Rocky and Balls's "Girls Like Boys With Skills" is probably the dirtiest double-entendre ukulele ditty since George Formby sang "With My Little Ukulele In My Hand."

Team America lives on.

Jeff Koyen sends this along and asks, "Anyone remember Evil Bert spotted alongside Osama in Bangladesh?"

Indeed. At left, a snapshot of the original Kim Jong Il puppet from the Team America movie. I shot the photo during a visit earlier this year to South Park Studios. The little guy does get around.

• Team America preview screening in Hollywood
• Team America puppet sex scenes revealed
• Wired: South Park's Puppet Regime
• MPAA freaks out over puppet sex scene in "Team ...

A press alert received by Boing Boing from the U.S. Army Public Affairs Office reports that PFC Bradley Manning— who is believed to have provided Wikileaks with a trove of classified data including the "Collateral Murder" video and the recent "Afghan War Diaries" archive— was today transferred from the Theater Field Confinement Facility in Kuwait to the Marine Corps Base Quantico Brig in Quantico, Virginia. Snip:

Manning remains in pretrial confinement pending an Article 32 investigation into the charges preferred against him on July 5. Manning was transferred because of the potential for lengthy continued pretrial confinement given the complexity of the charges and ongoing investigation. The field confinement facility in Kuwait is designed for short-term confinement.

The criminal investigation remains open. Preferral of charges represents an accusation only; Manning is presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty. The case will be processed in accordance with normal procedures under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

With this transfer to Quantico, Manning is now under the General Courts-Martial Convening Authority of Maj. Gen. Karl Horst, the commander of U. S. Army Military District of Washington. Manning will remain in pre-trial confinement as the Army continues its investigation.

An Article 32 investigation is similar to a civilian grand jury hearing or a preliminary hearing. The investigating officer will make findings and recommendations that the chain of command considers in determining whether to recommend the case be referred to trial by court-martial.

Earlier today, an announcement that investigators had found evidence linking Manning to the Wikileaks material, and Wired reported of previous conflicts Manning may have had with Army higher-ups, over YouTube videos the 22-year-old uploaded containing information about classified facilities.

• Xeni on Rachel Maddow Show: Wikileaks and "Afghan War Diaries ...
• Report: Army admonished Manning for YouTube uploads referencing classified facilities
  
• Wikileaks releases classified Afghanistan war logs: "largest ...


• Wikileaks: a somewhat less redacted version of the Lamo/Manning ...


• US will press criminal charges against Manning, alleged Wikileaks ...


• Was alleged Wikileaks leaker Bradley Manning's crisis also one of ...


• Wikileaks/Manning: "Are America's foreign policy secrets about to ...


• Manning linked to classified Afghanistan reports

"An Army private suspected of leaking classified information to WikiLeaks was admonished as a trainee in 2008 for uploading YouTube videos discussing classified facilities, according to an Army official with direct knowledge of the incident." Wired News has more.

Rebecca MacKinnon reports: "Numerous major American and European news outlets are reporting that Google is blocked in China, based on the information appearing on Google's Mainland China service availability page. However no journalist has actually confirmed with a human being at Google that this information is correct. What's more, I've heard from several dozen people all over China who say that Google isn't blocked for them when they access it on their Internet connections from Beijing to Shanghai to Sichuan to Hunan."

In this Instructable, talbotron22 shows how to make "Kitty Crack," an ultra-potent catnip extract containing nepetalactone, catnip's active ingredient. One pound of catnip yielded 143mg of nepetalactone. A note about safety. Yes, it is safe to use this extract on cats. I have looked into it, and there are a number of studies (very interesting in their own right) using pure nepetalactone on cats in experiments trying to figure out why it causes them to go bonkers. The upshot is that it's pretty safe. In the last of the references below, the LD50 of nepetalactone was determined to be 1550 mg/kg (about the same as aspirin), meaning you would have to force feed your average 5 kg cat ~8 grams in order to cause it any harm. So as long as you are reasonable with the extract it should pose no harm. DIY Kitty Crack: ultra-potent catnip extract

Prepare to have your mind blown.

Certain dinosaurs—physically disparate enough that we've always thought of them as different species—may actually be the same animal at different stages of its life cycle. Also: Those big, protective-looking bone formations surrounding some dinos' heads and necks probably weren't all that useful as a defense against predators.

Case in point, triceratops. Or, maybe we should be calling it torosaurus now, I'm not sure. See, according to research done by scientists at Montana's Museum of the Rockies, the familiar triceratops is really just the juvenile form of the more-elaborately be-frilled and be-horned torosaurus.

This extreme shape-shifting was possible because the bone tissue in the frill and horns stayed immature, spongy and riddled with blood vessels, never fully hardening into solid bone as happens in most animals during early adulthood. The only modern animal known to do anything similar is the cassowary, descended from the dinosaurs, which develops a large spongy crest when its skull is about 80 per cent fully grown.

Scannella and Horner examined 29 triceratops skulls and nine torosaurus skulls, mostly from the late-Cretaceous Hell Creek formation in Montana. The triceratops skulls were between 0.5 and 2 metres long. By counting growth lines in the bones, not unlike tree rings, they have shown clearly that the skulls come from animals of different ages, from juveniles to young adults. Torosaurus fossils are much rarer, 2 to 3 metres long and, crucially, only adult specimens have ever been found. The duo say there is a clear transition from triceratops into torosaurus as the animals grow older. For example, the oldest specimens of triceratops show a marked thinning of the bone where torosaurus has holes, suggesting they are in the process of becoming fenestrated.

There are other species this might apply to, as well. Some with even bigger shifts in appearance.

While this is a Big Hairy Deal for dinosaur science, it also elicits a little bit of a "duh" moment when you go back and look at the animals in question. What you should really be getting out of this story is an illustration of how difficult it is to study a creature that's been extinct for millions of years.

After all—as my husband pointed out—nobody would be shocked to learn that a baby chick, an adult chicken, and plate of parmigiana were all the same animal. But that's because we've experienced chickens. Were an alien to drop in on Earth for one afternoon, they might be just as amazed at the life cycle of poultry as we are now at the triceratops/torosaurus'. Paleontologists are tasked with reconstructing the lives of animals nobody has ever seen alive. And that creates a world where the obvious just isn't.

New Scientist: Morph-o-saurs: How shape-shifting dinosaurs deceived us

(Via John Taylor Williams)

Image courtesy Flickr user lindseywb, via CC

Via our Submitterator, Fang McGee points us to this novel use of 3D printers: spitting out fabric structures for clothing. From Ecouterre: ...Designer-researchers like Freedom of Creation in Amsterdam and Philip Delamore at the London College of Fashion are cranking out seamless, flexible textile structures using software that converts three-dimensional body data into skin-conforming fabric structures. The potential for bespoke clothing, tailored to the specific individual, are as abundant as the patterns that can be created, from interlocking Mobius motifs to tightly woven meshes.
"Are 3D-Printed Fabrics the Future of Sustainable Textiles?" (via Submitterator)

Kite designer Tim Elverston sent in this video through Submitterator, showing his friend making a piece of kite line move "magically" with the help of static electricity. Also, they got shocked. If you listen to the video through headphones, you can clearly hear an electrical buzzing every time their fingers get close to the kite line.

Interestingly, the effect seems to have been dependent on the line material, and the bench the kite was tied to—both of which were made from plastic composite.

The two other identical kites flying in the same conditions were not doing the same thing. They were flying on different line material, and tied off to different things, a person and a wooden fence. There was visible lightning and electrical activity in a storm that was about 1-3 miles to the West of us. The only other two times I have experienced this were both while riding in my kite buggy, and I started to get a shock through my leg to the metal frame of the buggy.

On August 14-15, San Francisco's Golden Gate Park will host Outside Lands, a massive music festival with several dozen excellent bands, food, wine, art, and a big dose of Bay Area culture. Main stage performers include Kings of Leon, Furthur featuring Phil Lesh and Bob Weir, The Strokes, My Morning Jacket, Al Green, and Cat Power. There are also a slew of killer acts throughout the day on smaller stages, from Gogol Bordello to Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars to Rebirth Brass Band. The best news is that our friends at Outside Lands kindly provided Boing Boing with two pairs of two-day tickets to give away to our readers! ($140/ticket value!) Want them? Tell us why. Or rather, sing it to us.

To enter our Outisde Lands 2010 ticket contest, please compose a song about why you want to go to the festival, and record it on video or audio. Your song can be as simple (a capella!) to as elaborate (orchestral!) as you want. If you make a video, please upload it to YouTube. Audio only recordings should be posted on Archive.org. Our own Dean "Dino" Putney is going to judge, so email dean at boing boing dot net with a link to your entry. The deadline for entries is August 4 at 11:59pm PDT. We'll announce the winners on Friday, August 6.

Good luck and we look forward to, er, hearing from you! For more on Outside Lands, click here.

For Boing Boing Video coverage of Outside Lands 2008, click here.

I'm speaking Monday, Aug. 16th, at the University of New Mexico's INCBN IGERT Symposium, which focuses on the integration of neuroscience and nanotechnology. As the pre-symposium dinner entertainment, I'll be talking about "Those Fabulous Octopus Brains"—looking at cephalopod intelligence and brain structure. I fully admit that my topic choice is a blatant attempt to curry audience favor w/ cute pictures of octopuses. If you won't be attending, don't worry. It looks like I should be able to get video of the presentation, which will be posted here. (Unless I bomb, in which case we shall never speak of this again.)

In late 2005 Dirk Schwieger, a German cartoonist, went to live in Japan for a year. He got an office job, and started keeping a journal of his experiences in Tokyo. On his blog, he invited readers to email him "assignments," which he dutifully carried out and reported in comic strip format in a Moleskine notebook.

The assignments included eating fugu (blowfish sashimi that has a toxin that could kill you if not prepared properly), going to a capsule hotel, visiting the Ghibli Museum, riding a roller coaster on top of a building in a shopping center, reporting on the "coolest of the cooler things happening in Japan" (some kind of barrel with poles on it and tentacle-backpacks hanging from it -- I have to admit I had no idea what he was talking about here), eating okonomiyaki (a bowl of raw egg, red ginger, pork, squid, shrimp, and cabbage that you cook yourself), and so on.

Schwieger's art is funny and detailed, and his observations are insightful. Moresukine is an enjoyable, too-brief account of a Westerner trying to discover Japanese culture.

Moresukine

Sogen Kato was believed to be the oldest man in Tokyo. Officials heading out to congratulate him on his 111th birthday, however, met not an ancient gent but a corpse, mummified in his own bed for perhaps 30 years. [BBC; photo and cake by Ann Larie Valentine]

I admire Sheila C. Bair, the chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, more than any other official in government. Ms. Bair's actions during the financial meltdown in 2008 and in intervening years has shown a steady hand, remarkably free of partisan favor, that likely prevented a much worse banking and mortgage catastrophe. Thus it is with a heavy heart I must reveal a book she's written that hasn't gained much notice, which is full of the bad ideas that led to low consumer savings, inflated investor expectations, and financial innumeracy.

In this book, Ms. Bair advocates:

• Immediate gratification of consumer desire.

• Disregarding employment opportunities that aren't a perfect fit when a job is needed.

• Undercutting a market with unfair competition through low-cost labor.

• Zoning violations.

• Tax avoidance on earnings.

• Avoidance of rent.

• Lack of collateral against risky investment.

• Use of shared resources for private gain.

• Disdain for state taxes.

• The use of monetary symbols to substitute for Roman characters.

The book also tells investors to expect a 100-percent return on capital in a single day, along with the dissolution of a 24-hour partnership. And, she claims that newspapers continue to print stock charts every day.

On the plus side, she encourages entrepreneurship, word-of-mouth marketing, and the value of hard labor.

Now, you might argue, "This is a children's illustrated book, you moron, and uses simple lessons to tell a complicated story!" And then you might grab me by the shoulders and shake me, and possibly slap me a few times across the face.

When I'd recovered, I'd argue in response, "True. But Ms. Bair muddles some of the fundamental aspects of economics and the market in this lesson in a way that may leave questions." I'd say that while running away from you, fast, and holding my hands in front of my head.

I hear in the distance, "Aren't you like that ranting Sun-Times columnist, Terry Savage, who, along with her brother, yelled at kids running a lemonade stand for giving away lemonade and Cory Doctorow blogged about here before and stop running away!"

Well, no. I'm not ranting. I'm dispassionate. And my concern about this book arises from the real world, not a fever dream of Ayn Randism dreamt by Ms. Savage.

My children have read this book several times, and request it all the time. This leads to awkward questions, like, "Daddy, is negative amortization a function of deflation, or does the basis of a loan remain the same regardless of CPI?" I find those questions hard to answer, or even understand.

In the book, Isabel's Car Wa$h (see what she did there with the "s"?), Ms. Bair tells the story of a little girl who wants a $10.00 doll, but only has 50¢.

Rather than recommending the age-old solution of begging her parents for money until their ears are bleeding, Isabel comes up with the idea of suckering her friends. After discarding dog walking and babysitting, Isabel spots a car wash. She fails to examine the price the car wash charges, but sees plenty of vehicles entering.

She decides to go into business washing cars without any additional market research, training, or a business plan. She finds herself $4.50 short of the funds for the supplies she needs to bootstrap the business.

Isabel remembers that friends once loaned her money for lunch, and her mother repaid them with a 40-percent premium for assuming the risk. Using that as the basis, she prepares a road show to sell her initial public offering, selling 50 percent of her shares split evenly among five friends.

Ms. Bair now takes a huge leap into socialism. Isabel sets up shop, without any permits, in her parents' front driveway in likely contravention to neighborhood convenants about operating businesses. She uses her parents' water and facilities, but pays them no dividend or rent. Shameful.

Her first customer isn't concerned about quality, but price. She spreads the word that a child laborer is offering what is likely an 80-percent discount off the going rate for an automatic car wash. (Remember that Isabel didn't find the going price, so she has imperfect knowledge and underprices her labor. She realizes this when called upon to wash a dog.)

After a hard day's work in which Isabel generates about $2.50 per hour, she repays her investors a 100-percent dividend and cashes them out, dissolving her company. For a total of $25 raised, Isabel keeps $10, or about $1.25 per hour. She pays no taxes and provides no 1099 forms to her shareholders. (Once again, socialism: her mother provides free cookies and lemonade, and provides a meeting space for the corporation at no cost.)

Isabel is set to purchase her doll (street price, $10), but on arrival at the store is visited by the dread spector of state sales tax: a 5-percent fee is levied on the doll. (Dolls have a 5-percent tariff in Isabel's state, along with shelled split peas, dog collars, and used DVDs.)

Curses, she thinks (I'm assuming that), as Ms. Bair veers into libertarianism. Unjust state, taking my earnings! Nonetheless, Ms. Bair has Isabel deplete her savings, taking her last 50¢ to pay the full $10.50 for the price. This leaves her with nothing, and the doll is only worth $4 when she leaves the store with it. Consumer impulses--gratified!

In a dense two-page addendum, Ms. Bair explains what happened, but likely leaves children more afraid of bears than they were when she started.

This short book contains the entire spectrum of economic philosophy and speculation, leading children into a trap: kids who read these book are likely to become economists and derivative traders, and create new, worse financial vehicles and theories that will eventually take us down.

Ms. Bair is the worst form of super-villain. A patient one.

I like haircuts and I like Popsicles -- hell, who doesn't? But I will apparently never be an art impresario, let alone a performance art impresario, because it never would have occurred to me to combine the two, as the downtown Los Angeles gallery Actual Size is doing this Saturday: Filmmaker Josh Lee will sell his inventively flavored popsicles to onlookers while they watch haircuts and buzz cuts performed by artists in the gallery space. The hair clippings will accumulate for the duration of the performance, resulting in a sculptural work. Walk-ins are welcome. No appointments are necessary. This comes via PSFK, which adds: The project has the potential to lead to a meditation on human waste; however, the act of cutting people's hair builds on a set of power relations that allow artist and audience to forge a more intimate relationship as he/she manipulates the image of the viewer. Plus, come on: Popsicles!

Ibogaine, a hallucinogen derived from an African plant, is used (illegally) as a cure for opiate addiction. This month, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Research will test the effectiveness of Ibogaine on heroin addicts.

Popular Science has a brief article about the upcoming trial. “As great as ibogaine seems, no one knows exactly how effective it is as a treatment,” says Valerie Mojieko, the director of clinical research for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Research (MAPS), a privately funded Massachusetts-based nonprofit. So starting this month, MAPS will enlist Clare Wilkins, the director of Pangea Biomedics, to run the first long-term study to gauge the drug’s lasting effects at her clinic in Mexico (where patients already pay $5,000 for the treatment). She will treat 20 to 30 heroin addicts and, for the next year, MAPS will subject them to psychological and drug tests to quantify ibogaine’s effectiveness.

Fighting Drugs With Drugs: An Obscure Hallucinogen Gains Legitimacy as a Solution for Addictions

Photo by Hive. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

MAKE Volume 23 is on newsstands now!

In this special GADGETS issue, we show you how to make a menagerie of delightful machines: a miniature electronic Whac-a-Mole arcade game, a tiny but mighty see-through audio amplifier, a magic mirror that contains an interactive animated soothsayer, a self-balancing one-wheeled Gyrocar, and the Most Useless Machine — the creepy mechanical box whose only purpose is to turn itself off (as seen on The Colbert Report!). Plus: how Intellectual Ventures made their incredible laser targeting mosquito zapper, how to use the industrial-strength microcontrollers called PLCs, and a lot more.

Project highlights in MAKE Volume 23 include:

The Most Useless Machine
Gyrocar
Squelette, the Bare-Bones Amplifier
Magic Mirror
Solar Car Subwoofer
College Bike Trunk
and much more, of course!

MAKE Volume 23

Russian manufacturer Lenpolygrafmash makes the computer component equivalent of brutalist architecture. According to the Russian culture blog Metkere.com, the devices such as the printer and scanner above are designed for harsh mechanical and climatic conditions. Lenpolygrafmash (via Submitterator, thanks Metkere!)

Glenn Beck's website, it turns out, can be manipulated into doing strange and NSFW things by messing with the URL. An insecure PHP utility accessible at the site allows for shenanigans like directory traversal, exposing all sorts of things that should not be exposed. Like password files, and a user group named for Rush Limbaugh. [Thanks, Dean!] Update: the discussion thread is down. Here's the Google cache of it.

"The Flower" is a modern day version of The Sunshine Makers, with a sad ending.