Rob B and I were discussing the inherent oddness of those faux stereos, TVs, and computers used in furniture store displays. Cut to a good half-hour of browsing the site of Props By IDM (International Dummy Machines?). Not only does Props by IDM offer the latest in fake component stereos, laptops, and flatscreens, but they also sell huge plastic washer and dryer sets, simulated iPod with speaker dock, and fake windows with mountain views. Also available are accessories for the props, such as DVD and VHS boxes for unreal movies (Boy Story! Yo Adrian!), a wide selection of images for the various screens, including sports scenes, PC desktops, and fake Tetris for the fake video game system ($20!). Unfortunately, the company says that a "major catastrophe" at their manufacturing facility has forced them to put business on hold for the next few months. Electronic gear props

Zhang Ruifang, 101, of Henan province in China, appears to have a horn growing on the left side of her forehead. Another is reportedly sprouting on the right side, according to the Daily Mail. I know, I know, the Daily Mail... but look at that horn. Just look at it. From the Daily Mail:

Although, it is unknown what the protrusion is on Mrs Zhang's head, it resembles a cutaneous horn.

This is a funnel-shaped growth and although most are only a few millimetres in length, some can extend a number of inches from the skin.

Cutaneous horns are made up of compacted keratin, which is the same protein we have in our hair and nails, and forms horns, wool and feathers in animals.

They usually develop in fair-skinned elderly adults who have a history of significant sun exposure but it is extremely unusual to see it form protrusions of this size.

The growths are most common in elderly people, aged between 60 and the mid-70s. They can sometimes be cancerous but more than half of cases are benign.

Etsy seller TheWren sells messenger bags made out of South African cement sacks (which, I imagine, are durable by definition). Very nice, old school art. I had to give up messenger bags to spare my back (the lopsided burden was killing me), but I still have a soft spot for them, and live vicariously through others on this score.

PPC Cement Laptop Bag - OPC (via Wired)

Not only are torture techniques like waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and forced stress positions evil, they don't work very well for interrogation. Jacques Vallee talked about that on BB last year in his provocative essay, "Waterboarding's curious corollaries." This week's New Scientist also considers the efficacy of torture and "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" (CIDT). On the heels of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, Obama established the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group to study and practice "scientifically proven" techniques to interrogate without torture or CIDT, which are illegal.

The idea that coercive interrogation works rests on an untested and largely unsupported framework, says Shane O'Mara, director of the Institute of Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. On the face of it, the coercive model for interrogation seems like common sense: there is information that the interrogator wants to know and the subject holds but doesn't want to give up. The interrogator applies some pressure to break down the defences put up by the subject, who then spills the desired information. "You see this model repeatedly in movies and TV series such as 24," says O'Mara.

The idea that coercive interrogation works rests upon an untested and largely unsupported framework Whether it really works like that is questionable, however. "Everything we know shows that the ability to accurately retrieve information is severely impaired under conditions of extreme stress," O'Mara says. Studies on soldiers, for instance, have shown that manipulating sleep, food and temperature produces severe effects on memory, even when people are willing to give up information.

In a recent paper, O'Mara outlined the problem (Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol 13, p 497). Both torture and CIDT flood the brain with stress hormones such as cortisol and the catecholamines, with potentially profound effects. Three regions are especially affected: the hippocampus, which is important in retrieving long-term memories; the amygdala, which forms part of the fear network; and the frontal lobes. Disturbances of these regions are likely to kick in during coercive interrogation, particularly if such questioning continues for weeks or months.

In addition, prolonged stress could also lead to the creation of false memories based on information and supposed facts presented by the interrogator. This phenomenon, known as confabulation in psychiatric jargon, is also found in people with frontal lobe disorders. "These people are not consciously making stuff up or trying to lie," says O'Mara. "But they have difficulty discriminating between genuine memories and those that don't bear any relationship to events they have experienced. Though the occurrence of confabulation in torture victims is more speculative, it's a marked possibility."

Warning: This may shock you if you love dogs and cats. In this video report, CNN's Emily Chang goes to a dog and cat meat market in Guanghzhou, China. There, dogs and cats are kept in cages and sold to restaurants and street vendors that specialize in things like cat stew and frozen dog leg. The Chinese government has taken the first steps in banning the consumption of dog and cat meat, but this report says it may take a decade for actual changes to be implemented.

Karen O'Leary creates hand-cut city maps from paper. She just finished Paris, and it is shown above. More here, and her Flickr stream is here.

Susannah Breslin writes, "Apparently, there's an entire phenomenon of young women videotaping themselves talking to the internet as they show off the latest cache of goods they scored at the mall. Do not underestimate the haul vloggers. They are fascinating." More on this by Susannah at True/Slant, and one such specimen is above. What-so-ever.

Photo © Kadir van Lohuizen / NOOR: Nelvis Clerge sits on the rubble that was his family's home in Port-au-Prince. Nelvis, a 55-year old construction worker, built the house with his own hands 25 years ago. The Clerge family is one of many struggling to survive in post-emergency Haiti with little assistance.

This image is part of a larger slideshow on survivors of the Haiti quake, and the work of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières in Haiti. MSF: Facebook, Twitter-USA, Twitter-UK. (thanks, Julie Whitaker)

Six women from Essex County, New Jersey were hospitalized after getting black market butt enhancement procedures in which they were injected with the kind of non-medical grade silicone you can buy at the hardware store. I've read about similar practices in drag queen communities as well. I'd imagine that DIY cosmetic surgery, like medical tourism, will become more "mainstream." It's not clear yet if the six new cases are related. From NJ.com:

Different from medical-grade silicone, the substance used in the botched procedures was believed to be a diluted version of nonmedical-grade silicone.

"The same stuff you use to put caulk around the bathtub," said Steven M. Marcus, executive and medical director of the New Jersey Poison Information and Education System, who learned about the bizarre procedures through a committee he sits on that monitors outbreaks in the metropolitan area.

"What a tragedy," said Gregory Borah, chief of plastic surgery at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick. Using over-the-counter silicone can cause abscesses that he said resemble "a big zit"...

A plastic surgeon doing buttocks augmentation would make an incision to develop a pocket underneath the muscle and shape the buttocks with inert medical-grade silicone, Borah said. He noted it is a relatively uncommon procedure in most practices and that he has done only two in his 24-year career. By the time he tells patients of the potential risks — from anesthesia, scarring and silicone shifting when patients sit down — they often change their minds.

[via Etsy]

Nick from i3 Detroit hackerspace sez, "We all know that robot poverty is a major problem but no one is taking any steps to help combat it...until now. Help i3 Detroit, Detroit's Hackerspace, move to our bigger 8,000 sq/ft location and fight the causes of Robot Poverty. Most robots don't have the basic alcohol they need to survive or the tanks of pneumatic fluid to pressurize appendages. It's everyone's problem and you can help. Watch our informative video and support us via our Kickstarter program."

i3 Detroit v2.0 (Thanks, Nick!)

Lauren from Orbit books sez, "I thought you guys might like my latest behind the scenes design project, while designing the latest cover in a Victorian/Steampunk book series, I left the video screen-capture on...for like 6 hours (never knew how much I checked email until I had to edit them out of there) - we condensed the rest down to just under 2 minutes, and voila."

I love watching people who are good at their jobs do their thing, such a treat to watch over Lauren's shoulder. Also, what a smart little promo for the book!

design editor's inspiration (Thanks, Lauren!)

Boing Boing heroes Megan and Rick Prelinger run the Prielinger Library, an amazing privately-funded but public "appropriation-friendly" collection of books, magazines, and ephemera in San Francisco. In my opinion, the Prelinger Library's materials have the vibe that I imagine a Boing Boing Library would feel like. Megan has been working on a fascinating book, "Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957-1962," that will be published in May by Blast Books. Judging by today's New York Times preview of the book, it's going to be a doozy of retro-futurism and atomic/modernist design. Congrats, Megan! From the NYT:

Some of the most extravagant of these visions of the future came not from cheap paperbacks, but from corporations buffing their high-tech credentials and recruiting engineering talent in the heady days when zooming budgets for defense and NASA had created a gold rush in outer space.

In the pages of magazines like Aviation Week, Missiles and Rockets and even Fortune, companies, some famous and some now obscure, were engaged in a sort of leapfrog of dreams. And so, for example, Republic Aviation of Farmingdale, N.Y. -- "Designers and Builders of the Incomparable Thundercraft" -- could be found bragging in Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine in 1959 about the lunar gardening experiments it was doing for a future Air Force base on the moon. Or the American Bosch Arma Corporation showing off, in Fortune, its "Cosmic Butterfly," a solar-powered electrically propelled vehicle to ferry passengers and cargo across the solar system...

The book, she said, was inspired by a shipment of old publications to the library, including Aviation Week & Space Technology and Missiles and Rockets. "I little expected that the advertising in their pages would seize my attention more than the articles themselves," she writes in the introduction to her book.

Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957-1962 (Amazon)

Jeremie writes,

The written declaration 12/2010 regarding the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is now open for signatures. It has to be signed within three months by more than half of the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). It is a great opportunity for the European Parliament to prove its commitment to protecting fundamental rights and freedoms. Every EU citizen concerned about ACTA and the preservation of an open Internet can participateA dedicated campaign page is available here: http://www.laquadrature.net/wiki/Help_sign_the_Written_Declaration_12/2010_against_ACTA by getting in touch with MEPs and urging them to sign the written declaration.

A dedicated campaign page has been set up to allow EU citizens to participate in collecting the signatures of the majority of the Members of the European Parliament. From Monday, March 8th to Thursday, March 11th, MEPs will meet in Strasbourg for a plenary session. From now on and until mid-June, plenary sessions will be the best periods to collect signatures on the written declaration.

"Signing the written declaration 12/2010 would show MEPs' commitment to protecting citizens' rights. The adoption of the written declaration will send a strong message to the Commission and Member States that the European Parliament will not let EU citizens' freedoms be undermined by opaque diplomatic negotiations. Every citizen and NGO concerned about ACTA can participate by calling MEPs and urging them to sign the declaration.", concludes Jérémie Zimmermann, spokesperson of La Quadrature du Net.

French firm Design Crew for Architecture has come up with this interesting design for a water purifier. From Inhabitat:

In order to facilitate water purification, the tower will be made up of several circular tanks filled with brackish water (water that has more salinity than fresh water, but not as much as seawater), which will be enclosed in spherical greenhouses. Using tidal powered pumps, the brackish water will be brought up into the tower and circulate through the mangrove plants, which have the unique ability to thrive on brackish water and perspire freshwater. The freshwater sweat then evaporates and condensates into dew on wall of the greenhouse and is collected in a freshwater tank. The resulting freshwater can then be distributed to the fields using gravitational flow.

According the designers, one hectare of mangroves should be able to produce 30,000 liters of freshwater a day. In other words, the tower would be able to irrigate a one-hectare field of tomatoes per day.

Feel free to stare directly at this great footage of last summer's solar eclipse, taken in Varanasi, India, as part of the BBC's Wonders of the Solar System series.

I've seen photos and video of solar eclipses before, but it's always just a little breathtaking to watch the moon slip in front of the sun. As physicist Brian Cox says in the video, it's quite the reminder of the fact that we're floating in space.

The protective suits worn by bomb diffusers in "The Hurt Locker" are real, right down to those fabulously popped collars, and they really do save lives. The secret is all in the materials, which provide a barrier against both shockwaves and shrapnel.

The overpressure wave is actually the more dangerous of the two. A microsecond after a bomb goes off, the explosion compresses the surrounding air and blows it outward in a lightning-fast shockwave that ripples through clothing and literally flattens internal organs.

The suit's rigid outer armor layer, the first and most important defense against this threat, is composed mainly of aramids: high-tech synthetic materials that are "strain-rate sensitive." In other words, "the faster something hits them, the harder they become," says Borkar. (Kevlar is simply the brand name of an aramid manufactured by DuPont.) The entire front-facing portion of the suit is reinforced from head to toe with hardened composites of two or more aramids, optimized for strength and lightness. This rigid layer can literally reflect or bounce some of the overpressure energy away from the technician, while also repelling flying fragmentation.

And that's only the first layer of defense. The suits have three total. The downside to all that protection: Weight. Each suit adds an extra 60 or 70 pounds, thus making it even more impressive that Staff Sgt. Jeremy Herbert, the explosive ordnance technician team leader for Marine Wing Support Squadron 271, has run a mile, wearing his suit, in nine minutes and 58 seconds.

Dvice: How Bomb-Proof Suits Work