Logo cousins: RE/Search and Target?

David Pescovitz at 7:37 PM Fri 

Logos separated at birth: RE/Search Publications and, er, Target's new home goods line? Read the rest

Preparations for alien contact

David Pescovitz at 2:23 PM Fri 

If we do make contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, what happens next? Well, assuming the ball is in our court, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project has a plan. In fact, SETI even has a Post-Detection Taskgroup made up of scientists, journalists, philosophers, and, of course, science fiction writers. Astrobiologist Paul Davies of Arizona State University leads the bunch. From Smithsonian:

Their job is to advise relevant parties—other scientists, governments, the United Nations—about what to do if a SETI signal or any "putative evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence" were detected. While waiting for a contact, the group deliberates about what the consequences might be. While a discovery of microscopic life on another body in our solar system would be "of profound significance, which would change our worldview," Davies says, "it's not one of these things that is going to be disruptive to society." But the discovery of a signal from intelligent extraterrestrials could lead to "mayhem." (former of head of NASA's SETI program John) Billingham agrees. "Some people will think that this is a natural event in the continuing work on scientific questions," he says, and others will ask, in panic, "What do we do now?"

People would likely fall into two camps. Catastrophists, as one of the camps is called, might well predict the end of humanity as we know it, or at least the end of our current culture. In 2010 Stephen Hawking said that making contact with aliens would be "a little too risky" and compared the event to Columbus arriving in the New World, "which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans." But millenarian enthusiasts anticipate revelations of rapture: how to cure cancer, solve the energy crisis or win world peace. And if aliens did manage to come to Earth, says (Center for SETI Research director Jill) Tarter, an admitted enthusiast, "they would likely have outgrown the aggressiveness that has served us so well."

Chris & Cosey mix

David Pescovitz at 9:32 AM Fri 

The Quietus presents a wonderful 90 minute musical journey from BB pals Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti of Throbbing Gristle and Chris & Cosey fame. Along with their own music and remixes, they've selected tracks from Art Of Noise, Alva Noto & Blixa Bargeld's ANbb, Plastikman, The Fall, Kraftwerk, Coil & Rose McDowall, Angelo Badalamenti, and more. This is the best music for today. From The Quietus:

If we were running a chart of all the artists featured on the Quietus mix series, out ahead of the pack in terms of frequency of inclusion would be Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti. The past few months have seen not only Optimo's vinyl reissue of Carter's brilliant The Space Between, but also four Chris & Cosey LPS originally released in the early 80s, Heartbeat, Trance, Songs Of Love & Lust and Exotika. February 4th will see their first performance in years at Richard D Clouston's Cosey Club at the ICA, supported by Factory Floor. There, they promise "classic C&C; tracks from their substantial back catalogue, reworked and accompanied by mash-ups of new and old C&C; video projections." It's surely set to be just one more step on their music reaching a far wider, contemporary audience. We're therefore honoured that Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti have compiled Number Eight in the Quietus mix series.

Carter Tutti & Chris & Cosey Read the rest

What makes a good sideshow "talker"

David Pescovitz at 11:33 AM Thu 

Ward Hall is a sideshow legend -- magician, fire-eater, sword swallower, and famed "talker" responsible for luring carny patrons into the ten-in-one. Sixty years after he first took the midway stage, here's Hall talking about what makes a good talker. After the jump, Mr. Hall on "building the tip," gathering a curious crowd. Step right up!

Read the rest

Twin Peaks 20th Anniversary Art Exhibition

David Pescovitz at 10:31 AM Thu 

A Twin Peaks 20th Anniversary Art Exhibition is in the works for a February 12-13 run at Clifton's Brookdale in Los Angeles. An astounding array of artists like Tim Biskup, Chris Mars, Stella Im Hultberg, Glenn Barr, Ryan Heshka, and Jessica Joslin will show pieces inspired by David Lynch's classic show. I hope to showcase more of the work from the exhibition here at BB in the future, but in the meantime please gaze in awe at Joslin's owl sculpture made for the event. Exquisite. “In The Trees: TWIN PEAKS 20th Anniversary Art Exhibition” (Thanks, Stacey Ransom!) Read the rest

Relieving test anxiety by writing down worries

David Pescovitz at 10:08 AM Thu 

A new study suggests that students who write down their anxieties a few minutes before taking an exam are much less likely to choke on the test. University of Chicago psychologists Gerardo Ramirez and Sian Beilock ran one study for two years at a high school. Students who spent ten minutes writing about feelings and worries about the test scored six percent higher than those who wrote about non-"expressive" topics. This reminds me of "exposure therapy" for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, PTSD, and phobias in which safe exposure to the feared object or situation gradually desensitizes you to it. The researchers published their results in the current issue of the journal Science. From the Science podcast:

Beilock: There’s work in clinical psychology showing that getting clinically depressed individuals to journal or write about emotional or traumatic experiences in their lives can help decrease rumination. And we have a lot of work in our lab showing that students worry in testing situations, and this is something that can really derail their ability to attend to and remember information they need for the test. So, we hypothesized that perhaps having students write about their thoughts and feelings about an upcoming test before they took the exam might, in a sense, allow them to deal with some of these worries, such that when they were in the actual exam situation they were less likely to pop up.

"Writing About Testing Worries Boosts Exam Performance in the Classroom" (Science) Read the rest

Mark Dery on America's toy gun culture

David Pescovitz at 9:40 AM Thu 

Responding to the Jared Lee Loughner tragic shooting spree in Tucson, Mark Dery puts America's toy gun culture in his crosshairs. The title of the essay says it all, "Gun Play: An American Tragedy, in Three Acts." Above and referenced by Dery is Negativland's "Guns," a cut-up of 60s toy gun commercials. From Dery's essay at Thought Catalog:

Growing up in ’60s America meant reliving the tragedy of the Native-American genocide as farce while shoveling in your Swanson Salisbury Steak TV dinner: Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Death Valley Days, The Rifleman, The Virginian, The Big Valley, Branded, Have Gun–Will Travel, The High Chaparral, Rawhide, Wagon Train–the list of prime-time westerns seems endless, in hindsight. These and dozens of shows popped out of the same mold schooled Americans in the lesson that there’s no problem so complex it can’t be resolved with violence. (A lesson taken to heart by cheerleaders for American exceptionalism and architects of imaginary empire like Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and William Kristol, who wrote in their manifesto for a “new American century” that the United States must assume its rightful “constabulary” role in global affairs, capable of outgunning the best-armed posse in town.) PTSD’d by race riots and Vietnam war protests, the America of the ’60s rejuvenated its dream of itself by returning nightly to a Disneyfied version of its frontier youth.

For boys–even boys like this author, whose liberal-ish parents fulminated against the soul-scarring effects of “violent toys”–growing up in that America meant dreaming of guns. Cap guns, whose sweetly acrid smell is a grace note in memories of my boyhood summers. The impressively realistic toy Peacemaker in the Sears Roebuck catalog, with the tie that lashed its holster to your thigh for gunslinger cool and those little pellets that made smoke trail convincingly from the gun’s barrel when you fired it. The Johnny Seven One-Man Army, a super-gun whose sheer overkill–it rolled a grenade launcher, anti-tank rocket, anti-bunker missile, rifle, machine gun, and automatic pistol into one mega-weapon–launched a million power fantasies, making it the best-selling boys’ toy of 1964. Daisy BB rifles, like the one my friend came within a whisker of blinding his kid brother with one languid, directionless afternoon when his parents weren’t home  (why weren’t the parents ever home, in ’60s Southern California?). And of course real guns, like the .22 my older buddies, longhaired brothers who embodied cool itself, used to obliterate beer cans. Later, when their father died by his own hand, I thought of the locked gun case in their family room, a shrine to quiet menace, and of cans lined up for execution in the summer sun, jumping to life at the instant of impact.

Drug-smuggling pigeon

David Pescovitz at 9:09 AM Thu 

A few weeks ago, we heard news of a vulture accused of spying on Saudi Arabia. Now, Colombian police nabbed a pigeon they think was on its way to smuggle weed and cocaine paste into a Bucaramanga prison. Apparently, the package was too heavy for the bird. From the BBC:

"We found the bird about a block away from the prison trying to fly over with a package, but due to the excess weight it could not accomplish its mission," said Bucaramanga police commander Jose Angel Mendoza...

Police said carrier pigeons had been used in the past to smuggle mobile phone Sim cards into the jail.

Tricks of hotel marketing photos

David Pescovitz at 2:00 PM Wed 

The Oyster travel review site has a fun section of "Oyster Photo Fakeouts," in which you can compare hotel marketing photos (above left) with real snapshots (above right). Cropping, careful choice in angles, styling and perhaps even shoop result in large pools, serene settings, close landmarks, and mouthwatering buffets that just don't jibe with reality.

Photo Fakeouts (Oyster.com)
"'The sexy lady' and other hotel photo tricks" (CNN) Read the rest

Man posted nude photos from women's hacked email

David Pescovitz at 12:54 PM Wed 

George Bronk, 23, pled guilty for hacking his way into thousands of women's email accounts, grabbing any nude photos he found, and posting them to their Facebook profile pages. "In one case he persuaded a victim to send him even more explicit photographs by threatening to post the ones he'd stolen if she didn't," according to IDG. He's facing up to six years in prison for felony hacking, child pornography and identity theft. "Man Stole Nude Photos From Women's E-mail Accounts" (Thanks, Jason Weisberger!) Read the rest

Poe grave visitor a no-show again

David Pescovitz at 12:13 PM Wed 

For 60 years, a mysterious man (or perhaps his sons) visited Edgar Allan Poe's grave on the writer's January 19 birthday and left him a bouquet of roses and a bottle of cognac. Last year, he didn't show up. And although several impostors visited last night, none gave the secret signal known only to Poe House and Museum curator Jeff Jerome. From The Globe and Mail:

In 1993, the visitor began leaving notes, starting with one that read: "The torch will be passed." A note in 1998 indicated the originator of the tradition had died and passed it on to his two sons.

The sons didn't seem to take the duty as seriously as the father. One left a note in 2001 referencing the Super Bowl and another in 2004 implying criticism of France over its objections to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, upsetting many of the traditionalists. When the Poe toaster didn't show last year, Mr. Jerome theorized that the 200th anniversary of Poe's birth in 2009 might have been considered the appropriate stopping point.

Or, it was thought at the time, perhaps the toaster just had a flat tire on the way to the cemetery.

But that's the sort of happenstance unlikely to happen two years in a row. Mr. Jerome says he'll return one more year. If the visitor fails to show in 2012, he'll considered the tradition over and done.

"It's sort of like a marriage that ends," Mr. Jerome said. "Part of you still wants the warmth that was part of it, and you go looking for the same woman. No, it's over with. And if it's over with, it's over with. If people want to continue the tradition, it's going to be without me."

"Mysterious Poe grave visitor a no-show, sparking fears that 60-year tradition is over" Read the rest

Girl gives birth to a frog!

David Pescovitz at 11:04 AM Wed 

"Doctors blame LSD." (via Dangerous Minds)
Read the rest