FeedSkimmer: Oddly Enough...

Cardboard Bieber taken from Waterloo drug store

(Thanks to Eric Hartwell)

Do you have trouble remembering what all of those classic HTTP error messages mean? Well, here they are, illustrated with cats. You?ll never forget again! Check out the gallery of HTTP status message cats below!

Google Books' scan of Edward Spitzka's book, "Insanity", includes this interesting page concerning involuntary constriction of the pupils, disturbances in the flow of words, and how patients distort letterforms when writing insane documents. [Thanks, Joel!]

Andrew Ainsworth is a Londoner who designed the original Storm Trooper helmets for George Lucas?s Star Wars. Ainsworth has been casting new armour from his original moulds for the past eight years, selling them to fans at up to £1,800 a throw. Lucas sued Ainsworth in a US court, which held that he had violated Lucas?s copyright; but because Ainsworth has no US assets, Lucas had to bring suit in the UK to collect. However, UK law affords only limited copyright to costumes, and the UK Supreme Court held that costumes are not sculptures, and only get a 15 year term of copyright in the UK, meaning that Storm Trooper armour is now in the public domain in Britain. The court also found that Ainsworth had violated US copyright.

Mr Ainsworth sells his Stormtrooper costumes for up to £1,800

A prop designer who made the original Stormtrooper helmets for Star Wars has won his battle with director George Lucas over his right to sell replicas.

Andrew Ainsworth, 62, of south London, successfully argued the costumes were functional not artistic works, and so not subject to full copyright laws.

George Lucas loses Stormtrooper battle at Supreme Court
(Thanks, @erichhugo!)

Caters News Agency claims to have bought exclusive rights to the iconic self-portrait taken by a macaque that snatched a photographer's camera while the latter was shooting on Sulawesi. Caters has sent copyright threats to some sites that reproduced the image, prompting Techdirt (one of the nastygram recipients) to delve deeply into the question of the copyrightability of works created by non-humans.

Under US law (we'll deal with elsewhere soon), you have to have made the creative contributions (the copyrightable aspects) to the image to have it qualify for any copyright protection (and then, it's only the creative aspects that get the copyright). Thus, you could argue that if the photographer had set up the camera, framed the shot, and simply let the monkey click the shutter, perhaps there is some copyright there (though, even then it would likely be limited to some of the framing, and not much else). But David Slater has already admitted that the monkeys found a camera he had left out by accident and that he did not have anything to do with setting up the shot. He's stated that the monkeys were playing with the shiny objects and when one pushed the shutter, the noise interested them and they kept it up. It would be difficult to argue he made any sort of creative contribution here to warrant copyright.

Can the monkeys get the copyright? No. As Justin Levine kindly pointed out, according to the rules published by the US Copyright Office:

503.03 Works not capable of supporting a copyright claim.
Claims to copyright in the following works cannot be registered in the Copyright Office:
503.03(a) Works-not originated by a human author.
In order to be entitled to copyright registration, a work must be the product of human authorship. Works produced by mechanical processes or random selection without any contribution by a human author are not registrable. Thus, a linoleum floor covering featuring a multicolored pebble design which was produced by a mechanical process in unrepeatable, random patterns, is not registrable. Similarly, a work owing its form to the forces of nature and lacking human authorship is not registrable; thus, for example, a piece of driftwood even if polished and mounted is not registrable

Can We Subpoena The Monkey? Why The Monkey Self-Portraits Are Likely In The Public Domain

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For this month?s final Historical Thursday, we?re going to discuss a similar topic as last week; mind-boggling inventions that are decades ahead of their time. Recently, an article has been making it?s way around the tubes that delves into the history of how people could enjoy live music without being anywhere near it. While we might have found it revolutionary that we can listen to music on our phones, it turns out this is no where near a recent invention. 19th century Paris was jamming out to tunes over a handset with a fantastic device called the Theatrophone.

Scientific American found an article in their archives from 1892 describing a 2 year-old invention: the Theatrophone. The Theatrophone was a Paris-exclusive device that brought concerts to the masses. Not everyone could afford to put on their most expensive outfits and travel to the local concert hall, so the city came up with a device to to enable music lovers everywhere to experience the joy of live performances from the comfort of their own home or even local cafes. To own a device in your home, one would have to pay for a subscription service after deciding which concerts they would like to virtually attend. The public Theatrophones had a charge of 50 centimes (French for, you guessed it, cents) for 5 minutes of music.

The whole set up was extremely well organized. All the Theatrophone lines ran to a central hub, which was set up very much like telephone operating centers of the day. This hub was connected to secondary stations, located within the theatres which captured the music via a series of tubes microphones.

The Theatrophone itself was a ingeniously simple device. It was essentially a telephone without a microphone but with a built-in alarm. The alarm was set for 5 minute intervals and would shut the machine off after the user?s time had expired. But what if the concert ended too soon or went into an intermission? Don?t worry, the operator was listening and would switch you to another concert. And what happens in case there isn?t a single live concert happening anywhere in the city? You?ll get hooked up with some prerecorded piano tunes.

At one point there were over 100 Theatrophones in public places around the city of Paris and an undisclosed amount installed in private homes. Not much is known about their fate but I, for one, would gladly give this technology a loving home.

And for funsies, here?s the 1892 issue of Scientific American where the Theatrophone was first described.

Enjoyed what you read? Check out all whole compendium of Historical Thursdays!

Pictures and Information courtesy of: Scientific American and io9.

As always, if YOU have an idea for a Historical Thursday, let me know at thereifixedit@gmail.com

A little while back, we had a Bring Your own Code called The Disgruntled Bomb that sought to answer, "what is the worst thing a disgruntled employee could leave behind in the source code?"

The comments were great and featured all sorts of solutions. Most were in C and C++, but there were few unique ones like a cronjob and even an incredible one-liner for .NET.

While C and C++ give programmers enough rope to shoot themselves (or build a crazy bomb), managed platforms like .NET and Java limit your options. That is, unless you know where to look. Alexander Keul took advantage of Java's cached boxing conversions to come up with this concept:

package dont.try_this.at_home;
import java.lang.*;

class ValueMunger extends Thread {
    public void run() {
        while(true) {
            munge();
            try { sleep(1000); } catch (Throwable t) { }
        }
    }
    
    public void munge() {
        try {
            Field field = Integer.class.getDeclaredField( "value" );
            field.setAccessible( true );
            for(int i = -127; i<=128; i++)
            field.setInt( 
                Integer.valueOf(i),
                // either the same (90%), +1 (10%), or 42 (1%)
                Math.random() < 0.9 ? i : Math.random() < 0.1 ? 42 : i+1  );
        } catch (Throwable t) { ; }
    }

}

A simple call to (new ValueMunger()).start(); will spin off a new thread that will randomly redefines the values of integers between -127 and 128, ensuring that maths will never be the same again:

Integer a = 2;
Integer b = 3;

System.out.println( a + b ); // could be 5, 6, 7, 44, 45, or 84 

To extend the fun, this works for Boolean and several other primative types like BigInteger, Long, Short, etc.

John Young, co creator of Nerd Merit Badges, says:

Like many other happy mutants, we over at Nerd Merit Badges have been reading about Bitcoins with interest. ("It's like the gold standard, man, except instead of gold, it's math. MATH!") And of course we wanted to participate in a way that fully embodies the unique qualities and special attributes of this self-referential P2P currency.

We've made a badge that can only be purchased with Bitcoins, so the act of displaying it proves you've participated in the Bitcoin economy. We call it the "Bought This Bitcoins Badge With Bitcoins" badge.

Naturally, you can buy the Bought this Bitcoins Badge With Bitcoins badge with bitcoins, and only with bitcoins. So that when someone asks you "Sure, bitcoins sound neat, but what can you, er... BUY... with them?" you can proudly tap your badge, take a deep breath, and tell them.

This kind of recursive internet jackassery is _exactly_ why Randy and I started making Nerd Merit Badges in the first place. We're very excited about it!

Buy the "Bought This Bitcoins Badge With Bitcoins" badge with Bitcoins

saccade.com writes "Telehack.com has meticulously re-created the Internet as it appeared to a command line user over a quarter century ago. Drawing on material from Jason Scott's TextFiles.com, the text-only world of the 1980s appears right in your browser. If you want to show somebody what the Arpanet looked like (you didn't call it the "Internet" until the late '80s) this is it. Using the 'finger' command and seeing familiar names from decades ago (some, sadly, ghosts now) sends a chill down your spine."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Say two Amazon merchants start using an algorithm to reprice their books based upon the prices set by rivals. Fine. Now say that two merchants pick one another's prices and a recursive repricing loop begins. What happens next? Perhaps you assume that the automatic price war would send prices spiraling rapidly down. In the case of Peter Lawrence's The Making of a Fly, you would be mistaken. [Michael Eisen via Hacker News]

In 1918, an article in Ladies' Home Journal stated: ?The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.? What happened? Smithsonian, er, addresses that question in a short featuring University of Maryland clothing historian Jo B. Paoletti, whose new book Pink and Blue: Telling the Girls From the Boys in America is due out later this year. From Smithsonian:

?It?s really a story of what happened to neutral clothing,? says Paoletti, who has explored the meaning of children?s clothing for 30 years. For centuries, she says, children wore dainty white dresses up to age 6. (At left, Franklin Roosevelt -- ed.) ?What was once a matter of practicality?you dress your baby in white dresses and diapers; white cotton can be bleached?became a matter of ?Oh my God, if I dress my baby in the wrong thing, they?ll grow up perverted,? ? Paoletti says.

The march toward gender-specific clothes was neither linear nor rapid. Pink and blue arrived, along with other pastels, as colors for babies in the mid-19th century, yet the two colors were not promoted as gender signifiers until just before World War I?and even then, it took time for popular culture to sort things out...

When the women?s liberation movement arrived in the mid-1960s, with its anti-feminine, anti-fashion message, the unisex look became the rage?but completely reversed from the time of young Franklin Roosevelt. Now young girls were dressing in masculine?or at least unfeminine?styles, devoid of gender hints. Paoletti found that in the 1970s, the Sears, Roebuck catalog pictured no pink toddler clothing for two years.

?One of the ways [feminists] thought that girls were kind of lured into subservient roles as women is through clothing,? says Paoletti. ? ?If we dress our girls more like boys and less like frilly little girls . . . they are going to have more options and feel freer to be active.? ?

"When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink?"

A recently released MI5 report on a bungled Nazi sabotage plot details how a group of hapless, big-mouthed Nazi "spies" landed in Florida (after drunkenly bragging about their mission in a Paris cafe), and never managed to make bombs or poison Americans because their commander immediately surrendered to the FBI.

The submarine dropping half the group on Long Island ran aground, and MI5 noted that "it was only owing to the laziness or stupidity of the American coast guards that this submarine was not attacked by U.S. forces."

The Germans were stopped by a coast guard, who -- to the evident astonishment of the British -- did not detain them. He told his superiors, who were slow to contact the FBI.

The others in Florida also made it ashore, despite their attention-grabbing attire of "bathing trunks and army forage caps."

Unfortunately for the team, their leader, George John Dasch, had decided to surrender. The report describes Dasch "ringing up the FBI in Washington from the Mayfair Hotel and saying that he was a saboteur and wished to tell his story to Mr. Hoover" -- FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI was initially skeptical, but Dasch was soon giving a full confession, and the whole gang was rounded up.

Within months, the saboteurs had been tried and sentenced to death. All were executed except Dasch and another who had also backed out. They were deported to Germany after the war.

British spy files shed light on Nazi saboteurs

(via Runnin' Scared)

(Image: 1943 ... bad thru and thru!, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from x-ray_delta_one's photostream)

Alex Bellos writes:

In the first chapter of my book I mention experiments at the University of Ulm that discovered that Saharan desert ants have a sense of number. Researchers first sent ants down a tunnel for food. Once the ants reached the food some of the ants had pig bristles attached to their legs, as in the picture above. Others had their legs clipped shorter, and some were allowed to keep their legs as was.

It turned out that the ants with stilts overshot the distance home, and the ants with clipped legs undershot the distance. Only the ants with no modified legs got the distance right.

BONUS: See the scientists? own description, in their study ?The Ant Odometer: Stepping on Stilts and Stumps,? Matthias Wittlinger, Rudiger Wehner and Harald Wolf, Science, vol. 312, June 30, 2006, pp. 1965-7.