Friday, January 21, 2011

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Hotel made of beach trash in Madrid

Posted: 21 Jan 2011 03:20 AM PST


Madrid's Beach Garbage Hotel is a liveable art installation made from garbage washed up or dumped on European beaches; the trash has been sterilized and used to build a centrally located hotel with five double rooms (all rooms are free -- though there are no toilets or other plumbing). The artist, Ha Schult, says, "I created the Beach Garbage Hotel because the oceans of our planet are the biggest garbage dump."

New hotel is complete rubbish

(Image: AFP)

 


Enfield, CT cancels screening of Moore's Sicko after pressure from local gov't

Posted: 21 Jan 2011 03:13 AM PST

ResourceShelf has a number of links and excerpts relating to the sordid story of the Enfield, Connecticut public library being forced to cancel its showing of Michael Moore's Sicko after a few people complained to the town council, who took issue with the characterization of the film as "non-fiction."
The Connecticut Library Association believes that public libraries should be a pillar of our American democracy and that democracy depends on an informed citizenry. People should be able to go their public library to read or view a wide variety of books and films about controversial topics and then make up their minds. Censoring the choices that people have or silencing the opposition is an insult to our form of government. The public library is supposed to be a battle ground for ideas.
Public Libraries: "Connecticut Library Cancels Screening of Michael Moore Movie 'Sicko' Under Pressure" (Thanks, Rubble88, via Submitterator!)
 


Unicorn of the sea chaser (for Chase No Face)

Posted: 21 Jan 2011 04:17 AM PST

For those troubled by Chase No Face, the good-natured but facially disfigured kitty (link to potentially disturbing post), here's an interesting unicorn chaser about the unicorn of the sea, the narwhal. National Geographic got dentist Martin Nweeia up to the Arctic to look into the male narwhal's left tooth, which forms a unicorn-like tusk. In the video above, he examines a narwhal tusk up close and discusses its function. Note: If you are squeamish about seeing someone get dental work, you might need to skip this one, too, ya big wimp. (Video link, via National Geographic's Wild Chronicles)

Africa is having a sale on electricity

Posted: 21 Jan 2011 01:22 AM PST

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Mega Jeopardy champ and microfinance philanthropist Bob Harris snapped this funny photo in Africa. He says, "This sign was all over Kigali, outside small groceries, gas stations, and any other local equivalent of the convenience store, and it always made me smile. Somehow I couldn't help but imagine they had these big tubs of the stuff sitting around on shelves. You come in, maybe carrying a cardboard box or a plastic bag, and they pour you a bunch, with lots of little sparks dripping down the sides, and you go on your way."

Previously:



Make nice smelling cleaning products at home

Posted: 20 Jan 2011 06:02 PM PST

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Over at credit.com, I wrote about my experiences using the recipes from a book called Make Your Place: Affordable & Sustainable Nesting Skills to make home cleaning products from scratch.

I went online and ordered all the necessary ingredients and equipment: funnels, plastic squeeze bottles, spray bottles, vinegar, borax, castille soap, baking soda, and oils of peppermint, tea tree, lavender, and eucalyptus. Most of the ingredients were inexpensive, except the oils, which were quite costly. Fortunately, the recipes called for just a few drops of the fragrant oils. A little goes a very long way. I estimate that home-made cleaning solutions cost about half as much as store bought products.

My two daughters (ages 7 and 13) and I made the all-purpose cleaner first. We combined water, castille soap, borax, the essential oils, and a bit of vinegar. It smelled good and I tested it on a sticky, crumb-covered countertop. The solution made short work of the mess.

Next, we made the window cleaner, which was mostly vinegar and castille soap. After mixing the ingredients, my younger daughter sniffed the solution and wrinkled her nose. "Yuck! She exclaimed. It smells gross." I took a sniff myself and was nearly bowled over by the foul smell. My older daughter said it smelled like vomit.

Make Nice Smelling Cleaning Products at Home

More on the possible WikiLeaks-inspired Bank of America domain name grab

Posted: 20 Jan 2011 06:33 PM PST

PBS "Need to Know" has an in-depth report on MarkMonitor Inc., the "little-known company that specializes in protecting the public image and product identity of Fortune 500 companies." They've been "quietly buying up hundreds of domain names that could be used to host online criticism of Bank of America," in case Wikileaks does dump something dirty on BofA (previous BB posts on this here and here).

EFF obtains docs that reveal when authorities can get your data from social media companies

Posted: 20 Jan 2011 05:30 PM PST

The Electronic Frontier Foundation today posted analysis of documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act which show how various popular social media companies handle requests for user data from authorities. The issue became a focal point earlier this month when the US Department of Justice obtained a court order for records from Twitter on users affiliated with WikiLeaks. The EFF's Jennifer Lynch writes:

We received copies of guides from 13 companies, including Facebook, MySpace, AOL, eBay, Ning, Tagged, Craigslist and others, and for some of the companies we received several versions of the guide. We have combed through the data in these guides and, with the Samuelson Clinic's help, organized it into a comprehensive spreadsheet (in .xls and .pdf) that compares how the companies handle requests for user information such as contact information, photos, IP logs, friend networks, buying history, and private messages. And although we didn't receive a copy of Twitter's law enforcement guide, Twitter publishes some relevant information on its site, so we have included that in our spreadsheet for comparison.

The guides we received, which were dated between 2005 and 2010, show that social networking sites have struggled to develop consistent, straightforward policies to govern how and when they will provide private user information to law enforcement agencies. The guides also show how those policies (and how the companies present their policies to law enforcement) have evolved over time.

For example, the 2008 version of Facebook's guide explains in detail the different types of information it collects on its users, but it does not address the legal requirements necessary to obtain this data. In contrast, the 2009 version groups this information into three categories (basic subscriber information, limited content, and remaining content) and describes, under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), the different legal processes required to obtain the various data. However, the 2010 version merely says that the company "will provide records as required by law." Facebook doesn't explain why it changed its language from year to year. While the 2010 guide's language may allow the company to be flexible in responding to requests under a complicated and outdated statute, it does so through a loss of transparency into how it handles these requests.

Social Media and Law Enforcement: Who Gets What Data and When? (eff.org)

Previously: US orders Twitter to hand over account data on Wikileaks and multiple Wikileaks supporters

An afternoon with Girls Drawin Girls at Meltdown Comics 1/22/11

Posted: 20 Jan 2011 05:34 PM PST

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My favorite comic book store is throwing a book launch party for Girls Drawin Girls on Saturday.
Come and meet the talented ladies of GDG and get their newest book and calendar signed!

Girls Drawin Girls was founded in 2006 by Simpsons veteran Melody Severns and storyboard artist Anne Walker as a way to showcase women artists working in the male-dominated industry of animation. Together, they felt it was time for these talented women to demonstrate their creative abilities and artistic interpretations of female sexuality by re-defining the art of the pin-up.

Since its conception, the group has published three volumes of pin-up art and grown to over 90 active members who work professionally in various entertainment industries.

The group provides collaborative projects for its artists (such as book collections, group art shows, and opportunities to participate in charity art events such as the Pasadena Chalk Festival), in addition to promoting each member's individual artistic endeavors through cross-promotion and marketing prints, original artwork and other art-related merchandise.

Temaki Fresh Sushi Handrolls food truck and bar will be set up for all to indulge!

Girls! Girls! Girls! Jan. 22nd, 3pm: An Afternoon with Girls Drawin Girls

How American farmers avoided data charges in the telegraph days

Posted: 20 Jan 2011 05:14 PM PST

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At the New York Farmers Museum blog, a fun post on how rural folks attempted to reduce data charges in 1906 with "telegraph ciphers," shorthand codes to replace longer, commonly typed words and phrases. These, my children, are the LOLs and WTFs of our farming ancestors. (via Submitterator, thanks Paul Coleman)

US Supreme Court in JPL case: right to 'informational privacy' does not exist

Posted: 20 Jan 2011 05:02 PM PST

Pygmy mammoths in ancient Egypt?

Posted: 20 Jan 2011 05:05 PM PST

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Is this small, tusked, apparently furry creature depicted on the wall of an Egyptian tomb really a pygmy mammoth? Palaeozoologist and science blogger Darren Naish explains where this idea came from, what other explanations exist, and why we'll probably never know the truth.

Inspired by the then-new discovery that a dwarfed population* of Woolly mammoths Mammuthus primigenius were still living as recently as 3700 years ago (albeit on Wrangel Island in the Siberian Arctic: Vartanyan et al. (1993), Guthrie (2004)), Rosen (1994) made the tentative suggestion that the elephant shown in Rekhmire's tomb might actually be a dwarf Woolly mammoth. If true, this would have radical implications. It would mean that the ancient Egyptians had a trading link of sorts with far eastern Siberia, and also that mammoths were captured and then transported alive to Africa!

As you may already have guessed, there is [another] possibility: this being that Rekhmire's elephant is neither a Siberian mammoth nor a wrongly-scaled 'symbolic' elephant, but perhaps a depiction of one of the pygmy Mediterranean island-dwelling species.

Most of the dwarf Mediterranean elephants were Pleistocene animals that were long gone by the time of the Pharoahs, but Masseti (2001) noted that a population of dwarfed elephants seem to have lingered on in isolation on the Greek island of Tilos.

Radiocarbon dating of the Tilos dwarf elephants apparently puts some of them as recent as about 4300 years old (+/- 600 years), meaning that they overlapped with the presence of Bronze Age people on the island (Masseti 2001). The remote possibility exists, therefore, that Tilos elephants were captured by ancient Aegeans and then traded between Aegeans, Near Eastern people, and Egyptians - in fact, known trade did occur between these regions during the late Bronze Age at least.

Via Ed Yong

Pygmy mammoths: The new unicorn chaser.

Vantec SATA/IDE to USB 2.0 Adapter

Posted: 20 Jan 2011 04:30 PM PST

IDE to USB 2.0 Adapter Supports 2.5-Inch, 3.5-Inch, 5.jpegThis gadget is a barebones adapter for mildly tech-savvy people to connect a 2.5" or 3.5" hard drive to your computer's USB port. I've been using it for about six months, and have attached a variety of drives (IDE and SATA) to my Mac, to a PC, to a VirtualBox Windows VM, and to a dedicated NAS box running Linux. I've consistently used it without installing dedicated drivers (and for that matter, without reading the installation guide which is provided on CD-ROM). For the same money (about $20) you could get a USB enclosure that keeps your drive better protected, but then you'd be locked into one specific drive size and connector type. The Vantec adapter is flexible across several drive types (2.5" v. 3.5", SATA v. IDE) , and comes with adapters for both the data and power connections. I reach for this gadget when I need temporary access to a drive--usually because I took the drive out of another machine and need to get data off before it dies. Or, because I need to format a drive before it gets installed elsewhere, or just for a fast data transfer. -- Maarten D Vantec SATA/IDE to USB 2.0 Adapter $20 Comment on this at Cool Tools. Or, submit a tool!

Meet Chase No Face, the heroic, seriously disfigured kitty

Posted: 20 Jan 2011 06:46 PM PST

Here is what I know about this kitty (un-blurred photograph after the jump, or click the blurred one to see, some find it disturbing):
DSC_0005mosaic.jpg I was in an accident when I was 4 wks (2005), I became disfigured.

I have a Furry Will to survive & I am completely healed. I require medication during the day to keep my eyes moist. I will always look different but I am in NO PAIN!

I have seen 10 vets and they can attest to that! Im a happy kitty and hope to help other humans feel just as great about themselves and realize that not everyone looks perfect and that is OK.

=^..^=

Chase No Face kitty is on Facebook and the chasenoface blog.

Larger, unblurred photo of the kitty after the jump.

(thanks, Tara McGinley)

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The rise and decline of military super-soldier research

Posted: 20 Jan 2011 04:37 PM PST

Although currently out-of-fashion—thanks, in part, to the realization that it wasn't going to help much in Afghanistan and Iraq—the American military is interested in the idea of using science to create enhanced "super-soldiers". Today, enhancement research goes under the name "optimization" and is less ambitious, but it's definitely not gone.

Another look at soap and science

Posted: 20 Jan 2011 04:27 PM PST

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Earlier today, guest blogger Sean Bonner posted a study that he said supports his decision to live a soap-free lifestyle.

Now, I don't really care too much about the soap/no soap debate one way or the other. Although I have not personally met him, Xeni assures me that Mr. Bonner really is pleasant to be around, without any funky odors to him. And, regardless of his success, I'm not likely to give up things like shampoo and apricot scrub anytime soon, due to my own personal experiences managing my hair and skin.

But, I thought it would be interesting to do a Google Scholar search, and try to get an idea of what the scientific literature, as a whole, says about the value of soap. Or lack thereof. Before you read on, please note that I'm not sure how applicable this information will be to the specific soap/no-soap partisan divide here on BoingBoing. Most of the research I found was either studying handwashing practices among health care workers, or sanitary precautions in parts of the world that have ongoing problems with some nasty communicable diseases that aren't really a big deal in the United States and Europe.

That said, here's what I found:

•So, first off, the study that Sean Bonner cites isn't necessarily a great argument for the superiority of water-alone washing. Only about 40% of healthcare workers comply with handwashing guidelines (yipes, right?), so people are constantly looking for ways to reduce disease carrying. The idea behind this study is that, even if the soap-and-water method works best, it doesn't help much if people don't do it. If they will use a squirty gel thing, even if it it kills fewer germs than the soap, maybe you're still better off in the long run. The goal wasn't to prove what cleaning option was best, but to see how well the non-washing-based options did, with the idea of choosing one to use as a realistic alternative to handwashing. You'd want to set up a different sort of study to test the question of whether people are better off without soap.

This study ran two sets of trials using a bacteria in one and a virus in another, with 14 different cleaning options, including the two controls—water alone, and soap and water. With the virus, after 10 exposures, water alone was killing the most bugs, followed closely (closely enough that you can't really say water alone was absolutely better) by plain soap and water. But with the bacteria, the situation was different. After 10 exposures, water and soap-and-water were again running neck and neck, but they were both at the bottom of the pack. Soap with 2% chlorhexidine gluconate won the day.

Basically, this one study doesn't tell us much about soap vs. no soap.

• I didn't find any studies that directly compared whether washing with soap or washing without soap killed more germs. Doesn't mean they aren't out there. This was kind of a cursory scan. But it's safe to say that this question isn't of the utmost importance to most public health researchers.

• One of the reasons healthcare workers don't wash their hands as often as they should is because of soap-induced irritation of the skin. There are lots of studies addressing this problem. But, again, healthcare workers are outliers. If you aren't a healthcare worker, and you're washing your hands as often as they are—often enough to get serious skin irritation—you might want to try less frequent washing before shifting toward giving up soap entirely.

• A systematic review of the literature on handwashing and diarrhoeal disease (meaning that the researchers reviewed and compiled data from every study done in a specific way, on this specific topic) found that "washing hands with soap can reduce the risk of diarrhoeal diseases by 42-47% and interventions to promote handwashing might save a million lives." Again, bear in mind, this is talking about developing countries, and it doesn't tell you whether washing without soap would have done better. But it does seem like there is some value to soap.

• I saw a study called "Soap May Seriously Damage Your Health", and thought I'd hit a jackpot. Turns out, it's actually about soap operas. Apparently, there's a correlation between the popularity of a specific suicide method, and whether a TV character has used that method to kill themselves recently.

• Not washing your hands after using the bathroom, and not washing dishes and utensils thoroughly, has been associated with an increased risk of diarrhea among American wilderness hikers. One study specifically called out the use of soap as a protective behavior. Apparently, previous research has shown that you need to use some kind of rubbing agent (soap, ash, or dirt, in the case of campers and backpackers) if you want to actually get fecal matter and the contaminants it carries off of your skin. Which, you know, you do.

Bottom line: I can't conclusively say whether soap is better than no soap. And it seems like the no-soap option is significantly better than no washing at all. But there is, at least, some research out there suggesting that soap is better—in certain situations—at preventing diarrhea.

Deploying the British Granny Cloud to tutor poor Indian classrooms over Skype

Posted: 20 Jan 2011 01:34 AM PST

This BBC video-clip describes the latest ingenious project from Sugata Mitra, an Indian-born professor at Newcastle University. You'll most likely know Mitra from his Hole in the Wall computers set into the walls of buildings in India's poorest slums. Mitra's new project uses the "UK Granny Cloud" -- a large group of British grannies who've agreed to volunteer an hour a week to tutor Indian classrooms over Skype video conferences -- to supplement education in Indian schools where there is a shortage of teachers.

Gateshead Granny Cloud (Thanks, Avisolo, via Submitterator!)

 


Fake New York Times article is the most perfect fake New York Times article ever

Posted: 20 Jan 2011 02:18 PM PST

Google: Larry Page to replace Eric Schmidt as CEO

Posted: 20 Jan 2011 02:25 PM PST

During a fourth quarter earnings announcement today, Google released the news that co-founder Larry Page will replace Eric Schmidt as CEO of the company. Schmidt will become Chairman. VentureBeat, New York Times, Ars Technica, CNN.

Alex Roman's astonishingly hyper-real CGI animation

Posted: 20 Jan 2011 02:22 PM PST

Animator Alex Roman's beautiful work has been discussed here in the past. He also made a great "making of" video of his acclaimed The Third and The Seventh. Late last year, he posted this lovely montage of unbelievably believable CGI, created for kitchen countertop company Silestone. Be sure to watch it in HD for maximum amazement.

Above Everything Else (Video link).

Two free garage punk songs

Posted: 20 Jan 2011 12:49 PM PST

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As a longtime Cramps aficionado, I enjoyed this song by former Cramps member Congo Powers. I liked "Dream On (Little Dreamer)" by Hunx & His Punx even more (never heard of 'em, but here's a funny video of another song of theirs).
The Scion A/V Garage 7" series proudly presents two new tracks, one from a legend and one from an upstart. Once the president of The Ramones Fan Club and later a member of legendary bands The Gun Club, The Cramps and Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Kid Congo Powers has stayed a champion of the garage rock scene for three decades. Now he releases "Floor Length Hair" with his group Kid Congo Powers & The Pink Monkey Birds, a dirty-suited glam rocker with scuzzy guitar licks and shoo-bopped glances to the past. The B-side is a little ditty from Hunx & His Punx, the newish band from Seth Bogart that has quickly expanded from its Bay Area base to national attention. "Dream On (Little Dreamer)" is a sassy tune supplemented by a trio of female background singers and bubble gum-popping backbeat.
Download them both as nonDRM'd MP3s. (Note, I didn't realize that this music was sponsored by Scion until I looked into it. Scion did not pay to have this item posted on Boing Boing. It is not an ad. I just like these songs.)

Can Jared Loughner help us get beyond good and evil?

Posted: 20 Jan 2011 01:06 PM PST

ongchewpeng-devil-jesus.jpg Sarah Palin was on Sean Hannity's Fox show this week, and between breaths joined the many commenters who've labeled the Tucson shootings suspect with the "E" word: she mused on "...how, um, evil a person would have to be to kill an innocent." Since prime suspect Jared Loughner cited Nietzsche's Will To Power as a favorite, this seems like a good moment to bring up the problems with "good vs. evil" ideology. It has a peculiar geek resonance because of the ideology's heavy use in comic books and roleplaying: superheroes, arch-villains, chaotic good, lawful evil, and what-not. It's also infused in our political discourse, with someone like Palin or Obama being good or evil depending on your point of view.

Nietzsche is frequently a fave of angry young men who might qualify as what Pesco called confident dumb people. Nietzsche works well for the modern kook with web-induced attention deficits: The fourth chapter of Beyond Good and Evil is a series of 122 Twitter-length aphorisms, and his work is snarky and occasionally humorous. Nietzsche wrote Beyond Good and Evil to criticize earlier philosophers who made assumptions about morality based on pre-Christian and Christian beliefs about "evil." Below I discuss why we need to steal Nietzsche back from these people, and I look at a couple of other writers who have examined what gets called "evil" and have attempted to explain it in more nuanced and rational terms.

(Image: Devil vs Jesus (2008) by ongchewpeng at Deviant Art. Print available. Used with permission.)

For a little background, Matt Feeney posted a terrific piece in Slate last week about the Angry Nerds who embrace a version of Nietzsche:

If your social world fails to appreciate your singularity and tells you that you're a loser, reading Nietzsche can steel you in your secret conviction that, no, I'm a genius, or at least very special, and everyone else is the loser. Like you, Nietzsche was misunderstood in his day, ignored or derided by other scholars. Like you, Nietzsche seems to find everything around him lame, either stodgy and moralistic or sick with democratic vulgarity.

Feeney's piece is worth reading in its entirety, as is Beyond Good and Evil. It's a lot to sum up in a blog post, but Nietzsche basically says there are two types of moral systems: master-morality and slave-morality. His best summary is section 260. In master-morality, the ruling class makes the rules and thus considers itself noble, while in slave morality, there is a suspicion of those in power and in what they consider "good." So in slave morality:

Here is the seat of the origin of the famous antithesis "good" and "evil":--power and dangerousness are assumed to reside in the evil, a certain dreadfulness, subtlety, and strength, which do not admit of being despised. According to slave-morality, therefore, the "evil" man arouses fear; according to master-morality, it is precisely the "good" man who arouses fear and seeks to arouse it, while the bad man is regarded as the despicable being.

In other words, it's all a big misunderstanding based on your point of view, kind of like how you might see Palin as evil when your neighbor sees her as good. As Feeney points out, Nietzsche has been distilled into a nihilist in popular culture, which isn't accurate or fair. His aphoristic style means that quips like "God is dead" get stripped of meaning and turned into soundbites. We need to reclaim Neitzsche from angry nerds and deists who distort his writings.

In the case of someone charged with serious crimes like Loughner, there is often a meeting of the minds on the E word. People want to create a simple label to separate someone like him from the rest of us. We say he is sick, or crazy, or evil. Two books on criminals made me rethink my use of those terms: Eichmann in Jerusalem and Speaking with the Devil.

Pretty much everybody is in agreement that Adolf Eichmann or Jeffrey Dahmer were not great guys, so Hannah Arendt and Carl Goldberg use them as jumping-off points for larger discussions. Arendt of course summed up Eichmann's action with the phrase "the banality of evil" (also a meaning-stripped soundbite now). After sitting through his trial and execution, she observed that he seemed to do everything by rote, even his last words. He was able to do the unthinkable because he was "unthinking." He didn't seem to have a fanatical hatred of Jews, he was just following orders. What's interesting in relation to mass murders like the Tucson incident is that people can rationalize their way into an internally consistent logic that normalizes their thoughts and actions. I recommend reading Arendt, because she also has a great deal to say about how incidents and events get seized upon by people interested primarily in facts, and therefore try to distort the facts, and intellectuals, who have little interest in the facts and use them as a springboard for ideas. We've seen a lot of both since Tucson.

Goldberg takes a much more behavioral approach to the question. He recommends avoiding terms like "evil" and using the term "malevolence" instead. Using Dahmer and other extreme cases as examples, he lays out a case that most criminals engage in what he calls experimental malevolence, where their bad behavior escalates over time. It's clear that in the case of Dahmer that he had begun exhibiting signs of trouble in early life, including aspects of the Macdonald triad and a later pattern of murders that increased in frequency and brazenness. Looking at Jared Loughner's actions prior to his arrest, he had been ramping up his troubling behavior with a number of incidents that raised red flags with observers. Various opportunities to intervene and get Loughner some help did not materialize.

What I find most interesting about people who justify violent actions is the production of a script. They have a story they tell themselves about how the world works, a story that explains why they need to do what they plan to do, and often a fantasy about how their actions will play out. One of the things they teach you in assault prevention classes is to try to get someone off their script if you are being attacked. Many instructors suggest saying or doing something unexpected, to snap them out of what's running through their heads as they commit the attack. All people produce a script about who they are and why they do what they do. That process only becomes a problem when that script lacks empathy, the ability to comprehend and embrace the thoughts and feelings of others.

When Giffords gave an apparently unacceptable response to Loughner's obtuse question about language not being real, she seems to have caused him some cognitive dissonance. He apparently expected her to recognize his intellectual superiority, and when she didn't, he became fixated on what he saw as a slight that threw his self-assessment into question.

It's entirely possible to explain these behaviors without resorting to some facile descriptor like "sick" or "evil." Loughner's videos and writings suggest he held a set of beliefs that were delusional, about himself and the world and how it works. Everyone, myself included, probably has a delusion or two in their belief system. Once in a while they combine with other factors in a person to create a lethal combination: anger, incompetence, rejection, isolation, lack of empathy, drug-induced hallucinations, participation in economies of violence, unthinking behavior, production of a flawed script. That's not evil. It's simply a tragic nexus of human flaws that can culminate in what is too easily dismissed as evil.

Further reading:

Beyond Good and Evil (Project Gutenberg translation)

Beyond Good and Evil



Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin Classics)

Speaking with the Devil: Exploring Senseless Acts of Evil

Leather guitar bag and backpack

Posted: 20 Jan 2011 06:07 PM PST

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 Ryan Barr of Whipping Post Leather makes these gorgeous guitar case bag backpacks. "I always wanted to create a bag for my guitar that matched its character," he writes. "Something that could age with time and maintain its classic appeal like any well made instrument. The more it got used and abused the better it became. Kind of like my guitar." They're very steep, but if I were a guitarist, I think I might sell my soul to the devil for one of these. In the meantime, I'll just have to wait for the keytar edition.

Best mafiosi nicknames from today's historic bust

Posted: 20 Jan 2011 12:06 PM PST

The Village Voice has combed through the arrest reports for the 100+ alleged mafiosi taken into custody by the FBI today and assembled a list of the 20 best AKAs used by the aforesaid legitimate businessmen:
8. ANTHONY DURSO, also known as "Baby Fat Larry" and "BFL"
7. GIUSEPPE DESTEFANO, also known as "Pooch"
6. JOHN AZZARELLI, also known as "Johnny Cash"
5. ANDREW RUSSO, also known as "Mush"
4. VINCENT FEBBRARO, also known as "Jimmy Gooch"
3. BENJAMIN CASTELLAZZO, also known as "Benji," "The Claw" and "the Fang"
2. ANTHONY LICATA, also known as "Cheeks," "Anthony Firehawk," "Anthony Nighthawk," "Nighthawk" and "Firehawk"
1. JOHN HARTMANN, also known as "Lumpy," "Fatty" and "Fats"
The 20 Best Nicknames in the Big Mafia Bust
 


What makes a good sideshow "talker"

Posted: 20 Jan 2011 11:54 AM PST



Ward Hall is a sideshow legend -- magician, fire-eater, sword swallower, and famed "talker" responsible for luring carny patrons into the ten-in-one. Sixty years after he first took the midway stage, here's Hall talking about what makes a good talker. After the jump, Mr. Hall on "building the tip," gathering a curious crowd. Step right up!



Tsovet All-Black Watch

Posted: 20 Jan 2011 10:48 AM PST

Twin Peaks 20th Anniversary Art Exhibition

Posted: 20 Jan 2011 11:57 AM PST

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A Twin Peaks 20th Anniversary Art Exhibition is in the works for a February 12-13 run at Clifton's Brookdale in Los Angeles. An astounding array of artists like Tim Biskup, Chris Mars, Stella Im Hultberg, Glenn Barr, Ryan Heshka, and Jessica Joslin will show pieces inspired by David Lynch's classic show. I hope to showcase more of the work from the exhibition here at BB in the future, but in the meantime please gaze in awe at Joslin's owl sculpture made for the event. Exquisite. "In The Trees: TWIN PEAKS 20th Anniversary Art Exhibition" (Thanks, Stacey Ransom!)

Ruleaks.net publishes first leak, gets DDoSed

Posted: 20 Jan 2011 01:35 PM PST

Via the Boing Boing Submitterator, BB reader Yenisei says,
Ruleaks.net, a website that publishes Russian translations of Wikileaks cables, ran its first own leak on January 18: pics of Putin's alleged $1bn palace on the Black Sea shore. In a few hours a heavy DdoS attack was launched against them and is still raging (also rospil.info, see link above) Coincidentally, Assange, a possible Nobel Peace nominee has just been invited to Russia by Wikileaks' (creepy) local representative Israel Shamir.


Relieving test anxiety by writing down worries

Posted: 20 Jan 2011 11:34 AM PST

A new study suggests that students who write down their anxieties a few minutes before taking an exam are much less likely to choke on the test. University of Chicago psychologists Gerardo Ramirez and Sian Beilock ran one study for two years at a high school. Students who spent ten minutes writing about feelings and worries about the test scored six percent higher than those who wrote about non-"expressive" topics. This reminds me of "exposure therapy" for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, PTSD, and phobias in which safe exposure to the feared object or situation gradually desensitizes you to it. The researchers published their results in the current issue of the journal Science. From the Science podcast:
Images A05 Es 1S Replace-Test-Anxiety-Confidence-200X200 Beilock: There's work in clinical psychology showing that getting clinically depressed individuals to journal or write about emotional or traumatic experiences in their lives can help decrease rumination. And we have a lot of work in our lab showing that students worry in testing situations, and this is something that can really derail their ability to attend to and remember information they need for the test. So, we hypothesized that perhaps having students write about their thoughts and feelings about an upcoming test before they took the exam might, in a sense, allow them to deal with some of these worries, such that when they were in the actual exam situation they were less likely to pop up.
Science Magazine podcast January 14, 2011 (MP3)

"Writing About Testing Worries Boosts Exam Performance in the Classroom" (Science)

The Meal that Ended My Career as a Restaurant Critic

Posted: 20 Jan 2011 09:42 AM PST

Boing Boing pal Steve Silberman wrote a fun piece on his "last supper" as a food critic for a glossy magazine in San Francisco in the 1980s. "Being a critic in one of the great restaurant cities on Earth felt like getting paid to have sex with someone you love," he explains, as he describes the meal that ended his run 25 years ago. The prose is as delicious as the meal must have been:
grinod.jpg

I returned just as the chirpy waiter brought the coup de grâce, which looked like evidence from a crime scene: a dish of angry red flesh with a knob of pale bone jutting out of it. This, apparently, was my "grilled veal chop with wild forest mushrooms."

I had ordered the chop medium-rare, but it arrived bleu, as the French say; ultra-rare, chilly in the center (calf sashimi, if you will), with crimson blood pooling on top, drowning the chanterelles, porcini, Hen O' The Woods or whatever they were in the unmistakable taste of pennies: copper-laden hemoglobin. This was like veal à la Dexter.

Having only recently re-embraced meat-eating, it was as if all the gluttonous karma of the West took its revenge on a lapsed vegetarian in a single meal. I feared that if I tried to choke down all that raw meat, I'd end up strangling -- spewing bloody chunks of calf, clots of cream, and skeins of raw fettucine across the starched tablecloth as a horrified busboy tried to administer the Heimlich maneuver.

Enough! Check, please.

The Meal that Ended My Career as a Restaurant Critic (plos.org)

Mark Dery on America's toy gun culture

Posted: 20 Jan 2011 09:42 AM PST


Responding to the Jared Lee Loughner tragic shooting spree in Tucson, Mark Dery puts America's toy gun culture in his crosshairs. The title of the essay says it all, "Gun Play: An American Tragedy, in Three Acts." Above and referenced by Dery is Negativland's "Guns," a cut-up of 60s toy gun commercials. From Dery's essay at Thought Catalog:
Wp-Content Uploads 2011 01 Daisy-Bb-Gun-Ad Growing up in '60s America meant reliving the tragedy of the Native-American genocide as farce while shoveling in your Swanson Salisbury Steak TV dinner: Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Death Valley Days, The Rifleman, The Virginian, The Big Valley, Branded, Have Gun–Will Travel, The High Chaparral, Rawhide, Wagon Train–the list of prime-time westerns seems endless, in hindsight. These and dozens of shows popped out of the same mold schooled Americans in the lesson that there's no problem so complex it can't be resolved with violence. (A lesson taken to heart by cheerleaders for American exceptionalism and architects of imaginary empire like Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and William Kristol, who wrote in their manifesto for a "new American century" that the United States must assume its rightful "constabulary" role in global affairs, capable of outgunning the best-armed posse in town.) PTSD'd by race riots and Vietnam war protests, the America of the '60s rejuvenated its dream of itself by returning nightly to a Disneyfied version of its frontier youth.

For boys–even boys like this author, whose liberal-ish parents fulminated against the soul-scarring effects of "violent toys"–growing up in that America meant dreaming of guns. Cap guns, whose sweetly acrid smell is a grace note in memories of my boyhood summers. The impressively realistic toy Peacemaker in the Sears Roebuck catalog, with the tie that lashed its holster to your thigh for gunslinger cool and those little pellets that made smoke trail convincingly from the gun's barrel when you fired it. The Johnny Seven One-Man Army, a super-gun whose sheer overkill–it rolled a grenade launcher, anti-tank rocket, anti-bunker missile, rifle, machine gun, and automatic pistol into one mega-weapon–launched a million power fantasies, making it the best-selling boys' toy of 1964. Daisy BB rifles, like the one my friend came within a whisker of blinding his kid brother with one languid, directionless afternoon when his parents weren't home  (why weren't the parents ever home, in '60s Southern California?). And of course real guns, like the .22 my older buddies, longhaired brothers who embodied cool itself, used to obliterate beer cans. Later, when their father died by his own hand, I thought of the locked gun case in their family room, a shrine to quiet menace, and of cans lined up for execution in the summer sun, jumping to life at the instant of impact.

"Gun Play: An American Tragedy, in Three Acts"

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