Friday, June 3, 2011

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Which dates belong on the Hacker Calendar?

Posted: 03 Jun 2011 03:15 AM PDT

Emmanuel Goldstein sez, "2600 Magazine is compiling a hacker calendar with photos of hacker-oriented technology. Input from the community is being sought to help compile a comprehensive list of important and obscure dates of interest, such as when "War Games" was released, the founding of the EFF, or the most recent Sony security breach. The hacker world is full of milestones and this is an attempt to put together a thorough record of them."
March 3, 1885 - American Telephone & Telegraph founded
June 3, 1983 - "War Games" released
September 27, 1983 - The GNU Project announced by Richard Stallman
November 17, 1985 - The first issue of "Phrack" released
July 10, 1990 - Electronic Frontier Foundation started
January 21, 2000 - Kevin Mitnick released after five years in captivity
June 2, 2011 - Hacker group LulzSec reveals massive Sony security breach
HELP US COMPILE THE HACKER CALENDAR (Thanks, Emmanuel!)

MI6 hackers replace al Qaeda bomb recipes with pirated cake recipes

Posted: 02 Jun 2011 11:43 PM PDT

Hackers working for UK intelligence agency MI6 modified an online al Qaeda magazine and replaced the bomb recipes therein with cake recipes. They called it "Operation Cupcake."
When followers tried to download the 67-page colour magazine, instead of instructions about how to "Make a bomb in the Kitchen of your Mom" by "The AQ Chef" they were greeted with garbled computer code.

The code, which had been inserted into the original magazine by the British intelligence hackers, was actually a web page of recipes for "The Best Cupcakes in America" published by the Ellen DeGeneres chat show.

Written by Dulcy Israel and produced by Main Street Cupcakes in Hudson, Ohio, it said "the little cupcake is big again" adding: "Self-contained and satisfying, it summons memories of childhood even as it's updated for today's sweet-toothed hipsters."

Sounds like someone's got a copyright infringement case on their hands. I hear MI6 has deep pockets.

MI6 attacks al-Qaeda in 'Operation Cupcake' (via Reddit)

(Image: Pirate Cupcake, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from nikki1201's photostream)

Home Depot to American Family Ass.: take a hike, we support gay causes

Posted: 03 Jun 2011 12:05 AM PDT

The American Family Association presented Home Depot's board of directors with his organization's demand that they stop funding gay pride events and other events that promote tolerance and diversity. He had a petition with about 500,000 signatures from people who've vowed to boycott the store unless it joins them in their campaign against gay people.

Home Depot Chairman Frank Blake told the AFA to take a hike, stated that Home Depot was proud of its support for diversity, and that's that.

Like all big box stores, Home Depot isn't without its problems, but today, they've shown some real backbone.

Home Depot Tells AFA To Take A Hike (via Making Light)

World's smallest Klein bottle

Posted: 02 Jun 2011 11:17 PM PDT

This Klein bottle on Etsy measures just one and a quarter inches tall! I don't know if it's actually the world's smallest, but it's believable and it's totally adorable, AND it comes in its own little gift wrapped package.

World's smallest Klein bottle at Etsy

Thanks Dannel!
Add Dannel to your Etsy Circle to find more nerdy favorites

Cellphone radiation not a problem for this guy

Posted: 02 Jun 2011 07:05 PM PDT

plastinated.jpg The plastinated body of a man is pictured during an exhibition preview at Naturhistorisches Museum (Natural History Museum) in Vienna, last year. Photo: Reuters/Heinz-Peter Bader.

Smurf in Terraria

Posted: 02 Jun 2011 06:57 PM PDT

John Walker takes us on a tour through hit indie game Terraria...as a Smurf. [RPS]

SPECIAL FEATURE: Gallery of galls

Posted: 02 Jun 2011 06:56 PM PDT

Galls grow on plants infected with bacteria, parasites or insect eggs. Different species' galls are highly distinctive, often providing protection or nourishment for the creature growing within. Some are even useful to us; ink was traditionally made with tannic acid gleaned from oak galls. Enjoy this gallery of growths, blisters and curious protrusions in the plant kingdom.

Read the rest



Egypt: "Virginity tests will spark next revolution"

Posted: 02 Jun 2011 02:57 PM PDT

Mona Eltahawy in the Guardian, on gender and revolution in Egypt:
Mona-Eltahawy-003.jpg

If the "it wasn't about gender" mantra is stuck on repeat so that we don't scare the boys away, then let them remember the state screwed them too, literally - ask political prisoners, and remember the condoms and Viagra found when protesters stormed state security headquarters.

(...) Let's be clear, "virginity tests" are common in Egypt and straddle class and urban/rural divides. Be it the traditional midwife checking for a hymen on a bride's wedding night, or a forensics expert or doctor called in after a prospective bridegroom's suspicions, young women are forced to spread their legs to appease the god of virginity. But no one talks about it.

But it's different when the state [or the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces] is the one forcing women's legs apart. A protest is planned for Saturday. It's a perfect time for gender to come out of the revolution's closet.

This must be our moment of reckoning with the god of virginity. The rage against the military must also target the humiliation brought by those tests, regardless of who carries them out.

Read the full opinion piece here.

 


GE's neat Tumblr

Posted: 02 Jun 2011 02:00 PM PDT

Tumblr Lm6Akr6Jbu1Qk4Ealo1 500
General Electric has a Tumblr and they seem to be doing a fine job at it! Seen here:
A pulse-detonation actuator from our Energy & Propulsion lab. It produces high-pressure, pulsating supersonic jets, which help with airflow control in high-speed travel. Active airflow control reduces the drag, noise, and fuel consumption of an aircraft, making for smoother and more efficient flight.
The GE Show (Thanks, Ariel Waldman!)

Sony hacked again: 1m compromised, claims LulzSec

Posted: 02 Jun 2011 02:31 PM PDT

sonii.gif Already infamous for defacing PBS's website earlier this week, cracking outfit LulzSec today claimed a familiar scalp—whatever remains of it, anyway. This time, it's Sony Pictures Entertainment, the movie-making division. From a statement attributed to the group:
Our goal here is not to come across as master hackers, hence what we're about to reveal: SonyPictures.com was owned by a very simple SQL injection, one of the most primitive and common vulnerabilities, as we should all know by now. From a single injection, we accessed EVERYTHING. Why do you put such faith in a company that allows itself to become open to these simple attacks? What's worse is that every bit of data we took wasn't encrypted. Sony stored over 1,000,000 passwords of its customers in plaintext, which means it's just a matter of taking it. This is disgraceful and insecure: they were asking for it.
The haul of data, already posted to The Pirate Bay, also includes 3.5 million Sony Music coupons. Sony traditionally is run as a set of 'silos', independent departments, divisions and joint ventures that have much autonomy from one another. This might be why there are so many different attacks: perhaps there is always another Sony silo which runs its own web infrastructure, where hundreds of dollars worth of web development can go down the drain, just like that.

Worst sublets in NYC

Posted: 02 Jun 2011 12:28 AM PDT

The Awl's Choire Sicha is looking for a sublet in New York; this worst-of from Craigslist sublet listings paint a pretty awful picture for shared accommodation in the Big Apple.
• "Couples/420/cigarettes/drinking totally ok, but NO PETS."

• "Room DOUBLES AS A MUSIC TEACHING STUDIO from 9:30 AM - 9:00PM ON WED, THUR & FRIDAY so you would need to be out during these hours on these days."

• "I smoke in the kitchen, but only there and a heavy curtain blocks the door."

• "1br - Open House!-Curtained living room available from June 5, female only"

The 13 Worst Things I Found on Craigslist While Looking for a NYC Sublet

New Geekdad book: "Guide to Weekend Fun"

Posted: 02 Jun 2011 02:01 PM PDT


Video Link I had a great time chatting with Geekdad.com kahuna Ken Denmead at Maker Faire last weekend. I found out he's got a new Geekdad project book out, too, called The Geekdad's Guide to Weekend Fun. And take a look at this promo video for his books, which is vibrating with hallucinatory weirdness! (I like the girl's shirt. It reads, "Self-Rescuing Princess.")
Ken Denmead struck a chord with parents and kids across America with his GeekDad blog on Wired.com, which receives more than one million page views per month. His debut book, Geek Dad, was on bestseller lists and in its seventh printing just two months after hitting store shelves. With The Geek Dad's Guide to Weekend Fun, he keeps the nerdtastic novelties coming, with projects that teach readers how to:

•Build homemade robots from scratch

•Write and direct simple stop-motion movies

•Hack into mechanical toys to add cool electronic twists, and more

United by the premise that to really understand science and how something works you must design and build it yourself or remake it better, Geek Parents everywhere will celebrate this latest installment of weekend workshop wonders.

The Geekdad's Guide to Weekend Fun

Researcher claims Skype protocol reverse-engineered

Posted: 02 Jun 2011 12:27 PM PDT

Efim Bushmanov, a freelance researcher, claims to have reverse engineered the Skype protocol. Notes and source available for download.

Is Titan Media mislabelling gay porn torrents to make it easier to blackmail downloaders?

Posted: 02 Jun 2011 01:43 PM PDT

Titan Media is a company that makes porno movies and legal threats over porno movies. They've grown notorious for threatening to sue people who allegedly were downloading gay porn, and demanding hush-money to make the embarrassing allegations go away. Now, TorrentFreak reports that Titan Media also sends legal threats to people who were downloading gay porn files that were mislabelled, appearing to their downloaders to be greatest hits albums by Ryuichi Sakamoto or Dire Straits.

It's hard to understand how Titan Media could know that a file called "Album - Ryuichi Sakamoto - The Best Of Ryuichi Sakamoto.rar" was really "110 Degrees in Tuscon." Perhaps they got a tip-off, or maybe they're downloading every single BitTorrent file listed on a public tracker in order to check and see if it's really one of their movies.

Or maybe they're running a honeypot which they seed with gay porn that's been relabelled as music (and other non-pornographic content), so that they can threaten to sue downloaders and get a quick settlement when their victims learn that they're about to be named in an embarrassing lawsuit. That is, you might be willing to go to court to argue that you weren't really downloading a Dire Straits album, but you might not want your name associated with "Cop Shack on 101" or "Boner! Man's Best Friend" even if you think you could win the suit.

In the court papers there's a letter from a Ms. Gonzales that reveals some very interesting details. In her plea for mercy, Ms. Gonzales explains to the court that she never intended to download gay porn, and that the file she downloaded was labeled as a greatest hits album from the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto.

What's even more interesting is that Titan Media's lawyer was fully aware of the fact that Ms. Gonzales downloaded a mislabeled file. In fact, the settlement letter she received gave her the option to settle the case for $1,875, and clearly stated that the title of the infringed work was "Album - Ryuichi Sakamoto - The Best Of Ryuichi Sakamoto.rar." If Ms. Gonzales did not pay within a few weeks, the settlement offer would increase to $3,375, it further noted.

U.S. P2P Lawsuit Shows Signs of a 'Pirate Honeypot'

NYT's first woman exec. editor wrote in 2006: "When Will We Stop Saying 'First Woman to _____'?"

Posted: 02 Jun 2011 12:28 PM PDT

abramson092908.jpg

Irony: Jill Abramson, who today became the first woman to serve as the executive editor of the New York Times in the paper's entire 160-year history, wrote a piece for the New York Times back in 2006 titled, "When Will We Stop Saying 'First Woman to _____'?"

For what it's worth, I, too, long for the day when "First Woman To ____" is no longer notable. But for now, in many cases, it still is a big deal.

Mladic in The Hague

Posted: 02 Jun 2011 11:42 AM PDT

RTR2N5PW.jpg

PHOTO: Bosnian Muslim woman Alic Mina cries near the grave of her son Mihrudin before a mass funeral in the village of Memici, about 30 kilometres from Zvornik, June 1, 2011. The remains of eight people, victims of an "ethnic cleansing" campaign that former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic is accused of instigating, were retrieved from mass graves in Zvornik and buried during the mass funeral on Wednesday. Mladic, extradited to the Netherlands from Serbia on Tuesday after 16 years on the run, will appear in court on Friday, according to a statement issued by the court on Wednesday. Mladic was indicted over the 43-month siege of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo and the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica, close to the border with Serbia, during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. (REUTERS/Dado Ruvic)

Now that the Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic is safely behind the bars in the Hague international war tribunal, some questions are becoming more urgent.

Where was Mladic hiding all these years? Who helped him evade justice? Why did his protectors stay silent and unpunished? Will there be a investigation and a punishment for them, too? In Serbia, in the Hague, in hell?

In 2008, Radovan Karadzic, Mladic's best-known ally and also a highly wanted war criminal, was arrested in Belgrade while posing as a New Age medical guru. Karadzic had been living undercover for years, with a semi-public persona as a quack medical expert. He often appeared in conferences and wrote for fringe medical papers.

I interviewed some people who worked or spent time with Karadzic.

Somehow I believed those rather simple-minded devotees, who burned candles to cure cancer. Surely people this gullible could not imagine that Dragan 'David' Dabic, this hoarse-voiced impostor with his gloves, long beard and white topknot, was actually Radovan Karadzic. After all, Karadzic was a blustering politician who was always clean-shaven and in dark suits.

But at one point, one of my informants from the clinic became conspiratorial. He pulled out his cellphone showing me a snapshot of the worn, thin face of an elderly man.

Do you recognize him? he asked me. At the time I had no clue, but a week ago, when Mladic was arrested with his new look as a gaunt, reclusive rural villager, I thought I recognized his face. There was also surprising news that Mladic had been seeking treatment for lymph cancer.

It's a strange addition to the Mladic legend, because, for years, most everybody in Serbia has glimpsed Mladic somewhere or other. Mladic was a mountain warrior hiding armed in the caves. Mladic was in drag as a peasant woman selling eggs in the Belgrade downtown market. He was working for peanuts as a common construction worker. He was hiding in an Orthodox nunnery after suffering a stroke. He was dead and buried in various tombs.

There also remains a tragic mystery of two young Serbian soldiers killed on duty -- they allegedly had seen Mladic and had to be eliminated. That story itself has many suspicious twists and turns, and is still pending without a plausible and honest explanation to the parents of the dead.


In the days between May 26, when Mladic was arrested, and June 1 when he was extradited to the Hague, the pace of these stories accelerated. The official stand is that Mladic was simply on the run, continually changing places and finding new circles of comrades to help him with money and shelter. In short, he just plain outsmarted the authorities, which clearly is nobody's fault!

The Serbian mainstream press has excelled in its pathological interest in the broken heart and soul of Mladic, who is clearly one of the cruelest people in contemporary history. Not only did Mladic methodically liquidate eight thousand Muslim men and boys in three days of machine-gun fire, he was particularly clever and cold-blooded about this crime. He bullied the helpless prisoners, tricked their families into collaborating in their own death program, and methodically lied to the UN officers who were there to protect the Muslim enclave. The famous picture of Ratko Mladic feeding the children with chocolates before executing their fathers has become his lasting icon.


There's also the repugnant fact that Mladic was a pious holy warrior. Pictures of the general and his soldiers being blessed by the priests of the Serbian Orthodox church were broadcast widely by the national Serbian TV in the nineties.


In my book: "Scorpions, the Design of Crime," I followed the trial of a paramilitary troop from Serbia which participated in the Srebrenica massacre. The infamous six paramilitary marauders arrested because of a movie they made, in which they executed captive civilians. This underground movie circulated as a boost to the killers and their ideology during the war. Then it surfaced in 2005 as damning evidence against the Scorpions.


Now that Mladic is old and sick and jailed, the bells of mercy and tolerance are ringing as if Srebrenica never happened. The people's hero and militant demigod is re-branded as a martyr and object of pity.


Mladic expressed a regret before going to the Hague: that he would never return alive to Serbia was to visit the grave of his daughter. This daughter committed suicide in 1994 shooting herself with his favorite gun. At the time Mladic and his allies blamed the opposition press for his daughter's despair of life. I remember journalists threatened because of texts they wrote detailing the cruelty of General Ratko Mladic. It never occurred to him, then or now, that hordes of innocent people including his daughter had died from his demonic activities.


Mladic's lawyer has already announced that he will not plead guilty. His son who visited him in the Belgrade jail with his wife announced that his father was a patriot who had diligently performed his duty.


Mladic, in prison, asked for strawberries and a doctor. Not just any doctor, but the President of a the Serbian Parliament, who is a woman from the Milosevic party, presiding over Parliament due to the bizarre power diplomacy of the pro-European Tadic government. She duly attended the prisoner and gave him a medical examination. Mladic was treated with maximum compassion and humanity, which, of course, made relatives of his victims rage with disbelief.


He also asked to visit his daughter's grave -- or, failing that, that they disinter her coffin and bring her corpse to his prison cell. This bizarre demand was a typical Karadzic-Mladic blood-and-soil declaration -- but why not bring Mladic all the coffins that he hammered shut?


Outside his prison and in the Belgrade major square, thousand Mladic supporters violently demonstrated, doing a good business with their now-standard commemorative books and T-shirts. More than a hundred would-be rioters were arrested, despite the prisoner's meek request that they keep quiet and stay out of trouble. The Serbian police seem determined to clear the streets and the path toward United Europe.


Efforts to thwart and repress Serbian war criminals have always come with a heavy cost in Serbia itself. In 2003, Zoran Djindjic delivered Slobodan Milosevic to the Hague tribunal. This bold act meant the end of criminal dominance in Serbia, but it also cost Djindjic his life. Djindjic was gunned down by a radical nationalist gang who declared themselves to be patriots killing a traitor.


How much have things changed since then in Serbia? They have changed a great deal, and never more than lately, but for every strawberry there has been a bloody coffin nail.



Blog: jasminatesanovic.wordpress.com



Cassini: "space fan"-made film, using NASA footage

Posted: 02 Jun 2011 11:18 AM PDT

CASSINI MISSION from cabbas on Vimeo.

Filmmaker Chris Abbas created the beautiful short film above, and explains:
I truly enjoy outer space. It's absolutely amazing that we now have the ability to send instruments out into the void of the universe to observe all sorts of interesting things. Asteroids! Moons! Planets! Dark matter! This is the perfect opportunity for a Carl Sagan quote: "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known." The footage in this little film was captured by the hardworking men and women at NASA with the Cassini Imaging Science System. If you're interested in learning more about Cassini and the on-going Cassini Solstice Mission, check it out at NASA's website.

(via Colin Peters)

 


Vancouver

Posted: 02 Jun 2011 11:05 AM PDT

[Video Link]. "To compete and show their best". With auto-tune.

(thanks, @kyall)

Walled gardens vs makers

Posted: 01 Jun 2011 11:45 PM PDT

Make has posted on of my columns from the print edition online; "Walled Gardens vs. Makers" is a look at the way that modern, Internet-era making is built on knowledge sharing and collaboration, and how walled gardens get in the way:
Because, of course, today I have millions of hacks and tips and tricks and ideas at my fingertips, thanks to the internet and the tools that run on top of it. When I invent or discover something, I immediately put it on the net. And when I find myself in a corner of the world that is not to my liking, I Google up some hack that someone else has put on the net and apply it or adapt it to my needs.

Making, in short, is not about making. Making is about sharing. The reason we can make so much today is because the basic knowledge, skills, and tools to make anything and do anything are already on the ground, forming a loam in which our inspiration can germinate.

Walled Gardens vs. Makers

Help Plazm Magazine's 20th anniversary issue go to press

Posted: 02 Jun 2011 10:26 AM PDT


Founded in 1991, Plazm is a wonderful Portland-based magazine of culture/art/design. Old-school bOING bOING pal Tiffany Lee Brown (aka Magdalen) is at the core of the Plazm collective. I've known Tiffany for nearly two decades, as she was a vital force in the vibrantly weird-yet-productive early cyberculture scene around Mondo 2000, Fringeware Review, and bOING bOING. Plazm was set to publish its 20th anniversary issue, but then their printing bill suddenly skyrocketed. So they've launched a Kikstarter campaign to take the magazine to print. It looks to be a stellar issue, featuring the likes of David Lynch, Bruce Sterling, Sherry Turkle, Erik Davis, Amber Case, Douglas Rushkoff, and Corin Tucker of Sleater-Kinney. There are some great rewards based on pledge level. If you're really flush, you can donate $1,1111 (tax deductible) and, among other goodies, you'll receive a scarce print copy of bOING bOING issue #1! (I don't even have one of those!) Good luck, Mag/Tif and Plazm! "Plazm Magazine's 20th Anniversary: print with us!"

Keyboard whose keys are raised in proportion to their frequency of use

Posted: 01 Jun 2011 11:42 PM PDT


Mike Kneupfel, a student at NYU's Interactive Technology Program, made a 3D model showing the keys he presses most frequently when typing, composed of raised keys on a keyboard. It's a fun and eye-catching way of visualizing data by using the thing whose data you're analyzing.
Conclusions - This was just a first go at trying to create a data driven 3d sculpture. I wound up scaling the keys a little bit too much in the vertical direction. The weight of the tall keys caused the towers to tilt at an angle. I plan on showing this prototype to a few people that will hopefully give me more ideas for new data sets to look at. I want to try and use the CNC for future data driven sculptures. I also want to try and include color into the sculpture somehow.
Keyboard Frequency Sculpture (via Neatorama)

Demdike Stare podcast: a mix from the magickal masters of dubtronica

Posted: 02 Jun 2011 03:13 PM PDT

Demdikeeee
For months, I've been tripping out to the dubby, samply, dark ambient music of Demdike Stare, a collaboration between the UK's Mike Whittaker and Sean Canty. Whittaker is a producer affiliated with Modern Love records while Canty is essentially a professional crate digger, seeking out weird horror soundtracks, Kollywood rarities, avant-garde curiosities, and other obscure vinyl for reissue by Finders Keepers records. Demdike Stare, the pair's own musical collaboration, was named for one of England's most notorious Pendle Witches of the 17th century. They released three EPs on Modern Love in 2010 that in vinyl form are already collector's items. Fortunately, all three releases plus additional material have been combined into the lavishly-packaged Tryptych CD. Also available (if you can find a copy) is Bookmat's limited edition 3 LP reissue of the vinyl albums. It's a gorgeous set and I hope to nab one sometime soon. Clearly, I'm really enchanted by Demdike Stare. That's why I was thrilled to see that they created an online mix for XLR8R's podcast series. The tracklist reveals the deep eclecticism of their own musical taste.

Demdike Stare mix at XLR8R

Surfer speak video, remixed

Posted: 02 Jun 2011 09:08 AM PDT


A few years ago, I posted the news clip above of a Huntington Beach, California surfer talking about what a great time he was having hitting the waves. It's one of my favorite YouTube clips ever, mostly because he's so sincere and genuinely, er, stoked. Now below, check out the terrific Auto-Tuned song sampling the interview (video link). Pitted... so pitted. (Thanks, Gabe Adiv!)



The real George Lucas has been imprisoned for 20 years while an impostor ran amok, making prequels

Posted: 01 Jun 2011 11:36 PM PDT

Here's a funny trailer for "George Lucas Strikes Back," a notional movie that supposes that George Lucas has been imprisoned for 20 years while a doppelganger cavorted around the Skywalker Ranch, making Star Wars prequels and Indiana Jones sequels. Finally, the real George escapes, and gathers an elite force and sets out to take back his identity.

George Lucas Strikes Back {HD Trailer} (via Neatorama)

North Korean propaganda machine improves its subtlety by approx. 1%

Posted: 02 Jun 2011 08:30 AM PDT

A rigorous study by North Korean government researchers has declared that the United States is the least happy nation on Earth. North Korea itself came in second behind China. (Thanks Aaron O.!)

The shocker

Posted: 02 Jun 2011 08:26 AM PDT

Scientists call the discovery of this giant lizard with a double penis an "unprecedented surprise."

A possible link between pollution and crime—and marshmallows

Posted: 02 Jun 2011 08:13 AM PDT

At Wired, Jonah Lehrer delves into an interesting theory about why American crime rates have fallen so drastically over the last 30 years. Apparently, there is both a correlation and a mechanism that would seem to connect falling rates of a certain kind of environmental pollutant to the downward trend in crime statistics. It all comes back to one of my favorite experiments in the annals of behavioral psychology. I'm speaking, of course, of the marshmallow test.

In the late 1960s, psychologist Walter Mischel left pre-schoolers alone in a room with a marshmallow. He gave the kids a choice: Eat your marshmallow now, and it's the only one you get. Resist temptation, and you'll be given two marshmallows to eat later. It's a classic test of delayed gratification and self-control. And only 20% of Mischel's test subjects managed to get the second 'mallow. Their secret: Distracting themselves with other activities, like singing or playing a pretend game.

But here's the interesting thing I didn't know—Mischel has followed those marshmallow kids over the course of their lives. Today, we know that the 20% who could hold out for a second marshmallow also had higher SAT scores, more friends, and fewer anger management issues as teenagers. And, thanks to brainscans, we can actually see differences between the adult brains of the 20% and their less self-controlled counterparts. In particular, Lehrer writes, the 20% demonstrate more activity in "the frontal cortex, [including] areas such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the anterior prefrontal cortex, the anterior cingulate, and the right and left inferior frontal gyri."

How does this tie back to crime and pollution. Turns out, those are also regions of the brain known to be particularly (and detrimentally) affected by early childhood exposure to lead. Medical researchers have long known that decreased impulse control is a common side-effect of lead-related brain damage. And, during the time that America's crime rates have fallen, so too have the levels of lead in our bloodstreams. According to this theory, environmental regulations that banned things like leaded gasoline and paint might be partly responsible for the fact that the murder rate in many American cities has fallen by 50%.

What Mischel's data demonstrates is that attention isn't just about information. Instead, it's also what allows us to blunt the urges of our errant emotions, allowing us to look past the desire to stuff that yummy marshmallow into our mouth. While we can't always control what we feel - many of our urges are ancient drives, embedded deep in the brain - we can control the amount of attention we pay to our feelings. When faced with a tempting treat, we can look away.

This returns us to aggression. Let's say you're being teased by a bully at school. You can feel your anger rising; the hot emotion is vibrating in your veins. It would feel so good to punch that bully in the face, to vent your frustration with a fight. However, you also know that such violence will get you suspended from school, which is why throwing a punch is not a good idea. If you can't strategically allocate your attention - and this is a skill that requires a solid prefrontal cortex - then you're not going to be able to resist your anger. You're going to get in a fight and get suspended. However, if you can properly look past this negative emotion - perhaps by counting to ten, or just walking away, or finding something else to think about - then your anger will subside. The hot feeling has been cooled off.

Video Link

Jill Abramson to replace Bill Keller at NYT

Posted: 02 Jun 2011 07:46 AM PDT

From Business Insider: "The New York Times will announce at noon today that managing editor Jill Abramson will become the paper's first-ever female executive editor, beginning in September. Bill Keller, the newspaper's current executive editor, is stepping down to return to writing."

Subjective experience and the law: should fMRI evidence of high punishment tolerance affect sentencing?

Posted: 01 Jun 2011 10:45 PM PDT

Brooklyn Law School professor Adam J. Kolber's paper "The Experiential Future of the Law" was recently published in the Emory Law Journal. The paper asks whether (and when) the law will take account of fMRIs and other tools that create quantitative indicators of subjective experience -- that is, what happens when someone claims that they can tell you how much pain they've experienced, and compare that to the pain that someone else in the same situation might experience?

Kolber points out that this question is relevant to crime and punishment, whether you're someone who wants to be sure that the person who committed the crime is punished in a way that's commensurate with the pain he caused; or whether you believe that punishments should be calculated to be bad enough to deter criminals.

Subjective experience is key to both questions, but the legal issues are sure to be thorny. If you're being sued for "pain and suffering" after your negligence caused someone's broken nose, should you be allowed to introduce evidence showing that the victim has an unusually high pain threshold and ask the jury to reduce the damages accordingly? Should state prosecutors be able to show that a convicted criminal has a high tolerance for incarceration and ask for a longer sentence to ensure that he suffers as much as a comparable criminal with a lower tolerance and a shorter sentence?

In this Article, I describe some of the ways in which new technologies are shifting the way we measure experiences and will continue to do so more dramatically over the next thirty years. I discuss in general terms how new technologies may improve our assessments of physical pain, pain relief, emotional distress, and a variety of psychiatric disorders. I also discuss more particular applications of such technologies to assess whether: (1) a patient is in a persistent vegetative state, (2) a placebo treatment relieves pain, (3) an alleged victim has been abused as a child, (4) an inmate being executed is in pain, (5) an interrogatee has been tortured, and others.

My central claim is that as new technologies emerge to better reveal people's experiences, the law ought to do more to take these experiences into account. In tort and criminal law, we often ignore or downplay the importance of subjective experience. This is no surprise. During the hundreds of years in which these bodies of law developed, we had very poor methods of making inferences about the experiences of others. As we get better at measuring experiences, however, I make the normative claim that we ought to change fundamental aspects of the law to take better account of people's experiences.

THE EXPERIENTIAL FUTURE OF THE LAW (PDF)

(Image: fMRI one, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from twitchcraft's photostream)

Thoughts for scientist parents

Posted: 01 Jun 2011 11:24 PM PDT


In Science magazine, Adam Ruben explores what it means to be a scientifically minded parent, from conception onward:
Scientists speak to their children differently than most people, and I'll probably find myself saying one or more of the following:

- "I'll pick you up from school at 3:30 ± 10 minutes."

- "Oh, I see. And if all of your friends rejected the Copernican principle, does that mean you would, too?"

- "I know you like peanut butter, but I don't know if you like peanut butter and jelly, so I packed you one sandwich of each. The peanut-butter-only sandwich is the control group."

- "Don't waste food! There are starving grad students in the world!"

- "If you kids don't quiet down back there, I swear I'll turn this car π radians."

- "Sorry, I'd love to buy you that video game system, but the funding didn't come through."

Experimental Error: Fetus Don't Fail Me Now (via /.)

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