Wil Wheaton sez,

Starting this month, the Los Angeles Metro Metrolink will be infected with some super-neat security theater: random bag searches will inconvenience the new crop of MTA riders who are turning to Metro to escape high gas prices.

The thing is, the searches will "randomly" target different stations, where signs will announce to everyone (except, presumably, illiterate terrorists) that they should go to a different station if they don't want to be searched.

Explain to me again how this makes us safer?

Update: Wil adds, " I made a mistake in my post at Blogging.la. The security theater is not coming to the MTA, which is our subway; it's coming to the Metrolink, which is our commuter rail. The idiocy of the thing still stands, but I regret my mistake and wanted to take responsibility for it as soon as it was pointed out to me." Link (Thanks, Wil!)

Responding to the news that John McCain and his wife owe AmEx $500,000 (presumably spent on the campaign trail), Jon Taplin writes,

I know what American Express charges for interest on a Platinum Card. A fiscally responsible household should probably sell some of the million of Anheuser-Busch stock they own and stop paying that 17% ARP on $500,000 worth of Amex charges. There are some other stark contrasts between the McCains and the Obamas. The McCains have a net worth around $40 million, almost all of it from Cindy’s holdings. The Obamas' net worth is closer to $4 million, most of it earned from Barack’s two recent books. Instead of going into debt they have managed to put $250,000 in a college savings account for their two daughters.

Link

Back in 2006, I proposed that Google should build a network neutrality detector, a distributed toolbar that collected statistics from millions of nodes on the net to determine sneaky traffic-fiddling by sleazy ISPs who only make a best-effort attempt to give you the stuff you request if they've been bribed to do so.

Well, now they've done it! Or at least, they've announced it. The one thing I hope is that they give you the option to submit statistics anonymously, without forcing you to be logged into Google.

Google has been very vocal on its stance for net neutrality. Now, Richard Whitt--Senior Policy Director for Google--announces that Google will take an even more active role in the debate by arming consumers with the tools to determine first-hand if their broadband connections are being monkeyed with by their ISPs:

"We're trying to develop tools, software tools...that allow people to detect what's happening with their broadband connections, so they can let [ISPs] know that they're not happy with what they're getting -- that they think certain services are being tampered with," Google senior policy director Richard Whitt said this morning during a panel discussion at Santa Clara University, an hour south of San Francisco.

Link (via /.)

Lewis Shiner is one of my favorite science fiction writers and last summer he began making all of his (fantastic!) old short stories available as free, Creative Commons licensed files on his site, under the banner of the "Fiction Liberation Front." Now he's expanded the program.

Lewis sez, "I've just expanded the range of Fiction Liberation Front to include free downloads of my novels, and I've kicked things off with my brand new thriller, BLACK & WHITE. My publisher, Subterranean, is fully supporting this move, and as we bring my other novels back into print we plan to release free PDF versions on the FLF site as well."

I can't wait for him to post his World Fantasy Award-winning novel Glimpses, which is one of my favorite novels of all time, a real desert-island book. Link See also: Lewis Shiner's short fiction online for free

Etsy seller FringeLore has a dab hand at making steampunk inflected jewelry and sculpture -- lots of dented and scratched and polished clockworks and gears. Link (Thanks, Olga!)

Seen here is 236.8 tons of hashish burning. Afghan commandoes found the dope buried in the desert. They called in British fighter jets to bomb the stash, thought to be the world's largest amount of illegal drugs ever found by authorities. An article about the bust in The Scotsman is punctuated with some stats on other massive drug finds of late:

5 million
Ecstasy tablets seized in Melbourne in 2005 were claimed as the largest haul of street-ready tablets in the world, worth £120 million.

9 tons
of cannabis resin was seized by Vietnamese police last month in the largest drug haul in its history. Found in 400 cartons covered by jeans, en route from Pakistan to China, it was estimated to have a street value of £45 million.

38,000lb
of cocaine was seized by US Coast Guard officers who boarded a 330ft ship off the Pacific coast of Panama in 2007. It was the largest single sea-based seizure of cocaine by a US agency, with an estimated street value of £250 million.

Link (via Dose Nation)

Will McGree got a letter form Virgin Media (his cable provider) and the British Phonographic Institute (the UK version of the RIAA (of which Virgin -- also a record label -- is a member turns out they're not affiliated with the record label any longer) telling him that he could be sued and disconnected from the Internet because someone used his open WiFi to download music. It wasn't Will -- the program used for file-sharing is a Windows app, and he runs Linux. It was one of his neighbours.

Virgin and BPI take the position that being a copyright holder means you get to specify the router configuration of every computer connected to the Internet. That just because open WiFi makes it harder for the BPI to hunt downloaders, no one should be allowed to offer it, no matter how convenient useful open WiFi might be. I've run open WiFi networks for close to a decade now -- I rely on open networks when I'm out and about, so it only seems fair to return the favour. Plus, closed WiFi networks are a pain in the ass if you have houseguests, exotic wireless devices, or older consoles and the like that can't handle passwords gracefully.

If I play my music with my window open, my neighbour might decide to open his window and listen in, instead of buying his own music. Does that mean that the record industry gets to order me to bolt my window shut?

Just one more reason not to pay for Virgin Broadband -- they're just not on their customers' side.

Virgin Media are the only ISP sending out BPI notices. They don’t have to - there’s no law or industry regulation that says so. They just leapt into bed with the BPI and the BPI couldn’t be happier that they’ve got someone doing their “policing” for them.

In September, we’re building a home server in our flat. It’ll be a Tor node so that finally Virgin Media don’t need to worry themselves with what’s flowing through their routers. It’s just data. Like I paid for.

Link (Thanks, Will!)

See also: Virgin Media UK working with record industry to spy on and threaten downloaders

From 2005-2006, illustrator Rafa Toro created and blogged a set of 80 notional monster trading cards. These are terrific -- I want them blown up to back-patch sized and safety-pinned to my jean-jacket! Link (via IZ Reloaded)

How pissed are Canadians about the new copyright bill, Bill C61, which was introduced without any consultation and which makes it a crime to upload clips to YouTube or use a region-free DVD player? Way pissed.

Ten thousand more Canadians signed up for the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group in the day following the Bill's introduction, bringing the grand total up to 50,000. Michael Geist has more ways you can show the government what you think of these shenanigans.

1. 1. Write to your MP, the Industry Minister, the Canadian Heritage Minister, and the Prime Minister.  If you send an email, be sure to print it out and drop a copy in the mail (no stamp is needed - c/o House of Commons, Ottawa, ON, K1A0A6).  If you are looking for a sample letter, visit Copyright for Canadians.
2. 2. Take 30 minutes from your summer, to meet directly with your MP.  From late June through much of the summer, your MP will be back in your local community attending local events and making themselves available to meet with constituents.  Give them a call and ask for a meeting.  Every MP in the country should return to Ottawa in the fall having heard from their constituents on this issue.
3. 3. If you are not a member of the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group, join.  If you are, consider joining or starting a local chapter and be sure to educate your friends and colleagues about the issue and starting working through the list of 30 things you can do.

Link

Joseph Rykwert is an architectural historian who has spent more than four decades studying how we relate to our cities, and how our cities change our relationships to each other. He's written nearly a dozen books exploring urban life and how cities develop, most recently The Seduction of Place: The History and Future of Cities (2000). CNN just conducted a fascinating interview with Rykwert. From CNN.com:

CNN: What is your assessment of the increasing prevalence of barriers and CCTV in public buildings and spaces today?

JR: I think it is a tragic development. I think it cuts a swathe out of public space. In a way, I think the American Embassy in London led the way but other institutions have followed. It has blocked off a bit of London.

Whether embassies are entitled to do that or not, I don't know. But it certainly presents itself as a fort or a castle. That's the metaphor that occurs to one going past it.

In a way, it suggests foreign domination in a way that embassies never did before. There are other embassies on the square and they are very modest by comparison.

The growth of security areas is something which is a reflection on our society. We are a frightened lot in a way that the people of the 1920's and 1930's were not.

This is not a British phenomenon, it is worldwide. You find gated communities in India and China perhaps even more than you do in England. Partly, of course, it's a feature of the unadvertised growing inequality in our society. But obviously it is a symptom of fear. It's also paralleled by the growth of the great commercial shopping centers which also cut up public space. Behavior has to be conformable, conforming to. Everybody has seen The Truman Papers. (Truman Show? -ed.) I think that kind of conformity is something that is imposed by turning the citizen into a customer.

Link to CNN interview, Link to buy The Seduction of Place

Mother Jones's Michael Mechanic created a chart that associates presidential campaign donations with the donors' stated occupation, from science teacher to professional golfer to baker to candle manufacturer. The data comes from FundRace.org.
Link

These days, lots of pot dealers use pre-printed ziplocs or stamps to "brand" their product. Or so I've noticed in the gutter of my neighborhood park. But that's nothing compared to this awesome header card that COOP just sent me. Kustom kulture pioneer Robt. Williams drew it during his employment at Roth Studios in the 1960s. It's meant to be folded in half and stapled on top of a baggie. I love that it has a punch hole marked for hanging on a standard retail display rack. Link to bigger image (Thanks, COOP!)

My friend Joe Hutsko contacted me a few weeks back with the intriguing offer to serialize his novel, The Deal, on Boing Boing. I jumped at the chance. I read The Deal when it first came out in 1999 and loved the thrilling story about a Apple-like company's undertaking to create an iPhone-like device.

Here's a link to Chapter 2 as a PDF or a text file. (Here's chapter 1 and an introduction to the book.)

To buy a paperback copy of the book, visit JOEyGADGET or purchase directly from Amazon.

Today on Boing Boing Gadgets we looked at an iPhone hidden in a Moleskine, the new Robocop, and had Newegg on toast. Joel found a beautiful pollution-themed table, John uneathed Dell's Eee clone—The "Dell E", and Rob spotted Femisapien heading east. There was a dongle that installs OSX on any PC; Nintendo execs screaming "NERRRRRDS!"; and a beautiful Japanese iPod dock.

Then there was the bad: 1Up outed Konami's threats to detain game reviewers who wouldn't sign an NDA and Denon started selling $500 ethernet cables to credulous audiophiles.

Joel also got a preview copy of the Spore 'Creature Creator' and has been busy making monsters to keep him company.

There's always a wonderful note to leave on, though: I dare you not to click on the Garlic Zoom!

Steampunk maker Jake von Slatt sez, "I've been into human powered vehicles for a long time, far longer then my current passion for steampunk. So I got very excited when Eric and Alan (aka Steuben's Wheelmen) sent me some new pictures of their completed and fully steampunkified tadpole trike!" Link (Thanks, Jake!)

The Open Source Cinema folks have cut together this PSA about Canada's new copyright bill, C-61, which imports the worst elements of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, turning millions of Canadians into presumptive criminals who will be forever at risk of losing their property, privacy and dignity for the "crimes" of posting a clip to YouTube, breaking the DRM on a CD, or using a region-free DVD player. Link (Thanks, Brett!)

Jesse Brown from CBC Radio's Search Engine sez,

Here at Search Engine we've been on the phone with Minister Prentice's and Minister Verner's offices, holding them to their promises that they would answer questions about the Copyright bill once it's out. Fingers crossed!

We're hoping Boing Boing readers can assist the CBC in collecting questions for the Minister(s). Specifically, we want to get beyond the angry emotions and pose practical questions.

Here's the form all questions should take:

"What if I _______: Will the new bill make me a criminal?"

Here are my questions, based on listening to the Minister weasel when asked them earlier:

* What if I remove the DRM from a public domain work?
* What if I remove DRM from copyrighted works that I created?
* What if I remove the DRM from a crippled CD in order to load it onto my iPod?
* What if I help a blind person remove the DRM from a crippled ebook?
* What if a blind person gives another blind person a copy of her cracked ebook?
* What if a blind person gives another blind person a tool that can be used to crack ebooks?

And here's two important ones that don't follow Jesse's template (if you ask me, these are the most important questions to get answers to from the Minister):

1. Don't we pay Parliament to make our laws? How come DRM companies and entertainment companies get to invent any copyright law they want (in the form of DRM) and enforce it using our cops? Isn't coming up with rules about what copyright does and doesn't allow your job?

2. Do you really think that Canadians are going to stop putting videos on YouTube, breaking DRM from their DVDs, enjoying region-free players, etc, just because you've passed this dumb law? What will happen to the public's respect for copyright law once every voter realises that you've just turned her into a criminal, just for watching the DVDs she bought on her iPod? How will you protect Canadians from selective enforcement and vindictive prosecution (like the time the RIAA went after a college kid who'd contributed code to a search engine that could find MP3s on the campus net, busting him for the MP3s on his hard drive, and demanding that he switch majors and stop programming computers as a condition of his settlement)?

Link (Thanks, Jesse!)

(Disclosure: I am a paid columnist for Search Engine)

Carlos Ramos was the creator of The X's on Nickelodeon, art director of Chalkzone, and also worked on Deter's Laboratory and a slew of other cartoons. He has a show of magnificent large paintings opening June 28 at the Corey Helford Gallery in Culver City, California. The show, titled Natural History Museum Part I, runs until July 16. I'd love to see a full-length film starring Ramos's fantastic menagerie of beautiful beasts. From the gallery's show description:

For his first solo show in Los Angeles, Ramos replicates the natural history museum experience for his audience, fusing the natural world with the art world. A series of twenty four large-scale paintings based on classic grand dioramas and a special installation of skeletal structures will transform the gallery into an epicenter of fl ora and fauna. The concept of the exhibition is based on Ramos’ childhood fascination with natural history museums and the “authoritative” impression they made on him growing up.

Link to view art, Link to Corey Helford Gallery

We'll be talking with Brendan at 11 Eastern in #boingboing. Click here to join the conversation or join #boingboing on chat.freenode.net in your client of choice.

We'll post the transcript here after we're done.

Update: Edited transcript after the jump.

UK-based Russell Porter chronicles alt music culture in the Porter Report with aggressive wit and offbeat charm. In today's episode, Russell has a sit down chat on a stoney beach with eclectic melodramatic pop musician, George Pringle.

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion and downloadable video.

Here are previous BBtv episodes featuring Russell Porter. (special thanks to Jolon Bankey).

Alexey Titarenko's "City of Shadows" is a series of haunting, gorgeous long-exposure shots of street-scenes in St Petersburg, Russia. The long exposure-times turn the people in the shots into ghosts and suggestions of motion. Link (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Painters Chris Crites and Chris Reccardi are having a joint show at Seattle's Roq La Rue Gallery opening tomorrow, Friday June 13. Reccardi, known in the animation world for his work on Ren and Stimpy, Powerpuff Girls, and Spongebob Squarepants, paints space age daydreams he calls "psy-fi." Crites generated quite a buzz in recent years with his paper bag paintings of vintage mugshots. For this new show, he created an entire series of firearm portraits. They resemble screenprints, but actually each color is hand-painted separately with no overpainting at all. The Roq La Rue show runs until July 5 and all of the work is also viewable online. At top, Reccardi's "Miss Mono" (acrylic on board). Below that, Crites's "M16" (acrylic on pine). Link to Reccardi gallery, Link to Crites gallery

Previously on BB:
• New psi-fi paintings by Chris Reccardi Link

Kevin Andrew Murphy sez, "I knew that Lady Puabi of Ur had d4s for the game boards found in her tomb, but it turns out the Romans had d20s and a nice green glass one is currently up for sale at Christie's. Only $17,925, for the gamer who has everything." Link (Thanks, Kevin!)

Moe Zilla sez,

Judge Alex Kozinski is a friend of free speech. Now bloggers have discovered his secret online porn stash -- and forgiven him for it. Yes, there's naked women painted like cows, a man fellating himself, and two women hiking their skirts under a "Bush for President" sign...

But the L.A. Times' "neutral" editorial language made it all sound much more sinister than it really is. Looking at the photos, they're clearly standard-issue viral emails. (Apparently his music directory even included two Weird Al Yankovic mp3s and Monty Python's "Lumberjack Song.")

The judge says he didn't know the directory was world-readable, and that many of the images belonged to his college-age son.

The internet has not only changed politics, media, and freedom speech -- it also made it easier for the judge to get caught in an embarrassing situation. But I also wonder if all the MySpace/Digg/Fark users in the world will give the judge a knowing wink, and we can all finally stop being hypocrites?

Link (Thanks, Moe!)

Update: Some thoughtful commentary on this from Lessig:

Here are the facts as I've been able to tell: For at least a month, a disgruntled litigant, angry at Judge Kozinski (and the Ninth Circuit) has been talking to the media to try to smear Kozinski. Kozinski had sent a link to a file (unrelated to the stuff being reported about) that was stored on a file server maintained by Kozinski's son, Yale. From that link (and a mistake in how the server was configured), it was possible to determine the directory structure for the server. From that directory structure, it was possible to see likely interesting places to peer. The disgruntled sort did that, and shopped some of what he found to the news sources that are now spreading it...

His son set up a server to make it easy for friends and family to share stuff -- family pictures, documents he wanted to share, videos, etc. Nothing alleged to have been on this server violates any law. (There's some ridiculous claim about "bestiality." But the video is not bestiality. It lives today on YouTube -- a funny (to some) short of a man defecating in a field, and then being chased by a donkey. If there was malicious intent in this video, it was the donkey's. And in any case, nothing sexual is shown in that video at all.) No one can know who uploaded what, or for whom. The site was not "on the web" in the sense of a site open and inviting anyone to come in. It had a robots.txt file to indicate its contents were not to be indexed. That someone got in is testimony to the fact that security -- everywhere -- is imperfect. But this was a private file server, like a private room, hacked by a litigant with a vendetta. Decent people -- and publications -- should say shame on the person violating the privacy here, and not feed the violation by forcing a judge to defend his humor to a nosy world.

When it comes to government invasions of our privacy, we are (and rightly) a privacy obsessed people. We need to extend some of that obsession to the increasingly common violations by private people against other private people. There is nothing for Chief Judge Kozinski to defend because he has violated no law, and we live in a free society (or so he thought when he immigrated from Romania). A free society should feed the right to be left alone, including the right not to have to defend publicly private choices and taste, by learning not to feed the privacy trolls.

The Onion nails the future of videogaming in this clip on World of World of Warcraft, a new videogame that allows you to play at being someone playing World of Warcraft. Link (via Wonderland)

If you're a Canadian and you care about the future of culture, art, free speech and the Internet, you need to do something about the Canadian version of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that Industry Minister Jim Prentice introduced yesterday. This bill was prepared without any consultation with Canadian stakeholders: there was no input from industry, libraries, education, artists' groups, Canadian record labels, technology developers or citizens' groups. Instead, the bill was written to specs handed down by the US trade rep and ambassador (who kept on telling the press about the "assurances" they'd had from the Minister on the bill's features).

The bill makes it flatly illegal to break any kind of digital lock, or to violate terms in one of those absurd end-user license agreements that make you promise to agree to let the record industry kick your teeth in and drink all your beer, just for the dubious privilege of paying for a song at iTunes or watching a video on Viacom's website. This amounts to private law: under Prentice's plan, Parliament would get out of the business of making copyright law, simply enforcing whatever copyright law the entertainment industry itself dreamed up.

This is even worse than the approach the US DMCA took ten years ago, and look where that's got them. Tens of thousands of Americans have been sued, key innovative technology companies have been destroyed, computer scientists have been jailed, and what did it get them? Certainly not an end to infringement -- file-sharing is up in every country in the world. And for all the money the record industry has harvested from tech startups and music fans, not one dime has been paid to an artist.

Here's your chance to tell your Member of Parliament what you think. Kat sez, "Copyright for Canadians ) has a handy tool that makes it easy to email your MP about bill C-61. After you send your email, print it out, address an envelope and send a physical copy, too--no stamp necessary! Here's the address:

House of Commons
Ottawa, ON
K1A0A6" Link (Thanks, Kat!)

Rstevens, creator of the wonderful webcomic Diesel Sweeties, sez, "I finally got off my ass and finished my 10 volme set of CC-ebooks. Opted out of Wowio or any of those stinky services that are ad-supported because not all countries can sign up. Just some weekend reading for the blogosphere!"

Ten volumes of Diesel Sweeties! w00t! Link (Thanks, R!)

Brendan I. Koerner, author of "Now the Hell Will Start," will be joining us in the #boingboing IRC channel tomorrow at 11AM Eastern time to discuss his book and the story of Herman Perry. We'll put up a post about an hour before we get cooking tomorrow reminding you of how to access IRC. Here's the details about connecting to the chat. There's a web-based Java client if you don't want to fire up a whole separate IRC client, but you won't be able to private message without registering your nickname on Freenode.

Start thinking up those questions and we hope to see you there!

Previously • Review: "Now the Hell Will Start" by Brendan I. Koerner

Photoshop Disasters posted this photo from Washington Post. The guy on the left is both behind and in front of Tiger Woods. Neat trick. Link

UPDATE: Here's some background from, Chris Combs, photo editor at the Washington Post Express: "This is a Getty photo and I ran it verbatim. I don't have time for Photoshop. The one error to which our sports editor will likely admit is that it is credited to "Stuart Franklin/AP," whereas it is "Stuart Franklin/Getty Images" that took the photo. Here is the picture on Getty's site.

"You may also find it on editorial.gettyimages.com by searching for "Stuart Franklin" tiger mickelson. I can't say that Stuart Franklin didn't 'chop the image, but Express didn't touch it."

UPDATE: Stuart Franklin says: "I would like to clarify something. Several people have been writing to my web address which is stuartfranklin.com complaining about some fakery etc. Please do not confuse me - the current President of Magnum Photos - with a sports photographer of the same name who licenses his work through Getty (I believe). I have little interest in sport except cross country running and no interest in photographing sport. You will need to take up your issue via Getty or AP."

My friend, the cartoonist Roy Doty, was interviewed for this terrific profile of inventor and bon vivant Peter Schlumbohm, creator of the Chemex coffee maker. It was written by Tejal Rao for Gourmet.

The Chemex coffee maker is part chemist’s funnel, part Erlenmeyer flask, with a blond leather band in the middle corseting its hourglass curves. An iconic symbol of German modernism and simple, functional Bauhaus style, the device—a Pyrex glass container with a sturdy paper filter—produced M.F.K. Fisher’s favorite cup of coffee and still holds an alluring power over coffee purists and design geeks. Its success launched its inventor, Dr. Peter Schlumbohm, into the arms of the design establishment (the coffee maker has been a part of the MOMA’s design collection since 1944, just three years after Schlumbohm patented it), and in the early years of World War II, it was considered a patriotic alternative to products made from metals and plastics (which were essential to the war effort). A Time Magazine article from November 1946 quotes the ebullient inventor as saying, “with the Chemex, even a moron can make good coffee.”

...

“He loved to drink and he loved to eat,” says Roy Doty, a cartoonist who was a friend of the late inventor, “so going out for dinner with Dr. Schlumbohm was a horrifying experience.” Guests were treated to epic all-night food crawls in his huge Cadillac Coupe De Ville, which he pimped out with built-in shades and a solid-gold Chemex coffee maker bolted to the driver’s door. (When he traded in his car every two years, he removed the golden amulet and set it on the newer, larger model.) Like many German immigrants, Schlumbohm felt at home in Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood, once a stronghold of German restaurants and coffee shops. He drove his guests up into the 80s, handed anyone loitering near the area a ten-dollar bill to watch the car, and then marched in for his first course. Soon, they all piled back into the car and moved on to the next joint. “Eventually,” says Doty, “you’d be somewhere eating streusel with him and by that time it was two or three in the morning.” But three in the morning was nothing to Schlumbohm, who surrounded himself with fellow night owls and often made calls around that time to discuss his newest ideas.

When he did return home, it was, unsurprisingly, to a bachelor penthouse on 5th Avenue—a peeping Tom’s paradise overlooking Greenwich Village, with thousands of dollars worth of binoculars dangling from the windows, and ice buckets stocked with perpetually chilling German beers and wines at the front door for visitors. “He loved women, Dr. S., and women loved him,” says Doty.

Link

We sometimes say that it "hurts" to part with our stuff even if it's junk, and we know it's junk. Behavioral scientists call it the endowment effect, a theory that people put higher values on things once they own them. Turns out though that it actually does hurt to sell something you own, and it has nothing to do with overvaluing. Stanford University and University of Pennsylvania psychologists recreated the endowment effect in volunteers while scanning their brains with MRI. From Nature News:

If the reason for the endowment effect came from the products being overvalued by their owners, (professor Brian) Knutson’s team expected to see a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbus change during the test. It didn’t, “whether buying or selling, the activation in the nucleus accumbus looked the same”, says (co-author professor Scott) Rick.

But others part of the brain, the insula, which has a role in the experience of pain, and the greater mesial prefrontal cortex became activated when the subjects contemplated selling one of their items. If they had ranked that item as one they particularly liked, the change in the insula was greater.

According to this research, this is because of loss aversion, says Rick. “It is not because people are overplaying the positive [aspects of a possession].” Rather, we just become attached to objects we own — so much so that it takes a lot to convince us to part with them.

Link