FBI rolls out the heavy gear for Obama's inauguration

Not sparing any precautions, the FBI has deployed a small fleet of vehicles and a load of high tech to aid the security detail for the inauguration ceremonies today. This will include a mobile command post, an evidence collection unit, an armored assault vehicle, and a hardened chamber designed to contain and transport explosives. (images)

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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.

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Mafiaboy grows up; a hacker seeks redemption The Internet attack took Yahoo Inc. engineers by surprise. It came so fast and with such intensity that Yahoo, then the Web's second most-popular destination, was knocked offline for about three hours. That was on the morning of Feb. 7, 2000. A few months later, 15-year-old Michael Calce was watching Goodfellas at a friend's house in the suburbs of Montreal when he got a 3 a.m. call on his cell phone. His father was on the line. "They're here," he said. A hacker seeks a career. This seems to be the standard arc: make news, get busted, do time, write a book, become a security consultant.

Follow up: Almost human: Interview with a chatbot No machine has yet passed. But the winner of the Loebner Prize at the weekend – Elbot, brainchild of Fred Roberts at Artificial Solutions in Germany – came close, according to the contest's rather generous rules.

Ocean Containers To Bury According to most survivalist sites, ocean containers can be buried, hidden away under the ground outfitted with electricals, rudementary plumbing, and all the food and water you can store for several months of keeping a low profile. While we at American Steel have seen it done, I'd like to give a word of caution.... Anyone planning to use a container for anything should take note. (via)

Downloads soar despite crackdown Music downloads among US adults have risen sharply during the past several months, despite a crackdown by the music industry to curb such behaviour. Few I know could afford their music collection. (via)

also:
Recurring science misconceptions in K-6 textbooks (via)
First look at Downey Jr and Jude Law as Holmes and Watson
$56,000 Turntable Only An Audiophile Could Love
Surrealist techniques (via)

viddy:
Buffalo Dance featuring Hair Coat, Last Horse, and Parts His Hair
Trio: Da Da Da
Alien Contact: What will happen on October 14 (thx, dave)

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Right Thing to Wear at the Wrong End of a Gun There are bulletproof leather jackets and bulletproof polo shirts. Armored guayabera shirts hang next to protective windbreakers, parkas and even white ruffled tuxedo shirts. Every member of the sales staff has had to take a turn being shot while wearing one of the products, which range from a few hundred dollars to as much as $7,000, so they can attest to the efficacy of the secret fabric.

also:
Was Life on Mars Extinguished Prematurely by a Huge Impact? (via)
Man of steel (rare Richard Serra interview)
Liveblogging a pending asteroid strike

Futility Closet - Allied Reptiles In February 1945, the British 14th Army had surrounded a mass of fleeing Japanese in a mangrove swamp in southern Burma. In the swamp were thousands of saltwater crocodiles, averaging 15 feet long, but the Japanese refused to surrender...

viddy:
Kraftwerk - Radioactivity (live)
Video Inside the Chernobyl Sarcophagus
Jack Kerouac reads from Doctor Sax in 1961
The Weather Underground (feature length doc)

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Crick was right about 'vision filter' in the brain As you read this sentence, your mind hones in on each word and blots out the rest of the page. This roving spot of attention tames the flood of visual information that hundreds of thousand of nerves attached to the back of your eye's retina stream into the brain. So far, most scientists held that the brain's outermost layer and main site of consciousness, the cortex, is responsible for housing the attention steering mechanisms that sort out all this sensory input. But back in 1984, the co-discoverer of DNA Francis Crick suggested that a simpler structure called the thalamus may also play a part in this process. Once thought to be only a highway that connects the eyes to the cortex, it could contain a mental searchlight that filters what we pay attention to, Crick proposed.

Using Video Games as Bait to Hook Readers Increasingly, authors, teachers, librarians and publishers are embracing this fast-paced, image-laden world in the hope that the games will draw children to reading.

Welcome to the official site for the BBC Prison Study The BBC Prison Study explores the social and psychological consequences of putting people in groups of unequal power. It examines when people accept inequality and when they challenge it. Based on the Stanford Prison Experiment. (via)

also:
King Wenceslas of Bohemia
American Revolution 101
Louis Prima and Space Junk "Wanting connections, we found connections -- always, everywhere, and between everything." Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum. (wink)
Top 10 Everyday Things People Do To Ruin Their Cars (via)

viddy:
Generation Tehran (roughly 70% of Iran's population is under 30 and they're hungry for change) (via)
Elvis is not dead And he's hacking RFID passport scanners.
Sinatra and Jobim (nice)
Cziffra playing Liszt's Transcendental Etude no.10 (smokin')

Nuclear Emergency Response

Livermore’s nuclear emergency response capabilities were tested in Operation Morning Light in 1978.

from: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories Science & Technology Review

Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST)
How Nuclear Detectives Work

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How the Music Business Spent the Summer Killing Itself Labels Pull Albums off iTunes, RIAA Goes After Internet Radio -- When Will They Ever Learn? Idiots. I think this lunacy is driven by lawyers who convince behind-the-times executives that the world is ending in order to fatten their bank accounts with the fees they collect filing cease and desist notices, removing videos from YouTube, and prosecuting their customer base.

The mass graveyard of the blogosphere How many dead blogs do you think exist in the blogosphere today? Take a guess… A couple of million perhaps…? Try again. According to Technorati and PC Mag, in 2007 the number stood at 200 million! Yes, 200 million! Which means blogs are now officially abandoned more often than red headed step children. More research from Perseus on blogging abandonment behaviour found that 66% of blogs hadn’t been updated for two months. So why is it that the blogosphere represents a mass graveyard of unfulfilled intentions? (via)

Clueless smugglers find 'gold' is uranium One thing puzzled them. At night, a report on a local government website said, “they were surprised that, when the lights went out, the treasure sparkled and glittered”. One of the men, identified as Mr Wang, “chipped a piece from it and kept it beside his bed — sometimes playing with it”.... “To prevent the sample being lost or stolen on the way, Mr Wang used tape to stick the unidentified treasure to his body, and it never left him night or day.”

Do No Harm To Humans: Real-life Robots Obey Asimov’s Laws European researchers have developed technology enabling robots to obey Asimov’s golden rules of robotics: to do no harm to humans and to obey them.

Shadow analysis could spot terrorists by their walk By analysing the movements of human shadows in aerial and satellite footage, JPL engineer Adrian Stoica says it should be possible to identify people from the way they walk - a technique called gait analysis, whose power lies in the fact that a person's walking style is very hard to disguise. (via)

Dairy farmers: True IT pioneers The dairy industry was an early adopter of information technology, and dairy farms have been among the most aggressive businesses in the agricultural industry at applying IT. Dairy IT got its start in the 1950s, when an IBM mainframe was used to develop the first dairy records management system and a genetics database...

also:
Nazi-era photos surface in Bolivia
The Global Album Cover Map (via)
Psychic investigator looks into spooky painting (via)
Finding a new position as a mature job hunter
John Titor weighs in on the LHC (entertaining) (via)

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Mexico's Cocaine Capital The bullet holes in the safe-house door tell you who's winning Mexico's drug war. The armor-piercing ammunition, fired from the inside by drug traffickers, shredded the 20-gauge steel like small cannonballs; the rounds fired from the outside, by federal police, merely punctured the metal like so much bird shot. After that midnight firefight on May 27--the result of a botched police raid in the desert city of Culiacán in northwestern Mexico--seven cops lay dead. Only one narco gunman died; the rest, at least half a dozen, escaped. For neighbors, the carnage carried an unambiguous message. "I realized," says Victor Rodríguez, a fishmonger and family man, "that the power of the narcos has surpassed the power of my government."

Cyber War and Cyber Terrorism in India India is also suffering from the menaces of cyber war and cyber terrorism. Nobody cares about any these threats in India. Far more citizens were concerned of the Amarnath issue than by potential risks of nuclear conflict, or near-breakdowns in Net and mobile security. China's intensified cyber warfare against India is becoming a serious threat to national security. (via)

India's 'fragrant' rubbish dumps Authorities in the western Indian city of Mumbai (Bombay) have been dousing rubbish dumps with perfume to lessen the putrid stench. Loved this: "Segregation of garbage is the solution to reducing stench," he said. (via)

also:
He dreamt up Bond, but did Fleming also create the CIA? (maybe helped) (via)
13 things that do not make sense (via)
A Conversation with Malcolm McDowell (audio)

viddy:
Buzz Aldrin Interview
Jay J. Ames, private investigator with hands of steel
Gordon Bradt's Six Man Clock Kinetic Sculpture
Interview with Douglas Hofstadter (en français)

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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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Science close to unveiling invisible man Invisibilty devices, long the realm of science fiction and fantasy, have moved closer after scientists engineered a material that can bend visible light around objects.

How to blow it It's the most winnable presidential election in American history - but the Democrats are old hands at losing. Michael Moore offers some helpful hints on how they might gift it all to the Republicans. (via)

Covert operation floats network-sniffing balloon Hidden in the back of a 22-foot moving truck, Hill and his team of about a dozen volunteers launched the balloon Friday morning, sending it 150 feet into the air for about 20 minutes to use special antennas and scanning software to scope out the Las Vegas skyline for unsecured wireless networks, an activity Hill calls "warballooning." Hackers have practiced wardriving for years, driving around in cars with computers and specialized software that sniffs for networks.

Controller praised for texting pilot down safely Five people on a flight from Kerry to Jersey received mobile phone text instructions from a quick-thinking air traffic controller when he guided them in to a safe landing at Cork. (via)

What's the big deal? It's the little things Again and again, American history has turned on the dime of such tiny things. The Watergate conspiracy might have unraveled no matter what, but it was a strip of tape on a Watergate building office door that alerted a security guard that burglars were about. Jimmy Carter's presidency might have crashed and burned anyway, but it was a crashing and burning helicopter in the sands of Iran during a failed rescue of American hostages that may have sealed his loss in 1980... The way small causes yield huge effects is itself only one piece of the much grander idea of simplexity, a science that is increasingly being studied at universities and institutes around the world... (via)

Is That a Real Reality, or Did You Make It Up Yourself? The idea that music can transform reality predates by many millennia the category "music" as we know it. Before art was understood as a phenomenon in itself apart from its ritual application (a relatively recent and culturally specific development), what we now call music was indistinguishable from magic. (via)

Vin Mariani A good 20 years before the original cocaine-infused Coca-Cola taught the world to grind its teeth and give ineffectual bathroom-stall handjobs in per•fect har•mo•ny, there was another drink of choice among those wishing to feel invigorated and overconfident for no good reason. It was called “coca wine” and it was loved not only by self-important blowhards wearing too much jewelry but by Kings and Popes and…

also:
Two Great Stories - BOTH TRUE - and worth reading!
I don’t care about fonts (via)
Penniless author sells shares in next novel (good idea) (via)
Athlete-bloggers at the Beijing Olympics
The Hardest Places in the World to Find a Bathroom
A Look at the Secret Service, and More from CRS

viddy:
Lecture on Marcus Auprelius (via)
Reggie Watts - F*$K,S#%T,STACK (NSFW) (via)
daedelus on the monome

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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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!

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Texters hurt as they walk, ride — even cook ER docs warn of serious injuries, deaths from text-message mishaps. I've seen people walk into phone poles and out in front of moving vehicles while texting. (via)

More Performance and cognitive enhancement “Within the next few years, we’ll see the second generation of these drugs,” says Mark Gordon, an endocrinologist in Los Angeles. “Like all second-generation drugs, they will be stronger, longer-lasting, and have fewer side effects.” (via)

Floatation tank horror A 30-year-old became the first person ever to drown in a floatation tank, an inquest heard yesterday. James Richardson, of Woodley, died in Floatnation in Oxford Road after taking the drug ketamine – used to tranquillise horses. Well, I can scratch that off my list of things to do before I die. (via)

also:
How to build a free computer from spare parts
76-year-old experimental music legend Pauline Oliveros on WFMU
Are figs really full of baby wasps?
19 Portrait Photography Tutorials (via)
The 7 Biggest Asshole Computers in Science Fiction (via)
Montana Meth Project does not pull any punches. (via)

viddy:
Intriguing Bigfoot video (real or hoax, it's pretty good)
Social engineering: How to Get Into Any Club (this method probably won't work forever, but it is worth a look) (via)
419 - the Nigerian Scam trailer (via)
Iran Missile Test (yeah, that one)
Darth Vader Meets Wolfman Jack!

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How medical marijuana is transforming the pot industry Most researchers agree that the value of the U.S. marijuana crop has increased sharply since the mid-nineties, as California and twelve other states have passed medical-marijuana laws. A drug-policy analyst named Jon Gettman recently estimated that in 2006 Californians grew more than twenty million pot plants. He reckoned that between 1981 and 2006 domestic marijuana production increased tenfold, making pot the leading cash crop in America, displacing corn. A 2005 State Department report put the country’s marijuana crop at twenty-two million pounds. The street value of California’s crop alone may be as high as fourteen billion dollars. (via)

For Some Products, Prices Have Been Falling A fair bit in the last ten years, too. (via)

Unidentified Flying Threats A healthy skepticism about extraterrestrial space travelers leads people to disregard U.F.O. sightings without a moment’s thought. But in the United States, this translates into overdependence on radar data and indifference to all kinds of unidentified aircraft — a weakness that could be exploited by terrorists or anyone seeking to engage in espionage against the United States. (via)

Extradition appeal for British hacker dismissed A British hacker who admitted breaking into U.S. military computers hoping to uncover evidence of UFOs looks set to be extradited to the U.S. after the highest British court dismissed his appeal against the extradition on Wednesday. This guy is facing 60 years in prison for "hacking" wide open, non-password-protected military computers using a 56k modem. It was found afterward that entire suites of computers were unprotected by the most basic login passwords. They should give this guy a medal and throw their sysadmins in prison. Our government is an embarrassment. (more)

Hacking Without Exploits Black Hat researchers will demonstrate how the bad guys are quietly raking in big bucks without ninja hacking skills, tools, or exploit code (via)

Man deposits millions, one tattered bill at a time For years, authorities say, he and his family have popped in and out of U.S. banks, looking to change about $20 million in decaying $100 bills for clean cash, offering ever-changing stories... (via)

Building 'The Matrix' Now physicists have created a rudimentary prototype of a machine that simulates quantum phenomena using quantum physics, rather than using data kept in a classical computer. While the new device can't make people fly like the Matrix does, it demonstrates a technique that could enable physicists to create, in the virtual world, materials that don't yet exist in nature and perhaps figure out how to build, in the real world, superconductors that work at room temperature, for example. (via)

One teabag, one spoonful of neurotoxins The PBOI says of aspartame: “The chemical caused an unacceptable level of brain tumors in animal testing. Based on this fact, the PBOI ruled that aspartame should not be added to the food supply.” Add to that all the microwaves pumped into your brain by cellphones and you have quite a toxic brew. (via)

also:
Widespread Flaws in Online Banking Systems
Bush Administration Scandal Map (via)
Six Vacation Photos That Can Kill You (via)
Fly 1950s style From the end of July until the end of the year, Finnair’s retro plane, Silver Bird, will fly to several destinations. The cabin crew will wear 1950s-style uniforms and the beat of music from the 50s will spur the takeoff. (via)
10 Most Bizarre Restaurants
The Bureau of Atomic Tourism (via)
Billy Bob Thornton on his music and movies Big Zappa and Beefheart fan. (via)
Laurie Anderson Interview (via)
Glitter And Doom: Tom Waits In Concert Hear A Stunning Performance, Recorded At Atlanta's Fox Theater (via)
Steve Reich Interview (podcast) (via)
Voodoo Funk Record Digging in West Africa (via)

viddy:
Julie Driscoll - Season Of The Witch (groovy)
More Traffic in Tehran (even better)
I Love Sarah Jane Excellent zombie short. NSFW
Tank Man A documentary about the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.

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Nukes Are Not the Best Way to Stop an Asteroid Although Schweickart has a great deal of faith in the agency, enough to risk his life piloting their lunar lander, he feels that they issued the misleading statement -- under immense political pressure. It was a nefarious excuse to put nuclear weapons in space.

Adventurer Steve Fossett 'may have faked his own death' "I've been doing this search and rescue for 14 years. Fossett should have been found.... "It's not like we didn't have our eyes open. We found six other planes while we were looking for him. We're pretty good at what we do." (via)

Headline of the Day: Human sperm from dental pulp via mouse testicles

Despite pain, woman believes in better days thanks to 'X-Files' Rock on, Kathy Green. (via)

Her Own Society A new reading of Emily Dickinson.

also:
"Comments on Comments" (a must)
Does everyone have claustrophobia?
Schneier Interviewed by RU Sirius (transcript) (via)
RU Sirius banned from Facebook for using a pseudonym (via)
Tomb reveals ancient trade network (via)
Smithsonian Podcasts (wow) (via)
Medpedia (via) (via)
Twitter me Ishmael Starting today, this Twitter account will post one paragraph from Moby-Dick every hour from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.

viddy:
Last.fm + YouTube = music tv goodness (via)
Joel Hodgson's Jollyfilter Test Video proof of concept is sound (via) (via)
Hans Richter - Vormittagsspuk (1928) The nazis destroyed the sound version of this film as "degenerate art".

Of course unmoderated anonymous comments on the internet can be incomprehensibly awful and frustratingly stupid. They can also be heartbreakingly sincere and shatteringly honest. That’s because they’re written by real people, and real people are complicated, messy, and weird. -- Derek Powazek (via) (good one, Guy)

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So Much for the 'Looted Sites' A recent mission to Iraq headed by top archaeologists from the U.S. and U.K. who specialize in Mesopotamia found that, contrary to received wisdom, southern Iraq's most important historic sites -- eight of them -- had neither been seriously damaged nor looted after the American invasion. (via)

Cyber-capos: How cybercriminals mirror the mafia and businesses Cybercrime, the harvesting and sale of credit card and other data for online fraud and theft, is a "shadow economy" that mimics the real business world in its practices and the mafia in its structure, according to a new report from security firm Finjan. I wonder how much of this is typical security-pro-speak, exagerrated to generate the requisite fear to sell more security? (via)

How China's taking over Africa, and why the West should be VERY worried While the bounty has, not surprisingly, been welcomed by African dictators, the people of Africa are less impressed. At a market in Zimbabwe recently, where Chinese goods were on sale at nearly every stall, one woman told me she would not waste her money on 'Zing-Zong' products. 'They go Zing when they work, and then they quickly go Zong and break,' she said. 'They are a waste of money. But there's nothing else. China is the only country that will do business with us.' (via)

also:

Yeats Meets the Digital Age, Full of Passionate Intensity (via)
Videogames getting minds of their own
Alabama man turns 112, still spends days drawing

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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)

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Chinese troops guarding carrots, tomatoes and one lonesome uglyfruit.

True to form, CIA keeps its spy museum hush-hush I hear the NSA's is even more so. (via)

Unbreakable Fighting Umbrella Splits Watermelons, Defends Presidents I would like to take a moment to tell you how happy I am with my new umbrella. Having been a martial artist for over 30 years I have always wished to find a umbrella that could stand the strain of being used in a true self-defense situation. Your umbrella has answered that call and more! Be sure to check out the video. (via)

New service tracks missing laptops for free When the team members first started work on Adeona, it wasn't the tracking and retrieval of missing laptops that piqued their curiosity. It was a privacy problem: How could they build a laptop-tracking service that was so private that even the people running the service could not discover the location of the laptop?

Overreacting to a Computer Beating Poker Pros Newspapers trumpeted a landmark event last week: a computer program beating professional poker players head-to-head at Limit Hold-Em. Parallels have been drawn to Big Blue’s victory over Gary Kasparov roughly a decade ago. Those parallels are not very meaningful.

Out of this world Iain Banks on how practising with SF led to The Wasp Factory The Wasp Factory was Iain Banks's first novel, right? Try sixth. (via)

S. Darko Ed Harcourt is writing the score.

Poppy powder a cheap 'high' Unlike opium, which oozes out as a milky substance from a lacerated poppy bud, poppy powder is made by grinding dried buds from the dried plants, sold in flower shops for decorative purposes. It's a simple process, and in recent years the powder has been increasingly popular in the burgeoning community of Indian origin west of Toronto. They call it "dode" and it's being used as a stimulant. (via)

Man cuts off own head with chainsaw after flat is earmarked to be bulldozed by developers It is understood police are not treating his death as suspicious. Just extremely fucked up. How do you psyche yourself up for that? (via)

Absurd Entries in the OED Ammon Shea spent a year working his way through the Oxford English Dictionary. The result is his book Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. But in the run-up to his book’s publication, Shea shared many of his most bizarre finds in an Oxford University Press blog.

also:
Interval signals, signature tunes, airchecks and identification announcements from international, domestic, and clandestine radio stations around the world (via)
Allmenus has 244,822 menus in 8,146 cities nationwide. (via)
13 Things Your Waiter Won’t Tell You

stray bullets

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)

Cyberspace Operator Badge

*Proposed Cyberspace Operator Badge (USAF). Awaiting wear criteria approval.

via Strategy Page