Lisa Congdon turned her scissor collection into a gorgeous mobile -- think of the incredible mental scars you could leave on your child by hanging this over her crib! Link (via Craft)

My uncle Kevin Scanlon has snapping photos of Appalachian life for as long as I could form sentences -- actually, no, longer. When I was young, his photos taught me to appreciate the modest, mostly overlooked beauty surrounding the old railroads that snake through West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and neighboring states. His photographs document what is now a dying culture.

His first-ever solo exhibit opens tomorrow in Grafton, West Virginia. It's probably safe to guess that most of the people who read this blog post aren't in easy driving distance of Grafton, West Virginia, but you can see some of the images online, and buy prints if you're so inclined. If you do go to the opening on Saturday, please give him a hug for me.

Shown above: Morning Coal Train, Coopers, WV, 2005. Here's another one of my favorites from his railroad series. (high five, uncle Kev!)

Previously on BB: Kevin Scanlon's heavy industry photography

Update: Here's a snip from an interview with Kevin:

West Virginia reveals itself much like a book, one page at a time. The mountainous terrain and twisting valleys force you in close. Every page of the state has an interesting story to tell and another surprising view. The railroad is the thread that ties it all together. There are two themes that define my approach to photography: context and light. I am drawn to industrial subjects because of their influence on the culture of an area. Railroads are iconic in West Virginia. They were the key in developing the state, they were one of the defining factors when the state's borders were laid out and they literally carry the state away every day, one carload at a time. This series of photographs attempts to depict the railroad as an element of the landscape.

In November, 1969, the New York Times reported on the existence of a secret, miniature art museum that had been smuggled onto the surface of the moon on Apollo 12:

...according to Frosty Myers, the artist who initiated the project, the Moon Museum was secretly installed on a hatch on a leg of the Intrepid landing module with the help of an unnamed engineer at the Grumman Corporation after attempts to move the project forward through NASA's official channels were unsuccessful.

According to the Times, the artworks are, clockwise from the top center: Rauschenberg's wavy line; Novros' black square bisected by thin white lines [in 1969, Novros also created the incredibly rich, minimalist fresco on the second floor of Judd's 101 Spring St]; a computer-generated drawing by Myers; a geometric mouse by Oldenburg, "the subject of a sculpture in his current show at the Museum of Modern Art" [a sculpture which is in MoMA's permanent collection, btw]; and a template pattern by Chamberlain, "similar to one he used to produce paintings done with automobile lacquer." Warhol's contribution, which is obscured by the thumb above, is described as "a calligraphic squiggle made up of the initials of his signature."

(I'm liveblogging from TED 2008, in Monterey, CA)

Presenter:

Technology hacker Joshua Klein built a vending machine that teaches crows to deposit coins they find into a special vending machine that dispenses peanuts. He has been studying crows for over ten years and has learned that they are very intelligent. Their brain/body weight ratios are similar to chimpanzees. He's showing a video of how a crow learned to use a tool to pull an object out of of a tube. It's impressive.

Crows are smart and adaptable. For example, they drop nuts on streets so cars run over them, then wait for the traffic signal to change so they can pick up the food. Other crows who see this happen quickly learn how to do this for themselves.

His machine uses Skinnerian training. He put coins and peanuts around the machine. The crows eat the peanut on the feeder tray. Then Joshua took away the nuts and left coins in the feeder tray. It pisses off the crows. They sweep the coins around with their beaks, looking for food. When a coin accidentally drops into the slot, it dispenses a peanut. Next, Joshua took away the coins. The crows learned to find coins elsewhere and deposit them.

So now he wants to train crows for search and rescue, picking up trash, and other mutually beneficial tasks.

(I'm liveblogging from TED 2008, in Monterey, CA)

Chris Anderson: If someone takes an obscure area of nature and spends a lifetime studying it, it can be applied to the world at large in interesting ways. Case in point, mycologist and author Paul Stamets, who believes mushrooms can save the world.

1.3 billion years ago, fungi were the first plants organisms to come on land, other plants followed hundreds of millions years later. We have more in common with fungi than other plants. Mycelium breathes oxygen like us.

Stamets says he loves a challenge and saving the Earth is a good one. He will present a suite of six mycological solutions.

Mycelium holds 30x 30,000 times its mass. They are soil magicians. Creates a spongey soil. It is earth's natural internet, a biologically successful model. It's highly branched. If a path gets broken, their are redundant paths. It is sentient, leaping up in aftermath of your footprints, trying to grab debris. They generate humus soils, and provide a multi-directional transfer of nutrients to trees. The sequence of microbes that occur of rotting mushrooms are an important part of natural cycle of the forest. I'm in love with old growth forests and I'm a patriotic American because of them.

Fungi uses radiation as a source of energy, so the possibility of fungi existing on other planets is a "forgone conclusion."

Mushrooms produce strong antibiotics. Work well against flu. We should save the old growth forests as a mater of national defense.

Here's a Salon article from 2002 about Stamets, titled "How Mushrooms can Save the World."

(I'm liveblogging from TED 2008, in Monterey, CA)

Presenter: Geophysicist and shipwreck explorer Robert Ballard unearth's lost histories in the ocean.

Why are people interested in going into space, but not in exploring the ocean? Most of the Southern Hemisphere is unexplored. It's naive to think that the easter bunny put all the resources on the continents. We are leaving so much of the table. 71% of Earth is ocean.

Ballard's gone on over 150 expeditions. On a good day we might have four people at the average depth of the Earth. 1/4 of our planet is a single mountain range, but we went to the moon before we went to the largest feature of our own planet. Tens of thousands of active volcanoes are down there. It's a very alive place.

No one had gone into that boundary of creation until 1974 when we went in a little submarine and went into the rift valley. No light can penetrate, no photosynthesis. We thought there'd be no life down there. Lots of tube worms, clam beds sitting on barren rock but when we opened them their body had taken over by a bacteria that uses chemosynthesis, not photosynthesis.

Ballard designed robotic subs to continue to search the bottom of the ocean (I would not let an adult drive my robot sub, because they don't have enough gaming experience, but I'l let a kid do it because they know how to control it). Found upside-down pools of water with the pH of Drano but it harbored life. Methane volcanoes. Also finding ships -- Titanic, the Bismarck, and many of the estimated 1,000,000 ships that have sunk.

NOAA's Office of Exploration is a ship that will explore unknown America - the 50% of US territory that's underwater.

Chris Anderson, who runs TED, asks Ballard whether or not we should learn about sustainability on the surface before we start harvesting what the "Easter Bunny" left for us in the Ocean. Ballard isn't really answering the question, he just says he didn't take artifacts from the Titanic or belt buckles from sunken Navy ship.

(I'm liveblogging from TED 2008, in Monterey, CA)

Presenter: Brain Cox works on the Large Hadron Collider that's about to become operational at CERN.

Aim of particle physics is to find out what everything is made of. As you get back to the early times of the universe, things were simpler. In the 1st billionth of a second it was very simple. Everything was made from 12 particles of matter stuck together by four forces. "All science is either physics or stamp collecting." - Ernest Rutherford

Large Hadron collider is 27 Km in circumference and will accelerates protons to 99.99999% the speed of light (I might not have gotten the right number of 9s, sorry if this spoils your calculations if you are trying this at home). These will collide with another beam of protons going in the opposite direction.

Higgs gives mass to fundamental particles. Particles are massive because they are surrounded by Higgs particles. (Maggie Thatcher shown here surround by a Higgs field). The LHC will hopefully verify the existence of Higgs particles. If not, it'll find whatever is responsible for giving mass to stuff.

What particle physics means to me: gives modern science a creation story. We know universe beAgn 13.7 billion years ago as a dot smaller than an atom. Universe underwent exponential expansion in a billionth of a second and continues to expand. AFter 400 million years, the first stars formed and other elements were cooked in them. On some planets oxygen and hydrogen formed into water, liquid water on some planets. On at least one planet, life formed.

Here at TED, I met a man named Steve Varon. He's a warm and gregarious man who runs a successful children's underwear company on the East Coast. For the last year or so, he's been working very hard to make his dream possible: to see the Dalai Lama carry the torch in the Chinese Olympics. He made a short video about it, which he submitted to Pangea Day, but you can see it now on YouTube. I wish him luck in his quest.

(I'm liveblogging from TED 2008, in Monterey, CA)

Presenter: MIT Media Lab's Todd Machover, who talks about how music has a special power in our lives.

We all love music, but it's even more powerful if you don't just listen to it -- you must make it yourself. Mozart Effect (increasing IQ in babies by subjecting them to music) doesn't work, you can't just listen to music to become smarter, you have to make it.

He created Brain Opera, which is 100 instruments anyone can play using natural skills -- you don't need to know how to play a traditional instrument. The Brain Opera led to Guitar Hero, which also came out of MIT Media Lab.

Music can change your life and the way you communicate with others and change your mind. What's after Guitar Hero? We are making toys for little kids like squeezie instruments. Software to help kids make music, called Hyperscore, allows anyone to compose music.

Music is one of the only things that people with advanced Alheimer's can respond to. It's also good for people with schizophrenia and other metal illnesses. Music is accelerating treatment in hospitals.

Music shows you who you really are. He says he's more nervous talking on stage than playing music. He's working on an opera called Death and the Powers. It will premiere in Monaco in September 2009. It's about a rich guy who wants to live forever, so he downloads himself into the environment. The stage becomes a character. The stage is a giant stringed instrument. There's also an army of robots on stage, a Greek chorus that observes the action. They are cubes, but they have a lot of personality. Stage also has a library with robotic books, each of which have high packed LEDs on the spines.

Machover wants to make personal opera and personal instruments, that can be adapted to the way you personally behave. It's the future of interfaces. He invites a young man on stage. His name is Dan Ellsey and he's in a wheelchair. He has cerebral palsy. He was flown in from the hospital where he lives in a special jet. He hardly ever travels -- this is the second time he's been out of Massachusetts in his life. He's using a text-to-speech to talk the audience. He just said he loves musics, and is using this personal instrument to compose and perform music.

Dan says he is going to perform a song called, "My Eagle Song." They are showing his Hyperscore composition. Now the music is playing. I'm not sure if Dan is controlling the playing of the music or not: he has a headband with some LEDs on it, and an iSight camera trained on him, so I think he is controlling the playback of his composition in some way.

Here's an article about Dan with a link to his music. Link

(I'm liveblogging from TED 2008, in Monterey, CA)

Presenter: author Amy Tan

She walks on stage and sets a bag on the ground. In every story something unknown is revealed. She says she will open the bag at the end of the talk.

Her creative process is nature, nurture, and nightmares, each word at one vertex on a triangle. One definition of creative is an inability to repress looking at associations.

She got some B minuses in school for her creative writing. Parents pushed her to be a doctor, or to be a pianist on Ed Sullivan show. Her father and brother were both diagnosed with brain tumors. Her father was a baptist minister and said God would take care of them. He died soon after and so did her brother. Her mother believed that she and Amy would be next. She then became very creative "in a survival sense." (This could be why she is so interested in "luck and fate and coincidences and the synchrony of mysterious forces.")

On writing a book: In that framework between page 1 and 300, I have to develop a cosmology as the creator of that universe. It can often take years and years to do that.

Dark energy and dark matter apply to creativity, too -- you sometimes find out what matters by what's missing. Sometimes what you hope to find is no longer there.

Moral ambiguity -- it is constantly there. "Save a man from drowning, you are responsible to him for life." We all hate moral ambiguity, but it is absolutely necessary in writing a story. It is the place where I begin.

"I will reveal what is in the bag - it's the muse that transforms our lives." It's little doggy that hops out and follows her offstage, where she puts the dog back in the bag.

(I'm liveblogging from TED 2008, in Monterey, CA)

Presenter: Robert Lang, origami expert

Origami has been around for 100s of years. It didn't change until 1970s when it experienced a Cambrian explosion in variety and techniques. It got richer and more interesting because people started applying math.

The secret to origami, and so many other things, is to let dead people do your work for you, like looking at the geometry of disk packing.

Four simple laws can give rise to very rich complexity in origami. They have to do with properties of crease patterns, angles around a vertex, layer orders, and valleys and ridges. If you obey these laws you can make anything. He has a program on his website that will show you the fold patterns needed to make anything. (You give it a stick figure, it shows you the folds.)

He shows how he uses these mathematical ideas to fold a square sheet of paper into anything.

Origami has applications in other areas, like a solar array that flew in a Japanese satellite telescope, umbrella telescope, solar sail, airbag, heart stent (origami may save a life).

(I'm liveblogging from TED 2008, in Monterey, CA) Presenter: designer Yves Behar, of Fuse Project. He designed the XO laptop, and the Jawbone Bluteooth headset.

The Jawbone: It has a humanistic technology. It feels your skin, and knows when you're talking and it gets rid of the environmental noise. We wanted to take out the techie and nerdy stuff and make it as beautiful as possible. If it isn't beautiful it doesn't belong on your face. We bring values and these values create a soul for the company we work with.

The XO laptop: (the $100 One Laptop Per Child). Nicholas Negroponte told Behar the design is why kids will want the laptop. He designed it to be iconic, too look like it was for a kid, but not a toy.

A couple of weeks ago I was in Palo Alto at a seminar, and I shot a short video clip of three people, who are a lot smarter than I am, struggling to open an XO laptop: Link

(I'm liveblogging from TED 2008, in Monterey, CA. This morning's session is "How Do We Create?") Presenter: John Knoll, inventor of Photoshop and visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light and Magic.

John compared how visual effects were made for movies from the 1950s with contemporary movies. He showed clips from Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and clips from Pirates of the Caribbean.

The process hasn't changed that much. You start off looking at the script, have discussions with director, and decide what needs to be shot using visual effects: anything you can't just go out and shoot, anything that doesn't exist, anything that's too expensive, too dangerous, or just not possible.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea used miniature ships in a studio tank (about 200 ' x 200', a few feet deep). The last pictures that used this techniques was Tora! Tora! Tora!. The tank method works pretty well but the scale of the water doesn't work well. Droplet size is wrong.

For Pirates, Knoll also built a tank, but came up with ways to split in full-size water droplets. Adding full scale water in background really helps.

Today on Boing Boing tv, another episode in our ongoing series of experimental animated shorts.

First, regular BBtv contributors monochrom from Austria give us The Void's Foaming Ebb, a hallucinatory retrospective of ancestral media -- from the eight-track to the VCR to long-extinct PDAs -- and a meditation on dead data-forms of the future (created by: Frank Apunkt Schneider, Christoph Sonnleitner, Johannes Grenzfurthner, Stefan Scheder, Roland Gratzer, David Dempsey). German version here.

Next, 198090 by BBtv favorites Peppermelon from Argentina -- a sweet short suggesting new forms of luminous eco-erotica (created by: Fernando Sarmiento & Tomás Garcia).

Link to BBtv post with downloadable video, and discussion.

Dave sez, "New legislation is before the Canadian senate that would deny arts funding for works deemed offensive. The legislation only became public yesterday, but could according to representatives of the film industry in Toronto, shut down many Canadian film productions before they get out the door, because funding would only be confirmed upon review of the finished product. No guarantee of funding means it's unlikely any lender would issue a performance bond."

A well-known evangelical crusader is claiming credit for the federal government's move to deny tax credits to TV and film productions that contain graphic sex and violence or other offensive content.

Charles McVety, president of the Canada Family Action Coalition, said his lobbying efforts included discussions with Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day and Justice Minister Rob Nicholson, and "numerous" meetings with officials in the Prime Minister's Office.

I'll be reading and speaking at the Lit.Cologne festival in Cologne, Germany tonight. It's in honor of the German release of Upload (AKA Eastern Standard Tribe) -- hope to see you there!

Science Fiction 2.0
Cory Doctorow – upload
Freitag, 29.02., 19.30 Uhr

Theaterhaus
Stammstraße 38–40, Ehrenfeld

TokyoFlash sent me one of their Tibida watches to play with in January. I've been buying TokyoFlash watches for years; they embody the perfect intersection of style, impracticality and blinky lights to tickle my nerdbuttons. The Tibida is no exception.

The face is a grid of circular white discs, each over a white LED. The watch has three modes: hours (hour is spelled out as a number on the bottom grid, minutes are approximated on the 12 lights on top), minutes (vice-versa) and binary (a fine update to the traditional binary LED watch).

I'm a clockwatcher, so I like having a little cognitive load associated with checking the time -- it slows me down and makes me recognize when I'm checking the clock (again).

TokyoFlash is giving away three Tibida watches to Boing Boing readers: just email the name of the holiday that's celebrated in Japan on March 14th, and email your answer to boing@tokyoflash.com. Three winners will be selected at random on Thursday March 6th 2008. Link

Here's the latest photo in my series of pictures from my travels over the years: a pair of Vash the Stampede cosplayers at ComicCon San Diego last July -- like the Incredibles cosplayers, these guys had their pose all worked out and dropped into it the second I took out my camera. Link

The record industry has sued over 20,000 music fans to "protect artists' copyrights." But they haven't turned over any of the money to artists (of course, they never forked over any of the money from my.mp3.com, Grokster, Napster, etc).

A contingent of prominent artist managers claims that little to none of that money has trickled down to their clients. They are now considering legal action.

"Artist managers and lawyers have been wondering for months when their artists will see money from the copyright settlements and how it will be accounted for," said lawyer John Branca, who has represented Korn, Don Henley, and The Rolling Stones, among others. "Some of them are even talking about filing lawsuits if they don't get paid soon."

A research team from LSU, Montana and France had found evidence that rain and snow are started by bacteria who are able to catalyse precipitation at lower temperatures than grit and dust:

Dust and soot particles can serve as ice nuclei, but biological ice nuclei are capable of catalyzing freezing at much warmer temperatures. If present in clouds, biological ice nuclei may affect the processes that trigger precipitation...

But, what makes this research more complicated is that most known ice-nucleating bacteria are plant pathogens. These pathogens, which are basically germs, can cause freezing injury in plants, resulting in devastating economic effects on agricultural crop yields.

The Shrine of the Mall Ninja collects the posts of "Gecko45," a poster to a gun-enthusiast message-board, who claimed to be a mall security guard trained in ninjitsu who had been given special dispensation to use machineguns after the saved the mayor's newphew from being sodomized near the Gap store, bravely stepping in where the local SWAT team feared to tread. The guy's claims are amazing, milk-nose-sortingly great, and halfway through he creates a sock-puppet who heralds the brave mall-cops of America, who fight the fights that the FBI are too chicken to intervene in.

I am the Sergeant of a three-man Rapid Tactical Force at one of America’s largest indoor retail shopping areas...If you want to laugh at somebody, try laughing at the sheep out there who go to the mall unarmed trusting in me to stand guiard over their lives like a God...

I tell you that we are undervalued for our beneficial effect on society at large, for the urban and suburban shopping centers see %80 of the armed violence in this nation, and why don’t the cops take care of it, because they are a bunch of wusses, and they are not man enough to put up with the danger and stress. You all who are makeing fun of me have never been threatened by jailed drug dealers, serial killers, and shoplifters, or fired at by high powered rifles so excuse me if I decide to have good weapons to protect and defend myself without all of you makeing fun of my choice, and they way I do my job!

My “Black-Ops” history ensures that you will never know about the missions I accepted in my younger days, and Vietnam still shudders when it hears the name of a an assasin so skillful and deadly, he is remembered decades later.

A family in Hatley, WI, was so fed up with the local "mailbox baseball" team that they staked out their mailbox, followed the vandals in a 100mph chase, tracked them to a gas-station, blocked them in and called the cops.

While repairing the mailbox again on Saturday, Greg Fisher suspected that it might again be targeted. Fisher, 49, and his son Dustin, 18, took watch at 2 a.m. Sunday, and their diligence was rewarded less than an hour later when a truck drove past three times. The final time, a man took a baseball bat to the mailbox.

"It was frustrating watching someone smash your property," said Greg, who was in the house when the mailbox was smashed.

Dustin, who was waiting in a car in the driveway, followed the truck for more than eight miles through Hatley and onto Highway 29. As the truck reached speeds of nearly 100 mph, Dustin slowed down after getting a partial license plate number, he said.

See also:
Survival of the fittest mailbox
Apple G4 converted to roadside mailbox
Fortified mailboxes, part 2

A graffiti artist has tagged an oft-pissed-upon wall in San Francisco's UN Plaza with these painted-on urinals. Link (Thanks, Dennis!)

Roy Doty has been illustrating books and magazines since the 1940s. I first came across his work around 1970 when I acquired an old stack of Popular Science magazines from the 1950s. He did (and still does) a regular comic strip called "Wordless Workshop," which showed you how to make something cool without using any words to describe how. That's difficult to pull off, but Doty's clear and precise drawing style was (and is) up to the task.

When we started MAKE in 2004, I was overjoyed to learn that Doty was still illustrating. I wrote him and asked if he'd like to illustrate our puzzle page. When he said yes, it was a dream come true.

To celebrate Leap Year, Doty sent out this delightful card of a Rube Goldberg-style machine designed to get you out of bed. Doty sends out a card for nearly every season and holiday. I think it's because he finds a lot of joy in life.

The TED Prize event is streaming live now. I watched it last year and it was very moving. I imagine it will be again this year.

About the 2008 TEDPrize

The TED Prize was created as a way of taking the inspiration, ideas and resources generated at TED and using them to make a difference. Winners receive a prize of $100,000 each, and more importantly, a wish. A wish to change the world.

During today's session, webcast live from Monterey, California, the 2008 TEDPrize winners will unveil their wishes for the first time. Prize winners Neil Turok, Dave Eggars and Karen Armstong will be joined by singer-songwriter Vusi Mahlasela.

(I'm liveblogging from TED 2008, in Monterey, CA) Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, is a global leadership and public policy professor at Harvard. She's talking about American responses to mass atrocities and genocide.

Rwandan genocide in 1990s: 700,000 people died. The 1994, the NYT reported between 200k and 300k people had already been killed. Patricia Schroeder, US Rep from Colorado, told the paper that hundreds of US citizens were calling about ape and gorilla deaths in Rwanda, but nobody was calling about the people who were dying. "There wasn't an endangered people's movement."

Today, universities and high schools have started an endangered people's movement. Anti-genocide groups. These student driven groups have launched divestment campaigns, launched a 1-800-Genocide number. Type in your zip code and it will refer you to your representative. Genocide grades for members of congress. This movement has put bottom up pressure on Bush leadership to take action Rwanda, and it's working.

In December, I wrote about Pangea Day, a "global film event showcasing short films from around the world," on May 10. Just now, TED released the trailer on YouTube.

(I'm liveblogging from TED 2008, in Monterey, CA) Presenter: Irwin Redlener, MD.

Irwin Redlener, MD is president of the Children's Health Fund spoke about how much loose nuclear material there is in the world, and how easy it is to make a suitcase nuke. Nuclear terrorism is probable, but survivable, he says. I missed most of his talk while typing up the last one (I'm sure Ethan Zuckerman will have a nice report on the talk). Here's a slide Redlener prepared on how to survive a nuclear attack.

(I'm liveblogging from TED 2008, in Monterey, CA)

Presenter: Professor Philip Zimbardo, creator of the famous Stanford Prison Experiment in the 1971 which put students into a prison setting, randomly chosen to be either guards or prisoners. He is the author of Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

Zimbardo is a very lively and engaging 75-year-old with a devilish van dyke beard.

For decades, he has been studying what makes people go wrong. Raised in South Bronx, he saw his friends live Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde lives. He learned that "the line between good and evil is movable and permeable." In other words, we all have the capacity to be good or evil. The human mind has an infinite capacity to make any of us kind or cruel, caring or indifferent.

God's favorite angel was Lucifer. God created Hell as a place to store evil. His favorite angel became the devil. What Zimbardo calls the "Lucifer Effect" focuses on why people can become evil (defined as the exercise of power to intentionally hurt people).

Abu Ghraib photos shocked Zimbardo but didn't surprise him. "I saw those same parallels when I was the prison supervisor at Stanford Prison Experiment."

Abu Ghraib soldiers were good but the barrels were bad and that made bad apples. He showed the shocking photos by US MP Guards from Tier 1-A Night Shift at Abu Ghraib. When Rumsfeld came to investigate, he said "who is responsible?" That's the wrong question to ask. "What is responsible?" What turns good soldiers into bad? What is the bad barrel? The power is in the system, it creates the situation that makes people evil.

Leadership failures caused the Abu Ghraib atrocities. It was going on for three months before it was stopped. They authorities didn't find out on purpose.

Zimbardo's fellow researcher, Stanley Milgram, wondered, "Could the Holocaust happen here?" Suppose Hitler asked you to electrocute a stranger. He tested 1,000 people who answered an ad that said "we want to test and improve people's memory."

The volunteers (called "teachers") saw a person wired to a machine that shocked them. The volunteer was told to turn the dial to 15 volts and press a button to shock the person (learner) when they got an answer wrong. (The learner was an actor unbeknownst to the volunteer, and the machine did not deliver a shock.)

As the experiment went on, the researcher told the volunteer to crank up the voltage, all the way to 375 volts, which had a warning on the dial that it was extremely dangerous. The learners would scream, cry, beg for life, appear dead or unconcious, etc. The researcher told the students to turn the dial to 450 volts, which was labeled "XXX."

Before the experiment, Migram and others thought up to 1% of the volunteers would turn the dial up to the danger point and ignore the learners' cries for mercy. But actually, 2/3 of the volunteers turned the voltage to the maximum, just because the authority figure told them it was OK. (Thank goodness for the 1/3 who refused to blindly obey authority.)

The Stanford Prison Experiment showed the same thing: 75 male students volunteered and were randomly assigned as prisoners or guards. Police came to the homes of the volunteer prisoners, cuffed and "arrested" them, and brought them to basement of the police station, and put them in cells. Almost immediately, guards began treating the prisoners very cruelly. Students had mental breakdowns. "Guards forced them to simulate sodomy."

Here's a trailer to a documentary about the experiment: Quiet Rage.

What can be done about this? Zimbardo offers heroism as the "antidote to evil." Teach kids to be ready to act heroically when the see evil. We need to give them real role models. Comic book superheroes are bad models, because they have super powers. A hero is the soldier who reported the Abu Ghraib abuses. People wanted to kill him. They threatened to kill his wife and mother, too. He had to go in hiding. Teach kids hero courses, teach them hero skills, make them heroes-in-waiting.

Declan McCullagh reports at News.com that....

Apple has confirmed a security glitch that, in many situations, will let someone with physical access to a Macintosh computer gain access to the password of the active user account.

The vulnerability arises out of a programming error that stores the account password in the computer's memory long after it's needed, meaning it can be retrieved and used to log into the computer and impersonate the user.

"This is a real problem and it needs to be fixed," said Jacob Appelbaum, a San Francisco-area programmer who discovered the vulnerability and reported it to Apple. He said he disagreed with the company's response: "They won't put it in the latest security update or release a security update just for this issue."

Appelbaum is one of the team of researchers who published a "cold boot" paper last week describing unrelated vulnerabilities in encrypted filesystems, including Apple's FileVault, Windows Vista's BitLocker, and a number of open-source ones.

Update: All of the technical details are here on bugtraq.

Earlier today, Xeni posted about the Billboard Liberation Front's improvement of an AT&T billboard last night in San Francisco. The BLF has just provided me with this link to video evidence of the shenanigans that occurred on a busy, well-lit thoroughfare in the heart of the Mission District. Footage by renegade videographer Iov de Beholther. Link

Dwiff sez, "Universal Studio blocks proposed bike path for fear that aspiring screenwriters will use it to throw their scripts onto the lot. No, seriously."

As Los Angeles struggles to restore its namesake river, a considerable obstacle has arisen -- NBC Universal, which is trying to block a public bike path from traversing its property along the waterway...

One bike advocate said Universal executives told him they feared that people would use the path to lob unsolicited screenplays onto the studio's nearby production lot -- something that apparently happens at other spots when a Universal film scores big at the box office.

(I'm liveblogging from TED 2008, in Monterey, CA) Presenter:

Garrett Lisi is introduced as a surfing physicist working on a grand unified theory - E8. He wants to find all the particles and forces that make a complete picture of our universe. He starts by making fun of himself, coming onto the stage and saying "Woah dude, check out those killer equations!"

But he wants to talk about particle physics without using equations. He starts showing images of corals. Coral polyps branch into copies. So do universes. He shows a funny slide of the Shroedinger's Cat problem (for comic effect, he puts Erwin in the box, and the cat gets to run the experiment). We see Shroedinger branching like a coral polyp in the unopened box. Quantum physics says "Everything that can happen does."

The four different known forces have different kinds of charges. The hypothetical Higgs particle gives mass to things, and the Large Hadron Collider that's about to go into operation will hopefully prove the existence of Higgs particles.

Electric charges are combinations of two different charges, hyper charges and weak charge.

Strong interactions between quarks are happening millions of times a second, holding atomic nuclei together. These particles are at the very limit of our knowledge. The known pattern of charges could come from a more perfect pattern that gets broken. to do these we need to introduce new charges with new directions. He shows a colorful animated pattern of elementary particle interactions. The interactions are taking place in the 8th dimension. Some of the places where there should be particles are blank. They need to be filled in with currently unknown particles.

What's one reason E8 is so appealing to him? "At the heart of this mathematics is pure, beautiful geometry."

He finishes by showing photos of his three obessions: physics, love, and surfing. He has been living in a van in Maui.

The consensus around here is that even though Lisi avoided equations, it was pretty incomprehensible. That's why I'm attracted to Renny Gleeson's explanation of the talk: it was about Spirograph art.

Wolfrum hates Diet Pepsi more than you hate anything.

If you haven't tasted Caffeine-Free Diet Pepsi, but would like an idea of what it tastes like, do this - keep a straw in your pocket and wander around outside until you find a pigeon or squirrel that's been dead for, oh, say three months. Stick the straw into the dead animal and suck. Caffeine-Free Diet Pepsi tastes like that, except worse. Plus, the taste lingers in your mouth for months. And gradually gets worse until it's like your mouth was invaded by the notoriously rare and deadly Asian Shit Ant.

What gets me is that they had high-paid executives sitting around a table, drinking this dreck and all nodding approvingly, "Oh yes, this is what America wants, a 'light, crisp, refreshing' beverage that tastes like Cheney sputum."

You want to defeat terrorists? Force them to drink Caffeine-Free Diet Pepsi. I'm sure it would violate the Geneva Conventions, but they'd immediately tell you anything they knew, then hang themselves. Caffeine-Free Diet Pepsi is torture in a 12-oz can.

(I'm liveblogging from TED 2008, in Monterey, CA) Presenter: Thomas Krens, director of the Guggenheim Foundation on rethinking museums.

After showing slides of works by Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rubens, Manet, Picasso, Mondrian, Warhol, Gehry, 1948 Indian Chief motorcycles, Krens asks: How do these objects of beauty tie together? How do we experience art, truth and beauty? Do art museums work as a territory for encountering these ideas?

The art museum is an 18th century idea (the encyclopedia) in a 19th century box (the extended and recycled palace) that more or less fulfills structural destiny sometime toward to end of the 29t century.

Art museums conjures up a Greece that never existed. It belies the fact that these sculptures were colorfully painted. Museums should be agents of agitation, social information and cultural change. Museums as platforms and networks of exchange.

Trying to establish bridge to Middle East. Wants to work with Abu Dhabi. The ruler of Abu Dhabi has a master plan to divide main island (1/2 size of Manhattan) into six centers. Wants Guggenheim to design cultural center of island with museums, parks, artist installations, a Yale cultural campus, a wold cultural forum, performing art centers, and grand canal through the island dividing it into 19 pavilions. Guggeneim Abu Dhabi is much bigger than Bilbao and will extend into desert.

(I'm liveblogging from TED 2008, in Monterey, CA) Presenter: fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi, on inspiration.

Where does inspiration come from? Not from research. It comes from lying awake at night. I don't know where it comes from. [He's going to try anyway.]

Color is something that motivates me. It's rarely a color that I find in nature. I'm inspired by the color of movies. I watch women in movies a lot. I think about their roles. I look at the way woman are portrayed and glorified (sometimes ironically), and denigrated or ironically denigrated. How can I make anything as beautiful as Natalie Wood or Greta Garbo? That's what keeps me up at night.

Balance of irony and earnestness. Skinny and fat. Balance is what its really about, that is part of my process.

I go to astrologers and tarot card readers a lot. I do what they tell me to do. Once a fortune teller told me I would meet a someone named Eric. I would go to bars and anyone named Eric I would be humping a lot.

I don't say that I do everything well, I try to do a lot of things. I try not to look back, but sometimes I do and think "what a fool!"

I don't think of myself as a fashion designer. I think of myself -- uh I don't know what I think of myself, so that's that.

In fashion, you always have to be slightly bored with everything. If you aren't, you have to pretend you are. But I am always slightly bored. I don't like to be bored. I play computer bridge.

I had a TV show, and that was a very big part of my process. [Shows a clip from his show, with some guy cutting Rosie O'Donnel's hair.]

I like to cook. I look at things like they are food. I always relate things to kitchenry. Everything boils down to that.

(I'm liveblogging from TED 2008, in Monterey, CA) Presenter: (My old Wired pal and now TED producer) June Cohen presenting on behalf of Nancy Etcoff, who fell ill and could not present.

Nancy Etcof is author of Survival of the Prettiest. Beauty matters to us. We respond to beauty physically, we describe things "jaw dropping," "breathtaking," "stunning." We feel happy when surrounded by beautiful things. But why?

The dominant idea in 20th century was that beauty was a social construction. But many studies point to an innate sense of beauty that's consistent across cultures. Infants at 2 weeks respond better to beautiful faces (even babies are shallow!).

Why do we think that certain things are beautiful? Because our ancestors did; it connotes an advantage to survival and reproduction.

When people are asked to describe a beautiful landscape they say the same thing: lake, river, mountain trees. We evolved to think it is beautiful becuase it is safe with escape routes.

When asked to describe beautiful people: clear skin, bright eyes, shiny hair -- all of these things connote health fertility, protection.

Beauty is not everything, only one factor in choosing mate - intelligence, how they move, sense of humor, are important.

If we can understand and accept our attraction for beauty we can manage it and temper our desire for it.

Here's the video of Roy Gould's TED 2008 presentation on the World Wide Telescope project. My kids are going to love it when it goes live this spring. Link

Researchers from Sweden's Lund University made an extraordinary video of a bat flying in a wind tunnel, in order to better understand the animal's aerodynamics. Someday, their research could inform the design of small autonomous air vehicles. In this still image from the video, the bat is seen feeding from a tube of nectar. From Nature News:

...The sharp edge at the front of their wings cuts through the air in such a way as to create a vortex on top of the wing, producing up to 40% of the lift needed to stay aloft.

“It explains how these animals are able to fly at very slow speed,” says Anders Hedenström from Lund University in Sweden, who led the research — published in Science — that showed the effect with a live bat.

The phenomenon of a 'leading-edge vortex' is known to help insects to fly; this discovery helped to work out how the bumble bee manages to stay airborne. But it hasn’t been definitively seen before in a non-insect with live animals.

I'm sitting here at TED's "Blogger's Alley"with a few other bloggers who are also liveblogging the event. Unlike me, they all appear to know how to touch type, so they spend more time reporting on the presentations than they do hitting the DEL key.

Ethan Zuckerman's blog | Renny Gleeson's blog | Michael Parekh's blog

On Wednesday night, two machete-wielding robbers, aged 20 and 16, attempted a heist at the Regents Park Sporting and Community Club in Sydney, Australia. Unfortunately for them, they picked the night that the tough Souther Cross Cruiser motorcycle club was having its monthly meeting. Apparently, the 50 bikers beat the hell out of them with tables, chairs, and fists. From CNN:

"These guys were absolutely dumb as bricks," Jerry Vancornewal, leader of the bikers, told CNN Thursday. "I can't believe they saw all the bikes parked up front and they were so stupid that they walked past in...."

One of the would-be robbers crashed through a plate-glass door and jumped off a balcony.

New South Wales police said they arrested the 20-year-old man a short distance away.

The second man made a break for it through the club's service entrance, but the bikers tackled him near a neighbor's fence.

"We just grabbed him, crash-tackled him to the ground, hogtied him with electrical wire and left him for the cops," Vancornewal said.

Following up on last week's post of the famed Bugs Bunny Abominable Snow Rabbit cartoon, Cryptomundo's Loren Coleman looks at a 1958 Felix the Cat 'toon where Felix encounters the Abominable Snowman at, er, the North Pole.
Link

(I'm liveblogging from TED 2008, in Monterey, CA) Presenter: Doris Kearns Goodwin is a historian who looks into the lives of US presidents.

The richest and fullest lives balance work, play and love. All three must be pursued with equal dedication.

She is talking about Abe Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson.

Lincoln: Fierce ambition is a good thing, not just power celebrity and fame, but to make the world a better place. He became depressed, people thought he was suicidal. He was, but wouldn't do it because he wanted to change the world for the better.

When he was elected president, he selected three of his rivals for the cabinet. Learned from his errors, acknowledged his mistakes, didn't harbor grudges.

What made Lincoln so great: integrity of character and moral fiber of being. Driven through tough times by his ambition.

Lyndon Johnson: Goodwin was selected as a White House fellow when she was 24. When she danced with Johnson at a party, he told her he wanted her to work directly in the White House. She eventually helped him with his memoirs in his later years. He was a good story teller, but a lot of them were tall tales. He was known as a minor league womanizer, she was worried until he told her "you remind me of your mother."

He had servants, family who loved him, lots of money, but in later years could find no solace in hobbies or family. Goodwin says it was because he did not pursue love or play with as much determination as he did with work. Needed a love of humor to keep from letting seriousness of life drag you down.

(I'm liveblogging from TED 2008, in Monterey, CA)

Presenter: Susan Blackmore, author of The Meme Machine.

History of life is a history of replicators.

Language is a parasite we've adapted to. It may have started out being harmful, but we've developed a symbiotic relationship with it.

First replicators were genes. Then memes. We now have temes (tech memes) are a third repliciator on our planet.

Don't think of intelligence, thinnk of replicators.

New Drake equation. Start with number of planets -- what fraction of those get a first replicator, a 2nd replicator, a 3rd?

Getting a new replicator is dangerous. We need to pull through each time. The 2nd replicator (memes) was dangerous -= big brains are painful: kills a lot of mothers and babies. Brains uses 20% of body energy for 2% of body weight; it may have nearly killed us off.

temes are just information -- they use humans to suck up planet's resources. Don't think we created the internet to benefit us; we are being being used by temes. It convenient for temes to piggyback on us because we replicate. But when temes can replicate without us, they will carry on without us.

Susannah Breslin points us to new work from fashion designer Hussein Chalayan, whose most innovative work frequently incorporates unusual uses of wearable technology:

At the end, two girls came out in mechanical dresses that, in the darkness, sent out moving spots of light configured to symbolize the big-bang beginning of the universe. They were, as always in a good Chalayan show, astonishing and moving.

The recent Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego featured an exhibition of work by forty mathematician/artists. Science News looks at several of the artworks that draw from dynamical systems, topology, and fractals. At left, a piece by Oberline College professor Robert Bosch:

The white line above forms a single loop, dividing the page into two regions. Looked at from afar, the image forms a Celtic knot.

"Coral Star" shows the motion brought about by one particular dynamical system.

Check out this massive (180cm X 190cm) pirate ship wall-decal for your kiddies' room. A perfect way to get the li'l downloaders off on the right foot. Or peg. Link (via Babygadget)

pi10k converts the first 10,000 numbers in pi to musical notes. You determine which notes correspond to each integer. Just for kicks, I used the familiar five-note musical motif from Close Encounters of the Third Kind as the basis of my pi melody. Link (via easternblot)

Previously on BB:
• Pi gang hand symbol Link
• Pi memory record broken Link

Free culture pioneer and Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig, who was considering a bid for Congress, has decided not to run. From Larry's Change Congress site:

After lots of thinking and advice, I have decided it does not make sense for the Change Congress movement for me to a run for Congress in CA12. We would have just over 30 days to introduce a district to me and to an idea. That would not be enough time to convince them to turn away from an extremely popular politician with 30 years of public service. And while anyone within the district would understand that, outside the district, the lesson would be that a "Change Congress" message has no salience or support. That would, in my view, harm the movement more than it would help.

So thank you to everyone who helped here. All the remaining funds in the campaign will be given to Change Congress (as soon as the paper work for that organization gets settled). And I would urge everyone who signed up here to signup there.

Today on Boing Boing tv, surreal shorts about food and drink, in a two-part showcase of works from filmmaker Stefan Nadelman.

First, "Food Fight," a stop-animation piece that provides an abridged history of war, told through the foods of the countries in conflict. (Ed.: the original work has been edited for time, and captions have been added to assist the history-impaired).

Next, "My Dog Impersonating Orson Welles," in which a pooch clutches a bottle of champagne, and attempts to form sentences.

Link to BBtv post with discussion and downloadable video.