Archive for October, 2009
Celebrity Hoax Dupes Tabloids
Paul Lewis reports in The Guardian:
The plan to subvert the pages of some of Fleet Street’s bestselling newspapers was hatched in a windowless office in east London. For months, a team of documentary makers had sat in the Brick Lane film studio they called “the cell”, trawling through tabloid clippings in search of stories they could prove were untrue.
They decided to concoct an experiment to test their theory that tabloid editors sometimes publish celebrity stories with scant regard for the truth.
“We consumed a lot of coffee thinking about it,” said Chris Atkins, the director of the forthcoming film Starsuckers. “How can we do this intelligently? How can we prove our point? But how can we make it funny?”
Atkins and his producers decided the answer was to pose as members of the public and offer completely fictitious stories to the tabloid press about well-known figures. Their first call, on 18 March, concerned a fictional sighting of…
Nazi Gnomes Invade German Town
Rob Quinn writes on Newser:
Some 1,250 controversial German gnomes giving the heil Hitler salute will greet visitors to the center of the German town of Straubing beginning today.
The artist behind the gnome blitzkrieg says the installation, Dance With the Devil, is designed “to get people to think, to react,” and to draw attention to the rise of far-right movements across Europe.
Giving the heil Hitler salute or displaying Nazi imagery is illegal in Germany, but artist Ottmar Hoerl has successfully defended his work in court, saying it ridicules rather than glorifies the Nazis.
“In 1942 it would have been the Nazis massacring me because of this piece of art,” he said. “I am presenting the master race as garden gnomes, and that falls into any sensible definition of satire.”
Why I Hate The ISO
From Black Sun Gazette
This is an article I’ve wanted to write for a long time. I considered the subject to obscure until my special lady friend assured me that it was not. If you’ve ever been within 50 miles of a college campus you probably know who the International Socialist Organization are. They’re the obviously middle-class kids shilling a banal newspaper in really large type font who curl into a ball and start crying if you ask them a question harder than “but is socialism really possible / aren’t people naturally selfish / didn’t socialism fail in the Soviet Union?” If the ISO weren’t running around claiming to be socialists, I can honestly say that I wouldn’t have any problem with them. If they just fessed up to the fact that they’re garden variety radical liberals who want good people to do good things in the world, I wouldn’t have the…
North Carolina Church to Burn ‘Satan’s Books’ in Time For Halloween
Kathleen Miller writes on RAW Story:
A Baptist Church near Asheville, N.C., is hosting a “Halloween book burning” to purge the area of “Satan’s” works, which include all non-King James versions of the Bible, popular books by many religious authors and even country music.
The website for the Amazing Grace Baptist Church in Canton, N.C., says there are “scriptural bases” for the book burning. The site quotes Acts 19:18–20: “And many that believed, came and confessed and shewed their deeds. Many of them also which used curious arts, brought their books together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver. So mightily grew the word of God and prevailed.”
Church leaders deem Good News for Modern Man, the Evidence Bible, the New International Version Bible, the Green Bible and the Message Bible, as well as at least seven other versions of…
Giant Snakes Threaten the U.S.
Sounds like a bad B-movie, like the ones the Sci-Fi Channel airs on a regular basis.
Larry O’Hanlon writes on Discovery:
No exaggeration: U.S. Geological Survey’s biologists have just published a report detailing the ecological risks of nine species of giant non-native boas, anacondas and pythons in the United States. Already Burmese pythons are reproducing in the wilds and no-so-wilds of South Florida, with an estimated population now in the tens of thousands. But things could get a lot worse. There’s even this tidbit about threats to humans in the press release:
Based on the biology and known natural history of the giant constrictors, individuals of some species may also pose a small risk to people, although most snakes would not be large enough to consider a person as suitable prey. Mature individuals of the largest species — Burmese, reticulated, and northern and southern African pythons—have been documented as attacking and killing people…
Blow-Up Over Artist’s Blow-Up of Obama Stipple Drawing
David Kravets writes in Wired’s Threat Level:
Pablo Picasso once said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”
But Wall Street Journal illustrator Noli Novak says Spanish artist Jose Maria Cano engaged in outright plagiarism in producing a large painting that meticulously duplicates Novak’s stipple portrait of President Barack Obama, including the surrounding text that ran on the front page of the Journal last year.
Jose Maria Cano’s giant hand-painted copy of Noli Novak’s Obama drawing “He copied it dot by dot,” Novak said.
Cano, who could not be reached for comment, has produced an entire series of paintings copied from the Journal’s signature stipple portraiture — all of them several times larger than the newspaper clippings from which they’re derived.
In a Tuesday blog post accusing Cano of misappropriation, Novak wrote that the attorneys for the Journal — which owns the copyright to her original Obama drawing — are looking into the matter.
“I’m just venting the fact that…
T-Mobile Sued For ‘Catastrophic’ Losses Of Data
By Wendy Davis of online media daily:
T-Mobile’s Sidekick data loss isn’t just a messy public relations problem. The debacle also could leave the company with some big legal bills.
This week, T-Mobile was hit with two separate class-action lawsuits alleging that the company misled consumers into believing that their data was more secure than was the case. “One of the major selling points of Sidekicks was that users always had access to their personal data, and that such data would and could be properly entrusted to defendants to maintain and retain, safely, securely and always available,” Sidekick user Maureen Thompson alleges in a lawsuit filed in federal district court in San Jose, Calif.
T-Mobile said Saturday that photos, contacts and other data that wasn’t currently on Sidekick devices had most likely been lost due to a server failure at Microsoft subsidiary Danger, which powers data services on the Sidekick.
Since then, however, the…
Got Acid? I’m Tripping Out. The Return of Hofmann’s Problem Child: LSD
Gary Stix writes in Scientific American:
Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, lambasted the countercultural movement for marginalizing a chemical that he asserted had potential benefits as an invaluable supplement to psychotherapy and spiritual practices such as meditation. “This joy at having fathered LSD was tarnished after more than ten years of uninterrupted scientific research and medicinal use when LSD was swept up in the huge wave of an inebriant mania that began to spread over the Western world, above all the United States, at the end of the 1950s,” Hofmann groused in his 1979 memoir LSD: My Problem Child.
For just that reason, Hofmann was jubilant in the months before his death last year, at the age of 102, when he learned that the first scientific research on LSD in decades was just beginning in his native Switzerland. “He was very happy that, as he said, ‘a long wish finally became…
Damien Hirst Slammed by British Media: “He Simply Can’t Paint”
If it were not for his prodigious fame, would Damien Hirst’s canvases be exhibited at London’s hallowed Wallace Collection? Of course not, says Tom Lubbock in The Independent. The man simply can’t paint:
A few quick questions. 1. Are these new paintings, painted by Damien Hirst himself, any good? No, not at all, they are not worth looking at. 2. So why are you writing about them at such length? Because he is very famous. 3. And why has the Wallace Collection decided to exhibit them? Because he is very famous. 4. And why did Damien Hirst even paint them in the first place? Because he is very famous.
Now let me put this at more length. Damien Hirst has painted some paintings, entirely by hand. So far he has made his name with other kinds of art: with assemblages, mainly involving dead animals and pills, and paintings, painted by other people.…
Can Perfume Make You a Winner?
Matthew Futterman reports for the Wall Street Journal:
World-class athletes crave routine. Baseball’s Wade Boggs ate chicken before every game. Swimmer Michael Phelps blasts hip-hop in his earbuds before races. Others have a lucky shirt or pair of socks that feel right on their bodies, and nearly all of them watch video of previous events to help visualize a peak performance.
Few bother with smell.
Michelle Roark, the 2009 U.S. freestyle skiing champion, wants to change that. Ms. Roark, who is two classes short of a chemical engineering degree from the Colorado School of Mines, is convinced that the scent from a patent-pending perfume blend that she developed and calls “Confidence” is as important to her success as a good night’s sleep. Before competing, she douses her neck-warmer in the natural fragrance and spritzes it on the back of her neck and behind her ears.
“It’s scientifically proven that smell is closest to our…
Stockholm’s Bunnies Burned to Keep Swedes Warm
In the “you can’t make this stuff up” department, the latest idea for renewable “bioenergy” is going to make the PETA crowd truly insane. As reported in The Local:
The bodies of thousands of rabbits culled every year from the parks in Stockholm’s Kungsholmen neighbourhood are being used to fuel a heating plant in central Sweden.
The decision to use Stockholm’s rabbit cadavers as bioenergy to warm Swedes living in Värmland doesn’t sit well with Stockholm-based animal rights activists.
“Those who support the culling of rabbits surely think it’s good to use the bodies for a good cause. But it feels like they’re trying to turn the animals into an industry rather than look at the main problem,” Anna Johannesson of Vilda kaniners värn (‘Society for the Protection of Wild Rabbits’) told the local Vårt Kungsholmen newspaper.
Every year, the city of Stockholm kills off thousands of rabbits in an effort to protect trees…
MIT predicts wearable recommendation systems!
In a new interview, Pattie Maes of MIT’s Media Lab predicts wearable real-world recommendation systems. “The vision is whatever knowledge, or information, or services that might be relevant to you, given the things that you are currently doing, will be sort of magically available to you.” Her early work influenced Amazon and Netflix’s recommendation systems, but now she says “It would be better if digital information and interactivity is embedded into day-to-day materials… Information should just be easier and more seamless and accessible.”
There’s video of Pattie’s “SixthSense” demonstration at this year’s TED conference — a computerized personal projector with a camera — but Pattie now says “We’re making it more like an Open Source project where we invite others to help improve the technology and to think about other applications and other form factors.” And there’s also a nice description of life at the Media Lab. (”Walk a little further and…
New Age Mafia Rivalry Causes Deaths?
Long time visitors to this site will know that Jaye Beldo has been a contributor and friend for many years. These days he runs lavacocktail.com and is reporting a bizarre story about one of the stars of the movie/book phenomenon The Secret (for more on that check out the disinformation book Beyond The Secret):
A new mafia rivalry may be to blame for a couple of sketchy, sweaty deaths.
Two people recently died at a “sweat lodge” retreat in Arizona hosted by New Age author James Arthur Ray. He charged $9,000 a head to stuff 64 people into a tiny, sauna-like room covered in tarps and blankets, promising they’d be spiritually cleansed by the ritual.
Two people died and many suffered oxygen deprivation, but visionary Jaye Beldo thinks a curse may be partly to blame.
In addition to Ray’s own negligence, Beldo believes the retreat was sabotaged by a rival “New Age mafia” that’s jealous of…
Farmers Arrested Planting Hemp On DEA Headquarters Lawn
The Huffington Post reports:
A group of civilly-disobedient hemp farmers and business leaders were arrested Tuesday morning while digging up the lawn to plant industrial hemp seeds at the headquarters of the Drug Enforcement Administration.
David Bronner, the president of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, a more than 60-year-old company that does tens of millions of dollars of business annually, was among those arrested.
Bronner buys the hemp used in his soaps from Canadian farmers. He was arrested outside the DEA museum, which shares space with the headquarters. “Our kids are going to come to this museum and say, ‘My God. Your generation was crazy. What the hell is wrong with you people?’” he said as Arlington County Police handcuffed him and walked him to a waiting car.
Telephone Company Is Arm of Government, Feds Admit in Spy Suit
Ryan Singel writes on Wired’s Threat Level:
The Department of Justice has finally admitted it in court papers: The nation’s telecom companies are an arm of the government — at least when it comes to secret spying.
Fortunately, a judge says that relationship isn’t enough to quash a rights group’s open records request for communications between the nation’s telecoms and the feds.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation wanted to see what role telecom lobbying of the Justice Department played when the government began its year-long, and ultimately successful, push to win retroactive immunity for AT&T and others being sued for unlawfully spying on American citizens.
The feds argued that the documents showing consultation over the controversial telecom immunity proposal weren’t subject to the Freedom of Information Act since they were protected as “intra-agency” records:
“The communications between the agencies and telecommunications companies regarding the immunity provisions of the proposed legislation have been regarded as intra-agency because…
Benito Mussolini Was Recruited By MI5
Tom Kington writes in the Guardian:
History remembers Benito Mussolini as a founder member of the original Axis of Evil, the Italian dictator who ruled his country with fear and forged a disastrous alliance with Nazi Germany. But a previously unknown area of Il Duce’s CV has come to light: his brief career as a British agent.
Archived documents have revealed that Mussolini got his start in politics in 1917 with the help of a £100 weekly wage from MI5.
For the British intelligence agency, it must have seemed like a good investment. Mussolini, then a 34-year-old journalist, was not just willing to ensure Italy continued to fight alongside the allies in the first world war by publishing propaganda in his paper. He was also willing to send in the boys to “persuade” peace protesters to stay at home.
Mussolini’s payments were authorised by Sir Samuel Hoare, an MP and MI5’s man in Rome,…
First Black Hole (For Light) Created on Earth
Whew, only for light. Please don’t implode the planet (not that you’d have any reason to…)
Anil Ananthaswamy writes in New Scientist:
An electromagnetic “black hole” that sucks in surrounding light has been built for the first time.
The device, which works at microwave frequencies, may soon be extended to trap visible light, leading to an entirely new way of harvesting solar energy to generate electricity.
A theoretical design for a table-top black hole to trap light was proposed in a paper published earlier this year by Evgenii Narimanov and Alexander Kildishev of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Their idea was to mimic the properties of a cosmological black hole, whose intense gravity bends the surrounding space-time, causing any nearby matter or radiation to follow the warped space-time and spiral inwards…
Is The Large Hadron Collider Being Sabotaged from the Future?
Lauren Davis writes on io9.com about an article in the NY Times:
What if all the Large Hadron Collider’s recent woes are more than bad luck and technical problems? Two noted physicists speculate that the future may be pushing back on the LHC to avert the disaster of observing the Higgs boson.
The quest to observe the Higgs boson has certainly been plagued by its share of troubles, from the cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider in 1993 to the Large Hadron Collider’s streak of technical troubles. In fact, the projects have suffered such bad luck that Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto wonder if it isn’t bad luck at all, but future influences rippling back to sabotage them. In papers like “Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal” and “Search for Future Influence…
RIP Captain Lou Albano
From Black Sun Gazette
I need to make a top five professional wrestling managers. Management and announcing is a place in professional wrestling where men like “Captain” Lou Albano, who never showed much promise in the ring, made their mark on the sheer strength of charisma. Or obnoxiousness. Or in the case of exceptional individuals like Lou, both.
The Captain was never much to look at and never had a lot of talent in the ring. Despite having held the now defunct WWWF United States Tag Team title, the below video shows that to call his ring work “workmanlike” is to give it undue praise. But even in his ring days, “Captain” Lou had so much talent as a performer that his tag team, The Sicilians, with their mafiosi gimmick were warned by real life gangsters to dial it down a bit.
Read More at Black Sun Gazette
…
