Emil Goh says: I have been photographing cyworld users in their minirooms & offline spaces.

And next week I will show a work done in my "officetel" (office-hotel=a korean type of dwelling for mixed use), mirroring my miniroom.

My main reasons for doing this work is a fascination of how much young Koreans live online plus the variety of accommodation types that exist in this city (from regular 3-4 bedroom family apart

Emil Goh moves seemingly effortlessly between countries and cultures. Malaysian born of Chinese descent, brought up and educated in Australia (and Goldsmith’s College in London) and now for the time being settled in Seoul, he manages to melt in pretty well almost anywhere. The place he stays in also provides his working material. His works are entirely about urban phenomena – lovers dressing codes for instance, or the Umbrella Taxi service he provided for pedestrians in a downtown area in Seoul. His currently most ambitious project is on the particular Internet culture in Korea relating to the “Cyworlds” that are created on a number of web-pages. Here young (and not-so-young) Koreans create their own Internet blogs, where they establish alternative personas and homes, complete with wallpapers and interior decorations. Much of the energy in Emil Goh’s work comes from his ability to become part of the phenomena he describes, not as a spy or observer, but as a participant and social chameleon.

Link

The marvelous Brothers McLeod are creating a series of cartoons called Spamland. The dialogue for the cartoons comes from the semi-sensical text found in the filter-busting portion of spam messages.

The first one is online and is nightmarishly excellent. Link (Via Drawn!)

China has unblocked Wikipedia. Wikipedia refused to censor itself to appease totalitarian Beijing, but China unblocked it anyway. China needs Wikipedia and Chinese net-users would access it using circumvention tools -- the block on Wikipedia made Chinese Wikipedia users into automatic dissidents.

If only Google, Microsoft and Yahoo had the same courage as Wikipedia, the same confidence that their search-engines were valuable enough to be indispensible.

Wikipedia reported on its site that it had received word from multiple users in the country on Chinese-forums.com that the site had been restored. The most recent blocking was the third such outage reported by Wikipedia.

Link (Thanks, Coop!)

Update: John Mark sez, "Reports on Slashdot from folks in China indicate that, while Wikipedia is currently not being blocked in its entirety, certain parts are still being blocked. Readers in China report having problems getting to the Chinese language version, and English-language articles on certain subjects, such as the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989."

That's predictable enough -- but it means that Beijing is now stuck playing cat-and-mouse with Wikipedia, having to ferret out every potentially sensitive page and update its filters accordingly. If MSFT, Yahoo and Google followed Wikipedia's lead, we could force Beijing to devote ever-escalating resources to this effort, a denial-of-service attack on its censors.

Eudora is going open source -- it'll be based on Thunderbird, the email client from the Mozilla foundation, the folks who run the Firefox project.

QUALCOMM Incorporated (Nasdaq: QCOM), a leading developer and innovator of Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) and other advanced wireless technologies, and the Mozilla Foundation, a public-benefit organization dedicated to promoting choice and innovation on the Internet, today announced that future versions of Eudora® will be based upon the same technology platform as the open source Mozilla Thunderbird™ email program. Future versions of Eudora will be free and open source, while retaining Eudora's uniquely rich feature set and productivity enhancements. QUALCOMM and Mozilla will each participate in, and continue to foster development communities based around the open source Mozilla project, with a view to enhancing the capabilities and ease of use of both Eudora and Thunderbird. QUALCOMM also today announced that it has released the final commercial versions of the current Eudora products for Windows and Mac operating systems. The open source version of Eudora is targeted to release during the first half of calendar year 2007. Once the open source version of Eudora is released, QUALCOMM will cease to sell Eudora commercially. In the interim, QUALCOMM will continue commercial sales, at a reduced price of $19.95 and with a six-month period of technical support. Existing technical support commitments will be honored in their entirety.

Link

The always-entertaining Heliomag has a fun profile of Boing Boing.

"My wife Carla and I started Boing Boing as a print zine in 1988," [Mark] says. "We were living in Colorado at the time and were interested in zines, the Church of the SubGenius, Timothy Leary, cyberpunk, underground comics, high weirdness, brain machines, and computers." Frauenfelder’s love of all things weird exploded exponentially as the Internet grew, and a phenomenon was born. The blog grew so large; he eventually had to recruit like-minded folks to help feed the public appetite for all things odd.

Link

In the current issue of Make, George Dyson wrote a piece called "Strange Love: or, how they learned to start worrying and love to hate the bomb." Here's a link to a PDF of the full article.

Physicists love explosions. We owe our nuclear predicament to a quirk of human nature: designing, making, and testing nuclear explosives can be fun. “The sin of the physicists at Los Alamos did not lie in their having built a lethal weapon,” physicist Freeman Dyson (my father) has explained. “They did not just build the bomb. They enjoyed building it. They had the best time of their lives building it. That, I believe, is what Oppenheimer had in mind when he said that they had sinned.” Eight years ago, I began interviewing retired (and semi-retired) nuclear weaponeers who had worked on Project Orion — the technically promising but politically unacceptable effort, begun in 1957, to build an interplanetary spaceship propelled by nuclear bombs. The project’s leader, physicist Theodore B. Taylor (1925-2004), exemplified the conflict between love of explosions and fear of the results.

“I was given a chemistry set when I was 7 or 8 and that rapidly turned into a laboratory for making explosives, with one restriction set down by my mother: never, never under any circumstances was I allowed to make nitroglycerine,” said Taylor. “So I didn’t.” He experimented with more explosive and less stable alternatives instead. “I was fascinated by explosions. I still am. Without any attraction to the damage. I hated to just fiddle around. I wanted to go to extremes.”

Taylor promised his mother, in the aftermath of Hiroshima, that he would never work on nuclear weapons, but the temptation proved impossible to resist. After an unsuccessful first attempt at a Ph.D., Taylor with his wife, Caro, and four-month-old Clare, drove their 1941 Buick to Los Alamos from Berkeley in November of 1949. “Within 24 hours of our arrival at Los Alamos, I was deeply immersed in the nuclear weapons program. Within a week, I was hooked on understanding what went on at these enormously high energy densities, clear off any human scale.”

Link

Christopher sez, "A Swedish artist is collaborating with the Swedish government to try and put a toy-sized replica of Sweden's iconic red cottages on the moon."

"If we manage to do this Sweden will be the third country to occupy the moon", said SSC's Fredrik von Schéele.

A competition has been arranged for students to construct a little red house that is suitably sized for placement by a moon landing device. The construction may not exceed eight square metres and can weigh a maximum of four kilos.

Link (Thanks, Christopher!)

Episode #4 of the Boing Boing Boing podcast (our motto: "B cubed or be square") is ready for downloading. Each block of the photo-mosaic above shows you what's inside.

Our guest this week is Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and author of "The Long Tail." With Chris, we talk about:

Robert Anton Wilson, Jon Lech Johansen, GooTube, book burning, John Hodgman's book tour, and how the infinitely versatile longtail theory applies to matters as diverse as low-grossing grossout movies, coffee, beer, public access cable TV shows, George Lucas, and Disneyland rides.

UPDATED Links (earlier published file was truncated at the end): Podcast, Podcast Feed, Subscribe via iTunes, MP3 Link (64K). Total time of podcast: 40:57.

UPDATE 2: Here's an MPEG-4 version (aka .m4a) of this week's episode, with support for chapters: Link. MP3 is the more standard format for podcasts, but I love that MPEG-4 allows you to divide a long audio file into bite-sized chapters, and embed art, descriptions, and links for each. Hope you enjoy it.

BONUS: The music you hear in this week's episode is by Q-Burns Abstract Message, aka producer and indie digital music entrepreneur Michael Donaldson. The song featured in Boing Boing Boing is his remix of "Angel Soup" by Cold Hands, recently released on vinyl and digital via Blunted Funk Records. He has very kindly uploaded this tune for free listening in entirety: Link, with info on where you can purchase this and other music by Q-Burns in delicious DRM-free MP3. I don't have a PhD in jamology like he does, but even a layperson like me can detect powerful dance waves and funkton particles emitting from this song.

The Financial Times reports that The Lancet, a British medical journal, claims over 600,000 people have died in the Iraq war, with the overwhelming majority dying from gunfire.

Conflict in Iraq has killed more than 600,000 people since the US-led invasion in March 2003, according to a controversial study published online on Wednesday by the Lancet, a leading medical journal. The researchers said their figure, far higher than any previous estimate, was more accurate than the death tolls produced by official Iraqi sources.

Gilbert Burnham of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, carried out the survey with doctors from Al ­Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, using a technique based on interviewing a random sample of households throughout Iraq. They concluded that there were 655,000 “excess deaths” as a result of the war, equivalent to 2.5 per cent of the population; 601,000 died through violence, usually gunfire.

Link

A small aircraft (some reports say helicopter, others say fixed-wing plane) just crashed into a highrise apartment building on Manhattan's Upper East Side (524 E. 72nd Street, corner of 72nd and York). Link. (thanks, Mark Hurst and many others)

Update: More now at the NYT, and Sean Bonner of metblogs says,

MBNYC has the scoop on the crash: Link.

A carnivorous plant at the Botanical Garden in Lyon, France, ate a mouse. The plant, Nepenthes truncata, is a pitcher plant native to an island in the Philippines. According to Wikipedia (which contradicts the Internet Broadcasting Systems article I link to below), this was the first time that a mammal was trapped in a pitcher of Nepenthes truncata but others in the Nepenthaceae family occasionally nab small mammals. In this case, the mouse remains were discovered once it began to stink.
Link

Garrett sez, "This is a fantastic video of a group of teens singing their order, with a guitar accompanying, at a McDonald's drive-thru. The complete lack of affect in the McDonald's employee is kind sad. It's a harmless and quite cute little prank." I disagree -- the McD's guy is clearly totally blown away! Link (Thanks, Garrett!)

Are people with autism disfunctional? Are psychopaths genetically adapted to survive by exploiting the rest of us?

CBC's Quirks and Quarks, my favorite science radio program, has run a couple of pieces recently about the idea that some of what we think of as "disorders" in human behavior can be more usefully treated as speciation -- a different kind of human.

Psychopaths: Quirks talks to research psychologists about the biological basis for psychopathy -- and the fact that psychopaths are sexually profligate and have lots of kids. Psychopathic rapists target fertile women -- not children or old women.

Dr. Marnie Rice is a psychologist with the Mental Health Centre Penetanguishene, in Penetanguishene, Ontario. She studies criminal psychopaths who are incarcerated there. She views psychopathic behaviour as an evolved survival strategy. She says that there’s not a lot of evidence to suggest that psychopaths are mentally ill but there’s good reason to believe that their disturbing behaviour is an evolved trait. She says psychopaths have evolved to capitalize in a particular environmental niche -- namely preying on the rest of society.

Autism: A noted cognitive nueroscientist and one of his patients (who has autism) team up to advance the hypothesis that autism isn't a disorder, but simply a different kind of person. They say that arguing that autism makes you "good at numbers" but "bad at socializing" is like taking a dog and saying that it's a special kind of cat that's "bad at climbing" but "good at fetching slippers." Autism makes you a different kind of person, most usefully compared to other people with autism.

The two researchers make an unlikely team. One is Dr. Laurent Mottron, a psychiatrist and cognitive neuroscientist at the Riviere-des-Prairies Hospital. He has been studying autism for 25 years. The other is Michelle Dawson, who is autistic. Ms. Dawson has never been to university, but is working at the level of someone with a PhD. For the last couple of years, these two have been collaborating on research into autism. They argue that autism should be recognized as a different way of being human, rather than as a disease or series of defects to be eradicated.

I realize that these are uneasy bedfellows. Autism isn't psychopathy. The question is, are there many "disorders" that are really "adaptations"? Homosexuality once appeared in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual as a disorder -- now, it's considered just part of the spectrum of human behavior, considered best as "a thing that a person does and is," not "a way that a person is broken." What else lurks in the DSM, waiting to be redefined?

As you wash with Skeleton Soap, the creature's skeleton is slowly revealed. The odd thing about the Colin Crab Skeleton Soap though is that crabs have exoskeletons.
Link to Colin Crab, Link to Freddie Fish, Link to Olivia Octopus (via New Scientist blog)

UPDATE: As BB reader Nathan Harrison points out, stranger still than Colin Crab is the Olivia Octopus, "since they lack skeletons of any kind -- inner or outer."

At the Mason County, Texas jail inmates wear pink jumpsuits, pink slippers, and make their beds in pink linens. All the cells, including the bars, are painted pink. Painting walls pink has been known to calm aggression, but that isn't the whole point of sheriff Clint Low's think pink policy at his cramped jail, which only holds five inmates. From the Associated Press:

Low got the idea of pink jumpsuits from a sheriff in Arizona, Joe Arpaio, who bought pink boxers to keep inmates from stealing the underwear and other clothing. In Mason, Low dyed the jumpsuits and slippers pink, and the color later bled to sheets, underwear and other articles during washings.

Low, who was a deputy in Mason before being elected sheriff, estimated the re-offense rate in the county is down 70 percent since he switched to pink jumpsuits for the inmates. He also said there have been no fights between inmates in the jail since it was painted.

"I wanted to stop re-offenders," Low said. "They don't want to wear them. Working inmates get a choice to work outside or sit inside, and some choose to sit inside because they don't want people to see them. They would rather stay upstairs."

Link

Chicago actor Gene Janson, 72, had a heart attack and collapsed last week twenty minutes into a performance of Gore Vidal's play The Best Man. He died later at a hospital. The irony is that Janson's character, a former US president, is scripted to die later on in the play. Link (via Fortean Times)

David Barsalou collected the source images for dozens of Lichtenstein paintings and presented them side-by-side. Link

Erik Johnson says:

(Click on thumbnail for enlargement)

Your Pete Bagge posting today reminded me of a Thanksgiving illustration I worked up a few weeks ago after travelling in the middle of the liquid explosives scare. (I hate taking off my shoes, and thought of those huge buckles on the cartoon pilgrims).

Ugly Pictures' short film "Battle of the Bands: Street Fight" is a Terry Gilliamesque stop motion animation farce featuring a series of fights between different classic album covers -- I love the Roxy Music babes' laser-boobs! But the most inspired bit is the Dead Kennedys logo versus Van Halen's. Link (Thanks, Linton!)

Kevin Tiell's photos of pinball games shot from the level of the ball as it zings across the table are stupendous. Link (Thanks, Edmond!)

This brooch florette made from a folded and refolded tape measure really tickles me. Link (via Craft)

This document appears to be Albert Einstein's high-school diploma (the blogger who posted it assures us "yes, it's authentic" but offers no evidence of this) in which he scores pretty high in all his subjects. Link (via Digg)

Update: Margaret sez,

Apparently Einstein left school when he was fifteen, a high school in Munich. He was not particularly interested in school, but he 'jumped' a class to join an older class. He moved to live with his parents in Milan. A year later he applied to a technical college in Zurich, but he was turned down. He then decided to go back to school and get his Matura (Reifeprüfung / matriculation). He did that at the school in Switzerland the graphic shows. He passed it in 1896 as the best in the class. I gather 6 is the best mark there.

I read German language and literature 5, French 3, no English, Italian 5, history 6, geography 4, algebra 6, something mathematical (geo something including trigonometry) 6, some form of geometry 6, physics 6, chemistry 5, natural history 5, mystery (some form of drawing) 4, technical drawing 5

Update 2: Haun sez, "On the diploma, Geometry is divided into planimetry, trigonometry, stereometry & analytic geometry The 'some form of geometry' line reads: Descriptive geometry. The 'mystery' is Artistic draftsmanship."