Remember those semi-medieval looking metal plates the shoe geek at Sears used to pick the right size shoes? The future of shoe sizing has six 3-D cameras to map every plantar’s wart and bone spur, and to store the data for posterity.

Looking for an investment opportunity? How about taking a piece of the billions spent annually in, on and around prisons. Here’s my favorite: “Incarceration Optimization Program International in New York City [offers] a 100-hour, $20,000 course that instructs mainly white-collar criminals on the finer points of prison etiquette.” [digg]

Wrap a video around a real-world object with video objects. “Once the system is aligned the projected videos can be exchanged in realtime by drag and drop in a VJ-like manner.” Today it’s some polymath’s tech project, tomorrow your kid’s McDonald’s toy. [wmmna]

Cory Doctorow says, “I’ve been giving away my books ever since my first novel came out, and boy has it ever made me a bunch of money.” His article in Forbes on the topic is notable not as much for its content (if you read boingboing you’ve heard it before) but for the fact that Forbes thinks the topic is worth exposing to its audience. Cory’s opening sentence captures why the Forbes crowd cares. [boingboing]

The Seattle Times has a brief but fascinating profile of the daily skirmishes between illegal immigrants, drug smugglers and police in the municipal tunnels that connect Nogales, Arizona, with Nogales, Mexico. It’s a setting rife with opportunity for a fiction writer with an eye for a dark and gritty urban future. [digg]