Today on Boing Boing tv, "Nazi Petting Zoo," a new piece of political theater by Austrian art prankster collective monochrom, who explain:

In 1938 Austria joined the Third Reich. Millions cheered Hitler and in the referendum 99.75% said 'yes' to 'Greater Germany'.

But after World War II, many Austrians sought comfort in the idea of Austria as "the Nazis' first victim". Factions of Austrian society tried for a long time to advance the view that it was only annexation at the point of a bayonet(te).

But it's time to embrace history. It's time to remember the feel-good days of 1938. It's time to let our real feelings out! It's time to hug the Nazi, Austria! Finally!

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion, downloadable video, and instructions for subscribing to the BBtv video podcast.

Previous Boing Boing tv episodes featuring monochrom:

* Fisch Interview
* Orwell's 1984 deconstructed by puppets: monochrom
* Monochrom's Marxist sock puppets
* Monochrom: MyFaceSpace, the musical
* Monochrom: Campfire at Will
* Monochrom: Falco Stairs
* Monochrom: Bar code artist Scott Blake / Falco stencil memorial
* Human USB Hack / Very Simple Motor
* Mark's Curie Engine / Monochrom's love song for Lessig

(note: this item was re-posted to include video embed. XJ)

Today's New York Times has a scary article about food shortages around the world, including heart-breaking slide shows and videos of people digging in dumps for morsels of anything with digestible calories.

In Haiti, vendors are selling flavored mud to starving people.

In Haiti, where three-quarters of the population earns less than $2 a day and one in five children is chronically malnourished, the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil and sugar, typically consumed only by the most destitute.

“It’s salty and it has butter and you don’t know you’re eating dirt,” said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in recent months. “It makes your stomach quiet down.”

Link

The TED Prize event is streaming live now. I watched it last year and it was very moving. I imagine it will be again this year.

About the 2008 TEDPrize

The TED Prize was created as a way of taking the inspiration, ideas and resources generated at TED and using them to make a difference. Winners receive a prize of $100,000 each, and more importantly, a wish. A wish to change the world.

During today's session, webcast live from Monterey, California, the 2008 TEDPrize winners will unveil their wishes for the first time. Prize winners Neil Turok, Dave Eggars and Karen Armstong will be joined by singer-songwriter Vusi Mahlasela.

Link

A campaign is afoot to build a memorial to Voytek, a soldier-bear who fought alongside the Polish army at the Battle of Monte Cassino, carrying ammunition. After the war, Voytek lived out his days in the Edinburgh Zoo, occasionally visited by his old army buddies who tried to slip him the cigarettes and beer he'd come to enjoy while serving in the army.

When Polish forces were deployed to Europe the only way to take the bear with them was to "enlist" him.

So he was given a name, rank and number and took part in the Italian campaign.

He saw action at Monte Cassino before being billeted - along with about 3,000 other Polish troops - at the army camp in the Scottish Borders.

The soldiers who were stationed with him say that he was easy to get along with.

"He was just like a dog - nobody was scared of him," said Polish veteran Augustyn Karolewski, who still lives near the site of the camp.

Link (Thanks, Grey!)

(Image: Iranian.com)

Yesterday here on Boing Boing, I pointed to two new projects about the sex trade from my friend Susannah Breslin: Letters from Johns and Letters from Working Girls. She says:

In the comments, a reader posted a link to a project in which the artist had turned sex worker stories into comic strips. That artist is Peter S. Conrad, a Northern California based writer and artist whose work has appeared in True Porn and will appear in I Saw You: Missed Connection Comics. I dropped Conrad an email about the project. He wrote back and sent the comic I've posted here. I asked him if I could ask him a few questions, and he said yes.

So today, Susannah has posted a short interview with Conrad, and the rest of "Going Back," with larger scans of his work. Link (contains explicit, adult material).

Researchers at the University of Portsmouth have demonstrated that we can tell from voice alone whether a speaker is smiling -- and even which sort of smile ("open," "smiley eyes").

The audio for the interviews was then played back to another group of test subjects. Even without seeing the speakers, the listeners were able to hear the different types of smile the speaker made as he or she went through the wacky interview.

"A voice contains a variety of acoustical characteristics" said Drahota. "It's possible that we interpret these 'flavours' in someone's voice almost without noticing."

Link

(Image: Another smile ..., a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike photo from Ferdinand Reus's Flickr stream)

Writer Susannah Breslin (of Reverse Cowgirl), whose work I've blogged many times here on Boing Boing, has launched two new projects: Letters from Working Girls, and Letters from Johns.

As the titles suggest, the blogs consist of first-hand accounts from real sex workers, and from real clients of sex workers.

Here's a snip from "Working Girls":

I am 26. I'm a grad student in New York. Internet men pay to spank me. If I don't maintain certain grades, I lose my scholarship, and at the beginning of the semester I was flipping my shit about this one class, insisting I was going to fail and whatnot. I was wondering how I was going to pull three or six thousand dollars out of my ass, depending on how bad I did, and my friend said, "It's too bad you don't live upstate, because my friend Mary has a dude that pays her a fuckton of money to just spank her. No sex." So I had to figure that if Mary can find a dude like this upstate, there HAS to be people like this in NYC I can find. And I have a high tolerance for pain and a passing interest in spanking, so it was on.

And here's a snip from "Johns."

I started seeing her once or twice a month and have kept on doing so even though I've been in relationships. I won't lie and say I don't think of it as cheating, it is. I finally stopped when I met a woman who, to be honest, shared a lot of similarities with B. I told B about this and she wished me nothing but happiness. We've spoken a few times since and seen each other socially. It's a bit like work friends after one person has moved to a different job.

In a fascinating article, the LA Times reports that as many as one million working-class people in China have been fleeced of their hard-earned savings in an ant farming pyramid scheme run by a company with close ties to the Chinese government.

These ants were far more than uninvited picnic guests, [investors] were told. When ground into a powder, they become an aphrodisiac, a kidney purifier and general cure-all, the Yilishen Tianxi Group declared. The ants would earn them a 30% annual return.

In reality, critics say, the ants apparently were little more than the bait for a vast pyramid scheme. Over an eight-year period, the company recruited as many as 1 million would-be ant farmers, collecting about $1.2 billion. In mid-December, it filed for bankruptcy.

...

The company hired as its spokesman Zhao Benshan, a famous comedian and actor who specializes in playing a hick. He has since dropped out of sight.

The boxes at the heart of the ant farming business are made of cardboard with a 2-inch-square plastic window and a small feeding hole framed so badly with duct tape that they look like the work of a careless teenager with a box cutter.

In return for their money, ant farmers were given the boxes, ants and a list of strict instructions: The ants need a spritz of water mixed with white sugar or honey at 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. every day. They should be fed cake and egg yolks every three to five days. And they should be kept indoors.

In return, the company would come and pick up dead dried ants every 74 days. Under no circumstances were the ant farmers to open their boxes and look inside, they were told, to ensure that the special Yilishen ants weren't mixed with inferior ants.

Link

UPDATE: The chairman of the company has been sentenced to death.

A concept "Sky Commuter aircraft" that absorbed $6 mil in startup capital is for sale on eBay. The seller appears to be one of the engineers, and the long description associated with the listing is a heartbreaking (and eccentrically punctuated) story of a beautiful, dashed dream:

The development of this advanced technology and project started back in the mid 1980's. Design and engineering was created by Boeing engineer's in Arlington Washington. Some 60 investors and well over $6,000.000.00 in R&D and production yielded only (3) concept test ships before the plant was shut down for reasons not listed here. The sad end was all and anything that was in the hangar was taken and or destroyed. This sole example of this technology, Advancements and investments are present and was saved in this single craft. The ship was not at the base location at the time or it to would have been destroyed...

In a brief description of the ship: It has a operational electric gas assisted lexan bubble canopy. Electric controled directional driving and landing lights. Electric Joystick and two foot pedals on both side and the craft was meant to be controlled from either seat. Advanced front dash shell made of Carbonfiber and Kevlar. Rear engine and electronics bay accessible by tilting seats forward and removing the back panel. (3) huge 3 foot lifting fans CCW/CW rotation. This was made to take off in vertical fight and land. It can be landed on water and float like a boat and take off of water. The targeted dream was to lift above it all and not deal with the daily gridlock traffic. Nearly at the finish line it all came to a abrupt stop and all the years and investment and R&D and production, Remains in this one craft shown here.

Link (Thanks, Bill!)

Buried at the end of an IHT article on French president Nicolas Sarkozy's plan to tax the Internet and raise levies on blank media is this doozy: abolishing gross domestic product in favor of a better metric of happiness, and defending the economy "sovereign wealth funds and other financial predators."

In the 45-minute speech, Sarkozy declared the death of the 35-hour week, suggested that large companies may have to double or triple the part of their profit they are obliged to share with employees and vowed to replace gross domestic product with a more holistic indicator of economic welfare that he has commissioned from two Nobel laureates in economics, Amarthya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz. He also said that he would put a state bank in charge of defending French industry against sovereign wealth funds and other financial predators.

Link (via Beyond the Beyond)

The Endless Belt Trains for Futuristic Cities described in the November, 1932 ish of Modern Mechanix is one of my all-time favorite tomorrows of yesterday -- a world run on rails, rising high above the city, slicing through it with arrow-straight, improbable lines:

Passengers board the first local train at any point, and it stops every 50 seconds for a period of 10 seconds. When the doors close, a gong sounds and the local platform starts moving. Now there is another signal and gates open for a second platform, or express, on which the passenger takes the major part of his trip. After ten seconds the gates close and the local slows down for another stop, while the express picks up to a 22 m.p.h. speed.

Noise of the system is at a minimum, and passengers are delivered at no more than 300 feet from their streets. All stations are controlled from one central point, all elements being so timed that there can be no hitches.

Link

Today in my ongoing series of photos from my travels: this nighttime shot of Berlin's "Check Point Curry," a currywurst-stand situated at the site of the notorious Checkpoint Charlie on the Berlin Wall. Link

The wonderful folks at Evil Mad Scientist Labs have figured out how to make edible googly eyes (snip the ed of a gelatin pill capsule pop in a round cake-sprinkle and affix it to half a Whopper; they demonstrate the technique with this excellent edible Flying Spaghetti Monster effigy!

While the gelatin capsules have a dome on each end, they have a lot of space in between that we really don't need. The photo above illustrates how much of each end we want to keep: the domed part plus a few millimeters. As it turns out, you cannot use the scissors to actually cut it there-- it will crack or suffer permanent creases, making it useless for our application...

Next, we're going to need rolling pupils for our eyes, and these fit the bill perfectly. These are Wilton Jumbo Rainbow Nonpareils, one brand of *giant* round sprinkles a couple of millimeters across. Our big surprise: these actually taste pretty good-- they're flavored candy. The downside is that we only really want dark pupils, so there's some fishing around to find them in the assortment..

Link (via Neatorama)

A while back I posted a story about a lawyer couple who were able to take away part of their neighbor's property under the doctrine of "adverse possession."

Many people in Boulder believe the court's decision was wrong. Others believe that while the court may have been technically correct, Richard McLean (a former judge in Boulder) and Edith Stevens used their connections to take the land in an underhanded manner.

Don Wrege, a Boulder songwriter, made three hilarious parody songs about the case. One is based on Mister Rogers' "Won't You Be My Neighbor," another parodies Woodie Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land," and the third is a delightful take-off of "You're a Mean One, Mister Grinch."

1. Stealing Land From Our Neighbor

2. This Land Belongs to Don and Susie

3. Edie and Dick (The Grinch Theme)

Link

A college student is attempting to level two "pacifist" characters up to the top of World of Warcraft's character progression, characters he's playing without attacking anything. It's partly to try out the philosophy of pacifism in the violent virtual world, and partly to see if he can do it:

Show us your kung fu: what's the actual nuts-and-bolts reality of this character?

Both my priest and my rogue try not to hit anything, although there's always a chance of a misclick when trying to open a quest item with mobs fighting near it. Both of them always wield a fishing rod, so any accidental hits won't increase their weapon skills. Neither of them will do quests where they have to kill things. In battlegrounds, my rogue will throw bombs to interrupt flag captures and stun people and may even accidentally kill players low in health or nearby critters. My priest only heals, so he is actually closer in roleplaying terms. Neither will "get around" these limits by grouping and having other players do their dirty work. In terms of bragging rights, I intend to keep my rogue's weapon skills (dagger, thrown and unarmed) at all 1s. My priest will also have all 1s, but it won't be obvious on WoW Armory that he has no offensive spells beyond the level 1 Smite all priests start with.

Link (via Negatendo)

My pal Roger Wood is a mad assemblage sculptor in Toronto who makes gorgeous steampunky kinetic clocks. Every day or two, he sends out a "newsletter" to his friends with a picture of his latest -- check this one out. I already own three of Roger's clocks (and they're among my favorite objects in the whole world), but I'm tempted to get a fourth. He's just brilliant. Link

Cracked has a list of five Fortune 500 companies that profited greatly by their active collaboration with the Nazis, from IBM (punchcard tabulators to count the concentration camp dead) to Hugo Boss (designed the Nazi uniforms) and others -- check out how incredibly evil Siemens is:

Siemens was the major player in the Nazification of Germany. The company, run by Werner's son, Carl, and then his grandson, Hermann, struggled in the wake of World War I and the Great Depression and had to earn some dough fast. When Hitler rose to power in the 1930s, it was the signal for the Siemens executives to start building factories, and nowhere was the real estate better than near the homey neighborhoods of Auschwitz and Buchenwald...

At the height of the Nazi terror during the 1940s, it was not atypical for a slave worker to build electrical switches for Siemens in the morning and be snuffed out in a Siemens-made gas chamber in the afternoon...

Well, a few years ago, in an act of insensitive fuckery so colossal it could blot out the sun, Siemens tried to trademark the name "Zyklon" with the intent of marketing a series of products under the name. Including gas ovens.

Link (via Plastic Bag)

Today in my series of pictures from my travels: these inexplicable, angelic, rendered pigeon wings that were just sitting there on the sidewalk yesterday in London's east end. Link

This November, 1939 Popular Science article fantasizes about a futuristic "skyscraper airport" for the "city of tomorrow." Pretty good predictions, except they missed the whole no-shoes, no-liquid, no-dignity policy. Link

This scary-ass (and handsomely designed) infographic details the thousand and one ways that high-heels are incredibly bad for your health, posture, and long-term prospects. Link (via Lawgeek)

Graffiti Research Labs Vienna builds "laser tagging" boxes out of lasers, laptops and projectors that allow them to paint "nondestructive, reversible" graffiti with light on the sides of buildings. In this Make Weekend Projects video, GRL and Make team up to show you how to make your own tag-box. Link (via Beyond the Beyond)

Warren Ellis's profane and angry take on the Three Laws of Robotics is good reading -- especially if you envision the future as an organic process where "laws" are emergent phenomena arising from lots of individual, uncoordinated actors (e.g., the Internet) instead of a centrally planned affair contrived by Wise Men in white robes (the Foundation).

2. Robots do not want to have sex with you. Are you listening, Japan? I don’t have a clever comparative simile for this, because frankly you bags of meat will fuck bicycles if they’re laying down and not putting up a fight. Just stop it. There is no robot on Earth that wants to see a bag of meat with a small prong on the end approaching it with a can of WD-40 and a hopeful smile. And don’t get me started on that terrifying hole that squeezes out more bags of meat.

Link

The NY Public Library has scans of an 1804 book from China that shows 22 engravings of common punishment methods of the day.

Shown here: a malefactor enduring the "punishment of the wooden collar." Can anyone translate the Chinese characters on the collar?

Link (Via BibliOdyssey)

Inspired by the never-ending news of new and ridiculous restrictions on flying, Grig Larson has written a grimly funny little science fiction vignette about what a world in which flying was really "made safe" would be like:

When she gets to the counter, a uniformed woman takes her booklet, and compares it to her ID. She asks for a fingerprint scan. Uh oh! There's a problem. Jill can't remember what finger she used! But the lady helps her out, and within minutes, she's approved to go into the disrobing chamber. The lady gives her a neck tag, stamps Jill's forehead, and sends her on her way past the many guards down a hallway.

Jill knows what to expect. Helpful pictograph signs show her what she will be doing when she gets to the disrobing room. At the end of the hallway, she steps into a free closet, and strips down naked. Don't forget those earrings and hair bands, Jill! Jill remembered that the safety of her personal belongings could never be guaranteed, so she came wearing nothing she couldn't afford to lose. She puts her belongings in a plastic bag, and seals it nice and tight. She sees herself in the mirror. Oh my, Jill. You have been gaining a little weight, haven't we? Better lay off those desserts at the buffet when you're in Los Angeles, Jill!

Link (Thanks, Grig!)

Today's the anniversary of Thomas Edison's vicious electrocution of a live elephant in order to prove the dangers of Nikola Tesla's alternating current and the safety of his competing direct current.

When the day came, Topsy was restrained using a ship's hawser fastened on one end to a donkey engine and on the other to a post. Wooden sandals with copper electrodes were attached to her feet and a copper wire run to Edison's electric light plant, where his technicians awaited the go-ahead.

In order to make sure that Topsy emerged from this spectacle more than just singed and angry, she was fed cyanide-laced carrots moments before a 6,600-volt AC charge slammed through her body. Officials needn't have worried. Topsy was killed instantly and Edison, in his mind anyway, had proved his point.

A crowd put at 1,500 witnessed Topsy's execution, which was filmed by Edison and released later that year as Electrocuting an Elephant.

Link

Rose White's 24th Chaos Communication Congress presentation "The history of guerrilla knitting" is an incredibly fascinating tour through the history of proprietary versus open knitting; mad, subversive knitting projects; knowledge-sharing and knitting, and so on. There're plenty of delightful slides and lots of juicy background about the way that knitting broke free of proprietary, secretive guilds, only to be locked down again by greed-heads, whence it is now being liberated by knit-hackers.

"Guerrilla knitting" has a couple of meanings in the knitting community - to some, it merely means knitting in public, while to others, it means creating public art by knitted means.

Contemporary knitters feel very clever for coming up with edgy language to describe their knitting, but the truth is that for decades there have been knitters and other textile artists who are at least as punk rock as today's needle-wielders. This talk will cover the vibrant history of contemporary knitting, with a focus on projects that will make you say, "Wow, that's knitted?" Feel free to bring knitting projects to the talk - let's get some public knitting going on at the conference!

Link, Video download (via Craft)

RideAccidents is a website that tracks gruesome carny-ride accidents -- the happiest manglings on earth! Fuel for your phobia of fun-fairs.

Air Glory ride cited for 25 code violations; report suggests operator, not deficiences, to blame for death

Owner: operator "had a tendency not to lock the carabiner after attaching the rider to the ride."

(Friday, July 27, 2007) - The Air Glory freefall ride from which a girl fell to her death in Wisconsin on July 14 has been cited for 25 code violations by investigators who inspected the ride after the accident. Officials from the Wisconsin Commerce Department do not believe that the deficiencies contributed to the girl's death because the ride was operating properly at the time she was killed. However, one official said that the ride might have been red-tagged if the violations had been discovered before the accident. The ride was due for an inspection three days after the accident.

Link (via Neatorama)

Inspired by the news that Netscape Navigator is officially dead, Torgo-X installed and ran a copy of Netscape 0.9b, one of my favorite flavors of the browser, and experimented with running it on the live web.

Moreover, NS 0.9b is like many early browsers in that it doesn't send a "Host: ..." header (lacking in HTTP 1.0, but now mandatory in HTTP 1.1), so that makes accessing most current web sites even harder. So I can't access Amazon, Google, or Wikipedia. IMDB pages actually load, if you hit Stop at strategic times. Still, the crashing; and also inexplicable DNS failures and network hangs.

Between the Host problem and the Content-Type problem, I can't even look at enough web pages such that I could make this NS 0.9b crash as much as I remember it being prone to. Or maybe it's just that Wine is more forgiving of wonky system calls that MSWindows 3.11 and/or Winsock were.

Link (via JWZ)

Hamish sez, "A few years ago I found a collection of over 200 35mm Kodachrome slides of travel and marketing posters from the 1950's and 1960's. I received a nice Epson scanner for Christmas so I dug them up and scanned them all in. If only the travel posters of today were so stylish and exotic! " Link (Thanks, Hamish!)