BLOG Thursday, May 15, 2008

In Norway, a French gentleman (F) told a Vietnamese gentleman (V) that he could double his money using a special liquid solution. V gave F $35,000, hoping to turn it into $70,000 overnight. This unidentified man was told by a 32-year-old Frenchman that if he mixed the real cash with blank bills and then marinate them in a special liquid for one night, he would have double the amount of the cash. The gullible Vietnamese believed the Frenchman's story and gave him 180,000 kroner (35, 000 U.S. dollars). But when he prepared to collect his money the next morning, both the cash and the Frenchman disappeared. Link (via Arbroath)...

Dave says: "A new animated short from Run Wrake, the director of Rabbit (previously mentioned on Boing Boing) is now online. Wrake's technique for animating classic illustrations seems to be his unique talent." Link...

A NY Times article describes how Domenico Salerno, an Italian was jailed by the US government for 10 days after coming to the US to see his American girlfriend and her family. [O]n April 29, when Mr. Salerno, 35, presented his passport at Washington Dulles International Airport, a Customs and Border Protection agent refused to let him into the United States. And after hours of questioning, agents would not let him travel back to Rome, either; over his protests in fractured English, he said, they insisted that he had expressed a fear of returning to Italy and had asked for asylum. ... “The border patrol officer said to my face that Domenico said he would be killed if he went back to Italy,” [Salerno's girlfriend Caitlin Cooper] recalled, voicing incredulity that, in his halting English, he could express such a thought. “Also, who on earth would ever seek asylum from Italy?” Twelve hours later, when Mr. Salerno was granted a five-minute phone call, he called Ms. Cooper and denied saying anything of the kind. Instead, he said, the asylum story seemed to be retaliation for his insisting on speaking to his embassy. After being turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he was taken to the Pamunkey Regional Jail in Hanover, Va., where he ended up in a barracks with 75 other men, including asylum-seekers who told him they had been waiting a year. Link...

Posted over at the Creative Review Blog, "Chemical Party/Electricity" is a funny science education-themed TV spot made by Hungry Man's Roderick Fenske. The commercial promotes the Europeant Union's Marie Curie Actions program supporting scientific training. Link...

Jess Hemerly found this fun Swedish TV special from 1968 about proto-punk group The Fugs. The interview segments at the beginning where they are asked to show their personalities in 30 seconds or less are a laugh-riot. The scene pictured here features Ed Sanders poetically commenting on his penchant for "astral perversion." Link to part 1, Link to part 2 Previously on BB: • Fugs are still recording Link...

Ethan Persoff scanned a US Army rifle maintenance booklet from 1968 that instructs soldiers to treat their rifles like a woman. Art by the incomparable WIll Eisner. Link...

This month's Scientific American Mind unpacks the neurology of orgasm. It summarizes some very intriguing and also controversial research. For example, brain scans seem to show that orgasms aren't just about heightened arousal but also the silencing of the brain's "center of vigilance" to lose all inhibitions. From Scientific American Mind: To find out whether orgasm looks similar in the female brain (as it does in the male brain), (University of Groningen neuroscientist Gert) Holstege’s team asked the male partners of 12 women to stimulate their partner’s clitoris—the site whose excitation most easily leads to orgasm—until she climaxed, again inside a PET scanner. Not surprisingly, the team reported in 2006, clitoral stimulation by itself led to activation in areas of the brain involved in receiving and perceiving sensory signals from that part of the body and in describing a body sensation—for instance, labeling it “sexual.” But when a woman reached orgasm, something unexpected happened: much of her brain went silent. Some of the most muted neurons sat in the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex, which may govern self-control over basic desires such as sex. Decreased activity there, the researchers suggest, might correspond to a release of tension and inhibition. The scientists also saw a dip in excitation in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which has an apparent role in moral reasoning and social judgment—a change that may be tied to a suspension of judgment and reflection. Brain activity fell in the amygdala, too, suggesting a depression of vigilance similar to that seen in men, who generally showed far less deactivation in their brain during orgasm than their female counterparts did. “Fear and anxiety need to be avoided at all costs if a woman wishes to have an orgasm; we knew that, but now we can see it happening in the depths of the brain,” Holstege says. He went so far as to declare at the 2005 meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Development: “At the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings.” Link...

New research suggests that the type of music one listens to while drinking wine can dramatically affect the taste. Heriot Watt University psychology professor Adrian North tested 250 students and found that the taste changed by up to 60 percent depending on the vibe of the tune. In an earlier study, North determined that people were five times more inclined to purchase a French bottle instead of a German one if accordion music was being played. From the BBC News: (In the latest study,) four types of music were played - Carmina Burana by Orff ("powerful and heavy"), Waltz of the Flowers from The Nutcracker by Tchaikovsky ("subtle and refined"), Just Can't Get Enough by Nouvelle Vague ("zingy and refreshing") and Slow Breakdown by Michael Brook ("mellow and soft") The white wine was rated 40% more zingy and refreshing when that music was played, but only 26% more mellow and soft when music in that category was heard. The red was altered 25% by mellow and fresh music, yet 60% by powerful and heavy music. The results were put down to "cognitive priming theory", where the music sets up the brain to respond to the wine in a certain way. Link...

Cracked has a fun list of seven crazy but real conspiracies. #7. The Business Plot The Plan: In 1933, group of wealthy businessmen that allegedly included the heads of Chase Bank, GM, Goodyear, Standard Oil, the DuPont family and Senator Prescott Bush tried to recruit Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler to lead a military coup against President FDR and install a fascist dictatorship in the United States. And yes, we're talking about the same Prescott Bush who fathered one US President and grandfathered another one. How did that work out?: A good rule of thumb: never trust a man named Smedley to run your hostile military coup for you. Besides being no fan of fascism, Smedley Butler was both a patriot and a vocal FDR supporter. Apparently none of these criminal masterminds noticed that their prospective point man had actively stumped for FDR in 1932. Smedley spilled the beans to a congressional committee in 1934. Everyone he accused of being a conspirator vehemently denied it, and none of them were brought up on criminal charges. Still, the House McCormack-Dickstein Committee did at least acknowledge the existence of the conspiracy, which ended up never getting past the initial planning stages. Though many of the people who had allegedly backed the Business Plot also maintained financial ties with Nazi Germany up through America's entry into World War II. Link...

Sixteen itty bitty pigs, which belong to a species that faces extinction, will be released into their natural habitat at the foot of the Himalayas. Sixteen of the world’s smallest and rarest pigs will take their first tentative steps in the wild today after the species was rescued from the brink of extinction. The pygmy hog (Porcula salvanius), once common in India, Nepal and Bhutan, was thought extinct in the 1960s after years passed without a sighting of the mammal, which stands up to 30cm high and weighs a maximum of nine kilogrammes (20lb). In 1971 four were rescued from a market in the state of Assam, in the north of India, a discovery that alerted the world to a further handful surviving in the region's tea gardens. After a 13-year captive breeding programme led by Durrell Wildlife, the Jersey-based conservation centre founded by the author Gerald Durrell, the descendents of those surviving hogs are being reintroduced to their natural habit at the foot of the Himalayas. Link...

BB pal Tim Biskup, who designed the new Boing Boing/Gama-Go t-shirt, has a show of insanely beautiful new paintings opening on Saturday, May 17, in New York City. When BBtv visited Tim's studio late last year, we were blown away by some of the paintings-in-progress. This body of large pieces is mind-bendingly magnificent. The exhibition, titled The Artist In You, runs through June 14 at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery. Coinciding with the exhibit, Tim is publishing a new book by the same name. It's a collection that includes take-no-prisoners rants against the art "intellegencia," responses to the big money business of fine art, and very personal statements about the process of painting. Above is a sneak preview of some of the Artist In You paintings. Click on each piece for a larger image. Congratulations, Tim! Link to Jonathan Levine Gallery, Link to Tim Biskup's site Previously on BB: • New Boing Boing/Gama-Go t-shirt by Tim Biskup Link • BBtv: Visit to Tim Biskup's studio Link...

(Click on image for enlargement) From the Comics Journal blog: "I’ve just received word that Mad Magazine pioneer and Little Annie Fanny co-creator Will Elder has died at the age of 86. I have no specifics regarding the cause of death; the funeral will take place on Sunday in New Jersey." As Fantagraphics Eric Reynolds said, "A finer cartoonist never lived." Link | (A-HAA just reposted a piece about Elder and Harvey Kurtzman's Little Annie Fanny for Playboy)...

The San Francisco-based Billboard Liberation Front has been transforming the world of advertising since 1977. When Austrian art-pranksters and regular BBtv guests monochrom recently visited the United States to spread their Sculpture Mob dogma, a historic meeting with the elusive BLF took place. BBtv's hidden cameras captured everything. And in part two of today's BBtv episode, Xeni travels with the BLF and monochrom to document their first-ever joint exploit to build "The Great Firewall of China" around one of the Google signs on the internet giant's Mountain View campus. Hijinks ensued; dogs, cops, and GOOG security guards pursued; TV news crews newsed. The goal of their "unpaid advertising services"? To draw attention to Google's role in online censorship within China. As it happened, this particular day was the same day of a Google shareholder meeting, during which related proposals came up for vote. Link to Billboard Liberation Front press release, and here's monochrom's side of the story. Here are previous BBtv episodes with monochrom. Link to Boing Boing tv episode with discussion and downloadable video....

Bruce Schneier has announced the winner of his annual "Movie Plot Threat" contest, in which his readers are invited to come up with ridiculous, improbable and frightening things that you could probably frighten people with enough that they're lured into buying some stupid product or giving up some essential liberty (or both). Here's the winning entry, from Aaron Massey (be sure to click through and check out the runners up, too!) Many Americans were shocked to hear the results of the research trials regarding heavy metals and toothpaste conducted by the New England Journal of Medicine, which FDA is only now attempting to confirm. This latest scare comes after hundreds of deaths were linked to toothpaste contaminated with diethylene glycol, a potentially dangerous chemical used in antifreeze. In light of this continuing health risk, Hamilton Health Labs is proud to announce Tommy Tester Toothpaste Strips! Just apply a dab of toothpaste from a fresh tube onto the strip and let it rest for 3 minutes. It’s just that easy! If the strip turns blue, rest assured that your entire tube of toothpaste is safe. However, if the strip turns pink, dispose of the toothpaste immediately and call the FDA health emergency number at 301-443-1240. Do not let your family become a statistic when the solution is only $2.95! Link See also: Schneier: Movie-plot security doesn't make America safe Movie-plot security threats bonanza Schneier TSA movie plot contest results Movie plot threat contest: make the TSA ban watches!...

Houston is a-swarm with "crazy rasberry ants" -- an exotic species that eats fireants and electronic equipment. The "crazy" part is that they kind of wobble and weave when they walk. They have multiple, exterminator-resistant queens, and are attacking the local animal population as well. They have ruined pumps at sewage pumping stations, fouled computers and at least one homeowner's gas meter, and caused fire alarms to malfunction. They have been spotted at NASA's Johnson Space Center and close to Hobby Airport, though they haven't caused any major problems there yet. Exterminators say calls from frustrated homeowners and businesses are increasing because the ants — which are starting to emerge by the billions with the onset of the warm, humid season — appear to be resistant to over-the-counter ant killers. "The population built up so high that typical ant controls simply did no good," said Jason Meyers, an A&M doctoral student who is writing his dissertation on the one-eighth-inch-long ant. It's not enough just to kill the queen. Experts say each colony has multiple queens that have to be taken out. Link (Thanks, Bonnie!)...

Popular Mechanics' August, 1939 feature "The Electric Home of the Future" features the kind of boundless, electrical future hovering on the horizon for the brave people of 1939. In the not-distant future, the home may well be equipped with “mood control,” which is made possible by newly developed light sources. It’s possible that people will suit the light and color of their rooms to their moods. These new-type lamps produce colors of warm white, daylight white, gold, red, blue, pink and green. It’s up to the psychologists to figure out the proper combinations of colors to lift one’s spirits, when they are down, with a flood of brilliant light, or subdue a sense of excitement with soothing mellow light. These new lamps are highly efficient colored-light makers, producing from ten to fifty times as much light per watt as has been possible with incandescent lamps. They utilize a very low-pressure mercury vapor discharge which produces ultraviolet radiations, giving little direct visible light or heat radiation. The inside surface of the glass tubes is coated with chemicals which glow when struck by invisible ultraviolet radiation. The combination of chemicals used in the coating of the lamp determines the resultant color. It is even possible that in the future we may produce on a commercial scale similar lights by bombarding the fluorescent material of the lamps with short-wave radio beams. Link...

Today on the Watchismo Times, a drool-worthy exhibition of multi-time-zone, multi-face watches. Ever since I started travelling a lot (and, consequentially, living in a bunch of timezones), I've bought a multi-face watch or two -- but these put my collection to shame. Link...

A creative new advertising campaign from journalist advocacy organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF), aimed at various regimes hostile to press freedom, including China. Click for larger size to see the detail that makes this such a compelling design. (thanks, Oxblood!)...

Over at the Wired defense technology blog "Danger Room," Noah Shachtman writes: The Air Force wants a suite of hacker tools, to give it "access" to -- and "full control" of -- any kind of computer there is. And once the info warriors are in, the Air Force wants them to keep tabs on their "adversaries' information infrastructure completely undetected." The government is growing increasingly interested in waging war online. The Air Force recently put together a "Cyberspace Command," with a charter to rule networks the way its fighter jets rule the skies. The Department of Homeland Security, Darpa, and other agencies are teaming up for a five-year, $30 billion "national cybersecurity iniative." That includes an electronic test range, where federally-funded hackers can test out the latest electronic attacks. "You used to need an army to wage a war," a recent Air Force commercial notes. "Now, all you need is an Internet connection." On Monday, the Air Force Research Laboratory introduced a two-year, $11 million effort to put together hardware and software tools for "Dominant Cyber Offensive Engagement." "Of interest are any and all techniques to enable user and/or root level access," a request for proposals notes, "to both fixed (PC) or mobile computing platforms... Link to full post....

The cover story on the Boston Phoenix this week is a wicked, long feature on steampunk! The 19th century ushered in the era of the amateur: a wild-eyed tinkerer in a lab had the capacity to stumble upon a discovery that just might alter society, a common theme paralleled in Victorian and Gothic fiction and, now, in Steampunk. “I find the optimism of Steampunk rather refreshing,” says Rich Nagy, a/k/a Datamancer, a popular Steampunk artisan originally based in New Jersey but now living in California who was represented at the Maker Contraptor’s Lounge. “Steampunk has a way of making technology, which is becoming more transparent and taken for granted every day, seem novel and fun again,” adds Nagy. That much is clear in his finely wrought pieces, like the “Computational Engine” computer casemod and his sophisticated “Steampunk Victorian Laptop,” a Hewlett-Packard ZT1000 laptop with a clockwork-under-glass display that, when it’s closed, looks like an ornate antique music box. It turns on with a clock-winding key. In effect, Steampunk is poised to bring the proletariat craftsman his 21st-century renaissance. Though Steampunk’s artisanal outputs have stolen much of the mainstream limelight so far, there is a whole other creative side to the scene that has received little attention in comparison. Countless bands have formed, filing their music under the Steampunk genre or citing Victorian fantasy as a muse. One of them, Vernian Process, is the solo project of San Francisco–based Joshua Pfieffer. A true testament to the notion of the ambitious dabbler, Pfieffer has no musical training, and writes songs with the aid of basic audio-production software. “The atmosphere is actually more important to me than writing good hooks, or melodic structure,” he says of his music, which he makes free to download. “I feel that what I do represents the genre as I would like it to sound.” Link (Thanks, Jake!)...

John sez, "This is from Spokane County's official transportation blog. The county employee who runs the blog was taking pictures of a weigh station that is going to be moved. Ten minutes later he was contacted by the state patrol on his phone." I was out taking pictures this morning of sites of transportation projects to be completed over the next twenty years. One of those projects is to move of the weigh station near Stateline further east along I-90. I stopped at the pretty much deserted weigh station and took a couple pictures, then drove off. About 10 minutes later I received a call on my cell phone from Washington State Patrol asking why I had been taking pictures of the weigh station! Link (Thanks, John!) See also: BB reader: "Two FBI agents just showed up at my door for taking photos in the Port of Los Angeles" Taking pictures on LA's Red Line violates the "9/11 Law"...

Universal Music Group loves the idea of suing music fans for the full freight when it comes to copyright infringement, celebrating their ability to extract $150,000 per act of infringement with punitive damages on top -- but now that Universal's been slapped with one of these copyright suits (for sampling Hendrix without permission, something I think they should be able to do, FWIW), they've decided that these damages are "unconstitutionally excessive." The case in question involves now-deceased rapper The Notorious B.I.G., whose album Ready to Die incorporated an unlicensed sample of "Singing in the Morning" from the Ohio Players after a Hendrix sample was denied clearance. The sample made its way onto the final album and even onto reissued albums. Bridgeport Music and Westbound Records, which control the rights to the song, sued. A district court ruled in their favor; Bridgeport took the $150,000 maximum in statutory damages, while Westbound sought compensatory and punitive damages. Westbound scored big, earning $366,939 from the jury along with punitive damages of a whopping $3.5 million. In appealing the ruling, Universal argued that the punitive damages award was "grossly excessive and should be vacated or at least reduced." The reason? It's excessive. The brief quotes a Supreme Court ruling that said, "In practice, few awards exceeding a single-digit ratio between punitive and compensatory damages, to a significant degree, will satisfy due process." Universal pointed out that the award in question was "approximately 10 to 1, far above the line of unconstitutional impropriety." Link...

Scott Beale says: "Spirit Magazine, the inflight magazine for Southwest Airlines, recently published an article on Nickelodeon which includes a wonderful illustration of some popular cartoon and comics characters as senior citizens." Link...

Here's a great dance mix version of the Bill O'Reilly freak-out video that made the rounds this week. Language is salty. (via For Your Entertainment)...

Here's Lo-Fi Saint Louis' profile of BLAB! publisher Monte Beauchamp. If you don’t know Blab, you should. It’s a collection of artists published lovingly in a magazine only once a year and each issue is kicked off with a gallery opening of work from the book. This past issue was launched at the Philip Slein Gallery right here in our own little city of St. Louis. Beauchamp has published several other books as well. You can get them all from Fantagraphic Books. Link...

Hal says: I thought this would be in the vein of a lot of the "photography is terrorism" posts that have been on Boing Boing lately. I'm a professional stock photographer, and just this morning, I was greeted by two FBI antiterrorism agents who wanted to question me regarding shooting in the Port of Los Angeles two weeks ago. When I was down there, a private security guard in a pickup truck chased me out of the area and onto the freeway. After he stopped following me, apparently he filed a report with the FBI. The agents that showed up at my door were at first intimidating, but after they realized I wasn't a threat, we had an interesting conversation about the balance between me doing my job, and them being required to follow up on leads in their job. I shot an email to Thomas Hawk earlier, he just made a blog post here. Link...

From Saul Hansell's Bits blog at the NYT: Charter Communications, the fourth-largest cable system in the United States, has started telling its high-speed Internet customers that it is going to keep track of every site they visit on the Web. ... I suggested to [senior vice president for product management and strategy] Ted Schremp that there are likely to be a fair number of customers who don’t consider having their Internet activities tracked to be an enhancement. He responded several ways. He said that Charter convened focus groups of customers in two cities and found that most didn’t object when the program was explained to them. (A key aspect of the NebuAd system is that it claims not to record any personally identifiable information about users. Rather, it associates each user’s behavior with 1,000 categories of interest to advertisers.) He offered his personal view that the system is harmless and well within the norms of the Internet these days. “The mainstream Internet user is hugely aware of the fact that the fundamental economic model on the Internet is advertising,” he said. Link...

Josh Levin of Slate writes about the world's strange obsession with computer solitaire. The game's continued pre-eminence is a remarkable feat—it's something akin to living in a universe in which Pong were the most-popular title for PlayStation 3. One reason solitaire endures is its predictability. The gameplay and aesthetic have remained remarkably stable; a visitor from the year 1990 could play the latest Windows version without a glitch, at least if he could figure out how to use the Start menu. It also remains one of the very few computer programs, game or nongame, that old people can predictably navigate. Brad Fregger, the developer of Solitaire Royale, the first commercial solitaire game for the Macintosh and the PC, told me that his 89-year-old mother still calls regularly to brag about her high scores. The game has also maintained a strong foothold in the modern-day cubicle. Despite the easy availability of other cheap amusements, five minutes of dragging cards around on the screen remains a speedy route to mental health and a mild form of workplace disobedience. (Just don't do it when Mayor Bloomberg is around.) Since solitaire doesn't take up the whole screen, it's easy to click over and play a hand or two when you get tired of data entry, then quickly toggle back over to your database program when your manager happens to walk by. This sort of multitasking, the ability to minimize and hide applications, is the most essential feature of the Windows OS. And solitaire taught us how to use it. Link...

Keith tried to take a picture on the Red Line in LA, and was told that he was breaking the "9/11 Law" by a metro worker who swore at him and threatened him with arrest when he asked what the "9/11 Law" was. Him: Hey! It's against the 9-11 Law to take pictures down here man! Me: You mean the Patriot Act? Him: No pictures. Me: Could you explain? What law do you mean? Him: You are lawyer? Me: No. Him: No pictures. You could be a terrorist. Very strict! Me: How about I take a picture of you? Him: F**k you...(I couldn't believe it either) He then proceeded to huddle in the corner and speak into his radio. Next thing I knew, a booming female voice very loudly announced over the loudspeaker "Attention to the gentleman in the plaid shirt: You are not allowed to take photographs in the Subway. You will be arrested if you continue to take photos and harrass the metro worker." I was incensed/surprised/embarrassed/horrified/bewildered. People started staring. Then the voice continued: "The gentleman in the plaid shirt: You must approach the callbox near the escalators and speak to the sheriff." I didn't budge. So she said it again, this time louder... "Okay" I thought, I'll play along...I went up to the callbox and pushed the button. A new voice this time, this one male, boomed out and said, "Why are you taking photographs sir?" Me: "What law am I breaking?" Voice: "You can't take pictures sir, we don't know why you are taking pictures." Link (Thanks, Keith!)...

Do any Boing Boing readers from Nashville know if this sign is real or a Photoshop job? (via For Your Entertainment)...