This is the 1942 yearbook from the Temple University School of Medicine. The design of the embossed leather cover drives me wild. It's on eBay right now with a buy-it-now price of $1495.
Temple University School of Medicine Skull Yearbook

The Wall Street Journal's Phred Dvorak has a thought-provoking feature on the use of laptops and Internet services by homeless people, who, like everyone else, use them for civic engagement with politicians, social interaction, job hunting, and entrepreneurial pursuits.

Here's a prediction: in five years, a UN convention will enshrine network access as a human right (preemptive strike against naysayers: "Human rights" aren't only water, food and shelter, they include such "nonessentials" as free speech, education, and privacy). In ten years, we won't understand how anyone thought it wasn't a human right.

And even then, there will be destitute former music execs, living rough on the streets, using their laptops to argue that no, it's not a human right: you should be deprived of your Internet access if you're accused of copyright infringement, because the Internet is just a machine for making copies of trivial, copyrighted entertainment products.

"You don't need a TV. You don't need a radio. You don't even need a newspaper," says Mr. Pitts, an aspiring poet in a purple cap and yellow fleece jacket, who says he has been homeless for two years. "But you need the Internet..."

Shelter attendants say the number of laptop-toting overnight visitors, while small, is growing. SF Homeless, a two-year-old Internet forum, has 140 members. It posts schedules for public-housing meetings and news from similar groups in New Mexico, Arizona and Connecticut. And it has a blog with online polls about shelter life...

Aspiring computer programmer Paul Weston, 29, says his Macintosh PowerBook has been a "lifeboat" since he was laid off from his job as a hotel clerk in December and moved to a shelter. Sitting in a Whole Foods store with free wireless access, Mr. Weston searches for work and writes a computer program he hopes to sell eventually. He has emailed city officials to press for better shelter conditions...

Robert Livingston, 49, has carried his Asus netbook everywhere since losing his apartment in December. A meticulous man who spends some of his $59 monthly welfare check on haircuts, Mr. Livingston says he quit a security-guard job late last year, then couldn't find another when the economy tanked.

When he realized he would be homeless, Mr. Livingston bought a sturdy backpack to store his gear, a padlock for his footlocker at the shelter and a $25 annual premium Flickr account to display the digital photos he takes.

On the Street and On Facebook: The Homeless Stay Wired (via Isen)

(Image: Brian L Frank for the Wall Street Journal)

Over on Offworld, our Brandon's spotted a stellar Team Fortress-themed mobile:

One of Valve's most renowned character design theories, evident in all recent multiplayer games from Team Fortress to Left 4 Dead, is in creating each figure as a shape so distinct that they're instantly recognizable from nearly any distance, in any light.

And, taking that idea to its logical extreme, Etsy seller SaltyandSweet has given life to the unofficial official Team Fortress 2 mobile, laser cut and "extremely lightweight [to stay] in motion with even the slightest breeze," and perfect for toddler-training tomorrow's jarate-tossing champs today.

If there's a Left 4 Dead one, I'm doomed -- it's all the wife can talk about these days; we'd end up with one in ever room, and Alice running around making pew-pew noises at them.

Shadowplay: SaltyandSweet's Team Fortress mobile

Discuss this on Offworld

Here are two videos of the amazing physicist Richard Feynman tearing it up on the bongos drums.

My friends from Youth Radio were at the Maker Faire Bay Area today, creating a live soundscape. Students roamed the fairgrounds collecting audio samples on flash recorders. As the roving reporters brought back their "tape" to the Youth Radio booth, others used Peak and Reason software to cut-up, loop, and collage the audio into a sick soundscape. The young people on the scene were Kenyon Colvin-Williams, Skyler Brynat, Luis Florez, Derrick Underwood, Khadejhia Kassenbrock, and Austin DeRubira. Production support came from Ben Frost, Charlie Foster, and Rachel Krantz.

Mixing Maker Faire

(Rudy Rucker is a guestblogger. His latest novel, Hylozoic, describes a postsingular world in which everything is alive.)

Looking back over the advance of physics over the last two hundred years, it's staggering to realize how much our world view has changed. As a science fiction writer, I'm always trying to imagine how much more things might change in the coming two centuries. The really hard thing to anticipate is the completely game-changing advances that occur every so often.

My sense is that, for one thing, we won't be using chip-based computers in two hundred years---any more than we use mechanical calculators now. That's why, in my recent novels Postsingular and Hylozoic, I've been speculating about a world in which our computations escape from our machines and filter into our ordinary matter.

Nick Herbert is one of my favorite offbeat physicists. One of his papers in particular is something I've thought about a lot over the years: "Holistic Physics, or, An Introduction to Quantum Tantra." Here Nick argues that our conscious minds display some of the same features as quantum mechanics. When we're not thinking about anything in particular, our thoughts evolve in a continuous, multi-universe kind of way---but when we focus on something, we carry out something like the quantum collapse that characterizes the process of measurement.

[Brain models from the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard University.]

As I've been saying, I think it's at least in principle possible that the quantum computations in ordinary matter might be capable of carrying out these same kinds of processes---which we normally associate with living, conscious minds. And Nick's paper helps you to think about this idea.

David Deutsch wrote a deep and technical paper about the topic of computation in arbitrary pieces of matter, called "Quantum theory, the Church-Turing principle and the universal quantum computer."

The basic idea is that quantum mechanical systems can act as universal computers, and it's generally believed that any universal computer can emulate a human mind (given the right program, and, aye, there's the rub).

One of our big problems is that we still have such an imperfect notion of how to build a software system that's like a human mind. The best idea along these lines that I've seen in the last few years is in the book On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee.

Two more rich sources for futuristic ideas.

(1) The arXiv.org site---for instance look at their New Papers on Cosmology and Extragalactic Physics page. It blows my mind that you can so easily access all these wild new papers, easily readable in PDF form. Even if, for the average person, a lot of the writing is incomprehensible gibberish (like the backwards neon sign shown above), you can skate through and pick up some great concepts and buzzwords.

(2) The physicist John Baez's pages. Baez is a deep thinker and a gifted popularizer, adept at imparting the true strangeness of this world.

It's liberating to realize that, as always, we're very much on the edge of knowing what's really going on.

Patrick sez, "A Canadian cinema has been fined C$10,000 for invasion of privacy when it searched a mother and daughter's bags for video cameras, but instead pulled out birth control pills from the daughter's purse. The mother had no idea. She sued. She won."

Staff at the theatre were searching customers' bags for video equipment that could be used for movie piracy.

Security guards didn't find any video equipment in the family's bags, but did turn up a large selection of snack food, which they asked the family to take back to their vehicle, Lurie said.

"They did so willingly. But they continued the search of the bags and while searching they also uncovered some birth control pills belonging to the older daughter," Lurie said.

"Needless to say the mother was not pleased to find out in this manner that her daughter had those pills in her possession."

Cinema ordered to pay $10K in damages for search (Thanks, Patrick!)

This week on the most excellent Pseudopod horror podcast, David Nickle's fantastic story "The Inevitability of Earth," a tale about the ignobility of those who would fly:

When Michael was just a kid, Uncle Evan made a movie of Grandfather. He used an old eight-millimeter camera that wound up with a key and had three narrow lenses that rotated on a plate. Michael remembered holding the camera. It was supposedly light-weight for its time, but in his six-year-old hands, it seemed like it weighed a ton. Uncle Evan had told him to be careful with it; the camera was a precision instrument, and it needed to be in good working order if the movie was going to be of any scientific value.

The movie was of Grandfather doing his flying thing -- flapping his arms with a slow grace as he shut his eyes and turned his long, beak-ish nose to the sky. Most of the movie was only that: a thin, middle-aged man, flapping his arms, shutting his eyes, craning his neck. Grandfather's apparent foolishness was compounded by the face of young Michael flashing in front of the lens; blocking the scene, and waving like an idiot himself. Then the camera moved, and Michael was gone -

And so was Grandfather.

Dave's got a new short story collection coming soon, available for pre-order: Monstrous Affections.

Pseudopod 144: The Inevitability of Earth

MP3 Link

Pseudopod podcast feed

The Great Frog's Michael Mouse Ring is a sweet chunk of chunky, infringing silver: a skull in Mickey ears.

Michael Mouse Ring

In this short video, sneering rappers from the young conservative movement bust rhymes about drilling in Alaska, forcing women to bear foetuses to term, eliminating social programs and merging Church and State. Lines include: "Three things taught me conservative love: Jesus, Ronald Reagan, plus Atlas Shrugged;" and "Everyone can succeed because our soldiers bleed."

It's (apparently) not a parody.

Why Conservatives Can't Dance

Among the free papercraft downloads at Canon's website is this beautiful model of the structure of the sun -- a perfect project for a sunny weekend!

Structure of the Sun (via Make)

A former FBI interrogator who successfully extracted secrets from senior Al Qaeda members using psychological tricks has gone public with his feelings on the ineffectiveness of torture. As he explained on CBC's As It Happens, torture is especially bad when you've got a "ticking bomb" situation, as a good psychological interrogator can establish rapport in hours, while torturing Al Quaeda suspects required dozens of sessions with waterboards and days of sleep deprivation to get any intelligence (and what it got, no one trusts):

Ali Soufan, a former FBI interrogator, revealed in an article being released in June that Osama Bin Laden's bodyguard opened up about the 9/11 terror attacks only after being offered -- sugar free cookies.

Bin Laden lieutenant Abu Jandal is a diabetic, Soufan said, and wouldn't eat sugar cookies he'd been offered.

"Soufan noticed that he didn't touch any of the cookies that had been served with tea: 'He was a diabetic and couldn't eat anything with sugar in it,' Time's Bobby Ghosh wrote. "At their next meeting, the Americans brought him some sugar-free cookies, a gesture that took the edge off Abu Jandal's angry demeanor.

"We had showed him respect, and we had done this nice thing for him," Soufan told Ghosh. "So he started talking to us instead of giving us lectures..."

"It took more questioning, and some interrogators' sleight of hand, before the Yemeni gave up a wealth of information about al-Qaeda -- including the identities of seven of the 9/11 bombers -- but the cookies were the turning point," Ghosh writes.

"After that, he could no longer think of us as evil Americans," Soufan said. "Now he was thinking of us as human beings."

Cookies, not torture, convinced al Qaeda suspect to talk, FBI interrogator says (Thanks, Mark!)

Ben sez, "A film from the 1939 World's Fair showing a Chrysler being built in Stop Action animation. Originally filmed in 'Three-Dimensional Polaroid Film.'"

Man, this thing has got it all: golden age World's Fair, that fantastic chipper music, dancing brightly colored machine-parts... I want to crawl in and nestle among the sparkplugs.

Exclusive: Chrysler Builds a Car (Thanks, Ben!)