...for the first time ever in our nation's history. That most interesting fact, cited in the lasest issue of an American prison industry trade magazine. Snip:
Quoting the recent report by the Pew Center on the States’ Public Safety Performance Project, Lamkey noted that for the first time in history more than 1 percent of adults in the United States – one in 99.1 persons is held in jail or prison.
Ned Sublette, on whose email list I found the item, says:
That is a good thing, if you sell things like Aedec's Pro-Straint prisoner restraint chair. [ * ] Another article at this journal's website discusses the problem of increasing numbers of alzheimer's cases in today's aging prison population.
More from the trade zine:
As reported in the May/June issue of Correctional News, the United States leads the world in the number of inmates per capita, with 750 inmates per 100,000 residents, according to the Pew report. During 2007, the U.S. prison population increased by more than 25,000 inmates to almost 1.6 million inmates, and local jails throughout the United States held 723,131 inmates at the end of 2007.
There are other interesting things in here, including tips on reducing carbon footprint of jail facilities, and stuff about colors and how they affect the imprisoned population.
A reader writes, "The Hand Drawn Map Association (HDMA) is an ongoing archive of user submitted maps and other interesting diagrams created by hand."
The Hand Drawn Map Association
Wired's got a nice photo-gallery of the 135-year-old San Francisco cable-car system, which is such a bizarre rube-goldberg-device (constantly moving subterranean cables!).
Cable cars faced extinction and persevered again in 1947, when San Francisco Mayor Roger Lapham proclaimed that the lines should be removed in favor of buses. Thankfully, a campaign led by San Francisco's social elite saved the cars. Today, people come from all over the world to experience a ride on the tried-and-true cable cars, first tested 135 years ago today
William Lamson's art-project is delightful: a helium balloon artfully positioned so as to blind a CCTV. This could be a lot of fun for real-world shenanigans or for a piece of fiction. Just got to hope for a windless day.
Link
(Thanks, Turadg!)
Last Friday's Science Friday on NPR featured a really exciting segment on a "microscope on a chip," an ingenious, $10 method for building a microscope using a digital camera controller. The 17-minute segment runs through a number of potential applications for this, from cellphone microscopes that could autonomously identify hazardous bacteria in water samples (for cameraphones, the cost of implementing microscope functionality is about $1), to implanting cancer-detecting scopes in high-risk patients, to putting hundreds of microscopes on a single chip for massively parallel sampling and testing.
Researchers have developed a micro-microscope. Writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists at Caltech describe the creation of an on-chip, lens-free microscope that they say could be built for about ten dollars. The device uses a screen of tiny holes mounted above a CCD sensor to image liquids flowing through microscopic channels in the chip. Such a microscope chip could provide high-resolution microscopic images in field instruments for tasks such as blood screening and water testing. We'll talk with one of the inventors of the device about its potential uses
A 56-year-old Saudi religious police officer from the Saudi Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice has been accused of having six wives, which is two over the limit.
Muslim men can keep up to four wives at a time under sharia, or Islamic law, which is applied in Saudi Arabia.
Cartoon historian Jerry Beck of Cartoon Brew declares that Uncle Funny Bunny and Chumpy, which appeared in 1950s issues of My Weekly Reader, is the worst comic strip ever made.
I'm inclined to agree with him, but I think Uncle Funny Bunny and Chumpy has a quality that commands it to be read, unlike the comic strips in today's newspapers, which are both awful and uninviting.
Admittedly it’s aimed at children, and produced in the more innocent era of the early 50s. But the consistently corny gags, the awful stiff artwork… surely this takes the prize. Unless one considers the Weekly Reader’s back up strip: Loki, Your Fuzzy Forest Friend.
BibliOdyssey has a fascinating, annotated collection of satirical maps of Europe from WWI:
"The Dogs of War are loose in Europe, and a nice noise they are making! It was started by a Dachshund that is thought to have gone made -- though there was so much method in his madness that this is doubtful. [NOTE FOR THE IGNORANT: The German for Dog is Hund. The English for German is Hun. Dachshund means badger-dog -- and he is sometime more badgered than he likes.] Mated with the Dachshund, for better or for worse, was an Austrian Mongrel. By the fine unwritten law of Dogdom big dogs never attack little dogs. There are, however, scallywags in every community, and, egged on by the Dachshund for private ends, the Mongrel started bullying a little Servian. And the fat was in the fire, for the little Servian had a great big friend in the form of a Russian Bear, and he stood up for his pal. And that was what the Dachshund wanted. He hoped that a big row would ensue, and in the confusion he intended to steal a bone or two that he had his eye on for some time. He got what he wanted -- and a little more. For the Russian Bear had friends too. There was a very game little Belgian Griffon, and there was a great big French Poodle, a smart dandified fellow, and there was a Bulldog. Rather a sleepy chap this last one, and the Dachshund despised him because he was not always yapping and snaring. But the Bulldog has a habit of sleeping with one eye open, and, when he is roused, he grips and won't let go.
The London Bananas Blog features page after page (after page after page!) of photos of forlorn banana peels on the streets and pavements of London. Here's my contribution to the effort.
London Bananas
(Thanks, Look For the Woman!)
Greg Elmensdorp was inspired by my story Printcrime (a short-short story I wrote for Nature Magazine) to created this blue-red 3D illustration. I think it's terrific and really captures the mood of the story.
The coppers smashed my father’s printer when I was eight. I remember the hot, cling-film-in-a-microwave smell of it, and Da’s look of ferocious concentration as he filled it with fresh goop, and the warm, fresh-baked feel of the objects that came out of it.
The coppers came through the door with truncheons swinging, one of them reciting the terms of the warrant through a bullhorn. One of Da’s customers had shopped him. The ipolice paid in high-grade pharmaceuticals – performance enhancers, memory supplements, metabolic boosters. The kind of things that cost a fortune over the counter; the kind of things you could print at home, if you didn’t mind the risk of having your kitchen filled with a sudden crush of big, beefy bodies, hard truncheons whistling through the air, smashing anyone and anything that got in the way.
William Lamson's art-project is delightful: a helium balloon artfully positioned so as to blind a CCTV. This could be a lot of fun for real-world shenanigans or for a piece of fiction. Just got to hope for a windless day.
