A Softer World:

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Fake celebrity pranks New York City in social experiment caught on video:

Brett Cohen pranked NYC on the night of July 27th, 2012, and he has video proof: he “came up with a crazy idea to fool thousands of pedestrians walking the streets of Times Square into thinking he was a huge celebrity,” and succeeded.
He is not a celebrity—or at least, he wasn’t before this video went viral. He’s a 21 year old SUNY New Paltz student.
Snip from the project description:

This social experiment, of sorts, makes a profound statement about how modern culture is so attracted to pop culture, without any real credibility needed. He dressed up like a typical celebrity and was accompanied by an entourage of two professional bodyguards, two assistants, and photographers pretending to be paparazzi. While the assistants and photographers waited for Brett to exit the 49th street marquee at NBC Studios, they started a buzz that a “big star” was about to walk out, thus making it worth their while to wait and get a picture. Many asked the crew whom Brett was, and no answer was given. They were forced to either make something up, or just take a picture with him in hopes that their Facebook friends or Twitter followers might have a better idea.

As the crew walked over to Times Square, the crowds around Brett grew on each consecutive block. Very few people even questioned who he was, where he was from, or what he does. Brett took pictures with nearly 300 people before the stunt ended. The video even includes interviews with people who had just taken a picture with Brett, and puts them in an awkward position when they’re asked questions such as, “Where do you know Brett from?” and “What’s your favorite movie he was in?” Many of them were overwhelmingly excited over Brett’s walk through Times Square, and it showed.

He hired the bodyguards and photographers from Craigslist, and wore cheap knockoff sunglasses and a shirt from an Express clearance rack.

[Video Link], and NY Daily News has more on the making of, via Joe Sabia.

[Possibly the awesomest misic video ever. -egg]

The colorful results of playing Cypress Hill through a squid:

[Video Link]

Greg Gage of the DIY neuroscience company Backyard Brains stimulated the axons of a squid with the electrical signals coming out of a headphone jack plugged into an iPhone playing a Cypress Hill song. He videotaped the Squid’s pigmented cells called chromatophores, which changed with the music.

We’ve been working hard on many new experiments at the Marine Biological Labs in Woods Hole, MA this summer and have some exciting (and beautiful) results. While working on the giant axons of the Longfin Inshore Squid, we decided to see what would happen if we played music like we do with our dancing cockroach leg experiment. The results were very cool.

Insane in the Chromatophores

Greatest movie threats of all time: hh1edits’s “The 100 Greatest Movie Threats of All Time” is a truly fabulous 11:37 worth of threatening behavior — angry, calm, brave, terrified. The creator casts an admirably broad net, including appearances from Monty Python, Wil Wheaton, and the Wicked Witch of the West. The 100 Greatest Movie Threats of All Time (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

[Extra-funny. -egg]
August 22, 2012:

Free science-based guide explains how to eat healthy on a limited budget:

Good Food On A Tight Budget is a free “science-based shopping guide of the top 100 foods that are healthy, cheap, clean and green” put out by the Environmental Working Group. The guide focuses on foods that give you the biggest nutritional bang for the buck while putting them together in recipes and snacks that also taste good. On average the 15 included recipes cost less than $1 per serving.
The researchers who put the guide together compared 1,200 foods and analyzed their cost, nutritional value, pesticide ranking and environmental impact. The goal was not only to show consumers that they can eat well for less money but also to lower their exposure to toxic chemicals.
Here are some interesting facts the EWG analysis revealed:

• One serving of filling oatmeal is about half the cost of a bowl of sugared cereal.
• Pears have even more fiber, potassium and folate – and fewer pesticide residues – than apples.
• Parsley packs a nutritional punch as potent as kale for a quarter of the cost.
• Roasted turkey topped the list of animal sources of protein. Hot dogs ranked dead last.

Todd Akin apologizes for “legitimate rape” remark:
From The Onion:

You see, what I said was, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” But what I meant to say was, “I am a worthless, moronic sack of shit and an utterly irredeemable human being who needs to shut up and go away forever.”

It is clear to me now that I did not choose my words with care and did not get across the point I was trying to convey. In hindsight, I guess instead of using the words “legitimate rape,” I should have used the words “I am an unforgivable, unrepentant, and unconscionable subhuman dickhead.” Or better yet, “I am an evil, fucked-up man who should never have been elected to the United States Congress, and anyone who would vote for me is probably a pretty big fucking dumbshit, too.” See how much more sense that makes? It’s amazing how a few key word changes can totally alter the meaning of a statement.

There’s a lot more.

I Misspoke—What I Meant To Say Is ‘I Am Dumb As Dog Shit And I Am A Terrible Human Being’

[Who knew? -Egg]
[BB]
WWII “war sand” on the beaches of Normandy:

As much as four percent of the sand on the beaches of Normandy consists of shrapnel left over from D-Day. In a post about this at BLDGBLOG, Geoff Manaugh references a book called “Sand: The Never-Ending Story.” The book is about the science and culture of sand, from the ocean floor to Mars. Written by geologist Michael Welland, it sounds like a fascinating read!

(Normandy sand microscopy image by Earle McBride, Univ of Texas)

[O_O O_O O_O O_O O_O O_O -egg]
[BoingBoing]
Adversarial mind-reading with compromised brain-computer interfaces:
“On the Feasibility of Side-Channel Attacks with Brain-Computer Interfaces,” a paper presented by UC Berkeley and U Geneva researchers at this summer’s Usenix Security, explored the possibility of adversarial mind-reading attacks on gamers and other people using brain-computer interfaces, such as the Emotiv games controller.

The experimenters wanted to know if they could forcefully extract information from your brain by taking control of your system. In the experiment, they flashed images of random numbers and used the automatic brain-response to them to make guesses as which digits were in their subjects’ ATM PINs. Another variant was watching the brain activity of subjects while flashing the logo of a bank and making a guess about whether the subject used that bank.

I suppose that over time, an attacker who was able to control the stimulus and measure the response could glean a large amount of private information from a victim, without the victim ever knowing it.

Brain computer interfaces (BCI) are becoming increasingly popular in the gaming and entertainment industries. Consumer-grade BCI devices are available for a few hundred dollars and are used in a variety of applications, such as video games, hands-free keyboards, or as an assistant in relaxation training. There are application stores similar to the ones used for smart phones, where application developers have access to an API to collect data from the BCI devices.

The security risks involved in using consumer-grade BCI devices have never been studied and the impact of malicious software with access to the device is unexplored. We take a first step in studying the security implications of such devices and demonstrate that this upcoming technology could be turned against users to reveal their private and secret information. We use inexpensive electroencephalography (EEG) based BCI devices to test the feasibility of simple, yet effective, attacks. The captured EEG signal could reveal the user’s private informa- tion about, e.g., bank cards, PIN numbers, area of living, the knowledge of the known persons. This is the first attempt to study the security implications of consumer-grade BCI devices. We show that the entropy of the private information is decreased on the average by approximately 15 % – 40 % compared to random guessing attacks.

On the Feasibility of Side-Channel Attacks with Brain-Computer Interfaces