The Nova Albion Steampunk Exhibition takes place March 12-14 in Emeryville, CA. Organizers promise "the best elements of traditional science fiction and fantasy conventions, [combined] with the passion, ingenuity, and hands-on workshops of Maker events, in a steam-powered, neo-Victorian setting that spans the 1830s through the early 1910s, from the cultured salons of gaslit London to the rugged coast of San Francisco." Sure sounds fun. I'm delighted to see a number of folks we've covered on Boing Boing before, including Jon Sarriugarte, Kimric Smythe, and The Neverwas Haul Crew in the "kinetics" portion of the event.

[ Image: Neverwas Haul, photo by Redteam. ]

Previously:

The whole American food system, from farm to fork, accounts for about 10% of the energy we use in this country. Of that, the largest single portion, 32%, is the energy involved in household food storage and cooking.

Put it another way: If we reduced agricultural energy use by 5%, nationwide, we'd save about 20 trillion British Thermal Units of energy a year. Them's no small potatoes.

But if just 5% of American households got a more efficient refrigerator, we'd save 54 trillion BTU.

Context: I'm spending today and tomorrow at a conference on energy efficiency in agriculture, put on by the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy. Those stats come from a presentation by Martin Heller, a researcher with the University of Michigan's Center for Sustainable Systems.

Video Link. I sneer at your loveseat! (via Dangerous Minds, thanks, Tara McGinley)

The owner of the Heart Attack Grill in Arizona, which offers a "quadruple bypass burger," is suing the owner of the Heart Stoppers Sports Grill in Florida. Both businesses are "heart-attack/medical-themed," with "sexy nurse waitresses." Both serve obscenely large stacked hamburgers, and side dishes of similar nutritional content. At the Heart Attack Grill, there's a scale over in the corner, and if you weigh more than 350 pounds you eat for free. More: Phoenix New Times, WSJ law blog, WSJ Health blog.

The food and the concept may be repulsive to many (ok screw it, by "many" I mean "me"), but what gets me the most is the Sad Sexy Nurse waitress, at far right in the 'shopped image above, photo courtesy of the Florida ABC affiliate TV station WPBF. Sexy nurse, why you so sad?

Incidentally, WPBF-TV (=stands for "West Palm Beach Florida") is pretty rockin'. As I publish this blog post, their top headline is "Elderly Man Accidentally Shoots Self Outside Gun Store: 80-Year-Old Airlifted To Hospital."

(via Veggie Grill, which is totally awesome.)

Fred from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez, "Paul Sweeting, one of the smartest analysts covering Hollywood's collision with the Internet, does a great job reminding us of the real reasons behind the recent spate of layoffs at Sony Pictures. 'Hitting the snooze button when the alarm goes off doesn't mean that what happens in the meantime is beyond your control. It means you're asleep.'"

The shift in consumer behavior toward rental? That was a function of wholesale pricing and the consumers' perception of value, which are entirely under the studios' control. If 40,000 supermarkets in America were selling new release DVDs for $8.99 by the checkout counter, how many consumers do you think would be lining up at the Redbox kiosk in the parking lot? How many supermarkets do you think would let Redbox on the premises?

Don't believe me? Then how is it the studios were previously able to alter consumer behavior from rental to purchase when they introduced the (comparatively) low-priced DVD to replace the high-priced VHS cassette?

Jonas Halpren is publisher of Drink of the Week and Channels Director at Federated Media.

San Francisco's famed science museum, The Exploratorium, recently transformed into a giant cocktail lab for an evening fundraiser. The Science of Cocktails featured interactive exhibits and presentations demonstrating the physics, chemistry and biology of cocktails and drinking.

Presentation topics ranged from "Ice and Thermodynamics in Cocktails" to "Anatomy of a Hangover". I also studied the effects of vodka on gummy bears. Image above right.

Recipes and videos after the jump.

Skip James plays "Crow Jane" in 1967. (After watching this video, I had to go back and watch one of my favorite YouTube videos ever, "Inflatable tube man dances to Cream's 'Glad.'") (Via Tinselman)

Cass Sunstein, Administrator of the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, recently suggested that the feds should "cognitively infiltrate" conspiracy theorist hang-outs and anti-government groups online. Over at Huffington Post, former BB guestblogger Arthur Goldwag, author of the fantastic book Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies, lays out why the government "shouldn't resort to secret agents and bought-and-paid-for claques and shills and ringers to promote its ideas." From HuffPo:

Sunstein's proposal was not issued under the auspices of the government, but in an academic paper. Co-authored with Harvard Law School Professor Adrian Vermeule and published in The Journal of Political Philosophy in 2008 (it can be downloaded as a PDF file here), "Conspiracy Theory" surveys the existing scholarship on the origins and characteristics of conspiracy theories and contemplates whether or not governments should try to neutralize them. In general, it takes a social sciences approach, arguing that conspiracy theories are neither legitimate political ideas nor symptoms of a psychological disorder, but are rather the inevitable distortions of closed-off, self-reinforcing belief systems. Using government agents to inject "cognitive diversity" into those communities, it suggests, just might provide the body politic with an antidote to the thought contagions they inspire.

Video above: Nuit Blanche, from Spy Films, directed by Arev Manoukian. There's a "making of" video here.

Best SNL skit since Black Flag was still together. Dave Grohl? More like Dave LOL. Video at Hulu, and alternate link which may or may not work for non-USA viewers. Or maybe this one. Sorry, region-blocking sucks. Alternates welcome in comments. (thanks, Sean Bonner)