jefu writes "J.G. Ballard, an author (of science fiction and other fiction) has died. His works include some of the strangest and most compelling novels ever, including 'The Crystal World,' 'Crash' and 'The Atrocity Exhibition.' For a truly weird read, try his 'Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race," compared with Alfred Jarry's "The Crucifixion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race.'" Here is Ballard's obituary at the BBC.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jeffrey Zeldman releases his 2001 book, Taking Your Talent to the Web, as a free downloadable PDF. The book is, "...for print designers whose clients want websites, print art directors who’d like to move into full–time web and interaction design, homepage creators who are ready to turn pro, and professionals who seek to deepen their web skills and understanding." #

Ethan Marcotte cooks up a crafty solution for images in fluid layouts that still look great in IE. Commence tire kicking. #

This week on the CRAFT blog we saw:

Roadkill Jewelry: The Art of April Hale

How-To: Cardboard Laptop Case

Missle Command Circle Skirt

Making Art from Trees

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Mathiasdm writes "The Invisible Internet Project, also known as I2P, has seen its 0.7.2 release (download). I2P uses multiple encryption layers, and routing through several other computers to hide both sender and receiver of messages. On top of the network, regular services such as mail, browsing, file sharing and chatting are supported. This release (and all of the releases since 0.7) is at the start of a new development period, in which the I2P developers wish to spread the word about the secure network. This new release includes performance improvements, a first edition of an experimental new desktop interface and security improvements (by limiting the number of tunnels a single peer can participate in)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

tuna writes "A real-world test by the Dutch province of Zeeland (a very windy place) demonstrates that small windmills are a fundamentally flawed technology (PDF of tests results in Dutch, English summary). Twelve much-hyped micro wind turbines were placed in a row on an open plain. Their energy yield was measured over a period of one year (April 1, 2008 — March 31, 2009), the average wind velocity during these 12 months was 3.8 meters per second, slightly higher than average. Three windmills broke. The others recorded ridiculously low yields, in spite of the optimal conditions. It would take up to 141 small windmills to power an average American household entirely using wind energy, for a total cost of 780,000 dollars. The test results show clearly that energy return is closely tied to rotor diameter, and that the design of the windmill hardly matters."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Twitter early this afternoon, Sarah Lacy posted a link to a TechCrunch article she wrote admonishing bloggers to go easy on Twitter. It included a graph called Gartner's Hype Cycle, which I loved, but I think it's complete nonsense, and in no way reflects what's going on with Twitter.

Now this is what I think, not a proven fact in any way. Twitter is the current holder of the baton in a series of social media bootstraps, each of which built on what came before. It is not Google, which is a search engine, rather it is what came after MySpace and captured its growth. Extrapolating, something will come along and do to Twitter what it did to MySpace.

Before all that there was LiveJournal, blogging, podcasting, Flickr, etc. Depending on who you ask different things came first. If you ask me, blogging came first, and it had the longest ramp. I saw podcasting grow at a much faster rate simply because the blogging network already existed and was used to promote podcasting.

Just for fun, I drew my own Gartner-like diagram: Dave's Continuous Bootstrap.

It would be foolish to believe that Twitter will not have a successor. And I'm pretty sure it'll grow faster than Twitter because word of its existence will spread on Twitter. That's why all this is a bootstrap. You can use iteration N to spread word of N+1.

Google is a search engine. A completely different beast. I don't buy that Twitter is search. Most of the stuff that you see on Twitter isn't worth finding. Try searching for something in the news and see if you don't agree. It's easy to conduct an experiment.

So what's the relationship betw Google and Twitter? For sure you can put ads on Twitter, just the kind of ads that Google loves to put on email or web pages. They can tell a lot about you by knowing who you follow and maybe who follows you. But Google is also a search engine, and I believe there's a connection there as well, but only when you push links through Twitter. You can view that as contributing to PageRank. Will this make search better? I have no idea. They'll have to try it. Maybe Twitter is working on it. If they'd open the firehose to developers (and not the limited firehose they're promising, the full thing) we could find out without waiting.

But Twitter is definitely leading edge, so it would be silly to predict what it will go through. Maybe Oprah will invest. And we know how much the entertainment industry respects and fears Oprah. Having her on board, in a fiduciary way, would do a lot to protect Twitter from competition in the US entertainment business. Without that, I'd worry about NBC or ABC starting their own Twitter for their programs. Or Comedy Central. And who knows, people in the news biz might figure out that instead of fighting last century's battle with Google they might try to take some of the growth from Twitter in the news system of the 21st century, which probably looks more like Twitter than Google News.

Anyway, just some random thoughts on my first Sunday back in Calif.

PS: It's impossible to take anything TechCrunch says about Twitter seriously. Like Mashable, they are on the Suggested User List and have received a massive influx of new followers as a result. It seems a very likely explanation why they make fun of those who criticize Twitter, or in Lacy's case, urge them to go easy. It's as if they do PR for Twitter.

travalas writes "Last year I moved to Rural Bangladesh. My work is pretty diverse, everything from hacking web apps to designing building materials. Increasingly a Linux VM on my MacBook Pro is insufficient due to storage speed/processing constraints and the desire to interface more easily with some sensor packages. There are a few issues that make that make a standard server less than desirable. This server will generally not be running with any sort of climate control and it may need to move to different locations so would also be helpful if it was somewhat portable. The environment here is hot, humid and dusty and brutal on technology and power is very inconsistent so it will often be on a combination of Interruptible Power Supply and solar power. So a UPS is a must and low power consumption desirable, so it strikes me that an Integrated UPS a la Google's servers would be handy. Spec wise it needs to be it needs to be able to handle several VM's and some other processor storage intensive tasks. So 4 cores, 8GB of ram and 3-4 TB of SATA storage seems like a place to start for processing specs. What sort of hardware would you recommend without breaking the bank?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As Cory noted below, JG Ballard died this morning. Ballard was one of my favorite writers ever and his thinking about culture, art, science, technology, and human behavior had a massive influence on me. He will be missed greatly.

"Picturing the psychology of the future is what it's all been about." --JG Ballard

(photo by Paul Murphy/Catfunt)

Jay sez, "After some rumors on twitter, Michael Moorcock and BBC confirmed the death of author J.G. Ballard. Sad stuff - but he needs to be noted."

The author JG Ballard, famed for novels such as Crash and Empire of the Sun, has died aged 78 after a long illness.

His agent Margaret Hanbury said the author had been ill "for several years" and had died on Sunday morning.

Cult author JG Ballard dead at 78 (Thanks, Jay!)

surpeis writes "This snub is an attempt to point the finger at something I feel has been widely ignored in the ever-lasting debate surrounding (illegal) filesharing, now again brought in the spotlight by the Pirate Bay trial. I should state that I am slightly biased, as I have been running my own indie label for some years, spanning about 30 releases. It's now history, but it was not filesharing that got the best of us, just for the record." (surpeis's argument continues below.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

John Gilmore sez,

I just saw a pre-screening of "American Violet", which opens across the US starting tomorrow. "American Violet", is based on true stories of rampant rural-Texas racism fed and empowered by Federal drug war money -- the kind that Obama just gave two BILLION more dollars to as part of his stimulus. The more convictions your "anti-drug task force" gets, the more money you get. Busting random poor people and offering them lose-lose plea bargains (90+% of drug cases are resolved with a plea bargain) is the fast route to local power and federal riches. Before we try to fix it, come see up close how it works, and what the victims face if they ever step up to fight it. The movie opens April 17 across the US. It's a horror movie that's a little too close to home to leave you unaffected.

I know the real-life ACLU lawyer who's portrayed, I've talked with him and read the book about the first Texas town they cleaned up (Tulia); this movie is about the second (Hearne), though all the names are changed to protect the guilty. My donations funded some of ACLU's Texas work.

American Violet exposes the racism of the drug war (Thanks, John!)

Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute recently wrote an opinion piece for the NY Times discussing the limitations of our space technology. He makes the harsh point that transporting human beings to other star systems isn't a reasonable goal even on a multi-generational time frame. However, advances in robotics and data gathering could instead bring the planets and stars to us, and do it far sooner. Quoting: "Sending humans to the stars is simply not in the offing. But this is how we could survey other worlds, around other suns. We fling data-collecting, robotic craft to the stars. These proxy explorers can be very small, and consequently can be shot spaceward at tremendous speed even with the types of rockets now available. Robot probes don't require life support systems, don't get sick or claustrophobic and don't insist on round-trip tickets. ... These microbots would supply the information that, fed to computers, would allow us to explore alien planets in the same way that we navigate the virtual spaces of video games or wander through online environments like Second Life. High-tech masks and data gloves, sartorial accessories considerably more comfortable than a spacesuit, would permit you to see the landscape, touch objects and even smell the air."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Okay, here's the deal. We've a huge amount of new inventory arriving at the backdoor to our warehouse in anticipation of Maker Faire. The problem is, we share a warehouse with the rest of O'Reilly and we need to clear out space to make room for the new stuff.

So...we've sharpened our pencils and for the next two weeks, 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 sale from now through midnight April 30th (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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suraj.sun writes with this quote from the Associated Press:"Britain's domestic spy agency — MI5 — is hunting for its very own 'Q,' of sorts. MI6's sister organization, which carries out surveillance on terror suspects inside Britain and gives security advice to the government, is searching for someone to lead its scientific work. Projects could include everything from developing counterterrorism technology to tackling a biological or chemical attack. 'Looking for a chief scientific adviser to lead and coordinate the scientific work of the security service so that the service continues to be supported by excellent science and technology advice,' MI5's Web site ad reads. MI5 has long had a roster of scientific staff tasked with developing high-tech gadgets, but an official said the service now wants a high-profile figure to lead pioneering work in technology and science. The adviser's work will focus chiefly on creating sophisticated new tools to help security service officers carry out surveillance and analysis work, said a government security official, who requested anonymity to discuss the work of MI5."

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.

I saw this on the Flowingdata RSS feed this morning. It is so cute, it makes my ovaries hurt. Thrill as PBS teaches kids the joys of the pictorial representation of data.

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 would we be without the laboratory mouse? The answer, to borrow one of my late Grandmother's best idioms, is, "Up shit creek without a paddle." Behind our modern understanding of genetic inheritance, behind 20th-century cancer treatments and 21st-century embryonic stem cell research, behind no fewer than 21 Nobel Prizes...you'll find a mouse.

mental_floss and I will be giving those mice the exposure they so richly deserve in an upcoming issue of the magazine. But I'd like to whet your appetite with a couple of fun lab mouse facts. Collect them. Share them. Trade them with your friends!

1. In an Alternate Universe, Lab Mice Worked With Mendel
Highly inbred to achieve a local hipster scene level of uniformity, today's laboratory mice don't bear much resemblance to their wild cousins. Basically, the lab mouse was invented in the early years of the 20th century. And, before that, mice really didn't have a major share of the lab animal market. But the mouse revolution might have happened earlier had it not been for one very uptight European bishop.
In the 19th century, Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, famously discovered the basics of how plants and animals pass simple physical traits on to their kids, via a series of breeding experiments using pea plants. But Mendel had started off studying the fur color of mice, instead. His efforts scandalized Bishop Anton Ernst Schaffgotsch, according to a 2003 article in the journal Genetics. Schaffgotsch, putting two and two together, reasoned that mice breeding would mean animals were having sex in Brother Gregor's quarters. Apparently, plant sex in the garden was considered spiritually preferable, and Mendel turned his attention to the color and texture of peas.

2. Lab Mice are Famous on the Internets
Meet the Nude Mouse. His claim to fame, being inbred so that he and all his kin are born hairless and, like Bubble Boy, without any immune system to speak of. You may recognize Nude Mouse from his brief stint as a media celebrity. Back in the late 90s, photos of a hairless mouse with what appeared to be a human ear growing on its back began making the rounds of email forwards. An ad featuring the photo was placed in The New York Times by an animal rights group, which claimed the mouse was a genetically engineered human organ factory. In reality, it was just a normal (non-genetically engineered) Nude Mouse whose inability to reject tissue transplants made him a great tool for growing artificial ears made from cow cartilage on biodegradeable scaffolding. Today, researchers can grow ears made from a human transplantee's own cartilage in a dish, without the middle-mouse.

Photo courtesy otisarchives2.

As traditional news media struggles to find a new method and business model for dissemination over the internet, some are suggesting that news-related games could be an avenue worth pursuing. Rather than using such games solely as entertainment, journalists could make some of their reports more educative and interactive, allowing readers to choose which threads of a story they would like to follow. Georgia Tech is currently running a research blog to better understand how games and journalism can interact. "The point to consider here is that the two processes do not have to be mutually exclusive, and may even be complementary. Just a couple of years ago, we were wondering if the blogosphere was trivializing journalism; now, most of us, including traditional journalists, are willing to accept the fact that the two can not only live in harmony but also play off of each other. Similarly, online games could help break down complex topics, and stimulate audience interest in the more mundane ones."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dan is an illustrator, and shares some information on how he creates his images in a few posts on his blog:

These pencil sketches mark the initial step for all my illustrations where text and concept are distilled into a visual expression.

Once I settle on sketches I think work the pencil roughs are scanned from my sketchbook and cleaned up, and 'tweaked' to fit the client's specifications and my idea of what the illustration should communicate. I'll then attach the jpeg image and email it to my client for their review and feedback.

After discussing the sketch with the client I complete any required revision of the sketch and working directly from the approved sketch I render the line work onto 140lb Arches Hot Pressed watercolor paper using Higgins waterproof drawing ink and a Hunt 101 Imperial pen nib. Once the line work is dry I paint over it with Winsor Newton watercolors. Absent any specific requests from the client I generally allow the mood of the narrative to dictate the color pallet.

What's your process for completing and delivering creative products?

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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 I'm currently working on an article for Prevention magazine about some of the surprising ways that climate change can screw with your health. The thing I least expected is the dirty lambada of destruction being danced, as we speak, by global warming and the common North American Toxicodendron radicans.

Part of what makes this so nifty to me, is that, once you think about it, it's sort of a "duh" moment. While not so great for you and I, carbon dioxide is, basically, plant food. I'm told that rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere affect different plants in different ways, but poison ivy is definitely one of the winners of global warming. For this unpleasant little weed, more CO2 seems to mean more growth

But wait, it gets worse. Lewis Ziska, a plant physiologist with the Agriculture Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has been studying poison ivy both in the lab and out in the natural wilds of Duke University's research forests. He says that, not only is poison ivy growing fat and happy on the spoils of our carbon emissions, but that plants getting more CO2 also produce more, and stronger, levels of urushiol---the toxin that makes the ivy so darned appealing to begin with.

In fact, while other factors like the local growing season and the amount of light the plants are getting can alter CO2's results, Ziska says we can definitely see a difference between the poison ivy of today and the stuff your parents were chasing each other around with at Camp Thankgodthekidsrouttastate 50 years ago.

Um...happy summer!

Photo courtesy quinn.anya

Make a set of sneaky earbuds that record what you hear. They create a binaural effect
when played back wearing headphones.
Thanks go to Bill Byrne for the original article in MAKE, Volume 17.
To download The Stealth Mic MP4 click here or subscribe in iTunes.

Check out the complete Stealth Mic article in MAKE, Volume 17 "The Stealth Mic"
and you can see that in our Digital Edition.

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The Times Online reports that researchers from the Institute of Ophthalmology at University College London and Moorfields eye hospital have developed stem cell therapy that can treat age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the most common cause of blindness. They are currently moving the treatment through the regulatory approval process, and clinical trials are expected to start within two years. Quoting: "Under the new treatment, embryonic stem cells are transformed into replicas of the missing cells. They are then placed on an artificial membrane which is inserted in the back of the retina. ... [Professor Pete Coffey, director of the London Project to Cure Blindness] said the treatment would take 'less than an hour, so it really could be considered as an outpatient procedure. We are trying to get it out as a common therapy.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Make a set of sneaky earbuds that record what you hear. They create a binaural effect
when played back wearing headphones.
Thanks go to Bill Byrne for the original article in MAKE, Volume 17.
View the PDF of this project. and then subscribe to MAKE Magazine for other great projects
you can do over the weekend.

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theodp writes "Slate's Farhad Manjoo would gladly pay a hefty monthly fee for immediate access to recent movies and TV shows — if someone would just take his money. In reality, he pays nothing because no company sells such a plan, and instead resorts to getting his programming from the friendly BitTorrent network.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rahul, a sudent from Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design in London, sent us info on a project that a group of MA design studies students are doing, called Re:Collect. It's an RFID bracelet that keeps track of common items you might carry (phone, keys, iPod, etc) and flashes, beeps, and vibrates when these items are out of range (i.e. when you leave them behind). Above, a student shows a mock-up of the product and its packaging. It's not clear from the email where this is in the development process, in terms of it becoming a real product, when, or how much it will cost. Maybe Rahul will chime in with Comments and let us know.

Re:Collect

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Here's the current (06:35BST, April 19, 2009) standing in a Guardian poll on the jail-time-and-millions-in-fines sentence handed down to the defendants in the Swedish Pirate Bay case. It's an unscientific poll, of course, but it's also telling: if the objective of the lawsuit was to make the public feel like the Pirate Bay was illegitimate and that downloaders should stick to official services like iTunes, then this suggests pretty abject failure on that score.

A fair sentence for pirates? (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Update:I'm an idiot who can't read graphs, clearly, Teach me to post at 5:30 in the morning.

Elizabeth Warren, chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel in charge of the Troubled Assets Relief Program, gave an incredible performance on The Daily Show, explaining what a goddamned train-wreck it all is. Between her and Stewart, it's hard to know who to watch. Neither of them seem to know whether to laugh or to cry.

Adrian Lopez writes "According to PC World, 'Hollywood may have won a battle, but the war against piracy is far from over. Unauthorized file sharing will continue (and likely intensify), if not through The Pirate Bay, then through dozens of other near identical swashbuckling Web sites. ... What Hollywood needs to remember is sites like The Pirate Bay are like weeds. When you try to kill one, they grow back even stronger. In this case, The Pirate Bay already moved most of its servers to the Netherlands, a move that could keep the site running even if The Pirate Bay loses its appeal.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Miracle Jones writes "Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive has jumped on Google's 'Authors Guild' settlement and asked to be included as a party defendant, claiming that they ought to get the same rights and protections from liability that Google will receive when the settlement is approved by federal court. From the Internet Archive's letter to Judge Denny Chin: 'The Archive's text archive would greatly benefit from the same limitation of potential copyright liability that the proposed settlement provides Google. Without such a limitation, the Archive would be unable to provide some of these same services due to the uncertain legal issues surrounding orphan books.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I've always been fascinated by the pocket gramophones of the 20s and 30s. I discovered there's a bunch of them on YouTube. The top one here is a Mikiphone, from 1926. The second one is a Peter Pan gramophone, from 1930. Some models of the Peter Pan even had a clock built into the carrying case/body of the player. My all-time fave pocket gramophone is the Gipsy, which can be seen here.

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An anonymous reader writes "With bots getting closer to beating text-based CAPTCHAs for good, New Scientist points out that when they do, OCR technology will at least have advanced. The article goes on to suggest that whatever kind of reverse Turing Test that comes next should be chosen to motivate spammers to solve other pressing AI problems, such as image recognition. Are there any other problems that criminal crowdsourcing could help with?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "With bots getting closer to beating text-based CAPTCHAs for good, New Scientist points out that when they do, OCR technology will at least have advanced. The article goes on to suggest that whatever kind of reverse Turing Test that comes next should be chosen to motivate spammers to solve other pressing AI problems, such as image recognition. Are there any other problems that criminal crowdsourcing could help with?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Image from WEEE Man

WEEE Man is a massive pile of technojunk brought out of the netherworld of the e-waste stream.

As an educational project, the WEEE (Waste Electrical & Electronic Equipment) Man site provides useful resources for teachers and students. Their overview is a good place to start on the big picture of the project.

Objectives of the WEEE Directive

• to increase reuse, recycling and other forms of recovery, leading to a reduction in the amount of waste going to landfill or incineration
• to improve the environmental performance of all operators involved in the life cycle of electrical and electronic equipment
• to set criteria for the collection, treatment, recycling and recovery of WEEE
• making producers responsible for financing most of these activities - private householders are to be able to return WEEE without charge

Collin wrote about WEEE Man a few months ago, and there have been features on Treehugger, Hackaday, Neatorama, and Trifter.

Have you made a WEEE boy or WEEE girl? Do you think you could do something to make a change? Give it a try, and tell us about your ideas for solutions in the comments.

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The people of Sustainable Duxbury were looking for a way to raise awareness about plastic bags, so they figured that gathering up the bags people put aside as they did their recycling would give a good visualization.

They got more than they bargained for...Janna ran some numbers:

Here are my calculations of the square area Duxbury could cover with plastic grocery bags. I measured the length and width of a Shaw's bag. It varies in width from top to bottom, but is roughly (conservatively) 1' x 1'. Based on that rough calculation, here's what I found:

In one weekend, Duxbury residents throw away enough plastic grocery bags at the transfer station to cover:

• 24,000 square feet OR


• .41 (nearly half) a football field OR


• .55 (just over half) an acre

That means that roughly speaking, Duxbury residents throw away enough plastic grocery bags at the transfer station in one year of weekends to cover 28 acres, or 21 football fields

Here are the conversions I used:

• A football field =57,600 square feet


• An acre=43,560 square feet

If anyone wants to figure out how long it would take for us to cover the land area of Duxbury, here are some more conversions:

• A square mile=27,878,400 square feet
• Duxbury covers 24 square miles (per encyclopedia Britannica online

)

Do you have any events to raise awareness about waste and what to do with it? Where does it go when you throw it away?

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College Humor made a hillarious (NSFW) music video about the deterioration of comment threads, to the tune of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start The Fire." As a wise man once said, "It's funny cause it's true." We Didn't Start The Flame War (Thanks, Vann Hall!)