Promotional DVDs smell like pizza when played
A Brazilian ad agency has built a campaign for Domino’s “Pizza” that uses a heat-sensitive coating on rented DVDs; when the disc is played, the heat from the player heats up the coating and causes it to emit a pizza-like odor; the coating also changes appearance and becomes a picture of a pizza with an ad for Domino’s.
Awesome! Maybe next they can make Domino’s smell and taste like pizza.
No, seriously. What if a bear just strolls into the office and eats Pete Campbell. How great would that be?So here’s what I was up to this afternoon.
A must-read.
— OH, THERE WOULD BE GIFS —
That weird moment when I see a post by me on my dash that I didn’t make. I deleted it, but I have no idea how that random reblog happened.
For the rest of the year we need to stop with the headlines that begin “20 Elementary School Students” unless they “Went to the Park” or “Read a Book” or “Collected a Million Pennies.” Get this straightened out.
A new app allows you to scan a product in the supermarket aisle and learn who exactly is behind that box of cereal. More impressively, you can join user-created campaigns to boycott groups of companies who may have lobbied against a cause you believe in.
Definitely an “I wish I had thought of that” type of idea. This is potentially very useful if the data is accurately programmed. Many people don’t know who owns what.
Counterpoint: Jurassic Park is perfect.
Some of what’s wrong with this video in 30 seconds or less:
For the record, “Space Aliens Stole My Face” is exactly the kind of article archaeologists, paleobotanists, and others hang in their fieldwork trailers.
But there are no archaeologists in this movie. The lead is a vertebrate paleontologist.
If media accounts are to be believed, the accused Boston marathon bombers were “radicalized” by watching American-born Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki’s YouTube sermons and reading Inspire, the al Qaeda magazine. To whatever extent it is true of the Tsarnaev brothers, this narrative follows a familiar path: one in which seemingly ordinary people are exposed to radical ideas, then adopt those ideas as their own, and then become violent. That theory was set out in a 2007 NYPD report called Radicalization in the West, which focuses exclusively on Muslims, and describes a four-stage progression – a “funnel,” the report says – in which each step towards violence is intrinsically linked with increased religiosity. Though the intelligence community at the federal level has distanced itself from the NYPD’s theory, it continues to dominate thinking in law enforcement. There’s only one problem, according to critics: It’s reductive and simplistic at best, and at worst is a thin justification for racial profiling of Muslims.
“Nobody watches YouTube or reads Inspire and becomes a terrorist. It’s absurd to think so,” says John Horgan, director of the International Center for the Study of Terrorism at Pennsylvania State University. “YouTube videos and reading Al Qaeda magazines tends to be far more relevant for sustaining commitment than inspiring it.”
The mistaken belief that the earliest stages of terrorism can be seen at “radicalization incubators” – Muslim bookstores, hookah bars, mosques, virtually anywhere Muslims congregate in person or online – has resulted in a focus on so-called “preventive policing,” a policy whose stated aim is to prevent a terrorist attack before one happens. Since the theory says adopting radical ideas is the first step toward someone becoming violent, officials say they’re justified in surveilling places where “radical” ideas might take hold.
According to Horgan, though, that’s just not how it works. “The idea that radicalization causes terrorism is perhaps the greatest myth alive today in terrorism research,” he says. “[First], the overwhelming majority of people who hold radical beliefs do not engage in violence. And second, there is increasing evidence that people who engage in terrorism don’t necessarily hold radical beliefs.”
Jamie Bartlett, head of the Violence and Extremism program at the think tank Demos, echoes these doubts. “The word ‘radicalization’ suggests a fairly simple linear path toward an ultimate violent conclusion,” he says. Studies suggest that although there may be stages in the evolution of a terrorist, placing them sequentially on a line, as the NYPD’s report literally does, is far too pat. The stages are fluid, not a simple trajectory, and it is virtually impossible to predict who will or won’t engage in violence based solely on their beliefs.
… Despite all this, law enforcement organizations have used the flawed logic of “radicalization” to justify investigating innocent Muslims in almost every part of their daily lives. Under “preventive policing,” critics say cops and FBI agents aren’t focusing on actual crime, but on protected first amendment activities – like the NYPD’s surveillance of student and political groups, or reports “that the FBI has infiltrated mosques simply to learn about what was being said by the imam leading prayers and by those attending” – without a clear reason to suspect criminality. [++]
The laughable radicalization theory is so vague and is applied so broadly that much of the spying and intelligence gathering done since 9/11 (this was true beforehand too) to “prevent terrorism” has been focused on non-violent and peaceful groups having absolutely nothing to do with the small al-Qaeda faction responsible for the attacks over a decade ago or any other group even remotely similar ideologically. In fact, the vast majority of the major counter-terrorism task forces haven’t uncovered a single lead, despite their extensive investigations, and have actually done far more damage than we care to admit.
“Radicalization” sounds like “brainwashing” paranoia all over again, resurrected from the dustbin of discarded 1950s-60s conspiracy theories.
1.44 megabytes of pure evil.
The first time I bought one of those I wondered who would ever need a whole box.
My generation will never forget that first betrayal, when a full disk started reading as blank.
How to Kill a Scientist: a response to the Florida science felony
I’m not saying to hand out medals to every mad scientist on the event of their first contained explosion (although I could get behind that), but there are better ways of handling this than with felony charges and expulsion.
