The Latest from Boing Boing

Chrome browser extension "Jimmy Wales-ifies" any web page
TSA security groping leaves 61-year-old bladder cancer survivor soaked in own urine
Judge orders Gawker to remove Sarah Palin book excerpts
Vast new nuclear plant in North Korea revealed
Defenestration: The Movie
"Kryptos" sculptor teases clues to C.I.A. cryptosculpture
TSA policies offend, but do they work?
I Am The WiMax and I Speak for the Trees
Craig Venter on "Designing Life," CBS 60 Minutes Sunday
The hippo collection
CATURDAY (Boing Boing Flickr Pool)
Dramatic Eagle

Chrome browser extension "Jimmy Wales-ifies" any web page

Posted: 20 Nov 2010 10:52 PM PST

The "Jimmy Wales" Chrome extension "adds [a] nice Wikipedia donation banner to every single web page." Related: "How I feel when perusing Wikipedia." (via reddit, thanks anon)

TSA security groping leaves 61-year-old bladder cancer survivor soaked in own urine

Posted: 20 Nov 2010 06:40 PM PST

61-year-old Thomas Sawyer is a retired special education teacher, and a survivor of bladder cancer. He says he was "absolutely humiliated," broke down in tears and soaked in his own urine, after a degrading and invasive TSA "pat-down" at Detroit Metropolitan Airport on November 7 caused his urostomy bag to rupture. Snip from MSNBC:

Due to his medical condition, Sawyer asked to be screened in private. "One officer looked at another, rolled his eyes and said that they really didn't have any place to take me," said Sawyer. "After I said again that I'd like privacy, they took me to an office."
Sawyer wears pants two sizes too large in order to accommodate the medical equipment he wears. He'd taken off his belt to go through the scanner and once in the office with security personnel, his pants fell down around his ankles. "I had to ask twice if it was OK to pull up my shorts," said Sawyer, "And every time I tried to tell them about my medical condition, they said they didn't need to know about that."
Before starting the enhanced pat-down procedure, a security officer did tell him what they were going to do and how they were going to it, but Sawyer said it wasn't until they asked him to remove his sweatshirt and saw his urostomy bag that they asked any questions about his medical condition.
"One agent watched as the other used his flat hand to go slowly down my chest. I tried to warn him that he would hit the bag and break the seal on my bag, but he ignored me. Sure enough, the seal was broken and urine started dribbling down my shirt and my leg and into my pants."

Sawyer was forced to walk through the airport drenched in his own urine, then board his plane and wait until after takeoff before he could clean himself up in the plane's toilet.

TSA pat-down leaves traveler covered in urine (MSNBC, photo courtesy Thomas Sawyer)

Judge orders Gawker to remove Sarah Palin book excerpts

Posted: 20 Nov 2010 06:41 PM PST

Gawker received, published and criticized excerpts from Sarah Palin's new book, America By Heart. Though a perfect example of fair use (a limitation on copyright that explicitly allows for reportage and criticism) her publisher has other ideas. Even after Palin publicized leaked excerpts at supporters' sites, HarperCollins filed a copyright lawsuit against Gawker yesterday. U.S. District Judge Thomas P. Griesa ordered Gawker to remove the passages today, despite the small size of the excerpts and writer Maureen O'Connor's substantial fair-usey criticisms. Gawker complied. Google's cache, however, republishes the post in full. It seems shrill to suggest that HarperCollins would have done this to get rid of Gawker's deflating pre-publication criticisms. Its toleration of identical 'infringements' in Palin-friendly venues can speak for itself.

Vast new nuclear plant in North Korea revealed

Posted: 20 Nov 2010 06:38 PM PST

Good news, everyone! North Korea has "secretly and rapidly" built a huge new facility to enrich uranium, which means they're either preparing to expand their nuclear arsenal or build a far more powerful type of atomic bomb.

The North Koreans claim there are already 2,000 centrifuges up and running.

Defenestration: The Movie

Posted: 20 Nov 2010 04:02 PM PST

Video link. The fine folks at Everything Is Terrible! have released a smashing collection of one of my favorite movie cliché/SAT word combos: defenestration. Enjoy over 7 minutes of window-breaking excitement! (EiT via RobSchrab)

"Kryptos" sculptor teases clues to C.I.A. cryptosculpture

Posted: 20 Nov 2010 09:42 PM PST

(photo: Drew Angerer/The New York Times)

In today's New York Times, the artist and cryptographer behind an enigmatic sculpture on the grounds of the CIA reveals long-awaited clues to Times reporter John Schwartz.

Kryptos,” the sculpture nestled in a courtyard of the agency’s Virginia headquarters since 1990, is a work of art with a secret code embedded in the letters that are punched into its four panels of curving copper.
“Our work is about discovery — discovering secrets,” said Toni Hiley, director of the C.I.A. Museum. “And this sculpture is full of them, and it still hasn’t given up the last of its secrets.”
Not for lack of trying. For many thousands of would-be code crackers worldwide, “Kryptos” has become an object of obsession. Dan Brown has even referred to it in his novels.
The code breakers have had some success. Three of the puzzles, 768 characters long, were solved by 1999, revealing passages — one lyrical, one obscure and one taken from history. But the fourth message of “Kryptos” — the name, in Greek, means “hidden” — has resisted the best efforts of brains and computers.
And Jim Sanborn, the sculptor who created “Kryptos” and its puzzles, is getting a bit frustrated by the wait. “I assumed the code would be cracked in a fairly short time,” he said, adding that the intrusions on his life from people who think they have solved his fourth puzzle are more than he expected.

Sculptor Dangles Clues to Stubborn Secret in C.I.A.'s Backyard (NYT).

See also: Original Decoding Charts for 'Kryptos' (NYT).

Related coverage at Wired News, and an earlier Wired article here.

UPDATE: "Berlin."

Screen-shot-2010-11-20-at-12.00.jpg

TSA policies offend, but do they work?

Posted: 20 Nov 2010 11:52 AM PST

Does the TSA get useful results? It's an interesting question, and not an easy one to get to the bottom of, according to Slate's "Explainer" column. Short answer: There's evidence that they do catch the "random nuts", as well as drug smugglers and illegal immigrants. (In the case of the latter, by using techniques similar to the Israeli visual behavior profiling system that's been brought up in the comments here several times). But the big game? Actual, honest-to-jihad terrorists? There's really no evidence available about that, one way or the other.

I Am The WiMax and I Speak for the Trees

Posted: 20 Nov 2010 03:09 PM PST

A breathless report from IDG News yesterday spread like a forest fire: Wi-Fi kills trees! Kills 'em dead! Oh n03s!!

Radiation from Wi-Fi networks is harmful to trees, causing significant variations in growth, as well as bleeding and fissures in the bark, according to a recent study in the Netherlands. All deciduous trees in the Western world are affected, according to the study by Wageningen University.

Hurray for credulity! Thousands of media sites and blogs picked up the story, adding new details, and rarely questioning the bizarre claim, despite the statement later in the same news item that only 20 trees were tested in one city, that researchers were not named, and it wasn't noted whether or not the study was published or peer reviewed. I turned, as I always do, to Gawker's Valleywag to bring sense and perspective to an issue. Wait. What? No, seriously. Valleywag's Adrian Chen found a public statement from the Dutch spectrum regulator (translation). The study took place indoors for three months with a variety of plants exposed to six Wi-Fi devices. Previous studies showed no harm. The work hasn't yet been published. I suppose BoingBoing readers are used to hearing sensational claims based on small-cadre studies issued in advance of peer review. Nonetheless, this one seemed particularly strange. Perhaps it was the combination of environmental harm, the fear of radiation (electromagnetic or otherwise), and the imprimatur of a university. Urban trees, which were apparently part of the focus of this study, are under tremendous stress, and tree cover in cities worldwide has been drastically reduced, although efforts in many places are underway to counter this. My hometown of Seattle has a loosely organized plan to plant hundreds of thousands of new trees in the coming years, for instance. Remember what happens when the trees get pissed off.

Update! A commenter warns that all Northern hemisphere deciduous trees are currently undergoing some sort of chromatic die-off producing vast amounts of ground pollution and decay. Top photo from Pripyat near Chernobyl by Timm Suess via Creative Commons. Yes, that's Suess, not Seuss. Photo of leaves by mksfly via Creative Commons.

Craig Venter on "Designing Life," CBS 60 Minutes Sunday

Posted: 20 Nov 2010 10:23 AM PST

Craig Venter on CBS TV's 60 Minutes this Sunday, Nov. 21. "The microbiologist whose scientists have already mapped the human genome and created what he calls 'the first synthetic species' says the next breakthrough could be a flu vaccine that takes hours rather than months to produce." (thanks, John Brockman)

The hippo collection

Posted: 20 Nov 2010 10:22 AM PST

Museum exhibits are wonderful, but what I absolutely adore are the collections kept under wraps. Give me a room lined with file drawers filled with carefully labeled pot shards and I'm in heaven. That's why I love this photo, taken in the Hippo Room (!!) in the Mammalogy Department of the American Museum of Natural History, by reader Mindy Weisberger, who works with the museum's Exhibitions Department. She says:

These are male and female hippo skulls from all over Africa, each weighing an average of about 200lbs. These and other large animal skulls were obtained by museum expeditions up until the 1950s/1960s, with the objective of building a collection that represented a range of morphological differences (based on sex and varying environmental conditions) and developmental stages. While the collections are not open to the public, they are utilized daily by the museum's own research associates and curatorial staff, and by visiting scientists from around the world.

Museums keep research collections like this tucked away in attics, basements and back rooms. In these quiet, little sanctuaries, touching is allowed. Getting access (albeit limited) to the collections at the University of Kansas' anthropology museum was one of the high points of my undergraduate experience. Mindy says the AMNH even has a few secret corridors where it stashes treasures. Great stuff!

Check out Mindy's entire set of photos from the hippo room.