A Brazilian ad agency has built a campaign for Domino's "Pizza" that uses a heat-sensitive coating on rented DVDs; when the disc is played, the heat from the player heats up the coating and causes it to emit a pizza-like odor; the coating also changes...
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Wisconsin's Chocolate Shoppe Ice Cream has some refreshingly honest ad-copy on the side of its vans. The photo was snapped by a Consumerist reader named David, and shows a van whose advert disclaims any nutritional merit, proudly proclaiming "gobs of...
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Danah boyd has a great summary of the new Pew report on Teens, Social Media, and Privacy. The whole thing is worth a read -- especially her thoughts on race and social media use -- but the most interesting stuff was about "social steganography" -- smuggling...
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Zack sez, "Jack 'King of Comics' Kirby's grandson is looking to raise funds for a coffee-table-sized book that will look at Kirby's life and times...along with a never-before-seen play by the master of comics. The book will include a wide variety of...
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Here'a an excellent piece on the promise and peril of "smart cities," which could be part of a system to make cities fairer and more transparent, or could form the basis for an authoritarian lockdown. As Adam Greenfield says, "[the centralized model...
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SF/thriller writer Iain Banks has weighed in to quash a rumor that he only wrote his amazing SF novels to pay the bills because the (also amazing) high-brow literary thrillers didn't bring in enough: I wish I did have the time to reply to everybody individually...
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Alan sez, "Two items here on the same theme: Ruben Bolling, comic author of Tom The Dancing Bug, contributor to JoCo Funnies, etc. has a raffle posted on his blog. If you donate to the American National Red Cross through a page he has set up, you will...
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The bestest kid costume yet: tiny, female Stan Lee! Little girl's cosplay of Stan Lee (i.imgur.com) ...
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Here's a very short and snappy explanation for why so much of the UK's government IT infrastructure is so fantastically, awfully bad: it's an RFP from a Northern Irish government business development fund for a "Content Management System to manage all...
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Ben Kokes wanted to give a ring to his sweetheart, and to make it interesting, he decided to create a ring with an inductive loop that would cause the stones to light up when they were close to a power-source. He documented the tricky technical problems...
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Brian Ashcraft updates us on the astounding foam-art of Osaka barista Kazuki Yamamoto. Yamamoto has now mastered 3D foam, and is blowing my mind. Ashcraft has a series of posts documenting the journey of Yamamoto to undisputed novelty foam king of the...
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Thousands of Britons have reported seeing "beasts" in various places, usually described as a large, muscular black cat -- possibly a melanistic leopard. Some have taken photos and found footprints, as well as animals torn apart on moors. However, the...
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A mechanical engineer (awesomely) named Anjan Contractor has won a NASA grant to prototype a 3D printer for food -- specifically pizza. It will lay down layers of food and flavor powder and melt them together; the powders are room-temperature stable...
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This excerpt from neurologist-philosopher Daniel Dennett's new book Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking lays out a set of rhetorical habits that I immediately aspired to attain: How to compose a successful critical commentary: 1. Attempt to...
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Magic Hat IP, LLC and Independent Brewers United Corporation filed a remarkably spurious trademark lawsuit against West Sixth Brewery in Lexington, KY. Ben sez: The suit alleges that West Sixth's own logo, which is a "6" within a circle, infringes upon...
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Margaret Killjoy sez, "Steampunk Magazine #9 is out and available for order. The pdf is up as well. New orders and pre-orders will be going out this weekend! 118 ad-free, Creative-Commons pages of steampunk mad science, lifestyle, fiction, and history....
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Bas writes, 3D printing is being condemned in the media because of the potential for printing guns. Engineers at Michigan Tech believe there is far more potential for 3D printers to make our lives better rather than killing one another. To encourage...
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Three men have been convicted of forging £1 coins. The London Police Detective Inspector even got all quippy about the sentencing ("These three men are organised criminals who were intent on undermining the UK monetary system. There is nothing fake...
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My new Guardian column, "Privacy, public health and the moral hazard of surveillance," discusses the way that the governments' reliance on social networks for intelligence purposes means that they can't intervene to help their populations get better...
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DeviantArt's TommyFilth modded a KitchenAid mixer and gave it a perfect Boba Fett makeover: "I asked for a Kitchenaid mixer for Christmas, I pointed my wife toward a broken one on eBay so that I could refurbish it, as I was taking it apart I got some...
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No government in Canadian history has been as hostile to science as Stephen Harper's Conservatives. John Dupuis has assembled a brief, brutal chronology of the ways that the Tories have attacked Canadian science. It's no coincidence that this government...
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Here's a mesmerizing gallery of "Fabrege Fractals" created by Tom Beddard, whose site also features a 2011 video of Fabrege-inspired fractal landscapes that must be seen to be believed. They're all made with Fractal Lab, a WebGL-based renderer Beddard...
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This 1919 French laxative ad promises that it will set lose a cadre of tiny sewage workers who will personally scour your colon of impacted poop. Butt Pirates ...
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Troy Maye was wanted for a string of identity thefts, but the IRS couldn't positively identify him. But after he passed a thumb-drive of stolen data to an IRS informant, investigators were able to pull his name off the drive's metadata. They used that...
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Remember the gigantic data-center that the NSA is building in Utah in order to (illegally) process the electronic communications of the whole world? Turns out that the state of Utah plans on taxing the titanic amounts of electricity it will consume at...
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On Slashdot, a reader called benrothke reviews a book called Locked Down: Information Security For Lawyers. This sounds like a vital book -- my experience of lawyers (and accountants, doctors and other professions that deal with sensitive information)...
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Matt Novak hits some highlights from Joanne Brown's 1988 Journal of American History paper A is for Atom, B is for Bomb (paywalled link), which discusses the weird, grim stuff that America contemplated at the height of the cold war, and worried about...
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On the Casual Cynic Tumblr, a heart-warming story about a waitress who got a $1,000 tip from a diner she'd met for the first time that night, who wanted to help her realize her dream of visiting Italy, whence her family hailed. So my mom and I have been...
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Bruce Schneier's got smart things to say about surveillance in the age of the Internet of Things: In the longer term, the Internet of Things means ubiquitous surveillance. If an object "knows" you have purchased it, and communicates via either Wi-Fi...
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London impressario Mat Ricardo writes in with news of the next London Varieties show: We had a ball last month at London's Leicester Square Theatre with a show that featured the very silly JOHANN LIPPOVITZ, very naughty EASTEND CABARET, very incredible...
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Here's a totally amazing and fascinating story about hyperinflation crashing the economy of Blizzard's massively multiplayer online RPG Diablo 3. Blizzard blew its economic strategy for Diablo 3 by making the "sinks" (places where gold is taken out of...
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The wonderful Retro Report (which revisits popular news stories of the years gone by and follows up on their claims) has posted a great, 10-minute documentary on "crack babies," concluding that the promised crack baby epidemic of kids with gross deformities...
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Joe, an engineer from Wisconsin, modified the (now censored) designs for Defense Distributed's 3D printed gun, the Liberator, and printed a working model on a Lulzbot A0-101, a $1,725 consumer printer that is much cheaper and more widely available than...
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Yitang Zhang is a largely unknown mathematician who has struggled to find an academic job after he got his PhD, working at a Subway sandwich shop before getting a gig as a lecturer at the University of New Hampshire. He's just had a paper accepted for...
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Shapeways interviews the amazing Bathsheba Grossman, a sculptor who creates mathematics-inspired 3D printed objects that can be bought on the Shapeways store. I own a bunch of her pieces, and I never tire of staring at them and handling them. I was originally...
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Lawyers for Ferrero, SpA (makers of the Nutella spread) have sent a legal threat to Sara Rosso, who founded and maintains the World Nutella Day site, where they promote Nutella through recipes, tweets, stories, and (obviously) an annual day devoted to...
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Michael Gove is the UK Secretary of State for Education, the subject of a vote of no confidence from the nation's head teacher's conference that ran 99% opposed to his ideas for educational reform. The major motif of Gove's reforms is an emphasis on...
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Pancakeist Nathan Shields polled his pals for their favorite athropods and then recreated them in pancake form. Crunchy! Favorite Arthropods 1 (via Neatorama) ...
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You'll remember last month's news that Fox had sent fraudulent takedown notices regarding my novel Homeland. This is hardly an isolated incident: the studios routinely exhibit depraved indifference to the inaccuracies in their automated censorship threats...
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Julian Assange has presented a set of freedom-of-information liberated messages from GCHQ, the UK spy headquarters, concerning his own case. According to Assange, the messages reveal that UK spies believed that the Swedish rape inquiry against him was...
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I gave the annual Sense About Science lecture last week in London, and The Guardian recorded and podcasted it (MP3). It's based on the Waffle Iron Connected to a Fax Machine talk I gave at Re:publica in Berlin the week before. ...
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The Twelve-Fingered Boy is John Hornor Jacobs's debut young adult novel and it's amazing. It's a horror novel about Shreve, a kid from a tough background who is stuck in juvie and makes the most of it by running a black-market candy dealership; and his...
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Dan from the Journal of Ride Theory passed me a copy of the original prospectus for Disneyland -- a rare and wonderful document I've never seen or even heard of before. I'm delighted to bring it to you today. Dan explains: I like it because I get the...
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Jim from the Open Rights Group writes in with the announcement for this year's ORGCon, a brilliant UK digital rights event: Legends of digital rights, Tim Wu and John Perry Barlow, will be leading Open Rights Group's 3rd national conference on June 8th....
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Canadian artist Howie Tsui redesigned a pinball machine to turn it into a crude simulation of a musket-ball rattling around a soldier's guts for a War of 1812-themed exhibition currently running at the Agnes Etherington Arts Centre at Queens University...
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