The Bad Astronomer is one of many readers who wrote to tell us about NASA's release of high-res photos showing the Apollo landing sites. The photos were taken from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and show the traces of earlier visits to the Moon. "The satellite reached lunar orbit June 23 and captured the Apollo sites between July 11 and 15. Though it had been expected that LRO would be able to resolve the remnants of the Apollo mission, these first images came before the spacecraft reached its final mapping orbit. Future LROC images from these sites will have two to three times greater resolution."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jordan Crane made this giant-sized silkscreen poster from Jaime Hernandez' fantastic illustration for the cover of Love and Rockets No. 24.

Jaime Hernandez silkscreen poster

The patent battle between RIM and NTP is considered something of landmark in alerting politicians and the general public to just how ridiculous the patent situation is these days. There was, however, an interesting sidenote on this. As part of its attempt to show that its own patents were valid, NTP convinced a couple other companies to "license" the patents -- except the details showed that NTP "invested" in each of these companies at the same time. That certainly looks like NTP paying a company to license its patents, just to make it looks like there were some legitimate licensees. Two of the companies that NTP did this with were Visto and Good Technology. Having licensed NTP's patents, Visto, at least, took a lesson from NTP and became an aggressive player in the patent lawsuit game, trying to mimic NTP's success by suing RIM as well.

There is no way to describe this other than sour grapes. Visto tried to play in the market and was a pretty big (and massively expensive) failure. RIM, on the other hand, was able to create a product that people wanted and build a good business on it. This wasn't by copying Visto's (or NTP's) ideas, but better understanding the actual market and creating a good product itself. Visto failed to do that. So, in turn, it just sued and demanded cash from the company that was able to innovate. Recently, Visto also purchased Good Technology (another NTP licensee) from Motorola (who had purchased it earlier), likely adding more patents to the portfolio.

Either way, it looks like RIM has finally grown tired of the game and has agreed to pay Visto $267.5 million. It's less than the amount NTP got, but it's still a hefty chunk of change. And, for what? For being the loser in the market place. This is a tax on innovation. The loser in the marketplace forces the winner to hand over a nice chunk of profits. It's bad for everyone (except some lawyers and Visto shareholders).

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Here's a simple, but powerful, coil gun made from the flash circuit of a disposable camera, a large cap, a coil of magnet wire and an ink pen shaft (and a few other parts). I like the use a light switch box as the project box.

Limitless Boredom - Coil BB Gun

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I'm just one guy programming away, but I have met Valentino Rossi, and when I'm very productive, as I have been this week, I feel like I'm programming the way he rides a motorcycle.

When things are clicking, programming-wise, it activates other parts of my creativity. I cook more imaginatively, and I consider moving to Italy, so I can enjoy the good life while reorganizing the world. They have Internet in Italy so it's hard to imagine how Berlusconi could interfere.

Anyway, this is not an earth-shaking announcement. I just got something working today that I imagined for quite some time, and it's nice.

The goal is to have a Small Pieces Loosely Joined equivalent of Twitter.

I know now that there are people at Google who share this vision. They have the resources to do centralization. What we have to make sure is that the Rest Of Us have the ability to route around the centralization. I hope they don't take it personally at Google, but enough with letting one company control the flow of the real-time web. There are always pundits who are willing to sell us out to the BigCo's, but I am not one of them. Never have. I remember when Google was One Of Us. Hopefully that thread still runs strong inside them now that they are a BigCo.

While everyone was debating the morality of Arrington releasing the Twitter info, I was thinking "Geez these people are focusing on the wrong stuff." The real question is how big TwitterCorp plans to get while holding the control tightly within the confines of their Corp. That can't work. It never has. I'm amazed that smart people like the people who run Twitter are willing to bet on that, still, so far into it. That they think a single company can run the Pulse of the Planet is a sign that they are drinking too much of their own Kool Aid. This can't work. Can't.

Anyway, here's what I have working.

A Twitter-like RSS feed with a single subscriber who gets notified by the cloud when the feed has updated. It then reads the feed and displays the new stuff. This all happens before I can refresh the page. It's the same speed as the connection between Twitter and FriendFeed. Now there will be people who say it can't scale. 1. They don't know. 2. They might be right. And even if it's slower than Twitter, it's worth the tradeoff. Because Twitter is going to break. Be sure of it. Nothing in the history of the Internet has ever done what they're trying to do. I don't know for sure, but I suspect it can't be done. And even if it can, it's bad.

Anyway, time for me to enjoy what's left of the day. It's gorgeous in California. I'm going to get some exercise then have my Italian dinner and then more work tomorrow! Buongiorno and arrivaderci!

Oracle Goddess writes "In a story just dripping with irony, Amazon Kindle owners awoke this morning to discover that 1984 and Animal Farm had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for, and thought they owned. Apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by George Orwell from people's Kindles and credited their accounts for the price. Amazon customer service may or may not have responded to queries by stating, 'We've always been at war with Eastasia.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this year, we wrote about a journalism student who witnessed a murder while doing a photojournalism project. While police were trying to get information from him, he invoked California's shield law for journalists, allowing them to protect "sources." The case is complex on a number of different levels -- from the fact that the kid is a student, not a full-time journalist, to the fact that the information on the murder wasn't directly a source from whom he was learning info, but something he just witnessed. The other complicating factor is the idea that the student could put his life in danger by revealing what he saw. Either way, a judge has ruled that, indeed, California's shield law protects this student and he does not need to reveal what he saw. The police are not happy, and referred to the student as a "coward," which seems a bit harsh.

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Here's a stunning Drew Friedman fine art print of The Three Stooges (with Shemp) and recurring nemesis Vernon Dent. Limited edition of 35 numbered prints signed by the artist.

mcgrew writes "New Scientist is reporting that creativity may be linked to schizophrenia via a common gene. Szabolcs Kéri, a researcher at Semmelweis University in Budapest, Hungary, carried a study of creative people. 'Kéri examined a gene involved in brain development called neuregulin 1, which previous studies have linked to a slightly increased risk of schizophrenia. Moreover, a single DNA letter mutation that affects how much of the neuregulin 1 protein is made in the brain has been linked to psychosis, poor memory and sensitivity to criticism. About 50 per cent of healthy Europeans have one copy of this mutation, while 15 per cent possess two copies. People with two copies of the neuregulin 1 mutation — about 12 per cent of the study participants — tended to score notably higher on these measures of creativity, compared with other volunteers with one or no copy of the mutation. Those with one copy were also judged to be more creative, on average, than volunteers without the mutation.' They hypothesize that people with this gene with high IQs are creative, while those with lower IQs are simply prone to the hallucinations that characterize the disease."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Via Rob Hyndman, we learn that in the Canadian gov't hearings investigating broadband provider traffic shaping, the providers revealed a lot about their traffic shaping practices that seem to contradict what those same providers claim on their websites well selling connectivity. Even if traffic shaping is to be considered legal, shouldn't broadband providers be required to be honest about what they're offering customers?

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A t-shirt design by OXEN over at Threadless. And the crowd goes wild. Three Keyboard Cat Moon (Thanks, UPSO!)

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In what could be a turning point in the RIAA's litigation campaign, a Michigan judge has decided to appoint pro bono counsel to represent college student Brittany Kruger, who is being sued by the RIAA in SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Kruger. As this article points out, 'if other judges follow suit, things will change dramatically.' That is because the RIAA's entire litigation campaign is based upon economic inequality of the litigants: almost none of those sued by the RIAA can afford legal representation, and the RIAA has a huge economic incentive to fight cases to the death, while the defendants have no economic incentive greater than the 'settlement' amount, which they often pay even when entirely innocent. If the courts follow the lead of District Judge Timothy P. Greeley [PDF], and appoint pro bono legal counsel, the RIAA will no longer be able to achieve the easy pickings default judgments and 'settlements' it's routinely obtained in the past."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slate's culture editor John Swansburg says,

Just posted an article by my colleague Dan Engber on the subject of animal masturbation. It turns out that onanism has been observed throughout the animal kingdom: dogs do it, cats do it, horses do it, turtles do it, birds love to do it. Some moose can even bring themselves to sexual climax by just rubbing their antlers on a tree (!).

Dan's article explores the scientific explanations for why animals might have evolved this behavior. There's also an accompanying video slide show -- it turns out folks are very fond of posting footage of their frisky pets, or of the strange activity they saw a koala enjoying at the zoo...

Hands or Paws or Anything They GotMasturbation in the animal kingdom.

April says:

Given your previous coverage of Google SketchUp, I thought you would love this music video made by one-man band Roche Limit. Why? Because he made it almost entirely using the free Google SketchUp software.

We also interviewed the man behind Roche Limit, Dave Righton, and he talks about the making of the music video.

Music video, My Friend Ship by Roche Limit

eldavojohn writes "After announcing the sale of The Pirate Bay to Global Gaming Factory X, it was unknown what would become of TPB. Details of the future plans have been released. 'According to Rosso, GGF plans to build a massive "storage cloud" on top of TPB that would use individual users as storage system's nodes. Apparently users can opt out for being part of the decentralized storage system, but then they'd have to pay a monthly fee for the service. More resources the user is willing to commit for the service, the cheaper the monthly subscription fee will be ... GGF's plan is to harness the resources users are willing to allocate to the cloud service and sell that computing power and bandwidth to 3rd party companies, essentially creating a service that could be used as a content delivery network (system that most large sites — including ours — use to deliver static content, such as images, software downloads and stylesheets, faster to the end user) or even as a web hosting cloud. As the service would use P2P technology, it could bring massive savings to ISPs, as the delivery of content to an end user would be provided from the closest possible "node", most likely from an user within the same ISP network.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jack and Beverly Wilgus have had this daguerreotype for 30 years. They assumed it was a whaler holding the harpoon that blinded him. But someone who saw the image recently suggested it was Phineas Gage, a railroad worker who survived an iron rod piercing through his skull in 1848. Gage's resulting personality change led to a new understanding of neurology.

This is the only known image of Gage.

[Phineas] Gage was the 25-year-old foreman of a construction gang on Sept. 13, 1848, preparing a railroad bed outside Cavendish, Vt. As usual, he was using a pointed iron rod -- 3 feet, 7 inches long and 13 1/4 pounds -- to tamp gunpowder and sand into a hole drilled in the rock. But on that day, the mixture exploded, sending the rod through his left cheek and out through the top of his head.

It was successfully removed and, to the surprise of physicians, Gage lived 11 more years, dying after a series of increasingly violent convulsions. His story is a showpiece in neurology texts and folklore because of his survival and the abrupt changes in his personality.

A piercing image of Phineas Gage

As newspapers have struggled to get the online world, most of them did the simplest thing of all, which was toss up some comment forms at the end of their articles. However, they never did anything to actually engage with commenters. Instead, they looked at the comment form as being a community, but never gave any incentives for the folks in the comments to do anything intelligent. They didn't tend to the community or have the authors of the articles respond to comments (in some cases they specifically barred it!). So if you treat your comments as a place where the riffraff is just going to say stupid stuff, don't be surprised when that's what happens.

But, it seems that some are getting the wrong message from this. Douglas Bailey, who apparently is a "media consultant" or a "media strategist" has simply determined that all newspaper comments are dumb and should be done away with. Instead, he suggests you write a letter to the editor or an op-ed.

But his reasoning is backwards (and makes me wonder why anyone would hire him as a consultant). First, he gives a few apocryphal stories to make his point -- which isn't exactly compelling since they could be entirely made up. Second, he assumes that because plenty of comments on newspaper sites are dumb the problem is the commenters or the very act of commenting itself. Apparently, it never occurred to him that perhaps the problem is the way the newspapers set up the comments. Those newspapers didn't do anything to try to build up community or to encourage people to post more insightful comments. The problem isn't that the commenters are dumb and pointless, but that the newspaper failed to put in place incentives to encourage smarter comments. The newspapers failed to actually engage with their community and talk with them rather than to them. Any newspaper that wants to hire a media strategist these days should probably find one who looks for ways to help a newspaper better engage their community, rather than one who tells them to ignore the community.

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Love these hanging pendant lights, made from spray paint cans. As Paul on DudeCraft says:

I imagine the cast offs from one graffiti artist could yield an entire showroom of these babies. Brought to you by the clever kids at Zek.

Can Delight

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The EFF has restated many of their original privacy objections about California's latest revision to the Pay-As-You-Drive auto insurance proposal. Admitting that the amended bill is an improvement, privacy advocates are still uneasy about the surveillance implications of this program. "The proposal centers on a simple idea: infrequent drivers are less of an insurance risk. By pricing policies according to the mileage driven, insurance companies can offer discounts to lower-risk infrequent drivers, and put an appropriate cost penalty on heavy drivers. The state estimates that 30% adoption of PAYD insurance nationwide would reduce miles driven by at least 10% among subscribers, and save 55 million tons of CO2 over the next ten years. The benefits of such a system could be quite dramatic, as California Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner is sure to emphasize. Such insurance plans first became available in 2004, and are now available as a limited option in 30 US states from insurance companies like Progressive and Liberty Mutual."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The EFF has restated many of their original privacy objections about California's latest revision to the Pay-as-You-Drive auto insurance proposal. Admitting that the amended bill is an improvement, privacy advocates are still uneasy about the surveillance implications of this program. "The proposal centers on a simple idea: infrequent drivers are less of an insurance risk. By pricing policies according to the mileage driven, insurance companies can offer discounts to lower-risk infrequent drivers, and put an appropriate cost penalty on heavy drivers. The state estimates that 30% adoption of PAYD insurance nationwide would reduce miles driven by at least 10% among subscribers, and save 55 million tons of CO2 over the next ten years. The benefits of such a system could be quite dramatic, as California Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner is sure to emphasize. Such insurance plans first became available in 2004, and are now available as a limited option in 30 US states from insurance companies like Progressive and Liberty Mutual."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last year, Phil, bless his pointy little head, came up with the idea of the "MAKEcation." With gas prices at an all-time high and so many news stories about families vacationing on the cheap, close to home, or even AT home, he had an idea for the MAKE community. Why not encourage people to stay at home, learn new skills, and make cool projects, as a family? The idea of the MAKEcation was born. Of course, Phil himself took the first one (he had to make sure it was safe for the rest of us).

So, for the rest of the summer, we'll be hosting a series of family-friendly projects and challenges here on Make: Online, with some awesome product bundles in the Shed, MAKEcation contests, and articles with MAKEcation ideas, tips, and how-tos. We're even going to have experts for each program come in as Camp Counselors. It should be a lot of fun.

Our first MAKEcation event starts this Monday. It's "Teach Your Family to Solder" week. We'll announce full details on Monday. Don't worry, we don't expect you to necessarily TAKE the MAKEcation next week, we'll just be running content related to soldering, posting easy-to-solder projects, announcing the Shed bundles we've put together, etc. And our Camp Counselor will be in his virtual cabin, if you have any questions related to soldering and basic kit-building. Soldering is too often seen as more of a challenge than it needs to be. It's really not that hard and it's something that even older children can do (with some supervision).

And don't wait for us to plan your MAKEcation! We're hoping makers will plan and take their own family-oriented DIY time off. If you do, please document it. We'll be giving away some cool Shed products to folks who send us the best MAKEcation videos and pictures. Upload yours to the MAKE Flickr pool and tag them "MAKEcation." If you're in the process of planning a family stay-at-home-and-make time, let us know about it in the comments. We'd love to see a brainstorm of MAKEcation ideas.

Above picture from the Hoefer family "Great Chair Challenge."

More:
Another MAKEcation family challenge
Hydrogen balloon camera project
Laser cut case for a clock - MAKEcation

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Jake points us to a story that (as Jake notes) makes you read the headline twice to make sure you got it right: Chinese Company Sues in U.S. to Block "Knockoff". It's not really "knockoffs" that they're suing over. It's a patent infringement claim from Changzhou Asian Endergonic Electronic Technology Co., which is upset that Best Buy, Wal-Mart and some other retailers are selling a competitors' dashboard mount that it claims is covered by its own patent.

Now, there are a bunch of points worth discussing here. First, apparently this is the first such case of a Chinese company (based in China) suing in the US over a patent infringement claim (a claim that really surprises me). Considering the long history of China copying (blatantly) American products and then reselling them, it's really quite fascinating to see a Chinese company now complain about the "reverse." Of course, as we've been highlighting recently, there's been a big push in China to build up a belief in patents. It seems this firm has already learned the basics of the American patent system: it's suing in Texas, of course!

The other odd thing about this case is filing the lawsuit against the retailers. The company is also suing the manufacturer (another Chinese company) which makes sense, but I've never understood why going after the retailer makes sense. Best Buy, Wal-Mart and others shouldn't need to investigate every product they sell to determine whether it violates someone else's patents. Let that be handled between vendors. Dragging the retailers into the lawsuit is just a waste of resources.

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Another installment of Tom's Hardware's how to articles has a look at what it might take to build your own render farm. The article looks at everything from top to bottom roll-your-own to buying things pre-built and the pricing insanity that goes along with it. "If you are working as a freelance artist in the above-mentioned media, toying with the idea, or doing so as a hobbyist, then building even a small farm will greatly increase your productivity compared to working on a single workstation. Studios can even use this piece as a reference for building new render farms, as we're going to address scaling, power, and cooling issues. If you're looking at buying a new machine and are thinking of spending big bucks to get a bleeding-edge system, you might want to step back and consider whether it would be more effective to buy the latest and greatest workstation or to spend less by investing in a few additional systems to be used as dedicated render nodes."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a new study, if everyone else was committing a crime, you would too, at least if you are a boy. The 20-year study showed what every grandmother could tell you; children from poor families, with inadequate supervision and bad friends were more likely to end up in juvenile court. What was more surprising is that exposure to the juvenile justice system seemed to increase the chance that the boy would engage in criminal activity as a young adult. "For boys who had been through the juvenile justice system, compared to boys with similar histories without judicial involvement, the odds of adult judicial interventions increased almost seven-fold," says study co-author Richard E. Tremblay.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Douglas Rushkoff

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Jeff Goldblum

Our pal Douglas Rushkoff was on the Colbert Report on Wednesday night, talking about his new book Life Inc. It's a very intense 6 minutes and I think Doug does a masterful job of getting his points across, and his passion for the subject matter is palpable. Congrats, Doug! We're proud of you!

Esquire interviewed Barney Frank about the Personal Use of Marijuana by Responsible Adults Act of 2009.

BARNEY FRANK: Announcing that the government should mind its own business on marijuana is really not that hard. There's not a lot of complexity here. We should stop treating people as criminals because they smoke marijuana. The problem is the political will.

ESQ: That's my second question. There's already been a lot of change in the country. Thirteen states have decriminalized pot. What's holding up Congress?

BF: This is a case where there's cultural lag on the part of my colleagues. If you ask them privately, they don't think it's a terrible thing. But they're afraid of being portrayed as soft on drugs. And by the way, the argument is, nobody ever gets arrested for it. But we have this outrageous case in New York where a cop jammed a baton up a guy's ass when he caught him smoking marijuana.

ESQ: You're kidding.

BF: Actually, I've just been corrected by my partner -- it was a radio he jammed up the guy's ass, not his baton.

He's Not High: Inside Barney Frank's Plan to Legalize Marijuana (Via Dose Nation)

Techdirt is reporting that Belgium is trying to extract fines from Yahoo for not producing user data that was recently demanded of the US company. Instead of following normal diplomatic channels Belgian officials apparently made the data demands directly to Yahoo's US headquarters and then took the company to criminal court where a judge issued the fine. "The implications of this ruling are profound and far-reaching. Following the court's logic would subject user data associated with any service generally available online to the jurisdiction of all countries. It would also subject all companies that offer services generally available on the global Internet to the laws of all jurisdictions, potentially exposing individual employees to a variety of criminal sanctions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's fun to watch these three charlatans summon the ghost of a fictitious manager of a phony chocolate factory, set up by BBC 3 television. (Via Cynical-C)

People who bought Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm for their Kindle were surprised to discover that it had disappeared from their devices overnight. It turns out the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic version, and Amazon caved into their demand to sneak into people's electronic libraries and take back the book at the publisher's request.

From Pogue's Posts:

This is ugly for all kinds of reasons. Amazon says that this sort of thing is “rare,” but that it can happen at all is unsettling; we’ve been taught to believe that e-books are, you know, just like books, only better. Already, we’ve learned that they’re not really like books, in that once we’re finished reading them, we can’t resell or even donate them. But now we learn that all sales may not even be final.

As one of my readers noted, it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.

This kind of bullshit will encourage readers to visit Web sites in countries where the copyright has expired on Orwell's books so they can get free un-stealable electronic copies.

Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others

Newspapers continue to insist that people will pay for news, but they never give any reasons why. Instead, they keep working on these vague threats of colluding and promising "you'll miss us when we're gone." The latest is that the editor of the Financial Times, Lionel Barber, is claiming that most news sites will be charging within a year.

I'm wondering if he's willing to bet money on that, because I'll take the other side of that wager.

First, as noted, very very very few online news sites give readers a real reason to purchase a subscription. Many could if they spent the time trying to figure out how, but very few do that. They just seem to think that charging for content is the answer. It's not. But, more importantly, you get the feeling that Barber is very narrowly defining what counts as a "news site." He does a bit of "damning by feint praise" thing on blogs, but seems to (once again) confuse blogging the platform with journalism the practice (apples and oranges, certainly). So, when he talks about "almost all" news sites charging, he's leaving out plenty of things that he doesn't consider to be news sites.

The big problem with that? Most of the reading public doesn't agree. Many are content to get their news from those other sources.

Furthermore, for every major news site that decides to charge, they have just opened the playing field wide open for others to come and scoop up their market with a better, smarter business model. And don't think some smart media execs and entrepreneurs aren't salivating over the opportunity of some major publications to go behind the paywall.

Still, Barber's talk was a lot more involved than just that one quote that's getting attention. You can read the whole thing, where he spends an awful lot of time talking up the importance of journalism, as if it's some sort of mantra. "Journalism is important, so of course people will pay us, because we're important." But as you read through the speech it becomes clear what the problem is in his thinking.

He puts "journalism" on a pedestal.

He continually talks up how important journalism is to the community, but doesn't do much to talk about how important the community is to news organizations. It's standard media elitism to assume that it's the news that's so important, and the clueless public is sitting there waiting to shovel it in -- but has no interest in actually being a part of the process or included in any sort of discussion. At best, he spends a little bit of time just talking about how consumers "consume" the news in a different way, and participate in stories in a different way, but he doesn't talk much about better serving them in terms of what they want to do. No, instead, he focuses on how important news is for that community, not about helping that community do more.

Meanwhile, along these same lines, David Simon, who's rantings on newspapers we've debunked before, has written a silly opinion piece for the Columbia Journalism Review, where he tells the heads of the NY Times and the Washington Post to both wall off all their content behind a paywall, insisting they can pretend they didn't collude, by saying they just read Simon's advice and decided to take it.

Simon's column involves strawman upon strawman, ignoring economic and technological realities. He (just like Peter Osnos in the same issue of the Columbia Journalism review) uses the same analogy of cable TV. Again, to say this misses the point is being unfair to the point -- which is somewhere a few miles away. Cable TV works because of certain limitations in television. Those limitations do not exist online. That's basic technology. How pricing works is economics, and when you have limits (lower quantity supply) price can be driven up. But when the supply is effectively unlimited (such as online), then price gets driven down. That's economics. Making arguments that ignore both technology and economics are not compelling. They're a waste of time.

It's as if folks who work in the old newspaper industry still can't be bothered with actually understanding the fundamental issue they're facing. They're using cargo cult science. They remember (somewhat incorrectly) a world that was before -- a world where people paid for newspapers via subscription and only went to that source. But like the cargo cultists, they're getting the wrong message. They think that if they just act in the same way as what they remembered in the past, they'll get the same results. So if they dress up like soldiers and man the airport (i.e., put subscriptions on news sites) they'll suddenly get food to drop from airplanes again (get people to pay again).

But this shows a fundamental misunderstanding of why people actually paid for newspapers in the past. At the time, it was the only real way to get that information and to be a part of that local community. The paper served the community without much competition. Yet, these days, there is plenty of competition, and these newspaper guys aren't talking about serving the community better than the competition, they're talking about limiting the value of newspapers by putting up paywalls, that make it harder for people to consumer the news, harder for people to discuss the news, harder for people to share the news and harder for people to be a part of the community.

And they'll wonder why the food doesn't fall from the sky?

Putting up subscription walls and assuming that the world goes back to normal is no different than the cargo cultists. It's totally misunderstanding the cause of what happened in the past, and thinking that if you just recreate a few superficial structures, the rest will magically come back. It won't.

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The incredible London museum The Wellcome Collection is staging a new exhibition, titled "Exquisite Bodies: or the Curious and Grotesque History of the Anatomical Model," running from July 30 to October 18. The talented Joanna Ebenstein of Morbid Anatomy was a curatorial adviser and graphic designer for the exhibition. I'm sure it will be an incredible, er, body of artifacts. From Morbid Anatomy:

Popular anatomical displays were a kind of popular, spectacular, democratized version of scholarly or professional medical museums. Often exhibiting objects intended for (or perhaps even once presented in) an academic context, these displays--which were extremely popular in the 19th Century and could be widely found at fairgrounds and in "popular anatomical museums" until the beginning of the 20th Century-blended education and entertainment, public health and spectacle, scholarship and prurience for a mass audience.

The centerpiece of these displays was usually the Anatomical Venus--a beautiful, life-like woman, generally made of wax, often life-sized, and demonstrating--upon the delicate removal of her breastplate--the mysteries of the inner female body. This central Venus was generally supplemented by waxes and other sorts of models, wet preparations, and illustrations parsing topics such as the ideal and compromised female body, the ravages of sexually transmitted diseases, the aberrant body, the mysteries of generation, and the ill effects of spermatorhea (aka "abnormally frequent emission of the semen without copulation", seen as a real public health issue at the time).

"Exquisite Bodies" (Morbid Anatomy)

As part of Mother Jones magazine's huge special report on the "war on drugs," -- awesomely titled "Totally Wasted" -- they've created a fun quiz to test your knowledge of the drug war. It too has a great headline, borrowed from Timothy Leary: "Just Say Know." Drug War Quiz: Just Say Know (Thanks, Mike Mechanic!)

lee writes "After almost three years online, the admin of Free Rainbow Tables has decided to call it a day, citing a lack of time to keep it running. (I'm sure that you all know a rainbow table is essentially a giant list of precomputed hashes.) This is a shame, as the site is a useful resource for those occasions when you really need an existing password exposed, rather than simply changing it. I'm a Windows admin, and this site has come in very handy in the past. The currently computed tables weigh in at well over half a terabyte, are available as torrents from the site, or from a couple of mirrors (and alternatives are available). When the site was active, it featured a downloadable BOINC client to put your idle cycles to work computing ever-greater tables, and a space-saving format for storing the tables. The admin is willing to hand over source code if you wish to take over, though I suspect hosting is not included!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Seen above and below are MRI scans of sushi. Uhei Naruse scanned the rolls at a hospital in a personal research project to tease out the secret of good sushi. Trevor Corson, author of "The Story of Sushi," has the details of this experiment on his Sushi Concierge blog. From Sushi Concierge:

Pictured (at left) are three sushi nigiri—hand squeezed rectangles of rice topped with a slice of fish. The first was made by the veteran chef. It was small and light, weighing in at only 12 grams, and the MRI scan revealed a lot of empty space inside it, between the grains of rice. It also revealed another secret of a veteran chef's skill—the grains of rice were mostly aligned lengthwise, which helps the nigiri hold together without being too dense, by creating adhesion along the edges of the aligned grains.

The second nigiri was made by the apprentice. It was denser—about the same size, but weighing 15 grams. And the rice grains were less uniform in their orientation.

The third nigiri was made by the robot, which couldn't come close to matching human skill. The grains of rice were hopelessly jumbled and the sushi was thick and heavy, clocking in at 20 grams. Naruse ate some of it and described it as "sticky." This is closer to the typical sushi that, sadly, we're content to eat in the States.

"Want to See the Inner Secrets of Perfect Sushi?" (Sushi Concierge)
"The Story of Sushi: An Unlikely Saga of Raw Fish and Rice" (Amazon)

io9 features some cool shots of sculptures by designer and photographer Andrew Chase, who makes articulated metal animal sculptures. Here's a stop-motion video he made by posing his "cheetah:"

Via Neatorama.

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A surprise announcement and massive game-changing news for musicians: developers Harmonix have just announced The Rock Band Network, a new initiative to let home users and indie bands create and sell their own Rock Band tracks through the game itself, in partnership with Microsoft's XNA Creators Club. We've got all the first details on the program, which is due to launch in closed beta by the end of the month, over at Offworld. I'm with the Band: Harmonix opens Rock Band track creation, sales to Xbox 360 home users

suraj.sun writes "The music industry will attempt to seize money paid to acquire the Pirate Bay. A couple of weeks back the Global Gaming Factory, a Swedish software company, announced that it would acquire the Pirate Bay for $7.8 million. Since then the company has been touting a new business model and even hiring executives, such as Wayne Rosso, the former Grokster president, to legally obtain content from film and music industries. What remains to be seen is how that sale might be affected by attempts by the music industry to collect the $3.6 million damages that a Swedish court awarded it in April. Alex Jacob, a spokesman for the IFPI, said that the group has always intended to collect the damages award, but now, should the sale go through, music execs know that the original Pirate Bay operators have access to the money." According to CNet, the four original Pirates claim they no longer own the company and that no money from the sale will go to them.

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Back in April, we wrote about the odd decision by massive Goldman Sachs to threaten legal action against a gripes/conspiracy site called GoldmanSachs666.com. The site was obviously not an official site of GS or endorsed by the company, and any moron in a hurry would recognize immediately that it was an anti-Goldman Sachs site. Threatening it made absolutely no sense. The company, as large as it is, had almost no chance to win in court, and the threat would only get that much more attention to the site itself -- which it has.

And, now that Goldman Sachs has bestowed so much media attention on the gripes site it's basically caved in and withdrawn its complaint (via CitMediaLaw). But, that still doesn't explain how anyone at Goldman Sachs thought it was a good idea in the first place to bully this guy?

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Fabien Cappello's "Typing the Sound" does just that by triggering individual notes with each typewriter keystroke - a simple idea with pleasantly whimsical results. Build info is scarce on this one, but the basics come across in the photos here (tactile switches placed beneath each key are presumably trigerring MIDI).

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Several months ago, Becky covered my remake of a low quality trash bag holder I bought through a SkyMall-esque catalog. This is how I explained the project at the time:

Trash cans have always sort of annoyed me. They take up so much space, especially if, like me, you favor large cans to minimize the number of trips to the dumpster each week. There's no practical way to pack a large trash can for storage or transport. If you're moving, of course, you can fill the can with lightweight stuff like dirty clothes or something, but only if you're willing to expose your linen to the inside of your trashcan. I always use trash bags, anyway, and for my money if you use a bag the only major function of the can is to hold the bag open. Well, it's possible to achieve that same function with a much cheaper, lighter, and compact device.

This how-to covers a slightly refined version of my original design, with one of its three legs removed in order to facilitate removing a full bag of trash from the frame. Also, some of the joints have been selectively glued in order to prevent annoying pop-outs without sacrificing collapsibility, and a simpler means of attaching the retaining clips has been devised.

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Myriad and a number of other readers passed along the news that the Canadian Privacy Commissioner has made a determination that Facebook violates Canadian privacy law in four different respects. Canada has the highest per-capita facebook participation in the world — about a third of the population — according to coverage in The Star. The EU is also expressing similar privacy concerns, though Canada's action "represents the most exhaustive official investigation of Facebook privacy practices anywhere in the world," says Michael Geist. The CBC's coverage spells out the areas of privacy concern, in particular that nearly a million developers of Facebook apps in 180 countries have full access to the entirety of users' private data. Also of concern: Facebook holds on to your data indefinitely after you quit the site. The BBC notes that Facebook is working with the privacy commission to resolve the issues, and quotes a Facebook spokesman thus: "Overall, we are looking for practical solutions that operate at scale and respect the fact that people come to share and not to hide." (Schneier recently blogged about research on "privacy salience," and cited Facebook's practices among others' as practical examples of how social networking sites have learned not to push the privacy issue in users' faces.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The NY Times has an article about how LifeStyle Lift, a company that does cosmetic surgery (facelifts) has reached a settlement with NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo over posting fake reviews on its site. It wasn't just a case of some "rogue" employees posting some fake positive reviews, either. The company apparently sent out emails to employees telling them to "devote the day to doing more postings on the Web as a satisfied client." It also created its own fake facelift review websites that (of course) reflected positively on themselves. The company has apologized and agreed to pay $300,000.

Now, it's clear that the company was doing a bad thing here, but there are some questions raised about this. Eric Goldman, who also notes that the company previously had sued a review site that had many negative reviews for trademark infringement (a clear misuse of trademark law to stifle free speech), points out that it's unclear what law was actually broken here. Andrew Cuomo claims that what the company did was illegal, but doesn't point to any specific law that says so. We've seen this before from Cuomo, who has publicly accused companies of breaking the law, without ever naming the law in question.

That said, it's clear in this case that LifeStyle Lift was a bad actor. The question is how to deal with it. Goldman suggests that review sites and consumers should deal with this themselves:

Ultimately, I believe the burden should largely rest on review websites to provide a forum that is sufficiently game-resistant that consumers can trust the information on the website.... In my opinion, the only real "solution" to fake consumer reviews is to teach consumers proper techniques for searching for information and evaluating the credibility of the information they consume. This is one of those crucial life-coping skills that everyone needs to learn at an early age, right up there with the three Rs and how to manage money. Education is the only scalable answer to the problems of information credibility in our complex information society.

For the most part, I agree... though I do wonder if there's potential to make a claim that the practices violate truth in advertising type laws or other consumer protection laws on deceptive practices. Of course, I would assume that it would then be an issue for the FTC, rather than the NY Atotorney General's office.

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Recently on Offworld we watched what surely must be the game trailer of the month: an extended look at animator Michel Gagne's upcoming Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet (above), with some of the most striking art direction and animation we've seen in games for some time, cut to black metal band Dimmu Borgir's "Blood Hunger Doctrine", which shouldn't work but absolutely fantastically does -- it's a must watch. Elsewhere we saw one fan's attempt to recreate Portal on the iPhone and the latest look at tiny-planet shooter Max Blastronaut, found the latest two gorgeously designed official Team Fortress 2 T-shirts, and listened to a wicked live remix of the theme song to The Silver Case -- the first PlayStation adventure game from No More Heroes and Killer7 creators Grasshopper Manufacture. Finally, we found a new on-demand publisher for budding board game designers that lets you piece together your pieces, upload your own artwork, and sell the game directly through the site, spent our first day on the Wii Sports Resort, which ended in broken glass and a trickle of blood, and our 'one shot's for the day: the gorgeous girls of Nintendo punk, a Metal Gear packing slip that's just a box, a fantastic new Darkstalkers montage, and, best of all, beautiful and very French pixels for what we genuinely hope is a new catburglar game.

alphadogg writes "The recession appears to have finally caught up with the video game market. Sales of video game hardware and software were down by around one-third in June compared to the same month last year. After initially showing positive growth as the US slid into recession, the latest figures mark the fourth month of declines and the largest year-on-year decline in almost 9 years. 'The first half of the year has been tough largely due to comparisons against a stellar first half performance last year, but still, this level of decline is certainly going to cause some pain and reflection in the industry,' said Anita Frazier, a games analyst with NPD Group. She added, 'The size of the decline could also point to consumers deferring limited discretionary spending until a big event (must-have new title, hardware price cut) compels them to spend.' The entire video game market in the US was worth $1.2 billion in June, down 31 percent from the same period last year, according to NPD Group."

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I've got two citrus trees in my back yard that thought they had something on me, height wise, but not any more! Check out Instructables user Thinkenstein's PVC fruit picker tutorial.

This fruit picker was designed for oranges, but it works for other fruit also. The body of the picker holds several oranges before needing to be emptied. That speeds up the picking process when there are lots of fruit.

The main feature of interest is the "J" shaped channel at the end of the pipe. One makes a spear-like thrust with the picker to get the fruit inside the pipe. The stem of the fruit follows through the "J" channel. A twist and pull of the picker put the stem at the end of the "J" slot, where a sharp razor blade cuts it. The fruit falls into the head of the picker.

Watch out grapefruits, here I come!

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After a recent post on the topic, I decided to experiment with a bit of IC decapping by way of propane torch. My first chip roast went relatively well allowing access to the precious chip within. I imagine a more evenly distributed & thorough torching would have made the hammer unecessary - but I was happy with it as a first try.

Now I find myself in need of better optics - anyone have any microscope recommendations?

[Note: seems there's some issues with text rendering in the above vid - hoping that comes off as 'stylistic' until remedied]

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Here's the flier for the upcoming Make: PDX meeting in Beaverton, OR.

Make: PDX

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Mike writes "Researchers at Korea's Advanced Institute of Science and Technology recently announced a breakthrough in OLED technology that reduces the ultra-thin lights' energy consumption by 75%. The discovery hinges upon a new method of creating 'surface plasmon enhanced' organic light emitting diodes that boast 1.75 times increased emission rates and double the light intensity." OLEDnet notes: "The finding was published in the April issue of Applied Physics Letters and the June 25 issue of Optics Express. It will be also featured as the research highlight of the August issue of Nature Photonics and Virtual Journal of Ultrafast Science."

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For many years, we've discussed the many challenges faced by countries in trying to recognize that "jurisdiction" on the internet isn't what they probably think it is. Many countries want to interpret internet jurisdiction as "if it's accessible here via the internet, it's covered by our laws." But it doesn't take much scenario planning to recognizing what a disaster would result from such an interpretation. Effectively that means that the most restrictive legislation anywhere in the world (think: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc.) would apply everywhere else.

That's why it's quite worrisome to find out that Belgium is trying to fine Yahoo for protecting its users' privacy and refusing to hand over user data to Belgian officials. Yahoo noted, accurately, that it does not have any operation in Belgium, and the data in question was held on US servers, not subject to Belgian law. On top of that, the US and Belgium have a good diplomatic relationship, such that such a data request could have gone through established diplomatic channels to make sure that US laws were properly obeyed as well. But, instead, Belgian officials just demanded the info from Yahoo's US headquarters directly, and then took the company to criminal court where the judge issued the fine. The Center for Democracy & Technology highlights the problems of not pushing back against this ruling:

The implications of this ruling are profound and far-reaching. Following the court's logic would subject user data associated with any service generally available online to the jurisdiction of all countries. It would also subject all companies that offer services generally available on the global Internet to the laws of all jurisdictions, potentially exposing individual employees to a variety of criminal sanctions.

The U.S. government should be paying close attention here: To understand how problematic this ruling is, we need only imagine how the governments of China, Iran, Vietnam or other repressive regime of your choice may decide that the precedent set here is one well worth following. Such actions undermine Belgium's moral authority since, after all, it would only be hypocritical for Western democracies to criticize such radically overbroad assertions of jurisdiction by other nations.

CDT suggests the US government should get involved and protest the Belgian court ruling:

In the present case, Yahoo! has done right by its users. The company asked law enforcement officials to follow established diplomatic and legal processes in order to gain access to user information. It also enlisted the support of its home government to facilitate the process. In return, Belgian authorities have flouted an existing MLAT agreement, slapped Yahoo! with a fine, and set a dangerous precedent that potentially imperils the privacy of all Internet users and invites abuse by bad actors.

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Summit writes "A scientist has claimed to have discovered a radioprotectant that all but eliminates acute radiation sickness even in cases of lethal doses of radiation in tests on rats and monkeys, when injected up to 72 hours after exposure. They also claim the drug, a protein, has no observed negative effects in humans. They have not irradiated any people just yet, but if this turns out to be true, it could mean everything from curing cancer to making manned interplanetary space expeditions feasible... not to mention treatment for radiation exposures in nuclear/radiological accidents/attacks. If this drug works, it would mean a true breakthrough as past experiments with radioprotectants were not particularly promising in any respect." The only source for the story at this time is an exclusive in YNet News, a site with the subtitle "Israel At Your Fingertips." Such a radioprotectant would be huge news for Israel. Make of it what you will.

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Skadrums71 took console modding in an unusual direction with this undead Super Nintendo. It appears those open wounds are infested with resistors … ewww(?) [via Geekologie]

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Photo credit: scrapthispack @ Flickr Note: Each week we'll be bringing you a roundup of fresh green topics from our friends over at TreeHugger. Enjoy! Packaging Design At Its Worst Poor packaging design and ridiculous examples of over-packaging come in all shapes and sizes, but it doesn't get much worse than these individually-wrapped bananas. Human Shrub Attacks Town Citizens of Colchester beware! Take to your houses. A creature from the swamps has been filling empty planters and baskets with brightly-coloured marigolds and begonias, last seen wandering the streets carrying a sign saying "Save the Roses." Your Eco-Wood Might Be Illegal Thinking of buying sustainably harvested wood from Brazil? Check the label, could be illegal wood passed off as eco-certified. 6 Ways To Defuse Anti-Cyclist Road Rage If you are a cyclist and the victim of Auto Road Rage, there are a number of things you can do to keep the peace. I like #5, don your best plumage.

Make some crazy musical noise with this 555 Timer-based Noisemusick Kit. Watch the video to see it in action and pick up your own at the Maker Shed.

In the Maker Shed:


In the Maker Shed: 555 Noisemusick Kit
To download The Noismusick Kit MP4 click here or subscribe in iTunes.

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anonymous cowpie sends word of a Utah startup that is about to introduce technology for writing DVDs that can be read for 1,000 years after being stored at room temperature. (Ordinary DVDs last anywhere from 3 to 12 years, on average.) The company, Millenniata, is said to be in the final stages of negotiation with Phillips over patent licensing and plans to begin manufacture in September. 1,000-year "M-ARC Discs" are expected to retail for $25-$30 at first, with the price coming down with volume. "Dubbed the Millennial Disk, it looks virtually identical to a regular DVD, but it's special. Layers of hard, 'persistent' materials (the exact composition is a trade secret) are laid down on a plastic carrier, and digital information is literally carved in with an enhanced laser using the company's Millennial Writer, a sort of beefed-up DVD burner. Once cut, the disk can be read by an ordinary DVD reader on your computer."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tom Phillipson, an Australian electronic musician, sent us a link to this YouTube video of his portable performance rig, housed in a Pelican case.

The setup consists of a modified Pelican case that enables the rack mounting of equipment. This means I can be setup and ready to play in under 4 minutes. Hardware includes Virus Snow, Virus C, M-Audio Audiophile, Numark CM200USB 5 Channel Mixer, Novation SL25 Compact, iPod + TouchOSC.

The custom patch bay includes XLR Lamp XLR & RCA OUT, RCA IN to Channel 5 fader, RCA IN to input on Virus C, RCA IN to line in on M-Audio.

He says it took about five months to complete and was all designed, constructed, and soldered together by himself.

Pelican Case MOD - Live Setup

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Raul654 writes "Last week, it was reported that the UK's National Portrait Gallery had threatened a lawsuit against an American Wikipedian for uploading pictures from the NPG's website to Wikipedia. The uploaded pictures are clearly in the public domain in the United States. (In the US, copies of public domain works are also in the public domain. UK law on the matter is unclear.) Since then, there have been several developments: EFF staff attorney Fred von Lohmann has taken on the case pro-bono; Eric Moeller, Wikimedia Foundation Deputy Director, has responded to the NPG's allegations in a post on the WMF blog; and the British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies has weighed in on the dispute in favor of the NPG."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've already been incredibly skeptical of the plans by certain cable companies to get TV networks to limit their content such that it can only be accessed online if you have a cable TV subscription. The whole thing is based on setting up artificial barriers and artificial scarcity to hold back the inevitable. Such plans never do well. They piss off users and drive them to alternatives. And, of course, you just knew that the likes of Comcast and Time Warner Cable would like screw up the execution too. Many folks (myself included) have been surprised at how well (for the most part) Hulu executed, but just leave it to big cable companies not to learn from Hulu's success.

Reports are coming out claiming that when the shows are put online for this "TV Everywhere" program they'll include the full slate of ads seen during the regular TV version. Studies have shown that this is a bad, bad idea. Having so many commercials -- especially on a platform (the internet) with so many other options, simply drives people away. Hulu learned very quickly to limit the number of ads to just a few -- and it's discovered that (1) people actually pay attention to them and (2) they can charge higher rates. One more sign that this TV Everywhere program is a disaster in the making.

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We've posted about the MultiMachine before, an open source, all-purpose machine shop uber-tool, designed with the developing world in mind. Pat Delany, the 74-year-old designer of the MultiMachine, is hoping to make it to Maker Faire Africa to demo the device.

There's a piece on the MFA Blog offering a vision of what the MultiMachine could mean to under-industrialized regions:

Wikipedia describes the MultiMachine as:

"...an all-purpose open source machine tool that can be built inexpensively by a semi-skilled mechanic with common hand tools, from discarded car and truck parts, using only commonly available hand tools and no electricity. Its size can range from being small enough to fit in a closet to one a hundred times that size. The MultiMachine can accurately perform all the functions of an entire machine shop by itself."

Lets think about this for a minute "an all purpose machine tool that...can accurately perform all the functions of an entire machine shop" built from discarded parts by semi-skilled mechanics (replace with jua kali workers, suame magazine fabbers etc.) What may be missing? A power source of sorts with the necessary torque and availability even in the most rural of areas. Perhaps coupling it with a system like the multifunctional platform would solve that problem.

(Maker Faire Africa will take place on August 14-16 in Accra, Ghana.)

The MultiMachine as a Roadmap

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Fujifilm has posted a firmware update for its Super CCD EXR sensor based FinePix F200EXR digital compact camera. Firmware v1.10 improves the performance of the camera's Super Intelligent Flash and adds four more languages in to its menu system.

There have been a few recent stories about jury members using Twitter, and courts have been trying to figure out how to deal with it. Well, over in Michigan, the Supreme Court has issued new rules for judges to tell jurors concerning their use of text messaging and other communication services. While it doesn't name Twitter specifically, it seems like the new rules are pretty clearly directed at jurors who might Twitter or use some other similar communication tool to explain what's happening in the case.

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bfire writes "Police officers in the Australian state of Queensland plan to conduct a 'wardriving' mission around select towns in an effort to educate citizens to secure their wireless networks. When unsecured networks are found, the Police will pay a friendly visit to the household or small business, informing them of the risks they are exposing themselves to. Officers also hope to return to surveyed areas within a month to see if users have fixed their security settings. The idea is modeled on another campaign where officers walk around railway stations checking cars have been locked, and leaving notes warning people of the dangers involved with leaving their vehicles unsecured."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What do you do if your kids are always leaving the refrigerator door open? Make a scrolling Arduino powered sign of course! It may be a bit overkill, but it's hard to miss the large format LED matrix scrolling in front of you. Next step, shock audio alert!

We have 5 kids in our household, and with that someone is always leaving the refrigerator door open. So we set out to built this next Arduino project so that when the door is left open, the LED panel will activate as a reminder to check and close the door.

Check out what he used to sketch his ideas on. Yep, it's a Maker's Notebook!

More about the Arduino refrigerator alert system

In the Maker Shed:

Make: Arduino

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Beat the heat this summer by setting a tray of raw cookies on your dashboard to bake in the stifling heat inside your car while you work -- you get a tray of warm, fresh-baked cookies to eat on the return commute!

It took about 2 1/2 hours for the cookies to bake completely. I ended up opening the car door shortly before the end of the baking period to check for doneness. This check has to be done manually, as there are no color indicators (such as brownness) to judge by because the sugar in the car cookies does not caramelize and brown like that of oven-baked cookies. So, I gently pressed the edges of the cookies to feel that they were firm and even more gently touched the center of one of the cookies to see that it held together and was not gooey (the center of the cookie should not be entirely firm, unless you are shooting for a crispy cookie). Finally, I slid one of the cookies around on the parchment paper - a good test for this type of baking because a baked cookie will release easily from the paper, while an unbaked cookie will stick in place. If your cookies are not done, add more baking time in 15 or 30 minute increments, as opposed to the 30 second or 1 minute increments you might add to an oven-baked cookie.

Car-Baked Chocolate Chip Cookies, step by step September 4 (via Making Light