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Nina Berman sent me this photo immediately after I read Glenn Greenwald’s post last Wednesday titled: What’s behind the scorn for the Wall Street protests? The photo was taken Sept 20th, Day 4 of the “Occupy Wall Street” action, just before the pepper spray incident and before the encampment downtown had taken root.

In his post, Greenwald discusses how threatening the protests are to institutional forces in both parties — particularly progressive critics harping on tactical and organizational issues, including the lack of a clear message or media strategy. Greenwald’s rebuttal to this “lack of professionalism” is that “young people speaking their minds,” as the song says, are exactly the ones to reject formalities and methodologies and just take to the streets to “channel widespread anger into activism rather than resignation.”

Given the costs and risks one incurs from participating in protests like this — to say nothing of the widespread mockery one receives – it’s natural that most of the participants will be young and not yet desperate to cling to institutional stability.

These words, of course, are offered to insulate the photograph as I can’t imagine anyone looking at this street scene – progressives included — without at least some amount of eye-rolling. What I would ask you to do, however, just as an experiment, is to:

…Close your eyes for a second and try and look at this photo again as if the 60’s had never happened.

…Take another look at this photo without a shred of irony.

…Think about how much this marketing age has so divorced us from our own bodies and so turned us into objects — whether objects of obsession or objects of manipulation — that the sight of too much skin (beyond our own intimates, and outside the billboard, magazine, video or movie screen) can be downright terrifying.

…Look at this photo as if “game playing” was widely understood as a clever intervention that, in the discomfort induced, successfully shakes people out of their Stepford-like stupor for a moment.

If you can manage to do all that, what you’ll see — in a society that has otherwise shunned freeform demonstration — is not randomness, frivolity, disorganization or nostalgia, but rather the hip-shaking arrival of New York City’s “first responders” to the utter collapse of economic justice.

PHOTOGRAPH by Nina Berman/Noor

Take this with a pinch of salt, I think, but Techgage is reporting the findings of a recent Nvidia conference call in which the graphics company suggested that PC games revenue will pass that generated by consoles in 2014. THAT MEANS THE PC WILL BE BEST. That’s not format-war. That’s math. Or something.

The blame for this lies with the rapid growth in digital distribution, microtransactions, and the free-but-not sector (as I am now calling it). The report also features a PC performance vs consoles graph (above) which made me laugh with the blatantness of it. Yes, top end PC graphics actually are 900%+ more powerful than console hardware. Thanks, Nvidia.

In SuperFreakonomics Illustrated, we published this penis-flag chart in the context of a discussion about how ill-fitting condoms failed to protect men and women alike in countries including India:

The fact is that reliable penis-size data is notoriously hard difficult to come by get. Here’s one website that aggregates data from around the world, and here are its data sources.

Using those data, Tatu Westling of the University of Helsinki has written a paper called “Male Organ and Economic Growth: Does Size Matter”?  Please do take this with a sizable grain of salt:

This paper explores the link between economic development and penile length between 1960 and 1985. It estimates an augmented Solow model utilizing the Mankiw-Romer-Weil 121 country dataset. The size of male organ is found to have an inverse U-shaped relationship with the level of GDP in 1985. It can alone explain over 15% of the variation in GDP. The GDP maximizing size is around 13.5 centimetres, and a collapse in economic development is identified as the size of male organ exceeds 16 centimetres. Economic growth between 1960 and 1985 is negatively associated with the size of male organ, and it alone explains 20% of the variation in GDP growth. With due reservations it is also found to be more important determinant of GDP growth than country’s political regime type. Controlling for male organ slows convergence and mitigates the negative effect of population growth on economic development slightly. Although all evidence is suggestive at this stage, the `male organ hypothesis’ put forward here is robust to exhaustive set of controls and rests on surprisingly strong correlations.

(HT: Otto Kässi)

Images: © Eliot Lee Hazel

The sheer magnificence of Miguel Valenzuela’s Lego pancake CNC is matched only by the delight of his daughters Maia and Lily “printing” their own Mickey Mouse pancakes. Love this project!

Thousands of studies have been done claiming that addiction is a disease, mostly by putting rats in a cage with some drugs and noting that they'll repeatedly take the drugs, even if it means starving to death.

Bruce Alexander was skeptical about these results. He noticed that the rats in the experiments were stuffed alone in a boring cage with little else to do. "If I was strapped down alone in a cage," he thought, "I'd probably want to get high too."

So he built a rat park -- a large, intricate, brightly-painted and heavily-padded structure to make the rats actually happy. He put half the rats in the normal cages and half in the park and gave both equal access to drugs.

The rats in the cage got addicted, while the rats in the park stayed away.

Then, even more strikingly, he took rats who'd had 57 days to get addicted to the drugs and took half of them out of the cages and put them in the park. The rats, even though they'd been addicted in the cage, suddenly stayed away from the drugs. They even voluntarily detoxed -- trembling and shaking, but still staying off the drugs.

Chase Lisbon

Uh oh, shit just got deep. Dexter Isaac, a longtime suspect in the 1994 shooting and robbery of Tupac at Quad Studios, has confessed to the crime. Not only that, but he says Jimmy Henchmen paid him $2500 to do the robbery, and he says he still has the chain he took from Tupac as proof. Isaacs, who is currently serving a life sentence for unrelated crimes, admitted to the shooting in a statement released today in response to a previous statement made by Henchmen following his recent indictment on drug charges.  The most interesting thing about Isaac’s statement though is that he promises to bring closure to both ‘Pac and Biggie’s mothers “at a different time”. Then he chastises Henchmen and Puff for trying to “come off all innocent-like” and asks Henchmen whether or not he’s going to flip on Puff when the Fed’s finally catch up to him. Isaac, who feels that Henchmen threw him under the bus after he sat in prison and kept his mouth shut for 13 years, clearly has some damning information and seems like he’s ready to share everything. This one dude may have just blown two of the most infamous unsolved murder cases in history wide open.

Link: Jimmy Henchman Associate Admits to Shooting Tupac; Apologizes To Pac & B.I.G.’s Mothers

Kranium is a bike helmet that is made from the same cardboard used for the boxes you find at the supermarket. This material, along with some clever construction, turns out to be a lot better at absorbing impact than the more usual polystyrene-filled lids.

Anirudha Surabhi’s design absorbs four times more impact energy that the polystyrene equivalent, and — unlike regular helmets which break on impact — it survives longer. One Kranium was smashed five times in a row and still passed the British Standard (EN 1078) test.

What about rains and sweat? No problem. Surabhi’s helmets mix the cardboard with a “waterproof acrylic compound” which makes them just as rain-resistant as the helmet you have now.

The Kranium is better than regular helmets in another way too. Because they are easy to build to order by scanning the buyer’s head and cutting the cardboard to order, it fits perfectly. This means that it will stay in place if you crash, offering much better protection.

Surabhi’s design has already been licensed by some major manufacturers, so this is one student project that may make it into stores.

Kranium project [Anirudharao via London Cyclist]

See Also:

• Blink: Touch-Sensitive Bike Lights Built Into Helmet
• Video: Terrifying 'Shaving Helmet' is a Skull-Scraping Hard-Hat …
• Helmet-Cam Mount for Last-Gen iPod Nano
• Prototype Bike-Helmet Stinks When Damaged
• Tunebug Turns Your Bike Helmet into a Speaker

Our friend Jasmijn was stopped in SOHO by NYPD for riding in a skirt! The officer said she could distract drivers and cause an accident...and should go home and put pants on.