Treehugger profiled Abe and Josie about their neat off-the-grid homestead in Mexico's Chihuahuan Desert. (Abe is the brother of Shawn Connally, MAKE's managing editor!)

Amidst the Chihuahuan Desert, Abe and Josie built a home out of dirt, designed a wind turbine from scrap parts, and raised their newborn without diapers and other conveniences ... Abe and Josie have the smarts to survive well in the big city, but they have chosen a different life, a remote life, off grid, debt free, and on their own terms and timeline. What is refreshing about this couple is that they are not rebelling against modern times. On the contrary, they are embracing it, and are in a sense early adopters of a lifestyle that was not possible until very recently. That is because their off grid, pay as you go lives are dependent on emerging technologies such as affordable DIY energy harvesting, satellite internet, and other modern advances. While off grid systems can be a costly investment, Abe and Josie have found the lo-fi, affordable route, proving that there is no reason to wait for off grid technology to improve or become more affordable.

Young Couple Says NO to a Mortgaged Life

Make Online has a new microsite called the Science Room, which offers "projects, tools, and techniques for backyard scientists." From Gareth Branwyn's introduction to the microsite:

The Make: Science Room is our DIY science destination. Here you'll find how-tos on setting up a home lab, evaluating and buying equipment and supplies, and conducting all manner of fun and educational home science experiments. We also provide a forum, through Comments, for our readers to share their ideas and collaborate on their own experiments and discoveries. Robert Bruce Thompson is your host. He's the author of the best-selling Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments (O'Reilly/Make: Books, 2008) and the (not-yet-published) Illustrated Guide to Forensics Investigations. We'll be including modified content from these books as well as creating original content. As time goes on, we'll expand the Science Room to include sections on astronomy, Earth sciences, biology, and other disciplines. We already have dozens of additional articles on deck and will be posting batches of them each week, so check back often.

Welcome to the Make: Science Room

Danny O'Brien over at the EFF has the details on how the entertainment industry is attempting to push through an attempt to DRM TV in the UK. It's not quite a "broadcast flag," but close enough. In the last few years, since the original fight over the "broadcast flag" ended in "failure" for Hollywood, they keep attempting to sneak it through in other ways. In the US, it's been via "selectable output control," or SOC. Over in the UK, it's a bit different, but no less ridiculous. Basically, there would be some encoded metadata with all digital TV channels, and the algorithm would be kept "secret." As Danny notes, this has nothing to do with preventing copying, and everything to do with giving the entertainment industry yet another "veto" on innovation (similar to the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA):

In Britain, as in the United States, this proposal isn't about piracy. It's about creating a rightsholder veto over new consumer technologies in DTV.

No British commercial digital TV manufacturer would risk any innovation that might invalidate their "metadata compression parameter" license, and leave them open to litigation. And competition between devices would be limited by the byzantine requirements that DRM requires (it's notable that the BBC says the rightsholders demands came via the Digital Transmission Licensing Administrator (DTLA), a DRM consortium who would clearly benefit from mandatory adoption of its own system.)

But, of course, in an era of copyright moral panics, we'll hear over and over again about how this is all about stopping "piracy" -- even though it actually does nothing to prevent unauthorized copying.

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Wannabe Code Monkey sends along an article from the Patriot Ledger about an effort in Massachusetts to pass a "Right to Repair" bill. "Since the advent of congressionally mandated computers in vehicles more than 15 years ago (for emissions), cars have evolved into complex machines that are no longer just mechanical. Computers now monitor and control most systems in the car from brakes to tire pressure and all the electronics and engine fluids... [and] car manufacturers continue to hold back on some of the information that your mechanic needs in order to properly repair your car and reset your codes and warning lights... Massachusetts is now poised to solve this problem and car-driving consumers should pay attention this fall when the Massachusetts Legislature takes up landmark legislation that would force manufacturers to respect the right of consumers to access their own repair information. The legislation, known as Right to Repair, is seen by car manufacturers as a threat to the lucrative service business in their dealerships and they are massing their lobbyists on Beacon Hill in an effort to defeat it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

KentuckyFC writes "Gravitational waves squash and stretch space as they travel through the universe. Current attempts to spot them involve monitoring a region of space several kilometers across on Earth for the telltale signs of this squeezing. These experiments have so far seen nothing. But by monitoring an array of pulsars throughout the galaxy, astronomers should be able to see the effects of gravitational waves passing by. They say such an array of pulsars should effectively shimmer as the gravitational waves wash over it, like a grid of buoys bobbing on the ocean. That'll create an observatory that is effectively the size of the entire galaxy. These observations should be capable of monitoring how galaxies and supermassive black holes evolve together, and shed light on the physics of the early universe. Best of all, the next generation of radio-telescope arrays should be capable of making these observations at a cost of around $66 million over ten years. That's a small fraction of the hundreds of millions that Earth-based observatories have already cost."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

To produce a naturally blue rose has been a dream of horticulturalists for almost as long as people have been breeding flowers. It turns out to be essentially impossible to do by traditional plant husbandry, and attempts have proved futile for so long that the blue rose itself has become a symbol of the impossible or the seemingly impossible, and only the rarest achievements call for their presentation as gifts. And until recently, even those rare occasions had to be served by artificially blue roses made by growing white roses in tinted water. Now, however, the Japanese company Suntory, in partnership with Australia's Florigene, have created a transgenic rose which incorporates a petunia gene to achieve a pale lilac color which is really only barely blue. It took them 13 years of work to do it, however, so I guess they've decided pale lilac is close enough.

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It seems that the porn world has had a "love/hate" affair with file sharing. Over the years, we've seen stories of porn film makers embracing piracy to their advantage, and others complaining about it. It's really not all that different than the rest of the entertainment industry. So, it should come as no surprise that different porn execs are responding quite differently in two recent stories. First, comes the news that Japanese porn film producers are looking to sue 65,000 people in South Korea for uploading. That's about double the number of people that the RIAA sued in the US for uploading. Wow.

Meanwhile, reader PrometheeFeu alerts us to quite a different story in France, where industry execs are taking a much more reasonable view on things (article in French, translation provided by PrometheeFeu). The execs admit that it doesn't make sense to try to keep things from users:

"Today all of our new productions simultaneously come out in DVD, download and streaming on our website and on our partner's VOD platforms. Back then, we looked at the music market as an example of what not to do and how to react"

And they know piracy happens, but they figure that it's just a part of the market, and you can't blame people (or sue people) for file sharing:

"If you leave unattended a bag of candy and some children, they will not understand why you punish them for eating the candy. Illegal files are 3 clicks away for just about anyone. It's normal that consumers will take advantage of those."

But, they're figuring out ways to compete, by focusing on high quality, high-end material:

"Of course, the large majority of free and illegal content is low-end. [...] The public rejects this mass of identical video. Whatever small amount of high end content obviously stands out."

The producers in Japan might want to visit France for a lesson on how this works.

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Here's a clip from a 1962 Russian movie called The Planet of Storms. The design of the vehicles and spacesuits is very nice. The information panel on the YouTube page has instructions for downloading the entire movie.

"The Planet of Storms" was one of the first Soviet fantastic films directed by Pavel Klushantsev, a screen version of the novel of Alexander Kazantsev about space travel. The film has been made with use of unique technologies of the combined shooting at times leave behind of advancing foreign analogues existing in those days.

On a planet Venus goes joint Soviet-American expedition on three spaceships. One of the ships perishes at collision with a meteorite. The remained crews make decision to make landing on Venus and left on an orbit only one person for support of communication with the Earth. The spaceship and a glider from other ship sit down far apart...

The Planet of Storms (Thanks, Mike!)

John Scalzi's scalding and funny diatribe about why he doesn't give favors to unestablished writers applies to more than just writers.

3. The person who determines what a writer should do for others is the writer, not you. Why? Well, quite obviously, because it’s not your life, and you don’t get a say. And if you’re somehow under the impression that well, yeah, actually you do have a say in that writer’s life, take the following quiz:

Think of your favorite writer. Now, are you:?
1. That writer??
2. That writer’s spouse (or spousal equivalent)??
3. Rather below that, a member of that writer’s immediate family??
4. Rather below that, the writer’s editor or boss?

If the answer is “no” to the above, then guess what? You don’t get a vote. And if you still assume you do, that writer is perfectly justified in being dreadfully rude to you. I certainly would be. I certainly have been, when someone has made such assertions or assumptions. And if necessary, I will be happy to be so again.

UPDATE: Here's Glenn Reynold's video interview with author John Scalzi.

On The Asking of Favors From Established Writers

An anonymous reader writes "My son brought home an order form from his middle school. Apparently the 7th (his grade) and 8th graders are being asked (required?) to purchase their own straps for the heart monitors they're to wear during gym class. I know nothing yet of the device in question, but have left a voice-mail with the assistant principal asking him to call me so I may ask some questions about the program and the device. My tinfoil-hat concern is that the heart rate data will be tied to each child, then archived and eventually used for/against them down the road when applying for insurance, high-stress jobs, etc. 'I see you had arrhythmia during 7th grade pickle ball? No insurance for you' Has anyone heard of such a program, or had their child(ren) take part in it? Does the device transmit to the laptop the overweight gym teacher will be watching instead of running laps with the kids? Perhaps data is downloaded from the device after the class? Or am I just being paranoid? Thanks for any insight."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous Make subscriber writes in with this wonderful Don Quixote robot. It even comes with it's own creation story:

I, Don Quixote of La Mancha, hereby introduce my Solar Powered Horse "Rocinante" (Rocín in Spanish means:- work-horse or low-quality horse ("nag") - ante means:-to go forward). He started out as a 6 pieces of Balsa Wood which the carpenter no longer needed. His legs come from the Blacksmith in the local village - (he donated 6 spokes off his racing steed). From the towns Alcamist came the photovoltaic cells (photo means light - voltaic means voltage). The Clock-Smith afforded me 6 cogs on approval (to be recycled pending wear and tear).

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A woman holds a small rectangle of bullet-proof glass in front of her face while a man (her husband?) stands off in the distance and fires a rifle at the glass. (via Richard Wiseman)

We were just talking about how DVDs of various TV shows, like The State and WKRP in Cincinnati were being crippled by music licensing rights that forced them to remove the original, classic music, and replace it with bland copies. However, in some cases, it's much, much worse. Michael Scott lets us know that some TV shows are being totally prevented from coming to DVD. The latest is the TV show Werewolf, which was apparently working on a DVD release, but the project has now been shut down, due to music licensing problems:

The Shout Factory had to cancel the release because of two artists (which will remain unnamed) that would not play ball. Sony does not have the individual audio tracks, so they were unable to replace the songs, as the audio was mixed together. The two songs were featured over dialogue scenes that could not be cut. The Shout Factory's only option, even after spending a lot of time and money on it, was to cancel it and give the title back to Sony. If Sony had the audio tracks, it would have been easy to replace the two songs.

It's still difficult to see how this makes any sense at all. It shouldn't require relicensing, and even if it does, it's plainly ridiculous for the musicians to refuse. It's difficult to see how this benefits them in any way.

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The folks at Dogfish Head Brewpub in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware show how they made chicha, a South American fermented beverage that sometimes involves chewing maize to convert the starch into sugar.

Ethan and I put on a workshop yesterday here in Salem. It was a blast. Jason Robb documented it all in sketchbook form. Beautiful work, Mr. Robb.

BJ_Covert_Action writes to let us know that an Oregon congressman has filed legislation to spend $154.5M for a research project into tracking per-vehicle mileage in the US, and asks: "Do we really want the government to track our movement and driving habits on a regular basis?" "US Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-Oregon) introduced H.R. 3311 earlier this year to appropriate $154,500,000 for research and study into the transition to a per-mile vehicle tax system... Oregon has successfully tested a Vehicle Miles Traveled fee... the [Oregon] report urged a mandate for all drivers to install GPS tracking devices that would report driving habits to roadside RFID scanning devices." Here is the bill (PDF). The article notes that the congressman's major corporate donors would likely benefit with contracts if such a program were begun.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The fine folks at Flux will show the animated short "Logorama" in their screening lineup at the Hammer museum tonight.

The entire universe of this film, even the characters within (a talking "Pringles" man, and a villainous Ronald McDonald), even the city of Los Angeles itself -- are all composed of repurposed corporate logo art, all of which is used without permission.

If you're in LA, you really must head over there tonight. There's a great post (with video clips) about the making of Logorama over at Creativity Online.

Jonathan Wells of Flux tells us,

The short was created by directors within H5, a French graphic studio renowned for its CD front covers (Superdiscount, Air, Demon...) and artistic direction (Dior, Cartier, YSL...). Members François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy and Ludovic Houplain directed many music videos (Alex Gopher, Massive Attack, Goldfrapp, Röyksopp...), and are regularly invited to exhibitions for their artistic talents (2007 Nuit Blanche, Beaubourg, MoMA). Logorama is their first short film, and premiered at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival where it won the Kodak Short Film Discovery Prize at the 48th Critics' Week. The short was *four* years in the making, and features a voice cameo by filmmaker David Fincher as the Pringles man.

More stills after the jump!

Instructables user Lighttamer presents this awesome software to turn your monitor and webcam into an augmented-reality scary face machine. Masks, which you can design, are overlaid on human faces in the video feed in real time.

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Artist Kevin Cyr made this crazy-awesome camper bike. Also, check out his camping kart, a tent that pops out of a shopping cart.

Camper Bike [via Dinosaurs and Robots]

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The Abstract Art Catapult is a participatory public art piece that gives passers-by the opportunity to create a collective work of abstract art by using a catapult to hurl paint-soaked sponges at a 6' x 8' stretched, primed canvas. The Abstract Art Canvas was commissioned by the Fuse Factory Electronic and Digital Arts Lab and created for the second annual Art al Fresco, a public art event in Columbus, OH organized by the Short North Business Association. The Abstract Art Catapult concept and design was developed by Alison Colman, the Fuse Factory's founder and Executive Director, and it was built by Rick DeWitt, a Columbus-based sculptor and furniture maker.

See the Flickr set for more shots.

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snitty writes "Wil Shipley, developer of Delicious Library, found some applications on the iTunes App Store that were using without permission some images from his popular desktop application. He outed them on Twitter. The team at Technically Legal broke down the story and the take-home messages for using other people's images."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reader cKarlGo points us to a story in Florida of local police arresting 28 women and six men on prostitution-related charges, after finding them all on Craigslist. They then used phone and email to negotiate with the women in order to confirm that they were selling sexual acts. Afterwards, they made the arrests. But here's the kicker: the sheriff is still blaming Craigslist:

"How can Craigslist allow this kind of content on their (Web) site and then state "We're not involved in any kind of criminal conduct,""

Well, it's actually quite simple. I would imagine that, right now, somewhere in Sheriff Grady Judd's jurisdiction, there are other prostitutes walking the streets. By Judd's own logic, I should be asking why Polk County is involved in criminal conduct. After all, it's happening in his jurisdiction. It's just that it's happening on the street. Or it might be on Craigslist. But it's neither the fault of the street nor Craigslist -- which is nothing more than a virtual street.

But, more to the point, whey isn't Sheriff Judd also blaming the telephone company and his internet provider? After all, Judd used three tools to find and communicate with these prostitutes: Craigslist, email and the telephone. The phone company allowed the prostitutes to make phone calls. Internet providers allowed the prostitutes to email. By Judd's logic they're "involved in criminal activity."

In the meantime, what kind of thought process does it take to use a tool to help you crack down on prostitution, and then blame it for the prostitution? How hard is it for Sheriff Judd to recognize that Craigslist is an incredibly useful tool for his staff to find and arrest prostitutes. You would think that having just used the tool for that very purpose he might realize that it's a great tool for catching prostitutes. So why is he blaming it?

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Jesse Brown, a BoingBoing guest-blogger, is the host of TVO's Search Engine podcast.

poster by Emma Segal

If you live in Toronto, come have a drink with me at the launch party for the new season of my podcast! It's tonight at The Ossington (61 Ossington) from 7pm on.

If you can't make it, you can still have fun with us by putting words in my mouth: I'm crowd sourcing my toast, and will hold forth with whatever 400 words end up here.

I will illustrate my speech with a slideshow using whatever pix end up here.

Here's a sample of what's up there so far:

"I'm Jesse Brown, and this speach (sic) is a dream come true...And it goes out to the ladies. To Search Engine! [Chewbacca sound here]"

Surveillance video of insurgents in Afghanistan accidentally blowing themselves up while planting a bomb. What an explosion! Like a scene from The Hurt Locker (one of my favorite movies of the year). (Via Jack Shafer's tweet)

If you find yourself with a scrape in the woods, appropriately named Instructables user fallscrape has a tutorial for using birch polypore as an antibacterial, self-adhesive bandage.

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Dave Shinsel makes some pretty impressive robots and he does a good job of documenting the builds, including the schematics, sourcecode, board layouts, etc.

Dave Shinsel's Robots

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CWmike writes "The US Department of Homeland Security is looking at a report by a research scientist in China that shows how a well-placed attack against a small power subnetwork could trigger a cascading failure of the entire West Coast power grid. Jian-Wei Wang, a network analyst at China's Dalian University of Technology, used publicly available information to model how the West Coast grid and its component subnetworks are connected. Wang and another colleague then investigated how a major outage in one subnetwork would affect adjacent subnetworks. New Scientist magazine reported on this a week or so ago, and the paper has been available since the spring."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of Arthur Ganson's kinetic sculptures, shown above, is a motor that turns at 212 RPM. It's attached to a series of twelve 50-1 reduction gear couplings. The final gear is fixed in a block of concrete. If it were free to turn, it would make a complete revolution in about two trillion years.

Ganson gave a presentation at SALT in San Francisco last night. Here's Stewart Brand's recap, with links to videos of a few of his other mesmerizing sculptures:

As Ganson spoke, a tiny chair walked meditatively around and around on a rock on the right side of the stage, projected live onto a video screen. (Thinking Chair.) No part in any of his kinetic art pieces is superfluous, he pointed out; everything functions. The piece should be crystal clear and also completely ambiguous. That's what allows each viewer to create their own story.

He showed a video of "Machine with Concrete." On the left an electric motor drives a worm gear at 212 revolutions a minute. A sequence of twelve 50-to-1 gear reductions slows the rotation so far that the last gear, on the right, is set in concrete. It would take over two trillion years for that gear to rotate. "Intense activity on one end, quiet stillness on the other," Ganson said. "It's a duality I feel in my own being."

The next video, "Cory's Yellow Chair," showed a chair exploding into six pieces, which hover at a distance, then gently reassemble, and instantly explode again. Ganson said he wanted the chair pieces to explode at infinite speed, rest in stillness at the extreme, then reassemble gradually. The piece is stab at the question of "when is now?" Now is when the chair coalesces, but it doesn't last.

Some of Ganson's machines inspire people to sit and watch them for hours. "Machine With Oil" does nothing but drench itself with lubrication all day long. In "Margot's Other Cat" a soaring chair is set in random motion by an unsuspecting cat. The cat's motion is utterly determined; the chair has its own life.

During the Q&A, Alexander Rose asked the full-house audience how many of them of were makers of things. Ninety percent raised their hands in joy.

Arthur Ganson at SALT

Pressure Printing and Ron English released this magnificent hand-stained intaglio print, titled Zembo Boy. The 4.875" x 3.375" print of English's hypnotizing painting is encased in a hand-casted resin frame modeled on an original antique frame. It's an edition of 100 and each signed/numbered print is $395. The Pressure Printing blog has the details on the creation of this work:

The image presented some unique printing challenges—Ron’s imagery has a truly socks-knocking, insane hyper-real aesthetic about it and we wanted to preserve as much of that as we could when translating the large-scale oil painting into a small-scale intaglio print. Similarly, frames like the one employed here were originally made to showcase old-style, tack-sharp daguerreotypes; we went through not a few rounds of plates attempting to be true to our sources, squeezing (literally!) as much fine detail, smooth sheen, and as many bottomless rich darks out of the plate as is possible.

Ron English "Zembo Boy"

There's no denying that school bullying can be a terrible thing for those who are being bullied. But, in the last few years, the urge to overprotect has gone to ridiculous lengths, including various "anti-bullying" laws (not to mention the silly idea that if Spiderman told kids to stop bullying, they would). Yet, as Eric Goldman points out, a new report notes that there's no evidence that anti-bullying laws actually do anything at all to prevent or stop bullying. It's one of those laws that people want because it sounds good, rather than actually doing anything good. Politicians pass them because who could possibly be in favor of bullying? But the problem is that these laws don't actually do anything, and now there are all sorts of attempts to expand them online where they still won't do anything to solve the problem, but will be used to go after people that prosecutors don't like.

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Ethan and I put on a workshop yesterday here in Salem. It was a blast. Jason Robb documented it all in sketchbook form. Beautiful work, Mr. Robb. #

What do a tin of Spam, a multimeter and a hotplate have in common? They are all the components that Keith of Keith's Electronics Blog used to calibrate the extruder head on his Makerbot. By measuring the resistance of his heat-sensitive thermistor at the boiling and freezing points of water, he was able to calculate the beta of his particular thermistor, and build a new look-up table that the Makerbot software can use to interpret temperature readings. He used the boiling and freezing points of water because they are a repeatable way to make exact temperatures.

This method of calibration, called parameter extraction, is an important part of designing precision electronics. You can use it to make models of your parts for circuit simulations, and is also used by chip manufacturers to inspect the products they are making.

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Matthew sez,

Media Awareness Network (MNet) and the Canadian Teachers' Federation (CTF) are once again joining together to host the fourth annual Media Literacy Week, November 2-6, 2009. The purpose of the week is to promote media literacy as a key component in the education of young people and to encourage the integration and the practice of media education in homes, schools and communities.

This year's theme -- Media Literacy in the Digital Age -- emphasizes the multiple literacy skills needed by today's youth for accessing, evaluating, repurposing, creating and distributing digital media content. Although young people easily acquire the skills to navigate new technologies, they still need to develop the critical thinking skills they need for responsible and engaged online citizenship. Critical thinking and other digital literacy skills are essential for young people to be able to decode and confront the advertising, propaganda and misinformation that are so common online; digital literacy is also key in helping youth become fully engaged online citizens.

Media Literacy Week - November 2-6, 2009 (Thanks, Matthew!)

Xerfas writes 'Microsoft's Zune HD, set to go on sale Tuesday, will not feature an open application store like its competitor the iPod Touch. It will come with some unique features, though, like an HD radio tuner, and with software that has been well-received by users. Those capabilities will determine whether the ZuneHD sells well — and whether Microsoft decides to keep selling its own music player, said Matt Rosoff, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft.' The Zune marketing manager was quoted in the Seattle Times on whether the Zune would open up for 3rd-party apps, and he gave a response of such mind-numbing PR-speak that John Gruber of Daring Fireball was moved to provide this English translation: "No, because our mobile strategy is a convoluted mess."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dominic from CBC Radio sez, "Darren Atkinson is a husband, a father, a musician... and a dumpster diver. If he's not playing drums for a living, he's diving into industrial waste bins, looking for treasure. This is work. This is his 'job'. He sells what he can, or trades thrown-away goods for services and favours. But can a self-confessed - and possibly obsessed - 'dumpsterologist' make a living from the cast-offs of our consumer society?"

Darren is an old pal of mine, and I've written about his amazing life and ethic for Wired and Forbes. This is fantastic radio documentary on him!

The Hunter Documentary

Direct link to MP3

Jesse Brown, a BoingBoing guest-blogger, is the host of TVO's Search Engine podcast.

Jonathan Goldstein's Wiretap is the greatest radio show you may have never heard of. That's because, despite being on CBC Radio for five years, building a dedicated cult audience, and just being generally wonderful, it's never been offered as a podcast.

Until now! Subscribe with RSS here or via iTunes here.

And check out the "unofficial" Wiretap archives here.

If you've never heard Wiretap before (or heard Goldstein on This American Life, or read his books) then you're in for a treat- he's a humble weirdo semi-genius. Whether he's imagining a hostile correspondence between Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble or rewriting the Bible, or absorbing abuse from his supporting cast of equally funny Montreal cronies, Goldstein is always dry as a bone and completely original. Check it out.

I love this little animated short by Mike Stern, and I'm delighted to see that he was part of the online school Animation Mentor, which I've reported on before. Watch: Distraxion, more at sternio.com (thanks, Joaquin Baldwin!).

New research suggests that many shower heads are teeming with Mycobacterium avium, a bacteria that can cause lung disease. The University of Colorado scientists report that a third of the 50 shower heads they checked contained a film coating of "significant levels" of the bacteria inside. "If you are getting a face full of water when you first turn your shower on, that means you are probably getting a particularly high load of Mycobacterium avium, which may not be too healthy," said lead researcher Norman Pace. (But how many people are facing the shower head when they turn on the water?) Anyway, from the BBC News:

Water spurting from shower heads can distribute bacteria-filled droplets that suspend themselves in the air and can easily be inhaled into the deepest parts of the lungs, say the scientists from the University of Colorado at Boulder...

While it is rarely a problem for most healthy people, those with weakened immune systems, like the elderly, pregnant women or those who are fighting off other diseases, can be susceptible to infection...

Since plastic shower heads appear to "load up" with more bacteria-rich biofilms, metal shower heads may be a good alternative, said Professor Pace.

Taking showers 'can make you ill' (BBC News)
"Opportunistic pathogens enriched in showerhead biofilms" (PNAS)

Glyn sez, "The UK government is now considering laws that would allow individuals to be cut off from the internet. If Lord Mandelson's plan becomes law, disconnection may start for alleged copyright infringement, with no guarantee it would not be extended for other things. If you want to hear more about the Governments plans. David Rowntree (Blur), Ben Goldacre (Guardian / Bad Science) and Gerd Leonhard (Media Futurist) are doing a benefit talk for the Open Rights Group on October 2 in London, entitled 'Stop Mandelson's disconnection plans'."

Open Rights Group | Stop Disconnection without trial (Thanks, Glyn!)

Believer it or not there's been a lot of controversy about the screen saver in Apple's new operating system release.

I know this isn't something most people spend a lot of time thinking about, but I happen to think one of the nicest things about the Mac is its screen saver, cause I love high-res photography and one of the nicest ways to use great photos is to hang them on the wall on a 50-inch HD monitor and use the Mac screen saver to drive it. Try it sometime, you won't be disappointed.

That's why I was bummed when I did a complete fresh install on a Mac that's being turned into an art computer, first Leopard then Snow Leopard, when it appeared as if the "Choose Folder" option on the screen saver had disappeared. But I figured someone on Twitter would know what happened, and sure enough, Mike Murry pointed me to the new way of doing things.

There's a plus and minus at the bottom of the list. When you click the plus you can add a folder to the list. Nice little improvement. Used to be there could only be one folder, now you get as many as you like.

Just thought I'd leave a pointer here to anyone else who gets confused.

Last week, a few folks submitted the news that the Canadian Private Copying Collective, who collects a tax (levy) on every blank CD sold in Canada is now, once again, pushing for a tax on every iPod sold. They try to do this pretty much every year. A few years ago, Canadian courts struck down an attempt to do so. Then there was another try which, again, was struck down with the court pointing out that they'd covered this in the past.

But they're back at it again. And it's really no wonder. Already the cost of a blank CD in Canada has an astounding 90% of the price go to this levy. But what happens to all that money? Well, the CPCC claims that it needs this levy to sustain the livelihood of artists. That's also its reasoning for extending it to iPods. But, Howard Knopf dug into the numbers a bit and notes how laughable that claim is. First, CPCC claims that its brought in over $150 million from the blank CD levy, and handed it out to 97,000 rights holders "most of whom would not be able to continue their careers without this revenue."

That's quite a claim, isn't it? But if you just do the most basic division, you'll find that it makes no sense at all. At $150 million over ten years for 97,000 rights holders, you're talking about $160 per year on average. And, of course, the truth is that it's significantly less for most, and much bigger for a very small number. I think it's safe to conclude that "most" of the 97,000 rightsholders aren't relying on CPCC money for any kind of career. Oh, but you know who did get a lot of money to play with? CPCC. Knopf notes that:

About $22 million has gone to the costs of pursuing Copyright Board tariffs (lawyers, consultants, surveys, etc.), collection and enforcement (e.g. lawyers and auditors), and other causes such as "communications and government relations - $1,272,000." And that's only the end of 2007.

But it's all about the artists, right?

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A thoughtful list of things Dan Gillmor would do to fix news organizations, from one of the great sages of contemporary journalism. Spoiler alert: #11 involves the traffic-pander-y nature of lists themselves, including, yes, Gillmor's own.

yahoi writes "Companies around the world are leaving themselves wide open to Web- and client-side attacks, according to a new report released today by the SANS Institute that includes real attack data gathered from multiple sources. SANS found that most organizations are focusing their patching efforts and vulnerability scanning on the operating system, but they're missing the boat: 60 percent of the total number of attacks occur on Web applications, and many attacks are aimed at third-party applications such as Microsoft Office, and Adobe Flash and other tools. Exacerbating the problem, they're taking twice as long to patch Microsoft Office and other applications than to patch their operating systems."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new video was just added to our ongoing series of interviews with notable Makers, sponsored by Dow Chemical. Lynn Rothschild, an astrobiologist/exobiologist at NASA's Ames Research Center, and faculty member at Brown and Stanford Universities, talks about her lifelong fascination with microbes. "I'm getting paid, really, to be a grown-up five year old," she quips, describing her globetrotting research into microbial extremophiles that has, in order to better understand the possibilities for extraterrestrial life, analyzed data from a radioactive spring in Australia and the top of Mount Everest, among other places.

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Champions Online is Cryptic Studios' latest entry into the Superhero MMORPG genre, representing several years of advancement in game design both for Cryptic and for MMOs as a whole. It's no longer a new field, and there are now certain expectations about what an MMO should contain, and how it should play. Two major factors to a new game's success or failure are the standards they embrace and do well, and the ones they reject and do differently. Champions Online succeeds at adapting many established concepts, while still setting themselves apart from the typical swords & sorcery backdrop. Read on for the rest of my thoughts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Frustrated by bad photos on Ebay and Craigslist, Instructables user bloomautomatic shares with us some tips for better close-up photos.

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Reader Mark points us to the latest ridiculous claims from a newspaper publisher against search engines like Google. This time, it's Brendan Hopkins, the CEO of APN, Australia's largest regional newspaper, who seems to be blaming everyone else for his own inability to come up with a good business model. The real kicker is his attack on search engines:

"To use an analogy, I see search engines as breaking into our homes, itemising the contents, walking out and listing everything for everyone to see. And they get money out of that process.... The only problem is, I don't see any revenue being paid directly from Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft in our company profit and loss accounts."

Yes, how dare they point more people to your site. And this isn't private info in your house that Google is suddenly maliciously displaying. This is content that you put up on your site on purpose with the goal of getting more people to see it. The analogy would only make sense if you didn't offer up that content for public consumption.

But, of course, the blame also gets spread around to anyone else who reports on the news in one of APN's papers:

"Our value is diminished by other media companies, both online and in print, with limited resources, who feed off our newspapers, by those who take the ideas of the newspapers, rewrite our journalists' words to be miraculously their own words, and then put it on a blog or a broadcast piece and call that journalism."

No, your value isn't diminished in such scenarios -- it's increased. Otherwise, why would anyone want to use your work as a basis of their own. If you can't monetize being first and having all the contacts and the details, doesn't that suggest a problem with your own ways of trying to monetize, rather than with what your competitors are doing?

Even worse, Hopkins claims that YouTube's recent agreement with PRS over music hosted on YouTube should serve as a model for newspapers to get paid. I had suggested earlier, that Google's willingness to "cave" on some of these sorts of deals was only going to cause more problems, as more companies and industries would all start assuming that Google owed them money too -- using the examples of where Google paid others as evidence. Unfortunately, it looks like that was correct.

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TheClockworkSoul writes "According to both the BBC and NewScientist, showering may be bad for your health. Apparently, dirty shower heads can be an ideal breeding ground for Mycobacterium avium , a bug responsible for a type of pulmonary disease more prevalent than tuberculosis in developed countries, cases of which have risen in parallel with the rise in showering. Tests revealed nearly a third of devices harbor significant levels the critter."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jesse Brown, a BoingBoing guest-blogger, is the host of TVO's Search Engine podcast.

Socalled AKA Josh Dolgin is an annoying, talented, annoyingly talented "buddy" of mine.

We used to make cartoons together but these days he's a big star on the European Klezmer circuit (!).

He fuses klezmer with hiphop, rediscovers aging novelty musicians and does stupid magic tricks. His live show is incredible.

I like this video of his better than his more successful one, but I'm usually difficult in that way. Enjoy!

Swiss medium format manufacturer Sinar has been hived-off into two companies with its Swiss distributor Tekno AG taking over development, sales, service and support for the brand's products and manufacturing passed to Femron, a management buyout of its production facilities. A new company called Sinar Photography formed by Teckno will take over the relevant assets. Former owner Jenoptik withdrew from the medium format market in July 2009 following the collapse of its partner in the Hy6 system: Franke & Heidecke.

stavros-59 writes "Australia's internet censorship watchdog, ACMA, uses an internet classification system originally intended for children's PC filters. ACMA has now made what must be the most amazing recent decisions of the whole bizarre censorship debate. The Register today has a story about ACMA's decision to force Apple to withdraw their ITMS gift feature from Australia on the basis that MA+ (over 15 and maybe sex) rated movies could not be given to children using the gift cards. The films are also banned on the internet but not at local video/DVD stores as detailed in this Whirlpool Forum post. At the same time, the photographic work of Robert Mapplethorpe (not for the fainthearted) has been classified as PG (Parental Guidance) by the Classification Board — which is not part of ACMA, but an agency under the Attorney General's Department."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Well, well. Last week, we noted that a large number of well known musicians had come out against the idea of kicking accused file sharers off the internet, noting that it would only escalate the problem rather than solve it. But, of course, the industry organizations who claim to represent musicians' best interests can't have that, so this week they're on the attack. The head of a royalty collection society apparently called the statement from musicians "grossly naive and desperately damaging." Yes, but damaging to whom? Perhaps to collections societies, but not to artists. Smart artists know that going to war with fans is never a smart move. But the collection society head went on:

"This is more than unhelpful. It's destructive, I wish I could understand the hostility. But if between us all we don't screw it up, within 12 months we could have some legislation in place. I am quietly confident."

You wish you could understand the hostility? There was no hostility from the artists. The only hostility has come from an industry hellbent on protecting an old and obsolete business model by kicking people offline for sharing the music they love. These artists were coming out against hostility. They were coming out against this war mentality where it's the industry against the consumer.

Meanwhile, another group, the Musicians Union has come out and called the statement from the musicians last week "a bit blinkered" and "counterproductive" and then said:

"I am disappointed they went maverick without looking at the bigger picture. Our position is somebody should be paid for their creation."

Actually, they are looking at the bigger picture, and recognize that kicking people off the internet doesn't have anything to do with getting paid. You get paid by providing something that people want to buy. Kicking people off the internet doesn't make anyone want to pay you. It actually does the opposite. No one is saying artists shouldn't get paid for their creation -- least of all the musicians who spoke out last week. What they're saying is that kicking people off the internet doesn't help anyone get paid.

Honestly, does anyone actually think that kicking people off of the internet is a good business model?

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Though titled "Lightning Fields", Hiroshi Sugimoto's photo series was actually created by applying a high voltage current directly to film. Check out some more striking examples here. [via Kottke]

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If you share my obsession with ball chain, you may be interested in Angela Cazel Jahn's upcoming installation at STARK gallery, which will only be open this Friday, September 18 from 5-9 PM. Her piece incorporates 10,000 individually hung strands.

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eldavojohn writes "China's controversial Green Dam Internet Filter died on new PCs a month ago but it wasn't until recently that Chinese schools silently removed it. Claims that the software inhibited work in schools was cited as the reason by Reuters. "We will remove all Green Dam software from computers in the school as it has strong conflicts with teaching software we need for normal work," said one school while another claimed 'It had seriously influenced our normal work.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From Treehugger

Rm w Vu: Tall, Terrifying and Terrific Towers
Would you live in one of these architectural wonders (read: oddities)? Even for the view?

Wild and Wacky Places to Stay in the Countryside
Maybe one of these kooky cabins is more up your alley for a unique vacation get-away.

Tick Saliva May Cure Skin, Liver and Pancreas Cancer
Turns out a stay in a tick-infested woods might be just what the doctor ordered if you have a particular type of cancer.

Green Porno 3 with Isabella Rossellini Now Live
Green Porno has been renewed for a 3rd season (and a book), and today is the official launch online, with the TV launch scheduled for next week (September 21st).

PETA Has Pamela Anderson Stripping People at Airport (Video)
There's another group that knows how to use sex for education...here's the latest from PETA.

consonant writes "The NY Times has an article on insurers refusing to cover cheaper devices such as iPhones and netbooks which may be used by the speech-impaired, and instead requires them to acquire devices that cost from 10 to 20 times as much. The reason? 'Insurance is supposed to cover medical devices, and smartphones or PCs can be used for nonmedical purposes, like playing video games or Web browsing.' From the article: 'For the millions of Americans with A.L.S., Down syndrome, autism, strokes and other speech-impairing conditions, the insurance industry's aversion to covering mainstream devices adds to the challenges they face. Advocates say using an everyday device to communicate can ease the stigma and fear of making the adjustment. At the same time, current policies mean that the government and private insurers may be spending unnecessary dollars on specialty machines.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Ken Murphy is capturing a year's worth of timelapse sequences from atop San Francisco's exploratorium - seen above is the first 42 days of his project -

The earliest day is in the upper left, and consecutive days follow left to right, then down, with the most recent day in the lower right. It starts a little before sunrise, so it's dark for the first few seconds:
[...]
Keep in mind that all of the days are synchronized, so at any given moment, you're looking at the sky at the exact same time of day for each of the panels. The cascading effect at sunrise and sunset is caused by the variations in day length.

The collective effect of sunset is quite cinematic - read more on MurphLab.

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Jesse Brown, a BoingBoing guest-blogger, is the host of TVO's Search Engine podcast.

My podcast Search Engine launches a new season this week with a discussion between me and (my radio hero) Ira Glass, host of This American Life.

Ira is a pleasure to talk to, nimble and playful in his conversation, even when he's insisting that he has nothing to say! Ira Glass on Search Engine (mp3)

Subscribe to Search Engine: on iTunes

with XML

A bunch of folks have been submitting stories about the ongoing fight between multimillionaire artist Damien Hirst and a teenager he had arrested. If you don't recall, the kid had created some collages, where some of them included an image of a jewel-encrusted skull that Hirst supposedly made and sold for insane amounts of money (reports put it at £50 million). Hirst, apparently got so upset by a 16-year-old kid using the image in his own artwork, that he threatened to sue the kid, and forced the kid to hand over the artwork and to pay £200 to Hirst. A bunch of other artists started creating more artwork using Hirst's skull in protest. But the whole thing got more bizarre lately, after the teen stopped by a Hirst exhibit and took a box of pencils that were in one of the "sculptures" and left a "ransom note" demanding his own artwork back. Except, the police have valued that box of pencils at £500,000 and arrested the kid. Yikes.

I wasn't sure I was going to write about it, but then a lot more of you also pointed to this beautiful old-fashioned rant by Charlie Brooker where he does a lovely job tying the "Damien Hirst puts a kid in jail" story to the new effort to kick file sharers offline in the UK. Basically, they're both stories about huge, ridiculous wealthy copyright holders totally overreacting to a rather minor inconsequential infringement. The whole thing is good, but here's a taste:

The vast majority of people who illegally download music from the internet do so because they bloody love music. They're resorting to theft because they're either too skint to afford 79p per track (often because they're students), or because what they're looking for is too obscure to find by commercial means, or because it's been leaked and isn't officially available and they're just too damn excited to wait. In the main, these are dedicated fans: precisely the same audience who in days of yore would've filled C90 cassettes with songs taped off the radio. In its heyday, the Radio 1 Sunday evening Top 40 countdown constituted the biggest file-sharing portal in British history, with millions of users hooked up simultaneously, mercilessly downloading content to their tape decks.

The government and the music industry should cheerfully view these people as eager young addicts. Let them have their illicit free samples because once they're hooked, they'll cough up later: when they've got more money, when the tracks are easier to find via legitimate means, or when they go to see an act they only discovered via free illegal downloads play live (and pay £30 for a ticket, £30 for drinks, and £30 for a poster and T-shirt).

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CWmike writes "Microsoft says it won't patch Windows XP for a pair of bugs it quashed Sept. 8 in Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. The news adds Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) and SP3 to the no-patch list that previously included only Windows 2000 Server SP4. 'We're talking about code that is 12 to 15 years old in its origin, so backporting that level of code is essentially not feasible,' said security program manager Adrian Stone during Microsoft's monthly post-patch Webcast, referring to Windows 2000 and XP. 'An update for Windows XP will not be made available,' Stone and fellow program manager Jerry Bryant said during the Q&A portion of the Webcast (transcript here). Last Tuesday, Microsoft said that it wouldn't be patching Windows 2000 because creating a fix was 'infeasible.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jeff of MightyOhm takes a look back at his solution for adding temperature control to a space heater -

The project involves using a digital programmable thermostat to control an inexpensive space heater.  The original motivation for this was that I wanted to lower the temperature of the heater at night, reducing my energy bill, while still being able to wake up to a toasty room in the morning by setting the heater to turn on full blast 30 minutes before I awoke.

The project's instructable plus relevant schematic can be found here.

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What's the first thing that comes to mind when you're handed a N900 and told to connect it to another object? That's what was asked of design studio Tinker.it in preparation of a promotional contest recently launched by Nokia. Tinker.it collaborated with London agency Hyper to devise and build four example objects "inspired by the 80's".

Built using the Arduino platform, they were extremely intriguing: a Speak and Spell which was used to text a message to a member of the audience, a Rolodex which identified a contact's details after being manually spun and automatically pulled it up on the phone, an FM radio hack which identified any '80's musician texted to the phone and then connected to Last.fm to pull up the relevant cover art as you tuned the radio to a station playing the selected artist's music, and finally a View-Master which used the phone to create custom 3D photos.

Hacking 80's Gadgets with the Nokia N900: PUSH N900 London Launch

[via psfk]

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Bonnie sez, "Bonnie Burton at Lucasfilm tries on the Jabba the Hutt inflatable costume to give it a test run by doing the Hutt Strutt around the Lucasfilm campus, to the ILM cafe Javva the Hutt, and to Starbucks down the street. She even dances in it (video included) to see if the costume holds up to the strenuous test."

Jabba the Hutt Costume Test Run (Thanks, Bonnie!)

Tony sez, "These haunting images of the gigantic 'ghost fleet' of ships parked off the coast of Singapore are one more gripping visualization of the economic state of affairs the world over."

Here, on a sleepy stretch of shoreline at the far end of Asia, is surely the biggest and most secretive gathering of ships in maritime history. Their numbers are equivalent to the entire British and American navies combined; their tonnage is far greater. Container ships, bulk carriers, oil tankers - all should be steaming fully laden between China, Britain, Europe and the US, stocking camera shops, PC Worlds and Argos depots ahead of the retail pandemonium of 2009. But their water has been stolen.

They are a powerful and tangible representation of the hurricanes that have been wrought by the global economic crisis; an iron curtain drawn along the coastline of the southern edge of Malaysia's rural Johor state, 50 miles east of Singapore harbour.

Revealed: The ghost fleet of the recession (Thanks, Tony!)

A bunch of folks have sent in the news that MonaVie, a company I must confess I've never heard of -- but which apparently is a typical multilevel marketing deal, this time involving something to do with acai berries -- is threatening a critical blogger for the sin of mentioning the company name in metatags. Well, actually, they threatened him over a lot more in their legal nastygram to the blogger's domain registrar. However, when the good folks at The Consumerist asked MonaVie for clarification, the company's lawyer claimed that the original letter was from "a new person working in our compliance department" who apparently went a bit too far. But, that the company still felt the use in metatags was a violation of trademarks. That seems hard to believe for a variety of reasons, as no moron in a hurry would confuse a blog critical of MonaVie with the company itself. This certainly sounds like an abuse of trademark law in an attempt to stifle speech.

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US photographic trade body PMA and dpreview.com are conducting a survey looking for the views of dedicated amateur photographers. The five-minute survey asks about your photographic use, the features you'd like to see in cameras and your use and experience of photo sharing sites and printing services. It aims to get a clearer understanding of what committed non-professional photographers want from their cameras and related services and may even result in those things getting a bit better. Responses will be discussed at the forthcoming 6Sight conference.

BuzzSkyline writes "Ukrainian researchers have managed to take pictures of atoms that reveal structure of the electron clouds surrounding carbon nuclei in unprecedented detail. Although the images offer no surprises (they look much like the sketches of electron orbitals included in high school science texts), this is the first time that anyone has directly imaged atoms at this level, rather than inferring the structure of the orbitals from indirect measurements such as electron or X-ray interferometry."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What exactly is the Automatonic Gourd? I'm not sure, but I like it. This would be a cool project for our Halloween contest! Does anyone know more about this project? Let me know in the comments! Thanks.

More:

How-to Tuesday: Scariest Pumpkin Ever

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This Halloween season:

If your house could use more haunt...
If your props are lacking pulsations....
If your creepies are short on crawl...

...consider Twitchie, won't you?

The Twitchie Robot Kit includes 3 servomotors, 6 laser-cut wooden members, 1 circuit board, 1 ATMEGA168 preloaded with LilyPad firmware and Twitchie software, a printed manual, and various electronic parts such as LEDs, capacitors, and resistors. It could be a great starting point for your entry in the 2009 Make: Halloween Contest.

In the Maker Shed:

Twitchie Robot Kit

More:

• Twitchie scorpion - HOW TO - Make a robotic scorpion
  
• Twitchie clown heads on Attack of the Show!

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Germano-Ukranian specialist lens maker Hartblei has announced a medium format camera designed with a 35mm lens mount. The Hartblei CAM can mount any digital or film medium format back up to 4.5x6" and will be available in Canon EF, Nikon F or Sony Alpha mounts. The company is working to develop the EF-mount version so that it can electronically control the apertures on Canon's latest 17mm and 24mm TS-E lenses. Mounting the Nikkor 12-24mm F2.8, either on the native Nikon version on the EF mount version with an adapter, gives a viewing angle of 135°.

Adobe has released Photoshop Lightroom 2.5 and Camera Raw 5.5. These are final versions of updates which were originally posted as 'release candidates' on the Adobe Labs site, and are now available for immediate download. Both provide additional Raw support for Nikon D300S, Nikon D3000, Panasonic DMC-GF1 and Olympus E-P1. Although support is offered for Panasonic DMC-FZ35, it doesn't extend to the Japanese and European version of the camera (the FZ38). In addition, the ACR update also includes corrections for sensors with non-conventional color filter arrays (as introduced in the most recent DNG specification).

This is really great. Wolfgang Senges writes in to update us on how a group of passionate people who believe in a more bottom up approach to reinventing the music industry were able to put together a fantastic looking music conference in just weeks, called all2gethernow (disclosure: they asked me to come and present, but I was unable to make it). The story behind the event is that Popkomm, one of the bigger recording industry events, held in Germany each year, was canceled this year, with the guy behind it blaming "piracy" rather than, say, the economy and structural changes in the industry. A bunch of folks in Germany who knew better decided to show Popkomm's organizers how to organize a better event these days, and scrambled, pulling together a fun-looking event to be held at the exact same time as Popkomm had originally been scheduled. I'm sorry I couldn't attend, as it really looks like it should be an excellent event. Either way, it shows not only how events can work, but how the whole industry is shifting. The top-down model is changing, and the bottom up one, where more people are empowered, is taking over.

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I love Your Monkey Called's list of book titles if they had been published today. Got any of your own? Add 'em to the comments. Best entry gets an invisible, entirely notional rosette and a free* Gideon Bible.

Then: The Wealth of Nations
Now: Invisible Hands: The Mysterious Market Forces That Control Our Lives and How to Profit from Them

Then: Walden
Now: Camping with Myself: Two Years in American Tuscany

Book Titles, If They Were Written Today (via Making Light)

*To collect your prize, you have to pay for a room at a hotel of your choosing.

I love this idea: herb-gardens that come as rolled up "turf" made from corrugated cardboard, ready to be unrolled, watered and tended. I can't tell if it's just a concept or a product (the designer's site is a huge Flash blob that won't load properly for me on my slow hotel-room connection).

English designer Chris Chapman wanted to make planting vegetables and herbs at home less work with his roll-out vegetable mats. The design aims to make home food production as simple as possible and easy to maintain for busy individuals and families. The design features a mat pre-treated with fertilizer on its underside and a series of seed pouches which slowly biodegrade over time.

chris chapman: roll-out vegetable garden (via IZ Reloaded)

Creative Commons has released the results of its wide-ranging research project into how creators and users of information view "non-commercial" -- as in, "This work is licensed for non-commercial use." It's a fascinating look at the rough, emerging consensus on what is and isn't fair in the Creative Commons universe.

Creative Commons noncommercial licenses include a definition of commercial use, which precludes use of rights granted for commercial purposes:

... in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation.

The majority of respondents (87% of creators, 85% of users) replied that the definition was "essentially the same as" (43% of creators, 42% of users) or "different from but still compatible with" (44% of creators, 43% of users) theirs. Only 7% of creators and 11% of users replied that the term was "different from and incompatible with" their definition; 6% or creators and 4% of users replied "don't know/not sure." 74% and 77% of creators and users respectively think others share their definition and only 13% of creators and 11% of users wanted to change their definition after completing the questionnaire.

On a scale of 1-100 where 1 is "definitely noncommercial" and 100 is "definitely commercial" creators and users (84.6 and 82.6, respectively) both rate uses in connection with online advertising generally as "commercial." However, more specific use cases revealed that many interpretations are fact-specific. For example, creators and users gave the specific use case "not-for-profit organization uses work on its site, organization makes enough money from ads to cover hosting costs" ratings of 59.2 and 71.7, respectively.

Defining Noncommercial report published

Last spring, students from the NYC Pratt Institute of Design created an exhibit of designs for the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in which the materials cost for each piece was one dollar or less. Some of the results are less successful than others, but the best are very good.

Pratt Students Design For One Dollar

One of the Internet Archive's less-well-known archives is their TV collection (it's mostly not available to the public). For years, the Archive has been recording dozens of TV stations around the clock. They happened to be rolling on September 11th, and they've published three days' worth of around-the-clock TV coverage from six different networks. This is a view into how history was experienced that we've never really had before.

The September 11th Collection (via Internet Archive News)

This breathless -- and mysteriously incomplete -- Modern Mechanix article from 1931 promises a bold future in which vacuum tubes replace motors:

IMAGINE a tube, a thing of glass and metal, replacing a motor to operate a piece of machinery. Imagine a fiat bed printing press--or any machine using a reciprocating motion---getting its energy from a glorified descendant of a radio tube.

That's just one of the things that research engineers of the General Electric Company expect to see within the next few years. With Thyratron power tubes and solenoids it is technically possible today.

William C. White, engineer of the vacuum tube research department of General Electric, makes that prediction. The field of vacuum tube engineering, he says, is not to simply do a thing in a different way and with different means, but to do it better and cheaper. It is possible, he adds, that as knowledge of the possibilities of vacuum tubes increases we may have to modify many of our ideas, such as the accepted one that an electric motor is the best and cheapest means of producing mechanical movement, at least in reciprocating parts.

Amazing Vacuum Tubes May Eliminate Motors (Aug, 1931)

bennyboy64 writes "Australia's Internet Industry Association has put forward a new code of conduct that suggests ISPs contact, and in some cases disconnect, customers that have malware-infected computers. 'Once an ISP has detected a compromised computer or malicious activity on its network, it should take action to address the problem. ISPs should therefore attempt to identify the end user whose computer has been compromised, and contact them to educate them about the problem,' the new code states. The code won't be mandatory, but it's expected the ISP industry will take it up if they are to work with the Australian Government in preventing the many botnets operating in Australia."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kudos to Google for committing to data-portability in its online applications: its new "Data Liberation Front" initiative makes it easier to take your data and move it back to your own computer, or a competing service.

We're a small team of Google Chicago engineers (named after a Monty Python skit about the Judean People's Front) that aims to make it easy for our users to transfer their personal data in and out of Google's services by building simple import and export functions. Our goal is to "liberate" data so that consumers and businesses using Google products always have a choice when it comes to the technology they use.

What does product liberation look like? Said simply, a liberated product is one which has built-in features that make it easy (and free) to remove your data from the product in the event that you'd like to take it elsewhere.

Introducing DataLiberation.org: Liberate your data! (via /.)

One of the most delicious cups of coffee I ever had was cold-brewed -- the coffee flavor slowly diffused into cold water. No bitter, acid taste, just sweet and aromatic awesomeness. I have no idea if Hammacher Schlemmer's cold-brewer makes a decent cup of joe, but you get the idea.

The hourglass does not require any electricity; simply combine 2 1/4 cups of coarsely ground coffee beans with 3 1/2 cups of water in the brewing chamber and allow the coffee to infuse with the water for 12 to 24 hours. When the infusion process is complete, turn the hourglass over and 16 oz. of extract instantly drains through a reusable stainless steel filter and into the extract chamber. Combine some of the extract with hot water for traditional coffee or cold water for iced coffee. The extract can be kept in the included carafe and stored in a refrigerator for up to two weeks.

So, I don't know about that two week business. All those aromatics are, by definition, volatile. Calling food chemists -- that can't be right, can it?

The Acid Reducing Flavor Enhancing Coffee Hourglass. (via Red Ferret)

Scathing and right-on visual commentary on the lotto from Cracked.com -- it's not just a tax on innumeracy, it's a finely tuned psychological weapon used to exploit cognitive blind-spots and profit from human misery.

The recession has seen a rise in lotto sales as people streamline their financial idiocy from "paying for money they don't have" to "paying for money they'll never have." Even the Wikipedia article says that "buying a lottery ticket reduces the buyer's expected net worth..."

If Lottery Tickets Told the Truth (via JWZ)

Inspired by Dan Ariely's book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Lives, Jeff Atwood used its list of cognitive blind-spots endemic to our species and produced a list of nine ways to avoid making decisions that will make you unhappy later.

5. Design for Procrastination

Ariely conducted an experiment on his class. Students were required to write three papers. Ariely asked the first group to commit to dates by which they would turn in each paper. Late papers would be penalized 1% per day. There was no penalty for turning papers in early. The logical response is to commit to turning all three papers in on the last day of class. The second group was given no deadlines; all three papers were due in the last day of class. The third group was directed to turn their papers in on the 4th, 8th, and 12th weeks.

The results? Group 3 (imposed deadlines) got the best grades. Group 2 (no deadlines) got the worst grades, and Group 1 (self-selected deadlines) finished in the middle. Allowing students to pre-commit to deadlines improved performance. Students who spaced out their commitments did well; students who did the logical thing and gave no commitments did badly.

* Steer clear of offers of low-rate trial periods which auto-convert into automatic recurring monthly billing. They know that most people will procrastinate and forget to cancel before the recurring billing kicks in.

* Either favor fixed-rate, fixed-term plans -- or become meticulous about cancelling recurring services when you're not using them.

9 Ways Marketing Weasels Will Try to Manipulate You (via Kottke)

On a daily basis we tend to get a couple comments here or there from people who insist that I shouldn't have written a certain post. Some of them are from the small group of folks who make sure to complain about every post here (what a life they must lead). Others are from people who like some of the stuff I write, but get upset if I venture into a particular topic area. A common refrain on some of them are that I shouldn't comment at all on certain topics because I'm not an expert in those topics or because they don't fit into the categorization of what those people think this site is about. I have to admit, I've always found these comments slightly amusing and slightly perplexing. As I've said before, I view the posts on this site as a part of a larger conversation, not as any sort of "reporting" or journalism. When you have a conversation with friends/colleagues/strangers, you will almost always express an opinion on something perhaps without "fact checking" every last bit of it. And from that you learn.

Fred Wilson did a great blog post recently, where he discussed the same basic concept, pointing out how people complain whenever he dips into politics or healthcare -- outside of his official realms of expertise. But he points out that it's his blog and he sees no reason not to speak his mind:

I am not an expert in everything I write about. But that is not going to stop me from speaking my mind about things other than venture capital and web startups. It might annoy or piss some people off. It could even hurt our business because those people are less likely to do business with me or our firm.

But I've made the decision to put myself out there, speak my mind publicly, and say what I think. And I am going to continue to do it.

There are plenty of regular readers of this blog who don't agree with me on most of my political views. People like Andy Swan, JLM, Dave in Hackensack, Steve Kane and many others. But they've never suggested that I shouldn't speak my mind. They leave comments arguing that I'm wrong. And you know what? They've opened my mind to other viewpoints and I have to say that I am more open minded about their views than had they not taken the time to articulate them sensibly and articulately.

If you really think I am full of s**t, let me know in the comments, but please don't suggest that I don't have the right to speak my mind. We live in an open society where everyone has this right.

And that's exactly how I feel as well. I really enjoy the discussions held on this blog, and hope to actually expand them in the near future. At the same time that people complain about some of the topics I pick, others complain that we're sometimes too narrowly focused on certain other topics. We've been discussing how to balance all of this, and I'm hopeful that we have some useful solutions coming up that will allow the topics under discussion here to expand, while still being engaging. But, no, not all of them will fit into what some people think this site has to be about -- and most of them will be an effort at further discussion, rather than what people decide is "reporting." But, just as we suggest that companies adapt to changing times, so too, do we hope to adapt and grow as well -- all with the goal of adding more value (and not taking away value). We're always looking to connect with fans, and we'd love to get your thoughts in the comments here on how best to cultivate more discussions.

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Rachel at CRAFT posted up this nifty print-and-fold iPhone dock, easy and functional!

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For the second time this month, Google is playing in the paranormal realm. The logo links to a search for "crop circles."

Physical Storage vs. Digital Storage @ The Mozy Blog... Click on through to see the massive image...

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Wired has a writeup on Chad Conway's CommutaCar. It came out really nice, and helped point him in a good direction for his studies. Keep in mind that he was busy with his studies and after school sports, so did the bulk of the rebuild during his half hour lunch breaks over about a month or two in high school.

Best of all, Conway says his car proves that EVs have been possible and practical for more than three decades. "By driving a car that is 30 years old and can still satisfy the majority of my transportation needs, I always seem to ask myself why a similar car is not being produced today," Conway said. "I have had over a hundred people ask where they can get one for themselves because they think it is perfect."

For more info, check out his site. There are more photos on his and my Flickr accounts.

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jerryatrix writes "Legends of the New Zealand Maori tell of giant man-eating birds. New scientific evidence proves that these birds did exist and were around the same time as humans in New Zealand. From the article, 'Scientists now think the stories handed down by word of mouth and depicted in rock drawings refer to Haast's eagle, a raptor that became extinct just 500 years ago.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Too many companies these days are focused on ways to keep you locked-in somehow or another, so it's quite refreshing to find out that Google is now officially announcing its Data Liberation Front, which does exactly the opposite: systematically helping you to get your data out of Google's services so that it can be used elsewhere. Apparently the group has been working on this for a while, but has only just now been publicly "announced." It's difficult to think of too many other companies that would do the same thing. Of course, it's easy to think of independent or competing companies that might do this -- but we usually hear about the original company suing anyone who tries to free up data. Good move by Google to offer the service itself.

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CWmike writes "Google is developing a product called Fast Flip that aims to make it simpler and faster to browse through news articles on the Web, a process the company says is cumbersome and discourages people from reading more online. Fast Flip, which lets readers glance at pages and browse through them quickly without having to wait for multiple page elements to load, was expected to go live late Monday at the Google Labs Web site. The idea is to try to replicate online the ease with which people flip through the pages of print magazines and newspapers in the offline world. This could motivate people to read more online, which Google argues will help publishers attract more readers and increase their revenue. However, when users click on a Fast Flip link, they will be taken to the corresponding publisher's Web site, where the Google technology will not be on hand to display the page more quickly."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Olympus has released a firmware update for its E-P1 Micro Four Thirds camera. Version 1.1 improves the camera operation in Continuous AF mode (C-AF). The company has also posted firmware updates for the E-P1's kit lenses: the M. Zuiko Digital ED 14-42mm 1:3.5-5.6 and the M. Zuiko Digital 17mm 1:2.8 pancake lens. The updates promise to improve the autofocus operation of both the lenses. Firmware updates can be downloaded via the Olympus Master/Studio software.

So everyone, thanks for coming out to camp! Our lucky winner is Eric, who made the nice patio cooler mod featured above. He turned an ordinary plastic cooler into a piece of patio furniture by building a frame for it out of cypress wood and spare sheet metal roofing. For his winning entry, he will receive a $100 gift certificate to the Maker Shed. Congratulations!

Want another chance to win great prizes? Check out the Halloween contest!

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Doug Lichtman's latest IP Colloquium takes on the question of derivative works, mainly discussing the infamous Harry Potter Lexicon reference guide that a judge recently barred from publication. In the program, Lichtman talks with the General Counsel of Warner Bros. studios, Jeremy Williams, and Anthony Falzone from Stanford's Fair Use Project. Unless you're really into some of the very very narrow details of copyright law (such as the differences between the various sections in copyright law), much of the discussion may not be that interesting. There were a couple of things worth noting, however. I tended to think that Williams' views on fan fiction made a lot of sense -- where he basically said that studios recognize that it's a bad idea to stop fan fiction, and that the studios have to learn to let go of trying to control everything. I was actually quite surprised that Lichtman pushed back on this point, with an argument that, to me, makes little sense: suggesting that if an artist could potentially at some future time benefit from creating their own such works, then any derivative work should be seen as infringing and likely stopped.

I thought that Falzone did an excellent job rebutting such suggestions from Lichtman later in the podcast, leading to some points at the end where Lichtman recognizes that many of the issues around whether or not derivative works should be allowed are actually redundant to questions of fair use. But he does claim that there are a few situations where fair use and derivative works don't overlap. However, I had trouble finding any that make sense. Lichtman gave an example of a teacher's answer key to a college textbook, where he notes that the answer key probably doesn't substantially copy the original work, but could be controlled by the original publisher via a "derivative work" claim of Section 106(2) in the Copyright Act.

But, to me, this seems ridiculous on a basic common sense reading. I can't fathom how anyone can (at least honestly) claim that copyright really has an idea/expression dichotomy and then say that Section 106(2) makes any sense at all. What's wrong if someone else wants to produce an answer guide to an original textbook? Why would it ever make policy sense to deny such a right? In most cases, you would assume that the original creator of the textbook would have a better understanding of the topics and the answers, so an "unauthorized" answer key is unlikely to be as valuable. But why should it be prevented? On top of that, if the answer key is just answering questions, then how could it be infringement? Those answers are accurate "facts" responding to questions. If an answer key is infringing, then wouldn't that make student answers infringing as well?

In listening to the podcast, the only thing I could think was that I can't come up with a single example where it makes sense to give the original creator the right to derivative works. I recognize that may be an extreme, but take a look at cases like recent banning of an unauthorized (and, apparently, not very good) sequel to Catcher in the Rye. I can't see any reasonable explanation for how a society that prides itself on freedom of expression and encouraging creative works would ever deny such a right. It does not harm the original work in any way. It does not remove the ability of the original creator to create their own derivative work in any way. And it's hard to imagine a situation in which an unauthorized derivative work would take away from the ability of the original creator to profit. Does anyone honestly think that if J.D. Salinger wrote an actual sequel to Catcher in the Rye people wouldn't buy it because they'd already bought the unauthorized sequel written by some other guy?

So if it's true that copyright only protects the expression and not the idea, how does control over derivative works make any sense at all?

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Gabriel writes in to share his homemade heliostat project. The heliostat is the first step in his solar energy experimentations, and it is designed to keep a mirror aligned so that it keeps the reflection of the sun onto a specific point. Once the energy is focused on that point, it can be harnessed by other devices such as a solar oven. A single unit can be useful, however it gets really fun when you start adding multiple devices to concentrate a bunch of energy on a small spot.

Related:

• The SunFlopper: a mini heliostat made from a floppy drive
• The light sharpener - 12 foot solar collection dish

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Check out this awesome Lego bowling game by Flickr user Nxtguy. After a ball is rolled, a sound sensor detects when the ball hits the pins and uses a light sensor to check how many pins have been knocked down. After the frame completes, a NXT servo connected to a pair of linear actuators resets the pins. A work in progress, it is currently impossible to get a strike, though you can get a spare.

See the Flickr set.

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We've wondered in the past why the movie industry tries to shut down fansub efforts. It makes no sense. These projects tend to increase attention for a particular movie by making it accessible to those who couldn't enjoy the movie before. And yet, once again, we see stories of movie studios going after sites that are doing free labor for the studios in helping them translate the movies into other languages. In this case, they're demanding hundreds of thousands of dollars from three people who helped translate a bunch of films, and run a site for more such fansubs. What a world we live in when those who do free labor for you are worthy of being sued for huge cash amounts.

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Lane Copley sent us this link describing her encounter with a gentleman named Raymond Duarte and his tricked-out ride while selling Girl Scout cookies with her stepdaughter in SF.

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