gurps_npc writes "Forensics Innovations claims to have for sale a product that detects headerless encrypted files, such as TrueCrypt Dynamic files. It does not decrypt the file, just tells you that it is in fact an encrypted file. It works by detecting hidden patterns that don't exist in a random file. It does not mention steganography, but if their claim is true, it seems that it should be capable of detecting stenographic information as well."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

gurps_npc writes "Forensics Innovations claims to have for sale a product that detects headerless encrypted files, such as TrueCrypt Dynamic files. It does not decrypt the file, just tells you that it is in fact an encrypted file. It works by detecting hidden patterns that don't exist in a random file. It does not mention stenography, but if their claim is true, it seems that it should be capable of detecting stenographic information as well."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I knew it was only a matter of time before Car Wars, Mad Max, and dozens of video games featuring weaponized vehicles, came to television. On May 11th, the producers of Mythbusters will be bringing Weaponizers, a three-part series, to the little screen. Two teams will design, build, and send into remotely-controlled combat, lethally-outfitted vehicles. Sounds like my idea of a good time.

Weaponizers [via Gizmodo, and BotJunkie]

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Jay Rosen: "I got put on Twitter's official suggested users list last night. I asked them to take me off it today and they did."

afabbro writes "There are scattered reports today that Apple is building a team to design its own chips, with an eye towards reducing power consumption on iPods and iPhones."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Our Maker Faire Bay Area 2009 is only 4 weeks away on May 30th and 31st at the San Mateo County Fairgrounds! Maker Faire is the world's largest DIY festival, so you won't want to miss it. In a nutshell, it's a two-day, family-friendly event to MAKE, create, learn, invent, CRAFT, recycle, think, play, and be inspired by celebrating arts, crafts, engineering, food, music, science and technology.

Every year, we strive to green our festival more and more. Last year, about 65,000 people came out to play with us, and this year we're expecting even more. If you are planning on joining us (which we hope you are), it's not too early to plan how you'll be getting there. One great option is to share a ride. We've set up a Maker Faire page on PickupPal to make coordinating that ride share easier. Check it out, make some new friends, and we'll see you there!

Pssst, you can also still get discounted advanced purchase pricing on your Maker Faire tickets until May 20th!

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Al writes "Researchers at the MIT Media Lab have created a cheaper way to track physical motion that could prove useful for movie special effects. Normally an actor needs to wear special markers that reflect light with numerous high-speed cameras placed around a specially-lit set. The new system, called Second Skin, instead relies on tiny photosensors embedded in clothes that record movement by picking patterns of infrared light emitted by inexpensive projectors that can be mounted in ceilings or even outdoors. The whole system costs less than $1,000 to build, and the researchers have developed a version that vibrates to guide a person's arm movements. Watch a video of Second Skin in action."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Automata artist Dug North has posted a round-up of books related to gear-making and is looking for suggestions for others.

After seeing the beautiful use of gears in Bill Durovchic's kinetic sculpture, I started looking for books on gears. The following books all look good and get great ratings from Amazon's vast customer base.

Additional suggestions are welcome!

Handbook of Practical Gear DesignHandbook of Practical Gear Design (Mechanical Engineering, CRC Press Hardcover)
by Darle W. Dudley

Product Description from Amazon: "For more than 30 years the book Practical Gear Design, later re-titled Handbook of Practical Gear Design, has been the leading engineering guide and reference on the subject. It is now available again in its most recent edition. The book is a detailed, practical guide and reference to gear technology. The design of all types of gears is covered, from those for small mechanisms to large industrial applications."

List of books on gear design and fabrication

More:

• Toolbox: Shop bookshelf (mechanics, tools, and misc)
• Toolbox: Shop bookshelf (electronics and MCUs)

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While the entertainment industry still really seems to think that the disputed verdict in the Pirate Bay trial was a victory, most folks who can look beyond the immediate ruling have recognized what a horrific loss this has been for the industry. On the technology side, it's done nothing of importance. Even if The Pirate Bay is eventually shut down, there are at least a dozen other sites to step in and take up the slack. On the business model side, shutting down The Pirate Bay will do nothing to fix a seriously broken business model. But, perhaps most important of all, the industry is pushing more and more people over the edge, from indifferent to the industry, to actively working against the industry. I expected the uselessness of the verdict when it came to tech and business models, but I didn't realize that it would energize people on the political side as well.

There's been lots of talk about how the verdict massively increased the number of Swedes joining The Pirate Party, but the big question is whether or not it will be enough people to make a difference, and will they actually follow through. The initial showings are impressive. A new political poll shows that the party's popularity has grown tremendously, to the point that if a vote were held today, The Pirate Party would gain a seat in the European Parliament. It's now become the second largest party for voters in the 18 to 29 age group. This isn't just a random fringe group that the industry (and other politicians) can completely dismiss. It is still small, but what's amazing is how the industry's blatant shortsightedness has given rise to an entire political movement that keeps attracting more and more members. It seems likely that the entertainment industry still doesn't realize what sort of backlash it's creating, but at some point, it might want to start paying attention.

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Eyal sez, "The Saturday, (May 2nd 2009)is 'Free Comic Book Day' all over the world. Here is the scoop, you go into any participating comic book store (and there are a lot of them) on Saturday and you get to choose a free comic from over 30 comics. That's it. No catch. As a 40 year old self professed comic geek and a dad of 3 boys who is always looking for ways to get them to read more. The first Saturday in May is a great way to combine both activities. I am in no way affiliated to this promotion or its sponsors. I just feel it's a shame more people don't know about this great day. Did I mention that the comics are free?"

Free Comic Book Day (Thanks, Eyal!)

FEMA has decided to pull a children's coloring book entitled, "A Scary Thing Happened" from their website. The coloring book contained three images of the twin towers on fire for children to color. Rose Olmsted, the coordinator behind the book said, "I stand firm that it was a very well thought-out and useful resource for kids, but it's obviously being misinterpreted by a lot of people." Since people are so upset about the coloring book, I can only assume FEMA's plan for a human remains concentration game will be put on hold.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If I'm reading the pop-up window correctly, domain registrar Godaddy recommends against purchasing .tv domain names because the island of Tuvalu, which the domain represents, is sinking. One more reason not to get bent out of shape over the fact that CNN bought "boingboing.tv" out from under us back in 2007. (via Eddie Codel)

Starting in May, the airline that offers Boing Boing Video episodes as an entertainment option, the same airline that allowed us to name one of their planes "Unicorn Chaser" -- well, they're going to start serving absinthe in the skies. At left, the "herbal liqueur" company's spokesfairies, who may or may not appear magically in the seat next to you.

Le Tourment Vert's website offers some interesting cocktail recipes, including "Corpse Reviver II."

Fun facts about this beverage: yes, it is legal in the USA. Yes, it contains thujone. I do not know if it will cause you to hallucinate, but it is indeed brewed with wormwood. More about Le Tourment Vert (in French: "The Green Torment") from absinthe aficionado website absintheology.com:

INGREDIENTS (as found in all traditional absinthes) Holy Trinity: Anise, Fennel & Grand Wormwood (Artemisia Absinthium). Plus, it contains aromatic herbs including Sage, Rosemary and Coriander. Le Tourment Vert contains the maximum dosage of thujone currently allowed by the United States Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB).

Incidentally, Virgin America (which today started service to/from Orange County) is also expanding the number of craft in its fleet that offer in-flight WiFi. Absinthe + internet + idle time? Can't wait to read the mile-high tweets that result.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

As we all learned in preschool, Muppets are native to New York City, and once freely roamed (in a floppy, yet oddly stiff-limbed sort of way) the whole of the five boroughs. Sadly, those days have passed. But now, kindly urban planning wonks are hoping that new, livable-streets initiatives can help the good old days return.

In the early part of the 1900s, Zozos - large, furry, innocent, purple creatures - once freely roamed New York City's streets, and were seen frequently mingling among its denizens and enjoying the public realm. But with the advent of the automobile their numbers slowly dwindled, until the 1930s when sightings became rare and they were thought to go extinct. But now thanks to a burgeoning livable streets movement and a marked improvement in public spaces in NYC, Zozo sightings have been reported. World-renowned crypto-zoologist Donald Druthers has convinced us to document the facts - and yes, it looks like Zozos could be making a comeback! See the evidence for yourself."

(Download MP4, or watch on YouTube.) In today's episode of Boing Boing Video, we review the Tricaster, a compact device that facilitates high-quality live internet video broadcast production for a lot less dough than the equivalent amount of traditional TV production gear.

A number of web video productions are now using the Tricaster, including Leo Laporte's TWIT.tv, and Mahalo's newly launched Kevin Pollak chat show. I visited the Kevin Pollak set this week to view the device in action with BBV editor Wes Varghese and Richard Metzger. Metzger has also been experimenting with live-to-hard-drive production (= tape his interview show using the Tricaster, then it's ready to go as a produced piece without a lot of editing.).

What interested me most about the device was the possibility of changing the economics of live video online. The Tricaster costs about $10K, and just renting a satellite truck full of switching gear and engineers for conventional live production costs a hell of a lot more - like, start adding zeroes.

So, the possibilities I see are much like the possibilities we began to see for web video 10 years ago, when digital video cameras suddenly became a lot more affordable, and video editing software became cheaper, more widely distributed, and a lot easier to use. Bottom line: more live video, in more of it the hands of people who wouldn't be producing live video otherwise.

Newtek, the company that makes the Tricaster, loaned Boing Boing Video a review unit and we're going to be doing some experiments soon.

Below, and after the jump, some screengrabs from backstage video I shot on the Kodak zi6. The featured guest on this installment of the Kevin Pollak show was Jon Hamm of Mad Men. Diggnation/Totally Rad Show/Project Lore star Alex Albrecht was also in the house, as was George Ruiz of ICM, who shot some nicer photos here. Kevin Pollak show crew notes: Alex Miller was running the TriCaster. Kenny Chen was the floor director, Josh Negrin is sitting next to Alex at the Mac Pro and Jason McIntyre is sitting at the 2 iMacs.

RSS feed for new episodes here, YouTube channel here, subscribe on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are blog post archives for Boing Boing Video.

(Special thanks to Philip Nelson of NewTek, to Jason Calacanis, and to Boing Boing's video hosting partner Episodic.)

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Sponsor shout-out: This Boing Boing Video episode is sponsored by WEPC.com, in partnership with Intel and Asus. WePC.com is a site where users come together to "share ideas, images and inspiration about the ideal PC." Participants' designs, feature ideas and community feedback will be evaluated by ASUS and "could influence the blueprint for an actual notebook PC built by ASUS with Intel inside."

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lousyd writes "Volokh has hosted a paper by George Mason University law professor Adam Mossoff on the patent fracas a century and a half ago surrounding the sewing machine. A Stitch in Time: The Rise and Fall of the Sewing Machine Patent Thicket challenges assumptions by courts and scholars today about the alleged efficiency-choking complexities of the modern patent system. Mossoff says that complementary inventions, extensive patent litigation, so-called 'patent trolls,' patent thickets, and privately formed patent pools have long been features of the American patent system reaching back to the antebellum era."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In mid-March, I had the pleasure of giving the second day keynote talk at the Leadership Music Digital Summit. It was a lot of fun, and generated some really fascinating discussions (as always). There was a lot of demand to get the video online, and I wanted to thank the team at Leadership Music (Kira and Abby) and Matt Houser who volunteered to put together the video with my slides, which you can see on the media page or embedded below:
Leadership Music Digital Summit 2009 - Mike Masnick keynote address, 3/25/09 from Leadership Music Digital Summit on Vimeo.

If you've seen my earlier Midemnet presentation, this is actually an extended and improved version of that, so part of it will already be quite familiar to you. However, the final 10 minutes of the presentation gives me an opportunity to respond to the biggest question that came after the original presentation: how does this work for less well known musicians. So, I went through five different musicians, who all come from different backgrounds and experiences, representing different "success levels" in the industry, to show that this basic concept of connecting with fans, giving them a reason to buy (and not freaking out about piracy) works quite well.

You'll note at the beginning of the presentation, I note that the RIAA was a major sponsor of the event, and there was a huge RIAA logo hanging over my head (not seen in the video). The RIAA also sponsored the lunch following my keynote. While I actually did end up talking to representatives from all four of the major record labels while in Nashville (with... um... very, very, very different reactions from reps from each label, from outright frosty, to curious, to very interested and engaging), no one from the RIAA itself actually said hello. Too bad.

In the meantime, there are a bunch of new events I'll be speaking at in the coming months (all doing very different presentations), and I'll be putting up a post detailing some of those in the near future as well -- and I hope to meet more readers and Techdirt/Insight Community participants at these events.

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JacobSteelsmith writes "A respected American think-tank, Nemertes Research, reports the Web has reached a critical point. For many reasons, Internet usage continues to rise (imagine that), and bandwidth usage is increasing due to traffic heavy sites such as YouTube. The article goes on to describe the perils Internet users will face including 'brownouts that will freeze their computers as capacity runs out in cyberspace,' and constant network 'traffic jams,' similar to 'how home computers slow down when the kids get back from school and start playing games.' ... 'Monthly traffic across the internet is running at about eight exabytes. A recent study by the University of Minnesota estimated that traffic was growing by at least 60 per cent a year, although that did not take into account plans for greater internet access in China and India. ... While the net itself will ultimately survive, Ritter said that waves of disruption would begin to emerge next year, when computers would jitter and freeze. This would be followed by brownouts — a combination of temporary freezing and computers being reduced to a slow speed.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

krou writes "The Wrap has an interesting interview with Eric Schmidt on Google's new plan for news. Google is apparently planning on rolling out 'high-quality news' to users who not actively searching for news. It's expected to launch in approximately six months' time, and the first two news organizations to be involved will be The New York Times and The Washington Post. 'Under this latest iteration of advanced search, users will be automatically served the kind of news that interests them just by calling up Google's page. The latest algorithms apply ever more sophisticated filtering — based on search words, user choices, purchases, a whole host of cues — to determine what the reader is looking for without knowing they're looking for it. And on this basis, Google believes it will be able to sell premium ads against premium content.' Although Schmidt said that companies like the New York Times won't get any of this ad revenue, he commented that it will push stories to users who want them, drive up traffic to those stories, and in turn bring higher advertising rates for those stories." As VentureBeat points out, Google hasn't officially confirmed any of this, and with no ad revenue going to the other companies, it only partially addresses complaints that Google is profiting unfairly from the work of news publications.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alan sez, "Thought you'd be interested in the following two documents, which I've translated from French, concerning the debate over the anti-p2p 'Hadopi' law in France [Ed: this is the "three strikes" law that would allow copyright holders to have your network connection cut by accusing you of three infringements, without having to show any proof. The law was defeated earlier this month, but is back for another kick at the can]. I think it's pretty important to see that there are significant numbers of cultural producers opposed to the law, something of a first on this scale. The first letter is from the world of cinema, signatories include directors, producers, actors (including Catherine Deneuve!) as well as a former general executive of French anti-piracy agency, ALPA (dedicated to the film sector). The second, I think you'll be particularly interested in, as it is a collective letter of protest against Hadopi by innumerable people in the field of science-fiction"

Artists, creators, all those cultural actors without whom that word would be emptied of meaning, are being instrumentalised for the benefit of a law which, we must remind everyone, contains measures to filter the net, install spyware on individuals machines, and suspend internet connections without the involvement of a judge on the basis of IP numbers (whose lack of reliability has long been established) collected by private companies, and the extension of measures initially conceived for police anti-terrorist activity to the sharing of files between individuals.

Whilst deeply attached to copyright, which represents the sole or principal source of income for many precarious intellectual workers in our ranks, we protest against those who brandish it incessantly to justify measures which, while technically unfeasible, are certainly dangerous, and whose potential to erode our rights is only too obvious in the eyes of those of us whose daily work involves the scientific, political and social thought which is at the core of science-fiction.

Likewise, conscious of the interests and value of creative communities, we also protest against the danger that this law poses to the universe of culture distributed and shared under free licenses, which constitutes a wealth accessible to all.

The internet is not a chaos but rather a collective work, where no actor can demand a privileged position, and it is aberrant to legislate on practices born from 21st century technologies on the basis of schemas taken from 19th. Think about it.

Because the future is our trade.

Sci-fi Against Hadopi: Who Will Control the Future? (Thanks, Alan!)

Just Posted: Our review of the Fujifilm FinePix F200 EXR. Fujifilm has built up a reputation for following its own path when it comes to sensor technology, which has resulted in cameras such as the F30, F31fd and S5 Pro that have developed devoted followings. Now we have the FinePix F200 EXR, the first camera to incorporate the company's Super CCD EXR technology. So does this latest wizardry live up to the promises of improved low-light performance and greater dynamic range? And, just as importantly, what's the camera like to use? Find out the answer to both questions in our in-depth review.

Hugh Pickens writes "European antitrust regulators, who have been aggressively pursuing what they see as anticompetitive practices among technology companies, could impose their largest fine ever in a market-dominance case against Intel. The commission began investigating Intel in 2000 after Advanced Micro Devices, its arch-rival, filed a complaint. In two sets of charges, in 2007 and 2008, the commission accused Intel of abusing its dominant position in chips by giving large rebates to computer makers, by paying computer makers to delay or cancel product lines, and by offering chips for server computers at prices below actual cost. Some legal experts speculate that Intel's fine could reach about a billion euros, or $1.3B. 'I'd be surprised if the fine isn't as high or higher than in the Microsoft case,' said an antitrust and competition lawyer in London. In 2004 Microsoft paid a fine of €497M, or $663M at current exchange rates, after being accused of abusing its dominance; the EU imposed another $1.3B fine in Feb. 2008."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While there are plenty of legitimate worries that the Obama administration is way too influenced by copyright maximalists, who knew that the battle for ridiculous new copyright laws would start involving the First Lady as well? For years, the fashion industry has been a shining example of an industry where innovation and competition thrives, despite no ability to copyright designs and widespread copying of those designs. However, what's resulted is a more dynamic and more creative marketplace that has actually increased output and helped enlarge the market. In fact, repeated studies have shown that it's this lack of intellectual property protection that has made the industry so successful, and that implementing restrictions would actually harm the industry. That's because the rampant copying has done many good things:

• It helps permeate new designs into the market much faster.
• It creates a defacto market segmentation between "originals" and copies, which actually has increased the value of having an original brand name design.
• It encourages more innovation because designers know that they need to keep coming out with new works to stay on top, rather than relying on their old designs.

And it's working. The fashion market is highly competitive, very robust, and very, very creative. So it makes no sense at all that anyone should want to add new IP into that market. The purpose of copyright is to encourage new content creation, and anyone would be hard pressed to say that the fashion industry isn't quite good at constantly churning out tons of new designs. And yet... as with so many case studies about intellectual property, those who are on top often want increased IP protection, not to encourage the creation of new content, but to stamp out competitors and be able to slow down innovation and rest on their laurels.

In other words, the leaders in highly competitive markets often implicitly recognize that IP protection does exactly the opposite of its intended purpose: and they want that. It helps lock them into a leadership position by easing competition, and slowing down the pace at which they need to innovate. So, it should be no surprise that over the years, some top fashion designers have pushed hard for Congress to create a new copyright for fashion designs, despite the total lack of evidence of any need (and, in fact, lots of evidence to the contrary). NY Senator Chuck Schumer has been a big supporter of such a damaging idea, but it hasn't gone anywhere to date.

Yet, now we find out that many top designers, who have designed dresses for the First Lady, Michelle Obama, are hoping to enlist her help in supporting such legislation. They're apparently excited that Michelle Obama is known for her fashion sense, and are playing off of that to get more attention. Unfortunately, in the article linked here, the Washington Post's fashion columnist simply parrots the designers' false claims about how such copying "harms" the industry, despite the evidence saying exactly the opposite. I guess it's too much to ask the Post's fashion columnist to actually understand or research the issue, but it's unfortunate that these false ideas are being reported as fact, and that the First Lady may get dragged into a battle that would ultimately harm fashion design by establishing protectionism where none is needed.

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• A water-propelled jetpack that lets you jog on water.

• Joel parked his keister on to two fancy ergonomic chairs.

• Some novelist wrote 100,000 words of his book on a smartphone (and man are his thumbs tired).

• The pizza box of tomorrow, today (even yesterday).

• Building an iMac G4 out of LEGOs = rad. Including a working LCD = RAD.

• Recycled plastic bags as art light fixtures.

• How to make a Moleskine notebook using a cereal box (!)

• We tested a powder that combats "monkey butt".

• Reports of another mysterious "brick in a box" from Best Buy.

• A pre-revolutionary wooden clock from Russia can cost $20,000.

• A PSP look-a-like that lets you play classic games.

• First-look at a reusable to-go cup for eco-conscious coffee drinkers.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

The most intriguing, and hard to pin down, questions I've gotten from readers over the past few days have revolved around overblown crises, fear, and why news organizations (and the public) seem to <3 both those things. People cite SARS and the 2006 bird flu publicity blitz, and wonder why the media is so quick to turn into Marvin the Paranoid Android, jumping in every five seconds with, "So this is it, we're all going to die."

First off, it seems pretty clear to me that this phenomenon does happen. While there are some things the media gets unfairly beaten up over, this isn't one of them. As Tom Fiedler, dean of Boston University's College of Communication and former editor of the Miami Herald told the Washington Post this week,

We [meaning the media] have a tendency to reach for the apocalyptic, but the apocalypse hasn't reached us yet."

Obviously, some of this has to do with the format of a modern 24-hour, non-stop news cycle. Unlike 30 years ago, when your news came in fits and spurts, it's now expected to be a continuous stream. But more information doesn't necessarily come along to fill that increased news hole.
If you're CNN, you've long ago committed yourself to the stream. It's a little late for Wolf Blitzer to glance down at his watch, shrug his shoulders, and say, "So that's all we know for today, folks. See ya in the morning." I think that the unconscious pressures served up by that dilemma have been the cause of EXTREME!News (WOOOooo! Rock n' Roll!) at least as often as any temple-fingered, evil-y cackling, calculated push for ratings.

But I've always thought this wasn't just a media thing. The feedback loop of positive ratings that tells CNN to keep freaking you the frack out isn't based only on them manipulating you into being captivated. As any fan of zombies can tell you, average people are going around offering a hand to the apocalypse at least as often as their heavily made-up TV news counterparts. So what gives? Why are we so fascinated with (and almost damn-near excited by) the prospect of civilization collapsing any....minute...now?

For a good theory on that, I naturally had to turn to America's #1 Most Trusted News Source...and Philip Alcabes, a man who is surely feeling a strange mix of guilt and elation over the oddly fortuitous timing of his new book, Dread

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Philip Alcabes
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis First 100 Days

I'm interested in y'all's thoughts on this.

For the record: I do not think swine, excuse me, H1N1 flu is just a toothless scare. This really is a virus with pandemic potential and, as has been said, you should be concerned...but not freaked out. I don't think there's a lot of point in "what ifing" this into the death of civilization.

(Image: Fail Pig, by Fabio Rex Too.)

The excellent foodblog Ethicurean has a good roundup of news links about H1N1 and the pork industry.

edadams sends in a story about the legal questions that are starting to crop up over property disputes in virtual worlds. A lawsuit in March 2008 that stopped one Second Life user from selling a virtual product created by another user marked the beginning of a significant amount of casework for several law firms, in large part due to the way Second Life's currency interacts closely with real money. (And yes, apparently the product in that particular case was for cybersex — did you have to ask?) "As transactions grow in volume, it's inevitable that disagreements will crop up. Linden says that although it will enforce its terms of service, including its ban on violating other users' intellectual property, it can't settle most disputes for users." A lawyer for one intellectual property firm handled a case in which the co-ownership of virtual real estate had to be determined, ending with a financial settlement given to two users who helped a virtual land developer run a group of Second Life islands. As virtual worlds get more popular and their business models more directly affect real-life finances, we can expect these legal issues to become more common as well.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jon Sarriugarte, whose machine art hijinks I first encountered through SRL, is hosting a fun event this Saturday, May 2, in West Oakland. This installment of the Boiler Bar is a benefit for Jon's Snail Car (an amazing metal/fire/artcar) project, and will feature other cool retro-mechanico creations like the Neverwas Trolly Car. Should be tons of Oilpunk fun.

Tickets and more info: Boiler Bar May Day Event. Here's the Facebook event link, and the Facebook fan club for the snail car and her adventures.

Instrucrables user vbnicolau made this how-to for making a dynamo-powered bike safety light from an old relay coil and a few hard drive magnets.

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("Origami dollar t-shirt" photo by Flickr user Vaguely Artistic, under a CC license).

The Wall Street Journal recently ran a breathless "microtrends" piece by Mark Penn and E. Kinney Zalesne titled, "America's Newest Profession: Bloggers for Hire," which begins:

In America today, there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers. Already more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers or firefighters.

Paid bloggers fit just about every definition of a microtrend: Their ranks have grown dramatically over the years, blogging is an important social and cultural movement that people care passionately about, and the number of people doing it for at least some income is approaching 1% of American adults.

The best studies we can find say we are a nation of over 20 million bloggers, with 1.7 million profiting from the work, and 452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income. That's almost 2 million Americans getting paid by the word, the post, or the click -- whether on their site or someone else's.

And went on to talk of $75K/year incomes, and $200/post pay rates. More bloggers than bartenders! A permalink in every pot! I asked Clay Shirky to analyze the piece and its findings. He kindly obliged. His essay follows.

Blogging for Dollars
Clay Shirky

Picture you chillaxin at home, flipping through stories on Digg, and just cold bloggin' those links. It's fun to share your opinions about Susan Boyle or the coup in Antananarivo, but can you do it for a living? Mark Penn and Kinney Zalesne say yes! The co-authors of the book Microtrends, put together a Wall Street Journal story about a hot new microtrend, blogging for dollars, and the news is good: "It takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year." Sweet, no?

No.

The Penn and Zalesne piece is worthless as a guide to the economics of blogging. For starters, it's methodological garbage. They take their figures from "[t]he best studies we can find", without noting whether these studies are the crème de la crème, or simply the least lousy parts of a bad lot. (Hint: Lousy.) They never note that their key figure -- 2% of bloggers claim it's their primary source of income -- would be well below the margin of error for data collected by a serious polling organization, much less for self-reported data, making that figure useless as an input. (And Penn was a pollster, no less.)

Never mind the bad data -- there's a microtrend to invent! -- and so they press onward, taking that 2% and multiplying it by a bigger self-reported number of bloggers making any money at all, concluding that 452,000 people blog as their primary source of income. (As Kevin Marks says "Any anecdote times a made-up number can be a big number.")

Then come the weasel words. They write about people making serious money from "posting their opinions", but later make it clear that many of these bloggers are flacks, paid only to post the opinions of the PR department, not their own. (The inclusion of employee-bloggers also complicates their later assertion that barriers to paid blogging are low. Where the barriers are low, the pay is minuscule, and where pay is high, the barriers are enormous.)

They also use "profitably" without meaning that revenues exceed expenses, they say "Americans" a lot, even though the report they reference covers Europe and Asia as well, and, most egregiously, they deliberately confuse "primary source of income" with "making a living." They never explain that students running AdWords could have blogging as a primary source of income without coming close to making a living at it. How many bloggers do make a living at it? I have no idea, and neither do they, but it is a much much smaller number than 452,000.

(MORE AFTER THE JUMP.)

Worst of all, they present completely atypical figures as normal. By focusing on blogs with 100,000 monthly unique readers, they are already excluding over 90% of blogs that generate revenue, and even reaching an audience of that considerable size doesn't get you anywhere near $75K a year.

Penn and Zalesne are observing a power law distribution, normal in the blogosphere for years now, and either misunderstanding or misreporting the results. Because the few people making the most money from blogging are making so much more than anyone else, the average blogger's revenue has no more descriptive power than if the average wealth on your block went up because Bill Gates moved in. What matters instead is the median revenue, which is to say the revenue made by someone in the middle of the distribution.

In fact, the very Technorati report they draw many of their numbers from notes that the median reported revenue for bloggers with 100K+ audiences is less than a third of the average revenue, and that number itself is dominated by employee-bloggers. Average revenue for bloggers in the top 10% of revenue is even lower than the 100K median, and the median income for all bloggers running ad-supported weblogs is (wait for it)...

...$200. A year.

When half of ad-supported blogs generate less than $200 a year, it only takes one blogger making $350,000 (the highest number reported to Technorati) to drag the average far away from anything remotely resembling the normal case.

Penn has added an update to the original article noting that, yes, average and median differ, something he declines to quibble about (his word), presumably because such quibbling would involve telling his readers why median numbers are meaningful and average ones aren't, say, or how tiny the median numbers really are, or explaining how rare 100K+ readerships are, and how much his numbers rely on bloggers with corporate salaries.

There was no way to rescue this piece, since the argument rests on incorrect extrapolations from selective readings of suspect data; the Wall Street Journal should be embarrassed to have published it. (The dispositive critique of the "Bloggers: Livin' Large!" meme remains Chris Anderson's Don't Quit Your Day Job, useful as an antidote now.)

Clay Shirky's Writings About the Internet: Economics & Culture, Media & Community, Open Source.

(thanks, Richard Metzger)

destinyland writes "In China's Guangdong Province there's been "almost miraculous" progress in actually using stem cells to treat diseases such as brain injury, cerebral palsy, ataxia and other optic nerve damage, lower limb ischemia, autism, spinal muscular atrophy, and multiple sclerosis. One Chinese biotech company, Beike, is now building a 21,500 square foot stem cell storage facility and hiring professors from American universities such as Stanford. Two California families even flew their children to China for a cerebral palsy treatment that isn't available in the US. The founder of Beike is so enthusiastic, he says his company is exploring the concept of using stem cells to extend longevity beyond 120 years."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Check out this sweet little earbud owl our very own John Park made, using the Epilog Zing laser cutter he's been playing around with, and an "owl wrap" cord manager file from Thingiverse. He was probably going to post it here eventually, but I beat him to it [cue: childish taunting sounds].

Laser cut earbud owl

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A couple years ago, we mentioned an interesting story about "book piracy" in the early 18th century, which (according to the article we linked to) the term "piracy" was first used in reference to copying the creative works of another in 1701, concerning a a poem by Daniel Defoe (it's worth noting, as an aside, that even in this first case of "piracy" Defoe wasn't bothered by the practice, even encouraging them to try to sell their copies "if they please," -- he just wanted to make sure they copied the poem accurately). Now, via Freakonomics, we're pointed to a recent study by K. Matthew Dames on the history of the word "piracy," both for high seas privateering and when it comes to copying content. This seems to be a small part of a larger project by Dames, who says his later research will help show why the use of the term "piracy" when it comes to copyright is inaccurate, and is misused by the entertainment industry to get laws repeatedly passed in their favor without a basis in reason. I'm definitely looking forward that later study, but as a starter, this history of the term piracy, is certainly a worthwhile read.

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Barence writes "Microsoft is effectively giving away Windows 7 free for a year with the launch of the Release Candidate. The Release Candidate is now available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers, and will go on unlimited, general release on 5 May. The software will not expire until 1 June 2010, giving testers more than a year's free access to Windows 7. "It's available to as many people who see fit to use it, although we wouldn't recommend it to just your average user," John Curran, director of the Windows Client Group told PC Pro. "We'd very strongly encourage anyone on the beta to move to the Release Candidate.""

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Liane sent me this demo of an awesome little electric cat she built from wire, a pager motor, and a coin cell battery - so simple and cool! The battery pressure switch is a very nice touch (npi!). This could be a big hit on Halloween with a little fake fur coat ;)

Make a Vibrobot  Volume 10, Page 119

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(MP4 Download). Boing Boing Gadgets' Joel Johnson says,

Two chairs enter... two chairs leave.

In fact, I'm sitting my fat ass on one of the two chairs we reviewed right now: the Herman Miller Embody, a fine chair that only wobbles a little after running it into a wall. But I'm only sitting on it because I had to take the other chair, the Steelcase Leap, downstairs to do some more shooting for this video.

So which chair should you buy? Honestly, they're both so much better than a typical office chair it's difficult to pick, but if I were paying real money and not just begging review samples off of the manufacturers, I'd be hard pressed to pay nearly twice as much for the Embody, even if it is fantastically weird in looks. (Especially in the showcase cream-and-orange livery.)

Also, for the record, yes, this is the very best Clarkson impression I can do. And yes, it disturbed me that it isn't that different from how I normally talk in these things.

Discuss this video in the very busy thread over at BB Gadgets.

And Xeni back again with a personal plug: if you fancy buying a new office chair, and the ones featured in this review are too rich for your wallet, ping Mar over at ambiencedore.com for recommendations on cheaper alternatives, designed with ergonomic support in mind. 800-840-3488, or mar at ambiencedore dot com.

RSS feed for new episodes here, YouTube channel here, subscribe on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are blog post archives for Boing Boing Video.

CodeShark writes "Mozilla released their latest Firefox 3.X beta today (3.5b4), and increased their score on the Acid 3 test to 93 [on my XP laptop], with tests 70, 71, and tests 75-79 being the final challenges. Curiously though, the current release of the top Acid3 performer — Safari — still not only rates higher (I got scores of 99 once and 100 most of the time) but is usually faster by a little (1.1 sec avg. vs. 1.4 over ten runs apiece) but only because the new Firefox beta was all over the map — frequently better by 25% (.85sec) or tanking badly with rendering times in the 2.5 — 3 second range, and both suffer performance hits on one test (#69)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CodeShark writes "Mozilla released their latest Firefox 3.X beta today (3.5b4), and increased their score on the Acid 3 test to 93 [on my XP laptop], with tests 70,71, and tests 75-79 being the final challenges. Curiously though, the current release of the top Acid3 performer — Safari still not only rates higher (I got scores of 99 once and 100 most of the time) but is usually faster by a little (1.1 sec avg. vs. 1.4 over ten runs apiece) but only because the new Firefox beta was all over the map — frequently better by 25% (.85sec) or tanking badly with rendering times in the 2.5 — 3 second range, and both suffer performance hits on one test (#69)"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Marco Tempest demonstrates his playing card magic and augmented reality hybrid act using - "100% real-time stuff - No post-processing. Programmed In C++ with OpenFrameworks, OpenCV, ARToolkitPlus, MacCam and other Open Source goodies..." Very cool to see AR tech finding its way into established performance crafts like this. I'm guessing we'll see these techniques combined with live/performance and projection more and more as ARToolkit catches on. [via Create Digital Motion]

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CurtMonash writes "Web analytics databases are getting even larger. eBay now has a 6 1/2 petabyte warehouse running on Greenplum — user data — to go with its more established 2 1/2 petabyte Teradata system. Between the two databases, the metrics are enormous — 17 trillion rows, 150 billion new rows per day, millions of queries per day, and so on. Meanwhile, Facebook has 2/12 petabytes managed by Hadoop, not running on a conventional DBMS at all, Yahoo has over a petabyte (on a homegrown system), and Fox/MySpace has two different multi-hundred terabyte systems (Greenplum and Aster Data nCluster). eBay and Fox are the two Greenplum customers I wrote in about last August, when they both seemed to be headed to the petabyte range in a hurry. These are basically all web log/clickstream databases, except that network event data is even more voluminous than the pure clickstream stuff."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While plenty of us have been quite concerned about President Obama's decision to appoint a bunch of copyright maximalists to the Justice Department (and the likely appointment of a maximalist to the IP Czar position), there's still the question of where the administration might come down on patent reform. While most of the press reports about President Obama's new Science And Tech Advisory Council have focused on names like Google's Eric Schmidt or Microsoft's Craig Mundie, one interesting appointment is Richard Levin, the President of Yale, and an economist with a long-term interest in patents.

While Levin is in the camp of folks who seem to believe the system can be fixed with some tweaks, he definitely recognizes many of the problems with the system, and his earlier research has noted (like similar research) that for new technology markets, patents can often get in the way -- especially in situations (like high tech) where innovation is "cumulative." Levin has pushed hard for increasing the obviousness bar, and making sure that patents actually are new and non-obvious -- something that would significantly help. He also was among the team that wrote A Patent System for the 21st Century. While there's plenty that I disagree with in both the assumptions and conclusions of the book, on the whole, it does show a rather thoughtful analysis. It's nice to see at least someone talking to the President recognizes that "more" isn't always "better" when it comes to intellectual monopolies. Separately, as others have noted, the really big deal here isn't necessarily who's on the board, but how much the new administration is willing to invest in funding for science and tech initiatives...

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Last week, we had Nathan Seidle on the show, from SparkFun, talking about the company, how it all got started, and about the recent Autonomous Vehicle Competition that was just held at SparkFun HQ. SparkFun will, of course, be at Maker Faire, so look for Nathan and company there.

Our Hosts Picks:
As always, we also talked at the top of the show about what's going on at Maker Media and in the world of DIY.

Mark:
Mark was on about his chickens and how they'd recently ended up on the business end of a coyote's K9s. One of the family's beloved birds, Ethel, required $200 worth of sutures n' surgery. Mark came home after a day at the vet's to a lovely chicken meal he'd loaded into the crock pot in the morning. No, NOT Ethel, or any of the other family birds. They don't eat them. The girls name them and get too attached. But they do enjoy the eggs. We all shook our silly human heads at how we can blow $200 on pampered family fowl while merrily wiping the grease from a grocery store bird from our lips. Ethel is now recovering nicely, BTW.

Goli:
Dale was in Madrid, Spain, so once again, the most-awesome Goli Mohammadi, associate managing editor of MAKE and CRAFT, joined us. She talked about how jazzed she was by the wooden turntable we'd posted about earlier in the week. She also talked about the re-posting of the "Unsafe at any amperage" piece, the debate over the infamous "anti-gravity lifter" project we pulled from MAKE a few years back which sparked (er... no pun intended) a heated debate all over again when Goli reposted it.

Gareth:
My pics were the announcement of the discovery of extra-solar planets in the "Goldilocks zone" of a red dwarf, Gliese 581, some 20 light years away, the first such find from the recently-launched Kepler telescope, and the posting I'd just done before going on the air of the Jansen Walker, an Arduino-driven, laser-cut walking mechanism, inspired by the Strandbeest, Dutch artist Theo Jansen's kinetic sculptures/mechanical beach creatures. Becky Stern chimed in via IM to inform me that I was mangling Jansen's name. It's pronounced Te-oh Yon-son. Good to know.

Make: Talk #008 w/ Erik Knutzen & Kelly Coyne, Friday, May 1, 12-noon PDT
This week on Make: Talk, Mark, Dale and I will be joined by Erik Knutzen and Kelly Coyne of Homegrown Evolution. We'll be talking to them about small-scale urban agriculture, and their book, Urban Homestead, from Process Media.

As always, we'll also be taking calls from listeners and talking about MAKE, the upcoming Maker Faire, and news from the world of DIY, so please join us

Make: Talk on BlogTalkRadio

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The holster for my iPhone broke recently and I've been reduced to carrying the phone around in my pocket. I sort of like this as a change, especially not having to worry about the case getting in the way of the keyboard area or the camera lens. But the phone is getting dinged up inside the garbage scow that is my pocket.

So I could use one of Lenore's no-sew (can't sew) iPhone cozies. With little more than some iron-on adhesive tape, some lightweight fabric, and a few minutes, you can fashion yourself a sleeve that'll at least protect your phone from car keys, little Leathermen, loose change, and the other indignities of an over-crowded pocket.

Super quick no-sew iPhone cozy

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coondoggie writes "So, if the government gave your company $500 million to spend on building a new data center what would you buy and how would you build it? Well, the Social Security Administration is about to find out. As part of the stimulus bill, or the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the SSA got the tidy little sum to replace its National Computer Center. The SSA in fact says it will need closer to $800 million to fund a new IT infrastructure, including the new data center — the physical building, power and cooling infrastructure, IT hardware, and systems applications. (This is addition to a $72 million backup facility currently under construction in Durham, North Carolina)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For the next issue of MAKE, our second robot-themed issue, I'm doing a review of one of my favorite robot-related books, Valentino Braitenberg's Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology. It is a seminal work in robotics, especially with behavior-based robotics, BEAM, and other forms of simple, bottom-up robot architectures. Alex at Tinkerlog decided to build a simple robotic platform to experiment with Braitenberg vehicles, but using Ardunio, so that inputs and outputs could be easily swapped around in code rather than analog rewiring. He writes:

Valentino Braitenberg developed a model of simple vehicles with sensors and actuators (motors) and interconnections between them. While the vehicles are extremely simple, the emerging behaviour is not. It is often interpreted as love, aggression, or caution.

The easiest one is a light seeking vehicle. That's like "hello world" in robotics. The sensors are affecting directly the motors. The right sensor affects the left motor and the left sensor affects the right motor. That means, if light shines on the right sensor, the left wheel turns. And if the light shines brighter on the right sensor, the left motor will turn faster than the left one and so the vehicle will turn towards the light source.

These kind of simple robots can be build with analog techniques alone, they don't need a microcontroller. Think of two sensors feeding into two amplifiers that control the motors. The big advantage a controller brings in, is the possibility to rewire the connections between inputs and outputs in software. Even more complex functions for the interconnections can be reprogrammed easily.

Arduino-powered Braitenberg vehicle

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The Newspaper Association of America, who just recently has been out pushing the value of a print product as opposed to an online-only product, seems to not be taking its own advice. According to Romenesko, the NAA has not only laid off nearly 50% of its staff, but it's also switching its own print magazine to an online-only production. Seems difficult to take the group seriously when it claims print is somehow fundamentally a better product, doesn't it?

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sciencehabit writes "From Science: 'Astronomers suspect that hundreds of medium-sized black holes are roaming loose in the Milky Way. These rogues, according to a new study, are the orphaned central black holes of the many smaller galaxies that the Milky Way has swallowed over its billions of years of existence.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is the last day of our Spring-cleaning sale in the Maker Shed. We still have a lot of fantastic deals, but hurry it's over tonight at midnight. That's midnight Pacific Time, so all you East-Coasters get a little 'extra' time to scoop up some great deals!

We are rolling back the prices on over a hundred of our existing products. Most around 50% off, but some of them discounted as much as 75% off! Once they're gone they're gone. This is a limited time spring-cleaning that ends at midnight (midnight on our San Francisco clocks).

Use code BLOWOUT at checkout for the FREE shipping on orders over $100. (Contiguous US)

Check out all the products that are on sale now!

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For months now, the Story Spieler podcast (which features readings of public domain texts from Gutenberg Project as well as some CC licensed works) has been working through a 1910 book called Edison, His Life and Inventions by Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin, a glowing biography of Edison. I've always thought of Edison as a kind of jerk and a plagiarist who took credit for his juniors' inventions (a narrative familiar to fans of Tesla), but there's some really remarkable stuff in here. Most recently, the podcast included the chapter on Portland cement, and a remarkable account of a prefab, three-storey concrete house that Edison invented, which could be erected for $1200 (as opposed to $30,000 for a comparable cut-stone house). The house-moulds could be varied and permutated so that each house came out differently, and the houses were intended to form industrial suburbs around factories, so that working people could own their own homes.

Edison's conception of the workingman's ideal house has been a broad one from the very start. He was not content merely to provide a roomy, moderately priced house that should be fireproof, waterproof, and vermin-proof, and practically indestructible, but has been solicitous to get away from the idea of a plain "packing-box" type. He has also provided for ornamentation of a high class in designing the details of the structure. As he expressed it: "We will give the workingman and his family ornamentation in their house. They deserve it, and besides, it costs no more after the pattern is made to give decorative effects than it would to make everything plain." The plans have provided for a type of house that would cost not far from $30,000 if built of cut stone. He gave to Messrs. Mann & McNaillie, architects, New York, his idea of the type of house he wanted. On receiving these plans he changed them considerably, and built a model. After making many more changes in this while in the pattern shop, he produced a house satisfactory to himself.

This one-family house has a floor plan twenty-five by thirty feet, and is three stories high. The first floor is divided off into two large rooms--parlor and living-room--and the upper floors contain four large bedrooms, a roomy bath-room, and wide halls. The front porch extends eight feet, and the back porch three feet. A cellar seven and a half feet high extends under the whole house, and will contain the boiler, wash-tubs, and coal-bunker. It is intended that the house shall be built on lots forty by sixty feet, giving a lawn and a small garden.

It is contemplated that these houses shall be built in industrial communities, where they can be put up in groups of several hundred. If erected in this manner, and by an operator buying his materials in large quantities, Edison believes that these houses can be erected complete, including heating apparatus and plumbing, for $1200 each. This figure would also rest on the basis of using in the mixture the gravel excavated on the site. Comment has been made by persons of artistic taste on the monotony of a cluster of houses exactly alike in appearance, but this criticism has been anticipated, and the molds are so made as to be capable of permutations of arrangement. Thus it will be possible to introduce almost endless changes in the style of house by variation of the same set of molds.

EDISON PORTLAND CEMENT (via Story Spieler podcast)

(Image: The Thomas Edison Papers)

Time Doctor writes "The de-facto standard in Quake 3 engine technology, ioquake3, has hit version 1.36 recently. It includes a garbage bag full of improvements: in-game VOIP; optional external Mumble (voip); OpenAL; IPV6; anaglyph stereo rendering; Full x86-64 architecture support; Rewritten PowerPC JIT compiler, with ppc64 support; new SPARC JIT compiler, with support for both sparc32 and sparc64; improved console command auto-completion; persistent console command history; improved QVM (Quake Virtual Machine) tools; colored terminal output on POSIX operating systems; multiuser support on Windows systems (user-specific game data is stored in their respective Application Data folders); PNG format support for textures. Of course, there are even more fixes for security holes and other bugs in there. So, if you don't like ads and queues in your Quake 3 experience, get a copy of Quake 3 off Steam and copy your data files and key into your ioquake3 directory."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's no secret that plenty of folks tend to confuse price and value, falsely thinking that if price = $0 then it means that the value is also 0. That's not true at all, as we've discussed multiple times. But, there's a flip side to that discussion that many in the news business seem to be struggling with as well: they believe that if they raise the price of their product, then by that very same equation, they've somehow increased the value, and people will suddenly pay for the news. Except... that's obviously a fallacy. Just because you raise the price on something it doesn't mean that people will suddenly pay.

Yet, Stephen Brill's new operation is based on this very premise. The fine folks at NPR's Planet Money spoke to Brill about his new venture, but what was frustrating was that they didn't directly challenge a number of his highly questionable assertions. They did bring on someone afterwards who disagreed with Brill, but it could have been a lot more powerful. For example, Brill claims that readers have always paid for a share of the news -- while the truth is subscribers usually barely (if at all) covered the costs of printing/delivering the physical paper, but not for the reporting itself. Brill claims that the decision by newspapers to go online was "group suicide," but neglects to note that almost everyone (with a very few exceptions) who tried to charge online -- including Brill himself -- found that people just didn't want to pay. It wasn't "group suicide," it was economic survival to recognize that charging wasn't working. He also claims that giving away content for free online is why newspapers are in trouble, which is shown as wrong later in the program, when it's pointed out that most newspapers are still profitable -- but the real problem was how much debt the papers took out. It's not about getting readers to pay, it's about how screwed up management has been.

Brill also seems to totally misunderstand iTunes, saying that it works because it's simple and cheap, so his Journalism Online project will be that way too. He leaves out the key point of why iTunes worked: the iPod. People wanted to fill up their iPods and iTunes made that easy. But in the case of news, there are already lots of other options that are easier and more efficient.

Yet, at the same time, folks like Alan Mutter (who will be on the "news" panel at The Free Summit), are suggesting that newspapers should raise their prices. But, again, this seems to be mistaking price for value, assuming that if you just raise the price, people are more than willing to pay.

Instead, the opposite seems to be true. Mark Potts recently pointed out how the online price of the Wall Street Journal (usually held up as the example of online news people will pay for) has gone up so much that he's reconsidered subscribing. Every time they raise the price, it just becomes an increasingly questionable expense, for no added value.

In contrast, however, Potts points to the Cedar Rapids Gazette in Iowa, who unlike most of these other papers, actually does seem focused on actually providing more value, not just talking about how everyone should value the paper, or nostalgically reminiscing about the "good old days" before there was competition. Instead, the paper has absolutely everyone talking and thinking about ways to really become the central hub for everyone in their community. They recognize that they can't rest on their laurels and be the voice of the community because there's no one else. Instead, they know they need to work at it, embrace new technologies, and actually strive to provide a better solution than what else is out there. That's a paper that's focused on value first, rather than complaining about price. Who knows if it will work, but it's a much better strategy than just focusing on price, like so many others.

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Meneguzzi writes "Having stuck with wired mice for years, I have recently been impressed by a couple of cordless mice I've used on other people's computers so much that I now want to buy one to use with my Mac Book Pro. However, while shopping around for the perfect cordless laptop mouse I was stuck with the question of whether to go for a bluetooth mouse or one of the many proprietary cordless mice with tiny USB receivers. To my surprise, there seems to be little literature systematically comparing these two options for attributes like precision, battery life (both for the mouse and the laptop), RF interference, and whatnot. As a Mac user, bluetooth has the advantage that it won't take up a USB port, and (in theory), would consume less battery than a USB port, but I wonder if this is actually true in practice. On top of that, I noticed that there are far fewer (and less fancy) options for Bluetooth mice than there are for proprietary cordless ones. Logitech, for instance, has a very basic Bluetooth Mouse, while its proprietary options are much fancier. So I was wondering what are the experiences from Slashdotters on this particular type of hardware, and any recommendations."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Treasures like these sterling silver Wiimote cufflinks make me wish that t-shirts could somehow be adorned with French cuffs. Alas, I already own about six sets of cool cufflinks, and I wear French cuffs about once a year, if that.

Wiimote Cufflinks (via Craft)

Lots of state attorneys general around the country have been taking shots at sites like Craigslist, MySpace and Facebook. They're generally pretty misguided, and seem to really have more to do with politcal opportunism than anything else. Many of these diatribes are based on a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of the internet and social-networking sites, so maybe we should welcome the news that a senior Facebook exec is thinking about running for AG in California. There's a lot more than internet issues to the AG's job, but hopefully if the exec, Chris Kelly, got elected, he could inject some intelligence into the other state AGs' moral panics over online activity -- though given the way they react to disagreement, that's probably just wishful thinking.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Ethan Zuckerman grilled the census worker who came to his door about the giant, clunky, dysfunctional PDA the US government uses to conduct its census with. It's a crapgadget par excellence.

The device she had strapped to her hand was a Harris HTC, which looks either like the ugliest cellphone you've ever seen, or a Palm Pilot designed by the US government. We scrolled through bad, inaccurate maps of the area, which looked like they'd been dumped from an early version of MapQuest, wondering how the ridgeline behind my house had magically been transformed into a navigable road, and talked about the device...

They're not making a whole lot of friends with this new device. Last year, the Government Accountability Office added the 2010 Census to a list of high-risk programs. Basically, it sounds like requirements changed several times, and Harris ended up very late to market, with a somewhat buggy device. This freaked people out, and the Census quickly announced that they wouldn't actually be using the devices - they'd use them just to conduct the first stage of the census, checking addresses, while the actual census (conducted door to door, of people who hadn't sent in the forms themselves) would take place using clipboards and paper.

In other words, the relatively lame device my friendly enumerator was carrying, which cost $600 million, doesn't actually work well enough to use for its intended purpose, is still being used in the field, perhaps so that it can be readied for 2020? Anyone believe that we'll be able to do better than a half-pound, paperback-book sized plastic brick within ten years?

If US government contractors had designed the iPhone

Now that the Coughing Pig Death has finally legitimized your compulsive handwashing tendencies, there's no better time to revisit Etsy seller Foliage's line of hand-soaps shaped like tiny disembodied baby-hands: "You will get at least 10 hands (at least/about 100 grams of soap). This soap is made from goat's milk and vegetable glycerin with a light scent. Your hands come packaged in a pretty bag...all ready for gifting to a friend with dirty paws!"

handsoap set (via Bioephemerma)

The Bucherland map from Alphons Woelfle (1938) depicts an imaginary and lovely land of books: "The Land consists of about half a dozen distinct territories, most of which are explicitly named: Leserrepublik (Reader's Republic), Vereinigte Buchhandelsstaaten (United States of Booksellers), Recensentia (a realm for Reviewers), Makulaturia (Waste Paper Land), and Poesia (Poetry). The capital of the US of B is the city of Officina (Latin for workshop, and the origin of our 'office'; the name seems remarkably unremarkable. Possibly there is an old reference or a German word-joke here we're not getting)."

373 - A Map of the Land of Books (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Wired Science interviews UCSC's Craig Haney, a psychologist who's an expert on long-term solitary confinement, and concludes that solitary confinement is unequivocally torture. It makes people go insane. And 25,000 Americans are in long-term solitary in the US penal system.

First let me note that solitary confinement has historically been a part of torture protocols. It was well-documented in South Africa. It's been used to torture prisoners of war.

There are a couple reasons why solitary confinement is typically used. One is that it's a very painful experience. People experience isolation panic. They have a difficult time psychologically coping with the experience of being completely alone.

In addition, solitary confinement imposes conditions of social and perceptual stimulus deprivation. Often it's the deprivation of activity, the deprivation of cognitive stimulation, that some people find to be painful and frightening.

Some of them lose their grasp of their identity. Who we are, and how we function in the world around us, is very much nested in our relation to other people. Over a long period of time, solitary confinement undermines one's sense of self. It undermines your ability to register and regulate emotion. The appropriateness of what you're thinking and feeling is difficult to index, because we're so dependent on contact with others for that feedback. And for some people, it becomes a struggle to maintain sanity.

That leads to the other reason why solitary is so often a part of torture protocols. When people's sense of themselves is placed in jeopardy, they are more malleable and easily manipulated. In a certain sense, solitary confinement is thought to enhance the effectiveness of other torture techniques.

Solitary Confinement: The Invisible Torture

This hand-cranked cell-phone charger mounted in a hollowed-out log was apparently discovered in Chechen fighters' encampment. Some of the components -- the pull-string, presumably -- are said to come from toy cars.

Chechen fighter's homebrew phone-charger (via Red Ferret)

Syuzi at the Fashioning Technology blog just did an interview with my one of my favorite soft circuit creators, Hannah Perner-Wilson. Very inspiring!

More:

• Fabric Bend Sensor Kit
  
• Electronics in limpet shells
  
• Maker Channel 104 - I/O Brush, Barcalounger, Massage Jacket, Giant Match
  
• Soft tilt-sensing bracelet
  
• HOW TO - fabric buttons
• Circular fabric potentiometer
  
• Soft Circuit archives on CRAFT

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CWmike writes "Despite its complexity, the software development process has gotten better over the years. "Mature" programmers remember manual intervention and hand-tuning. Today's dev tools automatically perform complex functions that once had to be written explicitly. And most developers are glad of it. Yet, young whippersnappers may not even be aware that we old fogies had to do these things manually. Esther Schindler asked several longtime developers for their top old-school programming headaches and added many of her own to boot. Working with punch cards? Hungarian notation?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's no secret that these are tough times for network TV: dwindling ad spending, viewers moving away from linear channels in favor of DVRs, and others getting their shows from the web. So it's time for some reinvention, BusinessWeek says. The only problem is that its outline of the networks' reinvention doesn't really sound too different from the status quo, saying TV networks' big upcoming innovations are cutting production costs and slicing an hour out of prime time. It's clear that something needs to happen on the cost side of the equation, so perhaps these are incremental steps forward, but those cost cuts aren't going to help much if the networks don't do more to serve the changing desires and needs of their audience. But to that point, BW also says that "programs will be tailored to audiences" in the future, making one wonder exactly what they're tailored to now. The problem is, of course, instead of doing that, they're more interested in locking up their content and making it more difficult to access. There is one bit of "innovation" in the BW article, tacked on in the very last paragraph: evidently there's a new service being tested that will let friends send text messages to each other about shows they're watching. Now that sounds like a savior...

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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kl76 writes "The NetBSD Project have announced the release of NetBSD 5.0 after two years of development. Highlights of the seven million new lines of code in 5.0 include a new threads implementation, kernel preemption, a new scheduler, POSIX real-time scheduling, message queues and asynchronous I/O, WAPBL metadata journaling for FFS filesystems, improved ACPI support, UDF write support, X.Org instead of XFree86 (on some platforms — at last!) and lots of driver updates. Binary distributions for 53 different platforms are provided."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nothing sounds quite like a vintage amp for that old school flavor, and there are plenty of them online waiting to be employed. But when you get your hands on that oldie but goodie, you're most likely going to have to do some housecleaning and resurrecting. Enter this "vintage" MAKE article from Volume 02, back in 2005. Brothers Tom Anderson and Wendell Anderson show you how to get all Bob Villa on that amp in their how-to, "Resurrecting This Old Amp."

From the intro:

Musicians use vintage amplifiers for their uniquely satisfying tone. Old tube amps are expensive, but you can find solid-state models from the 1970s for less. Some audiophiles argue that transistor amps from this era have the best sound of all, because they don't burn out like tube amps and don't exhibit the crossover distortion found in many modern designs. We bought a few classic amplifiers on eBay, restored their vintage tone, and made them safer.

Tom and Wendell give you the know-how you need to diagnose, open, and repair that old amp and make it sound as good or better than the day it was made. Check out the project in full in our Digital Edition to get started. And if you don't already own a copy of Volume 02, you can still pick one up in the Maker Shed.

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I left Long Island for Silicon Valley years ago, partly on the assumption that the cooler things were happening here. Yet, when it comes to broadband, that doesn't seem to be the case. I have had rather notorious problems getting broadband at home here over the years, despite living in the heart of Silicon Valley. Where I used to live (until a year and a half ago) I had one single broadband provider who provided absolutely terrible service. Where I am now, I do have two choices, but neither choice is compelling, and my speeds top out about about 1 Mbps. So... consider me a bit jealous of my parents back on Long Island who now have the opportunity to be among the first US homes to have 100 Mbps connections with no caps or meters.

A few years back, we noted how the battle between Cablevision and Verizon on Long Island had turned nasty, involving all sorts of underhanded tricks on both sides, but noted that the end result might actually be good for competitors, as it was one of the rare situations where the two competitors were actually investing in technology to top each other. So, while Verizon is offering FiOS connections, Cablevision is now rolling out those 100 Mbps using DOCSIS 3.0. The fight is still a bit nasty, with Verizon calling Cablevision's announcement nothing more than a parlor trick, but that's misleading itself. Cablevision has, no matter how you look at it, significantly increased the bandwidth available to home users.

Unfortunately, in most other areas (such as right here in the heart of Silicon Valley) it seems the focus is on seeing who can avoid being the "least worst" provider, rather than on pushing the boundaries forward. In a normal market, this would be a huge opportunity for a third provider to come into the market and offer much better service, but thanks to the structure of the broadband market, and quite a bit of regulatory capture, most folks are limited to just two choices. If only they'd start competing on quality like the two choices on Long Island...

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Hugh Pickens writes "Time Warner is inching closer to untangling one of the worst mergers in American corporate history that began with the merger of Time Warner with America Online, a deal that has resulted in the evaporation of more than $100 billion of shareholder value. "Although the company's board of directors has not made any decision, the company currently anticipates that it would initiate a process to spin off one or more parts of the businesses of AOL to Time Warner's stockholders, in one or a series of transactions," Time Warner said in the filing. Tech industry analysts have speculated for years that Time Warner would spin off AOL; the two companies merged in 2001 with the idea that AOL's strengths as a new media company could benefit an old media company like Time Warner, and vice versa. But few synergies ever arose from the marriage and even AOL founder Steve Case, who is no longer with the company, has said that he believes the two companies should be separated."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It was a bit of a surprise when the French parliament rejected the country's proposed three-strikes law against file-sharers a few weeks ago. The bill had gotten a lot of support from President Nicolas Sarkozy (who is something of a pirate himself) and many musicians, but it was able to get defeated by a little bit of clever chicanery from the opposition. But the proposal lives on, and has been revived in parliament. This legislation continues, even though there isn't agreement on whether the proposal is okay with the EU's new draft of rules on three-strikes laws. Previous stories on the EU rules seemed to indicate that France had shaped the European rules so that this law would be acceptable, but Billboard says the proposal is in conflict with EU telecom law. One fantastic new detail of the revived bill: the BBC says two members of Sarkozy's party have joined the opposition to the bill, because it features an amendment that would make users who were banned under the law continue to pay their ISP bills. It just gets better and better...

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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My friend Julie Wolfson is in Japan, and is sharing some of her photos. This is from a pet store in Roppongi, where the puppy cubicles face the street.

UPDATE: Boing Boing reader Goemon has an interesting comment about this place. He says:

That pet store runs a scam with the hostesses in the area:

The hostess walks by with her "john" and coos about how cute a puppy is. The john is convinced to buy her the puppy/fashion accessory/sex token.

After leaving her john later that night, the hostess returns the puppy to the pet store to get her cut of the sale.

And the cycle continues.

"We will buy your dreams!"

About 30 years ago my friend loaned me couple of copies of Simon and Kirby's early 1950s The Strange World of Your Dreams. I hate it when people tell me their dreams, but Kirby and Simon were able to convert reader-submitted dreams into great comic book stories.

Download issues 1-4 here. (Via Beware, There's A Crosseyed Cyclops In My Basement!!!)

We recently noted that a Swedish ISP was advertising the fact that it doesn't keep log files of its users, following the newly implemented Swedish law, IPRED, that requires ISPs to hand over log files if users are accused of copyright infringement online. It appears that the attention generated by that one ISP has now lead multiple Swedish ISPs to also promise to delete all user data, so that there would be nothing to turn over. As a representative from Tele2 noted: "It's a strong wish from our customers, so we decided not to store information on customers' IP numbers anymore." Between this and the new interest in encryption and VPN software in Sweden, you have to wonder why the entertainment industry was so excited about the IPRED law passing in the first place.

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Stephan Zielinski wrote a program to translate a swine flu gene into music.

The algorithm I used is a bit complicated, but just in case you’re curious: since the gene is expressed as a surface protein antibodies can sense, it’s considered as a string of amino acids. Each beat corresponds to one amino acid, and the piece is in 3/4 time, so each six measures would correspond to five turns around the alpha structure. (I’m weaseling because I haven’t the foggiest idea how the protein actually gets folded.) Amino acids with side chains that are neither aromatic not aliphatic control the piano and organ: the nine non-hydrophobics the piano, and the four hydrophobics the organ. The three amino acids with aliphatic side chains control the low synthesizer, while the four with aromatics control the percussion.

It's got a good beat, and you can convulse to it!

Solarch writes "Late in the afternoon on Wednesday, the WHO raised the pandemic threat level for H1N1 "swine flu" to 5. Global media outlets(such as CNN, Fox News, and the BBC) preempted normal broadcast coverage and immediately published stories on their websites. To clarify, the WHO's elevation is mainly a sign to governments that the virus is spreading quickly and that steps should be taken on a governmental level to stage supplies and medicines to combat a possible pandemic. Unfortunately, broadcast coverage focused on phrases like "pandemic imminent" (CNN marquee). In other news, patient zero, the medical term for the initial human vector of a disease, has been tentatively identified in Mexico."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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On Saturday, May 2nd, from 12noon to 5pm our friends at GAMA-GO will be celebrating the opening of the GAMA-GO flagship store in San Francisco at 335 8th Street (cross street is Folsom).

Greg Long says:

Indeed, we will delightfully lavish free gifts and effervescent carbonated beverages upon you.

No promises, but there's probably gonna be booze.

Of note, we're giving away a specially-designed-and-limitedly-produced t-shirt to the first 100 customers. The multi-talented Wednesday Kirwan designed this tee and it's frickkin' awesome.

GAMA-GO Flagship Store Opening Party

Matt Berg, of BuildAfrica.org, put together a photo montage (PDF) on the increasing use of super-cheap Chinese LED lighting in Mali, in West Africa. The middle picture is of a street-corner cell phone charging station. It costs about .25 to get your phone charged.

That last picture is basically of a motorbike filling station (with the fuel inside of recycled bottles). The little 36-lamp LED light on the left is the station's nighttime lighting. The light costs around US$4.75 and can be powered for a week to a month of 4 D-cell batteries.

LED Lights and 12V Cell Phone Charging Mali [via AfriGadget]

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Mister Jalopy wrote the following at Dinosaurs and Robots. I've reposted it here in its entirety.
A few years ago, I wrote:

Everything you love, everything meaningful with depth and history, all passionate authentic experiences will be appropriated, mishandled, watered down, cheapened, repackaged, marketed and sold to the people you hate.

Punk rock was profoundly important to me. The power, the rage and the message. It was authenticity incarnate. A clarity and directness with a political message that was overpowering. As big corporations watched, they started to smell money. They circled and studied. And they aped the aesthetics, but we knew it was fake. Now, I hear The Clash or The Stranglers or The Undertones and I am still amazed. The corporate fakers faded away and the real deal survives.


I believe that punk rock experience is core to the values of a generation. DIY is not a marketing term or a cliche, we know we can do it. We can create it ourselves and form businesses that reflect our personal passions. The Maker Movement, the rise of crafting, the slow food movement - they share a commonality of power through engagement. We, as individuals, are personally awesome and we want to collaborate.
Jenny Hart is no stranger to D+R readers as she is our longest running perma-guest blogger. She has inspired us with her work and the passion of her business Sublime Stitching. For me, selfishly, the greatest benefit of starting D+R has been the gracious contributions of my co-hosts. To see what inspires them, what moves them to create. All too infrequently, I fail to recognize how important my co-hosts contributions are to me personally. Thank you.

As corporations take notice, just as punk rock was diluted to the point of simple aesthetics, the fakers are trying to establish credibility. Besides so brazenly copying Jenny Hart's designs, Urban Threads has disingenuously positioned themselves as an indie company built by a single individual. A little whois and Google mapping show that Urban Threads is not a charming home run business, but rather an offshoot of a long established machine embroidery business called Embroidery Library.

Is Embroidery Library a giant faceless corporation? No, I don't think so. Seems to be a smallish, long established company that has been cranking out machine embroidery patterns for years. Like the rest of us with independent businesses, I am certain they have stretched their budgets, wondered how to grow and hoped they could compete on a national scale. If it were a major corporation, it would be easier to understand as they operate behind an opacity of scale and lawyers, but how in the whole wide bing-bong world would a smallish company think it would be a good idea to copy Jenny's patterns? Embroidery instructions have existed for hundreds of years, so why would Urban Threads chose to re-word Sublime's instructions? To butcher Jenny's quotes and represent them as their own? That is not a very punk rock thing to do.

Urban Threads has so brazenly ripped off Sublime Stitching that I can't help but wonder if Jenny Hart is the only artist that has been ripped off. Please, take a moment to look at the Urban Threads catalog of designs and see if you recognize any other chicanery. Let us know, we will pass it along.

Supporting independent businesses means $upporting independent businesses. I bought Sublime Stitching patterns today. I ordered Chinese Acrobats, Handmade Nation (because I like Faythe's movie so much), Garden Variety (because I like bugs) and Zombies and Monsters (because I started one of these at Maker Faire Austin and gave it away before it was done.)

Today, send our friends at Sublime Stitching a note of support. And, while you are at it, drop a note to Urban Threads and tell them where to stick it.

Hey big companies! Don't rip us off! We want to work with you! Contact us! We value your experience! Let's make this huge! We all win when we collaborate! Rip us off and a thousand blogs will descend on you!

$upport Independent Business and Reject the Fakers

An anonymous reader writes "Larry Lessig, known (hopefully) to everyone around here as a defender of all things having to do with consumer rights and fair use rights when it comes to copyright, is now on the receiving end of a DMCA takedown notice from Warner Music, who apparently claimed that one of Lessig's famous presentations violated on their copyright. Lessig has said that he's absolutely planning on fighting this, and has asked someone to send Warner Music a copy of US copyright law that deals with 'fair use.'" Reader daemonburrito notes that the (rehosted) "video remains available at the time of this submission."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We're seeing a ton of bogus claims coming out of the UK lately about how movie piracy is somehow destroying the industry. So it's good to see not everyone is buying into these false statements. Gavin King points us to a great rant by Mark Kermode, a well known film critic in the UK who points out that piracy isn't a consumer problem, but an industry problem, because the industry still treats everyone like criminals (such as taking away mobile phones from viewers, not that anyone can film a whole movie on their phone) and refuses to give them what they want. As an example of doing things the right way, he talks about a recent film in the UK that did a "day and date" release, launching the film in theaters, DVD, pay-per-view and online all on the same day, letting people decide for themselves how, when and where they wanted to see the film. Unfortunately, when they tried that here in the US, the theaters revolted, refusing to show the film. Still, if we start seeing more successes when that's done, eventually, the theaters will have to cave in, and focus on what's always worked for theaters: making the overall experience better.

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Will the next Kindle have a color display? Gamma Dynamics has announced a new electrofluidic reflective display (devloped at the Novel Devices Laboratory at the University of Cincinnati) that uses colored pigments.

Voltage is used to electromechanically pull the pigment out of the reservoir and spread it as a film directly behind the viewing substrate. As a result, the display takes on color and brightness similar to that of conventional pigments printed on paper. When voltage is removed liquid surface tension causes the pigment dispersion to rapidly recoil into the reservoir.

The lennas above compare electrofluidic and electrophoretic displays used in ebooks.

Gamma Dynamics' electrofluidic color display technology

jchrisos writes "Microsoft is planning to disable autorun in the next Release Candidate of Windows 7 and future updates to Windows XP and Vista. In order to maintain a 'balance between security and usability', non-writable media will maintain its current behavior however. In any case, if it means no more autorun on flash drives, removable hard drives and network shares, that is definitely a step in the right direction. Will be interesting to see what malware creators do to get around this ..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in 2006, an Australian TV network, The Nine Network, sued a startup, IceTV, for creating an electronic program guide that listed out when TV programs played for use in programming DVRs and such. It was difficult to see how a simple listing of TV program info could be infringement, but an Australian court disagreed, saying that the networks owned their own scheduling info. Luckily, however, Phill informs us that Australia's high court has overturned the lower court ruling, saying that creating your own TV program guide without licensing the info is perfectly legal. It's sad that it had to take nearly three years for this conclusion, but at least it's the right result.

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mighty7sd writes "I am about to be released from my contract with Time Warner for my home internet service, and I am evaluating alternatives to my current cable modem setup. I would love to use AT&T U-Verse or Verizon Fios, but they are not available in my area. I have a good idea of what the costs and limitations of Cable and DSL service, so I am considering using mobile broadband for my home internet connection. Most providers seems to cap the connection at 5 GB of data transfer per month. I am a relatively heavy internet user using streaming video and a web server, so I need decent down/upload speeds and a large data transfer cap. Has anyone in the /. community had a good experience using mobile broadband cards at their home, specifically with lots of streaming video or a home server? What has happened if you have gone over your data transfer limit? Cricket Wireless is available in my area for $40 per month with 'unlimited' service, but I am skeptical that it is truly reliable and unlimited. I also found products that act as a WiFi router for mobile broadband services, but it seems that this is against most carriers TOS. Can they really detect these, and are they comparable to a wired broadband router?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

So the best way I've found to bribe myself into exercising regularly is to use the time on the elliptical machine for watching TV shows I otherwise don't have time to catch. Like Nova. For the last couple of days, I've been getting in some sweaty installments of a really fabulous episode called Astrospies---about a U.S. outer-space military spying program so secret, not even the guys recruited for it knew what the hell was going on during their training.

Not only does this show feature some great spy-vs-spy back and forth---as Russia and the U.S. vie to be the first country to put secret astronauts on a secret space station, taking secret photos of other countries, secretly---but the story also has some smaller details that are equally (if not more) fascinating than the usual Cold War stuff.

For instance, in order for the program, code-named MOL (for Manned Orbiting Laboratory), to take detailed pictures of Russian military installations, the research team had to develop a telescoping camera technology so ahead-of-its-time, that the same basic set-up is still used in modern equipment, including the Hubble Space Telescope.

Also amazing: The MOL program was responsible for recruiting Robert Henry Lawrence, Jr., the man who would have been America's first African-American astronaut. Instead, his tragic death ended up marking the beginning of the end for the program.

I highly recommend watching this if you get a chance.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

Where will you "get away from it all" this summer? Personally, I'm going to the Bay Area Maker Faire at the end of May. But if you still need ideas, my book, Be Amazing, contains a few interesting--if somewhat impractical--holiday suggestions.

All Aboard for Antarctica!
Get Away From: Stupid people. Without any permanent residents, the folks you're most likely to encounter are the 4,000-odd scientists who live in the continent's research stations.

Also Left Behind: Your clock. Antarctica lacks a standard time zone system. Instead, the various researchers use their home country's time, the time on the nearest land mass, or Greenwich Mean Time. In Antarctica, it's always 5 o'clock somewhere.

Visit the Beautiful Demilitarized Zone!
Get Away From: Civilians. The Demilitarized Zone is a 2.5-mile-wide demarcation line separating North and South Korea. Other than tourists (and the very small populations living in dueling North/South propaganda villages), the only people around are soldiers.

Don't Forget: Your sense of adventure. After all, the DMZ is home to the World's Most Dangerous Golf Course---a single par 3 hole, where the "rough" is actually a live minefield.

Zdravstvuj From the 101st Kilometer!
That Means: "Hello" in Russian. For some reason it's not as common in the American vocabulary as "Do Svidanya" (Rough translation: "Goodbye, Mr. Bond").

Get Away From: All the "good" communists. Back during the heyday of the Soviet Union, dissidents (both actual and otherwise) were shipped off to the gulag prison camps in Siberia. The lucky few who survived that ordeal returned home to find they couldn't actually return home. To keep former political prisoners culturally silent, Soviet law stipulated that they weren't allowed to settle in cities. Instead, they had to live at least 100 kilometers (62 miles) away---leading to the creation of 101st kilometer towns where nearly every resident was a "reformed" subversive.

Mind Hacks wrote about a 2003 study from Epilepsy and Behavior about ecstatic seizures.

Patient 1
The first seizure occurred during a concert when he was a teenager. He remembers perceiving short moments of an indefinable feeling. Such episodes recurred and a few months later evolved into a GTC [generalized tonic–clonic seizure]. He characterizes these sensations as “a trance of pleasure.” “It is like an emotional wave striking me again and again. I feel compelled to obey a sort of phenomenon. These sensations are outside the spectrum of what I ever have experienced outside a seizure.” He also describes cold shivering, increased muscle tension, and a delicious taste, and he swallows repeatedly. He enjoys the sensations and is absorbed in them in a way that he can barely hear when spoken to. When in a particular, relaxed mood, he can sometimes induce seizures by “opening up mentally” and contracting muscles. He denies any religious aspects of the symptoms. “It’s the phenomenon, the feeling, the fit taking control.” It lasts a few minutes and afterward he is tired with difficulties expressing himself for about 1 hour.

They also ran this quote from Dostoyevsky, who said the following about his own epilepsy seizures:

"I would experience such joy as would be inconceivable in ordinary life - such joy that no one else could have any notion of. I would feel the most complete harmony in myself and in the whole world and this feeling was so strong and sweet that for a few seconds of such bliss I would give ten or more years of my life, even my whole life perhaps."

A trance of pleasure

Hugh Pickens writes "Researchers have developed a camera that snaps images less than a half a billionth of a second long and can capture over six million images in a second continuously. Dubbed Serial Time-Encoded Amplified imaging, or Steam, the technique depends on carefully manipulating so-called 'supercontinuum' laser pulses. While other cameras used in scientific research can capture shorter-lived images, they can only capture about eight images, and have to be triggered to do so for a given event. The Steam camera, by contrast, can capture images continuously, making it ideal for random events that cannot be triggered. Keisuke Gode, lead author of the study, and his colleagues used their camera to image minute spheres flowing along a thin tube of water in a microfluidic device." (More below.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Using a handful of apps available on Android Market, the folks over at hdblog.it have transformed the stock Android interface into a detailed rendition of the iPhone interface complete with slide lock, dock, SMS, and icon themes. It even has a handy interface to change the color of the LED alerts.


hdblog.it (Site is in Italian) [via thebestdigital]

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