Boing Boing reader David posted a Bit Torrent file of a cool educational comic book from 1949 called "Learn How Dagwood Splits the Atom" by Joe Musial. Dagwood plays the happy-go-lucky moron, while Mandrake the magician takes on the role of the all-knowing giver of wisdom. Link

Anthony Townsend, my colleague at Institute for the Future and the co-founder of the non-profit NYCwireless, has launched a new blog titled Blue Economy, about our future relationship with the planet's oceans. It's a fascinating topic and I look forward to the myriad threads Anthony uncovers with this research-as-blog. So far, he's posted about subjects as diverse as fish farming, tidal power, and diatoms as inspiration for engineers. From his description:

The world's oceans were the platform for the first great era of globalization over a century ago. While the 20th century was dominated by exploitation of the land and air, over the next few decades, a convergence of economic, climatological and technological forces will bring the oceans back to the forefront as a new frontier for human activity. From new sources of energy and nutritious food to limitless biodiversity and potential settlement sites the ocean is the last great unexploited frontier on earth. This blog is a window into that future, and seeks to encourage discussion about how humanity can create a future on and in the seas in ways that ensure economic and ecological sustainability.

Link

This advertisement appeared last week in Urdu-language newspapers in Pakistan. It apparently urges anyone to report any unregulated or uncontrolled nuclear isotopes, known as "orphan sources." According to Pakistani officials, no radioactive sources have been lost or stolen, and the ad is just meant to raise public awareness. From News@Nature:

Pakistan's Nuclear Regulatory Authority played down the significance of the ads. "No radioactive source has been stolen, lost or missed," spokesman Zaheer Ayub Baig told news@nature.com via e-mail. Baig says that the newspaper ads were simply meant to warn citizens about old medical and industrial sources that may have been lost before the founding of the nation a half-century ago. He adds that in coming weeks, advertisements will also appear in regional and English-language papers.

Link

My friend Roger Wood is a kick-ass sculptor who builds wild, steampunky assemblage clocks; I've written about him a bunch here. He sends out a daily newsletter featuring his latest creation -- today's knocked my socks off. Link

Media Rights Technology, a DRM crippleware vendor, has launched what may be the dumbest DMCA legal threat ever. They are threatening Adobe and Real with lawsuits for failing to buy their crummy technology. Forbes says that Media Rights Technology advanced the theory that since the DMCA makes it illegal to break DRM, companies with broken DRM have to buy someone else's DRM.

Well, it's a theory.

Media Rights Technologies (MRT) and BlueBeat.com have issued cease and desist letters to both companies and to Adobe Systems Inc (nasdaq: ADBE - news - people ) and Real Networks -- which produce the Adobe Flash Player and Real Player respectively -- for actively avoiding their X1 SeCure Recording Control, which they said is an effective copyright protection system.

MRT and Bluebeat said the failure to use an available copyright protection solution contravenes the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits the manufacture of any product or technology designed to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a copyrighted work or protects the rights of copyright owners.

They said a failure to comply with the cease and desist order could result in in a federal court injunction and/or the imposition of statutory damages of 200-2,500 usd per product distributed or sold.

Link (Thanks, Tom!)

A gamer has solved that insanely hard Mario level I blogged in April -- a level so hard it actually hurt my eyes to watch it. What's more, this video is a speed-run of that level in which the player solves it in two minutes! Link (Thanks, Anthony!)

Update: Clint sez, "The hosting site describes this video as: 'This is a tool-assisted speedrun of the probably most famous Super Mario Bros Hack.' Tool-assisted means that the player didn't play the game normally; the most common tool-assist slows the game down to a fraction of normal game speed, allowing for perfect jumps and a much more deliberate play than the intended 'jumpduckjumpjumprunjumpjump-ohno-ohno!' This is more like having a really powerful cheat code running while you play."

University of Hertfordshire psychologist Richard Wiseman has written a book called Quirkology, about the scientific study of strange human behavior. It's out now in the UK and hits shelves in September as a US edition. New Scientist has published Wiseman's list of his "eight favorite studies made in the pursuit of peculiar knowledge." I can't wait to read the whole book! From New Scientist:

In 1988, psychologist Fritz Strack of the University of Würzburg, Germany, asked two groups of people to judge how funny they found some cartoons. In one group, each person held a pencil between their teeth without it touching their lips, which forced a smile. The other group were asked to hold the pencil with their lips (not using their teeth), forcing a frown.

The results revealed that people experience the emotion associated with their expressions. Those with a forced smile felt happier, and found the cartoons funnier than those who were forced to frown...

Anthropologists and psychologists have long been interested in superstitions. One of the key categories of superstitious thinking is the "law of contagion", which says that when an object has been in contact with someone, it somehow acquires their "essence". Psychologist Paul Rozin and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania have investigated how common such thinking is today.

They asked people to rate how they would feel about wearing a nice, soft, blue jumper that had been freshly laundered - but previously worn by someone else. As they varied the fictitious previous wearers of the jumper, it became clear how strongly people follow the age-old belief in magical contagion.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the volunteers were unhappiest about wearing the jumper if they were told it had previously belonged to a serial killer. On the whole they would rather have worn a sweater that had been dropped in dog faeces and not washed - raising genuine health concerns - than a laundered sweater that had been worn by a mass murderer.

Even in the 21st century, we are far from being the rational creatures that we like to think we are, as a final part of the experiment made dismayingly clear. When asked to imagine that the laundered sweater had been worn by someone who had contracted HIV through a blood transfusion, most people once again said they wouldn't wear it.

Link to New Scientist, Link to pre-order the book from Amazon

I mentioned back in March that IDW comics is doing a series of six comics based on my short stories, with a Creative Commons-licensed collection at the end of the series. I've just gotten my first cover for the series, for my story Anda's Game, designed by kick-ass comics artist Sam Kieth. Man, that's h4wt, and the script, written by Dara Naraghi (I blogged his webcomics back in October), is fantastic. Link

In this tight little Socratic dialog, Chad Orzel explains many-worlds quantum theory to his dog:

"And if you were to eat steak at the computer, you'd probably drop some on the floor."

"I don't know about that..."

"Dude, I've seen you eat." Yes, the dog calls me "dude." There may be obedience classes in her future.

"All right, we'll allow the possibility."

"Therefore, it's possible that you dropped steak on the floor. And according to Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, that means that you did drop steak on the floor. Which means I just need to find it."

"Well, technically, what the Many Worlds interpreation says is that there's some branch of the unitarily evolving wavefunction of the universe in which I dropped steak on the floor."

Link (via Making Light)

Update: Kevin sez, "Bizzare fact. The Everett of "Many Worlds" is the father of Mr E off of the Eels (popular beat combo)." That's so cool. I love the Eels. Every single track off Daisies of the Galaxy is in my top-ranked playlist.

Instructables has a super-smart plan for turning a Carbonit Hane Solo action-man into a chocolate-bar mold. Link (Thanks, Chris!)

Update: Tyler sez, "I read your post about the Han Solo shaped chocolate bars, and it reminded me of another Instructables. My best friend made an Instructable on how to create a Han Solo 'En-Queso'd In Carbonite'."

This Victorian "pocket watch" is actually a cunningly disguised spy-camera:

The Lancaster Ladies Watch Camera was brought into Bonhams by a gentleman whose grandfather had owned it originally. He was a cabinetmaker at the Birmingham-based firm J. Lancaster & Son, probably working on the many wooden cameras sold by the company. The vendor, consigning several watches to one of Bonhams’ sales, noticed that among his collection was what looked like an ordinary nickel-plated pocket watch case when closed – but when he opened it he discovered that it actually contained a tiny camera inside.

Link

Today on the NPR program "Day to Day," the conclusion of a two-part series (part 1 here) I filed on "Mingering Mike," the imaginary soul superstar whose work is chronicled in a new book.

- - - - - -

LISTEN:
NPR: "The Search for Mingering Mike" Link to segment audio (Real/Win), and MP3s of two songs recorded 30 years ago by Mingering Mike, in his basement. Direct MP3 Link. Or, listen in the "Xeni Tech" podcast (subscribe via iTunes here). NPR "Xeni Tech" archives here.

- - - - - -

Excerpt of NPR transcript:

While rummaging through record bins at a flea market, vintage vinyl collector Dori Hadar found what looked like a vast trove of recordings by an R&B great from the late '60s and early '70s.

But a closer look revealed the whole thing was fake. They were all cardboard discs with hand-drawn grooves, inside elaborately illustrated covers.

Dori shared the cover art with fellow collectors on message boards at the "crate-digging" forums on Soul Strut. The fictitious soul superstar Mingering Mike became Internet-famous, and Dori made it his mission to track this mysterious artist down.

Dori works as a criminal investigator by day, so he used those skills to keep trying to locate whoever was behind all those obsessively crafted cardboard fantasy records.

He left word with one of Mike's relatives.

"I called my relatives," the man known as Mingering Mike now recalls, "And they just happened to say, 'Someone came and left their phone number.' So I called."

Mike was suspicious, but agreed to meet Dori and another record-collector friend.

"He and Frank came to the door and said, 'I have some items that belong to you,'" Mike remembers. "I said, 'My babies, you have my babies?'"

Link to full transcript.

Other voices you'll hear in this piece, music journalist Neil Strauss, and historian Gerald Early, of the University of Washington, St. Louis.

Book: Mingering Mike: The Amazing Career of an Imaginary Soul Superstar.

Mingering Mike online (home-recorded audio, and scans of some of his album covers):
website, Myspace.

Previously on BoingBoing:

a post from 2004 about "Mingering Mike,"

The Mystery of Mingering Mike: imaginary soul superstar (NPR "Xeni Tech")

Two years ago, I posted about my Parisian friend Nicole Locher's line of t-shirts for "perverts, degenerates, and nasty bitches." The screenprinted t-shirts available then, like the popular "Will Fuck For Shoes" design, was basically Nicole's beta test for what she envisioned at the time and has now made a reality.

From Nicole's bio:

Nicole recognized the amazing beauty found in the embroidery done on a turn of the century handkerchief lost in some grandma's drawer. She marveled at the technique and realized that embroidery done today was never of this quality. It became her mission to bring back the refinement of this embroidery style and add it to shirts that would be in fashion today. To counterbalance the elegance and antiquity of the embroidery, she adds the playful charm of a dirty saying embroidered into every shirt.

Link

Previously on BB:
• Will Fuck For Shoes Link

Kim says:

Recently I was at an airport that had a self-serve "Mailsafe Express" kiosk which (for a fee, of course) lets you safely divest yourself of potentially unsafe materials while ensuring you're eventually reunited with them.

Want your Bic lighter mailed back to you? That'll be $45.00, please.

Oh, and just in case the entire security process wasn't humiliating enough, a video camera embedded in the kiosk records the entire transaction for your "safety." (As if you hadn't just passed through a security check that x-rayed, metal-detected and spectrum-analyzed everything in your possession.)

This kiosk was located after the security checkpoint, which means by the time you encounter it you basically have no choice but to cough up the dough to use it, or surrender your contraband to the TSA.

Link

Robyn says: "I ran into this operating procedures manual for the monorail on some obscure Disney blog. It's wonderful... the best Disney manual I've yet seen. Very slick. The blog is also great." Link

Already a huge hit in the UK, The Dangerous Book for Boys, by Conn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden, is taking the US by storm. The first print run of 80,000 has been supplemented by a second order for 300,000 copies.

While the book is beautifully produced and entertaining, it really doesn't contain any risky projects that the title and nostalgic design suggest. I can't blame them -- the authors and publisher would open themselves up to lawsuits if they included potentially dangerous projects in the book.

The trouble is, an awful lot of exciting projects carry an element of risk. Things that explode, burn, fly, and make loud noises are great fun. Safety precautions are necessary whenever you experiment with anything that is capable of quickly releasing a lot of energy. Because many people don't bother with goggles, gloves, grounding, and other safety measures, today's book publishers are reluctant to publish books that have potentially unsafe projects in them.

But "dangerous" books are available, if you want them. Some are reprints of old books now in the public domain, others can be picked up used or downloaded on P2P networks, and some are still being published today by brave authors and publishers.

Here are a few of my favorites:

The American Boy's Handy Book: What to Do and How to Do It (1890)

Dangerous projects include: War kites with broken glass on the strings, mole-trapping techniques, hot air balloons with fireworks, blow guns, and a spring shot-gun ("Although the shot cast from the tube will have sufficient force to stun a small bird, it will not injure the specimen by making ugly holes in the skin and staining the feathers with blood.")

Almost 120 years old, The American Boy's Handy Book offers a glimpse of what life was like (or what boys of that era fantasized about) in the late 19th century. Children in those days wanted to emulate Lewis and Clarke, pioneers, trappers, and settlers -- people who could be airdropped naked into the wilderness with nothing but a buck knife and a coonskin cap, and six months later be whittling happily in a rocking chair on the front porch of their newly-built log cabin, a curl of smoke rising from the chimney, and a half dozen rabbits waiting to be collected from snares and added to the stewpot simmering over the fire.

The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments (1960)

Dangerous projects include: making chlorine, ammonia, hydrogen, and ethanol.

The book is long out of print, and used copies are very expensive (Amazon.com has used copies for over $100). Of course, in today's litigious environment, no major publisher would dare republish a book that had actual chemistry experiments in it, for fear getting sued. I have long wanted to own a copy of The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments. I sort of forgot about it, but recently a friend emailed me a page he had scanned from a copy he owns. It prompted me to search for a sub-$100 copy. I got lucky and found a $0 copy, thanks to BitTorrent. Here's a link to the torrent file for a nice scan of the 112 page book.

The book is an example of everything great about vintage children's science books. Once you lay your eyes on it, you will come to the sad realization that our society has slipped backwards in at least three important ways: 1. The writing quality in old kids' science books was better; 2. The design and illustration was more thoughtful and skillful; 3. Children in the old days were allowed and encouraged to experiment with mildly risky but extremely rewarding activities. Today's children, on the other hand, are mollycoddled to the point of turning them into unhappy ignoramuses.

Whoosh Boom Splat: The Garage Warrior's Guide to Building Projectile Shooters (2007) and Backyard Ballistics (2001), by William Gurstelle

Dangerous projects include: potato cannons, catapults, fire kites, and tennis ball mortars.

William Gurstelle is a friend of mine, and a contributing editor to MAKE magazine. (Here's a funny video he made to promote Whoosh Boom Splat). Recently, MAKE magazine decided to kill a story because we deemed the project (a high-voltage "lifter") to be unsafe. MAKE invited its technical advisory board to weigh in on the subject of safety, and William's comments are worth excerpting here:

This is a question — about publishing information that could hurt, injure, or kill if misunderstood — that I've spent a long time considering.

Several years ago I published a book called Backyard Ballistics which explained, among other things, how to build a device that shoots projectiles at high velocities. Am I worried that someone might goof up and get hurt? Of course. Is that a reason not to publish information -— that someone, anyone could make a mistake?

True story: a couple of years ago, a young adult in Texas built a spud gun and went out in the swamp. He spent all day collecting bullfrogs, tossing them down the barrel of his spud gun and shooting them into froggy goo on the other side of the swamp. But on the last occasion, his gun misfired. Against every warning and caveat possible, he looked down the barrel of the gun, and as you probably guessed, took a fair-sized bullfrog between the eyes with unfortunate results. (Google it for details.)

Point is, just because someone could make a mistake with the information you're providing, it doesn't mean the magazine is liable, morally or legally. Unless it's incorrect.

But if the info is correct, that is, it has been thoroughly vetted, can be clearly explained, and contains plenty of warnings of the magnitude of the consequences of error, well then, I say go for it. I don't know the first thing about high-voltage power supplies, so I can't tell how complete the MAKE explanation is, but if complete and thorough information can be provided, then go for it. Nanny State be damned.

Legal disclaimer: But as Dennis Miller says, that's just my opinion; I could be wrong.

Even if you aren't planning on tackling the projects in these books, they make for interesting reading.

Reader comment:

Richard says: "Just read your boingboing post and felt you should include this book: Manual Of Formulas; Recipes, Methods and Secret Processes, if not in your post, at least in your collection, originally published by Popular Science Magazine Publishing Co in 1932. It has since been republished and is an entertaining read. Has things like illuminous paint recipes/ make up / fireworks/ floor polishes etc. Huge disclaimer when it was republished given that it was a different time and health and safety was not high on the priority list."

Cheap Chic Weddings is holding its annual toilet paper wedding-dress competition -- to win, you make the nicest possible wedding dress using nothing more than TP, glue and tape. Last year's winners are pretty kick-ass. Link (via Craft)

Daniel from Metroblogging Bangkok says,

Thailand's National Legislative Assembly approved a controversial law this week which could seriously effect how Thailand's internet users use the web. The main effect of the bill is to outlaw any attempt at bypassing government censors to access any of the thousands of sites that have been censored due to their moral or political purposes.

This single law could put Thailand in the same category as China and Burma with regards to censorship and the lack of a democratic right for free speech. (...)

This was on the cards but I was shocked at the speed it was passed.

This has SERIOUS consequences for anyone using the internet, blogging or posting anything "someone" deems offensive. To be honest it makes the life of a blogger impossible now, something I always feared.

Link. There's also an online petition to block the new law. (Thanks, Sean Bonner)

Douglips sez, "Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories have built a 3D printer that works in sugar, but can also be used to do dot-matrix toasting. It's going to be at the Maker Faire, and boy does it kick all kinds of ass."

It certainly does. The Evil Mad Scientists have some key realizations about making junkfood in a fab: sugar is cheap, precision isn't important, and hot air guns are cheaper fusers than lasers. This looks totally build-able.

Our design goals were (1) a low cost design leveraging recycled components (2) large printable volume emphasized over high resolution, and (3) ability to use low-cost printing media including granulated sugar. We are extremely pleased to be able to report that it has been a success: Our three dimensional fabricator is now fully operational and we have used it to print several large, low-resolution, objects out of pure sugar.

Link (Thanks, Douglips!)

According to the Seattle Times, police were called to a local theater after someone had discovered a dead fawn dressed in baby clothes.

The outfit included an infant sleeper and a bib that read, "You think I'm cute? You should see my aunt."

Link (Thanks, Biotic!)

Following up on yesterday's BB post about David McRaney's sociological analysis of LOLcats, image macros, and invisible cheezborgahs, Internet knowitall Simon Spero says:

McRaney's recent article [McRaney 2007],whilst interesting from the syntactics perspective, fails to cite the relevant literature, and as a result does not satisfactorily align his work to the central research questions within the field.

The methodology applied in [Spero 2007] uses a Description Logic approach to the begin the process of unifying the emergent ontology of lolcats with the rules of cuteness heuristically determined in Frost's definitive and ongoing survey [Frost 2005].

Our study revealed several strengths and weaknesses inherent in a pure Description Logic approach. Although it was trivial to dervive a solution to the lolcat/cheezeburger hypothesis (lolcat can has multiple cheezeburger), other classifications are not expressible without the use of more powerful formalisms.

For example, due to monotonicity constraints, it is not possible to encode the knowledge that, whilst by by default things that look like Hitler are not cute, a kitten that looked like hitler, wrapped in a burrito, with its paw up, might be a CuteThing. Also, without the use of higher order reasoning capabilities, it is non-trivial to describe the set of things accompanied by smaller versions of themselves.

[McRaney 2007] David McRaney, L337 Katz0rz, 1 J. Am Soc. Macrologists available at [Link] (2007)

[Spero 2007] Simon Spero, Loltology - I saw ur mom on teh sermantic webz, 1 LJ. Am. Lolbrarian. Assoc (2007) available at [Link].

[Frost 2007] Meg Frost, The Rules of Cuteness, J Cuteology (2005-2007, ongoing) available at [Link]

Previousleh on BB:

Pedantic overanalyzer sucks all the fun out of LOLcats

LOLtrek

Oh, how I love the gebril macros!

Massive cache of kittah pix (aka LOLcats, cat macros)

This cool vintage fly buckle and belt from the '60s or '70s is up for auction on eBay. Starting bid is just $6.95.
Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne Rauback!)

ThinkGeek has a great take on the AACS number censorship thing -- they've made a t-shirt that shows all the hex values in sequence leading up to the AACS key, a blank line labelled [redacted] and then all the numbers following from it. Link (Thanks, David!)

Jeff Hoke's Museum of Lost Wonder probably would have eaten my life if someone had given me a copy when I was 15 or so. It's a hard-to-describe mixture of science, history, and craft book that invites the reader to construct a series of papercraft models as part of the construction of a personal "cabinet of wonders" mated with a "memory palace." The text is grouped into chapters (which are "halls" in the museum/memory palace) derived from alchemy, and it's got that arch, McSweeney's feel of olde tyme science. But there's precious little mysticism here -- instead, readers are shown how creation myths and astrological signs were created and are invited to create their own (there's even a supplied worksheet). The message is clear: mysticism is a game that we play with ourselves, not a revealed truth.

The design of the book is gorgeous, lovely line-art illustrations and papercraft models that look to be a hell of a lot of fun to assemble. I read this book in bed, but I kept wanting to get up and clear the dining room table to glue together its models. Link

Tyler sez, "The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence announced today a $400,000 Online Matching Challenge, backed by PayPal Co-Founder and Former CEO Peter Thiel, to fund their long-term research program to develop safe, stable self-improving systems. They also released a 10-minute video, featuring interviews with Barney Pell, Aubrey de Grey, Christine Peterson, and others." Link (Thanks, Tyler)

Last year, I spoke at Ray Kurzweil's Singularity Summit at Stanford, a day-long event about the future of technology and the possibility of a coming Singularity. There were some killer speakers (including my hero Douglas R "Godel, Escher, Bach" Hofstadter).

The technological Singularity -- what Ken Macleod called "The Rapture of the Nerds" -- is the moment at which it is possible to make a computer that is as smart as a human, and then smarter. The idea is that we will irrevocably change as a species at that moment.

The Singularity Institute has put up full videos and audio from the Summit now -- there's some great stuff here. Link (Thanks, Tyler!)

Today's Wired News carries a frank interview with Mark Klein, the AT&T whistle-blower who heroically outed his employer for helping the National Security Agency to illegally wiretap every Internet connection in America. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing AT&T using his information, and the court procedure is a lever for discovering what the NSA was up to. Klein literally got fed up with the illegal activity in his workplace and walked into the EFF offices one day and told them what he knew.

What got me back interested was The New York Times' story in December 2005. (Editor's note: The Times reported that the government had been secretly monitoring Americans' phone calls and e-mails that crossed the nation's border since shortly after 9/11 without getting approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA.)

The president admitted the program existed, but only admitted that part which had been exposed -- and he avoided talking about the part that wasn't, which was the internet.

The administration sent officials out to defend the program, including (Vice President) Dick Cheney, and they said they didn't think they had to obey FISA.... This was the defense of the indefensible. So I decided if they are going to perpetuate this fraud then I'm going to blow their cover.

Link