From the EFF, an excellent Wired story about the dangers of electronic voting (and a link at the bottom to further coverage of the issue). This is perhaps the single most compelling issue in American politics right now, and I predict that it will spread to other countries. If this unmatched opportunity for subversion of the democratic process comes anywhere near you, fight it. If you vote in the US, do it by mail for the forseeable future, until e-voting is forced to add a paper trail at the very least.



From Neat New Stuff: freefulltext.com "provides direct links to over 7000 scholarly periodicals which allow some or all of their online content to be viewed by ANYONE... for free". Marylaine points out that the site only has an alphabetical index, so it's mainly good as a reference link for when you already have your citation. (Also, I haven't checked but "some or all" may be problematic.)



Remember the dragon in a bottle that made the blog rounds a while ago? Turns out it was a promotional prank by this self-satisfied asshole. The report calls it a hoax, but it was just a grubby moneymaking stunt. Hoaxes should have a point, dammit; Ern Malley is turning in his grave. (via waxy.org links miniblog)



Lots of things from Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools go straight into my "want" folder. Consider this gorgeous book on African rituals, or this collection of somewhat more Western ones.



US troops will soon be armed with a weapon that jwz aptly dubs the Bowel Disruptor: a stun gun that emits a baby's scream, played backwards, at between 110 and 145 decibels (the pain threshold is around 120, which is like standing next to a jet aircraft as it takes off).



They played every song as if their nuts were on fire, and shrieked out incomprehensible banshee babblings; this was music to kill dogs with a hammer by.



From Stavros: Charlie Brown is an existentialist, and a collection of truly remarkable pictures.



I might as well just pipe Graham's RSS feed straight in. All human communication fails, except by accident: Jukka Korpela has provided the world with a translation of, and some commentary on, Wiio's Laws. Wiio:communication::Murphy:everything, pretty much. It's funny 'cos it's true.



Noam Chomsky has a blog, which is where I found a link to The Nation Institute via one of their projects, TomDispatch. They've been around for a while, and look good at a glance:

Founded in 1966, The Nation Institute has a fundamental commitment to the values of free speech and open discourse. The Institute places particular importance on strengthening the independent press in the face of America's increasingly corporate-controlled flow of information, and through its programs the Institute promotes progressive values on a variety of media platforms.

They list their Trustees but don't give any details on where their money comes from.