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Slate announces they're turning the site's The XX Factor blog for ladies into its own full-fledged, stand-alone "web magazine" for chicks called Double X. Between Elizabeth Spiers's impending "Maxim for women," Salon's Broadsheet, and Jezebel's caterwauling, in the coming months you won't be able to swing a stick online without hitting a vaginablog, it seems.
In the spirit of post-election adventure, Slate is starting to work on a new web magazine: Double X. A magazine by women but not just for women, Double X will spin out from our XX Factor blog, where we've started a conversation among women—about politics, sex, and culture—that both men and women enjoy listening in on. The new site will do all this and more. It will take the Slate and XX Factor sensibility and apply it to sexual politics, fashion, parenting, health, science, sex, friendship, work-life balance, and anything else you might talk about with your friends over coffee. We'll tackle subjects high and low with an approach that's unabashedly intellectual but not dry or condescending. The blog will be at the heart of the site, but we’ll also publish essays, reporting, and other features.
Also, they use the word "post-feminist." (Full disclosure: I'm a contributor to Slate's existing vaginablog.)
Mike Webb of ProPublica says, "I thought you guys might be curious about the changes to Obama’s Change.gov website which was supposed to describe how the president-elect would use technology to involve more people in government. They shut it down over the weekend, so we flagged it in a post (since then they responded that they’re “retooling” the site)."
Snip from the ProPublica post:
We noted Friday that President-elect Barack Obama’s transition Web site, Change.gov, included pages describing how he will use technology to increase public participation in government and provide more information to the public.Obama’s ‘Agenda’ Disappears From Change.gov. Here's the campaign's response today.But sometime over the weekend, those pages went away. All that remains on the Agenda portion of the transition team’s site is a two-paragraph overview of what the agenda will include:
President-Elect Obama and Vice President-Elect Biden have developed innovative approaches to challenge the status quo in Washington and to bring about the kind of change America needs.
The principal priorities of the Obama Administration include: a plan to revive the economy, to fix our health care, education, and social security systems, to define a clear path to energy independence, to end the war in Iraq responsibly and finish our mission in Afghanistan, and to work with our allies to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, among many other domestic and foreign policy objectives.
If you go directly to the two pages we linked to last week, you get the message: "Not Found: The page you requested is not available right now." (Here are cached versions of the pages.)
Also now gone are pages outlining how the new administration plans to revitalize the economy, end the war in Iraq and provide healthcare to all.
Snapshots of some of the pages are on the site whitehouse2.org.
Previously on Boing Boing: Change.gov
A few weeks ago I was at the Burbank airport. The gift store carried Mexican jumping beans. I bought a couple of boxes for my kids.
I was as delighted with the jittery beans as my daughters were, but I was even more charmed by the informational card that came with the beans. The irresistible, off-kilter writing style of card's author reminds of Dr. Bronner's, with the added bonus of making sense.
Excerpts:
IT IS IMPORTANT TO KEEP CHILDREN OUT OF HARMS WAY. IN THE LAST 10 YEARS, I HAVE ONLY HEARD OF TWO INSTANCES OF CHILDREN SWALLOWING A MEXICAN JUMPING BEAN. ONE LADY CALLED BACK TO LET ME KNOW THAT THEY FOUND THE MISSING BEAN. IT IS MY BELIEF THAT THE STRONG ACID CONTENT OF THE STOMACH WILL KILL THE GERMS AND LARVA IN SHORT ORDER.MEXICAN JUMPING BEANS ARE REAL!...
THE MEXICAN JUMPING BEAN IS UNDOUBTEDLY AMONG ONE OF OUR CREATOR’S BEST ACCOMPLISHMENTS. IT UNDOUBTEDLY GIVES MORE PLEASURE AND INTRIGUE FOR THE MONEY THAN ANY OTHER CREATION.
...
REGRETTABLY, THEY ARE DOOMED WHEN THEY LEAVE THEIR NATURAL HABITAT IN MEXICO. THERE ARE NO HOST PLANTS THAT WILL PERMIT THEM TO CONTINUE THEIR LIFE CYCLE AND THE ENVIRONMENT WILL KILL THEM FROM HEAT, DEHYDRATION, FREEZING. THE MOTH SHOULD BE PERMITTED TO FLY FREE IF THEY EMERGE FROM THE BEAN. A SCENIC TRIP AS IT WERE.
...
[Instructions for playing the Mexican Jumping Bean Game include the following legal advice:] If you wager, make it small amounts. The Government doesn't like gambling unless they get a piece of the action.
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The PICSynth project uses 2 digitally controlled oscillators along with analog waveshaper and a voltage-controlled filter resulting in some very sweet sounds.
- Dual oscillator mono synth
- Really easy to build using just 1 custom programmed PIC chip, 4 ICs and single 12v supply
- All circuits built on veroboard - no printed circuit board making skills needed
- PIC based dual oscillator and digital keyboard scan
- Analog VCF/VCA/Envelope
- Waveforms : sawtooth, square (with pulse width adjust), triangle
- Tuning presets : in-sync, out-sync, detune1 and detune2
- Expandable, first two modules shown below.
More:
How to build a modular AVR synth
One more MAKE around the web today! We have a preview of MAKE 16 running on Lifehacker today through Wednesday. Pop over and check out the Talking Booby Trap article - Surprise enemy spies with the sound of your own voice. If you like Lifehacker (and MAKE) consider subscribing to MAKE, Lifehacker readers will get a Maker's Notebook with subscription. This is an experiment along with what we're doing on Hack-a-day, we'll see what the response is!
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Over at News.com, Declan McCullagh writes that Barack Obama's election as the next president of the United States has bolstered the hopes of those hoping to impose network neutrality regulations on the Internet. While Obama's key advisors have been cagey about precisely what the new administration's stance on the issue will be, it's a safe bet that we'll be hearing a lot about the issue in the coming months. This seems like a good time for a long-overdue conclusion to my ongoing series on network neutrality regulation.
One of the things that has been missing from the network neutrality debate has been a sense of how it fits into the broader history of government regulations of network industries. It's easy to imagine that the Internet is so new and different that historical comparisons just aren't relevant. But as we've seen with copyright and patent debates, we can learn a lot from historical experiences that may not seem immediately relevant.
I think this is equally true in the network neutrality debate. While the specifics of network neutrality are unlike anything that has come before, the general principles involved—non-discrimination, competition, monopoly power, and so forth—have actually been with us for more than a century. Indeed, today's network neutrality debate bears a striking resemblance to the debate that led to the very first American regulatory agency: the Interstate Commerce Commission, which was created to regulate the railroad industry.
The railroad industry was the high-tech industry of its day, and it had many of the same kinds of transformative effects on the 19th Century American economy that the Internet is having today. As with today's Internet, some parts of the railroad market were highly competitive, while other markets were served by only one or two firms. And people had concerns about the behavior of the largest railroad firms that echoed those that people have about large Internet providers today: that they restrict competition, discriminate among customers.
In 1887, Congress passed legislation (you can read an abridged version here) that is strikingly similar to the proposed network neutrality legislation that we're debating today. The Interstate Commerce Act declared it illegal to charge different prices to different customers for "the transportation of a like kind of traffic under substantially similar circumstances and conditions." It also said that railroads may not "make or give any undue or unreasonable preference or advantage to any particular person, company, firm, corporation, or locality, or any particular description of traffic." Compare that to the leading network neutrality proposal during the last Congress, which would have required network providers to deliver content on a "reasonable and nondiscriminatory" basis without imposing "a charge on the basis of the type of content, applications, or services made available."
Unfortunately, the story of the Interstate Commerce Commission does not have a happy ending. Grover Cleveland appointed a railroad ally named Thomas M Cooley as the first chairman of the ICC. The ICC was widely regarded as toothless for its first couple of decades, largely rubber-stamping railroad industry decisions. Things got even worse after the turn of the century, when the ICC began actively discouraging competition in the railroad industry. The ICC had the power to decide when new firms were allowed to enter the railroad industry, and by the 1920s, the FCC was actively working to discourage competition and push up railroad rates. In the 1930s, the ICC gained authority over the infant trucking industry, and used its authority to slow the growth of the trucking industry to protect the railroads from competition. By 1970, things had gotten so bad that a Ralph Nader report described the ICC as "predominantly a forum at which transportation interests divide up the national transportation market."
What went wrong? The story is too long and complicated to fully describe in a blog post, but I think there are two key lessons. First, the authors of the ICA dramatically underestimated the complexity of the railroad industry and the difficulty of government oversight. One of the reasons the ICC was relatively toothless in its early years is that it was completely overwhelmed with paperwork, as dozens of railroads sent it information about thousands of routes. The railroad industry was simply too complex and dynamic for a few Washington bureaucrats to even understand, to say nothing of regulating them effectively.
Second, the ICC's failure is a classic example of what economists call "regulatory capture": the ability of special interests to gain control of the regulatory process and use it to their advantage. Because the railroads cared more about railroad regulation than anyone else, they were adept at getting their allies appointed to key positions at the commission. Over time, the ICC not only ceased to be an effective watchdog of consumer interests, but actually began actively defending the interests of the railroads at consumers' expense. For about six decades—from about 1920 to 1980—the ICC pursued policies that reduced competition and raised prices in the railroad industry. And when trucking emerged as a potentially disruptive innovation, the ICC helped to limit its growth and slow the corresponding decline of the railroad industry.
The story of the ICC is not an isolated case. Similar stories can be told of the Civil Aeronautics board, which limited competition in the airline industry until the 1970s. And, of course, there's the example of that the FCC actively promoted AT&T's monopoly in the telecommunications market until it was broken up in 1984.
We can certainly hope that Congress has learned from the experiences of the 20th century and will avoid the most egregious mistakes it made in the 20th century. But it's worth remembering that many of the conditions that led to the ICC's problems are still with us. Today's FCC, like the ICC of the 20th Century, has a revolving door between the commission and the firms they regulate. And the Internet, like the railroad industry of the 19th century, is extraordinarily dynamic and complex. As a result, there's a real danger that if Congress gives the FCC the power to regulate the Internet, it will make things worse, either because it cannot keep up with the Internet's rapid evolution, or because industry incumbents will succeed in getting their own allies in key positions within the commission. Either way, the results could be very different from what network neutrality proponents are hoping for.
Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.
Mute01 adds faders to the Arduino Pocket Piano for additional noise control. Nice mod - this starts to shows how much potential the synth has beyond its onboard controls.
Arduino Pocket Piano Synth Kit
MAKE contributor David Prochnow has a piece on PopSci DIY about making visible and audible object finders out of the receivers found in RadioShack ZipZaps micro RC cars and Atmel ATtiny13 chips.
These electronic finder remotes always seem more trouble than they're worth -- technology that sounds good on paper... But your mileage may vary. Might be a fun little project, nonetheless.
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Inspired by the Brain Machine project, Jason created brain entrainment software for iPhone -
Simply select the duration of the session and your desired state of mind and MindPulse will use flashing light and binaural beats to entrain your brain from its current state and into the state you have selected.Very cool! I officially need a new phone - MindPulse
Hack Your Brain - Make Video Podcast
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Nice Boxee write up at Gizmodo, how-to max out Apple TV's potential with Boxee...
This is a guide that, if followed, will unchain your Apple TV from its cruel iTunes tether, turning it into the useful living room conduit of music, video and web-based content it should have been all along via the media center software Boxee. Boxee can be installed fairly easily via the ATV's USB port to bring Hulu and Comedy Central streaming, playback of any video or music file anywhere on your network in virtually any file type imagineable, and a bevy of internet A/V sources like Flickr, Last.fm, NPR and BBC podcasts and tons of others—all upping the usefulness and fun of Apple's notoriously underachieving box by a factor of 10, easily. If you have an ATV, Boxee is a must-install, and it's 100% free. Let's get started...Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this!
Slides (PDF) of the WattzOn presentation at the Web 2.0 Summit...
MacArthur Fellow, Dr. Saul Griffith will demonstrate a new, free digital application that allows anyone to more broadly understand their real energy footprint. The rich online audit calculates personal energy consumption from flying, driving, powering a home, eating, shopping, working and even one's share of the energy necessary to make our society function. WattzOn helps users understand their personal impact on the environment and how they rate compared to others WattzOn users, as well as global averages.
Drawdio on Veroboard from Dylski on Vimeo.
Ladyada writes:
dylski wanted to build a Drawdio, but didn't want to pay/wait for international shipping. No problem, he just made his own out of parts kicking around his workbench and some stripboard/"veroboard". The big insight for me here is the stripboard preplanning. Check out all the details, pictures and video at his website
More:
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Armenian and Greek monks duked it out at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
Dressed in the vestments of the Greek Orthodox and Armenian denominations, rival monks threw punches and anything they could lay their hands on.Monks brawl at Jerusalem shrineThe Greeks blamed the Armenians for not recognising their rights inside the holy site, while the Armenians said the Greeks had violated one of their traditional ceremonies.
Israeli policemen scuffle with an Armenian altar boy during a fight at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on 9 November2008
An Armenian clergyman said the Greek clergy had tried to place one of their monks inside the Edicule, an ancient structure which is said to encase the tomb of Jesus.
"What is happening here is a violation of status quo. The Greeks have tried so many times to put their monk inside the tomb but they don't have the right to when the Armenians are celebrating the feast," he said.
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Watch this lifelike hexapod robot carve a 3D human face out of foam material.
Hexapod Robot CNC router (Via Finkbuilt)
I can't identify the animal(?) depicted on this little rubber ball that my five-year-was playing with last night. Any guesses?
John Scalzi's a hell of a writer and a hell of a smartass, and Zoe's Tale, his debut young adult novel, features one of the most likable, most smart-assy protagonists I've ever had the pleasure of sharing 330 pages with.
Zoe's Tale is set in the Old Man's War universe -- the universe established in his debut novel -- in which the human race has begun to colonize the stars, creating a secretive military bureaucracy that oversees it all. The shock troops of the colonization effort are genetically modified supermen who started out as senior citizens on the overcrowded Earth before opting to get a new finely tuned body and a new lease on life battling the alien races that compete with human beings for access to the plum planets that can sustain life.
The Lost Colony, the third Old Man's War book, tells the story of the Roanoke colony, the first colony made up of colonists from other worlds (instead of Earth) that single-handedly stands off a fleet of 400 alien races that are determined to wipe the colony out.
In Zoe's Tale, we have the same story, told from the point of view of a different character, Zoe Boutin Perry, the adopted teenage daughter of the colony leaders (themselves ex-military supersoldiers from the previous volumes). Zoe is incredibly likable, believable, and witty -- a smartass's smartass. She also has a unique position in interstellar politics: her birth father, Charles Boutin, created a technology that gives consciousness to a powerful alien race called the Obin. The Obin had been uplifted into intelligence by a race of cruel and godlike aliens who endowed them with intelligence but not consciousness. The Obin revere Zoe as a goddess and her safety and disposition are the matter of a complex treaty between humanity and the Obin.
Zoe is a colonist on the sleepy backwater world of Huckleberry when her parents are tapped to lead the experimental Roanoke colony, a move she wholeheartedly supports. On the colony ship, she makes a group of fast friends and emerges as a leader herself, something that is doubly important once the ship arrives and it transpires that Roanoke isn't what they were promised. Instead, the new colony is a pawn in a galaxy-spanning military game that endangers all the colonists and exposes them to hardship.
As the story plays out, Zoe blossoms beyond her outer shell of witty barbs and finds hidden reservoirs of strength and maturity. On her journey, she is forced to confront the inequity of her relationship to the Obin, and to question the nature of intelligence and consciousness.
This is a novel for young people that has it all: action and adventure, science and philosophy, love and angst. Scalzi's own likable personality (and that of his delightful daughter, Athena) shines through the narration, making these people into just the sort of folks you'd like to be stranded on a hostile planet with.
I smiled when I saw this posting on MAKE contributor Steve Lodefink's blog about making and canning Concord grape jelly. When we moved into our current house, which has several mature concord grape vines, we decided to make jelly. Like Steve, we went onto the net, and it looks like we landed on the same recipe. We too started to peel the grapes as recommended, decided to forget it after a few dozen, and just crushed the rest. We canned a bunch of small jars of jelly, made our own labels (tho nothing as cool as Steve's) and gave our homemade jelly away as Christmas presents. I had a bunch of left-over green tomatoes at the end of the season, typed "green tomatoes" into Google, and found a green tomato relish recipe. We canned that too. The two jars, with the bright green relish and the vivid grape color, with our homemade labels, looked great. And the results were INSANE. We couldn't get over how amazing both products tasted. Friends, family, and neighbors we gave the two jars to were calling and begging us for more. We started treating the remaining few jars like gold bullion. Every year, we make noise about canning more grape jelly and tomato relish, but we always seem too busy. Shame, really. That was a truly satisfying maker experience, from start to finish. Sounds like Steve didn't have as good a beginner's luck, but his labels are MUCH cooler! That little girl looks sugar-crazed!
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When Charlie Stross -- the mad, gonzo antipope of science fiction -- told me he was working on a Heinlein-esque novel, I wasn't surprised. Old Robert A. Heinlein's classic fiction was some of the best action-driven sf ever written. Then Charlie told me he was working a late Heinlein-esque novel and my eyes bugged out.
Towards the end of his career, RAH's novels got very long, very meandering, explicitly sexual, and very weird. Turned out, he had a tumor that was blocking the flow of blood to his brain (really!) and after it was removed, his fiction (and, reportedly, his personality) really changed again.
And it was those giant, pervy books that Charlie was setting out to pay tribute to.
Saturn's Children is that novel. It's the story of Freya, a sex-bot who was engineered (along with her untold legion of near-identical, near-immortal sisters) to be the perfect pleasure-toy for human masters. Unfortunately, the human race went extinct before Freya was ever booted up, leaving her (and the rest of the robots that comprise galactic civilization) with no purpose in life.
Robot society is sick -- because it was created in the image of our own. Robots are hardwired to obey humans and to serve them and their governments. When humans let themselves go extinct, the robots divided into two castes: those who wired to be empathic and those who were not. The non-empaths seized the moment: they formed shell corporations that bought their robot bodies from their dead and absent owners, and effectively owned themselves. Once this aristocracy of "free" robots was established, they ruthlessly enslaved the rest of robot society, seizing their deeds and slave-chipping them into obedience.
The robots yearn for -- and dread -- the reappearance of humans. The hardwired robotic obedience to humans means that the robots clique that successfully engineers a new human (preferably without releasing the dread "pink goo" -- the robotic bogeyman of self-replicating organic material) may be able to liberate robotkind, or enslave it forever.
Against this backdrop, Freya lives and (nearly) dies as she finds herself embroiled in a series of interplanetary intrigues, shuttling from world to world in realistic (and therefore slow and miserable) spaceships that can take a decade or more to reach Eris and the rest of the outer system. In a book laden with science-fiction in-jokes, philosophy and sly critiques, this may be the very best fillip. Stross puts the terrible lie to the idea of sub-lightspeed space-travel and explores the only way a species could effectively colonize our own system: by turning into robots, willing to amputate limbs to reduce payloads (or, in extreme cases, to simply ship "soulchips" bearing copies of their personalities around), willing to perch atop highly radioactive fission reactors, willing to take a one-way ticket to the outer reaches of our system.
What's more, Stross manages to find the narrative juice hidden in this constrained version of space-travel: to tell a tightly plotted, Maltese-Falcon-esque thriller with reversals and surprises galore, spread out across decades of objective and subjective time.
It's quite a remarkable trick. It's one that neither Heinlein, nor Asimov (the other author to whom the book is dedicated -- as is only proper, given Asimov's prominence in society's conception of what a robot is) managed. This is a fabulous book, a witty and deep critique of the field's shibboleths, and well worth the price of admission.
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Notice anything missing?I absolutely agree. It is the entrepreneurial spirit that is needed right now. But, at the same time, it makes you wonder just how Obama would have accomplished this. Any one or two entrepreneurs are unlikely to do a really good job representing all entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs, for the most part, don't all view things the same way, and there's no real organization of entrepreneurs. The reason entrepreneurs become entrepreneurs is often that they see their own way of doing things and don't want to be locked up by convention. So, while it is worrisome that there aren't any entrepreneur-types on the list, I'm not sure I'd be that much more comfortable with a few entrepreneurs representing the interests of all entrepreneurs either.
Not a single entrepreneur. Yes Warren Buffett started a business, but he will be the first to tell you that he "doesn't do start ups". Which means there isn't a single person advising PE Obama that we know of that knows that its like to start and run a business in this or any economic climate. That's a huge problem.
Joey Lopez and Brandon Wiley were kind enough to let me pick their brains about ACTLab, an interdisciplinary program at the University of Texas focused on the intersection of technology, culture, and art:
Dorkbot/Make interviews ACTLab from jl on Vimeo.
Video editing by Joey Lopez
If you're in Austin, check out their space this Wednesday at Dorkbot.
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Today through Wednesday, UK photographer Nick Knight and SHOWstudio are airing a live webcast of his latest project: "Let There Be Light." While Knight is an internationally known photographer (you make recognize this iconic image of Björk), he is also one of the most transparent, regularly exposing his works-in-progress on the SHOWstudio blog. This time he's shooting model Lily Donaldson for V Magazine, and livestreaming the machinations behind the machine. (They're also tweeting.)
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Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The iPhone rocket: The story (and data) of how an iPhone hit 1300ft. Peter writes -
Michael Koppelman - an iPhone developer and model rocket enthusiast - decided to combine his hobbies by launching an iPhone into the skies with his very own “iPhone rocket.” Mobile Orchard’s Dan Grigsby interviewed Michael on his experiment (see Flash video below or go to the video at Vimeo).You can also check out Michael's site here with more information and data... Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this!
alt-chart-2.pngPowered by a Aerotech G80-13 engine, the rocket reached some 440m (1312 feet) in altitude (or 200m in relative altitude) before heading back to the ground. Michael developed an iPhone application that constantly polled the iPhone’s GPS and accelerometers, logging them to a file, as well as sending GPS data over the Web so that the unit could be easily located if it became lost.
Michael shares lots of interesting technical (and some less than technical) information during the interview...
Here's Drew Friedman's latest illustration for The New Republic. It's titled (yikes) "Campaign 2012." Click to see it larger.
Interesting "Letter from Mexico: Days of the Dead," by Alma Guillermoprieto, illuminating the narcotraficante culture in Mexico.
"Days of the Dead."Along the edges of the packed street, young men took quick snorts of glue and sometimes wept. A thin tattooed and pierced man with terrible skin was the only one of the many young toughs present who was willing to talk to me, and his amiability may have had something to do with the fact that he had just absent-mindedly assembled a joint about the size of a Robusto and was now wreathed in its smoke. The Holy Death had restored to him the love of the excruciatingly shy woman at his side, the man said, and he was now Death’s devotee forever. At the front of the crowd, banks of flowers to rival those laid at Princess Diana’s grave paid tribute to the skeleton. Half hidden by the flowers was a large, clear plastic death figure, and behind it was a sound system at which one of Queta’s sons would soon lead the Rosary. Behind that, Queta cackled in answer to a question. Yes, it was true that the Catholic Church disapproved of her “Little Skinny One,” she said. “But have you noticed how empty their churches are?”
Queta’s genius has been to create out of her Catholic faith an inclusive syncretic ritual: a Rosary, which is recited complete with Hail Marys and the Lord’s Prayer; special prayers for those in jail; and a culminating, quasi-Pentecostal moment when the faithful all lift their effigy to Heaven to “charge it with energy.” It is a cult, Queta says, accurately, that does not discriminate. A Catholic priest might extend grudging absolution to those who confess that they have just sold several grams of crystal meth to a bunch of twelve-year-olds, but only at Queta’s Rosary can you be blessed on a monthly basis without the matter of how you earn a living ever coming up.
Queta, naturally enough, denies that the Santa Muerte is a devotion for drug traffickers—one more element of the narcocultura. Why, then, I wondered, was it perceived as such outside Tepito?
“Ha!” she exclaimed. “Because every single time one of them is arrested or killed they find my Little Skinny One on their altar!” From the storefront next to the shrine, where she sells candles and other devotional objects for the cult, she blew another kiss and called out to her patron saint, “Preciosa!”
MAKE has a special deal running on Hack-a-day at the moment, if you like hack-a-day and want to support the site (and MAKE) check them out and subscribe to MAKE using DAYHACK as the code, you'll get a free Maker's notebook which seems to be all the rage amongst makers lately.
If our memories aren’t all that fuzzy, then why do we often forget the details of things we want to remember? One explanation is that, although the brain contains detailed representations of lots of different events and objects, we can’t always find that information when we want it. As this study reveals, if we’re shown an object, we can often be very accurate and precise at being able to say whether we’ve seen it before. If we’re in a toy store and trying to remember what it was that our son wanted for his birthday, however, we need to be able to voluntarily search our memory for the right answer—without being prompted by a visual reminder. It seems that it is this voluntary searching mechanism that’s prone to interference and forgetfulness.Why Do We Forget Things?
Heart shaped box, sorta - papercraft...
Kirigami - heart shaped paper craft.
Open heart kit - The Open Heart is an LED matrix of individually addressable LEDs. It can be used to create a brooch or bag light with highly customizable animations. It can be configured so that you can temporarily attach it to fabrics with headers that you simply push through, or you can configure it to be sewn into a project using conductive fabric for a more permanent setup. You'll need an Arduino to complete this project as well as a soldering iron and basic hand tools.
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This unusual lion coffee table was auctioned on eBay a few months ago. It is paper mache and signed by the artist. D-Listed Decor compares it to a Jeff Koons sculpture, which I think is apt.
Use a Nintendo SNES controller on a Sony PSP! via Hacked Gadgets. The Foo writes...
Some time ago I was contacted by a nice guy in the US. He asked me wether I would be interested in building a psp mod for his partner. She has limited use of one of her hands and as such cant use a psp, but she can however use a SNES controller perfectly (I've seen it, its quite a talent). So he asked if I would be able to add a SNES controller to a PSP for her. Well at long last here it is.Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Electronics | Digg this!
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NgeokNean made this very cool LEGO Mindstorms NXT walker - I've never seen this kind of pivot-mechanism used for turning, it's very creative!
Via NXT Step blog
According to recent polls, large segments of the American population think the media is attentive to trivia, and indifferent to what really matters. They also believe that the media does not report the country's problems, but instead is a part of them. Increasingly, people perceive no difference between the narcissistic self-serving reporters asking questions, and the narcissistic self-serving politicians who evade them.His diagnosis for how this happened is quite interesting as well:
And I am troubled by the media's response to these criticisms. We hear the old professional line: "Sure, we've got some problems, we could do our job better." Or the time-honored: "We've always been disliked because we're the bearer of bad news; it comes with the territory; I'll start to worry when the press is liked." Or after a major disaster like the NBC news/GM truck fiasco, we hear "this is a time for reflection."
These responses suggest to me that the media just doesn't get it - doesn't understand why consumers are unhappy with their wares.
The media are an industry, and their product is information. And along with many other American industries, the American media produce a product of very poor quality. Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it's sold without warranty. It's flashy but it's basically junk. So people have begun to stop buying it....On top of that, he clearly recognizes the changes that are underfoot as a result of technology ending the old monopoly of the news media:
In recent decades, many American companies have undergone a wrenching, painful restructuring to produce high-quality products. We all know what this requires: Flattening the corporate hierarchy. Moving critical information from the bottom up instead of the top down. Empowering workers. Changing the system, not just the focus of the corporation. And relentlessly driving toward a quality product. Because improved quality demands a change in the corporate culture. A radical change.
Generally speaking, the American media have remained aloof from this process.... [The] news on television and in newspapers is generally perceived as less accurate, less objective, less informed than it was a decade ago. Because instead of focusing on quality, the media have tried to be lively or engaging - selling the sizzle, not the steak; the talk-show host, not the guest; the format, not the subject. And in doing so they have abandoned their audience.
When I was a child, telephones had no dials. You picked up the phone and asked an operator to place your call. Now, if you've ever had the experience of being somewhere where your call was placed for you, you know how exasperating that is. It's faster and more efficient to dial it yourself.He goes on to decry the way news becomes polarized -- he refers to it as the Crossfire Syndrome -- noting that it uses soundbites and extreme positions to ignore the real issues, and basically does the viewer or reader a disservice. And his premise is that the consumer of media recognizes this and would jump to alternatives. Ten years after he wrote this piece, Jack Shafer checked in with him to get his reaction to the fact that his prediction of the death of such media organizations appeared wrong. Crichton replied that: "I doubt I'm wrong, it's just too early."
Today's media equivalent of the old telephone operator is Dan Rather, or the front page editor, or the reporter who prunes the facts in order to be lively and vivid. Increasingly, I want to remove those filters, and in some cases I already can. When I read that Ross Perot appeared before a Congressional committee, I am no longer solely dependent on the lively and vivid account in The New York Times, which talks about Perot's folksy homilies and a lot of other flashy chrome trim that I am not interested in. I can turn on C-SPAN and watch the hearing myself. In the process, I can also see how accurate The New York Times account was. And that's likely to change my perception of The New York Times, as indeed it has. Because The New York Times seems to have a problem with Ross Perot. It reminds me of the story told about Hearst, who remarked upon seeing an old adversary on the street, "I don't know why he hates me, I never did him a favor."
But my ability to view C-SPAN brings us to the third trend: the coming end of the media's information monopoly - a monopoly held since the inception of our nation. The American Revolution was the first war fought, in part, through public opinion in the newspapers, and Ben Franklin was the first media-savvy lobbyist to employ techniques of disinformation. For the next 200 or so years, the media have been able to behave in a basically monopolistic way. They have treated information the way John D. Rockefeller treated oil - as a commodity, in which the distribution network, rather than product quality, is of primary importance. But once people can get the raw data themselves, that monopoly ends. And that means big changes, soon.
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This project shows how to build several edge-lit plexiglass strips out of a cracked old CD case using a white LED that is heatshrinked to fit the end of each piece. The result is a nice way to expand the light of a dark space or to add light to an interactive piece.
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Madnoodler presents his process for circuit bending a toy cellular - in animated framey-goodness!
Nice to see he brushed up on the basics before jumping in. [via GetLoFi]
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momo : a haptic navigation device - A haptic navigational device that requires only the sense of touch to guide a user. No maps, no text, no arrows, no lights. momo sits in the palm of your two hands and navigates you to an end location by leaning and vibrating. Akin to someone pointing you in the right direction, there is no need to find your map, you simply follow as the device gravitates to your destination.
We covered this last year at the ITP show, but the video above is new... thanks Bre!
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Alberto Tadiello's "EPROM" is an installation of music boxes that are activated by small electrical engines fed power through a transformer. The resulting sound is cacaphonous but soothing and Tadiello's choice of layout mimics that of some PCB designs.
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When it comes to dancing, 6 legs are better than 2! Maybe it's their fancy outfits, or the 18+ servos all working in unison? Who knows? Who cares! This is some fancy hexapodal footwork.
More about the Robotic dance-off
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Kill A Watt - Take apart @ SparkFun-
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Plug the Kill-a-watt into a standard 110V US outlet, then plug the device (like a TV, air-conditioner, computer, etc) you want to measure into the Kill-a-watt. The KAW will measure voltage, amps, watts, Hz, kWhr, and elapsed time (since plugged in). The unit requires no batteries (it's plugged into the wall after all) and does a pretty good job. I bought two so I could measure intermediary loads, and of course so I could take one apart and not have to worry about destroying it.
Lynne Bruning has a nice instructable about using machine embroidery to cover conductive thread. I kind of like the look of the silvery thread, but you might feel differently and want to cover it up.
Read more about Machine embroidery covering conductive thread
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Becky from Craft has a great write-up about the new Soft Circuit Kits in the Maker Shed and Massive Soft Electronics Roundup
In the Maker Shed:
Lilypad E-Sewing Kit
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The great South African musician and human rights activist Miriam Makeba has passed away. "Mama Africa" was 76 years old, and died of a heart attack after a performance in Italy. Link to New York Times Obituary. Above: In 1960, a very young Miriam Makeba performs the song "Into Yam", in the movie "Come Back, Africa."
Horrible, gang - we need to work towards changing this... reuse and recycle locally, the video hits hard - "Where do the millions of computer monitors, cell phones and other electronic refuse our society generates end up? Scott Pelley reports." 60 minutes & more.
60 Minutes is going to take you to one of the most toxic places on Earth - a place government officials and gangsters don't want you to see. It's a town in China where you can't breathe the air or drink the water, a town where the blood of the children is laced with lead.
It's worth risking a visit because much of the poison is coming out of the homes, schools and offices of America. This is a story about recycling - about how your best intentions to be green can be channeled into an underground sewer that flows from the United States and into the wasteland.
That wasteland is piled with the burning remains of some of the most expensive, sophisticated stuff that consumers crave. And 60 Minutes and correspondent Scott Pelley discovered that the gangs who run this place wanted to keep it a secret.
What are they hiding? The answer lies in the first law of the digital age: newer is better. In with the next thing, and out with the old TV, phone or computer. All of this becomes obsolete, electronic garbage called "e-waste."
Henrique sent me a link to this cool DIY light that he built from traffic cones. I asked him to post some shots of the build process so our readers could easily make one, and he did! Thanks Henrique, it looks like a really cool light that is really easy to build.
I just finished the drawings of the DIYstrict Light for Letsevo. Super simple and easy to build, you can leave on the floor to give your house a mine field look or hang from the ceiling.
More about Light DIYstrict
In the Maker Shed:
Aurorarium light show
Yesterday I bought the first cellphone of my life. I had been using the junker phone that my niece lost two years ago when she was in 7th grade. It resurfaced when she finally cleaned her closet. The phone was already on the plan and they had replaced it Tmobile was going to charge to turn it off. My entry phone almost worked, and it wasn't pink. Eventually I would need to get an 'adult phone'.
So a few months ago Google started making noise about the Android. Open source, touch screen, 3G, browser, all the good stuff in modern phones. I had thought about getting an iPhone, but that was so last Spring. Verizon has a few iPhone copies, but they are basically wannabees. Why not get the real thing?
Since I live in a fringe area, they don't have Tmobile stores nearby. The noncorporate stores don't carry the phone yet. I went twice to the store on Newbury street in Boston, but their hours are not late enough for my schedule. Yesterday I finally got my G1.
My uncle asked last night if the G1 was any better than the iPhone. I told him that it probably isn't better as far as a design standpoint. Apple has been working up the various parts of that interface for years. The true value to me is that the Android and G1 are open source. By encouraging people to not only use the phone but actually improve it, the G1 has much more potential than the locked down design from Apple.
Here are a few observations about the device and what it has me thinking about:
The web browser is okay, pages load pretty slow. Having a web browser in my pocket is definitely a plus.
When you turn the phone on its side, the screen doesn't adjust. You have to open the slider to get it to switch to landscape mode. That's annoying to me, and certainly somebody will hack into the motion sensor and fix the flaw.
On the keyboard, there are not arrow keys. The keys are pretty small, but seem to work ok. After a bit of practice I have gotten the hang of a bit more. It took me a while to figure out that the rolly ball is like a track ball and allows you to move the cursor around. It is pretty sensitive.
Email: The phone is linked to my Google account. So this means that gmail, google documents, youtube and blogger all know that I am me. I think I signed in once and everything else was good to go.
Photos: One of the reasons that I got this phone was that it has a 3 megapixel camera. A couple of years ago I started carrying a Nikon S4 digicam in my pocket every day. Having a camera with me all the time changed the way I think about photography. That camera finally died in September, and I have missed the smallish size of it compared to my larger Canon S515. The exposure of the G1's camera is not that great in low light. It is not yet seamless to shoot and have it go straight to my flickr account. At this point, the best way seems to be to take the picture, then email it to the flickr address tied to my account. Pictures go up, but don't have tags, nor are they added to sets. Certainly that will be figured out. Since the phone has a micro sd card reader, I could use my other camera with an adapter and micro sd, then use the phone to upload on the fly. That will be useful. No video yet. Somebody will solve that issue, right?
Internet: for me, web access is a new thing to have in my pocket. I think I will like it.
Power: The battery took its first charge while I sat at the counter in the store and played with it. The seat was comfortable and there was much to learn about the phone, so I stayed a couple of hours. Several times it shut itself down in the store. I pointed this behavior out to the salesguy, but he did not seem inclined to replace the phone. A great feature of power is that the phone charges with a standard mini USB plug. This means that I can get a charge any time I am near a computer. It also means that I do not need to have a special phone charger. They tried to sell a car charger to the guy after me in line. I quietly told him that the phone used USB and saved him twenty bucks. You could probably use a Minty Boost to top it off if for some reason you were out of reach of the great USB.
Reception: This phone has much better reception in my fringy town in the suburbs than my middle school hand me down. Originally, I thought that I would only be able to use it as a phone around home base. Instead, I have been able to get email and web access in town, and the coverage seems better than I anticipated. Apparently the 2G coverage includes data. In the house, the phone does not seem to be able to see the wireless N router very well. Tomorrow I will see how it likes the routers at school.
Maps: Since the phone is tied to all things Google, google maps and street view are ready to roll. I looked at the street in Boston where I often park my car, but the photos must have been taken on a day when I was out of the city. When there is good coverage from lots of cell towers, the phone can pinpoint its gps location pretty well. Out in the boonies, it shows the one tower that is in range. One really nice thing about that is that the phone can show me where the cell towers are in my area. I have been wondering where the cell towers are for quite some time. It appears that the phone can show me the location of the Tmobile cell antennae through the maps data. The other day, I was actually seriously considering looking up the coverage maps in the FCC documentation. To me, the gps reception/simulation means that back country geocaching will not be successful, but innercity hunting could work fine.
Physical form: The phone is a bit clunky and big, but not as big as a blackberry. Last night some Blackberry addicts found me out at a family party and had a wonderful time showing me how good my phone was. I was worried about the hinge, but it seems sturdy, and I think HTC is the company tht makes the Sidekick. Getting the back off to change the sim card and battery was a tool-free event. Fingernails and a couple of tugs got the plastic back off.
Interface: I have found the interface both good and a bit complex. I like the touch screen response, but wish it had the magnification feature I see on the iPhone. My 10 year old daughter has enjoyed poking around in the menus, and figured out the music player aspect pretty well before I did. She seems to think that it will be easy to learn the features and add more capability to it.
What does the G1 Android have me looking to learn? It would be nice to make a headphone adapter that can make use of the regular 1/8th inch stereo plug. The board and surface mount components could be made easily in the Fab Lab. A usb keyboard would be nice to be able to plug in and use at times. Custom cut vinyl will be very possible, there is lots of real estate on the back that is just waiting for a skin. My friend Perry is anxious to learn about programming in Java so he can make his own apps for the android. Could students in programming classes learn to program for the G1?
What possibilities do you see in the G1 Android? What does it make want you to learn? What has it taught you already? How will it change the way people see phones and hardware? Can it change the way people learn?
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HOW TO - Make LEGO gummies! SFHandyman writes...
I'm going to show you how to make gummy candies. I made a silicone candy mold from Legos. You don't need to make a custom mold. There are many commercially available silicone molds, or you could just skip the mold completely and cut them with cookie cutters, a knife or even scissors.Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Crafts | Digg this!
Here it is!! MAKE Volume 16 - Spy Tech (m4v video). No mission is impossible when makers put their minds to it. Make Volume 16 will help you get smart with a special section on spy tech. Learn how to build and use tiny surveillance devices, and how to know if a spy is using them on you. From tiny video cameras to sneaky recorders, this volume has enough cool stuff to make James Bond's inventor Q envious.
You can start reading MAKE right now if you're a subscriber in our digital edition, or sign up and get going right away! Use code CMAKE to get $5 off!
Music by Sideways.
Phil Endecott has done a bit of hacking with the Linksys NSLU2 "Slug", the low-power network storage device which runs Linux under the hood. His SlugPower project is a switched outlet that can be controlled from the Slug. This enables his print server to power up the printer when it needs to be printing, and automatically cut power to the device when it's not in use.
This page describes the hardware and software design of a printer power switch controlled over USB from my Linksys NSLU2, aka Slug. The unit can, however, be controlled from any Linux box, and can switch anything, not just printers.My NSLU2 acts mostly as a file and print server. I can go for weeks without printing anything, so I want to keep the printer switched off when I'm not using it (it takes about 4W while idle, which must be more than 99% of its total energy consumption). But it's upstairs, and I don't want to have to go up and down stairs once to switch it on and again to collect my printing. So I decided to get a power switch.
Remote power switches are pretty common in server rooms, but they are costly. This is a pretty affordable way to control the power to any device from anywhere in the world.
SlugPower - A Slug-Controlled Power Switch
Phil Endecott's Slug Projects
NSLU2-Linux
Spontaneous singing at the first Second Line in New Orleans, Louisiana since the presidential election. November 9, 2008: Shine the Light on Obama (shot by AnorexicRapper). Related videos: Sudan Social Aid and Pleasure Club 2008, also shot today in New Orleans (shot by cjdunn1), and Sudan Kids Getting Down today, to the sounds of the Hot 8 Brass band, who we've profiled before on Boing Boing tv (part one, part two).
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In response to my posting of the DIY hobby o-scope item, Ken_S sent a link to his "Minimalist Oscilloscope 08M Project," which uses a PICAXE 08M chip and a Nokia cellphone screen to create a... well... minimal oscilloscope. Given that he got the phone for a buck, he was able to build the scope for $5. I like at the bottom where he brags: "Check out these impressive specifications rivaling scopes costing twice the price."
The Minimalist Oscilloscope 08M Project
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I understand Maker Faire Austin is done and gone, but I'm still thinking about how much fun it was. Over the next week or 2, I'll continue to share some highlights from the most make-tastic event Austin's ever seen.
Recycling Biking Globe from the town of Chelmsford
In addition to many Makers reusing salvaged materials in their projects, Maker Faire Austin also managed to recycle over a ton of materials. Literally:
1360 lbs corrugated cardboardRead more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Maker Faire | Digg this!
700 lbs # 1 pete plastic (soda and water bottles)32 lbs mixed plastic
570 lbs brown glass
530 lbs mixed paper
62 lbs aluminum cans
That's 3222 lbs or a bit over a ton and a half.
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Dean Kamen is working on a Stirling engine car and it's on the road...
The same day that Ford and General Motors announced catastrophic third-quarter losses, Dean Kamen was showing off his new electric car.
The prototype vehicle, a zippy two-seat hatchback designed with more than a passing resemblance to the Volkswagen Beetle, can go about 60 miles on a single charge of its lithium battery and with practically zero emissions.
The secret?
"It's the world's first Stirling hybrid electric car," its inventor said with a flourish.
Installed in the car's trunk compartment is a Stirling engine invented at DEKA, Kamen's technology company in the Manchester Millyard. It powers the features that would normally drain huge power from the battery, notably the defroster and heater.
That leaves the battery primarily for propulsion. "You're running a pure electric, which is enormously cheaper to operate and enormously more environmentally friendly," Kamen explained.
And if the battery does run low, the Stirling can recharge it, so you'll never get stranded, he said. That's why Kamen calls his Stirling engine "an insurance policy" for the electric car.
Kamen showed off his state registration for his new car, listed as a 2008 DEKA Revolt. "I'm a car manufacturer!" he grinned. "It's so exciting!"
More:
The Two-Can Stirling Engine- The Stirling engine has long captivated inventors and dreamers. Here are complete plans for building and operating a two-cylinder model that runs on almost any high-temperature heat source. MAKE 07 - page 90.
Dean Kamen: The Dean of Engineering. Wasting time is an unspeakable crime, says Segway inventor Dean Kamen. MAKE 04 - page 28.
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