So you couldn't get a visa to Ghana, misplaced your tickets to Accra, didn't have an up-to-date yellow fever shot or for some other reason couldn't make it to Maker Faire Africa...Well lose that sad face, the feed is just beginning. It always seems that during amazing events like Maker Faire, the online coverage doesn't really get rolling until people get back to their home base and upload their photos and videos and write up their reflections.

Here are a few of the feeds that are worth watching regarding Maker Faire Africa. Afrigadget has had some great coverage of the lead up and goings on of the event. They are tagging their stories for easy retrieval with MFA09. Over at Twitter, the same tag turns up some great results.

Adam pointed us to the Maker Faire Africa pool on Flickr, and has picked out some great projects worth checking out.

Amy Smith's research group from MIT has an annual month-long international conference, which this year coincided with Maker Faire Africa. You can check out the IDDS blog for more day to day info on their gathering.

Erik Hersman who usually blogs on White African, has been writing on Afrigadget during Maker Faire Africa, also has a great collection of photos from the event on Flickr.

If you see something else, please mention it in the comments. If you went to Maker Faire Africa, drop a line with more stories of the great work that you saw and did and of course, the MAKE Flickr pool is hungry for your photos and video of the event.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Maker Faire | Digg this!

Last year, when the FCC was busy slapping Comcast's wrist for its traffic shaping policies, Comcast pointed out that it wasn't clear the FCC had the authority to do so. I tend to agree, actually. It's not at all clear that the FCC really has a mandate to tell private network operators what they can do with their network -- though, if that argument gets anywhere, it seems likely that a net neutrality-friendly Congress will quickly adjust and add it to the FCC's mandate. However, what was odd was that Comcast waited over a year before finally going to court over this issue. To be honest, I can't see what Comcast "wins" here, even if it wins the case. Congress would likely change the FCC's mandate. Separately, the FTC actually might have a stronger case here, as the real problem wasn't necessarily the traffic shaping, but Comcast's refusal to tell users about it, effectively providing false advertising to customers. That's an FTC issue.

But a much bigger problem for Comcast may be the fact that the company has had no problem actively promoting the FCC's supposed "mandate" over them when it suits them. In a separate lawsuit over the very same traffic shaping, Comcast tried to get out of the lawsuit by claiming it was an issue covered by the FCC:

This issue "i.e., the reasonableness of a broadband provider's network management practices" has, however, been firmly placed within the jurisdiction of the Federal Communications Commission ("FCC"), an administrative agency whose authority to regulate internet broadband access companies' services is well-established.

You have to imagine that this quote from Comcast will be prominently displayed by the FCC in response to Comcast's latest action.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

stadium writes "An oil-filled transformer exploded at the Sayano-Shushenskaya power plant in Siberia, destroying three turbines and bringing down the ceiling of the turbine hall, which then violently flooded. The dam itself did not sustain any damage. It is unclear how many people were killed, but with 12 confirmed deaths and as many as 64 still missing (all presumed dead), this is a serious incident. The huge transformer had enough oil in it to produce a three-mile-long oil spill slowly moving downriver. BBC News reports with three separate videos. The dam produces a quarter of the total energy of RusHydro (whose stock thus took a steep dive at London Stock Exchange) and also feeds the world's largest aluminum smelter. The damages will take years to repair."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Steampunk fans with a taste for horror will likely appreciate The Pyramid Gallery, which, besides being an online emporium where handmade "configurations" (as the puzzle boxes are known among afficionados) are sold, is a pretty remarkable piece of collective fan fiction. If you weren't sufficiently in the know, it would be fairly easy to visit their site and imagine that it is, in fact, the online face of an obscure New York art gallery specializing in weird niche historical artifacts.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "After the permanent injunction barring Microsoft from selling Microsoft Word, many armchair lawyers and pundits wondered how the ruling would affect OpenOffice. The company with the patent, i4i, believes that OpenOffice does not infringe upon it. But lest anyone think that therefore ODF will win out over OOXML, keep in mind that Microsoft has its own broad XML document patent, which issued just two weeks ago, having been filed in December 2004, and they're telling the Supreme Court to apply the Bilski ruling narrowly, so that it doesn't invalidate patents like theirs (and i4i's). After all, unlike most companies and individuals, Microsoft can afford $290 million infringement fines. Then again, given that Microsoft's new patent has only two independent claims (claim #1 and claim #12), and both of those claims 'comprise' something using an 'XML file format for documents associated with an application having a rich set of features,' maybe they wouldn't be that hard to work around if you just make sure any otherwise infringing format is only associated with an application lacking in the feature richness department."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I've been reading Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos books since I was a boy, and nothing pleases me more than discovering a new one on the shelf, as I did this week, picking up the paperback of Jhegaala, the eleventh volume in the series.

For the uninitiated, Vlad Taltos is a human assassin in a strange world where humans occupy the eastern kingdoms and the rest is run by the Dragaereans, a long-lived elfin race whose sorcery is far more formalized than humanity's witchcraft (the human culture on Dragaera is based loosely on ancient Hungarian culture, and the magic is derived somewhat from Hungarian animist mysticism). Vlad lives among the Dragaera, pledged to the house of Jhereg, a mongrel house that you can buy your way into (the others are hereditary), whence come all the crime lords and assassins. In Vlad's storied, ten-volume adventures, he goes from street-punk to crime-boss to lordling to political operative, embroiled in a magnificently realized fantasy world that leaps off the page with a fascinating poleconomy, literary tradition, spirituality and history ancient and modern.

Vlad is a hard-boiled, wise-ass hero, whose narration is part of what makes the series so irresistible, laden as it is with deadpan humor, great observation, wicked emotional truths, and a keen gourmet sensibility (seriously: the food and drink in this book are so well described that I spent the entire time while reading it yearning for one of the marvellous cups of coffee or the hearty bowls of stew that Vlad subsists on through much of the tale).

The other thing about Vlad is that he grows, from an immature punk in the first couple volumes -- books that captivated the teen me perfectly -- into the rapidly wisening exile that we meet in Jhegala. In this volume, Vlad is on the run, driven from home by a political struggle that demands that he choose a side even though he strenuously resists it.

Now Vlad has come to the eastern lands, the human kingdoms that his family hailed from, which he has never seen before. He comes to Burz, an industrial town barely held in the balance between the mercantalists and the manufacturers and the peasantry who still work the land. Vlad's arrival shatters the uneasy peace and sets off a chain of terrible massacres that leave him trying to solve the town's mysteries before he becomes one of them.

This is Steve Brust doing Hammett's Red Harvest, the classic hardboiled novel that is the epitome of the "someone comes to town" kind of story. Brust's take on it is a tour-de-force of subtle characterization, mystery, mayhem, and a rare grasp of the invisible economic forces that shape our lives. Brust is one of the few fantasy writers in the history of the genre whose worlds have all the moving parts necessary to actually exist as economic realities, and here his virtuosity is right at the fore.

There are some spoilers in this volume if you haven't read the previous ones (and if you haven't, you ought to), but I don't think they're deal-breakers if you wanted to start here. If you've never read Brust, you're in for a treat. If you already follow the series, then you know why this is such great news.

Jhegaala

All the Vlad Taltos books

I'm a sucker for MAD Magazine-style parody lyrics to popular songs, and I love me some monsters, so I leapt on Sipping Spiders Through a Straw: Campfire Songs for Monsters when I saw it on the shelf at Toronto's excellent Labyrinth Comics, a store that never fails to delight when I'm in town.

Sipping Spiders delights. Lyricist Kelly DiPucchio has a wicked sense of meter and a wickeder sense of humor, and the two work together to remake songs like "Home of the Strange" (Oh, give me a home/where the Boogie Men Roam/where the ghosts and the green goblins play); "My Delicious Frankenstein" (In a kitchen, in a castle/filled with mold and turpentine/lived a baker, monster maker/and her true love Frankenstein") and "Creepy Creepy Little Jar" (How I wonder what you are/Up upon that shelf so hi/like a pickled shrivelled guy").

Artist Gris Grimly (how's that for a perfect name?) draws a darned good and scary monster, with lots of grime, elaborations, scars and the like. His illustrations have plenty of funny little fillips that reward careful examination, like the worms dribbing off of Zombie Midge in "Zombie Midge is Falling Down" (rolling round, all through town/Zombie Midge is falling down/My pale lady).

Poesy's 18 months now and she's just started singing songs, and it's a real treat to have something more fun that "Itsy Bitsy Spider" to share with her.

Sipping Spiders Through a Straw: Campfire Songs for Monsters

Louis Armstrong meets zombies in this machinima clip that sets the brilliant zombie game Left 4 Dead to the "What a Wonderful World."

What a Wonderful L4D (via Wonderland)

There have been a whole series of alarmist studies that get lots of press lately, with titles about how social networks or other technologies are somehow negatively impacting people's brains. Nearly all of these didn't hold up under much scrutiny, as they almost all took things out of context or greatly extrapolated a finding and misinterpreted the results. The latest to add to the pile? A report claiming that texting may be "rewiring young brains." The evidence? Kids who used mobile phones a lot finished a variety of tests much faster, but tended to be "less accurate." That's about it. From there, the guy who did the study concludes that it must be the fact that many mobile phones use "predictive texting" that's training kids to be fast, but inaccurate, assuming something else will come in and fix the mess. Now, perhaps that's true, but it seems like the study doesn't actually show that at all. Also, it's not clear from the report what sort of mistakes are being made. The article talks about spelling mistakes, which are common in texting, but the real question is whether or not that really matters? It may very well depend on context. In a text message, a spelling mistake isn't a big deal. In a resume, it's a different story. But where on that spectrum did these tests land? But more importantly, even if we grant the premise that kids who text a lot are a lot sloppier on certain tests... how do you go from that to immediately concluding that their brains are being wired differently? It sounds a lot more like what they've been trained to do, rather than any serious neurological shift.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

igrigorik writes "Most web applications are built with the assumption that the client / browser is 'dumb,' which places all the scalability requirements and load on the server. We've built a number of crutches in the form of Cache headers, ETags, and accelerators, but none has fundamentally solved the problem. As a thought experiment: what if the browser also contained a Web server? A look at some of the emerging trends and solutions: HTML 5 WebSocket API and ReverseHTTP."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"What We Become," Volume 10 of the fantastic and wrenching zombie comic The Walking Dead keeps right on shambling relentlessly toward the total annihilation of the human race. I read it in about 30 minutes, shivered for 10, then read it again. Then shivered some more.

Kirkman, Adlard and Rathburn are masters of pacing, and as the survivors push on towards Washington and the possibility of some explanation, or even salvation, the story never lets up once. This volume focuses on the horrors of war and disaster, and what people become through necessity or weakness, and I can't wait for volume 10 11.

The Walking Dead, Vol. 10: What We Become

Link to Volume 9, Link to Volume 8, Link to Volume 7, Link to Volume 6, Link to Volume 5, Link to Volume 4, Link to Volume 3, Link to Volume 2, Link to Volume 1

KentuckyFC writes "Recommendation systems attempt to guess what books, movies, or news people are likely to be interested in. Companies such as Amazon, Google, and Netflix have developed algorithms to mine vast databases looking for correlations that they then use to recommend new items. Now a team of computer scientists has used some of the same filtering techniques to predict the origin of malicious Web attacks so that they can be blacklisted in advance. The team mined a database of hundreds of millions of security logs looking for correlations between victims. The correlations were then used to produce a predictive blacklist of potential attackers. The team says its algorithm is up to 70 per cent more successful at predicting the origin of attacks than current state-of-the-art predictive blacklisting."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As huge fans of water rockets, we are worshipping Australian rocketeer George Katz and his Air Command Water Rockets team, who are now launching single-stage soda bottle rockets over 600 feet using three drop-away booster engines that separate, NASA-style, when their thrust is spent. The boosters have upward-pointing pins that slip into rings on the main rocket, so they simply slip back out upon burnout.

Water Rocket with 3 boosters from AirCommand on Vimeo.

To make it work, the team devised a clever launch base with an air manifold that pressurizes all three boosters equally, simultaneously with the main rocket. Air Command's insanely good website has video of the launcher build, DIY instructions for drop-away boosters and all aspects of water rocketry including multi-stage and parachute mechanisms, plus build and flight logs for all kinds of crazy rockets. And their launch videos (from ground and onboard cams) are so awesome we want to build a water rocket Cape Canaveral.

Link.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Flying | Digg this!

The famed SXSW event is going through their annual process of picking speakers/panels/discussions and they decided that having me do one of my presentations on the music industry might be a good idea. However, the SXSW process involves getting the community to vote on who should speak. That process has just begun, and my talk is now listed for you to vote on. So, go and have your say in whether or not I get to speak at the event.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Artist Derek Erdman, whose "Teens Party with Morrissey" painting was blogged on BB, is as fascinated as we are with the animal species known as the Greater North American Juggalo.

He took it a bit further than we have, though, and attended the 2009 Gathering of the Juggalos, shot lots of photo and video, and published it for your enjoyment.

Here are Erdman's photos from the event. And embedded above, and here: video. (very Heavy Metal Parking Lot).

(via Dangerous Minds, thanks, Richard Metzger, and it looks like The Gathering of the Juggalos has a more lenient fair use policy on photography and videos than Burning Man. Interesting.)

Thomas Murphy, 45, vice president of corporate brand marketing for Sprint, was killed on Friday when a boulder smashed through the windshield of his car, while he and his family were driving in Colorado.

The Colorado State Patrol said a boulder the size of a briefcase fell off a mountain and crashed through the windshield of the family's 2007 Chevy Tahoe. Murphy was knocked unconscious, and his 11-year-old son, Ethan, suffered moderate injuries. Murphy's wife, Jennifer, placed the Tahoe in neutral in hopes it would come to a stop while it was on a steep downhill trajectory, but authorities said it took more than a mile for her to bring the vehicle under control from the front passenger seat.

Sprint executive killed by a boulder (Image: HEATHER ROUSSEAU. Story: Kansas City Star, thanks Chief Fulfiller of Needs)

Detroit-based indie rockers The High Strung, whose penchant for playing live music in libraries was the subject of a This American Life feature, were invited to play a show at the Guantanamo Bay library this summer. They said yes. What followed is documented in a Vanity Fair article, written by the older brother of one of the bandmembers.

Some of their turnout may have been siphoned off by the presence of another group that had flown in with them [m]ade up of about eight active-duty armed forces members(...) "They're called USA Express," Derek said. "Which is probably the worst band name in the world. That's the best we can do, the all-powerful minds of the U.S. military? Anything would be better than that. The Rangers. The Fighters. Really, anything.

USA Express was also a rock band, but in a different idiom. They played covers of contemporary hits, as instructed by the Army. "Nothing they did was their decision," Derek said. "Where they went, how long they performed, their playlist. The Army said, You have to learn these 60 songs, and your first tour starts in three weeks. Go." For prurience sake, I asked what the 60 songs were. "Something by Pink, 'Freebird,' 'Billie Jean.'" Derek laughed. "That was the highlight of their first show for me actually, 'Billie Jean,' because I was invited to sit in. Their drummer was this 52 year-old dude, and he wanted to perform some dance moves during 'Billie Jean,' so they asked me to cover for him, and he got up and did this Michael Jackson-style dancing while we played.

Video of that "Michael Jackson-style dancing" after the jump. The High Strung Rocks Gitmo (Vanity Fair, thanks Mark Kleiman)

xp65 alerts to the plans of an international consortium called Excalibur Almaz Limited to open up a new era of private orbital space flight for commercial customers. The group, consisting of Russian, US, and Japanese companies, will use a formerly top-secret Soviet re-entry vehicle called Almaz to carry paying research crews on on-week missions into Earth orbit by 2013. This ambition represents a large step beyond the sub-orbital flight market so far targeted by most other private space companies. "Excalibur has raised 'tens of millions of dollars' to initiate what will become a several hundred million dollar program, [CEO] Dula tells Spaceflight Now. He has spent more than 20 years eying this specific Almaz program... He also says 'the business plan closes' generating profits within a few years. His surveys have found research and science customers for space missions that are not tourist hops, but less demanding than ISS operations."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Got an Arduino, and don't know what to do with it? Learn to interface with potentiometers and LEDs at this introductory class being offered by Hack PGH. Sign-ups are being accepted now.

WHAT: Intro to Programming the Arduino: Physical Pixels

WHERE: Hack Pittsburgh
1936 5th Avenue, Pittsburgh PA 15219

WHEN: Saturday, Aug. 29 at 2 p.m.

HOW MUCH: $30 for members, $40 non-members

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arduino | Digg this!

The debate between Ben Sheffner and William Patry continues over at Patry's blog, and Sheffner has an interesting piece where he argues (delicately) that sometimes the customer isn't right. He admits upfront that this is a tricky position to defend, and he starts out with a more nuanced view as to why that is, but then he gets to this:

So everyone wants the product -- but too many don't want to pay for it. Hell, I don't want to pay for it. I would love it if I could get all the movies and music I want for free. And I would love it if I could get all the BMWs, houses in the hills, and meals at Urasawa I want for free as well. But of course I realize I can't. Just about everyone is with me on the BMWs and houses part. But too many think that movies and music should be free, and don't see anything wrong with taking them. I'm willing to say they're wrong.

Everyone understands why they can't have all the physical goods they want for free. But they have a much harder time understanding that with intangible goods like movies and music. IP is just harder to understand, and to explain, than physical property. We need theories to undergird it, special laws to define it, and special classes at law school to learn how to fight over it -- not to mention eight-volume treatises to tell us what the law actually is. So when people commit copyright infringement, they may think they're causing no harm -- but they are. They're undermining a system that enables those big, bad companies that everyone loves to hate, to finance the movies and albums that we all love.

This is a myth. It's a popular myth, and I'm quite sure that Sheffner and lots of folks on both sides of the debate think its entirely accurate. But it's a myth. The nature of a good economic transaction is one in which both parties are better off after the exchange. That means the people "paying" don't mind paying. They're happy to pay because they believe that what they have received is better than the cost it took to acquire it. But basic economics plays into the situation here: if the same thing can be made available by others in a better way, it's only natural for people to ask why they should have to pay.

But if you want real proof that there's a lot more at work than the idea that consumers just want everything for free and think that if it's not free they should just take it, look no further than the countless examples we've shown of people paying lots of money to support those providers who don't treat their fans as criminals, who don't try to prevent what the technology allows and who actually work to connect with those fans and give them a true reason to buy.

Everyone wants a good deal, and a fair deal, but people are more than willing to pay if it makes economic sense. Whether consciously or not, there are an awful lot of people who inherently recognize that the economics don't make sense when a good is infinitely available. As much as people have trouble understanding explicit economic concepts like supply and demand, instinctively many do, in fact, understand the very nature of abundance and what it means for pricing. It's not some nefarious story of a bunch of immoral "thieves" wanting stuff for free. It's an inherent understanding of competitive markets.

On top of that, Sheffner takes the position that paying for these things is necessary, because not paying for them "undermines the system," he is once again being misleading. It may undermine one particular way that the system works, but the false statement is implicit in his argument: that this is the only way of funding such creation. That is demonstrably false, as we've shown time and time again. I have no doubt that Sheffner is sincere in his argument, but it's based on a false premise that because the system used to work one way, back before technology changed the basic economics it relied on, that somehow we should all suffer by limiting what the technology allows and by ignoring basic economics.

It would be nice if it were possible, but I cannot find a single example of a modern society being able to successfully hold back or ignore what technology allows when it comes to economics.

Finally, way back when I was in high school, I worked at a bagel shop, which also sold other baked goods. The boss's position was that "the customer is always right" except for one particular issue: the customer could only get the next piece of coffee cake in order. We had this giant sheet cake coffee cake, and many customers didn't want "end pieces," and would ask for middle pieces instead. On more than one occasion, this resulted in angry customers stomping out -- and even once resulted in a fist fight between a customer and the owner's son. Over time, as more competition entered the neighborhood (a Dunkin' Donuts across the street, another bagel shop a block away), we lost a lot of business for our baked goods.

The point, which should be clear, is that you can say the customer is wrong all you want. But, in the end, the market will decide that the customer is right. Always. If you don't provide what the customer wants (a fair transaction) and others are able to do so, you will suffer.

The movie industry and the music industry both have had numerous opportunities to embrace what the technology allows -- and to craft new business models that would be massive money makers in doing so. They have chosen not to do so. They have said that the customer is wrong, and, as Sheffner notes, they have no problem saying so. The problem is that, whether legal or not, the competition is springing up left and right. Sheffner and his former colleagues can stand on whatever principles they want. The market doesn't care. The market only cares for those who serve the customers' needs. Plenty of others are doing so (both legally and illegally). Those who want to survive in business would be smart to take lessons from those who are succeeding and looking to implement smart business models around them. Those who want to insist that "the customer can be wrong" may feel good when they look in the mirror, but they're going to have to contend with a rapidly diminishing customer base.

The customer can be wrong, but focusing on that doesn't get them to pay you.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Richard Metzger has posted an appreciation for the British sketch comedy show Snuff Box, starring Matt Berry (IT Crowd, Darkplace) and Rich Fulcher ("Bob Fossil," "Eleanor," etc., on The Mighty Boosh, which we've been featuring in a series of one, two, three BB Video episodes). Snip from Metzger's post, which includes a bunch of video embeds of his favorite Snuff Box moments:

First broadcast at 11pm on BBC3 in 2006 and never broadcast again, Snuff Box sadly was missed by its target audience, who ended up discovering it anyway, via YouTube and Bit Torrent. (Snuff Box finally came out on DVD in 2008). Each episode begins with Berry and Fulcher (playing "themselves") walking down a white hallway, before choosing a door leading to a typically odd "situation." The pair are employed as government hangmen. They also spend a lot of time in a gentleman's club (where time travel occurs), nursing whiskeys and swearing. There is a LOT of swearing in Snuff Box, so much so that it gives Deadwood a run for the money. It's one of the meanest spirited comedies I can think of (not that this is a bad thing, of course).

SNUFF BOX: BEST SKETCH COMEDY SHOW YOU'VE NEVER HEARD OF (Dangerous Minds)

A few years ago, writer Jimmy Guterman produced The Sandinista Project, in which 36 performers each covered one song from the Clash's Sandinista! Jimmy writes to tell us he's doing something with it online today:

"It's Joe Strummer's birthday, a good day to give Clash fans a present. The Sandinista Project didn't set any sales record and of course the number of copies shared on the Net was greater than the number we sold. We didn't undertake the project to make ourselves any money (it was a charity record) so I didn't mind that it was available everywhere for free. But it did bother me that so many of the torrented versions sounded like crap.To rectify this situation, for one day only, we're offering, without charge,the full record in good quality, as well as one bonus cut and PDFs of the CD booklet and packaging. And hurry up: this is a 24-hour offer. At midnight Pacific Time tonight, it's gone."

The Sandinista Project: free for one day only!

Sony's press conference today at the Gamescom convention was full of announcements. They officially revealed the PS3 Slim, which will be 36% lighter and 33% smaller than the normal PS3. It will come with a 120 GB hard drive and list for $299 when it hits retail stores in early September. Normal PS3s will drop to that price as well starting tomorrow. (Unfortunately for Sony, their unveiling was spoiled a bit by several retailers jumping the gun on new advertisements, not to mention the rumors that had been swirling for weeks ahead of time.) Sony also announced a PS3 firmware update as well as new features and customization options for Home. In addition to that, the PS3 and PSP will be getting a digital reader service. At launch it will bring access to Marvel comic books, and will expand from there. They didn't talk much about their upcoming motion control scheme, but promised more details next month at the Tokyo Game Show.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

inkslinger77 notes a Computerworld interview with Martin Odersky on the Scala language, which is getting a lot of attention from its use on high-profile sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn. The strongly typed language is intended to be a usable melding of functional and object-oriented programming techniques. "My co-workers and I spend a lot of time writing code so we wanted to have something that was a joy to program in. That was a very definite goal. We wanted to remove as many of the incantations of traditional high-protocol languages as possible and give Scala great expressiveness so that developers can model things in the ways they want to. ... You can express Scala programs in several ways. You can make them look very much like Java programs which is nice for programmers who start out coming from Java. ... But you can also express Scala programs in a purely functional way and those programs can end up looking quite different from typical Java programs. Often they are much more concise. ... Twitter has been able to sustain phenomenal growth, and it seems with more stability than what they had before the switch, so I think that's a good testament to Scala. ... [W]e are looking at new ways to program multicore processors and other parallel systems. We already have a head start here because Scala has a popular actor system which gives you a high-level way to express concurrency. ... The interesting thing is that actors in Scala are not a language feature, they have been done purely as a Scala library. So they are a good witness to Scala's flexibility..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For a school project, Nicholas Kwan made this interesting inclinometer, which is a device that measures how far over an object is tilted.

For a sensor, he built a variable capacitor out of two semicircles of tinfoil mounted vertically, with a petri dish half-filled with water stuck in between them. When the wheel rotates, the water stays in the bottom half, which causes the capacitance across the tinfoil to change (because water and air have different dielectric constants). This change is then detected, and then used to change the frequency of a 555 timer chip, which is measured and translated into tilt by a microcontroller.

You could probably accomplish the same measurement by using an accelerometer in much less time, but I think this method is much more enlightening. I really like that the whole thing was made from scratch; it does a great job of demystifying how the sensor works. I realize that it was a second year engineering project, but it might be interesting to see what the dynamics of the system are (for example, how long it would take for the water to settle down if it was bumped?).

Does anyone think that it might be possible to design the capacitor differently so that it can sense which direction the tilt is occurring? You might also be able to use this kind of capacitance circuit to measure how much water is in a pipe, such as a rainwater gauge. Fun stuff!

Oh, and if you want to learn more about inclinometers, there is ... wait for it ... a whole blog dedicated just to them!

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Electronics | Digg this!

Ladyada's design documentation of the TV-B-Gone kit, it explains how the TV-B-Gone works (people ask this all the time) and this information might come in handy when building IR receivers or transmitters! Pictured above, the Sony on/off code.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Electronics | Digg this!

US courts have generally been pretty good at protecting the anonymity of online speech from forced exposure -- in fact, as we're posting this story, we've come across yet another ruling protecting anonymous speech online. However, every so often a judge goes in the other direction. Earlier this year, we wrote about a case involving a model, Liskula Cohen, who was so upset about a blog that had a grand total of four posts insulting her, that she filed a lawsuit to uncover the anonymous blogger, claiming that it was defamatory to call her a "skank." Of course, most of us would never have heard of the blog, its posts, Liskula Cohen or that anyone thought she was a "skank" until this lawsuit was filed. But that's another issue for another day.

However, CitMediaLaw alerts us to the news that the judge in the case has ruled that calling Liskula Cohen a "skank" is potentially defamatory, and not just an opinion or an everyday insult, and thus the blogger should be unmasked:

But Madden found that use of the terms "skank," "skanky," "ho" and "whoring" defamed Cohen because they appeared in captions near photos of the model in provocative poses. "Under these circumstances," Madden wrote, the words combined with the suggestive photos "carry a negative implication of sexual promiscuity."

Madden also rejected the blogger's contention that the words were vague insults. "In the context of this specific blog, such words cannot be reasonably viewed as comparable in meaning and usage to the word 'jerk' or any other loose and vague insult," Madden held.

While certainly not the most high brow of insults, it's difficult to think that anyone reading the blog posts in question would take from it that it is somehow factual that Cohen was actually sexually promiscuous. I would imagine that the very small number of people who actually saw the site would conclude, accurately, that some unknown, anonymous blogger didn't like Cohen very much and posted a very small number of silly blog posts about her. And then they'd get on with their lives. Hopefully, the still (for now) anonymous blogger decides to appeal. Yes, the speech may have been nasty and obnoxious. But that doesn't warrant the gov't and Cohen forcing the blogger to be revealed.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

MAKE, Volume 19 features a special section on robots. Learn how to make a model plane with an autopilot and a small built-in robot brain. We 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. MAKE, Volume 19, on newsstands today!

Subscribe to MAKE, or log in to check out the Digital Edition.

Subscribe to the MAKE Podcast in iTunes, or download the m4v video.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Announcements | Digg this!

The inventor of the beautiful Chemex brewer, Peter Schlumbohm, once said, "With the Chemex, even a moron can make good coffee.” Now, Intelligentsia Coffee has produced a terrific video that will show morons how to make terrific coffee.

Hugh Pickens writes "The Business Software Alliance (BSA) is a trade group established in 1988 representing a number of the world's largest software makers whose principal activity is trying to stop copyright infringement of software produced by its members, performing roughly the same function for the software industry that the RIAA performs for the music industry. Yet, as Bill Patry, author of a 7-volume treatise on US copyright law and currently Senior Copyright Counsel at Google, notes on his blog the BSA is a 'far less unpopular organization' than the RIAA because there are three key differences between the BSA's campaigns and the RIAA's. First, BSA's members have always offered their products for sale to the public, through any channel that wants to sell them. Second, BSA's members are consumer-oriented; they try to develop products that respond to consumers' needs, and not, the reverse: focusing on what they want to sell to consumers. Third, because consumers can easily purchase BSA's members products, those who copy without paying are simply scofflaws. 'I think the fact that the public does not object to BSA's campaign proves my point [that]... people do not want things for free; they are willing to pay for them,' writes Patry. 'It should not be surprising that when consumers are not treated with respect, they react negatively. That's something the software industry learned long ago, and that's why people don't object to the BSA's enforcement campaign.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For my money, it is one of the more perverse facts of the physical universe that elemental mercury, which is so beautiful and has so many amazing and useful properties, is also so dangerous.

This fountain, commissioned by the Spanish government from Alexander Calder for the 1937 World's Fair, pumps quicksilver instead of water. Today the entire fountain, located at the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, is enclosed in a glass box to prevent exposure of visitors to the toxic metal. Professor David Eppstein at UC-Irvine has a nice gallery of pictures, including the above.

More:

• Mercury driven motor

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!

Last week we did some debunking on the unsupported idea that just because Radiohead was sick of recording full albums, it somehow meant that the band's business model experiment had been a failure, and that the band did not like using "free" as a part of its business model. Amazingly, the usual cast of characters in our comments continued to insist that Radiohead had clearly learned that "free" doesn't pay. Amusingly, that very same day a "brand new" Radiohead track suddenly appeared on BitTorrent, leading to all sorts of speculation (much of it wrong). But on Monday, the band not only officially released the track for free, but in order to distribute it, it pointed to the very same torrent tracker that had been uploaded last week. In other words, the band leaked its own latest song (for free) via BitTorrent, let the buzz build, and then officially announced the "release" a few days later. But, of course, we're to believe our commenting friends who insist that the band learned that "free" doesn't work?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

NewsWatcher writes "The BBC has an interesting story about the link between sightings of UFOs and sci-fi films. From the article: 'Documents from the Ministry of Defence released by the National Archives show the department recorded 117 sightings in 1995 and 609 in 1996.' Those years correlate with the screening of the film Independence Day (1996) and when The X-Files was at the height of its popularity in the UK (1995). 'The more that alien life is covered in films or television documentaries, the more people look up at the sky and don't look down at their feet,' said an expert on UFO sightings based at Sheffield Hallam University."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

guard dog
quimby the mouse
my paper mind
cyriak
the brothers mcleod
we got time
disney templates

previously on web zen:
animated zen 2008
animated zen 2007
animated zen 2005

Permalink for this edition. Web Zen is created and curated by Frank Davis, and re-posted here on Boing Boing with his kind permission. Web Zen Home and Archives, Store, Twitter. (Image courtesy Eric Curry. Thanks Frank!)

In 1985, American artist Evelyn Rosenberg developed a technique for embossing thick metal plates by blasting them onto a mold with sheets of plastic explosive. "Detonography," as she calls it, can impress very delicate images into metal surfaces, and can weld dissimilar metals together into single panels. Shown above is "Pillars of Knowledge," featuring four detonographs treated with various chemicals to produce different patinas.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!

Jake Staub writes "Just replaced the gasoline engine in a Honda Insight with a Diesel engine. On a 3,000 mile cross-country shakedown journey the car averaged 92mpg over 1,800 miles. Around a very hilly town in Northwest Washington, the car is averaging 78mpg. These mileage averages are without the electric side of the vehicle fully functional. With a bit more tinkering on the electric side and through a slight gearing change through tire size, it is anticipated that the car will likely average 100mpg. The build for the car has been documented on the web site and is as close to open source as my time allows. The car was built by two guys in a garage in Southern Maryland. If we can do it I don't see any reason why major auto manufacturers can't do it since we used their parts."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Flickr member DEFNET's autonomous four-wheeler sports an iPod to display serial data -

This is my autonomous robot. It uses an Arduino to control it, an ultrasonic sensor, and an iPod displays output data through the serial port.
It drives using two servos modified for continuous drive. The servo for the sensor does not presently work because using the default code library I can only control two servos.
When it gets too close to a wall it backs up, turns to look both ways, and chooses the way with least obstruction. All while outputting distance and decision information to the serial port.

Awesome contrast between the cardboard enclosure & iPod Touch! Have a closer look on the project's photo page.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Robotics | Digg this!

'Mister Jalopy' is the reuse, recycle guru on CNN.com!

There is a "maker's movement" gaining prominence on a global scale. Mister Jalopy works out of converted hot-rod repair shop. This is where he builds "the stuff of my dreams." One of its pied pipers is a man known by his pen name, Mister Jalopy. His agenda is simple. "You need to be able to modify, hack, repair, rebuild and reuse the stuff that you buy."

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Makers | Digg this!

It's no surprise these days to see that service providers are getting sued for the actions of their users, but it is always fun to see how the lawyers for the plaintiffs try to get around the obvious problems of DMCA or CDA safe harbors. The latest case involves boxing promoter One Ring suing Ustream, one of a number of live video streaming companies out there. Like the misguided lawsuit against Justin.tv, this involves a sports group suing the platform provider because a user turned their webcam towards the television, so that others could watch the stream. The DMCA pretty clearly makes these lawsuits entirely baseless, as the only liability is on the person who actually used the account and pointed the webcam at the TV (separately, the fact that you can potentially be guilty of copyright infringement for showing the world what you see with your own two eyes is quite troubling, but a discussion for a different day).

In this case, though, there's a little tidbit, brushed over by the original article, but which suggests how One Ring hopes to get around the DMCA safe harbors on copyright infringement. It's not just suing Ustream over copyright, but it's also claiming that since its logo was seen via the broadcast, Ustream is also guilty of trademark infringement. That's because there's an annoying loophole in that trademark is not technically covered by either the DMCA's safe harbors or the CDA's safe harbors. The DMCA only covers copyright, and the CDA specifically exempts "intellectual property," thus leaving trademark in nowhere's land between the two. Not surprisingly, this has become a popular loophole for lawyers to try to exploit (in fact, we were recently threatened on this very point).

That said, it still seems like Ustream should have a strong case. Even if trademark is not explicitly covered by a safe harbor, simple common sense should make it clear that the company should in no way be liable for the actions of its users. On top of that, claiming that its trademark infringement to show the One Ring logo is also quite questionable and hardly seems likely to stand up under scrutiny. Still, it's an annoying lawsuit that Ustream has to deal with, for no particular reason.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

1.6 million Buprestidae shells were glued to the ceiling of the Royal Palace in Brussels. The project is by artist Jan Fabre and his team of 30 beetle-gluers.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!

It delights me to no end to see our pal Mister Jalopy as a headline on the front page of CNN.com. The article is titled: "'Mister Jalopy' is the reuse, recycle guru." Jalopy tells me, "A neighbor (that drives a CNG Honda) scolded me for driving a big truck. I told him, "I am the reuse guru!" From CNN.com (photo from MAKE):

Mister Jalopy owns a laundromat and a used-bicycle store, and he operates out of a converted hot-rod repair shop along an industrial strip of land in the shadow of Interstate 5.

He calls his workshop "Hooptyrides World Headquarters." "It's my personal shop where I do my writing, think up my crackpot business schemes, repair bicycles and do my auto maintenance ... where I build the stuff of my dreams."

It's brimming with high-quality tools, odds and ends from 20 years of harvesting garage sales, and machines like a lathe and welder that would delight a working tradesman.

He created the "world's largest iPod." It's housed in a 1950s record console that can now digitize his music off the turntable, and the original buttons control the iPod. He also made an "urban guerrilla movie theater" -- a handmade movie projector sitting on an adult tricycle.

His used-bike shop, Coco's Variety, is named after one of his two dogs. "The credo of my store is 'Faded champions reborn for another chance at glory.' "

He adds: "These old bikes, already manufactured, [are] tenderly brought back to life for someone to love anew. The best bike for the environment is one that already exists. Not one made fresh."

"'Mister Jalopy' is the reuse, recycle guru"

mr_sifter writes "There's a large lexicon of monosyllabic, four-letter words for describing something you don't like — but only PC gamers use the word 'port' with such a fervent degree of repulsion. Common complaints about console ports include meager graphics options, dodgy third-person camera angles, poorly-thought-out controls and sparsely distributed save points. In this feature, Bit-tech talks to developers of games such as Dead Space, Red Faction and Tales of Monkey Island to find out why porting games between the three major consoles and the PC is so difficult. Radically different CPU, graphics and memory architectures play their part, as do the differences in control methods and the rules Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo set about how games should work on their systems."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

xp65 writes "NASA scientists have discovered glycine, a fundamental building block of life, in samples of comet Wild 2 returned by NASA's Stardust spacecraft. 'Glycine is an amino acid used by living organisms to make proteins, and this is the first time an amino acid has been found in a comet,' said Jamie Elsila of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. 'Our discovery supports the theory that some of life's ingredients formed in space and were delivered to Earth long ago by meteorite and comet impacts.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Using a custom APK file you can root your Android phone with relative ease. Once rooted, you're free to install one of the latest custom Android ROMs on the phone and enjoy new features still in development or scratch that itch the standard SDK won't facilitate.

Android Rooting in 1-click [via RyeBrye & Hackaday]

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Cellphones | Digg this!

Back in January, we noted that it looked like there might be a new winner in the battle to see who was responsible for the largest ever credit card breach. Until that time, the honor had gone to a series of department stores owned by TJX (TJ Maxx, Marshalls, etc.). That involved info on 94 million credit card holders. Not bad. But the newer deal, involving Heartland Payment Systems appeared to effect well over 100 million. Now, you may have seen the news reports this week that have upped that total to 130 million, as part of the announcement of indictments against three individuals for illegally accessing the data. But, what's fascinating is that the one guy in custody, Albert Gonzalez, was already in custody for his role in the TJX hack (along with some other retailers). Oh, and there's also the tidbit about how he was a government informant, handing over info on (you guessed it) the underworld involved in stolen credit card numbers.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

French artist/designer Aïssa Logerot created an shake-powered LED 'spraycan' for light-writing -

halo is a handy light-writing tool, preserving the techniques and gestures that graffiti artists use with spray cans. It is possible to change the color and the brightness of the led to change the graffiti’s styles. If the light doesn’t have enough battery, users simply have to shake it to have energy again.

More pics of the project in use over on his site.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!

(Photo by AP)

A 48-year-old elephant who lost part of her front left leg a decade ago was fitted with a prosthetic last week and is reported to be doing great. The artificial leg was made by the Prostheses Foundation, which also makes artificial limbs for human amputees.

Let the witty naming begin -- Robo Dumbo has been used, and I'm thinking someone more creative than me can come up with a nifty Steampunk version of Elephunk.

More:

• Report on Treehugger
• Report by Associated Press with more photos
• Nice chronology here

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Announcements | Digg this!

Pre-IFA 2009: Casio has announced a pair of Exilim Zoom series digital compacts. The EX-Z450 and EX-Z90 feature an Intelligent AF function that attempts to identify photographic subjects beyond just looking for humans as faces. The Z450, which has a 4x zoom lens starting at 28mm equivalent, also incorporates an enhanced version of the company's Dynamic Photo mode that now allows a moving subject to be cropped from a single shot, as long as the background flat and of a single color. Both feature 12.1MP sensors and offer HD recording.

Casio has announced a pair of Exilim Zoom series digital compacts. The EX-Z450 and EX-Z90 feature an Intelligent AF function that attempts to identify photographic subjects beyond just looking for humans as faces. The Z450, which has a 4x zoom lens starting at 28mm equivalent, also incorporates an enhanced version of the company's Dynamic Photo mode that now allows a moving subject to be cropped from a single shot, as long as the background flat and of a single color. Both feature 12.1MP sensors and offer HD recording.

Harry writes "Once upon a time, Microsoft said that Windows Vista would transform life as we knew it. Palm said its Foleo was a breakthrough. Circuit City said firing its most experienced salespeople would save the company. And Apple said that Web apps were all that iPhone owners needed. I've collected the original press releases for these and other ill-fated tech announcements, and annotated them with the facts as they played out in the real world."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the midst of an intense initial cleanup/setup, Darren of Ontario's Kwartzlab provides a tour of the groups new home. Congrats on the space, gentlemen! [via @mghiemstra]

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Events | Digg this!

This video shows nine different coin-flipping machines designed and built by Nitipak Samsen of the Design Interactions program at the Royal College of Art. His aim is to build a machine that can predictably flip a coin to land either heads up or tails up.

It's not easy to control the fate of a flipped coin. Samsen has identified 31 factors that influence the outcome, but believes it is possible to nail them down.

I'm impressed by the wide variety of prototypes he built, as well as his stick-to-it-iveness.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Gadgets | Digg this!

mudimba writes "The iPhone 3GS 32GB is currently the best selling phone in Japan (the 16GB version came in at number nine). This is in stark contrast to reports from earlier this year that the Japanese hate the iPhone. Nobody is sure what specific features caused the change of heart, though it is speculated that video capture and voice control might be part of the answer. When the 3G iPhone first came out it saw a spike in sales, but unlike the 3GS it was unable to outsell locally-made handsets."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've talked a lot about how content is advertising, and we still get pushback from people who seem to think that we mean underhanded marketing or "product placement" is what we're talking about. But that's not it at all. We're talking about how good content is almost always advertising for something, and it need not be explicit at all. A great example of this is this NY Times article looking at how the Broadway play Next to Normal successfully used Twitter to promote itself. Rather than just setting up a feed to hype up the play, or to announce discounts, they actually had the playwright adapt the play for Twitter. And, from there, they ran the adapted version on Twitter, which built up a huge following, while specifically choosing not to go with a hard sell.

But it appears to have worked. The number of Twitter followers has ballooned, and there's been a nice correlation in ticket sales (admittedly, there may have been other factors as well, but there appears to be a lot of evidence that many attendees were drawn to it via the Twitter campaign). None of this was surreptitious. None of it involved "tricking" people. None of it involved "product placement." All it involved was making good use of good content to draw more attention -- and from there, people figured out what they wanted to buy. That's the point of content as advertising, and it's great to see it put to use so creatively.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Each week, our friends at TreeHugger share some of their most curious and provocative posts with us. We're doing the same over on their turf. Enjoy! -- The Boingers
A poisonous cloud of endosulfan blew through the Sierra Mountains and into crucial frog habitats. What happened next? You thought Fiji water was evil because it is shipped halfway around the world in plastic bottles. Here's another reason for it to deserve your ire. An oldie but a goodie: our green guide to sex! (PG-13 photos are safe for work, unless you work around kids) An iPhone app for controlling your car? It's real. Just not your car...yet. Had a bird poop facial or Bull Semen conditioning treatment lately? What other horrors are we massaging into our heads? You won't get fries with that. Bicycle discrimination at the drive through. After sending skinny nude models to protest fur, PETA calls overweight women "whales" in a new ad campaign. Sounds like PETA has a body image problem. Does it need a hug?

The Insanewiches blog catalogs elaborate sculpted sandwiches that resemble domino games, racecars, wireless mice and many other objects.

Insanewiches (Thanks, Marilyn!)

My latest Guardian column, "Why free ebooks should be part of the plot for writers," talks about how free ebook releases benefit well-known and obscure writers alike.

Releasing a book as a free download isn't newsworthy in and of itself. It was, once upon a time, especially when that book had the backing of a major publisher. Publishers are often characterised as being conservative about the net, so it was surprising when it happened. These days, many writers have convinced their publishers to dip their toes in the water on this, and it's simply not notable when it happens again.

Which is not to say that free downloads have no role when it comes to promotion, publicity and marketing. Their main effect is to magnify any good feeling your book has generated, by making it simple for people who love the book to get it under the nose of their social circle.

Why free ebooks should be part of the plot for writers

Bowloftoast sez, "This is a short animation that takes the viewer through a progressive description of all (and all possible) dimensions, up to and including the 10th. It is an elegant introduction to the fundamentals of string theory and a mind-blowing toe-dip into the pool of the metaphysical."

Imagining the Tenth Dimension (Thanks, Bowloftoast!)

Latest "Gadget Freak" - the wake up machine!

Here's an alarm clock that clicks on your favorite music, vibrates your pillow, removes your sheets and makes your coffee. Brian Wagner and his mechanical engineering teammates at Colorado State University (Matthew Cuff, Ryan Seeboth and Steve Schmitt) devised the perfect wake-up machine. The alarm uses a keypad and six LEDs to indicate depressed buttons or command functions that determine the sensory mix to wake you up and ease you into your day. The temperature gauge can be connected to a heater or fan to activate the perfect wake-up temperature.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this!

Last week we wrote about how the Southeastern Conference (SEC), a big college sports division was looking to limit how fans could interact with the world while at games. Michael Kruse, at the St. Petersburg Times did an excellent analysis of this move (and I don't just say that because he quoted me), talking about how it's really about the SEC trying to prevent the genie of "fancasting" events from getting out of the bottle, because exclusive broadcast contracts are so lucrative. While a short-sighted economic analysis by SEC officials may think this makes sense, perhaps other college sports divisions see this as an opportunity to pick up fans. CitMediaLaw points out a comparison showing that another division, The Big Ten, seems to take a very different approach, not just encouraging fans to use social media tools to broadcast their views and thoughts, but also providing linkable and embeddable videos and content to make it even easier. Admittedly, college sports fandom often has more to do with where you personally attended, but you have to think that enabling fans to help promote you is going to be a better long term strategy for building up fan loyalty than trying to actively stifle their ability to express themselves and promote the teams and events. How enthusiastic are SEC fans going to be, if every time they try to talk up their favorite team, the league threatens to sue them?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

krou writes "It looks like the launch of the UK Pirate Party came not a moment too soon. The Independent reports that Business Secretary Lord Mandelson is going to take a hard-line stance to preserve copyright after intense lobbying by the music and film industry. 'Under the proposed laws, Ofcom, the industry regulator, would be given powers to require Internet service providers to collect information on those who downloaded pirate material. The data would be anonymous, but serious repeat infringers would be tracked down through their computer ID numbers.' Prospective punishments included restricting internet access, either slowing down an offender's broadband or disconnecting them altogether, and fines up to £50,000. The Pirate Party came out against the scheme, calling it a gross invasion of civil liberties, while Tom Watson, the former minister for digital engagement, spoke out against the move, saying that the government should stop trying criminalize downloaders just so as to 'restore 20th-century incumbents to their position of power', but should instead be 'coming up with interventions that will nurture 21st-century creative talent.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

RjDuino allows you to control an Arduino with your iPhone running RjDj. I definitely want to try out this project, especially the pitch controlled LEDs.

Using a custom RjDj patch to control an Arduino. Made possible via the "netsend" and "netreceive" objects in PD, which are also usable in RjDj. The interface with the Arduino is made through the Firmata firmware in combination with the PDuino library.

In the Maker Shed:


Make: Arduino

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arduino | Digg this!

Paul Kedrosky has a thought-provoking post, discussing how various entrepreneurship programs don't seem to be producing more entrepreneurs. He's finding that when he talks to people in those programs, they're often more interested in participating in the ecosystem around entrepreneurship (such as by becoming a venture capitalist) rather than being entrepreneurs themselves. To be honest, I don't find this all that surprising. Most entrepreneurs I know are pretty driven to start a company now and not wait around for however long it takes to go through a schooling program. If I didn't have the opportunity to tack on business school right after undergrad (unlike most b-schoolers), I doubt I would have gone back (and I spent way too much time in business school talking to others trying to convince them to start businesses). I don't think entrepreneurship programs are a bad thing, per se, but I'd imagine the real help is in assisting those already in the process of building a business, rather than studying to be entrepreneurs. Also, while Paul talks about the importance of "creating more entrepreneurs," I'm not sure that makes sense. I think the people who are meant to be entrepreneurs become entrepreneurs.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that it is possible to fabricate blood and saliva samples containing DNA from a person other than the donor, and even to construct a sample of DNA to match someone's profile without obtaining any tissue from that person — if you have access to their DNA profile in a database. This undermines the credibility of what has been considered the gold standard of proof in criminal cases. 'You can just engineer a crime scene,' said Dan Frumkin, lead author of the paper. 'Any biology undergraduate could perform this.' The scientists fabricated DNA samples in two ways. One requires a real, if tiny, DNA sample, perhaps from a strand of hair or a drinking cup. They amplified the tiny sample into a large quantity of DNA using a standard technique called whole genome amplification. The other technique relies on DNA profiles, stored in law enforcement databases as a series of numbers and letters corresponding to variations at 13 spots in a person's genome. The scientists cloned tiny DNA snippets representing the common variants at each spot, creating a library of such snippets. To prepare a phony DNA sample matching any profile, they just mixed the proper snippets together. Tania Simoncelli, science adviser to the American Civil Liberties Union, says the findings were worrisome. 'DNA is a lot easier to plant at a crime scene than fingerprints,' says Simoncelli. 'We're creating a criminal justice system that is increasingly relying on this technology.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Legohaulic figured out a "coin method" to attach LEGOs in a new way.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in LEGO | Digg this!

People often ask why we focus on the entertainment industry so much around here, and one of the points I've tried to make is that what's happening in the entertainment industry is nothing but a precursor to what's going to happen in almost every industry out there, as new technologies come about that change the fundamental economics that their old business models relied on. Healthcare? Packaged goods? Food? Financial services? All may be facing similar issues before you know it, and having a clear understanding of what went right and wrong in the entertainment industry will hopefully help those industries avoid making the same mistakes (they can make new ones instead!).

Another industry where this is already starting to happen is energy. In a discussion on HP's datacenter efforts, there's a quick discussion of how the energy industry is facing the same "dematerialization" threat as the music business:

But ultimately, the goal is making the world lighter, also called "dematerialization." Information technology can help replace energy-intensive and carbon-heavy methods--with basic materials, business processes or entire business models. Think of how the digital transformation has completely redefined the production and distribution of music.

Extend that model more broadly: By 2012, all of the servers in the world will use as much power as was used by all of Mexico in 2007. Breakthroughs in photonics allow us to use light instead of copper wire to transmit data. Not only can we reduce the use of natural resources, we can dramatically reduce energy consumption, taking another step forward from the work we've done at Wynyard.

While it may not seem to impact people as directly, I'd argue that what eventually happens in those other industries will have an impact far greater than anything that happens in the entertainment industry -- so we might as well look deep into what's happening to understand it now, before we create a much bigger mess in other industries.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

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."

Worshippers of Morbid Anatomy: Just as I'm warming to my task, my time on the Boing Boing marquee is over. I'd hoped to squeeze in posts about the pornographic rapture of Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Theresa (don't you love the sweetly sadistic smile playing at the corner of the cherub's lips as he hovers, poised to plunge the golden spear of holy desire into Theresa's "very entrails," leaving her "all on fire with a great love of God," moaning with the "surpassing... sweetness of this excessive pain"?) and about the hallucinogenically beautiful sculptures in the Borghese Gallery, carved from seemingly infinite varieties of marble: snow-white Carrara, perfect for modeling the soft swell of a breast, the curve of a flank, a chin-dimple; busts of cardinals made of pink marble mottled with white blobs, giving their heads the appearance of being sculpted out of, er, headcheese; marble the color of blood sausage, marble the color of raw salmon, marble green as mint jelly, purple as eggplant, marble flickering with blue and gray veins, Pentelic marble, Parian marble, and let's not forget Phrygian marble, a psychedelic rock that the Victorian writer Henry Hull described as "one of the most curious, as well as handsome varieties of marble with which I am acquainted," a mineral delirium of "banded layers of silicious limestone of various shades of green, verging on blue or gray, alternating with others of a pure white...contorted, waved, or foliated in a remarkable manner..."

If I'd had time, I would have walked you through the Museum of Pathological Anatomy in Florence and the taxidermic Eden of the Museum of Zoology in Bologna, its wall-eyed creatures leaking stuffing, unloved by anyone except the occasional devotee of what the postmodern theorist Steve Baker calls "botched taxidermy." Did I mention the bizarre, Ed Gein-ian anatomical preparations of the 18th century naturalist Girolamo Segato, in the anatomy museum at the Ospedale Carregi in Florence? (A "maker" after Boing Boing's heart, he crafted a handsome table, inset with what looked like polished stones but were, in fact, human organs, preserved, cut into geometric shapes, and fitted into a colorful mosaic. When Segato proudly presented a local noble with the results of his handiwork, the squicked-out noble declined.) And then there's the incomparable museum of teratology and pathology, just a building away in the same hospital, with its mind-altering waxes of skin diseases and its wet specimens of congenital deformities, a Boschian garden of unearthly (yet all too human) things, unforgettable, almost indescribable. And then there's the Museum of Veterinary Pathology and the Ercole Lelli waxes in the Palazzo Poggi, both in Bologna, and...and...

Happily, I'll be blogging about all these things at Shovelware, so if my posts over the past two weeks have whetted your interest in the Pathological Sublime, do drop by. Blogging for Boing Boing has been thrilling, if exhausting. As I said in my opening post, the collective intelligence of Boing Boing's hive mind is among the smartest readerships anywhere. Of course, every wise crowd has at least one troll-tastic Master of His Own Domain, the all-knowing and tirelessly punctilious offspring of George Costanza and Felix Unger. Nonetheless, I'm immensely grateful to those of you who took the time to offer constructive critiques, suggest alternate angles of attack on my subjects, or point me toward stones left unturned in my research. To you I can only say: mille grazie---and then some.

IMAGES (from top to bottom): Sculpture of head with tumors, Museum of Teratological and Pathological Anatomy, Florence; Botched taxidermy, Museum of Zoology, Bologna; Wax model of hydrocephalic child, Museum of Teratological and Pathological Anatomy, Florence; Postcard from Reliquia di San Valentino, Basilica di Santa Maria in Cosmedin, Rome.

Better late than never with this announcement, but The Brooklyn Kitchen is giving two more Food Science Fridays demonstrations this month at their store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 21 at 4PM: IT'S ELECTRIC!

Tuber Town: We're going to see what kind of kitchen electronics we can run with potatoes and citrus fruits!

Sparks!: Not the malt liquor! We're going to see what sort of minty things we can get to spark in the dark recesses of our mouths.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 28 at 4PM: UP, DOWN AND OVER

How Do You Get An Egg In A Bottle?: We'll demonstrate how temperature and air pressure interact to pull a hardboiled egg into a narrow mouthed bottle. The real question will probably end up: How do we get the egg out?!

Chemical Propulsion: We're going to build a rocket to the moon. Well, maybe not the moon, but we are going to propel things short distances into the air using baking soda and vinegar.

Dry Ice Cream: Making ice cream always feels a bit scientific, especially the old fashioned rocksalt and ice way. But today we're going to go nerdtastic and make ice cream using dry ice.

Their September class lineup is online today, too!

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Science | Digg this!

Looks like it might be possible to run other OSes without additional software on the TI-83...

The ever-mysterious Benjamin Moody posted a cryptic message on the United-TI forum yesterday. In it, he listed the factorization of the 512-bit RSA modulus used by TI's OS signing key for the 83+ (the "0004 key"). No other details are yet available about how he achieved this feat of substantial brute forcing power. In the event of United-TI downtime, Brandon Wilson has put a copy of Benjamin's values on his personal website.

With this achievement, any operating system can be cryptographically signed in a manner identical to that of the original TI-OS. Third party operating systems can thus be loaded on any 83+ calculators without the use of any extra software (that was mentioned in recent news) Complete programming freedom has finally been achieved on the TI-83 Plus!

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Gadgets | Digg this!

Harry writes "PC World and Technologizer conducted a survey of 5,000 people who use Windows XP as their primary operating system. Many have no plans to leave it, and 80% will be unhappy when Microsoft completely discontinues it. And attitudes towards Vista remain extremely negative. But a majority of those who know something about Windows 7 have a positive reaction. More important, 70 percent of respondents who have used Windows 7 say they like it, which is a sign that Windows 7 stands a chance of being what Vista never was: an upgrade good enough to convince most XP users to switch."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's this concept out there in the newspaper world, pushed by Alan Mutter more than any other, that the "original sin" of the newspaper industry was failing to charge when they put their content online. This is simply wrong. Many did try to charge, and they failed, because no one paid. However, Steve Buttry has a post making a much better point. The real "original sin" by newspapers wasn't failing to charge, but failing to innovate. Basically, the entire competitive landscape and the entire marketplace they were used to changed. Entirely. And nearly all of them seemed to think that they could get by doing the same basic thing they had always done.

These days, they're blaming everyone else for their problems: bloggers, readers, Craigslist, Google, some unknown "aggregators." But the simple fact is that these newspapers were incredibly fearful of innovating themselves, and basically let all those other sites online do the innovation for them. And now they're upset that the traffic goes to the innovators? At every turn in the game they were free to innovate themselves. They didn't. To then step up late in the game and look for legal and regulatory support to hold back those who did innovate seems inherently ridiculous.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

spectre_240sx writes "We've discussed server naming a fair amount in the past, but I haven't seen much about workstations. Where I currently work, we embed a lot of information in our workstation names: site, warranty end date, machine type, etc. I'm of the opinion that this is too much information to overload in the machine name when it can more suitably be stored in the computer description. I'd love to hear how others are naming their workstations and some pros and cons for different naming schemes. Should computers be logically tied to the person that they're currently assigned to, or does that just cause unnecessary work when a machine changes hands? Do the management tools in use make a difference in how workstations are named?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As the discussions over newspaper business models have continued, I keep hearing from newspaper people that they "do local news better" and that local news will be what saves them. Yet, at the same time, we keep hearing about new local news startups that appear to do a much better job of it... and the best of those startups keep getting bought by big media companies. The latest is that MSNBC has purchased EveryBlock, a cool local news player that did a really nice job bringing together a variety of sources. While it may not have gotten as big as expected, and it's unclear whether MSNBC will end up killing it (the history of startups going to big media companies usually doesn't have a happy ending), it makes you wonder why no newspapers thought of buying it. The things that EveryBlock has done -- like linking local stories to feeds from Flickr, blog posts, and other online sources -- seems like exactly the sort of useful community building that a newspaper should be doing. Yet, I can't recall any actually doing that themselves... and now they let one of the startups enabling it get bought by someone else. In fact, I'd bet that EveryBlock is potentially one of these evil "aggregators" the newspapers keep complaining about as being "unfair." You can keep complaining, or you can do something. MSNBC appears to have done something, while the newspapers keep complaining.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

RawJoe writes "Today, the Southeastern Conference (SEC) is expected to release a final version of its new media policy that, at the moment, can best be described as a ban on all social media usage at SEC games. Earlier this month, the conference informed its schools of the new policy, which says that ticketed fans can't 'produce or disseminate (or aid in producing or disseminating) any material or information about the Event, including, but not limited to, any account, description, picture, video, audio, reproduction or other information concerning the Event.' Translated, that means no Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, TwitPic, or any other service that could in any way compete with authorized media coverage of the event. In the case of the SEC, authorized media coverage rights belong to CBS, who has a $3B deal with the conference over the next 15 years, according to The St Petersburg Times." Good luck with that. To quote Clay Shirky, "The idea that people can't capture their own lived experience is a losing proposition."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kirk, the leader of our Backwards Beekeepers club here in LA, shows how to harvest honey. Film made by fellow bee club member Russell Bates.

Backwards Beekeepers TV: The Honey Harvest

Whenever we talk about bloggers or others outside the mainstream press doing some kind of investigative reporting, some traditional journalists tend to stop by and complain that even if it was done this one time by this one individual, that individual won't stick around and do any future investigative reporting. However, that seems to miss the point. With the new tools of production these days, the simple fact is that if there's a story to get out, anyone can now get it out there and get it attention. If they only do it once in their lives, that's great. The next story will be done by someone else. Again, this isn't to knock professional reporters -- who I still believe strongly have a place in this ecosystem. But the complaints that investigative reporting simply won't be done without newspapers still rings incredibly hollow.

In the latest example, sent in by Chris, a blogger in Florida has apparently been doing an excellent job breaking a number of key stories concerning a recent murder. Even the local police say they're now seriously investigating leads brought to their attention by this guy's reporting -- even as the local mainstream press continued to argue against what the guy was reporting. It's still not settled what happened exactly, and some of the blogger's ideas may not turn out to be true, but as the NY Times notes, he has not yet had to retract any of his posts, and many of the factual points he's raised have later proved to be true.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Got a favorite author here at MAKE? Need to cut down on your daily blog intake, or just want more ways to organize your information? We now have RSS feeds for each author here at Make: Online:

• Kipp Bradford (Technical Consultant/Writer)
• Gareth Branwyn (Senior Editor)
• Shawn Connally (Managing Editor)
  
• Chris Connors (Education)
• Collin Cunningham (Contributing Writer)
  
• Dale Dougherty (Editor and Publisher)
  
• Diana Eng (Guest Author)
  
• Adam Flaherty (Contributing Writer)
  
• Mark Frauenfelder (Editor-in-Chief, MAKE magazine)
• Bill Gurstelle (Guest Author)
  
• Peter Horvath (Intern)
  
• Kip Kay (Weekend Projects)
  
• Matt Mets (Contributing Writer)
• Goli Mohammadi (Associate Managing Editor)
  
• John Park (Contributing Writer)
• Sean Ragan (Contributing Writer)
• Becky Stern (Associate Editor)
• Phil Torrone (Senior Editor)
• Marc de Vinck (Contributing Writer)

Of course, our site's full RSS feed is available too, if you haven't already subscribed. There are many more ways to read Make: Online, too, including a daily email digest of all posts (sign up in the sidebar), our Twitter feed (lovingly updated by the folks above, not a bot), our Facebook page, YouTube channel, our iTunes Podcasts, and daily tips service.

More site improvements:

New Make: Projects section, author index

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Announcements | Digg this!