This crafy Flickr user has knitted a series of characters from George Romero's classic Dawn of the Dead, then staged photos of yarn zombies chasing yarn defenders. Brilliant and twisted and BRAINS MORE BRAINS. Link (Thanks, Foist!)

Today on Slashdot, a message board challenge to assemble a catalog of favority math and logic riddles. There are some doozies, too:

There is a king and there are his n prisoners. The king has a dungeon in his castle that is shaped like a circle, and has n cell doors around the perimeter, each leading to a separate, utterly sound proof room. When within the cells, the prisoners have absolutely no means of communicating with each other.

The king sits in his central room and the n prisoners are all locked in their sound proof cells. In the king's central chamber is a table with a single chalice sitting atop it. Now, the king opens up a door to one of the prisoners' rooms and lets him into the room, but always only one prisoner at a time! So he lets in just one of the prisoners, any one he chooses, and then asks him a question, "Since I first locked you and the other prisoners into your rooms, have all of you been in this room yet?" The prisoner only has two possible answers. "Yes," or, "I'm not sure." If any prisoner answers "yes" but is wrong, they all will be beheaded. If a prisoner answers "yes," however, and is correct, all prisoners are granted full pardons and freed. After being asked that question and answering, the prisoner is then given an opportunity to turn the chalice upside down or right side up. If when he enters the room it is right side up, he can choose to leave it right side up or to turn it upside down, it's his choice. The same thing goes for if it is upside down when he enters the room. He can either choose to turn it upright or to leave it upside down. After the prisoner manipulates the chalice (or not, by his choice), he is sent back to his own cell and securely locked in.

The king will call the prisoners in any order he pleases, and he can call and recall each prisoner as many times as he wants, as many times in a row as he wants. The only rule the king has to obey is that eventually he has to call every prisoner in an arbitrary number of times. So maybe he will call the first prisoner in a million times before ever calling in the second prisoner twice, we just don't know. But eventually we may be certain that each prisoner will be called in ten times, or twenty times, or any number you choose.

Here's one last monkey wrench to toss in the gears, though. The king is allowed to manipulate the cup himself, k times, out of the view of any of the prisoners. That means the king may turn an upright cup upside down or vice versa up to k times, as he chooses, without the prisoners knowing about it. This does not mean the king must manipulate the cup any number of times at all, only that he may.

Link

I was completely charmed by this collection of Yiddish postcards from the early 20th century, retreived and scanned from the poster's grandfather's collection:

This web site is devoted to the postcards my grandfather collected from approximately 1906-1918. The collection is comprised of 435 postcards, most of which were produced in Russia, Poland and Germany. My maternal grandfather, Benjamin Swartzberg, lived from 1890 to 1985. For the past five years I have simultaneously been researching the history and origins of my grandfather’s postcard collection as well as the genealogical history of my grandfather’s family. Both aspects of my research have resulted in discoveries about my grandfather and his family which have been immensely gratifying. What follows is an account of my exploration into my grandfather’s life as seen through his postcards and his family history. You will find 36 images of Benny’s postcards here on this web page.

Link (Thanks, Carson!)

Today on the Worth1000 photoshopping contest: mix robots into classical paintings. Terminator at the Last Supper! Link

Jim sez, "WFMU's 'Beware of the Blog' has an entry up about JibJab's hypocrisy: although they, with help from the EFF, took shelter in the First Ammendment to defend themselves from a suit over their use of 'This Land is Your Land', they're now doing the exact same thing to a website that uses 9 non-contiguous seconds of their work in another project. I guess things are different when you can afford lawyers." Link (Thanks, Jim!)

David sez, "They'll fry anything -- a vendor at the N.C. State Fair (happening now in Raleigh, NC) is selling fried strawberries, fried pina colada strips and fried banana puddin' bites, among other things." Link (Thanks, David!)

Wal-Mart called the police on a high-school student who brought in a pic of a homemade anti-George Bush poster for photo-finishing. The Secret Service went to the kid's high-school and confiscated the poster.

Jarvis had assigned her senior civics and economics class "to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights," she says. One student "had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb's-down sign with his own hand next to the President's picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster..."

An employee in that Wal-Mart photo department called the Kitty Hawk police on the student. And the Kitty Hawk police turned the matter over to the Secret Service. On Tuesday, September 20, the Secret Service came to Currituck High.

"At 1:35, the student came to me and told me that the Secret Service had taken his poster," Jarvis says. "I didn't believe him at first. But they had come into my room when I wasn't there and had taken his poster, which was in a stack with all the others."

Link

This Livejournaller connected an oscillating fan to his PS2's joystick in order to have repeat the same movements over and over again without intervention, enabling him to collection one million roses in the video game We Love Katamari Damacy.

We Love Katamari Damacy is the sequel to the magnificent Katamari Damacy in which you play a little cosmic prince charged with rolling around a magnetic ball that picks up household objects (thumbtacks, candies, mice) growing larger and larger until you begin to roll over and pick up entire cities, mountains and clouds. Playing the Katamari games is totally, utterly hypnotic, like playing Tetris was when it first emerged. And like Tetris, Katamari games make you start viewing the world in terms of what you can likely roll up.

Getting one million roses in We Love Katamari Damacy apparently unlocks a screen where the King of All Cosmos congratulates you warmly for your astonishing dedication. The photos of the gamer's screen reveals the text of this message.

On Friday night I hooked up a PS2 controller to a sturdy wooden chair with some string so it is immobile. I then taped the left analog stick in the forward direction. Then I put an oscillating fan in front of the controller-chair setup. To the fan, I attached a string with a loop on the end of it. I put this loop around the other analog controller so that when the fan oscillates, it pulls the stick in different directions.

The purpose of this setup is to collect one million roses in We Love Katamari.

Yes, I said one million. Doing this without assistance would be so ridiculously time consuming. It's not even vital to winning the game, but you get fun little things in the game for doing it.

Link (Thanks, Batty!)

Update: Patti accomplished the same thing with two rubber bands!

Candy Addict sez, "Five weeks ago, Jonathan Coulton (mentioned previously here started a 'Thing A Week' project where he released a new recording each week. This week is his best yet - a cover of Sir Mix-a-lot's Baby Got Back. Hearing a soulful folkie crooning about his 'home boys' and how he 'likes big butts and cannot lie' is absolutely hilarious.  All of his songs are released under a Creative Commons license." Link (Thanks, Candy Addict!)

This Flickr group is for people who create striking abstract photos by setting their cameras for long exposures and then tossing them in the air. Link (Thanks, Joseph!)

Mologogo is a free GPS friend-tracking service that works on Nextel phones with Java and GPS, including a $60 Boost Mobile pre-paid handset. Over at the MAKE: Blog, Phil Torronne took Mologogo for a walk. From his post:

The phone will transmit your position to server (Uses Rails, Linux, Google Maps) and you/your friends can view where you are at in real time. I've hacked up tons of solutions to do the same thing, and this is simplest and cheapest (pretty much free if you have the phone, or $60 if you go pre-paid + 0.20 / day).

Link to MAKE: Blog, Link to Mologogo

The Buddhist monks in the separatist south of Thailand are facing increasing violence from guerrilla fighters. In response, a local armorer named Major Songphon Eiamboonyarith, who is called "Thailand's Q" has developed bulletproof "monkmobiles" and saffron-tinted bullet-proof vests. His other achievements include "umbrellas that shoot rubber bullets, bullet-proof baseball caps and a hand-held device to fire a man-sized net 30 feet (10 m) to stop a villain in his tracks." Link (via We Make Money Not Art)

Mark Forman is the podcaster who's been serializing my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom read aloud, one chapter at a time, with backing from great, Creative Commons-licensed music. Today he concluded the reading with chapters nine and ten in one installment. Now he's embarked upon his next project, reading Lessig's magnificent Free Culture. Link to Podcast feed, Link to final installment of Down and Out (Thanks, Mark!)

This mug bears the text of the Bill of Rights. When you fill it with hot liquid, the text slowly vanishes, simulating the effect of the Bush presidency. Link Cheaper link (Thanks, Kyle!)

Update: Mike sez, "I've got one of these mugs and people need to know that they're NOT dishwasher or even hot water safe! Sort of like the parchment of the first ten amendments to our constitution - It garbles up and becomes a worthless jumble of letters when not taken good care of! Cooler heads (and water) are the only way to protect either."

A photog is selling prints of his pix from the Kostnice Ossuary, a church in the Czech Republic where the bones of 40,000 dead parishoners were dug up and used to line the walls. I've seen this in Portugal, Spain and Italy, too -- it's just amazing and goth as all get out and eyeliner. Chandeliers made of bones, walls lined with skulls and femurs, wow wow wow. Link (Thanks, Miss Cellania!)

Update: Here's a panorama of the place, thanks to Adrian.

Update 2: Frantisek sez, "'Kostnice' is Czech word for 'Ossuary'. When you wrote 'Kostnice Ossuary', you basically wrote 'Ossuary Ossuary'. The name of the town is 'Sedlec'. There are other ossuaries in the Czech Republic, the Sedlec one being the most famous (several Hollywood movies were shot here, including Dungeons & Dragons and Van Helsing)."

This entry into a teen-furniture design-competition is called MyRoom, and consists of an inflatable private room with air matress and cubbies for storing MP3 players, magazines and other small personal effects. I would have killed for one of these at 17. Link (via Crib Candy)

Jim says: "Here's a slideshow made from a set of sequential digital photos taken of a large motorcycle pileup as it happened along a freeway somewhere in a Russian city. Paul Bissex converted the original photos to a slideshow and posted them on neobike.net.

"The original directory with the photos is at Link"

This cute kitty in Dobson, North Carolina was born with two tongues and five toes on each paw. The cat's name is Five Toes. From Local6.com:

Owner Bill Whittington told a North Carolina TV station that he noticed the cat's second tongue in December. He said he yelled when he saw the tongues flicker...

Whittington said Ripley's Believe It Or Not will feature Five Toes in its 2006 guide.

Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne Rauback!)

My story Truncat (a sequel to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom) has been translated into German by Magnus Wurzer. The translation is called Schnipsel and it's licensed under a Creative Commons license. Link (Thanks, Magnus!)

My friend Tim Wu is a legal/regulatory scholar who writes amazing, lucid papers that frame debates about hard regulatory questions in ways that totally blow my mind (and clarify my thinking). His Copyright's Communications Policy changed the way I think about copyright forever.

Now Tim's breaking fresh ground with a paper on broadband regulation that once again has opened my eyes to a whole new way of understanding the debate:

In the communications world some technologies attract what you might call a high chatter to deployment ratio. That means the volume of talk about the technology exceeds, by an absurd ratio, the actual number of deployments. ''Videophones'' are a great historical example, as is ''Video-on-Demand'' and, of course, the glacial sixth version of the Internet protocol (IPv6). In the 1990s, the technology named Voice over IP (VoIP) was a starring member of this suspect class. The technology promises carriage of voice signals using Internet technology, an attractive idea, and in the 1990s and the early 2000s it was discussed endlessly despite minimal deployment.

The discussion usually centered on the question: when would broadband carriers deploy VoIP? And the answer was always, ''not quite yet.'' There were reasons. Many within the industry argued that VoIP was not a viable technology without substantial network improvements. Engineers said that the Internet Protocol was too inconsistent to guarantee voice service of a quality that any customer would buy. Industry regulatory strategists, meanwhile, were concerned that offering voice service would attract federal regulation like honey attracts bees. As for the Bell companies, the main Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) providers, there was always the problem of providing a service that might cannibalize the industry's most profitable service.

Link (via A Copyfighter's Musings)

Jack Thompson is a wacko anti-video-game campaigner (so crazy that even the anti-gamers at the National Institute on Media and the Family have told him to stop citing their materials in his credibility-destroying rants). He has offered to donate $10,000 to charity if a video-game company will make a game based on an idea of his to illustrate how bad violent games are for you:

I'll write a check for $10,000 to the favorite charity of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc's chairman, Paul Eibeler - a man Bernard Goldberg ranks as #43 in his book 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America - if any video game company will create, manufacture, distribute, and sell a video game in 2006 like the following:

Osaki Kim is the father of a high school boy beaten to death with a baseball bat by a 14-year-old gamer. The killer obsessively played a violent video game in which one of the favored ways of killing is with a bat. The opening scene, before the interactive game play begins, is the Los Angeles courtroom in which the killer is sentenced "only" to life in prison after the judge and the jury have heard experts explain the connection between the game and the murder.

Osaki Kim (O.K.) exits the courtroom swearing revenge upon the video game industry whom he is convinced contributed to his son's murder. "Vengeance is mine, I will repay" he says. And boy, is O.K. not kidding.

O.K. is provided in his virtual reality playpen a panoply of weapons: machetes, Uzis, revolvers, shotguns, sniper rifles, Molotov cocktails, you name it. Even baseball bats. Especially baseball bats.

Link (Thanks, Stanley and Eric!)

David of Eatbrains.com says,

There is so much fucking zombie action tommorow, October 15, I don't even know what to do. Seattle, Minneapolis, Philly, Calgary. And then there's NYC next weekend.

See also the Graveyard Games, taking place in San Francisco tomorrow, Saturday October 15.

Previously:

Things to do in SF when you're dead: Zombie Flashmob

Hundreds of "zombies" mob posh Vancouver mall

Donna Wentworth from Copyfight says, "Annalee Newitz has a column filled with righteous ranting about the latest nastiness that Blizzard Games is perpetrating via its EULAs: spying on gamers' computers. You'll recall that Blizzard is the company that sued three open source programmers for creating software that let gamers play with others on the platform of their choice." Excerpt:

According to the World of Warcraft terms of service, when you install the latest version of the game, an anticheat program called Warden snoops through your entire computer looking for "unauthorized third-party programs" that allow users to "hack" or "modify" the online game environment or "cheating of any kind." Warden then "communicates the information" it finds back to Blizzard. This "communication" process is described in alarmingly capacious terms that make it clear Blizzard has the option of examining your PC's hard drive anytime it wants. [...]

Breaking the rules isn't nice, but this is a game, people -- a game! It's not a matter of national security; nobody is going to get killed except the stupid video game avatars. Do you realize the government would have to have a warrant to get the kind of information Blizzard claims it has the right to suck out of your computer to stop cheaters? Doesn't that seem a wee bit wrong?

Link

The Daily Set without Jon Stewart Spokesfan Hal Bringman sends out an SOS to Boing Boing readers in or near New York City...

Save our set! Producers of Mouth of America Network, which recently announced "The Daily Set without Jon Stewart" tour and subsequent webcasts and podcasts arrived in New York today to take delivery of the set and begin the tour.

Blame it on new math or the declining education system in America, but the measurements of the set as told to us by TDS were dramatically undermeasured and the set does not fit on the truck.

We need your help! The set pieces are at least 12 x 12 x 3 and weigh no less than 500 pounds. We need a vehicle that could allow the set to be toured, as planned.

Email us at producers@thedailyset.com if you can help. Thanks!

Hal's SOS does read like another layer of recursive irony on an already wacky project, but this is no publicity stunt. The daggone thing really is too big for the vehicle they rented. Sounds like they had fun hijinks planned, let's hope they can still pull 'em off.

Previously:
The Daily Set, Sans Jon Stewart

Defensetech's Dan Dupont says,

Back in college I had a Soviet studies professor whose office was decorated with lurid, humorless security posters from the U.S.S.R. I thought they were artifacts peculiar to repressive, secrecy-obsessed regimes -- until I started covering the Pentagon.

On bulletin boards, doors and office walls throughout the building, my colleagues and I would find dozens of security posters and signs of varying quality and message – some of them just as spooky as those Soviet posters in my professor’s office (and some still focused on the Soviets, for that matter). My favorite, which one of my co-workers was kind enough to swipe for me, was a warning to government officials about to travel abroad. “Get your travel threat briefing before departing,” it screamed, the words surrounded by hideous, bloody drawings of what might happen to if you weren't careful – hostage situations, attacks in café’s, etc.

Link to the best and worst of US military security-awareness posters. There's a whole lotta WTF up in here!

Also on DefenseTech today: this weird robo-mule with a leg-wheel hybrid. Link. (thanks, Noah Shachtman)

Simon Shea built a large bookcase that hides secret doors. The best part is the mechanism for opening the door. Just reach for the old Sherlock Holmes volume.
Link (via MAKE: Blog)

Boing Boing pal Jason Schultz says, "I'm not surprised about banning chat rooms where people talk about adult sex with kids, but banning all kids from all chat rooms? That's crazy. I remember in the late 90's all these great stories about gay teens in the midwest who found community in online chat rooms and felt less depressed and it lowered their suicide rate significantly."

Snip from San Jose Mercury News story:

Yahoo Inc. said Wednesday it will bar chat rooms that promote sex between minors and adults and restrict all chat rooms to users 18 and older. The changes come under an agreement with New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning.

"This is about protecting kids," Bruning said.

Link

Synthetic biologists have genetically engineered E.coli to produce resilin, the rubbery protein that enables fleas to jump and insect wings to flex. The researchers from CSIRO Livestock Industries in Australia inserted part of the resilin gene from a fruitfly into the bacteria. From News@Nature:

(Biochemist Chris) Elvin says that the team is dreaming up a range of applications for the material. At the moment the group is focusing its attention on using the stuff to make replacements for spinal discs, the spongy material that lies between bones in the spine.

The resilin molecules in a fruitfly's wings might have to stretch about 500 million times during its life, says Elvin, and a human may flex their back a similar number of times. Using a material that can withstand a lifetime's punishment could significantly improve existing artificial spinal discs, which are made of metal and polythene....

The team is studying how the material behaves inside living lab animals to find out whether it could be used in such implants.

The group is also trying to add a gene that makes spider silk to the modified E. coli, so that the rubber it produces is stronger than resilin itself while being just as stretchy. "People have been trying to do similar things with spider silk for a while," says Lakes, "and I think this approach could bear fruit."

Link

Boing Boing reader Mike Ransom says,

My dad became a frequenter of thrift stores after retirement. During my weekly visits, I was accustomed to discovering a new atrocity, destined for speedy banishment by my mom.

One time my dad said, "I've got a painting to show you." I braced for some typical piece of kitsch, like the outhouse sketch he managed to keep in the front room for a couple of weeks before it was forcibly retired to his office.

It seems my mental preparation wasn't adequate. The large, framed print he trotted out crashed through the floor of my expectations in its grandiosity. I started to chuckle, then laugh, then helplessly slid off the couch and convulsed on the floor for awhile.It would have been a surreal scene from an outsider's perspective; my parents didn't react that much to my fit, though I think my brother was amused at my reaction.

This masterpiece depicts the rapture occurring from a perspective just outside Dallas. Some of the fascinating details: an airliner crashes into a building (ghosts of the passengers wafting heavenward), a pile-up on the freeway (ghosts again liberated), a graveyard releases another wave, etc. Don't miss the glowing linebacker Jesus placed dead center in the picture.

Link to full-size image.

Previously: Awesomely weird Jehovah's Witness art

Or mommy. They don't care. They're robots. Organizers of the Combots event are holding an eBay auction for sponsorship dibs on future fightfests. Link

For today's edition of the National Public Radio program "Day to Day," I filed a report on international efforts to move central control of the Internet from the United States-based nonprofit group ICANN to an international system that would provide other governments with more direct control. Some critics of the proposed move question whether it would give too much power to countries that don't embrace the idea of open information. Link to online audio for this report, Link to archive of past "Xeni Tech" segments.

Here's a tutorial on making a monster-themed wreath for Halloween.

It's made with fun fur, ping pong balls, a paint pen, stuffing, and lots of hot glue (I didn't feel like sewing)  It's basically just a wreath-shaped pillow with a ribbon on the back to hang it on the door.

Link

The Guardian has an amazing interview with my hero, Brazilian culture minister and jazz legend Gilberto GIl:

And in one small development that none the less sums up the mood, the left-wing administration of President Luiz Inacio da Silva, or "Lula", has announced that all ministries will stop using Microsoft Windows on their office computers. Instead of paying through the nose for Microsoft operating licences, while millions of Brazilians live in poverty, the government will use open-source software, collaboratively designed by programmers worldwide and owned by no one.

"This isn't just my idea, or Brazil's idea," Gil says. "It's the idea of our time. The complexity of our times demands it." He is politician enough to hold back from endorsing the breaking of laws, for example on music downloading, but only just. "The Brazilian government is definitely pro-law," he grins. "But if law doesn't fit reality anymore, law has to be changed. That's not a new thing. That's civilisation as usual." (He is not a hi-tech person himself, he says, but readily concedes that his children have "probably" done a fair bit of illegal downloading.)

Link (Thanks, Robert!)

Here's step-by-step instructions for building a computer-controlled LED tank-top. The model on display is displaying output from the classic Game of Life, in which an ecosystem is modelled and simulated, with the outcomes of mutation and evolution displayed in pixels on a board. Link (Thanks, Chris!)

Update: Martijn sez, "The Game of Life is not actually about mutation. It could be considered to be about evolution, though not darwinian evolution - no natural selection is involved either - just in the sense of having an evolving universe.

"Conway's Life is a simple mathematical universe that allows surprisingly complicated structures to exist and indeed, evolve. In a big enough grid one could, in theory, build a universal computer, so as an environment it's pretty powerful for having such simple rules. Still, it's a simulation more analogous to physics than it is to biology, even though the name would suggest otherwise."

This small gallery of Chinese space program posters (part of a much larger and amazing collection of Chinese propaganda art) is utterly charming. Like Iz Reloaded, I like this image of a little girl in an open-top space coupe with her kitten and puppy space crew, all in bubble-helmets. Link (Thanks, IZ Reloaded!)

The Esse Firewall is a 110mm-deep gas fireplace meant to mount between two drywall studs and sit flush with the surface of the wall. The appearance is of a framed photo on the wall that happens to be ablaze with cheery gas flames. Nice one -- I want framed fire in every room. Link (Thanks, Todd!)

Gaijin Biker sez, "Japanese court enforces newspaper's insane linking policy -- says a website can't use newspaper article HEADLINES as hyperlinks to the articles themselves on the newspaper's own site!" Link (Thanks, Gaijin Biker!)

Jim Munroe says: "The editor of the zine Infiltration (the zine about going places you're not supposed to go) and the guy who coined the term "urban exploration" has self-published a how-to book being launched next week. Like his zine, it's a very well written, funny, and responsible guide to a slightly illicit hobby."
Link

Reader comment: Tom sasy: "Ninjalicious, the guy who wrote Access All Areas, died of cancer on Aug 23rd, just before the book was released. He was also known as Milky, and appeared under that name in Jason Scott's BBS Documentry.  Jason blogged about his death here."

(Click on Thumbnail for enlargement) Last Friday, my PowerBook's hard drive experienced catastrophic failure and I lost everything.

Fortunately, I'd made a backup of my disk the night before using the best backup software for Macs, Super Duper, so I was able to recover everything but that day's changes to my hard drive. I asked people to resend certain emails, including Charles Platt, and he gave me this great tip: set up a rule in Mac's Mail.app to send a copy of every email that goes in and out over to a Gmail account. That way, you'll always have a searchable archive of all the email you send and receive.

I just set up the rule, and it seems to be working. Thanks, Charles!

Make magazine (disclaimer: I'm the editor in chief) has started a new crafting sub-blog. Here first entry -- these adorable knitted robots.
Link

Industrial designer Jan-Henrik Andersen collaborated with particle physics to visualize the hidden world of elementary particle physics. (Seen here, "Higgs Field 3 [Interaction with third generation fermions]," ink on canvas, 42"x56".) From Symmetry Magazine:

"The idea was to transform physical properties into visual properties," Andersen explains. After working extensively with University of Michigan physicists Gordon Kane and David Gerdes, Andersen decided on four rules that would govern his representation of particles:

1. All the forms should be generated by one simple visual element.

2. The particles must have the same basic form, yet reflect differences in mass, parities, functions, and behavior.

3. There must be logical coherence between the particles according to the categorization and decay patterns of the Standard Model. Yet, the model must be open for possible extensions due to supersymmetry, string theory, gravitational forces, and the Higgs field/particle.

4. The particles' spins and directional velocities require a multidirectional visual quality.

Link