The Sheriff's Office in Shelby County, Tennessee, is warning locals to turn in anyone who takes too many pictures of bridges or shopping malls, because they might be scouting for Al Qaeda, who are clearly slavering at the opportunity to make a gigantic media splash by getting up to some serious naughtiness on the "iconic Hernando DeSoto Bridge."

The Sheriff also asked environmentalists to look out for anyone "a little bit radical" who might be a terrorist provocateur hoping to exploit the trusting, gentle hippies to turn them into deep green Unabombers.

"You may think a guy is just shooting pictures, but if you report it to us, we'll send it on to the FBI and they may have four or five other reports of the same thing," said Richard Pillsbury with the Tennessee Fusion Center, a collaboration between the Department of Safety and the Department of Homeland Security.

Shelby County sergeant Larry Allen warned attendees at the meeting to look for people who appear to be doing surveillance outside public buildings, such as shopping malls.

"One of the things discussed in the al-Qaeda manual is conducting surveillance of your target," added Eric Jackson with the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force. "That could mean looking at a building to see how security is established."

Link (via Schneier)

Artist Nina Katchadourian tried repairing spider webs with thread, but her efforts were rebuffed: "My repairs were always rejected by the spider and discarded, usually during the course of the night, even in webs which looked abandoned."

The Mended Spiderweb series came about during a six-week period in June and July in 1998 which I spent on Pörtö. In the forest and around the house where I was living, I searched for broken spiderwebs which I repaired using red sewing thread. All of the patches were made by inserting segments one at a time directly into the web. Sometimes the thread was starched, which made it stiffer and easier to work with. The short threads were held in place by the stickiness of the spider web itself; longer threads were reinforced by dipping the tips into white glue. I fixed the holes in the web until it was fully repaired, or until it could no longer bear the weight of the thread. In the process, I often caused further damage when the tweezers got tangled in the web or when my hands brushed up against it by accident.

Link (via Kottke)

Here's the latest Instructables HOWTO to tie in with my young adult novel Little Brother, which tells the story of young geeks who use technology to restore liberty to post-9/11 America.

This week, it's HOWTO start a flashmob:

Timing is everything
This refers back to the whole participation thing. If your event is spontaneous in nature and just requires people to show up at the same time and do something goofy(say, gather at a subway stop and follow the first bearded person you see as if they were Jesus), they won't need much time to prepare. The ideal time for this sort of event is at the end of the workday (between 5 and 6PM) during the week as a) the streets are more crowded and b)participants are more available. For whatever reason, Thursdays seem to be most effective.

If you are planning something more elaborate, like a Costumed Rampage, you want to give people at least a week to prepare, and preferably two. These events are most effective in heavily populated shopping and tourist areas, so Saturday afternoons work best. Note: these often turn into drunkfests.

Link

Devin sez, "I believe this was the navigation system for several old English bombers (Victor, Vulcan, and Valiant). Very wire-y and cool. Many, many plugs and things all over the place." Link (Thanks, Devin!)

Watchismo's feature today covers the illustrious history of early LED watches, whose origins are stylish as only artifacts from a lost era can be.

With the recent release of the $350,000 Opus 8 and the de Grisogono Meccanico dG with their mechanically mimicked LED digits, I wanted to also share this video and photos from the collection of UK LED collector, Lloyd "Theledwatch". He was recently featured on Antiques Roadshow (see video above) where he shared some of the best examples of early 1970s digital light emitting diode watches like the Pulsar Hamilton P1, Girard Perregaux Casquette, Omega Time Computer and my one-of-a-kind favorites by the Royal designer Andrew Grima.

Link

Sam sez,

In March 2007, a free speech and free assembly rally was held in Union Square to protest a new NYPD rule of dubious constitutionality instituting a permit requirement for any assembly of 50+ people on foot or on bike in NYC.

While the restriction would apply to any assembly of 50 or more people, it was enacted as transparent attempt shut down, harass or frustrate the Critical Mass bicycle rides that have occured monthly in Manhattan for at least ten years.

After the rally proper, a Critical Mass ride (accompanied by citizen videographers from the Glass Bead Collective and other groups) set out north from Union Square, only to be subjected to outrageous and illegal treatment by NYPD officers in Times Square under the supervision and instigation of Sgt. Timothy Horhoe.

Despite the numerous video-verified complaints of unlawful arrest and the numerous provably false sworn statements in police reports documenting the incident, the Civilian Complaint Review Board said in March of this year that they cannot act to punish the officers involved for their willful perjury.

Link (Thanks, Sam!)

Interesting Andy Warhol quote, found on The Happiness Project:

"Actually, I jade very quickly. Once is usually enough. Either once only, or every day. If you do something once it’s exciting, and if you do it every day it’s exciting. But if you do it, say, twice or just almost every day, it’s not good any more.”

Link

Institute for the Future, the nonprofit thinktank in Palo Alto, California where I'm a research director, has a rare job opening. We're looking for a Collaborative Media Designer and Drupal hacker. This is a great opportunity. Mike Love, who created the position but is leaving for grad school, did amazing work building open source collaborative tools for forecasting. There's room here for someone motivated to design, build, and integrate new blogging platforms, wiki applications, visualization tools, digital video, and online collaboration systems. (Please don't email me directly as I'm not involved in the hiring process.) From the job description:

Looking for the right person with a passion for new technologies and social software. If you are a developer or researcher with an interest in experimenting, designing, developing, and implementing collaborative technology tools—such as open-source online platforms and social software to support dynamic research processes—this is the job for you. If you are a Drupal tinkerer or developer, we’d love to meet you!

Link

Two years ago, Hanson Robotics' incredible Philip K. Dick robot head went missing. David Hanson had left it in the overhead bin on an America West airplane and it hasn't been seen since. Hanson sued the airlines but the case was recently dismissed. The summary judgement is a laff-riot. Here's an excerpt, posted at the Total Dick-Head blog:

Plaintiff David Hanson (“Plaintiff”) has lost his head. More specifically, Plaintiff has lost an artistically and scientifically valuable robotic head modeled after famous science fiction author Philip K. Dick (“Head”). Dick’s well-known body of work has resulted in movies such as Total Recall, Blade Runner, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly, and a large group of admirers has grown following his death in Orange County, California, in 1982. His stories have questioned whether robots can be human (see, e.g., Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)), so it seems appropriate that Plaintiff reincarnated Dick as a robot which included the Head, valued at around $750,000. (Motion 1:9-10.)

Link

Previously on BB:
• PKD robot still lost Link
• PKD robot MIA Link
• Philip K. Dick robot Link

Famed NYC-based prankster/billboard artist Ron English recently took his brilliant brand of witty culture jamming to the Los Angeles area. Our pals at Hi-Fructose have the photographic evidence of the shenanigans. Link

Previously on BB:
• New Ron English book: Abject Expressionism Link
• Billboard Liberation Front: AT&T Link

After Mister Jalopy posted a link to mmk_kobayashi's "tasteless, frequently mean, sporadically NSFW, sometimes jaw dropping and generally hilarious" Flickr photostream my productivity ground to a halt. Link

Nick denBoer says: "Check out this video I did for the Toronto band, Run With The Kittens."

Slightly better version here: Link

Radar asked Bill Geerhart to send follow-up notes to the serial killers he wrote in the late 1990s, posing as a 10-year-old. The killers promptly replied (both in 1998, and recently).

in the late '90s, pop-culture historian Bill Geerhart had a little too much time on his hands and a surfeit of stamps. So, for his own entertainment, the then-unemployed thirtysomething launched a letter-writing campaign to some of the most powerful and infamous figures in the country, posing as a curious 10-year-old named Billy.

As it turns out, no group hates to disappoint a child more than convicted killers, all of whom responded promptly to Billy's questions about dropping out of school. Their letters, published here for the first time, range from criminally insane to downright sensible, offering snapshots of the personalities behind some of America's most hideous crimes. Recently, Radar asked Billy to follow up with his mentors as a college student. Link

"Anatomical Theatre is a photographic exhibition documenting artifacts collected by and exhibited in medical museums throughout Europe and the United States. The objects in these photos range from preserved human remains to models made from ivory, wax, and papier mâché. The artifacts span from the 16th Century to the 20th, and include examples from a wide range of countries, artists, and preparators."

Hunterian Museum : London, England The skull of a young boy with a second imperfect skull attached to its anterior fontanelle. Sent to John Hunter from Bengal, India in the late 1780s.

Link (Thanks, Gilbert!)

Seen here is dirt. Well, more specifically, it's the first nanoscale image of soil. Cornell University researcher used X-ray spectromicroscopy to study the structure and composition of soil carbon at a scale of 50 nanometers. (One nanometer is about 100,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair.) They determined that even the tiniest samples of soil taken just micrometers apart can have vastly different compositions. From the Cornell Chronicle:

According to a study published in the April issue of Nature Geoscience, knowing the structure and detailed composition of soil carbon could provide a better understanding of the chemical processes that cycle organic matter in soil. For example, the research may help scientists understand what happens when materials in the soil get wet, warm or cool and how soils sequester carbon, which has implications for climate change.

"There is this incredible nanoscale heterogeneity of organic matter in terms of soil," said Johannes Lehmann, a Cornell associate professor of crop and soil sciences and lead author of the study. "None of these compounds that you can see on a nanoscale level looks anything close to the sum of the entire organic matter."

Link

Actor John Cleese went to India to visit a doctor who has started a laughing club. The people meet each morning and do silly things to make each other laugh. Laughter has many health benefits, says the doctor. I believe it.

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Laughter yoga
• Laughing yogi video

The New York Sun reports that the price of gasoline in the US will soon be in line with what Europeans pay.

Translating this price into dollars and cents at the gas pump, one of our forecasters, the chairman of Houston-based Dune Energy, Alan Gaines, sees gas rising to $7-$8 a gallon. The other, a commodities tracker at Weiss Research in Jupiter, Fla., Sean Brodrick, projects a range of $8 to $10 a gallon.

While $7-$10 a gallon would be ground-breaking in America, these prices would not be trendsetting internationally. For example, European drivers are already shelling out $9 a gallon (which includes a $2-a-gallon tax).

Early last year, with a barrel of oil trading in the low $50s and gasoline nationally selling in a range of $2.30 to $2.50 a gallon, Mr. Gaines — in an impressive display of crystal ball gazing — accurately predicted oil was $100-bound and that gasoline would follow suit by reaching $4 a gallon.

His latest prediction of $200 oil is open to question, since it would undoubtedly create considerable global economic distress. Further, just about every energy expert I talk to cautions me to expect a sizable pullback in oil prices, maybe to between $50 and $70 a barrel, especially if there's a global economic slowdown.

While Mr. Gaines thinks there could be a temporary decline in the oil price, he's convinced an overall uptrend is unstoppable. In fact, he thinks his $200 forecast could be conservative, and that perhaps $250 could be reached. His reasoning: a combination of shrinking supply and increasing demand, especially from China, India, and America.

Link

Hubert's Museum was a Times Square dime museum open from the mid-1920s until 1965. This cabinet of curiosities was an icon of sideshow culture, featuring a flea circus, sword swallowers, contortionists, and other fabulous freaks. During its later years, the museum was frequented by my favorite photographer, Diane Arbus. Indeed, that's where she met the awesome giant Eddie Carmel who stooped for a famed family portrait with his normal-sized parents. Recently, a rare book dealer named Bob Langmuir came to possess the personal papers of Charlie Lucas, a sideshow performer himself who served as a manager at Hubert's Museum. Among the papers were two dozen of Arbus's original photographs, worth around $100 when she was alive and now valued in the high six figures at least. A new book by Gregory Gibson, titled "Hubert's Freaks," tells the story of the Museum, Lucas, and Lagmuir's efforts to make big bucks of his find. I ordered a copy before even finishing the review of the book in yesterday's Los Angeles Times. From the LA Times:

During the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, Charlie Lucas presided over the "Darkest Africa" exhibit as "African Chief of the Duckbill Women," a.k.a. "WooFoo, the Immune Man." He wore a bone through his nose and swallowed fire. (The fair that year celebrated, without irony, a "Century of Progress.") He and his wife, the beautiful Woogie, eventually settled in New York, and Lucas found work managing Hubert's Museum, where Woogie performed her snake-charming act alongside the aforementioned Sealo, Professor Heckler's Flea Circus, Mildred the Alligator Skin Girl, a Russian midget named Andy Potato Chips and Eddie Carmel, the Jewish Giant.

Not incidentally, Lucas was befriended there by photographer Diane Arbus, who talked her way into the homes of his colleagues and shot what would later become iconic photos of, among others, Andy Potato Chips with two other midgets in his Uptown living room and Eddie Carmel bent beneath the ceiling of his Bronx apartment, his parents looking like frightened Lilliputians beside him.

So when Bob Langmuir -- the protagonist of Gibson's tale, a rare-book dealer and collector of African Americana -- happened across a trove of Lucas' papers, he had reason to be excited.

Link to buy Hubert's Freaks, Link to HubertsFreaks.com (Thanks, Mark F.!)

Hammer Film Productions is a UK-based horror film company that made a slew of cheap but great horror films in the 60s and 70s. Their Dracula, Frankenstein, and Mummy series are classic. Flickr user Poletti has posted screengrabs of more than 100 female stars featured in the Hammer Films. The Flickr set is titled "Hammer House of Hotness." Link (Thanks, COOP!)

Previously on BB:
• Star Trek's "Galactically Hot" women Link

My old friend Meri Brin is a terrific fine art printmaker and crafter. She creates and sells limited art prints and also handmade notebooks and other lovely goods. You may have come across her work at last year's Maker Faire Bay Area. Seen here, "A Knife In Quiet Hours" (variable edition of 30). Link to Meri's site, Link to Meri's Flickr stream, Link to her notebook company Fixed Orifice Press

Gord says: Back again, for its (I believe) third run in Toronto, is the hilarious Evil Dead: The Musical. I recently saw these awesome street posters and wanted to share. Link

Today on Boing Boing tv, a look at some of the talented animators from around the world whose work has been featured on our show. Link to BBtv episode with discussion and downloadable video.