Today in my ongoing series of photos from my travels over the years: this new installation from street artist Asbestos, spotted on Brick Lane in London last Sunday. I really like the way this shot turned out. Link

Boy, does today's XKCD ever resonate with me -- every year, my New Year's resolution is "stop arguing with strangers on the Internet" and every year, I break it within days. Link

The Indonesian state railway is installing paint-sprayers to douse "roof riders" who ride atop the trains into Jakarta -- Indonesia lacks a cheap and reliable way to get into and out of the city, and many commute illegally on the roof (the Jakarta Post says more than 50 roof riders have been killed in the past two years).

After several failed attempts to discourage roof riders over years, the state owned railway company PT Kereta Api will from next week douse them with a coloured liquid so that officers can identify them when they get off the train, the Jakarta Post said.

"We will confiscate their IDs and give them a ticket," Kereta Api regional spokesman Akhmad Sujadi was quoted as saying.

"We will send a copy of the ticket to their family, their local neighbourhood unit head, their employer, or, if they're students, their headmasters," added Sujadi, who described the move as "unique."

Link

(Image: A child looks through the window, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Danumurthi Mahendra's Flickr stream)

Got some extra network cable lying around? (who doesn't?) Why not try your hand at some Cat-5 macrame and make a handsome high-tech plant-hammock out of it?

Since I was cleaning anyway, I took the time to straighten up a few other areas, including some potted plants and cabling. When finished, I had a left-over mint plant, and forty-some feet of damaged Ethernet cable. Since I had plenty of other things to do, and didn't particularly want to do them, I spent a relaxing half-hour knotting a plant hanger with the cable.

Link (via Craft)

The Bush Administration has put forth new rules demanding that visitors to the US from Europe need to apply for "approval" to land, days in advance of purchasing their tickets. Airlines will also be required to provide information on travellers' families, and to allow US Air Marshals to fly on any flight that will pass over or land on US soil.

The demand to put armed air marshals on to the flights is part of a travel clampdown by the Bush administration that officials in Brussels described as "blackmail" and "troublesome", and could see west Europeans and Britons required to have US visas if their governments balk at Washington's requirements.

According to a US document being circulated for signature in European capitals, EU states would also need to supply personal data on all air passengers overflying but not landing in the US in order to gain or retain visa-free travel to America, senior EU officials said.

And within months the US department of homeland security is to impose a new permit system for Europeans flying to the US, compelling all travellers to apply online for permission to enter the country before booking or buying a ticket, a procedure that will take several days.

I think this is a great idea. While we're at it, lets give Mexico the right to put its Sky Marshals on any American flight that's bound for South America, and Canada could put Mounties on all US flights headed over to Alaska from the mainland. Also: if you're on a US flight headed to, say, Germany, your flight could have gun-toting cops from Canada, Ireland, the UK, France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and Switzerland on it. Link

Here's a fantastic take-off on the Barack Obama Yes We Can video, in which McCain sings "bomb bomb bomb Iran," and says that we're going to be in Iran for 100 years, while singing Americans look on in abject terror. Link

More news on the Draft Lessig front: a couple days ago, I posted here about the movement to draft Larry Lessig to run for Congress to fill Tom Lantos's recently vacated seat. Now, Larry's put up a "Lessig08" site with a video that explains the nature of his "anti-corruption" campaign to reform government to reduce the perverting effect of money on public policy. The site does not say that Larry will run for Congress, but it does invite you to show support for the idea so that Larry can gauge whether it's feasible for him to make a run without taking any corporate or special-interest money.

This site hosts this video to explain the launch of two exploratory projects — first, a Change Congress movement, and second, my own decision whether to run for Congress in the California 12th.

I have decided I want to give as much energy as I can to the Change Congress movement. I will decide in the next week or so whether it makes sense to advance that movement by running for Congress.

Link

MediaSentry, a company that provides "investigative services" to the RIAA, has redesigned its site to remove references to its services in support of litigation. The move comes after the Massachusetts State Police told MediaSentry that it was illegal to investigate of Boston University students without a license.

The updated version of the MediaSentry site has no reference to litigation or prosecution, which seems odd for a company making what appears to be mad bank from supporting the RIAA's litigation campaign. Instead, it offers assistance in determining "the scope and scale" of piracy problems and measuring "efforts to reduce unauthorized distribution."

Link

The stairs going up to the attic room of a Victorian row house in London have been fitted with books that line each riser and wrap around the edges. As someone who lives in small places with lots of books (and no matter what I do, no matter how ruthless I am, I always seem to have lots more books than I have room for) this kind of thing is sheer aspirational porn for me.

The flat occupies part of the shared top floor of an existing Victorian mansion block. Our proposal extended the flat into the unused loft space above, creating a new bedroom level and increasing the floor area of the flat by approximately one third. We created a 'secret' staircase, hidden from the main reception room, to access a new loft bedroom lit by roof lights. Limited by space, we melded the idea of a staircase with our client's desire for a library to form a 'library staircase' in which English oak stair treads and shelves are both completely lined with books. With a skylight above lighting the staircase, it becomes the perfect place to stop and browse a tome. The stair structure was designed as an upside down 'sedan chair' structure (with Rodrigues Associates, Structural Engineers, London) that carries the whole weight of the stair and books back to the main structural walls of the building. It dangles from the upper floor thereby avoiding any complicated neighbour issues with the floors below.

Link (Thanks, David!)

The Aardvarchaeology blog looks at the ruins of children's treehouses, which can often be found in wooded areas near residential areas. There's a big difference between the way that kids and adults abandon their sites -- children leave everything in situ, forgotten and frozen, while adults strip a site of everything that might be useful.

And the treehouse sites are hardly ever cleaned up. In fact, the children's parents often have only a vague notion of where the treehouse is. They may help to build it, but they don't feel responsible for it. It's out in the woods where only children and mushroom pickers see it: out of sight and out of mind. The mess there would never be tolerated in the back yard, just as most Westerners of today feel really uncomfortable in the stench and litter of Third World villages.

So the next time you come upon an abandoned treehouse site, you might give some thought to the fact that you're standing in the ruins of someone's childhood. The children who used the site no longer exist: they're grownups now, living somewhere else, disposing more rationally of their belongings. And some of them very probably have kids of their own now who are wheedling them to buy a few boards and a box of long nails, a rope ladder and some tarred roofing cardboard. And daddy -- can I please have your old drum kit / dough mixer / rollerskates? I'll take them out of your sight.

Link (via Neatorama)

Oxblood Ruffin shares word that Cult of the Dead Cow just launched a large-scale scanner project, Goolag.org:

SECURITY ADVISORY: The following program may screw a large Internet search engine and make the Web a safer place.

LUBBOCK, TX, February 20th – Today CULT OF THE DEAD COW (cDc), the world’s most attractive hacker group, announced the release of Goolag Scanner, a Web auditing tool. Goolag Scanner enables everyone to audit his or her own Web site via Google. The scanner technology is based on “Google hacking”, a form of vulnerability research developed by Johnny I Hack Stuff. He’s a lovely fellow. Go buy him a drink.

“It’s no big secret that the Web is the platform”, said cDc spokesmodel, Oxblood Ruffin. “And this platform pretty much sucks from a security perspective. Goolag Scanner provides one more tool for Web site owners to patch up their online properties. We’ve seen some pretty scary holes through random tests with the scanner in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. If I were a government, a large corporation, or anyone with a big Web site, I’d be downloading this beast and aiming it at my site yesterday. The vulnerabilities are that serious.”

Goolag Scanner will be released open source under the GNU Affero General Public license. It is dedicated to the memory of Wau Holland, founder of the Chaos Computer Club, and a true champion of privacy rights and social justice.

The second place winner in the "Greener Gadgets Competition" is Clay Moulton's LED lamp, which uses a gravity mechanism to generate electricity. To light the lamp, you lift the weight and let it slowly fall.

A Virginia Tech student has created an LED floor lamp that is powered by gravity, using a weight slide similar to the concept of a grandfather clock. The lamp puts out the equivalent of a 40-Watt bulb, and lasts four hours per cycle. The mechanism is expected to last 200 years.

To "turn on" the lamp, the user moves weights from the bottom to the top of the lamp. An hour-glass like mechanism is turned over and the weights are placed in the mass sled near the top of the lamp. The sled begins its gently glide back down and, within a few seconds, the LEDs come on and light the lamp, Moulton said. “It’s more complicated than flipping a switch but can be an acceptable, even enjoyable routine, like winding a beautiful clock or making good coffee,” he said.

Link (Thanks, Tom!)

You can buy a $50 kit to build this beautiful LED persistence of vision wristwatch. (Or pay $189 for the fully-assembled, ready-to wear watch.)

With two time display options (Binary and wave-it-in-the-air POV display) and a super-bright flashlight mode, this watch is sure to turn some heads. Buy as a chip only, a kit to assemble yourself, a preassembled board, or a complete watch.

Link (Via Make)

Wired's Danger Room blog is running a contest to come up with a name for that weird military operation Mark blogged about last week -- in which the US government will attempt to shoot down a wayward satellite meandering around in the heavens. Poor li'l satellite. Link to the Wired contest. (thanks, Noah Shachtman)

from Ethan Persoff's COMICS WITH PROBLEMS, scans of a midcentury slaughterhouse graphic novelette advocating against animal mistreatment. I mean, well, advocating against inadvertently bruising cows and pigs before you kill 'em for sweet delicious bacon and steaks. I'm so confused.

Regarding the cell above: "Man, what an unfortunate and unintended history reference," says Ethan.

Previously on Boing Boing:
* About that ginormous beef recall

Russian artist Andrey Kuznetsov has created a series of Russian folk-art woodcuts inspired by science fiction films like The Matrix, Star Wars and War of the Worlds. These are just...inspired. Link (via IO9)

The Perucci Brothers, a pair of kinetic artists, created this insanely elaborate domino run for the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center. I've never seen anything that comes close to this for sheer, audacious, obsessive domino nerddom. Link (Thanks, Jason!)

Wikitravel, the collaborative wiki project that compiles guides to cities and countries around the world, has spun out Wikitravel Press, which will publish hardcopy editions of the Wikitravel guides. Each copy will be printed on demand, using a recent (no more than a month old) version of the selected Wikitravel pages (printed and fulfilled by lulu.com). This is a nice bridge over the gap between the currency of a wiki page and the convenience of a bound volume.

Wikitravel, the Webby Award-winning online travel guide, has over 30,000 guides to destinations around the world. At Wikitravel Press, we select the best ones, give them to our carefully selected local editors to polish and fact-check, and then typeset them with our revolutionary one-click Yucca engine. This lets us update the guides from top to bottom every single month. When you order online, a fresh copy is printed just for you and shipped to your doorstop in less than a week*.

And that's only half the story! On your travels, you're sure to discover great new restaurants or hip new bars not listed in the guide. For normal travel guides, you could write some "feedback" and hope they put it into the next edition five years from now. But for Wikitravel, you can add it yourself, and less than one month later your contribution (and your name) will be in print.

Link

IO9 has a set of provocative rules for "fan husbandry" -- nine things creators should do to keep their fans active (if not, you know, happy or satisfied):

Fans love inconsistencies. Fans claim to hate contradictions in long-running stories, but actually that stuff is catnip to them. If Londo Mollari says he has seven penises in one episode and then refers to his twelve penises in another episode, the fans will spend hours coming up with explanations for the discrepancy. Marvel Comics realized this years ago, when it started sending "no prizes" to fans who could come up with the cleverest explanations of continuity goofs. So don't worry about trying to be consistent with old stories. Just ignore them, and let the fans worry about them.

Link

The Mecha Manga Bible Stories comix I blogged earlier today's got competition from another manga Bible called "The Manga Bible: From Genesis to Revelation," a single volume from Ajinbayo Akinsiku, who is training to become an Anglican priest.

In a blurb for the Manga Bible, which is published by Doubleday, the archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, is quoted as saying, “It will convey the shock and freshness of the Bible in a unique way.”

No doubt. In the Manga Bible, whose heroes look and sound like skateboarders in Bedouin gear, Noah gets tripped up counting the animals in the Ark: “That’s 11,344 animals? Arggh! I’ve lost count again. I’m going to have to start from scratch!”

Abraham rides a horse out of an explosion to save Lot. Og, king of Bashan, looms like an early Darth Vader. The Sermon on the Mount did not make the book, though, because there was not enough action to it.

Link, Link to the Manga Bible on Amazon

Here's a great Ask Metafilter thread on maintaining economic balance in massively multiplayer online worlds. A lot of basic questions get asked, answered, and reformulated here -- it's a great introduction to the subject of virtual economies.

EVE Online has had a staff economist for about a year now, I think, as mentioned above. I play EVE, and a large part of my time in-game is spent making economic decisions: what to manufacture, where to buy raw goods cheap, transportation costs and risks (20 jumps through low-sec space to buy low might be worth it, or I might lose my ship and all its fittings)...and, yeah, it's really tedious but still somehow fun.

The great thing about EVE's economy is that, with the exception of skill books and basic blueprints, everything in the game is player-created -- from the lowliest ammo to the most gargantuan battleships. So prices can fluctuate wildly across regions, and wily traders (with better ships than I can fly) can make mucho moolah off of those shifts.

Link

This wall made from 7200 bananas is on display at NYC's Deitch gallery until Feb 23. It's part of artist Stefan Sagmeister's exhibition "Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far."

Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far, an interactive exhibition by Stefan Sagmeister, opens at Deitch Projects on January 31, 2008. The exhibition will include works that have a life of their own, transforming throughout the exhibition as viewers engage with them. Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far is timed to coincide with the release of a new book of the same title, which surveys Sagmeister's illustrious career.

Link

The Nautilus is an incredible and ambitious steampunk home theatre setup that is themed like the galley of Captain Nemo's ship in Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It was built by designers who'd worked on Tokyo Disneyland (the Disney Sea park at TDL is easily the most beautiful human-constructed environment I've ever been to), and is a 900-square-foot, football-shaped room lined with portholes and artificially rusted struts.

The theater is located above the new garage addition. Malone handled the original sketches, which were approved by the Morans without question. During the design stage of the home theater, Malone refrained from watching the Disney film. “The idea of a Victorian submarine presents such a broad palette of ideas and it’s fun to experiment,” he says. “I didn’t want imagery from the movie to find its way into the theater.” Still, he admits that he couldn’t help but be influenced by his childhood memories of Harper Goff’s imaginative vision for the movie’s mysterious submarine.

Link (via Dvice)

The British National Consumer Council has decried the business practices of 17 software companies whose EULAs contain abusive and unfair language. The companies include Microsoft, Adobe and Symantec, and the Council's objections include the EULAs' contents as well as the fact that the terms of the EULA are not visible on the outside of the box, so you don't find out what you've agreed to until you've already paid for it and brought it home.

I'd love to see a law that said any EULAs had to be printed on the packaging in 12-point type, which would leave software companies with two choices -- enormous, threatening boxes covered in dense legal type; or short, simple, fair license agreements that could fit comfortably in a couple lines on the side of the package.

"Software rights-holders are shifting the legal burden on to consumers who buy computer programmes, leaving them with less protection than when they buy a cheap Biro," said Carl Belgrove of the NCC.

"Consumers can't have a clue what they're signing up to when some terms and conditions run to 10 or more pages.

"There's a significant imbalance between the rights of the consumer and the rights of the holder," he added.

Link (Thanks, Laura!)

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Paleontologists have discovered a giant frog in Madagascar that lived 65-70 milllion years ago. My favorite part of the story is that they named the frog Beelzebufo. This devil of a frog measured around 20 centimeters across and was 40 centimeters long. From Nature News:

The team couldn’t piece together a complete skeleton, but did get a nearly complete picture of the skull, which was “short and fat with a huge mouth", says (University College London scientist Susan) Evans.

Similarly-shaped South American frogs have a strong bite and can feast on small vertebrate such as mice and lizards: “Basically, they eat anything smaller that walks by,” Evans says.

Link (Thanks, Vann Hall and Kirsten Anderson!)

Today's Washington Post has a profile of Paranoia magazine, a terrific print magazine about wild conspiracies, Forteana, and the paranormal. I remember when Paranoia first launched in 1992 during the print 'zine heyday. I haven't read Paranoia in a while but I'm going out later to find a copy at my local independent newsagent. From the Washington Post:

I decided to ask the co-editors, Joan D'Arc and Al Hidell. I called and Joan D'Arc answered. Well, I wasn't born yesterday so I knew that name was fake -- a subtle reference to Joan of Arc. So I asked her: "What's your real name?" She refused to tell me.

"You must surely realize that there are people out there who hate us and would want to harm us."

She told me that editing Paranoia was not a full-time job so I asked her what she did for a living.

"I'm not at liberty to discuss that," she said.

Apparently, when you're exposing the secret government you can't be too careful. D'Arc told me that Paranoia was born in 1992 in Providence, R.I., where she ran an alternative bookstore called Newspeak, which hosted weekly meetings of the Providence Conspiracy League. The league started collecting conspiracy information and storing it in a big loose-leaf binder with a picture of Lee Harvey Oswald on the cover. And the binder led to the magazine.

Link to the Washington Post article, Link to Paranoia (via The Anomalist)

MIT researchers received NASA funding to develop a radio telescope array for the far side of the moon. Consisting of hundreds of telescope modules working in tandem, the Lunar Array for Radio Cosmology (LARC) will be used to look back into the "cosmic Dark Ages" shortly after the Big Bang when stars and galaxies first formed. Construction on the $1 billion array won't begin until after 2025. Seen here is physicist Jacqueline Hewitt with a prototype radio telescope array. From MIT News:

Observations of the cosmic Dark Ages are impossible to make from Earth, (lead researcher Jacqueline) Hewitt explains, because of two major sources of interference that obscure these faint low-frequency radio emissions. One is the Earth's ionosphere, a high-altitude layer of electrically charged gas. The other is all of Earth's radio and television transmissions, which produce background interference everywhere on the Earth's surface.

The only place that is totally shielded from both kinds of interference is the far side of the moon, which always faces away from the Earth and therefore is never exposed to terrestrial radio transmissions.

Link

In the latest issue of John Brockman's always-provocative EDGE e-newsletter, he presents a video of MIT researcher Drew Endy, a pioneer in synthetic biology. The idea of synthetic biology is to engineer modular genetic components that can be snapped together into biological systems that don't previously exist in nature. (More about synthetic biology can be found in articles I've written over the years here, here, and here.) From Endy's Edge video:

The big question, to come back to it, is, how do we make biology easy to engineer, and then the parallel question that comes along with that is, what are the consequences of success? If you look around the room that we're in, everything in the room is a synthetic or engineered artifact, right? From this stuff, to the wood itself, the materials here, even the air that we're breathing, has been engineered for temperature and humidity, so that it is easier for us to deal with.

The only thing that hasn't been engineered are the living things, ourselves. Again, what's the consequence of doing that at scale? Biotechnology is 30 years old; , it's a young adult. Most of the work is still to come, but how do we actually do it? Let's not talk about it, let's actually go do it, and then let's deal with the consequences in terms of how this is going to change ourselves, how the biosecurity framework needs to recognize that it's not going to be nation-state driven work necessarily, how an ownership sharing and innovation framework needs to be developed that moves beyond patent-based intellectual property and recognizes that the information defining the genetic material's going to be more important than the stuff itself and so you might transition away from patents to copyright and so on and so forth.

Link

The Reanimation Library is a curious independent little library in Brooklyn. The collection consists of several hundred books that contain odd graphics and photos. It's sort of a visual library-as-wunderkammer of books scored from thrift stores, stoop sales, and garbage cans around the country. It started as a personal resource for Andrew Beccone when he was making a lot of fliers for his punk bannd. Today, Beccone launched his Reanimation Library browsable image archive where he's posting scanned art from the books and making them publicly available. Right now, the scanned image archive represents just a tiny fraction of the pictures you might see visiting the physical library, where a scanner is available for public use. Link (via Morbid Anatomy)

Phil says:

MAKE is at The NYC Toy Fair 2008 - thousands of toy makers come here each year to show off their latest - our lens on this show is a lot different than any coverage you'll see anywhere else - stay tuned for posts, images and videos of unique MAKE-style products. DIY kits, science kits, engineering, weird and bizarre -- things you'll see no where else! We'll be reporting live over the next few days, come back early and come back often!

Link

My brother Mark Pescovitz snapped this photo of hibernating ladybugs in his garage. He has a show of his photographs of "groupings" opening March 28 at Indiana University's Marsh Galley in Indianapolis. In his spare time, Mark is a transplant surgeon and professor of microbiology and immunology.

Greg Zanis and his sons paid $60,000 to build this pyramid-shaped electric Dream Car, which is a fraction of its true value, if you ask me. (Via Treehugger)

In today's episode of Boing Boing tv:

An all-knowing "Life Booth" controls humans and their thoughts, in this animated short by twentysomething French animators Loic Tari and Samantha Duris. In Le Programme du Jour, we follow a pre-programmed day in the life of asymmetrically-faced citizen B42-347, who "follows the rules of the Life Booth" until life takes an unexpected twist. Link to Boing Boing tv episode, with video and discussion, and more about the creators.

Here's his resignation statement in Spanish, here's a copy in English. But wait, is a livejournal on the way?

My only wish is to fight as a soldier in the battle of ideas. I shall continue to write under the heading of ‘Reflections by comrade Fidel.’ It will be just another weapon you can count on. Perhaps my voice will be heard. I shall be careful.

This is a well-known paradox, but I like the way it's used on this pair buttons. Sold out on Etsy. Link (Via Notcot)

Here's a trailer for Crash Course: The Accidental Art of Arnold Odermatt, a Swiss police photographer. (Via PCL Linkdump)

A man in Perthshire UK was found guilty of drunk driving, despite his claim that he has a unique “balloon-like” sac in his neck that stores alcohol in his throat and caused the breathalyzer to falsely indicate he was drunk.

Harvey admitted he then crashed his car into a ditch and was climbing out of the window when police arrived.

He also accepted his breath smelled of alcohol when he was questioned by police.

However, he told the court he had since been diagnosed with “laryngocele” and had undergone an operation to have a sac the size of a tennis ball removed.

The accused said he had been driving home after visiting family members when he decided to stop by a river to drink some wine.

Link (Thanks, Simmie!)

Chip Kidd is one of the world's greatest graphic designers, specializing in book design. Book One is his design retrospective filled with concept sketches and hilarious anecdotes and insights into design.

Kidd's also an excellent novelist. A few years ago he wrote The Cheese Monkeys: A Novel In Two Semesters about 1960s college design students.

The Learners is a sequel to Cheese Monkeys, in which the main character goes to work in an ad agency, which from the reviews I've read, sounds something like the agency in my favorite TV show, Mad Men.

A Boing Boing reader named Meryl alerted me to a video called "5 Experiments in Form and Contrast" Kidd created to promote The Learners. She says, "He basically reads a well-known piece of dialogue by one person while putting on the voice and physical affect of another well-known person." Link

For the past 18 months, the Steal This Wiki project has been industriously updating Abbie Hoffman's 1971 classic, Steal This Book, and now they're ready to ship. Ploney Almoney sez, "We now have our first alpha available for people to download as ODT or PDF, it is a huge bloated draft with minimal images but we have added just about every survival tip we could think of for shelter alternatives living out of a pack, cooking without a kitchen, escaping the United States, and even making a fabber, plus all of the protest and propaganda distribution in a more useful DIY format. Now we need lots of people to read it and help us get the edits done so it can be sent for printing."

This site is intended to support and distribute information that is relevant to this day and age, which can be reasonably defined as one in which Americans are forced to deal with difficult issues (such as a military led by an unwise and unreasonable group of people) as well as with real and dangerous threats.

Hopefully as the content on this site evolves, it will become a new and useful work, holding true to the spirit of the original, and providing useful information to those who value freedom, peace, and justice.

This site contains the how-to information on everything from how to grow a garden to how to teach a college level class. How many revolutions were about putting the existing means of production into the hands of the people. We have seen that these revolutions, given enough time, always ended with a new power caste abusing the under class. We want to give the means of production for basic needs back into the hands of every person so they can choose to ignore the heavy hand of a government which has melded itself with the mega-businesses in a way that leaves ordinary humans with a voice or a choice. [edit]

Link to Steal This Wiki, Link to download PDF of alpha edition

See also: Steal This Book, the wiki

British Olympic athletes are being forced to sign contracts forbidding them from speaking out against the Chinese government, on threat of being banned from participating in the Beijing games. Other countries, including Canada and the US, have not made their athletes sign onto such an agreement, and have averred that their athletes can speak their minds. Prince Charles has vowed to boycott the Beijing Olympics.

The controversial decision to award the Olympics to Beijing means this year's Games have the potential to be the most politically charged since 1936.

Adolf Hitler used the Munich Games that year to glorify his Nazi regime, although his claims of Aryan superiority were undermined by black American athlete Jesse Owens winning four gold medals.

Link

I'm a great fan of the geeky podcast Tank Riot, produced by three pseudonymous young men in Madison, WI. Each episode, the Tank Rioters take on some goofy, nerdy subject and crack wise (and informative!) about it for an hour or so. They're often very funny, they always very geeky. The last episode, a biography of Nikola Tesla, was particularly great. Link, Link to podcast feed

The January, 1932 issue of Modern Mechanix invited us to weep for poor Thomas Edison, who allegedly bankrupted himself with dumb real-estate deals before dying, going to his grave a poor man. Edison was a notorious rip-off artist (he once told Nikola Tesla that the money he'd been promised would never come to him, and that Tesla just "didn't understand American humor) and liked to electrocute animals for kicks, so a pauper's death sounds like pretty reasonable karma to me.

Mr. Edison secretly expressed to me the hope that some day I would write just this kind of a story so that it might form a sort of guidance to inventors who would pick up the threads of science where he left off.

During our last meeting I distinctly remember how he placed his arm around my shoulder and said, “I have told you all. Be discreet. Do not tell everything until after I am gone. Then, after I have departed, you can do inventors and scientists a great duty by telling the rest..."

Mr. Edison replied, in his own handwriting: “Would not like to do this for many reasons. At present my income has nearly disappeared on account of the depression in business.”

Link

See also:
Edison electrocuted an elephant 105 years ago today
Edison and the music biz: nothing's changed
Edison's mistakes recapitulated by RIAA

John Scalzi and Tor are making his groundbreaking novel Old Man's War available as a free download as part of the runup to the launch of Tor's killer new sf supersite. There are plenty of other titles available too -- you just need to sign up to get an email notifying you of more cool free stuff from Tor. Link

Love this hamburger-shaped lunchbox from Happy Trails. Each level of the plastic burger lifts off, revealing itself to be a neat little tray for a different kind of food -- everything goes in, nothing touches. Link (via PopGadget)

MIT prof Patrick Winston gives an infamous annual talk called "How to Talk," a lecture on how to give good lectures. It's open to students and, apparently the public. This 1999 version of the talk (pre-Powerpoint!) is filled with damned good advice on persuasive public speaking, delivered in the form of "heuristics" that you can use to guide your own presentations. Link

Bruce Sterling called designer Mieke Gerritzen's presentation at the LIFT conference in Geneva "the freakiest, most-out there" presentation at the event. Gerritzen's talk is on "Next Nature," the way that corporatism and nature will mesh more and more as time goes by -- think of butterflies gengineered with corporate logos. The talk is a heady mix of what-if and have-you-seen, and manages to make my head swim every time I watch it. Link

Etsy seller Loveevol created these rings by gluing plastic flies to sliver bands and replacing their eyes with glittery paste-gems. Link

The American Psychological Association's refusal to condemn psychologists who participate in illegal government torture of suspected terrorists has driven a deep rift into the organization, with many prominent members quitting in protest. Metafilter has a good roundup of links to various positions from within the APA.

Since 2004 there have been numerous reports in the press and from official sources of psychologists playing central roles in the design, implementation, and translation of abusive interrogation techniques into standard operating procedures 2. The same sources have implicated psychologists in the misuse of detainee medical information to make interrogation techniques more effective in individual cases. The issue at hand is not whether the APA condemns torture and prohibits participation in torture. The issue is whether the APA endorses psychologists’ participation in the types of detainee abuses that have been sanctioned by the US government and practiced by psychologists in the Department of defense (DoD) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Although APA leadership has issued statements against torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment (not unlike the Bush Administration), it has never straightforwardly condemned psychologists' participation in these government-sanctioned, but abusive interrogation techniques and detention conditions. When the APA leadership has commented on psychologists known to have violated torture statutes, it has merely denied that those implicated were APA members. In cases where those implicated were, in fact, APA members, the organization has remained silent.

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Lurking in the bowels of the Internet Archive is the Jonestown Death Tape, a recording made by Jim Jones of the final hours of his cult, as he fed them poison and watched them all die, men, women and children. I wasn't able to listen to this -- just reading about the children screaming and Jones berating parents who balked at killing them was enough to give me a serious bout of willies. Still, this is one of those historical documents that I'm glad is out there -- atrocities like Jonestown don't happen every day (thankfully), and getting some insight into those who commit them is a worthwhile endeavor (for someone with a stronger stomach than mine).

An audio recording made on November 18, 1978, at the Peoples Temple compound in Jonestown, Guyana immediately preceding and during the mass suicide or murder of over 900 members of the cult.

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The February, 1933 issue of Modern Mechanix included this great, long article on the state-of-the-art of horror movie makeup.

All the information he could dig up gave only a suggestion, not a solution of Pierce’s problem in turning Karloff into a duplicate of Osiris for “Im-ho-tep,” in which picture the mummy comes to life. Manifestly embalming fluids and perfumes have no place in makeup for the camera, so for a month Pierce experimented with pigments, paints, drying materials. He had to have a rotted cloth that would not fall from the body, yet would crumble easily when the body stirred from its coffin. The face must look very old and withered and dry. The eyes must be closed, yet seem to see.

An assistant spent a week feeding double-weight cheese cloth in two widths—two and three inches—through a barrel-like cylinder over a gas flame, winding it gently over a turning wheel. This cooked and charred the cloth without actually burning it.

Pierce experimented with 20 dry colors until at last he looked down into his mixing pot on exactly the yellow-gray color with which good mummies are covered. Burnt umber, light umber, fullers’ earth, other colors, glue and hot water combined to produce this mud-like substance. With a little cotton and the standard make-up pigments Pierce was ready for the big job— a seven hour ordeal—of turning back the pages of time 3700 years, all for a five-minute effect on the screen.

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