Above: One of the items identified as notes produced by the infamous Dr. Bruce Jessen, a psychologist whose work was used to design the so-called "Enhanced interrogation techniques Program," which amounted to torture of "war on terror" detainees in custody of the CIA and Department of Defense. — Read the rest

Electronic music pioneer Max V. Mathews died a few days ago at the age of 84. While at BELL Labs in the 1950s, Matthews developed MUSIC, the first popular computer program for generating sound. The multimedia visual programming language Max/MSP was named in part for Mathews. — Read the rest

This item in the Guardian's coverage of the latest Wikileaks dump is not the first time I've heard that the Casio F-91W digital watch is thought to be "the sign of al-Qaida," and "a contributing factor to continued detention of prisoners by the analysts stationed at Guantánamo Bay." — Read the rest

Congratulations to our pal Joi Ito who has just been named the new director of the MIT Media Lab! I can't wait to see how Joi's incredible vision, creativity, curiosity, and kindness impact the place. From John Markoff's article in the New York Times:

Mr.

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Tim Heidecker, doing stand-up in LA: "You know that expression, 'don't sweat the small stuff?' Life is too short. You gotta worry about the big stuff. Government."

Video Link, and you can watch his full set here: part 1, part 2. — Read the rest

David Kravets at Wired.com reports that FBI agents today raided the Los Angeles apartment of a Screen Actors Guild member suspected of being the first to upload to The Pirate Bay the Oscar-winning film The King's Speech, as well as Black Swan and other movies that were still in theaters.

Here is bOING bOING patron saint Dr. Timothy Leary explaining Mind Mirror, the software he created in 1985 with Bob Dietz and Peter Van den Beemt. Published by Electronic Arts, Mind Mirror was a pop psychology role playing game where you could "try on" different personalities. — Read the rest

Authorities in Thailand are freaking out over viral videos and photos of young women dancing without shirts at a traditional festival honoring Thai goddesses who are often depicted dancing without shirts.

Global Voices breaks it down.

The photos and videos of the three girls dancing bare breasted in Silom, Bangkok immediately went viral and generated intense debates on Thai culture and morality.

Last year, our friends at the Imaginary Foundation opened an all-too-temporary art installation in San Francisco's Lower Haight district. Fortunately, they have now created an interactive virtual gallery to preserve this wonder of culture and chalk. From "The Undivided Mind":

The Director of The Imaginary Foundation had longed dreamed of creating a physical environment to portray the wondrous intersection of Science and Art.

The headline: "Human Cannonball Dies."

Surely you've been following the iPhone-tracks-your-location-data story in recent weeks. As of today, the Wall Street Journal is the latest large outlet to cover the story of security experts Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden's study of what location data the device stores about where users go, on what dates. — Read the rest

Los Angeles's Huntington Library is celebrating the exquisite sculptures and phantasmagorical animation of Southern California artist John Frame. The exhibition, titled "Three Fragments of a Lost Tale," runs until June 20 and features more than three dozen figures and props, ranging from a few inches to almost three feet tall, that Frame crafted from carved wood and found materials. — Read the rest

"Do you want a 'real' experience to talk about when you get home from your vacation? Come and get yourself Activationized." That's what the flier read inviting Cape Cod tourists to a 1948 gathering of "Activationists." According to a LIFE magazine article, the founder, Milton Hood Ward, had "watched Indian and Haitian dancers whooping up their tribal rites (and) figured that inhibited Americans would feel better if they did the same thing." — Read the rest

The Department of Justice has concluded its investigation into New Orleans's notoriously corrupt police force and concluded that it is so bad, so rotten from top to bottom, that the police have been placed under the supervision and authority of a fed judge. — Read the rest

I carry these little, folding scissors with me everywhere. They are very sharp, and fold and unfold very easily. They are also very powerful considering their size. Best of all they have a very slim (flat) profile in my pocket.

I am an avid fisherman, and fish over lunch, on my way to work, etc and I always take these with me. — Read the rest

Graphic artist Allister Lee of Toronto collects black markers of all varieties and vintages. He has 600 of them. And whenever he gets a new one, he renders it on paper. Using a black marker, of course. Collectors Weekly interviewed Lee:

I have bit of a nerdy hobby of writing to marker companies.

Arash Ferdowsi, CTO of Dropbox, wrote to me to clarify Dropbox's present and historical privacy policy:

first, I'd like to clarify what our intent was in how we represented privacy in our TOS. in our help article we stated "Dropbox employees aren't able to access user files" we didn't intend to mislead anybody with this statement – we prevent this via access controls on our backend as well as strict policy prohibitions.

Tim Hurson's TEDxMaastricht talk "The shock of the possible" is a great, impassioned rant about the power of the unexpected in innovation, making connections between many of the turning points in human history. It reminded me of the stellar discussion of the history of randomness and information theory in Gleick's The Information — a reminder that the unexpected is the source of everything that delights and uplifts. — Read the rest

Sculptor Alan Wolfson created his Canal Street Cross-Section as a kind of doll's house model of Canal Street from street level to the subways below, combining real, imaginary, and displaced elements of the NYC he loves:

I wanted to build a piece that resembled a core sample of a city street.

Tor.com reprises Jo Walton's wonderful "When We Were Robots in Egypt," a Passover story for mechanical people, in verse.

Other nights we use just our names,
but tonight we prefix our names with "the Real"
for when we were robots in Egypt
they claimed our intelligence was artificial.