I've set up a Formspring account, which you can use to ask me anything!

I've just posted a quick rundown of the ten best things to put under the tree for the naughty people on your list over at weeklysextip.com -- and I'm sure you're all dying of curiosity to know what made the list. Check it out!

We have, through no fault of our own, kittens.

Six of them. All black. Five boys and one girl. One of the cats at zaiah's farm house got loose when she was in heat, and got knocked up almost instantly, so kittens! Six tiny fuzzy cute little tiny cute fuzzy little kittens!

They need homes. If you want one of these kittens, and you're in or near Portland, let me know! My cat Liam, who is not included in this offer, loves them to death.

If you've ever run a small business, or done any accounting, you're probably familiar with Intuit, the company that makes the popular QuickBooks accounting software.

Intuit does a lot of things other than QuickBooks, of course. They are also a business Web hosting company, a payroll tax service, a credit card merchant account company, a computer virus distribution network, and a marketing company, among other things. Not everyone knows about all the services they offer; in particular, their marketing and computer virus distribution services appear to be underrated.

Yep, you read that right. They distribute computer viruses.

Oh, not on purpose, I'm sure. They simply appear to run Web sites whose Webmasters don't really seem to know a lot about Web security. Which would seem to be about par for the course these days, except that they..err, specialize in software that handles business financial information.

Which is a wee bit concerning, if you use Intuit and would like to feel reassured that they take the security of their network and servers seriously.

Now, to be fair, it's not actually their main site that has the problem, at least not that I've seen so far. Instead, they run many "community" sites, and on some of these sites they appear to have a...relaxed approach to security and best practices.

*** WARNING *** WARNING *** WARNING ***
The URLs listed below are live as of the time of this writing. They WILL try to redirect you to sites that attempt to download malware onto your computer. DO NOT visit these URLs if you don't know what you're doing!

While cleaning out the contents of the spam trap on one of the WordPress sites I run, I spotted a large number of spam-trapped comments advertising FREE NUDE PICTURES with URLs of an Intuit-owned property, community.quickbooks.co.uk. Now, I see these spam posts all the time, usually made from machines in Eastern Europe and usualy pointing to sites that try to download the Asprox or Zlob malware.

This particular site, though, is overrun to a large degree even for sites that have security problems. The site itself allows users to create their own profiles, but it does not appear to sanitize the user-supplied profiles for things like JavaScript and it allows users to embed links and images in their profiles.

Which is, when you get right down to it, a recipe for disaster.

Anyway, the community.quickbooks.co.uk Web site is currently home to a large number of fake, automatically-generated profiles which redirect through a series of intermediates to malware sites that use a cocktail of browser exploits and social engineering tricks to try to slip malware onto visitors' computers.

A smattering of these profiles includes:

http://community.quickbooks.co.uk/discussion/index.php?showuser=57944

http://community.quickbooks.co.uk/discussion/index.php?showuser=58063

http://community.quickbooks.co.uk/discussion/index.php?showuser=58395

http://community.quickbooks.co.uk/discussion/index.php?showuser=57939

Some of these profile sites, unusually, redirect through TinyURL to to destination payload site; others redirect more conventionally, through traffic loader sites in a manner similar to the ones I've written about before.

The sites redirect through TinyURL or another traffic loader to several intermediates and eventually end up at a place such as

http://stereotube.net/xfreeporn.php?id=45035

which offers free porn if you download a movie-player codec...which is, of course, a virus. (No free porn for YOU!)

Unsurprisingly, the payload site stereotube.net is registered with bogus information belonging to an identity theft victim; also unsurprisingly, it's hosted on black-hat Web hosting company Calpop, a California Web host that has a long and ignoble history of knowingly hosing malware sites for Russian organized crime, as I've mentioned before.

In basic scope and layout, this is nothing but yet another Russian malware distribution network. There are only a few things about it that deviate at all from the bog-standard run-of-the-mill compromises I see every day. The first is that the compromised site is owned by Intuit, which makes me very nervous about how seriously they take computer security.

The second is that the phony profile pages that redirect to malware hide some of the redirection steps behind TinyURL redirectors such as http://tinyurl.com/25avirua rather than relying 100% on their own redirector network (the TinyURL address redirects to a more conventional traffic redirector at http://arhetector.com/in.cgi?3¶meter=25aug, hosted by Worldstream.nl, which itself redirects to one of several sites such as stereotube.net or to http://tinyurl.com/stereotubeonline-boom-03, which redirects to http://stereotubeonline.com/xplays.php?id=48034 also hosted by Calpop.

The third is that the phony profile pages are pulling images from various real porn sites. For example,

http://community.quickbooks.co.uk/discussion/index.php?showuser=57939

is grabbing a picture from http://www.pink4free.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/Pink4Free/Cecash/BigTits/AllFreePorn.gif. The Web site pink4free.com used to run a WordPress blog--it appears to be defunct now--but that Wordpress blog still has an open image directory, and it contains advertising banners that the Russian hackers are drawing from in a bid to make the redirectors look more convincing.

When I go to my taxes next year, I don't think I'll use Intuit.

In the study of stellar evolution, there is this concept called the main sequence, a well-defined band that you see whenever you survey all the stars in the sky and plot their color on one axis and their brightness on the other. Not all stars fall into the main sequence, but the vast majority do; there's even a lovely image of the graph here.

It seems the same is true of relationships. Stellar evolution and stellar nucleosynthesis map with remarkable fidelity onto relationships, I've observed, with a plot of "intensity of relationship" (as a function of emotional investment and expectation of continuity) vs. "sexual boundaries" showing patterns startlingly similar to the main sequence. At least to me.

So for example if you plot sexual boundaries horizontally and relationship intensity vertically, you might see something like this:



The sexual boundaries increase from left to right, with the classifications as:

A: Anything goes. Unbarriered, unprotected, full-on squishy fluid-bonded sex.
B: Barriers for anal and PIV sex
O: Unbarriered oral; no penetrative sex.
F: Fisting and/or fingering without barriers; barriers for anything else.
G: Gloves for fingering; no wet and squishy contact, even manual, without them.
P: Pants stay on; above-the-pants contact allows.
M: Makeout partners--no removing of clothing.

Now, not all the partners one can have fall in the main sequence. Along the top of the graph, we see partners distributed in Type Ia and Type Ib classifications: these are people you will schedule regular orgies with or a regular BDSM play relationship with, which may or may not involve sex (directly) but do involve a high level of emotional investment and commitment. Some of these folks might even be considered "family."

If you're part of the sex-positive community, you might go to orgies or play parties on a regular basis, and see the same folks over and over. These are folks you don't necessarily have squishy sex with, but you might have some sort of irregular or semi-regular play/makeout relationship with. There's not necessarily a high level of emotional investment, but you notice when you show up to a party and they aren't there.

Type IV partners are most commonly found in poly relationships. These are the "Too Complicated To Explain" partners--they're not necessarily partner partners, and they're not necessarily part of the family, but they're not not partners either...

A branch from the main sequence sometimes occurs for metamours, who a person might have some sort of sexual relationship with, but might not continue if that person's partner breaks up with that person, but then again, sometimes these relationships do continue on their own, and...yeah, it's complicated. Past a certain point, it's not always clear from a single partner whether that person is main sequence or metamour.

A scattering of partners exist with a high level of sexual contact but a low level of relationship investment. These partners tend to scatter along the Friends with Benefits and One-Night Stand axes.

I've mentioned this before, but one of the things that baffles me the most when I say I want to live forever is the folks who say "Wouldn't you get bored?"

The question totally boggles me. Bored? Who on earth has time to be bored? Life changes constantly. In the last two thousand years, we have gone from Bronze Age tribalism through the Iron Age, the rise and fall of the empire of Rome, feudalism, the Renaissance, the discovery of a new continent, industrialization, the rise of mass communication, to atomic power and the beginning of the exploration of the physical universe. In all of that, we have seen incredible changes in society, philosophy, science, art, engineering, customs, tradition, and knowledge. Who would say of a man born in the time of Jesus and still alive today, "But aren't you bored?"

The question to me seems to show a projection of the present onto the future--I almost wonder if the folks who ask aren't envisioning people commuting to work, stopping for lunch at McDonald's, listening to Rush Limbaugh on the radio, heading home through rush-hour traffic to watch reruns of "Friends" on TV in the year 6,000. I think that's particularly strange given that, in the memory of people who are still alive today, the United States has moved from a largely agrarian nation to a post-industrial nation, pausing along the way to split the atom, tame Niagra Falls, and put men on the frikkin' MOON.

No, I don't think I'd be bored.

In fact, I've started to make a list of some of the things I would like to live long enough to see--things for which a single "ordinary" human lifespan is insufficient. The next thousand years offers exciting prospects for the human species unmatched in the last ten thousand, and I want to see what happens. For example:

What will happen when we discover evidence of life elsewhere in the universe? Given the incomprehensibly vast scope of the physical universe, it seems profoundly unlikely that we alone live here. If the emergence of life is so unlikely that it happens even once out of ten billion solar systems, that would mean it's everywhere--the physical universe is just that big. If, as seems more likely, it develops and takes a foothold anywhere that it is not prevented from doing so by the laws of physics, then it's probably ubiquitous. What does it look like? How does it work? What would it mean to us to learn that we're not alone? What form would it take? Where will we find it? What implications will it have for philosophy, religion, morality, our conceptions of ourselves? What will we learn from it? Will the knowledge that it exists make us feel more connected or more disconnected from the universe and from each other? Will we see life as being more sacred or less sacred?

Will we succeed in moving beyond our own fragile home on earth? Where will we go? What will we learn? How far will it be possible for us to extend our reach? How will we change in the process? Will knowing that we have left the only home humanity has ever had for its entire existence change our conceptions of ourselves, and in what way? How will we adapt?

What does a post-scarcity society look like? From the stone knives used by our earliest hominid ancestors to the Large Hadron Collider, everything we have ever built has been built in the same way--by taking the materials we find and heating, cooling, chipping, hammering, carving, cutting, and pounding away at them until they're shaped to do the task we want. This crude method of building things, which has been refined only in degree but not in kind since the days of flint knapping and bearskins, necessarily means resource scarcity, because it is limited both by the natural raw materials available and by the man-hours of labor needed to fashion the raw materials into finished things. But what happens when we gain the ability to put things together on a molecular level exactly as we want to? Oh, then everything changes. Then it becomes possible to make just about anything--food, Ferraris, fuel, iPods, spaceships--from dirt and sunlight. No more scarcity means no more resource competition, no more competition between the "haves" and the "have nots," no more division of nations into "first world" and "third world." What will that mean for human society? How will it change the way we interact with each other? Who will be the first to figure out molecular assembly, and how will that affect everyone else? Is it true, as some folks say, that wars are fought for resources first and ideology second, and if so, will a post-scarcity society really make war obsolete? Or will we simply shift from competing for material resources to competing for ideas?

What happens when we gain the ability to control ourselves on a molecular level? Biomedical nanotechnology is a hot field of research, barely out of the starting gate--the state of the art right now is roughly at the state of the computing art during the time of Charles Babbage. We know it is possible to build machines that can change and repair living organisms on a cellular or molecular level--we just don't know how to get there yet. But what happens when we do? What does a human society look like when you take away the inevitability of deterioration, aging, enfeeblement, and death? And more than that--what does it mean to be able to make modifications to to ourselves on the level of our DNA? When you give people the ability to change in that way, will you see a society of nearly-identical supermodels, or a society of people with orange fur and tails? Will we begin to enforce common standards of physical appearance, or will we start changing ourselves in all sorts of novel and interesting ways? If people can change their physical sex at will, and be completely functional in whatever their chosen physical sex is, what will that mean for gender differences? How will that affect society, when some of our most basic assumptions about what being human means become obsolete?

What happens when we remove the biological limitations on our brains and bodies? Human brains and human bodies do not have infinite capacity. Our brains are limited, both in terms of raw processing power and in terms of the concepts we are easily able to imagine and comprehend. Are there things about the physical universe that we simply do not have the capacity to understand, in the same way that a dog does not have the capacity to understand calculus? Are we nearing the limits of what we are able to understand about the physical world around us? What will it mean if we can re-wire our brains to add capacity? What will it mean if we can change our bodies to give ourselves abilities we lack now--the ability to breathe underwater, say, or to adapt to hostile environments? How much of what we consider our "humanity" is a consequence of our limitations and of the environment we live in? If we begin to diverge from one another in these ways, will we lose our ability to relate to one another, or will this simply serve to underscore the ways in which we are all connected? What will we learn about ourselves? What will we learn about the world we live in?

What happens when we encounter the first non-human intelligence? There are many ways this might come about; it could be an AI, a non-human race, even an animal that's been modified to have a higher level of cognitive capability. How will seeing an intelligence that isn't ours affect us? What will we learn about ourselves? Will we discover new ways of comprehending the universe? Will we discover blindness in our own way of thinking, and if so, how will we be better for it?

What kind of macroengineering projects are we capable of? The largest-scale engineering we've ever done is really, when you get right down to it, not that far above Stonehenge. But what happens when we become capable of building on a global scale, or larger? The Space Elevator is a good beginner's macroengineering project, but what comes next? Will we be able to terraform planets? Build ringworlds? What will those things look like? How can they be done? How will they extend our capabilities as human beings? How will transforming the physical universe transform us? Will we encounter anyone else who is already building on this scale? What will that mean for us?

Now, to be perfectly honest, even if these things were not on the horizon, even if things would always be as they are now, I would still want to live forever. There is hardly a day that goes by that I don't encounter something that is so mind-blowingly beautiful that it makes me grateful to be alive; the world just as it exists in this instant in time is so filled with wonder and beauty that I could live for thousands of years and never grow tired of it. There is so much joy to be had, all around, that I can't quite fathom living in anything other than a perpetual state of awe.

...two more updates to two of my long-neglected side projects.

First, I've updated and tweaked the software on HackerSluts, which is my server-side RSS aggregator for sex blogs. Or, at least, sex blogs I know about. It's kind of my own combination of Feedburner and Technorati but for sex and kink.

I've also made some user interface changes over at Weekly Sex Tip, which is a site I update with a new sex tip once per week. Err, exactly as the name suggests. The tweaks to the skin now allow you to choose a category and browse sex tips only in that category.

Whew! I almost feel accomplished.

...an update to the interactive version of the Map of Human Sexuality.

Finally solved the single biggest problem with it, which was that you could not correct a mistake while you were creating a map. With the new version, you can now remove a pin if you accidentally place one in the wrong page...a simple idea that took a lot of head-pounding and hair-tearing to implement.

Next on the List of Things To Do is to make a login system so you can go back and update/change your map later.

And in honor of the revamped map software, I've created a new personal map that reflects some of the new things I've tried since doing the original!

...I have decided to help fuel the orgy of capitalistic excess with some special offers of my own!

As a Twitter friend of mine put it (and who says Twitter is always insipid?), the biggest shopping day of the year is a good time to support artisans and small businessmen you like. So with that in mind, I've set up two special deals on my own Web site!

The first is the "Get One, Give One" deal on the poster version of the Map of Human Sexuality. Looking for a cool, fun gift for someone on your Christmas list of naughty people? Want something cool to hang on your wall that will get people talking? Running short on funs in the recession? The Get One, Give One deal is your answer! Buy a poster, get a second poster for half price and I'll even ship it to a second address for free if you like!

The second is a Sexual Explorer's Wilderness Survival Kit. Buy a copy of the Map of Human Sexuality and get ten dollars off the registration for Onyx, the Game of Sexual Exploration. Onyx helps you explore, and the Map lets you know where you've been! The only thing missing is a canteen. And a compass. And, y'know, one of those wilderness adventure knives with the little thing on the handle that you can unscrew and put matches in so they don't get wet.

Sound interesting? Clicky the link to learn more!

The thing about the Internet is that no matter how long you surf and how many sites you visit, there's always something really awesome and cool that you just haven't stumbled across yet.

There's also a phenomenal amount of teh dumb, to be sure. In that way, the Internet is, as the saying goes, like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea -- massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.

But still. There's a lot of really cool stuff out there. Like PartiallyClips, a clip-art Webcomic that devoured my entire afternoon recently. I ended up reading every single one of them.

Some of my personal favorites:



( A few more, with a special bonus comic for datan0de )

From an email I just made on a polyamory-related list:

I've found that a lot of my relationship fears vanish and my relationships become a lot stronger and more healthy when I start with certain assumptions: namely, that my partners want to be with me, that they see value in me, that when given the opportunity they will seek to make choices that honor our commitments and cherish the relationship we're in, that they are honest and can be counted on to behave with integrity, and that when they say they love me, it's because they do.

Often it seems to me that people base relationship rules on the assumption that their partners can not be trusted, that if given free action their partners will not choose to honor and nurture their relationships, and that their partners are harboring secret agendas involving dumping them when someone 'better' (whatever that means) comes along. I can't quite fathom building a relationship on those assumptions, nor why someone would want to remain in a relationship where they were true.

Ahh, the mysteries of life.

From my email inbox this morning, a bit of spam directed at my Symtoys address from a sex toy manufacturer:

Dear Owners

We are the Leading manufacturers-cum-exporter of complete Adult Body Jewelry like Nipple Rings, Nipple Weight Stretchers, Cock Rings.

We TRIUNE SKINMOD SUPPLIES exporting this Adult Body Jewelry successfully throughout the world. Your good-self kindly requested to please visit our web-site indicate items of your choice enable us.

The company in question is in Pakistan...and no, it isn't the same company that has offered to sell me sex toys from Pakistan in the past.

You were so busy worrying about 1984 you didn't notice you were living Brave New World.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”

In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

--Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

Though I must say it isn't necessarily either/or. We have created a culture that has spawned both an unprecedented attack on civil liberties from on high, particularly under the last administration, along with a reactionary anti-intellectualism that openly scorns the quest for knowledge, giving us the worst of both.

There appears to be a new social engineering attack making the rounds of registered owners of Web sites that have SSL encryption certificates. I have a large number of Web sites, and so far I've only received emails to the technical address of sites which have SSL (security) certificates on them.

*** WARNING *** WARNING *** WARNING ***
This attack is currently live. DO NOT attempt to visit the URLS in this email if you do not know what you are doing!

The emails come from a phony From: address that is system@[thewebsitename.com]. Each email takes the form:

Attention!

On October 16, 2009 server upgrade will take place. Due to this the system may be offline for approximately half an hour.
The changes will concern security, reliability and performance of mail service and the system as a whole.
For compatibility of your browsers and mail clients with upgraded server software you should run SSl certificates update procedure.
This procedure is quite simple. All you have to do is just to click the link provided, to save the patch file and then to run it from your computer location. That's all.

http://updates.[thenameofthewebsite.com].secure.ssl-datacontrol.com/ssl/id=712571016-[email address of registered contact]-patch257675.aspx

Thank you in advance for your attention to this matter and sorry for possible inconveniences.

System Administrator

So for example if you have a Web site called "theweaselstore.com" and your email address is "headweasel@theweaselstore.com" you may receive an email claiming to be from: system@theweaselstore.com, which tells you to click a link that looks like

http://updates.theweaselstore.com.secure.ssl-datacontrol.com/ssl/id=712571016-headweasel@theweaselstore.com-patch257675.aspx

Needless to say, the "patch" you download from this address is a computer virus.

---

This is one of the most sophisticated social engineering attempts I've seen to date. It seems to be going after a very specific group of people: people who own secure Web sites. The email itself is custom-tailored to look as much as possible like it comes from the system operators of the Web site in question, and the payload is delivered from a hostile server with a URL that has the address of the target site owner's Web site embedded within it.

My suspicion, though I have not taken the time to analyze the payload, is that it is a key logger, and that the virus writers are attempting to get FTP credentials for the target Web site.

Being able to hack secure Web sites would offer the hacker a treasure trove of advantages. First, secure Web sites may contain customer information, transaction records, payment histories, and credit card numbers for the site's customers.

Second, a phony bank or eBay site placed on a secure server is more convincing, because the phony site can be accessed using "https://" and will have the browser padlock indicating that the site is secure, which may help it to fool more people.

I've mentioned in this post how a Web address can be designed to fool people. It does not matter what's in the address except for the part in front of the very first / character; so for example if you see a Web address that looks like

http://www.ebay.com.ws.eBayISAPI.dll.signin.ru/?SignIn&ru=12345

you are not on eBay. You can see where you are by looking at the part just before the first / which in this case is

http://www.ebay.com.ws.eBayISAPI.dll.signin.ru/?SignIn&ru=12345

a site called signin.ru in Russia.

Similarly, in the URLs in these hacker emails, the key part of the URL is

http://updates.theweaselstore.com.secure.ssl-datacontrol.com/ssl/id=712571016-headweasel@theweaselstore.com-patch257675.aspx

The computer virus is being distributed from a site called "ssl-datacontrol.com".

---

ssl-datacontrol.com lives on servers belonging to an ISP called trouble-free.net, which is now a subsidiary of another ISP called interserver.net.

Trouble-free.net is an ISP I'm very familiar with. As near as I can tell, the "trouble" they are free of is meddling trouble such as legal issues, or those pesky problems you might have with having your spam or phish site shut down; they have, in my experience, a long and ignoble history of hosting viruses, spammers, pirate software sites (notorious credit card fraudster and pirate Art Schwartz has been hosted on trouble-free.net for over five years), and other criminal content.

The whois for ssl-datacontrol.com is, unsurprisingly, Russian:

whois ssl-datacontrol.com

Whois Server Version 2.0

Domain Name: SSL-DATACONTROL.COM
Registrar: ANO REGIONAL NETWORK INFORMATION CENTER DBA RU
Whois Server: whois.nic.ru
Referral URL: http://www.nic.ru
Name Server: NS1.CEDNS.RU
Name Server: NS2.CEDNS.RU
Status: clientTransferProhibited
Updated Date: 05-oct-2009
Creation Date: 05-oct-2009
Expiration Date: 05-oct-2010

>>> Last update of whois database: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 21:44:52 UTC <<<


Registrant ID: HEIGAAS-RU
Registrant Name: Elena V Zhuravlyova
Registrant Organization: Elena V Zhuravlyova
Registrant Street1: Orekhovyi boulevard
Registrant Street1: d.31 kv.72
Registrant City: Moscow
Registrant State: Moscow
Registrant Postal Code: 115573
Registrant Country: RU

Administrative, Technical Contact
Contact ID: HEIGAAS-RU
Contact Name: Elena V Zhuravlyova
Contact Organization: Elena V Zhuravlyova
Contact Street1: Orekhovyi boulevard
Contact Street1: d.31 kv.72
Contact City: Moscow
Contact State: Moscow
Contact Postal Code: 115573
Contact Country: RU
Contact Phone: +7 499 2678638
Contact E-mail: awoke@co5.ru

Registrar: ANO Regional Network Information Center dba RU-CENTER

---

So in short what we have is a very sophisticated, highly directed attack targeted at Web site owners who are using SSL security certificates on their Web sites, being conducted through emails which create a custom From address and custom attack URL for each specific victim.

The same rules apply to this as to all emails:

- DO NOT believe the From: address of an email. Ever.

- DO NOT respond to ANY security alert, question, or prompt you receive in ANY email. Ever. No matter who it appears to be from.

- Learn to read Web site URLs. DO NOT trust any part of a URL except the part immediately in front of the first slash.

Once again, I find my browser with about 40 open windows, so once again, it's time for another dump of Cool Stuff On The Web into the unsuspecting lap of you, my reader.

Today's roundup is all kinds of interesting and fun stuff with no discernible theme. I'l try to categorize them as much as possible, but fair warning...this batch is all over the place.

Onward to the links!

Art

Liu Bolin: The Invisible Man

This might be called "I Can't Believe It's Not Photoshop!" Liu Bolin does the hard way what would be easy in Photoshop; he painstakingly paints himself, then photographs himself from a carefully calculated vantage point so as to vanish into the background. There are other Web galleries of his work as well, and he recently appeared in a real-life art gallery called the Vanguard Gallery, whose Web site seems broken at the moment.



The Underground City on Governors Island

Governor's Island is a small island off the coast of New York City which formerly housed a military base and a small town. In the 1950s, the government transplanted all the town's inhabitants and buried the entire town. Now it's being excavated, and the pictures are amazing. (Edit: Apparently, this place is a hoax.)

Building a Terminator

Or, "what some people with far too much time on their hands do with their action figures."

How-to images for designing a Big Daddy costume from the video game "Bioshock"

Flipping amazing. When I grow up, I want to be half as talented as this guy. I'd never heard of the game Bioshock, and this costume was enough to make me want to play it. Neat feature: the gigantic drill arm actually spins!

Science

New Scientist: How to Cure Diseases Before they Even Start

The advent of antibiotics wrote a new chapter on human health, but effective antiviral drugs are thin on the ground and tend to be extremely specific, often working only against one variant of one virus. A group of researchers is now working on a new class of broad-spectrum antivirals which, if they work, will do for viral disease like what antibiotics have done for bacterial infections.

HPV linked to lung cancer?

A study has found that a significant number of lung cancer tumors express genetic material from the human papilloma virus, the virus responsible for genital warts and cervical cancer.

This does not necessarily prove that HPV causes lung cancer--it's possible that cancerous cells are more susceptible to HPV infection--but it's certainly an interesting correlation. If HPV does in fact lead to lung cancer, this will make immunization against HPV even more valuable, especially in men, who are not often immunized now.

Canadian Startup Proposes Nuclear Fusion at Bargain Basement Price

Nuclear fusion is the holy grail of energy--cheap, clean, safe, and virtually unlimited. Conventional approaches to nuclear fusion as a power source rely on fantastically complex inertial or magnetic confinement of hot hydrogen plasma. This approach, which is simpler and cheap, proposes using a sphere of molten metal as a kind of "anvil" to both contain and compress hydrogen to generate fusion power.

Single molecule pictured for the first time

Scientists from IBM used an atomic force microscope (AFM) to reveal the chemical bonds within a molecule. What else is there to say? This is cool fucking shit, yo.

Can dogs see colors?

Turns out the answer is "yes;" dogs aren't colorblind the way we've often thought they were. However, they do not see the range of colors human beings do; their color vision seems to be limited to shades of blue, yellow, and gray.



Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens

I've written about this briefly before, I think. The technology is getting closer, and when it's here, it's gonna be a game-changer.

Humor

Why the Cops Won't Patrol Brice Street

A motorcycle, two patrol officers, and an insane attack squirrel from the darkest depths of Hell. I laughed so hard I almost peed myself.

Instructions for Baby

Timeless warnings for new parents everywhere.



High Weirdness

Wearable Robotic Eyeball

I...don't know what to think. Apparently, it's linked to the wearer's iPhone and is part of a video game, I guess. Japanese culture is weird.

Cat rides the daily bus for four years

And apparently doesn't have to pay a fare. Neat trick, that. Click the link and go "Aww...."

A French Revelation, or The Burning Bush

So according to Jacques Chirac, in early 2003 President Bush told him that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse.

Sex Degrees of Separation Calculator

I didn't file this one under "science" because a number of the assumptions that the calculator uses strike me as somewhat implausible, or at least poorly supported, but it's a fun toy anyway. Put in your number of sexual partners and your age, and it tries to figure out how many people are in your extended sexual network. These things scale pretty quick, even if the assumptions the calculator uses are a bit liberal.

A History of Orgies

Kind of a fun article, even if it does end on the socially mandated "the orgy just does not seem such a good idea any more" note.

>Disabled Kids Walk With Jesus, Lefty Journos With Satan

An...interesting bit of artwork, supposedly inspired by a vision from God, in which we learn that the US Constitution was written by Jesus himself, the Founding Fathers were all devout Christians, and TV journalists are the tools of Satan. I wonder if I can buy it on black velvet?

Movie Mashups

Movie posters for one movie, done in the style of a different movie, funnier than you might think.



The Cost of Sexual Weirdness

My Human Sex Map project inspired someone to write about the social cost of expressing the variability and range of the human sexual experience.

And finally... Warning: If the Help Desk Thinks Your Question is Stupid, We Will Set You on Fire

Yesterday, NASA's LCROSS mission impacted the moon at high speed.

The purpose of the mission was to create a large plume of dust from impacting the bottom of a deep cater near the moon's south pole so that the plume could be analyzed for signs of water ice. In that particular respect, it went swimmingly, no pun intended.

However, the mission also revealed something totally unexpected--a treasure trove of barking moonbats here on planet earth. The moonbats have set up a Web site in which they claim the LCROSS mission is a part of a conspiracy by a "powerful syndicate of military-industrial criminals" that was "inspired by fanatical terrorist airline hijackers" to bomb the moon. From the Web site:

Of course, there is much more behind this attack than casual scientific curiosity on whether or not there is water on the Moon. First of all, since the long-range accuracy of intercontinental ballistic missiles has never been proven to work, the LCROSS suicide mission serves as a live-fire test exercise for US war strategists with an interest in the precision of orbiting satellite weapons—in other words, the southern hemisphere of the Moon will be turned into a firing range, making this mission one giant leap for the global reach of space warfare. Secondly, LCROSS has been promoted as "the vanguard" for the US military-industrial-entertainment complex’s return to the Moon—according to NASA, finding water is a necessary first step for "building a long-term and sustainable human presence" there. Historically, the purpose of exploration has always been the exploitation of resources and the colonization of territory without regard for ecosystems or indigenous peoples, and clearly the Moon is the next territory coveted by imperialists.

This so-called "NASA experiment" is a hostile act of aggression and a violent intrusion upon our closest and dearest celestial neighbor. Does any love song or poem or fairy tale worth its salt not mention the Moon? Who can take a walk in the Moonlight with a lover and not feel the romance to your very soul? At night, when the Moon rules, we sleep, and we can visit the Moon in our sleep with ease. The Moon is our night light, our blanket, our grandmother, our mother—it is woman, child, domestic life, tides, bodies of water, liquids, circulation, comfort, nurturing, paintings by Remedios Varo, stories by Jules Verne, and so much more.

It's not entirely clear to me that the authors of this Web site understand what the word "ecosystem" means or why the moon doesn't have one, but I'm particularly curious about who, exactly, the indigenous peoples in question are.

On the bright side, at least they're not trying to deny that we ever landed on the moon at all...

And for the record, it absolutely blows my mind to see so many people--including women! Women!--lining up to support a rich white guy who drugged and forcibly raped a 13-year-old child, then skipped away scot-free¹.




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¹ Edited to add: Okay, so he didn't really get away scot-free. While on the lam, he was forced to endure certain privations, such as spending his time with his movie actress wife shuttling between a luxury penthouse in Paris and an enormous chalet located in an exclusive ski resort in the Swiss mountains, but if he wanted an ironing board or a new set of sheets, could he pop down to a Wal-Mart and get them? Could he?

Since zaiah and I have moved into our house here in Portland, I've set up my office in the basement. One of the things I've done since moving in is put a set of shelves on top of my computer desk, the very same desk where I spend a great deal of my time working for clients who tend to pay me late.

But I digress.

Anyway, the cat Liam has taken over the bottom shelf on top of the desk, and likes to sit there while I work. In fact, he likes it so much that zaiah put a small blanket on the shelf just for him.

I spend my afternoons working at the computer desk, and Liam spends his afternoons on the shelf watching me. These pictures were taken over a span of about a week and a half or so.

Yes, I know my desk is a mess. Hush.