Even though I'm not an economist, I'm pretty sure that the US government can print money.

So if we have a $1 trillion deficit this year, that does not imply that someone has to lend us $1 trillion and it does not imply therefore that someone will have to pay someone back that money at some date in the future. If there's an economist listening who thinks this is not true, please say so and everyone else ignore what I'm about to say.

So then why does the discussion on Meet The Press and This Week revolve around how much better the private sector could spend the money or how we're passing on the problem to future generations. That seems like hooey. They have these discussions based on a make-believe premise that there are only two ways for the US government to pay for something -- taxation or borrowing. There is a third way, the one they're taking -- they just invent the money.

Now, in normal times you pay for this invention with inflation, but inflation isn't a problem -- quite the opposite, the world economy is having a massive going out of business sale. Prices are going down. Think they're low this week? Wait till next week, they'll be even lower. And wait is what people do, and that drives the prices lower. It's like inflation in reverse. Worrying about inflation now is like a starving man worrying about getting fat if he eats too much. You'll take your calories any way you can get them. Anything that makes people want to buy things now is a good thing for the economy. One way to do that is to give them money by hiring them.

So forgive me for thinking the analysts on TV are either corrupt or idiots, or whatever.

And of course please forgive me if I'm wrong and the government isn't going to print money to get out of this hole.

Hugh Pickens writes "The San Fransisco Chronicle is running a story about Brian Malow, a stand-up comedian who has showcased his science-centric stand-up humor for more than a decade in comedy clubs, at conventions and for corporate clients across the country. Fortunately, club patrons don't need a degree in quantum mechanics to appreciate one-liners like 'I used to be an astronomer, but I got stuck on the day shift,' 'I just started reading, "The Origin of Species." Don't tell me how it ends!' or that he 'attended a magnet school for bipolar students.' While his show is very rational and based on hard science, Malow cleverly infuses it with an abstract or surreal comic twist."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The idea of the "MAKEcation" is slowly making the rounds, here's a cool case my friend made for an upcoming clock kit - she made this on her MAKEcation!

If you take a day off, a vacation and choose to just "make something" - toss a photo up in the MAkE Flickr photo pool...

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paleshadows writes "The Times Online reports that researchers claim that each query submitted to Google has a quantifiable impact. Specifically, two queries performed through a desktop computer generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a cup of tea. From the article: 'While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 [whereas] boiling a kettle generates about 15g [...] Google is secretive about its energy consumption and carbon footprint. It also refuses to divulge the locations of its data centers. However, with more than 200m Internet searches estimated daily, the electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions caused by computers and the Internet is provoking concern. A recent report [argues that] the global IT industry generate[s] as much greenhouse gas as the world's airlines — about 2% of global CO2 emissions.'" Google makes an interesting focus for such claims, but similar extrapolations have been done before about, for instance, the energy costs of sending a short email.

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Jonathan sez, "I've been writing a song every day in the month of January, for the Fun-A-Day-In-The-Bay Art project. My 10th song is about the internet. It contains the line: 'The internet is a less than physical space containing a multitude of varying opinions on a wide variety of topics written by monkeys.' Enjoy!"

That's some serious goddamn wisdom.

Song # 10! “3 Rules of the Internet”

An anonymous reader writes "So, with the financial crisis and loss of jobs everywhere, what are the chances of getting a good IT job? I'm going to graduate this year with a BS in Software Engineering majoring in Network Security. I'll be looking for a job as a penetration tester eventually, but I hear that is hard to get right out of college so I'll be looking for a job as a Junior Network Admin or similar type of job to start off in. Is there a lack of jobs in this field? I figure computers always need fixing so they have to have some sort of IT personnel on staff to maintain the core of their business. Anyone have a good insight on this issue?"

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A reader writes, "Filipino composer and gamer Diwa De Leon performs a five man a-capella and violin of the themes from Legend of Zelda."

This is my own rendition of the themes from Legend of Zelda game composed by Koji Kondo. Most of my picks came from Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past originally for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES).

I'm a professional composer, arranger and violinist, and cosplaying is one of my hobbies as well as playing video game music just for fun.

Legend of Zelda medley - A Capella Voices and Violin

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

• Museum of Unnatural History
  
• Make your own Yarn at Yarnia
  
• Free Waving Chevron Scarf Pattern
  
• Credit Crunch Sampler
  
• "Kniitiing" for the Wii
  
• Star Trek Embroidery
  
• Saras Sock Vati
  
• "Neck Sausage" Scarf
  
• Melanie Bilenker's Hair Jewelry
  

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Heise Security reports that a 'team of researchers from Bonn University and RWTH Aachen University have analysed the notorious Storm Worm botnet, and concluded it certainly isn't as invulnerable as it once seemed. Quite the reverse, for in theory it can be rapidly eliminated using software developed and at least partially disclosed by Georg Wicherski, Tillmann Werner, Felix Leder and Mark Schlösser. However it seems in practice the elimination process would fall foul of the law.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TornCityVenz writes "I've seen many complaints in the feedback on Slashdot every time an article on Google's Chrome browser hits; the calls for true cross platform availability have struck me as a valid complaint. So now it seems Google is answering your calls, promising in this article on CNET a deadline for Mac and Linux support." I'd really like to not care about the name of the browser I'm using, but the mental cost of switching could be high for someone used to particular Firefox extensions, unless or until they can all be expected to work seamlessly with Chrome.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

gzipped_tar sends in this excerpt from the Salt Lake Tribune: "The embattled SCO Group Inc. is proposing to auction off its core products and use proceeds to continue its controversial lawsuits over the alleged violations of its copyrights in Linux open-source software. The Lindon company has filed a new reorganization plan with the federal court in Delaware where it sought bankruptcy protection from creditors after an adverse ruling in the Linux litigation. If approved by a bankruptcy judge, the plan could mean SCO's server software and mobile products lines are owned by other parties while SCO itself remained largely to pursue the lawsuits under the leadership of CEO Darl McBride. 'One goal of this approach is to separate the legal defence of its intellectual property from its core product business,' McBride said in a letter to customers, partners and shareholders. Jeff Hunsaker, president and COO of The SCO Group, said the litigation had been distracting to the company's efforts to market its products. 'We believe there's value in these assets and in order for the business to move forward it's imperative we separate it from our legal claims and we allow our products business to move forward,' he said Friday."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

About a year ago, John Wells left New York and moved out to Terlingua, Texas, to take a stab at living off the grid. My brother’s experience was part of what influenced John to move to the desert. A letter to the editor John wrote to MAKE tipped me off to his story, and I've been following along ever since.

Most days, John blogs a little something about his day, everything from welding wind turbines, driving to town to visit with friends, watching spiders and other wildlife, or getting up at 3 a.m. to take photos of the space station as it passes overhead. For me, it’s always an enjoyable, quick read that offers an interesting insight into, what for most of us, is a completely different lifestyle.

--Shawn

The Field Lab Daily Journal

(Shawn Connally and Bruce Stewart are guest bloggers)

One of the common complaints from people in journalism about bloggers is that we just comment on reports in the news, we don't do original reporting. It's so often repeated it's become a cliche, but it's simply not true and I can prove it.

Draw a continuum of different kinds of news, at the left edge put a dot and label it "Event." At the extreme right edge put "Commentary." On the line between those two extremes, somewhere put a circle and label it "Reporting."



No one questions that bloggers produce writing that belongs at the right edge of the continuum, but then so do pros. That's editorial and op-ed pages. People like Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, Frank Broder, Krugman -- in days gone by James Reston, Russell Baker (my childhood role model). Think of it as shared territory between pros and amateurs.

At the left edge, bloggers win hands-down. We have far more original sources blogging than the pros have writing in their pages. Over time, as the thirst for news goes up and the volume provided by the pros goes down, expect to see more. The thirst to be heard has always been high, and this is fueling the explosion of blogging at this edge.

Now, if you're a regular reader of Scripting News, you see us do investigative reporting all the time. And I'm not using the plural in a regal sense, I very much do mean "us" -- as in me and you and a whole lot of other people. For example, in December, after seeing Tweetree, and having put a lot of work into systematizing thumbnail generation (with the ongoing help of a reader, who lives in Turkey), I wanted to connect the two. So I proposed a way to do that. Immediately a flood of comments probing my decision, and a number of suggestions that I look at work done by others that I hadn't found when I looked. Now this process is not trivial, it's the equivalent of a reporter making dozens of phone calls to experts. Sure, I'm not probing their ethics, looking for malfeasance, whether or not they're bugging Watergate, or stealing funds from taxpayers or widows, instead -- they're doing that to me. Which I've learned to live with, and see as a good thing. I know my heart is pure, but they don't, at least not at first. They are right to be suspicious of a fellow technologist. Many are corrupt. I've writen about that here. (Part of the reason there's so much corruption, btw, is that the professional press including some of the pubs we all revere, have been playing footsy with the industry for a long time. But that's another story, one often told here, btw, which has gotten me a rep with the press for being an "irascible gadfly.")

Anyway, a comment left here by a reader in December bothered me, so I looked into it and found he had something, so I revised my approach, and published the revision here, on Friday. Then another reader suggested I use a format that Digg had proposed, and I agreed, so -- another revision. Now here's a key point, in all the reporting I had done up till this point, I had never stumbled across this. It hadn't been reported on by pros as far as I could tell, and up till that point, none of my readers knew about it either. Is this an investigative process? Absolutely. Is it journalism? I don't see how it's any different from the best journalism done by the pros, except 1. it's done out in the open, that's an essential element, and 2. it's being done by people who do it for reasons other than being paid, directly, for it. To trivialize those reasons is to ignore other reasons people want to know something, it ignores the motivations of the sources and the readers, both of whom are essential to the news processs (though the journos are often loathe to acknowledge this), and neither of whom are paid for their efforts.

But even then the story is not over. Another reader says there's a mistake, the format wasn't authored by Digg, it was actually authored by Facebook! I did a bit of investigation and couldn't find a claim that they authored it, or a news report, but I did determine that they supported it, by doing a test, that worked. We saw a citation on the Digg site that said that Facebook was the source, so that was good enough for me, and I revised my piece accordingly. (I allow myself that until the day closes, then if I want to revise I have to write another piece, like the one I'm doing now, that's why serious stories on Scripting News tend to come in a series.)

Finally I published a "cap" to the series, and reported on the significance of all this work. A full week of work, with lots of human contact, research, sourcing, fact checking. I'm sure there will be some who say this doesn't belong in the circle in the middle of the continuum above, and I'm sure we'll get ample opportunity to discuss that, and learn from each other.

Julie188 writes "Here's a new idea to stop certification test-taking cheaters; Cisco is considering introducing a verbal interview portion to its CCIE lab exams across the world. Cisco confirmed that it is running a pilot in its exam lab in Beijing, China that involves candidates taking a 10-minute verbal interview as part of their lab exam. Cisco said that if the pilot is successful, the interview could be introduced as a requirement for CCIE Routing & Switching candidates worldwide. The company has been running the pilot since August."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Harry McCracken writes "One of my top picks at the Consumer Electronics Show was Sixense's TrueMotion, a game-controller technology that resembles the Wii's remote, but uses an electromagnetic field to provide far more precision — it knows the exact location of the controller in 3D space and which way you're pointing it. (The Wiimote only knows which direction you're moving the controller.) TrueMotion-based remotes are due by Christmas, bundled with a PC game for under $100."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Stef sez, "Here's an Instructable explaining in 25 simple steps how to convert your car to run on household trash using a process called Gasification. As the site sez: 'Gasification is the use of heat to tranform solid biomass, or other carbonaceous solids, into a synthetic "natural gas like" flammable fuel.' Not only that, but as a benefit it pimps your car out with a fantastic steampunky contraption to impress your fellow road users with!"

Convert your Honda Accord to run on trash (Thanks, Stef!)

theodp writes "Every day, Americans toss out more than 350,000 cell phones and 130,000 computers, making electronic waste the fastest-growing part of the US garbage stream. A lot of the world's e-waste is exported to Guiyu, China, where peasants heat circuit boards over coal fires to recover lead (a 15" computer monitor can pack up to 7 lbs. of Pb), while others use acid to burn off bits of gold. Guiyu's willingness to deal with lead, mercury and other toxic materials generates $75 million a year for the village, but as a result. Guiyu is slowly poisoning itself with the highest level of cancer-causing dioxins in the world. The village experiences elevated rates of miscarriages, and its children suffer from an extremely high rate of lead poisoning. TIME suggests checking out recycling brokers and accredited e-stewards the next time you're ready to toss a gizmo."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Adam Korbitz writes "NASA's planet-hunting Kepler mission is set to launch late on the evening of March 6th. A few days ago, the space telescope arrived in Florida for final launch preparations. According to the NASA/JPL Planet Quest website: 'Kepler will hunt for planets using a specialized one-meter diameter telescope called a photometer to measure the small changes in brightness caused by the transits. Over a four-year period, Kepler will continuously view an amount of sky about equal to the size of a human hand held at arm's length or about equal in area to two "scoops" of the sky made with the Big Dipper constellation.' A map of the area Kepler will search is shown superimposed on a picture of the constellation Cygnus, The Swan. NASA has posted a countdown clock for Kepler, as well as animations of the spacecraft mission and the science objectives."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

KentuckyFC writes "A group of electronics engineers have discovered that a thin layer of vanadium oxide acts as a memristor, the fourth basic component of circuits after resistors, capacitors and inductors that were discovered last year. At a critical temperature, a current passing through the layer causes it to change from an insulating state to a metal-like state, thereby changing its resistance (abstract). The effect lasts many hours — which is what makes the layer a memristor (a resistor with memory). The team says this could be scaled up to make resistive random access memory, or RRAM, at very low cost, from little more than layers of vanadium oxide."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

mcgrof writes "Linux developers have announced the release of a reverse-engineered open source firmware for Broadcom 4306 and 4318 wireless hardware, licensed under the GPLv2. 'Although the base firmware is not fully 802.11 compliant, e.g., it does not support RTS/CTS procedure or QoS, we believe that someone could be interested in testing it. The firmware does not require the kernel to be modified and it uses the same shared memory layout and global registers usage of the original stuff from broadcom to ease loading by the b43 driver.' You can go check out and download the firmware at the Italian Universita' Degli Studi Di Brescia Open FirmWare for WiFi networks project page. This is a good example of clean room reverse engineering design where one group worked on specifications while another worked on the the driver and the firmware. Kudos to the specification writers and bcm43xx development team for their hard work."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I happened to trip over this Youtube video of John Lennon, Paul Simon and Andy Williams at the Grammies in (I think) 1975. They're announcing the winner of the Best Song, I think -- as usual Lennon is very funny and wry, and Simon is funny too.



Some observations...

1. There's a surprise guest toward the end, I won't spoil the fun by saying who it is, but we might spill the beans in the comments, so if you don't like spoilers watch the video before reading the comments.

2. Either John Lennon was short or Paul Simon is standing on a box. It's weird how a lot of famous people are really short, but you never find out until they stand next to someone who you know is short.

3. I don't get the joke about "dawn" -- Lennon says: "So this is what Dawn does." Dawn of Tony Orlando and Dawn? Hmm.

4. Weren't they both disapponted that Olivia Newton-John won? The competition was so good, Elton John, Roberta Flack, Joni Mitchell, Maria Muldaur.

5. Muldaur's song, her only hit, Midnight At The Oasis, also played a big role in the fabulous movie, Lost In Translation.

6. Unrelated, on NPR yesterday I heard that Enya has sold 70 million albums and lives in a castle in Ireland and is not lonely.

It's amazing to me, the Twitter Status Report and Twitter Spewage Report are both still running. You leave those background projects around and they just don't go away.

I wonder sometimes how long after I die will some "Dave Winer code" be running somewhere on this planet? It could be over very quickly, or you never know, maybe some of my code will run a long time. I, of course, won't be around to find out.

Anyhoo, here are the links...

http://twitter.scripting.com/status.html

http://twitter.scripting.com/spewage.html

And here's the blog post in April last year announcing the spew report. It was shortly after this that Twitter started becoming unreliable. Wonder if there's a correlation? Heh. That's supposed to be a joke. Okay sorry.

DragonFire1024 writes with this story from Wikinews that says "access to the Chinese Wikinews website has been blocked in China. Wikinews can also confirm that the English version of the website is still available in China. ... Users using the social networking site called Twitter have reported that the site was "blockade[ed] today by the mainland" of China. Others, writing on the Wikimedia Foundation's mailing list also state that the Chinese version of Wikinews is blocked in major Chinese cities such as Beijing."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The History of Visual Communication...

This website attempts to walk you through the long and diverse history of a particular aspect of human endeavour: The translation of ideas, stories and concepts that are largely textual and/or word based into a visual format, i.e. visual communication. Wikipedia defines visual communication as:

Visual communication is the communication of ideas through the visual display of information. Primarily associated with two dimensional images, it includes: art, signs, photography, typography, drawing fundamentals, colour and electronic resources. Recent research in the field has focused on web design and graphically oriented usability. It is part of what a graphic designer does to communicate visually with the audience.

The primary tool by which man has visualised ideas is through the usage of writing and, by extension, type: Writing/type is the visual manifestation of the spoken word. And words are what we communicate with. Thus it is no overstatement when we say that type is the essence of visual communication and by extension of visual communication design. Type, where it is present, is simply the single most important element that you put on a page, since it inherently carries the essence of communication and communication is what our subject of study as graphic/multimedia designers is all about. Thus, the history of visual communication, i.e. the history of the visualisation of the spoken word, will largely follow the development of typographic systems, with a special focus on the Latin typographic system, given that this is the one that we are operating under. Although the primary focus will be on typographic elements and methodologies, the course will, of course, also cover pictorial aspects of visual communication, such as illustration, illumination, photography, shapes, colour etc as and where they pertain to the essence of the subject.

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Uncle Wilco sez, "Andy from the wonderful Workshop Shed has made a Victorian flea chariot in his shed!"

The mounting is an old victorian era french coin about the size of a 2p, the chariot is secured with a small magnet and a tiny piece of steel glued below the axle (brass is not magnetic). I picked up the glass display case on Ebay for a bargain. A new groove was turned in the base so that the dome can be removed and replaced. The carry case in the background is some fake books made from wood which I got from a junk shop many years ago...

Flea Circuses evolved out of the skills of watch makers and jewellers and were made famous in the 1830s by L.Bertolotto who turned the bias from the construction skills to the performance. They remained popular until the 1960s and many peoples grandparents have seen one. I've been researching this topic for about 4 years now and regularly make new discoveries which I publish along with other flea news on the flea circus research library blog.

Victorian Flea Circus Chariot (Thanks, Wilco!)

kandela writes "CBC News is reporting that Nebula and Hugo award winning author Robert J. Sawyer is to become the first-ever writer in residence at the Canadian Light Source synchrotron facility (see also their media release). Sayer will spend two months at the facility, where he is hoping to be inspired by the everyday grind of scientists, 'I spent a lot of time visiting science labs over the years, but it's always the VIP tour,' he said in an interview Wednesday. 'You are in and you are out in a couple of hours, and everyone has shown you all the things they want you to see but none of the day-to-day grind of the work as well. I want to get the flavour of that.' As a scientist who has worked at synchrotron facilities (and occasional sci-fi writer myself (page 4)), I'm excited to see what a professional can do with that environment for inspiration."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's beer in my chocolate! There's chocolate in my beer! Somehow this combo doesn't feel nearly as right as Reese's famous mixing of peanut butter and chocolate. I drink many different types of beer, but I don't think this chocolate beer is going to work for me. Anybody tried this?

--Bruce (via Invertido)

(Shawn Connally and Bruce Stewart are guest bloggers)

twistah writes "It seems that a recent 'reply-all storm' at the State Department caused the entire e-mail infrastructure to crash. A notice sent to all State Department employees warned of disciplinary actions which will be taken if users "reply-all" to lists with a large amount of users. Apparently, the problem was compounded by not only angry replies asking to be taken off the errant list, but by the e-mail recall function, which generated further e-mail traffic. One has to wonder if capacity planning was performed correctly — should an e-mail system be able to handle this type of traffic, or is it an unreasonable task for even the best system?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

1. The Shuttle/The Glider


2. The Balance


3. Controller


4. Computer


5. Scanner


6. Rack


7. Printer

• The Glider is wound up, The Shuttle is at the right position.
• The Shuttle moves to the left.
• The Glider winds down until it touches the book.
• The Shuttles moves to the right. The Glider, touching the book, filps the page.
• The Glider winds up.
• The Balance is lift up. The computer detects the event and sends message to the scanner.
• The machiene pauses for 35 seconds, while the scannaer is working.
• The Balance lifts down.
• Repeat.

This is just what I was hoping someone had built! Totally awesome. Now it just needs to add OCR and text-to-speech to convert to MP3s that you can listen to. Thanks to woyzeck in the comments for the link.

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JadedApprentice writes "Caught a mention of this startup yesterday on CNBC while they were reviewing the latest gadgets at CES. In the off chance that there was anything remotely feasible or safe about the wireless power prototypes PowerBeam had on display, I took a quick google and found this nice little write-up on the technology (along with some priceless comments for those that scroll down, and I'm not talking about those on the page below). Bottom line: while it's possibly safe, it may not be efficient and it sure as hell won't power your 1200W gaming rig, the guys at PowerBeam are hoping the convenience of wireless power delivered through directed IR lasers will not only give you the coolest living room in town, but make them very rich in the process" This may be the only one using lasers, but there's a fair gaggle of wireless power schemes on the floor at CES. Besides several chargers limited to charging the controllers of specific game consoles, I walked through a working high-concept demo put on by PowerMat (also mentioned in that PC Magazine article), which relies on dedicated per-device sleeves and dongles to power cameras, phones, and other necessary pocket-fillers; the sleeve-equipped devices then sit to charge on one of the PowerMat induction mats. That means that if your gizmo isn't one for which a sleeve or dongle is available, you're out of luck, unless it uses AA or AAA batteries (there's a charger made to fit on the mat) or can be powered by USB (for which the company has hockey-puck sized USB-power sources, which, Yes, sit on the induction mat). Impressive, but at $30 a pop, that would mean a fair outlay to convert many gadgets to use such a system.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.