OhGizmo has an interesting piece on all the fake coconuts hanging from trees in San Jose, CA. Apparently, the hard-shelled impersonators were created by MIT Media Lab researcher Tad Hirsh, to help outsource the difficult work of complaining for you. The coconuts are equipped with noise sensors and integrated cell phones. The idea is that whenever the tree-bound fruit log too much noise from low-flying aircraft, the crabby coconuts do what timid neighbors won’t—they automatically call the airport and complain about it (supposedly, in unique voices each time). Story via OhGizmo.

If you thought hypnosis was just about making people quack like a duck when you snap your fingers, think again. Hypnosis is being used more and more frequently to help people get through stressful and painful ordeals — like surgery and giving birth. You heard right: it’s called hypnobirthing, and according to British doctors, the technique produces “really chilled babies.” (Which is to say, cool, Daddy-o babies, not hypothermic ones.) What’s more, the mothers — who learn to induce self-hypnosis rather than having someone dangle a watch in front of their eyes and count backwards — often sail through the birthing process in only a few hours, with fewer complications than usual — and without so much as aspirin. One mother, who describes herself as “a worrier” who had been excessively nervous about giving birth, describes her experience with hypnobirthing this way: “I just breathed her out without drugs it was just great and I could not have wished for anything better.”

Meanwhile, on our side of the pond, a recent study indicates that hypnosis can help women going through breast cancer surgery. 200 women were recruited to undergo just fifteen minutes of hypnosis before surgery — during which they were instructed to relax, and given pleasant mental images to concentrate on — the majority of which reported markedly fewer side effects, pain, nausea or emotional distress after the operation.

If that wasn’t enough, doctors are also beginning to use hypnosis treat conditions as varied as hay fever, asthma, eczema, migraine headaches — and even to aid in the success rate of in-vitro fertilization (studies in Israel have found that hypnotized mothers-in-hoping have twice the chance of becoming pregnant as those not hypnotized).

All that sounds great, but selfish as I am I find myself wondering if I couldn’t use hypnosis to help get through more mundane trials, like having my teeth cleaned at the dentist or getting through a slower-than-molasses rush hour commute.

Have any of you ever been hypnotized? Did it work?

Do you work in an office? Do you like wasting time? How about hitting people in the face with beachballs? If you answered yes to any of these, I hereby command you to investigate Faceball, invented at Flickr, but now sweeping offices worldwide.

The game is pretty simple — two people sit in office chairs, ten feet from each other, and throw beachballs at each other’s faces. No ducking is allowed. If you score a face-hit, you keep throwing until you miss, gaining points all the while. After an agreed-upon number of rounds (generally five), the player with the most points wins. (If this explanation isn’t enough, check out the video introduction on the Faceball site – scroll down.)

Faceball is all about documentation — because Flickr staffers invented it, they present tons of photos of beachballs hitting faces. The quintessential Faceball photo shows a beachball impacting a person’s face — silly and a bit humiliating. Faceball co-creator John Allspaw explains that the game was invented “to relieve work stress and replace it with humiliation and embarrassment.”

See also: a news story (video) from CBS 5 about the game. Also: a Flickr Blog entry about the game.

Six feature films, three spinoff films, five television series, plus video games, books, and merchandise, plus a big chunk of the internet, all devoted to the Star Wars universe. There will always be movies with fans, but those who identify with Star Wars are so numerous, so prolific, and so vociferous, they redefine what it means to be a fan. For those of you who enjoyed the movies, but aren’t rabid Star Wars fans (I’m more of the Star Trek type), here are some clues to how they feel. Andrey Summers summed up what makes Star Wars fans so different in The Complex and Terrifying Reality of Star Wars Fandom.

If you run into somebody who tells you they thought the franchise was quite enjoyable, and they very-much liked the originals as well as the prequels, and even own everything on DVD, and a few of the books, these imposters are not Star Wars Fans.

Star Wars fans hate Star Wars.

Let me count the ways…
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Dodgeball takes a lot of knocks in gym class for being dangerous, but it’s got nowhere near the death rate of these sports. Here’s a look at six sports you wouldn’t want your kids playing in gym class.

1. Pakistani Kite Flying

Every year Pakistanis celebrate the beginning of spring with Basant, a joyous festival with music, horses, flowers and kites. Well, actually, scratch the kites; they were banned by the Pakistani government. The tradition of flying kites competitively on Basant was resulting in a surprising number of deaths. Over the course of the festival, the Pakistanis created a tradition of not just flying the kites, but battling them. Bands on the streets would play whenever someone’s kite strings were cut, which led to people replacing their kite string with razor wire to up their advantage. The competitive nature of the kite flying has led to a shocking number of deaths, from cuts from razor wire to people falling off roofs or being hit by stray bullets. After 9 deaths in 2004 and 20 in 2005, the Pakistani government established the kite-flying ban. Bowing to public opinion, the government lifted the ban for the 2007 Basant, but that only resulted in ten more deaths. With odds like those, Charlie Brown’s probably lucky he never got his kite off the ground.

2. Pole Vaulting

When two pole vaulters were killed within five days of each other in 2002, the chairman of the USA Track and Field pole vaulting safety committee wasn’t even shocked. After all, the flaws in pole vaulting had been clear for a while. With at least 18 deaths since 1982 out of only 25,000 participants, pole vaulting has the highest rate of death of any American sport. Most of the deaths came from high school competitions, where the rules aren’t consistent between schools, let alone states. The size of the landing pad was the main culprit; the American Society for Testing and Measurement recommends a landing pad more than 21 feet wide and 16 feet long, but most schools had mats far smaller. Helmets were also an issue- there was no standardized helmet, so most competitors used a bike or skateboard helmet, if they had one at all. Since 2002, though, the Kevin Dare Memorial Fund (set up after the death of Kevin Dare, one of the 2002 fatalities) has been lobbying for increased safety and laws requiring helmets. The efforts seemed to have worked, since no deaths have been recorded since Dare’s.

3. Pro Wresting

One of the most talked-about sports stories this summer was pro wrestler Chris Benoit’s murder-suicide. Not as talked-about were the deaths of three fellow pro wrestlers since Benoit’s death. In fact, since 1997, 65 pro wrestlers have died before they turned 50, according to journalist Dave Melzer. That’s the equivalent of 186 MLB players or 435 from the NFL. Most of wrestling’s deaths can be linked back to steroid use, whether it’s an overdose or organ failure brought on by steroids. People are quick to blame WWE promoter Vince McMahon (who had his own death faked earlier this year) for the rampant drug use, since he once urged athletes to bulk up to drive up ratings.

PLUS: Ivy League football (pre-1905), and more, after the jump!

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I’ve written about the size of fashion magazines in the past, both in essays and fiction, but I really must dip a toe back into the pool again here because, I’m sorry, but the new issue of Vogue has – not kidding – 727 pages of advertising!!

And guess what folks, they’re so proud of this inanity, they’ve gone and boasted as much on the front cover! Yes, it’s 100 pages thicker than last year’s September issue!

I mean come on now Condé Nast! Forget for a moment about the number of trees needed to publish an albatross of that size, what about the amount of money spent by both advertisers and publisher putting it together? Couldn’t they find a better use for all that dough?

To attract 100 new advertisers, the mag had to come up with a new ploy: a Web-based broadband channel, which they’re calling “added value.” (With shows entitled “60 Seconds to Chic,” it’s hard to argue.)

Eh, I’m not impressed. I mean GQ in Italy has had their own broadband running for a couple years now. I know because they interviewed me (watch for yourselves here and here) way back in ’05. I don’t think the number of subscriptions over at that mag has gone up because of it, nor do I think Vogue TV will change the world, either.

The other thing I’d like to add about fashion magazine heft is this: when you’re standing in line at the supermarket, mindlessly thumbing through one, have you ever noticed that you can NEVER EVER find the cover story? Is it just me, or do they really make it hard for us to find them, buried as they are between perfumed advertisements and malnutritioned-looking runway glams??

I always feel like everyone else I know has some great story about going to a corporate retreat–sweat lodges, pontoon boats, severely rustic weekends (a la “Colonial House”). CNNMoney went looking for employee ambivalence to these “offsites” and found it:

A dozen workers at a small international marketing company recently found themselves at a retreat run by experts from an “experiential learning” firm. “They came in talking about the seven cornerstones of teamwork,” says one attendee, so each employee was given a pouch filled with seven colored stones that stood for concepts like sharing resources, defining roles, and communicating frequently. Whenever a participant violated a cornerstone during the exercise, others had to roll a stone at him across the table. “Not communicating? Here’s a purple stone,” says the attendee mockingly. “It was ridiculous. We’ve worked together better since that silly offsite, but it’s probably because we sat around the bar afterward laughing.”

During my longest tenure in a full-time position, I have to say I was kind of hoping we’d at least get to do group Bikram or a trust fall. I think “Photoshop Olympics” interoffice emails became a kind of stand-in for enforced camaraderie, though I suppose they fostered a cliquishness for those not cc’d, those with whom we probably needed to do a high ropes course. So, now I’m going to troll for corporate retreat stories.

Turns out fairies are real … and rather scary. How do we know this? Fossil evidence, of course — or at least, that’s what entomological artist Tessa Farmer would have us believe. Her nearly microscopic exoskeletal sculptures manage to be whimsical and morbid at the same time (quite a balancing act, if you ask us) — depicting fantastical battles royale between fairies and insect-kind. From a gallery’s website:

Constructed from bits of organic material, such as roots, leaves, and dead insects, each of Farmer’s figures stand barely 1 cm tall, their painstakingly intricate detail visible only through a magnifying glass. Presented as wee preternatural discoveries, Farmer’s sculptures conjure a superstitious premise, dismantling the mythos of fantasia with evidence of something much more gothic, sinister, and bewitching.

Didn’t your mother teach you not to play with dead things, Miss Farmer? In any case, we’re glad; these works are creepy and cool. (more…)

I’ve posted about Stanley Kubrick before, and just came across a fascinating article from 2004 by Jon Ronson, a Guardian Unlimited reporter who spent months among Kubrick’s extensive archive. Fans of Kubrick will enjoy the full article, though in a bit of a bummer, the end appears slightly truncated. Even so, there’s plenty of interesting stuff there. Here are a few samples:

The fan letters are perfectly preserved. They are not in the least bit dusty or crushed. The system used to file them is, in fact, extraordinary. Each fan box contains perhaps 50 orange folders. Each folder has the name of a town or city typed on the front – Agincourt, Ontario; Alhambra, California; Cincinnati, Ohio; Daly City, California, and so on – and they are in alphabetical order inside the boxes. And inside each folder are all the fan letters that came from that particular place in any one year. Kubrick has handwritten “F-P” on the positive ones and “F-N” on the negative ones. The crazy ones have been marked “F-C”.

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Researchers at the University of Cincinnati are trying to program computers to recognize a joke. So far, they’ve only gotten to the kindergarten level, by teaching computers to recognize words that sound the same (but are spelled differently) or words that sound somewhat similar and can be taken more than one way. In a word, puns. The example in the article reminds me of my daughter’s first joke. She approached me carrying a broom and said, “Shh! Be quiet! I’m trying to SWEEP!” I laughed at that all day, but mainly because she was two years old and had never successfully told a joke before.

Joke recognition software could be very useful to someone like me. I’m always searching the internet for humor, but funny stories are often not labeled with the words “humor”, “funny”, or “joke”. The program in this project allows a computer to recognize a joke, but it still cannot discriminate between a funny joke and a dud. That’s fine, if you’re a kindergarten humorist, but it won’t lead to an improvement in joke-telling when all you receive is positive feedback (insert mechanical voice: “That is a joke. Ha ha ha”). They hope to expand the program’s repertoire eventually, and learn more about human reactions to humor by replicating them in a computer. It seems like an uphill battle to me. The human brain has an almost unlimited capacity for obscure connections, which many people never use. You can tell a lot about a person by whether they understand and appreciate very subtle humor. If he “gets it”, he shows a certain level of intelligence. If he gets it and still doesn’t crack a smile, he may be a snob or just too serious for my tastes. Studying human reactions to humor is a complex process that most of us do without thinking.

What will this lead to? Will we eventually have household robots who not only do chores, but laugh at our lame attempts at humor? That’s what we have children for!