Kamis, 14 April 2011

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede - update on the movie

Posted: 14 Apr 2011 04:10 AM PDT

I wrote back in 2009 about the wonderful news that Bradley Denton's world-beatingly awesome comic novel Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede was to be adapted as a big-budget science fiction movie. I hadn't heard much since then, but today Brad wrote to say "now there's a revamped website as well as the just-released teaser trailer. It was produced by Molly Mayeux for Dahlia Street Films, written & directed by Robert Rugan, and stars Jon Heder as Oliver Vale."

For those of you unfamiliar with the book, the premise is a simple one: Oliver Vale (whose recently deceased mother instilled in him a healthy respect for Buddy Holly) is about to watch a John Wayne movie pulled in by his satellite dish when the transmission is interrupted by a shot of a young Bully Holly, standing in a bubble on an airless rock, holding a guitar. Holly reads a sign hanging from the camera in front of him, and it says, "For assistance, contact Oliver Vale." And then he reads out Oliver's home address.

That's weird, but what's weirder is that the Buddy Holly transmission (which, it transpires, is originating from the Jovian moon of Ganymede) is playing on every terrestrial, cable and satellite TV and radio station in the world. And lots of people are very upset with Oliver.

So he does what any self-respecting satellite repairman/Buddy Holly fan would do: he gets on his vintage motorcycle and sets off to Lubbock, Texas, where he plans on exhuming Holly's grave to ensure that his body is still mouldering in Earth's soil, not playing guitar in orbit around Jupiter. On the way, Oliver is pursued by all manner of bad guys: evangelicals, aliens, G-men and local law. It's a road-trip novel like no other, and it remains one of my all-time favorite books.

The paperback is long out of print (though there are many reasonably priced used copies on Amazon), but Denton was generous enough to Creative Commons license the text and stick it online.

Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede

UK court rules that kettling was illegal

Posted: 14 Apr 2011 03:08 AM PDT


A UK court has ruled that kettling -- the police tactic of surrounding peaceful protestors and beating anyone who tries to leave -- was illegal during the Climate Camp demonstration in 2009. This was the same demonstration where a policeman who'd illegally removed his badge struck a passing newsagent from behind. Ian Tomlinson, the newsagent and father of nine, died immediately afterward of internal bleeding.
Officers were told they were containing or detaining those in the climate camp to prevent a breach of the peace. Protesters would be held for hours. Notebooks secured from some officers contain admissions they used violence, but officers said this was to protect themselves or colleagues.

The protesters bringing the case say police were indiscriminate in detaining and isolating the peaceful climate camp. In documents setting out their case, their lawyers say: "The police took action against the climate camp as if it were a violent crowd ... That is how the instruction to impose containment was interpreted by officers on the ground."

The Metropolitan police says kettling, or detaining a mass of people, is a necessary tactic to tackle the potential for violence at demonstrations. The force and its lawyers are expected to study the judgment.

Kettling of G20 protesters by police was illegal, high court rules

(Image: Climate Camp - police eye view, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from bagelmouse's photostream)

Lessons from 10 years of Pepys's diaries online

Posted: 14 Apr 2011 02:28 AM PDT

For ten years, Phil Gyford has been republishing Samuel Pepys's diaries online in one-entry-per-day chunks. On the way, he and a growing community of readers, historians, literary scholars and enthusiasts have annotated Pepys's legendary accounts of life in 17th century London. In this presentation, Phil walks us through the most surprising and interesting moments in his decade of Pepysianism, from random Twitterers who've taken on the personae of other characters in Pepys's saga to Google mashups of Pepys's London. I saw him present this earlier this year at The Story in London and it was marvellous.

My talk about Samuel Pepys' diary as an online story

MP3 Link

1882 varmint trap made with revolver

Posted: 13 Apr 2011 04:53 PM PDT

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In 1882 James Williams filed a patent for this varmint trap. He added that "This invention may also be used in connection with a door or window, so as to kill any person or thing opening the door or window to which it is attached."

How do you draw a straight line? How do you determine if a circle is really round?

Posted: 13 Apr 2011 01:30 PM PDT


I spent some time this morning watching the fascinating videos that illustrate the amazing mechanisms and geometrical solids discussed in the book How Round is Your Circle? by John Bryant and Chris Sangwin. They show linkages that allow you to draw an exact straight line, non-spherical solids that behave like ball bearings, a way to measure the area of an irregular shape with a coat hanger, and more. It's fun stuff that's reminiscent of Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Recreations" column from Scientific American.

How do you draw a straight line? How do you determine if a circle is really round? These may sound like simple or even trivial mathematical problems, but to an engineer the answers can mean the difference between success and failure. How Round Is Your Circle? invites readers to explore many of the same fundamental questions that working engineers deal with every day--it's challenging, hands-on, and fun. John Bryant and Chris Sangwin illustrate how physical models are created from abstract mathematical ones. Using elementary geometry and trigonometry, they guide readers through paper-and-pencil reconstructions of mathematical problems and show them how to construct actual physical models themselves--directions included. It's an effective and entertaining way to explain how applied mathematics and engineering work together to solve problems, everything from keeping a piston aligned in its cylinder to ensuring that automotive driveshafts rotate smoothly. Intriguingly, checking the roundness of a manufactured object is a trickier proposition than one might think. When does the width of a saw blade matter to an engineer's calculations--or for that matter, the width of a physical line? When does a measurement need to be exact and when will an approximation suffice? Bryant and Sangwin tackle questions like these and enliven their discussions with many fascinating highlights from engineering history. Generously illustrated, How Round Is Your Circle? reveals some of the hidden complexities in everyday things.
How Round is Your Circle?

To understand the U.S. federal budget, divide by 100,000,000

Posted: 13 Apr 2011 12:03 PM PDT

Philip Greenspun divided the U.S. 2011 federal budget by 100,000,000 and wrote a little parable:
We have a family that is spending $38,200 per year. The family's income is $21,700 per year. The family adds $16,500 in credit card debt every year in order to pay its bills. After a long and difficult debate among family members, keeping in mind that it was not going to be possible to borrow $16,500 every year forever, the parents and children agreed that a $380/year premium cable subscription could be terminated. So now the family will have to borrow only $16,120 per year.
Understanding Congress's solution to the federal deficit problem

TOM THE DANCING BUG: "Totally Rad, Louis," performed before an imaginary audience

Posted: 13 Apr 2011 06:28 AM PDT

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Did You Know?: The INS No Longer Exists

Posted: 13 Apr 2011 11:49 AM PDT

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is sad that people didn't pay attention to their bureaucratic reorganization malarky. (I still can't remember what the Bureau of Standards changed its name to a few decades ago.)

Forced perspective castle in Disney World's new Fantasyland

Posted: 13 Apr 2011 11:29 AM PDT

A Disney blogger writes, "The Disney Parks Blog has a backstage look at the creation of Beast castle at Magic Kingdom Park, a huge milestone in the Fantasyland expansion. Imagineers are using forced perspective architecture to make the structure look more grandiose in size than it appears in reality."

Beast Castle: Behind the Scenes With Walt Disney Imagineers

Guest of Honor at 75th Philcon

Posted: 13 Apr 2011 11:26 AM PDT

I'm absolutely delighted to announce that I'll be the guest of honor at the 75th Philcon in Cherry Hill, NJ, Nov 18-20 2011. Philcon is the oldest science fiction convention in the world; it's one I've attended a dozen times or so, and I'm honored to be invited on such an auspicious occasion.

Twitter-organized essay collection to benefit Japan quake, with contributions from Gibson and Yoko Ono

Posted: 13 Apr 2011 11:25 AM PDT

2:46: Aftershocks: Stories from the Japan Earthquake is a fundraising anthology of essays about the Japan quake and tsunami. It was organized on Twitter and published in a very short time (it's a Kindle book). Contributors include Yoko Ono and William Gibson, who explains his motives to the Globe and Mail:
His contribution begins with a description of a weird scene he once witnessed in Tokyo while riding in a taxi along an elevated highway and seeing into a lit room where a naked man sat at a long marble table. That unsettling vision leads him into "this strange meditation on the profound restlessness I was feeling after the quake and the tsunami, which made me feel I should go there, I should do something. I don't even know if it was an urge to help. It was an urge to make sure one of my favourite places was there..."

"These are what the Victorians would have called occasional pieces: 'on the occasion of the great earthquake.' The form is an ancient one, but the platform is up to date. ... In the past, it was gathered after the fact. Now, we have this facility to respond in real time."

2:46: Aftershocks: Stories from the Japan Earthquake

(Globe and Mail)

Quakebook excerpts

(via IO9)

HOWTO turn your scholarly journal into an open access journal

Posted: 13 Apr 2011 11:17 AM PDT

Seb sez, "The Association for Learning Technology has published a brief guide about how to tender for a new publishing contract for a scholarly journal. This is, on the face of it, dry-as-dust stuff. But what underlies it is the sea change that is taking place in the way that peer-reviewed research is published, and, in particular, the move towards making the results of research (usually publicly funded....) publicly available under one or other Open Access model. Here is the abstract:"
Hundreds of societies publish journals in collaboration with publishers. Some may be considering how and whether to renegotiate or go out to tender. Some may be considering whether they can/should/wish to change the business model of the journal (e.g. by a move to Open Access). Other societies may be considering using an external publisher for the first time. This guide, based on our experience, is written for all of these. In mid October 2010 we issued a request for proposals (RFP) for a new publisher. We had interest from six publishers who asked questions about our intentions. We then received four proposals: one which offered an Open Access model only, one which offered both Open Access and conventional publishing as discrete alternatives, and two which offered approaches that included an Open Access component. Three of the proposals were from big publishers. After evaluating the proposals, ALT's Trustees decided in December 2010 to make the journal, which has been renamed Research in Learning Technology, a fully Open Access journal with effect from 1st January 2012.
Journal tendering for societies: a brief guide. (Thanks, Seb!)

Ghost World envisioned as a Charlton comic book adaptation of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon

Posted: 13 Apr 2011 10:45 AM PDT

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Mr. Ed created this terrific "mush-up" cover of a fake comic book that combines Hanna-Barbera's execrable yet iconic Scooby Doo with Dan Clowe's sublime and almost iconic Ghost World.

Hanna-Barbera's Ghost World

Lobster shell golf balls

Posted: 13 Apr 2011 10:43 AM PDT

I've always thought it nuts that many cruise ships have golf ball driving ranges where you hit into the open seas. Isn't that, um, littering? Seems that University of Maine Researchers agreed, so they've developed a biodegradable golf ball from lobster shells. From UMaine News:
News Files 2011 03 Lobster-Golf-Ball2 Though biodegradable golf balls already exist, this is the first to be made with crushed lobster shells with a biodegradable binder and coating, creating value from waste material.

"We're using a byproduct of the lobster canning industry which is currently miserably underutilized — it ends up in a landfill," (engineering professor David) Neivandt says. "We're employing it in a value-added consumer product which hopefully has some cachet in the market."

And that cachet doesn't come with a higher price tag. Biodegradable golf balls that are now on the market retail for a little under $1 per ball. The raw materials for the lobster shell balls cost as little as 19 cents per ball.

(BioEngineering undergrad Alex) Caddell, a golfer, says the balls perform similarly to their traditional, white-dimpled counterparts. And they can be used with both drivers and irons.

"The flight properties are amazing," Caddell says. "It doesn't fly quite as far as a regular golf ball, but we're actually getting a similar distance to other biodegradable golf balls."

"UMaine Researchers Use Lobster Shells to Create Biodegradable Golf Ball" (via Inhabitat)

Chumby 8: the adorable, open networked device grows up

Posted: 12 Apr 2011 10:26 PM PDT


CNet reviews the latest Chumby device, these being adorable little networked appliances that do a little of everything, with loads of engineering smarts and a wide-open platform that invites innovation from all comers. Chumby is the brainchild of Bunnie Huang, the author of Hacking the XBox -- a brilliant engineer and great creative thinker. His idea for a general-purpose networked cute computer was years ahead of its time, and it gets even better with every revision.
Breaking away from its legacy as a touch-screen beanbag, the Chumby 8 cuts a trim figure with a modern photo-frame-like design that looks like a boomerang from the side. The device is 8.75 inches wide, 6.75 inches tall, and 5.5 inches deep, giving it a steady base against your touch-screen-jabbing finger.

On the left side you'll find a Tic-Tac-size power button near the top and a pair of memory card slots at the base that can accept SD, MMC, MS, and Compact Flash. There's a speaker grille on each side that can be used to crank your Internet radio or locally stored tunes loud enough to wake you up or keep you rockin' at your desk.

On the top edge, above the Chumby 8's antiglare 800x600-pixel-resolution, 8-inch screen, there's a proper inch-wide button affectionately called the "smash bar." It basically acts as a home button to take you back to the top of the main menu, but pulls double duty as an alarm clock snooze button, as well. Flip the Chumby 8 around, and you'll notice four sockets on the back: one for power, one for audio output, and two full-size USB ports for hosting music or photos.

Overall, the Chumby 8's design is sturdy, functional, and pleasing to the eye from just about every angle. Unlike the softball-size Chumby devices of the past, this latest model is a little large to work well as a glorified alarm clock. We picture the Chumby 8 more as a living room accessory for displaying photos, playing music, or showing headlines. But really, it's meant to be a multipurpose device, and its design is adaptable.

Chumby 8 (via Engadget)

A gallery of doctored cosmonaut photos

Posted: 13 Apr 2011 10:16 AM PDT

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Wired has a gallery of before-and-after photos showing how the Soviet Union airbrushed some cosmonauts out of history. These are absolutely fascinating, not just because of the uncovered lies—but because what was being lied about turned out to be much less horrible than anybody in the West had guessed. Former NASA scientist James Oberg explains:

Western space enthusiasts, including me, eventually found both versions of some of these photographs, and in some cases, three or four different versions. Side-by-side publication of the forgeries sparked widespread mockery of the clumsiness of the Soviet lies. This led to a series of awkward attempts to explain the photos, that let slip even more information.

Finally, under Gorbachev's glasnost in the final years of the Soviet regime, the USSR's own devoted space journalists and historians were able to track down and share the names and fates of the men who had been deleted by clumsy censors.

The lies illustrated by these images fueled Western suspicions that a number of cosmonauts had died in secret space disasters, but it turns out this wasn't true. The erased men had either misbehaved and been expelled, or even more innocently, had simply developed disqualifying medical conditions.

BBC radio documentary on Library Music

Posted: 13 Apr 2011 10:14 AM PDT

Musiclife Musiclibrar12
In the media biz, "library music" is music that's usually owned outright by a company and then licensed to customers who use it as soundtracks for TV shows, radio programs, industrial films. Much of it is horrendously cheezy, but there are also many true gems, especially the further back you go in history. Indeed, 1960s and 1970s library music has had a resurgence amongst crate diggers and rare groove trainspotters leading to a slew of limited edition reissues on CD. The terrific LP covers in this post are from a book on the subject, titled "The Music Library: Graphic Art and Sound." BBC Radio 4 has just produced a fantastic audio documentary about the history of the genre, titled "Into the Music Library." From the program description:
Musiqueidddd Sports themes, situation comedies, game shows, cartoons, talk shows, classic children's tv, the testcards and even Farmhouse Kitchen was brought to us all with the help of library music. Themes for Terry And June, Grange Hill, Mastermind, Match Of The Day and of course that gallery tune from Vision On are all well placed library cues. But there are reels (and reels) of gorgeously crafted, equally great stuff that never made it past the elevator door! We have been surrounded by it forever, but we know so little about it.... Where does it comes from? Who actually makes it? And how do you actually set about making music for the inside of a waiting area, a lift or for a plane before it takes off?

In this first ever documentary about library music we'll look into its history (starting in 1909), speak with the dynastic library owners (de Wolfe, KPM, John Gale), We find out what's it's like to make music to imaginary pictures by speaking to the library music makers (which could include Jimmy Page and Brian Eno), and even have a word with the Musicians Union who banned UK recording of library music throughout the late 60s.

We also talk to the modern day enthusiasts, the collectors (The Specials founder Jerry Dammers) and explore the contemporary influences of this extraordinary musical genre. And of course re-acquaint ourselves with some of the most familiar music we've never listened to!

"Into the Music Library" (via @chris_carter_)

Headless flies respond to light—Or: Why invertebrates are awesome

Posted: 13 Apr 2011 10:04 AM PDT

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This is possibly the best opening line to a peer-reviewed research paper that I have ever read:

When I tell people I've been working on headless fruit flies' responses to light, they often look puzzled or laugh nervously. Allow me briefly to explain why I started cutting off flies' heads.

In this highly readable paper by Marc Egeth, we learn that flies continue to respond to light under conditions where they shouldn't be able to—namely, when their phyiscal movement is dulled by high doses of anesthesia, and (more astoundingly) when their heads have been severed from their bodies. This has some implications for the anesthesia—obviously, it doesn't completely restrict movement, so it would be interesting to know whether it's dulling pain as much as we think it is.

But it also raises some questions about what the heck is going on with the flies' sensory perception. Egeth has two theories. Prepare to get your mind blown a bit, on several subjects:

By what mechanism might headless flies detect light? Two possibilities are photodetection or thermodetection.

The light source itself was not hot because the light was channeled away from the halogen bulb by fiber optics (the instrument was a Schott ACE microscope light). In addition, I also found that headless anesthetized flies would move in response to a light from a 100-lumen LED flashlight, which does not get hot.

But, the flies might be responding to being heated by the infrared components of these lights. Or, the flies' extracephalic photoreceptors, which have previously been implicated in circadian entrainment, might also directly drive behavior. For readers of Perception, photoreception might be a more interesting alternative than movement in response to warmth, but either mechanism would be a novel phenomenon for the body of fly literature (Xu et al, 2006).

Headless flies are known to maintain posture, walk around, entrain to new circadian rhythms, engage in defensive behavior against conspecifics, and even learn to avoid a shock - and this even faster than flies with heads [emphasis mine](Booker & Quinn, 1981).

Butterflies have photoreceptors in their penises that guide mating behavior (leading to the phenomenon termed "hindsight"), and crayfish have "caudal photoreceptors" and thermoreceptors that can drive walking behavior without the involvement of the brain (Arikawa, Suyama & Fujii, 1997; Wilkens, 1988). After I submitted this paper, Xiang et. al. (2010) reported that light-responsive cells "enable [Drosophila] larvae to sense light exposure over their entire bodies and move out of danger." It seems plausible that similar cells are present in adult Drosophila bodies. These phenomena remind us that central human processes may be found distributed throughout the invertebrate body.

Naturally, the first thing this makes me think about is cephalopods. Like the flies, cephalopods are invertebrates. They also have a brain that distributes processing around the body. And, the like animals mentioned by Egeth, researchers have found evidence that cephalopods sense light in places other than their eyes. In fact, Roger Hanlon, a researcher at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, thinks that octopuses might be color-blind in their eyes, but perceive color through light-sensitive parts of their skin. (You can find out more about this by fast forwarding to the 20-minute mark in the video I made for BoingBoing about cephalopod neurobiology.)

There's clearly some really interesting stuff going on in the world of the invertebrate senses. I, for one, cannot wait to see what we find out next.

Read Marc Egeth's paper on light-responsive headless flies

Watch a video Egeth made where you can see the flies respond as he turns a microscope light on and off.

Big thanks to Daniel Graham!

Image: Some rights reserved by Image Editor

Alchemy-themed art show in Brooklyn

Posted: 13 Apr 2011 09:55 AM PDT

Jessebransfordasm
Pam Grossman of Phantasmpahile is curating an intriguing alchemy art show at Brooklyn's Observatory Room, opening May 7. The show, featuring a dozen artists, runs until June 12. Painting above by Jesse Bransford, below by Robert M. place. From the show description:
Robertmplacecaduceus Like dreams, alchemy speaks in pictures. At first glimpse, alchemical manuscripts from the 16th and 17th centuries look like a panoply of hallucinations. They feature images of fornicating kings and queens. Suns and moons shining in stereo. Lions and serpents and eggs, oh my. Black and white and red all over. Secret codes and effulgent iconographies teeming with meaning, yet ultimately ineffable. These pictures beget picturing. They're signs that beg to be resignified; to be reinterpreted and refined.

The participants in ALCHEMICALLY YOURS have done just that. Varying in medium and style, each piece in this exhibition pays homage to the alchemic tradition — all the while affirming that the artist fills the role of alchemist in the present-day. For who better can elevate the mundane, turn the sub- into the sublime?

ALCHEMICALLY YOURS – A Group Art Show

Air Plant gallery

Posted: 13 Apr 2011 09:48 AM PDT

Airplan
Garden Design has a gorgeous slideshow of Tillandsias, aka "air plants." Seen here, T. 'Showtime." I have quite a few Tillandsias in my home, including several that I glued to hunks of old bark to hang on the wall. My thumb is not green but even I can manage to keep these beauties alive. Air Plants Gallery

How to dig jive talk

Posted: 13 Apr 2011 09:36 AM PDT

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Pay heed: the cat who wrote this is really in there. (Via Working Stiff 925)

Human footprints in Tanzania

Posted: 13 Apr 2011 09:16 AM PDT

Journalist Kate Wong (and several other people) are tweeting from the American Paleoanthropological Society meeting this week. I love live conference tweets. There's always interesting things to be learned. For instance: George Washington University professor Brian Richmond just told the crowd about a newly discovered site in Engare Sero,Tanzania where hundreds of human footprints were found in volcanic ash dating to 120,000 years ago. The prints appear to belong to ~34 individuals, including women, men, and children. And one set of prints seems to be from a group of 18 people traveling together. You can follow the conference at the #PAS2011 hashtag.

Operating instructions for system to deliver music and marijuana

Posted: 13 Apr 2011 09:14 AM PDT


[Video Link] The Booth and Bong Hit Station supplies remote control car racers with music and marijuana.

Older people and eating disorders

Posted: 13 Apr 2011 10:35 AM PDT

Sunny Sea Gold has a website and a new book, both about her struggle with binge eating, and how she, and other people with eating disorders, have been able to develop healthy relationships with food. I've browsed around the site a bit and found it fascinating. Although the other side of eating disorders—anorexia and bulimia—have been written about extensively in recent years, I've seen very little about binge eating and didn't have a very good idea of what it was, why it happened, or to whom.

That last question has some particularly surprising answers. Even though Gold's site is called Healthy Girl, it's not just girls who suffer from eating disorders. This letter Gold got from a 72-year-old woman was incredibly moving.

I am 72 years old and just realized that I have had an ED all of my life. It started when I was 12 and went on a diet and lost 20 lbs. I married at 18 and always felt my husband did not love me. I started binge eating when I was alone. I have done it occasionaly thru the years. After some years of lots of stress I started binge eating in the last 4 years and it is getting worse. I really feel sick and miserable afterwards and for a couple of days. It finally dawned on me that I have an ED and don't know what to do about it. I have been a yoyo dieter all of my life. I really don't know how to eat normal. Is there any hope for me??

This woman isn't alone. As Gold points out, the cycle of dieting and binging has almost been enshrined as a normal part of life for older women. It's something that turns up in movies and media as a joke. Think about everything you've ever seen in "Cathy" comics. When an unhealthy behavior gets simultaneously normalized and made fun of that way, it's partly about cruelty, but I think it's also partly a reflection of how many people can relate to the experience. If it wasn't common, there wouldn't be anything to talk about in that context, let alone a joke to be made. And, in fact, an eating disorder program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, recently told the New York Times that, since 2003, half its patients have been adults.

This is definitely worth paying attention to, especially for doctors. For instance, one woman in the New York Times story said that several doctors had actually encouraged her eating disorder. Because they weren't expecting older patients to have those problems, the same symptoms they'd be worried about in a teenager were interpreted as "maintaining a healthy lifestyle" when presented in an adult.

Historical first look into the Fed's bailout payments reveals breathtaking multi-trillion-dollar corruption

Posted: 12 Apr 2011 10:39 PM PDT

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi continues his excellent, infuriating coverage of the Wall Street bailout with analysis of the newly released data on the no-recourse, low-interest loans the Fed made (these are tax-funded loans that don't have to be repaid, offered at an interest rate that's so low you could simply stick the money in the bank and come out ahead). The depth of corruption in these loans is breathtaking -- $35 billion to a Bahraini bank whose majority shareholder is Muammar Qaddafi's Central Bank of Libya; $2.2 billion to the Korea Development Bank whose mandate is investment in South Korea and only South Korea; and a pair of $2 trillion loans to Citibank and Morgan Stanley.

But Taibbi really goes to town on the $220 million loan made to the wives of two Morgan Stanley execs, who had no visible investment experience. These millionaires were given another $220 million of tax-payer money, at rock-bottom interest rates, without any requirement to pay it back. They used it to buy up securities that the Fed had bought from Morgan Stanley (the pricing for these transactions remains a secret, as the Fed refuses to disclose it). These securities -- mortgages, student loans and so on -- have paid out handsomely for their new owners, but they have still not repaid $150 million of the tax money they were given to buy them.

It's hard to imagine a pair of people you would less want to hand a giant welfare check to -- yet that's exactly what the Fed did. Just two months before the Macks bought their fancy carriage house in Manhattan, Christy and her pal Susan launched their investment initiative called Waterfall TALF. Neither seems to have any experience whatsoever in finance, beyond Susan's penchant for dabbling in thoroughbred racehorses. But with an upfront investment of $15 million, they quickly received $220 million in cash from the Fed, most of which they used to purchase student loans and commercial mortgages. The loans were set up so that Christy and Susan would keep 100 percent of any gains on the deals, while the Fed and the Treasury (read: the taxpayer) would eat 90 percent of the losses. Given out as part of a bailout program ostensibly designed to help ordinary people by kick-starting consumer lending, the deals were a classic heads-I-win, tails-you-lose investment.

So how did the government come to address a financial crisis caused by the collapse of a residential-mortgage bubble by giving the wives of a couple of Morgan Stanley bigwigs free money to make essentially risk-free investments in student loans and commercial real estate? The answer is: by degrees. The history of the bailout era reads like one of those awful stories about what happens when a long-dormant criminal compulsion goes unchecked. The Peeping Tom next door stares through a few bathroom windows, doesn't get caught, and decides to break in and steal a pair of panties. Next thing you know, he's upgraded to homemade dungeons, tri-state serial rampages and throwing cheerleaders into a panel truck.

It was the same with the bailouts. They started out small, with the government throwing a few hundred billion in public money to prop up genuinely insolvent firms like Bear Stearns and AIG. Then came TARP and a few other programs that were designed to stave off bank failures and dispose of the toxic mortgage-backed securities that were a root cause of the financial crisis. But before long, the Fed began buying up every distressed investment on Wall Street, even those that were in no danger of widespread defaults: commercial real estate loans, credit- card loans, auto loans, student loans, even loans backed by the Small Business Administration. What started off as a targeted effort to stop the bleeding in a few specific trouble spots became a gigantic feeding frenzy. It was "free money for shit," says Barry Ritholtz, author of Bailout Nation. "It turned into 'Give us your crap that you can't get rid of otherwise.' "

The Real Housewives of Wall Street (via MeFi)

(Image: Free Market My Ass!, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from freemarketmyass's photostream)

Of corpse flowers and magnetism

Posted: 13 Apr 2011 08:39 AM PDT

Over at his new Photonist blog, physicist-turned-journalist David Harris has a fascinating breakdown of a recent study that attempted to measure biomagnetism in plants. How crazy is that? Not as crazy as you might guess. Humans and animals have small magnetic fields, after all. There's good reason to suspect that plants would have them, too. The study is even more interesting because it involves the corpse flower—a favorite of plant of random-fact purveyors everywhere, thanks to its Hollywood set-design looks, rotting-flesh smell, and infrequent blooming habits.

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How small are these fields? The average magnetic field at the surface of the Earth is about 1 gauss. That is the field that makes your compass swing about to align with north. Magnetic fields from activity in the human heart have been measured at about 1 microgauss, one millionth of the Earth's field. Human brain activity has been measured at about 1 nanogauss, 1000 times smaller again.

Are all plants the same? Not at all. But the physicists decided to use something quite exotic to enhance their chances of measuring the field. They decided to look at Amorphophallus titanum, the Titan Arum. It's a tuberous plant native to Indonesia and has the unusual characteristics of only flowering every few years, the flowering lasting for about 12 hours, and the the odor emitted upon flowering is described by the physicists as "cadaverine and putrescine." Indonesians call it the bunga bangkai, or corpse-flower. The reason why the Titan Arum seems potentially interesting is that it has this very rapid activity when it flowers, and there happened to be one in Berkeley about to flower when the scientists were looking at doing the study. So much is going on inside the plant that there should be lots of movement of ions, thereby increasing the magnetic fields generated. A model of the ionic motion suggested fields of up to 30 microgauss.

So just tell us, what did they measure?! The physicists found that the magnetic fields coming from the plant were less than 0.6 microgauss while their model suggested fields of up to 30 microgauss. Clearly the model doesn't work well but it is also a remarkably small field. It could be signficantly smaller than that limit but there was too much magnetic noise around to know for certain.

If you're feeling let down, here, don't. Science is still interesting, even when it doesn't yield the predicted results. Either way, we've learned something important about the world. Better yet, this single study opens up whole new avenues of research. As Harris points out in his write-up, the next step isn't admitting defeat—it's seeing what kind of magnetic fields can be detected around much smaller active plants, such as the sensitive plant, which folds up its leaves when touched. And there's also another question begged here: If plants really don't have very strong magnetic fields, relative to animals and humans, why is that the case? How do we benefit from our magnetic fields, and why don't those benefits extend to plants?

Thanks to Phil Marshall!

EUROPEANS! Write to your MEP NOW to oppose copyright term extension for sound recordings

Posted: 13 Apr 2011 08:09 AM PDT

Peter from the Open Rights Group sez, "In 2009 a Directive aimed at extending the term of copyright protection for sound recordings from 50 to 70 years, which flies in the face of all the credible evidence, passed the European Parliament. This week, the plans are back in front of the European Council and may soon become law. But there's a chance we can stop this if we make enough noise. We need people to write to their MEPs and ask them to oppose these plans and make sure the Directive gets properly debated."

I've just written to my MEPs and I'll be calling them tomorrow. We need people from across Europe to do the same if we're going to stop this. There's no credible reason to extend the copyright on works that have already been made; historically this has not enriched artists (there are vanishingly few recordings that are still commercially viable after 50 years), but it has stopped preservationists, fans, and remixers from re-issuing or re-using all those recordings, often to the point where all known copies of the works degrade and disappear.

But isn't making sure artists continue to be paid a good thing?

Yes. But this won't help the majority of artists and comes at the expense of consumers and our cultural realm. The economic evidence is stacked against the proposal. Leading IP professors, the UK government's 'Gowers Review' of IP, and independent economic analysts have all said that extending the copyright term is unwise. The Financial Times labelled the proposal 'disgraceful' in an editorial in 2009. It will likely result in higher prices for consumers. It will benefit only a small number of artists and businesses - according to a joint academic statement, signed by 80 eminent academics, including several Nobel Laureates, 96% of the economic returns will go to the major record labels and top 20% of performers. Four leading IP professors this week argued that 'If there was a policy designed to suppress social and commercial innovation, retrospective term extension would be your choice.' Large chunks of our cultural history will be locked up.

Looking at the impact on the UK, the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at the University of Cambridge argued that extending the term of protection will 'likely to have a significant, negative effect, on balance of trade' and that 'it would be particularly inadvisable, given our present state of knowledge, for a rational policy-maker to extend the term of copyright in sound recordings.'

Copyright term extension - you can help stop it (Thanks, Peter!)

One physicist's theories about the end of "Source Code"

Posted: 13 Apr 2011 07:59 AM PDT

Have you seen the movie Source Code? Are you bothered by the apparent paradox at the end of the film? So was physicist Jim Kakalios. In a fun (and, incidentally, spoiler-riffic) guest post at the Cosmic Variance blog, Kakalios fan-wanks the ending of Source Code as only a physicist could.

If Chris Ware was Charlie Brown

Posted: 13 Apr 2011 07:51 AM PDT


Noah sez, "Nathan Bulmer is in the midst of an thoroughly entertaining yearlong daily illustration project he calls "Eat More Bikes" and today's post posits what the Peanuts strip would have been like if Chris Ware replaced Charlie Brown..."

Lil' Chris Ware. (Thanks, Noah!)

Space Invaders gingham by the yard

Posted: 13 Apr 2011 01:50 AM PDT


The fabric from the Space Invaders gingham pillow I blogged the other day is available by the yard from Spoonflower: "The classic gingham pattern has been invaded. These white invaders on a black background would look awesome as a shirt or bag for your favourite sleek geek. Or let them invade your home - sew a beanbag for the games room or make wallart to hang in your computer room."

Collection: Gingham Invaded (Thanks, Dean!)
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