Brad Stone's article for Wired about the intransigence of US car insurers in the face of claims that even cars using RFID-based security devices can be stolen makes for depressing reading:

John Hutton, an architect from Fairfax, Virginia, lost his Acura RSX last fall and was reimbursed only after six months of aggressive wrangling with Geico. "The inspector treated me like I was a liar and a criminal," Hutton says. "It all kept going back to the transponder system and their belief that 'You can't steal it! You can't steal it!'" Sally Nguyen's Acura TL went AWOL last New Year's Eve and was later found gutted and submerged in the Sacramento River. When an investigator from her insurance company, Esurance, dropped by her house, he left a business card on which he'd scrawled, "Regarding your 'stolen' Acura." Six months later, Esurance denied the claim, citing her car's security system. Esurance wouldn't talk to me about her case. Mohammad Awan lost his 2002 Ford Explorer last year; his son wrote to tell me that his insurer, Progressive, felt the existence of a transponder system – plus other "red flags," like Awan's outstanding debt – amounted to enough evidence to deny the claim. "Your vehicle is equipped with an immobilizing trans-ponder system which will not allow it to start without the use of a proper transponder key," read the denial-of-claim letter.

Stone's article goes on to point out how easy it is to circumvent even modern security systems once they've been around for a little while and word has spread as to how to disable or bypass them. Even if you discount a portion of the stories on the grounds that the individuals involved may be telling only part of the story, or might have been seeking to defraud the insurance company, the discussions of all the ways the technology can be beaten with just a little knowledge and planning are impressive.

(If you think the insurance companies' attitude is bad, just watch what happens if the government goes ahead and introduces a National Identity Register and an accompanying ID card. The technologies involved may not be all that similar, but I guarantee you the stubborn refusal to own up to the fallibility of the hardware and software will be identical.)

[Via Slashdot]

Japanese women learning how to get mugged in a foreign language. How bizarre…

I've never seen a fractal cephalopod before.

The trailer for the film adaptation of P D James' Children of Men is out.

It feels slightly odd to see a trailer advertise that the film is from the director of Y tu mamá también and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – talk about a contrasting set of credits – but the trailer itself looks fine. I haven't read James' novel, so I don't know how far the distinctly grim tone comes from the source material or was imposed by the screenwriter, but the cast certainly looks to be up to scratch so it's going on my "To see" list for the remainder of 2006.

(Which, for the record, places it in the company of Miami Vice, The Notorious Betty Page, Lady in the Water, Renaissance, A Scanner Darkly, Severance, Pan's Labyrinth, The Devil Wears Prada, The Prestige, Marie Antoinette and Casino Royale.)

[Trailer for Children of Men via The Onion A V Club]

I caught the last two episodes of The West Wing this evening. It felt strangely anticlimactic for a season finale, what with the mechanisms of the US political system swinging into gear and ejecting our cast from the White House on schedule as the housekeeping department swung into the well-rehearsed routines by which one administration leaves every four or eight years and another arrives. (It would have been fascinating if the writers had decided to tell the story of the Bartlet administration's final days and the arrival of President Santos through the eyes of the housekeeping staff. After all, many of them have probably seen off two or three administrations, so to them this is just another transition to facilitate. I know there's no way in hell that the producers would have taken such a radical step for the show's finale. That doesn't mean it's intrinsically a terrible idea.) There was a certain amount of dramatic tension over the question of whether Bartlet would sign a pardon for Toby, but the writers correctly resisted the temptation to liven up the last episode with melodrama by staging an assassination attempt or inflicting a late-breaking crisis to cause friction between Bartlet and Santos.

I really enjoyed the story of Santos' fight for the nomination and the campaign against Vinick; it didn't really feel like The West Wing of the Sorkin years any more, but as a politics junkie who has always been fascinated by American presidential elections I loved every minute of it anyway. Having said that, More4 did their second airing of the show's finale this evening no favours at all by preceding it with a day of episodes from earlier seasons: the older episodes served to remind us of just how good the show used to be, and of how badly John Spencer will be missed. (In fairness, they also reminded us of just how far off the pace of contemporary American politics the show was from the very start. Still, in times like these there are worse crimes than a weakness for idealism.)

Taken as a whole, The West Wing was one of the TV highlights of the last decade. Here's hoping Sorkin's new show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip turns out to be half as entertaining.

The BBC News Magazine tackles a topical question: Why are 99s called that?

This report from the History Channel about Lake Peigneur in Louisiana is astonishing.

Basically, in 1980 a simple drilling operation on the lake went terribly wrong when the drill breached a salt mine: cue the collapse of the mine (what with water being so very good at dissolving salt) and the sudden appearance of a huge whirlpool as the lake's waters disappeared into the maw of the collapsing mineshafts, taking several barges, a fair number of trees and a considerable quantity of the surrounding topsoil layer with them. Not to mention causing the river that usually flowed away from the lake to temporarily reverse direction as the breach sucked down millions of gallons of water.

Still, it wasn't a total disaster: according to the locals, the fishing is better in the area now…

[Via kottke.org remaindered links]

If I ever set up a wireless network, I'm definitely going to implement this trick to penalise freeloaders.

(However, I think I'd go with the -blur option rather than the -flip one.)

[Via Needcoffee.com]

CNET UK pitted a ten year-old Apple Newton against a modern Samsung ultra-portable tablet PC. The Newton won, albeit on a points decision.

Which is as it should be (IMHO, obviously.) First, because the Newton was designed to be a handheld computer from the outset, unlike every Windows-based portable system out there. Second, because when it comes to a portable device that's supposed to act as your outboard brain, battery life trumps features every time. (This is the same logic that made Palm handhelds so much more usable than Windows CE/Pocket PC models.)

[Via Daring Fireball]

Courtesy of scans_daily, an early Grant Morrison JLA story: Ghosts of Stone.

[Via LinkMachineGo]

Ted Conover's Capitalist Roaders recounts a road trip he took in China with a group of affluent Chinese who come together to take a "self-driving trip":

[In some ways...] the Chinese are still figuring cars out and doing things their way. Take the phrase used to describe our expedition: "self-driving trip." It is called self-driving to contrast it with the more customary idea of driving in China: that someone else drives you. Until recently, everyone important enough to own a car was also important enough to have his or her own driver. Traditions grew up around this, like the chauffeur joining his boss at the table for meals while on duty — something still commonly seen.

But those practices are growing fusty. What are new and explosively popular are car clubs — some organized around the idea of travel, like the Beijing Target Auto Club, and others organized around the idea of. . .well, simply fun. The Beijing VW Polo Club, for example, has an active Web site and hundreds of youthful members. (The Polo is a VW model popular in Europe and Latin America and now manufactured in China as well.) Club members meet regularly to learn about maintenance, deliver toys to orphans and take weekend pleasure drives reminiscent of America in the 30's and 40's. To celebrate the 2008 Beijing Olympics, four-dozen members recently turned up in a giant parking lot to form the Olympic logo with their compact, candy-colored cars, each circle a different hue. Single members have found mates in the club, and at least one of their weddings featured an all-Polo procession through the streets of Beijing.

Fascinating stuff. See, for example, the attitude to speed limits:

National highways were typically posted with limits of 50 miles per hour, and expressways up to 75 miles per hour, and the orientation brochure that each driver had received from the Beijing Target Auto Club insisted that we adhere to those limits. ("This is only self-driving, not car racing!" the brochure read. "Speeding is not necessary.") Yet all the drivers, including Zhao, paid the rules no attention whatsoever, often driving 100 m.p.h. or more. Police cars were seldom seen; when drivers spotted them, to my surprise, they paid no attention at all. The cops rarely used radar, it turned out, and they almost never tried to pull you over.

What did concern Zhu and the others, though, were the speed cameras mounted unobtrusively on poles in the median. If you went too fast past a camera, it snapped your picture, and the ticket arrived in the mail. Simple as that. Zhu knew the location of most of the cameras along his normal routes around Beijing, but whenever he headed afield, the bills really piled up — sometimes $70 or $80 a month.

His solution was friends in the police department. They had given him a special red license plate that was affixed beneath his regular one; he believed this stopped a lot of the tickets in their tracks. But Zhu — like many others on the trip — was also intrigued by a device in the Nissan S.U.V. of Li Xingjie, 42, the leader of the Fangshan businessmen's group. The short, bald man was widely envied among members of the tour for his radar detector, reputed to detect not only radar but also cameras. I joined him one afternoon, and he proudly demonstrated: the rumors were true, and the device also gave advance notice of tollbooths and service areas. Made in Taiwan, the detector cost Li $350 and, as it stated in English on its bottom, detected "all speed equipment on mainland!" He used to pay about $1,250 annually in fines, but no longer did.

"But isn't this kind of seditious?" I asked via Li Lu. "Isn't this Taiwan helping to undermine the laws of the mainland?"

On the contrary, Li said, "this detector helps me obey the law. You have to obey laws. We have to obey the government!"

I wasn't sure whether he was sincere. As we blew by an aging police cruiser at over 100 (the cruiser, by my reckoning, was traveling closer to 50), I asked him to help me unravel more mysteries of Chinese highway law enforcement. "Why isn't anybody worried about those police? Why don't they chase anybody and give out tickets?"

That's just not how it's done here, Li said. Occasionally you were hit with an expressway fine when you stopped at the next tollbooth, but ordinarily, unless there had been an accident or some other irregularity, cops wouldn't chase you; tickets just arrived in the mail. Police cars were slow, but the mails were reliable.

John Gruber asks the Magic 8-Ball about Microsoft's 'Zune' iPod-killer:

Q: Seems funny to think that Microsoft went around to the entertainment companies with a message that, if you think about it, boils down to, "So we hear that you’re worried about the growing leverage that Apple is accumulating in the digital media space, and that you’re looking for a partner who can be trusted not to use such an advantage unfairly or to bludgeon competitors. How about Microsoft?"

A: YES — DEFINITELY.

Gun vs Katana.

Machine Gun vs Katana.

So now we know.

[Via Japundit]

The Canal Plus Cinema Channel produced a hilarious advert for La Marche de l'empereur (released over in English-speaking markets as March of the Penguins.)

[Via Peace Dividend]

According to Engadget, Apple are considering making the next-generation 'widescreen' video-capable iPod double up as an e-book reader.

Now the first point to remember is that 95% of rumours about new Apple hardware are wide of the mark. However, it's certainly plausible that Apple might decide that if they've sold you a widescreen iPod they might as well let you use all that lovely screen real estate to read e-books.

Sad to say, the majority of publishers would no doubt fail to learn the lesson of Baen Books, and would demand that encrypted and proprietary formats be used in order to protect their precious content, landing readers right in the middle of the format war that already dogs e-books on other platforms with Microsoft and Adobe and half a dozen other vendors pushing their mutually incompatible formats and restricting content to those formats they choose to provide reader software for.

Even so, provided that Apple were also sensible enough to make the iPod support reading plain text, RTF and HTML files alongside whatever encrypted formats they chose to support I'd find it really easy to persuade myself to upgrade to the new model ASAP. Especially if it looked as pretty as the (admittedly highly speculative) iPod design Engadget posted…

[Via Cult of Mac]

Airtoons are lovely little illustrated parodies of airline safety information.

[Via Away With Words]

I'd somehow failed to notice the Pet Shop Boys' video for Flamboyant when it was released a couple of years ago. Not a bad track, albeit not exactly groundbreaking, but the video is a delight.

[Via Stylus Magazine, via MetaFilter]

A couple of interesting, ambitious SF films in the pipeline:

• There's a strikingly pretty new trailer out for Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain. Two of my favourite actors in the leading roles, a director who isn't afraid to try something a little different: what's not to like?
• I still don't have much of a handle on what on earth Richard Kelly's Southland Tales is all about, despite watching three short clips on YouTube and reading an interview with Kelly published in the wake of his film's terrible reception at Cannes. And yet, I'm sufficiently intrigued to be pretty sure I'll catch it just as soon as it shows up in UK cinemas. Funny how that works…

[Southland Tales links via Fimoculous, trailer for The Fountain via kottke.org remaindered links]

When I read a story entitled Project Orion to Follow Apollo to the Moon I wondered whether the next generation of astronauts were going to be leaving a radioactive trail all the way to the moon.

Under Project Orion, NASA would launch crews of four astronauts aboard Orion capsules, first to Earth orbit and the International Space Station and then later to the Moon.

Turns out they're using the name, but not the technology.

(Until I read the Wikipedia article about the first Orion project, I had no idea there had been a third Project Orion, a proposal for a laser broom which would sweep debris out of the International Space Station's path.)

[Via Slashdot]

Clive Thompson surveys the world of serious gaming:

"What everyone's realizing is that games are really good at illustrating complex situations," said Suzanne Seggerman, one of the organizers of [the third annual Games for Change conference in New York]. "And we have so many world conflicts that are at a standstill. Why not try something new? Especially where it concerns young people, you have to reach them on their own turf. You think you'll get their attention reading a newspaper or watching a newscast? No way."

Henry Jenkins, an M.I.T. professor who studies games and learning, said the medium has matured along with the young people who were raised on it. "The generation that grew up with Super Mario is entering the workplace, entering politics, so they see games as just another good tool to use to communicate," he added. "If games are going to be a mature medium, they're going to serve a variety of functions. It's like with film. We think first of using it for entertainment, but then also for education and advertising and politics and all that stuff."

Given away free, they have found astonishingly large audiences. The United Nations game, Food Force, has been downloaded by four million players, a number to rival chart-busting commercial hits like Halo or Grand Theft Auto. In May, MTV'S college channel released an online game called Darfur is Dying in which players escape the Janjaweed while foraging for water to support their village: despite its cartoonish graphics, a strangely powerful experience. In the first month alone 700,000 people played it. Of those, tens of thousands entered an "action" area of the game — political action, that is — where they can send e-mail messages to politicians and demand action on Darfur.

I was a little surprised that Thompson failed to mention Chris Crawford's Balance of Power, an obvious precursor of this type of game, right down to the practice of coding your assumptions about how the world works into your game then claiming it reflects 'reality' at some level.

[Via Fimoculous]