Marilyn Manson - Food Pyramid

(video link)

Marilyn Manson explains the food pyramid in this delightful romp. Helpful and edifying.

via We know who we are and what we want to say.

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Foreign Policy: The Top 10 Stories You Missed in 2008 Don't miss them this time.

Briton saved dozens in hotel A millionaire private equity broker from London has emerged as a hero who stopped Islamic terrorists from massacring Britons and Americans in their attack on Mumbai.

LAX Tops Nation In Stolen, Missing Luggage Items "Easy pickings?" "Easy pickings." "I wouldn't put anything valuable in LAX" These two LAX employees would only talk if we concealed their identities. "I saw thefts within the first few weeks of working there." They both say there are organized rings of thieves, who identify valuables in your checked luggage by looking at the TSA x-ray screens, then communicate with baggage handlers by text or cell phone, telling them exactly what to look for. (via)

What is truth serum? Indian officials plan to inject captured Mumbai terrorist with the "truth serum," sodium pentothal, but history tells us that the technique isn't up to the task

Particulate Emissions From Laser Printers Do laser printers emit pathogenic toner particles into the air? Some people are convinced that they do. As a result, this topic is the subject of public controversy. Researchers have now investigated what particles the printers really do release into the air.

Black Garlic Introducing a simple food with a wonderfully complex flavor. Black garlic is sweet meets savory, a perfect mix of molasses-like richness and tangy garlic undertones. It has a tender, almost jelly-like texture with a melt-in-your-mouth consistency similar to a soft dried fruit. Hard to believe, but true. It’s as delicious as it is unique. (via)

also:
Two cases of compulsive swearing - in sign language
A Fragment Theory Of Deja Vu
Academics invent a mathematical equation for why people procrastinate (when they were supposed to be writing papers)
Ancient city discovered deep in Amazonian rainforest linked to the legendary white-skinned Cloud People of Peru
Prized sculpture destroyed on trip to Art Basel Miami
How to Stretch a Canvas

don't miss:
The ultimate fate of Mr. Pink in Reservoir Dogs (via)

viddy:
William Eggleston: I am at war with the obvious

Smoking in Japan

Smoking in Japan

hat tip: Lucy's Drowning

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Villagers in fear of occult killers who deal in flesh Human genitals are the most prized parts and can be used to attract wealth and increase fertility. Children's body parts are believed to be the most potent. They are cooked and ground down, to be used with herbs and other ingredients. Sometimes parts are used whole - it is believed that if a human arm is waved around each morning in commercial premises it will draw customers.

Space 'smells like fried steak' Nasa has commissioned Steven Pearce, a chemist and managing director of fragrance manufacturing company Omega Ingredients, to recreate the smell of space in a laboratory.

also:
The Five Oldest Banks in the World (via)
Logic Exercises - The Three Laws of Robotics
Meetways.com: find a point of interest between two addresses (via)

viddy:
Robert Wyatt & Bertrand Bergalat - This Summer Night
Björk talking about her TV
Allen Ginsberg interview (via)
Don't you put it in your mouth

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Top NSA Scribe Takes Us Inside The Shadow Factory No outsider has spent more time tracking the labyrinthine ways of the National Security Agency than James Bamford. But even he gets lost in the maze. Despite countless articles and three books on the U.S. government's super-secret, signals-intelligence service — the latest of which, The Shadow Factory, is out today — Bamford tells Danger Room that he was caught off guard by revelations that the NSA was eavesdropping on Americans. He remains confused about how the country's telecommunications firms were co-opted into the warrantless spying project. And he's still only guessing, he admits, at the breadth and depth of those domestic surveillance efforts. In this exclusive interview, Bamford talks about how hard it is, after all these years, to fit together the pieces at the NSA's "Puzzle Palace" headquarters.

The Programming Aphorisms of Strunk and White If I could take ten software development books to a desert island, The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White would be one of them. (via)

Making A Living From Music For Picture Writing music for picture seems like the ideal career. You get to work in your studio for a living, you can earn good money, and there's so much potential work: action films, travel and nature documentaries, romantic comedies, cartoons, low-budget sci-fi, even breakfast cereal ads. But how do you break into this lucrative world? As we find out in the first part of this new series, the first thing you need is determination... (links to pts. 2-9) (via)

Talk to Elbot I did. For way too long. It was interesting, but I could tell it wasn't human, although I was probably biased because I already knew. It was a decent conversation and was quite funny at times. Elbot can be a bit of a wise-ass. (prev)

also:
New audio tapes of JFK released (via)
World Chess Championship 2008 (wiki) (more)
Searching for Robert Johnson (third photo?)
Project 10^100 is a call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible (Google is giving out 10 million for the best ideas, deadline Oct. 20)
Invention: Natural colour underwater photographs
Sleep-deprivation is a myth, expert claims
How to Survive a Grizzly Bear Attack
The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan (via)

viddy:
Photojournalist on the frontline
Inside The Actor's Studio: Dennis Hopper (1994)
Fernando Botero Interview 1/2 2/2 (prev)
Márta Sebestyén and the Sebő Ensemble: Sándor Weöres poems (lovely)
Hairyman (animated interpretation of an African-American folk tale from the South)
Do you know the first ten elements of the periodic table?
Gijs Gieskes beautiful spinning photoelectronic acid machine (synthporn)
Zombie Robots!

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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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HIV/AIDS Emerged as Early as 1880s Until now it was thought that HIV-1 Group M, the strain of HIV that causes the most infections worldwide, originated in 1930 in Cameroon. Epidemic levels of AIDS and HIV-1 infections started appearing in Leopoldville, Belgian Congo (now Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo), around 1960. Findings from the new study, however, suggest that the virus most likely started circulating among humans in sub-Saharan Africa sometime between 1884 and 1924.

John Le Carré: The Madness of Spies The gun was indeed part of me: so much so that I had ceased to notice its presence on my hip. Stooping to address the ball, I was startled by the clang of a heavy metal object striking the tiled floor, and looked around to identify the source. Finally, I saw the Browning lying at my feet, but by then the inn had emptied itself of customers and landlord. I retrieved it, returned it to my waistband, and picked up the briefcase. “Abort,” the A.I.O. ordered, pausing only to finish his beer. Le Carré shares some personal history.

The Secret of How the Titanic Sank New evidence has experts rethinking how the luxury passenger liner sank (via)

A mannequin on a toilet and dry porridge – it's the Turner Prize The Turner Prize, the annual award for artists that never ceases to raise furious debate on what constitutes art and what should be dismissed as nonsense, yesterday proved it was not about to change the habit of a lifetime.

also:
Russian rap video soldier sent to Siberia
The Essays of Francis Bacon
The Speech Accent Archive (audio - very useful for actors) (via)

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Antiquities smuggling: Growing problem at US ports Three years ago, an elderly Italian man pulled his van into a South Florida park to sell some rare, 2,500-year-old emeralds plundered from a South American tomb. But Ugo Bagnato, an archaeologist, didn't know his potential customer was a federal agent. (via)

Tourist who found Stone Age axes rewarded £20,000 A British tourist who unearthed four Stone Age axes on a beach in Brittany has been put forward for a prize worth more than £20,000 by the Ministry of Culture for not keeping the treasure. (via)

CEO murdered by mob of sacked Indian workers Corporate India is in shock after a mob of workers bludgeoned to death the chief executive who sacked them from a factory in a suburb of Delhi. (via)

also:
Cheap Chinese lederhosen anger Germans
a couple of good lists this week: Top 10 Things That Are Surprisingly Good For You & 10 Odd Discontinued Olympic Sports (and don't forget drawing and watercolors)
Flashback: The One Elevator Trick Every Traveler Should Know
Neil Armstrong makes rare speech as NASA turns 50
Erase Cell Phone Data: Free Data Eraser (via)

viddy:
The Mike Wallace Interview: Frank Lloyd Wright (via)
The arty farty show
Sati Audiovisual (excellent VJ performance)

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Death of the bookworm Children are being taught to read at school – but not to love books' complexity and depth.

Looking at beautiful art can act as a painkiller Beauty is truth, the English romantic poet John Keats once wrote, but according to the latest scientific research it is also a painkiller. Looking at a beautiful piece of art has long been said to have the power to heal emotional wounds but the new research also claims it offers a distraction from physical pain.

Stealing History Over the last couple of months articles about the theft of items of historical significance have made there way into my reading queue. I didn’t seek these interesting pieces out on purpose, but the string of serendipity is too much to ignore so I though I would share them with you all.

Don’t Buy That Textbook, Download It Free In protest of what he says are textbooks’ intolerably high prices — and the dumbing down of their content to appeal to the widest possible market — Professor McAfee has put his introductory economics textbook online free. He says he most likely could have earned a $100,000 advance on the book had he gone the traditional publishing route, and it would have had a list price approaching $200. “This market is not working very well — except for the shareholders in the textbook publishers,” he said. “We have lots of knowledge, but we are not getting it out.” (via)

Print on demand with 'ATM for books' Imagine walking into a book store and knowing that even the most obscure or out of print books will always be in stock. Angus & Robertson today became the first Australian book chain to install the Espresso Book Machine (EBM), capable of printing, trimming and binding a paperback book on demand within minutes. I brought this idea up to some friends back in 2001. I thought it would be a good idea-- not unto itself but as a part of bookstore or coffeeshop or somesuch. People laughed at or just ignored me. I shouldn't listen to friends that don't read. (via)

also:
Take a look at what Hurricane Gustav did to Grand Isle, LA. (stunning) (via)
The Digested Read podcast: The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon A podcast version of John Crace's wickedly satirical Guardian column, lampooning the literary style of leading authors by summarising their books in five minutes
IMDB Video Watch Full-Length Movies, TV Shows, and More — Free! (via)

viddy:
2005 PBS NOW interview with Kurt Vonnegut (via)
Renoir painting (verb) (and puffin' somethin')
Why Schools Make You Tuck In Your Shirt! (wow)

Futility Closet - Elementary: Sherlock Holmes was based on a real man, Scottish surgeon Joseph Bell, whom Arthur Conan Doyle had served as a clerk in the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. (read more)

Word Spy: secondhand drinking n. A negative effect that a drinker has on a non-drinker.

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Scientists receive death threats over 'end-of-world' experiment The scientists behind the world's biggest ever scientific experiment have received death threats from critics who claim it could cause the end of the world. What? "If you destroy the world, I'll kill you." seems like a pointless threat.

Researchers Use Facebook App to Create Zombie Army Computer researchers built a tool that demonstrates how hackers could silently turn Facebook users into a powerful zombie army that can attack other websites or scout for vulnerable sites on the net. Some might maintain that Facebook already has a powerful zombie army.

also:
Brazil oil boom 'to end poverty'
Hand Weapons of Trench Raiders, WWI
How To Spot A Heart Attack Soon After It Occurs
Murder map of London, 1888 (via)

viddy:
Top 10 Amazing Physics Videos
『Gypsy Rhythm Machine Crazy Beatbox(動画)』
Zen Wind - Yoga and the Art of Farting (via)

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Out There: People Who Live Without TV For many Americans the thought of life without TV is akin to forgoing food, shelter or, God forbid, the Internet. But about 1 to 2 percent of Americans do abstain from the boob tube, and they might seem like strange bedfellows. A recent study of those who live without found that about two-thirds fall into either the "crunchy granola set" or the "religious right, ultraconservative" camp... I guess I'm in the other one-third. I haven't had cable or air television since 2005. To be honest, I didn't get rid of the TV because I hated it, I got rid of it because I liked it too much. I needed to get some things done and I figured losing it would eliminate a distraction. It worked. I'm far more productive than I was then. I do watch movies and whatnot on the computer, but I practically have to force myself to sit down for one. I have nothing against people who watch TV. Not everyone can sit at home and write a novel or read Shakespeare after a long hard day of work. It's a matter of preference. I was a bit surprised that it was only 1-2 percent that abstain.

It’s Likely That Times Are Changing A century ago, mathematician Hermann Minkowski famously merged space with time, establishing a new foundation for physics; 
today physicists are rethinking how the two should fit together... In a lab, time is simple. You can watch experiments and record what happens as time passes simply by referring to the clock on the wall (or the computerized timers on the lab bench). But suppose you are studying the universe as a whole, attempting to formulate the laws of quantum gravity that rule the cosmos. There is no wall enclosing the universe on which to hang a clock, no external timekeeper to gauge the whenness of being. Yet quantum physics requires time to tell the universe what to do — time is necessary for things to happen. Or, as the famous restroom graffito puts it, time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once. (via)

Heroin addicted elephant clean after rehab Referred to as 'Big Brother' or 'Xiguang' in Chinese media reports, the elephant was captured in 2005 in southwest China by illegal traders who fed him heroin-laced bananas. The traders used the spiked bananas for several months to control him before they were arrested by police. Xiguang was released back into the wild but was soon sent to animal protection centre after his behaviour appeared to suggest he was suffering withdrawal symptoms from heroin, Xinhua news agency reported.

Robot builders seek a little help from sci-fi "It's surprising how often people make nervous jokes about robots taking over the world. I don't want to make too much of that, but I think there's something there." So says one roboticist who thinks finding out exactly how fictional robots influence people can help engineers build real ones.

Bach fan thrills to discovery of lost 1724 pages For 25 years, Teri Noel Towe has deeply treasured a slim volume bound in red morocco that he acquired at an auction house, a volume containing six handwritten pages of a musical manuscript. Pages three and four, containing the last measures of the opening choral movement and all of the following bass aria, cover the front and back of a music sheet presumed lost. Until now. (via)

Digitizing Archives From The 17th Century A researcher on a short trip to a foreign country, with little money, but a digital camera in hand has devised a novel approach to digitizing foreign archives that could speed up research.

also:
The 11 Kinds of Insomnia (via)
How to Read an FBI File (via)
The 100 Oldest Companies in the World (via)
The heaviest and biggest tanks in history (via)

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Strapped for cash, some in New Orleans stay and hope Several New Orleans residents say they can't afford to leave-- for various reasons.

Serial killer on the loose in California, police say Los Angeles, California, police detectives are looking for a serial killer who they believe killed at least 11 people, many of them prostitutes, over a 23-year period. Just one? I always thought that it was policy not to talk about serial killers with the press. There must be some specific reason why their breaking protocol in this case.

Roald Dahl's seductive work as a British spy Old Roald seems to be getting around quite a bit these days... just like he did when he was alive, it seems.

also:
The son of John le Carré on ninjas, mimes and his first novel
Extreme Macro Photography on a budget (via)
Photo Tampering Throughout History (via)
iPosture Just over one inch in diameter, the iPosture automatically senses when the body slouches, and it alerts the user with brief vibrations to correct it. They also have the 'extreme tase' setting for hardcore slouchers. (via)

viddy:
The first few minutes of The Conversation (via)
The Moog Foundation YouTube page (via)

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World's largest machine--the electric grid--is old and outdated The U.S. electric grid is so old and outdated it can't handle the influx of wind power and other intermittent renewable resources.

Space Station Dodges Orbital Junk The International Space Station fired its rocket engines to dodge space junk for the first time in five years on Wednesday.

Is It Possible To Teach Experience? Business veterans claim you cannot teach ‘experience’, but European researchers say you can. (via)

The Secrets of Storytelling: Why We Love a Good Yarn Storytelling is one of the few human traits that are truly universal across culture and through all of known history. Anthropologists find evidence of folktales everywhere in ancient cultures, written in Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Chinese, Egyptian and Sumerian. People in societies of all types weave narratives, from oral storytellers in hunter-gatherer tribes to the millions of writers churning out books, television shows and movies. And when a characteristic behavior shows up in so many different societies, researchers pay attention: its roots may tell us something about our evolutionary past.

also:
Top 10 Amazing Prison Escapes
10 Things Millionaires Won't Tell You
Now Hear This: Don't Remove Earwax (I always suspected that those Chinese candles weren't so good for you.)
6 Funny Things About Asimov's Foundation Series
The Unofficial Stephen Jay Gould Archive (via)

viddy:
Cockfighting and dominoes: Haiti's poor at play (via)
Hackers prepare supermarket sweep
Groucho Marx on the Dick Cavett Show

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Trading Places We are not witnessing the abandonment of the suburbs or a movement of millions of people back to the city all at once. But we are living at a moment in which the massive outward migration of the affluent that characterized the second half of the twentieth century is coming to an end. For several decades now, cities in the United States have wished for a "24/7" downtown, a place where people live as well as work, and keep the streets busy, interesting, and safe at all times of day. This is what urbanist Jane Jacobs preached in the 1960s, and it has long since become the accepted goal of urban planners. Only when significant numbers of people lived downtown, planners believed, could central cities regain their historic role as magnets for culture and as a source of identity and pride for the metropolitan areas they served. Now that's starting to happen... This has been happening in the South for close to ten years. (via)

Mark Cuban: A Note to the MPAA = Promotion works better than prevention Invest in a positive message that can get people more excited about their member products and the unique experience offered in theaters, or send a message that your customers are crooks and pirates... I have more than 1 billion dollars invested in the entertainment industry. I get to see our content distributed illegally online. I get a daily report of all the torrents and other files available online. You know what I think about that? So what. That's what I think. It's collateral damage. Unlike music, it takes time to upload and download movies. People with more time than money will steal content. They weren't going to pay for it otherwise. People with a conscious will pay for the content. Fortunately that is most people.

also:
The Five Things You Need to Know About Finding the Work You Love (via)
10 Literary Geniuses Who Went To Jail
'Dancing Plague' and Other Odd Afflictions Explained
Parasite 'turns women into sex kittens' (via)
First Look: The Road (photos)

viddy:
Fishing with Ween: Brownie Troop Fishing Show (latest episode: Ween fishing with the Butthole Surfers) (via)
This Video will Make You Understand Fuel Cells and Catalysts in 10 Minutes
Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture 2008 - Steven Pinker (via)
Grant Morrison interview

Sick Day

image

I'm a bit under the weather, so just this one post today. I'll be back with you tomorrow. In the meantime, it's lots of bed rest and Monty Python for me, the archives and my splendid blogroll for you, if you need some.

But before I leave you, a few notes and some videos.

First of all, I was shamelessly pleased to discover that Uncertain Times was kindly and thoughtfully introduced by the esteemed Jahsonic. His weblog and Art and Popular Culture Wiki are required reading and reference.

some news:
Sad to say, an American Tourist Is Killed in Beijing
Babies born 8/8/08 at 8:08; 8 pounds, 8 ounces (thx)
Update: Fake-CNN spam mutates as attacks continue

some nugs:
Literary Voyeurism (enough to choke on)
Roald Dahl's “Taste” - Read by John Lithgow for Selected Shorts series on public radio. (don't miss it) (via)
Roadside Architecture is back on the road. (prev)
Darren Aronofsky updated his blog.

some video:

The Chambers Brothers - People Get Ready (via)




From The Last Waltz, The Band performs It Makes No Difference. I forgot how good they were. (via)




August 9th is Frank Zappa Day in Baltimore. Enjoy an excellent live version of Inca Roads.

And finally, Procrastination. (not the one that made the rounds a few months back)



See you tomorrow!

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Anthrax Evidence Called Mostly Circumstantial The evidence amassed by F.B.I. investigators against Dr. Bruce E. Ivins, the Army scientist who killed himself last week after learning that he was likely to be charged in the anthrax letter attacks of 2001, was largely circumstantial, and a grand jury in Washington was planning to hear several more weeks of testimony before issuing an indictment, a person who has been briefed on the investigation said on Sunday. (also) (also) all (via)

Falcon 1 suffers another setback Lost aboard the Falcon was the U.S. military's Trailblazer satellite, two small NASA payloads and a cache of cremated human remains, including the ashes of astronaut Gordon Cooper and Star Trek actor James Doohan. (via)

For Wealthy Brazilian, Money From Ore and Might From the Cosmos “I AM connected to the divine, to these forces here,” João Carlos Cavalcanti, the Brazilian mining magnate, said as he swept an arm out across the lily pad-covered lake behind his $15 million mansion. (via)

Lunch with Heather Perry (self-trepanner) It didn't take that long at all, probably about 20 minutes. Eventually I could feel a lot of fluid moving around. Apparently, there was a bit too much fluid shifting around, because they'd gone a little bit too far and I was leaking some through the hole, but this wasn't especially dangerous as there are three layer of meninges before you get to the brain. (via)

also:
Franz Kafka’s porn brought out of the closet (via)
Moscow's House of Fairy-tales (ht)
Blogging Merit Badge (out of stock) (via)
Make bookends from old vinyl records (via)
KLF - The Manual (How to have a Number One the easy way) (via)

viddy:
Balls Deep--Sewers of Bogota: Part 1 of 5 (don't miss it) (via)
How Buildings Learn - Uploaded by Stewart Brand Himself
Ask an Astronomer - What Will Happen to the Earth When the Sun Dies?
Iain Banks interview (audio)
20 Ways to Die Trying to Dunk a Basketball (via)

Palisades Rathouse: Elderly Twins Fed Local Vermin Population

Illustration by Chris Rahn

Old ladies lovingly nurtured rats, turning a home in one of the nation's priciest enclaves into Willard...

In 1997, I lived in a house on Arabella Street, uptown New Orleans. A couple of blocks away there was a grocery store and across the street was an unpainted, not small, but beat up old house. Every time I would walk by that house, I caught a wiff like you get when you're around a place with a lot of animals. I figured they must have had a fair handful of dogs or cats, or both.

One night I was walking along and I passed by the old stinky house. I heard a rustling in the vine entwisted live oak to my right and when I looked over, staring at me were at least thirty rats, sitting calmly in the vines, or scurrying about. The thing that struck me immediately was that they showed no fear. I had the distinct sense that they were used to being close to humans.

I reflexively jumped to the side and I never walked on that side of the street after that. I saw the rats now and again, but not always.

I would tell friends about what happened and they either wouldn't believe me or didn't really care, so I just stopped bringing it up.

One day, a couple of years later, I received a phone call from a friend, frantically telling me to turn on the television. Apparently, rats had been burrowing into the grocery store and messing things up. Some people got the idea that it might be that house across the street. On the other side of the street from the store and the house was an old Jewish cemetery. A news crew set up in there with cameras on the house. What they found was, the man living there would come out and hold and pet and feed the rats, even kiss them. They lived with him in the house, hundreds of them. They interviewed the guy and he was unphased and unrepentant. He loved those rats.

At least I knew I wasn't hallucinating or imagining things.

The story linked to above seems far more extreme than mine.

via szanalmas

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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)

The unfortunate 'rat people' of Pakistan

Nazia, a 30-year-old with microcephaly. She guards the shoes at the Shua Dulah shrine

'Rat people' forced to beg on Pakistan's streets:

Outside a Muslim shrine in this dusty Pakistani city, a "rat woman" with a tiny head sits on a filthy mattress and takes money from worshippers who cling to an ancient fertility rite.

Nadia, 25, is one of hundreds of young microcephalics -- people born with small skulls and protruding noses and ears because of a genetic mutation -- who can be found on the streets of Gujrat, in central Punjab province.

Officials say many of them have been sold off by their families to begging mafias, who exploit a tradition that the "rat children" are sacred offerings to Shah Daula, the shrine's 17th century Sufi saint.

What makes us human?:

The word "microcephaly" comes from the Greek, "small head". But in Pakistan, such children are known as chuas or "rat people". The name is uncharitable but apt, for their sloping foreheads and narrow faces do, indeed, have a rodent quality. When I visited the shrine earlier this year, I found only one chua, a 30-year-old woman called Nazia. Mentally disabled - I would judge her intelligence to be about that of a one- or two-year-old child - her nominal function is to guard the shoes that worshippers leave at its entrance, but that work seems to be mostly done by her companion, a charming hypopituitary dwarf called Nazir.

via Sepia Mutiny

Baby's First Heater

Andrew Jacobs:

About 350 million of China’s 1.3 billion people are regular smokers, more than the entire population of the United States, and even though 1.2 million people die each year from smoking-related causes, there is a widespread belief that cigarettes hold some health benefits. A cigarette in the morning is energizing, many smokers will declare, and even when confronted with scientific reason, they will cite Deng Xiaoping, an inveterate smoker who lived to 92, and Mao Zedong, who lived to 82.

China produces a third of the world’s tobacco, with more than 400 domestic brands offered at Beijing’s ubiquitous tobacco shops. During a debate over antismoking measures last year, Zhang Baozhen, a vice director of the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration, warned that “without cigarettes the country’s stability will be affected.”

via Unwell.