rawdog

I'm speaking Monday, Aug. 16th, at the University of New Mexico's INCBN IGERT Symposium, which focuses on the integration of neuroscience and nanotechnology. As the pre-symposium dinner entertainment, I'll be talking about "Those Fabulous Octopus Brains"—looking at cephalopod intelligence and brain structure. I fully admit that my topic choice is a blatant attempt to curry audience favor w/ cute pictures of octopuses. If you won't be attending, don't worry. It looks like I should be able to get video of the presentation, which will be posted here. (Unless I bomb, in which case we shall never speak of this again.)

On August 14-15, San Francisco's Golden Gate Park will host Outside Lands, a massive music festival with several dozen excellent bands, food, wine, art, and a big dose of Bay Area culture. Main stage performers include Kings of Leon, Furthur featuring Phil Lesh and Bob Weir, The Strokes, My Morning Jacket, Al Green, and Cat Power. There are also a slew of killer acts throughout the day on smaller stages, from Gogol Bordello to Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars to Rebirth Brass Band. The best news is that our friends at Outside Lands kindly provided Boing Boing with two pairs of two-day tickets to give away to our readers! ($140/ticket value!) Want them? Tell us why. Or rather, sing it to us.

To enter our Outisde Lands 2010 ticket contest, please compose a song about why you want to go to the festival, and record it on video or audio. Your song can be as simple (a capella!) to as elaborate (orchestral!) as you want. If you make a video, please upload it to YouTube. Audio only recordings should be posted on Archive.org. Our own Dean "Dino" Putney is going to judge, so email dean at boing boing dot net with a link to your entry. The deadline for entries is August 4 at 11:59pm PDT. We'll announce the winners on Friday, August 6.

Good luck and we look forward to, er, hearing from you! For more on Outside Lands, click here.

For Boing Boing Video coverage of Outside Lands 2008, click here.

In late 2005 Dirk Schwieger, a German cartoonist, went to live in Japan for a year. He got an office job, and started keeping a journal of his experiences in Tokyo. On his blog, he invited readers to email him "assignments," which he dutifully carried out and reported in comic strip format in a Moleskine notebook.

The assignments included eating fugu (blowfish sashimi that has a toxin that could kill you if not prepared properly), going to a capsule hotel, visiting the Ghibli Museum, riding a roller coaster on top of a building in a shopping center, reporting on the "coolest of the cooler things happening in Japan" (some kind of barrel with poles on it and tentacle-backpacks hanging from it -- I have to admit I had no idea what he was talking about here), eating okonomiyaki (a bowl of raw egg, red ginger, pork, squid, shrimp, and cabbage that you cook yourself), and so on.

Schwieger's art is funny and detailed, and his observations are insightful. Moresukine is an enjoyable, too-brief account of a Westerner trying to discover Japanese culture.

Moresukine

In late 2005 Dirk Schwieger, a German cartoonist, went to live in Japan for a year. He got an office job, and started keeping a journal of his experiences in Tokyo. On his blog, he invited readers to email him "assignments," which he dutifully carried out and reported in comic strip format in a Moleskine notebook.

The assignments included eating fugu (blowfish sashimi that has a toxin that could kill you if not prepared properly), going to a capsule hotel, visiting the Ghibli Museum, riding a roller coaster on top of a building in a shopping center, reporting on the "coolest of the cooler things happening in Japan" (some kind of barrel with poles on it and tentacle-backpacks hanging from it -- I have to admit I had no idea what he was talking about here), eating okonomiyaki (a bowl of raw egg, red ginger, pork, squid, shrimp, and cabbage that you cook yourself), and so on.

Schwieger's art is funny and detailed, and his observations are insightful. Moresukine is a enjoyable, too-brief account of a Westerner trying to discovere Japanese culture.

Moresukine

Sogen Kato was believed to be the oldest man in Tokyo. Officials heading out to congratulate him on his 111th birthday, however, met not an ancient gent but a corpse, mummified in his own bed for perhaps 30 years. [BBC; photo and cake by Ann Larie Valentine]

I like haircuts and I like Popsicles -- hell, who doesn't? But I will apparently never be an art impresario, let alone a performance art impresario, because it never would have occurred to me to combine the two, as the downtown Los Angeles gallery Actual Size is doing this Saturday:

Filmmaker Josh Lee will sell his inventively flavored popsicles to onlookers while they watch haircuts and buzz cuts performed by artists in the gallery space. The hair clippings will accumulate for the duration of the performance, resulting in a sculptural work. Walk-ins are welcome. No appointments are necessary.

The project has the potential to lead to a meditation on human waste; however, the act of cutting people's hair builds on a set of power relations that allow artist and audience to forge a more intimate relationship as he/she manipulates the image of the viewer.

I admire Sheila C. Bair, the chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, more than any other official in government. Ms. Bair's actions during the financial meltdown in 2008 and in intervening years has shown a steady hand, remarkably free of partisan favor, that likely prevented a much worse banking and mortgage catastrophe. Thus it is with a heavy heart I must reveal a book she's written that hasn't gained much notice, which is full of the bad ideas that led to low consumer savings, inflated investor expectations, and financial innumeracy.

In this book, Ms. Bair advocates:

• Immediate gratification of consumer desire.

• Disregarding employment opportunities that aren't a perfect fit when a job is needed.

• Undercutting a market with unfair competition through low-cost labor.

• Zoning violations.

• Tax avoidance on earnings.

• Avoidance of rent.

• Lack of collateral against risky investment.

• Use of shared resources for private gain.

• Disdain for state taxes.

• The use of monetary symbols to substitute for Roman characters.

The book also tells investors to expect a 100-percent return on capital in a single day, along with the dissolution of a 24-hour partnership. And, she claims that newspapers continue to print stock charts every day.

On the plus side, she encourages entrepreneurship, word-of-mouth marketing, and the value of hard labor.

Now, you might argue, "This is a children's illustrated book, you moron, and uses simple lessons to tell a complicated story!" And then you might grab me by the shoulders and shake me, and possibly slap me a few times across the face.

When I'd recovered, I'd argue in response, "True. But Ms. Bair muddles some of the fundamental aspects of economics and the market in this lesson in a way that may leave questions." I'd say that while running away from you, fast, and holding my hands in front of my head.

I hear in the distance, "Aren't you like that ranting Sun-Times columnist, Terry Savage, who, along with her brother, yelled at kids running a lemonade stand for giving away lemonade and Cory Doctorow blogged about here before and stop running away!"

Well, no. I'm not ranting. I'm dispassionate. And my concern about this book arises from the real world, not a fever dream of Ayn Randism dreamt by Ms. Savage.

My children have read this book several times, and request it all the time. This leads to awkward questions, like, "Daddy, is negative amortization a function of deflation, or does the basis of a loan remain the same regardless of CPI?" I find those questions hard to answer, or even understand.

In the book, Isabel's Car Wa$h (see what she did there with the "s"?), Ms. Bair tells the story of a little girl who wants a $10.00 doll, but only has 50¢.

Rather than recommending the age-old solution of begging her parents for money until their ears are bleeding, Isabel comes up with the idea of suckering her friends. After discarding dog walking and babysitting, Isabel spots a car wash. She fails to examine the price the car wash charges, but sees plenty of vehicles entering.

She decides to go into business washing cars without any additional market research, training, or a business plan. She finds herself $4.50 short of the funds for the supplies she needs to bootstrap the business.

Isabel remembers that friends once loaned her money for lunch, and her mother repaid them with a 40-percent premium for assuming the risk. Using that as the basis, she prepares a road show to sell her initial public offering, selling 50 percent of her shares split evenly among five friends.

Ms. Bair now takes a huge leap into socialism. Isabel sets up shop, without any permits, in her parents' front driveway in likely contravention to neighborhood convenants about operating businesses. She uses her parents' water and facilities, but pays them no dividend or rent. Shameful.

Her first customer isn't concerned about quality, but price. She spreads the word that a child laborer is offering what is likely an 80-percent discount off the going rate for an automatic car wash. (Remember that Isabel didn't find the going price, so she has imperfect knowledge and underprices her labor. She realizes this when called upon to wash a dog.)

After a hard day's work in which Isabel generates about $2.50 per hour, she repays her investors a 100-percent dividend and cashes them out, dissolving her company. For a total of $25 raised, Isabel keeps $10, or about $1.25 per hour. She pays no taxes and provides no 1099 forms to her shareholders. (Once again, socialism: her mother provides free cookies and lemonade, and provides a meeting space for the corporation at no cost.)

Isabel is set to purchase her doll (street price, $10), but on arrival at the store is visited by the dread spector of state sales tax: a 5-percent fee is levied on the doll. (Dolls have a 5-percent tariff in Isabel's state, along with shelled split peas, dog collars, and used DVDs.)

Curses, she thinks (I'm assuming that), as Ms. Bair veers into libertarianism. Unjust state, taking my earnings! Nonetheless, Ms. Bair has Isabel deplete her savings, taking her last 50¢ to pay the full $10.50 for the price. This leaves her with nothing, and the doll is only worth $4 when she leaves the store with it. Consumer impulses--gratified!

In a dense two-page addendum, Ms. Bair explains what happened, but likely leaves children more afraid of bears than they were when she started.

This short book contains the entire spectrum of economic philosophy and speculation, leading children into a trap: kids who read these book are likely to become economists and derivative traders, and create new, worse financial vehicles and theories that will eventually take us down.

Ms. Bair is the worst form of super-villain. A patient one.

Ibogaine, a hallucinogen derived from an African plant, is used (illegally) as a cure for opiate addiction. This month, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Research will test the effectiveness of Ibogaine on heroin addicts.

Popular Science has a brief article about the upcoming trial.

“As great as ibogaine seems, no one knows exactly how effective it is as a treatment,” says Valerie Mojieko, the director of clinical research for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Research (MAPS), a privately funded Massachusetts-based nonprofit. So starting this month, MAPS will enlist Clare Wilkins, the director of Pangea Biomedics, to run the first long-term study to gauge the drug’s lasting effects at her clinic in Mexico (where patients already pay $5,000 for the treatment). She will treat 20 to 30 heroin addicts and, for the next year, MAPS will subject them to psychological and drug tests to quantify ibogaine’s effectiveness.

Fighting Drugs With Drugs: An Obscure Hallucinogen Gains Legitimacy as a Solution for Addictions

Photo by Hive. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

MAKE Volume 23 is on newsstands now!

In this special GADGETS issue, we show you how to make a menagerie of delightful machines: a miniature electronic Whac-a-Mole arcade game, a tiny but mighty see-through audio amplifier, a magic mirror that contains an interactive animated soothsayer, a self-balancing one-wheeled Gyrocar, and the Most Useless Machine — the creepy mechanical box whose only purpose is to turn itself off (as seen on The Colbert Report!). Plus: how Intellectual Ventures made their incredible laser targeting mosquito zapper, how to use the industrial-strength microcontrollers called PLCs, and a lot more.

Project highlights in MAKE Volume 23 include:

The Most Useless Machine
Gyrocar
Squelette, the Bare-Bones Amplifier
Magic Mirror
Solar Car Subwoofer
College Bike Trunk
and much more, of course!

MAKE Volume 23

Russian manufacturer Lenpolygrafmash makes the computer component equivalent of brutalist architecture. According to the Russian culture blog Metkere.com, the devices such as the printer and scanner above are designed for harsh mechanical and climatic conditions. Lenpolygrafmash (via Submitterator, thanks Metkere!)

Glenn Beck's website, it turns out, can be manipulated into doing strange and NSFW things by messing with the URL. An insecure PHP utility accessible at the site allows for shenanigans like directory traversal, exposing all sorts of things that should not be exposed. Like password files, and a user group named for Rush Limbaugh. [Thanks, Dean!] Update: the discussion thread is down. Here's the Google cache of it.

"The Flower" is a modern day version of The Sunshine Makers, with a sad ending.

Investigators say they've found concrete evidence linking Pfc. Bradley Manning with the "War Logs" ultimately leaked to the Guardian, New York Times and Der Spiegel. From the WSJ:

A search of the computers used by Pfc. Manning yielded evidence he had downloaded the Afghanistan war logs, which span from 2004 until 2009, the official said. It's not clear precisely what that evidence is. The investigation is also looking at who might have helped Pfc. Manning provide the documents to WikiLeaks, a web-based group that earlier this week released 76,000 secret reports from Afghanistan.

Mike Senese shows you how to pirate vinyl by casting it in silicone. [Mike via Make]

The Obama administration wants to make it easier for the FBI to force ISPs to turn over records of individual Internet activity without a court order if agents believe the information is relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation. "The administration wants to add just four words -- 'electronic communication transactional records' -- to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge's approval. "

If you're interested in becoming a science writer—or even just a writer, in general—hop over to Not Exactly Rocket Science, where blogger Ed Yong has started a collection of Science Writer Origin Stories. It's chock-full of career-path tales and helpful advice from people like the amazing Carl Zimmer, Wired's Steve Silberman, Newsweek's Mary Carmichael ... and, hey, me!

The initial response to the Wikileaks Afghan document leak from the Pentagon and White House focused largely on the documents' purported irrelevance as "old news," and general condemnation of the leak as a violation of federal law. Now, the response has shifted more specifically to focus on the fact that within the massive cache of documents, names of Afghan informants are included in plain view, with no redaction. Those informants can now be located and punished or murdered by the enemy, the logic goes.

For its part, Wikileaks frontman Julian Assange has stated in interviews this week that the organization is holding off on releasing the next 15,000 or so documents from the Afghan leak material to scrub some personally identifying data, as "harm minimization procedure."

Supporters of Wikileaks counter that, basically, now's a fine time for the military to be fretting about harm to Afghans. Glenn Greenwald of Salon tweets that Wikileaks should have been more careful about redactions, but:

So the WikiLeak-ed documents might put Afghans at risk? You know what else does? 10 yrs of bombings, air raids, checkpoint shootings, drones

Noah Shachtman reports at Wired Danger Room blog that the investment arms of the CIA and Google are together backing a firm that monitors the web in real time, and claims to use that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents -- both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine "goes beyond search" by "looking at the 'invisible links' between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events."

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online "momentum" for any given event.

Research a person
Monitor news on public figures to...
Identify future travel plans; spot past travel trends and patterns
Search for communication with other individuals; graph their network
Monitor career history and announced job changes
Find quotations and sound bites in the news and blogs
Discover future and past strategic positioning
Uncover public political ties and family relationships

Video above, a trailer of sorts for "Recorded Future."

Sources at YouTube tell us that online video giant will soon increase the maximum duration of uploaded video clips from 10 minutes to 15 minutes. The move may not mean much to some, but if you're a YouTube uploader, the increase would mean significantly less chopped-up installments of longer form works, and subtly redefine the medium, given that YouTube is the largest video hosting service online.

YouTube Partners (online video companies like us and other content owners who have agreements with the company involving shared ad revenue) are already able to upload videos longer than 10 minutes, but it's a fairly big deal for the rest of the ecosystem— and amateur folk make up a huge portion of that ecosystem.

Just think about it: the move would bring 50% more "haul videos," from shopaholic teen girls; 50% more crazytime rants from random dudes; 50% more hamster montages; and 50% more double (whoah that's almost a triple) rainbows.

Why now? I don't know. Why not? But I'd put my money partially on the company's recent win in the Viacom case, and a sense that they've now figured out more effectively how to help the big content owners (labels, movie studios, TV networks) identify infringing uploads, which might tend to fall largely in that longer-form category.

We're hearing something about a "15 minutes of fame" contest to celebrate the expanded video duration, in which winning uploads will be featured on the YouTube homepage in a future spotlight.

The video to "Brain Games," the third track from Arman Bohn's Atari 2600-inspired "Bits" album, was created using drawings made on a Nintendo DSi. These elements were combined with traditionally-shot footage in After Effects, resulting in a monochrome 1080-line-high heap of pixels.

The video to "Brain Games," the third track from Arman Bohn's Atari 2600-inspired "Bits" album, was created using drawings made on a Nintendo DSi. These elements were combined with traditionally-shot footage in After Effects, resulting in a monochrome 1080-line-high heap of pixels.

Get Lamp, a documentary about text adventures, is finally available to order after years in development. [Getlamp.com] Computerworld's Ken Gagne interviewed creator Jason Scott.

Amazon's newest version of the Kindle is just $139. [CrunchGear]

Water as flavor enhancer? Yes, ma'am. At least, that is, with booze and coffee. NYT's The Curious Cook explains the science and the taste behind this trick. (Via Graham Farmelo)

Buried in Wikileaks' Afghanistan documents is a largely ignored 2007 warning that Pakistani spies were planning to poison booze intended for American soldiers using sulfuric acid. It sounds a little far-fetched.

Until you hear the story of James Yeager, an American geologist who claims to have narrowly avoided being poisoned in exactly this way in, yes, 2007.

Yeager was in Afghanistan advising the government as they took bids on a massive mining contract ...

he returned to his residence in Kabul to find it had been burgled. The intruder took money from a drawer and left behind a bottle of Corona beer. The Corona bottle sat on his counter for the next two weeks Yeager says, because Corona is one of his least favorite beers. He finally opened it during a going away party as the other drinks began to run low. [emphasis mine]

"I pulled it out and when I popped it there was no fizz and the cap was loose," says Yeager. "Because this one didn't have fizz you wonder if it went rancid or not, and I just kind of sniffed it and I went 'Oh, that doesn't smell like beer.' "

Yeager, a geochemist familiar with acids, realized it smelled like sulfuric acid - otherwise known as battery acid. He called a friend over who had the same reaction to the smell. Yeager poured the "beer" into the toilet and it foamed and fizzed, leaving "no question" in his mind it was sulfuric acid.

Insert your own Corona joke here.

Christian Science Monitor: Wikileaks confirmed? A plan to kill American geologist with poisoned beer

Fun trailer for Mary Roach's new book, Packing for Mars, which comes out on August 2. It tells the story of life in outer space. In this video, early '60s-era NASA conducts some delightful experiments in "minimal personal hygiene", to find out how humans might respond, socially, to a reality without earthly bathrooms.

Via Submitterator

(In July, I went on a family vacation to Japan. Here are my posts about the trip: The Ghibli Museum | Watermelons in the shape of cubes, hearts, and pyramids | What happened to the Burgie Beer UFO of Melrose Avenue?)

Having been to Tokyo three times previous to our recent vacation, I was excited to take my daughters to Harajuku, a popular teen shopping area in the city. To get there, we took a short ride on the JR Line to Harajuku Station, which has a neat Tudor-esque building built in 1925.

(Harajuku Station photo by Shiny Things. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.)

We took the Takeshita Exit from the station, which lead us to Takeshita Dori, a narrow pedestrian street filled with teen fashion boutiques and creperies.

Many more photos after the jump.

I didn't see anyone smorking (or smoking, for that matter), but I saw plenty of "touts" -- young African men who follow shoppers down the street to try to convince them to shop in stores that hire them to tout their wares. No one seemed to pay any attention to the touts. I wonder how they make a living?

Cheap trinkets were in abundance near the top of the street, giving this part of Takeshita Dori a slightly seedy, past-it's-prime vibe, much the way I remember London's Carnaby Street in the 1980s.

I liked these luggage tags.

My kids had fun shopping in the Tamagotchi store, which has this happy exterior.

Further down Takeshita Dori, the stores get more interesting and less garish.

This store had an airplane fuselage running through it.

Kawaii desu ne!

The little alleys that ran off Takeshita Dori had quiet and intriguing little businesses. This is a hair salon.

As much as I liked climbing the colored stairs and visiting the wee Hide A Way Tree House Concept Salon Cafe & Bar -- which sold drinks, clothes, books, and other select products -- everyone was smoking so we beat a hasty retreat back outside.

Stores in Tokyo have lots of vending machines in them. Some dispense products. Others accepted our 100 yen coins, flashed several screens of Japanese at us, and returned to a dormant state.

My 12-year-old daughter was intrigued by this establishment, which was filled with space-age photo booths. Girls can get their photos taken here, and the photos are automatically altered to make them look like manga characters, with big eyes and washed out complexions.

The photo booth shop had a sign that said "GIRLS ONLY!" but the manager of the store said to us, "Family OK!"

My daughter had some photos taken, and when they came out of the printer, they were tiny. So tiny, in fact, that we seemed to have lost them. (If I find them I will add them to the post.)

More kawaiiness.

A nearby street in Harajuku, called Omotesando, is more upscale than Takeshita Dori. This shady, tree-lined avenue is one of my favorite streets in Tokyo for sitting down, cooling off, and watching the never-ending parade of people go by.

We spent a long time at Kiddy Land, a toy story with six floors.

I can't remember which floor of Kiddy Land was selling these little anatomical models, but aren't they great? I wonder if Audrey Kawasaki used this line of models as reference in the painting we bought from her last year, "I Want to Play?"

Near the Harajuku Station is Yoyogi Park, where cosplayers happily pose for photos.

And where friendly folks give free hugs (we all got hugs!).

We went to the Hello Kitty Ice Cream Stand three times while we were in Japan.

Fabulous crepes abound!

My favorite snack was the hot waffles made on the spot in Yoyogi Park.

From the Good Blog: Where Did the Money to Rebuild Iraq Go?

From the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, July 27, 2010 (PDF):

Weaknesses in DoD's financial and management controls left it unable to properly account for $8.7 billion of the $9.1 billion in DFI funds it received for reconstruction activities in Iraq. This situation occurred because most DoD organizations receiving DFI funds did not establish the required Department of the Treasury accounts and no DoD organization was designated as the executive agent for managing the use of DFI funds. The breakdown in controls left the funds vulnerable to inappropriate uses and undetected loss.

After seeing Pesco's moogarific Osmonds post, I got to thinking about a terrific piece of cinematic sleaze from 1971 called Pretty Maids All in a Row starring Rock Hudson and Angie Dickinson, written by Gene Roddenberry, and directed by Roger Vadim (Brigitte Bardot's svengali, over-the-top bon vivant playboy, and director of Barbarella). The lead song, "Chilly Winds," was performed by the Osmonds, and is probably their best song ever.

I can't beat Bad4Alice's description of the movie, so I'll just cut-n-paste:

The First 5 minutes of "Pretty Maids All in a Row" (1971) - Welcome to the 70's! A Teen boy seduced by a HOT substitute teacher (Angie Dickenson); a Footbal Coach / 'Counselor' (Rock Hudson) giving 'Private Lessons' to the Willing and Sexy Young High School girls - Short Skirts, No Bras, Lots of 'Bounce' and Upskirt Peeks - It makes Certain 'Things' Hard for a young highschool guy, especially the New Substitute in her Short Skirt, Jiggly Butt, and Tight Top, who 'Accidently' pokes his face with her Breasts! He has to get a Hall Pass, and 'Limp' to the Boys' Room, holding a clipboard in front of himself, for a little 'Relief'! He's about to start, when he finds a cute young girl in the next stall, Skirt Up and Panties showing - But she's having a harder day than his - She's DEAD! The movie (NOT the Clip) goes on to more girls murdered, lots of nudity, Telly Savales & James Dohan (Scotty on Star Trek) as the Cops, Roddy McDowall as the Principal. and the Osmonds singing the Theme Song! It's a Sexy Comedy/Murder Mystery -- Far Out, Groovy, and Right On!

Mark Richards says: "I spotted an instructive sign at a Greek festival."

Er... Switched-On Osmonds. (Thanks, Jean Paul Bondy via Jeff Cross!)

A couple of days ago my 7-year-old daughter and I decorated her bedroom wall with designer Yiying Lu's "Lifting a Dreamer" (Elephant) wall graphics set. (Yiying is the illustrator of Twitter's famous Fail Whale. Here's an interview with her.) The three-foot elephant set is $59.95, and the four-foot set is $79.95. They are available in the Makers Market / Boing Boing Bazaar.

Yiying Lu premium wall graphics are self-adhesive and will stick to almost any surface (walls, windows, even ceilings), and can be removed and re-hung 100 times without leaving a mark or damaging your walls.

These are NOT vinyl stickers or decals, which have a tendency to curl, peel, bubble, and crack, and are difficult to re-position without losing adhesion or damaging surfaces.

About Yiying Lu: “Yiying” is 2 characters in Chinese. “Yi” means Happy; “Ying” means Creative. Born in Shanghai, Yiying moved to Sydney when she was a teen. Yiying has been educated in UK and Australia. She has studied at Central St Martins College of Art & Design in London and University of New South Wales in Sydney. She graduated from the University of Technology, Sydney with 1st-Class honors in Bachelor of Design Visual Communication 2007.

Yiying is the illustrator of the social networking site Twitter.com’s Fail Whale icon, which has been featured in CNN, New York Times Magazine, BBC, NPR & Wired Magazine.

Yiying has also done design and creative work for Anna Sui New York, Maybelline, GettyImages, Glam Media, JWT, the Surfrider Foundation, the University of Technology Sydney, McCann World Group, and LTL PRINTS.

CJR has a very detailed explanation on how the arrangement around "The Afghan War Diaries" between Wikileaks and three newspapers (Guardian, NYT, Der Spiegel) came to pass. Notably, the article incorporates a disparaging use of the verb "flounce."

Predictably, Jon Stewart's Daily Show take on the Wikileaks/Manning/Assange/Lamo/AfghanMegaDump telenovela is spot-on, revelatory, and required internet viewing (though folks outside the USA are SOL, as it's region-blocked).

This t-shirt design by John Slabyk over at Threadless should be part of any credentialed Futurist's wardrobe:

they lied to us
this was supposed to be
the future
where is my jetpack,
where is my robotic companion,
where is my dinner in pill form,
where is my hydrogen fueled automobile,
where is my nuclear-powered levitating home,
where is my cure for this disease

Over at the Submitterator, Cheftournel turns us on to Belgian design firm Khuan + Ktron's lovely illustrations of entire countries, created for Weekend Knack Magazine. They have a bit of a Mary Blair vibe, but also are rather fresh too. KHUAN + KTRON for Weekend Knack Mag­a­zine

Watch video: YouTube, or download MP4.

Make sure to have your copybooks ready, you'll want to take notes. In this episode of Boing Boing Video, the offbeat British comedy duo of Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz, creators of the BBC series "Look Around You," speak to us on the occasion of the US DVD release for their absurdist fake-educational science program.

Bonus: They are also founders of the faux religion of Tarvuism. In this very video, for the first time ever, they recite the full invocational prayer of Tarvu, meaning that just by watching, you are automatically indoctrinated as a member of the Church of Tarvu. So if octopuses (octopi? octopodes?) start chattering priestmuntyisms to you in the night, you've been warned.

In addition to the LOL-rich endeavors they discuss in this interview, these guys are busy: there's Popper's long-running prank phone call and Timewaster Letter series, work on the IT Crowd, and their Radio Spirit World podcasts, Popper is writing for South Park lately. Serafinowicz has an eponymous BBC show out on DVD, and lots of movie roles in the works, including the new Yellow Submarine remake. US audiences may know Serafinowicz best as the voice of Darth Maul.

We'll be debuting a new comedy short from these guys soon on Boing Boing Video, so stay tuned. Thants!

• LOOK AROUND YOU Season 1 on DVD (Amazon)
• Watch excerpts from the DVD at the LOOK AROUND YOU YouTube channel.
• More Boing Boing Video: tv.boingboing.net, or check out our YouTube channel.

Photo, below: Popper (L) and Serafinowicz (R) at Comic-Con, with a new pal...

Mark Zuckerberg, noted critic of privacy, gets to live the dream. [Gawker]

Artist Michele Banks uses watercolor to depict natural, scientific, and medical phenomena. This one above shows cell divisions (note that it's not meant to be completely accurate); another one I like is a bright blue canvas with a single line showing someone's heart rate. Her work is available for sale in the Makers Market/Boing Boing Bazaar!

[via Try Handmade via Submitterator]

Check out this great Japanese TV commercial for Delicare M's, a jock itch cream. Tokyo gets really hot in the summer, and men still have to wear suits to work, so the idea of a refreshingly itch-less crotch is likely to appeal to many salarymen.

[via Spoon & Tamago via TokyoMango]

"[I]n rushing to declare what the war logs are not, many in the media have been quick to pass over what they are. Or, at the very least, what they might be: If not something 'new,' 'shocking,' and Pentagon Paper-esque, certainly a trove of material to add texture, detail, and anecdote—in other words, reporting—to a war that, despite the good work of some brave and diligent correspondents, has gone largely underreported in recent years." Joel Meares in CJR.

Just days after the U.S. Copyright Office explicitly authorized DRM-cracking by consumers, a British court has effectively abolished the import and sale of blank Nintendo DS cartridges. The mere possibility of piracy is sufficient to ban them, even if the media has legitimate uses such as storing freely-available third-party software. "The mere fact that the device can be used for a non-infringing purpose is not a defence," read the ruling by Justice Floyd. [BBC]

Created by DeviantArt user Gamefan84, who says all that needs to be said: "Craziest request ever: Chewie riding a giant cute squirrel chasing down Nazis. He needs long flowing fur and a giant roar."

You might stop by his DeviantArt page and tell him how great this is.

(via BB Submitterator / The High Definite)

I thought of sf writer Terry Bisson's work as being delightfully absurdist, always moving but never solemn, but then I read Fire on the Mountain, his acclaimed 1988 short novel, reprinted in 2009 by PM Press in a handsome pocket edition with an introduction written by the revolutionary Mumia Abu Jamal from his cell on death row. Now I know that Bisson is perfectly capable of being as solemn as a funeral, and that when he takes on that mode, he is just as moving, and sweetly sad in a way that reveals the powerful mastery that's hidden behind his whimsy in stories like They're Made of Meat and Bears Discover Fire.

Fire on the Mountain is an alternate American civil war history, in the classic mode: one battle goes differently, for the want of a battle the war is lost, and the nation becomes an altogether different place. But Bisson's approach is more than a bit of militaristic speculation: it is a revolutionary polemic clothed in an exciting and moving adventure story. In Bisson's world, Harriet Tubman joins John Brown at Harper's Ferry and the two of them kindle a nationwide abolitionist uprising that sparks a global series of socialist revolutions, in Canada, Haiti, Mexico, France, England, Ireland, and across the American continent among indigenous people.

The story takes place in two timelines: the history of the revolution is told in the form of a memoir of a slave-boy who grew up to be a revolutionary leader, and in correspondence from a white Virginian doctor who turned his back on privilege and fought alongside the rebels in John Brown's army.

Then there's a "contemporary" story, set in 1959, when socialist Africa is just about to land its first astronauts on Mars. Yasmin is the great-great granddaughter of the ex-slave whose memoir recounts the history of the revolution, and she is the widow of an African astronaut who died in space on an earlier, failed Mars mission. She is delivering her ancestor's papers to a revolutionary museum, travelling cross-country with her teenaged daughter, Harriet, the bother of them absorbed with bitter emotion at all the space travel in the news.

Weaving between these three stories, Bisson paints a picture of a world where progress is based on peace, not war, cooperation, not competition. And he tells the gripping tale of the war that was fought and the blood that was shed to get to that world, and of the ambivalence that the fighting and the not-fighting engender among all concerned.

It's a slender novel, a mere 150 pages, but it does the science fiction trick of making you step back from your own world and see it more clearly, and it does so while wrenching your heart and setting your pulse pounding. All in all, one of the best alternate histories I've read -- and a side of Bisson (a southerner who fought in the John Brown Anti-KKK League) I'm glad to have discovered.

Fire on the Mountain

Greetings from one of the best places in the world to learn foreign languages! DLI, CIA University? No, a small town in Vermont that hosts an annual summer language institute: Middlebury. To call the Middlebury language schools a camp is like calling a hurricane a rain shower.

At the core of the language program here is the contractual agreement of all participants to only use their language of study for the duration of their stay. The "language pledge" is in effect 24-7 and contributes to the full-immersion environment. In many ways, you are exposed to more of the language than in a country where it is spoken. There is simply no escape from the language outside of withdrawal from the program, resulting in a strange environment in this small Vermont town near the Green Mountain National Forest. Pictured above is Sunday morning at the library where students pore over word lists, prepare for the upcoming week, and listen to audio files to improve their listening comprehension.

Giving up English for 7-10 weeks has a strange, Kafkaesque effect on the brain. You live in a heterotopian space, one that makes you question where and when you exactly are, and how you came to be there. Time seems to stand still in this environment as the new language permeates you, even as an instructor. The frustration of not being able to express yourself in English either gives way to creative uses of the new language, or a bout of 'language breakdown' when students are incapable of any form of communication. This intense committment to staying in the language has resulted in the occasional call from the local hospital asking for a translator for an injured student who is 'stuck' in the language.

I am teaching beginning German this summer to students who have had almost no exposure to the German language. They too sign away English for seven weeks, and of course they often make the most progress of all students. It is a testament to the hard work of the students and to the human brain's ability to acquire languages.

Middlebury started with a school of German in 1915, when Vassar professor Lilian Strobe thought that Middlebury's isolated geography would make an ideal place to allow students to focus on language learning. Today, Middlebury teaches 10 languages and on any Friday night, the town pub becomes an even more surreal place. As you walk in you can hear a table of German speakers, a table of French, a table of Spanish, etc. If you passed through town accidentally and did not know what was going on, you might question where in the world you were. If you try to speak to the students, you would only get a strange look or an answer in the language they study. The motto of the Language Schools is "No English Spoken Here".

Teaching a language without the aid of any English explanations or translations is an interesting challenge, but the challenge forces both me and the students to strain our minds to comprehend and communicate. It forces a more efficient, comprehensive teaching and learning style that manages to promote quick and effective language acquisition.

Students from a variety of backgrounds come here, including many graduate students who need a language for their research, government types whose first phrase in the language is "I'm not permitted to tell you what I do for a living," and students who are preparing to move abroad and need to learn as much of a language as possible in a short period of time.

The program runs from June-August only and is roughly the equivalent of two years of instruction. The real trick is the constant immersion and steady interaction with other speakers. Contrary to popular belief, there is no way to 'pick up' a language quickly with self-study. Languages are spoken among people and that spoken interaction is critical to learning. Here, students only sit in classes 3-4 hours daily. The rest of the day is spent doing other activities involving high frequency vocabulary such as working out, playing teams sports, yoga, singing in a choir, eating, drinking, putting on a play, playing billiards, and hiking in the nearby forests; all in the target language. Often, these seemingly superfluous interactions outside of the classroom prove to be the most beneficial way to solidify what one has learned in the classroom earlier that morning.

I have long lamented the state of language education in the United States, but I see change and improvement in foreign language education every year. Middlebury reflects this trend and has shown a steady increase in demand. Overall applications for admission to the program have increased 120% over a ten-year period. For Arabic, applications are up 375% and this increase has prompted the program to move the Arabic school to Mills College in Oakland, California. For my passion, German, applications are up a significant 75% with steady enrollments over a ten- year period, countering the trends of decreasing interest after the fall of the Berlin wall.

For a realistic look at the amount of progress made, you can view the before and after videos on the Middlebury web site.

Richmond police recently refused to arrest a group of men who beat up a naked drunk in public. "We don't need it," one said to a woman who filmed the incident. [The Awl]

"To use an analogy here, as opposed to arresting the guy who broke into your home, we've arrested the guy that gave him the crowbar, the map and the best houses in the neighborhood. And that is a huge break in the investigation of cyber crimes."—International authorities have nabbed "Iserdo," the 23-year-old Slovenian hacker believed to have written the "Botnet" code that a network of criminals used to infect 12 million computers, compromising the security of major banks and corporations worldwide.

Wired writer and Danger Room blog editor Noah Shachtman has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today cautioning those who dive in to the Wikileaks Afghan war logs to read the military-produced reports they contain with some skepticism. Not because Wikileaks has released anything less than the genuine article, but because reports produced by the military don't always tell the whole story. Shachtman cites a series of reports related to actions of the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines, in Helmand province on August 25th:

I happen to know this because I was there with Echo company, reporting for WIRED magazine. And the wide difference between what actually happened at the Moba Khan compound and what the report says happened there should give caution to those who think they can discover the capital-T truth about the Afghanistan conflict solely through the WikiLeaks war logs. It should also give pause to those officers in military headquarters who count on these updates to learn about what’s happening on the front lines. The military has a problem in how it talks to itself.

Here's the full op-ed at the WSJ. If you search for it via Google News, you should be able to get around their stupid paywall.

Susannah Breslin has posted a new story to The War Project website, her independent online project featuring first-person stories of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Every as-told-to story is based on an in-person interview Susannah conducted with the veteran, and a photo portrait she took of the veteran. About today's story:

Sgt. George Zubaty, whose father was a Vietnam War veteran, grew up in a small southern town and was deployed as an Army infantryman to Afghanistan in 2002 and Iraq in 2003. In his story, he talks about being among the first to enter Baghdad, what Iraq and Cormac McCarthy's The Road have in common, and why some soldiers have more problems than others.

"Every single vehicle we come by is shot up, burnt, tank tread down the center of it. I mean, you're looking in a car, and there'll be mom, dad, kids, everything's burnt, everything's torn up. Remember, it's 2003. At that point, Army units, they were training to do a general movement warfare type action. The whole point of our training was, just kill people. It wasn't soft and nice. It was, you've been shot at, you shoot back until the firing stops."

You can follow The War Project on Twitter.

Get Lamp, a documentary about text adventures, is finally available to order after years in development. [Getlamp.com] Computerworld's Ken Gagne interviewed creator Jason Scott.

Buried in Wikileaks' Afghanistan documents is a largely ignored 2007 warning that Pakistani spies were planning to poison booze intended for American soldiers using sulfuric acid. It sounds a little far-fetched.

Until you hear the story of James Yeager, an American geologist who claims to have narrowly avoided being poisoned in exactly this way in, yes, 2007.

Yeager was in Afghanistan advising the government as they took bids on a massive mining contract ...

he returned to his residence in Kabul to find it had been burgled. The intruder took money from a drawer and left behind a bottle of Corona beer. The Corona bottle sat on his counter for the next two weeks Yeager says, because Corona is one of his least favorite beers. He finally opened it during a going away party as the other drinks began to run low. [emphasis mine]

"I pulled it out and when I popped it there was no fizz and the cap was loose," says Yeager. "Because this one didn't have fizz you wonder if it went rancid or not, and I just kind of sniffed it and I went 'Oh, that doesn't smell like beer.' "

Yeager, a geochemist familiar with acids, realized it smelled like sulfuric acid - otherwise known as battery acid. He called a friend over who had the same reaction to the smell. Yeager poured the "beer" into the toilet and it foamed and fizzed, leaving "no question" in his mind it was sulfuric acid.

Insert your own Corona joke here.

Christian Science Monitor: Wikileaks confirmed? A plan to kill American geologist with poisoned beer

Buried in Wikileaks' Afghanistan documents is a largely ignored 2007 warning that Pakistani spies were planning to poison booze intended for American soldiers using sulfuric acid. It sounds a little far-fetched. Until you hear the story of James Yeager, an American geologist who claims to have narrowly avoided being poisoned in exactly this way in, yes, 2007.

Yeager was in Afghanistan advising the government as they took bids on a massive mining contract ...

he returned to his residence in Kabul to find it had been burgled. The intruder took money from a drawer and left behind a bottle of Corona beer. The Corona bottle sat on his counter for the next two weeks Yeager says, because Corona is one of his least favorite beers. He finally opened it during a going away party as the other drinks began to run low. [emphasis mine]

"I pulled it out and when I popped it there was no fizz and the cap was loose," says Yeager. "Because this one didn't have fizz you wonder if it went rancid or not, and I just kind of sniffed it and I went 'Oh, that doesn't smell like beer.' "

Yeager, a geochemist familiar with acids, realized it smelled like sulfuric acid - otherwise known as battery acid. He called a friend over who had the same reaction to the smell. Yeager poured the "beer" into the toilet and it foamed and fizzed, leaving "no question" in his mind it was sulfuric acid.

Insert your own Corona joke here.

Christian Science Monitor: Wikileaks confirmed? A plan to kill American geologist with poisoned beer

Amazon's newest version of the Kindle is just $139. [CrunchGear]

Water as flavor enhancer? Yes, ma'am. At least, that is, with booze and coffee. NYT's The Curious Cook explains the science and the taste behind this trick. (Via Graham Farmelo)

Fun trailer for Mary Roach's new book, Packing for Mars, which comes out on August 2. It tells the story of life in outer space. In this video, early '60s-era NASA conducts some delightful experiments in "minimal personal hygiene", to find out how humans might respond, socially, to a reality without earthly bathrooms.

Via Submitterator

Created by DeviantArt user Gamefan84, who says all that needs to be said: "Craziest request ever: Chewie riding a giant cute squirrel chasing down Nazis. He needs long flowing fur and a giant roar."

You might stop by his DeviantArt page and tell him how great this is.

(via BB Submitterator / The High Definite)

(In July, I went on a family vacation to Japan. Here are my posts about the trip: The Ghibli Museum | Watermelons in the shape of cubes, hearts, and pyramids | What happened to the Burgie Beer UFO of Melrose Avenue?)

Having been to Tokyo three times previous to our recent vacation, I was excited to take my daughters to Harajuku, a popular teen shopping area in the city. To get there, we took a short ride on the JR Line to Harajuku Station, which has a neat Tudor-esque building built in 1925.

(Harajuku Station photo by Shiny Things. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.)

We took the Takeshita Exit from the station, which lead us to Takeshita Dori, a narrow pedestrian street filled with teen fashion boutiques and creperies.

Many more photos after the jump.

I didn't see anyone smorking (or smoking, for that matter), but I saw plenty of "touts" -- young African men who follow shoppers down the street to try to convince them to shop in stores that hire them to tout their wares. No one seemed to pay any attention to the touts. I wonder how they make a living?

Cheap trinkets were in abundance near the top of the street, giving this part of Takeshita Dori a slightly seedy, past-it's-prime vibe, much the way I remember London's Carnaby Street in the 1980s.

I liked these luggage tags.

My kids had fun shopping in the Tamagotchi store, which has this happy exterior.

Further down Takeshita Dori, the stores get more interesting and less garish.

This store had an airplane fuselage running through it.

Kawaii desu ne!

The little alleys that ran off Takeshita Dori had quiet and intriguing little businesses. This is a hair salon.

As much as I liked climbing the colored stairs and visiting the wee Hide A Way Tree House Concept Salon Cafe & Bar -- which sold drinks, clothes, books, and other select products -- everyone was smoking so we beat a hasty retreat back outside.

Stores in Tokyo have lots of vending machines in them. Some dispense products. Others accepted our 100 yen coins, flashed several screens of Japanese at us, and returned to a dormant state.

My 12-year-old daughter was intrigued by this establishment, which was filled with space-age photo booths. Girls can get their photos taken here, and the photos are automatically altered to make them look like manga characters, with big eyes and washed out complexions.

The photo booth shop had a sign that said "GIRLS ONLY!" but the manager of the store said to us, "Family OK!"

My daughter had some photos taken, and when they came out of the printer, they were tiny. So tiny, in fact, that we seemed to have lost them. (If I find them I will add them to the post.)

More kawaiiness.

A nearby street in Harajuku, called Omotesando, is more upscale than Takeshita Dori. This shady, tree-lined avenue is one of my favorite streets in Tokyo for sitting down, cooling off, and watching the never-ending parade of people go by.

We spent a long time at Kiddy Land, a toy story with six floors.

I can't remember which floor of Kiddy Land was selling these little anatomical models, but aren't they great? I wonder if Audrey Kawasaki used this line of models as reference in the painting we bought from her last year, "I Want to Play?"

Near the Harajuku Station is Yoyogi Park, where cosplayers happily pose for photos.

And where friendly folks give free hugs (we all got hugs!).

We went to the Hello Kitty Ice Cream Stand three times while we were in Japan.

Fabulous crepes abound!

My favorite snack was the hot waffles made on the spot in Yoyogi Park.

From the Good Blog: Where Did the Money to Rebuild Iraq Go?

From the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, July 27, 2010 (PDF):

Weaknesses in DoD's financial and management controls left it unable to properly account for $8.7 billion of the $9.1 billion in DFI funds it received for reconstruction activities in Iraq. This situation occurred because most DoD organizations receiving DFI funds did not establish the required Department of the Treasury accounts and no DoD organization was designated as the executive agent for managing the use of DFI funds. The breakdown in controls left the funds vulnerable to inappropriate uses and undetected loss.

I thought of sf writer Terry Bisson's work as being delightfully absurdist, always moving but never solemn, but then I read Fire on the Mountain, his acclaimed 1988 short novel, reprinted in 2009 by PM Press in a handsome pocket edition with an introduction written by the revolutionary Mumia Abu Jamal from his cell on death row. Now I know that Bisson is perfectly capable of being as solemn as a funeral, and that when he takes on that mode, he is just as moving, and sweetly sad in a way that reveals the powerful mastery that's hidden behind his whimsy in stories like They're Made of Meat and Bears Discover Fire.

Fire on the Mountain is an alternate American civil war history, in the classic mode: one battle goes differently, for the want of a battle the war is lost, and the nation becomes an altogether different place. But Bisson's approach is more than a bit of militaristic speculation: it is a revolutionary polemic clothed in an exciting and moving adventure story. In Bisson's world, Harriet Tubman joins John Brown at Harper's Ferry and the two of them kindle a nationwide abolitionist uprising that sparks a global series of socialist revolutions, in Canada, Haiti, Mexico, France, England, Ireland, and across the American continent among indigenous people.

The story takes place in two timelines: the history of the revolution is told in the form of a memoir of a slave-boy who grew up to be a revolutionary leader, and in correspondence from a white Virginian doctor who turned his back on privilege and fought alongside the rebels in John Brown's army.

Then there's a "contemporary" story, set in 1959, when socialist Africa is just about to land its first astronauts on Mars. Yasmin is the great-great granddaughter of the ex-slave whose memoir recounts the history of the revolution, and she is the widow of an African astronaut who died in space on an earlier, failed Mars mission. She is delivering her ancestor's papers to a revolutionary museum, travelling cross-country with her teenaged daughter, Harriet, the bother of them absorbed with bitter emotion at all the space travel in the news.

Weaving between these three stories, Bisson paints a picture of a world where progress is based on peace, not war, cooperation, not competition. And he tells the gripping tale of the war that was fought and the blood that was shed to get to that world, and of the ambivalence that the fighting and the not-fighting engender among all concerned.

It's a slender novel, a mere 150 pages, but it does the science fiction trick of making you step back from your own world and see it more clearly, and it does so while wrenching your heart and setting your pulse pounding. All in all, one of the best alternate histories I've read -- and a side of Bisson (a southerner who fought in the John Brown Anti-KKK League) I'm glad to have discovered.

Fire on the Mountain

After seeing Pesco's moogarific Osmonds post, I got to thinking about a terrific piece of cinematic sleaze from 1971 called Pretty Maids All in a Row starring Rock Hudson and Angie Dickinson, written by Gene Roddenberry, and directed by Roger Vadim (Brigitte Bardot's svengali, over-the-top bon vivant playboy, and director of Barbarella). The lead song, "Chilly Winds," was performed by the Osmonds, and is probably their best song ever.

I can't beat Bad4Alice's description of the movie, so I'll just cut-n-paste:

The First 5 minutes of "Pretty Maids All in a Row" (1971) - Welcome to the 70's! A Teen boy seduced by a HOT substitute teacher (Angie Dickenson); a Footbal Coach / 'Counselor' (Rock Hudson) giving 'Private Lessons' to the Willing and Sexy Young High School girls - Short Skirts, No Bras, Lots of 'Bounce' and Upskirt Peeks - It makes Certain 'Things' Hard for a young highschool guy, especially the New Substitute in her Short Skirt, Jiggly Butt, and Tight Top, who 'Accidently' pokes his face with her Breasts! He has to get a Hall Pass, and 'Limp' to the Boys' Room, holding a clipboard in front of himself, for a little 'Relief'! He's about to start, when he finds a cute young girl in the next stall, Skirt Up and Panties showing - But she's having a harder day than his - She's DEAD! The movie (NOT the Clip) goes on to more girls murdered, lots of nudity, Telly Savales & James Dohan (Scotty on Star Trek) as the Cops, Roddy McDowall as the Principal. and the Osmonds singing the Theme Song! It's a Sexy Comedy/Murder Mystery -- Far Out, Groovy, and Right On!

Artist Michele Banks uses watercolor to depict natural, scientific, and medical phenomena. This one above shows cell divisions (note that it's not meant to be completely accurate); another one I like is a bright blue canvas with a single line showing someone's heart rate. Her work is available for sale in the Makers Market/Boing Boing Bazaar!

[via Try Handmade via Submitterator]

Greetings from one of the best places in the world to learn foreign languages! DLI, CIA University? No, a small town in Vermont that hosts an annual summer language institute: Middlebury. To call the Middlebury language schools a camp is like calling a hurricane a rain shower.

At the core of the language program here is the contractual agreement of all participants to only use their language of study for the duration of their stay. The "language pledge" is in effect 24-7 and contributes to the full-immersion environment. In many ways, you are exposed to more of the language than in a country where it is spoken. There is simply no escape from the language outside of withdrawal from the program, resulting in a strange environment in this small Vermont town near the Green Mountain National Forest. Pictured above is Sunday morning at the library where students pore over word lists, prepare for the upcoming week, and listen to audio files to improve their listening comprehension.

Giving up English for 7-10 weeks has a strange, Kafkaesque effect on the brain. You live in a heterotopian space, one that makes you question where and when you exactly are, and how you came to be there. Time seems to stand still in this environment as the new language permeates you, even as an instructor. The frustration of not being able to express yourself in English either gives way to creative uses of the new language, or a bout of 'language breakdown' when students are incapable of any form of communication. This intense committment to staying in the language has resulted in the occasional call from the local hospital asking for a translator for an injured student who is 'stuck' in the language.

I am teaching beginning German this summer to students who have had almost no exposure to the German language. They too sign away English for seven weeks, and of course they often make the most progress of all students. It is a testament to the hard work of the students and to the human brain's ability to acquire languages.

Middlebury started with a school of German in 1915, when Vassar professor Lilian Strobe thought that Middlebury's isolated geography would make an ideal place to allow students to focus on language learning. Today, Middlebury teaches 10 languages and on any Friday night, the town pub becomes an even more surreal place. As you walk in you can hear a table of German speakers, a table of French, a table of Spanish, etc. If you passed through town accidentally and did not know what was going on, you might question where in the world you were. If you try to speak to the students, you would only get a strange look or an answer in the language they study. The motto of the Language Schools is "No English Spoken Here".

Teaching a language without the aid of any English explanations or translations is an interesting challenge, but the challenge forces both me and the students to strain our minds to comprehend and communicate. It forces a more efficient, comprehensive teaching and learning style that manages to promote quick and effective language acquisition.

Students from a variety of backgrounds come here, including many graduate students who need a language for their research, government types whose first phrase in the language is "I'm not permitted to tell you what I do for a living," and students who are preparing to move abroad and need to learn as much of a language as possible in a short period of time.

The program runs from June-August only and is roughly the equivalent of two years of instruction. The real trick is the constant immersion and steady interaction with other speakers. Contrary to popular belief, there is no way to 'pick up' a language quickly with self-study. Languages are spoken among people and that spoken interaction is critical to learning. Here, students only sit in classes 3-4 hours daily. The rest of the day is spent doing other activities involving high frequency vocabulary such as working out, playing teams sports, yoga, singing in a choir, eating, drinking, putting on a play, playing billiards, and hiking in the nearby forests; all in the target language. Often, these seemingly superfluous interactions outside of the classroom prove to be the most beneficial way to solidify what one has learned in the classroom earlier that morning.

I have long lamented the state of language education in the United States, but I see change and improvement in foreign language education every year. Middlebury reflects this trend and has shown a steady increase in demand. Overall applications for admission to the program have increased 120% over a ten-year period. For Arabic, applications are up 375% and this increase has prompted the program to move the Arabic school to Mills College in Oakland, California. For my passion, German, applications are up a significant 75% with steady enrollments over a ten- year period, countering the trends of decreasing interest after the fall of the Berlin wall.

For a realistic look at the amount of progress made, you can view the before and after videos on the Middlebury web site.

Richmond police recently refused to arrest a group of men who beat up a naked drunk in public. "We don't need it," one said to a woman who filmed the incident. [The Awl]

Mark Richards says: "I spotted an instructive sign at a Greek festival."

Over at the Submitterator, Cheftournel turns us on to Belgian design firm Khuan + Ktron's lovely illustrations of entire countries, created for Weekend Knack Magazine. They have a bit of a Mary Blair vibe, but also are rather fresh too. KHUAN + KTRON for Weekend Knack Mag­a­zine

Check out this great Japanese TV commercial for Delicare M's, a jock itch cream. Tokyo gets really hot in the summer, and men still have to wear suits to work, so the idea of a refreshingly itch-less crotch is likely to appeal to many salarymen.

[via Spoon & Tamago via TokyoMango]

Er... Switched-On Osmonds. (Thanks, Jean Paul Bondy via Jeff Cross!)

Watch video: YouTube, or download MP4.

Make sure to have your copybooks ready, you'll want to take notes. In this episode of Boing Boing Video, the offbeat British comedy duo of Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz, creators of the BBC series "Look Around You," speak to us on the occasion of the US DVD release for their absurdist fake-educational science program.

Bonus: They are also founders of the faux religion of Tarvuism. In this very video, for the first time ever, they recite the full invocational prayer of Tarvu, meaning that just by watching, you are automatically indoctrinated as a member of the Church of Tarvu. So if octopuses (octopi? octopodes?) start chattering priestmuntyisms to you in the night, you've been warned.

In addition to the LOL-rich endeavors they discuss in this interview, these guys are busy: there's Popper's long-running prank phone call and Timewaster Letter series, work on the IT Crowd, and their Radio Spirit World podcasts, Popper is writing for South Park lately. Serafinowicz has an eponymous BBC show out on DVD, and lots of movie roles in the works, including the new Yellow Submarine remake. US audiences may know Serafinowicz best as the voice of Darth Maul.

We'll be debuting a new comedy short from these guys soon on Boing Boing Video, so stay tuned. Thants!

• LOOK AROUND YOU Season 1 on DVD (Amazon)
• Watch excerpts from the DVD at the LOOK AROUND YOU YouTube channel.
• More Boing Boing Video: tv.boingboing.net, or check out our YouTube channel.

Photo, below: Popper (L) and Serafinowicz (R) at Comic-Con, with a new pal...

"[I]n rushing to declare what the war logs are not, many in the media have been quick to pass over what they are. Or, at the very least, what they might be: If not something 'new,' 'shocking,' and Pentagon Paper-esque, certainly a trove of material to add texture, detail, and anecdote—in other words, reporting—to a war that, despite the good work of some brave and diligent correspondents, has gone largely underreported in recent years." Joel Meares in CJR.

"To use an analogy here, as opposed to arresting the guy who broke into your home, we've arrested the guy that gave him the crowbar, the map and the best houses in the neighborhood. And that is a huge break in the investigation of cyber crimes."—International authorities have nabbed "Iserdo," the 23-year-old Slovenian hacker believed to have written the "Botnet" code that a network of criminals used to infect 12 million computers, compromising the security of major banks and corporations worldwide.

CJR has a very detailed explanation on how the arrangement around "The Afghan War Diaries" between Wikileaks and three newspapers (Guardian, NYT, Der Spiegel) came to pass. Notably, the article incorporates a disparaging use of the verb "flounce."

Susannah Breslin has posted a new story to The War Project website, her independent online project featuring first-person stories of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Every as-told-to story is based on an in-person interview Susannah conducted with the veteran, and a photo portrait she took of the veteran. About today's story:

Sgt. George Zubaty, whose father was a Vietnam War veteran, grew up in a small southern town and was deployed as an Army infantryman to Afghanistan in 2002 and Iraq in 2003. In his story, he talks about being among the first to enter Baghdad, what Iraq and Cormac McCarthy's The Road have in common, and why some soldiers have more problems than others.

"Every single vehicle we come by is shot up, burnt, tank tread down the center of it. I mean, you're looking in a car, and there'll be mom, dad, kids, everything's burnt, everything's torn up. Remember, it's 2003. At that point, Army units, they were training to do a general movement warfare type action. The whole point of our training was, just kill people. It wasn't soft and nice. It was, you've been shot at, you shoot back until the firing stops."

You can follow The War Project on Twitter.

Wired writer and Danger Room blog editor Noah Shachtman has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today cautioning those who dive in to the Wikileaks Afghan war logs to read the military-produced reports they contain with some skepticism. Not because Wikileaks has released anything less than the genuine article, but because reports produced by the military don't always tell the whole story. Shachtman cites a series of reports related to actions of the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines, in Helmand province on August 25th:

I happen to know this because I was there with Echo company, reporting for WIRED magazine. And the wide difference between what actually happened at the Moba Khan compound and what the report says happened there should give caution to those who think they can discover the capital-T truth about the Afghanistan conflict solely through the WikiLeaks war logs. It should also give pause to those officers in military headquarters who count on these updates to learn about what’s happening on the front lines. The military has a problem in how it talks to itself.

Here's the full op-ed at the WSJ. If you search for it via Google News, you should be able to get around their stupid paywall.

Predictably, Jon Stewart's Daily Show take on the Wikileaks/Manning/Assange/Lamo/AfghanMegaDump telenovela is spot-on, revelatory, and required internet viewing (though folks outside the USA are SOL, as it's region-blocked).

This t-shirt design by John Slabyk over at Threadless should be part of any credentialed Futurist's wardrobe:

they lied to us
this was supposed to be
the future
where is my jetpack,
where is my robotic companion,
where is my dinner in pill form,
where is my hydrogen fueled automobile,
where is my nuclear-powered levitating home,
where is my cure for this disease

Mark Zuckerberg, noted critic of privacy, gets to live the dream. [Gawker]

Just days after the U.S. Copyright Office explicitly authorized DRM-cracking by consumers, a British court has effectively abolished the import and sale of blank Nintendo DS cartridges. The mere possibility of piracy is sufficient to ban them, even if the media has legitimate uses such as storing freely-available third-party software. "The mere fact that the device can be used for a non-infringing purpose is not a defence," read the ruling by Justice Floyd. [BBC]

Jess Bachman, infographic designer extraordinaire, shares this new work which shows how Glenn Beck "uses his influence to peddle dubious information and endorse fraudulent companies, and how how those companies go about scamming fear ridden consumers into buying terrible investments."

It's a pretty epic infographic, complex and big, like much of what Jess does. I've just shown the top, oh, 20% of it above to whet your appetite.

Fools Gold: Inside the Glenn Beck Goldline Scheme (ritholtz.com)

A couple of days ago my 7-year-old daughter and I decorated her bedroom wall with designer Yiying Lu's "Lifting a Dreamer" (Elephant) wall graphics set. (Yiying is the illustrator of Twitter's famous Fail Whale. Here's an interview with her.) The three-foot elephant set is $59.95, and the four-foot set is $79.95. They are available in the Makers Market / Boing Boing Bazaar.

Yiying Lu premium wall graphics are self-adhesive and will stick to almost any surface (walls, windows, even ceilings), and can be removed and re-hung 100 times without leaving a mark or damaging your walls.

These are NOT vinyl stickers or decals, which have a tendency to curl, peel, bubble, and crack, and are difficult to re-position without losing adhesion or damaging surfaces.

About Yiying Lu: “Yiying” is 2 characters in Chinese. “Yi” means Happy; “Ying” means Creative. Born in Shanghai, Yiying moved to Sydney when she was a teen. Yiying has been educated in UK and Australia. She has studied at Central St Martins College of Art & Design in London and University of New South Wales in Sydney. She graduated from the University of Technology, Sydney with 1st-Class honors in Bachelor of Design Visual Communication 2007.

Yiying is the illustrator of the social networking site Twitter.com’s Fail Whale icon, which has been featured in CNN, New York Times Magazine, BBC, NPR & Wired Magazine.

Yiying has also done design and creative work for Anna Sui New York, Maybelline, GettyImages, Glam Media, JWT, the Surfrider Foundation, the University of Technology Sydney, McCann World Group, and LTL PRINTS.

COOP scanned and posted a 1964 mail order catalog for hotrod art pioneer Ed "Big Daddy" Roth filled with fantastic t-shirts, sweatshirts, jackets, and other hot merch. Be warned, it "contains lots 'trash' and 'super ugly' designs to stoke and sicken your mind!" Ed "Big Daddy" Roth 1964 Monster Catalog