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Park your phone

Suppose you’re heading into a federal courtoom in Florida. Suppose you’ve got your phone with you. It’s probably got a camera on it — which means you won’t be allowed to bring it into the courtoom; the state has banned cameras because they don’t want the identities of protected witnesses revealed.

This is happening all over the country, and it’s producing a hilarious industry of merchants who, for a fee, will hold your phone while you go inside. According to a story in the Monterey Herald, there’s hot-dog stand outside the Monterey federal court that will store your phone for 10 bucks. And if he’s not free? One women recently tried to get the guard to let her take her phone inside, and wasn’t able to:

After begging failed to sway him, she walked outside to a nearby planter, rearranged some shrubbery and buried her Nokia camera phone.

When she returned to the planter to retrieve her phone, she ran into another lawyer digging away at the same soil.

”The guards were laughing,” she said.

(Thanks to Textually for this one!)


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Bio:

I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.

Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!

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Recent Entries

A long German word for “noticing when ads are being customized based on your surfing history”

Gay squid sex

“El Ajedrecista” — an analog chess-playing computer from 1912

Hacking the Model T

“How did you find my site?” and Vannevar Bush’s memex

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a bunch of stuff

May 20, 2011 » 02:28 PM

From Christopher Kennedy’s very droll book “Neitzsche’s Horse”.

July 28, 2010 » 07:35 AM
“Wr” - S

July 06, 2010 » 10:05 AM

My Xbox broke, and I was trying to Google some possible technical solutions, when I noticed that Google appears to be encouraging me to make a typo. I suppose it’s possible that Google’s algorithms know that typing “wont” instead of “won’t” would produce better results.

June 29, 2010 » 05:00 PM

On the other hand, when I tried the test for multitasking, I was pretty abysmal. I performed worse than people who identify themselves as heavy multitaskers, and those who identify as low multitaskers.

June 29, 2010 » 04:58 PM

I finally got around to trying out the interactive “test your distractability and multitasking” page at the New York Times, which they put up alongside their story earlier this month about how computer distractions are eroding our lives. 

According to the test, I guess I have good focus — I’m not very distractable! 

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Collision Detection: A Blog by Clive Thompson