The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Danny O'Brien sez,
EFF get the biggest chunk of its funding from individual donors, and a lot of that money comes in right around now -- at the end of the year.Share 'The 12 Days of EFF'Usually we do a quick summary of the areas our team of thirty lawyers, techies and activists have worked on, civil liberties online, privacy, fair use, free speech, protecting innovators, and battling overreaching IP laws.
But after looking over everything we've tried to handle this year -- from our real-time US election monitoring system, to our ongoing fight against warrantless wiretapping, to keeping an eye on Comcast's packet forging, to defending dancing babies on YouTube, to representing whistleblowing MIT students on the Boston MBTA -- we decided the only way we could summarise it all was in traditional cloyingly seasonal song form.
You can watch the 12 Days of EFF here. Or just skip to where we really want you to be: on our our holiday donation page. Have a great holiday -- and a free and open 2009!
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Today's Cool Tool mailing reminded me about one of my favorite year-end publications: the Uncle Mark 2009 Gift Guide and Almanac. Put out yearly (this year and last, anyway) by Mark Hurst, who runs the Gel Conference, this guide is tremendously unglamourous (in a great way). It's laid out (and spelled out) in a rather simple, straightforward style, and covers stuff that Mark likes and believes in, regardless of whether it's the latest or most popular. On my site, Street Tech, we used to do an annual tech guide we dubbed "the world's least sexy gadget guide" ('cause we covered stuff that worked, regardless of whether it was this year's tech or not). Mark's guide is equally unsexy.
Along with his reviews of landline phones, board games, cooking tools, books on religion, "essential items" (TiVo, a wallet pen, and The Economist), the Almanac covers such how-tos as preventing a sneeze, how to always have an umbrella when you need one, leaving good voice messages, how to make sure you always have batteries in your camera, and other handy tips.
Quirky. Fun. Useful. Free.
Uncle Mark 2009 Gift Guide and Almanac
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The Synthesia "Open Synth Hardware Platform" uses a Gumstix board, FPGA chip to create a anaolog modelling synthesizer with touchscreen interface -
The synthesia platform is a project whose purpose isto create an Analogue modelling musical synthesizer; that is, a synthesizer implemented using both analogue and digital components that intends to emulate the sounds of traditional analogue synthesizers, whilst being controllable through modern-day digital protocols such as the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI).- Synthesia hardware overview Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Electronics | Digg this!
The synthesizer platform exists upon it’s own standalone hardware, and may be controlled using a variety of existing MIDI-capable instruments, including keyboards, guitars and drums.
Additionally, the unit features it’s own innovative touch-screen interface which intends to
provide simple-and-intuitive control of the system, but with an unprecedented ability to
customize and control synthesizer parameters and sound generation.
Special attention has been placed upon the usability of the synthesizer, particularly within the realms of it being played by musicians in a live environment.
The unit’s MIDI capabilities also mean that it is easily combined with professional studio
equipment and sequencing software such as Cubase VST
Free Muntadar Zaidi now! (Making Light)Muntadar Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at George Bush, needs to be rescued.
According to his brother Durgham Zaidi, Muntadar Zaidi is in the heavily fortified Green Zone compound in central Baghdad where the US embassy and most Government offices are housed. He’s being held there by Iraqi forces under the command of Muaffaq al-Rubaie, Iraq’s national security adviser.
“He has got a broken arm and ribs, and cuts to his eye and arm,” Durgham said.
Three things the entire world knows:
1. Bush dodged both shoes with impressive speed, and didn’t seem upset.
2. It was a symbolic act of contempt, not an attack.
3. If Muntadar Zaidi had intended harm, he wouldn’t have been throwing shoes.One more extremely important thing the whole world knows: It may have been a serious expression of contempt, but it was also funny.
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Hi Susie,
Our new issue, on newsstands next week, includes a list I compiled of the "55 Most Important People in Sex" of the past 55 years.
I wanted to see if you might like to respond with a letter to the editor that addresses anyone you feel is ranked too high or too low -- and/or argue for anyone who isn't on the list but should be.
We plan to publish responses in the April issue. Thanks for considering it.
Chip Rowe
Senior Editor
Playboy Magazine
Hi Chip,
You should be on the list. So should I!
I'm sure you can guess; your list pissed me off - it has way too many sad pin-up girls, who are only there because of some Svengali in their lives, not because of their own efforts or sexual initiative. There's not a single man of that ilk on the list.
And how about Terry Southern?...
I do like the many scientists you included, because people will be amazed to know their achievements. The real question is, who does one have to sleep with to get on the list?
Susie
S,
You actually were on the short list, but let's just say I lost some arguments about the final 20.Tell me two or three names of women you would have included!
Chip
Okay... Where is Simone de Beauvoir, Shere Hite, or Pat Califia? Joani Blank, Anais Nin, Pauline Réage?
Then there's gay liberation. How can we imagine sexual revolution without it? Kinsey was bisexual. Dan Savage deserves a place near the top.
S.
Wonderful! In my defense, the list is limited to last 55 years; de Beauvoir's most influential work, The Second Sex, was from 1949- and Nin is best known for her erotic diaries from the 1930s, although they weren't published until the 1960s, so you have me there. Story of O was 1953, although that's certainly close enough. Dan Savage and Southern, those are good.
Chip
Señor,
Okay, I actually chewed over those elder entries! Beavoir almost single-handedly led French feminism in 60s & 70s, w/out being a prude, like Steinem.
And Anais made the decision to release Delta of Venus, et al, on 70s , when they had greatest impact
The best known names are always dead, sadly. I can't wait for my posthumous PB tribute!
SB
Susie,
Good points. Can I add that comment about Beauvoir?
Here's the list:
1 Alfred Kinsey
2 Dr. John Rock
3 Hugh Hefner
4 Alex Comfort
5 Marilyn Monroe
6 Monica Lewinsky
7 The Rolling Stones
8 Timothy Berners-Lee
9 Peter Dunn and Albert Wood
10 Madonna
11 Helen Gurley Brown
12 Charles Ginsburg
13 Ruth Westheimer
14 Elvis Presley
15 Masters and Johnson
16 Howard Stern
17 Ed Meese
18 Brigitte Bardot
19 Estelle Griswold
20 Bo Derek
21 Catharine MacKinnon
22 Vladimir Nabokov
23 Anita Bryant
24 Farrah Fawcett
25 Erica Jong
26 Barney Rosset
27 Germaine Greer
28 Christine Jorgensen
29 Pamela Anderson
30 Frank Sinatra
31 Nancy Friday
32 Jenna Jameson
33 William O. Douglas
34 Philip Roth
35 Charles Keating Jr.
36 Candace Bushnell
37 Dr. Mary Calderone
38 Beverly Whipple
39 Alberto Vargas
40 Potter Stewart
41 Linda Lovelace
42 Mike Nichols
43 Betty Dodson
44 Dr. David Reuben
45 Ian Fleming
46 Lenny Bruce
47 Gloria Steinem
48 Robert Mapplethorpe
49 Danni Ashe
50 J. Edgar Hoover
51 Gay Talese
52 Rock Hudson
53 Bernardo Bertolucci
54 Dell Williams
55 Rudi Gernreich
(Susie Bright is a guest blogger)
Luis did some circuit bending on what appears to a sound box from a talking stuffed animal or similar. The light sensitive effect is likely controlled by a photocell put in place of the unit's timing resistor. In other words - cool.
[via Matrixsynth]
Click here if you're a grown-up and can handle the original version of the illustration above, with stylized, un-mosaic'ed retroboobage. Flickr user Ben Pearce has a spectacular set of seventies images from magazines, advertising, entertainment packaging, and other forms of media. Some of them include nudity, so caveat Flicktor. The sexy cocaine starship fantasy art above is my favorite, but I'm also kind of nuts about the Wookiee posse.
Photo set: RETRO (NSFW, found via Q-Burns on twitter)
Update: Bonnie from Lucasfilm sez, "That family shot of the Wookiees is cool, but not retro. It's from the movie "Revenge of the Sith" which came out in 2005."
"I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system." -- George Bush, at 1:40 in this CNN video. (via Slate)
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Navs built a big ol' box of birthday noise for a friend -
Introducing the Trobetronic40 - my first DIY synth project, built for a mate's 40th birthday out of parts sourced from a knackered Korg PolySix, Thingamagoop box and various cheap components.Must be a good friend to ransack a Polysix and a Thingamagoop for - either way, looks like a lot of fun - Trobetronic40 - DIY Noisemaker Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Music | Digg this!
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St. Louis Aerial Clock Radio brings 1920s airplane cockpit aesthetic to your bedside table, Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets
Absolutely gorgeous. The St. Louis Aerial Clock Radio apes the cockpit control mechanisms of a 1920s airplane, with four separate digital windows displaying the time like an altometer. But that's about it: it's merely a radio and alarm clock, without even a line-in jack or iPod dock connector. £49.95
NYPL joins Flickr Commons (Thanks, David!)
We think of this as a sort of appetizer course, a sampler of collections accessible in greater breadth and depth on the NYPL Digital Gallery, and on-site in our network of libraries. Lush images of modern dance pioneers; haunting early cyanotypes of algae (the first photographic works to be produced by a woman); majestic geographical surveys taken along the Union Pacific Railroad, iconic Depression-era images taken under the Farm Security Administration's famed photography program; Berenice Abbott's epic documentation of 1930s New York for the Federal Art Project; stunning 19th century vistas of the Egypt and Syria; scenes and portraits of Ellis Island Immigrants, the Statue of Liberty under construction... These and more are now available to view, tag and discuss in the Flickr Commons, and are offered as an invitation to explore further on our own site or in our actual libraries. After this initial road test, we expect to post many more images into the Commons pool.
"The pitch pine woods on the right of the Corner road. A piercing cold afternoon, wading in the snow. R. Rice was going to Sudbury to put his bees into the cellar for fear they would freeze. He had a small hive; not enough to keep each other warm. The pitch pines hold the snow well. It lies now in balls on their plumes and in streaks on their branches, their low branches rising at a small angle and meeting each other. A certain dim religious light comes through this roof of pine leaves and snow. It is a somber twilight, yet in some places the sun streams in, producing the strongest contrasts of light and shade."
Each day of the year Kris Holmes publishes an entry from one of Thoreau's journals, dating from 1837 to 1861.
Photo: Uqbar-is-back
(Susie Bright is a guest blogger)
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[via Apartment Therapy Unpluggd]
In October, I wrote a piece that explained why I like netbooks. It listed a set of criteria that says if something is a netbook or not. Yes, it's my opinion. But someone has to start this conversation. There have been some ridiculous ideas of what netbooks are and aren't. According to Steve Jobs, an iPhone is netbook. Heh. He's making a joke. It's funny. I have an iPhone and I like it -- but I have a netbook too. 
Another concern came up in a recent thread on FriendFeed with Kevin Tofel of GigaOm, who is one of my closest netbook buddies. We share information and pretty much share a philosophy of netbooks. He says there's still a cloud over XP, that Microsoft says they're going to withdraw it at some point. They keep saying that. To which I said, Geez Louise guys, come on -- you have a winner. Microsoft has to be the most out to lunch technology company out there. By now you'd think they'd realize that the market doesn't want a new operating system, that XP is just fine, thank you. But they have their own reasons, like the auto makers, to do what they do. Or the journalists. The last people they'd let drive the market are the users, right? Microsoft is basically a full employment charity for operating system programmers. They should let all those programmers go, and hire some new ones from the user community, fix bugs and give the users what they want. Of if they insist, keep them employed, but please let us continue to use XP. It's not a half-bad operating system and its cheap and runs on cheap hardware. We like it! 
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The folks at Oomlout, who created the OAWR and SERB robot projects, have put up a new Instructable on controlling their SERB (or any Arduino-based bot) usuing the Wii Nunchuck.
BTW: The OAWR project is featured in The Best of Instructables. We have request a SERB kit from Oomlout and hope to have full build details on it after we've had a chance to put it together. Oomlout encourages you to make your own, but parts from them, or a full kit.
How to Control Your Robot Using a Wii Nunchuck (and an Arduino)
Best Of Instructables
Our Price: $34.99
Sale Price: $29.99
You Save $5.00!
Instructables.com has become one of the most popular magnets for makers and DIY enthusiasts of all stripes. Now, with more than 10,000 projects to choose from, the Instructables staff, editors of MAKE: Magazine, and the Instructables community itself have put together a collection of home, craft, food and technology how-to's from the site. The Best of Instructables Volume 1 includes plenty of clear, full-color photographs, complete step-by-step instructions, and tips, tricks, and new build techniques you won't find anywhere else.
Highlights:
* 336 pages, 6-5/8 x 9-3/8, same dimensions as The Best of MAKE and MAKE magazine.
* Over 120 projects!
* Projects cover everything from food hacking and making home furnishings from junk to building robots and CNC milling machines. And in-between you'll find projects on arts, crafts, costume-making, tool tips, themed photo galleries, and tons more.
A Modest Proposal:
Raising the Minimum Age for Porn
"Can a girl of 21 really know what she is consenting to when she signs a release form for a pornographer? Does she really understand what the ramifications might be later in life?Jon Swift, the author of this proposal, is perhaps the hardest working satirist in the English language since his redoubtable namesake."That is why I propose that we raise the minimum age of consent to participate in pornography to 65..."
(Susie Bright is a guest blogger)
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Time is running out for those of you planning to give artificial beards this year for the holidays. Erin Dollar is selling them on Etsy.
On his blog Monster Brains, Aeron posted this gorgeous print of a what appears to be a prehistoric animal hootenanny. He writes:
I would like to request the help of anyone familiar with this kind of prehistoric creature illustration. I'm collecting work to present as a week long post devoted to dinosaurs next spring. I'm interested in illustrations of dinosaurs more along the lines of those found in this previous post where the interpretations aren't exactly scientifically accurate, but are perhaps more fantastic, thanks!Pre historic animals and reptiles
(Flash video embedded above, here's a downloadable MP4.)
Today's episode of Boing Boing tv is an OFFWORLD feature -- this time, Joel and Rob visit the annual chiptunes music gathering Blip Festival 2008, better known as "blipfest."
Joel interviews several artists in this episode who create music inspired by the aural texture of old-schoold video games: Mr. Spastic, Jellica, and Nullsleep.
Previously: Blipfest 2008: Joel interviews chiptunes artist Bubblyfish.
(Special props to Beschizza for doubling as director of photography for these episodes! Holy Brother of Mario, what can't that guy do. Seriously. )
Steven Johnson's latest book, The Invention of Air, is a wide-ranging, learned, engrossing biography of the polymath pioneering scientist, Joseph Priestley. Priestley, a contemporary of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, was a kind of radical scientist/politician/theologian, an all-but-unimaginable combination in today's world of politicised science and deep fractures between faith and empiricism.
Johnson uses the life of Priestley to illuminate a theory of history that holds that great people are neither an inevitable product of their times, nor luminous, supernatural geniuses -- rather, they are the product of an ecosystem of influences, technologies, climate, and energy (literally -- the story of stored energy in coal, saltpetre, and plant-bound carbon are vital to the story). He pulls this off deftly, with a series of insightful, beautifully realized anaecdotes from the life of Priestley and his contemporaries -- his allies and his many enemies -- that make the idea of history being shaped by webs and networks seem absolutely true.
Who was Priestley? He was a slapdash, overexcited scientist with an absolute knack for apparatus design, fantastic intuition, and boundless energy -- his novel instruments and flighty nature led him to discover oxygen and the role plants played in its production (an insight that Benjamin Franklin helped build into the foundations of the modern notions of homeostasis). Likewise, he invented club soda, wrote the standard textbook on electricity (used for a century thereafter) -- but he also stubbornly held onto a belief in phlogiston, the mystical substance that allowed matter to burn, refusing to let go of this idea long after everyone else in the field came to believe in oxidization. But he was also a firm believer in open sharing of knowledge, a voluminous publisher of results and cross-pollinator of ideas who refused to be confined to one discipline.
Priestley was also a minister, an eccentric and dissenting one, who, by the end of his career, had denied the divinity of Christ and helped to found Unitarianism -- writing a book that condemned the exaltation of saints and Jesus as pagan beliefs, a book that brought Thomas Jefferson back to Christianity, promising a faith divorced from mysticism and spookery. But Priestley was also a firm believed in Revelations, convinced that they foretold the falling of the ten crowns of Europe, and that the realization of their surreal predictions was at hand. This -- along with his support for the French Revolution -- got him exiled from England, literally chased out of his home by a torch-wielding mob who burned his lab and house to the ground.
An exile in America, Priestley took up the cause of civil liberties and, along with other early Republicans, inspired Adams to pass the Alien-Sedition Act (one of the darkest chapters in the history of American civil liberties), though Adams never got around to using it on Priestley himself. Closely allied to Jefferson, Priestley took up the cause of politics and led the charge against Adams' regime and his campaign against the revolutionary French Republic, all the while preaching Unitarianism, Revelations, Phlogiston, and a series of remarkable, cross-disciplinary scientific discoveries that he made on his homemade apparatus.
Johnson's life of Priestley conjures up a man who was, in many ways, absolutely 21st Century: a miscellarian who relied on conversational networks to feed his fascination with technology, a fascination that was simultaneously all-consuming, ill-informed, and brilliant. But Priestley also epitomizes the late 18th century in his boundary-crossing revolutions in science and religion and politics, helping to change the course of history. As Johnson says, "The roving, untutored, connective intelligence was not particularly suited to defining the bylaws of a new scientific paradigm. But it was exceptionally well suited for exploding the old conventions, for pushing the field into its revolutionary mode. Some great minds become great by turning the rubble of an exploded paradigm into something consistent and meaningful. Others become great by laying the gunpowder, grain by grain."
Johnson's a wonderful science writer, but it's his scientific histories -- Emergence, The Ghost Map and now The Invention of Air that I like best. Like Levy's Hackers, Johnson's science histories bring these people and their passions to life in a way that is at once familiarly geeky and inspiring.
The Invention of Air, Joseph Priestley on Wikipedia
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At our work we were decomissioning six old HP/Compaq servers to clear up space for new servers and, naturally, each server had a fairly large raid array. Instead of formatting every hard drive (would have taken weeks performing a DoD level wipe) and disposing them all together with the servers, I decided to disassemble the hard drives and recycle them into something neat. With a lot (a lot) of patience, I made this shiny Xmas tree. In total there are around 70 old SCSI hard drives, between 9gb and 18gb in size each. They were nice and chunky, oldschool style. There were quite a few different hard drive models, which is good because they each had different bits which I could use. The Xmas tree is made with parts from hard drives only except for one nut which I had to purchase for $0.39.Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Holiday projects | Digg this!
Mind Hacks reports on a Consciousness and Cognition article about a "36 year-old woman with a long history of excessive daydreaming where she'd spent long periods of time wrapped up in a fantasy world." The woman is not mentally ill, and can tell the difference between the real world and her daydream universe.
Her condition reminded me of the "Jet-Propelled Couch" chapter in The Fifty Minute Hour: A Collection of True Psychoanalytic Tales by Dr. Robert Lindner. The chapter was about a Los Alamos physicist who had been sent to Lindner because he was acting strangely at work, often going into a trance-like state. Because the physicist had a high level security clearance, his superiors were quite worried about his odd behavior.
It turns out that the physicist believed himself to be John Carter, the protagonist in Edgar Rice Burrough's series of science fiction adventure novels that take place on Mars. The physicist was coincidentally also named John Carter. The physicist told Lindner he was able to teleport himself to Mars and have the same kind of adventures the fictional John Carter had. The physicist kept detailed maps and records of his adventures, accumulating 10,000 pages of notes! I won't spoil the rest for you. It's an incredible story. (You can read the "Jet-Propelled Couch" chapter through Google Book Search)
I first read A Princess of Mars, Burrough's tale of adventure on the red planet, when I was in junior high school. (Dejah Thoris, the princess in the novel, may have been my first crush.)
A few years ago I re-read A Princess of Mars, prepared to be utterly disappointed. But I loved it just as much as I did when I was 12 years old. Burrough's description of the Martian animals and societies, particularly the hideous six-limbed green Martians', is a hoot, and the plot moves along at a fast clip. It unfolds much like a contemporary science fiction movie. It's fallen out of copyright, and you can download it for free from Project Gutenburg's site.
We did a massive Arduino gift guide this year and a few folks asked if we had a PDF of it, so here it is! Remember the last day of shipping from the Maker Shed is this Friday, December 19th!
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A quick note for the last minute shoppers...
Orders placed Dec. 17th - Choose FedEx 3-Day Saver
Orders placed Dec. 18th - Choose FedEx 2-Day
Orders placed Dec. 19th - Choose FedEx Overnight
Stop by the Maker Shed store and check out THE place for open source hardware, Arduino & Arduino accessories, electronic kits, science kits, smart stuff for kids, back issues of MAKE & CRAFT, box sets, books, robots, kits from Japan and more.
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Gorgeous photo set of art made from maps via NOTCOT & store.
"He worked until the retirement age. We had been looking forward to going to various places as a couple and were excited that we would be able to spend a relaxing time together," (a Japanese newspaper) quoted the man's wife as saying."Japanese man dies after retirement party hijinks" (via Fortean Times)
"No matter what I say he won't come back, but I want to find out why this happened."
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From Neil Gaiman to J. Michael Straczynski: News on the Julius Schwartz Lecture Series (Thanks, Andrew!)Our first speaker, appropriately enough, was Neil Gaiman, whose work spans comics (The Sandman), fiction (American Gods), cinema (Mirrormask), television (Neverwhere), the blogosphere, and much much more. Gaiman gave a memorable opening lecture on the nature of genre and its influence on the creative process, which is best known for an extended rift on how pornography and musicals follow similar conventions. It was inspired by Linda William's Hardcore, but Gaiman took it in his own idiosyncratic directions. As the evening continued, we had a great conversation, which ranged across his career, talked about some of the key themes in his work, and especially dug deep into his ideas about myth, storytelling, and popular entertainment. Anyone whose ever heard Gaiman knows he's a charming and engaging speaker with lots of interesting insights into cultural history and media theory.
"Muppet (of Burlesque) Show at Monday Night Tease"Vixen Violette as Fozzie Bear stepped on stage wearing a brown, terrycloth hoop dress and matching knee-high boots, dancing to Elvis Presley's "Teddy Bear"; Scarlett Letter as Sam the Eagle took to a podium to rant about the topic of nudity ("Outrageous!"); Anastasia Von Teaserhausen as the Swedish Chef hand-crafted a giant hamburger consisting of the various meats and cheeses that made up her skirt (plus the heads of lettuce she wore as a bra); Red Snapper did her best Elton John to "Crocodile Rock" and was attacked by a giant stuffed crocodile; a corseted and velvet gloved Vixen Magdalene gothed things up a bit with her Dr. Steel Show; Isabella Star as Miss Piggy auditioned to be an Opera star; Lux La Croix as Rizzo the Rat kicked off her heels, got gangster and bumped her tail to Dr. Dre's "Rat Tat Tat"; Jewel of Denial rocked out and stripped down to Emmet Otter's Riverbottom Nightmare Band; and Dizzy Von Damn! as Gonzo the Great closed out the night with excellent pasty twirling technique and a Muppet version of Frank Sinatra's "I Did It My Way."
In just four weeks, Make: premieres on public television stations nationwide. But you can watch a preview right now. Here's Cyclecide's Paul Da Plumber and his Bicycle Rim Shot made out of recycled parts from the SF dump.
View the clip above, get the M4V and/or subscribe in iTunes. And don't forget to comment on this week's Make: television post.
Make: premieres on www.makezine.tv and on public television nationwide in January. To find out when it's on in your city, call your local public television station and ask for the "Viewer Services" department.
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Meggiecat points us to Cheeky Magpie's blog, where I found these papercraft reindeer - it looks like a fun holiday project for kids!
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Just what Noby is is hard to explain, but the fundamentals are simple: you control a Noby "BOY" with both analog sticks: one for the head, one for the tail, flexing, stretching, and eventually tying yourself in knots, in a playground world that's otherwise devoid of goals. And, as 1UP's preview points out, a Noby "GIRL", suspended in the heavens, is similarly stretchy, but only as a progress-bar reflection of the combined total of collective Noby Noby Boy player progress."It's a stretch: Explaining Katamari creator's new Noby Noby Boy" and "Another new look at Noby Noby Boy"
BB pal Tim Biskup just issued a bunch of new limited-edition prints and other goods, including this fantastic sterling silver ring featuring Tim's "Helper" character. Seen here is the ultra-limited ruby eyeball edition. Mark F got one and man is he jazzed about it!
Soheil Abedian, founder and president of Palazzo Versace, said he believed it is possible to design a refrigerated beach and make it sustainable. “We will suck the heat out of the sand to keep it cool enough to lie on,” he said. “This is the kind of luxury that top people want...”"Chill out, you beautiful people, the Versace beach is refrigerated" (Times Online), "Cool Sand Likely To Make Environmentalists Hot" (National Public Radio)
Versace's plans have shocked environmentalists. Rachel Noble, the campaigns officer at Tourism Concern, which promotes sustainable tourism, said that the carbon generated by such projects would contribute to climate change, whose worst effects would be felt by the poor.
“Dubai is like a bubble world where the things that are worrying the rest of the world, like climate change, are simply ignored so that people can continue their destructive lifestyles,” she said.
On this day in 1903 @ Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville and Wilbur Wright made some of the first sustained flights. The first flight was a approx. 120 feet lasting about 12 seconds. As you travel this holiday season this about how far we've come in just 100 years! It might not seem that way if there are delays though!
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Scientists have discovered an average of two new species a week in Southeast Asia's Greater Mekong River region. Unusual animals found in this incredibly rich and diverse habitat include Desmoxytes purpurosea, a pink millipede that spews cyanide to defend itself, and Heteropoda maxima, a spider that may be the world's largest with a 12 inch legspan.
This holiday video card installation by AKQA uses 49 microwave ovens stacked in a dark space and timed to sequentially turn off so that the only thing left is their blinking, unset clocks which resembles twinkling stars in the night sky (you need to watch the video until the end to see the full effect). The timed ovens going dark reminds me of a city at night fall where people are turning off lights in their apartments while getting ready for bed... Happy holidays to all the Makers out there!
via Mr Starfish
Smart Projects is a special holiday pack of 10 Arduino boards in an array of colors - neat! Unfortunately I do not find myself in need of 10 Arduinos … at least not right now :/ - Arduino Duemilanove Color [via Arduino Blog]
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Charles Platt helped pick a winner from our "Will these vehicles run? A puzzle from the past" contest -- MAKE reader shabadu please email me to claim your prize, a Maker's Notebook!
There's a lot of good stuff here. Most people seemed to get the right answer (so far as I can tell), although they used different paths to reach it. My vote goes to shabadu because he sums it up so succinctly (brevity is always a virtue), he writes clearly, he mentions a couple details that other posters missed, he gets everything right (so far as I can tell), and he adds a note of humor at the end. I regret that he didn't attempt the calculation regarding the first vehicle that Theodire Minick included, but Minick seems to use some unstated assumptions that bother me. For instance, he assumes that the lead balls have potential energy based on a 4-foot difference, but how did he come up with that number? It has to be a guess, and therefore doesn't justify his calculation to umpteen significant figures!I don't think any of the posters took into account the likely behavior of the balls on the roof. When the vehicle accelerates (assuming it does) the balls in the channel will tend to roll backward relative to the vehicle, because of their inertia. Therefore they will roll off the channel at increasing speed relative to the vehicle, and therefore they will hit the chute lower down, with greater kinetic energy, creating a more powerful forward thrust. On the other hand, their rearward motion will cause them to hit the lower chute at an increasing angle, which will deliver less forward thrust.
Of course the balls will not roll along the upper channel with zero friction, especially if they tend to rub against each other; and the balls in the reservoir over the cab will be significantly constrained. Therefore their mass, in addition to the mass of the vehicle, must be overcome by the forward thrust. However, the aggregate mass will diminish as the number of balls diminishes, and this will enable the vehicle to accelerate faster. Since this is a complex system involving factors such as the friction of lead against lead and the precise contouring of the ball containment system, no precise calculations are possible.
A simple way to look at the first vehicle is to assess the energy which would be required to lift the balls up onto the roof in the first place. This is the most energy that you can get back out of the system by allowing the balls to drop. In practice you will get less, because of frictional losses everywhere in the system.
Another issue which was not addressed is the question of "where the energy goes" in vehicle number two. The motor, after all, is doing work, circulating the water. If that work is not translated into motion, what happens to it? The answer of course is that it is converted to heat by friction between the water and the pipes. I would expect the water to become perceptibly warm as the truck sits there churning the water around and around while going nowhere.
And here's Shabadu answer...
In the first vehicle, the falling balls will apply a forward force. Just like pool balls bouncing off a bumper, the falling ball will be deflected backward by their impact with the second trough. According to Newton's third law of motion ("To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.") the vehicle will also deflect forward from this same impact. In an ideal system this will move the vehicle forward. However, any deformation of the second trough or the tires, and friction in the axles, and even wind resistance, will very likely overpower any forward force applied by the falling balls.The second vehicle won't move at all. The same principle that applied forward force to the first vehicle exists in the second one, so the water hitting the trough does give it a forward force, but since the water is collected it hits the back of the trough/pipe when it turns at the bottom to return to the pump. This impact applies a second force in the opposite direction of the first. In addition, the frictions, deformations, and wind resistance that might completely stop the first vehicle would be even more detrimental in this vehicle because the water will probably have less momentum than the lead balls, which provides less force to be transferred into movement of the vehicle.
On the other hand, the second vehicle does have a better chance of moving after the police arrest the first driver for dropping huge lead balls all over the road.
In this six-part video, Richard "God Delusion" Dawkins interviews stage hypnotist/magician Derren Brown about the techniques used by "psychics" to fool people (and maybe themselves) into thinking that they have extrasensory powers.
Richard Dawkins interviews Derren Brown (via 3 Quarks Daily)
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
?This gel-remote control which was redesigned by Panasonic as something that is "waiting to be touched" actually seems a bit more freaky than functional. Constructed from a soft, flesh-like gel, the remote appears to be cold when turned off. When on, a soft light glows from its middle and the device begins to mimic the motions of "breath" by moving ever so slightly. Just be careful not to lose it in a sex shop, otherwise it might be mistaken for something else.
via Next Nature
Adam writes in -
You can buy weighted bases that are specifically made for the Panavise 201 Jr; but I had the materials lying around and a lot of times making stuff is funner than buying it.- Easy (and cheep) Panavise weighted baseI used a 2.5lb plate weight (or dumbbell weight) for the weighted base. The only modification needed was the drilling of three holes for mounting the Panavise.
More:
HOW TO - build the Arms of Assistance
?Korean designer and maker Sang-Kyun Park has come up with the "LightDrops" umbrella that employs a Polyvinylidene Fluoride (PDVF) conductive membrane that transforms the energy from falling raindrops into electrical energy that causes LEDs embedded inside the umbrellas to light up. The heavier the rain, the brighter the lights get, thus illuminating your view. Next up would be to use a windmill on the top of the umbrella to store even more storm energy and build a plug to power your mobile devices from the inclement weather.
via Yanko Design
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A number of people have asked for more info on how I modded the Gakken SX-150 analog synthesizer for pushbutton usage. If you'd like to add a DIY keyboard youself, check here's my recipe -
Parts - Feel free to experiment with other resistor/trimpot values and using more/less switches. The basic idea here is to divide up the resistance of the original control strip into sections which are then connected via the switches to the stylus wire.
Schematic -
(click for larger view)
I removed the cut a piece of 'pad-per-hole' perfboard about the same size then built the keyboard circuit per the above schematic. I ran wires through the preexisting holes used for the control strip and soldered them internally to the appropriate board connections. After testing it out, I secured the board in place using a bit of hot glue.
I find the pushbutton/keyboard setup to be a lot more fun than the control strip, but I still have that stylus hanging about. Hmm, perhaps the strip could be mounted additionally in another area … Well until then, you can see the finished product at work in the original video I posted -
Once you experiment a bit with your own design, you'll likely notice how simple and versatile it can be. I picked up the basic concept a while back from Ray Wilson's excellent Music From Outer Space. Drop a line in the comments if I've left anything out/etc - and most importantly, Have fun!
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This project attempts to physically represent the amount of "rock" at a concert. It uses an Arduino and pressure sensors on the floor to measure the movement of the audience. It takes that data and creates a visual representation of the "rock" factor.
An idea popped out of Radio 1 Interactive a while ago. This would be a device that measures 'rock' - how much the band and the crowd are rocking at a gig - called The Rockterscale. It would display the amount of rock at the venue and on the web in real-time, maybe even showing it at other gigs and encouraging bands and crowds to out-rock each other. But, until now, no-one has really tried building it. But we were due another hardware hacking session so we decided to build the Rockterscale.
In the Maker Shed:
Make: Arduino
Next to an intersection with the main road to Mulanje works a group of men with basic tools. One of them was actively welding with a scratch built arc welder.
Wire was wrapped around a group of metal plates, and the whole thing was housed in a basic wooden frame.
To turn it on, the power wires to the transformer were connected hook style to the AC electric supply coming out of the store room.
There was one guy doing the welding, and he was also alternating between bashing away at a brake disk from a Toyota, trying to remove a part of the wheel hub. The banging was what originally caught my attention. He was beating away at it with a hunk of steel, fatiguing the metal of the hub for removal.
While I was there, he repaired two bikes, one by welding the pedal post back on to the crank.
While shooting the pictures of him welding, I protected my eyes by looking at the display of the camera and shielding my eyes by placing the camera in the line with the arc. The welder used no goggles. US safety inspectors would not have been pleased if they had been with me. I didn't realize it until I looked at the photos afterwards, but his technique was to do 'blind welding' He would attach the ground to the bike, close his eyes, and scratch at the point he wanted to work with the electrode. When the current flowed and the electrode melted, he worked it until it was close, then would stop, open his eyes, check his work, and continue on or finish up.
Since most Malawians have little or no access to the energy of fossil fuels, people get around by either walking or using bicycles. These bikes are used for everything, carrying heavy loads, personal transportation and serving as taxis. They almost all have sturdy steel racks on the back. The bikes are made in China or India, Humber was a common brand name.
If you lived a life with very little access to the leverage of fossil fuels, like the people of Malawi and many other countries, how would you get things done? Have you seen or done a project like this? how could access to a tool like this change a person's or a community's possibilities? What are your safety procedures for welding? Contribute to the discussion in the comments and add your photos and videos to the Make Flickr pool.
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This is a DIY version of commercially available carbon fiber trekking poles. The end product cost less, and they can be easily customized to suit your individual needs.
I thought it would be fun to see if I could make my own Carbon fiber trekking poles on the cheap that would rival the more expensive, commercially-produced ones out there. So, here we go!
More about DIY: Homemade carbon fiber trekking poles
In the Maker Shed:
The Best of Instructables Volume I
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
PHAT KNITS
(via Yanko Design)
Stefan sent in this circuit bent video mixer. I really like the effects it generates, I only wish there was more information on how it was made. [Thanks Stefan]
This is a DIY videoprocessor with Audio In which reacts to Audio in via RCA or through the build in microphone. Build into an old TI-99 case. It creates some nice colourful effects even from Black and White footage
More about the Bent videomixer
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Photograph by Muriel Thies
If you love the look of movies such as The Nightmare Before Christmas and The City of Lost Children, there's a sculptor out there after your own heart. In fact, none of Stéphane Halleux's darkly whimsical renderings -- robotic wheelchairs, squat submarines, armored cars, men with mechanical bat wings, animal soldiers wearing hand-stitched leather gas masks, a 30-inch cyclist whose suit includes electrodes that generate energy -- would be out of place in these fantasy flicks.
Two years ago, the former comic-book illustrator got sick of drawing "uninteresting things for other people" and started building the lanky-limbed, roboticized characters he enjoyed doodling -- ominously cartoonish forms that are futuristic yet also recall the past.
Now, Halleux works on his sculptures full time out of his home in the Belgian countryside, where he lives with his partner and their two boys. He sketches the rounded and slumped shapes, then coaxes the creatures from wood, metal, and hide, using scrounged antique parts for appendages and each of the fine details.
"It's as if these old, saved elements, full of history, were giving a soul to the final work," Halleux says of his recycled materials. "I like crazy mixtures, unlikely associations, advanced technology mixed with mechanisms of long ago."
The seemingly mechanical conformations give the impression that they are capable of rolling, taking off, or -- in the case of the cyclist -- pedaling. But actual movement is all in the spectator's mind, Halleux says.
"Each one has an invented history. If I really wanted to animate them seriously, the form and atmosphere would suffer. I think imagination is stronger than a working light or a turning propeller."
>> Halleux's Collection: www.stephanehalleux.com
From the column Made on Earth - MAKE 11, page 20 - Megan Mansell Williams.
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Every year when I go home for the holidays, I wind up setting up new computers, printers and cameras, as well as troubleshooting and de-lousing all the old ones. For most of my relatives' desktops, total computer meltdown takes about 3 months from time of install. So by December, most of these machines can be nicely classified as "a project".
This year, while I'm working on everyone's machines, I'm hoping to give the gift of free software. To do this, I'll be distributing flash drives with useful open-source desktop applications that I think will get the most traction. You can't expect everyone will become a full-on Linux convert overnight, but if I'm going to be installing office suites, digital photography tools, and antivirus software, now is a perfect time to introduce the great open source applications that will meet everyone's needs.
Anti Virus
The first thing that needs to be done on many machines is to run a virus and adware scan. ClamAV is a solid open source virus scanner that's used by server administrators to scan and filter email coming in and out of corporate networks. There's a derivative of this program, ClamWin, that adds a desktop interface to the package, and you can use this to effectively scan and clean a Windows box before installing anything else.
There's also a Mac version called ClamXav which I've included a link to for completeness. At this point in time I haven't really experienced any adware or virus issues in OS X, but the download is there if you need it.
On a side note, I've noticed so many problems on relatives' machines that are directly related to commercial virus scanning utilities. I've never installed these, so I don't know if it's a misconfiguration issue or that the hardware/OS combination isn't speedy enough to handle on-the-fly scanning of everything that's going on, but my first move is usually to uninstall these programs. More often than not, performance problems seem to be the direct result of a virus scanner. This is my opinion only, but I'd recommend removing any existing anti-virus software, or at least disabling the real-time scanning features before installing ClamWin. Better to use a safe browser and scan down downloads manually, in my opinion.
Safe Browsing
One of the best things you can do for Windows users is to install Firefox. It provides a more secure browsing experience and lessens the exposure to adware, popups, and virii, without damaging the user experience with so many warnings you can't differentiate problems from normal behavior. It's a solid install for Mac users as well, since there are a number of Firefox addons which can add additional security features to your browsing experience.
Secure Browsing and Communication
Encryption and anonymity features can be very important, especially for laptop owners and users who want to email information securely. If you know a very mobile laptop user, there's a reasonable chance that their laptop will get lifted or lost at some point. I've included GPG on my gift sticks so that sensitive files like bank and tax records can be encrypted in case of loss.
Also recommended is the Tor anonymity routing tool. If you're browsing the web in a public space, it will help to prevent local snoops from monitoring your communications. You'll still need to use SSL enabled (https) sites to ensure end-to-end encrypted connections, but Tor will help to keep those connections anonymous.
There are also Firefox plugins for GPG and Tor. The GPG plugin allows you to easily encrypt and decrypt data within web applications. If you know a GMail or webmail user, this will allow them to secure communication on these mail systems. Torbutton for Firefox provides a simple way to enable and disable the Tor network. Browsing with Tor can be heinously slow, so it's nice to only use it when necessary.
Word Processing, Spreadsheets, and Office Tools
Most people use MS Office at work, but don't have the latest version (or any version at all) at home. The Google Docs online apps do a reasonable job, but OpenOffice.org is a much more robust suite, can do most everything MS Office can, and it will function offline. It's the largest install on my gift drives—the installer weighs in at about 150MB for both the Mac and Windows versions. If you know someone who has a pirated or ancient copy of MS Office, though, installing OpenOffice on their machine might make for a great gift.
Photography and Image Manipulation
If someone gets a camera this year, forget about the crappy bundled software that comes with it. Even in the best case scenario, it's a crippled version of a popular app that will leave anyone wanting. In the worst case, well, some of the bundled photo tools rank right up there with bundled printer applications, which is to say that I can't write about how I really feel about them.
GIMP is awesome. Install it for your family and show them how to open, crop, scale and save JPGs. If they can get past that, teach them how to color correct and desaturate images. It's the 99% of what most people need to know to get the most out of their photography.
As of this writing, the native Darwin version of GIMP for OS X is still too buggy to use. The X11 version runs reliably, but you'll need to get the X11 package that comes with XQuartz or install it from the OS X install disks.
The Software
Without further ado, here are the downloads for all the above packages, separated by platform.
For Windows Users:
Downloads:
Firefox 3
GPG4Win (Based on GNU Privacy Guard)
GIMP - GNU Image Manipulation Program
Firefox Extensions:
FireGPG GPG Firefox extension - use GMail/Webmail securely
For Mac Users:
Downloads:
Firefox 3
Mac GPG (Based on GNU Privacy Guard)
GIMP for OS X - GNU Image Manipulation Program
This requires X11, which you can install with the XQuartz-Project if you have Leopard. With 10.4 (Tiger), you'll need to install the X11 package from the optional installs section of the OS X disks.
Firefox Extensions:
FireGPG GPG Firefox extension - use GMail/Webmail securely
Easy Download Option
I collected all of the installers for both Windows and Mac platforms into a single zip file that you can download from Sourceforge. At the time of this post, these were the latest stable binary installer releases for all of the above files, excluding the Firefox extensions, which you'll need to open in Firefox manually after installing it on the destination machine. You should be able to download either the giftstick-mac.zip or giftstick-windows.zip (or both), unzip it to a 500MB flash disk, and go on a free software installation binge.
Please note that the source files and latest releases for all of these programs are available at the sites listed above. The GiftStick zips are provided as a convenience for grabbing all of these applications in a single download. If this turns out to be helpful for a lot of people, I'll try and keep the GiftStick downloads up to date.
Considerations
The Mac files come out to about 360MB (bigger if you need to keep both 10.4 ad 10.5 installers), and the Windows files are at about 220MB. You can fit either on a 512MB or larger flash drive, or toss files for both platforms on a 1 Gig drive. I'm going to do the latter and help people with the installs and training, but you may want to consider putting this on a couple $30 drives and leaving them behind. Maybe it will get passed along to other potential free software converts.
Of course, there are many other open source packages that I've missed here. If you think I've left out anything essential, please share a link in the comments.
Hack on, and happy holidays!
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Today's XKCD swallows its own tail with a great flowchart explaining how to read flowcharts.
It allows people to programatically search, access, and preview books digitized as part of Book Search. For an example of the viewport in the wild, here's the Book Search iGoogle gadget that incorporates the previewer. Just install it on your iGoogle page and then click on a book to see a preview. I haven't seen a lot of cool uses of the previewer yet (which is why I'm pinging you), but I think there is potential for it. For example, I want to see someone annotate a bunch of books (maybe make an app engine app that lets people do this generically?) and then allow users to navigate around the book based on the comments - imagine the potential for collaborative reading or interpretation of a text. Using the API you can move forward or back in a book, zoom in or out, show the current page number, jump to a page, or search within the book.My Google Book Search Library, API documentation (Thanks, Frances!)
Better Worlds by Rudy Rucker on Lulu, Better Worlds on Rudy's blog
I took up painting in 1999 and quickly I fell in love with the medium. I started with oils, and switched to acrylics, as they’re more amenable to quick set-up and clean-up. My studio is a plastic chair and table in our back yard.I enjoy the exploratory and non-digital nature of painting, and I love the luscious mixing of the colors. Usually I make a quick sketch with broad brush. Sometimes I have a specific scenario in mind, other times I don’t think very much about what I’m doing, I just paint and see what comes out. Sometimes I’ll even start with an abstract pattern and slowly tweak the blobs into objects. Once I know where I’m going, I’ll polish the painting through two or three or even more iterations. I’m never in a rush to finish.
My pictures are realistic in the sense that they contain recognizable objects and landscapes, but fantastic in their use of heightened colors, cartoony simplifications, and odd scenarios. Many of images are telling a little story.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Knob Tyler thinks he’s the strongest, toughest, most badass motherfucker on Mill Avenue. Unfortunately, Knob has a lollipop for a head. This makes him not quite as badass as he thinks he is.CANDY-COATED By Carlton Mellick III, Candy-Coated, read by the girl who tells you which register to use at Whole Foods over the PA (Thanks, Carlton!)While he’s strutting down the street with his white muscle shirt tossed over his sweat-drenched shoulder, Knob likes to flex his pectorals at the ladies. Whenever he says ladies, he pronounces it laydaaays. But for some reason the laydaaays are never impressed by the size of his pecs. They are too creeped out by his weird lollipop head to notice anything special about his muscles.
Knob’s lollipop head is the size of a bowling ball and light orange in color. The flavor of the lollipop is Tropical Sensation, which is a mixture of pineapple, mango, and star fruit. His tiny candy eyes, nose, and mouth are clustered together in the center of his large round face. His eyebrows are always curled downward to show how fucking serious he is about shit.
For her Masters thesis at the MIT Media Lab, Anita Lillie created a music library visualization tool called MusicBox. The project will analyze the songs in a music library and group them based on a number of different dimensions - stuff like song length, tempo, ID3 genre information, and more advanced spectral properties of the audio.
This project is killer in so many ways, but my favorite feature is that you can use your mouse to draw a path through the song graph and and the tool will create a playlist that smoothly transitions between the different genres along that path. If this ever gets released, human DJs are going to have to step up their game.
MusicBox: Mapping and visualizing music collections
Previously:
Anita Lillie's Arduino sleep tracker project
Sean Ragan has put his old soldering iron to good use:
Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this!The upgrade left me with a surplus soldering iron and the opportunity to try a modification which first occurred to me when I was 10 or 11 and still playing around with Dad's tools in our old garage, which was to try to adapt a soldering pencil barrel to accept the threads of an X-acto Type A blade holder. The idea was to be able to conveniently adapt my trusty hobby knife for hot-blade work, useful for instance in the cutting of plastics.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
(Embedded Flash video above, and here's a downloadable MP4)
In just a few weeks, Boing Boing TV will be traveling to Vegas for The 2009 Consumer Electronics Show with the Boing Boing Gadgets guys -- Joel, John, and Rob. We're planning to broadcast video reports from the show floor. We're also bracing ourselves for lots of casino umbrella drinks.
To get us started in planning our coverage on the blog in text, photos, and in video, we thought it might be cool to hear from you, our audience. So we asked BB commenters and peeps who follow us on Twitter -- what do you hope or expect to see more of, or less of, at the world's largest electronics show this year. What exactly do you want us to bring home from CES?
In this episode of BBtv, we share your responses. They include:
? Find weird things on the fringes -- BE BOING BOING.
? OH WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN!!! (capture that on video.)
? Better netbooks, notebooks -- mobile computing.
? The most impractically ginormous flatscreen television ever.
? mobile gaming! laptops and mobile devices that allow me to get my game on out in the world.
? What notebooks or a/v devices are attendees themselves using on the show floor?
? Do not cover gadgets at all. Cats are better than gadgets. Also, they are an emergency food source during times of economic crisis.
Sponsor shout-out: Boing Boing TV's coverage of CES 2009 is sponsored by WEPC.com, in partnership with Intel and Asus. WePC.com is intended to be a site where users come together to "share ideas, images and inspiration about the ideal PC." Participants' designs, feature ideas and community feedback will be evaluated by ASUS and "could influence the blueprint for an actual notebook PC built by ASUS with Intel inside."
"There's a new president and he says it's time for a change; well, then it's time for a change," the 35-year-old continued. "They need to accept a name. A name's a name. The kid isn't going to grow up and do what (Hitler) did...."Cake request for 3-year-old Hitler namesake denied (Thanks, Jason Weisberger!)
Heath Campbell said he named his son after Adolf Hitler because he liked the name and because "no one else in the world would have that name." He sounded surprised by all the controversy the dispute had generated...
He said he was raised not to avoid people of other races but not to mix with them socially or romantically. But he said he would try to raise his children differently.
Today on Offworld we got an extensive look back at the design behind Chronic Logic's fluidly dynamic platformer Gish, and nosed around the new Club Nintendo campaign which has finally hit the U.S. We also saw indie adventure game Aquaria released on Steam, decoded game title anagrams, and played Lode Runner on our iPods.
Elsewhere, we saw Dogmeat finally get his armor, budgeted for the downloadable DS games coming to Japan for the holidays, watched even more new footage of Noby Noby Boy, from Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi, and saw Joel talking with NYC Game Boy musician Bubblyfish at the recent Blip Festival.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Emmanuel Florac and the rest of his officemates had a bit of a problem: while they could freely leave the office as they pleased, none of them could get back in. Undoubtedly, it had something to do with the new ironclad door and accompanying electronic locking mechanism that was recently installed. Try as they might, no one’s keycard would open the door.
Throughout the day, the office manager could not get a hold of the locksmith. Call after call after call ended with a simple, “we’re sorry, this voicemail box is full; please try your call again later!” As afternoon grew shorter and the evening approached, the jokingly-proposed “someone’s going to have to sleep at the office tonight” became more and more a reality.
Fortunately, Emmanuel had a better idea. All it took to open the door from the inside was a light tap on the switch, so all he’d need to do is find something that could lightly touch the door switch. Unable to find any robot-building components in the office, he sprung for the best alternative: a few cardboard boxes and an unused office PC. This is what he came up with:
The following morning at 8:00AM, one of his coworkers called him up to open the door. Emmanuel put down his cup of coffee, went upstairs to his computer, and then:
1) VPN to the office
2) SSH to the machine in the hall
3) Ran ~# eject /dev/scd0
And, click, the door was opened.
The locksmith did end up fixing the door later that day, putting the door-opening robot out of service just as quickly as it came in.
Thinking of giving a subscription to MAKE this holiday season? We've made some print-at-home cards suitable for giving and mailing. Consider dressing up your card a bit with some LEDs! I used conductive thread and a watch battery to power the holiday lights on the front of our "Tinker, Tinker, Little Star" card. See how I did it at my Flickr set.
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Not content with the functional-yet-pedestrian-looking hipster PDA (it's just a binder clip and index cards), GTD practitioner Patrick Ng applied his rather impressive design chops to building this stunning, one-of-a-kind productivity notebook he calls the mind.Depositor.
Instead of just inserting plain index cards for random note taking, I created a GTD template to print 4 tabs on these 4x6 index cards: Next Actions, Projects, Wait for, Someday/maybe. The tabs are highly useful to classify index cards into groups, just check the box and start writing to-dos. I also used plastic index cards from KOLO's Havana box to divide "Office Work" and "Personal" index cards (labeling done with Dymo's embossers). I wish I can find better quality index cards in cream color but it is difficult, so for now I'm settled with these ugly blue lined index cards.
His 4x6 in. index cards are retained with two seriously cool-looking clips he bought in Japan. Other features include a pen holder, custom dividers for "Office" and "Personal" notes, and tons of style. I wish I could get organized enough to use something like this, but I'd just continue to customize it as a form of procrastination.
mind.Depositor by Scription
via Lifehacker
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Life on the Inside
by Charles Platt
The man by the metal detector looks like somebody’s benevolent uncle. White-haired, folksy and jovial, he could be in a TV commercial selling hearing aids. You’d never guess he controls access to a concrete-walled correctional facility.
Getting into this Texas prison is turning out to be more difficult than I expected. First I had to submit a written application with a photocopy of my driver’s license, for a background check. After I was approved, I had to establish the date of my arrival, and when I drove out here this morning my car was subjected to some truly amazing security theater, as one humorless uniformed guard stared solemnly at all the stuff in the trunk while another peered under the hood at the engine.
Finally I was allowed to park in the visitor lot, after which I walked into a little fortified bunker at one corner of a huge perimeter fence topped with coils upon coils of razor wire. This is where I am now, with white-haired Mr. Friendly asking me—in the nicest possible way—to empty my pockets. Since inmates are not allowed to possess money, I’m not allowed to carry any in—with the exception of two rolls of quarters, which I was advised that I actually should bring with me, for purposes that I do not yet understand.
I’m here to visit a prisoner named Son Tran, who joined a Vietnamese gang in Houston when he was thirteen and was convicted of two gang-related homicides four years later, although he has raised some questions about the validity of his confession. After sitting in shackles on death row for several years he found himself suddenly reprieved, as the U. S. Supreme Court decided that kids who committed their crimes when they were under eighteen should not be given the death penalty.
Forced by the feds to spare a life, the Texas criminal justice system did the next-best thing: It sentenced Son to forty years before he can be eligible for parole. He now spends his days providing unpaid labor, sewing underwear for a garment manufacturer that has contracted with the prison system. Forget about third-world sweatshops; some of the most lucrative ones are staffed by felons here in America.
Probably to most people, forty years would seem a fair punishment for a former gang member convicted of homicide. Most people might also feel that keeping such an individual locked up is a sensible precaution to protect the rest of us. In this text, I will explain why I disagree with both of these propositions. As Exhibit A I’ll offer a personal statement by Son Tran, which I have formatted as a PDF file. You can view it by clicking this link. I think it’s a remarkable piece of work, especially considering that he was brought up speaking Vietnamese at home, and never finished high school.
Across the Free-Fire Zone
Today will be my first opportunity to see my inmate pen-pal face to face. I’ve never spoken to him, because at the time of my visit, Texas still doesn’t permit any of its prisoners to communicate with the outside world by telephone. I found his name on a web site dedicated to establishing communication with inmates via that most archaic system, the U. S. Postal Service, and I’ve been swapping letters with him for more than a year since then.
Mr. Friendly is now waving me through the metal detector, beaming at me and telling me to “have a nice day,” without any perceptible irony. Presumably this cheerful old geezer was chosen for his gatekeeper role to discourage any suspicion that a correctional system might have a dark side.
After I emerge from the metal detector I pick up my two rolls of quarters and proceed to a kiosk enclosed in bullet-proof plastic, which makes the woman on the inside look as if she’s peering at me from under water. I slide my driver’s license through a tiny slit, and she waves me forward, through a remote-controlled door.
I find myself in a holding area the size of an elevator. The door closes behind me, and I have some difficulty controlling my reflexive claustrophobia. But, the license checks out okay, and she returns it to me through another slit before opening a second, inner door, allowing me to proceed into the prison.
Now I walk along a section of asphalt path across a free-fire zone between the outer fence of the prison and the inner fence. Two guard towers are strategically placed to overlook this arid moat, and I have no doubt that men with loaded rifles are watching me with more than casual interest. Probably it would not be a good idea to stray from the path, here.
I pass through a gate that clangs behind me, and I continue across a grassy area toward the central building of the prison—which closely resembles a modern high school, although maybe I should say that high schools, these days, closely resemble modern prisons. Vaguely I wonder when the American school system embraced the slit-windowed concrete-box motif, and why. But then I am inside the main building and I find myself in a spacious lobby, where another official takes my driver’s license, and keeps it, giving me a slip of paper in return.
This I take with me to another armored cubicle, where I present it through another slit to another out-of-focus figure behind bulletproof plastic. I advance into another elevator-sized holding area. The door closes behind me, another door opens ahead of me—and here, finally, I am in the visitor area.
The Social Scene
Now I am seriously disoriented. After all the layers of security, this is the ultimate anticlimax. I have entered a large room like a cafeteria, where families are sitting at dining tables. Kids are running around, chasing each other and laughing. The low-security prisoners are allowed to sit alongside their estranged relatives, hanging out and eating sandwiches.
The convicts are utterly unlike the thugs you see in Hollywood prison movies. They’re everyday guys in their twenties, looking no different from people you might expect to see working at the paint counter in Home Depot or servicing cars at Jiffy Lube.
Over the years I have encountered some genuinely violent people—the kind who radiate an aura of menace which anyone with any sense will interpret as a clear warning to stay away. Those dark vibes are absent here, and after a moment’s thought, I realize why: Drive-by shooters and serial killers constitute only a small percentage of the prison population. Drug offenders, these days, are the largest subset. Thus, most of the men I am looking at probably made the mistake of trying to earn a little cash on the side by selling herbal or pharmaceutical products from which the government, in its wisdom, feels we should be protected.
Son Tran, of course, is imprisoned for a much more serious reason, and cannot mingle with visitors. There’s a long, enclosed section for such “violent” types, who have to communicate via telephone handsets from behind more panels of bulletproof plastic. To me it’s ironic that the prison has invested in such an elaborate system of protection, because I’m not sure who scares me more: The inmates, or the system that put them here. Call me paranoid (and indeed, many people have), but the many arms of law enforcement have broadened and strengthened their powers to an extent which would have seemed unbelievable just a decade ago.
The list of ominous indicators is long and getting longer, including warrantless wiretaps, innocent people killed or traumatized during no-knock drug busts based on bogus tipoffs, random traffic stops in search of drivers who have had two beers and will be hauled straight to jail, search-and-seizure of laptops by immigration officers, suspension of constitutional rights for anyone suspected of “terrorist acts,” tasering of citizens who ask why they’re being arrested, harassment of tourists taking photographs in public places, grandmothers fined tens of thousands of dollars because kids used their computers for file sharing, seventeen-year-old boys jailed for having sex with sixteen-year-old girlfriends, men stigmatized for life as “sex criminals” because they urinated in public, photo-radar systems that can track vehicle movements by using character recognition of license plates, naive wives of drug dealers imprisoned for years as “couriers,” and revival of the archaic offense of criminal libel, raising the risk of prison time if you post a little too carelessly on Craig's List. I used to view law enforcement as a source of protection; today I tend to see it more as an instrument of intimidation.
Among the adult population of the United States, 1 person out of every 100 is now behind bars. Thus the unweighted odds of going to jail are greater than the odds of being a crime victim. Of course I am aware of the counter-argument: “If you don’t break any laws, you’ll have nothing to worry about.” Tell that to Governor George Ryan of Illinois, where DNA evidence exonerated so many people who had been placed erroneously on death row, he felt obliged to commute the sentences of the remaining 163 inmates awaiting execution.
No doubt the prison that I am visiting harbors some truly unpleasant characters whom I would not want to encounter while walking alone on a dark city street. But I don’t believe that Son Tran is one of them.
Gas-Station Sandwiches
I sit on a plastic chair and wait for the prison
authorities to allow Son to come here to converse with me.
Finally he appears behind the bulletproof window, grinning
happily, as if this is the highlight of his week—and
who knows, maybe it is.
I ask him why he wanted me to bring two rolls of quarters, and he explains that I can buy food from vending machines in the visitor area. So, I go to the machines, which dispense what I call “gas-station sandwiches”: skimpy slices of Wonder Bread containing a minimum filling of tuna salad or ham and cheese. I buy a few and surrender them to a corrections officer, who places them in a paper sack and passes them through a small hatch to the restricted area behind the bulletproof plastic. In this way, I buy lunch for my inmate friend. I’m suitably sobered by the idea that the sandwiches constitute a treat compared to the regular prison diet. For one such as myself, accustomed to whole grains, organic greens, tofu, and other health-conscious vegetarian staples, eating nothing but prison food for forty years might be the single most awful aspect of being locked up.
Son devours his rations with enthusiasm, and we chat, through the telephone handset, in the same awkward style of a visitor chatting with a patient in a hospital. How are things? How are you doing? Have you seen your family lately? All topics seem trivial compared with the big and basic fact that I am free and he is not, but I can’t think of much to say about this. When he was taken off death row, he lost his court-appointed lawyer who was managing his appeal, and he lacks the resources to get a new attorney. In any event, he can’t talk about his case with me because the connection may be monitored, and our conversation won’t be protected by attorney-client privilege.
We talk about current events, and everyday life with other prisoners (most of whom he feels are harmless), and about the pencil drawings that he has been creating. Since Texas prisoners are not permitted to earn money or possess money, donations for them are placed in an Inmate Trust Fund account, from which the balance may be applied to purchases from the prison commissary. And since #2 pencils are the only drawing implement stocked by the commissary, Son Tran’s opportunities for self expression are limited.
Still, he has been creating painstaking portraits, which he has sent to me as gifts from time to time, leaving me wondering what to do with them. If I try to sell them on his behalf I’ll place him in a risky position, since he is not allowed to indulge in anything that could be considered a business activity. If he violates this regulation, he may be punished by losing his opportunity to further his education. In other words, if a Texas prisoner tries to make himself useful by selling something that he has made, the system may respond by preventing him from educating himself.
Money, Fear, and Politics
I guess I’m beginning to sound like a bleeding heart, here; but this is not entirely accurate. Let us suppose, for a moment, that Son Tran was guilty of the crime of which he was convicted. I fully accept that homicide should entail the most serious consequences. The question is, what exactly should those consequences be? From a strictly rational point of view, does incarceration for forty years make good sense, or would something else be better?
Let’s start with the concept of deterrence. I’ll ignore the death penalty, since the Supreme Court has already eliminated it for people under 18. Thus, we are left with incarceration. Has any study ever proved that the prospect of forty years without parole is a better deterrent than, say, thirty years, or even twenty years? It seems utterly implausible to me that the actions of a teenager in an inner-city gang will be affected by such a distinction. In fact I don’t believe that deterrence is either the effect or the purpose of the long, mandatory sentences that have become endemic in the United States during the past two decades.
It’s important to understand just how extreme the
situation is. We now incarcerate a larger proportion of our citizens,
and a larger absolute number of them, than any
other nation in the world. The United States has less than 5
percent of the global population yet has almost one-quarter
of all the world’s prisoners. (Source: New York Times,
April 23, 2008.) The Land of the Free has become the land of
the confined.
Now here’s the interesting part. From 1925 through 1975, the American incarceration rate remained around 110 prisoners per 100,000 population, not far from the current world median of approximately 125. (Source: New York Times, as above.) What happened since then? How could the rate increase by a factor of 7 during just three decades?
I can suggest an answer in three words: Money, fear, and politics.
Money is an issue because the United States is one of the few nations that can afford to build enough prisons and keep millions of people locked up. Most other nations are unwilling or unable to spend so much money unproductively.
As for fear and politics:
Back when Ronald Reagan was the Governor of California, growing discontent among conservatives encouraged the state to lead a movement toward tougher sentencing. When Reagan reached the White House in 1981, with his wife promoting the “war on drugs” and chanting “Just say no!” with her vapid grin, conservatives gained the power to encourage changes on a national level.
This trend reached its culmination in 1988, as Reagan’s reign was ending and Republican presidential candidate George H. W. Bush was looking for an edge over Michael Dukakis, his Democratic opponent. Bush’s campaign manager, Lee Atwater, and his media consultant, Roger Ailes, found their opportunity in the story of a convicted murderer in Dukakis’s home state of Massachusetts who had served 12 years in jail before being released on a weekend furlough, at which point he proceeded to commit a particularly unpleasant rape and other associated crimes.
Atwater and Ailes believed that one disturbing incident of this type, involving a heavy-set black rapist, would matter far more to voters than any reasoned debate about policy issues. It would capture the imagination, regardless of statistics showing that the event was a rarity or even a singularity. They didn’t seem to care whether the furlough policy had been a good thing or a bad thing. They simply knew that Dukakis had been in favor of it while he was governor, and it could smear him as damagingly as possible.
After the story was circulated via The Reader’s Digest, Bush started hammering away relentlessly at Dukakis for being “soft on crime.” This issue became probably the biggest factor enabling him to win the election. For more information about the propagandists who facilitated the rise of the Bush dynasty (leading by extension to the rise of Bush Junior) you can check the Wikipedia page for Willie Horton, the rapist who was at the center of the controversy. It makes depressing reading.
Many other politicians were quick to notice Bush’s successful exploitation of public anxiety, and followed a similar strategy, calling for harsher penalties while denouncing their opponents for being less punitive than they were. In other words, they followed the ancient practice of whipping up fear while simultaneously promising to alleviate it.
This is a simplification of a complicated national trend, but I believe it does help to explain how the general U. S. prison population increased by a factor of 7. Many conservatives see no problem in this, since long sentences have been accompanied by a reduction in violent crime. On the other hand, in Canada, violent crime went into a similar decline without a massive increase in the prison population; and in some states (notably, New York) the crime rate didn’t go back up even after authorities relaxed their previous punitive policies.
Therefore the linkage between longer prison terms and a lessened crime rate remains a matter for debate. One conclusion, however, is indisputable: Tough sentencing does reassure anxious voters.
Adjusting the Consequence to Fit the Crime
Let’s suppose that protecting the general public is the fundamental issue. The question then becomes: How much protection is enough? Logically, to reduce the risk to zero, all violent offenders should be imprisoned for life or executed. Since this may be unethical and is certainly unaffordable, we have to find a reasonable compromise, balancing the risk that a released criminal may repeat his crime against the social advantage of enabling the majority of prisoners to resume productive lives.
Traditionally, the parole system is supposed to serve this purpose by assessing each prisoner on a case-by-case basis to determine which ones are safe for release. Parole can be especially appropriate for juvenile offenders who may have been immature or unduly influenced by their peers.
This gets me back to the case of Son Tran. Imagine yourself aged thirteen, feeling angry and estranged from your fellow students because you’re Vietnamese-American. Imagine that you are approached by some older kids who are themselves Vietnamese. They invite you to join their club, and for the first time in your short life, you are freed from your feelings of alienation. You find acceptance.
Of course, there’s a price to pay. It’s like joining the army: You go through a process of indoctrination and desensitization, during which you bond with your comrades-in-arms and learn to obey orders.
The scenario that I’m outlining does not excuse the crime. It merely suggests that someone who was not yet an adult, and became infatuated with gang culture at a very impressionable age, should not be judged as harshly as, for example, a serial killer who has committed multiple crimes over ten or fifteen years. After a decade in prison, the serial killer may still represent a severe risk to the general public while the younger man may not, and a system that refuses to take this into account wastes human potential and wastes our money. Even when the state reaps some income on the side by forcing prisoners to do menial work for no pay, incarceration remains an expensive proposition.
There is of course the point of view that punishment should be administered for its own sake; that criminals should be made to suffer. This bothers me, because aside from deterrence (already discussed above) I see no social benefit from punishment. Very often, it seems to be simply an outlet for revenge, and revenge is not a very highly evolved impulse. It receives mixed reviews in the New Testament, does not ennoble anyone, and certainly doesn’t enrich anyone. I prefer the concept of restitution, requiring the guilty party to earn money to compensate a victim or his family. That at least is useful—and, incidentally, may still serve as some deterrent.
I also refuse to give up on the idea of rehabilitation, because I know people who have successfully decided not to repeat past mistakes. Prisons are properly referred to as “correctional facilities,” implying that they should be capable of correcting bad behavior. If there’s a chance to redeem someone rather than execute him or take away his liberty for half of his life, wouldn’t that be a more constructive option?
Most of all, I am dispirited by the simple-mindedness of imprisonment as a social tool. Our remedies for most social problems have evolved over the past couple-thousand years; people who are mentally ill, for instance, receive medical treatment instead of just being shut away in lunatic asylums. But the ritual of incarcerating criminals survives basically unchanged. Really, we need a smarter and more creative alternative that doesn’t cost so much. If it can also be less destructive of human lives, so much the better.
Contact Info
One thing on which everyone can agree, regardless of their political orientation, is that prison is a depressing place. Based on my experience in Texas, merely visiting it is extremely depressing, even when the facility is modern and relatively humane.
As I leave the barbed-wire fences behind me I feel the same kind of sadness that I experience when someone dies. It’s a similar situation: A loss of human value which I am powerless to prevent. That’s why I continue to send letters to Son Tran from time to time.
Other prisoners have suffered greater injustices, other prisons impose harsher conditions, other nations subject their prisoners to crueler treatment, and millions of people—drug offenders, especially—are incarcerated for reasons that make no sense to me at all. Son Tran just happens to be the guy I know, and so, he’s the one I am telling you about. If his life story interests you, you can write to him yourself, while remembering that he has to buy postage stamps, envelopes, and paper from the commissary to reply to you, and therefore, even very small donations are appreciated. The trouble is, you cannot send money to him directly. It will be returned by the authorities, and will rouse suspicions that he is soliciting assistance, which he is not.
Here’s what you can do, if you are interested. Send me a blank email at this account that I have set up: sontranfund@gmail.com. In return I’ll tell you how to write to him and how to make a small donation if you so wish. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose.
—Charles Platt
My toaster is hooked to the internet to tell the world when I am toasting and when my toast is done. The system uses the ioBridge module and event widgets and Twitter to echo the feedback from my toaster. I would love to hear your thoughts.Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this!
Time has a cool slideshow and interesting article about vertical farming. See the article for a focus on the now, like this experiment in El Paso:
And more futurism in the slideshow. My favorite:
Even if they're not always the most efficient, you've gotta love those Savonius turbines on top...
Please share in the comments any details on actual, operating vertical farming setups you've found.
Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Green | Digg this!
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