Marilyn sez, "UC Davis psychiatry prof Stephen M Stahl, MD, PhD wrote this Gilbert & Sullivan-inspired 'I Am the Very Model of a Psychopharmacologist'. Stahl also wrote the book on Essential Psychopharmacology." Link (Thanks, Marilyn!)

See also:
"I am the very model of a Usenet personality"
I am the very model of a Singularitarian -- transcendent song-parody

Strange Harvest has a great collection of scans from a book called Masquerade: The amazing camouflage deceptions of World War II that details the ingenious ways that the Allies used camouflage to fool the Nazis, everything from hidden gun-encampments to inflatable tanks and trucks. Shown here: "A US army HQ disguised as a rubbish pile."

Spence's counterfeit docks proved to be good box office. German planes came over periodically to photograph them, but fighter patrols and antiaircraft kept the intruders at altitudes of thirty thousand feet, and at that height it was virtually impossible for enemy cameras to pick up any remaining flaws. On German prints, the Docks looked authentic. Now and then, Nazi long range artillery on Cape Gris-Nez would even lob a few inaccurate shells at the terminus - and whenever these landed the camouflage crews would create suitable 'fire damage' using sodium flares and mobile smoke generators'

Link, Link to Masquerade (via Plastic Bag)

See also: Razzle-Dazzle: WWI cubist paint-jobs for battleships

The pool hustler is an archetype of American's gritty underbelly. Sadly though, the game seems to be over, at least according to an editorial in today's New York Times. The writer, L. Jon Wertheim, is the author of Running the Table: The Legend of Kid Delicious, the Last American Pool Hustler. According to Wertheim, a confluence of factors killed the classic con, from the Internet to the poker boom to fraud king Kevin Trudeau's International Pool Tour. From the essay:

Hustlers who had been traveling incognito for years came out of the woodwork to try to qualify for the (International Pool Tour). Joining meant that their cover would be blown, but the money was too good to pass up.

The first three events were smashing successes. But in keeping with the circadian rhythms of pool, the boom times didn’t last. Last year, after a tournament in Reno, Nev., players were informed of an inconvenient detail: the tour couldn’t pay the prize money. Mr. Trudeau, once accessible and upbeat, was nowhere to be found.

The tour eventually notified players that the debts would be paid in small, periodic installments. But to date the players have yet to be paid all of the money they are owed. There hasn’t been another International Pool Tour event since.

Some players were so demoralized by Mr. Trudeau’s hustle that they quit the sport entirely. And the rest had become known quantities to avid amateur players. Unmasked by television and the Internet, these once-stealthy hustlers could no longer lure anyone into believing they were just passing through town, innocently looking to relax at the local poolroom.

Link to the New York Times, Link to buy Running the Table

Over at Dark Roasted Blend, Avi Abrams has compiled a lovely collection of retro-futuristic artwork as part of a new series collecting these "vintage visions of the future." But rather than showcase the usual American pulp art fare, Abrams is seeking "artwork from rather unlikely sources: Soviet & East Block "popular tech & science" magazines, German, Italian, British fantastic illustrations and promotional literature - all from the Golden Age of Retro-Future (from 1930s to 1970s)." Seen here, Gennady Golobokov's "Socialist Space Workers" (1973). Link

Centerton, Arkansas mayor Ken Williams resigned last week after, er, an injection of "truth serum" made him realize that he was, um, brainwashed by satanists in the 1970s. Apparently, Williams also remembered that he is actually Don LaRose, a former preacher in Indiana who was married with two kids. In 1980, he ran away and changed his identity to escape the unspecified satanists. Williams's secret came out when his former family tracked him down through a Web site that, stay with me here, Williams himself runs about LaRose's disappearance. From 4029tv.com:

"I had no choice. The choice was to watch my family killed before my eyes or go with these people, and I chose instead to run," Williams said. He wouldn't explain from who he was running, saying only that he had been brainwashed.

"I had multiple shock treatments," Williams said. "It took five years to get my memory back..."

Williams said his current wife is standing by him and the two of them want to continue living in Centerton. He said he plans to continue living as Ken Williams.

Also, his resignation was signed with two names, he said.

Link to 4029tv.com, Link to Williams's site "Whatever Happened to Don LaRose"

Four teenagers in Tokyo were arrested for throwing beer bottles at suburban cop inside a police box. They had previously discharged a fire extinguisher on a cop car. Why? The rush of running away. From Mainichi Daily News:

"After seeing them on TV, I really adored motorbike gangs. I wanted to experience the thrill of being chased by a cop," one of the teens told the police...

When a police patrol car set off in pursuit of the teens, they slammed their motorbikes against the vehicle and hurled more beer bottles it, police said, adding that as soon as the youths were arrested, all immediately offered profuse apologies.

Link (Thanks, Paul Saffo!)

This Ward Sutton/New York Times slideshow analyzes the messages underlying the design of current and recent campaign stickers and posters. There's some good, thoughtful stuff here -- plus: funny. Link (via Warren Ellis)

Productivity guy Merlin Mann did a great presentation for IDEO, a great design shop. He talks about how to regulate the technological systems in your life, and how to get the people around you to play along. I spend a lot of time with overheads -- answering emails, organizing stuff, following up -- and Merlin's ideas on this stuff are really smart. Link (Thanks, Avi!)

See also:
Rule the Web show: Merlin Mann, Wednesday, July 18, 5pm Pacific
Hilarious productivity speech from Merlin Mann
Merlin Mann on "email bankruptcy"
Merlin Mann's 43 Folders podcast
Merlin Mann and David Allen podcast
Merlin Mann of 43 Folders interview
Boing Boing Boing podcast 008: Merlin Mann
Merlin Mann's decluttering roundup
Merlin's tips and tricks
How to filter out press releases from your email
Suit-productivity tips for nerds roundup concluded

Porkshanks's "Ambience Enhancer" is a sweet little steampunk MP3 player mod:

I bought a pair of vintage Cannonball Empire headphones off Ebay and I disassembled and gutted them. I then transplanted the working parts of a Sony MDR-006 (that I randomly found on the ground at a bus stop 2 days ago!) into them, and viola! Cool looking 'old' headphones that work just fine with my MP3 player ^ _ ^

figuring out how to get the speakers into the Cannonballs was not easy. I actually ruined the prototype trying to do it in an overly fancy way with a different pair of sony headphones.

So then I decided I needed some way to get my MP3 player to match my steampunk daily wear.

First I hand sewed a little cover for the MP3 player and attached the brown leather protection pad to it. Then I took a raw sheet of Brass and cut out the form, bending it into shape carefully and adding the lynch pins and strapping last. I wanted to be able to wear this on my jacket as well, so I created a little latch on the left arm of my jacket so it can be put on and off easily.

Link (Thanks, Littleoracle!) (Ciarge! Il y a beaucoup de Steampunk links ici!)

USA Today ran a nice profile of Teller from Penn and Teller last week. It includes photos by Steve Marcus of his beautiful geeky house.

"Like much of my life, this house is a reflection of everything I wanted back when I was 12," says Teller, 59. "I love this house because it's honest. If you see a floor that looks like concrete, that's because it is concrete. But, ah, on the other hand, nothing is what it seems."

Did we mention the house has multiple mirrors, hidden doors, screaming tables and one talking bear sculpture who plays card tricks on visitors? Like the man said, it's a 12-year-old's dream. Zoom back. A decade ago, Teller spotted a 10-acre rocky outcropping with great views of the Vegas Strip and the mountains and decided this was his Xanadu. What rose on the spot is a squared-off fortress with an exterior of corrugated steel that's interrupted by expanses of windows.

Inside, the structure is more maze than living space, 4,500 square feet of books, memorabilia, DVDs, as well as a coffin and the odd preserved human skull — macabre touches shared by Teller's show-mate, Penn, who lives a mile away in his own eclectic mansion.

Link

My friend Kaden Harris, a Canadian inventor and artist who makes desktop medieval siege weapons, has a new book out called Eccentric Cubicle: Office Accessories from a Parallel Universe.

It's published by O'Reilly's Make Books imprint (I'm editor-in-chief of MAKE) and contains step-by-step instructions for building 11 wonderfully strange desktop accessories. Throughout, Kaden humorously shares his immense knowledge of the art of making cool things out of scrap materials. There's nothing like this book.

From desktop guillotines and crossbows to mood-enhancing effects and music makers, each project presents a different set of challenges and opens new avenues of Maker lore. There's a strong emphasis on the basic mechanical theories and principles of the devices presented in the book, as well as the fabrication techniques you need to use. But this is far more than a book of project "how-tos." Eccentric Cubicle offers oblique industrial design and fabrication philosophies, countless cultural reference points, and innumerable bad puns.

This book is a dream come true for you office-bound souls who are tech DIY enthusiasts, hobbyist engineers/designers, and Makers at heart. Imagine having your cubicle sport projects such as:

* A mechanical golfer
* Lucid dreaming induction device
* USB-powered bubble blower
* Fog machine
* A desktop guillotine
* And a whole lot more

In the Eccentric Cubicle, Harris starts with classic, time-honored principals, then modernizes and augments his designs with performance enhancements and updated feature sets -- all while precariously balancing form, function, and oddness. Scavenging and repurposing materials and components at every opportunity, he challenges and inspires you to modify and adapt the projects and designs to meet your own scale, performance, and aesthetic requirements. Bring character and life to your office desktop with Eccentric Cubicle!

Link

From the Daily Mail article:

"...the 'Temples of Damanhur' are not the great legacy of some long-lost civilisation, they are the work of a 57-year-old former insurance broker from northern Italy who, inspired by a childhood vision, began digging into the rock.

The first time the police came it was over alleged tax evasion and still the temples lay undiscovered. But a year later the police swooped on the community demanding: "Show us these temples or we will dynamite the entire hillside."

Stunned by what they had found, the authorities decided to seize the temples on behalf of the government."

Link

Marty Z says: "My friend's sister made this for Thanksgiving yesterday -- we were voting on which pies were our favorite and no one voted for this one -- yet somehow it still won the pie contest." Link

Stephen says: "This USA Today article outlines a lawsuit filed by The Romantics who authorized a cover version of their song What I like About You. The problem is the cover version sounds exactly like the original. By recording a "cover" version means that Activision can avoid paying full royalties to the band because they are not using the original recording."

"It's a very good imitation, and that's our objection," said Troy attorney William Horton. "Even the guys in the band said, 'Wow, that's not us, but it sure sounds like us.'"

Horton said Activision should have secured a master license for the Romantics' original 1980 recording, then paid appropriate royalties. He said the band became aware of the issue when fans said they'd heard the song in the game but members saw no accounting for it on their record-label royalty checks.

"I was very upset because the band had worked very hard over many years to develop and use its distinctive sound," the Romantics' Wally Palmer said in an affidavit.

Link

- stream of consciousness
- logo graveyard
- bootleg objects
- day60
- nl design
- the apartment
- we fail
- bd4d
- k10k

Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!)

Shown above: "Call for Proposals: Designing for Next Nature."

Scientists at the University of Arizona researchers built a robot that's guided by a moth's brain impules.

The moth is immobilize inside a plastic tube mounted atop the 6-inch-tall wheeled robot. To get the moth to imitate flight, [professor Charles M.] Higgins and his team placed the moth in its apparatus on a circular platform surrounded by a 14-inch-high revolving wall painted with vertical stripes. The moth's neuron reacts to the movement of the stripes and the process begins.

The brain of a moth is about the size of a grain of rice. Although small, “its compact size and simplicity allows for an efficient way to do brain research,” Higgins said.

Link (Via ComDig)

Hawala is a money-transfer system based primarily in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, based on independent brokers who phone one another and say, "I'm holding so much money in such and such a currency, please transfer an equivalent sum in local funds to such and such a person." The settlements are based on the honor system, and by some accounts, the network has its origins in the Silk Road. The system functions even in places where the rule of law and other elements normally considered crucial to a a functional financial system have collapsed.

The unique feature of the system is that no promissory instruments are exchanged between the hawala brokers; the transaction takes place entirely on the honor system. As the system does not depend on the legal enforceability of claims, it can operate even in the absence of a legal and juridical environment. No records are produced of individual transactions; only a running tally of the amount owed one broker by the other is kept. Settlements of debts between hawala brokers can take a variety of forms, and need not take the form of direct cash transactions.

In addition to commissions, hawala brokers often earn their profits through bypassing official exchange rates. Generally the funds enter the system in the source country's currency and leave the system in the recipient country's currency. As settlements often take place without any foreign exchange transactions, they can be made at other than official exchange rates.

Hawala is attractive to customers because it provides a fast and convenient transfer of funds, usually with a far lower commission than that charged by banks. Its advantages are most pronounced when the receiving country applies distortive exchange rate regulations (as has been the case for many typical receiving countries such as Pakistan or Egypt) or when the banking system in the receiving country is less complex (e.g. due to differences in legal environment in places such as Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia).

Furthermore, the transfers are informal and not effectively regulated by governments, which is a major advantage to customers with tax, currency control, immigration, or other legal concerns. For the same reasons, governments do not favor the system, and accusations have been made in recent years that terrorist funding often changes hands through hawala networks.

Link (Thanks, Jens!)

Vert Design's flat-pack mallet sells for AU$40 -- it's a functional hammer cut out of a sheet of plywood with a CNC machine that you punch out, slot together and then bash away with. Link (via Gizmodo)

Christopher Wren's great fire Monument in the City of London is to be surrounded bulwarked by this bizarre, pleated accordion mirror-building which will leave only the tip of the Monument visible, serving as part of a giant sundial. Looks like none of the Monument will be visible from the street, though, which would mean that you'd need permission from whichever nameless developer owns the building in order to view it, photograph it, etc. I take it back -- on closer inspection, the Monument is in front of the building, not inside it

Architect Ken Shuttleworth has obtained planning permission for a building resembling an accordion which will fold around the City square where the Monument has stood since 1677.

There will be a roof garden that will form a giant sundial, with Wren's 202ft column acting as the gnomon, the pillar which creates a shadow on the dial, indicating the time across the landscaping.

Link (via Gizmodo)

Here's a maker with a dream: a he-she car made of wooden parts, divided down its long axis, with a modern body down one side and a vintage body down the other, the whole thing gleaming under multiple coats of laquer and rumbling with all the power of a 1981 Opel.

A Ukrainian man gave up his job, sold his two other vehicles and spent one and a half years in his garage to create his dream vehicle. His literally half-modern, half-retro car has a wooden body made of thousands of oak parts.

Vasily Lazarenko says the most difficult thing was to preserve the balance between the modern and vintage halves of his design, so that they didn’t clash with each other.

Under the wooden bonnet there’s a 1981 Opel with a 100-horse-power engine.

Link (via Gizmodo)

Veronica sez, "I'm a burlesque performer in NYC and me and a bunch of the girls and NYC photographer Burke Heffner created the calendar 'The Lovely Mistresses of George W. Bush.' It's a beautiful, vintage styled pinup calendar. Each girl represents a special interest group or corporation that has profited from Bush being in power. The calendar is topical, environmentally friendly, and 25% of the profits are going to watchdog organizations that monitor corporate influence over our government." Link (Thanks, Veronica!)

Escape Pod has just podcast an audio version of my short story "Other People's Money," which originally appeared in the Forbes "future of work" issue:

Which is why she was hoping that the venture capitalist would just leave her alone. He wasn’t a paying customer, he wasn’t a fellow artist — he wanted to buy her, and he was thirty years too late.

“You know, I pitched you guys in 1999. On Sand Hill Road. One of the founding partners. Kleiner, I think. The guy ate a salad all through my slide-deck. When I was done, he wiped his mouth, looked over my shoulder, and told me he didn’t think I’d scale. That was it. He didn’t even pick up my business card. When I looked back as I was going out the door, I saw his sweep it into the trash with the wrapper from his sandwich.”

The VC — young, with the waxy, sweaty look of someone who ate a lot of GM yogurt to try to patch his biochemistry — shook his head. “That wasn’t us. We’re a franchise — based here in LA. I just opened up the Inglewood branch. But I can see how that would have soured you on us. Did you ever get your VC?”

Link, Escape Pod podcast feed

See also: Other People's Money: My Forbes story on the future of work

City 7: Toronto Conflict is a Half-Life mod featuring several familiar Toronto landmarks, which allows you to realize your age-old fantasy of running around the Eaton Center, heavily armed, fighting bad guys and invaders.

City 7: Toronto Conflict, is an action packed Half-Life 2 mod with a variety of unique levels and game play. Explore what has become of City 7 in areas like Dundas square, Eaton Center , Mel Lastman square, St. Michael's Hospital and TTC system under the Combine rule. This version features Gordon Freeman as the main character, stuck in Toronto due to a teleporting accident in Kleiner's lab. Try to escape this war torn city by finding any type of teleporting technology and send him back to City 17.

Despite our small development team and short production time, we managed to get halfway to the CN tower and have already created 2-3 hours of fun and action packed game play! We want to finish this mod the way it was intended it to be, as a glimpse at what happen to a part of North American during the Combine invasion.

Link (Thanks, Ron!)

Jalopnik's Murilee Martin spent the day at the junkyard, pulling parts and incidentally snapping a great photo-series of shots of christmas tree air-fresheners hanging from the rearviews of the junker cars. Thus proving the Repo Man axiom: "You find one in every car, kid, you'll see." Link (Thanks, Murilee!)

Science fiction great Elizabeth Hand is serializing her cult novella "Chip Crockett's Christmas Carol." She sez, "one of the few versions of the Dickens classic to feature a character inspired by Joey Ramone as the Ghost of Christmas Past."

"Chip Crockett?" Brendan frowned, staring at his computer screen as though he was afraid Tony might materialize there. "You mean, like, The Chip Crockett Show?"

"Yeah, man." Tony sighed deeply. "My brother Jake, he just faxed me the obituary from the Daily News. He died over the weekend but they just announced it today."

There was a clunk over the phone receiver, a background clatter of shouting voices and footsteps. Tony was working as a substitute teacher at Saint Ignatius High School. Brendan was amazed he'd been able to hang onto the job at all, but he gathered that being a substitute at Saint Ignatius was way below being sanitation engineer in terms of salary, benefits, and respect. He heard a crackle of static as Tony ran into the corridor, shouting.

"Whoa! Nelson Crane, man! Slow down, okay? Okay. Yeah, I guess it was lung cancer. Did you know he smoked?"

"You're talking about Chip Crockett the kiddie show host. Right?" Brendan rubbed his forehead, feeling the beginning of a headache. "No, Tony, I didn't know he smoked, because I don't actually know Chip Crockett. Do you?"

Link

Amnesty International's "Unsubscribe Me" campaign invites us to unsubscribe from the use of torture in fighting the "war on terror;" to tell the world's governments that torture cannot be done in our name. As part of the campaign, they've released an incredibly moving and disturbing video reenacting a CIA-approved "stress position" torture taken straight out of a CIA interrogation manual. In order to make the film, the directors put the actor into a stress position for six hours -- the whimpers and trembling we see are real, the anguish you feel even when you choose to do this, let alone when you are kidnapped and subjected it for weeks, months or years. Amnesty is making two more videos and then doing a theatrical release for all three. We will never be made free by adopting the tactics of dictatorships. Link

Joe Klein's latest column in Time Magazine badly butchers the debate over the NSA's program of wiretapping Americans without judicial oversight. Klein gets every single salient detail wrong, making it sounds like the Democrats are bent on hobbling the NSA's activities in wiretapping actual terrorist abroad, when in fact the bill is aimed at ensuring that domestic surveillance is undertaken in accord with the rule of law. Ryan Singel has the detailed scoop at Wired's Threat Level.

If the NSA can only get at a suspected foreign target by wiretapping them inside the United States and they think the target may talk to Americans, the bill would require them to prove to the FISA court that they have probable cause to believe the target is a foreigner. If it's an emergency, they can start tapping and days later provide "probable cause" that the foreigner is a foreigner to the secret court.

That's what Klein calls giving "terrorists the same legal protections as Americans." In the case of targeting Americans inside America, the government has to prove much more - mainly that the government has good reason to believe that the American is an agent of a foreign power or is a terrorist.

Moreover, Klein can't even figure out that the House bill that passed last week IS the House Intelligence Committee's bill, not some Democratic substitute masterminded by Pelosi...

I have no idea how Klein managed to keep a mainstream media job after lying about his anonymous authorship of Primary Colors (after my Shakespeare professor Donald Foster outed him using textual analysis software).

But Time ought to stop Klein from writing about any substantive topic, especially FISA.

Because when it comes to these topics, Klein is well beyond stupid. He's dangerous.

Link (Thanks, Tom!)

This Saturday, Toronto's Bakka Books will host the official launch of Tesseracts 11, the latest volume of the seminal Canadian science fiction anthology series that launched 22 years ago. I was immensely privileged to co-edit (with Holly Phillips) this year's edition, and doubly privileged to buy knockout stories from the likes of Daniel Archambault, Madeline Ashby, Greg Bechtel, Nancy Bennett, Lisa Carreiro, Peter Darbyshire, Khria Deefholts, Candas Jane Dorsey, Susan Forest, Kim Goldberg, Andrew Gray, Alyxandra Harvey-Fitzhenry, Stephen Kotowych, Claude Lalumière, John Mavin, Randy McCharles, Steven Mills, David Nickle, Kate Riedel, Hugh Spenser, Jerome Stueart and Élisabeth Vonarburg.

I've read every volume in the Tesseracts series, and published in some of them. I remember reading the first Tesseracts on the Cummer 42 TTC bus on the way home from school and having my mind so blown by stories from Margaret Atwood, William Gibson and David Kirkpatrick that I missed my stop and had to walk home (reading all the way). It was an incredible honour to co-edit one of the successor volumes.

There will be launch-parties for the book all across Canada, including Vancouver and Calgary.

Saturday, November 24, 2007 - 3:00pm
Bakka-Phoenix Books
697 Queen Street West
Toronto, ON

This year, Tesseracts Eleven brings the series to a new height, with a blend of past and present writers, with their own individual visions of the future. The literature of Tesseracts Eleven has been critically selected and shaped into the collection you see by this year's editors, two of Canada's finest writers - acclaimed authors Cory Doctorow and Holly Phillips. Together they have chosen a powerful combination of 22 works by well known writers, as well as newer authors whose futures you will want to follow.

Confirmed authors in attendance for Toronto launch include:

* Susan Deefholts
* Steven Kotowych
* David Nickle
* Sandra Riedel
* Claude LaLumiere
* Douglas Arnott

Link, Buy Tesseracts 11 on Amazon

Nelson Minar's latest blog post has a nice bit about the continuing evolution of heart emoticon (<3) among gamers:

<3 is a little sideways heart, to express love. Usually used ironically in response to a bitchy joke, or in apology for making said bitchy joke. Variants include </3 for a broken heart, <$ to convey a financial motive for love, and <4 as the superlative of <3.

<4 is just brilliant. Link

Elizar of the Elzr blog has challenged his readers to come up with a design for a business-card sized calendar that doesn't resort to teeny-weeny eye-strain-o-rama type to squeeze an entire year onto the card. There are soem damned ingenious solutions here (shown below, Joe Lanman's design).

It all started because my 48-year-old mom, bless her, can’t read small type very well. She has trouble using little calendar cards because the day numerals are so small and last time she complained I paused and empathized with her travail. The problem, it was suddenly obvious, was not only the marketing debris that encroaches upon every poor card but rather the quite wasteful scheme we use for representing a year—the same table with the same thirty-something numbers over and over.

Link (via Kottke)

Alfred Hitchcock, who is known to have noshed on many a well-baked russet in his time, would no doubt smile upon this tuber-y remake of the famous Psycho shower scene. I believe this is what's meant by the expression "bad carbs." Video Link. (Thanks, Bonnie Burton!)

Crystal pushers Swarovski and electronics maker Philips have teamed up to offer some glamtastic, $178, 1-gig USB keys, one of which is shaped like a heart. Some fetching earphones "enhanced with a dome of faceted crystal" for digital music players here, too -- $79 a pair. Link to "active-crystals.com." (Thanks, Susannah Breslin!)

Today on Boing Boing Gadgets, in between cooking stuffing and pumpkin pies*, we looked at these nifty concept CFL light bulbs, a vintage brochure from a old Honda truck from 1964, a bedside clock with a gadget charger that happens to look like a book, holiday programming on LEGO TV, a couple of atypical shelves, a commercial starring Of Montreal, roll-up solar panels, a ladybug robot to clean rest-stop bathrooms, stories from an SR-71 pilot, a painfully kawaii Tachikoma robot, an old Austrian 6-in-1 carving tool for kids, a light that lets you know when to water your plants, and Target's foray into refurbished gadgets. We did deals, too, but they were a bit crap.

* The trick is fresh pumpkin.