Wednesday, September 15, 2010

The Latest from Boing Boing

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The Latest from Boing Boing

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HOWTO read a patent (funny!)

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 04:59 AM PDT

Dan Shapiro's HOW TO READ A PATENT is superb, a wonderful demystification of one of the most obfuscatory, potentially harmful instruments in contemporary law. Also, it's funny.
Step 2: Skip the drawings

Patent drawings are mostly similar to high school notebook doodles except that they cost $5,000. They're generally impossible to read and only indirectly have a bearing on the enforceability of the patent. The occasional exception exists: the incredibly edifying flowchart. the drawings that look like a giant gummy bear (because the invention is, actually, a giant gummy bear) and sometimes a picture is simply worth a thousand words (particularly when that picture depicts the inventor, one Mr. Edward L. Van Halen, demonstrating proper use of his invention).

How to read a patent in 60 seconds (via O'Reilly Radar)



Enormous library desk made of books

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 04:55 AM PDT


A reader writes, "Books are reused to create this enormous piece of library furniture at TU Delft architecture bibliotheek. Because the books are stacked rather than dismantled, this desk is true to its origins as well as its function."

Library information desk



PA Homeland Security gave names of anti-drill activists to drilling company

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 04:40 AM PDT

Pennsylvania Homeland Security has been spying on anti-drilling activists, taking down names of attendees at meetings and even a screening of a documentary on drilling; these dossiers on peaceful protesters are then supplied to Marcellus Shale, a drilling company. The State Homeland Security Director James Powers justifies the snooping on meetings and information sessions because activists' "presence may spark something else. [I don't want to see public meetings] escalate to physical criminal acts."
Comparing himself to Tommy Lee Jones' character in the film "The Fugitive," Powers said, "I don't care" which side of the issue someone is on -- or if he or she is innocent. "My concern is public safety." However, the "intelligence" in the briefings includes lists of public meetings the state has determined anti-drilling activists plan to attend.

"I find it kind of creepy that the state is compiling information on the innocuous activity of citizens," said Jan Jarrett, president of PennFuture, a group that has expressed concern about drilling issues.

When one of these intelligence bulletins was spotted on a pro-drilling Internet site and disseminated among anti-drilling activists, Powers sent an e-mail of reprimand to the woman who e-mailed it.

He mistakenly thought she was pro-drilling.

In the e-mail, Powers told the woman the "sensitive information" she disseminated is not meant for the public, but only for those "having a valid need to know."

He added, "We want to continue providing this support to the Marcellus Shale formation natural gas stakeholders, while not feeding those groups fomenting dissent against those same companies."

Documents show Homeland Security tracks anti-drill groups in Pa. (via /.)

(Image: Terrorists Struck USA Despite Bush Claim!, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from notionscapital's photostream)



Big Corn wants to change "High Fructose Corn Syrup" to "Corn Sugars"

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 04:35 AM PDT


The US Corn Refiners Association has petitioned the FDA for permission to change the name "High Fructose Corn Syrup" to the much more innocuous-sounding "Corn Sugars." This comes as 58% of Americans say they are concerned about HFCS's impact on their health. HFCS is a heavily subsidized industrial byproduct of the corn industry, and is ubiquitous in American processed food -- everything from Rice Krispies to "healthy" granola bars.

HFCS isn't particularly high in fructose, as it turns out -- the name is a hang-over from the 1970s, when it first came into popular use. But even though "Corn Sugars" might be more descriptive, the name-change is clearly a move intended to confuse Americans who have slowly but surely come to reject products with HFCS on the ingredients list (when they can find alternatives that aren't laden with HFCS, that is). Maybe the FDA should approve the move, but require a ten year period when the ingredient is written as "Corn Sugars (formerly High Fructose Corn Syrup)."

A New Name for High-Fructose Corn Syrup



Man tries to rob bank, applies for loan instead

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 04:34 AM PDT

A would-be bank robber in Watsonville, CA was arrested when a clerk convinced him to fill in a loan application instead. While he was filling in the paperwork, the cops arrived and arrested him.
But when Mark Smith, 59, allegedly tried to rob the bank, the bank manager suggested that what he actually needed to do was take out a loan, and she had him sit down while she said she was going to retrieve the loan paperwork. Instead, she called 911, according to Assistant District Attorney Dave Genochio.

Man claiming to have a bomb in Watsonville bank gets talked into filling out loan paperwork, then arrested (via Digg)

(Image: bank robber, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from bjornb's photostream)



UK government hands £500M copyright enforcement and censorship tab to nation's Internet users

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 04:31 AM PDT

The UK government's Department for Business, Innovation, and Skills has concluded its consultation on how to pay for all the new copyright enforcement built into the Digital Economy Act.

The DEA is a sweeping, punishing copyright law that the former Labour government crammed through Parliament without debate in a closed-door, poorly attended vote hours before it called the next election (which it lost). The Act requires ISPs to send letter to their customers warning them that an entertainment company has accused them of infringing copyright (if this fails to reduce national levels of infringement by 70% in 18 months -- which it will fail to do -- ISPs will then be required to disconnect entire families from the Internet on the unsubstantiated accusation of a rightsholder).

The Act also allows rightsholders to demand that whole domains be censored across Britain, through provision of a Chinese-style Great Firewall of Britain.

One question that wasn't answered by the Act (that would have come out in the debate, if it had happened), is who will pay for this -- the copyright industries, who are the beneficiaries of reduced infringement, or the ISPs, who would then bear the additional costs and have to pass them on to their customers, including the ones who aren't breaching copyright?

Now the UK government has answered the question: the ISP industry and its customers will subsidize multinational record labels and movie companies to the tune of 25 percent of the cost of sending out the letters. The Open Rights Group estimates that this will come out to £500 million in extra costs that all ISP customers will bear.

So much for the so-called ideology of the LibCon government -- fair markets, proportionate justice, and small government. Instead, it's business as usual: smoke-filled rooms filled with powerful industrialists who use the state to distort the market at the public's expense.

Cor blimey! British ISPs must fund P2P copyright crackdown



A moonshine maker describes his setup - a Boing Boing exclusive

Posted: 14 Sep 2010 05:00 PM PDT

A fellow known only by the moniker "NaOH Jones" gave me permission to run his description of his homemade distillery setup on Boing Boing.
In your book, Made by Hand, you list several projects that you wanted to attempt. One of them is to build a still, so I thought I'd share my experiences in home-distilling.

Distilling is fun -- but it's really best as an addition to home-brewing or home wine making. Distilling is a great way to recycle a bad batch of wine or beer by converting it into brandy/vodka. You mentioned the importance of failure as part of the DIY process in your book. Distilling turns failed wine/beer experiments into booze, and I call that a success.

Home distilling has two camps -- purists who aim for the cleanest, clearest neutral spirit, and adventurers who take advantage of the ability to play around making concoctions that won't ever be found on liquor store shelves. Personally, I fall into the latter, in part because I don't have the technical know-how to really fine-tune my still. I make a "bierschnapps" at Christmas-time. Beer is essentially made from the same stuff as whiskey, but with the added bittering of hops. When distilled, beer becomes a great aperitif, with a peppery citrus finish.

201009141640

This is my inline reflux still. After digging through several hobbyist forums on Yahoo, I found several great plans in the forums at homedistiller.org. They range from tea-kettles with refrigerator tubing soldered to them for pot stills to retrofitted pony-kegs with digital temperature controls. I based my still on one of many excellent design sketches posted by a fellow named Bokabob - it's a variant on his popular "mini-still" design called a "two-cups" still.

Even though I didn't invent the design I made a point of drawing out my plans several times from scratch. I find that drawing out plans myself is a good way to make sure I understand how the thing works.



201009141643


The boiler is a 20L stainless steel milk pail. Got it on eBay. I had
a metal shop cut a hole into the lid and asked them to weld a threaded
coupling to the opening. I told them I was building a robot.



201009141644


This was my first stumbling block. The shop I went to told me they couldn't weld stainless directly to copper - but they could braze brass to stainless. Brass isn't ideal because there is often traces of lead in the alloy. I did some research and learned how to chemically strip lead from the fixture. Once the lid and coupler were brazed, I made a mixture of 1 part 3% hydrogen peroxide and 2 parts white vinegar. Soaking the lid in that solution for about 5 minutes cleaned the brass of any lead in the fitting's surface. I used a chemical lead-test to check and it came up clean. For safety, I repeat the treatment every few months since high-proof alcohol is a solvent.

The rest of the still is copper.


201009141646


The column is made of 3" copper pipe and stands 4' tall. It has three segments: The "main column", the "head" and the "condenser".

The main column is a 2' segment of copper pipe that is packed with copper pot scrubbers. Steam rises from the pot, up the column, through the mesh. The surface area of the mesh provides the steam plenty of surface area to collect and condense and fall back down the column, essentially creating an environment where the alcohol is continuously distilling, or refluxing, and getting more and more pure the higher it rises up the column. If I take out the scrubbers, I can operate the still like an old-fashioned pot-still.


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From the main column, it passes through the head. This was the first
thing I ever soldered and it shows. Check out that giant glob of
silver solder on it. It shames me every time I look at it. Steam
passes through the T-joint in the head and up into the condenser. I
built in a port for a thermometer that is positioned right at the top
of the main column, so that I can gauge the temperature of the steam,
(which in turn allows me to know what is being collected, as different
alcohols come off at different temperatures, and you always want to
ditch any potential methanol - which is easy because it comes out
first.)



201009141648



Once the steam passes through the head - it moves into the condenser.
I coiled about 20' of 1/8" copper tube around a broomstick, annealing
with a torch the entire way to keep the tube from collapsing or
kinking due to work-hardening. The center of the coil is also packed
with copper mesh. It fits pretty nicely into the second segment of
copper pipe. The column is left open at the top to avoid a
pressure-build-up (pressurized alcohol vapor = bomb).

A pond-pump in a bucket of ice water circulates cold water through the coil. It's important to monitor the circulating water temperature and add ice as-needed to make sure that the alcohol vapor isn't lost out the top. Some people attach their condenser coils to the faucet...but I prefer to use a closed system so that I can reclaim the water and put it to use in the garden.

Back in the head, the collected liquid has two paths it can take - I can open the collection valve, and it will drain off to be collected in a mason jar, or I can close the valve and the liquid level will rise until it reaches the overflow level in the T-joint and get returned to the column to be further distilled. By adjusting the collection rate at the valve, I'm able to increase or decrease the potency of the collected spirit.

A still needs a heat source. I use a gas turkey fryer to bring the liquid almost to temperature, and then I turn off the flame and turn on an electric industrial bucket-warmer belt - it's got a thermostat that allows me to adjust the heat throughout the process. I could use the bucket-warmer to bring the whole thing to temperature, but it would take forever. That said, flames + alcohol vapor = fire-extinguisher on hand at all times. That's another reason to have a built-in thermometer that's reading the vapor temperature.



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If I just let 'er rip with the valve wide open, this still can pull
beer from 6%ABV to 45%ABV in one go.

Last weekend, I played with the reflux rate and pulled 7 bottles of two-buck-chuck (the cheapest wine Trader Joe's sells at $1.99/bottle) into just over 1.5 quarts of 80% ABV neutral spirit. I split that up into small batches and am soaking a few different fruits and herbs for a week - at which point I'll dilute down to 40% ABV. I'm pretty stoked about the ginger and the orange zest. I'll end up with almost 2L of various flavored spirits.

If I had better conditions, I could probably pull upwards of 90% ABV for a really clean vodka (obviously you don't ever DRINK it at that ABV, you always dilute to 50% or lower). But since I'm doing this in the backyard in the dead of night, always watching for Johnny Taxman...I'll have to settle for what I can get.

Sterilization, Castration and the Road to Purity and Marriage Counseling (1939)

Posted: 14 Sep 2010 08:36 PM PDT

John Ptak sent this to me a while back and I'm just getting around to it. He said: "The eugenic-oriented Human Betterment Organization (?!) and deep believer in the forcible sterilization of the "feebleminded", prostitutes, and other social deficients was also the first man in the US to open a marriage counseling practice. This would all be pretty funny if it weren't for the fact that 75,000 people were sterilized in the US in '20s - '30s with just these wicked ideas in mind...and that the Nazis translated the thing virtually right away after it was published. And its only 79 years old. Good bloody god."
201009141606 The Betterment people shed more light on the role of sterilization and sex offenses by women. (My bold.)  "Of 304 feebleminded girls sterilized and paroled, 9 out of every 12 had been sex offenders before commitment.  After sterilization, only one out of every 12 became a sex delinquent on parole". 

If this wasn't such an awful story, "sex delinquent on parole", a phrase I've never seen before, might make for a great 1950's trashlit title. (It could've been a series, too:  all you need to do is take the title "Sex Delinquents on Parole" and add something to it, like "...on Parole from Outer Space" or "...on Parole:  Queenie the Slip Crown Breaks Her Knuckles" and so on.)

The sorry story that I've interrupted with this bit of frivolity is that the "sex offenses" that are being discussed here is actually "prostitution".  These young women weren't committing violent acts of sexual savagery, they were just prostitutes, which meant that in most state they were "depraved".  The "feebleminded" girls I would guess were poor or working poor, without the best education, and didn't do well on whatever test was being administered to them to determine their test-taking intelligence. It seems to me that if  the goal was to liquidate prostitution that perhaps the men "seeing" these women should've been the ones faced with the operation. But that isn't how the dominant culture viewed the situation, and that the best way to approach the problem was to remove the reproductive capacities from the weakest members of society.


The good old days really weren't that good.

Sterilization, Castration and the Road to Purity and Marriage Counseling (1939)

Gary Lachman Valentine of Blondie: Jung, Consciousness, and the Occult

Posted: 14 Sep 2010 03:25 PM PDT


Mas Assets Full 9781101188293 In the 1970s, Gary Valentine Lachman was the founding guitar player for Blondie. In recent years though, Lachman shifted his focus to writing a slew of books about fringe culture, the occult, consciousness, and esoteric figures from history. His book about sixties psychedelia and the occult, Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius, is one of my favorite chronicles of the time. I highly recommend it. (The 2001 book was recently reprinted in the UK as The Dedalus Book of the 1960s: Turn Off Your Mind.) In the above interview, Lachman talks about his own long strange trip, and his new book, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life and Teachings. He's also blogging over at the Daily Grail!

Documentary about the residents of the Duplex Nursing Home

Posted: 14 Sep 2010 03:16 PM PDT

One of my favorite zines in the late 1980s and early 1990s was Duplex Planet. It was founded in 1979 by David Greenberger, the activities director of the Duplex Nursing Home in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. In each issue, David would ask the residents questions and run their answers without editing them. (Greenberg still publishes Duplex Planet!)

Here's a sample question, with answers by residents:

WOULD YOU SPEND A MONTH MAKING A HANDLE FOR A YARD TOOL OR SPEND SEVEN
DOLLARS TO BUY A NEW ONE INSTEAD?

FRANK KANSLASKY: I don't need it, so what the hell do I want to buy it for?


BILL LAGASSE: They ain't reliable if you make 'em yourself.

ANDY LEGRICE: Buy one, it's already made. Why spend three or four weeks on
it when you can buy one?

FRANCIS MCELROY: I'd spend seven dollars to buy a new one, then I'd know I
had it -- when you buy it, you know you got your product.


LEO GERMINO: It depends on if you really need it -- you need that money
for your room rent and for your ways of living. The only people that can
buy them things is the very rich people.

GEORGE STINGEL: I'd buy one, they're already made.

ERNIE BROOKINGS: I'd make it. It could be if I had seven dollars I'd buy
it, but I don't have the seven dollars right now.


FRANK: What's he say, that he'd make it?


DBG: Yes.


FRANK: He's a Yankee, that's why.

JOHN FAY: I wouldn't spend no seven dollars for one. There's all kinds of
tools right here. Eddie Meade's got all kinds of tools here.

CHARLES SHEA: Seven dollars to buy a new one, it's easier.

ABE SURGECOFF: A second one, right? A new one is too much, an old one is
practical. If it's new tools you have to put this and that and linseed oil
on them. If it's old you can keep it long. ED POINDEXTER: I would buy one, it's cheaper.

Above, part one of a 1993 documentary by Paul Athanas and Jay Rooney about the residents of the the Duplex Nursing Home, called Your Own True Self.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 |



Awesome limited-edition cycling prints

Posted: 14 Sep 2010 02:53 PM PDT

orange hung.jpeg

Marc Evans, a freelance designer and illustrator based in the UK, has created an inspiring series of cycling related prints, each with an amazing quote by a cycling world great (or someone noteworthy just talkin' bikes). I saw these last night on Trackosaurus Rex and haven't stopped thinking about them since, especially the one above while I booked it across town on two wheels en route to a meeting over coffee. I was inspired to ride fast and it felt amazing. There are 5 prints in the series, available in A3 and A2 size in a limited edition of 50 each, signed and numbered by the artist. They cost £18 and £27 each and are available from TheFootDown, while supplies last of course. Bike people, don't sleep on this one. They are stupidly awesome.

all hung front on.jpeg

Classic LOL-video revisited: "Just Talking About Some Stuff."

Posted: 14 Sep 2010 02:46 PM PDT

Shop window: What would Leeroy Jenkins do?

Posted: 14 Sep 2010 02:44 PM PDT

Patience Worth, a real ghost writer

Posted: 14 Sep 2010 02:32 PM PDT

Images Ghost-Writer-Pearl-Curran-388
At the beginning of the 20th century, a woman named Patience Worth made a literary splash with her novels and poems, several of which were anthologized as some of the best of the year. She produced seven books, short stories, plays, and hundreds of other literary works. The curious thing is that Patience Worth was, er, a 17th-century spirit who was being channeled by a St. Louis housewife wielding a Ouija Board. Smithsonian has the whole fascinating tale from the heyday of spiritualism. From Smithsonian:
Images Ghost-Writer-The-Sorry-Tale-Patience-Worth-2 Almost overnight, Patience transformed Pearl Curran from a restless homemaker plagued by nervous ailments into a busy celebrity who traveled the country giving performances starring Patience. Night after night Pearl, a tall, blue-eyed woman in a fashionable dress, would sit with her Ouija board while her husband, John, recorded Patience's utterances in shorthand. Those who witnessed the performances, some of them leading scholars, feminists, politicians and writers, believed they'd seen a miracle. "I still confess myself completely baffled by the experience," Otto Heller, dean of the Graduate School at Washington University in St. Louis, recalled years later.

Through Pearl, Patience claimed to be an unmarried Englishwoman who had emigrated to Nantucket Island in the late 1600s and been killed in an Indian raid. For three centuries, she said, she'd searched for an earthly "crannie" (as in "cranium") to help her fulfill a burning literary ambition. She'd found it at last in Pearl....

A long list of psychical sleuths, psychologists and other skeptics tried to debunk Patience and prove that Pearl was a fraud. No one succeeded. Scholars who examined Patience's work marveled at her deep knowledge of the plants, customs, clothing and cuisine of several historical epochs, stretching back to the ancients, and at her ability to draw on this vast knowledge without hesitation. "Maybe there was some preparation going on during the day, yet that alone cannot account for the material Pearl was producing," says Daniel Shea, professor emeritus of English at Washington University, who has studied the case and believes it can be explained without citing supernatural forces.

The Patience Worth case remains one of the most tantalizing literary mysteries of the last century, a window onto a vanished era when magic seemed to exist because so many people believed in it. In the decades since Pearl Curran's death, in 1937, no one has explained how she produced Patience's writing. Combing through the voluminous archives, however, a modern sensibility starts to see clues and patterns that may not have been apparent at a time when science was just starting to explore the far reaches of the human mind.

"Patience Worth: Author From the Great Beyond"

Haystack is burning: Iran activists disable privacy app after security holes exposed

Posted: 14 Sep 2010 03:14 PM PDT

Remember Haystack, the privacy app designed to help Iranian dissidents speak freely without fear? Even before it was released, a string of breathless coverage in newspapers, magazines, television networks, radio programs, and blogs and blogs and more blogs touted it as a tool for technoliberation, during a news cycle in which reporters were eager to tell a story about the internet enabling a righteous revolution in Tehran.

The project was the brainchild of Austin Heap (shown at left); with friend and fellow anti-censorship advocate Daniel Colascione, he formed a nonprofit called the Censorship Research Center to manage Haystack and related cryptoanonymity projects.

Today comes news that brings no one joy: Haystack has effectively been forced to close down after security researcher Jacob Appelbaum* (Tor Project, Wikileaks) and tech writer Evgeny Morozov identified significant and fundamental security holes in the service—flaws that could endanger the safety of people in Iran who use Haystack. The Haystack team have stopped testing the app inside Iran, and are urging people who have installed copies to refrain from using it for the time being.

Coverage of the takedown is all over the place today: Wired News, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, SF Chronicle, The Financial Times (paywall), The H, Ostatic, Computerworld UK.

Danny O'Brien's Oblomovka has an authoritative (and compassionate) account. Snip:

Lessons? Well, as many have noted, reporters do need to ask more questions about too-good-to-be-true technology stories. Coders and architects need to realize (as most do) that you simply can't build a safe, secure, reliable system without consulting with other people in the field, especially when your real adversary is a powerful and resourceful state-sized actor, and this is your first major project. The Haystack designers lived in deliberate isolation from a large community that repeatedly reached out to try and help them. That too is a very bad idea. Open and closed systems alike need independent security audits.
And Jillian C. York's blog post on the affair chronicles sloppiness and lack of disclosure on the part of reporters who covered the project in its early phase.

Haystack's tagline: "Good luck finding that needle." Sadly, it appears the needle has been found. Haystack's website, by the way, still solicits donations "to help with the cause."

Update: EFF releases warning advising against Haystack. The post couldn't be more blunt: "Stop Using Haystack Software Now."

* A disclosure: Appelbaum's a personal friend, and I was able to verify over the weekend that the Haystack team's claims they'd taken the service offline were untrue, by examining an entry in BoingBoing's server logs.

Luck: 9.5 minutes of sudden death averted

Posted: 14 Sep 2010 02:11 PM PDT

Luck is a genuinely nerve-wracking 9.5 minute compilation videos featuring people nearly getting smushed, bashed, crushed, smeared, and just plain killed by falling trees, speeding trains and cars, and all other manner of sudden death averted. Everyone is fine, no one is hurt, but I defy you to watch this without at least once letting out an involuntary Woah!

Luck : A Compilation of Close Calls (via Kottke)



Banned Books Week trivia game show in Second Life

Posted: 14 Sep 2010 02:03 PM PDT

Jim Tyre sez, "The American Library Association Office of Intellectual Freedom is sponsoring a Banned Books Week Trivia Game Show in Second Life on September 30. (Thanks, Jim, via Submitterator!)

NYT on 3D printing

Posted: 14 Sep 2010 02:13 PM PDT

The NYT covers 3D printing, from the Makerbot and textile printers to custom prosthetic limbs to a mighty house-printer:
A California start-up is even working on building houses. Its printer, which would fit on a tractor-trailer, would use patterns delivered by computer, squirt out layers of special concrete and build entire walls that could be connected to form the basis of a house.

It is manufacturing with a mouse click instead of hammers, nails and, well, workers. Advocates of the technology say that by doing away with manual labor, 3-D printing could revamp the economics of manufacturing and revive American industry as creativity and ingenuity replace labor costs as the main concern around a variety of goods.

"There is nothing to be gained by going overseas except for higher shipping charges," Mr. Summit said.

3-D Printing Spurs a Manufacturing Revolution (Thanks, Joeross, via Submitterator!)



Just look at this awesome banana shoe.

Posted: 14 Sep 2010 01:56 PM PDT


Just look at it.

Banana 2010 (Thanks, Knutmo!)

Previously:

Man robs pharmacy with "poison syringe"

Posted: 14 Sep 2010 03:17 PM PDT

Terry Lee Cornwell, 41, of Bolingbrook, Illinois, is accused of robbing a Walgreens pharmacy by threatening the clerk with a "poison syringe." It turns out, the gentleman's syringe was filled with water. From Triblocal:
The pharmacist turned over 330 Hydrocodone pills, 46 morphine sulfate pills, 40 Oxycodone pills, (police spokesman Lt. Mike) Rompa said.

Police arrested Cornwell at 12:13 p.m. Wednesday at his home, but were unable to locate the syringe, Rompa said. He was arraigned Thursday and is due in court again on Sept. 24.

"Man allegedly tried to rob pharmacy with water-filled syringe" (via Fortean Times)

Twitter to announce inline photos and video

Posted: 14 Sep 2010 01:47 PM PDT

Techcrunch reports that Twitter's big press event this evening will include an announcement that users will soon be able to incorporate images and video directly into tweets.

Adobe issues security advisory for Flash Player, plans fix "during the week of September 27"

Posted: 14 Sep 2010 01:37 PM PDT

Adobe has issued a security advisory for "Flash Player 10.1.82.76 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Solaris, and Adobe Flash Player 10.1.92.10 for Android, which also affects Adobe Reader 9.3.4 for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX, and Adobe Acrobat 9.3.4 and earlier versions for Windows and Macintosh." The vulnerability can allow an attacker to take control of the affected system, and there are already reports of active exploits against Adobe Flash Player on Windows. The company plans to issue a fix "during the week of September 27." For now, may I recommend ClickToFlash? (via Micah)

What risks are you willing to take for a pharmaceutical company's marketing department?

Posted: 14 Sep 2010 12:19 PM PDT

"Research and Development is no longer responsible for research—it is now the responsibility of Sales and Marketing." In Mother Jones, University of Minnesota bioethics professor Carl Elliot writes about how drug research is becoming a farce, with Big Pharma gaming the system and turning what should be crucial studies of safety and efficacy into back-door marketing, carefully designed to never make their drug look bad. One key problem—we weigh the risks of human research against benefits to society, science and public health. What risks are you willing to take for a pharmaceutical company's marketing department?

Why some fat people are healthy

Posted: 14 Sep 2010 11:14 AM PDT

The Obesity Panacea blog is running a five-part series on the phenomenon of The Metabolically Healthy Obese—the 25-to-30% of obese people who don't experience the health problems normally associated with obesity. It's a fascinating topic, and one I've not seen tackled from a research-and-data perspective before. I'm looking forward to reading the whole thing.

Human ancestors had cooties

Posted: 14 Sep 2010 10:37 AM PDT

cooties.jpg

Cooties, of course, are a colloquialism for lice. And our cooties, so says Smithsonian, have a lot to tell us.

For instance, a 2008 study of ancient Peruvian mummies found that lice were already making themselves at home in the Americas, long before the arrival of Europeans. And the DNA of those lice is identical to that of lice we know originated in Africa. If the lice moved to the New World from Africa, it's likely the people they lived on did, too.

Even more intriguing—there's actually a type of head louse that only lives in the Americas. And scientists think it's a remnant of interaction between Homo sapiens and our Asian cousins, Homo erectus.

They found two genetically distinct types of head louse, one found worldwide and another exclusive to the Americas. Strangely enough, this would be possible if the two groups of louse had been living on the heads of two different species on different continents, the scientists say. Reed argued that both modern and archaic humans had their own types of lice. As modern humans--Homo sapiens--began to move out of Africa, they would have intermingled with Homo erectus--Homo sapiens' evolutionary predecessors that were living in Asia and East Africa--picking up their archaic parasites along the way to the New World.

Read more, and get links to the original research papers, at Smithsonian

Image: Some rights reserved by Wandering Magpie

Where religion and evolution go hand-in-hand

Posted: 14 Sep 2010 10:08 AM PDT

shockedfish.jpg

The Zoque people of southern Mexico greet the rainy season with a religious ritual that involves poisoning a stream that runs into the nearby Cueva del Azufre, and gathering up the bounty of cave fish that float, anesthetized, to the surface. Those fish—considered gifts from the gods of the underworld—help keep the Zoque fed until crops grown in the rainy season can be harvested.

But centuries of annual die-offs, caused by a single, locally sourced poison, have functioned as a driver of natural selection. Today, researchers found, fish that live in Cueva del Azufre—downstream from the point where the Zoque poison the water—are becoming resistant to that poison.

Fish exposed to the annual ritual indeed proved more resistant to the toxin than fish that lived elsewhere, able to swim in poisoned waters for roughly 50 percent longer. As such, the poison from the ceremony apparently has over time helped select fish that can tolerate it -- fish that cannot get captured and killed by the Zoque.

This is more than just a fascinating look at evolution in action. The local government recently banned the fish harvest ritual, out of concern over its impact on the fish population. The researchers hope their data will help explain what the ceremony actually does to local fish, and maybe lead to a compromise that would allow the Zoque to keep their traditions, and their rainy season food source.

Recommended on Submitterator by Charles Q. Choi, who is also the author of the LiveScience story about this research.

Image: Some rights reserved by bensonkua

Tinkering School founder Gever Tulley in Buffalo, NY

Posted: 14 Sep 2010 09:32 AM PDT

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My friend Gever Tulley, founder of Tinkering School, is going to Buffalo NY on October 1, 2010 for a weekend of tinkering and presentations.

Gever Tulley, author of Fifty Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do), and the founder of the Tinkering School.

Tulley's hands-on educational program teaches kids problem-solving and teamwork skills by giving them real tools and materials to build a variety of projects. A frequent speaker on TED, Gever Tulley is coming to Buffalo for the weekend to speak about what alternative education can mean to a child, the success of Tinkering School, and to lay the groundwork for a potential Tinkering School in Buffalo.

How cool is this poster! An Evening with Gever Tulley, Founder of Tinkering School



Is Steve Jobs a Ninja?

Posted: 14 Sep 2010 11:41 AM PDT

NINJOBS.jpg A Japanese magazine, SPA!, claims that Steve Jobs was stopped by airport security last year, even though he was boarding his own plane. According to the report, they objected to a set of ninja stars. From Bloomberg:
Jobs said it wouldn't make sense for a person to try to hijack his own plane, according to the report. He then told officials he would never visit Japan again, the magazine reported. Apple declined to comment.
A Kansai airport spokesman confirmed that "a passenger using a private jet was stopped at the end of July for carrying shuriken." They were then discarded. Fortunately for Jobs, they did not find his smoke bombs, caltrops or flash powder, ensuring that the flight remained safe from attack by the evil ninja, Sho Kosugi. Update: The WSJ writes that "Apple says that Steve Jobs is not a ninja."

How to snap like a diva

Posted: 14 Sep 2010 09:35 AM PDT

Don't mess with The Snap Diva. As you will learn through the video above, there are many ways to snap. Appears to be some experimental African-American gay theater/spoken word performance art (anyone know the source?). Out of context, it begs to be born anew as a meme. Found at Robert Popper's blog. I'm particularly fond of "The Medusa Snap."

(video courtesy of the Institute of Snap!thology)

Update: The clip is an excerpt from the 1991 PBS P.O.V. special "Tongues Untied," by Marlon Riggs. You can buy it on DVD here. Clip grabbed by and blogged recently at FourFour.

British tabloids link wrong game to neglect case

Posted: 14 Sep 2010 09:05 AM PDT

Britain's Sun and Daily Mail each ran stories about a child neglected by parents 'addicted' to online gaming. The online game is apparently Small Worlds. However, the newspapers confused it with Small World, a completely unrelated offline board game and iPad app. The point where the two games meet in the tabloid imagination remains vague and unresearched, at least by them: the original reporter "cheerfully admits" that he doesn't even know which is which. The publisher of Small World -- the board game -- is understandably upset. [via RPS]
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