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My friend T.Bias, a composer and "media experimenter" who also has spectacular hair, says,
I flipped my dreadlocks in front of an exceptional high-speed camera shooting on the low end of its abilities; a mere 6,800fps. k0re happened to be there to record the event in realtime which is great for comparison. I edited it to my song, "Rag Tag Flag", from my Hooks'n'Heels project.Enjoy.
(The nanobristles) spontaneously curl into a precise array of helical bundles when immersed in an evaporating liquid. AAizenberg likens the phenomena to the way wet, curly hair clumps together and coils to form dreadlocks...Mimicking the Building Prowess of Nature
As they twist together, the nanoscale bristles can capture nearby particles (image avbove right), a property that could be used to develop novel adhesives or a method for capturing and releasing drugs at specific sites within the body. The structures could also be used for their optical properties, says Aizenberg. As the distances between the bristles shrinks or expands, the optical properties of the material changes from reflective to nonreflective.
This crazy-looking dress, created by two designers in London for the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, is made of silk chiffon and 24,000 full color LEDs. It's called the Galaxy Dress. It runs on tiny iPod batteries woven into the fabric so no one part becomes extra-bulky or heavy. The catch: it uses as much electricity as two light bulbs and will only stay lit for up to an hour.
Designer duo create a dress with 24,000 LEDS 
The story of Tim Langdell's relentless and darkly fascinating trademark fight against any and all users of the name 'Edge' has been quietly storming under the surface for the better part of this year.
In a nutshell: Langdell's Edge Games, a UK-based publisher in the earliest days of home computer games, has tirelessly struggled to maintain ownership over the word against any would-be competitor, regardless of discipline, growing more convoluted and ludicrous the farther down the rabbit hole you go (the Chaos Edge blog is the most damning at documenting just how bizarre it's become).
For nearly two decades, it seemed to work. Edge Games successfully struck settlements with movie and comic book companies, further strengthening his grip on the four-letter word, but then Langdell attempted to swat down what should have been his easiest target: tiny French indie developer Mobigame, and their iPhone debut, titled, of course, Edge (pictured left).
After successfully managing to get the game removed from the App Store, Langdell butted up against what could prove to be his downfall: the collective, unshakable 'might' of the indie game community, who've coalesced around the Mobigame struggle and mounted reams of evidence and circumstantial quotes about Langdell's business practices in his early days, seeking to shred the paper tiger and expose what little claim Edge Games has over the trademark.
Now with the legal might of no less than Electronic Arts behind them (who recently filed this scathing suit against Edge Games after Langdell seemed to be targeting EA's Mirror's Edge, using much of the evidence gathered by the indies), and with Edge Games now having successfully convinced Apple to remove Killer Edge Racing from the App Store, the indie community has served its latest sardonic volley against Langdell, rallying together to show support for 'the fallen' by incorporating the name into their own games.
Below, then, a gallery of all the participants' parodies. Whether the 'troll day' has any effect other than situation-awareness and to what end the community will take its efforts remains to be seen, but either way it's a heartening reminder of the size and solidarity of the indie games movement. 
Derek Yu modifies his Spelunky with its new name, and a pixel-caricature of Edge Games' owner.
Steph Thirion's iPhone debut Eliss gains an added dimension to give the game more, well, edges.
Effing Hail designer Greg Wohlwend and Closure creator Tyler Glaiel introduce their latest work and company name.
Recently featured Toronto dev Capybara announce a title switch for their game previously known as Critter Crunch.
Also recently featured Canabalt creator Adam Saltsman unveils the largest of the efforts: a new website for Atomic Edge Games, pitch perfectly capturing the spirit of Langdell's amateur site-development skills, and following suit by renaming his games and using, as does Langdell, assets from pre-existing works to promote them.
Austria's Broken Rules (now to be known as Broken Edge) converts their PC/soon-to-be WiiWare game And Yet It Moves to its new name.
Mike Kasprzak modifies his iPhone debut game Smiles down to the level of each mode.
Art game master Messhof announces his latest work.
Dejobaan take their already unlikely named game AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! -- A Reckless Disregard for Gravity to new heights.
And finally, Fez creators Polytron unveil their decision to re-introduce their game as Fedge.
To learn more about the Edge Games vs. The World efforts, visit the Chaos Edge blog, TIGSource's roundup of the ongoing story, and Simon Parkin's Eurogamer feature laying out just how this all began.
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Chip makers Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc said they have settled all outstanding legal disputes, including antitrust litigation and patent licensing issues.
Intel said on Thursday it will pay AMD $1.25 billion as part of the settlement, sending shares of AMD up nearly 30 percent.
The two companies also sealed a five-year cross license deal and said they would give up any claims of breach from their previous license agreement.
Competition authorities in Asia, Europe and the United States have taken action against Intel in recent years because of persistent complaints by AMD about the behavior of Intel, which makes 80 percent of the central processing units at the heart of personal computers.
"While the relationship between the two companies has been difficult in the past, this agreement ends the legal disputes and enables the companies to focus all of our efforts on product innovation and development," AMD and Intel said in a joint statement.
AMD said it would drop all pending litigation including a case in U.S. District Court in Delaware and two cases pending in Japan. AMD will also withdraw all of its regulatory complaints worldwide.
As a result of the settlement, Intel adjusted its fourth-quarter outlook. The chip maker raised its spending forecast to $4.2 billion from $2.9 billion, and said its effective tax rate would be about 20 percent, down from 26 percent. Other expectations are unchanged, Intel said.
Shares of AMD jumped 23 percent to $6.55 in early trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Intel shares were halted.
(Reporting by David Lawsky and Tiffany Wu, Gerald E. McCormick, Dave Zimmerman)
soreHoly water dispenser combats spread of swine fluIt functions like an automatic soap dispenser in public lavatories - a churchgoer waves his or her hand under a sensor and the machine spurts out holy water.
"It has been a bit of a novelty. People initially were a bit shocked by this technological innovation but then they welcomed it with great enthusiasm and joy," said Father Pierangelo Motta...
"After all the news that some churches, like Milan's cathedral, were suspending the use of holy water fonts as a measure against swine flu, demands for my invention shot to the stars. I have received orders from all over the world," (inventor Luciano Marabese) said.
Writing CULTS, CONSPIRACIES, AND SECRET SOCIETIES, I learned about a lot of truly terrible people with really disturbing ideas (Charles Manson, the white supremacist David Lane, Canada's Roch "Moses" Thériault spring to mind); I also encountered some monsters who preached only good things (Jim Jones, Bhagwan Rajneesh). But the people who made the deepest impressions on me and stayed with me the longest were the Cranks. Koreshanity, the religio-political-pseudoscientific cult founded by Dr. Cyrus Read Teed (1839-1908), who believed that we don't live on the exterior of our planet but within it, on its "inner habitable surface of land and water," led me to a whole nineteenth century literature on hollow earth theory. Because Google digitized books in the public domain first, I was able to find some really rare volumes without even leaving my desk, such as William E. Lyon's THE HOLLOW GLOBE, OR, THE WORLD'S AGITATOR AND RECONCILER (1873), a portmanteau of science, mediumship, and Manifest Destiny, which looks forward to our colonization of the planet's inner frontier. I spent some time with Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel VRIL: THE POWER OF THE COMING RACE (1871) too. Theosophists wrote about Vril--a mysterious form of energy--as though it were real, as did members of Thule, a German occult racialist society. In 1960 Louis Pawels and Jacques Bergier wrote a book called LE MATIN DES MAGICIENS that claimed that something called the Vril Society was Thule's inner circle; in the 1970s, a holocaust denier named Ernst Zundel, who sold an English translation of the book through his publishing house, announced an expedition to Antarctica to search for Nazi-built Vril-powered UFO bases (it never got off the ground). Zundel is currently serving a prison sentence in Germany for inciting racial hatred.
The oddest thing I encountered has no wider significance whatsoever. It's just really, really... strange. Not uncanny or eerie, it wouldn't belong in a book like IMPOSSIBLE: YET IT HAPPENED, it's more like running into an old friend in an utterly unexpected place. It happened when I was researching The Processeans.
I first came across the Processeans when I was writing about Charles Manson--they had sued the publisher of Ed Sanders' THE FAMILY, which claimed that their involvement with Manson went deeper than the interview they did with him for the "Death" issue of their magazine The Process. The publisher recalled the book and every reference to the "black-garbed, death-worshipping Processeans," as Sanders had called them, was removed from its pages. In 1987, a book called THE ULTIMATE EVIL accused the Processeans of involvement in the Son of Sam murders. Long after I turned in my manuscript to Vintage, in June, 2009, Feral House published Timothy Wyllie's LOVE SEX FEAR DEATH: THE INSIDE STORY OF THE PROCESS CHURCH OF THE FINAL JUDGMENT. I wish I had had access to it when I was writing my book, but I had to scrounge around for whatever I could find. Someone had scanned whole issues of the Process magazine onto his Web site, along with memoirs by ex members and a whole book by one of Process's founders. An obituary for another founder led me to an article in the Rocky Mountain News, which is now posted on Rick Ross's cult website. But more on that in a moment.
First, who were the Processeans? Some Boing Boing readers might remember them or have even had personal experiences with them; I'm too young and led too sheltered a life. Process began in London in the early 1960s as an Adlerian psychoanalytic practice. It was led by two ex-Scientologists, an ex-cavalry officer named Robert Moor (who changed his name to Robert de Grimston) and a former call girl named Mary Anne MacLean. By 1966, their practice had transmogrified into a religion (Alistair Cooke's daughter and stepdaughter were members). With a follower's inheritance, they purchased a mansion in Mayfair and began to publish their magazine (the press dubbed them "The Mind Benders of Mayfair"). Mick Jagger appeared on one of the magazine's early covers; De Grimston published a chapbook whose first and last lines gave the group its catchphrase: "As it is, so be it." In 1966 they decamped to the Yucatan, where they witnessed the destruction of Hurricane Inez. De Grimston's thinking took on an apocalyptic tinge: "The power of Jehovah, Lucifer, and Satan is the dominant power," he wrote. "Conflicted though they may be for the purpose of the Game, upon one matter They are in total agreement....and that matter is the fact of the End. The End of the world as we know it; the end of humankind as we know it." Processean Churches sprung up around the country; their services featured sitars and invocations of Christ, Lucifer, Jehovah, and Satan.
In the mid-1970s, De Grimston and MacLean (the Omega, they called themselves) divorced and the group collapsed. But it didn't die. Instead it changed. First into another religion, The Foundation Faith of the Millennium. And then into something else altogether. As that article in the February 28, 2004 Rocky Mountain News reported:
One of the world's most admired animal sanctuaries has a skeleton tucked deep in its closet - one with a history worthy of its own miniseries. The Best Friends Animal Society runs the nation's largest "no-kill" shelter in Utah and raised $19.9 million last year alone. But more than three decades ago, its key founders formed a movement that was accused - falsely, they say - of being a satanic cult.
The title is a mouthful: Hocus Pocus Junior The anatomy of legerdemain. Or, The art of iugling set forth in his proper colours, fully, plainly, and exactly; so that an ignorant person may thereby learn the full perfection of the same, after a little practise.
The publication date is 1634. Although it's the earliest book devoted to magic as a performing art, it apparently takes its text almost exactly from a 1584 book called The Discoverie of Witchcraft. The Witchcraft book was meant to be a debunking text, proving to people that witches didn't exist and, thus, that we shouldn't go about condemning other people for witchcraft. Hocus Pocus Junior took the chapters on sleight of hand and slightly (heh) reworked them as an instructional manual.
Comparing Hocus Pocus Junior and the Discoverie of Witchcraft at Early Modern Whale.
Two Posts on the History of Hocus Pocus Junior from Bookride.com
Thanks to Holly Tucker!
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