The Latest from Boing Boing

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• Strange tunnels of Austro-Germany
• This is a seventy-five dollar felt ice cream sandwich
• Own a piece of the Balloon Boy saucer
• BB gets WordPress, Disqus, new machines
• Sexism flamewars explained in webcomic form
• Where music and foodie culture meet
• Isaiah Seret on his Jonestown video for Cults
• Dwarf Fortress: “perhaps the most complex video game ever made”
• Friday Freak-Out: The 5th Dimension’s “Up, Up and Away” (1967)
• Oslo bombing shocks Norway
• Lowercase theories, uppercase Theories, and the myth of global cooling
• Prison chase Benny Hillified
• Parody ads tell the horrible truth about AT&T&T
• Subterranean sewer mutant caught on CCTV
• Young Rewired State: learn to hack government data workshop for kids
• Auditions for a black cat, 1961
• New Yorkers freestyle rap in Union Square
• Sesame Street/Beastie Boys mashup
• Deviled Tongue: organ meat ads of yesteryear
• Colorful Dairy Queen ad, 1960

Strange tunnels of Austro-Germany Posted: 24 Jul 2011 10:36 PM PDT German and Austrian archaeologists are taking notice of an extensive network of tunnels that riddle central Europe. These tunnels — thought to date from the 10th to 13th century — have fanciful names like “goblin hole” and their exact historical function is somewhat mysterious. A group of female healers, noting the exit looks “like a vagina,” re-enacted their births using Austrian “Schlupf” tunnels. Others attribute them to the druids, or Christian rituals, or believe they were used to hide from bandits in the lawless “medieval clearing period.” The tour begins in the taproom and proceeds down a stone stairway into the cider cellar, where there is a trap door that opens into a gaping hole. “We don’t let people with heart conditions do the tour,” Wösner says in his thick Austrian accent. He keeps a large sling on hand for emergencies, so that if anyone faints he can pull them out of the narrow tunnel. The vaults could not have served a practical purpose, as dwellings or to store food, for example, if only because the tunnels are so inconveniently narrow in places. Besides, some fill up with water in the winter. Also, the lack of evidence of feces indicates that they were not used to house livestock. There is not a single written record of the construction of an Erdstall dating from the medieval period. “The tunnels were completely hushed up,” says Ahlborn. Archeologists have also been surprised to find that the tunnels are almost completely empty and appear to be swept clean, as if they were abodes for the spirits. One gallery contained an iron plowshare, while heavy millstones were found in three others. Virtually nothing else has turned up in the vaults. Until recently, the secret caves were explored only by amateur archeologists. The pioneer of Erdstall exploration, Lambert Karner (1841 to 1909), was a priest. According to his records, he crawled through 400 vaults, lit only by flickering candlelight, with “strange winding passages” through which “one can often only force oneself like a worm.” Experts Baffled by Mysterious Underground Chambers (via BLDGBlog) (Image: Ben Behnke / DER SPIEGEL)

This is a seventy-five dollar felt ice cream sandwich Posted: 24 Jul 2011 05:00 AM PDT It has a face and a bite taken out of it. It is also apparently crying and wearing rouge. A felt ice cream sandwich with a bite taken out of it and a face with little buck teeth that is crying and wearing rouge on Etsy for $75 – Thanks Sam!

Own a piece of the Balloon Boy saucer Posted: 24 Jul 2011 04:58 AM PDT Remember the balloon boy hoax of 2009? Richard and Mayumi Heene claimed their 6-year-old son had floated away in the saucer-shaped contraption only to later be revealed hoaxsters trying to land a reality TV show. Soon, you’ll be able to own a piece of the prank. Michael Fruitman of Mike’s Stadium Sportcscards in Denver, Colorado paid Heene’s attorney $2500 for the saucer at auction. He’s putting it on display for a bit before chopping it up for “souvenirs.” “Balloon Boy Saucer To Go On Display In Colo. Store“

BB gets WordPress, Disqus, new machines Posted: 24 Jul 2011 03:05 AM PDT Good news, everybody! We’ve just upgraded our site software, installed new hardware, and moved our antiquated comment system to Disqus, replete with modern features. The site itself is otherwise unchanged; the grueling task of making everything look and work the same on a completely new platform fell to our lead developer Dean Putney and sysadmin Ken Snider. Both have worked tirelessly for weeks, and deserve many thanks. Thanks, guys! Your current comment login will work on the new system, but you’ll need to reset your password. Fire any bug reports to bugs@boingboing.net and we will stamp on them ASAP. Also, the Submitterator will be in drydock for its own upgrades for a short while; in the meantime, submit via the private form.

Sexism flamewars explained in webcomic form Posted: 24 Jul 2011 01:32 AM PDT Gabby from the Gabby’s Playhouse webcomic produced this 2010 installment that neatly summarizes every discussion about gender on the net; click through below for the whole thing. In which we betray our gender (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Where music and foodie culture meet Posted: 21 Jul 2011 09:52 PM PDT Covers is an underground dinner club in San Francisco where — now stay with me here — “covers” of famous chefs’ signature dishes are paired with thematically-appropriate cover songs. Sponsored by Bay Area’s Noise Pop music festival, Covers is only one of many recent hipster foodie efforts to connect fine dining with fine tunes. The Bay Citizen gives us a taste: “The beef represents Dylan’s leathery exterior â€" the man is 70, after all â€" and the seaweed and soy provide heavy notes that pair well with his raspy voice,” said (Covers founder Blair) Warsham, whose events aim to match wide-ranging musical selections with complementary dinner entrees… While restaurants have long had musical accompaniments, and concerts have long had food concessions, the current endeavors exhibit a new level of cross-pollination between music and food obsessives. Musicians like M. Ward, co-author of a blog dedicated to crème brûlée, and members of the local band Vetiver have given lengthy interviews about their food interests. Summer festivals like Outside Lands, taking place in August at Golden Gate Park, advertise extensive creative food offerings, while the San Francisco Street Food Festival, also in August, boasts a large roster of hip-hop DJs and live bands… “Obviously, you’ve got the total punk aesthetic of the working kitchen, with the cursing, staying up until 4 a.m., the drugs and everything,” said Dawson Ludwig, marketing director for Noise Pop. “But it’s more than that. Good music and good food are total indulgence, both providing fulfilling sensual experiences.” “Mixtapes for Meals: The New World of Music Pairings“ “What Sounds like Dessert? Local Chefs and Musicians Recommend Pairings“

Isaiah Seret on his Jonestown video for Cults Posted: 21 Jul 2011 09:35 PM PDT Last week, we premiered the provocative and fantastic new video for the song “Go Outside” by Cults. Directed by Isaiah Seret, the video is made from archival footage of Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple before the mass suicide of more than 900 people in Guyana. Over at Turnstyle, Noah Nelson interviews Seret about the project: “When the idea [for the video] came about,” Seret tells me, “it came about in a spontaneous moment. And I really feel that afterwards I had to check it: Wait is this being exploitive? What is this going to be? That process of checking back in actually helped me shape the story. “It became this sentiment that I want to put the band in this historic story, to take the audience back into that historical experience. So when I was building the band into it, at first I had this thought: ‘Oh I should do a narrative, like a sub-narrative of the band’s story. They should be in conflict whether to leave Jonestown because you read accounts and this was going on with a lot of people.’ “But then when I got all those videos from Jonestown and I was studying the footage I realized there would never be a moment of sort of… basically everyone was so brainwashed when the camera was on. To put on the positive face and present Jonestown in a positive light to the world that the camera would never have captured a moment of uncertainty, conflict, any of those things. It’s just not in the records. Until the very end when everything is falling apart in the NBC clips.” “Go Outside” Director Isaiah Seret on the Specter of Jonestown   Go Outside, by Cults – Boing Boing

Dwarf Fortress: “perhaps the most complex video game ever made” Posted: 21 Jul 2011 09:26 PM PDT In the July 24, 2011 edition of the New York Times Magazine, Jonah Weiner profiled Tarn and Zach Adams, the brothers who created the game Dwarf Fortress, which is kind of like a much geekier, vastly more complex version of Minecraft (in fact, the creator of Minecraft is a fan of Dwarf Fortress). Weiner says, “Dwarf Fortress is, from the perspective of game play, perhaps the most complex video game ever made.” It’s rendered with extended ASCII characters, like a roguelike. Though its medieval milieu of besieged castles and mutant enemies may be familiar, Dwarf Fortress appeals mainly to a substratum of hard-core gamers. The game’s unofficial slogan, recited on message boards, is “Losing is fun!” Dwarf Fortress’s unique difficulty begins with its most striking feature: The way it looks. In an industry obsessed with pushing the frontiers of visual awe, Dwarf Fortress is a defiant throwback, its interface a dense tapestry of letters, numbers and crude glyphs you might have seen in a computer game around 1980. A normal person looks at and sees gibberish, but the Dwarf Fortress initiate sees a tense tableau: a dog leashed to a tree, about to be mauled by a goblin. … The brothers [Tarn and Zach Adams, creators of Dwarf Fortress] themselves are often startled by what their game spits out. “We didn’t know that carp were going to eat dwarves,” Zach says. “But we’d written them as carnivorous and roughly the same size as dwarves, so that just happened, and it was great.” The article is a fascinating profile of obsession. Rob and I are going to interview Jonah about his article in the upcoming edition of Gweek, Boing Boing’s podcast about games, science fiction, comic books, and other geek media. The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress

Friday Freak-Out: The 5th Dimension’s “Up, Up and Away” (1967) Posted: 21 Jul 2011 09:14 PM PDT [video link] Friday Freak-Out: The 5th Dimension perform “Up, Up and Away” from their 1967 debut album of the same name, also available on the “Essential 5th Dimension” compilation.   Friday Freak-Out: The Rolling Stones' "2000 Light Years From Home … Friday Freak-Out: Electric Lucifer – Boing Boing Friday Freak-Out: Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man" (1970) – Boing Boing Friday Freak-Out: Brothers Johnson play "Strawberry Letter #23 … Friday Freak-Out: Arthur Brown's "Nightmare" – Boing Boing Friday Freak-Out: Ready, Steady, Go psych/mod parody from … Friday Freak-Out: The Electric Prunes' "I Had Too Much To Dream … Friday Freak-Out: It's A Beautiful Day's "White Bird" (1971 …

Oslo bombing shocks Norway Posted: 21 Jul 2011 09:02 PM PDT The latest on the Oslo bombing, which has claimed a number of lives and injured many more, and shootings at a nearby youth camp where the prime minister was thought to be in attendance. [BBC]

Lowercase theories, uppercase Theories, and the myth of global cooling Posted: 21 Jul 2011 09:00 PM PDT “Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.” Men In Black‘s Agent Kay isn’t exactly a great public philosopher, but I think he does do a good job of summing up the reason why some people don’t like the idea of applying the science of climate change to the realm of political policy. Science changes, after all. Who’s to say that 100 years from now we won’t find the results of 21st century climate modeling as ridiculous as a map of a flat Earth? This argument isn’t totally off-base. Scientific theories are frequently overturned by new evidence. But, just as often, the new evidence changes one part of a theory, while leaving the big picture intact. That’s because scientists use the same word–”theory”–to describe two very distinct classes of ideas. Gravity is a theory. But so is the existence of Gliese 581g–a wobble in the light given off by a distant star which may, or may not, turn out to be a planet. One of these things is not like the other. Of the two, new evidence is much more likely to disprove the existence of Gliese 581g. Scientists still study what gravity is and how it works. It’s a living theory, not a cold, unchanging edifice. In fact, there’s a lot of weird, little anomalies that tell us we don’t have this gravity thing totally figured out just yet. But as new evidence comes in, it tends to refine the details, not demolish everything we thought we knew. Einstein revolutionized the theory of gravity, but he didn’t make apples start to fall up. With that in mind, I want to tell you a story. There are a lot of climate myths out there—misconstrued facts and frank deceptions used to discredit good climate science. But one of those myths is particularly interesting to me, because it’s a very good example of the difference between little lowercase “theories” and uppercase “Theories”. The myth of global cooling is the kind of thing that happens when people get the two mixed up. Let’s start at the beginning, with a quick summary of the myth itself. According to the standard version of this story, everybody in the 1970s thought that the Earth was actually getting colder, and that we were in for a new Ice Age. Animals like armadillos were migrating southward, fleeing the encroaching cold. The Arctic ice pack was unexpectedly thick. Scientists warned of massive crop failures, and wrung their hands over the fate of the millions who would die in our frozen future. They urged governments to take action, either by stockpiling food, or with more disturbingly drastic measures–such as intentionally melting the Polar ice caps. All the same people who, today, tell us that the Earth is heating up were, once upon a time, singing a very different tune. The implicit message about scientists that people get from this story: You just can’t trust ‘em. It would be nice if the myth of global cooling were a fringe belief. But it’s not. Influential, big-name talkers push the story. Lots of average people listen to them. The author Michael Crichton worked it into his last novel. Senator James Inhofe told the tale in Congress. Rush Limbaugh believes in the myth. So does George Will. And, consequently, so does at least one of my uncles. But they’re all wrong. In reality, global cooling was never a broadly accepted Theory. It’s reasonable to assume that a good chunk of Americans never heard about it at all. And global cooling never had the support of most climate scientists, let alone scientists in other disciplines, like biology and public health, which are linked to climate change in many important ways today. We know all of this thanks to the work of two scientists, Thomas Peterson and William Connolly, and a journalist, John Fleck. In 2008, they published a detailed history of this myth in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. So that’s another thing that makes the myth of global cooling stand out from the pack. Unlike a lot of myths, the path from fact to fiction is very well-documented. A Myth is Born The truth is, for a short period in the mid-1970s, the idea of global cooling was somewhat trendy–as measured in newspaper and magazine stories, but not scientific evidence. In 1975, both Newsweek and Time ran articles about the coming Ice Age. The next year, National Geographic published a more detailed story about climate science, in general. It touched on global cooling as one of several possibilities for the future of climate. But all of these stories were based on the same small handful of peer-reviewed papers. In fact, Peterson, Connolley, and Fleck found that, between 1965 and 1979, only 7 peer-reviewed papers were published supporting the idea of global cooling. (In contrast, during that same time period, 44 published peer-reviewed papers found that the Earth was getting warmer. And 20 were neutral on the subject.) All those papers were the work of scientists who were, for the most part, trying to understand the basics of how the climate system worked, not expanding and refining an already accepted big idea. These were, in other words, lowercase “theories”. Cause and Effect The issue was inputs. These are the variable factors–like levels of greenhouse gases, or particles of dust and soot in the atmosphere–that can impact how the natural processes of the climate system play out. In the 1970s, scientists didn’t understand variable inputs very well. They knew, based on ice cores and tree rings, that the Earth was probably coming due for a cold snap. In fact, the Northern Hemisphere had been cooler than average between 1940 and 1970. And they knew that particulate matter–the smoke of volcanoes, the soot of factories, the obvious air pollution–could reflect light from the sun and have a cooling effect. But they also knew about the greenhouse effect. This is the almost 200-year-old idea at the heart of the Theory of climate change. For a quick refresher, the greenhouse effect describes the cycle of heat transfer that keeps our planet from becoming a frigid ball of dirt, no more habitable than Mars. First, heat from the Sun passes through our atmosphere. Some is absorbed by the ground and oceans, and some of that heat gets reflected back towards space. But the gasses in our atmosphere don’t let all that reflected heat out. Instead, atmospheric gasses bounce most of the heat back down again. It’s kind of like turning on a laser pointer in a hall of mirrors. Because of the greenhouse effect, Earth is able to trap enough heat to sustain life-as-we-know-it. We’ve known about this effect since 1824. Climate change is really just an exaggeration of the greenhouse effect. Carbon dioxide is better than a lot of other gasses at bouncing heat back down to Earth. The more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the more heat gets trapped, and the higher our global average temperature rises. We’ve known about the way rising carbon dioxide levels enhance the greenhouse effect since 1896. By the 1970s, climate scientists knew cars, power plants, and other aspects of modern energy use were releasing unprecedented amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The question everybody was trying to answer: Which input was more powerful? In other words, would particulate matter beef up a natural cooling trend to the point that the greenhouse effect was merely a pleasant distraction? Or, would the impact of carbon dioxide and its greenhouse gas cousins outpace both natural and anthropogenic cooling, and take us to a warmer world? The Way It’s Supposed To Work In the 1970s, nobody really had a solid answer to those questions. In a given year, one scientist would publish a paper that supported cooling, while another two or three would publish results that favored warming. And journalists would report on all those papers. In 1975, the same year that Newsweek and Time warned of a coming Ice Age, Peterson, Connolley, and Fleck found that The New York Times actually ran two climate science stories. The first was titled “Scientists Ask Why World Climate is Changing; Major Cooling May be Ahead.” The second: “Warming Trend Seen in Climate; Two Articles Counter View that Cold Period is Due.” If you saw both Times stories, you’d have a pretty good idea that scientists weren’t totally in agreement on this issue. But not all journalists provided that kind of context. Every peer-reviewed climate science paper was like a part of a mountain range. The only way to make sense of the topography was to zoom out, and look at the whole thing. But, some journalists had a tendency to report on each new study that came out as though it were an isolated hill of fact in the middle of an empty plain. One group actually did review the big picture of climate science in 1975. That was the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. The NAS is sort of like a cross between a professional organization and a medieval court adviser. Not all the scientists in the United States are members. Instead, current members elect new ones, based on the quality, importance, and influence of their research. Think of it as the Science Hall of Fame. Getting in is a big deal. But it’s more than just symbolic. That’s because the NAS plays a role in American politics. Most politicians aren’t trained scientists. Even if they are, they can’t be expected to be experts on everything. So, instead, when politicians need to know what’s going on in a particular field of science, they turn to the actual experts at the NAS. Every year, the Academy puts together many reports summarizing the state of scientific research on a wide array of topics and offers their advice about what politicians should do with that information. The 1975 NAS report on climate science reflects the confusion that surrounded the field at that time. In fact, the introduction flat out says, “…we do not have a good quantitative understanding of our climate machine and what determines its course. Without the fundamental understanding, it does not seem possible to predict climate…” There wasn’t anything close to a scientific consensus on climate in 1975. But that was about to change rapidly. Over the next five years, research methods improved, more papers were published, and all those little theories began to add up to a single big Theory–the Earth was getting hotter. By 1979, it was already clear that the effect of greenhouse gases had a bigger impact than the effect of dust particles. When the NAS came back to the subject of climate science that year, the state of research had changed enough that their summary was now very different. Instead of uncertainty, the 1979 NAS report emphasized a message that was, basically, the same as what we still hear today: The Earth is warming, and that fact should not be ignored. The popular press liked the story of global cooling. But their interest in that story didn’t reflect what scientists were actually thinking. There was no flip-flop of science here. Instead, what happened in the 1970s was that science worked the way it’s supposed to work. Researchers identified an important question. They studied it. They figured out how to study it better. And, slowly, between roughly 1970 and 1980, they came up with a broad, generalized answer. They went from a jumble of lowercase theories to an uppercase Theory. Since then, the uppercase Theory hasn’t changed. No new evidence has surfaced to challenge it. Instead, researchers have busied themselves with the details—studying the lowercase theories within climate change to try and make that big Theory more specific. What they’ve learned has made them more and more certain that the big Theory is correct. So, in a way, the scientific consensus certainly has changed since 1975. But it changed from, “We don’t know,” to “Climate change is definitely happening. Image: Frozen World, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from laszlo-photo’s photostream

Prison chase Benny Hillified Posted: 21 Jul 2011 08:16 PM PDT This video was made from surveillance footage of correction officers chasing an inmate around New York’s Albany County jail. A jail investigator made the film a few years ago while looking into the events leading to an officer’s injury during the chase. That former corrections officer sent the video to the Times Union newspaper this week after losing a federal lawsuit “that claimed he was the butt of derogatory comments by his co-workers.” From the Times Union: Robert D. Hunter, who sent the video, said it was evidence in his 2008 lawsuit… He led the chase, but feels the video ridiculed him and was shown for humor’s sake at the police academy and a CPR training session. He said he experienced racial slurs because of his part-American-Indian heritage. “You ran after that guy like he stole your land,” Hunter said a correction officer said to him. “Benny Hill behind bars?” (Thanks, Gil Kaufman!)

Parody ads tell the horrible truth about AT&T&T Posted: 21 Jul 2011 08:11 PM PDT Eddie sez, “The media reform group, Free Press, has released a series of satirical videos to fight the AT&T/T-Mobile merger.” Stop the AT&T T-Mobile Merger

Subterranean sewer mutant caught on CCTV Posted: 21 Jul 2011 08:04 PM PDT This image was taken by a CCTV camera exploring an underground sewer pipe in Newtonbreda, Northern Ireland. NI Water officials say that “Sewerface,” as they’ve dubbed this character, is most likely “a result of a combination of the bend in the sewer line and variations in light.” But of course we know the Truth. “‘Sewerface’ lurking in city underground” (via Fortean Times)

Young Rewired State: learn to hack government data workshop for kids Posted: 21 Jul 2011 07:54 PM PDT Adam sez, “Young Rewired State is an annual week-long working-with-government-data-learn-how-to-hack-code event aimed at those 18 and under. Building on the skills of those competing, YRS throws in a place to code outside of the bedroom, to meet fellow geeks, and support from a network of mentors. The week concludes, on the Friday afternoon, with hackers presenting their work to an audience of geeks, other YRSers, journos, politicos, civil society, civil service, and nosey-parkers for show and tell/prize-giving. There’s still space for people to sign up to code and for show-and-tell. Here’s a map of centres.”

Auditions for a black cat, 1961 Posted: 21 Jul 2011 07:53 PM PDT Here’s a wonderful series of 1961 photos from the LIFE archive documenting “Black Cat Auditions in Hollywood.” The photographer is Ralph Crane. One of the photos includes a shot of Vincent Price, suggesting that this audition could have been for director Roger Corman’s Tales of Terror (1962), film adaptations of a trio of Edgar Allen Poe stories including “The Black Cat.” “Audition for a Black Cat” (via a 2009 Thought Patterns post)

New Yorkers freestyle rap in Union Square Posted: 21 Jul 2011 02:14 PM PDT In 2009, Chris Sullivan hung out a beat-box shingle in NYC’s Union Square, inviting passers-by to come and rap with him. The results were great, and the Master of Fine Arts rap is especially piquant. Free Beats – The Director’s Cut! (via Kottke)

Sesame Street/Beastie Boys mashup Posted: 21 Jul 2011 02:04 PM PDT This Sesame Street/Beastie Boys “Sure Shot” mashup does some very clever stuff with fast and slow framerates that makes the puppets appear to be perfect lipsynchers. It’s virtuoso editing and a demonstration of the puppet’s natural place in mashups. (via Kottke)

Deviled Tongue: organ meat ads of yesteryear Posted: 21 Jul 2011 02:02 PM PDT It’s been a long time since you could call a product “Deviled Tongue.” 1918 was a fine year for organ meat. Underwood Deviled Tongue. 1918. Photo from PeriodPaper.com

Colorful Dairy Queen ad, 1960 Posted: 21 Jul 2011 01:14 PM PDT There’s something almost pornographic about the color palette and line-weights in this 1960 ad for Dairy Queen. Dairy Queen, 1960

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