Todd Lappin, a combination pop-culture / military tech geek-historian, recently visited The Black Hole, an equipment surplus store that sells all sorts of cast of machines from Los Alamos. His Flickr set has his excellent comments.

It's been on my must-visit list for years, but owing to my recent obsession with building Dr. Strangelove- style control panels, my need became more pressing. So at last, I made the pilgrimage to visit Ed Grothus at The Black Hole, a remarkable place in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Ed is a former Los Alamos National Laboratory employee, and The Black Hole is his masterpiece -- an improbable but effective combination military surplus outlet, pacifist shrine, and "museum of nuclear waste."

Ed was on hand when I stopped by, so I had the opportunity to talk with him, watch his presentation on the perils of atomic warfare, learn about his plans to erect a pair of "Rosetta Stones for the Nuclear Age" in Los Alamos, and, of course, wander the aisles.

Link

Reader comment:

Paul Alvarado-Dykstra says:

Per your Boing Boing post about Todd Lappin's awesome Flickr tour of The Black Hole in Los Alamos, I must also highly recommend the 2002 documentary "Atomic Ed & The Black Hole" (directed by Ellen Spiro and produced by Karen Bernstein), which is as fascinating as it is amusing. It aired on HBO and PBS, and is now available on DVD. A QuickTime clip can be viewed here.

San Francisco photographer Jim Ferreira shoots film noir style portraits. I love the lighting and angles. Link (Via Eye of the Goof)

No MP3 collection is complete without Forrest J. Ackerman's MUSIC FOR ROBOTS. Thanks to the fabulously named blog, Scar Stuff, for the zip file! Link (Via PCL Linkdump)

From Chicago Dyke, reporting from a talk by Sid Blumenthal and Glenn Greenwald at the Center for American Progress:

Sid says that Wilkerson, Powell’s old chief of staff, believes that the correct number of victims in secret Bush prisons is 35,000, only 5% of which “may” have to do with terrorism. More than twice what I thought, and hardly any to do with the “war on terror.”

Link (Via Searchblog)

Scott sez, "Every year my friend James Lopez creates an incredible haunted house, featuring many loving homages to Disney's Haunted Mansion ride. James is an incredible artist (he was a longtime Disney animator and is currently at Dreamworks) and on his blog he shows how he has created the elaborate props and features for his own haunted house."

One year, I decided to build the coffin-where the guy is trying to get saying, "lemmeouttahere!".So, I went to Home Depot, bought some MDF particle board, some molding, etc. and built it. It turned out great-but it was heavier than Hell!!!!

Every year it was a big ordeal-I constantly had to get a neighbor or a good friend to help me move it into place.

I sculpted the hands. The lid was made from styrofoam. I built a mechanism inside that would open and close the lid. I put it on a folding card table and put a skirt around it and whah-lah! A coffin.

Woah, this guy is my new all-time hero. You have to see these props to believe them.

Link (Thanks, Scott!)

John Gilmore sends in news of the Human Rights Video Blog, "an interesting site that posts videos of human rights abuses worldwide."

It includes footage of the Zimbabwean police and security intelligence services breaking up a peaceful demonstration by members of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trades Unions (ZCTU) on September 13th. The police repeatedly beat the demonstrators, who are calling for the provision of antiretroviral (ARV) drugs for the treatment of HIV, a minimum wage, and stabilisation in the prices of certain basic commodities. The bulk of the video involves interviews with the ZCTU members describing the events of the day, and the actions of the police. Ethan and Rachel Rawlins have kindly provided a transcript.

When news of the beatings originally leaked out, trades unions in other countries strongly condemned Robert Mugabe’s hardline approach with legitimate and peaceful demonstrations. Last week a court dismissed the police report on the incident, and postponed the trial of the ZCTU protestors until October 17th, to give the Criminal Investigation Department time to conduct a thorough investigation of the allegations of police torture. When footage of the protests was smuggled out of Zimbabwe on DVD to South Africa this week, it prompted the head of one of South Africa’s labour unions to say that she would give President Thabo Mbeki a copy of the DVD of the beatings in a meeting with him on Friday.

Link (Thanks, John!)

A LiveJournaller has had it with Sony MovieStudio, a lawfully acquired program that can't be used because the "anti-piracy product activation" it comes with doesn't work:

The server contacted is for a company that no longer even services the product. The product activation people do not answer the phone, even after a 6 minute hold period that consists of really bad techno music and product pitches, probably for more things that do not work...

Anything you ever buy that has "product activation" may stop being something you can use at any time, for any reason. Consumers are being raped wholesale by these companies when they invade our privacy with this method of copy protection - and thats assuming it even works in the first place.

The software does install great on a microwave oven, however...

Link (Thanks, Taepo!)

A professional horseshoer's dog, Skidboot, is astonishingly smart. His uncanny ability to comprehend spoken words has won him appearances on Letterman and Oprah. Link

My student Noah Keating and his friend Aaron Meyers made an hilarious short film about P2P downloading in the style of an old Reefer Madness educational short, using a ton of stock footage from the Internet Archive. It's called "Filesharing" and we just screened it in class to many big yuks. Link

My favorite LA comic shop, Secret Headquarters of Silver Lake, is hosting an art show by Jordan Crane -- the opening is the evening of Oct 27. Crane's latest, The Clouds Above is described as "a cross between Where the Wild Things Are and The Wizard of Oz." Sounds like a great show!

Winner of numerous awards in the design and comic industries, Jordan Crane first emerged in the comic world in 1996 with the anthology NON. Crane edited, contributed to, and published Non, which has become known as that era's showcase for the most explosive young experimental cartoonists. The short lived series has been compared to Spiegelman and Mouly's Raw.

Crane's first self published comic novella, The Last Lonely Saturday (now published by Fantagraphics), is noted for well observed narratives that focus on the vulnerability and mystery of the human experience. Crane's work simultaneously has the feel of humble handcrafted objects made in the garage of a lonely teenager, and the sophisticated work of an artist at the height of his form.

Link

Dan sez, "The mayor of Montreal, Gerald Tremblay, announced - without consultation - that Montreal's 'Avenue du Parc' would be renamed 'Avenue Robert Bourassa.' The street has a lot of history and hosts some thriving communities, so feeling is rising high on the issue. A web-consulting company - that happens to be located on Avenue du Parc - put up an e-petition. When I first saw the thing they were aiming to collect 1000 'signatures.' It's grown so fast over the past day that they're now aiming for 20000. I keep getting emails from friends with a link to the petition and it seems to be growing by the minute." Link (Thanks, Dan!)

My favorite recently-discovered podcast is David Moldawer's Morning Brew. David is my book editor at St. Martin's (I'm writing a guidebook about getting stuff done using the Internet, called Rule the Web) and last week I found out he's been podcasting for quite a while and not telling me.

A couple of times a week, David calls a friend and they'll talk about three items in the news, focusing on pop culture, technology, and politics. The discussions quickly spin off into delightful absurdity. I listened to all ten episodes (each one runs about 15-minutes) and frequently laughed out loud. Link| Subscribe via iTunes | RSS feed

I'm delighted to announce that I'll be the guest of honor at the science fiction convention Orycon, in Portland, Oregon, November 17-19. I've never attended an OryCon before, but its reputation as an excellent event precedes it, and I'm excited to be there with other guests including Vincent DiFate, Ellen Datlow and Michael DeMerritt. The room block is filling up quick, so register ASAP if you want to get the convention rate at the hotel.

While in Portland, I'm also giving a talk on copyright at Portland State University on November 16 at 5PM -- it's free and open to the public. Link to OryCon, Link to PSU talk

I just got my contributor's copy of the WorldChanging book -- a huge, encylopedic tome on the novel ways that the technology and social movements are being used to make the world a better place, from the grass roots up. WorldChanging is based on the excellent blog of the same name, and is thematically organized with sections on "Stuff," "Shelter," "Cities," "Community," "Business," "Politics" and "Planet," each broken into a series of quickly digestable essays on subjects like "Healing polluted land," "Green marketing," "Movement building" and "Citizen science." (I contributed an article on the global copyfight and what expanding copyrights mean to the developing world).

The book features a foreword by Al Gore and an introduction by Bruce Sterling, and begs to be taken out of its handsome slipcase and browsed. Link

David Bousson says: "I followed the link to This Old House about the Home Inspection Nightmares, and then clicked on one of the links at the end. It took me to this page, on Rehabilitating Sex, which I'm afraid I cannot explain within its context. It's This Old House, explaining the ongoing sexual revolution in Russia. And it's in their kitchen section to boot. It was supposed to be a link to their Fall Inspection Guide."

Last December at an erotic-art exposition in Moscow, a woman was covered in whipped cream and men in the audience were invited to lick it off; the scene was later shown on late-night TV. The capital even boasts its first touch of Times Square raunch, at the Tramway Workers' House of Culture, which last month began playing host three nights a week to a nude revue featuring a striptease and a simulated sex act.

What the heck is this article doing on the This Old House site?! Link

My God, this sounds amazing. Anyone spotted a copy online? It's probably not as funny if you don't speak/read Arabic, but -- still. Snip from NY Times story by Michael Luo:

Nearly every night here for the past month, Iraqis weary of the tumult around them have been turning on the television to watch a wacky-looking man with a giant Afro wig and star-shaped glasses deliver the grim news of the day.

In a recent episode, the host, Saad Khalifa, reported that Iraq’s Ministry of Water and Sewage had decided to change its name to simply the Ministry of Sewage — because it had given up on the water part.

In another episode, he jubilantly declared that “Rums bin Feld” had announced American troops were leaving the country on 1/1, in other words, on Jan. 1. His face crumpled when he realized he had made a mistake. The troops were not actually departing on any specific date, he clarified, but instead leaving one by one. At that rate, it would take more than 600 years for them to be gone.

(...) The show’s title appears initially as “The Government,” but the Arabic words split in half to reveal the actual name, another crack at the country’s plight.

Link. Image: Saad Khalifa, the "Jon Stewart" of "Hurry Up, He’s Dead." Insane. (thanks, Adam Fields, Perry Metzger)

Reader comment: Bob Lee says,

He looks like Bootsy Collins! This clip from the Mighty Boosh brought it to my attention.

Julian "Play Money" Dibbell writes for New York Magazine about his experiment with a Calorie Restrition diet -- living as close to the starvation threshold as possible, in order to radically prolong your life.

“Michael, could you hand Don the arugula?” April calls over her shoulder, looking up from the laptop that’s always near to hand as she cooks, loaded with an interactive diet-planning program that helps not only count calories but track the twenty other nutrients without which CR would just be a glorified form of anorexia. “Don, I need you to put 24 grams on each plate, please.” And so Don Dowden, attorney at law, commences weighing arugula on an electronic postage scale, carefully adding a leaf here, removing one there, like a drug dealer parsing out dime bags. Tall, dark-haired, craggy, Don gets by on a ration of about 2,000 calories a day and swears by its rejuvenating effects. “I used to wear glasses, but I don’t wear glasses anymore,” he says. “I don’t have 20/20 vision, but I can drive, and I can read the paper, and I’m 74.”

“You’re 74 years old?” I blurt, not so much astonished as simply confused. It’s not that I can’t see Don’s age in his face and skin, now that I know to look for it. But there’s something in the way his body moves, the way he holds it—an ease and an assuredness—that doesn’t quite square with the fact that he was born before FDR took office.

“He gets that a lot,” says Michael, a trace of glee in his otherwise quiet, clipped, north-of-the-border tone. April has him chopping asparagus now, while she continues crunching numbers. Tonight’s calculations are based on Michael’s caloric requirements, and those requirements are as strict as they come. Unlike April’s daily average of about 1,300 calories, which really is an average (she likes to go out drinking and dining with friends on weekends, and doesn’t mind enduring a few 1,000-calorie weekdays to save up for the splurge), Michael’s regimen of 1,913 calories a day is exactly that: 1,913 calories every single day, 30 percent of them derived from fat, 30 percent from protein, and 40 percent from carbohydrates. Cooking for him is the same elaborate exercise in dietary Sudoku it is for all CR die-hards, only more so.

Link (via Megnut)

Last week, Steven Johnson published his excellent new book The Ghost Map, a scientific thriller about an 1854 cholera outbreak on London's Broad Street in Soho. Through the story of the two Soho residents who solved the mystery of how cholera is transmitted, The Ghost Map celebrates cartography in the context of neighborhood knowledge, the wisdom about a place that can only come from living there. Now Steven has brought that same theme alive in today's world of Google mash-ups and location-enhanced computing. Launching today, outside.in is a tool for participating in the online conversations taking place about your community within your community. After you locate yourself on a map, real-time blog posts, reviews, and news relevant to that area appear. Drag the map and the content changes. The system draws from a wide variety of placeblogs, user-contributed links, and tagged neighborhood data. All of that hyperlocal information is then aggregated together and linked to the physical places where the news matters most.

From the outside.in core principles:

1. The natives know best. Part of our inspiration at outside.in was the amazing rise of hyperlocal bloggers -- sometimes called placebloggers -- writing about their own communities. (Brooklyn, where we all happen to live, may well be the placeblogger capital of the world.) And so we've seeded outside.in with a list of about 500 placebloggers from the top 25 metro areas in the US.

2. The post's location is more important than the blogger's location. People have been creating maps of blogger locations for years now. (The NYC subway blogger map is one of our favorites.) But from our perspective, we're less interested in the location of the blogger than we are the location of what the blogger is writing about. So in our system, each item (a blogger post, or a link submitted by a user) can be associated with its own specific point in space.

3. Neighborhoods are more important that maps. We love the neo-geo movement as much as anyone, and continue to marvel at the amazing work being done with Google map mash-ups. But maps can often overwhelm with too much specificity. Most of the time when you're thinking about local issues, you don't actually need specific geo-coordinates or street addresses. You just want to know roughly what's happening around you. That's why we've made the navigational unit for outside.in the neighborhood. And if the neighborhood is too specific, you can always zoom out on the navigational map and see a broader view.

4. Geo-tags are only the beginning. Neighborhood content needs to be location-aware for it to be useful, but that can't be the whole story. It's just as important to know when something is happening, as it is to know where it's happening. So we've creating a simple tagging architecture for all our posts: what/where/when. This lets you create powerful filters for viewing all of outside.in's data: you can see recent crime reports within two miles of your neighborhood, real estate openings in your zip code coming up this weekend, poetry readings city-wide.

5. Local news often has a long-shelf life. One thing both blogs and traditional newspapers share is that they are organized around time, with the latest news given priority. But a lot of neighborhood information is news that stays news: a parent's comment about the science program at a local school is just as relevant six months after it was posted; a guide to gay-friendly bars could be useful for years. That's why outside.in is designed not just as a "latest headlines" service; it's also an evolving neighborhood encyclopedia, capturing all the things that have been said about specific places.

Link

Merlin sez, "Many parents worry that Halloween -- while full of fun and frivolity -- can be a dangerous holiday if care is not taken. 5ives presents these simple tips for ensuring safe and healthy costumed begging for everyone."

1 For large groups of trick-or-treaters, always set at least one child ablaze, ensuring enough light that other children won’t trip over uneven pavement.

2 Only separate shards of X-Acto blades from rodent poison once you get home; doing so in the dark will lead to inevitable mixups and tummyaches for youngsters with allergies...

Link (Thanks, Merlin!)

Charles sez,

To celebrate Mr Skilling's sentencing, the "Enron Explorer" offers access access to the whole corpus of 200,000 enron emails released during the fraud investigation.

The system generates a visualisation of each executive's social network and analyses the thematic signature of their communications. you can access each person's mailbox, read individual messages, or take a thematic slice through the archive. clicking on someone in the visualiser zooms them to the centre and loads their information.

My personal favourite from Mr Skilling is:

"Fuck you, you piece of shit. I can't wait to see you go down with the ship like all the other vermin. Smug, paranoid, unhappy mother fucker. Eat shit."

Link (Thanks, Charles!)

Update: Ben sez,

Further to that Enron Explorer story, a close look through the archives suggests that the "Fuck you, you piece of shit" email was sent by a troublemaker pretending to be Skilling, not Skilling himself.

Skilling had resigned as CEO when that email was sent from the Yahoo! address jeffreyskilling@yahoo.com, so it's something that he plausibly might have said, given that he isn't a very nice person.

However, Skilling was having his Enron mail forwarded to markskilling@hotmail.com and it doesn't look like the Yahoo address is his.

This message shows that whoever sent the "Fuck you" had entered the name "jeff lawson" when setting up the Yahoo! account.

Andy Zipper, the recipient, asks HR to deal with the problem:

And this message *may* represent the offender being found and punished (by his employer, an energy trading company):

"We pulled the log ... found the guy ... and told him to knock it off. Please let me know if there is a repeat performance."

Lik-Sang, an amazing e-tailer that specializes in importing Asian electronics to Europe and the US, has been forced out of business by legal threats from Sony Europe. Lik-Sang's customers were true technophiles -- my household got its Japanese Katamari Damacy game, a limited edition Nintendo DS, and numerous accessories from Lik-Sang -- the kind of people who are fantastic customers for the likes of Sony.

This is part of Sony's ongoing, suicidal war against its own customers -- from installing rootkits on CD-buyers' PCs to threatening hackers with lawsuits over teaching new dances to their Aibos to re-crippling the PSP to lock out homebrew software. Great companies like Lik-Sang that exist to serve an early-adopter, passionate user niche are collateral damage in the war.

Thanks, Sony. I hope you lose a shitload of money on Blu-Ray.

Lik-Sang.com, the popular gaming retailer from Hong Kong, has today announced that it is forced to close down due to multiple legal actions brought against it by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Limited and Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. Sony claimed that Lik-Sang infringed its trade marks, copyright and registered design rights by selling Sony PSP consoles from Asia to European customers, and have recently obtained a judgment in the High Court of London (England) rendering Lik-Sang's sales of PSP consoles unlawful...

A Sony spokesperson declined to comment directly on the lawsuit against Lik-Sang, but recently went on to tell Gamesindustry.biz that "ultimately, we're trying to protect consumers from being sold hardware that does not conform to strict EU or UK consumer safety standards, due to voltage supply differences et cetera; is not - in PS3's case - backwards compatible with either PS1 or PS2 software; will not play European Blu-Ray movies or DVDs; and will not be covered by warranty".

Lik Sang strongly disagrees with Sony's opinion that their customers need this kind of protection and pointed out that PSP consoles shipped from Lik-Sang contained genuine Sony 100V-240V AC Adapters that carry CE and other safety marks and are compatible world wide. All PSP consoles were in conformity with all EU and UK consumer safety regulations.

Christ, it's hilarious to see Sony wringing its hands over its poor customers! These are the people who compromised 500,000 computer networks with their rootkits and spyware!

Link (Thanks, Stewart!)

Mike Harrison maintains a page of photos of his experiments microwaving CDs and then sticking them on top of Tesla coils -- the results are mad and gorgeous. Link (Thanks, Jennifer!)

An investigative newsletter called the North Country Gazette publishes the surreal notice on each page that "This article is copyright protected and Fair Use is not applicable." Of course, fair use is the right to use a copyrighted work without the creator's permission -- and it's particularly applicable to investigative reporters who frequently reproduce copyrighted works without permission in the course of their reportage. Without fair use, reportage would be pretty thin -- you could only reproduce evidence of wrongdoing if the wrongdoer gave you permission to do so.

Harvard law-blogger David Giacalone wrote to the Gazette's editor about this, and got a scorching response:

My own attempt, by email, to suggest to the offending editor the error of her ways (by quoting the statute and referring her to two resources), resulted in an angry rebuff, in which I was accused of practicing law without a license, told that my email would therefore be forwarded to the Attorney General and the paper’s lawyer (who it was implied had okayed their statement denying Fair Use rights), and threatened with hearing from said lawyer, should I take any of their materials.

Link (Thanks, Chad!)

This may be the world's most overpimped Honda Civic -- there's something heroic about expending this much effort on such an unassuming little car! It makes me want to get an airbrushed mural for my used Hyundai Elantra (the first car I've ever owned -- I'm still getting used to the idea). Link (via Neatorama)

USC students take note: you can win a bad-ass Neuros OSD set-top box if you produce the winning mashup of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead in a Hallowe'en remix contest:

Free Culture USC is hosting a remix competition where you get your hands dirty remixing George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead into a 5 minute short in any style of your liking. The winner (or winning team) will receive a Neuros OSD open-source media player. Oh man, too cool!

We will be holding a screening/pizza party for all the shorts on Sunday, October 29th. This is where your short will first be screened - after the screening we will post them on our website for the world to see and vote upon! The winner will be announced the following Sunday (Nov. 5th) at the ‘Remixing the Archive’ Visions and Voices event at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy, where hundreds of people will have the opportunity to see your work.

Link (Thanks, Cameron!)

Hugh sez, "Oct 24 is United Nations Day, and to celebrate, LibriVox has just released audio of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, read in 21 different languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Esperanto, Korean, and Walloon."

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was ratified in 1948 by the United Nations General Assembly. It defines the fundamental rights of individuals, and exhorts all governments to protect these rights. The UN has translated the document into over three hundred languages and dialects. This audiobook includes readings in 21 languages, by LibriVox volunteers.

Link (Thanks, Hugh!)

Desperate Mousewives lays the racy dialog from a Desperate Housewives scene over a Mickey Mouse cartoon (both produced by the same company, Disney) -- the video mashup is hilarious and deeply weird, and it was produced by Flying Squid Studios--who created The Skeletor Show and Star Trek: Infinitive Split! redub serials. Link (Thanks, Jeremy!)

Slate delves into what it will take to repair the Picasso that billionaire goofball Steve Wynn put his elbow through:

The torn ends of the canvas can probably be lined up, and conservators can identify matching fibers on either side of the rip by inspecting them under a microscope. In general, you can expect the wefts in the fabric—that is, the crosswise yarns of the weave—to split at the site of the impact. The lengthwise warps tend to get stretched out, but they may not break.

Link (via Kottke)