techyum ::

I was all excited looking at a link to the Topo Table at transmateial that Jonathan sent me — a beautiful, modulated dining table that holds plants in a variety of configurations — when I saw the gorgeous Wet Lamps also for sale on the nondesigns site. The Wet Lamps are glass balls filled partway with water, then an exposed light bulb is submerged. Which seems weird, but gets even weirder and cooler when the dimmer switch — a thin silver rod — is introduced. Dip the silver rod deeper into the water to brighten the bulb; less submerged silver means less light. It’s a wonderful contradiction in reason, and a beautiful lamp. Though it’s definitely not the kind of thing you’d want to leave within kitty’s reach…

A while back, cartoon character skeleton drawings by Michael Paulus made the blog rounds, but in the meantime Korean artist Hyungkoo Lee has been painstakingly drawing and sculpting Bugs, Daffy and more in resin (and steel springs, wire and paint). My pal artist Holly Bobisuthi was lucky enough to see Lee’s work in person at the Bienalle this year, and I just found a hyooge gallery of his cartoon characters here, plus sketches of the pieces before casting. It’s so cool to see someone really map out imaginary skeletons on paper.

Over at Ars Technica, Eric Bangeman reports that a judge has ordered record labels to cough up actual figures on download expenses, and that the damages sought by the RIAA are unconstitutionally excessive. Duh. But in a double smackdown, showing that the music industry is a giant, painful learning lesson of what not to do in every sense with regard to digital media and the Internet, New York Magazine gives a nice opinion piece about Universal Music Group CEO Doug Morris’ admission to Wired that they never even bothered to put a digital media strategy together until it was too late to make a strategy. He’s a prime example of the dying media dinosaur, and everything they’re taking to their tar-coated graves. It’s, like, so cute when they flagrantly disregard technology and consumers!
In Ars Technica’s Judge tells record labels to cough up download expenses, we learn that the wholesale price of music (not previously disclosed) is a mere .70 a song. And if damages are as they suggest no more than ten times the 70-cent loss, then file sharers would only have to pay $7.00 per shared song. Snip:

(…) Beckerman has argued that the RIAA’s actual damages are in the neighborhood of 70¢ per song, less than 0.1 percent of the minimum statutory damages provided for by the Copyright Act. The RIAA initially fought to keep its wholesale pricing secret, but its lead counsel has since admitted that the 70¢ figure is in the right neighborhood. Beckerman would like to see any damages capped at no more than 10 times the amount of actual damages should infringement be proven.

Link.
But the real laugh-a-minute is over at New York Magazine in Universal Music CEO Doug Morris Speaks, Recording Industry in Even Deeper Shit Than We Thought, where we get to read:

In a way, he almost comes off as cute, like if your grandfather were accidentally hired to run Google (at one point, Morris hilariously compares his embattled industry to a character in “Li’l Abner,” a comic strip that stopped running in 1977).
As for his actual digital strategy, it’s pretty much what we expected — Morris’s singular goal these days is to limit the power of Steve Jobs and iTunes. He puts most of his energy into designing Universal’s own Internet music store (Total Music, which is definitely doomed to fail), cutting deals with Apple competitor Microsoft for a piece of those massive Zune profits, and heroically doing all he can to make it even more difficult for consumers to justify paying for music online. But then he says something so ridiculous it sort of blows our minds. (…)

Link (via).

My current lifetime goal is to create and have a houseful of robot minions and friends, much like Sebastian in Blade Runner, but would I trust them with my credit cards? Not likely. However, lest we forget, we’re already kind of trusting a lot of robots these days with things like our credit card information and sometimes even our rights. No, really. Check this article by Mark Rasch at Security Focus:

Automated tools — including automated replies, spiders, crawlers, and browsers — may enter into contracts on our behalf, but without our knowledge.
That’s a problem, when, in the ordinary course of browsing the Web or engaging in other electronic transactions, a person may enter as many as between 50 and 100 contracts a day. These include the terms of service (TOS) for your ISP, search engine, and browser, terms of use for a Web site, the privacy policies posted on the Web sites, copyright agreements or notices, trademark agreements or notices, warranties or disclaimers of warranty, and of course, the terms of software end user license agreements or EULAs. These agreements may include conditions on what you may or may not do on the site, an agreement to arbitrate disputes, an agreement to abide by and sue under the law of a particular jurisdiction, a granting of a license to use your information, and agreements not to use the information to which you are granted access in particular ways. In addition, an entity can condition your “access” to their Web site based upon your agreement to their terms and conditions — failing to abide by their terms and conditions results not only in potential “breach of contract” liability, but also in liability for trespass, unauthorized access to a computer, or the civil tort of “trespass to chattels.”
The situation begs the question: Are such contracts binding and if so, binding on whom?

Link.

The things one learns on the internet! Over at the New England Journal of Medicine, the case studies this month include that of a woman found to have a 4.5-kilogram bezoar in her tumtum. Yes, yes, in fact, I did say “kilogram.”
Comic book fans and those who don’t need my candy-apple fairy tale may remember the concept of the bezoar; it appears in an early episode of a certain Beowulf-lover’s The Sandman, wherein a bezoar is needed to cast a spell that’ll imprison the muse Calliope and shake an author loose from his writer’s block — something I am sure a real writer would never do without a really good reason or an approaching deadline on a project for which s/he’s already spent the advance.
What’s a bezoar? Oh, it’s just a “sort of calculus or concretion, a stone found in the intestines of mostly ruminant mammals” — that, or a big chunk of impacted hair in the maw of a human who compulsively munches on his or her delicious tresses. The condition of eating one’s hair is called trichophagia, and can lead to Rapunzel Syndrome, which I recall Mr. Sandman appreciating.
According to NEJM, the young woman in this case had her hairball removed successfully. One year later, we’re told, “She has regained approximately 9 kg of body weight and reports that she has stopped eating her hair.” Which is nice.
While at NEJM I learned about another disease with a fairy-tale name. NEJM tells me: “Harlequin’s Syndrome typically is considered to be an idiopathic, benign condition causing localized failure of the upper thoracic sympathetic chain, with sparing of the first (oculomotor) thoracic segment,” all of which which appears to be a nice way of saying that this female aerobics instructor went to the gym, exercised, and turned all pink on one side. The cause of the condition is a benign tumor that presses on the sympathetic trunk. The tumor was removed; the patient was doing well one year after surgery, though reported to still be exercising.
Bezoar link.
Harlequin’s syndrome link.
Image via the New England Journal of Medicine.

National Geographic has some amazing video here (embedded video auto-start alert) of the sinking of the cruise ship MS Explorer, the first cruise ship ever built specifically to operate in the Southern Ocean near Antarctica; she also became the first cruise ship to sink there after striking an object, probably ice (you think?) near the South Shetland Islands on November 23.
The Liberian-registered ship was operated by GAP Adventures, which issued a statement that the ship was not sunk by an iceberg, but by pack ice, which is probably important to somebody, but damned if I could tell the difference anywhere but in my Johnnie Walker.
All 154 passengers and crew of the Explorer were rescued by a coordinated effort of the Argentine Coast Guard and the Chilean Navy.
Link.
Image: MS Explorer in 2005, by Constantine via Wikipedia.

This is such a beautiful and strangely devious tool: Dealmonger has the Gerber’s Demolition Explosive Technician’s Multi-Tool for $79 from a variety of sources — it’s the only multi-tool certified for explosive ordinance disposal units, with U.S. military specs. It is flat black and non-reflective, and features a blasting cap crimper, and a universal saw coupler with remGritT saw — and of course, standard screwdrivers and the much-needed-on-the-bomb-site bottle opener. Awesome!

Over at Science Blogs, there is a terrific post in reaction to a Canadian school board’s decision to remove books by an author — because he is an atheist. What would a library be without atheism? According to PZ Meyers’ well-done post, pretty much empty (especially the science and science fiction sections). Snip:

A Canadian school board has decided to remove Philip Pullman’s books from its schools’ shelves because people complained that the author is an atheist. This is a remarkable objection, obviously. I mean, we don’t see school boards screaming to remove Chuck Colson’s books from the shelves because the author is a convicted felon, which seems to me to be a much more serious indicator of moral turpitude than atheism, nor do we see a call to eject books by Ann Coulter because she is incredibly stupid, and is therefore a poor role model for students. It’s just atheism that spurs this objection.
I think we ought to run with it. The school board didn’t go far enough. Let’s purge school libraries of all books by atheists.
Wikipedia has a nice partial list to start with. Let’s throw all these authors out.
* Douglas Adams (1952-2001): British radio and television writer, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
* Isaac Asimov (1920-1992): Russian-born American author of science fiction and popular science books. (…)
(…) Targeting the intellectual, literate segment of the culture, the kinds of people who write and read books, is simply guaranteed to hit large numbers of atheists, and it’s a powerful strategy for this school board to take, especially if they want to reduce spending on books. There is the problem that it’s often not easy to detect which books had an atheist author — it’s not the kind of datum that’s specified in the card catalog. Maybe we should also insist that publishers stamp some distinguishing mark on books by atheist authors to simplify their identification, like, say, a scarlet A on their spines. (…)

Link.

In Germany, in a quarry; an ancient find. No wonder there were crazy creatures in myths; the Romans and Greeks may not have been too far off. The LA Times has a *glorious* artist’s rendering, but Guardian UK has good text:

It is enough to give people with arachnophobia a large dose of the heebie-jeebies. Scientists have discovered the fossilised claw of a sea scorpion that suggests the giant scorpions, spiders and crabs that once crawled around the world were even bigger than previously thought.
Found in a German quarry, the claw is 46cm (18ins) long, suggesting the sea scorpion was 2.5m (8ft) long – almost two feet longer that it was previously thought the aquatic creatures grew to. Because land-based scorpions and spiders are believed to have descended from the sea scorpion, scientist believe the discovery means that they also may have been even bigger than had been believed.

Link.

Proving there’s a market for everything, or one culture’s creative + capitalist channel is another culture’s evil dark parable of drug addiction: South Korea’s Jump Up Internet Rescue School. It’s going to be fodder for the next “fat camp” reality TV show, I know it. Snip:

But these young people are not battling alcohol or drugs. Rather, they have severe cases of what many in this country believe is a new and potentially deadly addiction: cyberspace.
They come here, to the Jump Up Internet Rescue School, the first camp of its kind in South Korea and possibly the world, to be cured.
South Korea boasts of being the most wired nation on earth. In fact, perhaps no other country has so fully embraced the Internet. Ninety percent of homes connect to cheap, high-speed broadband, online gaming is a professional sport, and social life for the young revolves around the “PC bang,” dim Internet parlors that sit on practically every street corner.
But such ready access to the Web has come at a price as legions of obsessed users find that they cannot tear themselves away from their computer screens.
Compulsive Internet use has been identified as a mental health issue in other countries, including the United States. However, it may be a particularly acute problem in South Korea because of the country’s nearly universal Internet access.

Link.