The ``living dead,'' having been cheated out of their property, cannot afford to pay bribes or even legitimate fees to get their cases dealt with.
Lal Bihari, president of the Association of the Living Dead, estimated 35,000 people in Uttar Pradesh state have been wrongly certified as dead.
(via Beyond the Beyond) [Boing Boing]
Subversive Cross-stitch: rude and snarky cross-stitch patterns to amaze and delight.
(via Making Light)
[Boing Boing]
A Magic Cube is a three dimensional Magic Square: a 3D grid in which the numbers in all the rows, columns and diagonals total up to the same number. The very first order-5 Magic Cube (previously suspected to be impossible) has been discovered.
Link
(Thanks, Johannes!)
[Boing Boing]
Seiko Epson Corp. showed off their flying micro-robot at this week's International Robot Exhibition in Tokyo. EE Times reports that ultrasonic wristwatch motors keep the 8.9 grab machine airborne. It's also outfitted with Bluetooth and several microsensors including a gyro and camera. Right now though, battery weight keeps it tethered to its power supply. (The photo is from Yahoo! News.) Link (Thanks, Gabe!) [Boing Boing]
"You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don't know what was in the newspapers that morning... a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be." [Motivational Quotes of the Day]
Just in time for the holiday season: Pink Floyd: The Wall action figures. Collectible action figures. Strictly limited edition. (Limited, I suspect, to the number of units they think they can sell.)
(via Smartpatrol)
Nice Fark photoshopping contest: turn celebrities into the living dead.
Got a dead, orphaned Apple G4 Cube lying around? According to the ancient traditions of the Mac-faithful, this is a signal that you are to get out your caulking gun and turn it into a fishtank.
(via MacSlash)
[Boing Boing]
From David Barringer's site: The Dead Bug Funeral Kit comes with an Illustrated Buggy Book of Eulogies with Ribbon Bookmark, Casket, Grave Marker, White Clay Flower, Burial Scroll, and Pouch of Grass Seed.
"We are deeply saddened by your loss. We hope the Dead Bug Kit will honor your bug. We are working as briskly as we can to make these Kits, but there is a lot of grief in this world. And there are a lot of bugs. We appreciate your patience." Link (Thanks, Invisible Cowgirl!)
[Boing Boing]
The Austrian cyber-activists Quintessenz put on the local Big Brother Award ceremony. To promote it, they distributed these stickers that look like hidden cameras, encouraging people to put them up in toilets and other places where privacy matters. The caption means "The Most Shameless Surveilleur."
Bernie Simmons, a spokesman for SPSS, said it was thought the frogs migrated to the warmer climate of southern Europe during the last ice age where they separated into distinct colonies that slowly started to diverge.
Part of that diversity has emerged as regional accents.
The accents are different depending on whether pool frogs belong to the ancient Iberian, Italian or Balkan populations.
(Thanks, Rod) [Boing Boing]
BoingBoing patron saint Bruce Sterling points our dirty minds to a website containing this suggestive series of images created entirely from mathematical algorithms. "If you find them offensive in any way," says the site's creator, "all I can say is that beauty (or obscenity) is in this case most certainly in the eye of the beholder." If high school algebra had been half this fun, perhaps I would have passed. Link [Boing Boing]
Dan Gill
mor's
on
his
annual teaching
stint
in
Hong
Kong,
or it can generate random pseudo-intellectualism:
Chaos theory: Its debt to Jesse Jackson
What is the contemporary significance of psychotic chaos theory? Psychotic chaos theory is often confused with teleological realism. Psychotic chaos theory is of particular interest to grandfathers.
other modes include Haiku, Bureaucratese, Fortune Tellers, and so forth.
(Thanks, Chris!) [Boing Boing]
BoingBoing pal Roland Piquepaille says,
"In this short article, Technology Review tells us that Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have built a new robot, named Cardea, which is able to push open doors and has the bottom half of a Segway scooter. Cardea will be five feet tall with a torso, three arms, a variety of sensors, and a human-like head with expressive features and vision, and mounted on a Segway base. More details and references are contained in this review which also includes several pictures. For even more details, go to the Cardea Project homepage."
* Nearly all American milk-cows are infected with Bovine Leukemia Virus
* One of the heroes of 'Black Hawk Down' was a convicted child molester
* The Bayer Company developed and marketed another "wonder drug": Heroin
* After 9/11, White House staff reviewed and considered a Special Ops presentation, Thinking Outside the Box: Poisoning Afghanistan's Food Supply
* Pope Pius II wrote a best selling erotic novel
* Positive HIV test results are wrong for half of all low-risk people
* Two atomic bombs were dropped on North Carolina
* You can mail letters for little to no cost using simple methods to fool
the post office
* Senior auto industry execs characterize SUV drivers as "insecure and vain... nervous about their marriages... self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors or communities."
I'm in Barcelona at the tech/art/culture confab Artfutura, listening to the two effects masterminds behind the Matrix trilogy: John Gaeta (right-hand side of the photo below) and Greg Juby of effects house ESC (Greg's at left in this photo).
ESC is the company created by the Wachowski brothers and John Gaeta to produce the complex work of visual effects in the Matrix series. Gaeta may well be the single most influential person in the last decade of visual effects, and right now he's talking to the audience of Spanish digital artists and tech developers here about the creative process behind the films, and what to expect in the forthcoming Matrix: Revolutions:
* "What will be different in Revolutions? It's the final, ultimate manifestation of Larry and Andy Wachowski's anime dream: to make am movie as close to an anime as possible. Take the best and coolest aspects of anime -- large scale robotics, entanglements between man anad machine -- and tranform it into a feature, live action film. You'll also see lots more bullets."* "Subconsciousness needs to be redefined with every generation. Matrix is a stylized sci-fi story, but the root of the idea that you can have imagery placed into your mind is a very possible scenario, and I think that's a universe that our generation was finally ready to start dealing with. I grew up on Kubrick, Ridley Scott, Hitchcock, Orson Welles, and many other filmmakers that triggered ideas inside my mind -- that's how evolution works. One generation speaking to another. Larry and Andy [Wachowski] are preoccupied with those ideas, too, but they're also pop culture junkies and they share an obsession we also have with darker sci-fi threads in films you see in films like Bladerunner. It's no accident that some of the scenes in the Matrix trilogy are reminiscent of Bladerunner, because we've been dying all our lives to do that kind of work. "
* "I want to make an electrochemical movie.
In the year 2099 I'll be 130 years old, but I think around 2063 I'm going to have my brain taken out and have it inserted into a clone who's about 21 years old. Maybe some bionic augmentation upgrades, too. In about 40 years, I'm thinking some sort of military-industrial-supercomplex-international-intelligensia supergroup will figure out how to export imagery to people's brains. If you can see it in your head while you're dreaming -- well, that image is created somehow. Someday, someone will figure out how to place that image into your brain. It'll be some combination of electricity and drugs, and they'll call it Rosebud.
A billion people will attend the first electrochemical movie premiere. Everyone in the audience will experience love again for the first time, and we'll become gazillionaires. I don't know how we'll make our electrochemical movie into a DVD, though. And distribution is definitely going to be a problem."* "The most difficult thing about creating effects for the trilogy? Designing choreography that could never be actualized by human beings."
The artist is now 71 years old and living in Palm Springs, Florida, enjoying his new career as a painter.
His name is Cheeta, and he's the world's oldest living primate.
* Christina James was the first to submit Koonago Factory. Comments: Several judges picked this one. Dark, violent Japorn featuring tiny cartoon fairy-doll women? What's not to like? (NSFW rating: some nudity and grossness, but nothing Rotten-grade).
* Wayne Mercier submitted The International Trepanation Advocacy Group. Comments: Invisible Cowgirl says, "Because nothing says scary like I Got a Hole Drilled in My Head personal testimonials."
* Steve Lew submitted
Mutant Midget Interracial Lemon Porn. Comments: Xeni says, "Strange fruit. Mmmmmmm."
* Steve Mills submitted Coffee Table Wife. Comments: Warren Ellis liked it. Go figure.
* Lucas Emery submitted Aussie Scrotum Shop. Comments: Made Warren smile.
* Zach Rodgers submitted Ordo Magazine. Comments: Invisible Cowgirl says, "A beauty of a blog chock full of everything that's weird and wonderful on the web." (NSFW guide: Links to some sexually explicit stuff, but links to lots of other stuff, too).
* An anonymous Link-Fu Master submitted Jesus is With You Everywhere. Comments: Xeni liked the scary trucker picture.
* Peace Rug and Wholesome Swimsuits
came from from Judson. Comments: Mark thought they were weird, silly and fun. [Boing Boing]
Gallery of black and white photographs of mental patients in a Taiwanese Buddhist sanctuary. Link
(via signormori.clarence.com) [Boing Boing]
