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People Staring at Computers
The US Secret Service has raided the home of an artist who collected images from webcams in a New York Apple store. The tumblr is still up, as is a explanation of the project by the artist at F.A.T.
Makes Part One Look Like "My Little Pony"
The Human Centipede sequel just too horrible to show, says BBFC. In the sequel, a man becomes erotically obsessed with a DVD copy of the original film – in which the victims are surgically stitched together mouth to anus – and decides to recreate the idea. Director Tom Six responds to news of the ban. Teaser preview. [Descriptions of events in film are NSFW; teaser preview is just silly.]
To The Finland Station
Portugal, in the throes of an IMF / EU bailout that Finland could block, sends a video letter to convince Finland to support the rescue effort. Finland responds. Bonus: crisis the focus of Portugal's Eurovision entry this year.
Murdochileaks
Documents and databases: They're key to modern journalism. But they're almost always hidden behind locked doors, especially when they detail wrongdoing such as fraud, abuse, pollution, insider trading, and other harms. That's why we need your help. The Wall Street Journal launches a "safe house" for whistleblowers. There's instant criticism, plus the question: will anybody use the site? (P.S. don't forget to read the Terms of Use).
Been Caught Stealin'
The urge is mightier than the pen for Vaclav Klaus. Of course, it goes viral, even though Chilean officials say it was a gift.
AtariPadGasm
Atari Brings 100 Retro Titles to iOS in "Atari's Greatest Hits". Designed for the iCade. Toucharcade review. ArsTecnica review. Does it break the iTunes App rules?.
Chump Change
A Euro Scam That Unfolded at a Snail's Pace
“It wasn’t so unusual to get coins from China,” said Susanne Kreutzer, a Bundesbank spokesman. “That is a business model for some people.”
Use Cheap Vodka
"The Bloody Mary has been called the world's most complex cocktail, and from the standpoint of flavor chemistry, you've got a blend of hundreds of flavor compounds that act on the taste senses. It covers almost the entire range of human taste sensations -- sweet, salty, sour and umami or savory -- but not bitter." Research that's part of the International Year of Chemistry.
Holy Crap
An anonymous writer is sticking his or her novel, titled Holy Crap, to a series of street lamps in New York City's East Village, one page at a time.
New York Post report.
Village Voice report.
Yahoo report.
Picture of Page 7.
Picture of Page 8.
Screw Tops
Meet Andrew Myers, one of the most patient modern-day sculptors around. He starts with a base, plywood panel, and then places pages of a phone book on top. He then draws out a face and pre-drills 8,000 to 10,000 holes, by hand. As he drills in the screws, Myers doesn't rely on any computer software to guide him, he figures it out as he goes along. "For me, I consider this a traditional sculpture and all my screws are at different depths," he says.
Other work by Andrew Myers.
Angry Bird-day To You, Angry Bird-day To You
We Make Cameras See Things
Yangsky's cognitive vision solutions cover the spectrum from applications that allow end users to use webcams for visual tasks such as flame detection, bar code reading, home security, and allow enterprisers to use industrial video cameras for visual tasks such as traffic monitoring, fire alarm, and visual tracking.
Tura Santana, RIP
Tura Satana, the actress whose authoritative presence, exotic looks and buxom frame commanded the attention of viewers of Russ Meyer’s 1965 cult movie “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!”, died on Friday evening in Reno, Nev. [Previously.]
Mickey Mantle's Grilled Cheese
Mickey Mantle's outstanding event at Yankee Stadium. [NSFW text] Fact-checked by Snopes.
And this from a man who did a lot of outstanding things in Yankee Stadium.
Letters Of Note previously.
House Movie
Cue up a kaleidoscope of House Industries techniques, substrates, disciplines and muscle memory compressed into high-definition pixels and actively matrixed through modulated electroluminescence with an audio lesson from The Bird and The Bee.
Two Whole Minutes!?
Lyndon B. Johnson Buys Pants
"In 1964, Lyndon Johnson needed pants, so he called the Haggar clothing company and asked for some. The call was recorded (like all White House calls at the time), and has since become the stuff of legend. Johnson’s anatomically specific directions to Mr. Haggar are some of the most intimate words we’ve ever heard from the mouth of a President."
From Put This On. (Via).
He's Not Dead, It's Just That His Tour Has Ended
Notes from the Road is a Tumblr with "notes, photos & video of the Leonard Cohen 2010 World Tour by: J.S. Carenza III". Also: Emily St John Mandel on the tour, at The Millions: Take This Waltz: Leonard Cohen’s Tour Comes to an End
Dream Thread
The book “Traumgedanken” (“Thoughts about dreams”) contains a collection of literary, philosophical, psychological and scientifical texts which provide an insight into different dream theories. To ease the access to the elusive topic, the book is designed as a model of a dream about dreaming. Analogue to a dream, where pieces of reality are assembled to build a story, it brings different text excerpts together. They are connected by threads which tie in with certain key words.
Captain Beefheart, RIP
Sad news out of California today for the avant-garde and experimental rock world: Rocks Off has learned from multiple online sources that Don Van Vliet of influential rockers Captain Beefheart passed away today at the age of 69 after a battle with multiple sclerosis. Van Vliet's management confirmed his death to Rolling Stone.
A Robust Feature of Terrorism
He is one of a handful of U.S. and European scientists searching for universal patterns hidden in human conflicts — patterns that might one day allow them to predict long-term threats. Rather than study historical grievances, violent ideologies and social networks the way most counterterrorism researchers do, Aaron Clauset and his colleagues disregard the unique traits of terrorist groups and focus entirely on outcomes — the violence they commit.
Call it the physics of terrorism.
"Suddenly, I'm relevant again"
Jack Levine, Realist Artist, Dies at 95. Mr. Levine burst onto the American art scene in 1937 with a scathing triple portrait remarkable for its bravura brushwork and gleeful vitriol. Titled “The Feast of Pure Reason,” it depicted a police officer, a capitalist and a politician seated at a table, their bloated faces oozing malice and evil intent. His painting Cain and Abel hangs in the Vatican. Upon his discharge from service he painted Welcome Home, a lampoon of the arrogance of military power; years later the painting would engender political controversy when it was included in a show of art in Moscow, and along with works by other American artists, raised suspicions in the House Un-American Activities Committee of pro-Communist sympathies. You can see some of The Complete Graphic Work of Jack Levine (1984) via Google books. Online gallery.
In The Cut
The book is as much a sculptural object as it is a work of masterful storytelling: here is an “enormous last day of life” that looks like it feels.
The Meta Prefix: Is There Anything It Cannot Do?
An Invisible Man with perfect vision sounds like a superhero from a comic, but may be close to reality thanks to scientists at the University of St Andrews. A team of physicists are one step closer to creating a Harry Potter-style invisibility cloak, with a new form of material that could also be attached to contact lenses to provide ‘perfect’ eyesight. Here comes the science.
I Like To Party, Very Much
There is a porn parody of The Human Centipede called The Human Sexipede. Here is the script. That is all.
[NSFW]
Tickling the Master's Creatures
Thomas Pynchon is one of the great unheard lyricists. His award-winning novel, Gravity's Rainbow, is full of song lyrics. Depending on how you count, there are around 100 in the book. Over the course of a year, the Thomas Pynchon Fake Book managed to set twenty-eight of them to music.
SEO Speedwagon
Anyone driving the twists of Highway 1 between San Francisco and Los Angeles recently may have glimpsed a Toyota Prius with a curious funnel-like cylinder on the roof. Harder to notice was that the person at the wheel was not actually driving. SLNYT + video.
Goats on the Roof Trade Dress
A Young Rabbit, Wishing to Escape the Oppressiveness of its Bedroom
In May, Jacob Lambert wrote in The Millions about the subversive messages hidden in classic children's books in the essay Are Picture Books Leading Our Children Astray? His conclusion: "What I previously considered whimsical trifles now reveal themselves as other things entirely: thinly-veiled endorsements of chaos, malfeasance, naïveté." Now Lambert's back, with: Again, I Ask: Are Picture Books Leading Our Children Astray?
Dude, Where's My Kestrel?
Canadian carmaker Motive Industries Inc has announced a new electric vehicle, the Kestrel, with body parts made of a hemp composite.
Track Record
The Wall Street Journal investigates web snoops. The 50 sites installed a total of 3,180 tracking files on a test computer used to conduct the study. Only one site, the encyclopedia Wikipedia.org, installed none. Twelve sites, including IAC/InterActive Corp.'s Dictionary.com, Comcast Corp.'s Comcast.net and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN.com, installed more than 100 tracking tools apiece in the course of the Journal's test.
Objectivision
Reason.tv heads to the set of Atlas Shrugged Part One to offer viewers a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse of this most anticipated film.
Previously. Previouslier.
Happy Birthday, Bugs & Elmer
Bugs Bunny just turned 70. So did Elmer Fudd. Their simultaneous debut came 70 years ago yesterday, in A Wild Hare.
Be vewwy, vewwy quiet....
Previously: Tex Avery
Cocoa Puffed
Earlier this week news bubbled up that a hedge fund manager with a Bond-villain nickname had made a Bond-villain move: "Choc Finger" bought a whopping 241,000 tons of cocoa beans -- 7% of the world's cocoa supply and enough to make 5 billion chocolate bars -- driving prices to 33-year highs.
Beat Stilled
Too Small To Fail
The world's fourth-smallest country, Tuvalu, is famous for selling its sexy-looking internet domain, .tv, and for the threat of sinking (or not).
Now it has joined the World Bank, becoming its 187th member. Anyway, if it needs help, bailing it out would only cost $12m.
O Ano da Morte do José Saramago
Portuguese writer and 1998's Nobel Prize for Literature recipient José Saramago has died, age 87. [News link in Portuguese] He died in Lanzarote, Spain, where he had lived since a bust-up in the early 1990s with Portugal's government over his controversial book, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. Saramago wrote nearly 30 books, and was cited for the Nobel as a writer "who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality." No holiday for death, after all.
Lap Stop
Ridiculous product for sale. Ridiculed on Amazon, in comments and in pictures. It causes a stir at NPR. Borked by Jalopnik.
Whoopsgle!
Google accidentally collects private data over WiFi networks. Affects US, Brazil, Hong Kong, Germany, France. Google apologizes & explains & promises to knock it off. Plus the data was kind of all just hanging out there, unencrypted. So all is well, right?
The Letter U, and the Numeral 2
Reconnaissance will outlive the U-2, but there will always be a divot in the hearts of those who have seen the curvature of the earth, the stars seemingly close enough to touch, and known the satisfaction of having completed a mission with the Dragon Lady.
Former U-2 pilot and military correspondent Cholene Espinoza writes a lovely adieu to these beautiful, difficult-to-fly aircraft, as well as a requiem for the era of human pilots for surveillance, giving way now to UAVs and other remote-control drones. The U-2 is, amazingly, still in service, but apparently soon to be grounded -- or not -- half-a-century after Francis Gary Powers' little Cold War incident. [Previously]
Eros Kapital
This recent academic article [PDF] by Catherine Hakim presents "a new theory of erotic capital as a fourth personal asset, an important addition to economic, cultural, and social capital," and proposes "a new agenda for sociological (and feminist) research and theory." Here's a stripped-down magazine version. The theory is controversial and thought-provoking, sure, and there are counter-arguments. The Financial Times notes the obvious: If eroticism is indeed a kind of capital, then there is a market in it. Meanwhile, newspapers get yet another reason to print pictures of sexy people. [All links are SFW]
The Treachery of Images
A French association for non-smokers' rights has launched a new ad campaign [all links potentially NSFW] that visually equates smoking with oral sex, using the tagline: "To smoke is to be a slave to tobacco." The pictures show adolescents, young men and women, and the act looks submissive, even forced. Uproar ensues. The Minister for Families vows to ban the images. Commentators join in. French slang helps explain: "Faire un pipe" and "Fumer le cigare" are both common-enough terms for the act that most people who see the images would get the double-entendre.
Cert Dead
Born on Halloween in 1920, died on Valentine's day 2010, Dick Francis wrote many, many, many great mysteries most of which centered on a world he knew well, with the racetrack at its omphalos.