HeroRats are rodents who have been specially trained to sniff out unexploded landmines. The Dutch organization Anti-Personnel Land Mines Detection Product Development (APOPO), first referenced on BB in 2004, use Pavlovian conditioning to teach the rats to detect the scent of TNT and then send them to Mozambique for final testing and deployment. From CNN (image Goooutside/Wikimedia Commons):
Their olfactory senses are superb. They're native to Africa, so tropical disease is no problem, and they rarely weigh more than the 3 to 10 kilograms required to trip a mine, (APOPO chief of mine action and human security Havard) Bach said. It also helps that the mine-sniffing rats are not bonded to individual trainers or prone to ennui, as dogs are, he said.
"If you compare them to canine mine detectors, it's pretty much the same in terms of sensitivity and capability," Bach said, noting that dogs are better equipped to work in brush or high grass that might conceal a rat.
"Rats are not going to oust dogs in this industry, but it's a very positive complement," he added. "You could say they work for peanuts."
In 1988, Batman joined the War On Drugs to fight an Ecstasy-fueled killer and the pusher who got him high. Erowid has scanned several pages of the issue, Detective Comics #594. "Batman Ecstasy-Villain Commentary" (via Dose Nation)
Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story, by Alexander Shulgin and Ann Shulgin is one of the strangest books I've ever read. Alexander Shulgin is a well known psychedelic chemist, and he has synthesized hundreds of drugs, which he and his wife Ann have taken and written about in Pihkal (Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved) and in their follow up book, Tihkal (Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved). Fortunately for Alexander, he has a Drug Enforcement Administration Analytical License that allows him to possess, identify, and analyze drugs that would land other psychonauts in the slammer.
Vice recently sent Hamilton Morris ("VBS’s resident expert in all substances mind-bending") to the Shulgins' home in Northern California for a video interview.
After spending days, weeks, months poring over the work of psychonaut-in-chief, Alexander Shulgin, Hamilton Morris mustered up the chutzpah to give him a call and request an interview. The result is this: an epic love-fest on the man who birthed Ecstasy in a test-tube. Hamilton visits the Shulgin residence (in San Francisco, naturally) and tempers his fanboy freakout with a rare and intensive look at the home and laboratory that caused the balls of millions to trip.
(Video link) Amy (with the help of her friends Ben and Brian) attached 100 $1 bills to a tree on a public street. She says she did it "just to see what would happen." A lot of passers by didn't notice the tree. A lot of them noticed the tree but kept walking. A lot of them took one bill. A few took more than one.
What would have happened if Amy had attached $100 bills to the tree instead of $1 bills? (Via Cynical-C)
A big press event today from Google: the launch of "Google Instant," described as "a new search enhancement that shows results as you type."
We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type.
What fun might we have with this? A "Google Instant" alphabet, charting what term results when one types in each leter of the alphabet? Numbers, too: "4" is for 4chan.
Samuel Cockedey, a French photographer based in Tokyo, has uploaded another one of his mesmerizing time-lapse short films. This one is called inter // states, and it's best to watch it in HD full-screen here.
The sound track is a piece by Paul Frankland, aka Woob, called "Paradigm Flux."
Police in Europe shut down 49 servers and detained 10 people in 13 countries in a coordinated raid against an online movie-pirating network, according to a statement today from the Belgian prosecutor's office.
In Sweden, police raided seven locations including one in a suburb of Stockholm containing servers used by file-sharing website The Pirate Bay and WikiLeaks, the whisteblowing website.
This is a fire tornado that emerged from a brush fire on Sunday near Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano. National Geographic posted a gallery of amazing shots of these strange blazing whirlwinds. "Fire-Tornado Pictures: Why They Form, How to Fight Them"
Today the Sunlight Foundation launched analysis that reveals more than $1.3 trillion in federal reporting data from 2009 is broken. These data inaccuracies account for 70 percent of the total $1.9 trillion in government spending data reported last year. Clearspending offers a critique on the reliability of data from USASpending.gov, across three metrics--consistency, completeness and timeliness--and covers spending from 2007, 2008 and 2009.
While there has been an increase in the number of programs reporting to USASpending.gov in the past three years, the reported data suffers from an abundance of errors, as well as problems with the data's timeliness and completeness. Findings from Sunlight's Clearspending show that a significant portion of the government's data is unreliable and that USASpending.gov has not fulfilled its legal requirement of providing the public access to accurate, timely and detailed information on how federal agencies fulfill their spending obligations.
The US Department of Agriculture is bombing Naval Base Guam with dead mice stuffed with generic Tylenol and transponders. Their aim is to kill off the non-native brown tree snakes that are killing off the island's birds and also become ensnared in power lines causing black-outs. From CNN:
Since scientists discovered that the household pain reliever was deadly to the brown tree snakes, they’ve been trying to figure out how to get it to where many of the serpents live in the canopies of the island’s forests, according to a report in Stars & Stripes. The Tylenol-loaded mice are attached to two pieces of cardboard joined by paper streamers that snake exterminators hope will catch on tree branches, providing deadly snacks for snakes at those heights, according to the Stripes report.
The aerial attack on the tree snakes is designed to augment current trapping systems, which are placed around ports and airports to prevent the snakes from hitching rides to other Pacific islands such as Hawaii and causing the same ecological nightmares they’ve been responsible for on Guam...
If the current the experiment works – scientists will know because they’re also packing the dead mice with radio transmitters for the snakes to ingest – death from above will be coming for snakes at the island’s Anderson Air Base next year, according to Guam Newswatch. Success there could see the program expand island-wide.
Now that I'm set up with an iPad (protected by a Moleskine-like Dodocase), Comic Book Pad, and the free Digital Comics Museum, there's really no good reason for me to buy anything else ever again.
Above, Sparky Watts No. 9, from 1949, by the great Boody Rogers.
From NPR, a list of 5 common parental worries that are extremely unlikely, and the top five risks for kids: the gap between the two is the source of much anguish, bad policy, and danger:
Based on surveys Barnes collected, the top five worries of parents are, in order:
But how do children really get hurt or killed?
1. Car accidents
2. Homicide (usually committed by a person who knows the child, not a stranger)
3. Abuse
4. Suicide
5. Drowning
HappySmurfday has dug up and scanned some printouts of the login screen from Penn and Teller's circa-1987 BBS, Mofo Ex-Machina. They are nerdgasmic and glorious.
Here's another barn-burner of a speech by rogue archivist Carl Malamud, addressing the Gov 2.0 Summit 2010. Carl sez, "Washington, D.C. has become a vast wasteland of computer contracts. The U.S. government spent $81.9 billion in 2010 on information technology and much of that money is misspent, crippling the ability of government to do the jobs with which it has been entrusted. How can we deal with a global environmental crisis or a renegade financial industry or rescue the vast works that lie fallow in our national libraries when the basic machinery of government does not work?"
From Wired's Raw File, a gallery of a creepy Ukrainian salt mine that has been converted into a convalescent home for recovering asthmatics. It's something called Speleotherapy: breathing in salt-saturated air as a means of soothing respiratory problems: "Kuletski describes the atmosphere among patients as 'calm and relaxed' despite the 'appallingly unsafe conditions. ... The presence of kids wearing safety helmets and cheap plastic sheets to protect them from dripping water from the ceiling makes being there even more surreal,' says Kuletski."
Last year, Boing Boing reader Cory Dodt responded to my request for a bookmarklet to make it easy to add attribution information for Creative Commons-licensed photos from Flickr. When Flickr updated its layout, the bookmarklet broke, but Cory was good enough to update it so that it works -- and now it's better than ever, with links to the relevant Creative Commons license text. Thanks, Cory!
— Cory • Comments: 4
Michael Geist writes in with more analysis of the recently leaked draft of ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret treaty being negotiated among rich countries whose entertainment lobbyists have decided that the United Nations is too open and balanced to be used for future copyright negotiations.
I posted yesterday on the updated Internet chapter in the latest version of ACTA, which features a major change on secondary liability [ed: e.g., holding ISPs and web-sites liable for copyright infringement if they don't surveil and censor their users] and the U.S. attempt to clawback on recent domestic DMCA changes by arguing against linking circumvention and copyright infringement [ed: that is, the attempt to broaden the reach of the US law that prohibits breaking "copy-protection" even if you're doing so for reasons that don't violate copyright, such as loading unauthorized software onto locked mobile devices like iPads].
While there remains a number of issues to be determined in that chapter (and a great deal to be addressed in the other IP enforcement chapters on criminal provisions, civil enforcement, and border measures), the rest of ACTA has largely been decided. As in the Internet chapter, where compromise was needed it was the U.S. that did most of it, as it becomes increasingly apparent that the USTR is willing to agree to almost anything in order to bring home an agreement before the next round of elections in November.
Most interesting is the U.S. decision to cave on border issues. The U.S. had sought a provision requiring that each party shall adopt and maintain appropriate measures that facilitate activities of custom authorities for better identifying and targeting for inspection at its border shipments that could contain pirated goods. The article then specified a range of activities including consultation, information exchange, and a mandatory audit power. Moreover, there was an additional article on information exchange between customs authorities. All of that has been dropped, leaving only a provision where a party may consult with stakeholders or share information.
All three bear improvements over earlier generations of this familiar fruit, but some of the new additions—and in some cases, what's missing—may surprise you. Following are snapshots of the new iPod Shuffle, iPod Nano, and iPod Touch, with taste-test notes.
Look at this squid's eye. Just look at it. See anything eerily familiar?
Squid, along with the rest of the family Cephalopoda, haven't shared a common ancestor with us vertebrates in some 500 million years—long before the evolution of our camera-like eyes. And yet, there the cephalopods are, flagrantly swimming about with eyes that use a lens to project an image onto a retina. Call it Squid Eye for the Vertebrate Guy. So, how's it work?
Convergent evolution, my friends. Convergent evolution. We happened to hit on similar solutions to the same problem of sight, even though the eyes of vertebrates and cephalopods evolved separately, in very different ways, at different times. Today, we can see that legacy in cephalopod and vertebrate fetal development. With vertebrates, the eyes grow on stalks, reaching out from the brain. In cephalopods, the eyes start as a clumping of cells on the surface of the skin and reach backwards, into the head, to make brain contact. Similar destinations. Very different road maps.
This lovely illustration—featuring dissections of the head, funnel, mantle and eye of a Thaumatolampas diadema—comes from The Cephalopoda Part I: Oegopsida and Part II: Myopsida, Octopoda Atlas written in 1910 by zoologist Carl Chun following a German expedition to the Indian, Atlantic and Great Southern oceans.
Here's Instructables user Sunbanks's simple HOWTO for making candles out of discarded shotgun shells, just the thing for your William S Burroughs-reviving seance!
Here's a service that takes Google maps satellite views and converts them into print-and-fold envelopes you can use for your correspondence, creating a kind of handsome, 21st-century stationery.
Articles included: "How to Get Rid of Your Woman," "Trouble With Twats," "Why Men Wear Beards," and then: "Positive Prison Reform Plan."
Above, the cover art for an issue which contained a feature article titled "How to Select a Good Ol' Lady." Apparently, the courtship ritual involves strangling her. Then, meth!
Some of the images on the aforelinked link are not work-safe.
I was going through my photo archive and came across this sign for funnel cakes that I photographed in Austin a couple of years ago. Doesn't it whet your appetite?
This video of a cruise ship in heavy seas is intense, and the Rod Stewart soundtrack doesn't make it any less so. I bet it was quite scary for the folks onboard. (Thanks, Mathias Crawford, via Dangerous Minds!)
Mark David Chapman, who murdered John Lennon in 1980, has again been denied parole. From CNN:
In their written comments, the commissioners told Chapman they had concerns "about the disregard you displayed for the norms of our society and the sanctity of human life." After considering the action he took in 1980, they concluded Chapman's "discretionary release remains inappropriate at this time and incompatible with the welfare of the community."
The beta test period for Makers Market has come to a close and we're bummed to announce that the doors are closing on the Market and our Boing Boing Bazaar. There is some terrific stuff in the BB Bazaar and we encourage you to reach out to the sellers directly and seek out their merchandise via other channels. Thank you to all the makers, the buyers, and our great partners/friends at MAKE! We learned a lot from this experiment and are currently exploring some new ways to create a curated catalog of wonderful things. More on that soon. The official message from our partners at MAKE follows.
Clifford Nass is the Thomas M. Storke Professor at Stanford University and director of the Communication between Humans and Interactive Media (CHIMe) Lab. Corina Yen is editor-in-chief of Ambidextrous Magazine.
For the first century of the automobile's use, passengers were always people or pets. However, in the past decades, automobiles have begun to carry a new "passenger": a voice-based computer agent used to give directions, warn of problems (e.g., "your oil is low"), control entertainment (e.g., "you are now listening to KQED"), and make suggestions (e.g., "the closest Starbucks is 2.3 miles away"). As a social scientist who studies human-technology interaction, I've guided my design of and research on these "virtual passengers" by studying real passengers. By leveraging those attributes that make passengers likeable and non-distracting, one can then make GPS systems, voice-activated controls, and other voices in the car more desirable and effective. For example, we've found that people adjust their way of speaking to match the situation in the car: when the driving is dangerous passengers unconsciously shorten and simplify their sentences. There are now GPS systems that do the same. Similarly, when BMW found that German drivers wouldn't take directions from a female voice and had to have a product recall, they found a voice that better matched their brand: a male "co-pilot."
One of the most important issues to address in car interfaces is how to deal with upset drivers, as negative feelings are among the primary causes of accidents on the highways. Unfortunately, there is little known about effective strategies that passengers can use when dealing with an upset driver. In particular, should a passenger -- real or virtual -- in a car with an upset driver sound happy and upbeat or depressed and morose?
There's still time to reserve a free ticket to see Boing Boing's screening of the much-talked-about documentary CATFISH at the Landmark Theatre on Pico blvd. in Los Angeles.
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Their olfactory senses are superb. They're native to Africa, so tropical disease is no problem, and they rarely weigh more than the 3 to 10 kilograms required to trip a mine, (APOPO chief of mine action and human security Havard) Bach said. It also helps that the mine-sniffing rats are not bonded to individual trainers or prone to ennui, as dogs are, he said.
A black man who worked for a 
As predicted last week in 
Here's Instructables user Sunbanks's simple HOWTO for making candles out of discarded shotgun shells, just the thing for your William S Burroughs-reviving seance!
There's still time to 
Check out 
