The fires under Centralia, PA

In 1962, attempts to clean up a landfill by burning it set fire to the coal mine underneath Centralia, Pennsylvania. The fire has been going strong ever since. Most of Centralia is in ruins and its population has dropped from over 1,000 residents in 1981 to less than 10 in 2007. As the area is loaded with rich deposits of coal, the spreading underground fire is expected to threaten the neighboring town of Ashland in the near future. There are no immediate plans to extinguish the fire, which is consuming an eight-mile seam containing enough coal to fuel it for upwards of 250 years.

So you want to visit Centralia PA ...

Centralia Pennsylvania (many photos)
Centralia, Pennsylvania wiki

hat tip to wtf_nature

Global Outlook: The Legacy of R. Buckminster Fuller

R. Buckminster Fuller, Dymaxion House Model, Third Version, 1929, mixed media. Photo: Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller

Bucky Fuller is profiled in the November 2008 issue of Artforum.

via BFI

Bath time

Rizwan Sadir, a wrestler and factory worker, showers from a hand pump next to the Ravi river in Pakistan. Hand pumps are not deep enough to avoid the polluted water. photo: Malcolm Hutcheson

Unsustainable living - photography prize 2008

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Mayfair, and the Deaths of Harry Nilsson, Mama Cass and Keith Moon
How to Embalm a Body (via)
Middle Eastern Contemporary Artists Booming
Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion Systems (via)
The Felt Toothbrush
Recommended piano books
Iain Banks talks to Writing Magazine

viddy:
This American Life - Judgement to the Wife (funny)
Zumba Cinco - Moça do Biquini Azul
São Paulo in 1943
Aldous Huxley's Deathbed (as related by his wife) (via)

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Can’t See the Forest for the Trees But as she drove around the country, Hecht noticed plenty of trees. Some were remnants of old forests, but she also saw hedgerows, backyard orchards, coffee groves, trees growing along rivers and streams, cashew and palm plantations, saplings sprouting in abandoned fields, and heavily wooded grassland. Almost every village abounded with trees—“like a big jungle forest,” she said. Rather than no trees, she saw them everywhere. Nature was far from extinguished; it was thriving. Re-evaluating the 'myth of the pristine forest', it seems that humans have been shaping them for quite some time. (via)

As SLow aS Possible Fair warning for long-term music lovers: the world’s slowest concert, a 639-year organ piece by American avant-garde composer John Cage (01912-01992), will next change notes in just over a month’s time, on 5 November 02008. (with video of the last change, this past July)

Indigenous Media Because I do Internet and Indigenous/Grassroot identity I am occasionally asked “what do you know about Indigenous people on the Internet or on other media?” The answer is: I don’t usually mix these two. However in the name of developing some competence here are a few links...

also:
Thomas Pynchon’s next book (can't wait)
Ancient Peru Pyramid Spotted by Satellite
Man reads entire Oxford English Dictionary
100 Skills Every Man Should Know (girls, too)
10 High Paying Dirty Jobs

viddy:
High-speed (super slow motion) Video Clips (loads)
Sam and Dave interview - 1967
1977 CBC Interview with Marshal McLuhan

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US Hands Over Seized Antiquities to Iraq Home to what was once ancient Mesopotamia, Iraq has long been a target of looters and thieves intent on stealing the country's treasure trove of antiquities. But a large cache of priceless artifacts has been returned to Iraq's government, thanks to a multi-year initiative by U.S. customs authorities to intercept items being smuggled into the United States.

Crows may be smarter than apes Researchers found evidence that the birds are able to outsmart people's closest relatives when it comes to finding a way to access food without it falling into a trap.

New face of Canada's lumberjacks African immigrants make up the bulk of the region's forestry workers.

The future of photography Photography entered the digital age in the early 90s and the resulting wave of technical innovation has put cameras everywhere, from satellites to cellphones. But bigger changes in the technology are yet to come.

also:
Cray and Microsoft launch $25,000 'deskside supercomputer'
Top 13 Polar Super Vehicles from Antarctic (via)
A good breakdown of The Statute of Limitations
Marco Polo's Travels on Google Maps (via)

viddy:
The venomous Goliath Tarantula is the largest spider in the world. What should you do if one lands on you?
The Prisoner Video Exclusive - Jim Caviezel Says There's Sand in His Cranium
Leo Kottke - Vaseline Machine Gun (it kicks in around halfway through and it's smokin')
Raga Shivranjani on Bansuri (Indian Bamboo Flute) (beautiful)

A sheen of oil is seen...

Photograph: Reuters

24 hours in pictures:

High Island, US: A sheen of oil is seen around a pump jack surrounded by floodwater after the passing of hurricane Ike.

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The Rise of the Numerati With the explosion of data from the Internet, cell phones, and credit cards, the people who can make sense of it all are changing our world... Sometimes Morgan's team spots groups of Web surfers who appear to move in sync. The challenge then is to figure out what triggers their movements. Once this is clear, the advertisers can anticipate people's online journeys—and sprinkle their paths with just the right ads. And who actually clicks on those ads? Fewer than you'd think, I'd wager. I always had the feeling that the true power of these people is in their ability to convince advertisers that they really know what the hell they're talking about. (via)

Life of the Party I ran into the Buzzkills at a party last weekend. This is not their real name, of course, and I wouldn’t dare call them that to their face, but Jim and Lori Buzzkill are a white, affluent, middle-aged couple whose mission in life is to suck all the joy out of every single party they attend. They bait every guest into an argument that highlights their moral superiority... The Buzzkills are extremely political and contentious. This is not to say that they just argue about politics - lots of people argue about politics, and I don’t have a problem with that. My annoyance lies in their abrasive stance as environmental anti-globalization vegan warrior activists. They somehow manage to politicize any topic of conversation, whether it be about a recipe for jerk chicken (”people who kill chickens are the real jerks”), or the cute new shoes you bought on sale this week (”too bad there’s no good deals for the starving babies who made those shoes”). (big ups, Radmila)

The Professional Panhandling Plague A big part of the cities’ woes is the professionalization of panhandling. The old type of panhandler—a mentally impaired or disabled homeless person trying to scrape together a few bucks for a meal—is giving way to the full-time spanger who supports himself through a combination of begging, working at odd jobs, and other sources, like government assistance from disability payments. I remember reading a story, back in the late 1970's, about a guy that lost his legs in WW2 and would panhandle the streets of New York. When he died, they found out that he would leave the city in the fall and head down to his home in Florida where he would hang out for the winter and run the bar that he owned. Come springtime, he would go back up to New York and get back to work. Apparently, he left behind a considerable chunk of change, hundreds of thousands.

also:
Future Doctors Could Sniff Out Cancer
Atlas of electromagnetic space (extremely cool visualization) (via)
Eno's Oblique Strategies (via)

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The Internet's New Shortcut Now, professors Arvind Krishnamurthy of the University of Washington and Richard Yang of Yale say they have a better way to solve broadband providers' woes. Their algorithm, which they call P4P or "local file-sharing," tracks users' locations to find the shortest path across the Internet. The result, they say, should please both sides of the peer-to-peer debate: Users can download files about 20% faster than conventional file-sharing, while cutting the bandwidth requirements by more than a factor of five. Broadband providers are stoked... content providers, not so much, I'm sure.

Australian "hot rocks" offer 26,000 yrs of power Barely one percent of Australia's untapped geothermal energy could produce 26,000 years worth of clean electricity... (via)

Last work of surrealist Marcel Duchamp discovered The last ever art work created by the influential French surrealist Marcel Duchamp has been discovered in an apartment in in northeastern Spain.

Selections From H.P. Lovecraft's Brief Tenure as a Whitman's Sampler Copywriter. Toffee Nugget: Few men dare ask the question "What is toffee, exactly?" All those who have investigated this substance are now either dead or insane. (via)

also:
Advice for writers about research (via)
Who were the Neanderthals?
French Authorities Uncover a Bizarre Serial Killer's Trail

viddy:
Man Ray: "Home Movies"

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Deep in the radioactive bowels of the smashed Chernobyl reactor, a strange new lifeform is blooming Ever since, a 30 km 'exclusion zone' has existed around the contaminated site, accessible to those with special clearance only. It's quite easy, then, to conjure an apocalyptic vision of the area; to imagine an eerily deserted wasteland, utterly devoid of life. But the truth is quite the opposite. The exclusion zone is teeming with wildlife of all shapes and sizes, flourishing unhindered by human interference and seemingly unfazed by the ever-present radiation. Most remarkable, however, is not the life buzzing around the site, but what's blooming inside the perilous depths of the reactor. (via)

Global Trail of an Online Crime Ring As an international ring of thieves plundered the credit card numbers of millions of Americans, investigators struggled to figure out who was orchestrating the crimes in the United States. When prosecutors unveiled indictments last week, they made a stunning admission: the culprit was, they said, their very own informant.

Unabomber objects to cabin display at Newseum Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski wrote a letter to a federal appeals court complaining about a museum exhibit of the tiny cabin where he plotted an 18-year bombing spree. Kaczynski, who is serving a life sentence with no possibility of parole, says the display at the Newseum in Washington runs counter to his victims' wish to limit further publicity about the case. (see the letter) (via)

FBI seeks owners of stolen art after collector dies When New York art collector William Kingsland died in 2006, he left behind hundreds of works of art. But some, including works by Pablo Picasso, turned out to have been stolen.

Is 'gene doping' the next Olympic threat? Could this be the first Olympics in which athletes are discovered altering their own DNA?

In search of Western civilisation's lost classics The unique library of the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, buried beneath lava by Vesuvius's eruption in AD79, is slowly revealing its long-held secrets (via)

also:
Photography Bans (what will they do when we have cameras in our heads?)
The Agritopia Project is an effort to design and build a neighborly community around an urban farm. (via)
Old Computers Recycled to Make Construction Material
Watchmen: The Movie Blog - A Mysterious Discovery in New York
Carl Craig Gets an Orchestra
Should You Worry About Digital Drugs?
Is the New Bernie Mac & Samuel L. Vehicle Cursed?
Update from the Samorost world (games)
Public Computer Errors pool (via)
Bugs made from found objects (via)
Cat butt menagerie
Cat Butt Museum (via)

Atomic Wednesday: Project: Upshot Knothole

viddy:
Q-Tip works the turntables
Tommy James and the Shondells - Cellophane Symphony
Robert Anton Wilson - Maybe Logic

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The Girl in the window Three years ago the Plant City police found a girl lying in her roach-infested room, naked except for an overflowing diaper. The child was pale and skeletal, communicated only through grunts. She was almost seven years old. The authorities had discovered the rarest of creatures: a feral child, deprived of her humanity by a lack of nurturing. Audio, video and slideshow tell the strange, sad and ultimately hopeful story of Danielle. (via)

Is that keyboard toxic? Warning: Your keyboard could be a danger to you and the environment. Sound preposterous? Then consider this: Some keyboards contain nanosilver, which, because of its antimicrobial properties, is increasingly incorporated into everyday items even though studies have questioned its health and environmental safety.

Superbugs In August, 2000, Dr. Roger Wetherbee, an infectious-disease expert at New York University’s Tisch Hospital, received a disturbing call from the hospital’s microbiology laboratory. At the time, Wetherbee was in charge of handling outbreaks of dangerous microbes in the hospital, and the laboratory had isolated a bacterium called Klebsiella pneumoniae from a patient in an intensive-care unit. “It was literally resistant to every meaningful antibiotic that we had,” Wetherbee recalled recently. The microbe was sensitive only to a drug called colistin, which had been developed decades earlier and largely abandoned as a systemic treatment, because it can severely damage the kidneys. “So we had this report, and I looked at it and said to myself, ‘My God, this is an organism that basically we can’t treat.’ ”

Microsoft 'degrees of separation' study interpretation challenged "Researchers have concluded that any two people on average are distanced by just 6.6 degrees of separation, meaning that they could be linked by a string of seven or fewer acquaintances," a Washington Post article stated. However, one publication, eFluxMedia, suggested the study was "heavily misinterpreted" by the media.

Mother Earth Naked: A Modern Masterpiece Have you ever wondered what our world would look like stripped bare of all plants, soils, water and man-made structures? Well wonder no longer; images of the Earth as never seen before have been unveiled in what is the world’s biggest geological mapping project ever.

An Anarchist in the Hudson Valley: In Conversation: Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey) We have all these knee-jerk phrases that in the sixties sounded like communist revolution, and now are just corpses in the mouths of real estate developers. "Sustainable development"—that means very expensive houses for vaguely ecologically conscious idiots from New York. It has nothing to do with a sustainable economy or permaculture. They talk about agriculture, they get all weepy about it, but they won’t do anything for the family farms because family farms use pesticides and fertilizers, which is a terrible sin in the minds of these people. So they’re perfectly happy to see the old farms close down and build McMansions, as long as they’re green McMansions, of course, with maybe a little solar power so they can boast about how they are almost off the grid. This is just yuppie poseurism. It’s fashionable to be green, but it’s not at all fashionable to wonder about the actual working class and farming people and families that you’re dispossessing. This is a class war situation, and the artists are unfortunately not on the right side of the battle. If we would just honestly look at what function we’re serving in this economy, I’m afraid we would see that we’re basically shills for real estate developers. (via)

also:
Why Does RCMP Refer to Flesh Eating Murderer as “Badger”?
FBI takes library computers without a warrant
On the brains of the assassins of Presidents
Fairy Tale Geometry: Unfolding Buckminster Fuller's Tetrascroll (more) (via)
Meeting with a Remarkable Man: A Talk with Robert Anton Wilson (2003 interview)
When Computers Meld With Our Minds (brief Vernor Vinge interview)
Defining Female Chauvinism (Rethinking feminism, as it is. I'm no expert, but I think she nails it.) (via)
Queen's Guitarist Publishes Astrophysics Thesis The founder of the legendary rock band Queen has completed his doctoral thesis in astrophysics after taking a 30-year break to play some guitar.
MIT students on quest to build $12 computer (no, not $120) (via)
Saturday Night Lost Long-time SNL set builders Stiegelbauer Associates had the treasure trove of pop-Americana that’s been stashed away for years in Building 280, literally jackhammered to bits last month. (Bummer. Did they even try to find a way to preserve it?) (via)
The Mystery of the Bloodied Room A woman is found lying dead on her bed in a house with walls covered in blood. However, she doesn't have a mark on her and neither she, nor the bed, have any blood on them. The cause of her death is still unknown.
My buddy's art car Alan Evil makes the papers. (more art cars)

viddy:
Britain seen from above A new BBC series makes use of satellite technology to create stunning images of Britain from above. Can't wait to see this. They even track phone chatter. (via)
Anthropologist explores heavy metal in Asia, South America and the Middle East
Magnetic stripe card spoofer (using an iPod!)
Bob Godfrey Documentary A short but delightful BBC special (in two parts) about British animation legend Bob Godfrey.

Life is a chair of bullies - Soupy Sales (prev)

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How CAPTCHA got trashed CAPTCHA used to be an easy and useful way for Web administrators to authenticate users. Now it's an easy and useful way for malware authors and spammers to do their dirty work. More good news.

2008 State of the Future report proposes 15 global challenges Even more good news.

How to Write With Style From one of the best. (via)

also:
Stefano De Luigi - Photo Essay: Blindness (via)
Something to Read: The Book Bike A most unusual bicycle that travels around Chicago on the weekends giving away books. (via)
This is Sand Big Time time devourer. (via)
CISMA Brazilian director, Denis Kamioka, aka CISMA, has his portfolio online. The Nike football ad is awesome. Polamalu rocks it. (via)

Western man acquired from the technology of literacy the power to act without reacting….In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner. — Marshall McLuhan, from Understanding Media (via)

The Scrotal Radiendocrinator

From the always excellent Environmental Graffiti:

The Radiendocrinator was intended to be placed over the endocrine glands to invigorate sexual virility and consisted of seven radium soaked pieces of paper, about the size and shape of a credit card, covered with a thin piece of clear plastic and two gold-wire screens. Men were advised to place the instrument under the scrotum at night like an ‘athletic strap’. The inventor of the Radiendocrinator (and Radithor), William J. Bailey, had so much faith in his products he claimed not only that he regularly used them, but that he had drunk more radium water than any living man - he died in 1949 of bladder cancer.

10 Radioactive Products That People Actually Used

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Did Bush really say this? I have my doubts. I'd wager whatever was said was probably blown out of proportion, though that's just my intuition speaking. More dumb than evil. This part is priceless, though: Mr Bush also faced criticism at the summit after Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, was described in the White House press pack given to journalists as one of the "most controversial leaders in the history of a country known for government corruption and vice". The White House apologised for what it called "sloppy work" and said an official had simply lifted the characterisation from the internet without reading it. Haw! (thx)

How your GPS can dob you in Years back, I remember reading that the FBI used OnStar to eavesdrop. The courts told them to stop, but I seriously doubt that they did. (Remember) I've heard through the law enforcement grapevine that they bug whether they can get a warrant or not. You just have to use your own gear. You get your info then back-engineer your case, clean up your evidence and make it look proper for the prosecutors and the courts. (via)

Maps out the hoo-haa Impressive. (via)

houseplantpicturestudio.com was fun. Click on the spines to see the pictures. I recommend A very pleasant afternoon at the home of Phyllis Diller.

Automatic GEOFON Global Seismic Monitor Map marking all the earthquakes on the planet over the last two weeks. The blinking one is the most recent, usually within hours. Lots of activity on this planet.

About all Jeff wanted to know actually pretty consistently - Jeff Bridges the beginning of the start of shooting of every scene - he’d walk up to one or the other of us and ask if we figured whether or not The Dude burned one of the way over…. This Distracted Globe - The Big Lebowski (1998) (via)

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Local and national outbreak of grave robbing Grave robbing has become an above-ground affair. Gone are the days when enterprising thieves would dig up an old grave and pillage for gold teeth and rings. Today, it's mostly the bronze markers and flower vases that draw their attention. Rising scrap metal prices, coupled with the lagging economy, have triggered a string of cemetery thefts both locally and across the nation. (via)

The World’s Lost Environmental Causes A few of what were once considered imminent environmental catastrophes now seem like memories from a bygone era. Whether the problem is solved, the public loses interest, or there was never really much to fear, environmental causes can sometimes simply fade away.

Chimp Loose In San Bernardino National Forest Moe, a 42-year-old chimpanzee who grew up in suburbia until being forced to live in an animal sanctuary, was believed to be at large in a Southern California forest Monday after escaping his cage. Update: this is the same chimp that horribly mutilated the man bringing the cake a few years back.

The Caffeine Viewer Project is a group of some electronic devices connected to our coffee machine se we can put information about our insane coffee consumption available online to anyone, in real time. (via)

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Five Steps to Sustainable Governance in Africa Paul Collier, a professor of economics at Oxford University and the author of The Bottom Billion, discusses policy options for helping the poorest countries in Africa.

Tons of Scrap Metal Removed from Chernobyl Zone Daily New reports indicate that up to 100 tons of scrap metal are removed from the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone every day. Approximately half this amount is legally removed by the government, but the other half is smuggled out to the rest of the world.

Brazil's pigeon drug mules Brazilian prison authorities have discovered carrier pigeons being used to deliver drugs and mobile phones to inmates. (via)

also: How To Survive Without Air-Conditioning; 9 Extraordinary Human Abilities; Dogs Acting Human (temptation from the fluffy side)

Lagniappe: PostPanic + Postman Returns (watch, cool visuals, booming sound) (via)

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. - Hanlon's Razor (not to be confused with Heinlein's corollary to Murphy's Law - Things will go wrong, even if they can't. Murphy was an optimist.*)

*see

Astonishing Volcanoes that Cause Death and Destruction

Photo EPA

Life in the Fast Lane takes us on an in-depth and action-packed tour of the world's most violent, destructive and deadly volcanoes. (with notes on volcanoes as alternate energy and volcano vacations)

What We Can Learn From Buckminster Fuller

As you might have noticed, I'm a total geek for Buckminster Fuller. I'm reading Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth again this weekend and I really enjoyed this Wired photo essay.

The above image is one of his wackier ideas:

To construct one of his Lightful Towers, Fuller imagined that one airship would first drop a bomb and create a hole in the ground, then a second airship would drop the building into the hole. The stacked apartment unit would be sealed into the ground with cement and ready for use.

There is a more human, even somewhat darker side to the Fuller mythos that was brought back to mind by the comment on the above post and was hinted at in a recent New York Times article. We'll be exploring this side of dear old Bucky in the offing.

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The Unclear Origins of Oil Crude oil is almost $140 per barrel. By now you'd think we would know where it comes from. No one really knows. The conventional wisdom is that oil descends from algae from eons ago. Lots and lots of algae. Unimaginable mounds of dead algae in quantities no longer found on this planet, pressed, and cooked into hydrocarbon liquids. Thus: fossil fuel. Others, notably the Russians, have an alternative theory that oil comes from non-biological carbon compounds deep in this planet, like the methane oceans we find on other planets. In this scenario oil is a planetary phenomenon. Indeed this abiogenic oil could still be forming in the earth. Thousands of Russian papers supporting this view have still not been translated.

The Rise of Medical Tourism: Shopping the World for Medical Procedure Bargains I hear about this more and more. I wonder when the horror stories will start to surface in the mainstream? Did I miss something? There is an organization known as the Medical Tourism Association that aims to promote, raise awareness and keep an eye on things. I have a feeling that this is only going to become more popular as the farce that is the American medical/insurance apparatus continues to fail to meet the needs of a substantial portion of the population.

Beautiful Messes: A Travel Guide to Man-made Disasters Whether you want to cruise by the floating pile of plastic in the Pacific or throw some trash into the nation’s largest landfill, GOOD has the dirt on where to go to get a close-up look at the most spectacular disasters man has wrought on the environment. Plus: What to do when you visit. Feel GOOD about yourself while you visit god-awful nasty places.

Also, the CIA's latest Studies in Intelligence has a few interesting articles (via); Earth to Aliens: We're a Bunch of Dorks (via); Exaggeration with Maps (via); Michel Gondry Wants You To Watch These 25 Music Videos

Lagniappe - AMNH Picturing the Museum (via); Flickr: The Commons (via); Mr. Picassohead (thx)

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Marines in Afghanistan Weigh In on a Life at War They live in crude mud-wall compounds. There are no sewage system, no telephones, no electricity — these young men have been sleeping in the dirt for weeks. But the Marines have come up with a trick to beat the Afghan heat. Lance Cpl. Brian Archer sticks water bottles in a wet cotton sock. "Piece of cloth, wrap up a hot drink in it, well water over it, let the wind hit it. Be like an hour or two. And it feels like you just pulled it out of the fridge. It's great," he explains.

Online service lets blind surf the Internet from any computer, anywhere New software, called WebAnywhere lets blind and visually impaired people surf the Web on the go. The tool developed at the University of Washington turns screen-reading into an Internet service that reads aloud Web text on any computer with speakers or a headphone connection.

Stoners, Like, Totally Solve Nation's Air Travel Problems Air travel is a total hassle, man, and marijuana advocates in Denver say everyone would find the normally excruciating process a lot more pleasant if they could enjoy a few bong hits before boarding. It might even help solve a few of the problems that airlines have been experiencing lately. The way they see it, if people can knock a few back before a flight, they should be able to spark one up. They're calling on airports nationwide to install marijuana lounges. Not sure where they're going with this by the end, but if it helps alleviate the humiliation of gate-rape, I'm, like, all for it. Seems like they should focus their energy on the legal issues first, man.

How Can I Free My Home of Pests without Harming My Family? I'm fully behind all-natural pesticides. Those chemicals make me feel sick. If I even walk by a house that had been recently sprayed it gives me a headache.

I never knew Google was THIS massive! If you only read one of these, read this one. It will blow your mind. (via)