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previously on generator zen:
generator zen 2005
generator zen 2003.2
generator zen 2003.1

Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!)

This beautiful piece of original Robert Crumb artwork is on eBay right with a Buy It Now price of $14,500. I loved it before I even noticed that one of the robot's noises is "Boing!" From the item description:

This is original art for an unused cover for an unspecified issue of Inkling. The art is undated, but was probably done in the late '60s, as Mr. Natural, who appears in the piece, wasn't created until 1967. The artwork measures 8" x 10.5" and has been tastefully matted and framed to an overall size of 11.5" x 14".

Link

Ashtray at Carmen Hotel in Granada, Spain offers a mixed message. Link

Enter some nouns, adjectives, and other stuff into a text form on this website, and you get an instant BoingBoing post! Don't miss the extra bonus link at the end, for some palate-cleansing unicorn goodness by "Snark Frankenfurter." I think they really nailed the BoingBoing spirit. It's almost as good as an open source bluetooth dildo website woven by Bigfoot that gets banned by internet censors in China. ALMOST. Link. (thanks, Katie)

RayK says

In an experiment, a team from MIT were able to power a 60W light bulb from two meters away. Calling their demonstration 'WiTricity,' the researchers believe that a system is possible that could send electricity to your battery powered devices within a room sized space.

It's a Tesla-dream come true.

WiTricity is based on using coupled resonant objects. Two resonant objects of the same resonant frequency tend to exchange energy efficiently, while interacting weakly with extraneous off-resonant objects. A child on a swing is a good example of this. A swing is a type of mechanical resonance, so only when the child pumps her legs at the natural frequency of the swing is she able to impart substantial energy. Another example involves acoustic resonances: Imagine a room with 100 identical wine glasses, each filled with wine up to a different level, so they all have different resonant frequencies. If an opera singer sings a sufficiently loud single note inside the room, a glass of the corresponding frequency might accumulate sufficient energy to even explode, while not influencing the other glasses. In any system of coupled resonators there often exists a so-called “strongly coupled” regime of operation. If one ensures to operate in that regime in a given system, the energy transfer can be very efficient.

Link

The medical journal The Lancet reports on the case of a hospitalized man who was discovered to have green blood.

"It was sort of a green-black. … Like an avocado skin maybe," said the patient's doctor, Dr. Alana Flexman.

The patient may have had a condition called sulfhemoglobin, caused by a drug interaction that makes sulphur bind to red blood cells, preventing oxygen from binding. Link to CBC article loaded with Mr. Spock jokes about the incident

The Graffiti Research Lab, creators of the LED throwie and inspiration for the mooninite signs that destroyed the city of Boston in January, went to Barcelona with their amazing laser guided graffiti project system. Here's a video of the event, which has a good shot of the pedal-powered projection system. Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Graffiti Research Labs high-power projection system
• Graffiti Research Lab's video of Maker Faire
• Mind blowing video of laser-guided graffiti system
• LED ad campaign ignites terrorism scare in Boston
• Make cheap magnetic LEDs for fun graffiti projects

I just finished Christopher Noxon's "Rejuvenile: Kickball, Cartoons, Cupcakes, and the Reinvention of the American Grown-up," a snappy little book about the perpetual childhood of Transformer toys, adult skateboarding, and "Playalong Parenting."

Noxon wants to know why America's adults increasingly dress up as Klingons, collect dolls and action figures, participate in urban pillowfights, play RPGs (fantasy and massively multiplayer), participate in crafts, read comics, and hang out on the carpet with the kids and the legos instead of plopping the kids into a playpen and then settling in with a martooni.

He tracks the early history of the "rejuvenile" movement back to Lord Baden-Powell's pitch to potential Scout-masters to become "boy-men" in the woods with their young charges, through boomer entitlement, and to a new generation who, driven by a mad housing market and a lunatic job-market, find themselves holding off on kids and marriage through their thirties.

Written as a series of fun case-studies of grown-ups who won't grow up (a woman who attained brief fame by skipping everywhere she went, a man who tried unsuccessfully to get his son to play with his Star Wars action figures) in some way or another, Rejuvenile is a thoroughly affectionate look at the breaking down of the barriers between adulthood and kidhood.

I was utterly charmed. Here was a book that pulled together a ton of diverse threads -- friends who spend their weekends at American Coaster Enthusiast events, haunting eBay auctions for access to the lost toys of my boyhood, and that floating D&D game I keep trying to squeeze into my schedule.

Noxon's style is breezy and his touch is light, but he doesn't shrink from the harder questions of protracted adolescence. If your desk is covered in vinyl toys and Schoolhouse Rock nodders, this book will probably mean a lot to you. Link

Dot-com exuberance from June, 1939: Mechanix Illustrated's ecstatic article, "X-Ray Solves the Secret of Life!"

The X-ray is more than the tool of the surgeon. It is a force in the change of civilization. So great a force is it in changing of sex, the reduction of infection, radio and telephone, and a score of other fields that scientists are beginning to wonder if it is not the single greatest force shaping our development toward the Utopia towards which all scientific achievement points.

The story of the X-ray of today and tomorrow is a fabulous story of amazing accomplishment, more thrilling than the wildest tale of incredible adventures ever lived by a human being.

Link

Tetris fridge magnets -- it was inevitable! Link (via Shiny Shiny)

La Luz de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles is currently showing work by incredible hot rod cartoonist Ed "Big Daddy" Roth (1932-2001). The ink-on-board artworks were created for t-shirt and decal designs. This is a rare opportunity to see these original large illustrations in person. You can even take one home with you if you've got the scratch--$20k or so. From the online gallery:

Ed “Big Daddy” Roth did what he did best. He followed his heart & became a pied piper to loads of weird kids in the 60's that turned into weird adults in the 80's & 90's. Roth created "weirdo" characters for fun. People loved these drawings so Roth painted 'em on t-shirts. He became a grease-monkey Andy Warhol, employing incredible artists like Ed Newton & Robert Williams to do his art for him, which he signed and mass produced. Like Warhol, he fathered an art movement; lowbrow/pop-surrealism, quite similar in many ways to the pop-art movement. In recent years Roth has become the Warhol of a new generation, tuned in by his star pupil, Robert Williams. Roth, no longer in the underground, (though he is sadly located there now) is a rock star in his own right. See these unbelievably rare lowbrow pop art hieroglyphics in person, as you will probably never see the original artwork for these disposable masterpieces ever again.”

Link to La Luz de Jesus online gallery, Link to Juxtapoz photos of the opening

Hobo illustrator and LOLcats historian Ape Lad asks, "I live 55 miles West of Cape Canaveral, and a little over an hour after the launch, these clouds could be seen over Orlando. Could they be related to the launch?"

Previously on BoingBoing:

Space Shuttle Atlantis, mission STS-117, lifts off

Reader comments: Short answer, yes the clouds are directly related to the shuttle launch. They are also simulacra!

Jay Schomer sent in this upside-down version of the same photo, and was one of many to point out that it really does kinda looks like a flying angel when you look at it in that direction. Turn it sideways, and you see the face of Jesus in a tortilla.

Sam Stein was among the many readers who pointed us to this BBC News article, which includes this photo and a caption indicating it was related to the Shuttle launch.

Robotech_Master says,

Regarding Ape Lad's clouds, I think this passage from Fallen Angels chapter 21 explains it:

"Remember the vapor trail, sprawled all over the sky? They used to call that 'frozen lightning,' the Germans did, I mean. It's in Willy Ley's books," Bailey said. "In the thirties they thought their rockets were going wild-—"

"It's just stratospheric winds blowing the vapor trail around," Mike Glider said, sticking his head into camera view. Umber scowled.

"Yeah, but it looks like something spun by a spider on LSD. The Green bigshot cop, Moorkith, he saw the frozen lightning and thought the Phoenix must have crashed. He was searching the desert for Phoenix while the whole gang drove away."

Zan and many others wrote in to say,

According to Spaceflight Now, the clouds are in fact exhaust from the space shuttle launch. See their dramatic image halfway down the page.

chris myers says,

Space shuttle contrails confirmed in this Flickr set: Link.

Lars Peterson says,

Here in SoCal we occasionally get crazy cloud formations similar to those noticed by the LOLcats guy down in Florida. The formations (like the one in the linked photo) are the result of rocket launches at Vandenberg AFB, which is up the coast beyond Santa Barbara. So it seems likely those clouds are connected to the Shuttle launch.

Here is one image, and more Vandenberg launch photos (including "the classic 'Illuminated Sperm Cell' as the rocket flys into direct sunlight") and info here. (I'm not connected to that site; it's just the result of a quick google search).

Thanks to BB reader Eric Hartwell, too -- he points us to more confirmation, and a related set of images, at NASA: Link.

Link to NASA coverage, here's Space.com's, here's John Schwartz at the New York Times before liftoff, and here's an AP item. When you look up in the sky and think of the STS-117 crew, Just remember what they're wearin' under those suits!

wallpaper from the 70s

extratapete

wall candy arts

wallter

wonderful graffiti

Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!) ( posted from Guatemala / Xeni )

Skytyping is a form of skywriting that looks like the work of God's dot-matrix printer. It may not be new, but I've never seen it before and neither had BB reader Eric Eberhardt who noticed an example over LA recently and submitted the link. Eric says, "The neat thing was, you couldn't even see the planes, so it looked like message was writing itself!" From The Skytypers Web site:

The Skytyping process utilizes five airplanes that fly abreast, 250-feet apart and "type" up to 30 character messages in a dot-matrix-like pattern. When Skytyping, the airplanes create messages in the sky that are 5 miles long, as tall as the Empire State Building and can be seen for 15 miles in any direction or nearly 400 square miles.

Link

Previously on BB:
• Secrets of contrails Link
• Religious skywriter tags Epcot Link

Artist Rosemarie Fiore converted an amusement park ride called The Scrambler into a giant drawing machine. The specially-outfitted Good-Time Mix Machine produces huge geometric paintings that resemble the output of a Spirograph.

From the project description:

I connected a gas generator and air compressor to buckets of paint and secured them into the seats of a Scrambler amusement park ride. Once the ride was in motion, paint sprayed out of the benches onto vinyl tarps placed underneath. The result is a series of enormous hypocycloid designs which recorded the hidden patterns created by the ride as it turned.

Link to project page, Link to video (via Information Aesthetics, thanks Mike Love!)

I've launched a new blog to accompany my new book Rule the Web: How To Do Anything and Everything on the Internet -- Better, Faster, Easier.

Like the book, the blog will be a guide to cool ways to use the Internet to make your life better. It’s not a comprehensive list of every website out there — instead, it shows you how to enhance different areas of your life — your creativity, work, education, travel, health, leisure, and so on.

My editor and pal, David Moldawer will also contribute to the blog. In the coming weeks, we'll offer a variety of online-based tips that we hope you'll find useful. I'm also doing a weekly live call-in podcast and will soon launch a wiki and run screencasts. Link

A few years ago, someone knocked my mailbox off its post, and I went around taking photos of fortified mailboxes around my neighborhood (Part 1, Part 2).

Today, Linda F. alerted me to her new blog, "Your Ugly Mailbox," which sports photos and snarky comments about tacky mailboxes. It's gone on my must-read list. Link

Here's a quick video tutorial for turning your TV display into a horizontal stripe of dancing colors. Link (Via Good Experience)

What does a family of four in North Carolina eat in a week? How about in Cuernavaca? Or Konstancin-Jeziorna? Several years ago, photographer Peter Menzel and journalist Faith D'Alusio--creators of the fantastic Robo sapiens book--traveled the world documenting what 30 families in 24 countries eat in a week. (Seen here, the Ayme family of Tingo, who spend $31.55 on food in a week.) In 2005, Menzel and D'Alusio published Hungry Planet: What The World Eats, but Time has just now put a selection of the photos online. As interesting as how much each family spends on food are the variations in diet. Link to the photo essay, Link to buy Hungry Planet (Thanks, Eric Paulos!)

Here's a pretty damned simple ice-cream recipe: combine ingredients in a baggie. Fill a bigger baggie with ice, salt and the baggie of ingredients. Shake for five minutes. Ice cream. Who knew?

1. Fill the large bag half full of ice, and add the rock salt. Seal the bag.
2. Put milk, vanilla, and sugar into the small bag, and seal it.
3. Place the small bag inside the large one and seal again carefully.
4. Shake until mixture is ice cream, about 5 minutes.
5. Wipe off top of small bag, then open carefully and enjoy!

Link (via Make)

Update: Mapletree7 sez, "An even cooler way to make ice cream - especially on a hot day with a passsel of kids - is to put the baggie with the ice cream ingredients inside a small can, and then put that can and the ice and salt in a coffee can. Tape the lid on securely and ask the kids to kick it around the back yard."

Update 2: Ryan sez, "Here's a soccer-ball-shaped thing: put all the ingredients in, kids kick it around for a 15-20 mins."

Director Robert Rodriguez has produced a series of short movies called "Ten-minute cooking school" that explain how to cook using cut-up footage from his movies. This one is for "Sin City Breakfast Tacos" -- which seem delicious indeed. Link (via Waxy)

Steal This Film, a great documentary on the Swedish "pro-piracy" movement and The Pirate Bay, is in production for its second sequence, and they want clips of you (and you and you) expressing your feelings about the entertainment industry:

STEAL THIS FILM II (codename: Dissolving Fortress) is currently in production at a secret bunker location Berlin. We're very excited about its forthcoming release. But we need you to help us complete it. Tbe task is simple: take a few minutes, turn on your webcam and microphone, and record your message to the intellectual property industries.

Express yourself to the full extent of your capabilities, using costume, mask or avatar, from Second Life or 'real' life, whether you're young or old, drunk or sober — you are a Peer and we want to hear from you. Use a Camcorder, a Webcam or a Microphone — record the statement in the best quality you can. There is no minimum quality but we'd appreciate you getting us the best recordings you can. (If you don't have software for recording video, you can use YouTube's help -- please tag it "STFII" and mail us the link: peers@stealthisfilm.com).

Link

See also: Steal This Movie: documentary on Swedish piracy movement

The city council of Glasgow is fighting illegal handbills with science: they're paying city workers to go around and stick "cancelled" stickers on all the illegal gig posters put up around town.

Staff who patrol the city every working day spotting new posters and marking them are now a central part of the council's £100,000 a year war on flyposting.

And other workers have been issued with "cancelled" stickers which make it clear the ad has been banned by the council.

And they have already had an impact on some rogue promoters who have been inundated with complaints from music fans.

People who have bought tickets to some of this summers big gigs have complained, thinking that an event, rather than the advert, had been cancelled.
Link (Thanks, Jono!)

(Photo thumbnail ganked from a larger pic credited to Jamie Simpson)

Wired News has a great gallery of the free crap on offer at the American Psychiatric Association's annual conference in San Diego, including this leather-bound, personally engraved Provigil journal given to doctors who completed short quizzes. Link

Richard Charkin, the CEO of Macmillan USA Chief Executive of Macmillan and owner of Nature Publishing Group -- a division of Holtzbrinck, the same company that owns my publisher, Tor -- disgraced himself this week at BookExpo America in NYC. He walked up to Google's booth and stole two of their laptops, then later returned them, saying that he'd done it because there wasn't any sign telling him not to steal them.

This was intended as trenchant commentary on Google's book-scanning project, a generally laudable effort to scan and index all the books ever published, including huge dark-matter of books that are out-of-print with no clear rightsholders.

Pat Schroeder and the American Association of Publishers have sued Google over this, saying that Google shouldn't be allowed to index these out-of-print books (the majority of books published) unless they take on the Sisyphean task of figuring out who controls the copyright to all of them and then get permission to make an index.

Google makes indexes of every page on the Internet without ascertaining who their copyright belongs to, without asking permission. If your page is on the public Internet, Google will index it. The publishers argue that books shouldn't be indexable without explicit permission.

Larry Lessig has posted a great rebuttal to the idea that stealing laptops is the moral equivalent of indexing books -- a must-read if you want to understand exactly why Charkin's stunt was so mind-numbingly wrong-headed.

(3) If the computer was not sitting at a market booth, but instead was in a trash dump (like, for example, the publishers out of print book list), or on a field, lost to everyone, then that fits the category of property that Google is dealing with. But again, Google doesn’t take possession of the property in any way that interferes with anyone else taking possession of the property. The publisher, for example, is perfectly free to decide to publish the book again. Instead, in this case, what Google does is more like posting an advertisement — “lost computer, here it is, is it yours?”

(4) Or again, imagine the computer was left after the conference. No easy way to identify who the owner was. No number to call. In that case, what would the “head honcho’s,” or anyone’s rights be? Well depending upon local law, the basic rule is finders keepers, loser weepers. There might be an obligation to advertise. There might be an obligation to turn the property over to some entity that holds it for some period of time. But after that time, the property would go to the “head honcho” — totally free of any obligation to Google. Compare copyright law: where the property can be lost for almost a century, and no one (according to the publishers at least) has any right to do anything with it. Once an orphan, the law of copyright says, you must be an orphan. No one is permitted to even help advertise your status through a technique like search engine.

(5) Or again, imagine the computer was a bank account in New York. And imagine, the bank lost track of the owner of the account. After 5 years, the money is forfeited to the state. Compare copyright: in New York state, a sound recording could be 100 years old, but no one has any freedom with respect to that sound recording unless the copyright owner can be discovered.

Link

XKCD, the great nerdy comic strip, is in fine form today, with a danceable twist on "Talkin' 'Bout My Generation." Link

See also:
Where LOLCats come from
Geeky comic strip uses Cory as the punchline
Funny map of online communities in the style of a D&D map
Nerd humor about Katamari Damacy
Ironic Internet malapropism grid
Geeky comic about chess and roller-coasters
Sarcastic comic about computational linguistics (and emo kids)
Pi joke

A teacher in Virginia accidentally exposed a room full of fourth-graders to explicit pornographic images that appeared on an educational videotape:

About 20 students saw about 10 seconds of the pornography before a teacher sprinted across the room to turn off the television, said Ryan Edwards, a spokesman for the Bedford County schools, east of Roanoke. "The children and the teacher were completely shocked," Edwards said.

The offending clip appeared after the credits of a video called Tessellations that was produced in 2003 by Teachers Video Co., said Mark Flemming, communications director for School Specialty Inc., the Greenville, Wis., parent company of Teachers Video. (...) The Bedford schools had the tape for four years and no one had ever played the video past the credits."

Link. Lucky for the teacher involved, authorities in this case aren't behaving as stupidly as those in the unfortunate case of Julie Amero. Previous BoingBoing posts about that story here. (Thanks, Grayson)

Reader comment: Michael Kopp says,

I work for an educational publisher and we had this happen with one of our video titles a few years back. Fortunately we caught it before it shipped. Based on what the (very apologetic) firm responsible told us, I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often. They explained that a lot of their revenue, and the revenue for many video duplication outfits, comes from the porn industry. (They may have been something of a bottom feeder, though, as I doubt this is true industry-wide.) Duplicators reuse tapes to save money, and though they are supposed to erase these tapes instead of just recording over them, that obviously doesn't always happen. Needless to say, we found another company to dupe our videos.

The switch to DVDs might have taken care of this. A lot of schools still use VHS, though, and given their lack of funding may continue to do so for a long time. So if you're a teacher using VHS, or anyone with cheap VHS tapes, you might fast forward past the credits and see what you can find.

10 Zen Monkeys has published a very entertaining interview with Justin Kan of Justin.TV, transcribed from an episode of The RU Sirius Show. BB pal Jamais Cascio participated in the discussion, which covers surveillance implications, pornographic possibilities, and potential copyright problems as Justin's one-man show transitions into a network and a franchise.

Photo by Scott Beale

JEFF: Isn't there going to be a big scandal for your franchise when the first person starts broadcasting themselves naked or having sex or something that's considered obscene? How do you regulate that?

RU: I thought that was the idea! (laughter)

JUSTIN: Justin.tv has been R-rated at best, so far.

JEFF: But isn't that going to be a problem? It will probably become some kind of a free speech issue. You'd have to force people through some channel where whatever they're going to be webcasting -- it's okay. Because otherwise, anybody can just load up their browser and watch people having sex!

JUSTIN: Well they can already do that. Just not on justin.tv!

JEFF: You're going to make it a lot easier...

RU: So whatever people are going to do with their Justin franchises is OK to you?

JUSTIN: Well honesty, justin.tv shouldn't be a platform for the (sort of) "bad stuff" out there on the internet. Whether it's hate speech or obscenities of whatever. So we'll almost definitely do some censorship. If someone's using their channel to broadcast themselves committing a crime – well, that's not something we want to promote. You know? We would definitely shut that down.

Link

a Boing Boing reader says: "'Lie' is a group of robotic cow tongues by Doo Sung Yoo. This is another example from his series about the relationships between biological objects and machines." Enjoy the video! Link

Jim Munroe sez, "Nanotech is going to be able to do all that and more according to the third episode of INFEST WISELY, a lo-fi sci-fi video podcast. 'Early Adopter' follows the story of a voice actress after she ingests a beta version of a new, chewable technology. Is it just the stress of her disintegrating relationship or is the EyeSee application a little... buggy?"

I've been following this "low-fi sci-fi" video podcast for a month now and while the first couple episodes didn't move me much, the last couple have been killer. The production values keep getting better, too. Link (Thanks, Jim!)

Wellington Grey -- a British physics teacher whose wonderful comic flowcharts are often featured here on Boing Boing -- is fed up with the quality of physics education in the UK. He's written a scathing open letter to the Board of Education detailing his view of the crisis in British physics.

On topics that are covered by the specification, the exam board has answers that indicate a lack of knowledge on the writer’s part. One questions asks `why would radio stations broadcast digital signals rather than analogue signals?’ An acceptable answer is:

* Can be processed by computer / ipod [sic]

Aside from the stupidity of the answer, (iPods, at the time of this writing, don’t have radio turners and computers can process analogue signals) writing the mark scheme in this way is thoughtless, as teachers can only give marks that exactly match its language. So does the pupil get the mark if they mention any other mp3 player? Technically, no. Wikipedia currently lists 63 different players. Is it safe to assume that the examiner will be familiar with all of them? Doubtful.

Link (Thanks, Wellington!)

See also:
Science and faith: two flowcharts
Slashdot: the flowchart
W.W.G.W.B.D.? flow chart

Matt sez, "Here's a surreal clip from an old Soviet propaganda film 'reenacting' Stalin's arrival in Berlin to his loving masses. The whole thing is in Russian, but you don't have to understand the language to know what's going on here. 'LONG LIVE STALIN!!!'" Link (Thanks, Matt!)

Update: ArtilleryMagazine writes, "The ironic thing is, Stalin never visited Berlin. He said upon screening of the film, that it was so beautiful, and he wished he had gone."

Air & Space Magazine tells the story of condensation trails, or contrails, the white streams of ice crystals generated by airplanes flying at high altitudes. From the article:

They are created by airplanes flying at high altitudes, where the air is below –38 degrees Fahrenheit. Exhaust from airplane engines contains water vapor as well as other gases and particles of soot and metal. When the exhaust is expelled into and mixes with the cold air, the water vapor condenses into droplets, which instantly freeze into tiny ice crystals...

It’s not only jets that make contrails; piston aircraft do too. So do rockets. So, apparently, do birds. “I have heard of wild geese leaving vapor trails high over the Canadian Rockies,” Guy Murchie wrote in his book Song of the Sky. A goose exhaling warm, moist air into –38-degree air could produce a contrail, Minnis allows, although “it would certainly be a small one..."

There are those who consider contrails to be downright sinister: noxious chemicals sprayed from aircraft to sicken populations and alter weather patterns, according to conspiracy theorists. The claims seem to rest on the notion that thin, short-lived contrails may consist of ice crystals, but the thicker, long-lived ones are not. In reality, the expanded lines are merely contrails that have evolved.

Link

Previously on BB:
• Airplane exhaust scars Link

UPDATE: Kate Green writes:

Turns out that contrails act like artificial cirrus clouds, and their presence actually affects regional temperatures. Like cirrus clouds, they cool the earth during the day by blocking out sunlight and warm the earth at night by trapping heat. A Penn State researcher determined contrails make a difference of about 2 degrees after the attacks on September 11, 2001 when planes were grounded; for the first time he was able to directly compare temperatures logged in the presence of contrails against temperatures collected in contrail-free skies. I wrote an article about it here.

Pamela Low, who created the flavored coating of Cap'n Crunch cereal, died on Friday at age 79. After graduating in 1951 from the University of New Hampshire with a microbiology degree, she took a job as a flavorist at Arthur D. Little. The Cap'n Crunch flavor was inspired by a treat made by her grandmother.

"Grandma would make this concoction with rice and the sauce that she had; it was a combination of brown sugar and butter," Ms. Low's brother William of Westerville, Ohio, said with a chuckle. "It tasted good, obviously. They'd put it over the rice and eat it as a kind of a treat on Sundays..."

Taking a job at Arthur D. Little (in the early 1950s), she became a flavorist, a scientific connoisseur of the artificial tastes that tempt consumers to return for more. She tinkered with flavors of products such as Almond Joy and Mounds, but her biggest achievement came when Quaker Oats developed a new cereal.

"I developed the flavoring, the coating," she told UNH Magazine in 2002.

Link (Thanks, COOP!)

UPDATE: BB pal Jim Leftwich provides us with this fascinating selection of informative links:

Seeing the obituary for the creator of Cap'n Crunch's flavor coating, I couldn't help notice that poor Cap'n Crunch has unfortunately undergone the same downgrade makeover that so many packaging characters have fallen prey to. Mark has pointed this out numerous times before (remember the poor Trix rabbit?).

Or maybe the Cap'n's got himself a meth lab down in the Guppy's hold, because he now appears to be either tweaking or criminally insane. Link, Link, Link, Link

I found one old black and white photo of the original Jay Ward Cap'n, which showed that he originally had sort of cool heavy-lidded Ellen Feiss eyes! Link

Another couple of earlier Cap'ns: Link and Link

Another good archive from tvparty.com: Link

Including some vintage RealPlayer commercials: Link, Link, Link, Link

In searching for some of the old vintage designs, I also came across some great old Ray Patin character studies on Dan Goodsell's Flickr site: Link

MIT researchers report the identification of a mechanism in the brain that's tied to the experience of déjà vu, French for "seen already." The neuroscientists studied how subregions of the hippocampus--a part of the brain responsible for creating memories--contribute to our ability to differentiate between distinct places that are very similar. To conduct their study, the scientists observed the behavior of genetically-engineered mice in similar chambers, one with a floor that could shock them. (Yeeowch!) From the MIT News Office:

Researchers believe that a set of neurons called place cells fire to provide a sort of blueprint for any new space we encounter. The next time we see the space, those same neurons fire. Thus we know when we've been somewhere before and don't have to relearn our way around familiar turf.

But if we enter a space very similar to one we have seen before, a new but overlapping set of neurons creates the blueprint. When there is enough overlap between the two sets, we experience an eerie feeling of déjà vu--a French phrase that literally means, "already seen."

Link

Previously on BB:
• Chronic Deja Vu Link
• Deja Vu in Scientific American Mind Deja Vu in Scientific American Mind Link

The terrific Smith Magazine just published Chapter 4 of its webcomic about the New Orleans disaster, called A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge. It's a true story about real people who lived in New Orleans and survived the disaster and its aftermath. The website also has podcast interviews with the people portrayed in the comic. It's an excellent way to present the personal stories of people affected by the natural disaster and the monumental government failure that followed. (Here's a YouTube video about the comic, which is drawn by American Splendor artist, Josh Neufeld.)

Link

Reader comment:

Larry Smith: editor and publisher of Smith magazine adds:

This series about Abu Ghraib is one of the most interesting things we've ever done: "Behind the Hood," artist Daniel Heyman's series of Abu Ghraib prisoners' words and images.

Heyman was invited to Amman, Jordan where former prisoners were being deposed. He listened to their stories, took notes--and made art. “I began drawing their faces as the interviews got underway, listening to the reporting of biographical information through the translator, the number of children they had, where they lived, but mostly concentrating on getting a good start on the portrait."

The Say-A-Blessing electronic keychain plays ten common Jewish prayers and blessings in Hebrew and English. It also contains a bonus LED flashlight. Unlikely that it would be kosher to use this on the Sabbath. It's $15 from the Jewish Learning Group.
Link (Thanks, Jason Tester!)

Link to Neatorama post, here's the deck itself (gah, Flash with complicated popup windows, my crappy Guatemalan wifi connection is choking), designed by Headcase. (Thanks, Mike D.)

Archaeologists in the Nasca region of Peru discovered a headless skeleton with this ceramic "replacement" head beside it. The head "jar" and skeleton were from AD 450 to 550, according to Texas State University researcher Christina Conlee. Evidence suggests that the previous owner of this skeleton, a 20 to 25-year-old male, was killed in a human sacrifice. From National Geographic:

The archaeologist also noted that the head jar is painted with the reversible image of a human face that can be seen right-side up or upside down, suggesting that the jar might have been meant as a substitute for the victim's missing head.

"The La Tiza head jar was a rather literal replacement and reflects the Nasca belief that a person needed to have a head when he entered the afterlife," Conlee said.

The jar also bears evidence of having been used before the burial. Conlee said that decorations on head jars suggest they were used for both human- and crop-fertility rituals.

Link

Over at the excellent Afrigadget blog, a post about a DIY welding machine in Kenya:

I took a walk down Ngong road, an area with a lot of shadetree mechanics, wood carvers and metal fabricators. The first place I stopped at had a home made welding machine. Simon, the shop owner, showed me a couple of the machines and gave a video tour of how it works. He’s a prime example how an entrepreneur in Africa will figure out ingenious solutions to meet local market demands. The welders sell for around 14,000 Kenya Shillings (just over $200), but fabrication costs only a small fraction of that.

Link, with videos and more photos.

Back in February, 1938 Camel ran this ad in Popular Science, promising that smoking their cancer-sticks would make you a better sniper -- er, "expert marksman." Link

See also: Allen Ginsberg's "Put Down Your Cigarette Rag"

Update: David uploaded a couple great radio ads for cigs: Camels, Philip Morris. David notes, "I particularly enjoyed the claim that doctors recommend a certain brand of cigarettes for sore throat sufferers."

John sez, "Some watch obsessive took this insanely detailed video of the inside of a Panerai movement. It's interesting to see the little balance wheel - the top thing that flicks back and forth - sliding around on the inset rubies." Link (Thanks, John!)

A group of Moscow geeks have opened a museum of Soviet-era arcade games. Wired News is sporting a gallery of the collection. The physical design of these things is incredible -- heroically ugly, radiating un-fun like a potato studded with razor-blade splinters. I want a laptop that looks like this.

From the late '70s to the early '90s, Soviet military factories produced some 70 different video game models. Based largely (and crudely) on early Japanese designs, the games were distributed -- in the words of one military manual -- for the purposes of "entertainment and active leisure, as well as the development of visual-estimation abilities."...

Last month, the four officially opened the Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines in a Stalin-era bomb shelter under a university dormitory. Packed into two rooms are dozens of Soviet-made video game carcasses in various states of repair. Some work perfectly; others last for a few minutes, then fade. One common feature among them all is a lack of a high-score list.

Link

See also: Guess what this photo from Wired News is

Text by Jasmina Tešanović
photo by Bruce Sterling ( Nura in Bologna)

The mothers of mass graves

Nura comes from Srebrenica and she goes to places where her voice needs to be heard. For those who don’t know and the many who still refuse to know, Srebrenica was and is the enclave of genocide in Bosnia, committed there in 1995 by General Ratko Mladic and his soldiers.

Mladic is still in hiding from the justice of the international war tribunal in The Hague. The day Nura came to Italy from her hometown, another war criminal, the helper of Mladic, was arrested by police in Bosnia. Nura saw helicopters above her head.

Some claim the arrest was all staged. How could the third most wanted Srbrenica criminal be be arrested within Bosnia? Obviously a conspiracy was hiding him in the center of Belgrade, that capital from where all the evil orders were given by the late Slobodan Milosevic.

Says Nura calmly: that guy is half dead and only a stuntman for the real issue: the issue of hiding Mladic. It is a farce, who do they want to fool? Carla del Ponte arriving in Belgrade to check on the Serbian secret police, always involved in hiding war criminals more than finding them.

While us, the citizens from the enclave, still have to live under the power and law of those who killed our men en masse and raped women who failed to flee. Ten thousand people missing, twenty-five hundred of them found in mass graves.

Ape Lad has just discovered and published more of his grandfather Aloysius' 1900s-era comic, The Laugh Out Loud Cats.

As we now know, this is the true historic precursor of the contemporary LOLcats meme. First published in 1912, the Laugh Out Loud Cats featured the hijinks of pro-LOL-gonist Meowlin Q. Kitteh ("a sort of cat hobo-raconteur," says Ape Lad) and his diminutive sidekick, Pip.

Explains Ape Lad, "The strip did not last long due to a run-in my great-grandfather had with none other than William Randolph Hearst."

Link to the latest painstakingly restored frames. And to all the killjoys out there who believe the Laugh Out Loud Cats is not real, or some kind of internet juvie joke -- stick the Lascaux cheesburger cave painting in your pipe and smoke it. (See also "long horse.")

BTW, Cthulhu Monkey!

Previously on BoingBoing

True historic origins of the Laugh Out Loud cats

(posted from on the road in central america / xeni)

Jake von Slatt, proprietor of the Steampunk Workshop, created this stately and elegant LCD monitor to match his RSS telegraph sounder and neo-antique keyboard. Gareth Brawnyn, who profiled von Slatt in MAKE: Vol. 09, has more info on the steampunk monitor over at Street Tech.
Link

Previously on BB:
• HOWTO make a steampunk keyboard Link
• Steampunk Telegraph Sounder for RSS Link
• HOWTO make etched brass steampunk journals Link

COOP made blog post celebrating Don Mossi, a quite unusual-looking fellow who played professional baseball from 1954 to 1965. Apparently, he was nicknamed "The Sphinx" and "Ears." As Mark F. said, he'd have been a great character actor. From Wikipedia, here is what baseball historian Bill James said about Mossi:

"Don Mossi was the complete five-tool ugly player. He could run ugly, hit ugly, throw ugly, field ugly and ugly for power. He was ugly to all fields. He could ugly behind the runner as well as anybody, and you talk about pressure ... man, you never saw a player who was uglier in the clutch."

Link

Seattle's incredible Roq La Rue Gallery opens its latest group show, Venus, this Friday evening. Featuring a stellar line-up of artists--including Stella Im Hultberg, Audrey Kawasaki, Lori Earley (image right), Isabel Samaras, Marion Peck, Glenn Barr, Amy Crehore, Kukula (image left), and a bunch more--the show is centered "around the concept of the feminine as muse, in whatever form that may take. From gorgeous to ghastly, innocent to vampy. All of the work is viewable online as well. Link

During the recent Republican presidential debate, the moderator asked nine candidates to raise their hands if they "didn't believe in evolution." Senator Sam Brownback, Governor Mike Huckabee, and Representative Tom Tancredo raised their hands. Last week, Brownback wrote a New York Times op-ed attempting to explain his reasoning. You can read it here. The op-ed reveals nothing more than Brownback's complete misunderstanding of evolutionary biology and, worse, a total rejection of science. In the new edition of John Brockman's EDGE, University of Chicago professor of ecology and evolution Jerry Coyne, author of Speciation, lays out the idiocy Brownback's comments. From Coyne's essay:

Whether he knows it or not, Brownback's forthright declarations, denying any possibility that empirical matters of fact might differ from those assumed by his creed, amount to nothing less than a rejection of the whole institution of science. Who is "we", and where did "our" conviction and certainty come from? Would Brownback believe these "spiritual truths" if he hadn't been taught them as a child, or brought up in the United States instead of China?

According to Brownback, we should reject scientific findings if they conflict with our faith, but accept them if they're compatible. But the scientific evidence says that humans are big-brained, highly conscious apes that began evolving on the African savannah four million years ago. Are we supposed to reject this as "atheistic theology" (an oxymoron if there ever was one)?

Link