Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with his partner Sally, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

First off, I love cars, I own an odd one, and, thanks in part to Make: magazine, I've even raced them a little bit. That's why I've deluded myself into thinking my opinion on this has any relevance here at all. So, if you don't mind, indulge me.

Recently, a study showed that people tended to prefer cars with "angry" faces. Auto designers have known this for a while, as the vast majority of cars available today have "faces" (you know, the front end arrangement of headlights, grille, and shapes that we tend to read like a face) that are at least aggressive, and at most absolutely freaking livid. This is across the board, too-- from entry-level cars to minivans to expensive sports sedans-- they all look like pissed-off turtle robots. There are exceptions, of course, but many of the most notable ones (New Beetle, Mini) are modern updates of vintage designs.

Now, I think there is absolutely a place for aggression, determination, and even a bit of anger in auto design-- some of my favorite cars use this as a major styling inspiration-- it's more about raw power and aggression becoming the default look for all cars that disturbs me.

Personally, the visual character I've always sought out in a car is a certain degree of plucky fun-- something upbeat, capable, but not so damn serious all the time. Now, I don't expect everyone to have the same tastes as me, but there seems to be a growing homogenization in auto design to favor these cars that look like douchebags. The fact that the statement everyone wants to make by the vehicle they drive is one of intimidation and power seems like it's the symptom of something unpleasant going on in our culture.

Maybe someone smarter than me can shed some light on this; I know people want to seem successful and powerful, to some degree, so maybe that's it. I don't think this is the case in all cultures, as Japan seems full of cars so confusingly cute you want to spit. Cars form part of the constant background of our visual lives, so it's worth taking a look at them every now and then and seeing how they make you feel. Lately, when I look around a parking lot, it feels more like I've stumbled into a den of demented robot land-sharks. If I had it my way, the land sharks would still be there, but there'd be a good assortment of other faces out there, some of which would be looking like they just want to chug some 87 octane, go fast and have fun. Oh, and maybe get your ass to work on time.

After admitting flat out yesterday that he downloaded and distributed songs using file sharing software, and that he lied about it, there wasn't a question of whether or not Joel Tenenbaum would be found guilty. In fact, the judge even said that the question wasn't even at issue. The only thing the jury had to work out was how much the damages would be, and they didn't take long at all, awarding $22,500 per song, or a total of $675,000. While a lot less than what the Jammie Thomas jury awarded, it's still a hefty chunk of change.

I've already expressed my distaste for how this trial was handled by Nesson and "Team Tenenbaum," but honestly, if he was going to just admit that he did it, it's unbelievable that he didn't just settle earlier when he had the chance. The only reason to go through with this is if the entire purpose is to create a later constitutional challenge on the statutory rates -- which many assume was Nesson's plan all along. However, if that's the case, is this really a good test case for that? Gleefully ignoring the law isn't the sort of thing that I think many judges/justices will find endearing. If this case does move up the appeals chain, one would hope that a better team of folks will handle Tenenbaum's appeal, and focus on the real legal issues. Of course, even before the appeal, it appears that Judge Gertner is planning to review whether or not the amount appears to be unconstitutional. It seems that particular ruling will be a lot more important than what the jury had to say.

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Dale Grover, of GO-Tech (Ann Arbor, MI), writes:

Developers, artists, and enthusiasts will display their ideas at the first Ann Arbor "Mini" Maker Faire, August 29, 2009, in downtown Ann Arbor. Applications are sought from people and groups with engaging, cool projects.

Entry Deadline: August 4, 2009. Space is limited--please submit your entry by the deadine!
Notification of Acceptance: Entries submitted by August 4th will be notified by August 8th.
Location: Neutral Zone, downtown Ann Arbor.
Hours: open to the public 10 AM - 5 PM Saturday August 29, 2009
Website: http://www.a2makerfaire.com
Entry Form: http://www.a2makerfaire.com/registration

Organized by members of the Ann Arbor tech and arts communities such as a2geeks and GO-Tech, this "Mini" Maker Faire is a small, local version of the huge Bay-area Faire, the newfangled fair that brings together science, art, craft, and engineering, and music, in a fun, energized, and exciting public forum. The aim is to inspire people of all ages to roll up their sleeves and become makers. This family-friendly event showcases the amazing work of all kinds of makers--anyone who is embracing DIY and wants to share their accomplishments with an appreciative audience.

We encourage you to join the fun and enter a project to exhibit. You can submit an entry through the web using the link described below.

Entries: The first step to participating in this Mini Maker Faire is to submit an entry that tells us about yourself and your project. Entries can be submitted from individuals as well as from groups such as hobbyist clubs and schools. Please provide a short description of what you make and what you will actually bring to the Mini Maker Faire. Please link to photographs or videos of what you make. Maker exhibits should be non-commercial. We particularly encourage exhibits that are interactive and that highlight the process of making things.

Maker Exhibit: Our standard setup for a Maker exhibit is roughly a 8' x 8' space. Use this space to display your work and/or demonstrate how you make something. Workshop/classes are also possible.

Additional presentation space (e.g., stage) may be available for presentations, performances, and demonstration workshops. We will ask accepted exhibitors for proposals to use this space on an hour-by-hour basis.

All proposals will be reviewed and we will notify makers of acceptance via email by August 8th (for entries received by the August 4th deadline).

NOTE: Makers whose entries are accepted will receive free registration to Mini Maker Faire. However, we cannot pay for transportation, accommodations, or other costs.

[The above photo is from a recent GO-Tech demo of lost-foam sand casting by Rick Chownyk.]

More information http://www.a2makerfaire.com

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NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The jury awarded the record company plaintiffs $675,000 in the Boston trial defended by Prof. Charles Nesson, SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum. I was not surprised, since exactly none of the central issues ever even came up in this trial. The judge had instructed the jurors that Mr. Tenenbaum was liable, and that their only task was to come up with a verdict that was more than $22,500 and less than $4.5 million. According to the judge, her reason for doing so was that, when on the stand, the defendant was asked if he admitted liability, and he said 'yes.' The lawyers among you will know that that was a totally improper question, and that the Court should not have even allowed it, much less based her holding upon the answer to it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last year, we wrote about a student at Carleton University in Canada who was arrested for hacking, after he wrote up a 16-page paper telling the school how poor its computer security was, and had some suggestions on how to fix it. It does sound like, in the process of figuring this out, the guy did hack into some accounts to prove that the vulnerability was there -- but there doesn't seem to be any evidence that he did anything with the access. And the fact that he wrote up a detailed paper on it and alerted the university certainly suggests his intentions were benevolent. So it was a bit disturbing that he was arrested. However, Allan Lussier-Meek writes in to let us know that charges against the guy were recently dropped after he agreed to go through a community service program. It's still not entirely clear why he needed to do that. This really does seem like blaming the messenger.

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Ficara's oscilloscope scrolling text display project uses just one PIC chip & no other components, well battery power supply of course :) -

Scrolling text on oscilloscope, built with only one component: the Microchip PIC16F628A. The characters to be displayed are stored in EEPROM (ascii codes from 0x20 to 0x5f so numbers, capital letters and special characters).
[…]
The oscilloscope will be set for 2mS/div on X axis and 1V/div on Y axis. One full screen contains 10 characters.

More info + source available here. [via Hacked Gadgets]

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coondoggie writes to mention that NASA's Green Flight Challenge is offering up to $1.5 million for an aircraft that can hit 200 passenger miles per gallon while maintaining 100 mph on a 200 mile flight. "The Challenge is intended to bring about the development and convergence of new technologies and innovations that can improve the community acceptance, efficiency, door-to-door speed, utility, environmental-friendliness, affordability and safety of future air vehicles, CAFÉ stated. Such technologies and innovations include, but are not limited to, bio-fueled propulsion, breakthroughs in batteries, motors, fuel-cells and ultra-capacitors that enable electric-powered flight, advanced high lift technologies for very short takeoff and landing distances, ultra-quiet propellers, enhanced structural efficiency by advances in material science and nano-technology and safety features such as vehicle parachutes and air-bags."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Once again, we get to see the entitlement culture at work -- this time over in France. JohnForDummies points us to the news that a French company, Bottin Cartographes, is suing Google over its Google Maps offering, because Google lets companies use its web mapping services for free (how dare they!). Bottin Cartographes, on the other hand, offers a similar service that it charges for. Apparently, it seems to think that "competition" itself is "unfair competition." Why should Google have to charge just because this other company has a bad business model? We're back to companies declaring felony interference with a business model.

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Sabre Runner writes to mention that a new British start-up, Aesir, has acquired the assets of a defunct drone company and is working on evolving a working model from several prototypes of "flying saucer" drones. "Aesir's first prototype, named 'Embler' [...] demonstrates the so-called 'Coanda effect,' where air speeds up as it 'sticks' to a curved surface. Aesir's drones take advantage of the Coanda effect to direct air down, away from the drone, boosting lift. Aesir doesn't appear to have any paying customers yet — and is reportedly bankrolled by a single investor."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This evening we recorded the sixth Bad Hair Day podcast. (not to be confused with actual BHDs which number in the tens of thousands)

You can find the show page on the BHD site.

The feed is handy for subscriptions.

And the MP3 if you're in a hurry and just want to listen.

Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with his partner Sally, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

Before computers became small, cheap, and reliable enough for this purpose, people still had the desire to stand in front of armoire-sized cabinets, stare into a glass panel, and pretend to do things they normally didn't do, like kill aliens, drive like a madman, or work in a junkyard. The way they did these things was with wonderful, complicated electromechanical arcade games.



These electromechanical games are incredible contraptions, using every kind of trick-- projections, spinning drums, remotely articulated models, whirring discs, mirrors, lights-- to give the illusions of speed, action, explosions, distance, and more. Looking at them, it's amazing they worked so well in such a high-abuse public environment. These are real engineering gems, long gone, and very rare now. Luckily, there's a bunch of videos out there, since stills really don't do these justice: Speedway, Hill Climb, Invaders, Haunted House. Enjoy!

From the Rules of Thumb website:

A deep oil well has the same proportions as a human hair ten feet long. -- Harold E. Haynes

Picturing an oil well

Over at the mightyOhm, Jeff Keyzer has a guest blogger, his friend Tony. Tony's first project posted is (part 1) of this awesome diamond-bladed precision chop saw he built with parts from hard drives. The motor, pivot bearing, and motor driver are all from old drives. The blade is a surplus wafer-dicing blade, 300µm thick!

Tony's Diamond Chop Saw (Part 1)

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Jeremy A. Hansen writes "Bruce Schneier gives us an update on some ongoing cryptanalysis of AES. 'Over the past couple of months, there have been two new cryptanalysis papers on AES. The attacks presented in the paper are not practical — they're far too complex, they're related-key attacks, and they're against larger-key versions and not the 128-bit version that most implementations use — but they are impressive pieces of work all the same. This new attack, by Alex Biryukov, Orr Dunkelman, Nathan Keller, Dmitry Khovratovich, and Adi Shamir, is much more devastating. It is a completely practical attack against ten-round AES-256.' While ten-round AES-256 is not actually used anywhere, Schneier goes on to explain why this shakes some of the cryptology community's assumptions about the security margins of AES."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over the years I've heard of a few different companies that have done variations on what Spinvox appears to be doing: using a combination of both speech recognition and cheap offshore labor to convert audio voicemail messages into text. But, Mark alerts us that Spinvox is trying to patent the process of using humans to transcribe messages (you can see the patent application here). It seems pretty ridiculous that the concept of transcribing a voicemail message could get a patent -- and one hopes that such a patent no longer has any chance under the current Bilski rules, but you never know. It's quite telling, though, how the company responds when asked about the patent:

"Generic patents help us build different combinations -- i.e.: Humans interacting with machines -- to prevent any other companies doing similar things in the long term."

In other words, they're blatantly admitting it's got nothing at all to do with actually innovating, but getting enough of a patent thicket to have different combinations that prevent anyone else from doing things.

Separately, it's a bit odd, but mixed in at the end of the BBC article is a small highlight of one potential problem with using humans to transcribe voicemails: some of the Pakistani transcribers apparently haven't been paid by Spinvox, and attached a message to one of the transcriptions, telling the recipient of their plight and asking for help.

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ADiamond writes "There is no Wi-Fi allergy. The English DJ claiming a Wi-Fi sensitivity, chronicled earlier, was a PR stunt to promote his new album. It would appear that the stunt was highly successful, appearing in multiple high-profile media outlets like The Sun, The Telegraph, and Fox News. The article at Ars goes on to discuss the evidence, or lack-thereof, of electromagnetic spectrum sensitivity."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with his partner Sally, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

This article at National Geographic gives a good gist of what's going on: apparently, regular old blue food coloring, like the stuff you find in Gatorade or M&Ms, has been found to reduce spinal cord trauma and inflammation, leading to at least a partial reversal of paralysis, at least in some mice. And, unlike other treatments, there's no toxic effects.

And the best part? They turned blue! Now there's hope for anyone hoping to both regain use of paralyzed limbs and a desire to look like a really cold guy in a cartoon.

I've often discussed the original constitutional reasoning behind patents and copyright law, specifically the phrase we all know in Article 1, Section 8:

The Congress shall have Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

From this, I still believe it's quite clear that if copyright or patents are used in a way that does not "promote the progress" of those things, then it is unconstitutional to use copyright or patent law in that way. Not everyone agrees with me, of course. However, I've mostly focused on the "promote the progress" side of things, but haven't delved as much into the details of "science and useful Arts." I have read up extensively on what the founders meant by that, which can be simplified as "science" meaning scientific publishing/books and "useful Arts" meaning inventions. There's also a fair bit of evidence that the real focus of the founders was on patents, rather than copyright. It wasn't that they weren't concerned at all about copyright (they were), but that the bigger issue was patents, and copyright was a sort of "throw in" at the behest of some vocal authors, along with some remembrance of states' fights over local copyright policies. But, on the whole, it was patents that were considered of much more importance to progress than copyrights.

And, not only were copyrights initially for a "limited time" (14-years) but the first federal copyright law in the US limited copyright to books, maps and charts. Tom Bell points out that, based on this, and some other aspects of the early intentions of the founders, you can make an argument that copyright law, as per the constitution, was never intended for things like art and music. After all, what does art or music have to do with "science"? And if it really was intended to cover art and music, then why didn't the founders have it cover music that was being composed at the time? Perhaps it was because they realized that music and paintings had nothing to do with science, and the Constitutional clause is only limited to promoting the progress of science and the useful arts (and, again, in the parlance of the day, "useful arts" was inventions). As Bell states:

Here as elsewhere, acquiescence to long-accepted practices has dulled us to the Constitution's bracingly straightforward words. We should read them anew and reflect that the Founding generation did not evidently think that granting statutory privileges to such purely artistic creations as romantic operas or pretty pictures would promote the progress of both science and the useful arts. Furthermore, most citizens today would, if presented with the Constitution's plain language rather than the convoluted arguments of professional jurisprudes, probably say the same thing about pop songs, blockbuster movies, and the like. That is certainly not to say that purely expressive works lack value. They may very well promote such important goals as beauty, truth, and simple amusement. The Constitution requires that copyright promote something else, however--"the Progress of Science and useful Arts"--and a great many works now covered by copyright cannot plausibly claim to do both.

Bell is interpreting the Constitutional clause in an even stricter manner -- suggesting that any work covered by patents or copyright needs to promote both progress in science and in the useful arts, which is an even higher bar, though I'm not sure I'm convinced it was meant to be both. Also, many would retort that the Constitution grants the Congress the ability to determine if such monopolies promote the progress of science and the useful arts -- and as long as Congress says they do, then we should consider that they do (no matter how wrong they might be). For a variety of reasons, that line of thinking is problematic, but it is the line that the Supreme Court has taken with copyright before (such as in the Eldred case). I'm not necessarily convinced of Bell's thinking here, but it's certainly a point worth pondering (and discussing).

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An anonymous reader writes "The St. Ansgar, Iowa school system is considering buying cell-phone jamming equipment for up to $5000 if it is deemed legal. The use of the equipment would be suspended in the case of an emergency, but one has to wonder if they would be quick enough to shut it down should an emergency arise. 'A Federal Communications Commission notice issued in 2005 says the sale and use of transmitters that jam cellular or personal communications services is unlawful.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Susan Blackmore, author of the excellent book The Meme Machine, has suggested that beyond genes and memes, there is a new evolutionary "replicator" on the scene. She doesn't have a name for it, but it's related to the difference she sees between memes and digital information. From New Scientist:

Memes work differently from genes, and digital information works differently from memes, but some general principles apply to them all. The accelerating expansion, the increasing complexity, and the improving interconnectivity of all three are signs that the same fundamental design process is driving them all. Road networks look like vascular systems, and both look like computer networks, because interconnected systems outcompete isolated systems. The internet connects billions of computers in trillions of ways, just as a human brain connects billions of neurons in trillions of ways. Their uncanny resemblance is because they are doing a similar job.

So where do we go from here? We humans were vehicles for the first replicator and copying machinery for the second. What will we be for the third? For now we seem to have handed over most of the storage and copying duties to our new machines, but we still do much of the selection, which is why the web is so full of sex, drugs, food, music and entertainment. But the balance is shifting.

"Evolution's third replicator: Genes, memes, and now what?"

When I first saw this, I didn't think it seemed like such a bright idea -- maybe because of how it apparently beats the crap out of the tin and because this guy carries a lot of keys. I only carry three and a flat LED keyfob flashlight. And I always carry a tiny-tin Altoids box with my meds in it. I'm always looking to consolidate the contents of what I carry -- cut down on that chipmunk-cheeks pocket bulge -- so maybe I'll experiment.

Keychain box

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Bill Maher is seriously funny in this LA Times op-ed about the growing threat of the birther movement. (Maher wrote this before poll results came out showing that a majority of Republicans either don't believe or aren't sure Obama was born in the United States).

This flap might be a deluded right-wing obsession that is a total waste of time, but so was Whitewater, and look where that ended up. A handful of Republican operatives, enraged at Bill Clinton's unprecedented economic growth and budget surpluses, found a woman named Paula Jones, which led to a woman named Monica Lewinsky, which gave me enough material to eventually be able to buy a big house in Bel-Air. Which I'm still conflicted about.

More recently we had the Swift Boat allegations against John Kerry, in which Kerry was accused of volunteering to serve in Vietnam so he could jump in front of a bullet so he could get a medal and then throw it away to satisfy his urge to insult real Americans. This was so stupid that Kerry refused to even discuss it.

And we all know how well that worked out.

No matter how dumb, the people who are questioning whether Obama was born in the U.S. could eventually cause real problems.

UPDATE: This graph shows the geographical breakdown of birthers and fact-based thinkers.

A London-based shrink named Dr Richard Graham wants to create an all-psychiatrist guild for World of Warcraft to treat "addiction" to the game, in the game. And he wants them all to get free accounts.

He has called on Blizzard Entertainment, the company that makes World of Warcraft, to waive or discount the costs associated with joining the game so that therapists can more easily communicate with at-risk players in their preferred environment.

"We will be launching this project by the end of the year. I think it's already clear that psychiatrists will have to stay within the parameters of the game. They certainly wouldn't be wandering around the game in white coats and would have to use the same characters available to other players," said Dr Graham.

"Of course one problem we're going to have to overcome is that while a psychiatrist may excel in what they do in the real world, they're probably not going to be very good at playing World of Warcraft.

"We may have to work at that if we are going to get through to those who play this game for hours at end."

Addiction therapists signing up to World of Warcraft (via Futurismic)

brumgrunt writes "After three decades of speculation, original Alien director Ridley Scott has signed on to the new Fox sequel. 'Nothing is known about the set-up of the new movie, except that chronologically it precedes the plight of the Nostromo. Since it's obviously going to involve the human race [...] Writer Jon Spaihts successfully pitched to Fox and Scott Free Productions, and is working on the script.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This handsome chair looks like a prototype you'd find in the workshop of a mid-century furniture designer. Instructions are at Instructables.

How-To: Rubber hose chair

A 66-year-old woman lived with her dead husband for two months in their home near Copenhagen. The man had cancer and his death was only discovered by authorities after family members called police. The Copenhagen Post reports that the "woman will be charged with failing to ensure medical assistance for her husband." "Woman lives two months with dead husband" (via Fortean Times)

Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci's wonderful anthology of nerdy fiction and comics, Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd was a great read: the short fiction ran the gamut from soul-searing angst to high comedy and all the territory in between. Of particular note were Scott Westerfeld's "Definition Chaos" (a story about a gun-toting gamer and his nutsy ex-girlfriend transporting $80,000 by train to Florida to pay for a con's hotel deposit); Garth Nix's "The Quiet Knight" (a disabled LARPer finds his true self in boffer armor); Lisa Yee's "Everyone But You" (a baton-twirling midwesterner reinvents herself in a Hawaiian high school); Kelly Link's "Secret Identity" (the book's top piece; a novella about a girl who travels to New York to hook up with a man she met in an MMORPG, despite the fact that doing so will reveal to him that she has lied about her identity); and Libba Bray's heartbreaking "It's Just a Jump to the Left" (a girl discovers she can't escape her life at Rocky Horror)

Intercut with the stories is a series of charming one-page comics drawn by Hope Larson and Brendan Lee "Scott Pilgrim" O'Malley.

All told, Geektastic is a cliche-busting, smart, and funny book about celebrating your inner mutant. Highly recommended.

Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd

In January of 2001, word began to leak that Dean Kamen was working on something amazing that would change the world. If you were paying attention to tech news, you may recall it was everywhere. There was some book deal about it, and we were told that it was going to change the way cities were laid out and would absolutely revolutionize transportation. It had the blessing of Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and John Doerr and was amazing. But no one knew what it was. Hell, it didn't even have a name. It was referred to either as IT or Ginger -- and there were all sorts of rumors about what IT might be. Eventually, of course, IT was revealed as the Segway. And while it was sorta kinda maybe cool, it hardly came close to living up to its original billing. It was expensive and not really all that useful for most people. Segway, the company, has gone through a merry-go-round of new CEOs and new strategies, none of which have gotten it out of a niche market.

Recently, in talking about how the Netflix Prize helped demonstrate the value of openness and collaboration when it came to innovation, rather than hoarding and taking the "inventor-knows-best" attitude towards things, Mark Blafkin of the Association for Competitive Technology (a tech industry lobbying group who tends to be a patent system supporter) took exception to what we said about the value of openness and collaboration instead of focusing on patents, by noting that Dean Kamen has also put a lot of effort into collaboration and prizes to award innovation, but also is a strong believer in patents (and, actually, making them stronger).

In response, I pointed out that Kamen's thinking on patents may actually explain part of the reason why Segway has struggled so much over the years. In believing so strongly in patents, it shows someone who tends to believe invention is more important than ongoing innovation, even as there's a growing body of evidence to suggest the exact opposite is true. Invention is the original idea, but innovation is an ongoing process of taking a product and adjusting and adapting it to the market. And we've been seeing more and more studies that note the innovation part is so much more important in determining the success and the economic contribution of a product.

So it seems like perfect timing to see Paul Graham's recent essay about why the Segway failed to change the world. He focuses mainly on the fact that the Segway basically makes people look dorky -- and that a better design might have helped more people find it enticing. But at the end he notes:

Curiously enough, what got Segway into this problem was that the company was itself a kind of Segway. It was too easy for them; they were too successful raising money. If they'd had to grow the company gradually, by iterating through several versions they sold to real users, they'd have learned pretty quickly that people looked stupid riding them. Instead they had enough to work in secret. They had focus groups aplenty, I'm sure, but they didn't have the people yelling insults out of cars. So they never realized they were zooming confidently down a blind alley.

Exactly. Again, this highlights the difference between invention (believing that you alone have come up with the perfect idea for a great product) and innovation (the ongoing iterative process of going back and forth with the market to test and understand what the market wants and how to make your product meet their needs). By focusing so much on the invention, Segway missed the real opportunity for innovation, and that's caused all sorts of problems for the company.

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Who needs to explore outer space when our own world has so many wonderfully weird animals!

Freakish And Odd Creatures

The Jetlev-Flyer is a tethered jet pack that uses water instead of rocket fuel. The pressurized water is pumped up a hose attached to a custom Jet-Ski. From Popular Science:

It took four prototypes and more than 200 flight tests to get it right. But now, with a mere 30-pound pack, the Jetlev-Flyer is almost ready for production, generating 430 pounds of thrust and letting (Raymond) Li fly forward at 22 mph up to three stories high. His next unit will get up to 35 mph. Want one? Late this year, the craft will go on sale—just be ready to dish out close to 130 grand.

"A Water-Powered Jetpack"

jonk689 writes "Let's face it, System Administrators get no respect 364 days a year. This is the day that all fellow System Administrators across the globe, will be showered with large piles of cash and expensive sports cars in appreciation of their diligent work. But seriously, we are asking for a nice token gift and some public acknowledgment. It's the least you could do."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with his partner Sally, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

1. If you were designing your own superhero costume, how would you accessorize?
a. Cape
b. Scarf
c. Sidekick
d. Gun
e. Stack of fliers saying you are a superhero


2. What part of Canada would you most like to sleep with?
a. Victoria
b. Regina
c. Moosejaw
d. Calgary
e. Prince Edward Island


3. Burrito is to Chimichanga as
a. Jonathan Silverman is to Matthew Broderick
b. Gary Busey is to Nick Nolte
c. Paul Rieser is to Richard Lewis
d. Kelsey Grammar is to anyone else with an enormous freaking forehead


4. What's the worst thing you can say to a mugger?
a. Mom?
b. Don't forget to check my other shoe.
c. I don't think you're man enough to fire that gun
d. Now that you mention it, there may be something in my rectum


5. Your butler tells you that your yacht cleaner will take two hours longer than expected. What do you do?
a. Shoot them both in the face.
b. Shoot just the yacht cleaner in the face, cause hey, it's not your butler's fault.


6. You fall into a space-time portal and land in Hitler's 7th birthday party. What do you do?
a. Devote the rest of your life to mentoring him, so that he'll grow to be a right and just member of society.
b. Molest the shit out of him.

(Thanks, Van Gogh-Goghs!)

Every time we post a story at Techdirt about the iPhone, we see the comments rapidly bifurcating into a religious battle between the "fanboy idiots who make excuses for the useless little iPhone like a beaten wife just because it's trendy and shiny" and the guys who "whine because [the iPhone doesn't do] everything and cost nothing" (this is what the two sides are saying, not us). It's sad to see such an interesting, seminal device be reduced to "nyah, nyah" levels of discourse. Our position on the iPhone is hopefully more objective. No, it's not perfect, lists of gripes are frequently made, but overall it's the phone to beat.

Recently, we've decried Apple's autocratic governance of their App Store. But don't let that mislead you into thinking we're down on the whole product. The iPhone is a turning-point device, which changed the usability level of the mobile Internet. All of a sudden, the mass market - who until then had no interest in muddling with clumsy mobile data services - was able to connect to the web on their phone, browse sites, download apps, and truly realize the promise of "anytime, anyplace, any info". The phone also revolutionized the mobile phone UI. While the other handset vendors developed each application and hardware in its own silo, Apple designed it all as a single whole experience, also sketching-in the content and application ecosystem. And it's been no shock that good user experience matters a whole lot! Lastly, the iPhone shattered the iron grip carriers had on handset vendors, and the phones their customer's eventually owned. Apple yanked some of that control away, and their more open (than carriers) approach has blown open the barn doors of developer creativity. The iPhone sales figures and data usage stats are in. Its a success. So if you are one of the people that says the iPhone is nothing more than a shiny toy, you need to come back to reality.

So why do so many criticize the iPhone, if it's so great? I think it's because they make the classic marketing mistake of thinking "It's all about ME." It isn't. The iPhone haters see the limitations (hard keys, cut/paste, tethering...) of the phone, and they focus on how the phone doesn't have any tech breakthrough or meet THEIR specific needs. But the mass market is what really matters in business. Is the mass market even aware of the limitations of their iPhone? If you told one of them, would they care? They would tell you that, on the contrary, their iPhone has not limited them, it has empowered them to access the mobile services and networks that have been "available" since 2000, but were blocked by poor user experiences and walled gardens.

I liken the whole debate to the stick-shift versus automatic transmission debate decades ago (still in the EU). True motoring aficionados could not accept the dumbed-down, lazy automatic transmission. They insisted on doing the work themselves. It was harder, but it was "the only way to truly 'drive' the automobile". Tough luck if it put driving out of the reach of some. By now, the mass market has decided that "easier" trumps a religious argument about "real feel for the road". Good products take people to their destination as easily as possible. The market has spoken: Getting there is not half the fun.

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

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xanthos writes "Sir Richard Branson was at the annual Experimental Aircraft Assoc Fly-in to show off EVE (previously known as White Knight Two), the launch vehicle for Virgin Galactic's commercial space operation. Test flights for the vehicle are slated for next year with the first paying passenger's going up in 2011. What surprised me was the following from the article: 'So many people have signed up already, Whitehorn said, that the company has collected $40 million in deposits with orders to build five spaceships to meet the demand.' Will this mean that the $200k price tag may be dropping?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This may be your last chance to buy the T-shirt my daughter Sarina and I designed for Woot. It's ranked at 26 and if it doesn't make it to the top 20 by next week it'll go out of production. A steal at $15!

About a year ago Marc linked to the original version of this tutorial on my personal page. This is a revised version with more detailed and user-friendly instructions.

The idea here is to use a simple, inexpensive concrete mixture to cast decorative containers using common trash items as sacrificial mold elements. Styrofoam packing inserts, in particular, are available in an endless variety of shapes; the trick is to cultivate an eye for the negative spaces that are molded into these inserts, and set aside the interesting ones to use as outer forms. Inner forms, obviously, should be simpler, because the inside of the pot is not going to be visible.

Tools:

• Wheelbarrow or other mixing bin
• Shovel or other mixing tool
• Tamping rod, e.g. 1.5" wooden dowel or closet rod, about 12" long
• Knife or other metal straightedge
• Old towel, preferably undyed
• Saw or plastic pipe cutter
• Hammer
• Punch

Materials:

• Styrofoam packing insert with interesting negative space
• Beverage cup, food container, or other suitable inner mold
• Play sand
• Portland cement
• Water
• Plastic garbage bag
• Short section(s) 1" pipe or other suitable drainage hole mandrel

---

Step 1: Gather your mold elements

I used a Styrofoam block I found discarded in a hallway in the UT chemistry department as an outer mold. It contains four identical cylindrical recesses and was originally used to package 4L glass solvent bottles. The inner forms are nested polyethylene tubs of the type provided at many grocery stores to package bulk dry goods.

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Carrie McLaren is a guest blogger at Boing Boing and coauthor of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. She lives in Brooklyn, the former home of her now defunct Stay Free! magazine.

I was all set to post the Philharmonicas doing Raymond Scott's "Powerhouse" but just realized that Mark already did. Fie! Well, here's an equally swank soundie: the Don Redman Orchestra featuring a curious duo known as Red and Struggie, who = the bomb. Totally hilarious. (Both of these appeared on a 1994 MGM swing compilation.)

Stupified writes "High school student Justin Gawronski is suing Amazon for deleting his Kindle copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four (complaint, PDF), because doing so destroyed the annotations he'd created to the text for class. The complaint states: 'The notes are still accessible on the Kindle 2 device in a file separate from the deleted book, but are of no value. For example, a note such as "remember this paragraph for your thesis" is useless if it does not actually reference a specific paragraph.' The suit, which is seeking class action status, asks that Amazon be legally blocked from improperly accessing users' Kindles in the future and punitive damages for those affected by the deletion. Nothing in Amazon's EULA or US copyright law gives them permission to delete books off your Kindle, so this sounds like a plausible suit."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yesterday, we had the story of the incredibly popular viral wedding video, talking about how the music in that video, despite being over a year old and being sung by someone with massive reputation problems (Chris Brown, who assaulted his then girlfriend), was suddenly back in both the iTunes and Amazon top 5 downloads, almost entirely because of the video. Soon after the post went up, we saw that Google had just put up its own post highlighting it as a case study of a copyright holder monetizing an opportunity. Basically, Google allowed Sony Music to:

claim and monetize the song, as well as to start running Click-to-Buy links over the video, giving viewers the opportunity to purchase the music track on Amazon and iTunes. As a result, the rights holders were able to capitalize on the massive wave of popularity generated by "JK Wedding Entrance Dance" -- in the last week, searches for "Chris Brown Forever" on YouTube have skyrocketed, making it one of the most popular queries on the site.

But... as some in our comments began to wonder, shouldn't the folks in the video (or, perhaps the person who shot it) get some of that monetizing as well? After all, if we base our thinking on traditional RIAA-style thinking, the whole reason why there are suddenly so many new sales and renewed interest in Brown and this song is entirely due to this wedding party and whoever shot the video. Now, they might not want or care about the money, but just the fact that Google is hyping up the monetizing of the video... doesn't something seem wrong that the actual copyright holder of the video in question isn't getting any of that money? At the very least, shouldn't there be some sort of "referral bonus" or some such?

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Carrie McLaren is a guest blogger at Boing Boing and coauthor of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. She lives in Brooklyn, the former home of her now defunct Stay Free! magazine.

It's a long (or, rather, uninteresting) story but our book, Ad Nauseam, doesn't have an index. I was hoping that Amazon's "search inside" feature could help fill that gap, but our publisher says it takes a while for Amazon to make it functional.

So I've gone ahead and made an index myself. I have no idea how to make an index, frankly, and there are no doubt a number of typos, but for those of you who have bought the book or are considering buying it, it's better than nothing. And if anyone wants to list typos in the comments, I'll update the index accordingly. Thanks.

Link (pdf)

In the history of the company, there's only been one Nintendo-published game that has been overtly about "fighting and fucking": GameCube game Animal Leader (Cubivore in the states), and it's the subject of Margaret Robertson's latest One More Go column, where she peers into Nintendo's heart of darkness and prods at some of the company's more whitewashed ugly truths (see: the true relationship between Mario Bros' Bowser and Peach). Elsewhere, we see artist Jude Buffum reflect on the financial crisis also through Mario's lens (and made an open plea for more financial system gaming), saw how Shigeru Miyamoto lifted ancient Japanese legend when creating Super Mario, and wolf-whistled at PopCap's Plants Vs. Zombies doing an absolutely phenomenal job of parodying the ubiquitous bosomy banner ads for free-to-play game Evony (above). We also took a guided tour through the Nintendo DS's new Facebook Connect features, saw more mind-melting footage of "type anything" DS puzzle game Scribblenauts and Left 4 Dead invading The Sims, found new official Monkey Island fashion, and watched the latest fantastically expressive 50x50 pixel video from Garth + Ginny. And, for the final few that haven't seen it, we also saw the first concept art of the Magic Kingdom's steampunk dystopia in Disney's upcoming Wii project Epic Mickey, and our 'one shots': an ode to Fallout's Nuka-Cola Quantum, the domestic bliss of Mr. and Mrs. Pac.

My pal Ross Connard is a Junior at the Pratt Institute and has a student job as a technician in the school's Fine Arts Metal Shop. The shop has a cool tradition of students building their own equipment and leaving it behind for subsequent generations of students to use. Shown above is a custom stencil Ross made to mark the positions of fire extinguishers on the concrete shop floors. Below is a custom tool rack he designed and fabricated from bulk steel and plywood. I can only imagine how great it must be to work in a space where every piece of equipment was built with love and respect by users like myself.

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Keldrin_1 writes "Researchers Alfredo Ortega and Anibal Sacco, from Core Security Technologies, have discovered a vulnerability in the 'Computrace LoJack for Laptops' software. This is a BIOS-level application that calls home for instructions in case the laptop is ever lost or stolen. However, what the application considers 'home' is subject to change. This allows the creation of malware capable of 'infecting the BIOS with persistent code that survive reboots and reflashing attempts.' Computers from Dell, Lenovo, HP, Toshiba, Asus, and others may be affected."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

how to pick the right gnome
arborsmith studios
garden zombie
led garden lamps
strange fences
die screaming...

Permalink for this edition. Web Zen is created and curated by Frank Davis, and re-posted here on Boing Boing with his kind permission. Web Zen Home and Archives, Store, Twitter. (Image courtesy Eric Curry. Thanks Frank!)

Awesome. (via @rmack)

A bunch of folks have been sending in Neil McAllister's writeup at InfoWorld about how Wolfram Alpha, the incredibly overhyped "knowledge engine" (that, in my experience doesn't work very well) is claiming copyright on all of its output, which raises questions about what would happen if others did the same thing:

In other words, Wolfram Research is claiming that each page of results returned by the Wolfram Alpha engine is a unique, copyrightable work, like a report or term paper. That makes Wolfram Alpha different not just from classic search engines, but from most software. While software companies routinely retain sole ownership of their software and license it to users, Wolfram Research has taken the additional step of claiming ownership of the output of the software itself. It's a bold assertion, and one that could have significant ramifications for the software industry as a whole.

It really depends on the output, but in many cases I have trouble believing the output really is copyrightable. After all, you cannot copyright facts and (in the US, at least) you can't copyright a collection of facts, either. The article doesn't discuss that, and seems to assume that the output may be copyrightable, but I would think that it would need to be significantly more unique and have additional creativity before it could be covered (and then, only the unique parts would be covered). Still, there may be a legal gray area, as McAllister notes:

Suppose you have an Excel spreadsheet full of numbers that you input, but then you ask Excel to generate a series of complex graphs based on rules, formulae, and templates designed by Microsoft. Or what about pivot tables? What about mash-ups or tools like Mozilla Jetpack? If unique presentations based on software-based manipulation of mundane data are copyrightable, who retains what rights to the resulting works?

I'm guessing that the graphs still wouldn't be copyrightable, as they'd really just be the same collection of data, but you could see a mathematically illiterate court finding otherwise...

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Instructables user wholman made this chair from some plywood, a rubber air hose, and some long pieces of all-thread.

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We hope you and your family are having fun learning how to solder. If you are, take some pictures and load them to the MAKE Flickr pool. The first five people who load family soldering pics and tag them "MAKEcation" will get a free Maker's Notebook.

To help give you some ideas for projects you can do, we've put together some of our favorites from the site. We tried to pick ones that are easy enough that a beginner can handle, but where you also get something useful (and/or fun) for your effort. If you are working on some soldering projects with the family, please tell us what they are in the comments.

Make a pocket LED cube - Weekend Projects Podcast
Make a pocket LED cube - Weekend Project PDFcast

Tiny Cylon Kit (one of the three kits in the Teach Your Family to Solder bundle)

MintyBoost USB Charger Kit v2.0

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Al writes "The Fermi Paradox focuses on the existence of advanced civilizations elsewhere in the galaxy. If these civilizations are out there — and many analyses suggest the galaxy should be teaming with life — why haven't we seen them? Carlos Cotta and Álvaro Morales from the University of Malaga in Spain investigate another angle by considering the speed at which a sufficiently advanced civilization could colonize the galaxy. Various analyses suggest that using spacecraft that travel at a tenth of the speed of light, the colonization wavefront could take some 50 million years to sweep the galaxy. Others have calculated that it may be closer to 13 billion years, which may explain ET's absence. Cotta and Morales study how automated probes sent ahead of the colonization could explore the galaxy. If these probes left evidence of a visit that lasts for 100 million years, then there can be no more than about 10 civilizations out there."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India's ailing private aviation companies have agreed to suspend all domestic flights for one day -- Aug 18 -- to see if they can coerce the government into bailing them out.

No private airlines to fly on Aug 18

Chet sez, "Steampunk Monkey Nation is a 20 card set inspired by turn-of-the-century cigarette card design. These portraits, with biographies on the reverse, explore an alternate world of Simian Steampunk."

Chet Phillips Illustration Steampunk Monkey Nation (Thanks, Chet!)

Barence writes "Gary McKinnon has lost the judicial review of his case, dealing a potentially fatal blow to his hopes of avoiding extradition to the US. Lord Justice Stanley Burnton and Mr. Justice Wilkie dismissed the review at the Royal Courts of Justice. The review had been assembled to determine whether the diagnosis of McKinnon's Asperger's Syndrome had any bearing on the Home Office's original decision to extradite him to the US. Asperger's sufferers often exhibit obsessive behavior and social naivety, which McKinnon's lawyers have long offered as mitigation. His legal team now has 28 days to appeal the verdict, and his lawyer, Karen Todners, has indicated they may consider taking his case before the US Supreme Court. Last year we discussed a full profile of the hacker published by the BBC." Sophos's survey of 550 IT professionals found that 71% believe McKinnon should not be extradited.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Barence writes "Gary McKinnon has lost the judicial review of his case, dealing a potentially fatal blow to his hopes of avoiding extradition to the US. Lord Justice Stanley Burnton and Mr. Justice Wilkie dismissed the review at the Royal Courts of Justice. The review had been assembled to determine whether the diagnosis of McKinnon's Asperger's Syndrome had any bearing on the Home Office's original decision to extradite him to the US. Asperger's sufferers often exhibit obsessive behavior and social naivety, which McKinnon's lawyers have long offered as mitigation. His legal team now has 28 days to appeal the verdict, and his lawyer, Karen Todners, has indicated they may consider taking his case before the US Supreme Court. Last year we discussed a full profile of the hacker published by the BBC." Sophos's survey of 550 IT professionals found that 71% believe McKinnon should not be extradited.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rose M. Welch points us to a wonderful writeup by King Kaufman at Salon (whose sports column I miss -- but the value of his work about the future of journalism more than makes up for it), concerning the news that Time Magazine used a stock photo it bought from iStockPhoto for a recent cover story. The photographer whose photograph was used was thrilled (as were some of the other photographers). However, there was also a group of photographers who went on to berate him (the photographer) for getting screwed over by a "multi-billion dollar company." Except, of course, they've missed the point. The photograph had already been taken (it didn't take any more work by the photographer to do this) and he was perfectly happy to get money he wouldn't have received otherwise -- even if it was a small amount. From there, Kaufman goes into beautiful beat down mode, and explains how the complaining photographers are flat-out wrong... while also comparing the situation to journalists who say the answer is to just put up a paywall and magically people will pay. It's so good, that I'm quoting a large portion of it, but go read the whole thing as well (and then follow that blog):

Saying that if photographers all refused to do stock photography they'd all get paid more is like saying that if restaurants all refused to give customers napkins without charging they'd all make a bundle on napkin sales. It's like saying that if local bands refused to play for drinks at dive bars, they'd all make good money playing music.

It's also like saying that if news organizations stopped giving away content on the Web, people would pay for news content online. It's absurd.

The posters in that forum who are making that argument are failing, or refusing, to understand basic economics, if not human nature. All photographers are not going to refuse to do stock photography. The ones who do refuse will simply be opening up the market for those willing to sell their pictures cheaply, either because they're not in it for the money or because they can make a profit on volume.

And those arguing that Time should have paid more for this stock photo because it sometimes pays more for other photos, or because it has a lot of money, are forgetting a little thing called supply and demand.

We should note, though, that because Time prints so many copies, it is likely it had to pay iStockphoto for an unlimited-run license, and that its cost was more like $125 than $30. Still nowhere near thousands, and we should also note that Lam, the photographer, was thrilled with his Time cover at a price of $30, and plenty of his colleagues were thrilled for him.

The same pricing dynamic is in play in journalism. The price is not set by how much time, effort, talent or experience went into making the product, and it's not set by how much money the customer has. It's set by supply and demand. The supply of stock photography is very large. The supply of general news content is huge.

If Time hadn't found Lam's stock photo of coins in a jar for $30, or $125, it would have found a similar photo for a similar price. If news consumers can't get their news online for free from their favorite news organization, they'll find it for free somewhere else.

What happened with Lam's photo is not a failure of the system, not a case of photographers eating their own and not a matter of big, rich Time magazine taking advantage of the little guy. I doubt those photographers would expect Time, because it has such a big budget, to pay $3 for a postage stamp or $20 a pound for the office coffee.

What happened with Lam's photo is simply the way the industry works. Time paid what it paid for that image because that's about what it was worth.

When the barrier to entry is low, the supply of goods is large and the alternatives available to the buyer many, the price is going to be low. Wishing it were otherwise, as the photographers are doing in that online forum and as opponents of free content do in Future of Journalism nerdland, will not make it otherwise.

Indeed. What Kaufman describes is the same sort of economic illiteracy that we run into in conversations all the time. People feel that because they don't like the way things work, they need to either blame those who are happy with the way things work or to blame those of us who are simply explaining the economics of supply and demand to them. It's a blame the messenger sort of thing. If I could create a world where photographers and journalists could magically make tons of money, I would. That would be great. But, that's not the world we live in, and pretending it is (or pretending you can simply start charging high amounts and people will keep paying) doesn't help matters. Instead, figuring out ways to understand the economics at play, and then looking for ways to take advantage of those basic economics, seems to make the most sense. This is not about what "should" happen or what people would "like" to happen. It's about what is happening, and learning to take advantage of it.

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High school student Justin Gawronski is suing Amazon for deleting his Kindle copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four, because in so doing, they messed the annotations he'd created to the text for class (the annotations say things like "remember this paragraph for class" but the paragraph in question has been deleted). The case is intended to become a class-action on behalf of other Kindle owners whose annotations were deleted rendered useless by Amazon when it improperly deleted an infringing copy of the Orwell book from Kindles. Nothing in Amazon's EULA or US copyright law gives them permission to delete books off your Kindle, so this sounds like a plausible suit to me.

PDF: UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT WESTERN DISTRICT OF WASHINGTON AT SEATTLE (via Engadget)

A former British fraud cop has assembled a database of 4,000,000 British identities, including credit card numbers and PINs, seemingly by buying data from hackers and phishers. Now he's selling access to the database to panicked members of the public who want to know if their identities have been stolen.

Highly sensitive financial information, including credit card details, bank account numbers, telephone numbers and even PINs are available to the highest bidder...

The information being traded on the web has been intercepted by a British company and collated into a single database for the first time. The Lucid Intelligence database contains the records of four million Britons, and 40 million people worldwide, mostly Americans. Security experts described the database as the largest of its kind in the world...

The database is held by Colin Holder, a retired senior Metropolitan police officer, who served on the fraud squad. He has collected the information over the past four years. His sources include law enforcement from around the world, such as British police and the FBI, anti-phishing and hacking campaigners and members of the public. Mr Holder said he had invested £160,000 in the venture so far. He plans to offset the cost by charging members of the public for access to his database to check whether their data security has been breached.

Four million British identities are up for sale on the internet (via Making Light)

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Looks like Rob Cruickshank chills with bees on the daily!

A series of trap nests for solitary bees and wasps, mounted in plexiglas on our back window. The nests are open to the outside, and have plexiglas covers, alowing us to observe the activity from inside the house, as well as piezo transducer contact mics, allowing us to hear the activity inside, via the speakers on the right.

Wonder if ever has to ask them to keep it down? Hmm, I suppose he could just disconnect the speakers. I used to shared a place with a praying mantis … nice guy, very religious. … What? Check out the trap nest window on Flickr.

More:

DIY Bee Box

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rrohbeck writes "Today Amazon credited my card with $65.45. After ordering an Eee PC 1005 HA from amazon.com, I asked them for a refund for the cost of Windows XP via the 'Contact us' form. At first they told me to cancel any items on my order that I wanted a refund for, but after I explained that XP was pre-installed on the machine they got it. They asked what the cost of the OS was, and I answered that I had no idea but that Amazon UK refunded £40.00. Within a few hours I got a response saying 'I've requested a refund of $65.45 to your Visa card.' Somehow I doubt that Amazon will charge Asus or even Microsoft, but maybe they will one day if more people do this. Oh, and peeling off the 'Designed for Microsoft Windows XP' sticker is easy, too."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Install a sneaky bug in a book or any small covert object. I used an old vcr tape to capture secret surveillance.
Thanks go to David Simpson for the original article in MAKE, Volume 16.
To download The Covert Wireless Listening Device MP4 click here or subscribe in iTunes.

Check out the complete Covert Wireless Listening Device article in
MAKE, Volume 16 "Covert Wireless Listening" and you can see that in our Digital Edition.

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Install a sneaky bug in a book or any small covert object. I used an old vcr tape to capture secret surveillance.
Thanks go to David Simpson for the original article in MAKE, Volume 16.
View the PDF of this project. and then subscribe to MAKE Magazine for other great projects
you can do over the weekend.

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splodus writes "The European Court of Justice, Europe's highest court, has ruled that a service providing 11-word snippets of newspaper articles could be unlawful. Media monitoring company Infopaq International searches newspaper articles and provides clients with a keyword and the five words either side. This practice was challenged by the DDF, a group representing newspaper interests, as infringing their members' copyright. The court has referred the issue back to national courts to determine whether copyright laws in each country will be subject to the ruling. The full ruling is available at the European Court of Justice Web site."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Joan Healy's sound-activated Meat Market devices explore motions of organic materials under the control of … AGH! It's freakin' dancing meat, people!!!

[Thanks, Eric!]

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Yesterday, I posted a reprinted from my old tech site, Street Tech, of a piece I did on Zach DeBord's solar-powered vibrobots. Here's another piece from Street Tech, one on building solarrollers, a simple kind of solar-powered car common in beginner BEAM robotics. Like the vibrobots, this would make a perfect project for a family who's just learned how to solder and wants to collaborate to build something fun (and cool!). - Gareth

Gopod bless Flickr! While searching on it recently to see if anyone else had built Mousey the Junkbot or a Symet or Solarroller inspired by my BEAM robotics articles in MAKE, Volume 06, I discovered Zach DeBord and his amazing BEAM creations. A Chicago-based designer and Web developer who's done work for (among others) Comcast, Volvo, and Yellow Tail (mmm...wine), Zach's bots put the "A" ("Aesthetics") back into BEAM, with gorgeous, meticulously-rendered designs that are as much objets d'art as autonomous robo-critters.

All of his robots are awesome-looking, but I was instantly attracted to this roller because it's bigger than any solarroller I've ever seen, and it uses two solar cells, four storage capacitors, and two gearmotors. Ingeniously, this roller can be steered (sorta). Zach writes: "It is currently configured to go forwards, but by angling either solar panel, it will turn more in one direction since one panel will be getting more light. With both panels angled in the same direction, it is pretty phototropic."

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Introduction To LED Lighting

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Hugh Pickens writes "PC World reports that at the Black Hat security conference this week, security researchers say that it is pretty easy for a technically savvy hacker to make a fake payment card that gives them unlimited free parking on San Francisco's smart parking meter system. 'It wasn't technically complicated and the fact that I can do it in three days means that other people are probably already doing it and probably taking advantage of it,' says Joe Grand. 'It seems like the system wasn't analyzed at all.' To figure out how the payment system worked, Grand hooked up an oscilloscope to a parking meter and monitored what happened when he used a genuine payment card. Grand discovered the cards aren't digitally signed, and the only authentication between the meter and card is a password sent from the former to the latter. Examining the meters themselves could yield additional vulnerabilities that might allow someone to conduct other kinds of attacks, such as propagating a virus from meter to meter via the smart cards or a meter minder's PDA."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As you know, eBay bought Skype for a ton of money a few years back, without having any real plan for what to do with it. There were no synergies between the two, and about the best that can be said for eBay's ownership of Skype is that they didn't kill it (though, frankly, the new UI is so bad, it makes me wonder what they were thinking) and let it continue to grow organically. Earlier this year, eBay finally announced plans to spin off Skype. Fair enough. It can probably do a lot more outside of eBay than from within. However, it turns out that there may be a bit of a legal hitch, as Skype's founders claim that eBay/Skype no longer have the legal rights to Skype's underlying technology. Apparently, the claim is that Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis and a separate company they ran, Joltid, only licensed the underlying technology to eBay/Skype for a limited time -- and that deal has now concluded. The two companies are scheduled to fight this out in court.

There are a few interesting asides to all of this. First, it reminds me of how Zennstrom and Friis ended up in another lawsuit a few years back, also involving questions about licensing the core underlying technology of Skype. There's a lot of background here, and not all the details are clear (at all), but that original case involved the claim that Zennstrom and Friis used the same core underlying technology that they used to build Kazaa to build Skype. Way back, Zennstrom and Friis had created two operations: Kazaa and FastTrack, which created the underlying tech used in Kazaa. However, they also licensed FastTrack to a company called Streamcast, that made a product called Morpheus that competed with Kazaa in the file sharing space. Got that?

The folks at Streamcast insist that part of their contract with FastTrack was that they had a right of first refusal on buying the underlying technology. But then, all sorts of stuff happened, with Kazaa being sold off to a group in the South Pacific, but Zennstrom and Friis supposedly retaining some core technology which (Streamcast claims) they used to build Skype. Then, once Skype sold, Streamcast claimed that the whole thing was an elaborate shell game, but in selling the Skype underlying technology, Streamcast claimed that Zennstrom and Friis violated their agreement on having a right of first refusal on purchasing the technology.

Yet, now I'm left wondering if that original claim was true. If the current claim is that Joltid still "owns" the original technology and Skype/eBay only licensed it, then the technology itself might never have actually been sold (unless, we're talking about two separate core underlying technologies... which is possible).

Still... the bigger question? How the hell did eBay make a deal and not make sure it had either purchased (entirely) the core underlying technology or had a guaranteed perpetual license that couldn't be revoked? The eBay Skype purchase was bad enough already. Could it be even more ridiculous in that eBay didn't even properly purchase the technology in question? It seems preposterous to believe that a company could screw up an acquisition that monumentally, so you have to wonder if it's actually true.

In the meantime, since there are questions about how eBay can rebuild Skype's underlying core technology without violating the many patents in the space, it makes you wonder if eBay may be forced to simply buy someone else's technology. Maybe it's time to call up the Gizmo Project (which has built a very Skype-like product) to see what they're up to these days. Though, can you imagine eBay needing to buy another company just to power Skype so it can be spun off again? Yikes!

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This ingenious folding power plug design efficiently shaves off the extra bulk of a standard UK 3-prong plug, while increasing safety and ease of use. It has recently been entered to compete for the 2009 James Dyson Award and has been determined a shortlisted entry. Check out their entry page for more information, photos, and sketches.

When people carry laptops with U.K plugs in a bag, it always causes problems such as tearing paper, scratching laptop surfaces and, sometimes, it breaks other stuff. 'Folding Plug' changes the shape form the normal U.K plug into a 10mm thickness object, solving these damaging problems.

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A study by an international team published in the journal Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition finds that when seniors do odd, complex motor tasks while taking medication, it increases the likelihood that they'll remember to take their meds next time. I love this stuff -- the idea that thinking takes place in the body as well as the brain -- and I bet it works for non-seniors just as well.

"In extended medication-taking situations, the habitual nature of the task may make it difficult for older adults to remember whether or not they took the medication on a particular day, especially if pill boxes are not used," explains Mark McDaniel, Ph.D., lead author of the study and a professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University.

"To remedy this potential problem, older adults could be instructed to take their medication while placing one hand on their head or in some other unusual or silly way, like crossing their arms," he suggests. "Our results indicate that older adults can use these sorts of more complex motor tasks to effectively reduce repetition errors in habitual prospective memory tasks, such as taking a daily medication."...

In another phase of the experiment, participants were asked to do the letter-recognition task while simultaneously carrying out an additional more complicated and distracting task -- listening to a series of random numbers and pushing a clicker whenever they heard two odd numbers in a row...

"When ongoing task demands were challenging, older adults committed more repetition errors than younger adults, regardless of whether they'd been told in advance to err on the side of omission -- told not to push the F1 key if they had any doubt about whether it had already been pushed once in the same trial," says McDaniel.

However, older adults asked to carry out the more complex motor task (placing hand on head) while pushing the F1 key made significantly less repetition errors than older adults not making use of this memory enhancing technique

A Silly Pat On The Head Helps Seniors Remember Daily Medication

Jared sez, "Prison Proxy is a blog maintained by an acquaintance (friend?) of an inmate serving a life sentence in an unspecified "Texas Penitentiary." The blog, purportedly based on daily snail-mail letters from the prisoner, provides fascinating, 'live' insight into prison life. The July 30th post explains how inmates create soldering irons to 'fix headphones and alter radios.'"

To make the soldering iron, one must first fill up his hotpot with water. Then, he laces each prong of the hotpot's plug with wire, the left side of which is readied to be inserted in the plug, and the right side of which is for the iron.

He then takes a pencil and shaves an inch or so of wood off the end, so that the lead sticks out that far by itself. He uses fabric to wrap two pieces of metal--each shaped like a long hockey stick with the L-curve on both ends--to the pencil with their L-curved ends clamping down on either side of the exposed lead.

How It's Made: Soldering Irons (Thanks, Jared!)

70+ Canadians in Sarnia, Ontario have committed to dropping their pants and mooning a spy balloon that a US company is launching to surveil the border, including their town.

In a letter to the PM Thursday, Mike Bradley said the camera hovering over Port Huron, Mich. is scanning Sarnia's waterfront, which includes many homes, private businesses and government offices.

"There was absolutely no consultation with the local community and I am not aware if there has been at the national level about this particular initiative," he said.

The surveillance balloon based on Port Huron's waterfront is equipped with a $1-million camera and is being tested on the international border.

The 50-foot dirigible, shaped like an airplane wing, is owned by the Sierra Nevada Corporation and operated by True North Logistics of Port Huron.

It has clearance to fly to 1,000 feet and can read the name of a ship from nine miles (14 kilometres) away. Its owners hope to draw interest from U.S. Homeland Security.

'Moon the Balloon' protest grows, mayor writes PM (Thanks, Gord!)

Just posted: Our lens review of the Pentax smc DA* 55mm F1.4. This lens is marketed by Pentax as a fast portrait prime for APS-C format digital SLRs, and the spiritual successor to the film-era FA 85mm F1.4. It certainly ticks all the right boxes, with weatherproof construction and a 'Supersonic Drive motor' for autofocus, but how well does it work when actually attached to a camera? Find out in our detailed review.

Just posted: Our lens review of the Pentax smc DA* 55mm F1.4. This lens is marketed by Pentax as a fast portrait prime for APS-C format digital SLRs, and the spiritual successor to the film-era FA 85mm F1.4. It certainly ticks all the right boxes, with weatherproof construction and a 'Supersonic Drive motor' for autofocus, but how well does it work when actually attached to a camera? Find out in our detailed review.

Well, you just knew that there were going to be class action lawsuits filed over Amazon's decision to delete unauthorized George Orwell ebooks that had been sold for the Kindle, but it appears that the class action lawyers have found the most headline-worthy story to get the word out. As we mentioned in the original post on this story, at least one kid lost the notes he had been taking on one of the books. So, we get a story about how a high school student is suing Amazon for deleting his summer homework, and the lawyers are hoping to turn it into a class action.

As bad as Amazon's actions were, I can't see this lawsuit getting very far. For most Kindle users, they're going to have a hard time showing any sort of real "harm." The kid with the lost homework might be able to show some (small) amount of harm, but I have to imagine that Amazon is mostly protected from liability in such cases. Still, with Amazon being quick to apologize and swear it would never ever ever delete an ebook again, you have to wonder if Amazon will step up and just try to appease the kid (and get the lawyers to go away).

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Marilyn sez, "The East Hampton Library on Long Island wants to add a children's room, but the East Hampton Village Zoning Board has blocked it for a year, even though the money for the expansion ($4 mil) has been already been raised by private donations. What's their objection to a children's room at the library?"

Library Director Dennis Fabiszak has said that the East Hampton Village Board of Zoning Appeals has expressed concern that an expanded children's collection would lead to more library usage by those who live in the less affluent areas of Springs and Wainscott...

The proposed 6,800-square-foot addition to a community that includes Martha Stewart, Rudolph Giuliani, and Katie Couric as summer residents would enable the library to add 10,000 additional children's books to the library's collection. Last year, the Long Island library ranked last for books available per child...

The library serves not only the Village of East Hampton but also the less affluent communities of Springs and Wainscott.

Library Expansion in Posh NY Hood Goes On (Thanks, Marilyn!)

The MAKEcation learn to solder bundle is a fun collection of all things blinky. All the kits are easy to solder and each one makes a fun little blinky piece of hardware. The bundle also includes our Maker's Notebook and MAKE Volume 01, which features a great learn to solder tutorial. Have fun this summer, learn to solder, and blink some LEDs!

Features:

• MAKE Volume 01 $14.99 value
• tinyCylon $10 value
• Wee Blinky $8 value
• Lux Spectralis $10 value
• Maker's Notebook $19.99 value

More about The MAKEcation learn to solder bundle

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tomlins writes "eBay is faced with the prospect of having to close down the hugely popular VoIP app Skype due to its reliance on proprietary code still owned by Skype's original founders, who are threatening to pull the plug on the licensing agreement they have with eBay."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canon has posted a firmware update for its EOS 50D digital SLR. Version 1.0.7 corrects the a magenta cast that can appear on images in specific shooting modes. It also fixes incorrect indications on the Arabic, Romanian, Spanish and Ukrainian menu screens. The firmware is available for immediate download from Canon's website.

Canon has posted a firmware update for its EOS 50D digital SLR. Version 1.0.7 corrects the a magenta cast that can appear on images in specific shooting modes. It also fixes incorrect indications on the Arabic, Romanian, Spanish and Ukrainian menu screens. The firmware is available for immediate download from Canon's website.

Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with his partner Sally, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

If you're one of the (most likely imaginary) people that have been following my posts religiously, you might remember when I posted about the Black Widow turbine-powered Beetle a few days ago. Now, I have some scans from Turbonique's Hot Rotor magazine, which is jam-packed with great pictures of truly bonkers jet-powered vehicles, and jam-unpacked with words.

Many of the images have the parts presented on flat-color backgrounds, making for some really satisfying compositions, aesthetically. And, in the few pictures with people, they always appear stiff and with oddly blank expressions, which makes the images even better, somehow. Enjoy.



(Thanks, Chris!)

Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with his partner Sally, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

By nature, I'm not a guy particularly interested in safety concerns, but when I saw these massive wheel spikes on this big rig on the 5 freeway the other day, I couldn't help but wonder if having something normally associated with a brutal chariot race is such a hot idea.

This picture doesn't quite do them justice, but these spikes are no joke; they could easily turn a close call into a harrowing, screaming gash torn into the bodywork of your car. I've never seen these before, but, then again, I don't really do that much driving in a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland ruled by gangs of mechanized toughs.

A few years ago, newspapers were all blaming Craigslist for their own business model problems. Then, of course, it became popular to blame Google. However, there's been an odd shift recently, to a claim that the problem is from "pirates" and "parasites." We see this in the AP's sudden desire to DRM the news by tracking how it's used and going after those it feels are using its content unfairly. We see it in the Marburger brothers' plan to put legal pressure on "parasitic aggregators." The problem, as we discussed, however, is that these parasitic aggregators are few and far between and the complaints against them just don't ring true at all.

Being a "publisher" of sorts, this is actually an area we have some experience with. As we've noted many times, there are plenty of "parasitic aggregators" (we usually refer to them as "spam blogs") that copy all our content. We track them, just because they tend to show up in searches, and one thing quickly becomes clear: they get little to no traffic at all, and any advertising revenue they bring in has to be close to nil. The average lifespan of such sites is usually about 3 months before they go away, and the argument that they take money away from us is silly. If anyone sees those copied posts, it doesn't take long to figure out that Techdirt is the originator of the content, and from that to learn it's probably easier/faster/better to just read the content here -- plus, by reading it here, they get to take part in the conversation that's actually happening here. The Marburgers admit that any one of these parasitic aggregators might not bring in that much money, but in aggregate (yes, aggregating the aggregators), they represent a substantial loss. Yet, they offer no evidence of that whatsoever, and as a publisher whose content is regularly used in this manner, I've seen no evidence that this is a real problem at all from a revenue standpoint.

Of course, that's the lowest of the "low" on these parasitic aggregators. But the Marburgers' define parasitic aggregators to include sites that don't have reporters on the scene, but still have journalists who write up stories based on others' reporting. But, oddly, the properties it names, such as Newser and The Daily Beast are both relatively small -- and both try to position themselves as sort of "premium" sites, rather than (as the analysis implies) ones trying to push down CPM ad rates. If these sites are taking away any traffic from major media sites, it's minimal at best, and it's quite unlikely they're really putting any pressure on newspaper ad rates.

It really just seems like a problem that isn't there.

But adding a bit more fuel to the fire, recently, was an article in the NY Times that read more like a press release from a company called Attributor (who's been banging this misguided drum for years), where it claims that a recent study found "publishers were losing $250 million a year from unauthorized copying." This number is creating all sorts of questions and controversy. And, it should. Because the number is bunk. Attributor is pretty cagey with how it came up with the numbers, but it involved looking at how many pages were "copied" from 25 major publications and then extrapolating out to other media sites. Even companies that work with Attributor think the claims are ridiculous. On top of that, even if you grant the premise on these "losses," that still represents a tiny amount of money spread across the entire industry.

But, just as with the music industry and its complaints about "piracy," this is yet another case of people falsely declaring sales not made (or, in this case, ad impressions not loaded) as being "losses." The reality is that you don't know if people would have seen the content otherwise. And you don't know if, having viewed the content at one of these other sites, they aren't later convinced to just go directly to the source. Like music "piracy" the issue isn't "parasites" or aggregators "free-riding." The problem is the originating sites not adding enough value to make it worthwhile to visit them, rather than using one of these other (still tiny) sites. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: if you're a publisher, and someone paraphrasing your content is enough to keep people away from your site, you're not doing a very good job adding enough value on your site to get folks to visit.

This is a problem that just doesn't exist. It's being blown way out of proportion. There is no real problem with "parasites" or "pirates" when it comes to news content. It's a distraction, and publications that spend a lot of time or money on it, will find that they're taking their eyes off the real issue: providing value to bring in more users and adapting to the new media marketplace.

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TheSync writes "The Guardian reports that BSkyB will launch Europe's first 3D TV service in 2010. You will need the Sky+ HD set-top box, and a '3D ready' TV set (glasses-based stereoscopic system such as LCD shutter glasses or polarized glasses). Note that the first 3D TV service was from Nippon BS Broadcasting BS11 for use with Hyundai 3D sets."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dead-Air sez, "At the Science Fiction Message Board the results are in for our 2009 'Author August' post-a-thon extravaganza! The regular members, along with some visitors lured by news of the upcoming event, have nominated a wildly diverse range of authors. From SF's earliest days to the latest hot new talent, this 4th annual event has as wide-ranging a list of writers as anyone could wish to see. Every day during August a different author will be spotlighted in their own thread in our Author Central forum. We encourage all to visit on that day and post photographs, reminiscences, cover scans, links to appropriate sites, reviews, and other reactions. With 31 days and 31 authors there's a chance to share what you know as well as learn new things, so come and join in the fun!"

8/1 Alfred Bester; 8/2 William Tenn (Phillip Klass); 8/3 Gene Wolfe; 8/4 E.T.A. Hoffman; 8/5 Norman Spinrad; 8/6 Lucy Sussex; 8/7 Robert J. Sawyer; 8/8 Phillip Reeve; 8/9 Ian McDonald; 8/10 Ken MacLeod; 8/11 Dan Simmons; 8/12 S.M. Stirling; 8/13 Sean McMullen; 8/14 James Blish; 8/15 Kelley Eskridge; 8/16 Octavia Butler; 8/17 Charles Stross; 8/18 Colin Kapp; 8/19 Fritz Leiber; 8/20 Nicola Griffith; 8/21 Hal Clement; 8/22 J.G. Ballard; 8/23 Alison Sinclair; 8/24 E.C. Tubb; 8/25 Neal Asher; 8/26 Karl Schroeder; 8/27 Jack L. Chalker; 8/28 John Varley; 8/29 Alan Dean Foster; 8/30 David J. Williams; 8/31 Kurd Lasswitz

Author August 2009! (Thanks, Dead-Air!)

Rebecca from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez, "Iranians protesting the results of the recent election found an outlet and a means of organizing with the Internet, and showed that new digital media can help free speech and fight repression globally. But what happens now the headlines and the Twitter trends have died down? Join EFF for a panel discussion Monday Aug. 3 from 7pm - 9pm PDT. If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area, you can find details on attending in person here. If not, you will be able to watch the live stream here. Let's make technology useful and safe for netizens in authoritarian regimes!"

BayFF on August 3: Iranian Protests and Digital Media (Thanks, Rebecca!)

Sharna sez, "Already known for her stand against criminalizing music downloaders, now Lennox has given DJEarworm her multi-track masters to mash up. The resulting track 'Backwards/Forwards' is stunning and is featured on his site and hers and on both artists' youtube channels."

Annie Lennox: Backwards/Forwards (Thanks, Sharna!)

John McCardell (a president emeritus and a professor of history at Middlebury College) in the Atlantic argues that the US national drinking age of 21 is a failure -- it has failed to stop underage drinking, and has instead driven it underground and made it more dangerous. I grew up with Ontario's drinking age of 19, but I started drinking at parties and so on at about 14 or 15, often to bad result; ironically, once I was old enough to drink in bars, I drank a lot less, as the culture in bars was generally different from the parties I'd drunk at until then.

The way our society addresses this problem has been about as effective as a parachute that opens on the second bounce. Clearly, state laws mandating a minimum drinking age of 21 haven't eliminated drinking by young adults--they've simply driven it underground, where life and health are at greater risk. Merely adjusting the legal age up or down doesn't work--we've tried that already and failed. But federal law has stifled the ability to conceive of more creative solutions in the only place where the Constitution says such debate should happen--in the state house--because any state that sets its drinking age lower than 21 forfeits 10 percent of its federal highway funds. This is called an "incentive."

So what might states, freed from this federal penalty, do differently? They might license 18-year-olds--adults in the eyes of the law--to drink, provided they've completed high school, attended an alcohol-education course (that consists of more than temperance lectures and scare tactics), and kept a clean record.

Teach Drinking (via Kottke)

We've had a bunch of articles in the last couple years about video game execs complaining about the used video game market, saying that they deserve a cut of any such sale -- or that the used market should be banned altogether. This, of course, is short-sighted, as studies have shown that a healthy secondary market improves the primary market by adding value to the product (i.e., people may be more willing to buy the new product, knowing they'll be able to resell it later). And, of course, the market has a way of dealing with these things.

So, it's a bit amusing to now see sort of the flip side to that story (sent in by the amusingly named "Just Another Moron in a Hurry") -- with some warning that the rise in direct downloads of video games is threatening the used video game market, and that may be bad for consumers as well. Obviously, those games can't be resold (at least not easily), and thus there isn't a cheap price entry point for consumers, as there is with used packages games. Again, even though this is complaining from the other side, I'm not sure it's really that big of a deal either, as the market again should start to deal with this situation. Being able to offer games direct to consumers should lower video game production costs (no more packaging/shipping/logistics/hard goods/etc.) and, even they don't initially, eventually the prices should reflect that, as well.

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Ask MAKE is a weekly column where we answer reader questions, like yours. Write them in to becky@makezine.com or drop us a line on Twitter. We can't wait to tackle your conundrums!

Dan writes in:

How are big closed cell polystyrene bocks made? I've seen them 12" square and about 8' long.

Expanded polystyrene foam (EPS or Styrofoam) is made from pellets of polystyrene, which is a plastic made from crude oil. The pellets are expanded in a steam chamber. You can find these pellets in this form inside most beanbag chairs. To make solid objects, they use steam molds that fill a chamber with the pellets, then steam fuse them into custom packaging, foam drinking cups, etc. Here are a few videos I found on the topic; one's on Planet Green, the other one is a segment on Discovery's How It's Made:

Polystyrene is lightweight and good for protecting valuables in shipping, among other things, but it's not biodegradable. It can, however be recycled. I found a video on Planet Green where they turn styrofoam packaging into moulding for your house. Neat! Also, don't forget to check out the Wikipedia page on polystyrene foam.

More:

• Styrobot built by father & son (pictured above)
  
• Styrofoam chandelier
  
• Moldable plastic from styrofoam
  
• Hot wire foam cutter

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Cherie Priest's zombie steampunk mad-science dungeon crawl family adventure novel Boneshaker is everything you'd want in such a volume and much more.

Boneshaker is the story of the Wilkes/Blue family, a storied Seattle clan whose three generations unmade and remade the city through a series of scientific and martial adventures that are recounted with great relish and verve. First, there's Leviticus Blue, an arrogant mad scientist who developed a great tunnelling machine (part of a Russian-sponsored competition to improve Alaskan gold-mining) and undermined the city of Seattle, releasing the Blight, a poisonous gas that causes the dead to rise, and to hunger for the flesh of the living. Then, Maynard Wilkes, a prison guard in Seattle, committed an act of great mercy and bravery by releasing the prisoners in his care before they could be blighted, losing his life in the process, and becoming a hero to those left behind the walled-off city of Seattle, and a pariah to the settlers in the Outskirts beyond the wall. Then there's Briar Wilkes, the widow of Leviticus and the daughter of Maynard, who is scraping by in the Outskirts, trying to outrun her reputation but unable to, and unable to escape Seattle because of the great Civil War that is eating America with martial trains and dirigibles and great armies. Finally, there's Ezekiel Wilkes, the son of Briar and Leviticus, who has snuck back into the walled city, wearing an antiquated Blight-mask, to discover the truth about his father.

And that's where the action kicks off, with son and mother chasing one another through the Blighted city of Seattle, avoiding the zombies, befriending the Chinese laborers who run the great machines that suck clean air from beyond the wall into the sealed tunnels beneath the city, trying to escape the clutches of the evil Dr Minnericht, the self-appointed king of Seattle (who may or may not be Leviticus Blue), befriending rogue zeppelin pilots, armored giants, and steam-powered cyborg barmaids.

It's full of buckle and has swash to spare, and the characters are likable and the prose is fun. This is a hoot from start to finish, pure mad adventure.

Boneshaker

BB pal Kirsten Anderson, proprietor of Seattle's Roq La Rue Gallery, says:

Roq la Rue Gallery has announced the release of a new print by Camille Rose Garcia, entitled " 'Lil Elorphant." Published by Roq la Rue, the entire proceeds of the sale of this print goes to charity, The <a href="

David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Kenya. I just got back from visiting the Trust in Kenya and was really amazed by the hard working staff and innovative community outreach programs they foster. A HUGE thank you to Camille for so generously creating a new work for this project! Please contact us to order one.

Camille Rose Garcia
"Lil' Elorphant"
signed and numbered giclee, edition of 100
14" x 17" with hand deckled edges
$400.

Roq La Rue contact info

Artist Peter Root's Low-Rise via jwz.

Low-Rise is a precarious assemblage of thousands of free-standing stacks of staples densely tessellated to create a city-like mosaic. Like a city, the staples are subject to the elements, on a micro scale. The slightest breath or vibration and the domino effect kicks in.

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Remember back when you used to check the local newspaper for movie listings? To be honest, I can barely remember when that happened. These days, it's just easier to look up the info online. However, many newspapers apparently still print movie listings -- and apparently (I had no idea...), this is actually paid advertising by the theater chains. AMC Theatres, however, is realizing that most people now get movie times online and has pulled its listings from the Washington Post (via Romenesko), leading some readers to believe, incorrectly, that the Post had dropped the listings (similar to the way many newspapers have dropped stock listings). But, since this is ad revenue, the Post is actually quite upset about this, and worried that other chains might follow suit. So it's actually hoping that theater attendance will drop, and AMC will be convinced to pay for movie listings again. Of course, the data itself is factual information, and if the Washington Post really wanted to, it could print the times itself -- but, instead it clearly wants the advertising money (and to prove why it thinks AMC is making a mistake). It will be fascinating to see what happens, but I get the feeling that even if AMC is convinced to come back, it won't be long before movie theaters stop paying newspapers to print showtimes.

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An anonymous reader writes "A student team from Virginia Tech Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory have created a vehicle which allows the blind to drive. The vehicle uses a laser range finder to determine distances and alerts the driver through voice commands and vibration. Tomorrow [Friday] morning, the vehicle will have its first public test drive at the University of Maryland. At last, Braille on drive-up ATMs may finally be vindicated."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of my favorite DIYs in the newest issue of MAKE, Volume 19, is a sweet project titled "MIDI Camera Control" in our DIY Imaging section by Josh Cardenas. A while back, Josh got the rare opportunity to run visuals for The Hard Sell tour, a collaboration between renowned turntablists DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist. These fine gentlemen were out to show nonbelievers that DJs do more than "just play records" by simultaneously performing using only original vintage-pressing 45 rpm records played on 8 turntables through 4 mixers. Josh was tasked with coming up with the unobtrusive multi-camera live setup for the show. And what he presents us with in MAKE 19 is how to make your own lower-budget version. He uses standard CCD security cameras and pan-and-tilt brackets with a couple of servomotors for each one. To avoid the prospect of interference during showtime, though, instead of R/C, Josh chose to use MIDI for control. You can roughly see the setup in the performance shot above, but here's a closer look:

Read the full DIY in MAKE Volume 19, which will be in your hands any minute now if you're a subscriber. Otherwise, look for it on newsstands on August 18th.

And for kicks, check out this awesome little intro video for The Hard Sell tour, explaining the concept:

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BullJustin writes in to alert us to the news that the Department of Homeland Security is cutting subscriptions to paper newspapers and magazines, cutting $47,160 from the budget over the next two years. Of course, for Homeland Security that's a tiny drop in the bucked (hell, it's not even that big). But, the writeup (somewhat tongue in cheek) suggests that this is unfair to newspapers who are "hurting enough financially" already. Of course, on the flip side, I'd think most people agree that not wasting taxpayer money on content that people are probably reading for free online anyway, is a good thing...

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(Download MP4 / Watch on YouTube)

In this episode of Boing Boing Video, we visit the Ojai studio of artist Cassandra C. Jones, whose "Google-found" digital photo collages and video loops explore how we "create, communicate with, and consume photography in today's 'remix culture.'" San Francisco gallery Baer Ridgway is hosting a solo exhibition of her work, titled "Send Me A Link," August 1st - September 5th 2009.

Some of the works included are constructed by compiling hundreds of professional and amateur snapshots of the same subject taken by different people. Ranging from full-color lightning bolts to old black and whites of horses jumping over a fence, she links them in ways that depict motion, line and non-linear narrative. Other pieces are made by deconstructing single photographs, removing their backgrounds and reducing them to isolated shapes. Jones then duplicates and arranges these forms to create compositions where singularity and multiplicity exist simultaneously. There is both an order and a chaos present in the body of work, which overall asks the question, what does it mean to organize and interpret imagery in the digital realm, where the archives of visual information are in a constant state of growth and evolution?

More images after the jump, and you may also want to read this article about her work today in the San Francisco Chronicle.

"Send Me a Link is at once a nod to the digital landscape in which we find ourselves, and a plea, perhaps an imperative, to create context amidst an endless expanse of images. The phrase explicitly signals the centrality for Jones of network- or systems-oriented digital technologies in the appropriation, accumulation, and manipulation of photographs; the artist culls many of her images from stock or professional photo agencies with an ease and speed unique to our lived moment. Similarly, the wide ranging content of the artist's most recent compositions (leaping animals, looping roller coasters, hovering athletes) all share a suspended quality, suggesting that approaches to flight, air, falling, or hovering might form a new common thematic concern in Jones' evolving practice. She has pushed the suggestion even further in recent compositions: by manipulating streaks of lightning across the night sky into explicitly figurative shapes (Lightning Drawing Series, 2009), she offers another link: the aligning of the practices of drawing and photography."

-James Merle Thomas

The NY Times has an article about how a group of psychologists are quite upset that the original 10 "Rorschach test" ink blots have been added to Wikipedia, along with brief explanations of what people commonly see in the ink blots (here's the Wikipedia page on the Rorschach test). As I would hope most of you know, Rorschach tests are used by some psychologists, believing that what people see in the blots can tell the psychologist a lot about their personality. The ink blots themselves are in the public domain, so there's really no legal issue over them being available, but that hasn't stopped the complaints. Some psychologists are worried that this creates a "cheat sheet" that will be abused. To that, I say that if your test is so easily gamed, it's time to find a different test.

But, much more bizarre is the claim by the German publisher of Rorschach's book, Hogrefe & Huber Publishing, that it's likely planning legal action:

We are assessing legal steps against Wikimedia.... It is therefore unbelievably reckless and even cynical of Wikipedia to on one hand point out the concerns and dangers voiced by recognized scientists and important professional associations and on the other hand -- in the same article -- publish the test material along with supposedly 'expected responses.'

It's pretty difficult to see any leg to stand on. The content is clearly in the public domain. And, on top of that, the issue shouldn't be with Wikimedia, but the guy who uploaded the images. Also, most of that statement from the publishing company doesn't make much sense. It's not cynical to both post the images and the discussion about the concerns. It's actually quite logical and reasonable.

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The NY Times has an article about how a group of psychologists are quite upset that the original 10 "Rorschach test" ink blots have been added to Wikipedia, along with brief explanations of what people commonly see in the ink blots (here's the Wikipedia page on the Rorschach test). As I would hope most of you know, Rorschach tests are used by some psychologists, believing that what people see in the blots can tell the psychologist a lot about their personality. The ink blots themselves are in the public domain, so there's really no legal issue over them being available, but that hasn't stopped the complaints. Some psychologists are worried that this creates a "cheat sheet" that will be abused. To that, I say that if your test is so easily gamed, it's time to find a different test.

But, much more bizarre is the claim by the German publisher of Rorschach's book, Hogrefe & Huber Publishing, that it's likely planning legal action:

We are assessing legal steps against Wikimedia.... It is therefore unbelievably reckless and even cynical of Wikipedia to on one hand point out the concerns and dangers voiced by recognized scientists and important professional associations and on the other hand -- in the same article -- publish the test material along with supposedly 'expected responses.'

It's pretty difficult to see any leg to stand on. The content is clearly in the public domain. And, on top of that, the issue shouldn't be with Wikimedia, but the guy who uploaded the images. Also, most of that statement from the publishing company doesn't make much sense. It's not cynical to both post the images and the discussion about the concerns. It's actually quite logical and reasonable.

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