"He posts YouTube videos of security loopholes at SFO, and instead of remedying them, the agency attacks him.

It wasn't me. I almost wish that it was, but it wasn't.

I am not the pilot who found himself in hot water for posting scandalous security videos on YouTube.

The pilot, whose name has not been released, uploaded a series of clips taken at San Francisco International Airport. His intent was to expose the insane double standard of TSA's airport employee screening policies: Although pilots and flight attendants are required to pass through the same concourse checkpoints as passengers, many ground workers, including baggage handlers, caterers and cabin cleaners, are exempt from these checks. The YouTube segments, which have since been taken down, showed ground employees passing through a simple turnstile on their way to work. You can see some highlights from the videos in this television news report by News10 in Sacramento, Calif., where the pilot lives.

This has been TSA policy from the beginning. It is also something I've been writing about in my columns, on and off, for the past eight years. Finally the issue is getting some attention -- if not entirely for the right reasons. This should be a story about farcical security practices; instead, as the media has been playing it, it's the story of a renegade pilot.

TSA says the pilot's actions are "under review," citing the possible release of what the agency calls, "sensitive security information..."

-- So they go after this guy for revealing the obvious. The TSA is nothing more than a large scale perfomance art project.

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"A provocative new study called “Placebos Without Deception,” published on PLoS One today, threatens to make humble sugar pills something they’ve rarely had a chance to be in the history of medicine: a respectable, ethically sound treatment for disease that has been vetted in controlled trials.

The word placebo is ancient, coming to us from the Latin for “I shall please.” As far back as the 14th Century, the term already had connotations of fakery, sleaze, and deception. For well-to-do Catholic families in Geoffrey Chaucer’s day, the custom at funerals was to offer a feast to the congregation after the mourners sang the Office for the Dead (which contains the phrase placebo Domino in regione vivorum, “I shall please the Lord in the land of the living”). The unintended effect of this largesse was to inspire distant relatives and former acquaintances of the departed to crawl out of the woodwork, weeping copiously while praising the deceased, then hastening to the buffet. By the time Chaucer wrote his Canterbury Tales, these macabre freeloaders had been christened “placebo singers.”

In modern medicine, placebos are associated with another form of deception — a kind that has long been thought essential for conducting randomized clinical trials of new drugs, the statistical rock upon which the global pharmaceutical industry was built. One group of volunteers in an RCT gets the novel medication; another group (the “control” group) gets pills or capsules that look identical to the allegedly active drug, but contain only an inert substance like milk sugar. These faux drugs are called placebos..."

-- An interesting read on a new study about this fascinating subject.

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"Based on the japanese phenomenon of the love hotel, this pop up LLove hotel was created by eight japanese and dutch designers with themed rooms that are installations, where people can actually make a reservation and stay over night.

Initiated by amsterdam’s Lloyd hotel (the hotel’s artistic director suzanne oxenaar) and works were coordinated by jo nagasaka of the japanese architecture studio schemata."

SEE HERE

-- All the cars in this museum-like garage are housed in a stark-white hangar like building with dedicated white platforms for each vehicle.

Photographs by Todd Eberle.

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"The 19th-century Analytical Engine computer, complete with CPU and a memory, remained unbuilt – time to put that right, says John Graham-Cumming.

In 1837 British mathematician Charles Babbage described a mechanical computer that later became known as the Analytical Engine. Calling it a computer is no stretch: the Analytical Engine had a central processing unit and memory and would have been programmed with punched cards.

Parts of the Analytical Engine were built in the 1800s and are on display in the Science Museum in London along with a stack of punched cards. But Babbage never completed the project.

The computer was an extension of his well-known Difference Engine, which was designed to calculate tables of numbers such as logarithms..."

READ HERE

"In news straight from the Rudolph Files, Norway’s 200,000 reindeer are being fitted with reflectors to reduce the number of car crashes that kill around 500 of the animals each year. To date, almost 2,000 reindeer have been fitted with reflective yellow collars or small antler tags this month in a project of the Norwegian Public Roads Administration.

Tests so far have shown that marked reindeer were much more visible in the dark than others. Several people are injured every year in car accidents involving reindeer, not to mention the fatalities suffered by the reindeer themselves. Indigenous Sami herders have experimented with attaching reflective tape to the animals but the glue failed in the cold. Finnish herders have also tried using a reflective spray, which seems like a true act of desperation–but it was unsuitable as it reduced the fur’s ability to keep out the cold. Not good..."

READ HERE

-- The CMYK EP by James Blake, was released on yellow, magenta and cyan colored vinyl which form a CMYK color model when overlapped.

Photo by Jan T. Sott. via Laughing Squid

“The UK-built solar-powered Zephyr aeroplane has been confirmed as a record-breaker following its non-stop two-week flight earlier this year.

The world governing body for air sports records, the Federation Aeronautique Internationale (FAI), gave Zephyr three records including longest time aloft.

Built by defence technology company Qinetiq, the craft completed its two-week flight in the US in July.

The company sees applications in surveillance and communications.

The July feat led to Zephyr being dubbed the "eternal plane".

"This aircraft can help track pirates off the Horn of Africa, alert the authorities about where and how fast forest fires are spreading, and ensure that soldiers' communications remain unaffected when fighting in mountainous or hilly terrain," said Qinetiq's chief designer Chris Kelleher.

The FAI noted that Zephyr smashed the previous record for the absolute duration of an unmanned autonomous vehicle (UAV) flight - set by Northrop Grumman's Global Hawk in 2001 - by a factor of 11.

The organisation set the official duration at 336 hours, 22 minutes and eight seconds.

Zephyr's flight also set a new mark for flight duration for a UAV of its class - unmanned craft weighing 50-500kg - and, for that class, the altitude record of 21,562m (70,741ft)…”

-- Impressive! Can't wait until this type of technology can be applied on a grander scale for much heavier aircraft. Follow the links for more info and video. BBC has at least three different clips so far. via Current

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"Some of the most influential scientists in history, from Franklin, to Lavoisier, to Mendel, weren’t formally educated in their fields of study. They just took an interest, and started conducting experiments, sometimes in their own back yards. But more recently, the specialized tools of science have put new discoveries out of reach for ordinary people. Now that dynamic is beginning to change again.

The internet has spawned a fantastic explosion in science that allows non-experts to actually participate in science by interacting with scientific data itself. I wrote about several such projects last year. Now, in just the past week, two new public tools for analyzing data have been unveiled, from two very different fields of study..."

READ HERE

"Bright stars, clouds of dust and glowing nebulae decorate this cosmic scene, a skyscape just north of Orion's belt. Close to the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy, the wide field view spans about 5.5 degrees. Striking bluish M78, a reflection nebula, is at the left. M78's tint is due to dust preferentially reflecting the blue light of hot, young stars. In colorful contrast, the red sash of glowing hydrogen gas sweeping through the center is part of the region's faint but extensive emission nebula known as Barnard's Loop. At right, a dark dust cloud forms a prominent silhouette cataloged as LDN 1622. While M78 and the complex Barnard's Loop are some 1,500 light-years away, LDN 1622 is likely to be much closer, only about 500 light-years distant from our fair planet Earth."

SEE HERE

-- Watch this!