(Courtesy of Wired: "TSA Special Agent John Enright, left, speaks to Steven Frischling outside the blogger's home in Niantic, Connecticut, after returning Frischling's laptop Wednesday." Photo: Thomas Cain/Wired.com)

On Saturday morning, following the incident in which a Nigerian man attempted to blow up a US-bound flight, the TSA issued an urgent security directive to thousands of contacts around the world—airlines, airports, and so on. On Tuesday, Special agents from the TSA's Office of Inspection showed up at the homes of Steven Frischling and Christopher Elliott, two bloggers who appear to have been the first to publish a copy of that document online, and interrogated each on where they obtained the document. Both bloggers received civil subpoenas from the TSA agents.

Snip from Wired piece by Kim Zetter:

The document, which the two bloggers published within minutes of each other Dec. 27, was sent by TSA to airlines and airports around the world and described temporary new requirements for screening passengers through Dec. 30, including conducting "pat-downs" of legs and torsos. The document, which was not classified, was posted by numerous bloggers. Information from it was also published on some airline websites.

"They're saying it's a security document but it was sent to every airport and airline," says Steven Frischling, one of the bloggers. "It was sent to Islamabad, to Riyadh and to Nigeria. So they're looking for information about a security document sent to 10,000-plus people internationally. You can't have a right to expect privacy after that."

Here is Elliot's post about his visit from a friendly TSA Special Agent named Flaherty. "[T]he TSA wants me to tell them who gave me the security directive. I told Flaherty I'd call my attorney and get back to him. What would you do?"

Here's Frischling's post. He says, "I wish I had a long intertwined story about how I got the document, but I don't. I received it, I read it, I posted it. Why did I post it? Because following the failed terrorist attack on the 25th of December there was a lot of confusion and speculation surrounding changes in airline & airport security procedures."

Here at Boing Boing, I linked to Frischling's leak post after I got home from an international flight into the US on which I personally experienced the procedures detailed in the leaked directive. I also tweeted what I experienced of those procedures before, during, and after the flight. Thorough physical patdowns and secondary hand luggage screening pre-board, no leaving your seat or electronics or putting anything on your lap during the final hour of flight, and so on. Attendants on my flight explained that the stepped-up procedures came from a just-issued TSA security directive. As soon as airlines and airports began implementing the directivemdash;and that began before the bloggers posted their copies—the contents of the directive were no hardly secret. So why the strong-arm tactics?

Read more: New York Times story, Wired News story.

Muzorama from Muzorama Team on Vimeo.

This fun video by illustrator Jean-Philippe Masson (aka Muzo) was produced in just 6 weeks. Its sense of absurdity reminds me of Betty Boop cartoons.

The flamingo tongue snail Cyphoma gibbosum appears to have a shell decorated with bright spots (top of image). Amazingly though, the spots aren't actually part of the shell, but rather the animal's flesh! When the animal retracts into its stark white shell, so do the spots (bottom of image). The Cyphoma gibbosum is the star of the latest CreatureCast video from Dr. Casey Dunn's laboratory at Brown University. RISD animator Chris Vamos, who was also a student in Dr. Dunn's invertebrate zoology course, created the video. Watch it after the jump!

AbeBooks has a fantastic virtual Weird Book Room. I was thrilled to discover that I only have three of the books on the page: Mannix's The History of Torture (highly recommended!), The How And Why Wonder Book of Guns (useful!), and the Gangsta Rap Coloring Book (a gift!). Oh, how I love thee, Abe. Abe Weird Book Room (Thanks, Vann Hall!)

You're looking at a water flea, as captured by Dr. Jan Michels of the University of Kiel, Germany. It's the top-prize winner in the 2009 Olympus BioScapes contest—a competition focused on images taken via microscope. The winners gallery is full of gorgeous pictures in striking, day-glo purples, greens and reds. Worth browsing, for both art and science nerds.

Olympus BioScapes 2009 Winners Gallery

Every culture with a gender binary imposes gender onto all aspects of human appearance and behavior. This is done in order to reify that binary and make it appear to be "natural," rather than arbitrary. As an example, let's look at handwriting. Most people can make a better than chance guess at someone's gender identity based on a handwriting sample. But why?

A couple of years ago, a reader asked me how she could make her handwriting more "feminine." I had a general sense that in the US, "feminine" handwriting is neater, more loopy, and in its most mockable form has little circles or hearts dotting each letter I. It turns out it's much more complicated than that, and the entire field of inquiry can easily devolve from legitimate forensics into quackery like "graphology" and "evolutionary psychology." The section has become the most popular part on my how-to site for transgender people, as there is considerable general-market interest in the topic, even in our age of texting and IMs. I include 30 handwriting samples (worth reading because they are cute aphorisms). Learn about gradient, structure, concavity, and maybe even make your chicken-scratch a little more legible, no matter what your gender.

Handwriting and gender cues (via Transsexual Road Map)

Here's MAKE's Collin Cunningham explaining Ohm's Law: Voltage = Current X Resistance.

1934 photo of a baby in a wooden and wire cage hanging out of a window a few stories up. It looks secure.

According to the YouTube description for this video, a guy threw his bicycle at a pair of purse-snatching thieves who were speeding away on a scooter, causing them to crash and become quite upset.

Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com collected the data for this handsome infographic designed by Jesus Diaz of Gizmodo. It shows your odds of becoming an airborne victim of terrorism. Maybe the new TSA rules will decrease the odds of being a terrorism victim from 1 in 10,408,947 to 1 in 10,408,948. Let's hope so!

The True Odds of Airborne Terror Chart

ReflectionOf.Me posted a graph that shows how much HP printer ink costs compared to human blood, vodka, crude oil and other precious liquids.

I read Lamebook sometimes, but I've never seen anything there that made me snort tea out my nose. Until now. It begins in the magical kingdom of Facebook, with a "What Lord of the Rings Character are You?" quiz ...

Fair warning: There is some NSFW language and liberal doses of the stupid, preteen usage of the word "gay".

Lamebook: FroDOH!

Bruce Schneier: a voice of reason, as usual.

Terrorism is rare, far rarer than many people think. It's rare because very few people want to commit acts of terrorism, and executing a terrorist plot is much harder than television makes it appear.

The best defenses against terrorism are largely invisible: investigation, intelligence, and emergency response. But even these are less effective at keeping us safe than our social and political policies, both at home and abroad. However, our elected leaders don't think this way: They are far more likely to implement security theater against movie-plot threats.

Is aviation security mostly for show? (CNN guest editorial)

"Just / want / allah / help / good / people." Link, requires Java and no adblockers.

Via Wired Danger Room on Twitter, from @i2pi and via @drewconway

Appfrica has a great infographic that looks at the number of Earth's dead humans and the causes of their deaths, and creates comparisons between the population of the dead and that of the living.

"How many people have ever lived?" The numbers in this piece are highly speculative but are as accurate as modern science allows. It's widely accepted that prior to 2002 there had been somewhere between 106 and 140 billion homo sapiens born to the world.

One interesting fact he digs up: There are more people currently alive in Asia, Africa and Latin America than the total number of people who died—anywhere, and for any reason—during the entire 20th century.

Appfrica: Population of the Dead

(Thanks, Maria Popova!)

Two Science Questions from a Toddler in the same month? It's a Festivus miracle! Or, you know, the unexpected byproduct of trying to write weekly blog posts during a month where damn-near all the sources you need to talk to are on vacation. But I'm a glass is half-full kind of woman.

Speaking of byproducts, BB reader Tammy says there's a small person in her life who wants to know, "Why is poop brown?"

First off, the fact that this kid's poop is brown is a really good sign. See, your stool can come in several different colors. Brown just happens to be the color of good health.

Now that we've gazed inside what is purported to be Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's explosives-laden underwear, let's look inside his mind, by way of an archive of postings he made to the Islamic discussion website gawaher.com.

Would the prophet Muhammad have played soccer, were he alive today? Is it okay to eat meals with my parents, even though they're unclean? All this and more he asked, and we know this because Wired Danger Room dug up a slew of links.

The following post is credited to "Farouk1986", whose email was listed as umarm21@hotmail.com.:

First of all, i have no friend. Not because i do not socialise, etc but because either people do not want to get too close to me as they go partying and stuff while i dont, or they are bad people who befriend me and influence me to do bad things. Hence i am in a situation where i do not have a friend, i have no one to speak too, no one to consult, no one to support me and i feel depressed and lonely. i do not know what to do. And then i think this loneliness leads me to other problems. As i get lonely, the natural sexual drive awakens and i struggle to control it, sometimes leading to minor sinful activities like not lowering the gaze.

And in the next line, "i want to talk about is my dilemma between liberalism and extremism." Here's one from a few months later in 2005, in which Farouk1986 discusses having found happiness in Yemen:

After a hard battle deciding where to go and what to do, i finally ended up in Yemen. I'm doing a 3 month arabic course and so far it is just great. There are a lot of Brits and Americans also studying in the Institute i'm studying in, Sana'a institute of Arabic Languages- http://www.sialyemen.com

Wired Danger Room post

(Correction: an earlier version of this post quoted items now understood to have been posted by a different user of the gawaher.com forums).