Richard Metzger is the current Boing Boing guest blogger

Have you ever been walking around a 99 Cents store and seen a bottle of cheap cologne with a sticker on the box that reads: "If you like "Calvin" you'll love "Kevin!"? Apparently the same sort of thing applied to crooner/goofball double acts in the 1950s. Ladies and gentlemen, meet ersatz Martin and Lewis, Sammy Petrillo and 'Duke' Mitchell. There is not very much information about these guys online, but these four links, to the Wikipedia entries for Sammy Petrillo, Duke Mitchell, an interview with Sammy Petrillo, and an interview with "Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla" director Herman Cohen are probably all you'll need. Thanks Tara McGinley!

Photo from Cnet.uk

Build the Ultimate Quiet PC has a number of suggestions, ranging from cheap to pricey.

Not got enough cash for a new case? Then you can modify your existing chassis. Among the best sound-deadening materials is the Acousti AcoustiPack Deluxe (v2) SE acoustic material kit... It's essentially a pack of sticky-back foam used to line the panels of your case. It comes in pre-cut packs for a small number of cases, but you can easily cut custom shapes with a pair of scissors.

Maximum PC has a decent article on quieting your computer.

The CPU is usually the hottest component in today's PCs; as such, it typically requires the most extravagant--and often the noisiest--cooling apparatus. Reducing the amount of noise emanating from your CPU's cooling system is a huge step toward muting your machine, so let's examine this hotspot first.

While stopping shy of a truly silent PC in the Maximum PC article, it does provide some handy ideas on how to get rid of that airport ambiance.

Their cover story on 50 Things Every PC Geek Should know is also worth taking a look at.

Silent PC Review also has a number of good resources for the sound weary computer operator.

What are your tricks to mute your machine? Tell us about it in the comments.

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NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "According to a report I just read in Mashable, Pirate Bay is coming to Facebook. Writer Ben Parr says that The Pirate Bay site now includes links under torrents to 'Share on Facebook.' Once posted to a profile, the Facebook member's friends can click the link on Facebook to begin the download right away, provided he or she already has a torrenting client installed. I just hope people do not use this feature to download copyrighted materials which are not authorized to be downloaded, or at least not materials copyrighted to litigation-happy RIAA Big 4 record labels. No doubt, if their song files were downloaded through this method, the record companies would sit back for awhile, derive profit from the promotional excitement generated for their dying industry, and then — armed with Facebook's data — sue the pants off all the hapless Facebook users who fell for it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week on the CRAFT blog we saw:

• Victoria Altepeter's Metalwork Show
  
• CRAFT Recipe: Moussaka
  
• How-To: Mend Broken Jewelry
  
• Plush Knee Complete!

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An anonymous reader writes "Zen and the Art of Programming published an article about MacRuby's new experimental 0.5 branch (project blog entry here). According to the included benchmarks, Apple's version of Ruby could already, at this early stage of its development, be about three times as fast as the fastest Ruby implementation available elsewhere."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Richard Metzger is the current Boing Boing guest blogger

Jamie O'Shea, for ten years editor of the genre-defining visionary arts magazine, Juxtapoz, probably the largest circulated art monthly in the world --I mean, hey, they sell it at Whole Foods-- is now an internationally known creative director and the editor of a new online blog called SuperTouch. SuperTouch is great --kind of a nice hybrid of PAPER magazine style party pics/gossip and the artistic fare seen in O'Shea's former mag, a cool mix. I was happy to see a post there about my pal Cheryl Dunn's "Spit and Peanut Shells: American Pictures" show at The Country Club gallery in Cincinnati, Ohio. Cheryl's wicked cool and her website is one of my favorite artist's sites. If you are in Cincinnati, check her show out.
And finally, this is redneck sushi:

Richard Metzger is the current Boing Boing guest blogger Wow, this sure is a fun new use for an old media relic. Amazing art made with old audio cassette tapes Thanks Adam Wade!

Get started with the LilyPad Arduino! It's a sewable microcontroller that lets you embed lights, sounds, sensors, and much more into your wearables, perfect for clothing and accessories. In this video I'll show you how to attach the LilyPad and power supply to each other, and upload a basic program that blinks an LED. You can use Arduino with Windows, OS X, and Linux. Next time I'll show some more advanced topics including hooking up a sensor and using it to change the circuit's behavior.

Subscribe to the CRAFT Podcast in iTunes, or download the m4v (iPhone) or mov movie.

Download the code you'll need for Arduino to execute this example. It's also here:

strobe_gpio shell script example

In the Maker Shed:

Lilypad E-Sewing Kit

LilyPad Pro Kit

More:

Electronic Embroidery - CRAFT Video Podcast

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Image from InsideNikeRunning

Did you know that your sneakers are probably the result of a vision of insight at the breakfast table? Maybe you recall wearing shoes that looked like these back in the day. Bill Bowerman, was a successful track coach when he appropriated his wife's waffle iron one day after breakfast.

Bowerman and his wife often ate waffles for breakfast-not an unusual or special event for them. Yet one morning, while thinking about his shoe designs and eating waffles, Bowerman had a flash of inspiration. He ran into the garage with the waffle iron and poured rubber on it. With that one idea, Bill created Nike's now famous waffle sole. As it turned out, when placed on a lightweight shoe, the waffle sole gripped running tracks better than the established ripple sole. It soon became a major success story.

But makers beware:

Unfortunately, Bowerman's desire for perfection cost him his health - the effects of exposure to toxic chemicals in the adhesives caused irreparable damage to his nervous system.

While reviewing a textbook last week, I saw a reference to the waffle inspiration attributed to Bowerman's Nike cofounder Phil Knight. I hadn't heard the story at all before, and both Bowerman and Knight were unfamiliar names.

The inspiration moment is one that we should all be working towards as makers. We can nurture these flashes of insight, and do our best to capitalize on these glimmers of the future. Notebooks, blogs, Flickr collections, wikis and more are a great way to both explore and record our ideas. What are you doing to collect your greatest ideas? What can you do to develop your fantastic idea and bring it to market, or share it with the world?

You might also want to check out Adam Savage's article on moldmaking in MAKE, Volume 08, page 160. Let us know what you mold up!

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There's still time to start making or just watch this week's Weekend Project: Flash Memory Hard Drive . You can view the video here, or subscribe in iTunes to get all our Weekend Projects and PDFs delivered each week.

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RobGoldsmith writes in with news of the further adventures of Charles Simonyi, whose first trip to the ISS we discussed a couple of years ago. The Russian Soyuz vehicle carrying Simonyi and two others docked a day after the US space shuttle Discovery landed in Florida. "Space Adventures, Ltd. ... announced today that its orbital client Charles Simonyi and his crew successfully arrived at the International Space Station after launching on-board the Soyuz TMA-14 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on March 26. The spacecraft docked to the ISS at 9:05 am (EDT) with Dr. Simonyi and Expedition 19 crew members Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka and NASA astronaut Michael Barratt. They were greeted at approximately 12:30 p.m. (EDT) by the Expedition 18 crew..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

mmmscience writes "Researchers in Switzerland think they had identified the regions of the brain responsible for creating phantom limbs and the senses that go along with them. Scientists studied a stroke victim who claimed that the phantom limb of her now-paralyzed left arm could do a number of things a normal limb could do, including 'scratch an itch on her head, with an actual sense of relief.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Avi sez, "John Medina, author of Brain Rules, an excellent summary of 13 neuroscience hacks applicable in daily life, has put the cool companion DVD online for free as an introduction to the paperback release of the book."

Here's what I wrote about Brain Rules when the hardcover came out:

John Medina's Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School pulls off a terrific trick: combining popular science with touching personal memoir and a bunch of practical conclusions for improving work, education and personal life.

Brain Rules takes the brain's mysteries apart into twelve pieces: Exercise, survival, wiring, attention, short-term memory, long-term memory, sleep, stress, multisensory perception, vision, gender, and exploration. He discusses the best, most current science describing what drives each one, delving into psychology, neurology, evolutionary biology, and practical disciplines like behavioural economics, organizational science, and pedagogy.

Woven into the science are a series of vivid anaecdotes from Medina's life and from case histories gathered across the scientific literature, and emerging naturally from that are a series of eminently practical recommendations for reforming the workplace and the education system, and for improving the way that we interact with ourselves and others.

Medina's approach to the subject combines the best aspects of Oliver Sacks and Getting Things Done, making the book into something that's part manifesto and part education. The BrainRules.net site features a ton of audio and video about the book's subject (Medina's descriptions of the value of multisensory learning are very compelling) and other supplementary material, and the book comes bundled with a DVD containing much of this material as well.

Brain Rules in paperback

Brain Rules DVD online

Emmanuel, a French sculptor, was inspired by the Chronulator DIY clock-kits to make this handsome steampunk clocke out of a tea box and some spare parts:

My Chronulator was made of a tea box, some pieces of brass curtain rod ends ( not sure of the translation ) then a piece of amarante wood, patiently cutted and varnished.

For the meters, I made the design on Illustrator, then a friend of me made the engraving on a numeric milling machine. ( Thanks, Pierre ! )

As you imagine, it was a piece of art to disassemble, cut, paint, and reassemble the vu-meters in a new shape... Very thin and fragile pieces !

In front of it you can see two "code morse manipulators", made of brass drawer handles, which push on two stems, to go down to the pushers on the mainboard.

Steampunk Chronulator (Thanks, Emmanuel!)

TechCrunch is running a story about three possible security issues with Google Docs recently uncovered by researcher Ade Barkah. It turns out that an image embedded into a protected document is given a URL which is not protected, allowing anyone who knows or guesses it to see the image regardless of permissions or even the existence of the document. Barkah also pointed out that once you've shared a document with another person, that person can see diagram revisions from any point before they gained access, forcing you to create a new document if you need to redact something. The last issue, the mechanics of which he disclosed only to Google, affects the document-sharing invitation forwarding system, which can allow somebody access to your documents after you've removed their permissions. Google made a blog post to respond to these concerns, saying that they "do not pose a significant security risk," but are being investigated. We previously discussed a sharing bug in Google Docs that was fixed earlier this month.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Joe sez, "South Korea is arguably one of the world's most internet-connected countries. Regrettably, the corrupt dinosaurs in the Korean National Assembly have just passed a bill in-committee to use a "three strikes" law against ISP connections there. The law awaits approval by the legislature. New Zealand recently defeated similarly-worded ISP laws. A brief prediction from someone who lives in Korea. Korea is like a high-tech ocean miles-wide and one-inch deep. Once the implications are understood, look for this law to collapse under its own bureaucratic deadweight, or to otherwise morph into the usual scofflaw behavior. Consider the following:"

1. Currently, under Korea's copyright law, there are broad classroom exemptions for educational use of material, without compensation to rightsholders. (Chapter 2, Section 4, Subsection 2, Article 25 ) Look for universities and other public schools to become hotbeds of exemption challenges.

2. PC Bangs (internet cafes) might try to put each other out of business using the new laws. This could result in some cafes using advanced black-box anonymizing services to protect themselves and their customers (not necessarily a bad thing).

3. Korean "netizens" might otherwise protest the new system by seeding government BBS and official websites with infringing links and material, and then use the reporting process to overwhelm the system.

4. This proposed law will push internet services into greater black-market criminal activity. Pirated software can be found everywhere, including software commonly-used by government employees. 99% of Korean software is Windows-based. Korea uses active-X controls for practically everything, meaning the entire country is already prone to security problems.

5. Additionally, the use of the internet for organizing civil protest in Korea has been highly effective: the recent Mad-cow Disease protests (while factually incorrect) reached hysterical proportions, delaying implementation of the US-Korea Free-Trade Agreement. Korea still has national security laws against criticizing the government. Online K-blogger Minerva was arrested because he brought to light the Korean government's economic manipulations. With an unstable currency and an undercurrent of restlessness among its populace, the government has been greatly embarrassed. Look for this law to be the perfect tool for Korea to once-again shoot itself in the foot.

Three Strikes, Movie Copyright and The Mad Cow Coming Home to Roost (Thanks, Joe!)

Update: Here's Rogers's' slides from the talk

Today at the Game Developers' Conference in San Francisco, I saw an outstanding talk on the lessons for level design to be had in the design of Disneyland. It was presented by Scott Rogers, Creative Manager at THQ in Los Angeles, who taught himself level design for Pac Man World by thinking about the experiences he'd had on many visits to Disneyland. The talk was full of lively insights and fun facts about both Disneyland and game-lore, and Rogers was a great presenter. I took copious (for me) notes and photos of most of the slides and I've just put them online (Rogers says he'll put the slides up in better form shortly, I'll link to them when he does).

* Walt invented lots of "moving people around" tricks that are useful in level design e.g. weenies (landmarks that draw guests towards certain locations)
   * Good navigational points for open worlds like GTA
   * Provides "picture spots" to stop and think, "Wow this is cool" -- Athens coming into sight in God of War

* How Weenies Work
    * First weenie is the castle -- you walk down linear Main St, and as you reach the hub, more weenies open up, the fronts of the lands, prompting the player/guest to choose where to go
    * As you go further, more weenies open up, the rivers, treehouse, Matterhorn, Space Mtn -- peeking over the horizon, giving a tantalizing glimpse

* Enhancing Weenies:
    * Draw players towards goals geographically and visually
    * Change altitude to enhance drama/scale
    * Make player backtrack/change direction to give more information
    * Switchbacks can do this
    * See ratchet and clank games

Notes from the talk

Slides from the talk

Scott Rogers' homepage

ryanleary writes "I am currently a junior computer science major at a relatively competitive university. I intend to remain here for some graduate work, and I would like to get a master's degree. What would be a good field to study? An MS in computer science appears to be highly theoretical, while an MS in IT seems more practical due to its breadth (covering some management, HCI, and design). What looks best on a resume, and where might I expect to make more money in the not-too-distant future? Computer Science, Information Technology, or something different altogether — perhaps an MBA?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this month my netbook was infected.

Yesterday, after checking into my Salt Lake City hotel, I wanted to see if their wired Internet was faster than my Sprint EVDO. So I did a Google search for "speed test" and clicked on the first three tests, Speakeasy, Speedtest and CNET. I wasn't expected to get infected, wasn't even thinking about it, so of course I didn't take notes. But a couple of them came up with empty frames after running their tests. I assumed this was because I had Java turned off. I decided the tests weren't worth the trouble so I just used the EVDO. After a bit of putzing around I went out to dinner.

When I came back, there was a familiar malware dialog on the display, warning that my machine had been infected and wanting me to install some software to fix it. Yeah yeah. This time I didn't click any buttons, I just let it keep warning me.

I had Avast installed, but a week or so ago I had turned it off, it was too annoying. At that moment of course I wished I hadn't. I ran its scanner, it found the virus, said I had to reboot, which I did, and when it started back up it did a scan of the hard disk, but found nothing further. Then the malware started acting up again. I ran the Avast scan again, and it found it, recommended I reboot, this time I didn't.

I did a Google search for "spyware protect 2009" found a Yahoo Answers page that suggested doing what I had started doing, plus running one more program, Superantispyware, which I downloaded, but chose not to run. I remembered from last time that this rootkit virus patches the hosts file, and I didn't trust anything I had downloaded after the infection. (Later I found that it had patched the hosts file, but not for this domain, so the download was likely safe, I trashed it anyway and redownloaded.)

I then ran Malwarebytes, it found the virus, asked me to reboot so it could remove it, I did, and this time, no more dialogs. Even so, when I did another scan of Avast, it found the rootkit, and at this point I was beginning to think there was no getting rid of the mess, but it did get rid of it. Another scan by Malwarebytes found nothing, and then Avast found nothing. I ran Superantispyware and it found nothing. So at this point, I'm convinced my machine is clean again, and I have Avast turned on.

Lessons learned:

1. Java is not the root of this problem.

2. Both times my machine got infected I was using a speed test site to evaluate the performance of someone else's network. My guess is that it isn't the speed test site, because Google has a pretty strict policy about malware sites, and it seems pretty unlikely they'd point to an infected site on the first page of hits on something so common and important as a network speed test.

3. Using Firefox is no longer a protection against malware, if it ever was. It's now popular enough that the nasty people target it, in addition to MSIE.

4. While I was fighting this I was thinking this is the last time I travel with Windows. But now that things are working again, I don't feel that urgency. Human nature at work!

Flickr user Monkeyjen has uploaded a short video of a surprisingly entertaining and simple gag: stick a Darth Vader action-figure top on a dashboard hula-girl bottom, and voila, mesmerizing video gold!

Watch Darth Vader Hula (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

uctpjac writes "London media lawyer Emily MacManus argues that UK libel law has three features which make it the 'defamation tourism' capital of the world and a serious threat to web free speech. First, there is no free speech presumption in the UK as there is, for example, in the US. Second, every access of a web page is considered to be a separate act of publication in the UK (unlike the US, where 'original publication' holds). Third, 'no-win-no-fee' libel litigation is now allowed in the UK. If any blog, anywhere, publishes something you'd like taken down, threaten libel action in the UK: no one except the super-rich can afford to even take these cases to court, so media lawyers advise publishers to 'take it down, take it down quickly, take it down again.' There's not much chance that the judges will move the law any time soon because they just aren't seeing the cases that could cause them to set new precedent."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

`

Catherine sends this in about Maya Pedal, which helps create and supply bicycles and pedal-powered machines to communities in Guatemala.

Bicimáquinas (translates as "bicycle machines") are pedal-powered machines that act as an intermediate technology to assist the family economy in obtaining a higher production capacity in agriculture and in small business. Each bicimáquina is produced individually in our shop with a combination of old bikes, concrete, wood, and metal. So far we have developed several original designs that have proven to be both functional and economical.

Maya Pedal is working with a number of sponsoring organizations, on projects in Guatemala to bring low tech solutions to rural people.

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On Wednesday, we discussed news that AT&T had begun sending takedown notices to users whom the RIAA has accused of illegally downloading copyrighted works. Cox and Comcast are both cooperating with the RIAA in that regard as well. However, while Cox seems willing to shut off service in the case of repeat offenders, Comcast denied that it was considering a similar penalty, and AT&T said they'll flat out refuse to terminate service on the RIAA's word alone; it will take a court order. They seem satisfied with the effect letters have had on inhibiting such downloads: "'It's a standard part of everybody's terms of service,' [AT&T senior executive vice president Jim Cicconi] said. 'If somebody is engaging in illegal activity, it basically gives us the right to do it...We're not a finder of fact and under no circumstances would we ever suspend or terminate service based on an allegation from a third party. We're just simply reminding people that they can't engage in illegal activity.' Cicconi said the company began testing this kind of 'forward noticing' late last year and even experimented with sending certified letters. Cicconi said the notices worked. The company saw very few repeat offenders."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Deepa Sivarajan sends word that the journal Transformative Works and Culture has published an issue that focuses on games, containing a variety of articles which examine how games interact with modern culture. One essay takes a look at how developers gain an understanding of the systems and structures that drive gameplay, and another discusses motivation and "participatory culture" in games that have a substantial degree of user design involvement, such as mods and addons. There's also an evaluation of how the enthusiast press affects the perceived value of games. The issue includes game-related book reviews and interviews, which can be found at the bottom of the full list of articles.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Blogoscoped posted a chunk of Javascript last week that unlocks a few experimental features in Google Search. The features are being pushed to a trial group, but the Javascript will add a cookie that allows anyone to participate.

I just got around to playing with the "Wonder Wheel" search view. It's a small graphical application that provides tangential, semi-related topics for any search term. Searching for "science fiction" provides a link to "science fiction authors," which links to "isaac asimov," which links to "carl sagan," for instance. Not shown in the photo above is that the complete search results are listed to the right. It's not the sort of thing that helps refine a search, but it could come in handy for browsing through related topics.

Also worth checking out is a timeline view, which gives you an idea of the volume of published content for a particular search term over time. It's well suited for digging up an old article with a common search term, filtering through the results by date.

Google's Wonder Wheel Experiment, and More

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From the MAKE Flickr pool

• Self-immolating wood oven

• OSC library for Arduino [above, bottom-right]

• All-in-one mint tin watercolor kit [above, top-left]

• Gakken synth bending + theremin control [above, bottom-left]

• DIY capacitive touchpad [above, top-left]

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Technology Review has promising news on the AIDS front: researchers have captured HIV T cell transmission on video. The upshot could be new avenues of treatment. "The resulting images and videos show that, once an infected cell adheres to a healthy cell, the HIV proteins... migrate within minutes to the contact site. At that point, large packets of virus are simultaneously released by the infected cell and internalized by the recipient cell. This efficient mode of transfer is a distinct pathway from the cell-free infection that has been the focus of most prior HIV studies, and reveals another mechanism by which the virus evades immune responses that can neutralize free virus particles within the body."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Photo from Petmar0 on Flickr

Pete responded in the comments to the the call for designs in the Rural Celly Charger article on Saturday.

How about connecting a joule-thief circuit (DC-DC upconverter) to a cap on one side and a small solar cell (like the ones in calculators) on the other? You pull off of the cap to the cell phone directly. If I remember correctly, most cell phones have internal Vregs between the battery and the rest of the circuitry, so that takes care of your OV protection. I'll see if I can build this, and then get back to you.

Within a few hours on his busy Saturday, he had a rough build tested and posted up. His photos of the build have been added to the MAKE Flickr pool. Obviously, a few tests on some quickly assembled parts do not make a working solution, but they do demonstrate the concepts behind the circuit that could be worked up in a more detailed analysis and build. Ultimately, it would be ideal to come up with a design that can be replicated across cultures and great distances with minimal and less than ideal tools.

Photo from petmar0 on Flickr

The original article on Women of Uganda Network, or WOUGNET, told of how a Ugandan woman built her own charger after an unscrupulous vendor nicked her good battery and replaced it with a nearly dead one. The design that she came up with uses five D cell batteries to pump some charge into her phone. That should be quite a bit more voltage than is really needed to fill up a cell battery. She and her neighbors could benefit from a buildable design that could be made from easily sourced supplies.

The comments offered a number of perspectives on the problem and possible solutions. As is the case in many rural communities, she has access to a bicycle, some supplies, and maybe a bit of know-how about electricity. It is likely that her experiment was more 'seat of the pants engineering' than a studied formal solution based on book based research.

Generally, DC motors are relatively plentiful in electrojunk. Old cassette players, CD drives, VCRs, and more are good sources for surplus motors, and it is possible that a design based on a motor would be easy to build in rural Africa. The resistor and transistor needed for the Joule Thief could be harvested from many old devices. A capacitor could be used to store the charge, and then we would need a fitting to connect it to the phone. It is likely that many of the phones in a given community are of similar design and a spare could be appropriated for a cell phone charger.

How can you add to this idea? Could you design and build a cell charger only from junk? If you did not have access to a decent soldering iron, how would you get your connections consistent? If you have an idea to add to this conversation, bring it over to the comments. If you can, build up a sample circuit like Pete did and show it to us through a post on your blog, or you can add it to the MAKE Flickr pool.

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Hugh Pickens writes "New cognitive research shows that 3-year-olds neither plan for the future nor live completely in the present, but instead call up the past as they need it. 'There is a lot of work in the field of cognitive development that focuses on how kids are basically little versions of adults trying to do the same things adults do, but they're just not as good at it yet. What we show here is they are doing something completely different,' says professor Yuko Munakata at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Munakata's team used a computer game and a setup that measures the diameter of the pupil of the eye to determine mental effort to study the cognitive abilities of 3-and-a-half-year-olds and 8-year-olds. The research concluded that while everything you tell toddlers seems to go in one ear and out the other, the study found that toddlers listen, but then store the information for later use. 'For example, let's say it's cold outside and you tell your 3-year-old to go get his jacket out of his bedroom and get ready to go outside,' says doctoral student Christopher Chatham. 'You might expect the child to plan for the future, think "OK it's cold outside so the jacket will keep me warm." But what we suggest is that this isn't what goes on in a 3-year-old's brain. Rather, they run outside, discover that it is cold, and then retrieve the memory of where their jacket is, and then they go get it.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

mdwh2 writes "Graphic artists, publishers and MPs have condemned the UK's Coroners and Justice Bill, which will criminalize possession of sexual depictions that appear to show someone under 18 (the age of consent is 16 in the UK), as well as adults where the 'predominant impression conveyed' is of someone under 18, and even if they are merely drawn as being present whilst sexual activity took place between adults. The definitions could include Lost Girls, Watchmen, and South Park. The Comic Book Alliance has launched a petition against the law."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BobB-nw writes "Many have been worrying that the Conficker worm will somehow rise up and devastate the Internet on April 1. These fears are misplaced, security experts say. April 1 is what Conficker researchers are calling a trigger date, when the worm will switch the way it looks for software updates. A 60 Minutes episode about the worm on Sunday will stoke concerns. But the worm has already had several such trigger dates, including Jan. 1, none of which had any direct impact on IT operations, according to Phil Porras, a program director with SRI International who has studied the worm. 'Technically, we will see a new capability, but it complements a capability that already exists,' Porras said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Photo from The Boston Globe

While working at a local shop, Earl Cogswell, jr. saw the need for people to have a clean, secure way to store their propane tanks during transit to and from the filling stations. As he filled up tanks for people, he could see that often women were jamming the tank in with their groceries, and other times they were loose in the backs of pickup trucks.

Cogswell asked his suppliers for something to secure the tanks, but couldn't find anything. Thus was born the idea for the Tank Nanny, a skid-free plastic holder that provides a snug fit for the standard 20-pound propane tank. It costs $18.95 and has a built-in seat belt loop.

As a result of the problem he saw and the design process he went through with his family, he has developed a product called Tank Nanny.

Cogswell, 44, sketched the design on napkins and backs of envelopes. His wife, Donna, and daughter Jennifer, an engineer for Pratt & Whitney in Connecticut, helped with the details. Another daughter, Jessica, designed a website, posters, and brochures and created the Tank Nanny logo - a female figure in silhouette.

Maybe you think his idea is brilliant, or maybe you have been getting by with milk crates for decades, but you have to hand it to him for running with his idea. If you had an idea for a product that the world could use, would you know how to bring it to market? Where do you turn to for support on your design ideas? Let us know what you think in the comments.

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Richard Metzger is the current Boing Boing guest blogger I'm not sure this story is an actual anecdote or just a meandering way of introducing an amazing YouTube clip, but here goes nuthin' : As a lad growing up in Wheeling, WV in the 1970s, at approximately the age of twelve, I decided that I was NOT going to eat the food I was being served by my parents any more. In a home where greasy pan-fried hamburgers (or "Steakums") and Kraft macaroni and cheese were the normal dinner fare, I simply wanted to eat healthier. My parents were not very happy about this this demand --for that is what it was-- but what could they do? However, the severity of my new diet must have really taken them by surprise. I became, pretty much a Fruitatarian, almost a raw foodist, years before this was common. What influenced my twelve year-old mind to do something like this was an obscure book I found in the local library called "The Mucusless Diet Healing System" by Dr. Arnold Ehret. I won't go into the details of the diet, which extols the value of avoiding "mucus" and "pus" in your food --sounds like an admirable goal, right?-- but suffice to say that while Dr Ehret's work still has many followers --he's thought of as the founder of Naturopathy -- some diet experts consider him a total quack. But I am not here to debate the merits of his ideas, pro or con, merely to offer some brief context before I send you off to read this short essay, The Definitive Cure of Chronic Constipation. Okay? You got that? At the very least skim it. The language he uses is quite distinctive isn't it? The total disgust he expresses about the digestive system is almost Nietzschean in its peculiar character. The absolutist tone must've contributed greatly to my pre-teen interest in the diet. Now flash-forward to the late 1990s, New York City. I had become friends with the then 91 year old Theodore Gottlieb, better-known as the infamous dark comedian Brother Theodore, a big influence on Eric Bogosian, Lydia Lunch and Spaulding Gray, who had been performing his totally insane one-man show at the tiny 13th Street Theater for ages and was a frequent guest on David Letterman's show during the 1980s. No exaggeration to say that Theodore had been around forever. He was delivering lines like "The only thing that keeps me alive is the hope of dying young" long before I was born. What was a great gag when he was, say, 50 years old, and then to STILL be delivering a line like that at the age of 93, as he did on my UK television series, well that existential tension is what made his nonagenarian performances so incredibly spell-binding. The show was in the form of a stern lecture. It was impossible to tell if this was an act you were seeing or if he was utterly batshit crazy, a berserk "genius" impervious to the laughter as long as an audience bought tickets. The props were a chair, a table, a chalk board and a stryrofoam cup. There was a single spotlight. If you were anywhere near the stage in that little theater he could totally scare the shit out of you. Of course, whenever I brought friends, I took them right down the front! It was an act, I can assure you. Theodore in real life was a mellow old bohemian guy who lived several lives in his 94 years. He'd been in Dachau and he'd also been on Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin and most famously on Late Night with David Letterman. He was in "The Burbs" playing Tom Hank's great uncle and was the voice of Gollum in "The Hobbit" cartoon. He had a cameo in Orson Welles' "The Stranger." Theodore was an old Beatnik, that's the way I saw him. (He was even in a porno movie! An X-rated parody of "Jaws" called "Gums." Theo plays the boat captain, in a thankfully non-balling role. In "Gums" he is seen, rather inexplicably, wearing a Nazi uniform for most of the film). In his nineties he was dating a woman in her mid-forties. He rode a bike around New York City until he was late in his eighties. He really wasn't anything like his crazed monk act in real life, though. And let me tell you, when you are in your thirties and have a friend who is in their nineties... you learn things about life. Not all of them good, either. 94-years is a long time to live. Too long, if you ask me. I'm quite sure he felt that way, too. Theodore apparently had great difficulty memorizing lines, even his own material and so he only really ever did two major monologues --he'd switch off between them when he felt like it-- for over 40 years. One was called "Foodism" -we'll get to this one in a minute and the other was called "Quadrupidism" where he'd extol the virtues of human beings getting down on all fours. One day I was visiting Theodore at his apartment and I was looking at his sparse book shelf. On it sat "The Confessions of Aleister Crowley," Baudelaire's "Les Fleur du Mal," an Edgar Alan Poe anthology, The Portable Nietzsche, St Augustine, and... ta da... "The Mucusless Diet Healing System" by Dr Arnold Ehret. I remarked to him that I myself was a pre-teen adherent to Arnold Ehret's ideas about diet and he replied that it was the inspiration for his "Foodism" monologue. "I merely exaggerated his writings. Just slightly. That was all it took!" My jaw hit the ground. He'd managed to craft one of the most brilliant comic monologues of all time based on Ehret's zany diet-sprach. I was awestruck at how amazing this revelation really was. I mean... how creative!! You read that essay about constipation, right? Promise me? Now go watch this extended excerpt from "Foodism" performed on Letterman in the mid-80s. A Secret Noodle Ring in Minnesota New York Times obituary for Theodore Gottlieb Brother Theodore is Dead by Nick Mamatas Brother Theodore by Jon Kalish (the "TV producer" referred to here is probably me) A radio tribute to Brother Theodore on WNYC's "The No Show" Tears from a Glass Eye... with a Tongue of Madness! (Brother Theodore record) O Brother, Where Art Thou? (on the Theodore documentary) To My Great Chagrin (Brother Theodore documentary) Note that there are several torrents of Brother Theodore performances out there on the Interwebs.

newsblaze writes "The UN Human Rights Council assaulted free expression today, in a 23-11 vote that urges member states to adopt laws outlawing criticism of religions. The proposal came to the UN from Pakistan on behalf of the Organization for the Islamic Conference. There were 13 abstentions. South Korea, Japan, India, Mexico and Brazil, all strong democracies, allowed this to pass by abrogating their responsibility. While the resolution doesn't mention the online world, where does this subject get mentioned most, if not online?" The coverage is from NewsBlaze, which says its mission is to carry important news that other media are not paying attention to. There does not seem to be any other coverage of this vote.

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