In the wake of LOLTrek, LOLCODE, LOLMETAL and LOLVogue, we now have LOLTHULHU.

I have no idea what comes next.

[Via Oblinks]

Watching me, watching you:

So far there is no gadget that can actually see inside our houses, but even that's about to change.

Ian Kitajima flew to Washington from his laboratories in Hawaii to show me sense-through-the-wall technology.

[...] Using radio waves, you point it a wall and it tells you if anyone is on the other side. His company, Oceanit, is due to test it with the Hawaiian National Guard in Iraq next year, and it turns out that the human body gives off such sensitive radio signals, that it can even pick up breathing and heart rates.

"First, you can tell whether someone is dead or alive on the battlefield," said Ian.

"But it will also show whether someone inside a house is looking to harm you, because if they are, their heart rate will be raised."

A nicely circular line of reasoning there: will their increased heart rate be because they're looking to attack you, or because they're scared you're about to break down their door and lob a hand grenade into the room because your technology tells you they're preparing to attack you?

"And 10 years from now, the technology will be much smarter. We'll scan a person with one of these things and tell what they're actually thinking."

That sounds awfully Star Trek.

He glanced at me quizzically, noticing my apprehension.

"Yeah, I know," he said. "It sounds very Star Trekkish, but that's what's ahead."

Uh-huh.

A truly brilliant idea: Pretend to be a Time Traveler Day.

You must spend the entire day in costume and character. The only rule is that you cannot actually tell anyone that you are a time traveler. Other than that, anything's game.

There are three possible options:

1) Utopian/clich̩ Future Р"If the Future did a documentary of the last fifty years, this is how badly the reenactors would dress." Think Star Trek: TNG or the Time Travelers from Hob. Ever see how the society in Futurama sees the 20th century? Run with it. Your job is to dress with moderately anachronistic clothing and speak in slang from varying decades. Here are some good starters:

• Greet people by referring to things that don't yet exist or haven't existed for a long time. Example: "Have you penetrated the atmosphere lately?" "What spectrum will today's broadcast be in?" and "Your king must be a kindly soul!"
• Show extreme ignorance in operating regular technology. Pay phones should be a complete mystery (try placing the receiver in odd places). Chuckle knowingly at cell phones.

[...]

[FX: evil cackle.]

[Via Qwghlm]

Emily Lakdawalla ponders the implications of the latest images from the Cassini probe's encounter with Iapetus:

What a strange place! How can you possibly explain it? Where did that black stuff come from? It's smeared all over the front and part of the back of the moon, a strange giant splat. Scientists are trying to come up with some ongoing process that can make this world produce such a dichotomous surface, but they are grasping at straws. It's tempting to fall back on a sort of Deus ex machina and just propose that somehow, pretty recently, a giant ball of black stuff splatted onto Iapetus and sprayed all over the place. It's just too ad hoc an explanation to be sensible, but it's temptingly uncomplicated.

[Via Matt McIrvin]

Remember, kids: fighting is bad!

[Via MetaFilter]

This slide-show essay at Slate was the first I'd ever heard of The Spire of Dublin.

The sheer scale of the thing is impressive, but what I really like is the decorative pattern etched into the surface (best captured here and here) that gives it an oddly organic look.

Definitely something to see if I'm ever over that way.

The Scariest Thing The Last Psychiatrist Has Ever Seen.

As a bonus, the post I linked to above – a review of Rod Zombie's remake/re-imagining of John Carpenter's Halloween – includes a strong contender for this year's Line Least Likely To Be Quoted On A Movie Poster Award:

"I defy anyone to get an erection within a week of this movie."

[Via dsandler]

DM of the Rings: unrelenting nerdery, and funny with it.

[Via Betsy Devine]

Martin Klimas takes exquisite photographs of porcelain figurines on the verge of destruction. He talked to Rosecrans Baldwin about his work:

I wonder, when you look at your own finished work, do you see what you’ve just destroyed, or what you’ve made from the transformation?

The aspect of destroying is not the most important one in my work. Let’s say it is a catalyst to unleash and study this transformation. The hardest part of my work is to smash so many figurines until I find one that truly is showing me something new. I am in that sense a sculptor, but I have only a 5000th of a second to build my sculpture.

I think this one is my favourite, for what it's worth.

The story of two offspring of early adopters:

Two teenage girls were engaged in a fierce battle to the death, high atop the Empire State Building. Their names were Lyric and Grace, and both were famous on the internet. As babies, their births had been the first ever announced via Twitter and Facebook, respectively. Now, a decade and a half later, they hated each other with a passion unmatched, and neither would stop until the other was dead, or in pieces.

How did it come to this? How did it ever come to this? [...]

[Via (un)filtered]

Top this:

Post subject: maddy and IVF – the diana connection???

i have been reading the forum a lot and have been very interesetd at the clever theories around this case – why has no one here talked more about maddy and the fact she was conceeved by ivf???

if you look at her she is a very beautiful blonde little girl – just like the late dear princess diana was when she was little – LOOK AT THE PICTURE OF A YOUNG DIANA!! http://www.englishmonarchs.co……_diana.jpg

it was also well known diana wanted a daughter well maybe she had some eggs frozen – they can be preserved for years – and they were used years later and implanted into kate mccann

when MI-6 and the royal family found out about maddie's existence (especially as the family is IRISH and has ira connections…. allegedly) they abducted maddie and took her away and now unhappy with the publicity they are fitting the parents up with the crime – IS IT ANY COINCIDENCE that the charges are being brought just around the tenth anniversary of diana's death and the SEPTEMBER 11th ATTACKS anniversary as well

i would wage good money the masons are involved too

what do you think?????

Diana and MI6? I'm sure Mohamed Al-Fayed is on the case…

For the benefit of non-UK readers, Madeleine McCann is a four year-old who disappeared whilst on holiday with her parents in Portugal in May 2007. The case has been a fixture on the front pages of Britain's tabloid newspapers ever since.

[Via Qwghlm]

Ed Felten on Intellectual Property and Magicians:

Jacob Loshin has an interesting draft paper on intellectual property among magicians. Stage magic is a form of technology, relying on both apparatus and technique to mislead the audience about what is really happening. As in any other technical field, innovations are valuable, and practitioners look for ways to cash in on their inventions. They do this, according to Loshin, without much use of intellectual property law.

This makes magic, like cuisine and clothing design, a thriving field that operates despite a lack of strong legal protection for innovation. Recently legal scholars have started looking harder at such fields, hoping to find mechanisms that can support innovation without the cost and complexity of conventional intellectual property law, and wondering how broadly those alternative mechanisms might be applied. [...]

Fascinating work, though I think that the applicability of the model to other fields is somewhat limited. For one thing, the impact of a trick is inextricably bound up with the live performance in which it's delivered – magicians don't do mass production.

Steven Poole contemplates why the term "9/11" became so ubiquitous.

Whereas Steven Poole ascribes the phenomenon to the rhythm of the term "9/11", I think the primary reason it took off in the United States is much simpler: the connotations of the term "911" as the US emergency services telephone number and the date when written in the American style made for a gruesomely appropriate pairing, and media coverage did the rest.

Jobs Offers Apple Lisa Early Adopters Store Credit:

People interested in the refund will need to bring in an original receipt showing they bought the Lisa in 1983 and proof of purchase from the Apple Lisa box.  Sales figures from that year show that if all people who bought the computer claim the refund, Apple could be liable for almost $70,000.

Come to think of it, Sir Clive Sinclair owes me £200 for slashing the price of the Sinclair QL a fortnight after I bought one for £399.¹ The bastard!

(But then, Sir Clive doesn't have a store to give me credit in these days. Oh well…)

¹ Don't laugh: I liked the QL. Yes, really. Hated the Microdrive. Loathed that godawful membrane keyboard. Loved the multitasking in QDOS, and the Psion office software suite that came with the QL.

[Via rc3.org]

Best. Anti-Piracy. PSA. Ever!

[Via Daring Fireball]

Which door should I choose? – inventive toilet signage from around the world.

[Via Qwghlm]

The lessons learned by a Wall Street trader as the US subprime mortgage market implodes:

4) Our society is really, really hostile to success. At the same time it's shockingly indulgent of poor people.

A Republican president now wants to bail them out! I have a different solution. Debtors' prison is obviously a little too retro, and besides that it would just use more taxpayers' money. But the poor could work off their debts. All over Greenwich I see lawns to be mowed, houses to be painted, sports cars to be tuned up. Some of these poor people must have skills. The ones that don't could be trained to do some of the less skilled labor — say, working as clowns at rich kids' birthday parties. They could even have an act: put them in clown suits and see how many can be stuffed into a Maybach. It'd be like the circus, only better.

Transporting entire neighborhoods of poor people to upper Manhattan and lower Connecticut might seem impractical. It's not: Mexico does this sort of thing routinely. And in the long run it might be for the good of poor people. If the consequences were more serious, maybe they wouldn't stay poor.

[Via MetaFilter]

The ancient city of Seuthopolis could rise again:

In the 1940s, archaeologists discovered the ancient city of Seuthopolis, the capital seat of the Odrysian Kingdom beginning in the 4th century BCE.

Unfortunately, the discovery came too late, because under construction nearby was a reservoir dam, which would soon flood the valley and drown "the best preserved Thracian city in modern Bulgaria."

Now over half a century later, a project proposed by Bulgarian architect Zheko Tilev would uncover and preserve the ruins using "a circular dam wall, resembling a well on the bottom of which, as on a stage, is presented the historical epic of Seuthopolis."

If this proposal were to be implemented it'd be a hell of a sight: take a look at the artist's impression of the site at night towards the end of the post.

Some of the images of celebrities featured in the Partial Face Transplants Pictures Gallery are tremendously creepy. See, for example, TomKat and Two Queens.

By contrast, the images featuring pairings of the likes of Orlando Bloom and Johnny Depp or Keira Knightley and Natalie Portman are surprisingly dull.

[Via kottke.org]

From Richard Dawkins's Times Literary Supplement review of Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great:

God Is Not Great is a coolly angry book, but there are good laughs too; for example, Hitchens's hilarious account of how Malcolm Muggeridge launched "the 'Mother Teresa' brand upon the world" with his story that, while the BBC struggled to film her under low-light conditions, she spontaneously glowed. The cameraman later told Hitchens the true explanation of the "miracle" – the ultra-sensitivity of a new type of film from Kodak – but Muggeridge fatuously wrote: "I myself am absolutely convinced that the technically unaccountable light is, in fact, the Kindly Light that Cardinal Newman refers to in his well-known exquisite hymn".

Hitchens also offers an extremely funny brief history of Mormonism: how it was invented from scratch by Joseph Smith, a nineteenth-century charlatan who wrote his book in sixteenth-century English, claiming to have translated the text from plates of gold – which conveniently ascended into heaven before anyone else could see them. Even the amanuenses to whom the illiterate Smith dictated had to sit behind a curtain lest they should catch a glimpse and be struck dead. Do you know anyone so gullible? Yet today, Mormonism is powerful enough to field a presidential candidate, its clean-cut young missionaries patrol the world in pairs, and the Book of Mormon nestles in every Marriott hotel room.

[Via 3quarksdaily]