BoingBoing reader Robert Daeley says, "Came across this picture on the wall just behind a copy machine. All the hackers I know wear ski masks when they commit their crimes. Oh, and big thick leather gloves are great for typing."

Link to blog post with pointer to full size image. Mwuhuhahahahaaaaaaa.

Max Mitchell sez: Tim is a guy I know. He was helping some guy with his website. The guy owes him £400, so Tim stopped helping him.

This is a cellphone message left by the guy where he starts ranting and raving. Swearing and telling Tim he's going to go crazy if Tim doesn't call.

A minor version of Winnebago man. Nice bit of swearing with a London accent. Link (NSFW unless you are wearing headphones.)

This Halloween mask of entertainer Michael Jackson is pretty creepy. Link

raul gutierrez sez: "When hanging around Beijing, one can't help but be impressed by the staggering number of recently built architectural monstrosities. Now there's a site that collects them all in one place."

(I'd take the three kings building over a Gehry "crushed beer can" any day.) Link

Glenn Fleishman sez: As befits a new dad who loves technology, I've made a small movie (with my wife as videographer) of two quick ways to swaddle a baby: using regular receiving blankets and with a special garment called the Miracle Blanket. Swaddling is supposed to help babies be calmer when they're upset and to sleep better. And, holy cats, it worked for us. When I got a good swaddle going and added some hairdryer noise (recorded and burned to CD), my wife and I started sleeping at night quite a bit, only two weeks into his young life. Link (and when baby gets a few months older, I recommend that they ferberize him.)

This looks like an interesting problem. Lloyd Borrett writes:

Take up the challenge of "Petals Around the Rose". Also read what happened when Bill Gates was introduced to Petals Around the Rose in June 1977. How he tackled this brain teaser is an interesting insight into the man at the helm of Microsoft.

Link

I'm waiting to get my copy of "The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora," a new book coming out from Fantagraphics. Flora was a record album cover illustrator in the 1940s and 1950s. I discovered him about 15 years ago when I bought a Benny Goodman record with a Flora cover at a garage sale for $1. Finding this illustration reconfigured my brain.

Here's a good description of Flora's style (from the back cover of the book):

Vintage music buffs have long been bedazzled by bizarre, cartoonish album covers tagged with the signature "Flora." In the 1940s and '50s, James (Jim) Flora designed dozens of diabolic cover illustrations, many for Columbia and RCA Victor jazz artists. His designs pulsed with angular hepcats bearing funnel-tapered noses and shark-fin chins, who fingered cockeyed pianos and honked lollipop-hued horns. In the background, geometric doo-dads floated willy-nilly like a kindergarten toy room gone anti-gravitational. He wreaked havoc with the laws of physics, conjuring up flying musicians, levitating instruments, and wobbly dimensional perspectives. Yet Flora's wondrous, childlike exuberance was subverted by a sinister tinge of the grotesque. As Flora confessed in a 1998 interview, "I got away with murder, didn't I?"

There's a nice Flora art gallery online, which is maintained by Irwin Chusid, who compiled the book for Fantagraphics.

Fantagraphics also published a book by one of my other main influences, Gene Deitch, called The Cat on a Hot Thin Groove. He did the covers for a jazz fanzine in the 1940s, called The Record Changer. In the '60s, Deitch was the art director for UPA, the cartoon studio that produced Gerald McBoingBoing. ABout 10 years ago I had the pleasure of visiting Deitch in his San Francisco home (He lives most of the year in Prague). He drew a great picture of his jazz character, The Cat, for me and presented it to me. I interviewed him for the print edition of bOING bOING, but I never got around to transcribing the tape. I hope I still have it.

One of my other big influences, Disney Artist Mary Blair, got her own book this year too! (Illustrator Bob Staake has a couple of pages with Blair's art.)

Now, all I need to round out my library of illustrator-gods are books about the work of Tom Oreb and Ed Benedict.

Following up on last week's series of Zero-G posts on BoingBoing, Matt Fraction says:

My favorite Buzz thing-- aside from the time he busted that guy in the chops for asking him if the moon landings were fake-- was when Letterman was sending him out and about in the world for a while. He went to the daytime emmys in his astronaut suit and did red carpet interviews.

Which would go like this:

Buzz: Hi there! Who are you?
Soap Star: I'm Mr. Soap Star, and I'm nominated for best hooha in a thingy.
Buzz: That's great. I walked on the moon.
(very awkward silence)

Image: Floating in lunar gravity with Dr. Buzz Aldrin, on the Sep. 15, 2004 debut of Zero Gravity Corp.'s parabolic flight service. Before this moment, the last time Dr. Aldrin had experienced lunar gravity was when he walked on the moon with Neil Armstrong on July 20,1969. Image: Jim Campbell. And if any BoingBoing have pointers to online archived footage of Dr. Aldrin's moment of Emmy zen, do tell.

BoingBoing reader D says, "Have an old computer case? Or, perhaps you're doing a casemod for your computer, so you don't need your old case. Enter, The Reverse Mod; turn your old computer case into a bookshelf!" Link

In the new issue of Popular Science, Jessican Snyder Sachs has an interesting and well-written article about virtual autopsies as a permanent record for pathologists. Michael Thali and the Virtopsy research team at the University of Bern, Switzerland use computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to create full-body scans of murder victims.

Besides being a bloodless approach to an otherwise messy job, the digitally preserved bodies of the Virtopsy Project have the added benefit of permanency. “Murder victims have the unfortunate habit of decomposing,” Thali notes.

Link

Margo Jefferson, the NYT's Pulitzer-winning culture critic, has launched a new occasional column dedicated to "avant-garde" art. (I've always loved that term and I'm happy people are bringing it back into fashion.) Jefferson's introductory column is insightful, smart, and, most importantly, she doesn't take herself too seriously. I look forward to the next installment!

When you hear the phrase avant-garde 1)You flip through your intellectual file folder looking for examples (Dada, 12-tone music, modern dance, underground films, the Beats, theater of the absurd, electronic music).

2) You experience a certain dread. (You ask yourself if you are the only one in the gallery not getting the artist's joke, or worry that you can't finish that book said to challenge narrative conventions so boldly.)

3)You rage, "Where's the vision today, the energy?" You think back longingly. Paris, 1913: Diaghilev's Ballets Russes hurl Stravinksy's "Rite of Spring" at a shocked public. New York in the 1940's: Bird, Diz and Monk lead the charge for the music that would be known as bop. The 1960's and 70's: lofts, galleries, parks and churches shelter free jazz, new music and every kind of performance. What does it take to bring artists together to make brave new works?

I've felt each, and I'm about to start writing about the avant-garde in occasional essays and pieces of criticism. Which brings up another question: If an avant-garde is written about in a major newspaper like this one, doesn't that prove that it has moved to the culture's prosperous Midtown?

Link

My friend Stella just turned me on to Aya Takano, another one of the young Japanese illustrators in Takashi Murakami's Kaikai Kiki artist collective. I've never been a big anime fan, but this post-manga style that Murakami dubbed "superflat" a few years ago continues to really grab me. Link (to Takano's bio) Link (to a Flash animation work) Link (to Takano's monograph Hot Banana Fudge)

Scientists have set a new record in atomic resolution imaging. In the journal Science, researchers from Oak Ridge National Laboratory reported using a scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) to create this direct image of a silicon crystal with .6 angstrom resolution. (An angstrom is one ten-billionth of a meter, the approximate diameter of a single atom.) ORNL researcher Stephen Pennycook:

"It's always better to see what's what. For the materials, chemical and nano sciences, you want to see what is going on at the atomic scale--how atoms bond and how things work."

Link

The free/open Wikipedia encyclopedia project just posted its 1,000,000th article.

The Wikimedia Foundation announced today the creation of the one millionth article in Wikipedia, its project to create a free, open-content, online encyclopedia (Wikipedia.org (http://en.wikipedia.org)). Started in January 2001, Wikipedia is currently both the world's largest encyclopedia and its fastest-growing, with articles under active development in over 100 languages. Nearly 2,500 new articles are added to Wikipedia each day, along with ten times that number of updates to existing articles.

Link (via Joi Ito)