Looking to game Google’s copyright enforcement bot? That’s the system that was used to hunt down rogue Hitler videos that remixed the bunker scene from Downfall , and it’s pretty thick: Mark Smitelli has poked around at the system, uploading copies of the copyrighted song “I Know What Boys Like,” sonically altered in various ways: compressing or expanding the time, lowering or raising the pitch, adding noise, etc. Mark runs the complete results, but to roughly summarize: Altering parameters more than 5% often seems to fool the Identifier, and using less than 30 seconds also seems to let the clip slip through the rule-bound robot’s shiny little nets. Playing clips in reverse confused the Identifier, but stripping out everything except the vocals did not. Using a clip for as satire or political commentary undoubtedly wouldn’t keep it from the Identifier’s snares, although such use is likely protected and non-infringing. The Identifier, unsurprisingly, seems to be a poor reader of human intention. [Thanks to David Abrams for the tip.] YouTube’s automated copyright filter

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HOWTO sneak Hitler onto YouTube

“The 1947 Radarange was a whopping six feet tall, weighed nearly 750 pounds, and required its own 220 volt electrical line and a dedicated water line for the cooling tube. It sold for $2000, or nearly $22,000 today.” Eat Me Daily looks at the natural history of microwave ovens, from radar technology, to recipes for gourmet steamed pudding, to Joan Collins in her Dynasty finest. (Via Nicola Twilley .)

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Microwave ovens: The early years

You know SETI, the nice folks out in California who scan the stars for radio transmissions, hoping to find evidence of E.T. You are probably also aware that this strategy hasn’t exactly panned out. Now, some physicists are starting to pipe up, suggesting that SETI’s problem maybe isn’t so much a lack of aliens, but an over-dedication to searching for one, narrowly defined artifact of intelligent life. SETI is space archaeology, they say. And current practice is the equivalent of studying ancient Earth-bound civilizations using nothing but flint spear points—there’s a lot of cultures you’d completely miss, because their technology was more advanced. Paul Davies, a physicist at Arizona State University, points out that widespread radio communications may prove a short-lived historical phenomenon on Earth. Humans are, after all, increasingly using fibre optics to talk to each other. Moreover, many modern radio devices (such as mobile phones) rely on a technique called “spread spectrum” encoding. It uses signals that look like background noise, except to a receiver equipped with the right unscrambling code. Radio signals that are clearly artificial in origin may, then, be only a transient sign of civilisation. What to look for, instead? Scientists interviewed by The Economist suggested everything from pollution (the fact that there are Earth-based telescopes capable of studying the atmospheric composition of planets outside our solar system is mind-blowing enough on its own), to evidence of intelligent tampering with the energy output or aging process of distant suns. The Centauri Dreams blog gets into those later, sci-fi inspired possibilities a bit more in-depth. It seems like the key to this new approach is looking ahead in our own development, rather than behind or alongside, for searchable signals of intelligent life. And that’s fascinating, not just for its possibility in the field of alien hunting, but for the questions it forces us to ask about Earth-bound technologies. Things like: Is there a better way we could be doing some of our basic techie activities, and how soon would it be able to supplant current methods? What might we be capable of in 1000 years, and what impact could that technology leave on our planet and our solar system? At the very least, I fully expect this line of inquiry to lead to some great, new literature—and maybe some usable tech ideas, too. (Via Lee Billings ) Image courtesy Flickr user pasukaru76 , via CC Previously: Observing the SETI observatory Protecting Earth and space from people If alien life exists, we have probably weirded it out by now Boing … Alien Appearance 6th man on moon says space aliens are real (and have visited us …

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Space archaeologists!

Samarium is a rare-earth element that can have a half-life of 106 billion years. You’ll note that the entire freaking capital-U Universe, itself, is only around 14 billion years old. Thus, said long-lived isotope of samarium is one of the radioactive elements that gets pulled out when scientists want to date especially old chunks of rock—like ancient Martian meteorites . (Although, in that case, the samarium date is disputed.)

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The Methuselah of elements

I can’t say the thought ever occurred to me , but apparently enough people think it’s a good idea to get high, film themselves and post the results to YouTube that psychologists at San Diego State University were able to use the crowd-created video archive to do one of the first studies of the drug’s behavioral impacts. Why study how people act when they’re high on Salvia? Despite carrying a lot of the same cultural trappings as pot, Salvia is actually pretty unique, from a chemical standpoint. In fact, that was part of why it was legal in so much of the U.S. for so long—the chemical structure wasn’t close enough to any already-outlawed drugs to be automatically covered as an analog under the same bans. Not surprisingly, Salvia’s effects on the human brain are also very different, and science doesn’t know much about those effects, says Mind Hacks’ Vaughan Bell . Pharmacologically, it is fascinating as it seems to have its major effect on kappa opioid receptors . These are not the same opioid receptors that drugs like heroin and morphine work on, so the effects are very different, but it is a completely different mechanism to virtually all other hallucinogenic drugs (only ibogaine is known to have a similar effect on the brain). Image courtesy Phyzome via CC

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Scientists mine YouTube to study effects of Salvia divinorum

Gizmodo did a good thing and a bad thing yesterday. The good thing was publishing the gadget-blogging scoop of the decade –this summer’s iPhone!–an honor shared by Engadget and a blogger named TEDream , both of whom scored earlier photographic ur-scoops of the new model. The bad thing was the ludicrously dramatic outing of the Apple engineer who lost the prototype. This earned Giz a well-deserved backlash, but we shouldn’t let it overshadow the value of the original scoop. Checkbook journalism has its uses , and journalism of any kind is gold dust in the PR-fed world of gadget writing. BBG fans may be pleased to see that Joel Johnson, now at Gizmodo, agrees that the engineer’s outing was a bad idea. He also kills another rumor doing the rounds–this being that the whole thing was a controlled leak–and repeats the point that access journalism sucks. You shouldn’t trust the tech press PR corps who are happy with it any more than you trust Gizmodo. It’s impossible to argue that “access journalism” has anything but a deleterious effect on the objectivity of journalists. Journalists will often freak out if you point this out because you are implying they are ethically or psychologically compromised. Tough shit. As someone who also gets sneak previews from gadget companies and free gear to test, even if temporarily, I have to cop to it, too. We do our best not to let it influence us, but to deny there is any influence at all is disingenuous. … Almost everyone in tech writing is compromised, but in this instance, only Gizmodo, Engadget and a single anonymous blogger have anything to show for it. It’s hardly fair to complain about gadget writers rewriting press releases, then complain about how they get to real news, too. There’s just not that much on the beat that isn’t spooned out by PR people; if it takes a drunken employee’s mishap and a paid-off thief, that’s what it takes. Also, those fantasizing in public about someone prosecuting Gizmodo should put it away. It’s disgusting. If you find Giz intolerable now, imagine it getting to mythologize its victimhood as a crusading poster child for press freedoms. God help us if Apple sues it or if it is prosecuted over this! Finally, you know what that SIM slot means? I think it means we’re stuck with AT&T for another gen. Damn. Apple Didn’t Leak the iPhone–And Why That Matters [Gizmodo]

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Gizmodo vs. critics of iPhone scoop

Readers of Charles Burns’ creepy comic book series Black Hole will recognize these faithful recreations of the yearbook photos of the monstrous teenagers from the series. The project was a collaboration between photographer Max Oppenheim and prosthetic artist Bill Turpin. Theoperators.net has the full series of photos , but unfortunately its Flash interface makes using the website as fun as brushing up against a Teddybear Cholla Cactus . UPDATE: Bless Spencer Cross’ heart for finding the non-Flash blog entry . (Via Fantagraphics )

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Characters from Black Hole comic brought to life

Salt & Fat is a lovely food blog maintained by two guys, Neven Mrgan and Jim Ray , who spend their days developing software and web products and every other moment, apparently, thinking about food, and the making and eating of it. The name tips you that this isn’t going to be a one of those oppressively good-for-you food-blog experiences. It’s also not one of those sites that paints cooks as a kind of priesthood and cooking itself as something rarified, distant and difficult. In fact, as Ray noted in an introductory post on the day he and Mrgan started the site three months ago, …people think cooking is too hard. Or takes too much time. I’d say the biggest marketing message is that we’re constantly being told we’re too busy (not necessarily too stupid, but I suppose that’s an implication in all mass marketing) to bother to cook a meal, here’s a meal-in-a-box full of sodium, preservatives and saturated high fructose whatnot. Let’s put a stop to that. Today’s entry on the cast-iron skillet is a good example of what the site does so well — deliver a large quantity of useful information in a way that’s brisk and sensible. There’s a food-lovers’ maxim to the effect that if you want to judge a new restaurant you shouldn’t order the most complicated thing on the menu, you should order the simplest, because a kitchen that can turn out perfect scrambled eggs probably has its house in order. That’s the sense you get from reading Ray’s post on the iron skillet, which is the scrambled eggs of food blog topics — the sort of basic entry that underpins everything else. When Ray answers, once and for all, the question of how to clean your iron skillet (and debunks the “Grandma never cleaned hers, not once, and she lived to be two hundred” myth) you know you’re in good hands. Full disclosure: I clean my skillet just as Ray advises. It’s a huge, hulking, heavy thing I bought at Target, because there’s another old maxim — I’ve seen it attributed to Michael Ruhlman , but haven’t been able to confirm that independently — that anybody who pays more than 12 bucks for a skillet is a freakin’ idiot.

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Cooking with Salt & Fat