Former guestblogger Johannes Grenzfurthner has started a blog for Monochrom, the Austrian arts collective he's a member of -- it's full of the same wonderful stuff that he posted to our sidebar last month. Link

The Electric Company archive has audio ("Arthur J. Crank sings 'S On The End'," "Easy Reader," "Greedy Greg Grabbed," "The HEY YOU GUYS! Song," "Monolith," etc) and video ("There's A Banana In Your Ear!," "I Am Cute" with Mel Brooks, and "Silhouette Syllables" with Morgan Freeman) from one of the all-time great musical kids' shows of the 1970. Link (Thanks, Jeremy!)

Engadet reports on Aiwa's new ¥15,000 headphones, which can take standard audio input and play it through and/or record it as an MP3 to its built-in 128MB of memory. It's a great idea, and I can think of a million things I would love to use them for, from recording tracks off vinyl records to the air-traffic control chatter on Channel 12 on United flights. Link

Darren sez, "Watch a family of wild boars, live with video and audio 24-hours a day. I watched and listened for a few minutes tonight, which is tomorrow morning in German boar time. I didn't see any pigs, but I did hear them. The audio is fantastic--very atmospheric. You can hear them scuffling around and snorting in the dirt. Over the past two weeks, apparently this site in Germany was become something of a phenomenon, registering 1.5 million visitors." Link (Thanks, Darren!)

Donna sez: "EFF provides a quick and dirty technical work-around for protecting your privacy if you want to use Google's beta Gmail service - only a temporary fix, and there's the rub: Google needs to step up and provide a solution that protects its customers' privacy (and the same goes for other businesses than can link email to search data!)."

For current and prospective Gmail users, we suggest that you start by deleting your existing Google cookies before you use Gmail (and before you enter your real name or existing email address in any Google form). This will help prevent your pre-existing search history from becoming associated with your identity in the future. (Note that it will also cause you to lose any Google preferences you have entered, such as language or adult content preferences.)

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Verichip announced the development of a gun safety system based on radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology. The aim is to prevent a gun from being fired by anyone other than its owner. Here's how it works: A gun is outfitted with an RFID reader. An RFID tag is implanted in the gun owner's hand. Only in the presence of that tag will the handgun allow its trigger to be unlocked. Link

What do cells sound like? Nanotech pioneer Jim Gimzewski and grad student Andrew Pelling are using the tiny tip of an atomic force microscope like the needle of a record player to pick up a cell's sound-generating vibrations. Gimzewski has named the fieled "sonocytology." From a Smithsonian Magazine article about the research:

"The distance the cell wall moves determines the amplitude, or volume, of the sound wave, and the speed of the up-and-down movement is its frequency, or pitch. Though the volume of the yeast cell sound was far too low to be heard, Gimzewski says its frequency was theoretically within the range of human hearing. 'So all we're doing is turning up the volume,' he adds."

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Great Reason article about people who flat out refuse to pay income taxes.

While in the past evangelists of the "income tax is a fraud" message have tended to sell books and seminars, the We The People Foundation has the advantage of being hard to blithely condemn as a scam. It is not a business selling advice but a nonprofit dedicated to spending money -- more than $1 million since taking up this fight -- to spread the word. Its founder claims Gandhi as his influence: From him Schulz learned that to fight an unjust tyranny, you need a proactive, nonviolent mass movement, and that is what he is trying to create.

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Paul Boutin conducted an interview with Neal Stephenson for Wired News in honour of Neal's new book, Confusion, sequel to the Leibnitzpunk doorstopper Quicksilver, a book that I like more and more the further I get from it (that is, when I read it, I liked it OK, but the more I think about it, the better I like it). Paul got Stephenson to expound for quite a while on money and what it means, a subject on which Neal has many interesting and rarely-heard things to say.

[M]oney is a sort of medium for the exchange of information. When the price of cloth went up in Antwerp, it was because the system of international trade, in some fashion that's too complex for us to understand, was transmitting information about the supply/demand balance. Money makes that kind of information flow better.

Nowadays money is electronic and there's plenty of it. Back then, money had to be silver or gold. In those days silver came from the Spanish colonies of Mexico and Peru, and gold came from the Portuguese colony of Brazil. It was transported across the Atlantic to Europe, though English and other privateers did their best to intercept it en route. Some of it circulated in European markets, some was hoarded in the vaults of wealthy families and institutions, and a lot of it flowed east toward India and China. China was notoriously hungry for silver. It was a complicated flow pattern, with any number of sources and sinks and eddies and feedback loops, and like any other such system it was capable of chaotic behavior. If enough people hoarded their metal, a money shortage would develop, which would make it very difficult to conduct trade on any level beyond that of a village market, and throttle the flow of information.

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According to this New York Times article about porn star Jenna Jameson's fabulous abode, we weblogger/freelance writer types are totally in the wrong business. I mean -- check out the size of her shoe closet, for chrissakes.
Link (Thanks, Susannah)

I'm no expert on Thai society, but I'm fascinated by the role of transvestites and transsexuals in Thai movies and popular culture. The relative social acceptance of "lady boys" seems to be rooted in part in Buddhist tradition, but modern manifestations owe as much to Holllywood dreams as anything else. For instance: the "Greatest Lady-man Pageant in the World," which took place last Friday in Pattaya, promising lady-men "more beautiful than you have ever seen anywhere before."
Link to Lady-Man Pageant website, Link to Flash-based website for the forthcoming Thai film Beautiful Boxer ("He fights like a man so he can become a woman").

This new scale can detect mass differences of an attogram (10^-18 grams)

"The nanoelectromechanical device used by Craighead and colleagues consists of an oscillating cantilever made from a small wafer of silicon 4 microns long and 500 nm wide. When a small particle is absorbed onto the wafer, it alters the frequency at which the wafer vibrates. The team was able to monitor this change by measuring laser light reflected off the wafer, which then allowed the mass of the particle to be calculated."

Link (Via ZZZ)

"The PC HabiCase allows your gerbil, hamster or mouse to live INSIDE your computer. Ample room is provided for climbing, or your pet can hang out in one of the two "play pods" located at the front and top of the case. Heat from your CPU ensures your rodent will be warm and comfortable in a climate controlled environment." Cost $149. Motherboard not included. It's an April Fool's Joke. Link (Via World of Wonder)

Harisu, a famous transexual pop singer in Korea, will appear in TV commercials for menstrual pads.

"Harisu, who's hit song "Foxy Lady" has made her quite busy lately, will return to Korea on Friday. She is currently in the United States, where she will perform a concert after being selected as the "Korean Artist We'd Most Like to See" by the LA Korean Chamber of Commerce. Harisu, who's hit song "Foxy Lady" has made her quite busy lately, will return to Korea on Friday. She is currently in the United States, where she will perform a concert after being selected as the "Korean Artist We'd Most Like to See" by the LA Korean Chamber of Commerce."

Link (Via World of Wonder)

Here are the Hamsters! A graduate student at Cornell University built a MIDI sequencer controlled by six hamsters:

"The MIDI sequencer intelligently produced melodies by manipulating the musical elements of rhythm and note-choice. Guided by inputs based on hamster movements, Markov chains were used to perform such beat and note computations. In culmination, 3 simultaneous voices were produced spanning 3 octaves and 3 rhythmic tiers. Each voice was controlled by two hamsters: one that was responsible for adjusting the rhythmic qualities of the melody and another that modified the note sequence. With all of these elements in combination, an output was produced with very musical qualities."

Link (Thanks, Nick and Morris!)

Instructions on how to make your very own USB-powered hunk of faux feces. Why anyone would want to, I cannot fathom. Link (Thanks,JL). And when you're done, you can print out this uttery non-worksafe coprophilia coloring book, and frolic away merrily in the land of poo. Link (Thanks, Manuel Wanskasmith, via Susannah)

BoingBoing reader Roland Piquepaille says:

In order to boost its environmental image, Ben & Jerry's teamed with Penn State University to build 'green'-technology freezers which will replace existing ones inside its stores. These new greener chillers use sound waves for cooling instead of environment-damaging chemical refrigerants linked to global warming. In this article, the Wall Street Journal (sorry, paid subscribers only) reports that Ben & Jerry's invested $600,000 in the project and that the first acoustic chiller will be installed in New York next week. And these sound waves will really 'scream for ice cream': they will be attached to amplifiers generating 183 decibels, a sound level thousands of times beyond rock concert levels. This overview contains other details and references about the 'green' chiller.

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Boingboing reader Shelly Rae Clift read yesterday's post on fashionable iMac-like poultry housing and says:

Not only is Chicken Keeping allowed in the fine city of Seattle but you can have up to three (as long as they are hens that is)! (And yes, hens lay eggs just fine without roosters). The City Chickens phenomenon has sparked some creative coop architecture and an annual tour of City Chicken Coops. Now I wonder how I can get an Eglu of my own...?

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