Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
These two sharp-looking HP laptops, reskinned by Paul Frank Industries (left) and Shepard Fairey (right), are currently up for auction on eBay. Sponsored by HP and PC Magazine, the proceeds of the "Computerlicious Design Experience" auction, which includes work by a handful of hipster artists/designers, benefits The National Cristina Foundation, a tech non-profit that deploys donated computers to charities, schools, and public agencies. The Paul Frank model is an HP Pavilion HDX Entertainment Series NB. The Shepard Fairey design is on an HP Pavilion tx1000z CTO NB. Link
One June 1, photographers throughout Los Angeles will gather at the Hollywood and Highland Metro Station to peacefully protest against the unnecessary treatment they have received from security guards (particularly the white shirts), LAPD, and LASD while photographing in public places, and on the Metro.
Make signs, T-shirts, and be sure to bring your cameras (still and video). Sign ideas as well as other ideas should be posted here. We need things that will make us stand out as a cohesive group.
Start Time: 11:00am, June 1
Location: Hollywood and Highland, 6801 Hollywood Los Angeles, CA 90028
At about 1:30pm we will board the Metro and travel to Union Station
Start Time: 2:00pm
Location: 800 N Alameda St Los Angeles, CA 90012
Contact: info@discarted.com
France's Cartonnistes sculpt beautiful, whimsical full-size furniture from old cardboard -- and offer workshops on making your own pieces.
Link
(via Cribcandy)
Sharon's Tiny Buildings blog features many delightful tiny buildings made from card, packaging, and odds and sods. This is my kind of model village.
The third 'chapel' happens to be an attempt to replicate the actual building, in a vineyard, where the reception was held. It is a beautiful old stone farm building, with a loft space for parties and weddings and such.
This invitation was handmade by the couple, with loads of patience, creativity, and joy, it seems. They used small strips of colorful illustrations from magazines and other sources to create obi-wrapped bundles of paper. The colors they selected evoked the Tuscany-like place they had their ceremony; and were a great contrast with the naive austerity of the printed invitation.
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Canadian Industry Minister Jim Prentice keeps on hammering away at his plan to bring US-style copyright legislation based on the disastrous Digital Millennium Copyright Act to Canada, without any consultation with the public or industry. Thankfully, we have Members of Parliament like the NDP's Charlie Angus, who stood up in Question Period and put it to Prentice: when are you going to give us public consultations on your plants to rewrite Canada's copyright laws?
Prentice's response? A stupid, unfunny joke.
Link
(Thanks, Charlie!)
From Current TV: "Brooklyn's Etsy's Lab art collective hosts a monthly event where people come to play and show off their handmade music instruments." Link
Radley Balko says: Given that you've linked to coverage of Cory [Maye]'s case in the past, I thought you might be interested in a new documentary on his case put together by Reason and Drew Carey. I guess I'm a bit biased, but I think this is a really compelling piece of work.
At 11p.m on December 26, 2001 police in Prentiss, Mississippi raided the residence of Cory Maye, a 21-year-old father who was at home with his 18-month-old daughter Ta'Corriana.
The cops were looking for drugs and smashed through the back door. In the ensuing chaos, Maye hunkered down with his daughter in a bedroom and when the police broke down that door, he fired three bullets, one of which killed Officer Ron Jones. Maye testified in court that the police did not identify themselves until after they had entered his residence; indeed, he testified that they did not identify themselves until after he had fired his shots. Once they did, he said he put his weapon on the floor, slid it toward police, and surrendered.
The police, who refused to talk with reason.tv, tell a different story. They claim that they identified themselves multiple times before entering Maye's house and bedroom, and that there was no way Maye couldn't have known who they were. A jury rejected Maye's case that he was acting in self-defense and he was sentenced to death for the murder of Office Ron Jones.
"Mississippi Drug War Blues" is a story about the intersection of race (Maye is black and Jones was white); the war on drugs; the disturbing increase in the militarization of police tactics; and systemic flaws in the criminal justice and expert-testimony systems. It is a tragedy in which one man is dead and another may spend his life in prison.
Joshua Klein's TED presentation about how he taught crows to drop coins into a peanut vending machine of his own design was my favorite talk at the conference.
Hacker and writer Joshua Klein is fascinated by crows. (Notice the gleam of intelligence in their little black eyes?) After a long amateur study of corvid behavior, he's come up with an elegant machine that may form a new bond between animal and human.
Joshua Klein will hack anything that moves -- his list includes "social systems, computer networks, institutions, consumer hardware and animal behavior." His latest project, though charmingly low-tech, has amazing implications for the human-animal interface.
Right now, Klein is working at Frog Design as a Principle Technologist, while developing mobile/social applications, health care-related systems and other tools that improve people’s lives. He's the author of the novel Roo'd, which was the first modern book (after Tarzan) to be ported to the iPhone.
"Klein envisions a new symbiotic relationship between these intelligent birds and the humans that encroach on their habitat. ... Why not turn a longstanding rivalry between man and crow into something that profits both species?"
Bruce Schneier's latest column is a good primer on getting your laptop through US (and other) customs without having your data vacuumed up by the DHS.
Encrypting your entire hard drive, something you should certainly do for security in case your computer is lost or stolen, won't work here. The border agent is likely to start this whole process with a "please type in your password". Of course you can refuse, but the agent can search you further, detain you longer, refuse you entry into the country and otherwise ruin your day.
You're going to have to hide your data. Set a portion of your hard drive to be encrypted with a different key - even if you also encrypt your entire hard drive - and keep your sensitive data there. Lots of programs allow you to do this. I use PGP Disk (from pgp.com). TrueCrypt (truecrypt.org) is also good, and free.
While customs agents might poke around on your laptop, they're unlikely to find the encrypted partition. (You can make the icon invisible, for some added protection.) And if they download the contents of your hard drive to examine later, you won't care.
Today, the subject is using encrypting your Gmail messages:
The principle behind GPG encryption is easy. Anyone who wants to play creates a public key and a private key. Your public key is the part of the encryption that you make public. Your private key is the part of the encryption that you never share with anyone under any circumstance.
The two keys work together so that you need both to decrypt anything. To send an encrypted message to someone you lock the message with their public key and when they get it, they can unlock it with their private key. If they want to respond, then they encode the message with your public key and you can read it with your private key.
Of course, this only works so long as you can trust that you have been given the right public key and that you know who you are talking to. One of doing this is by having a key signing party with your close friends. You all show up at a given location at a given time and exchange public keys. Then you have a list of trusted public keys with which you can communicate. This is often referred to as a web of trust.
My kids and I have been having a lot of fun with our Kick N' Go, a $100 scooter that's propelled by a chain-driven lever you press with your foot. Unlike Razor-style scooters, which send you flying over the handlebars whenever the tiny wheels hit a pebble, the Kick N' Go's wheels are big enough to roll over small obstacles without a mishap or the ensuing application of Hello Kitty band aids to skinned knees. Link
Ryan sez, "Chicago is touting their new 'intelligent' 700+ camera network as being able to flag suspicious activity without human intervention, based on operator-defined criteria within the video frame. Video is archived for 30 days in a 60 terabyte storage vault. Great."
They're everywhere. They're multiplying. Several thousand cameras are now capable of sending live pictures into a room - the operations center at the city's Office of Emergency Management and Communication.
There's no way that human beings can effectively watch all those feeds, so enter video analytics. By programming algorithms, you give the camera intelligence.
"We actually can tell the camera, 'This is precisely what we're looking for.' The camera will watch for that circumstance, and when that circumstance occurs, comes back to the human being whether they're watching that camera or not - with an alert," said OEMC director Jim Argiropolous.
Someone needs to come up with a name for this fallacy, the "untouched by human hands" fallacy: "the computers are impartially finding the bad behavior -- there's no human bias or prejudice at work -- we just program it and then it proceeds with perfect platonic precision to catch all the bad guys."
Link
(Thanks, Ryan!)
From “Stories from the Near Future,” the 2008 New Yorker Conference -- Yoky Matsuoka, the director of the neurobotics laboratory at the University of Washington, discusses how brain signals can control prosthetic limbs, and other advances in the hybrid field of neuroscience and robotics.
Link|Subscribe to all New Yorker Conference videos on iTunes
Photoshop disasters posted this ad for humungous "wings." The Monty Python sketch below is a good fit:
Customer: What flavor is it? Man: It's a bird mate, it's a bloody bird, it's not any bloody flavor. Albatross!
Customer: It's got to be some flavor, I mean everything's got a flavor. Man: All right, it's bloody albatross flavor, it's bloody sea bloody bird bloody flavor. Albatross!
Customer: Do you get wafers with it?
Man: Course you don't get bloody wafers with it, it's a bloody albatross innit. Albatross!
In Norway, a French gentleman (F) told a Vietnamese gentleman (V) that he could double his money using a special liquid solution. V gave F $35,000, hoping to turn it into $70,000 overnight.
This unidentified man was told by a 32-year-old Frenchman that if he mixed the real cash with blank bills and then marinate them in a special liquid for one night, he would have double the amount of the cash.
The gullible Vietnamese believed the Frenchman's story and gave him 180,000 kroner (35, 000 U.S. dollars). But when he prepared to collect his money the next morning, both the cash and the Frenchman disappeared.
Dave says: "A new animated short from Run Wrake, the director of Rabbit (previously mentioned on Boing Boing) is now online. Wrake's technique for animating classic illustrations seems to be his unique talent." Link
A NY Times article describes how Domenico Salerno, an Italian was jailed by the US government for 10 days after coming to the US to see his American girlfriend and her family.
[O]n April 29, when Mr. Salerno, 35, presented his passport at Washington Dulles International Airport, a Customs and Border Protection agent refused to let him into the United States. And after hours of questioning, agents would not let him travel back to Rome, either; over his protests in fractured English, he said, they insisted that he had expressed a fear of returning to Italy and had asked for asylum. ... “The border patrol officer said to my face that Domenico said he would be killed if he went back to Italy,” [Salerno's girlfriend Caitlin Cooper] recalled, voicing incredulity that, in his halting English, he could express such a thought. “Also, who on earth would ever seek asylum from Italy?”
Twelve hours later, when Mr. Salerno was granted a five-minute phone call, he called Ms. Cooper and denied saying anything of the kind. Instead, he said, the asylum story seemed to be retaliation for his insisting on speaking to his embassy.
After being turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he was taken to the Pamunkey Regional Jail in Hanover, Va., where he ended up in a barracks with 75 other men, including asylum-seekers who told him they had been waiting a year.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
Posted over at the Creative Review Blog, "Chemical Party/Electricity" is a funny science education-themed TV spot made by Hungry Man's Roderick Fenske. The commercial promotes the Europeant Union's Marie Curie Actions program supporting scientific training. Link
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
Jess Hemerly found this fun Swedish TV special from 1968 about proto-punk group The Fugs. The interview segments at the beginning where they are asked to show their personalities in 30 seconds or less are a laugh-riot. The scene pictured here features Ed Sanders poetically commenting on his penchant for "astral perversion." Link to part 1, Link to part 2
Ethan Persoff scanned a US Army rifle maintenance booklet from 1968 that instructs soldiers to treat their rifles like a woman. Art by the incomparable WIll Eisner. Link
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
This month's Scientific American Mind unpacks the neurology of orgasm. It summarizes some very intriguing and also controversial research. For example, brain scans seem to show that orgasms aren't just about heightened arousal but also the silencing of the brain's "center of vigilance" to lose all inhibitions. From Scientific American Mind:
To find out whether orgasm looks similar in the female brain (as it does in the male brain), (University of Groningen neuroscientist Gert) Holstege’s team asked the male partners of 12 women to stimulate their partner’s clitoris–the site whose excitation most easily leads to orgasm–until she climaxed, again inside a PET scanner. Not surprisingly, the team reported in 2006, clitoral stimulation by itself led to activation in areas of the brain involved in receiving and perceiving sensory signals from that part of the body and in describing a body sensation–for instance, labeling it “sexual.”
But when a woman reached orgasm, something unexpected happened: much of her brain went silent. Some of the most muted neurons sat in the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex, which may govern self-control over basic desires such as sex. Decreased activity there, the researchers suggest, might correspond to a release of tension and inhibition. The scientists also saw a dip in excitation in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which has an apparent role in moral reasoning and social judgment–a change that may be tied to a suspension of judgment and reflection.
Brain activity fell in the amygdala, too, suggesting a depression of vigilance similar to that seen in men, who generally showed far less deactivation in their brain during orgasm than their female counterparts did. “Fear and anxiety need to be avoided at all costs if a woman wishes to have an orgasm; we knew that, but now we can see it happening in the depths of the brain,” Holstege says. He went so far as to declare at the 2005 meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Development: “At the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings.”
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
New research suggests that the type of music one listens to while drinking wine can dramatically affect the taste. Heriot Watt University psychology professor Adrian North tested 250 students and found that the taste changed by up to 60 percent depending on the vibe of the tune. In an earlier study, North determined that people were five times more inclined to purchase a French bottle instead of a German one if accordion music was being played. From the BBC News:
(In the latest study,) four types of music were played - Carmina Burana by Orff ("powerful and heavy"), Waltz of the Flowers from The Nutcracker by Tchaikovsky ("subtle and refined"), Just Can't Get Enough by Nouvelle Vague ("zingy and refreshing") and Slow Breakdown by Michael Brook ("mellow and soft")
The white wine was rated 40% more zingy and refreshing when that music was played, but only 26% more mellow and soft when music in that category was heard.
The red was altered 25% by mellow and fresh music, yet 60% by powerful and heavy music.
The results were put down to "cognitive priming theory", where the music sets up the brain to respond to the wine in a certain way.
Cracked has a fun list of seven crazy but real conspiracies.
#7. The Business Plot
The Plan: In 1933, group of wealthy businessmen that allegedly included the heads of Chase Bank, GM, Goodyear, Standard Oil, the DuPont family and Senator Prescott Bush tried to recruit Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler to lead a military coup against President FDR and install a fascist dictatorship in the United States. And yes, we're talking about the same Prescott Bush who fathered one US President and grandfathered another one.
How did that work out?: A good rule of thumb: never trust a man named Smedley to run your hostile military coup for you. Besides being no fan of fascism, Smedley Butler was both a patriot and a vocal FDR supporter. Apparently none of these criminal masterminds noticed that their prospective point man had actively stumped for FDR in 1932.
Smedley spilled the beans to a congressional committee in 1934. Everyone he accused of being a conspirator vehemently denied it, and none of them were brought up on criminal charges. Still, the House McCormack-Dickstein Committee did at least acknowledge the existence of the conspiracy, which ended up never getting past the initial planning stages.
Though many of the people who had allegedly backed the Business Plot also maintained financial ties with Nazi Germany up through America's entry into World War II.
Sixteen itty bitty pigs, which belong to a species that faces extinction, will be released into their natural habitat at the foot of the Himalayas.
Sixteen of the world’s smallest and rarest pigs will take their first tentative steps in the wild today after the species was rescued from the brink of extinction.
The pygmy hog (Porcula salvanius), once common in India, Nepal and Bhutan, was thought extinct in the 1960s after years passed without a sighting of the mammal, which stands up to 30cm high and weighs a maximum of nine kilogrammes (20lb).
In 1971 four were rescued from a market in the state of Assam, in the north of India, a discovery that alerted the world to a further handful surviving in the region's tea gardens. After a 13-year captive breeding programme led by Durrell Wildlife, the Jersey-based conservation centre founded by the author Gerald Durrell, the descendents of those surviving hogs are being reintroduced to their natural habit at the foot of the Himalayas.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
BB pal Tim Biskup, who designed the new Boing Boing/Gama-Go t-shirt, has a show of insanely beautiful new paintings opening on Saturday, May 17, in New York City. When BBtv visited Tim's studio late last year, we were blown away by some of the paintings-in-progress. This body of large pieces is mind-bendingly magnificent. The exhibition, titled The Artist In You, runs through June 14 at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery. Coinciding with the exhibit, Tim is publishing a new book by the same name. It's a collection that includes take-no-prisoners rants against the art "intellegencia," responses to the big money business of fine art, and very personal statements about the process of painting. Above is a sneak preview of some of the Artist In You paintings. Click on each piece for a larger image. Congratulations, Tim! Link to Jonathan Levine Gallery, Link to Tim Biskup's site
Previously on BB:
• New Boing Boing/Gama-Go t-shirt by Tim Biskup Link
• BBtv: Visit to Tim Biskup's studio Link
From the Comics Journal blog: "I’ve just received word that Mad Magazine pioneer and Little Annie Fanny co-creator Will Elder has died at the age of 86. I have no specifics regarding the cause of death; the funeral will take place on Sunday in New Jersey."
The San Francisco-based Billboard Liberation Front has been transforming the world of advertising since 1977. When Austrian art-pranksters and regular BBtv guestsmonochrom recently visited the United States to spread their Sculpture Mob dogma, a historic meeting with the elusive BLF took place.
BBtv's hidden cameras captured everything.
And in part two of today's BBtv episode, Xeni travels with the BLF and monochrom to document their first-ever joint exploit to build "The Great Firewall of China" around one of the Google signs on the internet giant's Mountain View campus. Hijinks ensued; dogs, cops, and GOOG security guards pursued; TV news crews newsed.
Bruce Schneier has announced the winner of his annual "Movie Plot Threat" contest, in which his readers are invited to come up with ridiculous, improbable and frightening things that you could probably frighten people with enough that they're lured into buying some stupid product or giving up some essential liberty (or both). Here's the winning entry, from Aaron Massey (be sure to click through and check out the runners up, too!)
Many Americans were shocked to hear the results of the research trials regarding heavy metals and toothpaste conducted by the New England Journal of Medicine, which FDA is only now attempting to confirm. This latest scare comes after hundreds of deaths were linked to toothpaste contaminated with diethylene glycol, a potentially dangerous chemical used in antifreeze.
In light of this continuing health risk, Hamilton Health Labs is proud to announce Tommy Tester Toothpaste Strips! Just apply a dab of toothpaste from a fresh tube onto the strip and let it rest for 3 minutes. It’s just that easy! If the strip turns blue, rest assured that your entire tube of toothpaste is safe. However, if the strip turns pink, dispose of the toothpaste immediately and call the FDA health emergency number at 301-443-1240.
Do not let your family become a statistic when the solution is only $2.95!
Houston is a-swarm with "crazy rasberry ants" -- an exotic species that eats fireants and electronic equipment. The "crazy" part is that they kind of wobble and weave when they walk. They have multiple, exterminator-resistant queens, and are attacking the local animal population as well.
They have ruined pumps at sewage pumping stations, fouled computers and at least one homeowner's gas meter, and caused fire alarms to malfunction. They have been spotted at NASA's Johnson Space Center and close to Hobby Airport, though they haven't caused any major problems there yet.
Exterminators say calls from frustrated homeowners and businesses are increasing because the ants – which are starting to emerge by the billions with the onset of the warm, humid season – appear to be resistant to over-the-counter ant killers.
"The population built up so high that typical ant controls simply did no good," said Jason Meyers, an A&M doctoral student who is writing his dissertation on the one-eighth-inch-long ant.
It's not enough just to kill the queen. Experts say each colony has multiple queens that have to be taken out.
Popular Mechanics' August, 1939 feature "The Electric Home of the Future" features the kind of boundless, electrical future hovering on the horizon for the brave people of 1939.
In the not-distant future, the home may well be equipped with “mood control,” which is made possible by newly developed light sources. It’s possible that people will suit the light and color of their rooms to their moods. These new-type lamps produce colors of warm white, daylight white, gold, red, blue, pink and green. It’s up to the psychologists to figure out the proper combinations of colors to lift one’s spirits, when they are down, with a flood of brilliant light, or subdue a sense of excitement with soothing mellow light.
These new lamps are highly efficient colored-light makers, producing from ten to fifty times as much light per watt as has been possible with incandescent lamps. They utilize a very low-pressure mercury vapor discharge which produces ultraviolet radiations, giving little direct visible light or heat radiation. The inside surface of the glass tubes is coated with chemicals which glow when struck by invisible ultraviolet radiation. The combination of chemicals used in the coating of the lamp determines the resultant color.
It is even possible that in the future we may produce on a commercial scale similar lights by bombarding the fluorescent material of the lamps with short-wave radio beams.
Today on the Watchismo Times, a drool-worthy exhibition of multi-time-zone, multi-face watches. Ever since I started travelling a lot (and, consequentially, living in a bunch of timezones), I've bought a multi-face watch or two -- but these put my collection to shame.
Link
AntiPhormLite runs independently and silently in the background of your PC. It connects to the web and intelligently simulates natural surfing behavior across thousands of customizable topics. This creates a background noise of false information disguising and inverting your own interests. We believe our technology is indistinguishable from that of a typical user engaging the internet. To support this claim we have introduced a preview mode that works with any of your preferred browsers, and together with a detailed reporting system and a host of custom options each AntiPhormLite will appear unique.
At 11p.m on December 26, 2001 police in Prentiss, Mississippi raided the residence of Cory Maye, a 21-year-old father who was at home with his 18-month-old daughter Ta'Corriana.
'Scuse me while I bask: 
My kids and I have been having a lot of fun with our Kick N' Go, a $100 scooter that's propelled by a chain-driven lever you press with your foot. Unlike Razor-style scooters, which send you flying over the handlebars whenever the tiny wheels hit a pebble, the Kick N' Go's wheels are big enough to roll over small obstacles without a mishap or the ensuing application of Hello Kitty band aids to skinned knees. 
From “Stories from the Near Future,” the 2008 New Yorker Conference -- Yoky Matsuoka, the director of the neurobotics laboratory at the University of Washington, discusses how brain signals can control prosthetic limbs, and other advances in the hybrid field of neuroscience and robotics.
Sixteen of the world’s smallest and rarest pigs will take their first tentative steps in the wild today after the species was rescued from the brink of extinction.
