Last month we had mentioned how Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson was taking on the RIAA's strategy of suing music uploaders by claiming that the laws the RIAA was relying on were unconstitutional. That case ("the Tenenbaum case") started moving forward this week, and the Associated Press had a story at the beginning of the week, which about fifty people submitted (with some angrily wondering why we hadn't written about it). We didn't write about it because it was basically the same story we had covered in October.

However, there is some interesting news in the case, as Ray Beckerman has posted the proposed witness list put forth by Tenenbaum's legal team and it is quite the star-studded list. It's becoming quite clear (if it wasn't already) that this is a case where a bunch of different folks in the "copyfighting" realm are converging to confront the RIAA's legal strategy. The list includes:

• John Perry Barlow (former songwriter for The Grateful Dead, founder of the EFF, and well known digital thinker)
• Prof. Johan Pouwelse (technical and scientific director of European research project P2P-Next)
• Prof. Lawrence Lessig (needs no introduction, I imagine, for folks around here)
• Matthew Oppenheim (who has a somewhat murky relationship with the RIAA, at times representing the RIAA, and at other times insisting he does not represent the RIAA)
• Prof. Terry Fisher (a director of Harvard's Berkman Center and author of Promises to Keep, an early book looking at how the internet was changing the entertainment industry, and how it's business models need to change)
• Prof. Wendy Seltzer (well known copyfighter, law professor, former staff attorney at the EFF and founder of the Chilling Effects site)
• Prof. John Palfrey (Harvard law professor, co-director of the Berkman Center, author of Born Digital)
• Prof. Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard and Oxford law professor, co-director of the Berkman Center, author of The Future of the Internet)
• Andrew Grant (former antipiracy specialist at DRM company Macrovision)

That is quite the all-star list. This case is going to be a fun one to watch.

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somanyrobots writes with an interesting followup in the New York Times to the earlier-reported substantial reconstruction of the woolly mammoth genome: "Scientists are talking for the first time about the old idea of resurrecting extinct species as if this staple of science fiction is a realistic possibility, saying that a living mammoth could perhaps be regenerated for as little as $10 million. The same technology could be applied to any other extinct species from which one can obtain hair, horn, hooves, fur or feathers, and which went extinct within the last 60,000 years, the effective age limit for DNA." (The Washington Post article linked from the earlier post was much more skeptical, calling such an attempt "still firmly the domain of science fiction." The New York Times article, while describing the process in similar terms, also calls attention to recent advances in sequencing DNA, as well as recoding DNA for cloning.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today Offworld got an exclusive sneak peek at the awesomely retro-futurist super HYPERCUBE, a game by Montreal art collective Kokoromi and developer Polytron that uses both red/blue anaglyph glasses and Johnny Lee-style Wii-mote head-tracking to play a stylishly minimalist block game inspired by the famous "human Tetris" Japanese gameshow video. The game makes its debut tonight at Montreal's Society for Arts and Technology (the SAT), so head down if you're in the area. We also mapped the evolution of the rhythm game from Parappa to Rock Band via a new interactive timeline, snickered behind the back of Kids In The Hall's Scott Thompson utterly failing at Portal, worried about UK indie dev Introversion trying to build an AI that cannot be stopped from blowing up the entire world, and finally, celebrated the tenth anniversary of Valve's original Half-Life, with new footage from a team of modders attempting to bring the game into the 21st century.

MAKE publisher and BoingBoing guest blogger Dale Dougherty points out this collection of unhappy hard drive sound clips you may be all too familiar with.

These are the last words of devices which will hopefully find new life as wind chimes clocks and more good stuff. Could be fun to build a percussive sample set out of these! [via BoingBoing]

More:

The Sound of Data

&

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Punkky is a watch enthusiast from Japan. On his blog, PIC Microcontroller Note, he's documenting the built of a 7-Segment PIC Digital Clock using the PIC16F628A MCU. It's his first MCU project. After working the kinks out on breadboards, he etched and hand-routed a board (he'll share the Eagle file with others if you ask).

Making a Digital Clock

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In this special episode of Boing Boing tv (Direct MP4 link for download), Xeni interviews Tibetan sovereignty activists Lhadon Tethong and Tenzin "Tendor" Dorjee from Students for a Free Tibet, over a Skype video chat.

They're in Dharamsala, India, the home of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Government In Exile, and they're attending an historic week-long meeting taking place this week to determine the future of the Tibetan independence movement.

Snip from a New York Times story by Edward Wong about the "Special Meeting":

The conclave is the first of its kind since 1991. The Dalai Lama has called for hundreds of Tibetans to gather in the Himalayan town of Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan government in exile, to help decide on a new strategy for Tibet.

In a statement released Monday, the government in exile sought to play down speculation that a significant shift in its approach to the issue of Tibetan independence might be near.

“A change in policy need not come from this meeting,” the statement said, according to Reuters. “If a change in basic policy is considered necessary, there is a way that is democratic and which has the mandate of the Tibetan people.”

Lhadon and Tendor are updating the SFT blog here, and they suggest that people interested in following the story check Phayul.com, and the High Peaks Pure Earth blog, with commentary from Tibetans inside Tibet and China. Here is a statement on the "Special Meeting" from the Dalai Lama, who is not personally attending. The Tibetan Government in Exile is producing video reports from the Special Meeting here. Tibetan poet Woeser has published her thoughts on the meeting here. (Special thanks to Laird Brown, and Phuntsok Dorjee)

Pixel-based typography from 1567 - On the death and 441-year life of the pixel via DF.

The struggle to adequately render letterforms on a pixel grid is a familiar one, and an ancient one as well: this bitmap alphabet is from La Vera Perfettione del Disegno di varie sorte di ricami, an embroidery guide by Giovanni Ostaus published in 1567. Renaissance ‘lace books’ have much to offer the modern digital designer, who also faces the challenge of portraying clear and replicable images in a constrained environment.

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destinyland writes "For decades, people have been asking this brain teaser: 'What's the longest word you can type with only the left-hand letters on a keyboard?' The answer is supposed to be 'stewardesses,' but grepping the standard dictionary that ships with Unix reveals a much better answer. There's nearly 2,000 shorter words that can typed with only the left hand — including one word that's even longer. (The article also quotes a failed novel attempt using nothing but words typed on the keyboard's left side.)"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

destinyland writes "For decades, people have been asking this brain teaser: 'What's the longest word you can type with only the left-hand letters on a keyboard?' The answer is supposed to be 'stewardesses,' but grepping the standard dictionary that ships with Unix reveals a much better answer. There's nearly 2,000 shorter words that can typed with only the left hand — including one word that's even longer. (The article also quotes a failed novel attempt using nothing but words typed on the keyboard's left side.)"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It will be great when Guns N' Roses' Chinese Democracy album comes out -- if only because it'll end 14 years of speculation and hype, and maybe we'll stop hearing about it for a while. It's scheduled for release on Sunday (and will be available only at a single chain of stores, thanks to an exclusive agreement), but the band is already streaming the record on its MySpace page. This comes after the band got the FBI to investigate a blogger who posted some songs from the album online a few months ago; the blogger was eventually arrested, and recently plead guilty in a plea bargain. So, like so many people in the music business, it appears that GNR love the power of online music as a promotional tool, as long as it's on their own terms. Having the guy who posted the songs prosecuted did nothing to stem the tide of illegal downloads of GNR songs, while his actions helped to promote the band and their work. Furthermore, what's the real difference between streaming the songs on MySpace, and having them freely available elsewhere online? Those who are so inclined can still find a way to convert the streams into downloaded files, while the streams could just point some users to download the album via BitTorrent, where it's readily available.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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The iTunes U category @ the iTunes store gathers together a ton of free and interesting educational vids on a variety of topics including - engineering, mathematics, science, and much more - iTunes U

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Interactive electronics learning online!

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netbuzz writes "Meeting in Minneapolis this week, the Internet engineering community is debating whether to aggressively fashion and apply fixes for the so-called Kaminsky bug in the DNS discovered this summer, or to simply let its threat stand as motivation for all to move with greater speed toward DNSSEC, which is considered the best long-term security solution. Problem with the latter approach is that DNSSEC has been in the works for a decade already, no one is confident it will be universally embraced, and the Kaminsky flaw is causing real problems today.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Oh, what won't intrepid NYT reporter John Schwartz do for space journalism! Snip:

There are many elements of [NASA's current Space Shuttle Endeavor] mission, which is devoted to further construction of the station and improvements that will allow the station to double its crew size from three to six next year. But the gizmo that is getting the most attention is the “water recovery system,” which will recycle the station’s water supply. That’s right: urine, sweat in the air, waste water and other forms of moisture will be fed into the system, distilled and sent back to the tap.

The system, created at a cost of about $250 million, will recycle about 93 percent of the water used aboard the station. The cost of lifting supplies up to orbit is so high, though, that NASA estimates the system could pay for itself in as little as two years. Similar systems would be essential to maintaining long-term bases on faraway outposts on the Moon and Mars.

The astronauts don’t have a problem with this system. As Sandra H. Magnus, one of the astronauts who will be among the first to drink water produced by the new system aboard the station, noted in a recent interview, our earthbound water has been endlessly filtered through bodies, evaporated and rained down again. “We drink recycled water every day,” she said, “on a little bit longer time scale.”

You'll have to read the whole piece to learn how the stuff tastes.

Rick Sanchez on CNN showed this video of world leaders at the G20 Summit refusing to shake hands with President Bush. Sanchez says "It's almost sad." (Via The Fire Wire)

A few years ago, after realizing that blaming consumers wasn't a particularly effective strategy in covering up for the entertainment industry's own inability to adapt to a changing market, industry insiders chose a new strategy: blame ISPs. That sent them down a path of trying to force ISPs to do a variety of things, such as installing filters, policing their networks for copyright-infringing material and, of course, kicking users off their networks. In the mind of entertainment industry execs, a failure to do any of these things should be a crime. Note how the industry totally shifts responsibility here. Rather than admitting that they should change with the market, it's always someone else who needs to change to protect the entertainment industry's obsolete business model.

While the industry has been able to get some politicians and ISPs to agree (amazingly, often against their own best interests), it's now gone a step further. A bunch of the biggest movie studios (Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros Entertainment, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Disney Enterprises, and the Seven Network) have teamed up to sue Australia's largest ISP, iiNet, for failing to stop copyright infringement. iiNet, you may recall, is the same ISP that has been mocking the Australian government for requiring filters. So, naturally, it's response to this lawsuit is rather direct. While the studios complain that iiNet isn't doing anything, iiNet responds that this is not true at all. They pass each complaint on to the police, because if there's a crime, then the police should deal with it:

They send us a list of IP addresses and say 'this IP address was involved in a breach on this date'. We look at that say 'well what do you want us to do with this? We can't release the person's details to you on the basis of an allegation and we can't go and kick the customer off on the basis of an allegation from someone else'. So we say 'you are alleging the person has broken the law; we're passing it to the police. Let them deal with it'.

We are not traffic cops. We can't stand in the middle of it and stop the individual items that might be against the law. These guys are asking us to be judge, jury and executioner.

Even better, iiNet's CEO Michael Malone gets to the heart of the matter:

I think they genuinely believe that ISPs have a secret magic wand that we are hiding and if we bring it out we can make piracy disappear just by waving it. And it doesn't exist.

Indeed, but that might mean that the entertainment industry has to actually take responsibility for their own business model failings, and they can't do that. So they have to blame others.

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How to make it & Science and Invention covers... absolutely stunning.

But wait, there's more!

Electric Experimenter.

Practical Electronics!

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duh P3rf3ss3r writes "The Associated Press reports that, after 200 years of speculation and investigation, the tomb of Nicolaus Copernicus has been found. Although the heliocentric concept had been suggested earlier, Copernicus is widely thought of as the father of the scientific theory of the heliocentric solar system. The positive identification was made by comparing the DNA from a skeleton's teeth with that from hairs in a book known to have belonged to Copernicus. A computer-generated facial reconstruction is said to also bear a resemblance to contemporary portraits of the scientist."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Not to be limited to pencil, the Drawdio sound generating/art project is seen here using the conductivity of water from a paint brush. Temporary marks can be made and used - then just let them evaporate away. Neat!

Drawdio Kit

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This is a cool way to incorporate an Arduino into your Thanksgiving dinner. Check out this site on Thanksgiving for live video feeds and core turkey temperature graphs thanks to an Arduino. [Thanks Michael]

In addition to video, flickr and twitter feeds, probably the single coolest part of the site is the live temperature graph. We have an arduino based system that measures the temperature of the bird, the air in the smoker and the outside air and updates a graph on the site so anyone can see how the bird is coming.

More about the Arduino Based Turkey Temperature Probes

In the Maker Shed:


Bare Bones Arduino Board Kit (Unassembled)

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10 Years of the ISS in pictures @ Universe Today.

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10 Years of the ISS in pictures @ Universe Today.

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Artist Jason Freeny has produced this awesome Micro Schematic of a LEGO minifig. Via I Heart Guts!

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Artist Jason Freeny has produced this awesome Micro Schematic of a LEGO minifig. Via I Heart Guts!

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TRS-80 writes "Apple has sent a DMCA takedown notice to the IpodHash project, claiming it circumvents their FairPlay DRM scheme. Some background: Apple first added a hash to the iTunesDB file in 6th-gen iPods, but it was quickly reverse-engineered. They changed it with the release of iPhone 2.0 and a project was started to reverse the new hash, but weren't successful yet. My guess is Apple used the same algorithm as FairPlay for the new hash, so Apple could use the DMCA to prevent competing apps like Songbird and Banshee from talking to iPods/iPhones. BTW, don't tell Apple, but the project uses a wiki, so the old page versions from before the takedown are still there." Link To Original Source

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The ultimate gadget of 1930s - Jaeger LeCoultre Compass via NOTCOT.

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The ultimate gadget of 1930s - Jaeger LeCoultre Compass via NOTCOT.

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The Cincinnati Junior Makers group started as a bunch of bike riding fathers with young kids. The group used to go on rides hauling their cherubs around on bike trailers and tagalongs. Now the kids are old enough to ride on their own, but not quite up for the challenge of traffic. Since they like each others' company and are raising clever kids, they have turned to Make to help provide some worthwhile activities.

Brad Writes:

Our group - the Cincinnati Jr Makers, got together and made the air rockets detailed in Make 15 makezine.com/15/airrocket/ . These are really easy to build. Literally some paper and tape. I had put the launcher together that morning. It is basically a battery operated spud gun with a big impressive detonator type button to launch. We used a battery from my son's min-jeep but a drill battery should work fine too. Total project cost was around $60.

We spent a few hours making and decorating the rockets. Then off to the local park to launch. These were simply AMAZING! A friend who is also in the club had made 2L water rockets last year - he brought his setup as well and we had a rocketfest! My wife is taking the video - you can see from her response at the launch how successful this was (I am the guy in the black Make t-shirt). We spent maybe 2-3 hours launching, repairing, and modifying the rockets. Who knew that simple fin modifications could be so impactful. This one was so successful that I have done it 3 times since with people who missed the first session.

You can check out the article in Make 15, or try these links to the digital pages. First - Second Third - Fourth - Fifth - Sixth

Would you like to use Make as a resource for organizing activities and project with students and kids? If you do, take some pictures and video, add them to the Make Flickr pool. If you have a set of pictures, add some text explaining what you did to the set description.

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The Cincinnati Junior Makers group started as a bunch of bike riding fathers with young kids. The group used to go on rides hauling their cherubs around on bike trailers and tagalongs. Now the kids are old enough to ride on their own, but not quite up for the challenge of traffic. Since they like each others' company and are raising clever kids, they have turned to Make to help provide some worthwhile activities.

Brad Writes:

Our group - the Cincinnati Jr Makers, got together and made the air rockets detailed in Make 15 makezine.com/15/airrocket/ . These are really easy to build. Literally some paper and tape. I had put the launcher together that morning. It is basically a battery operated spud gun with a big impressive detonator type button to launch. We used a battery from my son's min-jeep but a drill battery should work fine too. Total project cost was around $60.

We spent a few hours making and decorating the rockets. Then off to the local park to launch. These were simply AMAZING! A friend who is also in the club had made 2L water rockets last year - he brought his setup as well and we had a rocketfest! My wife is taking the video - you can see from her response at the launch how successful this was (I am the guy in the black Make t-shirt). We spent maybe 2-3 hours launching, repairing, and modifying the rockets. Who knew that simple fin modifications could be so impactful. This one was so successful that I have done it 3 times since with people who missed the first session.

You can check out the article in Make 15, or try these links to the digital pages. First - Second Third - Fourth - Fifth - Sixth

Would you like to use Make as a resource for organizing activities and project with students and kids? If you do, take some pictures and video, add them to the Make Flickr pool. If you have a set of pictures, add some text explaining what you did to the set description.

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Meredith from the Steampunk Workshop hipped us to this strange objet d'art from a deviantArtist named Astalo, a Finnish blacksmith and jeweler. Of his piece, Astalo writes (translated from the Manglish):

Weird steampunk-themed "hand mechanism" that I made from brass, silver, steel, leather and some parts of one old alarm clock. (like gears and spring, etc.)

Making it took almost two months and it's probably the most complex metalwork that I have ever done. The mechanism really works and it moves the user's fingers for a brief period of time (Unfortunately that steel spring is not very strong).

Clockwork hand [via Steampunk Workshop]

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Meredith from the Steampunk Workshop hipped us to this strange objet d'art from a deviantArtist named Astalo, a Finnish blacksmith and jeweler. Of his piece, Astalo writes (translated from the Manglish):

Weird steampunk-themed "hand mechanism" that I made from brass, silver, steel, leather and some parts of one old alarm clock. (like gears and spring, etc.)

Making it took almost two months and it's probably the most complex metalwork that I have ever done. The mechanism really works and it moves the user's fingers for a brief period of time (Unfortunately that steel spring is not very strong).

Clockwork hand [via Steampunk Workshop]

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Reader SteveD sent in this story a week ago, but I just got around to looking at the details. Apparently the makers of the video game World of Goo, which (as mentioned) was released without DRM, have roughly calculated the rate of piracy on the game to be about 90%. The calculation is certainly a rough one, and people can quibble with the number, but the basic reasoning seems sound. A lot of folks focused on that 90% number, but didn't pay as much attention to the more important comparison: how this compared to a DRM'd game. The game makers noted that it had almost no difference compared to another game released with DRM, showing that adding the DRM did absolutely nothing to prevent piracy. So why do video game companies keep insisting they need DRM?

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boyko.at.netqos writes "Timothy B. Lee (no relation to Tim Berners-Lee), a frequent contributor to Ars Technica and Techdirt, has recently written 'The Durable Internet,' a paper published by the libertarian-leaning CATO institute. In it, Lee argues that because a neutral network works better than a non-neutral one, the Internet's open-ended architecture is not likely to vanish, despite the fears of net neutrality proponents, (and despite the wishes of net neutrality opponents.) For that reason, perhaps network neutrality legislation isn't necessary — or even desirable — from an open-networks perspective. In addition to the paper, Network Performance Daily has an interview and podcast with Tim Lee, and Lee addresses counter-arguments with a blog posting for Technology Liberation Front."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Forgetomori came across this neat example of pareidolia.

Have you seen Jesus today? The photo above may be a good chance. Sent by Jessica Lundgren from Sweden to paranormal.about.com, you can see the clear profile of a giant bearded man with closed eyes. It does resemble common representations of a fellow named Jesus. Even though that enormous Jesus head doesn’t quite fit into the rest of the image. What’s going on there? Jessica writes that “the child died short after the photo was taken”.

The link also has another photo that is either pareidolia or a hoax. Good example of pareidolia

Mr. Tom created this freeform nightlight using the dark-detector circuit from EMS Labs.

Simple LED Nightlight

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The LIFE photo archive hosted by Google has a ton of lovely gems, here are a few I found that I really liked - all through a "MAKE" filter...

The contents assiting the Atomic Energy chemistry set.
Location: US
Date taken: September 1948
Photographer: Martha Holmes

Science As A Party Game
Author Kenneth Swezey (L) blowing pinch of cornstarch into candle flame to show how dust carried in the air can explode & destroy factories or coal mines as fans watch this experiment fr. his new bk. AFTER-DINNER SCIENCE.
Location: US
Date taken: October 1948
Photographer: George Silk

Science Fair.
Location: Cleveland, OH, US
Date taken: March 1958
Photographer: Andreas Feininger

A woman tool maker assembling a Buffalo machine gun.
Location: US
Date taken: 1943
Photographer: Wallace Kirkland

Chair maker working in shop.
Location: Damascus, Syria
Date taken: 1943
Photographer: John Phillips

Sixth grade science teacher Mildred Vance teaching a TV class.
Location: Hagerstown, MD, US
Date taken: November 1956
Photographer: Peter Stackpole

Leaping rubber explosively created from butadiene gas in bottle as demonstrated by M.I.T.'s Dr. A. Morton.
Location: US
Date taken: 1952
Photographer: W. Eugene Smith

Jr. Science Convention
Date taken: May 05, 1950
Photographer: Bernard Hoffman

Hopkins Science Show
Date taken: February 1952
Photographer: Mark Kauffman

Students conducting experiments in chemistry class at the Montevideo Highshool.
Location: Montevideo, Uruguay
Date taken: 1941
Photographer: Hart Preston

Life like models for use in science and health lectures manufactured at Cologne Health Museum.
Location: Cologne, Germany
Date taken: February 1955
Photographer: Ralph Crane

Folk singer John Jacob Niles (R) and cabinet maker Harry Mefford giving finishing touches to a new dulcimer. It will not be ready to play until it has "hung" for two or three years.
Location: Lexington, KY, US
Date taken: March 1943
Photographer: Alfred Eisenstaedt

Pirate robot in a new Disneyland ride called "Pirates of the Caribbean."
Location: CA, US
Date taken: 1967
Photographer: Ralph Crane

Fresno's Sunnyside Bowl-Bowling Alley.
Location: Fresno, CA, US
Date taken: 1961
Photographer: J. R. Eyerman

Cal. Tech chemistry professor, Dr. Linus Pauling, with his mineral collection.
Location: CA, US
Date taken: 1954
Photographer: J. R. Eyerman

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Everything is Terrible found this funny infomercial from a long gone company Zillionaire.com, pushing a site called dotplanet.com ("the world's only lifestyle destination portal").

If George Bush would have ran an Internet business in the late 1990s, he would have had the same spiel and delivery style of Zillionaire.com CEO Hubert Humphrey (Not the politician):

"I firmly believe that Dot Planet is the most powerful phenomenon to ever hit the Internet. Our goals are just mind-boggling. We will be the fastest portal to ever hit one million users, two million, three million and all. Our vision is limitless. And I'm totally convinced that Dot Planet will be just as well known in the very near future as America Online. Microsoft, Yahoo, and it's all because of one thing: out great Zillionaire Internet army."

Here's an interesting 1999 article from Investment News about Hubert Humphrey and Zillionaire.com. Humphrey now runs a company called WLG International. From perusing the WLH site, I can't make heads or tails of what the business does: "WLG International has the Quantum Compensation Plan, which is specifically designed to help associates build and grow their 'business within a business.' One of the most powerful compensation and promotion plans in marketing, it offers a unique blend of great Personal Contracts, Infinity Overrides, Generational Overrides, Bonus Pools and Equity Sharing Pools – featuring a 100 percent gross payout to the field." Huh?

The First Zillion is Always the Hardest

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The RIAA's case in Boston against a 24-year-old grad student, SONY BMG Music v. Tenenbaum, in which Prof. Charles Nesson of Harvard Law School, along with members of his CyberLaw class, are representing the defendant, may shape up as a showdown between the Electronic Frontier and Big Music. The defendant's witness list includes names such as those of Prof. Lawrence Lessig (Author of 'Free Culture'), John Perry Barlow (former songwriter of The Grateful Dead and cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation), Prof. Johan Pouwelse (Scientific Director of P2P-Next), Prof. Jonathan Zittrain (Author of 'The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It'), Professors Wendy Seltzer, Terry Fisher, and John Palfrey, and others. The RIAA requested, and was granted, an adjournment of the trial, from its previously scheduled December 1st date, to March 30, 2009. (The RIAA lawyers have been asking for adjournments a lot lately, asking for an adjournment in UMG v. Lindor the other day because they were so busy preparing for the Tenenbaum December 1st trial ... I guess when you're running on hot air, you sometimes run out of steam)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A few folks have submitted links to a blog post by Mark Mulligan, who is a VP and Director of Research for Forrester. In the post, Mulligan talks about why music can't be free, noting:

Another argument being aired is that the music industry should stop being so hung up on trying to get paid online, indeed one story even referred to "the Music Industry's obsession with copyright". That's like saying "the car industry's obsession with cars". Copyright is the oxygen of the music industry. Without it there is no industry. Sure there may be cases for changing some industry practices but copyright remains the essence of making money from music.

Music cannot just be 'for free' anymore than cars or houses can 'just be for free'. If people aren't paid they don't make the product. Sure music will still exist, but you'll swap nicely programmed download stores and well stocked high street stores for buskers and millions upon millions of artist pages, all clamouring for your attention. Perhaps that sounds appealing? The problem is, most of them would sound a fraction as good as they would if they'd been able to give up their day jobs and been given proper equipment, studio time, mentoring and artist development support. And even those that would still manage to sound ok, would struggle to find their way to your PC or mobile screen as they wouldn't have any marketing support to help them get there.

Mulligan's post is actually in response to the various stories about France's SPPF suing a bunch of file sharing apps. However, it's a bit worrisome that a "research director" at one of the biggest research firms seems to have done so little research on the situation. While Mulligan's post is longer, let's just go through these two paragraphs and explain where Mulligan went wrong.

First of all, copyright is not, has not been and never will be the "oxygen of the music industry." The oxygen of the music industry would be fans, and if you treat your fans as criminals, you can be pretty sure that eventually they cut off that oxygen. Copyright may be an oxygen tank that artificially pumps oxygen into a sick and infirm patient, but it's hardly relevant to a healthy and robust system based on business models that take into account basic economics.

Next up is the claim that "music cannot be 'for free' anymore than cars or houses can 'just be for free.'" You would think that someone working as VP and research director of the second largest analyst firm would at least understand a little basic economics -- including the economics of scarce goods vs. infinite, or non-rivalrous, non-excludable goods. Apparently, not. So, Mulligan is simply wrong here. Yes, music absolutely can be free. Music, by itself, is quite different, fundamentally, than a car or a house, because those are scarce goods. If one person has a particular house, another person cannot. Yet, with music, everyone can have a copy of the same song. And, as we learned in basic economics, price is the intersection of supply and demand, and when supply is infinite, those curves meet at a price of zero. Alternatively, you can attack the same problem from another angle, which again was taught in basic economics: in a competitive market, price gets driven to marginal cost. The marginal cost of making a copy of a song is, once again, zero. Music can and should be priced at $0. That's just basic economics. To claim it "cannot be" without addressing such fundamental economics is troubling.

Even more troubling is that beyond even the "theoretical" aspects of the above paragraph, is the widespread proof that music absolutely can be free -- and that musicians can do quite well when it is free. Yet, instead of recognizing that, Mulligan trots out the tired and widely debunked line that "If people aren't paid they don't make the product." See what he did there? It's common among folks who are entering into such discussions for the first time. They say (a) music can't be free because (b) if people don't get paid, they don't make money. The problem with this statement is that he makes a huge leap that if (a) then (b). If music is free, musicians don't get paid. The problem is, that's false. We've spent over a decade chronicling various business models where people use free something to get paid for something else.

And, of course, this is hardly a "new" or "revolutionary" business model. It's the way the world has worked for ages. The pizza shop down the street from me offers a free soda with two slices of pizza. Yet, according to Mulligan's professional opinion on business models, the pizza shop should go out of business. After all, it's giving away a product for free, thus it's not getting paid. The problem with Mulligan's analysis -- which one would hope is not indicative of Forrester's quality of work -- is that he seems to have focused so narrowly on the market, that he doesn't know what the market actually is. He seems to think that the entirety of the market is selling music -- rather than using the music to sell plenty of other things. Musicians can sell a variety of scarcities, such as concert tickets, merchandise, access to the band, the ability to create new music and many other things.

The rest of Mulligan's argument simply builds on the spurious assertion that musicians wouldn't make any money without copyright. Considering that his underlying assumption is false, the rest of the paragraph makes little to no sense, especially in light of the reality of the music industry -- which is musicians can (and already do) make more money from focusing on selling scarcities.

Yes, we've all seen these arguments in the past -- but they're usually put forth by someone who hasn't thought through these issues, and has simply jumped into one of these debates without taking the time to understand the actual market fundamentals. Yet, here's a case where a top exec and director of research at one of the world's largest analyst firms is making these same very basic rookie mistakes. If your firm happens to be relying on Forrester for advice on such matters, perhaps it's time to consider an alternative.

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MacBook x-ray via BBG.

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Blue's News pointed out a report about a study sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation which found that online gaming and social networking are beneficial to children, teaching them basic technical skills and how to communicate in the Information Age. The study was conducted over a period of three years, with researchers interviewing hundreds of children and monitoring thousands of hours of online time. The full white paper (PDF) is also available. "For a minority of children, the casual use of social media served as a springboard to them gaining technological expertise — labeled in the study as 'geeking out,' the researchers said. By asking friends or getting help from people met through online groups, some children learned to adjust the software code underpinning some of the video games they played, edit videos and fix computer hardware. Given that the use of social media serves as inspiration to learning, schools should abandon their hostility and support children when they want to learn some skills more sophisticated than simply designing their Facebook page, the study said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(images via dartmouthwaveenergy.com)

A horrible name and simple design for pumping water (which can then drive turbines) via wave action on a buoy tethered to the ocean floor (via Treehugger).

Not suddenly solving all the world's energy woes, but large numbers of this relatively simple, DIY-friendly design could have a nice impact towards sustainability...

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Reason's David Weigel thinks Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano (rumored to be Obama's pick) wouldn't be a bad choice for Secretary of Homeland Security. My favorite part of Weigel's piece is his assessment of Rudy Giuliani:

I think history has already forgotten Battlin' Bernie Kerik, the laughably corrupt and mobbed-up cop whom Rudy Giuliani commended to George W. Bush as a great replacement for Ridge. Kerik's nomination caught fire like styrofoam in a microwave, and we as a nation got the first clue that Giuliani had been replaced at some point in 2001-2004 by a strange, bald cyborg that needed to recharge batteries by making inopportune phone calls to its "wife."

Dammit, Janet, I Love You

Here's the debut episode of our regular video updates from OFFWORLD, Boing Boing's new gaming blog. Editor Brandon Boyer says:

After an oxygen fire knocked our interstellar video link temporarily out of commission, we bring you our Boing Boing TV premiere via Azeroth, where my spiritual Death Knight equal gives you a little background on where we're is coming from and where I hope to steer the ship. As usual, here's the direct MP4 link, if you prefer a downloadable rather than the Flash.

Offworld bonus fact: in real life, my eyes and sword glow a much more vivid shade of blue. That is indeed, though, almost exactly how I shake a tail feather.

Here's a direct MP4 link, if you prefer to download the video. Like this episode? Tell Brandon and the Offworld gang what you think over at offworld.com: the comments thread is here.

(SPECIAL THANKS to the Project Lore guys, who showed us around the 'hood -- namely, Charles Ottaway.)

pparsons writes "Bell Canada Inc. will not have to suspend its practice of "shaping" traffic on the Internet after a group of companies that resell access to Bell's network complained their customers were also being negatively affected. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission today released a decision that denied the Canadian Association of Internet Providers' request that Bell be ordered to cease its application of the practice to its wholesale customers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You would think that, given the widespread negative publicity generated by EA's choice to use draconian DRM with the release of Spore, that other video game companies might recognize that they'd be better served going in a different direction. Unfortunately, that's not the case with Sega, whose Sports Interactive subsidiary has released the latest copy of its incredibly popular Football Manager product, only to find that many, many legitimate customers are discovering they cannot activate the offering because the DRM is not working properly. And, not surprisingly, this is now leading to numerous negative reviews on Amazon, as people point out how the DRM has stymied their ability to actually play the game they've purchased (while some have noted that cracked copies of the game are already widely available). Congratulations, Sega. Not only have you failed to stop piracy, you've also pissed off many legitimate paying customers, and made sure that the game is poorly rated on Amazon. What do you plan for an encore?

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It's usual practice for a magazine to run an excerpt of a book written by one of its editors. However, BusinessWeek went one step further and converted an excerpt from senior editor Steve Hamm's new book into a comic or manga. His book, The Race for Perfect: Inside the Quest to Design the Ultimate Portable Computer, is “a popular history of portable computing and also a narrative of a single, contemporary product (Lenovo’s X300) as it travels from conception to the marketplace.” Here's the first panel of this version, which tells the story of Alan Kay, one of the creative visionaries and inventors of the computer revolution.

Steve wrote in his Globespotting blog that one of his purposes in writing the book "was to get young people interested in being engineers, designers, inventors, and entrepreneurs." Make magazine shares that goal.

I use Alan Kay's famous quote in my talks: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." I take the liberty of substituting "make" for "invent." I would love to have Alan Kay come to Maker Faire.

View the rest of Alan Kay series on the BusinessWeek website

EPLIOG, makers of laser cutters/etchers have a nice library of projects you can download and try out on your laser cutter, the wood dinosaur and chess board are cool. Pictured here, the tiny wolly made @ NYCR.

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I heard the distant rumble and looked up from the trail. I quickly took this photo as fast as I could.

It's a relatively small avalanche but I'd never seen one before. They are the stuff of legend, especially in the minds of those who don't live in snow country. I can't place a particular TV drama from the sixties but I know that where I first heard the shout "Avalanche!".

We were out about two hours on a trail leading from Lake Louise towards the Victoria glacier. It was very cold but sunny. We had been told to expect avalanches with the sun warming up the ledges. The trail leads to the Plain of Six Glaciers. The avalanche we saw was snow falling off the top of the Lefroy Glacier.

Everywhere you see evidence of avalanches past such as this one.

Iddo Genuth writes "Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics recently won a contract from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to design quieter, more energy efficient, and more environmentally friendly commercial airplanes. The two-million-dollar contract from NASA is just an initial step in bringing green technologies to the sky."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Musical Hell from Cabaret Mechanical Theatre on Vimeo.

Cabaret Mechanical Theatre has opened a new virtual exhibition of Paul Spooner's work in celebration of his 60th birthday. Spooner is an incredibly talented kinetic sculptor - he sells through Cabaret Mechanical and does custom commissions through Fourteen Balls Toys (with Matt and Sarah Smith). Chicago Museum of Science and Industry has a real life exhibition of his work through March 2.

Maker Shed carries Cabaret Mechanical's Designing Automata Kit (backordered, but we hope to have more soon!). We also have their informative and entertaining book, Cabaret Mechanical Movement.

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Techdirt has covered many copyright lawsuits in the past, but this one is a bit different. Singers Daryl Hall and John Oates have filed a suit against their publisher, Warner/Chappell Music, who they claim have failed to enforce their rights and sue an unnamed singer-songwriter for infringement. They claim this is in breach of their contract, and are seeking the termination of said contract as well as unspecified damages.

Two things strike me about this lawsuit (although I'm not a lawyer and haven't seen the contract, so take it for what it's worth). First, though the alleged infringer isn't named, there seem to be two possibilities given they date it as 2006 - Nelly Furtado's Maneater was apparently influenced by it, and it was sampled by the Ying Yang Twins in their song Dangerous. I would have hoped both of these would be covered by fair use -- Oates in fact said of the former, "it's flattering and it makes you feel good because you think you've influenced a new generation of musicians." The second is that litigation should be a tool of last resort, and a lawsuit over someone not suing isn't exactly in line with that sentiment.

In fairness to Hall and Oates, their reasoning for the filing is that Warner/Chappell have failed to act over a "conflict of interest", which implies the publishers were benefiting from the alleged infringement and failing to pass that benefit on. Still, the idea that a label could be liable for failing to sue for copyright infringement is hardly likely to improve the litigation-happy nature of the industry at present.

Douglas Gresham is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Douglas Gresham and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Lovely paintings on books, does anyone know who made these so I can get a proper link?

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How to make water bounce from Edison's desk. Using a high-speed camera setup in the lab, GE scientists captured details of water droplets dancing on amazing superhydrophobic surfaces developed in GE Global Research's Nanotechnology lab. Tao writes -

Hello everyone, I have some exciting videos that I want to share with you! Using a high-speed camera setup in the lab, we can finally capture the details of the water dancing on these amazing superhydrophobic surfaces. We discovered that even when the surfaces had the same contact angle for stationary water droplets, their ability to resist the wetting of impacting droplets could be totally different. In the following three videos, the contact angles of a stationary droplet on all three surfaces are ~150 degree. When an impacting droplet (with the same impact speed) hits on the surfaces, the droplet can either stay on the surface.

Look at the way the water droplet spreads, recoils, breaks into satellite droplets, and completely lifts off... that's what we really want for an impacting-droplet resistant surface! You might wonder what we can do with a cool thing like this? Imagine applications that involve high speed water droplets, such as wind turbine blade, airplane wing, or even just your car in motion. These are just a couple of the exciting possibilities that we are looking at.

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Garabito writes "A spider that had been sent to the International Space Station for a school science program was lost. The arachnid was sent in order to know if spiders can survive and makes webs in space, but now only one spider can be seen in the container. NASA isn't sure where the spider could have gone. I for one, welcome our new arachnid overlords."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's a round up of the "greatest defunct tech mags ever" - it includes one of my favorites, Popular Electronics....

Popular Electronics (1954-1985) - What made it special: Mostly one legendary cover story–the January 1975 one about the MITS Altair microcomputer kit. When Paul Allen saw it on a newsstand in Harvard Square, he showed it to his buddy Bill Gates; the two got so excited that they formed a company to write software for it. Would Microsoft have been founded if Popular Electronics had never existed? Probably, but the mag still deserves the credit for inspiring the biggest software company the world has ever known.

Random factoid: Popular Electronics may have predated Ziff-Davis publications such as PC Magazing and PC/Computing by decades, but it wasn’t Ziff’s first magazine for gadget nuts. That would be Radio News, which it acquired in 1938.

The final days: In 1982, the magazine tried to reinvent itself into a computer magazine under the name Computers and Electronics; it didn’t work. Renaming and refocusing magazines never works. (See: PC/Computing.) Computers and Electronics folded in 1985, but the name was revived in 1989 for a magazine that was later renamed Poptronics before closing again in 2002.

More:

• Scans of Popular Electronics Magazine.
• Popular Electronics @ Moderm Mechanix.

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I thought I had it yesterday, but there was a case I didn't test, and it didn't work, so there's still some more work to do.

What I want:

1. http://apache.twitterland.org/ should be served from the static Apache folder, which is in its virgin state with the "It Works!" page. And it does work.

2. The npr sub-folder should be served by the OPML Editor, and it is.

3. http://test5.twitterland.org/ should also be served by the OPML Editor, but it is not. Instead it's serving the static Apache folder.

Here's a copy of my httpd.conf file. The VirtualHost stuff is at the end of the file.

This is a virgin Apache install, with the modifications made in yesterday's checklist, with one additional change, I've set the DocumentRoot to C:/www.

Da Massive writes "Leading Hollywood film studios Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros Entertainment, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation and Disney Enterprises are suing Australia's second largest ISP, iiNet, saying it's complicit in the infringement of their copyrighted material. According to a statement of claim, "the ISP knows that there are a large number of customers who are engaging in continuing infringements of copyright by using BitTorrent file sharing technology"."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wow - Disney and NASA have teamed up for a contest - K-12 kids can name the next Mars Rover. Grand prize is a trip to NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab to sign your name on the real rover!

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FornaxChemica writes "In a surprise move, Google announced today, both on-site and in its blog, that it will permanently shut down its 3D virtual world, Lively, by the end of the year. This makes Lively one of Google's few scrapped products, and one of the most short-lived, too, barely lasting 6 months. No official reason was given, only that Google wants to 'prioritize [its] resources and focus more on [its] core search, ads and apps business.' Lively might have taken too much and given back too little, even by Google's standards."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's pretty much a rite of passage for any tech company these days, as you get larger and more recognized, some company that has an overly broad and probably obvious patent will sue you for patent infringement. For the company in question, the lawsuit is as much a publicity event as it is an attempt to squeeze revenue from an actual innovator. The latest example of this is with an Ohio company no one's heard of called Leader Technologies, who is suing Facebook for patent infringement, and was kind enough to send out a press release announcing this before Facebook even got to see the lawsuit. Clearly, this is a publicity stunt.

As for the patent itself, it basically describes the rather obvious process of associating a piece of data with multiple categories. It's almost surprising that the company is suing Facebook instead of Google. While I'm not a heavy Facebook user, I'm not sure where Facebook uses such a system. Google, however, has made widespread use of a similar idea with its Gmail "labels." The idea is that rather than sorting data into a specific folder or category, it can be associated with multiple categories. If that seems rather obvious and ridiculously broad, well, that's the patent system for you these days.

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Tour of a frozen pizza factory, it only takes a few people to run it and it makes over 2 million pizzas a week...

While many retailers are feeling the pinch, the food industry is prospering with convenience food proving to be a popular item for many families who are eating out less than before.

Two factories in the Irish Republic produce more than 150 million frozen pizzas a year.

Product development manager Ciara Morgan gave a tour round the Goodfella's pizza site in Naas.

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The Vienna vegetable orchestra shares video of their shopping, creation, and performance processes. The included concert footage is from a benefit for the Spanish Vegetable Workers Union.

More:
Carved carrot clarinet
&
Make music with veggies

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This project shows how to use a MiniPOV3 as an AVR programmer. Read more about this build at the link below.

Using a MiniPOV3 as an AVR programmer

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ric482 writes "With the release of the Mozilla Foundation's 2007 financial report, questions have been raised by the IRS who are due to perform an audit on the non-profit organization behind the massively popular Firefox browser. Last year the Foundation received $66 million of its total $75 million revenue (88 percent) from search engine maestro's Google, so the IRS are looking for blood over the organizations tax exempt status. Back in 2006, Mozilla got $59.5 million from Google — around 85 percent of the organizations revenue. Google and Mozilla are part of a 'you scratch my back, I'll pay your bills' sort of agreement with the Google search bar firmly placed in the toolbar, and on the default homepage. Things were a bit rocky a couple of months back when Google unveiled the Beta-run of its Chrome browser, but Mozilla and Google hugged it out and sealed a deal that will last for a further three years. That deal will expire in November 2011."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Switch closes window, turns on heat for early riser - Modern Mechanix, 1932.

THERE would be fewer people late for work these winter mornings if the room were warm enough to permit arising in comfort, but a warm room is impossible if we keep the windows up to scare the T. B. bugs away. That is, it was impossible until the inventive genius of G. A. Brewer, a sophomore at Western Reserve Academy, came to the rescue of himself at least. The alarm clock wakes Mr. Brewer, even as you and I. But does Mr. Brewer throw the clock out the window and pull the covers over his head? He does not! He merely reaches over and throws a switch, which closes the window and turns on the radiator. Give us the combination, Mr. Brewer.

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The Long Awaited, Foundling - Patricia Piccinini’s silicone sculptures via io9.

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Here's a simple project that uses three pennies as anchors for the various parts of a radio build. Check out the link below for instructions and parts list for building this device.

Three Penny Radio

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geekmansworld writes "From the Washington Post, 'An international team of scientists has reconstructed more than three-quarters of the genome of the woolly mammoth using DNA extracted from balls of hair, the first time this has been accomplished for an extinct species.' Who wants a pet mammoth?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This has been covered before, of course, but it's always good to see more research on the subject. The MacArthur Foundation has just released Mizuko Ito's latest study about online socializing, and found that it's an important and healthy part of youth communications these days, and politicians and parents who freak out over the amount of time kids spend chatting with each other online are overreacting. Hopefully, with more studies like this, we can get politicians to stop trying to ban social networks in school, and recognize that it can be a healthy part of the way kids communicate.

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Reading the news it's not clear if we're going to give Detroit the money to keep them going for a while longer. Pretty sure we can't afford not to, and of course they'll be coming back for more next year, and that's probably a good thing, cause it's time to make some changes. We need to own them for a while so they start working for us not continuing to feed our oil habit and keeping their buddies at Exxon-Mobil's profits high.

And they have to retire their fleet of corporate jets. And all their execs take pay cuts down to less than $1 million per year. If they choose to quit, so be it and good riddance. And since we're going to own them, a new rule -- no more commuting from Seattle to work in Detroit for the CEOs. We're bailing them out not because we think they've done anything remotely like a good job, we're doing it so that we don't have to feed and house their remaining employees and bail out their suppliers when they go bankrupt. We're doing it to save our country, not to save the auto industry as its currently configured, which is rotten and dangerously short-sighted.

I just got a briefing from Frontline, a show that aired just before the election called Heat, about global warming. Lots of interesting stuff in there, all of which must be taken, of course, with a grain of salt. But if you believe them, Detroit had a Prius before Toyota did, funded by the government, but it never went into production. The Prius was a response by Toyota to a US initiative to increase gas mileage. They took our money in Detroit, but never shipped the damn car. Now they're rebooting their effort to produce a hybrid, and get this -- they're starting from scratch. The bastards threw away the R&D we paid for. Oy. So much for trusting them with our money. Can't do it.

But we also can't jump off the cliff. We'll have Hoovervilles in every shopping mall. When you go to the supermarket the shelves will be empty. It's already happening at some local retailers. When the economy fails, distributors go out of business, then the manufacturers the distributors stiffed, and all of a sudden even if you have money in the bank you can't find food to buy. You turn up the thermostat and there's no heat. Old people and children and people with chronic diseases die when we get there. Perhaps you have some people like that in your family. Perhaps you're one of those people?

If you've ever been to the Third World, or parts of the US that are the Third World like the South Bronx and New Orleans and (I'm told) parts of Detroit -- you owe it to yourself to find out what that's like. Because if you're stupid enough to think that letting Detroit fall off the cliff somehow won't take you and your family with it, you need to get educated, fast.

I'd start with watching the Frontline episode about global warming and see if that doesn't get you thinking. Then, after we give them the $25 billion, when they come back in (say) February, we'll be ready with a plan for them to execute. And they won't be coming to Washington on their corporate jets next time. We need to cut our oil consumption, fast, and they need to cut the fat. Let's get going everyone.

PS: Some people say they should go into bankruptcy, and I'd be willing to make that a condition for the companies to receive government loans. If they can get by without the loan, fantastic. If they can get a bank to give them a loan without going bankrupt, even better. I might also add the requirement that while the companies are receiving our money, their CEOs take the pay cuts outlined above. You don't like it? Quit. We'll keep taking resignations until one of your execs is willing to roll up his or her sleeves for the cause. Taking government money should be a painful process. They've gotten accustomed to our bailouts and keeping their corporate jets -- it must be factored in their planning that we're soft touches. That's got to stop.

Demand for sewing machines seems to be going up in the UK...

Tesco has also reported a surge in the number of sewing machines and in shoe cleaning equipment as consumers look to cherish their clothes and shoes, rather than let them fall apart. Julia Dudrenec, at the Welwyn Garden City outlet of John Lewis, said: "There are many first-timers coming into the haberdashery and dress fabrics departments asking for advice on how to create their own gifts. "Some shoppers are being very creative, stitching fashion bags and skirts from old jeans, buying simple cotton bags and embellishing them with buttons, feathers and sequins with the new trend for "craft couture" really gathering momentum." Last month peers on the Science and Technology Committee called for a return to post-war thriftiness with an attack on 'fast fashion'. They criticised the rising popularity of High Street clothes which are so inexpensive that there is no incentive to repair them. At the Paris fashion shows this month Dame Vivienne Westwood championed clothes created from off-cuts. "There is status in wearing your favourites over and over again until they grow old or fall apart," she wrote. "Make necklaces out of safety pins, shawls from blankets, tablecloths, curtains or towels", the notes suggested. 'Make Do And Mend' first came to prominence during the Second World War, when it was the title of a pamphlet published in 1943 by the Ministry of Information. The guide gave household tips on how to save food and mend clothes on the cheap.

More: Craft - Volume 3 - Anatomy of a Sewing Machine (Page 36). Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Crafts | Digg this!

Watches made from Apollo 11 stuff... via NOTCOT.

Forget diamonds - one Swiss watchmaker is betting on watches made from moon dust, parts of the Apollo 11 rocket and bits of spacesuits to capture consumer cash as an economic slow down bites.

More than 600 watchmakers have the Swiss brand stamp, so Geneva-based Romain Jerome aims to use "inaccessible materials" to set its products apart from rivals such as Richemont's Vacheron Constantin and independent watchmaker Patek Philippe.

"We chose the space conquest," he said. "Going to the moon was the biggest adventure of human kind."

The group will make 1969 watches - matching the year of Neil Armstrong's and Buzz Aldrin's first journey to the moon - for the "Moon Dust-DNA" collection.

The watches, which start at $US15,000 and can cost as much as $US500,000, will be launched in Geneva on Wednesday and presented to customers at next year's Baselworld, the largest annual fair for the watch and jewelry industry.

Cool idea and everything, I want moon dust and space stuff to be so common that they're not luxury items. How does one acquire moon dust? Does NASA even sell it to anyone? Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!

"Monsieur Houdin, n'oebliez pas votre oiseau!" is a mechatronic sculpture of a bird with an eagle skull perched on an oversize leather glove. Pretty interesting idea for a bot and pretty creepy as well, too bad it's past Halloween.

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The Digital Youth Project, a MacArthur-funded three year, 22 case study, $3.3 million ethnographic study of what kids are doing online, has wound up and published its results. The project was undertaken by the eminent sociologist Mimi Ito and her talented colleagues (including the incomparable danah boyd) and is the largest and most comprehensive study of young peoples' internet use ever undertaken in the US.

The conclusions are sane, compassionate, and compelling: in a nutshell, the "serious" stuff we all hope kids will do online (researching papers and so on) are only possible within a framework of "hanging out, messing around and geeking out." That is to say, all the "time-wasting" social stuff kids do online are key to their explorations and education online.

Ito and her team establish a taxonomy of social activity, dividing it first into "peer-driven" and "interest-driven" -- the former being what kids do with their real-world friends, the latter being the niche interests that drive them to locate other people who are as fascinated as they are by whatever brand of esoterica they fancy.

Within these two categories, the researchers break things down further into "hanging out" (undirected, social activities), "messing around" (tinkering with media, networks and technologies) and "geeking out" (delving deep into subjects based on global communities of interest) and for each one, they describe the successful and unsuccessful techniques deployed by parents and educators to direct kids' activities.

All this is explained in a crisp, 55-page white paper, a snappy two-pager, and a full-length book called (appropriately), "Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media." All three are available as free downloads, naturally, and the book can also be purchased as a physical object in a year when it's published.

This project is the best set of research-driven recommendations and observations about young peoples' use of technology I've seen -- it's the perfect antidote to the scare stories of "internet addiction" and pedophiles stalking MySpace, and the endless refrain about "kids today." If you care about kids and want to understand how they use technology and why, this is a must-read.

Two-pager, White paper, Book: Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out (download), Digital Youth homepage

Howard Zinn's remarkable book, A People's History of the United States tells the underside of American history, the stories of everyday people who were on the losing side of America's prosperity and expansion, from the indigenous people and slaves to the conquered people, conscriptees and refugees. People who demanded, but did not receive, justice.

A companion to this book is this CD, "Readings from Voices of a People's History of the United States" -- a collection of famous speeches from people who held America to the standard it set, and found it wanting. These are inspiring and infuriating, and are expertly read by a cast of talented voice-actors including Danny Glover ("The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro -- Frederick Douglass"); Paul Robeson, Jr. ("Ballad of Roosevelt -- Langston Hughes"); Wallace Shawn ("Why We Fight -- Vito Russo"); Marisa Tomei ("It's Time the Antiwar Choir Started Singing -- Cindy Sheehan"); John Sayles ("Comments on the Moro Massacre -- Mark Twain") and many others.

These are the words of people who refused to accept injustice as inevitable, who demanded better. Someone once said, "All countries fail to live up to their ideals; the ideals that America fails to live up to are nobler than most." I agree with that sentiment. The liberty and justice guaranteed by America's foundational documents are a high standard to meet, and if the country is to live up to it, it must be held to account by those who suffer as a result of its failures.

Readings from Voices of a People's History of the United States

See also: Howard Zinn's "A People's History of American Empire" graphic novel

This is a really industrial looking remote shutter release for your camera. I like the idea of being able to trigger the shutter with your foot. [Thanks Ross]

More about DIY: USB camera shutter release

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Just a few months ago, when Google launched its "Lively" 3D chat offering, I questioned Google's strategy, as it didn't seem to offer anything different or compelling. Some people here disagreed, and believed Google would be able to turn the service into something compelling, but that appears not to be. Since the launch, to be honest, I can't recall ever hearing about Lively again -- and had pretty much forgotten it existed. And, indeed, less than six months after launching it, Google has killed off Lively, admitting that the experiment was something of a failure.

There seems to be a growing pattern in figuring out which Google projects are a success and which will fail. When it merely copies something others are doing, as with Lively, it tends not to do very well. When it changes the game, as it did originally with things like Google Maps (the first real AJAXy mapping solution) and Gmail (huge storage and AJAXy front end), then it gets usage. Google's success has always been in reimagining products that people seem to believe are mature, and completely reshaping how people think about those products. That was true with maps (which had been dominated by MapQuest and Yahoo Maps for years) and email... and it was even true in search. People thought the search market was too crowded when Google showed up, but its solution was so different and so much more compelling it got attention. Lively, on the other hand, was a pure me-too play. There are half-a-dozen other offerings that effectively do the same thing. Google didn't give anyone a real reason to use Lively... and, so it shouldn't be too surprising that Lively is now dead.

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In its special website section devoted to 30 years since Jonestown, the San Francisco Chronicle has republished a copy of a 1977 report on Jim Jones and People's Temple by Marshall Kilduff and Phil Tracy. The investigative report marked a turning point for People's Temple, an arc towards the catastrophic end that would come one year later. Before this exposé was published in New West magazine (because back then, the Chronicle's editor refused to run it), Jim Jones enjoyed what amounted to broad support and protection from news organizations, powerful social figures, and politicians who saw the influential preacher as a "deliverer of votes."

Collectively, they turned a blind eye to mounting reports of coercion, corruption, and physical and sexual abuse within his church. And they bear some responsibility for the tragedy that followed.

I agree with what one sfgate.com commenter wrote about the two tenacious reporters who fought to produce this piece:

30 years on, this is a piece that should be required reading by all journalism students at any level. To quote the 1998 article on why this was published in New West rather than the Chronicle, "Kilduff said that when he later proposed a story on Jim Jones, (San Francisco Chronicle city editor) Gavin said 'we had done a profile and that was sufficient.' I went at him several times, and said I thought we should do more. He didn't see it that way.'" Jones had co-opted the powers that were in the City, including the Chronicle, and only the persistence of Kilduff began to reveal the horrible truth.

Three decades later, the whole article is a must-read. I'll paste the final two paragraphs here:

[S]omething must be said about the numerous public officials and political figures who openly courted and befriended Jim Jones. While it appears that none of the public officials from [California] Governor [Jerry] Brown on down knew about the inner world of Peoples Temple, they have left the impression that they used Jones to deliver votes at election time and never asked any questions. They never asked about the bodyguards. Never asked about the church's locked doors. Never asked why Jones's followers were so obsessively protective of him. And apparently, some never asked because they didn't want to know.

The story of Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple is not over. In fact, it has only begun to be told. If there is any solace to be gained from the tale of exploitation and human foible told by the former temple members in these pages, it is that even such a power as Jim Jones cannot always contain his followers. Those who left had nowhere to go and every reason to fear pursuit. Yet they persevered. If Jones is ever to be stripped of his power, it will not be because of vendetta or persecution, but rather because of the courage of these people who stepped forward and spoke out.

Inside Peoples Temple, Marshall Kilduff and Phil Tracy, Monday, August 1, 1977. (SFGATE.com). Here is a PDF of the original 1977 article (via Jonestown Institute). The SFGate web feature on 30 years after Jonestown includes a number of related features, both archived and new, all well worth reading.

What lesson should we learn from this today? Why does this matter now? Snip from an extensive piece in today's Washington Post by Charles A. Krause, one of the journalists who survived the November, 1978 trip to Jonestown with Congressman Ryan:

Many Jonestown survivors and their families believe that the lessons of Jonestown are to remember and guard against demagogues who use religion as a cover for fraud, deception and imposing their own sometimes dangerous social and political beliefs on their naive and unsuspecting followers.

(...) It was that theme that dominated Tuesday's memorial service at the mass grave in Oakland. In an emotional and highly charged address, the Rev. Amos Brown, bishop at San Francisco's Third Baptist Church and president of the San Francisco NAACP, warned the mourners to beware of religious leaders who claim to have all the answers and insinuate themselves into politics, as Jones did so effectively in San Francisco.

"Good religion elevates folk, it teaches people to think for themselves. Good religion isn't authoritarian. Good religion isn't bigoted," he said. "Open up your eyes, America. America isn't a theocracy, it's a democracy. . . . And that is the lesson we must learn from Jonestown."

Boing Boing posts on Jim Jones, Jonestown and People's Temple:

- Jonestown, 30 years later: original audio recordings from People's Temple and Guyana.
- Jonestown, 30 years later: Life and Death of People's Temple (PBS video).
- Jonestown, 30 years later: interview with a survivor (video)
- Jonestown, 30 years later: From Silver Lake To Suicide
- Jonestown, 30 years later: "Father Cares," NPR documentary from 1981
- Raven: The Untold Story of The Reverend Jim Jones and His People
- Andrew Brandou on his Jonestown paintings

The single most comprehensive online public resource for original source material related to Jonestown is Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple, a website sponsored by San Diego State University's Department of Religious Studies. The site includes scanned documents, photographs, first-person testimonies and reflections, and a periodic email newsletter with updates on research, and the whereabouts of those who survived.

The section I've spent the most time in is the Audiotape Project Index, which includes copies of original recordings made by People's Temple members in California and Guyana.

Some of the cassette recordings at the SDSU website were retrieved from Jonestown by the FBI; others are in the possession of the FCC, which monitored radio transmissions from the compound. I'm not clear on the specifics, but it seems many of the original recordings in government possession are lost, missing, or still classified and unavailable to the public. Some ham radio operators once maintained a website documenting their battle to get the FCC to release more shortwave radio recordings from Jonestown, but the website is now offline.

Here is a list of recording transcripts and summaries at the SDSU Jonestown Project website. They include:

* Peoples Temple audiotapes collected by FBI
* Tapes of Peoples Temple radio conversations collected by FCC
* The Miscellaneous Audiotapes link includes tapes donated from private individuals and collections.

Three examples of the recordings in this collection:

* FBI #Q 042, "The Death Tape", made in Jonestown on 18 November 1978, during the mass deaths. Warning: the audio is very disturbing. You can hear children dying. Here is the audio at archive.org.
* FBI #Q594: In this tape recorded 5 days before the mass deaths, Jones and followers fantasize how they will torture and kill People's Temple defectors.
* FBI #Q174: music and entertainment performed by Peoples Temple members in October, 1978. An announcer speaks: "And now, ladies and gentlemen. We’re glad to have you here in Jonestown, Guyana. Sit back and enjoy yourself. We have a brief program. Presenting to you, the Jonestown Express."

The Jonestown Institute website is maintained by Elizabeth Parker, and archivist-historians Fielding McGehee III, and Dr. Rebecca Moore, an SDSU professor of religious studies. Together, they have played an instrumental role in preserving and digitally archiving many important historical documents related to People's Temple at SDSU, and with the California Historical Society. The SDSU site introduction expresses hope that visitors "will come away with an understanding that the story of Jonestown did not start or end on 18 November 1978. Dr. Moore has a personal connection to the tragedy: her two sisters died there. Annie Moore was Jim Jones' nurse, and Carolyn Moore Layton was his lover and lieutenant.

---

RELATED:

* The fact that so many Jonestown-related source materials went missing or remained classified for years has fed much speculation, and many conspiracy theories. This Feral House book includes an interesting essay by Jim Hougan which explores some of the wackier theories, and some of the possible links between Jonestown and various military/government activities involving the US or Guyana.

* Snip from a 1998 CNN item about how the lack of access to documents and audio recordings has fueld rumors of CIA involvement:

Some people believe CIA agents were posing as members of the Peoples Temple cult to gather information; others suggest the agency was conducting a mind-control experiment. In 1980, the House Select Committee on Intelligence determined that the CIA had no advance knowledge of the mass murder-suicide. The year before, the House Foreign Affairs Committee had concluded that cult leader Jim Jones "suffered extreme paranoia."

The committee -- now known as international relations -- released a 782-page report, but kept more than 5,000 other pages secret. Without those documents, it's hard to confirm or refute the speculations that have sprung up around Jonestown, said Melton, who planned to be in Washington Wednesday to ask for the documents' release.

George Berdes, chief consultant to the committee at the time of the investigation, told the San Francisco Chronicle the papers were classified to assure sources' confidentiality, but he thinks it is time to declassify them.

* Loren Coleman has a post up on his Copycat Effect blog about connections between the Jonestown deaths and the murders of then San Francisco political figures Harvey Milk and George Moscone. For some time before the extent of his insanity and destructive activity were known, Jones and his church -- in which most members were black, while most leaders were white -- received expressions of support from left/liberal politicians including Milk and Moscone, and black power activists like Angela Davis and Huey Newton.

---

Boing Boing posts on Jim Jones, Jonestown and People's Temple:

- Jonestown, 30 years Later: Inside People's Temple, the 1977 exposé.
- Jonestown, 30 years later: original audio recordings from People's Temple and Guyana.
- Jonestown, 30 years later: Life and Death of People's Temple (PBS video).
- Jonestown, 30 years later: interview with a survivor (video)
- Jonestown, 30 years later: From Silver Lake To Suicide
- Jonestown, 30 years later: "Father Cares," NPR documentary from 1981
- Raven: The Untold Story of The Reverend Jim Jones and His People
- Andrew Brandou on his Jonestown paintings

Oscar sent in this cool looking Arduino powered robot. Apparently it was built by a group of 16 year olds for a soccer competition. The translated site has a lot more information about the ArduSoccerBot.

ArduSoccerBot is a kind of teaching which aims to make a robot soccer (in the style of the RoboCup Junior) using a single USB controller Arduino Diecimila.

More about ArduSoccerBot: Arduino soccer robot

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Next year is going to be a big year folks, we'll see more investment and emphasis on alternative energy than ever before, this will be our "space race" and our "moon landing". The children of today will be the ones who will shape the next decade and the next century. As a parent, a friend, a mentor or just someone who is giving a gift this holiday season - instead of a plastic toy or nik-nak I'm going to ask the you consider giving something that might just spark the attention of a young mind that will be called to solve our energy needs.

We all know we will not be able to sustain a future on a fuel (oil) that's going to eventually go away and/or become more expensive. No one really likes dealing with the Middle East for the most part and other nations like China and India are going to drive demand through the roof, we're going to need to diversify our energy needs. It's not going to be a lot of us reading MAKE right now, it's going to be the children of folks reading MAKE.

Solar, wind, biodiesel, nuclear - these are all things we explore in the pages of MAKE, online, in our videos and with the kits we carefully select for our Maker Shed. We're not going to get out this current crisis with the same thinking that got us here, we need to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers, it's going to take decades - 8 to 12 year olds today will be the ones who will need to rise to the challenge. Will our education system do enough? No - we'll all need to do something. It's a daunting task and a seemingly impossible challenge, and that's why I know we'll do it - if it was easy, it wouldn't be interesting.

Entrepreneurs will see this as a wonderful opportunity to start new and amazing companies, I'm positive there are going to be more incentives to do so starting next year. We're talking jobs, new industries, tax breaks - it's going to happen, but everyone needs to do something. It might just be tinkering around with a solar panel in your neighborhood to get folks interested, it might be modding the Prius you just bought - a new era in energy independence is going to happen, not overnight, but I am 100% positive it will happen and it will be makers (and their children) who lead the way.

I've put together a gift guide of all the cool and interesting alternative energy kits and resources - check it, maybe send it to a few friends... if you think a young person might have what it takes to change the world, this might be the spark that starts it off... People always ask "how can we get started" - this is just one of the ways.

Solarspeeder Kit
A quick Solaroller that can cover 3 meters (10 feet) in under 40 seconds in direct sunlight. Simple to construct and a great project for beginners!
Price: $25.00

Also check out:

• Solarengine kit.
• Solarengine Upgrade kit.

Keep reading for a ton more alternative energy, DIY kits and resources for building the future!

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Danny is a frequent user at the Boston Fab Lab. He has done some great work to figure out the laser cutter. In nice Fab Lab community fashion, Danny has encouraged and tutored many other lab users on how to get the most out of the tools in the lab.

The Boston Fab Lab is housed in the South End Technology Center, and is supported by the Center for Bits and Atoms at the MIT Media Lab. The lab has open hours on Thursday evenings and Saturday afternoons. If you would like to get your hands on some of the tools you have been hearing about in Make, then it may be worth a visit.

Mostly staffed by volunteers, the Fab Lab community depends on the cooperative effort of people helping people. Once you know how to do something, you pass along the experience to some other person, and share your ideas and techniques. You may also want to take a look at some of the documentation created by users of the Boston Fab Lab. There are also some photos in the Boston Fab Lab Flickr Pool.

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Dean sent in this really interesting build of a VW Microbus model. The original kit was a VW Beetle, but not much of the final vehicle was original. Click through the website to see a lot more information about the build.

More about Modifying a VW Beetle model

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Today, Microsoft launched the New Xbox Experience for Xbox Live. The list of new features includes the streaming of TV shows and movies through Netflix, the ability to install games to the HDD, an avatar system, and the Community Games platform. The launch itself was shaky at first, but most issues have been smoothed out. Sony-owned Columbia Pictures immediately pulled their movie selection, though it may return when a licensing deal gets worked out. Halo 3 developer Bungie pointed out that not all games will run faster when installed to a HDD because of the way the games already interact with the drive.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What's inside a Canon 17-85 lens? All of this!

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We've discussed, in the past, the infamous Bayh-Dole Act, which tried to push universities to patent more of their research, with the idea that it would make research more commercializable. In fact, the unintended consequences were to significantly harm university research. Universities quickly set up "technology transfer" offices, with the idea of selling off patents for tons of money, but the vast majority of universities discovered that such technology transfer offices cost a lot more than they made, and so they were a drain on university resources (you know, which could have gone to basic research). On top of that, the new focus on patenting everything caused researchers to be much more afraid to share ideas and concepts with colleagues, greatly diminishing the value of research or the ability of researchers to explore other areas where colleagues might have already applied for patents, for fear of "infringing."

However, it looks like Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures, which we've discussed at length, in the past, is looking to take advantage of this situation. With so many university technology transfer offices losing money, IV has been going around and signing deals with universities. Basically, IV gives those tech transfer offices some money upfront, allowing IV to effectively add each university's patent pool to its own portfolio that it uses to go around demanding hundreds of millions of dollars from companies to "protect" them against any future lawsuits.

Effectively, the end result is less actual research being done at universities, while some guys who don't actually build anything get rich. And, oh yeah, the companies that actually do stuff are poorer. Doesn't something seem highly suspect about this scenario?

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I love the Buddha Machine, a little plastic ambient music generator that looks like a transitor radio -- put two or three in a room together and play them at the same time and you get something haunting, bent and hypnotic. Now there's a new version, with more loops, colors, and sound-tweaking options.

The Buddha Box 2 features nine new ambient sound loops. The new selection is noticeably more diverse than those of its predecessor--a welcome change. One of my biggest issues with the first incarnation of the box was its relatively limited aural palate. The selections on number 2 should fit a wider range of ambient-suitable scenarios. For further variation, the box also includes a wheel that bends the loops' pitch, to help you tailor the sound perfectly to its surroundings.

Hands On: Buddha Machine 2 (Thanks, Crosshatch!)

See also: Buddha Machine: spiritual, generative transistor radio

Writer/game designer/film-maker Jim Munroe sez,

IFComp 2008, The 14th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition and keeper of the old-school text-game torch, recently declared its winners. Bronze went to my game, Everybody Dies, silver went to Eric Eve's Nightfall, and the gold went to Jeremy Freese's Violet.

Everybody Dies puts you in the shoes of a chubby metalhead who has smoked his last smoke, with illustrations by Michael Cho; Nightfall drops you into a mysterious city where everyone's fled before the approaching Enemy; and in Violet your struggle to write your dissertation is aided by the most charming voice-in-your-head character in history.

All 35 of the comp entries, playable with interpreters, are available at ifcomp.org, but Violet and Everybody Dies can be played online

Congrats, Jim!

Everybody Dies Takes Bronze at IFComp, Everybody Dies review at Play This Thing! (Thanks, Jim!)

Bell Canada, the giant Canadian telco, is before the Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission over its throttling practices, whereby it secretly corrupted the download sessions of its customers. The company also interfered with the connections initiated by its wholesale customers -- ISPs that leased lines from the giant and re-sold them to end-users. Bell said that it had to cripple everyone's connections, or the people who bought network access from its wholesale customers would get a better service than its own retail customers, which would be "unfair" to retail customers. Steve sez,

According to the CBC, after twice delaying the ruling, the CRTC will make a landmark decision on the Bell Throttling case by 9 a.m. tomorrow. The decision will determine whether Bell Canada has violated the Telecommunications Act by slowing down the Internet access it sells to wholesale customers.

Steve Anderson from SaveOurNet.ca coalition will be available for comment.

Steve said today, “This decision has huge implications for Internet service competition online innovation, consumer choice and free speech. The biggest battle over the Internet is yet to come, but this ruling will signal whether the CRTC is willing to take action to put Canada on a path that supports online innovation, and online choice. Otherwise the CRTC is abdicating its responsibility to Canadian people and putting us on a path towards a more closed Internet defined by the interests of big telecom companies.”

Every time I'm asked whether I'd consider moving back to Canada sometime, the answer is the same: "Not until the country gets some real telcom regulation." I earn my living on the Internet. I can't afford to live somewhere where the telcos get to throw away your packets if they don't fit their business model.

CRTC to Make Landmark Decision on Internet Freedom (Thanks, Steve!)

Buying an Apple computer? Get ready to throw away your monitor, over and over again. New Apple hardware is shipping with "HDCP" anti-copying technology that prevents showing some video on "non-compliant" monitors. Best part: the list of "compliant" monitors will change over time: the monitor you buy today can be "revoked" tomorrow and stop working.

Slashdot says that Apple's added "copyright protection" to its video. But copyright law isn't violated when you watch a movie on an "unapproved" monitor. This isn't about enforcing copyright law, it's about giving a small handful of movie companies a veto over hardware designs.

Yesterday, our buddy David Chartier at Ars and Sam Oliver at AppleInsider both publicized an issue that's been burning up the support boards for a while now: iTunes video rentals and purchases in HD are flagged for HDCP control, and in cooperation with the new Mini DisplayPort connector on the MacBook and MacBook Pro unibody models, those movies and TV shows are refusing to play back on non-compliant external displays.

In this case, 'compliant' means HDMI or recent-vintage DVI, but even monitors or TVs that support HDCP may not properly negotiate with the DisplayPort connector to give iTunes and QuickTime the all-clear signal (if so, quitting and relaunching iTunes once the display is hooked up may clear the playback hold).

Equally annoying: HDCP is only supposed to apply to 'high-value' digital streams, meaning standard-def purchases and rentals on the iTunes store should be out of scope... but some reports indicate that both the HD and SD instances are flagged, blocking playback on anything but the laptop's internal display or a straight-thru HDMI connection. Argh!

MacBook Pro users getting bitten by HDCP (Thanks, Denver Jewelry Guy!)

coondoggie writes "NASA is trying to decide between eight space exploration missions that include further exploring Venus and comet composition as well landing on an asteroid or examining the space around Jupiter. The space agency today began accepting solicitations for these space exploration opportunities and will ultimately pick one of them to begin perusing in 2009 with a launch date targeted at 2018. The solicitations and ultimate expedition are part of NASA's New Frontiers program, which has as its main objective to explore the solar system with medium-class spacecraft missions that will conduct high-quality, focused scientific investigations, NASA said. The first New Frontiers mission was selected in 2003 and will result in the launch of Juno, a Jupiter polar orbiter mission set to blast off in 2011."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ken Moore, a user experience designer at Google, created a very convincing Theremin simulator using a Wiimote and a Roland JV-1080 synth.

I've seen a few Theremin simulators that use accelerometer data, in both Wiimote and iPhone form, but this is the first I've seen that does a good job of recreating an authentic Theremin experience in all its 50s sci-fi awesomeness. Using some IR gloves and the Wiimote's CCD, one hand's horizontal movement controls pitch and the other hand's vertical movement controls volume.

At just $35, the Wiimote is an AMAZING piece of technology. It has an infrared camera in it which tracks the position up to 4 infrared light sources. So I bought a pair of leather gloves, wired up a couple infrared LEDs to 1.5 volt batteries, and poked an LED through the tip of the index finger of each glove.

Then, I connected my Wiimote to my computer (the Wiimote also supports Bluetooth connections): building on top of Brian Peek's Wiimote hacking software library, I wrote a program which detects the two infrared gloves and converts the vertical position of the left hand to volume, and converts the horizontal position of the right hand to pitch. That information is then sent via MIDI to the synthesizer which creates the actual sound.

One of the more interesting possibilities with this setup is that by adjusting the synthesizer, you can use a Theremin-like interface to control a huge number of effects, not just the standard sci-fi sine wave. I wonder if Léon Theremin would approve.

Wii Theremin

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Ken Moore, a user experience designer at Google, created a very convincing Theremin simulator using a Wiimote and a Roland JV-1080 synth.

I've seen a few Theremin simulators that use accelerometer data, in both Wiimote and iPhone form, but this is the first I've seen that does a good job of recreating an authentic Theremin experience in all its 50s sci-fi awesomeness. Using some IR gloves and the Wiimote's CCD, one hand's horizontal movement controls pitch and the other hand's vertical movement controls volume.

At just $35, the Wiimote is an AMAZING piece of technology. It has an infrared camera in it which tracks the position up to 4 infrared light sources. So I bought a pair of leather gloves, wired up a couple infrared LEDs to 1.5 volt batteries, and poked an LED through the tip of the index finger of each glove.

Then, I connected my Wiimote to my computer (the Wiimote also supports Bluetooth connections): building on top of Brian Peek's Wiimote hacking software library, I wrote a program which detects the two infrared gloves and converts the vertical position of the left hand to volume, and converts the horizontal position of the right hand to pitch. That information is then sent via MIDI to the synthesizer which creates the actual sound.

One of the more interesting possibilities with this setup is that by adjusting the synthesizer, you can use a Theremin-like interface to control a huge number of effects, not just the standard sci-fi sine wave. I wonder if Léon Theremin would approve.

Wii Theremin

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Thirty years ago this week, nearly a thousand adults and children lost their lives in Jonestown, Guyana. The settlement was also known as "Peoples Temple Agricultural Project", and was formed by followers of the Reverend Jim Jones and Peoples Temple.

Today, some refer to the mass deaths as suicide, others murder. We still don't really know all the facts of what happened, or how, or exactly why. Autopsies were botched, records and forensic evidence were mis-handled, and many of the US government's documents remain classified, out of reach of FOIA requests.

But we do understand that most of the people who died on November 18, 1978 drank fruit-flavored Flavor-Aid laced with a variety of intoxicants and poisons: Valium, chloral hydrate, and cyanide. The victims included hundreds of children. Many of the corpses, including children, bore puncture wounds indicating they received lethal cyanide injections. Adults who resisted were injected with cyanide or killed by gushot.

Jones' followers had moved from their Northern California base to the South American jungle the year before. The promise: they'd build a utopian, agrarian, interracial community in Guyana, which had a Socialist goverment at the time. Jonestown was to be free from racism, sexism, and ageism, and founded on communist principles. Jones told his followers to think of him as a living incarnation of Jesus Christ, and God.

Over the past 30 years, many documentaries, books, and articles have been produced about Jones, Peoples Temple, and Jonestown. I'll be blogging pointers to some of them today.

I want to start with the one I've returned to again and again -- a radio documentary from 1981 that for me, also defines what radio journalism can achieve. "Father Cares: The Last of Jonestown," was co-written by my NPR colleague Noah Adams. Here's a snip from the original introduction on npr.org:

In the months preceding the tragedy, Jim Jones and his People’s Temple followers recorded their tho ughts, their problems and their aspirations. The hundreds of hours of audio tape form the basis of [this] NPR documentary (...) written by James Reston, Jr and Noah Adams, and produced by Deborah Amos. It was based on the tapes Reston acquired under the Freedom of Information Act, and won most major broadcast awards including the Dupont Col umbia Award, the National Headliner Award and the Prix Italia.

Father Cares: The Last of Jonestown recaptures the final months for the People’s Temple cult. After problems arose for the group in San Francisco, they moved to the South American jungle during the 1970's. In 1978, reports of an increasingly hostile and controlling atmosphere by Jones led to a Congressional fact-finding mission into the cult. As the group, led by Rep. Leo J. Ryan (D-Calif.), was preparing to leave they were ambushed. Ryan, three American journalists and a Peoples Temple defector were killed. A dozen other people were injured. The incident was just hours prior to the deaths of the cult members.

---

Here's the web page for Father Cares: The Last of Jonestown, with audio links. Here is the direct *.ram link for the complete 90 minute program (requires Real Audio). The website for this related NPR feature, produced in 2003, also includes 3 direct audio urls for "Father Cares," broken into 45 minute chunks (requires Real Audio or Windows Media Player). Another powerful, related NPR piece: Noah Adams talks with Deborah Layton, author of Seductive Poison: A Jonestown Survivor's Story of Life and Death in the People's Temple.

---

Here is more on producer Deborah Amos. Here is James Reston's website.

You may also want to obtain a copy of Reston's book, for which this radio work was, in part, preparatory research: Our Father, Who Art In Hell.

I stayed up all night last Saturday listening to Father Cares in entirety. I really hope you listen to it. It is a profound example of the power of radio as a storytelling medium. It captures the souls of those who died, and those who survived, with a sense of lasting respect and sorrow.

Boing Boing posts on Jim Jones, Jonestown and People's Temple:

- Jonestown, 30 years Later: Inside People's Temple, the 1977 exposé.
- Jonestown, 30 years later: original audio recordings from People's Temple and Guyana.
- Jonestown, 30 years later: Life and Death of People's Temple (PBS video).
- Jonestown, 30 years later: interview with a survivor (video)
- Jonestown, 30 years later: From Silver Lake To Suicide
- Jonestown, 30 years later: "Father Cares," NPR documentary from 1981
- Raven: The Untold Story of The Reverend Jim Jones and His People
- Andrew Brandou on his Jonestown paintings

The LA Weekly published an article by Barry Isaacson about the discovery earlier this year of a number of letters sent by a Jonestown resident to her parents, who lived in LA's Silver Lake neighborhood.

Phyllis and her family were dead for more than a decade by the time her elderly parents moved out of their house in Silver Lake in 1992. Architectural real estate agents had to bring the exquisite midcentury modern on Micheltorena Street back from the brink of decrepitude before selling it to my wife, Jenny, and me. Handing over the keys, they told us that, according to neighborhood folklore, the Alexanders might have left behind a concealed suitcase containing correspondence from their long-dead daughter and grandchildren. We looked but found nothing, and having been made aware of the circumstances of this family’s demise, we felt reluctant to intrude on an almost unimaginable grief.

But this past February, 10 years after we started to raise a family of our own where the Alexanders had raised theirs, a handyman working on our house emerged from the basement carrying a dusty vinyl briefcase. Inside was an extensive collection of press clippings, evidence of an almost obsessive attempt by the Alexanders to make sense of their daughter’s fatal acts of bad judgment.

In a separate envelope were letters written by Phyllis from San Francisco and later from Jonestown, Guyana, where she and her husband had moved with their children in 1975. There were fond letters to their grandparents from Gail and David. The most moving document in the cache was a carbon copy of a painful valediction from Dr. Alexander to Phyllis, written on an old manual typewriter on September 21, 1977. Tenderly, but with eloquent firmness, he reprimands her, perplexed and offended by her embrace of Jim Jones, the deviant cuckoo who had flown into the Alexanders’ nest and whom Phyllis and her fellow Peoples Temple members called “Dad.”

From Silver Lake to Suicide (LA Weekly). Here's a related slideshow in the LA Weekly.

See also this related section of the SDSU Jonestown document archives, "The Chaikin/Alexander Letters," with PDFs of the original documents.

Boing Boing posts on Jim Jones, Jonestown and People's Temple:

- Jonestown, 30 years Later: Inside People's Temple, the 1977 exposé.
- Jonestown, 30 years later: original audio recordings from People's Temple and Guyana.
- Jonestown, 30 years later: Life and Death of People's Temple (PBS video).
- Jonestown, 30 years later: interview with a survivor (video)
- Jonestown, 30 years later: From Silver Lake To Suicide
- Jonestown, 30 years later: "Father Cares," NPR documentary from 1981
- Raven: The Untold Story of The Reverend Jim Jones and His People
- Andrew Brandou on his Jonestown paintings

Current TV contributor Charmosh produced this interview with Jordan Vilchez, a Jonestown survivor who lives in the Bay Area. In 1971, cult leader Jim Jones established the headquarters of the Peoples Temple on Geary Boulevard in San Francisco, CA. The building is now a US Post Office. Vilchez, a survivor of mass deaths in Jonestown, Guyana in 1978, remembers what it was like in the early days of the Peoples Temple. (thanks, Gabriel del Rio)

Boing Boing posts on Jim Jones, Jonestown and People's Temple:

- Jonestown, 30 years Later: Inside People's Temple, the 1977 exposé.
- Jonestown, 30 years later: original audio recordings from People's Temple and Guyana.
- Jonestown, 30 years later: Life and Death of People's Temple (PBS video).
- Jonestown, 30 years later: interview with a survivor (video)
- Jonestown, 30 years later: From Silver Lake To Suicide
- Jonestown, 30 years later: "Father Cares," NPR documentary from 1981
- Raven: The Untold Story of The Reverend Jim Jones and His People
- Andrew Brandou on his Jonestown paintings

Of the many television and film documentaries produced on Jonestown, the 2006 PBS American Experience feature Jonestown: Life and Death of People's Temple, directed by Stanley Nelson, seems to me the most sensitive and comprehensive. I read somewhere that Jim Jones' adopted son -- who appears in this film -- also feels that way. Google Video embed above, and here's the link. Amazon Link to purchase DVD, and here is the PBS website, with additional background.

Boing Boing posts on Jim Jones, Jonestown and People's Temple:

- Jonestown, 30 years Later: Inside People's Temple, the 1977 exposé.
- Jonestown, 30 years later: original audio recordings from People's Temple and Guyana.
- Jonestown, 30 years later: Life and Death of People's Temple (PBS video).
- Jonestown, 30 years later: interview with a survivor (video)
- Jonestown, 30 years later: From Silver Lake To Suicide
- Jonestown, 30 years later: "Father Cares," NPR documentary from 1981
- Raven: The Untold Story of The Reverend Jim Jones and His People
- Andrew Brandou on his Jonestown paintings

There were a lot of sad posts today on the blog related to 30 years since Jonestown this week, so as is the tradition, and as our commenters have requested: unicorn chaser. (thanks, Takuan)

Here's a reminder that all craft kits in the Maker Shed are 10% off until the end of November! There are great gifts in there for your kids, your friends, and any other crafters you know. Use promo code CRAFTER at checkout to take advantage of this deal.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Crafts | Digg this!

Here's a reminder that all craft kits in the Maker Shed are 10% off until the end of November! There are great gifts in there for your kids, your friends, and any other crafters you know. Use promo code CRAFTER at checkout to take advantage of this deal.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Crafts | Digg this!