Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Bill Gurstelle is a Contributing Editor for MAKE magazine. His most recent book is entitled Absinthe & Flamethrowers: Projects and Ruminations on the Art of Living Dangerously. You can follow Bill on his danger-quest at twitter.com/wmgurst. He is a guest Make: Online author for the month of August.
Thanks to Gareth and all my Maker Media associates for giving me this opportunity to author some articles online. My new book, Absinthe & Flamethrowers, contains a number of projects that I think most makers will find interesting. It's probably worth noting that there are sections on making and doing stuff that, well, may seem a little dangerous to some.
Note the adjective "little." There's a difference between interestingly dangerous and crazy dangerous. I believe the content of my book falls within bounds of the former. Part of the reason I wrote it was to explore the spirit of courageous discovery that filled the lives of people like Thomas Edison, Amelia Earhart, Francis Crick, and Gordon Moore.
Read their biographies and you'll find out that these people worked on the edge, and prospered by doing so. Sometimes making things involves a bit of risk and I think many of the best makers embrace that and know the boundaries between cool and crazy. So, I've included projects there such as making your own gunpowder, chemical rockets, and yes, even a flamethrower.
One of the sections is on the art and science of enjoying absinthe, the wormwood-based alcoholic beverage that was deemed too dangerous for regular people to consume and made illegal in most of the world for nearly a century. But now, it's back, and becoming very popular once again.
One way of enjoying absinthe is to drip water onto a sugar cube carefully positioned on a slotted spoon over a glass of absinthe. Hardcore absinthe devotees typically use a fountain that looks like this.
Being a frugal maker, I built the water dripper in the photo (it's called a "fountain" by absinthe connoisseurs.) It issues two precisely controlled drips of very cold water. The drops fall on a sugar cube which slowly dissolves into the absinthe. This is the approved method of tempering one's absinthe (most people won't want to drink the stuff straight - it's usually 120 proof or more.) As the sugar water falls into the absinthe, it undergoes the famous color change called the "louche," prized by absinthe imbibers, turning from clear green to a milky opalescence.
I made the fountain in a couple of hours from clear PVC, type L copper tube, and two small gate valves. I found the gate valves at the local hardware store for a couple of dollars each. The copper tube is sealed with epoxy into the PVC water chamber and the gate valves attach via compression fittings.
A votre sante!
The Smoking Gun today published the results of a seven-week investigative probe into Pranknet, an anonymous, web-organized group of meanies who pulled a bunch of particularly sadistic phone pranks on businesses and residents throughout the US. A number of American television news networks have been breathlessly covering Pranknet's hijinks of late. These are the jerks who thought it was funny to call low-budget hotel rooms and convince occupants that they had to break open windows to escape imminent deadly gas leaks, or smash televisions to evade impending doom. As one Fark commenter put it, "I'm not sure who sucks more, the prank callers or the idiots that listen to them and destroy their hotel rooms."
Photo inset at left: 25-year old Tariq Malik, Pranknet's founding bully, pictured in a webcam still taken in his Windsor, Ontario bedroom. I think it's fair to debate whether or not calling Malik a "telephone terrorist" (as TSG does in the headline) is inflammatory and over the top, but I will say this: what he and his anonymous coward buds did was cruel, lame, and could have caused physical injury or loss of life, in addition to the substantial property damage reported.
You can hear a female victim panicking and crying on the recording below.
Malik and his fellow Pranknet anons refer to her as a "crazy bitch," then they whine about how many idle logins are in the chat room with only a few participating in the prank. Other recordings reflect the stronger sort of racist and homophobic language one might find in the dregs of chan. I hope Malik and the perps who helped him get the absolute maximum possible sentences, to be accompanied in prison by cellmates who lack a sense of humor.
But guess what? Like so many anonymous internet bullies, tough-guy Tariq "Dex" Malik lives with his mommy. Snip from TSG:
On July 22, a pair of TSG reporters approached "Dex"'s building at 1637 Assumption Street in Windsor, where he lives in the ground-floor 'B' apartment. Calling to his mother, who was standing near an open living room window, a reporter asked her to summon her son. The woman disappeared into "Dex"'s adjoining bedroom, where the pair could be heard whispering. Despite repeated requests to come out and speak with TSG, "Dex" hid with his mother in his bedroom, the windows of which were covered with plastic shopping bags, a towel, and one black trash bag.Telephone Terrorist: Outing An Online Outlaw (smokinggun.com)As the sun set and his room darkened, "Dex" did not reach to turn on a light. The notorious Internet Tough Guy, who has gleefully used the telephone to cause all kinds of havoc, was now himself panicking. He had been found. And, as a result, was barricaded in Pranknet World Headquarters with his mom, while two reporters loitered outside his window and curious neighbors wondered what was up. That's when the online outlaw came up with a plan. Tariq Malik, the 25-year-old founder and leader of Pranknet, decided to call the police.
It's quite clear under U.S. law that Mr. Coetzee did nothing wrong -- as far as U.S. law is concerned, the photos are not copyrightable, the NPG website's "browsewrap" contract is unenforceable, there is no "database right," and using Zoomify on public domain images doesn't get you a DMCA claim. It's also clear that everything he's alleged to have done took place on his computer and Wikipedia's computers, none of which are in the UK.In a separate case involving people in the US and a lawsuit in the UK, Mike Arrington, who runs TechCrunch, was recently sued for libel in the UK. The standards for proving libel in the UK are significantly lower than in the US, and considering that TechCrunch is a US site, based in the US on US servers, Arrington (reasonably) felt that responding to the lawsuit itself made little practical sense. Even if he could have won the case (and from the details, the case seems patently ridiculous, more a case of sour grapes than anything else), it would have been way too costly to defend. So he refused to respond... leading to the inevitable summary judgment (which is what happens by default when the other side doesn't appear). This is a bad result for everyone, as it means Arrignton can no longer travel to the UK (and, in fact, canceled planned travel there), for no good reason at all, other than not wanting to spend an incredible sum of money to defend himself in a country he doesn't live in or operate in. It's hard to see what's reasonable or fair about that at all.
In the offline world, that would certainly be the end of the matter. If Mr. Coetzee had flown to London, purchased posters of the same paintings at the museum store, brought them home, and started making copies for his friends, it's clear he would be well within his rights in doing so.
Why should the answer be different simply because he posted the photos to Wikipedia? NPG seems to think that UK law should apply everywhere on the Internet. If that's right, then the same could be said for other, more restrictive copyright laws, as well (see, e.g., Mexico's copyright term of life of the author plus 100 years and France's copyright over fashion designs). That would leave the online world at the mercy of the worst that foreign copyright laws have to offer, an outcome no U.S. court has ever endorsed.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An experiment. It's just a test. I put up a web service that returns a Twitter subscription list as OPML. You should be able to import it into your RSS aggregator or feed reader. But it's just a test. When the experiment is over the service will come down. It just builds on the Twitter API and took me a couple of evenings to put together. It's not Big Tech, it's just a little thing. But interesting? Perhaps.
(Video above contains adult content, NSFW).
I've been editing this blog post for the past couple of hours, and was going to start off with the fact that today, the third season of "Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! came out on DVD, and that you should go pick up a copy because I think the show is wonderful, but then I had to add the thing about the recent Vanity Fair interview which does a fine job of illuminating their particular brand of creepyfunny, and then all of a sudden, LOL and behold, I saw this: a new music video for Major Lazer's track "Pon De Floor," directed by Eric Wareheim. I think it may just be the greatest music video ever. It's hella NSFW, just like Dance Floor Dale. The Village Voice called it "ToeJam & Earl + Donnie Darko + The Sims + a Japanese game show + straight-up pornography." Fader calls the performers it features "malfunctioned, horny and frightened Sims." I follow Tim and Eric on Twitter, you should too: @timheidecker @ericwareheim. Okay, I think that's about it, I'm going to publish this post now.
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."
So, what is this thing, the Pathological Sublime? Many, if not most, Boing Boing readers who have done the grad-school death march will be familiar with the sublime, a durable philosophical meme that, arguably, dates back to the Greeks but is more typically associated, in academic circles, with Edmund Burke, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. The invaluable Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism helpfully defines the sublime as:
a sense of wonder or awe (colored by fear, according to English theorists), which is created by the experience of grandness or 'vastness'; and in some cases writing on the sublime comes close to being nothing more than a list of objects said to produce the effect in question: mountains, oceans, Milton, an angry deity, etc. At its most sophisticated, however, 18th-century reflection on the sublime shows a new interest in aesthetic psychology, with attention shifting away from the sublime object and onto the response of the reading or perceiving subject.
The Dictionary goes on to note that this tactical interest in the psychological reverberations of the sublime was in some ways a reaction against neo-classical virtues such as order, symmetry, and The Beautiful, with which it (the sublime) is often counterpoised.
(This cultural dynamic replayed itself in the postmodern era, when critics such as Jean-Francois Lyotard rebooted the sublime as a corrective to the instrumental rationalism of modernism. Personally, when I need to destabilize "repressive totalities," I reach for a Bombay martini, the reliable culprit behind many of "Poppy" Bush's snarling rants to the startled press corps on Air Force One, according to several Bush family bios.)
In time, the sublime came to be associated with Romanticism, especially German Romanticism. The 19th century German landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich is the poster boy for brooding, fog-haunted sublimity. His "Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog" (1818) is a textbook example of the human psyche overwhelmed by the illimitable vastness and awful grandeur of nature, whose monumental scale and mysterious workings and, more to the point, utterly alien lack of purpose (teleologically speaking, at least) or meaning (in any human sense, anyway) combined to make the viewer's sense of self dwindle suddenly to a guttering spark, alone in the cosmos. (Paul Bowles anatomizes this phenomenon with his usual surgical skill in a marvelous little reverie called "The Baptism of Solitude".)
But the go-to guy for the sublime, as we know think of it, was the 18th century conservative politician and philosopher Edmund Burke. In A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756), Burke drove a wedge between the accepted definition of the sublime and prevailing notions of beauty, arguing that, in our psychological experience of sublime nature, delight and terror---a sort of epistemic vertigo, in which our sense of our place in the order of things is unsettled---commingle disconcertingly. "The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature...is astonishment," wrote Burke, in A Philosophical Inquiry. "And astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror."
Pardon my grad-school seminar. But I had to tell you these things, by way of background, to make sense of the Pathological Sublime. Back in the late '90s, while researching an essay on "Formaldehyde Photography and the New Grotesque" for my book The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink, I was thinking about the fervent cult following that had sprung up, like toadstools in the cultural unconscious, around the morbid photos of Joel-Peter Witkin. I was thinking, too, about the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, and its growing status as a must-destination for medical-goth tourists---Hannibal Lecter's idea of family fun. Felicitously, the Mütter's beloved (and now late and much-lamented) curator Gretchen Worden faxed me what I would come to regard as the skeleton key to the deeper meanings of these subcultural phenomena, in the form of a brief, unsigned essay from the May 21, 1845 issue of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal.
Worden was emphatic in her belief that the author of the anonymous essay was none other than Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., a thought leader in the medical community of his day as well as a celebrated wit, poet, popular essayist for Harper's, and author of the best-selling collection of squibs and vignettes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858). The evidence seems to be on her side: certainly, the droll style is vintage Holmes. It's a deliciously bizarre little bon-bon, well worth searching out. (Lawrence Weschler reproduces the "marvelous unsigned item," virtually in its entirety, in the endnotes to his book Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, about the Museum of Jurassic Technology.)
Titled "Illustrations of Tumors among the Chinese," the item in question is a droll, tongue-in-cheek (?) review, by a doctor addressing the medical men who made up the journal's readership, of an exhibition of oil paintings of Chinese patients with skin diseases, many of them characterized by grotesque tumors. The author exhorts "worshippers of morbid anatomy" to savor the perverse pleasures of these startling images. The fact that "these monstrous diseased growths are very serious things to our poor fellow-creatures of the Celestial empire" doesn't inhibit the writer's artistic appreciation of another man's afflictions. (Edward Said, White Courtesy Phone: cringing at the author's genteel colonialism, the contemporary reader reminds himself that Holmes---granting that Holmes is the author---was writing in the Victorian age, when the Great White Male's self-satisfied perch atop the Social Darwinian ladder was plain for all to see, received anthropological wisdom well-supported by craniometric fact and cultural achievement.) Transposing the Burkean sublime into the key of pathological anatomy, the author writes, "The truth is, the practiced eye kindles at the sight of any very remarkable excrescence, as the traveler's does at that of lofty mountains or colossal edifices."
Holmes has done a fascinating thing, here, shifting the philosophical gaze from wild nature (storm-tossed seas, vertiginous chasms, Olympian mountains) to the human, specifically the human body (and by implication its mysterious interior, a lead pursued by the photographer Max Aguilera-Hellweg in The Sacred Heart, a gasp-inducing book of images from operating rooms, such as Hellweg's photo of a ribcage jimmied open to expose a heart beating in a slurry of gore, the body exhaling its heat from the newly opened crevice like the corporeal equivalent of a hydrothermal vent). Holmes pushes the envelope of Burke's horror into what for Burke would have been regions of unimaginable strangeness: the abject flesh of the pathological (and, by extension, teratological) body. A transport of aesthetic rapture that is equal parts horror and wonder, the Pathological Sublime is inspired by dark matter that holds beauty and repulsion in perfect, quivering tension. Refusing the moral gaze, the Pathological Sublime surrenders to the spell, at once aesthetic, psychological, and philosophical, of the fascinating (a word whose etymological roots are instructive: from the Latin fascinatus, "bewitch, enchant"), no matter the moral or ethical cost.
Holmes's insights have proven invaluable in my thinking about what makes "worshippers of morbid anatomy" tick---why so many of us fall prey to the uncanny seductions of La Specola's obstetric Venuses and the wax moulages of pathological conditions on display at museums such as the Mütter. It's also helping me wrestle with questions like: When do we avert our eyes in horror, and when do we reserve the right to stare, in a world where any morning's forwarded e-mail can bring us face-to-face with terrorist trailers for real-life beheadings or worse, images that once seen will replay themselves forever in the multiplex of the mind, scarring us in ways we don't yet understand? Where does aesthetics end and ethics begin? (Sontag had some thoughts on this in Regarding the Pain of Others, but her moral ponderousness, her ever-present sense of her own gravitas, crushes flat the subversive glee in Thinking Bad Thoughts and Looking at Forbidden Things that I believe is essential to free thought.) What are the long-term effects, in individual as well as societal terms, of gawking at the atrocity exhibition?
Recently, while rolling these ideas around in my head, I decided, on a whim, to try to track down the paintings in Holmes's review. Incredibly, I believe I've located the very images whose virtues he extolled; I believe, as well, that I'm the first scholar to have done so. Tucked away in the basement of Yale University's Historical Medical Library are the archives of the Reverend Dr. Peter Parker, a Yale graduate and the first American surgeon to practice in China. A medical missionary, Parker established the first American hospital in Guangzhou and, while there, commissioned the Chinese artist Lam Qua to paint a series of before-and-after portraits of patients suffering from tumors, which Parker surgically removed. We know, from Stephen Rachman's illuminating essay, "Curiosity and Cure: Peter Parker's patients, Lam Qua's portraits," that Parker was in Boston in 1841, lecturing to "an enthusiastic audience gathered at a special meeting of the Boston Medical Association"---a presentation Parker illustrated with the Victorian equivalent of PowerPoint: a series of photorealistically accurate paintings of patients with unspeakable tumors, and of those same sufferers delivered from their agonies by Parker's deft scalpel. I believe Holmes was in the audience at one of Parker's lectures, and that the brief, untitled review in the Journal is his response to Lam Qua's astonishing images, "hand-painted dream photographs" (Dali) of pathologist's nightmares.
Rachman argues that the Parker paintings drew crowds of medical men---for purely professional reasons, ostensibly, although Holmes's little essay debunks that notion neatly---at "a time when Americans began to participate on a mass scale in the business of curiosity" through P.T. Barnum's American Museum in New York City, dime museums in other metropolises, and carnival midways in small towns. Even now, he argues, the paintings "remain 'curiosities,' uncontrolled growths like the tumors they present, artifacts that startle tact and science rather than promote scientific and cultural order." He cites, in support of his argument, a telling "bit of undated doggerel" found inside one of the cabinets containing the rarely exhibited paintings:
Peter Parker's pickled paintings
We're thrilled to have our buddy Bill Gurstelle as a guest author on Make: Online for the next month. I've had the profound pleasure of knowing some really delightful and brilliant eccentrics in my life, folks whose response to "think outside the box" is "what box?" This guy works beyond the box. One thing I love about Bill is his deep sense of child-like wonder and enthusiasm for the physical world and the magic it encodes. He can come up with the most outlandish ideas and pitch them to Dale with a straight face ("How about a MAKE "prison tech" issue?" "Can we do an article in MAKE about making your own fireworks?") And, of course, he's always at the ready to creatively and spectacularly blow stuff up. He's a mischievous kid with a valid ID and a grownup's bank account.
Bill has been involved with MAKE from the beginning. He serves on our Technical Advisory Board and is a Contributing Editor to the magazine. He was also a producer of Make: television and one of its on-air talents. Bill is the author of a number of best-selling books, including Backyard Ballistics and Whoosh-Boom-Splat: The Garage Warrior's Guide to Building Projectile Shooters. His most recent work, Absinthe & Flamethrowers, is a meditation on the art of living dangerously, with projects!
So, please give a round warm of applause to... Bill Gurstelle...
Notes from the Technology Underground (Bill's blog)
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
This is an artist's mock-up of a new Bangkok highrise with a bit of a pixelated feel to its structure. Lisa has the details over at Boing Boing Gadgets.
Word coming in that Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the two reporters for Current TV who were imprisoned in North Korea for illegally crossing the border into that closed nation, will be released. New York Times tweet. Looks like former US president Bill Clinton's mission was a success. Oh, and they're coming home on his private plane. What an utterly pimped-out ending to a very frightening saga for the women, and their families. May I be the umptybillionth person to say: Way to go, Mister Clinton, you are the man. (via @laughingsquid)
Previously: Photo of the day: Bill Clinton with Kim-Jong Il
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Hipster Logic has released an iPhone electronics reference app, called, well... Electrical Ref. From their iTunes description:
Have you ever wondered how many Ohms that resistor your holding is? Maybe wondered what the capacitance is of a ceramic disc capacitor with the code 103? Forgotten how to assemble a 555 timer circuit? Or wondered how to make your Arduino detect an EMF? Then Electrical Ref is the app for you. It features a resistor calculator, capacitor calculator, & circuit diagrams.
The app costs a buck.
Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Electronics | Digg this!
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Design Observer has posted Part 1 of a fascinating email exchange between two of my favorite writers and thinkers, Douglas Rushkoff and Kurt Andersen. They each have new books out about the economy in America. Rushkoff's book is called Life Inc., and Andersen's is called Reset. Julie Lasky was the moderator.
Douglas Rushkoff: All I wanted to do [in writing Life Inc.] was show how we got here, how this way of life was sold to us in the 20th century by the very same folks who originally saw fascism as a great idea, and why I believed it to be economically unsustainable. Remember, now, every chief economist of every major investment firm or bank I spoke with insisted that the economy was sound, and that it was bound for increasing expansion. And none of them knew what I was talking about when I asked them about the biases of the money we use. "There were other kinds of money?" they all asked, amazed.Kurt Andersen and Douglas Rushkoff: Part I. Two cultural critics and one global economic meltdown add up to a bracing conversation about values and what they're worth.Kurt Andersen: Actually, the ideas in Reset germinated six or seven years ago, when I was deep into historical research for Heyday, my most recent novel, which is set in the mid-19th century. Through that research and writing, I acquired a new gut understanding of what I take to be the cyclical course of American economic and political history, and of the concomitant bipolar nature of the American character — that is, how America has always swung back and forth between Yankee prudence and manic magical thinking, between free-market worship and communitarian public-spiritedness, between financially driven busts and bubbly booms. Sometimes the cyclical swings are swift and extreme, and those violent swings can result in progressive political and economic rejiggerings of the system. So when the crash came last fall, followed by (and probably causing) the election of Barack Obama, I was inclined to take a longer view, and see it as a rare and potentially positive convergence of cyclical economic and political swings. And that led me to write Reset.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Erik Davis's Expanding Mind radio showThis weekly hour-long radio show hosted by author and San Francisco native Erik Davis explores the many dimensions of mind and consciousness. From meditation to parapsychology, from the effects of art and technology on our souls to the abiding mysteries of religion and spirituality, the show’s discussions are designed to expand our understanding and experience of ourselves while casting a critical and often humorous eye on the twists and turns that consciousness takes as it tries to make sense of itself and the world. Each episode will begin with a sparkling stream-of-consciousness riff by Davis, followed by a back-and-forth with his charming co-host Maja D’Aoust—a hip and sassy esoteric teacher based in Los Angeles. These will be followed with an interview with a scholar, writer, or practitioner, a “spirit song” of the day (a selection from Davis’ vast collection of religious and spiritual music), and finally a no-doubt lively back-and-forth with callers.
ZeroEdge Aquariums makes these groovy continuously-overflowing fish tanks. I'm afraid to ask what they cost, but it seems like a do-able remake.
"Judge clears way for dinosaur park to be seized" (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)(Hovind) was found guilty in November 2006 on 58 counts, including failure to pay employee taxes and making threats against investigators.
The conviction culminated 17 years of Hovind sparring with the IRS. Saying he was employed by God and his ministers were not subject to payroll taxes, he claimed no income or property.
Collin Cunningham of MAKE produced this fun video about cymatics, the study of visible sound and vibration. As he shows, you can have a lot of fun with cornstarch, water, tone generator software, a guitar amp, and a speaker.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Atelier WM designed a variety of candles cast from real hands flipping the bird and giving the sign of the horns. But this Vulcan salute wins, er, hands down. They're $61 from A+R Store.
The latest episode of Richard Metzger's new online talk show (and blog)"Dangerous Minds" features...
...satirist, counter culture icon and all around iconoclast, Paul Krassner, author of the new collection, Who's to Say What's Obscene?: Politics, Culture, and Comedy in America Today. Topics include the definition of obscenity in today's America, the Obama presidency and what it means for political satire, Jon Stewart and The Daily Show's influence on younger people, the state of the "underground press" today and a lot more.Dangerous Minds: Paul Krassner
I built the Mechamo Crab kit a while ago and really enjoyed the experience. I finally got around to making my Mechamo Centipede kit, which has been sitting in my studio for many months! The entire build took a few hours, but I'll spare you all the details and speed it up a bit, well, a lot!
I thought it would be cool to make all the Mechamo kits 10% off for the next week, get 'em while you can, they are a lot of fun!
More about the Mechamo Centipede kit
var digg_url = 'http://digg.com/odd_stuff/In_the_Maker_Shed_Mechamo_Centipede_kit';
Related:
Build: Mechamo Crab & Halloween Hack
I love old-style manually-operated tools. They frequently feature in my survivalist fantasies: the zombies come, the power grid collapses, and I'm the only one left who can still build killdozers because all my tools are manually-operated. Then one day Alyson Hannigan runs screaming into my compound, in terrible distress and in dire need of my assistance. It kinda goes downhill from there.
Anyway, this manually-operated drill is designed so that the operator can apply the weight of his or her body to the drilling action by leaning against the rearward brace. It is, most regrettably, called a "breast drill," a name that obviously dates to ye gay days of old. They are still being manufactured, and are available through our pals at Garrett-Wade.
Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Gadgets | Digg this!
(Above, trailer for upcoming movie, "Leslie, My Name Is Evil")
Here's Part 1 of a 5-part excerpt from John Waters' forthcoming book, Role Models (2010) running in the The Huffington Post. Waters writes about his friendship with Leslie Van Houten, the Manson Family member who is serving a life sentence for murdering Leno and Rosemary LaBianca in 1969.
I have a really good friend who was convicted of killing two innocent people when she was nineteen years old on a horrible night of 1969 cult madness. Her name is Leslie Van Houten and I think you would like her as much as I do. She was one of those notorious "Manson girls" who shaved their heads, carved X's in their foreheads and laughed, joked, and sang their way through the courthouse straight to death row without the slightest trace of remorse forty years ago. Leslie is hardly a "Manson girl" today. Sixty years old, she looks back from prison on her involvement in the La Bianca murders (the night after the Tate massacre) in utter horror, shame, and guilt and takes full responsibility for her part in the crimes. I think it's time to parole her.
I am guilty, too. Guilty of using the Manson murders in a jokey, smart-ass way in my earlier films without the slightest feeling for the victims' families or the lives of the brainwashed Manson killer kids who were also victims in this sad and terrible case. I became obsessed by the Sharon Tate murders from the day I read about them on the front page of the New York Times in 1969 as I worked behind the counter of the Provincetown Book Shop. Later, when the cops finally caught the hippy killers and I actually saw their photos ("Arrest Weirdo in Tate Murders", screamed the New York Daily News headlines) I almost went into cardiac arrest. God! The Manson Family looked just like my friends at the time!
I'm looking forward to reading the other four parts of this excerpt, though I seriously doubt it'll change my opinion that Van Houten should spend the rest of her life in prison.
Leslie Van Houten: A Friendship, Part 1 of 5, by John Waters | Part 2
Larger size here. Former American president Bill Clinton with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, a still from video footage shot in Pyongyang today. Clinton is reported to be in North Korea for the purpose of negotiating release for two jailed American journalists. (image: Reuters)
Previously: North Korea Finds Two US Journalists Guilty of Unspecified "Grave Crime," Sentence: 12 Years Hard Labor
Video from tonight's EFF talk on Iranian Protests And Digital Media (Thanks, Danny!)I've just came home from a great EFF panel/audience discussion on the interaction of the Internet and social networks with the Iranian protests in SF. The speakers on the panel were Tor developer Jacob Appelbaum, and Iranian commentator Cyrus Farivar.
There was a lot here, even for those who've been following the Iran election. Cyrus gave a historical context to Iran's use of the Internet (it was one of the first countries to have net connectivity in the region), Jake had some new stats and info on Iraq's censorship system, and we had audience contributions from bloggers and activists from Iran, Pakistan, and Brazil.
The talk starts around 56 minutes into this archive of the live feed; there's also photos and links, twitter discussion.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A group of technology researchers in Washington state are attempting to construct a three-dimensional model of Rome from photographs found on Flickr -- in one day.
Entering the search term Rome on Flickr returns more than two million photographs. This collection represents an increasingly complete photographic record of the city, capturing every popular site, facade, interior, fountain, sculpture, painting, cafe, and so forth. It also offers us an unprecedented opportunity to richly capture, explore and study the three dimensional shape of the city.Rome in a Day (via Dean Putney)In this project, we consider the problem of reconstructing entire cities from images harvested from the web. Our aim is to build a parallel distributed system that downloads all the images associated with a city, say Rome, from Flickr.com. After downloading, it matches these images to find common points and uses this information to compute the three dimensional structure of the city and the pose of the cameras that captured these images. All this to be done in a day.
Designer and BB pal Ehrich Blackhound points us to a GOP infographic about the Democratic health care plan (PDF). Source: Joint Economic Committee, Republican Staff Congressman Kevin Brady, Ranking House Republican Member, via foxnews.com.
"I love how dense and jarring the design is," Ehrich notes, "As if to say "Your donor liver will be lost somewhere under this red arrow!"
But wait! There's always two sides to every pie chart.
"The Democrats have a response!" Ehrich says. "Soothingly designed, as if to say, 'Your new healthcare plan is like a day spa and as fun to play with as your iPhone. Also, it comes in several flavors of sherbet.'" Organizational chart of the House Democrat's health plan: Do not fck with graphic designers (Flickr, Robert Palmer)
Recently on Offworld we played with words in two ways: first, by downloading our latest iPhone obsession, NewToy's Friends With Words, as svelte and streamlined as an online-multiplayer Scrabble-alike we've played, and as perfect (read: dangerously addictive) as the original Scrabulous proved when it first dominated Facebook.
We then saw Flashbang co-founder Matthew Wegner solve PopCap's fellow iPhone word-smither Bookworm with science, with a fully automated OCR word-finder that just might be expanded to a web service soon.
Elsewhere, we saw Spore, Fathom and more indie all-star devs joining August's rapid-proto Experimental Gameplay competition, electro star Deadmau5 taking on Zelda, learned what Disneyland can teach devs about game design, and saw "worlds first computer programmer" Ada Lovelace coming to LittleBigPlanet with other historical friends.
Finally, we found a wicked Mario 64 optical illusion papercraft, looked inside Italy's Art of Games gallery exhibit, read the latest, fantastically well researched update on the Tim Langdell v. Mobigame trademark battle, and our 'one shot's: Parappa and Umjammer Lammy play in "My First Rockband", and gorgeously abstract picture-postcards from Wipeout HD (above).
Tokyo-based artist/programmer Daito Manabe posted this demo video of what appears to be a visually interactive laser setup with generative sound -
Not much info to be found for this one - please leave a comment if you have any insights/details! [via Califaudio] Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!
- Alvaro Cassinelli: concept, software and hardware development
- Daito Manabe: sound concept and sound generation
- Kuribara Yusaku: latest software development including contour
tracking and interface
- Stephane Perrin: participated in early development of the smart
laser scanner technology used for tracking.
Randy Sarafan needed some bright light for making (and documenting) projects, so he came up with this clamp-light-tastic curtain rod track lighting solution.
Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this!
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
On Noah Zerkin's blog, he has a round-up of augmented reality (AR) project videos that have been floating through the aetherweb in the last few months. In the above vid, Aaron Meyers and Jeff Crouse, both involved with Eyebeam, the OpenFrameworks community, and interactive art in general, explain to RocketBoom their "World Series of 'Tubing," an interactive AR social game played with YouTube videos.
Augmented Reality Roundup (some of the exciting stuff from the last few months)
Turned off by the unreliability of DVD players artist Tim Tate developed custom electronics for use in these glass bulb video memorials. See more examples and listen to an interview on NPR's All Tech Considered. [Thanks, Scott!]
DAAP industrial design student Kyle A Koch designed and fabricated this useful flat pack copy stand for the iPhone. It will copy a standard letter-sized sheet with reasonable fidelity.
[via crave]
Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in iPhone | Digg this!
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
From the MAKE Flickr pool
Zackaholic made this rather unique powered desktop speaker with some neat features -
It's a speaker... in a phone! The kind of cool thing is that the power switch is wired to the phone cradle switch so to turn it on you just take the phone off the hook. It doesn't run off power from the phone jack, but it could will a little extra effort. The jack in my room is dead, so this one's wired to a wall wort.More deets on the Flickr photo page.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Here's a charming, inspiring little intro to the documentary about William Kamkwamba, the Malawian teen who got a book out of the library on windmills (which had pictures of the them, but no tech details) and figured out how to build his own to bring electrical power to his family.
William will be participating in Maker Faire Africa.
William Kamkwamba is Coming to Maker Faire Africa
Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Maker Faire | Digg this!
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Whew! All of that soldering and kid-wrangling worked up a powerful thirst. So, you drag over the ol' Coleman and crack open a few cold ones. Sitting there drinking your beers (be they root or hops) with your newly-trained team of solder-droids, you all start contemplating that old faithful camping cooler. Maybe it needs some EL wire highlights around its edges, or an entertaining LED display, or how about some solar-powered, active cooling? Or heck, maybe some wheels and a motor so you can drive that sucker around the patio.
Okay, maybe that last idea is too silly, but you get the idea. It's summer, you've got the family itchin' to do something with their new-found geek cred, why not take our MAKEcation Cooler Hacking Challenge? Trick out any beverage cooler however you like -- the sky's the limit (hey, sending a cooler into space on a weather balloon -- now there's a challenge...), upload the images to the MAKE Flickr pool, and tag them "MAKEcation." As with the Soldering Challenge, you're eligible for a $100 Maker Shed Gift Certificate and some other cool prizes.
For the Soldering Challenge, we brought on Dave Hrynkiw from Solarbotics as our beloved Camp Counselor. He wasn't called out of his virtual cabin very often, but he was dutifully at the ready... and remains so. The Soldering Challenge will continue until the end of the month, so there's still plenty of time to submit your MAKEcation photos to Flickr.
For the Cooler Hacking Challenge, we want to introduce you to our latest author-addition to the site, Matt Mets. He'll be starting off his stint with us as your next Camp Counselor. Matt is an electrical engineer who loves creative repurposing of electronic junk, hacking open source software, and photography. Besides now working for MAKE, he's also currently an artist-in-residence at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh. He's in the process of designing a ferrous wheel and an emotional typewriter. No, really. Matt will be here to help brainstorm cooler hacks, to answer any technical questions, consult on your hack ideas, and to help us judge the entries at the end of the month. If you have any questions for Matt (or for Dave), send them to: campcounselor@makezine.com.
We'd also love to get your help in brainstorming ideas for cooler hacks. Post your ideas in the comments. We'll pick our favorite one and you'll get a Maker's Notebook and your choice of The Best of MAKE or The Best of Instructables.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
I've been a Talking Heads fan since I was 13, and I've seen Byrne perform four times before, but nothing to top last night's show, which featured a huge number of performers -- three backup singers, three dancers, two percussionists, various guitar players, a keyboard, a bass -- and the sweetest, goofiest, most lovely choreography since Stop Making Sense.
Byrne and co performed a mix of tracks from the fantastic new disc Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, made in collaboration with Brian Eno, along with an eclectic mix of earlier Eno collaborations, including songs from My Life in a Bush of Ghosts, and a ton of old Talking Heads songs (including some non-Eno tracks like Burning Down the House).
One of my least favorite interview questions is, "What's your favorite __________?" (book, blog, movie). I always reply, "If I was the sort of person who had one favorite, I'd have written a single blog post about it and stopped -- but instead, I've written 40,000 posts."
But there is one unequivocal favorite in my pantheon: my all-time favorite performer and musician is David Byrne. From Talking Heads to his remarkable solo career, I have never heard a Byrne project I didn't like (for a real treat, go hunting in the treasurehouse of Luaka Bop, the world music label he curated, through which I first discovered Tom Ze, Gilberto Gil, Fifi, Tete Y Popo, Gal Costa and many the other musicians whose work never fails to move me).
So last night's show was a fabulous treat. From the opening -- Byrne giving his benediction to photographers, despite the dire warnings on the programs -- to the closing -- three encores, each sweeter, more fun, and more wonderful than the last -- it was nearly two hours' worth of absolute musical joy. I got up and danced -- along with the entire audience -- despite the fact that I never dance. I wasn't the only non-dancer moving in the crowd. It was a proper nerdstock, full of people proving out the aphorism that the best dancer is the one who's having the most fun (I recently re-watched Stop Making Sense and realized that virtually all of the ridiculous things I do when I dance come straight from that movie).
Speaking of dance, the dancers on-stage were stupendous. The choreogr
aphy, like that in Stop Making Sense, was at once graceful, playful, beautiful and informal, accessible even to philistines like me. After a year on tour, the entire ensemble meshed perfectly, and the dancers, singers and musicians traded off vocals, movement and instruments with ease.
The old Byrne and Talking Heads standards are as familiar to me as daydreams, songs that have worn grooves in my brain through repetition, but nevertheless, each performance brought out some nuance, some new interpretation I'd missed until now. And, of course, "Heaven" made me tear up as it never fails to do.
Byrne and co have just a few dates left here in the UK. I have no idea if they're sold out or not, but if you can get a ticket, go. Last night was the highlight of a year full of highlights.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Hutchison's campaign initially told the Austin American-Statesman that "a vendor sold them on a tool that generates the phrases hourly or less in an attempt to divine the most frequent Web searches made by individuals who search online using one or all of the terms 'Rick Perry,' 'Kay Bailey Hutchison' and 'Texas'"--and plenty of people search for "rick perry gay."Hidden gay slur, search terms, get campaign site blacklistedThe tool was allegedly used to help make banner ad buying decision, said the campaign, a claim that makes little sense on its face. Why would such a list be inserted in the website's source code unless the goal was to draw search traffic to the site?
Advice on designing scientific posters (via Hack the Planet)
The best general advice I can give a first-time poster constructor is to describe the circumstances in which a poster will eventually be viewed: a hot, congested room filled with people who are there primarily to socialize, not to look at posters. Because poster sessions are often concurrent with the "wine and beer" mixer, chaos is further increased by hundreds of uninhibited graduate students staggering around hitting on each other. It's not a pretty sight.And it gets worse: meeting organizers will invariably sandwich your poster between two posters that are infinitely more entertaining, such as "Teaching house cats to perform cold fusion" and "Mating preferences in extraordinarily adorable red pandas." In such a situation, your poster must be interesting and visually slick if you hope to attract viewers.
(Image: Poster Session, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike photo from Nucho's Flickr stream)
Stuart Breidenstein of Go Robot! gave me a demo of his working stove necklace at Urban Craft Uprising this weekend in Seattle. It's a hand-crafted brass and copper alcohol burner with a fuel line and tank. Alcohol stoves are popular for light-traveling hikers, as the fuel is readily available at hardware stores and it burns clean and hot. I I was blown away by the craftsmanship and ingenuity of this piece of functional jewelry.
Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
PaperBack - paper based backups an "open source joke"...
PaperBack is a free application that allows you to back up your precious files on the ordinary paper in the form of the oversized bitmaps. If you have a good laser printer with the 600 dpi resolution, you can save up to 500,000 bytes of uncompressed data on the single A4/Letter sheet.
Nikon has also announced three new Coolpix S-series compact cameras. The Coolpix S70 is built around a 3.5 inch touch-sensitive OLED screen. New screen technologies can register multiple touchs and should make the camera more responsive, easier on batteries and easier to view than its predecessor. It features an optically stabilized 5x zoom lens (28-140mm equiv.), 12.1MP sensor and HD video recording. Next comes the S640 - the fastest Coolpix to date, which Nikon says offers 'DSLR-like focus speed.' It also features an 'air gapless' screen which fits the protective outer panel more closely to the LCD for improved contrast. Along with the less expensive S570, it features a 5x optically stabilized zoom lens starting at 28mm, 2.7 inch LCD and 12MP sensor. The S570 does without the S640's air gapless screen, fast AF and USB charger, helping keep its MSRP €50 lower. Comments Off [link]
Nikon has unveiled the world's first compact camera with an in-built projector. The S1000pj projects images up to 40 inches in size with a VGA resolution and at a maximum distance of 2 meters. The camera is supplied with a remote control and stand for ease of use. It features an optically stabilized wide angle 5x zoom lens (28-140mm equiv.), 2.7 inch LCD and a 12.1MP sensor. Comments Off [link]
Nikon has also announced three new Coolpix S-series compact cameras. The Coolpix S70 is built around a 3.5 inch touch-sensitive OLED screen. New screen technologies can register multiple touchs and should make the camera more responsive, easier on batteries and easier to view than its predecessor. It features an optically stabilized 5x zoom lens (28-140mm equiv.), 12.1MP sensor and HD video recording. Next comes the S640 - the fastest Coolpix to date, which Nikon says offers 'DSLR-like focus speed.' It also features an 'air gapless' screen which fits the protective outer panel more closely to the LCD for improved contrast. Along with the less expensive S570, it features a 5x optically stabilized zoom lens starting at 28mm, 2.7 inch LCD and 12MP sensor. The S570 does without the S640's air gapless screen, fast AF and USB charger, helping keep its MSRP €50 lower. Comments Off [link]
Nikon has unveiled the world's first compact camera with an in-built projector. The S1000pj projects images up to 40 inches in size with a VGA resolution and at a maximum distance of 2 meters. The camera is supplied with a remote control and stand for ease of use. It features an optically stabilized wide angle 5x zoom lens (28-140mm equiv.), 2.7 inch LCD and a 12.1MP sensor. Comments Off [link]
There's amazing time-lapse video of a giant LEGO light bulb being constructed.
Lisa warns against letting social networking ruin your social skills.
We announced the winners of our Gadget Fiction competition.
Guest reviewer David Wertheimer tested Klipsch's Image X5S headphones.
We gaped at Frank Buchwald's beautiful hand-made light fittings.
A dancing humanoid robot has an iPhone 3GS instead of a head.
Rob reviewed the Loop Pointer, a very odd controller indeed; and Steven reviewed Nokia's N97. Find out why it's no good.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
67 queries. 2.324 seconds
