Thursday, September 30, 2010

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Only 1.7% of sites blocked by Scandinavia's "child-porn" filters are actually child porn

Posted: 30 Sep 2010 02:09 AM PDT

Christian sez,
Germany's working group against censorship, AK Zensur, has analysed a few recent Scandinavian blacklists, allegedly meant to block sites containing child abuse material. Our less-than-surprising findings:

* From 167 listed sites, only 3 contained such material.
* Two of them were listed on different blacklists since 2008, obviously without the authorities trying to take the sites offline.
* All three were taken down by the hosting providers within hours or even minutes after receiving an AK takedown request by email.

So what were the reasons again that made access blocking an essential weapon in fighting child abuse?

Blacklists of Denmark and Sweden analysed (PDF)

Press release: "Access Blocking means looking away instead of acting"

(Thanks, Christian!)



Live chat today with CBC's Book Club

Posted: 29 Sep 2010 10:54 PM PDT

I'm doing a live online chat today (Thu) with the CBC's Book Club at 8AM Pacific/11AM Eastern/4PM UK. Hope to catch you there!

Chris Ryniak's monsters with personality

Posted: 30 Sep 2010 02:11 AM PDT

Junkbot lamps

Posted: 29 Sep 2010 10:46 PM PDT

Naked Radio: nontraditional materials, no case

Posted: 29 Sep 2010 10:43 PM PDT

Designer Simon Hasan's "Naked Radio" is a functional sculpture that uses beautiful, nontraditional materials to make a working radio. It's made of porcelain, lace, walnut, brass and stainless steel (the lace is the speaker grille), and you tune it by moving the aerial.

Naked Radio (via Neatorama)



Inside the finances of the UK "legal blackmail" copyright enforcement company

Posted: 29 Sep 2010 10:36 PM PDT

Ars Technica's Nate Anderson continues his excellent reporting on British law firm ACS:Law, a much-derided firm that sends threatening copyright letters on behalf of pornographers. ACS suffered an Anonymous denial of service attack in September, and inadvertently dumped its entire email repository, which is now available for download all over the net. Today, Anderson digs into ACS's finances -- how much it makes, what it expects to make, and how much paper it goes through printing threatening letters to mail to poorly researched accused infringers.
Now, Crossley has expenses, of course. He keeps an office in Westminster, London. He employs a staff of 19 paralegals, five administrators, and a few supervisors. He has to pay for all that paper he uses to print his letters--believe it or not, paper costs Crossley more each year (£31,000) than he pays in salary to any one of his employees.

But these costs are minimal. Crossley pays his administrators only £13,500 a year, his paralegals get £16,000, and no one makes above £20,000. Rent is £6,000 a month. Each month, his total expenses come to just about £50,000, or £600,000 for an entire year.

So let's run the numbers. For 2010 and 2011, Crossley expects his firm's share to be £4,261,585, but he only has a total of £1,200,000 in expenses. Raw profit in Crossley's own pocket: £3,177,722. Nice work if you can get it, and it explains why he's been looking for a mansion to rent and buying a Bentley and a new Jeep.

P2P settlement factory expects £10 million from... mailing letters



HOWTO: Make Dexter blood-slide candies

Posted: 29 Sep 2010 10:31 PM PDT

These blood-slide candies, inspired by the serial-killer drama Dexter, are clever and simple: sheets of clear sugar with a little red food coloring, and hey-presto, serial killer gourmet!

Bio-hazard! Dexter Blood Slide Suckers: Eat With Caution! (via Neatorama)



Bohemian Rhapsody on slide whistles

Posted: 29 Sep 2010 09:35 PM PDT

Mark Day, our friend at YouTube, shares the phenomenal cover of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" with us, above, and asks, "Does MysteryGuitarMan ever get old? Or this song either?" I'm voting no on both. Video link.

Related: You may also enjoy Rocketboom's interview with MysteryGuitarMan, which was recorded inside the same space in Los Angeles where we produce Boing Boing Video.

Fabrickit: DIY wearable computing

Posted: 29 Sep 2010 03:31 PM PDT

1_fabrickitfront.jpeg

This just got released at Maker Faire NYC on Sunday: a starter kit for making your own wearable computing, from a new company called Fabrick.it. The kit is broken down into modules or "bricks" for everything from light-up LED's to rechargeable batteries, all linked together with attractive sewable, washable, and solderable conductive silver ribbon.

Perhaps more valuable than the components themselves will be the instructions and tutorials for putting things together, and the community that should develop around DIY wearable technologies.



Greetings Happy Mutants

Posted: 29 Sep 2010 03:27 PM PDT

Rushkoff_PortraitEDIT.jpgDouglas Rushkoff, here. Mark graciously invited me to guest blog for the next two weeks, in celebration of the release of my first book explicitly about digital culture, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age (for which BB readers get an additional 20% discount if they type the code BOING in the discount box on the last screen).

In all honesty, the book brings me back to the core values that have been espoused here on Boing Boing since the beginning: these technologies are the most fun and the most useful if we have some idea of how they work, and if their workings remain accessible to us. Knowledge of the codes - both digital and otherwise - is the best way to begin changing them. Meanwhile, an awareness of some of the more dehumanizing biases of some of these tools and spaces helps us keep our digital communities productive, collaborative, and happily mutant.

For me, this was the core insight of using these technologies in the first place. As a kid raised on television, I was inspired by how computers allowed me to get behind the screen and change what was in there - even share what I did with others. It seemed to me that once people experienced the mutability of online spaces and systems, they'd begin to see the mutability of real world spaces and systems, too.

But over the years, as interfaces get thicker, devices get locked down, and the real programs and agendas behind the tools we use get more obtuse, I'm finding people quite willing to treat technologies as given circumstances. The cyberpunk insight I tried to share with others in religion, government, and economics seems somewhat scarce right here in cyberspace. I talk to kids - the ones I once extolled as "screenagers" - now accepting programs like Facebook at face value: they think Facebook exists primarily to help them make friends, and accept the system's embedded values as if Facebook had no agenda of its own. This is a perception I think communities like this one help to change, and I'm honored to be among you as a reader, commenter and, now, poster.

My posts over these two weeks will be likely be biased toward my own current fascination with people and organizations who are changing the rules and inviting others to do the same. But I will of course be on the lookout for anything of value to share with you for your appraisal and discussion.

(Portrait by Leland Purvis)

Conservative activist tries, and fails, to "punk" CNN

Posted: 29 Sep 2010 02:37 PM PDT

Conservative activist James O'Keefe has attempted to trick CNN reporter Abbie Boudreau into a video where she'd be surrounded by sex toys, porn, and other "incriminating" stuff on a boat. He failed. O'Keefe is most infamous for the ACORN 2009 undercover video controversy. In the CNN case, Boudreau was tipped off on the way to the boat by Izzy Santa, exec director of O'Keefe's Project Veritas.
"I have a problem on my hands that I think has the potential for unnecessary backlash," Santa wrote (to a financial donor to Project Veritas). "Today, James is meeting with a CNN correspondent today on his boat. She is doing a piece on the movement of young conservative filmmakers.

"She doesn't know she is getting on a boat but rather James' office. James has staged the boat to be a palace of pleasure with all sorts of props, wants to have a bizarre sexual conversation with her. He wants to gag CNN."

She wrote that "the idea is incredibly bad" and "the more I think about it we should not be doing this."

O'Keefe had also instructed Santa to print a "pleasure palace graphic" on a large poster, according to an e-mail.

CNN later obtained a copy of a 13-page document titled "CNN Caper," which appears to describe O'Keefe's detailed plans for that day.

"The plans appeared so outlandish and so juvenile in tone, I questioned whether it was part of a second attempted punk," Boudreau said.

But in a phone conversation, Santa confirmed the document was authentic. Listed under "equipment needed," is "hidden cams on the boat," and a "tripod and overt recorder near the bed, an obvious sex tape machine."

Among the props listed were a "condom jar, dildos, posters and paintings of naked women, fuzzy handcuffs" and a blindfold.

"Fake pimp from ACORN videos tries to 'punk' CNN correspondent"

1930s version of the Human Centipede

Posted: 29 Sep 2010 02:44 PM PDT

Screen Shot 2010-09-29 At 1.47.18 Pm

The vomitous Human Centipede movie was predated by a mail order Masonic hazing prop of the same name, which delivered electrical shocks to the groins of its hapless riders.

Screen Shot 2010-09-29 At 1.50.12 Pm

Update: Eric Reynolds of Fantagraphics informs me that this page is from their book, Burlesque Paraphernalia. Here's info:

201009291442 Do you wish to separate the jolly good fellows from the dour sour pusses from those who seek to ASCEND TO THEIR SIDE DEGREES — but you suffer from lack of imagination when it comes to constructing elaborate hazing rituals and DEVICES? Does fake vomit, joy buzzers and a party pack of fake moustaches only produce yawns, rather than giggles, among your once-merry members? Well, look no further than Catalog No. 439: Burlesque Paraphernalia and Side Degree Specialties and Costumes, in which the manufacturers De Moulin Bros. & Co. from Greenville, Ill. feature the finest electro-dropo benches, goat-shaped tricycles, electric branding irons (and much much more)!

Not only does this 1930 catalog, reproduced with marvelous 21st century machinery, provide tightly rendered pen-and-ink period illustrations and detailed product descriptions, it also has helpful how-tos and scripts to aid in the pulling of these pranks on initiates!

(WARNING: Fantagraphics Books is in no way responsible for any resultant maiming, crippling, immolation, or disfigurement resulting from the construction and/or use of devices pictured in this catalogue. At least, we don't think so.)

Today, DeMoulin Bros. & Co. is one of the largest suppliers of costumes for marching bands in the United States. But in 1930 the company produced an amazing array of props and devices created specifically to be used in minor "hazing" of candidates in the side degrees of various fraternal organizations. The great 1930 DeMoulin Bros. & Company Fraternal Supply Catalog No. 439 is truly a holy grail for the prankster, arm-chair sadist and those interested in the some of the zanier historic arcana lurking behind that neighborhood odd-fellows lodge.

This is the ultimate desert-island book for pranksters looking for something edgy and new to dream about, Rube Goldberg-like devices created to instill terror and bemused respect, before the candidate ascends to receive a more sublime form of illumination. All in good fun, it is — or was — the American way!

Here's more about the book.

1930s version of the Human Centipede (Via Tony Moore)

Daily cycling is secret to 96-year-old gentleman's health and happiness

Posted: 29 Sep 2010 08:55 PM PDT

"I'm strictly a recreational cyclist," he says. "I've never been one of those guys who gets on a bike and sees how fast I can go. I just trudge along at my own leisurely pace. But I've been doing it almost all my life." Jack Thacker, who will be 97 in October. He cycles about 12 miles every day and credits his daily bike routine, in part, for his good health. (via LACM)

Masturbation jokes as ad copy for Minneapolis real estate agent

Posted: 29 Sep 2010 12:48 PM PDT

201009291244

Minneapolis real estate agent Rich Will Wanket has a sense of humor about his name, but I'm not sure I'd hire him to sell my house. I'm surprised the newspaper let him pull this off.

Beat it Flick it Choke it Rub it Real Estate Masturbation (Via Blame it on the Voices)



Gary Wolf at TED on ways to track and analyze data about your body and behavior

Posted: 29 Sep 2010 12:24 PM PDT

My friend Gary Wolf gave a talk at TED@Cannes about the ways people are "using mobile apps and always-on gadgets to track and analyze your body, mood, diet, spending -- just about everything in daily life you can measure -- in gloriously geeky detail."

Gary Wolf: The quantified self



The House That Steve Built

Posted: 29 Sep 2010 12:15 PM PDT

Jobshouseee
Here are the rough designs for Steve Jobs' new home in Woodside, California. He's tearing down the site's existing 1920s Spanish Colonial Revival mansion (14 bedrooms, 13.5 baths) and building an understated 5 bedroom house with a vegetable garden. From Gizmodo:
If anything, the conceptual plans submitted to the Woodside Town Council depict more of a small, private retreat than any towering glass-and-steel tech chapel or totem of wealth. According to these initial designs, Jobs intends to populate the 6 acres with an assortment of indigenous flora; a simple three-car garage; a modest 5 bedroom home with plenty of windows and decks; a network of lighted stone walkways; and even a private vegetable garden. Everything is neat, tight, pragmatic, and in its place.

While the pared down modernist home will occupy the same basic location as the existing George Washington Smith-built manse, nothing will remain of the estate's former grandiosity. In lieu of the 8 bedroom/9.5 bathroom main residence, Jobs has opted instead for an unassuming living/working space that's half the size. No chauffeur's cottage, no cook's cottage, and no tennis courts. In fact, when compared something like Larry Ellison's $70 million feudal Japan themed estate located right up the road, Jobs' new digs seem downright monkish—if not Buffettian.

"The Plans for Steve Jobs' New House"

Brain surgery through the eye socket

Posted: 29 Sep 2010 11:19 AM PDT

New research determines that physicians don't have to saw off the top of the skull to conduct many kinds of brain surgery -- rather, they can just go in through the eye socket. Medical doctors from the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine and University of Washington Medical Center published their findings on transorbital neuroendoscopic surgery (TONES) in the scientific journal Neurosurgery. It's long been possible for surgeons to access the brain through the nose, but apparently requires much more equipment and people. (This is fascinating on its own, but I also wanted the chance to post this great comic panel that Klint Finley used to illustrate his post about the research at Technoccult.) From UC San Diego Newsroom:
Panelbraineyeee "By performing surgery through the eye socket, we eliminate the need for a full craniotomy, gain equivalent or better access to the front of the  brain, and eliminate the large ear-to-ear scar associated with major brain surgery," said Chris Bergeron, MD, assistant professor of Surgery, Division of Head and Neck Surgery, at UC San Diego Health System.

To achieve access, the surgeons make a small incision behind or through the eyelid. A tiny hole is then made through the paper-thin bone of the eye socket to reach the brain. This pathway permits repairs to be made without lifting the brain. The TONES approaches also protect the optic nerves, the nerves for smell, as well as the carotid and ophthalmic arteries.

"This approach has opened a new field of brain surgery," said study investigator, Kris Moe, MD, chief of the Division of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery and professor of Otolaryngology at University of Washington Medical Center. "The advantages to this transorbital approach are many, including reduced pain and decreased recovery time for the patient."

"Scarless Brain Surgery Is New Option for Patients" (indirect thanks, Chris Arkenberg!)

Tom the Dancing Bug: Billy Dare - Subtle Racism?

Posted: 29 Sep 2010 10:58 AM PDT

Huge fight at birthday party

Posted: 29 Sep 2010 11:03 AM PDT

Books Fight460

Illustration from William Hazlitt's "The Fight and Other Writings" (Penguin Classics)

A fight involving 75 people broke out at a Fraternal Order of Eagle's Hall in Cincinnati, Ohio yesterday... during a 3-year-old's birthday party. From WCPO.com:

Police said beer bottles were the primary weapons used in the melee and that four people were detained. All four likely face charges, but police have not released their names or those charges.

"Anywhere you could think of there was blood and broken glass," said Peskin. "We were told there was one gentleman who stood in the back of the room throwing bottles until he didn't have any more in front of him."

A total of 20 officers responded to the scene and police believe a majority of those involved were heavily intoxicated...

"They seemed like they were nice people. I talked one or two of them. They were asking me to help them move in stuff for the party, microwaves and things. They seemed like nice normal people," said Jesse Ficke of Eagles Lodge.

"75 people brawl at birthday party" (Thanks, Charles Pescovitz!)



Where Everybody Knows Your Game

Posted: 29 Sep 2010 10:25 AM PDT


BabyCastles, the videoarcade in Ridgewood, Queens, is quickly turning into a hub for intersection of the art, technology, and culture of independent gaming. It's a place where you can sample the latest in indie videogames, like the Hungarian physics Sumotori Dreams above, or experience fully curated exhibitions - all in an atmosphere more like a hacker's coffee bar than a museum or a commercial arcade. Everybody is on the inside.

Founded by two graduates of NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, Syed Saluhuddin and Kunal Gupta, BabyCastle is basically just a wall of the music venue Silent Barn right now, featuring six video arcade cabinets with rotating content. But the extended BabyCastles collective is growing - and has launched a Kickstarter campaign for a pop-up video game, art, and music venue on 42nd Street in Manhattan, along with partnering organization Showpaper.org. Their purpose, in addition to having fun, is to change common perception of the art and culture of video games.

Yes, there is life after Gamestop.



Cloning Neanderthals

Posted: 29 Sep 2010 10:20 AM PDT

Should we clone a neanderthal? No, really, should we? Recently, Archaeology magazine considered the scientific, legal, and of course ethical challenges of doing just that. Researchers from Roche's 454 Life Sciences and genetics firm Illumina are collecting bits of Neanderthal DNA to sequence the genome of a 30,000-year-old Neanderthal woman from Croatia. Once the genome is complete, making a clone is no easy task. But as the article explains, it's within the relam of possibility. And what happens if there's success? From Archaeology (image: Wikimedia Commons):
Wikipedia Commons Thumb E E0 Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis.Jpg 470Px-Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis Bernard Rollin, a bioethicist and professor of philosophy at Colorado State University, doesn't believe that creating a Neanderthal clone would be an ethical problem in and of itself. The problem lies in how that individual would be treated by others. "I don't think it is fair to put people...into a circumstance where they are going to be mocked and possibly feared," he says, "and this is equally important, it's not going to have a peer group. Given that humans are at some level social beings, it would be grossly unfair." The sentiment was echoed by Stringer, "You would be bringing this Neanderthal back into a world it did not belong to....It doesn't have its home environment anymore."

There were no cities when the Neanderthals went extinct, and at their population's peak there may have only been 10,000 of them spread across Europe. A cloned Neanderthal might be missing the genetic adaptations we have evolved to cope with the world's greater population density, whatever those adaptations might be. But, not everyone agrees that Neanderthals were so different from modern humans that they would automatically be shunned as outcasts.

"I'm convinced that if one were to raise a Neanderthal in a modern human family he would function just like everybody else," says Trenton Holliday, a paleoanthropologist at Tulane University. "I have no reason to doubt he could speak and do all the things that modern humans do."

"I think there would be no question that if you cloned a Neanderthal, that individual would be recognized as having human rights under the Constitution and international treaties," says Lori Andrews, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law. The law does not define what a human being is, but legal scholars are debating questions of human rights in cases involving genetic engineering. "This is a species-altering event," says Andrews, "it changes the way we are creating a new generation." How much does a human genome need to be changed before the individual created from it is no longer considered human?

"Should We Clone Neanderthals?"

Sharper footage of Apollo 11 moon landing

Posted: 29 Sep 2010 09:27 AM PDT

Space 2010 09 28 Moon-Landing-Zoom
A few minutes of "long lost" footage showing Neil Armstrong climbing down the ladder of the Apollo 11 lander will be screened next week in Australia. Apparently, it's much crisper than the footage we're all familiar with. I haven't seen the new video yet, but I already know it's fake. I can tell from the pixels. From Discovery News (NASA image above):
"NASA were using the Goldstone (California) station signal, which had its settings wrong, but in the signals being received by the Australian stations you can actually see Armstrong," he said. "In what people have seen before you can barely see Armstrong at all, you can see something black -- that was his leg..."

The Armstrong footage, which has only previously been seen by Apollo veterans and other members of the astronomy community, would form part of a highlights reel of restored, digitized moonwalk footage at the awards, he added.

There was a "long detective story" involved in the search for the footage and Sarkissian said it took painstaking frame by frame work to shift the material from the deteriorating black and white film to digital format.

"Long-Lost Footage of Apollo 11 Mission Surfaces"

A dream makers' and fabbers' pad

Posted: 22 Sep 2010 02:07 PM PDT

201009221359
Lion's bed head by Monkeys Workshop in Colorado.

100k Garages is a Mesh-web-enabled sharing-platform that pairs people who want to make things (Makers) with digital fabrication tools (Fabbers). Many projects are small businesses that sell unique items, like the bed head above. But 100k Garages, a team-up of ShopBot Tools and Ponoko, has big plans.

Using grass roots enterprise and ingenuity this community can help get us back in action -- to modernize our public infrastructure, develop energy-saving alternatives, or simply produce great new products for our homes and businesses. There are already thousands of ShopBot CNC tools in garages and small shops across the country, ready to locally fabricate the components needed to address our energy and environmental challenges and to locally produce items needed to enhance daily living, work, and business.

Less than a two-years old, 100k Garages has won praise from its community and the press and is rapidly knitting together garages near you.



Update to Tahoe-LAFS, a private filesystem for the cloud

Posted: 29 Sep 2010 08:51 AM PDT

Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn of the Tahoe-LAFS project (which aims to make "cloud computing" storage more secure and private) writes:
Tahoe-LAFS is a secure distributed storage system. All of the files that you store in Tahoe-LAFS are automatically encrypted so that nobody--not even the people who control the computers that store the data--can read or alter your files without your consent. Remarkably, the encryption doesn't get in the way when you want to share specific files or specific directories with specific other people.

Therefore, Tahoe-LAFS is good for backing up your personal files, accessing them over the Internet, and sharing them. All of the source code is Free-as-in-Freedom.

We just released v1.8 of Tahoe-LAFS. What is new is that downloads are faster and more fault-tolerant, and it supports non-ASCII characters on Windows, and it works on Win64. You should care because you want to retain control over your own data, but you're already storing a lot of your data on remote servers, and you're going to continue doing that more and more in the future.

ANNOUNCING Tahoe, the Least-Authority File System, v1.8.0 (Thanks, Zooko!)



In which we celebrate socially approved addiction

Posted: 29 Sep 2010 08:34 AM PDT

It's National Coffee Day. CBS has a list comparing the caffeine content of various coffee drinks from Starbucks, Dunkin' Donuts and home brewed. I think they mean it as a warning—"a 16-ounce Dunkin Donuts brewed coffee can have anywhere from two to four times as much caffeine as a Starbucks espresso"—but the beauty of information is that it can be used in many different ways. Happy legal addiction, everyone.

Why squirrels masturbate, or Some thoughts on nuts

Posted: 29 Sep 2010 08:18 AM PDT

squirrelTesticles2.jpg

This image has not been digitally altered.

It's a Cape ground squirrel, writes sci-blogger Ed Yong, and they all (or, anyway, all the dude squirrels) look like that. And if you think this is impressive, you should see their penis*.

Perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly, Cape ground squirrels are known for masturbating.

Ed quotes from the observations of researcher Jane Waterman:

"An oral masturbation was recorded when a male sat with head lowered and an erect penis in his mouth, being stimulated with both mouth (fellatio) and forepaws (masturbation), while the lower torso moved forward and backwards in thrusting motions, finally culminating in an apparent ejaculation, after which the male appeared to consume the ejaculate."

With that kind of flexibility, the question of why squirrels masturbate might seem superfluous, but Waterman's research suggests Cape ground squirrel behavior could form the basis for a new theory of male masturbation. In general, there are two competing hypotheses: Either masturbation is just a fun outlet with no adaptive benefit, or it's a useful tool (of sorts) for flushing older sperm out of the pipes and keeping what's used on the ladies fresh, and ready for fertilization. Waterman spent 2000 hours watching Cape ground squirrels, and recording every single sex act the males took part in**. She thinks there's a third explanation ...

This glut of data told her that males masturbate more often when females are ready for mating. But Waterman also found that dominant males were far more likely to masturbate than subordinates, and males who had actually had sex were more likely to do it than those in dry spells. That rules out the sexual outlet hypothesis, which predicts that subordinate males and those who were spurned by females would be the most frequent masturbators. The alternative "sperm quality" hypothesis doesn't work either, for males masturbated more often after sex than before it. It's clearly not an act of preparation.

Waterman considered, and ruled out, the possibility that masturbation is some sort of signal. It's unlikely that the males are in some way displaying to future mates, because they were no more likely to do it when females were close. It's equally unlikely that they're sending messages to rivals, advertising the fact that they've just had sex. After all, Waterman found that one masturbating male did nothing to put off rivals from making advances on a female.

The final explanation is that masturbation is actually a form of self-medication. By cleaning their genitals, males reduce their odds of contracting a sexually transmitted infection.

If she's right, Ed says, the theory could also explain why so many species of male animals groom their genitals after sex, and why human males are prone to post-coital peeing. This could even make a connection back to everybody's favorite Internet science sensation: Fruit bat fellatio.

What I want to know now, though: Does it actually work? Somebody needs to get out there and run a little squirrel STD testing clinic to find out whether the male squirrels who masturbate most are any more STD-free than their less-enthusiastic brethren. And, as far as human applications go, I'd love to know whether urination really does anything to "tidy up", as it were. Suffice to say: Interesting theory. Needs moar data.


Not Exactly Rocket Science: Squirrels masturbate to avoid sexually transmitted infections


*No, I do not have a picture to link to. No, I do not especially want you to send me one.



**It's science, kids! Someday, if you study hard and go to school for a really long time, you, too, can spend 2000 hours watching squirrels doing it.

And now, a hump-day haiku

Posted: 29 Sep 2010 07:20 AM PDT

hurricane.jpg

Hurricane season;
Left coast for inland shelter-

Fine with books, food, beer.

By Nancy White, one of the winners of Left Coast Press' haiku competition.

(Via the Neuroanthropology blog)

Image: Landfall of Hurricane Rick, Palmilla Point, Baja California, Mexico. October 20, 2009. Some rights reserved by Ani Carrington

What if your 15 minutes of fame comes 3 million years after you die?

Posted: 29 Sep 2010 08:56 AM PDT

108825861v6_480x480_Front_Color-Red.jpg

A bunch of my friends are preggers these days, and I just keep finding geeky T-shirt slogans that I want their babies to wear on onesies. This is my new favorite, made by The Affable Atheist store on Cafe Press* and introduced to me by paleo-blogger and stand-up hominid Brian Switek.

*Also purveyors of "If You Can Read This, Thank an Evolutionarily Successful Hominid" bumper stickers.

SUPERDAD: moving and infuriating memoir of fatherhood and crack

Posted: 09 Jun 2010 06:44 AM PDT

Christopher Shulgan's Superdad: A Memoir of Rebellion, Drugs and Fatherhood is an infuriating, moving, and terrifying memoir of self-destructive hypermasculinty and a journey to a kind of uneasy truce between the idea of "father" and "real man."

Shulgan, an accomplished Toronto magazine writer, was raised in a small Ontario town, and wore his ideals of masculinity on his sleeve: drinking his ass off, fighting, partying, snorting coke, smoking crack. His binges tied into an idea of wildness, of being "alternative" and authentic and not settling down to become a boring adult. At the same time, Shulgan was attaining many of adulthood's prizes: a wonderful wife, professional recognition and acclaim, and, finally, a baby.

The news of the pregnancy galvanizes two conflicting urges in Shulgan: on the one hand, the urge to settle down and step up to his responsibilities; on the other, the need to prove that he is still young, wild and free. Neither urge wins, and Shulgan manages to do both: acting the role of a sober dad-to-be while sneaking away to score crack, to go on all night, guilt-ridden binges that he almost completely hides from his wife, who is complicit to the extent that she never seems to look very hard at his excuses for his absences.

When the baby comes, Shulgan's commitment to his family redoubles -- and so does his need to get high. What follows (the meat of the book) is a painful account of someone who can't break off his love-affair with self-destruction; who doesn't really want to, not in his heart of hearts. With wrenching honesty, Shulgan spells out his ambivalence toward sobriety, making a case that would be convincing if it wasn't for the equally honest account of the pain he's creating for himself and his loved ones.

Love, ultimately, is the answer: the writer's love for his family shines through on every page, even as he narrates his betrayals. And in the end, that love -- tender but blazing -- gets him through his troubles.

Shulgan is a fine writer. As a writer, I found myself awed by Shulgan's tale-teller's facility; as a dad, I found myself wanting to smack him until he stopped destroying his family and his life. SUPERDAD is a brave memoir that humanizes the self-immolating urge of the crack addict.

Superdad: A Memoir of Rebellion, Drugs and Fatherhood



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