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!)

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.

Read the rest

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.

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.

Read the rest

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.

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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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:

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)

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!

Directed by Scott Compton for Boing Boing Video

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?