• Notebook overhaul on the horizon: “Five years from now, the desktop will probably look pretty much like it does today, but the notebook will likely be smaller and lighter, capable of making cellular calls on its own and running on methanol. Component development projects under way portend fairly substantial changes in notebook design, according to executives and analysts. Fuel cells and battery enhancements, which will let notebooks run three to 10 times longer without a recharge, will begin to appear by late 2004.” C/Net
  
• The laptop? The deck: ‘Then, in that classic wonk moment, you pull your Global Civil Society Designer Laptop from your ballistic-nylon shoulder bag and you boot it up. “Whoa!” is the instant response from a stunned and impressed public. “Where’d you get *that*?” “Oh, this? We’ve *all* got these now! They’re *everywhere!*”

  But it isn’t really a laptop per se. It’s more like your portable office network. Or maybe it’s more like a collection of PDAs. Let’s call it a Deck (as in a deck of cards…)’ nonsensical

Declan McCullagh: Media chief decries Net’s moral fiber: ‘The president of media giant News Corp. warns that the Internet has become a “moral-free zone

,” with the medium’s future threatened by pornography, spam and rampant piracy.

Speaking Tuesday at an annual conference organized by the Progress & Freedom Foundation, Peter Chernin decried the “enormous amount” of worthless content online. He also predicted that without new laws to stave off illicit copying, News Corp.’s vast library of movies may never be made available in digital form.’ C/Net

Declan McCullagh: RIAA asks Verizon for name of P2P subscriber: “In what may become a new legal front in its war against online copying, the Recording Industry Association of America has asked a federal court for help in tracing an alleged peer-to-peer pirate.

On Tuesday, the RIAA asked a federal judge in Washington, D.C., for an order compelling Verizon Communications to reveal the name of a customer accused of illegally trading hundreds of songs. Citing privacy concerns and potential legal liability, Verizon has refused to comply with a subpoena the RIAA sent last month.” C/Net

Also:“The U.S. Department of Justice is prepared to begin

prosecuting peer-to-peer pirates, a top government official said on Tuesday.

John Malcolm, a deputy assistant attorney general, said Americans

should realize that swapping illicit copies of music and movies is a

criminal offense that can result in lengthy prison terms.” C/Net

Yahoo agrees to China censorship

The aspiration to a borderless Internet has fizzled along with technology stock prices. Commercial Web sites are eagerly recreating real-space national boundaries in cyberspace, so that they run Japanese ads for people who log on in Japan and German ones for Germans. National regulators are tightening control, asserting their right to tax e-commerce sites in their countries and the right to “wiretap” e-mail with suspected criminal connections. For the most part, this is good: There’s no reason why societies that choose to ban child pornography in real space should decide that the same material in cyberspace is fine, or why bricks-and-mortar stores should pay sales taxes while clicks-and-mortar stores escape them. But this principle can sometimes go too far. It’s ironic that the latest company to cross the line is none other than Yahoo. Washington Post editorial

“Airport security screeners may soon try to read the minds of travelers to identify terrorists.

Officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration have told Northwest Airlines security specialists that the agency is developing brain-monitoring devices in cooperation with a commercial firm, which it did not identify.

Space technology would be adapted to receive and analyze brain-wave and heartbeat patterns, then feed that data into computerized programs “to detect passengers who potentially might pose a threat,” according to briefing documents obtained by The Washington Times.”

Offender Supervision with Electronic Technology

(.pdf)

The document is designed to help readers understand

and appreciate the process needed to incorporate and

implement electronic supervision strategies within

justice system programs. It was developed for agency

staff that want either to introduce electronic

supervision as a new program component or enhance

the use of electronic supervision that has already

been implemented. The document is divided into five

sections, and by reading each of these sequentially,

the steps for developing or enhancing electronic

supervision strategies will be apparent.

American Probation and Parole Association [via Politech]

Disputed Air ID Law May Not Exist: “A recent lawsuit filed by Electronic Frontier Foundation founder John Gilmore against U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, United Airlines and several others challenges the requirement that airline flyers present government-issued identification in order to travel within the United States.

The suit claims unpublished federal regulations have created an “internal passport” for Americans in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

As it turns out, there may be no such law on the books. Instead, carefully worded rules and statements allow airlines to make it seem that way. Under current federal regulations, they’re only required to ask for ID, not to make it a condition of travel.” Wired

Dennis Fox: “Why are corporations working so hard to impose high-stakes standardized testing on the nation’s public schools?“

Cities Die. Should New York Be the First to Clone Itself?: New York’s race to preserve its architectural DNA. Village Voice

Palm admits color flaw in m130: “Palm’s low-end color device, the m130, has been advertised as 16-bit color supporting 65,000 colors. Now it turns out that, well, it isn’t, and it doesn’t.” infoSync

Rock’s fifty greatest meltdowns Rolling Stone

Many thanks to David Walker, rapidly assuming the role of an unofficial auxiliary FmH editor for the number of blinks he sends me, for the following list, reprinted in its entirety, of what captivated during my week away:

• followup on the MIT blackjack team profiled in Wired
  
  kottke.com
  
• recruiting the leading minds of computer science into “the industrial revolution of biology”

  Wired

• Born Digital
  
  : a special report on the ‘children of the digital revolution’. Wired

• report about Robert Blake’s celebrity status in the LA jail where he is being held after charged with his wife’s murder. E! Online
• Calvin Trillin wonders if wine connoisseurs can really tell ’em apart
  
  The New Yorker
  
• boing boing‘s
  
  blink to writer John M. Ford’s 110 one-line “stories” about being in NYC on 9-11
  
  
• “America may want to rethink a system that creates so many hardened criminals” The Economist
  
• Ambushed on “Donahue”! Salon. “A defender of video games is given the trash talk-show treatment. Here’s what he really wanted to say.”
  
• “How NPR’s online executive producer turned the nation’s top public network into an Internet player.” Business 2.0
• Danny O’Brien’s Oblomovka, interesting blog found via Robot Wisdom with which I hadn’t been familiar
• null device‘s take on the ‘Florida faith-based spanking’ travesty I wrote about below
• 
  
  null device‘s take on Turkmenistan’s madman leader Niyazov, whose effort to rename a month of th year in his own honor I wrote about last week
  
  
• Jamie Lee Curtis turns traitor, as noted on Supermodels are Lonelier Than You Think (SALTYT)
• Russian authorities enjoin a St. Petersburg hospital from psychosurgery as addiction treatment Plastic

• Rafe Colburn links to a 8/16 article from Army Times “that includes a lot more detail about the rigged Millenium Challenge 02 wargame”; he’d been skeptical when he’d only read about it in The Guardian. [I love to blink to The Guardian, as I suppose readers have gleaned… — FmH] rc3
  
• kottke’s comments on hearing James Gleick discuss what the Internet has done to journalism. Gleick doesn’t much like weblogs, kottke observes, and he offers this Steven Levy observation in a Newsweek piece about “Living in the Blog-osphere” in counterpoint:
  

  “Even the various computer-generated lists that purport to probe what’s happening on Planet Blog don’t go beyond the 10,000 or so most popular ones, rated by the numbers of links to and from the various sites. But the bigger story is what’s happening on the 490,000-plus Weblogs that few people see: they make up the vast dark matter of the Blog-osphere, and portend a future where blogs behave like such previous breakthroughs as desktop publishing, presentation software and instant messaging, and become a nonremarkable part of our lives.”

  As one of the 490,000, I agree…

• Not clear what David is pointing to in the null device
  
  ‘s 08/23 archives
  
  , but if I had to guess I’d cast my vote for the pointer to this fascinating Ohio.com story
  
  about a European skeptic’s investigation of “the story of a man who appeared suddenly on the streets of New York City in 1950, bearing the property and identity of a man who had vanished in 1876”

I recall my panic when I took a vacation after the first few months of FmH’s existence about whether there would be any readers left when I returned two weeks later. I approached each of several friends from the blogiverse about having them keep up the blog as a guest editor during my absence. Ultimately, I rejected the idea — I’m too much of a control freak about FmH, I guess — and it certainly seems that it remains interesting enough for many of you to remember to come back after a week or two when it hasn’t been refreshed, and for others of you to think of me, by collecting pertinent blinks, while I’m away. Again, I’m indebted, David. Keep sending me those pointers!

Thanks to Alwin Hawkins, a fellow health professional weblogger, for sending me this blink.

‘A tiny particle found in the spinal fluid of schizophrenia patients is baffling doctors who cannot work out what it is.

The Swedish researcher involved has even suggested it might be “a new form of life”, although other experts say this is unlikely.

However, it could mean that doctors have a reliable test for schizophrenia.’ BBC

The ‘new form of life’ angle, the more sensationalistic aspect of this news, should be placed in the context of the continuing British preoccupation with BSE (“mad cow disease”), caused by miniscule nonviral, nonbacterial communicable (but by no stretch of the imagination living!) protein particles known as prions. However, I’m among those who find this analogy implausible for schizophrenia, which has none of the epidemiology of an infectious disease. If these mystery particles are real, they are more likely a byproduct than a cause of the pathological process in the schizophrenic brain. And that’s a great big “if” — the history of schizophrenia research is rife with the ‘discovery’ of putative markers for the disease in blood, urine or cerebrospinal fluid which have uniformly turned out to be artifacts. I’d love to read the scientific paper on this finding (from Neuroscience Letters; here’s the abstract

but the full text requires a subscription), rather than rely on the popular press, which does not even indicate if the study was done in a “double blind” fashion.

It seemed abit unreal that not much worth noting had happened while I was media-less last week, then I find out that Abu Nidal is dead in Bagdhad, where he was staying for the past several months as a guest of the Iraqi government while he reportedly underwent treatment for skin cancer. Confused reports suggest he committed suicide “when confronted by Iraqi agents about his anti-government activities”, namely reported contacts with anti-Saddam elements in Syria and Jordan. However, “sources in Abu Nidal’s group said on Monday that he shot himself because he was suffering from cancer and was addicted to painkillers.” Ever vigilant for a WoT®-serving soundbite, Administration mouthpiece Ari Fleischer commented:

“Abu Nidal is one of the most craven and despicable terrorists in the world, who is responsible for killing at least 900 people in 20 different countries. The fact that Iraq gave safe haven to Abu Nidal demonstrates the Iraqi regime’s complicity in global terror. He will not be missed.” Guardian UK

However, not content with this level of complicity, the hawkish Telegraph UK reports that

“While in Baghdad, Abu Nidal, whose real name was Sabri al-Banna, came under pressure from Saddam to help train groups of al-Qa’eda fighters who moved to northern Iraq after fleeing Afghanistan. Saddam also wanted Abu Nidal to carry out attacks against the US and its allies. When Abu Nidal refused, Saddam ordered his intelligence chiefs to assassinate him. He was shot dead last weekend when Iraqi security forces burst into his apartment in central Baghdad.”

Abit too neat, tying up Palestinian terror, Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda in one tidy package and delivering them to the WoT®-meisters, it seems. How would we ever know if it is true?

This National Geographic Magazine feature on meerkats is getting alot of linkage. “Welcome to the strange social life of one of Africa’s most beloved carnivores.” Replete with cute pictures [and no references to the O’Reilly Network…]

‘Thank You for Financing Global Terror’: “Make a subtle-but-powerful statement about the connection between rampant fuel consumption in the United States, and the financing of terrorists (and their families) by oil-producing nations, particularly America’s ‘ally’, Saudi Arabia.” Subvert Press

Are We? “A recent Newsweek article claimed that a half-million blogs populate the Net. But weblog software companies and industry experts say many new journals are authored by the same people who’ve abandoned older ones, just as AOL users stop using screen names they’ve outgrown.” Wired

New from McDonald’s: the McAfrika burger :

McDonald’s has been accused of extreme insensitivity after releasing a new sandwich called the “McAfrika” in Norway, one of the world’s richest countries, at a time when 12 million people are facing starvation in southern Africa.

The launch of the new hamburger has infuriated the Norwegian equivalent of Christian Aid and the Norwegian Red Cross and generated a storm of bad publicity for the American fast-food giant. Guardian UK

Musharraf Grants Self Broad Powers

Despite widespread criticism, President Gen. Pervez Musharraf unilaterally amended the Pakistani constitution Wednesday, granting himself sweeping powers – including the right to dissolve parliament – and extending his term in office.

“Pakistan is passing through a very crucial transitional period,” Musharraf told reporters in announcing his decision to implement the amendments, which were first unveiled in June. “We are taking Pakistan from democratic dictatorship to elected democracy. I want to introduce a sustainable democratic order.” Lycos News [thanks, Abby]

Is this not getting more airplay because of the Administration’s investment in downplaying this inevitable price of holding together the ludicrous WoT® coalition? Has there been any U.S. official reaction to these moves?

“Osama bin Laden voodoo doll:

• Hang him from the rear-view mirror
  

• Shave him
  

• Dress him in women’s clothing
  

• Tie him to your front grill or dangle him from your car trunk
  

• Give him to your dog You call the shots!”

[Also available: a mother-in-law doll and an ex-husband doll.] And, on the subject of dolls, look at these monsterdolls by marthasue

.

What’s a nice boy like David Rees doing with a cult hit comic strip like “Get Your War On”? The Independent Weekly [thanks, David]

‘“Manuscript Found in Zaragoza,” based on a 200-year-old novel by a Polish count, tells the tragicomic tale of the seduction of an 18th-century Spanish-German soldier by a pair of Muslim princesses. Like so many Romantic adventurers and Western fictional heroes, from Lord Byron to Kit in Paul Bowles’s novel The Sheltering Sky, the protagonist is drawn into a sensuous and illusory dreamscape that ultimately leads to his destruction. Directed by one of Spain’s most renowned playwrights, Francisco Nieva, the play has been adapted by him from a book of the same name written by Jan Potocki, a Polish ethnographer and historian, between 1797 and 1815.’ NY Times Arts & Leisure [via Abby]

I saw the labyrinthine, phantasmagorical The Saragossa Manuscript

, a 1965 Polish film from the same source (of which this article makes no mention) directed by Wojciech Has (1925-2000), in the ’70’s when I was in college. Although abit rococo, its complex structure of dreams inside stories inside reveries inside fables, which left the audience reeling and laughing in confusion, haunted me for several decades during which I had lost track of its title and could find no further information about it. Even posting queries on the internet when it became viable a decade later was without results, until I happened to read in the mid-’90’s

that it was reputed to be Jerry Garcia’s favorite film

and that, along with Coppola and Scorsese, he was funding its restoration to its original 175-min. length — in the process learning its name again. The restored version premiered at the New York Film Festival in the fall of 1997, with a posthumous dedication to Garcia. I finally obtained a video copy around two years ago. Potocki’s book has recently reappeared in print, prompted by the revival of the film.

Probably because both films were most suitable for midnight viewing and, if you weren’t in an altered state of mind going into them you would be upon emerging, I often think of Alexandro Jodorowsky’s 1970 El Topo

(“What it all means isn’t exactly clear, but you won’t forget it. “) — anyone else remember this? — in the same vein. Funny, this Bright Lights Film Journal piece on The Saragossa Manuscript leads off with a reference to the latter.

There are rumors, by the way, that

Jodorowsky is working on a sequel to El Topo

with Johnny Depp annd Marilyn Manson in the cast. Here’s a pre-release flyer. Other Jodorowsky ( “I ask of film what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs”) trivia:

• he studied mime with Marcel Marceau
• he ‘signed on to direct a French-American production of Dune, which was to star his son Brontis, Orson Welles, Salvador Dalí and Gloria Swanson. The screenplay he wrote, by some accounts, could have been made into a 12- to 16-hour film. The financial backers pulled out in 1976.’ Dune was of course, disappointingly, made by David Lynch in 1984…
• he ‘was also reported to have scouted locations in Tangier in the mid-80’s with William S. Burroughs for a film of Naked Lunch that was never made’

‘“Manuscript Found in Zaragoza,” based on a 200-year-old novel by a Polish count, tells the tragicomic tale of the seduction of an 18th-century Spanish-German soldier by a pair of Muslim princesses. Like so many Romantic adventurers and Western fictional heroes, from Lord Byron to Kit in Paul Bowles’s novel The Sheltering Sky, the protagonist is drawn into a sensuous and illusory dreamscape that ultimately leads to his destruction. Directed by one of Spain’s most renowned playwrights, Francisco Nieva, the play has been adapted by him from a book of the same name written by Jan Potocki, a Polish ethnographer and historian, between 1797 and 1815.’ NY Times Arts & Leisure [via Abby]

I saw the labyrinthine, phantasmagorical The Saragossa Manuscript

, a 1965 Polish film from the same source (of which this article makes no mention) directed by Wojciech Has (1925-2000), in the ’70’s when I was in college. Although abit rococo, its complex structure of dreams inside stories inside reveries inside fables, which left the audience reeling and laughing in confusion, haunted me for several decades during which I had lost track of its title and could find no further information about it. Even posting queries on the internet when it became viable a decade later was without results, until I happened to read in the mid-’90’s

that it was reputed to be Jerry Garcia’s favorite film

and that, along with Coppola and Scorsese, he was funding its restoration to its original 175-min. length — in the process learning its name again. The restored version premiered at the New York Film Festival in the fall of 1997, with a posthumous dedication to Garcia. I finally obtained a video copy around two years ago. Potocki’s book has recently reappeared in print, prompted by the revival of the film.

Probably because both films were most suitable for midnight viewing and, if you weren’t in an altered state of mind going into them you would be upon emerging, I often think of Alexandro Jodorowsky’s 1970 El Topo

(“What it all means isn’t exactly clear, but you won’t forget it. “) — anyone else remember this? — in the same vein. Funny, this Bright Lights Film Journal piece on The Saragossa Manuscript leads off with a reference to the latter.

There are rumors, by the way, that

Jodorowsky is working on a sequel to El Topo

with Johnny Depp annd Marilyn Manson in the cast. Here’s a pre-release flyer. Other Jodorowsky ( “I ask of film what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs”) trivia:

• he studied mime with Marcel Marceau
• he ‘signed on to direct a French-American production of Dune, which was to star his son Brontis, Orson Welles, Salvador Dalí and Gloria Swanson. The screenplay he wrote, by some accounts, could have been made into a 12- to 16-hour film. The financial backers pulled out in 1976.’ Dune was of course, disappointingly, made by David Lynch in 1984…
• he ‘was also reported to have scouted locations in Tangier in the mid-80’s with William S. Burroughs for a film of Naked Lunch that was never made’