USDA News Release: "Elkhorn Valley Packing LLC, a Harper, Kan., establishment, is voluntarily recalling approximately 406,000 pounds of frozen cattle heads with tonsils not completely removed, which is not compliant with regulations that require the removal of tonsils from cattle of all ages, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service announced today." Link (Thanks,Eric!)

Author Rupert Sheldrake, whose ideas about biology and consciousness sometimes spark controversy, was stabbed after giving a lecture in Santa Fe, NM, last week. He is currently recovering. Here is a local news article, and following is Mr. Sheldrake's own account of the events (continues after the jump)...

A week ago, on the afternoon of Wednesday April 2, I was giving a talk to several hundred people at the International Science and Consciousness Conference in the ballroom of the La Fonda Hotel, in the centre of Santa Fe, New Mexico. After the talk ended at 3pm, I stepped down from the podium and was talking to people in a small group that had gathered around me.

Suddenly I felt a violent blow on my left thigh, as if I had been punched. It was totally unexpected, and I did not see my assailant run towards me. He was rapidly pulled away. I looked down at my leg, and to my astonishment saw the handle of a dagger sticking out of my trousers. Without thinking, I pulled it out: the blade of the bloodstained weapon was about five inches long and an inch wide. I felt my trouser leg was wet with blood, and I pulled my trousers down.

Every time my heart beat, a fountain of blood spurted from the wound in my thigh about four inches into the air. I was fortunate that several people from the audience with medical experience rapidly came to my assistance, including a nurse, doctor and paramedic. I lay down on the stage while they fastened a belt around my thigh as a tourniquet and pressed on my leg to reduce the flow of blood.

Nerve and IFC have produced an ambitious list chronicling the "50 greatest comedy sketches of all time." The reason I'm posting this to Boing Boing at the end of the work day, Los Angeles time, is because I've spent the last 10 hours watching these clips and accomplishing little else of worldly value. Now it's your turn. I don't care to argue over whether the precise numeric order is correct or not -- comedy's such a subjective thing, no? -- but lo, there is a buttload of greatness all up in this list. SNL, Abbott and Costello, Monty Python, Kids in the Hall, Upright Citizens Brigade, and above, the "Nairobi Trio" from the Ernie Kovacs show. Link to the list. (thanks, Rufus Griscom!)

The knowing smirk on the face of everyone's favorite Fox News spokesdouche suggests he might be in on the visual joke. Screengrab generously provided by R Stevens, apparently from Sunday's broadcast. Link to larger size.

Waldo Jaquith says:

Remember FEMA faking a press conference? The judge telling a rape victim that she couldn't use the word "rape" in her testimony? The guy who wasn't allowed to have a "GETOSAMA" license plate in New York? The woman who was charged criminally for swearing at an overflowing toilet in her own home? The people responsible for this jackassery are getting their comeuppance, in the form of the vaunted Jefferson Muzzle Awards. This dubious distinction has been handed out annually since 1992, highlighting the nation's most egregious violations of First Amendment rights. Muzzles were handed out to eleven other businesses, organizations, and government entities.

My favorite is the lifetime achievement award for the FCC, "for years of applying inconsistent (if not arbitrary) standards in determining what is 'indecent' on broadcast airwaves."

Link

Shane says: "Great article from the Guardian about how the letters of mob boss Bernardo Provenzano give good guidance about how to behave and succeed in the business world."

Rule 2: Mediation

"Be calm, clear, correct and consistent, turn any negative experiences to account, don't dismiss everything people tell you, or believe everything you're told. Always try to discover the truth before you speak, and remember that, to make your judgment, it's never enough to have just one source of information."

This letter has been described as "a manifesto of Cosa Nostra under Bernardo Provenzano". After a decade of unspeakable violence under the previous leader, Totò Riina, Provenzano changed the culture of Cosa Nostra by instructing his men in the art of negotiation and the importance of dialogue.

Link

Dug North, who runs a great blog "for makers and collectors of mechanical automata and mechanized toys" says:

This is the repaired inner mechanism of a Vichy automaton made in France in 1875. The complete automaton depicts a lady who breathes, closes her eyes, turns her head, fans herself, and lifts her glasses to her eyes.

Link

Tomorrow, John Brownlee will be hosting "Pre-Cogs vs. Replicants," a version of the popular "Mafia" (a.k.a. "Werewolf") social game in the #boingboing IRC channel. Remember, he who lies best lies last.

Game: Pre-Cogs vs. Replicants (a variation of the Mafia party game.)

Time: April 10th at 1pm EST

Place: #boingboing on FreeNode IRC (chat.freenode.net)

Setting: The sinuous, slithering bowels of Grope-Kant University: a festering intestinal track four years long in which the turgid philosophical constructs of pimpled undergrads are broken down into a semantic slurry suitable for the suckling of tenured flatworms. Within this excretionary system exists a small nodule of scientific inquiry: Grope-Kant U's Department of Bio-Chemical Engineering, comprised of twenty two researchers tinkering with the building blocks of life.

If you've never played a Mafia game before, it's a blast. Come give it a shot!

More flesh-curdling backstory, rules, details about how to connect to IRC, and pre-game trash talking. [BBG]

Even if I weren't the editor-in-chief of MAKE, I'd still be very excited about this year's Maker Faire -- a two-day, family-friendly event that celebrates arts, crafts, engineering, science projects and the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset. It will be held in San Mateo, CA on May 3 & 4.

If you subscribe to MAKE or CRAFT, you'll get a free pass to the event. Link

"Ten Thousand Cents" is a digital artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon's Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool. The total labor cost to create the bill, the artwork being created, and the reproductions available for purchase are all $100. The work is presented as a video piece with all 10,000 parts being drawn simultaneously. The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, "crowdsourcing," "virtual economies," and digital reproduction.

Link (Via Presurfer)

Death can be cute when it's commemorated with a Hello Kitty gravestone. (The video offers a glimpse of an Easter Island style tiki gravestone, too!) Link (Via JapanSugoi)

Dan Morse of The Washington Post looks for evidence to support McCain's frequent claims that Washington is the "city of Satan."

First, McCain:

McCain, a Republican senator from Arizona, has regularly called Washington Satan's City over the past 10 years. He did so twice last month, including during a visit to the Atlanta headquarters of Chick-fil-A, the fast-food chain whose founder is such a devoted Baptist he keeps the eateries closed on Sundays. "It's harder and harder trying to do the Lord's work in the city of Satan," McCain said, according to an Associated Press account.

(Maybe McCain thinks Satan is going to try to stop him from carrying out a "a biblically prophesied end-time confrontation with Iran, which will lead to the Rapture, Tribulation, and Second Coming of Christ," as his new best friend forvever, Pastor John Hagee, prays for.)

Next, Cutting Edge Ministries director David Bay:

"McCain was right," said David Bay, speaking by phone from Lexington, S.C., where as director of Cutting Edge Ministries he has long asserted that Washington's streets are positioned to usher in Lucifer as "the ultimate master of Government Center."

"You will need to have your maps of Washington, D.C., opened in front of you as we proceed," reads a treatise on the subject posted on Bay's Internet site.

Using Dupont and Logan circles as northern points, Bay instructs, you can trace various interlocking streets to form a demonic pentagram, one that bores directly into 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Other satanic hot spots cited by believers include the U.S. Capitol and the Washington Monument. The latter was described by Bay, the South Carolina author, as a filthy, phallic and satanic homage to the god Baal.

Link (Via The Day They tried to Kill Me)

UPDATE Steve Reed says: "I think that McCain might have missed the real threat in Washington. A giant malevolent dachshund bearing down on the Capitol! It's clearly visible (and angry) as you can see from my enhanced image."

Media artist Michael Naimark and his colleagues developed a system to "Flickrize" Google Earth. The Viewfinder tool not only enables photos to be placed in the right geolocation on a 3D model like Google Earth, but "poses" them at the correct angle. The video demo is fantastic. From the Viewfinder project page:

“Geotagged” photos, geographically indexed on a world map, either manually or via GPS, are an increasingly popular phenomenon. However, current implementations treat maps, and particularly 3D models, in fundamentally different modalities than photographs. The result is that photos tend to hover like playing cards, seemingly suspended over the world, remaining 2D objects in a 3D environment, and negating the transformative experience that we think should occur when combining images and a 3D world.

We can do better. We believe we can craft an experience that is as visceral as Google Earth and as accessible as Flickr by integrating photos into corresponding 3D models (such as Google Earth) so that they appear as perfectly aligned overlays; this could be called “situated,” “dimensionalized” or “seamless” alignment. Using appropriate interactive methods that combine human and machine intelligence, we believe that it will be possible to open up the process to geo-locate any and all photos that correspond to real-world places.

Link to Viewfinder, Link to New York Times article on Viewfinder

Over at MobHappy, Russell Buckley comments on a news story about an elderly gentlemen who for years has called his late wife's Verizon voicemail just to hear her voice. During a system change though, the message was lost. Apparently though, Verizon heard about the sad situation, found a back-up of the old greeting, and restored it. Link

One of JG Ballard's greatest novels is Crash, a dark and magnificent tale of car crash fetishists. As a tribute to Ballard, a private pilot known as Crashman brought his fascination with airplane crashes online for the public to, er, enjoy. For years, Crashman has collected videos of plane crashes and edited them to music. In 2006, he uploaded the bulk of them to YouTube as an "experiment." The Ballardian blog has an essay by Crashman where he explains his fascination that may be less unique than one might think. From Ballardian:

After I had made a few of the videos public, a collective audience began to slowly emerge. I began to receive feedback and criticism, sometimes constructive, often laudatory, and sometimes merely abusive. But these people were accustomed to horrible sights and events already, like a doctor or air crash investigator. How would a random, general audience feel and what would they say? I took the next step: in 2006 I uploaded most of the videos to YouTube.

I expected to be excoriated by this wider, larger general public as a ghoul, an exploiter of the suffering of others, and as it happened the word ’sick’ was freely applied to the videos as well as to myself. I considered this a compliment, as it mirrored the initial publishers’ response to Crash (’This author is beyond psychiatric help: do not publish’). But, and I had expected this too, neo-Ballardians began to show themselves, finding subtle excitements and even strange beauty in the videos, that uneasy, disquieting splendour inherent in the slow-motion breakup of a speeding aircraft.

Link to Ballardian, Link to buy Crash (Thanks, Mark Dery!)

Funny video shows a dog who won't go through a screenless screen door.

UPDATE Claudia points out that cats (Dutch, ones anyway) are as clueless as dogs when it comes to screenless screen doors. Link

William Singalargh, 27, of New Zealand's North Island, was arrested for assaulting a 15-year-old boy with a hedgehog. He apparently hurled the animal at the boy. From The Daily Telegraph:

"It hit the victim in the leg, causing a large, red welt and several puncture marks," Senior Sergeant Bruce Jenkins said...

It was not known whether the hedgehog was dead or alive when thrown on February 19, but it was dead when collected as evidence.

Link (Thanks, Sean Ness!)

Spooky pop surrealists Femke Hiemstra and Travis Louie have a joint show of new work opening Friday at Seattle's Roq La Rue Gallery. Based in Amsterdam, Hiemstra paints windows onto strange fairlyands inhabited by opium-smoking cats, gingerbread men, and evil insects. Above left, Hiemstra's "Fortune Cookie Hunter." Louie's portraits capture the delightful personality of mutants like "Martin Gibbon," above right. According to Louie, "Martin was the first Gibbon to be named head master at Belhaven Hill in Dunbar." Link to Hiemstra preview, Link to Louie preview

Brett Foster made a working 1:12 scale television for his daughter's dollhouse -- you can hook it up to any traditional TV peripheral, like cable feeds, consoles, DVD players, etc. He's selling them for £99 (US$6,700,232.22).

"The TV's are easy to install, they have a very clear crisp picture and are a must for any dolls house enthusiast," added Brett.

"With the colour TV being common place in homes from the 70's and 80's it stands to reason that they would find there way to the dolls house scene."

Link (via Geekologie)

Vimeo user Flight404 uploaded a triptastic collection of hyperdelic music visualizations. Link (Thanks, Mike Love!)

The IMF says that the US debt crisis has a one in four chance of plunging the world into global recession.

America's mortgage crisis has spiralled into "the largest financial shock since the Great Depression" and there is now a one-in-four chance of a full-blown global recession over the next 12 months, the International Monetary Fund warned today.

The US is already sliding into what the IMF predicts will be a "mild recession" but there is mounting pessimism about the ability of the rest of the world to escape unscathed, the IMF said in its twice-yearly World Economic Outlook. Britain is particularly vulnerable, it warned, as it slashed its growth targets for both the US and the UK.

Link

UK-based Russell Porter chronicles alt music culture in the Porter Report with aggressive wit and offbeat charm. Today, the "professional chancer and well known layabout" joins us on Boing Boing TV for a live session by alt-blues-punk band the Guillotines (Sounds Like: "we suffer for our music and now it's your turn.") Next, some wasted chick with a double mohawk tries to hit our host up for spare change.

Link to Boing Boing tv episode, with discussion and downloadable video.

Here are previous BBtv episodes featuring Russell Porter. (special thanks to Jolon Bankey).

Peter Brown from the Free Software Foundation sez,

End Software Patents (ESP) and the Free Software Foundation have filed an amicus curiae brief in the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's (CAFC) rehearing of the In re Bilski case set for May 8, 2008. The rehearing could lead to the elimination of patents on software.

With the boundary to what can be patented effectively destroyed by previous Federal Circuit rulings, massive-scale liability has been created throughout the US economy. Over the last few months alone, ESP has tallied over fifty non-software companies being sued for infringement regarding their web sites or other course-of-business software, including the Green Bay Packers, McDonald's, Dole Foods, Kraft Foods, Caterpillar, J Crew, Burlington Coat Factory, Wal-Mart, and Tire Kingdom. The rest of this list can be found here.

Ironically, the Federal Circuit's own web site is produced using software that likely infringes some number of software patents.

ESP executive director Ben Klemens said, "This is an historic opportunity to fix the US patent system, as the Bilski rehearing will directly address the boundaries of the subject matter of patents. In our brief, the End Software Patents project supports the Supreme Court's long-held position that computer software should not be patentable, and has highlighted to the Court the real economic harm software patents cause the US economy."

Link,/a>

I'm awfully fond of this Chinese mobile phone strap that unfurls into a USB charging/data cable and includes a microSD reader. Link (Thanks, Brando!)

Etsy seller Rivkasmom has these gorgeous cufflinks made from old watch-movements on sale for $55 -- I saw a similar item at a posh London men's store on Jermyn Street last week for £400! Link (Thanks, Dani!)

Update: I was wrong: it turns out that New Zealand's anti-circumvention rules are as good as they come -- the Kiwis slipped one by old Uncle Sam!

Andrew sez, "Released by the NZPA on Wednesday, 09 April 2008, this article mentions the passing into law of the Copyright (New Technologies) Amendment Bill in New Zealand."

It does not change the balance between protection and access to copyright material, but makes sure the balance can continue to operate when new technologies are involved.

It introduces an offence, carrying a sentence of a maximum fine of $150,000 or up to five years imprisonment, or both, for commercial dealings in devices, services or information designed to circumvent technological protection measures.

"Thanks Uncle Sam."

Thanks indeed -- now New Zealand joins the growing list of nations where it's illegal to sell digital lockpicks, even if you only use them to get at files you have the rights to, which have been locked up by greedy (or bankrupt, or uncaring, or sloppy) software and entertainment companies. Link (Thanks, Andrew!)

A paper by the University of Hong Kong's Li-Hai Tan and colleagues in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demonstrates that people who are dyslexic in one language may not have problems with other languages -- particularily if the dyslexia is in a alphabetically written language as opposed to a symbolically written one:

People suffering from dyslexia may find that their problems evaporate when they learn a new language, especially one that works with symbols very different from their native one. A study released yesterday reveals that brain abnormalities in English-speakers with dyslexia are quite different from those in people who speak Chinese. So it's very possible that a person who is dyslexic in Chinese wouldn't be in English, and vice versa.

Link (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Joel takes note of a Slate article by Alexandra Harney on the end of cheap Chinese electronics, led by unstoppable inflation

The era of cheap Chinese consumer goods may finally be ending, thanks to irrepressible inflation. Now when the Chinese present their lists, some American importers are conceding higher prices, meaning that American shoppers, for the first time in years, are starting to pick up the tab for rising costs in China. Some Chinese factories are now asking their American customers for price increases of as much as 20 percent to 30 percent.

Link, Discuss on Boing Boing Gadgets

On WorldChanging, Alex Steffen gives a briefing on the Freeaire System, which pipes in cold external air when available to cut energy bills.

"...designed to provide such free cooling for walk-in coolers, freezers and cold storage warehouses. The system utilizes an electronic controller to finely tune the operation of standard refrigeration equipment, and this controller simply monitors the outdoor temperature and desired temperature settings and stops refrigerator evaporator fans when not needed, which also reduces the compressor's refrigeration load. Proper airflow is maintained when the evaporator fans switch off by operating one or more energy-efficient circulating fans.

Roughly half the electricity consumed by a typical convenience store is used for refrigeration. The Freeaire System is designed to save energy year-round by allowing refrigeration equipment for a walk-in cooler or freezer to run only as much as it has to. Once the system is installed, evaporator fans typically operate 50 to 75% less often, and reach-in door heaters operate 90% less frequently. Condensing units also usually experience a 10 to 20% reduction in operations. Moreover, a Freeaire System saving 20,000 kilowatt-hours annually can prevent 40,000 pounds of CO2 from being emitted to the atmosphere.

Link

A Japanese roboticist plans to build a 13-foot-high Gundam clone (and wants to take it one further and build a six-storey version!)

[Takayuki Furuta,] the director of the Future Robotics Technology Center in Chiba, Japan, figured out how to make a real-life, six-story-tall Gundam, the classic battle robot from Japanese anime. He ran computer models on every aspect of the bot to determine what parts he would need to power and control the beast. Then he surfed electronics and industry-equipment catalogs to find the components. The result: a complete blueprint for a $742 million bot. By showing how the anime fixture can actually be built, he hopes to get schoolkids fired up about robotics. Well, that and he actually intends to build one. A 60-foot-tall robot may not be financially feasible, Furuta says, but he's going to try making a version that could be as tall as 13 feet. He aims to have it working by 2011, when, ideally, someone will have created something for it to fight.

Link (via Futurismic)

When you look up gumption in the dictionary, you should find a reference to this July, 1931 Popular Science article entitled "Anyone Can Fly a Blimp." Ah, the sweet promises of yesteryear. We have been betrayed by the future comrades. I want to fly a blimp, dammit.

On the top end of the rope was a parachute. Untrustworthy as it may have been, it was better to clutch the three- quarter-inch manila than to ride a burning hydrogen bag down. In these modern blimps, however, there is no fire hazard. Helium will not burn and for that property blimp owners pay $60 for each thousand cubic feet. It costs $4,500 to fill her with 76,000 cubic feet of helium, and nearly $100 a month to replace in the envelope the helium that seeps through the rubberized fabric.

Here we were, comfortable in upholstered chairs, looking out from an inclosed five-passenger cabin, suspended beneath a gas-filled bag that, barring some nearly-impossible accident that would tear a great hole in the top, would bring us to earth under any circumstances. No parachutes here—no need for them.

WERE the blimp to become disabled, the motors to stop, Smithy would merely free-balloon her down again on some level spot, deflate the bag if necessary, and wait for help. These blimp pilots, you see, must become pilots of free balloons before they’re trusted with one of the six in the Goodyear fleet.

Link

Back in July, 1931, the Western Secretarial school whipped up this four-foot high working telephone dial to help initiate its students into the mysteries of the tele-phonic business instrument.

Not a dummy, the big dial actually works. It is connected with two telephones, an amplifying apparatus, and a loudspeaker. When the instructor dials a number, the loudspeaker reproduces, so that all may hear them, the typical sounds that will be heard; and the instructor explains to the pupils what they mean.

Link

Hurrah! Flickr finally has a feature that allows you to upload, tag and flag short videos alongside of your photos. We use Flickr's private posting facility to share baby pictures with relatives all over the world, but haven't found anything as elegant for video sharing.

Video on Flickr is going to be defined by our incredible, diverse, far-flung and fabulously talented members. Some answers that we’ve come up with:

1. A long photo
2. Personal
3. Simple – not overproduced or slick
4. Possibly the best answer so far: The Great Unknown

Link (via Kottke)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Fred von Lohmann sez, "In a brief filed in federal court yesterday, Universal Music Group (UMG) states that, when it comes to the millions of promotional CDs ('promo CDs') that it has sent out to music reviewers, radio stations, DJs, and other music industry insiders, throwing them away is 'an unauthorized distribution' that violates copyright law. Yes, you read that right -- if you've ever received a promo CD from UMG, and you don't still have it, UMG thinks you're a pirate."

UMG seems to think that the "promotional use only" label somehow gives it "eternal ownership" over the CD. While this might make sense to a goblin living in Harry Potter's world, it's not the law under the Copyright Act. According to the first sale doctrine, once a copyright owner has parted with ownership of a CD, book, or DVD, whether by sale, gift, or other disposition, they may not control further dispositions of that particular copy (including throwing it away). It's thanks to the first sale doctrine that libraries can lend books, video rental stores can rent DVDs, and you can give a CD to a friend for their birthday. It's also the reason you can throw away any CD that you own.

For EFF's view of the reality of "promo CDs," and why it's absurd for UMG to claim to still own them, years after they mailed them out and deleted all records of who they were sent to, read our summary judgment brief on behalf of Augusto, also filed yesterday.

Link (Thanks, Fred!)