Tuesday, January 4, 2011

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg: an exclusive excerpt

Posted: 03 Jan 2011 05:57 PM PST

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Alyson Sinclair says: "Timothy Leary, the 'straight Harvard professor,' and Allen Ginsberg, 'the world's most famous bohemian' sat down at a kitchen table in 1960 and made plans to launch a spiritual psychedelic revolution.

"Peter Conners' new book, White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg (City Lights Publishers, Nov. 2010), is the story of how they unleashed that revolution on the world."

Read the excerpt. Buy White Hand Society on Amazon.

Two girls race to top of US-Mexico fence in 15 seconds

Posted: 03 Jan 2011 04:12 PM PST


[Video Link] The Danged Fence proves to be no barrier to a couple of girls.

Bikini models photographed by young chimpanzee in a kimono

Posted: 03 Jan 2011 04:12 PM PST

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Having fun in 1963. (Via Where is My Mind?)

Rain of 4,000 dead birds

Posted: 03 Jan 2011 03:41 PM PST

NYT: "About 10 p.m. Friday, thousands of red-winged blackbirds began falling out of the sky over this town about 35 miles northeast of Little Rock. They landed on roofs, roads, front lawns and backyards, turning the ground nearly black and scaring anyone who happened to be outside."

A City Councilwoman remarked, "Looks like some sort of phenomenon happened"

(Via Tim O'Reilly)

Steel Spring Hook

Posted: 03 Jan 2011 03:08 PM PST

51caVeLCPQL._AA1500_.jpeg I was introduced to spring hooks by a repair technician at work around 10 years ago. He was using the tool to get into tight spaces on check processing equipment and gave me one as he thought I'd find it handy around the house. The tool is quite simple. It's an eleven-inch stainless steel rod with a 90-degree hook at the end. I found it useful for any task in tight places requiring force to be exerted with precision. I used it for a few years before it died of natural causes and I then found a supplier and bought half a dozen; they were only a few dollars each at the time. I spread the new supply around the house in the kitchen, office, as well as my workshop and I was surprised to find my wife using them more than I. She's used them for sewing projects to thread elastic through a waistband, for craft projects to guide the placement of small parts, and for her own forays into light equipment repair. I find this tool uniquely capable of getting into tight spaces where no other tool can go making it one of the most versatile tools I own. It is sold in various configurations by numerous suppliers, but the 11" version I was given years ago has proven most useful. -- Paul Steger 8.25" Steel Spring Hook $3.30 Comment on this at Cool Tools. Or, submit a tool!

New stop-motion short by PES

Posted: 03 Jan 2011 02:36 PM PST

Temporary zombie tattoos by Mitch O'Connell

Posted: 03 Jan 2011 02:20 PM PST

zombie-tats.jpgMy high school art class buddy, Mitch O'Connell, drew these 30 temporary zombie tattoos. I'm going to have to order a couple of packs for my daughters.
You have love for the pale-skinned undead, so why not share it with the world? Temporary tattoo book takes the classic anchors, hearts and horseshoes and gives 'em a brain-eating twist. Package comes with 30 tattoos (15 designs, 2 tattoos of each) in a handy 4"x6" matchbook
Temporary zombie tattoos by Mitch O'Connell

Best of Bootie 2010 released

Posted: 03 Jan 2011 02:06 PM PST

bootie-2010.jpg In case you missed it, Best of Bootie 2010 was released about a week ago. Very dance-heavy, and a lot of Van Halen, the best of which is "Imagine a Jump." A couple of other inspired juxtapositions, most notably "Smells Like Rockin' Robin."

Best of Bootie 2010

The Wormworld Saga: beautiful online graphic novel

Posted: 03 Jan 2011 01:54 PM PST

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Daniel Lieske's Wormworld Saga is a visual treat. Lieske works at a German computer game company and draws this online graphic novel in his spare time. You can find out more about how he creates his stunning illustrations on his personal website.

The Wormworld Saga

Spokeo, personal data aggregators, and your privacy rights: Xeni on The Madeleine Brand Show

Posted: 03 Jan 2011 03:30 PM PST

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[Direct MP3 link for audio] This morning, I joined the Madeleine Brand Show to talk about the latest personal data privacy aggregator that has many of us spooked: Spokeo.

Listen to the archived radio segment here.

Spokeo isn't new, nor is it alone: peoplefinder, pipl, spoke, zabasearch, Intelius, and many other internet companies exploit the same weaknesses in America's privacy laws. But Spokeo popped up in the news over the holidays after launching a "username search" feature. The focus of this morning's radio segment: what sites should be able to access your personal data, and what, if anything can you do to stop them?

So, about Spokeo. As Sean Bonner guest-blogged here over the weekend, you enter your name on the site, and if you're in its reach, the site freely returns data about everything from your religion to gender to marital status to hobbies to "wealth level." Oh, and your home address and phone number, even if you go to some effort to keep those un-listed. They apparently only traffic in US addresses, so those of you outside the states shouldn't end up in Spokeo's search results.

The project dates back to 2006, the dorm room brainchild of 27-year-old Stanford student Harrison Tang. He told the Los Angeles Times last June that Spokeo gets data from about 80 "public" sources, including LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter and Yelp, and has been working with Facebook to open that door, too. Tellingly, Mr. Tang opted out of his own site over privacy concerns.

Spokeo claims not to possess Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, bank accounts, or other private financial data such as credit scores. Despite this, they do report "wealth level," whatever that means, and this prompted a Federal Trade Commission complaint last summer by The Center for Democracy and Technology, alleging that Spokeo "purports to provide information about individuals' credit ratings and other financial data, but fails to disclose the source of the data or allow consumers an opportunity to dispute and correct false information."



Spokeo's offices are located in Pasadena, CA. The business address they publish is a small mailbox at a UPS Store in a Pasadena strip mall (though the LA Times also tracked down and published the company's physical address).


Peoplefinders and OptOut are owned by the same company, and share an address in Sacramento. Spokeo publicizes that they have a "partner" relationship with ReputationDefender, a site that, for a fee, promises to help "manage your reputation online" and deal with offending leakers like Spokeo. It's hard to ferret out exactly what the data publishing sites like Spokeo have with the privacy service sites like ReputationDefender, but it seems fair to at least characterize them as symbiotic.


As frightening as the prospect of having a satellite photo of one's home next to one's marital status, religion, and estimated income in one free search result may be— Boing Boing guestblogger Andrea James points out that Spokeo probably isn't the scariest data-monger in the room. "Information commerce company" Intelius bought people search site Spock last year, scaring the bejeebus out of a lot of people in the process. Who knows what may yet come of that merger.


I reached out to Sharon Nissim, a Consumer Protection Fellow from EPIC, to make sense of Spokeo and sites like it. Nissim said this felt "one step away from having someone's SSN," and is "indicative of a pervasive problem online: people really have no idea how much tracking is being done, because behavioral tracking services effectively track everything you look at online."

Regarding paid services that promise to "clean" the internet of your personal data, "You shouldn't have to pay to keep your information private," said Nissim, "privacy should be a default setting."

EPIC is among the privacy watchdog groups backing the idea of a "do not track" mechanism first proposed in 2007, which was initially modeled on the popular "do not call" database administered by FCC to limit telemarketing access. Nissim explained that while the two can't technologically can't work same way, and the idea of a government-maintained centralized registry of websites is a non-starter, there is hope. One solution under discussion with researchers at Stanford for "do not track" involves using HTTP headers on the browser side.

"For now, making sure to opt out of data sharing or data storing when given a choice by credit card companies, banks, and websites is one good thing to do," said Nissim. "We're also concerned about the privacy threat posed by mobile phone/smartphone data. We don't carry our computers everywhere we go, but we do carry these mobile devices. The location information that apps store and share will surely be of greater concern, as their usage grows."

"Online tracking is a huge problem, and while it is certainly good that some steps are being taken to try to crack down on some of it, we are really far behind where we need to be," adds Nissim. "The FTC is just waking up to the issue and strong enforcement of any do not track mechanism is imperative for it to succeed. That being said, I am hopeful that Congress will get behind the initiative and that movement will continue on protecting peoples' privacy online."

RELATED READING:



•
EPIC page on online tracking and behavioral profiling



• Stanford Do Not Track website


•
EFF on how to protect your privacy online

How to stay safe at public WiFi spots

Posted: 03 Jan 2011 11:20 AM PST

Glenn Fleishmann has a piece up at Ars Technica with advice on how to "secure all the connections over which you pass anything personal, financial, or confidential." These tips are good to know when you're at home or at the office, but particularly vital when using public WiFi services at cafés, airports, and the like.

Harlan Ellison: The Road ripped off A Boy and his Dog

Posted: 03 Jan 2011 04:14 PM PST

the-road_l.jpg In a WSJ interview on the subject of old typewriters, science fiction legend Harlan Ellison conspicuosly works in a claim that Cormac McCarthy's The Road is ripped off from A Boy and his Dog.
A friend said "oh gee, you should sell it, they sold Cormac McCarthy's typewriter." And I said, "yeah, Cormac McCarthy who ripped off my story "A Boy and His Dog" to do "The Road." I said how much did they get $20?" And he said "they got $220,000 because they gave it to charity and I said "that's nice."
Clearly a joke, right?

Jason Sanford explains why it might not be a joke for McCarthy or the producers of the motion picture based on his novel. Ellison famously sued the producers of The Terminator over the use of ideas also present in his stories, which earned a payoff and director James Cameron's description of him as a "parasite who can kiss my ass."

The key point all authors and creators should remember is ideas are not protected by copyright. As the U.S. copyright office states, "Copyright does not protect ideas, concepts, systems, or methods of doing something. You may express your ideas in writing or drawings and claim copyright in your description, but be aware that copyright will not protect the idea itself as revealed in your written or artistic work."

Plagiarism is a serious charge and I wish Ellison wouldn't throw the term around like it is nothing. Simply because an author has written on an idea Ellison once wrote about does not equal theft.

The problem, practically speaking, is that it's often cheaper to pay someone off than defend yourself in court. This creates a huge incentive to litigate that goes from Ellison-style cantankerousness all the way up to the RIAA's industrial-scale shakedown racket.

Sanford notes the WSJ's own reference to Ellison's infamous lawsuit is vague: "he penned Soldier, which James Cameron drew from for The Terminator." He sees in this the pernicious effects of abusing copyright law. It doesn't just tax culture, but rewrites the history of creative inspiration to the advantage of litigators.

Still, Ellison's actually done the world a favor here. I love his work, and like many SF readers feel vindication in the modern appreciation of his literary merits. But his new comparison finally cleared something up for me: just how differently a good writer and a great one express similar ideas.

Women Laughing Alone with Salad

Posted: 03 Jan 2011 11:24 AM PST

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Link (thanks, Jason Weisberger!)

LOL: Judith Miller criticizes Wikileaks' Assange for not verifying his sources

Posted: 03 Jan 2011 11:15 AM PST

Why is disgraced former New York Times reporter Judith Miller not fond of Wikileaks and Julian Assange? "Because he didn't care at all about attempting to verify the information that he was putting out or determine whether or not it would hurt anyone," she said.

Groupon Editorial guidelines are funny

Posted: 03 Jan 2011 11:12 AM PST

Is this real or a joke? I don't know, but it's the best parody yet I've seen of the Groupon editorial voice: "The bagel, like the circle from which it takes its shape, is a metaphor for life; it literally never ends. Today's Groupon celebrates that sacred, delicious symbol: for $3.."

Lovely montage of East Coast blizzard

Posted: 03 Jan 2011 10:49 AM PST

It's always hard to capture the scope of a huge weather phenomenon, and some of the great ones focus more on carefully observed details. Roger Ebert points out this lovely example shot by Jamie Stuart, titled "Idiot with a Tripod." Video link.

Haiti: "Dispatches from tent cities where rape gangs and disaster profiteers roam"

Posted: 03 Jan 2011 10:33 AM PST

"The way you saw the earth shake, that's how our bodies are shaking now." A Mother Jones piece by Mac McClelland on the living hell faced by quake survivors in Haiti. Rape and other forms of sexual violence against women and girls are rampant. The youngest reported victim? 2 years old.

The creation of breathable chocolate, an excerpt from The Lab: Creativity and Culture, by David Edwards

Posted: 03 Jan 2011 10:21 AM PST

David Edwards teaches at Harvard University in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. In this excerpt from his book, The Lab: Creativity and Culture he writes about creating a "food inhaler" that dispenses breathable chocolate.
le-whif.jpg Thierry Marx was helping transform how we enjoy the purely aesthetic realm of eating. Each year, in the town of Pauillac, north of Bordeaux, within the chateau of Cordeillan-Bages, he created hundreds of new ways to prepare, visualize, and consume familiar foods. By 2007 the reputation of his restaurant drew comparisons with the two top experimental restaurants in the world, Ferran Adrià's El Bulli outside Barcelona and Heston Blumenthal's The Fat Duck north of London.

That same year we had a chance to involve Thierry in an experiment at Le Laboratoire with the colloid physicist Jérôme Bibette. To explore how a chef became an exhibiting artist, we traveled down to his restaurant in July. The conversation swirled that day around wrapping flavor in particularly thin membranes. Having looked into the idea of inhaled aerosols for delivering drugs and vaccines, I brought up the idea of breathing these colloids into your mouth. Later in the fall I shared that notion with students at Harvard University. They would need to make the food particles small enough to get into the air, and large enough to avoid entry into the lungs under all conditions of breathing. We knew this much. But what did inhaling food mean? Would there be pleasure in it? After a semester of reflection, brainstorming, and quite a bit of coughing (even after designing the particles with a size to avoid the lungs, we discovered that, no matter how we breathed through straw-like inhalers, the particles flew to the back of the throat) I put a piece of tape over the paper cylinder my students had prepared to inhale things like carrot powder. The coughing stopped. And here we had the first prototype of the food inhaler we called Le Whif.

The LaboGroup was just then being formed, and José Sanchez decided we could manufacture Le Whif in the Chinese factory where we planned to make the plant filter. Six months after the idea had come up in Thierry's restaurant, we manufactured the first Whifs in China. They arrived in Paris a few days before Thierry and Jérôme's culinary art exhibition at Le Laboratoire, in March 2008. We exhibited our fledgling product over a Whif Bar imagined by Caroline Naphegyi and cosponsored by the Nestlé division Nespresso. Nespresso offered each visitor a free coffee, and we included a little brown object that looked like a tube of lipstick, by which you whiffed chocolate into your mouth.

To be perfectly frank, Le Whif didn't work well. Chocolate powder fell out if you inclined one end above the other, and you almost invariably coughed when you inhaled for the first time. But this was a lab, and we were testing a new idea--a new way of experiencing food! Two Harvard students, Trevor Martin and Larissa Zhou, had flown to Paris for the event. Jonathan Kamler, who had graduated the year before, having led the previous semester's student whiffing project, was also in Paris to work full-time for the LaboGroup. These three kept the chocolate inhalers full of chocolate powder as several hundred opening night guests tried it out.

It turned out to be fortuitous that, just weeks before the exhibition, the French government had outlawed cigarettes in cafés. This had outraged many French café-goers. Le Whif seemed a kind of inventive response. The traditional sip of coffee, bit of chocolate, and smoke that properly ended a French meal became, in this new anti-cigarette era, sipped coffee and smoked chocolate. Our guests had a ball with it. They invariably held Le Whif between their fingers as if it were a cigarette, and kept it long after the tube was empty, chatting, appreciating a novel social experience (which became, in the hands of my three little boys, something of a slightly illicit thrill).

No, this wasn't a commercial product, and nobody pretended it was. Nobody, that is, but the LaboGroup team. Why? Because the team was having fun. The hoped-for outcome of this first experiment had been observed in the public reaction to the exhibition, and now there were more experiments to be done. And, besides, if Le Whif did manage to become a product one day, magical revenues would appear. The team needed to hope for this income stream. The risk of running out of money was too palpable.

True, whiffing was even more far-fetched than filtering the air with plants. However, being far-fetched made the idea plausible as the preoccupation of an art lab, and commended the idea as a valid creative process even as it cast doubt on the eventual outcome of a valuable commercial product.

the-lab-bkk.jpgClearly there were things to improve. The design needed to prevent all the chocolate from spilling out as you moved Le Whif around after filling it and before inhaling. But the product needed to remain simple; especially, it needed to avoid the unattractive trappings of pharmaceutical products. Le Whif needed to reliably deliver enough chocolate to satisfy taste but not so much as to fill your mouth with dry powder or provoke a spasm of coughing. The LaboGroup launched a second version of Le Whif in the fall of 2008 with the opening of the new LaboShop. The public could come inside and enjoy a whiff of chocolate with a cup of espresso. Whiffed chocolate came in mint chocolate, raspberry chocolate, and pure chocolate flavors. We invited the public to opine on the result and help us design a fully commercial chocolate inhaler that we would launch within the year.

We said that whiffing was a new way of eating, and proposed Le Whif as a kind of inhaled fork or spoon--and we believed it. Until now, nobody had reliably put food in the mouth through breathing. First there were the hands, then chopsticks, then forks and spoons, and now Le Whif. Yes, we were starting with chocolate, but you could inhale many other things, too, as we did during private evenings of experimentation in the FoodLab--with cheese, mushroom, exotic teas.

From the fall of 2008 into the winter of 2009, our local LaboShop clientele included young professionals, kids, and an occasional celebrity, like the French actress Isabelle Adjani, who would sneak in and out, sunglasses donned, enjoying a private pleasure. This eclectic group, probably fewer than a hundred people, returned regularly to the LaboShop, defining for us the commercial potential of Le Whif and rarely leaving before posing the same impatient question: When could they actually buy Le Whif and take it home? The LaboShop team would, when asked this question, point to the upcoming product launch, whose date we kept moving out further into the future as we tried to improve the design of Le Whif, now a third time, and work out a business model in the absence of a huge demand.

The team geared up for the commercial launch over regular late-evening drinks at the neighborhood café. Production costs needed to be lowered, simplicity improved, and more chocolate added, among other things.

With so much happening then at Le Laboratoire--the global financial crisis having fully settled down on us--our product development was spotty and informal. We did the best we could with limited time and resources. After many delays, the date of the launch was set for April 29, 2009. There would be a world tour to bring Le Whif to major cities and accustom people to the notion of breathing chocolate. We put together communication materials and planned a launch that resembled the opening of an art exhibition, which was the only kind of opening we knew. Our message was philosophical. Breathe chocolate and experience food as an artistic act. If chocolate failed, we had other ideas--inhaled spices, inhaled steak, inhaled coffee. Thierry Marx began to think about it all.

Four weeks before the scheduled launch in Paris, something very surprising happened. In his first months working for us, when he was still living in Cambridge, Tom Hadfield helped us put the business plan of LaboGroup in shape. In the midst of this he sent a note in early April saying that he was about to start a buzz campaign by Internet. Distracted by the challenges of the launch, we didn't take special notice. Tom's note probably arrived on a Thursday. The campaign was to begin the next day, he wrote.

On Saturday morning Tom reported that some blogging had started and the traffic on the Internet site had doubled. We received another note from Tom on Sunday. Internet traffic had doubled again. Similar messages came on Monday and Tuesday. By then Internet orders for Le Whif were flooding in. Several major blog sites picked up the story midweek, and on Wednesday the New York Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the Boston Globe wanted to do interviews. "The world has been waiting for breathable chocolate!" Tom wrote ecstatically in one of the many emails now zipping across the ocean. By the end of the week the Today Show, Good Morning America, and CBS Morning News had asked for the product to test. We had waves of orders and media requests from England, Germany, Italy, Spain, South Africa, India, Thailand, Japan, Poland, and other countries.

The world had awakened to the idea that we had a new, surprising commercial product. But we actually didn't. We were unprepared. The day before the April 29 launch I was in Washington, D.C., to give a talk at the National Institutes of Health on work I was doing related to infectious diseases. On my way from the airport I received an email from Jonathan Kamler explaining that Le Whif had arrived, filled with chocolate and properly packaged. But, when he took it out of its packaging to test it, Jonathan discovered it didn't function properly. He couldn't even open it. Out of a hundred Whifs, perhaps thirty worked. In a lightning decision, we decided to hand pick the new product, throw out the defective ones, and launch the next day. Thankfully, the surprise of the product, the suddenness of international public reaction, and the bizarre atmosphere of the FoodLab, with Thierry Marx presiding over lunch, helped everyone ignore that day how unreliable this first product actually was.

The team was invited a few weeks later to the Cannes Film Festival to help animate the beachfront terrace café of the Majestic Hotel. For two weeks young women walked between café tables from noon through mid-afternoon. Shoulder straps held serving trays from which they offered free Whifs, like vendors selling hotdogs at a baseball game. Later that month the team traveled to Chicago for the All Candy Show. This went relatively smoothly, and by the end of the month we ran out of the first faulty stock--15,000 Whifs.

A new shipment arrived in July, and until October 2009 it performed mostly as we wished it to, particularly in the hands of those educated to use it or patient enough to learn how to use it even when it dusted your knees with chocolate, or when the chocolate flew into your mouth in one quick burst, or when the inhaler arrived empty, because of some glitch in the filling, packaging, and transporting process. While we received many disappointed notes from customers who received Le Whif and either did not understand it or experienced a malfunction in one of these ways, we also received notes from at least as many customers delighted by the product, who understood Le Whif even with all its youthful blemishes, and who remained hopeful about ordering more, particularly once we'd figured out the issues of manufacture and supply.

The experiment continued. In October we produced an even more reliable chocolate inhaler that began to sell in Lafayette Gourmet within the flagship Galeries Lafayette store. Helped by a brilliant chocolate expert, we completely changed the packaging and marketing of the product to better signal our commercial intentions while preparing the launch of a fully commercial Whif at the end of January 2010. This final product was launched at Davos, Switzerland, during the World Economic Forum, and later that spring in Dylan's Candy Bar in New York City and other locations around the United States, such as the gourmet shop Cardullo's in Harvard Square. That same spring the product launched in England within the House of Fraser in London and in many other cities and towns around the United Kingdom.

Le Whif's commercial appearance mobilized the entire network of artscience labs. LaboGroup ran the business, Le Laboratoire curated the idea through exhibitions, The Laboratory at Harvard introduced the product during its opening in 2009, and the Idea Translation Lab at Cloud Place organized a few high school whiffing parties. Through sales, Le Whif would benefit all the artscience labs eventually; but this was not the reason why Le Whif went on exhibit in Paris or animated parties in the United States. The labs participated in this experiment mostly because Le Whif was a surprising idea, conceived with students at the intersection of aerosol science and culinary art, and, while fun, it also expressed something essential about what each lab did, or wished to do, with students, creators, and the public.

More than a commercial product, Le Whif carried the creative process outside lab borders. We wished the product to be understood in its original art-as-process context. This was signaled by the launch parties in Paris and, later, at the Cannes Film Festival, in Chicago, in Cambridge, and elsewhere. It was signaled by the early silver balloon packaging we used, and by the "airline tickets" we handed out to explain what we had in mind with the "world tour" promotion. Our sales approach reflected a lab sensibility; it did not reflect a reasoned analysis of the market.

Le Whif traversed the entire idea funnel. It started as a catalyst of education, soon became a catalyst of cultural exploration, and went on to be a catalyst of commercial sales revenue that helped keep our labs running. It also inspired new culinary art and science experiments, from whiffed coffee, which launched in the spring of 2010, to whiffed vitamins, scheduled to launch later within the year. And on the horizon was yet another design, Le Whaf, which I conceived with the French designer Marc Bretillot as a new way to "drink by breathing." This was a new form of food--a standing cloud of flavor that falls between a liquid and a gas, just as whiffed food fell somewhere between a solid and a gas.

From The Lab: Creativity and Culture by David Edwards. Copyright © 2010 by
David Edwards. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Kanye West's "Monster," reinterpreted by Muppets

Posted: 03 Jan 2011 10:19 AM PST

[Video Link, NSFW and not for children].

This is not an official Kanye video, nor is it an official Muppets video. Strictly fan-remix territory, by YouTuber Bobby Miller.

Science, sans context

Posted: 03 Jan 2011 09:44 AM PST

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While I'm normally opposed to taking quotes from scientific research completely out of context, I'll make an exception for Out of Context Science—a blog that plucks particularly strange or funny quotations from peer-reviewed research and stories about peer-reviewed research. To be fair, it's not much different from what your average pundit does with science, but far, far less harmful. And Out of Context Science, at least, includes citations. Some highlights:

Before 1700, it was widely accepted that flu epidemics began with horses.

She recruited 40 volunteers and showed them an unpleasant 12-minute film including graphic scenes of human surgery.... Thirty minutes later, half of the group played Tetris for ten minutes.

A cage control group was removed from their cage and sacrificed.

The Sahara was wet enough to support fishy and human migrations at that time.

Thanks to Malaal for Submitterating!

Image: Some rights reserved by tibchris

The first fights over secular government in America

Posted: 03 Jan 2011 09:13 AM PST

How did the original members of the Constitutional Convention react to the fact that the United States government was going to be explicitly secular—with no established state religion, no religious test for citizenship or public office, and, in fact, no mention of God in the document at all? I've often wondered about this. I know a little about the perspective of the founding fathers who successfully pushed for secularism, but what about the ones who disagreed?

Slacktivist—one of my favorite bloggers on ethics, Christian theology, politics and history—has been reading a book that describes the knock-down, drag-out fight that led to our secular Constitution. Amusingly, the rhetoric of the losing side is oddly familiar ...

Colonel Jones, a Massachusetts delegate, told the state's ratifying convention that American political leaders had to believe in God and Jesus Christ. Amos Singletary, another delegate to the Massachusetts ratification convention, was upset at the Constitution's not requiring men in power to be religious "and though he hoped to see Christians [in office], yet by the Constitution, a papist, or an infidel was as eligible as they." In New Hampshire the fear was of "a papist, a Mohomatan, a deist, yea an atheist at the helm of government." Henry Abbot, a delegate to the North Carolina convention, warned that "the exclusion of religious tests" was "dangerous and impolitic" and that "pagans, deists, and Mahometans might obtain offices among us." If there is no religious test, he asked, "to whom will they [officeholders] swear support -- the ancient pagan gods of Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, or Pluto?"

More specific fears were clearly at work here. The absence of religious tests, it was feared, would open up the national government to control by Jews, Catholics and Quakers. The Rev. David Caldwell, a Presbyterian minister and delegate in North Carolina, worried that the Constitution now offered an invitation to "Jews and pagans of every kind" to govern us. Major Thomas Lusk, a delegate in Massachusetts, denounced Article 6 of the Constitution and shuddered "at the idea that Roman Catholics, Papists and Pagans might be introduced into office, and that Popery and the Inquisition may be established in America." A delegate in North Carolina waved a pamphlet that depicted the possibility that the pope of Rome might be elected president.

There's more, but you get the idea. If you aren't familiar with Slacktivist, it's worth noting that he's an evangelical Baptist, and this post is part of a longer argument he's made for secularism being good for both government and for religion, itself.

Slacktivist: Reading the Godless Constitution

A tour of underground New York City

Posted: 03 Jan 2011 08:55 AM PST

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They don't build cities like they used to—which is, to say, by simply backfilling and constructing on top of older architecture, leaving behind a layered time machine just ripe for adventure. The idea that some very old cities, like Rome, are three stories taller than they originally were—that the ground you walk on today is not really, precisely, the ground at all—is still completely mind-blowing to me. Even after I've been below, and seen the buildings-built-atop-buildings with my own eyes.

That's why I love stories like this one from NPR, where professional explorer Erling Kagge accompanies amateur adventurer Steve Duncan on a 25-mile journey through the sewers of New York City. It's no Golden Palace of Nero, but there are some little historical thrills. The photo above, for instance, taken by Duncan, which shows THE canal for which Canal Street was named. Bricked over in 1812—you can see the line between the different stages of brickwork—it's now a sewer. And a clogged one, at that.

The story even includes a short interview with one of the so-called Mole People—homeless people who have figured out how to live more comfortably below ground than on the street.

One of them, Brooklyn, lives in an "igloo," as she put it -- a sort of dump beneath the tracks, which were lined with mural after mural of intense, weird graffiti.

"What do you think people above ground do wrong in life?" Kagge asked her.

"It's called appreciate what you got," Brooklyn said. "And hold on to it. And don't lose it. I don't know why people are miserable -- they got everything that I don't have. And I'm happier than them."

Soon, she burst into Sister Sledge's "We Are Family."

Via Christopher Ryan

Maggie talking about the future of energy

Posted: 03 Jan 2011 08:17 AM PST

The Minnesota Atheists have a weekly local radio show/podcast. This Sunday was their annual Future of Science show, and they invited me on to talk about the book I'm currently writing, and the three big trends that will shape the future of energy. You can download it or listen online. My bit starts about 14 minutes into the show, but there's some cool stuff before me—media analyst Steve Borsch talks about mobile internet and the future of education—and after my segment is science blogger and biological anthropologist Greg Laden, who summarizes the top science stories of 2010, and talks about what stories to watch in 2011.

Tablets & Televisions: what to expect from CES

Posted: 03 Jan 2011 07:47 AM PST

stevemarcusCES.jpg

Photo: REUTERS/Steve Marcus

• Glass! Millions of square inches of glass; numberless finger-smudged tablets as far as the eye can see. These will be mostly in the mainstream iPad style, but also the desktop-OS "Dr. Stylus" style that Microsoft just can't quit. It should be a good year for the former category, with RIM's PlayBook, a rumored 10-incher from Motorola, and Android 3 on the way. Expect every major laptop maker to have their game face on, finally.

• Will Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer get up on stage and announce another Windows 7 tablet? That would be quite the show. Even if he does, we shouldn't let it distract from the smart stuff, which will be in his Windows Phone 7 pitch. The slick mobile OS was well-received, especially its minimalist UI design, and has a rosy future if it can ramp up sales. Also rumored is a new version of Windows designed for ARM chips, which has baffled analysts but might hints at its long-term tablet plans.

• 4G and the Verizon iPhone. There's a lot of buzz around Verizon, as it's expected to offer up its long-awaited model of the iPhone this month, if not actually at CES. It'll be pushing the rollout of its 4G cellular network at the show, and the clues should be loud and clear.

• Mature Android smartphones, with clear advantages over iPhone 4, are closing in on Apple at the top end of the market. But the public perception of equivalence is denied to LG and co. by low-ppi displays and Android's rough edges. Expect CES's new batch to smooth things out.

• CES 2011 will be the death of the featurephone: cheap Android models will take their place this year. In particular it would be nice to see specialist handsets -- Casio's ultra-rugged models, for example -- get some brains.

• Apple, which doesn't exhibit at CES, could announce iStuff (say, an iPad 2) elsewhere. They did this with the iPhone in 2007 and it stole the show's thunder.

• Televisions will be everywhere, but there won't be much to see. The 3D revolution is out of steam and Google TV is already on the ropes.

• Laptops will also be in abundance, but that's business as usual. Netbooks won't be sexy again until they can deliver MacBook Air performance at a markedly lower price, and the most exciting tech upgrade going for the rest of the market is USB 3. Be on the lookout for good design, though: it often comes hand-in-hand with the lack of marketable spec bumps.

Rad Rap Photoshop Tutorial from CMY KILLA

Posted: 02 Jan 2011 06:15 PM PST

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Suck at photoshop? No worries, CMY KILLA is about to drop some science on you with a little help from his crew Masta Bevel, Lens Flare, Filter Phil, DJ Dodge, MC Burn, Rastorvizer, and the rest. They have more filters than a T-Pain album and will have your mock ups bangin' in no time.

What's that? You have a question? Yo, shut up fool, no talkin when I'm shoppin' that's the number one rule!

Video Link (Thanks Luke)

Mophie Juice Pack Plus for iPhone 4

Posted: 03 Jan 2011 08:26 AM PST

mophie-juice-pack.jpgLike Cory, I suffer from a very poor sense of direction. I never know which way to turn when I leave my hotel room or step out of a restroom. When I'm walking around a city, even one I'm familiar with like Los Angeles, I can easily get lost. When I'm with my wife I let her lead the way.

Ever since I've had an iPhone with GPS I've become totally dependent on it. It's so useful to have it in a place like New York. When I'm walking down the street I can look at the screen and the little blue dot tells me where I am. The problem is that when I'm using the GPS radio, the batteries drain pretty quickly. So I have to conserve my use. But now that I have a Mophie Juice Pack Plus -- a $99 rechargeable external battery case for my iPhone (the manufacturer sent me an evaluation unit) -- I can stare at my iPhone the entire time I'm in public without having to worry that the battery will lose its charge before I get back to my hotel.

The Mophie adds some bulk and weight to the phone, but not much. It's got a power switch so that when the iPhone's battery is starting to die I can switch over to the Mophie's battery. It's kind of like those old cars that had two gas tanks in them -- when one tank ran out you turned a valve to start getting gasoline from the other tank.

When the case is on you use the included micro USB port to charge the phone's battery, the Mophie's battery, and to synchronize the phone with iTunes. The Mophie comes with a four-LED status indicator to let you know how much charge remains.

The manufacturer claims that the Mophie is rechargeable for over 500 cycles, and that partial cycles aren't counted as full cycles. That means you can charge the Mophie's battery 10% of the way 10 times before counts as a full cycle. The Mophie's battery is designed to drain before the iPhone's battery drains, so that means when the juice pack has done its thing you can remove it and your iPhone will be fully charged.

I haven't measured how much more time the Mophie gives me. Here are the manufacturer's specs:

Up to 8 add'l hours talk time on 3G; 16 hours 2G
Up to 7 add'l hours internet on 3G; 11 hours WiFi
Up to 44 add'l hrs audio playback
Up to 11 add'l hrs video playback

This means I can play Fruit Ninja the whole time I'm on a flight from Los Angeles to New York, and still have enough juice to find my way to Forbidden Planet in Manhattan.

Mophie Juice Pack Plus Rechargeable Battery and Case for iPhone4
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