I snapped a photo of this sticker in one of the restrooms at Ritual Coffee Roasters in San Francisco's Mission District. There used to be one just like it posted above a small hole in the wall in the other restroom. That sticker was removed though once the hole was patched to, er, block the camera's lens.
Link to a bigger image

UPDATE: In the comments, Sean Savage confesses to being the creator of this fine sticker. He writes:

I made it up last year, originally as a prank for the toilets on the (Burning Man) playa (hence the Bureau of Land Management logo).

Print em out yourself w/ the PDF here, or remix w/ the template file: Link

IEEE Spectrum has published the last interview with the late, great Sir Arthur C. Clarke. Spectrum editor Harry Goldstein emailed me, "In January, we sent Saswato Das to Sri Lanka to interview Clarke, who was in the hospital at the time. We were planning on putting the article and the audio up tomorrow anyway. Eerie timing." From Das's Spectrum article:

I started our interview sessions with geostationary satellites—those in orbit above Earth's equator that have the remarkable property of matching the period at which Earth rotates. As a result, these satellites look stationary to someone on Earth. They are extremely useful for communications, because transmitting and receiving antennas on Earth don't have to track them. In a 1945 article, “Extra-terrestrial Relays,” published in Wireless World, Clarke proposed that geostationary satellites would be ideal telecommunications relays. I asked Clarke whether he'd ever suspected that these satellites would one day prove to be so valuable to telecommunications.

He laughed. “I'm often asked why I didn't try to patent the idea of communications satellites. My answer is always, ‘A patent is really a license to be sued.' ”

Link

Osian Batyka-Williams's cutlery chair makes lovely use of the mountains of discarded restaurant cutlery. Though, as Make notes, it could probably use a cushion or two. Link (via Make)

Though I could never, ever, ever afford one, I'm in love with the Sarpaneva "bas-relief double moonphase Korona K3" watch, whose Lumiere-brothers-esque moon-face rotates endlessly around the gorgeous, moire-patterned face. Link

DailyLit, the excellent free ebook-by-email service, has been putting a ton of my Creative Commons-licensed works online. DailyLit lets you subscribe to receive books in small, quickly-readable chunks every day. They started with my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and now they've got all my novels and short story collections and a couple of my uncollected stories, too! Link

Mike Disher works with my pals at OpenRoad.tv, the fantastic travel video site for the American West. On the OpenRoad.tv forum, Mike posted about his unusual hobby, constructing beautiful high-end turntables. From his site:

About 5 years ago I decided to try my hand at building a custom turntable. Turntables and mechanical watch and clock movements fascinate me. I view them as functional pieces of kinetic art. I based my turntable design on the legendary Rega P3, and I created a new, custom acrylic plinth and a set of feet. I also devised a way to hide the motor, and I improved the motor mounting system. The plinth rests on small silicone dots, providing added isolation. The result was a very modern looking table. I called it the P3 Skeleton. Skeleton is a watchmaking term for a movement in which material is removed from the plates and bridges to reveal the inner workings. A fellow audio enthusiast saw this table at my house and offered to buy it on the spot. I did not sell it, but I was happy that others appreciated my work.

Link to Mike Disher's turntable page, Link to OpenRoad.TV's forum (Thanks, Jim Wirth!)

Previously on BB:
• OpenRoad.TV and Pesco visit the Musée Mécanique Link
• OpenRoad.TV: Natalie Zee Drieu of CRAFT Link

Chris sez, "I saw your post about the close-up photos done with the Eyeclops camera. Last week, a friend and I dissected an Eyeclops for an art project he's working on, and found something really funny: look closely at the photo and see if you can figure it out!

The Eyeclops contains two circuit boards: one is the real, functional board while the other is a sticker with an image of some circuitry printed on it. Apparently this is an attempt to compensate for the now-puny electronics that go into kids' toys. Makes me nostalgic for the days of my old vacuum-tube Atari that took up the entire family room." Link

See also:
Geeking out over velcro-like fasteners in infant wares
Magnified shots of ziploc seals

James sez, "The slow decline of the US dollar as a global currency continues with the tailors of Bangkok now advertising their rates in Euros. Advertisements for tailors can be found on the free tourist maps of Bangkok. I was in Bangkok in 2005 and all of the prices were in USD. Now the advertisements are in Euros." Link (Thanks, James!)

Writing in the NYT, David Leonhardt has a good primer explaining the exotic, sleazy economic shenanigans that turned some bum mortgage loans into a multi-hundreds-of-trillions-of-dollars toxic bubble that threatens the planetary economy:

Investors then goosed their returns through leverage, the oldest strategy around. They made $100 million bets with only $1 million of their own money and $99 million in debt. If the value of the investment rose to just $101 million, the investors would double their money. Home buyers did the same thing, by putting little money down on new houses, notes Mark Zandi of Moody’s Economy.com. The Fed under Alan Greenspan helped make it all possible, sharply reducing interest rates, to prevent a double-dip recession after the technology bust of 2000, and then keeping them low for several years...

Many of these bets were not huge, but were so highly leveraged that any losses became magnified. If that $100 million investment I described above were to lose just $1 million of its value, the investor who put up only $1 million would lose everything.

Link (via The Consumerist