Why it's probably just as well New Zealand is a peaceful country: the nation's top military scientist has quit after allegations that his resume falsely claimed he was a former Marine, a nuclear weapons designer, and an Olympic bobsledder who raced against Jamaica's "Cool Runnings" team. — Read the rest

Video link. Jim Henson teaches viewers how to make puppets from tennis balls, spoons, socks, cardboard tubes, envelopes, and other common household items. Lots of interesting commentary on puppet aesthetics and utility, too! Hearing his voice, which isn't a stretch from Kermit's, is always a treat. — Read the rest

Video link. There's a whole genre of ASL (American Sign Language) music videos, exemplified perfectly by smokin' hot hottie-hot Jennie Batchelder in her fantastic interpretation of Michael Franti's "The Sound of Sunshine." Michael's had ASL interpreters at his shows for 11 years, so come check out more at the Power to the Peaceful Festival in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park on September 10-12, 2010. — Read the rest

A Canadian safety awareness group put a 45-foot decal of a little girl on a West Vancouver intersection. Apparently when you approach it, it creates an optical illusion of a real 3D figure. The effect is similar to the fake speed bumps I posted about in 2008. — Read the rest

Just look at it.

Banana Boat. Wood, string and banana. 2010 (Jacob Dahlstrup Jensen, Denmark)

(Thanks, Austin!)

Hey, Germans! Next Monday, I leave for a ten-day tour of Deutschland with the German edition of Little Brother. At my urging, my publisher Rowohlt has set an insane pace so that I get to as many places as possible. — Read the rest

Roombots are autonomous, roving furniture segments that cruise around your house, looking for each other and spontaneously organizing themselves into furnishings that evolve based on how you use them. It's a project from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

This project intends to design and control modular robots, called Roombots, to be used as building blocks for furniture that moves, self-assembles, self-reconfigures, and self-repairs.

Want to smell like a Swiss Army Knife? Lucky for you, Victorinox has introduced a line of fragrances, sold with a little caribiner for your active scented lifestyle.

(via Beyond the Beyond)

Following up on Ben Terret's calculations on the number of unkerned 100pt pieces of normal cut Helvetica it would take to stretch to the Moon (2,826,206,643.42), Jason Kottke has calculated the type-size necessary to reach the moon with a single instance of the word Helvetica (282.6 billion points — "the 'h' would be 44,600 miles tall, roughly 5.6 times as tall as the Earth"). — Read the rest

Where to start with this old Karo Corn Syrup ad touting "Deep South Peanut Pie?" Between the creepy, naked (!) kid with the bowler hat over his (?) privates (!), the ornate type used for "Deep South Peanut Pie" (and the attendant innuendo!) — Read the rest

Sweden, home of The Pirate Bay and birthplace of The Pirate Party, has a funny relationship with copyright (not least because of all the US pressure on the country's parliament to pass copyright laws that give advantage to American entertainment giants). — Read the rest

San Franciscans: the latest installment of the excellent, free science fiction reading series SF in SF is coming this Saturday, Sept 11, featuring Amelia Beamer and Mark Van Name. Free to attend, highly recommended.

Here's an archival thing of beauty from steampunk assemblage clock-sculptor Roger Wood of Klockwerks, who notes: "All I've been creating lately are clock-on-wheels so I'm showing one of my favourites from a few years ago."

Here's Yeshmin, a YouTube character whose schtick is somewhere between Yakov Smirnov and Andy Kauffman, wandering the halls of the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX: a nerdgasmic gamer/culture convention run by the Penny Arcade webcomic), chatting with the likes of Wil Wheaton and Jonathan Coulton. — Read the rest

The New York Times reports that US Department of Defense officials are "negotiating to buy and destroy all 10,000 copies of the first printing of an Afghan war memoir" from St. Martin's Press, which they claim includes intelligence secrets. — Read the rest

Newsweek reports that Wikileaks will soon publish what is believed to be an extremely large cache of war documents, constituting the biggest military leak of all time. The exact number of documents and the nature of their contents have not been revealed, but the material may include what imprisoned Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning is believed to have passed along to WikiLeaks earlier this year. — Read the rest

Allen Dale June, one of the 29 original Navajo Code Talkers who encrypted American military communications during World War II using principles of indigenous language, died Wednesday night in Prescott, Arizona, at age 91.

The Code Talkers took part in every assault the Marines conducted in the Pacific from 1942 to 1945.

When I was in Kyoto, I watched people waste their money at a cork gun game. Nobody was able to knock over the prizes. The corks were so lightweight that they harmlessly bounced off the boxes of candy and packs of cigarettes set up on the racks. — Read the rest

(Video link) This TV commercial for the City of Toronto's e-waste program is funny. (Via thedailywh.at) — Read the rest

Via the BB Submitterator, reader Keith Irwin writes,

Carlos Miller reports that there's a new TSA poster which seems to suggest that people who photograph airplanes are suspicious. The TSA blog has responded saying that 1) the poster isn't new and 2) the pictures on the poster just show general things which happen around airports and are not meant to cast photographers as terrorists.