With all the misleading claims about blogs and other sites acting as "parasites" or ripping off the news, there's a really good question that the big media properties don't seem to want to answer. If these sites are really attracting so much traffic... why not build one yourself? Over at E-Media Tidbits, Amy Gahran discusses how that might work:

While many journalists are attached to long-form stories delivered in a traditionally detached and serious tone, that doesn't necessarily align with how more and more people actually consume media and news.

So why not offer both approaches on a news site? Rather than wait for (or actively solicit) popular venues such as Gawker or "The Daily Show" to imbue labor-intensive, in-depth reporting with mass appeal, news organizations could instead present their own briefer, more lighthearted takes on longer stories and increase the chances of driving traffic and engagement to the original stories.

If those other sites really get all the attention, then come up with a way to bring the attention back. That's what we normally think of as competition. If the car dealer across the street is having a blow out Labor Day sale, you don't complain about them "parasiting" your customers. You come up with a promotion yourself.

Now, to be fair, my guess is that the response to this is that would only add more expense on top of what's already being done, without a guaranteed payoff. Also, part of the complaint (at least from the Marburgers) isn't so much that these sites get all the traffic, but that they drive down ad rates for the long form journalism. Of course, if that's true (and it's not clear it is), then the answer is again to focus on coming up with creative ways to expand your audience/community or to make them more valuable to advertisers. And, certainly building a better community around more "webby" type content wouldn't hurt...

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beef curtains writes "Phil Schiller, Apple senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, responded by e-mail to a blog post discussing Apple's rejection of a dictionary app. If Schiller's e-mail is to be believed, it offers an interesting perspective on this whole issue. He said, 'The issue that the App Store reviewers did find with the Ninjawords application is that it provided access to other more vulgar terms than those found in traditional and common dictionaries, words that many reasonable people might find upsetting or objectionable. ... The Ninjawords developer then decided to filter some offensive terms in the Ninjawords application and resubmit it for approval for distribution in the App Store before parental controls were implemented. Apple did not ask the developer to censor any content in Ninjawords, the developer decided to do that themselves in order to get to market faster. ... You are correct that the Ninjawords application should not have needed to be censored while also receiving a 17+ rating, but that was a result of the developers' actions, not Apple's.' PC World has an article summarizing the drama-to-date, the blog post, and Schiller's response."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's almost time for Burning Man, and you know what that means -- no, not rampant nudity -- dust. Lots and lots of dust. Tom Elverston decided to make his own pair of black leather dust goggles -- tres Mad Max -- from an old leather jacket and some pieces of tempered and UV resistant glass from halogen 'puck style' lights.

How to make Dust Goggles - Tim Elverston design and process [via Boing Boing]

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This week, I had reason to visit the San Francisco headquarters of The Gap. The company's founder, Donald Fisher, is a huge art lover and has a jaw-dropping collection of contemporary art. I really respect that he and his wife spend so much of their wealth on art, and want to share it with the public. The company lobby itself is like a Lichtenstein gallery. For example, the fantastic portrait of Swee'Pea seen above, titled "Reflections on the Scream," is hanging right in the entryway. And there are a slew of great pieces by Warhol, Calder, Oldenburg, and other modern Western artists throughout the building. For the last two years, the Fisher family had been aiming to build a public museum for their full collection in San Francisco's historic Presidio, a former military facility that's now a national park. Apparently though, historic preservationists and conservationists were upset with the Fishers' plans. Now it's not clear where their collection will go, and it may very well leave the city. From the Los Angeles Times:

"It would be an absolute crime if it left San Francisco," said Dede Wilsey, president of the board that oversees the De Young and Legion of Honor, two of the city's major art museums. "No one could amass that collection now. They couldn't afford it, even in a recession."

The collection, housed in a warehouse and at Gap headquarters in San Francisco, is open to scholars, and Fisher routinely loans pieces to museums. But until an agreement is reached, most of it will stay behind closed doors.

"You could very easily teach the history of art over the past 50 years with this collection," said Hilarie Faberman, a curator at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. Faberman said nearly every piece deserves to be displayed.

"S.F. art community fears loss of Gap founder's massive collection"

There have been plenty of stories over the years of domain name registrars "front running" domain names, whereby they take domains that people do a search on, and then register themselves, hoping to sell it to the person who searched later for a higher price. Network Solutions, for example, was accused of this practice, though it insisted that it was only "protecting" the domain from others who might snatch it. ICANN was eventually sued for letting this happen. It appears that ICANN also hired Ben Edelman to look into the problem, and his research has apparently turned up no evidence of such domain front-running anywhere. He notes that this doesn't mean it doesn't happen, but he tested it all over and was unable to find it happening. Considering the vast number of reports and complaints about it happening in the past, does this mean that registrars have cleaned up? Or did Edelman miss something?

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Several sources are reporting that while native audio/video support has been dropped from the HTML 5 spec, the Khronos Group has released a few details about their up and coming WebGL 3D acceleration standard. "The general principle behind WebGL is to offer a JavaScript binding to the group's OpenGL ES 2.0 system, allowing code run within the browser to access the graphics hardware directly in the same way as a standalone application can. As the technology would rely solely on JavaScript to do the heavy lifting, no browser plugin would be required — and it would be compatible with any browser which supports the scripting language alongside the HTML 5 'Canvas' element."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

60,020 people submitted doomsday picks in Slate's "Choose Your Own Apocalypse" interactive feature (Here's my post about it). "Loose Nukes" was the top pick, with 10.5 percent of readers choosing it.

While "Israel-Arab War" (picked by 7.6 percent of users) represents another worry that's generations old, the "Peak Oil" (9.3 percent) and "China Unloads U.S. Treasurys" (8.2 percent) scenarios are new apocalyptic visions. Peak Oil—"Petroleum production reaches terminal decline. Oil becomes too expensive to extract, and alternative energies can't maintain our fossil-fuel-dependent lifestyle"—is the hobbyhorse of widely read collapsists James Howard Kunstler and Dmitry Orlov. It's the scenario of choice for the modern doomsayer who thinks Western civilization has industrialized its way to destruction. Fears of an economic collapse triggered by China pulling out from the American economy are a symptom of both our worries over the current economic crisis and anxiety over America's place in the world.

How Is America Going To End? The apocalypse you chose.

wisebabo writes "Some researchers at Technische Universitaet Muenchen and Harvard have developed a way to make DNA 'Origami' fold up into all sorts of desired nanoscale shapes. While this has been done before, there now seems to be a much greater assortment of shapes they can create. What's particularly interesting is that they've developed some software that can be used (presumably with a DNA assembler) that will create what you want; think of CAD/CAM on a molecular scale! 'The toolbox they have developed includes a graphical software program that helps to translate specific design concepts into the DNA programming required to realize them. Three-dimensional shapes are produced by "tuning" the number, arrangement, and lengths of helices.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nancy creator Ernie Bushmiller sure looks happy!

Heidi MacDonald says:

I have a post you may enjoy, from the ever wonderful Life Mag/Google Archives. It's from 1950 and it shows the artists of Nancy, Smokey Stover and so on drawing on scantily clad young models. It's kinda creepy but sort of endearing in that old time girdle fetish way, too.

It reminds me of an event Craig Yoe would produce.

A bunch of old school strip cartoonists draw on the bathing suits of comely young models

btr1701 points us to an odd (and slightly disturbing) story about a prisoner in Texas. Most of the story is about the fact that the guy is ridiculously obese and had been able to sneak a gun into prison in between flabs of skin, which was totally missed on a bunch of searches. But, btr1701 points out that the reason the guy was arrested in the first place was because he was apparently selling bootleg CDs. According to the article, he was "charged with possessing or selling unlabeled recordings." Now, I can sort of, maybe, kinda see why selling unlabeled recordings could be a violation of the law (though, even that seems questionable). But, possessing unlabeled recordings? How is that against the law? Does this mean that anyone who burns some music to a blank-DVR could be in trouble? Anyone in Texas have any more details on the real story here, because I'm hoping there's more to it.

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Florida law enforcement agents have charged 48-year-old Keith R. Griffin (shown at left) with 10 counts of possession of child pornography after a detective found over a thousand such images on his computer.

In his defense, Mr. Griffin told detectives "he would leave his computer on and his cat would jump on the keyboard. And when he returned there will be strange material downloaded."

He is jail, with bail set at a quarter million dollars. His cat roams free.

(tcpalm.com and nbcmiami.com via Danny Sullivan)

Above, Bling Teeth, which sell for 75 cents a pop in vending machines. This image has nothing to do with what follows in this blog post, other than humor and a tangential association to the cultural trappings of hip-hop.

Alrighty then. "Snacks and Shit" is a blog dedicated to the appreciation of "rap and hip-hop lyrics that are absolutely absurd, ludicrous, nonsensical, ridiculous, basic, basically stupid, basically bad, basically basic, or preposterous." The authors "take some lines and examine them literally." Critics call them "willfully obtuse," I call them "funny."

"No room service just snacks and shit." - Jay-Z, Hey Papi

This is the line that started our whole obsession with rap and hip-hop lyrics. Honestly, this sounds more like something my dad would say. "Remember, no ordering room service. It's too expensive. Plus, I brought snacks."

Snacks and Shit (via John Moe)

Kill Or Cure explores the UK Daily Mail's obsession with hysterical headlines about what causes and/or cures cancer, with a link index to stories on the subject:

affluence both causes and prevents cancer
* Wealthy background can raise the risk of cancer for teenagers
* Middle classes 'face twice the risk of skin cancer'
* Is your lifestyle giving you breast cancer?
* Well-off children 'more at risk of cancer'
* Why affluent women in the South are more likely to die from breast cancer
* Gap between rich and poor women who survive breast cancer grows as disease progresses

Kill or cure? (Thanks, Alice!)

UCLA urban planning teacher Donald Shoup's book The High Cost of Free Parking makes the case that urban parking has a high, hidden cost:

The free parking that Americans love isn't really 'free' at all. A recent parking garage project in New Haven, Conn., for example, cost more than $30 million for almost 1,200 spaces - that's more than $25,000 per space. If you were to finance it using a mortgage, the actual cost would be over $40,000 per space. This breaks down to roughly $135 a month, or $1,600 a year per space - not including externalities like the air pollution and congestion created by increased trips drawn by cheap parking. Even when garages and meters charge for parking, they rarely charge the real value of the parking space. (In Vauban, by contrast, drivers must purchase a parking space in the garages at $40,000 each.) All this amounts to a massive subsidy. Shoup calculates that in 2002 the total subsidy just for off-street parking was between $127 and $374 billion (for comparison, the budget for national defense that year was $349 billion).

Who pays for this? Everyone. The cost of building all that parking is reflected in higher rents, more expensive shopping and dining, and higher costs of home-ownership. Those who don't drive or own cars thus subsidize those who do.

Free parking can become a drain on city coffers. According to a study (PDF) by Bruce Schaller, deputy commissioner of planning and sustainability at the NYC Department of Transportation, the city was losing more than $45 million in parking meter revenue annually as a result of the free parking privileges commonly offered to city employees. But the costs are more than economic: free parking also changes behavior, encouraging us to take more trips and drive alone more often. According to the same study, without that free parking, 19,200 fewer vehicles would enter Manhattan every day, easing congestion.

Free Parking Isn't Free (via Kottke)

Krystalo writes to tell us that Microsoft hardware has an interesting demo of a pressure-sensitive keyboard they have designed. While there are no currently announced plans to turn this into a shipping product, there are many cool uses that one could imagine a device like this providing. "The device will be put to use in the first annual Student Innovation Contest in Victoria, Canada, where contestants will be supplied with a keyboard prototype and challenged with developing new interactions for it. Contestants will demo their creations and attendees will vote for their favorite at the conference on October 5. $2,000 prizes will be given to the authors of programs deemed as the most useful, the best implementation, and the most innovative."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's been an interesting discussion concerning my post taking the RIAA to task for various (incorrect) "FACTS" it listed about Joel Tenenbaum and his case. As expected, of course, not everyone agrees with me, but there's a point of disagreement that I wanted to focus on, because I think people are merging two ideas in their minds, and it's clouding their judgment:

1. There's the issue of whether or not Joel Tenenbaum had the right to download or share the songs that he did. On that we absolutely agree that he broke the law. No questions at all.
2. There's a separate issue of whether or not the RIAA "deserves to get paid" for its music.

The folks who are arguing against my point combine these two as a single point, and say that if Joel downloaded/shared the music then the labels "deserve to get paid." My argument is that those are two separate discussions. We agree that Joel broke the law. But that doesn't mean that the record labels "deserve payment." There's no indication that Tenenbaum would have bought CDs in absence of the songs being available online. The labels have a job to do, which is putting in place a business model that gets them paid. And they're failing in doing so, which is why their financials are looking so pitiful these days.

I recognize that it's difficult to separate out these two issues, but it's important. If you understand that these are two separate issues, then you recognize that this is a business model issue, not a legal one. If you recognize that these are two separate issues, then you recognize that it's not about "deserving to get paid" and there's no "we had no choice but to sue." Instead, you recognize that the issue is that the labels have failed to put in place a business model, and their response has been to fight the wrong thing. It's to legally go after the people who wish the labels had put in place a better business model, rather than actually putting in place a better business model.

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MAKE's most wonderful editorial assistant, Laura Cochrane, has been helping us host a series of Mini Maker Faires this summer. Here she files a little report about last weekend's event, held at Copperfield's Books in Petaluma, CA. The video was shot by Copperfield's. - Gareth

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Last Saturday, I helped out at the Mini Maker Faire that was held in a local bookstore in Petaluma, CA. This was one in a series of Mini Maker Faires that we've held this summer in and around MAKE's hometown of Sebastopol, CA.

I was making toothbrush bristlebots and LED throwies along with one of the Make: Labs engineering interns, Eric Chu. Other makers that came out on Saturday included David Nutty, working with basic electronics; Elaine Barr, cranking out some sweet t-shirt stenciling; Terry Reilly with High Tech Bikes, showing solar and dual motor bikes; Peggy Jo Ackley crafting collage greeting cards; and Brad Prather with his fun, quirky solar gadgets. All in all, it was a stellar lineup, and the day was a huge success.

The bristlebots project was probably the most involved, and I'll be honest - this was my first time making one. The step that I (and seemingly everyone else) found the most challenging was making a solid connection between the end of the stripped wire and the contacts on the pager motor. We weren't soldering, so we used conductive tape instead, which unfortunately, isn't very sticky! That fact, combined with the fine motor skills required to manipulate the wire and tape on the tiny motor contact, made this step a real challenge. I ended up making two bristlebots, and I used regular tape on my second generation, which seemed to be a better option, given what we had to work with.

The final Mini Maker Faire is this Saturday, Aug. 8, at Copperfield's Books in Montgomery Village, Santa Rosa, CA. It runs 11am to 1pm. Stop by if you're in the area!

Featured makers: Bob Peak from Beverage People with a cheese making demonstration, David Nutty demonstrating the basics of electronics, Brookelynn Morris with needle felting, the MAKE team making bristlebots and LED throwies, Francois Cordesse with astronomy gadgets, and Community Bikes, showing you how to fix your bike.

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In yet another move to display how antiquated and completely ignorant of digital culture he is, Rupert Murdoch has started demanding that Amazon hand over user info for all Kindle users. This demand comes right after Murdoch just finished negotiating a larger share of revenue from Amazon sales. At least Amazon hasn't decided to comply with this request yet. "'As I've said before, the traditional business model has to change rapidly to ensure that our journalistic businesses can return to their old margins of profitability,' Murdoch said. 'Quality journalism is not cheap, and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalizing its ability to produce good reporting.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In what appears to be a beauty pageant held at a prison in Russia, scores of women gather around a makeshift runway in the courtyard as their fellow inmates strut their stuff. I don't read Russian, but the photographs alone tell a great story.

More photos here [via Zaeega (Japanese)]

I like Scott Bradlee's ragtime versions of popular 80s songs.

Ever wonder what your favorite 80's jams would sound like if they were written around the turn of the century, at the height of the ragtime piano era?

Wonder no more.

Come with me as I take you on a journey to a bygone era in an alternate universe-- where "Don't Stop Believin'" refers to the Wright Brothers' first flight and "Never Gonna Give You Up" is an ode to President Taft's epic moustache.

The songs featured are:
Come on Eileen - Dexy's Midnight Runners
Don't You Want Me Baby - Human League
THE FINAL COUNTDOWN - Europe
Axel F - Harold Faltermeyer
Material Girl - Madonna
Every Breath You Take - The Police
Don't Stop Believin' - Journey
Living on a Prayer - Bon Jovi
Never Gonna Give You Up - You've Been Rickrolled! ( or
Ragtimerolled?)
Total Eclipse of the Heart - Bonnie Tyler

(Via Blogadilla)

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.

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In this month's MAKE magazine, Volume 19, I've got a piece on the world-famous Speed Week. That's the gathering of speed enthusiasts that meets at Bonneville Salt Flats, near Wendover, Utah, to celebrate all things that go very, very fast but don't leave the ground (at least if everything goes the way it's supposed to.)

The MAKE piece focuses on a special type of vehicle called a Belly Tank Racer. Of all homemade four wheeled vehicles, the belly tankers appeal to me most. After World War II, a California race car builder named Bill Burke came up with the idea of building a race car out of war surplus 165- and 315-gallon aircraft drop tanks, typically referred to as a belly tank. (The original use of the drop tanks was to extend the range of P-51 Mustang and P-38 Lightning fighter planes.)

I took lots of photos of the belly tankers, but because of space considerations, only a few could appear in the article. So, I've placed several more photos of them on my blog, Notes from the Technology Underground.

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mcgrew writes to mention that the Large Hadron Collider, smasher of particles, will get another chance to prove itself this November. The restart will begin with tests at half power, a mere 7 trillion electron volts (TeV), and ramp up slowly to the designed goal of 14 TeV. "Measurements indicate that some of the electrical connections could not safely handle the amount of current needed to run at the full 14 TeV, so will need to be replaced before dialing up the energy that far. But even 7 TeV is much higher than physicists have ever probed in the laboratory before. The Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, is the current record holder, with collisions at 2 TeV."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 1979, Robert Crumb created "A Short History of America," depicting the rise of the urban landscape from the wilderness. The art first ran in the Whole Earth Catalog's offspring CoEvolution Quarterly. The animation of the original black and white artwork seen above is from the movie Crumb. Several years later, Crumb added three new panels showing possible future scenarios: The Fun Future (above), Ecological Disaster (above), and The Ecotopian Solution. You can purchase a color poster of the full 15 panel version from Steve Krupp's Curio Shoppe. (Thanks, Jason Tester!)

It was just a few days ago that Mark Cuban was singing the praises of Redbox as the perfect model for movie distribution, claiming that the movie studios loved it, because they pay the studios a minimum guarantee with no returns. Cuban claims that this is a no-risk deal for studios who get pure incremental revenue. That didn't read right to me, because it was just a few months ago that it seemed like Universal Studios was doing everything it possibly could to kill Redbox. And, now, Mark alerts us to the news that 20th Century Fox is also demanding wholesellers not sell to Redbox. In fact, the article notes that Redbox only has a deal with Sony. It purchases all the movies from other studios through wholesale middlemen -- which seems to contradict Cuban's claims. Either way, this is a story of the movie studios letting their own greed interfere with innovation. These movies are being legally purchased. It's difficult to see how the studios have any leg to stand on in preventing Redbox from using their movies in its service. Isn't there a First Sale right somewhere?

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BB readers may remember the amazing Golden Mean snail car and Boiler Bar, created by blacksmith and oilpunk artist Jon Sarriugarte. For years, Jon has also built beautiful fire pits, flaming zen gardens, and patio heaters. Sometimes he sells them, but he's always encouraged folks to make their own. Finding the right fittings, regulators, and tubes can be a hassle though, so now Jon is offering fire pit kits. They start at $95. From Jon's Form and Reform site:

(For a fire pit,) in addition to these kits you will need a container that is able to handle high temperatures and be fully sealed underneath (leaks or drain holes will also allow gas out). A 55 gal drum works good. The weldable coupler provided will need to be welded though the bottom, legs added, then simply attach the fittings, ring, hose, propane BBQ tank and add sand. Sand should be 3-4? above the ring. This is a match light system and I like those plumbing torches to light mine. Light the torch, then turn on the gas with the flame above the sand. It will take several seconds for the sand to fill with gas and rise to the top. Once lit it’s time to play in the sand with simple tools. This works best after dark when you can turn the flame down very low tell you only see a blue flame.

Fire is hot! DO NOT TOUCH the sand.

Fire Pit Kits for Sale

sukotto writes "Ubuntu recently released an unannounced and experimental 'multisearch' extension to Firefox alpha 3, apparently in an effort to improve the default behavior of new tabs and of search. In a response to one of the initial bug reports the maintainers mentioned that the extension's other purposes were 'collecting the usage data' and 'generating revenue.' Since this extension installs by itself and offers no warning about potential privacy violations, quite a few people (myself included) feel pretty unhappy. The only way to opt out is to disable the extension manually via Tools > Add-ons." Most posters to this Ubuntu forum thread are not happy about multisearch.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Etharooni designed this wonderful intervalometer to help him take awesome photos with his camera. He writes:

Entry-level Nikon DSLRs don't have many built in features that the higher-end cameras do, like an interval timer, for instance. It's an exceedingly useful feature. If you want to take star trails, time lapse, repetitive self-timer shooting, or whatever, an intervalometer is really important.

Another feature that Nikon seems to have forgotten about for us lower-class photographers, is a built in, physical, connected cable release. If that existed, this project wouldn't be that spectacular. What they do have, though, is an infrared sensor for taking photos with a remote. So, logically, I took advantage of that for the project.

He has a nice write-up about the project, including schematic, Gerber files, source code, and even a list of things to change for version 2. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arduino | Digg this!

This Egyptian bust has become a popular attraction at Chicago's Field Museum because it's a spitting image of Michael Jackson, complete with a tweaked nose. It was carved between 1550-1050 BCE and depicts a woman. "Statue's a Dead Ringer for Jacko" (NBC Chicago)

Interesting question came up in response to yesterday's piece about naming. Since name resolution is inherently centralized, aren't we trading one vulnerable system for another? Couldn't a hacker take down the name server just as easily as they swamp twitter.com with zombie requests?

First, I'm not an expert on this subject, so take everything I say with a grain of salt.

Second, let's summarize the problem we're solving.

We're trying to turn a mnemonic like judy into a URL like looselycoupled.net/judy.xml.

If the name server were to go down, one thing we lose is the ability to find new people. But our clients still know how to find all the people we were subscribed to before the attack. We also lose the ability to relocate feeds that move. But that's only temporary, and we still have HTTP-level redirects, and we don't have that ability in the RSS network today and we seem to get along okay.

Another observation. Somehow the domain name system survives these kinds of attacks (knock wood). That's all we're talking about here, a service that's no more complex than DNS. And like DNS, the net could operate indefinitely even if it went down, though we'd lose the ability to find new people or ones that moved.

One more comment, unrelated to the centralization question. A question that keeps coming up. Why not have the name be like an email address, like judy@looselycoupled.net instead of judy. There are several reasons why. 1. Twitter has nice short names, and if you want to be as easy as Twitter, you have to have short names too. 2. The goal is to map a name to a URL. If the name has all the info the URL does, why bother mapping at all? No point, just skip the whole thing and have users enter URLs.

I posted a video excerpt from Oliver Stone's movie Any Given Sunday where Al Pacino tells the team they have to fight for every inch if they want to win. I've learned that simplicity in protocols is the same. You don't get many breakthroughs, most of the simplicity comes from fighting for every inch. Stone, speaking through Pacino, tells the story infinitely better than I can.

Jim Posner asked an interesting question via email.

"I was wondering about your estimate re: the number of rss updates per second there are on the web. Crazy question I know but just trying to understand orders of magnitude.

"If I were to subscribe to every available feed on the net do you think that would be 1000/updates a sec or closer to 1M/sec. Any guidance appreciated."

I responded that I don't have any idea. But I bet it's 1000 times what Twitter does. And it never goes down and isn't subject to a DOS attack.

We all know about the ongoing legal fight over Shepard Fairey's iconic Obama poster, but it looks like there may be another potential battle over a different photo. After the election last year, Time Magazine published a bunch of photos of Obama in college, taken by a fellow student Lisa Jack, that had never been seen outside of a small group of people. One of the photos, showed Obama smoking a cigarette. It's probably not a huge surprise that a marijuana legalization group, NORML, has modified the image to create a poster. You can see the two juxtaposed here:



Not surprisingly, Jack is not at all happy about the use of the photo, leading to yet another set of questions about fair use:

"They do not have my permission," said Jack, a psychology professor in Minnesota. These photos "are absolutely not to be used in this way. ... I really made a grand effort to do this properly, and I'm very irritated. If I'd wanted these to be used for political purposes, I'd have sold them to Hillary years ago."

Now, of course you can appreciate her feelings on this, in that she doesn't want her photo used this way, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's not legal. And, even though it's buried at the end of the article, Jack later admits that "it's really cool" that her image is considered "iconic" enough to use in that manner. The real question is whether or not Jack will actually do anything about this. Copyright law is not designed to be used to stifle speech (especially political speech), but we could soon see yet another fair use battle over a famous Obama image.

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This gentleman is George Vera, 25, who managed to smuggle a 9mm handgun and 2 clips with him into a Houston area jail. The 600 pound fellow allegedly hid the contraband between layers of his body fat. From Click2Houston.com:

Houston police said... Vera was arrested Aug. 2 and taken to the city jail. He spent a day there before being transferred to the Harris County Jail. After being there for 14 hours, going through intake procedures, he was taken to the showers, the final step before going to his cell. There, Vera told police he had a 9mm handgun on him, along with 2 clips.

(Former Harris Counter Detention Major Mark) Kellar said Vera should have been searched at least three times before getting to the jail.

Houston Police Officers Union President Gary Blankinship said cadets are trained how to search morbidly obese people.

"We teach officers to lift up and look under," Blankinship said. "The officer may not have arrested anyone this big before."

"Inmate Hides Gun In Fat Layers" (Thanks, Jess Hemerly)

An anonymous reader writes "Danny Kalev has an interview with Bjarne Stroustrup about the failure of concepts, the technical issues of concepts, whether the ISO committee's days are over, and whether C++ is at a dead-end. 'I don't think that concepts were doomed to fail. Also, I don't think concepts were trying to fix many things or to transform C++ into an almost new language. They were introduced to do one thing: provide direct language support to the by-far dominant use of templates: generic programming. They were intended to allow direct expression of what people already state in comments, in design documents, and in documentation. Every well-designed template is written with a notion of what is required from its arguments. For good code, those requirements are documented (think of the standard's requirements tables). That is, today most templates are designed using an informal notion of concepts.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Danny Kalev has an interview with Bjarne Stroustrup about the failure of concepts, the technical issues of concepts, whether the ISO committee's days are over, and whether C++ is at a dead-end. 'I don't think that concepts were doomed to fail. Also, I don't think concepts were trying to fix many things or to transform C++ into an almost new language. They were introduced to do one thing: provide direct language support to the by-far dominant use of templates: generic programming. They were intended to allow direct expression of what people already state in comments, in design documents, and in documentation. Every well-designed template is written with a notion of what is required from its arguments. For good code, those requirements are documented (think of the standard's requirements tables). That is, today most templates are designed using an informal notion of concepts.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mario Cacciottolo came to Los Angeles and took my photo for his "Someone Once Told Me," photography project. He has taken 700 photos of people holding hand-lettered signs quoting something someone once told the subject.

My quote was something my grandmother told me when I was very young. Her parents were killed in Russia during the revolution and she had to forage in the forest for a while. She developed a fear of snakes there, probably Vipera berus.

The photos and signs are a lot of fun to browse through.

Someone Once Told Me

What's that you say? You don't need an 8-inch diameter snow globe? Especially not one featuring a vignette of Al Pacino as Tony Montana in the climactic battle scene from Brian De Palma's Scarface? I say you're wrong: You need one of these. You need one so badly you don't even know it yet.

This project began when I, myself, realized that need; that deep need that every man knows sooner or later, in his life, which can only be satisfied by a say-hello-to-my-little-friend snow globe. I scoured the tubes looking for a suitable Tony Montana figurine, and though I found several, the only one featuring suitable full-auto-enraged-coke-frenzy action was MezCo Toys' Tony Montana ("The Fall" version), which is 7" tall. That's way too big for even the largest empty snow globe I could find. (It turns out, incidentally, that sourcing empty snow globes online is a bit of a trick. There a couple of crappy kits on Amazon, and a predictable selection of snow-globe photo frames, but for the real stuff you have to go to snowdomes.com.)

So I was forced to consider other options. Then one day at the hardware store I looked at a shelf full of glass lamp globes and the light bulb went on. And although the round, perfectly clear variety is a bit harder to find, I was able to run one down on eBay without spending too much time on it. The globe I used is made of glass, 8" in diameter, and features a 3.5" opening, which are ideal dimensions for the MezCo Tony Montana. Turns out the same globe is available in clear acrylic, and frankly that would be a better choice because of the reduced weight and danger of breakage.

Next I had to figure out how to seal the opening. It wasn't long before I remembered seeing, in some lab that I worked in at some point, a really giant black rubber stopper. It took a bit of research, but it turns out the biggest rubber stopper manufactured, which is #15, fits very well into a 3.5" globe opening. These stoppers are commonly available in natural (i.e. off-white) and black rubber. I found a black #15 rubber stopper on eBay for not too much, and was able to figure out a clever way to seal it tightly into the neck of the globe without having to use adhesive, sealant, or tape.

The final problem was the snow itself. Turns out the composition of snow globe snow is a closely-guarded trade secret, and although you can buy small packets of it as part of commercial snow globe kits, I couldn't find anyone selling it in bulk. Glitter can be used for this purpose, but it was totally inappropriate to serve as snow in the context of my vignette. A craft site put me on to the idea of using crushed eggshells, but it took some experimentation to figure out how to treat, clean, and grind them to make good snow.

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Author copies of Handcrafted CSS arrived today. I took some pictures of it. Related: just 7 more days of early-bird pricing for the Handcrafted CSS workshop on September 14th here in Salem, Massachusetts. Book now. Book often.

(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

Linuss points out research published in PLoS Biology that demonstrates the reawakening of latent human cells' ability to manufacture an HIV defense. A group of scientists led by Nitya Venkataraman began with the knowledge that Old World monkeys have a built-in immunity to HIV: a protein that can prevent HIV from entering cell walls and starting an infection. They examined the human genome for any evidence of a latent gene that could manufacture such a protein, and found the capability in a stretch of what has been dismissively termed "junk DNA." "In this work, we reveal that, upon correction of the premature termination codon in theta-defensin pseudogenes, human myeloid cells produce cyclic, antiviral peptides (which we have termed "retrocyclins"), indicating that the cells retain the intact machinery to make cyclic peptides. Furthermore, we exploited the ability of aminoglycoside antibiotics to read-through the premature termination codon within retrocyclin transcripts to produce functional peptides that are active against HIV-1. Given that the endogenous production of retrocyclins could also be restored in human cervicovaginal tissues, we propose that aminoglycoside-based topical microbicides might be useful in preventing sexual transmission of HIV-1."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After the Jammie Thomas trial, the RIAA tried to claim that the juries in both her trials represented a representative sample of the nation's views on copyright law. Now, following the Joel Tenenbaum trial, entertainment industry lawyer Ben Sheffner is making the same claim again:

On the Internet, (almost) everyone hates copyright. In fact that's one of the reasons I started this blog. Every day, for years, I would read about how copyright is stupid, outmoded, destructive, and downright evil. But I knew that the "law" I would read about bore scant resemblance to the actual law, and the way that businesses that earn revenue from production and exploitation of copyrighted works actually function. And I knew that not everyone harbored such vitriol and venom for the copyright owners, who routinely win major victories in the courts and the political arena.

The Jammie Thomas-Rasset and Joel Tenenbaum verdicts have highlighted this chasm between the "Internet" view of copyright, and what average citizens think of the topic. Now three juries, made up of 34 ordinary people from the Minneapolis and Boston areas, none of whom had any connection to the entertainment industry, have passed judgment upon use of p2p networks to obtain music without paying for it -- an activity that is excused, or even celebrated, in many quarters of the web. And all three of those juries demonstrated through the very large damages awards they imposed that they view illegal downloading and "sharing" as wrong, and deserving of harsh sanction.

While I'm sure that sounds good and is comforting to folks who make their living by profiting off of government granted monopolies, it's not even close to accurate. First of all, a jury is hardly a representative sample. The lawyers on both sides work hard to weed out those who actually are knowledgeable on these topics. In the Tenenbaum case, for example, any juror who admitted to using any file sharing apps was ruled out from serving on the jury. I have no problem with this from a legal standpoint, and totally understand why it happens, but it highlights that these juries are not a representative sample by any means.

Second, trials have very, very specific rules (many of which Tenenbaum's team tried to break), which limit what sort of information you can share about various issues. So at no point could there be a real conversation on copyright or business models. The jury was not an informed audience.

Third, Sheffner tries to use the fact that all three juries did not assign the statutory minimums as a sign that they felt that file sharing deserved harsh punishment, but again, that's not necessarily true (though, certainly it could be). There's a tremendous amount of evidence out there on jury decision making, and the award amounts that juries give can be heavily influenced by numerous factors, including something as simple as the numbers tossed out by those involved in the case. A few separate studies have shown that when numbers are discussed, it gives the jurors an anchor and they just see those numbers as acceptable, rather than comparing the numbers to the actual crime. Given that, the fact that the jury chose a number towards the lower end of the statutory range suggests that the jury actually didn't think the punishment should really be that harsh.

Fourth, in both of these cases it was clear that the defendants broke the law. The jury's job is made clear to them, and it is to make a determination on the law (and in the Tenenbaum case, even that was taken out of their hands by Tenenbaum's admission). Saying that this is somehow representative of the actual views on the activities is again, quite misleading.

Fifth, it's no surprise that those who don't follow these issues closely believe the idealistic story about copyright being an undeniable good thing. It's what most of us were taught, and if you don't know the details or haven't been directly impacted by draconian copyright laws, you probably believe that myth that many of us were taught from a very young age. So you put a bunch of those folks together on a jury, limit their ability to be educated, and of course they're going to default to thinking "copyright = good."

Over the years, I've found that most people who don't pay much attention to these things believe that story of copyrights and patents being the "root cause" of American creativity and innovation. It's a fable that sounds so good as youngsters, and why not? Yet, when you talk to such folks one on one or in small groups, and start going through the real details... and when you explain to them how copyright is used to stifle speech and innovation, and when you show them the new and unique business models that don't rely on copyright, they recognize the issue. When you finally show them the evidence -- the studies upon studies about the harm done by such things, it's not hard for them to realize that there's a real problem with copyright laws, and that problem isn't the fact that some kids aren't paying for downloads.

The only people I've found who resist such things are those whose own income in some way depends on exploiting copyright for their own advantage. There may be others, certainly, but in my experience it's incredibly rare. Not only that, but I've actually found that even within much of the entertainment industry, there's an understanding of this as well. I can't even begin to tell you the number of industry insiders who pull me aside at entertainment industry events to say (quietly) that they agree with a lot of what I say, but there are too many legacy issues to deal with to move forward strategically.

So, claiming that these juries are somehow representative samples of the views of people on file sharing is not even close to being accurate, no matter how much a small group of entertainment industry lawyers hope it's so.

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Mike Firth is a hobby glassblower in Dallas, Texas. His site includes a great page on a variety of techniques that can be applied to reclaimed glass bottles, including several methods of cutting them. The site also describes more exotic bottle-working techniques like slumping, stretching, drilling, and blowing out.

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Barence writes "Windows chief Steven Sinofsky has taken the unusual step of responding in the comments of a blog posting that claimed Windows 7 was suffering from a potential 'showstopper bug'. Stories had been sweeping the Internet that using the chkdsk.exe utility on a second hard disk would lead to a massive memory leak bringing the operating system to its knees in seconds. Responding to a blog post titled 'Critical Bug in Windows 7 RTM,' Sinofsky wrote: 'While we appreciate the drama of "critical bug" and then the pickup of "showstopper" that I've seen, we might take a step back and realize that this might not have that defcon level.' He signs off with the words: 'deep breath.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Well this is bad news. I had a hunch the stuff was evil, even though I've been slathering it on like skin cream when I travel to malaria-infested places. Some 200 million people a year use the stuff, and apparently it's bad news for the brain and nervous system, particularly when combined with other repellents that have similar toxic effects. Snip from a Science Daily article:

The active ingredient in many insect repellents, deet, has been found to be toxic to the central nervous system. Researchers say that more investigations are urgently needed to confirm or dismiss any potential neurotoxicity to humans, especially when deet-based repellents are used in combination with other neurotoxic insecticides.

Vincent Corbel from the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement in Montpellier, and Bruno Lapied from the University of Angers, France, led a team of researchers who investigated the mode of action and toxicity of deet (N,N-Diethyl-3-methylbenzamide). Corbel said, "We've found that deet is not simply a behavior-modifying chemical but also inhibits the activity of a key central nervous system enzyme, acetycholinesterase, in both insects and mammals".

Popular Insect Repellent Deet Is Neurotoxic

Here's the source report: Deet inhibits cholinesterase: Evidence for inhibition of cholinesterases in insect and mammalian nervous systems by the insect repellent deet (BioMed Central)

Folks at Carnegie Mellon are developing displays with inflatable buttons to make for a tactile touch screen. The video has got to be seen to be believed. Via Core77.

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Fresh off vague and undefined plans to put up a paywall on various news sites, it seems that Murdoch's latest misguided target for digital angst is Amazon. ikonoclasm alerts us to the news that Murdoch is angry and threatening to remove all News Corp. material from the kindle unless Amazon is willing to hand over subscriber names and info to News Corp., despite having just negotiated a larger share of revenue. Of course, the subscribers themselves might actually like the fact that Amazon isn't handing out their user info. Either way, it seems like Murdoch is suddenly hellbent on making it more difficult to read any of his content digitally.

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PainMeds writes "Apple's stepped-up and controversial rejections are helping to foster competition in the app store marketplace. According to an article by Wired, developers aren't taking AppStore rejection lying down, but are turning to the hacking community's repository system for the iPhone to launch an app store of their own. The 4-month-old Cydia store is yielding notably higher sales for a few application developers than Apple's AppStore, and is reportedly running on over 4 million Apple iPhone devices, with perhaps 350,000 connected at any one time. In this store, developers are distributing applications they've written that push the limits of Apple's normal AppStore policies, with software to add file downloads to Safari, trick applications into thinking they're on Wi-Fi (for VoIP), and enhance other types functionality. You'll also find the popular Google Voice application, which was recently rejected by Apple. Third party application development has been around since 2007, when the iPhone was originally introduced, and became so popular that O'Reilly Media published a book geared toward writing applications before an SDK was available. The Cydia store acts as both a free package repository and commercial storefront to third-party developers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MAKE pal, metalsmith, and fire artist Jon Sarriugarte is now selling fire pit kits, all the components you need (minus the gas supply and pit itself) to create your own fire garden. Jon has had these gardens set up at Maker Faire, and as Mister Jalopy says on D+R, "I can attest that they have an almost magical quality to them. I suppose it is a basic primal instinct to gather and celebrate around fire." I agree completely. Definitely something very enchanting, hypnotic, about watching the flames dance around on the sand. The kits sell for $95.

Fire Pit Kits for sale

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Because of its affordable price and speedy framerates, Sony's PS3 Eye camera has become a popular choice for hacking by interactive video experimentalists. Creat Digital Motion posted a nice feature on modding the device, highlighting several video tutorials by Peau Productions for IR filtration and even adding a custom enclosure. Read the full article over at CDM.

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An anonymous reader writes "A Georgian blogger with accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and Google's Blogger and YouTube was targeted in a denial of service attack that led to yesterday's site-wide outage at Twitter and problems at the other sites on, according to a Facebook executive. The blogger, who uses the account name 'Cyxymu' (the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia), had accounts on all of the different sites that were attacked at the same time, Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook, told CNet News." Here are user Cyxymu's LiveJournal Google cache and LiveJournal account (unreachable at this writing). Larry Magid writes on CNet that this individual blogs about independence of a breakaway region of Georgia. Macworld has some speculation in other directions on the motivations behind the DDoS attack.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A group from the University of Tokyo have developed a method for adding tangibility to holograms using focussed ultrasonic waves -

This project adds tactile feedback to the hovering image in 3D free space. Tactile sensation requires contact with objects, but including a stimulator in the work space dilutes the appearance of holographic images. The Airborne Ultrasound Tactile Display solves this problem by producing tactile sensation on a user's hand without any direct contact and without diluting the quality of the holographic projection.

More info from SIGGRAPH '09 and the project's page.

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JJ sends in a short quote from Radiohead's Thom Yorke about the music business:

"There's a process of natural selection going on right now. The music business was waiting to die in its current form about twenty years ago. But then, hallelujah, the CD turned up and kept it going for a bit. But basically, it was dead."

Bingo. The "recording industry" has basically been a "sell plastic discs" industry for way too long, and used the monopoly rents it received from the government to significantly overprice its products, and then lived fat and happy for many years. So, of course, when better, more efficient formats for distribution, recording, promotion and listening came along, it wanted absolutely nothing to do with them, because they didn't present the same sort of monopoly rents.

And, that, of course has been the point we've been trying to make here for quite some time. This has always been a business model issue. The record labels lived off the CD business for so long that it refused to recognize that a better, more efficient system was showing up, because it meant giving up some easy profits.

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An anonymous reader suggests a Cosmos Magazine note that nicotine has been shown to enhance attention and memory in schizophrenics. Research is now aimed at developing new treatments that could relieve symptoms and prevent smoking-related deaths. "A strong link between schizophrenia and smoking — with over three times as many schizophrenics smoking (70 to 90%) as the population at large — prompted scientists to investigate the link. Researchers led by Ruth Barr, a psychiatrist at Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, set out to find if the nicotine in cigarettes was helping patients to overcome their difficulties with cognitive function, such as planning and memory in social and work settings."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Get rid of those cue cards and make a low-cost teleprompter for pro results
Thanks go to Brian Lawler for the original article in MAKE, Volume 02.
To download The DIY Teleprompter MP4 click here or subscribe in iTunes.

Check out the complete DIY Teleprompter article in
MAKE, Volume 02 "No More Cue Cards" and you can see that in our Digital Edition.

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In this Boing Boing Video, PopSci columnist and author of the splendid and high-recommend Theo Gray's Mad Science, explains how electrochemical machining (ECM) works and shows off a rig he put together to do ECM in his shop.

The entire how-to can be found at popsci.com.

Carve Steel with Saltwater, Electricity and a Tin Earring (Popsci)

More:
Theo Gray on why "safety" is overrated
Behold: the flaming bacon lance of death!

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Terry Pratchett, who has early-onset Alzheimer's (and whose mental acuity is still fine) has written a stirring editorial on the need to legalize suicide in the UK. He avows his intention to commit suicide, to "jump before I am pushed," and explains why.

More than 100 Britons have travelled to assisted suicide clinics in Switzerland, and their loved ones face prosecution for accompanying them.

I write this as someone who has, regrettably, become famous for having Alzheimer's. Although being famous is all the rage these days, it's fame I could do without.

I know enough to realise there will not be a cure within my lifetime and I know the later stages of the disease can be very unpleasant. Indeed, it's the most feared disease among the over-65s.

Naturally, I turn my attention to the future. There used to be a term known as 'mercy killing'. I cannot believe it ever had any force in law but it did, and still does, persist in the public consciousness, and in general the public consciousness gets it right.

We would not walk away from a man being attacked by a monster, and if we couldn't get the ravening beast off him we might well conclude that some instant means of less painful death would be preferable before the monster ate him alive...

I am enjoying my life to the full, and hope to continue for quite some time. But I also intend, before the endgame looms, to die sitting in a chair in my own garden with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Tallis on the iPod - the latter because Thomas's music could lift even an atheist a little bit closer to Heaven - and perhaps a second brandy if there is time.

Oh, and since this is England I had better add: 'If wet, in the library.'

Who could say that is bad? Where is the evil here?

I'll die before the endgame, says Terry Pratchett in call for law to allow assisted suicides in UK

(via Forbidden Planet)

(Image: Terry Pratchett, Powell's, a Creative Commons Attribution licensed photo from Firepile's Flickr stream)

(Note: it takes something damned important to get me to link to the vile Daily Mail. This qualifies.)

This American Society for Information Science and Technology paper by Yahoo's Christian Crumlish has a tidy little cosmology of dumb things that social media does:

Briefly, the Cargo Cult means imitating superficial features of successful websites and applications without really understanding what makes them work...

Don't Break Email warns against the practice of using email as a one-way notification or broadcast medium while disabling your users' ability to hit reply as a normal response...

The Password Anti-Pattern is the pernicious practice of asking users to give you their passwords on other systems so that you can import their data for them, thus training them to be loose and insecure with their private information...

The Ex-Boyfriend Bug crops up when you try to leverage a user's social graph without realizing that some of the gaps in a person's network may be deliberate and not an up-sell opportunity...

Lastly, a Potemkin Village is an overly elaborated set of empty community discussion areas or other collaborative spaces, created in anticipation of a thriving population rather than grown organically in response to their needs (see also Pave the Cowpaths)....

The Information Architecture of Social Experience Design: Five Principles, Five Anti-Patterns and 96 Patterns (in Three Buckets) (via Beyond the Beyond)

Hugh Pickens writes "David Weir writes on Bnet that the thousands of journalists being let go from newspapers, magazines, and television networks have increasingly been showing up on AOL's payroll — over 1,500 in the last eighteen months — a number AOL expects to double or even triple over the coming year. 'Over time, talent is a fixed cost,' says Marty Moe, Senior Vice-President of AOL Media. 'You can syndicate it, distribute it as you scale. Furthermore, we are already the largest branded content company in the US, with an audience of 75 million domestic uniques. At our size, we can leverage the cost of our publishing and content management systems along with the talent and make the whole thing do-able on an advertising model.' Weir writes that AOL's turnaround started three years ago via the acquisition of Weblogs, Inc., and its set of branded verticals, including Engadget in technology, Autoblog covering the auto industry, and Joystiq covering gaming."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Danah boyd has a sober second look at some widely cited research from Nielsen (reported on Mashable) that states that "teens don't tweet." Bottom line: teens tweet.

We have a methodology and interpretation problem. As Fred Stutzman has pointed out, there are reasons to question Nielsen's methodology and, thus, their findings. Furthermore, the way that they present the data is misleading. If we were to assume an even distribution of Twitter use over the entire U.S. population, it would be completely normal to expect that 16% of Twitter users are young adults. So, really, what Nielsen is saying is, "Everyone expects social media to be used primarily by the young but OMG OMG OMG old farts are just as likely to be using Twitter as young folks! Like OMG."

We have a presentation problem. Mashable presented this report completely inaccurately. First off, Nielsen is measuring 2-24. My guess is that there are a lot more 24-year-olds on Twitter than 2-year-olds. Unless Sockington counts. (And she's probably older than 2 anyhow.) Regardless, the Nielsen data tells us nothing about teens. We don't know if young adults (20-24) are all of those numbers or not. If all 16% of those under 24 on Twitter were teens, teens would be WAY over-represented in proportion to their demographic size...

There's more, be sure to read it. File under lies, damned lies and statistics.

Teens Don't Tweet... Or Do They?

Marilyn sez, "Naples has developed an innovative ex-offender program that sends former convicts back out on the streets-- with maps and tourist brochures."

But what's most innovative is that they've also given 80 former convicts gigs offering tourists advice on staying safe in the city. The (mostly) men, clad in yellow vests, can now be found escorting tourists attempting to maneuver through dodgy neighborhoods, helping with heavy luggage, and offering suggestions to avoid becoming a target of a petty crime (you really shouldn't be wearing that flashy watch, now should you?). Their services are all free, and tipping is discouraged (let's not even talk about bribes).

Ex-Cons as Tour Guides? (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Tim sez, "I made these goggles for the dust in the desert at Burning Man. I am posting these images as instructions for those who might want to try making some of their own. Good goggles for the desert are hard to find and they are very expensive if you do. These are made from an old leather jacket, and from two pieces of tempered and UV resistant glass that I got from the halogen 'puck style' lights. I popped the glass out of the plastic ring. They also sell tinted circles that can be used for torch brazing which would be great. I wanted these for night also, so I'm leaving them clear. The whole process took about 3 hours. If you have any questions please email me. You can get the address from our website."

How to make Dust Goggles (Thanks, Tim!)

I think this particular angle has been played out with a few previous examples, but I did want to post one final example of how common it appears for newspapers to copy stories from blogs without giving any credit at all. If Ian Shapira was upset that Gawker "only" gave him three links, I wonder what he feels about a long list of newspapers taking a story from a blog and giving no credit at all (found via Mathew Ingram). The story involves the news that the military is banning the use of certain social networks -- a story researched and broken on a blog by Noah Shachtman, but in newspaper after newspaper after newspaper after newspaper, no such credit is given. As the original link above points out, this is part of an outdated view of "journalism":

This isn't the fault of any individual reporter. It's the fault of an outdated newspaper convention that equates proper referencing with an admission of professional failure. Before the internet, it was pretty easy to get away with slighting your colleagues. But now that everyone has GoogleNews at their fingertips, it looks like exactly what it is: churlish and archaic vanity. Everyone can see who got the story first. Not a single reader, I'll bet, will ever say, "Aha! Because Noah Shachtman got the story first, clearly Julian Barnes is an inferior reporter!"

I don't even think it's that big of a deal. But it's just how stories spread. No one "owns" the news. Giving credit where credit is due is a nice and neighborly (online) thing to do (which is why we always try to credit where we found a story or who alerted us to it), but in the grand scheme of things, it's pretty meaningless overall. It's pretty silly to suddenly be making a big deal of it -- and the only reason to do so appears to be some newspaper folks who can't figure out how to fix things, and instead are lashing out at anyone else who seems to be getting attention. First it was Craigslist. Then Google. Now blogs. But none of that actually solves the newspapers' problem of building business models for the twenty-first century.

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MAKE's photo editor, Sam Murphy, sent us a link to this 1930s Chevrolet educational video which describes how a differential gear works. Skip ahead to 1:50, if you don't want to see the rest of the video (which is highly entertaining throughout).

How Differential Gear works [Thanks, Sam!]

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Product Design students Andrew Duffy, Craig Tyler and Edward Harrison built this cordless drill powered table top rotational molding machine in order to learn more about the process.

To have an idea is one thing, to fully understand the process is paramount to good design.

The D.I.Y rotation moulding machine was built to replicate the industrial process to help further understand its possibilities. The machine was built at no cost from scrap materials and simply powered by a cordless drill. With the use of cold setting bio resins, Andrew and Craig are now able to create a fully sustainable range of hollow plastic products.

[via dezeen]

More about DIY: Rotational Molding

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johnjac points us to a nice little rant from John Graham-Comming about how Network Solutions has obfuscated the common (and easily understood) names of a bunch of its basic services. So, "Domains" has become "nsWebAddress," "web site" has become "nsSpace" and "SSL Certificates" becomes "nsProtect." Why? Well, the speculation in the comments is that this is all for trademarking purposes -- as each of those new terms is accompanied by the old (TM) mark. But, of course, it just makes things that much more confusing for users. Once again, this idea that "more patents/copyrights/trademarks must be a good thing" is put to the test...

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Ricoh has released a firmware update for its GR Digital II compact camera. Version 2.40 improves playback features and assigns more functions to the ADJ lever of of the camera. It also fixes minor issues related to orientation information.

Ricoh has released a firmware update for its GR Digital II compact camera. Version 2.40 improves playback features and assigns more functions to the ADJ lever of of the camera. It also fixes minor issues related to orientation information.

Death Metal writes with this excerpt from Computer Weekly, which casts some doubt on the security of the UK's proposed personal identification credential: "The prospective national ID card was broken and cloned in 12 minutes, the Daily Mail revealed this morning. The newspaper hired computer expert Adam Laurie to test the security that protects the information embedded in the chip on the card. Using a Nokia mobile phone and a laptop computer, Laurie was able to copy the data on a card that is being issued to foreign nationals in minutes."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

My parents recently joined Facebook (a few months after joining Twitter), and I actually thought that was pretty cool -- but I'm no longer at the age where everything my parents do embarrasses me. For kids who are at that point in their lives, having parents join Facebook is quite a conundrum. The latest study out of the UK is suggesting that, with parents suddenly joining Facebook en masse, it's becoming uncool for kids to be there. I have no idea how accurate the study is, but if it's true, it raises an interesting question: is there a way to avoid such an "uncoolness" factor as a site like Facebook expands? I would think that you'd need to build in certain features to separate out groups easily, so that you could quickly dunk parents into a certain bucket, and friends into a different one, to make sure that lives are "kept separate."

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Hugh Pickens writes "Historically, many scientists have regarded itching as just a less intense version of pain, though decades spent searching for itch-specific nerve cells have been unfruitful. Now, Nature reports that neuroscientist Zhou-Feng Chen and his colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri have found the first behavioral evidence that there are separate circuits of nerve cells to convey itchiness and pain, and their studies suggest that itch and pain signals are transmitted along different pathways in the spinal cord. 'Most people accept that there are specific, highly specialized neurons for sensations like taste,' says Chen. 'But for pain and itch this is much more controversial.'" (Continues below.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

This week's question comes from Kevin:

I heard that you can use an LED as a light sensor. How?

LEDs are diodes tuned specifically to emit light and packaged in translucent enclosures. A photodiode is essentially the same thing, but sensitive to a wider range of light wavelengths. From the very informative Wikipedia page on the subject:

For example, a green LED will be sensitive to blue light and to some green light, but not to yellow or red light. Additionally, the LED can be multiplexed in such a circuit, such that it can be used for both light emission and sensing at different times. In Dietz et al., a scheme for implementing this multiplexing is presented:

• A LED is connected to two bidirectional CMOS I/O pins on a microcontroller (or a microprocessor with an I/O bus).
• To emit light, both of the I/O pins are set to output mode, and the LED is driven with current in the forward direction, resulting in current through the LED and emission of light.
• To detect ambient light:
• • The I/O pins are set to output mode, and the diode is driven in the reverse-bias direction, such that the diode inhibits the current and the LED's inherent capacitor is charged.
  • The I/O pins are set to high-impedance CMOS input mode.
  • The diode leaks current at a rate proportional to the incident light, as incident photons cause electrons to leap across the band gap.
  • The time it takes for this leakage current to discharge the LED's inherent capacitor is measured and is inversely proportional to the incident light.

Don't be intimidated by the electronics terms above, it's actually pretty simple. Arduino has an example on their site showing a LED connected from one digital pin to another through a 100 ohm resistor. Part of the code tells the LED to light up, and part of it reverses the current and tells the former power pin to read the current leakage of the diode, which will change relative to the amount of ambient light in the room.

Here's a short video showing a grid of red LEDs being used also as photodiodes (also photo above). Provolot tried it out, too, with success (and source code). Forest M. Mims III uses this technique to sense specific wavelengths of light for sun research in Hawaii.

Have you worked with LEDs as photodiodes? Share your project, video, or tips with us in the comments!

This week's Ask MAKE has been sponsored by Jameco Electronics.

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Adam Thierer notes that Amherst NY has rejected an attempt by a Chuck-E-Cheese get a "game license," which makes him ask why anyone should need a special license to run a video arcade? He points out that this is basically a money grab by the town, which makes a lot of money off such licensing fees -- while also pointing out that if the city's concerns are legit (they claim worries about little kids playing violent video games) there are numerous ways to deal with that, from content rating systems to (gasp!) parental responsibility.

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The age of the citizen scientist continues to be interesting - as opposed to using your computer for a screensaver to help compute bits, you can use the best computer ever - your brain - to help classify galaxies - You can listen to a podcast at SciAm too...

Welcome to Galaxy Zoo, where you can help astronomers explore the Universe - The Galaxy Zoo files contain almost a quarter of a million galaxies which have been imaged with a camera attached to a robotic telescope the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, no less). In order to understand how these galaxies — and our own — formed, we need your help to classify them according to their shapes — a task at which your brain is better than even the fastest computer. More than 150,000 people have taken part in Galaxy Zoo so far, producing a wealth of valuable data and sending telescopes on Earth and in space chasing after their discoveries. Zoo 2 focuses on the nearest, brightest and most beautiful galaxies...

...Over the past year, volunteers from the original Galaxy Zoo project — people like you — created the world's largest database of galaxy shapes. This database is already showing us surprising things about the nature of galaxies. For example, astronomers used to assume that if a galaxy appears red in colour, it is also probably an elliptical galaxy. But with your help, Galaxy Zoo has shown that up to a third of red galaxies are actually spirals. Similarly, there is a much larger number of blue ellipticals than previously thought, including a small but significant fraction of blue ellipticals that are in the process of forming considerable numbers of new stars — sometimes up to 50 times as many new stars as our galaxy.

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Hi everyone! It's me, your friendly MAKEcation camp counselor Matt. Have you started your cooler hacking project yet? If not, here are some ideas to help get you started. Be sure to post your own ideas in the comments. We'll be giving away a Maker's Notebook and The Best of MAKE or Best of Instructables to the one we think is the most interesting. If you have any questions about the challenge, don't hesitate to send them to me at: campcounselor@makezine.com.

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Temperature Monitor: Add a temperature display to keep you informed about how cool your refreshments are. If you plan to store perishable foods inside, how about an alarm to alert you before they spoil?

Increased Efficiency: Or, avoid the whole problem of heating all together by making your cooler more efficient. Going somewhere without shade? Try building in an umbrella holder, to keep those hot sun rays away from your vittles.

Solar Cooling: Instead of diverting the sun's rays, why not catch them with a solar panel and then use the energy to drive a thermoelectric cooling unit?

Mobility: Having trouble getting your cooler to your picnic location? Adding a motor so that you can drive it might be a bit extreme, but a simple set of wheels and a hitch would allow you to tow your cooler behind a bike. Don't feel like getting up to fetch your next drink? Cannibalize a toy car and finally build that remote controlled cooler.

Ok, now I want to go camping so I have an excuse to try all these things out!

Here are some other possibilities:

• Build a robotic cooler that comes when you command it
• Add racing stripes for extra speed!
• Built-in electronic drum kit for performing around the campfire
• Add a secret compartment to hide your keys
• Dry compartment for storing cake
• Fingerprint reader lock to protect your juice boxes
• Built-in floats to take it rafting
• Dalek/remote control cooler mashup?
• Build in a propane cooler
• GPS logger to record your favorite hang-out places

And here are some previous hacks for inspiration:

Youth Family Films share their Cooler Kart

David Calkins explains how to make an RFID-protected beer fridge

Simon Jansen shares his jet powered beer cooler

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celticryan writes "NASA's new telescope has made a promising discovery. 'As NASA's first exoplanets mission, Kepler has made a dramatic entrance on the planet-hunting scene,' said Jon Morse, director of the Science Mission Directorate's Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. 'Detecting this planet's atmosphere in just the first 10 days of data is only a taste of things to come. The planet hunt is on!'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While plenty of people are familiar with the fact that NTP got $612.5 million from RIM in a patent dispute a few years back (which drew tremendous scrutiny into the realm of patents), one of the most interesting details that many people didn't follow was that at the same time as the lawsuit was going on, the US Patent Office was re-examining those same patents, and issuing rejections of the very same patents. Despite the USPTO even rushing to announce its problems with the patents way ahead of schedule, the judge chose not to wait for the final rejections and pressured RIM into paying up.

This sort of thing happens all the time.

For example, just weeks after TiVo was practically dancing in the streets over its latest wins over EchoStar in a patent dispute over basic DVR functionality, the USPTO has given an initial rejection on some of the claims at issue in the case. While TiVo is quick to downplay this as just the first step in a long process (which it gets to respond to), it's being a bit misleading in suggesting that this sort of thing happens all the time. Sure -- it happens a lot, but to questionable patents. It seems that, if the USPTO has agreed to review a patent and clearly the examiners have serous questions about the patentability of certain claims, shouldn't any lawsuits that hinge on those patents be put on hold?

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When I visited the 3000-year-old city of Yazd, Iran, the old school technology I was most fascinated by is the windcatcher. Seen atop many a building in this arid city with an annual rainfall of 2.4 inches and summer temps frequently pushing 104°F, these towers are the predecessors to the swamp cooler. Basically, the wind shafts on the rooftops have directional ports, and only the one facing away from the incoming wind is left open. The wind gets sucked in and pushed down over water below, and the cooled air is circulated through the house. In the ancient homes I saw, the room at the bottom of the wind shaft had a little pool of water and the sides of the room were often built-in brick benches covered with carpet, where the dwellers would spend the hottest part of the day.

The city of Yazd has an underground water management system called the qanat that taps into subterranean water. This illustration from Wikipedia's windcatcher page demonstrates how the windcatcher tech utilizes the qanat system to cool the air:

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If I were a marketing consultant, I would call this Detroit masterpiece "Homebrew aftermarket transformative rebranding." BB mod Antinous quips, "I'm holding out for the Dolce & Gabbana Pacer."

1986 custom cutlass supreme!! - $4500 (detroit.craigslist.org via The Frisky, thanks Susannah Breslin)

The Associated Press' attempt to DRM the news is a bad idea for a variety of reasons, but its claims for the news registry's capabilities seem pretty misguided, once you examine the technology behind it (the "magic DRM beans"). Ed Felten dug into the details of the registry's microformat, hNews, which the AP announced a few weeks earlier, and here's where it gets really interesting: the hNews rights field is based on the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language (ccREL).

If the AP thinks it'll be able to build its "digital permissions framework" with Creative Commons technology, it's in for a letdown.

I'm not sure if I'm "allowed" to quote the press release, but this is how it describes the news registry:

[It] will tag and track all AP content online to assure compliance with terms of use. The system will register key identifying information about each piece of content that AP distributes as well as the terms of use of that content, and employ a built-in beacon to notify AP about how the content is used[...]

The registry will employ a microformat... [that] will essentially encapsulate AP and member content in an informational "wrapper" that includes a digital permissions framework that lets publishers specify how their content is to be used online and which also supplies the critical information needed to track and monitor its usage.

The registry also will enable content owners and publishers to more effectively manage and control digital use of their content, by providing detailed metrics on content consumption, payment services and enforcement support. It will support a variety of payment models, including pay walls.

Microformats provide a syntax for expressing machine-readable licensing metadata in the HTML of a web page. ccREL was intentionally developed so that others could innovate freely on top of it, but the AP is trying to use it for something it's simply not designed to do -- "protect" and control. The Creative Commons has responded, explaining that ccREL is a tool for rights expression, not rights enforcement. (That doesn't mean the AP isn't allowed to try this, but it's not going to work very well... it's like trying to lock a door with posters.) Felten described the AP's claims for the microformat as much ado about nothing, saying "the hNews spec bears little resemblance to AP's claims about it," and the Creative Commons clarification echoed the point:

Microformats and other web-based structured data, including ccREL, cannot track, monitor, or generally enforce anything. They're labels, i.e. Post-It notes attached to a document, not locked boxes blocking access to the content.

There's no "encapsulating" or "wrappers" -- it's just annotation.

This ecosystem of technology is about rights expression, not enforcement, and it's more about telling people what you can do than what you can't. There are tools built on top of Creative Commons technology, like FairShare, that "track and monitor" usage of content across the web, but these are search engine tools (similar to Google Alerts) rather than any sort of "built-in beacon." Other tools, like Tynt's Tracer (which Creative Commons blog uses), use javascript to append attribution and licensing information when you copy/paste, but that's hardly a "wrapper." These tools are based on the idea of granting permission, not requesting it. Participation is not enforced; anyone can remove or adjust metadata before reposting HTML, Tracer's attribution is just plain text that can be changed (as I did when quoting the blog here), and FairShare can't actually stop anyone from posting your content. These tools are based on a decentralized, permissive view of the web; they aren't designed to create centralized registries and exert control.

If you re-read the AP's description of the technology, it sounds a lot less scary, but a lot more hopeless. The tools are designed to convey further rights to users beyond what copyright allows, not further restrictions that limit user rights already granted by copyright law (e.g. fair use). This is a great way of tagging news articles, but it's next to useless as a digital lock. They would be smart to employ this technology to make their content more usable and more valuable, but hoping it's going to help them lock it down will only lead to disappointment.

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

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