Sheesh, here I was bragging all over the place about Boing Boing's amazing guestbloggers -- most notably, our current star, Susannah Breslin -- and the guys at Gizmodo have to one-up us over here. NASA's frickin' Mars Lander is guestblogging over there. Brian Lam says the Phoenix Mars Lander is blogging about its "last days on Mars, recalling its life and bravely facing impending death." Gah! Brilliant.

Glen Jackson Taylor of Core77 visted NASA to profile the designers of the next manned lunar rover.

Evan Twyford and Carl Conlee are two of three industrial designers working in NASA's Habitability Design Center (HDC), and in just over 2 years they have transitioned the department from one that dealt only with small isolated ergonomic projects to working on arguably the most exciting project at NASA today—a next generation pressurized lunar rover. The thing is, NASA doesn't actually have an industrial design department. They don't even have a design department. Not technically, anyway...

Designing for Space: Core77 visits NASA's Industrial Design Team

Stephen Worth says:

Today, we posted more amazing "Cappiana" from the collection of cartoonist, Mike Fontanelli at the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive, including...

• Al Capp's infamous "Jack Jawbreaker" story -- a devastating satire of the notorious exploitation of Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster by DC Comics.

• More than a dozen rare Wildroot Cream-Oil strips, as well as original artwork and Nat King Cole's version of the jingle.

• Two complete Fearless Fosdick stories, including Capp's over-the-top masterpiece of surreal violence, "The Case of the Chippendale Chair (or Kiss The Blood Off My Springs)"

Capp's sense of humor was decades ahead of its time, predating the sort of sick humor that is so popular in comics and cartoons today. It's amazing what he got away with in "family newspapers" during the 50s!

CAPPtivating Heroes: Jack Jawbreaker and Fearless Fosdick Fight Crime

Here's a chart from the Marijuana Policy Project that summarizes the nine (out of 10) marijuana-related ballot initiatives around the country that passed in yesterday's election, and the one bad initiative that was defeated. The margins were pretty big, too.

Massachusetts Question 2: Remove the threat of arrest or jail for possessing an ounce or less of marijuana, replacing it with a $100 fine, which could be paid through the mail without lawyers or court appearances, just like a speeding ticket. WIN 65%-35%

Chart of marijuana-related ballot initiatives for 2008: big wins

Found on Next Nature:

19th century people needed some explanation to understand the difference between the regular candlelight and the electrically simulated candlelight. Note the disclaimer at the bottom: “The use of Electricity for lighting is in no way harmful to health, nor does it affect the soundness of sleep.”

Light bulb warning sign

A really great photograph, via Boston.com. Does anyone have photog credit info? Link to original photo series, a collection of portraits of our president-elect (who, as the shot demonstrates, sometimes reads the Wall Street Journal). Here's the info on this photograph:

US Democratic presidential candidate Illinois Senator Barack Obama shares a fist bump with Ethan Gibbs, the five year-old son of campaign communication director Robert Gibbs, upon disembarking from his campaign plane at Dulles airport in Chantilly, Virgina, on October 22, 2008. (EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/Getty Images) #

(via @SdGeek)

I'm Learning to Share was kind enough to share this delightful and gentle version of the Kingston Trio's 1959 hit folk song, M.T.A., by French singer Eileen Grayam.

There's a dearth of information out there regarding 'Eileen Grayam' and The Storytellers, but one possible theory suggests that this Eileen could be the same American-born yé-yé girl Eileen who recorded in France in the 1960's and had a hit with her French-language version of Nancy Sinatra's 'These Boots Were Made For Walking' in 1966.

'Charlie on the M.T.A.' in French: Eileen Grayam - Le Metro de Boston b/w Michel

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Nick Reynolds, RIP

Hope you'll join us in SF if you're in town tonight. Details here, and more here. Thanks Scott Beale! For Web 2.0 conference participants who are attending the dinner/auction at the Palace Hotel tonight: we'll be up late with the Drinkup, so just cmon by when Web 2 wraps up.

Do people with Asperger Syndrome understand intentional actions in a different way than people without Asperger Syndrome? Edouard Machery, a philosopher of psychology and an experimental philosopher in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, says they do:

Consider the following probes:

The Free-Cup Case
Joe was feeling quite dehydrated, so he stopped by the local smoothie shop to buy the largest sized drink available. Before ordering, the cashier told him that if he bought a Mega-Sized Smoothie he would get it in a special commemorative cup. Joe replied, ‘I don't care about a commemorative cup, I just want the biggest smoothie you have.' Sure enough, Joe received the Mega-Sized Smoothie in a commemorative cup. Did Joe intentionally obtain the commemorative cup?

The Extra-Dollar Case
Joe was feeling quite dehydrated, so he stopped by the local smoothie shop to buy the largest sized drink available. Before ordering, the cashier told him that the Mega-Sized Smoothies were now one dollar more than they used to be. Joe replied, ‘I don't care if I have to pay one dollar more, I just want the biggest smoothie you have.' Sure enough, Joe received the Mega-Sized Smoothie and paid one dollar more for it. Did Joe intentionally pay one dollar more?

You surely think that paying an extra dollar was intentional, while getting the commemorative cup was not. So do most people (Machery, 2008).

But Tiziana Zalla and I have found that if you had Asperger Syndrome, a mild form of autism, your judgments would be very different: You would judge that paying an extra-dollar was not intentional, just like getting the commemorative cup (Zalla and Machery ms).

Intentional action and Asperger Syndrome

In January of this year, on what amounted to a whim, I created an online project called Letters from Johns. To be perfectly honest, I can't even recall exactly why I did it, but I've been writing about the sex industry for years, and I suppose I was curious about why men pay for sex. Rather than hearing someone else's version of their stories, I was interested in collecting their stories. So, I put out a call on my blog for exactly that, and that's exactly what I got.

Every so often, another letter from a john would show up in my email box. They were state investigators, lonely, single guys, married men, enlisted, world travelers, virgins, and thrill-seekers. When Spitzergate hit, I got more letters than ever. (I wrote about the project here.) Eventually, though, the call girl and john coverage slowed. These days, I get fewer letters than I used to.

Last night, I got a new letter from a john. It was more sad than most, although many of the letters are somewhat sad. More often than not, the emails are testimonies to loneliness, and the lengths people, men, in particular, will go to be anywhere but alone. This letter, though, was particularly sad, and my guess is it came from a Boing Boing reader. Seeing as I hadn't gotten any letters in a while, and this one rolled in the night I started guestblogging, it's likely he came across the project from here.

Of course, I don't bring this up to out him. He's a John Doe, and all letters remain anonymous. Sometimes, though, there's a tendency to see stories like his, or those of the others, as belonging to lives that are nothing like ours, to "Other-ize" them, when, in fact, the themes of these letters -- the desire to transcend one's internal abyss -- are not so unlike the stories of most who have experiences that require them to find out what's hidden in their darkest places.

"I Wanted To Kill Myself."

A new video, "S.U.S. (Save UR Soul)," directed by (a very pregnant) M.I.A. and featuring Blaqstarr mashup/covering Tom Waits' "Way Down In The Hole," which various artists have covered as the theme song for HBO's "The Wire," with M.I.A. crooning about her laptop. On the video's lo-fi look, from the YouTube credits: "cheapest video ever made , i spent $9.95 on it."

On Myspace, M.I.A. blogs:

Me and Blaqstarr found the image at the end from a Joy Division video and thought about the election and thats how people want you to see the world , black/ white , good/ evil, jesus/devil for you the words are Obama vs Mc Cain for me its terror vs genocide simple maths so we put it on at the end to show how far we've gone and how far we've come, i have to start staying at home more because i dont think i can fit through my front door anymore but i want this to do the traveling for me.

I am loving this strange medical-themed footwear. Created by student designer Gwendolyn Huskens, the set of six sick shoes aim to "reveal the taboos associated with physical deformities." Couture for the clubfooted? Reminds me of Romain Slocombe's medical fetishism, "Crash," and stumbling supermodels. More images at designboom. Photo credit: René Van Der Hulst.

Artists Moira Hahn, Tessar Lo, and Bill Blair have a show of new work opening this Friday at Seattle's Roq La Rue Gallery. Seen above is Lo's "Knowledge" (mixed media on paper, 27.5" x 36"). It drives me wild. From the show description:

Born in Indonesia and raised in Canada, Tessar Lo (Los Angeles) brings a very eastern influenced style into his work. Lo has been influenced by artists such as Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara and by japanese ukiyo-e printers and other traditional asian techniques. He juxtaposes these traditional influences with current pop culture and music to create his own unique view of the world around him. His is known for his emotionally evocative paintings of young people with giant totemistic animal guardians, most notably tigers. Rather than one note narratives, there is always an ambiguity in each scene, and the viewer never really has a clear sense of who is actually guarding who. The symbolic, majestic creatures are as vulnerable, and as able to achieve a painful sort of transcendence, as we are.

Hahn, Lo, Blair preview

Tone Generation is a twelve-part audio documentary on the global history of electronic music until the 1970s. I just started listening to the podcast and it's absolutely fascinating. Ian Helliwell created the program earlier this year for England's Resonance FM. It was produced by sound designer Simon James who also did the otherworldly audio for Ken Hollings's Welcome To Mars series. Tone Generation's structure was inspired by Helliwell's analogue music history chart, also a terrific resource. From The Tone Generation project page:

The Tone Generation is Ian's continuing radio series exploring electronic music; a personal selection drawn from his records and cds, looking at different themes or composers in the era of analogue tape and early synthesizer technology. Within the limitations of his collection and the half hour time slot, the programmes will hopefully act as a useful and enlightening overview of electronic music as it developed in many different countries, and will be of special interest to enthusiasts and students studying the history of analogue electronics, from the formative days up to the 1970s.

The Tone Generation podcast (Odeo), The Tone Generation MP3 downloads (SimonSound), The Tone Generation project page (Ian Helliwell's site)

This intensely beautiful photo, credited E. Leslie, accompanies a Science News article about how climate change has been negatively impacting the population of Norway lemmings. From Science News:

Norway lemmings, Lemmus lemmus, are about half the size of a guinea pig and live in nests beneath the snow during the winter months. When the snowpack is light and fluffy, warmth from the ground melts small spaces under the snow that the lemmings use to forage for sedges, grasses and mosses without being exposed to predators. But in recent years, warmer winter temperatures have rendered the snow less fluffy. That, in turn, has made the snow more likely to melt and refreeze at ground level, coating the ground with ice and making life more difficult for lemmings.

Climate Change Stifling Lemmings

Tiny horse joyfully runs free, evading all attempts to capture it.

Paper engineer Haruki Nakamura created this amazing heart of gears. The video really gets cranking around :50. Gear's heart (via Drawn!)

New research suggests the lefties are more likely to be inhibited and anxious. Psychologist Lynn Wright and her colleagues at the University of Abertay Dundee ran behavioral tests on more than 100 people to see if they agreed with statements like “I worry about making mistakes, "“Criticism or scolding hurts me quite a bit," and “I often act on the spur of the moment." The answers of left-handed subjects revealed more reticence than righties. From New Scientist:

In left-handers the right half of the brain is dominant, and it is this side that seems to control negative aspects of emotion. In right-handers the left brain dominates...

However, (Swansea University behavioral neuroscientist Philip Corr, who was not involved in the study,) says handedness is not so much a predictor of personality as a great way to understand how emotions are handled in our brains. “Although we may have a predisposition to an inhibition, that may encourage us during adulthood or childhood to develop coping strategies,” he says. “It could act as a blessing.”

Wright, a lefty, agrees. “They [left-handers] like to colour-code things, they like to write lists, it’s almost a way to alleviate their stress,” she says..

"Left-handed people are more inhibited"

Online betting outfit Paddy Power is offering 4-1 odds that God exists. So far, folks have wagered $5000 on the question. Interest has increased resulting from an atheist ad campaign on London buses with the slogan: "There's probably no God." From The Telegraph:

A spokesman for Paddy Power said that confirmation of God's existence would have to be verified by scientists and given by an independent authority before any payouts were made, however.

He added: "The atheists' planned advertising campaign seems to have renewed the debate in pubs and around office water-coolers as to whether there is a God and we've seen some of that being transferred into bets.

"However we advise anyone still not sure of God's existence to maybe hedge their bets for now, just in case."

"Paddy Power offers odds of 4-1 that God exists"

Stefan Savage, a UC San Diego computer science professor, has developed software that can clone house keys from photos.

House keys can be cloned from photos taken on normal mobile phones, and even from shots taken over distances of hundreds of feet.

The images are scanned by a digital imaging programme that copies the exact contours of a key to create working duplicates, no matter the angle or distance at which the photos were taken.

Although the software has been developed by university researchers who have pledged not to release the code, they warned that it would not be difficult for technology-savvy criminal gangs to make similar applications.

Quick -- somebody tell these Flickr users to hide their keychain photos!

Software can clone keys from single photo

Yes, We Can. And Yes We Did. What an amazing and historic night. Never have I witnessed so many people, all over the country, expressing such hope, optimism, and pride all at the same moment. If this mood tonight in America is a sign of what's to come, the future might -- in spite of everything -- be better than the last eight years.

What an incredible night to be an American. As I type this in a hotel in San Francisco, I can still hear people screaming and honking car horns out in the streets. I just left a diner with friends, and periodically the joint erupted in spontaneous cheering. Never in my life have I seen anything like this.

Above, flag photo by Siege. Tweeted Warren Ellis: "And that's it. Nice work, America. You got your country back."

Lessig to the FCC. Schneier to Homeland Security. Let the fantasy football cabinet appointment riffing begin.

Here's an open thread. Please discuss.

In related news, Ape Lad says the "H in sunrays" will no longer appear in the Laugh Out Loud Cats.

I don't usually blog about conference stuff I'm doing, but this one's going to be special. I've been looking forward to it for weeks.

Tomorrow at the Web 2.0 Summit, helmed by Tim O'Reilly and BB's own "band manager" John Battelle, I'll be hosting a panel about the future of online video. It's something I've been thinking about, and working on, every single day since we launched Boing Boing tv a year ago.

I am honored to welcome the following esteemed guests on this panel: Timothy Shey (Next New Networks), David Prager (Revision3), Robin Sloan (Current), Greg Goodfried (EQAL), Miles Beckett (EQAL), and Andrew Baron (Rocketboom). I'm really jazzed about the workshop, and the material people are going to share. If you're in town and thinking of coming to Web 2.0, I hope (a) this will convince you to come to the event, and (b) you'll stop by at 1130 for this panel.

The Future of Online Video (Web 2.0 Summit 2008)

A visible woman in a creation by designer Manish Arora bedecked with Swarovski crystals walks the London runway. Photo credit: Gareth Cattermole. Link.

Last weekend, I bought a copy of Art Spiegelman's newest book, Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! It's one of those book that you have to experience tactilely. It's oversized, hardcover, and brilliantly colored. In theory, it's a reprint of a collection of work from his younger years, but the real gem of the book is the introduction, in which Spiegelman looks back across the years to figure out what turned him into the king of Mauschwitz.

Early works that paved the way to Maus are here, too -- a "Maus" strip and the searing "Prisoner on the Hell Planet" --, but in the book's opening meta-autobiographical artwork, the artist exposes how all the pieces fit together in his personal history and explores the wrenching process beneath the panels. One of the most striking pages features a messy collage of early drafts of "Hell Planet," wherein he recounts his mother's suicide. Looking over the page of his old pages, you see the story come to life.

For something of a sneak peek, Slate has an insightful Breakdowns slideshow: "Making Comics After Mauschwitz."

Tracie Egan has assembled the mindboggling: "10 CASTRATION SCENES FROM HORROR MOVIES." Probably, you don't want to click on that NSFW link if you have a penis, but since I don't, I found the whole, incredibly graphic lineup to be pretty fascinating, especially the one with the dog. I guess this is the part where I should say something more, but what do you say after that thing with the Rottweiler? Not much, really.

(Image from "Ilsa, She Woolf of the SS.")

If you need a unicorn chaser after that Sarah Palin erotica, I recommend Casiotone for the Painfully Alone's "White Corolla" video, directed by the awesome and awesomely young Julia Pott, and animated by Pott and Robin Bushell.

Be warned, this video is NSFWIAPTOTOAFYO. That is, Not Safe For Work If Animated Pandas Tearing Off Their Own Arms Freak You Out.

(Via Videos.antville.org.)

Hi! Susannah Breslin here. Thank you to Xeni for the kind introduction and to the rest of the Boing Boing team for inviting me to guestblog. Surely, it will be a good time.

On this exciting election night, in which all my dreams may be realized at the moment McCain's head explodes, I could not think of a better way to start my tenure here than with some Sarah Palin erotica. First, there was the This Is Not Sarah Palin Inflatable Love Doll. (I know I enjoyed mine.) Then came the haunting specter of "Nailin' Paylin." Still, a question remains. What about something for those Palin obsessed who are a bit more sensitive, those aesthetes? In this spirit, Rachel Kramer Bussel created Sarah Palin Erotica, an online repository of erotic stories about the person I pray will disappear into this good night, leaving in her wake little more than a deflated love doll in my closet.

What makes Sarah happiest right now is that she has the attention of a great many men. If her favorite thing is telling herself she will be the next president of the United States each time she passes a reflective surface, her second favorite thing is to sit in a conference room full of men in their crisp, slightly sweaty dress shirts and designer slacks with their earnestness and condescension and turn away from the table just enough to slowly cross and uncross her legs. She’ll allow her eyes to crinkle, the corners of her mouth turning up slightly and she’ll lean forward just enough for her blouse to part. She’ll watch them and the predictable way their eyes follow the toned muscles of her calves up to her breasts. They’ll clear their throats and adjust their ties and shift uncomfortably in their seats. She knows what they’re thinking—they’re thinking if they play their cards right, they too could be fucking the next president of the United States.

Sarah Palin Erotica

MIT researcher Alex (Sandy) Pentland used tiny devices called "sociometers" to collect thousands of hours of data about the unconscious speech patterns that can influence the outcome of conversations. For example, the way you talk in an interview -- even if neither you or the interviewer are remotely aware of your tone -- may have a tremendous impact on what the employer thinks of you. We all know this of course, but Pentland has actually studied it scientifically. The value of the sociometers isn't in producing a verbal record of a conversation but rather quantifiable information about more subtle cues like tone and physical activity. Apparently, Pentland was able to use the data, not the words themselves, to accurately predict how a conversation about, say, a date or an investment pitch, would play out. He calls these cues "honest signals," and has just written a new book about the idea, titled Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World. From the MIT News Office:

The features he found that are highly predictive of outcomes, he says, "match the literature in biology about signaling in animals." In fact, Pentland suggests, the non-linguistic channels of communication that are measured by the sociometers may have started among our ancestors long before the evolution of language itself, forming a deeper, more primal way of understanding intentions, coordinating activities and establishing power relationships within the group.

"Half of our decision-making seems to be predicted by this unconscious channel," says Pentland, the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences. "That's exactly the channel that you see in apes" as they coordinate their activities without the use of language... The data gathered from the devices can be used not only to predict the outcomes of specific interactions between people, but even the relative productivity of different teams within a company. "This information is not in the organizational charts," Pentland says. "This human side is missing from all traditional measures" of how groups of people work together.

Honest Signals (Amazon), "Tuning in to unconscious communication" (MIT)

After GAMA-GO's Greg Long and I finished raving about the fine poster illustrations of Fleet Street Scandal, Greg turned me on to amazing Oakland designer Jason Munn. His Small Stakes studio creates book covers, magazine graphics, and rock posters like those above for Beck, Modest Mouse, The Decemberists, Death Cab for Cutie, and others. Jason Munn/The Small Stakes