Michael Doyle and his pals in Detroit decided to stage a post-apocalyptic Edwardianpunk croquet match, so they snuck into the ruins of the old Packard factory and had an afternoon's match while dressed in Edwardian finery. Croquet Social (via Beyond the Beyond)

On Tor.com, author Jo Walton takes a look at the dystopian backdrops in Robert A Heinlein's juvenile novels like Starman Jones and Citizen of the Galaxy. Heinlein's juveniles were his best work for my money, and I've always remembered them as being relentlessly upbeat, so it's startling to realize how many of them are set in failed or failing universes. As usual, Walton has smart things to say about this.

No individual one of these would be particularly noticeable, especially as they’re just background, but sitting here adding them up doesn’t make a pretty picture. What’s with all these dystopias? How is it that we don’t see them that way? Is it really that the message is all about “Earth sucks, better get into space fast”? And if so, is that really a sensible message to be giving young people? Did Heinlein really mean it? And did we really buy into it?

The Dystopic Earths of Heinlein’s Juveniles

Nick Saber, president of CrossTech Media, came back from lunch on Monday and tried to log on to his Gmail account. Instead of his email, he got this message:

Sorry, your account has been disabled. [?]

When he emailed Google's customer support, he got the following:

Thank you for your report. We’ve completed our investigation. Because our investigation was inconclusive, we are unable to return your account at this time. At Google we take the privacy and security of our users very seriously. For this reason, we’re unable to reveal any further information about this account.

Chris Brogan reports:

Suddenly, Nick can’t access his Gmail account, can’t open Google Talk (our office IM app), can’t open Picasa where his family pictures are, can’t use his Google Docs, and oh by the way, he paid for additional storage. So, this is a paying customer with no access to the Google empire.

When Google Owns You (Chris Brogan)

Jake Bronstein (left) of Zoomdoggle says:

I've been outsourcing some of my blogging to India using a "virtual personal assistant service" called Tasks For Today.

I've got him hired for 80 hours. He does 4 hours per day for me. But that means by day one he'd written a whole month of Zoomdoggle.

Outsourcing The Doggle (Zoomdoggle)

Here's an Instructable on how to give yourself elf ears. Body-Mod: Elf Ears (via Zoomdoggle)

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Cosmetic surgeon will point your ears?

Todd Lappin was invited to take a demo flight of the Emirates A380. He took a bunch of photos and wrote about it on his blog, Telstar Logistics.

It was the kind of offer Telstar Logistics cannot refuse: "Please join us for an exclusive opportunity to experience and fly on Emirates’ cutting-edge A380 aircraft during a two hour ‘demo flight’ and reception," they said. So we said, "Sure! Sign us up!"

And away we went. Dubai-based Emirates brought the airline's first Airbus A380 to San Francisco today to provide the locals with a first-hand demonstration of the aircraft's formidable bling. Airbus delivered this A380 less than two weeks ago, and Emirates quickly put it to use as a high-profile billboard to introduce the airline to the American public.

Flight Report: Airborne in an Emirates A380 at SFO

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Warren Ellis' friend busted in Dubai for melatonin
• Dubai is a creepy but intriguing place
• Vanity site of Dubai sheikh who pardoned US music producer
• UAE's very scary drug laws
• Boing Boing banned in UAE, Qatar, elsewhere.

Derrick Bostrom, a Meat Puppet member and the producer of the jewel-like "Your Favorite Little Podcast" program, points to this download of a terrific out-of-print LP by the Glenn Miller Orchestra, called Do You Wanna Dance? from 1966.

Wedding the Miller big band style and DeFranco’s top-notch soloing to go-go dance rhythms, lush easy-listening atmospherics and Command’s trademark high-tech aural experience, the album is no mere nostalgia trip for aging jitterbuggers. Rock fans will delight as this august organization tackles such teenage hits as “Cinnamon,” “Sunny,” “For Once In My Life” and “Love Child.” Naturally, the ubiquitous McCartney-Lennon catalog is represented, not once but twice, with “Hey Jude” and “A Little Help From My Friends.” In fact, there’s not a MOR track anywhere to be found on this album — it’s all strictly Top Forty. Do YOU wanna dance?

Glenn Miller Orchestra - “Do You Wanna Dance?” (Bostworld)

T0AD says:

Lawrence Lessig, a respected Law Professor from Stanford University told an audience at this years Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Half Moon Bay, California, that “There’s going to be an i-9/11 event” which will act as a catalyst for a radical reworking of the law pertaining to the Internet.

Lessig also revealed that he had learned, during a dinner with former government Counter Terrorism Czar Richard Clarke, that there is already in existence a cyber equivalent of the Patriot Act, an “i-Patriot Act” if you will, and that the Justice Department is waiting for a cyber terrorism event in order to implement its provisions.

Excerpt:

Lessig: "I had dinner once with Richard Clark at the table and I said 'is there an equivalent to the Patriot Act -- an iPatriot Act -- just sitting waiting for some substantial event just waiting for them to come have the excuse for radically changing the way the Internet works?' And he said, 'Of course there is' -- and I swear this is what he said, and quote -- 'and Vint Cerf is not going to like it very much.'"

Lessig starts talking about it around 4:30 into the video.

UPDATE: Video source is Silicon Valley Watcher.

Law Professor from Stanford University Predicting i-9/11 (Google Video)

Design firm Adaptive Path worked with Mozilla Labs to create an engaging concept video, titled Aurora, to communicate a forecast of future Web-browing experiences. From Adaptive Path:

With Aurora, we set out to define a plausible vision of how technology, the browser, and the Web might evolve in the future by depicting that experience in a variety of real-world contexts.

The release of Aurora is part of the launch of Mozilla Labs’ browser concept series, an ongoing initiative to encourage designers and developers to contribute their own visions of the future of the browser and the Web. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be releasing more video segments, as well as background material showing just what went into imagining the future of the Web and translating that into a video.

Aurora (adaptive path)

Oddly compelling video of a guy lip-syncing "Be My Baby" while getting his head shaved. (Thanks, Jerry!)

Todd says: "Another human foot found, this time not a hoax. Lab tests confirm. It was found on a north beach of the Olympic Peninsula in WA state. Past ones had been found on Canadian beaches. I think a migration is in progress."

DNA testing next on human foot found on North Olympic Peninsula beach (Peninsula Daily News)

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Severed feet washed up in Canada

Australian designer Hamit Kanuni Kuralkan has designed a train for people who don't want to have anything to do with other passengers.

It reminds me of an interview I read with one of The Ramones. I can't remember if it was Dee Dee, Johnny, or Joey, but he said when The Ramones eventually got to the point where they hated each other, they used a special tour bus with four rooms built into it. After a show, they'd get on the bus without saying a word to each other, go into their room and shut the door. When they got to the next city, they'd get out without saying a word, do the gig and go back to their rooms on the bus. Avoid Interaction With Other Humans in New Train Design (Treehugger)

Eric Zimmermann of The New Republic says:

On TNR.com, Professor Alan Ehrenhalt describes the startling trend of “demographic inversion” in American cities:

“Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city -- Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center -- some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white -- are those who can afford to do so.”

Of course, this is a stark reversal from the decades of “white flight” that re-shaped the demographics of American cities.

The demographic inversion of the American city (The New Republic)

Boing Boing reader Eric Fischer (nycentral13@gmail.com) says:

Iggy and The Stooges are in the middle of a huge tour and this is a disaster - not to mention some rare kit gone forever. Please help if you can. If anyone who reads this and lives in or near Montreal, Canada or if anyone has information, ANY INFORMATION! please, please, PLEASE as soon as possible contact Eric Fischer at:
nycentral13@gmail.com
cell phone: +1 646 932 1907

IGGY AND THE STOOGES
EQUIPMENT STOLEN ON AUGUST 4, 2008
OUTSIDE THE EMBASSY SUITES HOTEL
208 SAINT ANTOINE OUEST,
MONTREAL, QUEBEC, CANADA

all equipment was in a rented penske 15 foot yellow truck
with u.s. (michigan) license plate number AC46493
parked immediately outside the hotel, the theft had to have happened in the morning, between 6:30 and 7:30 am...

More details on the stolen stuff, with photos and serial numbers, after the jump.

The TSA says a laptop with the personal information of 33,000 Clear card applicants was lost at San Francisco Airport on July 26.

The TSA has suspended new enrollments in the program, known as Clear, which allows passengers to pay to use special "fast lanes" at airport security checkpoints.

The laptop belonged to a privately run company known as Verified Identity Pass Inc., which operates the program at 17 airports nationwide.

Security Breached At SFO Due To Stolen Laptop (CBS5)

Previously on Boing Boing:
• ETech phone snapshot: Anil Dash's trusted traveler card

Cracked.com presents their list of the five greatest things ever accomplished while high. They said, "To make the cut, an accomplishment has to be considered great by people who could pass a field sobriety test. So no Grateful Dead music."

The list includes:

#5 Francis Crick Discovers DNA Thanks to LSD

#4 Freud and Cocaine Invent Psychoanalysis

#3 A Coke Addict Makes a Coke-Flavored Cola and Calls it Coke

#2 Dock Ellis Trips His Way to a No-Hitter

#1 Moses Takes 'Shrooms, Shits Out Ten Commandments

Francis Crick Discovers DNA Thanks to LSD: Crick spent the 50s and 60s throwing all night parties famous for featuring that era's favorite party favors: LSD and nudity. Crick never made it a secret that he experimented with the drug, and in 2006, the London paper The Mail on Sunday reported that Crick had told many colleagues that he was experimenting with LSD when he figured out the double helix structure.

The 5 Greatest Things Ever Accomplished While High (Cracked.com)

Wildlife Conservation Society researchers have found approximately 125,000 endangered western lowland gorilla in a relatively small part of the Northern Republic of Congo. That's more than double the number of western lowland gorillas thought to exist in the world. From CNN:

Acting on a tip from hunters who indicated the presence of gorillas, (researcher Hugo) Rainey said that the researchers trekked on foot through mud for three days to the outskirts of Lac Tele, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) from the nearest road.

"When we went there, we found an astonishing amount of gorillas," said Rainey, speaking from the International Primatological Society Congress in Edinburgh, Scotland...

"This is the highest-known density of gorillas that's ever been found," Rainey said.

Western lowland gorillas are listed as critically endangered, the highest threat category for a species. Their populations are declining rapidly because of hunting and diseases like Ebola hemorrhagic fever...

"More than 100,000 rare gorillas found in Congo" (CNN)
"Wildlife Conservation Society Discovers "'Planet of the Apes'" (WFC)

We're excited to announce that in January 2009, MAKE: will come to public television. Produced by MAKE:, Twin Cities Public Television, and American Public Television, the show will bring the DIY wonder of the magazine to the small screen, in high definition. A preview of the first episode is now online and I think it captures the fun maker mindset perfectly. There's also a segment of the show that will feature maker-made videos. The producers are currently seeking videos for that segment, called the Maker Channel. Be sure to submit your two minute clip! The deadline is September 19, 2008.

MAKE: television
Maker Channel video submissions

Axel Peemoeller's award-winning parking lot design has giant words that snap into focus when you stand (or drive) in the right position, providing strong orientation cues: "In Melbourne I developed a way-finding-system for the Eureka Tower Carpark. The distorted letters on the wall can be read perfectly when standing at the right position. This project won several international design awards." Eureka Carpark Melbourne (Thanks, Bill!)

Today on Boing Boing tv, Xeni is joined by astronaut and American hero Buzz Aldrin, Virgin Galactic founder Sir Richard Branson, Scaled Composites founder Burt Rutan, and other space luminaries for an exploration of private space travel -- the technology, the science, and the human experience.

We fly to the Mojave spaceport to witness the unveiling of WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft that will carry SpaceShipTwo and passengers on Virgin Galactic suborbital space flights.

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Link to Boing Boing tv blog post with viewer discussion, downloadable video, and video podcast subscription instructions.

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Related: All about "Eve": Virgin Galactic mothership unveiled.

Earlier today, I blogged about an article in Nature Neuroscience about the way that studying stage magic illuminates important facts about neuroscience. I sent an email to Nature Online's Timo Hannay asking him to stick the article outside of Nature's paywall because it seemed so deliciously bloggable -- written as it was by a set of co-authors that included five prominent magicians, including Teller of Penn and Teller. Timo came through, and now the article is downloadable by all and sundry. It's pretty fabulous, too.

Inattentional blindness and change blindness. Attended objects can seem to be more salient or to have higher contrast than unattended objects19, 20, 21, 22. These perceptual effects have well-documented neural correlates in the visual system23. Magicians use the general term 'misdirection' to refer to the diversion of the spectator's attention away from a secret action. Thus, misdirection can be defined as drawing the audience's attention away from the 'method' (the secret behind the 'effect') and towards the effect (what the spectator perceives)7, 24. Misdirection can be applied in an overt or a covert manner. Here we use the term 'overt misdirection' to indicate cases in which the magician redirects the spectator's gaze away from the method. In the more subtle 'covert misdirection', the magician draws the spectator's attentional spotlight (which can be thought of as the spectator's focus of suspicion) away from the method without redirecting the spectator's gaze. Thus, in covert misdirection the spectators can be looking directly at the method behind the trick and yet be unaware of it because their attention is focused elsewhere.

The concept of covert misdirection is exemplified by the cognitive-neuroscience paradigms of change blindness and inattentional blindness. With change blindness, people fail to notice that something is different from the way it was before. This change can be expected or unexpected, but the key is that it requires the observer to compare the post-change state with the pre-change state. Change-blindness studies have shown that dramatic changes in a visual scene will go unnoticed if they occur during a transient interruption25, such as a blink26, a saccadic eye movement27 or a flicker of the scene28, 29, 30, 31, even when people are looking right at the changes. However, observers can also miss large gradual changes in the absence of interruptions32. A dramatic example of change blindness is illustrated in the Colour-Changing Card Trick video by Richard Wiseman and colleagues (available online at YouTube.com). In this demonstration, the viewers fail to notice colour changes that take place off-camera.

With inattentional blindness, people fail to notice an unexpected object that is fully visible in the display. Thus, inattentional blindness differs from change blindness in that no memory comparison is needed — the missed object is fully visible at a single point in time. In a classic example of inattentional blindness, Simons and Chabris33 asked observers to count how many times the members of a basketball team passed a ball to one another, while ignoring the passes made by members of a different team. While they concentrated on the counting task, most observers failed to notice a person wearing a gorilla suit walk across the scene (the gorilla even stops briefly at the centre of the scene and beats its chest!). In this situation no acute interruption or distraction was necessary, as the assigned task of counting passes was absorbing. Further, the observers had to keep their eyes on the scene at all times in order to accurately perform the task. Memmert showed, using eye-tracking recordings, that many observers did not notice the gorilla even when they were looking directly at it34.

Attention and awareness in stage magic: turning tricks into research

See also:
* Magic and Showmanship: Classic book about conjuring has many lessons for writers
* Derren Brown's Tricks of the Mind: book explains magic, hypnosis and the rationale for rationalism

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our John sets off a firework in celebration of EFF's latest victory: forcing "psychic" Uri Geller to eat crow:

The outcome was predictable to anyone with an ice cream scoop worth of brain jelly slapped into their skull cavity, but professional psychic Uri Geller somehow didn't see it coming: his company, Explorologist Ltd., had its spoon bent by the EFF yesterday over a frivolous DMCA takedown notice Geller sent to the creators of a 13 minute YouTube video debunking Geller's supernatural powers... a video which happened to contain a ten second copyrighted clip of one of his performances. Fair use, in other words.

The EFF has really made Geller eat it here: not only has he been forced to withdraw, but they made him license the clip in question as non-commercial Creative Commons to boot, so as to freely aid the efforts of other skeptics. Right on, EFF!

"Psychic" spoon-bender Uri Geller pwned by EFF, Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

The Boston Globe's Ideas section covers a paper just published in Nature Neuroscience about the way that magic tricks illuminate the inner workings of human perception -- the paper is co-authored by five magicians, including Teller of Penn and Teller:

"Our picture of the world is kind of a virtual reality," says Ronald A. Rensink, a professor of computer science and psychology at the University of British Columbia and coauthor of a paper on magic and psychology that will be published online this week in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. "It's a form of intelligent hallucination."

The benefit of these sorts of cognitive shortcuts is that they allow us to create a remarkably rich image of our environment despite the fact that our two optic nerves have roughly the resolution of cell-phone cameras. We don't have to, for example, waste time making out every car on the highway to understand that they are, indeed, cars, and to make sense of how they are moving - our minds can simply approximate from the thousands of cars we have already seen in our lives.

But because this method relies so heavily on expectation - not only to fill in the backdrop around us but to determine where to send what psychologists call our "attentional spotlight" - we are especially vulnerable to someone who knows our expectations and can manipulate them, someone like a magician.

"In magic," says Teller, half of the well-known duo Penn & Teller and one of five magicians credited as coauthors of the Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper, "we tend to take the things that make us smart as human beings and turn those against us."

How magicians control your mind (via Architectures of Control in Design)

Update: Hurrah! Nature Neuroscience has put the whole article online free

Eileen sez, "This cool home-grown slide show that Greg Bear made for his new novel, CITY AT THE END OF TIME (which is hitting the shelves today, from Del Rey/Orion) is an example of what a motivated writer can do with a camera, a few Photoshop chops, and generous splash of suspenseful pacing. It looks like the trailer for a very classy science-fiction movie. The book is set in Seattle, where Greg lives, so he (and his wife Astrid) took a few photos of local streets and alleys, P-shopped 'em until they looked alien and ominous, and stitched them together. Greg and his kids, Erik and Alex, also wrote and designed the rest of the site, and Erik created the music for the slide show. It's tough to impress me with slick marketing, but this low-tech trailer made my fingers itch to get my hands on the book. " City at the End of Time slideshow, City at the End of Time on Amazon

Update: Greg adds, "Erik did not do the music—that’s Creative Commons work downloaded by Terran McCanna, who did the animation and additional website artwork and graphics. Astrid helped with research and photography. Alexandra is blogging as Hope Hodgson, and we invite contributions of artwork and dreams of the far future. Erik did a Flickr photolog which we’re also using on Moo cards we’re handing around at Worldcon. Plus buttons, of course."

Neatorama rounds up some of the best Flickr photos of the third floor of the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum, where abides a 1,000 square meter scale model of Shanghai as it will appear in 2020 (provided that all goes according to plan without variation for the next 12 years, a near certainty, natch). Gargantuan Scale Model of Shanghai in 2020

(Image: shanghai_planning1, a CC Attribution photo from larryncelia's Flickr stream)

The December, 1938 issue of Popular Science carried a glowing (heh) account of a UV branding iron used to scorch newborns' initials into their tender skin so that the nurses wouldn't mix up the babies.

A new hand-type ultraviolet-ray lamp makes it easier for nurses in a Brooklyn, N.Y., hospital to brand the initials of a new-born baby on his skin to prevent identification mix-ups in the hospital nursery. Soft ultra-violet rays pass through stenciled initials placed within the easily handled unit to tan the letters on the infant as well as on the mother. Harmless, the identification brand is said to remain visible for a period of two weeks.

New Sun Lamp Held in Hand Brands Babies (Dec, 1938)