Police in Huntington Beach, CA are asking for the public's help in trying to identify possible victims in photos belonging to convicted rapist and serial killer Rodney Alcala (the "Dating Game" killer). Above, photo #110, from a series of hundreds taken on of before July, 1979, many believed to have been shot by Mr. Alcala. The prints were found in his Seattle storage locker. Some have been ID'd since the scans were published online.

(Random case fact: he is reported to have studied film under and worked for Roman Polanski.)

"When they cut off my nose and ears, I passed out." Bibi Aisha, 19, of Afghanistan, who was punished by the Taliban for "shaming" her in-laws when she ran away to escape torturous domestic abuse. Her father sold her to her abusive husband when she was 10.

Atia Awabi, a CNN International correspondent based in Kabul, says "If you are moved by [this] story you can help by donating to womenforafghanwomen.org." CNN interviewed this young woman in January, and ABC News followed recently.

Women for Afghan Women has posted an update on her story here (some people may find the full image of her brutally disfigured face disturbing).

Her husband "kept her in the stable with the animals until she was 12 (when she got her first menstrual period)." More:

Aisha has been recovering these past months from the unimaginable trauma she has suffered. She has brought criminal charges against her father for giving her away in the illegal practice of "baad." She would like to also bring charges against her husband, but since he is a Talib in Uruzgan, he is unreachable. Aisha has decided after weighing all the options before her that she would like to come to the United States for her surgery and post-operative care. Just as important as her surgery, will be the support system we organize for her recuperation. We are currently engaged in setting up that support system for Aisha.

You can donate here. (CNN blogs, via Kristie LuStout)

Above, a "food indemnity form" for takeaway food at a hotel in Dubai. Tweeted by CNN International correspondent Atia Awabi, who is based in Afghanistan.

Village Voice columnist Michael Musto, whom I've been a fan of for many years, talks about why he loves riding his bike around the streets of New York in this fun video profile.

[He] has been riding a bike in New York City for more than 25 years, long before it was fashionable or we had bike lanes and cycletracks. Musto has never had a driver's license, and he tells us the bicycle is an advantage in his profession. Although he's had his share of bikes stolen (he recommends buying a used, cheap bike), he has nothing but positivity and praise for the velocipede.

I love the part at the end, when Michael addresses safety concerns. Bottom line: "You're gonna be fine." I enthusiastically agree with that, but I would respectfully add: consider wearing a helmet!

Streetfilms: Michael Musto, Il Ciclista Dolce (Streetsblog)

British bug-killing company Rentokil recently put out a press release containing made-up numbers about the prevalance of bug infestations on public transport. The missive — "2,000 bugs taking a ride in every train compartment," parsed one quality daily — resulted in widespread condemnation. Especially on Twitter, where Rentokil went from zero to defensive in record time.

In a scorching post on the company's blog, YouTube Chief Counsel Zahavah Levine accuses Viacom of going to great lengths to secretly upload videos to YouTube in order to take advantage of its promotional value even as they were suing YouTube, arguing that YouTube should be able to tell the difference between Viacom videos that were uploaded by actual infringers as opposed to Viacom employees and agents being paid to pretend to be infringers.

For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt "very strongly" that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.

Viacom's efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.

Given Viacom's own actions, there is no way YouTube could ever have known which Viacom content was and was not authorized to be on the site. But Viacom thinks YouTube should somehow have figured it out. The legal rule that Viacom seeks would require YouTube -- and every Web platform -- to investigate and police all content users upload, and would subject those web sites to crushing liability if they get it wrong.

Broadcast Yourself (via /.)

(Image: Kara Swisher and Philippe Dauman, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Joi's photostream)

These edible QR Code cupcakes from Montreal's clevercupcakes are actually scannable, and will direct you to the Montreal Science Centre website.

Kuriositas: QR Code Cupcakes That Work (Thanks, RJ!)

(Image: QR Code Cupcakes, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from clevercupcakes' photostream)

After years of trying to cloud the public mind by calling it "piracy" instead of "unauthorised downloading," key copyright industry reps are starting to realize that "piracy" actually sounds kind of cool. So now they're lobbying for the even less intellectually rigorous term "theft," which describes an entirely different offence, enumerated in an altogether different section of the lawbooks.

This has all the dishonesty of calling everything you don't like "terrorism" (or as my friend Ian Brown says, it's like rebranding jaywalking as "road rape").

"Piracy" sounds too sexy, say rightsholders

(Image: Pirate Cory, taken by Gordon Doctorow, Hallowe'en 1974)

In my latest Guardian column, "Is the music industry trying to write the digital economy bill?", I look at the last two weeks' events in the life of the UK Digital Economy Bill, a piece of legislation tailor-made for the record industry at the expense of the public interest, freedom and due process. The question I can't answer is, does the record industry put on these vastly over-reaching shows of power because they don't care about backlash, or are they just so arrogant that they don't imagine that there will be a backlash?

[T]he next day, Bridget Fox, a LibDem prospective parliamentary candidate who had spoken out against her party's new pro-censorship stance, introduced an emergency motion to the LibDems' spring conference. This motion called for the LibDems to follow a policy that puts internet freedom front and centre, categorically rejecting web censorship and disconnection of infringers and their families, and embracing net neutrality and all the other freedoms that you'd expect from the "party of liberty". In other words, the LibDems had declared themselves to be not biddable by the entertainment industry, and indirectly but firmly rebuked the Lords who'd done the BPI's dirty work for them.

By all accounts, the "debate" following Fox's proposal was a one-sided affair. No one came forward to oppose it. Instead, for half an hour, speaker after speaker stood up to declare the importance of a free and open net. When the vote came, it was near-unanimous (I hear that there was one vote against the proposal). If the BPI had hoped to have an ally for the years to come in the LibDems, they blew it by asking for too much - and getting it. Their greed in exploiting their influence over the LibDem Lords galvanised the LibDem rank and file into enshrining a rejection of the BPI's agenda into the party's official policy.

Is the music industry trying to write the digital economy bill?

What pageviews may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil? A beautiful piece of experimental prose by our former colleague Joel Johnson, formerly of Boing Boing Gadgets and now of Gizmodo, about ghosts in the cloud: mortality and connectivity, and how internet permanence might change memory of those who pass, after they're gone. Snip:

Chances are we'll each be lost to time. 100 billion people have been born before us. Most of them no longer exist as individuals in our memories. No names. Faces only reflected in our own and not in any way that really matters.

But not us. We might be remembered forever. All our Twitter updates, our email, our Vimeo movies, our Xbox Live profiles, our wormy FourSquare maps. They won't be important. Not to most people, anyway. But they'll be there if the sysadmins take care of us, if the corporations and machines to whom we've entrusted our records do not fail or are not destroyed.

We won't matter to most. But our memories will be cataloged, indexed, made available along with our stories, our names. $viewcount++.

Raiding Eternity (Gizmodo)

Mark Dery has another wonderful essay on True/Slant, called "Dead Man Walking: What Do Zombies Mean?"

The zombie is a polyvalent revenant, a bloating signifier that has given shape, alternately, to repressed memories of slavery's horrors; white alienation from the darker Other; Cold War nightmares of mushroom clouds and megadeaths; the post-traumatic fallout of the AIDS pandemic; and free-floating anxieties about viral plagues and bioengineered outbreaks (as in 28 Days Later and Left 4 Dead, troubled dreams for an age of Avian flu and H1N1, when viruses leap the species barrier and spread, via jet travel, into global pandemics seemingly overnight. Which may be why the Infected, as they're called in both the film and the game, move at terrifying, jump-cut speed, unlike their lumbering, stuporous predecessors.)

On his blog, Mark provides Attention-Conservation Highlights: "Karl Marx's goth-iness; cultural historian of horror David J. Skal's take on zombies as poster children for the econopocalypse; Haitian zombies and post-colonial trauma; white supremacists' Turner Diaries dreams of circling the wagons and holding off the "golden horde" of multiculti urbanites with "boomsticks"; Nazi zombies. Oh, and braaains."

Dead Man Walking: What Do Zombies Mean?

If you've never seen anyone handle their instrument like Charlie Patton might have, this musician from Botswana is incredible--I think I can safely say I've never really seen anyone play a guitar before:

Youtube user Bokete7, (who shot the video), told me he is: "Ronnie Moipolai from Kopong village in the Kweneng district 50 km west of the capitol Gaborone. He is 29 years old and goes around the shebeens selling and playing his songs for 5Pula each (80dollarcents). He learned guitar from his now late father, has 3 brothers that also play guitar (KB is one of them), has also a big sister and plenty of kids in the yard. Nobody has a formal job and his mother sells Chibuku beer and firewood they get from the bush trying to make ends meet."

Bioacoustician Bernie Krause has recorded the amazingly rhythmic vascular systems of thirsty trees: 

He discovered that the cells in the xylem and phloem of the tree fill with air to try to maintain the osmotic pressure that's usually produced by the sucking of water up through the roots.  At a certain point the cells burst. Krause adds "When they pop, they make a noise: we can't hear it, but insects can. And when insects hear multiple cells popping, they're drawn to the tree because certain ones are programmed to expect sap. And when the insects are drawn to the tree, the birds are drawn to the tree to eat. it's all a microhabitat formed by sound: The sound of popping cells."  (Incidentally, when the xylem cells pop, they die and form the rings of the tree).  Recordings are made at their natural high frequency (about 47 kHz!) with a hydrophone and then slowed down by about a factor of seven. 

Bernie's done some fascinating work in the field of "biophony", which is based around the idea that every animal in an eco-system has its own acoustic territory, or bandwidth of sound that it vocalizes in. If something comes in and takes over a certain bandwidth (like the regular route of a noisy airplane) entire populations can suffer, or be forced to adapt.

You can find more of his recordings here

Jessi Buchanan is a Georgia artist who takes all the normal obsessions of an average American boy -- lawn ornaments, corn dogs, giant mutant koalas with laser-beam eyes -- and gives them back to the world in colorful, cartoony canvases. Other than his work, not much is known about Buchanan. Some say he doesn't really exist. Some say he's never been spotted in the company of the much more successful Jeff Cohen; others say nothing at all. Most mysteriously, Buchanan seems to have abandoned an ambitious cycle of paintings called The Jessi Buchanan Alphabet at the letter "M" (for "mullet"), sometime in 2006. Will he ever re-surface?

I haven't paid much attention to Lego kits for the last 20 years or so. But a new book, Lego Minifigure Ultimate Sticker Collection, was a fun way for me to appreciate the cleverness, artistry, and humor of the little characters that people the kits. This DK book has over 1000 "reusable" stickers of characters ranging from Plankton (the little one-eyed jackass in SpongeBob SquarePants) to Slave Leia from Star Wars. I'm not much of a collector of anything, so this book was an excellent way to admire these fun figurines with the expense and clutter of buying and keeping them. I just gave the book to my six-year-old daughter and she is enraptured.

Lego Minifigure Ultimate Sticker Collection

How about discovering a temperate planet outside our solar system that will actually be relatively easy to study? Spanish researchers have done just that, according to Science News. The newly spotted planet, COROT-9b, is 1,500 light years away. It isn't, itself, Earth-like—think something more akin to Jupiter or Saturn—but its atmosphere might contain water vapor, and, if it turns out to have any moons, those could be habitable. Most important, though, is the fact that researchers can actually study the thing.

Although a number of extrasolar planets with moderate temperatures have been discovered, only a planet that passes in front of -- or transits -- its star can be studied in depth. The starlight that filters through the atmosphere of the planet during each passage reveals the orb's composition, while the amount of starlight that is blocked outright indicates the planet's size.

All the other transiting planets seen so far have been "weird -- inflated and hot" because they orbit so close to their stars, notes study collaborator Didier Queloz of the Geneva Observatory in Sauverny, Switzerland. Deeg, Queloz, and their colleagues report their findings in the March 18 Nature.

• Deeg, H.J. 2010A transiting giant planet with a temperature between 250K and 430K. Nature 464:384. doi:10.1038/nature08856

(Via Ecospheric blog)

Ecological issues like soil erosion and deforestation play a major role in keeping Haiti locked in a cycle of poverty. The Haiti Regeneration Initiative is working to help Haitians improve their environment and, with it, their lives. I LOVE seeing science in action like this!

(Via Jorge Salazar)

Artist Nina Maria Kleivan dressed her baby daughter Faustina up in outfits of infamous dictators and took photos. She says the photos are a reminder of how “we all begin life the same. We all have every opportunity ahead of us. To do good, or inexplicable evil.”

Nina Maria Kleivan’s "Potency," Exploring The Meaning Of Evil (Thanks, Dollyhead Books!)