I've been asked if Chrome's announced bookmark synch is enough to get me to switch from Firefox.

Short answer: No.

Why?

1. Right now all my machines run Firefox, and most of them are Macs. Chrome doesn't run on Macs. Yes I know they have a pre-alpha. Let me know when it's solid. And I might not do it even then.

2. I don't like it when a BigCo plays hardball with a little guy. I like XMarks. It works, and before Chrome competes with it, they should give them a chance to support their browser.

3. I like XMarks because a focused developer is going to care more about the service than a huge company that has lots of irons in lots of fires. They could easily forget about bookmark synch, if for example, a key engineer quits, or gets interested in something else. Bookmark synch is how XMarks' bread is buttered.

4. I'm scared of giving Google all my data. What if someday they decide I don't exist. What recourse would I have?

Show notes.

MP3.

Feed.

There are just a few hours left if you want in on the special promotion.

With our CwF + RtB experiment in full swing, we've asked some of the participants involved to provide some guest posts about their own experience with new business models and new promotions. Don Bartlett manages Joe Pug, one of the artists involved in our Techdirt Music Club. If you order both the Techdirt Music Club and the Techdirt Book Club before midnight PT, tonight, we'll throw in a free Techdirt hoodie, or a free lunch with Mike Masnick. Bartlett and Pug ran a fascinating experiment starting last year, where they experimented with giving away totally free CDs (not just downloads). Bartlett agreed to write a guest post about what they learned:

It's hard to glance at a music blog these days without finding an article talking about the "new model" for the music industry. As the conversation advances, thoughtful commentary has popped up from sources as diverse as Mark Cuban and Trent Reznor. From my perspective, too many musicians have adopted the sound bytes that "labels are dead" and "you don't need a label" without fully thinking through the ramifications of that. While it is certainly true that many labels have backed themselves into a tough spot for a variety of reasons, the good ones still provide essential infrastructure such as distribution, publicity, financing, promotion and expertise. As we move towards a world where labels have less of a role, it's more important than ever for bands to become well-versed in how to handle these duties themselves.

For developing bands, one of the most critical parts is marketing and promotion. Fortunately, this is an area where the playing field is more open than ever. We are excited for Joe Pug to be a part of the Techdirt Music Club because we share the ideology of "Connect With Fans" and "Reason to Buy." These are core principles that every band should abide by. On the surface, it sounds very simple. The tricky part is to take your unique situation and determine what methods will achieve those goals.

In the case of Joe Pug, we felt very strongly that his songs would connect with people. This is not something we decided emotionally, but rather by looking at his history with existing fans, sales numbers, the responses he was getting from live shows, and other objective metrics. The challenge for us, then, became getting these songs in new ears in an efficient, cost effective way. We printed up CDs with two of his songs on them, along with contact info and a note that the full record was available on iTunes. We started by passing them out after shows at local venues. We had success, but we were casting too wide of a net, and it wasn't cost efficient. This is when it occurred to me that we should be inviting the people who are most excited about Joe's music to help. You can't possibly ask for more targeted marketing... people are intimately familiar with their friends' musical tastes, so if they're passing the CD along -- there is a high probability that they will be interested.

The results were instant, and overwhelming. Every possible metric jumped immediately... physical sales, digital sales, MySpace plays, Facebook friends, attendance at shows and merchandise sales. And somewhat unexpectedly, the fans who were requesting the samplers were emailing him about how excited they were to help. Without really intending to, we identified Joe's most enthusiastic fans in a place where we could interact with them and reward them with special treatment. It became one of our primary ways of connecting with fans, and the two songs were connecting well enough to give the new fans a reason to buy the full record or come out to a show. It is important to note here that it's not up to me to make moral judgments about the price of music. It's my job to look at the available revenue streams and find a way to maximize them for my client.

When it comes to connecting with fans, what worked for Joe may not work for someone else. Each situation has a unique path between band and fan. Identify your fan base (or distinct segments of your fan base for larger bands), then take a close look at how they interact with music. A younger fan might scan his RSS feed for blog posts and trade songs with his friends over AIM. An older fan might not even know how to download an mp3 into his iTunes. A busy professional might ask the clerk at a boutique what is playing while she shops. An electronic music fan is a whole lot more likely to share a widget than a folk music fan. Successfully identifying these factors within your fan base is probably the most crucial part of the equation, in my estimation.

There is a great deal of discussion these days about the "new model," but really it is only new to the music industry. Develop a truly great product that people are legitimately excited about. Invest the time, effort and money to market that product efficiently, and leverage small successes into larger ones. Eventually, the successes become large enough that everyone who gambled on the product gets their share of the profits. This is hardly MBA-level material.

What is "new" is that artists are more free than ever to execute their own marketing plans, rather than relying on the inefficient, bloated ones many labels push. I have been told many by people with nice cars, important business cards and famous friends that Joe's sampler CD program was wasteful and even "degrading to my artist." I respectfully disagreed. A year into his career, with only one EP released, Joe is playing Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, and Newport and touring with some of his idols. 14 months after its release, the EP sells more each month than the month previous. Is he rich? Is he famous? No. He is, however, making a very respectable living as a musician and laying the foundation for a fantastic career. That, I would hold, is the "new model".

For the Techdirt Music Club Joe is offering up a special version of the EP, with specially designed Techdirt-inspired cover art, and some unreleased songs. Check it out.

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I came across Astonish Yourself: 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life when I took my kids to the California Science Center in Los Angeles a few weeks ago and found it in the gift store. It was written by philosopher Roger-Pol Droit, a researcher at the Centre de Recherche Scientifique and, as the title indicates, contains 101 mental and perceptual exercises you can perform on yourself.

In his introduction, Droit says the purpose of the experiments is to "provoke tiny moments of awareness," and to "shake a certainty we had taken for granted: our own identity, say, or the stability of the outside world, or even the meanings of words." Most of the experiments require about 20 minutes to complete, and often involve nothing more than merely thinking about something.

Some of the experiments you'll probably want to try when you are alone at home (like calling your name repeatedly for 20 minutes, or repeating some other word to drain it of its meaning), but others can be performed anywhere (like imagining that the world was "created from nothing, just an instant ago" and will vanish "like a light going out" in 20 minutes).

Some of the experiments you can't really plan in advance; they'll happen by accident, like when you wake up without knowing where you are -- a magical experience I love having, but Droit explains how to make the best use of this five-second-long "delicious lightness of a mystery without menace" the next time it happens: "What you do not know, for a tiny interval of time, is what the place is called, where it is, and you you are doing there. But you're certain that you are somewhere, and will find out very soon... try not to lose hold of this rare moment of perfect suspension between doubt and confidence, certitude and ignorance, anxiety and satisfaction."

One of the things I've learned from doing just a few of the exercises in this book is how hard it to stop being so busy and slow down enough to do the experiments. I don't want to stop sitting in front of my computer, playing games, reading a book, tending to chickens, tidying the house, or a million other things that tug at me, but a few minutes after getting started with one of Droit's exercises, I feel good about taking a break from those habitual behaviors.

Astonish Yourself: 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life

James Grimmelmann performed an experiment using the AP's form to request a license to use more than four consecutive words from one of their articles. Except that he didn't paste in words from the (randomly chosen) article, but instead used 26 words written by Thomas Jefferson 196 years ago: If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea. The AP cheerfully charged him $12 to use Jefferson's 26 words. Both Boing Boing and TechDirt have picked up the story so far. Grimmelmann adds an update to his blog: the AP has rescinded his license to Jefferson's words and issued a refund for his $12. They did not exhibit the grace to admit that their software is brain-dead.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BB pal and periodic guestblogger Richard Metzger has an amazing blog post up about the off-Broadway musical Man on the Moon. The play was conceived by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas and his third wife, South African actress, Genevieve Waite, as a potential film or stage production originally entitled "Space."

The stage performance was produced by Andy Warhol. Long-lost video footage of the play is embedded above. More video over at Metzger's blog, too, amazing stuff.

The following text was written by Chris Campion and Jeffrey A. Greenberg from the liner notes of the CD release of Andy Warhol Presents Man on the Moon.

I'll post a snip here, but you have to read the whole thing to hear about the part Philips wrote for Elvis, and all the weird little factoids about Warhol's work, and allegations that George Lucas stole the idea for Star Wars from this offbeat project. Snip:

Space was born the day Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon. Like millions of other people, John watched the 1969 moon landing on TV. He was living, at the time, on the Malibu property rented by British film director Michael Sarne, who was under contract at Fox to direct the adaptation of Gore Vidal's novel, Myra Breckenridge, with Rex Harrison, Raquel Welch and Mae West. Sarne had commissioned John to write songs for the film.

The Apollo 11 moon landing became an obsession. John would watch a recording of the TV transmission made on an early video tape machine over and over. The idea of exploring this new frontier - and particularly Neil Armstrong's scripted aside as he stepped onto the lunar surface that it was, "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" - fired John's imagination, and he began to piece together ideas for a mythical space opera set to music. "He loved myths," says Genevieve, who was first introduced to John by Sarne that summer. "He liked Homer - The Iliad and The Odyssey."

(...) Genevieve bemoaned the fate of the show to her friend, Andy Warhol, who offered to find a backer, and did. Warhol also agreed to serve as a producer, and provided a director in the form of Paul Morrissey, who had made a series of avant-garde exploitation films under Warhol's aegis (Flesh, Trash, Heat, Chelsea Girls, etc.). John expressed his bemusement about Warhol's involvement in the song, "Oh Andy My Assistant": "Oh Andy, my assistant/your mind is so consistently blank/that I'm banking on you now/so please so don't try to comprehend/the reason why I have to send/ you up or else, I'm sure that we, shall have a terrible row/It's either you or I must save the race/ So bye-bye Andy and off you're goin' to Space."

LONG LOST FOOTAGE OF MUSICAL PLAY BY JOHN PHILLIPS, PRODUCED BY ANDY WARHOL (1975) (Dangerous Minds, photo courtesy Ken Regan / Camera S)

Music CD: Andy Warhol Presents "Man on the Moon" (Amazon.com)

Steve Roberts, the "high-tech nomad," was one of my first hardware hacking heroes. I just started following him on Twitter, and via his feed, found this other nomadness site, Technomadia. It chronicles the technomadic lives of Cherie Ve Ard & Chris Dunphy. In this post, they talk about being on "Nomadic Standard Time," and about the concept of "nomadic serendipity."

The downside to living a life without a firm itinerary is that it's awfully difficult to convey arrival times and destinations. When we don't know where we'll be even tonight, how can I tell our next rendezvous or host when to expect us? At first, this caused me a great deal of stress. Either we were rushing to meet a plan we conveyed, or we were afraid of leaving friends and family in a state of limbo.

It actually once contributed to a pretty major highway scare for us because we were pushing too hard to make an arrival date. Spinning down the interstate jack-knifed while towing a trailer was a wake-up call. Never again.

And thus now when conveying potential plans I always prefaces all dates and times being on NST - or Nomadic Standard Time.

A nomad, like a wizard, always arrives precisely when they are meant to.

Looking at their site, I had a moment of true wanderlust and thought: Hey, maybe *I* should become a technomad. It could happen. Since all my work is online, I can do it from anywhere, with the right tech.

Living on NST - Nomadic Standard Time

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Vanity Fair recently had a long, but absolutely fascinating article on how Harvard gambled away a big part of its endowment. Even worse, folks at Harvard seemed to think that the annual increases to the endowment were a sure thing, and spent like they were always going to see massive returns. The university is now feeling a pretty massive pinch because of this, and trying all sorts of things to cut costs and bring in more revenue. Apparently, that includes trademark trolling. ChurchHatesTucker points us to the news that Harvard is looking to trademark a bunch of common or well-known phrases, including "Ask what you can do," (based on President Kennedy's famous speech) and "Lessons learned." Not surprisingly, this is raising some free speech questions, concerning the university's right to try to claim some form of "ownership" over these common phrases. The university claims it's just for defensive purposes:

"Since we're spending so much time and money to promote this phrase, we just want to make sure someone doesn't say we can't use it."

Of course, that basically highlights the ridiculousness of the way copyright, patents and trademarks are viewed these days: as something you need to "stockpile" so someone else doesn't get them. Some of the trademark applications are on phrases that Harvard isn't even using:

"You need to reserve something in case you intend to use it," Calixto said. "We're strategically protecting it for use at some point down the line."

And I thought you could only get trademarks on actual use in commerce.

In the meantime, when I started reading the articles linked above, and thought that it would make for a good post, I totally planned to end it by pointing out that people should start getting around these trademarks by referring to the university as "Hah-vahd." Except... the university has an application pending for "The Hahvahd Tour." Oh well...

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(Ed. Note: We recently gave the Boing Boing Video website a makeover that includes a new, guest-curated microblog: the "BBVBOX." Here, folks whose taste in web video we admire tweet the latest clips they find. I'll be posting periodic roundups here on the motherBoing.)

---

More @BBVBOX: boingboingvideo.com

CWmike writes "Intel has confirmed that its new consumer-class X25-M and X18-M solid state-disk drives (SSDs) suffer from data corruption issues and said it has pulled back shipments to resellers. The X25-M (2.5-inch) and X18-M (1.8-inch) SSDs are based on a joint venture with Micron and used that company's 34-nanometer lithography technology. That process allows for a denser, higher capacity product that brings with it a lower price tag than Intel's previous offerings, which were based on 50-nanometer lithography technology. Intel says the data corruption problem occurs only if a user sets up a BIOS password on the 34-nanometer SSD, then disables or changes the password and reboots the computer. When that happens, the SSD becomes inoperable and the data on it is irretrievable. This is not the first time Intel's X25-M and X18-M SSDs have suffered from firmware bugs. The company's first generation of drives suffered from fragmentation issues resulting in performance degradation over time. Intel issued a firmware upgrade as a fix."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

People in (recycled) glass houses...

DIY: Backyard Hideaway Made from Old Windows Gallery

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A group of tinkerers and security researchers announced findings that prove it is possible to bypass the controls of "e-meter" parking meters -- which means it's possible to park for free where such meters are in use. The group announced their findings last week at the 2009 Black Hat Briefings in Las Vegas. Snip:

Throughout the United States, cities are deploying "smart" electronic fare collection infrastructures. In 2003, San Francisco launched a $35 million pilot program to replace approximately 23,000 mechanical parking meters with electronic units that boasted tamper resistance, payment via smart card, auditing capabilities, and an estimated $30 million annually in fare collection revenue. Other major cities, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Portland, and San Diego, have made similar moves. This presentation details our evaluation of electronic parking meters, including hardware disassembly, smart card protocol emulation, and silicon die analysis.

Slides and presentation: Smart Parking Meters: Grand Idea Studio.

News coverage: CBS, PC World, Venturebeat, internetnews, infoworld, CNET (thanks, Jake Appelbaum).

An underground Hungarian stem-cell clinic offering unspecified "therapies" to desperate members of the public has been the subject of a police raid. Reportedly, some 100 "stem cell tourists" have visited the clinic, paying "as much as $25,000 per person."

Stem cell therapy is promising, but there are major hurdles to overcome, not least the risk of the cells causing cancer.

"There's no proven benefit of any of the treatments on offer at commercial clinics, and there's risks of infection, not getting the stem cells at all, or them growing into something you don't want," says Stephen Barrett, a retired psychiatrist in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, who runs the Quackwatch website. "So to go for treatment is a very foolish thing to do."

'Guerrilla' stem cell clinic raided by police

Defense technology reporter Noah Shachtman has been covering conflicts over the use of social media within the US military ranks for years. This past week, he's been on top of the most recent news that the Pentagon may impose a very wide ban on Twitter and Facebook for security reasons.

He first posted the news of a possible "near-total ban" on social media last week at Wired's Danger Room blog, and there's now an update.

Snip from his most recent post:

Military Times says discussions on what to do about the social media sites involve U.S. Strategic Command, "the Pentagon's chief information officer and its public affairs organization, and are being guided by Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn."

Opinions range across the "full spectrum" from an all-out blockade to doing nothing at all, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman tells the paper.

"The answer is somewhere between," he said. We're working through this challenge of how do we operate in this environment -- because these are important communication tools -- and at the same time, provide the necessary protection to our systems [and] ensure the necessary operational security and private security concerns that any organization would have."

Pentagon Wrestles with Possible Twitter, Facebook Ban (Updated) (Wired Danger Room; photo: USAF)

Update: Danger Room contributor David Axe has an exclusive interview up today with the Pentagon's "Social Media Czar," who strongly advocates Web 2.0 access despite pressures to ban.

Last year, you may recall, we pointed out that the Associated Press had a laughable sliding scale price if you wanted to copy and use more than 4 words (the first 4 free!). After that, it cost $12.50 for 5 to 25 words. This, of course, ignores fair use, which (and, yes, it does depend on the circumstances) almost certainly would let most people quote more than 4 words without having to pay. But, of course, it gets worse. Boing Boing points us to a little experiment by James Grimmelmann, testing out the AP's text licensing system, where he discovers that you can put any text you want into the calculator, and the AP will gladly sell you a license. So, just for fun, Grimmelmann paid $12 for a license to a (public domain) quote from Thomas Jefferson, culled not from the AP, but from Jefferson's famous letter to Isaac McPherson, where he warns of the excesses of intellectual monopolies: Grimmelmann also points out the ridiculousness of the terms associated with licensing the content, including that it must be used exactly as written, and requires the exact attribution footer the AP's system generates (which never bothers to check to see if the content is actually from the article in question). Oh yeah, it also doesn't let you quote for "political Content," however that's defined. It makes you wonder if the same folks who build this little anti-fair use licensing system are the same folks who are building their DRM for news.

And, of course, there are similarly ridiculous situations, such as Dave Zatz finding out that it will cost himself $25 to quote himself (thanks johnjac). The AP keeps making a mockery of itself.

Of course, the AP has put out a statement, basically mimicking the one it put out last year, saying that the icopyright stuff is not intended for bloggers. But then who is it intended for? Considering that the AP has threatened bloggers in the past for quoting its words, the whole thing seems bizarre. So you can rely on fair use if you're a blogger, but not... if you're something else? How does that make sense? I've read through our copyright laws more than a few times, and I don't recall the clause that says "fair use applies to bloggers, but not others."

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This is all kinds of awesome. "Snow Day," written and performed by a very cool 8-year-old girl named Emma at the 2009 Spring Coffee Shop Jam, at The Columbia City Theater in Seattle, WA. This is the same event, same teachers, same group of kids where that "Folsom Pwison Blues" video came from, last week. There are more videos here, and quite a lot of gems within the mix. Rob, from Hampton Guitars, who teaches Emma and the previously blogged Wesley, says:

Emma announced during a guitar lesson one day that she felt like writing a song. I started playing some chords, and this is what she came up with. Amazing. The Jam's a chance for Heartwood Guitar Instruction students to showcase their talents. Enjoy!

I'm pretty nuts about the original punk/hardcore/deathmetal jams written and performed by 9-year-old Connor, too -- 'specially DEATH NIGHTMARE. WTF with all these rockin' kids, Seattle, is it something in the water up there?

Journalist and filmmaker Maziar Bahari, who holds dual citizenship in Iran and Canada, was among more than 100 reporters, activists, and protesters who appeared in court this past Saturday, August 1, in Tehran, held on undefined crimes against the state. More in this NYT article. Entities campaigning for his release include Index on Censorship, Newsweek, the Committee to Protect Journalists, PEN, and Canadian Journalists for Free Expression. There is a support website for him here: freemaziarbahari.org.

Mr. Bahari has not been allowed to see a lawyer since his arrest in June.

Video above: an earlier conversation between Mr. Bahari and American television and radio news journalist Ted Koppel.

suraj.sun writes "Ed Markey has introduced his plan to legislate network neutrality into a third consecutive Congress, and he has a message for ISPs: upgrade your infrastructure and don't even think about blocking or degrading traffic. The war over network neutrality has been fought in the last two Congresses, and last week's introduction of the 'Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009' [PDF] means that legislators will duke it out a third time. Should the bill pass, Internet service providers will not be able to 'block, interfere with, discriminate against, impair, or degrade' access to any lawful content from any lawful application or device. Rulemaking and enforcement of network neutrality would be given to the Federal Communications Commission, which would also be given the unenviable job of hashing out what constitutes 'reasonable network management' — something explicitly allowed by the bill. Neutrality would also not apply to the access and transfer of unlawful information, including 'theft of content,' so a mythical deep packet inspection device that could block illegal P2P transfers with 100 percent accuracy would still be allowed. If enacted, the bill would allow any US Internet user to file a neutrality complaint with the FCC and receive a ruling within 90 days."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Das original! It's the German-made Messograf caliper pen from Cleo Skribent. Built into the retractable ballpoint pen is a 4? Vernier caliper that measures in increments of both 0.1mm and 1/16?. The pen also functions as a metric screw thread scale and a tire tread depth scale. Garrett-Wade carries them.

Always Have Calipers On Hand

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A jury has decided that 25-year-old Boston University student Joel Tenenbaum must pay $675,000 to four record labels for downloading and sharing 30 digital music files. He admitted to having downloaded hundreds of songs, but the labels and the court nailed him for 30 specific tracks he dowloaded via Kazaa.

This past June, a federal jury in Minneapolis ordered Jamie Thomas-Rasset, a 32-year old Native American mother of four, to pay $1.92 million for copyright violations involving 24 downloaded songs.

Snip from New York Times item:

[He] testified Thursday in federal district court in Boston that he had downloaded and shared hundreds of songs by artists including Nirvana, Green Day and the Smashing Pumpkins, and said he had lied in pretrial depositions when he said friends or siblings may have downloaded the songs to his computer. (...) Under federal law they were entitled to $750 to $30,000 for each infringement, but the jury was permitted to raise that to as much as $150,000 a track if it found the infringements were willful.

There's a support website for Mr. Tennenbaum here: joelfightsback.com.

AmLaw Litigation Daily, a legal trade publication, had an interesting piece up about the arguments in this case around fair use -- and about some of the courtroom drama, including defense attorney Charles Nesson posting an internet video of his wife calling one of the members of the defense team a "schmuck." Snip:

On Monday, with jury selection about to begin, the judge knocked out one of Nesson's key legal theories, granting partial summary judgement to the five record companies suing Tenebaum on the question of Tenenbaum's fair use of the copyrighted songs. Though the judge said she will issue a full opinion later, her minute order is pretty stinging: "Tenebaum proposes a fair use defense so broad that it would swallow the copyright protections that Congress has created," she wrote.

Fair Use Defense Gets KO'd at Boston Illegal Music Downloading Trial (law.com, thanks Rob Rader)

Reader Osno points us to the latest in misplaced liability rulings... this time in Argentina. Apparently both Google and Yahoo have been fined (Google translation) approximately $15,000 (US) after a lawsuit from a member of a popular reality show band accused both search engines of leading people to pornographic websites when people searched on her name. This reminds me of a similar lawsuit in the US, that is still ongoing and seems unlikely to get very far. It's difficult to see how a search engine can be responsible for what others put up on a porn site, or the fact that a search on someone's name leads people to a porn site. But... apparently that's what the judge in Argentina decided. There's a separate jurisdiction issue here as well, since neither Google nor Yahoo have operations in Argentina. Either way, it's expected that the companies will appeal, and hopefully the higher level courts will recognize that this shouldn't be a search engine's liability.

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This 32-story condominium in Fort Myers, Florida has 200 units and only one is occupied. The Vangelakos purchased their unit four years ago and nobody else has ever moved in. The scene sounds like something from a JG Ballard novel, which is appropriate considering I heard about it from Simon Sellars's @Ballardian Twitter stream. From the Associated Press:

Most of the other tenants in the 200-unit condo didn't close on their contracts, and the few that did have transferred to an adjacent building owned by the same company because more people live there.

The Vangelakos' mortgage lender will not allow them to do the same.

That leaves them as the sole residents of the Oasis Tower One.

"It's a beautiful building," said their attorney, John Ewing, who is representing 27 others who made deposits on units. "The problem is, it's a very lonely building."

When the Vangelakos' travel from Weehawken, N.J., to spend a week or a few days in their Florida home, they have exclusive use of the pool, game room and gym, but they miss having a few tenants around.

"Being from the city, it's very eerie," Vangelakos said. "It's almost like a scary movie."

A large, circular fountain in front of the building is dry. The automatic glass doors that lead to the front lobby are locked. On the front desk is a guest sign-in sheet. The last entry: Feb. 13, 2009.

"It's like time froze here six months ago," Ewing said.

"Fla. highrise has 32 stories, but just 1 tenant"

If America comes to a catastrophic end, what will the causes be? Josh Levin of Slate wants to know. He's created a "Choose Your Own Apocalypse" web-based application that lets you select five causes from a collection of "144 potential causes of America's future death." Based on your choices, Slate will tell you what kind of a doomsayer you are. People who take the poll are also asked to supply age, gender, zip code. On Friday, Slate will publish the results.

I picked Peak Oil, China Unloads U.S. Treasuries, Deficit Spending, Peak Water, and Megadrought, which makes me a "humanitarian internationalist." Compared to the average Slate reader, I believe more people will survive and that the disaster is more man's fault than nature's.

If and when America expires, we probably won't agree on the cause of death. For proof that autopsies of empires are inconclusive, consider the case of Alexander Demandt, the German historian who set out in the 1980s to collect every theory ever given for why Rome fell. The final tally: 210, including attacks by nomads on horseback, blood poisoning, decline of Nordic character, homosexuality, outflow of gold, and vaingloriousness.

In tribute to Demandt, I've gone looking for every possible reason why America could fall. I've paged through the work of scholars who have studied the characteristics of declining and failed societies. I also collected theories from futurists, doomsayers, separatists, economists, political scientists, national security experts, climatologists, geologists, astronomers, and a few miscellaneous crazy people. The result: a collection of 144 potential causes of America's future death.

Choose Your Own Apocalypse

eldavojohn writes to tell us of a new service, "BringIt.com," that allows gamers to put their money where their mouth is with respect to their console gaming skill. "BringIt supports the PlayStation 2, the PS3, the Xbox 360 and the Wii. Players challenge each other on the site, but play on their consoles. BringIt holds players' entry fees until the game is finished. After the game is done, it verifies the results and credits the winner, minus the service fee. To attract players of a broad range of skill sets, BringIt has separate tournaments meant for novice players and expert gamers. Levin compared it to the handicap system in golf or the weight-class system in wrestling.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

eldavojohn writes to tell us of a new service, "BringIt.com", that allows gamers to put their money where their mouth is with respect to their console gaming skill. "BringIt supports the PlayStation 2, the PS3, the Xbox 360 and the Wii. Players challenge each other on the site, but play on their consoles. BringIt holds players' entry fees until the game is finished. After the game is done, it verifies the results and credits the winner, minus the service fee. To attract players of a broad range of skill sets, BringIt has separate tournaments meant for novice players and expert gamers. Levin compared it to the handicap system in golf or the weight-class system in wrestling.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This summer, two research expeditions are headed to the Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch between California and Hawaii. Twice the size of Texas, the Garbage Patch is a massive dump of discarded plastic, much of which has deteriorated into tiny bits. Fish and birds eat the material, and die. With 70 percent of the Garbage Patch's plastic sunk under the surface, cleaning it up isn't a matter of skimming the surface of the vortex. From National Geographic:

"We need to do the chemistry and see how much plastic is reaching the water and the ocean sediments, how much is being broken into [these] tiny particles and ingested by marine life at rates we can't imagine," said (Jim Dufour of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego).

The project will also explore clean up options, which aren't as easy as simply scooping up waste.

"It's a tough job. [Open-ocean] fish live under things like Styrofoam cups. If you simply drag a net you'll end up killing off a lot of the resources that you want to protect," Dufour said.

"Giant Ocean-Trash Vortex Attracts Explorers"

Domain Name News writes "Until recently, there hasn't been a case of a domain theft where the thief was caught and arrested. However, on July 30th, Daniel Goncalves was arrested at his home in Union, New Jersey and charged in a landmark case, the first criminal arrest for domain name theft in the United States. 'Cases of domain name theft have not typically involved a criminal prosecution because of the complexities, financial restraints and sheer time and energy involved. If a domain name is stolen, the victim of the crime in most cases would need experience with the technical and legal intricies associated with the domain name system. To move the case forward, they would also need a law enforcement professional who understands the case or is willing to take the time to learn. For example, the Angel's told us that in their case they called their local law enforcement in Florida who sent a uniformed officer in a squad car to their home. The first thing you can imagine the officer asked was, "What's a domain?".'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We haven't heard much from Jared Bouck, of Invent Geek, recently. But he wrote in to tell us that he's released free downloadable plans for his paintball turret gun.They also now have a kit available.

Paintball Turret Plans

More:
Paintball turret gun

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Scott Richter was a bigtime spammer, who was so proud of being a spammer, at one point he planned to release his own line of "Spamking" clothing (seriously). In 2005, though, he filed for bankruptcy (even though it appeared his spamming operations were still rolling in cash. That same year, there were reports that Richter had actually gone legit and he was actually removed from the infamous ROKSO list of known spammers (not an easy list to get removed from). Except... sometimes it's just difficult to stay away. MySpace sued Richter in 2007 and won a $6 million award against him (though, Richter claimed victory since MySpace wanted much more).

Now, Michael Scott alerts us to the news that Richter tried to have his insurance company pay the fines, but a court has now said that these fines were excluded from the policies, and thus Richter is on the hook for the fines instead. That seems like a good thing. It would be pretty troubling if spammers were able to buy insurance against getting fined.

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Birthers, who refuse to accept Obama's actual Hawaiian birth certificate as proof that he was born in the United States, are holding up a copy of a laughably shoddy, error-filled, forged Kenyan birth certificate as incontrovertible proof that Obama was born in Kenya.

Daily Kos and other sites are having fun debunking this poorly-executed forgery.

First, the hospital is Coast Provincial General Hospital (sometimes said to be Coast Province General Hospital), not Coast General Hospital.

Second, Kenya was a Dominion the date this certificate was allegedly issued and would not become a republic for 8 months. Third, Mombasa belonged to Zanzibar when Obama was born, not Kenya.

Fourth, Obama's father's village would be nearer to Nairobi, not Mombasa.

Fifth, the number 47O44-- 47 is Obama's age when he became president, followed by the letter O (not a zero) followed by 44--he is the 44th president.

Sixth, EF Lavender is a laundry detergent. Seventh, would a nation with a large number of Muslims actually say "Christian name" (as opposed to name) on the birth certificate?

Eighth, his father (born in 1961) would have been 24 or 25 when he was born and not 26.

Ninth, it was called the "Central Nyanza District," not Nyanza Province. The regions were changed to provinces in 1970.

Debunking the unbearably stupid

Al writes "The Sunlight Foundation, based in Washington, DC, hopes to raise an army of web volunteers to analyze all the earmarks in government bills. The groups new Sunlight Labs transparency corps invites users to join an effort to analyze the information collaboratively. Users are presented with PDFs released by hundreds of different offices and asked to enter the pertinent information like the date and dollar amount of a request, name of the requester, description of the project, and so on. These then become part of a searchable database. The project's launch roughly coincided with the launch earlier this month of the government's new IT Dashboard. But this tool is somewhat limited — users can find the primary recipients of IT project funding, but not subcontractors; it's not easy to discern the origins of contracts or their geographic distribution, and it's almost impossible to see how they are connected to elected officials."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've been talking a lot about "entitlement culture" these days, with much of the focus being on companies or individuals who feel entitled to keep their old business models, even as the market is changing. But entitlement society shows up in other places as well. Jeff Nolan points us to the story of a college graduate who has been unable to find a job since she graduated in April and is now suing her college, Monroe College, for the $70,000 she spent on tuition. Apparently, the fact that we're in one of the worst economic downturns in ages doesn't come into play. Or the fact that what you learn in college (hopefully) lasts a lifetime. To this woman, the fact that she hasn't been able to find a job in four months means she deserves her entire tuition back?

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University of Massachusetts researchers have made a breakthrough with "Geobacter", a microbe that produces electric current from mud and wastewater. A conservative estimate puts the energy output increase at eight times that of the original organism potentially allowing applications far beyond that of extracting electricity from mud. "Now, planning can move forward to design microbial fuel cells that convert waste water and renewable biomass to electricity, treat a single home's waste while producing localized power (especially attractive in developing countries), power mobile electronics, vehicles and implanted medical devices, and drive bioremediation of contaminated environments."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mark Dery is guest blogger du jour until August 17. He is the author of Culture Jamming, Flame Wars, Escape Velocity, and The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium. He's at work on The Pathological Sublime, a philosophical investigation into the paradox of horrible beauty and the politics of "just looking."

When the American Academy in Rome appointed me a scholar in residence for two weeks this summer, an evil gleam kindled in my eye. I knew exactly what I wanted to do: worship Italian cooking in its birthplace like some foodie penitent, a gastro-fundamentalist version of those frighteningly devout pilgrims who earn plenary indulgences by ascending, on their knees, the steep marble stairs of the Piazza di Porta San Giovanni in Rome. (Pontius Pilate's staircase, allegedly, lugged all the way to from the Holy Land to the Holy City in the year 326. A wood casing protects the venerated steps; strategically cut openings reveal what are purported to be Christ's bloodstains. Believer beware...)

That was my first, albeit covert, order of business.

My Official Reason for Being in Italy was to research my book-in-progress, The Pathological Sublime, a philosophical investigation of the paradox of awful beauty---beheld things whose retinal seductions are irresistible yet whose content is morally horrific, politically incorrect, or at the very least, viscerally repulsive. (About which, more shortly, in my next post.)

The second item on my hidden agenda was to convince the editors of Boing Boing to let me blog my Grand Tour, which I hoped would be of interest to like-minded Mutants. With the editors' blessing, I would chronicle my encounters with Wonderful Things&trade in a style that, in my dreams, crossed the scholarly fastidiousness of Charles Willson Peale with the deadpan urbanity Rod Serling, whose brand of suave always hit that sweet spot between Mad Men and the mortician's prep table.

I'm not being glib, here. In his famous natural-history museum, Peale was one of the first to embrace the logic of the Linnean taxonomy, a paradigm-shift away from the jumbled cabinets of curiosity, or "wonder closets," of the 17th century, whose intent was not to rationalize and secularize/de-sacralize the world, but to inspire wonder and horror at wild nature and exotic cultures in a time when fact and fable were conjoined twins. Boing Boing's insistence that it is a "directory" implies a certain Enlightenment epistemology, an ordering impulse, the same desire to Explain the Mystery of It All that flickers through the pop sociology and scientific edutainment of TED videos, WIRED articles, and Gladwell lectures. At the same time, Boing Boing is all about "wonderful" things---tagged by category, to be sure, yet experienced by the reader as a free-associated stream of images and ideas and events. The site is a wunderkammer of the Web, where a post about Jack Kirby's comic-book retellings of readers' dreams might follow an item about a summer camp for atheist kids or a link to a photo that does (or does not) bear an uncanny resemblance to the famous image of Jack Ruby shooting Oswald. The implicit logic, here, is less that of the diligently taxonomized archive than that of the madcap cabinet of curiosities, where the prehistoric insect embedded in a piece of amber sits next to the bona fide unicorn's horn, the anencephalic fetus in a vitrine full of brandy keeps company with the mummified mermaid on the shelf beside it.

Later today, and over the next two weeks, I hope you'll join me on a guided tour of some of Italy's most spectacular manifestations of the Pathological Sublime (with occasional corner-of-the-mouth asides inspired by more conventional tourist destinations, as well). In Rome, we'll prowl the Museo Storico Nazionale dell'Arte Sanitaria in Rome, and of course the Crypt of the Capuchin Monks, and we'll contemplate the sanctified eroticism of Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Theresa, too. In Florence, we'll succumb to the uncanny seductions of the 18th-century wax medical models, especially the obstetric mannequins known as "Anatomical Venuses," in the stunning museum La Specola. In the same city, we'll visit the by-invitation-only museums at the Careggi hospital, where we'll marvel at the bizarre, Dr. Phibes-ian anatomical preparations of Girolamo Segato (1792-1836), whose exact nature remains a mystery to this day, and at the breathtakingly hyperrealistic wax models of pathological conditions, and at the unforgettable teratological specimens preserved in formalin. In Ozzano Emilia, outside Bologna, we'll wander the Museum of Veterinary Pathology and Teratology, also by invitation only, a surrealist bestiary of congenital mash-ups, most of them stillborn; back in Bologna, we'll pay homage to the exquisite medical waxes of the incomparable Ercole Lelli, in the Palazzo Poggi, nor will we neglect the dimly lit, unloved Museum of Zoology of the University of Bologna, an unintentional monument to the Taxidermic Grotesque, its stuffed animals in their final, melancholy stages of decay.

I'm thrilled by the prospect of submitting these sights, and my insights, for your sharp-witted consideration. In my experience as a reader and a writer, the bb multitudes are smarter by an order of magnitude than nearly any avant-pop, mass/cult audience I've encountered. As important, you've earned your weirdness stripes through frequent exposure to the unkillable GOATSE meme. Over breakfast.

As I go, I'll be test-driving arguments for my book-in-progress; any Mutant whose comments sharpen my analysis or inspire previously unconsidered angles of intellectual attack will of course be cited in my acknowledgements.

Is all of this a bit much for a Monday morning? If so, my apologies. But I never promised you a unicorn chaser.

Image: "The Artist in His Museum," Charles Willson Peale, self-portrait, 1822. Collection: Philadelphia Museum of Art, the George W. Elkins Collection. Used under the Fair Use provision.

Last Thursday we had a very successful meeting in NYC to discuss development of the 140-character loosely-coupled message network built on rssCloud.

The main immediate followup was to create an place for online discussion.

Let's use the comments on this post to begin.

My preference is to set up a YahooGroup, but if there's a consensus to use some other collaborative environment, I'll go with it.

I'm delighted to welcome Mark Dery as our guestblogger for the next two weeks. Mark is a cultural critic and author whose work I've enjoyed for almost twenty years. In my library, his books share a shelf with the best nonfiction by Ballard, Burroughs, and Eco. As I've written on BB before, "Mark and I have overlapping interests in subjects that, as once defined by Mark Frauenfelder's young daughter Sarina, are 'creepy, interesting, and real.' Mark Dery's take on such matters is often filled with wonderfully obscure references to history, culture, and philosophy that, more often than not, are news to me. That's one of the reasons I like reading his essays and books so much. When I finish one, I always have a great list of links and juxtapositions to follow up on." Here's Mark's "official" bio:

Mark Dery is a cultural critic. Way back in the day, he edited Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (1994), an academic anthology that kick-started scholarly interest in techno-feminism and black technoculture (through Dery's trailblazing essay "Black to the Future," in which he coined the term "Afrofuturism"). His 1993 pamphlet "Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of the Signs" popularized the term "culture jamming" and helped launch the movement of the same name. In 1996, Dery established himself, with Suck essays such as "Bit Rot," his point-by-point obliteration of Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital, and his book Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century, as a passionate, progressive critic of libertarian cyberdrool. In 1999, he published The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink, an analysis of the cultural psyche of millennial America as refracted through media figures such as the Unabomber, the Heaven's Gate cult, and right-wing survivalists like Timothy McVeigh, and emerging trends such as gated communities, "safe rooms," and Jerry Springer-style freaktalk---a zeitgeist whose economic instability, social pathologies, and media-fueled weirdness seem to be back with a bang. Until fall 2009, he taught media criticism and narrative nonfiction in the Department of Journalism at New York University. Since leaving NYU, he has been a freelance journalist, book author, and lecturer. In summer 2009, he was appointed visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome, where he researched his book-in-progress, The Pathological Sublime, a philosophical inquiry into the paradox of awful beauty (images whose retinal seductions are irresistible yet whose content is viscerally repulsive or morally obscene), an aesthetic conundrum that is particularly relevant to our Age of Unreason, with its viral videos, tabloid media, and gorenography.

Mark Dery

Researchers are developing a new nanotech process to create a self-healing material that repairs itself if damaged The scientists from the Fraunhofer Institute and Duisburg-Essen University peppered a layer of electroplating with fluid-filled nanocapsules. If the electroplating is scratched, the nanocapsules burst open to fill the damage. From Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft:

Mechanical bearings are one example of possible applications – the materials of the bearings usually have a electroplated coating, in which the capsules can be embedded. If there is a temporary shortage of lubricant, part of the bearing's coating is lost, the capsules at the top of the layer burst and release lubricant. The bearing is not therefore damaged if it temporarily runs dry. The researchers have produced the first copper, nickel and zinc coatings with the new capsules, although surface coverage does not extend beyond the centimeter scale. Experts estimate that it will be another one and a half to two years before whole components can be coated. In a further step the team worked on more complex systems – involving differently filled capsules, for example, whose fluids react with one another like a two component adhesive.

"Self-healing surfaces"

Ars writer Jeremy Reimer takes a stroll down memory lane, recalling over 20 years of (almost) constant Microsoft Word use and why with current and emerging tech trends he thinks his relationship with the program may be at an end. "So why don't I need Word any more? To figure this out, I tried to go back to basics and think about what Word was originally designed to do. In the early days, Word's primary purpose was to ready a document so that you could print it out. As a student I needed to print out essays so I could hand them to my instructor. In the office I needed to print out reports so that I could hand them to my supervisor. The end goal was always the same: I printed out something to give to someone more important than me, who would evaluate it and, if I was lucky, give it back to me at some indeterminate time in the future. One didn't question this; it was just the way the world worked. Somewhere along the way, we stopped printing things out quite so much. Maybe it was the rise of office networking. Maybe it was when the printer companies kept raising the price of ink to ridiculous levels. Maybe it was when we realized we couldn't print out the whole Internet. Despite the fact that fewer things were being printed, we kept on using Word to create our documents."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I really like this simple accent lamp by designer Richard Lawson. It lights up when placed in the upright position. Consisting of just a couple of LEDs, a tilt switch, and a 9V battery clip encased in a block of tinted resin, it'd be an easy re-make.

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Dr Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency (IEA), says his agency's recent study of 800 oil fields around the world (representing three quarter's of the world's oil reserves) reveal that we are facing a global energy catastrophe even sooner than researchers thought.

The IEA estimates that the decline in oil production in existing fields is now running at 6.7 per cent a year compared to the 3.7 per cent decline it had estimated in 2007, which it now acknowledges to be wrong.

This means the pressure will be on to start using enivonmentally-disastrous tar sands in Canada.

Catastrophic oil shortfalls threaten economic recovery, says world's top energy economist

Another day, another ridiculous situation brought on by patents. Back in November, we wrote about how a company almost no one had ever heard of, called Leader Technologies (name not descriptive of the company) had sued Facebook for patent infringement over Patent 7,139,761 on associating a piece of data with multiple categories. As broad and obvious as that appears to be, it struck us that the whole lawsuit appeared to be a publicity stunt by this no-name company. Yet, for a publicity stunt, things may be getting troublesome. A magistrate judge has ordered Facebook to turn over its source code to the other company. Now, whatever you think of proprietary source code vs. open source, it doesn't seem right that a service like Facebook, which does a lot of different things with its service, should be required to turn over its entire source code to some tiny company with an overly broad patent. It sounds like Facebook is fighting this, as it should. I could understand (maybe) such an order if there were a charge of copyright infringement and direct copying of source code -- but a patent infringement claim shouldn't need source code.

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darthcamaro writes "Remember Conficker? April first doom and gloom and all? Well apparently after infecting over five million IP addresses, it's now an autonomous botnet working on its own without any master command and control. Speaking at the Black Hat/Defcon Hat security conference in Las Vegas, Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at security firm F-Secure was told not to talk in detail about the Conficker gang — problem is that not all researchers were under the same gag order. Just ask Roel Schouwenberg, senior anti-virus researcher at security firm Kaspersky who says 'The Conficker botnet is autonomous, that is very strange in itself that they made Conficker replicate by itself," Schouwenberg said. "Now it seems like the authors have abandoned the project but because it is autonomous it can do whatever it wants and it keeps on trying to find new hosts to infect.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sound can have some amazing effects on liquids - and some downright bizarre effects on non-newtonian fluids such as the conveniently simple mixture of cornstarch & water. I'd experimented a bit with cornstarch cymatics in the past, but never quite matched the writhing results I'd seen from others. Now, after bringing my own small puddle of goop to 'life', I feel pretty much satisfied =]

Some additional pics from the session -

From the pages of MAKE:

Chladni Plate  Volume 16, Page 122

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Julie Yu, a post-doc at San Francisco's Exploratorium, has a really good collection of unusual home lab activities on her page, including a home column chromatography experiment using common materials, which is the first of its kind I've seen.

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Matt_dk writes "The Opportunity rover has eyed an odd-shaped, dark rock, about 0.6 meters (2 feet) across on the surface of Mars, which may be a meteorite. The team spotted the rock called "Block Island," on July 18, 2009, in the opposite direction from which it was driving. The rover then backtracked some 250 meters (820 feet) to study it closer. Scientists will be testing the rock with the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer to get composition measurements and to confirm if indeed it is a meteorite."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Recently on Offworld we saw heartening tales of Indie Spirit leading to two cross-promotional cross-overs: Crackerblocks' Enviro-bear -- ursine motorist star of the indie PC favorite and recently-launched iPhone port of the same name -- coming as an unlockable character to Mountain Sheep's just-launched iPhone shooter Minigore (above), and bunny battleships coming to Positech's Gratuitous Space Battles to help promote Wolfire's leporine/lupine battler Overgrowth. We also saw the first footage of an entirely new game from Knytt and Night Game creator Nifflas -- the fantastically ambient and atmospheric platformer project title Q -- and it's every bit as gorgeous as his earlier games above. Elsewhere, we got the latest update on homegrown voxel-deforming puzzler Flipper as it makes its way to DSiWare, purchased one ticket to mouth-foaming seizures and glitched-out landscapes in a video for chiptune artists Chromelodeon, saw papercraft artist Harlancore do an 8-bit console Speakerdog, and read an interview with the founder of abandonware repository Home of the Underdogs, who, as it turns out, is Harvard alum and investment bank exec Sarinee Achavanuntakul. Finally, our one shot's for the day: making love, not Wor, and the tale of the bravest invader.

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.

I've been fascinated by these for quite a while, and I'm gathering information on them for a future book project: "These" and "them" are Thai Edan trucks-- possibly the only cottage-industry motor vehicles in the world.

These are farmer's trucks, made in rural workshops in Thailand to order for local farmers. Though there are many small village factories making them, they do appear to have some standardization of design; for example, they all seem to be built around the same 14 (or so) hp diesel Kubota generator motors. They're all wonderfully and elaborately decorated and painted, and, while undeniably crude, seem very capable of doing their job.

I love the ingenuity of these, but I'm afraid they're not going to be around much longer; more advanced, cheap, and modern used Isuzu and Toyota pickups are starting to become competitive with the locally-built Edan trucks, so it's likely just a matter of time before these little workshops shut down. It's understandable, but a shame.

Information about them online is a bit scant, but this blog entry (also where I snagged that picture) has some excellent information from a man who had one built. I'm hoping to produce a nice, big coffe table type book about these, full of good pictures, since I think I'm not the only one who finds these lovely brutes fascinating.

Slashdot points us to a story that sounds like it has to be a joke/satire, concerning a plan by the UK's Children's Secretary, Ed Balls, to spend £400 million to put 20,000 families (the worst families) under constant surveillance including 24-hour CCTV cameras in their homes, and private security guards checking on them from time to time. The cameras will supposedly be used to make sure kids go to bed on time and eat proper meals. Even in the UK, where surveillance cameras are even more popular than in the US, this seems quite extreme. Balls apparently explained:

"This is pretty tough and non-negotiable support for families to get to the root of the problem. There should be Family Intervention Projects in every local authority area because every area has families that need support."

I'm hopeful that someone in the UK can let us know if this is somehow an exaggeration of what's going on or if this is accurate, because it honestly seems difficult to believe.

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I never knew you could create a watertight cup by placing a ring of fresh cut wood around a base and letting it shrink as it dries. Instructables user morfmir shows us how.

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Harry writes "Rumor has it that RadioShack is planning to re-brand itself as The Shack later this year, after eighty-eight years under the old name (most of them with a space in between "Radio" and "Shack"). I hope it's not true, because I don't think the move would do a thing to make the retailer a better, more successful business." Where will we go to buy soldering irons and those RCA to headphone jack adapters now?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gareth Branwyn conjured up this fun 1970 documentary on the Church of Satan and its founder Anton Szandor LaVey. According to many friends of mine who knew LaVey, the "black pope" was, er, wicked smart, insightful, witty, and had the charisma of a great showman. Which of course he was. He also played a mean organ. I wish I'd met him! Satanis: The Devil's Mass

The Architects Journal compiled a top 10 list of "the greatest illustrated urban spaces" from comic books. Above, panels from Moebius' The Long Tomorrow and Herge's Tintin. Also featured: Radiant City, Metropolis, Ubicand, Gotham City, Daredevil's New York, From Hell's London, Chris Ware's Chicago, and Mega City One. Top 10 Comic Book Cities (via Drawn!)

It's Lucas again, our poster child for the MAKEcation Family Soldering Challenge. Here he is (note: safety glasses this time!) working on his second soldering project, a Drawdio. Lucas (and family) get a free Maker's Notebook because they posted pics of their MAKEcation to the MAKE Flickr pool. The next four people who post their pics will also get a free notebook.

And don't forget, we're giving away a $100 gift certificate to the Maker Shed for our favorite family soldering photos/videos and five Best of MAKE or Best of Instructables books. Adafruit industries has also generously given us some of their awesome soldering merit badges to give out to winners. But you've gotta upload your pics!

More:

• Let the MAKEcation solder-fest BEGIN!
• Let's take a Summer MAKEcation!
• MAKEcation: "Teach Your Family to Solder" week
• Super learn-to-solder roundup
• Camp counselor Dave's soldering tips
• YOUR soldering tips
• Lucas learns to solder
• A brief history of my soldering experiences
• Toolbox: Soldering essentials, part 1
• Toolbox, Soldering tools, part 2

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Jerod Venema writes "Today, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt resigned from Apple's board of directors, citing conflicts of interest. Apple has released a statement that the company and Schmidt reached a decision to split ties as Google enters new markets that directly compete with Apple's iPhone and Mac operating systems. Schmidt had recused himself of portions of Apple's board meetings when conflicts of interest or anything Google-related arose. But Steve Jobs said Schmidt would have to leave much larger portions of the meetings after Google announced last month that it would enter the operating system sphere."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As part of a campaign for a car company, PLEASELETMEDESIGN used the auto to design a new font. iQ Font (via Drawn!)

This Grey Gardens Coloring Book is the best curious collectible for the day. There are three volumes, signed by the artist, in the $30 set. Grey Gardens Collectibles Coloring Books (via Bust)

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Wow - feeling pretty lucky I don't share a workplace Flickr member zomie84 and his cubicle crossbow -

Designed to shoot marshmellows, pens, or just about anything you can fit in it to attack your cube mates. I can get about 25ft with a bic pen. The trigger is spring loaded making it easy to reset and aim.

Best keep those pens capped - lest ye risk losing employee of the month!

In the Maker Shed:

Eccentric Cubicle

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Russian modder mike_ap has crammed an Asus Eee PC 900 into a Sven Multimedia EL 4002 keyboard, and despite it being a little on the bulky side it's still a sleek mod. Pure modern retro!

[EEE-PC.ru via Liliputing]

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Reminder: As stated below, our special promotion where you get a free hoodie or lunch with Mike for buying both the Music Club and the Book Club package ends tonight! Don't miss out...

With our CwF + RtB experiment in full swing, we've asked some of the participants involved to provide some guest posts, including their thoughts on the experiment itself. Michele Boldrin and David Levine are two well-known economists who recently published Against Intellectual Monopoly, which is a part of our Techdirt Book Club (which gives you Against Monopoly along with four other excellent books, all signed by their authors). If you order both the Techdirt Book Club and the Techdirt Music Club before midnight PT tonight, we'll throw in a free Techdirt hoodie, or a free lunch with me (Mike). In the meantime, here's the guest post written by David and Michele:

On new business models for authors:

With copyright vanishing de facto, even as legal protections become more extreme, the question of how to get paid for creation without the monopoly granted by copyright becomes more salient. Historically one of the most important sources of revenue has been "complementary sales" -- the sale of something other than the copy. For example: in the case of music -- live performances; in the case of movies -- theatrical performances. In the case of news and blogs advertising has historically been the key, but the selling of the author is another potential source of revenue as the industry becomes more decentralized and competitive. Signed copies of books by authors is one possibility we'll be interested to see, but we also expect successful authors to extract substantial income from public speeches and similar events. Popularity, it seems clear, pays off quite well. Frankly, the two of us have a lot of confidence in the ability of the market to generate new and creative solutions even if we personally have no ability to predict what the specific outcomes will be. This period of experimentation with business models is essential and it will be interesting to see which models catch on. In the case of small comic strips the answer is already in -- comic strip based t-shirts amazingly enough turn out to be the trick.

Why we wrote Against Monopoly

The purpose of copyrights and patents is to grant a short-lived monopoly to encourage creation and innovation. We were led to write the book when we discovered that existing economic theory greatly exaggerated the importance of these temporary monopolies in providing incentives. This lead us to put into context a lot of data and case-studies showing that competitive markets work and work well even without these monopolies. The book (ironically under copyright, although a free copy is always available online) tried to put this all together in a way that would be comprehensible for a non-economists (that is, we tried to avoid the mathematics and jargon that economists love).

And thanks to Mike for the entrepreneurial spirit we academics can only admire.

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Glyn Moody writes "Microsoft is at it again: trying to redefine what "open" means. This time it wants open standards to be "balanced" — for them to include patent-encumbered technologies under RAND (reasonable and non-discriminatory) terms. Which just happens to be incompatible with free software licensed under the GNU GPL."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bruno Mathez and Mike Blow's art installation, PHOTOPHONICS, presents an interesting relationship between light-controlled oscillators and video projection -

PHOTOPHONICS is the first result of Bruno's 3d video-projection mapping experiments. It is a 'dispersed instrument' with a number of electronic oscillators created by Mike, positioned on architectural elements of the dark performance space. Each one emits sound in direct response to light. A fascinating visual score is played, transforming the space into an hypnotic audiovisual experience.

Nice fresh approach to some familiar elements here - I can imagine further evolutions growing quite dense and complex. [via Synthtopia]

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David Gerard writes "The Times in London reports that Apple attempted to silence a father and daughter with a gagging order after the child's iPod music player exploded and the family sought a refund from the company. Well, at least they're not Microsoft. Or something."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

David Gerard writes "The Times in London reports that Apple attempted to silence a father and daughter with a gagging order after the child's iPod music player exploded and the family sought a refund from the company. Well, at least they're not Microsoft. Or something."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Every year, Joe Grand, aka Kingpin, aka The Sultan of Solder, and hardware hacker extraordinaire, designs the badges for Defcon, the annual hacker convention in Vegas. The badges are more than just conference ID badges, they have electronics on-board that do something, and conferees have to figure out what that something is. There's also a Badge Hacking contest, to come up with some cool, outrageous, ingenious hack of the badge. Winner gets an Uber badge, which gets them into Defcons for life.

This year's badge uses the Freescale MC56f8006 DSC (Digital Signal Controller), has an on-board mic, and an RGB LED. Apparently the LED pulses out the morse code of a web address. At that address is a few goodies, like a sketchbook of designs for a badge (a page is seen above), an MP3 song, and most importantly, all of the badge tools, source code, CAD files, etc. According to the discussion on Hack a Day, it appears to do some pretty ingenious stuff (like physically network with other badges).

Previous year's badges:
Defcon 14
Defcon 15
Defcon 16

[Photos via Wired's coverage of the badge.]

More:
DEFCON Badge hacking
DEFCON badge hacking contest (pictures)

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reporter and barnyjr were among the readers alerting us to the discovery of a new strain of the HIV virus, found in a woman from the west central African nation of Cameroon. "It differs from the three known strains of human immunodeficiency virus and appears to be closely related to a form of simian virus recently discovered in wild gorillas, researchers report in Monday's edition of the journal Nature Medicine. ... The most likely explanation for the new find is gorilla-to-human transmission, Plantier's team said. But... they cannot rule out the possibility that the new strain started in chimpanzees and moved into gorillas and then humans, or moved directly from chimpanzees to both gorillas and humans. ... Researchers said it could be circulating unnoticed in Cameroon or elsewhere. The virus's rapid replication indicates that it is adapted to human cells, the researchers reported."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It appears that some (certainly not all) in the mainstream press still seems to have problems understanding the value of getting people to talk about what they reported on. They seem to come at this viewpoint from the old line of thinking that a reporter reported on the story and that was it. The story was done. But that's not the way the news works. A news story is simply a part of the conversation. It may be a starting point in a bigger effort -- which is why it's important for so many people today to be able to spread and share the news with others. Yet, if you come at things from a viewpoint of the newspaper article being a final and definitive word, then suddenly such sharing and spreading is viewed as "theft" or being "ripped off" and the person promoting and discussing and sharing your work is suddenly a parasite.

Over the weekend, just such a situation cropped up, when Ian Shapira, a writer for the Washington Post wrote about how he felt when the blog Gawker wrote about one of his articles. At first, he was thrilled. It was validation. In fact, he called it "one of journalism's biggest coups." He should have stopped there, because he was right.

But after excitedly telling his editor about it, his editor claimed that Ian was "ripped off" by Gawker... and Ian appears to have come around to that view. But was he really? Not at all. The Gawker post links to the Washington Post three separate times. And, even worse, almost all of the article they quoted wasn't actually Shapira's writing at all, but quotes from the person he was profiling -- someone Shapira most certainly did not pay. As we recently discussed, newspaper reporters regularly get free quotes and free insight and free advice from various experts, that they get to use in their articles. And now suddenly it's "stealing" for someone else to quote the same people (with a link -- or three) back to the story? Please.

At some point, more people will come around to realizing that when others are discussing the stories you helped bring forth and linking back to you, it's time to join in the conversation -- not scream and whine about others stealing. That just makes it less likely anyone will ever write about one of your stories again.

This isn't even an issue about fair use, as some are suggesting. It's an issue about common sense. If you have a story, you'd better want it to spread, and what better way to get it to spread than to get more people talking about it wherever they want to talk about it. You can't keep all the discussion at your site, nor should you want to. Doing so only guarantees no one cares about what you have to write.

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Spotted this nice pummer design on the BEAM Robotics Flickr pool. In the set, there's a video of the pummer in its nocturnal mode.

Pummer - sideview

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Interested in using your Palm Pre as a WiFi router? Recent Pre convert Max Lee has written a tutorial that may get you closer to 3G tethering bliss.

[via Max Lee]

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Catholic Archbishop Vincent Nichols apparently is not a big fan of social networking online, as he's making some news for trashing sites like Facebook and MySpace for creating "transient" friendships. He also throws in some bizarre statement about how these sites lead kids to commit suicide. To be honest, his statements don't sound all that different than plenty of old luddites who have never bothered to actually use the technology. And his complaints don't sound all that different complaints heard throughout time by an older generation against what's popular at the time. As we've noted, at various times, people have complained about the nefarious influence of rock 'n roll, comic books, movies, the telephone, novels, plays, the waltz and chess. In every case, the fear is more from someone not understanding what's going on, rather than any real fear, and the issue appears to be the same this time around as well.

Reporter Yumi Wilson, though, points out something more important though: despite what this archbishop is saying, the Catholic Church has actually been embracing social media, using text messages and creating its won social network. It also has a strong presence on Facebook and has used it to connect various Catholics to each other. And, she notes, the Vatican has its own YouTube Channel. Apparently, the Catholic Church, itself, doesn't quite agree with the views of Archbishop Nichols.

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theodp writes "Admit it, IT is ingenious. Also, IT is surprisingly effective for certain uses, including real cops and mall cops. And if you tried IT, you probably smiled to yourself. So why all the Segway hate? Paul Graham looks into The Trouble with the Segway and offers a hypothesis about what prompts people to shout abuse at Segway riders: 'You look smug. You don't seem to be working hard enough.' Not that someone riding a motorcycle is working any harder, adds Graham, but because he's sitting astride it, he appears to be making an effort. When you're riding a Segway you're just standing there. Make a version that doesn't look so easy for the rider — perhaps resembling skateboards or bicycles — and Segway just might capture more of the market they hoped to reach."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Aquariums can be a lot of work, especially the saltwater variety. Why not have an Arduino handle some of the routine tasks like temperature monitoring, pH, and water levels? I had an aquarium for many years, and I would have really appreciated a little Arduino automation.

More about the Arduino aquarium controller

In the Maker Shed:


Make: Arduino

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Tony from the StarShipSofa podcast sez, "The Sofanauts is a weekly SF news related show. Joining me each week are a variety of guests from science fiction literature, SF blogs and publishing to bring you the latest news and gossip from the world of SF. Guests have ranged from science fiction writers, including Jeff VanderMeer, Mary Robinette Kowal, Jeremiah Tolbert and Gord Sellar (nominated for this year''s John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer) to editors and publishers, like the anthologist John Joseph Adams and Pablo Defendini (mover and shaker over at Tor.com). And one day I hope to snag young Mr Doctorow!

"We are now in the 14th week of the show's conception and it seems to be going from strength to strength. You can always tell how popular a show becomes as guests now ask to be on the show. This week will see the Sofanauts blast full throttle into Worldcon 2009, bringing you all the daily gossip and titbits of what is going on at this year's convention."

StarShipSofa, The Audio Science Fiction magazine has just given birth to... (Thanks, Tony!)

Carrie McLaren and Jason Torchinsky are guest bloggers! Well, they were.

From Carrie: Many thanks Boing Boing and goodbye everyone. I've had loads of fun. If you're ever in Brooklyn, come on down to our useless lectures series, Adult Education. The next show, on September 8, will focus on beer.

From Jason: This was a blast. Thanks very much to Mark F. for letting us do this, and for everyone for reading, commenting, and silently eye rolling when you didn't think I could see. And, if you don't mind, why not buy our book, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture! We appreciate it.

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.

My tour of blogging duty is wrapping up here, but I wanted to put up some photos I had set aside here for possible blogging use. Here we go:



This squirrel got himself stuck in our homemade squirrel feeder. Ha ha ha! Idiot! (I got him out okay; he's fine.)


No one here is interested in getting into any Apple vs. Microsoft crap, but I saw this Zune wall-outlet-to-5V-USB adapter, and compared it to the one that came with my iPhone, and was a bit confused. Microsoft is a colossal company, with more money than God's dad's boss. Why is their AC adapter about four times the size of the Apple one? Couldn't they have called, say, anyone in China and asked for an AC adapter as small as the Apple one? I can't imagine the cost is that much more, in volume. Baffling.


Murillee Martin at Jalopnik has a really wonderful set of junkyard pictures. You can never have too many. I had a Volvo P1800S like the one in the sample image there, too. I hope that's not it.


There's a fair number of sites on the web that mock these sorts of improvised solutions. I love them-- This guy had a dead van, a working truck, and a dream. Way to go, improviser!


This happened a while ago, but it's so much fun to talk about. One morning, I pulled back my desk chair in my office, and found this possum.

James Grimmelman sez,

The Associated Press -- which thinks you owe it a license fee if you quote more than four words from one of its articles -- doesn't even care if the words actually came from its article. They'll charge you anyway, even if you're quoting from the public domain.

I picked a random AP article and went to their "reuse options" site. Then, when they asked what I wanted to quote, I punched in Thomas Jefferson's famous argument against copyright. Their license fee: $12 for an educational 26-word quote. FROM THE PUBLIC FREAKING DOMAIN, and obviously, obviously not from the AP article. But the AP is too busy trying to squeeze the last few cents out of a dying business model to care about little things like free speech or the law.

They tell me I have to use the sentence "exactly as written" and heaven help me if I don't include the complete footer with their copyright boilerplate. Along the way, their terms of use insisted that I'm not allowed to use Jefferson's words in connection with "political Content." Also, I can't use use his words in any manner or context that will be in any way derogatory" to the AP. As if. Jefferson's thoughts on copyright are inherently political, and inherently derogatory towards the the AP's insane position on copyright. I require no license to quote Jefferson. The AP has no right to stop me, no right to demand money from me. All their application does is count words to calculate a fee. It doesn't even check that the words come from the story being "quoted."

The AP Will Sell You a "License" to Words It Doesn't Own (Thanks, James!)

tikurion writes "It's only been a few weeks since the law dubbed Zugangserschwerungsgesetz (access impediment law) was passed in the German Parliament despite over 140,000 signatures of people opposed to it. The law will go into effect in mid-October 2009. Now Minister for Family Affairs Ursula von der Leyen implied in an interview that she is planning on extending the reach of the law, claiming '...or else the great Internet is in danger of turning into a lawless range of chaos, where you're allowed to bully, insult, and deceive limitlessly.' More on golem.de via Google translate (here is the German original)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I really dig this new "Yeti Kong" t-shirt by our pals at GAMA-GO! Order it along with a Boing Boing t-shirt (or anything else to make your total over $25) and shipping is free!

This botched Turkish building demolition features an entire building rolling, Katamari style, through the streets of Cankiri.

Cankiri Turkey Demolition Gone Wrong

Berlin anti-gentrification car-arsonists use slow-burning fuses to torch an average of one luxury car per day -- and they also hit police cars:

THEY occur at a rate of nearly one a night, without warning or fanfare. By the time the police arrive, all that remains are smoking wrecks. Even the identifying badges -- Porsche, BMW, Mercedes, VW -- are often obliterated by fire...

During the past six months, more than 170 cars have been destroyed by fire in Berlin and police confirm conservatively that 93 were politically motivated attacks.

A mysterious, single page website, brennende-autos.de (Burning Cars of Berlin), shows the number of cars set alight and where the crimes occurred, revealing clusters in ''richer'' areas, or in suburbs where gentrification and redevelopment are changing the demographic of local neighbourhoods...

Police cars, too, are being targeted. The favoured method is to use the slow-burn barbecue fire starters, which take time to smoulder and provide plenty of get-away time for the perpetrators.

''It is very difficult to get evidence. The fire can be started underneath a car but the person that did it can be many streets away when it is alight,'' Mr Millert said.

German radicals turn to arson (via Beyond the Beyond)

Lockpicking legends Marc Weber Tobias, Toby Bluzmanis and Matt Fiddler demo'ed a series of ingenious hacks for opening "unpickable" locks at Defcon last weekend. Included is a hack that opens the expensive electronic/mechanical CLIQ lock, which requires an electronic handshake between the key and the lock, and which logs every open/shut event) by simply vibrating the key:

Bluzmanis demonstrated an attack by taking an Interactive CLIQ electro-mechanical lock made by Mul-T-Lock and inserting a mechanical-only key cut to the same keyway. After inserting the key, he does something to vibrate the key for a few seconds until the mechanical motor in the cylinder turns and lifts the locking element to release the lock. He asked Threat Level not to disclose the precise method, other than to say it involves no special tool or skill.

"There's no audit trail that the lock has been opened," Tobias says, "because there are no electronics [involved]." If the attacker entered the room to steal documents or sabotage the facility, the last person who entered before him and who showed up in the audit log, would presumably get the blame if the thief wasn't caught on surveillance camera or the video surveillance was also sabotaged.

Electronic High-Security Locks Easily Defeated at DefCon

Today on the Worth1000 photoshopping contest: removing the trousers of celebrities, revealing their tightie-whities and budgie-smugglers.

Where Are My Pants? 7

Obras robóticas del artista colombiano Mario Caicedo

Monstros de Mangle Verde

NES para mesa de trabajo de Miltron B

Sistema de monitoreo de posición y eficiencia energética automotriz GSM + GPS + OBD2 + Google Maps

Versiones robóticas de los jugadores del Barcelona: Puyol y Messi

More from Make: en Español.

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The end of an era.. RadioShack soon to be called "The Shack" ? via Engadget.

"The Shack" re-branding RadioShack is in the process of re-branding[citation needed] the company as "The Shack" as well as re-building corporate culture. This will be kicked off by a launch celebration in both San Francisco and New York featuring "14 foot tall laptops" streaming the images from their webcams from one city to the other, live music in both locations, as well as television coverage of the event.[13] The event will take place in Times Square and Justin Herman Plaza on August 6-8, 2009, starting each morning at 6AM Eastern and lasting until Midnight. In addition, "The Shack" began a telemarketing campaign on July 31, 2009, in which they call post-paid customers in the morning to inform them about upgrade eligibility.

Post up your RadioShack stories in the comments for googlemultivac to eternalize. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Retro | Digg this!

Toyota’s running humanoid robot -

[The video] from Toyota demonstrates the running capabilities of the new humanoid robot. The robot takes a step every 340ms and has no contact with the ground for 100ms of that. Notice in the video how the robot remains balanced even after pushed by the human

We still miss the QRIO... and the AIBO. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in News from the Future | Digg this!

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.

Fender has had a program where they're finding up-and-coming artists to paint guitars; my friend Lysa Provincio has done a few of these, and they look pretty great. In addition to this one, there's more on her site. Enjoy!

MojoRilla writes "In Japan, Nissan unveiled their all-electric LEAF (press release, and Flash site). Slated to launch in late 2010 in Japan, the US, and Europe, this car will have a 100-mile range, seats 5, has an advanced computer system with remote control by IPhone, and promises to be competitively priced. While this car's range won't work for everyone, it could be a game changer as a commuter car." Recharge time is 8 hours with a 200-volt power source, and "just under 30 minutes with a quick charger" (no further details given) to charge to 80% of capacity.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I spotted these sketchbook notes by Austin Kleon on Flickr, of a presentation that Heather Gold gave for VizThinkU. I wasn't at the talk, but it's amazing to me how much of the gist of it these two pages seem to convey.

Heather Gold on unpresenting for VizthinkU

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The NY Times has an opinion piece that makes starkly clear the financial decline of the music industry. It's accompanied by an infographic that cleverly renders the drop-off. The latest culprit accelerating the undoing of the music business is free, legal online music streaming. "Since music sales peaked in 1999, the value of those sales, after adjusting for inflation, has dropped by more than half. At that rate, the industry could be decimated before Madonna's 60th birthday. ... 13- to 17-year-olds acquired 19 percent less music in 2008 than they did in 2007. CD sales among these teenagers were down 26 percent and digital purchases were down 13 percent. ... [T]he percentage of 14- to 18-year-olds who regularly share files dropped by nearly a third from December 2007 to January 2009. On the other hand, two-thirds of those teens now listen to streaming music 'regularly' and nearly a third listen to it every day."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.