Vigile writes "Despite the rising excitement over SSDs, some of it has been tempered by performance degradation issues. The promised land is supposed to be the mighty TRIM command — a way for the OS to indicate to the SSD a range of blocks that are no longer needed because of deleted files. Apparently Windows 7 will implement TRIM of some kind but for now you can use a proprietary TRIM tool on a few select SSDs using Indilinx controllers. A new article at PC Perspective evaluates performance on a pair of Indilinx drives as well as the TRIM utility and its efficacy."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I have to admit that I've never really understood Apple's ongoing efforts to block any sort of compatibility with both iPod devices and iTunes. You may recall a few years back the big fight between Apple and RealNetworks when Real tried to let its software connect to iPods, which Apple treated as a gross injustice. Now Palm is doing the opposite, by letting the Pre connect and sync with iTunes software by making the device pretend it's an iPod when connected to a computer. Apple, however, has responded with a neat little message that never actually mentions Palm, even if it's entirely transparent who it's about, warning people that Apple can easily break syncing when it updates its software. Of course, Apple did it in a way that it can claim wasn't meant nefariously at all. All the company really meant was to make people understand that it has no control over how the Pre syncs with iTunes, and it's possible that an update could break that syncing. Sure. Right. Except most people assume this means Apple intends to break it.

But I don't understand why. For people who bought the Palm Pre, that's only going to piss them off and drive them to use other software, taking them away from Apple's products. Why does that help Apple? Having Palm Pre syncing with iTunes increases the value of iTunes. What's wrong with that, other than being the latest example of Apple's dislike of anyone doing anything not invented in Cupertino?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Boing Boing former guestblogger and bOING bOING editor Gareth Branwyn just returned from the Equinox Festival in London. He's kindly agreed to give us a taste of the magick in a series of posts. Gar writes:

Well, I made it to London on the mangy tail end of a ten-hour flight from DC that was supposed to take six. Since there's been one light rain since I got here, apparently the rain gods got it all out of their system before I left the States. We were held on Dulles tarmac for close to four hours while the plane was repeatedly power-washed in an apocalyptic deluge that even the flight crew said they'd never seen.

As detailed in a previous post, I've come to London to do some research on a novel and to trace some of the haunts of my beloved William Blake.

My first stop was the Equinox Festival, a fascinating experimental music fest and occult spirituality conference put on by multimedia artist Raymond Salvatore Harmon (along with Simon Kane and Andrew Hartwell). The Festival was a rather hit and miss affair, with that awkward, fumblingly vibe so often accompanying first times. Ray, Simon, and Andy's hearts were definitely in the right place and that made up for some of the late starts, schedule changes (which caused me to miss at least one important talk I'd come for) and other shortcomings. I heard surprisingly little grumbling, and overall, people seemed to be happy to be there and pleased with what they were getting.

Some of the highlights for me:

The Equinox Festival catalog – Not your typical event booklet. This is a substantial 200-plus page book of essays by the speakers, beautiful artwork, pieces about the intent of the Festival from the organizers, background and interviews on the artists at the Festival, and more. There was great spirit at this event, such great intent, but things got lost in the newbie kerfuffle. This book is a wonderful take-away which supports what happened and will allow it to take root much more effectively for those who were there. I've read the essays of several presenters and the interview with the re-united band Comus after their performance and it really helped deepen my experience. They were selling extra copies of the catalog at the event. I hope they sell them online afterwards. If they do, it's definitely worth getting a copy. It stands well on its own as something of a snapshot/ad hoc manifesto of the current “occult revival” (if, in fact, such a thing is happening). The book was published by Strange Attractor and lists for GBP 11.99.

The nighttime music programs - The Festival was set up so there were lectures and films by day, one ritual performance piece in the afternoon, and musical programs each of the three nights. Each night's music was my favorite part of the event. Some of the music was rather noodlely, “difficult” (it ain't called “experimental” for nothin') and I tended to gravitate more toward familiar soundscapes. Percussionist Z'ev, whom I hadn't heard in years, was powerful, and avant garde saxophonist John Zorn's performance was memorable -- they were the headliners for the “Opening Gala.” The next night, I was pretty much onboard for the entire line-up, which included K11- Pietro Riparbelli, doing his “Voices from Thelema” piece (of short wave radio receivers set up inside the ruins of Crowley's Abbey of Thelema in Cefalu), Clay Ruby's Burial Hex (whose gloomy graveyard droning beneath pounded piano I found extremely effective, psycho-active), and the surprise of the night for me, Comus. I was only passingly familiar with this band, in the context of '70s British prog/acid folk. I saw their sound check and it was pretty ragged (as sound checks have a right to be, but it still makes you wonder about the performance ahead). Their set was a revelation. Maybe because everything else had been so experimental, not easily accessible, their music was so beautiful, welcoming and familiar (at least in comparison), while dealing in those typical 70s progressive staples of fast tempos, odd time signatures, stops and starts, etc. I missed a bunch of the final night's music, but did manage to catch TAGC (The Anti-Group Company), Adi Newton's (Clock DVA) current project, Aethenor, and Peter Christopherson's Threshold House Boys Choir. TAGC performs multimedia pieces with hypnotically strobing, symbolic imagery and trancey music. The Threshold House Boys Choir is just Sleazy in a great bold-patterned robe (that he described as looking like something from 101 Dalmatians) speaking in a low, gentle voice while playing rather soothing soundscapes, all the while showing videos of such “alternative realities” as public ritual tattooing and amateur films of the Taiwanese sex-trade.

By far, the most interesting performance I saw was by Arktau Eos, a two-person ritual performance art/musical group from Finland (here joined by a percussionist). They did this inexplicably weird ritual, with all three of them in black tunics and what looked like burlap bags over their heads (think: Scarecrow from Batman). Very effectively anonimizing and creepy. They chanted, bowed, made intricate hand gestures, moved somnambulistically from the stage to the floor of the hall, lighting incense, unfurling cryptic banners, spewing liquids into the air, while a droning soundscape filled the hall and a blurry video of a Blair Witch Project-like woodlands jittered behind them. If the art at this event was supposed to allow you to enter some other state, another green (or black) world, this was the piece that provided the gateway for me. The rest of the ritual performance pieces, while interesting, didn't speak to me beyond curiosity and maybe an intellectual twiddle or two. This piece did. My only criticism was that it stayed at a similar tone, a similar level, for the entire piece. There was no break, no dynamic. It would have been far more effective for me if it'd had more variation in it.

As usual with events like this, the people I met and hung out with was the highlight for me. I spent a bunch of time with Erik Davis (Techgnosis, The Visionary State) and Aaron Gach (Center for Tactical Magic). They also gave talks that were among my favorites. I interviewed both of them and will have another piece about them. I also got to meet and spend some time with Peter Grey and Alkistis Dimech of Scarlet Imprint. Peter is the author of The Red Goddess, an amazing devotional history of the goddess Babalon (and her historical roots in Inanna, Ishtar, Astarte and the other holy whores and love/sex goddesses of Western religions on up through Crowley, Jack Parsons/the Babalon Working, and up to today). It was the most interesting book I read last year and I'm still poking my nose in it from time to time, drawing more out of it. I've bought all of the Scarlet Imprint titles at this point and each of them is a wonder. They take their “talismanic” publishing seriously, with each volume cast as a beautiful and thoughtful artifact that's worth every pound you pay.

In the festival catalog, they proclaim this Equinox Festival the first of an annual event. I can definitely say that I would return next year, and would be willing to lend a hand, to help smooth out some of the rough edges. And that's probably the best review I could give.

[Image from the Arktau Eos website]

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories show us how to make this rad geometric sculpture:

George W. Hart is a professor at Stony Brook and is one of our favorite artists, making a wide variety of stunning geometric sculptures. On his of his many works that has particularly captivated us for some time is a sculpture called Frabjous.

When we realized that George had posted a template for this sculpture we dropped everything, grabbed the cardboard and hot glue, and raced to build our own.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Paper Crafts | Digg this!

Dylan Thuras is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Dylan is a travel blogger and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Joshua Foer.

So to contrast with the giant industrial holes and moon poop Josh and I have been posting about, I am going to highlight one of my favorite bioluminescent wonders in the world.

Happening right now, and for the next few days the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee will light up as P. Carolinus fireflies begin to blink in beautiful, astonishing unison. The fireflies, who can sense when their neighbor fireflies are flashing and attempt to flash before them, send waves of light to cascading down the Tennessee hillsides. One of the best spots to see them is in one small area, near the Little River Trailhead in Elkmont, TN.

Long thought to be an exclusively Southeast Asian phenomenon, the dazzling behavior was only discovered in an American firefly species (P. Carolinus) in 1992. The American fireflies were first brought to the attention of scientists by a reader of Science News, who thought it odd that an article on Asian firefly synchronicity mentioned nothing about the bugs near her own home. She wrote a letter to a Steven Strogratz, a Cornell mathematician who studies synchronization:

"I am sure you are aware of this, but just in case, there is a type of group synchrony lightning bug inside the Great Smoky Mountain National Park near Elkmont, Tennessee. These bugs "start up" in mid June at 10 pm nightly. They exhibit 6 seconds of total darkness; then in perfect synchrony, thousands light up 6 rapid times in a 3 second period before all going dark for 6 more seconds.

"We have a cabin in Elkmont... and as far as we know, it is only in this small area that this particular type of group synchronized lightning bug exists. It is beautiful."

In 1995, scientists confirmed the existence of the Great Smoky Mountain synchronized fireflies, and have subsequently discovered other populations in the Congaree Swamp in South Carolina and other high altitude locations in the Appalachian mountains. As this curious phenomenon remained undiscovered for years, it is quite possible that there are other varieties of fireflies blinking in unison throughout the United States, perhaps even in your own backyard.

More info on the Smokey Mountain fireflies here and here more info on bioluminescent spots around the world on the Atlas bioluminescent spots page.

Artist Nicholas Galanin created this piece, titled "What Have We Become? Vol. 1," out of a 2,000 page book. What Have We Become?

mattnyc99 writes "With tensions high on the border, a new commander in Afghanistan, and complaints of civilian deaths from robotic U.S. strikes in Pakistan raising anti-American sentiment, the Air Force is sketching out concepts for new robotic hitmen, reports Esquire.com. Among the new drones (which are all very small) are the Suburb Warrior (loaded with four or five mini missiles for semi-urban environments), the Sniper targeting system ("that can lock on to multiple targets, allowing a single drone pilot to coordinate the attacks of a squadron of robots"), and a backup fleet of flying buggies that act as suicide-bomber snipers. From the article: "Picking through the dozens of systems in this briefing, many of which will be flight-tested within five years, there's a clear set of goals: build smaller, even microscopic drones with smaller weapons that can hunt in swarms and engage targets in the close quarters of urban battlefields. And hunt as soon as possible.""

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Download / YouTube)

Boing Boing Video guest correspondent Miles O'Brien checks in with us for an update on the scheduled launch of the Space Shuttle, and on new information about what may have led to the recent Air France crash, and finally, on the confirmation that geese -- yes, geese -- were responsible for the emergency conditions that led to the "miracle on the Hudson" emergency landing.

Follow Miles' coverage of Endeavor's scheduled launch at spaceflightnow.com, or follow him on Twitter: @milesobrien.

Update, 11:15pm PT: From Miles' live-tweeting at the launch site: the space shuttle Endeavour launch has just been postponed because of another leak in the gaseous hydrogen venting system between the launch pad and external fuel tank.

---

Sponsor shout-out: This week's Boing Boing Video episodes are brought to you in part 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 "will influence the blueprint for an actual notebook PC built by ASUS with Intel inside."

In writing about ridiculously bad patents, we've seen a trend of commenters insisting that if a patent is truly "bad," then there's no problem, since it will likely get rejected. However, the process of getting a bogus patent rejected is ridiculously long and cumbersome. The EFF is rightfully happy that the USPTO is going to throw out a ridiculous patent on web subdomains, presenting another victory for the EFF's Patent Busting Project. We discussed this specific case earlier this year, when the patent in question received its initial rejection.

While this is certainly a victory against a bad patent, what should be quite worrying is just how long it's taken to get this far. The EFF launched their patent busting project almost five years ago. And while it's had success in getting two patents busted, one significantly narrowed and re-exams on three more, this is an incredibly slow moving process. Yet during that time, such a bogus patent can be used to stop innovation and advancement. That should be seen as quite troubling. Now some may argue that it takes an equally long time to get a patent granted, but that doesn't hold back innovation in the same way. While the patent process is going on, innovation can continue. Yet if a bogus patent is preventing innovation for many years, the harm to society can be great.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

This morning I posted a query about CSS that would make my River of News aggregator look beautiful. It was hard to communicate what I was looking for. So I've decided to take a new approach.

1. I'm going to use tables. This really is an application for tables. That was made clear in the discussion. If, when we're done, someone can show me how to do the same thing without tables, I'll change to do it that way.

2. I'm going to provide a style sheet in the app, but I'll make it very easy to have it use your own. That way people can tinker with the real live working app while it's running and share the results for others to see.

3. If anyone comes up with a really fantastic way of displaying the River of News with CSS, I will use their CSS, with full attribution and accolades, and release the result under the GPL, including the aggregator. Then we'll have a beautiful River of News aggregator that's available in open source.

I've started to work on this approach, and will post when I have something you can install.

http://scripting.com/misc/riverExample.html

Yes, the first and third columns are necessary. I haven't filled them in yet.

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Mr. Archer tries his hand at this cube soldering exercise - a simple yet effective test of skill.
As detailed in Joseph J. Carr's How To Design and Build Electronic Instrumentation, 2nd Ed -

"There are several reasonable ways to learn the art of soldering, and all of them come down to: DO IT! One method favored by many technical institute instructors is to give the student exactly one foot of 12- or 14-gauge bare bus wire (or insulated wire that has been stripped). This wire is cut up into twelve one-inch lengths, all exactly the same. Why do you suppose that we want exactly twelve pieces, not thirteen or nine? Well, there are twelve edges on a cube, you see. Take these twelve slivers of wire, and construct a cube using solder to hold together the joints. Now, here's the catch - you may use only a pair of long nose pliers, soldering iron, and solder. No holders, vices, or any other implement! The idea is to teach you not to move the work while it is cooling. When you finish the cube, let it cool (This should take about fifteen minutes if you have been working diligently), and then crush it in the palm of your closed fist. If any of the joints break, get another twelve inches of wire and do it again, and again, and again, until you do it correctly."

As the first line says, experience is the best teacher here. Tips are helpful, but nothing beats developing your own set of strategies. Lengthy soldering sessions can actually be quite relaxing, even meditative.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Electronics | Digg this!

Dylan Thuras is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Dylan is a travel blogger and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Joshua Foer.

The Kansas Underground Salt Museum would be a curious site all on its own. Sixty-five stories below the ground of Hutchinson, Kansas sits a massive salt mine with salt veins stretching from Kansas all the way to New Mexico, and comes complete with an underground salt museum and tram tour. There is, however, an even more unusual aspect to this site. What might be the world's oldest organism was reanimated from the salty walls of this mine.

Deep in the mine, within a pocket of salt water trapped in a 250 million-year-old salt crystal, two biologists and a geologist discovered the 2-9-3 virgibacillus bacteria. This would be unremarkable save for the fact that this bacteria was 100 million years older than the dinosaurs... and it was still alive.

Bacteria have the ability to go into a kind of semi-permanent hibernation, but survival for this long was unheard of. After lying dormant in the salt crystal for 250 million years, the scientists added fresh nutrients and a new salt solution, and the ancient bacteria "re-animated."

Dr. Russell Vreeland, one of the biologists who found the bacteria, pointed out that bacteria can survive the forces acceleration via rubble thrown into space via a meteor impact. If it is possible for a bacteria to survive being off the planet and to stay alive within a salt chunk for 250 million years, then in a sort of "reverse-exogenesis" it may be possible that earth's own microbes are already out there.

"When man goes to the stars, our microbes will be waiting for us," Vreeland said.

Today the antiquity of the bacteria is still being tested. For a great roundup of the objections to and data backing up the bacteria try here at American Scientist. For more on the mine, which also stores the master prints of thousands of Hollywood films such as Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, check the Atlas page here and more about the scientists on this excellent blog post at The Lope.

fiannaFailMan writes "An international plan to build a nuclear fusion reactor is being threatened by rising costs, delays and technical challenges. 'Emails leaked to the BBC indicate that construction costs for the experimental fusion project called Iter have more than doubled. Some scientists also believe that the technical hurdles to fusion have become more difficult to overcome and that the development of fusion as a commercial power source is still at least 100 years away. At a meeting in Japan on Wednesday, members of the governing Iter council will review the plans and may agree to scale back the project.' Iter will be a Tokamak device, a successor to the Joint European Torus (JET) in England. Meanwhile, an experiment in fusion by laser doesn't seem to be running into the same high profile funding problems just yet."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When Joe Satriani sued Coldplay for copyright infringment last December, lots of people were quick to notice that a bunch of other songs shared the same melody, including some predating Satriani's tune. Last month, Yusuf Islam (formerly known as Cat Stevens) made headlines claiming that Coldplay had "stolen" the melody from him, not Satriani. Islam's 1973 song was one of many that people had noticed which sounded similar, but Islam was sure Coldplay got the melody from him ("if you listen to it, it's mine!") and said he'd decide whether or not to take legal action "depending on how well Satriani does." Now, Islam is talking about it again, this time saying he's not angry with Coldplay:

I stand by what I said. They did copy my song but I don't think they did it on purpose. I can understand why they got so upset because they probably don't even realise they have done it. It happens all the time. I have even copied myself without knowing I have done it. I'll write down what I think is a new melody and then listen back to it and realise it's the same as something I have already done. It's just one of those things and I don't want them to think I'm angry with them. I'd love to sit down and have a cup of tea with them and let them know it's ok.

That's a step up from Satriani's "dagger through my heart" response, especially if he's suggesting the cup of tea instead of a lawsuit (though, TwentyFourBit notes that the Flaming Lips would be annoyed if Coldplay gets a tea settlement while they got a royalty split). But it's still odd that Islam is so convinced that the melody is his. What about all the other songs with the same melody? Islam doesn't even entertain the possibility that no copying took place, that it's just a natural melody to sing over those chords. He's forgiving them for something they deny having done, and, although upset initially, Chris Martin actually said the claims are inspiration to write better songs. It's nice to see Islam recognize that this sort of thing "happens all the time" and that "it's ok" -- and hopefully that means he's given up on a lawsuit -- but he fails to admit even the possibility that Coldplay came up with the melody on their own. Regardless, this can't be helping Satriani's case.

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

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Joshua Foer is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Joshua is a freelance science journalist and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Dylan Thuras.

A couple years ago, I came across the incredible story of the 19th-century Japanese sculptor Hananuma Masakichi in Umberto Eco's essay collection Travels in Hyperreality. After being diagnosed with tuberculosis, Masakichi decided that his last great project would be to carve a perfectly life-like portrait of himself out of wood, to leave behind for the woman he loved. The hair, fingernails, teeth, and toenails of the sculpture were all pulled directly from his own body. The above image is from an old postcard of the statue, which has the following caption:

The statue is composed of over 2000 separate pieces being hollow with the exception of the feet. The head, thighs, calves, and every member of the anatomy was carved separately and the whole put together. The joints were perfectly made, dovetailed, and glued together -- no metal nails, only wooden pegs or pins beings used to fasten where necessary. After putting all the members together and finishing as far as the woodwork was concerned, he painted and lacquered the statue to give it the flesh and blood appearance; The hairs which adorn the figure belong to himself. He used clippings of his head and ears and each and every hair is bored for and put in one by one. The body hairs were actually pulled from his own body and put in exactly the same position as they occupied on himself. The eyes were also made by the artist and are the wonder of the oculist and optical precision.

And just in case this story wasn't poetic enough already, Ripley's Believe It Or Not!, which owns the statue, holds that Masakichi "later regained his health but lost his lover."

When I originally wrote about Masakichi in the Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society, the only information I could find about the sculpture's present whereabouts was a notice saying that it had once been on display in a Ripley's museum, but was put in storage after being badly damaged in an earthquake.

I called up Ripley's the other day to find out about the fate of the sculpture, and was connected to their archivist, Ed Meyer. He informed me that it got banged up pretty badly in the 1989 San Francisco earthquake. "It was on a rotating platform, and it spun right off the rotator," he said. It took four months for a professional restorer to get Hananuma back into shape, however, "the hair still looks a little funny." The self-portrait is now back on display in Ripley's Wisconsin Dells location.

None of the Ripley's museums have yet been entered into the Atlas Obscura. But surely they all will be soon!

UPDATE: I found this picture at Sideshow World. Man or Image?! I guess that's the real Masakichi on the right.

An anonymous reader writes "Following disputed elections in Iran, opposition groups and activists have turned conventional protests into a major threat to the ruling government. The low-intensity protest movement is rapidly becoming the first true netwar of the 21st century. Opposition protesters have shown that within a few hours or less, the information technologies that are the mainstay of modern society can become its weapons, as well. This article examines the current situation in Iran and the part played by new media technologies and strategies, showing how far the theory and practice of netwar has advanced since the concept first emerged in the late nineties."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Checkout Create TV this Saturday, June 20 for an all-day marathon of Make: episodes. Starting at 6am and going until midnight you can see every episode of Make: in HD. We don't actually recommend watching that much TV, hopefully you head out of the living room and into the garage and to build something you saw. Remember, all of the Maker Workshop projects have detailed PDFs on makezine.tv. It's still a great time to build your own DTV Antenna!

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Make: television | Digg this!

Economists Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf have written some previous papers on this subject, but they've just come out with a new working paper on how weaker copyright protection benefits society (pdf file). Michael Geist has an excellent overview and summary of the paper. To understand the key points made by the paper, you need to understand the purpose of copyright -- something that many people are confused about. It's always been about creating incentives to create new works. Copyright maximalists and defenders of strengthening copyright laws always suggest that without copyright, there would be much less creative output, because there would be much less incentive to create. History has shown that to be false. If you look back at the age when all creative output had to be registered to be covered by copyright, studies showed that only a very small fraction of content creators even bothered, because copyright wasn't the incentive. It's only now, when copyright is automatic, that people seem to think that copyright is somehow necessary.

But the paper shows why this isn't true, and highlights a few points that we've made repeatedly over the years. Even if there are fewer "album" sales, more people are creating more music than ever before in history, and more people are making some money from the production of music -- even if it's not from album sales directly:

Overall production figures for the creative industries appear to be consistent with this view that file sharing has not discouraged artists and publishers. While album sales have generally fallen since 2000, the number of albums being created has exploded. In 2000, 35,516 albums were released. Seven years later, 79,695 albums (including 25,159 digital albums) were published (Nielsen SoundScan, 2008). Even if file sharing were the reason that sales have fallen, the new technology does not appear to have exacted a toll on the quantity of music produced....

Similar trends can be seen in other creative industries. For example, the worldwide number of feature films produced each year has increased from 3,807 in 2003 to 4,989 in 2007 (Screen Digest, 2004 and 2008). Countries where film piracy is rampant have typically increased production. This is true in South Korea (80 to 124), India (877 to 1164), and China (140 to 402). During this period, U.S. feature film production has increased from 459 feature films in 2003 to 590 in 2007 (MPAA, 2007).

So the idea that file sharing has somehow damaged creative output is simply not supported by the numbers. At the same time, the paper also makes the other point that we've made: that as infinite goods spread more widely, it only tends to increase the ability to make money from other scarce complements. After going through a few different studies, the paper notes:

As these results show, income from the sale of complements can more than compensate artists for any harm that file sharing might do to their primary activity. We are not aware of empirical work that has looked at these effects in industries other than music. But the potential of complements to provide ancillary income is certainly not unique to the music industry. In film, for instance, the International Licensing Industry Merchandisers' Association (LIMA) estimates that Hollywood derives $16 billion annually from sales of entertainment merchandise, a figure that exceeds the value of ticket sales (Film Encyclopedia, 2008).

The role of complements makes it necessary to adopt a broad view of markets when considering the impact of file sharing on the creative industries. Unfortunately, the popular press -- and a good number of policy experts -- often evaluate file sharing looking at a single product market. Analyzing trends in CD sales, for example, they conclude that piracy has wrecked havoc on the music business. This view confuses value creation and value capture. Record companies may find it more difficult to profitably sell CDs, but the broader industry is in a far better position. In fact, it is easy to make an argument that the business has grown considerably. Figure 7 shows spending on CDs, concerts and iPods. The decline in music sales -- they fell by 15% from 1997 to 2007 -- is the focus of much discussion. However, adding in concerts alone shows the industry has grown by 5% over this period. If we also consider the sale of iPods as a revenue stream, the industry is now 66% larger than in 1997.... Technological change will often lead to changes in relative prices and shifts in business opportunities. Focusing exclusively on traditional streams of revenue to arrive at a sense of how new technology changes welfare will typically be misleading.

This looks like another great addition to the literature on the overall economic impact of "file sharing" and copyright. How much do you want to bet Congress will ignore it?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Photograph by Sally Myers

Like many people of his generation, Baron Margo was dazzled by the futuristic concept cars Detroit trotted out year after year. And, like many people, he was disappointed that those streamlined vehicles remained unobtainable concepts to the average motorist. But unlike many people, Margo did something about it. He, as he describes it, "stepped up."

He started to build his own cars. Cars that appear to come from a parallel world, one where you debate whether to vacation on the beaches of Venus or go skiing at Olympus Mons on Mars.

I first saw one of Margo's rocket cars parked at a local diner, a gleaming silver torpedo wedged between unremarkable Corollas and SUVs. Closer inspection showed the work of an incredible craftsman: the sleek aluminum surface was covered with metallic detail, bristling with rivets, lights, and a massive faux jet exhaust with a rotating outer rim.

The three-wheeler uses recognizable parts -- a modified front suspension from a VW Beetle, a motorcycle engine -- in clever reworkings of proven designs, a practical approach that makes Margo's vehicles not just beautiful to look at, but also legally roadworthy.

But these quite noticeable cars are just the surface. Margo's home is a treasure trove of robots, rockets, and intricate machines, made primarily from found scrap, aerospace salvage, and construction remnants from the Glendale Galleria. Standing in one place, you can see a brass-and-steel train, an old Crosley auto, a gigantic robotic dragonfly, a family of upright robots and their android dog, and so much more. It's dizzying, inspirational, and humbling.

Margo is a reserved man, and while he's sold some works to the rich and famous and to the movies (rayguns for the Men In Black series), Margo does what he does simply because he loves it.

Margo is a wildly creative man, a dreamer who manages to actually make things real, thanks to a strong sense of the pragmatic, as seen in the two pieces of advice he gave me: "Take the easiest path" and "Don't burn yourself." Sage advice for every maker.

>> Baron Margo's Cars and More: baronmargo.com

From the column Made on Earth - MAKE 12, page 18 - Jason Torchinsky.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Made On Earth | Digg this!

ThousandStars writes "Contrary to what the specious Wall Street Journal article Early Transition to Blog Pro says, You're Not Going to be a Professional Blogger argues that not that many people can make money through web advertising. The WSJ article 'doesn't discuss how people actually use their blogs to make money, which is by selling ancillary services.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

My recent post on glassknapping mentioned Kevin Dunn's 2003 book Caveman Chemistry, and I've received many requests for a dedicated review. So here goes!

Caveman Chemistry came to my attention a few years ago through the Lindsay Technical Books catalog. I'm a chemist by profession and a hacker by calling, with a long-standing interest in garage science, so the book's title was basically irresistible to me. I plunked down my nickel and twiddled my thumbs for a week while the snails carried it to my doorstep.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Reviews | Digg this!

While courts around the world have come to different conclusions on the legality of hotlinking -- placing an inline link in a web page to an image hosted on a different web server -- it's a practice that's generally regarded as bad internet manners. The cases have generally focused on the sites displaying other people's images, but this point was apparently lost on one bright spark, who threatened the host of a site whose images he was hotlinking with a lawsuit (via Kottke.org) after the host took the original site down and deleted the images. Again, while courts differ on their views about hotlinking, it's pretty unlikely that any court would agree that the person doing the hotlinking has a right to the continued use of the images. This guy felt otherwise, at least until he actually spoke to his lawyer about it, who apparently clued him in. In some way, it's sort of disappointing that the guy's lawyer didn't want to move forward, since the suit would been pretty amusing.

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.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

An anonymous reader writes "Two African entrepreneurs have secured exclusive access to market near-space technology — developed by Space Data, an American telecommunications company — throughout Africa. The technology raises hydrogen-filled weather balloons to 80,000 — 100,000 feet, which individuals contact via modems. The balloons, in turn, serve as satellite substitutes which can connect Africans to broadband Internet. 'Network operation centers are located close to a fiber optic cable — say, in Lagos or Accra — and a signal is sent back and forth to the [balloon] in near space,' says one of the entrepreneurs, Timothy Anyasi. The technology will also allow mobile phone operators to offer wireless modems to customers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There are fewer hassles for an adventurer or business traveler bigger than lugging around bags of silver and copper pieces. Luckily TG-Gold-Super-Markt has installed gold vending machines in 500 locations including train stations and airports all across Germany. The machines charge about 30% more than the current trading price for gold, and are updated every few minutes. All are closely monitored by cameras, and like 3rd and 4th edition, electrum pieces are not accepted.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Aeonite writes "As the title suggests, Game Design: A Practical Approach presents a practical approach to game design — one that is almost too practical in places. The book does a good job of covering many of the foundational elements of game design (called "atoms" by the author), but in places the level of practical detail — and the heavy focus on Lua code examples — is a bit hard to work through. Readers allergic to code may find themselves skipping over swaths of text instead of actually reading it." Read below for the rest of Michael's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It appears that the big record labels and their lobbyists aren't content with just suing and shaking down students across the country -- now they want to threaten them for taking a political stand as well. Earlier this week, musicFIRST, the big time lobbying group put together by the RIAA to push for the highly questionable Performance Rights tax on radio stations, did a neat little publicity stunt where it asked the FCC to investigate radio stations that apparently were "boycotting" musicians who supported the Performance Rights tax, claiming that it was an abuse of the airwaves. Remember, this is the same group that just recently called radio "a kind of piracy."

So, wait, which is it? If it's a kind of piracy to play songs on the radio, shouldn't musicFIRST and the RIAA be thrilled that radio stations aren't playing their music? Or do they recognize the free promotional benefits radio provides for artists? They can't have it both ways, can they? First they're upset that the music is being "pirated" and now they're upset that it's not being "pirated"? Please explain!

Now, as for those nasty nasty radio stations "boycotting" certain artists, well who are they? Turns out one of the main culprits is a tiny 100-watt high school radio station who has explained, in great detail the reasons behind their political stance. They are making a political choice by purposely boycotting musicians who support the view that playing their songs on the radio is "a kind of piracy." You would think that would make musicFIRST, the RIAA and those musicians happy. But, more to the point, that music "boycott" was a temporary thing, and lasted for one month, from mid-June 2007 until mid-July of that same year. Yes. It lasted for one month, to make a political statement, and it happened two years ago. And suddenly the RIAA/musicFIRST wants an FCC investigation? Of a bunch of high schoolers making a political statement against a tax that would harm their educational radio station by not "pirating" materials that the lobbyists claim are pirated?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

MIT researchers built a radio chip inspired by the inner ear. The "RF cochlea chip" could be a key component in a "cognitive radio," a device that can determine the appropriate frequency and power consumption required and adjust itself accordingly. Such a universal radio architecture could efficiently handle a wide range of signals, from cellular to WiFi to television. From MIT News:

The RF cochlea mimics the structure and function of the biological cochlea, which uses fluid mechanics, piezoelectrics and neural signal processing to convert sound waves into electrical signals that are sent to the brain.

As sound waves enter the cochlea, they create mechanical waves in the cochlear membrane and the fluid of the inner ear, activating hair cells (cells that cause electrical signals to be sent to the brain). The cochlea can perceive a 100-fold range of frequencies -- in humans, from 100 to 10,000 Hz. Sarpeshkar used the same design principles in the RF cochlea to create a device that can perceive signals at million-fold higher frequencies, which includes radio signals for most commercial wireless applications...

The RF cochlea, embedded on a silicon chip measuring 1.5 mm by 3 mm, works as an analog spectrum analyzer, detecting the composition of any electromagnetic waves within its perception range. Electromagnetic waves travel through electronic inductors and capacitors (analogous to the biological cochlea's fluid and membrane). Electronic transistors play the role of the cochlea's hair cells.

Drawing inspiration from nature to build a better radio

Rosamond Purcell, Wunderkammer-keeper and amazing photographer of curiosities and collections, contributed a short piece to McSweeney's that's tied to her latest book, Egg & Nest. The marvelous book couples Purcell's images celebrating the exquisite form and color of eggs with essays about egg collecting, ecology, conservation, and biology. In McSweeney's, Rosamond comments on the calligraphy-like markings on eggs of the Common Murre.

From McSweeney's:

The calligraphic effects so pronounced on blackbird eggs may appear over the entire surface of the shell on certain eggs of the Common Murre (above left), dancing and twisting in lines reminiscent of Japanese writing or Chinese brush painting, executed with flourish and grace. In the example below I photographed the circumference of this egg one section at a time. Then, my husband Dennis and I assembled the pieces into a "Mercator" projection (above right).

The effect of stitching together these slices creates a large mural of acrobatic monkeys swinging from vines, a young chimp riding a unicycle, gibbons in free-fall. But then, looking again, a "vine" becomes the outline of the back of a bull, emerging now like an ancient creature from the walls of Lascaux. I begin to think about the connections between avian and human art.

"Eggs And Bacon" essay at McSweeney's

Buy Egg & Nest

An anonymous reader writes "In a dangerous judgment for British bloggers and whistleblowers, a British court has ruled (absurdly) that because blogging itself is a public activity, bloggers have 'no reasonable expectation of privacy' regarding their identities, and newspapers are allowed to publish their identities if they can find them by fair or foul means. A British police detective who recently won the Orwell Prize for his excellent political writing used his blog to write highly critical accounts of police activities and unethical behavior, making very powerful enemies in the process. A well-funded newspaper with powerful connections quickly heard of his blog and decided it was absolutely vital to expose his identity using an investigative journalist. Like any good newspaper, the blogger anonymized the people and the locations in all the cases he discussed on his blog, but the newspaper alleges these were not sufficiently anonymized and complains that they could work out the identities, though British newspapers don't complain that they are allowed to publish the identities of men who are falsely accused of rape and cleared in court. The newspaper also helpfully contacted the blogger's employer, and his job is now threatened."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nik Software has updated the Complete Collection, that bundles all of its imaging software tools, to support Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2. The updated edition also include installers for Adobe Photoshop and Apple Aperture. Priced at $299.95 for new users or free to existing users, it is available for immediate download from the company's website or in a boxed version.

The crowd in this pro-Ahmadinejad rally appears to have been clone-tool enhanced.

????? ??? ???????? ????? ????? ???? ?? ??????? ??????? ?????

Mirror

(Thanks, Yishay!)

Earlier this month, pro skateboarder Jereme Rogers apologized to his Redondo Beach neighbors after he "ate some `mushrooms' and bugged out." In the early morning hours, Rogers apparently stripped naked, climbed onto the roof of his Redondo Beach home, and had "fragmented, interrupted conversations with people that weren't there," police said. From the Daily Breeze:

"It obviously was not an everyday experience," the 24-year-old athlete said. "It was a very out-of-body experience. I've never had an experience like that..."

"It was obviously something I shouldn't have done," Rogers said as he rolled a marijuana joint in his bedroom. "It was just something that happened."

Skateboarder 'sorry' for naked rooftop incident (Thanks, Dave Gill!)

Check out the collection of photos from the use of this swing on at BART train in San Francisco. Fun! Via NOTCOT.

More:

Swing skirt

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Culture jamming | Digg this!

I'm re-doing the way the NewsRiver aggregator displays the most recent news. Up until now it has used tables. Now I want to use CSS.

I've uploaded the table-based version of the page so you can see what I'm starting with.

http://scripting.com/misc/riverExample.html

I'm looking for examples that do something similar, in CSS. All pointers are appreciated. Help me get this right and I'll publish the results, as an OPML Editor tool, open source.

Dustin "UPSO" Hostetler, publisher of the eyeball-spanking art 'zine Faesthetic, is curating a Los Angeles area show of artists previously featured in the magazine. Titled "This Must Be The Place," the exhibition opens June 20 at the LA Gallery Space in Culver City. Dustin says, "This Must Be The Place is comprised of artwork centered around a theme of 'home,' and loosely limited to a 2 color palette, just like an issue of Faesthetic." Exhibiting artists include BB pal Jemma Hostetler, Gluekit, Matt Curry, Maxwell Loren Holyoke-Hirsch, Skullphone, Damien Correll, Dan Funderburgh, and Joel Speasmaker.
Faesthetic art show

Back in January, we wrote about the murder trial of teenager Daniel Petric, who had killed his mother and shot and wounded his father. Daniel had attempted to use the ever popular "blame the video game" approach, claiming that he was addicted to the game Halo 3, and when his parents took away the game, he was so addicted that he went and shot them both not believing that death was permanent. Luckily, the judge rejected that ridiculous argument, though still did seem to question video games. Of course, there was significant additional evidence, including details that Daniel had planned for weeks beforehand to kill his parents, suggesting this had a lot more to do with a mentally disturbed teen than with an "addiction to violent video games."

But why let that get in the way of a good story. Mark alerts us to the Associated Press's coverage of Petric's sentencing to 23-years in jail, pointing out how ridiculous the AP's opening sentence is:

A Ohio teen who shot and killed his mother and wounded his minister father was sentenced Tuesday to 23 years in prison for crimes rooted in his obsession with video games with violent themes.

Beyond the grammatical mistake (should be "An" not "A"), it's simply not correct that the crimes were "rooted in his obsession with video games with violent themes." The rest of the article again focuses on Daniel's supposed "addiction," as if that's the cause of his actions. Part of it is that the judge seemed to buy into this story as well, claiming:

It's my firm belief that after a while the same physiological responses occur that occur in the ingestion of some drugs. And I believe that an addiction to these games can do the same thing...

The other dangerous thing about these games, in my opinion, is that when these changes occur, they occur in an environment that is delusional. Because you can shoot these aliens, and they're there again the next day. You have to shoot them again. And I firmly believe that Daniel Petric had no idea, at the time he hatched this plot, that if he killed his parents, they would be dead forever.

Now, it may be that Petric had no idea they'd be dead forever, but that wouldn't be because of video games. It would be because of some sort of severe mental problem on his part. Study after study after study has shown that teens can tell reality from fiction. On top of that, as violent video games have become more popular, incidents of youth violence have continued to drop. If video games were really having such an impact, it would be the reverse. Petric was obviously a very disturbed teen, and yes, he played violent video games (just like nearly every other kid his age, I'd imagine), but it's ridiculous to blame his decision to murder his parents on those games. He'll now be locked up for decades, not because of any video game, but because of his own disturbed decision to shoot his parents.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Fun vid by Bang-yao Liu, bringing the coordinated tyranny of stickies to life -

This is my senior project at Savannah College of Art and Design. Where my idea comes from is that every time when I am busy, I feel that I am not fighting with my works, I am fighting with those post-it notes and deadline.

Well looks like he must've taken his time making this one - breakout and rain sequences are great! [via Geekologie];

And in case you missed it, check out Takeuchi Taijin's "A wolf loves pork" - another excellent stop-motion short -

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!

Hugh Pickens writes "Troy Wolverton writes in the Mercury News that in less than a year, the iPhone has become a significant game platform, but its bigger impact could be to help change the way the game industry does business. 'It's got everything you need to be a game changer,' said Neil Young, co-founder and CEO of ngmoco, which develops games solely for the iPhone. With a year under its belt and an installed base of iPhone and iPod Touch owners at around forty million, the iPhone/iPod Touch platform has eclipsed next-gen console penetration numbers and started to catch up to the worldwide penetration of both Sony's (50 million) and Nintendo's (100 million) devices. Wolverton writes that not only is the iPhone one of the first widely successful gaming platforms in which games are completely digitally distributed, but on the iPhone, consumers can find more games updated more often, and at a cheaper cost per game than what they'd find on a typical dedicated game console. While an ordinary top-of-the-line game for Microsoft's Xbox 360 sells for about $60, and one for Nintendo's DS about $30, a top-of-the-line iPhone game typically sells for no more than $10. With traditional games, developers might wait a year or two between major releases; ngmoco is planning on releasing new versions of its games for the iPhone every four to five months. 'You have to think differently,' says Young. 'It's redefining what it means to be a publisher in this world.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Instructables has a roundup of cool projects you can make for/with your dad; if you find the right one maybe you can get him the instructions, tools, and materials to make it himself!

More:

DIY for Dad: Happy Father's Day from MAKE, a gift guide for Dad

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Holiday projects | Digg this!

narramissic writes "A trifecta of Kindle-related news surfaced this week, with Jeff Bezos speaking at Wired's 'Disruptive by Design' conference on topics including Kindle pricing and business models. And yesterday, reports blogger Peter Smith, 'there was a flurry of blogging activity yesterday stating that Amazon had released the Kindle source code. Once everyone caught their breath, it became apparent that the files in question were just some open source libraries that Amazon had modified (they're being good open source citizens and releasing mods they've made to open source code — good for them!), not the complete source code.' Now, back to the Kindle pricing: According to a post at Wired, Bezos said Amazon opted to sell the Kindle for 'something akin to the actual cost for hardware,' rather than subsidizing the hardware costs and requiring a monthly subscription or requiring the buyer to purchase a certain number of books per month because 'fees and minimum purchase requirements create friction.' Smith has a different take: 'If I'm buying a Kindle from Amazon that enables me to buy books from Amazon, I'm broadcasting a desire to buy Kindle books. I would welcome some subsidization of the hardware since I'm going to be buying content anyway. No, I really think Amazon priced the Kindle the way they did because they thought they could get away with doing so (and they were right, it would seem).' Meanwhile, over at the New York Times, Bezos said 'that he sees Kindle-the-device and Kindle-the-book-format as two separate business models, and that the Kindle iPhone App won't be the last software reader to appear.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kingston Technology has announced the worlds first 128GB USB Flash drive. DataTraveler 200 sports a cap-less design and includes a built-in Password Traveler security software for data protection. It also comes in 32GB and 64GB capacities. The 128GB version is priced at $546, while the 64GB and 32GB drives are priced at $213 and $120 respectively.

There are two 3D printing workshops happening in Philadelphia soon:

Fab@Home 3D printing workshops

Fab@Home creator, Evan Malone will give a workshop on 3D Printing and 3D Modeling for the Fab@Home Fabber. Attendees will be able to work hands-on with the Fab@Home machine. The workshop is Wednesday, June 17 from 6 to 8PM at Klein Art Gallery (3600 Marrket St. Philadelphia, PA). Please RSVP to the Klein Art Gallery (via facebook) as space is limited.

MakerBot 3D printing workshops

The MakerBot workshop is happening at Hive 76 and is starring MakerBot founder Zack Hoeken. The class is Saturday June 20th, from 1PM to 5PM at Hive 76 ( 915 Spring Garden, Suite 500, Philadelphia PA). You just need to show up on time, and with a laptop, and we do the rest. We’ll teach you everything you need to do a first design, and a first printing using the MakerBot. Tickets for the 4 hours class are $25 (or $5 for students).

Find out more at Geekadelphia.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Events | Digg this!

eldavojohn writes "The long and torrid trial of Jammie Thomas is in its second stage and in full swing. Yesterday, two major events took place: Thomas gave her surprising testimony and the RIAA was threatened for not disclosing new information to the opposing counsel. Thomas claimed she didn't know what KaZaA was before the trial started. She also admitted that the hard drive handed over to investigators was different than the one that was in her computer during the time of infringement. Her testimony from the first trial was that 'the hard drive replacement had taken place in 2004 and that the drive had not been swapped again since.' This is problematic because the new hard drive had a manufacturing date of 2005. The RIAA had its own troubles, almost losing all evidence from a particular witness when they added an additional log file to evidence without the defense being notified of it. The judge mercifully only removed that new evidence from the trial. It was related to whether or not an external hard drive was ever connected to the computer."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chicago's Griffin Theatre has mounted a live production of my young adult novel Little Brother, adapted by William Massolia. This is incredibly exciting; Time Out Chicago gave it four stars, saying, "Doctorow raises many worthy points about the relationship between our safeties and our freedoms, and in Milne's bracing production, newcomer Mike Harvey as Marcus makes a confident tour guide." Bill Shunn, writing in Sci-Fi Wire, said, "Little Brother is an exciting and thought-provoking production, imaginatively staged on a bare-bones set with some multimedia elements stirred in."

I've managed to wrangle a trip to Chicago to see the play on July 9 -- I hope to see you there! And if July 9 doesn't work for you, I hope you can catch it on another night.

LITTLE BROTHER: Griffin Theatre, Chicago

Time Out: Little Brother

Sci Fi Wire: Review: Cory Doctorow's revolutionary novel Little Brother comes to the stage

Chicago Sun-Times: 'Little Brother' tackles big issues

Production photos

Plenty of countries have reasonably pointed out that the entire point behind copyright laws was to protect again commercial for-profit copying -- and thus, private, non-commercial personal use copying really shouldn't be covered by copyright laws. Of course, for an entertainment industry hell-bent on filing lawsuits against people rather than adapting to the marketplace, this is a serious, serious problem. So, the recording industry has been lobbying hard in any country that carves out an exception for private copying, trying to make it illegal. Unfortunately, it appears they've won in Japan. A new copyright law has been passed that specifically says that private, non-commercial copying is infringing (via Cybeardjm). This really isn't all that surprising, given that Japan has also been pushed on copyright extension and a recent court ruling found that uploading your own content for personal storage could be infringement. Still, it's yet another victory for entertainment industry lobbyists who will do anything possible to pass laws to protect old business models.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Pure Data, or Pd as it's known, is an open source, visually oriented programming environment similar to the popular MAX/MSP software. One of the only issues with going with free Pd is the scant amount of formal documentation available to newcomers. Thankfully, Johannes Kreidler's loadbang Programming Electronic Music in Pd provides a bookfull of tutorials and lessons free via the web. Check out the html version here.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Music | Digg this!

dkleinsc writes "The NY Times has a piece about work being done by Congressman Rush Holt (D-NJ) and others to curb NSA efforts to read email and Internet traffic. Here's an excerpt: 'Since April, when it was disclosed that the intercepts of some private communications of Americans went beyond legal limits in late 2008 and early 2009, several Congressional committees have been investigating. Those inquiries have led to concerns in Congress about the agency's ability to collect and read domestic e-mail messages of Americans on a widespread basis, officials said. Supporting that conclusion is the account of a former NSA analyst who, in a series of interviews, described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans' e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I asked Cyrus Farivar, an Iranian-American journalist and the author of the forthcoming book "The Internet of Elsewhere," about the history and effects of the Internet in four countries around the world -- including Iran -- to send us some of his favorite English-language links on the topic of the turmoil in Iran.

He kindly obliged. As Jon Stewart aptly lampooned on last night's Daily Show, cable news networks seem to be having a grand time pointing to random Facebook and MySpace status updates, for lack of better understanding of Iranian online culture. Do yourself a favor, try the list Cyrus compiled, instead.

David Marusek's Mind Over Ship is the long-awaited sequel to his groundbreaking 2005 debut novel Counting Heads, and it was worth the wait.

Mind Over Ship returns to the awesomely weird and exciting Marusek future, where humanity trembles on the verge of transcendence, splintering into people, clones, avatars, AIs, temporary and permanent models (some made without the model-ee's consent) and a thousand other fragments. Each of these factions battles for the best deal it can get -- even as the individual members of each clade fight for their own personal best interests.

Mind Over Ship is so complex, with so many storylines and so many incredibly inventive premises, that it trembles on the verge of breakdown, acrobatically walking on a tightrope over the pit of too-weird. It's a book that demands and rewards attention, as it explores a hundred important philosophical questions about free will, destiny, bioethics, intelligence, and duty.

For example, there's the story of the betrayal of the cold-sleep deep-space ships, which are meant to be launching by the dozens to distant, unexplored stars (but which have been co-opted for use as space-condos in a hostile corporate takeover). This leaves their erstwhile owners -- semi-sovereign collectives of Jesus freaks, defective spare-organ clones of VIPs, fatalistic Ukrainian Chernorbyl survivors, and other disaffected groups yearning to breath the air of distant worlds -- out in the cold.

Then there's the biowar flu, "the 24-hour nonspecific grief flu," which causes its victims to feel, well, nonspecific grief for 24 hours, before their immune systems fight the bugs off. Or do they?

NASTIEs are nanoweapons, the scale of a dandelion seed, which take root and begin coopting nearby matter, sending out tree-like roots to seek out the raw materials to assemble themselves into "deadly weapons of mass destruction." The army that launched the NASTIEs disbanded sixty years ago, but the seeds still flutter on the wind, periodically dissolving whole housing complexes as cloned first-responders seek to disassemble them before they can realize their destiny.

Clones are in trouble -- different kinds of clones, provided by different workforce vendors, are all going through massive, wrenching existential trauma. Do they have "clone fatigue" that causes them to run against type? And of course, every clone wonders if his creators imbued him with "musts" (secret, tailored cocktails of trace minerals whose absence will kill a clone in short order) and "candy" (like "musts," except that these cocktails evince extreme ecstatic responses, acting as a powerful Skinnerian conditioning agent).

There's even weirder life in Mind Over Ship: a beheaded tycoon whose head is grafted onto a cloned baby's body; her mother, secretly alive, encoded in the modified brains of "panasonic" fish around the world. And then there's the lively media: nits and the nitwork, micro-, mezzo- and nano-scale spybots that form a ubiquitous surveillance grid around the planet, a grid that can only be avoided by taking powerful purgatives that destroy the artificial fauna populating your outer and inner self before passing through an airlock.

Marusek's hyperfuturistic, hyperimaginative soap-opera is a tour-de-force of imagination, philosophy, dark humor and humanity. Let's hope he writes the next one quickly!

Mind Over Ship

coondoggie writes "While NASA's commercial partners such as SpaceX and Orbital have made steady progress in developing space cargo transportation technology, they have recently fallen behind their development schedules. Combine that with the fact that the most critical steps lie ahead, including successfully launching new vehicles and completing integration with the space station, and you have a hole that will be tough to climb out of. Those were the two main conclusions of a Government Accountability Office report (PDF) on the status of the commercial space world this week. The GAO went on to say that after the planned retirement of the space shuttle in 2010, NASA will face a cargo resupply shortfall for the International Space Station of approximately 40 metric tons between 2010 and 2015." Speaking of SpaceX, reader Matt_dk sends along an update on the company's Falcon 9 flight efforts. "Six of the nine first stage flight engines have completed acceptance testing and all nine flight engines are on schedule to complete acceptance testing by mid-July."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Robin Burkinshaw, a British games design student, created a homeless father-daughter pair in The Sims 3, "moved them in to a place made to look like an abandoned park, removed all of their remaining money, and then attempted to help them survive without taking any job promotions or easy cash routes." The results are surprising heart-rending:

This is Kev and his daughter Alice. They're living on a couple of park benches, surviving on free meals from work and school, and the occasional bucket of ice cream stolen from a neighbour's fridge.

When you create a Sim in The Sims 3, you can give them personality traits that alter their behaviour. Kev is hot-headed, mean-spirited, and inappropriate. He also dislikes children, and he's insane. He's basically the worst Dad in the world. He is a horrible human being, but he's also amusing to watch...

As her father dislikes children, he hates sleeping next to her. In the morning, he's always the first to wake, and he immediately throws a tantrum and wakes up Alice to tell her to leave the room. Alice understandably responds that they're not in a room, and she doesn't have anywhere to go. Then they argue, and Kev seems to blame Alice for every possible thing.

Part 0: Hello!

Part 1: Alice and Kev

Part 2: No hugs and no sleep

Part 3: Just trying to be alone

(via Wonderland)

Jeff Vandermeer writes in with more news about Shared Worlds, the summer science fiction and fantasy writing camp for kids:

Shared Worlds asked Elizabeth Hand, Nalo Hopkinson, China Meville, Michael Moorcock and others: "What's your pick for the top real-life fantasy or science fiction city?"

At Shared Worlds our students create fantasy and science fiction worlds to fuel their art and writing projects. But even the strangest made-up place can have some real-world spark, and some of the real world's cities can be stranger than anything found in fantasy and science fiction.

With this in mind, we asked some of speculative fiction's brightest minds to tell us their own picks for real-life fantastic cities, and you can read their answers here.

Now in its second year, Shared Worlds is a two-week unique summer camp for teens ages 13 to 18, held at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. This year the camp runs from July 19 to August 2, with registration still open to the end of June. Creative and fun, Shared Worlds emphasizes writing fiction, game development, and creating art--all in a safe and structured environment with award-winning faculty. Participants in this "teen think tank" meet like-minded students and learn how to work together and be proactive on their own. The first week, the students form teams and create their own worlds; the second week, they create in them. Faculty for 2009 will include Holly Black, co-creator of the Spiderwick Chronicles, Hugo Nominee Tobias Buckell, White Wolf game developer Will Hindmarch, World Fantasy Award winner Jeff VanderMeer, Weird Tales fiction editor Ann VanderMeer, and more.

Shared World's Top Five Real Fantasy/SF Cities (Thanks, Jeff!)

From the MAKE Flickr pool

B_light's edge-printed notebook makes for some stealthy tourism -

My Moleskin hack entry hides the fact that you are a tourist and can only be used on a soft cover notebook. When you fold the notebook length-wise (when the spine practically touches the long edge of the back cover), the fore-edge of the pages fan out. Only when the notebook is folded this way, does a subway map clearly appear. This is due to the fact that the map is printed on the edge while the notebook is positioned like this. You can hide the fact that you are consulting a subway map and be spared the embarrassment and scorn from locals.

FYI -this 'mapskin' was created as an entry for the My Moleskine 2.0 competition. It would be cool to see this technique used for a convenient table of contents listing on pocket refs and the like.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Crafts | Digg this!

Via Slashdot we learn that Germany is the latest country to consider a censorship regime that would create a blacklist of sites that ISPs would be required to block. As with most such things, the official claim is that this would be to block out child porn. Of course, this is a head-in-the-sand approach to fighting child porn. It's about trying to pretend it's not there, rather than tracking down those actually responsible. Those who really want access will find it elsewhere through non-blocked sites or groups. Except now it will be more underground and harder to track. But, more importantly, in setting up any sort of secret censored list, you can pretty much guarantee that the list will be abused. A similar attempt in Australia, where again everyone was told it was about stopping child exploitation, was recently revealed to have a lot of other stuff on the list -- such that only 1/3 was actually about preventing child porn. The article linked above shows that Germans have teamed up to protest such a censorship regime -- and have done so in a very constructive manner -- suggesting much more reasonable alternatives. Now we just need to see if politicians recognize that there are better solutions before just jumping on the easy censorship "for the children" bandwagon.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

skuzzlebutt writes "In a federal tax case reported in the Las Vegas Review Journal last week, a local businessman has been paying his employees in gold coins instead of cash or ACH, and has reportedly told them that they can only be taxed on the face value of the coinage — not the much higher market value of the metal. The United States disagreed, and brought him up on 57 counts of income tax evasion, tax fraud and criminal conspiracy. The non-authenticated comments section of the original article brought a lot of supporters out of the woodwork, including a few who thought the jury should be hung (literally, procedurally, or figuratively ... pick one). In response, the prosecution has subpoenaed the names of the anonymous commenters, citing fears of jury safety. Or something. The obvious questions of privacy and protected speech aside, for the folks that support the defendant (the newspaper is fighting the subpoena), this also brings back into the spotlight the troll-empowering nature of pseudo-anonymous, non-authenticated boards. If they want to find you, they will; is anonymous commenting still worth it, or is it just too risky for the board owners?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

narramissic writes "Last week the IRS caused an uproar when it requested public comments on ways to clarify a decades-old law, seldom enforced, that would tax personal usage of business cell phones. But IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman said that the request for comments did not mean that the largely ignored rule would now be enforced. 'Some have incorrectly implied that the IRS is "cracking down" on employee use of employer-provided cell phones,' Shulman wrote. 'To the contrary, the IRS is attempting to simplify the rules and eliminate uncertainty for businesses and individuals.' And in fact, the IRS is now recommending that the law be repealed, saying that 'the passage of time, advances in technology, and the nature of communication in the modern workplace have rendered this law obsolete.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Recently Hackerbot Labs was invited by Intellectual Ventures to demonstrate their Maker Faire Editor's Choice Award-winning high voltage coin shrinker in front of a Vision Research Phantom 100k fps high-speed camera.

Discharging about 10 kV (15,000 joules!) from enormous 300 µF capacitors the team at Hackerbot Labs "Turn half dollars into quarters! Turn quarters into dimes! Turn dimes into little semi-molten balls of metal!" with their custom built apparatus through a process known as "Magnaforming".

Passing current through a coil of wire produces a magnetic field. In this case, with so much current, the magnetic field produced is gigantic: the coil becomes a magnificently powerful electromagnet.

The creation of a magnetic field in the coil-now-magnet induces a circling current to flow around the coin sitting inside the coil. This current in the coin also produces a magnetic field (i.e., the coin becomes another electromagnet). The kicker is that the coin's magnetic field and the coil's magnetic field point in opposite directions, so the coin and the coil repel each other furiously.

This repulsion creates forces which overcome the strength of the metal; the coil is expanded out and explodes, and the coin is pushed in and shrunk.

Some interesting facts were gathered as a result of the demonstration:

• Filmed at 100,000 fps, the coin will shrink in just 30-40 microseconds


• The coin will have shrunk prior to the coil exploding


• A loud 135 dB shockwave is produced as the coil explodes


• When shrinking the edge of the coin moves at about 400 mph

High Speed Coin Shrinking [via Intellectual Ventures]

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Science | Digg this!

iiNet is the Australian ISP that has been standing up for its customers' rights against the entertainment industry which is suing the ISP for not magically stopping copyright infringement. iiNet's argument, from the very beginning, has been that if the entertainment industry believes that iiNet customers are breaking the law, then they should sue those customers. It shouldn't be iiNet's responsibility to act as the industry's police:

They send us a list of IP addresses and say 'this IP address was involved in a breach on this date'. We look at that say 'well what do you want us to do with this? We can't release the person's details to you on the basis of an allegation and we can't go and kick the customer off on the basis of an allegation from someone else'. So we say 'you are alleging the person has broken the law; we're passing it to the police. Let them deal with it'.

iiNet has also raised questions about whether or not a user making use of BitTorrent is technically violating copyright, especially since they may only be sharing a tiny fragment of a file based on the way BitTorrent works.

Either way, a court has now ordered iiNet to hand over a small sampling of customer data requested by the anti-piracy group AFACT, which AFACT claims will show infringing activities on the part of iiNet subscribers. Of course, it would be no surprise at all that a group of folks hand picked by the industry can be shown to be infringing. The real legal question is whether or not (a) there's enough evidence to prove who was actually infringing and (b) more importantly, why this is iiNet's responsibility.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

I really like the wheels on this robot, it looks like a good solutions for omni directional movement. The maker said it cost about $10 and took about 20 hours to build. Unfortunately there aren't any schematics posted yet. Check out the link for more information.

This is not a very intelligent, or special robot - it took me long enough, but it was really just for my education etc. This is about 10cm high, it is a clear ball with three servo motors, driven by three 74AC740 ICs. The ICs measure the amount of light coming through an array of sensors on the top, and rotate the balls in a direction and speed proportionally to that. The result is that the ball "drifts" towards the brightest object, or follows a spotlight directed down at it.

More about this Three wheeled light seeking robot

In the Maker Shed:


Mousebot Kit

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Robotics | Digg this!

A bureaucratic boondoggle in the western San Bernardino County, California school district will cost the students their summer breaks -- the schools inadvertently introduced a school-time shortfall amounting to two school days' worth of instruction time over the entire school year. Due to a quirk of regulation, they have to keep the schools in session for an extra thirty four days or lose $7 million in funding.

"We made an error on the minimum days of about five minutes," said Dickson Principal Sue Pederson. "Realistically, that's our accounting mistake as adults. We're unfortunately making the children pay for it by making them give up their summer."

Students at each school exceeded the state's requirement of at least 54,000 minutes of annual classroom time, but the problem arose in the district's minimum days. Schools typically have one shortened day per week, allowing teachers to use the remaining time for planning and parent conferences. Under state law, these days must be at least 180 minutes, and the daily average classroom time over 10 consecutive days must be 240 minutes.

An internal audit in early May discovered that 34 minimum days had been 175 minutes at Dickson and 170 at Rolling Ridge, said district spokeswoman Julie Gobin. That adds up to a shortage of 170 and 340 minutes, respectively, which could be made up in one or two school days. But under state law, these too-short days do not count at all, meaning that all 34 must be made up to avoid a state penalty of more than $7 million.

"The penalties for not meeting the instructional time requirements are high, much higher than just making up of the time," said Hilary McLean, spokeswoman for the state Department of Education. "It was the intent of the Legislature to make the penalties so stiff [in order] to discourage districts from shaving off minutes here and there."

Chino district's error delays summer break by 34 school days for some students (via Neatorama)

Panasonic has released firmware updates for its latest digital cameras including the GH1, G1, ZS3 and TS1. The new firmware can identify genuine Panasonic batteries and prevents the use of any third party battery packs. The company says it has taken this move to ensure safety of its users against possible injuries because of overcharging, internal heating or short circuit in third-party batteries.

Barence writes "The UK Government is planning a 50p-per-month levy on fixed-line connections to pay for next-generation broadband. The Government claims that market forces alone will bring fiber connections to only two thirds of the country, so it plans to use the 'broadband tax' to pay for the final third by 2017. The plans form part of the Government's Digital Britain report, which also see the UK guarantee connections of 2Mbits/sec for every citizen by 2012." The report also threatens legal action and bandwidth restriction for repeat file sharers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Arduino Nano is a great solution for projects that don't have a lot of available space. It's breadboard friendly, and has integrated USB.

It has everything that Diecimila has (electrically) with more analog input pins and onboard +5V AREF jumper. Physically, it is missing power jack and power select jumper. Since the Nano is automatically sense and switch to the higher potential source of power, there is no need for the power select jumper.

More about the Arduino Nano board

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arduino | Digg this!

While there are certainly many problematic US laws, the fact that our court system recognizes and values the right to anonymous posting as a First Amendment issue is something that's quite wonderful. Tragically, very few other countries view things the same way. The UK has been especially bad when it comes to not protecting any rights to being anonymous, and the latest news is no exception. A UK judge has required the unveiling of an anonymous police blogger, claiming blogging is "essentially a public rather than a private activity," and thus, there is no right to anonymity.

In this particular case, the anonymous blogger was a working police officer, writing about daily experiences, and often taking strong opinions that could potentially get him in trouble. Now, some of us would think this is exactly why his anonymity should be protected, but the judge seemed to interpret it in the opposite way:

Mr Justice Eady said the blog contained opinions on a number of social and political issues relating to the police and the administration of justice.

He added Night Jack had expressed strong opinions on matters of political controversy and had also criticised a number of ministers.

The judge said the blogger risked disciplinary action if his employers found out one of its officers was communicating to the public in such a way....

Rejecting the argument that all the blogger's readers needed to know was that he was a serving police officer, the judge said that it was often useful, in assessing the value of an opinion or argument, to know its source.

"For so long as there is anonymity, it would obviously be difficult to make any such assessment.

"More generally, when making a judgment as to the value of comments made about police affairs by 'insiders', it may sometimes help to know how experienced or senior the commentator is."

This is troubling for any number of circumstances, especially in that it will certainly present quite a chill on people speaking out freely and anonymously on supposed problems within their workplaces. That seems a lot more dangerous and troubling than allowing this guy to speak anonymously, where readers were free to weigh the legitimacy of the information knowing the guy wasn't posting under his real name. Of course, it will come as no surprise that, now that the blogger has been identified, he's been disciplined by the police force. So much for encouraging any sort of public discussion.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Amazon has released (some of?) the source-code for the Kindle -- presumably, this contains the modifications to the GPLed code they incorporated into its firmware, and possibly more material (there's no accompanying documentation in the tarballs or on the webpage).

I really want to like the Kindle, but I'm having a hard time feeling good about the device for so long as Amazon refuses to answer these three basic questions:

1. Is there anything in the Kindle EULA that prohibits moving your purchased DRM-free Kindle files to a competing device?

2. Is there anything in the Kindle file-format (such as a patent or trade-secret) that would make it illegal to produce a Kindle format-reader or converter for a competing device?

3. What flags are in the DRM-free Kindle format, and can a DRM-free Kindle file have its features revoked after you purchase it?

No one at Amazon will answer these questions. I've asked them of my contact there, a manager who wrote me to tell me about the existence of Amazon's DRM-free option for Kindles, and he hasn't replied to my questions over a period of several months and several re-asks. Then, an O'Reilly exec asked Amazon to clarify this, as O'Reilly is releasing all its books as DRM-free editions for the Kindle, and he, too, has been stonewalled. Then I wrote to their press office, on behalf of the Guardian newspaper, and they didn't even deign to reply with a simple "no comment." Just radio silence.

Just as with Audible, Amazon's DRM-locked audiobook division (which has the monopoly on providing audiobooks through iTunes as well), I want to like this stuff. Audible's got a great catalog and reasonable prices. The Kindle, too, seems like a perfectly pleasant little device. But Audible requires mandatory DRM on all its files (my Amazon contact said that this has changed, but refused to answer any followup questions on the subject), and Amazon won't tell you what the rules of the road are for your "DRM-free" Kindle books. Given how crummy the license terms are on the "DRM-free" MP3s Amazon sells, I'm very cautious about this.

Please, Amazon, open up. Tell your customers what they're buying.

Amazon is pleased to make available to you for download an archive file of the machine readable source code ("Source Code") corresponding to modified software packages used in the Kindle device. By downloading the Source Code, you agree to the following:

AMAZON AND ITS AFFILIATES PROVIDE THE SOURCE CODE TO YOU ON AN "AS IS" BASIS WITHOUT REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND. YOU EXPRESSLY AGREE THAT YOUR USE OF THE SOURCE CODE IS AT YOUR SOLE RISK. TO THE FULL EXTENT PERMISSIBLE BY APPLICABLE LAW, AMAZON AND ITS AFFILIATES DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. AMAZON AND ITS AFFILIATES WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES OF ANY KIND ARISING FROM THE USE OF THE SOURCE CODE, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, PUNITIVE, AND CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES.

Source Code Notice (via Engadget)

Ryanair, the discount Irish airline famous for incredibly cheap fares, combined with massive charges for anything extra (recently, it's talked seriously about charging for bathroom access), announced that passengers would need to check in online, or face a large additional charge of £40. Yet... just a month later, it announced that it needs to take down its website for a whole 10 hours for maintenance purposes. So, if you're planning to check-in or fly during that time period, you might be in a bit of trouble. Regulators aren't pleaseed either, noting that it's irresponsible of the company to both require online check-in and to close down the website for a significant period of time.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Russell Bates says: "Check out these late-50s commercials for a Washington DC coffee company, starring early iterations of the Muppets doing violent things to each other"

From 1957 to 1961, Henson made 179 commercials for Wilkins Coffee and other Wilkins products, including Community Coffee and Wilkins Tea. The ads were so successful and well-liked that they sparked a series of remakes for companies in other local markets throughout the 1960s. The ads starred the cheerful Wilkins, who liked Wilkins Coffee, and the grumpy Wontkins, who hated it. Wilkins would often do serious harm to Wontkins in the ads -- blowing him up, stabbing him with a knife, and smashing him with a club, among many other violent acts.

Shockingly violent coffee commercials starring Muppets

rduke15 writes "I'm trying to find a centrally managed anti-virus solution for a small business network, which has around 20 Windows XP machines with a Linux server. It is too big to manage each client manually. However, there is no no full-time IT person on site, and no Windows Active Directory server — just Linux with Samba. And the current solution with Symantec Endpoint Protection seems too expensive, and too complex for such a simple need. On the Linux server side, email is handled by amavisd and ClamAV. But the WinXP clients still need a real-time anti-virus for the USB disks they may bring to work, or stuff they download from their personal webmail or other sites. I'm wondering what others may be using in similar situations, and how satisfied they are with it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over on Offworld, our Brandon's spotted this splendid "Mushroom Kingdom Retirement Village" tee.

T-shirt: the Mushroom Kingdom Retirement Village

Discuss this on Offworld

Never has it been more clear -- we are building a dangerously precarious centralized system that will, given everything we know about computer networks, at some point, fail. It's so important now that the US State Department got in the loop in the last couple of days.

Meanwhile there's an incredibly vibrant competition in the Twitter client space. At least three leading apps: Twitterdeck, Seesmic and Tweetie, are slugging it out. Each with strengths, waves of new versions, users comparing products, always something new to look forward to. The kind of rapid evolution we desperately need in the back-end.

There's a little bit of Facebook in the mix (it has a lot of users, but not many of them use these clients, I think) and yes there is Identi.ca, but it has a very small user base compared to Twitter and Facebook.

In a thread that was spawned from a Twitter post earlier today, we talk about the possibility of a competitor to Twitter coming from Google or Facebook. Not sure who else could launch a back-end that would find enough support among users to gain critical mass. And I agree, totally, with Don Park, that if Facebook wants to play, they must start from scratch, with a totally simple system that matches Twitter, and adds stability, performance, beauty, or a few sought-after features.

Google would compete by building a system out of components of the open web, the small-pieces-loosely-joined approach. I outlined how this would work in an earlier blog post.

EFF's patent-busting project has put another notch in its belt: today they killed a truly outrageous patent on the use of subdomains for navigation and content management, as with jwz.livejournal.com. Can you believe that the patent office granted that patent in 2004, based on a 1999 application? Can you believe that the people who filed the patent claimed (with a straight face) that they didn't know of any other prior art that made this invalid?

It's hard to know whether to be happy for and grateful to the Electronic Frontier Foundation for killing this abomination, or pissed off with the patent office for creating it.

In the original reexamination request, EFF and Rick Mc Leod of Klarquist Sparkman, LLP, showed that the method Ideaflood claimed to have invented was well known before the patent was issued. In fact, website developers were having public discussions about how to create these virtual subdomains on an Apache developer mailing list and on Usenet more than a year before Ideaflood filed its patent application. The open source community's public record of the technology development provided the linchpin to EFF's patent challenge.

"In the reexam, the Patent Office systematically rejected each of Hoshiko's arguments as well as the patent claims. We were fortunate to have the Internet Archive and Usenet Archive as proof of the prior work by the open source community," said Rick Mc Leod, who drafted the EFF petition.

"This patent was particularly troubling because the company tried to remove the work of open source developers from the public domain and use it to threaten others," said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. "Ironically, the transparent open source development process gave us the tools to bust the patent!"

EFF Busts Bogus Internet Subdomain Patent

Barry sez,

This cartoon appeared in the April 2009 Dollars and Sense magazine (an actual economics magazine), written and penciled by Charles M. Schulz Award winning political cartoonist Barry Deutsch (that's me), and inked by illustrator and cartoonist Bill Mudron. The cartoon features characters from Star Wars (Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, Darth Vader, Chewbacca, and the Emperor), drawn as muppets, arguing about how to pay for Luke's prosthetic hand. One panel also includes a tiny caricature of Christopher Eccleston as Dr. Who.

Since this cartoon is about paying for health care, I thought it would be neat to use it to help pay for someone's health care. Internet searching connected me with Connie Parrott, who is trying to raise money to pay for her type I diabetes equipment by asking people on the internet. After getting Connie's permission, I eventually drew the strip, with help from the awesome Bill Mudron, who unlike me can draw that goddamn weird-ass helmet Darth Vader wears.

Star Wars Muppet Health Care Mashup + Original Art Auction! (Thanks, Barry!)

20-Watt Solar Panel by Parker Jardine in Primer. With a few solar-cells and a plastic case, you can utilize the sun's energy to power anything from a light bulb to your entire house. Page 158 - MAKE 12. Read this article now in the MAKE digital edition.

Or get MAKE 12 from the Maker store and/or subscribe to MAKE (use code CMAKE for $5 off USD).

You can view all our in depth Primers from MAKE here too.

Solar Power System Design - A Primer @ MAKE
Solering and Desoldering - A Primer @ MAKE
HOW TO - Make printed circuit boards - A Primer @ MAKE
Welding - A Primer @ MAKE
Microcontroller Programming - A Primer @ MAKE
Sensor interfaces - A Primer @ MAKE
MIDI control - A Primer @ MAKE
Moldmaking by MythBuster Adam Savage - A Primer @ MAKE
Working with carbon fiber - A Primer @ MAKE

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this!

Artist Shi Jinsong's 2006 show, "Ne Zha - A Child's Boutique," featured Klingon Death Metal bladed baby toys and furniture that would fit in just great in any kids' bedroom:

As described by Shi Jinsong, Ne Zha is "a supernatural youthful hero who always recovers and refuses to grow up. He has three heads, nine eyes and eight arms, with blue clouds coming from his mouth, flamed wheels under his feet, and all kinds of powerful weapons in his hands. He needs only to shout for clouds to turn into rain. He cuts his own flesh and commits suicide to save his father, fights the dragon king, and overturns the universe."

In the two years that have elapsed since the baby boutique offered a walker, cradle, pacifiers etc. suitable for the new-born infant, Ne Zha has grown up and the articles now available are appropriate for the young, all-powerful mini-warrior - a suit of armor, rocking horse, etc. In addition there is a naked effigy of the eight-armed youthful hero.

Shi Jinsong (Thanks, Will Flameboy!)

The CS Monitor has an article talking about a recent study that suggests internet usage is cutting into spending time with families. It certainly wouldn't surprise me if that's true, but I'm having trouble understanding why the article focuses on the internet as being the issue, when it seems to say that it's an even bigger issue with television:

The center, which has been conducting surveys on Americans and the Internet since 2000, found that 44 percent of Americans said they were sometimes or often ignored by family members who spent too much time using the Internet, while 48 percent said they were ignored by family members who spent too much time watching TV.

Doesn't that suggest television is a bigger issue? So why is the headline and the article focused on the internet? At least if people are online, other family members can also get online and interact. And, no, I'm not saying that's an acceptable substitute for face-to-face family time, but it should at least be recognized that it's a different type of communication, rather than just some blackhole.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

pdragon04 sends in the hardly surprising news that direct-to-consumer genetic testing isn't predicting diseases as well as they claim. "...[Francis] Collins, who played a central role in the Human Genome Project and is rumored to be the next head of the National Institutes of Health, announced at the Consumer Genetics Conference in Boston last week that he had had his genome analyzed [using a made-up name] by the big three of direct-to-consumer genetic testing: 23andMe, Navigenics, and DecodeMe. Collins said that sequence-wise, the tests 'appear to be highly accurate': there were almost no differences in the genotype information generated in the three different analyses. But there were significant differences in the numbers of genetic variations used to calculate disease risk, as well as the final risk score. ... For example, one company used 5 single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs, to calculate risk for a particular disease, pronouncing Collins at low risk. Another used 10 SNPs, placing him at high risk, and the third used 15, concluding that he is at average risk."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A VOLTA" from NASA Project: Narco-Cholo Game Ultraviolence (Download / YouTube).

The debut of a new video from the NASA music project: "A Volta," featuring Sizzla, Amanda Blank & Love Foxxx. Video by Logan, with art by The Date Farmers. Extra videos: A "mockumentary making of" video and a musical montage of Date Farmers art at the blog post.

Maker Faire Selects - CandyFab, DIY Screen Printing, Electric Music. (Download / YouTube)

Mark Frauenfelder and Boing Boing Gadgets editor Lisa Katayama profile three cool things found at the recent Bay Area Maker Faire: The Yudu personal screen printer, an interactive, collaborative, musical Tesla Coil, and a candy-fabbing device from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.

Miles O'Brien on Technology Questions in The Air France Disaster (Download / YouTube).

The veteran space and science journalist joins BBV for a look at some of the possible technical factors in the recent air disaster.

---

Where to Find Boing Boing Video: 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 Boing Boing's video hosting partner Episodic).

---

Sponsor shout-out: This week's Boing Boing Video episodes are brought to you in part 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 "will influence the blueprint for an actual notebook PC built by ASUS with Intel inside."

You may have seen this already, but this traffic barrel monster made me smile. Rawr!

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Culture jamming | Digg this!

I love Woody Allen movies, more so over time, as I grow older, they seem to get better. A couple of years ago I went through them all, Annie Hall, Manhattan -- classics, but there were also some surprises, some great movies that I didn't remember as being great. I pretty much liked them all.

This weekend, I finally saw Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which got mixed reviews, but I loved it. On Twitter someone said it's just a beautiful postcard of Barcelona. Agreed, and what's wrong with that! People who love art somehow can't forgive a movie for not being heavy on story, but rather leaving an impression. Those are some of my favorite movies, they're more like paintings or postcards. Here, look at this scene and now look at this one. If it's beautifully done, if the acting is superb and the story convincing, as it is in VCB, what's not to like?

So, when I saw that Woody Allen was the guest on Fresh Air, I savored it. He doesn't do many interviews, and this one was disappointing.

Terry Gross went for the scoop. She wanted him to slip up and confess something about his personal life, so she repeatedly asked probing questions, which he skillfully and for me, painfully, dodged. This is the interviewer interfering, getting between the subject and the listener -- preventing the subject from talking about what the listener is most interested in. With Woody Allen, that would be movies! Who would be a better person to just let ramble about the art of movies. To remember his favorites, or what it was like to work with the writers and actors he's worked with.

There are little bits of this -- the script of his new movie was originally written for Zero Mostel, but he died before they could make the movie. You get a little peek behind the scenes, how he works, his craft, and how it relates to Mostel's.

Gross often nails it, where other interviewers are selfish, she lets the subject be the story. But not this time, unfortunately.

Wired broadband is often compared to the highway system, in that both are "natural monopolies" in that it often doesn't make sense to build competing setups, since you really only want one massive infrastructure product. With highways, you don't want to rip up too many parts of the country, and with broadband you don't want to let every company get rights of way to dig up everyone's yard. However, some politicians are pushing a rather simple, and totally reasonable plan that says if someone is already building or modifying a highway with federal funds, then they should also run conduit for fiber optic cables (they don't have to run the fiber themselves, just install the conduit). The idea -- and this makes a surprising amount of sense -- is that if the road is already being dug up, why not put conduit for future fiber there, rather than having to redig up areas to run fiber in the future. Sensible thinking from government officials? How much do you want to bet this goes nowhere?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

So you've got a pile of spent CDs you'd rather not toss into a landfill and a shiny new iPhone 3GS in need of a dock. What are you going to do? Well, if you're like Jules over at Geeky Gadgets you're going to do the green thing and fabricate an upcycle dock using available materials, a little all purpose adhesive, and the ever-popular Dremel rotary tool.

[via GeekyGadgets]

In the Maker Shed:


In the Maker Shed: iPhone Hacks

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in iPhone | Digg this!

narramissic writes "Based on a request that a group of rural operators sent asking the FCC to examine the practice of handset exclusivity, four members of the Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet sent a letter to the FCC expressing their concern. Small operators, like U.S. Cellular argue (PDF) that 'exclusive handset contracts divide wireless customers into haves and have nots.' But nationwide operators, including Verizon, maintain (PDF) that 'in the absence of exclusivity agreements, wireless carriers would have less incentive to develop and promote innovative handsets.' The Commerce Committee expects to hold a hearing on the issue tomorrow."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A group of senators has announced they'll hold a hearing in Washington on Wednesday to examine exclusive deals between mobile handset vendors and operators, and has asked the FCC to look into the practice. The senators want to know if the deals (such as those that make the iPhone exclusive to AT&T and the Palm Pre to Sprint) "unfairly restrict consumer choice or adversely impact competition". Exclusive deals are becoming a big part of the operators' strategies as they look to grab users from their rivals. As prices, coverage and other competitive factors reach a degree of parity, exclusivity on certain devices is a major way the operators seek to differentiate themselves. Smaller and rural carriers argue this puts them at a disadvantage, because of their small size, which makes it impossible to compete for hot devices if a bigger operator wants an exclusive deal. The senators seem to be capitalizing on the recent outcry from some iPhone owners regarding AT&T's upgrade policy, as well as its lack of support for new features in the latest version of the iPhone software. It's unclear just how far the senators want to take this. For instance, if exclusives are banned, would manufacturers be forced to build variants of a handset for any operator's network? Say the exclusive deal for the iPhone was abolished. Would Apple be forced to build a CDMA version for Verizon and Sprint? Would it have to make a model that supported the frequencies used by T-Mobile's 3G network? Hopefully the attempt to gain some publicity by seizing on a hot topic won't lead to rushed legislation that brings unintended consequences.

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.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story