Heather sez, "A new painting & print from the fabulous Suzanne R Forbes is on Etsy. $10 of each print purchase goes to the EFF. "

Miss Eva G posed for me in her SOMA loft, dressed in her own fabulous steampunk finery, with an antique crossbow she brought back from China. The painting took several sittings with Miss E and then many hours of work painting in the detailed background. She is defending early implements of the computer revolution, Jacquard punch cards and IBM cards, a CDV of Ada Byron, and Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2. An apple core represents Turing, eaten up by the intolerance of his era. Also prominently displayed are so

me wonderful modern creations- The Steampunk Laptop by Datamancer and the Steampunk Flatpanel and Keyboard by Jake Von Slatt- who were kind enough to allow me use their work in the painting. The packet-sniffing rat under the desk is a nod to the EFF’s most recent victory; the EFF logo appears among the luggage stickers on the trunk. I added the bullet shells at the last minute when I learned that Miss E. is a crack shot.

Link (Thanks, Heather!)

In the current New Yorker, anthropologist Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse, looks at the vengeance practices of tribal societies in New Guinea. While Diamond was conducting field work in the New Guinea Highlands, he was driven around by a young man named Daniel Wemp of the Handa clan. The two got to talking and Daniel recounted how he avenged the death of his uncle who had been killed by the neighboring Ombal clan. The tale is amazing, insightful, and gets you thinking about our own, er, taste for revenge. From the New Yorker article, titled "Vengeance Is Ours":

The war between the Handa clan and the Ombal clan began many years ago; how many, Daniel didn’t say, and perhaps didn’t know. It could easily have been several decades ago, or even in an earlier generation. Among Highland clans, each killing demands a revenge killing, so that a war goes on and on, unless political considerations cause it to be settled, or unless one clan is wiped out or flees. When I asked Daniel how the war that claimed his uncle’s life began, he answered, “The original cause of the wars between the Handa and Ombal clans was a pig that ruined a garden.” Surprisingly to outsiders, most Highland wars start ostensibly as a dispute over either pigs or women. Anthropologists debate whether the wars really arise from some deeperlying ultimate cause, such as land or population pressure, but the participants, when they are asked to name a cause, usually point to a woman or a pig. Any Westerner who knows the story of Helen and the Trojan War will not be surprised to hear women named as a casus belli, but the equal importance of pigs is less obvious. However, New Guinea Highlanders, whose main food staples are starchy root crops like sweet potato and taro, are chronically starved for protein, of which the island’s dark, bristly pigs traditionally furnished the only large source. As a result, pigs are prized symbols of prestige and wealth. Peaceful competition and ostentatious displays involve pigs, and they are also used as currency for buying women. Pigs are individually owned and named, and, as piglets, they are sometimes nursed at one breast by a woman nursing an infant at her other breast.

A typical Highland village is a cluster of huts housing between a few dozen and a few hundred people plus their pigs, traditionally surrounded by a fence, and situated a mile or a few miles from the next village. A village’s pigs are taken out to forage during the day, and are prone then to wander into people’s vegetable gardens, breaking down or digging under fences erected to keep them out. A single pig can root up and ruin an entire garden in a few hours. If the intrusion happens at night, or if the offending pig is not caught in the act, it is virtually impossible to prove which particular pig was responsible.

That was how the Handa-Ombal war began. An Ombal man found that his garden had been wrecked by a pig. He claimed that the offending pig belonged to a certain Handa man, who denied it. The Ombal man became angry, demanded compensation, and assaulted the Handa pig owner when he refused. Relatives of both parties then joined in the dispute, and soon the entire membership of both clans—between four and six thousand people—was dragged into a war that had now raged for longer than Daniel could remember. He told me that, in the four years of fighting leading up to Soll’s death, seventeen other men had been killed.

Link

My old pal Rodney Ascher has curated a show in Los Angeles of strange, provocative, creepy, and downright freaked-out narrative photography. For example, Rodney created "The Fumigator Series" (above left), which he describes as "a rightwing fantasy inspired by vigilante movies of the 70's and 80's and action/adventure paperbacks like The Executioner, the Enforcer, The Death Merchant, and the Penetrator." Others shot fake movie stills and dramatic tableaus, like the one seen here above right created by The Blacksmoke Organization. The exhibition, Photo Fictions, runs until May 17 at the Show Cave. Link

The Red Ferret's had a little experiment with a dual-SIM conversion kit for GSM phones -- pop it into one of the many compatible handsets and you can flip back and forth between two different carriers. I have a British and a US SIM that I switch between, depending on which continent I'm on, so this could be pretty handy.

The only thing I’ve noticed so far is that the offline mode doesn’t seem to be really offline with this thing in, because my battery now runs down a lot faster in offline mode than it used to. It’s no biggie, I’ll just switch the phone off or take out the twin SIM on flights, but it’s something to watch out for. It may just be a peculiarity of my setup, of course.

The other thing that’s not really clear from the site is the compatibility of handsets. The site has a long list of compatible handsets on it, which includes a lot of standard 3G and other phones, but even though the Nokia 6110 Navigator I upgraded wasn’t on the list, it still worked fine. So maybe it’s a matter of taking a gamble if your handset is not listed? Oh and remember you’ll need a phone with a back cover which bends enough, or has enough room to cope with the extra SIM.

Link

Listeners to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's radio program Search Engine, gathered the information necessary to allow the CBC's President to lobby the Chinese ambassador to Canada to have the service unblocked by the Great Firewall of China:

Thanks to their efforts our show broke this story, which was picked up throughout the country and resulted in the CBC's President appealing to the Chinese Ambassador to end the blockage at once. Today the news is out that the CBC, along with Wikipedia and the BBC, is back online.

This was a great display of citizen journalism in action. Our China-based listeners alerted us to the blockage, then confirmed it throughout China by working the message boards. We tapped other listeners in the area through our Facebook page, and every one of them responded, testing our sites and others. Through that we were able to establish that the blockage was limited to China and didn't occur in neighbouring countries, which helped rule out technical failure as a cause.

Several of the people who helped us have requested anonymity (one is an Olympic torch-bearer and wants to keep the job!). We've decided to keep all of you anonymous, but you know who you are, and we're appreciative. Thanks!

Link (Thanks, Philip!)

(Disclosure: I am a paid columnist for Search Engine)

Gary Wolf wrote a terrific profile of Piotr Wozniak, creator of a memory program called SuperMemo, for Wired. I've been using SuperMemo (the Mac version, called Genius) to learn Spanish vocabulary and am really impressed with the results.

SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you've learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you've forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you're about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?

Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off. This pattern has long been known to cognitive psychology, but it has been difficult to put to practical use. It's too complex for us to employ with our naked brains.

Twenty years ago, Wozniak realized that computers could easily calculate the moment of forgetting if he could discover the right algorithm. SuperMemo is the result of his research. It predicts the future state of a person's memory and schedules information reviews at the optimal time. The effect is striking. Users can seal huge quantities of vocabulary into their brains. But for Wozniak, 46, helping people learn a foreign language fast is just the tiniest part of his goal. As we plan the days, weeks, even years of our lives, he would have us rely not merely on our traditional sources of self-knowledge — introspection, intuition, and conscious thought — but also on something new: predictions about ourselves encoded in machines.

Given the chance to observe our behaviors, computers can run simulations, modeling different versions of our path through the world. By tuning these models for top performance, computers will give us rules to live by. They will be able to tell us when to wake, sleep, learn, and exercise; they will cue us to remember what we've read, help us track whom we've met, and remind us of our goals. Computers, in Wozniak's scheme, will increase our intellectual capacity and enhance our rational self-control.

Link

Brian sez,

Wizards of the Coast, a subsidiary of Hasbro, is releasing a new license with the upcoming fourth edition of Dungeons of Dragons. Publishers can create compatible D&D; products, but only if the companies no longer publish any games which are distributed via the Open Gaming License.

This would be like saying that developers could not run programs on Vista if they publish -any- programs under a GNU license. Keeping up with the D&D; 4th edition "GSL" license situation might be important, because it could very well be a precedent.

Update: The license itself has not been released, but the linked article below contains links to message-board postings from senior Wizards of the Coast employees that seem to validate this view of the license.

Link (Thanks, Brian!)

Police in the Congo have arrested 13 individuals suspected of stealing, or shrinking, their victims' penises. It seems that the accused practitioners of black magic were nabbed for their own protection. A dozen years ago, mobs killed a group of men rumored to be penis snatchers. From Reuters:

Rumors of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo's sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.

Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure...

"But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it's become tiny or that they've become impotent, (said Kinshasa's police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko.) To that I tell them, 'How do you know if you haven't gone home and tried it'," he said.

Link

The infernal Joe Coleman has a show of his mind-blowing paintings opening next week, May 2, at the Dickinson gallery in New York City. Titled "Devotio Moderno," the exhibition also features works by the 15th century Northern Primitives, artists whose work directly inspires Coleman. Seen here, Coleman's "The Book of Revelations," 1999, Acrylic, fabric, paper, blood on panel, 62.2 x 77.5 cm. The show runs until June 15 and the art is viewable online too. From the press release:

(Coleman's) fascination with themes derived from religion and primitive painting, and his meticulous and detailed style of unabashed realism, have led to numerous comparisons between his art and the paintings of the northern renaissance. All his works are united by a very personal autobiographical theme, and in many ways relate to the early primitive devotional paintings. This exhibition allows admirers of Joe's work to see the imagery that influences him, and provides a unique opportunity to see masterpieces of the northern renaissance side by side with masterpieces by today's greatest "primitive" painter. Similarly, seeing works by Memling and his contemporaries in this setting, gives us an opportunity to truly appreciate their shameless realism, and the modernity of expression they gave to religious work of the 15th century still provides a resonant critique of the human condition today.

Link (Thanks, Richard Metzger!)

A smartcard hacker says that he was paid large sums of cash by NewsCorp's satellite company (hidden in electronic devices mailed from Canada no less!) to crack the DISH network smartcards in order to cost the competitor hundreds of millions:

Christopher Tarnovsky -- who said his first payment was $20,000 in cash hidden in electronic devices mailed from Canada -- testified in a corporate-spying lawsuit brought against News Corp's NDS Group (NNDS.O: Quote, Profile, Research) by DISH Network Corp (DISH.O: Quote, Profile, Research)...

But lawyers for DISH Network claim Tarnovsky's mission was to hack into DISH's satellite network, steal the security code, then flood the market with pirated smart cards costing DISH $900 million in lost revenue and system-repair costs.

Link (Thanks, Michael!)

Here is an insanely comprehensive collection of "x does it with..." statements. It's funny, silly, sophomoric, and alphabetized! Link (Thanks, Jason Tester!)

Grab your LED throwies and your laser tagging units, comrades, and join the revolution. Today on Boing Boing tv, a sneak peek at a new documentary film on the subversive public art collective known as Graffiti Research Lab, who develop and distribute "open source technologies for urban communication." The voices you'll hear in today's episode -- GRL founders James Powderly and Evan Roth.

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion and downloadable video.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

From their statement, redacted by the "U.S. Dept. of Homeland Graffiti"...

From their origins in the trash room of a non-profit in Manhattan to their emergence as the instigators of an international art movement, Graffiti Research Lab: The Complete First Season documents the adventures of an architect and an engineer who quit their day jobs to develop high-tech tools for the art underground. The film follows the GRL and their network of graffiti artist collaborators (and commercial imitators) across four continents as they write on skyscrapers with lasers, mock advertisers with homemade tools, get in trouble with The Department of Homeland Security and make activism fun again. Primarily using video footage from point-and-shoot digital cameras (“The Pocket School”) and found-content on the web, the movie’s visual style draws as much from the art of the power point presentation and viral media as conventional documentary cinema.

Narrated by GRL co-founders, Roth and Powderly, The Complete First Season makes a humorous and insightful argument for free speech in public, open source in pop culture, the hacker spirit in graffiti and not asking for permission in general. The film was premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2008. Available 24/7 on The Pirate Bay.

Part two of today's episode documents GRL's hijinks at Maker Faire 2007. That event's 2008 edition is coming up next week.

GRL was mistakenly credited with the Boston Mooninite LED Terror Freakout; while their work no doubt inspired the street marketing team responsible for the Aqua Teen Hunger Force debacle, Powderly told Boing Boing the day it happened that GRL was not involved.

Link to more info about the DVD and where you can download a torrent -- or, see it at the premiere, May 4, at New York's MOMA.

Matt sez, "Along the lines of the 'ghost' hotels in Egypt sitting incomplete, Disney World has had the Legendary Years section of Pop Century sitting incomplete for several years as well. " Link to YouTube video, Link to photo gallery (Thanks, Matt!)

Next Thursday, May 1, I'll be launching my next novel, Little Brother, at Toronto's Merril Collection, at 7PM. Little Brother's my first young adult novel, a book about young people who use technology to fight for the restoration of the Bill of Rights to American politics, setting them square in the crosshairs of the war on terror.

BakkaPhoenix books will be selling books at the event, and they're also happy to take pre-orders for custom inscriptions -- CDN$19.95 for the book, plus $9 and GST for shipping in Canada, $15 to the US, $20 to Europe, and $25 to the rest of the world (BakkaPhoenix: 416 963 9993, inquiries@bakkaphoenixbooks.com). Link

Weighing in on JK Rowling and Warners' lawsuit against a fan-compiled concordance of the Harry Potterverse, Neil Gaiman (whose first two books were unauthorized nonfiction and relied heavily on fair use) describes the creative importance of the freedom of rip each other off in fantasy lit:

Back in November I was tracked down by a Scotsman journalist who had noticed the similarities between my Tim Hunter character and Harry Potter, and wanted a story. And I think I rather disappointed him by explaining that, no, I certainly *didn't* believe that Rowling had ripped off Books of Magic, that I doubted she'd read it and that it wouldn't matter if she had: I wasn't the first writer to create a young magician with potential, nor was Rowling the first to send one to school. It's not the ideas, it's what you do with them that matters.

Genre fiction, as Terry Pratchett has pointed out, is a stew. You take stuff out of the pot, you put stuff back. The stew bubbles on.

Link (via Copyfight)

Adam Sternbergh's long investigative New York Magazine piece, "You Walk Wrong," makes a compelling case for shoes as inherently damaging to your feet and spine. I have very flat feet, which has always meant problems with my hips, knees and back, and I've work custom orthotic inserts since I was a teenage. Last year, I picked up a pair of Vibram Fivefingers "barefoot shoes" that do a pretty good job of simulating the experience of going barefoot without the tetanus and laceration risk, and I've done a lot of city and country walking in them, and I have to say, my back and knees and feet feel pretty damned good after a couple days in them.

At first glance, this seems like a sensible and obvious approach—to work with the foot, not against it. But it represents a fundamental break from the dominant philosophy of shoe design. For decades, the guiding principle of shoe design has been to compensate for the perceived deficiencies of the human foot. Since it hurts to strike your heel on the ground, nearly all shoes provide a structure to lift the heel. And because walking on hard surfaces can be painful, we wrap our feet in padding. Many people suffer from flat feet or fallen arches, so we wear shoes with built-in arch supports, to help hold our arches up...

Admittedly, there’s something counterintuitive about the idea that less padding on your foot equals less shock on your body. But that’s only if we continue to think of our feet as lifeless blocks of flesh that hold us upright. The sole of your foot has over 200,000 nerve endings in it, one of the highest concentrations anywhere in the body. Our feet are designed to act as earthward antennae, helping us balance and transmitting information to us about the ground we’re walking on.

But (you might say) if you walk or run with no padding, it’s murder on your heels—which is precisely the point. Your heels hurt when you walk that way because you’re not supposed to walk that way. Wrapping your heels in padding so they don’t hurt is like stuffing a gag in someone’s mouth so they’ll stop screaming—you’re basically telling your heels to shut up.

And your heels aren’t just screaming; they’re trying to tell you something. In 2006, a group of rheumatologists at Chicago’s Rush Medical College studied the force of the “knee adduction moment”—basically, the force of torque on the medial chamber of the knee joint where arthritis occurs. For years, rheumatologists have advised patients with osteoarthritis of the knees to wear padded walking shoes, to reduce stress on their joints. As for the knee-adduction moment, they’ve attempted to address it with braces and orthotics that immobilize the knee, but with inconsistent results. So the researchers at Rush tried something different: They had people walk in their walking shoes, then barefoot, and each time measured the stress on their knees. They found, to their surprise, that the impact on the knees was 12 percent less when people walked barefoot than it was when people wore the padded shoes.

Link (via Futurismic)

Everything2's Mikebert has posted a leet-speak Lord's Prayer that begins, "Our sysadmin, who chills in Heaven, feared be thy name."

0ǔr $¥$@dM!n, \/\/|-|0 ©|-|!££$ !n |-|34\/3|\|
ph34r3d β3 7|-|¥ |\|@m3
†|-|ÿ p\/\/n@g3 ©0|\/|3, †|-|ÿ $©r!p7$ b3 d0|\|3 !n /earth @$ i7 !$ i|\| /heaven.
$33|) u$ 7h!5 |)@ÿ oǔR d@!£ÿ R0|\/|$.
f0rG!\/3 u$ 0ǔr n00b 3xP£017$ @$ \/\/3 f0rG!\/3 $©r!P7 | R3\/34£ t0 u$ |\|07 Ζ3R0 |)@ÿ \/u£|\|$, βu7 $A\/3 u$ fR0|\/| t3h RIAA.
f0r 7|-|!|\|3 i$ t3h |\|37\/\/0R|<, @|\|d t3h rm -rf*, @|\|d @££ 0ǔR β@$3 @r3 β3£0|\|G t0 j00, f0R3\/3R @|\|d 3\/3R.
4|\/|3|\|.

Link (via Making Light)

The December, 1951 ish of Mechanix Illustrated promised a United Nations space police, in charge of keeping the world safe from high orbit:

But, given the go-ahead, it can be done and in a reasonable amount of time. Meanwhile, John Q. Public can only sit tight and hope that the first permanent space-buggy is a benign one, set whirling by the United Nations and carrying space cops to enforce peace on earth instead of war.

Link

In December 1938, Popular Science featured this fantastic, gigantic 12-ton "landing strip in a box" for converting cow-pastures to airstrips.

ROLLING swiftly down highways on ten oversize balloon tires, a revolutionary airport-in-miniature for use by passenger air lines and military air forces now provides quick and complete assistance to stranded airplanes. This curious “twelve-ton tool box” is the invention of Kibbey W. Couse, of East Orange, N. J. It is capable of turning any level cow pasture into an airport complete with machine shop, repair parts, floodlights, and radio.

Link

Michael built a Claude Shannon/Marvin Minsky "Ultimate Machine" -- flip a switch and a hand emerges and flips it off.

About 7 years ago I was reading an article on Claude Shannon and came across one of the funniest ideas I had ever heard. Claude, you see, was one of these incredibly brilliant engineers with an obviously great sense of humor. As I understand it, he, along with Marvin Minsky came up with an idea they called the "Ultimate Machine". Basically a plain box with a switch on the top. When you flip the switch, a hand comes out of the box and flips the switch off. Thats it.

Well, after reading the article, and laughing out loud, I decided that I HAD to build one of these boxes.

Link (via Make)

Seasonal Chef's farmers' market reports from across the USA come lavishly illustrated with beautiful photos of mouth-watering organic produce -- it's raw food porn!

It's still a little too early for strawberries, in my opinion. It's got to get hotter for them to sweeten up -- and that'll happen in about six weeks. But the price is coming down, so I figure it's time to try my first strawberries of the season. Blood oranges won't be around much longer. Time to buy a bunch, juice them, and boil the juice down to reduce it by half or more to make syrup for salad dressings that I'll freeze and use for months to come. Fava beans have been in the markets for some weeks now, but at $3 a pound unshelled, they're a pricy delicacy. They'll get cheaper until they vanish in about month. Today, I got these for $2 a pound -- a fair price for a fleeting springtime treat. Here are nine fava bean recipes that I like. The Catalan stew is time-consuming, but well worth it, once a year.

Link (via Waxy)

Cole sez, "Maureen F. McHugh's speculative fiction collection MOTHERS & OTHER MONSTERS has been released online by Small Beer Press as a free Creative Commons download."

Small Beer is knocking them out of the park with CC releases by some of science fiction's most talented, most brilliant short fiction writers. An entire Maureen McHugh collection online gratis is a watershed event. Link (Thanks, Cole!)

See also:
Kelly Link's gorgeous short story collection now a CC download
John Kessel's wonderful short story collection "The Baum Plan" free CC download

Marilyn sez, "Modern Mechanix photographed the 25 pages of this April 1965 Nat Geo story on the 1964 New York World's Fair. Great photos of the General Motors Futurama exhibit, people riding a Ferris wheel made to look like a gigantic whitewall tire, attentive concertgoers at the New York State's Tent of Tomorrow, which looked all elegant back then, with that gorgeous, huge (130x166 ft) terazzo floor Texaco road map of New York State. (Interestingly, in the U.S. Pavilion a display predicted the world population would hit 7 billion by 2000, but we're still shy of that figure by some 300 million today). But the best part was the Westinghouse Time Capsule: which included 'The Bible, a piece of heat shield from a space craft, a National Geographic Atlas of the World in microfilm, freeze-dried food, a bikini bathing suit, and a popular recording by the Beatles...' Also a transistor radio, a computer memory unit, a heart valve, an electric toothbrush, and a package of birth control pills.

Some 7,000 visitors file through the RCA Pavilion each day to see themselves on color television (below, left) and hear a backstage briefing on the technological magic that splashes rainbows on their living-room screens. On the same site 26 years ago, RCA introduced black-and-white television to the United States. Official color TV center for the Fair, RCA telecasts news announcements, interviews with visiting dignitaries, highlights of other exhibits, and special events—more than 2,000 program hours from April to October. The pavilion also helped reunite families last year by showing lost children on some 200 television sets in buildings throughout the grounds. At the Dupont Pavilion, science joins showmanship (center). Here colorless liquids mixed in flasks shine with intense blue light in a demonstration of chemiluminescence—the same phenomenon that makes fireflies glow. In Dupont’s production, “Wonderful World of Chemistry,” live actors sing, dance, and talk with life-size motion-picture images on movable screens. One scene shows a live performer blowing out candles on a filmed birthday cake and spraying another actor with frosting. Eight different troupes, working simultaneously in two theaters, present the Dupont show 48 times daily.

Link (Thanks, Marilyn)

See also:
18 hours of 64 World's Fair audio!
Bell System film for 1964 World's Fair
Giant road map from 1964 World's Fair

Wesabe, a company that takes your anonymized financial information from your bank-statements and uses it to figure out how you can use it to spend smarter, has just launched its "Tips" tab -- a service that automatically recommends competitors of the places you presently shop at, based on superior feedback, repeat visits and lower average spends by other Wesabe users.

These tips are pulled out of the billions of dollars worth of transactions that members have uploaded to Wesabe. We look at how much people spend at a merchant, how often they come back to give that merchant repeat business, and what they have to say about their satisfaction with that merchant. From these points, we build a comparison that lets you narrow in on the values in your neighborhood, and decide which merchant is best for you and your needs:

In the case above, Wesabe recommended a local grocery store I’ve seen but have never been to, since I shopped at a more expensive option, Andronico’s, in my area. What’s great about this tip is that it shows me a cheaper option that also makes far more people happy. That’s great for me to know, and it may very well change where I shop.

You can also use the very rich tagging data on Wesabe to find related merchants that might be hidden values, or might be well-known to you as brands but not as economic options:

Link (via Waxy)

(Disclosure: I am a proud member of Wesabe's advisory board)

See also:
Wesabe API lets you hack your bank
Wesabe: community money-saving service

Current TV is running this short intro to Maker Faire, which will be held on May 3 and 4. I'll be hanging out in the Make Pavilion and going around with the BBtv crew, so if you come, please introduce yourself. Link

UPI reports that a high school in Illinois "has suspended 11 seniors involved in a prank that featured a student in a gorilla costume chasing banana-clad seniors in the hallways."

The students were suspended for 7 days. How sad to punish seniors about to graduate for doing something harmless and delightful. If I were the principal, I would have given them gold stars and a letter-grade boost in the class of their choice. Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Gorilla suit making workshop
• National Gorilla Suit Day
• Brains turn gorilla suits invisible
• Silicon Valley traffic report: gorilla suited guy on freeway

John sez, "A giant mechanism will park your bike for you in an underground facility in a train station in Tokyo. It packs more than 9,000 bikes tight as sardines, and when you swipe your card to pick it up, it will find your bike and spit it out in 23 seconds!" Link (Thanks, John!)

Mark sez, "You guys have written before about these anti-teen noisemakers before when they were used in the UK. Well, they're being deployed in the US now and, inevitably, someone is not happy about it..."

"It's horrible, loud and irritating," said Eddie Holder, 15, who sprinted from his apartment for school one morning covering one ear with his hand to block out the noise. The device was installed outside the building to drive away loiterers. "I have to hurry out of the building because it's so annoying. It's this screeching sound that you have to get away from or it will drive you crazy.

"A spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union said the organization does not have a position on the issue. But James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Boston's Northeastern University, said that putting crowd-monitoring devices in the hands of private businesses and citizens is "dangerous.""

Link

See also:
Anti-teenager sound weapon
Kids turn "teen repellent" sound into teacher-proof ringtone
High-pitched, anti-teen alarm is now ringtone, techno track

(Image: Creepy Mosquito Powerpoint slides)