Ted Kaczynski updated his own entry in the Harvard alumni directory, just in time for his class's 50th reunion:
While many of his classmates sent in lengthy updates on their lives for the 2 ½-inch-thick “red book,” the entry for “Theodore John Kaczynski” only contains nine lines.
The listing says his occupation is “Prisoner,” and his home address is “No. 04475-046, US Penitentiary—Max, P.O. Box 8500, Florence, CO 8126-8500.”
Under the awards section, the listing says, “Eight life sentences, issued by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California, 1998.”
Miss Cakehead sends us these "Incredible and gross chicken feet cake pops created for the Evil Cake Shop by Miss Insomnia Tulip."
The feet are made from vanilla & raspberry cake, triple dipped in white chocolate with the pop hand painted to resemble a boiled chicken foot; the chicken dipping sauce pop (top) covered with coloured piping gel; the battered chicken foot pop is covered with the dipping sauce and crushed citrus sprinkles to resemble batter. Ruddy amazing Yorkshire based baking talent and a really innovative cake pop design to boot.
These meat-shaped balloons were created as a storefront display by Object Design League, who will sell you a steak or sausage model for $8. DesignBoom has tons more pics and notes on the production:
at the japan premium beef storefront, chicago-based design studio ODL (object design league) have created a meat-themed
installation of their 'balloon factory', with balloons that take the form of sausages and steak cuts. the installation was curated
by sight unseen as part of the NoHo design district during new york design week.
'balloon factory' was originally designed in 2011 as a performative assembly line (covered by designboom here).
the ODL team creates their own balloon formers, which are primed with soap before being dipped into latex.
the thin coat of rubber that adheres to the surface becomes the actual balloon. while it is still wet, latex colours
can be mixed or the balloon can be hand-painted to achieve various visual effects. once dry the rubber is leached
and vulcanized to be strengthened for inflating. in all, each balloon takes about three hours to produce.
The rocks, described as a smooth orange colored one and a smaller green one, have been sent to a state lab for testing. Initial tests at the county health department revealed phosphate. Chemistry experts said the rocks may have been coated with phosphorous, a substance that can spontaneously ignite when exposed to oxygen. Meanwhile officials from the U.S. Department of the Navy and from Camp Pendleton say they don't believe the substance stems from any military training exercises. The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station is believed to not play a role in the source of the burning rocks, experts said on Thursday.
You may fetch your own Terror Pebbles from the Trestles at San Onofre State Beach. [MSNBC]
Well this is rich. NBC Bay Area reports that Thomas Langenbach, identified as a VP at SAP's Palo Alto Integration and Certification Center, has been charged with four felony counts of burglary over ill-gotten LEGOs.
Authorities say the German software engineer generated his own fake bar codes, printed stickers with them, then slapped those cheaper bar codes over more expensive kits. And then, it is alleged, he sold that hugely-discounted LEGO loot on eBay for a profit.
This 1978 clip features the eternally popular Raffaella Carrà (now pushing 70) singing Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” as bald, mustachioed eye-patch wearing sci-fi weirdos, um, assist her..
That’s only the “night” part, just wait until the troupe of caped, dancing “Aladdin Sane” clones show up near the end!
[Video Link] What is this I don't even. The artist is HGich.T, the song "Tutenchamun." Original video sans subtitles and explanations are here. It's several years old, but new to me. (HT: @treyka)
A styrofoam-and-acrylic model of Osama bin Laden's compound that was used to plan the May 2011 raid that killed the al Qaeda leader has been declassified by the Pentagon.
CNN reports that the model of OBL's building and surrounding farmland in Abbotabad, Pakistan was built over a six-week period, and then was taken to the White House to brief President Obama on plans. After the raid, it sat on display in the lobby of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency in Fort Belvoir, Virginia.
Until last week, the model was considered classified and only those working or visiting the building could see it.
Now it is declassified, and agency officials wanted to bring it over to the Pentagon for a brief time to show it off to Department of Defense "customers" to highlight what the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency can do for them, according to an agency information sheet.
The to-scale diorama helped the Navy Seals literally measure the steps it would take to get to bin Laden.
Upcoming Appearances • April 2 at Skeptics in the Pub, Boston, Mass.— 7:00 pm at Tommy Doyle's in Harvard Square. Please RSVP. •April 4 at MIT: "Shedding Light, Online", a discussion about how blogging and a dynamic audience helped shape my book, Before the Lights Go Out—4:00 pm in Maseeh Hall. Please RSVP. • April 6 at Carnegie Mellon University: More details to come
• April 9-13 at University of Colorado, Boulder: 64th Annual Conference on World Affairs • April 10 at Colorado State University, Fort Collins: "Putting the Fun Back in Infrastructure"—3:30 pm in the Rocky Mountain Innosphere. • April 19 at The Bakken Museum in Minneapolis: Book Launch Party! Come enjoy snacks, a presentation by me, and some fun with the Bakken's Leyden jar.
• April 21 at Science Museum of Minnesota, St. Paul: Earth Day Tweetup event with Will Steger and Sean Otto—events run 10:00 am to 2:00 pm.
• May 2 at University of California, Berkeley: "Putting the Fun Back in Infrastructure"—6:00 pm, location TBA.
• May 3 at the American Institute of Architects, San Francisco Chapter—Lunchtime lecture, time and location TBA.
• May 3 at Barnes and Noble, El Cerrito, Cali.—7:00 pm.
• May 30 in New York City—Panel on local and DIY energy with the New America Foundation
• June 22-25 in Aspen, Colorado: Aspen Environment Forum • July 5-8 at CONvergence in Minneapolis, Minn.—exact times and dates TBA
For only 6 British Pounds, you can cure what ails you with Placebo maximum strength sugar pills.
I'm a little sad that Etsy user spellingmistakes got to this idea before I could start marketing Placebex, as I've been threatening to do since approximately 2001. Maybe there's an intellectual property lawsuit in there someplace. ;)
And, before you ask, yes ... there really is some evidence that placebos work even if the people taking them already know that the drug is a placebo. Back in 2010, a study of ethical placebos used with irritable bowel patients got a lot of press. It was a follow up to a 2008 study that found roughly the same results.
If you want to read more on ethical placebos, I'd recommend checking out the following stories:
Tattoo artist Dave Hurban displays an iPod Nano which he has attached to his wrists through magnetic piercings in his wrist in New York, May 14, 2012. Reuters has an interview with him here.
"I just invented the strapless watch," he said on Monday of his Apple Inc device, set to display a clock.
Hurban cheerfully recounted how he mapped out the four corners of the iPod on his arm and then inserted four titanium studs into his skin. Once the incisions healed, he popped on his iPod, which is held in place magnetically.
"It's way simpler than you think it is," said Hurban.
Below, Durban's HOWTO video for the project he calls "iDermal," explaining how he pulled it off. Not that he can just, you know, pull them off now.
Update: A day after this story broke in the LA Weekly, NBC LA runs a contradictory report, and the Weekly says Google's still scheduled to start renting in July 2014, but according to staff writer Simone Wilson, "They just might let Gold's stay in the space, strangely. (Kind of a sublet deal?) And Google won't comment on the other 170,000 square feet." (via Brad at YoVenice)
The nerds finally beat the jocks. The historic Gold's Gym location in Venice Beach, "mecca of bodybuilding" where former governator and movie star Arnold Schwarzenneger once trained, will soon be occupied by Google. This gym site opened in the late 1960s (and, to be honest, it was somewhat shabby in recent years—I was a member for some time). Ahnold is shown in the vintage stock reel here, along with other beefy Gold's Gym dudes of the seventies.
Update: Bret of the micro-local Yo Venice blog, which covers all things Venice, corrects my Gold's Gym location history, below.
Forming is Jesse Moynihan's ultra-weird graphic novel about the creation of the universe, filled with cursing, inexplicable violence, grotesque sexual acts, and primitive and strange illustrations. Set in the "Third Age of Total Bullshit," the story tells the tale of powerful aliens who visit Earth in the time of giants, set up camp in Atlantis, and enslave the indigenous giants to mine rare minerals for the galactic empire. These aliens are also involved with Noah, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Lucifer and the Archangel Michael, and a cast of personages more obscure and weird than any book of the apocrypha.
To understand Forming (assuming "understand" is the correct verb here), picture some lost Gnostic text translated by Jay (of Jay and Silent Bob) at his cussin-est, under commission by a delusional would-be cult-founder who cut his teeth on the work of Fletcher Hanks and who really liked drawings of weiners and boobies.
Moynihan walks a fine line between "weird" and "incomprehensible" and between "clever" and "dumb," and manages to stay on the right side of it through almost every one of these bizarre, demented panels. I can't say that I've ever read anything quite like this (though it did call to mind the weirder bits of The Incal). I'm glad I did.
Forming is published by London's NOBROW, whose books are fantastically well-made, beautifully cloth-bound and printed on high-quality, sustainably produced paper (they also publish the much-more-kid-friendly Hilda comics). It's a quality product.
As Kodak stumbles through its bankruptcy, all sorts of weird facts are surfacing, like the news that the company had its own nuclear reactor, producing weapons-grade isotopes. It was installed for neutron imaging experiments in 1974, and while the feds were duly notified, it doesn't look like there was ever a public announcement -- nor was there any notice given to the local firefighters who'd have turned up if anything ever went wrong. If only I'd known about this when writing Makers (which concerns itself with hedge fundies who buy up and strip down Kodak and Duracell), think of the subplots I could have written!
From the Democrat and Chronicle piece by Steve Orr:
Company spokesman Christopher Veronda said he could find no record that Kodak ever made a public announcement of the facility. He also wasn’t sure whether the company had ever notified local police, fire or hazardous-materials officials.
Current city of Rochester officials, whose personnel might have been summoned to Building 82 had an untoward incident occurred, said they were in the dark. Monroe County officials did not provide comment despite several requests.
The Democrat and Chronicle learned of the facility when an employee happened to mention it to a reporter a few months ago.
The recent silence was by design. Detailed information about nuclear power plants and other entities with radioactive material has been restricted since the 2001 terrorist attacks.
The feet are made from vanilla & raspberry cake, triple dipped in white chocolate with the pop hand painted to resemble a boiled chicken foot; the chicken dipping sauce pop (top) covered with coloured piping gel; the battered chicken foot pop is covered with the dipping sauce and crushed citrus sprinkles to resemble batter. Ruddy amazing Yorkshire based baking talent and a really innovative cake pop design to boot.
, my book about the future of energy in the United States, will be published April 10th.
Company spokesman Christopher Veronda said he could find no record that Kodak ever made a public announcement of the facility. He also wasn’t sure whether the company had ever notified local police, fire or hazardous-materials officials.
