Two Indonesian jobseekers have been tricked into getting their faces tattooed by a bogus official offering government jobs.

Village chief Sawiyono - who was helping the men find jobs in Jakarta - claimed he had received a text message from a government official offering them work as intelligence officers but saying they would have to be inked first with a dragon tattoo.

Sawiyono realised he had been tricked after checking with the subdistrict chief of the Bojonegoro district of East Java who told him there was no such requirement.

{ AFP/News | Continue reading }

A Swiss man with a tattoo of the Virgin Mary on his back, which was sold to a German art collector, will go on show for the first time next week at Shanghai’s SHContemporary fair, said Wim Delvoye, the Belgian artist who created the work.

The tattoo on Tim Steiner, 32, took 35 hours to create and was sold last week by Jutta Nexdorf’s gallery in Zurich for 150,000 euros ($214,320). The unidentified buyer has the right to sell Steiner’s tattoo or remove it upon the bearer’s death, Delvoye said.

“He will be the highlight of the fair,” Delvoye said in a phone interview yesterday from Belgium. “We’ve created a unique piece of art and a unique transaction and the world can see it for the first time” at Xin Beijing Gallery’s booth, he said. (…)

Delvoye is no stranger to controversy. His 2001 “Euterpe” resembles from a distance a cathedral window pane composed of tinted glass. The 2-meter work is actually a collage of 36 X-ray pictures, each the photograph of a Delvoye friend having sexual intercourse after being painted in radio-contrast barium sulfate.

His 2001 Cloaca machine replicated the human digestive system, producing rinds of feces that sold for 3,000 euros each in vacuum-packed bags. His plan to exhibit eight live pigs, each tattooed with the Walt Disney Co.’s characters and the Louis Vuitton motif, was rejected by SHContemporary’s organizer.

{ Bloomberg | Continue reading | more Wim Delvoye’s tattos | Delvoye attooing a pig }

photo { “The whole point to the blank banner is that my friends can write different things inside.” | Cafe con Lesley }

From ancient tribal cultures to San Francisco’s leather boy scene, tattoos have been inextricably linked with sex for many. (…)

Yes, there are people who climax while getting needled. Not many — otherwise there would be way more full body suits walking around — but it does happen.

The cumming client stories, however, get passed around like myths and legends around tattoo shops and online. (…) Thus, last November, my Tattoos & Sex Survey was born. (…)

Have you ever been brought to orgasm while getting tattooed?

Yes: 1.5%
No: 98.5%

{ SuicideGirls | Continue reading | part 2 }

photo { via ponyXpress }

Humans have been tattooing their skin for more than 8000 years and probably regretting it for just as long. The ink used is a suspension of coloured particles in a liquid. India ink, for example, contains carbon particles suspended in water. After the ink is introduced into the skin using a needle the water diffuses into the surrounding tissue, leaving colour particles embedded in the skin.

That’s the easy part. The difficult bit is removing the tattoo later. Current techniques include abrasion, surgical removal and laser treatment but all carry various risks, such as infection and the possibility of severe scarring. Now Michael Chancellor, professor of urology at the University of Pittsburgh, US, and a colleague have come up with a tattoo-erasing method they say is non-invasive.

It relies on a process called cavitation in which sound waves reduces the pressure of a liquid to the point where tiny bubbles of gas form. When the pressure is raised, the bubble collapses violently, generating huge pressures, albeit on a tiny scale.

Chancellor says ultrasound can be used to make this happen beneath the surface of tattooed skin so that the collapsing bubbles destroy pigment particles without damaging tissue. The result is a technique that should “safely, economically, and efficiently remove at least significant portions of the tissue markings”, they say, adding that remaining ink particles can be removed by other techniques.

{ New Scientist | patent application }

photo { ny glob }

related { Tommy Lee got his latest tattoo during a flight from Burbank, Calif., to Miami | photo }

Jim Mielke’s wireless blood-fueled display is a true merging of technology and body art. At the recent Greener Gadgets Design Competition, the engineer demonstrated a subcutaneously implanted touch-screen that operates as a cell phone display, with the potential for 3G video calls that are visible just underneath the skin.

The basis of the 2×4-inch “Digital Tattoo Interface” is a Bluetooth device made of thin, flexible silicon and silicone. It´s inserted through a small incision as a tightly rolled tube, and then it unfurls beneath the skin to align between skin and muscle. Through the same incision, two small tubes on the device are attached to an artery and a vein to allow the blood to flow to a coin-sized blood fuel cell that converts glucose and oxygen to electricity.

{ Physorg | Continue reading }

Scientists in Germany say that tattoos could be the ideal way of delivering vaccines into the body.

The researchers say that in tests undertaken with mice, tattoos were much more effective in provoking a response from the immune system.

Tattoos could be a useful way of delivering therapeutic vaccines in humans, including for some cancers.

Such vaccines have often failed to produce the expected immune response when delivered using an injection.

Tattoos have played a part in human culture for thousands of years.

Just over 100 years ago, the practice became more widely available with the invention of the electric tattoo machine in the United States. The same basic instrument is still in use to create tattoos today.

{ BBC | Continue reading }

The word “tattoo” is a borrowing of the Samoan word tatau, meaning to mark or strike twice. The first syllable “ta”, meaning “hand”, is repeated twice as an onomatopoeic reference to the repetitive nature of the action, and the final syllable “U” translates to “color”. (…)

The most common method of tattooing in modern times is the electric tattoo machine, which inserts ink into the skin via a group of needles that are soldered onto a bar, which is attached to an oscillating unit. The unit rapidly and repeatedly drives the needles in and out of the skin, usually 80 to 150 times a second.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

related { Tattoo with breast implants }

Some women in Springfield are regretting their decision last week to get a tattoo from a door-to-door tattoo salesman. At least one person had to be hospitalized and the others face serious health risks.

Friday night, a man knocked on doors holding a tattoo gun and offering his services. Tamra Eason described the tool as homemade, but still agreed to pay for a tattoo. So did two other women in her apartment complex.

The next day, Linda Falls passed out and had to be hospitalized. All the women have an infection in the tattoo area.

{ KMBC | Continue reading }

In 2005, in a sad act of desperation, a woman tattooed her forehead — receiving $10,000 for putting a permanent tattoo of an internet gambling site on the prime real estate of her noggin. If she was absolutely convinced this was the best way to get money, she might’ve thought the choice was binary — but there was a hidden choice: temporary tattoos. Turns out a guy from Nebraska got almost $40,000 for agreeing to wear a temporary tattoo on his forehead advertising an anti-snoring product having auctioned it off on eBay.

I guess the lesson is imperfect information can lead to permanent regret. And in the markets and in life, it does everyday.

{ Josh Wolfe newsletter, May 12, 2006 }

commercial { Outpost.com, Tattoos, 1998 }

A diabetes “tattoo” might be just the thing to relieve diabetes sufferers of the constant pain of needle sticks. Most glucose-monitoring methods require that a blood sample be taken using a needle; researchers have long sought a non-invasive test method. Finding a less painful way of monitoring blood sugar could make a real difference to the 6.7 percent of Americans who have diabetes.

Gerard Cote, biomedical engineering professor in the Dwight Look College of Engineering, is testing an experimental system using fluorescent polymer microbeads implanted just under a patient’s skin.

{ Live Science | Continue reading }

photo { Chase Lisbon via ponyXpress }

{ Princess Leia and R2D2 tattoo by Adam Pruneda, Texas }

{ Colleen AF Venable’s Giraffe connect-the-dots tattoo | flickr | blog }

Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool?

Consider the parents of an eight-year-old girl named, say, Molly. Her two best friends, Amy and Imani, each live nearby. Molly’s parents know that Amy’s parents keep a gun in their house, so they have forbidden Molly to play there. Instead, Molly spends a lot of time at Imani’s house, which has a swimming pool in the backyard. Molly’s parents feel good about having made such a smart choice to protect their daughter.

But according to the data, their choice isn’t smart at all. In a given year, there is one drowning of a child for every 11,000 residential pools in the United States. (In a country with 6 million pools, this means that roughly 550 children under the age of ten drown each year.) Meanwhile, there is 1 child killed by a gun for every 1 millionplus guns. (In a country with an estimated 200 million guns, this means that roughly 175 children under ten die each year from guns.) The likelihood of death by pool (1 in 11,000) versus death by gun (1 in 1 million-plus) isn’t even close: Molly is roughly 100 times more likely to die in a swimming accident at Imani’s house than in gunplay at Amy’s.

{ Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics, Chapter 5 }

Levitt compares the national ratios of number of pool deaths by children / the number of pools, against the number of children killed by guns / the number of guns, concluding that the likelihood of death by pool is 1 in 11,000 versus death by gun which is 1 in 1 million plus. However, in the hypothetical which precedes this comparison, he notes that “Molly” is forbidden from going to “Amy’s” house. Therefore Molly would be visiting a gun-owning household, not a gun.

I think there are approximately 110 million households in the US, and apparently 2 in 5 households own guns, according to a 2001 Harris Interactive study (the first Google-supplied link that I clicked). That means that there are roughly 44 million gun-owning households. The risk of death by gun for Molly is closer to 1 in 250,000. Still not close to the risk posed by a pool, but much riskier than Levitt concludes. (I do think that it’s safe to assume that there is one pool per household!).

While I don’t have access to the data, it would be interesting to know if the swimming pool / gun comparison would also turn differently depending on the age of the children involved. I.e. do most children swimming pool deaths occur in children under the age of 5? What about gun deaths?

However, a friend of mine pointed out that Levitt’s conclusion may be more seriously misleading. Levitt asserts that conventional instincts of parents are wrong because pools are more dangerous than guns; while it may well be the existence of this conventional wisdom which has led to guns being safer than pools. The perception that one activity is safe and the other unsafe is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Guns kill fewer children because parents are more cognizant of the dangers and act/parent accordingly. The statistics Levitt cites probably merely reflect successful parenting.

Levitt based his analysis on deaths-per-year, but the relevant statistic may be related to exposure rate or, even more importantly for children, to the unsupervised exposure rate.

{ Errors in Freakonomics | Amazon.com review by M. Parker, NY, October 2005 }

images { Andrew Brooke, Gun Tattoo, 1998 | gun tattoo | Watch Around Water ad }