such a clever little brain

"By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing." - Cioran

Designer Florian Kräutli is working on this rug with embedded conductive threads that, when walked upon, use the stepper's body as an antenna for a connected radio.

"Since people are going to be living longer and getting older, they'll just have to learn how to be babies longer." - Andy Warhol

A problem with interventions that use role-playing to beat prejudice is that bigots usually aren't motivated to take the perspective of the groups that they discriminate against. In a new study, Gordon Hodson and colleagues have tested the effectiveness of an unusual alien-themed intervention for reducing homophobia that involves participants taking the perspective of a homosexual person, without really realising that that is what they're doing.

Hodson's team tested the homophobic tendencies of 101 heterosexual students and then had 79 of them complete the so-called "Alien-Nation" simulation, whilst the remainder acted as controls and attended a lecture on homophobia. For the Alien-Nation task, the students formed groups of four to five members and imagined landing on an alien planet that's populated by aliens who look exactly like humans, but who don't allow any public displays of affection, and live in same-sex housing and reproduce by artificial insemination.

The participants answered questions about how they would cope with life on the planet and maintain their lifestyles. They also shared plans for how to behave romantically in secret and how to identify other humans. Research assistants then asked the participants whether the situation applied to any real-life groups. The participants failed to recognise the parallel with homosexuality, but the research assistants pointed out the comparison and drew attention to ways that people who are homosexual deal with the constraints of an intolerant society.

BPS Research Digest Blog | Intervention Helps Reduce Homophobia

say what?

What is 365Black?
At McDonald's®, we believe that African-American culture and achievement should be celebrated 365 days a year — not just during Black History Month. That's the idea behind 365Black.com. It's a place where you can learn more about education, employment, career advancement and entrepreneurship opportunities, and meet real people whose lives have been touched by McDonald's. Plus, you can also have a chance to win exciting once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. So make sure you visit often — you just might get inspired.

Like the unique African Baobab tree, which nourishes its community with its leaves and fruit, McDonald's has branched out to the African-American community nourishing it with valuable programs and opportunities.

365Black | McDonald's has a new website for black people.

"That which you call "the external world" is as much you as your own body." - Alan Watts

Nine years ago, in the autumn of 2000, Suelo decided to stop using money. He just quit it, like a bad drug habit. His dwelling, hidden high in a canyon lined with waterfalls, is an hour by foot from the desert town of Moab, Utah, where people who know him are of two minds: He’s either a latter-day prophet or an irredeemable hobo. [...]

The tribe had been getting richer for a decade, and during the two years he was there he watched as the villagers began to adopt the economics of modernity. They sold the food from their fields — quinoa, potatoes, corn, lentils — for cash, which they used to purchase things they didn’t need, as Suelo describes it.

They bought soda and white flour and refined sugar and noodles and big bags of MSG to flavor the starchy meals. They bought TVs. The more they spent, says Suelo, the more their health declined. He could measure the deterioration on his charts. “It looked,” he says, “like money was impoverishing them.”

Men.Style.com | Could You Survive Without Money?

"The beginning is half of every action." - Greek Proverb

Three Frames [Warning: NSFW]

"Our task must be to free ourselves...by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty."

What do these crises have in common:

Economic crisis
Water shortages
Global warming
Healthcare
Energy

Okay, they probably have lots of things in common. But the answer I was looking for is "food."

Imagine for a minute that everyone in the United States stopped overeating and became vegetarians, perhaps with some fish thrown in the mix for protein and Omega-3. We all know that situation can never happen, so this is just a thought experiment...

Read more: The Common Crisis | Dilbert.com Blog
Quote: Albert Einstein

You could save all of this money by using the public library.

Bucky's Animal Spirit is a public intervention disguised as an ATM Machine installed surreptitiously in a downtown office building... next to an actual ATM.
I installed this video game in a Troy, NY downtown office building on May 1st 2009 hoping people would think it was an actual ATM machine. I was quite pleased to see they did not want to punch my face off when they realized it was not an ATM at all, but an arcade game where they help "Bucky the Beaver" save money in the Shitty Economy.
Bucky's Animal Spirit

it's okay to be yourself because you are you

Sharifa is lonely and sad.

Hopefully, the depiction in this postcard can make you happy. Pears used to train mastodons many years ago. Now that mastodons are extinct pears just hang off tree branches. Scientists are trying to clone a baby mastodon so that pears have something to do again.

cohitre ☺ you

"They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself." - Andy Warhol

If the bondage business seems an unlikely pursuit for two button-down, slightly awkward, decidedly deadpan lower-class Pakistanis, it is. But then, discretion has been their byword. The brothers have taken extreme measures to conceal a business that in this deeply conservative Muslim country is as risky as it is risqué.

It helps that the dozens of veiled and uneducated female laborers who assemble the handmade items — gag balls, lime-green corsets, thonged spanking skirts — have no idea what the items are used for. Even the owners’ wives, and their conservative Muslim mother, have not been informed.

Today, they sell their products to online and brick-and-mortar shops, and to individuals via eBay. Their market research, they said, showed that 70 percent of their customers were middle- to upper-class Americans, and a majority of them Democrats. The Netherlands and Germany account for the bulk of their European sales.[...]

“I go to Sin City every year,” said Rizwan, referring to Las Vegas in a sheepish laugh. It’s all business, he said. “Clients know our country and culture, and they don’t invite us to participate. We’re a little bit shy.”

NYT | Lacy Threads and Leather Straps Bind a Business (With Video)

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein

"Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art." - Susan Sontag

Tumblr | David Horvitz

without music, life would not be fair

This is a device activated by three DJing Octodon (rodents of South America). The ensemble is presented in a row. Both Octodon, left and right of the image, turning in their wheel activates each turntable. The third animal, in the center, run the mixer of the crossfader, which determines the sound. That is to say that it is possible to hear, according to the position of the crossfader, one or other of the decks or both simultaneously. The result is sound and conducted randomly. It works to the whims of these animals.

Octodon's Mix

at what point did you stop chasing your dreams?

Drawing upon the full archive of Erwin Blumenfeld’s unseen film work, film-maker Adam Mufti and sound designer Olivier Alary have collaborated with SHOWstudio to create three, exclusive edits that focus on three discrete areas of Blumenfeld’s visionary motion image-making: Advertising & Layout, Surrealism & Process and Abstraction & Distortion.

Experiments in Advertising: Unseen Films

and in a hundred years the same flowers and the same animals would be here again

Scott is a guerrilla gardener, a member of a burgeoning movement of green enthusiasts who plant without approval on land that's not theirs. In London, Berlin, Miami, San Francisco and Southern California, these free-range tillers are sowing a new kind of flower power. In nighttime planting parties or solo "seed bombing" runs, they aim to turn neglected public space and vacant lots into floral or food outposts.
Part beautification, part eco-activism, part social outlet, the activity has been fueled by Internet gardening blogs and sites such as GuerrillaGardening.org, where before-and-after photos of the latest "troop digs" inspire 45,000 visitors a month to make derelict soil bloom.

The Guerilla Gardener Movement

image: here

title: Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World

love letters from hell

In the late '90s, pop-culture historian Bill Geerhart had a little too much time on his hands and a surfeit of stamps. So, for his own entertainment, the then-unemployed thirtysomething launched a letter-writing campaign to some of the most powerful and infamous figures in the country, posing as a curious 10-year-old named Billy.

To his surprise, replies soon started pouring in. Everyone from Dick Cheneyand Donald Rumsfeld (on tree-fort diplomacy) to Oprah Winfrey, Mister Rogers, Janet Reno, and members of the Supreme Court had words of wisdom for Billy. ("I like the Egg McMuffin," wrote Justice Clarence Thomaswhen asked about his favorite McDonald's food. "Actually, I like almost everything there.") Responding to Billy's idea for a "Hustler for kids," Larry Flynt wrote back encouraging the fourth grader to "Hang in there. You'll be 18 before you know it."

As it turns out, no group hates to disappoint a child more than convicted killers, all of whom responded promptly to Billy's questions about dropping out of school. Their letters, published here for the first time, range from criminally insane to downright sensible, offering snapshots of the personalities behind some of America's most hideous crimes. Recently, Radar asked Billy to follow up with his mentors as a college student. (Click here to skip ahead and read Billy's correspondence with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Larry Flynt, and other non-murderous celebrities).

Responses to "Billy's" Letters

art saved the city's soul

A sneak peek at a new documentary film on the subversive public art collective known as Graffiti Research Lab, who develop and distribute "open source technologies for urban communication."

take this as a sign

"If you give me $1,626 I will go to the small Okinawan island called Iriomote and send you an envelope filled with star-sand (don't worry, I've been there before, I know where to go). I will send it from there. [...]

"If you give me $30 I will walk around New York, and the first homeless person I see I will buy him or her whatever he or she wants to eat (as long as it is less than $30). I will mail you back the exact change (minus the paypal fee and the cost of the postage stamp) with the receipt for the food and the name of the person who ate it."

David Horvitz: "Things for Sale that I Will Mail You"

image:"FISKUR (fish)," 2004. 15 Polaroids placed in a row close to the floor. Each time someone took a look at the photos at the opening, another picture was shot and hung up beside the others. By Darri Lorenzen.

the struggle goes both ways

An unfortunate side effect of hanging or poisoning a man is that his organs go sour before they can be transplanted. Death-row inmates have repeatedly asked to donate their organs, but their requests are always denied. The simple reason is that execution generally ruins organs before they can be harvested. By the time you cut someone down from the gallows or pronounce the injection lethal, the heart and lungs will have thumped and puffed for the last time. Soon after, the kidneys start rotting, and before long nothing is useful but the corneas. Even with beheading— still practiced in Saudi Arabia—the heart and lungs probably wouldn’t make it, says Douglas Hanto, chief transplant surgeon at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. But by using what the bioethicist Arthur Caplan calls “the Mayan Protocol”—a term derived from the ancient Mayan practice of vivisecting their human sacrifices—the removal of organs would itself be the method of execution. If this sounds inhumane, compare it to current practices: botched hangings, painfully long gassings, and messy electrocutions. Removal of the heart, lungs, and kidneys (under anesthesia, of course) would kill every time, without an instant of pain. So far, the organs of all criminals executed in the United States have stayed with their original owners. Consider the loss. Someone died waiting for that killer’s heart. Two died waiting for his kidneys, and two more suffocated for lack of his lungs. The liver, split two ways, could have saved two babies. Take the hair, bone, skin, ligaments, and fluids for grafts and transfusions, and all that’s left of the donor’s body could be shuffled off into a very petite coffin indeed. The inmate could allow nearly a dozen people to live, in exchange for a body he wouldn’t be around to enjoy anyway. The math says we should encourage death-row organ donation.

But medical ethics, which bars doctors from murdering patients, says we cannot. Physicians have come out strongly against participating in capital punishment, even to administer anesthesia or find a vein for lethal injection. The result: inaccurate injections, and a sometime torturous demise for the condemned. And the fraternity of surgeons is quite attached to its cardinal directive in vital-organ-transplant ethics, the aptly named “dead-donor rule.” They will not take the lungs of someone still using them.

[read more...]

i would rather not go back to the old house

Felipe Assadi & Francisca Pulido's Casa Guthrie

Commissioned by a real estate company, this project's aim was to design a house that they could replicate easily on a hillside with an average slope of 25%. The costs had to remain within reach of the average young family and be no greater than 140 square meters.