SuperHeroStuff's R2D2 hoodie is a $70 way to keep warm and look like a droid ($73 if you want to look like an XXL droid). I dig the way it turns into a droid-inspired fencing mask if you zip it up all the way, and the way that this makes you into something like the real R2D2 in that you have no peripheral vision and are prone to being tipped over by malefactors.

Star Wars R2D2 Costume Zip Hoodie (via OhGizmo)

Joshua K. Pinney is charged with attempting to defraud a Bank of America branch in Des Moines into issuing him a bank card in the name of a man whose wallet had been stolen. To help with his ruse, Pinney allegedly conceived of this clever disguise, including whitening his beard, hair and eyebrows, and swathing his head and body in elaborate "bandages" to make it seem that he'd been injured in a recent accident as a way of explaining other physical differences between him and the victim

Here's more from Rose Egge in the Des Moines KOMO:

Prosecutors say Pinney presented the identification of an Oregon man to the bank manager and asked for a new debit card. The actual man on the ID was a client at the bank whose car had recently been stolen and his identification was missing. The victim had flagged his account to prevent anyone from using it.

Pinney told the branch manager that he was on a business trip in Washington and needed a new debit card, according to the police report. He also asked the branch manager if he could sit down and requested a glass of water, claiming he was in pain from a recent accident.

When confronted by police, Pinney stuck with his story and said he was at the bank to replace his debit card, documents said.

The police officer looked at the Oregon ID that Pinney had given the bank manager and asked the man if he was seriously trying to pass as the man in the picture. Court documents report Pinney hung his head and said “I know.”

Is it too late to make this my Hallowe'en costume?

Man's identity theft attempt falls flat at Des Moines bank (via Accordion Guy)

I was looking for a clever way to store excess novelty bread flours I'd bought to play with in my bread machine. Technician775 has one...

NoPhoto is Jonathan Dandrow's electronic countermeasure for traffic-cameras. It's a license-plate frame that uses sensors to detect traffic-cameras, and floods the plate with bright light that washes out the plate number when the cameras take the picture. It's presently a prototype, but he's seeking $80,000 through Indiegogo to get UL certification and go into production.

Dandrow believes that traffic cameras are unconstitutional, because "if you do commit a traffic violation, you should have your constitutionally guaranteed right to face your accuser – and that your accuser should not win by default just because it happens to be a camera that can’t talk in court."

His device is made in the USA, and (he says) it is legal to use in the US.

Here is how a typical traffic camera encounter would happen with the noPhoto installed on your car:

1 The traffic camera fires its flash to illuminate your car for a picture

2 The noPhoto detects the flash, analyzes it, and sends the proper firing sequence to its own xenon flashes

3 The noPhoto precisely times and fires the flash at the exact moment needed to overexpose the traffic camera

4 Since the traffic camera is not expecting the additional light from the noPhoto, all of its automated settings are incorrect and the image is completely overexposed. Your license plate cannot be seen you and you will not get a ticket in the mail.

Dandrow also says that traffic cams cause more accidents than they prevent, citing studies by the Federal Highway Administration and the Virginia Transportation Research Council, "The increase in rear-end collisions alone from people slamming on their brakes to avoid being ticketed is enough to increase accident rates overall."

(via Rawfile)

Back in 2007 Sean Donohue dressed up little PJ as Gimli, Son of Gloin, and immortalized him in pixels: "PJ was Gimli the dwarf from Lord of The Rings for Halloween. Michaela's mom made the costume, Michaela fashioned the helmet, hair, beard and battle ax. It was my idea. Yes, I'm sick."

Gimli, Son of Gloin (via Neatorama)

Here's an absolutely inspiring TED Talk showing how "self-organized computer science courses" designed around students building their own PCs from scratch engaged students and taught them how computers work at a fundamental level.

Shimon Schocken and Noam Nisan developed a curriculum for their students to build a computer, piece by piece. When they put the course online -- giving away the tools, simulators, chip specifications and other building blocks -- they were surprised that thousands jumped at the opportunity to learn, working independently as well as organizing their own classes in the first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). A call to forget about grades and tap into the self-motivation to learn.

The peer-reviewed journal Advances in Pure Mathematics was tricked into accepting a nonsense math paper that was generated by a program called Mathgen.

To be fair, the journal did note several flaws in the paper, such as "In this paper, we may find that there are so many mathematical expressions and notations. But the author doesn’t give any introduction for them. I consider that for these new expressions and notations, the author can indicate the factual meanings of them," and requested that they be corrected prior to publication.

However, the "author" of the paper replied with a set of pat rebuttals ("The author believes the proofs given for the referenced propositions are entirely sufficient [they read, respectively, 'This is obvious' and 'This is clear']" and these were seemingly sufficient for the editors.

Sadly, the paper wasn't published, as the "author" wasn't willing to pay the $500 peer-review fee.

On August 3, 2012, a certain Professor Marcie Rathke of the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople submitted a very interesting article to Advances in Pure Mathematics, one of the many fine journals put out by Scientific Research Publishing. (Your inbox and/or spam trap very likely contains useful information about their publications at this very moment!) This mathematical tour de force was entitled “Independent, Negative, Canonically Turing Arrows of Equations and Problems in Applied Formal PDE”, and I quote here its intriguing abstract:

Let ρ=A. Is it possible to extend isomorphisms? We show that D′ is stochastically orthogonal and trivially affine. In [10], the main result was the construction of p-Cardano, compactly Erdős, Weyl functions. This could shed important light on a conjecture of Conway-d’Alembert.

This is a nice follow-on from the Sokal hoax, wherein a humanities journal was tricked into accepting a nonsense paper on postmodernism. Goes to show that an inability to distinguish nonsense from scholarship exists in both of the two cultures.

Mathgen paper accepted! (via Neatorama)

The Reddit/Gawker/"jailbait" story has reached its likely zenith: an Anderson Cooper 360º interview. A second part is here. But is Brutsch really a troll? I don't know that this is accurate. Posting disgusting sexist shit on the internet does not make you a troll if you're playing to the home audience: if the people who view that content enjoy it and want more, it isn't trolling. If anyone "trolled," and I don't think the term is necessarily derogatory, I might argue the journalist who exposed him is. Who expected this story to go so wide? Not me. Anyway, here's what one world-famous troll thinks. I don't expect CNN's producers to understand or care about the fine points of internet culture nomenclature. But I'm interested to know what you, dear reader, believe. The man once boasted of having had oral sex with his teen stepdaughter; there's definitely a word for that. BTW, Gawker's Adrian Chen noted in his original story that Brutsch first heard about Reddit via Boing Boing. So there's that.

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"I bought 4 rooms for the band and prepaid for them on debit card. After sound check, Leo and the band went to the hotel and tried to check in. The manager refused to accept 3 of 4 members credit cards for incidentals (4th member is Rich Vogel/white dude). Leo called me and (my family and I) drove to the hotel at 7:30 pm. I asked what the hell and manager pointed at 3 members and said he wouldn't accept credit cards and "those people" need to pay cash deposit. When I asked what did he mean by "those people" - he pointed at Leo and said "black people."

I felt like I was hit in the face. It was stunning. I called the police and when they arrived, the police went through it with him and then he caught himself and said that they cannot check in any longer as he didn't feel "safe." He then refused to talk. Leo and Bill Dickens then had to console ME as I was beyond upset and they explained that as older fellows who grew up in the South, they understood this happens....

The manager refused to give his name until Police instructed him to give a contact reference and that is when I received a card for "Ginger" (Latu) who now supposedly does not work there!

I have called the hotel five times. No one will respond."

I called Travelodge myself and was told by the person answering the phone that a man named Matthew is the manager, and that he is in a meeting. He said he did not know Matthew's last name. I left a message for Matthew and also with the media relations department of Wyndham Hotel Group, franchisors of Travelodge.

There is an active thread discussing this on the Facebook page for The New Parish where Nocentelli is performing this weekend.

UPDATE at 12:39pm: Rob Myers from Wyndham's media relations department just called me back. He said he is aware of the story and that "all of our hotels are franchised, meaning they are independently owned and operated, so certainly this is not our policy, these allegations that exist here, but it wouldn't be appropriate for me to comment on it. It would be more appropriate for the hotel owners to comment on it."

Myers said he will ask the hotel to respond to my request for comment. He also asked for the names of those involved so that he can reach out to them. I sent him a link to this post and forwarded his contact info to Jason Perkins.

UPDATE at 1:28pm: Just posted on the Travelodge USA Facebook page:

Thank you to everyone who has brought this to our attention. We are deeply troubled to hear of this allegation. This is not in line with the quality of service that we expect guests to receive when staying at one of our franchised hotels. Please know that we are looking into the matter.

UPDATE at 1:45pm: Someone posting at The Examiner apparently reached the Travelodge's "Mr. Matthew":

Travelodge Central manager who identified himself only as Matthew W., claims hotel policy is to deny access to those whose credit cards reflect insufficient funds.

When asked if Mr. Nocentelli’s credit card had been run through for a credit check, Mr. W. responded, “there are cameras in the hotel.” Mr. W. then stated he was being harassed and hung up the phone.

"The Meters' Leo Nocentelli denied lodging for being black"

UPDATE at 4:35pm: The New Orleans Times-Picauyne interviewed Leo Nocentelli who went into greater detail about what happened before Jason Perkins arrived at the hotel. According to Nocentlli, the hotel clerk demanded $100 cash for incidentals from Leo and the other band members who hadn't yet checked in, and an argument ensued. "Meters guitarist Leo Nocentelli's confrontation at San Francisco motel making waves"

UPDATE Sunday 10/21: From the East Bay Express:

Perkins told us he argued with the manager through a hole in a plastic window, pressing him as to why he would not even let the band into the lobby. The manager told Perkins the hotel "didn't take credit cards from those people," finally admitting that by "those people" he meant "black people."

When Perkins called the police to the scene, they said this was not the first time they'd had similar complaints about that Travelodge. The police tried to negotiate a full refund for Perkins, which the hotel denied him.

"An SF Travelodge Allegedly Denies Guitarist Leo Nocentelli Lodging, New Parish Management Calls It Racism"

A spam filter almost scotched my chance to be on television. I was scanning through the usual detritus of offers in July 2011 to enhance body parts and transfer large sums of money from people in distant lands, and spotted this subject line:

Jeopardy! Contestant Audition in Seattle

Ha! That's a new scam, I thought, before I recollected that I had taken the Jeopardy quiz show's online screening test earlier in 2011. While I have been told my entire life that I would be perfect on Jeopardy due to my ability to retain and produce (on demand or in spite of protestations not to) trivial information, I thought I scored poorly on the online test. Apparently not.

I called the number in the email after first confirming via Google that it was actually connected to Sony Pictures Entertainment, which produces the show, and was told that, yes, it was legit. A year later, I found myself at Sony Pictures in a suit and a tie shaking hands with Alex Trebek, and hearing the dulcet tones of announcer Johnny Gilbert say my name.

If you have access to this quaint thing called "broadcast television," whether over the air or through cable or satellite receivers, you might have seen me win $15,199 last night by ultimately correctly recalling Karl Marx's name in the nick of time. That was a squeaker. I'll be on again this evening, and you'll see how I perform this time around.

Jeopardy is a fascinating cultural phenomenon. Everyone I know seems to have watched it as a kid, and some friends and colleagues' parents continue to watch it every night. The show had a top viewership of 50 million in the 1990s, but has declined to about 9 million today. The last time you may have thought about it, if you're a typical Boing Boing reader, is when you heard that Ken Jennings won 74 episodes in a row after the program lifted a five-win maximum. (Ken was an outlier. Few people have won more than five episodes since, and no one has come close to his run.)

Because it's in syndication, you can't stream it online. The show must police its copyright quite rigorously, too, as it's hard to find more than a handful of short bits on YouTube and elsewhere. Thus, the only way to experience it is to watch or record it when it's broadcast. (Someone uploaded a few minutes of last night's last clues and Final Jeopardy to YouTube, where it's still available at the moment.)

Achieving an ostensible lifelong goal was just as good as I'd hoped, especially since I won. The show requires that contestants be coy since it's taped two months in advance. We're not supposed to disclose outcomes, and I even waited until this week, when contestants' pictures are posted on the Jeopardy Web site, to promote my appearance. All I can say as this is published today (Friday) after winning a single game, I may lose tonight or I may still be flying down every week or two to record more shows. You won't know I've lost until you see a putative future episode in which I am no longer champion.

After my first (and only?) stint on the show, a friend of mine pointed out that while Jeopardy appears to be a quiz show, it's really a very particular form of a reality show. It's like The Amazing Race with most (but not all) of the personality stripped out. Instead of competing Survivor-like in physically intense challenges with deprivations and also trying to manage the social calculus of not being voted off, Jeopardy reduces us mostly to brains and reflexes.

This starts with the selection process. For decades, Jeopardy had cattle-call auditions in which interested people were called in to take a quick test. Those that scored well continued on, and some made it on the air. But most people were sent away. This is, of course, highly inefficient. Three years ago, the show switched to an online screening test, and now has 100,000 people take that quiz each year.

From the 100,000, the contestant coordinators winnow out about 2,000 to 3,000, they say, for in-person auditions, like the one I went to in August 2011. The audition is intended to make sure that people perform well on the show, and starts out with a 50-question rapid-fire exam in which answers don't have to be in the form of questions. It then proceeds into a quite realistic simulation of the show with signaling buzzers, a game board, and an interview section.

(Quick Jeopardy review: Three rounds. Jeopardy, Double Jeopardy, Final Jeopardy. First two rounds have 30 clues each divided into six categories, hidden on the board behind dollar amounts. Jeopardy questions are $200, $400, $600, $800, and $1,000. Double Jeopardy doubles that. Clues are in the form of an answer to which an appropriately phrased question must be posed by the contestant when called upon by Alex Trebek. A hidden Daily Double (one in the first round, two in the second) allows a contestant to bet either as much as they have accumulated so far, or, if a low or negative amount, up to the top dollar value on the board. In Final Jeopardy, you may bet up to whatever you have in your account on a single question with 30 seconds to answer. The show's winner by dollar amount keeps those funds; second and third prizes are $2,000 and $1,000. The one-day record is $77,000, but $15,000 to $20,000 is a more typical haul.)

The show wasn't and isn't looking solely for smart people who test well. Rather, they want people with a combination of traits: a deep knowledge well, the ability to retrieve an answer quickly, unflappability, a decent personal presentation and personability. The 21 people in my audition slot in Seattle (including an old friend I ran into who had auditioned before) for the most part had those characteristics.

If contestants were cast simply by rote memorization and rapid-retrieval abilities, you know the result, because you see it at technology trade shows and engineering colleges: a row of people, mostly men, would affectlessly and rapidly answer every question as fast as possible and seem somewhat unsympathetic. They might not even scream or smile when they won. That's not good TV. The show wants people who have a few interesting stories about themselves, and to whom the 10 million or so home viewers will be able to relate. They can't be super-brainiacs, because that deflates viewers playing along at home.

The questions on Jeopardy are difficult across the dimension of time and context, but typically not hard at all in the wider world of trivia and knowledge competitions that Ken Jennings (the 74-time Jeopardy winner) documents in his neat book Brainiac. (The book alternates covering his Jeopardy career with deep book and on-site research into the history and current practice of trivia competition.)

Rather, the combination of competition among well-matched players who are very good at this form of testing, but not ridiculously perfect at it, combined with the physical task of depressing a signal button, and the rapid pace of the show produces something people watch night after night.

From the auditions, Jeopardy calls up about 400 people a year from the general pool across 47 weeks of taping. There are also kids, teen, college, military, and teacher competitions now, as well as an annual tournament among the top-earning or longest-winning players in the season. Every week, 10 new people cycle through; some win and stay on longer as champions, while others appear and disappear in a single episode.

I thought incorrectly that the number of contestants in a week varied by who won, but my friend Paul Kafasis, a software developer, showed me some queueing theory on a piece of paper that made me smack my head. Every week starts with a returning champion, and each day two new people appear. It's thus nearly always 10 new people each week.

The exceptions are that it is both possible for everyone in Final Jeopardy to wind up with $0, in which case Alex dismisses them all, or for two or three contestants to finish with exactly the same dollar amount in that final round, in which case the tying parties keep the money and return the next day to battle again. It's rare. The show calls up 12 people for each taping day in which five episodes are recorded in case of illness, ties, or even disqualification. (Eligibility requirements have to be met, such as not having family working for Sony and a number of other companies.)

I knew my general knowledge was rusty, and consulted piles of almanacs, watched the show, and went through the J-Archive, a compendium of every clue and question ever posed on Jeopardy, run by fans and unaffiliated with the show. I read the three best-known Jeopardy books, too: Secrets of the Jeopardy Champions (1992), Prisoner of Trebekistan (2006), and the aforementioned Brainiac (also 2006). I had coffee with Jennings, who lives in the Seattle area, just before appearing, which was a nice morale boost. (I have an article about the studying process over at The Economist's Babbage blog.)

Contestants from outside the area tend to all stay at the same hotel a few miles away using a group rate from the studio. Jeopardy doesn't pay expenses to appear, although if you win over a gap in taping and need to return in a week or two for the next show, the program starts picking up airfare. We gathered in a group the Tuesday morning I arrived, all of us dressed nicely for TV and clutching garment bags with the requested outfit changes the show wanted us to bring to make it seem like shows are taped on separate days instead of back to back.

As expected, it was a lovely cohort. Matt gives away teddy bears for a living. Shaanti works in climate change research. Jan teaches physical education in a college. Abby is a senior at Rutgers University and towered over me. And then there was Stephanie. We arrived in the green room, where pastries, fruit, and caffeine awaited, and were introduced to the...five-time returning champion. Polite, forced smiles.

Stephanie, we shortly witnessed (as anyone who watched her 8-show run of 7 wins can attest), demonstrates how a human buzzsaw works in practice. She was fast, bright, and brassy, and as an American history professor with a clearly remarkable memory, gave us all whiplash. But she was also great. The secret of Jeopardy, what defuses the reality-show aspect, is that we all universally wanted each other to win even though we knew that only one person took home the big money and would return to fight again. (Don't cry for Stephanie. She won a pile, finishing at about the 12th position among regular season play, and she'll be back for this season's tournament of champions.)

The show's staff are also fantastic: Glenn, Robert, Corina, and their amazing chief, Maggie, made us laugh, cajoled us, encouraged us, and made sure the game is played fair. Everyone is looking out for fairness, both because of the laws around quiz programs, and because of basic decency. However they hire staff on the show and however they run the program day to day, they do it right. Everyone I had anything to do with was delighted to be there. They give money away every day, and that's their job.

There's a bit of the reality-show part in just the waiting. You're nervous the night before (or weeks before, even). Then you have to get dressed neatly and hang out with other people, some of whom you will be pitted against in combat. There are hours of briefing and rehearsals. The adrenal gland can only produce so much before it gives up. I developed something I will politely call a "gregarious bladder," which necessitated possibly 30 bathroom trips in the space of a few hours. The other contestants may still wonder if I was a drug addict.

The actual game play goes by faster than you can remember it happening. Clues come up an average of one every 12 seconds. If played well, you enter a sort of fugue state in which the board and Alex's voice and the signaling button in your hand are all that you hear, see, and feel. When they break for commercial spots, the coordinators and other staff come up with water, make us laugh, give advice about the buzzer. They can't offer tips on information or wagering, but they can help people for whom ringing in isn't going well.

You can't ring in for regular questions until both Alex finishes reading the clue completely, and then one of the writers presses a release button to unlock the signals. Lights light up on either side of the board when that released button is pressed, but if you rely on the lights, you're too late. You have to time it to start pressing madly at the right millisecond after Alex stops talking or, when competitors also know the right answer, you won't be the first to ring in. Ring in too soon and you're very briefly locked out, giving the edge to someone else with better timing.

We all get rehearsal time with the buzzer in the morning, but playing the real game is a different experience. Once you've played a game and return, you have more confidence with the device, and are facing other contestants who know you've just won. In Ken Jennings' run, a combination of preternatural signal reflex and the fact that people arrived and were told, "Ken has just won X dozen shows" seemed to give him the edge along with his extraordinary depth of trivia knowledge.

The strangest thing about appearing on Jeopardy is just how not strange it is. There's no green screen or artificial bits to it. The set is precisely what you see in the broadcast program, with all the lighting and game board and whatnot. It's like stepping into the television set to play. It's more surreal than real. Even the awkward banter with Alex is actually awkward. (If you want to know what I talked to him about over the credits Thursday night, I asked how he wound up at JPL's Curiosity rover landing event alongside our own Xeni Jardin. He's got the space bug, and was invited to be there. He also answers questions from the audience during breaks, and is a very witty and smart guy.)

Even though I can't tell you what happens next, beyond the fact that I'll be on the air on Friday, too, I can admit that it was a singular experience that stands outside what most of us might expect in a normal, quiet life. The money is nice, and I don't want to pretend it isn't. But I didn't need to win to enjoy being on the show. Jeopardy is a cultural phenomenon, even if its ratings have lagged, and while I may never meet an American president, I got to shake hands with Alex Trebek, look deeply into his eyes, and tell him a ridiculous story about breaking an iPod.

Peruvian illustrator Guillermo Fajardo has taken a crack at redesigning some of the more iconic breakfast cereal mascots, uploading his excellent efforts to his Behance portfolio. There's the Trix rabbit, Tony the Tiger, Count Chocula (shown above), and Cap'n Crunch (right).

Guillermo Fajardo on the Behance Network (via Neatorama)

BB reader Tony Teofilo says,

Master puppeteer Michael Earl (he did The Muppet Movie, Sesame Street, and many others) has Stage 3 Colon Cancer and no insurance. Any chance you could let the happy mutants know via BoingBoing? Swazzle is having a benefit sale for him 10/20; there is also a donation page if people want to help with his medical costs.

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