Fred sez, "As tax season approaches, Californians might want to know that, if you're single and your taxes are relatively simple, California may have filled out your return for you. Do you really want to pay TurboTax, again, for collating the information the government already has?" Link (Thanks, Fred!)

Trataron de forzarme ir a rehab, pero yo les dije que no, no, no. Me encantan las drogas. Link, and Previously. (OMG thx Susannah)

The BBC appears to have inadvertently (?) removed the controversial DRM from its iPlayer video-on-demand service. Now, all BBC programmes are broadcast across the country in digital form without DRM, literally diffused at the speed of light in all directions without any restrictions, but the Beeb somehow believes that there's a new risk of piracy created by letting those same digital files out on the net.

Glyn sez, "The BBC have just launched a version of their iPlayer that works with the iPhone (and iPod Touch). Instead of streaming Flash, it streams an MP4... but they don't let non-iPhone users know it's an option. To gain access to it you need to set your browser up to claim to be a iPhone. The User Agent Switcher plugin on Firefox will let you do just that. Now you can download files on Linux from the iPlayer website." Link (Thanks, Glyn!)

Mister Jalopy buys mixed tapes at garage sales, and we are playing them at Dinosaurs and Robots. This week on Mixed Tape Friday Night, Maria takes over the Trenton College Radio studio for "Everybody is a DJ Week." All extraneous audio, static, tape stretch, door slams and sorority sister antics have been included for your listening pleasure.

Every Friday night, Dinosaurs and Robots will upload a dusty cassette mixed tape! Found at garage sales and junkyard glove boxes, mixed tapes provide all the voyeuristic thrills of reading somebody’s diary without the related ethical quandaries.

Tune in each week for a new exploration into heavy metal thunder road trips, teenage bedroom melancholy meltdowns, college radio clunkers, headbanger barf bag parties, glam rock glitter fests, industrial punch-your-lights-out rockers and the ill-advised tapes created by lovers soon to be spurned. Before collaborative filtering, music was hand selected for us by those who know us best.

Link

Kathryn writes, "I spent a while last night and this morning decorating Easter eggs in Mathematica and this activity has proved wildly popular in this household: My children are going to run me out of toner in my color printer very shortly. My daughter has made a document entitled 'My Little Egg Book' out of egg printouts." Link, Link to equations for egg shapes

Miss Monster has sculpted these scratch-built steampunk animal skulls that blow me away. Fetish masks for a firelight ceremony in a parallel universe. Link to bear skull, Link to wolf skull (Thanks, Ananth!)

The Air Force's law-firm has sent an illegal DMCA take-down notice to YouTube, demanding the removal of a publicly available video promoting its Cyber Command project. Material produced by federal agencies is not copyrighted -- cannot be copyrighted, by statute -- so there's no basis for the Air Force's representatives to swear (on penalty of perjury, no less!) that this video infringed its copyright.

It's cyber war! Lawyers representing the Air Force's elite electronic warriors have sent YouTube a DMCA takedown notice demanding the removal of the 30-second spot the Air Force created to promote its nascent Cyber Command. We'd uploaded the video to share with THREAT LEVEL readers.

Link (via Wendy Seltzer)

Scott says: "There are a bunch of these odd Michael Jackson Playmobil custom figures up on Flickr!" Link

Bloxes are flat-pack die-cut cardboard 3D cubes that snap together to make super-strong, lightweight, infinitely configurable dividers, shelves, tables -- and they're also sound-dampeners. They come in multiple colors and look like they can be put together by kids, too. Link

Bookseat is a bench with integrated bookshelves from Fishbol -- can't figure out if it's just a concept or for sale. Link (via Neatorama)

See also:
Armchair incorporates 5m of bookcase
'Magnetique' Adjustable Shelf; 'Storyline' Sound Wave Shelf HOWTO make a secret bookshelf door
HOWTO make a bookshelf out of books
Bed built into an "igloo of books"
Equation Bookshelf with nesting parens
Xmas tree made from books
Hang your books from the rafters
Giant freestanding letters with bookshelves inside
Invisible bookshelf - floating stacks of books for your walls
Coffee table with integrated book-shelves like hanging files
Library built into a staircase

Magician Teller of Penn and Teller's produced a hilarious -- and magical -- short video about his life as the sole survivor of a zombie uprising. Teller stays alive by fighting the walking dead with a rifle and simple conjuring tricks, and narrates his experience with a fine-tuned patter that suggests that he doesn't have to be the silent partner in the act. Link (Thanks, Justin!)

Britain's breaking new ground in the slide into a total surveillance state: as of the end of this month, domestic passengers at the new Heathrow Terminal 5 will be fingerprinted and photographed twice, to "ensure the passenger boarding the aircraft is the same person." The airport says they'll only keep it for 24h -- unless the police need them to keep it longer.

This will all but eliminate terrorism.

Oh, wait, no.

That only works if terrorists are so picky about which domestic flight they blow up that they have to blow up one coming from terminal 5.

Well, I suppose that if you're the kind of lazy suicide bomber who believes in dying for the cause -- but not if it means rebooking your ticket or, you know, driving to Stansted or Gatwick or East Midlands or Manchester, this'll work. And that sounds like a pretty good adversary analysis. We all know how easily dissuaded suicide bombers are.

Time to buy stock in the train companies.

Even if domestic passengers have a passport with them, they will still have to go through the biometric checks.

Dr Gus Hosein, of the London School of Economics, an expert on the impact on technology on civil liberties, is one of the scheme’s strongest critics.

He said: "There is no other country in the world that requires passengers travelling on internal flights to be fingerprinted. BAA says the fingerprint data will be destroyed, but the records of who has travelled within the country will not be, and it will provide a rich source of data for the police and intelligence agencies.

"I grew up in a society where you only fingerprinted people if you suspected them of being criminals. By doing this they will make innocent people feel like criminals.

"There will also be a suspicion that this is the thin end of the wedge, that we are being softened up by making fingerprinting seem normal in the run-up to things like ID cards."

Link

Sean Ragan says: "I was thinking about writing an adult Choose Your Own Adventure book so I made a visual map of my favorite CYOA book from when I was a kid. It's a directed graph with a node for each page and arrows indicating choices/page jumps." Link

Chris says: "Here's interview with the governer of Montana on the Real ID that's being forced down states' throats by Homeland Security.

"This is the funniest interview I've heard with an elected politician on a security-related issue. He completely calls the Federal Government on their bluff, and completely dismantles the usefulness of this act. Please, start with the first minute. It gets better from there."

"We're putting up with the federal government on so many fronts, and nearly every month they come out with another hare-brained scheme ... to tell us that our life is going to be better if we just buckle under on some other kind of rule or regulation. And we usually just play along for a while. We ignore 'em for as long as we can. We try not to bring it to a head but if it comes to a head we found that it's best to tell 'em to go to Hell and run the state you wanna run your state.

Unfortunately this time around they've really got a hare-brained scheme... almost all those hijackers on 9/11 would have qualified for a Real ID."

Link

Notorious B.I.G. (RIP!) + Jimi Hendrix (RIP!) = This zip file of MP3s (alternate link here) from DJ Doc Rok. (thanks Matthew R. Rose).

Link to larger size. P-shopped by a Boing Boing reader who posts as HOLTT, from this thread about an ETEch snap. Our colleague Joel Johnson, not pictured, is of course -- the Wizard. (thanks, Teresa!)

Recently on Boing Boing Gadgets I popped open the Heineken BeerTender for a look (video review, including drunken hair clipper work, coming shortly), ran an older interview with Gary Gygax who passed away this week (and posted his "Random Harlot Encounter Table"), got the first look at the new "Lego Collector" catalog coming out later this year, asked everyone to help me plan a week of blogging in the woods, saw a man play a Legend of Zelda song on a carrot ocarina, took a peek at iRobot's robot wi-fi access points for the military, questioned the merit of a negative-ion-producing notebook computer, noticed that Apple and Nike are adding iPod stats tracking for cardio machines, got prepped to enjoy Slurm in real life, looked at a concept phone that would be recycled each year, saw this generation's "Hit Stix" (and the amplifier, too), said that the Renault Megane has beautiful doors that will never make it to production, saw an expensive but high-fidelity haptic interface that uses electromagnetic toruses, were impressed with a PC case that was all heat sink, applauded Wired.com's Gygax tribute, noticed that a company is selling tiny guns and grenades for LEGO minifigs, found a keyring that inflates when submerged, as well as a device for cramming limes into beer bottles. Oh, and sea cucumbers and their sexy peristaltic wriggle inspired the creation of space age plastics. Finally, I asked if the iPhone could make a killer gaming platform, especially for experimental and indie games. (Spoiler: Duh.)

I'm off in the morning for SXSWi, so lock up your sea cucumbers and gird yourself for the worst haircut in blogging.

This week's CRAFT magazine video podcast shows how to make a knitting pattern for this killer skeleton cardigan. In the podcast, Becky Stern details how she takes an antique anatomical illustration and uses Photoshop to convert it into a gridded knitting pattern. Next week, she'll show how to make the back panel of the actual sweater.
Link (Thanks, PT!)

In today's edition of Boing Boing tv, dramatic readings of real-life unsolicited emails. Part one, FOR MY DAUGHTER'S SAKE. If one were pitching this to a movie studio, you might describe the plot as Grapes of Wrath meets Spanish Prisoner meets an ATM. Part two, DE@L OF A LIFETIME, a tasty dish of word salad.

Link to BBtv post, with discussion, downloadable video, and talent + image / video remix credits. NSFW: Includes opera music.

Brickarms is a company that specializes in making highly detailed miniature toy guns for Lego figures. They have quite a wide range, including custom minifigs in military dress. Link (via Geekologievia Boing Boing Gadgets)

See also: Brickarms: Real-World Weapons for LEGO Minifigs

In the February 26, 2008 edition of The Stranger, Paul Constant writes about his experiences dealing with book shoplifters. (Wonderful illo by James Yamasaki).

There's an underground economy of boosted books. These values are commonly understood and roundly agreed upon through word of mouth, and the values always seem to be true. Once, a scruffy, large man approached me, holding a folded-up piece of paper. "Do you have any Buck?" He paused and looked at the piece of paper. "Any books by Buckorsick?" I suspected that he meant Bukowski, but I played dumb, and asked to see the piece of paper he was holding. It was written in crisp handwriting that clearly didn't belong to him, and it read:

1. Charles Bukowski

2. Jim Thompson

3. Philip K. Dick

4. William S. Burroughs

5. Any Graphic Novel

This is pretty much the authoritative top five, the New York Times best-seller list of stolen books. Its origins still mystify me. It might have belonged to an unscrupulous used bookseller who sent the homeless out, Fagin-like, to do his bidding, or it might have been another book thief helping a semi-illiterate friend identify the valuable merchandise. I asked the man whether he preferred Bukowski's Pulp to his Women, as I did, and whether his favorite Thompson book was The Getaway or The Killer Inside Me. First the book chatter made him nervous, but then it made him angry: He bellowed, "You're just a little bitch, ain't'cha?" and stormed out.

I'm not sure where Aleister Crowley goes on this list, but one one bookseller told me that anything by Crowley had to be kept locked up behind glass or it would be stolen immediately. Link (Via Hang Fire Books)

A paper from political scientist John Hickman, published in the journal Astropolitics, seeks to establish whether it would be possible to conduct commerce and trade over lightspeed-lagged interstellar distances. This has already been explored in science fiction (Karl Schroeder does a particularly fine job with his idea of the "Rights Society" in Permanence, a book with more fizzingly cool ideas per page than 98 percent of the sf ever published):

Economic exchange itself might be "alien" to the aliens. Members of an alien species may not experience the same intense sense of self that is exhibited in rationally self-interested economic exchange among humans. Instead, a collective identity could be dominant. Money might not exist and without it neither would complex markets or banking. If they do engage in economic exchange it might take a form akin to potlatch, the competitive gift-giving for status solely among members of the same tribe traditional among societies in Melanesia and the Pacific Northwest. Moreover an alien species might not live in separate societies and could thus have no conception of trade between different societies with different cultures.

Link (via Kottke)

Today on the Worth 1000 photoshopping contest -- pop culture remixes of puppets, especially Muppets. Link

Here's a machinima video for a convulsively funny leet-speak cover the classic Muppet song "Manamanah." The giant Tauren backup singers are especially fine. Link (via Making Light)

This Craftsman advertisement drives me wild. I wish I had this skeleton made from tools hanging in my house.
Link

From the September, 1955 issue of Mechanix Illustrated, this account ("I Was a Slave Scientist in Russia") of the life of the Nazi scientists who were taken to the Soviet Union (for comparison, the Nazis who came to the US were given perks like lecture tours and parts in Disney educational films):

I also like George N. from Er. He is the oldest of us and gives an impression of calm. He tells us how he had offered to develop an ultrasonic apparatus for fighting cancer for the Russians. His plans interest me and I tell him I am an ultrasonic expert. “Then you are certainly assigned to the project,” he says and I realize that my words at the examination at Bautzen have sealed my fate.

“How long in your opinion do we need to finish it?” I ask George N. I am no doctor but from my professional experiences I know that ultrasonic medicine is still in its infancy and there is nothing certain as to what will come from it. At least it is clear to me that the cancer project is a difficult and extensive task. George, on the contrary, calculates that we will finish it in two years. As I express doubts, he refers to his horoscope which forecasts a two-year stay in a foreign country and then freedom. From this moment onward I cannot believe that he is a scientist.

Link

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about Mister Jalopy's new store, Coco's Variety, and the Hamster's Lunch snack he sold there. Now you can order Hamster's Lunch on Coco's website using PayPal and have it sent to your home.

Following the epic demand for Hamster's Lunch, Coco's is pleased to announce that everybody's favorite tea time treat is back in stock. For those not familiar, this is not a lunchtime snack for a hamster, but rather a savory rice cracker snack for people who enjoy the company of highly detailed hamster figurine. And what sort of savage wouldn't enjoy a tea time snack with a new little friend?

Link

The late Jack Kirby created Captain America, The X-Men, The Hulk, The Fantastic Four, The Silver Surfer, Thor, Sgt. Fury, Kamandi, and many other famous characters. He was, and remains, at least twice as good as any other comic book creator I can think of. His groundbreaking innovations in layout, plot, character, and theme have not only influenced thousands of comic book creators, but the movie and animation industry as well.

Kirby: King of Comics, by Kirby's longtime friend and assistant, Mark Evanier, is part biography, part coffee table art book. The text of this lavishly-illustrated, 224-page, large format book runs 35,000 words, but Evanier says he's working on a 500,000 word biography of the world's greatest comic book writer and artist (I'll buy that when it comes out, too).

Not only was Kirby a man of awesome talent, he was also very kind-hearted. I've met a lot of my literary and artistic heroes and many of them didn't seem to be very nice. Not Kirby. I met him when I was 16 years old and I hung around him for three days. I'm sure I was a terrible pest, but he was as genial as could be, and he even gave me his address, inviting me to stay at his house if I ever came to California. What a guy. Link

PGA Tour player Tripp Isenhour got mad a hawk that made noise while he was on a TV show, so he drove closer to the bird in his golf cart and began hitting balls at it. He eventually hit the bird and killed it. He was charged with cruelty to animals and killing a migratory bird.

"I am an animal lover," he said.

After the hawk moved within about 75 yards and perched in a tall pine tree, Isenhour allegedly said: “I’ll get him now” and aimed for the hawk.

“About the sixth ball came very near the bird’s head, and (Isenhour) was very excited that it was so close,” officer Brian Baine of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, wrote in a report.

According to witnesses, Isenhour hit the hawk a few shots later. The bird, protected as a migratory species, fell to the ground bleeding from both nostrils. “As soon as this happened, I was mortified,” Isenhour said in a statement through his management company. “There was neither any malice nor deliberate intent whatsoever to hit or harm the hawk. I was trying to simply scare it into flying away.”

Link (Via Arbroath)

Pappy, the blogger of "Pappy's Golden Age of Comics" kindly scanned a story from a 1964 fanzine called Odd.

This early fanzine strip is from 1964. In a great little short by Marv Wolfman and artist Dave Herring perfectly captures the Wonder Woman comic. Odd was a fun fanzine, inspired by Harvey Kurtzman and Humbug.

The letters page is funny.

Link

Case Wester Reserver University researchers are developing a new plastic inspired by sea cucumber skin that could lead to safer brain implants or even clothing that hardens into armor with the flick of a switch. Sea cucumbers have skin that can switch between soft and rigid in seconds thanks to enzymes that bind the proteins fiber, and others that cause those binds to release. The new material is triggered by water but doesn't soak up the liquid like sponges or cardboard. From New Scientist:

"We have the elastic polymer, so that's the mimic for the sea cucumber skin, and then we put in the cellulose whiskers," (Stuart) Rowan says. "You can get these from paper pulp, but we got ours from another little sea creature called a tunicate."

When dry, the cellulose fibres keep the material rigid by forming a scaffold held together by hydrogen bonds. But water molecules are better at forming such bonds, so when wet, the fibres lose their grip on one another and bond to the water molecules instead...

The rigid material could easily be inserted into brain tissue, before softening into its floppy state. That would reduce the problems with inflammation solid electrodes can cause.

Rowan says they're now working on versions of the material that switch stiffness in response to a pulse of electricity.

Link

In the mid-1960s, photographer Danny Lyon spent several years riding with the Chicago Outlaws and documenting their scene on film. The resultant book, The Bikeriders (1968), is recognized as the first photo book about the biker subculture. It's currently available from Chronicle Books. Smithsonian magazine looks back on that moment in Lyon's career, and tells the story of the portrait above of club members Sparky and CowBoy. From Smithsonian:

Cowboy and Sparky, two pals on bikes. They've just been to a motorcycle race in Schererville, Indiana, and their girlfriends will soon get off work from the Dairy Queen. It is November 1965, and CowBoy - Irvin P. Dunsdon, who uses the capital B to this day - is 23 years old. He feels he's on top of the world.

He and Sparky — Charles Ritter - met in the Army and bonded instantly. When CowBoy got out of the service in 1964, he moved not to Utah, where he came from, but to Gary, Indiana—Sparky's hometown—so he could be there when Sparky got back from Vietnam a year later.

Now, in '65, they stick up for each other. They take no grief from anyone. They share the joy of biking on the open road. They belong to the Gary Rogues, a local motorcycle club.

Link to Smithsonian, Link to buy The Bikeriders book

I spotted in this in the SkyMall catalog, but SkyMaul couldn't have parodied it better. The Cruzin Cooler is a combination beer/food cooler and scooter. It's available in gas or electric models. According to the Cruzin Cooler site, it brings together two, er, "basic necessities of life, the ability to have cold food or a beverage handy along with the means to get somewhere, without walking." The Cruzin Cooler sells for $400 to $700 depending on the model.
Link

Previously on BB:
• Bizarre items on Sky Mall Link

According to new research, jazz musicians unconsciously switch off regions of the brain involved in self-censorship and firing up the area linked to self-expression. The scientists from Johns Hopkins University and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communications Disorders used fMRI to scan the brains of jazz musicians as they played a specially-designed piano keyboard. From a press release:

The scientists found that a region of the brain known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a broad portion of the front of the brain that extends to the sides, showed a slowdown in activity during improvisation. This area has been linked to planned actions and self-censoring, such as carefully deciding what words you might say at a job interview. Shutting down this area could lead to lowered inhibitions, Limb suggests.

The researchers also saw increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, which sits in the center of the brain’s frontal lobe. This area has been linked with self-expression and activities that convey individuality, such as telling a story about yourself.

“Jazz is often described as being an extremely individualistic art form. You can figure out which jazz musician is playing because one person’s improvisation sounds only like him or her,” says (professor Charles) Limb. “What we think is happening is when you’re telling your own musical story, you’re shutting down impulses that might impede the flow of novel ideas.”

Link to press release, Link to scientific paper in Public Library of Science (PLoS) ONE (via Michael Leddy's Orange Crate Art)