The Latest from Boing Boing

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• Support the magnetic ribbon industry ribbon!
• Molecular biologist on the dangers of pornoscanners
• Wunderkammerer front room crammed with nooks
• Motley frankenchair
• Delightful science fiction story in review of $6800 speaker cable
• German Pirate Party members strip off for Berlin airport scanner protest
• Holiday shopping online? Hit the Boing Boing Gift Guide!
• Can being bullied change your brain?
• Improving your site's SEO with each angry customer
• What happens when you light steel wool on fire?
• Electric, day-glo research (BoingBoing Flickr Pool)
• Actor decapitates mother with Freemason sword in Masonic and "Matrix-inspired" attack
• That Which Doesn't Kill Us
• Dolphin teleportation symposium: now with more Eisenhowers!

Support the magnetic ribbon industry ribbon! Posted: 28 Nov 2010 04:39 AM PST Finally, a magnetic ribbon that actually provides material support for the cause it espouses! I'll see your empty gesture and raise you...   Anti magnetic ribbon site - Boing Boing Stick Magnetic Ribbons on Your SUV song parody - Boing Boing Group wants to own trademark on "awareness" of a rare disease ...

Molecular biologist on the dangers of pornoscanners Posted: 27 Nov 2010 10:25 PM PST Jason Bell, "a molecular biologist and biophysicist... a Ph.D. candidate in Steve Kowalczykowski's lab at UC Davis," has posted a detailed critique of the research on the safety of airport backscatter radiation scanners. His specialty is the "molecular mechanism of how mutations in the breast cancer susceptibility gene, BRCA2, result in cancer," and he's posted a detailed, lay-friendly explanation of the scientific concerns expressed by the UCSF team that believes that they are unsafe for use. Which brings me to how the scanner works. Essentially, it appears that an X-ray beam is rastered across the body, which highlights the importance of one of the specific concerns raised by the UCSF scientists... what happens if the machine fails, or gets stuck, during a raster. How much radiation would a person's eye, hand, testicle, stomach, etc be exposed to during such a failure. What is the failure rate of these machines? What is the failure rate in an operational environment? Who services the machine? What is the decay rate of the filter? What is the decay rate of the shielding material? What is the variability in the power of the X-ray source during the manufacturing process? This last question may seem trivial; however, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory noted significant differences in their test models, which were supposed to be precisely up to spec. Its also interesting to note that the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory criticized other reports from NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) and a group called Medical and Health Physics Consulting for testing the machine while one of the two X-ray sources was disabled (citations at the bottom of the page). These questions have not been answered to any satisfaction and the UCSF scientists, all esteemed in their fields and members of the National Academy of Sciences have been dismissed based on a couple of reports seemingly hastily put together by mid-level government lab technicians. The documents that I have reviewed thus far either have NO AUTHOR CREDITS or are NOT authored by anyone with either a Ph.D. or a M.D., raising serious concerns of the extent of the expertise of the individuals and organizations evaluating these machines. Yet, the FDA and TSA continue to dismiss some of the most talented scientists in the country... Furthermore, when making this comparison, the TSA and FDA are calculating that the dose is absorbed throughout the body. According the simulations performed by NIST, the relative absorption of the radiation is ~20-35-fold higher in the skin, breast, testes and thymus than the brain, or 7-12-fold higher than bone marrow. So a total body dose is misleading, because there is differential absorption in some tissues. Of particular concern is radiation exposure to the testes, which could result in infertility or birth defects, and breasts for women who might carry a BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation. Even more alarming is that because the radiation energy is the same for all adults, children or infants, the relative absorbed dose is twice as high for small children and infants because they have a smaller body mass (both total and tissue specific) to distribute the dose. Alarmingly, the radiation dose to an infant's testes and skeleton is 60-fold higher than the absorbed dose to an adult brain! Review of the TSA X-ray backscatter body scanner safety report: hide your kids, hide your wife   Pornoscanner advisory flier - Boing Boing NJ, ID legislators ready to ban airport pornoscanners - your help ... (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Wunderkammerer front room crammed with nooks Posted: 27 Nov 2010 10:20 PM PST The nook-lined front room of this Stockholm hill-house, designed by Marge Arkitekter, is ready made for wunderkammerers who can't stop bringing home delightful objects they wish to exhibit. Judging from the architecture-magazine-style photo, I'm guessing that the owners aren't the sort to fill it with a weekend's worth of yard-sale treasures, but I can dream. Villa J by Marge Arkitekter (via Crib Candy)   30 Great Shelving Ideas - Boing Boing Ganging up Ikea shelves for a striking, cheapass wall-o-books ... HOWTO make mushroom shelves - Boing Boing Quad Shelves by Nauris Kalinauskas - Boing Boing 2.5 dimensional optical illusion bookshelf - Boing Boing Shelving system inspired by capillaries - Boing Boing Staircase storage: vertical shelving unit is its own stepladder ...

Motley frankenchair Posted: 27 Nov 2010 10:12 PM PST Sigurdur Gustafsson's motley "Copy and Paste Chair" is made from oak, red, black, white and natural with poly carbonate plates, and limited to 100 signed pieces. Copy And Paste Chair (via Crib Candy)   Knot Chair: cozy, semi-stone-age - Boing Boing Chair made from Coney Island wood slabs - Boing Boing New chair from legendary designer Niels Diffrient - Boing Boing Chair made from discarded paperbacks - Boing Boing Chair hand-woven from aluminium - Boing Boing

Delightful science fiction story in review of $6800 speaker cable Posted: 27 Nov 2010 10:08 PM PST Nestled amongst the many funny and delightful reviews for the AudioQuest K2 terminated speaker cable, an 8-foot audio cable that sells for $6,800.00 (a $1,650.00 savings!) is this wonderful short science fiction story by Whisper, an Amazon customer in California: We live underground. We speak with our hands. We wear the earplugs all our lives. PLEASE! You must listen! We cannot maintain the link for long... I will type as fast as I can. DO NOT USE THE CABLES! We were fools, fools to develop such a thing! Sound was never meant to be this clear, this pure, this... accurate. For a few short days, we marveled. Then the... whispers... began. Were they Aramaic? Hyperborean? Some even more ancient tongue, first spoken by elder races under the red light of dying suns far from here? We do not know, but somehow, slowly... we began to UNDERSTAND. No, no, please! I don't want to remember! YOU WILL NOT MAKE ME REMEMBER! Click through for the exciting finale! I have only a little time..., (via Making Light)   Amazon reader reviews of Denon's $500 scam cable are brilliant ... Snarky Amazon reviews for Denon's dumb-ass $500 Ethernet cable ...

German Pirate Party members strip off for Berlin airport scanner protest Posted: 27 Nov 2010 10:01 PM PST Hardy members of Germany's Pirate Party stripped down to their underwear and went to Berlin airport, their bodies marked with slogans in makeup or on paper signs: "Something to hide?", "Be a good citizen -- drop your pants." One woman has the word diaper scrawled on her lower back with an arrow pointing to her underwear and the word prosthetic printed on her leg. The word piercing and an arrow point to one of her breasts. The full-body scanners use high-frequency radio waves to produce an image of a passengers naked body beneath clothes. Anything a passenger is carrying against the body -- weapons, drugs or explosives -- would be exposed. The scanners would also reveal the presence of prosthetic devices and breast implants. As such, there have been privacy and legal concerns raised about the invasive equipment, particularly because its unclear if the scanners would be able to detect explosives hidden in body cavities and would therefore likely provide only minimal security. Full Monty Scanner or Enhanced Pat-Down - the Only Options? (Thanks, J9C, via Submitterator)   Pornoscanner advisory flier - Boing Boing Pornoscanner CEO flew with Obama to India - Boing Boing TSA head: We know nothing of Chertoff's pornoscanner conflict of ... Man at San Diego airport opts out of porno scanner and grope, told ... Traveller re-enters USA without passing through a pornoscanner or ... Federast: t-shirt for the age of TSA pornoscanners and grope-a ...

Holiday shopping online? Hit the Boing Boing Gift Guide! Posted: 27 Nov 2010 07:10 PM PST The 2010 Boing Boing Gift Guide is full of great ideas for your holiday shopping. Each item was hand-picked by a Boing Boing contributor because it's something we own, want, dig, and/or truly think is a wonderful thing we'd "gift" to our own loved ones. Especially that Porsche Speedster at the very end. Check it out.

Can being bullied change your brain? Posted: 27 Nov 2010 03:31 PM PST Scientists have long known that physical and sexual abuse in early childhood can alter brain development. But new research is showing that older kids who have been abused emotionally by their peers tend to share certain abnormalities in the corpus callosum. That's right: Being bullied is associated with an altered brain structure. The assumption here is that the bullying is causing the change, and not the other way around. It's also not totally clear what the external results of those internal changes might be—although researchers think it could have something to do with the higher rates of depression bullied kids also experience.

Improving your site's SEO with each angry customer Posted: 27 Nov 2010 03:32 PM PST David Segal has a fascinating and infuriating profile of an online retailer who says he deliberately antagonizes customers because their angry online reviews are part of his search engine optimization strategy. Welcome to the Troll School of Retail, making more money with each disgruntled consumer...

What happens when you light steel wool on fire? Posted: 27 Nov 2010 02:05 PM PST "Experiments" like this are really just about feeding your inner 10-year-old's desire to set things on fire and gawk at the results. I know it. You know it. But that knowledge doesn't make the inferno any less entertaining. And if we have to justify things by adding in a brief discussion about the interaction of oxygen and iron, so be it.

Electric, day-glo research (BoingBoing Flickr Pool) Posted: 27 Nov 2010 01:05 PM PST These groovy flasks are the result of research at the University of Oregon, aimed at creating synthetic analogs of complex organic chemical structures. In a bit of a surprise, the analogs turned out to be rather psychedelically fluorescent. Dean Walton from the University of Oregon Libraries posted them to the BoingBoing Flickr Pool , and gave us permission to post the image here. He says there's more to this research, but the details are currently under wraps. The graduate student who made these analogs is in the process of publishing a peer-reviewed paper about them, and doesn't want too much revealed until the paper goes to press.

Actor decapitates mother with Freemason sword in Masonic and "Matrix-inspired" attack Posted: 27 Nov 2010 07:00 PM PST Michael Brea, an aspiring Haitian-American actor whose most widely publicized role was a walk-on in the TV series Ugly Betty, is reported to have slashed his mother to death with a sword on Tuesday, November 23, after attending a Masonic Lodge meeting in Harlem. In an interview the NY Daily News managed to score inside Bellevue's prison ward, Brea describes the killing as having been inspired by the Matrix films. He identified with the character Neo (doesn't everyone?). During the attack, neighbors heard him chanting "Repent! Repent! Repent!," and other commands involving accepting Jesus, and referring to "The Grand Architect," a Masonic term for God. Neighbors say the NYPD were slow to respond: they came while the attack was under way, stood around, refused to break down the door of the apartment where the attack took place until it was too late—even leaving the scene of the crime, then returning when Brea's mother Yannick was finally dead. "I didn't kill her. I killed the demon inside her. It was the work of God," he says in the NY Daily News interview. More today in the New York Times. Michael Brea's twin brother lived in the home where Brea reportedly killed their mother, as did Michael, but the brother was not home at the time. According to reports, Brea was a failed Subway sandwich shop owner, and owed the franchise (and the state tax board, and various creditors) tens of thousands of dollars. There is some speculation that "money woes" were a contributing factor (though, heaven help us all if that becomes a defense in this economy...) From a profile on befim.com, described as a "Haitian Internet Movie Database"— "Growing up, my father used to tell me these great stories about Haiti and how we gained our independence in 1804. I am fascinated and proud to be Haitian-American. Which is the reason why I made it into film! I want my fellow American brothers and sisters to know the history of Haiti. I want to report the history of both worlds (Haiti and America) through film." In 2007, Michael L Brea opened a "Subway" restaurant located at 1709 Broadway Brooklyn N.Y 11207. His objective was to provide A healthier choice and to contribute to the development of urban communities. Giving out over 300 turkey footlong sandwiches on Thanksgiving of 2008, was an act no other subway has ever done! "I remember growing up," Michael says, "and my mother was always feeding people who were less fortunate. My parents raised me to always share and to give charity in the name of GOD!" Brea's father is reported to also be a Freemason. I'm seeing responses on a number of (unofficial) Freemasonry blogs seeking to distance the centuries-old organization from the attack—one early news report I can't seem to find right now quoted one Mason as saying that the Harlem lodge Brea attended wasn't officially sanctioned. I'll be interested to see if there's some sort of official response from some quarter of the group. No, not all Masons are delusional, psychotic murderers. Nor are all struggling actors, or fans of the Matrix motion picture series, or Subway sandwich store managers. There are crime scene photos around if one wants to Google them, including the bloody murder weapon described variously as a "ritual Masonic sword" and "a martial arts sword." I'd recommend the NMA video instead of the gruesome photos, though they're equally creepy now that I think about it.

That Which Doesn't Kill Us Posted: 27 Nov 2010 09:42 AM PST "That Which Doesn't Kill Us Makes us Stronger," a photograph contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by BB reader Monku!.

Dolphin teleportation symposium: now with more Eisenhowers! Posted: 27 Nov 2010 10:39 PM PST Presidential descendant and professional dolphin teleporter Laura Magdalene Eisenhower joins Joan Ocean in hosting a $1550 Hawai'ian symposium on dolphin teleportation, time travel, and the "transformative paradigm for 2012." Also: Ms Eisenhower's an AVATAR who was invited to a SECRET COLONY ON MARS. Dolphins and Teleportation (Thanks, Mrneutron!) Update: Ackpht, in the comments: There was a descendant of Dwight whose speed was much faster than light she went out to play with the dolphins one day and returned on the previous night.   Woowoo density goes to infinity - Boing Boing

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