tech@vedella

A gambling website purchased a small baggie of Michael Jackson's hair at auction for $10,000 and now they're compressing it into a roulette ball. From AOL: "Indeed, considering Jackson dedicated his life to entertaining millions, the prospect of this very special ball captivating crowds at roulette tables seems like a fitting use for it, (reads [...]

Floating just below the surface of the water near Italy's Mt. Vesuvius, an octopus suns its head lump in this National Geographic Picture of the Day. Thanks Maggie Fitzgibbon!

The National Air and Space Museum has a cool post up about the first metal Buck Rogers gun: the XZ-31 Rocket Pistol, produced in 1934 by the Daisy Manufacturing Company of Plymouth, Michigan. "That toy, which was wildly successful, even sparked a Christmastime price war between two of the biggest department stores in the country [...]

Etibar Elchyev, 39, of the country of Georgia, had planned to break a Guinness record for balancing 27 spoons on his face. Instead, he surprised everyone by balancing 50 spoons on his body. It's not clear whether he claims to be actually magnetic or if the media (myself included) just prefers to that word because [...]

[Video Link] TubeGnosis has a fantastic collection of esoteric videos, featuring Aleister Crowley, Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, Carlos Castaneda, Jacques Vallee, Ram Dass, Alan Watts, William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Kenneth Anger, Terence McKenna, Robert Crumb, and many more psychonauts and mutants. Above, a 16-minute film that David Lynch made in 2010 for Dior, called [...]

Slate.com is great, but it does have a predictable theme. That theme is contrarianism. If there were a contest for "most contrarian position Slate ever published", it's possible this is the story that would win. (Via Dr. Hypercube)

Rep Darrell Issa's Keep the Web Open has live coverage of the markup of the Stop Online Piracy Act bill, including a video stream of the hearing, and a version of the bill that you can help mark up. (Thanks, jcnoble2!)

Tiffiniy sez, "How bad is SOPA internet censorship? It's so bad, political cartoonist David Rees came out of retirement to make fun of it. getyourcensoron.com." Get your censor on.

At the French site Anecdote du Jour you can listen to the world's first audio recordings, made in 1859 and 1860 by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. The recordings, one of a tuning fork being struck and two of de Martinville singing, are scratchy and thoroughly eerie. All the more so because de Martinville himself never [...]

Filmmaker David Parker directed this short video, "Light," to more viscerally express the energy wasted from electric lights unnecessarily left on. I think it's a lovely and haunting piece. From his description: Bleeding, crying lights were meant to metaphorically parallel the way in which we invisibly squander our natural resources without much thought… The film [...]

A joint letter from the founders of Yahoo, Netscape, Google, Blogger, Twitter, the Internet Archive, Wikipedia, the Huffington Post, PayPal, Mozilla, Flickr, YouTube, Craigslist, eBay, and other pieces of Internet history tells Congress: "Let's not deny the next generation of entrepreneurs and founders the same opportunities we all had." Have you called Congress yet?

Folks from the American Library Association are launching a member interest group called Library Boing Boing, and we're delighted to give our blessing. From Jenny Levine's announcement, at the ALA's Marginalia site: On the one hand, Library Boing Boing is a collaboration between ALA and the fabulously amazing Boing Boing folks to highlight all of [...]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Corynne McSherry looks at the revised version of the Stop Online Piracy Act that is going to markup today, and finds that it does not address the substantive First Amendment issues raised by scholars who've weighed in since its introduction. First, both bills would still result in the censoring of non-infringing [...]

Post presented by Sony Here is my Holiday Video Game Guide for 2011: Buy Skyrim, Bastion, and Minecraft. Nailed it. However, I accept that I have not nailed it for everyone, and that you may require detailed and genre-specific help from game journalism professionals. (Also, you may have already completed these three games, if you [...]

Tiffiniy from American Censorship sez, "Tomorrow, the US government will vote to have broad powers to block any site. SOPA would not only hurt free speech, it will choke off the internet workforce and its readers by taking down entire websites. Today is the only day we have left to have our voices heard. It's [...]

Activists collecting signatures for the recall of Wisconsin's governor Scott Walker report widespread intimidation from the governor's supporters, including an incident recently captured "on tape" (I'm pretty sure tape wasn't involved). Kudos to the volunteers who stand their ground in the face of harassment from people who think "democracy" includes threatening people who disagree with [...]

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 [...]

In TIME magazine's 2011 Person of the Year issue, this cover by artist Shepard Fairey, portraits of more than 50 protestors from around the world, and an essay by Kurt Andersen: Massive and effective street protest' was a global oxymoron until-suddenly, shockingly-starting exactly a year ago, it became the defining trope of our times. And [...]

Jeffrey sez, "Tom Rohe is a professional voice actor. He had a tooth extracted in 2009 and was then diagnosed with TMD, which left him unable to speak properly, and therefore unable work. Curiously, when he takes Ambien, his speech returns. Tom made this video (and another one) to try and get some help. He's [...]

Kyle Bean has made a series of food sculptures in the shape of various weapons, improvised and traditional. I wonder if pieces of toast cut to look like brass knuckles would make it through a TSA checkpoint? CUT magazine: 'Soft Guerilla' (via Neatorama) (Photo: Sam Hofman)