The Latest from Boing Boing

CIA waterboarded individual suspects up to 183 times Posted: 20 Apr 2009 04:29 AM PDT Fee sez, "The BBC and Guardian report that despite claims that waterboarding leads to people confessing all quickly, some suspects were subjected to the torture hundreds of times. I was already appalled by the idea of civilised countries using torture... this level of torture enacted upon indivduals is inhumane and unspeakable. I hope they are prosecuted." The CIA waterboarded two al-Qaida terror suspects a total of 266 times, according to a report that suggests the use of the torture technique was much more extensive than previously thought. The documents showed waterboarding was used 183 times on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who admitted planning the 9/11 attacks, the New York Times reported today. The US Justice Department memos released last Thursday showed that waterboarding, which the US now admits is torture, was used 83 times on the alleged al-Qaida senior commander Abu Zubaydah, the paper said. A former CIA officer claimed in 2007 that Zubaydah was subjected to the simulated drowning technique for only 35 seconds. CIA waterboarded al-Qaida suspects 266 times (Thanks, Fee!)

Phlatprinter: a CNC machine you can build with hardware store parts Posted: 20 Apr 2009 02:06 AM PDT Francesco sez, "Phlatboyz are about to release the new and really improved Phlatprinter MK2: a special type of CNC machine (created by Mark and Trish Carew) that anyone can build with materials purchased at a local hardware store." The Phlatpriner MK II (Thanks, Francesco!)

Dollar a Day to Democrats for so long and Norm Coleman stalls Posted: 19 Apr 2009 11:24 PM PDT Adam sez, Republicans in DC know Al Franken won the Minnesota Senate race. But they are bankrolling Norm Coleman's continued court challenges and are encouraging him to drag this thing out forever. For them, it's worth it to keep shelling out money to block the seating of Senator Franken. Put simply, the incentives are all wrong. But this weekend, some online folks launched a new campaign to set the incentives right. Howard Dean's Democracy for America teamed up with the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (founded by former MoveOn.org organizers and Aaron Swartz, the co-inventor of Reddit and RSS) to launch www.NormDollar.com. At that site, people are asked to give a "Dollar a Day to Make Norm Go Away" -- with the funding going to help progressive candidates defeat congressional Republicans in 2010. The theory: If Republicans up for re-election in 2010 see the progressives who are out to defeat them get an infusion of donations each day that Coleman is obstinate, they and their funders will call Coleman and say, "Your time is up. Concede!" So far, it's working. In less than one weekend, Norm Coleman has raised over $20,000 to help progressive candidates -- and that number grows by the hour. NormDollar (Thanks, Adam!)

Enigma: Derren Brown's new live mentalism and magic show on UK tour Posted: 19 Apr 2009 10:09 PM PDT Mentalist and conjurer Derren Brown's taking a new show called "Enigma" on tour across the UK. Derren's a terrific performer who does an absolutely baffling mentalist act that combines applied psychology, prestidigitation, and a fabulous performing style that'll have you scraping your jaw off the theatre floor. We caught him in London last year and were just delighted. All the stuff you've seen him do on TV and YouTube? He does stuff that's that cool, except there's no camera, no edits -- nothing that could be used to simply trick you. The fact that he's a "psychic"-busting skeptic only makes it all cooler, since you know that there's a trick in there somewhere, but damned if you can find it. (Or at least, if you can, you're a lot smarter than me!) Tour 2009 Previously: Derren Brown's Tricks of the Mind: book explains magic, hypnosis ... Derren Brown's Tricks of the Mind video -- baffling mentalism ... Derren Brown, mentalist - Boing Boing False Memories of tragic and happy events - Boing Boing Can't see the video? Click here

Speccing servers for rural Bangladesh Posted: 19 Apr 2009 10:02 PM PDT Slashdotters are eagerly debating the answer to this provocative question, posed by Travalas, who needs gear that'll run unattended in Bangladesh: Last year I moved to Rural Bangladesh. My work is pretty diverse, everything from hacking web apps to designing building materials. Increasingly a Linux VM on my MacBook Pro is insufficient due to storage speed/processing constraints and the desire to interface more easily with some sensor packages. There are a few issues that make that make a standard server less than desirable. This server will generally not be running with any sort of climate control and it may need to move to different locations so would also be helpful if it was somewhat portable. The environment here is hot, humid and dusty and brutal on technology and power is very inconsistent so it will often be on a combination of Interruptible Power Supply and solar power. So a UPS is a must and low power consumption desirable, so it strikes me that an Integrated UPS a la Google's servers would be handy. Spec wise it needs to be it needs to be able to handle several VM's and some other processor storage intensive tasks. So 4 cores, 8GB of ram and 3-4 TB of SATA storage seems like a place to start for processing specs. What sort of hardware would you recommend without breaking the bank? Apart from the normal background radiation of dumb Internet answers ("Why don't you buy an RV and use it to house the armed guards you'll need?") there's some good techy discussion there. Rugged Linux Server For Rural, Tropical Environment?

Brazil cracks down on sat-hackers who bounce ham signals off US military satellites Posted: 19 Apr 2009 09:59 PM PDT Brazilian radio-cops are handing out $20,000 fines to satellite hackers who bounce their ham signals off FLTSATCOM -- an array of disused US military satellites -- using them as range-extenders for purposes as diverse as trucker-chatter to avoiding the logging cops in illegal Amazon logging operations: To use the satellite, pirates typically take an ordinary ham radio transmitter, which operates in the 144- to 148-MHZ range, and add a frequency doubler cobbled from coils and a varactor diode. That lets the radio stretch into the lower end of FLTSATCOM's 292- to 317-MHz uplink range. All the gear can be bought near any truck stop for less than $500. Ads on specialized websites offer to perform the conversion for less than $100. Taught the ropes, even rough electricians can make Bolinha-ware. "I saw it more than once in truck repair shops," says amateur radio operator Adinei Brochi (PY2ADN) "Nearly illiterate men rigged a radio in less than one minute, rolling wire on a coil." Brochi, who assembled his first radio set from spare parts at 12, has been tracking the Brazilian satellite hacking problem (.pdf) for years. Brochi says the Pentagon's concerns are obvious. "If a soldier is shot in an ambush, the first thing he will think of doing will be to send a help request over the radio," observes Brochi. "What if he's trying to call for help and two truckers are discussing soccer? In an emergency, that soldier won't be able to remember quickly how to change the radio programming to look for a frequency that's not saturated." The Great Brazilian Sat-Hack Crackdown (Photo: Divulgação/Polícia Federal)

Clement Freud's funniest joke Posted: 19 Apr 2009 09:55 PM PDT The Telegraph celebrates the recently departed Clement Freud (writer, grandson of Sigmund, chef, politician, broadcaster) with this clip of the delightful old codger telling "the funniest joke ever told." I laughed aloud -- and I loved his Grimble kids' books, which were weird, subversive and funny in just this way. Did Clement Freud tell the funniest joke ever told? Previously: Grimble and Grimble at Xmas online - Boing Boing

JG Ballard (1930-2009) Posted: 19 Apr 2009 12:05 PM PDT As Cory noted below, JG Ballard died this morning. Ballard was one of my favorite writers ever and his thinking about culture, art, science, technology, and human behavior had a massive influence on me. He will be missed greatly. "Picturing the psychology of the future is what it's all been about." --JG Ballard (photo by Paul Murphy/Catfunt) Previously: JG Ballard on Modern Architecture - Boing Boing JG Ballard's autobiography excerpt and sad news of cancer - Boing ... JG Ballard and David Cronenberg interviewed by Mark Dery - Boing Boing Mark Dery on JG Ballard's memoir - Boing Boing Tonight's JG Ballard event in San Francisco - Boing Boing JG Ballard quotation book - Boing Boing JG Ballard on CSI - Boing Boing JG Ballard: Interviews book, bash with RE/Search and Survival ... Ballardian pool on Flickr - Boing Boing

Anatomical paintings on vanity and fading beauty Posted: 20 Apr 2009 12:27 AM PDT Kim sez, "The sequence of paintings by a Spanish artist called Fernando Vicente is called Vanitas, meditations on the fading of beauty and the inevitability of death, basically." Fernando Vicente: Vanitas Fernando Vicente (Thanks, Kim!)

RIP, JG Ballard Posted: 19 Apr 2009 11:39 AM PDT Jay sez, "After some rumors on twitter, Michael Moorcock and BBC confirmed the death of author J.G. Ballard. Sad stuff - but he needs to be noted." The author JG Ballard, famed for novels such as Crash and Empire of the Sun, has died aged 78 after a long illness. His agent Margaret Hanbury said the author had been ill "for several years" and had died on Sunday morning. Cult author JG Ballard dead at 78 (Thanks, Jay!)

I Love Charts Posted: 19 Apr 2009 08:08 AM PDT Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine. I saw this on the Flowingdata RSS feed this morning. It is so cute, it makes my ovaries hurt. Thrill as PBS teaches kids the joys of the pictorial representation of data. Can't see the video? Click here

Let Us Now Praise Famous Mice Posted: 19 Apr 2009 07:56 AM PDT Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine. Where would we be without the laboratory mouse? The answer, to borrow one of my late Grandmother's best idioms, is, "Up shit creek without a paddle." Behind our modern understanding of genetic inheritance, behind 20th-century cancer treatments and 21st-century embryonic stem cell research, behind no fewer than 21 Nobel Prizes...you'll find a mouse. mental_floss and I will be giving those mice the exposure they so richly deserve in an upcoming issue of the magazine. But I'd like to whet your appetite with a couple of fun lab mouse facts. Collect them. Share them. Trade them with your friends! 1. In an Alternate Universe, Lab Mice Worked With Mendel Highly inbred to achieve a local hipster scene level of uniformity, today's laboratory mice don't bear much resemblance to their wild cousins. Basically, the lab mouse was invented in the early years of the 20th century. And, before that, mice really didn't have a major share of the lab animal market. But the mouse revolution might have happened earlier had it not been for one very uptight European bishop. In the 19th century, Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, famously discovered the basics of how plants and animals pass simple physical traits on to their kids, via a series of breeding experiments using pea plants. But Mendel had started off studying the fur color of mice, instead. His efforts scandalized Bishop Anton Ernst Schaffgotsch, according to a 2003 article in the journal Genetics. Schaffgotsch, putting two and two together, reasoned that mice breeding would mean animals were having sex in Brother Gregor's quarters. Apparently, plant sex in the garden was considered spiritually preferable, and Mendel turned his attention to the color and texture of peas. 2. Lab Mice are Famous on the Internets Meet the Nude Mouse. His claim to fame, being inbred so that he and all his kin are born hairless and, like Bubble Boy, without any immune system to speak of. You may recognize Nude Mouse from his brief stint as a media celebrity. Back in the late 90s, photos of a hairless mouse with what appeared to be a human ear growing on its back began making the rounds of email forwards. An ad featuring the photo was placed in The New York Times by an animal rights group, which claimed the mouse was a genetically engineered human organ factory. In reality, it was just a normal (non-genetically engineered) Nude Mouse whose inability to reject tissue transplants made him a great tool for growing artificial ears made from cow cartilage on biodegradeable scaffolding. Today, researchers can grow ears made from a human transplantee's own cartilage in a dish, without the middle-mouse. Photo courtesy otisarchives2.

What Poison Ivy Has Been Up To While You Weren't Paying Attention Posted: 19 Apr 2009 06:55 AM PDT Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine. So I'm currently working on an article for Prevention magazine about some of the surprising ways that climate change can screw with your health. The thing I least expected is the dirty lambada of destruction being danced, as we speak, by global warming and the common North American Toxicodendron radicans. Part of what makes this so nifty to me, is that, once you think about it, it's sort of a "duh" moment. While not so great for you and I, carbon dioxide is, basically, plant food. I'm told that rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere affect different plants in different ways, but poison ivy is definitely one of the winners of global warming. For this unpleasant little weed, more CO2 seems to mean more growth But wait, it gets worse. Lewis Ziska, a plant physiologist with the Agriculture Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has been studying poison ivy both in the lab and out in the natural wilds of Duke University's research forests. He says that, not only is poison ivy growing fat and happy on the spoils of our carbon emissions, but that plants getting more CO2 also produce more, and stronger, levels of urushiol---the toxin that makes the ivy so darned appealing to begin with. In fact, while other factors like the local growing season and the amount of light the plants are getting can alter CO2's results, Ziska says we can definitely see a difference between the poison ivy of today and the stuff your parents were chasing each other around with at Camp Thankgodthekidsrouttastate 50 years ago. Um...happy summer! Photo courtesy quinn.anya

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