Today in my ongoing series of photos from my travels: this half-head of a statue on display in the British Museum. Link

The threatening message received by a US Navy ship in the Strait of Hormuz may have come from a notorious radio troll known to seasoned skippers as the "Filipino Monkey."

Indeed, the voice in the audio sounds different from the one belonging to an Iranian officer shown speaking to the cruiser Port Royal over a radio from a small open boat in the video released by Iranian authorities. He is shown in a radio exchange at one point asking the U.S. warship to change from the common bridge-to-bridge channel 16 to another channel, perhaps to speak to the Navy without being interrupted...

“For 25 years there’s been this mythical guy out there who, hour after hour, shouts obscenities and threats,” he said. “He could be tied up pierside somewhere or he could be on the bridge of a merchant ship.”

And the Monkey has stamina.

“He used to go all night long. The guy is crazy,” he said. “But who knows how many Filipino Monkeys there are? Could it have been a spurious transmission? Absolutely.”

Link (Thanks, Bill!)

Update:Check out this awesome comment from Om -- lots of juicy detail on the Monkey and his imitator.

Over at Blogging.la, Ruth Waytz writes:

With a heavy heart I deliver the sad news that our friend Maila Nurmi, famous for her portrayal of Vampira, has passed at age 86. Maila passed away peacefully in her sleep at home. Funeral arrangements are pending legal steps as Maila had no relatives. Her friends are trying to get her a spot at Hollywood Forever Cemetery and will likely plan some sort of hearse procession for her.

Link.

Noah Shachtman at Wired's Danger Room blog writes,

It's not completely surprising that the Army wants to hire a band to tour its bases jn Afghanistan and Kuwait.  The armed services get all kinds of folks, to entertain the troops.  "But it's the way that they solicit for rock bands that makes the whole thing hilarious," Stephen Trimble notes. 

First, a summary of what the Army is seeking:

Professional Celebrity Rock Music Band, group not to exceed seven people for tour of FOB's [forward operating bases] in Kuwait and Afghanistan for February 4-13 2008. The band should be an active rock band, with a music genre consisting of Southern Rock, Pop Rock, Post-Grunge and Hard Rock. At least one member of the band should be recognizable as a professional celebrity. Protective military equipment, such as kevlar, body armour, eye and ear protection will be provided when the group is travelling on military rotary or fixed wing aircraft.

Oh, and it gets better. Link.

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CC-licensed image from Flickr user c h e e s e roc's photostream: Link.

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Snip from an article on AllAfrica.com:

"It is the Kenyan People Who Have Lost the Election," headlined Pambazuka News in its special Kenya election edition on January 3.

"But the real tragedy of Kenya," the editorial continued, is that the political conflict is not about alternative political programmes that could address ... landlessness, low wages, unemployment, lack of shelter, inadequate incomes, homelessness, etc. ... [instead] it boils down to a fight over who has access to the honey pot that is the state. ...[citizens] are reduced to being just being fodder for the pigs fighting over the trough."

Commentaries of particular interest from the U.S.include an op-ed in the Washington Post by Caroline Elkins, "What's Tearing Kenya Apart? History, for One Thing," a statement by Africa Action stating that U.S.-Kenya policy should support "robust democratic processes" rather than be defined by "a narrow agenda of the war on terror and international business", and a statement by the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars highlighting "the role of the U.S. government -- far from a neutral player -- both before and after the elections" and the danger that U.S. involvement will be biased by its close military relations with the Kenyan government..

More on current events in Kenya at AllAfrica.com: Link 1, Link 2, Link 3. (via Ned Sublette)

A special event for the release of the terrifically entertaining new Feral House book, The Hollywood Hellfire Club (with a beautiful cover by Drew Friedman), will be held on January 15 at The Silent Movie Theatre in Los Angeles at 8pm.

They made fans go crazy and censors apoplectic, spent fortunes faster than they made them, forged Rembrandts and hung them in major museums, went on trial for committing statutory rape with necrophiliac teenage girls, reinterpreted Hamlet as an incestuous mama’s boy, and swilled immeasurable quantities of spirits during week-long parties on wobbly yachts. They were “The Bundy Drive Boys,” and they made the Rat Pack look like Cub Scouts.

The last thing one might expect from the tony street north of Sunset Blvd. in Brentwood’s Bundy Drive would be a clan of obstreperous dipsomaniacs, but this was the '30s and '40s, when cocktail hour was a patriotic imperative, and the studio system was an autocratic lunacy to rebel against. (Well, some things never change.) This evening we’re celebrating the release of Feral House’s Hollywood’s Hellfire Club: The Misadventures of John Barrymore, W.C. Fields, Errol Flynn and ‘The Bundy Drive Boys’ by screening the amazing early talkie Svengali starring John Barrymore as the piercing-eyed hypnotic music master and Marian Marsh as the mesmerized underage beauty Trilby.

Also showing: W.C. Fields’ dirty short "The Dentist" and rare clips from Barrymore and Errol Flynn home movies. We’ll also be displaying original art by John Decker, the man who collaborated on a West Hollywood art gallery with Errol Flynn, drew the notorious Barrymore Death Bed Sketch, and whose forgeries now hang in museums across the country, including Harvard’s Fogg Museum. Authors Gregory William Mank, Charles Heard and Bill Nelson will be available to sign copies of their celebrated book. Tickets - $10

Link

Sample chapter 1 | Sample chapter 2

Dan sez, "Since you liked Chu Enoki's garbage city, you might like Chris Harvey's Mandala of Perfect Happiness, a sculpture made entirely from cheap plastic objects, many of them from 99 cent stores. Here are some pictures of it in my Flickr." Link (Thanks, Dan!)

SimCity has just been released as free software under the GPL version 3 license (though the name has been changed to Micropolis for trademark reasons; it was the original working title). This was precipitated by the inclusion of SimCity on the One Laptop Per Child XO machines, but no reason the kids should have all the fun. Can't wait to see the SimCity hacks that emerge now:

The "MicropolisCore" project includes the latest Micropolis (SimCity) source code, cleaned up and recast into C++ classes, integrated into Python, using the wonderful SWIG interface generator tool. It also includes a Cairo based TileEngine, and a cellular automata machine CellEngine, which are independent but can be plugged together, so the tile engine can display cellular automata cells as well as SimCity tiles, or any other application's tiles.

The key thing here is to peek inside the mind of the original Maxis programmers when they built it. Remember, this was back in the day when games had to fit inside of 640k so some "creative" programming techniques were employed. SimCity has been long a model used for urban planning and while it's just a game, there are a lot of business rules, ecosystem modeling, social dependencies, and other cool stuff going on in this codebase. It may not be pretty code but it's content sure is interesting to see.

In any case, it's out there for you to grab and have fun with. It was originally written in C and of course is old (created before 1983 which is ancient in Internet time). Don spent a lot of time cleaning the code up (including ANSIfying it, reformatting it, optimizing, and bullet-proofing it) as best he could. Don ported the Mac version of SimCity to SunOS Unix running the NeWS window system about 15 years ago, writing the user interface in PostScript. A year or so later he ported it to various versions of Unix running X-Windows, using the TCL/Tk scripting language and gui toolkit. Several years later when Linux became viable, it was fairly straightforward to port that code to Linux, and then to port that to the OLPC.

Link (via /.)

The "5-in-1 Office Tool" is basically a leatherman whose body has been replaced with a pocket calculator. It sports a stapler, scissors, measuring tape, and paper-clip holder. Link (via Dvice)

In a fascinating article, the LA Times reports that as many as one million working-class people in China have been fleeced of their hard-earned savings in an ant farming pyramid scheme run by a company with close ties to the Chinese government.

These ants were far more than uninvited picnic guests, [investors] were told. When ground into a powder, they become an aphrodisiac, a kidney purifier and general cure-all, the Yilishen Tianxi Group declared. The ants would earn them a 30% annual return.

In reality, critics say, the ants apparently were little more than the bait for a vast pyramid scheme. Over an eight-year period, the company recruited as many as 1 million would-be ant farmers, collecting about $1.2 billion. In mid-December, it filed for bankruptcy.

...

The company hired as its spokesman Zhao Benshan, a famous comedian and actor who specializes in playing a hick. He has since dropped out of sight.

The boxes at the heart of the ant farming business are made of cardboard with a 2-inch-square plastic window and a small feeding hole framed so badly with duct tape that they look like the work of a careless teenager with a box cutter.

In return for their money, ant farmers were given the boxes, ants and a list of strict instructions: The ants need a spritz of water mixed with white sugar or honey at 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. every day. They should be fed cake and egg yolks every three to five days. And they should be kept indoors.

In return, the company would come and pick up dead dried ants every 74 days. Under no circumstances were the ant farmers to open their boxes and look inside, they were told, to ensure that the special Yilishen ants weren't mixed with inferior ants.

Link

UPDATE: The chairman of the company has been sentenced to death.

Today in my ongoing series of photos from my travels: these hairy parody rockers who showed up in the back of a truck after one of the sessions at last year's Picnic conference in Amsterdam, all spandex and Cousin It wigs. Link

Sculptor Chu Enoki made this beautiful cityscape, entitled "RPM 1200," out of highly polished metal drill bits, junk and garbage. Link (via io9)

Terry Border is a sculptor who uses wire and household objects to make whimsical, funny and emotional little sculptures that entertain the hell out of me. His blog notes that he has a book coming out, too. Link (via Neatorama)

Researchers at the National University of Singapore have published a study that shows that photos and smells of delicious food cause us to make bad risk analysis and make impulse purchases:

In the first experiment, Li asked participants to act as "photo editors of a magazine" and choose among either appetite stimulating pictures of food or non-appetite stimulating pictures of nature. A control group was shown no pictures at all. All were then asked to participate in a lottery that would either pay them less money sooner or more money later.

Those who had been exposed to the photos of food were almost twenty percentage points more likely to choose the lottery with the chance of a smaller, more immediate payoff than those who were exposed to the photos of nature (61 percent vs. 41.5 percent) and eleven percentage points more likely to choose the short-term gain than those who had not been exposed to any stimulus (61 percent vs. 50 percent).

Similarly, another experiment used a cookie-scented candle to further gauge whether appetitive stimulus affects consumer behavior. Female study participants in a room with a hidden chocolate-chip cookie scented candle were much more likely to make an unplanned purchase of a new sweater -- even when told they were on a tight budget -- than those randomly assigned to a room with a hidden unscented candle (67 percent vs. 17 percent).

Link

(Image: Bake at 325..., a Creative Commons Attribution licensed photo from Clearly Ambiguous's Flickr stream)

For the past couple weeks, one of my favorite blog-reads has been Jonathan Taplin's blog. I got to know Jon when I lived in LA last year when he was co-faculty with me at the USC Annenberg Centre: he's a smart polymath with a background as a music and film producer (Bob Dylan, Mean Streets, others), Democratic party shaker, financier, high-tech startup entrepreneur, and good thinker on diverse issues related to media, politics and technology.

Taplin's blog is as eclectic as he is, a straight-up analysis blog that rips into the headlines, illuminating everything from economic news to the writers' strike to heavy weather to democratic politics. I keep finding myself returning to Taplin's posts as I read the news and talk with friends.

Hollywood is caught in "The Prisoner's Dilemma", a classic bit of game theory that is behind such notions as a nuclear arms race. It would be in the financial and security self interest of both India and Pakistan to not spend billions on nuclear weapons, but because they don't trust each-other, they continue to do so, instead of feeding their poor. Hollywood moguls, caught up in the useless notion of "Market share", don't trust each-other to not make more movies to grab greater share. The notion of market share of the box office never entered Hollywood's lexicon until the Coca Cola company bought Columbia Pictures in 1982, bringing their supermarket shelf space POV to the movie business. Market share with a commodity product like sugar water is a fine notion. Market share with a one-off variable cost product like a movie is financial suicide. Coke quickly figured this out and in 1987 unloaded Columbia to Sony, desperate to own content so it didn't get screwed in the DVD wars to come as it had in the Betamax disaster. Of course Sony's guess turned out to be wrong as well, as their ownership of content has not helped BluRay's High Definition player succeed in a similar Prisoner's Dilemma stand off with Toshiba's HD DVD. The excess movie output problem is further complicated by the role of A list talent, who's only objective is to secure as many multi-million dollar fees per year as possible. They always believe their film will rise above the crowd, and when this does not happen, they have no penalty for the failure. No one ever asks Tom Cruise or Joel Silver to give back their fees on a bomb.

With the hedge funds that fueled much of this madness now licking their wounds from the sub prime meltdown, perhaps some sanity may return to the business. Without crossing the anti-trust fine line, perhaps the majors and their equally guilty specialty divisions might make a New Year's resolution to cut back production. After all, the mark of a good business is not market share but Return on Investment.

Link

A concept "Sky Commuter aircraft" that absorbed $6 mil in startup capital is for sale on eBay. The seller appears to be one of the engineers, and the long description associated with the listing is a heartbreaking (and eccentrically punctuated) story of a beautiful, dashed dream:

The development of this advanced technology and project started back in the mid 1980's. Design and engineering was created by Boeing engineer's in Arlington Washington. Some 60 investors and well over $6,000.000.00 in R&D and production yielded only (3) concept test ships before the plant was shut down for reasons not listed here. The sad end was all and anything that was in the hangar was taken and or destroyed. This sole example of this technology, Advancements and investments are present and was saved in this single craft. The ship was not at the base location at the time or it to would have been destroyed...

In a brief description of the ship: It has a operational electric gas assisted lexan bubble canopy. Electric controled directional driving and landing lights. Electric Joystick and two foot pedals on both side and the craft was meant to be controlled from either seat. Advanced front dash shell made of Carbonfiber and Kevlar. Rear engine and electronics bay accessible by tilting seats forward and removing the back panel. (3) huge 3 foot lifting fans CCW/CW rotation. This was made to take off in vertical fight and land. It can be landed on water and float like a boat and take off of water. The targeted dream was to lift above it all and not deal with the daily gridlock traffic. Nearly at the finish line it all came to a abrupt stop and all the years and investment and R&D and production, Remains in this one craft shown here.

Link (Thanks, Bill!)

Hollywood writers and Silicon Valley geeks are teaming up to create startups like Virtual Artists modelled on the original United Artists, in which artists own and operate the studio:

Some writers are now taking matters into their own hands, using their downtime to meet with venture backers, other writers and technologists.

"We should show the studios some gratitude for getting us together," said "Rain Man" coauthor Ron Bass, a member of the WGA's negotiating committee and an investor and director of Virtual Artists. "This is not just an Internet play, but the beginning of what the future is going to look like."

About 20 entertainment and software writers are investing an average of $10,000 for a chunk of Virtual Artists. Co-founded by Aaron Mendelsohn, a screenwriter who created "Air Bud," Virtual Artists plans to fund projects as varied as shorts and feature-length movies. Its other investors include star television writer Tom Fontana of "Homicide" and "Oz"; "Hotel Rwanda" co-writer and director Terry George; "Chicken Run" screenplay author Karey Kirkpatrick; and John Logan, writer of "Sweeney Todd" and "The Aviator." Susannah Grant, who wrote "Erin Brockovich," and Warren Leight, who runs the TV show "Law & Order: Criminal Intent," also have agreed to invest.

Link to LA Times story, Link to Virtual Artists, Inc (Thanks, Henri!)

See also: Striking writers talk of launching web startups

Marilyn sez, "Harvard Medical School researchers have developed an ingenious way to deliver drugs directly to the brain (in order to kill a tumor, for example), that uses the virus that causes rabies, which is extremely effective in infiltrating the blood brain barrier that blocks most other kinds of molecules."

In this study, the drug was injected into the tail of the mice, targeting the blood vessels. Using small interfering RNA (siRNA) as a drug treatment for many diseases has been powerfully successful in other animal models, but the problem has always been the process of making it a practical drug for clinical application. Therefore, this new technology developed by Kumar et al sheds light into a new, non-invasive and feasible way to deliver siRNA specifically to the brain.

siRNA is gaining popularity as a preferred drug treatment method since its early conception in the past seven years. It takes advantage of the cell’s ability to stop its own protein production as soon as a short RNA sequence corresponding to the protein is detected outside of the cell’s nucleus. This triggers a powerful protein synthesis arrest, which can be harnessed to modulate or treat diseases such as diabetes, Hepatitis C, and even transplant rejection.

Link (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Competition from a free municipal WiFi network in Lawrence, KS (a one-ISP town) has forced the local monopoly into providing a competing free service:

Lawrence has been touted nationally as the "land that anti-trust forgot". It is one of the few cities in America where one company owns the cable provider, cable news channel, daily newspaper, online news journal, weekly independent and most popular website. What keeps this media machine running smoothly? Broadband Internet revenue. According to Ralph Gage, former Chief Operating Officer of The World Company, 53 percent of the World Company’s annual revenue was generated by broadband Internet access.

"What better place to start a municipal WiFi project," jokes Joshua Montgomery, founder of the Lawrence Freenet Project and CEO of the organization’s for-profit service provider, "I mean what could possibly go wrong?" The Lawrence Freenet municipal WiFi project was launched in April of 2005 by a small group of local geeks. "Mostly we just wanted to see what we could do with Wi-Fi," says Montgomery, "we started off with a $50 WiFi access point and a DSL connection. Now the organization has one of the largest mesh networks in the nation and serves over 1,100 members with broadband Internet access – all without a single dime of tax payer money."

Link (Thanks, Offlogic!)

Jun Murakoshi's "Noisy Instrument" is a hollow sculpture that fits into your ear and exploits the same dynamics that make the oceanic seashell noises to create a unique set of sounds:

What has not been done by using rapid prototyping technique? My answer is making sounds. It must be difficult to make music but it could be possible to make noise. When you put a seashell on your ear, you can hear something strange noise. It is noise but it makes us feel good. This product is a wearable instrument for listening the noise like seashell makes.

Link (via Dvice)

Southwest Airline's Spirit Magazine is my favorite of the in-flight magazines. Every time I flip through an issue, there's always at least one or two articles that are right up my alley. This month, there's a nice, long feature on the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas. From Spirit Magazine (photo by Phil Torrone of MAKE:):

“My brother and I learned to fix the machines using the Machinery’s Handbook,” (museum founder Tim Arnold) says. “Back then, in the early ’70s, you could buy a broken-down machine for 50 or 100 bucks, fix it up, nurse it back to health, and make 20 bucks a week off it. We ended up renting an 800-square-foot storefront in East Lansing. There were some minor details: Pinball was still illegal in Michigan, and we were under 18. We were putting machines in bars we weren’t supposed to be allowed into. My brother and I saw ourselves as bandits. It was organized crime, except that we weren’t very organized.” This was an impressive bit of technical entrepreneurship when you consider that the average college graduate in electrical engineering needs two years of tutelage under a skilled repairman to master the art of fixing old games.

Now all the games are beginning to bear the patina of yesterday. At the height of the pinball era in the early ’90s, the industry produced about 100,000 machines a year. Today only one company, Stern Pinball, remains, and it makes about 10,000 machines a year. “We have a saying: The last ice man makes the most money,” Arnold says. “Back in the ’20s, you had thousands of ice men in every city, delivering ice to every home. Then refrigeration came along, and nearly all the ice men went out of business. Nearly all. You still have a guy delivering ice to bars and restaurants. There’s room in every town for one ice man. That’s what the Hippie and I are.” He peered at me through his aviator glasses. “We’re the last of the ice men.”

Link to Spirit Magazine article, Link to PT's photo post on MAKE:

A 14-year-old boy in Lodz, Poland allegedly hacked a TV remote control so that he could control parts of his city's tram system. Sounds like he identified the infrared pulses used to override the track switching. Four trams were derailed but nobody and 12 people were injured. From The Register:

"He had converted the television control into a device capable of controlling all the junctions on the line and wrote in the pages of a school exercise book where the best junctions were to move trams around and what signals to change," (said Lodz police spokesman Miroslaw Micor.)

"He treated it like any other schoolboy might a giant train set, but it was lucky nobody was killed...

The youth, described by his teachers as an electronics buff and exemplary student, faces charges at a special juvenile court of endangering public safety.

Link (Thanks, Jason Tester!)

It's come out in the British House of Lords that a pair of twins, who didn't realize they were siblings, were married. Once the couple found out how close they really were, the marriage was annulled. The matter was discussed during a debate on the legislation surrounding human fertility and embryology. From CNN:

"They were never told that they were twins," (a senior British lawmaker) said during the Dec. 10 debate... They had been adopted by separate families and "met later in life and felt an inevitable attraction, and the judge had to deal with the consequences of the marriage that they entered into and all the issues of their separation."

No further details about the couple have emerged, and it is not known when the marriage took place or how long they were together before they discovered the truth.

Adoption groups said Friday the case proves the need for openness and transparency during the adoption process.

Link (Thanks, Mark Pescovitz!)

UK unicorn club girl by photographer Alistair Allan, via fashionista.com (thanks Susannah Breslin).

Søren Ragsdale has been traveling through Asia and sharing some interesting video and photos with friends. He also happens to be one of the folks behind waterboarding.org. He writes:

While we were in Cambodia this winter I visited the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Tuol Sleng is one of the few places where you can see a real actual waterboard in the room where it was used to torture prisoners. I've created a 'waterboardingdotorg' Flickr account and put a link up here.

Nice to know America has something in common with the Khmer Rouge -- something that isn't torture, of course. Among the photos in that set, this chilling shot of a poster on the wall of the Khmer Rouge's chief of staff, now covered with graffitti -- and this sign reprimanding less-than-reverent visitors; "no laughing allowed."

Previously:

* What Waterboarding Feels Like
* Senator Kit Bond: Waterboarding is "like swimming"
* Waterboarding.org

Noah Shachtman writes,

Just before the holidays, I took a trip up to iRobot's headquarters, outside of Boston, to take a look at the machine that'll form the heart of the Army's $286 million "unmanned surge."  Along the way, I caught my first glimpse of robot yoga.

Link.

Today, Friday, January 11th is the sixth anniversary of the opening of the US prison at Guantánamo Bay. The ACLU and a number of other organizations asked members today to "wear orange to protest this stain on America's reputation." Snip:

Closing the prison and ending torture and indefinite detention without charge is a first step towards restoring our reputation in the world.

80 people in Gitmo-style orange jumpsuits were arrested today at the US Supreme Court, in a protest calling for the prison's closure: Link. Other similar protests organized by Amnesty International took place in other world capitals.

There were also protests in Second Life: Link to screengrab-set by Taran Rampersad.

(image: Matthew Good).

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Penn Says is a new short video series where Penn Jillette turns on his webcam and talks about stuff on his mind, like time travel, gangs, and religion. From the press release:

"Big badass Crackle has given me the chance to talk directly to you about anything I want, anytime I want. I mean anything. I mean any time. When something gets my goat, or I want to get someone else’s goat or other farm animal, I’ll flip on my camera and rave about it. Half-cocked, from inside my head, electronically to inside your head in minutes. No script, no thinking, so I might be wrong. I’m counting on you to keep me honest with videos right back to me,” said Jillette.

Link

The TSA's Traveler Redress Website was created by a no-bid crony contractor, leaked giant amount of personal information from hundreds of travellers (who had already been screwed over by the agency and were writing in for justice) and exposed them to identity theft. The House Oversight Committee concluded that the TSA totally, absolutely screwed up.

They sure do a bang up job at stopping you from bringing water through the checkpoint though.

That's gotta count for something.

* TSA awarded the website contract without competition. TSA gave a small, Virginia-based contractor called Desyne Web Services a no-bid contract to design and operate the redress website. According to an internal TSA investigation, the "Statement of Work" for the contract was "written such that Desyne Web was the only vendor that could meet program requirements."

* The TSA official in charge of the project was a former employee of the contractor. The TSA official who was the "Technical Lead" on the website project and acted as the point of contact with the contractor had an apparent conflict of interest. He was a former employee of Desyne Web Services and regularly socialized with Desyne's owner.

* TSA did not detect the website's security weaknesses for months. The redress website was launched on October 6, 2006, and was not taken down until after February 13, 2007, when an internet blogger exposed the security vulnerabilities. During this period, TSA Administrator Hawley testified before Congress that the agency had assured "the privacy of users and the security of the system" before its launch. Thousands of individuals used the insecure website, including at least 247 travelers who submitted large amounts of personal information through an insecure webpage.

Link (Thanks, Bill!)

Update: If you want to read the world's greatest "TSA have lied and cheated and lied and cheated" rant, check out our Teresa's post in the comment thread on the five year old whom the TSA thinks is a terr'ist.