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Cannibal call not a hoax: The woman, known only as Anthea from Guisborough, rang up the Breakfast Show after DJ Graham Mack asked listeners about the most unusual thing they had eaten. The topic sparked a flurry of calls from Teessiders who had eaten sea urchins, monkey brains and play doh. But nothing prepared him for Anthea who calmly said: “I’ve eaten human being”. A shocked Mr Mack replied slowly: “Oh my goodness. Right, all bets are off. You can’t beat that. How come you were a cannibal?” (listen to the call) I believe her. What do yo think? (via)

also:
Terry and Harry Gilliam: being and having a famous parent (via)
Malcolm Gladwell Talks Sports (via)
Cryptome Eyeball: Obama Chicago Home Security Zone
dublab podcast: David Axelrod interview

60-Second Science: Broken Windows Crime Theory It’s called the "broken windows" theory and it says that in a neighborhood where buildings have broken windows, people are more likely to engage in bad behavior. Broken windows are contagious.

Word Spy: "mug me" earphones n. The distinctive white cord and earbuds associated with the often-stolen Apple iPod digital music player. Also: mug-me earphones.

viddy:
The most outrageous day on The Price is Right
Japanese Man Makes Mexico Airport Home

Wow, this is the first stray bullets since the day before the election. I'll be getting more of these up as I get some traction. The November Debacle really threw me off my game.

Studs Terkel (1912-2008)

A life fully lived.

Studs Terkel: Conversations with America
Conversations with History: Studs Terkel (YouTube) (via)
Conversation with Studs Terkel (via)

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Bringing a Trove of Medieval Manuscripts Online for the Ages One of the oldest and most valuable collections of handwritten medieval books in the world, housed in the magnificent baroque halls of the library in this town’s abbey, is going online... (roughly 7,000 handwritten manuscripts, many over a thousand years old)

Martin Scorsese and me - mentored by a master Celina Murga has experienced what all young film-makers must dream of – being mentored by Martin Scorsese. The master craftsman of American cinema explains why fostering talent is important to him, while Murga reveals what it’s like to be on set with a legend.

Black and white TV generation have monochrome dreams I'm not from that generation, but I watched a lot of B&W growing up. I have no recollection of any monochrome dreams. The white in B&W television always looked blue to me. I have an aunt that can tell what color something is in black and white. The family always razzed her for it, but I think maybe she could.

Obscure History: Let The Military Help In A Heist On October 17th, 1906, Wilhelm Voigt, a 57-year-old German shoemaker, impersonates an army officer and leads an entire squad of soldiers to help him steal 4,000 marks.

also:
Home Movie Day!!
The Invisible Library (list of fictional books from fiction) (via)
Giant Plush Microbes (all the favorites) (via)
FACT mix: Murcof
Black Swan Glossary (Taleb) (via)
Penguin Cover Notebooks (via)
Qwitter e-mails you when someone stops following you on Twitter...

viddy:
The Power of Art: Caravaggio (via)
Jim Henson - Ripples (via)
Diego Stocco: DIY Musical Machines

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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!

David Perry: Will videogames become better than life?

This is a good one. It's especially worth watching for the short film in the last half.

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Surveillance made easy Now German electronics company Siemens has gone a step further, developing a complete "surveillance in a box" system called the Intelligence Platform, designed for security services in Europe and Asia. It has already sold the system to 60 countries. According to a document obtained by New Scientist, the system integrates tasks typically done by separate surveillance teams or machines, pooling data from sources such as telephone calls, email and internet activity, bank transactions and insurance records. It then sorts through this mountain of information using software that Siemens dubs "intelligence modules".... However, it is far from clear whether the technology will prove accurate. Security experts warn that data-fusion technologies tend to produce a huge number of false positives, flagging up perfectly innocent people as suspicious.

Revealed: 8 million victims in the world's biggest cyber heist A Sunday Herald investigation has discovered that late on Thursday night, a previously unknown Indian hacker successfully breached the IT defences of the Best Western Hotel group's online booking system and sold details of how to access it through an underground network operated by the Russian mafia. (via)

Historian suggests Southerners defeated Confederacy This interview will blow away everything you thought you knew about the South and the Civil War. It is a matter of fact that a majority (95+%) of Southerners did not own slaves. A substantial and in some places an overwhelming majority did not support the Confederacy. To this day, Southerners bear the brunt of negative popular opinion that they do not deserve. Most people in the South are not racist and are some of the finest, friendliest and most neighborly people I have met in this country. It's time that people pulled their heads out on this issue.

In a Father’s Clutter, Historic Oddities When her father, John Lattimer, died in May of 2007 at the age of 92, Ms. Lattimer knew her inheritance would include more than the family tea set. Dr. Lattimer, a prominent urologist at Columbia University, was also a renowned collector of relics, many of which might be considered quirky or even macabre. Over the course of seven decades he amassed more than 3,000 objects that ranged in age from a few years to tens of millions of years. “He was like a classic Renaissance collector,” said Tony Perrottet, a writer specializing in historical mysteries who spent time with Dr. Lattimer before his death. “Anything and everything could turn up in the collection, from Charles Lindbergh’s goggles to a bearskin coat that belonged to Custer.”

also:
The next president will disappoint you
Opinion: Why Google has lost its mojo -- and why you should care
Models of Invention: the Science Fiction of Leonardo da Vinci (via)
Help Crack the Russian Hacker Mystery
Early American Counterfeiting
Myra Hindley painting taints London 2012 celebrations
Michael Chabon on 'writers who can dwell between worlds' (via)
Open Sound New Orleans ~A Collaborative Soundmap of the City~ (via)
Fellini's Book of Dreams

viddy:
Mars: Springtime 2020
UCB: Hot Chicks Room
Herbie Hancock - Crossings - Oeuvre réalisée par Philippe Charpentier

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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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Beijing Taxis Are Rigged for Eavesdropping As with digital cameras used in cities such as London, Sydney or New York, the stated purpose of the microphones is to protect the driver. But whereas the devices in other countries can only record images, those devices in Beijing taxis can be remotely activated without the driver's knowledge to eavesdrop on passengers, according to drivers and Yaxon Networks Co., a Chinese company that makes some of the systems used in Beijing. The machines can even remotely shut off engines. The whole world is rigged for eavesdropping. (via)

They Will Survive UNLESS John D. McCann, the managing director of Survival Resources, based in Hyde Park, N.Y., is wearing a suit for some sort of business meeting, he always carries in his pants pocket an Altoids tin. There are no mints inside it. Instead, he painstakingly packs the tin — which he explains can double as a mini-frying pan if you’re ever marooned in the wilderness — with a remarkable assortment of worst-case scenario supplies. Survival is good. (via)

Credit card thieves ran a polite, professional help desk Organized criminals often seen to be a step or two ahead of the competition. Many of us would settle for a help desk that was helpful.

also:
The Most Important Generation in History is the One Now Alive
blog all dog-eared pages: understanding media (McLuhan)
Top 50 Dystopian Movies of All Time (like the list, not the order) (via)
Gear Porn: Chemical Brothers Daft Punk
Cleveland Museum of Art via Flickr
Bartleby, the Scrivener.pdf (via)
The temple of tame tigers (photo essay) (patient, maybe)
A PhD in Ufology (via)
Frankie Knuckles Interview
Michel Gondry writes a comic book (via)

viddy:
An Interview With Jim Coudal (via)
The Prisoner: Caviezel and McKellen's First Reading
Smart Birds use cars to open their food (via)
Silent Shadow of the Bat-Man
Lessig on i-9/11
Powers of Ten A film dealing with the relative size of things in the universe and the effect of adding another zero.
Ladislas Starewicz - The Mascot, 1933 (creepy stop-motion animation) (more Starewicz)
Late Night TV in Japan: Spanking Class (this guy takes his spanking seriously)
MST3K 624: Samson Vs The Vampire Women (one of the best) (via)

Greetings San Martín De Sarroca!

Doodles, Drafts and Designs

Doodles, Drafts and Designs:

Engineers, inventors, and designers produce drawings as part of their creative process. They draw to work out and refine concepts and details. They draw to persuade. They draw to give direction. And they draw to record their ideas and to learn from others.

This exhibition presents examples of industrial drawings in the collections of the National Museum of American History and the Smithsonian Institution Libraries. Some are working drawings, ideas sketched in pencil or ink. Others are more finished, designed for presentation. A few are printed, either as sales material or as part of a patent application. They visually document American industrial creativity, from inventor's hand and investor's boardroom, to patent office, factory floor, and manufacturer's showroom.

Loads of fascinating images, from rough scribbles to fine draftsmanship, many both.

via Glasgow School of Art Library

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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)

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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)

Plato's Cave

Dead on, from beginning to end.

The Allegory of the Cave
The Republic

via Dedroidify

Alan Moore's Advice for Young Artists

Watch the whole interview here

via Pyr-o-mania

The Value of Science Fiction

aboutsf:

Nine legendary authors present their ideas on why SF is important to readers and what it teaches them. These excerpts are from a series of interviews and lectures done from 1968-1978 by Prof. James Gunn at the University of Kansas. Full interviews are on the Literature of SF DVD available at http://www2.ku.edu/~sfcenter/. It's brought to you by AboutSF and the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas. For more info, visit http://www.aboutsf.com.

It was most interesting to see these guys speak. I was never one to look into the authors, I just like to read their books.

via SF Signal

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A good night's sleep really does improve the brain Sleep appears to strengthen connections between communicating nerve cells in the brain - a process thought to form the basis of learning and memory. I know from experience that my brain functions better on more sleep. If I could chart it, you'd see a correlation between how well rested I am and how many typos and mistakes you'll find on this weblog. (via)

I've lost my key. Can you pass me that banana? Lock-picking enthusiasts are cracking the 'uncrackable' in increasingly creative ways. And locksmiths aren't happy about it. (via)

Buckminster Fuller Challenge Idea Index Launched The BFI has launched an interactive, searchable database of entries to the 2008 Buckminster Fuller Challenge. There are some great ideas in there. Loads of them, actually. I'm still getting through them.

also:
An Interview With Alan Moore
Can you assemble a superteam of real human wonders?
Amon Tobin's website is amazing (some of those things that look like debris flying by are zoomable and explorable critters)

star

...was once is still part of a star

via watcher of the skies

curator

* A new type of artist arises: someone whose task is to gather together existing but overlooked pieces of amateur art, and, by directing attention onto them, to make them important. (This is part of a much larger theory of mine about the new role of curatorship, the big job of the next century.) -- Brian Eno

big ups Guy

David Lynch: Where Ideas Come From

David Lynch on the creative process.

David Lynch
The Atlantic Podcasts
via The Morning News

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Shortsighted Statecraft: Washington's Muddled Middle East Policy (worthwhile); Journalist 'reported own murders' Police in Macedonia have arrested a journalist on suspicion that he is behind three murders he reported on. (via); Senor Coconut Takes Listeners Around The World

Moodstream by Getty Images (I'm still getting a feel for this, let me know how you like it) (via)

Moodstream is a powerful brainstorming tool designed to help take you in inspiring, unexprected directions. Whether you want images, footage or audio, or just need a stream of fresh ideas, tweak the Moodstream sliders to bring a whole new creative palette straight to you.

Have a marvelous summer Sunday

John Naisbitt: Drowning in information and starving for knowledge

Megatrends author John Naisbitt shares some thoughts on the future, information and change.

I'm in accord with the idea that there is a lot of hype around the concept of constant change. As far as I see it, we still eat food, drink water and breathe air and until you walk through my living room wall, I'll assume the laws of physics are still in place. That along with everything else shows that despite dramatic changes in certain aspects of this reality being fairly constant, the basics are still the same. I visualize it as a yin and yang-like relationship between the static and dynamic.

I think these points are relevant to the recent Singularity, aka the Rapture of the Nerds, (see also) kerfuffle. I agree with the Transhumanists in the sense that technological advances could, especially in the case of artificial intelligence, spiral off into something barely recognizable or cognizable. The thing is, if any technology were to outspan its utility, and it would if something like the Singularity were to occur, I think we'd be more inclined to bottle it up or shut it off completely. If you turn your stereo up so loud that the sound is distorted and the speakers are about to blow, you cut back a bit and find the right volume. If some wise-guy tries to sell you some new advanced speakers that could handle the power but would blow your eardrums out, break your windows and piss off your neighbors, what use is that?

If the Singularity is useless to us on a basic keep-the-trains- running-on-time sort of way then we'll make cool games with it or, more likely, the military will try to find some way to weaponize it. If we can't do that, we'll cast it away. We'll still need air and water and food and power and sex and to go to the bathroom. I just don't buy into the idea that we'll lamely stand by while some uber-intelligence flies off the charts and decides humans are obsolete. Remember, we control the breakers and if they take that control away, we'll blow the shit out of the power plant.

So what can we take away from all this? Well, if you strip away the eyebright and ooh-wow of the technological hype machine, you'll find that an overwhelming majority of the human beings on this planet are faced with the same basic problems and survival challenges, just within changing scales and contexts and hopefully with diminishing suffering and inconvenience and increasing efficiency and ease, though that might be a bit too optimistic at this crossroads.

It would be to their, and our, advantage if futurists moved from the realm of science fiction more into the world of non-fiction.

via MediaFuturist