November 07, 2007
Bully Proof Underpants
Two eight-year-old twins, tired of playground bullies, have invented "wedgie"-proof underwear.
Jared and Justin Serovich from Colombus, Ohio, came up with the "Rip Away 1000" underpants which prevent the painful yanking ritual.
item | w/links
November 06, 2007
Culture that Capitalism Can't Crush
...many people on Earth have actually retained their cultural ways in spite of the lure (or sometimes the force) of Western culture. There are still people across the globe who hunt and gather, herd animals or tend small garden plots as they always have.
...managed to incorporate some parts of Western culture while holding on to their dearest traditions. Tuareg culture is one of these...
press release | Live Science
~Every place on the face of the earth is reachable, exploitable manageable. Every nation and people are also. (The world's a theme-park man!)
A car company named a class of small trucks for suburbanites, "Tuareg".
Tuareg art and objects on display...include silver bracelets made in Niger in 1975. Photo from "Art of Being Tuareg" by Tom Seligman info.
somewhat related Wadi Rock Art
~If I happened to join these people on caravan would they watch as I did stupid things (dehydrate myself; fall off camels, etc ) and die then indifferently use my flesh to feed their dogs and turn my skin into leather for saddles and braces?
November 05, 2007
When singles turn to a matchmaker
...one in five single Britons now paying someone to find them a partner..
story | Telegraph
~The article's reporting on single Brits within a certain (Telegraph defined) demographic? They're not suggesting 'knocking shops' as part of the matchmaking 'agencies' people are now buying into? Knocking shops have been around forever.
[photo not with above]
'Memorial toilet' proposed in London for gay playwright
He did what he did because it was the only place he could do it in those days and I think it would show how attitudes have changed.
"We wouldn't be celebrating cottaging, we would be celebrating how much more liberal we are these days." (--Local trader Mike Weedon)
http://www.pinknews.co.uk/news/articles/2005-5791.html
..it would be an "insult" to (Joe) Orton's memory...Orton, celebrated in the 1987 film "Prick Up Your Ears", wrote a series of popular but controversial plays, including "Loot", "What the Butler Saw" and "Entertaining Mr Sloane.
AFPs story | by way of Daily Weird
November 04, 2007
Interactive Architecture
Interactive Architecture dot Org is a weblog about the emerging practice within architecture that aims to merge the digital virtual with tangible and physical spatial experience. Instead of defining a fixed architectural product it is an architecture in constant flux best suited to prototyping and semi-perminant installations.
more: http://www.interactivearchitecture.org/
~I'm unable to see around the corner, to begin to imagine the existence of shapes and spaces like these. Aren't they exotic, in a potentially functionary way? Like a man without a boat.
News of the Weird
Crime-fearing female pedestrians in Tokyo can soon protect themselves with fashion designer Aya Tsukioka's skirt that opens into a realistic-looking (except made of fabric), full-size vending machine that she hopes thugs will pass right by. It's one of several fanciful crime-avoiding creations of the genre that Japanese inventors are noted for, according to an October New York Times dispatch. Another, the "manhole bag," resembles a sewer covering when laid on the ground but can hold a person's valuables, again provided that the thug passes it up. Yet another is women's wraparound sunglasses that are extra-dark so that even shy, eye-contact avoiding females can stare unobserved at potential perverts in trains to guard against the ubiquitous groping. [New York Times, 10-20-07]
As several sightings were made around Washington, D.C., of dragonfly-looking bugs hovering in the air at political events, government agencies were denying that they had released any tiny surveillance robots, according to an October Washington Post investigation. "I look up and I'm like, 'What the hell is that?'" asked a college student at an antiwar rally in Washington. "They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But . . . those are not insects." Several agencies and private entities admitted to the Post that they were trying to develop such devices, but no one took credit for having them in the air yet. [Washington Post, 10-9-07] | NOTW: 11-04-07
~A new class of UFOs have been launched?
A new tool for Japanese street muggers to exploit?
The Forbidden Fruit Conference
The Forbidden Fruit conference will focus on the censorship of print, electronic and other literary and information resources for young people.
It will be an opportunity for practitioners from libraries, information services and education, researchers from a range of disciples, publishers, authors and policymakers from all sectors interested in to meet, network and share experiences.
Suggested themes include:
Young people, the Internet and censorship
Access to citizenship, health and other information for young people
Pressure groups and censorship
The role of information literacy
Publishers and censorship
Media literacy
Authors for young people and censorship
Media reaction to censorship
Graphic novels and manga and ‘crossover’ novels
Library selection policies
The history of censorship
But don't feel restricted by these - other ideas for sessions/themes are very welcome!
Download the call for abstracts at the bottom of the page
more info: http://forbiddenfruitconference.wetpaint.com/
thanks Diederik
[photo not from above]
2xSex Abuse Laws Can Fail School
An Associated Press investigation identified 2,570 cases from 2001 to 2005 in which teachers were punished or removed from the classroom for sexual misconduct.
Created in 1987, the list contains names of some 37,000 teachers who have had license problems, which includes all misbehavior, not just sexual.
~National Registry Gumbo: "Our inability to think that kids might be in danger, our inability to think that the nicest teacher on the block might be an offender — those things keep us uneducated."
The story doesn't say what percentage of the 37,000 teachers have licensing problems because of sexual criminal behavior that wouldn't be tolerated outside their academic communities. (I'm mistaken assuming that a new legal speciality has grown defending wrongly accused teachers. The school districts' methods of disciplining their employees require no extra-outside defense.)
by way of Daily Weird
UK Health: Call for national pet blood bank
Mr Dan Brockman, an expert in cardiothoracic surgery at the Royal Veterinary College, London, said he was now carrying out several open heart surgery procedures a year.
Other surgical procedures for dogs and occasionally cats - including heart valve replacement, heart valve repair, cancer operations, and knee-, hip- and elbow-replacements - are becoming routine.
The cost of between £3,000 and £10,000 is met by pet insurance policies or by the individual.
One of the things that has held back critical care in the UK has been an unwillingness to develop blood banking in the UK," Mr Brockman told reporters..."It's not possible to have a well functioning trauma centre without having blood product support as in human trauma medicine."
[photo not with above/ not a UK pet or pet owner]
November 03, 2007
Parents More Active in Raising Their Children; Children Get Less Television Time
Docuticker Press release, info, etc. http://www.docuticker.com/?p=17538
Census Bureau's press release etc.
[illus not with above]
~How about also prying their little grubby hands from the games?
Blog: Consumptive
Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one's ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.
- Franz Kafka, from The Blue Octavo Notebooks
/In fact, the basic techniques of photography were never enormously difficult, and they have now become very easy. Like belles-lettres in a land of universal literacy, the art of pictures-making is now open to everyone - or at least to anyone. It is today quite simple to make pictures that are as intelligent, cultivated, and original as the person who makes them - who remains, of course, the most interesting and dependable link in the system.
- John Szarkowski, from Looking at Photographs
/The mistress of this world has no name.
- Frederick Sommer
~~~~~~
~(Stubbornson) I picture a kitchen table under a bright flourescent ceiling fixture. Under it sits a table filled to overflowing with all manner and sizes of photographs. From this pile of cast aways, memories and twitches one can create a life. Of course no one works this way.
One is sometimes free to choose then choose again.
Street Imagery
...as filtered, packaged, edited and bundled(?) by...
Everyscape: http://www.everyscape.com/
~I don't see how Everyscape plans on making money. Pehaps their users will find locales people will be willing to pay Earthscape to view? It has to be more then that.
I'm not 'street-anything'. I'm 'colonial ranch' looking to downsize into a bungalow view of the world.
[photo not with above]
City Guide: Not for Tourists
http://www.notfortourists.com/ultimate-web-index.aspx?city=NY&citid=10000&catid=10000
~Basically a magazine with links for people who find themselves in selected cities with money to spend. Are the use of expense accounts as flexible as the offerings on this site would have us believe? Do tourists generally throw this kind of money away on weekends in Boston? Atlanta? Are many twenty-somethings relocating to these cities for work?
I don't know why I assumed less people then before 9/11 were required to move because of work. I may've confused tourists' paranoia and canceled business meetings responsible for the drop in airline travel with the unabated mass migrations on the ground.
[photo not with above]
Good mourning, you’re watching Death TV
Etos-TV will be Europe’s first channel devoted to death: documentaries on beautiful cemeteries, round-table discussions about the appropriate means of burial and on-screen obituaries that can be distributed later to friends and family on the internet.
“We’re planning to broadcast from early next year...”
This is not primarily an advertising channel,” Kerstin Gernig, for the undertakers, said....
“On offer...be an obituary service. For about €2,000 (£1,400), a photograph of a dead friend or relative will be shown on the screen, along with a spoken tribute. The 90-second obituary will be repeated ten times and then be available for distribution on the internet. For a higher fee, a short film can be made recording highlights from the life of the deceased.
“Every citizen should have the choice of having an obituary broadcast on television,” said Mr Schneider... “Why should only prominent personalities be honoured after their death?”
Until recently Germans have taken a very traditional stand on death and burial. It was rarely discussed in public and was regarded as a matter to be discussed only with the local priest.
Some 830,000 people die a year,” said Mr Schneider, “and there are two million elderly in care.”
press release | Times Online
November 02, 2007
Tiny sensor offers new medical, security uses
U.S. researchers have developed a magnetic sensor smaller than a grain of rice and sensitive enough to detect a fetal heart beat...described... in the journal Nature Photonics, provides a low-cost and portable way to detect changes in a magnetic field...
The device is 1,000 times more sensitive than NIST's last microchip-sized mini-sensor. Right now it is just a prototype, but Kitching said the device could be used in a range of applications, from fetal heart monitoring to screening for explosives.
Because of its small size, it could run for several weeks on a single AA battery, he (John Kitching of the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST)
said.
Magnetic fields are all over the place," Kitching said."
~It's got me thinking about hippies and their 'good vibrations'.
Is this what's meant by 'sensor dust'? Dusting a battlefield with these devices. (What happens to the batteries?)
How WOULD sensors so small differentiate among various energy sources? Location i.e. placement of the sensor will be all that's required?
