The Book Bound With A Human Face
The skin of Father Henry Garnet, a part of the in the 1605 gunpowder plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament (made popular by Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta), binds a 1606 record of this offenses against him, entitled A True and Perfect Relation of the Whole Proceedings Against the Late Most Barbarous Traitors, Garnet a Jesuit and His Confederates. The conspiracy still holds a special place for those in Great Britain, with the fifth of November celebrated as Guy Fawkes Day.

Garnet regularly listened to the confessions from the collaborators, and while not an active in the plot to blow up the House of Lords and kill King James I, Garnet received a punishment of death by hanging due to his knowledge of the plan, with his body later drawn and quartered prior to the removal of skin for binding.

One copy of of A True and Perfect Relation bound with Garnet’s skin is particularly unusual, as an impression from the face of Garnet is seen on the front cover (there is an image of it above, but the face is actually fairly hard to see). This copy is not very large, approximately 4 by 6 inches, and sold at auction for $11,000 in 2007. […]

The Nipple Book
Medical interns supplied the breasts of deceased female patients to an English binder of erotica in the 19th century, with the breast skin used to bind copies of Justine et Juliette by Donatien Alphonse François, better known as the Marquis de Sade. In one extreme example, intact nipples are found on the front cover of copies of L’eloge des seins, The Praise of Breasts of Women, by 18th Century French satirist Claude-François-Xavier Mercier.

Anthropodermic Bibliopegy, or The Truth About Books Bound In Human Skin

Vorher auf Nerdcore:
The History behind Anthropodermic Bibliopegy
John Miltons Poems bound in human Skin

Daniele Del Nero bastelt Miniaturen verlassener Häuser und lässt sie dann wortwörtlich verschimmeln. Der Pilz stirbt ab und hinterlässt eine Spinnenwebartige Struktur auf den Modellen. Die Dinger sehen aus, wie die Häuser aus der grandiosen King-Verfilmung „Der Nebel“.

Grown over several days, the mould used to create these stunning models then dies after two weeks leaving a layer of dust akin to a spider’s web which gives the miniature houses their creepy and mesmerising look. “I’ve always been fascinated by old ruined buildings,” says Del Nero, in an interview. “We are used to imagining our cities as permanent and definitive, but it’s amazing how little time it takes for nature to reclaim its spaces.”

After Effects (via Neatorama)

The several disorders and degrees amongst our idle vagabonds:

1. Rufflers (thieving beggars, apprentice uprightment)
2. Uprightmen (leaders of robber bands)
3. Hookers or anglers (thieves who steal through windows with hooks)
4. Rogues (rank-and-file vagabonds)
5. Wild rogues (those born of rogues)

Und ausgehend von dort bin ich in einer Datenbank mit der Geheimsprache der Diebe aus dem 18. Jahrhundert gelandet: 18th Century and Regency Thieves’ Cant. Alles ganz großartig, ich könnte da stundenlang drin rumstöbern, hier meine Favorites aus dem Abschnitt Crime:

GOING UPON THE DUB – Going out to break open, or pick the locks of, houses.
KNAPPING A JACOB FROM A DANNA-DRAG – This is a curious species of robbery, or rather borrowing without leave, for the purpose of robbery ; it signifies taking away the short ladder from a nightman’s cart, while the men are gone into a house, the privy of which they are employed emptying, in order to effect an ascent to a one-pair-of-stairs window, to scale a garden-wall, &c, after which the ladder, of course, is left to rejoin its master as it
SHUTTER-RACKET – the practice of robbing houses, or shops, by boring a hole in the window shutter, and taking out a pane of glass.
BIT – Robbed, Cheated or Out-Witted. Also Drunk, as He has bit his Grannum; He is very Drunk. Bit the Blow, performed the Theft, played the Cheat, You have bit a great Blow; You have robbed somebody of or to a considerable Value.
DROP A COG – To let fall, with design, a piece of gold or silver, in order to draw in and cheat the person who sees it picked up; the piece so dropped is called a dropt cog.

Before I talk about my own troubles, let me tell you about another book, “Computer Game Bot Turing Test”. It’s one of over 100,000 “books” “written” by a Markov chain running over random Wikipedia articles, bundled up and sold online for a ridiculous price. The publisher, Betascript, is notorious for this kind of thing.

It gets better. There are whole species of other bots that infest the Amazon Marketplace, pretending to have used copies of books, fighting epic price wars no one ever sees. So with “Turing Test” we have a delightful futuristic absurdity: a computer program, pretending to be human, hawking a book about computers pretending to be human, while other computer programs pretend to have used copies of it. A book that was never actually written, much less printed and read.

The internet has everything.

How Bots Seized Control of My Pricing Strategy (via JWZ)

David Sykes Skull-Candy hatte ich schonmal vor drei Jahren, damals hatte er aber nur den Schokikopf am Stiel, mittlerweile sind zwei weitere dazugekommen, obiger Skull-Lutscher und ein Totenkopf-Lolli. Hier der ganze Schädel-Süßkram:

(via Designboom)

Tolles Heisenberg-Cosplay, aber ein bisschen jung für Meth/Breaking Bad (sagt jemand, der sich mit 12 The Burning angesehen hat, der Film war jahrelang auf dem britischen Index der Video Nasties). (via Interweb3000)

This 100% custom made, touch sensitive lamp is made of laser-cut plexiglass and glows with powerful yet energy-efficient LEDs. The 6 inch cube light suspends from an integrated 11 foot power cord, making it ready to be hung from your ceiling and illuminate all of your LAN parties (Oh just admit it, we know you are having a LAN Party right now.).

To turn the lamp on and off, merely punch, er umm, we mean touch, the bottom of the cube and you’ll be rewarded with both light and the classic coin noise. Every eight times you toggle the light, you’ll get a 1-UP!

LVL Up Lamp (via Wonderland)

Die Drexel University in Philadelphia scant grade ihre Dinosaurierknochen und wird die Daten dann auf einem 3D-Drucker ausgeben. (Leider erst) in zwei Jahren wollen sie einen kompletten, funktionierenden, 3D-gedruckten Dinosaurier-Knochen-Roboter am Start haben.

Researchers at Drexel University are bringing the latest technological advancements in 3-D printing to the study of ancient life. Using scale models of real fossils, for the first time, they will be able to test hypotheses about how dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals moved and lived in their environments. […]

[Dr. Kenneth] Lacovara has begun creating 3-D scans of giant dinosaur bones and other fossils in his lab. The 3-D scan puts a virtual image in a digital workspace that researchers can manipulate and analyze. To bring these scans to life, Lacovara is also teaming up with mechanical engineer Dr. James Tangorra, an assistant professor in Drexel’s College of Engineering, to use 3-D printing technology to create and test scale models of fossil bones. […]

Lacovara predicts that they will have a working robotic dinosaur limb constructed by the end of 2012. A complete robotic dinosaur replica will take one to two years to create.

Robotic Dinosaurs On the Way for Next-Gen Paleontology at Drexel (via Reddit)

Vor drei Jahren hatte Da Chip ein Chiptunes-Remixalbum von Daft Punk-Tracks online gestellt. Jetzt hat er den zweiten Teil nachgeschoben, Download auf seiner Website oder von der Soundcloud, den ersten Teil gibt’s da auch.

Soundcloud Direktchip, via Polkarobot

Vorher auf Nerdcore:
Da Chip: Daft Punk 8-Bit-Remixalbum

Chris Arnade ist Trader an der Wall Street und macht Fotos von Huren, Obdachlosen, Junkies und Dealern in der Bronx, hört sich ihre Geschichten an und stellt alles online. Beeindruckend unaufdringlich, einem Banker hätte ich sowas nicht zugetraut, aber ich hab’ da auch Vorurteile.

Cynthia, forty six, starting working as a prostitute at the age of thirteen. She turned to the streets after battling her single mother in Brooklyn. “I didn’t want to listen to her. She didn’t give me any time.” Cynthia is now the mother of fifteen children, eleven of whom are still alive. Her “baby” is sixteen, her oldest child thirty.

We talked about the child prostitutes in Hunts Point now. She told me “Hunts Point isn’t what it used to be, when the girls would stick together. Then came crack and heroin, that fucked up everything. A girl out there at that age. She got no choice. It ain’t right.”

Cynthia was strung out, agitated and slurring. When I asked her how she wanted to be described she looked me in the eye, thought for a second, then said “An honest person. Thats what I am. An honest person.”

NYTimes: A Banker Whose Photos Tell the Stories of Bronx Prostitutes, Flickr: Faces of Addiction, Bronx (via MeFi)

The glasses will have a low-resolution built-in camera that will be able to monitor the world in real time and overlay information about locations, surrounding buildings and friends who might be nearby, according to the Google employees. The glasses are not designed to be worn constantly — although Google expects some of the nerdiest users will wear them a lot — but will be more like smartphones, used when needed.

Internally, the Google X team has been actively discussing the privacy implications of the glasses and the company wants to ensure that people know if they are being recorded by someone wearing a pair of glasses with a built-in camera.

The project is currently being built in the Google X offices, a secretive laboratory near Google’s main campus that is charged with working on robots, space elevators and dozens of other futuristic projects.

Google to Sell Heads-Up Display Glasses by Year’s End (via /.)

Vorher auf Nerdcore:
New York Times about Google X

Tolle Kartografie der Onomastik (Namenskunde) von Rappern. Hier das Teil in 4000×2800 Pixeln (lokale Kopie), hier kann man sich den Print für 30$ bestellen, kommt in 39″ x 27″ (bisschen größer als A1, bisschen kleiner als A0). Ich als größter lebender Fan des Hip Hop werde mir das Ding sicher nicht an die Wand hängen, extrem schick finde ich die Karte dennoch.

A ridiculously detailed guide to the semantics of rap names, this widescreen edition print spans over seven square feet and contains 636 rapper names as well as some all-time greats illustrated in the background. Blinged out in gold metallic ink, this print is straight stuntin’.

The Magnificent Map of Rap Names (via Notcot)

Tolles Portraits eines alten Mannes und seiner Wohnung voller Trödel in einem alten Laden in Manhattan. Ich glaub’, so werd’ ich später auch mal. Bin ja jetzt schon so und verschenk’ irgendwelche Sachen an halbfremde Leute und hab’ alles voller Toys und Roboter rumstehen. Auf der Website der Filmer gibt’s noch ein paar Outtakes.

On an unseasonably warm November night in Manhattan on our way to get ice cream, we stumbled upon what appeared to be a vintage shop, brightly lit display window and all. As we began to walk in, a man sitting out front warned us that we were welcome to explore, but nothing inside was for sale. Our interests piqued, we began to browse through the collections the man out front had built throughout his life. This is a story of a man and his home.

PETTICOAT PENSIONER. One kept by a woman for secret services.
KILKENNY. An old frize coat.
NICK. Old nick; the Devil.
MUGGLETONIANS. The sect or disciples of Lodowick Muggleton.
LOBLOLLEY BOY. A nick name for the surgeon’s servant on board a man of war, sometimes for the surgeon himself: from the water gruel prescribed to the sick, which is called loblolley.
EVIL. A halter. Cant, Also a wife.

1811 Dictionary in the Vulgar Tongue (via Jason Kottke)

Ich wusste bis grade nicht, dass BDSMler in Latexkostümen Gimps heissen. Wieder was gelernt. Jedenfalls hat Chris Elzinga den Gimpressionismus erfunden, in dem die Gummifetischisten in naiver Landschaftsmalerei versteckt werden. Schicke Idee! (via Laughing Squid)

Mit dem Ding einfach mal quer über ein Festivalgelände latschen. (via Geekologie)

Tolle Fotoserie von Colin Delfosse: Congolese Wrestlers. Wer keine Lust hat, sich durch die Bilder zu klicken, kann sich bei Doktor Katze durch ein paar der Fotos scrollen.

Kinshasa, 2010. Eight million inhabitants, thousands of shegués (street children), hundreds of wrestlers and their brass bands. Edingwe, Dragon, City Train, Mbokotomo : the “legends” of Congolese wrestling invent themselves on a daily basis in the outskirts of Kinshasa. 
 

Body-building, and even black magic enthusiasts fight for glory in makeshift rings. They come from the streets and their charisma commands respect and admiration. But the heros of the ring are modest in victory : « Kobeta libanga papa mundele » [we manage, white man].

In the last hours of the day, when they have hung up their everyday “occupations”, they put on masks and wrestling kit ready to fight. 

 

The motorised parade of wrestlers attracts crowds from the dusty streets of Massina, Ngili and Matete, towns round the Congolese capital. In back yards, on the tables of the street cafés, or even in the street, the spell casters warm up over primus stoves and cannabis. The ring is hastily set up, the judge climbs onto the ropes. “Let the match begin!” The fight starts and is usually more or less fixed. Rounds follow one another until the final spell is cast, until the adversary is floored, until the next fight.

Hier erstmal der neue Odd Future-Clip „Rella“, weitere Videos nach dem Klick.

Spank Rock – Car Song (feat. Santigold)
Vimeo Direktspank

Unknown Mortal Orchestra – Strangers Are Strange
Vimeo Direktstrange

YACHT – Shangri-La
Vimeo Direktshang

The Cool Kids – Rush Hour Traffic
Vimeo Direktcool

Timid Tiger – Miracle
Vimeo Direkttiger

Funeral Suits – All those friendly people
Youtube Direktsuits

Wildlife Control – Analog or Digital
Youtube Direktanalog

Mint Julep – To the Sea
Vimeo Direktmint

I Used To Be A Sparrow – Life is good
Youtube Direktsparrow

Yamantaka/Sonic Titan – Hoshi Neko
Vimeo Direkttitan

Diplo – Bird Is The Word
Youtube Direktbird

(via Popnutten, Testspiel, Videos, Stereogum, Nialler 9, )

SOMETHING FROM NOTHING ? [OFFICIAL] Richard Dawkins & Lawrence Krauss [HD] 02-04-12 – YouTube: Join critically-acclaimed author and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and world-renowned theoretical physicist and author Lawrence Krauss as they discuss biology, cosmology, religion, and a host of other topics.

Captain Mexico!!! – YouTube

Buenos Aires – Inception Park on Vimeo

Robot readable world on Vimeo: How do robots see the world? How do they gather meaning from our streets, cities, media and from us? This is an experiment in found machine-vision footage, exploring the aesthetics of the robot eye.

A Texas Chainsaw Massacre Documentary on Vimeo
Color my kingdom – YouTube
Release your Imagination on Vimeo
MARVS – WAIT FOR IT – THE FULL MOVIE on Vimeo
Disney – The Gruffalos Child .Full.HD – YouTube
TOCA ME 2012 / Opening Titles on Vimeo
NON STOP NINJA MOTION! – real life flipping animation – YouTube

Keck in Motion on Vimeo: Keck Observatory operates two ten-meter telescopes atop the summit of Mauna Kea Hawai'i. Keeping those telescopes on-sky every night is the summit crew of the Operations Department. This video is dedicated to the guys of the Keck daycrew who make it possible.

: Tuur van Balen – Hacking Yoghurt – YouTube: Tuur Van Balen utilizes a mixture of ancient and new technologies to reprogram the humble yogurt making lactobacillus so that it starts adding a little anti-depressant into your breakfast.

Dr Grordbort Presents: The Deadliest Game on Vimeo

DreamGiver on Vimeo: A regular night of dream delivering turns into a literal nightmare when a boy's book of ancient mythology comes alive.

Ride Of Passage on Vimeo: Toki's tribe expects him to bring home the head of the biggest animal possible. In return, he will receive honor and respect. However, this rite of passage does not turn out as planned. With the help of a colorful new friend, he achieves something much bigger.

Critical Thinking Part 1: A valuable argument – YouTube
Critical thinking Part 2: Broken Logic – YouTube
Critical thinking Part 3: The Man who was made of straw – YouTube
Critical thinking Part 4: Getting Personal – YouTube
Critical Thinking Part 5: The Gambler’s Fallacy – YouTube
Critical Thinking Part 6: A precautionary tale – YouTube

Deluge on Vimeo: 300.000 Norwegians move house every year. If the pattern made by this process could be compressed into one short animation, what would would it look like? What could you learn about your society from such an animation, if anything? Deluge is a C++ application designed to answer these questions. The underlying data was generated by cross referencing Norwegian tax records from 2006 and 2007 to find changes in postal codes.

Can Treating Your Life As a Game Make You a Better Person? | Popular Science: One full week of keeping track of absolutely everything, to see if gamification can net you a win in the game of life

BibliOdyssey: Map Ornamentation: Going for Baroque – The Iconography of the Ornamental Map

The Internet makes magic disappear – Salon.com: YouTube has killed the magician's art, and threatens the stores where tricks have been passed down for generations

Paris Review – Shelf-Conscious, Francesca Mari: A History of the Bookshelf.

Flooby Nooby: Chris Sanders’ Sketch Process: I was wanting to do a drawing of a witch.

Skateboarding in den Straßen von New York in den 1960ern ~ Interweb3000: Ich habe ein bisschen Retronaut gespielt und aus dem LIFE Fotoarchiv bei Google Schwarzweiß-Bilder mit Skateboardern zusammengestellt, die Bill Eppridge Mitte der 1960er in New York gemacht hat. Als Asphaltsurfen auf Rollbrettern noch in den Kinderschuhen steckte – im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes.

Nettes Featurette mit den Tricks aus The Walking Dead. Die zweite Runde der neuen Staffel macht mir ja bislang recht viel Spaß, endlich mal ein paar Charakterentwicklungen und Rick wird langsam zu dem Badass, den man aus den Comics kennt. Ich bin mal vorsichtig optimistisch für die kommenden Folgen.

Jemand namens Hashi hat bei Online-Recherchen eine alte japanische Schriftrolle aus dem 19. Jahrhundert gefunden. Und die heisst „He-Gassen“ („The Fart Battle“).

I was doing research for another post a while back, and found something a bit…unusual. It was an old Japanese scroll about farting.

No, you didn’t misread that last sentence. The whole scroll, which is called He-Gassen (“The Fart Battle”) is just about people farting. Farting at other people, farting at cats, farting off of horses, farting into bags; just farting everywhere.

Why? I couldn’t really tell you. I’ve tried to do some research but, believe it or not, academic literature on Japanese farting is surprisingly few and far between.

Japanese Fart Scrolls, die komplette Furzrolle in HighRes gibt’s hier. (via MeFi)

A bold idea such as Eternal Copyright will inevitably have opponents who wish to stand in the way of progress. Some will claim that because intellectual works are non-rivalrous, unlike tangible goods, meaning that they can be copied without removing the original, we shouldn’t treat copyright as theft at all. They might even quote George Bernard Shaw, who said, “If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”

Such opponents are condoning criminal activity, plain and simple, and are frankly no better than criminals themselves. Why would anyone want to create new ideas and intellectual works if they can’t benefit from them in perpetuity? Are we to believe that people have motivations other than the purely financial and quantifiable? And are they suggesting we should continue to allow modern “creators” to sully the legacy of legends like Jane Austen and Hans Christian Andersen with their pointless, worthless adaptations, remixes, and reinterpretations of Pride and Prejudice and The Emperor’s New Clothes?

In the interests of full disclosure, I do want to point out a genuine problem with Eternal Copyright, in that it will be difficult to enforce due to the inherently criminal nature of digital technology, which allows information to be copied perfectly and instantly. Absent a complete ban of the technology, which admittedly would be a little draconian, one obvious solution would be to hard-wire digital devices to automatically detect, report, and prevent duplication of copyrighted material. Yes, this might get the libertarians and free-speech crazies out protesting, but a bit of fresh air wouldn’t do them any harm.

Eternal Copyright: a modest proposal (via Boing Boing)

Designer Koby Barhad ist aufgefallen, dass Bücher immer öfter als Dekorationsobjekt hergenommen werden und hat eine Maschine erfunden, um sie schneller alt aussehen lassen zu können, damit sie benutzter, gelesener und wertvoller erscheinen. In der Maschine werden die Bücher UV-Strahlung und einer hohen Luftfeuchtigkeit ausgesetzt und so wird ihr Material innerhalb von ein paar Stunden ein Jahr älter. Man kann sie natürlich auch einfach in die Sonne legen oder in die Badewanne schmeißen.

The “Archive of Years to Come” is a book-ageing machine, a chrono-chamber. Inside, a book lives a synthetic history line. Spending four hours inside the chamber is the equivalent of one real year.

The work explores the tendency to glorify the obsolete, to make meaning of a process. It is a technology to give value. The project was originally designed for the “South Lambeth” library in London. It’s purpose was to create a new myth around a historical library building (one of the Tate’s free libraries that is currently under threat of closure). Having no documented history or records of its own past, I decided to create a working “time machine” that enable it to age the present in order to give it a new past.

At the time I was working on the project I noticed that the high streets are filed with shops decorating their goods with old books. £40 shoes standing on a pile of used books, library wallpapers, torn old pages decorating a storefront manikins. Except from what seems as a sale strategy (smart old jeans for intelligent people), it echoes McLuhan’s argument from almost 50 years ago. Books are obsolete and they will become an “art form”. They became materials for new designs, they became an art form, they became the subject of art. So what is that we evaluate in books now?

Archive of Years to Come by Koby Barhad

Die Mashable-Galerie mit 3D-gedruckten Memes kann eher nix, die Nyan-Cat ist ganz goldig und den Rest hat man schon tausendmal gesehen. Bis auf den 3Dprinted Sad Keanu. Großartig! Hier kann man sich den für 20$ selber drucken lassen und ins Regal setzen.

Okarola masht den Taxi Driver-Soundtrack mit Suzanne Vegas „Toms Diner“ und Portisheads „Machine Gun“, hier das Teil in der Soundcloud. Wahnsinn! Reinster, großartigster Wahnsinn! Vom Mashup selbst bis zum Teaserbild läuft das Ding hier über vor Stil und ich will ein Kind von Dir ein Soundtrack-Mashup-Album von Okarola! Ich mach’ da auch ‘ne Petition für, ich bin schwer begeistert!

Ich bin ja Mashups ein bisschen leid, die bestehen leider fast nur noch aus beknackten Remixen mit Trashpop der übelsten Sorte (diese komplett üble Best-of-the-Year-in-Pop-Serie etwa) oder noch beknackterem Dubstep-Schrott a la Skrillex, Musik für Ungefickte halt (Ich hatte es vorhin schon getwittert: ‘Der ganze kommerzielle Dubstep-Kram ist Mucke für Leute, die ewig nicht gevögelt haben. „ICH HAB SON DRUUUCK WOAWOA ICH HAB SON DRUUUCK“’ und „Das neue Skrillex-Video ist hierzulande gesperrt. Da hat die GEMA immerhin einmal was richtig gemacht!“). Und Okarola gibt mir da echt ein bisschen den Glauben an das Genre zurück. Danke dafür, ganz ganz großes Kino!

Vorher au Nerdcore:
Creep (Blume der Nacht)
Intergalactic (Get Yourself High)

Zombie-Videos, Zombie-Spiele, Zombie-Bücher, Zombie-Blogs. Nie waren die Untoten so lebendig wie heute. Mehr als 100 abendfüllende Zombie-Filme wurden in den letzten zehn Jahren gedreht. Wer die Leichen lieber live erlebt, kann sich bei sogenannten Zombie-Walks beteiligen und als bleich und blutig geschminktes Wesen sein Unwesen in der Fußgängerzone treiben.

Alles nur Horror-Karneval? Oder sind die lebenden Leichen eine besondere Ausgeburt der gegenwärtigen Finanzkrise? Es scheint jedenfalls kein Zufall, dass die Untoten vermehrt im Schatten des toten Kapitals auftreten. Schon sprechen Wirtschaftsexperten von “Zombie-Banken” und “Zombie Economics”: zielstrebig, willenlos, immer vorwärts, alles auffressen. Es scheint als habe unsere Gesellschaft im Zombie ihre Metapher gefunden.

SWR2 Feature am Sonntag: Zombie 2.0 – Die Perfektionierung der Untoten (MP3, 128MB, für den Download am besten den JDownloader installieren, mein Server bricht Downloads ganz gerne ab), hier das SWR-Posting zur Sendung, hier der Stream der Sendung

Schöne Kampagne von Greenpeace mit Illustrationen von Anatolij Pickmann für ihre Zeitung The Daily David. Die anderen drei Motive nach dem Klick. (via Interweb3000)

Wired: Because your father, Freeman Dyson, worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, you grew up around folks who were building one of the first computers. Was that cool?

George Dyson: The institute was a pretty boring place, full of theoreticians writing papers. But in a building far away from everyone else, some engineers were building a computer, one of the first to have a fully electronic random-access memory. For a kid in the 1950s, it was the most exciting thing around. I mean, they called it the MANIAC! The computer building was off-limits to children, but Julian Bigelow, the chief engineer, stored a lot of surplus electronic equipment in a barn, and I grew up playing there and taking things apart.

Wired: Did that experience influence how you thought about computers later?

Dyson: Yes. I tried to get as far away from them as possible.

Q&A: Hacker Historian George Dyson Sits Down With Wired’s Kevin Kelly

Tolles Cosplay geknippst von Danny Choo auf dem Wonder Festival.

Frodo has a Penis! Und das, obwohl Gandalf himself vor einer Weile noch Sex in Mittelerde ausgeschlossen hat. Dann können die Hobbitse ja schonmal mit ihren Actionfiguren üben.

This is an OOAK Frodo Doll. This Lord of the Rings action figure has been modified to be anatomically enhanced. He is hysterical. He even has the hand Grip, ready for action or just to hang out with himself. The box is not great but the doll is new, never played with. Just taken out to do the modifications on him and then put back in the box. He comes with all his accessories except his jumpsuit does not fit anymore.

Anatomically Correct Nude Male Doll (via io9)