Guestblogger Marina Gorbis is executive director at Institute for the Future.

Yesterday I posted an essay on Socialstructing--creating organizations around social connections rather than against them. I believe these types of organizational forms are growing and diffusing rapidly throughout the economy. However, I do not see them as panaceas from all our ills since they have a potential to bring with them new kinds of inequalities, exclusions, and Ponzi schemes. So this post looks at potential unintended consequences of socialstructing.

One of the best things about speaking Russian (possibly the only thing), is that it gives you an ability to access Russian literature in the original. Over the years I've tried many different translations of Russian writers and was disappointed every time. Nothing compares to the original. Maybe it is impossible to do justice to these texts because many Russian words are so deeply rooted in a uniquely Russian context and life circumstances. What I love about writers such as Gogol and Chekhov is that in portraying life in 19th century Russia they managed to capture universal themes of human inner struggles, desires, and life ironies. They created prototypes of characters and circumstances that are as real today as they were 150 years ago. People just work through those circumstances with a whole new suite of tools and technologies.

That leads me to one of my favorite pieces of Russian literature -- Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls, a novel first published in 1842. The story revolves around the exploits of Chichikov, a personality populating the lower rungs of the Russian society. Driven by a desire to enhance his social standing, Chichikov develops an ingenious scheme. He goes around Russian villages buying up records of dead serfs. It's a brilliant idea that capitalized on a unique and grotesque feature of the feudal Russian society -- ownership by landlords of the people who lived and worked on their land.

The number of "souls" one owned was a measure of one's economic and social status. Landowners in fact paid taxes based on how many serfs or "souls" they owned. The government kept count of owned "souls" and this count was based on government census numbers. Unfortunately, the census took place only infrequently and many landowners ended up paying taxes on their dead serfs. Grasping an opportune moment between the two censuses, Chichikov bought records of these dead souls from landowners eager to lighten their own tax burdens. Papers certifying Chichikov's ownership of 400 "souls" rapidly elevated Chichikov's status: landed gentry opened their homes to him, tried to give away their daughters in marriage, and celebrated him at town functions. And all it took was a record of ownership of hundreds of "souls." So every time I see another article or an ad about how to acquire more followers on twitter, friends on Facebook, or otherwise collect more "souls" for money, fame, or reputation, I start thinking about Chichikov. He did come to an ignominous end, finally fleeing town. Makes me wonder.

Dead Souls

Last week on the Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert did a gag about the new Cheap Trick album coming out on 8-track. I assumed it was just a joke, but apparently it's real. The band, as a little marketing gimmick is actually releasing the album as an 8-track (for you kids out there, the 8-track was a briefly popular form of cassette music, though it lived on at radio stations for years after it disappeared from public use). But, much more interesting is a quote at the end of the article about plans to offer the digital tracks at a steep discount from the typical iTunes price:

"We're kind of more worried about being ignored than being ripped off."

Indeed. This is just another way of saying that "obscurity is a bigger fear than piracy." And while such things are usually applied to new, up-and-coming artists, it's nice to see that more well known artists recognize the same formula applies to them, as well.

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coondoggie writes "On a day when one of the largest wind farm plans bit the dust, the US Department of Energy is offering up a five-year, $45 million grant to design and build a large dynamometer facility for testing 5 to 15 MW rated wind turbines and equipment. The DOE says such a facility is needed as the US has fallen behind other countries in the race to build ever-larger wind turbines for energy production. According to the DOE, the average size of wind turbines installed in the United States in 2007 increased to roughly 1.65 MW. Additionally, turbines already developed range in the 2.5 MW to 3.5 MW capacity sizes; with plans being developed for even greater power ratings. The larger wind turbines have outpaced the availability of US-based testing facilities, the DOE stated."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2600 Magazine's Emmanuel Goldstein sez,

Hackers on a Plane is one of those unique hacker events that defy all of the odds that the mainstream throws our way. What if a bunch of hackers got together and chartered space on a commercial airline, then journeyed throughout Europe to take part in various hacker conferences and see the emerging hacker spaces in several different countries? Not only is this very possible, but it's all completely organized. It's the perfect way to experience this summer's hacker activities on a global scale and at an affordable price.

But we have a serious dilemma. Not all of the tickets have been sold, no doubt due to the lousy economy and other such mundane issues. As those people who refuse to let reality get in the way, the hacker community needs to come together and keep this project from falling short, a fate that would probably doom future such endeavors. So if you have any dream of being a part of Hackers on a Plane, or know others who might be interested, now is the time to step forward. We only have to sell around ten tickets for the expenses to be covered and this needs to be done by the 10th of this month to fulfill terms with the airline and all that fun stuff.

This is what you get. For a total cost of $1618.03, you get round trip airfare from New York City, accomodations while you're away, admission to both PlumberCon and HAR, and a full tour of hacker spaces in Austria, Germany, and Holland. You leave New York the morning of August 4th and return the afternoon of August 18th.

Hackers on a Plane: A Brief History (Thanks, Emmanuel!)

(Image: Alli Rense)

There are few personal tech indignities that get me more riled up than the cost of printer ink, the control of the ink trade by the big printer companies, and the inability of most cartridges to be user-refillable. So I love this ol' hack, from 2002, that's resurfaced on the hack sites. It takes an Epson 760 printer and makes it into a continuous ink supply system by hacking each of the carts and attaching tubing that feeds ink to them. I assume folks have done similar hacks to other printer models.

Eddie's El-Cheapo CIS (Continuous Inking System) [via Hack n Mod]

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Jon Morgan writes "Whilst heaving around numerous data storage systems to sell (they weigh A LOT!), we got to wondering: How heavy is a Petabyte of data storage? Our best guess is 365KG, which is 6 million times lighter than in 1980! But is there a lighter way to store a Petabyte?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the key underlying themes about the posts we write here -- whether they're about RIAA lawsuits or public policy or business models or security through obscurity or anything else, really -- is that one of the amazing things about the internet is that it gives everyone a voice. And when everyone has a voice, the customer wins. Period. Customers will always be able to get the word out if you screw them over, and so any business has to be focused on providing positive value to customers, not pissing them off. A great example of how old school companies still don't get this (and what happens in response) was sent in by Jeremy Oudit, alerting us to how singer Dave Carroll dealt with a horrible customer service experience with United Airlines. Basically, United broke an expensive guitar in transit and refused to do anything about it. So, he started writing songs about United's terrible customer service and put them on YouTube, along with the story, and they're getting hundreds of thousands of views: This is just the first of at least three songs on the subject, called "United Breaks Guitars"... How much does all that bad publicity cost? How much would it have cost to have compensated Dave for the broken guitar?

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Travis Louie, whose art we've featured many times on BB, is curating a large group show opening this Saturday, July 11, at CoproGalley in Santa Monica, CA. The theme and title of the show: "Monster?" Seen above, clockwise from top left, Mark Garro's "Allure," Bob Eggleton's "Eye Monster," Audrey Kawasaki's ""While You're Sleeping," and Jessica Joslin's "Phineas." The entire show is viewable online as well. Monster? show preview (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)

Krneki writes "I've been developing monitoring solutions for the last five years. I have used Cacti, Nagios, WhatsUP, PRTG, OpManager, MOM, Perl-scripts solutions, ... Today I have changed employer and I have been asked to develop a new monitoring solution from scratch (5,000 devices). My objective is to deliver a solution that will cover both the network devices, servers and applications. The final product must be very easy to understand as it will be used also by help support to diagnose problems during the night. I need a powerful tool that will cover all I need and yet deliver a nice 2D map of the company IT infrastructure. I like Cacti, but usually I use it only for performance monitoring, since pooling can't be set to 5 or 10 sec interval for huge networks. I'm thinking about Nagios (but the 2D map is hard to understand), or maybe OpManager. What monitoring solution do you use and why?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A few years ago, we suggested that the entertainment industry could learn a lot from something that USA Today founder Al Neuharth did in the early years of USA Today: recognizing that the "thieves" taking his product without paying for it were actually his best distributors and promoters. In this case, it really was thieves -- college kids were stealing copies of USA Today. While Neuharth's lawyers suggested suing, Neuharth, instead decided to hire them as distributors, recognizing that this is what they were really doing already.

The same is quite often true with today's "infringers." Copyright law was really written for commercial infringement, and today because of its clumsy nature, it's capturing and punishing people who are really the content's best promoters and distributors. In many ways they should be rewarded rather than punished. And, it appears at least some businesses are trying to leverage that recognition. Jon Healey has the story of a product called Fotoglif that is targeting blogs and small publishers who don't have the money to license news photos. Thus, they either don't offer the photos or they use infringing images. However, Fotoglif tries to create an actual win-win situation for everyone involved, by allowing these sites to use photos for free and to profit from them. That's because the photos (licensed from the big agencies) include some small ads in them as well, with the ad revenue being split between the copyright holder, the publisher and Fotoglif.

Who knows if this particular business succeeds. I have my doubts that it can actually get enough usage or ad rates high enough to actually make it work as an ongoing business. But the general strategy, of recognizing there's a better way to build win-win business models, rather than assuming that all of the value is in the content alone while ignoring the value of so-called "infringers" promoting and distributing the content for free, is definitely a step in the right direction.

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S2 Games, longtime fans of the "Defense of the Ancients" (DotA) mod for Warcraft 3, have decided to create an entire game based around it (with IceFrog's blessing of course). Without offending their still-active NDA, I can say that Heroes of Newerth is shaping up to be a very polished RTS, with the ability to play both via S2's own online service and local games, something that even Blizzard seems to be missing these days. Unlike most publishers, S2 has also decided to simultaneously release Windows, Mac, and Linux clients, making this one of the best looking games that I have ever seen on my Linux box. Additionally, S2 would like to invite another 400 players to the HoN beta, so if you are an RTS fan (and especially if you are a DotA fan) just send an email to scuttlemonkey at slashdot dot org with the subject line of "HoN Beta Key Request" and I'll reply to the first 400 requests as best I can. Update 20:37 GMT by SM: In case you don't notice in your haste to create a beta account, let me remind you that this game is still under strict NDA, so please no specifics in the discussion below.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.

If you liked "RoboGeisha," you'll love "Hausu"! I don't know anything about this movie, except that it was made in 1977, it involves a murderous lampshade, and you should probably not watch it if you don't like blood fountains, disembodied body parts, light fixtures, screaming cats, screaming cat paintings, or screaming cat paintings spewing blood. Maybe in the comments somebody would like to tell us what they're hollering about? Probably NSFW due to some disembodied boobs. (Via Buzzfeed)

Bill Kendrick writes "My first computer was the short-lived 1200XL model of the Atari 8-bit computer line. I finally got ahold of one again, after having to settle with a lesser Atari system. My immediate reaction was: "Damn, it's as big as my Dell Inspiron laptop!", and I couldn't resist doing one of those side-by-side comparisons, complete with photos of one system sitting atop the other. (I also put the 1983 storage and speeds in 2009 terms, for the benefit of the youngin's out there.) While in many ways the Atari pales in comparison to the latest technology they cram into laptops, I do get to benefit from SD storage media. It also still boots way faster than Ubuntu on the Dell, has a far more ergonomic keyboard, and is much more toddler-proof."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.

The Big Picture takes a big pixel look back at President Obama's first 167 days in office. He looks cool in pretty much every picture. Well played, Barry, well played. (Image credit: Samantha Appleton)

This Saturday, July 11, 2009, is the next meeting of Dorkbot Southern California:

***** 1:00pm
***** Machine Project
***** 1200 D North Alvarado Street
***** Los Angeles, CA 90026

Here's the line-up of speakers:

Heather Knight Previously with the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab, Heather is a Social Roboticist who works at the Jet Propulsion Lab. She will present her work enabling robots to understand nonverbal human gestures and talk about the potentials for interactive technology incorporated into everyday objects, such as clothing.

Jody Zellen
Jody Zellen is an artist living in Los Angeles, California. She works in many media simultaneously making photographs, installations, net art, public art, as well as artists' books that explore the subject of the urban environment.

Xuan "Sean" Li
Sean will show a "Hertzian Explorer" that reveals the invisible electromagnetic waves of computation and communication in information society.

More info here.

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Slashdot points us to a WSJ story about how Toyota has purposely built up a patent thicket so thick that basically no one can build hybrid vehicles without paying up:

Since it started developing the gas-electric Prius more than a decade ago, Toyota has kept its attorneys just as busy as its engineers, meticulously filing for patents on more than 2,000 systems and components for its best-selling hybrid. Its third-generation Prius, which hit showrooms in May, accounts for about half of those patents alone.

Toyota's goal: to make it difficult for other auto makers to develop their own hybrids without seeking licensing from Toyota, as Ford Motor Co. already did to make its Escape hybrid and Nissan Motor Co. has for its Altima hybrid.

Defenders of the patent system often say that there's no problem: others should just "invent around" the patents. But when companies create a patent thicket like this, that makes it effectively impossible. The end result? We all lose. This makes it that much more expensive and difficult for others to innovate, because they need to allocate money to Toyota, rather than to their own innovations. It slows down Toyota as well, since it's devoting so much time and effort to lawyers. And it massively slows down the market. Rather than competing on innovation and a better product, the focus is on patents. And since it slows down competitors it means Toyota doesn't need to innovate as fast either. In the meantime... not only does the economy suffer, but so does the environment.

Of course, we can't just blame Toyota for this. It's the system that created such a scenario. In fact, Toyota recently went through a long and arduous patent battle with someone else over patents held by that guy -- resulting in Toyota having to pay a tax on every hybrid it makes. So, perhaps it's no wonder that it's trying to gobble up as many patents as possible around hybrids, if only to have the necessary "stockpile" for future patent battles against competitors. Once again, it's the entire patent system that's leading to this questionable result that harms everyone... except the lawyers, of course.

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Last week you asked Jazz technical lead Erich Gamma questions about Jazz or anything else in his realm of expertise. Here are his answers, along with many external links and places to continue the conversation if you are interested.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

These amazing welded creations from Brown Dog Welding are so characterful and detailed, it's hard to imagine they're basically constructed of nuts, bolts, screws, and bits of scrap metal.

Brown Dog Welding photostream

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Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.

Sure, it's a tad Bat for Lashes, but who's keeping track? This delightful promo spot for the Bicycle Film Festival, a "celebration of bicycles through film, art, and music" underway in Minneapolis as of today through July 12, was brought to you by this isn't happiness, one of my favorite blogs.

Michael Scott points us to a story about a copyright battle involving Yoko Ono and some video footage of John Lennon. I can only assume that the AP report summarizing the case is leaving out some important details, because otherwise the ruling doesn't make much sense. From the article, the timeline of events appears to be:

• 10 hours of video footage of John Lennon were shot at his estate in 1970 (when the Beatles were still together) by Anthony Cox (Yoko Ono's ex-husband, prior to her marriage to Lennon).
• In 2000, Cox sold the footage to World Wide Video for $125,000. Since he shot the video, it seems reasonable to assume the copyright did, in fact, belong with him -- unless there's some evidence of a work for hire agreement somewhere (not mentioned in the article). Thus, it would seem the sale would be legit.
• In 2001, a third party, Anthony Pagola, claimed to have copies of the same videos, and demanded that World Wide Video let him sell them. WWV claims that Pagola got the tapes from an ex-employee of WWV who stole them.
• In 2002, Pagola sold the videos and "the copyright" to Yoko Ono for $300,000. The owners of WWV claim that their signatures were forged on the sale sheet by Pagola
• In the intervening years, WWV created a documentary out of the footage, which it planned to release in 2008 until Ono sued them.
• WWV countersued, claiming that Ono was violating its copyright
• Ono asked the judge to declare the copyright was hers... and the judge agreed.

Assuming all of this is true, it's hard to see how Ono has a valid claim to the copyright, but the courts have ruled in her favor. The Boston Globe article has a bit more info, though it's still troubling. Apparently, the judge's reasoning was that WWV failed to take action to "reclaim the copyright" in the intervening years, even though it had "plenty of warnings" that Ono believed she had purchased the rights.

This seems incredibly backwards, with a touch of copyfraud thrown in for good measure. Why should WWV need to "reclaim" the copyright on something when they simply believed they held the copyright all along. Since, once again, copyright is not tangible property, it makes perfect sense that WWV would believe it still held the copyright in question, even if Ono thought she had purchased it. The fact that they didn't make a proactive effort to "reclaim" what they thought they already had doesn't seem to be a reason for Ono to now keep the copyright. It seems like evidence that WWV believed it properly held the copyright all along.

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thecarchik writes with this interesting excerpt: "It takes a lot of energy to split hydrogen out from the other atoms to which it binds, either in natural gas or water. Which means energy analysts are skeptical about the overall energy balance of cars fueled by hydrogen. Ohio University researcher Geraldine Botte has come up with a nickel-based electrode to oxidize (NH2)2CO, otherwise known as urea, the major component of animal urine. Because urea's four hydrogen atoms are less tightly bound to nitrogen than the hydrogen bound to oxygen in water molecules, it takes less energy to break them apart."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.

From the lovely collection of self-portraiture by Kimiko Yoshida. This one has something to do with minotaurs and Picasso. (Via NOTCOT)

duh P3rf3ss3r writes "The BBC is carrying a report from a team of researchers at Newcastle University who claim to have developed a the first 'artificial' human sperm from stem cells. The research, reported in the journal Stem Cells and Development, involved selecting meristematic germ cells from a human embryonic stem cell culture and inducing meiosis, thus producing a haploid gamete. The authors claim that the resulting sperm are fully formed, mature, human sperm cells but the announcement has been greeted with mixed reaction from colleagues who claim the procedure is ethically questionable and that the gametes produced are of inferior levels of maturation."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Music can have an overwhelmingly strong hold on the human mind, dramatically swaying our emotions and evoking memories. How come? The new issue of Scientific American Mind surveys recent research on music and the mind. For example, the power of music may come from its influence on regions of the brain responsible for language, feelings, movement, and other unrelated systems. It could also be an important vehicle for emotional communication and connection from which societies emerge. The article looks at studies supporting such theories. From SciAm Mind:

The musical tongue may also transcend more fundamental communication barriers. In studies conducted over the past decade, cognitive psychologist Pam Heaton of Goldsmiths, University of London, and her research team played music for both autistic and nonautistic children, comparing those with similar language skills, and asked the kids to match the music to emotions. In the initial studies, the kids simply chose between happy and sad. In later studies, Heaton and her colleagues introduced a range of complex emotions, such as triumph, contentment and anger, and found that the kids’ ability to recognize these feelings in music did not depend on their diagnosis. Autistic and typical children with similar verbal skills performed equally well, indicating that music can reliably convey feelings even in people whose ability to pick up emotion-laden social cues, such as facial expressions or tone of voice, is severely compromised.

Recently, in a clever experiment, acoustics scientist Roberto Bresin and his co-workers at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm garnered quantitative support for the idea that music is a universal language. Instead of asking volunteers to make subjective judgments about a piece of music, scientists asked them to manipulate the song—in particular, its tempo, volume and phrasing—to maximize a given emotion. For a happy song, for instance, a participant was supposed to manipulate these variables by adjusting sliders so that the song sounded as cheerful as possible; then as sad as possible; then scary, peaceful and neutral.

The researchers found that the participants—expert musicians and, in another study, seven-year-old children—all landed on the same tempo for each song to bring out its intended emotion, be it happiness, sadness, fear or tranquility. These findings, which Bresin reported at the 2008 Neuromusic III conference in Montreal, bolster the idea that music contains information that elicits a specific emotional response in the brain regardless of personality, taste or training. As such, music may constitute a unique form of communication.

"Why Music Moves Us"

stoolpigeon writes "At the end of last year, I made a move from an IT shop focused on supporting the US side of our business to a department that provides support to our operations outside the US. This was the first time I've worked in an international context and found myself, on a regular basis, running into long-time assumptions that were no longer true. My first project was implementing a third-party, web-based HR system for medium-sized offices. I found myself constantly missing important issues because I had such a narrow approach to the problem space. Sure, I've built applications and databases that supported Unicode, but I've never actually implemented anything with them but the same types of systems I'd built in the past with ASCII. But a large portion of the world's population is in Asia, and ASCII is certainly not going to cut it there. Fortunately, a new edition of Ken Lunde's classic CJKV Information Processing has become available, and it has really opened my eyes." Keep reading for the rest of JR's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.

Artist: Zina Saunders, "Alaskan Roulette," July 4, 2009. (Thanks, Zina!)

A textile company and coffin manufacturer are jointly introducing a new line of coffins made from wool or organic cotton. From a press release:

This is an innovative coffin and something completely new for the alternative coffin market, but the use of wool in burials is nothing new. The Burial in Wool Act of 1667 made it a legal requirement for the dead to be buried in woollen shrouds in an attempt to boost the struggling woollen industry of the time. With the current social eco agenda, rising concerns on the environmental impact of burials and this innovative product, the industry has come full circle.”

And from the description of the casket seen here, the Swaledale model:

The Swaledale coffin is made in Yorkshire using pure new wool, supported on a strong recycled cardboard frame. Wool is a fibre with a true "green" lineage that is both sustainable and biodegradable. The interior is generously lined with cotton and attractively edged in jute.

Independently tested and accredited for strength and weight bearing, the Swaledale's unique design combines the highest environmental standards with an attractive and soft feel. Designed to differ from the traditional wooden coffin, it offers a contemporary style with comfortable handling. The concept is completed with a personalised embroidered woollen name plate. All the materials used in the Swaledale coffin are readily biodegradable and suitable for cremation and all types of burial.

Hainsworth "Natural Legacy" coffins

Christian Engstrom, the representative from the Swedish Pirate Party who is now a member of the European Parliament has written an opinion piece in the Financial Times where he explains the basic rights he is fighting for and the worries about where society and culture go if we continue to allow a few small industries to overpower everyone else's rights:

If you search for Elvis Presley in Wikipedia, you will find a lot of text and a few pictures that have been cleared for distribution. But you will find no music and no film clips, due to copyright restrictions. What we think of as our common cultural heritage is not "ours" at all.

On MySpace and YouTube, creative people post audio and video remixes for others to enjoy, until they are replaced by take-down notices handed out by big film and record companies. Technology opens up possibilities; copyright law shuts them down.

This was never the intent. Copyright was meant to encourage culture, not restrict it. This is reason enough for reform. But the current regime has even more damaging effects. In order to uphold copyright laws, governments are beginning to restrict our right to communicate with each other in private, without being monitored.

He details the inevitable push by copyright holders to simply block what the internet enables because their old business models can't keep up and they're unwilling to change:

The technology could be used to create a Big Brother society beyond our nightmares, where governments and corporations monitor every detail of our lives. In the former East Germany, the government needed tens of thousands of employees to keep track of the citizens using typewriters, pencils and index cards. Today a computer can do the same thing a million times faster, at the push of a button. There are many politicians who want to push that button.

The same technology could instead be used to create a society that embraces spontaneity, collaboration and diversity. Where the citizens are no longer passive consumers being fed information and culture through one-way media, but are instead active participants collaborating on a journey into the future.

While certainly copyright system defenders love to mock the Pirate Party based on its name alone, the basic tenets of what Engstrom speaks about are quite important and reasonable: encouraging creativity by enabling technologies is much more important than protecting an obsolete business model -- and stomping out individual privacy rights or technologies just because a few old businesses can't compete any more just doesn't make any rational sense.

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Lenny Dykstra is bankrupt. For some reason that seems like big news to me.

Dykstra was one of the heroes of the 1986 world champion NY Mets. The same team that Mookie Wilson played for. These two guys, more than anyone else of that era, exemplified, to me, the spirit of the Mets.

I don't know anything about either person's off-field life, just what they were like as baseball players. Dykstra was the Mets own version of Pete Rose. Charlie Hustle. He'd run when it was okay to jog. There was an admirable intensity to the guy. He was a little guy, but he played big.

I've written about Mookie. The man with the heart of gold.

If someone says that guys like Lenny and Mookie are dumb, I think they don't know the first thing about success. To reach the top of anything, you have to have everything going for you. People used to say President Bush was stupid. He may be a lot of things, but stupid isn't one of them. You can't get where he got and be stupid. There's too much competition and it's too skilled and smart and ambitious and lucky and so many more things.

I know some people think that I've done nothing to achieve the success I've achieved. But I've actually lived this life, so I have a pretty good idea of the sacrifices I made to accomplish what I have. Not asking for anything, but I'm often amazed at how people think an idiot savant could do anything significant in the tech world.

Forrest Gump is a great story. I've had many moments where I feel like I'm leading his life, somehow as if by luck I end up where the action is. I certainly had that feeling this weekend, in the presence of Valentino Rossi and all those other fantastic athelets. I'm sure a lot of it is luck. But I look at a guy like Lenny Dykstra, out of money, a failure in business, and wonder what he must think we think. I'll tell you what I think. The man is a hero and always will be.

It's the season of rice paddy art in Japan and Pink Tentacle has collected some exquisite examples! The massive artworks are grown through the strategic arrangement of rice plants of varying hues. From Pink Tentacle:

The largest and finest work is grown in the Aomori prefecture village of Inakadate, which has earned a reputation for its agricultural artistry. This year the enormous pictures of Napoleon and a Sengoku-period warrior, both on horseback, are visible in a pair of fields adjacent to the town hall there.

Rice paddy crop art (2009) (Thanks, Tara McGinley!)

Doug Rushkoff is bullish on Google's plans to launch a Chrome OS (I blogged the news here on Boing Boing last night).

Snip from his essay today in The Daily Beast:

In a sense, Google is just bringing computing back to the way it was supposed to be. When Steve Jobs toured Xerox PARC and saw computers running the first operating system that used windows and a mouse, he assumed he was looking at a new way to work a personal computer. He brought the concept back to Cupertino and created the Mac, then Bill Gates followed suit, and the rest is history.

What Jobs didn't happen to notice was that the computer operating system he witnessed and copied wasn't meant as a way to organize the software and data on a single machine--it was actually a way for computers on a network to share resources. Not only files, but the software to work with them. The computers themselves were to be just dummies--terminals from which to run software and access files that were stored on someone else's expensive computer.

Instead, our operating systems have moved away from sharing and towards ownership. We buy a big powerful machine and do everything on it ourselves. This suits software and hardware companies just fine: they create new, bloated programs that require more disk space and processing power. We buy bigger, faster computers, which then require more complex operating systems, and so on. (It's as if the car companies and asphalt industry worked together, building roads that required new kinds of cars, and then cars that required new kinds of roads.)

Google's War On The PC (Daily Beast)

Rushkoff is also the author of the recently-released book Life, Inc..

An anonymous reader writes with news that multi-process browsing will be coming to Firefox. The project is called Electrolysis, and the developers "have already assembled a prototype that renders a page in a separate process from the interface shell in which it is displayed." Mozilla's Benjamin Smedberg says they're currently "[sprinting] as fast as possible to get basic code working, running simple testcase plugins and content tabs in a separate process," after which they'll fix everything that breaks in the process. Further details of their plan are available on the Mozilla wiki, and a summary is up at TechFragments.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's a nice demonstration of an aluminum-air battery which produces 1.0 V and 100 mA from the oxidation of aluminum foil. Metal-air cells such as this find common application in hearing aid batteries, for instance, which are driven by the oxidation of zinc.

More:

• How-To: Backyard battery
• The Supercap battery

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schwit1 writes with this excerpt from an AP report: "Plans for the world's largest wind farm in the Texas Panhandle have been scrapped, energy baron T. Boone Pickens said Tuesday, and he's looking for a home for 687 giant wind turbines. Pickens has already ordered the turbines, which can stand 400 feet tall — taller than most 30-story buildings. 'When I start receiving those turbines, I've got to ... like I said, my garage won't hold them,' the legendary Texas oilman said. 'They've got to go someplace.' Pickens' company Mesa Power ordered the turbines from General Electric Co. — a $2 billion investment — a little more than a year ago. Pickens said he has leases on about 200,000 acres in Texas that were planned for the project, and he might place some of the turbines there, but he's also looking for smaller wind projects to participate in."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Peter Friedman has another wonderful post, discussing why music is the "main battleground" in the copyright wars, raising a few good points -- including the idea that music master tapes are dying in vaults, causing locked up music to disappear, and highlighting a troubling series of case law decisions that seem to entirely ignore the concept of fair use when it comes to music (some of which we've discussed in the past here).

But the most interesting point may come at the end, when he brings up something that's been confusing here as well: how come Greg Gillis -- better known as Girl Talk, the popular mashup musician -- hasn't been sued yet. Especially since his Feed the Animals CD came out, generating a ton of publicity and popular press coverage (and sampled from hundreds of songs), pretty much everyone has been waiting for him to get sued. Friedman tosses out a suggestion that makes a lot of sense: the recording industry is scared to death that a court will rule in Girl Talk's favor and return "fair use" to music:

Well, I think I am a lawyer just like the lawyers representing Metallica, the Guess Who, and anyone else whose work has been sampled and repurposed by Gillis. And if were advising one of these clients (or I were representing the RIAA and could influence the lawyers for Metallica and the Guess Who), I would advise that client not to sue Girl Talk; Gillis's argument that he has transformed the copyrighted materials sufficiently that his work constitutes non-inringing fair use is just too good. I'd go after someone I am more likely to beat. Othewise, I'd lose all the leverage I have with the existence, as yet undisputed in case law, of the decisions in Grand Upright Music and Bridgeport Music.

When asked, Gillis has repeatedly stated that if he's sued he believes he has a strong fair use defense. Perhaps the lawyers at the record labels (and representing certain musicians) have all recognized the same thing. Gillis will almost certainly win in court, and all those terribly decided cases that ignore fair use in music will get pushed aside.

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Here's a simple bottle lamp you can make with rubbing alcohol and paraffin wax to get an interesting bubble effect.

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We've featured the incredible stop-motion animation of PES before. Here are two I hadn't seen before, "Human Skateboard" and "Fireworks," that are my new favorites. eatPES

A Montgolfier ram, also called a "hydraulic ram pump" or "hydram," is an arrangement of valves and reservoirs that can, without the addition of external power, raise downward flowing water to a point higher than its source. It does so, essentially, by dividing the flow into two streams, the larger of which gives power to raise the smaller. It is, in effect, a hydraulic transformer, and can be extremely useful in situations where a large flow of water is available, but at an inconvenient location. Clemson University hosts an excellent tutorial on making your own from hardware store parts.

More:

• Make a ram pump
• Make a peristaltic pump
• Pump water by walking to work

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yuna49 writes "Online Media Daily reports that a federal judge in Seattle has held that IP addresses are not personal information. 'In order for "personally identifiable information" to be personally identifiable, it must identify a person. But an IP address identifies a computer,' US District Court Judge Richard Jones said in a written decision. Jones issued the ruling in the context of a class-action lawsuit brought by consumers against Microsoft stemming from an update that automatically installed new anti-piracy software. In that case, which dates back to 2006, consumers alleged that Microsoft violated its user agreement by collecting IP addresses in the course of the updates. This ruling flatly contradicts a recent EU decision to the contrary, as well as other cases in the US. Its potential relevance to the RIAA suits should be obvious to anyone who reads Slashdot."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nine months after having launched the Chrome web browser, Google just now announced the Google Chrome Operating System, "an attempt to re-think what operating systems should be." Google plans to offer the OS for use on a wide array of devices in about a year. Snip from the official Google Blog:

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we're already talking to partners about the project, and we'll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Introducing the Google Chrome OS

It's become quite common for folks who dislike "web 2.0" or the concept of "free" business models to mock YouTube as an absolute disaster. For example, music industry lawyer (and hater of all things "free") Chris Castle has already declared the site dead (which is news to, well, just about everyone). Over in the UK, the Independent is running an odd little article that goes back and forth on whether or not YouTube is a real business proposition and then tries to extrapolate from there whether or not "free" works as a business model. The whole discussion is a bit off -- since YouTube really doesn't represent a good example of a business model that uses free, since the bandwidth costs of hosting video is so high. To use that as a proxy for the concept of free would be a mistake, since most other business models don't have that same issue.

That said, really the only truly worthwhile parts of the article are the ones where analyst Keith McMahon speaks up. He seems to be one of the few folks out there who actually has bothered to look at YouTube within the larger context of Google itself, and makes a few important points about (a) why YouTube helps Google in many other ways and (b) Google benefits from the widespread belief that YouTube is losing tons of money:

"There are many urban myths surrounding the way that companies extract value from the internet," he says. "Google's spin-off benefits from owning YouTube include the accumulation of our data and strengthening of their network design -- and the more time people spend watching online video, the more advertisers will pour into marketing on the internet as a whole. There's no doubt that Google can afford YouTube."

McMahon also believes that by keeping quiet about YouTube's hidden benefits and by allowing the misconception of it as a deeply unprofitable business to circulate, things work very nicely in Google's favour when it comes to negotiating with copyright holders in the world of TV, movies and music. Copyright holders can't demand money that isn't there, and it would certainly take no more than a hint of profitability at YouTube for lawyers to descend, threatening court cases and demanding higher royalties. In the new, topsy-turvy world of online economics, it seems astonishing that losses on paper have actually made YouTube a more powerful online force.

This leaves out another point as well: the more that people believe YouTube is unprofitable, the less likely they are to build serious competitors. I have no idea whether or not YouTube is actually profitable directly yet (I'd doubt it), but I think those who are insisting that the acquisition by Google was a bad idea, or that YouTube is somehow on its deathbed, haven't taken much time to understand some basic trendlines or the larger picture of how Google views YouTube, and the opportunities it has to make money via YouTube down the road.

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Ken Stanley writes "Just as interest in user-generated content in video games is heating up, a team of researchers at the University of Central Florida has released an experimental multiplayer game in which content items compete with each other in an evolutionary arms race to satisfy the players. As a result, particle system-based weapons, which are the evolving class of content, continually invent their own new behaviors based on what users liked in the past. Does the resulting experience in this game, called Galactic Arms Race, suggest that evolutionary algorithms may be the key to automated content generation in future multiplayer gaming and MMOs?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Image courtesy Jonathan Haeber / "Bearings" travel blog)

Recovering music industry exec John Niven wrote a hilarious/disturbing piece for the Independent (UK) today on the surreal, ongoing spectacle surrounding Michael Jackson's death, and the willful omission of any mention of those child abuse allegations from most of the coverage.

The barrage of utterly inane celebrity tributes ("inspirational", "a true hero", "a genius", "a gentle soul" "a treasure") was to be expected. The howling fans across the world, broken and gibbering nonsense for the rolling TV news crews ("he ... he died for all of us" etc), the inevitable autopsy results in a few weeks, with their Swiss laboratory inventory of prescription tranquilisers, all this too is standard operating procedure.

What has stunned me and truly floored me in the past week or so has been the complete sidelining by the entire media of Jackson's later life. Across the board, from every news channel to all the quality papers, there has been wholesale collusion in the notion that "he was a great artist and, yes, there was some, umm, troubling stuff later on, but let's forget all that right now and just celebrate the music".

Hang on a minute. I'm not the kind of person to start Paedogeddon-style witch-hunts gratuitously, but ... I thought I'd find some real analysis of the "troubling stuff" somewhere. But here's what we're getting: "Another beautiful boy is gone, wiped out in an instant." This was Germaine Greer in The Guardian. She made no mention at all of the multiple accusations of child abuse levelled at Jackson (although she was unintentionally hilarious when she wrote of his art no longer being fuelled by his ability to "run with the kids on the block". Uh, Germaine, love, they'd be more likely to be running away from him).

Michael Jackson: Bad! And very dangerous (Independent.co.uk, via @beschizza)

Niven is the author of the novel Kill Your Friends.

Update: BB commenter "ESCAPINGTHETRUNK" points us to the archive of Maureen Orth's pieces for Vanity Fair on the Jackson molestation charges. And Marc Powell reminds us that the term "Paedogeddon" is a reference to this.

For your consideration...

1. Google has been hiring engineers away from Microsoft for years. There was a time when I'd get an email every day from someone I had worked with at Microsoft saying "I'm at Google now."

2. Their CEO, Eric Schmidt, is a veteran of the Java Wars, when he was an exec at Sun Microsystems. So it's no surprise that Schmidt has navigated Google back into position with Microsoft in the ongoing battle of the titans in tech.

Today's Google thinks in terms of industry warfare, and when they look for an adversary to fight, they see Microsoft, looming large.

The only problem with all this war is that it has nothing to do with what computers are used for, or any relevance to the people who use them. All these wars do is simplify the world for the execs and the press, and make it seem like the warring parties and their wars are all that matter. After a while something new comes along from someone new, and the two warring parties are left to dook it out while the attention shifts to the shiny new stuff.

So yesterday Google announced The Chrome OS, which is hailed by the industry press as a surprise middle-of-the-night attack against their arch-rival, Microsoft. But did any of the reporters take a quiet moment to reflect on the basic question: What Just Happened? If they had, they would have been hard-pressed to find anything actually had happened, other than a press release.

Let's be dispassionate. Before yesterday's announcement: 1. Chrome ran on Linux. 2. Linux was an operating system. 3. Linux ran on netbooks.

However, most people want XP on their netbook, not Linux. That was true yesterday and it's still true today.

I'm one of the users who prefers XP. I have two identitcal netbooks, one runs Linux and the other runs XP. I travel with the one that runs XP because it runs my software. And that's the hurdle Linux has, whether or not Google calls it Chrome. Normal people, given a choice, want XP. It's also Microsoft's problem because people aren't wanting Vista or Windows 7 either.

I predict Google will hit the same wall Microsoft has hit. Getting a bunch of pundits happy about the drama of warfare isn't going to make a difference in the user base. It'll just put off the day that both companies deal with the issue -- how to create anything in the OS area that interests people enough to buy something new. Google doesn't have it. Chrome is popular for sure, esp for a browser that's less than a year old. But it runs on XP. Microsoft surely doesn't have it. And I don't think Apple has it either.

Back in user-land, on Planet Earth, I still can't use Chrome because it doesn't synch bookmarks the way Firefox with XMarks does. A much more meaningful announcement, imho, would be that Chrome now runs XMarks and can synch with Firefox. Ironically that would hurt Microsoft much more than any of the michegas they're doing, unless they have a browser that can hook into this network too. Bookmark synchronization is one of the very few new things that users actually want, so what is the tech industry doing about it? Nothing. Of course.

PS: I just noticed that XMarks, which was formerly FoxMarks, now has new positioning: "Bookmark-powered web discovery." Ugh. I suspect that's a phrase chosen to make investors happy. To me, I use XMarks as a way to synch bookmarks between the computers I use. I hope they're not going to stray too far from that.

Travis Goodspeed demonstrates how to chemically remove (or 'decap') the plastic surrounding those delicate and incredibly cool looking IC wafers -

The following are instructions and matching photos for removing the packaging of microchips without a proper chemical laboratory. Neither a hot plate nor a fume hood is required, and the only chemicals necessary are fuming nitric acid and acetone. The result is a bare die, with bonding wires. The bonding wires may then be removed and the die photographed using microscope.

The same as any author of a lay chemistry article, I must caution you to be very careful with the procedure that I describe. If you've no prior experience with chemistry, purchase an introductory book and study the safety instructions thoroughly. Nitric acid in these concentrations is nasty stuff, even when cold.

Like the man said, safety first - but be sure to send us some sweet macro shots once you're done!
[via EMSL]

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Check out this amazing Captain Tinkerpaw special. Seen on Kevin Kelly's Street Use. KK writes:

I can't tell what this is for. Might be a portable night market stall (for food?). There's a generator on the tail and a light bulb hanging in the middle. Seems to be in Korea. That's all I know. (Thanks Dave Gray)

On Kevin's site comments, at least one reader smells a Photoshop job. I at least like that it looks sorta doable.

Scooter Contraption

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AbyssWyrm writes "Yesterday, Pandora founder Tim Westergren announced that the music service was on safe ground once again, but will no longer be free for all users. Instead, it will be really cheap — for those with a free account, there will be a cap of 40 hours per month, and a user may pay a one-time fee of $0.99 to resume unlimited listening to music for a month. According to the blog entry, this will affect the top 10% of listeners. Certainly not a bad deal considering the price, and I suspect that Pandora is one of few free internet resources whose users are loyal enough to pay a small fee to keep it afloat. Pandora's future had been uncertain ever since the royalty rates for internet radio were increased in 2007."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There have been rumors for years that Google might someday release its own operating system, but the announcement that it's turning the Chrome browser into an operating system is an odd duck for a variety of reasons (amusingly, the "Google browser" was also rumored for years before Chrome showed up). Why is it odd?

• Google already has an operating system in Android. While that was initially focused on mobile devices, it's already being expanded to netbooks, so turning that into a more complete operating system seems like the way to go.
• Chrome itself still needs a ton of work. I've tried using it, and it's crazy buggy and so unstable -- I simply gave up and went back to Firefox. Jumping from just browser functionality to a full on OS before the browser code is really stable seems like a big leap.
• The idea of turning a browser into an operating system has been around since the days of Netscape (folks there used to talk about how it was making Windows obsolete), but reality has proven otherwise. In fact, it was partly Netscape's desire to takedown Windows by making Netscape more OS-like that caused Netscape to get so bloated as to be nearly useless.
• Why now? Why an OS? Part of the appeal of the growth of the web itself (and Google with it) is the fact that it's made the whole operating system less and less integral to the computing experience. With the move towards more of a "cloud" based world (which Google has been a big part of driving) just doesn't value the operating system as much as in the past. So why jump on that bandwagon now?
• Given all of the above, it just seems like a confused strategy. There will likely be conflicts between Android and Chrome and consumer confusion as well, not to mention worries from folks who just want Chrome to be a simple, competent browser.

Perhaps Google can route around all of these issues, but at a first pass... it just seems like a confusing direction for Google to go in.

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There have been rumors for years that Google might someday release its own operating system, but the announcement that it's turning the Chrome browser into an operating system is an odd duck for a variety of reasons (amusingly, the "Google browser" was also rumored for years before Chrome showed up). Why is it odd?

• Google already has an operating system in Android. While that was initially focused on mobile devices, it's already being expanded to netbooks, so turning that into a more complete operating system seems like the way to go.
• Chrome itself still needs a ton of work. I've tried using it, and it's crazy buggy and so unstable -- I simply gave up and went back to Firefox. Jumping from just browser functionality to a full on OS before the browser code is really stable seems like a big leap.
• The idea of turning a browser into an operating system has been around since the days of Netscape (folks there used to talk about how it was making Windows obsolete), but reality has proven otherwise. In fact, it was partly Netscape's desire to takedown Windows by making Netscape more OS-like that caused Netscape to get so bloated as to be nearly useless.
• Why now? Why an OS? Part of the appeal of the growth of the web itself (and Google with it) is the fact that it's made the whole operating system less and less integral to the computing experience. With the move towards more of a "cloud" based world (which Google has been a big part of driving) just doesn't value the operating system as much as in the past. So why jump on that bandwagon now?
• Given all of the above, it just seems like a confused strategy. There will likely be conflicts between Android and Chrome and consumer confusion as well, not to mention worries from folks who just want Chrome to be a simple, competent browser.

Perhaps Google can route around all of these issues, but at a first pass... it just seems like a confusing direction for Google to go in.

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angry tapir writes "A botnet composed of about 50,000 infected computers has been waging a war against US government Web sites and causing headaches for businesses in the US and South Korea. The attack started Saturday, and security experts have credited it with knocking the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC's) web site offline for parts of Monday and Tuesday. Several other government Web sites have also been targeted, including the Department of Transportation."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Japanese farmers create some amazing works by way of carefully planned planting. The above works from the village of Inakadate use no paint or dye - their color variations are created solely by the different types of rice planted. [via Pink Tentacle]

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Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that the case of Mikhail Mallayev, who was convicted in March of murder after data from his cellphone disproved his alibi, highlights the surge in law enforcement's use of increasingly sophisticated cellular tracking techniques to keep tabs on suspects before they are arrested and build criminal cases against them by mapping their past movements. But cellphone tracking is raising concerns about civil liberties in a debate that pits public safety against privacy rights. Investigators seeking warrants must provide a judge with probable cause that a crime has been committed, but investigators often obtain cell-tracking records under lower standards of judicial review — through subpoenas, which are granted routinely, or through an intermediate type of court order based on an argument that the information requested would be relevant to an investigation. 'Cell phone providers store an increasing amount of sensitive data about where you are and when, based on which cell towers your phone uses when making a call. Until now, the government has routinely seized these records without search warrants,' said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. Last year the Federal District Court in Pittsburgh ruled that a search warrant is required even for historical phone location records, but the Justice Department has appealed the ruling. 'The cost of carrying a cellphone should not include the loss of one's personal privacy,' said Catherine Crump, a lawyer for the ACLU."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I love the very BEAMish practice of using the components themselves to create the bodies of your robots. Here, a standard 2-column breadboard, a battery holder, and two hacked servos create the body of the bot. The RBBB, from Modern Devices, is the brain. A Sharp IR sensor, a regular servo, some wheels, wire, and you're in business.

Easy Arduino Robot [Thanks to Shawn at Arduino Fun!]

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Zaiff Urgulbunger writes "After years of speculation, Google has announced Google Chrome OS, which should be available mid-2010. Initially targeting netbooks, its main selling points are speed, simplicity and security — which kind of implies that the current No.1 OS doesn't deliver in these areas! The Chrome OS will run on both x86 and ARM architectures, uses a Linux kernel with a new windowing system. According to Google, 'For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.' Google says that this new OS is separate from Android, as the latter was designed for mobile phones and set-top boxes, whereas Chrome OS is designed 'for people who spend most of their time on the web.'" The New York Times' coverage is worth reading, and there are stories popping up all over the web.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Randy Sarafan's audio device building streak continues, this time taking the mundane task of the plug adapter to a new level of elegance with the Ultimate Audio Converter -

I always find myself wanting to convert between mono and stereo and 1/8" and 1/4" jacks and never seem to have the right adapter on hand. The other day I was making two separate adapters for two separate conversion tasks when I had the sudden brainstorm to make a panel with every single mono to stereo and 1/8" to 1/4" conversion path I could reasonably think of. And with that in mind I bring you the ultimate audio converter.

It can convert from 1/8" or 1/4" stereo to either 1/8" or 1/4" mono (with the option to change jack sizes between channels). It can do simple conversion from 1/8" to 1/4" in mono and stereo. It can even split a mono signal into a stereo signal (again, with fully selectable 1/8" and 1/4" conversion options).

What? no banana jacks? … must have … more … banana … jacks!

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A bunch of folks have sent in a MediaPost story about a recently granted patent and some patent applications by Amazon that suggest the company is at least considering offering free ebooks with contextual advertising mixed in or possibly the ability to get a free ebook with the purchase of a physical book. To be honest, the idea doesn't seem all that surprising -- and ebooks supported by ads is something that's been talked about for ages (after all, once it's digital, it's effectively the same thing as a web page anyway, right?). So I'm a bit confused as to the reason for a patent. The basic process doesn't just seem obvious, but with tons of prior art, unless you suddenly want to pretend that an ebook is somehow different than any other digital file.

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Our pals over at Bug Labs sent us info about two classes coming up this Saturday:

First off is an Urban Farming Workshop by Lee Mandell from Boswyck Farms (www.boswyckfarms.org).

This class will include a quick history of hydroponics along with an overview of some of the many hydroponic methods, and their appropriateness for different crops.

The hands on portion will be building you own self contained hydroponic system to take home. The system is a basic drip system and will support one large plant such as tomatoes and peppers.

Following that will be Sewing Soft Circuits with Alicia Gibb.

This class is perfect for seamstresses who want to light up a project! It will be a beginner course, the core concepts of a circuit will be covered. No previous experience required for sewing or circuit building.

Above image from Boswyck Farms

Here to register for Urban Farming, please click this linK:

Here to register for Sewing Soft Circuits

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The guys in this video have rigged a 15 ton grapple with a 16 meter reach to be controlled by a Wiimote. The one thing to remember here is to stay at least 17 meters away when the thing is on.

[via proggit]

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Canon has announced the MP560 and MP490 wireless all-in-one photo printers. Along with the print, copy and scan options, both include features such as Auto Photo Fix II, Duplex and Wireless Printing. The MP560 is also Canon's first Pixma printer with the ability to print out pictures directly from a USB flash memory device. The MP560 and MP490 are priced at $149.99 USD and $99.99 USD respectively.

This is a great way to interface an optical mouse with your Arduino. Just make sure your mouse has one of the required optical sensors before you do any permanent damage. If you are interested in a How-To Tuesday based on this project, let me know in the comments. Thanks!

More about connecting an Optical mouse to an Arduino

In the Maker Shed:


Make: Arduino

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SF writer Ken MacLeod and his pals at the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum at the University of Edinburgh have just launched "The Human Genre Project:"

The Human Genre Project is a collection of new writing in very short forms -- short stories, flash fictions, reflections, poems -- inspired by genes and genomics.

Starting with just a few pieces at its launch in July 2009, the collection will grow and develop over time. Please check back regularly to see what has been added.

The project was conceived by Ken MacLeod, writer in residence at the Genomics Forum, who also edits the collection, and was inspired by Michael Swanwick's Periodic Table of Science Fiction.

The Human Genre Project is an initiative of the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum, part of the ESRC Genomics Network, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and based at The University of Edinburgh.

The Human Genre Project

Admittedly, parts of copyright law are quite complicated, but there are some basics that are rather simple and straightforward: such as that you cannot sue if you haven't registered your copyrights with the US copyright office. So, when the Premiere Football League sued Google/YouTube for hosting some videos of matches two years ago, I assumed at the very least that it had registered its copyrights in the US. Apparently not. A judge has tossed out the Premier League's claim along with some other foreign claimants' for not being covered by US copyright law. You would have thought this was something the Premier League's lawyers would have noticed before filing the lawsuit.

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Tom DBA notes a story up at The Register that begins "BT has abandoned plans to roll out Phorm's controversial web monitoring and profiling system across its broadband network, claiming it needs to concentrate resources on network upgrades... BT's announcement comes a day before MPs and peers of the All Party Parliamentary Communications Group are due to begin an investigation of Internet privacy. Their intervention follows the EU's move to sue the UK government over its alleged failure... properly [to] implement European privacy laws with respect to the trials, drawing further bad publicity to the venture." We've discussed Phorm many times in the past.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Looking for a fun craft to make on one of those rainy summer days? Check out the KnitFelt Animal kits by Crafty Alien. Just pick out your favorite little critter and get felting. If you make one of these kits, don't forget to post it in the MAKE Flickr pool. Thanks!

More about our KnitFelt Animals

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It's no secret that we think newspaper paywalls are a massive disaster in waiting. The number of folks actually willing to pay is a lot smaller than many in the newspaper industry think, and the papers' failure to recognize that they need to add more value rather than take it away by locking up their content pretty much guarantees the widespread failure of the plan. But Kevin Kelleher, over at The Big Money has a nice article that sums up exactly why paywalls will fail:

For the sake of argument, let's say that news sites are routinely charging readers in five years. By then, the economy may be substantially healthier than now, and advertisers will be looking for sites with large, loyal readerships to sell their ads on. But that won't include newspapers. They'll be catering to that 10 percent of their online audience willing to subscribe. The rest of the Web will have long stopped linking to--and talking about--their stories. The dollars will flow right past the newspapers' pay walls. And then they'll really be sorry.

And that's assuming 10% are willing to pay, which strikes me as high already. One other quibble with Kelleher's piece: he suggests that newspapers stood a better chance if they started trying to charge in 1994, ignoring the fact that many newspapers have tried to put up paywalls in the intervening years, and nearly all of them (with a very small number of high profile exceptions) have discovered that they don't work. Whether it's 1994, 2009 or 2024, it doesn't really matter. The future of online news is not behind a paywall.

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Maya sez, "Pratham Books is a non-profit trust that publishes high quality books for children at affordable prices and in multiple Indian languages. We have already uploaded some of our books under a CC-license on our Scribd account. We have also started uploading illustrations from our books for people to remix and reuse on our Flickr account. Over the weeks, we will upload more illustrations and add to our existing archive."

Pratham Books on Flickr

Pratham Books: Pratham Books - Remixing Illustrations: (Thanks, Maya!)

Mike writes "Students from Turkey's Sakarya University have unveiled a remarkable attempt at creating Europe's most fuel-efficient vehicle. Dubbed the Sahimo, their pint-sized hydrogen car is cable of eking out an incredible 568 km on 1 liter of fuel (about 1,336 miles per gallon). An aerodynamic carbon-fiber construction keeps the vehicle's weight down to less than 110 kg (243 lbs), and the designers hope to push the Sahimo's performance even further to a full 1,000 km per 1 liter of fuel before participating in the Global Green Challenge in October."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in July, I wrote to tell you about the preview I'd gotten of Under the Sun, the forthcoming solo album from Gordon Gano, former frontman for Violent Femmes:

My boyhood chum Paul Simcoe emailed me last week to sing the praises of the new Gordon Gano and the Ryans album Under the Sun. Paul and I grew up together, raised on the Violent Femmes (Gano's earlier band), and now that Paul's running Toronto's most excellent Criminal Records, he's a real treasure-house of kick-ass music suggestions.

Though the album isn't due out until Sept 1, Yep Roc, Gano's label, was kind enough to send me the album in MP3 form, and I've been seriously rocking to it ever since. It reminds me most of the Violent Femmes' underrated third album, The Blind Leading the Naked, with its mix of jangly, upbeat pop songs, semi-serious religious themes, and a few slow numbers that are more reminiscent of the track Good Feelings from the Femmes' eponymous debut album.

My standouts from this disc are Man in the Sand, Oholah Oholibah, Red, and Wave and Water

Well, it's September 1 and the album's out!

Gordon Gano & The Ryans (Yep Roc)

(Thanks, Paul!)

My boyhood chum Paul Simcoe emailed me last week to sing the praises of the new Gordon Gano and the Ryans album Under the Sun. Paul and I grew up together, raised on the Violent Femmes (Gano's earlier band), and now that Paul's running Toronto's most excellent Criminal Records, he's a real treasure-house of kick-ass music suggestions.

Though the album isn't due out until Sept 1, Yep Roc, Gano's label, was kind enough to send me the album in MP3 form, and I've been seriously rocking to it ever since. It reminds me most of the Violent Femmes' underrated third album, The Blind Leading the Naked, with its mix of jangly, upbeat pop songs, semi-serious religious themes, and a few slow numbers that are more reminiscent of the track Good Feelings from the Femmes' eponymous debut album.

My standouts from this disc are Man in the Sand, Oholah Oholibah, Red, and Wave and Water, whose video was just released on YouTube (see above).

I don't usually review stuff far in advance of release date, but Under the Sun was worth jumping the gun for; I've scheduled this post to run again at the beginning of September to remind you that the disc is out.

Gordon Gano & The Ryans (Yep Roc)

(Thanks, Paul!)

MALL MANIA 1990 time-lapse from Joel Fletcher on Vimeo.

Joel sez, "Just posted on Vimeo: A journey back in time to Los Angeles area shopping malls circa 1990."

MALL MANIA 1990 time-lapse (Thanks, Joel!)

While much of the focus on royalty rates has focused on the settlement between webcasters and SoundExchange, in a separate issue, an appeals court has sided with the Copyright Royalty Board in the rates it set for satellite radio (SoundExchange wanted the rates to be even higher, of course). The court found no reason to rule against the CRB, finding no evidence that the rates were "arbitrary, capricious, or unsupported by substantial evidence." But, perhaps drawing more focus was that, in this case, there were some side questions about the very legitimacy of the Copyright Royalty Board itself. This is due to a recognition (first in the patent space) that some of these appointments appear to violate the appointments clause of the Constitution.

While I do have serious questions about the legitimacy of the CRB, it's got a lot less to do with the appointments clause, and a lot more to do with the question of why judges are setting universal royalty rates in an industry, rather than letting the market set the rate -- especially when the CRB judges often do not appear to be particularly internet literate. So the whole appointments issue seems like a side show. Even if a court were to find that the CRB violates the appointments clause, I'm sure a hasty solution would be worked out, whereby those allowed to make appointments (the president or heads of cabinet-level departments) would simply rubber stamp the appointments.

Either way... it doesn't seem to matter just yet. In ruling on the latest case, basically the issue was punted, saying that the matter wasn't raised in a timely manner, and therefore the question will be ignored for now.

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Apollo sez, "This is a YouTube video of some West Virginia pro-coal thugs (dressed in Massey issued uniforms) crashing the peaceful 23rd annual Mountain Keepers Festival. The festival is a gathering of West Virginians who live in the hollows that are being destroyed by Mountaintop Removal mining, and their fellow advocates from all over the country. At one point the most vile of the thugs threatens a man and his child verbally and with a throat slitting gesture. Simply appalling."

Mountain Madness - Invasion of the Coal Thugs (Thanks, Apollo!)

Andy Kem designed some rad CNC-cut plywood furniture, utilizing tabs and subtle bends. Via Core77.

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

Katherine sez, "A group called Macro/Sea is taking used construction dumpsters and lining them to create swimming pools. It's throwing pool parties at undisclosed locations in Brooklyn (I think what they're doing may technically be illegal). One of the people involved is skateboarding legend Jocko Weyland. The current dumpster pools are phase one in a more ambitious plan to reclaim disused strip malls."

Dumpster Diving (Thanks, Katherine!)

relliker writes "So here I am at age 39 with two contractual possibilities, for practically the same pay. With one, I continue being a techie for the foreseeable future — always having to keep myself up-to-date on everything tech and re-inventing myself with each Web.x release to stay on top. With the other, I'm being offered a chance to get into management, something I also enjoy doing and am seriously considering for the rest of my working life. The issue here is the age of my grey matter. Will I still be employable in tech at this age and beyond? Or should I relinquish the struggle to keep up with progress and take the comfy 'old man' management route so that I can stay employable even in my twilight years? What would Slashdot veterans advise at this age?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last month, we wrote about Yahoo going to court to make sure it didn't need to pay any royalties to the NFL's Player Association in order to offer up fantasy football data. This would be consistent with recent rulings that have noted that services offering fantasy sports offerings don't need to pay up for the use of data (factual information) such as player names and stats. Oddly, however, Yahoo has now dropped the case, though no one seems quite sure why. It's possible that the NFLPA has said that it won't seek money, but if that's the case, why was the lawsuit filed in the first place?

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Lorien_the_first_one sends along a WSJ piece reporting on how Toyota is hoping to benefit from new Obama Administration regulations for automobiles here in the US. "Since it started developing the gas-electric Prius more than a decade ago, Toyota has kept its attorneys just as busy as its engineers, meticulously filing for patents on more than 2,000 systems and components for its best-selling hybrid. Its third-generation Prius, which hit showrooms in May, accounts for about half of those patents alone. Toyota's goal: to make it difficult for other auto makers to develop their own hybrids without seeking licensing from Toyota, as Ford Motor Co. already did to make its Escape hybrid and Nissan Motor Co. has for its Altima hybrid."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After years of back and forth negotiating (and more than a couple public spats), it appears that SoundExchange and music webcasters like Pandora have finally worked out an agreement on webcasting rates. If you don't recall, the Copyright Royalty Board assigned absolutely ridiculous royalty rates a few years ago, which seemed to have no bearing on reality (random aside: no one has yet explained why we feel it's okay for a small group of judges to determine what is a "fair rate"). The original rates would almost certainly put most webcasting operations completely out of business. But before delivering that death sentence, SoundExchange, the RIAA-spinoff that gets to collect the money (and has a long history of hanging onto it for longer than necessary and having trouble "finding" the artists it owes money to), thankfully agreed to hold off enforcing the new rates while everyone negotiated.

Since then, there has been a wide variety of back and forth details until the official agreement was put in place today... and even though many of the news stories present this as SoundExchange somehow backing down and "Pandora" winning, the details, frankly, seem so out of touch with reality it's difficult to see how it makes any sense at all. The main issue is performance rights, which radio stations already don't have to pay because radio is helping to promote artists. The idea that webcasters/broadcasters should need to pay artists for the right to promote them to fans just seems bizarre and borderline incomprehensible in the first place.

Also worth noting is that the royalty rates that traditional broadcasters do pay (to composers/songwriters/publishers) averages out between 3 and 4% of revenue. So, if you really had to come up with a reasonable rate to pay performers as well, you might think that it would start around that same 3 or 4%. Even that would be a pure bonus for performers who are used to getting nothing as a royalty (tax) from radio. But... no. The agreement is an astounding 25% of revenue as a bare minimum, with a requirement to kick-in $25,000 just to be a webcaster at all.

Pandora claims they're happy about this because it keeps Pandora in business (and settles a big legal dispute, which hopefully allows them to go raise some money to stay in business). But it's a stunningly large percentage of revenue that will make things prohibitively expensive for most webcasters to really stay in business. You now have to have huge margins to get anywhere in a notoriously competitive business.

Who loses? Well, just about everyone outside of SoundExchange/RIAA. Already, despite being happy about this deal, Pandora has announced that it's sharply curtailing its free service, and if you listen to more than 40 hours per month, you'll need to start paying. Most webcasters now have a huge expense that will make it difficult for many of them to remain in business at all. Musicians are severely harmed as well. While a few top musicians might get a new royalty check from SoundExchange (when and if it gets around to "finding" those artists), most musicians will now get less exposure, making it that much more difficult for them to put in place the successful modern business models needed to succeed today. This basically just rewards the RIAA/SoundExchange and a few large artists who will get an extra royalty check. Everyone else is worse off.

Some might say the NAB and traditional radio stations also make out nicely, in that since these rates may harm webcasters, it takes away some competition, but even if the radio stations are happy in the short-run, it's a bad deal. These rates, certainly, will likely influence any eventual "performance right" that's added to terrestrial radio, and could significantly jack up the cost of running a regular radio station as well.

We're living in an era of amazing technological progress, where it's easy for anyone to go out and promote musicians to others and help get those musicians and a larger audience, and all the RIAA has done, time and time again, is work as diligently as possible to prevent anyone but itself from promoting artists. What a shame. This "deal" does nothing to help up-and-coming artists and will significantly limit their ability to get their music noticed.

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(Image courtesy Flickr user Rainsoaked)

Brian Message, best known as one of the managers for the best band in the world, is said to be launching a new record label that will allow artists to retain greater ownership of their intellectual property. This article in NME says the new label, Polyphonic, plans to offer artists a 50% base share of profits, with that percentage increasing as an act grows more successful. Reports also indicate that Polyphonic's primary method of distribution will be online.

Although specifics details have not been released, the new company's policies look set to place emphasis on the digital distribution of music and may see release plans similar to Radiohead's 2007 album 'In Rainbows', which fans could choose how much to pay for when downloading it. Polyphonic is a joint venture between Message's company ATC and management firms MAMA Group and Nettwerk Music Group, reports the Telegraph.

(via PSFK)

More in the aforementioned Telegraph article: Radiohead manager teams up with Mama Group to launch record label

To hear the recording industry tell it, you would think that free music means that musicians have nothing left to sell. That's obviously false, as we keep seeing over and over again that musicians who connect with fans (rather than suing them) and give them something worth buying (rather than forcing the same old thing on them) have no problem selling plenty, despite any "piracy." In fact, there's increasing evidence that free music isn't even a real substitute for paid music, anyway. Earlier this year, we wrote about Corey Smith, and the experiment he ran last summer. Smith offers up all his music for free on his website, but still sells tracks on iTunes. The experiment involved removing the free downloads -- and watching as the iTunes sales fell. This is the exact opposite of what the recording industry lawyers insist will happen.

It looks like something similar is happening with Moby, as well. In an email to Bob Lefsetz, he points out that the new song that he's giving out for free is turning into a chart topper in sales as well:

How's it going?
The album just came out and it would be #1 euro charts if not for michael jackson re-releases.
So that's good.
But here's something funny: the best selling itunes track is 'shot in the back of the head'.
Why is that funny?
Because its the track we've been giving away for free for the last 2 months and that we're still givng away for free.
Odd.
How are you?
Moby

Of course, it probably helps that Moby doesn't treat his fans like criminals.

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Pop star Michael Jackson will be laid to rest today in a Los Angeles cemetary without his brain. Doctors investigating the cause of his death are retaining it for an undetermined period of time so they can perform further tests.

[The] LA coroner's office has still not completed its tests on Jackson's brain, and the singer's family have been advised that unless they wish to wait, he must be buried without it.

Jackson died from an apparent cardiac arrest on 25 June. Though his body was released the next day to relatives, his brain was not. The pop star's inert brain must "harden" for at least two weeks before doctors can conduct their neuropathology tests.

Doctors will examine Jackson's brain to help determine the cause of death, suspected of being linked to painkillers. Such examinations can also reveal unknown diseases, evidence of alcohol abuse or whether Jackson has suffered overdoses in the past.

Removing the brain is the "only way to carry out the tests" according to a source for the Mirror. "The tissue has to be examined. I can't tell you how long that is going to take."

Michael Jackson to be buried without his brain (Guardian UK, via @laughingsquid / Image courtesy Flickr user El_Enigma)