NobodyExpects writes "I'd like to wish a happy birthday to the Internet! Today marks its 40th birthday! In fall 1969, computers sending data between two California universities set the stage for the Internet, which became a household word in the 1990s. On September 2nd 1969, in a lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, two computers passed test data through a 15-foot gray cable. Stanford Research Institute joined the fledgling ARPANET network a month later; UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah joined by year's end, and the internet was born."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Our heroic moderator Antinous spotted this thrilling headline from BBC News. Now, if we were all just Happy Mutants!

Amazing demo of Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad computer design program, which he developed in the early 1960s.

"John, we're going to show you a man actually talking to a computer..." (via Tinsleman)

The Narrative Fallacy writes "Cosmologist Lawrence M. Krauss, director of the Origins Initiative at Arizona State University, writes in the NY Times that with the investment needed to return to the moon likely to run in excess of $150 billion and the cost of a round trip to Mars easily two to four times that, there is a way to reduce the cost and technical requirements of a manned mission to Mars: send the astronauts on a one way trip. 'While the idea of sending astronauts aloft never to return is jarring upon first hearing, the rationale for one-way trips into space has both historical and practical roots,' writes Krauss. 'Colonists and pilgrims seldom set off for the New World with the expectation of a return trip.' There are more immediate and pragmatic reasons to consider one-way human space exploration missions including money. 'If the fuel for the return is carried on the ship, this greatly increases the mass of the ship, which in turn requires even more fuel.' But would anyone volunteer to go on such a trip? Krauss says that informal surveys show that many scientists would be willing to go on a one-way mission into space and that we might want to restrict the voyage to older astronauts, whose longevity is limited in any case. "

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We keep seeing claims by newspaper people that bloggers don't fact check and that newspapers do. In fact, in a recent discussion, Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi seemed to blast bloggers for not being able to live without newspaper reporter fact checking:

"I can't imagine a world (or an internet) without the raw factual material that newspapers provide every day, but I guess the bloggers don't really care about any of that. They're mostly about themselves and their opinions, with little thought given to where they're getting their basic facts."

Fair enough. But, as we keep finding out, it seems that newspapers aren't all that concerned about where they get their "facts," either. And sometimes we "bloggers," who are mostly about ourselves and our opinions, have to step in and do some fact checking ourselves.

Case in point: last week, I wrote a post here on Techdirt about how Warner Music helped a famous 80's rapper get a PhD in psychology. The post was based on an article in the NY Daily News by Walter Dawkins. It seemed reasonable to assume that such a professional news organization had fact checked the story. Yet, even before I hit publish, some questions were raised. The article noted that she had received her PhD in psychology from Cornell -- my alma mater. And when I wrote the post up, I initially mentioned that fact (school pride is fun). Yet when I asked some people I know who also went through Cornell's psychology program and would have likely been in a position to have known (or known of) Roxanne Shante, I was told that they hadn't heard of her. Also, multiple attempts to find her dissertation in databases like PsychInfo turned up nothing. Oh yeah, and then there's this: Cornell doesn't offer a clinical psychology degree, and the article clearly states that her work is in clinical psychology.

So, I went searching, and found (first) a video interview where she claimed to have attended Cornell Medical -- which is still Cornell, but is a separate organization based in New York City, rather than up in Ithaca with the rest of the school. So... perhaps her degree was from there. But, then I came across another report claiming that she only got her masters at Cornell, and then returned to Marymount Manhattan College -- where she went as an undergrad -- for the PhD.

I thought that this made some amount of sense, and let the post go out. I figured that perhaps the Daily News reporter got confused about where she got her PhD, but he must have at least fact checked the rest? I should have known better.

After the post went up, some additional comments came in highlighting some other problems with her story, and so I decided to do some of the fact checking it appeared that the big professional reporters at The Daily News did not do. I contacted the administration at Cornell, and received the following response:

We've had everyone from the Graduate School to Alumni Affairs and Development to the Psychology Department search their databases, using every possible configuration of her names, and no one has found any evidence that Ms. Shante ever attended Cornell University.

Oops. Still, others pointed out that there were two references in two separate publications, The Cornell Chronicle and The Cornell Daily Sun, both to a conference held on campus that Shante took part in, though both seemed to be based on her own statements. The Daily Sun is independent of the university (though run by students), but the Chronicle is an official school publication. It's quite telling that the Chronicle article does not follow the established style guidelines of Cornell official publications in referring to an alum: it does not provide a year. It's typical to say things like "Ph.D. '08." That's done for others in that same article. But Shante's Ph.D. claim is not accompanied by a date, suggesting that the reporter was unable to confirm it. There's also an odd list of "Notable Cornell alum" that lists her, but the link is for "Class of '91," which she certainly didn't attend. Also, once again, her listing doesn't include a date.

From there, I contacted the administration at Marymount Manhattan College, and specifically contacted Dean Marguerita Grecco, who is named in the original Daily News article as supporting Ms. Shante, and sending the tuition bills to Warner Music. Despite multiple attempts to reach Dr. Grecco, she refused to respond at all. However, I was able to get a rather curt response from someone else in the administration, claiming that the only information he would give me is: "Roxanne Shante attended classes at Marymount Manhattan College during the fall semester of 1995." That did not answer my questions about what degree(s) she obtained (if any), and only seems to raise more questions. Did she attend classes there beyond that one semester? The school won't say.

Oh yeah, it's worth mentioning: Marymount Manhtattan College does not offer a PhD program in psychology. Only a bachelors.

So, the original article claimed that Warner Music spent over $200,000 on this woman's education. I reached out to Warner Music to ask them who they sent that money to. Admittedly, all of this happened back in the '90s, when Warner Music was owned by Time Warner. It no longer is. It's got new ownership and new management. Yet, despite the fact that folks at Warner Music aren't particularly big fans of this site (I have no clue why), they went digging through all sorts of records to see what they could turn up. From that, they sent over the following statement:

"Roxanne Shante's story is a compelling one and we wish her all success in her good works. With respect to the specifics of her recording agreement, we are not in a position to comment definitively because her agreement was with an independent record label known as Cold Chillin' Records, and the transactional file is more than 20 years old. Our examination of that file however has not revealed any evidence of any 'education clause' in any agreement. That is not a commentary on Ms. Shante's label or on the existence of such a clause. In fact, our view is that artists' compensation can be put to many good uses; if Cold Chillin' guided this artist's compensation to education expenses that would certainly be a worthy one."

So, even if there was an "education clause," Warner Music can't find any record of it. Instead, it appeared to just have a rather typical distribution deal with an indie label that she was signed to. Next up, the article claims that Shante is running "an unconventional therapy practice focusing on urban African-Americans." Unfortunately, searches of the NY database of such professionals has yet to turn up any evidence that she's listed. Admittedly, the interface for that system is not particularly user friendly, but various attempts to find her under various names (both her stage name and her birth name) turned up nothing. In searching around, I could find no business listing for her therapy organization.

Also, I could not find ways to contact her. I did try via a MySpace page that is supposedly hers, but it's not clear if it's really her page, and I have not heard back. Finally, I contacted the NY Daily News, and asked either for additional backup material, an explanation, or to let me speak with the original reporter, Walter Dawkins. As of publishing this, I have not heard from either of them.

I should note that this is yet another great example of how wonderful the Techdirt community is. It was via the comments that many of these questions were raised, and it allowed me to go in search of the details (or lack thereof). I've said before that what makes this site so much fun is the discussion we have in the comments, and this is yet another bit of proof. Update: Looks like friend of the blog Ben Sheffner was doing similar research over the past few days as well, and got Shante to admit the PhD doesn't exist, but she fails to explain pretty much anything else.

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Forgetomori has a good blog post exposing jackasses through the ages who pretend to levitate as a way of bilking deluded suckers.

Levitation Secret Revealed (70 years ago)

Our ongoing series of video interviews with notable Makers, sponsored by Dow Chemical, includes an interesting conversation with mad basement chemist Theodore Gray, a successful computer scientist whose personal chemical element collection drew so much web attention that he eventually was given a regular column with Popular Science, a 2002 Ig Nobel prize, and, most recently, a book deal for "Mad Science.".

In the Maker Shed:

Mad Science

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Tramaine de Senna, our creative assistant for sales and marketing at MAKE, is also a talented artist and musician. Here's an amazing song and video she created, called Double Dub. It's mildly NSFW.

A whole bunch of folks have been sending in the story of how UK inventor Trevor Baylis has written a letter to UK Business Secretary (and sudden fan of kicking people off the internet), urging him to change patent law to make it a criminal offense, using the same old tactic: comparing an "invention" to real property, and noting that stealing a car will get you jail time -- so why doesn't "nicking" a patent? Well, Mr. Baylis, it doesn't get you jail time for a whole host of very good reasons: when someone steals your car, you no longer have your car. If someone happens to come up with the same invention as you do, both of you still have it. Plus, note in that last sentence that patent infringement rarely involves actual "stealing" or "nicking" of ideas, but usually is about multiple people coming up with the same general idea at the same time. Doesn't it seem slightly problematic to think that you might go to jail if someone else just happened to come up with the same invention you did, but got to the patent office a day earlier? Hopefully, Mandelson will explain this sort of thing to Mr. Baylis, but given his confusion over copyright... that seems unlikely.

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The mayors of two Paris suburbs are so mad at each other that they made the D909 road one way in their districts, but one way in opposite directions. The mayor of Levallios-Perret, Patrick Balkany, did it first as a way to calm traffic in his area. Then Gillles Catoire, mayor of Clich-la-Garenne followed suit. From BBC News:

With the contradictory road-signs in place, the unsurprising result was gridlock, prompting the deployment of municipal and national police to direct traffic away from the area.

"What Clichy has done is not a long-term solution, but it is a response to a unilateral decision by the town of Levallois," Clichy's deputy mayor, Alain Fournier, was quoted as saying by AFP news agency.

But Mr Balkany insisted: "The mayor of Clichy has taken a position that is unreasonable and is hurting his own constituents."

"Paris mayoral feud blocks street"

KentuckyFC writes "Sodium acetate is the stuff inside chemical handwarmers that emits heat when it crystalizes after you press that little metal widget. That's why it is known as hot ice. Now a computer scientist in the UK has created a computer made entirely out of hot ice. The device processes information by exploiting the movement and interaction of wavefronts of crystallisation as they move through the material. The data input is in the form of metal wires that trigger crystal nucleation. The output works by reading off the direction of the moving wavefronts and the edges of the resulting crystals. The researcher has created AND and OR gates and solved a few problems such as finding the shortest path through mazes. There are even a few videos of the computer in action. The resulting computer is far from perfect, however. The data readout sometimes gives no solution and at other times gives circular results, the hot ice equivalent of a BSOD."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More at Dangerous Minds. Apparently it's somewhere in Mexicali. Pienso que prefiero éste sobre el otro que está en París. (via a number of Spanish-language blogs which trace back to this one: hazmeelchingadofavor/via Tara McGinley + Richard Metzger)

Today is the 140th birthday of Hiram Percy Maxim the "Father of Organized Amateur Radio." Maxim was founder of the ARRL and a known inventor and tinkerer creating gliders, automobiles, and acoustic silencers. Maxim had 59 patents issued in his name.

The ARRL is hosting a special event in his honor from Sept. 2- Sept. 9.: The operating event is open to all amateurs, and the goal is straightforward: Find the stations adding /140 to their call signs, and contact as many as possible during the event period, September 2-9. Who is eligible to sign /140? ARRL members who hold ARRL appointments, ARRL elected volunteers (such as ARRL Directors and Section Managers), ARRL Life Members, ARRL Headquarters staff and VEs, AECs, QSL bureau workers and awards managers (who are ARRL members). The complete list of eligible positions can be found on page 20 of the September 2009 issue of QST. If you work at least 25 /140 stations, an attractive certificate can be yours! The certificate can be endorsed in increments of 25 QSOs, up to 100.

Time Period: 0000 UTC September 2 until 2400 UTC September 9.

Exchange: All stations signing /140 send RS(T), their appointment and their name; others send RS(T) and their name.

Eligibility: All amateur stations may participate. ARRL Life Members, and those persons holding ARRL appointments, elected positions or ARRL HQ staff, may add /140 to their call signs for the duration of the celebration. Volunteer Examiners, Assistant Emergency Coordinators, QSL Bureau workers, Registered Instructors and Awards Managers who are ARRL members are also invited to participate.

Miscellaneous: /140 stations may be contacted on any band or mode for credit. You can work a station once per band and mode. Repeater contacts are valid for credit, but please be considerate of the users during a repeater's busy periods. All /140 stations are encouraged to be as active as possible on local repeaters and nets. The certificate
is available for making at least 25 contacts with /140 stations, with endorsement increments of 25, and a maximum endorsement of 100. To receive the award, send in a log extract with the date, time, band, call sign worked and exchange for each /140 contact. Include your name, call sign and address, and tell us how many /140 stations you worked. Mail everything to HPM/140 Celebration, c/o W1AW, 225 Main St, Newington, CT 06111-1494. You can also send in your entry on a disk or CD in regular text format. All entries must be accompanied by a check or money order for $5 (US) payable to ARRL. Please make sure your entry is postmarked by October 9, 2009.

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Xerolooper writes "What would the world be like if everyone could enjoy the same patent system we use in the USA? From the article: 'A senior lawyer at Microsoft is calling for the creation of a global patent system to make it easier and faster for corporations to enforce their intellectual property rights around the world.' They have already attracted opposition from the open-source community and the Pirate Party. According to the article, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) will be meeting in Geneva on the 17th and 18th of September."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've discussed in the past how idea sharing and content sharing is "the new normal" for many people, thanks to the internet these days. The "old" view of things -- the broadcast view -- was that big professional creators of content or journalism put a stamp of approval on some content and shipped it along to a waiting audience. But, the rise of the internet has muddied this picture greatly, showing that people actually prefer to be a part of the process. They want to share content. They want to comment on it. They want to modify it. They want to link to it. They want to promote it. They want to respond to it.

Content, itself, has become part of the social process.

Now, we spend lots of time discussing how that's mucking around with business models based on the old view, but it may be causing some troubles for technology as well. In a brief message on Twitter, Mediashift author Mark Glaser, highlighted a fantastic point by Dan Pacheco about why he preferred an iPhone to a Kindle for reading content:

Most content I share starts from the iPhone. Kindle's antisocial nature is what bugs me most.

This point made me realize why I have so little interest in a Kindle. You can't do much with the content on it. It's delivered to you in that old "we're the content creators, you're the content recipient" method. You can annotate it for yourself, but it's not social at all. And these days, so many of us have learned to interact with content socially. For something like eBooks to really take off, my guess is that it will take a much more social approach, where people can do more to interact over the content that they're reading.

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Twin Cities makers Adam Wolf and Matthew Beckler have created an interactive metronome kit that lets you tap your own beat directly on the PCB!

The Tactile Metronome is a tap-controlled metronome and "beat looper." "Syncopation machine." "Metronome with an attitude."

You tap the piezo speaker to set the frequency. The display shows the beats per minute, and the two buttons adjust the speed.

"Ehhh." "Boring," you say. Not so fast!

You can tap patterns into it, currently up to 11 beats long. As long as you tap the pattern in three times, it jumps in and continues beeping in that rhythm. The metronome can beep in three different tones, so you can play with more than one at a time.

Kits are available at the duo's web site wayneandlayne.com.

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Hugh Pickens writes "In 1935, JBS Haldane, one of the founders of modern genetics, studied a group of men with the blood disease hemophilia and speculated that there would be about 150 new mutations in each human being. Now BBC reports that scientists have used next generation sequencing technology to produce a far more direct and reliable estimate of the number of mutations by looking at thousands of genes belonging to two Chinese men who are distantly related, having shared a common ancestor who was born in 1805. To establish the rate of mutation, the team examined an area of the Y chromosome which is unique because, apart from rare mutations, the Y chromosome is passed unchanged from father to son so mutations accumulate slowly over the generations. Despite many generations of separation, researchers found only 12 differences among all the DNA letters examined. The two Y chromosomes were still identical at 10,149,073 of the 10,149,085 letters examined."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At Make Online, Marc de Vinck shows you how to make the "scariest pumpkin ever." I love it.

Earlier this year, we wrote how odd it was that the company Cash4Gold (made famous by its cheesy late night commercials) was threatening to sue bloggers for defamation for merely repeating and linking to a Consumerist article that quoted a former Cash4Gold employee about allegedly underhanded tactics used by the company. The defamation threat was odd for a variety of reasons. First, Cash4Gold itself was talking about these same allegations on its own website (which is actually the best way to deal with them: respond to them, rather than trying to silence them). Second, going the legal route only guaranteed much more attention to the issue and questions surrounding Cash4Gold's activities. Third, it made little sense to threaten someone who was merely summarizing what others were saying.

While Cash4Gold apparently backed off such threats, it did go forward and get an injunction against the former employee to stop her from "publishing any more confidential, proprietary information, and any defamatory information on the internet." I like how it mixes in confidential, proprietary and defamatory information -- so now we don't know which the original reports were. Were they defamatory lies? Or were they just confidential, proprietary information?

Either way, with that injunction, the company contacted Complaints Board -- the site where the employee originally put forth the allegations -- and Consumerist, who also posted on the allegations, and demanded they remove the posts. Of course, with no legal order, both sites refused to do so. In response, Cash4Gold has now sued both sites, once again guaranteeing that much more media attention is paid to alleged claims of underhanded business practices by the company.

Of course, rather than backing down, Consumerist is fighting this and has posted a lengthy and detailed article reviewing the original claims, backing many of them up with additional reporting details and pointing out that this is an ongoing news story that it believes it has every right to write about. Once again, though, we're left wondering why Cash4Gold would do this. All it's doing is drawing that much more attention to the claims against it.

The Citizen Media Law Project post above details two additional factoids about how Cash4Gold's lawyers are trying to get around the rather obvious (it seems) Section 230 safe harbors that almost certainly protect Complaint Board. First, they claim that because Complaint Board edited the title of the post, they're no longer just a service provider, but "created, developed and published." That seems like a long shot. Perhaps more likely to succeed is a reference to the recent Barnes ruling, where Section 230 was tossed out the window after the company promised to delete the content in question (and then didn't). Of course, it's not clear if Complaint Board did, in fact, promise that, but Cash4Gold claims that it did.

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UK toy fanatic James May is having a real house built from millions of LEGO bricks. While running new wires through the walls and plumbing fixes should be a snap, I'd hate to be anywhere near the place in case of fire. GeekSugar has a gallery of pictures of the place as it's being built.

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Good food for thought in this op-ed by Adam Cohen, which picks up on the work of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (disclosure: a group we're all big supporters of here at Boing Boing):

A little-appreciated downside of the technology revolution is that, mainly without thinking about it, we have given up "locational privacy." Even in low-tech days, our movements were not entirely private. The desk attendant at my gym might have recalled seeing me, or my colleagues might have remembered when I arrived. Now the information is collected automatically and often stored indefinitely.

Privacy advocates are rightly concerned. Corporations and the government can keep track of what political meetings people attend, what bars and clubs they go to, whose homes they visit. It is the fact that people's locations are being recorded "pervasively, silently, and cheaply that we're worried about," the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a recent report.

People's cellphones and E-ZPasses are increasingly being used against them in court. If your phone is on, even if you are not on a call, you may be able to be found (and perhaps picked up) at any hour of the day or night. As disturbing as it is to have your private data breached, it is worse to think that your physical location might fall into the hands of people who mean you harm.

A Casualty of the Technology Revolution: 'Locational Privacy' (New York Times via Mitch Kapor)

mikp writes "In a David-and-Goliath style fight, small music companies are battling it out with established behemoths to see who can own the future of mobile music. Spotify, the Europe-based music streaming company, is about to launch its iPhone app and has plans to develop it for other mobile platforms soon. In a preview, Spotify shows how you can cache songs to your iPhone so that you don't always need a connection but the songs don't remain on your iPhone permanently. Nokia, on the other hand, has just announced two more music phones that will feature Comes With Music, an unlimited music-download service that involves a one time fee, which is part of the price of the CMW phone, and lets you download music for free (and you get to keep it) for a year. The question remains, are people more likely to stream or download music on their mobile phones?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For what seems like many years I was a lonely voice in the wilderness, whispering at first "River of News" then speaking more loudly and finally shouting from the rooftops, but people wouldn't listen. Developers patterned their "news readers" after email programs. Each feed was a box, and like a mail program it would tell you how many unread messages there were. "This is wrong!" I would say -- RSS is not mail.

Well in 2006 or so, things turned in the other direction and rivers showed up everwhere. They call them streams, lifestreams, etc, but they're all the same basic idea. Park yourself on the riverbank and watch the news flow by. If you miss something, not to worry, if it's important some new story will refer to it.

Then an interesting experiment, the AnnArbor.com switched its home page to be a river. Wonderful, fantastic, futuristic. A long time ago I predicted the front page of every news site would be a river. But now Joshua Benton at Nieman Lab asks, basically, is a River enough? Do you need some other structure to hang the news on? Yes, imho, you do.

The question comes up on Twitter, when you want to know the context of a tweet, because sometimes people string them together. 140 characters isn't enough to express a full idea, so you write three or four. By the time you're at number four, someone has usually tweeted you back asking what you mean. The answer is in #1 or #2 of the 4-tweet sequence. If you answer the question, you'll just beget more questions, so you hope the person is savvy enough to click on your name and read your full stream to get the context.

In the 1980s I ran a system called LBBS on an Apple II in my living room. We had the exact same problem, and found a neat solution. At first the structure was strictly hierarchic. The sysop, me, would start a discussion area, and users would post questions or assertions as first-level subs. People would respond, and those would appear in reverse chronologic order as second-level subs. Responses to those would be third-level and so on. This was an early threaded discussion system. But how to find the new stuff? For that I added what I called a Msg Scanner, a reverse-chronolic browser that ignored structure. It would keep a bookmark for every user, a high-water-mark, and when you'd jump into the scanner that's where you'd start. You'd keep hitting Next until you reached the newest message. And here's the cool thing -- when you wanted to see the context, just type / and you'd switch over into the hierarchic structure, on the same message.

News will work the same way, except someone who is skilled at organizing stuff will figure out where each piece goes in the hierarchy. This will provide the context, and you will also be able to find out What's New.

Anyone who used the LBBS in 1981, that's 28 years ago, will understand, but in this world it's still a new idea.

I wrote a narrative of this development process in 1988 when I was starting up UserLand Software.

New York magazine reports that business has dropped off for cocaine dealers because of the recession. The article doesn't say how much coke is selling for these days. Could our coke-sniffing readers please provide that information in the comments?

Before condos in Williamsburg started selling at a loss and weekend flights to L.A. dropped to under $200, New York's cocaine dealers were supplying good times to people who indulged like the party wouldn't end. Before the recession, "I was making deliveries every night of the week," says Eddie, a middle-aged man who exclusively deals cocaine. (All names have been changed.) At the height of his career, in early 2008, Eddie sold eight-balls to hipsters, financiers, and Upper West Side high-school students. "Back then, I could afford to pick and choose. If I didn't know the address — forget it. If I didn't like their accent — forget it. On most nights, there were more people wanting than I could get to."

(Via DoseNation)

Tinselman likes these "weirdly displaced rooms" created by Tatzu Nishi.

If you want to learn how to make sauerkraut, kimchi, and choucroute garni, head over to Machine Project in Los Angeles this Sunday, September 6, for Kraut Fest 2009!

I'm teaching how to make sauerkraut (ridiculously easy) but I really am looking forward to learning how to make kimchi from Granny Choe!

UPDATE: the class is now SOLD OUT. If you signed up, I'll see you there!

Taught by Mark Frauenfelder, Erik Knutzen, Kelly Coyne, Jean-Paul Monsche, and the winner of Critter’s 2009 Kimchi Competition, Oghee “Granny” Choe.

Come learn how to make your own sauerkraut, kimchi, and choucroute garni, the signature dish of Alsace (described to us as a ridiculous meat fiesta).

11am - Making Sauerkraut - click HERE for a list of ingredients to bring!

12pm - Making Kimchi - click HERE for a list of ingredients to bring!

1pm - Choucroute Garni presentation & sampling

You can register to make either kimchi or sauerkraut for $10, or both for $15. Registration gets you a “kraut kit” consisting of a bucket, a plate to fit in the bucket and a limited edition, hand-silkscreened poster (see here).

Participants will need to bring their own ingredients (we’ll provide the shopping list). Funded in part by a grant from Slow Food LA. Thank you Slow Food LA!

Kraut Fest 2009! at Machine Project

Gen Art is a fantastic organization that showcases young, innovative, and avant garde fashion designers, filmmakers, musicians, and visual artists through a series of high-profile events around the United States. Their 15th anniversary Fresh Faces in Fashion show is Tuesday, September 15, in New York City. I'm proud of my friend Stella Lee whose brand new line, Linus, will be featured in the show along with Cloak & Dagger, Duskin, Min Young Lee, Vicente Villarin, Yeojin Bae, S2VS, Dieppa Restreo (shoes), Samma (jewelry), and Wendy Nichol (handbags). Gen Art Fresh Faces in Fashion

Researchers have developed an electronic tongue. (Don't start.) The device is something like a litmus test for taste that, according to chemists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is incredibly accurate at measuring sweet things. The system consists of a paper dotted with an array of color-changing gels that react to a variety of different sweeteners. The electronic device scans the color of the dots after the paper is exposed to a sample. The combination of the gels' reactions, represented by their color, reveals the "taste." There are already chemical or electronic methods to test for other flavors detected by human tongues: saltiness, sourness, and savoriness. From National Geographic:

Sourness is just another word for acidity, Suslick said, which any high school chemistry student can test for using litmus paper.

Savoriness - also called "umami" - and saltiness can already be measured by handheld devices sensitive to protein levels and sodium and potassium ions.

The final dimension of taste that remains to be cracked is bitterness, which is still somewhat of an unknown.

"We lump a whole bunch of things into that one word," said (UIUC professor Kenneth) Suslick, whose study appeared August 1 in the journal Analytical Chemistry. "It just isn't clear yet what the bitterness receptors [in the tongue] are and what they respond to."

"Electronic Tongue" Mimics Human Taste Organ

Vladimir Sedach writes "Aside from authoring narrowly focused technical books, teaching university courses, or mentoring others in the workplace, programmers don't often get a chance to pass on the knowledge of the practise of programming as a profession. Peter Seibel's Coders at Work takes fifteen world-class programmers and distills their wisdom into a book of interviews with each of them." Keep reading for Vladimir's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jesse van Kuijk is one talented and dedicated maker. He decided he wanted to fly, and then proceeded to design and fabricate his own pedal-powered plane! It took him three years to build, even requiring him to return home from college on the weekends to work on it. That is dedication! More details at the Spiegel Online.

[via neatorama]

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A few months ago, Newsweek ran an excellent interview with NPR CEO Vivian Schiller, who only recently joined the organization, after leaving the NY Times. The interview showed that Schiller totally understands the problems and issues facing journalism today. She's embracing better web interaction, recognizing that NPR isn't a "radio" operation, but a news operation, that NPR has strong advantages in terms of having local reporters on the ground around the country -- and, perhaps most interesting of all, that "free" is not a bad thing:

While employed by The New York Times, you helped the newspaper stop charging for online content. Now it's reconsidering. Generally, why do you oppose paying for content?
I am a staunch believer that people will not in large numbers pay for news content online. It's almost like there's mass delusion going on in the industry--They're saying we really really need it, that we didn't put up a pay wall 15 years ago, so let's do it now. In other words, they think that wanting it so badly will automatically actually change the behavior of the audience. The world doesn't work that way. Frankly, if all the news organizations locked pinkies, and said we're all going to put up a big fat pay wall, you know what, more traffic for us. News is a commodity; I'm sorry to say.

But the Times did get people to pay, right?
We far exceeded our expectation--225,000 subscribers paid $50 a year, in addition to the home delivery subscribers, who got all of the Web for free. But guess what, that's $10 million. Instead of 225,000 who pay the $50, let's say it's one million subscribers. OK. That's $50 million a year. That's not going to save any newspaper. It's going to kill your advertising base. The numbers don't work.

It appears that she's putting this realization to work in other ways, a bunch of readers have been submitting an NPR blog post explaining why it has stopped charging for transcripts of programs, and started offering them for free on its website. Despite being something of a cash cow for NPR, the organization realized that it was short-sighted to lock up the content, and went against what people wanted:

Why did we give up this revenue stream? First and foremost, the users expect to be able to come to our site and read the story they heard on the air. As rich as the radio stories are, reading is faster than listening, our users told us. Although we were writing Web versions of many radio stories, a number of stories still didn't have much text. Making transcripts free solved that.

But a bigger realization was recognizing the basic trendlines. Paying for transcripts is a shrinking business. Getting more people to the website and making money in other ways? That's an opportunity:

There are solid business reasons for making transcripts free. Sales have been dropping over the years. As people search for, discover and share content, offering free transcripts will boost the traffic to NPR.org, traffic that can be monetized with sponsorship. Finally, search engines like text. Many of our stories could not be found by the search engines because they did not have enough text. Now it will be easier for the search engines -- and ultimately the users -- to find and enjoy NPR's stories.

Now, of course, as a partially gov't supported non-profit, NPR has some different issues in how it operates, but those differences aren't nearly as big as many people might think. The gov't support only goes so far (hence the annoying pledge drives and pushes for corporate sponsorship). It'll be interesting to see what other business model ideas NPR and its new leadership comes up with in the future, and it'll be fun to see if the big newspapers put up paywalls, allowing NPR to increase its traffic, as planned.

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My latest Guardian column, "Not every cloud has a silver lining," is about the dirty secret of cloud computing: most of it is about making a buck off of you by supplying something you can do cheaply and easily for yourself.

Here's something you won't see mentioned, though: the main attraction of the cloud to investors and entrepreneurs is the idea of making money from you, on a recurring, perpetual basis, for something you currently get for a flat rate or for free without having to give up the money or privacy that cloud companies hope to leverage into fortunes...

Now, this makes sense for some limited applications. If you're supplying a service to the public, having a cloud's worth of on-demand storage and hosting is great news. Many companies, such as Twitter, have found that it's more cost-effective to buy barrel-loads of storage, bandwidth and computation from distant hosting companies than it would be to buy their own servers and racks at a data-centre. And if you're doing supercomputing applications, then tapping into the high-performance computing grid run by the world's physics centres is a good trick.

But for the average punter, cloud computing is - to say the least - oversold. Network access remains slower, more expensive, and less reliable than hard drives and CPUs. Your access to the net grows more and more fraught each day, as entertainment companies, spyware creeps, botnet crooks, snooping coppers and shameless bosses arrogate to themselves the right to spy on, tamper with or terminate your access to the net.

Not every cloud has a silver lining

Art sez,

We just launched a new Web-privacy-related webapp, and want to show it off to you.

The app is an example of using browser history detection to determine personal preferences of Web browser users and is located at http://whattheinternetknowsaboutyou.com. The history detection hack has been known for quite a while; it works by using the CSS :visited pseudoclass to style visited links differently from unvisited ones, in order to figure out which ones are present in the browser's history and does not require JavaScript.

There are over 20 tests to extract various kinds of information from the browser's history; the most obvious application is to check for visits to the most popular websites and blogs, which we grouped into categories (banks, pr0n sites, dating sites, social networks, etc.) We're also monitoring for more sensitive content, such as all visited Wikileaks articles and administrative pages, visited .gov and .mil websites, as well as Google search queries and zipcodes typed into forms. In addition to that, we're indexing over fifty most popular RSS newsfeeds (including Boing Boing, of course) to determine which recent news stories the user has read; also, for social news sites, we're trying to determine the user's username by detecting visited profile pages.

We also meticulously documented the problem and listed possible solutions in hope of educating casual Web users as well as browser vendors about this issue. Most people still have no idea that such history detection is possible, and in fact trivially easy to implement; what's worse, there are no simple ways to protect against this (other than disabling history altogether). I hope that by publicizing the issue we can get browser vendors to figure out sane ways of solving the problem to make our browsing histories private again, and would appreciate your help.

What the Internet knows about you (Thanks, Art!)

Glyn Moody writes "Sony has never been much of a friend to hackers, and its infamous rootkit showed what it thought of users. But by omitting the option to install GNU/Linux on its new PS3, it has removed the final reason for the open source world to care about Sony. Unless, of course, you find Google's new distribution alliance with Sony to pre-install Chrome on its PCs exciting in some way."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Center for Constitutional Rights published a set of Torture Team trading cards. You can see them all on the Torture Team web site. From Mother Jones:

Check out George W. and Condi, along with Cheney and his evil sidekick David "the Shadow" Addington, arguably the most ruthless driver of Bush-era torture policies and, according to a media quote on the card, "the most powerful man you've never heard of." Don't forget White House legal pariahs like John Yoo and Jay Bybee. Or the brass—former Pentagon top dogs like Don Rumsfeld, Guantanamo CO Geoffrey Miller (who helped involve doctors in torture) and the Iraq-bungling Douglas Feith. You can click to flip the cards and reveal each player's basic stats, along with fun tidbits and quotes in their own words. (Feith: "Removal of clothing doesn't mean naked.")

Torture Trading Cards

denobug sends word that major internet service providers in the US are seeking to redefine the term 'Broadband' to mean a much lower speed than in other developed nations. In recent filings with the FCC, Comcast and AT&T both came out in support of a reduced minimum speed. 'AT&T said regulators should keep in mind that not all applications like voice over internet protocol (VoIP) or streaming video, that require faster speeds, are necessarily needed by unserved Americans.' On the other hand, Verizon argued to maintain the status quo, saying that 'It would be disruptive and introduce confusion if the commission were to now create a new and different definition.' A public interest group called Free Press also filed comments with the FCC, recommending that the bar should be set significantly higher, and evolve in a way that corresponds with technological improvements.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Officially now back at my Offworld post (following a long break away to the Bay Area, that, most excitingly, saw me complete the first leg of the journey through the infinitely fascinating reality game The Jejune Institute), we return with some catching-up coverage that includes breakneck stunt-man simulator Canabalt -- a five-day stripped-down Experimental Gameplay entry from Adam Saltsman -- a game whose one-button simplicity completely belies its action/sci-fi flick inspired roof-top leaping thrills. We also found the first details on DeathSpank (above) -- the upcoming Diablo/LucasArts adventure mashup from former Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion creator Ron Gilbert, and discovered that a remake of classic multiplayer strategy game M.U.L.E. was in development, including an upcoming port to the iPhone. Elsewhere we saw new footage of Offworld-favorite 2D/3D platformer Fez, Nathan Fouts' gloriously garish Grapple Buggy, and dug through a flurry of new announcements from Nintendo with new color DSis/Wii Remotes and an updated Wii Opera browser now available for free. Finally, we saw a tiny custom (Shadow of the) Colossus Munny, and an NES Ghostbusters instruction manual T-shirt, and our 'one shot's: Olly Moss's gorgeous new prints for This American Life-inspired games podcast A Life Well Wasted, and Vera Bee's carny/sideshow illustrations make their LittleBigDebut.

(CLick for big) Jerry Lewis likes Drew Friedman's NY Observer piece so much that he invited him to be his guest at the MDA Labor day Telethon this coming weekend in Las Vegas. I like it, too!

We've been running Kevin's excellent series of posts on the push to put in place stronger patent and copyright laws in China and India, showing why that's probably shortsighted and likely will do more harm than good. China's example is instructive. There's been this big push to get China to "respect intellectual property," based on the slightly misleading claim that China is all about infringement (of both copyrights and patents). China only first got its patent system in the mid-1980s (due to much outside pressure) and didn't take it very seriously for a while. In the last few years, that's started to change (again, in large part due to outside pressure, but now combined with pressure from companies inside the country trying to block out competitors).

However, you should be careful what you wish for. Companies are now discovering that, just as in other countries, the patent system in China can and will be used to block out competition, rather than encourage innovation. France's Schneider Electric just learned that the hard way, after losing a patent infringement lawsuit in China and being ordered to pay $23 million for infringing on a Chinese company's patents. The problem? Schneider had tons of prior art to show that the patent by the Chinese firm, Chint, was hardly new or innovative. But, the Chinese courts ruled that it didn't really matter. That's because this was a utility patent (rather than an invention or a design patent) -- which based on the Chinese law requires almost no investigation into whether or not its new or obvious. Plus it's cheap. $70 and its yours. Basically, it's a formality system, rather than a true patent examination.

All those foreign nations who kept pushing China to build up its own patent system and learn to "respect intellectual property" may soon be regretting that, as they're suddenly blocked out of the Chinese market by Chinese firms who fast-tracked cheap utility patents themselves with little to no review. Be careful what you wish for.

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From the MAKE Flickr pool

Dan put his DIY push-pot design to work as the sole input control for a classic game of hangman -

Hangman on the Arduino. A random word is selected from a list, the user scrolls through the alphabet and presses down on a potentiometer to select the letter. Then enclosure is made from the side of an old computer and some scrap wood I had laying around the shop.

Schematics and code available over at NerdyByNature.

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neuroworld writes to point out a study which found a correlation between in-game violence and a player's ability to recall advertisements seen while playing. The test subjects were given two versions of a driving game, which included "unobtrusive" billboard ads, and their eye movements were recorded by a camera. One version had players hitting targets for points, and the other version had them running down pedestrians. "[The researchers] found ads displayed along with violent scenes to be more memorable to players than those shown with nonviolent content, even though players spent less time looking at them. The results are contrary to expectations stemming from research on television, where violence has been shown to decrease attention to advertisements."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ephemera Assemblyman has a nice gallery of movie poster paintings from Ghana. Don't you wish the dog in Cujo really looked like this? It's ten times more nightmarish. (Thanks, Laura!)

Above: Never Can Say Goodbye, a short documentary film by Dianna Dilworth that shows how hardcore Michael Jackson fans are mourning their idol's death. The documentary is a follow-up to her previous award-winning feature We are the Children (blogged on BB here), in which she followed a group of MJ trufans during his 2004-2005 trial on child molestation charges. In this new work, Dilworth reconnects with Michael Jackson impersonator Sean Vezina (MySpace profile), who has been dressing up as the pop star at Jackson's Hollywood star for the past five years. Vezina was also a featured character in We are the Children.

Video link:
* Never Can Say Goodbye (snagfilms.com)
* Never Can Say Goodbye (vimeo.com)

Hate is a word I've tried to wipe from my vocabulary, along with need. You don't really need more than air, food, water, a warm place to sleep, basic medical care. There are lots of things that are nice to have, like hugs and kisses and great sound systems and business-class-or-better. But needs are pretty basic things.

Hate? People throw that word around far too casually. The other day a rep of SXSW said that I had hated on them because I suggested they were taking money to keep me off the speakers list since 1998 or so. I had asked many times why I couldn't get in, and was met with a stone wall. So like all human beings, my mind filled in the blanks. I asked to be enlightened, if it wasn't a payoff, what was it? I offered to run a retraction if they would tell me the real reason. Stone wall again. Oh well. I don't hate them. The word I would use to describe my feeling about SXSW is frustrated.

But Comcast? I think that's the real thing. I'll tell you why.

Love and hate have a mathematical relationship:

hate = love + betrayed

I would love to have Comcast service, but I would never sign up for it again unless they apologized for the treating me so badly. And while most companies apologize when they screw up, I have a feeling that Comcast thinks I should apologize to them. And that ain't never going to happen.

Why write about this today? Well they're getting a lot of kudos because they try to fix their fuckups with reps who use Twitter to find unhappy customers. When I got fired as a Comcast customer, I was in contact with their Twitter caretakers. Not only couldn't they stop the Comcast machine from chewing me up and spitting me out, they had the gall to say they liked me while they were doing it! Now that's really asking for the hate.

Imagine a girlfriend dumping you, hard, and while she's doing it saying she likes you. Well fuck that shit bitch. <-- There's the hate.

But their service is much faster than my AT&T DSL. I pay my bills, in full and on time (as I did with Comcast), and they don't have Twitter accounts. They never cut me off (knock wood), and I never have to talk to a Twitter rep who likes me. Maybe I'm weird but that's kind of how I like to do business.

Over at CRAFT, Goli posted up this moss graffiti tutorial by Helen Nodding, featured in CRAFT Volume 04. It's a fun way to spread some green around the neighborhood.

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The Narrative Fallacy writes "Live Science reports that astronomers in search of the perfect site to take pictures of the heavens have combined data from satellites, ground stations and climate models in a study to assess the many factors that affect image quality — cloud cover, temperature, sky-brightness, water vapor, wind speeds and atmospheric turbulence. They have pinpointed the coldest, driest, calmest place on earth, known simply as Ridge A, 13,297 feet high on the Antarctic Plateau. 'It's so calm that there's almost no wind or weather there at all,' says study leader Will Saunders, of the Anglo-Australian Observatory. 'The astronomical images taken at Ridge A should be at least three times sharper than at the best sites currently used by astronomers.' Located within the Australian Antarctic Territory, the site is 89 miles from the PLATO (PLATeau Observatory) international robotic observatory. The new site would be superior to the best existing observatories on high mountain tops in Hawaii and Chile, Saunders says. 'Because the sky there is so much darker and drier, it means that a modestly-sized telescope would be as powerful as the largest telescopes anywhere else on earth.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jesse Garrison sez, "Powerhouse is a non-traditional biographical piece about Scott, told through a combination of puppetry, movement, swing dancing, physical comedy and live action. It follows the inverse paths of Scott's fall from success to obscurity and cartoons' (that used his music) rise to prominence in every American home."

It's 1936 and 27 year-old Harry Warnow has it all -- a beautiful wife, a hit record, a recording company, a publishing company, his very own swing orchestra and a new name: Raymond Scott. But in 30 years he would be virtually unknown. Secluded in his home studio, he would spend his time writing commercials and inventing futuristic music machines. Unbeknownst to Scott, however, his music had become imprinted on the minds of millions. For years, the animators at Warner Bros. had been scoring their Looney Tunes cartoons with Scott's life's work. This would be his legacy -- and he never knew. Due to its success, both critically and at the box-office, it's been granted an extended run in the Fringe Encore series.

At the Fringe: 'Powerhouse' (Thanks, Jesse!)

You would think that, with the music and movie industries to guide them, book publishers would be smarter than to complain about the rise of digital ebooks. But... apparently not everyone got the memo. Arnaud Nourry, the CEO of publisher Hachette is apparently quite upset about Amazon's pricing of ebooks and is warning that hardcover books may die. But the thing that strikes me? All he does is complain, and nowhere does he suggest what the industry is going to do about it... other than complain. This is the same mistake the music industry and the movie industry have been making. They don't propose any reasonable solutions, they just get angry at what the technology allows. He complains about public domain books, and then he complains about the prices Amazon charges:

"On the one hand, you have millions of books for free where there is no longer an author to pay and, on the other hand, there are very recent books, bestsellers at $9.99, which means that all the rest will have to be sold at between zero and $9.99."

Yes, if that defines the market you're dealing with. But why not adapt? Why not focus on giving people reasons to actually buy books at a profitable rate? And, of course, a bit part of the problem is that these same publishers didn't do anything to lead the way on ebooks. Instead, they sat around doing nothing while Amazon built the Kindle and Google went and scanned a bunch of books. The publishers could have put together a plan, but they ceded the advantage to the tech industry, and now they're complaining about their own lack of foresight? That's not very compelling.

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sv_libertarian writes "Mozilla recently updated its product roadmap through 2010. According to the first draft, the current browser will see a minor update in Q4 2009 and another in Q2 2010. Version 4.0 is headed for an October or November 2010 release and will bring a new user interface and browser sync integration. 'There is not much information on how this new user interface will look like, but the first mockups that have been posted on Mozilla's website suggest that the Mozilla team favors a Google Chrome-like design that integrates Windows 7 graphics features. Overall, window elements seem to be floating over the background.' The mockup page emphatically notes that the design is not final."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fires are on the minds of Californians, esp ones who live in the hills, like the ones in Berkeley and Oakland.

In 1991 these hills burned. I watched the fire, safely, from a friends' deck on Potrero Hill. It seemed far away, but now I live here.

In the RTN podcast on Monday I asked Doc Searls if we could learn from the fires in Southern California.

Today, on InBerkeley, I ask if there are any old-timers who were here during the fire of 1991 who would share what they learned.

September 2, 1969: Forty years ago today, in Leonard Kleinrock's UCLA lab, a group of computer scientists managed to pass bits of data from one computer to another over some some gray cable. In doing so, they created the first node of what we now call (long dramatic pause)... the Internet.

Kleinrock and colleagues were working with the government-backed Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), without which I would not be blogging these words today.

Now, some folks believe the actual "birthday" was October 29, 1969 - when Kleinrock sent the first message between two nodes, UCLA to Stanford. The message? "LO." As in "LO AND BEHOLD, THE INTERNET." Well, okay, not really. It was supposed to be "LOGIN" but the system crashed after Kleinrock typed "L" and "O."

Video above: Kleinrock talks about that first connection. Here's an AP item. I was a guest for a discussion about this anniversary on the NPR show "Tell Me More" today (segment link).

BB readers: share your birthday greetings or early webternet memories in the comments. If any of you ARPANET O.G.'s are in the house, do fire up the old Interface Message Processor and give us a packet-switched shout. (TCP/IP first-bump)

SenorBon's mega-Peggy plays Conway's Game of Life, Pong, and generates music -

We built a giant LED board, about 6.5x6.5 feet, with 900 LEDs using ping-pong balls as diffusers. It can play Conway's Game of Life, Pong, and Sketch mode that allows you to create a starting pattern for Life. We output board state information to a MIDI board that allows us to make music based on what is displayed. This gets interesting with Life, creating minimalist generative music.

Check out the project's photoset on Flickr. [via EMSL]

In the Maker Shed:

Peggy 2 Kit

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AP photo of Al Gore Len Kleinrock, whose research during the 60s was fundamental in establishing the tube network.

Over at Boing Boing, everybody's favorite Xeni reminds us:

Forty years ago today, in Leonard Kleinrock's UCLA lab, a group of computer scientists managed to pass bits of data from one computer to another over some some gray cable. In doing so, they created the first node of what we now call (long dramatic pause)... the Internet.

The Internet itself could not be reached for comment, but inside sources say the globe-sprawling data transfer network is spending the day relaxing with friends and family, who have prepared a coffin-shaped cake with black icing and started teasing it about being an "old fart."

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Chris Pirazzi writes "Online backup startup BackBlaze, disgusted with the outrageously overpriced offerings from EMC, NetApp and the like, has released an open-source hardware design showing you how to build a 4U, RAID-capable, rack-mounted, Linux-based server using commodity parts that contains 67 terabytes of storage at a material cost of $7,867. This works out to roughly $117,000 per petabyte, which would cost you around $2.8 million from Amazon or EMC. They have a full parts list and diagrams showing how they put everything together. Their blog states: 'Our hope is that by sharing, others can benefit and, ultimately, refine this concept and send improvements back to us.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Andrew van der Merwe cuts letter-forms into the beaches near Cape Town, South Africa, and takes lovely photos of the results. [via Dude Craft]

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Another day, another example of content creators embracing the business models we've been talking about -- and once again, this one is outside of the music industry. Recently we wrote about movie makers picking up on tiered funding offerings, similar to what Jill Sobule has done, and now we've got a budding author as well. To be clear: I'm absolutely sure there are others doing this as well, but I just heard about this particular example. Elinor Mills has the story of an author, Robin Sloan, who has apparently put some popular short stories that he's written online for free. But now he's trying to write a whole book. But rather than go the standard route, he's self-funding and then self-publishing the project, and like Sobule, Josh Freese, and many others (um, including us!), he's offering various tiers of benefits that you get for support:

Pledge $3 or more
DIGITAL PACK. Get a PDF copy of the book and follow along with behind-the-scenes updates.

Pledge $11 or more
PHYSICAL PACK. All of the above, plus get a physical copy of the book. (The more people who choose this level or higher, the better the book is for everybody!)

Pledge $19 or more
SINCERITY PACK. All of the above, plus your book is signed, and it comes with a little surprise.

Pledge $29 or more
PATRON PACK. All of the above, plus your name (or secret code-name) is listed in the acknowledgments.

Pledge $39 or more
SUPER OCCULT VALUE PACK. All of the above, plus get three more copies of the book (for a total of four), so you can give one to a friend, donate one to the library, leave one in a coffee shop with a line of hexadecimal code scribbled across the title page...

The cool thing? At the time I'm writing this, the last one had the highest number of buyers, and the cheapest one had the lowest number of buyers. And yet the Hollywood lawyers of the world insist that people just want to get stuff for free. Not true. Provide them real scarce value and people will buy.

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Device design repository Thingiverse has grown a new helpful appendage, the Parts Nebula -

Thingiverse citizens may now create structured part lists that can be shared and even embedded in their own websites. These part lists are designed to be as helpful as possible. They print out very easily for a trip to the hardware store. For those who prefer to shop online, suppliers can be added to parts to streamline the online part hunt. Parts themselves can be reused between Things, which saves time and effort. Last, but not least, there is an inventory system which allows you to keep track of what parts you have.

More infos on the Thingiverse blog. [via Boing Boing]

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theodp writes "Over at Intelligent Enterprise, Seth Grimes declares the Federal Government's USAspending.gov website a travesty, calling it 'almost a parody of a government-transparency site.' Among the faults cited by Grimes is a botched 'Federal Spending FY 2009 YTD' pie chart that graced USAspending.gov's home page. Not only were the sizes of pie segments not in proportion to the percentage labels (due to a Google Chart API error), the colors in the pie chart didn't even match the colors and values in the table immediately below the chart. Lucky for the Feds, Grimes didn't get a chance to look behind the curtain at the Federal IT Dashboard, where they forgot to remove a (commented) reference to a Google spreadsheet that states 'These totals are pretty poor numbers' (Google workbook). Oops!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Sweet Juniper blog has a gallery of abandoned Detroit houses that are being overcome by the foliage around them, trees and shrubs and plants growing around, on and in them.

Feral Houses (via Neatorama)

Update: Crap, this is a duplicate. Ah, c'est la vie. Enjoy it again, for the first time.

mikesd81 tips news that a California jury has found two web hosting companies liable for "contributing to trademark and copyright infringement" after hosting web sites that sold counterfeit Louis Vuitton items. Both companies are owned by the same man, Steven Chen, and are being ordered to pay $32 million in fines. A similar judgment for $61 million went against eBay last year for facilitating the sale of counterfeit Louis Vuitton merchandise. "The US District Court for the Northern District of California is expected to issue a permanent injunction banning the internet service providers from hosting Web sites that selling fake Louis Vuitton goods in the future, the company said. Attorneys for the luxury goods maker said in a statement that the case is the first successful application on the internet of the theory of contributory liability for trademark infringement. Under this theory, companies that know, or should know, that they are enabling illegal activities have an obligation to remedy the situation. Entities that fail to do so, as Louis Vuitton alleged in this case, can be held legally responsible for contributing to the illegal activities."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Got a Palm Pre and would like an on-screen keyboard, but didn't want to bend over backwards to get it installed? You're in luck. The WebOS Internals and preware.org folks have packaged everything needed to install the on-screen keyboard into a patch for their Preware app installer, making it a relatively painless process.

[via Gizmodo]

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Two Azerbaijani bloggers have been arrested for uploading a video depicting a donkey giving a news-conference. The video was a parody of Azerbaijan's propaganda "news-conferences." The official charge is "hooliganism" and police say that the bloggers got involved in a "scuffle at a restaurant" but they deny having participated in any "scuffle" and insist that the arrest was political.

My father was born in a refugee camp in Azerbaijan, near Baku, but I've never had the urge to go back and look up the spot.

Speaking to the BBC, Elsa Vidal - Europe desk officer with Reporters Without Borders - said that press freedoms in Azerbaijan were almost non-existent, making it "one of the black spots of the former USSR".

"The situation is still severe and local public servants enjoy virtual immunity from an investigation from the press when they try and expose corruption," she said.

"There are no grounds for the bloggers to be prosecuted. They should be released and all accusations should be dropped.

"The authorities have more to lose in jailing the bloggers than in freeing them, but who knows what will actually be said at the trial?" she added.

The UN Human Rights Committee also raised concerns about the arrests, saying there were "extensive limitations to the right to freedom of expression" in Azerbaijan.

Jail threat for donkey bloggers

Amiga Trombone writes "An article in the IEEE Spectrum argues that the rate of technological progress has slowed in the last 50 years. While there have been advances in areas such as computers, communications and medicine, etc., the author points out that these advances have largely been incremental rather than revolutionary. He contrasts the progress made within the life-span of his grandmother (1880-1960) with that in his own (1956-present). Having been born the year after the author, I've noticed this, too. While certainly we've produced some useful refinements, little of the technology available today would have surprised me much had I been able to encounter it in 1969. While some of it has been implemented in surprising ways, the technology itself had largely been anticipated."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Two separate stories concerning statements from those in charge of the patent system suggest that the new administration isn't about to help fix the problems in the patent system, but is eagerly looking to make them worse. It starts with new USPTO Director David Kappos, who some thought would recognize problems with the patent system from his years dealing with those problems at IBM. While IBM is a massive patent stockpiler, over the past few years it's at least indicated some recognition that the system is broken. But... his recent remarks suggest he wants to reverse the trend of patent examiners rejecting so many patents:

On the subject of quality, there has been speculation in the IP community that examiners are being encouraged to reject applications because a lower allowance rate equals higher quality. Let's be clear: patent quality does not equal rejection.

I don't think I could disagree any more strongly. Patent quality absolutely means keeping out bad patents -- something the USPTO has failed at for years. Considering the massive monopoly power handed out by a patent, one should only be granted in the rarest of cases -- when real quality, and a real need for the patent can be shown. After a lot of criticism about the way that patent system was run for the past few decades (where "when in doubt, approve" was the norm) since about 2004, the USPTO has finally started to become more aggressive in rejecting patents. Having the USPTO switch back in the other direction would be a massive mistake.

Meanwhile, an even more worrisome issue is that Kappos' boss, Gary Locke, the US Secretary of Commerce, seems to buy into all sorts of disproved myths about the patent system. It doesn't help that the journalists at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel seem to believe them too. Check out this quote, for example:

And economists concur that patents are the best known indicator of innovation.

Um, actually, a rather large number of economists do not concur at all on that statement (and note that two of those are Nobel Laureates), and can stack up study after study after study that suggests the opposite. But why let facts get in the way of an old myth?

The real problem, which becomes evident in reading the article is that since the USPTO is funded based on patent application fees, it has every incentive in the world, as an institution, to approve more patents. The more patents it approves, the more applications it gets, which means more money as well. This isn't to say that the individual examiners don't take their jobs seriously, and approve stuff just to get the fees. Obviously, they're not directly a part of that calculus. But the incentives put in place at higher levels are to bring in more fees to better fund the USPTO. Of course, if it functioned as originally intended, and only narrowly approved patents that were clearly shown to be a new and non-obvious invention that promoted the progress, the staff and the budget could be cut down significantly. But since when has a gov't agency ever willingly looked for ways to cut its own budget?

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Portland's Gary Moody has been caught -- for a second time -- hiding inside a pit latrine at a campsite. The first time he claimed he'd dropped his wedding ring (authorities sieved the biomass and found no ring); this time he claimed he'd dropped his shirt. In an affidavit, he describes himself as having an "outhouse problem."

In October of 2005, Moody pleaded no contest to trespass. The judge imposed a 30-day jail sentence but suspended all of it in exchange for two years of probation.

Moody was ordered to pay a $1,000 fine and $700 restitution to the Forest Service for the cost of pumping out the toilet tank and screening the contents. He also was sentenced to 30 days in jail in Maine for violating conditions of his probation by leaving the state without permission. He had been on probation for a drunken-driving conviction.

"This gentleman has been subject to a great deal of media scrutiny and drawn to himself, should I say, notoriety. And a healthy share of bathroom humor, if you will," District Court Judge Pamela Albee said during the sentencing in New Hampshire.

Man accused of climbing into pit toilet - again (Thanks, Teena!)

(Image: Toilet seat in Cap-Haitien a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike image from le Korrigan's photostream)

This is a very simple Arduino drum machine that is built around a few piezoelectric speakers. Check out the link for a very detailed build, including a really nice chromatic note chart.

Had a quick look round at turning a piezoelectric speaker in to a sensor that will detect a tap or knock. I also then had a search around for setting the output of a speaker to a different note. Combining this has given me a small basic drum machine and a headache to my girlfriend.

In the Maker Shed:


Drum Kit Kit for Arduino

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The Evil Mad Scientist Labs kitchen has a recipe for cookie-dough (eggless, if you're worried about salmonella) and ice-cream gyoza (Japanese dumplings). They look delicious.

Fold the plastic wrap over the slice of dough and roll it out until it is a little larger than your gyoza press.

Peel the plastic wrap off of one half of the circle of dough. Lay the thin dough over the press and gently push it into the center to make a depression for the ice cream.

Put a small spoonful of ice cream into the depression.

Ice Cream Gyoza

It looks like HackPittsburg's "Intro to Programming The Arduino" class was a success. This video was made by one of the students after taking the course.

On Saturday, August 29, a dozen students (some coming all the way from Ohio and even one from Detroit) gathered at HackPittsburgh to explore this question. Each student received all of the parts necessary to make a "physical pixel" - a breadboard, a three-color (RGB) LED, three potentiometers, some resistors, and some jumper wires. The students brought their own laptop, Arduino (or compatible board), and programming cable.

In the Maker Shed:


Make: Arduino

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Jonathan Margulies alerts us to an article in Fortune that discusses the insane lengths the major record labels in the US go to in the process of trying to pick which songs to promote -- while trying to keep the songs from leaking. Basically, they burn all sorts of CDs for label execs -- each with unique watermarks, to try to keep anyone from leaking the song (and to be able to track it back to them, if the song leaks). The article suggests that the mistake here is in burning CDs, rather than distributing the same content digitally... but as Margulies points out in his submission, the bigger issue is even going through that whole watermarking process in the first place. What does it do? Stop a song from getting leaked a week earlier? Meanwhile bands that are smart and don't want to waste a ton of money are leaking their own music, recognizing that it builds up buzz. The old record labels aren't struggling because of piracy. They're struggling because they're wasting tons of money on useless things like stamping out specially watermarked CDs for execs within their own company.

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Death Metal writes with this excerpt from ComputerWeekly.com about the UK's national ID card scheme: "Privacy advocates have reacted angrily to reports that the government plans to link national identity records to criminal records for background checks on people who work with children and vulnerable people. Up to 11 million such workers could be affected immediately if the plan goes ahead. Phil Booth, national co-ordinator of privacy advocates NO2ID, said the move was consistent with the various forms of coercion strategy to create so-called volunteers for national ID cards. 'Biometrics are part of the search for clean, unique identifiers,' Phil Booth said. He said the idea was patently ridiculous when the Home Office was planning to allow high street shops and the Post Office to take fingerprints for the ID card."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this summer, we noted that it was something of a pipedream by Stephen Brill to believe that 5 to 10% of online newspaper readers would pony up for a subscription to the online site. Having spent time looking at plenty of "free" websites that have tried to charge, the numbers are significantly lower in almost all cases. We're talking 1% tops -- unless there's a really really good reason to pay, and then you're talking 2 to 3%. In many cases, the number is even lower than 1%. At the same time, I pointed out that Brill was making the classic mistake that makes any venture capitalist laugh you out of the room: "if we just get x% of this market, we'll be huge!" But that's top-down thinking, and markets don't work that way. You need to be bottom up and explain not why x% will buy, but why the first person will buy, and the second person will buy and so on.

However, as the Nieman Lab points out, not only is Brill still playing the top down game, he's now increasing the number of "paid" subs he thinks he can get from the "5 to 10%" he was claiming a couple months ago to "10 to 15%" now:

The idea is that a newspaper probably has 10 or 15 percent of its audience who are the most engaged, who come to that Web site all the time. Those are the people who will be asked to pay a small portion.

They'll be asked, but they won't pay. Brill even tries to go through some numbers, but again, he does it top down, rather than bottom up:

Let's say that a newspaper in a given month has 1 million visitors. It might be that 850,000 of those people just came there casually through a Google News search, came there once or twice, but aren't particularly devoted to, let's say, The Washington Post.

On the other hand, there might 100,000 or 150,000 of those people who absolutely, positively have to see The Washington Post every day. They want to read your column. They want to read the stuff about lobbying.

They want to read the stuff that really makes The Washington Post The Washington Post.

Those people will be asked to pay something, typically getting a big discount if they already have a print subscription.

They'll be asked to pay... but will they? Fat chance. Now we run a website that has content that is viewed by over a million visitors per month (between RSS and the site itself). And, many of our readers are quite loyal and have certainly built a connection with the site. But I'll be the first to admit that the likelihood of 10 to 15% of our visitors agreeing to pay for the content is ludicrous. I'd argue that even thinking that 1% would pay is highly unlikely. There's too much "competition" for attention, and pissing people off with paywall doesn't make them more likely to stick around. Brill is way overestimating the willingness of online readers to pay for certain content.

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Video link (MSNBC), and YouTube link (for folks in places where the official source is region-blocked.)

This, my friends, is why we have television. Man, but Rachel Maddow kicks all kinds of ass. Here, she interviews former US Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge on revelations that the "Terror Threat Level" system was manipulated for political purposes during the Bush Administration.

As Jay Rosen aptly tweeted just now, "There are times when TV truly is an x-ray. Dissembling made visible. (...) To work himself out of the bind she had gotten him into, Ridge actually disavowed the jacket copy of his own book under Maddow's questioning."

Background: Ridge Claims That He Was Pressured to Elevate Threat Warning (Washington Post)

An anonymous reader writes "Mount Wilson is in danger from the Station fire burning near L.A. Their servers have gone offline, but there's a temporary mirror cam. It doesn't look good. Picture four on the L.A. Times photo gallery shows the observatory from the air. If anyone has any inside news on the condition of the facility, I'm sure there are lots of people on Slashdot that would love to hear it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This welcome comes long overdue, as Sean Ragan has already been writing here at Make: Online for a few months now, but hasn't had a formal introduction to you dear readers. Here he is to introduce himself:

I come from a long line of clever tool-using hominids. Also, I went to college and stuff. Way too much of it, in fact. I have a degree in philosophy, two in chemistry, and a couple semesters of law school. I started making stuff as a means to chill out during all that schooling, drawing on the long hours I spent, as a child, tinkering in the garage with my father and brother, who are both professional engineers. My Dad, in particular, holds a bunch of patents and has started more than one company to commercialize his own ideas, and he was always very supportive of my crazy schemes. And after following up on a bunch of them, one or two turned out to be not so crazy, after all, and people started paying attention. I started getting e-mails from people who admired my work or, even better, who had actually used my pages for guidance or inspiration in making something of their own. Today, I count myself hugely lucky that I am able to make a modest living making things and writing about making things. If you've made something remarkable, or know someone who has, or even if you just want to say "Hai," please don't hesitate to shoot me an e-mail and tell me all about it. Cheers.

Sean lives in Austin, TX, and is a mad scientist and jack-of-all trades, two of our favorite types of people. So welcome, Sean!

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Many in the US have been pushing for an "orphan works" law for quite some time -- which would create an exception for copyright infringement if the owner of a work simply can't be found. It's difficult to find any serious reason why an orphan works exception shouldn't be included in copyright law as written, but there are always some who pop up as being against it -- usually because they don't understand what it is (there are some who seem to be purposely spreading misinformation about orphan works bills). Thus, it continually fails to move forward in the US -- even as politicians insist it's necessary. It looks like Europe may be going down the same route these days, as it's now looking at creating an orphan works law as well. Now we'll see if it faces the same misguided opposition.

Still, as William Patry notes in his book, the real shame is that the whole reason we need an orphan works bill in the first place is due to how screwed up copyright law has become since switching from a "formalities" approach to one where everything is automatically covered by copyright. Under the old system (pre-1976 Act in the US), in order to get a copyright, you had to register, and then at certain points, re-register it, to have and keep it covered by copyright. Thus, any such "orphan" works fell into the public domain after a short period of time -- and it worked fine. There was no "orphan works" problem, because those works that no longer that weren't being used for commercial purposes went into the public domain in a relatively short period of time. The most amazing thing, though, is that very few of those supporting orphan works legislation seem to recognize that the whole "problem" is one they made themselves by extending insanely long copyrights to pretty much everything.

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NASA image of the Los Angeles fires, as viewed from high above our planet.

The image was acquired mid-morning on Sunday -- the fire has since more than doubled in size, mind you! -- by the "backward (northward)-viewing camera of the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) instrument on NASA's Terra satellite."

To give you a sense of scale, the image you see here covers an area 152 miles wide. Them's some big blazes.

More about the image here, and larger sizes. And here's more, from scientists at NASA JPL. Robert Mackey at the NYT has a related item. I cringe at linking to the Daily Mail, but hold your nose and click on this image: an annotated version of this same NASA shot that shows you where various parts of LA are located. I am happy to report that I am safely near the edge of the blue stuff, and not downwind of those huge, nasty smoke plumes.

After the Transistor, a Leap Into the Microcosm @ NYTimes.com

Gaze into the electron microscope display in Frances Ross’s laboratory here and it is possible to persuade yourself that Dr. Ross, a 21st-century materials scientist, is actually a farmer in some Lilliputian silicon world.

Dr. Ross, an I.B.M. researcher, is growing a crop of mushroom-shaped silicon nanowires that may one day become a basic building block for a new kind of electronics. Nanowires are just one example, although one of the most promising, of a transformation now taking place in the material sciences as researchers push to create the next generation of switching devices smaller, faster and more powerful than today’s transistors.

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Pre-IFA 2009: Panasonic has also announced the Leica DG MACRO-ELMARIT 45mm F2.8 ASPH. MEGA O.I.S. macro lens. This optically stabilized lens is bundled into a compact body measuring approximately 2.5 inches x 2.5 inches, with an inner focus mechanism that keeps the overall length constant on focusing. The optical construction consists of fourteen elements in ten groups, including one aspherical and one ED element, and the aperture mechanism uses 7 rounded blades for smoothly blurred backgrounds. The minimum focus distance is 15cm, and a switch on the lens barrel allows this to be limited to 50cm for longer range work.

Pre-IFA 2009: Panasonic has announced the LUMIX G 20mm F1.7 ASPH, a pancake type lens that has been designed to complement its latest GF1 Micro Four Thirds camera. With a 40mm-equivalant field of view, the lens measures just 25.5 mm (1 inch) in length and weighs only 100 grams. The optical design comprises seven elements in five groups, including two aspherical elements to minimize distortion and chromatic aberration.

Pre-IFA 2009: Panasonic has introduced what it bills as 'the world's smallest and lightest digital interchangeable lens system camera with a built-in flash' in the shape of Lumix DMC-GF1. Sporting a new 'artistic flat' body design similar to that of the recently released Olympus E-P1, the GF1 is 35% smaller than earlier G models. Headline features include the same 12.1Mp sensor as the DMC-G1, 1280 x 720 HD recording in AVCHD Lite format, an optional hot-shoe mounted electronic viewfinder, and a 3 inch LCD with 460k dots.

Just Posted: Our hands-on preview of the GF1 - the third model in Panasonic's Micro Four Thirds 'G' system. The GF1 squeezes much the same functionality as the G1/GH1 into a body that's roughly the same size as the Olympus E-P1. We've had an early production sample for a few weeks now; just enough time to produce an in-depth preview and an extensive samples gallery (including plenty of shots taken with the new 20mm F1.7 pancake lens). Enjoy.

While covering human trafficking between North Korea and China, Current TV employees Laura Ling and Euna Lee were captured and detained by North Korea. They were sentenced to 12 years hard labor, but released 140 days later after extensive efforts to negotiate their freedom. Here is a snip from the journalists' first public statement since their return to the United States:

When we set out, we had no intention of leaving China, but when our guide beckoned for us to follow him beyond the middle of the river, we did, eventually arriving at the riverbank on the North Korean side. He pointed out a small village in the distance where he told us that North Koreans waited in safe houses to be smuggled into China via a well-established network that has escorted tens of thousands across the porous border.

Feeling nervous about where we were, we quickly turned back toward China. Midway across the ice, we heard yelling. We looked back and saw two North Korean soldiers with rifles running toward us. Instinctively, we ran.

We were firmly back inside China when the soldiers apprehended us. Producer Mitch Koss and our guide were both able to outrun the border guards. We were not. We tried with all our might to cling to bushes, ground, anything that would keep us on Chinese soil, but we were no match for the determined soldiers. They violently dragged us back across the ice to North Korea and marched us to a nearby army base, where we were detained. Over the next 140 days, we were moved to Pyongyang, isolated from one another, repeatedly interrogated and eventually put on trial and sentenced to 12 years of hard labor.

Hostages in the Hermit Kingdom (Current)
Related video: Thank You From Laura and Euna (Current)

A ginormous amphibious air tanker called the Martin Mars just made a massive water drop over Mount Wilson, the hill northeast of Los Angeles where the century-old Mount Wilson Observatory and nearby TV, radio and cell phone towers are all located. The World War II-era flying boat literally water-bombed the peak today to douse flames from the Station Fire, which has burned 127,000 acres (the largest in LA County history).

Here's an LA Times pic of this bad boy in action over Mt. Wilson. Snip from the accompanying story:

Los Angeles County Fire Department Battalion Chief Steve Martin said, "We are going to burn, cut, foam and gel. And if that doesn't work, we're going to pray. This place is worth a lot, but it's not worth dying for. "

In a worst-case scenario, firefighters were expected to retreat to the safety of the observatory parking lot or seek refuge in the concrete and steel basement of the 105-year-old, 100-inch telescope observatory. A Martin Mars air tanker, also known as a Super Scooper, dropped 7,500 gallons of water on Mt. Wilson.

In previous BB posts about the LA fires, I mentioned these giant 747s that have also been spurting water from the sky, to extinguish the blaze. Wired has a nice photo gallery of those guys in action here. And Popular Science has some interior shots of the 747s. Spoiler: they are friggin huge inside.

The managers of the observatory are now very optimistic that the historic site will make it okay.

Below: Astronomer Mike Brown has been tweeting while the area around the Mt. Wilson Observatory burns, and he spotted the WWII flying boat in action.

My friend Tom emailed me to let me know he heard Chicago Tribune music critic (and host of the excellent music podcast Sound Opinions) Greg Kot on public radio's Marketplace, and said it sounded like I was talking, based on what was being said. Indeed, the interview hits on a lot of what we usually talk about here, noting how the old industry is overreacting, and there's a new music business that's growing rapidly by embracing what fans want:

There is a part of the music industry that is dying as a result of what's happening on the Internet. But I think a new industry is being born, a grassroots industry.

Kot is asked to describe the business model, and he notes the importance of community (though, he leaves out the latter part of the equation -- the "reason to buy" part):

I think what it comes down to is building a community around what an artist may do. I think what was happening in the past, where everything was being funneled through a few big corporations, a few big record companies, a few big radio stations, fans really didn't feel personally invested in the artist. And what the Internet is facilitating is artists communicating directly with their fans and vice versa. To the point where you have fans participating in the art, whether it's making videos, or doing remixes, they feel part of the equation. And as a result they're investing in the artist in numerous ways.

After naming (of course) Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails as bands that have it figured out, Kot's asked about how smaller, less well-known bands can do things, and Kot's got a ready answer (though, he doesn't name names -- even though there are many such examples):

You know, it's very hard to keep a secret on the Internet. If your music is genuinely good, you will not be a secret for very long. I think the key is start small, start with a community base, start with a few hardcore fans and build it from there. And secondly lower your overhead. Keep your operations small and surround yourself with a few invested businessmen. In other words, you still need infrastructure, but it should be a lot smaller.

All in all a good interview, though probably won't break much new ground for readers here. Still, it's nice to see Kot recognize these things, and makes me interested in reading his recent book, Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music.

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(Warning: video is totally gross). Via this SF Gate item, a Chicago-based animal rights group called Mercy for Animals shot the video above of baby chicks being ground up alive at an Iowa chicken processing factory. It's pretty disgusting, and reinforces a personal decision I made to avoid consuming eggs that come from this sort of place:

Hy-Line admitted to the Associated Press that "instantaneous euthanasia" (e.g. grinding up male chicks) is a standard practice and claims that it is also supported by the animal veterinary and scientific community. (Male chicks are less valuable because they can't lay eggs or be raised quickly enough for meat.) Mercy for Animals estimates that 200 million male chicks are killed annually and United Egg Producers confirmed this figure.

I'll take the happy kind of eggs Mark grows in his back yard, or none at all, yo. (Thanks, Brian Lam)

SpuriousLogic sends along this quote from CVG: 'You may remember reports of Sony's flashy Aino phone earlier this year which can, among other things, connect to a PS3 via Remote Play, giving you full access to your XMB through its tiny screen. Well, Sony's revealed that the Aino is now just weeks away from release in October, and spewed all the details prospective buyers need to know about the device. ... Remote Play with Aino lets you turn your PS3 on and off, browse and control the XMB and access the internet browser from anywhere in the world. Remote Play also lets you control and access the hard drive's media content on the PS3 using the built-in WiFi or 3G connections via Aino. You can also access the PlayStation Store via Remote Play or chat with friends via the PlayStation Network. It is also possible to buy and download a new game from the Store via Aino so it is ready and waiting for you when you get home.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MAKE subscriber Paul writes in with a fun little homemade traffic light project he made for his kids using a microcontroller and some junk found around the house, including an Altoids mint tin. I like that the light diffusers made from vending machine toy capsules. There is also a step-by-step guide on his website.

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Earlier this year, we wrote about a woman named Beverly Stayart, who had sued Yahoo over what she found when she did a search on her name. Her complaint was that some of the links advertised porn sites and possibly contained malware, and that this was a violation of her trademark and privacy rights. After the posting, we received a number of comments on that post, and more recently, received a legal letter from the woman's lawyer, demanding that we remove many of the comments or get sued. With the help of Paul Alan Levy at Public Citizen, we replied to the letter, refusing to remove the comments, and detailing our reasons why. To date, we have not been sued over this, but you may want to take our reporting on the subject with whatever caveats, given these facts.

Earlier this week, the court dismissed the lawsuit against Yahoo and denied Stayart's request to refile. The court had trouble with the idea that this was a trademark claim, noting that just because she does not like how her name is shown, it does not create a trademark violation. There are two major problems: (1) she doesn't appear to be using her name in commerce in this particular field and (2) there is little to no likelihood of confusion. From the ruling:

Similarly, Stayart is not engaged in the commercial marketing of her identity, and she does not allege an intent to commercialize. Stayart alleges that her name has commercial value, but it is clear that Stayart's complaint arises from the distasteful association of her name with pornographic images, advertisements for sexual dysfunction drugs, and a sexually-oriented dating service..... Stayart cannot satisfy this requirement [likelihood of confusion] as a matter of law because her complaint explicitly disavows any association with pornographic materials, sexual dysfunction drugs, or sexually-oriented dating services (i.e., Various' website AdultFriendFinder.com). As noted above, Stayart alleges that "in no way has [she] ever engaged in a promiscuous lifestyle, or other overt sexual activities, which she and a large portion of her community and social circle consider perverse and abhorrent." Complaint, ¶ 20. This allegation contravenes the likelihood of confusion, and Stayart pleaded herself out of court on her Lanham Act claim. No one who accessed these links could reasonably conclude that Bev Stayart endorsed the products at issue.

From this, it would certainly appear that the court is not at all persuaded that you can bring a trademark infringement lawsuit against a search engine based on how your name appears.

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The reason Photoshop was invented? I think yes.

AT-ST patrols Cannon Beach, Oregon, at sunset. Evidently the Empire is cracking down on the outlying systems.

Mike Horn made this series of still images over a weekend after several people asked for hi-res wallpapers from his videos Death Star Over San Francisco and Death Star Destroys Enterprise. He Photoshopped them from personal photos and Star Wars images off Wookieepedia.

Flickr set here, suitable for framing.

San Francisco scout trooper on lunch break on the Embarcadero, and in this joint you can bet he downed a few Buds with that burger. Ready to ride.

These stormtroopers are real -- they're members of the 501st Legion Golden Gate Garrison who generously volunteered to be in Horn's video Death Star Destroys Enterprise, shot on location in the old World War II artillery batteries in the Marin Headlands north of San Francisco.

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