The only piece of art on the moon (depending, we suppose, on one’s definition of art) is a 3"-tall aluminum sculpture titled "Fallen Astronaut." It was created by Belgian artist Paul Van Hoeydonck and installed by Apollo 15 astronaut David Scott, along with a plaque bearing the names of the 14 astronauts and cosmonauts who died in the service of space exploration.

In 1972, against the crew and NASA's wishes, Van Hoeydonck created 950 signed replicas of "Fallen Astronaut" and sold them for $750 a piece.

Reader comment: Liz Coster says:

This isn’t a panda, but a Yamanba lady! From wikipedia:

Yamanba (ヤマンバ?) sometimes written as "yamamba", is a fashion trend among Japanese young women. Starting with the bleached white hair and heavy tan of the ganguro girl, the yamanba adds white lipstick, white eye makeup, and sometimes brightly colored contacts, plastic clothing, and inappropriate accessories. Some yamanba wear stuffed animals as decorations, talk with a slurred speech, and enjoy shiny neon or dayglo colors. Some say that the result is a caricature of a blond Caucasian woman. The male equivalents are called "Center Guys".

The term yamanba comes from a mountain hag, known as Yama-uba, whom the fashion is thought to resemble.

In order to accomplish this, Microsoft has implemented many characteristics of the original Palladium model (now known as NGSCB) that has received a significant amount of criticism over the past several years.

While this is a noble effort, these new security technologies have a serious side effect. This side effect is that nobody, with the exception of Microsoft, can make changes to certain components of the Windows kernel. The PatchGuard functionality restricts any software that may be attempting to make extensions to the Vista kernel (even those attempting to do so for legitimate reasons). This includes techniques that are commonplace today such as system service dispatch table (SSDT) hooking and interrupt dispatch table (IDT) hooking to name a few.

Another disturbing side effect of this technology is that while legitimate security vendors can no longer make extensions to the Vista kernel (any attempt to circumvent these security features may only work temporarily), researchers and attackers can, and have, already found ways to disable and work around PatchGuard.

As a result of constant, semi-religious immersion in the works of J. G. Ballard and the early acquisition of a pilot's license, I have been fascinated, nay, obsessed with plane crashes for many years. Iowa hotelier/pilot Jay Honeck has built one of the freshest and best plane crash video repositories on the Web. Pilots worldwide vie to send him unusual and awful aviation accident vids.

Some people -- like the notorious Crashman and his Crash Groupies -- now take this questionable obsession to the next level and make music vids out of the oddly hypnotic crashes. Examples: YOU'RE GONNA MISS ME and HEAD OVER HEELS.

So CNN is reporting: "Because the plot involved taking liquid explosives aboard planes in carry-ons, passengers at all U.S. and British airports, and those boarding U.S.-bound flights at other international airports, are banned from taking any liquids onto planes."

And then they have the photo of the TSA guy dumping a tub of confiscated possibly explosive liquids into a garbage can in a crowd of people.

Figure that shit out for me.

Reader comments:

Gabe says

And check out this article from Asheville, NC. "Maya Leoni, who is held by Angela Perez, cries as her mother, A.J. Leoni, pours the last of her drink into the receptacle while in line for the security checkpoint at the Asheville Regional Airport."

POUR IT INTO A RECEPTACLE? Don't you think that some of these potentially explosive liquids might be more dangerous when, I don't know, mixed in a big vat in the middle of an airport?

Christ, why don't they just have people put their liquids into a big bonfire?

Drawing on [...] case studies, other research, and comments made by a cross-section of scholars, lawyers, librarians, and educators who participated in two day-long workshops organized as part of the project, the following emerged as the most significant copyright-related obstacles to educational uses of copyrighted material:

* Unclear or inadequate copyright law relating to crucial provisions such as fair use and educational use;

* Extensive adoption of "digital rights management" technology to lock up content;

* Practical difficulties obtaining rights to use content when licenses are necessary;

* Undue caution by gatekeepers such as publishers or educational administrators.

Update: Robotech Master sends in a link to a page about Dyar's tunneling habit:

During the 1920s Dyar's most peculiar hobby came to light. When a truck fell into a labyrinth of tunnels near Dyar's old home in 1924, newspaper speculation attributed these to World War I spy nests, Civil War trysts, and mad scientists. Eventually Dyar accepted responsibility for the tunnels and similar works behind his new home, saying he found relaxation in digging underground. The brick-walled tunnels extended for hundreds of feet and measured six by six feet.

Update 2: Charlie sends a pointer to "Baldasare Forestiere's incredible monument to industry and unrequited love near Fresno. It's got live trees bearing seven kinds of fruit with just their tops sticking out of the ground (providing natural air conditioning through leaf aspiration), a ball room, a glass-bottomed underground swimming pool, and numerous other marvels all built and excavated by a single man (derisively called the 'Mole Man' by locals) using simple hand tools between 1908 and 1946."

Update 3: Roninspoon sez, "I remembered a History Channel show I'd seen a few years ago called Secret Passages of the Cold War. One of the structures is featured was the home of Kenley Snyder. A business professor at Trinity Western University, he spent most of his free time for most of 30 years building a very elaborate, large, and professional quality bomb shelter under his home. He did all the digging and construction by himself and by hand. Apparently the house is now for sale."

Within the third of the ten files of user search queries AOL mistakenly released (user-ct-test-collection-03), there's a poem of sorts. Between May 7 and May 31 of this year, AOL user 23187425 submitted a series of more than 8,200 queries with no evident intention of finding anything - only a handful of the entries are paired with a search results URL. Rather, the author's series of queries forms a stream-of-consciousness soliloquy.

Whether it's fact or fiction, confession or invention, the search monologue is strangely compelling. It's a uniquely temporal literary form in that the server time stamps make the passage of time integral to the storytelling. It could be the beginning of a new genre of writing, or simply an aberation. But it does beg further explanation. What circumstances prompted the author to converse thus with AOL's search engine?

you come forward 2006-05-07 03:05:19

start to stay off 2006-05-07 03:06:04

i have had trouble 2006-05-07 03:06:41

time to move on 2006-05-07 03:07:16

all over with 2006-05-07 03:07:59

joe stop that 2006-05-07 03:08:36

i can move on 2006-05-07 03:09:32

give you my time in person 2006-05-07 03:10:07

never find a gain 2006-05-07 03:10:47

i want change 2006-05-07 03:11:15

know who iam 2006-05-07 03:11:55

curse have been broken 2006-05-07 03:12:30

told shawn lawn mow burn up 2006-05-07 03:13:50

burn up 2006-05-07 03:14:14

was his i deal 2006-05-07 03:15:13

i would have told him 2006-05-07 03:15:46

to kill him too 2006-05-07 03:16:18

It's doubtful user 23187425 ever intended these queries for publication. But AOL's decision to make the data available, despite subsequently removing the files, seems to render the issue of privacy moot. The files remain available online at sites like dontdelete.com. Having looked over the entries and found nothing really damning or invasive, I feel comfortable republishing this one user's queries.

I made two alterations to the list of user 23187425's queries to improve legibility: I added 10 spaces between the search term(s) and the time stamp, and I added blank lines to separate the queries by day. Let me know what you think.

CNN: "Terrorists planned to use MP3 players and energy drinks to blow up as many as 10 jetliners bound for the United States, authorities said Thursday. A senior congressional source said it's believed the plotters planned to mix a 'British version of Gatorade' with a gel-like substance to make an explosive that they would possibly trigger with an MP3 player or cell phone." Link
Previously:

Who the fuck brought this motherfucking beverage onto this motherfucking plane?

First, you have to create a new gamer profile and make it an Xbox Live "Silver" membership. It's free to create that new profile since the "Silver" membership is free, but there is a heck of a lot of data entry for contact information, not to mention the fact you need to give it an email address and password so it can sign on - just like a real profile. The representatives on the phone will tell you it doesn't matter what email address you give it, but from experience I know they send account notices and such to that email address, so it should probably be legitimate. Of course, that means if you don't have your own domain and/or can't figure out how to set up email address forwarding then you'll need to create a new, dummy Hotmail account or something. Super convenient.

Once you have the dummy gamer profile set up, Microsoft will credit that account with enough credits to go in and re-purchase all of the games you previously had unlocked. Getting that credit to come through takes eight-to-ten business days.

Inside the Gyuto Ramoche temple in the northern Indian city of Dharamsala, the scene is timeless, seemingly centuries old: Rows of scarlet-robed young monks from Tibet, hunched over prayer scrolls in mediation.

But outside, an antenna sits on a rooftop not far away. It's one of 30 connection points in a wireless network that's bringing the Internet to this remote region where communication technology has been expensive, unreliable and hard to come by -- until now.

The monks in meditation over those scrolls are a key inspiration for creating the wireless network. They are refugees from Tibet and part of a community of hundreds of thousands of refugees. Web access promises better communication, a path to preserve Tibetan culture and a way to tell their stories to the outside world.

Image: Inside a Gaddi family's barn on a hilltop, Phuntsok Dorjee (left) and another technician (whose name I don't have) set a solar-powered battery into place. 2006, Xeni Jardin.

Previously:

Part 1: The Gaddi People of Dharamsala

Part 2: Connecting Tibet's Exile Community Via the Web

And on the "reporter's notebook" blog associated with the series, a few new posts:

# China: Internet Companies Aid Censorship

# Dharamshala: "holy place"

# Economic tensions in Dharamshala

Give us a place to stand
And a place to grow
And call this land Ontario
A place to live.
For you and me
With hopes as high
As the tallest tree
Give us a land of lakes
and a land of snow
And we will build Ontario
A place to stand, a place to grow
Ontari-ari-ari-o !

The driver who endured the toughest commute over the old Wilson Bridge soon will get payback: Later this month, he or she will trigger detonation charges that will cut and bring down a nearly half-mile stretch of elevated steel girders that supported the old bridge over Jones Point Park in Alexandria, Virginia.

John Rollwagen, a colleague for many years, tells the story of a French scientist who visited Cray's home in Chippewa Falls. Asked what were the secrets of his success, Cray said "Well, we have elves here, and they help me". Cray subsequently showed his visitor a tunnel he had built under his house, explaining that when he reached an impasse in his computer design, he would retire to the tunnel to dig. "While I'm digging in the tunnel, the elves will often come to me with solutions to my problem", he said.

Update: Mr Bali Hai sez, "I worked for Cray Research from 1984-1996, and I can tell you that the story of him tunneling under his house is largely a fabrication made up by John Rollwagen to enhance Seymour's reputation as a quirky, visionary genius (which he was, but not because he was digging tunnels under his house). What actually transpired involved Seymour having some excavation work done on his basement by contractors. As far as I know, none of them were elves. Rollwagen also took an incident where Seymour burned a sailboat at his lake house and turned it into a mythic tale of Cray building a new sailboat every year, then burning it so he could design and build a new one the following year."

Update: Colin sez,

The makers of the In-Lock make some pretty bold claims. First of all, the stake looks like it is less than 12 inches long with screw threads that are only about 3 inches in diameter. It really would not take much effort to overcome the "physics" that they claim secures into the ground. Along those same lines, they claim that "physics" prevents the screw from being turned because a chain runs through the stake. Well, this would only be true if your chain were either extremely stiff or so short that the stake was right up against the bike wheel. Otherwise, you could certainly turn the stake at least 180 degrees in either direction, more than enough to get you started in championing their indominatable "physics".

Update 2 David sez, "How it should work: The bar you use for leverage to put the screw in the ground should also be a stake. After putting in the screw, you put the stake through a hole on the side of the screw's head and into the ground, then lock the stake in place (relative to the screw) with a regular lock."

Update 3: Phil sez, "Have two of those suckers. Screw them into the ground 2 feet apart, with the open eyes facing each other. Run a 3-foot long eyebolt through both eyes; padlock the eyebolt to one of the eyes so that the bolt is now locked through both anchors and can't be removed. Lock bikes anywhere along the eyebolt between the anchors. With the eyebolt through both anchors, neither one will turn."