Reason's Hit & Run blog reports that the DEA thinks American Express Bank International hasn't done a good enough job of monitoring its customers for drug-money laundering activities, so the DEA is fining the bank (which means, ultimately, its customers) $55 million.

It's always good to remember that in order to make it marginally more difficult for Americans to get high, not only are you footing the $1.9 billion bill it costs the DEA to raid homes, pay snitches, arrest doctors, spray poison across Latin America, and storm medical marijuana clinics each year, you also pay your bank to spy on your financial transactions on behalf of the U.S. government.

Link

Two of my patron saints as pitchmen. At left, Timothy Leary's 1993 print ad for The Gap. A copy is currently up for auction on eBay. At right, a still from the William S. Burroughs TV commercial for Nike from 1994. View the blipvert on YouTube.

Link to eBay auction for Leary ad, Link to Burroughs/Nike on YouTube

I just zipped through Death Valley, the first volume of Boom Studios' fun, clever zombie graphic novels. Death Valley follows the traditional zombie narrative: a few survivors left over after some Terrible Thing zombifies everyone else -- but with the gimmick that these survivors are a Breakfast Club mishmash of Hollywood teenagers whose world ends on graduation day. It's like John Hughes meets George Romero, a great mix of bathos and pathos. The art is great: manga-inflected, but clearly American, and the dialog just snaps off the page. The teenagers are pretty blase about the whole end of the world thing, which probably would have pissed me off if this had gone on much longer, but this is such a quick read that it didn't really get to me. I've got the whole series of Boom Studios books and if this is any indication of the overall quality, I can't wait to dig into 'em. Link

Christian Outdoorsman sells several types of camouflage Bibles, including a green one for boys and a pink one for girls.

A full text Bible in International Children's Bible translation in traditional camo canvas cover and just the right size for young hands. Embroidered with a cross, this Bible is perfect for adventurous boys.

The cloth binding style offers kids a compact and cool look to carry their Bible to church, school, or on-the-go. It's durable, flexible, and incredibly adventerous for boys of all ages!

Link

Juanita Marie Jones, 53, of Rochelle, Georgia, called police after realizing the crack cocaine she bought was bunk. According to an Associated Press article, she was hoping the cops would help her "get her money back." After arriving at Jones's home, they arrested her for possession. Link

Alex sez, "Karl Schroeder just posted an awesome essay on Worldchanging about how SF thinking about Mars colonization effortsm may actually prove the smartest, shortest route to creating the kinds of innovation we need to live on Earth without destroying the planet's climate and ecosystems. This is truly a kick-ass piece of perspective hacking:"

We should have been colonizing Earth as though it were a planet with no ecosystem resources to exploit.

Look at the difference between what we do when we settle a new area on Earth, compared to what we'd do on a planet like Mars. On Earth we'd take advantage of the free air and water, ready-made soils provided by local fauna, pollination provided by the local bees, all to minimize the costs of building and minimizing our colonies. This process is documented expertly by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel; he points out that the conquest of the Americas was really the invasion of one ecosystem by another, rather than a simple matter of moving human populations. North America is the greatest success story of European expansionism because its ecology was most similar to that of Europe, more than for any political or social factors.

Link (Thanks, Alex!)

Knowing my appreciation for artist Marcel Duchamp, Dave Praeger sent me this:

"In my book "Poop Culture: How America is Shaped by its Grossest National Product" (published by your friends at Feral House), I examine the impact of Victorian bathroom morality on every aspect of society, including art. A significant portion of the chapter on art focuses on Duchamp's "Fountain" -- the most important toilet in the history of art. I've posted a PDF excerpt for Boing Boing readers to enjoy."

Link to PDF, Link to buy Poop Culture, Link to Poop Culture Blog

Previously on BB:
• Duchamp's Fountain attacked with a hammer Link
• Making sense of Duchamp Link
• Not a pisser Link
• Smithsonian magazine on Dada Link

Bob says: "Here's a heads up for Seattle area BoingBoinger's: A Jim Woodring show at Gage Academy of Art."

I went to the opening last night. Jim gave a fun video slide overview of his career and artistic influences. It also happened to be the same night as the high school age summer school classes' show, so there were lots of families and kids in attendance, not the urban vinyl/hipster/ art gallery crowd. Nice extended Q&A afterwards with a lot of kids asking good questions. Jim was sporting his custom made-in-Japan high tops!

The show at Gage of Jim's work is small but varied, a real sampler box of assorted eye candy. You can see a charcoal drawing, a intaglio print (gorgeous!), camera-ready ink line art, watercolors, a couple oil paintings, and samples of his commercially produced vinyl figures, along with some of Jim's control drawings for sculpting them. You really get a sense of how his imagination creates a truly 3 dimensional world, complete with its own visual language of shapes, motifs and textures, and how he then realizes that internal vision into real objects.

(Click on thumbnails for enlargement)

Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• New Jim Woodring art -- Divinorum, or Life After Man
• New stuff from Jim Woodring
• MP3 interview with Jim Woodring
• Woodring animated
• New Jim Woodring figurine from StrangeCo
• Jim Woodring profile on STRANGEco
• Jim Woodring handpressed prints
• New Jim Woodring toy: Mr Bumper
• Woodring and Frisell's Mysterio Simpatico
• The Comics Journal Audio Archives: Jim Woodring
• Cool Jim Woodring animations
• Jim Woodring's pop-up Moleskine art
• Jim Woodring's Mr. Bumper toy sculpture
• New Jim Woodring toys: "Imperial Newts"
• Jim Woodring Interview
• Woodring's amazing plastic pals
• More wonderful Woodring Weirdness
• New Jim Woodring print: "The Confidence Bird"
• Jim Woodring interview
• Woodring-esque Salamander from old German kids' books

Harry Potter's French publishers have decided not to sue a 16-year-old fan who produced an amateur translation of Deathly Hallows, the concluding volume of the series. The boy undertook to translate the book into French when he discovered that the official French edition would lag the English by three months -- he was worried that his monolingual peers would have their enjoyment of the book ruined by spoilers leaking over from the English-speaking world.

The boy has already spent a night in jail and was facing counterfeiting charges. After a firestorm of worldwide negative publicity, the French publishers -- in consultation with JK Rowling -- decided that suing this child was a losing proposition.

No word on whether the people who thought that putting him in jail for a night would get any kind of promotion, though. Link (Thanks, Mike!)

The metamorphosis of Sabrina Sabrok. (NSFW) Link (Via Otomano)

I'm With Stupid. Link

Comic book scan: Patsy Walker vs. Commies. Link

"Scientists are trying a plumber’s approach to rid the brain of the amyloid buildup that plagues Alzheimer’s patients: Simply drain the toxic protein away." Link

This is not an iPhone. It's a non-working replica, made from metal and wood. Link

Proof of God. His/Her/Its name spelled out in eggplant seeds. Link

Mr. Bali Hai writes about the underrated gem of a movie, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. Link

Douglas Rushkoff's column about the zombie fiction genre. "Deep down, these schlocky horror flicks are asking some of the most profound questions: What is life? Why does it depend on killing and consuming other life? Does this cruel reality of survival have any intrinsic meaning?" Link

Video: Stoned people take a video of lots of stoned people under an umbrella running from a cop. Link

Mark says: "Finally, SCO, the patent-troll that's been suing *nix companies and users for alleged copyright infringement, gets a taste of its own medicine. A federal judge ruled Friday that not only does SCO not own the copyright to Unix, but Novell does, and furthermore, SCO must return to Novell 95% of the royalties it has collected from licensing Unix."

According to Judge Kimball's ruling, Microsoft paid SCO approximately $16 million for license rights and Sun paid approximately $10 million. SCO neglected to turn over the licensing fees to Novell, which "gave SCO its first profitable year in history," Kimball notes. "As a matter of law, the court concludes that SCO breached its fiduciary duties to Novell by failing to account for and remit the appropriate SVRX Royalty payments to Novell for the SVRX portions of the 2003 Sun and Microsoft Agreements," says Kimball. "Because of the decrease in SCO's revenues and assets, Novell fears that it will be unable to collect on its claim for royalties."

Link

Merlin Mann reports on a neat closet cleaning hack on 43Folders: turn you hangers backward. When you wear a garment, turn the hanger around the right way. After a certain number of months, you can safely get rid of the clothes on the backward hangers, since you didn't wear them and probably never will. Link

Ellen says: When I was in fourth grade I was fascinated by bugs. I actually put together a little catalog offering ant lions for sale to my classmates. Somehow it didn't strike me as a viable business model when I got older. But the folks who have this site are selling ant lions. I don't know if it is for real. I can't quite believe it.

Three ant lions for $9.95? How about a Zen Ant Lion Garden for adults? It includes two guaranteed-live ant lions, an ant lion den, and den sand. You can get an ant lion book, watch ant lion videos. You can even launch a career as an ant lion wrangler for the company. Shades of "Kids, Raise Mushrooms in Your Own Basement!"

Selling the sand never occurred to me, back in the day. But I did offer spittle bugs. Maybe the Ant Lion Den folks should expand their product line. Link

A reader says: "Dick Cheney in a 1994 interview explaining, quite correctly, how invading Iraq would lead to a quagmire. He even uses the word quagmire." Of course, this was before Saddam Hussein personally flew those airliners into our buildings on 9/11/2001. That changed everything. Link

Glynwintle says: "A teenager is taken to hospital after overdosing on espresso. She developed a fever and began hyperventilating after drinking seven double espressos while working at her family's sandwich shop." Link

My favorite news magazine, The Week, reprinted this fascinating personal account written the LA Times' former religious correspondent.

Nine years ago, William Lobdell was assigned to cover religion for the LA Times. He was a born-again Christian when he got the gig. In 2001 he started studying to convert to his wife's religion, Catholicism. That was when the trouble began for Lobdell. He began reporting on the molestation scandals in the Catholic church:

I discovered that the term "sexual abuse" is a euphemism. Most of these children were raped and sodomized by someone they and their family believed was Christ's representative on Earth. That's not something an 8-year-old's mind can process; it forever warps a person's sexuality and spirituality.

Many of these victims were molested by priests with a history of abusing children. But the bishops routinely sent these clerics to another parish, and bullied or conned the victims and their families into silence. The police were almost never called. In at least a few instances, bishops encouraged molesting priests to flee the country to escape prosecution.

I couldn't get the victims' stories or the bishops' lies -— many of them right there on their own stationery -— out of my head. I had been in journalism more than two decades and had dealt with murders, rapes, other violent crimes and tragedies. But this was different -— the children were so innocent, their parents so faithful, the priests so sick and bishops so corrupt.

In 2002, Lobdell decided not to go through the rite of conversion. He stopped going to church.

Next, he started looking into Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), the TV network that feature Billy Graham, Robert H. Schuller and Greg Laurie and other famous televangelists. He didn't like what he saw there, either -- a bunch of fantastically rich preachers who claimed to have a God-given power to cure people with grave diseases.

TBN's creed is that if viewers send money to the network, God will repay them with great riches and good health. Even people deeply in debt are encouraged to put donations on credit cards.

I spent several years investigating TBN and pored through stacks of documents — some made available by appalled employees — showing the Crouches eating $180-per-person meals; flying in a $21-million corporate jet; having access to 30 TBN-owned homes across the country, among them a pair of Newport Beach mansions and a ranch in Texas. All paid for with tax-free donor money.

...

At the crusade, I met Jordie Gibson, 21, who had flown from Calgary, Canada, to Anaheim because he believed that God, through Hinn, could get his kidneys to work again.

He was thrilled to tell me that he had stopped getting dialysis because Hinn had said people are cured only when they "step out in faith." The decision enraged his doctors, but made perfect sense to Gibson. Despite risking his life as a show of faith, he wasn't cured in Anaheim. He returned to Canada and went back on dialysis. The crowd was filled with desperate believers like Gibson.

At the end of the story, Lobdell realizes that his experiences destroyed his ability to believe in God.

Link

Reader comment:

Troy says:

Interesting post on the LA Times reporter "losing" his faith. While I agree wholeheartedly with the recent lawsuits against the Catholic church and that the authorities haven't gone far enough in sticking it to the Bishops, Cardinals, et al. and I also agree that TBN is a den of bad taste -- and even worse theology -- I would exempt Billy Graham from all that.

Did he appear on TBN? Yes he did. Did he buy into their health/wealth/prosperity theology? Hardly. Did he use their airwaves to get his message out? Undoubtedly. Graham himself was never wealthy (he earns about $200K/yr while his Association brings in over $100M) and always took a salary from his Association. I don't think he earned dime one off of any of his books, films, etc. I won't cry for him materially -- "he's got enough to eat and then some," but he lacks the conspicuous wealth of many of the others -- including Greg Laurie's Harley collection. Also witness Rick Warren giving back to his church his entire salary for the past 25 years or so and living in the same house since the 1980s and he has a ginormous cash-cow in his books -- which he does not use to enrich himself. There's no sin or hypocrisy in professional ministry per se, but there should be limits I believe in compensation -- especially when the world is watching and cutting no slack.

Anyway -- I would argue that Lobdell put his faith in the wrong thing to begin with. Christ didn't call us to put our our faith in a church -- an organization of people after all -- but in Him. An e-mail is too short to get into all that. We love our church, but we still do background checks on child-care workers and our pastor lives in a 2 bedroom in a gnarly part of Riverside (some would say all of Riverside is gnarly I realize!). No one, but a fool believes in human perfectibility.

No matter how scrambled a Rubik's Cube may be, it can be solved in 26 moves or fewer -- by a supercomputer anyway. The previous record was 27 moves, but Northeastern University computer science grad student Daniel Kunkle and his advisor Gene Cooperman developed new algorithms to save a step in the process and optimize the problem for a supercomputer. Their next step is to bring the magic number down to 25, which is still 5 more than the minimum number of steps that most researchers believe is possible. From Science News:

After 63 hours of calculation, the supercomputer found that it took no more than 16 steps to turn any random configuration into a special configuration that can be solved using only half-turns. And since those special puzzles can be solved in no more than 13 steps, this approach showed that 29 steps were enough to solve any Rubik's Cube.

But this answer wasn't good enough to set a new record. Last year, Silviu Radu of the Lund Institute of Technology in Sweden showed that any Rubik's Cube can be solved in no more than 27 steps. Kunkle and Cooperman realized that to set a new record, they would need to eliminate three steps.

Their existing method had established that all but about 80 million sets of configurations could be solved in 26 steps or fewer. By searching through all possible moves starting from those relatively few configurations, they succeeded in finding a solution for each one that took 26 steps or fewer.

Link

Previously on BB:
• Video of tot solving Rubik's Cube Link
• Table shaped like huge Rubik's Cube Link
• Michel Gondry solves Rubik's Cube with feet Link

Bill sez, "I built this steampunk clock after seeing other steampunk items on BoingBoing and just got inspired to make my own. This one is built on an empty vintage clock case from around 1910, and the parts came from local radio repair shops, a bicycle repair shop, Home Depot, and various car wreck sites that I pass on my daily walk. There's also a part (see if you can spot it) from an old Model T car. Besides the funky steampunk look, the best thing about this is that it tells the actual time, a good thing, since I'm an obsessive punctuality freak." Link (Thanks, Bill!)

See also: A proliferation of steampunk links

DailyLit is a fantastic service -- they take public-domain and Creative Commons-licensed books and email them to you, one page per day. They put my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town up last year to great response, and now they've added a whole slew of science fiction, including the rest of my novels and my latest short story collection, Overclocked, and many other sf books including Charlie Stross's Accelerando, Flatland, Frankenstein, From the Earth to the Moon, and The Time Machine. Link (Thanks, Jeff!)

A grocery store in Shenyang, China, has installed a dark-ride-style ride-system that weaves among the shelves. Shoppers climb into the cars and ride through the store, grabbing their groceries as they go. If you miss your shelf, you have to ride through again. Of course, the store also gets to totally engineer your retail experience, taking you past impulse items at eye-level, etc. Link (Thanks, Frank!)

Threatened by modernization and Chinese imperialism, Tibetan folk music is sadly vanishing into the dustbin of global culture. In an effort to preserve the traditional tunes, students at Qinghai Normal University are making digital field recordings of traditional Tibetan music for online archiving. In many ways, the the Tibetan Endangered Music Project (TEMP) reminds me of Alan Lomax's mind-blowing musicology for the Library of Congress in the middle of last century. TEMP has already recorded more than 400 songs, including, according to a National Geographic article, "melodies for herding, harvesting, singing babies to sleep, and coaxing yaks into giving more milk." The students are currently seeking donations to fund online hosting of the recordings. From National Geographic:

Tibetan music first went on the decline during the Cultural Revolution, a campaign between 1966 and 1976 during which the Chinese government sought to wipe out all "feudal" practices and "make art serve politics..." (Twenty-year-old student Dawa Drolma) said another problem has been the influx of modern Chinese pop music.

"People hear this music all the time on the radio, on [video CDs], and cassette tapes," she said. "It comes in and basically takes over."

Mechanization has also had an impact, she added.

"Butter-churning songs are disappearing, because there are now electric machines to do this and so no need to have a song to provide rhythm."

Link to National Geographic article, Link to video about the Tibetan Music Project, Link to donate via GiveMeaning.com

Previously on BB:
• Xeni.net/trek: Miss Tibet founder, DRM-free Tibet music Link

A masterpiece by Monster Crochet's Lady Linoleum.
Link

Danny Anderson and his son beheaded a 5-foot rattlesnake on their property in central Washington state. Then, they beat it over the head. But the snake still had its revenge. From the Associated Press:

"When I reached down to pick up the head, it raised around and did a backflip almost, and bit my finger," Anderson said. "I had to shake my hand real hard to get it to let loose."

His wife insisted they go to the hospital, and by the time they arrived at Prosser Memorial Hospital 10 minutes later, Anderson's tongue was swollen and the venom was spreading. He then was taken by ambulance 30 miles to a Richland hospital to get the full series of six shots he needed.

Link (via Fortean Times)

Okay, not "naked water wrestling," but you know how stuff gets blown out of proportion on the internet, and that's how it'll be portrayed on the slash fiction sites anyway.

At a taping of the Colbert Show last week, special guest Richard Branson dumped a mug of water on Stephen Colbert's head, and Colbert retaliated by pouring water on Sir Richard's head. The sources who alerted BoingBoing believed it to have been an unscripted, contentious moment so distressing for both host and guest that the Colbert Show producers would never, ever, air it.

Wrong! It may have been unscripted, and it may or may not have been unfriendly -- but it's gonna be on TV soon enough. We're told by a source that the splashdown will air on August 22. The show will apparently also include Colbert on board one of the Virgin America planes. He was supposed to christen "Air Colbert" (the airbus he named for the VA fleet) last week, but is said to have been stuck in traffic trying to get to the airport for 4 hours, because of a downpour in NYC that day.

Previously on BB:

Richard Branson dumps mug of water on Colbert and vice versa

Supremely bad Harry Potter knockoff books from China and Japan

Getting high with Richard Branson: Virgin America's virgin flight

BoingBoing names a Virgin America plane: "Unicorn Chaser"

Will Crowther's classic computer game "Colossal Cave Adventure" created the text-adventure game genre -- and immortalized a vision of cave-complexes that went on to inform Zork and its imitators, as well as countless D&D campaings and MMORPGs. Turns out that cave-complex is real -- it's modelled on Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky, and it really has a "maze of twisty little passages, all alike."

Because so little primary historical work has been done on the classic text computer game "Colossal Cave Adventure", academic and popular references to it frequently perpetuate inaccuracies. "Adventure" was the first in a series of text-based games ("interactive fiction") that emphasize exploring, puzzles, and story, typically in a fantasy setting; these games had a significant cultural impact in the late 1970s and a significant commercial presence in the early 1980s. Will Crowther based his program on a real cave in Kentucky; Don Woods expanded this version significantly. The expanded work has been examined as an occasion for narrative encounters (Buckles 1985) and as an aesthetic masterpiece of logic and utility (Knuth 1998); however, previous attempts to assess the significance of "Adventure" remain incomplete without access to Crowther's original source code and Crowther's original source cave. Accordingly, this paper analyzes previously unpublished files recovered from a backup of Woods's student account at Stanford, and documents an excursion to the real Colossal Cave in Kentucky in 2005. In addition, new interviews with Crowther, Woods, and their associates (particularly members of Crowther's family) provide new insights on the precise nature of Woods's significant contributions. Real locations in the cave and several artifacts (such as an iron rod and an axe head) correspond to their representation in Crowther's version; however, by May of 1977, Woods had expanded the game to include numerous locations that he invented, along with significant technical innovations (such as scorekeeping and a player inventory). Sources that incorrectly date Crowther's original to 1972 or 1974, or that identify it as a cartographic data file with no game or fantasy elements, are sourced thinly if at all. The new evidence establishes that Crowther wrote the game during the 1975-76 academic year and probably abandoned it in early 1976. The original game employed magic, humor, simple combat, and basic puzzles, all of which Woods greatly expanded. While Crowther remained largely faithful to the geography of the real cave, his original did introduce subtle changes to the environment in order to improve the gameplay.

Link

Update: Ian Holmes sez, "The history of the exploration of Mammoth Cave, which you mentioned in your boingboing post today, and its original explorer Stephen Bishop, is described in some depth in Graham Nelson's article The Craft of Adventure. Nelson is interesting in himself, a luminary of homebrew interactive fiction: a Cambridge mathmo who reverse-engineered the Infocom virtual machine, creating his own programming language for adventure games and (in the process) incidentally turning out one of the largest ever (free) adventure games that had ever been built at the time, Curses (still a beautiful & extremely playable classic of time-travel, parallel worlds and adventurer dynasties)."

Update 2: Julian Dibbell sez, "that Colossal Cave link did r0xx0r my b0xx0rs, but the author is a little stingy with the additionally awesome historical resonances of the Mammoth Cave/Adventure story. For more on that, see my very own elucidation on the subject."

Sf great Vernor Vinge conducted an interview with the French sf site ActuSF about his life-changingly weird and imaginative novel Rainbows End.

ActuSF : In Rainbows End, there’s a switch between generations as they’re usually seen in fiction. Hackers and "juvenile delinquents" are all about 70 years old, and youngsters are mainly dedicated consumers, surfing the internet by the book. What is the message ?

Vernor Vinge : Some of the old people in Rainbows End are very effective. (And whether effective or not, many of them are relatively healthy and rich.) While many still worry about poverty issues, the majority are well enough and rich enough to be a new type of upper class. In the 2025 of Rainbows End, the situation with old people is a surprising reversal of our current anxiety about pension plan insolvency.

Just as in our time, most teenagers are better adapted to the latest technology than are their parents – though they are more worried than most of their parents ever were about the prospect of unemployment. And some of the youngest children (6 to 10 years old) are extraordinarily adept in exploiting the newest cognitive tools, and are regarded somewhat fearfully by their older siblings.

Link

See also:
Vernor Vinge on computers, freedom and privacy
Vernor Vinge and Cory on the Singularity on NPR
Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds interviews sf author Vernor Vinge

gNAW, a furry artist, has created a series of illustrations portraying the Peanuts gang as contemporary manga characters. Despite the enormous difference in styles, the characters are instantly recognizable and translate very well. I'd read a comic book starring these characters. Link 1, Link 2, Link 3, Link 4 (Thanks, Neight!)