scottyblog

Summary by Slate:

The WSJ fronts a look at how “cyberspies” from Russia and China, as well as other unnamed countries, have managed to get into the U.S. electrical grid and leave behind software tools that, if activated, could destroy several key components of the network. “If we go to war with them, they will try to turn them on,” an intelligence official said. The spying has been discovered across the country, and officials warn that other infrastructure systems, including water, are also vulnerable to spies and attacks. Although terrorist groups could also gain the technical know-how to gain access to the networks, officials say the intrusions have been so sophisticated that Russia and China have to be the main culprits. But, of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the attacks were sponsored by their governments.

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This TED Talk by P.W. Singer is titled “Military Robots and the Future of War.” While TED Talks are usually optimistic and highlight positive aspects of technology, this one sets a different tone. He covers a lot of different, interesting topics and does a good job of questioning the ethics, consequences, and meaning of a new era where robotics are replacing humans in war.

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Sorry about the hacker who has taken over the site. Should have things up and running like normal again.

I’m a little isolated this April Fools Day from friends and family, so I was thinking I might escape unscathed. I quickly realized, however, that funny-guy HTML artists had me covered. Here’s a list of some of the top pranks:

Gmail is offering “Autopilot Mode.”

Qualcomm is improving their coverage by implanting a pigeon-wolf-hybrid creature with mini base stations: “The wolfpigeons inherit the survival skills and tenacity of wolves. Together they form a creature of preternatural swiftness. We simply cannot allow our network transmitters to be killed off by feral cats or cold weather.”

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Since when is that illegal? This is bullshit.

From the Smoking Gun:

Ohio man arrested for drunk driving on a homemade vehicle

MARCH 31–In a law enforcement first, Ohio cops this month arrested a man for drunk driving on a motorized bar stool. That’s right, a motorized bar stool, which can be seen below in a police evidence photo. According to cops, Kile Wygle, 28, crashed his bar stool near his Newark home earlier this month and called 911 due to his injuries. When an officer arrived and asked Wygle what happened, he answered, “I wrecked my bar stool.” According to a Newark Police Division report, a copy of which you’ll find here, Wygle’s homemade ride is powered by a Briggs & Stratton lawnmower engine. Wygle noted that the bar stool could hit nearly 40 miles per hour, but that he was only going 20 when he wiped out late in the afternoon on March 4 (a witness told police that he spotted someone driving a “strange motorized machine” before the crash). A plastered Wygle, who failed a series of field sobriety tests, was charged with DUI and driving with a suspended license, both misdemeanors. His bar stool was not impounded.

In France, surgeons completed a full face transplant. How ridiculous is that? I can’t even imagine what that really entails, except a lot of gauze.

It must suck for the other guy…

Here’s the article from Breitbart:

A 28-year-old man has received a face transplant at a hospital outside Paris, the doctor who performed the surgery told AFP Friday.

The 15-hour operation, completed Friday morning at Henri Mondor Hospital in Creteil, a suburb east of Paris, is the fifth face transplant in the world, and the third in France.

“The patient’s face was disfigured by a shotgun blast,” the surgeon, Laurent Lantieri, said.

“The patient is awake and is doing well. But it is far too early to say whether the transplant will take,” he said, adding that 15 medical personnel took part in operation.

A patient’s immune system will frequently reject a skin graft from a donor, requiring the systematic use of immunosuppressive drugs.

The gun shot had destroyed the muscles in the man’s lower face such that he could not open his mouth, even after several operations, Lantieri explained.

A large portion of the face of the donor was removed, along with bone to repair the recipient’s upper jaw.

Lantieri said that the transplant was similar to another he performed in 2007, as well as one done by Maria Siemionow in the United States in 2008.

The 29-year-old recipient of the 2007 transplant, known as Pascal, suffered from a rare genetic disorder called neurofibromatosis that had covered much of his face in a disfiguring tumour.

The first successful face transplant was performed in France in 2005 on Isabelle Dinoire, a 38-year-old woman who had been mauled by her dog.

A Chinese man who underwent a facial transplant 2006 after being attacked by a bear died in 2008.

Rose hip, hops, plum, peels
Yeasty must soothes my cortex
Flavor symphony

My Dad returned from the Spirit Shop with a box of Samuel Adams White Ale, a sensational spring seasonal. We’d been working all day around the old house we’re trying to sell, mostly outside, as the sun felt great–it was a glorious 70 degrees. Thanks to our revolutionary hero’s brew, we had a solid ending to the day.

I recently found this website called Beer Advocate, which I think started out as a magazine. Basically, a lot of beer enthusiasts grade beers across 5 categories: Smell, Taste, Feel, Drink, and Look. Pooling all of the reviewers grades, they come up with a composite score (A+ through F).

The beer that inspired me to write a Haiku only got a B! That’s bullshit. Here’s what they have to say about the Samuel Adams White Ale.

Here’s a list by Beer Advocate of what must be the best beers in the world.
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This commercial by Snickers is truly a great accomplishment. Whoever came up with it deserves a raise and a whole box of Snickers. It’s so good on so many levels.

First of all, it’s short. I don’t want to watch some drawn out ad that makes me lose track of whatever the hell is going on in the latest episode of Lost, that’s hard enough already. I can’t tell if Ben is evil or good, whether Locke is alive or dead, and I can’t keep track of whether we’re in the ’70s or the future or the present, so it’s great when the plot of the commercials is kept to a bare minimum. We’ve got a flannel shirt wearing dude who likes candy and gets destroyed by Patrick Ewing–great, that’s easy. A 17 second ad keeps it simple, and in the land of short attention spans and ADHD, this is crucial.

Secondly, it features a lovable, retired athlete. Patrick Ewing seems like a really good guy. Even after he smashes the neighborhood bball hoop to smithereens and bowls Ryan over, I totally forgive him. Plus, “Chewing” has a comedic aura about him. Patrick looked goofy all those years playing with the double knee pads. Throw the knee pads back on, add a chewbacca voice, and you’re golden.

The final redeeming point of this ad is the good-ol’-fashioned malapropism, which has become the theme of the Snickers campaign, also known as “Snacklish.” Again, the pun is a simple device, and Patrick Chewing’s commercial is all about simplicity.

This article goes into the details of Mars’ ad campaign:

It was only a year or so ago that the concept of affordable luxury meant a Coach bag, Tiffany bauble or Starbucks latte. Since then, the global recession has defined splurging downward to the price level of a can of soda, a pack of gum or a candy bar.
That is why many marketers of such prosaic products are still spending as if it were 2007 on advertising. For instance, both Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola recently came out with new campaigns, as did several gum brands, among them Ice Breakers.
Another case in point is the confectionery behemoth Mars, which is introducing a major campaign for its bestselling candy brand, Snickers, that is centered on a make-believe language called Snacklish.
‘‘Our competitive set is moving ahead, so we can’t afford to pull back,’’ said Carole Walker, vice president for integrated marketing communications at the Mars Snackfood U.S. division of Mars in Hackettstown, New Jersey.
The Snickers campaign, by the New York office of TBWA/Chiat/Day, is being rolled out in stages. The initial phase, which gets under way this week, includes outdoor ads and content on the Snickers Web site, Snickers.com, as well as Facebook.
Television commercials are scheduled to begin appearing next week.
And there will be more content on Snickers.com in the spring, including a way to translate regular language into the Snickers lingo.
Snacklish is a humorous way of speaking that revises everyday words and phrases for a Snickers-centric world. To underscore their origin, they are printed in the typeface and colors of the Snickers brand logo.
For instance, the basketball great Patrick Ewing becomes Patrick Chewing.
Combine the rapper Master P with the peanut, a main ingredient of Snickers, and he turns into Master P-nut — perhaps a hip-hop relation of the Planters brand mascot, Mr. Peanut.
Other examples include a Snickers taxi, or snaxi; peanutarium, for planetarium; and chompensation, for compensation.
And the Sigma Nu fraternity is transformed into Sigma Nougat, after another Snickers ingredient.
The possibilities are endless. You could someday, perhaps, read a Snacklish version of this article that quotes Caramel Walker, written by Chewart Elliott for The Nougat York Times.
In past recessions—and even during the Great Depression — brand-name products thrived if consumers deemed the out-of-pocket costs to be affordable.
Snickers is emblematic of that, having been brought out by Mars in 1930.
The genesis of the Snacklish idea can be traced to elements of a campaign, also by TBWA/Chiat/Day New York, that appeared from 2006 through early 2007. There were outdoor signs in large metropolitan markets that offered made-up words like ‘‘peanutopolis’’ and ‘‘nougatocity,’’ in the typeface and colors of the Snickers logo.
In research among consumers, ‘‘those billboards kept coming back’’ in positive comments, said Mark Figliulo, chairman and chief creative officer at TBWA/Chiat/Day New York, part of the TBWA Worldwide division of the Omnicom Group.
That led the agency to see ‘‘if we could make it more than an outdoor campaign,’’ he added, ‘‘by taking it from a word play to a language.’’ The tone and attitude of the campaign are purposely upbeat despite the grim economy, Figliulo said, to reflect the nature of the candy category.
The philosophy is ‘‘respect your category,’’ he explained, and in this instance consumers ‘‘want a smile and some light-heartedness, so you want to not take it too seriously.’’ Still, there is an ad that touches on the times, urging consumers to ‘‘Get a degree in snackonomics.’’ There could be more such ads, Figliulo said, because the campaign is intended to demonstrate ‘‘howSnickers is part of your life.’’ The campaign is also purposely infused with a slapstick, yuk-yuk approach, as evidenced in some of the initial commercials. In one spot, Ewing slam-dunks a basketball player along with a basketball. In another spot, a knight named Sir Snacksalot is incinerated by a dragon he is fighting.
That tack is meant to appeal to the target consumer for Snickers, defined by Walker as men ages 18-49 with ‘‘a bull’s-eye of 18-34.’’ Executives at Mars and TBWA/Chiat/ Day New York say the Snickers language will resonate with ‘‘young adults who are texting each other,’’ Walker said, ‘‘making up their own words, their own shorthand.’’ It can be tricky for mainstream brands to figure just howjocular an approach to take when addressing younger men. Twice in the last two years, Snickers encountered problems with commercials aimed at those consumers, one in the United States and the other in Britain. Both times, Mars had to withdraw spots because they were condemned as violent and homophobic.
‘‘We hope it’s in the past,’’ Walker said of those incidents, and as a result ‘‘we’re looking very carefully at everything that walks out the doors’’ in terms of legal and other forms of scrutiny.
Walker declined to discuss the budget for the campaign. In 2007, the last full year for which information is available, spending in major media for Snickers ads totaled $46.1 million, according to the TNS Media Intelligence unit of WPP, compared with $41 million in 2006.
For the first nine months of 2008, such ad spending totaled $26.3 million, TNS reported, compared with $36 million in the same period the previous year.
And according to Nielsen Co., sales in the United States for all chocolate candy in food, drug and mass-merchandise stores totaled $6.6 billion for the 52 weeks ending Jan. 24, 2009, up 2.6 percent from the 52 weeks that ended on Jan. 26, 2008.
That growth rate, however, slowed from the previous period. For the 52 weeks that ended on Jan. 26, 2008, sales totaled $6.4 billion, up 5.5 percent from the 52 weeks that ended on Jan. 27, 2007.

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The above image is a French AIDS poster intended to spread awareness (and fear!).

Astonishing news from the Washington Post today that the HIV/AIDS rate has hit 3% in Washington DC. This is high enough to be considered a “severe epidemic,” which is pretty scary. This also puts the nation’s capital at higher AIDS rates than some countries in West Africa. That’s right, the US has higher AIDS rates than parts of AFRICA!

Here’s the article:

At least 3 percent of District residents have HIV or AIDS, a total that far surpasses the 1 percent threshold that constitutes a “generalized and severe” epidemic, according to a report scheduled to be released by health officials tomorrow.

That translates into 2,984 residents per every 100,000 over the age of 12 — or 15,120 — according to the 2008 epidemiology report by the District’s HIV/AIDS office.

“Our rates are higher than West Africa,” said Shannon L. Hader, director of the District’s HIV/AIDS Administration, who once led the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s work in Zimbabwe. “They’re on par with Uganda and some parts of Kenya.”

“We have every mode of transmission” — men having sex with men, heterosexual and injected drug use — “going up, all on the rise, and we have to deal with them,” Hader said.

In addition to the epidemiology report, the city is also releasing a study on heterosexual behavior tomorrow. That report, funded by the CDC, was conducted by the George Washington University School of Health and Health Services.

Among its findings: Almost half of those who had connections to the parts of the city with the highest AIDS prevalence and poverty rates said they had overlapping sexual partners within the past 12 months, three in five said they were aware of their own HIV status, and three in 10 said they had used a condom the last time they had sex.

Together, the reports offer a sobering assessment in a city that for years has stumbled in combating HIV and AIDS and is just beginning to regain its footing. A more accurate accounting of the crisis offers a chance to contain what is largely a preventable disease.

So urgent is the concern that the HIV/AIDS Administration took the relatively rare step of couching the city’s infections in a percentage, harkening to 1992, when San Francisco, around the height of its epidemic, announced that 4 percent of its population was HIV positive. But the report also cautions that “we know that the true number of residents currently infected and living with HIV is certainly higher.”

The District’s report found a 22 percent increase in HIV and AIDS cases from the 12,428 reported at the end of 2006, touching every race and sex across population and neighborhoods, with an epidemic level in all but one of the eight wards. Black men, with an infection rate of nearly 7 percent, carry the weight of the disease, according to the report, which also underscores that the District’s HIV and AIDS population is aging. Almost 1 in 10 residents between the ages of 40 and 49 has the virus.

The report notes that “this growing population will have significant implications on the District’s health care system” as residents face chronic medical problems associated with aging and fighting a disease that compromises the immune system.

Men having sex with men has remained the disease’s leading mode of transmission. Heterosexual transmission and injection drug use closely follow, the report says. Three percent of black women carry the virus, partly a result of the increase in heterosexual transmissions.

“This is very, very depressing news, especially considering HIV’s profound impact on minority communities,” said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Health’s program on infectious diseases. “And remember: The city’s numbers are just based on people who’ve gotten tested.”

Ron Simmons, who is black, gay and HIV positive, said he’s not shocked by the study’s findings. “You have a high incidence of HIV among African Americans, and a lot of African Americans live in the city,” said Simmons, who is a member of a black gay support group. “D.C. also has a high number of gay men, and HIV is high among gay black men.”

Charlene Cotton, a D.C. resident who got an HIV positive diagnosis five years ago, said breaking the taboo on discussing HIV is the key to moving forward. “You need to start at home and talk about it,” Cotton said. “It’s so hush-hush.”

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) said he is aware that some advocates have called on elected officials and others to more aggressively and publicly address the crisis. He praised the city’s recent efforts, however, and expressed his frustration about the struggle ahead.

“In order to solve an issue as complex as HIV and AIDS, you have to step up,” he said. “It’s the mayor and certainly other elected officials. But it’s also the community. You have this problem affecting us, and you tell people how serious it is and it literally goes in one ear and out the other.”

David Catania (I-At Large), chairman of the D.C. Council’s health committee, said that although the District’s testing and monitoring have improved in the past two years, the AIDS office is still playing catch-up. The city was in the forefront of the crisis when it created the office in 1986, but it fell far behind. Hader took control in 2007. She is its 12th director and the third in five years.

“Frankly, there can be no excuse for the state of the HIV/AIDS Administration that I found in 2005,” Catania said. “I cannot speak to why it was not a priority previously. For years prior to 2005, mayors and previous individuals allowed things to exist in an unacceptable way. And I do blame this government for part of the epidemic we’re confronting.”

Until recently, the District’s AIDS office lacked a fully staffed surveillance unit to collect, analyze and distribute data. Inevitably, the office lost credibility, and although it has received millions in federal and local funds — $95 million this year — some care providers questioned whether resources were being properly allocated.

Critics also say congressional control over the District had restricted the AIDS office’s ability to combat the virus among drug injection users by banning the use of local tax dollars for a needle exchange program. After almost a decade, the ban was lifted last year.

The study is the most precise count to date, according to the authors. The document is an update of a breakthrough 2007 report, which brought into clearer focus a picture of a city in the grip of a complex and “modern epidemic” that had traveled from a mostly gay population to the general one and disproportionately hit blacks.

For years, District HIV/AIDS workers depended on estimates that put the rate at 1 of 20 living with HIV and 1 of 50 living with AIDS.

The current study notes that its tracking occurred as the city made a switch from a code-based counting system to a name-based one. The surveillance unit interviewed medical providers to find unreported cases, pressed providers who did not consistently report to the administration and searched databases for unreported cases.

More than 4 percent of blacks in the city are known to have HIV, along with almost 2 percent of Latinos and 1.4 percent of whites. More than three-quarters — 76 percent — of the HIV infected are black, 70 percent are men and 70 percent are age 40 and older.

Heterosexual sex was the principal mode of transmission for blacks with the disease, 33 percent. Men having sex with men was the chief mode of transmission for white residents, 78 percent; and Latinos, 49 percent. Black women represent more than a quarter of HIV cases in the District, and most, about 58 percent, were infected through heterosexual sex. About a quarter of black women were infected through drug use.

The companion study, “Heterosexual Relationships and HIV in Washington, D.C.,” is a detailed look at those whose social networks include individuals at high risk of infection and aims to analyze people’s choices and actions before they set foot in a clinic or get HIV.

The 750-participant study targeted four areas in wards 1, 2, 5, 6, 7 and 8 with both high rates of AIDS and poverty. Salaries of a majority of participants — 60 percent — were under $10,000 yearly; a similar percentage had never been married; and 43 percent were unemployed.

The survey’s methodology — interviewing those with connections to high-risk networks rather than those who exhibit high-risk behavior themselves — highlights a shift in the direction by the CDC, which developed the survey protocol.

There is good news in the AIDS office’s report: More people are getting HIV diagnoses early, while they are still healthy, as a result of a policy of routine testing implemented by the city in mid-2006. Publicly supported HIV testing expanded by 70 percent.

Walter Smith, executive director of the DC Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, praised the study but also lamented that it did not offer more current data on new infections. The report said that detailed information on new HIV cases is not included because the transition from the code-based tracking system to a name-based one takes five years to be mature, according to the CDC.

“I’m not criticizing them for that,” he said. “But we’ve had more testing, more needle exchange programs. We don’t have, at this moment, any understanding about what impact the new programs have had.”

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It’s hard to believe that many Icelanders actually accept the existence of elves, but it appears to be something they take quite seriously. “54 percent of Icelanders don’t deny the existence of elves and 8 percent believe in them outright, although only 3 percent claim to have encountered one personally.” It’s important to make the distinction between “not denying the existence of” and “believing in them outright,” but they’re taking it too far to delay construction projects in order to have elf-seers make sure everything is cool with the elf people. Come on. I think this helps explains what’s wrong with their economy. This article from Slate investigates:

An article on Iceland’s de facto bankruptcy in the April issue of Vanity Fair notes that a “large number of Icelanders” believe in elves or “hidden people.” This widespread folklore occasionally disrupts business in the sparsely populated North Atlantic country. Before the aluminum company Alcoa could erect a smelting factory, “it had to defer to a government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under it.” How do you find an elf?

With psychic powers. According to a poll conducted in 2007, 54 percent of Icelanders don’t deny the existence of elves and 8 percent believe in them outright, although only 3 percent claim to have encountered one personally. The ability to see the huldufólk, or hidden folk, can’t be learned; you’re just born with it. To find elves, seers don’t really need to do anything—they’ll just sense an elfin presence. The Vanity Fair article says that elf detection can take six months, but it’s usually a quick process that can last under an hour. And although the magazine claims that a “government expert” had to certify the nonexistence of elves, the Icelandic Embassy insists that these consults are performed by freelancers, not government contractors.

The huldufólk are thought to live in another dimension, invisible to most. They build their homes inside rocks and on craggy hillsides, and they seem to favor lava formations. The port town of Hafnarfjördur, near Reykjavík, is thought to have a particularly large settlement of elves—as well as other mystical beings like dwarves (who also fit under the broad category of huldufólk). According to local clairvoyants, the huldufólk royal family lives at the base of a cliff in that town.

Elf-spotting is an intergenerational phenomenon in Iceland, although more children than adults report seeing huldufólk. Indeed, it’s thought that many who are born clairvoyant lose the ability after the age of 8 or so. Furthermore, it’s not just Icelanders who have this capacity—theoretically, anyone, from any country, can have the power to communicate with elves. Clairvoyants see elves year-round, sometimes in their own backyards, but Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve are considered especially good occasions for elf-spotting. That’s because according to some legends, these holidays are traditional moving days for the huldufólk. Elves often dress in old-timey, 19th-century outfits like homemade-looking ankle-length skirts, and they come in all sizes. There are thought to be at least 13 types of elves, some of whom are as tall as humans. Others, like the Blómálfar, or flower elves, are just a few inches tall.

When Icelanders try to build roads or settlements through elf dwellings, the elves are said to go bonkers—causing equipment failures and other problems. In the early 1970s, for example, contractors trying to move a large rock to make way for a highway near Reykjavík hired a clairvoyant, Zophanías Pétursson, after experiencing several minor mishaps. Pétursson detected the presence of elves and claimed to obtain a waiver from the supernatural creatures so that work could progress. But the elves weren’t finished: A bulldozer operator who had helped move the stone fractured a water pipe that fed into a fish farm, killing thousands of trout hatchlings.

Although Pétursson apparently failed to mollify the highway-hating elves, huldufólk experts believe negotiation is possible. If a construction supervisor suspects he might be heading into an elfin zone or just wants to rule out the possibility, he can hire a medium (by asking for a reference from the Icelandic Elf School, for example). Elves sometimes agree either to move or to let a construction project go forth unimpeded as long as the workers don’t blow up their nearby dwelling.

A minority of construction projects face elf-related delays. But if a clairvoyant reports seeing elves hanging about a particular rock, an Icelander will probably think twice before blowing it up to make way for a swimming pool. And as the New York Times reported in 2005, planning councils in towns with sizeable elf populations, like Hafnarfjördur, try to keep elfin-interests in mind.

If you’re wondering where these crazy elf-believers reside, here’s a map:

Here’s another article from the NYT:

Do elves exist? Like many Icelanders, Hildur Hakonardottir considers the question to be more complicated than it appears.

“This is a very, very, very delicate question,” Ms. Hakonardottir, a retired museum director, said. “If you ask people if they believe in elves, they will say yes and no. If they say yes, maybe they don’t, and if they say no, maybe they do.”

Hypothetically speaking, what does she think elves look like?

“Well, my next-door neighbor is an elf woman,” she declared suddenly. “She lives in a cliff in a rock in my garden.”

Despite having seen the elf only once in 15 years – enough time to determine that she was “bigger than life and dressed like my grandmother, in a 1930’s national costume” – Ms. Hakonardottir, 67, has no doubt of her existence. “My daughter once asked me, ‘How do you know where elves live?’ ” she said. “I told her you just know. It’s just a feeling.”

It is a feeling that many people in Iceland apparently share. Polls consistently show that the majority of the population either believes in elves – generally described as humanlike creatures who are fiercely protective of their rocky homes – or is not willing to rule out their existence. But while believing in elves is rooted in Iceland’s culture, it remains a touchy subject.

“You have to watch out for the Nordic cliché,” the Icelandic singer Bjork told The New Yorker magazine several years ago. “A friend of mine says that when record-company executives come to Iceland, they ask the bands if they believe in elves, and whoever says yes gets signed up.”

Yet even Bjork cannot say no for sure. “We think nature is a lot stronger than man,” she said in another interview, when the Elf Question came up. “A relationship with things spiritual has not gone away.”

A belief not just in elves but also in the predictive power of dreams, in the potency of dead spirits and in other supernatural phenomena, is closely linked to Iceland’s Celtic traditions and punishing, powerful landscape – especially the harsh weather and the rocks that appear everywhere.

“If there was a large stone in the garden, and somebody said to an Icelander, ‘That’s an elf stone,’ would they blow it up? They wouldn’t,” said Terry Gunnell, head of the folkloristic department at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik.

“It’s not like they think there are little people living in there who come and dance outside,” he added. “It’s more a sense that there are other powers, other forces around them.”

This town, a port on the outskirts of Reykjavik, prides itself on its unusually high elf population. Tourists are invited to tour the known elf locations, including a large rock whose reputation as an elf habitat meant that a nearby road was diverted some years ago so as not to disturb its unseen residents.

Elly Erlingsdottir, head of the town council’s planning committee, said that made sense to her. Recently, she said, some elves borrowed her kitchen scissors, only to return them a week later to a place she had repeatedly searched. “My philosophy is, you don’t have to see everything you believe in,” she said, “because many of your greatest experiences happen with closed eyes.”

Recently, the planning committee considered a resident’s application to build a garage. “One member said, ‘I hope it’s O.K. with the elves,’ ” Ms. Erlingsdottir related. Should the council determine that it is, in fact, not O.K. – usually this happens when a local mystic hears from the elf population, directly or through a vision – the town would consider moving the project, or getting the mystic to ask the elves to move away, she said.

Such occurrences are not unusual. In nearby Kopavogur, a section of Elfhill Road was narrowed from two lanes to one in the 1970’s, when repeated efforts to destroy a large rock that was believed to house elves were thwarted by equipment breakdowns. The rock is still there, jutting awkwardly into the road, but it is unclear whether the tenants are.

“With the artificial lampposts, there’s too much light for them, and there’s also too much noise,” explained Gurdrun Bjarnadottir, who has lived across the street for some 30 years. “A lot of people believe they still live there, but I think they’ve moved.”

In the same town in 1996, a bulldozer operator, Hjortur Hjartarson, ran into trouble as he tried to raze a suspected elf hill to make way for a graveyard.

After two different bulldozers repeatedly and inexplicably malfunctioned, and local television cameras failed when trained on the hill, though they worked elsewhere, the crew halted the project. “We’re going to see whether we can’t reach an understanding with the elves,” Jon Ingi, the project supervisor, told Morgunbladid, a Reykjavik newspaper, at the time.

Local elf communicators were called in to arbitrate, and after a while, work resumed. “In my opinion, well, whatever it is, hidden people or elves, it has just accepted this and moved away from there,” Mr. Hjartarson told Valdimar Hafstein, an academic researcher who in the late 1990’s published “The Elves’ Point of View,” an article about elves and their effect on construction projects. “That’s my opinion.”

Although he found many similar cases, Mr. Hafstein has grown weary of the subject. For a while, the Icelandic tourist board cited him as a national elf expert. “I kind of feel that I’ve done my part,” he said. He recently completed a doctoral thesis (on Unesco, not elves) for the University of California, Berkeley.

Although it is easy to find Icelanders who roll their eyes at elf conversations, it is not easy to find hardcore skeptics. But 73-year-old Arni Bjornsson is one.

“Today, it is almost a fashion to say that you believe in supernatural beings, but I take this with a pinch of salt,” said Mr. Bjornsson, who worked for 25 years as the head of the ethnology department at the national museum.

But even he is not saying no, exactly. “If you were to ask me, ‘Are you sure there are no supernatural beings?’ I would say I don’t believe there are,” he said. “But I wouldn’t rule it out.”

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