A room without a view:

Eight artists snuck into the depths of Providence Place mall and built a secret studio apartment in which they stayed, on and off, for nearly four years until mall security finally caught their leader last week.

[...]

The casually furnished, unheated apartment was in a 750-square-foot loft beneath an I-beam and above an unused dusty storage room in the mall parking garage that was accessed through a door in a stairwell, according to Townsend, his fellow artists and the police.

[...]

[Via kevan]

A lovely zinger from Senator Joe Biden:

"A sentence from Rudy Giuliani has three parts: a noun, a verb, and 9/11".

A nicely presented chart of the number of inhabitants per doctor in the countries of the world.

[Via Bifurcated Rivets]

As evocative product names go, MomSpitâ„¢ is surely one of the very best:

It's not gel. It's not sanitizer. It's MomSpit – the universal no-rinse cleanser for hands and face. Works like magic, smells like heaven, cleans like soap and water without the sink.

[Via Away With Words]

Rejection letters for famous papers in Computer Science:

R.L. RIVEST, A. SHAMIR, AND L. ADELMAN
"A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems."

According to the (very short) introduction, this paper purports to present a practical implementation of Diffie and Hellman's public-key cryptosystem for applications in the electronic mail realm. If this is indeed the premise, the paper should be rejected both for a failure to live up to it and for its irrelevance.

I doubt that a system such as this one will ever be practical. The paper does a poor job of convincing the reader that practicality is attainable. For one thing, there is the issue of the number n used to factor the message.

[...]

Electronic mail on the Arpanet is indeed a nice gizmo, but it is unlikely it will ever be diffused outside academic circles and public laboratories—environments in which the need to maintain confidentiality is scarcely pressing. Laboratories with military contracts will never communicate through the Arpanet! Either normal people or small companies will be able to afford a VAX each, or the market for electronic mail will remain tiny. Granted, we are seeing the appearance of so-called microcomputers, such as the recently announced Apple II, but their limitations are so great that neither they nor their descendants will have the power necessary to communicate through a network.

[Via Qwghlm]

From Great Moments in the History of Technical Services:

427 A.D.
The Library at Alexandria decides to contract out its annual weeding project; Vandal hordes are the lowest bidder.

Heh.

[Via Making Light (Particles)]

I'm not sure the wind shaped pavilion is the most practical design for a building, but I could stand seeing a few of them around town:

Made entirely out of lightweight fabric, each of its six main segments twist around its central support frame in response to fluctuations in the wind. This means that the shape of the pavilion continually alters.

I wonder how much noise the segments make as they turn. Enough to drown out a conversation between the occupants, or just a background hum?

[Via Monoscope]

China Mieville on the attraction of floating utopias for those of a libertarian bent:

Freedom is late.

Since 2003, a colossal barge called the Freedom Ship, of debatable tax status, should have been chugging with majestic aimlessness from port to port, a leviathan rover with more than 40,000 wealthy full-time residents living, working and playing on deck. That was the aim eight years ago when the project first made headlines, confidently claiming that construction would start in 2000.

[...]

Freedom Ship’s website claims that the vessel has not been conceived as a locus for tax avoidance, pointing out that as it will sail under a flag of convenience, residents may still be liable for taxes in their home countries. Nonetheless, whatever the ultimate tax status of those whom we will charitably presume might one day set sail, much of the interest in Freedom Ship has revolved precisely around its perceived status as a tax haven.

[...]

[Via 3quarksdaily]

Apple's new release of OS X uses a rather cheeky icon to represent the typical Windows PC.

[Via Daring Fireball]

Hangman.

1776 meets 300.

[Via VideoSift]

Tonight's episode of Heroes on BBC3 might just be the most purely entertaining forty-five minutes of television I've seen this year.

That is all.

The anatomy of a balloon dog, revealed.

[Via kottke.org]

The wonderful world of Windows Vista.

It's funny because it's true.

[Via Bifurcated Rivets]

This statue of the Virgin Mary looks like something from the cover of a post-apocalyptic fantasy novel.

That's a big bang!

[Via Qwghlm]

A little bit of internet nostalgia.

Suck. Feed. I feel so old…

[Via (un)filtered]

A nice little background detail about Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers of Victory miniseries that I'd completely failed to pick up on: the architecture of his New York-analogue incorporated buildings once intended for real-life New York but never constructed.

The first issue of Seven Soldiers [...] features a broad Manhattan skyline that includes a hotel that the Spanish architect Antonio Gaudí designed for New York nearly a century ago. Not far away is the so-called Rolls-Royce Building (its facade resembles a grill) that the Austrian architect Hans Hollein unsuccessfully proposed as the new headquarters for Chase Manhattan Bank in the late 1950's. And snaking around the two buildings is the Mid-Manhattan Expressway, the elevated highway long championed by New York City's powerful urban planner Robert Moses.

[Via Glenn_Medeiros, posting at Barbelith Underground]

It appears that I was right to think that the vending machine disguise I posted about yesterday was a joke:

Back in 2005, I reported on this as, The ultimate Japanese disguise ‘Instantaneous Vending-Machine Skirt’. Now, more than two years later, it’s kind of disingenuous for the New York Times to report that this very tongue-in-cheek anti-crime device was invented by an “experimental fashion designer.” Actually, the inventor is an artist who has won an art show award for this as her student artwork long ago in 2001.

In other words, this vending machine disguise was “invented” more than six years ago—long before Japan’s so-called “crime boom.” The artist, Aya Tsukioka, is doing a great PR job recycling her 15 minutes of fame but….. She-e-e-it, it was not designed as an anti-crime device.

[Via Japundit, who suggested googling for "vending machine skirt"]

It seems to me that Aya Tsukioka has perpetrated an Onion-worthy satirical exercise:

On a narrow Tokyo street, near a beef bowl restaurant and a pachinko parlor, Aya Tsukioka demonstrated new clothing designs that she hopes will ease Japan’s growing fears of crime.

Deftly, Ms. Tsukioka, a 29-year-old experimental fashion designer, lifted a flap on her skirt to reveal a large sheet of cloth printed in bright red with a soft drink logo partly visible. By holding the sheet open and stepping to the side of the road, she showed how a woman walking alone could elude pursuers — by disguising herself as a vending machine.

The wearer hides behind the sheet, printed with an actual-size photo of a vending machine. Ms. Tsukioka’s clothing is still in development, but she already has several versions, including one that unfolds from a kimono and a deluxe model with four sides for more complete camouflaging. [...]

[Via Amygdala]