Pop surrealist David Stoupakis has a solo exhibition of his phantasmagoric paintings opening tomorrow, December 13, at Corey Helford Gallery in Culver City, California. Corey Helford Gallery has invited BB readers to preview the entire exhibition, titled "These Predicaments" at the link below. Seen above, "Soup" (oil on canvas, 36" x 72"). I wish I could see these gorgeous paintings in person! From the show description:

For his second solo exhibition at the Gallery, Stoupakis parlays his talent for the supernatural and macabre into dramatic narratives that reveal symbolic turning points and unexpected dilemmas. A delicate balance of childhood innocence and haunting imagery, the series of oil-on-panel paintings and graphite drawings recounts grim fairytales of the decadent and demure. Marking a new direction for the artist, Stoupakis employs a brighter color palette than before and will unveil his largest piece to date for the exhibition. The reception for “These Predicaments” takes place on Saturday, December 13, and the evening will include music scored by composer Geoff Gersh. Open to the public, the exhibition will be on view until December 31, 2008.

David Stoupakis Preview (username: preview, password: preview 25)

An anonymous reader writes "Windows-based netbooks aren't too expensive to be ruled out of the Aussie government's billion dollar promise to give a laptop to every school-aged child, according to several education departments. The admission follows an earlier report that open source machines based on Ubuntu or Mandriva are the only option to deliver up to four million computers to students for under $2 billion. Microsoft itself claimed it will keep costs per unit down by hosting a lot of the educational software in the cloud rather than on the netbook devices."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A nice set of hand-carved robot component stamps, posted to the MAKE Flickr pool.

More:

From CRAFT, Volume 02. Access the Digital Edition here. Subscribe here.

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Another installment in Etsy's Handmade Portraits series - this profile of leather-crafter Allison Sattinger provides a look into her making process as well as how she came to start her own brand, Sunny Rising. Great inspiration for those interested in turning their hobby into a business - Handmade Portraits: Sunny Rising Leather

More:
Sustainable wooden jewelry maker

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Noah Shachtman over at WIRED's Danger Room blog has posted a pretty big exclusive. "A Defense Department project, supposedly designed to support U.S. troops, was used instead to channel millions of dollars to personal friends and allies of its chief," he tells Boing Boing. How much you wanna bet we see anything but impunity for the crooks in the outgoing administration responsible for this? Also, what are the underwear perverts doing in that photo above? No, not Rumsfeld, I mean the blue and red guys.

Anyway: here's a snip from Noah's post:

The "America Supports You," or ASY, program was led in a "questionable and unregulated manner," according to a Department of Defense Inspector General report, obtained by Danger Room. At least $9.2 million was "inappropriately transferred" by the project's managers. Much of that money served only to further promote ASY, instead of assisting servicemembers.

In 2004, the office of then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld set up ASY as a six-month effort to showcase the U.S. public's backing for the troops and their families. "If you're serving overseas, and you watch the mainstream media coverage, sometimes you can't tell if America knows you're there," one official overseeing the program says. America Supports You was seen as a way to counteract that sense.

In time, however, the program grew. Pro-troop rallies were organized. Special wristband and dog-tags were made. Special-edition comic books were printed up. Processions were held on the National Mall, on the 9/11 anniversary. Sesame Street characters were enlisted to make DVDs that encouraged families with young children to talk about overseas deployments. America Supports You became a kind of umbrella group for all sorts of charity-related work for servicemembers and military families.

Meanwhile, ASY began to spend millions -- not to help the troops, the Inspector General says, but to help itself.

Exclusive: Pentagon Pro-Troop Group Misspent Millions, Report Says (WIRED Danger Room)

iandoh passes along the news that researchers at Stanford University have completed the first quantitative, scientific comparison of alternative energy solutions by assessing not only their potential for delivering energy for electricity and vehicles, but also their impacts on global warming, human health, energy security, water supply, space requirements, wildlife, water pollution, reliability, and sustainability. Based on their model, they found that the best sources of alternative energy are wind, concentrated solar, and geothermal energy. The worst are nuclear, clean coal, and ethanol-based fuels. In other words, "the options that are getting the most attention are between 25 to 1,000 times more polluting than the best available options."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you live somewhere that will have clear skies tonight, look up; NASA says the full moon will be the biggest of the year. The moon will become full just 4 hours after reaching perigee (when its orbit brings it closest to the Earth), and will be 14% bigger and 30% brighter than other full moons in 2008.

The best time to look is when the Moon is near the horizon. That is when illusion mixes with reality to produce a truly stunning view. For reasons not fully understood by astronomers or psychologists, low-hanging Moons look unnaturally large when they beam through trees, buildings and other foreground objects. On Friday, why not let the "Moon illusion" amplify a full Moon that's extra-big to begin with? The swollen orb rising in the east at sunset may seem so nearby, you can almost reach out and touch it.

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A bipartisan Senate report concluded that decisions by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld were a "direct cause" of inhumane treatment of POWs.

The report, endorsed by Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee, is the most forceful denunciation to date of the role that Rumsfeld and other top officials played in the prisoner abuse scandals of the last five years.

The document also challenges assertions by senior Bush administration officials that the most egregious cases of prisoner mistreatment were isolated incidents of appalling conduct by U.S. troops.

"The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own," the report says.

Instead, the document says, a series of high-level decisions in the Bush administration "conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody."

Of course, the only thing that will happen as a result of this report is that President Bush will give Rummy a medal.

Rumsfeld blamed in detainee abuse scandals

From the MAKE: Flickr pool

Flickr member rarebeasts shares this how-to for building a simple sound synthesizer using a a picaxe microcontroller - NoiseTron

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Matt_dk sends along a piece from the European Southern Observatory, which reports on observations of the so-called "Einstein Cross," a fortuitous conjunction of a nearby galaxy and a distant black hole. A team of researchers from Europe and the US combined the effects of macrolensing (from the intervening galaxy) and microlensing (from stars in that galaxy), captured by an earth-bound telescope. "Combining a double natural 'magnifying glass' with the power of ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers have scrutinized the inner parts of the disc around a supermassive black hole 10 billion light-years away. They were able to study the disc with a level of detail a thousand times better than that of the best telescopes in the world, providing the first observational confirmation of the prevalent theoretical models of such discs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An Anonymous Coward writes "China's online gaming themed service industry appears to be booming, riding China's fascination with online gaming all the way to the top is a Chinese restaurateur with his World of Warcraft inspired eatery." I would recommend the Critter Bites and the Haunted Herring, but would warn against the Carrion Surprise.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The mysterious Director of surrealist thinktank and clothier Imaginary Foundation has a gallery show of oil paintings and sculptures opening tomorrow night, December 13, at SURU in Los Angeles. The opening night festivities will include music by DJ Nitedog and Darkhorse and a special live appearance by the Cosmic Drummer featured on the Imaginary Foundation's "Space Is The Place" t-shirt. The show is titled "I Dream, Therefore I Become," and will be the subject of Monday's episode of BBtv. Tune in, and turn on.
Imaginary Foundation gallery show

Part party, part mixer, part Science Fair, and part performance, Handmade music was an informal gathering for geeksters and the geek-curious to come together, relax, and discover new sounds. The evening consisted of a gathering of inventors of circuit-bent toys, custom software and patches, interactive digital & visual instruments, custom electronics, electricity-powered noisemakers, DIY robots and new acoustic instruments. It was open to everyone from hard-core hackers & newcomers to music lovers who wanted to learn about the DIY music scene - we're doing one each month, stay tuned for the next one! Special thanks to 3rdward, Eric from Etsy and Peter Kirn!

More photos here.

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An anonymous reader writes "I have a technology background and worked as a programmer for a few years before slipping over to the dark side. I am now on the business side and have been given responsibility for a small team of Java programmers. While the technology aspect of what my team works on doesn't scare me, I need ideas to make sure the team stays motivated while reporting to me, a business-oriented guy. Perhaps I should mention I am in my early 30s while the majority of the team constitute an older, wiser generation. What advice should I follow to avoid turning into yet another Bill Lumbergh?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's an interesting peak into the production process of the iconic shell chair - construction involves more than the simple design seems to indicate. [via Kitsune Noir]

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Standalone printer hack via HaD. Good for a prank! Jeroen writes...

To talk to the Laserjet, I decided on using the Centronics parallel port. I could have used the serial port too, but I remembered the parallel port protocol was easy to implement, and the Centronics-port was said to have a +5V from the printer available. That would help me a lot because I wouldn't have to find an external supply of power for the microcontroller. For the microcontroller itself, I decided on my good old pal the ATTiny2313. I could have used an other avr, but I've got dozens of this type laying around and they're cheap enough, so I decided on this one.

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Rocketboom visits BugLabs - great video!

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Ed. Note: Boing Boing's current guestblogger Clay Shirky is the author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. He teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, where he works on the overlap of social and technological networks.

---

It is famously difficult to teach people to program, and CS lore says that there are simply people who get it and people who don't. Saeed Dehnadi and Richard Bornat, two computer instructors at Middlesex University in the UK, put that idea to the test, and ended up not with two kinds of people, but three.

They devised a basic aptitude test for first year students of computer programming, and then administered it on the first day of class, before the students had learned anything. (One of them maintains this was a mistake, the other claims it was planned.) The result was an almost perfect correlation between the results of the test and the student's subsequent performance.

The test asked simple questions about assignments (example shown in the image above.) The group tested broke down into three camps: people who answered the questions using different mental models for different questions, people who answered using a consistent model, and people who didn't answer the questions at all:

Told that there were three groups and how they were distinguished, but not told their relative sizes, we have found that computer scientists and other programmers have almost all predicted that the blank group would be more successful in the course exam than the others: “they had the sense to refuse to answer questions which they couldn’t understand” is a typical explanation. Non-programming social scientists, mathematicians and historians, given the same information, almost all pick the inconsistent group: “they show intelligence by picking methods to suit the problem” is the sort of thing they say. Very few, so far, have predicted that the consistent group would be the most successful. Remarkably, it is the consistent group, and almost exclusively the consistent group, that is successful.

Interestingly, this correlation is unrelated to correctness -- being consistently wrong in your mental model of how a computer works is better than being inconsistently right, because if you are consistently wrong, you only have to learn one thing to start being consistently right.

Dehnadi and Bornat's thesis is that the single biggest predictor of likely aptitude for programming is a deep comfort with meaninglessness:

To write a computer program you have to come to terms with this, to accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion. In the test the consistent group showed a pre-acceptance of this fact: they are capable of seeing mathematical calculation problems in terms of rules, and can follow those rules wheresoever they may lead. The inconsistent group, on the other hand, looks for meaning where it is not. The blank group knows that it is looking at meaninglessness, and refuses to deal with it.

(It will be interesting to see how long it will be in the comments before someone chimes in with the snake oil of the industry: "But method X/language Y is so intuitive that it solves this problem!" Dehnadi and Bornat's literature review should be required reading for this group.)

Dehnadi and Bornat's programming aptitude research

UPDATE: In the comments, Greebo points to research trying and failing to replicate the salience of consistency as a predictor, in a paper suggesting that "...the consistent group may actually contain two distinct subgroups, one that does much better than the inconsistent group, and one that does much worse." That paper is also interesting for its engagement with the larger issue of replication of experiments involving humans, as they were not able to fully replicate the research (self-selecting group, not given on first day of class, etc...) and use those issues as a platform for illustrating the difficulties with this kind of research generally.

On the Dif?culty of Replicating Human Subjects Studies in Software Engineering

beetle496 writes "It has been going on nine years now, but finally there are formal standards for Web accessibility for technologies other than HTML. They ask that you start with the press release (lots of links), but regulars might be more entertained by the last time WCAG made the front page here. Many folks here will point out that web accessibility is old hat, and by implication this is hardly news, but if you do Web development for any government organization, you should expect that accessibility is a base requirement. The Section 508 standards are to be updated (relatively) soon too."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Adventures in Ethics and Science blog has a nice mention of the MAKE Chemistry Gift Guide.

I was marveling at the Chemistry gift guide at MAKE. It has lots of cool items for your budding chemist/mad scientist of any age looking to equip his or her basement/garage/treehouse laboratory. (It's pretty hard to get fume-hoods installed in a treehouse, but who are we kidding? Most people who dabble in chemistry at home don't have fume-hoods either.)

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alphadogg writes "University of Utah researchers have invented technology that could come to be embraced by teenagers with the same enthusiasm they have for curfews and ID checks. And like those things, it could save their lives. Key2SafeDriving technology uses RFID or Bluetooth wireless capabilities to issue signals from car keys to cell phones to prevent drivers from talking on their phones or texting while driving. A company called Accendo LC of Kaysville, Utah has licensed the technology and is working to build it into commercial devices that could be on the market next year. The company is sorting out how to bring the technology to market, but one possibility is that it would be made available through cell phone service companies and could also be tied in with insurance companies, which might offer discounts for users."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this week, I wrote about a teacher in Austin who threatened to report a local free-Linux-machines charity to the police because "there's no such thing as free software" and they had therefore deceived the student she caught distributing Linux disks in class.

The teacher has since had a long conversation with the gentleman from the free Linux project, which is called HeliOS, and he's published a long, mature, and insightful note about the peace he's made with her (in particular, he posted a graceful and heartful apology for some out-of-line remarks he made about the teaching profession and the US teachers' union). It's worth a read:

Karen seems to be a good teacher, and as she stated to me today, she has learned more about the tech world in a few days than she's learned in five years.

That's because she's trapped in a world of Windows. Most people are.

I have contacted the technology department of AISD and have discovered it has a rich technology environment that uses open source software in all aspects of instruction, operation, and administration. The District has over 36,000 desktop and laptop computers. While about 24,000 of those computers run some version of Windows, AISD is anything but a Windows shop. Their current standard teacher/student image includes both Open Office and Firefox on all Windows computers, and recently has added Open Office to the Apple OS image. Other open source software on both images include audacity and lame, and other Free Software such as Google Earth, iTunes, Adobe and many plug-ins. They also are members of the world community grid; their 36,000 computers are providing many hours of spare processing time (during the work day) to organizations trying to solve major world problems such as energy, cancer, and AIDS. Additionally, they are running more than 100 Linux servers.

Character-Assasinations-Ain't-Us (via /.)

holy_calamity writes "CERN have released images of the damage done to the world's most powerful machine, the Large Hadron Collider, when an electrical fault caused a helium leak. New Scientist has posted them, along with explanations of what you can see. The sudden burst of gas shifted some of the huge superconducting magnets by half a meter, causing at least $21 million in damage."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you get a chance, check out tonight's full moon. It will be closer to Earth than it's been since 1993 - 221,560 miles away, making it look 30 percent brighter and 14 percent larger than 2008's other full moons. The composite NASA photo above shows how different the size of the moon appears at perigee, the moon's closest point to the Earth, and apogee, its furthest position from us. From National Geographic:

"Typically we don't have the full moon phase and perigee (the position of an object at its least distance from Earth), coinciding at the same time, so that makes this event particularly special," said Ed Krupp, director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, California...

"While high tides happen each month when the sun, Earth, and the moon are aligned, there is going to be an enhanced effect, with the moon being the closest it's been in more than a decade," said Ben Burress, staff astronomer at the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, California.

Sky Show Tonight: Bigges, Brightest Full Moon of 2008

Ballparks by Major League Models via BoJ.

Major League Models creates the world's finest "made-to-order" replicas of your favorite ballparks. Our incredible scale sizes yield museum-grade showpieces that consistently turn heads and bring favorite memories to the foreground. Ballparks begin with meticulous research utilizing blueprints, photos, and drawings. Ballparks are hand-crafted by renowned ballpark artist Steve Wolf with contributions from specialty artists to yield a unique three-dimensional art treasure. Over 1,800 hours of artistry are required to produce a single, one-of-a-kind gem.

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Dr. M. Russell Stein was a dentist in New York city who built models of human jaws, bridges, and ferris wheels out of toothpicks. The Feb 1940 issue of Popular Science has an article about his remarkable creations.

Toothpick engineering is dentist's hobby

A Hello Kitty-themed maternity and pediatric hospital has opened in Yuanlin, Taiwan. The small 30-bed facility is authorized by Sanrio. From Reuters (Christine Lu photo):

Director Tsai Tsung-chi said he hopes the white, mouthless cat that is one of the world's most recognisable characters will ease the pain and fear associated with childbirth and being admitted into hospital.

"I wish that everyone who comes here, mothers who suffer while giving birth and children who suffer from an illness, can get medical care while seeing these kitties and bring a smile to their faces, helping forget about discomfort and recover faster," he told Reuters.

"Hello baby! Hello Kitty welcomes Taiwan newborns" and photos (Thanks, Lindsay Tiemeyer!)

Boston's GASP (Gallery Artists Studio Projects) is an experimental art gallery co-founded by María Magdalena Campos-Pons, an incredible Afro-Cuban artist whose rich work ranges from paintings to mixed media to large-scale Polaroid photography. Opening tomorrow, December 13, at GASP is an exhibition of self-taught emerging artists, including Consuelo Isaacson (who also curated the show), Michael Padnos, Alejandro Lazo, and my brother Mark Pescovitz. Besides being a fine art photographer, Mark moonlights as a transplant surgeon and professor of microbiology and immunology. As Isaacson says, Mark "travels extensively around the world for his medical practice. Along the way he takes pictures that capture the inner strength of the people that he meets, the beauty of the landscape that he encounters and the the essences of locality in the scenes he passes by." Above is Mark's "Blue Depth: Catedral de sal de Zipaquira," taken in Zipaquira, Colombia. Regarding Mystery and Beauty (GASP Gallery)

Scientists discovered a brain in northern England that is at least 2,000 years old. The brain was found inside the, er, skull of its owner at an archaeological site at York University.

They believe the skull, which was found on its own in a muddy pit, may have been a ritual offering.

Rachel Cubitt, who was taking part in the dig, described how she felt something move inside the cranium as she cleaned the soil-covered skull's outer surface. Peering through the base of the skull, she spotted an unusual yellow substance.

"Britan's oldest human brain unearthed"

HarperCollins and Nintendo struck a deal to make your Nintendo DS a simple E-book reader. The 100 Classic Books Collection software loads up the game device with Project Gutenberg books. Brownlee has the details over at Boing Boing Offworld.
ebooks comes to the Nintendo DS

Bloomberg News filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Federal Reserve on November 7 to find out who is getting the $2 trillion in bailout money. The Federal Reserve told them to shove it.

The Fed responded Dec. 8, saying it’s allowed to withhold internal memos as well as information about trade secrets and commercial information.

...

“Notwithstanding calls for enhanced transparency, the Board must protect against the substantial, multiple harms that might result from disclosure,” Jennifer J. Johnson, the secretary for the Fed’s Board of Governors, said in a letter e-mailed to Bloomberg News.

“In its considered judgment and in view of current circumstances, it would be a dangerous step to release this otherwise confidential information,” she wrote.

You think Madoff's $50 billion fraud was something? He's a patzer compared to these guys.

Federal Reserve refuses to disclose the recipients of $2 trillion in emergency loans

An couple of anonymous readers wrote in to let us know about a followup to last Wednesday's story of the teacher who didn't believe in free software. The Linux advocate who posted the original piece has cooled off and graciously apologized for going off half-cocked (even though the teacher had done the same), and provided a little more background which, while not excusing the teacher's ignorance, does make her actions somewhat more understandable. Ken Starks has talked with the teacher, who has received a crash education in technology over the last few days — Starks is installing Linux on her computer tomorrow. He retracts his insinuations about Microsoft money and the NEA. All in all he demonstrates what a little honest communication can do, a lesson that all of us who advocate for free software can take to heart. "The student did get his Linux disks back after the class. The lad was being disruptive, but that wasn't mentioned. Neither was the obvious fact that when she saw a gaggle of giggling 8th grade boys gathered around a laptop, the last thing she expected to see on that screen was a spinning cube. She didn't know what was on those disks he was handing out. It could have been porn, viral .exe's...any number of things for all she knew. When she heard that an adult had given him some of the disks to hand out, her spidey-senses started tingling. Coupled with the fact that she truly was ignorant of honest-to-goodness free software, and you have some fairly impressive conclusion-jumping. In a couple of ways, I am guilty of it too."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Surrealist science fiction author Philip K. Dick's birthday is December 16. In celebration. Total Dick-Head blogger Dave Gill will be doing a two-hour radio tribute tonight, from 10pm-midnight PT, on Pirate Cat Radio. Tune in to 87.9 FM in the San Francisco Bay Area or listen online. Dave says:

The show's called Psionic Dehiscence and I'll be playing some interviews with PKD - old ones - not from beyond the grave, some John Dowland, hopefully the VALIS opera (if you have a copy of this please email me), some Sonic Youth, Flaming Lips, and other strange rock 'n rollers influenced by PKD. I even hope to have some interviews with some of PKD's friends and family (no names just yet). Maybe even some of PKD's old radio plays will find their way on the show. I promise lots of rarities, so fire up your satellite recorders, or load the transmission into your data player for later rebroadcast, but don't miss the satellite firing.

Somebody's Got a Birthday Coming (Total Dick-Head), Pirate Cat Radio (piratecatradio.com)

A new research study suggests that women are more likely to give their phone number to a man they don't know when they are most fertile. Psychologist Nicolas Guéguen of the University of South Brittany and his colleagues report their results in the scientific journal Biological Psychology. From New Scientist:

Guéguen is cautious in his interpretations, but the study seems to offer real-world behavioural support for studies showing that women are most receptive to advances when they are likely to get pregnant.

Hormones could play a role, as estradiol (a form of oestrogen) and progesterone levels wax and wane during a woman's cycle, and most birth control pills contain progesterone. But Guéguen worries that a woman's relationship status will confound such associations, since single women could be less likely to be on birth control.

Fertile women more open to corny chat-up lines

Vitra's "Workbay" looks like my kind of chair. At first glance, it appears to have been designed for top-heavy aliens who have evolved giant brains that make them resemble lollipop-headed Blythe-doll uberman -- which is pretty darned cool. Then it becomes apparent that this chair will effectively shield you from visual and auditory distractions, so that you can buckle down in a truly obsessive, single-minded focused way in front of your screen, and that's even cooler.

Workbay protects its users visually and acoustically thanks to the shape of its high backrest. It opens the possibility for users to distance themselves, even in busy environments, so as to be able to concentrate better with fewer disruptions.

Workbay (via Core77)

This not a fox but rather a rare albino raccoon that lives in the woods of Rockledge, Florida. A local woman has been lobbying for the zoo to capture it for its own protection.

Michelle Smurl, Brevard Zoo's director of animal programs, said the zoo is not at liberty to trap an adult animal that is thriving in the wild. She viewed photos of the animal and confirmed that it is a white raccoon.

"The raccoon looks healthy, and it looks like it's doing well," Smurl said. "I grew up with white squirrels up in New York, and I was worried that someone was going to shoot them."

Woman fears for albino raccoon's safety (via Fortean Times)

Kimberley sez, "XKCD is selling a number of the strips as signed prints for whatever amount you want to throw his way. Default is $15. He's calling it 'Radiohead style'".

Note on price: we get a lot of emails asking about donations. We like to send people something tangible for their money, so we're offering these prints Radiohead-style -- you can choose what to pay for them (above the default $15). If you want to donate money to the site but don't want a bunch of merch, just order a print or two and set your own price. Thanks!

A webstore of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. (Thanks, Kimberley!)

Thanks to Berend for pointing me to my new favorite thing in the world: a bicycle-based beer bar.

Originally in the Netherlands, there's an American version, too. The only way I can think of for this project to become cooler would be if people can ride up to it and link their bikes in on-the-fly...

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In 1961, a Cambridge don who'd taught navigation to cadets in WWII published an homage to Alice in Wonderland that used the book to illustrate concepts in navigation and geometry. The book, called "Navigation with Alice," was illustrated with fantastic replicas of the original Tenniel illos, recast to accompany the lessons (Anne Scarisbrick, the illustrator, was only 16 when she drew them!).

Frank Debenham was a Cambridge don who, during World War II found himself teaching navigation to young cadets, eager to learn but frustrated that the lack of materials meant that they could only learn principles in abstract terms without being able to properly put them into practice. To this end Debenham began to relate many of his teaching practises back to the varied characters in Alice in Wonderland, something he could be reasonably sure that cadets would have heard of, and if not, that they would be more likely to engage with, hence the book where we find Alice dancing Latitude Quadrilles with the Mock-Turtle, debating the markings on globes with the Dodo and learning about the use of altitude and horizons in a protracted smoking session with the Caterpillar.

Alice's Many Adventures - Part the Second (Thanks, Erik!)

phantomfive writes "The patent office has released some patent filings by Apple which indicate that the company is working on a 3D desktop of some sort. They call it a multi-dimensional desktop, according to the patent filing." There's also some commentary at ZDNet; both stories link to a detailed run-down at AppleInsider.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

4 floor advanced engineering demolition toy set via BBG.

Great News for all you construction and demolition lovers. Developed in 1998 Advanced Engineering is the original, the biggest and most realistic Construction & Demolition toy in the world! Take your pick of Modern Black Glass, Blue Gothic Stone OR Old Red Brick!

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A former Nasdaq chairman has been arrested for stealing over $50 billion through an elaborate Ponzi scheme run through his private investment fund -- he allegedly ripped off some clients to pay other clients, then recruited (and robbed) new clients to pay off the last round of losers. The Wall Street Journal says he was turned in by his sons.

In a separate criminal complaint, Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Theodore Cacioppi said Mr. Madoff's investment advisory business had "deceived investors by operating a securities business in which he traded and lost investor money, and then paid certain investors purported returns on investment with the principal received from other, different investors, which resulted in losses of approximately billions of dollars..."

The 70-year-old Mr. Madoff is the founder and primary owner of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC. The firm is primarily known for its business in market-making, or serving as the middleman between buyers and sellers of shares. But Mr. Madoff also oversaw an investment-advisory business that managed money for high-net-worth individuals, hedge funds and other institutions...

Both complaints say Mr. Madoff told his sons he believed losses from his fraud exceeded $50 billion. That figure couldn't be confirmed. But such a loss is plausible, had money been flowing in and out for years: At the beginning of 2008, according to the SEC filing, his operation had more than $17 billion under management.

Such a scheme would dwarf past Ponzi schemes. It would also be nearly five times larger than the accounting fraud that drove telecom company WorldCom into bankruptcy proceedings in 2002.

Top Broker Accused of $50 Billion Fraud (via Taplin)

(Image: Madoff.com)

US Representative Jim Langevin (D-RI) is one of the chairs of the CSIS Cybersecurity Commission that released a comprehensive 96-page report on Dec. 8 under the title, Securing Cyberspace for the 44th Presidency. The aim of the Commission is to help the incoming administration balance "cyberspace" security needs with civil liberties. We'd like to thank Rep. Langevin and his staff (some of whom are ardent Slashdot readers) for taking time to answer your (hopefully) cogent questions. Usual Slashdot interview rules apply, and — also as usual — we'll post Rep. Langevin's answers as soon as he gets them back to us.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

American Toy & Invention is selling a construction kit that's really a destruction kit. The goal at the end is to implode the building you make. And then repeat. Brilliance. Joel has more over at Boing Boing Gadgets. "Advanced Engineering build implosion toy set"

Corey Menscher's "Kickee" - when the baby kicks it sends a message to Twitter. You can see the baby's kicky tweets on Twitter here...

The maker writes-

As a baby grows inside the womb, pregnant mothers are constantly and acutely aware of its presence mostly through its movements. With the Kickbee, I intend to extend a baby's minute contact with the world beyond the mother's body by sensing these movements and transmitting them to digital networks.

There's something special about pregnant women's bellies that make so many want to touch them. The presence of a child inside the womb is mysterious because we only have visual clues to its presence. Yet we know that if we press our hand and wait patiently, we may be greeted with a physical manifestation of its existence by feeling the baby's subtle (and not so subtle) movements inside.

As an expectant father, I am once-removed from the physical knowledge my wife has of our baby and its development. With the Kickbee, I wanted to create a device that would give me a chance to be aware of our baby's movements. It can also aid in tracking the frequency of fetal movements, which is an important way to monitor the health of the developing child.

The Kickbee is a wearable device made of a stretchable band and embedded electronics and sensors. Piezo sensors are attached directly to the band, and transmit small but detectable voltages when triggered by movement underneath. An Arduino Mini microcontroller transmits the signals to an accompanying Java application wirelessly via Bluetooth. (a SparkFun BlueSMIRF v2 module that communicates serially with a Macbook Pro)

The Java application receives the sensor values and analyzes them. When a kick event is detected, a Twitter message is posted via the Twitter API. I chose to use Twitter because it is easy to initiate an SMS message to any mobile phone when a kick is detected. It also acts as a data log that can be accessed programmatically for visualization or archiving.

In the Maker Shed:


Botanicalls Kits let plants reach out for human help! They offer a connection to your leafy pal via online Twitter status updates to your mobile phone. When your plant needs water, it will post to let you know, and send its thanks when you show it love.

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Actor Daniel Hoevels was seriously injured on stage during a suicide scene in Friedrich Schiller's play Mary Stuart at Vienna's Burgtheater. The prop knife he used to slit his throat turned out to be real. Police are investigating whether it was an error or something more nefarious. The photo seen here is from a different performance. From The Guardian:

Daniel Hoevels, 30, slumped over with blood pouring from his neck while the audience broke into applause at the "special effect". Police are investigating whether the knife was a mistake or a murder plot. They are questioning the rest of the cast, and backstage hands with access to props; they will also carry out DNA tests....

The knife was reportedly bought at a local shop; one possibility is that the props staff forgot to blunt its blade. "The knife even still had the price tag on it," an investigator said.

"Actor slits his own throat as knife switch turns fiction into reality"

Cory writes-

Crafters are up in arms over a seemingly disastrous unintended consequence of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA), which will require lab certification that lead and phthalates are not present in toys or clothes -- sounds good, but crafters warn that this means that "a toymaker... who makes wooden cars in his garage in Maine to supplement his income cannot afford the $4,000 fee per toy that testing labs are charging to assure compliance with the CPSIA." The law takes effect on February 10th and the toymakers and small clothing designers are getting very worried indeed.

In 2007, large toy manufacturers who outsource their production to China and other developing countries violated the public's trust. They were selling toys with dangerously high lead content, toys with unsafe small part, toys with improperly secured and easily swallowed small magnets, and toys made from chemicals that made kids sick. Almost every problem toy in 2007 was made in China.

The United States Congress rightly recognized that the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) lacked the authority and staffing to prevent dangerous toys from being imported into the US. So, they passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) in August, 2008. Among other things, the CPSIA bans lead and phthalates in toys, mandates third-party testing and certification for all toys and requires toy makers to permanently label each toy with a date and batch number.

All of these changes will be fairly easy for large, multinational toy manufacturers to comply with. Large manufacturers who make thousands of units of each toy have very little incremental cost to pay for testing and update their molds to include batch labels.

For small American, Canadian, and European toymakers, however, the costs of mandatory testing will likely drive them out of business.

More:
National Bankruptcy Day.
Help Save Handmade Toys in the USA from the CPSIA.

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As Eric Reynold of Fantagraphics says: "First Dave Stevens, then Forrest J. Ackerman, and now Bettie Page. 2008 has been a brutal year for some of the icons of my Southern California adolescence." (Thanks, MinTphresh)

prone2tech writes "Both NPR and Wired are running stories about how nearly two decades ago, a dogged, absentminded Canadian geologist named Charles Fipke who was practically down to his last nickel when he discovered diamonds in the Northwest Territories. Back then there was no such thing as a Canadian diamond, and today, Canada is the world's third-largest producer. The story behind the addition of Canada to the ranks of diamond-producing nations leads back to this one man. His discovery started the largest staking rush in North America since George Carmack found gold in the Klondike a century earlier."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Just posted! The third of our group tests covers the premium 'point and shoot' compacts that sit at or near the top of their respective ranges. With wide lenses, up to 14.7 million pixels and stuffed to the gills with features these cameras command top dollar, but are they all worth it? Follow the link, delve into the reviews and see what we've found...

fermion writes "If seems that Google's Android and T-Mobile have not learned from the bad experience and wrath Apple incurred with roaming charges on the iPhone. Applications can switch to roaming and data operation without the user's knowledge. Also, according to The Register, there is no way to switch off roaming. Given the backlash that Apple experienced over international roaming charges, one would think that T-Mobile would have built a phone to prevent such unexpected charges." From the wording of the article, the inability to turn off roaming seems to be on a per-application basis; users can evidently disable it globally.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Free Flash game "Minotaur China Shop" is exactly what you think it is: You're the minotaur and if you break it, you buy it. Brandon has the details over at Boing Boing Offworld. "Minotaur China Shop, happiness in shattery"

Perhaps you missed an episode or two of Boing Boing's daily original video programming this week? Here's a recap, so you can watch while you pretend to be productive at work for what's left of this fine Friday.

? MONDAY: In our Weekly Update, we caught up with the people behind the BB post "Donate Your Used Digital Camera to LA's Skid Row Photo Club. BB readers donated used gadgets to the Skid Row Photo Club, and project participants join us from the heart of Skid Row. Then, we LOLled as Mark's chickens dance to Yakety Sax, and watched some gory splatterpunk claymation videos from Japan. WATCH IT. Here's a direct MP4 Link.

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? TUESDAY: In our weekly Boing Boing Gadgets Video feature, Joel reviewed the Philips Norelco Bodygroom ($50) a shaver for men. Strategic kitteh were deployed as figleafs to shield our viewers' eyes from inadvertently exposed people-parts. WATCH IT. Here's a direct MP4 link.

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? WEDNESDAY: Brandon Boyer, editor of Boing Boing Offworld, updated us on iPhone games and arty Wii avatars. WATCH IT. Here's a Direct MP4 Link.

? Also on Wednesday, we began a three-day commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in partnership with WITNESS. First episode: this video about the treatment of mentally disabled youth at a hospital in Paraguay, and proof of the power in video to stop human rights abuses. WATCH IT. Here's a Direct MP4 Link.

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? THURSDAY: I interviewed WITNESS digital archivist Grace Lile, and she spoke about the importance of preserving and making available video that documents human rights abuses -- here in the US, and around the world. WATCH IT. Here's a Direct MP4 Link.

? Also on Thursday, we aired a WITNESS video feature about the lives of child soldiers in the Congo, and a man who works to demobilize, rehabilitate, and protect them. WATCH IT. Here's a Direct MP4 Link.

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? FRIDAY, today -- we aired our final WITNESS feature in this week's series. This video told the story of a Mayan man who witnessed the Rio Negro Massacre in Guatemala. WATCH IT. Here's a Direct MP4 Link.

? And finally, today -- we ended the week with a Unicorn Chaser at a music festival, featuring our old pal from London, Russell Porter. WATCH IT. Here's a Direct MP4 Link.

Here is a super small, sneaky storage device for your secret stuff.
Thanks go to Andrew Lewis for the original article in Make: Volume 16
To download The USBattery MP4 click here or subscribe in iTunes.

Check out the complete USBattery article MAKE 16 "USBattery"
and you can see that in our digital edition.

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I like to give books as holiday presents, and I got some great deals through Daedalus Books this year. They carry mostly remaindered books at incredibly low prices, and they have new titles that are pretty heavily discounted.

One of the books I got this year was Fun with Computer Electronics. It comes with a book and lots of parts - LEDs, wires, resistors, a piezo transducer, and a couple of pre-mounted chips. You build projects by connecting parts via little spring terminals on a cardboard breadboard. The book explains a lot of basic concepts like AND, OR, NAND, and XOR gates, and the whole kit is only $5.98, a great deal! They have lots more books for kids, science books, fiction, music, and DVDs, check them out.

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Meet Reuben Margolin, a visionary Maker who creates elegant and hypnotic techno-kinetic wave sculptures.

View the clip above, get the M4V and/or subscribe in iTunes.

Less than 4 weeks until the premiere of MAKE: television! Stay tuned to www.makezine.tv for broadcast updates and full segments starting in January.

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Ed. Note: Boing Boing's current guestblogger Clay Shirky is the author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. He teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, where he works on the overlap of social and technological networks.

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Corey Menscher, an ITP student, has designed a kick sensor which monitors his pregnant wife's belly, and generates a fetal tweet whenever the baby kicks.

Update: Corey explains the technical details of the project in this comment, with more details here.

KickBee on Twitter

snydeq writes "Turning off PCs during periods of inactivity can save companies between $25 and $75 per PC per year, according to Energy Star, savings that can add up quickly for large organizations. Yet most organizations remain behind the times on PC power management, in large part due to common misperceptions about PC power, writes InfoWorld's Ted Samson, who outlines five PC power myths debunked in a recent report from Forrester, ranging from the energy savings of screen savers, to the energy draw of powering up, to the difficulties of issuing patches to systems in lower-power states."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here is a super small, sneaky storage device for your secret stuff.
Thanks go to Andrew Lewis for the original article in Make: Volume 16
View the PDF

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MarkWhittington writes "Has NASA become a problem for the Obama transition? If one believes a recent story in the Orlando Sentinel, the transition team at NASA, led by former NASA Associate Administrator Lori Garver, is running into some bureaucratic obstruction." Specifically, according to this article NASA Administrator Michael Griffin made calls to aerospace industry executives asking them to stonewall if asked about benefits to be gained by canceling the current US efforts to revisit the moon; we mentioned last month that cutting Aries and Orion is apparently an idea under strong consideration by the Obama transition team.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Glyn sez,

The UK Big Brother Awards are to recognise some of the people who have been trying to keep the monsters of state and corporate mass surveillance , snooping and control at bay.

The 2008 UK Big Brother Awards Roll of Honour

* Baroness Sarah Ludford MEP - one of the Liberal Democrat Members of the European Parliament whose Human Rights Committee has been trying to stem the onslaught of necessarily repressive legislation in the past few years.

* Phil Booth, the National Coordinator of the cross political party NO2ID Campaign -against the Database State. Phil was recently described as the "hardest man in NGO-world".

* Helen Wallace from GeneWatch UK, who did so much to help educate politicians and lawyers and the media about the counterproductive evil policy of keeping innocent people's DNA tissue samples and DNA profiles, seemingly for ever, This has been overturned in the very recent European Court of Human Rights judgement in the Marper case.

* Gareth Crossman - retiring Director of Policy at Liberty Human Rights

* Becky Hogge - retiring Executive Director of the Open Rights Group

* Rt. Hon. David Davis MP, the fomer Conservative Shadow Home Affairs spokesman, who was re-elected as the Member of Parliament for Haltemprice and Howden, on the principles of freedom and liberty.

The evil Big Brother Award was awarded simply to New Labour.

UK Big Brother Awards - boos for NuLabour, hurrahs for Sarah Ludford, Phil Booth, Helen Wallace, Gareth Crossman, Becky Hogge and David Davis (Thanks, Glyn!)

BUGbot Wheels Module by Ilan Moyer-

Ilan Moyer stopped by the Test Kitchen for a visit. With the CAD files he downloaded from BUG he was able to fabricate a base for wheels. The wheels use DC motors and a motor driver. They are programmable over serial, but we were trying to get the data through the Samtec connector that day. A truely awesome invention!

More:
Open source hardware 2008 - The definitive guide to open source hardware projects in 2008... Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this!

Kudos to Rob on Boing Boing Gadgets for spotting this flip-up bust of William Shakespeare that has a hidden switch inside that you can wire into your lights, garage door -- or alligator pit.

This is a bust of William Shakespeare which tilts back to reveal a remote control switch. See if you can remember where it came from—and hence why the makers believe they can get $315 a copy—before visiting the link!

This is not William Shakespeare's head Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

Wagner James Au sez, "This is machinima of the Bogon Flux, a beautifully ugly, totally strange, self-assembling, self-destructing, steampunky city comprised of rusty pipes and metal chambers. It's located in the post-apocalyptic Wasteland area of Second Life, so the filmmaker used 'London 2026,' a customized version of SL's atmosphere renderer which literally turns the air into dusty sepia. (At least from the machinima maker's point of view.)"

Man, this is the first SL machinima I've seen that crosses the line from "extremely promising" to "Holy crap!"

Mescaline's View: Watch "Pipedream", and Get the WindLight Preset It Was Made In (Thanks, James!)

Nice history and how-to at Popular Science on making vinegar at home...

Vinegar is one of those ingredients that people don't think of as often as they should. It is mostly just seen in salad dressings and pickles, which is a shame, because there is a whole world of flavor there just waiting to be tapped into. There are often times, especially during the holidays, when there is leftover wine after a festive dinner. Many of us will cork the bottle, with or without various safeguards to preserve the contents, and set it aside for the next day. Occasionally the bottles are forgotten, and when you finally open them again you find that the wine has evolved into something quite a bit different from what you were expecting. In these moments the change is often viewed with disappointment, as a delicate beverage has transformed into something sharper and edgier. Frankly, though, a smart cook will see the change as an opportunity. Good wine makes good vinegar and good vinegar is a stellar cooking ingredient.

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Although we tend to shy away from anyone calling their project a "first", this video claims to be the "first music video shot entirely with an iPhone" using a jailbroken phone and the "Cycorder" application which lets you record video directly to the flash drive of the phone. In any case, we still don't understand why Apple hasn't made video capabilities part of its iPhone OS yet? Apple care to comment?

via PicturePhoning

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drewmoney writes "According to a BBC article, Entrepreneur Oleg Teterin said the trademark for the ';-)' emoticon was granted to him by Russia's federal patent agency. 'Legal use will be possible after buying an annual licence from us,' he was quoted by the newspaper Kommersant as saying. 'It won't cost that much — tens of thousands of dollars,' added the businessman, who is president of Superfone, a company that sells advertising on mobile phones. The president of Russian social networking site odnoklassniki.ru, Nikita Sherman said: 'You're not likely to find any retards in Russia who'll pay Superfone for the use of emoticons.'" Teterin may have gotten the idea by catching up on some old news about Despair, Inc., which in May 2000 was awarded a US trademark on the "frowny" emoticon (Slashdot story).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Now instead of having the birthday and trying to capture the best photos, you can do two things at once. This birthday cake was made in the shape of a Nikon D700 SLR camera. Best of all, it looks like the cake is a red velvet, which would make it even more tempting to both the photographer and those attending the party.

via NeatoRama

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coondoggie writes "It really isn't a big enough penalty, and the company admitted no guilt, but Sony BMG Music Entertainment today agreed to pay $1 million as part of a settlement to resolve Federal Trade Commission charges that it knowingly violated the privacy rights of over 30,000 underage children. Specifically the FTC said the company violated the agency's Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the FTC did say the penalty was its largest ever in a COPPA case. To provide resources to parents and their children about children's privacy in general, and social networking sites in particular, the penalty order requires Sony Music to link to certain FTC consumer education materials for the next five years."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Flash video embedded above, MP4 Link here.)

Today is the final installment of Boing Boing tv's three-day special series in partnership with the video network WITNESS commemorating the 60th anniversary of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

In this episode: the story of Jesus Tecu Osorio, a Maya Achí man who witnessed one of the most horrific massacres of Guatemala's 36-year internal conflict, when he was a child -- and what he is doing to preserve the memory of victims, and the rights of survivors.

Here is a snip from the Wikipedia article about that massacre:

In 1978, in the face of civil war, the Guatemalan government proceeded with its economic development program, including the construction of the Chixoy hydroelectric dam. Financed in large part by the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank, the Chixoy Dam was built in Rabinal, a region of the department of Baja Verapaz historically populated by the Maya Achi. To complete construction, the government completed voluntary and forcible relocations of dam-affected communities from the fertile agricultural valleys to the much harsher surrounding highlands. When hundreds of residents refused to relocate, or returned after finding the conditions of resettlement villages were not what the government had promised, these men, women, and children were kidnapped, raped, and massacred by military officials. More than 440 Maya Achi were killed in the village of Río Negro alone, and the string of extra-judicial killings that claimed up to 5,000 lives between 1980 and 1982 became known as the Río Negro Massacres. The government officially declared the acts to be counterinsurgency activities.

This video is narrated by REM frontman Michael Stipe, and is presented with the music of composer Philip Glass. For more on WITNESS, and how they are using video to draw world attention to human rights abuses throughout the globe, visit the recently launched Witness HUB website.

Related: earlier here on Boing Boing, I shared a report I filed for National Public Radio about the group that conducted the exhumations mentioned in this WITNESS video. The Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala (FAFG) are technologists, anthropologists, and archaeologists who unearth these mass graves. They work to identify the dead and return the remains to their families for dignified reburial. The process begins with the hard work of the exhumation itself, but they also use DNA forensics and software they develop themselves, so they can identify a greater portion of the remains, and preserve evidence that could be used in criminal trials. FAFG staff routinely deal with death threats from those who do not support their work. Listen to "Group Works to Identify Remains in Guatemala ," and here is the entire NPR special series, "Guatemala: Unearthing the Future." (Image below: Xeni Jardin)

Although people might be consuming less, the demand for recyclables is crashing, so it's all piling up...

The economic downturn has decimated the market for recycled materials like cardboard, plastic, newspaper and metals. Across the country, this junk is accumulating by the ton in the yards and warehouses of recycling contractors, which are unable to find buyers or are unwilling to sell at rock-bottom prices. Ordinarily the material would be turned into products like car parts, book covers and boxes for electronics. But with the slump in the scrap market, a trickle is starting to head for landfills instead of a second life.

Have recycle programs stopped in your area?

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Jorge sent in a link to his latest creation, the Pan PC. It's made from found and recycled parts that he has collected. Apparently it doesn't even require electricity? Now that's cool. [Thanks Jorge]

Pan PC is my final draft of the graduate in electronics applied to the arts (IUNA), dictated by my friend and teacher Rusjan Diego. A silly machine, generating geometric images.

More about the Pan PC [translated]

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(Flash video embedded above, MP4 Link here.)

BBtv presents this week's Friday "Unicorn Chaser" -- the goofy truth behind Xeni and BBtv's UK music correspondent Russell Porter's reports from the SF Outside Lands music festival. Summer concert season is long gone, and the gaffer tape that once spelled "Boing Boing tv" on our tour bus has long since faded, along with our concert sunburns. So we figure it's safe to reveal how much dorking out took place between story tapings and band sessions. Besotted joyrides on stolen Segways, the snatching of sunglasses from complete strangers, and improvised pickup lines like "I'm the drummer from Radiohead. Really." Russell? You really are "special." We love you, man, and we miss "working" with you.

DHRECK sent in his interesting mod of the Wii-Mote. It uses several different kinds of hemp fibers to cover the original plastic case. I assume by the popularity of this project that more hemp-covered objects are in the works. [Thanks DHRECK]

In stark contrast with the original Wii-mote set, what was once sleek, cold, white and hard plastic has now become a slightly fuzzy, natural, warm and textured concoction. No more bland, branded and boring but mottled, flawfull, rough and a tad sweat absorbing.

More about the Hemp-Mote

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Here is another nice decoration you can make out of recycled materials. It's a little more 2D compared to the one I posted about last week, but it's still a nice addition to your holiday decorations.

Learn How to make paper star ornaments

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What do you get for crafters who also venture into the tech side of things? Before you start knitting a multimeter cosy, here are some great projects and gift ideas that intersect the worlds of MAKE and CRAFT.

Fashioning Technology

Ready to take your craft projects to the next level? With "smart" materials, unorthodox assembly techniques, and the right tools, you can create accessories, housewares, and toys that light up, make sounds, or do even more. Fashioning Technology offers jargon-free primers and lots of how-to projects that will have you making -- and even wearing -- functional works of art. This book demonstrates how to blend sewing and assembly techniques with traditional electronics to assemble simple circuits using conductive thread, solder joints for snaps, and switches for buttons. With the sewing machine as a viable substitute for the soldering iron, you can craft a new generation of objects that are interactive, quirky, and fashion-conscious.

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Kits/How-Tos

LED Mini Menorah Kits

Evil Mad Science make these LED Mini Menorah electronic soldering kits. Each time that it is switched off and back on, it displays one more light than it did the previous time that you turned it on. The source code is available for download. You can modify it, use it to program your own microcontroller, and make your own holiday decorations.

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Electronic Embroidery

In this CRAFT podcast, Becky Stern shows how to create this embroidered frog with LED fireflies. For a gift, you could put together a kit based on the supply list or create the project yourself to give.

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LilyPad E-Sewing Kit/LilyPad Pro Kit

For the more advanced craft tech nerd, the LilyPad e-sewing kit includes the materials to sew LEDs into all sorts of clothing. Add on the LilyPad Pro Kit to enable programming the LilyPad main board for more control. With these kits, make a project like the Turn Signal Biking Jacket.

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IEEE Spectrum: The Rise of the Machines - Robot density around the world...-

There are now 1 million industrial robots toiling around the world, and Japan is where they're the thickest on the ground. It has 295 of these electromechanical marvels for every 10 000 manufacturing workers--a robot density almost 10 times the world average and nearly twice that of Singapore (169), South Korea (164), and Germany (163).

More: In the last few years, the world of hobby robotics has exploded. Driven by the plummeting prices and ubiquity of microcontrollers, servomotors, and other electronic and mechanical components, the growth in personal fabrication technologies, and the success of such commercial toy, hobby, and domestic robots as Lego Mindstorms, the Robosapien line, Japanese mini humanoids, and iRobot's cleaning machines, robots are finally becoming rather commonplace (if still only in niche domains). And, of course, the robot growth being seeded by these new technologies is watered by the Big Muddy of the Internet, with its rapid information and idea exchange. The next generation of engineers and industrial designers who'll build tomorrow's robots are growing up with Vex kits and Arduino microcontrollers in their hands today.

For our MAKE Robot Gift Guide, we've put together a sampling of robot-related offerings from the Maker Shed, as well as some other robots we fancy. If you give or get any of these bots for the holidays, or especially if you or your recipients, hack them, we'd love to hear about it.

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An FCC commissioner has stated that video game "addiction," especially to World of Warcraft, is a "leading cause" of college dropouts. (Nevermind that 90% of the people diagnosed with "video game addiction" don't have any such condition, even according to the crazily broad definition used by its proponents).

With the explosion of educational resources available online, one might think parents would be 100% pleased with the internet’s role in their children’s lives. But surveys show just the opposite: a late 2006 survey that showed 59% of parents think the internet has been a totally positive influence in their children’s lives-- down from 67% in 2004.

You might find it alarming that one of the top reasons for college drop-outs in the U.S. is online gaming addiction - such as World of Warcraft - which is played by 11 million individuals worldwide.

FCC Commissioner Terms WoW a Leading Cause of College Dropouts

Julie188 writes "Researchers in Nevada are reporting that waste coffee grounds can provide a cheap, abundant, and environmentally friendly source of biodiesel fuel for powering cars and trucks. Their study has been published online in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. Growers produce more than 16 billion pounds of coffee around the world each year. Scientists estimate that spent coffee grounds can potentially add 340 million gallons of biodiesel to the world's fuel supply."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wired's Ryan Singel's done a great profile on Boing Boing pal Carl Malamud, the rogue archivist who's taking all the public material the government charges money to access and putting it on the web for free.

If you want to search federal court documents, it's not a problem. Just apply online for an account, and the government will issue you a user name and password.

Through the postal service.

And once you log in, the government's courthouse search engine known as Public Access to Court Electronic Records or PACER, will charge you 8 cents a page to read documents that are in the public domain — a fee that earned the federal judiciary $50 million in profits in 2006.

With its high cost and limited functionality, critics call the system an absurdity in the era of Google, blogs and Wikipedia, where information is free and bandwidth, disk space and processing power are nearly so.

"The PACER system is the most broken part of our federal legal mechanism," says Carl Malamud, who runs the nonprofit open-government group Public.Resource.Org ."They have a mainframe mentality."

Now Malamud is doing something about it. He's asking lawyers to donate their PACER documents one by one, which he then classifies and bundles into ZIP files published for free at his organization's website. The one-year-old effort has garnered him 20 percent of all the files on PACER, including all decisions from federal appeals courts over the last 50 years.

Online Rebel Publishes Millions of Dollars in U.S. Court Records for Free (Image: Carl Malamud, by Joi Ito, under a CC Attribution license

Three year old Sam Spiteri of Caledon, Ontario can keep the miniature pony he uses in therapy for his spastic quadriplegic cerebral palsy. The local council's granted the family a zoning exception that trumps the complaints of the family's neighbours who complained of the smell (they also border a cow-pasture!).

Caledon councillor Annette Groves told the Post that the boy should be allowed to keep the therapy pony.

“While you have to enforce the rules, there are times when you have to use discretion and have to remember that you’re a human being and have to have some compassion,” she said.

“That would be the case in the case.”

Disabled boy can keep his pony, Caledon rules (Thanks, Alex and Christine!)

Apple's refused to allow an application called "Comic Reader" in the iTunes Store because they don't like the comic book it ships with -- effectively, they've gotten into the business of banning or approving literature. I bought a G1 instead of an iPhone because I believed that giving any company the right to decide what programs I can use (Apple uses DRM to prevent unapproved programs from running on the iPhone) would be a bad idea in theory and in practice. "Program" and "art" can sometimes be very close together, and whatever else Apple is, they're not qualified to judge which art I'm allowed to look at.

Who at Apple has been set up to vet material? Specifically, why was Murderdrome vetted as an application and not as a publication? Apple has a Books category in the App Store. That’s where Murderdrome should have been placed.

Apple Forfeits eBooks By Banning A Comic Book! (Thanks, Reid!)

Tim Jones of the Electronic Frontier Foundation has some good commentary on the news that the MPAA has asked Obama to spy on the entire Internet, and to establish a system where being accused of copyright infringement would result in loss of your Internet connection (and your VoIP line, your access to your university, your lifeline to your parents in the old country, your means of participating in civic life, your means of fighting your parking ticket, etc etc etc). The MPAA also wants Obama to lean on other countries (notably Canada!) and force them to adopt US copyright laws.

Here, the MPAA is advocating for a number of things, the most problematic of which is a "three strikes" internet termination policy. This would require ISPs to terminate customers' internet accounts upon a rights-holder's repeat allegation of copyright ingfringement. This could be done potentially without any due process or judicial review. A three-strikes policy was recently adopted by legislation in France, where all ISPs are now banned from providing blacklisted citizens with internet access for up to one year.

Because three-strikes policies do not guarantee due process or judicial oversight of whether the accusations of copyright infringement are valid, they effectively grant the content industry the ability to exile any individual they want from the internet. Lest we forget, there is a history of innocents getting caught up in these anti-piracy dragnets. (Copyfighter Cory Doctorow has wondered what would happen if the MPAA's erroneous notices were subject to a similar three-strikes law.)

Thankfully, members of the European Parliament vehemently rejected these measures, resolving that "The cut of Internet access is a disproportionate measure regarding the objectives. It is a sanction with powerful effects, which could have profound repercussions in a society where access to the Internet is an imperative right for social inclusion." Let's hope the US government's decisions on this are as wise.

MPAA Asks Obama for More Copyright Surveillance of the Internet

What do you do if the Wii Fit games aren't intense enough for you? You build your own exercise gaming system, of course:

wondered about a way to get fitter, work out without having to go running outside (although that is very healthy). I didn't think the Wii balance board would do the trick, as the Wii games where reported not to be very intense, and the board itself is to hard for running on it. So what is different about the Swiiboard is that can absorb running effort, measure the effort and perhaps that it can use those measurements to control a virtual environment. It turned out this can be achieved using a Wiimote controller.

The controller is a simple setup: a wooden plank spans two chunks of mattress foam, and a Wiimote is zip-tied to the center. The accelerometer in the Wiimote can be used to measure your jogging pace, as well as the left to right tilt on the board, giving you all the control you need to move an avatar around a 3D world.

The Swiitboard (Footwii/Pedal navigation device)

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Glyn sez, "UK Culture Secretary Andy Burnham today indicated that he would support an extension of the length of copyright protection granted to sound recordings from 50 years to 70 years. The announcement directly contradicts previous Government policy on term extension, and could disappoint many UK citizens hoping the UK will reject proposals currently being discussed at EU level to extend the copyright term. Back in 2006, the independent Gowers Review of Intellectual Property recommended against term extension. The review commissioned significant independent research which found that extending term would have a negative effect on consumers, and scant benefits for the majority of performers. Making the announcement today, Burnham indicated that he was prepared to ignore the facts in favour of what he called a 'moral case'."

If it turns out the UK Government are unwilling to reject the Directive, then it will be up to the European Parliament to see sense and vote it out when they come to consider it (likely next February). Which means it’s all the more important to write to your MEP if you object to the proposal to extend copyright term.

Screw the evidence, says Burnham, let’s extend copyright term anyway, Write to your MP/MEP (Thanks, Glyn!)

Instructables user craft_tech made a tutorial for whipping up your own soft coincell battery holder from felt and conductive fabric.

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GameCyteSean writes "GameCyte is reporting that a new class-action lawsuit has challenged Nintendo's Wiimote straps once more. Interestingly, the suit was filed by the same lawyer who led the original 2006 attempt, and now argues that Nintendo hid records of broken TVs from the Consumer Product Safety Commission. From the article: 'This doesn't seem like a spurious accusation, either. Attached to the court filing (PDF) as a matter of public record is the very evidence Nintendo allegedly tried to hide: actual, internal Nintendo documents (PDF) where customer service reps received complaints of cracked televisions and broken Wiimote straps — and the corresponding Monthly Reports that Nintendo was compelled to file with the CPSC as part of their agreement.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GameCyteSean writes "GameCyte is reporting that a new class-action lawsuit has challenged Nintendo's Wiimote straps once more. Interestingly, the suit was filed by the same lawyer who led the original 2006 attempt, and now argues that Nintendo hid records of broken TVs from the Consumer Product Safety Commission. From the article: 'This doesn't seem like a spurious accusation, either. Attached to the court filing (PDF) as a matter of public record is the very evidence Nintendo allegedly tried to hide: actual, internal Nintendo documents (PDF) where customer service reps received complaints of cracked televisions and broken Wiimote straps — and the corresponding Monthly Reports that Nintendo was compelled to file with the CPSC as part of their agreement.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Instructables user faizzohri writes:

A City Storyteller may need a unique backpack in her pursuit to collect and tell stories about her city.
This backpack have 3 possible functions:

1) To provide storage during gathering of stories.
2) To provide a storage for the props to be used during a performance. It can be a prop itself.
3) To differentiate a City Storyteller from a rambling madman.

Materials needed
- a doll cabinet/wadrobe/cupboard/box
- the supporting aluminium frame of old hiking bags
- about 2 metres of twine/rope
- drill set
- different colors of paint (if necessary for decoration purposes.)
- other objects that you may feel necessary when you are building it.

Check out the instructable for making one of these yourself!

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Banana Derby is a "family show" in Greensville, South Carolina that stages races with monkey jockeys riding on dogs. For a fee, you can have them come to your next party or public event. Seen here is Bobo The Jockey Monkey riding on George the dog. George seems happy but I wonder about Bobo. Banana Derby (Thanks, Tara McGinley!)

Jennifer Lum points us to this fascinating segment from the TV documentary "Ants! Nature's Secret Power." Jen says, "Scientists poured cement into an ant colony structure and then excavated it (I imagine the ants died). It revealed an amazing network of fungus gardens and tunnels and garbage pits."

MojoKid writes "Ericsson and Intel have announced that they are collaborating on a way to keep your laptop's contents safe when your laptop goes MIA. Using Intel's Anti-Theft Technology — PC Protection (Intel AT-p) and Ericsson's Mobile Broadband (HSPA) modules, lost or stolen laptops can be remotely locked down. Similar to Lenovo's recently announced Lockdown Now PC technology, the Ericsson-Intel technology uses SMS messages sent directly to a laptop's mobile broadband chip. Once the chip receives the lock-down message, it passes it to the Intel AT-p function, which is integrated into Intel's Centrino 2 with vPro technology platform. Unlike Lenovo's anti-theft solution, the Ericsson module includes GPS functionality as well."

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Absolutely beautiful and inspiring bottle-based objects from Ryter Design.
via notcot via noquedanblog.

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Today on Offworld we read new details about the latest downloadable content set to come to Fallout 3, and downloaded G.E.C.K., the officially released mod kit for the PC version of the game. We also read about the precarious rebalancing of Street Fighter II for its Xbox 360/PS3 remake (and re-watched the most thrilling Street Fighter championship video ever recorded), and watched new footage of Thatgamecompany's serene Flower, a game that flexes every bit of the PS3's muscle purely to render fluttering petals and waves of tall grass. We also heard about a new DS game that generates items based on wi-fi hotspots in your area, saw web game portal InstantAction go free, recapped the best moment of last night's Fünde Razor, and fiddled with theRelativity, a version of the underlying tech behind PS3/PSN game echochrome that lets you look inside the "impossible objects" made popular by M.C. Escher. Finally, we played our two favorite indie games of the day: I Fell In Love With The Majesty Of Colors, a game from the vantage point of a lonely undersea Cthulu-esque monstrosity, and Minotaur China Shop in which a similar monster leaves the labyrinth to deal in dainty dinnerware, to expectedly disastrous results.

Startled Hippo writes "Japan's Tsubame supercomputer was ranked 29th-fastest in the world in the latest Top 500 ranking with a speed of 77.48T Flops (floating point operations per second) on the industry-standard Linpack benchmark. Why is it so special? It uses NVIDIA GPUs. Tsubame includes hundreds of graphics processors of the same type used in consumer PCs, working alongside CPUs in a mixed environment that some say is a model for future supercomputers serving disciplines like material chemistry." Unlike the GPU-based Tesla, Tsubame definitely won't be mistaken for a personal computer.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's a great way to increase the sunlight you bring indoors:

SunTrack

The SunTrack system can reflect the sun in my house and keep the reflection all day. That way it is possible to have a lot of light in my living room witch is facing east.

With a KlikAan remote control (433mhz) it is possible to:

Calibrate the sun postion by relecting the sun back and ajust the shadow.
Move to a point where the reflection should be, and save 3 reflection points.
Select one of the three reflection points and stay there by adjusting the rotors.
Power down: go to the sleep position.

(via hack a day)

Here's an (older, largely text-based) description of a solar concentrator; please comment with links to others!

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