Phos Pictures makes beautifully candid documentaries that are simultaneously heart-wrenching, haunting, and raw: The Last Minutes with ODEN[previously], Pennies Heart, 5 Hours with Woody, My YiaYia, and more (or, click here if you prefer Vimeo). [warning: good chance of rain on face]

I totally overlooked The American Astronaut (2001) and perhaps others did too? Musician and indie filmmaker Cory Macabee has a history as a huge misshapen head, has been to Reno, been a lounge act for the seedier offworld colonies, been smuggling illegal female embryos for the Jovian mining concerns, & been a father.
Macabee's 2-man interplanetary ships tend towards diesels with 1905 wallpaper ...and porcelain washbasins for when you're not dry-shaving to please the ladies. He offers a unique take on the asteroid miners' spaceport bar and their all-male pastimes. He reminds us that regardless of future genetic catastrophes, still we'll always have male pregnancy. And what's up with the odd religion practiced by those hypersapient zero-G Nevada silver miners? Yes, I too need to know about Th' CHART. More recently we find that Stingray Sam is not a hero, but he does do the things that folks won't do that need to be done. Macabee's stuff is available online; I'm picking up my copies now, so he won't have to hurt me.

95 snakes found in bag at Malaysia airport. That's 95 live boa constrictors. Keng Liang "Anson" Wong, 52, was previously convicted of wildlife trafficking in the United States. It is unclear whether he served the full term. (previously)

"If the male partner withdraws before ejaculation every time a couple has vaginal intercourse, about 4 percent of couples will become pregnant over the course of a year" Which birth-control method is more effective: condoms or withdrawal?

Eddie Izzard has been on the Blue before, but this time there are five full-length stand-up acts. Particularly don't miss what I consider the finest two hours of stand-up comedy ever performed, Dress to Kill.
Stripped — 2008 Sexie — 2003 (Released in the US as Live from Wembley) Dress to Kill — 1998 Glorious — 1997 Definite Article — 1996

Q: Does stretching before running prevent injury? A: No.

Behold, the glory of a thoroughly enstapleified telephone pole, snapped last week in Toronto.

Phone poles

Eric Archer has created some really great electronic devices, using primarily 1970's technology. His audio work includes a sort of retro synth studio in a box, a generative sequencer based on LFSRs (more commonly used in cryptography), and and several infrared synced devices like this analog drum machine. He's also made an analog computer and oscillography art generators.

Etsy seller Buster and Boo does a nice line in vintage, moderately priced jewelry and decorative art made from vintage typewriter keys from the 1920s and 1930s.

Buster and Boo

• Typewriter repairmen in photos
• Beautiful old typewriters in photos
• History of the typewriter through vocal sound effects
• NYC writer's space throws out last remaining typewriter user ...
• Prints made from typewriter parts
• Typewriter stays relevant in technology-saturated world
• Trove of classic typewriter info

So where would you go looking if you wanted to find the deepest and sickest cold wave synth-beats of all? Then I think we would have to look all the way back to John Bender, avant-garde synth pioneer, who released three seminal albums in the early '80s and then just disappeared, forever. What else sounds this fantastic, and has that addictive, computerized, lo-fi ice beat? Maybe Ultravox, and the frosty, hollow majesty of Hiroshima Mon Amour. Or Soviet with Candy Girl, or Lori and the Chameleons and Touch

Chilean graphic designer Juan Pablo Bravo (Flickr profile, blogspot blog) makes some pretty awesome character infographics. (Warning: the following links go to large sized flickr photos) 70 Disney Villains : 250 Disney Characters : 100 200 Pixar Characters (sorta previously) : 50 Movie Cars : and his most recent (and my personal favorite) 600 Hanna-Barbara Characters (via).
Bonus link: Here is a set of some of Bravo's professional infographic work for the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio.

Video Link (via reddit)

"Earlier this week, Tribune's KTXL Sacramento aired what it says is the first-ever TV station ad for marijuana. The Fox affiliate aired a 30-second spot, paid for by Sacramento-based medicinal marijuana advocacy group CannaCare and produced by KTXL, advertising a medical marijuana dispensary." CannaCare Commercial.

Ugly Vegas Carpets Want You to Keep Playing. "Mathematician-philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said, "It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious." This certainly rings true with Chris Maluszynski's Las Vegas Carpets series, whose name explains it all. The photos draw out the psychology of Las Vegas through the simple observation of carpet."

Xeni posted a great NASA image of the 2010 Hurricane Earl earlier this afternoon, which got me hunting around for some information on Hurricane Earls past. After all, this is not the first Earl. There've been three others, as well as some lesser Tropical Storms of the same name. The naming lists for these things are used again every seven years, and individual names are only retired after they've been attached to a particularly damaging storm. Earl, so far, has not.

When the names do get retired, replacing them isn't easy. According to Time magazine, there's a whole list of types of names that aren't allowed. Over the years, the meteorologists in charge of naming have resorted to flipping through the weirder end of baby name books and adding friends' names to the list.

Time: How are hurricanes and tropical storms named?

Above: Hurricanes Earl and Danielle in their 1998 incarnations.

To promote his newest film, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, director Werner Herzog is interviewed by twitter. (MLYT) (Via the AV Club.) (Previously on Herzog.)

Another oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded today. All crew members survived. Right now, nobody knows whether or not the explosion caused a leak in any of the seven wells that the rig collects from. There have been reports of an oil slick on the water near the fire, but that could just as easily be from the finite amount of oil stored on the rig—which would still a spill, but a significantly less problematic one.

Other than that, there's not really much information out about this right now. If anybody's learned anything from Deepwater Horizon it seems to be that you're better off, PR-wise, if you don't have to correct everything you say two days later.

To give you something to chew over in the meantime, though, Deep Sea News has been doing a really interesting series on the science (such as it is) of oil dispersants. It's interesting, not just because of the basic facts, but also because it gets into the details of why we don't know more.

Dispersants must be applied successfully and have a high effectiveness once in ocean waters. This sounds easy, in principle--once you've perfected your Corexit formula in the lab, just spray it from a helicopter, and voila! Except there are a lot of factors which you also have to take into account: the composition of the oil spilled, sea energy, whether the oil has been subjected to weathering at all, exact type of dispersant used and the amount which you sprayed, and ocean temperature/salinity.

Thank goodness for all those lab tests over the years which figured all this stuff out, you say. Um, well actually it seems like even designing simulation experiments is difficult, and different tests can report different effectiveness scores for the same dispersant. It is difficult to accurately scale up lab tests in order to predict dispersant action on real spills. Older studies used methods and analyses which have since been discredited. Wave-tank tests can probably provide upper limits on dispersant effectiveness, but there are SEVENTEEN (!!) critical factors that require strict control for accurate results (Fingas 2002). Field tests in open ecosystems are even worse for measuring the fate of oil and controlling variables. In terms of measuring dispersant effectiveness, tank tests, field tests, and lab tests all disagree. Awesome.

Part 1: How effective are dispersants on real oil spills?

Part 2: How toxic are dispersants?

Part 3: Do dispersants really promote degradation of oil?

Image of a random oil rig: Some rights reserved by kenhodge13

Mary Robinette Kowal sez, "Preschoolers in Richmond, California are being handed RFID jerseys when they get to school. The ACLU points out that in addition to the privacy concerns, these are not secure tags. It has the potential to make kidnapping and stalking very easy." The editors of Scientific American said it well back in May 2005: "Tagging ... kids becomes a form of indoctrination into an emerging surveillance society that young minds should be learning to question." Don't Let Schools Chip Your Kids (Thanks, Mary, via Submitterator!)

• Video of a guy implanting an RFID chip into his hand
• How to hack RFID-enabled credit cards for $8 TV
• Credit-card companies killed Mythbusters segment on RFID ...
• RFID Rube Goldberg device
• Britain will make foreigners carry RFID identity cards and will ...
• HOWTO kill/block an RFID
• Disney kills its spy-on-your-kids phones

Curator and artist Aunia Kahn selected a group of 23 lowbrow/pop surrealist artists to interpret one card each of the Major Arcana of the Tarot deck. Hi-Fructose has a sneak preview of 14 of the cards, which will debut October 1 with a full show at Los Angeles's La Luz de Jesus Gallery, a book, and of course a deck of cards. Above left, card back by Daniel Martin Diaz; right, The Devil by Chet Zar

The LowBrow Tarot Card Project preview (Hi-Fructose)

LOWBROW + TAROT + PROJECT

UPDATE: You can see the entire show at the La Luz de Jesus site here.

I can't stop looking at this photo of talented cartoonist Pete Emslie posing with my favorite Catwoman, the beautiful Julie Newmar.

Pete Emslie at Fan Expo 2010

• Julie Newmar as April Conquest
• More of Pete Emslie's doodles on newspapers
• Thoughts on doodling