Admin note: Posting will be spotty for the rest of the week due to obligations at work.

Top 10 UI bloopers in movies. (Via /.)

"Skype stress detector calls my mother a liar":

With the recent release of Skype 3.0 for the PC (Mac and Linux users will have to wait), the company has made some intriguing third-party "extras" available from within Skype. One of those, the KiskKish lie detector, claims to do "voice stress analysis" on Skype calls, measuring the stress in the other party's voice for signs of deception.

The program is based on the observation that, when people lie, their voices tend to rise in frequency. Tension throughout the body tightens sensitive vocal chords and produces higher-pitched sounds that can be measured by machines.

Anecdotal testing of the KishKish software reveals, among other things, that my mother is a massive liar, especially when it comes to the contents of Christmas dinner. A needle charts the speaker's stress on a graph in real time after taking the first 10 seconds of a call to establish a baseline stress level. A small light also changes from green to red when stress levels are abnormally high, perhaps a signal that the person is lying.

Denver International Airport before and after the blizzard. (Via Boing Boing.)

How large is our world? And video version. (Via Howard Roerig and Speculist.)

The science of artificial snowflakes. Merry Christmas!

"Whatever Happened To?...": Follow-up on 8 stories, including

The inflatable hotel?
Bird flu?
The predicted increase in storms?
A cheaper way to fight malaria?
The Hooke papers?
Woo Suk Hwang?
The new, extreme strain of tuberculosis in Africa?
The fish that crawled out of the water?
The new-fangled basketball?

Correlation between dog color and personality. Here's more info.

"'Hibernating' Man Survives For Three Weeks":

A man who went missing in western Japan survived in near-freezing weather without food and water for over three weeks by falling into a state similar to hibernation, doctors said.

Mitsutaka Uchikoshi had almost no pulse, his organs had all but shut down and his body temperature was 71 degrees Fahrenheit when he was discovered on Rokko mountain in late October, said doctors who treated him at the nearby Kobe City General Hospital. He had been missing for 24 days.

He is expected to make a good recovery, with no loss of mental function.

"UK report says robots will have rights". (Via Gravity Lens.)

"Mathematical proof is foolproof, it seems, only in the absence of fools". (Via ALDaily.)

Admin note: The good news is that our ISP is working again. The bad news is that we're in the middle of a huge blizzard. So posting may be near-normal or it may be quite irregular for the next few days.

"Are a country's foreign embassies an extension of its territory?"

Invention of the day: "The backpack that's easier to carry". Using a specially designed bungee suspension system,

...a load weighing 27 kilograms "feels" more than 5 kilograms lighter: the walker uses only as much energy as they would for a normal rigid pack weighing 21.7 kilograms.

The reason, Rome and colleagues report in Nature, is that the bungee pack bounces up and down on the frame exactly out of step with the vertical movements of the walker's body. So these movements cancel out and less energy is wasted shifting the load up and down.

Here's a related article.

"Had he not died so young, James Clerk Maxwell would almost certainly have developed special relativity a decade or more before Einstein."

Space Marines.

"The YouTube world opens an untamed frontier for copyright law"

"10 Ways to Build a Cult-Like Following". (Via Gravity Lens.)

Advances in cooling technology.

Real world taxes on virtual world profits?