By Cory Doctorow at 10:53 pm Monday, Oct 31
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Brand sez, "My little girl (age 8) put together her costume this year based on her favorite video game creature: the Minecraft Creeper. I've seen a few creepers this year, but none as good as hers."
Sad Creeper has a candies
(Thanks, Brand!)
By David McRaney at 3:20 pm Monday, Oct 31
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The Third Person Effect, an excerpt from the new book You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself, by David McRaney
The Misconception: You believe your opinions and decisions are based on experience and facts, while those who disagree with you are falling for the lies and propaganda of sources you don’t trust.
The Truth: Everyone believes the people they disagree with are gullible, and everyone thinks they are far less susceptible to persuasion than they truly are.
I can see right through that politician’s lies. People are such sheep. People are so stupid. People will believe anything. I prefer to lead, not follow.
Have you ever thought like this? Would it blow your mind to know everyone thinks this?
If everyone thinks they aren’t gullible and can’t be swayed by advertising, political rhetoric, or charismatic con artists, then someone must be deluding themselves. Sometimes it’s you.
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By David Pescovitz at 2:47 pm Monday, Oct 31
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I recently attended a conference at a luxury hotel in Marina, California where the spa brochure lists services like massage, facials, and, er, shamanic journeys. Ostensibly, the shaman is a white dude in southwestern resort ware who will place shells on your body and wave a feather over you as he "engages the forces of nature and the ancestors' ancient wisdom to create lasting changes for physical, mental and emotional well-being." Your shamanic journey includes illumination, soul retrieval, destiny retrieval and divination, and bands of power. Man, bands of power would alone be worth the $250 fee. Click the menu to see it larger. The shaman's red cast is either an artifact of my lousy scanner, or it's his aura.
By John Baichtal at 2:13 pm Monday, Oct 31
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In 2006, Vice President Dick Cheney pumped birdshot into a friend's face, simultaneously upping his thug cred while inspiring Lego fan Thom Beckett to depict the scene in plastic bricks.
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By Mark Frauenfelder at 1:49 pm Monday, Oct 31
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Hollywood's legendary Magic Castle, where Boing Boing has held yearly partner dinners, is on fire. Reports say the kitchen and dining room were extensively damaged, and that the other floors are also damaged. This is sad news as the Magic Castle is a beautiful and historic building.
UPDATE: Magician Lary Crews tweeted details: "120 firefighters got it out in 1hr. Started in attic. No injuries. Castle is closed tonight."
Fire erupts at Hollywood Hills' Magic Castle
Photo: Firefighters battle blaze at Magic Castle on Monday. Credit: KTLA-TV.
By Jacob Appelbaum at 1:25 pm Monday, Oct 31
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The Iceland Air lounge has helpful staff—the welcome desk offers helpful tips on avoiding
airport hassles and even provides free internet access. They'll help
you read your boarding pass and even answer questions about all its
confusing symbols. Should one ever be
in the unfortunate position of having the dreaded '
SSSS' marked upon it, the help desk will suggest you wait
until the exact boarding time before even approaching customs. They'll
even apologize, as if they had any hand in the process. And that was their
recommendation to me, when I had it clearly printed on mine. It was not my lucky day.
— Jacob
By Mark Frauenfelder at 12:28 pm Monday, Oct 31
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Our guest co-host is John Hodgman, actor, "resident expert" on The Daily Show, celebrity judge, and book author. The third and final installment in his trilogy of Complete World Knowledge -- That Is All -- comes out on November 1.
John spoke with Rob Beschizza, Ruben Bolling, and me about his book and many other things, including:
Our favorite comic book stores:
Bergen Street Comics (New York)
Forbidden Planet (New York)
Secret Headquarters (Los Angeles)
Meltdown (Los Angeles)
Gosh! (London)
Forbidden Planet (London)
The Judge John Hodgman podcast
My Friend [Jeffrey] Dahmer, by Derf Backderf
Flipback, which all the rage in Europe but only just hitting the U.S.
MiniBuek
The Book of Lists
The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People
Inconspicuous Consumption: An Obsessive Look at the Stuff We Take for Granted, from the Everyday to the Obscure, by Paul Lukas
Listomania: A World of Fascinating Facts in Graphic Detail
Atomic Robo
DC's unfortunate Reboot.
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By Maggie Koerth-Baker at 12:02 pm Monday, Oct 31
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The publication process for a research paper about physics works a little differently than other subjects. That's because of arXiv. Funded by Cornell University, this site posts research papers, before they're formally published in a scientific journal. Unlike most scientific journals, which charge big fees for subscriptions or even to view a single paper, arXiv is free and open to the public. You can read everything published there—more than 700,000 papers about physics, math, computer science, and more. The other big difference: arXiv isn't peer reviewed. At least, not ahead of time.
A lot of the time, when you read a newspaper article about a new study in one of those fields, the study hasn't actually yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. It's just been posted to arXiv, which sort of becomes a crowd-sourced peer review peer review of its own. Especially for headline-grabbing research making big, bold claims.
That's the background you need to understand what's going on right now with the study that claimed to find neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. That announcement was made in an arXiv paper. Putting those results on arXiv was as much a way of saying, "Woah, we just found something crazy, please tell us if you see something we've done wrong," as it was a formal declaration of scientific discovery.
Since that paper was published in September, there have been more than 80 follow-up papers, also published on arXiv, offering criticism of the original research or proposing theoretical explanations of how that seemingly crazy finding could fit into physics as we know it. And all of this is happening before anybody has gone through the peer-review publishing process.
That's why it's not terribly weird that you're now hearing all sorts of criticism of the original FTL neutrino findings. That's what was supposed to happen. It's also not terribly weird that the original researchers have announced that they're going to re-do the experiment themselves, taking into account some of the big criticisms brought up on arXiv. The BBC explains what will be done differently this time:
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By Cory Doctorow at 11:38 am Monday, Oct 31
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Here's a beautiful gallery of vintage Hallowe'en postcards from the New York Public Library Picture Collection on Flickr.
Haunted Postcards
(via How to Be a Retronaut)
Don't get too excited about the RTS,S malaria vaccine, the development of which is being funded by the Gates Foundation. At present,
the vaccine doesn't seem to work well enough to make a difference and nobody knows what it's going to cost (a big deal when you're talking about a disease like malaria, which goes hand-in-hand with poverty). Beyond that,
several leading vaccine researchers are questioning the methodology used to analyze the results of RTS,S trials. The vaccine may be even less effective than previously thought. Bottom line: The research is valuable, but this particular vaccine probably won't be the breakthrough people are hoping for.
— Maggie
By Maggie Koerth-Baker at 10:49 am Monday, Oct 31
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Scientists don't actually know how the bacteria in yogurt and other fermented foods help humans digest food easier. But a recent study hit on a possible explanation. Turns out, some probiotics seem to be capable of altering gene expression in our native gut flora.
Jeffrey Gordon, a microbiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, and his team gave a commercially-available probiotic yogurt containing five strains of bacteria to healthy adult volunteers and administered the same five strains to mice that harbored a subset of genetically-characterized human gut microbes. The yogurt bacteria did not significantly alter population structure in any of the entrenched gut microbes, in humans or mice—a result that is not surprising, according to Mills. “To assume that you could eat a yogurt and numerically challenge what’s in your gut is kind of like dumping a gallon of Kool-Aid in your swimming pool and expecting it to change color,” he said.
But RNA sequencing of the human gut microbes in the mice revealed that the probiotic bacteria changed the expression of gut microbe genes encoding key metabolic enzymes, such as those involved in the catabolism of sugars called xylooligosaccharides, which are found in many fruits and vegetables. Mass spectrometry of metabolites in urine, which result from the ramped up metabolic processes in the probiotic-fed mice, confirmed the alterations, and when the researchers ran similar analyses on gut microbes from the human yogurt eaters, they found upregulation of the same genes.
This study won't be the final word on the subject of how probiotics work. It needs to be replicated and, even then, there are still a lot of questions that need answering. But it does represent an interesting peek inside an interaction between our bodies and other life forms. Cool stuff!
The Oakland PD's use of projectile weapons such as flashbang grenades
used in the assault (
possibly by non-OPD officers) on the Occupy Oakland camp seems to
violate the 2004 court settlement it agreed to in a class-action settlement with Iraq war demonstrators who were assaulted by police: "You would think that after signing an agreement and paying out taxpayer money to 'compensate' for abusive police practices, the Oakland Police Department would learn how to behave in a civilized fashion when dealing with people exercising their First Amendment rights." (
Thanks, Cowicide!)
— Cory
By Maggie Koerth-Baker at 10:05 am Monday, Oct 31
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One artfully torn dress from Goodwill, white face paint, and some of that hairspray-style hair dye to color my hands and feet = A weekend of explaining what a "wight" is to people who have never read Game of Thrones. (Sadly, the cheap blue contact lenses I picked up at a gas station wouldn't go into my eyes successfully.)
What did you dress up as this year?
Mother Jones has published the results of its yearlong investigation that rips the big top off how Ringling Bros. circus treats its elephants. "
The Cruelest Show on Earth."
— Xeni
, my book about the future of energy in the United States, will be published April 10th.