).

Float like a butterfly.

The Bermuda Triangle is a dangerous place but no more so than the New Jersey Turnpike.

The virtual aging simulator suit helps young people experience the aches, pains, and creaks of getting old.

Segway owners love their scooters.

Unique tech support call: "Hello my computer was making a strange hissing noise last night and this morning when I turned it on there was a crackling noise and some smoke then nothing, if I bring it in can you fix it?" (Via GMSV.)

Physics trick of the day: A curtain wire can be made to defy gravity and stand upside down if subjected to rapid vibrations because of a phenomenon caused parametric oscillations.

Neuromarketing: "A company in Atlanta is scanning people's brains with MRIs, in an effort to record our subconscious thoughts about products and ads." Interesting (some would say diabolical) twist on using functional MRI as a lie detector. (Via Boing Boing.)

Star Trek updates: William Shatner doesn't mind being eternally typecast as Captain Kirk. Leonard Nimoy, on the other hand, has decided to quit acting to pursue photography.

Be careful when you upgrade your CD-ROM drive: According to laboratory tests, "At 52x CD-ROM speeds (27,500rpm) disks shatter in a 'rain of plastic particles', shooting out long, sharp, knife-like shrapnel at half the speed of sound..." Update: Matt Hartman wrote in with a cool picture showing how this happened to him a few months ago.

Take the Turing challenge: "As chief scientist of the Internet portal Yahoo, Dr. Udi Manber had a profound problem: how to differentiate human intelligence from that of a machine"

Marvel Comics will be introducing the first openly gay comic book title character hero in one of its comics -- the Rawhide Kid. Slap leather!

The science behind city-swallowing sand dunes.

Turkish Star Trek

The hot new Christmas "toy" is kiddie cell phones.

Classic Winston Churchill quotes.

The Google economy: A lot of people depend on Google for the bulk of their income.

IBM has created the world's tiniest transistor, which is a tenth the size of those used in current microprocessors.

The swords and armor of "The Lord of the Rings" (Via BBspot.)

Best Excel games. (Via Madville.)

A funny letter supposedly from a little boy to some sailors in the Navy. (Via Linkfilter.)

Mathematicians have calculated pi out to 1.2411 trillion digits, exceeding the old record of 206 billion digits by a factor of six.

"TiVo" is turning from a brand name into a common everyday verb, just like "to xerox" did before it.

Is this an example of real-life optical camouflage?

"The World According to Google"

Nine Things Strom Thurmond is Older Than (Via RWN.)

The 10 Best Mars Images Ever.

"Visitors to a off-beat Berlin arts center thought a dead woman on the ground was a performance art act rather than a suicide..."

Update on the "telco powered products": A couple of readers have pointed out that this might just all be a hoax or a joke since the referenced patent number at the bottom of the page has nothing to do with the products.

Poetic justice: Spammer gets taste of his own medicine. (Via BBspot.)

Remote control for bacteria.

Eugene Volokh has an interesting analysis of the legal status of internet speech and weblogs in libel cases.

Middle Earth gangsta rap. (Via Metafilter.)

A patient who had been undergoing treatment with radioactive iodine for thyroid disease has been setting off anti-terrorism sensors in the NYC subways, resulting in two strip searches by police. Here's the case report.

Haiku Enterprise. (Via BBspot.)

The telephone company provides free, unmetered electricity to houses through the telephone jacks. Here's how you can take advantage of that. (Via Boing Boing.)

An Australian mathematician has figured out the optimal way to lace one's shoes.

Weapon of the Week: The microwave phaser. (Via Linkfilter.)

Sean Kreck takes some pretty awesome photographs of the Colorado landscape and other parts of the country. (His commercial website is available here.)

In the 1980's, the BBC recorded a nearly-indestructible "digital archive" showing daily life of the times. But then the reading technology became obsolete, and only now have researchers been able to recover the lost data..

Speaking of criminals, police in Wyoming are looking for a burglar who's been breaking into other people's houses and using their computers to surf for porn. He apparently doesn't steal anything from the houses, but just uses the computers to sign up for membership on porno sites, then surfs for a while before making his escape. (Via Techdirt.)

Are criminals using "out of office" e-mail responses to figure out when to break into houses left empty by people going on holiday vacation?

During the Thanksgiving travel rush, airport security personnel across the country seized a number of contraband items, including a total of 15,982 pocket knives, 98 boxcutters, 6 guns and a brick.

Microscopic diamond fragments (aka "diamondoids") found in crude oil may be very helpful in nanotechnology development.

Wearable computing displays are getting slicker and sleeker.

"An Austrian electrician has invented the world's first tattooing robot."

Immobotic robots utilize a rudimentary form of "self-awareness" to help them solve problems. The key is that they "have a commonsense model of the physics of their internal components and can reason from that model to determine what is wrong and to know how to act".

"Toddler swallows transponder that is required to start car. Mother can't start car. Mother holds todder up to steering wheel and starts car. This is the BBC." (Via the Daily Rotten.)

The Flip-Pad Voyager laptop folds into 4 quarters. When unfolded, the display surface consists of two 13.3" screens yielding a total resolution of 1536 x 1024, but when folded it's only a little bit larger than a big notebook computer. Cool!

The NY Times has a nice article on night vision devices, and the tremendous advantage it gives to the US military.

The biggest battle in the online game EverQuest is not between players and monsters but between Sony and cheating hackers.

A Canadian biologist has found a huge 60-acre spiderweb in British Columbia containing "tens of millions of spiders". (Via Linkfilter.)

Mike Langenberg makes his 2002 predictions on what life in be like in year 2012. (His report card on his 1992 predictions of life in 2002 is here.)

Math question of the day: "Suppose you are limited to figures bounded by straight lines (polygons) and you are allowed only one straight cut. Using a fold-and-cut process, what shapes can you produce?"

The surprising answer: "[A]fter an appropriate sequence of folds, any polygonal shape can be cut out of one sheet of paper by a single straight cut. In other words, one cut suffices -- whether the drawing consists of a single polygon, adjoining polygons, nested polygons, or an array of disjoint polygons." More information about this remarkable theorem is available here.

The Einstein Papers Project is revealing a lot of interesting personal information about the man.

The Onion's guide to chatroom shorthand.

Molecular storage: "An image composed of over 1000 of bits of information can be stored in the atoms of a single molecule".

No professional courtesy: Shark bites California lawyer. (Via Transterrestrial Musings.)

Quantum computing continues to advance.

Google's Live Query lets their employees keep their fingers on the pulse of the internet.

A leading British plastic surgeon believes that face transplants will be feasible within the next year.

An unfortunate font choice. (Via GMSV.)

What can you do if your TiVo mistakenly thinks you're gay? Or a neo-Nazi?

The first cloned human baby is supposedly due to be born in January 2003.

The Ark of the Covenant (aka "The Lost Ark") might be in Ethiopia. (Via K5.)

How reliable are our recollections of so-called "repressed memories"? According to noted psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, not very.

Domino Artwork creates portrait mosaics from dominoes. What makes their work particularly challenging is that they always use complete sets, utilizing a mathematical technique called "integer programming" to help them determine how to optimally position the dominoes. (Via Boing Boing.)

"Physicist Fotini Markopoulou Kalamara has developed a way to connect relativity with quantum theory -- while making sure that cause still precedes effect"

"Intuition: Its Powers and Perils" Psychologist David Myers has written an interesting book about the phenomenon of intuition. More information is available at the author's web page and in this book review.

Afterlife Telegrams: "For a fee of $10 per word (5 word minimum), our customers can have a telegram delivered to someone who has passed away. This is done with the help of terminally ill volunteers who memorize the telegrams before passing away, and then deliver the telegrams after they have passed away." Diana observed that one flaw with this method is that it assumes that everyone's all going to the same place, a point that the company acknowledges in their FAQ. (Via Metafilter.)

Back in 1992, technology writer Mike Langenberg wrote an article on what life would be like in 2002. How accurate was he? Let's find out. (Via Techdirt.)

The NY Times has discovered the Sims.

Brewster Kahle, my old MIT housemate, talks about what he hopes to accomplish with the Wayback Machine. Great interview!

A new mobile phone keypad will give direct access to all letters and numerals.

Ellen Feiss admits that she was on drugs during her infamous Macintosh "Switch" commercial -- her allergy medication Benadryl. But her stoner fans still love her nevertheless.