In celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, New York's Laurence Miller Gallery is hosting an exhibition of Burk Uzzle's magnificent photographs of the event. The iconic images can also be seen online. From the gallery site:

Burk Uzzle shot the festival from the vantage point of a participant. In one particularly telling photograph, a sea of humanity as dense as a carpet of wildflowers in a meadow spills over a hillside; in another, a young hippie couple standing in a tender embrace under a grandmother’s quilt became the icon of a generation. Rather than document the music, Uzzle chose to focus on details of living, existence, and enjoyment over that three day period. In so doing, he captured the spirit of the festival and ultimately an era.

Burk Uzzle Woodstock: 40th Anniversary

Some South African ATMs have pepper-spray squirters that are intended to debilitate anyone who tries to tamper with them or install a card-skimmer. The idea is that spray incapacitates you while the cops come out. Unfortunately, they've also been known to incapacitate the poor bastards who install them by randomly firing capsaicin at them.

The extreme measure is the latest in South Africa's escalating war against armed robbers who target banks and cash delivery vans. The number of cash machines blown up with explosives has risen from 54 in 2006 to 387 in 2007 and nearly 500 last year.

The technology uses cameras to detect people tampering with the card slots. Another machine then ejects pepper spray to stun the culprit while police response teams race to the scene.

But the mechanism backfired in one incident last week when pepper spray was inadvertently inhaled by three technicians who required treatment from paramedics.

Pepper-spray defence means South Africa robbers face loss of balance at cash machines (via Schneier)

In this old Apokalips webcomic, the convergence of captchas, robots, and tragic dodgy tattoos.

Prove You're Human (via A Whole Lotta Nothing)

Howard Rheingold sez, "I spoke about 21st century literacies at the Reboot Britain event in London, July, 2009. (About 40 minutes)"

21st Century Literacies (Thanks, Howard!)

(Ed. Note: We recently gave the Boing Boing Video website a makeover that includes a new, guest-curated microblog: the "BBVBOX." Here, folks whose taste in web video we admire tweet the latest clips they find. I'll be posting periodic roundups here on the motherBoing.)

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More @BBVBOX: boingboingvideo.com

If you needed another reason to feel sad about the passing of the iconic television journalist Walter Cronkite today, this video is it. John Perry Barlow tweets, "True fact: Walter Cronkite was a hot drummer. Once saw him play with Mickey Hart, Mike Gordon, & Mutatator. Kept the one." This video is proof. Cronkite appears around 1:55 in.

Previously: Walter Cronkite, RIP.

Bill, where are you?

UPDATE: If you know where Bill is, please don't post his contact info here or anywhere publicly. But I would appreciate it if you could ask Bill to get in touch with me.

UPDATE: Gareth Branwyn says:

I talked to Bill! He actually goes by the name William now. He sounds really good. It was a little awkward at first, not having talked in over tens years, but we warmed up pretty quickly. He said he needed to take the time off, step out of the limelight for awhile. He doesn't have Internet on his ranch, so he's been somewhat out of touch with the online world. But the awesome news is that he's back doing art and he's working on a new book and website! He hopes to launch the site in September. He'll send Boing Boing more info as it's available. It was so great to hear his voice, I almost choked up. It's been way too long. (BTW: His friend David read Mark's post and the comments to Bill over the phone. He was touched by all of the memories of Schwa that people shared and the kind words about his art).

Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.

Apparently, Colorado's Denver Water is trying to get people to make sure that they don't overuse their toilets, or some such thing. No running toilets. No excessive flushing. No leaky toilets. That's what I gather, at least.

So, I guess they have some kind of toilet mascot? The "Running Toilet"? That pretty much amounts to a man in a toilet suit? Which sounds sort of unpleasant?

According to The Latest Word, Mr. Toilet got all crazy last weekend and bum-rushed a big water fountain where a bunch of kids were playing, spreading its "Use Only What You Need" toilet message hither and yon, while the kids were trying to play.

I don't think the toilet meant to scare them, but you have to admit that a giant toilet appearing out of nowhere and running through the fountain is a bit weird.

Agreed. Don't let the toilet terrorists win, kiddies, or we all lose. (Via Copyranter. Image via The Latest Word.)

Bonus link dedicated to Xeni "MJFan4RVR" Jardin: Toiletman moonwalking.

Walter Cronkite, the broadcast news legend who spoke the words "And now we have two Americans on the moon" 40 years ago this week died in New York today at age 92. Here is astronaut Neil Armstrong's statement on Cronkite's passing.

Here's a stunning Drew Friedman fine art print of The Three Stooges (with Shemp) and recurring nemesis Vernon Dent. Limited edition of 35 numbered prints signed by the artist.

A t-shirt design by OXEN over at Threadless. And the crowd goes wild. Three Keyboard Cat Moon (Thanks, UPSO!)

UPDATE: The shirt is now for sale!

Slate's culture editor John Swansburg says,

Just posted an article by my colleague Dan Engber on the subject of animal masturbation. It turns out that onanism has been observed throughout the animal kingdom: dogs do it, cats do it, horses do it, turtles do it, birds love to do it. Some moose can even bring themselves to sexual climax by just rubbing their antlers on a tree (!).

Dan's article explores the scientific explanations for why animals might have evolved this behavior. There's also an accompanying video slide show -- it turns out folks are very fond of posting footage of their frisky pets, or of the strange activity they saw a koala enjoying at the zoo...

Hands or Paws or Anything They GotMasturbation in the animal kingdom.

Jordan Crane made this giant-sized silkscreen poster from Jaime Hernandez' fantastic illustration for the cover of Love and Rockets No. 24.

Jaime Hernandez silkscreen poster

April says:

Given your previous coverage of Google SketchUp, I thought you would love this music video made by one-man band Roche Limit. Why? Because he made it almost entirely using the free Google SketchUp software.

We also interviewed the man behind Roche Limit, Dave Righton, and he talks about the making of the music video.

Music video, My Friend Ship by Roche Limit

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Douglas Rushkoff
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Jeff Goldblum

Our pal Douglas Rushkoff was on the Colbert Report on Wednesday night, talking about his new book Life Inc. It's a very intense 6 minutes and I think Doug does a masterful job of getting his points across, and his passion for the subject matter is palpable. Congrats, Doug! We're proud of you!

It's fun to watch these three charlatans summon the ghost of a fictitious manager of a phony chocolate factory, set up by BBC 3 television. (Via Cynical-C)

People who bought Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm for their Kindle were surprised to discover that it had disappeared from their devices overnight. It turns out the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic version, and Amazon caved into their demand to sneak into people's electronic libraries and take back the book at the publisher's request.

From Pogue's Posts:

This is ugly for all kinds of reasons. Amazon says that this sort of thing is “rare,” but that it can happen at all is unsettling; we’ve been taught to believe that e-books are, you know, just like books, only better. Already, we’ve learned that they’re not really like books, in that once we’re finished reading them, we can’t resell or even donate them. But now we learn that all sales may not even be final.

As one of my readers noted, it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.

This kind of bullshit will encourage readers to visit Web sites in countries where the copyright has expired on Orwell's books so they can get free un-stealable electronic copies.

Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others

The incredible London museum The Wellcome Collection is staging a new exhibition, titled "Exquisite Bodies: or the Curious and Grotesque History of the Anatomical Model," running from July 30 to October 18. The talented Joanna Ebenstein of Morbid Anatomy was a curatorial adviser and graphic designer for the exhibition. I'm sure it will be an incredible, er, body of artifacts. From Morbid Anatomy:

Popular anatomical displays were a kind of popular, spectacular, democratized version of scholarly or professional medical museums. Often exhibiting objects intended for (or perhaps even once presented in) an academic context, these displays--which were extremely popular in the 19th Century and could be widely found at fairgrounds and in "popular anatomical museums" until the beginning of the 20th Century-blended education and entertainment, public health and spectacle, scholarship and prurience for a mass audience.

The centerpiece of these displays was usually the Anatomical Venus--a beautiful, life-like woman, generally made of wax, often life-sized, and demonstrating--upon the delicate removal of her breastplate--the mysteries of the inner female body. This central Venus was generally supplemented by waxes and other sorts of models, wet preparations, and illustrations parsing topics such as the ideal and compromised female body, the ravages of sexually transmitted diseases, the aberrant body, the mysteries of generation, and the ill effects of spermatorhea (aka "abnormally frequent emission of the semen without copulation", seen as a real public health issue at the time).

"Exquisite Bodies" (Morbid Anatomy)

Jack and Beverly Wilgus have had this daguerreotype for 30 years. They assumed it was a whaler holding the harpoon that blinded him. But someone who saw the image recently suggested it was Phineas Gage, a railroad worker who survived an iron rod piercing through his skull in 1848. Gage's resulting personality change led to a new understanding of neurology.

This is the only known image of Gage.

[Phineas] Gage was the 25-year-old foreman of a construction gang on Sept. 13, 1848, preparing a railroad bed outside Cavendish, Vt. As usual, he was using a pointed iron rod -- 3 feet, 7 inches long and 13 1/4 pounds -- to tamp gunpowder and sand into a hole drilled in the rock. But on that day, the mixture exploded, sending the rod through his left cheek and out through the top of his head.

It was successfully removed and, to the surprise of physicians, Gage lived 11 more years, dying after a series of increasingly violent convulsions. His story is a showpiece in neurology texts and folklore because of his survival and the abrupt changes in his personality.

A piercing image of Phineas Gage

As part of Mother Jones magazine's huge special report on the "war on drugs," -- awesomely titled "Totally Wasted" -- they've created a fun quiz to test your knowledge of the drug war. It too has a great headline, borrowed from Timothy Leary: "Just Say Know." Drug War Quiz: Just Say Know (Thanks, Mike Mechanic!)

Esquire interviewed Barney Frank about the Personal Use of Marijuana by Responsible Adults Act of 2009.

BARNEY FRANK: Announcing that the government should mind its own business on marijuana is really not that hard. There's not a lot of complexity here. We should stop treating people as criminals because they smoke marijuana. The problem is the political will.

ESQ: That's my second question. There's already been a lot of change in the country. Thirteen states have decriminalized pot. What's holding up Congress?

BF: This is a case where there's cultural lag on the part of my colleagues. If you ask them privately, they don't think it's a terrible thing. But they're afraid of being portrayed as soft on drugs. And by the way, the argument is, nobody ever gets arrested for it. But we have this outrageous case in New York where a cop jammed a baton up a guy's ass when he caught him smoking marijuana.

ESQ: You're kidding.

BF: Actually, I've just been corrected by my partner -- it was a radio he jammed up the guy's ass, not his baton.

He's Not High: Inside Barney Frank's Plan to Legalize Marijuana (Via Dose Nation)

Seen above and below are MRI scans of sushi. Uhei Naruse scanned the rolls at a hospital in a personal research project to tease out the secret of good sushi. Trevor Corson, author of "The Story of Sushi," has the details of this experiment on his Sushi Concierge blog. From Sushi Concierge:

Pictured (at left) are three sushi nigiri—hand squeezed rectangles of rice topped with a slice of fish. The first was made by the veteran chef. It was small and light, weighing in at only 12 grams, and the MRI scan revealed a lot of empty space inside it, between the grains of rice. It also revealed another secret of a veteran chef's skill—the grains of rice were mostly aligned lengthwise, which helps the nigiri hold together without being too dense, by creating adhesion along the edges of the aligned grains.

The second nigiri was made by the apprentice. It was denser—about the same size, but weighing 15 grams. And the rice grains were less uniform in their orientation.

The third nigiri was made by the robot, which couldn't come close to matching human skill. The grains of rice were hopelessly jumbled and the sushi was thick and heavy, clocking in at 20 grams. Naruse ate some of it and described it as "sticky." This is closer to the typical sushi that, sadly, we're content to eat in the States.

"Want to See the Inner Secrets of Perfect Sushi?" (Sushi Concierge)
"The Story of Sushi: An Unlikely Saga of Raw Fish and Rice" (Amazon)

A surprise announcement and massive game-changing news for musicians: developers Harmonix have just announced The Rock Band Network, a new initiative to let home users and indie bands create and sell their own Rock Band tracks through the game itself, in partnership with Microsoft's XNA Creators Club.

We've got all the first details on the program, which is due to launch in closed beta by the end of the month, over at Offworld.

I'm with the Band: Harmonix opens Rock Band track creation, sales to Xbox 360 home users

Recently on Offworld we watched what surely must be the game trailer of the month: an extended look at animator Michel Gagne's upcoming Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet (above), with some of the most striking art direction and animation we've seen in games for some time, cut to black metal band Dimmu Borgir's "Blood Hunger Doctrine", which shouldn't work but absolutely fantastically does -- it's a must watch.

Elsewhere we saw one fan's attempt to recreate Portal on the iPhone and the latest look at tiny-planet shooter Max Blastronaut, found the latest two gorgeously designed official Team Fortress 2 T-shirts, and listened to a wicked live remix of the theme song to The Silver Case -- the first PlayStation adventure game from No More Heroes and Killer7 creators Grasshopper Manufacture.

Finally, we found a new on-demand publisher for budding board game designers that lets you piece together your pieces, upload your own artwork, and sell the game directly through the site, spent our first day on the Wii Sports Resort, which ended in broken glass and a trickle of blood, and our 'one shot's for the day: the gorgeous girls of Nintendo punk, a Metal Gear packing slip that's just a box, a fantastic new Darkstalkers montage, and, best of all, beautiful and very French pixels for what we genuinely hope is a new catburglar game.

Beat the heat this summer by setting a tray of raw cookies on your dashboard to bake in the stifling heat inside your car while you work -- you get a tray of warm, fresh-baked cookies to eat on the return commute!

It took about 2 1/2 hours for the cookies to bake completely. I ended up opening the car door shortly before the end of the baking period to check for doneness. This check has to be done manually, as there are no color indicators (such as brownness) to judge by because the sugar in the car cookies does not caramelize and brown like that of oven-baked cookies. So, I gently pressed the edges of the cookies to feel that they were firm and even more gently touched the center of one of the cookies to see that it held together and was not gooey (the center of the cookie should not be entirely firm, unless you are shooting for a crispy cookie). Finally, I slid one of the cookies around on the parchment paper - a good test for this type of baking because a baked cookie will release easily from the paper, while an unbaked cookie will stick in place. If your cookies are not done, add more baking time in 15 or 30 minute increments, as opposed to the 30 second or 1 minute increments you might add to an oven-baked cookie.

Car-Baked Chocolate Chip Cookies, step by step September 4 (via Making Light

Britain's pedophile-phobia has reached new heights of insanity -- now everyone who comes into contact with a child at school has to have a police background check and get certified as genuine non-pedophiles. But not just once -- over and over again; a different certificate for teaching karate, escorting field trips, or giving a presentation on careers day. Because, you know, you might not be a karate-teaching pedo, but you might be a field-trip pedo. Everyone's included from Members of Parliament to authors giving a reading. Charlie Stross has some good commentary on the potential dangers all this background checking creates:

As you can imagine, the authors are upset. As Philip Pullman puts it, "It seems to be fuelled by the same combination of prurience, sexual fear and cold political calculation," the author of the bestselling His Dark Materials trilogy said today. "When you go into a school as an author or an illustrator you talk to a class at a time or else to the whole school. How on earth -- how on earth -- how in the world is anybody going to rape or assault a child in those circumstances? It's preposterous..."

Even the simplest of databases have been found to contain error rates of 10%. (The HMRC database in this study contains merely first, second and surname, title, sex, data of birth, address and National Insurance number -- nevertheless 10% of the records contain errors.) Other agencies are even more prone to mistakes. For example: my wife recently discovered that our GP's medical records showed her as having been born outside the UK rather than in an NHS hospital in Manchester. We don't know why that error's in the system, and we've got the birth certificate and witnesses to prove that it is an error, but imagine the fun that might ensue if the control freaks in Whitehall decided to enforce record sharing between the NHS and the Immigration Agency ...! (Hopefully they're not that stupid, but who can tell?)

The point is, if 10% of government database records contain an error, than the probability of a sweep of databases coming up with an error rises as you consult more sources. And there are a whole bundle of wonderful ways for errors to show up. If your name and date of birth are the same as someone with heavy criminal record, a CRB check could label you as a bad guy. If your social security number is one digit transposition away from $BAD_GUY, see above. If the previous owner of your house was a child abuser, see above. If your street address is one letter/digit away from a street address occupied by a criminal and some bored clerk mis-typed it, you can end up being conflated with somebody else. And the more sources the CRB checks, the higher the probability of a false positive result -- that is, of them obtaining a positive result (subject is a criminal) when in fact the subject is a negative.

This is not a hypothetical worry. As of last November, the CRB had falsely identified more than 12,000 people as criminals, according to the Home Office. (Raw parliamentary answer here.) These are the disputes that were upheld, that is, ones where the falsely mis-identified were able to convince the CRB that their record was incorrect. These are false positives which have been conclusively identified as such. While the identified false positive rate is around 0.1%, the true figure is certainly much higher: because there will be a proportion of individuals identified as false positives who are in the unfortunate position of lacking the documentation to prove their innocence.

False Positives and the Database State

Someone who goes by the name of "Hacker Croll" breached the cloud computing accounts of one or more Twitter employees, and obtained access to extremely sensitive personal and corporate documents. I won't link to the documents, but they're floating around. I first read about the breach on the New York Times "Bits" blog.

This seems as good a time as any to remind everyone about choosing and managing passwords wisely. The New York Times' Gadgetwise blog has a helpful post up today along those lines. Snip:

The lesson Twitter employees are learning the hard way is a lesson for us all. If you use cloud services for personal or work purposes, you need to:

* Use strong passwords
* Use a different password for each of your accounts
* Pick tough security questions
* Keep your passwords and answers to security questions to yourself.

If you use Gmail, here are tips on how to keep your account secure. There are also instructions on securely retrieving a forgotten password with a text message to your phone.)

If you find it difficult to remember multiple strong passwords, choose a secure way to store them.

Twitter Gets Hacked. Can It Happen to You? (NYT Gadgetwise)

Related: Much debate online today about the ethics involved in publishing the ill-gotten docs. Here is a blog post at Information Week arguing that this reflects recklessness, and here are two blog posts which defend the notion that this is a protected right (my linking these should not be interpreted as a personal blessing, I'm thinking all of it through, too): copyrightsandcampaigns, and citmedialaw.org.

Here is Twitter co-founder Biz Stone's blog post about the data theft:

About a month ago, an administrative employee here at Twitter was targeted and her personal email account was hacked. From the personal account, we believe the hacker was able to gain information which allowed access to this employee's Google Apps account which contained Docs, Calendars, and other Google Apps Twitter relies on for sharing notes, spreadsheets, ideas, financial details and more within the company. Since then, we have performed a security audit and reminded everyone of the importance of personal security guidelines.

This attack had nothing to do with any vulnerability in Google Apps which we continue to use. This is more about Twitter being in enough of a spotlight that folks who work here can become targets. In fact, around the same time, Evan's wife's personal email was hacked and from there, the hacker was able to gain access to some of Evan's personal accounts such as Amazon and PayPal but not email. This isn't about any flaw in web apps, it speaks to the importance of following good personal security guidelines such as choosing strong passwords.

And, a question many are asking: will Twitter sue the blog that published a number of these documents today?

Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.

I took these photos on the set of an adult movie in the San Fernando Valley this April. It was April 10th, to be exact. Which is my birthday. Why I was on the set of an adult movie on my birthday is another story altogether. The story of my life.

The location was a hideous brown building in Canoga Park, not far from Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, where rocket engines are built and in front of which sits a giant rocket engine as if it has fallen out of the sky. Both sides of the soundstage were lined with themed rooms: a shower room, a weight room, a sex dungeon. That day's scene would take place on one of the ugliest adult movie sets that I have ever seen: pea soup-colored walls, a diarrhea-colored leather sofa, a faux wood floor. All the flowers were fake.

The name of the movie was "Interactive Sex with Tori Black." The director explained: "We were going to go with 'Existential Musings of a Porn Star,' but we thought we'd dumb it down. If you want to have sex with Tori Black and don't have chloroform, this is your next best option."

New York City is spending a million bucks on typewriters over the next three years. Apparently the NYPD is working toward computerizing everything, but they're just not there yet. So Swintec office equipment is on contract to provide manual and electrics, and maintenance, for the foreseeable future. From UPI:

Most of the city's arrest forms have been computerized, but property and evidence vouchers printed on carbon-paper forms still require the use of typewriters.

"It just doesn't make sense that we can't enter these (vouchers) on computer," a police officer told the newspaper.

Dr. Edith Linn, a retired New York police officer and professor of criminal justice at the city's Berkeley College, said many of the 500 police officers she interviewed for a study told her the outdated equipment makes them less likely to perform arrests for minor offenses.

"NYPD typewriter bill nearly $1 million" (via Orange Crate Art)

I'm looking forward to seeing Know Your Mushrooms, a documentary by Ron Mann (who also directed Comic Book Confidential).

KNOW YOUR MUSHROOMS follows uber myco visionaries Gary Lincoff and Larry Evans (two of the more expert and unforgettably mercurial characters in the community) as they lead us on a hunt for the wild mushroom and the deeper cultural experiences attached to the mysterious fungi.

Combining material filmed at the Telluride Mushroom Fest with animation and archival footage along with a neo-psychedelic soundtrack by the Flaming Lips, KNOW YOUR MUSHROOMS opens the doors to perception, takes the audience on a longer, stranger trip and delivers them to a brave new world where the fungi might well guide humanity to a saner, safer place… with extra cheese…

When I was young my grandmother would take my family on mushroom hunting trips. She really knew her mushrooms. Once when we were in the woods, my mother and grandmother got into an argument about whether or not a mushroom they'd found was poisonous. My mother said it was poisonous and my grandmother said it wasn't. To make her point, my grandmother ate the mushroom on the spot. (I have to assume she was right, because she lived to be 107.)

Last week in Colorado, my mother (who knows her mushrooms too, just not as well as her mother did) found and dried some mushrooms. Photos here.

Know Your Mushrooms documentary

Billy Shire Fine Arts in Culver City, CA is hosting an exhibition of Lou Beach's extraordinary collage work.

Shown here, World Of Men C, 15" x 19",$2800

Exhibition: July 11, 2009 - August 1, 2009

Lou Beach show at Billy Shire Fine Arts

Clay Roe says:

While browsing for horn modifications for my '08 Honda Civic Hybrid, I came across this extreme body modification to a 1992 Honda Civic CX. It may look like an Aptera's older road-weary brother; but the builder claims to have increased his drag coefficient from 0.34 to 0.17! Resulting in over 90 mpg! Just like my expensive hybrid!*"

* - (With the wind. Downhill. With the AC off.)

Home-made super-aerodynamic Honda Civic

This original, unopened 1967 Star Trek oil paint-by-numbers is for sale on eBay. It could be yours for just $1800! The seller has a slew of Star Trek memorabilia for sale.

Here's a nice time-lapse video simulation depicting the probable past and possible future of the Earth's land masses, "650 Million Years In 1:20 Minutes." (via CT2)

Aaron Barnhart of TV Barn shared this photo of a man who brought a small black & white television and a converter box into a Starbucks.

Dude in Starbucks watching black-and-white TV with converter box!

Guestblogger Marina Gorbis is executive director at Institute for the Future.

I don't know about you but I am feeling kind of bad about those poor Goldman Sachs investment bankers. Just a few months ago they looked so sad (remember those sad guys on the trading floor?). And now, in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, after taking money from American taxpayers, they earn huge profits as if the credit crunch never happened. The 29,400 Goldmanites are expected to take in on average around $800,000 in pay, bonuses, and benefit packages. I can only imagine what this means for the top 400. But I worry that this is just not going to make them happy. And this is because research on happiness reveals some surprising things:

• Wealth increases human happiness when it lifts people out of abject poverty and into the middle class but not thereafter (Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness.)

• The bewildering array of choices that wealth brings not only doesn't make us happier but actually erodes our psychological well-being. (Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice)

• Spending money on other people has a more positive impact on happiness than spending money on oneself. (Dunn et al., Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness)

So I want to humbly suggest that for the purposes of ensuring Goldmanites' happiness, they give large portions of their money to those impoverished by the recession, thus making themselves and others a bit happier. Spread a bit of that happiness contagion. What do you think?

Scott Dennis is the science fiction world's gift to sartori, a wandering t-shirt salesman whom I've run into at conventions on three continents. He'd just expanded his line of Ctholoid tees, adding this Cthulhu vs. the White House Capitol design that I'm very fond of indeed.

Cthulhu And Friend Designs

The Electronic Frontier Foundations has opened the nominations for its annual Pioneer Award, given to "leaders on the electronic frontier who are extending freedom and innovation in the realm of information technology." Of all the awards I've ever received, the Pioneer is the one I'm proudest of. It's independently juried by a group of tech luminaries who take public nominations and then deliberate.

The EFF Pioneer Awards were established to recognize leaders on the electronic frontier who are extending freedom and innovation in the realm of information technology. Each year we field nominations from the EFF community -- now is your opportunity to nominate a deserving individual or group to receive a Pioneer Award for 2009!

Nominate a Pioneer for EFF's 2009 Pioneer Awards!

Every single ingredient in this homemade oatmeal stout and Heath Bar ice cream is off my diet. Still, I want.

This was a total success, if I do say so myself. The ice cream base has a slight bitter flavor but also a bit of a toffee flavor from the stout. The sweetness of the Heath bar is a good foil to that bitterness while the toffee in it helps bring out more of that toffee flavor. The texture of the ice cream is beautifully creamy making a good base for the crunch of the Heath Bar. This is a flavor I'll definitely make again!

Oatmeal Stout and Heath Bar Ice Cream (via Craft)

In an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education Tyler Cowen argues for autism as part of a "neurodiverse" world that has many kinds of normal, noting that "diagnosed autistics are very often those people who encounter major problems in life," while those for whom autism provides an advantage are rarely diagnosed.

Autism is often described as a disease or a plague, but when it comes to the American college or university, autism is often a competitive advantage rather than a problem to be solved. One reason American academe is so strong is because it mobilizes the strengths and talents of people on the autistic spectrum so effectively. In spite of some of the harmful rhetoric, the on-the-ground reality is that autistics have been very good for colleges, and colleges have been very good for autistics...

A partial list notes that autistics have, on average, superior pitch perception and other musical abilities, they are better at noticing details in patterns, they have better visual acuity, they are less likely to be fooled by optical illusions, they are more likely to fit some canons of economic rationality, they solve many puzzles at a much faster rate, and they are less likely to have false memories of particular kinds. Autistics also have, to varying degrees, strong or even extreme abilities to memorize, perform operations with codes and ciphers, perform calculations in their head, or excel in many other specialized cognitive tasks. The savants, while they are outliers, also reflect cognitive strengths found in autistics more generally. A recent investigation found, with conservative methods, that about one-third of autistics may have exceptional skills or savantlike abilities...

It turns out that the American university is an environment especially conducive to autistics. Many autistics are disadvantaged or overwhelmed by processing particular stimuli from the outside world and thus are subject to perceptual overload as a result. For some autistics, that is debilitating, but for many others it is either manageable or a problem they can work around. The result is that many autistics prefer stable environments, the ability to choose their own hours and work at home, and the ability to work on focused projects for long periods of time.

Autism as Academic Paradigm (via Kottke)

To honor the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, NASA has just released these brand new restored videos of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's historic first steps on the moon. The space agency is working with Lowry Digital in Burbank to restore tapes from the July 20, 1969 moonwalk &mdash the project in its entirety will be completed in the fall, but they're offering a sneak peek at some of the iconic moments, like Neil Armstrong (above) and Buzz Aldrin (below) taking their first steps on the moon, starting right now. These clips show side-by-side comparisons of the footage stored in the NASA archives vs. the never-seen-before newly restored footage.

Stay tuned for more reporting about the "lost" Apollo 11 tapes and an interview with Buzz Aldrin on BBG on Monday.

Below, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin raising the American flag on the moon's surface:

Footage courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

I visited the home of BB pals Richard "Dangerous Minds" Metzger and Tara McGinley last week, and Richard showed me this gem, found on a telephone pole nearby. "I'm still peeing myself laughing about this guy," says Richard.

MAN CLAIMS TO LOOK LIKE MICHAEL FROM "GOOD TIMES" (Dangerous Minds)

Update: A savvy BB commenter points out that the guy's a) prolific b) known.

Kyle sez "An unidentified blob is making its way through the Arctic ocean, engulfing wildlife (only feathers and bones were left of a goose that was caught in it), and no one knows what it is."

Nobody knows for sure what the gunk is, but Petty Officer 1st Class Terry Hasenauer says the Coast Guard is sure what it is not.

"It's certainly biological," Hasenauer said. "It's definitely not an oil product of any kind. It has no characteristics of an oil, or a hazardous substance, for that matter.

"It's definitely, by the smell and the makeup of it, it's some sort of naturally occurring organic or otherwise marine organism..."

"It's pitch black when it hits ice and it kind of discolors the ice and hangs off of it," Brower said. He saw some jellyfish tangled up in the stuff, and someone turned in what was left of a dead goose -- just bones and feathers -- to the borough's wildlife department.

"It kind of has an odor; I can't describe it," he said.

Huge blob of Arctic goo floats past Slope communities (Thanks, Kyle!)

(Download MP4, or watch on YouTube)

Boing Boing Video proudly presents this newly rediscovered gem: The Texas Strip, a 1944 "Soundie" which inspired the Devo song and video "Whip It." Watch as a singing cowboy flirts with cowgirls sitting on a a fence, then strips one of them with his whip (oh my).

The WWII-era down-home striptease comes to us as a special courtesy of Oddball Film + Video, a San Francisco stock footage company that maintains a truly amazing and extensive archive of weird old moving images. They do regular screenings in San Francisco.

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Where to Find Boing Boing Video: boingboingvideo.com. RSS feed for new episodes here, subscribe on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are blog post archives for Boing Boing Video.

(Thanks to Boing Boing's video hosting partner Episodic, and to Robert Chehoski and Stephen Parr of Oddball Film + Video)

Photo credit: scrapthispack @ Flickr

Note: Each week we'll be bringing you a roundup of fresh green topics from our friends over at TreeHugger. Enjoy!

Packaging Design At Its Worst
Poor packaging design and ridiculous examples of over-packaging come in all shapes and sizes, but it doesn't get much worse than these individually-wrapped bananas.

Human Shrub Attacks Town
Citizens of Colchester beware! Take to your houses. A creature from the swamps has been filling empty planters and baskets with brightly-coloured marigolds and begonias, last seen wandering the streets carrying a sign saying "Save the Roses."

Your Eco-Wood Might Be Illegal
Thinking of buying sustainably harvested wood from Brazil? Check the label, could be illegal wood passed off as eco-certified.

6 Ways To Defuse Anti-Cyclist Road Rage
If you are a cyclist and the victim of Auto Road Rage, there are a number of things you can do to keep the peace. I like #5, don your best plumage.

The audiobook of Kissing the Bee combines two of my favorite things: Kathe Koja's young adult fiction and Full Cast Audio's use of skilled actors to bring fiction to life.

Kathe Koja's young adult novels are masterpieces of subtlety, understatement, and the sneaky, skillful use of everyday situations to illustrate large, difficult emotional truths about growing up. Full Cast Audio -- you may know them from their great adaptation of Heinlein's Have Space Suit, Will Travel -- have brought in as talented a team of voice actors as I've heard, and their narration does great things for an already strong narrative.

Kissing the Bee tells the story of Dana and Avra, two small-town high school seniors about to graduate. They're best friends, but brainy, shy Dana is always in egocentric, beautiful Avra's shadow. Dana is incredibly smart about people and her natural empathy lets her love her best friend, despite all her failings, and despite the fact that Dana is secretly in love with Avra's long-suffering boyfriend, Emil.

That's the setup, your basic adolescent love-triangle. But oh, does Koja ever do amazing things with it. Koja's special gift is empathizing with the wrenching drama of adolescent emotions, the looming, all-eclipsing feelings that suffuse every tissue, raising the stakes of your problems to infinity. Dana is smart and reflexive enough to know this, but she can't avoid or explain away her feelings. She is a genuinely good person trapped in a situation in which there is no genuinely good course of action that avoids one kind of betrayal or another. Her dilemma -- whom to betray, and how -- plays out with the crushing inevitability of an avalanche, but her reflexivity and thoughtfulness means that the reader never descends into helplessness, no matter how bad things get for Dana.

The three primary actors -- voices of Dana, Avra and Emil -- play it just perfect, with the nuance that conveys smart young people who are in two minds: the dramatic emotional whirlwind and the rational knowledge of its true scale as measured against the whole wide world.

Koja's admirable people-smarts have guided her through two different careers, first as a writer of lush, lavish horror and now as a writer of spare, whittled-down, understated young adult novels. She is proof that there are no tired or unoriginal situations, only tired or unoriginal writers. Thankfully, she is neither.

Kissing the Bee (CD)

Kissing the Bee (Hardcover)

I needed to make some holes. Specifically, I needed to drill into the brick support-pillars in my office because I have run out of wall-space to hang pictures. We've got a big 9mm Black and Decker drill at home and some mortise bits that I've used from time to time, but it's slow, heavy and difficult. I remember drilling the outside wall to put in a hammock-hook -- it took an hour and afterwards my arms and shoulders felt like I'd been broken on the rack. I also blew through two bits before the hole was done, and even then, it was sloppy and I needed to go buy a larger-gauge plug.

Being a poor workman, I blamed my tools and set off in search of a better one. I'd heard good things about cordless hammer-drills -- the last time I looked into them, most of the power-packs were NiCad and subject to all kinds of finicky recharging crap, but LiOn is everywhere these days -- and so I started reading online reviews. I hit on the Bosch Uneo "3 in 1" Cordless Lithium-Ion SDS Hammer and Drill/Driver, a sweet little 1.1kg tool that seemed almost too good to be true.

When it turned up, I charged it for a couple of hours and then went to work on the walls. Ever used a Demel to carve up styrofoam? That's about how smoothly the Bosch went into the brick while in hammer-mode, making quick, neat holes with just the lightest pressure. The clever chuckless head is the easiest one I've used so far, a collar that tugs up to admit a new bit, then snaps back to form a dust-collar. The rubber grips are right where I wanted them, and easily absorbed the shock of the hammer-drill action.

Around the same time, we got a big plastic storage shed for the back porch that had about a million screws. I brought the drill home for the evening, thinking I'd give it a shot (even though I usually find that the wrist strain from a manual screwdriver is usually less than the pain of slinging around a heavy corded drill). It was almost magic. The drill's trigger is a variable-speed control, making screwing much safer -- I didn't crack a single piece of plastic by overdrilling, nor did I strip any heads (good thing, too, since I inevitably installed the wrong screws in the wrong holes and had to use the drill to reverse them all out again).

Since then, I've drilled plenty of holes around the place -- once they're this easy to make, it's hard to resist the temptation -- and hung up my raygun collection, some framed assemblage sculptures, and many other little jobs besides. I'm sold -- going to get another one for home and give away the old Black and Decker.

Bosch Uneo "3 in 1" Cordless Lithium-Ion SDS Hammer and Drill/Driver (Amazon UK)

Wired contributing photographer Dan Winters made this TIE Fighter from Starbucks junk -- cups, stirrers, sleeves and such -- and now Wired's challenging you to make anything you can from the chain's stuff.

Contest: Make Art From Starbuck's Junk (via IZ Reloaded)

Here's a set of intriguing notes by Joey DeVilla from a talk at the FutureRuby conference called "Artisanal Retro-Futurism and Team-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism," presented by Brian Marick. I hope a video goes up soon -- I'd love to hear this in full.

# First, let's consider what "anarcho-syndicalism" is
# Consider an agile team. The see themselves as alone in a dangerous place, where no one else is offering any help.

   * It would be nice if a "daddy" swooped in and help save them from the mean people
   * The are problems with this approach: it's pathetic, and it often doesn't work

# Here's a story for you to illustrate things:

   * An agile team was made to work in cubicles, like the rest of the company
   * Agile methods aside, cubicles are the "single worst arrangement of humans and objects in space for the purpose of developing software"
   * The team proposed changing their workspace to an open one
   * Furniture Police turned them down
   * In response, the scrum-master went to the office over the weekend. She disassembled the cubicles and changed the office layout to an open one. On Monday, she declared to the Furniture Police that "If the cubicles come back, you will have to fire me."
   * They gave in

FutureRuby Talk: "Artisanal Retro-Futurism and Team-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism"

Update: Here's that video