Whiteox writes about an Australian researcher named Renata Pronk, who has discovered that octopuses prefer HDTV. She recruited 32 gloomy octopuses from the waters of Chowder Bay. Previously, researchers have reported little success when showing video to octopuses. Miss Pronk's insight was that the octopus eye is so refined that it might see standard PAL video, at 25 fps, as a series of stills. She tried HDTV (50 fps) and her subjects reacted to the videos of a crab, another octopus, or a swinging bottle on the end of a string. A further discovery is that octopuses show no trait of individual personalities, even though they exhibit a high level of intelligence. It would certainly be possible to quibble about the definition of "personality" employed, and whether Miss Pronk had successfully measured it.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

RobGoldsmith writes "Earlier this week images were appearing on the Net showing the WhiteKnightTwo craft doing some tests in Mojave. The earliest tests showed perhaps two of the engines being used, while a later test showed all the engines working and some further testing. Today the four Pratt & Whitney Canada PW308A engines finally carried the craft into the air. The maiden flight of the WhiteKnightTwo lasted just shy of one hour and happened today at around 08:15 local time, at Mojave air and spaceport. Rumors suggest that a Beechcraft King Air was used for a chase plane. The craft will be used to position Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo craft to fly into space; this is estimated to happen around 2010."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here are some of my favorite posts this week from the CRAFT blog:

• HOW TO - Aluminum Can Ornaments
  
• HOW TO - Recycled Newspaper Gift Bags
  
• Packaging Lights by Anke Weiss
  
• Gingerbread House SketchUp Contest
  
• Lemon Pie Tutorial
  
• Google Tea Towels
  
• CRAFT Gift Guide - Holiday Gift Projects Kids Can Make
  
• HOW TO - Wool Felt Holly Garland
  

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

Fubari writes "I have questions for those of you who have written books: what writing tools have you found helpful? I want to start my book off right (so I'm pretty sure I don't want to write it in MS Word). What has and has not worked well for you? So far I have thought of needs like chapter/section management, easy references to figures (charts, diagrams, source code), version control (check in/check out parts like chapters, figures, etc.), and index generation. I would also welcome advice about what I don't know enough to ask about. Did you encounter any surprises that you wish you had known about back when you started out?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Interesting article @ The NYTimes, are consumers are choosing simpler electronic gadgets? Pictured here a taken apart Flip camera.

THE National Bureau of Economic Research hardly stunned the nation this month when it announced that the United States had been in recession since December 2007.

And, as it turns out, the buyers of consumer electronics could very well have been a leading economic indicator. Over the last year, they chose to buy two inexpensive and simple products, the Wii and the Flip, over competing gadgets bristling with more features.

Nintendo has sold more than 30 million Wii game consoles since they were introduced two years ago. The machine is still luring shoppers: lines of buyers still form on Sunday mornings outside electronics stores.

The $130 Flip camcorder is also simple, and two to three times cheaper than camcorders made by Sony or JVC that have optical zoom, an optical viewfinder and special effects. The original Flip didn’t even have a headphone jack. Revenue at Pure Digital Technologies, its manufacturer, grew 44,667 percent, the highest rate of any company in Silicon Valley, over the last five years, according to Deloitte, the business services firm. Pure Digital Technologies says it has sold more than 1.5 million Flips since it unveiled the product line in 2007.

What do you think makers? What gadgets did you pick up this year? Are they more complex or "simpler" than last year?

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

High school students in Maryland are using speed cameras to get back at their perceived enemies, and even teachers. The students duplicate the victim's license plate on glossy paper using a laser printer, tape it over their own plate, then speed past a newly installed speed camera. The victim gets a $40 ticket in the mail days later, without any humans ever having been involved in the ticketing process. A blog dedicated to driving and politics adds that a similar, if darker, practice has taken hold in England, where bad guys cruise the streets looking for a car similar to their own. They then duplicate its plates in a more durable form, and thereafter drive around with little fear of trouble from the police.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

iammani writes with this excerpt from Reuters: "Warner Music Group ordered YouTube on Saturday to remove all music videos by its artists from the popular online video-sharing site after contract negotiations broke down. ... The talks fell apart early on Saturday because Warner wants a bigger share of the huge revenue potential of YouTube's massive visitor traffic. There were no reports on what Warner was seeking. 'We simply cannot accept terms that fail to appropriately and fairly compensate recording artists, songwriters, labels and publishers for the value they provide,' Warner said in a statement." Warner's deal with YouTube to make those videos available came just prior to YouTube's acquisition by Google.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Image via)

The New York Times put out photography tips, and Lifehacker made them better. My favorite, from Lifehacker:

Get a cheap, DIY lens hood or flash filter: A lens hood--like the kind you can print yourself--prevents glare, flare, and other light tricks beaming in from just around your lens edges. Similarly, a piece of white coffee filter can work wonders for diffusing your flash, giving bar shots and other low-light situations a much mellower light

.

For that aspiring paparazzi on your list, check out our Make gift guide for photographers!

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

An anonymous reader writes "Jim & Louise Gunderson, owners of a Denver-based computer software tool development company, have finally unveiled their autonomous robot, Basil. Basil is completely home built, runs Linux with some instructions in Java, uses a sonar-based 'reification' logic system, and can go get you a beer or a pot of tea. Quoting: 'The plan is this: The Gundersons will ask Basil to go to the bar, request a couple of stouts from the bartender, and then, once they're placed on the titanium tray perched on his head, bring them back to his creators. They haven't told him how to do this — there's no set script in his processors that tells him to roll a certain distance southwest, speak a certain command, then come back. He'll have to figure it all out on his own, using a basic knowledge of bars and beers and so on, reasoning skills and an ability to understand certain parts of the world. When his sonars capture the image of a person, for example, he knows it's a person, not just a nameless object to be avoided. And he knows that, in this case, that person wants a beer.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Matt_dk writes with news that scientists have detected water in a galaxy 11.5 billion light-years from Earth. Evidence came in the form of emissions from water masers around a quasar at the center of the galaxy. Detection at such a large distance was made possible by a closer, intervening galaxy which acted as a gravitational lens. "'We were only able to discover this distant water with the help of the gravitational lens,' said Violette Impellizzeri, an astronomer with the Max-Planck Institute for Radioastronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn, Germany. 'This cosmic telescope reduced the amount of time needed to detect the water by a factor of about 1,000,' she added. The astronomers first detected the water signal with the Effelsberg telescope. They then turned to the VLA's sharper imaging capability to confirm that it was indeed coming from the distant galaxy. The gravitational lens produces not one, but four images of MG J0414+0534 as seen from Earth. Using the VLA, the scientists found the specific frequency attributable to the water masers in the two brightest of the four lensed images. The other two lensed images, they said, are too faint for detecting the water signal. The radio frequency emitted by the water molecules was Doppler shifted by the expansion of the Universe from 22.2 GHz to 6.1 GHz."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What *is* it about cephalopods? You can build your own adorable squid at Te Papa's Colossal Squid site - there's lots of information about the real colossal squid, too.

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

When I glanced up from shoveling the driveway it looked like some kind of cool pattern. Maybe I did it on purpose, maybe it just happened that way. A quick photo from my pocket camera and then it was time to make it really go away.

Most of the continental US seems to be in the clutches of one freak snow storm or two lately. We are at the start of winter here in the Northern Hemisphere, so there should be plenty of time to try out snowy ideas. Arduino enabled snowman? Throwie Snowballs? WifI in your snow fort? Snow Lanterns? Storytelling with snow sculpture? DIY weather station?

How can you be creative with snow/ice/winter/cold/vacation? How do you color correct for snow pictures that are too blue? Are you and your neighbors doing crazy cool stuff to outdo one another? What kind of snow constructions did you make as a kid and are your kids making them this week? How is that snow cave working out? What have you built to take advantage of the snow's qualities? How do you have fun with that huge pile of snow left over by the snow plow? What are you doing with this palette of white fluffy material? Post your photos and videos in the Make Flickr pool, and add your comments to join the conversation.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this!

jd writes "NIST has announced the round 1 candidates for the Cryptographic Hash Algorithm Challenge. Of the 64 who submitted entries, 51 were accepted. Of those, in mere days, one has been definitely broken, and three others are believed to have been. At this rate, it won't take the couple of years NIST was reckoning to whittle down the field to just one or two. (In comparison, the European Union version, NESSIE, received just one cryptographic hash function for its contest. One has to wonder if NIST and the crypto experts are so concerned about being overwhelmed with work for this current contest, why they all but ignored the European effort. A self-inflicted wound might hurt, but it's still self-inflicted.) Popular wisdom has it that no product will have any support for any of these algorithms for years — if ever. Of course, popular wisdom is ignoring all Open Source projects that support cryptography (including the Linux kernel) which could add support for any of these tomorrow. Does it really matter if the algorithm is found to be flawed later on, if most of these packages support algorithms known to be flawed today? Wouldn't it just be geekier to have passwords in Blue Midnight Wish or SANDstorm rather than boring old MD5, even if it makes no practical difference whatsoever?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

http://ywwg.com/wordpress/?p=270

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

Ponca City, We love you writes "James Surowiecki has an interesting article in the New Yorker that crystalizes the problems facing print newspapers today and explains why we may soon be seeing more major newspapers filing for bankruptcy, as the Tribune Company did last week. 'There's no mystery as to the source of all the trouble: advertising revenue has dried up,' writes Surowiecki, but the 'peculiar fact about the current crisis is that even as big papers have become less profitable they've arguably become more popular,' with the blogosphere piggybacking on traditional journalism's content. Surowiecki imagines many possible futures for newspapers, from becoming foundation-run nonprofits to relying on reader donations to deep-pocketed patrons. 'For a while now, readers have had the best of both worlds: all the benefits of the old, high-profit regime — intensive reporting, experienced editors, and so on — and the low costs of the new one. But that situation can't last. Soon enough, we're going to start getting what we pay for, and we may find out just how little that is.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Paul Romein and Greg Radzimowsky have created an incredible stop action animation of their building of the Millenium Falcon in Lego. I suppose that if you go through the effort of making your own Millenium Falcon, you have to take it for a test drive, right?

Have you built your own starship? Have you flown one lately? How is your technique for stop motion animation? Contribute to the discussion in the comments, and add your photos and video to the Make Flickr pool.

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

ki1obyte writes "Earlier this year the Taiwanese firm Abit, once a leading-edge maker of computer mainboards and other components, was slated to shut down motherboard production by the end of 2008 and focus on consumer electronics devices. Now X-bit labs reports that Abit will cease to exist entirely after midnight on the last day of 2008 because the owner of the brand, Universal Scientific Industrial, is in the process of restructuring and cutting their costs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nice felted resistor from MAKE Flickr photo pool member made_by_moxie.

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

10 Gifts Under $10 for the SF Geek
With the economy in a downward spiral and Christmas just eight days away, the gang at GeekDad headquarters are there to help you decide on what gifts to get every member of your geekly gang.

Christmas Camouflage
Christmas Camouflage, not as cruel tricks to fool and deceive your delightful children, but as medicine to prevent Christmas sorrow after sleuthing out their presents ahead of time. They'll thank you one day.

The Twilight Zone Returns in Comic Book Form
Savannah College of Art and Design have teamed up with book publisher, Walker & Co. to revisit the Twilight Zone and plan to publish eight graphic novels based on early episodes.

New Advances in Mind-Reading, and What Might Be in It for Us
Scientists in the U.S. and Japan have figured out ways of determining what image a person is seeing just from analyzing his brain activity. The technology is limited at the moment to black-and-white images, and to extremely low resolution ones at that. But the implications are staggering: Eventually, technology may be able to view dreams as they occur, or record memories.

The Christmas Tree Dilemma: Artificial or Real?
Which will it be this year? Paper or plastic?

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

Here is my hacked MAKE gift subscription card I plan on giving this holiday season. I used an Arduino, a 7-Segment display, and a modified MAKE gift subscription card. The recipient gets the Arduino and a subscription to MAKE. It's the perfect combination!

It's never too late to pick up a Maker Shed Gift Certificate, or you could get a MAKE Gift Subscription and print you own MAKE Gift subscription Cards.

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

You can make your own USB microscope using an old webcam and a cheap toy microscope. All it takes is a soldering iron, some hot glue, and an hour of your time. Instructables user moris_zen has the details, which basically involves a little focusing trial and error before gluing things together:

While you view the image via the SW used for the webcam - position it so you get a clear image. You may need to play with it for a while. After you find the exact location use a hot glue gun to fix it to that position. Then tape the wires tidily to the microscope and start taking pictures...

I imagine you'd get even more interesting results substituting the old 320x240 web cam for an old 2 megapixel digital camera.

Also worth checking out would be to skip the optics entirely, positioning the CCD right up against the sample with a proper light source. I believe this is the technique being used in the UCLA cellphone microscope. The output is supposedly low-res and blurry, but it's decent enough to capture the shadows of individual cells, making cellcount-based diagnoses possible.

Build a USB Digital Microscope
Aydogan Ozcan, UCLA Lensless Imaging System

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

LinuxScribe writes "From Apple's ubiquitous 'I'm a Mac,' to Jerry Seinfeld, to Microsoft's 'I'm a PC' retort, operating system commercials have been flooding the airways. Except that Linux is the one OS that has been notably absent. Now the Linux Foundation is launching a video contest on their new video site to fill this void. The winner gets a trip to Tokyo next year to participate in the Linux Foundation Japan Linux Symposium, and some serious geek cred." The contest doesn't officially open until late January; the blog post has an email address to contact if you want to get a head start.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'm not convinced this isn't a hoax or viral marketing campaign, since "strange news blackout" can also mean "didn't actually happen." Even if it's fictional internet lore, it's notable as such. (Appears to be real). An anonymous friend of BB says,

There seems to be a strange news blackout around the horrifying story of the "Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs", three Ukranian teens who apparently recently performed a series of staggeringly violent serial killings and recorded them on cellphone video and then attended the victims' funerals. Supposedly this is some of the first actual video of this kind of crime that has made it into the wild of the internet - the perspective of the deranged killer.

If you Google-news "Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs," little if anything comes up, but the video and story is all over the gore/shock sites, putting them ahead of the news organizations here in the US.

I can't watch the video, and only came across the story by cruising Encyclopedia Dramatica for teh (non-violent, tsk-tsking) lulz, but I glimpsed some stills and felt a little more heartsick about humankind because of it.

Purported Translation of cellphone video dialogue. See also dnepropetrovskmaniacs.com. [warning: links include graphic violence]. Link to video of teens in Ukranian court [does not include video footage of the attacks, thanks leriseux]

---

A NOTE FROM THE MODERATOR: I don't want to see any more comments from people who read Xeni's description, watched the video anyway, and are complaining about how horrifying it is. Yes! It's horrifying! If you don't want to see that, don't watch the video. Furthermore, those of you who feel that stuff like this should not be given attention are hereby invited to (1.) not watch the video, and (2.) not post comments about it, either. (Ignoring: ur doin it rong.) Thank you.

p.s.: There's a large stash of unicorn chasers further down the thread. Use as needed.

--Teresa Nielsen Hayden

---

UPDATE: An anonymous commenter in the discussion thread for this post writes:

Hello all. I am from Ukraine, I live in Kiev, but at that time i worked with a girl whose family lived in the same entrance of the multistoried building as one of those teenagers. I remember the horror when she was speaking about what was going on and the shock when she knew it was her neighbor. What we know from the news is... they were 3. One of them was likely an initiator (his surname was Supruniuk) and second one supported him. The third one was kinda acting under the pressure. Nobody knows what moved them, because they rarely robbed. They just liked to kill, those who were weaker than they. It is totally sick, totally criminal. Some newspapers wrote that they might have been under the cover of the dad of this Supruniuk...that he kinda was selling those videos online. N tht he was trying to hide the evindece (smb threw mobile phones in the lavatory)... Some say that they got more pending crimes imposed upon them by police. They are very calm during interrogation, etc. Their parents can not believe. In the phone of one of them police found some nazi images... What can i say... I dont want to ever watch anything about that or know anything more than i know. Their souls are sick. May God do something to that.. Regards, Margaret

Our pal I-Wei Huang, aka Crabfu, got a nice profile on the Discovery Channel's Daily Planet. Congrats, man.

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

waderoush writes "Some of the coolest media technologies predate the Web and the PC — in fact, they predate the 20th century. My column in Xconomy explores the world of 19th-century stereoscopes and stereo views, which are the all-but-forgotten forerunners to anaglyphic 3D, VR goggles, and other modern stereo vision systems. As it turns out, it's pretty easy to 'free-view' vintage stereo images on an iPhone or other small screen, getting the full 3-D effect without any other viewing aids. The article has instructions for accessing a collection of old stereo images using the new Seadragon Mobile iPhone app from Microsoft Live Labs." The stereoscope, that killer technology of the last century but one, was invented in 1859 by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., who gave it away and never made a dime off it. If you don't have an iPhone and want to get the feel of free viewing on a computer monitor, start here at Roush's Flickr photostream.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

touretzky writes "Two ex-employees have sued Diskeeper Corporation in Los Angeles Superior Court after being fired, alleging that the company makes Scientology training a mandatory condition of employment (complaint, PDF). Diskeeper founder and CEO Craig Jensen is a high levelI, publicly avowed Scientologist who has given millions to his Church. Diskeeper's surprising response to the lawsuit (PDF) appears to be that religious instruction in a place of employment is protected by the First Amendment." The blogger at RealityBasedCommunity.net believes that the legal mechanism that Diskeeper is using to advance this argument ("motion to strike") is inappropriate and will be disallowed, but that the company will eventually be permitted to present its novel legal theory.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Make: television debuts in 13 days. The online premiere of Make: television is January 3rd 2009, visit makezine.tv or iTunes to see the entire first episode! The broadcast premiere will follow shortly after depending on when your local Public Television (PBS) station airs it. Episodes will be available: commercial free, on PBS, DRM free and in gorgeous HD (High definition format) on our site, iTunes and probably a lot of other places. We have a countdown clock on the right side of the MAKE blog and we'll have some fun posts leading up to the big day!

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

Into biking, making stuff, and opening bottles? This is the project for you!

Make a chain and hub bottle opener

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!

Why cut down a perfectly good pine when you probably have old hard drives, cardboard, or some other material just waiting to be a tree sitting around your house?

My favorite is the Mountain Dew can tree:

(via Ecofriend)

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