Today, my family rode the carousel in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Usually, the soundtrack is recorded organ and calliope music. But this morning, Abraham, the cool clown who was at the helm, was playing awesomely insane music that reminded me of the Pogues vs. a crazy circus sideshow band. He told us the music was by Gogol Bordello, a Gypsy punk band of Eastern European immigrants now living in New York City. I looked them up online and they're terriric. Oddly, I also read that Gogol Bordello performed with Madonna last year at the London Live Earth concert. Apparently, their live shows are insanely exhilarating musical extravaganzas too. (Live photo from Wikipedia.)
Link to Gogol Bordello's site, Link to their MySpace page

This Ann Arbor, MI Craiglist "missed connections" ad is a sincere and lovely note of thanks from one toker to another:

I called you from my cell phone but had completely forgot who I was calling by the time you answered the phone. Of course, you were also baked to bajeezus and forgot to tell me that I had called Cottage Inn.

When you answered and said, “Whatsup?” I thought about it, and after a 20 second pause I told you that was hungry. You suggested I try a pizza, and I agreed that it was probably a good idea.

Then I asked you if you sold pizza and you said that you could make me one. I said I wanted anchovies and something else on my pizza. You asked me what that something else was.

We spent five minutes listing toppings until we figured out that I was trying to remember how to say: “Sun dried Tomatoes.” When you said: “We'll bake that right up for you,” we both started laughing uncontrollably.

It was the best pizza I ever had; I just wanted to thank you for helping me out.

Link (via Growabrain)

Artist Gerald Scarfe created this chair/sculpture that looks like Chairman Mao (by way of Jabba the Hutt), so you can be cushioned by the gentle curves of the Great Helmsman as you play on your Xbox. Link

In July, 1961, Popular Mechanix brought its readers "a life-size, remote-controlled servomechanical robot built by Vienna engineer Claus Scholz. The MM47 can do almost anything from housework to handling radioactive materials or fighting fires from the inside while the operator stays at a safe distance. The 105-pound plastic robot cost about $760 to build."

Another one lost to the ages. Link

Merlin Mann's hilarious steampunk comedy monologue had me laughing hard enough to burst my gauges. Link

Ryan Thomas Grace of Omaha filed this patent application with the USPTO as a means of proposing to his girlfriend:

The purpose of this invention is to provide an improved method of proposing marriage to an individual. The method of proposing to an individual generally comprising the steps of meeting the individual; exchanging names with the individual; dating the individual (not necessary); drafting a government document having a proposal to marry the individual incorporated therein; and showing the government document to the individual. The government document may be a patent application. The patent application may claim the method by which the proposor will make a marriage proposal to the individual. The proposor could then use the method claimed in the patent application to propose to the individual. The patent application could be the actual marriage proposal.

Link (via Neatorama)

My friend Craig showed me this utterly fascinating archive of Mike Wallace Interview videos from the 1950s, which are hosted online by The School of Information at The University of Texas at Austin.

It's astonishing to watch television in which the host asks real questions and the guests answer in full sentences. Wallace never lets people off the hook and he smokes cigarettes like the world is ending tomorrow, piling on fulsome praise for his beloved Winstons before each interview begins.

And what a list of guests! He interviews Frank Lloyd Wright, Salvadore Dali, Leonard Ross (a 12-year-old California school boy who won a total of $164,000 on the game shows The Big Surprise and The Sixty-Four Thousand Dollar Challenge), Aldous Huxley, Gloria Swanson, Tony Perkins, Eldon Edwards (Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan), Philip Wylie, Jean Seberg, Earl Browder (former head of the Communist Party in the United States), Mary Margaret McBride (the "First Lady of Radio"), David Hawkins (the youngest of 20 prisoners to defect during the Korean War), Dr. Henry Kissinger, and many more.

Mike Wallace rose to prominence in 1956 with the New York City television interview program, Night-Beat, which soon developed into the nationally televised prime-time program, The Mike Wallace Interview. Well prepared with extensive research, Wallace asked probing questions of guests framed in tight close-ups. The result was a series of compelling and revealing interviews with some of the most interesting and important people of the day.

Link

Wall Street hacker Steve Steinberg, a former BB guest-blogger, has finally started a blog. From his teenage days with legendary hacker gang Legion of Doom, to his influential Worm and Intertek zines, to his years at Wired, Steve has always managed to grok complex technologies and illuminate them for the lay-person. He really gets what's going on under the hood of the tech itself but also how it may intersect with culture and business. He is a master at showing why most conventional wisdom is anything but wise, and he does it without the typical snarkiness of most tech trendspotters. Steve's new blog is called .csv, for "comma separated values." From his latest post, on the buzz around "crowd dynamics":

The tools and theories needed to analyze social interactions are just now reaching the level of sophistication — in accuracy, in robustness – necessary to leave the lab and enter commercial duty. We are in a period analogous to the early 1970s, when developments like the Capital Asset Pricing Model and the Black-Scholes equation transformed finance, changing it from an art to a science, and opening enormous new markets in the process. Now, new equations describing “crowd dynamics” are about to change our lives. And not always for the better. This is one of the most significant technology trends I have seen in years; it may also be one of the most pernicious....

It wasn’t long after the 2003 invasion of Iraq that US military theorists began to realize that our soldiers were completely lost amidst the country’s byzantine tribal structures, religious factions, and internecine feuds. They needed tools to help navigate these social structures that were as effective as their GPS devices and laser-designators were at guiding them through the local geography. DARPA moved quickly, creating a half-dozen social science programs, all of them focused on near-term research with mostly tangible deliverables. The mission became known as “human terrain mapping”, sure to be one of the most important neologisms of this decade.

It’s interesting, if unsurprising, that DARPA had focused on the social sciences only once before: in 1962, during the Vietnam War.

Link

James Leatham says:

Howdy!

Remember me?

The Apple //e computer animation . The film described in the Flickr posts of CineMagic Magazine has been 'special editioned' and posted in its entirety at Google Video.

That's me near the end as a government official.

Link

Scott says: "This is a great commentary on the 40th anniversary of Kubrick's masterpiece."

The site includes this YouTube clip from an interview with Kubrick.

The famously sniffish Renata Adler got to weigh in during her short-lived reign at the New York Times: "There is one ultimate science-fiction voyage of a man (Keir Dullea) through outer and inner space, through the phases of his own life in time thrown out of phase by some higher intelligence, to his death and rebirth in what looked like an intergalactic embryo... Its real energy seem to derive from that bespectacled prodigy reading comic books around the block. The whole sensibility is intellectual fifties child: chess games, bodybuilding exercises, beds on the spacecraft that look like camp bunks, other beds that look like Egyptian mummies, Richard Strauss music, time games, Strauss waltzes, Howard Johnson's, birthday phone calls... [T]he uncompromising slowness of the movie makes it hard to sit through without talking—and people on all sides when I saw it were talking almost throughout the film. Very annoying. With all its attention to detail—a kind of reveling in its own I.Q.—the movie acknowledged no obligation to validate its conclusion for those, me for example, who are not science-fiction buffs. By the end, three unreconciled plot lines—the slabs, Dullea's aging, the period bedroom—are simply left there like a Rorschach, with murky implications of theology. This is a long step outside the convention, some extra scripts seem required, and the all-purpose answer, 'relativity,' does not really serve unless it can be verbalized."

Link

Boing Boing Gadgets' Joel Johnson was at McMaster University yesterday where he met a researcher who used a focus ion beam microsocope to carve his school's logo on a human hair. I would love one for my wunderkammer! More info over at BBG. Link

Michael Moulton, a prof at the University of Florida, is suing a company tha republishes his students' notes from class, because he says that taking notes on his classes and selling them violates his copyright.

Those notes are illegal, Faulkner and Moulton contend, since they are derivative works of the professor's copyrighted lectures.

If successful, the suit (.pdf) could put an end to a lucrative, but ethically murky businesses that have grown up around large universities to profit from students who don't always want to go to the classes they are paying for.

The suit could also have ramifications for more longstanding businesses such as Cliffs Notes, which summarize copyrighted novels.

Faulkner Press publishes two e-textbooks that Moulton wrote and uses in his classes, and sells its own set of class notes for the course.

Link

A pit bull attacked Amy Rice's canine companion Ella. Rice couldn't get the dog off Ella so she bit it on the nose. Ella is recovering with staples and stitches while the pitbull is in quarantine. From the Associated Press:

"I didn't plan it, that's what happened. I broke the skin and had pit bull blood in my mouth," she said.

"I knew what happened, and I knew that it wasn't good..."

Rice said her doctor will have to determine whether she should get shots for rabies.

Link

Hurrah for Clay Shirky for pulling off a masterful stint on The Colbert Report, promoting his new book Here Comes Everybody, one of the tightest, sweetest explanations of What The Internet Is For that I've ever read. Link (Thanks, Jeff!)

See also:
Clay Shirky's masterpiece: Here Comes Everybody
Clay Shirky's Harvard talk: Here Comes Everybody
Shirky talks activism: how group forming networks change protest

Mister Jalopy sez, "Auction for banana leaf wallpaper that was destined for the Polynesian Hotel at Walt Disney World. When Cory builds the True Fan Enchanted Tiki Room, this will be perfect for the powder room!" Link (Thanks, Mister Jalopy!)

Gama-Go is having a big hoodie sale! Buy one and you can get a second for 1/2 off. That includes the limited-edition Boing Boing/Gama-Go hoodie too! (Unfortunately, very limited sizes remain on those.) So, for example, if you buy a $120 BB/GG hoodie (above left) and an $84 Deathbot Circuitry hoodie (above right), they'll half the price of the more expensive BB/GG hoodie, bringing your total to $144 for the two. The Gama-Go crew is holding the sale to support a very exciting new project: They're hoping to open a boutique and art gallery in San Francisco! Also, keep your eyes peeled for another fun BB/GG collaboration in the near future. Link

UPDATE: For those not seeing the discount when they order, the Gama-Go sale page informs, "To be clear, we will adjust your total after you've placed your order, but before we charge your card."

In this BBtv vlog episode, Xeni speaks with Tibetan human rights worker Lhakpa Kyizom about reported abuses against so-called "wired monks" in Tibet, by PRC military and police. Using cellphones, these monks photographed people who had been killed or injured during nonviolent, pro-Tibetan sovereignty protests that took place in March. The monks then disseminated these images to supporters outside Tibet, using connected computers and mobile devices.

After the images spread worldwide, and their origin became known to authorities in the tightly-controlled, tense, post-protest environment in Tibet, Kyizom says, military forces invaded the monastery, confiscated all communications tools, and detained nearly 600 monks in political retaliation.

Kyizom works as a radio producer for Tibet Connection, and is a trainer with the Active Nonviolence Education Center in the Northern Indian town of Dharamshala, also home to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile.

Link to Boing Boing tv episode, with discussion, downloadable video, transcript of Kyizom's account, and links to related reports.

Update: Nathan Freitas says, "The unfortunate aftermath of the incidents your video covered...."

Two monks commit suicide in Amdo Ngaba
According to confirm information received by the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy (TCHRD), two monks committed suicide in Amdo Ngaba (Ch: Aba) as a direct result of relentless oppression by the Chinese security forces after the series of peaceful protests.

Update 2: Chinese military police killed 8 Tibetans today, after shooting on hundreds of Tibetan monks and villagers in a monastery:

Witnesses said the clash – in which dozens were wounded – erupted late last night after a government inspection team entered a monastery in the Chinese province of Sichuan trying to confiscate pictures of the Dalai Lama.

Officials searched the room of every monk in the Donggu monastery, a sprawling 15th century edifice in Ganzi, southwestern Sichuan, confiscating all mobile phones as well as the pictures.

When the inspectors tore up the photographs and threw them on the floor, a 74-year-old monk, identified as Cicheng Danzeng, tried to stop an act seen as a desecration by Tibetans who revere the Dalai Lama as their god king

Link (thanks Oxblood)

Previously:
* BBtv Vlog (Xeni): Tibet's uprising and the internet.

Climate change denialists like to cite Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark's theory that global warming is caused by sunspots in excusing the ongoing de-terraforming of the Earth (Svensmark's work was the basis for a film called "The Great Global Warming Swindle"); but research from Lancaster University undermines Svensmark's conclusions.

The idea is that variations in solar activity affect cosmic ray intensity.

But Lancaster University scientists found there has been no significant link between them in the last 20 years.

Presenting their findings in the Institute of Physics journal, Environmental Research Letters, the UK team explain that they used three different ways to search for a correlation, and found virtually none.

This is the latest piece of evidence which at the very least puts the cosmic ray theory, developed by Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark at the Danish National Space Center (DNSC), under very heavy pressure.

Link (via Futurismic)

NPR talked to scientists who say that the benefits of drinking tons of water are overrated, and that you don't need to carry a water bottle for a stroll around the park -- "Just drink when you're thirsty."

Myth No. 1: Drink Eight Glasses Each Day
Scientists say there's no clear health benefit to chugging or even sipping water all day. So where does the standard advice of drinking eight glasses each day come from? "Nobody really knows," says Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, a kidney expert at the University of Pennsylvania.

Myth No. 2: Drinking Lots of Water Helps Clear Out Toxins
The kidneys filter toxins from our bloodstreams. Then the toxins clear through the urine. The question is, does drinking extra water each day improve the function of the kidneys?
"No," says Goldfarb. "In fact, drinking large amounts of water surprisingly tends to reduce the kidney's ability to function as a filter. It's a subtle decline, but definite."

Link (via Kottke)

Here's a short item about a Middlesex University study that concluded that players of violent video-games experience relaxation after they finish playing:

The psychologists studied 292 male and female online gamers playing World of Warcraft. They found that overall the gamers, aged between 12 and 83, were more likely to feel calm or tired after playing, although there were differences depending on sex, age and personality.

“There were actually higher levels of relaxation before and after playing the game as opposed to experiencing anger but this did very much depend on personality type,” said Middlesex University’s Jane Barnett, who is also an International Game Developers Association committee member.

Link (via Wonderland)

A UK court finally heard evidence about the bizarre liquid-explosive plot hatched in 2006 by some fairly unrealistic suicide bombers, the origin of the global ban on taking liquids through aviation security checkpoints. The plan? To mix Tang and peroxide in Lucozade bottles and make airplanes go boom. Ever since the plot first came to light, chemists and explosives experts have been highly skeptical of it working, and the TSA and UK authorities have blithely insisted that they believe it could come true.

Now, readers of Bruce Schneier's security blog are invited to weigh in on the feasibility of such a scheme, given the information that just emerged in court:

The court heard the bombers intended to use hydrogen peroxide and mix it with a product called Tang, used in soft drinks, to turn it into an explosive.

They intended to carry it on board disguised as 500ml bottles of Oasis or Lucozade by using food dye to recreate the drinks' distinctive colour.

The detonator would have been disguised as AA 1.5 batteries. The contents of the batteries would have been removed and an electric element such as a lightbulb or wiring would have been inserted.

Link to Schneier's blog, Link to Daily Mail article

Air Canada continues its slide into self-parody with a new optional service for fliers: for a mere $25-$35 per trip, the airline will sell you its "On My Way" service. What's "On My Way" service? It's a special number you can call that's staffed with people who aren't anaesthatized, script-reading drones, in the event that the airline loses your luggage, cancels your flight, or otherwise screws you over. This is the same airline that charges coach passengers two bucks for a "pillow" that's actually a ziploc bag you blow up and slip into a paper doily (business- and first-class passengers get their ziploc bags for free), so I guess it's all in keeping with business as usual at Canada's flagship air-carrier.

Air Canada said passengers who opt to pay an additional $25 one-way on short-haul flights and an extra $35 one-way on long-haul routes within North America will receive "speedy" access to "specially-trained" customer service agents who will help rebook flights on Air Canada or other airlines, as well as pay for hotel stays and meals, if necessary.

Air Canada said the program, which applies to any flight cancelled within 48 hours of the scheduled departure, goes beyond the industry practice of assisting customers affected by schedule changes deemed to be the airline's fault, such as mechanical problems with aircraft, scheduling glitches or crew members failing to show up for flights.

But while Air Canada is touting the program as an industry-first, at least one observer said it was once common for big North American carriers to go out of their way to help inconvenienced or stranded customers – free.

Link (via Consumerist)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Fred von Lohmann sez, "Agreeing with EFF's amicus brief, a federal court in Boston in a 52-page ruling concludes that 'merely exposing music files to the internet is not copyright infringement.' The Boston court disagrees with a ruling in New York on the same day, which found that a mere 'offer to distribute' a song could violate copyright, even if no one took you up on it. Obviously, this is a fight that's not over yet."

EFF filed an amicus brief in this case (formerly known as Atlantic v. Does 1-21), and our arguments appear to have found a more receptive audience in Boston that they did in New York City (the judge thanks us for our participation on page 11). The 52-page ruling is the most extensive analysis yet of the recording industry's "making available" argument, which claims that you infringe copyright merely by having a song in your shared folder, even if no one ever downloads it.

As we discussed yesterday, a key issue is whether a mere "offer to distribute" is enough to infringe the distribution right, in light of the fact that a mere offer can be enough to constitute "publication." Unlike the court in Elektra v. Barker, the judge in London-Sire v. Doe concludes that "distribution" and "publication" are not identical -- "even a cursory examination of the statute suggests that the terms are not synonymous." If you are interested in the details, the court's analysis is highly illuminating (p. 24-27), touching on a number of earlier rulings, such as Hotaling v. Church of Jesus Christ of Letter-Day Saints and A&M v. Napster (copyright nerds will recognize those as pivotal decisions in this area).

Link (Thanks, Fred!)

Popline is the world's largest health-information search engine, run by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health with funding from the US government. They have just changed their database so that queries for "abortion" show no results, even though the system has access to more than 25,000 documents on the subject. They say they've done this because they believe it's a requirement of their federal funding.

The massive database indexes a broad range of reproductive health literature, including titles like "Previous abortion and the risk of low birth weight and preterm births," and "Abortion in the United States: Incidence and access to services, 2005."

But on Thursday, a search on "abortion" was producing only the message "No records found by latest query..."

A librarian at the University of California at San Francisco noticed the new censorship on Monday, while carrying out a routine research request on behalf of academics and researchers at the university. The search term had functioned properly as of January.

Puzzled, she contacted the manager of the database, Johns Hopkins' Debbie Dickson, who replied in an April 1st e-mail that the university had recently begun blocking the search term because the database received federal funding.

"We recently made all abortion terms stop words," Dickson wrote in a note to Gloria Won, the UCSF medical center librarian making the inquiry. "As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now."

There was no notice of the change on the site.

Dickson suggested other kinds of more obscure search strategies and alternative words to get around the keyword blocking.

"In addition to the terms you're already using, you could try using 'Fertility Control, Postconception'. This is the broader term to our 'abortion' terms and most records have both in the keyword fields," she wrote.

She also suggested using a euphemistic search strategy of "unwanted w/2 pregnancy." But the workarounds don't satisfy critics of the censorship.

Link

Update: They've turned around:

I was informed this morning that the word “abortion” was blocked as a search term in the POPLINE family planning database administered by the Bloomberg School’s Center for Communication Programs. POPLINE provides evidence-based information on reproductive health and family planning and is the world’s largest database on these issues.

USAID, which funds POPLINE, found two items in the database related to abortion that did not fit POPLINE criteria. The agency then made an inquiry to POPLINE administrators. Following this inquiry, the POPLINE administrators at the Center for Communication Programs made the decision to restrict abortion as a search term.

I could not disagree more strongly with this decision, and I have ordered that the POPLINE administrators restore “abortion” as a search term immediately. I will also launch an inquiry to determine why this change occurred.

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge and not its restriction.

(Thanks, Rachel!)

Creative Japanese packaging designers at D-Barcode have come up with delightful ways of incorporating the UPC bar-codes into their products. Link, Link to Dark Roasted Blend roundup of creative barcodes (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Psychopathic monster Charlie Manson has released a new album, "One Mind," under a Creative Commons license. I am not entirely delighted by this news. Link (Thanks, Mike!)

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez,

Some days, the U.S. government truly astounds. At Public.Resource.Org, we released 50 years of decisions of the U.S. Courts of Appeals. Knowing that the U.S. Courts have to pay big bucks to West Law and Lexis/Nexis to access their own archives, we though they might be interested in having their very own copy.

So, we asked how we could maybe get a phone call to discuss making a donation of case law. Instead of a phone call, the general counsel of the courts (how's that for a meta position!) sent me a letter saying that while this would be great for the public he saw no benefit to the judiciary and our gift offer was hereby declined.

(Not only does the Judiciary spend big bucks on legal information services, this is the same group that runs the billion-dollar IT boondoggle called PACER, which mandates that the public pay $0.08/page for court documents even though they have $146.6 million in unspent funds in their computer account they can't even figure out what to do with.)

Link (Thanks, Carl!)

Josh Glenn says:

In this new Brainiac item I crack the lowbrow literary mystery, "What -- if anything -- does the awesome and influential Black Sabbath song 'Iron Man' have to do with the Marvel superhero? Or the Ted Hughes kiddie book, for that matter?" Having puzzled out the solution to this question, over which metalheads continue to wrangle nearly 40 years later, I offer a theory about what the 1970 antiwar song has to teach us today. Just in time for the new "Iron Man" movie!

Link

In a PBS interview CNN founder Ted Turner says if global warming continues people will cut out the middlemen and start eating each other to survive.

If steps aren't taken to stem global warming, "We'll be eight degrees hotter in 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow," Turner said during a wide-ranging, hour-long interview with PBS's Charlie Rose that aired Tuesday.

"Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals," said Turner, 69. "Civilization will have broken down. The few people left will be living in a failed state — like Somalia or Sudan — and living conditions will be intolerable."

It's probably a good time to buy stock in Soylent Green. Link (Thanks, Scott!)

Design collective Friends With You and wonderful toy maker Strangeco created this delightful series of characters called Wish Come True. Like old-school Weebles, the toys rock back and forth. Each one also has a little bell chime inside. Unlike most designer toys, Wish Come True characters are safe for little kids 18 months and up. I know my two-year-old will dig them! Link to Strangeco, Link to Wish Come True video

This fossilized shit is the best evidence that humans were living in North America 14,000 years ago, a millennium before the Clovis people, long thought to be the first Americans. Researchers from the University of Oregon studied the coprolites, found the crap in a cave in Oregon's Cascade Range. After the discovery, scientists at the University of Copenhagen's Center for Ancient Genetics analyzed DNA retrieved from the fossilized feces. The research was published today in the journal Science. From the New York Times:

Few artifacts were found at the cave, the discovery team reported, which suggested that the occupants’ visits were brief...

The researchers reported that 14 coprolites from the cave sediments were identified as being from humans. The laboratory studies showed that six samples had genetic signatures associated with American Indians and not shared by other groups.

Link (Thanks, Robert Pescovitz!)

In this video, Lego minfigs teach human biochemistry. Apparently, it was a collaboration between Dragonfilms and Brighton University biology students.
Link (via easternblot)

Upper Playground artist Jeremy Fish created this Barry the Beaver toy. You twist the tree stump and Barry vibrates. It's available for $45 for Ningyoushi.com, an incredible online supplier of Japanese toys, action figures, and designer toys. Denise from Ningyoushi told me that the 5" tall Barry the Beaver is Fish's "response to those stiff vinyl figures in the designer toy market." Sure it is...
Link

On Tuesday, a man broke into a funeral parlor in Madrid Spain. When police arrived, he tried to hide by playing dead in a glass chamber used for viewings. The cops nabbed him anyway. From the Associated Press:

"The custom here is for dead people to be dressed in suits, in nice clothes that look presentable. This guy was in everyday clothes that were wrinkled and dirty," the police official said...

"He was trying to fake being dead, but he was breathing," she said.

Link (via Fortean Times)

National Geographic's award-nominated feature on China's "instant cities" is online. It's a fascinating feature about the massive coastal manufacturing towns that now house 140 million people who've moved from the countryside as part of the largest migration in human history. It's split across eight screens, and there's at least one jaw-dropper per screen.

From the airport, driving south along the coast, I started with hinges—a stretch of road where the vast majority of billboards advertised every possible variation of the piece of metal used to swing a door. A mile later, the ads shifted to electric plugs and adapters. Then I reached a neighborhood of electric switches, followed by fluorescent lightbulbs, then faucets.

Deeper in the province, the shrines became more elaborate. At Qiaotou, I stopped to admire the 20-foot-high (six meters) silver statue of a button with wings that had been erected by the town elders. Qiaotou's population is only 64,000, but 380 local factories produce more than 70 percent of the buttons for clothes made in China. In Wuyi, I asked some bystanders what the local product was. A man reached into his pocket and pulled out three playing cards—queens, all of them. The city manufactures more than one billion decks a year. Datang township makes one-third of the world's socks. Songxia produces 350 million umbrellas every year. Table tennis paddles come from Shangguan; Fenshui turns out pens; Xiaxie does jungle gyms. Forty percent of the world's neckties are made in Shengzhou.

Everything is sold in a town called Yiwu. For the Zhejiang pilgrim, that's the promised land—Yiwu's slogan is "a sea of commodities, a paradise for shoppers." Yiwu is in the middle of nowhere, a hundred miles (160 kilometers) from the coast, but traders come from all over the world to buy goods in bulk. There's a scarf district, a plastic bag market, an avenue where every shop sells elastic. If you're burned out on buttons, take a stroll down Binwang Zipper Professional Street. The China Yiwu International Trade City, a local mall, has more than 30,000 stalls—if you spend one minute at each shop, eight hours a day, you'll leave two months later. Yiwu attracts so many Middle Eastern traders that one neighborhood has become home to 23 large Arabic restaurants, as well as a Lebanese bakery. I ate dinner at Arbeer, a Kurdish joint, with a trader from northern Iraq. He was

Link (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Check out these adorable uniformed monkeys zipping along the streets of Thailand on tiny motorcycles.

UPDATE: Neatorama has more about this here. (Via Telstar Logistics)

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Whiplash the Cowboy Monkey

Notsambass says: "I have posted a flickr set of military graffiti in Kuwait."

Camp Buehring is a staging camp for US Forces located in an isolated area of Kuwait. Many units pass through here on the way to Iraq. This set consists of concrete blast barriers that have been painted (mostly) by the units passing through. Representations of the esprit de corps of our fine military units as they prepare for operations in Iraq. Themes vary but unit crests, mottoes, and history are important elements. Reserve and Guard units often focus on where they are from. The units mission is often a key element in the painting. Throw in a large dose of martial machismo and a little subversive humor (they are Americans after all) and you have barrier art. Mostly it says we were here.

Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Nuclear launch center "blast door" art

Adam Selvidge says: Apparently someone nicknamed "A-Bomb" forgot his briefcase on his car.

04/03/2008 12:35PM - At 11:40 a.m., an FSU parking attendant reported to FSU police that he had spotted a car with a suspicious package on the fourth floor of Parking Garage No. 1 on Woodward Avenue. FSU police responded immediately and found a white Izuzu car in the southeast corner of the fourth floor with a briefcase that displayed a message about a destructive device. FSU police set up a command post nearby, cordoned off the parking garage and the street, and evacuated the building. They also initiated the university’s Alert notification system. The Tallahassee Fire Department and the bomb squad are on scene. The bomb squad is currently assessing the briefcase.

04/03/2008 1:45PM - At 1:30 p.m., the FSU Police Department issued an “all clear” and said they had resolved the incident at Parking Garage No. 1. A local 17-year-old high school student returned to his car and accompanied police as they searched the briefcase that had aroused suspicion. There was nothing inside. He told them that a message that seemed to suggest a destructive device was inside was actually his nickname, “A-Bomb.” Officers allowed those who work in the building to return to their offices and held traffic so that drivers parked in the garage could quickly exit. Surrounding streets were cleared, and the campus returned to normal status.

Link

My friend Jennifer Brown scanned this fantastic photo shot by her neighbor of his desk, circa 1983. The Return of the Jedi promotional glass set from Burger King is a perfect touch. Link to bigger picture

A few weeks ago BB posted a link to instructions for modifying a camera to shock the user.

Well, it would appear that a 14 year old student decided to try it out. And took it to school. Where he was arrested. No way to know for sure if the student in question found the instructions through BB, but the timing is intriguing.

A school resource officer says the makeshift device was potentially capable of producing a 600-volt shock.

The student has been charged with possession of a dangerous weapon on school grounds, attempted assault and breach of peace.

Link

Lars Haeh says

The pedal powered Flintstones car covered earlier on boingboing makes its way to court in Toronto today. Their lawyer, from the legal department of the Canadian Automobile Association thinks they will win. The highway traffic act does not categorize vehicles powered by muscle, friction drive, or wind as being "motor vehicles" for the purposes of the law.

People can see the trial at old city hall courthouse, in courtroom "R" at 3:00PM today.

Link

Kim Pallister says Brad Fortner, Ryerson University's technology director, has a couple excellent blog posts about a recent debacle in which Creative Labs has issued a cease-and-desist to a 'Daniel_K', an enthusiastic customer who has written and released drivers for Creative Labs, fixing features that were broken in their own drivers, and also supporting operating systems they didn't have drivers for. Clearly, improving Creative Labs products is something best left NOT DONE.

The blogosphere has responded to Creative's VP of Communications by 'crowdripping' him a new one! Post 1 | Post 2

Design Observer has an article about "blast door" art, painted by the people who man nuclear launch control centers in the US.

Like the garish and cheeky illustrations etched across the noses of World War II aircraft, these images in launch control centers across the United States testify to the bravado of the men (and, from the mid-1980s onward, women) of what has been called "America's Underground Air Force." But they also reflect the sometimes surreal pressures faced by two-person missile crews on 24-hour duty alerts, waiting for a call to turn their missile launch keys and perhaps end civilization as we know it. "You're sitting there waiting for the message you hope never comes," says Tony Gatlin, who painted the Domino's homage as a young deputy flight commander at Delta One in 1989. "That's a pretty screwed up way of looking at the world."

Now an Air Force major and deputy director of staff with the 100th Air Refueling Wing, based at the Royal Air Force's Mildenhall Base, in England, Gatlin was struck by the similarity of Domino's delivery time and that of his missiles. "One went with the other kind of well," he deadpans. Gatlin's painting is one of only a few the public can see, following the transformation in 1999 of the Delta One control facility and the nearby Delta Nine missile silo into an historic site by the National Park Service (NPS). Under the terms of the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty between the then-Soviet Union and the United States, many Minuteman missile sites have been deactivated or destroyed.

Link (Thanks, William!)

Venezuela president Hugo Chavez doesn't even realize he's wearing Mickey ears, but look at how happy he is. Maybe Rupert Sheldrake is onto something. Do you think the photographer was aware of the background when he/she shot the photo?Link

Scientist/pseudoscientist (take your pick) Rupert Sheldrake (wiki) was stabbed in the leg while giving a talk on "thought transference" at 10th International Conference on Science and Consciousness at the La Fonda Hotel in Sante Fe, NM. Witnesses said an attendee from Japan seemed to be upset with Sheldrake's remarks, prompting the attack.

David Edwards of Fresno, Calif., said Sheldrake had been talking about how thoughts can be transferred by staring into another's eyes. During the lecture in the main ballroom on La Fonda's second floor, an Asian man left the room and when he returned, he didn't take a seat but stood near the podium with his eyes closed like he was meditating, Edwards said.

The attack came when Sheldrake called for a break about 3 p.m. Edwards said he started to leave the room when he heard a commotion. By the time he looked back, he said, an Asian man was being held on the floor by four people while a fifth held a knife in a napkin. Mecham said the knife was a folding type that hunters typically use.

Edwards said Sheldrake had a 2- or 3-inch cut on the front of his left thigh, just above his kneecap, causing blood to spurt some 8 inches into the air as he lay on his back.

Link (Thanks, mpb!)

US banks are foreclosing on crappy, formerly overpriced sub-prime housing and then not taking title to it, in order to avoid the taxes. This could create suburban abandoned zones of boarded-up houses,where the local tax-base is depleted, undermining schools and services.

The local market conditions are what seems to determine the abandonment decision. In a region where the job and real estate market is doing anything better than "a little soft," I would surmise that abandonment makes no sense at all.

However, at a certain point, in a weaker region, with declining neighborhoods, certain lenders might make the decision to simply walkaway from a large swath of (potential) real estate holdings, on the simple basis that it might be cheaper to do so.

Link (Thanks, Jason!)

The Middlesex University Teaching Resources shop sells all manner of awesome science toys for kids of all ages. Right now the front door is selling highly light-scattering nano-material, paper made from elephant poo, elasticated balls in mesh bags, a wide variety of science exploration kits, a hydrogel that expands to form artificial snow and many other bits of assorted nift.

The material is a cast thermo-setting resin with extraordinary memory properties. Most polymers have some 'memory' but this one can be stretched by up to 200% and still remember its original condition.

When heated above 70°C, it softens, and can be shaped by stretching, bending, blowing etc. When cool it retains its new shape, but if the material is re-heated to 70°C, it reverts to its flat sheet condition.

Sheet size is approximately 3mm thick x 100mm x 150mm.

Link (Thanks, Yishay!)

Art-prankster Johannes Grenzfurthner of monochrom storms the front doors of various multinational corporations to ask employees (and random folk on the street) if they're aware that these companies have "corporate anthems." Yes, theme songs, sometimes official, sometimes unofficial, always painfully cheesy.

KPMG boasts a particularly heinous ditty, and while renditions sometimes pop up on YouTube, none can be quite so rich as the one we paid an Argentinian street musician $20 to sing. "KPMG, we're strong as can be -- a dream of power and energy!" Bet you $20 the song sticks in your brain longer than you'd like.

Johannes explains, "I told all of the would-be anthem singers that I was interviewing them for an Austrian economics journal called 'Wir kriegen euch' (We will get you, in German)."

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion and downloadable video.

Link to previous Boing Boing tv episodes featuring Johannes and the monochrom crew.

Here's a kick-ass gallery of a NASA refurb/prep procedure for the Space Shuttle. KOMPRESSOR LIKE BIG MACHINES. Link (Thanks, Spider!)