Gareth Branwyn of MAKE posted this video and photos of a super-realistic 1:10 scale model of a UAZ-469 ATV.

A few months back, I wrote about how director Kevin Smith (who's most well known for Clerks, but has done plenty of other stuff as well) is showing how the old CwF + RtB formula works in the movie business as well. Smith has gone above and beyond (and crazy far beyond that) in connecting with his fans in all sorts of ways. Beyond just making cool movies, he has a fun (mostly) weekly podcast, a blog (which he doesn't use as much any more), web forums and he regularly does Q&A sessions that are somewhat legendary and hilarious (check YouTube).

Recently, he jump onto the Twitter bandwagon and hasn't looked back (it explains why the blog has gone mostly silent), and he interacts with all sorts of fans that way. Last week, he announced that for Labor Day, he would do a 24-hour Twitter marathon, taking and answering questions from fans. It started up around 8am Monday morning, and was fun to follow along with (including some back and forth with Ben Stiller, who lives in Kevin's neighborhood, and has a house that Kevin wants...). Yet another example of connecting with fans -- though, every here and there he interspersed it with links to things to buy, such as a book made from some "best of" moments from the podcast, called Shootin' the Sh*t with Kevin Smith.

Smith seems to have the whole CwF+RtB thing down cold -- and has for many years. But, given all of that, I had no idea what his opinion was on the question of "piracy." While he notes, at one point, that Disney will own the rights to his movies forever, someone asks "How much money do you think your projects have lost to piracy?" to which Kevin responds:

See, I think "How many more converts did I get from piracy?"

Bingo. The smart creator these days looks to use "piracy" to his advantage. Smith has done that and more. Hell, we all wish that our favorite creators made plenty of money any time anyone viewed/heard/experienced their content -- but that's not the way the world works. So why not figure out ways to use what the world is doing to your advantage? Many have figured it out -- and yet the industry bigwigs and lawyers continue to insist it's impossible. Oh, and I'm looking forward to (finally) seeing Kevin Smith do a Q&A live later this year as part of his fall tour -- for which I was happy to give him money, once again, disproving Hollywood lawyers insistence that fans just want everything for free. Luckily, Smith doesn't appear to be listening to the lawyers in his neighborhood, and it seems like he's better off for it.

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Our pal Francesco Fondi, of Hobby Media, sent us a link to this staggeringly detailed UAZ-469 ATV. Wikipedia sez of the UAZ-469:

The UAZ-469 is an all-terrain vehicle manufactured by UAZ. It was used by the Red Army and other Warsaw Pact forces, as well as paramilitary units in Eastern Bloc countries. In the Soviet Union, it also saw widespread service in all state organizations that needed a robust off-road vehicle.

The video kind of goes on forever, but given the impressive craftship in evidence here, I can see how the builder can't get over his own handiwork. His website is in Italian, but there are tons of pics of the build and you can see how he created some of the components, such as 1:10 scale leaf springs.

Fuoristrada UAZ 469b radiocomandato autocostruito in scala 1/10 dal modellista Kostruktor

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I'm seeing a number of tweets from participants and organizers of the recent PAX (Penny Arcade Expo) which indicate at least one case of swine flu has been confirmed, and more feared.

PAX is a three-day game fest for tabletop, videogame, and PC gamers, and took place September 4-6 in Seattle. Perhaps folks more familiar with the details than I can update us in the comments here. Organizers are using the hashtag #paxflu to track updates on Twitter. Of course, this could also be a very crafty viral marketing campaign. Seriously, though: to those who contracted it or are at risk, get health care pronto, and get well soon. (via @willsmith)

The Hierarchy Of Digital Distractions: levels of digital activity, visualized. (by David McCandless, via Scott Beale)

Ok, first off, I'll say this: I don't watch 24-hour cable news shows. In the rare moments when I catch any of the talking heads for any of those networks (CNN, Fox News, MSNBC), it makes me somewhat crazy, because none of them seem to have the slightest common sense. Frankly, they're all just a bunch of entertainers who appear to either be completely clueless, or exaggerate and lie for effect. I have little time for such people -- no matter what ideological bent they happen to come from. One of the popular tactics of such shows, is to use the ever popular "report on a rumor" setup, which lets them insinuate something, without ever officially stepping up and saying it themselves. The simplest form is the "some are saying..." lead in that lets these folks spend plenty of time discussing things without ever actually investigating if they're true. But, at times it goes much deeper into finding some random conspiracy theorist, and building them up into a "movement." It seems to happen pretty regularly, and it's rather silly.

In the last couple of weeks, a random internet meme apparently sprung up to highlight this sort of reporting, initiated in a comment on the ever-excellent Fark, it involved a commenter questioning: "Why haven't we had an official response to the rumor that Glenn Beck raped and murdered a girl in 1990?" The idea, which seems plain to many involved, is not to actually suggest that Glenn Beck did such a thing -- but to highlight this tactic of making a totally bogus rumor into "news" by stating it, and wondering why there hasn't been a denial. A bunch of folks have picked up on this claim and run with it (apparently greatly upsetting some loyal Beck fans), turning it into one of those internet memes with legs.

Someone -- quite anonymous -- then set up a website to chronicle all of this, called (appropriately, given the meme): GlennBeckRapedAndMurderedAYoungGirlIn1990.com. The site itself is clear that it's a parody, attempting to highlight this sort of "news" tactic, and the fact that it's often employed by Beck:

This site is parody/satire. We assume Glenn Beck did not rape and murder a young girl in 1990, although we haven't yet seen proof that he didn't. But we think Glenn Beck definitely uses tactics like this to spread lies and misinformation.

It turns out that Glenn Beck isn't happy about this either. He's filed a domain name dispute over the domain name, claiming that it violates his trademark: Now, you might see some sort of claim over defamation (but, even that seems iffy, given that it's clearly a parody), but a trademark claim seems really iffy -- and not particularly smart. First, the site in question doesn't have any commerce. It does link to another site that sells stuff, which is how Beck tries to claim that it's a commercial site. For a trademark violation to occur, the name needs to be used in commerce. It's also supposed to be confusing -- but as plenty of "gripes sites" have shown, it's perfectly reasonable to use a trademarked term in a domain name (and, hell, Beck's name isn't even fully registered yet) as a part of a gripe/protest/parody, when it's clearly not run by the actual mark holder.

As for why it's not particularly smart -- whether he wins or loses -- is because he just called a whole bunch of attention to some silly internet meme that clearly wants attention. Beck would have been better off just ignoring it. Instead, in legitimizing it by trying to take it down, many more people become aware of the meme -- and may start calling attention to situations where Beck (and others) make use of such tactics.

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There's been concern expressed today in various Twitter messages that rssCloud might not scale to support all the people who might want to use it.

I'm not an expert in massive centralized systems, that's why I designed this to be decentralized, like RSS is.

I set up an rssCloud server, fairly confident that it would scale to meet the demand, and with a fallback if it shouldn't. I'm not risking anything, because we know that polling works for RSS. rssCloud is an optimization, its purpose is to make RSS faster. But if it fails RSS still works. As I wrote earlier, even though many people predicted in 1999 that RSS would never work, it's actually never failed, there is no RSS fail whale.

This is not my first time with rssCloud. My team at UserLand Software implemented it in 2002 in Radio and Manila. We had problems, but I've factored in what we learned in 2002 in the 2009 implementation. If you're interested in the details, I've spelled them out in the Implementor's Guide to rssCloud, which was published in mid-July and has been reviewed by dozens of programmers, and implemented by more than a few, including the people at Automattic.

I'm sure we'll talk about this at tomorrow's rssCloud meetup in Berkeley.

About 160 heads came to Kraut Fest 2009, held at Machine Project in Los Angeles on Sunday, September 6.

Of those 160 heads, 40 were human and 120 were cabbage. The humans were there to learn how to change the cabbage into sauerkraut (based on my Russian grandmother's recipe), kimchi, and choucroute garni (a "meat fiesta" from the Alsace region in France).

I recognized the nice couple in the photo above from Picklefest 2008, which was held last year at Machine Project. The couple that ferments together stays together!

Many thanks to Machine Project founder Mark Allen for hosting the event, Slow Food LA for sponsoring it, Urban Homestead authors Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen for organizing it, Granny Choe for the kimchi lessons, and Jean-Pail Monsché for the mouth watering choucroute garni!

Photos of Krautfest 2009

David Gerard writes "Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures doesn't sue people over patents, because that would be patent trolling! No, instead they just threaten to sell the patent to a known litigious patent troll. So that's all right then. Timothy Lee details how using patents to crush profitable innovation works in practice, and concludes: 'In thinking about how to reform the patent system, a good yardstick would be to look for policy changes that would tend to put Myhrvold and his firm out of business.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OK, stop. Before you read any further, we need to come to a legal understanding.

I, the author, and we, the MAKE blogging staff, as well as all of you, the readers, understand that this widget is only to be used in a car that is stationary, out of gear, and well clear of traffic. It is not designed, marketed, or sold for use in a moving vehicle, and indeed anyone who would do so is manifestly irresponsible and dumb as a post. Everyone with the sense to operate a car or a laptop, or, indeed, even to read this blog, understands that. THEREFOR: Commenters griping about how hyping this product is tantamount to genocide will be summarily vaporized by our orbital lasers.

And now that we've reached an understanding, I can talk about why I think this is cool.

1. It's incredibly useful, as anyone who's ever had to use a laptop in a car for more than a few seconds will recognize.
   
2. It's inexpensive and easy to manufacture, and could be easily remade in the material and style of your choice, for your own use or as an easy, thoughtful, and useful handmade gift.
   
3. It's clever! It does a lot with a little. Whoever thought up that curvy-slot-with-ears shape deserves a lollipop, at the very least.
   

I rest my case. If you're still mad, well, remember those lasers.

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(Download / Watch on YouTube, video duration: 3:47.)

Today in Boing Boing Video: we proudly debut a new music video from They Might Be Giants. "Meet The Elements," an animated upbeat ode to the periodic table of elements and how they form our world. Video directed by Feel Good Anyway.

This track appears on the new TMBG kids' album "Here Comes Science."

Cory reviews the album here. (Thanks, John Flansburgh!)

Trailrunner7 writes "Today vendors are finally releasing patches for the TCP vulnerabilities first publicized nearly a year ago that affect a huge range of networking products, including any device running a version of Cisco's IOS software, and a number of Microsoft server and desktop operating systems. Both Microsoft and Cisco released fixes for the vulnerabilities today. The Microsoft Patch Tuesday release included the fix for the TCP flaw, which affects Windows Server 2003 and 2008, as well as Windows Vista, both the 32-bit and 64-bit editions, and Windows 2000 SP4, for which no fix is coming. The TCP flaws were identified several years ago and were made public last year by two researchers at Outpost24, Jack C. Louis and Robert E. Lee. Louis, who has since died, developed a tool called Sockstress that tested for the flaw and was able to maintain extremely long-term TCP connections with remote machines using very little bandwidth."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's been a lot of talk lately about claims that blogs are somehow posting stories without revealing if companies are paying for them, and even the FTC has announced plans to come out with guidelines to stop such behavior. But, of course, that assumes that it's only "blogs" that do this sort of thing, and not the mainstream press. And, to be honest, I can't think of a dumber thing for a blog to do, because if evidence of such a thing ever came out, it would destroy that blog's credibility. Yet, apparently, some in the newspaper business have no problems overtly and proudly advertising such things. A whole bunch of folks have submitted the story of a weekly newspaper in Key West Florida that alerted local political candidates that if they want coverage, they need to buy ads:

"As far as candidate forums and debates, we'll cover those when we can, but if candidates want their campaign covered, they have to pay to play.... I gotta pay the bills."

While a bit shocking in its honesty, it also should raise pretty serious questions about the credibility of the publication, which promises "fair reporting and fair representation." Though, given that it looks like the Conch Color website was designed in 1996 (yes, it has a clip art animated spinning globe -- and I'm almost surprised there's no animated "under construction" gifs), perhaps its credibility was already in question.

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What to do if you have a bunch of MIDI devices, but want to control them all from one Arduino? The simplest solution would be if you could program them all to respond to different channels. If you can't change them, though, Sebastian at little-scale offers a good solution. He is using a (de)multiplexer to control which device is connected to the Arduino hardware serial output pin, allowing him to address up to eight MIDI devices individually.

More:
MIDI programming library for Arduino

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ThousandStars sends us to The Wall Street Journal for a report that momentum for nuclear energy is waxing in the US. "For the first time in decades, popular opinion is on the industry's side. A majority of Americans thinks nuclear power, which emits virtually no carbon dioxide, is a safe and effective way to battle climate change, according to recent polls. At the same time, legislators are showing renewed interest in nuclear as they hunt for ways to slash greenhouse-gas emissions. The industry is seizing this chance to move out of the shadow of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and show that it has solved the three big problems that have long dogged it: cost, safety and waste."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I fell down a rabbit hole into the weird history of ouija boards and ended up at the insanely comprehensive online Museum of Talking Boards. There, I learned about a variation of the classical ouija, called "dial plate" talking boards. From the Museum:

Today, we might consider a kitchen table a peculiar piece of equipment to use to speak with spirits. For the spiritualist mediums of the 1850's, it seemed quite natural. A table was an available and commonplace piece of household furniture and a natural gathering place for family members. It also provided an ideal contact surface for those performing a séance. It worked very simply: the sitters placed their hands palms down on the tabletop and asked questions of the spirits. The spirits responded by tilting the table and rapping a leg against the floor. One knock meant, "no," two knocks meant, "doubtful," and three knocks meant, "yes." For complicated messages, spiritualists either called out the alphabet and let the spirits knock at the appropriate letter, or they employed an alphabet pasteboard. A member of the group held up the pasteboard with one hand, and with the fingers of the other, passed them slowly over the letters. The spirits knocked when the fingers touched the desired letter. Although somewhat time consuming, it was a simple and effective way to spell out messages from the "Dearly Departed."

Some mediums believed that there might be better methods of interpreting messages than using tables and alphabet boards. Modeling their equipment after the new dial plate telegraphs of the period, the logic was plain: if you could contact the living using the telegraph, then why not the non-living? In 1853, a Thompsonville, Connecticut spiritualist, Isaac T. Pease, called his invention, suitably enough, the "Spiritual Telegraph Dial." Just a dial with letters arranged around the circumference and a message needle to point to them were necessary. There was no need for messy wires or electricity.

Dial Plate Talking Boards

Earlier this year, we wrote about a rather thoughtful analysis of the problems of the patent system by Intel founder and former CEO Andy Grove. His view was that patents separate the important part (the actual innovation) from the "asset" (the patent), and that allows for bad behavior. He compared it to mortgage-backed securities, where the underlying mortgages were completely separated from the "asset," and bad behavior ensued. Apparently, he received a lot of criticism for this view -- but he's not backing down (if anything, he appears to be getting more aggressive). The Economist's tech quarterly issue includes a fascinating look at Grove and his views on innovation as a whole, and the wider economy. He mocks the idea that the gov't should ever prop up failing business models, noting that it stalls innovation. At the very end, he's asked if he believes what he said earlier this year about patents, and he not only defends his earlier statements, but makes an even stronger one:

"You can't just sit on your ass and give everyone the finger."

Unfortunately, with today's patent (and copyright) system, you can.

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Hollywood, CA Lego fan Brandon Griffith created this fantastic chess set out of Lego elements. I love how he broke free of the chess paradigm of one figure per piece. For instance, the king shows Luke and Leia together, while the queen has Han and Chewie. Some of the pieces are tiny vignettes--take the king's bishop, which shows Ben Kenobi turning off the Death Star's tractor beam.

Since 1999, Lego has released over 100 different Star Wars Mini figures. To give Star Wars Lego justice, I decided to build three different Chess sets, one for each original episode. This is the first of the series. Star Wars: A New Hope Lego Chess.

My goals with the individual chess pieces is to:
1. Is durable enough to play the game with.
2. Present a piece that closely represents a scene form the movie. My favorites are "Obi-wan and the tractor beam" & "Greedo"

The chess board:
1. Built strong enough to carry with out breaking
2. The playing area easily removes from the rest of the board to reveal compartments to store the pieces.
3. The detailing on the side on the board utilizes a lot of SNOT (Studs Not On Tops) techniques. This a technique that came out of the Adult Lego community.

Other Facts:
1. The chess board is built on a base of layered Lego plates.
2. Weighs 25lbs.
3. the Minifigs were the most expensive part on the chess set.

See Griffith's Flickr set with more views of the project, or click on the image above to see a bigger shot.

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Engineers have run an electrical circuit using the power of tree, seemingly the first demonstration of its kind. The University of Washington researchers determined that bigleaf maples on the school's campus generate up to few hundred millivolts. (The current is not mentioned.) So they built a low-power sensing circuit that could scavenge enough juice from a tree to operate. From UWNews:

The tree-power phenomenon is different from the popular potato or lemon experiment, in which two different metals react with the food to create an electric potential difference that causes a current to flow.

"We specifically didn't want to confuse this effect with the potato effect, so we used the same metal for both electrodes," (electrical engineering professor Babak) Parviz said.

Tree power is unlikely to replace solar power for most applications, Parviz admits. But the system could provide a low-cost option for powering tree sensors that might be used to detect environmental conditions or forest fires. The electronic output could also be used to gauge a tree's health.

"It's not exactly established where these voltages come from. But there seems to be some signaling in trees, similar to what happens in the human body but with slower speed," Parviz said. "I'm interested in applying our results as a way of investigating what the tree is doing. When you go to the doctor, the first thing that they measure is your pulse. We don't really have something similar for trees."

"Electrical circuit runs entirely off power in trees"

yuna49 writes 'Lately I've been visiting colleges with my daughter, who is a senior in high school. Every school has proudly announced that they support both Windows and Macs, and most of these schools report having about a 50-50 split between the two. However we've been a Linux household for many years now, and my daughter routinely uses a laptop running Kubuntu 9.04. Sometimes I would ask the student tour guide if Linux was supported and was usually met with a blank stare. We're obviously not concerned about whether she can write papers using OpenOffice and Linux. Rather we've been wondering about using other computing services on campus like classroom applications, remote printing, VPNs, or Wi-Fi support (nearly all these campuses have ubiquitous Wi-Fi). Given the composition of Slashdot's readership, I thought I'd pose the question here. Does your school support Linux? Have you found it difficult or impossible to use Linux in concert with the school's computing services?'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today on Boing Boing Video, they premiere They Might Be Giants' new video ode to the elements. The song is part of the Giants' latest kids recording, "Here Comes Science." Cory has a review of the CD/DVD here. My son grew up with the Giants' awesome cover of "Why Does The Sun Shine?" It gladdens my heart to think of a generation of kids learning honest-to-goodness science through fun, quirky, joyful music like "The Elements" and the other tracks on this record.

They Might Be Giants: "Meet the Elements" music video (BB Video)

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Ars has a review of recent research, and a summary of the history, in the field of reidentification — identifying people from anonymized data. Paul Ohm's recent paper is an elaboration of what Ohm terms a central reality of data collection: "Data can either be useful or perfectly anonymous but never both." "...in 2000, [researcher Latanya Sweeney] showed that 87 percent of all Americans could be uniquely identified using only three bits of information: ZIP code, birthdate, and sex. ... For almost every person on earth, there is at least one fact about them stored in a computer database that an adversary could use to blackmail, discriminate against, harass, or steal the identity of him or her. I mean more than mere embarrassment or inconvenience; I mean legally cognizable harm. ... Reidentification science disrupts the privacy policy landscape by undermining the faith that we have placed in anonymization."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A year ago, Julian Sanchez took the time to dig into the numbers that the US gov't was using to explain the "cost" of "piracy" on the economy and found that they were completely bogus, based on an offhand mention decades ago, based on no research, and then twisted, pumped up and given a government "seal of approval." It looks like something similar has happened in the UK. Joseph Young points out to an investigation into the UK's oft-repeated number of 7 million illegal file sharers as being the reason for kicking people off the internet. But a dive into the details finds a massive extrapolation. That 7 million number is based on 136 people responding to a survey paid for by music industry lobbying group BPI, and conducted by Jupiter Research (now owned by Forrester). Not surprisingly, the research director who ran that study was also a guy who has claimed in the past that music can't be free and that without copyright there's no way for musicians to get paid.

Think those survey questions were unbiased?

Either way, the survey reached 1,176 net-connected households, of which 136 (11.6%) said they did file sharing. The researchers then just decided that 11.6% was too low, and bumped it up to 16.3%. Why? "To reflect the assumption that fewer people admit to file sharing than actually do it." Fine. But how was the number picked? They won't say. So... you've basically added 40% to the number there for totally unclear reasons. Then... the extrapolation gets more ridiculous. Jupiter Research said that there were 40 million people online in the UK, and they applied their made up 16.3% number to that number. Only problem? The 40 million number is made up to. The real number was 33.9 million. Thus, their "estimate" was first boosted by about 40% and then another 20%. And all that on top of likely leading questions to appease the music industry lobbyists paying for the study. And this is what the UK gov't is basing its decisions on?

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A year ago, Julian Sanchez took the time to dig into the numbers that the US gov't was using to explain the "cost" of "piracy" on the economy and found that they were completely bogus, based on an offhand mention decades ago, based on no research, and then twisted, pumped up and given a government "seal of approval." It looks like something similar has happened in the UK. Joseph Young points out to an investigation into the UK's oft-repeated number of 7 million illegal file sharers as being the reason for kicking people off the internet. But a dive into the details finds a massive extrapolation. That 7 million number is based on 136 people responding to a survey paid for by music industry lobbying group BPI, and conducted by Jupiter Research (now owned by Forrester). Not surprisingly, the research director who ran that study was also a guy who has claimed in the past that music can't be free and that without copyright there's no way for musicians to get paid.

Think those survey questions were unbiased?

Either way, the survey reached 1,176 net-connected households, of which 136 (11.6%) said they did file sharing. The researchers then just decided that 11.6% was too low, and bumped it up to 16.3%. Why? "To reflect the assumption that fewer people admit to file sharing than actually do it." Fine. But how was the number picked? They won't say. So... you've basically added 40% to the number there for totally unclear reasons. Then... the extrapolation gets more ridiculous. Jupiter Research said that there were 40 million people online in the UK, and they applied their made up 16.3% number to that number. Only problem? The 40 million number is made up to. The real number was 33.9 million. Thus, their "estimate" was first boosted by about 40% and then another 20%. And all that on top of likely leading questions to appease the music industry lobbyists paying for the study. And this is what the UK gov't is basing its decisions on?

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Instructables user I_am_Canadian writes:

This is a simple little chess set that I have come up with. The cool thing about this chess set is that the pieces don't just sit on the squares on the board, they actually clip in to it. Metallic and standard piece colors are needed to make this chess set usable. This could also be used as a checkers set, but everyone knows chess is so much better.

Check out the how-to for making your own Knex chess set.

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Artist Scott Hove created this scary/sweet installation of cake art. He made the Cake Vault from acrylic media, paint, wood, and cardboard. Hi-Fructose posted a selection of images from the Cake Vault, including a Quicktime VR tour of the surreal space. From the Cakeland artist statement:

Cakeland is a sculptural installation resembling a collection of perfect delicious cakes-- wall mounted, hanging and standing-- a walk-through cake environment complete with its own lighting.  It is a sweet refuge, an endless kaleidoscopic landscape of cake, a respite from the grinding realities of the outside world.

The sculptures have all of the appeal of the best cake you have ever tasted, but can never be eaten.  Whereas the nature of edible cake is fleeting, lasting only as long as the brief celebration it was made for, these cakes last as long as the artist or society have the wherewithal to preserve them, in order that they remain a place of pilgrimage, a seemingly idyllic oasis.

HF Exclusive: Explore Scott Hove's Cakeland!

A new documentary on William S. Burroughs is in production and the trailer looks fantastic. Titled "A Man Within," the film is directed by Yony Leyser and features the likes of WSB's friends and collaborators Laurie Anderson, Iggy Pop, V. Vale, Anne Waldman, James Grauerholz, Genesis P-Orridge, and David Cronenberg. Peter Weller narrates and Sonic Youth composed the soundtrack! William S. Burroughs: A Man Within

stoolpigeon writes "The popularity of web site Will It Blend? is indicative of how people enjoy mashing things together. Of course this kind of sharing and combining has been going on in the arts for quite some time. The new Lev Grossman novel, The Magicians asks 'will it blend?' of two rather popular fantasy series, J.K. Rowling's world of Harry Potter and the tales of Narnia from C.S. Lewis. Grossman's thoughts on both are tossed on top and then the author begins to play a symphony across the full range of buttons from stir to liquefy. What comes out is not children's fantasy but at times a rather bitter mix." Keep reading for the rest of JR's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Want to show a movie outdoors, but don't have a white wall to project it on? David Banks over at geekdad has you covered with this tutorial on how to build a portable outdoor movie theater screen. Perfect for hosting that private Friday evening screening in the garden!

[via curbly]

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Aaron sez, "papercutzinelibrary.org is 'a free lending library that specializes in independently published media, particularly zines.' They have been kicked out of their space in Cambridge, MA and are desperately looking for a new home. Their needs are relatively small, but it can be tough getting the word out. I encourage anyone in the Boston/Cambridge, MA area to check out their site and see if you can help. It would be a shame to let all the wonderful zines become unavailable!"

I dropped in on this place a few years ago and was absolutely charmed and delighted. This is a very worthy cause indeed.

Papercut needs new space for August 15 (Thanks, Aaron

It's well known how the MPAA tried to kill of the VCR (well, Betamax, originally), with Jack Valenti declaring: "The VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman alone." As William Patry's new book details, Valenti and the MPAA have been masters of creating moral panics -- bogus, hyped up threats to make legislative response seem not just palatable, but desired -- that do nothing more than try to protect an old, decaying business model from innovative competition. Given that history, it's worth pointing out that it appears to be happening again with Redbox, the DVD vending machine business, that's taken the video rental market by storm. We've covered this story since last fall, when NBC Universal tried to figure out a way to stop Redbox from renting its movies. It gave Redbox a long list of ridiculous ultimatums, and told distributors not to sell to Redbox. In return, Redbox sued Universal. Since then, 20th Century Fox and then Warner Bros. joined in. Sony and Paramount are the only studios enlightened enough to do deals with Redbox.

But, that hasn't prevented the moral panic lobbying/promotional campaign from gearing up -- though, at least some appear a bit skeptical about it. The NY Times has an article that goes through the details and notes that Hollywood lobbyists have been working over time to convince the press to complain that Redbox rents R-rated movies to children. And they're also trying out some ridiculous claim about how Redbox is going to put studio plumbers out of work. Seriously. But, just you wait and see. It won't be long until articles start appearing claiming that Redbox kiosks are a threat to our children, since they can rent R-rated movies (the fact that these same kids can access whatever websites they want in the privacy of their own homes, with content much more graphic than any R-rated movie probably won't be mentioned).

But, of course, that's purely a moral panic -- and one that Patry even predicted in his book. What Hollywood and its lawyers are really worried about is that they don't get the same monopoly rents on pricing of DVDs. Once Hollywood got over its totally bogus fear of the VCR, it eventually embraced the idea of "windows." It's basically an attempt to do what economists call differential pricing -- where different people pay different amounts for the same basic product (or perhaps in slightly different forms). Classic differential pricing is a good thing in economics, if done right, because you can actually better optimize the market -- selling expensive (high margin) goods to those who will buy them, but making additional money on lower priced/lower margin goods to those further downstream, thus (in theory) maximizing profit.

Hollywood's version is a bit mucked up, of course, because it often will seek to abuse its monopoly position to squeeze excess rents out of the market with the government helping it -- and thus it freaks out when any sort of innovation (the internet, rental kiosks) come along. The real fear is that by introducing $1 rentals as soon as the DVD is released, it will cut into DVD sales (why buy at all when it's so cheap to rent?) and rentals from places like Blockbuster, who have worked out revenue sharing deals with the studios. So, once again, rather than compete in the market, Hollywood's lawyers are trying to convince the press and politicians that Redbox DVDs are "a threat to your children." But this is the exact same sort of "folk devil" that Patry describes Hollywood trumping up with every kind of technological innovation. Hopefully, we're smart enough not to fall for it this time.

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Rob Hearn sends in a piece up at PocketGamer.co.uk on why Apple suddenly pulled Manomio's C64 emulator soon after finally approving it. (El Reg has coverage too.) "It was a glorious few moments for retro gamers when Manomio's C64 emulator was finally approved by Apple and released to the eager, nostalgic iPhone public. Then, calamity! It was gone again. Apparently some wily users figured out how to access the Commodore 64 BASIC system that was originally packaged with the emulator — something that Apple wasn't too happy with, given the nature of the interpreter's code. By setting the keyboard to 'always on', launching a game and restarting BASIC, players got into the 'empty shell' of their C64 emulator."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pioneering computer designer Robert Spinrad, former director of Xerox PARC, has died. He was 77. Dr. Spinrad was a prototypical maker who turned his passion for hacking electronics into groundbreaking research on laboratory automation and the use of computers in scientific experimentation. From the New York Times:

Trained in electrical engineering before computer science was a widely taught discipline, Dr. Spinrad built his own computer from discarded telephone switching equipment while he was a student at Columbia. He said that while he was proud of his creation, at the time most people had no interest in the machines. “I may as well have been talking about the study of Kwakiutl Indians, for all my friends knew,” he told a reporter for The New York Times in 1983.

"Robert Spinrad, a Pioneer in Computing, Dies at 77"

Dr. Spinrad was the father of our pal and former BB guestblogger Paul Spinrad, an editor at MAKE. Our thoughts go out to Paul and his whole family.

User [Trax] submitted this commendable write-up, at a Bosnian electronics forum, of his aesthetically note-perfect one-tube Nixie clock design. A green LED beneath the tube blinks once every second, and a button-press gives the time, digit by digit. The video, below, shows it in action. The hardwood case is just perfect. [via Hack a Day]

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You would think that the entertainment industry might look back at its rather long history of failed attempts to stop technological innovation from interfering with their business models and realize the sheer futility of trying to stop people from doing what they want to do, and could have learned that embracing what technology allows is a better path. But... that never seems to happen. Apparently the recording industry is now so worried that unauthorized file sharing on mobile phones is the next big threat, that rather than working on ways to use that to their advantage, they've teamed up with the Japanese gov't (note: not Japanese consumer electronics makers) to develop a system to break mobile phones if users are caught listening to unauthorized music.

Think of it like an automated "three strikes" plan for your phone:

Details are scarce, but apparently the system would consist of a central database which contains information about music which is authorized to be downloaded. This system would be responsible for verifying that cellphone users weren't downloading illicit music. Those that do would be sent warning messages.

But of course, simple warnings aren't enough for the music industry. The report claims that the music capabilities of cellphones could be disabled for persistent infringers.

Once again, the entertainment industry would prefer to break any new innovation rather than learn to adapt.

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Diabolus Advocatus writes "Ars Technica has an article on a new form of DRM being considered by the IEEE. It's called Digital Personal Property and although it removes some of the drawbacks of conventional DRM it introduces new drawbacks of its own. From the article: 'Digital personal property (DPP) is an attempt to make consumers treat digital media like physical objects. For instance, you might loan your car to a friend, a family member, or a neighbor. You might do so on many different occasions and for different lengths of time. But you are unlikely to leave the car out front of your house with the keys in it and a sign on it saying, "Take me!" If you did, you might never see the vehicle again. It's that ability to lose control over property that is central to the DPP system. DPP files are encrypted. They can be freely copied and distributed to anyone, but here's the trick: anyone who can view your content can also "steal" it irrevocably. The simple addition of a way to lose content instantly leads consumers to set up a "circle of trust" that can be as wide as they like but will not extend to total strangers on the Internet.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MAKE subscriber Rich Bernett writes -

I'm starting a short run of these "instruments" built into cigar boxes. They consist of tune-able guitar strings being plucked by hobby motors with individual actuation.

A second version of the string-box, with pushbuttons & tuners can be seen in action here.

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Just a reminder, don't forget to add your "MAKEcation" tagged photos to the MAKE Flickr pool to enter one of our three challenges: Teach your Family to Solder ("family" is a flexible term), Hack your Cooler, or Build a Trebuchet. We're giving away a $100 Maker Shed gift certificate to one winner in each category! Runners up can choose between The Best of MAKE or The Best of Instructables. The deadline is Wednesday, September 9 at 11:59pm Pacific time!

More:

Last weekend for MAKEcations

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I am thoroughly smitten with the new They Might Be Giants kids' album, Here Comes Science, which ships with a charming DVD of videos and supplementary material. In the best traditions of awesome educational kids music -- Schoolhouse Rock, the Animaniacs, Electric Company -- Here Comes Science combines top-notch pop music with humor that's aimed at both kids and adults (I once heard the creators of Sesame Street discuss how the inclusion of humor targeted at adults meant that grownups were more likely to watch with the kids, and thus be on hand to answer questions and discuss the material; this should be gospel for everyone who makes media for kids). And, of course, the material is great. Better than great. Perfect. This is the album They Might Be Giants was put on Earth to record: they are genuine science nerds, and it shows.

For Here Comes Science contains a broad, inclusive and thought-provoking tour through science in all its facets. Songs like "Science is Real" (which explains how scientific beliefs are different from beliefs in unicorns and other beliefs formed without rigorous testing) and "Put It To the Test" (possibly the best kids' song ever written about falsifiablity in hypothesis formation) cover the basics, the big Philosophy of Science questions.

Then there's songs for all the major disciplines: "Meet the Elements," "I am a Paleontologist" (also delving into the joys of a science career), "My Brother the Ape," "How Many Planets," and the diptych formed by "Why Does the Sun Shine?" (stars considered as superheated gas) and "Why Does the Sun Really Shine?" (stars considered as superheated plasma) -- these last two are a brilliant look into how different paradigms have different practical and theoretical uses. "Photosynthesis," "Cells" "Speed and Velocity" -- you get the picture.

Finally, there's some jaunty little numbers about technology: "Computer Assisted Design," and "Electric Car" and one genuinely silly and delightful track, "The Ballad of Davy Crockett (In Outer Space)." (I haven't enjoyed an "in outer space" reworking of a beloved classic so much since "Josie and the Pussycats In Outer Space").

These songs definitely address themselves to an older audience than the last two TMBG kids' discs, Here Come the 123s and Here Come the ABCs, but if you've got kids who started with these two, they're certainly ready to move up to Here Comes Science. And even if you don't, I defy you not to rock out to this excellent disc.

Here Comes Science on Amazon

Here Comes Science on They Might Be Giants' site

adamengst writes "In this TidBITS article, Matt Neuburg explores how Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard changes how the operating system handles preferred application bindings, dropping support for the creator codes that have been part of the Mac OS from the early days. He also explains how to work around the problem, if you want, for instance, text documents created with BBEdit to open in BBEdit even when TextEdit is the default handler for text files."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There have been a lot of stories lately about those who feel wronged demanding the identify of anonymous commenters. The latest such story, sent in by Kent Newsome involves a guy, Lucas Coe, who was charged in the death of his girlfriend's 4-year-old daughter. The local news organizations in Houston wrote about the case, and the stories generated plenty of comments. So, Coe's attorneys are demanding the identifying information on approximately 300 commenters. They're defending the request by saying that "the specificity of some comments that made it appear they came from people with personal knowledge of the case." Really? All 300 said stuff so specific that it appeared they had personal knowledge of the case? Or... is it just that his lawyers don't like what people are saying? Trying to find out the identities of anonymous speakers seems like a clear attempt to stifle free speech through intimidation. Luckily, the news organizations are defending their commenters' right to be anonymous. Hopefully, the courts agree.

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Space mirrors? Flying "volcanoes"? Over at National Geographic, my pal Mason Inman presents five extreme geoengineering proposals to prevent a global warming catastrophe. The ideas were included in report from the United Kingdom's Royal Society. From National Geographic:

Computer-controlled ships could ply the remote seas, pumping out seawater mist, which would encourage low, thick clouds to form, researchers say. The clouds would reflect sunlight back into space.

It would cost more than a billion dollars to launch a fleet of a few hundred of these ships, the new study says—a relatively small sum, as geoengineering costs go. But the cloud ships' ability to change local temperatures and weather could raise fears that countries will clash over control of the clouds...

Instead of trying to block sunlight via Earth's atmosphere, another approach would be to take the fight to outer space.

Huge mirrors or thin, reflective disks could orbit alongside Earth and block solar rays, some scientists say.

The approaches would be safe, with little in the way of side effects, the Royal Society says.

But it could cost a few trillion dollars and take decades to design, build, and launch, requiring "a space program many times larger than anything yet attempted."

"5 Last-Ditch Schemes to Avert Warming Disaster"

Okay I think it's time to explain what rssCloud means to people who use the web, as opposed to people who create it at a technical level.

The idea is to deliver news faster, without relying on a single company to do all the work.

Until now you could have one or the other, but not both.

You could have the news delivered via RSS, but if you wanted it fast you had to go to Twitter or Facebook or FriendFeed.

The problem with going to a company is two-fold: 1. The company might not be able to handle it. 2. The company might screw with it.

We saw both 1 and 2 with Twitter. Last summer they had trouble keeping the system up. They still "fail whale" a lot, and it could get worse, if they grow. Certainly if they grow to a billion users and become the "pulse of the planet" -- as they've said they want to. There are other reliability problems, like no good record of what's posted on Twitter. And all the trouble scaling has meant that new features show up in the center at a snail's pace, while the pace of innovation at the edges is furious, and limited by the slow growth at the center.

But even worse is that the company has not stayed out of the editorial flow of the community. At the beginning of the year, the basic metric, the Twitter equivalent of page-rank was follower count. Then all of a sudden some user's counts starting going up at an incredible rate. It came out that the company was recommending these people to new users. They were giving this flow to their friends, and to reporters who cover them, but not to people they don't know or don't like. They've even taken it away from reporters who have written stories they don't like. This is totally unacceptable, we've said so repeatedly. They ignore the concern.

Think about it another way. Imagine if Larry and Sergey's friends pages always showed up at the top of search results on Google, even when their pages had nothing to do with what people were searching for. Now you understand how un-Internet-like this is.

People say they're entitled to do this, and I suppose they are. But then we are entitled to take this idea and use the Internet to implement it, instead of all relying on a company.

That's how a techie like me, who loves the open-ness of the Internet, thinks.

To understand why, you have to understand that in 1993, I gave up on tech, because it was so utterly messed up by big companies fighting to control the users. A guy like me couldn't make software and sell it, because they were always screwing with us. They weren't doing it on purpose, they just didn't care. If you said "You should care" they'd call you a utopian or Mother Teresa and laugh. But in the end they got screwed by their own screwing around. The Internet straightened it all out, and newly charged with optimism, I learned something important. The tech world is cyclic. First it's wonderful, then it gets f*cked, then it gets wonderful again.

Our goal with rssCloud is to take what was wonderful about Twitter, that got f*cked by their Suggested Users List and the Fail Whales, and make it wonderful again.

I want everything fast with no company in the middle. That doesn't mean Twitter goes away, not at all. They just have to stop being in the middle.

That's what rssCloud is about. Fast news updates without the company in the middle. Small pieces loosely joined.

PS: And now maybe you understand why there was so much crap flying around RSS for the last few months. It always happens when the dam is about to break. No big deal. Just go right through it. The bark is worse than their bite.

Remember the BB blog post last week about one of our commenters spotting Garrido's creepy molester van following the Google vehicle in Google Street View? NBC's Today Show stopped by the Boing Boing Video studios yesterday and included a brief show-and-tell about this internet moment in a segment about what we can learn from the Garrido case, which ran earlier this morning. Yeah, it's his van alright.

Related Boing Boing Posts:
* The blog of Philip Garrido, serial rapist and kidnapper: "sound control" gadget hallucinations.
* Did Google Street View spot rapist/kidnapper Garrido?

Even with yesterday's holiday, we still caught up on some of the weekend's biggest news from PAX or otherwise, as Twisted Pixel -- the indie dev behind the recent fantastic one-button Xbox Live Arcade platformer Splosion Man -- unveils Comic Jumper, a superhero run and gun that will change its style as you, well, jump between comics from PowerPuff to Sin City. Elsewhere we saw oversized, super-punching blob-mech-fighters invading WayForward's remake of the NES original A Boy and his Blob, a new WiiWare Gauntlet-esque action game take on Pokemon, and the first video of the gorgeously Miyazaki-ish world in WiiWare LostWinds sequel Winter of the Melodias. Finally, we took the latest work in progress look at Power Pill (above), the upcoming ultrastylish iPhone collaboration between Fez creators Polytron and Marian creators Infinite Ammo, and our 'one shot's for the day: variations on a Slime, and Metroid in Lego.

The Hackney Council had workers paint over an East London mural by famed street artist Banksy. The mural was on a private building and it was painted over by, er, mistake. The Council had sent letters requesting to "clean" the building but they had gone to the wrong address. From the BBC News:

Property owner Sofie Attrill gave consent for the mural to be painted on the building so it could be photographed for the launch of Blur's 2003 single Crazy Beat.

Since then it has attracted tourists from all over the world and become a local landmark...

Hackney Council was initially unrepentant.

Cllr Alan Laing said: "The council's position is not to make a judgement call on whether graffiti is art."

But he later added: "Due to a problem at the land registry unfortunately our letters stating our intention to clean this building didn't reach the owner.

"As soon as we realised this, work stopped. We are now speaking with her about how to resolve the issue."

Blur Banksy is ruined by mistake (Thanks, Antinous!)

dagwud writes "Just a few days after this Slashdot article, South Africa's largest telecoms provider, Telkom (which has been taking flak for years for its shoddy and overpriced service), is being pitted against a homing pigeon to see which can deliver 4GB of call centre data logs quickest over a distance of around 80km (50 miles). According to the official website, the race is set to take place September 10."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Graphic designer Maria Ahlbrandt gets credit for this thoughtful re-purposing of old chair frames to make a classy garden bench. All sorts of junk chairs are probably amenable to this treatment. [via Recyclart]

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David Gerard writes "Remember the good old days of the 1990s, when you could teardrop attack any Windows user who'd annoyed you and bluescreen them? Microsoft reintroduces this popular feature in Windows 7, courtesy the rewritten TCP/IP and SMB2 stacks. Well done, guys! Another one for the Windows 7 Drinking Game."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The folks over at Slashdot point us to an interesting tidbit buried in IBM's amicus brief for the Bilski case, where the company claims that software patents helped drive open source software development:

Patent protection has promoted the free sharing of source code on a patentee's terms--which has fueled the explosive growth of open source software development.

The original report linked above conveniently drops the "on a patentee's terms" which makes for a better story, but is a bit misleading. It's that clause that explains what IBM means by this claim, though it shows absolutely no substantiation of the claim, whatsoever. And that's because even with that clause added back in, it makes no sense. At all. Yes, software patents may make some developers more willing to share code with others... but that's got nothing to do with open source development or the growth of open source software. The situations where a patent makes a developer more comfortable showing source code are clearly cases of proprietary software, where the developer/patent holder is worried about the software being copied. With open source software, there's no such "worry" because that's actually a feature of the system.

So why does IBM simply get to make stuff up in a filing for the Supreme Court?

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I just took a quick look at the RSS feeds of the major tech pundit blogs to see which had <cloud> elements.

I found one at Gigaom!

http://feeds.feedburner.com/ommalik

If you View Source you'll see it.

Something else worth noting, Feedburner preserves the <cloud> element. So two things are working!

I subscribed to his feed in River2 and it grokked his realtimeness. Oh life is sweet.

For techies, you might wonder why we received notification of an update after subscribing. That shows that Om's Wordpress installation is following the Walkthrough. You're supposed to test the notification handler before you register it. If it passes the test go ahead. If it fails, throw it away. This keeps the conversation real.

Vigile writes "Not many people have debated that Intel's Nehalem architecture is the fastest available for consumer desktop computers since it was released last year, but quite a few have complained about the cost of the platform. Intel just released new Lynnfield-based processors under both the Core i7 and Core i5 names and tests are showing the new CPUs beating Nehalem in both performance-per-watt and performance-per-dollar tests to a startling degree. And while raw performance probably still goes to the Nahelam-based Core i7 CPUs, the lower prices of motherboards and memory for Lynnfield processors will likely more than make up for it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Flickr member dnny posted a step-by-step photoset for building an APC/stepped tone generator without a circuit board. Seems this would fit nicely in a lightbulb enclosure.

Related:

'lectronics in a bottle

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Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide is the latest in a series of popular neuroscience books (Brain Rules, Stumbling on Happiness, Mind Wide Open, The Brain that Changes Itself) to (literally) blow my mind.

Lehrer, author of the celebrated Proust Was a Neuroscientist, lays out the current state of the neuroscientific research into decision-making with a series of gripping anaecdotes followed by reviews of the literature and interviews with the researchers responsible for it.

Lehrer is interested in the historic dichotomy between "emotional" decision-making and "rational" decision-making and what modern neuroscience can tell us about these two modes of thinking. One surprising and compelling conclusion is that people who experience damage to the parts of their brain responsible for emotional reactions are unable to decide, because their rational mind dithers endlessly over the possible rational reasons for each course of action. The Platonic ideal of a rational being making decisions without recourse to the wordless gut-instinct is revealed as a helpless schmuck who can't answer questions as basic as "White or brown toast?"

But overly emotional decisions are also likely to lead us into trouble. There is clearly a sweet-spot between white-hot emotional thinking and ice-cold reason, and Lehrer is trying to find it. By the end of the book, I'm nearly convinced he has.

My copy of How We Decide has literally dozens of dogeared pages that I've marked to return to in this reviews as examples of the kind of thing that made me go Wow! and sometimes even buttonhole nearby friends to read them passages. I'll run a few down for you here:

Lehrer's description of the amazing ability of dopamine to "predict" upcoming events is gripping all the way along, but I was delighted to learn that neuroscientists call signals for missed predictions (that is, the signal released when dopamine is released in anticipation of a reward that doesn't come), emanating from the anterior cingulate cortex the "Oh shit" circuit. The ACC is closely wired to the thalamus, so activation of the "Oh shit" circuit galvanizes the conscious mind, bringing the stimulus right to the front of our attention.

These mistakes are critical to good decision-making, as they are our best tutors. Lehrer describes a famous study from Stanford psych research Carol Dweck, who administered easy tests to 10-year-olds, who did well on it. The control group was praised for "being smart." The experimental group was praised for "trying hard." With only this difference, the two groups were then administered progressively harder tests. Dweck discovered that the "smart" kids did worse: they believed their initial good result was due to some innate virtue beyond their ken or control, and feared that a failure would show that they lacked this intangible. But the "hard-trying" group had been rewarded for taking intellectual risks, and so they continued. Afterwards, the "smart" kids rated the hardest tests as their least favorite; the "tryers" rated it as their most favorite.

Dopamine is the neurochemical star of the book, and its many pathologies make for gripping reading. There's a case study of Ann Klinestiver, a sedate school-teacher who was given strong doses of Requip a dopamine agonist (it imitates dopamine's action in the brain), as treatment for worsening Parkinson's Disease. Like 13 percent of Requip patients, Ann developed a gambling compulsion for slot machines that eventually ruined her life, costing her her husband, her family, and all her assets (she finally went off Requip and opted for severely constrained movement but no gambling).

The pathology here is all about missed predictions. Dopamine helps the brain to find patterns and thus make predictions about the future. But slots are random, and so in a normal brain, slot-play follows a common pattern: first the brain is delighted by the chance to chew on such a meaty problem. It formulates hypotheses about the slots' action, and then new input (mistakes that light up the Oh shit circuit) cause it to start over. But after a short time, a normal brain gives up -- there is no pattern to see, so there's no point in playing on.

But in a brain where the dopamine levels are abnormal, surrender never happens. The brain is in a constant state of reward, because of all the "new input" (random noise) that arrives every time the lever is pulled.

Irrationality doesn't just play a role in pathological gambling; the big casino on Wall Street is also a great confounder of reason. Neuroscientist Read Montague performed an experiment in which subjects were given play money and sat down in front of stock-market simulators that had, unbeknownst to them, been programmed to simulate great crashes (Dow 1929, Nasdaq 1998, Nikkei 1986, S&P 1987). Montague found that the subjects played out exactly the same panics that real-world investors fell prey to.

Subjects set out conservatively, with small bets that rocketed upward in the pre-crash bubble. Their Oh shit circuits lit up at the thought of all the money they hadn't made (the brain overvalues loss, which is why "One day only!" sales work). Subjects progressively increased their bets, putting more and more money into the bubble (which grew and grew). And then the bubble burst and Oh shit fired again, and the same subjects refused to cut their losses and take their money out of the market, because they were fixated on how much they'd lost, and couldn't bear the thought of leaving the game while they were down.

Indeed, investors follow this trend more generally, selling stocks that do well, and holding onto stocks that do poorly (because they can't part with them while they're still "behind"). Eventually, the investor's portfolio is filled with nothing but declining bad bets.

However, this loss-aversion can be short circuited with simple gimmicks, especially credit-cards. The brain just doesn't register the same loss when you swipe your card as it does when money leaves your pocket. Carnegie Mellon neuroeconomist George Loewenstein says, "credit-cards...anaesthetize your brain against the pain of payment." MIT business professors demonstrate this by showing that students bidding for tickets to a Celtics game on average bid twice as much when the betting is done by credit-card than by cash.

The answer to this is meta-cognition: think about what you're thinking. Think about what you're feeling. Think about your circumstances and what happened the last time you were here.

But don't think too much. There are classes of problems -- ones in which there are more variables than the conscious mind can juggle -- where thinking overwhelms your brain's ability to synthesize all these variables into a good conclusion. Timothy Wilson, a U Virginia psychologist, asked two groups of female college students to choose and keep their favorite art print from a selection containing a Monet, a van Gogh, and some inspirational kitten posters. A control group was asked to rate each poster from 1 to 9 and keep their top one. The experimental group was asked to fill in questionnaires about what they liked about each poster.

The controls overwhelmingly picked the fine art. Follow-up questions established that they were still happy with their decisions weeks later.

But the experimental group -- the group that had to explain what they liked about each poster -- chose the kittens. And when they were followed up, they were disappointed with their decision.

Wilson explains that the failure arises because the good things about fine art are difficult to describe: they are intangible aesthetic elements. We like them, but most of us can't explain why. On the other hand, the virtues of a kitten-picture are easy to enumerate. When asked to explain, rationally, which one is best, kittens win every time. But it is this very superficiality that causes us to quickly tire of the kittens and wish for a Monet.

Of course, it's not just kittens. Ap Dijksterhuis at the Dutch Radbout University has shown that the same failure plagues house-buyers. When given the choice of a modest house in the city near work and amenities and a huge McMansion in the suburbs, introspection favors the McMansion. It has easy-to-enumerate virtues: we can have big dinners there, the family can come to stay, and so on. But we only have a few big dinner parties and houseguests a year, and the rest of the year we're stuck with long commutes and no night-life.

Introspection is also critical to the placebo effect. Being told that you are about to experience a pharmacological effect primes you to feel that pharmacological effect. And vice-versa: students who are administered an energy beverage after being told that it is expensive experience 30 percent higher alertness than those who are told that it is a discount alternative. Likewise, people tasting wine they are told is cheap have measurably different brain activity -- and preferences -- from subjects who are told the same wine is expensive.

All this introspection takes place in the prefrontal cortex, which has lots of other work that it has to keep on top of, so when it is distracted, our ability to make good decisions decline. In one experiment, control subjects are asked to remember two numbers and are then walked down a hall to another room where they will be asked to recall them. On the way, they pass a refreshment table with chocolate cake and fresh fruit. The experimenters measure their ability to pick the "right" snack -- that is, the one that, in the light of cold reason they would opt for.

The experimental group goes through the same test -- only they're asked to remember seven numbers, which is somewhere near the upper range of what the average person can remember.

The experimental group eats cake. The control group eats fruit. When we're distracted, we stop introspecting and listen to our emotional minds. This fact is not lost on retail psychologists who design stores to maximise this effect.

Having too much information is a plague in many fields. In an experiment with MIT business students, one group is given extremely detailed reports on companies and asked to buy and sell their stocks based on what they learn. Another group is just given the stock-prices. The latter group -- betting blind -- bets better than the "overinformed" group, who have so much information that they can't decide what is and isn't important. The same thing happens to guidance counsellors who are given detailed dossiers on students and asked to predict their academic performance -- they do worse at predicting performance than counsellors who are just given student transcripts.

By the end of the book, Lehrer is ready to draw some conclusions from all this fascinating material. What he comes up with, basically, is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (a technique that has worked for me during a bout of depression). CBT consists, basically, of introspectively interrogating your emotional response to events, to see where and how emotion is influencing reason and vice-versa. CBT requires that you write things down (at first, anyway) so that your brain can't pull a fast one by selectively recalling your track record. It's the Goldilocks of introspection: not too much, not too little, just enough.

It's great advice, and a great book, too.

How We Decide

Pete Edwards of Casper Electronics shares his method for modding the classic NES console to generate synth-synced visuals and more -

It is a very simple bend and is a lot of fun to play with. To bend this unit I simply added a patch bay to a handful of points on the video processing chips. The Display can be tweaked by either connecting points together or by feeding in external signals, like audio or voltages from my modular synthesizer. the video shown above is an example of how the visuals can be controlled using clock signals from my modular synth.

Suggested solder-points and more documentation can be found on the project page.

Related:

Modified circuit bent NES

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Sherri Davidoff writes "Here's a real copy of an American citizen's DHS Travel Record, retrieved from the US Customs and Border Patrol's Automated Targeting System and obtained through a FOIA/Privacy Act request. The document reveals that the DHS is storing: the traveler's credit card number and expiration; IP addresses used to make Web travel reservations; hotel information and itinerary; full airline itinerary including flight numbers and seat numbers; phone numbers including business, home, and cell; and every frequent flyer and hotel number associated with the traveler, even ones not used for the specific reservation."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Maker David Findlay gets his Arduino Nano talking AAP to his iPod using a SparkFun PodGizmo connector, BOB-08745 Logic Level Converter, and a ginormous red button.

Of course, hooking up wasn't going to do much without some code to talk Apple Accessory Protocol, so that was the next task. I wrote an Arduino library for the parts of the Apple Accessory Protocol that I was going to need, and a bit more besides. I posted it on github in case anyone else wanted to use it. It comes with a couple of example sketches: a play/pause one using Simple Remote mode (wonder where I got that idea from); and one for Advanced Remote mode that pulls back information for the track that the iPod is currently playing. The latter could form the basis of an Arduino-based dock that showed track information on an LCD display, for example.

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It's been quite a few years, since we first heard calls for a "computer user's license" or an "internet user's license," but it seems such things have returned, with the recent call for just such a "license to compute" by a "criminologist" in Australia:

"At the moment we have drivers licences for cars, and cars are very dangerous machines. Computers are also quite dangerous in the way that they can make people vulnerable to fraud.

"In the future we might want to think about whether it's necessary there be some sort of compulsory education of people before they start using computers,"

Of course, using a car and using a computer are quite different -- and a big part of the reason for licensing drivers is the direct physical harm you can do to others with it. The issues with online scams is quite different. I'm all for more education to help people avoid such scams, but this guy doesn't make much sense when he says:

"I think at the starting point of it you need manufacturers of both hardware and software to devise technology that makes it difficult or impossible for people to be defrauded,"

Sure, that would be great. And, it would be great if cars never collided either. But, it's not so easy. But, then, what do I know? I've never received my "computer users' license."

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Each week we're bringing you some of our favorite posts from our friends over at TreeHugger. Enjoy!

Cool and Crazy Commuter Bikes
We want to see your bad ass commuter bikes. Send us your photos of ultra sleek designs, hideous hacks, fabulous rebuilds, or whatever it is you use to pedal from place to place.

Hatchery Horrors: Readers React
Both TreeHugger and Boing Boing posted about the gag-inducing male chick massacre video. TreeHugger readers react and cover all angles of the debate. Who do you agree with?

Pestival: A Festival of Insects in Art
It's called " Pestival A Festival of Insects in Art" and if it sounds crazy, well that's because it is...but in a cool way.

Against the Odds, Eco-Cities Moving Forward
Sometimes the designs behind eco-cities are outlandish, but they're moving forward regardless.

American Apparel Bag-O-Scraps: Green, Gimmick or Both?
The Bag-O-Scraps is not a nuanced product: it's a bag of scraps of leftover fabric. Would you buy it?

Home Energy Monitors Reviewed: Which Device Works for You? (Video)
Have a gadget preference when it comes to monitoring energy use? Well, you might after watching this...

Carbon Neutral Cupcakes and US Open Eco-Art Installation at Brooklyn's Little Cupcake Bakeshop
Chocolate...lemon...carbon-neutral...How do you take your cupcake?

Toyota Prius Faces Ban Due to US Patent Suit
Paice has filed a patent infrigement case against Toyota (yet again) and should Paice win, it could spell the death of certain vehicle imports, possibly including the green icon Prius.

Hoarding As An Art Form: Song Dong's "Waste Not"
If you're in New York: Chinese artist Song Dong's "Waste Not," an installation at the Museum of Modern Art made up of most of the objects obsessively collected by the artist's mother over a half a century in her Beijing apartment.

Enlightened Mosques Switch to Energy-Saving Lights Mosques around the globe are going green with energy efficient bulbs and nearly a million have been installed in Turkey alone!

One of the mantras of journalists who insist that paywalls will work, or that the world needs professional journalists is that they do such important work informing the public. And, certainly, sometimes that's true. The problem is that it's so rare. Jay Rosen points us to a report from the Columbia Journalism Review, where it notes that very little of the reporting on what to do about the healthcare system is actually about the healthcare system. Instead, it's mostly reporting on the chatter about the healthcare system:

The Project for Excellence in Journalism, for example, found that so far this year 55 percent of coverage of health care has been about the political battles, 16 percent about the protests, and only 8 percent about substantive issues like how the system works now, what will happen if it remains unchanged, and what proposed changes will mean for ordinary people.

In other words, the press is spending more time on the fighting, rather than on the substance. It's filler and fluff -- that often misleads and distracts from the actual discussion. And we're supposed to value that? There's a tremendous need for thoughtful discussions about healthcare, and it's a spot where professional journalists could be a huge help. But, it's a lot easier to just focus on the play-by-play commentary, rather than actually adding value.

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ljaszcza writes "Daily Tech brings us a story about Sony's run-in with the Mexican police. (Billboard picked up the story as well.) It seems that they raided Sony's offices and seized 6,397 music CDs after a protest from the artist, Alejandro Fernandez. Fernandez had signed a seven-album deal with Sony Music; he completed that commitment and then left for Universal. During the time with Sony, he recorded other songs that did not make it into the agreed-upon seven albums. Sony Music took it upon themselves to collect that material and release it as an eighth album. Fernandez claims that he fulfilled his contract with Sony, and residual material belongs to him. Hmm. Precedent from the Jammie Thomas infringement and distribution case gives us $80K per song. Sony vs. Joel Tenenbaum gives $22.5K per song. So 6,397 CDs at an average of 8 songs/CD is 51,176 infringing songs, with (IMHO) intent to distribute. The damages to Fernandez should be $1,151,460,000 using the Tenenbaum precedent or $4,094,080,000 using the Thomas precedent. Seems very straightforward to me."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Our standard HD44780 LCD from the Maker Shed is perfect for displaying data on your next Arduino-based project. They are really easy to connect, and will work using the Arduino LCD library. Keep your eyes on makezine.com for a How-To Tuesday based on these displays.

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Beloved Hugo-award-winning writer, dancer and choreographer Jeanne Robinson (wife of Spider Robinson) has cancer, and it has taken a turn for the worse. Spider Robinson describes their financial situation as dire ("running on fumes") and so he's asking for cash to help them get through this. There's lots of ways to give, from bidding in a charity auction to attending a benefit concert to buying Spider's books. I've just sent them what I could spare -- Jeanne and Spider have given me so much pleasure and wisdom over the years, it was an honor. I hope that some of you who've been touched by them will do the same.

As some of you know, I've been dealing with a rare biliary cancer for many months. It has already taken my gall bladder, bile duct and most of my liver...and it's not done yet. It looks like in a matter of weeks I'll be facing chemotherapy, in an attempt to at least slow its progress...

There are many things I need as I prepare for my third act--supplements, prescription drugs, counseling, expensive alternative therapies, etc--and they all cost money...money I don't have. So, after all these months of being silent and private about my illness, I recently said yes to my close friend Michelle Meyrink when she asked if she could organize a benefit concert for me. http://www.spiderrobinson.com/images/Dream%20for%20jeanne.pdf

Others have since jumped in, including my Vancouver Buddhist sangha, Mountain Rain Zen Community, and a dear friend in Florida, Jan Schroeder, who has been auctioning donated items (such as rare Babylon 5 scripts and other SF memorabilia) on eBay for me. Goods or services can be donated for the auction by contacting Jan at dreamforjeanne@aol.com. Several other methods of helping out, including a straightforward PayPal donation account, can be found at http://wedreamforjeanne.blogspot.com/.

Another way to help would be to buy our books from Amazon by clicking-through from Spider's site, so we can get the affiliate commission. We've spent decades holding up visions of humankind's highest evolutionary potential while entertaining you enough to keep you turning pages.

The Third Act

Hugh Pickens writes "With the perspective of forty-plus years since my graduation, I would say the single most useful course I took in high school was a business class in touch-typing that gave me a head start for writing and with computers that I have benefited from my entire life. So it was with particular interest that I read Gordon Rayner's essay in the Telegraph proposing that schools add a mandatory course in touch typing to the cornerstones of education: reading, writing and arithmetic. 'Regardless of the career a child takes up when they leave school, a high percentage of them will use a keyboard in their daily work, and all of them are likely to use a keyboard in their leisure time,' writes Rayner. 'Touch-typing would help every child throughout their lives — so why are our schools so blind to this?'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a Calgary Herald op-ed Kris Kotarski talks about the fundamental conflict between modern copyright enforcement and privacy, noting that in the pre-Internet days, "it was conceivable for copyright laws to be enforced in a manner that did not bring the state to anyone's doorstep." Whereas today, the entertainment industry has arrived at a consensus that copyright enforcement means universal network surveillance.

Given today's technological realities, this is no longer the case. If we look at legislation that either exists or is tabled across the Western world, sending a song to a friend by e-mail is a crime. Posting even a short clip of a copyrighted video on a message board for one's friends risks a fine whether the message board is public or not, and taping a television show and passing the tape to your mom or dad may be illegal as well.

No one likes stealing, but the problem lies in the fact that current copyright laws are completely unenforceable unless the government or industry groups start to read every e-mail and analyze every form of online communication done by citizens...

Such efforts aim to turn what citizens do in the privacy of their homes into criminal offences, and to compel enforcement, they aim to make Internet service providers (ISPs) liable for what users do with their Internet connections (just imagine your local grocer being held legally liable for selling a tomato that was thrown at a politician).

Copyright law threatening (via Three Quarks Daily)

Metaklett is a steel velcro-like substance created by Josef Mair and teammates at Technical University of Munich. One square meter of it supports up to 35 tons at temperatures up to 800 degrees Celsius.

Conventional hook-and-loop fasteners are used for everything from bandages to cable boots in aircraft and securing prosthetic limbs. Mair thinks his spring-steel fastener is tough enough to be used for building facades or car assembly. "A car parked in direct sunlight can reach temperatures of 80 °C, and temperatures of several hundred °C can arise around the exhaust manifold," he says, but Metaklett should be able to shrug off such extremes.

The fastening is made from perforated steel strips 0.2 millimetres thick, one kind bristling with springy steel brushes and the other sporting jagged spikes.

Extreme steel 'Velcro' takes a 35-tonne load (via IDSA)

Upgrade Complete is an hilarious Flash-game where the objective is to complete all the upgrades needed to play the game. I haven't had this much fun since I spent three days downloading a 50GB World of Warcraft "upgrade" that made the game stop running! Better even than spending a week patching Black and White! A wonderful homage to games like Achievement Unlocked.

Upgrade Complete (via Kottke)

Yesterday (Sept 7), Samoa's drivers switched from driving on the right to driving on the left. I've had Swedish friends recount the thrilling tale of .se's change, which involved midnight road-crews changing signs and repainting road-markers, and morning radio DJs exhorting all and sundry to remember to change over. The Samoans are changing over thanks to Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi who believes that this will save motorists money by allowing them to import cars from (relatively) nearby Australia and New Zealand.

The government has run a months-long campaign to educate drivers, and designated a practice lot. Monday and Tuesday have also been declared public holidays to get drivers used to the change, Hunter said.

"But it's when everybody goes back to work on Wednesday, that's the worry," he added.

Samoa and its closest neighbor, American Samoa, have been driving on the right side of the road since German occupation between 1900-1914.

Outcry as Samoa motorists prepare to drive on left (via Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media)

A reader writes, "Aeronautic machinists Adam Turnbull and Dan Melling converted their Toyota van - called 'Roofliss' - into an amphibious vessel. Yesterday they drove it across Cook Strait (between the North and South Islands of New Zealand)"

Men drive van across Cook Strait

This crafty little sweet from Etsy seller Proserpia illustrates my favorite gamer-slang motto "Less QQ [crying -- the Qs look like crying eyes], more pew pew [shooting]" -- in other words, "Stop whining and fight like an orc!"

Set of 4 Less QQ More PewPew Stitch Markers (via Wonderland)

Here's Senator Al Franken drawing a surprisingly detailed map of the USA, live on stage at the Minnesota State Fair. One cynic of my acquaintance claims he's tracing. I dunno, looks freehand to me (even though I'll freely admit that it would be easy to create indented trace-lines by using a pen with no cartridge in advance. Still, wouldn't it be cool if this was part of every senatorial race?

Senator Al Franken draws map of USA (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

bfwebster writes "Independent of one's personal opinions regarding the desirability and forms of government-mandated health care reform, there exists the question of how well HR 3200 (or any other legislation) will actually achieve that end and what the unintended (or even intended) consequences may be. There are striking similarities between crafting software and creating legislation, including risks and pitfalls — except that those risks and pitfalls are greater in legislation. I've written an article (first of a three-part series) examining those parallels and how these apply to HR 3200."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UK photographer Mark Nalder created a neato effect with a setup made with a blue LED mounted on a rotating K'nex construction, then shot with an open shutter.

The K'nex Orb was created from a K'nex motor that had two rotating drives at 90 degrees to each other. The vertical axle spun the motor horizontally, while another horizontal axle reached out to an arm holding an LED. (Imagine a big wheel spinning, then the base revolves around.) The shots of me and my hands were simply made by my flash gun, one hand then the other, then my face, all while the shutter was open.

See more of Nalder's open-shutter LED art on his Flickr page.

Photo credit: Mark Nalder (V a s s)

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This is worth a special post.

Wordpress did two things today.

1. They enabled rssCloud support on wordpress.com. This means that any weblog hosted on their server can publish real-time. This is the announcement that got all the attention.

2. But equally important is that you can install the rssCloud plug-in on any Wordpress blog that you host and it adds a cloud element to your feed and handles notifications for subscribers. That's how we got InBerkeley.com to be cloud-enabled. It takes a couple of minutes and you're ready to go.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/rsscloud/

djk1024 writes "I've just filed for a patent on a new approach to motion capture that is simple, cheap, easy, accurate, and portable. It's RF-based, accurate to 1 mm, and simple enough that a sophisticated hobbyist could build one in a couple weekends from plans and standard electronics. So now what? I quit my job and have been working on this full-time for the past couple of years; now I'm out of money so can't continue development on my own. I'm also not an electrical or RF guy so I can't carry out my own independent development on the electronics. I'm quite frustrated at this point. I've been in the software development field for over 30 years and have gone through a large number of startups, but always just as the head techie, and always as part of a team. This doing it alone sucks. I would love some advice on how best to go forward."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Ed. Note: The Boing Boing Video site includes a guest-curated microblog: the "BBVBOX." Here, folks whose taste in web video we admire tweet the latest clips they find. We'll post roundups here on the motherBoing.)

---

More @BBVBOX: boingboingvideo.com

A lovely, noirish tat by the talented skin-n-ink artist David Allen (via Chuck Anderson)

The "Los Alamos lifer" died at age 91 at his home in New Mexico.

He was one of the last surviving links to the scientific giants who had created the atomic age -- men like J. Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi as well as Dr. Teller. But more than that, he had also advanced the era.

Dr. Rosen was a lifer at Los Alamos. Where other scientists drifted away, he spent his career there, and built the most intense atom smasher in the world. He was also part ambassador, part lobbyist for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, promoting its continuing importance as a center not only of weapons development but also of basic research.

His atom smasher was his most spectacular project. "This monstrous gadget will give us new windows on the nucleus, a new set of probes," he said in an interview with The New York Times.

NYT obit.

Researchers Minsoung Rhee and Mark Burns at the University of Michigan have created an 8 bit processor using logic gates made of pneumatic valves. Besides just being awesome, the processor does have a practical use- it is designed to control a microfluidic medical device. By powering both the processor and the chemical reactors using air, the group hopes to create medical devices that don't rely on electricity to run.

The main article is behind a paywall, however the supplemental article describing the logic gates is available for free, as well as some neat videos of the logic gates in action.

So, someone want to make a steam-powered version?

[via teamdroid]

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