HOWTO E-Z realistic corpse from a cheap plastic skeleton
LoveCraftsman sez, "How to make a realistic corpse out of a cheap plastic skeleton in one hour."
Having experienced the tedium of creating a corpse with liquid latex and cotton fiber first hand I found this tutorial extremely helpful. It uses a cheap plastic skeleton, plastic dropcloths, and a heat gun to produce a surprisingly realistic final product. The one in the tutorial took about an hour and looks pretty good, particularly when compared to the latex treatments that take days to finish.
Quick and Dirty Corpses (Thanks, TheLovecraftsman!)
Interview: Yoko Ono
Artist and peace activist Yoko Ono (78), wife of the late John Lennon, was recently honored with the 8th Hiroshima Art Prize, an award for artists whose work has contributed to peace. To commemorate the award, The Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art is hosting “The Road of Hope: Yoko Ono 2011,” an exhibit honoring the “spirit of Hiroshima that yearns for permanent world peace and prosperity for all humanity.” The show is on display through October 16, 2011, and features new works by Yoko Ono inspired by the survival of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and by the disasters that struck Japan in March, 2011, “with hope for the future.”
I spoke to Yoko Ono in Japan a few days after she received the Hiroshima prize. She was in Tokyo to speak about “The Road of Hope” at the MORI art museum.
Continue reading
They call me Cha Cha
$300 Million Button: making customers create logins to buy cost etailer $300M/year
"The $300 Million Button," Jared Spool's 2009 article on usability and ecommerce design, is remarkable in that it a) articulates something that anyone who shops widely online already knows; b) is advice that would make a lot of money for sites if they adopted it; c) has been part of the literature for at least two and a half years; d) is roundly ignored.
Spool is recounting the story of an unnamed large ecommerce retailer who had one of those forms that made you register before you could buy anything, and to remember your login and password before you could shop there again. Removing this form, and allowing the option of saving your details with a login and password at the end of the transaction, increased the retailer's sales by $300,000,000 in the first year.
From a commerce perspective, the Internet's glory is reduced search costs for customers. When I was making my office coffee table, I decided I wanted to source some brightly colored anodized aluminum bolts, nuts and washers. I'd never bought these before, but I assumed they existed, and I was right -- a couple searches showed me that they existed and were sold to motorcycle modders. I found a site that supplied them, and ordered sixteen of each, plus some spares. It was the first time in 39-some years I'd needed brightly colored bolts, and it may very well be that long again before I need any more.
So while this specialist bolt retailer is visible to motorcyle hobbyists and can compete for their repeat business with other specialists, they're also tapping into a market to whom they were entirely invisible until the net came along. Periodically, someone like me is going to drop in and spend some money on a one-off basis, and make windfall cash for them. There are a lot of people who, at some time in their lives, want to buy some specialized component or good. Before the Internet came along, we'd likely have just got the non-specialized equivalent. But because of the Internet, businesses all over the world are getting sales from the unlikeliest of corners. And what's more, some of those one-time only customers might discover that they actually really enjoy whatever the specialist thing is, and come back for more. It's win-win.
But the fastest way to alienate those customers and scare away that free money is to make its owner establish a relationship with you before s/he can make a purchase. In the case of the company that sold me my bolts, I was required to create a login and password, and I still get a fortnightly newsletter full of information I don't care to know about bolts (I checked all the opt-out bits, but either I missed one or they just don't pay attention to it).
Spool's research showed that a substantial portion of ecommerce users are even more sick of this stuff than I am -- $300 million/year's worth, in fact. And what's more, of the repeat customers who might have benefited from the faster checkout afforded by creating an account, 45 percent had multiple accounts in the system because they'd forgotten their logins, lost access to the email accounts they'd used, and signed up again with a new address.
Repeat customers weren't any happier. Except for a very few who remembered their login information, most stumbled on the form. They couldn't remember the email address or password they used. Remembering which email address they registered with was problematic - many had multiple email addresses or had changed them over the years.The $300 Million Button (via Beth Pratt)When a shopper couldn't remember the email address and password, they'd attempt at guessing what it could be multiple times. These guesses rarely succeeded. Some would eventually ask the site to send the password to their email address, which is a problem if you can't remember which email address you initially registered with.
(Later, we did an analysis of the retailer's database, only to discover 45% of all customers had multiple registrations in the system, some as many as 10. We also analyzed how many people requested passwords, to find out it reached about 160,000 per day. 75% of these people never tried to complete the purchase once requested.)
The form, intended to make shopping easier, turned out to only help a small percentage of the customers who encountered it. (Even many of those customers weren't helped, since it took just as much effort to update any incorrect information, such as changed addresses or new credit cards.) Instead, the form just prevented sales - a lot of sales.
Alan Turing’s hand-drawn Monopoly Board
Yesterday, I had the delightful experience of attending a fundraiser for Bletchley Park, the birthplace of modern computing and cryptography, where the Allied WWII cipher-breaking effort was headquartered. Cold War paranoia caused Churchill to order Bletchley broken up, its work kept secret, its machines destroyed, and, very slowly, it is being rebuilt.
Earlier this year, the Bletchley Trust acquired Alan Turing's papers for the collection with a grant from Google.org, and I got this shot of Turing's awesome hand-drawn Monopoly board -- the cryptographers of Bletchley were sequestered from the rest of the world and desperate for distraction, hence this great bit of historical ephemera.
I also learned that Turing didn't believe the UK economy would survive WWII even if the Allies won the war, and so he drew as much of his pay as he could in silver half-crowns, melted them down, created two enormous ingots, and buried them somewhere in the region. They've never been recovered -- as far as we know. (finkployd just reminded me that this was in Cryptonomicon, but the detail had slipped my mind).
Alan Turing's hand-drawn Monopoly board, the Turing Papers, Bletchley Park, UK
AntiSec leaks 10GB of law enforcement data
AntiSec dropped a 10GB dump of information this evening, hacked from dozens of law enforcement agencies. Promised in the cache are hundreds of compromising email spools, personal information about officers, police training videos, and the contents of insecure anonymous tip systems. [Pastee via @ioerror]
The most beautiful female goat in the world
Photo: Ali Jarekji / Reuters
Wasieef, a Maaz Al Shami (Damascene goat), won the first prize for the "Most Beautiful Goat" title in the female category at a recent event in Amman, Jordan. The Mazayen al-Maaz competition was the first such event held in the desert kingdom. If you would like to see Wasieef looking right at you, a portrait is after the jump. Continue reading
Who is the man living in Fukushima evacuation zone?
Max Hodges of White Rabbit Press says:
About two months after 3/11 I started working on this long-term documentary photography story. I took my bicycle up to Fukushima and entered the 20 kilometer evacuation zone in order to document the fate of the many abandoned livestock and pet dogs and cats.Inside the Fukushima Evacuation Zone, Part I: Shoji KobayashiWhile working, alone in the exclusion zone, I came across a man, Shoji Kobayashi, who had been living alone in a town just 15 kilometers from the Daiichi reactor where everyone had evacuated. Kobayshi became the central subject of my story.
Blizzard “surprised” at fan rage over Diablo III online requirement
Earlier this week, Blizzard announced that the forthcoming Diablo III would be online-only, despite not being an MMO. Fan reaction has been brutal. MTV's Russ Frushtick writes:
"I'm actually kind of surprised in terms of there even being a question in today's age around online play and the requirement around that," said Bridenbecker. "We've been doing online gameplay for 15 years now…and with 'World of WarCraft' and our roots in Battle.net and now with 'Diablo 3,' it really is just the nature of how things are going, the nature of the industry. When you look at everything you get by having that persistent connection on the servers, you cannot ignore the power and the draw of that."
He also points out that you can play solo online, and that it's about where saves are saved, not DRM, which sucks as far as they are concerned, hurrah.
But here's the thing. Even if Blizzard did it for the good reasons Bridenbecker describes, news of the cash-for-items marketplace and a ban on user modifications emerged at the same time. Because there are no coincidences on the Internet, this makes it look like a scheme to get everyone online where they may pay to upgrade characters, share their doings on social networks, and all that nonsense--even if that's not really the deal at all. It's created fear, uncertainty, and doubt about a game series that's been a gold standard in zero-bullshit single-payment solo 'n' multi PC gaming for a decade.
Piers listened to voicemails; Guardian editor also used voicemail ‘hack’
More from the Murdochery of recent weeks: it looks like Piers Morgan, the CNN host who was a tabloid editor at the time but denied any involvement, really does have some explaining to do. He gave an interview in 2006 in which he described listening to celebrity voicemails:
In an article published by the Daily Mail, Morgan said that he had been played a tape of a message [Paul] McCartney had left on [Heather] Mills' cell phone in the wake of one of their fights. "It was heartbreaking," Morgan wrote. "He sounded lonely, miserable and desperate, and even sang 'We Can Work It Out' into the answerphone."A Guardian editor also admitted hacking voicemails in a 2006 story. Though it was to investigate a corrupt arms trader, the fact that people are now concerned about what happened to Heather Mills suggests that this line of reasoning may not get him off the hook.
Outside Lands 2011 limerick contest: The Winnahs!
I am pleased to announce that the winners of Boing Boing's Outside Lands 2011 Limerick Contest are MANDELBEN and CJHOWAREYA! Competition was fierce. MANDELBEN and CKHOWAREYA each score a pair of 3-Day Tickets to the Outside Lands festival in San Francisco's Golden Gate Part, August 12 through 14! A very limited number of 3-Day and Single Day Tickets are still available for purchase. And now, the winning wordplay:
mandelben:Outside Lands 2011I just earned me a bachelor's degree, and then moved to the Bay by the sea. Now I find that I'm broke - and my learning's a joke - so I'll take anything I can free.
And a chance just to see those folks play? That would make any poor mutant's day. So I'm letting you know that I do want to go (more than Cory hates DMCA). There are Phish and Stone Foxes and Mi5e; "Are they furries?" I ask, thinking twice. But dear Xeni's cat gifs have awakened my yiffs, so I shrug, nonchalant, "could be nice."
Oh can't I attend Outside Lands?
I've already made costume plans:
Wearing only pop tarts
I'll spew rainbow farts,
and spend all three days singing Nyans!(If nothing else, pity my plight: I lost my left arm in a fight. If my buddy and I could catch tunes 'neath the sky, why, I'm sure I'd soon feel *all right.*)
cjhowareya:
OutsideLands, you wonderful beast!
Each year, a musical feast!
A balding Mick Jones
Would delight my old bones,
As would beats by Zigaboo Modaliste.
Sponsor shout out: Watchismo
Our thanks to Watchismo for sponsoring Boing Boing Blast, our daily delivery of blog headlines to your inbox.
SNEAK PEEK: Watchismo is the first to unveil the pre-release spy shots and offer the new Nixon Rubber 51-30 and Nixon Rubber Murf watches. They're available for pre-order at only at Watchismo.com. So many cool watches, so few limbs to put them on...
Friday Freak-Out: Booker T and the MGs’ “Green Onions” (1967)
[video link]
Friday Freak-Out: Booker T and the MGs perform "Green Onions" on the Stax Volt Tour of Norway, 1967. Following this are more smoking numbers by Arthur Conley, Sam and Dave, Eddie Floyd, the Mark-Keys, and, yes, Otis Redding. The video is in six parts. All of these artists can be heard on the essential box set "Stax Volt: The Complete Singles 1959-1968." (via Greg Dulli/@twilitekid)
Previously:
- Friday Freak-Out: Electric Lucifer – Boing Boing
- Friday Freak-Out: The Rolling Stones' “2000 Light Years From Home ...
- Friday Freak-Out: The 5th Dimension's “Up, Up and Away” (1967 ...
- Friday Freak-Out: Ready, Steady, Go psych/mod parody from ...
- Friday Freak-Out: The Hi-5′s “Did you have to rub it in?” (1965 ...
- Friday Freak-Out: The Electric Prunes' “I Had Too Much To Dream ...
- Friday Freak-Out: Arthur Brown's “Nightmare” – Boing Boing
- Friday Freak-Out: Brothers Johnson play “Strawberry Letter #23 ...
- Friday Freak-Out: It's A Beautiful Day's “White Bird” (1971 ...
- Friday Freak-Out: Donovan's “Hurdy Gurdy Man” (1970) – Boing Boing
HTTPS Everywhere goes 1.0: make your browser support to secure connections when they’re available
HTTPS Everywhere, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's browser add-on that forces encrypted connections to sites that have the option, has just hit 1.0, 13 months after its first public beta. By using HTTPS Everywhere, you can protect your browsing habits from being peeked at by people on your network and by your ISP, as well as protecting potentially valuable login credentials. I use it.
It's true -- and regrettable -- that BB doesn't have HTTPS options for its readers yet. It's something that we've talked about a lot, but the costs associated with it are substantial, as it's much more processor-intensive than serving pages without encrypting them, and we often seem to be at the limits of our existing hardware. We're always investigating the possibility, and I really hope we'll be SSL-enabled soon."HTTPS secures web browsing by encrypting both requests from your browser to websites and the resulting pages that are displayed," said EFF Senior Staff Technologist Peter Eckersley. "Without HTTPS, your online reading habits and activities are vulnerable to eavesdropping, and your accounts are vulnerable to hijacking. Today's Paxfire revelations are a grand example of how things can go wrong. EFF created HTTPS Everywhere to make it easier for people to keep their user names, passwords, and browsing histories secure and private. With the revelation that companies like Paxfire are out there, intercepting millions of people's searches without their permission, this kind of protection is indispensable."
HTTPS Everywhere 1.0 encrypts connections to Google Image Search, Flickr, Netflix, Apple, and news sites like NPR and the Economist, as well as dozens of banks. HTTPS Everywhere also includes support for Google Search, Facebook, Twitter, Hotmail, Wikipedia, the New York Times, and hundreds of other popular websites.
3 things you need to know about biofuels
Why care about liquid fuel?
There’s a reason we use different forms of energy to do different jobs, and it’s not because we’re all just that fickle. Instead, we’ve made these decisions based on some combination of what has (historically, anyway) given us the best results, what is safest, what is most efficient, and what costs us the least money.
In a nutshell, that’s why liquid fuel is so valuable. So far, it’s the clear winner when we need energy for transportation—especially air transportation and heavy, long-distance shipping—because it allows you to stuff a lot of energy into relatively small amount of storage space, and easily refill on the go. There are other options, of course, like electricity. And that can work quite well, depending on what you’re trying to do. Eventually, we may find ourselves in a world where liquid fuel is no longer the best option. But we aren’t there yet. And for those forms of transport that take us into the air or move our belongings very long distances, we aren't likely to get there for a good long time.
That's why I care about liquid fuel, and why I'm interested in the future of biofuels. Yes, biofuels do have a future. But what that future will be depends on whether we can control for some very messy variables. Here, in three points, are the big things you need to know about biofuel.
1. Corn ethanol really is flawed. But maybe not as much as you think.
Biofuel is a nice, round word encompassing a lot of tricky, little, oddly shaped dots. You can make biofuel from lots of different things, in lots of different ways. Corn ethanol, cellulosic ethanol, bio-oil, bio-diesel, algae oil—they all have some benefits and some detriments, which means they all have some big backers and some big haters. Right now, any biofuel produced at a big, commercially useful scale is bound to be ethanol, and in the United Sates, that means corn ethanol. But, from what I see, the evidence favors using options that aren’t dependent on a dedicated corn crop. That’s not to say that corn ethanol is the devil—its bad reputation comes, at least in part, from backlash against some pretty heinous overselling—but it does have some big drawbacks and we might have an easier time making truly Green biofuels another way.
Continue readingMany US ISPs in epidemic of covert search-hijacking of their customers
The Electronic Frontier Foundation worked with UC Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute to uncover a widespread program of search-hijacking by American ISPs. Many US ISPs run covert proxies that redirect certain lucrative search queries (made by customers who believe that they are searching Google or another search engine) to their preferred suppliers, pocketing an affiliate fee for delivering their customers. Participating ISPs, which include Cavalier, Cogent, Frontier, Fuse, DirecPC, RCN, and Wide Open West (Charter used to do this, but appear to have stopped), did not disclose the practice to their customers, who were meant to believe that they were getting the search results that their preferred search-engines had presented.
EFF and ICSI uncovered the vendor that supplied the hijacking software, a company called Paxfire.
Using EFF's HTTPS Everywhere Firefox extension and a search-engine that permits HTTPS logins (such as Google or DuckDuckGo) will prevent this sort of hijacking.
Widespread Hijacking of Search Traffic in the United StatesThe published research papers did not identify the controller of the proxy servers that were receiving the traffic, but parallel investigations by the ICSI Networking Group and EFF have since revealed a company called Paxfire as the main actor behind this interception. Paxfire's privacy policy says that it may retain copies of users' "queries", a vague term that could be construed to mean either the domain names that they look up or the searches they conduct, or both. The redirections mostly occur transparently to the user and few if any of the affected ISP customers are likely to have ever heard of Paxfire, let alone consented to this collection of their communications with search engines.
The proxies in question are operated either directly by Paxfire, or by the ISPs using web proxies provided by Paxfire. Major users of the Paxfire system include Cavalier, Cogent, Frontier, Fuse, DirecPC, RCN, and Wide Open West. Charter also used Paxfire in the past, but appears to have discontinued this practice.
Why do they do this?
In short, the purpose appears to be monetization of users' searches. ICSI Networking's investigation has revealed that Paxfire's HTTP proxies selectively siphon search requests out of the proxied traffic flows and redirect them through one or more affiliate marketing programs, presumably resulting in commission payments to Paxfire and the ISPs involved. The affiliate programs involved include Commission Junction, the Google Affiliate Network, LinkShare, and Ask.com. When looking up brand names such as "apple", "dell", "groupon", and "wsj", the affiliate programs direct the queries to the corresponding brands' websites or to search assistance pages instead of providing the intended search engine results page.
(Image: 2005_South Africa_Centurion_DSCF0242, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from hmvh's photostream)
What’s it take to get off nuclear power?
To get off nuclear power, Germany plans to make its electricity system 80% renewable by 2050. That's not going to be easy. Just to reach the first milestone of that goal—35% renewable capacity by 2020—the country will have to build 2,800 miles of new, high-voltage transmission lines. Although, one significant thing missing from this story: How many miles of transmission lines Germany would have normally built during that time. Even so, watch this space for financing debates, NIMBY wars, and what promises to be some really fascinating problem solving. (Via Michael Noble and thanks to Chris Baker!)
Atlas rockets could carry astronauts to space again
It looks like Boeing will be the main competitor for Space X in the race to see what U.S. company will provide the commercial space flight services that NASA eventually plans to rely on.
Space X has its Dragon capsule, and Boeing is developing a new capsule system, called the CST-100. That capsule would ride into space under the power of an Atlas V rocket, an engineering descendant of the Atlas rockets that carried the first four American astronauts to space half a century ago.
Write an adventure novel in three days, the Michael Moorcock way
Michael Moorcock's tips for writing complete adventure novels in three days are the fruit of his early career, when he was writing novels (including his Elric classics) in three to ten days each. The advice comes from the opening chapter of the out-of-print Michael Moorcock: Death Is No Obstacle, which consists of interviews Moorcock conducted with Colin Greenwood. It's really good insight into how you can take mechanical plots and plot-devices and use them to make a book charge forward at a rate of knots, and still hang many different kinds of story, insight, and language off of them.
Go read the whole thing, it's great stuff.* "[The formula is] The Maltese Falcon. Or the Holy Grail. You use the quest theme, basically. In The Maltese Falcon it's a lot of people after the same thing, which is the Black Bird. In Mort D'Arthur it's also a lot of people after the same thing, which is the Holy Grail. That's the formula for Westerns too: everybody's after the gold of El Dorado or whatever." (Cf the MacGuffin.)
* "The formula depends on that sense of a human being up against superhuman forces, whether it's Big Business, or politics, or supernatural Evil, or whatever. The hero is fallible in their terms, and doesn't really want to be mixed up with them. He's always just about to walk out when something else comes along that involves him on a personal level." (An example of this is when Elric's wife gets kidnapped.)
* "There is an event every four pages, for example -- and notes. Lists of things you're going to use. Lists of coherent images; coherent to you or generically coherent. You think: 'Right, Stormbringer [a novel in the Elric series]: swords; shields; horns", and so on."
* "[I prepared] A complete structure. Not a plot, exactly, but a structure where the demands were clear. I knew what narrative problems I had to solve at every point. I then wrote them at white heat; and a lot of it was inspiration: the image I needed would come immediately [when] I needed it. Really, it's just looking around the room, looking at ordinary objects and turning them into what you need. A mirror: a mirror that absorbs the souls of the damned."
* "You need a list of images that are purely fantastic: deliberate paradoxes, say: the City of Screaming Statues, things like that. You just write a list of them so you've got them there when you need them. Again, they have to cohere, have the right resonances, one with the other."
* "The imagery comes before the action, because the action's actually unimportant. An object to be obtained -- limited time to obtain it. It's easily developed, once you work the structure out."
* "Time is the important element in any action adventure story. In fact, you get the action and adventure out of the element of time. It's a classic formula: "We've only got six days to save the world!" Immediately you've set the reader up with a structure: there are only six days, then five, then four and finally, in the classic formula anyway, there's only 26 seconds to save the world! Will they make it in time?"
How to Write a Book in Three Days: Lessons from Michael Moorcock (via Making Light)
Lucky Cosmonaut
Everybody say, "Hello," to Russian cosmonaut Yury Malenchenko. Hi, Yury!
I like this photo because he kind of reminds me of one of those Japanese lucky cats.
Image: REUTERS/Sergei Remezov
High temperatures change parenting behavior in birds
So here's a statistic I'd never heard before: Between 1979 and 2003 years, more Americans died from heat exposure than from hurricanes, lightning, tornadoes, floods, and earthquakes combined.
Wow.
That comes from Jason Goldman, a scientist and science blogger, who has a post up today about how animals that thrive in extreme heat situations actually manage to do that. Specifically, he's writing about a recent paper that studied how harsh environments change the parenting behavior of desert birds. Apparently, the hotter the nest, the more the male bird is likely to be involved in incubating the eggs.
Biparental care, which is the care of offspring by both male and female parents, represents a classic example of the trade-off between cooperation and conflict in social behavior in the animal kingdom. If they cooperate, parents can work to improve the odds of the survival of their offspring. By withholding care, however, an individual can potentially survive longer and increase the odds of successful breeding later in life. Assuming that biparental care is even possible in a given species, mathematical models expect it to occur anytime the possibility of offspring survival is significantly greater than when cared for by a single parent. In particular, the harsh environment hypothesis predicts that parents should both contribute to the care of their young in environments susceptible to harsh weather conditions, where food is scarce, where there is intense competition for resources, if desiccation of eggs is a possibility, or in areas where the offspring are regularly preyed upon.
The Kentish plover provided Al-Rashidi with the opportunity to conduct a particularly clever experiment. These birds lay their eggs on the ground, which means that the eggs as well as both parents have direct exposure to the surrounding environment. Some nests are located under bushes, and are therefore naturally protected from direct sunlight, while others are out in the open. This provided an obvious way for Al-Rashidi to create two experimental groups – one in direct sunlight and a second in the shade. In general, males tend to sit on the nest during the cooler nighttime, while females tend to take the daytime shift. The problem is that the females risk overheating if they incubate the eggs all day. The harsh environment hypothesis, therefore, predicts that the warmest nests will not only show evidence of more biparental care but that the two parents will take turns more often throughout the day.
... As expected, males and females both spent more time sitting on the exposed nests than the covered ones over the whole day, and as predicted by the harsh environment hypothesis, there were more change-overs – that is, they took turns more often – during the hottest part of the day at the exposed nests.
German cops call airport full-body pornoscanners “useless,” EU requires opt out from scanning
Bruce Schneier rounds up a series of links about problems with airport full-body "pornoscanners." The German police call them "useless" (35 percent of fliers repeatedly set them off, though they weren't carrying anything dangerous), some scanners are set off by sweaty armpits, and the European Parliament requires EU aviation authorities to allow you to opt out of full body scans (both UK and Dutch airports have a "get scanned or don't fly" requirement for people pulled for full-body scans). Here a bit from the Agence France Presse:
The report said the machines were confused by several layers of clothing, boots, zip fasteners and even pleats, while in 10 percent of cases the passenger's posture set them off.German Police Call Airport Full-Body Scanners UselessThe police called for the scanners to be made less sensitive to movements and certain types of clothing and the software to be improved. They also said the US manufacturer L3 Communications should make them work faster.
In the wake of the 10-month trial which began on September 27 last year, German federal police see no interest in carrying out any more tests with the scanners until new more effective models become available, Welt am Sonntag said.
"There had better be feathers on the raptors": Dino-blogger Brian Switek's open letter to Steven Spielberg upon the occasion of rumors about the possibility of a Jurassic Park 4.
Want to live a long life? Ignore centenarians, watch Seventh Day Adventists
If a centenarian jumped off a bridge while eating a bag of jelly donuts and chain-smoking, would you do it, too?
That's basically the message in a new column by LiveScience's Christopher Wanjek, which looks at why the people who live the longest should not necessarily be health role models for the rest of us.
It seems that longevity goes hand-in-hand with some funny yesbuts. What you eat and how active you are doesn't seem to matter ... if you're one of the very, very lucky folks with a genetic predisposition toward surviving into extreme old age. For everybody else, there's pretty good evidence that healthy habits actually do extend your lifespan. Part of what fascinates me about the studies that show that is that they often compare Seventh Day Adventists to the general population. Why? Because Seventh Day Adventists generally don't eat meat (the first time I ever saw lentil loaf, it came from SDA cookbook), and are discouraged from booze, cigarettes, drugs, and caffeine. It also doesn't hurt that they run a massive, and well-respected, healthcare system, centered around Loma Linda University. Makes 'em easier to study like that.
For the general population, there is a preponderance of evidence that diet and exercise can postpone or ward off chronic disease and extend life. Many studies on Seventh Day Adventists — with their limited consumption of alcohol, tobacco and meat — attribute upward of 10 extra years of life as a result of lifestyle choices.
Image: Elderly People - sign on Warwick Road, Olton, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from ell-r-brown's photostream
Old-timey German nose-error-correcting contraption
This delightful vintage German contraption will cure your nose erros (Potato Nose, Saddle Nose, Duckbill Nose, Wide Nose, Pointy Nose, Long Nose, Hook Nose and Slant Nose) and give you a "Greco-Roman Normal Form" in short order. All for 7-10 marks!
Text: SUCH NOSE ERRORS and similar will be quite significantly improved with the orthopedic nose former "Zello". The new and improved Model 20 exceeds all others. Double-layered padding clings exactly to the anatomical structure of the nose so that the affected nasal cartilage is normal-shaped in a short time. (Bone deformities are not.) Most warmly recommended by Royal Court Advisor Dr. G. von Eck, M.D. and other medical authorities. 100,000 "Zello" in use. Price 5 Marks, 7 Marks, and 10 Marks and a 10% surcharge for a doctor's visit. (A model or impression is desired.) Specialist L. M. Baginski, Berlin W. 126, WInterfeldstr.Ouch! Nasenformer "Zello" (Zello Noseformer!)
The Manhood Camping Firequest is NOT A GAY THING. [Craiglist via @Annaleen/@charliejane]
Rowan Atkinson reportedly injured in crash
Fresh from setting the fastest time ever recorded by a celebrity on the BBC's Top Gear, Blackadder and Mr. Bean star Rowan Atkinson reportedly received "minor injuries" in a car accident today. Hollie-Rae Merrick writes:
Emergency services were called to the A605 at Haddon at 7.30pm following reports that a man had been involved in a single car collision – believed to be a McLaren F1. On arrival, paramedics found that the car had left the road.Rowan Atkinson in hospital following crash [Evening Star]
The Slap Hat
This is no normal hat. This is a Slap Hat Extreme
Previously: Tactical pen.
Google Plus’s “Real Name” policy is abusive; Facebook is not a “Real Name” success story
Here's danah boyd in very good form, explaining why "Real Name" policies like the one Google has rammed down Google Plus users' throats (and like the insanely naive one that Randi Zuckerberg would like to foist on the entire Internet) are an abuse of power:
Over and over again, people keep pointing to Facebook as an example where “real names” policies work. This makes me laugh hysterically. One of the things that became patently clear to me in my fieldwork is that countless teens who signed up to Facebook late into the game chose to use pseudonyms or nicknames. What’s even more noticeable in my data is that an extremely high percentage of people of color used pseudonyms as compared to the white teens that I interviewed. Of course, this would make sense…“Real Names” Policies Are an Abuse of PowerThe people who most heavily rely on pseudonyms in online spaces are those who are most marginalized by systems of power. “Real names” policies aren’t empowering; they’re an authoritarian assertion of power over vulnerable people. These ideas and issues aren’t new (and I’ve even talked about this before), but what is new is that marginalized people are banding together and speaking out loudly. And thank goodness.
What’s funny to me is that people also don’t seem to understand the history of Facebook’s “real names” culture. When early adopters (first the elite college students…) embraced Facebook, it was a trusted community. They gave the name that they used in the context of college or high school or the corporation that they were a part of. They used the name that fit into the network that they joined Facebook with. The names they used weren’t necessarily their legal names; plenty of people chose Bill instead of William. But they were, for all intents and purposes, “real.” As the site grew larger, people had to grapple with new crowds being present and discomfort emerged over the norms. But the norms were set and people kept signing up and giving the name that they were most commonly known by. By the time celebrities kicked in, Facebook wasn’t demanding that Lady Gaga call herself Stefani Germanotta, but of course, she had a “fan page” and was separate in the eyes of the crowd. Meanwhile, what many folks failed to notice is that countless black and Latino youth signed up to Facebook using handles. Most people don’t notice what black and Latino youth do online. Likewise, people from outside of the US started signing up to Facebook and using alternate names. Again, no one noticed because names transliterated from Arabic or Malaysian or containing phrases in Portuguese weren’t particularly visible to the real name enforcers. Real names are by no means universal on Facebook, but it’s the importance of real names is a myth that Facebook likes to shill out. And, for the most part, privileged white Americans use their real name on Facebook. So it “looks” right.
Color video from Hiroshima
The Nation's Greg Mitchell has a new book out about the strange saga of color video, shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the nuclear bomb attacks, which was suppressed for nearly 40 years. You can see a couple of clips from that video in the trailer he's put together for the book.
In the weeks following the atomic attacks on Japan sixty-six years ago this week, and then for decades afterward, the United States engaged in airtight suppression of all film shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings. This included vivid color footage shot by U.S. military crews and black-and-white Japanese newsreel film.
The color US military footage would remain hidden until the early 1980s, and has never been fully aired. It rests today at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, in the form of 90,000 feet of raw footage labeled #342 USAF.
When that footage finally emerged, I spoke with and corresponded with the man at the center of this drama: Lt. Col. (Ret.) Daniel A. McGovern, who directed the US military film-makers in 1946, managed the Japanese footage, and then kept watch on all of the top-secret material for decades. I also interviewed one of his key assistants, Herbert Sussan, and some of the Japanese survivors they filmed.
Now I’ve written a book and e-book about this, titled Atomic Cover-up: Two US Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and The Greatest Movie Never Made.
What I think is particularly striking about the clips in Mitchell's preview video: They're heart-wrenching, but, at this point, not particularly shocking. The US Military may have successfully covered up video that showed the brutality of atomic warfare, but, in the intervening years, we saw the brutality of war (in general) in Vietnam and we saw what acute radiation poisoning can do the human body in Chernobyl. Secrets don't stay buried even when secrets stay buried.
Robot makes a cookie
Here is a video demonstration of a Willow Garage PR-2 robot making a single large cookie. Willow Garage also makes the robot that UC Berkeley researchers taught to fold laundry and pair socks. This baker robot was programmed by Mario Bollini and Daniela Rus of MIT's Distributed Robotics Lab. From Nick Bilton's Bits blog at the NYT:
In June, the same researchers programmed the PR2 to place grocery store products in a shopping cart. They also taught the robot to mix a bowl of ingredients with the goal of making breakfast, obviously not for the robot to eat."Your Very Own Cookie-Baking Robot" (Thanks, Mumbles Mumbach!)
How many Americans die because of routine racial segregation (the social kind, not Jim Crow)? According to calculations by the EpiAnalysis blog, it could be as high as 176,000 people per year. (Via Robin Lloyd)
Earth’s two moons
There's a big difference between the side of the Moon we can see, and the side we can't. Although it seems pretty pockmarked to the layperson, "our" side of the Moon is actually the smooth half. On the dark side, there's huge mountain ranges and much bigger craters.
There are lots of theories that seek to explain this disparity. The newest: Earth once had two moons. And the smaller of the pair eventually crashed into its larger sibling on the side that faces away from Earth. From the BBC:
Dr Martin Jutzi from the University of Bern, Switzerland, is one of the authors of the paper. He explained: "When we look at the current theory there is no real reason why there was only one moon.
After spending millions of years "stuck", the smaller moon embarked on a collision course with its big sister, slowly crashing into it at a velocity of less than three kilometres per second - slower than the speed of sound in rocks.
... In a commentary, Dr Maria Zuber from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, US, suggests that while the new study "demonstrates plausibility rather than proof", the authors "raise the legitimate possibility that after the giant impact our Earth perhaps fleetingly possessed more than one moon".
In other words, this isn't so much a proven thing, as the scientific equivalent of a plot bunny. The researchers hope to inspire studies that would either prove them wrong, or lend credence to their ideas. This could end up being the start of something big. Or it could eventually be regarded with about as much respect as the suggestion, "What if Moon were cookie?" We'll have to wait to find out.
Image: A mini-guide to our wonderful Moon, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from dingopup's photostream
Climate change and earthquakes: It’s complicated
In the wake of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami last March, I started seeing a lot of headlines like this:
"Does climate change mean more tsunamis?"
"Did climate change cause the Japanese earthquake?"
In those stories, environmentalists and climate science deniers went head-to-head, with one side pointing out yet another unintended consequence of fossil fuel consumption, and the other side pointing and laughing at what it saw as patently ridiculous fear-mongering. Missing: The nuance. And you know how much I love the nuance.
This is a story that contains a whole lot of yesbut. Yes, it really does make sense that climate change could trigger earthquakes. But it's very, very unlikely that that effect is responsible for any of the monster quakes we've experienced recently. And behind that apparent contradiction lies some really, really interesting science.
Alan Moore: Storyteller
Alan Moore: Storyteller is a lush new artbook about the writer and comic genius behind Watchmen, V for Vendetta, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and From Hell. The hardcover monograph spans Moore's entire career, from his early performance pieces and comic strips to his emergence as one of comicdom's most brilliant and esoteric voices. Along the way, we gain insight into his process and can even see pages from his work-in-progress notebooks and scripts. The book includes an audio CD with Moore's spoken word and audio performances. Gary Spencer Millidge, author of Comic Book Design, put the book together and Michael Moorcock wrote the foreward. A lovely objet d′art and tribute to this essential voice of 20th (and 21st) century narrative.
Alan Moore: Storyteller (Amazon)
And for more on Moore, don't miss BB pal Erik Davis's interview with him on the excellent Expanding Mind podcast. Topics include Psychogeography, John Dee, comic gods, and magic(k). Listen below!
Man busted for DIY fission experiments
Richard Handle, 31, of Stockholm Ängelholm, Sweden was attempting DIY nuclear energy experiments in his home. Wondering whether possession of radium, americium, and uranium might be illegal, he contacted Sweden's Radiation Authority to ask. His suspicions were confirmed when police arrested him. From the Associated Press:
"Swedish man caught trying to split atoms at home" (Thanks, Sean Ness!)"I have always been interested in physics and chemistry," Handl said, adding he just wanted to "see if it's possible to split atoms at home."
The police raid took place in late July, but police have refused to comment. If convicted, Handl could face fines or up to two years in prison.
Although he says police didn't detect dangerous levels of radiation in his apartment, he now acknowledges the project wasn't such a good idea.
"From now on, I will stick to the theory," he said.
I'm headed to Vancouver this weekend to give a keynote at SIGGRAPH; I did a long interview with Blaine Kyllo from the Georgia Straight about the subject of my talk -- that is, how you build a digital copyright system that gives creators a fair deal, and why getting it wrong is bad for the whole society, not just artists.
Photo: Escher painting refracted in a drop of falling water
Reddit's Smsilton took this incredible 60mm macro shot of an iconic MC Escher painting being refracted through a drop of falling water, and documented the process:
Yeah I used the Canon 60mm macro f/2.8. I shot at ISO 640 and 1/250. It took about 150ish shots to get that one, ~2 hours. The hardest part was focusing, in the set up picture I posted in the first comment you can see a piece of string above the eye dropper. I would let that hang down off the eye dropper and focus on that, then move it and squeeze the dropper and the shutter at almost the same time. I have like 30ish more pictures with the drop clearly in the shot but the sketch behind it isn't in focus, this was the clearest one I got.Water drop falling in front of an MC Escher sketch, I took this pic (imgur.com) (via Neatorama)
Can you identify this phone thief?
Do you know this man? He stole a mobile phone from a man on the street near my flat in east London this morning. I took this picture just before he ran off. If you know him please dial 101 (in England) to be connected to police, and quote reference number CRIS 4620821/11.
Update: Image removed at police request -- they know who the guy is and don't want to spoil the lineup.
Man who stole mobile phone, Brunswick Place, EC1V 9, Hackney, London, UK
How Felicia Day’s online gamer serial makes good TV, good business and good art
Forbes's David Ewalt has a really good profile on Felicia Day's innovative work in producing uncompromisingly niche-focused, medium-cost Web video that is both more artistically satisfying for her than TV was, and more lucrative.
Felicia Day: Mogul In The Making (via Copyfight)But when Day showed the script around, it fell flat. Studio execs “didn’t even understand the concept of gaming,” she says. “It was like a foreign country to them.” Agents advised her to drop it and write a script for an established program. But Day wanted to tell her story. So she produced the first few shows herself, borrowing equipment, recruiting actor friends, and shooting in her living room. It was, she says, the scariest thing she’d ever done—but it worked.
“The minute we uploaded a video and started getting feedback and interacting with our audience, it was so much more fulfilling than anything I’d done before,” she says. “There was no point for me to go and try to sell it as a TV show, especially when we put in a PayPal button and people started donating.”
Committed fans were key to the success of The Guild, and Day cultivated them carefully, using Twitter and Facebook to build two-way relationships. “We shoot a season once a year, but maintain our social network all year, because we’re committed to our audience,” she says. “They support us, we support them.”
Her devoted core audience, young and Internet-savvy, quickly attracted attention. Sprint subsidized production of The Guild in return for a short “sponsored by” message at the beginning of each episode. Microsoft paid to debut each season exclusively on Xbox Live, the Zune Video Marketplace and MSN Video. Episodes go to the Web four weeks after they complete that exclusive run.
Interview: Yoko Ono
By Xeni Jardin
3 things you need to know about biofuels
By Maggie Koerth-Baker
Climate change and earthquakes: It’s complicated
By Maggie Koerth-Baker
- Mark Frauenfelder
- Cory Doctorow
- David Pescovitz
- Xeni Jardin
- Rob Beschizza
- Maggie Koerth-Baker
- Ken Snider Sysadmin
- Antinous Lead Moderator
- Avram & Felton Moderators
- Dean Putney Developer
- Eric Mittleman Video Editor
- Terry Thurlow Finance
- Rob Rader & Marc Mayer Legal
- Ed Szylko Insurance
- Jason Weisberger Publisher-at-Large
- John Battelle Partner
- Federated Media Advertising
- Contributors
The world's greatest neurozine
Editors
Managing Editor
Science Editor
Happy Mutants
Cory
Latest collection: With a Little Help
[Donate a copy to a library or school]
Latest novel: For the Win
[Donate a copy to a library or school]
Upcoming appearances:
* Toronto, March 5, 5-7 PM: Keynote at U of Toronto iSchool Boundaries, Frontiers and Gatekeepers conference
* Toronto, March 6, 8-11PM: Reading with Karl Schroeder and David Nickle, Chiaroscuro
David
"Find the others." - Dr. Timothy Leary
Facebook
Maggie
I do the Twitter and the Google+.
Upcoming appearances:
• September 4—8, 2011: Science Center World Congress
Cape Town, South Africa
• March 29—31, 2012: Writer in Residence
York College of Pennsylvania