Karen Hertzberg writes "With video gaming — specifically the massively multiplayer online titles — quickly surpassing Hollywood's cash flow, it seems logical that the silver suits at Tinsel Town would begin paying attention to their digital brethren. On the same line of thought, Hollywood provides the MMO industry with a history in the entertainment medium that we simply don't have. Ten Ton Hammer's Cody Bye sat down with four industry experts to draw together some similarities between MMOs and films, and he attempted to use those points to draw out some predictions for the future of the MMO gaming industry."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Based in Vienna, Virginia, Kidtropolis designs and builds out amazing fantasy children's rooms. Seen above, the Magic Tree House and Carousel Room. If Richie Rich were real, I bet he'd be a client!
Kidtropolis (Thanks, Bloggy!)

We love it when our family members get involved with MAKE and send us suggestions for websites, tools, magazines, etc. Brain F Murphy, our photo editor Sam Murphy's dad, sends her cool hobby and tech links he comes across. Here's a video he sent of the Miniatur Wunderland, in Hamburg, Germany, the world's largest model railroad.

Miniatur Wunderland

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Last week, I wrote a post about the idea for something called Project EquilibRIAA. The idea was to reach out to the various musicians whose music was used in the trial against Joel Tenenbaum and here what they felt about it. Obviously, this had no legal basis, but was interesting from a cultural perspective, especially considering that just a day earlier the RIAA had declared that the trial wasn't about the RIAA but about how "Joel Tenenbaum and his egregious illegal behavior which robs artists and music creators of the right to be paid for their work." So, according to the RIAA, it's about the artists and their music, and I thought (as did the original poster of the suggestion) that it would be interesting -- no matter what they said -- to hear what musicians thought about the whole trial. No one suggested that it would have any bearing on the outcome. We just thought it would be a good experiment.

But what amazed me was the vitriol in the comments from the standard (small) group of RIAA supporters concerning this idea, and their absolutely dripping contempt for the actual musicians. Some samplings:

Comment #2: "It is entirely irrelevant, as the artists have signed away many of their rights (including those things that Joel was sued under). It would sort of like putting a dairy farmer in touch with a kid who stole milk posters at school. The relationship isn't relevant.

Comment #11: "I suspect you will get "wanna be cool party line" stuff, as each artist will dump a little crap on the RIAA, and then quietly cash the checks they keep getting."

Comment #12: "The artists don't have any rights. I don't care what the former owners of my car think about whether I've been maintaining it well or not and I don't care what the creator of a song who assigned the rights to someone else is now having cold feet about taking money from a record company. Bought, paid for, gone."

Comment #17: "What the Artists think doesn't mean crap. They all signed the distribution rights over to the record labels, and they are the ones that were wronged. I could care less if the artist stood on stage and told everyone to download their music, if they signed the distribution rights away, they are equally guilty of copyright infringement by telling people to download the music too."

This fascinates me. Statements like "it is entirely irrelevant" and "the artists don't have any rights" pretty much makes the point right there, doesn't it? These are the same people (yes, with the same IP addresses) who yell and scream about how what we discuss around here is insulting to artists and an effort to take away their "right to get paid." If this is all about respecting artists and helping them get fairly compensated, why are they so damn afraid of actually letting them speak? And why do they treat them with such contempt?

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musefrog writes "The BBC is reporting that the UK's Royal Opera House is to stage an opera created through social networking site Twitter. 'Members of the public have been invited to submit their "tweets" online — messages of up to 140 characters — which will form the new libretto.The first scene of the as-yet-untitled work has already been completed and features a man who has been kidnapped by a group of birds. Excerpts will be performed at the Royal Opera House in September.' I'm personally looking forward to lots of idiotic net memes and inane emo ramblings being trilled out by aging sopranos."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The folks at Fuji are trying to spread the word about their new EnviroMAX batteries. They gave MAKE and CRAFT some bundles to give out to our readers. We're giving away bundles of assorted batteries, sizes AAA to D, to two randomly-chosen Make: Online readers in the next 24 hours! Just leave us a comment below and be sure to include your email address in the form field (which won't be published).

You can comment about whatever you wish, but maybe you can tell us if you still use disposable batteries -- how and why -- or if you use all rechargeables. All eligible comments will be closed on Tuesday, August 11th at 11am PDT. Good luck!

Here's more about the Fuji EnviroMAX batteries:

The materials that make up a Fuji EnviroMAX battery are derived from the basic elements of the Earth. There is nothing inside a Fuji EnviroMAX battery that will harm the environment if it is disposed of through normal waste systems. A few reasons why are that Fuji EnviroMAX batteries contain no harmful mercury, cadmium - nor are they packaged with dangerous (and non-recyclable) PVC plastic. Instead, Fuji EnviroMAX batteries are made in some of the world's most eco-respectful battery plants, operating under some of the most strict standards of environmental responsibility. In fact, most of all resources used in the Fuji EnviroMAX manufacturing process are reused and recycled! What's more, Fuji EnviroMAX batteries are labeled and packaged with recycled paper and P.E.T. plastic. The result is batteries that meet a world standard for environmental responsibility and recyclable materials. And no other batteries are so respectful of our environment as Fuji EnviroMAX.

Fuji Battery

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A new company, True#, is seeking to bring extensive semantic context to numbers to give them obvious meanings just as certain words have obvious meanings to most readers. "Most of us can probably recognize 3.14159 and the conceptual baggage it carries, but how many of us would recognize 58.44? (That's a mole of sodium chloride, in grams, for the curious.) And the response that would work for words--look it up--doesn't work so conveniently for numbers. Only one of the top-10 hits in Google refers to salt, and Bing fails entirely (though it does offer "Women's Sexy Mini Skirts by VENUS"). Clearly, we haven't figured out how to make the Web work for numbers in the same way it does for words."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new company, True#, is seeking to bring extensive semantic context to numbers to give them obvious meanings just as certain words have obvious meanings to most readers. "Most of us can probably recognize 3.14159 and the conceptual baggage it carries, but how many of us would recognize 58.44? (That's a mole of sodium chloride, in grams, for the curious.) And the response that would work for words--look it up--doesn't work so conveniently for numbers. Only one of the top-10 hits in Google refers to salt, and Bing fails entirely (though it does offer "Women's Sexy Mini Skirts by VENUS"). Clearly, we haven't figured out how to make the Web work for numbers in the same way it does for words."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Patently-O has the somewhat horrifying story of the USPTO cashing the maintenance check for a patent holder, but then letting the patent expire because the check was $10 short. The guy apparently owed $1,040, but sent a check that was only $1,030 (and he used the wrong form and sent it to the wrong dept., but...) and the USPTO still cashed it, but declared the patent abandoned for not having paid the full maintenance fee. The guy only discovered this a few years later when he called the USPTO to get ready to send in his next maintenance check. Anyway, the article notes that CAFC smacked down the USPTO for this practice.

You can read all the gory details at the link above, but what struck me about this was two things. First, the guy paid the $1,030 to maintain this patent (and it doesn't appear he did much with the patent during that time) and then was ready to dump another chunk of change into maintaining it, but when he found out that the USPTO (yes, arbitrarily and somewhat dickishly) had declared the patent abandoned, suddenly said that it should be reinstated because he was:

"not an attorney but a pauper disabled living on a fixed income (SSI) who cannot pay $200 to petition your office."

This is the real shame here. This myth that all you need is a patent to be a success leads a pauper living on social security to spend thousands of dollars on a patent, which the USPTO gladly soaks up. What a scam. The US government is taking in folks like this guy, convincing him that all he needs to live out his dreams is to get a patent, knowing quite well that a patent by itself is pretty meaningless.

But the guy believes in the dream, as seen from the fact that he sued the USPTO for $1 billion, claiming that was the value of his patent "in the U.S. and world market." So here we have a guy, who is living off of a tiny Social Security check, throwing away thousands of dollars on a patent that he's not doing anything with, believing that it's somehow worth $1 billion. Doesn't that seem highly problematic to people?

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I've seen plenty of hacks based on the iconic Etch A Sketch, however this one may take the cake. Andrew Sliwinski has added a third wheel (and a bunch of electronics) to the traditional toy design, allowing users to make drawings in three dimensions! An Anaglyphic display is used to present the image. A remake of this would be a fun way to really get started with Arduino + Processing!

[via Gizmodo]

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Strange Maps has this lovely antique map of London circa 1675, created by an adventurous man named John Ogilby:

The life of John Ogilby (1600-1676) can be qualified without exaggeration as rather eventful. He freed his father from debtors' prison by buying a winning lottery ticket, founded a dance school in London and later Dublin's Theatre Royal, got shipwrecked on his return from Ireland, produced a very successful English verse transaltion of Virgil, lost all his property in the Great Fire of London (1666), and towards the end of his life managed to produce the Britannia Atlas (1675), considered to be the first road atlas of Britain.

The atlas, which housed a series of road maps like this one used for traveling through the UK way back when, is apparently also responsible for setting the 1,760-yards-to-a-mile standard. A web site dedicated to Priddy's Hard, an area in Hampshire, England, has this and other old school maps worth checking out if you're a closet road geek like me.

Scroll Britannia: the UK's First Road Map via Strange Maps

The Register is reporting that a New York woman has become the first person to have their pacemaker wirelessly connected to the internet for full-time monitoring. "The device contains a radio transmitter which connects to receiving equipment in New Yorker Carol Kasyjanski's home, using a very low-power signal around 400MHz, to report on the condition of her heart. Any problems are instantly reported to the doctor, and regular checkups can be done by remotely interrogating the home home-based equipment - the pacemaker itself doesn't have an IP address, fun as that would be."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

In the dream life of 18th and 19th Europe, Italy and the Gothic were conjoined twins.

The first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764)---a spookhouse ride whose oubliettes, subterranean passageways, and doors that slam shut by themselves still stock the Gothic prop room---is set in Italy. In fact, the first edition purported to be a translation of a 16th-century manuscript by an Italian cleric named "Onuphrio Muralto," rediscovered in the library of "an ancient Catholic family in the north of England." Ann Radcliffe's hugely influential Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), which provided seed DNA for all Gothic romances to come, takes place partly in Italy, in a gloomy medieval pile in the Apennines where Our Heroine is menaced by the sinister Count Montoni. (Radcliffe had used Italy as a backdrop before, in A Sicilian Romance (1790), and would again, in The Italian (1796), where a diabolical monk named Schedoni puts a twisted face on the terrors of the Inquisition.) To Northern Europeans, especially the English, Italy reeked of cultural atavism---the inbred depravity of a decaying aristocracy and the perversions of Papism (paganism in a reversed collar, as far as protestants were concerned).

It's as if the sheer antiquity of the place---all those Roman ruins, haunted by the godless shades of all those parricidal, pedophilic Caesars Gibbon described in such scandalous detail in the Decline and Fall (1776-1788)---deformed the Italian psyche, warping it under the accumulated weight of a thousand years of perversion and profanation, scheming and throat-slitting.

To the Enlightenment mind, Ancient Rome was undeniably the embodiment of classical virtues in philosophy and culture. But the brilliance of Seneca, Cicero, Horace, and Virgil had to be weighed against the horrors of Nero, Domitian, and Caligula. True, the Apollonian perfection of a Roman column was an inspiring sight, even in ruins. But it was also a melancholy reminder that even Rome, the sunburst of Western civilization, had succumbed to an epic fail. By the Middle Ages, the Eternal City had decayed into a necropolis of 10,000, abandoned by the popes. By day, the Forum was a pasture for grazing cows; after dark, wolves hunted the streets of the Vatican.

The Grand Tour of the continent impressed these lessons on England's upper class. Intended to certify the scions of the powerful as worldly wise and culturally literate, worthy of their perch high up the social pyramid, the Grand Tour was by 1700 "part of an English gentleman's preparation for life," as Richard Davenport-Hines notes in Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil, and Ruin. Italy, more than any other country, was seen as indispensable in sanding the rough edges off entitled party animals, turning them into well-rounded gentlemen. (The term "Grand Tour" was first used in Richard Lassels's Voyage of Italy (1670).) The more studious Grand Tourists studied Italian and acquired a fashionable taste for Italian art and architecture: Charles Talbot, Duke of Shrewsbury, remodeled his Oxfordshire home on the Villa Borghese in Rome.

But English Italophilia was darkened by the shadow of the gothic. "The broken magnificence which was to become integral to the gothic imagination fascinated the English in Italy," writes Davenport-Hines. "The morbidness in their approach was exemplified by two young gentlemen...whose grand tour in 1707 took them to Rome, where they were 'assiduous...in visiting...the remains of the superb Monuments of the Grandeur and of the Magnificence of the Ancient Romans.' The Catacombs held a horrible fascination for the English brothers, [which] 'is not very surprising for young Men who had heard it said that a Company of four German Gentlemen were lost there for some time, previously, with their Guide, [and] would not have appeared again, had it not been that Trumpeters and Drummers were led there several times to see if the sound of these instruments of war would enable them to find the right way again...' Dark and gloomy caves, subterranean labyrinths, the despair of incarceration---all these are staples of the gothic imagination."

If classical Rome's reason and rectitude made it a beacon for the Enlightenment, the eeriness of Italy's decrepit castles, the blasphemy of its Popish heresies and macabre relics and incorruptible saints, and the Medici murders and pagan depravities buried in its cultural basement proved useful to 19th century Romantics. Brandishing the Gothic like an upside-down crucifix against neoclassicism, the Romantics championed imagination over reason, excess over economy, a morbid obsession with the past over a utopian faith in progress.

The momentous discovery, in the late 14th century, of mysterious grotte, or underground chambers, in Rome's Aventine hillside had exhumed the Gothic's close cousin, the Grotesque. The caverns turned out to be Nero's Playboy Mansion, a party villa called the Domus Aurea ("Golden House") whose droll mosaics and frescoes captivated Renaissance artists: writhing vines; chimerical beings, gene-spliced from humans and animals; surreal landscapes. Inspired by these grotteschi, as the decorative elements in Nero's "grottos" were called, Renaissance artists such as Raphael borrowed the creative license of the pre-Christian Romans---"the capricious and bizarre designs of pagan painters who were given freedom to invent whatever they pleased" (Frances Barasch)---and decorated their friezes with wriggling tendrils and fantastic humanimals. In time, the style became known as grottesco, or Grotesque.

The Grotesque rejoices in excess, exhibiting a horror vacui reminiscent of the obsessive figuration of schizophrenic art. It delights in the subversion of the social and even the natural order, symbolized by misbegotten creatures whose bodies hybridized man and beast. In its playful perversities, it hints, with an absurdist wit its close kin the Gothic lacks, at unsettling truths behind the world we think we know. (The Grotesque is what the Gothic looks like after augmentation humor-plasty. Poe's Tell-Tale Heart and Fall of the House of Usher are Gothic; his Cask of Amontillado and Hop-Frog are Grotesque. Nick Cave? Gothic. The Tiger Lillies? Grotesque. Frank Miller? Gothic. Basil Wolverton? Grotesque. Stephen King's It? Gothic. Shakes the Clown? Grotesque.) The Gothic is here to tell us that the past is never really dead and buried, that it may rise again from its shallow grave in the cultural unconscious---or the individual psyche, for that matter. In that sense, the Gothic is reactionary---crypto-conservative, almost. The Grotesque, by contrast, is deeply subversive---carnivalesque, in the Bakhtinian sense. It mocks our insistence on lives that have purpose and a cosmos that makes sense, knocking received truths and established hierarchies ass over teakettle.



Think of these things as you make your way through the crypt of the Capuchin monks in Rome. From 1631 until 1870, the monks buried their dead here---some four thousand of them, reportedly. The musty, mineral smell of the hard-packed dirt floor mingles with the sweaty tang of your fellow Grand Tourists pressing close, their body heat turning the cramped corridor muggy. The corridor gives on six roped-off antechambers, or chapels. First up: the Crypt of the Resurrection, informs my helpful guidebook, Rinaldo Cordovani's Capuchin Cemetery (purchased in the Crypt's giftshop, naturally; we live in an age when even dust-mossed ossuaries have giftshops. I looked for the Capuchin Mummy Bendable Action Figure®, but was disappointed. With luck, some intrepid young monk with a knack for branding and marketing will read this post and take my hint...) Skulls and bones form an arch over a painting---Lazarus raised from the dead, fittingly. On the ceiling, skulls and what look like femurs, arranged in geometric shapes, simulate the effect of a coffered vault. Others explode in starburst patterns or tinkertoy themselves into trellises. Flanking the painting are two niches formed by arches of stacked skulls and leg- and thigh-bones; a skeleton, with just enough parchment skin still clingwrapping its skull to pass as a mummy, reposes in each, wearing the characteristic brown habit of the order. (Hence the term cappuccino.) In the second room, what might be scapulae and vertebrae describe crazy arcs across the ceiling; skeletons in habits, their empty-eyed skulls peering lugubriously out of the shadows of their cowls, stand propped against a wall of neatly stacked skulls. The third room, the Crypt of Skulls, features scapulae cascading down one wall, overlapping like scales on a suit of armor. In the fourth, the Crypt of the Pelvises, scapulae, pelvises, and assorted small bones form mescaline mandalas, turning the ceiling into a macabre kaleidoscope of fleurs-de-lis and rosettes (the central rosette being "formed by seven shoulder blades with appendages made of vertebrae, in a frame of sacral bones, vertebrae, and foot bones," notes my guidebook, in its anatomically exhausting way). The sixth and last chapel, the Crypt of the Three Skeletons, stars the skeletons of three children. (The guidebook strikes a philosophical note: "Death has no favorite age.") One, the skeleton of a Barberini princess, holds a scythe and the scales of judgment, a minikin Grim Reaper.

The Marquis de Sade came here, appropriately enough, in 1775; in his Viaggio in Italia, he describes "well-preserved" skeletons "in varying attitudes, some reclining, others in the act of preaching, others at prayer," all clad in the Capuchin habit, some still wearing their beards. "Never have I seen anything so impressive," the Divine Marquis enthuses, advising the Grand Tourist who wants to experience the crypt's jolt at full voltage to visit in the suitably sepulchral gloom of the evening, rather than during the day, when the sunlight "abates the horror." In The Marble Faun, Hawthorne thrilled with horror at the ossified monks:

The arrangement of the unearthed skeletons is what makes the special interest of the cemetery. [...] There is no possibility of describing how ugly and grotesque is the effect, combined with a certain artistic merit, nor how much perverted ingenuity has been shown in this queer way... In the side walls of the vaults are niches where skeleton monks sit or stand, clad in the brown habits that they wore in life... Their skulls (some quite bare, and others still covered with yellow skin, and hair that has known the earth-damps) look out from beneath their hoods, grinning hideously repulsive. One reverend father has his mouth wide open, as if he had died in the midst of a howl of terror and remorse, which perhaps is even now screeching through eternity.

By the last chamber, the brain is reeling. The claustrophobic confines of the crypt, the dizzy geometry of the anatomical arrangements, a Baroque delirium of rosettes and florettes and eight-pointed stars, all made of bones, bones, bones: it begins to feel like a bad-acid flashback, brought to you by Pol Pot. And then you come to appreciate the Spirograph rhythms of it all, the---gothic? grotesque?---aesthetic of the repeating visual melodies of capitals and crosses and cornices outlined in bones, and you remember something Francis Bacon said---"There is no excellent Beauty, that hath not some Strangeness in the Proportion"---and it makes a certain mad sense, after all.

Cimitero Monumentale dei Padri Cappucchini, Chiesa Immacolata Concezione ("Santa Maria della Concezione"), at the intersection of via Veneto 27 and via Cappuccini. Open Friday-Wednesday, 9-noon and 3-6 P.M. Tel. 06-4871185. Metro: Barberini. Admission: voluntary donation. Note: The crypt is hallowed ground; appropriate attire required. Women in short shorts or plunging décolletage will be turned away. Church website

Images: Cemetery of the Capuchins, Rome, Italy. Postcard. Reproduced under Fair Use clause of copyright law.

On Dinosaurs and Robots we like to feature side-by-side photos of familiar products and signs that have changed over time (usually for the worse, sadly). The Holiday Inn sign is the latest in our "Then and Now" series, spotted by Kevin Kidney.

Then and Now

I recently listened to an interview with a famed old school reggae musician, who's been in the business for 42 years. The interviewer asked him what kind of music he liked to listen to himself, and the guy said: "All kinds." He explained, by saying that any serious musician should listen to as much music as possible, just to learn from it and build your own skills. So even if he doesn't play country music or symphonies, he tries to listen to them just to gain a better appreciation of them so that he can take some of that and bring it back to his own music. This is a key point in the creative process, which is often missed by those who insist that musical creation is some sort of individual effort that doesn't involve outside influence.

It's also a point highlighted by musician David Hahn, writing a response to a mother concerned about her son file sharing. She sent in a note to The Working Musician, a blog by and for working musicians, saying that her son file shares, and she wants him to stop, saying that he would feel differently if it was his music being shared. Hahn replies, however, by telling her that he feels exactly the opposite: and that her son should download as much music as possible (found via EFF):

My perspective on file-sharing is probably different that you would expect. I think that your son should download every track he can find. I mean it. Download every song out there and sift through them one by one. And not just the genres he likes -- but everything -- Creole bandeon playing, French rap, hymns, metal, classical, South African jazz, samba -- whatever he can find.... If you're son is really going to be a musician -- I mean make a real, professional try at it -- he's going to need to know every one of those genres.

He goes on to give a number of other reasons to support this position, and it makes for quite a read. Obviously, plenty of musicians disagree with this, and we're not posting this to suggest it's a representative view of musicians. But it's yet another well-argued explanation for why locking up music isn't necessarily in musicians' best interests, despite what some might tell you.

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Disclaimer: We at the MAKE blog do not advocate the construction or operation of chariots with giant whirling blades to chop people into bits, even if they are very rude. Nor, in general, do we like to celebrate the creation of unstoppable killing machines. Or even stoppable ones, for that matter. But we're prepared to make broad, sweeping exceptions for Da Vinci, because, well, you know--prototype of the Renaissance Man and all that.

Having thus absolved myself, I present this fascinating collection of war machines designed by Leonardo himself.

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Trunk Records has reissued Tubby Hayes's Voodoo Session, an ultra-rare soundtrack tune from a 1965 horror film that looks fantastic: Dr. Terror's House of Horrors. The 7" vinyl, limited to 666 copies ('natch), features the film's "voodoo jazz" number, performed by Tubby Hayes on tenor sax and flute, Sheake Keane on trumpet, Jimmy Deuchar on mellophonium (!), and other Brit jazz greats. Check out the jam at 6:54 in the video above. (Any similarities to authentic Vodoun is, er, likely coincidental.) The "Clean Living in Difficult Circumstances" has more on the recording:

The plot of the film involves five men on a train carriage having their tarot cards read by Peter Cushing, who reveals the horrible destiny of each of them. One of the stories that is revealed through the cards features Roy Castle (of later Record Breakers fame) in his first starring role as jazz musician Biff Bailey, who encounters a Voodoo ceremony whilst touring the West Indies.

Loving the Voodoo sounds, he makes the mistake of copying down the music of the Voodoo Lwa Dambala and doing his own Brit jazz arrangement of the spirit rhythms at a club in London. Occult peril quickly ensues as a result of having stolen the music of Dambala.

Tubby Hayes' Voodoo Sessions

kaychoro writes to mention that at least one privately held bank is planning on removing a little bit more legwork for the consumer by allowing the electronic submission of paper checks via a new iPhone app. The app would allow users to take a picture of the front and back of the check and submit that to the depository. "Customers will not have to mail the check to the bank later; the deposit will be handled entirely electronically, and the bank suggests voiding the check and filing or discarding it. But to reduce the potential for fraud, only customers who are eligible for credit and have some type of insurance through USAA will be permitted to use the deposit feature. Mr. Peacock said that about 60 percent of the bank's customers qualify."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(NYC marijuana law chart from NORML)

An article in Cannabis News by Harry G. Levine, a professor of sociology at Queens College, City University of New York, explains why New York City is the "marijuana arrest capital of the world." The law states that possessing a small amount of pot results in $100 civil citation for the first offense. Yet 40,300 people were arrested and jailed in NYC last year for possessing small amounts of pot. How so? By trickery on the part of the NYPD. Police officers convince people to pull their stash out of their pocket, promising to go easy on them if they do, then bust them on charges of having marijuana "open to public view," which means they can be handcuffed, fingerprinted, and jailed on a misdemeanor charge. (As you might expect, racial profiling figures heavily into the arrests.)

The Epidemic of Pot Arrests in New York City (Via The Agitator)

Slashdot Regular Bennett Haselton writes "Websense, a U.S.-based Internet censoring software maker, claims not to sell to foreign governments that are censoring Internet access for all of their citizens. But the OpenNet Initiative reports that national ISPs in Yemen have been using Websense to filter Internet access for at least the past four years. Will Websense revoke their license? And what would happen then?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's an interesting article about a very clever gizmo by two scientists at Denmark's Risø National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy. It's being hyped as a totally original invention, but the idea is so conceptually simple that I have a hard time believing it's entirely new under the sun. Still, though--very cool.

So, quick science review: If you take a magnetic material and heat it up, eventually it stops being magnetic. The temperature at which this happens is called the "Curie temperature" (named for Monsieur, rather than Madame, Curie). The process is completely reversible: Cool the stuff down again, and its magnetism returns. And it turns out, with modern manufacturing, a very wide range of Curie temperatures is possible depending on the specific materials involved.

What Danish scientists Christian Bahl and Dan Eriksen have done is exploit the Curie effect to create a simple, heat-switching mechanical valve: At low temperatures, a magnetic attraction keeps the spring-loaded flapper in one position, but at temperatures above the Curie point, the magnetic attraction is annulled and the spring drives the flapper into the other position. Like other devices commonly called "magnetic valves," the Bahl-Erikson valve has the advantage that it can be operated without introducing any holes into the valve case, which is handy if you're working with nasty or delicate materials. Unlike other magnetic valves, however, it does not require any kind of external power to operate, and hence is more reliable as a failsafe.

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Dealing with gang activity is certainly a priority in areas beset by gang violence, but does that mean we throw out certain First Amendment rights? Last year, Florida passed a new anti-gang law that banned using electronic communications "for the purpose of benefiting, promoting, or furthering the interests of a criminal gang" and that included "advertis[ing] his or her presence in the community" via an online image or video. Apparently, authorities in Florida have now arrested 15 people under this law based on their MySpace profiles, including one 14-year-old who "posted pictures of himself dressed in gang colors and displaying gang hand signals." For this, all of those arrested now face up to 5 years in prison. Some are already protesting the constitutionality of this law. It certainly seems like a limit on free expression.

Even recognizing the problems with gang violence, it seems a bit extreme to arrest people and threaten them with jailtime just for posting such photos on their profiles. Why not use that information to track and monitor certain gang members to try to stop actual illegal gang activity? Here are kids advertising to anyone (including the police) that they're in a gang, which should make it easier for the police to follow them and use that info to deal with real gang activity.

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Recently on Offworld, American Elf artist James Kochalka dropped in to let us preview Robot Shark, one of the songs off his latest album Digital Elf, created entirely with Nanoloop on his Game Boy Advance, and we discovered that Jason Rohrer, creator of reigning memento mori art-game-champ Passage, was creating a two player DS strategy game based on the illicit blood diamond trade in Angola (!). We also watched Love Sport, a set of fantastically expressive pixel animations from Studio AKA's Grant Orchard, and heard Austin Wintory's soundtrack for thatgamecompany's PS3 art-game flOw being played live by LA's Golden State Pops Orchestra, and (literally) looked inside Sony's upcoming augmented reality virtual EyePet. Finally, we saw why 2D still matters in 2009 with the jaw-dropping visuals in XNA game Dust, and found infinitely adorable crocheted Marios, a re-imagined 80s arcade pinup, and, best of all, back-alley knock-off Pokemon.

For 80 years, Charles Atlas Ltd. has been helping young men like the fellow above not get pushed around on the beach. But who was Charles Atlas anyway? The man has been dead since 1972 but his business selling a physical fitness program thrives over a nail parlor in Harrington Park, New Jersey. This month's Smithsoanian magazine has a deep profile of Atlas who spent his life trying to "Make you a new man!" From Smithsonian:

Born in Acri, a tiny town in southern Italy, he arrived with his parents at Ellis Island in 1903 at age 10. His name was Angelo Siciliano, and he spoke not a word of English.

He didn't look like much, either. Skinny and slope-shouldered, feeble and often ill, he was picked on by bullies in the Brooklyn neighborhood where his family had settled, and his own uncle beat him for getting into fights. He found little refuge at Coney Island Beach, where a hunky lifeguard kicked sand in his face and a girlfriend sighed when the 97-pound Atlas swore revenge.

On a visit to the Brooklyn Museum, he saw statuary depicting Hercules, Apollo and Zeus. That, and Coney Island's side­show, got him thinking. Body­building was then a fringe pursuit, its practitioners consigned to the freak tents beside the fat lady and the sword swallower. Alone at the top was Eugen Sandow, a Prussian strongman discovered by showman Florenz Ziegfeld. Sandow toured vaude­ville theaters, lifting ponies and popping chains with his chest. Atlas pasted a photo of Sandow on his dresser mirror and, hoping to transform his own body, spent months sweating away at home with a series of makeshift weights, ropes and elastic grips. The results were disappointing, but on a visit to the Bronx Zoo one day he had an epiphany, or so he would recall in his biography Yours in Perfect Manhood, by Charles Gaines and George Butler. Watching a lion stretch, he thought to himself, "Does this old gentleman have any barbells, any exercisers?...And it came over me....He's been pitting one muscle against another!"

Atlas threw out his equipment. He began flexing his muscles, using isometric opposition and adding range of motion to stress them further. He tensed his hands behind his back. He laced his fingers under his thighs and pushed his hands against his legs. He did biceps curls with one arm and squeezed his fist down with the other. Experimenting with varied techniques, and likely aided by exceptional genes, Atlas emerged from many months at home with a physique that stunned school chums when he first revealed himself on the beach. One of the boys exclaimed, "You look like that statue of Atlas on top of the Atlas Hotel!"

"Charles Atlas: Muscle Man"

Al writes "Technology Review has a feature article that explores the business strategy underlying Google's decision to develop its Linux-based operating system, Chrome OS. Writer G. Pascal Zachary argues that Eric Schmidt has identified a sea-change in the software business, as signaled by Microsoft's recent problems and by the advancement of cloud computing. Zachary notes that Larry Page and Sergey Brin have pushed to develop a slick, open-source alternative to Windows for around six years (with the rational that improving access to the Web would ultimately benefit Google), but that Schmidt has always refused. While developing Chrome OS is a significant gamble for Google, Zachary believe it will exploit Microsoft's historical weakness in terms of networking and internet functionality, forcing its rival to better serve Google's core business goals, whilst initiating its own steady, slow-motion decline."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Got a limited mobility ferret? Instructables user odiekokee made this mobility aid for his recovering furry friend.

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Roboticists at the recent International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence discussed the frustrating lack of a common operating system among today's robots. From New Scientist:

This desire has its roots in frustration, says Brian Gerkey of the robotics research firm Willow Garage in Menlo Park, California. "People reinvent the wheel over and over and over, doing things that are not at all central to what they're trying to do..."

The challenge of building a robot OS for widespread adoption is greater than that for computers. "The problems that a computer solves are fairly well defined. There is a very clear mathematical notion of computation," says Gerkey. "There's not the same kind of clear abstraction about interacting with the physical world."

Nevertheless, roboticists are starting to make some headway.The Robot Operating System or ROS is an open-source set of programs meant to serve as a common platform for a wide range of robotics research. It is being developed and used by teams at Stanford University in California, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Technical University of Munich, Germany, among others.

ROS has software commands that, for instance, provide ways of controlling a robot's navigation, and its arms, grippers and sensors, without needing details of how the hardware functions. The system also includes high-level commands for actions like image recognition and even opening doors. When ROS boots up on a robot's computer, it asks for a description of the robot that includes things like the length of its arm segments and how the joints rotate. It then makes this information available to the higher-level algorithms.

"Robots to get their own operating system"

John Snodgrass writes "Neil Hunt, Chief Product Officer at Netflix, has announced on the Netflix Prize Forums that they are planning to hold a new data mining competition. The second competition will have some twists and is expected to be shorter in duration. It will feature two grand prizes, to be awarded in a 6 and 18 month time frame. A previous competitor still active on the board has already dubbed it: The Sparse Matrix: Reordered" and "The Sparse Matrix: Factorizations"."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• We review Spotify, a desktop app that lets users stream 3.8 million tracks of music — for free.

Good News: It's TERRIFIC.
Bad News: it's not yet available in the U.S.

• What will the Apple Tablet actually look like?

• We review Sonar's VS-100, a portable studio that includes a MIDI controller, multi-track recorder, and mixer.

• A rocking chair that looks like a purple hot dog.

• Fact: By 2010, all gadgets will feature teal/turquoise LED strips.

• Headphones built into a pair of fuzzy cat ears!

• We review Sony Ericsson's W518a cell phone. Verdict: "a good choice if you want a small, cheap phone that doesn't look like a toy."

• A newly-released, battery-powered, rechargeable neck warmer.

• We held a contest for a robotic space cock. The deadline was August 7, but we're going to give you one last shot. Enter to win by midnight EST August 11. So what is a robotic space cock? Good question!

There's a fascinating article in the Washington Post about the impact of the worldwide financial crisis on Nigerian 419 scammers. However, I have to admit, that I'm a bit confused about the article, which seems to state two totally contradictory things. First, that it's more difficult to be a Nigerian scammer these days since Americans don't have as much money -- but then at the same time, that Americans are falling for the scam more easily these days since they're desperate for money. I don't see how both can be true. Two quotes from the article:

"We are working harder. The financial crisis is not making it easy for them over there," said Banjo, 24, speaking about Americans, whose trust he has won and whose money he has fleeced, via his Dell laptop. "They don't have money. And the money they don't have, we want."

And then, just two paragraphs later:

U.S. authorities say Americans -- the easiest prey, according to Nigerian scammers -- lose hundreds of millions of dollars a year to cybercrimes, including a scheme known as the Nigerian 419 fraud, named for a section of the Nigerian criminal code. Now financially squeezed, Americans succumb even more easily to offers of riches, experts say.

And then, just a bit later, the scammers again complain that times are harder, and profits are down 40%.

So... um... which is it? Has it become more difficult or easier than ever? Isn't that the sort of thing that a newspaper reporter would be expected to search out and let us know? Not the Washington Post, apparently. It just tells us both are true and lets everyone else figure it out!

While, personally, I still can't figure out how anyone is still fooled by such scams after so many years of them being talked and written about, the article does suggest that the scammers themselves are easily scammed. This, of course, will come as no surprise at all to the group of folks who have fun scambaiting 419 scammers, but the article notes that scammers who are having a tough time are quickly throwing down lots of cash on magic potions, powders and artifacts to help them perform better as scammers:

Banjo said, he has traveled six hours to the forest, where a magician sells scam-boosters. A $300 powder supposedly helps scammers "speak with authority" when demanding payment. A powder, rubbed on the face, reportedly makes victims viewing the scammer through webcams powerless to say no.

"No matter what, they will pay," said Olumide, a college student, adding that he is boosting his romance scams by wearing a magical, live tortoise hanging from a cord around his neck.

So, scam baiters, it seems like perhaps you should be selling such things right back to the scammers.

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Spotted on The Smoking Gun, this fascinating group of mugshots from 1903 depicts three gentlemen "photographed with hats on, with hats off, and finally, dressed and groomed for their new digs."

There seems to be a growing number of hobbyists out there who are scratch-building the model rockets of yesteryear. Many of the instructions from the original commercial models are available online (copyright champions, look away) and some folks sell nosecones, decal sheets, and other parts for these models. One popular theme is the sci-fi movie and TV rocketships, such as those from Star Trek, Star Wars, and Battlestar Galactica.

Hobby rocket couple Verna and Randy scratch-built a fleet of Colonial Vipers from Battlestar Galactica, based on the old Estes kit. A friend of theirs, Jim Neubauer, made the decidedly more imposing 1/15th scale Viper (seen in the last photo).

Verna's Vipers [via HobbyMedia]

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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."

On a recent flight to Rome, I found my sleep-deprived thoughts turning to the question that has launched a thousand doctoral dissertations: Why is Hannibal Lecter an Italophile?

He wasn't always. When we first meet the debonair, serial-murdering doctor, in the Thomas Harris novel Red Dragon, he's curled up with a copy of Alexandre Dumas's Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine. We can see from the class signifiers he flashes---waspish wit, feline grace, courtly manners, and refined, Old Money tastes---that he's a highbrow degenerate (in the evolutionary, Max Nordau sense of the word), struck from the mythic mold that gave us real-life archetypes such as Elizabeth Bathory, Gilles de Rais, and the Marquis de Sade, as well as their fictional kin (most notably, Count Dracula (with whom Lecter shares many supernatural traits). His unabashed Eurocentrism would gladden George Will's wizened heart, but he hasn't yet outed himself as a flaming Italophile.

By Silence of the Lambs, however, the Lecter of the first book, who was little more than a few memorably zingy lines, glued together with attitude, has evolved into a suave, mordantly witty bogeyman for the age of the branded lifestyle: Milton's Satan in a Prada suit. This is a man-eater who would never use the wrong knife when slicing out your sweetbreads and sautéing them in a beurre noisette before your dying eyes. He's a card-carrying member of the cultural elite, a status that Harris signals through Lecter's exhaustive knowledge of Italian high culture. His tastes in interior decoration, in his cell in a prison for the criminally insane, run to pencil sketches of Florentine scenes: "the Palazzo Vecchio and the Duomo, as seen from the Belvedere." He admonishes Clarice Starling, the FBI trainee who's interrogating him, to look up the early Italian Renaissance painter Duccio if she wants to see an accurate depiction of a crucifixion, and to pay Titian's Flaying of Marsyas a visit, at the National Gallery, if she wants to study the fine points of human-skinning. He famously eats a census-taker's liver with "fava beans and a big Amarone" (a signature Italian dish, paired with an Italian wine) and offers Starling a clue to her case in the form of a quote from the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius.

In Hannibal, Lecter might as well work for the Italian national tourism board. His manor-born elegance, classical erudition, and, most of all, pitch-perfect taste are inextricable from his deep immersion in Italian culture, which for Harris (and presumably his mass audience) is shorthand for the profound knowledge, as sensual as it is intellectual, of all that makes life worth living---a cultural patrimony bequeathed to the world by the land that gave us the Roman empire and the Renaissance, Verdi and the Vespa, Prosciutto di Parma and Parmigiano-Reggiano, la dolce vita and menefreghismo (the Fine Art of Not Giving a Fuck, according to Nick Tosches). Lecter lives in Florence, where his nonpareil mastery of Dante, Florentine history, and archaic Italian---he demonstrates "an extraordinary linguistic facility, sight-translating medieval Italian and Latin from the densest Gothic black-letter scripts"---wins him the position of curator of the Palazzo Capponi. (Well, that, and the fact that he hastened the former curator's shuffle off this mortal coil.) Lecter shops for exquisite unguents at the Farmacia of Santa Maria Novella and tartufi bianchi at the gourmet emporium Vera dal 1926; reads himself to sleep with the piquant correspondence of a 15th century Venetian; accessorizes his mental Memory Palace with the Riace bronzes. Naturally, his mother is "a high-born Italian, a Visconti." It's all very Ted Bundy-under-the-Tuscan-Sun, Lucrezia Borgia-meets-ladies-who-lunch.

The question is: How did we get here? At what point did Italian culture become the capstone of the taste/class pyramid, morphing seemingly overnight from lowbrow to highbrow? At what specific historical moment, and by what cultural logic, did the fickle alchemy of mandarin taste transform balsamic vinegar into Bottled Essence of Snob Appeal, fetishized by status-conscious bobos who dole it out at dinner parties with the sort of breathless reverence they used to reserve for lines of Peruvian blue flake?

Not long ago, in the racialized anthropology of the late 19th century and the eugenic "science" of the early 20th, the "Mediterranean races" were demonstrably inferior to Nordic man. In 1924, congress passed the Johnson Act, which radically restricted immigration from the Mediterranean countries (as well as Eastern Europe) to forestall further pollution of the Anglo gene pool.

In the '70s, when I was a teenager growing up white and middle-class in the ardently Aryan suburbs of Southern California, "Italian" was a mama-mia, that's-a-spicy-meatball punchline, an ethnic caricature sketched in bold strokes: Mama Celeste frozen pizzas; Dean Martin singing "That's Amore"; the LaBella family, proprietors of the local Italian restaurant, the one with the inevitable rainbow-colored candles in the straw-wrapped Chianti bottles. Squid---no one called it "calamari"---was bait; pasta meant spaghetti---no one called it "pasta"; and radicchio, arugula, and fresh parmesan were unknown, at least to WASPs. (To this day, my suburban relatives obligingly produce a can of plastinated Kraft cheese dust when I ask for parmesan.) When did things change? Their problematic mix of ethnic stereotyping and ethnographic fact notwithstanding, were the Godfather movies (1972, 1974) instrumental in introducing WASP America to an Italian America that, for all its internecine bloodletting and dese-and-dose goombah-ism (as reflected in the Hollywood eye) also preached a conservative gospel of folkways and famiglia values (gangster family values, ironically, but no less traditional for that) and hard work? To a teenager adrift in the suburban badlands of San Diego, whose psychic geography was cratered by divorce and PTSD'd by Vietnam and Watergate and Helter Skelter, Connie's wedding, at the beginning of The Godfather, offered a seductive glimpse of an ethnic otherworld---the Old World teleported to the New World, with all its close family ties and cherished traditions magically intact.

After college, in the mid-'80s, I would go East, to be part of the advancing guard of bohemianization making the Italian-American neighborhood of Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn safe for alt.culture. Raised in the land of puka-shell necklaces and huaraches, where real-life Malibu Barbies and Bitchen Dudes disported themselves in the Endless Summer, I marveled at the studiously sullen young guys (codeword: guido) in the regulation tight T-shirts; equal parts greaser, disco stud, and hip-hop homeboy, they seemed to be channeling John Travolta's Tony Manero, some Italian-Stallion take on Mailer's white negritude, and, incomprehensibly, a collective memory of the Doo-Wop '50s. Shrines to patron saints sprouted throughout the neighborhood; in one front yard, a life-sized Saint Lucy held a plate with her plastic eyeballs glued to it, like a waiter serving canapés. I was enthralled by the thinly veiled paganism of the annual feast and procession of Maria SS. Addolorata, in which celebrants (just like the revelers in the Feast of Saint Rocco in The Godfather II!) carry a sad-eyed statue of the Blessed Virgin through the streets, where the devout festoon her gown with paper money, as they have done since 1948. The parade ends at the neighborhood's symbolic heart, the Mola Di Bari social club, which takes its name from the Southern Italian town to which many of the neighborhood's earliest Italian immigrants can trace their bloodlines. At the same time, there was an ugly side to this picturesque translation of smalltown Southern Italy into Brooklyn's doo-wop vernacular, exacerbated by the culture wars between Italian-American locals and the hipster homesteaders gentrifying the hood. After one too many encounters with carloads of goons yelling "faggot," and a horrifying episode in which a bat-wielding gang attacked a longhaired Asian-American guy, my wife and I joined the bobo exodus to the upstate burbs.

To be sure, Our Friends from Corleone also packed their blood feuds and backwater ignorance in their psychic baggage when they boarded the ship for Ellis Island. But the occasional horsehead in bed seems a small price to pay for idyllic afternoons in the sun, sipping Trebbiano d'Abruzzo while the accordions play "C'é La Luna Mezzo O Mare." Harry Lime had it right in The Third Man: "In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed---but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." (Never mind the fact that, as my Swiss friends point out with some heat, the cuckoo clock is a German invention. You get the point.) In the popular imagination, mythic Italy draws its symbolic voltage not only from its relatively newfound role as a bobo emblem of gracious living and good taste, brought to you by Williams-Sonoma, but also from the delicious depravity of all those Borgias and Medicis, not to mention the Caesars, whose sybaritic excesses thrilled the pants off Gibbon's readers. Lecter loves his tartufi and his Amarone, but he also loves the operatic passions and gothic brutality of the Quattrocento, when rough justice for, say, conspirators against the Medici capo Lorenzo the Magnificent meant being hung, naked, from a high window in the Palazzo Vecchio, as an object lesson---and guaranteed crowd-pleaser---for the rabble. The Mythic Little Italy of our multiplex fantasies, from Goodfellas to Moonstruck to The Sopranos, is among other things a wish-fulfillment fantasy for WASPs---middle America's dream of giving its superego the one-armed salute and partaking of the emotional catharses enjoyed by those passionate Mediterraneans. Of course, there are two sides to the Return of the Repressed: heads, you get Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita, indulging in a nighttime dip in Rome's Trevi fountain; tails, you get Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, beating another mobster to bloody jelly because the guy insulted him.

All of which is to ask: What does Italy mean? What does it signify, in the dream life of the West? A hopelessly knotty question, too complex to be teased out here. During my recent travels in Rome, Florence, and Bologna, I wondered if I was ever really seeing Italy, or if a million media apparitions---the Italy of The Talented Mr. Ripley and HBO's Rome, Death in Venice and The Monster of Florence---would always swarm before me, obscuring the thing itself, like those transparent overlays depicting the musculature and the nerves and the lymphatic system, in anatomy textbooks. In his masterful 1964 study The Italians, a cultural critique that is to Italy as Octavio Paz's Labyrinth of Solitude is to Mexico, Luigi Barzini is thoughtful on this point. In a poetic, unsettling meditation on the siren song of Mythic Italy, he talks about foreigners who visit the country and never leave, metamorphosing into that liminal being, the expatriate, suspended in that Phantom Zone between cultures. Many attempt to go native; some succeed in becoming more Italian than the Italians themselves, in some paradoxical sense. And many, as Barzini notes,

find, at one point, like Hawthorne, that they can no longer leave... They can no longer face the harsher world where they came from, where they see things perhaps too clearly, and where every word in their familiar language has a precise meaning. They have become hopelessly addicted to the amiable and mild ways of Italy. Many also have nobody left to go back to. They cling to their little lair, the view of the sea from the hill, the view of the Coliseum from the window if you turn your neck far enough to the right, the view of the Grand Canal, the roofs of Florence, the decayed villas of Rapallo... Italy is filled with people growing old, who can no longer think of leaving, living alone, comforted by a cat or a dog, waited on by a servant, an honest person at times but often enough an unscrupulous maid who feeds her family with what she steals. A day comes when these old people grow ill and helpless, far from the familiar sights and sounds of their youth, self-exiled for reasons which have become dim in their memories, in an alien place which they never really saw as it is and quite understood... Many die every year and are buried hurriedly in the corner of an Italian cemetery reserved for heathens or heretics; some bodies are shipped home to practically unknown and indifferent relatives. Many die without having really discovered why they chose to live the last years of their lives in Italy, of all places.

Cue the Godfather Waltz.

Image: Hannibal Lecter, taking the air in Florence. From the movie Hannibal. Reproduced under Fair Use provision of copyright law.

Organfairy rescued an ailing Casio SA-10 with corroded battery contacts -

I got this little CASIO SA-10 from a jumble sale. It cost me a massive 10 dkr - the equivalent of 2$.
Unfortunately there was no sound but it turned out to be just some old batteries that had leaked all over the place. This video shows the restoring process where I first take it apart. Then I wash the plastic parts and clean the contact pads. And finally I put it together again and test if it works.

Another good reason for keeping an old toothbrush at the workbench! [via Synthtopia]

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Here's something for someone that has everything: a personalized MakerBot-printed iPhone/iPod dock. Made to order, the doc features a sturdy lower housing made from 5MM plywood and a custom top housing personalized with your initials or, if you choose, the standard "BotMade" logo.

[via Etsy]

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eldavojohn writes "Last week, news broke of a tragic incident that resulted in the death of a 16 year old boy at one of China's internet addiction camps. Details were scarce except for reports that the camp remained open. New reports are now coming in from China Daily that report 13 arrested and the camp closed down on Friday with 122 participants being sent home. The vice-chief of the district has stated that the authorities are working on the case to identify and punish the criminals involved in the death. Xinhua is reporting that the camp was unlicensed. This is directly in conflict with what the Southern Metropolis Daily reporter is saying, 'When the reporter arrived outside the rear wall of the school, children on the third and fourth floors started to stick notes into aluminum cans, drink bottles, and slippers, and others folded notes into paper planes. They tried to throw them over the wall, but owing to the distance, none of them succeeded. Some children had papers bearing the messages "SOS" and "beating" which they waved out the windows. Some wrote calls for help on their clothing, which they displayed to the reporter. Some even yelled for help. They were all stopped by the instructors.' Here is that original story in Chinese. Is China handling this delicate issue appropriately or are the news reports of justice and monitoring treatments merely a facade?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Enough!

With every shortened URL the foundation of the 140-character-sphere gets shakier. Now we know that when Twitter switched from tinyurl as the default shortener to bit.ly, they cut off the path to growth for the other entrepreneurs exploring this space.

Now, according to Mashable, bit.ly wants to absorb tr.im. They would make tr.im URLs work for the forseeable future. That is, until bit.ly runs out of cash and has to shut down because it doesn't have a way to support their service.

Uncle!

URL-shorteners are at best a temporary workaround for a limit Twitter shouldn't have.

It's time for Twitter to add a simple feature to their platform that allows users to attach a URL of arbitrary length to a message, without using up any of the 140 characters. That would be the rational way to get out in front of this mess -- to remove the reason it exists.

Even if they can't implement it immediately, just announcing that they will would restructure the "market" and allow us a way forward that has a teeny bit of safety. We will still have the mess of the last three years to clean up. No way to avoid that.

If Twitter won't do that, then it's time that users insist that URL-shorteners at least provide the safety that Feedburner provided, by allowing users to point a subdomain at their server, and use that as the address for their shortened URLs. If tr.im had that feature, I would now be able to take over hosting of my own tr.im URLs and walk away from the mess. However because they didn't have that feature, I, and every other tr.im user, is stuck. Locked in, with no way out.

Twitter created this mess, now it's time for Twitter to become a leader in its own community and get involved in cleaning it up.

Two choices: 1. Obviate shortened URLs, or 2. Require portability.

Continental Airlines diverted a Twin-Cities-bound plane to Rochester due to a storm, and then locked the entire planeload of passengers in the plane overnight for nine hours. The TSA had gone home, so the passengers couldn't clear security if they got off and left the airport, and the ground crew wouldn't let them get off and stay in the airport. So 47 people -- including babies -- were locked into the plane with no food and overflowing toilets, held prisoner until the airline could get its act together. Jesus.

"It's not like you're on a [Boeing] 747 and you can walk around,'' said Christin, a professor at William Mitchell College of Law. "This was a sardine can, with a single row of seats on one side of the plane and two rows of seats on the other. And they've got about 50 people inside, including babies, for the whole night. It was a nightmare...''

The airline crew on the plane reached their maximum work hours in the air, so another crew had to be flown in. The alternative of chartering a bus didn't work out. And letting the passengers into the Rochester airport was not possible because they would have to go through security screening again, and the screeners had gone home for the day.

What about just letting the passengers sleep in the airport terminal? "That was not provided as an option by ground services personnel at the airport,'' said Nicholas...

As light began to fill the cabin around 6 a.m., the plane doors opened and passengers were allowed into the airport terminal, Christin said. The airlines gave them one free beverage, he said. By about 9:30 a.m., the passengers were sent back on the same plane they had spent the night in -- which by this time had no functioning restroom. They landed in the Twin Cities about 11 a.m.

47 trapped on 'nightmare' flight to the Twin Cities (Thanks, Cliff!)

Jafafa Hots writes "Some undergraduate and masters level courses at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary require trolling as part of their requirements. In William Dembski's classes on Intelligent Design and Christian Apologetics, 20% of the final grades come from having made 10 posts defending Intelligent Design Creationism on 'hostile' websites. There seems to be no requirement that the posts contain original writing, apparently cut and paste jobs are sufficient. Is this the first case of trolling the net being part of course requirements?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A bunch of folks have been asking my opinion on this past weekend's NY Times Magazine article by Michael Sokolove entitled What's a Big City Without a Newspaper? To be honest, there's not much to say about it. The article itself sort of meanders around, and doesn't make much of a point. Sokolove is wistful for the "good old days" and hopes that there's a future for newspapers. He dips his toes into some of the new experiments out there to cover the news, and spends a lot of time with the guy who is currently CEO of the bankrupt big Philly newspapers. The article doesn't really break any new ground. There are a few times when it seems to falsely assume that only newspaper reporters are real reporters (though, at other times it doesn't make this mistake). About the only really noteworthy thing is that the guy who runs the Philadelphia Daily News and the Philadelphia Inquirer, Brian Tierney, seems to be a bit clueless about economics -- which doesn't bode well for the two papers:

As soon as possible, he wants to begin charging for online content. As he told me this, he banged a bagel on a conference table, which sounded like a rock as it hit. "You hear that?" This bagel stinks, he said. "It's got the same consistency inside and out, but if you went down to our cafeteria, it costs like $1.25. That's what people pay for stuff like this, so you mean to tell me I can't get them to pay that for online access to all the incredible stuff in The Inquirer and Daily News online? People who say that all this content wants to be free aren't paying talented people to create it."

As any first year econ student would tell Tierney, the reason people are willing to pay $1.25 for a stale bagel is because they really don't have another easy choice. To get a better bagel would mean having to leave the building and head out somewhere further away that isn't nearly as convenient. But online there are other options. Loads and loads and loads of other options -- all only a click away. If his cafeteria had 1,000 different bagel suppliers all competing to sell their bagels, he'd discover that the bagels would be both a lot cheaper and a lot better tasting. And those who thought they could get away with charging $1.25 for a crappy bagel would soon go out of business. Update: Ha! After writing this, I discovered that King Kaufman wrote basically the same thing.

Oh, and then he also seems to believe that there's something special about newsprint that makes it more suitable for reporting than the web, but he fails to explain what that is, other than "brawn."

"We do the brawny work," Tierney said, sounding like the C.E.O. of some smokestack industry. "The Web efforts, they add something. I congratulate them. Let a thousand flowers bloom. But if somebody thinks in any short term, or even medium term, that the answers are those things, they're kidding themselves. I know I sound like a heretic in that I won't come out and say, 'They're the future." But they're not. The brawny work is what we're doing, and the brawny vehicle to carry it is the printed product."

I'm not against newsprint -- if someone could come up with a way to make it really add more value. I've talked about magazines making their print product more valuable, and I'm sure a creative newspaper could do it too. But claiming that newsprint is better because it carries "brawny work" doesn't seem like a particularly compelling explanation. It sounds like someone pining for a past that isn't returning. There's no vision there. There's only someone insisting that things must be a certain way because that's the way it is. The world, unfortunately, doesn't work that way.

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From the MAKE Flickr pool

Concrete-jungle.org shares pics of this human-powered apple munching machine, constructed for their annual Ciderfest -

Aluminum tube mounted on elevated plywood frame, with space underneath for a 5 gallon bucket to catch apple pomace.

1" shaft through the tube, with a 25lb flywheel and 18t bicycle freewheel mounted on flange bearings.

Mmmm … I do loves me some cider! If you're in the Atlanta area, be sure to check out Ciderfest on Saturday Sept. 5 - looks like a good time!

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Alex Queral does these wonderful heads, carved out of phone books (then painted with
acrylics). In his Artist's Statement, he says:

I carve the faces out of phone books because I like the three-dimensional quality that results and because of the unexpected results that occur working in this medium. The three-dimensional quality enhances the feeling of the pieces as an object as opposed to a picture.

In carving and painting a head from a phone directory, I'm celebrating the individual lost in the anonymous list of thousands of names that describe the size of the community. In addition, I like the idea of creating something that is normally discarded every year into an object of longevity.

Alex Queral

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GhostX9 writes "Tom's Hardware just interviewed Charlie Miller, the man behind the iPhone remote exploit hack and winner of Pwn2Own 2009. He explains the (now patched) bug in the iPhone which allowed him to remotely exploit the iPhone in detail, explaining how the string concatenation code was flawed. The most surprising thing was that the bug could be traced back to several previous generation of the iPhone OS (he stopped testing at version 2.2). He also talks about the failures of other devices, such as crashing HTC's Touch by sending a SMS with '%n' in the text."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Flickr member ohammersmith lasercut a full set of chess pieces from plywood -

This is a chess set I made for my Grandfather's 90th birthday.

I designed them in SketchUp and cut them out of 1/8" plywood with the laser cutter at TechShop Durham.

More pics in the Flickr photo set.

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In this video David from theunlockr.com shows us how to root the Hero, HTC's latest Android phone. With a rooted Hero you can do all kinds of fun stuff like run apps and swap space from an SD card in addition to running apps as a privileged user. Overclocking also becomes a possibility once you pwn your phone. Remember folks: If you can't open it, you don't own it.

[via phonedog]

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Woodworking Magazine ran an Altoids tin contest. Here are some of the results. The winning entry was Tom Bier's router plane (top three pics). Runners up included Kevin Bosse's light-duty vise and Kevin Hurbanis off-set gauge.

Thanks to @JeffreyGifford for the Twitter tip-off

The Winner of Our Altoids Tool Contest

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Well so much for that. About a year ago, it seemed like perhaps (just perhaps) EMI would be the first of the big major record labels to really learn how to embrace the digital era. First, it talked about leaving the RIAA and IFPI. Then, it talked about the importance of learning from Radiohead's success with the "pay-what-you-want" experiment. Finally, it hired some Silicon Valley stars. First, it hired Google's CIO Doug Merrill, and soon after that brought on Second Life's co-founder Cory Ondrejka. Suddenly, we began to wonder what would happen if a major record label actually had management talent that understood digital technologies.

But... it quickly became clear that this was not to be the case. EMI seemed to view both Merrill and Ondrejka as being in the "digital silo." And, if there's one thing we've learned, if you have a chief digital officer in a media company, you're doing it wrong. Pretending that digital is a "silo" is wrong. Digital impacts every area of your business, and pretending that it's separate suggests you don't have the right strategy in place.

And, of course, the fact that EMI become one of the most aggressive companies suing every potentially innovative startup out there didn't engender much confidence that the company had figured out how to embrace the new online world.

So it wasn't much of a surprise when Doug Merrill left after less than a year. However, the company then promoted Ondrejka. I saw Ondrejka speak at least year's Midem, and he talked up all these pie-in-the-sky ideas that never actually seemed to show up. Last month, when EMI's CEO admitted the company had lost touch with consumers and didn't know how to fix it, you had to wonder what the company had been doing.

And, now comes the news that Cory Ondrejka is also leaving EMI. He lasted just slightly longer than Merrill, sticking around for an entire 14 months, where it doesn't appear that EMI did anything particularly creative on the digital side, but did sue a whole bunch of innovators. Oh yeah, and it launched a blog. As far as I can tell, that's about the most innovative digital thing it's done in a while (yes, there's sarcasm there).

Oh well. It makes you wonder what could have been.

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jonniee writes with a link to Dr. Dobb's Journal's look at a rather cool living-room-suitable media-centric computer from Neuros (presented as being suitable mostly for developers and serious hobbyists for now), excerpting: "The Neuros LINK is essential a quiet x86 PC running Ubuntu Linux with an ATI graphics card delivering video via VGA, DVI, and HDMI output. ... What makes the LINK such a compelling platform for these folks and Linux/open source developers in general is the recognition that a real business entity is stepping forward to spend the money necessary to market and commercialize what tech enthusiasts have been doing for years."

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Malaysia's government has had something of a love-hate affair with citizens and opposing politicians using blogs and other social media to protest the government -- and has even sent opposition bloggers they don't like to jail. So, you can imagine the concern when the government announced plans to install widespread internet filters modeled on China's fault "Green Dam" software. Not surprisingly, the government officials back the plan insist it won't be used against political targets, but just obscene material. Opponents find that hard to believe. Even if (and it's a big "if") that's the intent of the government, having it be so easy to "accidentally" start blocking opposition sites is probably too tempting for many.

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Parallax announced their 2009 Propeller design contest. The deadline is November 16, 2009, so you still have plenty of time to get your project started. The grand prize is $2000!

Projects will be judged according to the following factors:

• 30% Propeller Design Appropriateness Determined on applicant's ability to use the Propeller's unique architecture to achieve a working design. An entry which receives the highest mark in this category will utilize the Propeller to achieve a design not possible with a traditional microcontroller.
  
• 30% Originality Creativity of the project.
  
• 25% Professionalism This is based on the use of clear English in the Project Report, a quality design (if needed), clarity of explanations, quality of pictures and source code formatting/commenting.
  
• 15% Practicality Based on the project's usefulness.

More about the 2009 Parallax Propeller design contest

In the Maker Shed:

Propeller Proto Board USB

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angry tapir writes with a snippet from Good Gear Guide: "A notorious patent case about a technology that allows people to search multimedia content may finally be coming to a close. Earlier this week, a judge ruled that two patents initially awarded to Encyclopedia Britannica are invalid. The patents were built on the infamous 5,241,671 patent first unveiled by Compton's NewMedia in 1993 at the Comdex trade show. That patent, which covered the retrieval of information from multimedia content and is now owned by Britannica, would have been relevant to the many companies selling multimedia CD-ROMs at the time."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Get some inspiration and make/re-make your own "cassette lamp" from this wonderful collection at ooomydesign.com

CASSETTE IS NOT DEAD 20x13x12cm Tribute to cassette tape, which kept us company all trough the 80ies and became a symbol of a generation. Taking advantage of its structural properties, a lamp/box has been created only by means of tying the tapes firmly together. The lamp dims the light in a soft delicate way and you can play with it changing the tapes even with yours and listening all of them too. Small version easy to send. There are transparents and with colours tapes.

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Former French President Jaques Chirac says that in 2003, President Bush asked him to send troops to Iraq to stop Gog and Magog, the "Bible's satanic agents of the Apocalypse."

From James A. Haught's piece in the Council for Secular Humanism:

It's awkward to say openly, but now-departed President Bush is a religious crackpot, an ex-drunk of small intellect who "got saved." He never should have been entrusted with the power to start wars.

For six years, Americans really haven't known why he launched the unnecessary Iraq attack. Official pretexts turned out to be baseless. Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction after all, and wasn't in league with terrorists, as the White House alleged. Collapse of his asserted reasons led to speculation about hidden motives: Was the invasion loosed to gain control of Iraq's oil--or to protect Israel--or to complete Bush's father's vendetta against the late dictator Saddam Hussein? Nobody ever found an answer.

Now, added to the other suspicions, comes the goofy possibility that abstruse, supernatural, idiotic, laughable Bible prophecies were a factor. This casts an ominous pall over the needless war that has killed more than four thousand young Americans and cost U.S. taxpayers perhaps $1 trillion.

A French Revelation, or The Burning Bush

Kostadin Vodenicharov writes "The International Olympiad in Informatics is considered one of the most prestigious programming contests in the world. Currently the 21st IOI is being held in Plovdiv, Bulgaria (which was the country that also hosted the 1st IOI), from 8th to 15th August. High school students from all over the world have gathered to put their programming skills to the test. Everyone else who wishes to participate can do it in the online contest which will run in parallel with the real one and will present the same tasks to be solved. The competition itself is going to take place on Monday 10th August and Wednesday 12th August from 9:00 to 14:00 EEST (UTC+3)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

WestCoastSuccess writes with this excerpt: "A year and a half ago, Canada's Shaw Cable began encrypting channels with the '0x02' flag. This flag has the effect of making the IEEE1394 (Firewire) output useless to customers who use third-party PVRs (such as the excellent MythTV, for example). After complaints to the CRTC and Industry Canada about this practice, the encryption flag was dropped on most channels and the Firewire connection again functioned. Until last night, that is."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.