This Wednesday, Podbrix will release its limited-edition Young Woz and Jobs custom "Lego" playset. The Apple founders are now immortalized as minifigs. Only 300 of the sets were made and they'll sell for $39.99. From the Podbrix announcement:

Hand created by Tomi, each playset contains a young version of Jobs and Woz immortalized in minifig form. The backdrop set features a desk with custom made computer, circuit board based project in progress, and a 2001 style calendar marking a fateful date. The reverse of the backdrop displays the limited edition unit number and is signed by Tomi. Some assembly is required.

Link

As regular BB readers know, fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) machines that scan the brain in real-time are now being used for a variety of unusual and interesting purposes, from studying fear to "neuromarketing" to lie detection. Yesterday's New York Times looks at the trend and profiles start-ups Omneuron, which plans to treat pain, addiction, and depression, No Lie MRI, a firm that sells "truth verification" via brain scans. From the article:

Ed Boyden, an assistant professor at the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a researcher in neuroengineering, distinguishes sharply among different brain-scanning ventures. “If you want to commercialize this technology,” he said, “then the use has to approximate real-world situations.”

In his view, tests of fMRI truth verification don’t meet that criterion. For instance, in studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 2002 and 2005, subjects were told to conceal the identity of a card under questioning. FMRI was able to distinguish falsification 77 percent of the time.

(No Lie MRI chief exec Joel) Huizenga was so inspired by this research that he decided to start his company, confident that fMRI would soon identify lies 90 percent of the time.

But Dr. Boyden says he believes that being asked to tell a falsehood that everyone knows is a falsehood is not the same thing as lying to deceive someone. Thus, whatever brain patterns fMRI detects when a person constructs such a requested fiction may be different from whatever happens when we lie.

By contrast, Dr. Boyden says: “What I like about Omneuron is that it’s working with real-world situations. They gave people visualization strategies which they could monitor — and which produced real, measurable results.”

Link (Thanks, Marina Gorbis!)

Previously on BB:
• Reading minds with fMRI Link
• Neuroscience of altrusium Link
• Shocking Pac-Man-like game used to study fear Link
• Neurology of humor Link
• Science of forgetting Link
• Neuromarketing soda Link
• Brain scans predict buying behavior Link
• This is your brain on Super Bowl ads: research conclusion Link
• Neuroscience of branding Link
• Lie-detection via fMRI: mind-reading or coercion? Link
• Neuroeconomics: sub-prime mortgages exploit a bug in our brains Link

UPDATE: BB reader Karen Green points out that an article from the New Yorker last month about fMRI and lie detection is now available free at the magazine's site. Link

Miss South Carolina from the Miss Teen USA on the subject of maps.
(Via Mt. Holly Mayor's Office)

I dig these Tattoo Bandages. Each handsome metal tin contains an assortment of three sizes and a "free toy to take your mind off of the excruciating pain." Sells for $3.99 at Perpetual Kid.
Link (via Neatorama)

The publisher of Baby Tattoo books is holding a weekend event for 100 people to meet and hang out with great artists, many of them featured on Boing Boing. Early bird registration ends this week. It's being held at the Mission Inn Hotel and Spa in Riverside, California, on October 5-7, 2007.

Q: What is Baby Tattooville?

A: Baby Tattooville is a weekend-long event geared toward art collectors. The event is being called a “Limited Edition Retreat” because only 100 paying attendees will be allowed to spend the weekend participating in both scheduled and spontaneous experiences with the event’s featured artists and special guests. In addition to social and educational interaction with fellow participants, Baby Tattooville attendees will receive surprise collectible items. The price of the event includes Friday and Saturday night hotel accommodations, a Friday night party with a no host bar, several informative panels and presentations, a Saturday night merchandise event and a Sunday brunch buffet. Registration is currently open, but will close as soon as 100 paid registration forms have been received.

Q: Who are the Baby Tattooville featured artists and special guests?

A: Gary Baseman, Tim Biskup, Gris Grimly, James Jean, Frank Kozik, Tara McPherson, Ragnar, Jeffery Scott (1019), Jeff Soto and Amanda Visell have been announced as featured artists as of August 6, 2007. Some special guests may also be revealed at a later date (maybe as late as at the event itself). An element of mystery is part of the whole Baby Tattooville vibe, so you need to be comfortable with the fact that we’re going to keep you guessing. Unforeseen circumstances may prevent any given artist from attending, so individual featured artist participation is not guaranteed; however, there will be a blockbuster group of ten or more in-demand artists on hand for all of the festivities. You will not be disappointed.

Link

Up for auction on eBay is this fantastic salesman's sample case of miniature vintage telephones. It's an absolutely beautiful relic of telecom history. Each phone is 2" x 4" and the handsets lift! Current bid is $50. Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne Rauback!)

UPDATE: Thanks to BB reader Steve LaNasa who reminds me that phones of this vintage were usually rented from Ma Bell, not purchased, so the salesperson who carried this case was most likely selling contracts.

I've posted before about Bay Area musician Greg Fleischut, the hyper-talented 15-year-old who plays in the fiery and awesomely-named bluegrass band The Lil' Billies, records his own solo folktronica, and, as of late, fronts an all-teenager indy rock outfit called The Audiophiles. (Above, from left to right, Jeremy Lyon Fleischut, and Zak Mandel Romann. Not pictured, drummer Jacom Blumberg. Photos by Jonathan Koshi from his Flickr photoset.) This year, the Audiophiles have been gigging all over the Bay Area, from Berkeley to Palo Alto, even though they're not old enough to get into some of the venues where they're performing. The Audiophiles recorded an EP (5 songs for $5) titled "This Party Has Just Started" that they're selling at their shows and are in the studio once again. Here is "Dance Wit Me," one of my favorite tracks from the first EP:

[Browser-compatibility note -- The audio link in this post appears as embedded Flash, and is brought to you by our sponsor: HP's iPaq 510 Voice Messenger. If your web reader doesn't allow you to access Flash, here's a direct MP3 Link.]

From Jess Hemerly's review of a recent show, posted at The Owl:

For music-loving teenagers, forming a band with friends is a rite of passage. Most of these bands never get much farther than friends' birthday parties or the high school auditorium stage, but every once in a while something unusually good emerges from the world of lockers, lunch money, and late slips - and I'm not talking about Hanson. While so many teenagers are wrapped up in the self-loathing world of emo, the Bay Area's Audiophiles have a much more lighthearted outlook on being kids. They also happen to be great musicians making some great indie rock, and not just for a bunch of teenagers. They're better than a majority of the local bands I've been subjected to lately.

Unfortunately, the 21-and-over Elbo Room is not the best venue for a group of teenagers. I heard the bouncers talking about them as I locked up my bike outside: "They either have to stay backstage or outside. They're not allowed anywhere else, there's nothing we can do." Not only were they prohibited from watching the bands after them, they also had to perform with big X's scrawled on the backs of their hands in black marker. Hopefully the audience realized that they don't associate with the "straight edge" movement, they're just minors...

Between the back-to-back guitar jam, a crotch-grab fakeout, the bassist's tight pants, and the drummer's sunglasses, they are a little awkward but they are far from pretentious. Frontman Greg Fleischut's voice may sound a like a young and innocent Stephen Malkmus but you'd be hard-pressed to find evidence of a massive Malkmus-like ego. Coming from a genuinely optimistic place, their lyrics remind you that being a teenager sucked, but it wasn't the worst thing in the world. It was a time of discovery, experimentation, and exploration that can be awful one minute and fantastic the next. Link

For those in the Bay Area, The Audiophiles play on Saturday, September 1, at the Oakland Metro.

Link to The Audiophiles on MySpace
Previously on BB:
• Greg Fleischut: The Lil' Billies at Maker Faire and The Audiophiles Link
• Greg Fleischut's teenage folktronica and bluegrass Link

In Opus -- Berkeley Breathed's comic strip followup to Bloom County -- the ever-changeable Lola Granola has taken up conservative Islam as her latest fad. In response, chickenshit newspaper editors across America have pulled the strip, scared of offending people with sex and religion. As Dan Gillmor writes at The Center for Citizen Media Blog, "Puritan prudishness and political cowardice: Now there’s a combination that’s just certain to attract more readers." Link to Salon editorial about the controversy, Link to this week's Opus

BLDGBLOG's Geoff Manaugh sez, "I just posted a long and heavily-illustrated interview with Toronto-based photographer and urban explorer Michael Cook. His photographs are genuinely amazing, and almost literally unbelievable at times (and the interview includes a lot of them); but he's also a super-interesting guy: we talk about future archaeologists and historians who might look back at these photos and wish that they included more context; we talk about the ecological consequences of turning an entire natural watershed into a concrete underworld; we get into things like common injuries, respiratory infections, and other ailments (including one called Rinker's Revenge, that strikes urban explorers in Minneapolis); and we even touch on things like urban legends about secret tunnel complexes (some place is apparently home to human sacrifices... but no one's ever found it), how a lot of these places are actually discovered by skateboarders, and what it sounds like down there - when the only thing ahead of you is 5km of unmarked concrete and your voice turns into pure reverb. So it's a fun interview, and Michael's images are great" Link to interview, Link to Michael Cook's site (Thanks, Geoff!)

Premature enunciation: dude can't manage to say the word "orgasm," despite coaching from crew, which ends up being pretty funny to watch. Outtakes from Lavalife TV commercial shoot. video link, via adgabber (thanks susannah!)

Premature enunciation: dude can't manage to say the word "orgasm," despite coaching from crew, which ends up being pretty funny to watch. Outtakes from Lavalife TV commercial shoot. video link, via adgabber (thanks susannah!)

Tony sez, "I work a MoSI, the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester and earlier today we had a Dalek invasion! The aim was to set the record for the most Daleks in one place and it was even attended by Raymond Cusick. The rule was that a person had to be inside each Dalek, hit the link for replicas, one from an old episode and many awesome costumes - including a one year old Dalek." Link to Flickr set, Link to BBC coverage (Thanks, Tony!)

Haunted Mansion superfan Chef Mayem has uncovered the orginal internal Mansion "information sheet" written by WED, the old design division for Disneyland, produced four months before the Haunted Mansion opened in Disneyland. Link

Karl Rove's dad's highly pierced wiener was a great excuse to learn more about the little-known early days of the contemporary body piercing movement in America: Link to essay by a friend of Rove on BMEzine, Link to Boing Boing's audio interview with "grandfather of body piercing," Jim Ward, and link to audio interview with "modern primitive" Fakir Musafar. Speaking of which here were profiles of some amazing bodymodded people: Link. Also, unicorns!

We heard William Gibson speak about his new novel: Link.

We read some Flowcharts!

We learned a new word: bacn. Wait, is it really new? Link.

We learned that the Secret of The Secret is that it's a big huge flaming crock of shit. Link.

We learned that Cruggs were fugly. Link.

We witnessed DRMshock. Link.

We discovered that yes, it is possible to create a version of "YMCA" even gayer than the original. Link.

We felt the sandy playa winds run through our hair, peeping at pix from Bonneville Speed Week: Link.

We felt bruised and abused at the hands of movie theater owners and the MPAA: Link. So did Wil Wheaton.

We fell in love with a cute yellow bobblehead-like 'bot: Link.

We looked through Google Earth, and for the first time, saw the stars: Link.

We watched a bunch of excellent sixties music videos: Link, Link.

Image above: We marveled, without shame, at yet another somethingawful photoshop contest: Link.