Here is a video montage of some of the fantastic dancers that clearly inspired Michael Jackson. (Thanks, Gil Kaufman via Daily Swarm)

Andy Freeberg created a fantastic series of photographs of the female "Guardians of Russian Art Museums." From his artist statement:

I found the guards as intriguing to observe as the pieces they watch over. In conversation they told me how much they like being among Russia’s great art. A woman in Moscow’s State Tretyakov Gallery Museum said she often returns there on her day off to sit in front of a painting that reminds her of her childhood home. Another guard travels three hours each way to work, since at home she would just sit on her porch and complain about her illnesses, “as old women do.”

Guardians of Russian Art Museums (Thanks, Tara McGinley!)

Mexico's Isla De Las Muñecas (Island of the Dolls) near Mexico City looks to be a dark and curious place, filled with old doll parts placed there over 50 years by Don Julián Santana, a hermit who died in 2001. Above is a short video about the place. More from Bizarre:

...The Island Of The Dolls is a shrine to a dead girl who was said to haunt (Santan), and in whose honour he collected dolls, to calm her restless spirit.

“There are many stories about why the dolls are here,” says Don Julián’s cousin, Anastasio, one of several family members who now curate the island, welcome visitors, and charge a token fee to take photos.

“Some people claim Don Julián was mad, and that he’d fish dolls out of the canal believing they were real children, and that he could nurse them back to life. But the real story is that, soon after Don Julián arrived on the island, he came to believe this place was haunted by the spirit of a poor young girl who drowned in the canal. So when he saw a doll floating past he took it and put it on a tree, both to protect himself from evil and make the dead girl happy. But one doll wasn’t enough; soon Don Julián had made the entire island into a shrine.”

For decades, Don Julián amassed a huge collection of dolls that had been rejected by their owners, either plucking them out of the canal as they bobbed past, or scavenging toys from rubbish heaps on rare excursions from his secluded home.

In later years, locals began to trade old dolls with Don Julián in return for home-grown vegetables, and before his death the hermit’s cadaverous collection covered every inch of the island – each unloved toy receiving a second lease of life as part of his surreal shrine.

"Mexico's Island of the Dolls"

Operation Midnight Climax is "a new fictional web series about the true story of the CIA using hookers to test LSD on American Citizens."

The year is 1953 and the CIA has just been formed. We meet Jake Kowalski (Quinton Flynn) and his Army buddy Reed Spencer (Todd Cahoon) in an undisclosed location where Jake, now a CIA spook, tells Reed about the government's MKULTRA campaign and the covert plans to administor LSD to unsuspecting brothel patrons while they are "filmed for research purposes," behind two-way mirrors.

Reluctantly, Reed follows orders and recruits four lovely lieutenants to help him run the government sponsored brothel: Millie (Meredith Salenger), June (Stephanie Lemelin), Ethel (Jessica Myerson) and Bea (Vernetra Gavin) all must decide if they are good patriots. Is everybody in?

Episode 1 is above. Here's the trailer.

Wikipedia article about Operation Midnight Climax here.

Artist Kevin Dart kicked off the summer with the trailer for A Kiss From Tokyo starring his sexy female superspy, Yuki 7. Now the much-anticipated book, Seductive Espionage: The World of Yuki 7, will be launched this Friday at Gallery Nucleus in Alhambra, CA.

The latest release from indie-art house Fleet Street Scandal chronicles the production of this imaginary 1960's spy film franchise. On display will be original Yuki 7 artwork from Kevin Dart, Chris Turnham, Scott Morse, Megan Brain, Don Shank, Elizabeth Ito, Bill Presing, and many more illustrious talents from the animation and fine art communities. The swinging soiree will include the authors, artists, and fans.

To celebrate, Fleet Street Scandal has reserved some special treats for a few lucky Boing Boing readers. Enter to win by tweeting the title of your own dream movie and tagging it #yuki7. One grand prize winner will receive a Collector's Edition of the book from a limited run of just 100 copies, which includes a set of 4 exclusive mini prints and a custom slipcase. A second prize winner will receive a signed copy of the book, and a third prize winner will receive a Yuki 7 t-shirt. Contest ends July 4th.

Order Fleet Street Scandal's Seductive Espionage: The World of Yuki 7

The International Space Station will get a new picture window early next year. Called the "Cupola," the new observation platform will be a control point for the space station's robotic arm. It will also serve as the ultimate chill-out room. From NASA:

"Crews tell us that Earth gazing is important to them," says Julie Robinson, the ISS Program Scientist at NASA's Johnson Space Center. "The astronauts work hard up there and are away from their families for a long time. Observing the Earth and the stars helps relax and inspire them."

Until now, space station astronauts have been confined to looking out small portholes or at best the 20-inch window in the US Destiny Laboratory. The Cupola will dramatically expand their view.

"The Cupola's 80-cm diameter circular top window is the largest window ever built for space," says Robinson. "Rather than peering through a little porthole, the Cupola will allow a stunning look at the cosmos and unprecedented panoramic views of Earth. Astronauts will share these views with the world through photographs taken through the windows and posted online."

Space Station Room With a View

My novel Little Brother has won the Campbell Award for best sf novel of the year (sharing the award with Ian MacLeod's "Song of Time"). The award's given out over the July 9 weekend at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, KS, and includes free events that are open to the public. Also in attendance will be Ian MacLeod and James Allan Gardner, whose "The Ray Gun: A Love Story" won the Sturgeon award for best short story.

(Funny thing: there's another Campbell award, given out with the Hugo Awards, for best new sf writer. I won it in 2000, and as near as anyone can work out, I'm the only writer to have won both!).

Hope to see you in Lawrence on July 11/12!

James Gunn, director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas, has announced winners of the 2009 John W. Campbell Award for the best science fiction novel of the year and the 2009 Theodore Sturgeon Award for the best short science fiction of the year.

The Campbell award is shared by Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother" (Tor Books) and Ian MacLeod's "Song of Time" (PS Publishing). James Alan Gardner's "The Ray Gun: A Love Story" won the Sturgeon award. The authors will accept their awards July 10 at KU and will be featured at the Campbell Conference on Saturday, July 11, and Sunday, July 12.

The Campbell Conference will discuss "What's Old, What's New: The New Space Opera, the New Hard SF, the New Weird." In the afternoon session the three winners will open a discussion on what's new in publishing and its effect on writing and reading.

Science fiction writers earn awards for best novels, short story of the year

I enjoyed this short, creative BBC video that tells the story of the Mexican jumping bean. (Via Bits and Pieces)

Bill Elkins is a pioneer of space suit design. He first entered the field in 1957, making "restraint couches" for astronauts. (And no, those aren't BDSM devices.) Air & Space spoke with Elkins, who is now 80 and still involved in R&D. From Air & Space:

Air & Space: How did the first astronaut restraint systems compare to jet pilot systems already in use?

Elkins: A jet pilot restraint system has a hard backpan and seat. It mainly is trying to contain the pilot in the seat, in a sitting position. In an astronaut couch you’re lying on your back. [In the late 1950s] they were planning a cast, form-fitting, backpan restraint couch for the astronauts. But in tests at high G it was causing substernal pain, where the sternum of the occupant would compress into the chest. I designed a sophisticated hammock supported by a tubular steel frame. It left your body in a more normal, natural form at high G.

A&S: What’s the biggest challenge in designing an effective space suit?

Elkins: Well, a big one is mobility, specifically the joints. If you look at the Apollo [suit] joints, the farther you bent them, the more effort it took and the harder it was to hold that position. Those suits were spring loaded to come back to the neutral position. So it took a constant force to keep them out of neutral, and that was very fatiguing. But when you move a constant volume joint to a new position, no further force is needed. When I left Litton and went to AiResearch, I invented the toroidal joint. Toroids maintain constant volume so long as the centerline remains constant. At AiResearch I designed the EX-1A [suit], the first prototype suit to use toroidal joints, in 1967. It was an outstanding suit.

"Space Suits Past and Future"

Here's the results from the first-ever survey of European fertility tourism:

Hundreds of women over the age of 40 are travelling to fertility clinics in Europe to try to get pregnant because NHS clinics in the UK will not take them, the first-ever Europe-wide study of fertility tourism shows.

The research shows considerable movement across Europe, with women seeking out procedures that are banned in their own country. Italian women are crossing the border in droves following tough legal restrictions on IVF imposed in 2004, while large numbers of gay French women bypass a ban by seeking treatment in Belgium.

NHS restrictions prompt fertility tourism boom

BBC Magazine gave 13-year-old Scott Campbell a gen-one Walkman in place of his MP3 player for a week, then gathered his impressions on the device:

It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.

Another notable feature that the iPod has and the Walkman doesn't is "shuffle", where the player selects random tracks to play. Its a function that, on the face of it, the Walkman lacks. But I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down "rewind" and releasing it randomly - effective, if a little laboured.

I told my dad about my clever idea. His words of warning brought home the difference between the portable music players of today, which don't have moving parts, and the mechanical playback of old. In his words, "Walkmans eat tapes". So my clumsy clicking could have ended up ruining my favourite tape, leaving me music-less for the rest of the day

Giving up my iPod for a Walkman (Thanks, John!)

On Boing Boing Gadgets, our Rob's found this vacuum tube chess-set made by Paul Fryer: "Beautiful! Made of wood, glass and choobs, only seven sets exist."

Paul Fryer's Vacuum Tube chess board

Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

Recently on Offworld neo-retro nostalgia has ruled the roost, with things like a box-art tribute to the 8-bit Lost game that never was, the zen-like recursiveness of 'Playered' (above) from the creator of the 8-bit Keyboard Cat, the latest look at the building blocks of Fez, and the low-bit d-pad block-tracer insanity of the WiiWare's latest Bit.Trip game.

Even better, we got a patch that will replace the lead character in your standard Super Mario Bros game with American Elf comic artist James Kochalka, listened to the latest NES rom flyer for NYC's ongoing chiptune showcase Pulsewave, and, finally, stepped away into more polygonal territory to take a deeper look at how Hand Circus's upcoming iPhone platformer Rolando 2 is leading some of the smartest social gaming campaigns in the App Store.

• The new iPhone has been jailbroken. But not by you.

• Should a steampunk lightsaber have cogs? Dark forces want to know.

• Good Lord, they still make the Flowbee?

• Joel spotted an animatronic Luxo Jr.

• April Julian made a beautiful, delicious-looking iPod cake. Time-to-Portal-reference: 7 comments.

• Moritz Wolpert's synthesizer is not like yours.

• Behold! PSP Phone mockups.

• Sony released the Signature Vaio Collection. Among the wonders is the world's first $2,000 netbook. We invent a Sony drinking game.

• Palm's Pre takes a bite out of Apple in a new Sprint ad.

• A kid in England switched his iPod for an ancient Walkman.

• The Mac Mini, it rules.

• Steorn, hawkers of perpetual motion, follow up with a $400 wand that measures fluctuations in the woo.

• The Touch Book is a curious convertible netbook.

Jeremy Ettinghausen from Penguin sez,

We Make Stories is a unique suite of digital tools for children to create, print and share a variety of innovative story forms. Members will be able to create pop-up books, customise audiobooks, design their own comics, produce exciting treasure maps and learn how to create a variety of entertaining adventures. The site has been developed with a group of interaction designers and is aimed at 6-11 year olds.

Jason Bradbury, author of Dot Robot and presenter of the Gadget Show has played with the site and says; "I am constantly playing with technology and stories - this site brings the two together in a blissfully easy to use and engrossing interface." Membership of the site will cost £5.99/$9.99 for individuals and £49.99/$74.99 for a schools licence (up to 15 users).

We Make Stories (Thanks, jeremyet!)

Diandra Leslie-Pelecky, a physicist who's got a good rep with her local news media, describes the process she went through to calculate the sound-bites explaining how a styrofoam soda-cup thrown from an oncoming car managed to smash the windscreen of the car it hit.

The reporter for Channel 8 asked me what the force actually meant. The best way to describe it would be that a scale placed on the windshield would register between 20 and 120 lbs when the cup hit. That quick calculation convinced me that it wasn't beyond the realm of possibility that a drink cup could actually break a windshield. If the cup were thrown, even a pretty bad arm could give it an additional 30-40 mph, so the force could have been much larger.

When we taped my interview for Channel 8, the reporter asked if it mattered how the cup was oriented when it hit. It does. Brandon - who is just a joy to work with - had pitched them the idea of taping the segment in front of a car using a Sonic cup as a prop, so I had the cup right there. This was a question that just came up, so I hadn't had a lot of time to think about it. That always makes me nervous because the last think you want is to be captured on tape saying something wrong. Sonic_CupShape

It does make a difference. Compare what happens when a cup hits bottom first or side first, as I've tried to illustrate to the right. The bottom of the cup is really rigid, so there isn't going to be a lot of give. If it hits side first, the cup is going to give. If you've ever grabbed a flimsy drink cup and it squished and the lid came off, that's exactly what would happen. This is the exact same principle the SAFER barriers use for racetracks. Deforming the wall increases the time it takes for a car to come to a stop, and that decreases the force the driver feels. If the cup hit side first, it wouldn't create as much force as if it hit end first.

And, of course, I wasn't mentally or numerically agile enough to think to calculate the kinetic energy during the taping. A 2 lb cup of soda going 130 mph would have the same kinetic energy as a baseball thrown at 150 mph, or the same energy you get from exploding a half gram of TNT. (Total tangent: A 44 oz Coke contains 371 kilocalories of energy, which is equal to the kinetic energy of a passenger car going 86 mph.)

dial-a-scientist

Former cigarette retailer Nexicon has a new shakedown racket: they automatically detect things that look like copyright infringement on the net, automatically find people who look like they're responsible for it, then automatically send a dire legal threat demanding cash to go away. Mostly, they work for pornographers, and the estate of Frank Zappa.

The process is simple. Their software monitors BitTorrent swarms and other filesharing networks and records the IP-addresses of those people who share the work of their clients. It then automatically sends an email to the ISP linked to the IP-address with a request to forward it to the associated customer...

In their email they write that "it may be beneficial to settle this matter without the need of costly and time-consuming litigation."

If you don't settle they are "prepared to pursue every available remedy including damages, recovery of attorney's fees, costs and any and all other claims that may be available to it in a lawsuit filed against you." To make it even more scary, they point out that ISPs might cut your Internet connection if you don't comply.

In the FAQ on the VPA website it is noted that consulting a lawyers is an option, but it would be a rather silly thing to do since it will cost more than the settlement itself. "It is likely that the cost incurred to retain a lawyer will exceed the settlement amount offered." [Ed: it's cheaper to pay us than it is to ask a professional whether to pay us].

Automated Legal Threats Turn Piracy Into Profit (via Digg)

The Rubber Room is the name for the places where New York City teachers who are under disciplinary investigation are sent to await their. For months -- sometimes years, and sometimes decades, these teachers go to "work" every day in a mostly bare room, and wait, and wait, and wait. Even if exonerated, many of these teachers are so stigmatized that they have to switch careers. Sounds like something out of Sartre or Kafka, but it's just New York.

Here's a documentary on the Rubber Room, made by an ex-teacher who was sentenced to it.

RubberRoomMovie.com (via DNTO)

After the Swedish Pirate Party (devoted to copyright liberalization and Internet freedom) took a seat* in the last EU election, new local Pirate Parties have launched in France (where a series of restrictive Internet laws have been proposed by Sarkozy) and the Czech Republic.

The Czech party has collected 2,500 electronic signatures to date and hopes to compete in October elections. It was just certified as an official political party by the Czech Interior Ministry under the name "Českou pirátskou stranu" (ČPS).

"We do not want any political posts," spokesperson Ondrej Profant told Czech news agency CTK. "If we managed to implement our program exclusively on the level of thinking, which means that large parties would embrace it as their own we would be satisfied."

Like many of the other European pirate parties, the Czechs lack a broad political program; they care only about intellectual property issues and hope to partner with other parties in a coalition.

The French pirates have little more than a Facebook group and a Wordpress blog at the moment, but they too hope to shape policy in the aftermath of the Swedish Pirate Party's win. France might seen like fertile soil for such a party to flourish, since the government has been pushing a tough "three strikes" law. To date, the group has 1,600 members of a Facebook group.

Pirate parties parade through Prague, Paris

*Two seats, if the Treaty of Lisbon is ratified

The 2009 Locus Award winners for best science fiction and related books published in 08, as voted by the general public, have been announced. A good place to start your reading if you want to read some of the best stuff out there.

Science Fiction Novel: Anathem, Neal Stephenson (Atlantic UK, Morrow)
Fantasy Novel: Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin (Harcourt)
First Novel: Singularity's Ring, Paul Melko (Tor)
Young-Adult Book: The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins, Bloomsbury)
Novella: "Pretty Monsters", Kelly Link (Pretty Monsters)
Novelette: "Pump Six", Paolo Bacigalupi (Pump Six and Other Stories)
Short Story: "Exhalation", Ted Chiang (Eclipse Two)
Anthology: The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed. (St. Martin's)
Collection: Pump Six and Other Stories, Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade Books)
Non-Fiction/Art Book: P. Craig Russell, Coraline: The Graphic Novel, Neil Gaiman, adapted and illustrated by P. Craig Russell (HarperCollins)
Editor: Ellen Datlow
Artist: Michael Whelan
Magazine: F&SF
Publisher: Tor

2009 Locus Award Winners

Honduras has undergone a military coup, with left-leaning president Manuel Zelaya being sent into exile by the Army after proposing a referendum on a constitutional change that would have let him run for a third second term in office. This is the first successful Latin American military coup since the end of the Cold War (though Honduras has a large English-speaking native minority, so "Latin American" may not be the right word here). Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, a close ally, has warned that any moves on the Venezuelan embassy will be treated as an act of war.

We honeymooned on Roatan, one of Honduras' Bay Islands, and it was not without its political problems. Indeed, martial law was briefly declared on Roatan during our two week stay, after a series of blockades and sabotage in protest of massive rate-hikes from the newly privatized power company. Zelaya's personal handling of that problem was less than perfect. But as developing nations' governments go, Honduras had a pretty stable, relatively non-corrupt government and administration. Certainly, a military coup is less democratic than a leader seeking a mandate to try for a constitutional reform.

U.S. President Barack Obama and the European Union expressed deep concern after troops came for Zelaya, an ally of socialist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, around dawn and took him away from his residence. He was whisked away to Costa Rica.

Zelaya, who took office in 2006 and is limited by the constitution to a four-year term that ends in early 2010, had angered the army, courts and Congress by pushing for an unofficial public vote on Sunday to gauge support for his plan to hold a November referendum on allowing presidential re-election.

Army overthrows Honduras president

Update: Xeni adds, "Regarding the notion that Honduras isn't all that corrupt -- I have some experience with the country, not in resort areas but in the poor/average areas, and it's bad. Wealth highly inequally distributed, but more importantly to the point of your statement, there is extreme and widespread corruption. So much so that Honduras placed WORSE than both Nigeria and Rwanda in transparency.org's list of corruption by country. They're worse than Nigeria and Rwanda. That's terrible. "

Lenovo's new laptop keyboards have bigger Del and Esc keys, which sounds right to me. I love the Lenovo ThinkPad keyboards more than any other keyboard I've tried. I recently switched away from Thinkpads for a season and then switched back and I could almost hear my fingertips sighing in relief as they touched down on the clacky, springy, responsive X200 keyboard. What a treat.

After a year's research, Lenovo boffins have installed larger Delete and Escape keys on their updated ThinkPad laptop T400s range...

The change is based on testing users on which keys they use the most. On average, they used the Escape and Delete keys 700 times per week, yet those were the only non-letter keys, that hadn't been made bigger.

Lenovo decided to make these two keys about twice as long in the vertical direction to fit the way people reach up for them.

Apparently the next keyboard evolution could be the death of the caps lock. It comes from the days when you wrote headings in capitals but these days exists only to be accidently pressed, stuff up passwords, or make you shout online.

Lenovo increases size of panic buttons (via /.)

Yishay sends us Persepolis 2.0, "a mini graphic novel telling the story of the last two weeks in Iran, in the style of Marjane Satrapi, by two Iranians living in Shanghai"

Persepolis 2.0 (Thanks, Yishay!)

Emma sez,

"Snitchtown: the photo essay" is a book of photographs of a (very small) subset of the 4.2 million CCTV in Britain. These have been put together with Cory Doctorow's essay on ubiquitous CCTV coverage, "Snitchtown" as part of the SoFoBoMo event, in which photographers work to put together a solo project in book form in one month.

I was inspired by some of the things that Cory said at an Open Rights Group debate. Not least of these was the fact that his daughter's pocket money was tied, in part, to her spotting the CCTV cameras on the way to school. This sounded so damned transgressive, and I realised how much we've been trained to pay no attention to the cameras that record our daily lives (I counted 21 on my exit from the tube station this evening alone.)

The book needed some words to explain why I wanted turn the lens back onto the CCTV cameras. I started by using some extracts from "Snitchtown", along with quotes from the press, and from CCTV manufacturers' catalogues. I quickly realised that none of these told the story as cogently as the original essay does. The upshot is a creative commons licensed collection of photographs, a creative commons licensed book (PDF only at the present time, but I plan to put it on a print on demand server.)

I'm very new to photography and I know of many people that could have done a much better job, but I wanted to stand under these cameras and document them. Doing so has made me much more aware of just how ubiquitous they are. I hope the photographs will help others to do likewise.

This is, I believe, my absolute favorite CC adaptation of my work to date; in that it's the first adaptation that I prefer to my original. Great work, Emma!

Snitchtown

Joshua Foer and Dylan Thuras are guest bloggers on Boing Boing. They are co-founders of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica.

Many thanks to David, Mark, Xeni, Cory, the Boing Boing team, and all of Boing Boing's readers for making these two weeks of guest blogging so terrific. We were thrilled to be able to introduce the Atlas Obscura to the world on Boing Boing.

One of the best parts of this experience has been following the thoughtful and wide-ranging discussion thread comments. We're awed by the responsiveness of BB's readers, and by the generosity with which you all have shared your knowledge and opinions.

We especially want to thank everyone who has taken time to add places to the Atlas Obscura. Over the last two weeks, the site has already grown to be more than just a collection of "wondrous, curious, and esoteric" places. Your contributions and comments are starting to turn it into a community. We hope you'll continue to share your knowledge of obscure places, so that we can continue to build the site into a truly awesome resource.

Please stay in touch with any thoughts, critiques, or suggestions that come to mind. Thanks again!

All Best,

Josh and Dylan

Joshua Foer is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Joshua is a freelance science journalist and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Dylan Thuras.

I ought to leave the Minnesota curiosities to Dylan, since that's his home turf, but I was just poking around the Atlas and stumbled on a mysterious waterfall called the "Devil's Kettle," recently added by a user named nursecarman. I realized I'd never seen anything quite like it before.

There is a mysterious waterfall in Judge Magney State Park in Minnesota. Half of the water drops 50 feet into the Brule river; the other half falls into a cauldron and disappears! Dyes and ping pong balls have been dropped into the pothole in an attempt to trace its route and find its outlet--presumably the water winds its way underground to Lake Superior a mile away--but the other end of the Devil's Kettle has yet to be found.

Anyone know of any other disappearing waterfalls like this? I'm guessing there must be others.

The developers behind the Pirate Bay team have been developing a video streaming site for the past two years, and an "extreme beta" version of the project is available (meaning, in their words, "Don't expect anything to work at all"). Users can share video clips here without having to fear concerns they may be removed over copyright claims, as with the current dominant video-sharing service, YouTube. Snip from an item on Torrentfreak:

However, as with most of their projects it can take a while before the public can catch a glimpse of what they are working on. The Video Bay - as the project is named - opened up to the public with a very early test version a few weeks ago. Initially, users were able to browse though the videos but this has been disabled now. What is left is an announcement that the site will be launched somewhere in the future.(...)

Pirate Bay Spokesman Peter Sunde agreed that it might take a while before the site goes live and told us that "it will be done when it's done, in the future, in like a year or five."

The Video Bay.

The part that starts right about 5 minutes in is utterly terrifying and sad. Watch the whole thing from the top, though. "God Hates the World," brought to you by Westboro Baptist Church who previously became internet-famous for "God Hates Fags" and "God Hates America." Incidentally, the song and lyrics of which this is a remake were co-created by none other than the recently departed Michael Jackson. (Uh, thanks Richard Metzger).

Dylan Thuras is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Dylan is a travel blogger and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Joshua Foer.

Riffing off David's recent post about stoned wallabies making crop circles, here is yet another set of "crop circles," made this time not by marsupials but by the gravesites of prehistoric man. From National Geographic

A thousand years older than nearby Stonehenge, the site includes the remains of wooden temples and two massive, 6,000-year-old tombs that are among "Britain's first architecture," according to archaeologist Helen Wickstead, leader of the Damerham Archaeology Project.

Discovered during a routine aerial survey by English Heritage, the U.K. government's historic-preservation agency, the "crop circles" are the results of buried archaeological structures interfering with plant growth.

Link to the National Geographic article

Bill Massiola, who adapted my novel Little Brother for a critically acclaimed stage-play running in Chicago right now at the Griffin Theatre Company performing at the Athenaeum Theatre, sent me these three video clips from the production. I'm coming through Chicago on July 9 to see the play (it runs until July 19); based on these clips I'm incredibly excited to see more!

Little Brother stage play

Comics writer Mark Sable was detained and intensively questioned by the TSA for carrying a script for an upcoming comic book about a writer who is detained and intensively questioned by the TSA for writing a comic about terrorism.

"Flying from Los Angeles to New York for a signing at Jim Hanley's Universe Wednesday (May 13th), I was flagged at the gate for 'extra screening'. I was subjected to not one, but two invasive searches of my person and belongings. TSA agents then 'discovered' the script for Unthinkable #3. They sat and read the script while I stood there, without any personal items, identification or ticket, which had all been confiscated.

"The minute I saw the faces of the agents, I knew I was in trouble. The first page of the Unthinkable script mentioned 9/11, terror plots, and the fact that the (fictional) world had become a police state. The TSA agents then proceeded to interrogate me, having a hard time understanding that a comic book could be about anything other than superheroes, let alone that anyone actually wrote scripts for comics.

"I cooperated politely and tried to explain to them the irony of the situation. While Unthinkable blurs the line between fiction and reality, the story is based on a real-life government think tank where a writer was tasked to design worst-case terror scenarios. The fictional story of Unthinkable unfolds when the writer's scenarios come true, and he becomes a suspect in the terrorist attacks.

"In the end, I feel my privacy is a small price to pay for educating the government about the medium."

Comics artist Mark Sable detained for Unthinkable acts (Thanks, Nosehat!)

Joshua Foer is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Joshua is a freelance science journalist and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Dylan Thuras.

Barometer World is a store in Okephampton, England that specializes in the sale and repair of instruments that determine atmospheric pressure. After two years of research, its proprietor built a reproduction of one of the most whimsical weather-forecasting devices of all time, the "Tempest Prognosticator," a.k.a. the "Leech Barometer," a.k.a. the "Atmospheric Electromagnetic Telegraph." The instrument, which uses fresh water leeches to predict incoming storms, was first exhibited at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851:

A contemporary account of the invention described it as an "elaborate and highly ornate apparatus... evolved by a certain Dr. Merryweather (no epigram intended) who had observed that during the period before the onset of a severe storm, fresh water leaches tended to become particularly agitated. The learned Doctor decided to harness the physical energy of these surprisingly hysterical aquatic bloodsuckers to operate an early warning system. On the circular base of his apparatus he installed glass jars, in each of which a leech was imprisoned and attached to a fine chain that led up to a miniature belfry--from whence the tinkling tocsin would be sounded on the approach of a tempest."

The more bells that rang, the greater the likelihood of an impending storm.

UPDATE: The above photograph is of the other Tempest Prognosticator reproduction, built in 1951 for the Whitby Museum in North Yorkshire.

Barometer World & Museum [Atlas Obscura]

Barometer World web site

Dylan Thuras is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Dylan is a travel blogger and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Joshua Foer.

Recently the most perfect spheres in the world were created as an answer to the "kilogram problem." Made to replace a chunk of platinum and iridium that has defined how much a kilogram weighs for 120 years (the weight of the metal has been changing ever so slowly ) the spheres are about the size of a melon and almost perfectly round. They are likely the most perfectly spherical objects on the planet.

"If you were to blow up our spheres to the size of the Earth, you would see a small ripple in the smoothness of about 12 to 15 mm, and a variation of only 3 to 5 metres in the roundness"

With this in mind we present you a collection of a few of the more interesting spheres found around the world.

Sweden Solar System: The world's largest model of our planetary system centered around the largest spherical building in the world.

The Mapparium: An three story inside-out glass globe built in 1935.

The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory: A gigantic spherical neutrino detector built into the largest man made underground cavity in the world.

Costa Rican Stone Spheres: Mysterious spherical rock formations from an earlier era.

Paris Sewer Museum: Giant wooden balls helped keep the Parisian sewers clean.

The Republic of Kugelmugel: A spherical "micro-nation" in the heart of Vienna.

Previously:

• History of giant spheres - Boing Boing
• Mapparium: walk-through globe - Boing Boing
• 
  

Our pal Stefan took photos of a fireworks stand. Fun!

I grew up in New York State, where even sparklers were illegal. Firecrackers, bottle rockets, and other goodies will be sold out of car trunks. Scoring even a pack of firecrackers was a big win.

In Oregon, stuff that explodes or shoots into the air is illegal, but in the week before the Fourth firework stands are plentiful and stuffed with eye candy.

Dylan Thuras is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Dylan is a travel blogger and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Joshua Foer.

From Atlas Obscura's newest team member, the terrific Annetta Black.

In Rome the cats have an ancient temple all to themselves. The site is known as Torre Argentina and was excavated under Mussolini's re-building efforts in 1929, revealing extensive multi-level temple grounds about 20 feet below modern street level. The site is actually composed of several temples as well as part of the famous Pompey's theatre, where in 44 BC Caesar was betrayed and killed on the theatre steps.

Today volunteers care for approximately 250 cats. After the site was excavated, Rome's feral cats moved in immediately, as they do all over the city. The gattare, or cat ladies began feeding and caring for them. Since the mid 1990s the population has grown from about 90 to the current nearly 250, and the organization has ramped up with care for sick or wounded cats, and an extensive spay & neuter program to try to keep the feral population in check. Most of the permanent residents have special needs - they are blind or missing legs or came from abusive homes.

On any given afternoon a small crowd gathers to watch the cats sunbathe on ancient pillars and steps.

Whether the cats rule themselves via Republic or recognize a cat Emperor is, as of yet, undetermined. More on Torre Argentina here.

The new report from the Deloitte Center for the Edge says that, "return on assets for U.S. companies has steadily fallen to almost one quarter of 1965 levels,at the same time that we have seen continued, albeit much more modest, improvements in labor productivity." Jon Taplin explains, "any productivity gains from the digital revolution have been more than wiped out by our corporate (as well as personal) addiction to debt. To understand this, it's important to grasp the difference between return on equity (the classic Wall Street measurement) and return on assets...By masking their absolutely dismal performance in the last 40 years in ROA, by taking on more and more debt to juice ROE, both Wall Street and America's corporate elite are engaged in a massive shell game, in which the average investor is the mark."

America's Corporate Shell Game (Jon Taplin)

The Shift Index (Deloitte Center for the Edge)

Water Brain Complete Edition（16：9） from Johann.Poo on Vimeo.

Jason sez, "I did a short post today on a "Chinese steampunk animation" I found the other day. It's a 15-minute 3d animation with some great visual combos of traditional Chinese symbols/icons/patterns with the steampunk aesthetic."

Chinese steampunk animation (Thanks, Jason!)

According to the Daily Mail, admittedly not the most reputable of sources, Michael Jackson's body will be plastinated by Gunther von Hagens of the controversial Body Worlds exhibition. We'll see. From the Daily Mail:

Von Hagens said that he spoke with representatives of the Jackson family 'many months ago' and it was agreed that his body will be plastinated and placed next to Bubbles, his late pet monkey who was plastinated a number of years ago and is exhibited at The Body Worlds & Mirror Of Time exhibition at the O2 Centre in London.

Von Hagens also confirmed it was one of Michael's final requests to be reunited with Bubbles.

'There is no better place than to do this at the venue where Jackson was due to perform his world record 50-date tour,' said a spokesman for Von Hagens.

He added: 'Von Hagens has hinted that a moonwalk pose would naturally be favoured. 'It is hoped the exhibit will be unveiled towards the end of July.'

"Michael Jackson set to be embalmed at the O2 Centre after missing the deadline for cryogenic freezing"
More at Morbid Anatomy

Dylan Thuras is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Dylan is a travel blogger and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Joshua Foer.

If you're looking for a good way to lose a day, I simply don't know any better resource than Natural History magazine's "Picks from the Past" page. The editors have assembled an inspiring selection of articles dating back to the magazine's early days at the turn of the last century. Here are a few of my picks from the picks:

Insects as Food: How they have augmented the food supply of mankind in early and recent times. By John S. Patton (1921)

Rains of Fishes: Do fishes fall in rain from the sky? By E. W. Gudger (1921)

Monkeys Trained as Harvesters: Instances of a Practice Extending from Remote Times to the Present. By E. W. Gudger (1923)

Floating Gold: The Romance of Ambergris By Robert Cushman Murphy (1933)

The Pearl of Allah: The giant clam yielded its treasure only after slaying a native diver trapped when its great jaws snapped shut. Worshipped as the gift of Allah, the 14-pound pearl was finally presented to the author by a Mohammedan chief whose son he saved from death. By Wilburn Dowell Cobb (1939)

Man and His Baggage: All along the rough road from savagery to civilization, man has found it an increasingly complex problem to carry the things needed for life. By Clark Wissler (1946)

The Crowninshield Elephant: The surprising story of Old Bet, the first elephant ever to be brought to America. By George G. Goodwin (1951)

One Man's Meat Is Another's Person: Humans may taste good, but most societies are a long way from cannibalism. By Raymond Sokolov (1974)

Rhonda Hackett, a Canadian expat clinical psychologist living in the US, has an editorial in the Denver Post with a good round-up of myths and truths about Canadian health care. I've lived under the Canadian, US, British and Costa Rican health care systems and of the four, I believe that the Canadian one functions best (I'd rank them Canadian, British, Costa Rican and US). My experience with all four includes routine and urgent care. I've had firsthand experience of pre-and post-natal care in Canada, the US and the UK; I've also seen the Canadian, US and UK palliative care system in action.

On the other hand, I believe that the UK system of caring for elderly people is better than the others; Costa Ricans have better services for rural people; and the US has a better culture of retail service (outside of healthcare) than anywhere else I've lived.

Myth: Taxes in Canada are extremely high, mostly because of national health care.
In actuality, taxes are nearly equal on both sides of the border. Overall, Canada's taxes are slightly higher than those in the U.S. However, Canadians are afforded many benefits for their tax dollars, even beyond health care (e.g., tax credits, family allowance, cheaper higher education), so the end result is a wash. At the end of the day, the average after-tax income of Canadian workers is equal to about 82 percent of their gross pay. In the U.S., that average is 81.9 percent.

Myth: Canada's health care system is a cumbersome bureaucracy.
The U.S. has the most bureaucratic health care system in the world. More than 31 percent of every dollar spent on health care in the U.S. goes to paperwork, overhead, CEO salaries, profits, etc. The provincial single-payer system in Canada operates with just a 1 percent overhead. Think about it. It is not necessary to spend a huge amount of money to decide who gets care and who doesn't when everybody is covered.

Debunking Canadian health care myths (via Digg)

FalseExpense will mail you an envelope full of fake receipts, suitable for submitting for reimbursement or deducting from your taxes, "FOR NOVELTY USE ONLY". Bruce Schneier notes, "I've heard of sites where you give them a range of dates and a city, and they give you a full set of receipts for a trip to that city: airfare, hotel, meals, everything -- but I can't find a website."

The process is simple:
You pay us a small fee- using your credit card
Email us the answers to a short questionnaire about the false receipt you want designed and printed (see below)
Within 24 hours, we will send you a draft scan by email of the fake store receipt.
You give us feedback/changes you may require
We print the fake register receipt with a real Point of Sale (POS) Thermal Printer and post 2 copies of the real receipt to your address.
You use them for whatever purpose you choose, we don't ask questions

fake receipts, free templates for store receipts, print fake receipts (via Schneier)

I wrote my latest Guardian column after hearing security experts lament, for the nth time, that sensitive systems like MRI machines, defense-contractor computers, and so on should never be connected to the Internet, and when these are compromised by spies, malware or worms, it's the fault of bad network policy.

I realized that this lament was like the one you hear from people who bemoan kids having sex and getting pregnant or catching diseases, "If they'd just abstain..."

Abstinence programs don't work -- not in IT, and not for teens' sex:

Every time a state secret disappears from an internet-connected PC, every time a hospital computer reboots itself in the middle of a surgical procedure because it has just downloaded the latest patch, every time an MRI machine gets infected with an internet worm, I hear security experts declaiming, "Those computers should never be connected to the internet!" and shaking their heads at the foolish users and the foolish IT department that gave rise to a situation where sensitive functions were being executed on a computer connected to the seething, malware-haunted public internet.

But no amount of head-shaking is going to change the fact that computers, by and large, get connected. It's what they're designed to do. You might connect to the internet without even meaning to (for example, if your computer knows that it's allowed to connect to a BT Wi-Fi access point, it will connect and disconnect from hundreds of them if you carry it with you through the streets of London).

Operating systems are getting more promiscuous about net connections, not less: expect operating systems to start seeking out Bluetooth-enabled 3G phones and using them to reach out to the net when nothing else is available.

All evidence suggests that keeping computers off the internet is a losing battle. And even if you think you can discipline your workers into staying offline, wouldn't it be lovely if you had a security solution that worked even if someone broke the rules? "You shouldn't be having net at your age, but if you do, you should at least practice safe hex."

Like teenagers, computers are built to hook up

Today, the amazing Drew Friedman posted this portrait of Michael Jackson on his blog. RIP Michael
Previously:

• Michael Jackson likes what he looks like and doesn't have to ...
• RIP Michael Jackson - Boing Boing
• The King is Dead: Lefsetz on the passing of Michael Jackson ...
• Michael Jackson Playmobil figures on Flickr - Boing Boing
• Creepy Michael Jackson fright mask - Boing Boing