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An American Ebay seller realises a European bidder is trying to scam him out of a Powerbook (fake escrow site, hijacked ebay account), so he sends him something far better, a P-P-P-Powerbook! Now, for you non-techies here, a factory model p-p-p-powerbook weights half what it's competitors weigh, comes with an A4 screen, the latest in internet adventure software, zero boot time, a fullsize keyboard (often with Key Redundancy^TM) and a state-of-the-art laser bluetooth mouse. This is technology. The seller posts to a forum and amongst the chatter people follow the package via the the Fedex tracking page and some even visit the delivery address (a barbershop/internet cafe) and take photos, video, and a seat for their hair cut. The duty tax on this particular p-p-p-powerbook is around £350 (paid for by the scammer) before he sees the package, and a few days later it's released by Customs as they watch in anticipation. A forum member arrives at the internet cafe, takes a seat and soon the package arrives. The scammer opens the box and there are angry raised voices heard. The barber doesn't understand what's wrong and asks... "Is it broken?"
posted by holloway at 7:41 PM PST - 57 comments

Shiver me illegally-harvested timbers! Why dust off a law used only twice, most recently 114 years ago? Because you have a grand jury and you can. The alleged sailor-mongerers have issued a statement on their website.
posted by trondant at 5:38 PM PST - 48 comments

The 27 rationales... There may be 50 ways to leave your lover, but a graduate student in Chicago found and tracked 27 different rationales used to justify the war in Iraq. Gathering over 1500 statements from the Bush cabinet, US senators, and from news stories, Largio even throws in some time series graphs in appendices, so you can see which rationales were hot, and which were not from Sept 2001 to October 2002.
posted by jasper411 at 4:06 PM PST - 16 comments

Naked guy in a maze
posted by dhoyt at 3:33 PM PST - 12 comments

The Wild Divine Project. "Kurt Smith and Corwin Bell have designed a computer game that teaches players to use biofeedback sensors worn on three fingers to help them control various events... By using breathing techniques to stimulate or soothe their biological responses, players can start an onscreen fire, juggle brightly colored balls and direct the flight of birds."
posted by homunculus at 2:06 PM PST - 8 comments

The Orange jumpsuit, couch potato Al Quida members, flawed timelines, the freepers connection, and the outspoken father. Nicolas Berg conspiracy theories abound on the Internet.
posted by thedailygrowl at 1:45 PM PST - 98 comments

Salam Pax gets a movie deal. The Baghdad Blogger has previously taken his posts to the book format and a company has just bought the rights to make a movie out of it. I can't say there are many blogs that would ever work as a movie, but this is certainly a new milestone for blogging.
posted by mathowie at 1:05 PM PST - 11 comments

Yackity yackity, choo CHOO!, Yackity yackity.....BLOGS! Self proclaimed Blogoholic George Packer, at Mother Jones, shits on blogs everywhere, joins bemused chorus - FOX, journalism grad students, and so on - blathering on blogs. What are they? What do they mean? Quoth Packer : "Blog prose is written in headline form to imitate informal speech, with short emphatic sentences and frequent use of boldface and italics. The entries, sometimes updated hourly, are little spasms of assertion, usually too brief......All of this meta-comment by very bright young men who never leave their rooms is the latest, somewhat debased, manifestation of the old art of political pamphleteering.....if blogs are "a new way of doing politics," there is also something peculiarly stale and tired about them — not the form, but the content......So far this year, bloggers have been remarkably unadept at predicting events.... Above all, they didn't grasp the intensity of feeling among Democratic primary voters — the resentments still glowing hot from Florida 2000, the overwhelming interest in economic and domestic issues, the personal antipathy toward Bush, the resurgence of activism, the longing for a win. The blogosphere was often caught surprised by these passions and the electoral turns they caused." Packer even gets paid for this, plus starring appearances on snooty public radio talk shows! [ Kevin Drum makes an appearance ].....I can excrete lightly digested opinions with the best of them. Where do I apply ?
posted by troutfishing at 12:58 PM PST - 25 comments

Better Propaganda is a site with hundreds of free (and legal!) mp3 downloads by independent musicians. The range is pretty impressive, going from TV on the Radio to Dizzee Rascal. Good times.
posted by acornface at 12:51 PM PST - 5 comments

Global Dimming?!? In the second half of the 20th century, the world became, quite literally, a darker place. Defying expectation and easy explanation, hundreds of instruments around the world recorded a drop in sunshine reaching the surface of Earth, as much as 10 percent from the late 1950's to the early 90's, or 2 percent to 3 percent a decade. Has anyone been following this? Heat I might do without for a while, but I've grown very fond of light.
posted by ahimsakid at 12:48 PM PST - 18 comments

'In the event, it was a near-unanimous verdict for the politics of inclusiveness - economic, social and cultural - and against the rhetoric of divisiveness and xenophobia.' The 'stunning' victory of Sonia Gandhi's Congress (I) party in the world's largest democracy may force us to reconsider some of our preconceptions about India. To the headline writers in Britain and the US, it's the place that's 'stealing' jobs from the West (itself a simplification); to most Indian voters, though, the BJP's economic miracle doesn't extend beyond the major cities, serving to accentuate rather than alleviate the poverty gap. The verdict on the ground? That this is a vote against the limited capacity of globalisation to bring real change to developing economies. Some might accuse Indian voters of cutting off their noses to spite their faces, but for hundreds of millions of them, the BJP's promise of a 'Shining India' spoke of an entirely different world.
posted by riviera at 12:46 PM PST - 14 comments

Going Poston! - This is a Flash parody about the NFL's most notorious player agents, the Postons, Carl and Kevin. This article from a month ago, pretty much sums up why they're becoming so infamous.
posted by Witty at 12:04 PM PST - 7 comments

Tigers bite back. Endangered Sumatran tigers have taken the destruction of their habitat into their own mouths by killing three & mauling several other illegal loggers.
posted by i_cola at 11:33 AM PST - 12 comments

"Burning Down My Masters' House" Indeed!
Jayson Blair, noted fraud and liar, is about to be liquidated along with all of the other titles in New Millenium's catalog. The publisher of such quality books as "Nicole Brown Simpson: The Private Diary of a Life Interrupted" by Faye Resnick and "Burning Down My Master's House" by Jayson "Truth? We Don't Need No Stinking Truth" Blair.
Its not known if Blair's memoir had a specific hand in the demise of the publishing house but it couldn't have helped. Selling a whopping 1,386 copies through March 18th.
Is there such a thing as the Anti-Midas Touch? Wherein, everything you touch turns from gold to lead or dust?
Continuing these threads to their karmic conclusion.
posted by fenriq at 10:04 AM PST - 13 comments

Let us say you are the premier of Alberta. Let's say you made some ill advised statements suggesting that public car insurance is the kind of socialist claptrap the forced Pinochet to stage a coup in Chile. Let us further posit that you were pursuing a degree at the time and had recently turned in a paper (word .doc) on that very topic, and presented it in the provincial legislature to back up those statements. Would you not then want to be pretty sure you hadn't plagiarized large chunks of your essay from the web?
posted by Capn at 8:41 AM PST - 43 comments

Leaking self-doubt...Tracing how the photos [of Abu Ghraib prison] became such hot public property reveals something striking, not only about the torture scandal, but about the coalition itself. This is a story, not of investigative journalism or antiwar activists exposing imperialist America to the world, but rather of America exposing its own uncertainty for all to see. The photos appear to have come from within US military or political circles; they were effectively volunteered for public consumption by elements within the military or higher up in the Pentagon, seemingly as part of a process of internal unravelling and deep disagreement over aspects of the war. In a sense, the publication of these photos to international outrage can be seen as the externalisation of America's own self-doubt about Iraq, and about its own mission in the world...
posted by Postroad at 8:28 AM PST - 42 comments

I'm done with Movable Type. After months of little useful communications about their plans, Ben and Mena have for all intents and purposes ditched the free version of their once-shining weblogging software. Now, MT is a "publishing platform" that costs at least $69 (with limited functionality). Lucky for us that, while MT slept, we have discovered a much improved and free Blogger, a truly open source WordPress, and a similarly priced but more powerful ExpressionEngine.
posted by johnnydark at 7:37 AM PST - 192 comments

ISS-Jupiter Transit tonight. Notable space station flyover tonight for you skywatching East Coasters: the ISS will pass quite close to Jupiter, and some of you lucky ones [coordinates|map] will even see the station briefly eclipse the planet. (Side note: Remember those days when everyone was using its radio call sign "Alpha?" Now the media just say "space station." Sigh.) East Coast, 9:30pm, I'll be outside, looking up.
posted by brownpau at 7:15 AM PST - 9 comments

What is the modus operandi of creativity? According to two cognitive scientists, Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, the subconscious operation of conceptual blending. The formal theory, known as the Network Model of Conceptual Integration (CI), seeks to explain how creative insights are derived from pre-existing knowledge and understanding.
[More Inside]
posted by Gyan at 6:45 AM PST - 10 comments

Peitho's Web: Classic Rhetoric and Persuasion.
posted by hama7 at 6:43 AM PST - 6 comments

Church of fools No time for church? Like sleeping in on Sunday? Worship the virtual way with Church of fools. Wander the crypt and sanctuary, chatting with Ned Flanders looky-likey's. For real, and sponsored by the Methodist church. Shockwave required. via linkdup
posted by backOfYourMind at 6:15 AM PST - 5 comments

1,3,7-trimethylxanthine (sometimes used as a pesticide to kill frogs) also happens to be one of the world’s most popular drugs.

Users find that it improves attention and concentration, and slightly decreases their heart rate at low doses. It is habit forming however and has been known to cause agitation, anxiety, insomnia, disorientation, nausea, delirium, hallucinations and tinnitus. Some people report involuntary tremors or even convulsions. Overdoses can cause seizures, respiratory failure and cardiopulmonary arrest. Withdrawal from regular use can cause symptoms including headache, nausea, nervousness, reduced alertness and depression.

The metabolic half-life of the drug is usually somewhere between three and seven hours so a typical user will take somewhere between fifteen and thirty-five hours to process 95% of their initial dose. How many milligrams have you taken today?
posted by snarfodox at 5:55 AM PST - 42 comments

Ad Aspera Per Astra - an interview with Brother Guy Consolmagno, one of several full-time Vatican astromomers at the Vatican Observatory. He talks about the Church's take on astrobiology and the eventuality of encountering an alien race. The idea of the Church's mission beyond the Earth is something that's come up in a few good books, like The Sparrow and A Canticle for Leibowitz. Interesting to hear an actual Jesuit's take on the matter. [Via BoingBoing]
posted by ubersturm at 5:11 AM PST - 8 comments

Opacity no match for technology! A CS grad student comes up with a technique for restoring words that have been blacked out in classified documents.
posted by nomis at 12:35 AM PST - 12 comments