The Latest from Boing Boing

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• TSA is sad that we don't want them to touch our junk
• HOWTO investigate a Satanic ritual killing
• Hilarious story of disastrous cross-country move with dogs
• NY-based Iraqi artist to implant camera in the back of his head for Qatar museum
• Snake Charmer with Cobra (Boing Boing Flickr Pool)
• Doctor makes a mistake—but it's not all bad
• Skull of a fetal dinosaur
• UK gov't promises to allow telcos to hold Brits hostage on "two-speed" Internet
• Ancient temples designed for tripping
• Sollight Lightship
• Intellectual history of cannibalism
• Xeni on Leo Laporte's This Week in Tech, ep. #274: "I'll Take the Frisking"
• "A Wretched Hive," Star Wars-themed print from Martin Ansin for Alamo Drafthouse/Mondo
• Noah Shachtman's WSJ op-ed: Naked Scanners and Touching of Junk do not make us safer
• Ultimate Kitten Snuggle
• Unusual horse bike
• San Francisco: Imaginary Foundation art show and pop-up shop
• Sexually assaulted by a TSA groper
• Liveblog coverage of today's House climate science hearing
• Mechanical Calculating Device (Boing Boing Flickr Pool)
• God-Man vs. Human-Man! Why Are They Fighting?!

TSA is sad that we don't want them to touch our junk Posted: 17 Nov 2010 11:19 PM PST Sources at the TSA are bitterly angry that CNN is covering the global horror at the new pornoscanner/genital-fondling procedure: because, you know, it hurts their feelings. Unlike, say, irradiating breast-cancer survivors, terrorizing three year olds, or sexually assaulting mothers while their children look on. Diddums.

HOWTO investigate a Satanic ritual killing Posted: 17 Nov 2010 09:55 PM PST Are you a murder investigator who is secretly ashamed of your inability to spot the signs of a Satanic ritual killing? Fear not: this gentleman will help you spot subtle signs like inverted pentagrams gouged into the victim's torso, as part of a video called "The Law Enforcement Guide to Satanic Cults." The Victim's Body (via IO9)   Rapist, murderer, and satanist claims religious persecution ... A kinder, gentler Son of Sam - Boing Boing The last days of Aleister Crowley Boing Boing

Hilarious story of disastrous cross-country move with dogs Posted: 17 Nov 2010 09:50 PM PST I'm not a dog person. It's not that I don't like dogs, but they're not my thing, and usually I skip over any news-item, blog-post or conversation that contains the word "dog." Not my bag. But once I started reading Hyperbole and a Half's "Dogs Don't Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving," I found myself unable to stop -- except to laugh uproariously: Unfortunately for the helper dog, it took us nearly a week to get everything packed up. By the time we were ready to begin the first part of our two-day journey to Oregon, she seemed almost entirely convinced that she was going to die at any moment. She spent the entire car ride drooling and shaking uncontrollably. But the simple dog seemed to enjoy the trip. Even though she threw up seven times. She actually seemed to like throwing up. To the simple dog, throwing up was like some magical power that she never knew she possessed - the ability to create infinite food. I was less excited about the discovery because it turned my dog into a horrible, vomit-making perpetual motion machine. Whenever I heard her retch in the backseat, I had to pull over as quickly as possible to prevent her from reloading her stomach and starting the whole cycle over again. But as far as the simple dog was concerned, it was the best, most exciting day of her life. Dogs Don't Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving (via Making Light)   Pug sings Batman TV theme - Boing Boing How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: explaining quantum physics ... Why do my dog's paws smell so good? - Boing Boing Dogs get freaked out by "Law and Order" theme? - Boing Boing Dog eats police car - Boing Boing

NY-based Iraqi artist to implant camera in the back of his head for Qatar museum Posted: 17 Nov 2010 07:39 PM PST A photography professor at NYU plans to install a camera in the back of his head for an art project commissioned by a new modern art museum in Qatar. Artist Wafaa Bilal (shown below), who was born in Iraq, will stream images captured by the device to the museum; visitors there will be able to peruse whatever is to be seen out of the back of his head. Snip from WSJ: Wafaa Bilal, an Iraqi assistant professor in the photography and imaging department of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, intends to undergo surgery in coming weeks to install the camera, according to several people familiar with the project. For one year, Mr. Bilal's camera will take still pictures at one-minute intervals, then feed the photos to monitors at the museum. The thumbnail-sized camera will be affixed to his head through a piercing-like attachment, his NYU colleagues say. Mr. Bilal declined to comment for this story. The artwork, titled "The 3rd I," is intended as "a comment on the inaccessibility of time, and the inability to capture memory and experience," according to press materials from the museum, known as Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art. Mr. Bilal's work would be among the inaugural exhibits of Mathaf, scheduled to open next month. If flying in the US with an Iraqi name wasn't already fun enough, I can only imagine Mr. Bilal will have an even more delightful time at TSA screenings once the device has been implanted in his head. News coverage: Wall Street Journal, New York Times, CNET, CNN, PopSci. The artist's website is here—poke around, some intense previous projects involving body modification, the internet, jihad, the US occupation of Iraq, and surveillance. His brother was killed at a US security checkpoint in Iraq five years ago. Here's his 3rdI (third eye / third "I") project site. The museum's website is here, Facebook, Twitter. (via the BB Submitterator, thanks TimDrew)

Snake Charmer with Cobra (Boing Boing Flickr Pool) Posted: 17 Nov 2010 06:58 PM PST LA-based photographer and adventure travel consultant Howard Goldberg contributed this image to the Boing Boing Flickr Pool: "Snake Charmer with Cobra, in Varanasi, India." This city, in case you're unfamiliar, is considered the holiest place in the world in the Hindu faith, and the center of the world in Hindu cosmology.

Doctor makes a mistake—but it's not all bad Posted: 17 Nov 2010 03:13 PM PST Something simultaneously scary, and hopeful: Massachusetts General Hospital's Dr. David Ring performed the wrong surgery on a patient. This kind of thing isn't as uncommon as you might hope. One study showed 1 in 7 hospitalized Medicare patients got the wrong treatment. What is rare: Ring apologized to his patient immediately and has gone on to write up a public acknowledgment of his mistake —with an eye toward preventing future mishaps—in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Skull of a fetal dinosaur Posted: 17 Nov 2010 05:36 PM PST Reader Keith took this shot at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. He's not sure about the species, but digging around the AMNH website, I think it might be an oviraptorid—and the first fetal carnivorous dinosaur ever discovered. UPDATE: I'm wrong, it's a Psittacosaurus! At least, according to Wikipedia and a clever Anonymous reader. Thanks, dude. Found on the BoingBoing Flickr Pool and used with permission.

UK gov't promises to allow telcos to hold Brits hostage on "two-speed" Internet Posted: 17 Nov 2010 01:16 PM PST So much for any hope that a Conservative-LibDem coalition would signal a beginning to sane network/information policy in Britain. Ed Vaizey, the new Minister of Culture, has given the go-ahead for a "two-speed," non-neutral Internet, in which your capacity to access a website or service would depend on whether that service had bribed your ISP. In this model, ISPs could slow down traffic from the sites you love if they don't pay for "premium access" to you -- essentially turning you into a hostage that gets traded around like a prisoner being swapped for a couple packs of cigarettes. So, Vaizey, what next? I can call any takeaway restaurant I want, but unless they've given a backhander to my phone company, I'll have to wait an extra 30 seconds to be connected, while an announcement offers to put me through to a competitor who's paid the "premium" danegeld? What kind of self-respecting Tory -- theoretically a staunch free marketer -- would allow pure rent-seeking from a common carrier, to the detriment of the whole population? He says: "We have got to continue to encourage the market to innovate and experiment with different business models and ways of providing consumers with what they want. "This could include the evolution of a two-sided market where consumers and content providers could choose to pay for differing levels of quality of service." He also suggests that content makers could be charged for the first time for the use of the ISP's networks - provided they too were clear about what they were getting. "Content and application providers should be able to know exactly what level of service they are getting especially if they are paying for it," he says. Minister Ed Vaizey backs 'two-speed' internet   Virgin Media CEO: Net neutrality is "bollocks," promises to breach ... The Master Switch: Tim "Net Neutrality" Wu explains what's at ... Tim Wu on Net Neutrality/Google-Verizon betrayal - Boing Boing YouTube speed tester: Net Neutrality judo will show you when your ...

Ancient temples designed for tripping Posted: 17 Nov 2010 12:52 PM PST Acoustic archaeologists are exploring how the Chavin culture in Peru may have designed underground temples to blow worshippers' minds using low-tech sound and light shows. Of course, this thread continued in cathedrals with massive stained glass windows and organs all the way to today's high-end multimedia megachurches. According to Miriam Kolar of Stanford's Center for Computer Research and Acoustics, the temple's maze of tunnels "could be physically disorienting and the acoustic environment is very different than the natural world," and might be especially freaky for folks who were tripping balls. "The iconography (of ancient Chavin drawings) shows people mixed with animal features in altered states of being," said Kolar, who is presenting her recent work at a conference in Cancun, Mexico this week. "There is peyote and mucus trails out of the nose indicative of people using psychoactive plant substances. They were taking drugs and having a hallucinogenic experience." If that wasn't enough, the mazes at Chavin de Huantar also include air ducts that use sunlight to produce distorted shadows of the maze's human participants. And sound waves from giant marine shells found in the maze in 2001 may have produced a frequency that actually rattled the eyeballs of those peyote-using ancients, Kolar said... The Chavin de Huantar site in Peru isn't the only place where sound played an important role. The Mayan rulers at Chichen Itza in the Yucatan also figured out how to use sound for crowd control. David Lubman, an acoustic engineer who has spent the past 12 years studying the Mayan site, says a strange bird-like echo from the Kukulkan temple was actually constructed on purpose. "It's sort of spooky," Lubman said from Irvine, Calif. "It's not an ordinary echo." Lubman's analysis compared the acoustic soundprint of the quetzal bird, which was revered by Mayans, to the sound of the echo at Chichen Itza. The two sounds matched. Lublin said the secret is in the acoustic properties of the steep staircase on the temple's front. "Acoustic Archaeology Yielding Mind-Tripping Tricks" (Thanks, Bob Pescovitz!)

Sollight Lightship Posted: 17 Nov 2010 12:31 PM PST This solar-powered LED light comes with suction cups and is incredibly handy. I keep one in the car on the back window, so it's always charged in case of a breakdown. It also features a red LED to preserve night vision, as well as an auto-shut-off that uses a light sensor. It is weather sealed and it stood up brilliantly to the sun, salt and sea while I lived in Fiji. I used this device, along with the brilliant LightCap. This latest version of the Sollight classic LightShip is fantastic as ever. Great for hands free light, camping, and emergencies. -- Kaz Brecher SolLight Lightship $18 Comment on this at Cool Tools. Or, submit a tool!

Intellectual history of cannibalism Posted: 17 Nov 2010 01:22 PM PST "Cannibal Feast—Fiji." Postcard sent on 15 July 1907. Romanian political scientist Cătălin Avramescu is the author of the enticing book An Intellectual History of Cannibalism. It is apparently the best scholarly book about the cultural impact and political theory surrounding people who eat people. Interesting topic, but perhaps too meaty for my current media diet. I'm pleased Cabinet has interviewed Avramescu so I can digest his material in more bite-sized chunks. OK, I'll stop. From Cabinet: Do you really think it's possible to do the intellectual history of cannibalism without doing the history of cannibalism itself? Yes and no. Cannibalism was often taken as a "thought experiment," much like Maxwell's demon or Schrödinger's cat. Philosophers have often fantasized about human flesh and the dire necessity that could compel a human being to eat another human being, though they have almost never observed it directly. Sometimes they even imagined situations that are plainly impossible, like that of the sailors adrift in a boat who supposedly cast lots to choose one to be sacrificed. In real circumstances, they would die of thirst long before dying of hunger. That said, I am reluctant to draw a sharp distinction between "real" and "imagined" or "symbolic" cannibalism. There is no separate Ding an Sich of anthropophagy, one that is not preceded by need, fear, or lust, or one that does not leave in its wake guilt, pleasure, or terror. On the other hand, actual cannibalism always lurks at the periphery of our sanitized, modern world of representations. A few years ago, a collection of photos from World War II was declassified. These pictures were so extreme that they had been kept in a vault at the Finnish Ministry of Defense for more than sixty years. Among the atrocities frozen in time by the camera are images of cannibalism in the ranks of Soviet soldiers... What is next for cannibalism studies? Are there themes from the book that you would like to see developed further, by yourself or by someone else? I am reluctant to advance a program. Scholarly research owes more to chance encounters that it often admits. I must say, though, that I would be interested to read a systematic analysis of how the non-Europeans have perceived, from a moral point of view, the diet of the Europeans. "The Raw and the Cooked: An Interview with Cătălin Avramescu" Hugo Chavez, cannibalism apologist Ted Turner: global warming could lead to cannibalism Cannibal restaurant in Germany? Cannibals reportedly sold body parts to kebab vendor Gallery of cannibal food mascots

Xeni on Leo Laporte's This Week in Tech, ep. #274: "I'll Take the Frisking" Posted: 17 Nov 2010 11:52 AM PST [Video Link] Leo Laporte kindly invited me to join a cast of merry men (John C. Dvorak, Brian Brushwood, Owen JJ Stone) on This Week In Tech, and I did. We had lots of fun. Topics included "Facebook mail, privacy while living in public, Android tablets, person of the year nominees, zoning out on Tetras, IAmTwittercus, and more." By "more," they mean Cthulhu and donkey-bonking. You can watch and/or listen here. Good heavens, the episode has its own Wiki Page. Some fans delivered liquor to the cabin where they tape it, so all of the dudes (save Dvorak) were extra loose and punchy this time. The episode really is full of surprises. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Thanks for inviting me, Leo and TWiT team. And thanks for being so nice to me in the IRC channel, TWiT army.

"A Wretched Hive," Star Wars-themed print from Martin Ansin for Alamo Drafthouse/Mondo Posted: 17 Nov 2010 11:29 AM PST The fine folks at Alamo Drafthouse today send Boing Boing an exclusive sneak peek at the wonderful poster above, "A Wretched Hive," by Martin Ansin. Comes in a regular (Copper) edition of 360, shown above, and a variant (Metallic Silver) edition of 150. Dimensions: 24"x36". Will go on sale November 18, follow @MondoNews for the "on sale now" announcement. About the design, the artist says: I've always liked that scene in Reign Of Fire where these post-apocalyptic survivors re-enact Star Wars scenes for their children; in the future, the stories that we really like have become legends. For this poster I tried to do something similar, but in the opposite direction in time. I wanted to see how the cantina scene would look if it had been illustrated for an old book, if Star Wars was a traditional epic adventure sharing space with King Arthur and Beowulf. Who knows, maybe sometime in the future it will." More about Alamo Drafthouse, and more about Mondo here. Most recently, Boing Boing featured Alamo Drafthouse as the distributors of the exceedingly fine Chris Morris "jihamedy" Four Lions.

Noah Shachtman's WSJ op-ed: Naked Scanners and Touching of Junk do not make us safer Posted: 17 Nov 2010 11:07 AM PST Danger Room's Noah Shachtman has an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal which heroically accomplishes two things: first, the word "penis," in the very first paragraph; second, a sober explanation of why the taxpayer-funded harassment now perpetrated upon the flying public by the TSA, in the form of backscatter scans and The Touching of The Junk, is a waste of everyone's time.

Ultimate Kitten Snuggle Posted: 17 Nov 2010 09:42 AM PST Stay with it 'til the reveal. Video Link (thanks, Tara McGinley!)

Unusual horse bike Posted: 17 Nov 2010 09:42 AM PST BB pal Jess Hemerly spotted someone in her fixie gang riding this bike in Critical Mass. Just kidding. But the Young Riders Bike is available in the Back In The Saddle catalog that Jess mysteriously received in the mail. It's $220. Unfortunately, kids sizes only. Horse Bike

San Francisco: Imaginary Foundation art show and pop-up shop Posted: 17 Nov 2010 12:05 PM PST Our friends at the surrealist thinktank/clothier Imaginary Foundation have an art installation and pop-up store opening Friday night in San Francisco. Titled "The Undivided Mind," the exhibition features a series of luminous paintings hung on walls chalked with the mathematical secrets of the universe. The opening is Friday, November 19, at 7:30pm, at FIFTY24SF Gallery. RSVP to receive free, limited edition Imaginary Foundation gifts. Imaginary Foundation: The Undivided Mind

Sexually assaulted by a TSA groper Posted: 17 Nov 2010 09:14 PM PST Erin, a prominent "Mommyblogger," had her vagina and breasts fondled without notice or warning by a TSA screener in Tampa Dayton. In her view -- and her lawyer's (and mine) -- this is a sexual assault, and she is proceeding accordingly: "I will not be a silent victim of sexual assault by a TSA agent. Total Sexual Assault."

Liveblog coverage of today's House climate science hearing Posted: 17 Nov 2010 08:05 AM PST The House of Representatives' Science and Technology Committee is hosting a hearing on climate science today. In fact, it's starting just about right now. This particular hearing has been convened by Democrats and is generally being looked at as a preemptive strike against Republican-led climate hearings next year. There will be a lot of scientists giving testimony—and (unsurprisingly, if you know the science) most of them will be talking about the widely accepted data showing that global climate change is happening—but there will also be several skeptical witnesses. The first is Judy Curry—a scientist who isn't skeptical about climate change, itself, but does have some legit critiques on specific claims made about what impacts climate change will cause. The other two are scientists I'm less familiar with—Richard Lindzen and Patrick Michaels. From quick research, neither denies climate change is happening, they just think the impacts will be so minor as to not really matter much. If you want to follow this, or catch up on it later, a good place to start would be Science magazine's live-blog coverage. Journalist Eli Kintisch & climate scientist Gavin Schmidt will keep you updated on what's going on throughout the day, and will likely provide better context and necessary background information than most other media outlets. Photo of California's Moss Landing power plant taken by astrophysicist Dawn Erb. Found in the BoingBoing Flickr Pool. Used with permission.

Mechanical Calculating Device (Boing Boing Flickr Pool) Posted: 17 Nov 2010 06:22 AM PST "Mechanical Calculating Device," a photo contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by BB reader sicsnewton, in Flagstaff Arizona.

God-Man vs. Human-Man! Why Are They Fighting?! Posted: 17 Nov 2010 12:21 AM PST

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