I read the front page story on John Edwards with delight, as I'm sure many others did.

Yes it is news, to those who ask, because he came close to being VP, and was a serious candidate for President and the press was ignoring the story until they couldn't ignore it any more.

I remember when Edwards came to speak at Gnomedex and everyone said he was great and he should have a webcam everywhere but in the bathroom and bedroom. They wanted the transparent candidate. He thought it was a good idea.

Now we know for sure, but I thought so for sure then, nothing about the guy was real. His story was good, too good. His wife has cancer. Meanwhile, according to the Times he's promising to marry the mother of his out-of-wedlock child as soon as the wife dies, in a rooftop ceremony with Dave Matthews providing the music.

This is the end of John Edwards, who if he could have kept the act up a bit longer might have been the Attorney General of the United States. He's fucked. And maybe we should reflect on just how fucked up we are that we go for that kind of nonsense. Edwards was our ideal of what a candidate should be. A commercial product advertised on TV with the judgement of a con artist. Just the kind of guy we want a heartbeat from the Presidency. Not.

Yes this is a front page story because who Edwards is says so much about who we are. Edwards is a good serious look in the mirror.

christian.einfeldt writes "Everyone is familiar with the Linux video ads created by IBM, Red Hat, and Novell, but until recently, there have not been any professionally backed forkable radio ads. Now, Austin-based Linux advocate Ken Starks has obtained the services of a professional radio talent in creating a high quality voice track, which can easily be adapted by local providers of Linux computer services. The raw material (mp3, ogg) addresses end-user frustration with Microsoft Windows malware, and promotes Linux as a more stable alternative. Starks hopes the raw material will seed pro-Linux ads across the US, and he offers his own final product as an example of how the raw material can be remixed with music. He has released all of the raw material and final work under the Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, and has waived the Attribution requirement in his blog. Starks's provocative ad is currently on the air in the Austin market during the popular talk show of Kim Komando, who just happens to be a Microsoft Windows enthusiast."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AthanasiusKircher sends in a Wired writeup on what should surely be a contender in the next Improbable Research competition: wiring a dead salmon into an fMRI machine and showing it pictures of humans designed to evoke various emotions. "When they got around to analyzing the voxel... data, the voxels representing the area where the salmon's tiny brain sat showed evidence of activity. In the fMRI scan, it looked like the dead salmon was actually thinking about the pictures it had been shown. ... The result is completely nuts — but that's actually exactly the point. [Neuroscientist Craig] Bennett... and his adviser, George Wolford, wrote up the work as a warning about the dangers of false positives in fMRI data. They wanted to call attention to ways the field could improve its statistical methods. ... Bennett notes: 'We could set our threshold [of significance] so high that we have no false positives, but we have no legitimate results.... We could also set it so low that we end up getting voxels in the fish's brain. It's the fine line that we walk.'" The research has been turned down by several publications, according to Wired, but a poster is available (PDF).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes "At MIT, an experiment that identifies which students are gay is raising new questions about online privacy. Using data from Facebook, two students in an MIT class on ethics and law on the electronic frontier made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person's online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. The project, given the name 'Gaydar' by the students, is part of the fast-moving field of social network analysis, which examines what the connections between people can tell us, from predicting who might be a terrorist to the likelihood a person is happy, fat, liberal, or conservative." MIT professor Hal Abelson, who co-taught the course, is quoted: "That pulls the rug out from a whole policy and technology perspective that the point is to give you control over your information — because you don't have control over your information."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes "At MIT, an experiment that identifies which students are gay is raising new questions about online privacy. Using data from Facebook, two students in an MIT class on ethics and law on the electronic frontier made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person's online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. The project, given the name 'Gaydar' by the students, is part of the fast-moving field of social network analysis, which examines what the connections between people can tell us, from predicting who might be a terrorist to the likelihood a person is happy, fat, liberal, or conservative." MIT professor Hal Abelson, who co-taught the course, is quoted: "That pulls the rug out from a whole policy and technology perspective that the point is to give you control over your information — because you don't have control over your information."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

jammag writes "Other coders get canned — but never you, right? From a developer who's now a manager (and who admits to being fired himself) comes the inside story on how the Big Ax might sneak up on you. To prevent it, he recommends some strategic bragging, keeping a CYA (Cover Your ...) folder to document your efforts, and making sure that your talent isn't frittered away so much that even your most mediocre colleagues look good. "

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

jammag writes "Other coders get canned — but never you, right? From a developer who's now a manager (and who admits to being fired himself) comes the inside story on how the Big Ax might sneak up on you. To prevent it, he recommends some strategic bragging, keeping a CYA (Cover Your ...) folder to document your efforts, and making sure that your talent isn't frittered away so much that even your most mediocre colleagues look good. "

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here is a Unix shell command that gets the address of my RSS feed: dig +short davewiner.supercloud.org TXT

It makes a DNS call to get the TXT record associated with davewiner.supercloud.org. That's different from an A record or a CNAME record. TXT records are used for things like this. That's why when you go there in your browser it doesn't go anywhere.

I have an app up for you all to try out, so you can have a supercloud.org domain for your RSS feed (it works equally well for Atom, or anything that can be parsed as XML).

http://dns.rsscloud.org/

Enter your Twitter username and password and the URL of your feed. It verifies that it is the correct password. (And it doesn't store it or use it for any other purpose.) And then if everything goes well, your username will map to a supercloud.org domain and point to your feed.

This is of course not rocket science.

But it does seem to work.

PS: Why this is interesting, possibly, is that it may give us a way to shorten URLs and make them more flexible if we want to build a loosely-coupled Twitter-like network with feeds distributed around the net. DNS is the little bit of centralization that the Internet, itself a loosely-coupled network, is built on.

I didn't plan it this way, but a lot of stuff is ready all at once.

Over the day I'll link them in here. They will also appear in various other places such as the rssCloud mail list, on Twitter, and I'm not sure where else.

1. A rssCloud walkthrough for publishers. This doc is a shortcut for publishers so they don't have to wade through the michegas that cloud and aggregator developers do.

2. A self-documenting OPML reading list of real-time photo feeds. Lots of new stuff working here. I also added a photo feed for television, in anticipation of the Emmies tonight.

3. DNS for RSS feeds. I have a proof of concept app up, for you to try out and comment on.

N. And last but not least, and I had nothing to do with this one -- the Scobles shipped another Scobleizer last night. Baby and mommy are happy and healthy, and according to daddy, cute. Happy birthday Ryan! It's nice to have you on board for this crazy thing we call life.

Malcolm J. Casadaban, a molecular genetics professor at the University of Chicago, died last Sunday, seemingly from an infection of a weakened form of Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that causes the plague. "Because this form of the bacteria is not known to cause problems in healthy people, special safety procedures are not required to handle it, said Dr. Kenneth Alexander, a virologist and chief of pediatric infections at the U. of C. Medical Center. Lab researchers who work with the bacteria would typically wear gloves, a lab coat and protective goggles, and the bacteria would be disposed of in a biohazard bag and heated for about two hours, Alexander said. Two key questions in Casadaban's death will be whether there was anything different about the strain of bacteria he was handling and whether Casadaban had any underlying conditions that may have made him more susceptible to infection."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

But you'll look sweet, upon the seat, of a bicycle built for two. via Robo Living

The build resulted from a challenge by my son, a former pro bicycle racer, and is purely for fun. Could I build an electric tandem based on actually pumping the pedals? Would it climb the steep hills where we live? The result of the challenge is Joules, who sits on the stoker seat and does all of the pedaling.

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So I spent an embarrassingly large amount of time this morning Googling around trying to find the best homemade Space Marine costume in the universe. Such is the blogging life. Apart from a couple of professionally-made props, these costumes from JesterSet's DragonCon 2005 photo-set take the trophy. I have almost no information about the makers or the wearers, regrettably. Help me out in the comments if you can.

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Busshy writes "Darkchen has released a Gameboy Advance emulator for the Nintendo DS/DSi that plays full speed with frameskip. This can only be played with the homebrew dev cart, the DS iPlayer. The emulator adds save states, cheats and tools to GBA games, and for DSi Fans the ability to finally get over the loss of the GBA Slot on the DSi."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Paul Graham has posted an essay questioning whether we ever really paid for "content," as publishers of news and music are saying while they struggle to stay afloat in the digital age. "If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn't better content cost more?" Techdirt's Mike Masnick takes it a step further, suggesting that the content itself should be treated as a resource — one component of many that go into a final product. Masnick also discussed the issue recently with NY Times' columnist David Carr, saying that micropayments won't be the silver bullet the publishers are hoping for because consumers are inundated with free alternatives. "It's putting up a tollbooth on a 50-lane highway where the other 49 lanes have no tollbooth, and there's no specific benefit for paying the toll." Reader newscloud points out that the fall 2009 issue of Harvard's Nieman Reports contains a variety of related essays by journalists, technologists, and researchers.

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Business Week has a piece discussing the effects internet-based technology and open sharing are having on the standards of higher education. The author says every product's success or failure depends on its fidelity — the overall quality of experience — and convenience. Since the internet has made the sharing of even expert-level knowledge convenient, he wonders how long it will be until some school or company raises the fidelity enough to have their degrees accepted alongside those of professional-grade colleges. Quoting: "Once in a while, a market gets completely out of balance. Forces conspire to prevent either a high-fidelity or high-convenience player from emerging. All the offerings crowd around one end or the other. Eventually, someone nails a disruptive approach. Customers and competitors rush in and the marketplace wonders why that great idea didn't come sooner. The higher education market is a lot like that. For centuries the university model dominated because nothing else worked. No technology existed that might deliver an interactive, engaging educational experience without gathering students and teachers in the same physical space. ... These days broadband Internet, video games, social networks, and other developments could combine to create an online, inexpensive, super-convenient model for higher education. You wouldn't get the sights and sounds of a campus, personal contact with professors, or beer-soaked frat parties, but you'd end up with the knowledge you need and the degree to prove it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ZipK writes with an update to last month's FCC inquiry that landed Apple and AT&T in hot water over the apparent rejection of a Google Voice app for the iPhone. All three companies submitted statements to the FCC — Apple claimed the app hadn't been rejected at all, that they were simply "studying" it further. The public version of Google's statement contained a redacted section, which they politely referred to as "sensitive," but after seeing Apple's comments, they decided to reveal the entire document. Google's FCC filing directly contradicts what Apple said: "Apple's representatives informed Google that the Google Voice application was rejected because Apple believed the application duplicated the core dialer functionality of the iPhone. The Apple representatives indicated that the company did not want applications that could potentially replace such functionality." (PDF, page 4.) Apple quickly released a statement reiterating that they did not reject the app.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE Flickr pool

• Matchbox collision photography [above, bottom-right]
  
• LED throwie analysis [above, bottom-left]
  
• Vintage viewfinder photo adapter [above, top-right]
  
• Timelapse history of the sky [above, top-left]

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Death Metal writes "In a working paper titled, 'Is Tom Cruise Threatened? Using Netflix Prize Data to Examine the Long Tail of Electronic Commerce,' Wharton Operations and Information Management professor Serguei Netessine and doctoral student Tom F. Tan pull information from the movie rental company Netflix to explore consumer demand for smash hits and lesser-known films. Netflix made its data available as part of a $1 million prize competition to encourage the development of new ways that will improve its ability to introduce customers to lesser-known titles they might find appealing." In short, the researchers say that the Long Tail effect described by Chris Anderson is much less important in the real world than popularly held. Says the article: "The key difference between the opinion of [Anderson's] book and the study by Wharton researchers is how they define 'hits' and 'niches.' In the book, Anderson focuses on the definition of hits in absolute terms such as the top 10 or top 1,000 products, while Netessine and Tan argue that, to take growing product variety into account, one has to define popularity in relative terms, such as the top 1% or top 10% of products, to properly assess the presence or absence of the Long Tail."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft recently gave more details on Windows Marketplace for Mobile during the Tech Ed New Zealand 2009 session titled 'Distributing and Monetizing Applications through Windows Marketplace Mobile,' led by Loke Uei Tan, Senior Product Manager on the Windows Mobile Team. Geekzone covered the event in good detail, but one of their points caused a lot of uproar in the blogosphere: 'If an application is approved but later removed from the marketplace it will then be automatically removed from all mobile devices.' That sounded a bit ominous to Ars Technica, so they checked in with Microsoft. 'In the vast majority of instances where an application is removed from Windows Marketplace for Mobile, users of this application will continue to be able to use these applications on their phones,' a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars. 'In the rare event an application from Marketplace exhibits harmful behavior or has unforeseen effects, Marketplace has the capability to remotely uninstall these applications. While we hope to avoid this scenario, we will make refunds available in such cases.'"

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Nadine Jarvis's "Carbon copies"... A little morbid, but a clever ideas -

Pencils made from the carbon of human cremains. 240 pencils can be made from an average body of ash - a lifetime supply of pencils for those left behind. Each pencil is foil stamped with the name of the person. Only one pencil can be removed at a time, it is then sharpened back into the box causing the sharpenings to occupy the space of the used pencils. Over time the pencil box fills with sharpenings - a new ash, transforming it into an urn. The window acts as a timeline, showing you the amount of pencils left as time goes by.

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This project began when I read the following entry [#274] in Volume 1 of Popular Mechanic's 1913 The Boy Mechanic:

The round lead weight for shot-putting or hammer throwing can be cast in a hollow cardboard or pressed-paper ball, sold in department and toy stores for 10 cents. Cut a 1/2-in. hole in the ball as shown in Fig. 1 and place it with the hole up in damp sand and press or tamp the sand lightly around the ball as shown in the section, Fig. 2. Cover over about 1 in. deep. A wood plug inserted in the hole will prevent any sand falling inside. When the sand is tamped in and the plug removed, it leaves a gate for the metal. Pour melted lead into the gate until it is full, then, when cool, shake it out from the sand and remove the charred paper. A file can be used to remove any rough places. The dry paper ball prevents any sputtering of the hot lead.

This idea of a hollow card or paper form buried in plain sand as a sacrificial mold for poured metal parts interested me. As the internet papercraft explosion has taught us, paper is really not a bad medium for 3D design, especially for the cost. Software like Pepakura Designer will convert any 3D digital model into a papercraft one that can be printed out, cut out, folded up, and glued or taped together to make a reasonably accurate real-world replica of the original. What if, instead of using the paper as a positive representation, one were to use it simply as a negative space--a volume, supported by dry sand, that would survive just long enough to impart its form to molten metal poured inside?

As a first experiment, I designed a paper template for the pieces of a classic put-together puzzle often called "The Four Piece Pyramid." The challenge is to use the four identical pieces to form a symmetrical three-sided pyramid. I chose this prototype form, first, because I think the puzzle is elegant; second, because all four pieces are identical so only one template design is required; and third, because the pieces are fairly simple, geometrically, and thus so are the templates.

Tools

• Computer with printer
• Scissors or an art knife
• Steel or aluminum bowl
• Safety gear (see below)
• Suitable heat source
• Melting pot
• Tongs or pliers for handing melting pot
• Squirt bottle with water
• Hacksaw frame with coarse blade

Materials

• 120 cm³ (1/2 cup) metal to melt (see below)
• Play sand (or table salt)
• The heaviest card stock you can get through your printer
• Printer ink
• Scotch tape

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theodp writes "Computerworld reports that 60-year-old billionaire John Sall still enjoys cranking out code as the chief architect of JMP ('John's Macintosh Project'), the less-profitable-but-more-fun software from SAS that's used primarily by research scientists, engineers, and Six Sigma manufacturing types. 'It's always been my job to be a statistical software developer,' explains SAS co-founder Sall. So if you didn't have to work — and had more money than George Lucas and Steven Spielberg — would you be like Sall and continue to program? And if so, what type of projects would you work on?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

My segment on Sparky — a robot made by San Francisco artist Marque Cornblatt using a Mac Mini, Skype, and a hodge podge of gadget parts — aired this weekend on PRI's Studio360, the arts and culture radio show hosted by novelist Kurt Anderson. Instead of doing a straight up interview, Marque and I took Sparky to the SF MoMa unannounced to see if we'd be let into the galleries. You can listen to the segment here, but for full effect I recommend going to Studio360's web site and watching the audio slideshow (below the Diablo Cody one) — it includes pictures of Sparky in the MoMa, Marque's living room, and the other characters that make appearances on the show. Cody, Ellroy, Sparky on Studio360