Found this gem of a list on...listverse. Give it the once-over.

10 Of The Most Bizarre Books Ever Written

ANDREW HANDLEY MARCH 30, 2014

If literary history teaches us one thing, it’s that people were just as confused and immature in the Middle Ages as they are now. From unsolvable codes to 13th-century penis doodles in the margins of bibles, history is like an all-encompassing high school cliche that never comes to an end. These books span the course of written history, and they’re all utterly bizarre.

10Codex Seraphinianus

Photo credit: Parigi Books

Written in a language that no one understands and filled with illustrations of surreal, impossible things, Codex Seraphinianus is possibly the strangest encyclopedia in the world. When Italian architect Luigi Serafini published the book in 1981, he presented it as a factual, scientific work. One look at the outlandish potpourri of images, however, reveals that Codex Seraphinianus is anything but scientific.

The entire book is handwritten, and the illustrations are all hand drawn and colored by Serafini himself, a task that he labored over for two years. Scholars have spent years trying to decipher the book, but the only thing we’ve figured out is that “Seraphinianus” is just a variation of Serafini’s name. As for the book’s language, the “alphabet” has about two dozen characters, and relates to absolutely nothing else humanity has ever created.

Daily Bleed for November 23rd, A Radical Anarchist Daybook

Our Daily Bleed...

In the very earliest time,     when both people & animals lived on earth,     a person could become an animal if he wanted to     & an animal could become a human being.     Sometimes they were people     & sometimes animals     & there was no difference.     All spoke the same language.     That was the time when words were like magic.     The human mind had mysterious powers.     A word spoken by chance     might have strange consequences.     It would suddenly come alive     & what people wanted to happen could happen —     all you had to do was say it.     Nobody could explain this:     That's the way it was.         — Edward Field, "Magic Words,"         translated from the Inuit (Eskimo)     http://archive.ala.org/booklist/v95/youth/oc2/60field.html     http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/696     http://homepages.wmich.edu/~cooneys/poems/Field.unwanted.html

NOVEMBER 23

DANIEL DELEON
American radical, helped found the Wobblies.

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ST. CLEMENTS DAY. Procession of blacksmiths & (mad) hatters.

Japan: NIINAME SAI, harvest festival.



I'M JUST A PATSY DAY.



INTERNATIONAL DAY TO END IMPUNITY.
http://daytoendimpunity.org/

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1170 BC -- [BC] Pyramid Scheme?: First recorded strike for better working conditions & pay, takes place in Egypt, by pyramid laborers who are tired of belaboring the point.

"They say the Pharaohs built the pyramids. Do you think one Pharaoh dropped one bead of sweat?

We built the pyramids for the Pharaohs & we're building for them yet."

         — Anna Louise Strong

1760 -- French revolutionary Francois-Noel Babeuf lives, St. Quentin, France.

FRANCOIS-NOEL BABEUF 1997 PATRON SAINT
Communist leader in the French Revolution, member of the Conspiracy of Equals, until betrayed to the Directory, when he was captured & executed.

... show details

1828 -- US: William Silvus, American labor activist, lives (1828-1869).

1831 -- France: The Silk Workers' Revolt in Lyon continues. Workers occupy the Town Hall & an attempt at an insurrectionary government is made.

For lack of a clear politics, or by a trick of the authorities, the latter regain control of the city on December 2.

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9volte_des_Canuts
http://metiers.free.fr/dcanuts/canutsi29.html 

1852 -- US: A Drop in the Bucket? Just past midnight, a sharp jolt causes Lake Merced to drop 30 feet (9m).
http://www.lmtf.org/FoLM/homepage.html

1859 -- US: Western outlaw, gunslinger, Billy the Kid (Bonney) lives.

while i've been going on the blood from my wrist has travelled to my heart & my fingers touch this soft blue paper notebook control a pencil that shifts up & sideways mapping my thinking going its own way — Michael Ondaatje, Collected Works of Billy the Kid http://www.tru.ca/faculty/tfriedman/ondaatje.htm http://web.archive.org/...americanwest.com/pages/gunsoutl.htm

Biblio-mat book-vending machine from The Monkey's Paw

Another one of my ideas stolen! Ahh well... I'll just have to one-up them soon.

Borrowed in its entirety from: http://www.quillandquire.com

Q&A: The Monkey’s Paw introduces the Biblio-mat book-vending machine

For nearly seven years, Stephen Fowler has owned The Monkey’s Paw, the curious antiquarian bookstore on Toronto’s Dundas Street West, offering bibliophiles a diverse selection of printed artifacts.

Self-dubbed “Toronto’s most idiosyncratic second-hand bookshop,” the store is more than a place to buy books: it is also an art stunt, with a collection of insect taxonomies on display and crafted window presentations aimed to startle unassuming pedestrians. For his latest venture, Fowler has revealed the Biblio-mat, a vending machine that dispenses random books for two dollars apiece.

Quillblog spoke with Fowler about his invention.

What is the story behind the Biblio-mat? I went fishing this past summer with Craig Small, co-founder of The Juggernaut, an animation studio in Toronto. I had this idea that I would love to have a vending machine that gave out random books. I pictured it as a painted refrigerator box with one of my assistants inside; people would put in a coin and he would drop a book out. But Craig is more pragmatic and visionary then I am. He said, “You need to have an actual mechanical vending machine.” That was beyond my wildest imaginings, but not Craig’s, so he just built it for me.

What did you envision for the machine’s appearance? We were very careful with the style of the thing. We are attentive to the whole presentation of the shop, its look and vibe, and we wanted something that would go with it. It is a new device but has a very intentionally vintage look. The cabinet is actually an old metal locker; the front of the locker is in the back.

What books are stocked in the Biblio-mat? The books in the machine are two dollars each – that’s not enough to make any profit, but the nature of the second-hand book business is that I end up with a lot of books that are interesting and worth keeping and disseminating, but have no practical retail value. Historically in the used books trade there has always been the dollar cart in front of the store. This is just a spin on that.

What has been the response from customers? The machine is still in the beta stage, so it doesn’t always work perfectly. The response is sometimes based on that. Of the people who have used the thing so far, almost every person has been pleasantly surprised and completely amused. I can think of two people who were dissatisfied with the book they got, but I can only assume they were people lacking in imagination and enthusiasm. In fact, this is something I’ve observed in the used-book trade: people are always looking for meaning. They’ll get a book and feel as though it was psychically selected for them.

How do you acquire your books? I buy estates, or from people who are moving or downsizing. I buy books over the counter, at library sales, and from charities. I travel all around and buy books every kind of way you can imagine. Except I don’t buy books online, nor do I sell books online.

This really isn’t a store for readers. The traditional purpose of a bookstore is as a place to buy a piece of printed culture. We sell printed artifacts that contain text – not that you can’t read these books – but people don’t come here to buy books to read, they come here to buy books to own.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

New Billboard Says Believing in Climate Change Makes You the Unabomber

Are you concerned about climate change? According to a new billboard campaign by the right-wing Heartland Institute, that makes you no different than the Unabomber, Fidel Castro, or Charles Manson.

The first billboard went up in the Chicago area this week.

I’ve written about nutty corporate ads labeling animal environmentalists and animal rights activists as terrorists, but this goes even further. It doesn’t matter whether or not you’re an activist, the Heartland Institute says, because even thinking about these things makes you dangerous.
Here’s how they explain it:

Why did Heartland choose to feature these people on its billboards?

Learn more about how corporations manufactured the idea of "eco-terrorism," and the impact of media stunts like this.

Because what these murderers and madmen have said differs very little from what spokespersons for the United Nations, journalists for the “mainstream” media, and liberal politicians say about global warming. They are so similar, in fact, that a Web site has a quiz that asks if you can tell the difference between what Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, wrote in his “Manifesto” and what Al Gore wrote in his book, Earth in the Balance.The point is that believing in global warming is not “mainstream,” smart, or sophisticated. In fact, it is just the opposite of those things. Still believing in man-made global warming – after all the scientific discoveries and revelations that point against this theory – is more than a little nutty. In fact, some really crazy people use it to justify immoral and frightening behavior.

Of course, not all global warming alarmists are murderers or tyrants…

Heartland is the engine behind climate change denialist efforts around the country. The group doesn’t reveal its funding sources, but Desmogblog obtained internal documents that show funding from ExxonMobil, GlaxosSmithKline, and Pfizer among others.

Heartland is also a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council, including its Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force (here’s more about ALEC’s ties to recent Ag Gag bills). The corporations mentioned above are ALEC members also.

According to Heartland, there are also plans in the works for comparing “global warming believers” to Osama bin Laden.

In related news, I heard from reliable sources that Timothy McVeigh believed in gravity. YOU DON’T WANT TO BE LIKE THE OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBER, DO YOU?!?!

UPDATE: New York Times reports that, responding to public outrage, Heartland Institute pulls the billboard.

http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/heartland-billboard-unabomber-global-warming/6000/?utm_source=GreenIsTheNewRed+Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=d5471f4f54-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2

Dead Drops: Anonymous, Offline, Peer-to-Peer File-Sharing Network in Public Space

Thanks Technoccult! Fascinating...

Posted on February 23, 2012 by Klint Finley

‘Dead Drops’ is an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space. USB flash drives are embedded into walls, buildings and curbs accessable to anybody in public space. Everyone is invited to drop or find files on a dead drop. Plug your laptop to a wall, house or pole to share your favorite files and data. Each dead drop is installed empty except a readme.txt file explaining the project. ‘Dead Drops’ is open to participation. If you want to install a dead drop in your city/neighborhood follow the ‘how to’ instructions and submit the location and pictures.

Dead Drops

(via Theremina)

If only there was some way to keep these from filling up with malware, porn and spam.

Trevor Blake wrote here a few years ago:

Now is a good time to establish lines of electronic communication that are not entirely (if at all) reliant on the Internet as it currently exists. Hand delivery of a stack of media is still one of my favorites. At a certain point it the best bit-per-second value known, it has certain privacy features that can’t be beat and it requires very little technical know-how or fancy equipment or money. For all the gnostic freakout of The Matrix, the scene where a disreputable character knocks on Mr. Anderson’s door and passes him a data disc might be the most prophetic.

Learning about cryptography, fidonet and the postal system won’t do anyone any harm. Nothing beats trusted person-to-person connections established in many only-partially overlapping social / professional circles.

See also: sneaker net.

This entry was posted in Misc and tagged Cryptography, darknet, darknets, encryption, p2p, peer-to-peer, sneakernet,sneakernets. Bookmark the permalink.

How Bots Seized Control of My Pricing Strategy

Before I talk about my own troubles, let me tell you about another book, “Computer Game Bot Turing Test”. It's one of over 100,000 “books” “written” by a Markov chain running over random Wikipedia articles, bundled up and sold online for a ridiculous price. The publisher, Betascript, is notorious for this kind of thing.
A story about computer science 
and other improbable things. 

It gets better. There are whole species of other bots that infest the Amazon Marketplace, pretending to have used copies of books, fighting epic price wars no one ever sees. So with “Turing Test” we have a delightful futuristic absurdity: a computer program, pretending to be human, hawking a book about computers pretending to be human, while other computer programs pretend to have used copies of it. A book that was never actually written, much less printed and read.

The internet has everything.

This would just be an interesting anecdote, except that bot activity also seems to affect books that, you know, actually exist. Last year I published my children's book about computer science, Lauren Ipsum. I set a price of $14.95 for the paperback edition and sales have been pretty good. Then last week I noticed a marketplace bot offering to sell it for $55.63. “Silly bots”, I thought to myself, “must be a bug”. After all, it's print-on-demand, so where would you get a new copy to sell?

Then it occured to me that all they have to do is buy a copy from Amazon, if anyone is ever foolish enough to buy from them, and reap a profit. Lazy evaluation, made flesh. Clever bots!

Then another bot piled on, and then one based in the UK. They started competing with each other on price. Pretty soon they were offering my book below the retail price, and trying to make up the difference on "shipping and handling". I was getting a bit worried.

The punchline is that Amazon itself is a bot that does price-matching. Soon after the marketplace bot's race to the bottom, it decided to put my book on sale! 28% off. I can't wait to find out what that does to my margin. (Update: nothing, it turns out. Amazon is eating the entire discount. This is a pleasant surprise.)

My reaction to this algorithmic whipsawing has settled down to a kind of helpless bemusement. I mean, the plot of my book is about how understanding computers is the first step to taking control of your life in the 21st century. Now I don't know what to believe.

It's possible that the optimal price of Lauren Ipsum is, in fact, ten dollars and seventy-six cents and I should just relax and trust the tattooed hipster who wrote Amazon's pricing algorithm. After all, I no longer have a choice. The price is now determined by the complex interaction of several independent computer programs, most of which don't actually have a copy to sell.

But I can't help but think about that old gambler's proverb: “If you can't spot the sucker, it's you.”

IPhone's Dirty Little Secret...

Dear MoveOn member,

The new iPhone is promoting anti-choice extremism. 

News broke yesterday that Siri, the new iPhone voice assistant, is directing women to anti-abortion pregnancy "crisis" centers in Washington, D.C., when they ask where to get an abortion. When users in New York City ask, Siri says she can't find any abortion clinics. When a user asked her why she is anti-abortion, she replied, "I just am."¹

Siri won't help you find an abortion clinic or even where to get emergency contraception, but she will help you find a strip club, an escort service, and where you might be able to buy marijuana.

Apple works hard to maintain its brand as a progressive company. Earlier this summer, they cut ties with a right-wing Christian network when customers complained that the network was funding anti-gay extremism.²

If enough of us weigh in and let them know we're outraged by Siri's anti-abortion extremism, we can get them to fix it. That's why I created a petition to Apple CEO Tim Cook on SignOn.org, which says:

Apple: Stop promoting anti-choice extremists. If a user asks for family planning services, they should be directed to a group that offers full services, like Planned Parenthood—not to a hard-right clinic with an extremist agenda.  

Will you sign the petition? Click here to add your name, and then pass it along to your friends:

http://www.moveon.org/r?r=268426&id=33390-6258030-ZOWvGVx&t=2

Post-Fukushima: 44% Increase in Infant Mortality Rates Up West Coast of North America

http://pregnancy-blog.parentingweekly.com/2011/06/are-babies-on-west-coast-dying-from.html
This one's a bit older, I believe it's up to 44%. It got challenged for accuracy and alarmingly came back even worse.

______________________________________________
http://fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/lies-from-fukushima-are-killing-babies/5047
_____________________________________________

The province of British Columbia today announced that infant mortality for the first six months of 2011 exceeded the infant mortality for all of 2010.

Officials attribute the infant mortality spike to "poor parent training."

In the CBC story on the announcement, no mention was made of Fukushima.

- http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/node/4550
______________________________________________

Infant Mortality Higher From Radiation US and Canada West Coast Study Finds
These folks touch on some interesting subjects not all of you may agree with...
______________________________________________

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/health-headlines/2011/6/13/janette-d-sherman-md-and-joseph-mangano-is-the-dramatic-incr.html

Global Earthquake & Volcano Overview - How paranoid would you like to be today?

My mom's been keeping me fairly up to date on all this stuff... and she's right about a bunch of it... and the USGS site and several other sites seem to be censoring their own data. Scary shit.

FBI releases files on controversial booksellers Paladin and Loompanics

I had to repost this article in its entirety from Boing Boing, because it's an interesting, under-reported story waiting to explode. And because I started Last Earth Distro on the remains of Loompanics Unlimited. R.I.P. Loompanics!

Rob Beschizza at 1:04 PM Wednesday, Jul 20, 2011

The FBI has released its files on two famously controversial publishers, Paladin Press and Loompanics Unlimited, following a FOIA request filed by Government Attic. The files suggest that the booksellers' huge libraries of books on drugs, guns and other ultra-libertarian issues only rarely drew the FBI's attention.

Though their catalogs were similar, Loompanics stood out for its countercultural style, whereas Paladin specialized in republishing declassified military guidebooks and the like. When Loompanics wound up operations in 2006, Paladin acquired part of its back catalog.

The FBI's files on Paladin Press date back some forty years, and reveal an early 1970s investigation into the classification status of the U.S. government materials that Paladin republished. Since then, however, the release shows that the bureau took little interest in it except to execute procedural inquiries on behalf of foreign investigators.

The Loompanics file is much the same. Concluding that the organization and its publications were legal, the FBI only revisited it to conduct inquiries triggered by hand-wringers and foreign cops.

Paladin Highlights

• In the early 1970s, the FBI looked into of how Paladin got hold of various government documents. A la "Wow, we declassified that? Huh."

• In 1983, a recipient of an unsolicited catalog for Paladin's books sends an angry letter to their senator, expressing disbelief "that something like this could exist in this country." The senator asks the FBI to investigate it "because of the desire of my office to be responsibe to all inquiries." The FBI: "Our review failed to find any violation of federal law ... the Paladin press has been brought to our attention in the past."

• After a Paladin video tape was found in the possession of a murder victim in Liverpool in 1997, the coppers there ask the U.S. Embassy if these guys ship guns or silencers to England or something. The FBI checks it out. Paladin says it only sells media, and refuses to provide general customer info on privacy grounds, but will do so for specifically-named suspects or victims. Once given the info, it reports that it has no records of any of them.

• Australia gets upset when Paladin republishes stuff from its classified military manuals. The resulting FBI investigation asks Paladin, where did you get that? Paladin says it bought the original manuals in a bookstore in Sidney, Australia. The FBI takes a motrin and fixes itself a drink.

Loompanics Highlights

• A typical FBI response to an inquiry from whomever: "AGAIN THIS IS NOT CLASSIFIED OR RESTRICTED MATERIAL ... THESE ITEMS ARE POSSIBLY OF INTEREST TO TERRORISTS OR EXTREMISTS, BUT, AS ALL ARE IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN OF THE U.S., POSSESSION OF SUCH ITEMS CONSTITUTE NO VIOLATION OF LAW."

• In 1984, the FBI interviewed the "owner" of Loompanics (i.e. Mike Hoy) in order to identify a particular subscriber to Loompanics who was a suspect in a criminal investigation. He was concerned about government intervention in his business but "reluctantly" advised that in order to get on the subscriber list, you had to buy a book. The FBI concluded that he violated no laws through the operation of his mail-order bookselling business.

• In the 1980s, police in Germany make an inquiry about the origins of Loompanics materials owned by locals who, "with the help of these materials ... have been attempting to create dissention." The books were "Total Resistance", "Psychedelic Chemistry" and "CIA Improvised Sabotage Devices".

You can download the files at Government Attic's Department of Justice documents page.

High levels of radiation detected in Northwest rainwater

Point here being: what else aren't they telling us that we might care to know?

SEATTLE -- A Seattle nuclear watchdog group is accusing the federal government of failing to keep the public informed of radiation from the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

In the days following the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the U.S. began monitoring radiation from Japan's leaking nuclear power plants.

Most of the public attention went to the air monitoring which showed little or no radiation coming our way. But things were different on the rain water side.

"The level that was detected on March 24 was 41 times the drinking water standard," said Gerry Pollet from Heart of America Northwest. He reviewed Iodine 131 numbers released by the Environmental Protection Agency last spring.

"Our government said no health levels, no health levels were exceeded.When in fact the rain water in the Northwest is reaching levels 130 times the drinking water standards," said Pollet.

Elevated rain water samples were collected in Portland, Olympia and Boise, which had the highest.

But EPA officials say the data was there for anyone to read on their website. A spokesman sent this statement, in part:

"Since Iodine 131 has a very short half-life of approximately eight days, the levels seen in rainwater were expected to be relatively short in duration."

State health agencies added that they constantly monitored public drinking water sources and never found levels even approaching the unhealthy range.

Even the watchdog group admits, watering plants with water exposed only briefly to those levels is unlikely to cause health problems.

But they say it's information the public deserves to know about.

The EPA points out this was a brief period of elevated radiation in rainwater, and says safe drinking water standards are based on chronic exposure to radiation over a lifetime.