Roland Piquepaille writes "According to researchers at the University of California at San Diego, visual areas of our brain respond more to valuable objects than other ones. In other words, our brain has stronger reactions when we see a diamond ring than we look at junk. Similarly, our brain vision areas are more excited by a Ferrari than, say, a Tata new Nano car. In this holiday season, I'm sure you've received gifts that excited your brain — and others that you already want to resell on an auction site."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This image of a threatening snowman is from a 1927 postcard. It was reproduced in a Smithsonian magazine feature about the history of the snowman in pop culture. From Smithsonian:

While no one knows for sure when exactly the snowman began smoking a pipe and drinking hard liquor, it may have started as early as 1890, based on a label from a bottle of whiskey from that year. An 1898 postcard shows a snowman carrying two bottles of champagne off to an office party. On holiday greeting cards from the 1900s through and on (up to the 1930s), the snowman often has a drink in one hand and a pipe in the other, mirroring our society’s changes and America’s fascination with smoking and drinking. This would eventually escalate to the snowman cavorting with women and offering drinks to minors. One could argue that these depictions were, in a way, humanizing, but seeing a tipsy snowman chasing a girl with a stick is disturbing at best.

By 1908, there was clear evidence of his partying ways were out of control. In the silent movie The Snowman by Wallace McCutcheon, a chain-smoking snowman is swigging whiskey and appears in the rest of the film sloshed, inspiring a flogging by the townspeople. This behavior would continue on film and media through magazines and postcards as a pickled, skirt-chasing, under-the-table lush. In other words, he had become a frozen W.C. Fields. By the ‘30s and ‘40s, there is no question, the two started to look alike, both wearing straw hats, putting on more weight and looking more round and sporting crimson noses. And both enjoyed prolific silent movie careers based on their reputations as charming drunks. It’s hard to say if either had copied from the other but they were both enhanced by the other’s notoriety. Ironically, W.C. Fields hated the holidays and passed away on Christmas Day, 1946.

Snowman Gone Wild

GMAW is one of many to mention that the Vietnam government has approved a new set of regulations aimed at bloggers. The new restrictions ban bloggers from discussing certain subjects that the government deems sensitive or inappropriate. Not only are the topics limited, but bloggers are being directed to only write about issues that directly impact their personal lives. "The rules, which were approved Dec. 18, attempt to rein in Vietnam's booming blogosphere. It has become an alternative source of news for many in the communist country, where the media is state-controlled. The new rules require Internet companies that provide blogging platforms to report to the government every six months and provide information about bloggers on request."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Greater City: Providence has a post on some recent LED lighting news (good stuff+links in the blog and the comments), including links to a couple of articles on LED streetlights in NYC, Ann Arbor, and others:

Since LEDs use less power than existing halogen, incandescent, or even fluorescent bulbs, it makes sense that this will be the choice in illuminating miles and miles of roadway. Moreover, when cities and states start ordering LED based street-lights, the quantity needed will no doubt force down the cost, eventually leading the way to more adoption of LEDs as a lighting source.

LED Street Lighting

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Continuing in our lazy-time retrospective of favorite Boing Boing tv episodes from the past year, we revisit an animated music video gem by Kristofer Ström of Ljudbilden & Piloten, based in Sweden. Here's their blog. Snip from the original BBtv blog post:

This short work is a music video he created for the Swedish electronica band Minilogue. The track is "Animals," and the video features colorful critter-blobs wreaking hyperfun havoc all over an urban real-life-scape.

We asked Kristofer to tell us a little about how this came together, and he explains:

In late 2007 we (me and the band Minilogue) started talking about making a followup to the very popular "hitchhiker's choice" video. At the same time I was doing some VJ-ing for them and found that those little animations i made for that could be characters in their next video. So I started producing a lot of loops of creatures. I hooked up with bart yates, nicholas wakeham and erik buchholtz, and our first thought was to put them all in an animated world... but i didn't really feel it. Then Erik showed me a test of my characters motion-tracked onto some footage -- and there it was. So he went out shooting some spots, rough cuts without the creatures, then we added those little fellas in the footage. Voilá! A longer version will be found on the minilogue DVD, coming this fall, finally! The longer version of "hitchhiker's choice" will be on there too. Some other stuff can be found on our temporary web site: http://varelsen.com. Link to Minilogue's YouTube features. (Special thanks to Claire Jones, and to Cocoon.)

Ryan Brenner made a Labyrinth as part of his Eagle Scout project.

Ryan <a href="http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/12/25/walking_the_lines
/">says:

My part was to lead the building of it, but there's a part of everyone who worked on it in the paths of the labyrinth. Some people brought stones from their yards, the beach, or travels and placed them there in memory of someone or with intentions and prayers. . . .

Now as more people return to walk the labyrinth, they bring stones to add or use other ways to make it their own special place," Brenner said.

The Hanover version is 55 feet across, with a 2-foot-wide path. The stones, which were delivered in piles or one at a time, are laid in a roping pattern of eight concentric circuits. There are two entrances, one leading to a 20-foot-long path that goes directly to the center, the other to a 100-yard-long path that goes all the way around before entering the center and then out.

The labyrinth is hosted by the First Congregational Church in Hanover Ma, where there is something of a labyrinthian tradition.

How can you bring your maker spirit out? Have you or somebody near you made a labyrinth? There are indoor and outdoor versions of this practice, which could lead to some very crafty solutions. Do you have people in your community who are making things that help tune others in to their deeper selves? Who is doing great and valuable Eagle Scout projects in your life? Add your comments below and contribute your photos and videos to the Make Flickr pool.

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confidence
drunkard's dozen
hr giger bar
sorry i missed your party
how to know when to leave the bar

community art makers

previously on web zen:
n.y.e party music zen

Permalink for this edition. Web Zen is created and curated by Frank Davis, and re-posted here on Boing Boing with his kind permission. Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!)

solweil writes to mention that Cryptol, a 'domain specific language for the design, implementation and verification of cryptographic algorithms', is now available to the public. Cryptol was originally designed for the NSA and allows for a quick evaluation and continued revisions and is available for Linux, OS X, and Windows.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yesterday was the NakedJen Film Festival in Salt Lake City and Berkeley; it was also Christmas Day around the world.

The festival is for movie lovers wanting to indulge in a massive amounts of movies on a day when many of the best movies of the year are released.

In Berkeley, we went to four movies: 1. Gran Torino, 2. Doubt, 3. Time Crimes and 4. Cadillac Records. By far, my favorite of the four was Doubt. Wonderful acting from Meryl Streep and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Very subtle plot and fantastic writing.

I totally didn't care for the last two, almost no substance to the story of Cadillac Records, it felt to me a lot like W., very shallow, almost no character development, at times I had no idea what to think about the characters, and it's not as if they were all strangers to me, I was a blues fan growing up and saw Muddy Waters play a number of times, and Chuck Berry is a hero of mine. I don't know why people liked this movie, I was hoping for something of the caliber of Walk The Line, that did enough character development so I actually cared about the cast. I didn't like Dreamgirls or the Ray Charles biopic either, though they were well-reviewed.

The Clint Eastwood movie, Gran Tornino, was nice, had a few memorable moments and lines, and followed the general pattern of one of Eastwood's earlier movies. I called it The Man With No Name at the Retirement Village (even though he was living in an old Detroit neighborhood that was becoming an Asian ghetto). I wanted one more of the old style Eastwood movies, a Dirty Harry for the ages, a bloodbath of righteous vengeance. I really loved the old Eastwood, the new kind, compassionate and thoughtful, well, not so much.

All the movies we went to were highly reviewed, including Time Crimes, which has a fairly predictable science fiction time travel plot up to a point, and then it goes a bit further, and has a few small surprises, but nothing that makes up for the extreme low-budgetness of it, and amateurish acting, and the fact that it's in Spanish with sub-titles. I was bored from beginning to end. Our other choice for this time slot in the festivale, Synecdoche, New York, a Charlie Kaufman film, probably would have been more entertaining, even though Kaufman movies generally leave me unimpressed and weary of his self-obsession.

I should also mention that I saw and loved Slumdog Millionaire, outside the context of yesterday's festivities; even though it was sort of spoiled by a negative review on Fresh Air by New York film critic David Edelstein, who thought (ridiculously) that the movie was ruined by the Bollywood dance sequence under the titles at the end of the movie. I give Edelestein a lousy review as a reviewer. The movie was lovely and disturbing. What's wrong with that? And it was great entertainment.

I still have to see Benjamin Button, Marley & Me, Bolt, Despereaux, Rebecca's Wedding, and what else? What a year for pictures!!

One other bit of housekeeping -- a lot of people didn't understand my $249 pre-Christmas gadget quest piece, and thought I was asking instead for a condescending lecture on charitable giving. Actually I wanted to know your dreams for modestly priced electronic luxuries, not a big ticket purchase like a 60-inch flatscreen or a new MacBook, but perhaps something like a hard drive, iPod, but off the beaten path, something a guy like myself might not have. I consider the piece a roaring success. The most popular suggestion was to get a Flip camera, which I'm still considering, even though I really like my Canon camera and can't get too excited about another picture-taker.

One thing was striking about the list was that there was almost nothing on it from Apple. Such a bad omen. I must have bought 10 or 15 Apple products in 2007. I can't think of a single Apple purchase I made this year. These days I can walk by an Apple store without going in. What happened? Why have they stopped creating products that a guy like me lusts for? In the last twelve months they haven't created anything in the Must Have category or even Nice To Have. That honor goes to Asus, I've bought two netbooks, and find I'm open to buying almost anything they offer.

Anyway, I did find a gadget that I don't have that I wanted, that I'm looking forward to getting! More on it when it arrives.

NYTimes Op-Ed Columnist Thomas Friedman - Time to Reboot America...

...we’ve fallen into a trend of diverting and rewarding the best of our collective I.Q. to people doing financial engineering rather than real engineering. These rocket scientists and engineers were designing complex financial instruments to make money out of money — rather than designing cars, phones, computers, teaching tools, Internet programs and medical equipment that could improve the lives and productivity of millions.

That’s why we don’t just need a bailout. We need a reboot. We need a build out. We need a buildup. We need a national makeover. That is why the next few months are among the most important in U.S. history. Because of the financial crisis, Barack Obama has the bipartisan support to spend $1 trillion in stimulus. But we must make certain that every bailout dollar, which we’re borrowing from our kids’ future, is spent wisely.

It has to go into training teachers, educating scientists and engineers, paying for research and building the most productivity-enhancing infrastructure — without building white elephants. Generally, I’d like to see fewer government dollars shoveled out and more creative tax incentives to stimulate the private sector to catalyze new industries and new markets. If we allow this money to be spent on pork, it will be the end of us

Makers, post your thoughts in the comments!

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An anonymous reader writes "Earlier this month, Computerworld Australia checked out the exhibition of 30 years of Star Wars history at Sydney's Powerhouse museum. They also have a pictorial look at what's on display: one of the largest collections of Star Wars memorabilia combined with real-life examples of how such technology is being applied for business and social advancement."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Short an ingredient for some holiday cookies? Slashfood can help you create DIY butter (via Lifehacker). Mother Earth News has another take here.

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Behold the Devil's armchair. Michael-Anne Rauback has been on a quest for weird chairs this week and this is the third fave find. The 1960s chair above, by Anthony Redmile, is made from malachite, bone, horn, and wood. If I ruled, this would be my throne. Anthony Redmile carved armchair

The Make: television show debuts in only seven days! I had no idea what to expect when they asked me to host the Maker Workshop segment of the show. Well, the entire crew is wonderful and incredibly hard-working, which made it totally fun and rewarding. Everybody was willing to pinch-hit when needed. In this picture we see Executive Producer Richard Hudson grabbing some tools and fixing the firing circuit on our Burrito Blaster air cannon. How many Executive Producers can do that?!

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theodp writes "Taking a page from the insanely-jealous-husband-playbook, Motorola management has adopted an if-I-can't-have-you-nobody-can stance on its fired employees, reportedly blocking RIM from offering jobs to laid-off workers. In a complaint filed in state court, Motorola is charged with improperly trying to expand a previous agreement 'to prevent the RIM entities from hiring any Motorola employees, including the thousands of employees Motorola has already fired or will fire.' Through its Compete America membership, Motorola has repeatedly warned Congress that failing to accommodate the lobbying group members' 'principled' demand for timely access to talent would not be in the United States' economic interest and would make the U.S. second-rate in education and basic research."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Got a Meggy Jr RGB? Wrap that rascal in this comfy Meggy Cozy. Right this way and Lenore will show you how it's done...

Meggy Cozy

More:

• Meggy Jr RGB Programming Guide and libraries
• Introducing Meggy Jr RGB

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CNet's Dan Farber took a look, not only at the popular news of how print media is dying a slow death, but also what contribution to the news print journalists are still making. According to research quoted, while the physical publications are quickly becoming a thing of the past much of the news that makes its way into circulation via blogs and other means still originates from the hard work of those print journalists. "While the Internet is growing as the place where people go for news, the revenue simply isn't catching up fast enough. The less obvious part of the Internet overtaking newspapers as the main source for national and international news is that much of the seed content--the original reporting that breaks national and international news and is subsequently refactored by legions of bloggers--comes from the reporters and editors working at the financially strapped newspapers and national and local television outlets. [...] As the financial pressures mount--the outlook for 2009 is dismal--and the cost cutting continues, we can only hope that the original news reporting by top-flight journalists is not a major casualty."

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Get a bird's-eye-view of the world with this Pole Mounted Aerial Rig for photography and video.
Thanks go to William Gurstelle for the original article in Make: Volume 16

To download The Pole's Eye View MP4 click here or subscribe in iTunes.

Check out the complete Pole's Eye View article in MAKE: Volume 16 "Pole's Eye View"
and you can see that in our digital edition.

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Dave Parker shares the building and programming instructions for this LEGO NXT inch worm on nxtprograms.com - the movement is really unusual.

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I bet it smelled good when instructables user rstraugh etched the brick pattern on this gingerbread bridge.

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Get a bird's-eye-view of the world with this Pole Mounted Aerial Rig for photography and video.
Thanks go to William Gurstelle for the original article in Make: Volume 16
View the PDF

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As we approach the end of the year it's time once again for the never-ending stream of retrospectives and year-in-review discussions. Wired has their version of the best technology breakthroughs of 2008. From phones to shrinking laptops to flexible displays, there is no shortage of interesting advancements when looking back at this year. What other groundbreaking advancements were made this year, and what do we have to look forward to for 2009?

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"FoldSkool Heroes" by Marshall Alexander are paper versions of the Commodore 64, original Pong game and other old school video game systems. They come in printable PDFs from the artist's site, so feel free to print and use as desk ornaments.

Foldskool Heroes via Retro Thing

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twitter writes "Bruce Perens has pulled the plug on Technocrat.net. 'The technocrat.net public discussion site is shut down. This has happened because the site never achieved the ability to financially sustain its editorial staff and system expenses with its revenues. When it became evident that Technocrat was un-viable as a business, I found that I did not wish to keep supporting the site as a hobby. Certain elements of the community that developed here, unfortunately, creep me out. At the end I faced the decision of asking for donations to keep the site running, or letting it die, and it became clear to me that I'd feel better if it would just die. I am very busy building a new software business, with some great new (and yet unannounced) Open Source software in development. I must focus on that for now. Best holiday wishes to you all.'"

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Sparkfun is planning a big ol' robot race around their building in Boulder, CO -

April 15th, 2009 10AM - Rain, shine, or snow

Create a vehicle that can autonomously navigate
around the SparkFun building

$300 cash first prize

Sounds like fun, though I'm kind of disappointed the prize wasn't some shiny new Sparkfun awesomeness - oh well, cash will do! More details available here - Autonomous vehicle race

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An anonymous reader writes "What better way is there to learn something than by making your own DIY gadget? Here's a new video showing how to use a common hobby servo, in conjunction with a small water pump, to create a USB controlled water gun! You can use your keyboard to aim and fire at an unsuspecting passerby. Both fun and educational, this project looks like a great DIY weekend project for any IT guy, wanting to make sure people think twice before asking a stupid question!"

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I had a chance to check out Dream Squawk & The Shadow Puppet Sequencer at the ITP Winter Show 2008. Amy Khoshbin & Michael Clemow of Semiotech created these interactive instruments and have used them during live performances. They are both really interesting pieces that worked well together.

SemioTech was founded by Amy Khoshbin and Michael Clemow in 2007. Their work explores the fields of perception and "Expanded Performance" through the application of varying technologies on the performing arts.

Semiotech has created two theatrical musical performance tools: Dream Squawk for voice modulation, amplification and sampling by Amy Khoshbin and the Shadow-Puppet Sequencer Table for auralization of narratives, by Michael Clemow.

Learn more about Dream Squawk & The Shadow Puppet Sequencer [ITP Page]

Dream Squawk by Amy Khoshbin

Dream Squawk integrates the performer's costume (a bird mask) with the technology itself to maximize performer mobility and create movements natural to the character. Dream Squawk is implemented using a wireless lav microphone, custom wireless circuit design built into the beak of the mask (using potentiometers and switches to record/mute two live vocal samples to create loops, and to allow the user to tweak echo effects and speed effects independently), a separate module worn on the head, and custom digital signal processing software (written in Pd).

More about the Dream Squawk by Amy Khoshbin

Shadow Puppet Sequencer by Michael Clemow

The Shadow Puppet Sequencer Table demonstrates an approach to narrative construction that is intimately coupled with sound design. The table provides a translucent surface upon which cutouts can be placed and moved, creating shadows that double as musical notes. The relationships between the shadow objects are thus spacial as well as musical. These relationships can be manipulated by moving the objects on the surface of the table. The narrative is propelled by changing the spacial-and thus musical-relationships of the objects over time.

More about the Shadow Puppet Sequencer by Michael Clemow

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Surprise! A classic pull-toy phone that really works. By Frank E. Yost....

I remember making pretend phone calls on my Fisher-Price Chatter Telephone when I was 7 or 8, and wondering if it was possible to turn it into a real phone. That question stayed with me, and when I saw a Chatter Telephone and a Crosley Princess Telephone recently at Target, I knew the answer was yes. I brought them home and made it work, and it was easier than I expected.

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patiwat writes "Newly installed Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva's first act was to send a spam SMS to tens of millions of Thai cell phone subscribers. The message, signed 'Your PM,' urged people to help him solve the Thai political crisis and respond with their postal code at a charge of 3 baht (10 US cents). The new premier was criticized for violating privacy regulations."

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Distributing a website over a content delivery network is typically an expensive proposition, but since the release of the Google App Engine beta program, there's an option for small to medium sized sites to easily distribute content on Google's infrastructure. Putting the application SDK aside, Matt Riggott wrote a decent howto on using the service simply as a free CDN:

A content delivery network, or CDN, is a system of servers spread around the world, serving files from the nearest physical location. Instead of waiting for a file to find its way from a server farm in Silicon Valley 8,000 kilometres away, I can receive it from London, Dublin, or Paris, cutting down the time I wait. The big names -- Google, Yahoo, Amazon, et al -- use CDNs for their sites, but they've always been far too expensive for us mere mortals. Until now.

There's a service out there ready for you to use as your very own CDN. You have the company's blessing, you won't need to write a line of code, and -- best of all -- it's free.

There are limitations to the service, of course. You can't host any files larger than 1MB, and you're limited to 650,000 requests a day and 10GB of downloads. That said, there are a lot of sites that fit within these parameters and could offload the static portion of their content to see a large reduction in bandwidth and provide faster load times to end users.

Using Google App Engine as Your Own Content Delivery Network
Google App Engine

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The great Eartha Kitt passed away today. Obituaries: Washington Post, Reuters, New York Times.

The idea of a white Christmas may seem magical for many of us, but Science Daily asks you to "spare a thought for a team of scientists forgoing the festive season to take part in a novel campaign being carried out in one of the most inhospitable regions on Earth to support ESA's CryoSat mission." Plenty of people cooped up in the upside-down parts seem to find good ways to amuse themselves; I am especially fond of this introduction to Condition One weather, and Cops McMurdo. If anyone is reading this down there, I hope you're having a nice holiday.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

How is your holiday hacking going? If you have been good, Santa has stocked you up with lots of clever goodies to keep you and yours entertained.

Below are a few things that I found in my stocking and am looking forward to fussing with:

Disposable battery/charger for cellphones.
At two dollars (frugal Santa), if this is what it might be, it could be really awesome. What I am hoping to find in here is a case that can be cracked open, batteries replaced and if I am really lucky a voltage regulator. Sort of like a Minty Boost, but cheaper. Will it work? Maybe. The fitting to the charge booster is proprietary, aimed at a Samsung phone user, but with a cut off a USB mini B cable fitting, it should fit most of the rechargeable devices in my life.

Kingston 8 Gig micro SD mobility kit
8 gigs will make my phone have pretty much unlimited storage (for now). It would also more than double one of my mp3 players' capacity. Probably the most happy thing about this kit is that it comes with a host of micro SD adapters. As more things move towards the Micro SD format, lots of adapters will be handy. They never seem to be around when things need to be uploaded. Between that and really high capacity cards, too many pictures are staying on the camera too long.

Sandisk M2 2 Gig adapter
Sony annoys me how they make everybody bend to their proprietary flash card format. If you want to jack up your PSP's storage, you have to do something like this. Video, audio, lots of applications, home brew apps, gotta have a memory card for the PSP.

Adhesive copper sheet
This stuff is neat for making circuits on the fly. Basically, it is wire with glue on the back. It can be cut with scissors, torn, scored with a knife and other wires can be taped to it or soldered into place. If you have access to a vinyl cutter, you can make a design in Gimp, open office or whatever and cut it mechanically. It seems like an easy, almost magical way of making circuits. No soldering if you don't want to. This may be a good way of getting kids into circuits without the safety issues of soldering.

Wireless Mouse and number pad
Maybe this could be something to make a soap controller out of, or maybe it could be a good controller for that Scratch game you create out of holiday wrappings and boxes. Or maybe it's just something to rig up to the computer.

12 volt to USB Mini B
Everything seems to run on Mini B lately. Now I can charge on the road. What I have been using is totally inefficient, 12 volt DC to AC 10 year old inverter to ac power adapter to DC. Too much conversion.

Little audio speakers
Frugal Santa does it again. $2 usd bought a pair of speakers with a little amplifier. It runs on 6 volts DC, and can be used with a battery pack or included AC to DC wall inverter. Certainly the speakers will be easy to use, with a stereo headphone jack, and they fold up nice.

Flashlight with a zillion white LEDs
Remember when white LEDs were like gold? Not anymore. Cheap enough at $15 usd, maybe this could be repurposed for photography lighting. maybe it could just be a big huge white light. It uses 3 D cell batteries, so at 4.5 volts, certainly something clever could be done with it. Underwater ROV lighting? Hmmmm.

Well there is certainly more to mess with under the tree and in the closets, but this is a start. What goodies are under your tree? If you aren't doing the Christmas thing, then how are you celebrating the hacking spirit lately? How could you use any of these materials and gadgets as classroom/school projects? What sneaky uses can you find for cheap stuff? What possibilities do you see in your holiday schwag? Add to the conversation in the comments and post your photos and video to the Make Flickr pool.

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fermion writes "According to the NYT, a judge has decided that Fox owns the copyright to Watchmen , not Warner. Is this an example of copyright law becoming so complex that companies can abuse the court system to prevent competition, or just extreme incompetence by Warner? In the current business environment, either explanation is believable. Yet it is unbelievable that seasoned producers would spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create a movie that they can't even release. It seems the judge didn't want to bring this to a jury, and maybe daring Warner to appeal, or Fox to settle." The article says that Fox acquired movie rights to the Watchmen story in the late 1980s, but budget disputes and personnel changes have muddied the waters; Wikipedia has a bit more on the "development hell" which has plagued the film project.

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Here are plans for a small-scale biodigester. Some details:

Have any commenters actually built or worked with methane-producing digesters?

(via Chelsea Green)

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