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Cory Doctorow at 6:14 am • 
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Ry4an sez, "Today's maker project was a pair of bedside lamps that switch one another. The effect is really jarring because the switches are so near the bulbs they'd normally control." I love this -- it's just annoying enough that you can imagine it appearing unintentionally in, say, a hotel room (the most notorious source of terrible lighting controls in the developed world), and yet perversely pleasing.
Crossed Lamps (Thanks, Ry4an!)
Cory Doctorow at 10:05 pm • •
Alan sez, "The makers of Dove have taken their 'Real Beauty' campaign against P-shopped models into the realm of hacktivism. As the video explains, they sneaked out a Photoshop plug-in (called an Action) that supposedly added a fake skin glow but in fact restored the initial appearance of a model prior to the usual sort of Photoshoppification."
Cory Doctorow at 6:08 am • •
The history of sneezing powder is unexpectedly fascinating, a tale of an obsessive prankster, whose burning passion to make people sneeze drove him to out-and-out chemical warfare:
No one's entirely sure what Adams used to make Cachoo. It depends on what he had easy access to. He worked for a company that made coal tar products, specifically dyes. Coal tar is what gets leftover when coal is made into more purified fuel. It's a viscous black substance that can be used to pave roads, but is also added to medicated shampoo, and used as a base for clothing or even food dye. There are plenty of by-products in the process that can - but probably shouldn't - be used as nasal irritants. These would be easily accessible, and, if they were by-products, cheap to acquire.
But more recent chemists think that to make Cachoo, Adams was actually pilfering one of the dyes that he was supposed to be selling. Dianisidine is a chemical that, with coal tar, makes a beautiful blue dye. It's also carcinogenic and, according to the CDC should be flushed from every part of the body it makes contact with. A sneeze response would certainly help with that. Dianisidine was first discovered in 1894, when people noticed that it, in combination with copper salts, made a pretty color on fabrics that set in faster than indigo. People would have been using it a great deal, especially in the manufacturing centers, testing out new products.
Unfortunately, over a few years they found out that it ran when exposed to acid, or even heavy perspiration, bleeding blue on anyone who wore clothing dyed with it. Its color might have worked for soap products, but it was useless in clothing manufacturing. The repeated testing, would have given Adams ample opportunity to see people sneezing. The eventual abandonment of it as a potential clothing dye may have given him the ability to pick it up at a good price for his initial stock of Cachoo. But is that what he did?
And this is why the FDA banned sneezing powder in 1919 [Esther Inglis-Arkell/IO9]
(Image: Archie McPhee)
Xeni Jardin at 1:35 pm • •
Cory Doctorow at 8:12 pm • •
Artist/prankster Phil Lucas puts up fake "planning notices" around Brighton, England, announcing his plans to radically improve the cityscape and inviting people to comment via the local government's planning authority.
I live in Hackney, which boasts England's "worst performing planning authority" (as one MP recently put it in Parliament), so I sympathise with these shenanigans. I've been through multiple planning petitions for permission to put a glass box on my disused balcony to grow plants in and use as a dining room in warm months, and have been turned down because it would "disrupt the street-scene" on my manky, dogshit-strewn, tumbling-down road in east London.
Planning Notices in Brighton (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)
David Pescovitz at 10:10 am • •
KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money is a new eBook charting the strange journey of prankster musicians/artists Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty at the birth of acid house. The KLF (aka The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu aka The Timelords) emerged from a similar countercultural milieu of high weirdness that inspired bOING bOING, from Robert Anton Wilson and Discordianism to Dada, punk, and Alan Moore. Of course, The KLF are best known for either burning one million British pounds for a music video or their 1988 melding of Gary Glitter's "Rock And Roll (Part Two)" with the Doctor Who theme. Drummond and Cauty's connections to Doctor Who run much deeper than that though. Over at the Daily Grail, Greg Taylor explores the KLF/Doctor Who synchronicities in his article, "The Regeneration of Doctor Who."
Cory Doctorow at 12:01 pm • •
Here's footage of a vicious and terrifying prank from a Brazilian candid-camera show, in which victims were put in an gimmicked elevator whose lights went out, allowing a small girl in horror-makeup to sneak out of a hidden compartment and "appear" when the lights came back on, ready to scream at them.
Extremely Scary Ghost Elevator Prank in Brazil (via Super Punch)
Xeni Jardin at 8:50 am • •
Cory Doctorow at 1:53 pm • •
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.
David Pescovitz at 9:31 am • •
On Monday, the Burger King burst into a McDonald's restaurant in Rome, Georgia, handed out free hamburgers to customers, danced, and posted for photos with children. Managers called the police, but the Burger King escaped in a white Acura before the fuzz arrived. "Man dressed as Burger King visits West Rome McDonald’s"
Xeni Jardin at 10:17 am • •
Brett Cohen pranked NYC on the night of July 27th, 2012, and he has video proof: he "came up with a crazy idea to fool thousands of pedestrians walking the streets of Times Square into thinking he was a huge celebrity," and succeeded.
He is not a celebrity—or at least, he wasn't before this video went viral. He's a 21 year old SUNY New Paltz student. Snip from the project description:
Xeni Jardin at 11:29 am • •
Robin Cooper is the phone-pranking, letter-pranking alter-ego of British writer/producer/funnyguy Robert Popper. I've blogged about his sillywork before ("Look Around You," "Friday Night Dinner," "Timewaster Letters"), but this new stunt is pretty great.
I interviewed him last year for Jesse Thorn's podcast: Listen here.
Cory Doctorow at 12:59 am • •
Redditor Junkyardmessiah has a proposal for dealing with neighbors with very large stereo systems:
Simple suggestion here, I had the same issue with a neighbor that no matter how nicely or how well I explained the situation he refused to stop playing death metal at 4 am. Frequent calls to the police only ratcheted up the harassment.
In deference to XKCD the real way to cause problems with her system is pretty simple. You need a Cheap CB radio, A linear amp, and a bottom loaded CB antenna (easier to build a ground plane for it ) . See if you can get a good guess where she has her shit set up and get your antenna close as you can to it, You should be able to talk to her THROUGH her stereo system. The amplifier sections are not shielded in these plastic ready made toys and the resulting AM signal will impact it. In my case I ran a continuous 6khz tone from a signal generator which was more than enough to blow it up good. ENJOY!
I came pretty close to desperate enough to try this last year, when the squatters in the derelict building next door to us got evicted and replaced by much, much less considerate squatters, including one young fellow who'd decide he was Fatboy Slim at around 3AM most mornings and start blaring dubstep directly into the shared wall that backed on our bedroom (and our infant daughter's bedroom, for good measure). That's when I learned that Hackney's "noise abatement" process is: a) call noise complaint line, leave message; b) wait 1-2h for callback; c) request a visit; d) wait 1-2 hours for the noise abatement team to show up; e) if the noise is still ongoing, they can then issue a warning to the noisy person. After multiple warnings, they can seize the offending equipment. Needless to say, we never managed to get them to the house in time to catch Mr Slim-Lite in the act, let alone issue one of their stern warnings.
(via Lifehacker)
