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An oil painting can record sound.

Ancient pottery can record sound too. I read an article in SciAm many year ago about an investigation into some ancient pottery. Seems the spiral groove design encircling the vase from top to bottom may have been created on the potter's wheel with the point of a wire held against it and moved slowly downward as the vase rotated. It was speculated that this could result in a primitive kind of phonograph, as any loud noise would cause the wire to vibrate and those vibrations would be indelibly recorded. The investigators mounted the vase on a lathe and attempted to "play back" whatever may have been recorded. After signal processing, they thought they could here the sound of horse's hooves on the pavement outside the potter's shop. I remember at the time I read this that just the thought of the possibility of bringing back a sound from 2000 years ago sent shivers down my spine.

A quick Google check yields a site that declares this a recent hoax: Ancient Pottery Recorded Audio but I swear I read about this in SciAm more than 20 years ago. Unfortunately, I am not a current subsciber to SciAm so I cannot look for that article directly.

Have any of you heard of The Sokal Hoax? In 1996, a daring and dissatisfied physics professor named Alan Sokal wrote a bullshit paper called "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", which Sokal called "a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense", which was "structured around the silliest quotations I could find about mathematics and physics" made by humanities academics. In short, it caused a big scandal because the paper was readily accepted without review by Duke University's postmodern cultural studies journal Social Text. It's probably one of the best and most controversial examples of a hoax on the "academic community," and it is excellent proof of just how much bullshit flies for "cultural studies." Run THAT through your paper detector! Read more about it here: Skeptic's Dictionary and Museum of Hoaxes

The fact is, laws passed for the "common good" invariably end up harming those they were notionally intended

Well indeed...

One obvious consequence of making .xxx well-regulated is that there will need to be a place for people to have non-well-regulated stuff. People who want sex and don't want to pay for it will want adware, so if you regulate against it, then you need a .ADS+XXX tld to say "yes, I want xxx but I'll tolerate ads to get them".

What problem is being solved by regulating this new domain that isn't even created anyway? Is it to make it more attractive so people will go there more? I thought the original reason for this domain was to say it was outside the bounds of social reason. Now they want to make a nice sociable place out of the place that is outside the bounds of socialness? Where will the social bounds of that be?

Will there be a .XXXX in a few years because they didn't feel welcome in .XXX?

Some people on the religious right probably think any mention of sex for anything other than making babies during marriage is bad and belongs in XXX, while others think XXX defines some distinction between hardcore and softcore, and so on. Will they be forward-thinking enough to break this domain into .MOSTLY.XXX and .SOMEWHAT.XXX and .NOTREALLYVERYMUCHATALL.XXX and .WRONGLYTHOUGHTTOBE.XXX and .WHATJERRYFALWELLTHINKSIS.XXX and .WHATTHEPOPETHINKSIS.XXX and .WHATYOUANDITHINKIS.XXX and .EVENWORSETHANCOMMONLYCALLED.XXX and then make everyone be subdomains under that?

Like legislating the value of pi to 22/7, there are some truths about the world that government should stay well clear of.

Sex is a big concept, full of complexity. You're never going to boil it down to something simple enough to legislate in a uniform way and if you have to idealize it before you can confront it, it's a bad idea to try because, like it or not, the world is not anyone's ideal. You'd think government would get that.

I don't think image is as important, more the fear of doing something different in small to medium sized businesses.

I mean check out this group photo of a small bunch of garage hackers in 1979:
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/photos/images/micros oft.jpg/
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/photos/microsoft.htm l/

What is more worrying is the adoption of MS only desktops in many educational facilities. I loved the time I was at tech here in NZ, we had desktops (Intel 8088 and 286's) running DR DOS, Servers were Netware 3.x, many of the tutors ran Macs, there was a DEC mainframe in the library (Old at the time but at least we could have a play with some big iron technology), and it all worked together on the campus LAN. Now people graduate from the same facility never having touched an OS other than Windows, so that is all they know. So that is then what they install/buy for their own business or at home.

I don't think image is as important, more the fear of doing something different in small to medium sized businesses.

I mean check out this group photo of a small bunch of garage hackers in 1979:
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/photos/images/micros oft.jpg/
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/photos/microsoft.htm l/

What is more worrying is the adoption of MS only desktops in many educational facilities. I loved the time I was at tech here in NZ, we had desktops (Intel 8088 and 286's) running DR DOS, Servers were Netware 3.x, many of the tutors ran Macs, there was a DEC mainframe in the library (Old at the time but at least we could have a play with some big iron technology), and it all worked together on the campus LAN. Now people graduate from the same facility never having touched an OS other than Windows, so that is all they know. So that is then what they install/buy for their own business or at home.

Oh, I dunno... It seems fairly easy to get a major news hoax going outside of China too - http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/comments /4033/

Perhaps you're joking, but just in case you're not...

That account of events was taken from a parody interview of Hiroshi Yamauchi. It did not actually happen. It was a hoax.

Links:
http://middaysoftware.com/MinhsBlogs/articles/223. aspx
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/comments /2216/

Actually you are wrong, there is still no scientific fact for Macro-evolution. There is scientific fact for micro-evolution, which Christians support. It makes sense for things to evolve due to elements in their surroundings, such as the common black moth, white moth theory, but to say things would just grow wings is out of the question. I personally don't believe Creationism or Intelligent Design either, but hey its about time they started telling us more religions other then the one the scientists are so fond of. http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/permalin k/peppered_moth_evolution_kit/

S'ok... they'll just have David Manning review the movies.

Because they forgot how to teleport!

man, i thought everyone knew that already .. all you had to do was ask them.

Cal Tech shouldn't be worrying about beating back old riddles posed by the flocks and get back to the business at hand of figuring out how to hack scoreboards.

• The Statue of Liberty sinking into lake Mendota.
• The 1008 Flamingos on Bascom Hill

Both were courtesy of Jim Mallon and Leon Varjian, leaders of the Pail and Shovel party at the University of Wisconsin. During their 1978 campaign they promised to raise enough money to buy the Statue of Liberty and fly it to Madison. During transit via helicopter the tow cable cable broke and Lady Liberty plunged into the lake.

I think the best of them all still has to be the Caltech rose bowl prank. Nothing I've read about even comes close to the level of skill and amazingness that they pulled back in the sixties.

Has the city of Paris really copyrighted the Eiffel Tower as it looks lit up at night, meaning that anyone (including a tourist) who takes a picture of the Eiffel Tower at night has to get permission and pay a fee before publishing that picture? As bizarre as it sounds, apparently this is true. Even if you wanted to post your holiday photos of the 'Eiffel Tower by night' on the web, you would technically have to get permission first. The Eiffel Tower itself was built in 1889, and therefore its likeness entered the public domain long ago, but the Parisian authorities sneaked around this fact by copyrighting the lights on the Tower. They did this in 2003. That's why the copyright issue only applies to the Eiffel Tower at night. So technically it's not the tower itself that is copyrighted. It's the lights on the tower. But you can hardly photograph the tower without getting the lights. This is the kind of thing that sounds so stupid you suspect it has to be false, but David-Michel Davies who's written about this over at FastCompany http://blog.fastcompany.com/archives/2005/02/02/ei ffel_tower_repossessed.html appears to have done his homework, so I'm inclined to believe him. http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/comments /2417/

I've read of using classical music to ward off the unwanted teen crowd at convenience stores. It seems a bit more humane and appropriately selective - in that it can serve as a cultural experience for those who don't mind it, and one might think those people would be more socially acceptable than those who loathe classical music.

-and there is photo evidence of the infraction online, than why can't that evidence be admissable?

David Attenborough, noted naturalist, remarked upon the discovery of a rare night-singing tree mouse found in the Sheba Islands in the south Pacific. The musendrophilus has a very haunting song. Also their webbed paws are highly prized by the natives for the creation of their musical instruments.

It is unknown if they are related to the rare "tree squeaks" that live in the treetops and squeak every time the wind rustles their home's boughs.

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/comments /boy_with_12_fingers_and_13_toes/ - heh --Still, think I'd rather stick to my four fingers and one thumbs or five digits per hand.

Yes, but this will be fixed as soon as Gov. Schwarzenegger blows up the moon.
 
-kaplanfx

Not only busted, but there was a class action formed and a settlement has been proposed.
So.. If you got fucked out of $12 (or whatever a movie ticket is now), the courts have generously decided to award you a whopping $5 (plus an additional $5 per child if uhh... you took children with you)

The following movies are eligible Hollow Man, Vertical Limit, A Knight's Tale, The Animal or The Patriot.

Link to PDF of settlement form. Of course, the wonderful "we can't punish Sony too much, so if too many people sign up, we

More info on the case

Maybe we should invent fake terminology and get them to print it. I cyberscape on my ripping blog using cyberdyned entrails.

Actually, the Caltech rose bowl stunt was done back in the 60s, which is actually many decades before the MIT hack referred to above. This has already been noted in other comments. Good research porcupine8.

A bunch of Yalies pulled a similar prank at this year's The Game, but there was no lock-picking or theft involved - just pure social engineering. They reconnoitered the Cantabs' stadium and designed their own card stunt. The day of the game, they dressed up as the "Harvard Pep Squad", and passed out their cards, without, apparently, raising an eyebrow. And not once, not twice, but three times (or more!), they got 1800 Havard students and alums to declare as one: "WE SUCK".

Caltech did it first. sorry

Caltech does have at least one good prank to its name.

I still think the 1961 Rosebowl prank is one of the very best. But yeah, these latest MIT ones were lame.

I'm sure there are plenty more where those came from.

If anyone still fell for these after reading the articles..
There was one really good April fools joke on slashdot yesterday , which would have been grand it been only one. The problem is that it was nuzzled in between some of the daft ones and thus made it so easy to pick out .
"fool me once shame on me , Fool me twice shame on you , Fool me 7 or more times..."
Seriously some the carefull planing that used to go into these jokes needs to be reintroduced, It seems hoaxing is a dead art .Seriously when that FFXI joke is considerd one of the more devious then i think they should take a look back for inspiration to thinks on the http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/
Now some of those were masterfull

This was moderately amusing, and then I noticed the byline: the article author is none other than Sid Finch. Sid Finch has moved from into a new phase in his career. First it was French Horn, then Tibetian monk, then Baseba^H^H^H^H^SteriodBall's hotest pitching prospect, now it's journalist. Read more here

there's a reason http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/top100.html hasn't been updated for a while. Lack of material.

Indeed, if would be much cooler if /. editors tried to pull of a real hoax, a la "hot-headed naked ice borers", or something that was at least amusing, like the old "spaghetti harvest" hoax.

Much goodness to be found along those lines at the Museum of Hoaxes, although the site appears to be running pretty slow today:

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/

And spaghetti grows on trees ;).

Other BBC hoaxes. Auntie Beeb has always like to have one up on her audience.

Oh sorry, /. is US-centered... Sorry guys, you can go back now to your beer, burgers and your ice-hockey...

---

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/EE/images/uploads/be llybutton_lg.jpg God bless
America!

I don't feel like digging up this material again just to argue with you

I definitely don't need you to do it..
As i posted in a correction, the link I attached to the word 'proof' was wrong. The actual proof is here.

To sum it up: this is the members page as it is now, and this is what it was (it's stored in a cache site). The faces of the members were obviously edited (compare the eyes, especially. Arguably, they did it in order not to use the face of some actual people). This pretty much proves that the whole website is a fake.

OTOH, I totally agree that the anti-evolution movement is a reality (sadly). It's enough to look at what happens in some schools, as the CEO of the AAAS (the association that publishes Science) is denouncing.

--
Requiem for the FUD

The proof is here! Sorry.
It shows how the faces of the members were "edited".

This type of thing has been going on for quite some time. Back in 1969, twenty-five people collaberated on writing a book with nothing to reccomend it except at least two kinky sex scenes in each chapter and got it published. Anybody beside me remember Naked Came The Stranger?

This is an example of the brilliant hoax first devised by "Naked Came The Stranger" (first link in Google), where a group of reporters wrote a book deliberately designed to be bad to show the crap and lack of taste that was coming out of the trashy romantic novel genre. At least 2 explicit sexual acts per chapter, the more deviant the better. Good writing and grammer were to be thoroughly sponged out of the book. They hired the sister of one of the writers I think to play the author and go around on TV shows saying rediculous stuff supposedly to promote the book.

The funny thing was that the book was published and then became so popular and the money grew so much that they spilled their guts and told the world about the hoax.

An earlier effort by 25 Newsday staffers produced the 1969 best seller Naked Came the Stranger.

It IS Bill, but, as noticed previously, it was in 1985 NOT in 1983 and NOT in Teen Beat http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/comments /2272/

According to Museum of Hoaxes, the photos were taken by Deborah Feingold in 1985 -- for the launch of Windows 1.0.

Here's a mirror, another blog.

AND... for the real freaks out there who need more than 2 photos, here are two other pics (one, two) from the same day (well, he's wearing the same clothes, anyway; I guess that doesn't mean much), a classic early MS photo (NOT a hoax, despite the domain name), and Billy G's mugshot.

You gotta wonder if that robot is going to hold up a HUSKIES sign.

It would be a great way to even the score.

-ch

Merely a snapshot of the continually-evolving Jargon File.

The Big Book of [Urban Ledgends|Hoaxes|Vice|Loosers|Conspiracy| etc.]

Again, more up-to-date stuff can be found at Snopes, The Straight Dope, The Urban Legends Research Centre, Hoaxkill, The Museum of Hoaxes, &c.

Nothing wrong with dead-tree books, of course, but nice to know of alternatives.

Bloggers: 43 Folders, Kris Dresden, Diane Duane, Paul Ford, Neil Gaiman, Michael Hanscom, Jason Kottke, Anne Murphy, Jessamyn North, Alia Phibes, Quentin Tarantino, and Wil Wheaton.

Linklogs: Anil Dash, Best of Craigslist, Boing Boing, CoolGov, Daze Reader, Fazed, Kottke Remainders, LinkMachineGo, MetaJournal, Michael Hanscom's Linklog, Museum of Hoaxes, NewYorkish, Paul Ford's Linklog, Snopes: New, SubText, and UFies.org.

Chicago: Chicagoist, jamas.org, CHICAGO.Metroblogging, Chicago Snapshot, CTA Tattler, Gapers' Block, and L or El.

Miscellaneous: Ask Slashdot, Citying, Cult of the One-Eyed Cat, Good Plastic Surgery, I Work With Fools, Schmo Blog, TeeVee, This Is Broken, Today In Alternate History, and x-entertainment.

Apple Bloggers: Buzz Andersen, Bill Bumgarner, Todd Dominey, Folklore, Steven Frank, John Gruber, Dave Hyatt, Brent Simmons,

Have we positively ruled out terrorism as a cause of this seismic activity at this point?

Yes, but I'm not so sure that they've fully addressed the possibility it all being this guy's work.

A very good read for sure, but last I heard, she admitted it was fake, more poetry than reality as she put it. Google for 'motorcycle fake chernobyl' and you can find some more info on it.

Yeah, it seems to be the case.
But, the images are still pretty incredible.

Have you actually read the Hutton report. Aside from the fact that it is a complete whitewash by a member of the establishment hand-picked by Tony Blair to clear him of any wrongdoing, it doesn't actually accuse the BBC of making anything up. At the end of the entire episode, I still have enormous amount of respect for the BBC and their journalists, and no respect whatsoever for the government or their lackey Hutton.

Then again, I suppose the BBC did make up the spaghetti tree hoax

Of course they don't. Insert obligatory spaghetti harvest link here

I put as much stock in their articles as the Pulitzer Prize Committee does... er... Janet Cooke's Jimmy's World Jayson Blaire Though Blaire worked for the NYTimes maybe it is time we set aside our trust for the media and tell the FCC to go blow it out their ass.

Of course, this could happen.

Might work, huh?

And then maybe Apple will be in the mood to issue duplicate prizes for automated winners.

to hide a Little Person inside one of these things? Baron Kempelen got away with such a scheme for quite a while... The Turk