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Images Projects The Experiment 1
Above are stills from a lovely biomechanical bug animation by Autofuss. It's titled "The Experiment" and you can watch it here. (Thanks, Stacey Ransom!)

Fake unfinished concrete wallpaper

Cory Doctorow at 7:47 PM Wed

ConcreteWall is a Norwegian company that sells wallpaper silkscreened to look like unfinished concrete in a variety of textures. I guess it's more "street" than drywall over 2x4s?

ConcreteWall.no (via Beyond the Beyond)

Instant Elements: Tom Lehrer's "Elements Song," with Google Instant (video)

Xeni Jardin at 7:38 PM Wed

Internet video memegenius Joe Sabia does it again: Tom Lehrer's paean to the periodic table, interpreted through Google Instant, which launched earlier today.

Watch: Video Link.

You may recall Joe as the guy behind Pulp Wave Fiction, a previous video riff on a Google product.

Tea Party multi-level marketing scheme

Cory Doctorow at 7:32 PM Wed

The mellifluously named TeaPartyBizOpp.info (presumably the .com was taken?) is a pyramid scheme that recruits disgruntled wingnuts to "Get Paid To Stop Liberal Tyranny!" by "helping raise funds to defend our freedom."

TeaPartyBizOpp.Info is a for profit fundraising company - Our mission is to help raise funds to finance conservative causes, that defend our freedom, and help fight Liberal Tyranny. There are two ways we do this one is selling subscriptions to our monthly newsletter (Stopping Tyranny), and the other is our home based business opportunity - where you get paid to refer others to become subscribers to (Stopping Tyranny), your subscription comes with a home based business opportunity. You get paid on your efforts and the efforts of everyone in your organization. (The business opportunity is entirely optional), and you can make money just by selling subscriptions to our newsletter, you don't have to recruit others into the opportunity if you don't want to - it's all up to you).

(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Death Star/TIE-fighter ear tattoo

Cory Doctorow at 7:28 PM Wed

Tattoo artist Jacob Walsh got this fabulous bit of space-battle tattooed on his ear: "I have the severed hand of Luke, still clutching to his lightsaber on my right arm. It needs a bit more work but I'd say it's about 90% completed."

Let's Hear It For This Cool Star Wars Ear Tattoo (via Geekologie)

Dupont cellophane ad, 1955: potato chips taste better in plastic!

Cory Doctorow at 7:24 PM Wed

What's better than fried potatoes? Fried potatoes in ~~petroleum~~cellulose-based packaging!

Chips are better 'cause they're fresher in Cellophane

Missed Connections personal ads from Dragon*Con attendees

Cory Doctorow at 7:21 PM Wed

Creative Loafing gathers up the best of this year's Craigslist "Missed Encounters" messages from Dragon*Con in Atlanta, the awesome nerdfest that ran last weekend:

You - WOW blond wizard. Me - ancient wizard. You were pressing awfully hard into me during our photo. Just wondering if there was a lingering interest. Put your robe color in Subject Line of first email...
I can't figure out why I left without getting your contact information. I know your name is Dan, and you make leather jackets. You were the best Wolverine I've ever seen. We talked for a while, just standing in the crowd. I wish I could find a picture of us. Hopefully, I'll see you at another convention soon. :)
I was dressed up as Eddie Riggs and saw you in the Marriott Saturday night. You invited me over and we talked about our costumes with your boyfriend (?). He was dressed as Eddie as well but I was getting the feeling that he didnt want me around. My friend took some pictures of the three of us together and I got a couple of pics of you and your Eddie. I'd like to get the chance to talk with you some more if you're interested. If nothing else I'd like to send you copies of the photos we got. Hope to hear from you soon.
Alien vs Predator Interstellar Swinger Party (Dragon Con - Sheraton). Full Alien or Predator costume required. All single women and couples will be accepted. There will be limited spots for single men. I will send out the time and room number to all who qualify.

Dragon*Con missed connections warm the heart (via MeFi)

Fan Conventions: Getting Through the Hype

"At any moment, Justin Bieber uses 3% of our infrastructure. Racks of servers are dedicated to him. —A guy who works at Twitter." The original tweet by Dustin Curtis is here, and Mashable has a related item up here. — Xeni • 1 Comment

John's Phone: the minimalist anti-smart-phone

Cory Doctorow at 7:17 PM Wed

John's Phones sell no-frills mobile phones that send and receive calls and pretty much nothing else (though there's a place to keep your pen). Warren Ellis likens it to a phone from minimalist Japanese housewares/clothing company Muji.

Finally a separate unit with no frills and conditions. A simlock free phone with large keys, an address book, a pen and over three weeks time standby... John's Phone is simple and easy for young, old, holiday, grandfathers, grandmothers, athletes, national and international business traffic.

John's Phones (via Warren Ellis)

Even bugs display individual differences in behavior—with some acting consistently aggressive and others consistently shy. Or, as pourmecoffee puts it, "Some insects are jerks." — Maggie • Comments: 3

WSJ vs. NYT on NMA: Taiwanese CGI geniuses take on NYC newspaper war

Xeni Jardin at 7:04 PM Wed

The Taiwanese tabloid animators recently profiled in Wired have done it again: a CGI retelling of the war between the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Animated Arthur Sulzberger, and Rupert Murdoch striking a Michael Bay action-movie pose, flanked by helicopters.

Hey, kid. Wanna buy a bag of cereal marshmallows?

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 6:56 PM Wed

I'm not sure which is more magical and wondrous: That it is apparently possible to buy a bag of the little, perfectly stale marshmallows normally only found mixed with terrible cereal, or that one buys bags of little, perfectly stale marshmallows care of a company called Discount Herbals. That odd business plan leads to such cognitively dissonant quotes as:

Cerealmarshmallows.com is positive that once you have tried our products, the results you experience will prove that no other herbal or vitamin nutritional supplements compare.

I haven't decided yet whether I think this is a joke site. Part of me (the part that wants to buy a bag of little, perfectly stale marshmallows) hopes it's not.

Via rstevens

Turtles Eating Things

Xeni Jardin at 6:42 PM Wed

My favorite new one-note-samba image blog: Turtles Eating Things. There's a Facebook Fan page, too. I like turtles. (via @seanbonner and @quarrygirl)

Video shows asteroid discoveries since 1980

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 6:38 PM Wed

Just in case I wasn't already in awe of the scientific progress made during my own lifetime, Lauren Submitterated (it's a verb now) this video showing the mind-blowing numbers of asteroids that have been discovered since 1980. Created by Scott Manley—and with some very lovely music, I might add—the video shows new discoveries in white, then changes their color to reflect position in relation to the inner solar system. Earth crossers are red. Earth approachers are yellow. All others are green.

Manley's included a lot of good information about what the patterns of where and when new asteroids appear in the video tell us about astronomy over over the last 30 years.

Notice now the pattern of discovery follows the Earth around its orbit, most discoveries are made in the region directly opposite the Sun. You'll also notice some clusters of discoveries on the line between Earth and Jupiter, these are the result of surveys looking for Jovian moons. Similar clusters of discoveries can be tied to the other outer planets, but those are not visible in this video.

As the video moves into the mid 1990's we see much higher discovery rates as automated sky scanning systems come online. Most of the surveys are imaging the sky directly opposite the sun and you'll see a region of high discovery rates aligned in this manner.

At the beginning of 2010 a new discovery pattern becomes evident, with discovery zones in a line perpendicular to the Sun-Earth vector. These new observations are the result of the WISE (Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer) which is a space mission that's tasked with imaging the entire sky in infrared wavelengths.

Keita Takahashi, the gaming visionary responsible for Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy, is reported to have departed Namco Bandai this week. (via BB Submitterator, thanks Toma) — Xeni • Comments: 0

Rats sniff out landmines

David Pescovitz at 1:40 PM Wed

HeroRats are rodents who have been specially trained to sniff out unexploded landmines. The Dutch organization Anti-Personnel Land Mines Detection Product Development (APOPO), first referenced on BB in 2004, use Pavlovian conditioning to teach the rats to detect the scent of TNT and then send them to Mozambique for final testing and deployment. From CNN (image Goooutside/Wikimedia Commons):

Their olfactory senses are superb. They're native to Africa, so tropical disease is no problem, and they rarely weigh more than the 3 to 10 kilograms required to trip a mine, (APOPO chief of mine action and human security Havard) Bach said. It also helps that the mine-sniffing rats are not bonded to individual trainers or prone to ennui, as dogs are, he said.
"If you compare them to canine mine detectors, it's pretty much the same in terms of sensitivity and capability," Bach said, noting that dogs are better equipped to work in brush or high grass that might conceal a rat.
"Rats are not going to oust dogs in this industry, but it's a very positive complement," he added. "You could say they work for peanuts."

"Giant rats put noses to work on Africa's land mine epidemic"

Giant pouched rats sniff out landmines

Batman vs. MDMA

David Pescovitz at 1:24 PM Wed

Batmanecsss
In 1988, Batman joined the War On Drugs to fight an Ecstasy-fueled killer and the pusher who got him high. Erowid has scanned several pages of the issue, Detective Comics #594. "Batman Ecstasy-Villain Commentary" (via Dose Nation)

Fake commercial for "Burn a Quran Day"

Mark Frauenfelder at 11:36 AM Wed

(Video Link) The talented D.C. Douglas wrote, produced, and voiced this fake commercial making fun of Koran-burning hate mongers.

WTF should I make for dinner?

Mark Frauenfelder at 11:26 AM Wed

Wtfdinner What the Fuck Should I Make For Dinner? offers meal suggestions with links to recipes.

Vice interviews famed psychedelic chemist Alexander Shulgin

Mark Frauenfelder at 11:11 AM Wed

Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story, by Alexander Shulgin and Ann Shulgin is one of the strangest books I've ever read. Alexander Shulgin is a well known psychedelic chemist, and he has synthesized hundreds of drugs, which he and his wife Ann have taken and written about in Pihkal (Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved) and in their follow up book, Tihkal (Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved). Fortunately for Alexander, he has a Drug Enforcement Administration Analytical License that allows him to possess, identify, and analyze drugs that would land other psychonauts in the slammer.

Vice recently sent Hamilton Morris ("VBS’s resident expert in all substances mind-bending") to the Shulgins' home in Northern California for a video interview.

After spending days, weeks, months poring over the work of psychonaut-in-chief, Alexander Shulgin, Hamilton Morris mustered up the chutzpah to give him a call and request an interview. The result is this: an epic love-fest on the man who birthed Ecstasy in a test-tube. Hamilton visits the Shulgin residence (in San Francisco, naturally) and tempers his fanboy freakout with a rare and intensive look at the home and laboratory that caused the balls of millions to trip.

SiHKAL: Shulgins I Have Known and Loved - Hamilton's Pharmacopeia | VBS.TV

What happens when you hang 100 $1 bills in a tree?

Mark Frauenfelder at 10:56 AM Wed

(Video link) Amy (with the help of her friends Ben and Brian) attached 100 $1 bills to a tree on a public street. She says she did it "just to see what would happen." A lot of passers by didn't notice the tree. A lot of them noticed the tree but kept walking. A lot of them took one bill. A few took more than one.

What would have happened if Amy had attached $100 bills to the tree instead of $1 bills? (Via Cynical-C)

Google launches "Google Instant"

Xeni Jardin at 10:26 AM Wed

A big press event today from Google: the launch of "Google Instant," described as "a new search enhancement that shows results as you type."

We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type.

More here about the new service, on Google. Coverage: Wired News, CNET, Gizmodo.

What fun might we have with this? A "Google Instant" alphabet, charting what term results when one types in each leter of the alphabet? Numbers, too: "4" is for 4chan.

New time-lapse video of Japan by Samuel Cockedey

Mark Frauenfelder at 10:25 AM Wed

Samuel Cockedey, a French photographer based in Tokyo, has uploaded another one of his mesmerizing time-lapse short films. This one is called inter // states, and it's best to watch it in HD full-screen here.

The sound track is a piece by Paul Frankland, aka Woob, called "Paradigm Flux."

Here's an interview with Cockedey abut his time-lapse process.

(Via Pink Tentacle)

A black man who worked for a Tyson chicken plant in Alabama sued his employer for discrimination, after being passed up for promotion in favor of white workers from another plant—and after being referred to regularly and derogatorily as "boy" by his supervisor, as were other black co-workers. An appeals court in Atlanta, GA ruled that calling an adult black man "boy" in this context was "nonracial." Notably, the NYT article skips the euphemisms. Core values, anyone? (via David Carr) — Xeni • Comments: 49

Warez raids in Europe hit close to Wikileaks

Xeni Jardin at 10:06 AM Wed

Police in Europe shut down 49 servers and detained 10 people in 13 countries in a coordinated raid against an online movie-pirating network, according to a statement today from the Belgian prosecutor's office.

In Sweden, police raided seven locations including one in a suburb of Stockholm containing servers used by file-sharing website The Pirate Bay and WikiLeaks, the whisteblowing website.

More: AFP, and AP.

Fire tornado photos

David Pescovitz at 9:57 AM Wed

Wpf Media-Live Photos 000 255 Cache Fire-Tornadoes-Burnado-Hawaii 25569 600X450
This is a fire tornado that emerged from a brush fire on Sunday near Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano. National Geographic posted a gallery of amazing shots of these strange blazing whirlwinds. "Fire-Tornado Pictures: Why They Form, How to Fight Them"

70% of US federal spending reports don't add up

Cory Doctorow at 9:45 AM Wed

Nicko from the Sunlight Foundation sez,

Today the Sunlight Foundation launched analysis that reveals more than $1.3 trillion in federal reporting data from 2009 is broken. These data inaccuracies account for 70 percent of the total $1.9 trillion in government spending data reported last year. Clearspending offers a critique on the reliability of data from USASpending.gov, across three metrics--consistency, completeness and timeliness--and covers spending from 2007, 2008 and 2009.
While there has been an increase in the number of programs reporting to USASpending.gov in the past three years, the reported data suffers from an abundance of errors, as well as problems with the data's timeliness and completeness. Findings from Sunlight's Clearspending show that a significant portion of the government's data is unreliable and that USASpending.gov has not fulfilled its legal requirement of providing the public access to accurate, timely and detailed information on how federal agencies fulfill their spending obligations.

Clearspending (Thanks, Nicko!)

Explore Congressional funding with Sunlight Foundation's mashup ...

Bombing Guam with dead mice

David Pescovitz at 9:44 AM Wed

The US Department of Agriculture is bombing Naval Base Guam with dead mice stuffed with generic Tylenol and transponders. Their aim is to kill off the non-native brown tree snakes that are killing off the island's birds and also become ensnared in power lines causing black-outs. From CNN:

Since scientists discovered that the household pain reliever was deadly to the brown tree snakes, they’ve been trying to figure out how to get it to where many of the serpents live in the canopies of the island’s forests, according to a report in Stars & Stripes. The Tylenol-loaded mice are attached to two pieces of cardboard joined by paper streamers that snake exterminators hope will catch on tree branches, providing deadly snacks for snakes at those heights, according to the Stripes report.
The aerial attack on the tree snakes is designed to augment current trapping systems, which are placed around ports and airports to prevent the snakes from hitching rides to other Pacific islands such as Hawaii and causing the same ecological nightmares they’ve been responsible for on Guam...
If the current the experiment works – scientists will know because they’re also packing the dead mice with radio transmitters for the snakes to ingest – death from above will be coming for snakes at the island’s Anderson Air Base next year, according to Guam Newswatch. Success there could see the program expand island-wide.

Tylenol-loaded mice dropped from air to control snakes (via Submitterator, thanks rkachowski!)

The Brown Treesnake on Guam (USGS)

The joy of the Digital Comics Museum

Mark Frauenfelder at 9:27 AM Wed

Now that I'm set up with an iPad (protected by a Moleskine-like Dodocase), Comic Book Pad, and the free Digital Comics Museum, there's really no good reason for me to buy anything else ever again.

Above, Sparky Watts No. 9, from 1949, by the great Boody Rogers.

Tom the Dancing Bug: Super-Fun-Pak Comix

Ruben Bolling at 8:15 AM Wed

Read the rest

How a wristwatch works - film from 1949

Mark Frauenfelder at 8:04 AM Wed

UPDATE: I changed the embed code to the Prelinger Archives version, which is higher quality and complete.

A 1949 film that reveals the inner workings of a wristwatch. They use a giant watch to demonstrate the function of the various parts. (Via onfocus)

What parents worry about, what parents should worry about

Cory Doctorow at 7:12 AM Wed

From NPR, a list of 5 common parental worries that are extremely unlikely, and the top five risks for kids: the gap between the two is the source of much anguish, bad policy, and danger:

Based on surveys Barnes collected, the top five worries of parents are, in order:
1. Kidnapping
2. School snipers
3. Terrorists
4. Dangerous strangers
5. Drugs
But how do children really get hurt or killed?
1. Car accidents
2. Homicide (usually committed by a person who knows the child, not a stranger)
3. Abuse
4. Suicide
5. Drowning

5 Worries Parents Should Drop, And 5 They Shouldn't (via Schneier)

Login screens from Penn and Teller BBS, 1987

Cory Doctorow at 6:30 AM Wed

HappySmurfday has dug up and scanned some printouts of the login screen from Penn and Teller's circa-1987 BBS, Mofo Ex-Machina. They are nerdgasmic and glorious.

Mofo Ex-Machina (Thanks, HappySmurfday, via Submitterator)

US federal IT spending: a wasteland of misbegotten contracts

Cory Doctorow at 6:30 AM Wed

Here's another barn-burner of a speech by rogue archivist Carl Malamud, addressing the Gov 2.0 Summit 2010. Carl sez, "Washington, D.C. has become a vast wasteland of computer contracts. The U.S. government spent $81.9 billion in 2010 on information technology and much of that money is misspent, crippling the ability of government to do the jobs with which it has been entrusted. How can we deal with a global environmental crisis or a renegade financial industry or rescue the vast works that lie fallow in our national libraries when the basic machinery of government does not work?"

The Currents Of Our Time (Thanks, Carl!)

Ukrainian salt mine therapy for asthmatics

Cory Doctorow at 5:54 AM Wed

From Wired's Raw File, a gallery of a creepy Ukrainian salt mine that has been converted into a convalescent home for recovering asthmatics. It's something called Speleotherapy: breathing in salt-saturated air as a means of soothing respiratory problems: "Kuletski describes the atmosphere among patients as 'calm and relaxed' despite the 'appallingly unsafe conditions. ... The presence of kids wearing safety helmets and cheap plastic sheets to protect them from dripping water from the ceiling makes being there even more surreal,' says Kuletski."

Eerie Ukrainian Salt Mines House Convalescing Asthmatics

(Image: Kirill Kuletski/Wired)

Last year, Boing Boing reader Cory Dodt responded to my request for a bookmarklet to make it easy to add attribution information for Creative Commons-licensed photos from Flickr. When Flickr updated its layout, the bookmarklet broke, but Cory was good enough to update it so that it works -- and now it's better than ever, with links to the relevant Creative Commons license text. Thanks, Cory! — Cory • Comments: 4

Secret copyright treaty: USA caves on border laptop/phone/MP3 player searches for copyright infringement

Cory Doctorow at 5:52 AM Wed

Michael Geist writes in with more analysis of the recently leaked draft of ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret treaty being negotiated among rich countries whose entertainment lobbyists have decided that the United Nations is too open and balanced to be used for future copyright negotiations.

I posted yesterday on the updated Internet chapter in the latest version of ACTA, which features a major change on secondary liability [ed: e.g., holding ISPs and web-sites liable for copyright infringement if they don't surveil and censor their users] and the U.S. attempt to clawback on recent domestic DMCA changes by arguing against linking circumvention and copyright infringement [ed: that is, the attempt to broaden the reach of the US law that prohibits breaking "copy-protection" even if you're doing so for reasons that don't violate copyright, such as loading unauthorized software onto locked mobile devices like iPads].
While there remains a number of issues to be determined in that chapter (and a great deal to be addressed in the other IP enforcement chapters on criminal provisions, civil enforcement, and border measures), the rest of ACTA has largely been decided. As in the Internet chapter, where compromise was needed it was the U.S. that did most of it, as it becomes increasingly apparent that the USTR is willing to agree to almost anything in order to bring home an agreement before the next round of elections in November.
Most interesting is the U.S. decision to cave on border issues. The U.S. had sought a provision requiring that each party shall adopt and maintain appropriate measures that facilitate activities of custom authorities for better identifying and targeting for inspection at its border shipments that could contain pirated goods. The article then specified a range of activities including consultation, information exchange, and a mandatory audit power. Moreover, there was an additional article on information exchange between customs authorities. All of that has been dropped, leaving only a provision where a party may consult with stakeholders or share information.

ACTA's Enforcement Practices Chapter: Countries Reach Deal as U.S. Caves Again

Apple's iPod harvest: hands-on with new Shuffle, Nano, Touch

Xeni Jardin at 6:30 PM Tue

As predicted last week in the Boing Boing agricultural almanac, Apple this week releases three new varieties of iPods for the fall crop.

All three bear improvements over earlier generations of this familiar fruit, but some of the new additions—and in some cases, what's missing—may surprise you. Following are snapshots of the new iPod Shuffle, iPod Nano, and iPod Touch, with taste-test notes.

You can find them all in your local farmers markets soon, or order them now at the online Apple store.

Read the rest

The beauty and wonder of a squid's eyeball

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 5:09 PM Tue

Look at this squid's eye. Just look at it. See anything eerily familiar?

Squid, along with the rest of the family Cephalopoda, haven't shared a common ancestor with us vertebrates in some 500 million years—long before the evolution of our camera-like eyes. And yet, there the cephalopods are, flagrantly swimming about with eyes that use a lens to project an image onto a retina. Call it Squid Eye for the Vertebrate Guy. So, how's it work?

Convergent evolution, my friends. Convergent evolution. We happened to hit on similar solutions to the same problem of sight, even though the eyes of vertebrates and cephalopods evolved separately, in very different ways, at different times. Today, we can see that legacy in cephalopod and vertebrate fetal development. With vertebrates, the eyes grow on stalks, reaching out from the brain. In cephalopods, the eyes start as a clumping of cells on the surface of the skin and reach backwards, into the head, to make brain contact. Similar destinations. Very different road maps.

This lovely illustration—featuring dissections of the head, funnel, mantle and eye of a Thaumatolampas diadema—comes from The Cephalopoda Part I: Oegopsida and Part II: Myopsida, Octopoda Atlas written in 1910 by zoologist Carl Chun following a German expedition to the Indian, Atlantic and Great Southern oceans.

You can see more of Chun's detailed, passionate illustrations at the BibliOdyssey blog.

Image: Some rights reserved by peacay

HOWTO make shotgun shell candles

Cory Doctorow at 4:03 PM Tue

Here's Instructables user Sunbanks's simple HOWTO for making candles out of discarded shotgun shells, just the thing for your William S Burroughs-reviving seance!