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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection.

Drugs and sexuality constitute the primary subject matter in Santo Domingo, but the collection’s larger function is to investigate the many altered states of the human mind. The collection therefore contains a substantial number of volumes on the occult, such as this work: The anatomy of the body of God, by occultist Charles Stansfield Jones (1886-1950), a member of Aleister Crowley’s order. Jones here writes under the name of Frater Achad, one of many titles and pseudonyms he adopted during his career. Several diagrams accompany this cabalistic text, including this colored frontispiece.

This edition”This first edition of The anatomy of the body of God consists of 22 copies, lettered Aleph to Tau, and 228 copies numbered 1 to 228″–Colophon. This copy is number 6.

Frater Achad. The anatomy of the body of God. Chicago: Collegium ad Spiritum Sanctum [i.e. Will Ransom], 1925. BF1999 .J55.

Thanks to rare book cataloger Ryan Wheeler for contributing this post.

The SNES (or Super Famicom, depending on where you're from) controller is probably my favorite console controller. Unfortunately, the proprietary connector makes it difficult to use with newer devices. Thanks to the Teensy USB dev board, you can get the best of both worlds: A great and sturdy game controller and USB connectivity so you can use it with modern consoles or with your PC. More »

A wee bit of good news about American prisons for a change: after rising each year since the mid-1970s, the US incarceration rate has declined each of the past three years.

I hereby submit my nomination for the most underreported public policy story of the past year: The continuing decline in the number of Americans who are behind bars or on probation/parole. Both the change itself and low level of attention it has garnered are worthy of reflection.

At the time of President Obama's inauguration, the incarceration rate in the United States had been rising every single year since the mid 1970s. The relentless growth in the proportion of Americans behind bars had persisted through good economic times and bad, Republican and Democratic Presidents, and countless changes in state and local politics around the country.

If a public policy trend with that much momentum had even slowed significantly, it would have been merited attention, but something far more remarkable occurred: The incarceration rate and the number of people under correctional supervision (i.e., including people on probation/parole) declined for three years in a row. At the end of 2011, the proportion of people under correctional supervision returned to a level not seen since the end of the Clinton Administration.

Commenters over at Marginal Revolution dug into the report a bit more and the decline may have a lot to do with things like state budget cuts and less to do with things like fewer/shorter prison sentences.

Tags: crime   legal   prison

The idea of private space tourism is certainly taking off, but at such high costs, only 1 percent of the 1 percent will be able to afford it. But, what if you could just do it all yourself? You're going to need some infrastructure to get you started, and luckily, NASA is reportedly looking to lease or sell off some Kennedy Space Center assets it no longer needs. While that list has not been made public, it apparently includes Launch Pad 39A, a landing strip, the Launch Control Center, and various other high-tech equipment and buildings from its late shuttle program. NASA also wants some quick deals before anything falls into disrepair, so if you're serious about your new space venture, you might be able to snag a bargain or two with some strategic low offers. Now you've just gotta wait for a cheap rocket deal to pop up on eBay and you're good to go.

Filed under: Misc, Science, Alt

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Via: The Loop

Source: Orlando Sentinel

The perpetual gotcha for T-Mobile's Monthly4G prepaid service has been the absence of truly unlimited data -- you could have one advantage or the other, but not both. TmoNews understands that this either/or choice is fading away after spotting what looks to be leaked promo material. Come January 9th, the carrier is reportedly replacing its 5GB Monthly4G tier with an unlimited alternative. The same $70 should net the previous unlimited talk and text, but skip the pesky throttling for very frequent users. As long as customers have good coverage, it's hard to see a downside for them if this proves real; next week can't come soon enough.

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Mobile, T-Mobile

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Source: TmoNews

“You are so pretty. God love you, holy mackerel.” – Just one of Joe Biden’s one-liners during the Senate swearing-in ceremony. Watch the collection.

“Revenge is sweeter than candy.”

Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters is an upcoming action film that imagines the famous fairy tale siblings as witch bounty hunters seeking revenge. It stars Jeremy Renner & Gemma Arterton and will open in theaters on January 25, 2013.

After getting a taste for blood as children, Hansel (Jeremy Renner) and Gretel (Gemma Arterton) have become the ultimate vigilantes, hell bent on retribution. Now, unbeknownst to them, Hansel and Gretel have become the hunted, and must face an evil far greater than witches…their past.

A bouquet of YA fantasy published in 2012. Come on now, cover designers. Each of these is pretty in its own right, but in aggregate it just makes me feel like I’ve already read all of them.

(Thanks again for all the books, Anita!)

Concrete is one of the world’s most popular building materials, with over 20 billion tons produced annually around the world. The production of concrete alone accounts for 5 to 10 percent of the world’s overall atmospheric CO2, so cutting down on its production could have major environmental benefits. Civil engineers at MIT have finally discovered what causes “creep,” the deformation of concrete that occurs over time. This discovery is the first step toward prolonging the life of concrete by slowing the rate at which creep occurs.

The MIT team discovered that creep is caused by tiny nano-scale rearrangements of particles. The discovery means that the engineers can use this new understanding of concrete creep to create incredibly long-lasting buildings and infrastructure objects. Until now, concrete structures have had to be pretty thick in order to remain stable over the years. Thin concrete succumbs to creep quickly, so lightweight concrete buildings have always been impossible.

In the future, concrete structures could be lightweight and thin while using far less material than current generations. And because they would be far stronger and longer-lasting than our current concrete structures, they will require fewer repairs and will last longer than any other concrete buildings. In theory, this nano approach to concrete engineering could result in concrete that lasts for thousands of years.

Keep Going - Check out this Great Related Dornob Article:

Curing Concrete: Engineered Bacteria Naturally Heals Cracks


DIY Concrete Light Bulb: Make Your Own Coat Hooks

Four months after TriMet eliminated the free zone to help balance its budget, the agency said that it plans to start a full-court press on sports fans without a valid transit fare starting Monday.

Hey geeks! We're beta testing a new site design. Please leave comments here.

katayanagi:

I painted a tasteful portrait of Beartato, Party Cat, and Reginald from Nedroid. They look very handsome.

This is very well done. It is also extremely terrifying. Thanks!

Submitted by: Unknown (via Neatorama)

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Twitter is buzzing with plans to evade the debt ceiling with a commemorative coin loophole, and supporters are trying to get the White House to take up the cause. Since the beginning of the current debt crisis years ago, pundits and bloggers have periodically suggested that the US Treasury mint a single, massively valuable platinum coin — say, a trillion dollars — and deposit it at the Federal Reserve, paying down the national debt without changing our laws or budget. But the idea has gotten new life during debates over the fiscal cliff, and it's been taken up outside the usual circle of finance debates. Supporters have deployed the hashtag #MintTheCoin, and a White House petition was started yesterday; it's currently at about 3,000...

Continue reading…

Boston MBTA Green Lne Average Weekday Traffic (2010) by Barrett Lane

Wednesday’s post, Subterranean Veins of Europe, and its discussion of design choices distorting data reminded me of this map/graph sent to me by Barrett Lane last year. At first glance, this is a really neat and cleverly devised concept: the ridership numbers for each station on Boston’s Green Line are presented in the form of a stylised map of the lines, with vertical bars representing those numbers. It looks great, there’s some solid data behind the graphic, and the visual conceit is very appropriate.

However, there’s one major flaw that — for me — stops this graphic from being a total success. Barrett has used three different vertical scales for his graphs, which prevents rapid visual comparison between numbers (which one might say is the whole point of graphical presentation of data).

The same height represents 5,000 riders on the “B” and “C” branches, 4,000 riders on the “D” and “E” branches, and 20,000 on the main trunk line. The graphic would be far more effective if the bars for the trunk line stations towered above those of the branch lines, don’t you think?

(Source: Barrett Lane)

ictidomys:

Indigenous Cultures of the North Pacific circa 1880. By State of the Salmon.

Filed under: Art, Parting Shot

In perhaps the quintessential "I can't believe no one did this sooner" moment in the brief history of the comic book/tumblr age, upcoming Uncanny X-Force scribe Sam Humphries has created "F Yeah Mohawk Storm," a tumblr page dedicated to Storm's ... Read more

 

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Seattle Weekly
Seattle Times sports columnist Steve Kelley has standard reasons for retiring at 63: “I find myself at a lot more games thinking ‘I’ve written this story 411 times now. Isn’t that enough?’” he tells Seattle Weekly contributor … Read more

Last week, we reported on Xbox Live’s cloud-storage troubles. Microsoft just updated its Xbox Live status page to confirm it is again suffering from those issues.

Users are reporting that they cannot access their game saves and user data that they have stored on Microsoft’s cloud storage. Known as “the cloud,” this is data saved remotely on an Internet server.

Additionally, Microsoft is also aware of issue users are having with redeeming, buying, and viewing Microsoft Points. We’ve contacted the publisher to determine if the two issues interrelate to one another.

Ironically, the aforementioned Xbox Live status page is also experiencing errors. When it is working, it states that Microsoft is working on the problems and will update the status of the issues with any new information every 30 minutes.

In the wake of the last cloud-storage outage, Microsoft gave everyone affected a free month of Xbox Live Gold.

We’ll update this story with any new information.

Filed under: Games

Why does Portland's airport, the inviting gateway to arguably the greatest coffee city in the world, have such god-awful coffee?

Back at the turn of the century, shoving MiniITX motherboards into just about everything was all the rage with the technologist crowd. [waterbury] had the idea of making a computer out of an SNES, but with the added ability of reading SNES cartridges. This idea had been floating around in [waterbury]‘s head for years now, and with a Raspberry Pi he can finally make his project a reality.

After desoldering a cartridge connector from an original SNES, [waterbury] plugged it in to a piece of perf board and started to figure out how to actually read the cartridge. An SNES cartridge need 16 address pins, 8 data pins, 8 bank control pins and 4 other control pins to be read; a total of 36 pins that [waterbury] accessed with the help of a neat I/O expander and a whole bunch of level converters.

[waterbury] accessed these data, address, and control lines via the Raspberry Pi’s I2C interface, a non-trivial task that took 70 minutes to read Donkey Kong Country before he found a way to speed up the Raspi by a factor of two. You can check out [waterbury]‘s complete project – able to read cartridges and play roms with EmulationStation after the break. Also, the code for the cart reader is available on [waterbury]‘s git
.

Filed under: Raspberry Pi

Several times a day, a NOAA weather satellite passes over your head, beaming down pictures of weather systems and cloud formations. These transmissions aren’t encrypted, and given the requisite hardware it’s possible for you to download these images from space as [Lovro] shows us in a tutorial video.

To get these near real-time satellite pictures, [Lovro] used one of those USB TV tuners we’ve grown so fond of. A somewhat specialized antenna is required to receive the right hand polarized transmissions from NOAA weather satellites, but with a few bits of wood and wire, [Lovro] made a helical antenna to listen in on the weather satellites transmitting around 137 MHz. After gathering a whole bunch of data from the satellites with SDRsharp, [Lovro] used an image decoder to turn an audio file into a picture taken from space just hours ago.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen images from a NOAA weather satellite downloaded with a software defined radio; last year [hpux735] did just that with a somewhat inexpensive Softrock SDR. [Lovro]‘s use of a USB TV tuner to receive the transmission from NOAA satellites is a lot easier on the pocketbook, though, with the largest expense being an investment in time to build a helical antenna.

Filed under: radio hacks

[Lambgx02] got tired of his Android device getting bogged down and decided to dig down to the cause of the issue. His investigation led him to believe that entropy is causing the slowdown. He believes that his workaround reduces 90% of the lag on the average Android device.

So how is it possible that entropy is causing the problem? It seems there is a bottleneck when an app requests a random number from the Linux kernel running at the lowest level of the device. Android is set up to use /dev/random for all random number requests, but [Lambgx02] says that location has a very shallow pool of numbers available. When they run out the kernel has to reload with a new seed and this is blocking the app that requested the data from continuing.

His solution was to write his own app that seeds /dev/random once every second using a number from /dev/urandom. He mentions that this might cause a security vulnerability as seeding the random data in this way is not quite as random. There may also be issues with battery life, so make sure to monitor performance if you give it a try.

[via Reddit]

Filed under: android hacks, linux hacks

An anonymous reader writes "An irritated father of a 23-year-old gamer hired 'In-game assassins' to attempt to make his son quit playing video games and have him get a job. 'Feng's idea was that his son would get bored of playing games if he was killed every time he logged on, and that he would start putting more effort into getting a job.' While the son recently had a job at a software development company he quit because he decided he didn't like the work."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dark Igloo has rendered lace doilies featuring the logos for Twitter and RSS.

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

Details are scarce on Compressorhead, this animatronic band. All we know is that it rocks. The video shows enough detail that it appears not to be a fake. I, for one, welcome our new robotic power chords.

Read the full article on MAKE