This week: unconscious passwords, isolation epidemics, and video grid time-shifting!

"Future of Visual Gadgets Rolled Out" A nice summary of the Society for Information Display's international symposium, with pictures of 3D displays and prototype rollable displays:

"BBN Tech Unveils World's First Quantum Cryptography Network"

The next generation of secure networks, over which eavesdropping is always detectable:

New methods and companies are forming to prevent camcorders from making pirated videotapes in movie theatres:

"Unconscious passwords"

Hebrew U. researchers have devised a method that allows people to use a type of password that they don't have to consciously remember:

"This is the most amazing, subversive piece of political webware I've ever seen. It scrapes the Parliamentary record and makes the entire thing commentable, searchable and permalinkable... We need one of these in every country in the world."

A former Microsoft technology manager bashes the company for its mediocre products and addiction to cash cows:

"Facing critical shortage of musicians for military funerals, the Pentagon has approved the use of a push-button bugle that plays taps by itself as the player holds it to his lips."

"For the second straight year, an Internet unknown won the famed World Series of Poker on Friday, ravaging a field of professional players on his way to glory and riches."

This guy won $5 million:

A new coating allows glass to be self- cleaning and non-fogging. It may help eliminate detergents in streams due to window washing:

"The Organic Foods Movement - Led by Heinz Corporation or We the People?"

"Drowning in an Ocean of Plastic"

A biological engineering plan to end human aging:

Never mind the news you've read last week about the lack of sex in Japan. I'm curious about "hikikomori", a contributing condition affecting one million teen boys - they never leave their rooms, sometimes for years (October 2002):

"Japan's Secret Epidemic" (May 31):

"Childhood obesity in the United States looks significantly worse than previously believed, suggests the largest assessment ever of public school students."

For when you really, really need a TV dinner, check out "The Single Man's Guide to TV Dinners":

Personal photos by the master Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky:

I recently saw Tarkovsky's 1983 movie "Nostalgia" - it is a masterpiece, but only for lovers of poetry, atmosphere, ideals, madness, and the sacred:

An article on Kyle Cooper, who's made the art-intensive opening and closing credits of such movies as Spiderman, Se7en, Sphere, Twister, and Mission: Impossible:

"L.A. To Oregon at Mach 9"

A homemade movie of a 10-hour drive from L.A. to Oregon in 6 minutes:

"Bad Hair Year"

A man took a photo of himself every day for a year and made this movie:

"Breaking"

An innovative new music video by up-and-coming musician Sam Bisbee. I don't know about the music, but this effect has never been done with live video before (I believe it was pioneered in the Beatles' Yellow Submarine):