The Latest from Boing Boing

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• Sleepy English town to be entirely surveilled in case criminals forget and drive through it on their way to crimes
• Reddit explains the debt ceiling to you like you’re five
• Apple has more cash right now than the US Treasury
• The “Moon Buggy Mission,” Apollo 15
• National Archive food and government exhibit: “What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam?”
• Fabric made from spider silk
• Bush explains reaction to 9/11 attack news during historic “My Pet Goat” reading
• “Narcosubmarine” carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine nabbed in Honduras
• Friday Freak-Out: The Hi-5′s “Did you have to rub it in?” (1965)
• Baby crocodiles, hatching
• Cosplay of excellence: Gender Bent Justice League
• Fuck and the law
• The pros and cons of irradiated food
• How To: Launch a cork rocket using an LED
• Colonoscopy video (with worm)
• Clothes given to Winehouse fans
• Words banned from Google’s “What do you love” project
• Happy Sysadmin Day!
• ihadcancer: social network for cancer survivors
• Breast cancer prevention and evidence
• House Committee passes bill requiring your ISP to spy on every click and keystroke you make online and retain for 12 months
• StagConf: Vienna conference on stories and games
• How to go to a sushi-ya in Japan (“The Japanese Tradition” spoof video series)
• Vindictive WalMart erroneously accuses couple of shoplifting, has husband deported, wife fired, costs them house and car
• Like-for-like photos of life in Mumbai and NYC
• Regulating science the way we regulate restaurant kitchens
• Batman logo in equation form

Sleepy English town to be entirely surveilled in case criminals forget and drive through it on their way to crimes Posted: 29 Jul 2011 10:37 PM PDT Royston, a small market town of 15,000 people in Herts, England, is being completely encircled with license-plate cameras that will record the comings and goings of everyone who passes in or out of the town, and store them for up to five years. There’s not really much crime in Royston. But the automatic number plate recognition manager for the region says that he will catch lots of criminals and terrorists because they might forget that this one town is totally surveilled and drive through it on their way to and from crimes and atrocities in other towns. Daniel Hamilton, director of Big Brother Watch, said: "It is such an arbitrary and intrusive method. To do this in what is essentially a sleepy market town is ridiculous. "Logging the movements of tens of thousands of innocent people living in the area is grossly disproportionate to the crime fighting abilities of the system and an abhorrent invasion of people's privacy." Inspector Andy Piper, Hertfordshire Police's ANPR manager, said: "On first sight, the ANPR coverage of such a low crime town as Royston may seem an unusual choice, but ANPR works both as a deterrent and a detection tool. "When we look at the bigger picture in terms of Hertfordshire, as well as nationally, the position of the cameras makes a lot of sense strategically to target those criminals travelling into the county on the main roads in that area – not to mention counter-terrorism.” ‘Sleepy market town’ surrounded by ring of car cameras (Thanks, Richard!) (Image: These days there’s no escaping from the #SS – even in our beauty spots ( #anpr, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from zombie’s photostream)

Reddit explains the debt ceiling to you like you’re five Posted: 29 Jul 2011 03:45 PM PDT Yesterday and today on Reddit, the subreddit section explain like I’m five, where users explain current news and tough topics as though they’re talking to a five-year-old, saw a huge surge in posts and interaction. One of the gems from this influx of interest is a post on what’s going on with the US government’s debates over the debt ceiling. Redditor The_Cleric lays it out for my five-year-old self: This is how I understand it. Pretend you have a credit card. And this credit card has a limit, we’ll say $1000. This credit card is pretty near maxed out and you don’t really have any cash. You need to buy some stuff soon, and you know that between now and August 2nd you need to buy some things, and you have no choice but to buy them on the credit card. At that point the credit card will be completely maxed out. This credit card is our debt ceiling. We will hit the limit of our borrowing limit on August 2nd. Now let’s continue further. We know we have some bills next month, and we also know that we have some cash coming in, but when we look at what we have coming in vs what we have to pay, we don’t have enough to cover it. Let’s just say we know we’ll be short by $100. So now we know ahead of time that we’ll be short, and we only have one real option: call the credit card company and ask them to raise our limit. This is what the debt ceiling legislation is trying to do: raise our credit limit. As you said, normally this happens all the time without issue. This time, some politicians decided to stand up and say: “Umm, long term this whole ‘borrow more money’ method may not work out.” So they are holding off on raising the debt ceiling until we can better align our “bills” and our “income”. There’s two ways to do this: either you lower your bills or you raise your income. Either you pay less money out, or you bring more money in. This is where the argument happens. Democrats (traditionally) would prefer to bring more money in, so they’d like to “raise taxes”. Republicans (traditionally) would prefer to have lower bills, so they’d like to do “spending cuts”. So the argument now is “How can we find a compromise where everyone is happy?” We haven’t (yet, hopefully) found that compromise. If we don’t find the compromise, and we don’t raise the debt ceiling, then we’ll have a bunch of bills due and not enough money to pay them. At this point we’ll have to start prioritizing who gets the money we do have. Should it be seniors on Medicare? Should it be active duty military? Should it be people we owe interest to for a loan payment? This is just like our credit card example if the credit card company doesn’t raise our limit. Do we pay our rent? Do we pay our car payment? Do we pay back a guy we borrowed $50 from? And the repercussions are this: whoever we DON’T pay, how does that negatively affect us? Will we be able to get more loans? Will people lose trust in us and a government? Etc. So the outcomes could be nothing or they could be disastrous. No one knows for sure. Pretty solid. There’s lots more discussion on the topic in the thread, and a promising link to Khan Academy’s take on the subject. via Can someone describe the debt ceiling to me Like Im Five? : explainlikeimfive.

Apple has more cash right now than the US Treasury Posted: 29 Jul 2011 01:34 PM PDT Matt Hartley at the Financial Post was the first to point this one out: As Republicans and Democrats continue to work towards a compromise to the country's debt ceiling crisis, the U.S. Treasury Department said on Thursday that Washington now has a total operating balance of only US$73.768-billion. Meanwhile, Apple currently boasts a cash reserve of US$75.876-billion, as of its most recent quarterly earnings report at the end of June. More nuance and analysis around the web: NPR, Apple Insider, Fortune. Photo: Apple CEO Steve Jobs takes the stage to discuss the iCloud service at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, California, June 6, 2011. REUTERS/Beck Diefenbach

The “Moon Buggy Mission,” Apollo 15 Posted: 29 Jul 2011 01:13 PM PDT This week marks the 40th anniversary for Apollo 15, the less famous of manned lunar missions including Apollo 11, Apollo 13 (“NASA’s finest hour”), and Apollo 14 (the one where Alan Shepard played golf on the moon). Ben Cosgrove of LIFE points us to a related gallery of classic images, and explains: While Armstrong and Aldrin walking on the lunar surface was mind-blowing, the idea of Irwin and Scott cruising around on a 450-pound moon buggy that they’d carted a quarter-million miles from Earth — during a basically flawless mission when Scott and Irwin spent three full days on the moon’s surface — makes XV the coolest of all the Apollo missions.

National Archive food and government exhibit: “What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam?” Posted: 29 Jul 2011 12:31 PM PDT Right now, the National Archives in Washington DC are hosting an exhibition about government and food. Titled “What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam?,” it covers everything from government regulations on food processing and labeling to nutritional campaigns for such things as, er, “Vitamin Donuts.” Smithsonian magazine was particularly intrigued by the exhibition’s information about US presidential diets. Above, Richard Nixon’s last meal in the White House, “slices of pineapple arranged around a plop of cottage cheese, paired with a glass of milk and served on a silver tray.” “What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam?: The Government’s Effect on the American Diet” (National Archive)

Fabric made from spider silk Posted: 29 Jul 2011 12:18 PM PDT This 13-foot-long textile was woven from silk produced by more than a million Golden Orb spiders from Madagaskar. It’s currently on display at the Art Institute of Chicago and moves to London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in January 2012. From The Telegraph: According to experts at the Victoria and Albert Museum, spider’s silk has not been woven since 1900, when a textile was created for the Paris Exposition Universelle – but that no longer survives. This will be the first time spider silk has been exhibited in Europe since. The earliest recorded weave using the silk of spiders dates from 1709, made by a Frenchman, Francois-Xavier Bon de Saint Hilaire, who successfully produced gloves and stockings and supposedly a full suit of clothes for King Louis XIV. Later, in the early nineteenth century, Raimondo de Termeyer, a Spaniard working in Italy, produced stockings for the Emperor Napoleon and a shawl for his first wife, Empress Josephine. To create the textiles, spiders are collected each morning and harnessed in specially conceived 'silking' contraptions. Trained handlers extract the silk from 24 spiders at a time. Unlike mulberry silk from silkworms, in which the pupa is killed in its cocoon, the spiders are returned to the wild at the end of each day. “Rare spider silk textile to come to V&A“

Bush explains reaction to 9/11 attack news during historic “My Pet Goat” reading Posted: 29 Jul 2011 12:03 PM PDT “I wanted to project a sense of calm.” George W. Bush explains, for the first time, why he reacted as he did after having been advised that the US was under attack on September 11, 2001.

“Narcosubmarine” carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine nabbed in Honduras Posted: 29 Jul 2011 11:44 AM PDT With help from the U.S. Navy, authorities in Honduras have snorted recovered 2.7 tons of cocaine from a submarine off the Central American nation’s Caribbean coast. There is more, they say: the boat’s carrying 5 and a half tons, total. AP item: The submarine-like craft is floating about 15 meters (50 feet) under the surface because the crew tried to sink it. Osorio said Thursday divers will need another two days to recover all the cocaine. The sub was intercepted two weeks ago, en route to the US from Colombia. More from Reuters.

Friday Freak-Out: The Hi-5′s “Did you have to rub it in?” (1965) Posted: 29 Jul 2011 11:23 AM PDT [youtube link] Friday Freak-Out: The Hi-5 perform “Did you have to rub it in?” (1966), now available again on Follow Me Down: Vanguard’s Lost Psychedelic Era. Vintage psych on Vanguard Records? Indeed! While Vanguard, formed in 1950, is best known for its essential folk/blues offerings in the 1960s by the likes of Joan Baez, Country Joe and Fish, Buddy Guy, and Otis Rush, the label also released some very fine nuggets of psychedelia — many of which were 45s by bands that vanished almost as quickly as they made the scene. Recently though, my dear pal and DIY musicologist David Katznelson of Birdman Records and Vanguard staffer Stephen Brower dug deep in the label’s archive to compile the best of these “lost” recordings. The vinyl release of Follow Me Down: Vanguard’s Lost Psychedelic Era is a beautiful double-gatefold, 18-track compilation. It’s also available as MP3s, but, well, I encourage you to dust off the old record player for this groovy set. Now then, what’s the story with the Hi-5′s “Did you have to rub it in?” A classic rock and roll tale of a band that was so very close to superstardom, but fell short. The band were regulars at the famous Café Wah, when Beatles manager Brian Epstein walked into the club and signed the Hi-Five to management. Soon after, labels like RCA and Columbia were cutting demos on the band. But when Epstein died at 32 of a drug overdose, the doors that had been opened were slammed shut. It was then that Vanguard, who had also had been interested in the band, offered them a single deal. Follow Me Down: Vanguard’s Lost Psychedelic Era   Friday Freak-Out: Ready, Steady, Go psych/mod parody from … Friday Freak-Out: Brothers Johnson play "Strawberry Letter #23 … Friday Freak-Out: The Rolling Stones' "2000 Light Years From Home … Friday Freak-Out: The Electric Prunes' "I Had Too Much To Dream … Friday Freak-Out: Electric Lucifer – Boing Boing Friday Freak-Out: Arthur Brown's "Nightmare" – Boing Boing Friday Freak-Out: The 5th Dimension's "Up, Up and Away" (1967 … Friday Freak-Out: It's A Beautiful Day's "White Bird" (1971 … Friday Freak-Out: Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man" (1970) – Boing Boing

Baby crocodiles, hatching Posted: 29 Jul 2011 10:43 AM PDT Caretakers display newly hatched Philippine crocodiles at a crocodile farm in Manila July 28, 2011. The Philippine crocodile, also known as the Mindoro crocodile, is a freshwater reptile considered to be among the endangered species. (REUTERS/Romeo Ranoco)

Cosplay of excellence: Gender Bent Justice League Posted: 29 Jul 2011 10:32 AM PDT Liz Ohanesian covers counterculture, cosplay, and cool music for the Los Angeles Weekly. She hit Comic-Con with photographer Shannon Cottrell, and came back with some great photo-essays. “I thought you might be interested in seeing our favorite cosplay of the con,” she writes, “they’re The Gender Bent Justice League.” Above, Kit Quinn as Superma’am and Tallest Silver as Batma’am. Gender Bent Justice League is a group of cosplayers who have taken characters associated with DC’s Justice League and transformed them into something that is more Rule 63 than it is crossplay. “A couple of us like to do female versions of preexisting male characters. One of our friends, Psykitten Pow, she had a female Flash,” says Tallest Silver, who organized the group and who dresses as Batma’am. “One night, we were all hanging out and I said how funny it would be if we had a whole Justice League with swapped sexes.”

Fuck and the law Posted: 29 Jul 2011 10:05 AM PDT “Fuck” is a 2006 scholarly paper by Ohio State U law prof Christopher M. Fairman, published in Center for Interdisciplinary Law and Policy Studies Working Paper Series No. 39. It starts with anecdotes about three legally trained people — a Master’s student in law, a sheriff, and a federal judge — reacting irrationally to the word “fuck,” and goes on to explore the way that psycholinguistic factors makes English speakers go crazy in the presence of the word, and the effect that has had on law. Fun reading! This Article is as simple and provocative as its title suggests: it explores the legal implications of the word fuck. The intersection of the word fuck and the law is examined in four major areas: First Amendment, broadcast regulation, sexual harassment, and education. The legal implications from the use of fuck vary greatly with the context. To fully understand the legal power of fuck, the nonlegal sources of its power are tapped. Drawing upon the research of etymologists, linguists, lexicographers, psychoanalysts, and other social scientists, the visceral reaction to fuck can be explained by cultural taboo. Fuck is a taboo word. The taboo is so strong that it compels many to engage in self-censorship. This process of silence then enables small segments of the population to manipulate our rights under the guise of reflecting a greater community. Taboo is then institutionalized through law, yet at the same time is in tension with other identifiable legal rights. Understanding this relationship between law and taboo ultimately yields fuck jurisprudence. Fuck (Image: FUCK, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from giacomospazio’s photostream)

The pros and cons of irradiated food Posted: 29 Jul 2011 09:56 AM PDT Irradiating food doesn’t make it radioactive, and it does kill dangerous bacteria, like the E.coli that killed many Europeans this summer. But it’s also not a panacea against food poisoning and it’s definitely not the most popular idea ever thought up. In a column in the New York Times, Mark Bittman examines the evidence behind irradiation, and how that evidence does and doesn’t get considered in the choices we make about food. When it comes to irradiation, you might need a primer. (I did.) Simply put, irradiation — first approved by the FDA in 1963 to control insects in wheat and flour — kills pathogens in food by passing radiation through it. It doesn't make the food radioactive any more than passing X-rays through your body makes you radioactive; it just causes changes in the food. Proponents say those changes are beneficial: like killing E. coli or salmonella bacteria. Opponents say they're harmful: like destroying nutrients or creating damaging free radicals. Many people are virulently for or against. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, says that irradiation "could do for food what pasteurization has done for milk." (The main difference between irradiation and pasteurization is the source of the energy used to kill microbes.) Wenonah Hauter, the executive director of Food & Water Watch — which calls irradiation "a gross failure" — told me it was "expensive and impractical, a band-aid on the real problems with our food system." There are a few people in the middle. Former assistant secretary of the Department of Agriculture (USDA) Carol Tucker-Foreman is mostly anti-, but said that if she ran a nursing home or a children's hospital — a place where people with weaker-than-average immune systems were cared for — it "might be something I wanted to do." Marion Nestle, a New York University nutrition professor and the author of "Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety" (and a food-movement icon), allows that "the bottom line is that it works pretty well if done right, and I'm not aware of any credible evidence that it does any worse harm to foods than cooking. But it isn't always done right, and foods can become re-contaminated after irradiation." Via Andy Revkin Image: NAM – Nabob Irradiated Coffee, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from lifeontheedge’s photostream

How To: Launch a cork rocket using an LED Posted: 29 Jul 2011 09:34 AM PDT OK, this should make up for the intestinal worm. In this video, you’ll learn how to use an ultraviolet LED to kickstart a chemical reaction capable of sending a cork flying halfway across a lecture hall. It’s a hazardous science demonstration! Hooray! Quick note: The sound quality gets a little sketchy at times. If you click on the CC option in the lower-right corner of the player window you’ll be able to read the English subtitles. Video Link

Colonoscopy video (with worm) Posted: 29 Jul 2011 09:30 AM PDT Hey look, everybody! It’s Ascaris lumbricoides! How you doin’? Sorry. I’m so sorry. It’s fascinating. But I’ll find something quick to take the edge off. Video Link

Clothes given to Winehouse fans Posted: 29 Jul 2011 09:20 AM PDT “This is what she would have wanted – for her fans to have her clothes,” Mitch [Winehouse] told the crowd.

Words banned from Google’s “What do you love” project Posted: 29 Jul 2011 09:17 AM PDT Anticipating internet malfeasance, Google banned a number of dirty and dirtyish words from wdyl.com (“What do you love”). Here’s the full list, as discovered and documented at fffffat by Jamie Dubs. (Thanks, Barbara Rella!)

Happy Sysadmin Day! Posted: 29 Jul 2011 09:15 AM PDT Hey, it’s July 29, and that means that it’s Sysadmin Appreciation Day, and once again, it’s time to all the systems administrators who toil through the nights, the holidays and the weekends to keep all our machines and networks running. I’ve been a sysadmin, but I was never fit to power-cycle the router of the administrators whom I am privileged to work with today, including the incomparable Ken Snider, who has kept Boing Boing running for years and years, through thick and thin, but not forgetting the likes of Boing Boing’s Dean Putney, our spamfighting sumbission-ninja Chris Smith, Mark Perkel, the folks at Canonical, and all the other skilled technicians, gurus, troubleshooters, firefighters, and technological saviours I’ve had cause to rouse at odd hours to fix things that they didn’t break. Thank you, sysadmins: you keep the universe running! System Administrator Appreciation Day (Image: Today, we are appreciated, thanks Karen!, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from insomnike’s photostream)

ihadcancer: social network for cancer survivors Posted: 29 Jul 2011 09:10 AM PDT IHADCANCER, a network for people fighting cancer, cancer survivors, and supporters of anyone affected. More at RWW.

Breast cancer prevention and evidence Posted: 29 Jul 2011 08:56 AM PDT The National Breast Cancer Coalition has come out with new evidence-based position statements regarding several popular preventative and treatment options for breast cancer. Among the findings: There is no link between abortion and breast cancer; there’s no evidence that breast self-exams actually do anything useful; and the policy of routine mammograms for every woman doesn’t help as much as we think it does.

House Committee passes bill requiring your ISP to spy on every click and keystroke you make online and retain for 12 months Posted: 29 Jul 2011 08:12 AM PDT Yesterday, the House Judiciary Committee voted 19-10 for H.R. 1981, a data-retention bill that will require your ISP to spy on everything you do online and save records of it for 12 months. California Rep Zoe Lofgren, one of the Democrats who opposed the bill, called it a “data bank of every digital act by every American” that would “let us find out where every single American visited Web sites.” Here’s commentary from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who’ve got a form for contacting your rep to ask her or him to kill this: The data retention mandate in this bill would treat every Internet user like a criminal and threaten the online privacy and free speech rights of every American, as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have recognized. Requiring Internet companies to redesign and reconfigure their systems to facilitate government surveillance of Americans’ expressive activities is simply un-American. Such a scheme would be as objectionable to our Founders as the requiring of licenses for printing presses or the banning of anonymous pamphlets. Today’s vote is therefore very disappointing, but we are especially thankful to GOP Representatives Sensenbrenner, Issa and Chaffetz, who chose principle over party-line in opposing this dangerous tech mandate. We hope that bipartisan opposition will grow as the bill makes its way to the House floor and more lawmakers are educated about this anti-privacy, anti-free speech, anti-innovation proposal. House Committee Approves Bill Mandating That Internet Companies Spy on Their Users

StagConf: Vienna conference on stories and games Posted: 29 Jul 2011 07:32 AM PDT StagConf is a European conference on stories and games, to be held in Vienna’s adorably insane Natural History Museum (the world’s maddest, overflowingest taxidermy displays, including a broke-necked giraffe with Frankenstein stitches, an infamous alcoholic chimp, and many other critters etoufees). It’s a one-day affair, on Sept 27: “You will meet game designers and writers who have worked on games in every imaginable form: from adventures to MMOs, from AAA console to the web, from social games to pen and paper RPGs.” (Thanks, Alice!)

How to go to a sushi-ya in Japan (“The Japanese Tradition” spoof video series) Posted: 29 Jul 2011 07:28 AM PDT I am going to Japan for the first time, tomorrow. I will most certainly follow the absolutely serious instructions in this helpful video on Japanese customs. “Always have a little guilt in your eyes.” I understand that these guys are responsible: ラーメンズ (Rahmens), Jin Katagiri and Kentaro Kobayashi. Anyone know how to purchase copies? (thanks, Scott Ghelfi/via G+) A few more clips from them below. The “Japan Culture Lab” videos remind me a lot of Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz’s “Look Around You” series. A number of readers have pointed out that the “Dating” series is one of their finest. Here is a copy on Vimeo, but it’s over-subtitled with Korean, so the viewing experience is messy for English or Japanese speakers. Other clips follow…

Vindictive WalMart erroneously accuses couple of shoplifting, has husband deported, wife fired, costs them house and car Posted: 29 Jul 2011 07:27 AM PDT A newlywed couple in Birmingham, AL had problems with the automatic checkout system at WalMart, which refused to ring up their $2.90 packet of chicken necks. A WalMart employee helped them with the system, and they paid and made to leave. A security guard confronted them and accused them of stealing the chicken necks, despite their receipt, which showed they had paid. The manager was summoned, reviewed the receipt and the security footage, and concluded the couple had done nothing wrong. However, the security guard insisted on calling the police, and then WalMart contacted the INS to alert them to the husband’s legal trouble (he hadn’t yet been naturalized following his wedding to a US citizen), as well as the WalMart where the wife worked in order to get her fired. The husband was deported, the wife lost her car and home in the ensuing legal battle. They’re suing. Plaintiff told these employees to look again as the item was on the bottom of the receipt and therefore accounted for. The security guard started screaming and asked to see the identifications of the plaintiff and her husband. The security guard screamed at the plaintiff and her husband saying they were going to be deported. The security guard, in overly loud voice, stated plaintiff and her husband were illegal and what were they doing in this country. Plaintiff asked for the assistant manager. The security guard answered by saying plaintiff and her husband were going to jail… The assistant manager said in presence of plaintiff and her husband: ‘I see where she scanned it, I see where it’s been rung up.’ Plaintiff responded: ‘I did scan it, I told you.’ Ricky, plaintiff’s husband said I’ll pay for it again if you want me to. The assistant manager then said to the security guard: ‘Well what do you want to do?’ The security guard said he wanted to put plaintiff and her husband in jail. …When the security guard found that Mary Hill Bonin had worked at another Wal-Mart, he called that store and informed it “that she was being charged with a Theft of Property in the Third Degree,” even though the assistant manager already had told him that the chicken bones had been bought and paid for, the Bonins say. Wal-Mart Goes Nuclear Over Chicken Necks; Newlyweds Lose House; Husband Deported (via Consumerist) (Image: Red Dog Deli Chicken Back & Neck, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from doggybytes’s photostream)

Like-for-like photos of life in Mumbai and NYC Posted: 29 Jul 2011 07:17 AM PDT Nisha Sondhe’s photos from Mumbai and New York compare like-for-like scenes of life in crowded, exuberant urban centers — trains and fishmongers and butchers and happy people — and captures each city’s distinctiveness as well as the universal character of urban life. Nisha Sondhe (via MeFi)

Regulating science the way we regulate restaurant kitchens Posted: 29 Jul 2011 06:56 AM PDT Peer-review does many things, but it isn’t built to weed out fraud. In the wake of large scandals like the expose of Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent autism study, the British government is starting to consider regulating science for fraud the same way it regulates restaurants for public health. Brian Deer, the journalist who helped expose Wakefield, supports the idea. What do you think? (Via Ivan Oransky)

Batman logo in equation form Posted: 29 Jul 2011 05:44 AM PDT A Redditor called “i_luv_ur_mom” posted this math teacher’s amusement, an equation that draws a lovely Bat-signal. Do you like Batman? Do you like math? My math teacher is REALLY cool

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