I was reading a Cool Tools review of a company that puts any image on blinds, wallpaper, or flooring, and one of the comments led me to some fantastic illusions made using photo prints on the floor. More info on the bathroom floor and elevator from the Amazing Illusions blog.
UPDATE: Turns out the bathroom was for a Photoshop contest and so, is faux. I hope somebody makes it real though! (Thanks, Dean Putney!)

Sic itur ad astra = Latin for "thus you shall go to the stars". Yet another beautiful work from artist Michæl Paukner. "I used some scans of old astronomy maps from the 17th century," he says. You can buy prints of his work now! I want the Aztec Calendar print so bad. And Luna, too. I want every single one he's selling, but then I'll need to buy some more wall space, too.

Above is an 18th century "witch bottle," used to fend off evil spirits. Discovered at a construction site in the London borough of Greenwich, this example is particularly rare because it's still corked. Retired chemistry professor Dr. Alan Massey analyzed the bottle and its curious contents. From Fortean Times:

(The bottle) contained 12 bent iron nails (one of which pierced a small leather heart), eight brass pins, 10 adult fingernail pairings (sic) (not from a manual worker, but a person "of some social standing"), a quantity of hair and urine with traces of nicotine, indicating it had come from a smoker. There were also traces of sulphur, then known as brimstone, and what is thought to be navel fluff. The brimstone recalled the passage in Revelation where the beast and the false prophet were "cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone".

"Discovery of witch bottle used to drive away evil spells"

In this video clip from New York University's annual talent show four years ago, Stefani Germanotta — aka Lady Gaga — performs two songs she wrote herself. She came in third place. At the end of her performance, one of the judges says: "Norah Jones, look out!" Little did she know that Lady Gaga would not be making Norah Jones-ish music at all. After the jump, a music video from her new album, The Fame Monster, which comes out Monday.

Britain is full of license-plate cameras, cameras used to send you tickets if you're caught speeding, or driving in the bus-lane, or entering London's "congestion-charge zone" without paying the daily fee for driving in central London. And because of Chekhov's first law of narrative ("a gun on the mantelpiece in act one will go off by act three"), the police have decided to also use these cameras as a surveillance tool, to "catch terrorists" (and other bad guys). So any police officer can add any license number to the database of "people of interest" and every time that license plate passes a camera, the local police force will receive an urgent alert, and can pull over the car, detain the driver, and search the car and its passengers under the Terrorism Act.

And, of course, police officers are less than discriminating about who they add to this list. For example, "Catt, 50, and her 84-year-old father, John" were added to the list because a police officer noticed their van at three protest demonstrations. And now Catt and John get pulled over by the police and searched as terrorists.

Environmental activists tend to be pretty forgiving of license-plate cameras, because they're a critical piece of congestion-charge systems that charge people money for driving instead of using public transit. This kind of regressive tax (the £10 charge in London is a pittance and no disincentive to the wealthy, and is crippling to the marginal and the poor) is also much beloved by the law-and-economics crowd, who assume that rational consumers will all be equally disincentivized by a little friction in the system.

But congestion charges require license plate cameras, and license plate cameras are an enormous piece of artillery to hand to the world's police, who are increasingly pants-wettingly afraid of any sort of public protest -- including environmental protests. I support reducing driving as much as the next green, but environmental change will require lots of protest, and that protest will get exponentially harder with the growth of the traffic cameras that are absolutely integral to congestion charge schemes.

The two anti-war campaigners were not the only law-abiding protesters being monitored on the roads. Officers have been told they can place "markers" against the vehicles of anyone who attends demonstrations using the national ANPR data centre in Hendon, north London, which stores information on car journeys for up to five years.

Senior officers have been instructed to "fully and strategically exploit" the database, which allows police to mark vehicles with potentially useful inform-ation such as drink-driving convictions.

The use of the ANPR database to flag-up vehicles belonging to protesters has resulted in peaceful campaigners being repeatedly stopped and searched.

Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act reveal Kent and Essex police deployed mobile ANPR "interceptor teams" on roads surrounding the protest against the Kingsnorth power station, in Kent, last year.

Activists repeatedly stopped and searched as police officers 'mark' cars (via Beyond the Beyond)

(Image: control, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike photo from Secret London's photo stream)

Parents, romantic partners and roommates of America: I am not encouraging your child, partner or person you share living space with to do this. At least, not in your good microwave. They should buy their own for this sort of thing. And for the love of Pete, they should wear protective eye covering.

I am so very serious about the protective eye coverings.

(Thanks, Greg Laden!)

Vadim Ponorovsky, the owner of the restaurant Paradou in trendy Park Slope Manhattan's meat-packing district, sent his employees an email in which he called them "lazy motherfuckers" because they failed to extract enough email addresses from their customers (he has a spam list and he makes it his servers' duty to get email addresses out of diners). Ponorovsky went on to call his employees "fucking lazy disrespectful assholes," "fucking children," and said, "Effective immediately, any server or host who fails to collect at least 20 emails per week, will be fined $100. Anyone failing to collect at least 20 emails for two weeks in a month will be fired immediately. No matter what. No matter who you are."

He also threatened to fire his entire staff, saying, "I have absolutely no respect for any of you," and "Go find another place to work."

And now, he's sent along a followup to the trade press, saying that this is just the way he talks, that "if you talked to anyone who ever worked for me, I could say without any sense of self-aggrandizement that they'd say I was the best boss they've worked for." In support of this he cites the fact that he's never missed payroll (e.g., he pays his employees the wages they earn), that he lets them work for him again after their vacations, and that they get to eat for free at the restaurant where they work.

He also declares himself to be a Reaganite and villifies anyone who disagrees with his treatment of his employees, who can only become wealthy if he gets rich first, through the magic of "trickle-down."

"If my staff has the ability for self-reflection and seeing the big picture, they should ask, 'Why would one of us fuck the rest of us so badly by damaging our ability to make money?" Ponorvosky says. "The first casualties of this will be the people who all of these protesters are 'defending.' No thought is given to 'the trickle-down,' to use Ronald Reagan's favorite expression." As for the people who are vowing to shut Paradou down, Ponorvsky says, "These people have no sense of rightness or goodness."

Paradou Owner Says Tirade Against Staff Was a Restaurateur's 'Howl'

Restaurant Owner's Email to Staff Belongs in Tyrant Hall of Fame

(via Making Light)

(Image: New York City - Paradou Brunch, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike image)

Designer Michiel Cornelissen laser-sintered stainless-steel crucifix has screwdriver bits cut into each tip, turning it into a screwdriver that repels vampires.

a bit cross (via Make)

Muji's going to start selling hole-punches that knock out patterns that can be threaded between two Lego bricks. They go on sale in a week, and open up many possibilities for crafty Lego extensions.

LEGO for MUJI Paper and Block Sets (via Make)

This looks like a truly useless, and depressingly ugly device for cracking eggs (which this TV commercial would like you to believe is a big problem).

Gary says:

I’m reading the latest Thomas Pynchon book, Inherent Vice, and he makes reference to this song.

It’s like Tiny Tim is tripping on acid, entertaining children, and predicting global warming — all at once.

Coming soon to a science fiction plot near you: with the right software, a plain-jane webcam can be a 3D scanner. It's a project from Qi Pan, a PhD candidate at Cambridge University Engineering Department.

ProFORMA: Probabilistic Feature-based On-line Rapid Model Acquisition (via Futurismic)

Michael Wolf took 100 photos of people living in Hong Kong's oldest public housing estate. Each flat is 100 square feet. Almost every room has the same kind of metal bunk bed. They almost all have a TV, electric fan, and rice cooker.

I looked at all 100 photos. Here's the creepiest room. Here's the most cluttered room. Here's the tidiest room. Here's the most spartan room.

Michael Wolf 100 x 100 (Thanks, Lookforthewoman!)

Matt Logue says: I just completed a self-published book depicting an uninhabited Los Angeles, and it got an honorable mention in the photography.book.now competition at blurb.com!  The photos were made over a period of 4 years, beginning in 2005, at a variety of locations around LA.

Empty Los Angeles