New additions to a previously-Boinged online gallery featuring brilliantly modernized versions of old propaganda posters. You can buy the retweaked graphics on sporty messenger bags, t-shirts, coffee cups, and -- well by golly, even a thong or two. Link (Thanks, Squiddo)

Ed Felten's posted a fascinating rumination on the impossibility of excluding bots from online poker games, and what that means for online casinos:

By reiterating their anti-bot and anti-collusion rules, and by claiming to have mysterious enforcement mechanisms, online casinos may be able to stem the tide of cheating for a while. But eventually, bots and collusion will become the norm, and lone human players will be driven out of all but the lowest stakes games.

But there is another strategy. An online casino could encourage bots, and even set up bots-only games. The game would then become not a human vs. human card game but a human vs. human battle between bot designers for geekly mastery. I'll bet there are plenty of programmers out there who would like to give it a try.

Link

Billy Hayes sez: Mark, Thanks for the cool post on the 99 cent cartoons. I bought a whole grip of them this evening. While I was in the store my wife and I walked around looking at all the other stuff. I spoted some tooth tat 2's. I read the package but couldn't bring myself to buy them. I checked out the web site from the back of the pack but it timed out. I did however fid a site that sells the tat's. Crazy Stuff at the 99 cent store. Link

A BB reader sez: "Raymond Chen has kept every single piece of spam and every virus-laden email which he has received, while at Microsoft, since 1997. He has taken the data regarding numbers and file size, and plotted them out on a graph. It makes for an interesting, and informational, read."

Spam went ballistic starting in 2002. You could see it growing in 2001, but 2002 was when it really took off.

Link (via The Spam Weblog)

An ad from the, ah, very right-wing American Conservative Union protesting the INDUCE Act. The ACU calls out Republicans for kowtowing to Hollywood against their principles. Ad ran in the Washington Times, Wall Street Journal and Weekly Standard.
Link (Thanks, Jason!)

Yoda sez: "I was just using Google to spell check the word necessary, you know to make sure I had it right, and the results were interesting! Nearly every result was a worthy read, with Hiroshima leading the pack." Link

Kevin Kelly has compiled a bunch of reviews of documentaries on his Cool Tools site. I want to go out and get every one. He just sent out the latest batch to subscribers to his Cool Tools mailing list, which he hasn't put on his site yet. I'm sure he'll get around to it soon. In the meantime, here's an excerpt from one of his latest reviews (for Colonial House):

The premise is somewhat familiar now. Take a hopelessly modern family and stick them in the past, as authenticated by historians, and make them live with only the tools and resources available centuries ago. In this case, the modern Americans are sent to live in the summer of 1628, on a forested island off of Maine. Their task: build a new world colony that can both survive and pay back its investors in England. ... Cameras record every detail as the pudgy newcomers scrounge for food, learn how to farm Indian corn and build with the most rudimentary tools, all the while wearing appropriate clothes, slowly starving, and assuming appropriate roles such as indentured servants with astounding ease. Who knew how easy devolution was?

(You can subscribe to the Cool Tools mailing list here. It's free, but you have to send him one review for Cool Tools to get on the list!) Link

Russ Meyer, the filmmaking legend responsible for such sexploitation atrocities masterpieces as "The Immoral Mr. Teas", "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!", and "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls", has passed away at age 82. He lived a long life, full of glamour and boobies. All of us should be so lucky. Fleshbot, naturally, has more: Link. Rest in peace, Mr. Meyer.

Some timeless quotes from "Faster, Pussycat!":

(The climatic finale)
Linda: I killed her - like she was an animal! Like she was nothing!
Kirk: She was nothing - nothing human!

(Billie throws Rosie a can of beer to calm her down.)
Bille: Here Rosie baby, pop the top before you blow your own!

Tommie: What's the point?
Varla: It's of no return, and you've reached it!

(thanks also to Caines, Jean-Luc, and others who suggested).

Newsweek's Brian Braiker writes about a newly released collection of work by the groundbreaking comedian Lenny Bruce.

If a comic gets onstage and tells his audience "I am not a comedian," he'd better say something important -- or really damn funny. Lenny Bruce -- the hepcat who took his act from L.A. strip clubs to Carnegie Hall, redefining stand-up in the process -- did both. Now, nearly 40 years after a fatal drug overdose, a dizzyingly complete six-CD collection of his trailblazing routines has been released.

"Lenny Bruce: Let the Buyer Beware" spans his career from his promising first performance in 1948 to the ravings of a haunted, hunted man the day before his death in 1966. The warts-and-all portrait includes hours of previously unreleased material and chronicles Bruce as he tilts against hypocrisy ("Censorship on the Steve Allen Show"), racism ("How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties") and religion ("Religions, Inc.").

Link

Live Steam enthuthiasts are guys who build large working models of steam and diesel trains and then ride them around gigantic layouts in their yards or in parks. This is dorky and irresistably cool. How fun would it be to spend a weekend with these retro-tech adventurers? Let the nerd flag fly high. I love them. They use wireless technology and stay up all night in tag teams to break new records in continuous train ride duration. Rock on, steamer man. Link (Thanks, Paul)

BoingBoing reader Andrew Gray says,

Since you've been covering the commercial zero-G flights of late, you might be interested in John Carmack's comments on his flight yesterday (with various Armadillo & ID people). Only a Usenet post, unfortunately, with a couple of linked pictures; but still interesting (and jealousy-inducing, damnit)

"A couple of us were doing low gravity judo throws, and I took a shot at the worlds first flying armbar in zero gravity (didn't work out too well)." (I dare not imagine...)

Link

Earlier this year, I posted the story of Amy Jenkins, a video artist who had been invited by the Salvatore Ferragamo company to create an artwork inspired by their 5th Avenue store. The store deemed Jenkins's completed artwork "distasteful" and refused to display it because it showed her baby daughter breastfeeding. Amy wanted to show the video somewhere else but it was made for a widescreen display that she couldn't afford to buy. Today though, I received the following email from David Gilman, a Brooklyn-based production manager with experience in sound and video engineering:

"I wanted to let you know that thanks to that post, Amy now has my 60" plasma screen in her studio. And in October, I'll be bringing it up to Boston so she can show her piece at a gallery there.

So, Go Internet!

I also wanted to point you towards Art Answers, a website I started after my initial meeting with Amy. While I can't lend every artist in the world my equipment, I can try to help them get the information they need. My dream is that one day Art Answers will have a storefront with reference libraries, on-staff experts, and a tool lending library. In the meantime, people can email or call with their art creation questions, and I'll try to get them answers."

Go David! Link

Chuck sez, "I thought I'd let you know about a little quicktime I just posted fast-forwarding through the history of blogs. It starts in 1999, spins around and flies back to 1660 and 1776, kareens through the 20th century and lands back in current blog-time." Link

A new research report shows that wood is one of the greener materials that can be used to build homes. According to the report, prepared by the Consortium for Research on Renewable Industrial Materials, the environmental impact of fabricating building materials and actually constructing a home is more intense than most people realize. And while the industry has slowly moved away from wood, the use of dead trees may actually be better (well, less bad) than other products and techniques. From a press release about the report:

The research showed that wood framing used 17 percent less energy than steel construction for a typical house built in Minnesota, and 16 percent less energy than a house using concrete construction in Atlanta. And in these two examples, the use of wood had 26-31 percent less global warming potential...The growth of wood in renewable forests works to "sequester" and remove carbon from the atmosphere, and fewer carbon emissions are created in the processing needed to produce wood products than their steel and concrete counterparts.

Link

Robin sez, "The autumnal equinox marks the middle of the Semaine québécoise de l'informatique libre, something like the Québec Free Software/IT Week. The web site has the full program, > 25 events in at least 6 cities all accross Québec between September 18th and 26th." Link (Thanks, Robin!)

Thirty years ago, the Russian military allegedly developed plans to build a base on the Moon. According to MosNews, the Novaya Gazeta weekly got the story from the project-deputy general designer of the General Machine Building Design Bureau (KBOM) who was directly involved in the project.

"Soviet scientists considered the Moon to be a very good place for a strategic headquarters as nuclear strikes on its surface would lose most of their destructive force. As the moon has no atmosphere, no shockwave could spread there and the radioactive dust would immediately fall out back on the surface without an atmosphere to carry it.

The designer also said that the USA had also developed a lunar base project and the Soviet scientists had been aware of these plans."

The source, Aleksandr Yegorov, said the Soviet plan was scrapped because... (surprise!) it was too damn expensive. Link (to the MosNews article) Link (to a history of Russian lunar base programs)

In this month's issue of my research digest ScienceMatters@Berkeley...

* Flipping the Switch on Cancer: Improving the effectiveness of Cancer drugs one molecule at a time.
* Think Molecularly, Act Globally: Studying the atmosphere from a converted spy plane.
* Quantum Computing's Magnetic Attraction: A new spin on magnetic atoms.
* The secret history of Vitamin B-12

Link

These guys are selling picture postcards of STOP BUSH graffiti around New York, and donating the funds to the Democratic party. Link (Thanks, Eric!)