In 2009, I posted that paleontologists found the fossilized remains of the world's largest snake, a 42-foot-long relative of the boa constrictor. Paleontologists from the University of Toronto dubbed the species Titanoboa cerrejonensis for the Cerrejón region of northern Colombia where they found the remains. The snake snacked on crocodiles. As part of a new Smithsonian documentary "Titanoboa: Monster Snake," sculptor Kevin Hockley built a life-size replica of the beast.

Finding a 42-foot-long snake (fossil) - Boing Boing

This is a very important ruling in the battle over the US Government's "anything goes" border search policies.

I think the court's analysis of the Fourth Amendment implications of border searches of electronics is incorrect. It attempts to draw a line in the sand that says strip searches require suspicion but searches of electronics do not. This conclusion is reached by arguing that if the search of the content of a brief case is not Unconstitutional than the search of the content of a laptop must also not be Unconstitutional, because they are both containers of potentially private information. Its probably the most reasonable and articulate finding on this that I've seen, but in some respects that makes it a bit more straightforward to challenge.

This analysis fails to consider that the scope of the information contained in a laptop is much wider than the maximum possible scope of the information that could be contained in a briefcase, and so the privacy impact is not just greater but rises to a level that is categorically different. This relates to the Mosaic theory of Fourth Amendment analysis which was raised recently in Jones. The fact that the police might see you driving down a particular street without having to get a warrant does not mean that its OK for the police to monitor every movement that you ever make with an electronic device. The fact that the police might look at a few documents that you happen to have in your briefcase while crossing the border does not mean that the they can spend months analyzing a complete archive of every email you've ever sent and every web page you've visited in the past couple of weeks.

The Mosaic theory is, mind you, controversial, but I think its necessary - its where we need to go in order to deal with issues like this.

Furthermore, the court quotes an older case in which it is observed that "Requiring Reasonable Suspicion for all computer searches may 'allow individuals to render graphic contraband... immune to [a] border search simply by scanning images onto a computer disk.'" While that is correct, it ignores the fact that individuals can already render graphic contraband immune to a border search by transferring that information across the border over an Internet file transfer instead of carrying it on a computer disk. Arguably the warrant requirements for wiretapping international telecommunications are a matter of Congressional policy rather than a Constitutional requirement, but applying ancient privacy principals to new technologies is a complicated interaction between all three branches of government and the court is remiss for not at least making note of this contradiction.

The analysis of the challenge to the duration that House's electronics were seized is kind of lame. Basically the court is saying that the government cannot hold onto your laptop longe... [ Read More (0.6k in body) ]

Politically Motivated Border Searches Could Be Unconstitutional, Judge Rules | Threat Level | Wired.com

This struck me as funny:

A housing recovery will probably begin within a year or so. In any event, it is certain to occur at some point.

"It is certain to rain at some point" is an interesting attitude to have in the middle of a drought.

Calculated Risk: Buffett's Views on Housing

This is the only lucid explanation I've read regarding the problem with the "Stand your Ground" law - most of the people analyzing the issue miss the point and talk about the idea that the law makes it hard to convict people who used deadly force of murder, but thats not the problem that is impacting the Zimmerman/Martin case - the problem is that Flordia's statute prohibits arresting and interrogating the shooter. This is essentially consistent with the argument going on between the police and the "Justice for Trayvon" movement, but the press hasn't zeroed in on the substantive legal issue.

So what is truly distinctive about Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law? It is this: while self-defense conventionally is just that -- a defense, to be raised at trial -- self-defense under the Florida law acts as an immunity from prosecution or even arrest. Section 776.032 of the Florida Statutes provides that a person who uses deadly force in self-defense "is immune from criminal prosecution." This odd provision means that a person who uses deadly force in self-defense cannot be tried, even though the highly fact-intensive question of whether the person acted in self-defense is usually hashed out at trial. The law thus creates a paradox: the State must make a highly complex factual determination before being permitted to avail itself of the forum necessary to make such a determination.

Not only that, Section 776.032 provides immunity from arrest unless the police have "probable cause that the force that was used was unlawful." Again, the law creates a Catch-22: police cannot arrest the suspect unless they have probable cause, not just to believe there was a killing, but also that the killing was not in self-defense; and where, as is often the case, the defendant is the only living witness to the alleged crime, the police likely will not be able to form probable cause without interrogating the suspect.

PrawfsBlawg: Trayvon Martin and Florida's 'Stand Your Ground' Law

Flying Robots Deliver Tacos To Your Location

Easy Ordering On Your Smartphone

Just tap and let the machines do the rest.

Tacocopter: One-click Taco Delivery in the SF Bay Area

While pixelated can be a dirty word in the field of photography, in design we welcome it. This collection is just a bit (ha!) of all the fun pixelated design out there. Here are over 15 of our favorite pixelated designs:null

Our Favorite Pixelated Designs | Design Milk

Sociologists and criminologists have a longstanding interest in race and its effects on police behavior. Based on a range of data sources (including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, citizen complaints, local police agency records and social observation), research suggests that police use of force, including the use of rearms, is applied more frequently and more severely to suspects who are young, male, and either Black or Latino (Geller, 1982; DOJ, 2001). Researchers like Terrill and Reisig (2003) have begun to explore how police shootings relate to the neighborhood in which an encounter occurs, and their initial results perfectly match the data reported here: a potentially dangerous and disadvantaged neighborhood may prompt more extreme use of force regardless of the suspect's race.

Clearly, racial cues can and do signal threat. Young Black male targets prompt a defensive orientation. But racial threat perception may be one manifestation of a more comprehensive threat-detection process — a process that monitors the environment for a variety of threats.

Dangerous enough: Moderating racial bias with contextual threat cues [PDF]

“They are very prudish,” said Margaret Donnelly, 28, a bartender at Tattoos and Scars who has lived in Key West for four years and remembers her own student antics “They are so afraid everyone is going to take their picture and put it online. Ten years ago people were doing filthy, filthy things, but it wasn’t posted on Facebook.”

The Volokh Conspiracy » Interesting Example of How the Possibility of Surveillance Interferes With Free Expression

But the way the police have handled the Martin case has been called into question as more details surface.

ABC News has reported that a source inside the police department told them a narcotics detective, not a homicide detective, first approached Zimmerman and peppered him with questions, possibly leading his story.

Another officer reportedly corrected a witness after she told him that she heard the teen cry for help, according to ABC. The officer told the woman that it was Zimmerman who cried for help, not Martin.

Shortly after the shooting, the police told the Martin family that Zimmerman had a clean record, Tracy Martin, Trayvon’s father, told HuffPost.But a public records search shows that he was arrested in 2005 for resisting arrest with violence and battery. The charges were later dropped.

This situation sounds highly questionable.

Trayvon Martin Case Salts Old Wounds And Racial Tension

AUSTIN, Texas--Former U.S. vice president Al Gore and Facebook's founding president Sean Parker argued passionately today that online communities must use the powerful tools at their disposal to save American democracy.

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Gore gave a series of impassioned mini-speeches throughout the panel... He touched on... his belief that a Wiki-democracy site could help lessen special interest groups’ impact on politics;

Al Gore with Sean Parker at SXSW: 'Occupy democracy!' | Geek Gestalt - CNET News