This looks like a truly useless, and depressingly ugly device for cracking eggs (which this TV commercial would like you to believe is a big problem).

Gary says:

I’m reading the latest Thomas Pynchon book, Inherent Vice, and he makes reference to this song.

It’s like Tiny Tim is tripping on acid, entertaining children, and predicting global warming — all at once.

Coming soon to a science fiction plot near you: with the right software, a plain-jane webcam can be a 3D scanner. It's a project from Qi Pan, a PhD candidate at Cambridge University Engineering Department.

ProFORMA: Probabilistic Feature-based On-line Rapid Model Acquisition (via Futurismic)

Michael Wolf took 100 photos of people living in Hong Kong's oldest public housing estate. Each flat is 100 square feet. Almost every room has the same kind of metal bunk bed. They almost all have a TV, electric fan, and rice cooker.

I looked at all 100 photos. Here's the creepiest room. Here's the most cluttered room. Here's the tidiest room. Here's the most spartan room.

Michael Wolf 100 x 100 (Thanks, Lookforthewoman!)

Matt Logue says: I just completed a self-published book depicting an uninhabited Los Angeles, and it got an honorable mention in the photography.book.now competition at blurb.com!  The photos were made over a period of 4 years, beginning in 2005, at a variety of locations around LA.

Empty Los Angeles

An after-Thanksgiving treat for the whole family...

Scrooge has no honor, nor any courage. Can three ghosts help him to become the true warrior he ought to be in time to save Tiny Tim from a horrible fate? Performed in the Original Klingon with English Supertitles, and narrative analysis from The Vulcan Institute of Cultural Anthropology.

Playing November 27 through December 13 at Minneapolis' Mixed Blood Theater. No really, this is for serious.

(Thanks Joel!)

As a little kid, I used to think electrical substations would make really awesome jungle gyms. This video helpfully demonstrates why 5-year-old Maggie was an idiot.

This is the Eldorado Substation near Boulder City, Nevada. What you're seeing: A substation like this one is connected to long-distance transmission lines and electricity has to be very high voltage to travel on those. The substation "steps up" the voltage so the electricity can travel. Everything at a substation is hot, in that shock the bejeezus out of you sense. So that maintenance can be done, substations are built with switching functions that allow you to disconnect and reconnect various parts of the system in modular sort of way. The big, crazy spark in this video happened when some of the switching mechanisms failed. The Arcs 'n Sparks page at Stoneridge Engineering explains what happened next...

I think we have to start thinking about the idea that humans in the last 30, 40, or 50,000 years have been domesticating ourselves.  If we're following the bonobo or dog pattern, we're moving toward a form of ourselves with more and more juvenile behavior.  And the amazing thing once you start thinking in those terms is that you realize that we're still moving fast.  I think that current evidence is that we're in the middle of an evolutionary event in which tooth size is falling, jaw size is falling, brain size is falling, and it's quite reasonable to imagine that we're continuing to tame ourselves.  The way it's happening is the way it's probably happened since we became permanently settled in villages, 20 or 30,000 years ago, or before.

(CC-licensed image by Flickr user laverrue)

Glass has been following the secret lives of wild Norway rats – otherwise known as brown rats, wharf rats, or, most evocatively, sewer rats -- for more than two decades now, but Baltimore has been a national hotspot for rat studies for well over half a century. The research push began during World War II, when thousands of troops in the South Pacific came down with the rat-carried tsutsugamushi disease, and the Allies also feared that the Germans and Japanese would release rats to spread the plague...

Glass – who started off studying cotton rats in the Midwest – traps the animals with peanut butter baits and monitors the diseases they carry. (Hantavirus, once known as Korean hemorrhagic fever, and leptospirosis – which can cause liver and kidney failure – are of particular concern.) Lately he’s been interested in cat-rat interactions. Cats, he and his colleagues have noticed, are rather ineffectual rat assassins: they catch mainly medium-sized rodents, when they catch any at all. This predation pattern may actually have adverse effects on human health: some of the deceased mid-sized rats are already immune to harmful diseases, while the bumper crops of babies that replace them are all vulnerable to infection. Thus a higher proportion of the population ends up actively carrying the diseases at any given time.

Last month, I wrote about a Japanese husband who confessed to his wife that he had a virtual girlfriend, a character from an addictive Nintendo DS game called Love Plus. Now, another man is planning to hold a wedding ceremony with his Love Plus girlfriend this coming Sunday. The man, who calls himself SAL9000, was so in love with Nene Anegasaki that he decided to marry her and take her on a honeymoon to Guam. Of course, this means that he literally just took his Nintendo DS to Guam... while there, he took photos, livecast their adventures on popular video-sharing site Nico Nico Douga, and documented their adventures using the augmented reality iPhone app Sekai Camera. In any case, the guy plans on having a public reception in Tokyo this Sunday. It will be livecast on Nico Nico Douga, but in case you miss it, we'll be bringing you an update early next week. Stay tuned!

via IT Media News (Japanese)

Spray Paint the Walls: The Story of Black Flag explores the history of one of the most important bands, if not the most important, in American punk history.

Snip from observations by writer Joe Carducci, who was long associated with SST Records (some links added):

"[The book is] very well reported and assembled by Brit music writer Stevie Chick, author of the better of the recent Sonic Youth books. Neither Greg Ginn nor Henry Rollins sat for interviews but their voices are included from earlier interviews, and more importantly Chuck Dukowski spoke to Chick - a first I believe. The story, laid out from the band's earliest practices in 1976 to its end ten years later, makes a far more dramatic book than the usual shelf-fillers with their stretch to make the empty stories of various chart-toppers sound exciting and crucial and against the odds. "

Spray Paint the Walls: The Story of Black Flag (Amazon, book comes out later this month)

Here's a related post on photographer Glen E. Friedman's blog.

You may also be interested in some of Carducci's own writings on the subject of music and fandom.

Big Bird cakes disasters

The idea, in a nutshell, is this: "Fix your ideal schedule, then work backwards to make everything fit — ruthlessly culling obligations, turning people down, becoming hard to reach, and shedding marginally useful tasks along the way."

Newport works between 8:30 and 5:30 on weekdays only, yet he gets a lot done:

This past summer, for example, I completed my PhD in computer science at MIT. Simultaneous with writing my dissertation I finished the manuscript for my third book, which was handed in a month after my PhD defense and will be published by Random House in the summer of 2010. During this past year, I also managed to maintain my blog, Study Hacks, which enjoys over 50,000 unique visitors a month, and publish over a half-dozen peer-reviewed academic papers.

Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You To Be Rich wrote about Newport and a few other people who use similar techniques to get a lot of meaningful work accomplished in 40 hours a week or less.

I think they are onto something -- ever since I had kids (which gave me fewer hours in the day to work, and also put a start and end time on my day) I've been much more productive.

Time management: How an MIT postdoc writes 3 books, a PhD defense, and 6+ peer-reviewed papers — and finishes by 5:30pm

This fellow apparently won a facial hair competition in 1991 for his beard head-cage with working door. (via Imaginary Foundation)

UPDATE: In the comments, lots of speculation that this is fake. May very well be, but I still think it's delightful.

Clark Planetarium Director Seth Jarvis said the stony meteorite was probably traveling 80,000 miles an hour when it hit our atmosphere. He said it happened 100 miles up in the air; so despite the brightness, Utah was never in any danger. "These collisions can do damage, but they are extremely rare; and literally once in a century do you observe something that's actually doing damage," he said. Witness Andy Bailey said, "Oh, it lit up the whole sky, like almost brighter than the day. It was bright." Don White was in Wyoming and told KSL Newsradio for a moment he suspected a nuclear strike. "With something that brilliant and that fast, it was like, whoa, did we just get hit or something? It would have been some bigger noise I guess if a nuclear device had gone off," he said.

My film director pal Scott Compton just finished shooting a documentary about singer-songwriter Chuck Prophet. Scott and collaborator John Behrens joined Prophet and his band in Mexico City earlier this year where the group recorded ¡Let Freedom Ring!, an album of "political songs for non political people." My favorite Prophet quote from the trailer: "I walk into the (recording studio's) control room and I could not believe what I saw -- I was looking at a studio that is totally state-of-the-art... for 1957." So with a background of earthquakes, H1N1 hysteria, power outages, sirens, and corrupt police, the band plugged in their instruments and set to work. "The best thing about Prophet as a film subject," Scott told me, "is that even as things fell apart around him, he always was looking for the bright side of the mayhem." I can't wait to watch the whole film, slated for completion by March. I'll see Scott later today when he'll be directing a Boing Boing Video interview I'm doing with Swell Season, aka Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová from the film Once. They're performing tonight at Oakland's Paramount Theatre.

Yesterday I received a surprise package in the mail: a cigar box ukulele kit from Papa's Boxes (which sells kits for four different ukuleles and a 5 string banjo, all based on cigar boxes). It looks like it has everything needed -- a cigar box, strings, hardware, glue, drill bits, and even a piezoelectric buzzer for an acoustic/electric pickup. The parts are all labeled and everything looks like it's been put together with loving care.

The neck is pretty much finished, with fretboard and frets already in place. That means it ought to be pretty easy to make with just a few standard tools, like a drill and a screwdriver.

I think this will be my Thanksgiving weekend project!

Papa's Boxes

Photographer Anthony Citrano recently pointed us to a possible Photoshop Disaster on the cover of W magazine's December issue, in which Demi Moore (aka @mrskutcher) appeared to be missing a chunk of flesh from her hip.

This reminded me of the Ralph Lauren debacle. Many blogs and news sites picked the item up. Over at Jezebel (they posted about it before BB), W magazine fessed to having altered the image, but "nothing out of the ordinary."

Yesterday, Mrs. Kutcher herself tweeted, "Here is the original image people my hips were not touched don't let these people bullshit you!"

Anthony Citrano replies: "I feel bad that Demi is on defense - she should not have to defend other people's mistakes; W Magazine should be addressing this rather than her." Citrano offers $5,000 to the charity of her choosing if the image she tweeted is provably the unretouched original.

Citrano's full reply and details on the thrown-down-gauntlet follow. All of this, by the way, IS VRY SRS BIZNESS.