jmcharry sends word that as the deadline looms for requesting broadband grants from the $4.7 billion available in stimulus funding, Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T are conspicuously absent from the list of applicants. Quoting the Washington Post: "Their reasons are varied. All three say they are flush with cash, enough to upgrade and expand their broadband networks on their own. Some say taking money could draw unwanted scrutiny of business practices and compensation, as seen with automakers and banks that have taken government bailouts. And privately, some companies are griping about conditions attached to the money, including a net-neutrality rule that they say would prevent them from managing traffic on their networks in the way they want. ... Yet those firms might be the best positioned to achieve the goal of spreading Internet access to underserved areas, some experts say." Reader Michael_Curator notes that while the major carriers may be holding back, there were still enough applications to slow government servers to a crawl, resulting in a deadline extension.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We recently expressed our concerns with the state of the government's attempts to increase broadband in the US. Karl Bode, over at Broadband Reports has now hit quite a homerun with his analysis of 5 signs of why the broadband plan is in trouble. The whole thing is worth reading, but I wanted to highlight number 5 on the list, because it's a big problem:

The FCC continues to hold "workshops" to discuss the direction and scope of the national broadband plan. They're also recording presentations by all of the FCC's "constituents," and offering consumers instantaneous access to all of the documents being presented at the workshop at the Broadband.gov website. All of this is absolutely great. What's not so great?

There are 51 panelists attending the latest 8 workshops. Out of those 51, there are just five people not directly associated with a company: Dave Burstein, Craig Moffett, George Ford, Victor Frost and Henning Schulzrinne. Moffett is a stock jock who's positions (such as upgrades are unnecessary and consumers should be paying more money) are clearly not going to serve anyone but investors. Ford works at the Phoenix Center, an AT&T-funded "think tank," who's job is to parrot AT&T policy positions.

Of the remaining three, only Burstein, a long-time telecom beat reporter, will likely ask any hard questions -- and then again his job is to get scoops, not to represent the public interest. Zero of the originally scheduled attendees acted as public interest witnesses. After complaints by consumer groups, Dr. Mark Cooper from the Consumer Federation Of America was added at the last second, but the fact that this was an afterthought raises questions about how "transparent and inclusive" this process really is.

This definitely seems like politics as usual. And it's a problem, not just for the FCC, but for the very businesses involved in these discussions. Ignoring consumer will these days is increasingly a suicide pact. The businesses leading this discussion would be well-served to look at what's happening in other industries (music, newspapers) where business execs have been trying to ignore consumers' rights and interests, in the belief that they have some sort of monopoly control over their market. Those things can disappear quickly, and when stripped of such artificial protections, it's amazing how fast the consumers you mistreated will move elsewhere.

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Here is YouTube ukulele star Julia Nunes doing a haunting but delightful version of "God Only Knows" by the Beach Boys. And no, this isn't Mark posting under David's name.

eldavojohn writes "Anyone who's seen King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters knows that Ottumwa, Iowa is the Dodge City of video games. Yesterday, 3,500 people showed up to the kick-off speech that announced the intent to build the International Video Game Hall of Fame right there. Radio Free Iowa states Ottumwa's desire to become the 'video game capital of the world' and held a Halo 3 and Guitar Hero tournament there yesterday. Will this town of 25,000 residents secure the title?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The terrific blog Inhabitat has an intriguing article about the winning entries in the Rising Tides competition, wherein entrants came up with ways to deal with what could be a 55" rise in the San Francisco Bay waters in the next century.

From Inhabitat's recap:

Another mind-boggling solution to the high-water mark is Folding Water, by Kuth Ranieri Architects. The proposal is an alternative to the traditional barrier dike: this one placed in the middle of the bay, maintaining current water levels with a series of pump walls and artificial estuaries. It looks invisible: reminiscent of what we hope our future impact to be: undetectable.

The competition ended up with 6 winners sharing a $25,000 prize, and there were a handful of Honorable Mentions highlighted as well. The whole thing -- the competition, the plethora of entries, the thoughtfulness and cleverness of the entries -- was a great reminder to me that makers hold the key to surviving the next 100 years and beyond.

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What is it with public transportation groups? Over the past year or so we've seen time and time again that these companies seem to think they own the data on their schedules, and have come down hard on anyone who supplies an iPhone app that gives people good schedule info. The reason many public transportation groups do this is they think they can make some money licensing the data, but this is silly. If an individual or a hobbyist can provide better data in a better format to users, that just encourages more people to actually buy tickets for the train ride, which is what you would think these train operators would want.

The latest example of this battle, sent in by Anthony Townsend, is the MTA in NY making life difficult for a guy who created a scheduling app for the Metro North train line. The guy also happens to have a blog about Metro North, that he's used to draw attention to problems with the service. That seems to have upset the MTA people, who claimed his site was "pretending to be an official MTA website." He pointed out how ridiculous that was, since most of the blog posts were highly critical of the MTA. Any reader would quickly recognize that it was not an official site.

Soon after that, though, the MTA threatened him over the scheduling app, claiming that it violates the MTA's copyright on its data. Except... you can't copyright facts. The MTA argues that if someone misses a train due to the guy's info, they'll get mad at the MTA. I'd argue that's overblown. First, so long as the app is clear that it's not official, there shouldn't be much of an issue. And, honestly, how often would that sort of problem occur? The real thing is that the MTA wants to squeeze money out of the guy, and sent him a licensing agreement demanding a share of any revenue he makes, but wants him to back pay for the past year or so, plus a non-refundable $5,000 fee. It also refuses to give him any notice as to when the schedule changes. Given the MTA's claims that they're against the app because people might miss the train, the fact that they're fighting him over being alerted to scheduling changes seems to make clear that the MTA is lying.

It's difficult to see how the MTA has much of a legal leg to stand on here, but they don't seem to have a problem being a bully against a developer who's actually helping riders have a better experience.

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wirelessjb writes to share that after a resounding defeat at the hands of Microsoft in the first major browser war of the mid 1990s, Marc Andreessen is looking to have another go at the market by backing a new startup called "RockMelt." "Mr. Andreessen suggested the new browser would be different, saying that most other browsers had not kept pace with the evolution of the Web, which had grown from an array of static Web pages into a network of complex Web sites and applications. 'There are all kinds of things that you would do differently if you are building a browser from scratch,' Mr. Andreessen said. RockMelt was co-founded by Eric Vishria and Tim Howes, both former executives at Opsware, a company that Mr. Andreessen co-founded and then sold to Hewlett-Packard in 2007 for about $1.6 billion. Mr. Howes also worked at Netscape with Mr. Andreessen."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While this probably isn't a huge surprise, given the fact that the Justice Department is stocked with former lawyers for the entertainment industry (and because it's filed similar briefs before), but it's still worth noting that the Justice Department has filed a brief in the Jammie Thomas lawsuit, in support of the constitutionality of the $1.92 million fine (and, no, none of the former RIAA lawyers are signatories to the brief, though you have to imagine their "expertise" was consulted). The reasoning is quite troubling and appears to include some serious revisionist history.

First, what's stunning is that the brief claims the awards are perfectly constitutional because it is not "so severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportioned to the offense [or] obviously unreasonable." Really? It seems that an awful lot of people find the idea of being forced to hand over $80,000 per song without any evidence that it was ever actually shared by anyone is severe and oppressive to the point that it's disproportionate to the offense and quite obviously unreasonable. I mean, this is a woman who wanted to listen to her favorite bands, and she now has to pay nearly $2 million. How can anyone claim that's not "severe and oppressive" in relation to the actual "harm" done?

Second, the brief claims that the damages should be much more than the $1.29 price per song found on iTunes, because it "ignores the potential multiplying effect of peer-to-peer file-sharing." Except, if that were the case, shouldn't the plaintiffs been required to show that these songs were actually shared? And should Thomas also be liable for the actions of anyone else she shared the songs with? That seems to go quite beyond what the law states.

Third, and perhaps most troubling, is the Justice Department's sneaky little claim that the statutory rates are obviously fair for file sharing, because they were put in place in 1999, with the explicit statement from Congress that these numbers were there because of internet file sharing. That sounds good, but ignores the fact that this little change in the law was pushed almost entirely by entertainment industry lobbyists (the same folks who now run the Justice Department!) to protect their dying business model, rather than through any empirical evidence. The real original purpose of statutory rates had nothing to do with punishing personal, non-commercial use, but were very much about dealing with commercial harm.

It's a neat, but immensely troubling, trick by the entertainment industry. Sneak through bizarre and totally unsupported legislation through a Congress that's never met a stronger copyright law it didn't love, using your high paid lobbyists. Then, get those same lobbyists appointed to the Justice Department to defend it against Constitutional challenges. Regulatory capture at its finest.

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DikSeaCup writes "Arbor Network's Jose Nazario, an expert on botnets, discovered what looks to be the first reported case of hackers using Twitter to control botnets. 'Hackers have long used IRC chat rooms to control botnets, and have continually used clever technologies, such as peer-to-peer strategies, to counter efforts to track, disrupt and sometimes decapitate the bots. Perhaps what's surprising then is that it's taken so long for hackers to take Twitter to the dark side.' The next step, of course, is to code the tweets in such a way that they aren't so suspicious."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apparently some porn studios haven't realized what a disaster the RIAA's "sue 'em all" strategy has been. A bunch of US- and Japan-based porn studios have supposedly decided to sue 10,000 individuals in South Korea for uploading unauthorized porn. Do they actually think this will help their business models? On top of this, they're asking the police to investigate as well, hoping to get some of the lawsuits to lead to jailtime. I'm sure that South Korean citizens are happy their gov't signed a "free trade" agreement with the US that included a bunch of provisions put there by US entertainment industry lobbyists, resulting in these strict new copyright laws.

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Interesting sequence of events.

Marc Canter writes a blog post asking if we should trust Marc Andreessen, after the hole Netscape left its users in when they sold out to AOL. He makes some good points about the browser, esp the part about how they blamed Microsoft for their demise. I think they could have survived it, if they had gotten their software act together. Instead we had five or six years of Microsoft dominance of the browser market, and those were not good years for the web.

But Canter overlooked one thing, without Netscape there never would have been RSS. I said this in a tweet. "Really???" asks Rbonni. Really.

Here's the sequence of events that led to RSS 0.91. Obviously this is from my point of view, but all these things did happen and all were necessary for RSS to become what it is today.

1. In 1997, as an experiment to satisfy Adam Bosworth, who was pestering me (jn a nice way) about XML, I produced a syndication of my "news site" -- Scripting News. I called the format scriptingNews format.

2. In 1998, almost nothing happened with this format. A few experiments, but it looked like it was going nowhere. I had other XML-based projects that appeared to have much more promise.

3. Then in 1999, Netscape comes out with RSS 0.90. It does most of what scriptingNews does, and a few things it didn't do. And vice versa. At first I was upset, they had mostly ignored my work, been incompatible when it would have (imho) been easier to be compatible.

4. Then I did one of the smartest things I ever did. I surrendered unconditionally. They didn't even ask me to. I adopted their format. Wholesale. Discarded my old format. The way I figured it, I had nothing to lose and everything to gain. Because, and this is the key point -- they had support from content companies, notably Wired, Salon, Red Herring and Motley Fool. In one step, swallowing my pride, little old Scripting News and all the allied sites that used my software, could join the club. So I did it. Goodbye scriptingNews, hello RSS. (It's a little more complicated, I left out a few steps, but this is the net-effect.)

Maybe some other BigCo would have come along and do what they did, but with the benefit of hindsight, none did. It was years before the other tech companies adopted RSS, they came in after the publishing industry, led by the New York Times. It seems that scriptingNews format would have continued doing nothing. I could claim to have invented it, but no one would have cared.

Fact is, Netscape did something unusual there, something good. They were a big company that actually stuck their neck out and did something worthwhile. Did Andreessen play a role in it? I have no idea. But the company he started did it, so if he takes responsibility for the bad stuff, seems he ought to get credit for the good stuff.

Todd says:

Here's Robert trying to flatten a warped 78 record by heating it in the oven. It's a difficult process, and one that can easily destroy the record as well. His efforts were unsuccessful this time, and we're asking you for your help. Robert is looking for this 78 record by DOC HOPKINS — "OLD JOE CLARK" and "21 years". Released on Paramount 577. He needs a clean copy, Any leads would be appreciated.

R. Crumb tries to fix a warped 78 record by melting it flat in the oven

All photo by Ed Troxell

There are good days and bad days here at the MAKE offices. Mostly good, although sometimes the days can be long and very, very busy -- like 2 days before the next issue goes to the printer or a week before Maker Faire.

The day Captain Yo came to visit was a good day.

The Captain had read that one of our talented engineering interns, Eric Chu, was a yo-yo enthusiast and since he lived nearby, he'd contacted us to arrange a meeting. We'd, of course, invited him over to meet Eric and show us his wares.

Captain Yo (aka Don Watson) is an author, inventor and award-winning yo-yo player. His visit to our offices turned into a show-and-tell, a physics lesson, and a performance or two. At first just Eric and he were conversing, then slowly but surely more and more of us in the office came into the conversation to have a look inside his several yo-yo cases; listen to a story or two about past events and his inventions; and glimpse a fancy trick or two.

All in the name of work!

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Nice story at CNN.... Dumpster diving + computer = 100 trees-

Jude Ndambuki teaches high school chemistry, but when he's not in class, you might find him Dumpster diving for discarded computers. For the past eight years, the Kenya native has been refurbishing computers, printers and other electronic educational resources otherwise headed for landfills, then sending them to grateful students back home. "The children in Kenya have very few resources; even a pencil is very hard to get," said Ndambuki, 51, who lives in the New York City suburb of Dobbs Ferry. "Being one of the kids who actually experienced very dire poverty in Kenya, I feel any part that I can play to make the life of kids better, I better do it."

In NYC alone I see at least a dozen+ computers *per day* in the trash when I go on long walks.

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Our Challenges system has become increasingly popular since its launch eight months ago but we've always said we would continue to develop it to make it more useful and fun to use. In response to the brand- or technique-specific challenges that are now being created, we've developed a system to link those challenges with their relevant forums. Associated challenges will be given greater prominence within the communities that use those forums.

Our Challenges system has become increasingly popular since its launch eight months ago but we've always said we would continue to develop it to make it more useful and fun to use. In response to the brand- or technique-specific challenges that are now being created, we've developed a system to link those challenges with their relevant forums. Associated challenges will be given greater prominence within the communities that use those forums.

puroresu writes "Scientific American reports on the efforts of Selmer Bringsjord and his team at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who have been attempting to develop an AI possessed of an interesting character trait, pure evil. From the article, 'He and his research team began developing their computer representation of evil by posing a series of questions beginning with the basics: name, age, sex, etc., and progressing to inquiries about this fictional person's beliefs and motivations. This exercise resulted in "E," a computer character first created in 2005 to meet the criteria of Bringsjord's working definition of evil. Whereas the original E was simply a program designed to respond to questions in a manner consistent with Bringsjord's definition, the researchers have since given E a physical identity: It's a relatively young, white man with short black hair and dark stubble on his face.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MAKE Vol. 19 features a special section on robots. Learn how to make a model plane with an autopilot and a small robot with a built-in brain. We'll also show you how to make a comfortable plywood chair, a bicyclist's vest that shows how fast you're going, and projects that introduce you to servomotors. All this, and much more in MAKE Vol. 19

With iPod rumor season upon us (videocams? microphones for VoIP calls!), it's time to gaze back fondly on those quaint iPods of yestermonth. And the quaintest has got to be Mister Jalopy's World's Biggest iPod hack, as seen in MAKE, Volume 04.

Who doesn't love MJ's fat little iPod (is that a 3rd Gen?) grafted into a lovely 1940s radio cabinet, complete with a Panasonic turntable and Mac mini to rip old vinyl to MP3s, and the original working radio buttons hacked to control the iPod. Journalist and author Kurt Andersen, the host of public radio's Studio 360 (and former editor of Spy magazine), recently visited Mister Jalopy's Garage for an interview and grabbed this video of the World's Biggest iPod in action.

More at Hooptyrides.com.

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Our friend Paul Krassner wrote a piece for The Huffington Post about his Woodstock experience.

While The Who were performing, [Abbie Hoffman] went up on stage with the intention of informing the audience that John Sinclair, manager of the MC5 and leader of the White Panther Party, was serving ten years in prison for the possession of two joints; that this was really the politics behind the music.  

Before Abbie could get his message across, Peter Townshend transformed his guitar into a tennis racket and smashed him on the head with a swift backhand.  Townshend had assumed that Abbie was just another crazed fan.  When The Who played at Fillmore East the previous week, a plainclothes cop rushed on stage and tried to grab the mike.  He intended to warn the audience that there was a fire next door and the theater had to be cleared, but he was able to do so only after Townshend kneed him in the balls.

On the 40th Anniversary of Woodstock

reporter writes to tell us that researchers are claiming to have discovered a genetic mutation that allows people to manage with much less sleep. One of the researchers hopes that this could lead to artificially reducing the amount of sleep required in your average human. "Although the mutation has been identified in only two people, the power of the research stems from the fact that the shortened sleep effect was replicated in mouse and fruit-fly studies. As a result, the research now gives scientists a clearer sense of where to look for genetic traits linked to sleep patterns."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hollywood really never learns, does it? Following 20th Century Fox's decision to try to stop Redbox from getting movies to rent via its kiosks (to which Redbox has responded by suing Fox), Warner Bros. has joined in as well, but isn't just trying to stop Redbox, but Netflix, too. It wants to force both companies not to rent DVDs until a month after the DVDs are actually released... unless the companies agree to share revenue from the rentals.

There's basically no legal basis for this move, which would only serve to piss off consumers (yet again). These companies are free to buy the DVDs and rent them out, but the studios want a cut of every rental. It's sort of like video game makes demanding a cut of every used game sale, or an artist demanding a cut every time a piece of his artwork is sold. It's entitlement society all over again. Nothing should happen without the original company getting paid. What they don't realize is how this limits them. Netflix and Redbox become less interested in promoting Warner Bros.' movies, because they're now a lot more expensive to those companies. Instead, Hollywood is handing incentives over to these companies to promote other films that don't demand their tithe.

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Leader of the Danish golden age!

Thanks to Google, hundreds of millions of people are today celebrating Hans Christian Ørsted's birthday without having much of a clue who he is … so who exactly was he? ... Probably not even the physics geeks remember much about Hans Christian Ørsted, although Google's Doodle logo illustrates his key discovery. That is, if you run a current through a wire – in this case, from the battery at the front – then the electricity creates a magnetic field, which will deflect a compass needle. Thus the study of electromagnetism was born, and it's the basis of a lot of modern life: it led to the development of electricity generators and transformers. Remember that next time you flick a light switch.

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Ars Technica is reporting that domain tasting has been all but eradicated now that the full penalty for excessive cancellations has taken effect. "In 2008, ICANN decided to act. It allowed domain registrars to withdraw as many as 10 percent of their total registrations; they would face penalties for anything above that. Initially, ICANN adopted a budget that included a charge of $0.20 for each withdrawal above the limit, which was in effect from June 2008 to July of this year. Later, it adopted an official policy that raised the penalty to $6.75, the cost of a .org registration; that took effect in July 2009. The results have been dramatic. Even under the low-cost budget provisions, domain withdrawals during the grace period dropped to 16 percent of what they had been prior to its adoption. Once the heavy penalties took hold, the withdrawal rate dropped to under half a percent."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's certainly a lot of concern at universities these days about how some students may be using modern technology to cheat in some manner or another, but does that ability to cheat require a change to the grading system? Apparently Simon Fraser University believes so. It's instituting a special new failing grade for students caught cheating: FD. They say it will only be used in cases of repeat offenders caught doing things considered to be egregious cheating -- and that it will only stay on the transcript for two years. It's an interesting idea, but is it really all that different than a typical failing grade? Will students act differently because the potential of a temporary FD grade instead of an F? And if it's a case of a repeat offender taking part in egregious cheating, why not just kick them out and refuse to give them a degree?

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Fifty years ago this summer, Sir Christopher Cockerell publicly demonstrated the hovercraft. The black and white photo at the top shows the curious craft, called the SR-N1, on the Thames at Westminster, UK. Fortean Times celebrates the birth of the "flying saucer" and also its, er, human-powered descendent, the Steam Boat Willy. Watch the video above and give the Steam Boat Willy project an A+ for effort. Here's the project leader Chris Roper quoted in Fortean Times:

“You don’t need to be an athlete to hover it. Everyone who has tried has succeeded in becoming airborne under their own leg power in this craft. It’s still at the prototype stage, and the craft is currently being tested, developed and improved. It weighs in at 56lb [25kg] empty, and has carried a 58lb [26kg] girl as a passenger. Is it a boat, a bike, a plane or an ‘air-car’? It is an Unclassifiable Flying Object.”

"Unclassifiable Flying Objects"

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 February, 2009, I approached Steven Pinker, a deep thinker about linguistics and cognitive science who fishes where the two streams flow together, with a request for an interview. I was on assignment for the cultural studies journal Cabinet, writing a personal essay that would intertwine my own fraught relationship to the notion of intelligence with a historically informed critique of the cultural politics of the IQ test, specifically the Stanford-Binet and its successor the Wechsler.

A professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University (until 2003, he taught in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT), Pinker has popularized his theories of language and cognition through articles in the popular press and via critically acclaimed books such as The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, and The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. The furthest thing from a vulgar Darwinian---he rejects the term "genetic determinism"as a social-constructionist slur---Pinker is nonetheless a vigorous opponent of what he contends is the ideologically inspired insistence (often from the academic left, he maintains, and typically from those in the humanities rather than the hard sciences) that we are exclusively products of cultural influences, rather than, as he puts it, "an evolutionarily shaped human nature."In his popular critique of this assumption, The Blank Slate, he takes up the sword for evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics, and cognitive science against social constructionism.

Exhaustively knowledgeable about the science of cognition, and a foeman who gives as good as he gets (if not better) in the nature-versus-nurture culture wars, Pinker seemed the perfect foil for some of my ideas about the IQ test. Thus, I was delighted when he agreed to an informal e-mail exchange that lasted through much of February and into early March. I was equally chagrined when I had to inform him that his thoughtfully considered, sharply argued quotes didn't make it into my published essay. Happily, my guestblogger stint offered the perfect solution: publish our spirited exchange as a Boing Boing exclusive. I owe Professor Pinker a debt of gratitude for allowing me to publish our interview on Boing Boing. I'm very much the beneficiary of his deeply insightful, eloquently argued ideas; the privilege of sharpening my ideas on the whetstone of his intellect is a rare one, and I'm delighted to share that opportunity with Boing Boing's readers...

Mark Dery: I'm interested in the relationship between a facility with language---eloquence, by any other name---and intelligence. I'm especially interested in the question of whether people possessed of a certain facility with language can use language as a sort of simulation engine to create the illusion of a greater intelligence than they actually possess, whether through eloquence or, more crudely, the strategic use of a large vocabulary (specifically, arcane words or rarified jargon), highbrow allusions, and the like.

Thanks for taking the time to read and consider this query.

Steven Pinker: Unfortunately, there has not been much systematic work on the relation between language fluency and psychometric measures of intelligence. There are some neuropsychological and genetic syndromes in which retarded children and adults can speak deceptively well, fooling onlookers into thinking that there is nothing wrong with them. I discuss one case of hydrocephalus, and another of a child with Williams Syndrome, in chapter 2 of The Language Instinct.

Within the normal range, the word "glib"pretty much captures the common-sense intuition that it is possible to be verbally fluent without saying anything intelligent. On the other hand, even if fluency, high vocabulary and the like can momentarily fool listeners into overestimating the person's intelligence (or at least the quality of his thought, which is not perfectly correlated with intelligence---smart people can say foolish things), I suspect that the vast majority of verbally fluent people are also intelligent by standard measures. Vocabulary, as you probably know, is highly g-loaded, and on average, people who test well in verbal intelligence also test well in all other measures of intelligence (that is the basis for "g").

On your cultural critique of IQ tests: I'm not sure if you plan to reiterate the arguments of Stephen Jay Gould in The Mismeasure of Man (and similar critiques from Leon Kamin and others) but I assume you know that his arguments were considered highly inaccurate (to the point of dishonesty) by the scientists who study intelligence even when the book was published, and by now have been pretty much discredited.

MD: I take your point about glibness, although I'd argue that, in popular parlance, the usage implies a certain mendaciousness or sophistry or flipness---a use of language to hoodwink. Then again, perhaps that's just the Judeo-Christian mistrust of the silver tongue reasserting itself: Satan the special pleader, and all that. You write, "I suspect that the vast majority of verbally fluent people are also intelligent by standard measures."But, as you note, there's no hard data to support that presumption, correct? Obviously, your gut instinct is surely better than virtually anyone's, on this subject, but I wanted to be sure I had that right. By the way, mightn't the phenomenon I've described be a species of savantism, at least in theory? Or do I misunderstand savantism?

As for my critique of IQ tests, I'm not out to mailbox-whack the IQ test, although I am inclined to believe that no psychometric instrument is immune to the intellectual climate of the moment that gave birth to it, or uninflected by the prejudices and presumptions of the culture around it. In a previous essay, I delved deep into the MMPI, researching it in depth and, ultimately, taking the test. I was simply flabbergasted, and not a little alarmed, to discover that such a risibly biased artifact---a perfectly preserved fossil of antediluvian attitudes toward women and gays---was still in use in corporate and military contexts. It was like learning that Harvard medical school's core curriculum still included mesmerism and phrenology!

In any event, I am aware that the battle lines are drawn between social constructionists and genetic determinists. I believe we can give Darwin his due while rendering unto Gould what is his.

SP: There are no hard data (that I know of) showing that verbal glibness or sophistry is correlated with general intelligence, mainly because there are no standardized tests (that I know of) for verbal glibness or sophistry. There are measures of "verbal fluency"(e.g., how many synonyms a person can come up in some unit of time), and they are correlated with intelligence, but that's not exactly the same thing.

Retarded people with excellent language fluency are generally not thought of as savants because their abilities do not exceed that of normals, in the same sense as, say, autistic people who can do lightning-fast calculation or calendrical computation. There are some autistics who seem to be "savants"at acquiring multiple languages, but again that is not the same as silver-tongued patter.

It is not accurate to write that "the battle lines are drawn between social constructionists and genetic determinists."When it comes to psychological traits, there are no "genetic determinists"(i.e., people who believe that genes determine psychological traits such as intelligence and personality with probability = 1). The term is a debating tactic designed to misdescribe those who note that genes probabilistically influence psychological traits---that is, it is a crude form of straw-manning.

MD: Surely the sheer size of something as unsubtle as vocabulary could be quantified, and perhaps even its "breadth,"i.e., the extent to which esoteric words are represented within that data set (although esoteric is, of course, an inescapably subjective judgment)? Obviously, determining how many synonyms a person can come up with in a limited time period may measure fluency, though it may not sound the depths of the subject's vocabulary or map its outer bounds, if that makes sense. Is there a psychometric test that accurately gauges vocabulary size in, say, the same way that some such tests gauge mnemonic ability? In the popular mind, a large vocabulary is shorthand for being smart; hence the tendency to characterize eggheads as people who use arcane or polysyllabic words while the rest of us stumble along with garden-variety vocabularies. Hence, too, the ever-expanding pop-psych business literature of "vocabulary building,"which attempts to arm the corporate warrior with "word power."Both presume that words = smarts; the bigger the word, the smarter the speaker. (Of course, class animosities in American culture, manifest in the American preference for "plain speaking"and g-droppin' "tough talk,"also ensure that public speakers with big vocabularies are tarred with the charge of elitism---Palin and McCain tried to make that charge stick to the more verbally fluent Obama, in the recent race.) Of course, popular perceptions are hardly hard science, so the connection may simply be a figment of the mass imagination. My point is that we may be able to isolate testable aspects of verbal ability---vocabulary---as opposed to glibness, which as you say may not be testable. And we may be able to isolate vocabulary in a manner that tests not only for the ability to use it, on the fly, but that also gauges its size and breadth (variety).

Interesting to hear you say that "when it comes to psychological traits, there are no 'genetic determinists' (i.e., people who believe that genes determine psychological traits such as intelligence and personality with probability = 1)."I just finished interviewing a source who told me, unequivocally, that "about 50% of our personalities"is attributable to genes. Clearly, there are those who are pushing the position beyond the one you've outlined.

In any event, point taken that your use of genetic influences isn't simplistically deterministic. But your statement that I should be wary of Gould's Mismeasure---specifically, the pre-emptive nature of that statement, coming as it did before I had expressed any affinity with Gould's ideas---only reaffirms my perception that the culture war rages on, even within the secured perimeters of "value-neutral" hard science. I'm no postmodern practitioner of science studies who thinks empirical truth (small "t") is some Baudrillardian mirage (although I do believe that the Alan Sokal-style mischaracterization of the postmodern position as the belief that there's "no such thing as reality"is, to use your phrase, "a crude form of straw-manning"). But neither do I think that science, in everyday practice, can possibly remain untouched by the cultural that surrounds it or the historical moment in which it is embedded. The history of science, from social Darwinism to eugenics, Victorian "cures"for "hysterical women"to the midcentury vogue for lobotomies, is instructive, I think. Let me be emphatic: I am not, repeat not, using the cheap, guilt-by-association tactic to tar your work or the work of any who reject Gould, here. Rather, I'm simply noting that both sides of the debate see their positions as based on incontrovertible scientific evidence and their opponents as blinded by ideology. My position is that ideology is part of the cultural air we breathe; that humans are creatures of nature and culture; and that we must give both Darwin and the devil (Gould?) their due.

Of course, we part company on the question of human nature. By my lights, nothing could be more unnatural than the human animal. The naked ape is unquestionably a product of evolution, to be sure, and much of what we once thought was imbued in us by nurture or the wider society is turning out to be genetically influenced. Yet, at the same time, culture is nature, for naked apes, and is only becoming more so, as we live more and more of our lives immersed, headfirst, in the world on the other side of our screens, coming up for air at ever more rare intervals.

But now I'm talking poetry.

Thanks for hearing me out, nonetheless.

SP: Vocabulary generally makes up a substantial portion of verbal IQ tests, as well as the verbal component of SAT and GRE. My understanding is that it correlates highly with other measures of intelligence. Indeed, there is a quickie IQ test called the Wordsum that consists simply of ten multiple-choice vocabulary questions, and it correlates > .8 with IQ measured by traditional tests. Likewise, a commonly used test for intelligence in children consists of matching words to pictures; again it correlates well with other measures. There are several possible reasons why this could be so: rarer vocabulary involves more sophisticated concepts; learning words from context requires powerful inferential abilities; smart people read more and are exposed to more words. I don't know enough of this literature to know whether any have been confirmed or disconfirmed.

The degree to which words are "esoteric"is easily quantified. The frequency of words in large corpora (occurrences per million words of text) have been tallied, and are routinely used in psycholinguistics experiments.

If your informant literally said that "50% of our personalities is attributable to genes,"he or she does not understand the concept of heritability, which quantifies the percentage of variance in a trait, not percentage of a trait. If he or she said that 50% of the variation in personality is attributable to variation in genes, then he or she is not a genetic determinist, because 50% is different from 100%. No one who understands the concept of heritability and is familiar with the past hundred years of data in behavioral genetics is a genetic determinist when it comes to psychological traits. (When it comes to certain diseases, such as Huntington's, genetic determinism is correct.)

My own view, and I suspect that of most scientists, is that ideology is a nuisance that good science is designed to work around. It's like personal ego, financial conflicts of interest, methodological sloppiness, cognitive limitations, and other barriers to discovering the truth---obstacles that make doing science nontrivial, and that call for countermeasures such as peer review, open criticism, academic freedom, testability and falsifiability, and others. The fact that science has undeniably progressed, both intellectually and practically, is evidence that those countermeasures have been successful, though of course they are not perfect and cannot act instantaneously.

I also find that many specific examples alleging that scientific theories are products of culture and ideology are pretty flimsy---after-the-fact just-so stories that aren't rigorously tested against alternative explanations. Worst of all, I've never heard of anyone admitting that his own claims are culturally biased; it's always "relativism for the other guy."

MD: Yes, science always intends to work around ideology, the weasel word here being "intends."Peer review, open criticism, academic freedom, testability and falsifiability are all intended as guarantors of good science, and as a true son of the Enlightenment, I place much faith in them---but not all my faith, since peer review is only as good as the peers involved, and entire cultures can suffer from ideological blind spots, prejudices and presumptions that are the birthright of anyone born at that time, in that place, in that socioeconomic class or gender or whatever. Peer review, open criticism, academic freedom, testability and falsifiability were---more or less---alive and well in the '20s, weren't they? And yet the scientific establishment's best minds toasted the bright future promised by eugenics and state legislatures followed suit, mandating the forced sterilization of felons whose subnormal criminal minds, as any good scientist knew, were hereditary.

Regarding your assertion that "many specific examples alleging that scientific theories are products of culture and ideology are pretty flimsy---after-the-fact just-so stories that aren't rigorously tested against alternative explanations": How, then, to explain the medical practices enumerated in my earlier letter? I'm not arguing that scientific theories are entirely products of culture; nor would I deny that they are less so now, happily, than they were in the past. Rather, I'm arguing something subtly different: that in everyday practice scientific theories have, at various historical junctures, borne the deeply embossed stamp of ideology.

In the past hundred and a half years, we've witnessed the dominance of scientific theories that even in their purely theoretical form, let alone everyday practice, were sharply etched with the prejudices and presumptions of the day. I've mentioned eugenics; I'll name a few others: the 1950s vogue, in psychotherapy, for dosing with antidepressants or institutionalizing housewives suffering from what Betty Friedan later called the Problem With No Name (a suicidal dissatisfaction with the role of the happy homemaker). Psychiatry and psychosurgery have been used, throughout their morally checkered history, to bring to heel women who were feminists avant la lettre, as well as political radicals and others who questioned the ideological assumptions of the world they were born into. "Science"decreed them aberrant, and "science"dealt with them, summarily. If pills didn't work, the electroshock room beckoned, or perhaps the leucotomist's pick. Another example: What peer-reviewed journals, open debate, and falsifiability claims prevented the pathologization and in many states criminalization of homosexuality, which was only removed from the DSM-II in 1973? Who, in the peer-reviewed medical journals and openly critical medical community, stood up (until very recently) to oppose the routine surgical "reassignment"of intersex (hermaphroditic) babies, at birth, to a single gender? To be sure, hermaphroditism is anomalous in the strictly statistical sense, but the reflexive assumption that the intersexed patient must be "normalized"with the knife---like the presumption that homosexual "deviance"must be psychopharmaceutically treated---is inarguably a cultural bias, soaked through with ideology. So, too, is the not uncommon tendency, in such cases, to "rationalize"the hermaphroditic male infant with the small but fully functional penis (and male reproductive system) into a female, on the presumption that a small penis is too unendurable a humiliation for any man to bear, in American society. These are only a few examples of science corrupted by cultural bias---ideology, by any other name. If sexism, homophobia, and culturally bounded notions of the normative aren't to blame for the lamentable chapters in American medicine I've just detailed, then what alternate explanation would you posit?

As for your assertion, "I've never heard of anyone admitting that his own claims are culturally biased---it's always "relativism for the other guy." Well, I'll happily admit that my oppositional politics incline me to be wary of institutional power, whether it wears a mortarboard, a white smock, or a power suit with the requisite American flag lapel-pin. I try to correct for that bias by honoring reason, logic, empirical evidence, and the scientific method. But I'll be the first to admit that our blind spots are, by definition, unknown to us. This is precisely why even science needs its watchdogs, and why a few of them must not be peers.

In any event, this fascinating debate was intended to be a preamble to questions about the history of, or scientific validity of, the IQ test. Beyond your own work, and Gould's, who else would you suggest I read regarding the history of, controversies surrounding, and scientific validity of either the Stanford-Binet or the Wechsler (which I gather has largely if not entirely superseded the Stanford-Binet)? In IQ: A Smart History of a Failed Idea, Stephen Murdoch is quite critical of the Wechsler. I wondered if you were familiar with his critique. (Interestingly, he doesn't cite Gould!)

SP: Thanks for the explication, but I'm not persuaded by the examples. Even putting aside the fact that eugenics is not a scientific theory but a political policy, I don't see any evidence that the practices and policies you mentioned are connected to the ideology of the times (as opposed to being examples of stupidity, ego, error, ambition, unanticipated consequences, bad science, and so on ). Eugenics was popular among the robber-baron right and among the progressive left (e.g., Emma Goldman, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski, John Maynard Keynes, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Margaret Sanger); was institutionalized in the American South and in Scandinavia; today it's practiced in Singapore and often rediscovered by ingenuous undergraduates. I don't see any ideological common denominator, or identifiable ideological change that correlates with its rise and fall in popularity. (As far as I can tell, the main reason for its current taboo status is the historical experience of Nazism.) The same with the medical practices you describe: most were abandoned when people became aware of the harms they led to, or were replaced by better techniques; in some cases, they are still used when the evidence suggests they can be helpful (e.g., electroshock). Some of these changes were driven by explicit moral argumentation (e.g., in the case of sex reassignment surgery or the classification of homosexuality as a "disorder") which persuaded people to change their practices. And yes, the mechanisms of open disagreement, review, moral argumentation, examination of hypotheses in the light of evidence, and so on, were effective in changing these practices; that's why lobotomies were abandoned after a couple of decades, whereas trephination, exorcism, prayer, etc. lasted for millennia.

My point isn't that science (or more generally, rational and evidence-driven argumentation, of which science is a part) could ever prevent people from trying out stupid and evil things. It's that I don't see the evidence that these stupid and evil things are inevitably, or even usually, products of the surrounding social and political ideology. Maybe they are sometimes, but that has to be demonstrated in comparisons with simpler, alternative explanations, by getting independent assessments of the prevailing ideological climate and showing that they predict which kind of bad ideas arise in a given period. The tendency I see in the science-studies mindset to treat ideology as the self-evident, only thinkable explanation.

My own books are not about IQ or IQ testing, so I don't go over the history myself. The Bell Curve, though treated as toxic by many intellectuals, has some clear historical discussion, and the journalist Daniel Seligman (who died a couple of weeks ago) wrote a history of intelligence testing a while back. An interesting article on the original embrace of intelligence testing by progressives was written by Adrian Wooldridge: "Bell Curve liberals," New Republic, February 27, 1995. Linda Gottfredsen has documented the predictive power of IQ tests in her work, and Camilla Benbow and David Lubinski have many papers on the predictive power of high SAT scores in their sample of people who were given the test in early adolescence. J. B. Carroll has written a number of books and edited handbooks on intelligence, and I suspect that one or more contain histories of the field. Ian Deary is probably the most active researcher today on neural correlates of intelligence as measured by IQ tests, and Robert Plomin the most active researcher on its heritability. I also have citations to a number of reviews of Gould's book that challenge his prosecutorial history of testing:

Blinkhorn, S. 1982. Review of S. J. Gould's "The mismeasure of man." Nature, 296, 506.
Jensen, A. R. 1982. The debunking of scientific fossils and straw persons: Review of The Mismeasure of Man. Contemporary Education Review, 1, 121-135.
Rushton, J. P. 1996. Race, intelligence, and the brain: The errors and omissions of the "revised" edition of S. J. Gould's The mismeasure of man. Personality and Individual Differences, 23, 169-180.
Samelson, F. 1982. Intelligence and some of its testers (Review of S. J. Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man"). Science, 215, 656-657.

I'm by no means an expert the particulars of individual IQ tests. The Wechsler strikes me as pretty cheesy, but that's part of the scientific interest of it: you can measure intelligence with all kinds of disparate, fishy, and amateurish-looking tests, and they all correlate with one another---Wechsler, Stanford, Raven's, SAT, Wordsum, Wonderlich, and even a three-item test devised by Shane Frederickson at MIT. Basically, any test that anyone devises that depends on what common-sense would call "intelligence"is going to pick up the same thing. This is part of the pattern in which the various subtests of any IQ tests correlate with one another, and have surprising predictive power in real-world outcomes. All of this tells us that a large part of intelligence consists of some big, robust, unsubtle dimension of individual variation. It's a bit like height: you don't need lasers to document that some people are taller than others.

The hypothesis that "while IQ is highly heritable, the environment also has massive effects"is the consensus these days, if by "environment"you mean "not the genes."It's a simple restatement of the fact that heritability of IQ is less than 1. The concession that "IQ is highly heritable"is quite a departure from the Kamin-Lewontin-Rose-Gould position: Kamin wrote in 1974, and reiterated in 1984, that "there exist no data which should lead a prudent man to accept the hypothesis that IQ test scores are in any degree heritable."

The problem is in identifying those "massive environmental effects."This is a complex question (see, e.g., the "Children"chapter in The Blank Slate). At any one historical period, and holding culture more or less constant (e.g., more-or-less middle class), the 50% or so of the variance that is not genetic (the "environmental"effect) is, as far as I can tell, due to random chance, probably in prenatal or early postnatal development of the brain; it doesn't correlate with anything in the environment you can measure.

On top of that there has been an environmental factor, probably now petering out, that increased IQ scores across the board about a standard deviation between the 1920s and the recent present (this is the Flynn effect). In addition, low-SES [socioeconomic status] kids may show bigger environmental effects than the middle class, and in addition to that, there is some factor that causes black people to score a standard deviation lower than white people, on average. Flynn used to suggest that whatever caused the Flynn effect (no one really knows) might also cause the B-W difference, but has backed off from that claim, since the B-W difference is in g, and the Flynn effect is in a slightly different constellation of mental abilities. I believe that while IQ variation has a substantial genetic component, there is enough non-genetic variance in addition that the B-W difference could be completely environmental.

MD: Respectfully, I think you're moving the goalpost---defining as "science"whatever seems most defensibly untainted by ideology. To say that eugenics was political policy, not scientific theory, is to perform a forensic sleight-of-hand, not to mention some tactical revisionism of inconvenient historical truths. I'd argue that eugenics was scientific theory that, in time, influenced political policy. If you're arguing it wasn't scientific theory, then how do we account for its defenders among the ranks of scientists, from Francis Galton to Julian Huxley to Charles Davenport to John Watson? The historical record amply evidences the vocal support of prominent scientists; as well, the racial theories undergirding eugenics were widely perceived, by popular audiences as incontrovertible fact: "Galton said it, I believe it, that settles it."Eugenics robed itself in the cultural authority of the white lab coat, legitimated its discourse with the languages of population genetics and evolutionary biology, and pleaded its case in the statehouse and the state fair based on the scientific soundness of its social program. It's a riddle to me how eugenics could have so many scientists among its defenders---claiming the mantle of science, employing the rhetoric of science, and justifying its social program in the name of science---and not believe itself to be scientific theory, nor be popularly received as such. Perhaps you can help me unriddle it.

As for the progressives you count among the company of the guilty, you'll get no argument from me on that point. But if you're arguing that the left and right are equal-opportunity eugenics offenders, and that this proves there is no "ideological common denominator,"I can't agree. Jack London and Jacob Riis were both progressives, yet both bore the stamp of social Darwinism. Are you arguing that a culture, in a given historical moment, isn't governed by prevailing ideas? Or are you conceding that, yet arguing that science stands outside culture and history, untouched by either? Perhaps the tripwire, here, is the word "ideology."I use it in the Marxist/post-Marxist sense, meaning: the hegemonic worldview of the power elite (as opposed to the narrower, purely political definition).

In that sense, I believe that eugenics was part of the warp and woof of Western thought, expressing itself in the 19th century as social Darwinism and even earlier in the notion of the Great Chain of Being. The "ideological common denominator,"throughout much of this period, is the white, patriarchal, Eurocentric, Christian worldview. Ideology is the air we breathe---the unconsidered (because self-evidently "true") prejudices and presumptions that inflect our view of ourselves and the world around us. Hierarchical dualisms (man/woman, self/Other, culture/nature, white/black, Christian/heathen, civilized/savage, empire/colony, et. al.) have structured Western epistemology for centuries; only recently have they been called into question by critical theorists and activist intellectuals who've exposed and interrogated their philosophical foundations, and the moral and ethical implications of those foundations.

The a priori assumptions that permeated the historical moments in which social Darwinism and eugenics flourished were profoundly ideological in that they manifestly served the interests of power. Ideology is the theology of power. Which is why intellectuals on both the right and left swelled the ranks of the eugenicists. Slice that stat another way, substituting class for political consciousness, and you'll find that nearly all of its adherents were white, upper-middle-class or upper class Americans and Europeans---the very flower of the ruling class. Class makes happy bedfellows of political foes, sometimes. Yes, the Third Reich made racial hygiene the untouchable third rail of public discourse, but many of its devotees---including its apologists among credentialed scientists, simply found more palatable ways to articulate such ideas, or to promote such programs. of course, you'll still find indefatigable adherents among those who consider themselves to be both members of the cognitive elite and the socioeconomic elite, some of whom are even indiscreet enough to out themselves as eugenics sympathists in front of a live microphone. I'm thinking of poor, dotty old James Watson. Oddly, it's only ever white people, most of them men, most of them upper class, who exhibit such sympathies. Women, blacks, and especially black women are curiously underrepresented among their number. Which would argue my point: that this pseudoscientific cant, legitimating the evolutionarily ordained superiority of the white, European male, is the theology of power, a theology that even some scientists ardently espoused, when the world was a little younger.

SP: Actually, the characterization of "science"that differentiates it from ideology in the case of eugenics goes back at least a century. G. E. Moore, in his famous paper introducing "the naturalistic fallacy,"specifically cited eugenics as the paradigm case of illegitimately leaping from an "is"to an "ought."And that's the criterion I was appealing to. Eugenics is not a theory of how anything works or how it came to be ("is"); it's a prescription for how to improve society ("ought"). Yes, I know, I know, postmodernists and Marxists reject the is/ought distinction, but that's one of the reasons I'm not a postmodernist or Marxist.

I'm not arguing that science, in practice, stands outside of culture and history, just that ideology, class, race, and gender interests are one subset of many sources of human folly and error, together with ego, greed, ignorance, cognitive limitations, illogic, the information available at a given historical period, and so on. I would argue that the institutions of secular reason (including science) are designed to overcome these nuisances, and that over the course of history, they more or less work, haltingly and unevenly. The exposition of the Marxist/postmodernist view that you provided in your email is well put and clear, but I think it's a dogma; it has swept the humanities, but has never been convincingly demonstrated (as I mentioned in a previous e-mail, the fact that our predecessors made blunders has numerous explanations, of which class/race/gender interests don't strike me as the most compelling). To take just one example, the intellectual opposition to eugenics, as I understand it, mainly came from the church, another group of privileged white males who subscribed to all those tenets of Western epistemology.

MD: For the record, I'm not a card-carrying Marxist, although I'm convinced that Marx is one of our most prescient, poetically eloquent critics of the cultural corrosions of capitalism. Likewise, I believe postmodernism has much to teach us about life in the Digital Age, a historical period whose salients include information overload, technological hyperacceleration, global capitalism, appropriation aesthetics (the tendency toward quotation and recombination that characterizes our visual culture, from Hollywood to the Web to gallery art). The assertion, popular in some quarters, that postmodernism entails believing there's no such thing as an empirical fact is in my opinion a straw man---the merest Sokal-ism.

But I digress.

What, in your opinion, accounts for the Flynn effect? Richard E. Nisbett has speculated that the upspike in IQ scores might have something to do with an increased emphasis, in elementary-school education, on math and related, problem-solving skills---the very skills the Wechsler measures.

SP: As I understand it, no one really knows what caused the Flynn Effect. The problem is that the effect itself has chugged along for more than 70 years, but no single putative cause ---literacy, schooling, nutrition, technology---has been increasing steadily over that time. Most likely there has been a mixture of small factors, overlapping in time, and all pushing in the same direction. They would include schooling and literacy (more so in the earlier part of the century), electronic gadgets with visual controls, and an increasing emphasis on abstract thinking in schools, businesses, and public life---what Flynn himself calls the spread of "scientific spectacles,"as reasoning styles from the sciences and social sciences have left the academy and permeated everyday discourse. This last factor is vague and hard to quantify, but may account for why the increases seem to be in the most abstract subtests of IQ tests, like similarities, analogies, and pattern extrapolation, rather than in world knowledge, memory, or mathematical calculation.

MD: I'm going to ask you to play cultural critic for a moment. Not your bailiwick, I realize, but since you obviously do not shrink from spirited debate, I thought you might be willing to try your hand at cultural commentary. My question is this: What do you think is America's relationship to Intelligence? (I capitalize the term to signal that I mean it in a mythic, or iconic, sense.) Intellectuals, especially left-leaning ones, have argued that American culture has historically been hostile to intellectualism, which is metonymic, presumably, of intelligence. Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in America is the classic text for this argument. Hofstadter and others maintain that our puritan roots, and the Christian tradition more generally, have created a cast of mind that is suspicious of skeptical inquiry rather than leaps of faith. As well, the argument goes, our Benthamite utilitarianism and our embrace of laissez-faire capitalism as a national religion ensures a certain hostility toward "impractical"thought---philosophy, the arts---that has no immediate market value. At the same time, the shelves of bookstores groan under the weight of business books that console anxious executives with the knowledge that they, too, can build "word power"and pump up their memory muscles. And the Web is overgrown with pop-up ads for bogus IQ tests. On one hand, we elected that manifestly incurious C-minus student George W. Bush, and a certain segment of the public thrilled to Sarah Palin's mockery of Obama's apparently suspicious "eloquence"; on the other, many of us seem to rejoice in the knowledge that we have, at long last, a smart guy in the Oval office (although Maureen Dowd derides our brainiac-in-chief as too Spock-like in his coolly deliberative intelligence). So which is it? Do we respect intelligence, or revile it? What is our relationship, as a nation, to the notion of smartness?

SP: I hesitate to generalize about America because it is so heterogeneous. At a first cut it comprises two political cultures: a culture of the Enlightenment and a culture of honor, to use the anthropologist's term (and the title of another of Richard Nisbett's books). This corresponds roughly to the blue-state/red-state divide. David Hackett Fischer, in Albion's Seed, cuts the pie into finer slices, and traces them back to the regions in England from which the first waves of colonists originated.

I suspect that many of the contradictions in the embrace of intellectualism come from differences among these subcountries, with the dominant strand at any time coming from the various borderline, neutral, and uncommitted blocs that tip their allegiance one way or another. In a culture of honor, the cardinal virtue is resolve, strength, deterrence, and pursuit of justice (often in the form of revenge against insults). Thinking too much corrodes these virtues, since a thinker may correctly calculate that retaliation is not in his best interests, which only emboldens his adversaries. Standing firm as a matter of constitution rather than rational choice makes your implicit threats more credible, because you can't be talked out of them. Your adversaries have more trouble making you an offer you can't refuse.

MD: You write, "What Flynn himself calls the spread of 'scientific spectacles,' as reasoning styles from the sciences and social sciences have left the academy and permeated everyday discourse. This last factor is vague and hard to quantify..."This is especially intriguing, since it belies the received wisdom, at both ends of the political spectrum, that we live in an Age of Unreason, when irrationality owns the cultural battlefield. Liberals like Susan Jacoby (The Age of American Unreason) argue that the anti-science, anti-rationalist cast of the evangelical mind, together with what she sees as the dumbing-down of the culture brought on by post-literate media (no friend of Grand Theft Auto, she), have turned us into a "nation of dunces."On the right, American Tories like George Will bemoan the flood tide of "graphic entertainments"(the dreaded video game again!), which he contends are hastening the "infantilization"of American culture, drowning us in "stupidity."Left and right make common cause, it seems, in their contempt for what Mencken called the "booboisie."

Yet you, a scientist, argue that "reasoning styles from the sciences"are permeating "everyday life."What's the channel by which these values are transmitted? More to the point, can you offer any evidence of the percolation of scientific values---the importance of skeptical inquiry; of self-critique and peer review; of falsifiable propositions based on logical, causal reasoning and material evidence---into "everyday discourse"? Our notorious scientific illiteracy has made us the laughingstock of the so-called first world: more of us believe in the literal existence of a horned-and-tailed devil than in the truth of Darwinian theory (62% versus 42%, according to a 2007 poll), and as of 1988 one in five of us was, in effect, living in a pre-Copernican cosmos, based on a National Science Foundation study that found that millions of Americans were convinced the sun revolves around the earth. Thus, I'm curious to know what evidence you've found to support the notion that the reasoning styles of the sciences, hard or social, have taken hold in the public mind.

Your use of the "culture of honor" argument makes me think of game theory---Prisoner's Dilemma, that sort of thing. But doesn't the tenacious grip of irrationalist epistemology, most notably religion, play a larger role in our attitude toward intelligence? Perhaps I'm confusing intelligence and reason, or rationalism, although by my lights they're inseparable. (I'm a creature of my culture---the scholastic culture of academe!) But surely the fact that America is more zealously religious, and more biblically fundamentalist, than so many European nations cannot be unrelated to our pervasive hostility to science in everyday life: Darwin in the classroom, stem-cell research, global-warming research, and so forth. And doesn't it logically follow that an intractable, irrational hostility toward Darwin and others who dethroned the divine would translate, in the popular mind, into a hostility toward skeptical inquiry and reasoned debate---intelligence, by any other name? Or maybe I'm using the term "intelligence"too broadly. But it simply stands to reason, in my mind, that an insistence on blind faith over proven fact correlates to a suspicion and hostility toward the intellect. Is it mere happenstance, I wonder, that so many religious traditions insist that the price of enlightenment is unplugging one's critical intellect? Whenever I hear the exhortation to turn off my mind, I reach for my Bertrand Russell.

SP: There are several dimensions to scientific thinking, and Flynn's suggestion did not address the culture of discovery in science (open criticism, testability, etc.) so much as the analytic tools that have escaped from the ivory tower and become part of conventional wisdom, everything from "zero-sum,""exponential growth,""triangulate,""circular reasoning,""fuzzy math,"and "market forces"to the very idea of taxonomic categories. An uneducated person in the 1920s who was asked "What do a fish and a crow have in common?"(one of the kinds of IQ-test questions that has shown a Flynn effect) might have replied "absolutely nothing."Today we would expect even a child to note that they are both exemplars of the category "animal,"a fact that would have been considered too banal and irrelevant for the 1920s respondent to mention. But the scientific tool of putting things in valid categories so as to generalize from them (e.g., you can deduce that a crow breathes even if you have no direct experience of that fact) has become part of our accustomed ways of thinking. This use of analytical tools from science might be independent of other aspects of scientific reasoning such as skepticism and falsifiability, not to mention an explicit embrace of intellectualism and articulateness.

I don't know of any direct evidence for Flynn's hypothesis (as I mentioned, I don't think anyone has a well-validated theory of the Flynn effect, perhaps because it was caused by many factors). You may want to look at Flynn's recent book on intelligence, or at The Rising Curve, a collection of essays (now probably out of date) that grapple with the phenomenon. Recent evidence suggests that the Flynn effect is petering out in the Western democracies.

I suspect that the American reluctance to accept evolution is not so much scientific ignorance (most people who believe in evolution don't really understand it, and probably couldn't tell you the evidence for it) as using a belief as an identity badge for moral worth and community identity (a common human vice, and another source of folly that good science tries to circumvent, not always successfully). In much of the country, to say that you doubt evolution is to affirm that you're a decent person with loyalty to family, community, and morality, opposed to the godless and amoral forces that foster pornography, urban violence, illegitimacy, and so on. This particular badge is probably a historical legacy of the fact that in much of the anarchic American West and South, religion was a civilizing force: the brawling, hard-drinking cowboys and miners only settled down with families after the women and preachers arrived (see David Courtwright's Violent Land). I think this in part explains why "family values"and "faith"are such talismans in red-state America. In Europe (and the parts of the US that are extensions of the European mindset), law and order has been maintained by government for centuries, and religion is more of a joke.

MD: For my last question, I'd like you to put yourself on the psychobiographical couch. Self-analysis, in public, is odious to the scientist in you, I suspect, but perhaps this question will go down easier if you think of yourself as a lab rat whose cortex you're dissecting in the lab.

Question: I've interviewed several subjects for this essay, all experts on intelligence, and all have had revealing stories to tell about what drew them to the subject. I'm not asking what intellectual passions led you to the subject of intelligence, but rather what formative events in your childhood struck the catalytic spark of your interest in intelligence. What was your relationship to intelligence, as a kid? You were, I suspect, the smartest kid in the room, in many situations, and knew it. How did you react to that realization, psychologically? How central to your sense of your own self-worth is your sense of yourself as smart? Do you find yourself unconsciously ranking others according to intelligence? On what do you base that estimation, in social or professional encounters? How did your immersion in the academy, where smart people congregate, change your relationship to the idea of intelligence? Do schoolyard anxieties regarding who's the smartest kid in the room still prevail, at conferences, beneath the veneer of scholarly civility? To what extent is the desire to prove one's intelligence---let's call it the Alpha Geek syndrome---and a gnawing anxiety about who's the brightest bulb in the field---Cortex Envy, I call it---shape the psychologies of academics, even in the sciences?

SP: Funny you should ask about formative childhood experiences: see my recent article (PDF) in the New York Times magazine, where I hardly shy away from self-revelation. I'm not particularly interested in intelligence as a research topic, and in fact said some rude things about it in the final pages of my first trade book, The Language Instinct: "To a scientist interested in how complex biological systems work, differences between individuals are so boring! Imagine what a dreary science of language we would have if instead of trying to figure out how people put words together to express their thoughts, researchers had begun by developing a Language Quotient (LQ) scale, and busied themselves by measuring thousands of people's relative language skills. It would be like asking how lungs work, and being told that some people have better lungs than others, or asking how compact disks reproduce sound, and being given a consumer magazine that ranked them instead of an explanation of digital sampling and lasers."Some individual-difference researchers gave me a hard time about this passage.

I only began to mention intelligence when I detected that academics' hypocrisy about the topic was a symptom of the doctrine Of the blank slate. As I wrote in my book with that title, "I find it truly surreal to read academics denying the existence of intelligence. Academics are obsessed with intelligence. They discuss it endlessly in considering student admissions, in hiring faculty and staff, and especially in their gossip about one another."

Ideological denials aside, academics probably have a similar relationship to intelligence that professional athletes have to innate athletic talent. It goes into the status hierarchy, to be sure, and to all the anxieties that that triggers, but is modulated by a number of realizations. One is that there will always be colleagues and competitors who are smarter than you, so being the smartest person in the room is not an option. Another is that intelligence is a necessary but not sufficient condition for productive work: we all have colleagues and students who are brimming with raw intelligence but never amount to much, for any of a number of reasons: they're head cases; they are so critical of everyone's work, including their own, that they never take chances or publish anything; they're lazy; they're uncreative; and so on. Conversely there are contributors who are not off the chart in raw intelligence, but who have the minimum, and who achieve stardom by being creative, indefatigable, insightful, have a "feeling for the organism,"or are just plain lucky.

Copyright Mark Dery. This interview may be reproduced by anyone, anywhere, for nonprofit use; written permission required (markdery at verizon dot net) in all other instances.

Photo of Steven Pinker by Henry Leutwyler

Great 1953 video of Les Paul showing off his newfangled recording system to Alistair Cooke. (Via PCL LinkDump)

krou writes "According to the Guardian, the Augustine panel is going to declare that there is simply no money to go back to the moon, and the next-generation Ares I rocket is likely to be scrapped unless there is more funding. The $81B Constellation Program's long-term goal of putting a human on Mars is almost certainly not going to be possible by the middle of the century. The options outlined by the panel for the future of NASA 'are to extend the working life of the aging space shuttle fleet beyond next year's scheduled retirement until 2015, while developing a cheaper transport to the moon; pressing ahead with Constellation as quickly as existing funding allows; or creating a new, larger rocket that would allow exploration of the solar system while bypassing the moon.' All of this means that NASA won't be back on the moon before the end of the next decade as hoped, 'or even leaving lower Earth orbit for at least another two decades.' Another result of the monetary black hole is that they don't have the '$300m to expand a network of telescopes and meet the government's target of identifying, by 2020, at least 90% of the giant space rocks that pose a threat to Earth.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A shy glass blower made a glass shell for a hermit crab... "glass houses" video here...

Scientists at the New Zealand Marine Studies Centre and Aquarium at Portobello near Dunedin are looking at hermit crabs in a whole new light. The crabs have moved into new man-made glass shells and it's opened up a new world for those both inside the shells and out. "We brought the shells out there and sure enough in a week to ten days the hermit had decided that the glass house was better than their own house and had made it their home," explains aquarium curator Adelle O'Neill. There are over 60 species of hermit crabs living on New Zealand shorelines. They live in a shell because unlike normal crabs they don't have a hard exterior.

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There are lots of ways to do this particular trick. You may have seen bottles "cut" using a bucket of ice water, a string soaked in fuel and set alight, a hot narrow gauge resistive wire, or some combination of the above. I've tried all of these ways, at one point or another, with varying degrees of success, and I'm reporting here the method that gives most consistent results for me. But if you're interested in trying some other way, by all means experiment. Glass bottles are freely available just about everywhere, and you can always recycle your mistakes.

Regardless of which of these methods you favor, "bottle cutting" is generally a misnomer, as what's really going on is a process of controlled breakage. (Unless, of course, you're actually using a tile saw or something similar, in which case I'm prepared to agree it's really "cutting.")

Anyway. Glass, molecularly, is mostly silicon dioxide, but it's distinct from crystalline solids like ice or table salt in that the molecules are not well-ordered in space. You may have heard some balderdash about how glass is really a liquid with practically infinite viscosity; generally the swelling of ancient cathedral windows at the bottom is sited as evidence to that effect. Well, it's not true: There is, to my knowledge, no reliable evidence that glass will flow at room temperature regardless of how long you wait. Turns out cathedral glaziers made their windows thicker at the bottom on purpose.

But as an analogy, "infinitely viscous liquid" is not a bad way to understand the random molecular ordering of bulk glass. The upshot of this anisotropy is that glass does not cleave in orderly ways: Cracks tend to wander off in random, unpredictable directions, and shattering can easily occur due to internal stresses. There is, therefor, an element of luck involved in the bottle cutting operation, but with a bit of practice and good technique you can make it work most of the time.

Tools

• Glass cutting wheel
• Bottle cutting jig
• Small butane torch
• "Lazy Susan" or other rotating platform
• Scrap of plate glass at least 8x8"

Materials

• A suitable glass bottle to cut
• 400 grit silicon carbide wet/dry sandpaper
• Bulk silicon carbide grit (at least 80 mesh)
• Tap water
• Oil for glass cutting wheel

Step 1: Select a bottle

Your choice of bottle depends on what you want to do with the finished piece. Are you making a drinking vessel? A flower pot? A lampshade? Very often people are interested in cutting a particular bottle that has unique aesthetic or sentimental appeal. A special bottle of booze or wine, well-cut to make a useful container, can make a great gift for the person you shared it with. Before you attempt to cut a valuable bottle, however, you should develop skill with bottles that are disposable to you. You will almost certainly ruin a few getting the hang of the process.

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Step 2: Score the bottle

It is important that the bottle be scored cleanly and evenly in a circle around its circumference. Inexpensive jigs are available commercially for this purpose. Get a quality metal one, or build one yourself, and steer away from plastic jigs hyped on late-night TV and the like.

The cutting jig is first set to accurately position the cut along the length of the bottle. Then a drop of cutting oil is applied to the built-in glasscutting wheel. Now, set the bottle in place and apply firm pressure towards the cutting wheel as you rotate about the bottle's axis. Maintain continuous pressure as you rotate, and stop as soon as the scoreline comes all the way 'round and meets itself. Resist the temptation to go over the same scoreline more than once. This will only lead to a messy break.

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Step 3: Apply heat

Position the bottle upright in the center of your turntable. Spin it around a few times to make sure the bottle is well-centered, then fire up your torch. Direct the flame just slightly above the scoreline, about four inches away, and steadily rotate the turntable with your free hand. The rotation doesn't have to be very fast, but it should be constant and even. The goal, obviously, is to evenly heat the bottle around the scoreline. Uneven heating, again, can lead to cracks wandering off in all directions.

You will hear a series of clicks and pops as the bottle breaks. You can also, generally, see the break as it propagates around the glass. Continue rotating and applying heat until the break is complete, removing the flame and testing occasionally by lifting the bottle from its neck. When the cut is complete, the top of the bottle will lift off with no effort. Be patient at all times. Nothing in this process can be forced.

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Step 4: Polish the edge

If everything went well, you now have one or more bottle sections with relatively clean breaks along their edges. Some small deflection, especially where the beginning and end of the scoreline meet, is common and can be polished out. Bumps or jogs much larger than 1mm, however, become increasingly tedious to grind away, although it can be done if you're persistent. It's generally much faster to just cut another bottle than to try to repair a fracture gone awry.

The edge is polished by lapping against a piece of scrap plate glass. This can be window glass, a bit of mirror, or, as in my case, the plate from an old broken scanner. Dump a pinch of grit into the center of the lapping glass and wet it with a spray bottle. Then set the bottle section edge-down against the abrasive surface and, applying light pressure, scrub it around in a figure-eight motion. Be aware that the sound this makes can set your teeth on edge, if you're sensitive, so you may want to have ear protection around just for the sake of aesthetics. But it's not generally loud enough to be dangerous.

Continue lapping, adding grit and/or water to the slurry as necessary, until the edge is completely polished. Unfortunately wetting can make this difficult to tell, so keep at it until it feels done, then wipe off the edge with a paper towel until it's completely dry. Now, it should be easy to tell if you need to polish some more or not: The edge should be smoothly and uniformly "etched" all over, with no glossy spots remaining.

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Step 5: Round over the corners

The lapping process will produce a very flat edge which, where it intersects with the sides of the bottle, can make for a fairly sharp corner in cross-section. Particularly if you want to use the cut bottle as a drinking vessel, I recommend that you take a minute to lightly break the inner and outer corners with a scrap of silicon carbide sandpaper. The easiest way to test this process is by touch: Continue until the corner feels comfortably smooth to a fingertip run around the edge.

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Notes and ideas

I have found that the use of a turntable during the heating process makes a significant difference. Attempting to manually rotate the bottle never works so well for me, but if I use a turntable the breaking process is quite reliable. The turntable I use is the bottom part of a cheap plastic rotating shelf intended to keep spices in the kitchen cupboard.

If you want a neater polished edge, you can use a series of grits of increasing fineness to do the lapping. A recharge kit for a rock polisher can be a good source for these. If you want to go this way, proceed (obviously), from larger to smaller grit, clean the edge thoroughly between steps, and be certain to use a separate lapping plate for each grit. Contamination of finer with larger grits can spoil the polishing effect.

The physical details of the bottle you choose to cut can also make a big difference. Generally, straight-sided bottles are easier to score evenly than those with round or sloping sides, so you may want to limit yourself to those at first. Many bottles have features I call "useful inclusions," which are rings or grooves molded in around the bottle's circumference. These are handy for two reasons: 1) Siting a cut at such an inclusion generally results in a better-looking finished piece, and 2) the inclusion itself can be used to guide a manual glasscutting wheel, eliminating the need for a bottle-cutting jig.

How the bottle is labeled can be important. I personally prefer bottles with painted-on labels, like Corona bottles, because the markings will stand up to wear, water, and washing over time and will continue to show off the origins of the piece throughout its lifetime. Or you can simply remove the labels altogether. Paper labels are generally the toughest to clean off; and the best tool I've found for this process is the wire wheel on a bench grinder. Even so, you may have to wipe off the remaining glue using Goo-Gone and/or lighter fluid.

If you plan to etch your bottle in some way, it is possible to use the label as a built-in resist. Just cut the design you want etched into the label, peel off the positive areas, and apply etching cream as usual. Adhesive plastic labels work best for this process; paper ones will result in messy edges where the etching cream bleeds under. When the etch is complete, just remove the remaining label as you normally would.

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Carlos Ramos, a painter and animator who created Nickelodeon's Chalkzone and worked on Dexter's Laboratory, has a marvelous new show of paintings opening tomorrow evening, August 15, at the Corey Helford Gallery in Culver City, Califoirnia. This majestic new body of work is focused on Indian iconography. All of the paintings are also viewable online. Carlos Ramos: India

We keep hearing from the big record labels and the RIAA how they're doing everything they do "for the artists." Yet, everywhere we turn, we see artists who are anything but happy by what's being done to for them. The latest, sent in by Bryan Colley, is that the singer Morrissey is going on fan sites, warning fans not to buy the new box sets of his music that EMI is putting out, noting that not only did he have nothing whatsoever to do with them, he won't see a penny in royalties from them. But it's all for the artists, right? These days, when artists are finally learning to connect with fans directly, those fans want to know that when they choose to spend money on an artist, that money actually goes to the artist.

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Michiel Roos notes that at this week's OpenSource World, a Dell executive deflated Microsoft's claims that Linux notebooks have return rates four or five times higher than Windows machines. "Todd Finch, Dell senior product marketing manager, said the number of Linux returns are approximately the same as those for Windows netbooks. He categorized the matter of returns as a 'non-issue.' 'They are making something of nothing,' he said of Microsoft's claims."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Via Wired's Danger Room blog, word that one ought not fck with Egyptian fisherman if one is a Somali pirate:

A group of Egyptian fishermen apparently escaped from their high-seas captors the old-school way, overpowering the pirates and seizing their weapons. Reuters has the scoop on how it went down, plus a quote from "an associate of the pirates" (nice!) who told the agency the Egyptians made a run for it after seizing the pirates' weapons. "The two Egyptian ships sailed away after a fight with my friends," said the associate, who gave his name to Reuters as Farah.

Note to Pirates: Don't Mess with Egyptian Fishermen

The piano maker who assembled this incredible toolkit died in 1925. His name was H.O. Studley. A poster is available through Fine Woodworking magazine. I resisted all kinds of "Studley chest" puns in titling this article. I hope you appreciate it.

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An anonymous poster to the Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede movie thread just made my day: turns out Bradley Denton has posted the entire book as a PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives download. You are in for some treat: I think that this is the great American comic science fiction novel, a book about the quest to exhume Buddy Holly's corpse from Lubbock, TX to prove that he can't possibly be broadcasting an all-powerful jamming signal from a hermetically sealed bubble on a distant, airless moon. Bradley Denton's homepage

Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede PDFs: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede PDFs (Coral cache mirrors): Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Alive and Well movie site

Human beings are funny. They struggle to get noticed. Only a few do. And of those only a few get powerful enough to control which other humans get noticed. These people are called gatekeepers.

The idea comes from the days when rich people had gates. The richer you were the bigger and more impressive the gate. I once bought a house that had a gate, but I had it removed. All that was left were two big stone pillars, ornaments with no purpose. They also had a gasoline pump and tank on the property. I had them removed too. Then I removed myself, and now I live in a noisy neighborhood with people walking by all the time. That's how I like it. I learned that I don't like to be isolated, even though I was raised to think privacy is a good thing. Instead we thrive with lots of other humans around us.

You know how Doc says there's no demand for messages? Well, there's no demand for gatekeepers. In fact there's negative demand for them. Because once a gatekeeper sets up shop, we immediately begin to figure out ways around them.

On the Internet we call them outages. Gatekeepers are outages. They're the connections that don't get made because someone imagines themselves powerful enough to prevent them. But it's only temporary. Like a river that encounters an obstacle, eventually water (influence) piles up behind it, and then either flows over or around it. There's not much future in being an obstacle.

If you live long enough in tech, you get to see this happen over and over. I've lived a long time already, and I can testify. I've watched people, even friends, get the idea their influence was so permanent that they, like the Soup Nazi on Seinfeld, could say No soup for you! if there was something about you they didn't like. Only in this case, instead of soup, it's flow. My advice -- don't believe it.

A long time ago I discovered this fundamental rule of the net -- People come back to places that send them away. Places like Google, Yahoo, Craigslist, Youtube, even Twitter. These are the mainstays. You go there to get somewhere else. Sites that try to suck you in and hold you there, no matter how cleverly, go away. While it may seem like a good approach at first, long-term it's a losing strategy.

Jonathan Haeber of Terrastories took these incredible photographs from inside an abandoned Titan I missile site. He writes,

On Memorial Day of 2007, and then again in December, I visited two separate Titan I missile sites. The first was quite the introduction. The second was mind-blowing. There are no words to describe being in what is perhaps the world's largest underground missile complex. In fact, I've tried more than once, and in my mind have not achieved an adequate description. Last month, I clicked on a random link and encountered the narrative of another man who had done the same. His words, and his story came much closer to describing the feeling in detail. Even better, this man knew all of the intricacies of the base. He was a true savant of Titan I - and probably the foremost non-military expert of these historic bases. I contacted him and asked if he would be willing to talk about his experience and he readily agreed.

Discovering the History of a Titan I Base (Terrastories)

Here is an extensive gallery of photographs: Various Trips to Titan Silos in California and Colorado

An anonymous reader writes "IM company Digsby has quietly included malware in an update to their client software that utilizes users' computing power and bandwidth while idle for a quick buck. When questioned, developers at Digsby claim that they have done no wrong and that users should not complain because the client software is 'free.'" The money-making distributed computing software is in addition to six "crapware" apps that users must refuse during installation. The terms of service that no one ever reads does describe the CPU- and bandwidth-robbing moneymaker, and its off switch is located behind the "Support Digsby" menu item.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here in Los Angeles, local news channels have been locked on a chase and subsequent standoff between police and a mentally ill man accused of making threats on the White House. The LAPD have him cornered at the Federal Building. I was just in the area (for other reasons) -- traffic's a mess, streets are blocked off, law enforcement all over the place.

The LAPD bomb squad is using a remote-controlled robot to coax the suspect out of his Volkswagen beetle. This device is operated by a human, and is not autonomous -- sort of a humanoid drone, a machine proxy for a human negotiator. You can see it in the photo above, from the Daily Breeze. I wonder if anyone knows more about the particular robot/ROV/whatever they're using?

At least four police cruisers blocked the red Volkswagen Beetle in the driveway of a parking lot on Veteran Avenue just south of Wilshire Boulevard. Officers stood nearby with their guns pointed at the vehicle, and a police robot wheeled its way next to the driver's side door as the standoff continued. A military-style armored vehicle was also brought to the scene and was parked near the vehicle.

Update: Anonymous says,

That particular piece of equipment is a Remotec (a subsidiary of Northrop-Grumman) model F-6A by the looks of it. It has 3 cameras, a microphone and a speaker. It can be operated remotely by a fiber optic tether or by radio waves. It is used by Law enforcement and the Military typically in bomb disposal operations. The use in hostage situations is not unprecedented however.

Above, a photo of the Northrop-Grumman/Remotec ANDROS F6A with Window Breaker and Dual PAN Disrupter mount. On the product page, the manufacturer refers to it as a "robot," so all of you arguing in the comments that this is an improper term can simmer down now, please. More photos of an ANDROS equipped with a gun and window-basher, and live video stream of today's human/robot standoff, after the jump.

here's the Daily Breeze, here's KTLA, LA Times.

Image: ANDROS F6A on toes with SL6 shotgun and mount.

 

There's some good news on the fair use front. Many people seem to falsely believe that if a work is used for commercial purposes it cannot be fair use. They think fair use only applies to non-commercial efforts. But that's not true. Commercial use is factored into the analysis, but just because it's commercial does not mean that it's not fair use. A few years ago, an important case made this point, involving Grateful Dead concert posters that were used in a book. The Bill Graham Archives, who owned the posters in question, claimed that because the book was published commercially, it wasn't fair use. But the court ruled that even though the images were used commercially, and even though they were used in their entirety without modification, the fact that they were used in the context of a book describing the history of the band, made it fair use.

It looks like we now have another, quite similar, ruling -- this time involving movie monsters, and whether or not magazine covers could be used in a book. And, once again, a court has ruled that this is fair use, despite the commercial nature. In this case, the book was a look at the artwork of Basil Gogos, who apparently designed numerous magazine covers concerning monster movies in the 1950s and 60s. The magazine publisher claimed that the use of the magazine covers in the book violated its copyrights and trademarks, but the judge ruled that this was fair use, noting that the use (if not the works) was transformative. That is, the original works were designed for use as magazine covers, but this use -- as a biographical and retrospective look at the artist -- was entirely different.

"The fact that the Gogos book is inherently biographical renders it so fundamentally transformative in nature, coupled with the fact that Spurlock utilized such a quantitatively and qualitatively minor portion of the magazines, requires this court to conclude that Spurlock's use is fair use and to grant Spurlock's motion for summary judgment on the copyright claims,"

This is definitely an important fair use ruling, though will likely still go through appeal. Hopefully, it'll be allowed to stand.

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The follower of Charles Manson was convicted of trying to kill President Gerald Ford in 1975, at age 26. She is 60 years old, and left the Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth this morning. AP via NYT

This recycled wine bottle torch makes for a funky backyard picnic light, and you can get all the extra parts at the hardware store. (Thanks, Katie Wilson!)

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Instructables user elha2 had problems when shopping for an energy-conserving power strip, and writes:

We bought some "Energy Saver" power strips from Zweibrueder. The devices are very solid and not very expensive. They feature an external switch and no further intelligence. You can place the switch in a good spot and leave the cabling under your desk. The major drawback when using those power strips with manual on/off switches on PCs, is that you'll have to wait for your PC to shutdown completely before pushing the off switch.

Check out the neat mod to use USB power as a signal to turn the power strip completely off once the PC shuts down.

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Handbrewer writes "The FreeBSD developer Poul-Henning Kamp (phk) has sued Lenovo in Denmark (Google translation, original here) over their refusal to refund the Windows Vista Business license, even though he declined the EULA during installation. Lenovo argues that they sell the computer as a full product, and that they cannot refund it partially, such as the power supply or the OS even if people intend to use a different one. This seems to be contrary to previous rulings in the EU where Acer and HP has been forced to refund the 'Microsoft tax.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Many out there are all too familiar with sharp pain resulting from extended keyboard/etc usage. Though rest and improved ergonomics are the ideal response, when I absolutely must keep my hands going, a basic wrist brace can do wonders. Well, I recently found myself with a bad case of angry tendons and sadly my trusty brace was nowhere to be found. Pain being such a great motivator, after a quick survey of the apartment, I managed to fashion a surprisingly effective brace from household stuff. Just a rice ladle, some velcro strap (from an old sleep mask) + a little fabric cushioning and I was back @ my desk clacking away. Gotta love those cheap and satisfyingly simple little fixes.

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Photographer Tod Seelie has great shots and tales of recent travels to Indonesia on his blog. The set that really caught my eye is of the tall bike crew in Yogya. They remind me of an Indonesian Cyclecide, and they certainly have no shortage of modded rides.

Seelie also posted a video of riding tall bikes in Jakarta. Love the perspective as vehicles cruise by. Being tall is clearly a safety plus for visibility.

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The Angry Mick writes "My wife and I recently moved, and during the course of providing change-of-address information to the many companies we do business with, I asked each if they were storing a full Social Security number in their databases, and if so, could they remove it or replace it with an alternate identifier. Neither the experience nor the results were particularly enjoyable. On the positive end of the spectrum, some companies were more than willing to make a change, even offering suggestions for a suitable alternate such as a driver's license number. In the middle were companies that made things a little more difficult, requiring several steps up the management tree before speaking to someone with some actual authority to address the issue. Then there was DirectTV. This company not only flatly refused to consider the suggestion, but also informed me that even if I were to discontinue service with them, they still intended to keep my full SSN on file indefinitely. There is no logical reason for them to do this, and I'm not keen on the idea of being left vulnerable to identity theft should they have experience any security breaches at any future point in my life. So, my questions to the Slashdot community are: Has anyone else tried getting your SSN replaced or removed in corporate databases, and what were your experiences? And short of Armageddon, is there any way to force a company to erase your SSNs after you cease doing business with them, or is this a job for a lawyer or regulatory body?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It may have taken the (very) long way to get there, but it looks like at least some folks over at Sony have figured out that openness can be a competitive advantage, and have decided to support the open ePub ebook format for its ebook reader. Now, there are lots of caveats here. Amazon has effectively been able to capture the leadership position in this market, while Sony has languished, so partly this is a hail mary pass -- which we've seen happen elsewhere as well. And, of course, despite it being an open format and the fact that Sony is ditching its own DRM, the new format will still have Adobe DRM -- so this isn't a truly opened up solution, but it is a step. It may be difficult for Sony to recapture the lead in this market by this point, but it seems like that the open ebook platforms will only gain steam (and eventually Amazon will end up supporting it as well). It's the natural progression that we see over and over again: a closed platform may help define the market, and then weaker competitors often circle around an open platform, realizing it's their only chance to fight back against the lock-in of the market leader. While it often takes some time, the open platforms do tend to get better and better, even to the point that the original leader is eventually forced to adopt it as well.

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Craving some frantic air hockey fun, oldschoolstructure built an eight-foot air bearing table using chipboard, a leaf blower and plenty of elbow grease. Check the step-by-step in the project's instructable

More:

HOW TO - Make a table hockey table... with real ice!

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Timothy B. Lee writes "If you want to access federal court records, you're often forced to use PACER, a cumbersome, paywalled Web site run by the federal judiciary. My colleagues and I at Princeton's Center for IT Policy have released a new Firefox extension called RECAP that allows users to automatically upload the documents they download from PACER into a public archive hosted by the Internet Archive. It also saves users money by automatically notifying them if a document they're searching for is available for free from the public archive. Over time, we hope to build a comprehensive, free repository of federal court records that's available to everyone."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Build your own 3-string, electrified cigar box guitar and make some sweet sounds.
Thanks go to Ed Vogel for the original article in MAKE, Volume 04.
To download The Cigar Box Guitar MP4 click here or subscribe in iTunes.

Check out the complete Cigar Box Guitar article in MAKE, Volume 04 "Cigar Box Guitar"
and you can see that in our Digital Edition.

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Build your own 3-string, electrified cigar box guitar and make some sweet sounds.
Thanks go to Ed Vogel for the original article in MAKE, Volume 04.
View the PDF of this project. and then subscribe to MAKE Magazine for other great projects
you can do over the weekend.

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Rachel over @ CRAFT pointed out this cozy piece of science. Apinnick was knitting a basic sweater for her husband, when they decided to change gears and do something a bit different. Brainstroming commenced -

Baruch is a microbiologist in the pharmaceutical industry. I thought about it and studied his sketches. The angles of the lines and the hexagons looked like a charter’s nightmare and I decided, in the end, that I wouldn’t be able to translate them into knitting, not in the immediate future.

“How about the Periodic Table?”

I pondered for 2 minutes, then said, “That’s do-able.” He photocopied the periodic table from his highschool chemistry textbook and I charted the actinides and lanthanides. Halfway through the lanthanides, I realised that I didn’t need a chart after all and just knitted it directly from the photocopy. Any mistakes were corrected later with duplicate stitch.

Excellent. She even managed to add fungus and bacteria to the sleeves. yah - the names of fungus & bacteria. Check out the project blog entry for more of the story and pics. [via CRAFT]

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A family-owned and operated company, Renovo sells custom-built frames forged from two halves of hollowed out wood that are bonded together. The result is strong and absolutely stunning!

From their website:

Some folks view these frames as works of art, too nice or delicate for daily use, but they aren't your Brigitte parks oh-so-carefully ... mom's dining room table. We chose wood for it's ride quality and sustainability, and got beauty as a bonus; but it's not a weakness. An impact that will dent and ruin a butted metal or carbon frame merely bounces off the Renovo frame leaving a small dent.

Wood is tough stuff; a good example is the walnut stock of the 1903 Springfield rifle. Used in warfare from WW1 through the Korean conflict, they were thrown from trucks,dragged through sand, rivers and hell, used as pry bars, clubs, crutches and occasionally, rifles. But after the wars, civilians bought these battle-scarred relics and refinished the stocks into gorgeous sporting rifles.

Calling them Functional Art is fine with me.

Renovo (via Inhabitat)

More:

Long Live the Bicycle

Wooden Bike

Wooden Bicycle from China

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D1gital_Prob3 excerpts from a Reuters story that says "The US government is covertly testing technology in China and Iran that lets residents break through screens set up by their governments to limit access to news on the Internet. The 'feed over email' (FOE) system delivers news, podcasts and data via technology that evades web-screening protocols of restrictive regimes, said Ken Berman, head of IT at the US government's Broadcasting Board of Governors, which is testing the system. The news feeds are sent through email accounts including those operated by Google, Microsoft's Hotmail, and Yahoo. 'We have people testing it in China and Iran,' said Berman, whose agency runs Voice of America. He provided few details on the new system, which is in the early stages of testing. He said some secrecy was important to avoid detection by the two governments."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's been a push by people both inside and outside the government to get public court documents out to the public. As it stands now, most court documents can be found via PACER, the court system's own online service, which charges $0.08 per page. PACER notes that it's charging for the documents to cover its own costs of managing its system, but this still bothers many who don't like the fact that important public domain case law is so costly. There are some private services, like Justia trying to fill the void, and Carl Malamud is pushing hard to get the government to put public documents up for the public to read.

Now there's a new service that has an interesting tactic to try to help bring these documents to the public domain. Ed Felten's Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University is announcing a service and a Firefox extension called RECAP (it's PACER backwards), with the tagline: "turning PACER around." It's a bit ingenious. Basically, if you're a PACER user, you install the Firefox extension, and any documents you access via your PACER account automatically get uploaded to a public archive (hosted by the Internet Archive folks). If the document has already been uploaded, the extension alerts you to that fact in PACER, so you can access the open archived one.

While the folks at PACER might not like this, it's all perfectly legal. The documents are public domain, and people can do whatever they want with the documents once they have them. Creating a public archive is one option -- and a rather useful one at that. The real question is how many PACER users will actually participate in the program in order to make this a truly useful resource. At launch time, this public database has already been seeded with about a million documents, but the question is how quickly will it grow? No matter what, conceptually, this is a fantastic idea that hopefully will help to open up public domain court information that has been locked behind PACER's paywalls for too long.

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The best TI-83 RPGs ever... Carolyn writes -

For some, nothing was more exhilarating in high school than playing a cool calculator game right in front of the teacher’s face while she thinks you’re graphing some crazy parabolic curve. Every kid who’s privy to the beat on the street knows that the first thing to do after persuading your parents to buy you a $100 Texas Instruments graphing calculator is to grab a link cable and get some Space Invaders and Final Fantasy on that sleek machine.

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Some N97 owners find the integrated GPS doesn't perform as well as they'd like, so they've taken it upon themselves to render a proper fix. Using a copper wire attached to the existing antenna, Symbian Freak contributors Bruno and Teo have greatly improved their signal strength and can go about geocaching with fewer dropped signals.

[via Symbian Freak]

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Geoff Ryman, author of the stellar novel The Child Garden (a book in which cancer is cured with the side effect of reducing human lifespan to 30 or so), needs your help:

I'm looking for a composer to collaborate on a podcast project, an audio version of my novel The Child Garden. The novel is in part about a musician who sets all of Dante's Divine Comedy to music. I'm hoping to provide excerpts from this fictional opera as part of the podcast, short interludes of contemporary classical music for orchestra and voice, to be sung in Italian. It would be used in key scenes and as signature music for the serial podcast.

How many such interludes and how long they are would be up to you as I can't pay anything. I'm hoping that the project would appeal to someone needing to compose music for a dissertation or doctorate. The music would of course remain your copyright; my site would link to yours, provide a biography and help to maximise publicity and PR value for you. The Child Garden won the Arthur C Clarke Award, the John W Campbell Award (first place) and an excerpt from it won the British Science Fiction Association Award.

I fell in love with this book when Jeff VanderMeer gave it to me for my birthday when we were both at Clarion in 1992. I've thought about it more or less constantly ever since. I only wish I was a musician so that I could work on this.

Email Geoff

More on "brown fat" -- the fat that burns regular fat -- from the New Scientist. They say that 50g of brown fat in your body burns 500 calories a day, and hint that it's possible to lipo out your regular white fat and turn it into brown fat and re-implant it.

Brown fat's role in heat generation, also known as thermogenesis, has been extensively studied by animal physiologists. It turns out that brown fat cells have unusual mitochondria, the tiny structures found in almost all cells that release energy from food. In the vast majority of cells this energy is either stored or used to power cellular processes. The mitochondria in brown fat, however, contain a protein called thermogenin (or uncoupling protein 1), which causes energy to dissipate as heat. "This is a tissue whose sole purpose is burning energy," says Francesco Celi, a researcher at the US National Institutes of Health...

Kahn's team is focusing on a compound called bone morphogenetic protein 7, or BMP-7, also known as osteogenic protein 1. It is best known for promoting the formation of bone and cartilage, and a genetically engineered version is used in bone surgery. Last year, the group showed that if cells derived from mouse embryonic stem cells are treated with BMP-7 they turn into brown fat cells. When transplanted into a special breed of mouse that accepts tissue from unrelated individuals, they formed discrete islands of brown fat (Nature, vol 454, p 1000).

To test this approach in people, the team now plans to take white fat cells obtained through liposuction and treat them with BMP-7. The resulting brown fat cells could then be reimplanted into the original donor. "It's got a lot of potential," says Kahn.

The fat that makes you thin

(Image: Bacon Fat, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike image from kaktuslampa's photostream)

Food Face plates! I love food in face form. My wife gives me smiley-face porridge in bed every year on my birthday, and it's the highlight of the day.

Food Face Kid's Dinner Plates

Shigeru Kobayashi wrote in to tell us about this very cool project, physical x wonderfl, which is a mash up of an online IDE and physical computing. With an Arduino or Gainer board and the Funnel Server, you can connect your microcontroller board to a computer, and run your sketch from inside the browser. You can also share sketches for others to use or try out sketches that others have uploaded.

The screencast embedded above shows the steps needed to get up and running with this neat tool.

physical x wonderfl - sharing physical computing experience

Arduino/Digital/Blink in physical x wonderfl

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Zachary Seward over at the Nieman Lab is revealing more of the AP's "top secret" plan to figure out this darn web thing. Following the plan to hold back some content from its members, the latest installment is focused on trying to attack Wikipedia's search dominance with its own SEO play: creating "landing pages" designed to be the definitive destinations on certain topics, with the idea of using inbound links from partners newspaper sites to goose the Google juice and shoot them to the top of the list.

Now, as a first pass, this is actually not a bad idea. Creating compelling topic pages that become the main source for people to go to is a good strategy. The problem is that it's just not that easy. A bunch of other sites have tried to do the same thing and have failed miserably. Many of these are startups, obviously, but even Google itself tried to do something similar with its Google Knol offering, and that's been a massive disappointment. And it has the inside scoop on how to get good PageRank.

Even worse, as Felix Salmon points out, the AP seems to think that these pages should be autogenerated! Yes, the AP seems to think the way to take on Wikipedia is with a computer spitting out spam SEO-trap pages. Wow. The biggest asset (and yes, it's a huge asset) that the AP has is the wealth of knowledge in the heads of all of its reporters. They could actually create some very useful definitive content pages... but instead they're going to hand it over to computers to autogenerate? Talk about missing the point...

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Dave Knott writes "Entertainment Weekly reports that Univeral Pictures has confirmed rumours of a Battlestar Galactica feature film. Directed by Bryan Singer, and co-produced by original series creator Glen Larson, the new movie will not be related to the recently concluded SyFy Network series. Rather, it will be a 'complete re-imagining of the sci-fi lore that was invented by Larson back in the 70s.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Murmur Study by Christopher Baker and Marton Andras Juhasz looks at micro-messaging sites like Twitter and Facebook and outputs a physical record of some of the conversations that are happening. All 30 printers are controlled by and Arduino which receives data from Processing. This piece really did make me think about all the personal information available on the internet, and what it might be used for in the future. Scary.

This installation consists of 30 thermal printers that continuously monitor Twitter for new messages containing variations on common emotional utterances. Messages containing hundreds of variations on words such as argh, meh, grrrr, oooo, ewww, and hmph, are printed as an endless waterfall of text accumulating in tangled piles below.

More about Murmur Study by Christopher Baker and Marton Andras Juhasz

In the Maker Shed:


Make: Arduino

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Mark alerts us to the news that Illinois has approved a new law that bans registered sex offenders from social networking sites. Now, I have no sympathy for anyone who uses a social networking site to approach kids for such nefarious purposes, but this seems like a rather broad brush for a variety of reasons. First, considering how many sites have added "social networking" features lately, this could block out a rather large portion of the internet. Hell, just recently Google announced new social features for its iGoogle homepage. Second, the vast majority of registered sex offenders weren't convicted of trying to entice a kid via a social network. Completely blocking all of those people from social networks seems rather pointless. Finally, the whole idea that social networks are some sort of breeding ground for predators is a moral panic made up by the press. Studies have shown that the common story of a predator getting online, pretending to be a kid, and befriending "targets" and "grooming" them is mostly a myth. That's not to say it hasn't happened, but it's quite rare, and the best way to deal with it is simply to educate kids on how to deal with strangers. Most are smart enough to deal with the issue on their own. But, of course, that doesn't make for good headlines for politicians who want to make sure everyone knows they're "protecting the children."

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srjh writes "In the Australian Federal Government's latest assault on the internet, draft legislation has been released that allows network operators to intercept communications to ensure that their networks are being 'appropriately used.' Such legislation is particularly important given the interference of Communications Minister Stephen Conroy in a recent copyright lawsuit against iiNet, one of the largest ISPs in the country. Conroy called prominent filtering opponent iiNet's inaction over copyright infringement 'stunning,' whereas iiNet claimed that it would be illegal under current Australian law to intercept its users' downloads. While this latest legislation appears to be a concession of that point, the government is said to be watching the case closely and along with attempts to introduce a three-strikes law in Australia, it appears the law will be changed if the government dislikes the outcome of the case. The internet villain of the year just continues to earn his title."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in June, we wrote about how cab drivers in Tampa Bay were trying to get the city council to outlaw new competitors in the form of free ad-supported transportation from some owners of electric vehicles. Like so many cities, Tampa Bay's cab system operates on a license system, which the city and the existing cabbies work closely to limit, and do make sure prices remain artificially high. However, the free electric vehicles had thought they got around this by noting that the permit system only applied to cabs for hire. Since they weren't charging, they weren't covered. Until now.

EEJ alerts us to the news that Hillsborough County transportation officials have announced that the free electric vehicles need to get permits as well -- except, oh by the way, there aren't any available. Too bad. At least one of the electric vehicle operators plans to go to court to fight this, but it may be an uphill battle. While the officials are hiding behind "safety" claims, the truth is that it's a typical move of regulatory capture by the cab companies, limiting competition so they can keep their prices artificially high and avoid any sort of business model innovation.

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

Louis writes:

I've seen the term "voltage divider" used a lot lately. What exactly is a voltage divider, and what is it used for?

A voltage divider does what it sounds like: it creates an output voltage less than the input voltage. A potentiometer can be used as a voltage divider, as can two resistors in series. It's often used as a reference voltage, where little current is drawn over the connection. Op-amps use reference voltages to change signal output, so you can use a pot as a voltage divider to change attributes of sound in a synthesizer, for example. The op-amp outputs current that is proportional to the difference in voltage between it's two inputs, so the resistor divider is used to make the output voltage a multiple of the input voltage- basically a resistor divider in reverse.

Many sensors respond to their respective input by producing a corresponding change in resistance. For instance, a light sensor might have a high resistance when it's bright out, and a low resistance in darkness. Sensors can be used in one of the positions pictured above (R1 or R2; the diagram is a resistive voltage divider) to invert the output. For example, a light-sensitive resistor (LDR) in a voltage divider could be changed from its normal high-when-light state to high-when-dark. Sure, you could invert that output in software, too, but what if you're not using a programmable microcontroller? With just an extra resistor, you've inverted the sensor's function.

Here's some more reading material on voltage dividers:

• Doctronics voltage divider page
• All about circuits - voltage dividers
• Voltage divider Wikipedia page

Where do you use voltage dividers? Post up your experiences in the comments.

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

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I recently had lunch with Erik Davis, whose riffs and insights on the intersection of technology, mysticism, and high weirdness have always inspired me. We talked about one of my favorite head trips, the idea that we're living in a simulation or control system of some kind. Decades before The Matrix, folks like Jacques Vallee, John Keel, Stephen Wolfram, Rudy Rucker, and Hans Moravec explored this notion. And of course it's also been the subject of countless science fiction novels. Recently, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom developed a mathematical argument to support the mind-bending theory. But Erik turned me on to Ed Fredkin, a computer scientist whose name I knew but had somehow missed in the context of the Simulation Argument. A pioneer of "digital physics," Fredkin worked with Richard Feynman, made a ton of money in various tech businesses, and is currently a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT. He is also convinced that the universe is a computer. Robert Wright's 1988 book Three Scientists And Their Gods includes a profile of Fredkin. When the book came out, the section on Fredkin was excerpted in The Atlantic. The piece really gives me a sense of the scientist and also does a great job explaining his theories in simple terms. From The Atlantic:

Fredkin works in a twilight zone of modern science—the interface of computer science and physics. Here two concepts that traditionally have ranked among science's most fundamental—matter and energy—keep bumping into a third: information. The exact relationship among the three is a question without a clear answer, a question vague enough, and basic enough, to have inspired a wide variety of opinions. Some scientists have settled for modest and sober answers. Information, they will tell you, is just one of many forms of matter and energy; it is embodied in things like a computer's electrons and a brain's neural firings, things like newsprint and radio waves, and that is that. Others talk in grander terms, suggesting that information deserves full equality with matter and energy, that it should join them in some sort of scientific trinity, that these three things are the main ingredients of reality.

Fredkin goes further still. According to his theory of digital physics, information is more fundamental than matter and energy. He believes that atoms, electrons, and quarks consist ultimately of bits—binary units of information, like those that are the currency of computation in a personal computer or a pocket calculator. And he believes that the behavior of those bits, and thus of the entire universe, is governed by a single programming rule. This rule, Fredkin says, is something fairly simple, something vastly less arcane than the mathematical constructs that conventional physicists use to explain the dynamics of physical reality. Yet through ceaseless repetition—by tirelessly taking information it has just transformed and transforming it further—it has generated pervasive complexity. Fredkin calls this rule, with discernible reverence, "the cause and prime mover of everything."

Did The Universe Just Happen?

UPDATE: Kevin Kelly also points me to his excellent meditation on digital physics and the all stars of the field that appeared in a 2002 issue of Wired. The piece is aptly titled "God Is The Machine."

On Twitter there's been a tradition called "Follow Fridays," where you tell your friends who they should follow. It's nice, but I've got another idea, a way to help build and diversify the Internet, and probably help preserve a record of what we were thinking way back in 2009 and 2010.

Every Friday, rain or shine, write a blog post.

These days when I think an idea needs elaboration I ask for a blog post.

When you see an interesting idea expressed in 140 chars that you think could use elaboration, ask them to do a long-form post to explain. Especially on Fridays.

Maybe Fridays will become "Blog Post Fridays."

It'll be good for the Internet!

Remember, Scoble's blog still loves him, and your blog still loves you, even if you haven't called in a while!

Great overview of online resources for the amateur astronomers @ CNET. Don writes -

This week, astronomers will be up in the early morning hours to see Perseids, a meteor shower that has historically proven to put on quite a show. This happens every August when Earth passes through debris from the Swift-Tuttle comet. If you're an amateur astronomer or someone looking to get started with the hobby, you might be surprised to know that there are online tools to help you tonight, when you want to see Perseids, and every other night you go in the back yard and set up your telescope.

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AnonJr alerts us to the news that publisher/media firm SitePoint, has decided to do away with the passwords on the PDF versions of its books, noting that it seemed to only serve to piss off customers:

In the 18 months I have worked at SitePoint, barely a week has gone by where I have not received at least a couple of emails from customers questioning the logic behind our password protection policy. My response, based on the SitePoint philosophy, was always that we were taking an ethical (if largely symbolic) stance on the piracy issue. But how long could we maintain that line while simultaneously placing primacy on the customer experience, as all the while more and more requests to remove password protection poured in.

As a web development resource and learning centre, we know that we must embrace the state of flux -- not as a lofty ideal, but as a normative imperative. You can't claim to be all about the cutting edge when you're stubbornly clinging to old, outmoded processes -- especially when your own beloved customers are urging you to move on. And if we're not keeping pace with the constantly evolving face of web design and development, then we're neither a resource nor a learning centre -- we're a museum.

Kudos to another company recognizing that pissing off your best customers is hardly a way to run a business.

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A. Harvey writes "Ten Ton Hammer has an interesting article about the transition to Asian-style MMO games, specifically Aion. 'In many ways, the West is catching up to the East in terms of gaming. Per capita gaming ... and broadband proliferation is markedly higher in Asian markets. Gaming is much more social in the East as well; many players gather together in internet cafes to spend their game time with each other. Another surprising difference in most Asian-based games is that most functions of game control are mouse based.' I think the author hit the nail on the head that Aion will be a big success in North America and will introduce a lot of players to games with an Eastern feel."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Holy CRAP this is good news: Bradley Denton's incredible comic sf novel Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede is being made into a movie directed and written by Robert Rugan.

Buddy Holly is the story of Oliver Vale, whose mother was obsessed with Buddy Holly, and who one day discovers that Buddy Holly is on the TV, on every TV, on every station, with a guitar around his neck, standing in a bubble on the surface of Ganymede, disoriented, musical, and periodically reading out a sign saying that further information is available from Oliver, and supplying his home address.

The entire world chases Oliver at this point: cops, radio cops, televangelists and their flocks, aliens -- you name it. And Oliver begins a road-trip across America to Lubbock, Texas, there to exhume Buddy Holly's corpse and verify for himself that the famous musician is not on a distant, airless moon.

When this book came out, I was a bookseller at Bakka in Toronto, the venerable science fiction bookstore. If you were a science fiction reader in Toronto in those days, it's a damned good bet I sold you a copy of it. I hand-sold about 750 copies of that book, and would have sold more. Will sell more.

Bradley Denton is a stone comic genius and no two of his books are alike, but this is the one I love -- I worship -- as the apotheosis of a certain kind of gonzo, brilliant, marvellous thing that is to American science fiction comedy what Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers' series is to British sf comedy.

To see it come back and to the big screen, too -- marvellous. Congrats, Brad, and well-deserved.

Jon Heder to star in 'Buddy Holly' (via IO9)

Evgeny sez, "Authorities in Belarus, the last authoritarian regime in Europe, are considering introducing a new school uniform that would protect schoolchildren from electromagnetic radiation that comes from their mobile phones. The phones would be stored in a special pocket. The government is apparently very excited about it."

Belarus develops school uniform that makes tin foil hats obsolete (Thanks, Evgeny!)

(Image: Maker Faire 2007: Tinfoil Hat, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike photo from r3v || cls' photostream)

Artist Monty Monty does a fine job of thinking way outside the box on his modded instruments. The piece pictured above is the Blues Bike, which obviously isn't an instrument but uses repurposed instruments in its form. His actual instruments are beautiful hybrids of the most unexpected pairings, like the Electric Bass and Strings and the Bowling Ball Bass, both shown below.

And for more eye candy, check out the closeup details below of the Electric Bass and Strings and one of my favorites, the Lumber Jack's Axe Guitar. Classic. Monty Monty has tons more where that came from in his online gallery.

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A while back, we posted some details about how you could read Massimo Banzi's Getting Started with Arduino on an iPhone using the Stanza reader. It's gotten even easier (and slightly cheaper): currently priced at $4.99, the standalone iPhone app version of Getting Started with Arduino is available for purchase via iTunes or directly on your iPhone or iPod touch.

Getting Started with Arduino (iTunes link)

In the Maker Shed:

Make: Arduino

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Yet another example of "entitlement culture," as companies misuse intellectual property law to try to prop up questionable business models, comes in this latest story, sent in by Jesse. An insurance company in British Columbia, Canada, called ICBC, is suing a website that offers advice on how not to get your insurance claim denied. Obviously, for policy holders, this is useful information. But, to ICBC, it's copyright infringement. Well, at least that's what the article linked above says. I have a hard time seeing how there's a copyright claim here -- especially since the ICBC spokesperson states that they don't have a problem with the content, and that they just have to protect their trademark. So... let's give ICBC the benefit of the doubt and assume the newspaper reporter screwed up, and this is actually a trademark claim rather than a copyright claim (professional reporters for the win, again!). Even so, this would seem like a typical "gripes site" type discussion where, as long as it's clear that the site in question is not run by the company, there shouldn't be any problem. In fact, given that the site provides useful information for ICBC customers, it's difficult to see what the problem is, other than that the insurance company doesn't like its policy holders to learn how to stand up for their rights.

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(Download MP4 / Watch on YouTube)

Part 2 of Boing Boing Video's interview series with Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding, co-creators, writers, and stars of the "psychedelic comedy" series The Mighty Boosh. In this installment, Noel and Julian share insights into the role music plays in their TV show and live stage performances, and we also learn about "crimping" -- the nonsensical, nerdy, embarassingly British dork-raps you'll see often in their hit BBC program. Imagine these two grown men in crazy character costumes acting out nursery rhymes, and you've got the idea. Or, watch this episode, in which they perform a "Boing Boing" crimp. Yup.

BB caught up with the Boosh gang when they were touring the US to promote the stateside release of a three-season DVD set, also available on iTunes. Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim" recently begain airing episodes in the US, too.

If you missed part 1 of our interview series with Noel and Julian, you'll find that here.

Did you know there's a supervillain made of bubblegum? Watch this episode 'til the very end, and feel his chewy justice.

Previously:

(Special thanks to Mark Kleiman and Stefanie Fletcher for their generous support of this Boing Boing Video interview series.)

Sitting here in our un-airconditioned hackerspace after a long bike ride has got me thinking about how to cool off, and what better way than to make your own air chiller? It turns out there are a number of different ways that makers have figured out how to do this. I wish I had one of these here with me now!

Pete H. made this cool-looking device that uses cool water pumped through copper tubing to chill the air being blown by a fan.

And here's a more advanced, radiator-based design that should be more efficient than the copper tube version above.

Finally, here's an Instructable about how to make a battery-powered version for when you are on the go.

Any other ideas about making a portable air chiller using a cooler? How about a portable swamp cooler that has an icy reservoir of liquid to keep you cool? A portable mister that uses gravity or compressed air to keep an area cool? An astronaut helmet that keeps your head in a cool bubble? Share your ideas in the Comments.

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You may recall that a guy named Gary Odom, who refers to himself often in the third person as "Patent Hawk," has been known to stop by here every so often to insult us without ever, you know, backing up a point. His day job is helping companies do patent/prior art searches. Last year, he made a bit of news by suing Microsoft for a patent he held on "editable toolbars" (exciting stuff). Microsoft later accused him of violating a contract, in that Odom (whoops) had worked for Microsoft, and had an agreement about not filing for certain types of patents, or asserting them against Microsoft.

Now, with the Supreme Court agreeing to hear the Bilski case, which could have a big impact on the patentability of software and business models, a bunch of folks have been dutifully filing their amici briefs attempting to convince the Supreme Court one way or the other. These latest briefs more or less reflect what was in the original briefs filed prior to the CAFC ruling. Still, there was one interesting one: Odom and a buddy filed their own brief (which Odom, again in the third person praised his own brief as being "cogently potent in its brevity and conservatism" -- nothing like patting oneself on the back).

The brief itself is fine (though I believe a bit misleading in what it leaves out... but that's what these briefs tend to do). However, what stood out, was the odd claim on the brief that it was filed on behalf of the State of Oregon (where Odom resides). That's quite a claim... and it appears the State of Oregon, in the form of its Attorney General, doesn't agree with Odom that this represents the state:

Tony Green, a spokesman for the Oregon Attorney General, said no one in his office had heard of Odom's purported statewide representation before [Joe Mullin at The Prior Art] called. "It is our preference that people accurately convey who they're writing an amicus brief on behalf of," says Green. "We neither authorized this or had any knowledge of it."

Of course, Green also points out that the Supreme Court figured out that Odom's claim to represent the State of Oregon was backed up with about as much weight as his typical insults, and properly filed the brief as just being from Odom and his friend, rather than the state of Oregon.

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