Maitri

The internet of things may be coming to us all faster and harder than we'd like.

Reports coming out of Russia suggest that some Chinese domestic appliances, notably kettles, come kitted out with malware—in the shape of small embedded computers that leech off the mains power to the device. The covert computational passenger hunts for unsecured wifi networks, connects to them, and joins a spam and malware pushing botnet. The theory is that a home computer user might eventually twig if their PC is a zombie, but who looks inside the base of their electric kettle, or the casing of their toaster? We tend to forget that the Raspberry Pi is as powerful as an early 90s UNIX server or a late 90s desktop; it costs £25, is the size of a credit card, and runs off a 5 watt USB power source. And there are cheaper, less competent small computers out there. Building them into kettles is a stroke of genius for a budding crime lord looking to build a covert botnet.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about.

I have an iPad. (You may be an Android or Windows RT proponent. Don't stop reading: this is just as applicable to you, too.) I mostly use it as a reacreational gizmo for reading and watching movies, and a little light gaming. But from time to time it's handy to have a keyboard—I use it for email too. So I bought one of these (warning: don't buy it direct, it costs a lot less than £90 on the high street). It's a lovely piece of kit: charges over micro-USB, magnetically clips to the front of the iPad to cover it when not in use, communicates via bluetooth.

But I suddenly had a worrying thought.

This keyboard contains an embedded device powerful enough to run a bluetooth stack. The additional complexity of adding wifi is minimal, as is the power draw if it's designed right. Here's an SD card, with wifi. It's aimed at camera owners: the idea is it can automatically upload your snapshots to the cloud. Turns out it runs Linux and it's hackable.

Look at that cute Logitech bluetooth keyboard. There's a lot of space in it, behind the slot the iPad sits in. Presumably that chunk of the case is full of battery, and the small embedded computer that handles the bluetooth stack. Even if it isn't hackable in its own right, what's to stop someone from buying a bunch of bluetooth keyboards and installing a hidden computer in them? Done properly it'll run a keylogger and some sniffing tools to gather data about the device it's connected to. It stays silent until it detects an open wifi network. Then it can hook up and hork up a hairball of personal data—anything you typed on it—at a command and control server. Best do it stealthily: between the hours of 1am and 4am, and in any event not less than an hour after the most recent keypress.

I hear tablets are catching on everywhere. Want to dabble in industrial espionage? Get a guy with a clipboard to walk into an executive's office and swap their keyboard for an identical-looking one. When they come back from lunch they'll suffer a moment of annoyance when their iPad or Microsoft Surface turns out to have forgotten it's keyboard. But they'll get it paired up again fast, and forget all about it.

I don't want you to think I'm picking on Logitech, by the way. Exactly the same headache applies to every battery-powered bluetooth keyboard. I'm dozy and slow on the uptake: I should have been all over this years ago.

And it's not just keyboards. It's ebook readers. Flashlights. Not your smartphone, but the removable battery in your smartphone. (Have you noticed it running down just a little bit faster?) Your toaster and your kettle are just the start. Could your electric blanket be spying on you? Koomey's law is going to keep pushing the power consumption of our devices down even after Moore's law grinds to a halt: and once Moore's law ends, the only way forward is to commoditize the product of those ultimate fab lines, and churn out chips for pennies. In another decade, we'll have embedded computers running some flavour of Linux where today we have smart inventory control tags—any item in a shop that costs more than about £50, basically. Some of those inventory control tags will be watching and listening to us; and some of their siblings will, repurposed, be piggy-backing a ride home and casing the joint.

The possibilities are endless: it's the dark side of the internet of things. If you'll excuse me now, I've got to go wallpaper my apartment in tinfoil ...

As I mentioned last time, a good starting point for geophysical computing is to write a mathematical function describing a seismic pulse. The IPython Notebook is designed to be used seamlessly with Matplotlib, which is nice because we can throw our function on graph and see if we were right. When you start your own notebook, type

ipython notebook --pylab inline

We'll make use of a few functions within NumPy, a workhorse to do the computational heavy-lifting, and Matplotlib, a plotting library.

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

Next, we can write some code that defines a function called ricker. It computes a Ricker wavelet for a range of discrete time-values t and dominant frequencies, f:

def ricker(f, length=0.512, dt=0.001):
    t = np.linspace(-length/2, (length-dt)/2, length/dt)
    y = (1.-2.*(np.pi**2)*(f**2)*(t**2))*np.exp(-(np.pi**2)*(f**2)*(t**2))
    return t, y

Here the function needs 3 input parameters; frequency, f, the length of time over which we want it to be defined, and the sample rate of the signal, dt. Calling the function returns two arrays, the time axis t, and the value of the function, y.

To create a 5 Hz Ricker wavelet, assign the value of 5 to the variable f, and pass it into the function like so,

f = 5
t, y = ricker (f)

To plot the result,

plt.plot(t, y)

But with a few more commands, we can improve the cosmetics,

plt.figure(figsize=(7,4))
plt.plot( t, y, lw=2, color='black', alpha=0.5)
plt.fill_between(t, y, 0,  y > 0.0, interpolate=False, hold=True, color='blue', alpha = 0.5)
plt.fill_between(t, y, 0, y < 0.0, interpolate=False, hold=True, color='red', alpha = 0.5)

# Axes configuration and settings (optional)
plt.title('%d Hz Ricker wavelet' %f, fontsize = 16 )
plt.xlabel( 'two-way time (s)', fontsize = 14)
plt.ylabel('amplitude', fontsize = 14)
plt.ylim((-1.1,1.1))
plt.xlim((min(t),max(t)))
plt.grid()
plt.show()

Next up, we'll make this wavelet interact with a model of the earth using some math. Let me know if you get this up and running on your own.

Let's do it

It's short notice, but I'll be in Calgary again early in the new year, and I will be running a one-day version of this new course. To start building your own tools, pick a date and sign up:

    

On December 4, when you were doing whatever you were doing, a gamer who goes by the name of Artio was apparently chartering a plane to fly her to a remote town in Alaska. Why? So she could make a particularly powerful move in the video game Ingress.

Read more...

While you're anxiously awaiting the sixth Westeros book from George R.R. Martin, there's something to tide you over. This week, Martin released a new novella set in the past of Westeros, and it shows just what happens when there's a war with tons of dragons.

Read more...

Tom Scocca writes that ostentatious positivity, pitched as a noble response to the web's omnipresent snark, typically amounts only to the worse thing that snark itself cures: smarm.

What is smarm, exactly? Smarm is a kind of performance—an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. Smarm disapproves. Smarm would rather talk about anything other than smarm. Why, smarm asks, can't everyone just be nicer?

The most significant explicator of the niceness rule—the loudest Thumper of all, the true prophetic voice of anti-negativity—is neither the cartoon rabbit nor the publicists' group nor Julavits, nor even David Denby. It is The Believer's founder and impresario, Dave Eggers.

Smarm is another word for Serious Culture—"In smarm is power"—and you know what to do with that.

Cruising around the web last weekend looking for geosciencey Christmas presents, coupled with having 3 kids (aged 9, 5, and 3) to entertain and educate, I just realized I have a long list of awesome toys to share. Well, I say toys, but these amazing things are almost in a class of their own...

Bigshot camera

A full kit for a child to build his or her own camera, and it's only $89. Probably best suited to those aged 7 up to about 12. Features:

• comes with everything you need, including a screwdriver,
• a crank instead of a battery,
• multiple lenses including anaglyphic 3D,
• a set of online tutorials about the components and how they work — enlightening!

LittleBits

Epic. For kids (and others) that aren't quite ready for a soldering iron, these magentic blocks just work. There are blocks for power, for input (like this pressure sensor), and for output. They can, and should, be combined with each other and anything else (Lego, Meccano, straws, dinosaurs) for maximum effect. Wonderful.

Anything at all from SparkFun

... and there's Adafruit too. I know we had Tandy or RadioShack or whatever in the early 1980s, but we didn't have the Internet. So life was, you know, hard. No longer. Everything at SparkFun is affordable, well-designed, well-documented, and—well—fun. I mean, who wouldn't want to build their own Simon Says? 

And this is just a fraction of what's out there... Lego MINDSTORMS for the bigger kids, GoldieBlox for smaller kids, Raspberry Pi for the teens. I get very excited when I think about what this means for the future of invention, creativity, and applied science. 

Even more exciting, it's us grown-ups that get to help them explore all this fun. Where will you start?

It's either a medical miracle, or the ultimate surveillance device, depending on your perspective. This incredible new sensor can monitor drug levels in your blood in real-time, and has already been shown to work in mice. This video shows how it functions.

Read more...

The frickin’ geniuses at Marchex—some doggone data-mining/advertising firm—have announced that Ohioans curse more than residents of any other state, on average. This is the result of a study that compiled the data from 600,000 dadgum recordings of customer-service calls to businesses. (That’s right: When that message comes on to tell you “this call may be recorded,” this is the kind of horse pucky they’re using it for.) So maybe Ohio really does swear more than all the other mother-loving states in the whole dadgum Union, or maybe they just get especially crappy customer service. In any case, Ohioans in the sample swore about once every 150 conversations, which doesn't sound like so fudging much.

Since these Marchex ice-holes were already invading our privacy anyway, they decided they’d also track the usage of “please” and “thank you” in the phone calls. The results of this additional bullspit survey determined that ...

It’s not a “selfie”, it’s an “all aloney” –I’m on Reddit AMA now! http://t.co/pvlEKjte8z pic.twitter.com/O1oeX4elRm

— Joel Hodgson (@JoelGHodgson) November 26, 2013

Joel Hodgson, creator of the show Mystery Science Theather 3000, held an AMA on Reddit to give fans the answers to all of their burning questions as he prepares for the show’s Thanksgiving day web marathon. Take a look at some of the best answers and advice he gave, and attempt to keep your sanity with the help of your Reddit friends.

If you want to catch up on some classic MST3K and enrich your (and your family’s) enjoyment of Thanksgiving tomorrow, tweet the episodes you’d like to see on the web marathon @JoelGHodgson. Then, you can watch the fan-selected marathon presented by Hodgson on MST3KTurkeyDay.com.

Of course, you can look over the whole, multi-hour AMA on Reddit yourself, but we’ve collected a few of our favorite exchanges for you:

Did the show ever make a movie’s creators angry?

mrgregknight
My son and I love watching re-runs of MST3K. Did you ever get any negative replies from writers/producers/etc of the movies you screened? I would think that some of them may have been pissed off at being on your show.

Joel_Hodgson_
The only time I’m heard someone say something negative was one of the producers who said “I know my movie isn’t Citizen Kane but did they have to do this?” Ultimately he took the money and let us do our thing.

It’s apparently not always about whether or not a movie is “good.”

JW8790
Did you ever riff a movie on MST3K that you thought was genuinely good?

Joel_Hodgson_
I loved so many of the movies. A movie being bad has nothing to do with it really. In every movie you riff, you find really great moments regardless. Just saying they are bad movies is a coloring book version of what we do, really. As you know, you can riff on any movie. But the cheesy movies are easier to get. It was just the path of least resistance, to use cheesy movies.

Mocking movies brings families together and (maybe) increases intelligence.

Troomaan
I’m 34, my oldest brother is 53. He and I were distant until the fateful day I started quoting some of the movies I’d seen on MST3K. He used to watch some of those movies when they were on TV in the wee hours of the night (in the days before cable). You really helped bring me closer to my family.
Thank you so much for the show!

Joel_Hodgson_
Thanks, that is so sweet. If you watch enough episodes, it’s like Mozart, and scientists have determined that it increases your intellect.

Joel gives his sage advice to those trying to copy the show’s format.

analogkid01
Hey Joel, we actually met at the Lakeshore Theater in Chicago back in 2008…you thought I was your friend’s son Ryan, which I was not. But I was pretty tongue-tied and forgot to introduce myself. So hi, I’m BJ, it’s great to meet you.
How do you feel about homegrown MST3K knockoffs? What advice would you have for a group who’s stealing the MST3K format for creating educational videos for kids?

Joel_Hodgson_
I love it when people do movie riffs and my only advice would be don’t be disembodied voices on a video where no one knows who you are. If you don’t produce anything that explains why you’re riffing on a movie it’s very disorienting. You need to introduce yourself to the audience by creating a theme song or create an introduction on video so that the people who don’t know you will know you.

Joel is the greatest ever and everybody loves him (and his robot pals).

floralmuse
I love you!
Why is Servo so adorable?

Joel_Hodgson_
I think he’s the universal passion being.

GirlGargoyle
Why are you so adorable?

maynardftw
He’s the universal passion being.

Now we will forever think of Joel Hodgson as the universal passion being—no matter who else he tries to bestow that title upon.

(via Reddit, image via Joel Hodgson on Twitter)

Meanwhile in related links

• For more Thanksgiving fun, try these Deadpool sweetrolls
• Improv Everywhere makes movies funny their own way with Spartacus in real life
• Kids watch Batdad and have their own humorous reactions

Read @JohnLAllenJr on Pope Francis's quest for synthesis, w/shrewd observations about internal life of the church: http://t.co/Geof0T6fEW.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) November 27, 2013

And then read @pegobry offering a free-marketeer Catholic's response: http://t.co/IyyNemehnY

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) November 27, 2013

To which I would only add this: It is important for conservative Catholics to listen to the pope when he challenges them/us …

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) November 27, 2013

… but it is *also* healthy for conservative Catholics to learn how to disagree w/a pope on some points w/out having their faith shaken.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) November 27, 2013

Listen Respectfully, Then Agree or Disagree…Except on Dogma © 2007-2013 by the authors of Popehat. This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only. Using this feed on any other site is a copyright violation. No scraping.

A glorious rant from Nick Harkaway on embodied cognition:

Because NO, NO, NO, you are not a ghost driving a machine. You are not a tiny green homunculus sitting at the controls of a steampunk automaton. You are not Spock trapped in a body that wants to be Kirk. You are not dual, you are not refined intellect riding gross matter like an unruly mustang. You are not Ariel carried by Caliban.

What are you, then? Please, allow Nick to explain.

What’s the difference between cognition and consciousness, anyway? Do brain scientists and/or philosophers of mind draw a sharp distinction? I think I like the word “cognition” about 10X better than “consciousness.” Consciousness feels flat, passive; a thing that is. Cognition feels sharp, active; a thing that does.

In 2008 I pointed out that the TSA's pseudo-scientific "behavior detection" program seemed almost indistinguishable from random chance. Five years and millions of gropes-by-government-agents later, the General Accounting Office agrees:

The program called Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT) trains TSA officers to identify suspicious behavior that could reveal a terrorist. While it has been criticized for years for alleged racial profiling, TSA officials say it is a key part of screening airline passengers.

The Government Accountability Office reviewed 400 studies over 60 years that found people are only slightly better than chance at spotting deceptive behavior. And a Department of Homeland Security study in April 2011 intended to validate the program was unable to demonstrate its effectiveness because of unreliable data, according to the new GAO report.

The program has cost a billion dollars. The TSA can't demonstrate that it works using accepted scientific means. The TSA's reaction is unsurprising: "yeah, well, our other methods are even worse:"

Behavior Detection Officers also operate a program called Managed Inclusion which evaluates passengers at the checkpoints and allows some to enter the faster Pre-Check lanes.

"Defunding the program is not the answer," Pistole said. "There would be fewer passengers going through expedited screening, there would be increased pat downs, there would be longer lines, and more frustration by the traveling public."

Or, put another way, a piece of shit is better than no piece of anything:

The union representing TSA officers defended the program.

"An imperfect deterrent to terrorist attacks is better than no deterrent at all, " said American Federation of Government Employees National President David Cox, speaking in a conference call after the hearing. "Is it a perfect program? No, but until we have a better program, we shouldn't just trash and burn this program."

That's so sciency! "Well, I can't prove this hypothesis. But until I come up with a better hypothesis, I think we should stick with this one."

Meanwhile, in Texas . . .

. . . did you just say "aw, shit, this is gonna be awful, because it's Texas?" Perhaps you did. Perhaps you are not completely unjustified in leaping to that conclusion. But you're wrong. Texas, it turns out, passed an innovative law to allow prisoners to attack convictions premised on discredited junk science spouted by prosecution "experts." Last week, using that law, a Texas court overturned the convictions of four women caught up in the "ritualized child abuse" scare of the 1980s and 1990s:

Indeed, at the original trial of the San Antonio Four, a pediatrician testified that the victims exhibited physical signs of sexual abuse. This expert testimony provided the prosecution with much needed corroboration of the two girls' stories. Such medical testimony, however, has now been debunked by new understandings in the field of pediatrics. If the two girls had been physically examined using today's standards, the medical testimony would no longer corroborate the allegations of sexual abuse.

Like many of the defendants in ritualized-abuse cases, the San Antonio Four faced bizarre and fanciful claims that should have triggered skepticism — had not "think of the children!" drowned out all critical thought. Like many such defendants, junk science and bizarre and facially questionable allegations combined with innate identity-based hostility:

A witness for the prosecution, pediatrician Nancy Kellogg, testified that the two young girls’ injuries were used in satanic rituals prevalent among lesbians.

I don't claim to be a scientist. I'm functionally scientifically illiterate. But I know enough to understand that science is about questioning and proving, and that when it's the government that shows up with the snake oil, we too often accept it without scrutiny. That may be because the government usually packages junk science with fear.

Dispatches From The Junk Science Front © 2007-2013 by the authors of Popehat. This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only. Using this feed on any other site is a copyright violation. No scraping.

Recorded during a lecture at the University of Toronto. Lyrics are included. Level of scientific accuracy is spectacular. I'm really looking forward to the release of the GZA's full physics and cosmology-themed album, "Dark Matter".

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smug is only a month away from being released, so it’s time to get obsessed with Middle Earth all over again. In order to get us reacquainted with Tolkien’s magical realm, HRS UK put together this lovely travel guide so you won’t find yourself saying the wrong thing to the locals.

While the explanations of all the different locations in Middle Earth are pretty great, what really made us buy into this travel guide was the “etiquette” and “Staying Safe” sections, which teaches you all about the different races and what not to say to them. Now you’ll know exactly what to do if you ever get stuck traveling with a hobbit. The trick is to eat a whole lot. Like, all the time.

(via HRS UK)

Meanwhile in related links

• Here’s how much insurance would have to pay out in Middle Earth
• Somebody recreated the latest Hobbit trailer with LEGO
• But where are they taking the hobbits, Legolas?

According to this video, 46% of Americans don’t believe in evolution, and as it turns out, neither do 100% of dogs. At least YouTube user Steve Gerben’s dog Jiggs doesn’t, and he’ll tell you why in this video. The dog is also wearing a tie, which doesn’t help its credibility, but does make it look adorable.

We have little patience for listening to people deny evolution, but when it’s coming from a cute little dog, it turns out we can put up with it for at least 1:41, the length of the video.

As explained in the video’s description, it’s a take on the classic Richard Dawkins/Wendy Wright debate. Also in the description, Gerben writes:

We could imagine that if Jiggs had a higher degree of consciousness, the world really would look designed for him. Jiggs, however, eats trash. Thankfully, unlike that adorable Norwich terrier, modern humans have brains which are able to understand natural phenomena (like the origin of species) at a level far deeper than mere appearances. You’re that modern human. It’s beautiful.

At its core, it’s a satirical look at the argument against the science of evolution, but on the surface it’s a cute dog video. Those are both things we love, so nice work to Gerben and Jiggs.

(Steve Gerben via Jim Grammond)

Meanwhile in related links

• PBS launched a new web series we love, The Advanced Apes
• Spiders are partially responsible for the evolution of butterflies
• DarwinTunes evolves noise into music

The absolutely stunning work of Swedish artist Anders Ramsell, who painted each frame as a 1.5 x 3cm work of art. It's taken him a while to complete the epic job; Pesco wrote about the first three minutes last year. The end result runs about 30 minutes, which is exactly how long Blade Runner should be. [Video Link]

The current economic recovery officially began June 2009 and is one of the weakest in the post-World War II period.  This is true by almost every indicator, except growth in profits.

One reason it has offered working people so little is the contraction of government spending and employment.  This may sound strange given the steady drumbeat of articles and speeches demanding a further retrenchment of government involvement in the economy, but the fact is that this drumbeat is masking the reality of the situation.

The figure shows the growth in real spending by federal, state, and local governments in the years before and after recessions.  The black line shows the average change in public spending over the six business cycles between 1948 and 1980.  Each blue line shows government spending for a different recent business cycle and the red line does the same for our current cycle.  As you can see, this expansionary period stands out for having the slowest growth in public spending.  In fact, in contrast to other recovery periods, public spending is actually declining.

According to Josh Bivens:

…public spending following the Great Recession is the slowest on record, and as of the second quarter of 2013 stood roughly 15 percent below what it would have been had it simply matched historical averages… if public spending since 2009 had matched typical business cycles, this spending would be roughly $550 billion higher today, and more than 5 million additional people would have jobs (and most of these would be in the private sector).

The basic stagnation in government spending has actually translated into a significant contraction in public employment.  This figure highlights just how serious the trend is by comparing public sector job growth in the current recovery to the three prior recovery periods.

As Josh Bivens and Heidi Shierholz explain:

…the public sector has shed 737,000 jobs since June 2009. However, this raw job-loss figure radically understates the drag of public-sector employment relative to how this sector has normally performed during economic recoveries… [P]ublic-sector employment should naturally grow as the overall population grows. Between 1989 and 2007, for example, the ratio of public employment to overall population was remarkably stable at roughly 7.3 public sector workers for each 100 members of the population. Today’s ratio is 6.9, and if it stood at the historic average of 7.3 instead, we would have 1.3 million more public sector jobs today.

In short, the challenge we face is not deciding between alternative ways to further shrink the public sector but rather of designing and building support for well financed public programs to restructure our economy and generate living wage jobs.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

I've tried my level damndest to ignore the latest Richard Cohen column controversy, because life is short and Cohen will stumble into another racial contretemps within six weeks or so. And I don't like the idea of a columnist being Mau-Mau'd out of a job because he's a casual bigot. The smarmy-sounding Fred Hiatt defense—that Cohen "isn’t afraid to take on subjects where culture and politics and emotion overlap"—isn't entirely wrong. Past-their-prime white guys have opinions, too.

No, the problem with Cohen's column was that he made an assertion about an entire class of people being racist, and did no work to prove it. Cohen claimed that people with "conventional" views might be spooked by Bill de Blasio's interracial marriage and the social change it represents. "What I was doing was expressing not my own views but those of extreme right-wing Republican tea party people," he told Paul Farhi. "I don’t have a problem with interracial marriage or same-sex marriage." In an interview with the Huffington Post, he asserted that "I was expressing the views of what I think some people in the Tea Party held," though "I don't think everybody in the Tea Party is like that, because I know there are blacks in the Tea Party. So they're not all racist."

That's still quite an assertion about a group of people Cohen didn't even try to talk to for his column. He could have asked Tea Partiers whether they were bothered by Clarence Thomas' marriage to a white woman, given that she took a (short-lived) role as a would-be Tea Party leader in 2009 and 2010. He could have asked about their reaction to FreedomWorks Outreach Director Deneen Borelli, whose husband, Tom, is white. Or, because anecdotal evidence is only worth so much, he could have "taken the Internet express" to Gallup.com and noticed that 85 percent of whites and 70 percent of elderly people are fine with interracial marriage. He could have shelled out for some current political science research, which suggests that "there is no difference between the racial attitudes of the general white population and self-identified tea party members."

He could have. Instead, Cohen made up a claim about a bunch of conservatives probably holding circa-1960 racial views. It's the sort of claim any columnist with sense or a work ethic would probably veto right away, but it jibes with a sterotype of conservatives, so even the publisher of the Washington Post gave it an attaboy.

Brilliant: richard Cohen on why Cruz beats Christie in iowa: http://t.co/Ofl85i5lf1

— katharine weymouth (@weymouthk) November 12, 2013

To their credit, conservatives haven't made much of a "poor us!" fuss about the Cohen column. It's offensive to them, sure. But what do they care about a dim-witted columnist who only gets read when he trips over his words like a drunk uncle tumbling over the wedding cake?

Jenny Hart (my friend who makes those cute iron-on embroidery patterns and kits) saw my post of the claustrophobic bookstore in Helsinki and it reminded her of a charming claustrophobic bookstore in Paris. She wrote about it on Dinosaurs and Robots.

Un Regard Moderne is considered affectionately by many to be the greatest bookstore on earth. Tucked away on a tiny street in Paris, the space is so crammed with obscure books on art, photography, comics and true crime that only two people can sorta fit in there for browsing. The owner, Jacques Noël, stands quietly on a stack of books in the corner (sometimes only his forehead and a plume of smoke can be seen), graciously willing and able to locate any book from a mind-boggling array of stacks that seem to close in more and more each time I return. I once asked him if he had any books by Polish artist and author Bruno Shulz. He thought a moment and said no, he didn't. But the next time I stopped in several weeks later, without even inquiring, he silently walked over to me and placed two copies in my hands he'd ordered. Ah, Paris! Buenaventura Press has some good photos on Flickr giving you a feel for it.