A roundup of festive crap sent in to BoingBoing by you, dear readers:

• Evil Christmas Carols (audio). How beautiful! With "sinister" key changes to minor, they sound menacing, like soundtracks to silent movies about damsels in distress on Christmas eve.
• Weird nativity in FL retirement community, above (WTF? Raelians?)
• Scientific formula for blink-free holiday group photos
• War on Moisture: TSA bans snowglobes on planes
• Top 10 DIY Christmas trees
• $600 upside-down Christmas tree
• Flickr pool: your strangest holiday ornament
• Roombas singing Christmas carols (video)
• Rankin-Bass Santa + Rudolph rescued (previous BB post)
• 101 Classic Christmas Videos

• Gingerbread Katmari Damacy (above)
• Video: horribly Bad Star Wars Christmas: part 1, part 2
• Ultraviolent Star Trek holiday office diorama
• Baby Jesus kidnapped, returns with snapshots
• A Very Cthulhu Christmas (audio)
• More Ctholhiday cheer: Scary Solstice (audio)
• sf-themed holiday story collection (+ 2, 3, 4, 5)

• Newtonmas crafts (above): holiday tree topper, costume
• Iranian political asylum applicant mom jailed in NC after applying for permit to sell street art (BB reader Pembdasi, who submitted this item, says, "I am her half-brother. I just found out about this today, the day before Christmas Eve. Merry Christmas I suppose.")
• Silent choir sings "Silent Night" in sign language
• Retro ads: shopping mall Santas arriving by copter, parachute
• Zanta, holiday cult figure in Toronto. Here's more.
• Boymongoose: 12 days of Christmas, Indian-style (video). Re-blogged by popular demand -- everyone I've showed this to in person squeals, then emails it to 20 people. About: Link, and you can buy the boy-band's "Christmas in Asia Minor" album online, in CD or download form: Link. Includes such classic carol faves as "Hark the Herald, Angel Singh," and "We Are Wishing You A Merry Christmas."

(Thanks and happy hols, Huw Bowen, Rob Nachbar, Tim Shore, Dave Topping, Mark Vadnais, John/Disney Blog, Scott, Wil, Justin, Human, Mark Wu, Paul Campbell, Tay, Tobias, Robn, Stef, Jacob Appelbaum, and Santa's Helper!)

Lee says: "CNN ran a fascinating little story on 12/22/06 about a 'mystery stone' found in New Hampshire. No one seems to know what the carvings on the stone mean, how it was made, or even who might have made the artifact. I Googled to find out more about the item, and came up with this site from the New Hampshire Historical Society, who has possession of the stone." Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Mystery of the Bayer Stone Head

Scott says: "there's no denying it anymore." Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Photos of extinct long-horse
• Long horse on Wikipedia
• Balinese long horse

Link to image gallery, more media including audio, video, and text reports here: Link.

Link. (Thanks Raian)

Snip from CNET News.com story:

U.S. District Judge Sam Lindsay in the northern district of Texas granted a preliminary injunction against Robert Davis, who operated Supercrosslive.com and had been providing direct links to the live audiocasts of motorcycle racing events. Lindsay ruled last week that "the link Davis provides on his Web site is not a 'fair use' of copyright material" and ordered him to cease linking directly to streaming audio files.

Link (Thanks, Scott)

pea hix says,

here's some of my favorite shitteos called "asdf." i guess the main thing that ties all these films together is that the people that posted them thought so little of their work that they just titled them by hitting the four "home position" keys under their left hand- pretty much the default "word" you type when you have nothing at all to say but you have to fill in a text box anyway.

Link, and related Wikipedia entry on asdf: Link.

"Gov. Jeb Bush's official portrait unveiled at the governor's mansion shows him in his office standing next to a picture of his family with his trustworthy BlackBerry." Link. (Thanks, Andrew Breitbart!)

Researchers exploring the so-called "Dark Web" analyzed 86 websites from groups labeled as terrorist orgs by the US government, using data mining software. In a report titled "Analyzing Terror Campaigns on the Internet," a team of tech and culture experts from several US universities compared them to 92 US state and federal government websites. The researchers determined that the government sites lagged behind in advanced web technologies. In short, they said, the terrorist groups demonstrated greater sophistication in their use of Web 2.0 tools.

I filed a story about that report for today's edition of the NPR News program "Day to Day," and spoke to one of the authors, Dr. Jialun Qin of the Univ. of Mass., Lowell. Does he believe the American government is losing a "war of websites" against terrorist organizations in the Middle East? Well, not exactly. Snip from transcript of Qin's comments:

According to some studies, the US government is the best in the world in terms of using the internet to communicate with the general public. So it's not a problem of the government, really -- the government is doing a pretty good job. The problem is that the terrorists are learning very fast, they're taking advantage of a lot of different new technologies including the internet. The US government has to improve its usage of internet. The terrorists surprised us.

Some of the groups are even doing e-commerce, Qin said -- selling t-shirts, CDs, even comics for kids or modded video games on the internet to generate income.

Also in the segment: James Ellis of the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, a nonprofit group in Oklahoma City funded by the Department of Homeland Security. I asked him if he believed the government should be doing more to shut down these sites, as some have argued -- significantly, the report states that some portion of the activity ends up being hosted on servers inside the United States at one point or another. Ellis said:

It's more complicated than people realize. The information is transient. When you shut down a site, it doesn't go away, that community doesn't go away. In some cases, it can be more helpful to leave a site intact so you can monitor the activity, and watch it over time... watch them develop as indicators and warnings. It's like cutting off the head of a Hydra -- it's just going to pop up somewhere else.

• ARCHIVED AUDIO LINK, with pointers on where to read the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies report online.

Image: Left, a web graphic on one of the sites in the report. The poster depicts Abu Mus’ab Zarqawi, and the text says "Emir Zarqawi, may God save him. Eagle of Iraq, volcano of Jihad, and the beheader." Right, the NPR segment includes audio from the Al-Anbar website, which offers "holy war" hymns in an audio section.

Also on today's edition of "Day to Day," an amazing interview my colleage Neal Carruth put together -- this one is truly a must-listen:

Sunni Insurgents Launch TV Channel
Sunni insurgents in Iraq are running a 24-hour television channel, called Al Zawraa. The channel shows attacks on Americans and Shiites, as well as violence committed by Shiite militias. Saad Qasim, a translator in NPR's Baghdad Bureau, talks with Alex Chadwick.

• ARCHIVED AUDIO LINK for that segment.

"People Doing Stuff" is a site that automatically inserts a random name and verb into Google Image Finder each time you hit reload. The resulting image sets always have something interesting in them. Here's a cool picture that showed up in a search for "victor wanders." Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Photographs from the Arkansas State Prison 1915-1937
• Japanese cosplay photos
• Photographs of pregnant animals

CNN has a video of a live giant squid sighting, a very rare event. The researchers tried to capture the squid, but it died.

A Japanese research team has succeeded in filming a giant squid live -- possibly for the first time -- and says the elusive creatures may be more plentiful than previously believed, a researcher said Friday.

The research team, led by Tsunemi Kubodera, videotaped the giant squid at the surface as they captured it off the Ogasawara Islands south of Tokyo earlier this month. The squid, which measured about 24-feet long, died while it was being caught.

"We believe this is the first time anyone has successfully filmed a giant squid that was alive," said Kubodera, a researcher with Japan's National Science Museum. "Now that we know where to find them, we think we can be more successful at studying them in the future."

Link

Related BB posts:
• Unusual photo of large squid in parking lot
• Giant squid caught on film for first time
• Squid biomass exceeds human biomass
• More squid posts on Boing Boing

I think the object of this Japanese game show is to pay attention to what the scantily clad young woman is cooking and not to the scantily clad young woman. Link

Related: Boing Boing video picks for 2006

Reader comment:

Brian says:

Regarding the "Japanese game show features food prepared by scantily clad cooks", it is a popular weekly　variety show known as Pu-Sma. The show has two hosts, Yusuke Santa-Maria and Tsuyoshi Kusanagi (of the pop group SMAP), additionally each episode will include two or more celebrity guests that will join in on the fun.

Yusuke is well-known for his passion of all things "Ero", so the show often exhibits scantily clad young women in one situation or another.

Each episode features a different competiton that takes place between the two hosts and their special guests. If the competition involves the purchase of something, the loser of the competition must pay for whatever items were used during that particular episode. The expensess can easily get into thousands of dollars that come directly from the losing team's wallets.

This full page ad from an old issue of Boy's Life recommends BB rifles as an ideal gift for kids between the ages of 7 to 17. I hope mom and dad got real rifles. Link

Inspired by Mark's limited-edition gremlin Moleskines, Jake von Slatt created a magnificent collection of journals with etched brass covers made using an electrolytic etching process. Gareth Branwyn, who wrote a profile of Jake for an upcoming issue of MAKE:, has the details over at Street Tech. Link

Related BB posts:
• Gremlin Moleskine notebook Link
• Le moleskine blog Link
• Moleskine stops a bullet, saves man's life (It was a joke) Link

What's not to love about this photo of two happy pots on a stovetop, whose facial features are made of reflections from bottle caps, pieces of spaghetti, and the stove's burners? Link

Related: Interesting perceptual illusion with faces | Mr Angry and Mrs Calm optical illusion | Excellent purple dot illusion | Optical illusion's effects last overnight | More illusions on Boing Boing

New Zealand surgeon Peter Walker missed his flight from Queenstown back to Christchurch after Qantas Airways staff noticed his suitcase was bleeding. Apparently his baggage contained a plastic bag loaded with bloody operating gowns, a towel, and surgical instruments. After Walker sealed his sack inside a plastic airline bag he was permitted to catch a later flight. From the New Zealand Press Association:

(Local medical officer of health Dr. Derek) Bell intends to refer the incident to the Medical Council because of the potential for injuries to bag-handling staff from sharp objects inside the bag, and the risk of exposure to blood and body fluids.

Mr Walker said the instruments were safely inside steel trays and he always asked patients beforehand if they had infectious conditions such as Aids or hepatitis. He declined to disclose what operation he performed at the Queenstown Medical Centre.

Link (Thanks, Vann Hall!)

Arista, Warner, Capitol, UMG, and other record labels are taking legal action against the long-troubled Russian digital music site AllofMp3.com. Earlier this year, a statement from a US government trade representative pegged the site as being an even higher-volume digital music distributor than iTunes. Tom Zeller at the NYT's "The Lede" blog reports,

Started in 2000, the Web service, which charged just pennies per song and roughly $1 for an album, established its legality by claiming that it complies with Russian copyright laws, and that it distributes royalties through, and is licensed to sell its music by something called the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society.

Of course, that body was not officially recognized outside the country, and the legality of the business plan was hotly debated even inside Russia, but while that was being sorted out, the service grew to become what the United States Commerce Department called the world’s highest-volume distributor of online music.

The service quickly began suffering death by a thousand cuts this year — with Visa and Mastercard refusing to process payments for AllofMp3’s parent company, Mediaservices, earlier this year. Then last month, Russian authorities agreed to move to shut down the music service, after the United States gently suggested that such a clear and constant violation of international copyright standards could hold up Russia’s acceptance in the World Trade Organization.

Link.

Previously on BoingBoing:

• AllOfMP3 loses Visa account, switching to ad-supported
• US Trade Representative bends Russia over on copyright
• Is it legal to buy songs from Russian MP3 sites?
• USA: Russia can't enter WTO unless it shuts down AllofMP3
• Russian MP3 site given thumbs up by investigators
• Archived BoingBoing posts about AllofMP3.com

Last week's edition of the New York Times included an odd item about NBC latenight host Conan O'Brien doing an on-air bit about a hypothetical fetish site called hornymanatee.com. But, the NYT reported:

There was only one problem: as of the taping of that show, which concluded at 6:30 p.m., no such site existed. Which presented an immediate quandary for NBC: If a viewer were somehow to acquire the license to use that Internet domain name, then put something inappropriate on the site, the network could potentially be held liable for appearing to promote it. In a pre-emptive strike inspired as much by the regulations of the Federal Communications Commission as by the laws of comedy, NBC bought the license to hornymanatee.com, for $159, after the taping of the Dec. 4 show but before it was broadcast.

Conan being Conan, he and the late-night team soon built out and launched a bogus porn site at that address, all about horny manatees. Radar Magazine ran a followup item, pointing out that...

There are no FCC regulations that required NBC to buy the domain. "We have no regulations dealing with URLs," says David Fiske, an FCC spokesman. "I don't know what they're talking about, frankly."

"Yeah, the Times overstated that a bit!" wrote Marc Liepis, a spokesman for the show, in an e-mail, explaining that NBC has a policy of registering domain names mentioned on-air not to comply with regulations but "to prevent others from registering sites that our talent mention, then trading off our intellectual property."

Who cares. What BoingBoing readers no doubt want to know is -- finally, finally there is an online home for hot manatee-on-manatee action: Link.

Reader comment: Glenn Fleishman says,

"NBC bought the license to hornymanatee.com, for $159," More importantly -- "bought the license," what are we in the 1950s dot com world or something? Did they buy the license for all the internets? Where they smoking the drugs when they paid the $159?

John Brownlee from Wired blog Table of Malcontents says

According to Conan O'Brien, they licensed it for 10 years for $159, which isn't great but ain't too shabby. We posted a video clip of Conan explaining the whole thing here: Link

BoingBoing buddy Gareth Branwyn says,

...And Andy Samdberg was on Late Night last night and attempted to converge the very viral "Dick in a Box" SNL Digital Short with HornyManatee.com by showing "Fan Art" he'd done of him and the Manatee with their dicks in festive, gift-wrapped boxes.

Here's the link to "Dick in a Box" (Link), though postings of which appear to be disappearing from YouTube as we speak, even though Samberg said last night that NBC had sent it to YouTube. Not THIS again...

Oscar says

NBC does in fact have an official YouTube account, under which they posted the uncensored version of Dick in a Box, among other things. So maybe they only half-understand how this viral video business works. Link.

Previous BoingBoing posts on NBC's adventures in viral video: Link.

Cityrag has compiled video links for a list of The 50 Greatest Cartoons as voted on by the animation industry in 1994. Here's an excerpt:

1. What's Opera, Doc? (1957)
2. Duck Amuck (1953)
3. The Band Concert (1935)
4. Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century (1953)
5. One Froggy Evening (1956)

The complete list is here, and it's absolutely awesome: Link.

At Cryptomundo, Loren Coleman posted a wonderfully weird list of his "Top Ten Creepy Fossil Finds of 2006." From his post:

1. Volaticotherium antiquus - Ancient Gliding Beast.

Discovered in Mongolia, this little half a pound squirrel-like animal is a whole new order of animals. It is a mammal that glided 70 million years before any other mammals—and maybe before birds flew.

Link to Cryptomundo

Related BB posts:
• Two-headed fossil Link
• Cryptomundo on the Hobbits Link
• Own your own Hobbit skull model Link

Quinn Norton files a report from the Global Voices Online conference in New Delhi, India, where about 100 bloggers from more than 25 countries gathered last weekend:

Exciting things happen when dedicated bloggers from around the world meet for the first time. For Briton Rachel Rawlins, being introduced to Tunisian exile Sami Ben Gharbia was the chance to meet a personal hero.

Gharbia is the creator of the Tunisian Prison Map -- an idea inspired by a New York Times interactive map charting murder locations in New York City. Gharbia turned the concept on its head: Instead of showing government figures on crime, he'd display where his former government was behaving criminally, imprisoning political dissidents for daring to speak out.

When you click on a place-mark on Gharbia's Google Maps mashup, a pop-up reveals details, stories and videos of prisoners and their families. The map is compelling and provocative, and it's one more reason Gharbia, who now lives in the Hague, says he can't go home.

The site is "the best advocacy tool I've ever seen anywhere," gushes Rawlins, managing editor of Global Voices Online, an international citizens' media group that held its second annual summit in India's bustling capital last weekend.

Link

Link to flickr slideshow. Coming up next on BoingBoing: Watch paint dry! (thanks el Brente)

Barbara Rushkoff is now blogging at Babble, the new urban parenting site launched by Nerve.com founder Rufus Griscom. I've gotten a kick out of Barbara's brilliant wit, nerdy irreverence, and comforting honesty since the days of her print 'zine Plotz. (Her book Jewish Holiday Fun For You! is a high-larious holiday gift.) As a new dad, I'm looking forward to following Barbara's parenting adventures on her Babble blog, "A Girl Grows In Brooklyn." From a recent post:

From where I stand, in the middle of Park Slope, I’m almost urban, not quite suburban, and alls I can say that the farthest thing on my mind is trying to be cool.

Here's the thing. I remember when Mamie was 6 months old I went out and spent $32 on a Sex Pistols t-shirt for her. Here I was imposing my youth on her, like my punk days would show everyone how cool my kid was. How cool I was. So can I tell you how stupid I felt when nannies at the local playground would look at me and ask me about the shirt.

”Well, it’s this band that I used to love.”

I didn't mention that the only time I listen to Never Mind The Bullocks these days is when I clean the house. Punk rock man, yeah. (Isn't John Lydon like 60 now anyway?) But saying that sentence I realized the shirt had nothing to do with my kid, and everything to do with me trying to show everyone what kind of parent I was trying to be. Which is so wrong.

Link

A bunch of griefers in Second Life staged a members-only metaverse assault on "virtual real estate tycoon" Anshe Chung yesterday, during a staged SL event with CNET reporter Daniel Terdiman. A torrent of pixelated male genitals rained upon the victim, whose offline name is Ailin Graef.

Steve Hutcheon of the Sydney Morning Herald filed a comprehensive report of the incident here and tells BoingBoing, "If you can't visualize it, see this YouTube clip: Link Google Video Link." Snip from Steve's report:

"She is very popular, and some people don't like her," said CNET reporter Daniel Terdiman, whose Second Life avatar (online persona), GreeterDan Godel, was interviewing Anshe at the time of the attack.

"She's made a lot of money, and is one of the most prominent of all Second Life residents. So to some people, some griefers, that makes her a target."

Griefers are so-called because they create grief. Their antics are designed to interrupt proceedings in virtual worlds and games usually for no other reason than because they can.

Attacks like the one launched against Anshe are triggered by a program code that generates self-replicating objects.

Much like email spam, these "griefspawn" attacks can chew up system resources and slowing down performance. They can sometimes even trigger network crashes.

Daniel Terdiman's transcript is here: Link

BoingBoing reader Paul Camp says,

Daniel Engber, Slate Magazine's Explainer in Residence, has posted a list of submitted but unanswered questions from the preceding year. Many are truly unhinged, such as the one from a guy with apparent connections in Nigeria seeking advice on how to fence gold and gems. Mr. Engber has unwisely promised to answer the one that gets the most votes. Given the demonstrated ability of boing boing readers to bring web servers to their knees, I'm thinking this is a battle we can win.

Link. Here's a sample of the items up for voting:

# Given the exchange and dispersion of matter, how likely is it/how often do we inhale/consume and/or incorporate into our own protein structure molecules that were once in some historical figure, say Abraham Lincoln?

# Lasers are now powerful and small (at least I think they are), so why don't our troops carry laser guns?

#I have been pondering this situation for as long as I can remember (maybe age 7-8) and it drives me nuts. It makes me feel like my head will implode if I think any harder. Is the universe infinite? It must end somewhere. But when it ends... there must be something on the other side... right?

# If a group of passengers on a hijacked plane wanted to, could they bring a plane down by all of them using their cell phones at the same time?

# Can you tell me how long it will take if you eat rat poison to see if it is going to affect you? Please e-mail me back. Because my niece ate some.

# Hi. I just wanted to know if our eyeballs roll back when we are sleeping (or closed) or do they shake? Or...

# PYGMIES: How/when/where/still in existence/do we mate with them?

Reader comment: Anonymous says,

Greg from The Talent Show has already taken a pass as explaining most of the "Unexplained Explainer" questions. A sample :

"If we taught animals to talk, how would that affect the world?"

There would be more vegetarians, but we'd get definitive proof that cows are complete dumbasses.

"What would happen to the stock market if a meteor impacted the earth? What would happen to the global markets and the U.S. market? Say a meteor hits inside U.S. borders and takes out two states."

The insurance industry would crash, but the U.S. government would bail them out. Unfortunately the same won't be done for the millions of refugees created by the meteor strike. But at least the trillions of dollars wasted on the "war against meteors" will create a few more jobs, right? Also, we *must* abolish the death tax.

Link

Tom Mathews says,

I think I know the answers to two of the questions. If you don't read anything else, check out the Stavatti's TIS-1 proposal. The future is now (or, at least, coming soon).

For "breathing in other people", I read an article in (I believe) Science News around 1993. I've forgotten the specifics, and I've tried to track it down on the web, but have been unable to. It involved statistical modeling of gaseous dispersion in the atmosphere, and found a single exhalation would disperse after several hundred years. I believe the example they used was that, in every breath you take, you're breathing in Napoleon's last breath. Now it isn't protein or particulate matter, but it does give an upper bound to the answer.

For the Laser Rifle, check out Stavatti's Tactical Infantry System-1. It's a proposal submitted to the US Army for a gasdynamic laser lethal at over 1000 meters and up to 170 bursts/minute. Lethal lasers with a fast recharge and long life require a lot of energy, so you usually end up talking nuclear. Section VI of the proposal covers the challenges and risks to laser weapons... mainly that of cheaply producing large quantities of Polonium-210 (currently produced only in microgram quantities, and extremely lethal). It's interesting to note that Po-210 is the same thing that the assassin used on Mr. Litvinenko.

The military is also researching non-lethal laser weapons (dazzlers), but that's a touchy area, as blinding weapons are banned by the Geneva convention. The workaround is in Article 3, which states that it's ok to blind as long as that's not the purpose: "Blinding as an incidental or collateral effect of the legitimate military employment of laser systems, including laser systems used against optical equipment, is not covered by the prohibition of this Protocol."

Dever says,

BB reader Tom Matthews mentioned the Stavatti TIS-1 and gave a brief description of it under "The Unexplained Explainer". I'm writing to provide you guys with the actual PDF from the company who "makes it" -- PDF Link.

Salvador Rodríguez says,

Another one of the unexplainables, explained. Current theoretical physics indicate the the universe is finite. Let's start with an obvious example:

Is the Earth infinite? Obviously, no. However, if you are a creature tat only moves along the surface of Earth, you might go on endlessly and end up where you started, since the earth is curved. For a two dimensional being the Earth might seem infinite, though it is not. You need to break through a third dimension and fly out to space to really understand that the Earth is finite.

This happens to us when thinking of the Universe. If we think in three dimensions, then the Universe seems infinite to us. However, if we understand that space-time is a third dimension and that the universe is curved along this dimension, we might understand that we might travel endlessly through the Universe only to end up on the other side. If we were to travel through space-time, we might very well find ourselves outside our Universe.

As to the second part of the question, the string of theories (pun intended) is so long we're better off letting the physicist duke it out for a while.

Scott Willoughby says,

We here at Drivl couldn't resist answering Slate Magazine's 40 Unanswerable questions. Link

Paul Camp, of the Spelman College Department of Physics, says,

OK, what I actually had in mind was forcing Engber to address a question that was clearly unanswerable, but this is good too.

Since my academic background is in relativity and cosmology, though, I have to address the "finiteness of the universe" comment. Drawing an analogy to the surface of the Earth is pretty good as far as it goes. Essentially, you let two spatial dimensions represent space, suppressing the third because it has to do duty representing time. Pursuing that analogy, in a closed spacetime the "direction toward the center of the Earth" is playing the role of time and the center of the expansion is the big bang event. That is a rather roundabout way of saying that there is no spatial center just as there is no center to the surface of the Earth ("Mediterranean" notwithstanding).

However, the comment that current belief is that the universe is finite is no longer operational. As of the last 5 years or so, with highly refined measurements of the distances to very distance galaxies, we actually detect that the expansion rate of the universe is accelerating due to the presence of dark energy. This necessarily implies that the universe is open and the whole idea of a spherical topology is moot. Not only that, but it means that the universe has always been infinitely big and is expanding only in the sense that the curvature is changing.

This whole discussion revolves around a misunderstanding of what the big bang theory actually says. People think of it like they think of a normal explosion -- there is space, and somewhere in it a big boom occurs, and from the boom stuff goes flying out into the existing space. Doesn't work that way.

The stuff (galaxies, etc.) is not flying anywhere. To be more precise, the local motion of any particular bit of stuff is approximately zero. You only see relative motion on cosmological distances, not locally, but that is because the space in between the stuff is changing. The stuff is only going along for the ride.

So a more accurate, if puzzling, picture is that, open or closed, the entire universe has always been full of stuff. The big bang did not happen at some center and stuff is flying out. No, the big bang happened everywhere, all at once, and nothing "flew out." Rather, the geometry of the spacetime in which the stuff exists began to change. Things get further apart because there is more and more space being created between the things, not because the things are flying in any particular direction. Think of it like a bunch of paper clips connecting rubber bands together. If you stretch the rubber bands, the paper clips get further apart, but not because they actually moved around on the rubber bands. The paper clips (galaxies) stayed put. It was the rubber bands (geometry) that changed.

There. Maybe I can work for Slate.

Pink Tentacle links to a slew of amazing wildlife illustrations drawn by Kurimoto Tanshuu (1756-1834) during the Edo period in Japan.
Link (Thanks, John Alderman!)

The study of a rare genetic disease that speeds up the aging process may lead scientists to ways to extend human lifespans. Erasmus Medical Center geneticists Jan Hoeijmaker and his colleagues examined DNA from a boy who suffered from XPF-progeroid syndrome, a condition that caused him to die of "old age" at just 15. From Scientific American:

The teen's illness... when replicated in mice, allowed an international team of researchers to answer a fundamental question in the science of aging: Do we get old due to the accumulation of damage over our lifetimes or due to the genetic blueprint we inherit?

"What we say is [that] both are valid and that, in particular, damage to DNA contributes to aging," says Jan Hoeijmakers, a geneticist at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and lead author of the study, which comprised teams from four different institutions in Europe and the U.S. "Damage accumulates ... but it is modulated by your genetic makeup. If you have better repair and/or slower metabolism, you age slower..."

The researchers compared the activity of thousands of genes in the liver of a 15-day-old mutant mouse to those in a normal mouse who lived two and a half years. The result? "The rapidly aging mice switched their activity from growth to maintenance and repair, up-regulating cellular defenses and down-regulating respiration and metabolism," Hoeijmakers says. "This also occurs upon natural aging, and if you [could] switch to this 'survival' mode early in life, you would live longer."

Link

These illustrations are some of the incredible lettrines and adornments found on a late 15th century illuminated score for love songs called "Chansons d'Amour." The medieval French manuscript is parchment, 17.5cm x 12 cm.
Link (via BibliOdyssey)

As I type this, a 99%-unclothed Naomi Campbell (okay, she's wearing shoes) is posing for photographer Nick Knight, who is using a 3D body scanning device to capture her likeness digitally in a warehouse somewhere. You can watch the whole supermodel camgirl stunt online: QuickTime stream link. It's live now (12:20pm ET), not sure how long they'll continue. Susannah Breslin, who points us to this spectacle, says "I can't tell if this will be interesting or not. Maybe if she hits someone with a phone." Link to project home page.

Update, 12:57pm ET: Ms. Campbell's not on set anymore, and the scanners aren't active -- but here are some low-res screengrabs from the video stream, so you can get an idea of how they set up the shoot (worksafeness: one of them contains blurry, pixelated, waist-up nudity): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

The model stood on a small circular platform, and scanners were perched mid-torso level on mobile, mechanical arms. I'm not sure where the resulting photos will be shown, but it looked really cool. There's a technical credit on the project website for the scanning technology -- "Kev Stenning at Rapido3D." Here's that company's website: Link. Would be interesting to know the resolution at which they're scanning for this shoot, and more tech specifics about the devices they're using.

Reader comment: Brem says,

The scanning system they are using is a set of Full Body scanners from InSpeck, a company I worked for, incidently: Link. Here is the product details: Link. It appears those actual cameras are 1.3 Megapixels. There are 4 cameras on two columns and the subject usually takes 50-80% of the image. So in theory: 1.3 x 4 x 0.8 = approx 4.2 Million polygons, but with sampling and polygonal reduction, it would come to aroudn 1 M polygons or less, depending on the needs.

Michael Calanan says (@1:50pm ET),

They've started 3D scanning again, here's a snapshot of the QT feed: JPG Link JPG Link 2.

Bob Klepfer says,

Your story gave me a most startling deja vu---remember "Looker"? (Ed. Note: Michael Crichton wrote that one.) Definitely a favorite for adolescent boys, at least. Now just be on the lookout for something to "happen" to the models so they don't have to pay them fees.

Andrew says: "For the aspiring nuke-triggering president on your list. Pity they didn't call it Project Strangelove, but I guess licensing the name cost too much. I like the kid sweating in anticipation. Probably looked even better on the storyboard." (In all fairness, the commercial says it's launching a satellite into orbit.) Link

Related: 1960s TV commercial for V-RROOM! tricycle noise-maker | Creepy Crawlers TV commercial | Mr. Machine toy robot TV commercial

The RU Sirius Show celebrates Christmas this year by having Brian Flemming, the director of the atheist documentary film, "The God Who Wasn't There," on the show to talk about his "Blasphemy Challenge" and his "War On Christmas." And then they play a bunch of hilarious Christmas songs by the likes of Leonard Nimoy, Root Boy Slim, the cast of Bonanza, and Elvis Presley. (A text version of the interview is up at 10 Zen Monkeys.)

BRIAN FLEMMING: The early Christians, the very first Christians, did not believe in a human Jesus... If you look at the beginning of Christianity...nobody was mentioning Bethlehem or Jerusalem as the place where he was crucified. Basically, nothing that you and I would call the story of Jesus was told then. He was a savior who lived up in another realm. He had died and had risen back up to be with his father. All of this took place in an upper realm, not down on earth. Bit by bit, they added historical details.

Link