(Click thumbnails for enlargement) On June 4, I posted photos of some plants in my garden that I couldn't identify.

A lot of people offered their opinion, but there wasn't consensus on what kind of plants they are. A few people asked me to post photos when the plants blossomed. Well, they did blossom, and they flowers are pretty -- some are white and some are purplish / mauve.

Now does anyone know what kind of plant it is?

Today on Boing Boing Gadgets we saw this pretty and entirely pedestrian HP Calculator; the Konami code for Google Reader; a industrial shredder eat an Asteroids cabinet; GPS-maker TomTom's intention to make iPhone software; the mystery of Macbook Air's optical illusion beveled design (and other nice laptop design tricks); a way to project trippy Hello Kitties all over your ceiling; a fancy shisha maintenance kit that looks like a espresso maker; fancy Italian asymmetric sunglasses; a whole bunch of alarm clocks; beautiful Pac-Man-inspired art; and a way to store your shoes that has a better name than execution.

We also glanced at Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard; saw not one but two different all-in-one desktop PCs; discovered a way to cheat at Guitar Hero with a machine; played Star Wars 'Imperial March' on a floppy drive; shuddered at a phone shaped like a giant butterfly; saw that Bob Moog's company has a guitar with infinite sustain; applauded a outdoor router from D-Link used in a Native American wind generation system; saw a vending machine that crushes fine china (yup, it's art!); and found another DIY project we'll never make: a bank of Commodore 64 SIDs made into a big synthesizer.

But the best thing we found all day? (At least in my opinion?) The Little Red Riding Hood’s Zombie BBQ game for the Nintendo DS.

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Keith says:

I'm a regular Boing Boing reader. Here's something that's kinda strange, maybe you can help. Here's a link to a picture of my tongue. Perhaps other Boing Boing readers can help me out.

I've had these things hanging under my tongue all my life. Only recently have they been bothering me. I've been accidentally biting them and/or getting them caught on my lower teeth. It hurts a lot when this happens. Nobody else I know has these, except for my 5-year-old son; I figure it's genetic. As an adoptee though, I have limited access to my genetic history. My birth mother says that she doesn't have these. Anyone out there have these? Anyone have them removed? I searched Gray's Anatomy online, and of course have googled, but haven't found anything on this. Any tips or information would be appreciated.

Anyway, if you could post this, cool, I'd like to hear what others have to say about it.

Anyone have an idea of what these things are? Post it in the discussions area.

Is the U.S. Running out of emergency grain reserves?

“According to the May 1, 2008 CCC [USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation] inventory report there are only 24.1 million bushels of wheat in inventory, so after this sale there will be only 2.7 million bushels of wheat left the entire CCC inventory,” warned [Larry Matlack, President of the American Agriculture Movement (AAM)].

“Our concern is not that we are using the remainder of our strategic grain reserves for humanitarian relief. AAM fully supports the action and all humanitarian food relief. Our concern is that the U.S. has nothing else in our emergency food pantry. There is no cheese, no butter, no dry milk powder, no grains or anything else left in reserve. The only thing left in the entire CCC inventory will be 2.7 million bushels of wheat, which is about enough wheat to make 1⁄2 of a loaf of bread for each of the 300 million people in America.

Link

Nifty piece of plastic keeps computer cables from falling behind your desk. I wonder if there's an easy way to make something like this from plastic that most people throw away.

For sheer bang-for-the-buck, these cord management cards are tough to beat. They're cheap polyethylene sheets you either stick or screw to the edge of your desk and then snap the cables coming from your computer and peripherals into the recesses. I was tired of picking my iPod connector off the floor when it would fall off my desktop. With this, the ends of the cables are kept at the ready on your desk, which is especially great for stuff you are regularly plugging and unplugging. You can also use it to neatly route other cables coming from the back of a PC tower, like speaker and ethernet, which really helps cut down cable clutter.

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Feral House publisher Adam Parfrey took these cell phone photos of Mennonite missionaries during the BEA book expo at the LA Convention Center.

He says: "I thought it was a strange fish-out-of-water thing to see these pale rural Wisconsinites on Broadway downtown. They handed me a CD of dull anti-evolution speeches, and had them in English and Spanish."

Coop has a terrific blog post about his latest painting, which is based on a smoking devil he created for a cigarette lighter company in 1993. The story of how Coop's illustration spread across the planet reminds me of the story of Robert Crumb's Keep on Truckin' illustration.

He quickly gained a life of his own. Lots of cars, trucks and skateboards, tool boxes, laptops, etc. ended up plastered with a Smoking Devil sticker. I started to meet people with the Smoking Devil tattooed on their body. It was at this point that I started to realize that I had, pretty much by accident, created something powerful. However those lines and forms came together, it had a power all its own. It was becoming something more than a piece of art or merchandise. It had become a symbol of something, a little talisman that people used to signify something about themselves and their lives. Pretty heady stuff for a dumb hillbilly such as myself.

As is often the case when an image reaches this level of recognition, it started to become bigger, something that was beyond my control. Like Frankenstein's Monster, the creation often thwarted the will of its creator. The Smoking Devil started to pop up in places where I never intended it to be. It was knocked off as merchandise, used without permission to adorn bars and businesses. I began to understand how Nagel must have felt the first time he saw one of those hideous paintings in the window of a nail salon. (That's probably what killed him.)

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The new Moog Guitar Paul Vo Edition is made by the famed synthesizer company but is not a guitar synth or MIDI controller. However, the electric geetar is capable of "infinite sustain" that impressed the hell out of Lou Reed. Listening Post has details along with a promotional video featuring Reed and other guitar heroes.
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Bus services across America are spending a fortune on driver-side kill-switches for busses that have been hijacked by terrorists that can stop them or slow them to five miles per hour. This is to stop terrorist from ramming busses into buildings.

So now, I suppose, terrorists will have to content themselves with activating the kill-switch signals to make every bus on every freeway in America slam to a stop all at once, causing massive fatalities and snarling the nation's traffic in a weeks-long, gory jam.

Nice one, movie-plot-fighters!

Private bus companies have received millions of dollars from the Department of Homeland Security for the security systems. It costs $1,500 to equip each bus, with $50-per-bus monthly maintenance costs.

Gray Line double-decker tourist buses and Coach USA have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal funds to install 3,000 devices. After receiving a $124,000 federal grant, DeCamp Bus Lines is installing the device on its 80 commuter buses, which travel routes from northern New Jersey to the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Midtown.

New Jersey Transit is currently in the process of equipping all of its roughly 3,000 buses with the technology. NJ Transit Chief of Police Joseph Bober said: "This enhanced technology helps us protect our bus drivers and customers. It's another proactive tool to protect our property, employees and customers."

Link (via Schneier)

I spotted this random children's flash card at a rec center this weekend. The back was blank. On first glance, the illustration, combined with the word "Indian," looks like it was meant to teach yogic levitation. (And yes, I realize that in this case "Indian" refers to Native American, not South Asian, and the card actually describes an exercise.)
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Previously on BB:
• Videos of Ramana's levitations Link
• Yogic "flying" Link

Geoducks are large saltwater clams that live off the Pacific Coast of the U.S. and Canada. I find them very curious and otherworldly. Dark Roasted Blend posted an homage to their bizarre beauty. Link

Save vs. Death uncovered this awesome video of the Monks ("American GIs stationed in Germany in the mid-sixties" -- wiki) performing "Oh, How to Do Now" on a German teen music TV show (circa 1966). Check out the banjo! Link

Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, is home to a thriving black market where drugs, pirated DVDs, guns, and crappily-made "Startar" baseball jackets, can be easily purchased for remarkably low prices. The sellers will even help with "shipping." In the new issue of GOOD Magazine, Sacha Feinman visits the markets of Ciudad del Este that generate an estimated 30 percent of the country's GDP. From GOOD:

One shop in particular, I’m told, is a clearinghouse for drugs. Armed with the proper introduction, in I went. In lieu of a traditional greeting, the owner simply asks me what I’m looking for, and how much of it I’ll need. “And, yes, we have cocaine,” he adds as an afterthought...

He quizzes me, asking where I live in the city, if I have the cash on me, and if I’ll need assistance getting it back home from Ciudad del Este. Satisfied with my answers, he reaches under the counter to produce a narrow tan brick of densely compressed Paraguayan Brown (marijuana), barely softer than a rock. It looks like AstroTurf.

He asks me again how much I’m looking for and I stutter, blurting out that 50 kilos should do it for now. He chuckles. “We usually sell more than that, 200 or so, but we can do 50. One second.”

He leaves the room to make a phone call, and a moment later returns: “It’ll be $20 U.S. a kilo,” he says. “And are you sure you don’t need any help getting that to Argentina?”

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Yes I Can transform dead motorcycles into Giger-esque furniture. And yes, they're quite spendy. John Brownlee has more over at Boing Boing Gadgets. Link

Before cuttlefish embryos even hatch, they look through their translucent eggs to learn to identify their future prey. Researchers at the University of Caen Basse-Normandy put crabs in a tank with cuttlefish eggs. Once the cuttlefish hatched, they were released into a tank with both shrimp and crabs. The cuttlefish that previously saw the crabs through their eggs had a taste for them. Cuttlefish that weren't exposed to the crabs as embryos preferred to eat the shrimp. From the BBC News:

...Unborn cuttlefish... have fully developed eyes. That leads the researchers to conclude that the cuttlefish embryos must peer through their eggs, and learn to recognise their prey, a behaviour which will help give them a head-start in life.

It is less likely that birds, reptiles and, particularly, mammals - including humans - could recognise visual images in the womb.

But the cuttlefish discovery helps reinforce the idea that some animals at least can begin to learn before they are born.

Link (Thanks, Greg Benjamin!)

Defense industry journalists Sharon Weinberger and Nathan Hodge took a two year tour of key locales related to nuclear weaponry and turned it into a book, A Nuclear Family Vacation. The pair visited a slew of intriguing destination, including the "Underground Pentagon" bunker where Cheney allegedly hangs out, the Isfahan Uranium Conversion Facility in Iran, the Trinity Test Site, and the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee, which until 9/11 hosted an annual Department of Energy deer hunt. IEEE Spectrum reviewed the book and posted a a slideshow from the "Nuclear Family Vacation." Looks like a fascinating read! From the article:

The 1955 Apple-2 bomb was designed for “civil effects testing” at the Nevada Test Site. The government built make-believe houses and stores and filled them with mannequin families to understand how civilian infrastructure would be disrupted by a nuclear blast. This shack (seen above) is a survivor of Apple-2.

Link to IEEE Spectrum article, Link to buy A Nuclear Family Vacation

UPDATE: Noah Schacthman kindly reminded me that Sharon Weinberger also blogs at Danger Room. Noah posted a terrific interview with her today about the new book! Link

Jason sez, "Rasmus Fleischer is a co-founder of The Piracy Bureau, a Swedish group critical of copyright, and the parent organization of BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay. This month he has a new essay up at Cato Unbound, the Cato Institute's online magazine of ideas. In it, he argues that attempts to impose 20th-century copyright standards on digital media are doomed to failure -- indeed, they're failing already, and threats to privacy and civil liberties are growing: "

Every broken regulation brings a cry for at least one new regulation even more sweepingly worded than the last. Copyright law in the 21st century tends to be less concerned about concrete cases of infringement, and more about criminalizing entire technologies because of their potential uses. This development... will have seriously chilling effects on innovation, as the legal status of new technologies will always be uncertain under ever more invasive rules.

Link (Thanks, Jason!)

Matt sez, "I thought that you might like to know about 'Brave Men Run,' a mash-up superhero/thriller novel by author Matthew Selznick, published by Swarm Press. What's really cool is that the author and publisher have released this as a multiple-format DRM-free e-book, remix-friendly Creative Commons audio book AND in the traditional print format, so readers are free to enjoy 'Brave Men Run' in any way that they choose. It's another sign that times are changing and the publishing industry is light years ahead of their brethren in the music industry." Link (Thanks, Matt!)

Señor Coconut made a cool Latin version of Trio's "Da Da Da."

PingMag has an article on the making of the video.

Señor Coconut is a unique and long-standing Latin music project by the electronic music prodigy, Atom Heart. His recently released album, “Around the World,” gathered a lot of attention for his Latin remakes of tracks by Prince and Eurythmics. PingMag had the opportunity to witness the shooting of Señor Coconut’s music clip. The studio was bustling with activity in a collaborative effort between Atom and the stylish and exotic performance unit ROMANTICA!

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Scott Beale says: "v!Nc3sl4s created a really cool time-lapse video showing the harmonious nighttime traffic flow in Hanoi at an intersection without any traffic lights." Link

Readers of Todd Lappin's Telstar Logistics blog are entitled to a free copy of the fantastic reader-made travel magazine, Everywhere.

Everywhere is a travel magazine that's created from articles and photographs contributed by members of the online community at everywheremag.com. The community votes on their favorite contributions, then Telstar Logistics fleet management officer Todd Lappin (who also moonlights as the editor-in-chief of Everywhere) curates the best of the best to produce an inspiring travel magazine that looks fabulous on your coffee table or personal jet. Published contributors receive $100 and a free one-year subscription.

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Leif of Today's Inspiration found a copy of Comic Epitaphs from the Very Best Old Graveyards (1957) in a used book store. He scanned some of the pages. If you are a fan if the cartoonist Seth, you'll love these. Used copies with dust jacket intact are going for as little as 24 cents on Amazon! Link

Video of a gentleman who attempts to kick a wall to pieces, but is surprised when the wall exacts revenge. (via Arbroath)

In today's edition of Boing Boing tv, music legend David Byrne transforms an entire NYC building into a giant musical instrument, and Xeni joins him inside for a BBtv tour.

Playing the Building is Byrne's latest sonic innovation, and morphs the century-old Battery Maritime Building into a clanging, vibrating sound sculpture. In this installation, the former Talking Heads co-founder blurs the boundaries between the creators and consumers of culture. He explains:

Devices [have been] attached to the building's structure — to the metal beams and pillars, the heating pipes, the water pipes — and are used to make these things produce sound. The activations are of three types: wind, vibration, striking. The devices cause the building elements to vibrate, resonate and oscillate so that the building itself becomes a very large musical instrument.

Byrne sees music as deeply embedded within the natural sounds that surround us every day, and believes "anyone can be a writer, artist, or musician if they want to." Playing the Building continues through August 10, 2008 at 10 South Street, New York, NY; open every Friday through Sunday, noon - 6pm. Admission is free of charge.

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion and downloadable video.

(Photos used in this episode are by Clayton Cubitt. Special thanks to Danielle Spencer, and Jason Wishnow).

Update: Byrne will receive a lifetime achievement award at the Webby Awards tonight.

Marilyn sez, "There are some 5,000 copies of the English-language edition of National Geographic distributed in China every month, but readers of the May issue, which was dedicated to China, found some controversial pages were glued together. "

National Geographic magazine dedicated its May issue to China, but some in China had trouble reading it — because pages had been glued together.

Readers of the 5,000 copies of the English-language edition distributed in China have reported that pages 44 and 45, which show a map of China, were stuck together. These pages didn’t make the often-censored slip-up of treating Taiwan as a separate country, but the concern might have been labeling several borders disputed with Pakistan and India. Another map, on pages 126 and 127, showing the distribution of China’s ethnic minorities, was also glued, perhaps because of recent sensitivities over the country’s Tibetan population.

Pages 100 and 101, which feature controversial artwork, as well as pages 128 and 129, on dissent, were also censored, presumably for more obvious reasons...

Link

Reminder: I'll be the guest of honour at the Swedish national science fiction convention, SweCon, in Linköping, Sweden, next weekend! Hope to see you there:

Swecon 2008 - ConFuse 2008
The Swedish National Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention 2008
Guest of Honour Cory Doctorow

Date: 13-15 June 2008
Venue: Ryds Herrgård, Linköping, Sweden

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