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Troy Carney, a New Zealand artist living in Hawaii, paints with oil and gold leaf. He creates bas relief images of dreamy, ethereal scenes from those tropical islands and other beaches around the Pacific. You can see many more examples of his work at the link.

Link

What will they think of next? Aluminum bubble wrap! Molecular superglue! And how about that titanium foam? It's as simple as coating a piece of polyurethane foam with titanium, and then getting rid of the foam. Neat, but this next part is even better:

The exact properties depend on the porosity of the foam, but the results are strong and—most importantly—incredibly light. In fact, the material is just perfect for replacing bone: it has incredibly similar mechanical properties and, because it's porous, new bone can grow and around its structure, truly integrating the implant within the skeleton. Anything that gets us that much closer to a real-life Wolverine is okay in our book.

Read about five such brave new materials and what they may be good for at Gizmodo. Link

From Quirkology's Richard Wiseman comes another roundup of pub tricks that you can use to impress and/or vex your friends.

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Chopping Block comic for Friday, September 6, 2013

Have you guys been watching Under The Dome? Me neither.

So much to do! Sleep is not an option.

Ron Paulk posted a proud video showing off his awesome homemade workbench and found himself inundated with requests to build similar benches for his fans. Instead, he created a business selling plans to workbench aficionados, which has brought him enormous satisfaction, as he describes in this video. As he describes, the customers for the plans especially love the fact that they built their workbenches themselves, modifying them to suit their particular needs.

How the Paulk Workbench Unexpectedly Became a Product Design Hit

Max your 401k or equivalent employee contribution
Buy inexpensive, well diversified mutual funds such as Vanguard Target 20XX funds
Never buy or sell and individual security. The person on the other side of the table knows more than you do about this stuff
Save 20% of your money
Pay your credit card balance in full every month
Maximize tax-advantages savings vehicles like Roth, SEP and 529 accounts.
Pay attention to fees. Avoid actively managed funds.
Make financial advisor commit to a fiduciary standard
Promote social insurance programs to help people when things go wrong

They forgot "acquire enough money for half of this stuff to matter," but there you go. Ezra Klein explains. [Washington Post]

Itsy Bitsy is a free 78-page Kindle story by John Ajvide Lindqvist, Swedish horror writer of Let the Right One In. I have not read it yet, but from the description below it sounds like a paparazzo gets punished, so I am looking forward to reading it. A young celebrity lives on my street and the paparazzi tear up and down it like maniacs. One day they are going to kill a pedestrian.

Destined to become a modern classic, the short story Itsy Bitsy is guaranteed to make you think twice before you take a picture of someone in a bikini. In this creepy shocker, horror author superstar John Ajvide Lindqvist gives new meaning to punishing the paparazzi.

Itsy Bitsy

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David Harper's installation "Stacks" is part of the collection at the Stone Quarry Hill Art Park in upstate New York. For another view, check out this shot.

(via Kadrey)

Kites are just people wishing that they had birds as pets. That’s all.

Truth is Beauty by Marco Cochrane / Photo by Trey Radcliff

As the Snowden leaks (and the materials that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has compelled the DoJ to publish) show, the NSA is out of control. The laws that supposedly limit its activities are routinely flouted; the court that is supposed to oversee its activities is a rubber-stamp machine; and the supposed Congressional oversight of its activities are kept in the dark and denied any real authority.

Ten lawmakers in the Senate and the House have proposed eight bills to reform American surveillance laws. While it's nice that Congress has woken up to the dangers of all this spying, that's still a lot of legislation to keep track of! Thankfully, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Mark M. Jaycox, a policy analyst and legislative assistant, has compiled a cheat sheet with commentary on each of the bills, showing how they relate to one another. Can't tell the players without a scorecard!

Section 215 Bills:

Sen. Patrick Leahy: The FISA Accountability and Privacy Protection Act of 2013

Reps. John Conyers and Justin Amash: The LIBERT-E Act

Ending Secret Law:

Reps. Adam Schiff and Todd Rokita: The Ending Secret Law Act

Corporate Disclosure:

Sen. Al Franken: The Surveillance Transparency Act of 2013

Reps. Rick Larsen and Justin Amash: The Government Surveillance Transparency Act of 2013

Restructuring the FISA Court:

Sen. Richard Blumenthal: The FISA Court Reform Act of 2013 and the FISA Court Judge Selection Reform Act

Rep. Adam Schiff: The Presidential Appointment of FISA Court Judges Act

Rep. Steve Cohen: The FISA Court Accountability Act

EFF's Cheat Sheet to Congress' NSA Spying Bills

According to a report in Der Spiegel, the NSA has cracked the protection on Android, iOS and Blackberry devices, and can access protected files, including contacts and location history. Slashdot also notes a WashPo report stating that Obama's justice department had secretly granted permission for the NSA to deliberately spy on Americans' phone calls, and to retain stored phone calls for extraordinary lengths of time.

The documents state that it is possible for the NSA to tap most sensitive data held on these smart phones, including contact lists, SMS traffic, notes and location information about where a user has been.

The documents also indicate that the NSA has set up specific working groups to deal with each operating system, with the goal of gaining secret access to the data held on the phones.

In the internal documents, experts boast about successful access to iPhone data in instances where the NSA is able to infiltrate the computer a person uses to sync their iPhone. Mini-programs, so-called "scripts," then enable additional access to at least 38 iPhone features.

The documents suggest the intelligence specialists have also had similar success in hacking into BlackBerrys. A 2009 NSA document states that it can "see and read SMS traffic." It also notes there was a period in 2009 when the NSA was temporarily unable to access BlackBerry devices. After the Canadian company acquired another firm the same year, it changed the way in compresses its data. But in March 2010, the department responsible at Britain's GCHQ intelligence agency declared in a top secret document it had regained access to BlackBerry data and celebrated with the word, "champagne!"

Privacy Scandal: NSA Can Spy on Smart Phone Data [Spiegel Online]

It's been a long time anybody has mentioned that Star Trek Into Darkness is not, in fact, a very good movie, so thanks to the Honest Trailers guys for getting this important message back out there. Looking back, I have no idea why we thought a movie that didn't have the sense to use a colon would be okay.

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Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

 The Beatles had just finished their concert at the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium and were relaxing in their suite at the Delmonico Hotel in New York. It was August 28, 1964.

We all have our special dates that have a big influence of effect on the rest of our lives. For the Beatles, this was to be one of those days.

Bob Dylan, a huge hero to each of the Beatles, and his journalist friend Al Aronowitz pushed their way through police and hordes of Beatles fans in the lobby, and eventually made it up the elevator to the Beatles' floor. Even there, they found more police, journalists, the Kingston Trio, and folk singers Peter, Paul, and Mary. After that, they finally made their way into the Beatles' official domain. The boys had just finished their room service meal.

As Dylan stood in the doorway, the boys noticed he was shorter than they thought. Brian Epstein, the Beatles' manager, asked Dylan if he's like a drink.

"Cheap wine!" Dylan replied.

Epstein clumsily made introductions all around, and everyone waited while Brian dispatched one of the Beatle aides to fetch Dylan's requested wine. During the wait, the boys asked Dylan if he'd like to take some speed pills with them. Pills, at this point in time, were the Beatles drug of choice. Although illegally obtained, they were not, in themselves, illegal. But Dylan suggested they smoke some marijuana instead.
 
Brian sheepishly admitted they had never smoked pot before.

"But what about your song?" asked a surprised Dylan. "The one where you sing 'I get high?'"

John Lennon informed Dylan that the actual chorus in the song "I Want to Hold Your Hand" was "I can't hide," not "I get high."

Surprised but undeterred, Dylan then offered the Beatles some marijuana he and Aronowitz had brought with them.

A bit timid, but still interested, the Beatles agreed, and those present bolted the door and pushed bathroom towels under every available crack and crevice. Dylan then proceeded to roll the Beatles' first joint. After he finished, he handed it to John.

John, a bit apprehensive, handed it to Ringo, calling him "my royal taster." Ringo, a bit braver, then became the first Beatle to sample marijuana. Getting a bit greedy, Ringo proceeded to smoke the entire joint himself!

But Dylan and Aronowitz rolled a half dozen more and everybody eventually got into the act, including manager Epstein.

The Beatles got into fits of giggles, laughing sometimes at actually funny things, but also breaking up at a wink, a nod, or even a pause in the conversation. Paul summoned aide Mal Evans to take notes on his pontifications. Paul remembered lecturing Mal about the "seven stages" of life and truth. Mal dutifully took down every word.

Brian laughed hysterically and said, "I'm so high I'm on the ceiling!" At another interval, Brian kept pointing to himself, laughing and repeatedly saying, "Jew! Jew! Jew! Jew!"

Finally, all smoked out and exhausted from laughing, the Beatles aired out the room and a room service guy was summoned to clean things up. As the boys watched him doing his routine cleaning chores, they laughed hysterically at his every action.

The Beatles didn't fall immediately under the spell of marijuana, but after a few months, according to John, they were "smoking it for breakfast," "Let's have a laugh" soon became their code line for "Let's have some marijuana."

The ritual of the four Beatles, in the middle of the Beatlemania hurricane they created, huddling up together in their latest hotel's bathroom, stuffing a towel under the bathroom door, and lighting up a joint together soon became fairly routine. According to George, these times together in the bathroom were "the only times they could find any peace."

Their next film, Help! was filmed, not entirely, but a majority of the time, while the Beatles were high on marijuana. Although their current album Beatles for Sale was almost entirely finished and was not effected, their next, Rubber Soul, was definitely influenced by marijuana.

Paul's 1966 song "Got to Get You Into My Life" was not about a woman, as most everyone thought, but was his personal homage to marijuana. The Beatles' 967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band included a song sung by Ringo, "With a Little Help from My Friends," which did finally use the mistaken lyric Dylan heard: "I get high."

Later in 1967, all four Beatles, plus manager Epstein, signed a pledge in The Times to legalize pot. George Harrison was busted for possession of pot in 1969 (although he claimed he was set up and the marijuana was "planted" at his house by the police). Paul McCartney was busted several times in the '70s and '80s for marijuana possession, most infamously in Japan, where he was jailed for over a week.

While the Beatles were indisputably great musicians and songwriters, with or without drugs like marijuana, it is obvious the drugs they took had an influence on the style and content of their music. All four would eventually try LSD, with John admitting to taking "thousands of trips."

John was, admittedly, always the biggest drug-taker of the group; "probably because I'm the craziest," he surmised. While of the four, only John, along with wife Yoko Ono, later experimented with heroin, marijuana definitely played a huge role in each of the Beatles' lives -both on a personal and on a professional level.

 

(video link)

Funny or Die made a humorous animation about the event. Contains NSFW language.

I just reloaded them. This is probably the last batch as I ramp up to new stuff for the fall.

Grab yours right here. Limit 100 per person.

It's the perfect painting to find at a garage sale: the 1970s-style space whale, floating through a psychedelic wonderland of nebulae and hippie hopes for world peace. But where did this iconic image come from?

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Sorry for the lack of Wednesday’s comic. I wasn’t feeling quite…. myself.

Can you do me a favor? Can you buy an item from the store? That would be really great. Thank you!

Internet security expert Bruce Schneier writes about Lavabit founder Ladar Levison's "extreme moral act in the face of government pressure," in closing the security-focused email service rather than complying with a US government order to share user data. "It's what happened next that is the most chilling. The government threatened him with arrest, arguing that shutting down this e-mail service was a violation of the order."

Illustration: YUKO SHIMIZU

Enjoy this all-new tale of Marcus Yallow, the hero of the Little Brother and Homeland.

The story is about how Marcus and his friends deal with a severe Bay Area earthquake centered on Oakland—and how people facing sudden emergencies and catastrophes do a lot less looting, and a lot more constructive self-organization, than we're taught to expect.

Adds Patrick Nielsen Hayden, the novella's editor: "There are also way-cool crowdsourced drones." A teaser follows.

If you grow up in San Francisco, you grow up with a bone-deep sense of what it means when the ground starts to move: quake. The first quake I remember was just a little tremor, a 2.8, but whether it’s the big one or a little dish-rattler, there’s no experience in the world like the experience of having the ground start to move. It’s wrong like seeing a broken bone sticking out of your skin, wrong like being carried upside down, wrong like trying to sign your name with your non-dominant hand, but times a bazillion. I was six when that little dish-rattler knocked the knickknacks off the shelves, and as I recall, I went from sitting on the living room sofa to crouching under the kitchen table by teleportation, or at least I moved so fast and so automatically that I have no recollection of consciously deciding to move.

When the Seneca quake hit, I was halfway from Oakland airport to Coliseum BART, on the shuttle bus, and again, wham, one minute we were tootling down the road and the next, the road buckled and the bus was tilted 45’ up and to the right, and we were all rolling toward the back, flailing or curling up into protective balls, and there was a sound like a burrito finding its way through the digestive system of a cow the size of the galaxy, a rrrrrrrumble that went right up through your skin to your bones and joints, more felt than heard. When it stopped, the sound got louder: car alarms, crashing buildings, screams.

That wasn’t a good day.

Read the rest: Lawful Interception [Tor]

Picture the scene: a quiet moment between Russian president Vladimir Putin and his prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev. A momentary intersection between two lives made busy–so busy–by the hard work of government. Medvedev has just put his bra back on. He is disheveled. Putin grabs a comb and runs it lazily through his deputy's hair. Medvedev's eyes firmly engage the viewer, but Putin looks oddly to one side. What is he looking at? Perhaps his eye falls upon the Romanov Tercentenary Egg on his desk, adorned with portrait miniatures of the dynasty.

For the first time, they seem to gaze back at him, no longer lost within Fabergé's gilded relic. Putin no longer sees their deaths in his mind's eye, that invigorating minute in Yekaterinburg. Now he hears only their voices, the whispers that wake him. Though both men creep toward the threshold of the golden afternoon, the evening is yet young.

Alas, this delightful set-piece is no more: police raided the gallery and took it away without a word of explanation. [BBC]

This, writes Gawker's John Cook, is a taxi used in "NYPD's indiscriminate and probably illegal spying program." According to the two Pulitzer Prize–winning authors of the book, Enemies Within, it's a "real yellow cab, complete with an authentic taxi medallion registered under a fake name used by the department's intelligence division to conduct surveillance operations."

It's mainly used to keep tabs on activities around New York's mosques, say the book's authors, Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman.

Cook's advice, "If you hail this cab, don't tip."

This is the NYPD's Secret Spy Cab