December 14, 2011:

Oh man, this is a really cool SciFund project. Check it out!

Boy pulls own tooth by tying it to the round in a nerf gun, yanking trigger:

In this video, an enterprising young fellow ties his loose tooth to the projectile in his Nerf Big Bow and fires the weapon, taking his tooth out in one glorious, nearly painless instant.

Pulling a tooth using a Nerf gun

(via Geekologie)

Complex Systems Institute claims “bear raid” market manipulation crashed the global economy:

A paper from the New England Complex Systems Institute claims that they have found evidence that traders executed a “bear raid” on Citigroup in 2007, precipitating the financial collapse. A “bear raid” is a market manipulation technique in which short sellers conspire to dump huge quantities of borrowed shares into the market all at once, driving the price down (short selling is a stock-trading technique in which shares are borrowed for sale; the short seller makes money when the value of the borrowed shares declines).

“Bear raids” have been considered a risk to markets since the Great Depression, and a financial regulation called the “uptick rule” was instituted in 1938 to prevent the tactic. The uptick rule was repealed in in July, 2007, and the alleged bear raid took place in November, 2007.

On November 1, 2007, Citigroup experienced large spikes in short selling and trading
volume. The number of borrowed shares—short interest—increased by approximately 130
million shares to 3.8 times the 3-month moving average. The total trading volume jumped
from 73 million shares on the previous day to 171 million shares, 3.7 times the 3-month
moving average. The ratio of the increase in short positions to volume was 0.77. This is the
fraction of the total trading that day that may be attributed to short positions held until
market closing. The total value of shares borrowed on November 1 was approximately $6.07
billion. Adjusted for the dividend issued on November 1, 2007, Citigroup stock closed on
November 1 down $2.85 from the previous day, a drop of 6.9%.

The number of positions closed on November 7, 202 million, was 53% larger than the
number opened on November 1. The short interest before the increase on November 1 and
after November 7 are virtually identical, the larger decrease corresponding to an additional
increase in short interest between these dates. The mirror image one-day anomalies in short
interest change suggest that the two are linked. We can conservatively estimate the total
gain from short selling by multiplying the number of short positions opened on November 1
by the difference between the closing price on November 1 and closing price on November 7
($4.82), which yields an estimated gain for the short sellers of $640 million.

Evidence of market manipulation in the financial crisis (PDF)

(Thanks, Dan!)

TOM THE DANCING BUG: So… You’ve Been Indefinitely Detained! Helpful Information From Your U.S. Government!:

RECOMMEND: Follow RUBEN BOLLING on TWITTER.

Street Art Utopia’s photo gallery: Street Art Utopia posted a gallery of “106 of the most beloved Street Art Photos – Year 2011.” (Photo by Sandrine Estrade Boulet)

Nonsense Shopping List Prank:

Fancy Boy lip glitter, fish poison, left-handed washing glove, turtle mix, non-alcoholic whiskey, daddy butter, and an eye removal kit. These are just a few of the items Greg Benson and Ryan Smith of Mediocre Films asked employees of Target and Walmart to help them find on a recent shopping errand. Also, Greg wrote Ryan’s list without Ryan reading it before Ryan entered the store, and vice versa. (Via Laughing Squid)

Gear cube:

This cube made of gears is a great example of some of the really brilliant stuff coming out of the 3D printing scene; it’s a phenomenon on Thingiverse, where the method for turning any solid shape into a geared wonderment has been generalized into a formula that can be applied to your 3D model-file.

Cube Gear

(via Making Light)

Close-order drill from hacked Elmobots:

In this video, an artist skins and skeletonizes a cadre of Elmo robots, installs Arduinos in them, and hacks them to do synchronized maneuvers. Yes, I am well aware that I wrote this into a novel. Dang, I wish they showed more of the bots moving!

Adrianne Wortzel first saw Tickle-Me-Elmo-TMX during her residency in the Artificial Intelligence Lab in Zurich, Switzerland, and noticed something interesting about the robotic toy. It wasn’t long before she amassed an army of them. And what army is complete without synchronized maneuvers…

Choreographing a Well-Armed Militia Bearing Arms: Adrianne Wortzel

58 donors responsible for 80% of SuperPAC funding:

With the Citizens United ruling, the Supreme Court turned money into a form of political speech, paving the way for enormous influxes of cash from the American ultra-elite one-percent-of-one-percent, and, to a lesser extent, organized labor (money given to the GOP by big business dwarfs labor’s contribution to the Dems by a factor of about 2.5). The extent to which this has distorted American politics is only now becoming apparent, as statistics about SuperPACs and their “donations” are gathered and published. In this Salon report, Justin Elliott publishes some eye-opening figures about the new political reality in money-as-speech America.

Especially concerning: 80 percent of the money sloshing around in America’s SuperPACs’ warchests came from just 58 donors.

The Super PACs are not paragons of transparency, but what has been disclosed gives a sense of where the money is coming from and the interests of those giving it. Based on the donors and the origins of these groups, we can already discern what messages the Super PACs will generate in the home stretch of the campaign.

Red money, blue money: The making of the 2012 campaign