Remember how the NFL told the press that they weren't allowed to live blog or live Tweet games, as it would be a violation of the league's broadcast rights? I noted that I couldn't see how that was enforceable by the league, other than by kicking reporters out of the stadium. Of course, even that would backfire, because a reporter could just watch the game on TV and live blog. And... in fact... that's exactly what the WSJ just did, apparently thumbing its collective nose at the NFL's restrictions. Ben alerts us to the news that a WSJ reporter, safely on his couch at home, live blogged a recent football game between the NY Jets and the Tennessee Titans. Your move, NFL...

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Fiddler, composer, singer, music teacher and lovely human being Amy Farris has passed away. I first learned of her work in the context of performances in various lineups with former members of the great punk band X, and their country offshoot band The Knitters: namely Exene Cervenka, and with Dave Alvin, with whom Ms. Farris played in the video clip embedded above (Dave Alvin & Guilty Women / "Abilene"). The Texas native died in Los Angeles on Wednesday of an apparent suicide. More at the LA Times.

marquinhocb writes "Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger requested $4.7 billion in federal stimulus money Friday to help build an 800-mile bullet train system from San Diego to San Francisco. 'We're traveling on our trains at the same speed as 100 years ago,' the governor said. 'That is inexcusable. America must catch up.' Planners said the train would be able to travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco in two hours and 40 minutes, traveling at speeds of more than 200 miles per hour. About time! There comes a point when 'let's add another lane' is no longer a viable option!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is a solar panel. Really. If you've observed that it looks a lot like a piece of live-edge fluorescent acrylic, you're more than halfway to understanding how it works. Light entering the panel from the sides is absorbed by dyes and converted, by some fancy top-secret nano-metal whatnot ingredients, into a kind of internal re-radiation that is collected by conventional silicon applied only at the edges. Fair warning: Full science-hype disclosure rules apply here. The responsible party is Israel's GreenSun, and they do not have a product at market yet. But The Economist seems to be buying in, and their ethos is good for a click or two, in my book.

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Bill sez, "Den of Geeks is reporting that 'The IT Crowd' has been green-lit for a fourth season. Details are few and far between, but it looks like Moss, Roy, and Jen will be back for another 6 episodes."

Hurrah! What wonderful news!

IT Crowd and Peep Show get new series orders

We keep hearing newspaper industry execs claim that the news can't be free, and they absolutely have to put up paywalls to start charging for content online. And yet... not everyone appears to agree. Lots of folks are sending in the news today that the London Evening Standard has decided to go from a fee-based newspaper to a freesheet. Starting in a week or so, Londoners will be able to pick up a free copy of the newspaper, rather than paying for it. They're preparing to more than double the printed circulation, assuming that many more people will be interested in the free paper (and, thus, greatly boosting their ad inventory). Alexander Lebedev, who only recently bought a controlling stake in the paper has the right idea:

"I am confident that more than doubling the London Evening Standard's circulation and maintaining its quality journalism is what is best for London. An essential fabric of a free and democratic society is high quality journalism. It acts as a deterrent against corruption and is a way to highlight what is beneficial and worth celebrating. I want to invest in newspapers in general for this purpose and in the London Evening Standard in particular. The Standard has been producing exceptional journalism since 1827 and that is not going to change under my ownership. The London Evening Standard is the first leading quality newspaper to go free and I am sure others will follow."

Again, this highlights the silliness of trying to set up a paywall. All that does is open up an opportunity for someone else to go free, and to soak up all of the readership.

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Chicago may have lost its Olympic bid due to the insane fingerprints-and-photos regime at the US border: the Chicago bid team was questioned by an IOC member who called the US border "a rather harrowing experience." I've actually found the O'Hare border procedure pretty painless, but God help the foreigner who lands in Texas. At DFW, I was told by a border guard that I wasn't allowed to listen to headphones in the (two-hour-long) line; at Houston, we once stood in line for three hours just to change planes between Honduras and the UK.

Among the toughest questions posed to the Chicago bid team this week in Copenhagen was one that raised the issue of what kind of welcome foreigners would get from airport officials when they arrived in this country to attend the Games. Syed Shahid Ali, an I.O.C. member from Pakistan, in the question-and-answer session following Chicago's official presentation, pointed out that entering the United States can be "a rather harrowing experience..."

"It's clear the United States still has a lot of work to do to restore its place as a premier travel destination," Roger Dow, U.S. Travel's president, said in the statement released today. "When IOC members are commenting to our President that foreign visitors find traveling to the United States a 'pretty harrowing experience,' we need to take seriously the challenge of reforming our entry process to ensure there is a welcome mat to our friends around the world, even as we ensure a secure system."

Chicago's Loss: Is Passport Control to Blame?

The trippy video above featuring the song "Worm Mountain" by the Flaming Lips (feat. MGMT) was created by a DIY electro-gadget maker named darcyklyne. BB pal Tom Osborn (who works at the Lips' label, Warner Bros. Records, when he's not reading our blog) pointed us to the video and adds,

Here's a forum thread talking about how this person built the Tesla Coil. They ended up being a new fan that found out about The Flaming Lips from The Colbert Report and were somehow inspired to make the following video with their newly created Tesla Coil.

Richard Metzger blogs, "I can't wait to see the surreal new British comedy Bunny and the Bull, from Mighty Boosh director Paul King. Although it keeps getting referred to as "The Mighty Boosh movie" (and looks quite Booshian) it's not, the Mighty Boosh just happen to be in it." Video over at Dangerous Minds.

Previously:

SkinnyGuy writes "Carbon nanofibers and nanotubes are the future of computers, cars, energy and more, but it won't happen until someone figures out how to make carbon nanotubes more efficiently and in formations that can deliver enough energy and functionality to offer practical solutions for real-world problems. Honda's latest breakthrough could be the first step. Of course, Intel is working on similar carbon nanotube fabrication technology. Whoever finally delivers a practical solution, it sounds like a win-win for us."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SkinnyGuy writes "Carbon nanofibers and nanotubes are the future of computers, cars, energy and more, but it won't happen until someone figures out how to make carbon nanotubes more efficiently and in formations that can deliver enough energy and functionality to offer practical solutions for real world problems. Honda's latest breakthrough could be the first step. Of course, Intel is working on similar carbon nanotube fabrication technology. Whoever finally delivers a practical solution, it sounds like a win-win for us."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Barence writes "According to PC Pro, Google has removed all search result links to The Pirate Bay, the notorious file-sharing site. The move is a reaction to a takedown notice issued under the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), although it's unclear who filed the complaint. The ban isn't particularly effective: The top result is now The Pirate Bay's Wikipedia entry, which provides a prominent link to the site's homepage. It's also possible to search The Pirate Bay itself using Google's site search."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week, Shelby Bonnie, former CEO of CNET wrote a great guest piece for TechCrunch, where he suggested killing off CPM as a measurement for online advertising. I'd go even further, and suggest that the obsession with CPM has seriously harmed online advertising. The key point is the one that Bonnie makes first: if you pay for impressions, you create incentives to get impressions. But impressions, by themselves, are not particularly useful, especially when everyone making those impressions ignores the advertisement itself.

We've experienced this first hand. While we do offer some CPM-based advertising on the site, we've made it clear that such display advertising is a waste for most companies. Our audience doesn't pay much attention to it at all. Ad blindness is the rule. Instead, we always suggest to companies who approach us about advertising that they would get a much better and much more valuable bang for their buck by engaging our community via the Insight Community. Doing so isn't strictly "advertising," but it actually gets the attention and engagement of the smart folks who hang around here. And, on top of that, beyond just getting people to see your brand, the company actually gets something of value back -- insightful analysis from our community.

And yet... some of the people we speak to can't even comprehend how getting people to engage is smarter than just pushing annoying banner ads that will get ignored. You can always tell when you're dealing with that sort of person when they start focusing on how to calculate the CPM value of an Insight Community case. They ask how many impressions it will get. These are people who would much rather one million people totally ignore their ad, though it gets loaded in the background somewhere, than have a committed group of targeted individuals actually engaging with the brand. It makes no sense at all, but it's the type of conclusion people come to when they focus so much on CPM. When the CPM rules all, then all you get are impressions -- and there are all sorts of games sites can (and often do) use to boost impressions with totally worthless traffic.

Hopefully advertisers really are waking up to the pointlessness of CPM as a an ad measurement system, and really are interested in exploring true engagement. That would be a huge step forward in taking online marketing and advertising from the level its at today (which is mostly just replicating print advertising, but online) to where it belongs tomorrow: taking real advantage of the interactive nature of the medium.

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The sponsors of this year's Halloween contest will be providing us with a number of product samples to give away throughout October. First up for grabs is a PIC32 Starter Kit, shown above, with a retail value of $50, together with a PIC32 I/O Expansion Board, shown below, which sells for $72. To enter, leave a comment describing what cool Halloween-themed project you'd make with it. The winner will be announced next Friday, October 9.

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

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Brian Law's Woodenclocks has four different, completely free, sets of plans available, in .DXF format, for wooden mechanical clocks you can download and build yourself.

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areYouAHypnotist writes to tell us the New York Times has the scoop on a new comic book about the quest for logical certainty in mathematics. "The story spans the decades from the late 19th century to World War II, a period when the nature of mathematical truth was being furiously debated. The stellar cast, headed up by Bertrand Russell, includes the greatest philosophers, logicians and mathematicians of the era, along with sundry wives and mistresses, plus a couple of homicidal maniacs, an apocryphal barber and Adolf Hitler."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jared Bouck, over at InventGeek, sent us news of this project for building an Arduino-controlled algae bioreactor. Jared is gaga over algae, so much so, he's created a new site, algaegeek.com. Here he explains his bioreactor design:

This project is an easy to use platform for one technique that is broadly being used to trick algae into reproducing. Each algae species reacts differently in many ways to its environment and a light frequency that affects one algae may have no effect at all on another. So I have created an easy to build microcontroller platform that can be variably set and allows for easy configuration to any bioreactor. The LEDs can be swapped out to experiment with different colors and even UV for some hydrogen producing species. The platform is flexible enough to add other features like relay control for lighting, pumps, agitation and cooling and heating. While you may not be an algae fan like I am there is tremendous potential in this simple organism and inventgeek applauds researchers worldwide in their efforts and research.

Arduino Strobe Algae Bioreactor

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Chalk up another victory for trademark bullying. Linden Lab, the creator of Second Life, apparently just got around to registering certain Second Life trademarks, but wasted no time using them to shove around at least one site that was only helping to get more people to use Second Life. Game Politics points us to the news that the operator of the Second Life in Education Wiki was on the receiving end of a legal nastygram. This is, frankly, dumb.

The site has been around for over two years without an issue, and helps educators better understand ways to use Second Life as a tool for education. It's clearly put together outside of the auspices of Linden Lab, but is a useful tool for educators who want to use the virtual world. It's the sort of thing Linden Lab should be encouraging. No "moron in a hurry" would go to the wiki and think that it was run by Linden Lab. Linden Lab's lawyers will, of course, claim that they have to monitor uses of their marks to avoid it going generic, but that's a cop out. They do not need to go after anyone who uses the mark in any way. In a case like this, where it's clearly an educational tool, not being used to describe a different or competing platform, there's no issue. Still, the operator of the site has decided it's not worth fighting, and will be changing the name of the site and moving it to a different domain. Too bad. Another win for needless trademark bullying.

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Why is Heather Lang fascinated with chess? Though she is a master player herself, her passion lies in coaching others, and helping guide them to the moment where they say "Ah, yes, got it!". In this video, she talks about running after-school chess clubs to get kids interested in the game.

Heather's interview is the latest installment in our Fascination series of interviews with notable scientists and technologists, sponsored by Dow Chemical.

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itwbennett writes "Sony announced Friday that it has developed a prototype power system based on magnetic resonance that can send 'a conventional 100 volt electricity supply over a distance of 50 centimeters to power a 22-inch LCD television.' Unfortunately, Sony's prototype wasted 1/5 of the power fed into it and additional losses 'occurred in circuitry connected to the secondary coil so the original 80 watts of power was cut by roughly a quarter to 60 watts once it had made its way through the system.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Audrey Kawasaki says:

REVO LA is putting on a benefit art show to raise money for "Sekolah Dasar Balem Wamena" (SDBW), a model school, which has recently become a light of HOPE in the corrupt regions of West Papua, Indonesia.

Featuring works from Ekundayo, Joshua Clay, Shepard Fairey, Mr. Brainwash and more. The show opens on October 4th sunday at the UCLA Ackerman Grand Ballroom.

I have two prints up for sale there.

Special edition large print of 'Two Sisters' and the Pressure Printing intaglio print 'Okimiyage'.

chrb writes to tell us that Dell's new Latitude Z has finally been delivered as promised, complete with ARM processor. Codenamed BlackTop, the device runs a modified version of Suse Linux, and is capable of near-instant bootup. Dell's research has apparently found that some early users spend 70% of their time in the Linux environment." Relatedly snydeq writes "Colombian computer maker Haleron has designed a netback that combines Atom processors in an effort to provide the performance of a standard laptop at a price more affordable to Latin Americans. The Swordfish Net N102 includes two Atom N270 processors running at 1.6GHz. Haleron worked for six months to modify Intel's 945 chipset to run the two processors. The processors divide the workload, much like a dual-core processor does, the company said. The netbook, which begs the question, when does a netbook stop being a netbook, comes with Windows XP Home Edition. 'We found that it works best on the Windows XP operating system. Both Windows Vista and the new Windows 7 performed below Windows XP in the load sharing department,' the company said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

So we were just talking about some new company called Free All Music, which has a plan to let people download free mp3s if they agree to watch a video ad first. I have my doubts about how well it would work... but apparently the company may also need to watch out for another issue: a bogus patent. You see, there's some company called Ultramercial, who not only holds a US patent 7,346,545 on the concept of distributing content where the user can get it for free after watching an ad, but Ultramercial recently went legal. Just a few days ago, it sued Hulu, YouTube and WildTangent for infringement over that very patent. Seriously, USPTO? A patent on watching an ad before getting free content? This is why patent examiners get such a bad rap.

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The Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) is a directed energy weapon (aka ray gun) developed by Boeing under a US military contract. According to an overview document (PDF) about Boeing's Directed Energy Systems program, "In August 2009, the ATL defeated a ground vehicle target from the air, demonstrating its first air-to-ground, high-power laser engagement of a tactically representative target." The video above documents that experiment, in which the laser weapon, mounted on a C-130H Hercules transport plane, was fired at a car. See the Boeing site for more videos, including aerial footage. (via Smithsonian Air & Space)

Rob Cockerham says: "I made a sandwich calculator which will allow people to choose bread, cheese and other sandwich toppings and find out how much it will cost to put it together at home."

Joe Stirt says: "Swiss luxury penmaker Montblanc has just come out with a $23,000 pen to commemorate the austere, ascetic leader of Indian independence's birth on this date (October 2) in 1869."

The limited-edition Ma­hatma Gandhi pen, priced at Rs1.1m ($23,000, €15,800, £14,400), has an 18-carat solid gold, rhodium-plated nib, engraved with Gandhi’s image, and “a saffron-coloured mandarin garnet” on the clip. The pens were unveiled this week, before the national holiday on Gandhi’s birthday.

Dilip R. Doshi, chairman of Entrack, Montblanc’s distributor in India, said the pen embodied Gandhi’s timeless philosophy of non-violence and respect for all living creatures. “We are creating a thing of simplicity and beauty that will last for centuries,” he said.

Fountains of dismay greet Montblanc's 'Gandhi Pen'

Bassam Tariq is a Boing Boing guestblogger who is the co-author of 30 Mosques. A blog that celebrated the NYC mosques during the Islamic month of Ramadan. He lives in Harlem, NY.

The McSweeney folks were going to give us five signed copies, but then Dave Eggers himself loved this Haiku idea so much he's giving us another five. So, we're giving out a total of ten signed copies of Zeitoun. How great is that?

We  had a blast reading all the entries. We went through them three times to make sure none of the 380 entries were missed. A big thank you to Lisa Katayama who also chimed in at the last minute and helped select some of the winning entries.

 It was really hard choosing ten, so in no particular order here are the winners!

Top Ten Haikus -

I need to read this
to know why Al Qaeda would
strike in a canoe
- Zagrobelny

I will not waffle:
Zeitoun defrosted my heart.
 Leggo My Eggers!
- gabius

Flooding and prison
Not as bad as office life
Try and prove me wrong
- 45Visigoth

The waters recede
Deeper problems are revealed
Please paddle faster
- jcartan

Raised in Bible Belt,
And just moved to New Orleans.
Want understanding.
- Maghrabi

They all felt the rain.
It rose back to the heavens.
Some folks swim there still.
- okalready

This was not the world
My fiction promised to me
Where are my jetpacks?
- JMike

Levees are broken
Foundations washed away
A book preserves
- inter_baltic

My grandpa just passed
He left me an old canoe
Teach me to paddle
- crankarms

Flooded New Orleans
I'd rather read about it
Than live it again
- improvgreg

-----

Honorable Mentions

"An awesome writer,
Eggers is," says Yoda. "My
Children he can have."
- Kelly Coyle

Lolcat in your boat
Katrina took my capnip
Can I haz book now?
- simonbarsinister

I deserve the book.
I'm a Nigerian prince
living in London.
- Dasbub

I like Dave Eggers
Cute girls see this on my shelf
Everybody wins
- Subdrill

The man in the mosque.
The woman breaking her fast.
I am just like them.
- Marsha Keefer

----

Congratulations to all those who won a signed copy of Zeitoun. Dave Eggers is eager to read the winning haikus so I'll be sending it to his folks as soon as I get the chance.

Next steps? I'll be collecting addresses and will send the books as soon as I get them.

CWmike writes to mention that IBM has launched LotusLive iNotes, a system designed to compete with GMail and Exchange that offers email, calendaring, and contact management. "Pricing starts at $3 per user per month, undercutting Google Apps Premier Edition, which costs $50 per user per year. IBM is aiming the software at large enterprises that want to migrate an on-premise e-mail system to SaaS (software as a service), particularly for users who aren't tied to a desk, such as retail workers. It is also hoping to win business from smaller companies interested in on-demand software but with concerns about security and service outages, such as those suffered by Gmail in recent months. LotusLive iNotes is based on technology IBM purchased from the Hong Kong company Outblaze."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Julie Lasky of Design Observer says:

I thought you guys might be interested in minutes I dug up from a 2003 cryogenics seminar, with attendees discussing the design of Timeship, a loopy facility for housing 10,000 frozen dead people. Much conversational chatter about things like "frozen religious leaders" and "vitrified brains." The architect of Timeship, Stephen Valentine, just came out with a book [Timeship: The Architecture of Immortality] about his still-unbuilt design.

Timeship

On her blog, Shelley Rickey shows you how to make Bad Dog Pâté.

The grass is made out of Hummus covered in Parsley with sprigs of Chives sticking out. The Poop is made from Aubergine Pate with lots of Paprika Powder added to give it..uh, a 'nice' poop color. The flies are made out of Olives and Onions. Happy Animal Day Everyone!

If you're thinking of building your own wort chiller for homebrewing, you might benefit from seeing how Instructables user iPodGuy installs a ball valve on a cooler.

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Yesterday, our online tech team, ever-vigilante to keep our site ship-shape, updated our RSS templates. Unfortunately, this caused RSS reader applications to think all the entries in the feed were new and downloaded them again. Oops.

We're sincerely sorry for any problems, inconvenience, or hair-pulling this may have caused. We'll try to make sure it doesn't happen again.

- The Mgt.

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So, we recently wrote about how Geoff Taylor, head of BPI (the UK's equivalent of the RIAA) seemed to be going after British Telecom (BT) with a variety of highly questionable claims about how BT had some sort of obligation to stop file sharing on its network, and that BT was using unauthorized file sharing to prop up its own business model. Both claims are flat out ridiculous, but BPI apparently was quite upset with us pointing that out. Of course, rather than actually respond in the comments where we might have a conversation about it, they've been sending us a series of emails, taking issue with our statements and laying out their claims in more detail. In the interest of an open debate, I'll post BPI's comments here, with my responses mixed in (but of course):

It's unfortunate that in a piece which wrongly charges BPI with making things up, you have misrepresented what our Chief Executive said. He did not say that "BT broke the law in not stopping file sharing", as you assert.

Hmm. Let's look at what he did say: "If you operate a commercial service and know it is being used to break the law, taking steps to ensure it is used legally is a cost of doing business." Perhaps there's a way to interpret that, which doesn't imply that BT is breaking the law in not stopping illegal activity, but it seems like that is the rather clear implication of his statement. But, BPI goes on to say they actually just meant BT has a "social responsibility" to stop the illegal activity. Ah.

BT fosters a reputation as a socially responsible company. BPI has questioned whether it's appropriate for such a company to do nothing about 100,000 instances "a small sample" of the illegal behaviour that BT knows is occurring on its network. BT knows about this activity because BPI provides detailed weekly notifications enabling BT to verify each and every infringement. BPI's notifications are based upon robust copyright infringement detection techniques which have been accepted by the UK High Court in over 150 cases.

I see. Would that be the same "robust copyright infringement detection system" that a recent study in the UK found was accusing elderly couples of downloading gay porn, along with a significant number of other "false positives"? Furthermore, there's quite a difference between knowing that there is illegal activity on the network and being able to stop it. As we noted in one of our original posts, in a land with due process (the UK has that, right?), people aren't guilty upon accusation. It appears that BPI has leapfrogged beyond even the draconian "three strikes" proposals and is looking for something of a "one strike."

But this is a serious question for BPI: really, what would you have BT do? You are informing them of activity you claim is infringing, but BT has no way of verifying that is a fact. Secondly, by the time you've informed BT, the activity is over. So what is BT to do at that point? Finally, how is BT to determine what ongoing actions are actually legitimate? Plenty of smart content creators choose to give away their works on purpose. Plenty of the record labels represented by BPI, even, have long histories of sending out mp3s themselves for promotional purposes. BT has no way of knowing which content is legit and which is not. Pretending that BT can wave its magic wand and suddenly be all-knowing is just silly.

Oh yeah, as for the claim that BT "fosters a reputation as a socially responsible company," I would think that such would include not violating the civil liberties of its customers by spying on what they do online in an effort to prop up someone's obsolete business model. Wouldn't you?

We understand that BT employs very sophisticated traffic and network analysis technologies that allows it to see the proportion of network traffic that is P2P. We have never said that all P2P traffic is illegal, because not all of it is. But the weekly notifications we send to BT relate solely to music files which we know are being shared illegally.

Again, BPI assumes that BT can magically tell which content is infringing and which is not. Just recently, we pointed out that EMI -- in the UK -- was happily distributing infringing mixtapes from Lily Allen off of an EMI owned website. If someone is downloading such content, should BT stop them? How could it possibly know which content in real time is authorized and which is not? And, more importantly, why should that be BT's responsibility? Just because the folks at the labels that make up BPI haven't been able to adapt? If BPI believes that individuals are breaking the law, why is it not going after those individuals? Obviously, because it knows that it would be a public relations nightmare. But just because BPI has a PR issue, it doesn't mean that BT should have to spend a ton of money trying to fix BPI members' broken business models.

Since 2003, annual UK broadband revenues have increased from £0.6 billion to £2.7 billion (2008). Recorded music revenues have fallen every year in the same period, principally due to illegal filesharing. It is therefore not difficult to see that the growth of BT's consumer broadband business has been assisted by the increase in illegal filesharing.

Wow. I mean... wow. Talk about a logical somersault. Seriously? First off, just because one industry's revenue falls and another's grows, it does not mean the two are causal. I mean, this is really, really basic stuff. Correlation, causation, blah blah blah. But, even then, the link is so tenuous as to be laughable. First, the claim that recorded music revenue is falling. Well... be careful. As we've been pointing out, PRS in the UK has admitted that the music industry is actually growing, not shrinking. Apparently, the folks at BPI don't read the PRS economic reports. If they did, they'd know that the study found that the overall industry is growing, with a big shift in money going from recorded music to live music.

BPI, you're blaming the wrong culprit! It ain't the ISPs, it's the live venues! And those bands playing live shows! Why aren't you demanding that they cut it out! After all, wouldn't it be the "socially responsible" thing for them to stop gigging so that people would go back to buying CDs?

And, of course, the whole claim that the decline in recorded music sales is "principally due to illegal filesharing" is also flat out, ridiculously, laughably wrong. Study after study has shown that file sharers tend to buy more. Isn't it a lot more likely that the decline in recorded music revenues is due to a shift in the marketplace due to technology? That technology has taken away the monopoly on distribution that BPI members used to have. Whenever you lose a monopoly on distribution, it's to be expected that you lose monopoly rents and your revenue goes down. That's Econ 101 (or maybe 201, if we're talking monopoly rents... depends on your econ prof).

Besides, we spend a lot of time here working with and talking to and about musicians who have embraced file sharing, and put in place smart business models to take advantage of it. And, you know what? They're doing better than they did in the past. The problem isn't "illegal filesharing." It's bad and obsolete business models. Those who are embracing file sharing in combination with a good business model are doing better than in the past. That rules out "file sharing" as the problem, and suggests the real problem is BPI's resistance to smarter business models.

Other ISPs are recognising that it is not sustainable in the long-term for a high percentage of ISPs revenues to be based on the transmission of illegal data, and that in future they need to share in revenues from providing high quality entertainment services for their customers

This is again ridiculous. ISP revenues are not "based on the transmission of illegal data." ISP revenues are based on the fact that pretty much everyone needs an internet connection these days just to function. It's how people communicate, you know? Claiming that BT is making any more revenue because people file share is laughable. People are using the internet because it's useful for all sorts of things. Hell, we keep hearing ISPs saying that they need to break net neutrality because all this file sharing is filling up their network and costing them too much in network upgrades. How can they be making so much money off of file sharing if it's costing them so much?

Once again, this is typical entertainment industry drivel. They totally overestimate how much their own stuff is "worth" to the wider ecosystem, and then demand that everyone just pay up. Except... that's not the way the world works. The world works by having smart people with smart business models figuring out ways to make people want to give you money, not by sitting back and demanding others just hand over money.

So, thanks for the emails, BPI, but at least work on making your statements a little more believable next time. And, as always, our comments are wide open for you to reply to and interact directly with people here.

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davecl writes "The Herschel space observatory has just released stunning five-color images of a section of our own galaxy, showing the complex twisted structures of the interstellar medium that drive star and planet formation. The images are the first produced using two of Herschel's instruments, SPIRE and PACS, simultaneously and show the power of this approach. This image is just 2x2 degrees in size, but future Herschel programs will image the entire galactic plane at this sensitivity and resolution. Full scale science operations with Herschel begin in just a few weeks. More information on the project can be found from the ESA, the mission blog (which I contribute to) and from the SPIRE instrument team. The BBC is also covering this story."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This photo-essay at Planet magazine of a purported "new tribe of Ukrainian Amazons," shot by French photographer Guillaume Herbaut, is receiving a lot of attention online. The magazine article is the only source I see for the following background on the women in these photos:

In the Ukraine, a country where females are victims of sexual trafficking and gender oppression, a new tribe of empowered women is emerging. Calling themselves the "Asgarda", the women seek complete autonomy from men. Residing in the Carpathian Mountains, the tribe is comprised of 150 women of varying ages, primarily students, led by 30 year-old Katerina Tarnouska. Reviving the tribal traditions of the Scythian Amazons of ancient Greek mythology, the Asgarda train in martial arts, taught by former Soviet karate master, Volodymyr Stepanovytch, and learn life skills and sciences in order to become ideal women. Little physical documentation existed on the tribe, until recently, when renowned French photographer, met the Asgarda back in 2004 in the midst of the Orange Revolution.

Is this the official Asgarda website? Does anyone know more about them? Are they a cult? A lesbian martial arts club? A planned community? Or manufactured narrative for a sweet series of photos by some French dude in an art magazine? I was inclined to think the whole thing was a hoax, like the "motorcycle ride through Chernobyl" hoax that made the blog rounds years ago, but maybe that's because a tribe of noble Ukrainian girl-warriors sounds too awesome to be true in this cold, cruel world.

Techdirt points out a great postmortem for the Rocky Mountain News, a newspaper that ended up shutting down because they couldn't adapt to a world beyond print. While long, the talk (in both video and print) is incredibly candid coming from someone who lived through it and shares at least some portion of the blame. "It seems like pretty much everything was based on looking backwards, not forward. There was little effort to figure out how to better enable a community, or any recognition that the community of people who read the paper were the organizations true main asset. ... The same game is playing out not just in newspapers, but in a number of other businesses as well. Like the Rocky Mountain News, those businesses are looking backwards and defining themselves on the wrong terms, while newer startups don't have such legacy issues to deal with."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This deep trashcan appears to be an ad for Volkswagen, however I really like idea of giving regular objects impossible properties. They claim that it caused people to throw away more trash than a regular trashcan, but I'm skeptical that that effect would last for long. Still, neat idea!

[via neatorama]

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Neuroendocronologists report that a nasal spray containing a chemical secreted by the body's own immune system can improve the formation of long-term memories while sleeping. Lisa Marshall and team at Germany's University of Lubeck studied the impact of the substance, interlukin-6, on emotional and procedural memory retention. From the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology:

To make this discovery, Marshall and colleagues had 17 healthy young men spend two nights in the laboratory. On each night after reading either an emotional or neutral short story, they sprayed a fluid into their nostrils which contained either interleukin-6 or a placebo fluid. The subsequent sleep and brain electric activity was monitored throughout the night. The next morning subjects wrote down as many words as they could remember from each of the two stories. Those who received the dose of IL-6 could remember more words.

"You must remember this: Scientists develop nasal spray that improves memory"

A few weeks back, we noted that VoIP provider MagicJack had begun blocking calls to certain numbers it didn't like -- specifically free conference numbers that were using a regulatory arbitrage loophole that required the networks of incoming calls to certain rural telcos to pay huge connection fees, creating incentives for those telcos to develop cheap or free services that brought in lots of calls. Then, a few weeks ago, it came out that Google was blocking similar calls via its Google Voice offering. I still believe that offering a telephone service that connects to POTS requires that you complete all non-fee-based (i.e., 900 number) calls, according to an FCC order in 2007 on this particular subject. Google and MagicJack disagree.

However, with more and more people switching to VoIP services, combined with more and more VoIP providers going down this route, it's becoming a big issue, quickly. Harold Feld notes that Speakeasy is the latest VoIP provider to go down this route, blocking similar calls. To Speakeasy's credit, however, unlike both MagicJack and Google, it at least clearly alerted customers to this change, and also publicly lists out the blocked numbers. It's amazing that Google and MagicJack did not do either of these things.

Still, as Feld notes, this is becoming a big deal. It's likely that more and more VoIP providers are going to quickly go down this same path, and the phone system will start to splinter. This is bad. For a phone system to work, you shouldn't have a situation where the service you use can arbitrarily refuse to complete certain phone calls. The real answer is to get rid of the arbitrage loopholes. The rural telcos are clearly abusing the rules. Yes, this could seriously curtail various free conference calling solutions, but that's better than the alternative.

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New research suggests that a slurry of wood ash and piss makes a good fertilizer for tomatoes. It's the nitrogen in urine and the calcium and magnesium in the ash that does the trick. After promising results in a greenhouse, University of Kuopio environmental scientist Surendra Pradhan and his colleagues plan a real world test in Nepal. From National Geographic:

Human urine and wood ash have each separately been used as fertilizer for centuries. But until now, no one had explored applying them together...

Urine can be collected from eco-friendly, urine-diverting toilets. Or farmers could just collect their pee in cans.

The researchers estimate a single person could supply enough urine to fertilize roughly 6,300 tomato plants a year—yielding some 2.4 tons of tomatoes.

The farmer would just need to give plants ash three days or more after applying urine...

One potential setback may be that pharmaceuticals and hormones excreted in human urine—such as remnants of birth control pills—could negatively impact crops, Pradhan said. For instance, such byproducts could promote antibiotic resistance in local bacteria or get absorbed by the plants.

"Human Pee With Ash Is a Natural Fertilizer, Study Says"

Michael Geist sez, "The Canadian government has introduced Internet surveillance legislation that requires ISPs to disclose customer information without a warrant. Peter Van Loan, the Minister in charge, claims that a Vancouver kidnapping earlier this year shows the need for these powers. I did some digging and shows this to be a lie - the Vancouver police acknowledge that the case did not involve an ISP request and the suspect is now in custody."

Van Loan's Misleading Claims: Case for Lawful Access Not Closed

An anonymous reader writes "This week the House Energy and Commerce Committee passed the 'Informed P2P User Act' and has sent it along to the full House for consideration. The bill, which appears to have heavy support on both sides of the political fence simply states that P2P software must not install extra software or prevent users from removing it, in addition to being 'clear and conspicuous' about which files are being shared and getting user consent to share them. 'Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), the powerful committee chairman, opened the markup session by warning about "the danger of inadvertent sharing of sensitive information through the use, or misuse, of certain file sharing programs. Tax returns, medical files, and even classified government documents have been found on these networks. The purpose of H.R. 1319 is to reduce inadvertent disclosures of sensitive information by making the users of this software more aware of the risks involved."'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today at Boing Boing Gadgets, we saw the original IBM thinkpad, a lightbulb doorknob, and a crazy man flashed a gun at the Apple store. Our visit to Mercedes' research lab yielded two more videos: how to pair an iPhone with the console, and the company's plans to create an in-car appstore for its in-dash computers. Also, Ooma ($250 lifetime subscription to VoIP) has new hardware out, HP updated its Windows Home Server box, and reviewers of the PSPGo nailed Sony on the pricing. You may also, thanks to Skymall, carry a portable bidet with you.

Yesterday was a big day for anthropology, seeing the first publication of some 15 years worth of analysis of a 4.4 million-year-old fossil skeleton of Ardipithecus Ramidus first discovered by Gen Suwa, then a graduate student of Berkeley paleoanthropologist Tim White, in Ethiopia, in 1992. Science magazine has made all eleven papers freely available to anyone willing to register at their site.

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gpronger writes "Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones, but Glass Will Certainly Mend Them! The old schoolyard ditty may be changed to reflect developments using metallic glass that will dissolve in situ instead of the traditional stainless steel or titanium hardware, which require removal by surgery once the bone has healed. Physics World reports that researcher Jörg Löffler at ETH Zurich has created an alloy of 60% magnesium, 35% zinc, and 5% calcium, molded in the form of metallic glass. Through rapid cooling, the alloy forms a molecularly amorphous glass that slowly dissolves over time, supporting the injury long enough for healing, then slowly dissolving away."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

gpronger writes "Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones, but Glass Will Certainly Mend Them! The old schoolyard ditty may be changed to reflect developments using metallic glass that will dissolve in situ instead of the traditional stainless steel or titanium hardwar, which require removal by surgery once the bone has healed. Physics World reports that researcher Jörg Löffler at ETH Zurich has created an alloy of 60% magnesium, 35% zinc, and 5% calcium, molded in the form of metallic glass. Through rapid cooling, the alloy forms a molecularly amorphous glass that slowly dissolves over time, supporting the injury long enough for healing, then slowly dissolving away."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The "Copyright Alliance" is a propaganda organization put together by the entertainment industry, pretending to focus on "the rights of creators," but which has always been focused on strengthening the monopolies of the middlemen (the same folks who quite frequently screw over the creators). Recently, the Copyright Alliance came out with its latest astroturfing attempt, with an automatic letter generator that will pop out cloned letters that the Copyright Alliance itself will send to President Obama and Vice President Biden. The tone of the letter is rather silly, as it seems to suggest that Obama and Biden haven't been supporting the entertainment industry's position all along -- and that there's some huge legislative movement afoot to wipe out artists' rights. It is, as William Patry notes, yet another attempt by the entertainment industry to create a folk devil and a moral panic in an attempt to further prop up its business model. Patry, not surprisingly, takes little time ripping the letter to shreds:

It is very hard not to laugh in the face of such ugliness and to wonder where the reason is in such dysfunctional nonsense, but what came to my mind was Helen Reddy's 1972 anthem, which began: "I am woman, hear me roar/In numbers too big to ignore." The moral panic in the Alliance's letter is that the very essence of what makes America America is threatened by evil forces that supposedly have launched an assault demanding that Helen Reddy and her 11 million colleagues give their works away for free, that the evil doers be permitted to have their way with the vestal virgins of America's copyright sweethearts. This is of course complete baloney. Name one piece of pending legislation that would accomplish what the Alliance claims. Name one lawsuit currently pending that would accomplish what the Alliance claims. There are none.

Indeed. At first, I had considered setting up our own "letter generator" in response, highlighting the problems of stricter copyright law, the vast and ever growing evidence of how copyright law is misused by the very organizations that back the Copyright Alliance to prop up obsolete business models rather than innovate. On top of that, such a letter would highlight all of the creative content creators who have been embracing new technologies for creating, promoting and distributing content along with embracing new business models and finding that they work better than the old models.

But, honestly, I'd like to believe that our President and Vice President aren't swayed by a bunch of form letters from an industry propagandist, and that, instead, people would be inspired to write their own letters highlighting the creativity that new technology has allowed -- and how some legacy industries have repeatedly abused copyright law to stifle such innovation and creativity many times over. Luckily, Jonathan Melber has a nice prototype of just such an open letter, where he highlights our cultural heritage, and how content creators regularly build on the works of others in creating something new and wonderful -- but how that tradition is often blocked by an industry that doesn't like outsiders trying to route around its control.

Separately, the Copyright Alliance should be ashamed of itself for blatantly lying with statistics. It tries to claim the right to speak for $1.52 trillion of the nation's GDP. This is pure farce. It's based on a study done by (you guessed it) the industry itself in the form of the International Intellectual Property Alliance, which is yet another propaganda/lobbying organization made up of the other lobbying/propaganda groups representing different industries: including the MPAA, the RIAA, the BSA and the ESA among others. In other words, hardly an unbiased source.

The methodology of the study is pretty laughable. It's based on WIPO's stated methodology, which is basically "count absolutely everything that even remotely touches on copyright" and then assume that every bit of that revenue is because of strong copyright laws. Hell, by the methodology used in the report, all of the revenue we earn here -- despite all the content on this site being public domain -- gets credited to "the copyright industry." It's such a typical DC-insider move: use totally bogus stats to bolster a weak argument. But that's the game that the Copyright Alliance has played since its inception. Just defining all those industries as "copyright industries" is misleading, because it implies that their revenue is due to copyright. But it's much worse than that. Companies that make furniture or jewelry are specifically listed as being a part of "the copyright industry" for purposes of this calculation. Yes, because without copyright, no one would be making furniture, right?

Even more amusing -- that same report shows continued and strong growth in what it defines as the copyright industries. So much for that massive attack destroying American society, huh? And this highlights the intellectual dishonesty of the Copyright Alliance and its backers. For the sake of making themselves look "big" they have to throw everything and the kitchen sink into their estimates and show that it's "growing." But for the sake of demonizing anyone who might seek to stop abuse of copyright laws, they have to claim that those industries are under constant attack, even as they grow to record levels. Propaganda at its finest.

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Bassam Tariq is a Boing Boing guestblogger who is the co-author of 30 Mosques. A blog that celebrated the NYC mosques during the Islamic month of Ramadan. He lives in Harlem, NY.



Many of you may remember my post on Can't Take It With You, a landmark photo exhibit showcasing Muslims in America that's opening next week in New York. Omar Mullick, the photographer of the exhibit, invited me to the gallery space yesterday and we had a little chat.

Bassam: How are you feeling?

Omar: A little tired, a little happy. We've been working around the clock.

Bassam: So, first things first, where did the title for the show come from?

Omar: It's the opening lines of a Radiohead song called Reckoner. It had a pretty strong impact on me when I heard it. I realized that I was as capable of going to Radiohead or The Brian Jonestown Massacre as I was Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan for the same notes of transcendence....

.....I think that speaks volumes about me being Western and Muslim. It evokes other things, too, but some things I think are better left unarticulated. I'll tell you some thing great though: a photographer friend mentioned to me that he thought the title was a comment on photography and the effort to fix things and moments that slip by. On the same day a Muslim friend read the title as a comment on mortality and shot me an email to that effect.

Bassam: Seven years is a long time for a road trip to take photos.

Omar: It was on and off, in between commercial gigs or when I was traveling.

Bassam: Why show it now then?

Omar: Well the point of the project was to make a broad brushstroke -- I wanted to get at some thing about the country, about the sweep of the place and this moment. This community was a way in to that narrative. They are at the center of what we will accept as American or Western - right on the edge of what we think of as the 'other.' What can I say? I am not one to look away. I don't think I answered your question, though. I only feel now, I think, that I got a sense of this being an American narrative, and an irrevocable one, and the sheer breadth of it.



Bassam: So how do you edit that down?

Omar: With difficulty! I tried editing photos as if I were marrying the images to statistical facts about the community. That was an abject failure. The whole thing died on the page. It's a series of impressions in the end - I make no pretensions about being objective. I think the job is to be transparent about your biases. Consistently, I was drawn in the gallery edit to photos of people or moments who problematized some of the prevailing stereotypes. In the end though, when the high concepts paled, I kept coming back to things that move me about photography: wonder, awe, light - looking for the humanity in people.

Bassam: Why black and white? Why film?

Omar: I can give you all these explanations but to be perfectly honest I liked the aesthetic for this project. It's that simple. I also love what film does when you point it directly in to the light. I am interested in where all that starts to break. My bread and butter is digital though, so don't read in to my remarks some aversion to digital - far from it

Bassam: Getting back to the edit, we had a question from a reader asking after the emphasis on scarved Muslim women in the edit. Do you have women in the show who do not have scarves? And is my reading of this emphasis fair?

Omar: Great question. Yes, I do have women in the show who are Muslim and are not wearing scarves. Of the photos that come to mind, there is one photograph I am particularly fond of that shows a young girl wearing the hijab (headscarf) in New York talking to an elderly Afghan Muslim woman at her store in the West Village. The elderly woman is not wearing a scarf. I like that shot because the prevailing stereotype of scarves is that an elderly generation imposes it on the younger one. The expectation is reversed here. Incidentally, that same photo has the Afghan husband, cheerful and beardless, smoking a cigarette outside his shop. I loved that. I also have another photo where a young girl is wearing a hijab and riding a bmx and another girl behind her who does not wear a scarf has got a riding helmet on, probably for safety. I thought that's subtle, and a little playful.

 

Bassam: Any other photography books that depict Muslims that you like?

Omar: Sure, Joachim Ladefoged did a book called The Albanians - I used to travel with that in my backpack. Fazal Sheikh: Ramadan Moon. Stanley Greene did a book called Open Wound on Chechnya. All wonderful.

Bassam: So what's next?

Omar: I've been shooting a lot of pictures of a corner in the Brooklyn music scene that I am particularly enamored with. I am curious to see where that goes. I have to shoot things I am a little in love with.

The gallery opens October 8th and runs till November 5th in New York.

RSVP at the Facebook event

(photos by Michael Kirby Smith, taken on the fire escape at GalleryFCB)

Check out the Make:NYC meeting next Wednesday!

Ready for some high-flyin' fall festivities??

Challenge: Airplane Battle

Makers will construct their most elegant of aeronautical designs in a head-to-head competition for ultimate performance. Basic construction materials will be made available!

Show and Tell

Meet your fellow NYC Makers and show off your creations! Bring your gadgets, gizmos, sketches, ideas, anything you'd like to put in the spotlight. We encourage NYC Makers to collaborate on and discuss DIY projects. If you're planning to bring a project, drop us a note at meetings@makenyc.org.

If you'd like to attend we have plenty of space for everyone, but please RSVP!

Make:NYC Meeting 15
Wednesday October 7th, 6:30PM
Bug Labs
598 Broadway at Houston
4th floor
New York, NY 10012

Do you have an event coming up? Check out the Maker Events Calendar and add yours!

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Over at LA Weekly, a photo gallery of kits used to slay vampires. This may shock you, but at least some of these are hoaxes. (thanks, Calpernia Addams!)

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Red Hat has filed a friend of the court brief with the Supreme Court in regards to the In Re Bilski case, which has become incredibly important due to the possibility that it could redefine the scope of patentable subject matter in a way that affects software patents. In the brief, Red Hat argues that software should not be considered patentable subject matter because it causes economic harm due to patents being granted with vague subject matter, which makes it impossible to say that a given piece of software doesn't arguably infringe upon someone's patent. They also point out Knuth's famous quote that you can't differentiate between 'numeric' and 'non-numeric' algorithms, because numbers are no different from other kinds of precise information." Read below for the submitter's thoughts on an earlier amicus brief filed in the Bilski case by Professor Lee Hollaar.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Aman Ali, a BoingBoing guest blogger, is the co-author of 30 Mosques, a Ramadan adventure taking him to a different mosque in New York City every day for a month. I'll spare you guys the annoyance of raving about how good the TV show Mad Men is. But now apparently Sesame Street has gotten Mad Men fever. My friend's 3-year-old son saw the clip and said he wants to grow up and be like Don Draper. I said "You and me both kid, you and me both."

Faith Erin Hicks's Zombies Calling is a fun, fast graphic novel about Canadian university students who battle zombies on campus. The protagonist, Joss, is an incorrigible zombie movie nut who argues endlessly with her roommates about the internal consistency of zombie genre films and the rules that heroes must follow when they are confronted by the walking dead. She's also a helpless anglophile who peppers her speech with affectations like "crumbs," which annoys her roommates but is actually very sweet for the reader.

Zombies Calling fits nicely into the Scott Pilgrim mode: rich with pop-culture reference, snappy dialog, and a delightful disregard for the boundary between reality and fantasy.

Hicks has got lots going for her -- great illustration and writing style, funny dialog and likeable characters -- but what I was most impressed by was her cinematic talent for making a zombie chase-scene come alive with real tension through clever panel-layout and illustrations. I didn't expect to have my heart thumping over a funnybook about zombies, but thump it did.

Zombies Calling

Just Posted: Our in-depth review of the Pentax K-7. When it arrived in May we were impressed by the way the K-7 managed to squeeze all the features of its predecessor and a handful of new tricks into such a compact package. It still has a 14.6 megapixel CMOS sensor but gains a new metering system, revised autofocus, a faster shutter mechanism, a high resolution LCD, faster continuous shooting and the ability to shoot HD movies. And, as that svelte little magnesium alloy body has been passed around the office, it's continued to leave a good impression. So, how did it fare in our studio tests?

David Carpenter is an effects professional, so this tutorial he's posted looks especially interesting. Apparently the last three steps (fitting, electronics, and painting) are still incomplete, but the first five are worth the click.

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

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I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Thanks to a recent ruling (PDF) by the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, corporations now have a right to 'personal privacy,' due to the application of a carelessly worded definition in the Freedom of Information Act. FOIA exempts disclosure of certain records, but only if it 'could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.' But in its definitions, FOIA makes the mistake of broadly defining 'person' to include legal entities, like corporations. The FCC didn't think that 'personal privacy' could apply to a corporation, so they ignored AT&T's claim that releasing data from an investigation into how AT&T was overcharging certain customers would violate the corporation's privacy. The Third Circuit thought that the FCC's actions were contrary to what the law actually says. So now the FCC has to jump through more hoops to show that releasing data on their investigation into AT&T's overcharging is 'warranted' within the meaning of 5 USC 552(b)(7)(c) before it can release anything."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Excellent news. In the ongoing case involving Autodesk and a guy, Timothy Vernor, who was trying to sell legally acquired used versions of AutoCAD on eBay, the district court judge has ruled that Autodesk has no right to restrict the sales of its used software. This wasn't a huge surprise, as the court indicated as much last year, when it refused to grant Autodesk's motion to dismiss the case. But this is an important ruling for a variety of reasons. Beyond just reiterating the well-established right of first sale on software, it also helps clarify that when you by a piece of software, you own it, rather than just license it. As the judge noted:

"The transfer of AutoCAD copies via the license is a transfer of ownership."

The judge also mocked Autodesk's claim that allowing such sales to go forward promoted piracy:

"Vernor's sale of AutoCAD packages promote piracy no more so than Autodesk's sales of the same packages."

Autodesk, of course, will likely appeal the ruling, so this isn't done yet. But, so far, this is definitely good news.

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SubtleGuest writes "In the latest issue of Cancer Research, a breakthrough study shows that Metformin, a cheap and common diabetic medicine, kills cancer stem cells — the cells postulated to be responsible for tumor resistance and recurrence after chemotherapy ( research abstract here). It has been known that diabetics taking Metformin experience lower cancer rates, and now it is apparent why that may be and how it may apply to non-diabetics as well. When combined with Doxorubicin to kill non-stem cancer cells, the results are nothing short of astonishing: total remission in a mouse xenograft model. The results are achieved at levels below the dosage needed for diabetic control, opening many new avenues in cancer treatment and prevention."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is a simple kludge, really, but it's worked out remarkably well, considering I knocked it together in about 40 minutes 5 years ago and it's seen almost monthly use since then. What I started with was a pile of junk grill and smoker components, most of which came from a Brinkmann "Gourmet" smoker (as shown below) that my mother once accidentally set on fire. Lots of electric smokers have this three-part lid/body/base construction, however, and the exact make and model are not important.

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Tomorrow we're doing a live Rebooting The News podcast at the SF Hilton. It's going to present an interesting challenge because it will be in a room with a number of people talking, and without spending a lot of money on new equipment, I have to get them all on the recording with a single mike.

Which leads to this: omnidirectional microphone.

I'd like to have the room set up as a big conference room with seats around a table, and a single microphone in the middle of the table.

There will be no time for sound checks, it has to work the first time.

Whatever I buy has to be here by tomorrow mid-day. If it's not here, we'll have to go on without it.

It would also be nice to webcast it through BlogTalkRadio and perhaps Ustream or similar services.

One possibility, admittely low-tech, is to have everyone call in on their cell phones!

Any advice people have would be quite welcome.

Thomas Hawk sez, "I was disappointed after reading about the new Walt Disney Family Museum's opening this week in San Francisco's Presidio via the SF Chronicle to learn that the museum has chosen to prohibit photography. For a cultural institution this is unfortunate. With many public museums moving more recently towards more open photography policies (including the EMP in Seattle just last month) it is disappointing to see a new museum opening with a closed policy. The Walt Disney Family Museum should consider following the lead of most of the other museums in the Bay Area and open their museum up to photographers."

As Thomas notes in his post, the Disney parks have an exemplary open photography policy, too; one that works superbly for Disney, engaging its fans and customers with its products and resorts. It's a real failure of confidence in their own success to impose a policy like this in the museum.

The New Walt Disney Family Museum's No Photography Policy Sucks (Thanks, Thomas!)

alphadogg notes that the 2009 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded yesterday evening in Cambridge, MA. (You may find that site has been pre-Slashdotted; and improbable.com's video feeds of the ceremony don't work at the moment either.) News.com.au has coverage of the bra that converts quickly to two gas masks, a study of why pregnant women don't tip over, the award for literature, and other gems. "Ireland's police won the literature prize from writing more than 50 traffic tickets to a frequent visitor and speeder named Prawo Jazdy. In Polish, this means 'driver's license.' Pathologist Stephan Bolliger and colleagues at the University of Bern in Switzerland won for a study they did to determine whether an empty beer bottle does more or less damage to the human skull than a full one in a bar fight."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this year, we wrote about Tim Langdell and his claim of owning a trademark on the word "edge" when used in any kind of video game. Of course, Langdell last came out with a game himself in 1994, which makes the whole trademark claim pretty iffy. You need to be using your mark in commerce for it to be valid. Instead, Langdell just seems to be trying to stop anyone else from using the word "edge." Thankfully (as a bunch of you sent in), EA has finally decided to stand up and ask the USPTO to dump Langdell's trademarks. Beyond claiming that the marks are abandoned, EA is also claiming that they were obtained through fraudulent means. Either way, it seems that the basic "moron in a hurry" test should knock out most of Langdell's claims. It's too bad how rarely that test is used...

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Jeffrey sez, "We're getting more and more excellent panoramic photographers uploading their spherical panoramas to our site - but this one made me splutter with delight. Hundreds, or maybe thousands, of yogis with their feet sticking up in the air, as far as you can see, while the sun rises in the distance. I feel more relaxed just looking at it.... If you right-click on the panorama and then select 'little planet' you get a yoga planet of legs...."

Umag Asanas At Sunset (Thanks, Jeffrey!)

The Homebrew Alarm Purse is a simple, fashionable way to add an audible alarm to your purse.
Thanks go to Norene Leddy for the original article in MAKE, Volume 19.
To download The Homebrew Alarm Purse video click here and subscribe in iTunes.
Check out the complete Alarm Purse article in MAKE, Volume 19
and you can see that in our Digital Edition.

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The Alarm Purse is a simple, fashionable way to add an audible alarm to your handbag.
Thanks go to Norene Leddy for the original article in MAKE, Volume 19.
View the PDF of this project. and then subscribe to MAKE Magazine for other great projects
you can do over the weekend.

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theodp writes "Evil is in the eye of the beholder, but there's certainly not much to like in the newly-disclosed Apple patent applications for Systems and Methods for Provisioning Computing Devices. Provisioning, says Apple, allows carriers to 'specify access limitations to certain device resources which may otherwise be available to users of the device.' So what problem are we trying to solve here? 'Mobile devices often have capabilities that the carriers do not want utilized on their networks,' explains Apple. 'Various applications on these devices may also need to be restricted.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CWmike writes "A two-day Distracted Driving Summit in Washington concluded Thursday, after experts raised multiple thorny questions on how to reduce cell phone and texting while driving, with a big emphasis placed on driver and employer responsibility. But that was not before President Obama signed an executive order that tells all federal employees not to engage in texting while driving government vehicles. [US Transportation Secretary Ray] LaHood also announced that his department would ban text messaging altogether and restrict cell phone use by truck and interstate bus drivers, and disqualify school bus drivers from receiving commercial driver's licenses if they have been convicted of texting while driving. His department also plans to make permanent some restrictions placed on the use of cell phones in rail operations, he added without offering further details. The executive order 'shows the federal government is leading by example' and 'sends a signal that distracted driving is dangerous,' LaHood said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Console hacker extraordinaire Benjamin J. Heckendorn (aka Ben Heck) built this one-off PS3 Slim laptop for portable gaming without compromise. Along with the PS3 Slim, Ben incorporated a Gateway 1775W widescreen LCD display and had a little extra room left over for cable storage.

Related:
Interview with Ben Heck
HOW TO - Design a 2D robo-hand & Atari 800 laptop
HOW TO - Make a Wii laptop
Archive: Benjamin J. Heckendorn

[thanks, Thomas!]

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John Temple, the former editor, president and publisher of the now shuttered Rocky Mountain News, has been running a great blog about issues from the newspaper industry over the past few months. He consistently has been saying stuff that made me wonder why the Rocky Mountain News didn't seem to do the sorts of things he seemed to constantly talk about... and now he's explained why. He recently gave a talk at Google about lessons from the collapse of the Rocky Mountain News in both text and video form. It's long, but well worth watching/reading: You should take in the whole thing, rather than just reading my summary, but he basically goes over the last decade and a half or so of mistakes that the Rocky Mountain News made in terms of trying to figure out the online business. The key takeaways aren't that surprising if you're a regular reader around here. The company kept defining itself as a newspaper company, not a news organization (or, better yet, a community builder). Everything it did was based on how it would impact the paper edition. The focus was not on competing with web properties and services, but on the other major newspaper in town, the Denver Post. Things got so bad that when the Columbine Massacre happened, the newsroom refused to give any news to the web people, because they were afraid that the Denver Post would "steal" it.

It seems like pretty much everything was based on looking backwards, not forward. There was little effort to figure out how to better enable a community, or any recognition that the community of people who read the paper were the organizations true main asset.

The talk is amazingly honest, coming from someone who accepts a share of the blame for what happened, and should be required reading/viewing for anyone in the media business, new or old. The same game is playing out not just in newspapers, but in a number of other businesses as well. Like the Rocky Mountain News, those businesses are looking backwards and defining themselves on the wrong terms, while newer startups don't have such legacy issues to deal with.

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John Temple, the former editor, president and publisher of the now shuttered Rocky Mountain News, has been running a great blog about issues from the newspaper industry over the past few months. He consistently has been saying stuff that made me wonder why the Rocky Mountain News didn't seem to do the sorts of things he seemed to constantly talk about... and now he's explained why. He recently gave a talk at Google about lessons from the collapse of the Rocky Mountain News in both text and video form. It's long, but well worth watching/reading: You should take in the whole thing, rather than just reading my summary, but he basically goes over the last decade and a half or so of mistakes that the Rocky Mountain News made in terms of trying to figure out the online business. The key takeaways aren't that surprising if you're a regular reader around here. The company kept defining itself as a newspaper company, not a news organization (or, better yet, a community builder). Everything it did was based on how it would impact the paper edition. The focus was not on competing with web properties and services, but on the other major newspaper in town, the Denver Post. Things got so bad that when the Columbine Massacre happened, the newsroom refused to give any news to the web people, because they were afraid that the Denver Post would "steal" it.

It seems like pretty much everything was based on looking backwards, not forward. There was little effort to figure out how to better enable a community, or any recognition that the community of people who read the paper were the organizations true main asset.

The talk is amazingly honest, coming from someone who accepts a share of the blame for what happened, and should be required reading/viewing for anyone in the media business, new or old. The same game is playing out not just in newspapers, but in a number of other businesses as well. Like the Rocky Mountain News, those businesses are looking backwards and defining themselves on the wrong terms, while newer startups don't have such legacy issues to deal with.

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Today's XKCD pays sweet homage to the GNU/Linux user's touching faith in his fellow users' industrious hackery.

xkcd Surgery

Today's XKCD pays sweet homage to the GNU/Linux user's touching faith in his fellow users' industrious hackery.

xkcd Surgery

Genius: "This small, sixteen-page pamphlet is produced to put inside the postage-paid, business-reply envelopes that come with junk mail offers. Every envelope collected is stuffed with the pamphlet and mailed back to its original company."

The pamphlet depicts (in the style of an airplane emergency card) office workers snapping, destroying their workplace and turning into carnal, hunter-gatherer communards.

Business Reply Mail

Genius: "This small, sixteen-page pamphlet is produced to put inside the postage-paid, business-reply envelopes that come with junk mail offers. Every envelope collected is stuffed with the pamphlet and mailed back to its original company."

The pamphlet depicts (in the style of an airplane emergency card) office workers snapping, destroying their workplace and turning into carnal, hunter-gatherer communards.

Business Reply Mail

The Improbable Movie Trading Cards contain the answer to the question that's plagued us all for decades: "What would the kid's merchandising for Apocalypse Now look like?"

I was addicted to movie trading cards as a kid, especially the stickers that came in the packs, so I'm glad to see that this collection contains a few of 'em.

Improbable movie trading cards (Thanks, Danny!)

The Improbable Movie Trading Cards contain the answer to the question that's plagued us all for decades: "What would the kid's merchandising for Apocalypse Now look like?"

I was addicted to movie trading cards as a kid, especially the stickers that came in the packs, so I'm glad to see that this collection contains a few of 'em.

Improbable movie trading cards (Thanks, Danny!)

Roel sez, "We're a casual gaming company from the Netherlands and we just finished a very big wall painting (containing several game and anime characters) for our meeting room."

Love this -- it's like one of those Sharpie pen murals crossed with the back of my Junior High notebook.

Our awesome meeting room (Thanks, Roel!)

Roel sez, "We're a casual gaming company from the Netherlands and we just finished a very big wall painting (containing several game and anime characters) for our meeting room."

Love this -- it's like one of those Sharpie pen murals crossed with the back of my Junior High notebook.

Our awesome meeting room (Thanks, Roel!)

Alex from Worldchanging sez, "It's our sixth anniversary today, so we're running the 70 of our most popular and enduring pieces, in the 7 categories - Cities, Shelter, Business, Politics, Planet, Community, Stuff - we cover. Some great stuff here, which leads on to other great stuff, over 10,500 pieces in all... if you want a quick reminder of the ideas Worldchanging's been exploring these last six years, you couldn't do better than this. It's sort of like How to Change the World, an Overview"

Worldchanging 101: An Anniversary Collection (Thanks, Alex!)

Alex from Worldchanging sez, "It's our sixth anniversary today, so we're running the 70 of our most popular and enduring pieces, in the 7 categories - Cities, Shelter, Business, Politics, Planet, Community, Stuff - we cover. Some great stuff here, which leads on to other great stuff, over 10,500 pieces in all... if you want a quick reminder of the ideas Worldchanging's been exploring these last six years, you couldn't do better than this. It's sort of like How to Change the World, an Overview"

Worldchanging 101: An Anniversary Collection (Thanks, Alex!)

It's made from reinforced resin and finished with automotive paints by Aaron of Fiberglassblades. That's him in the Ryo Sanada getup below. Holy crap.

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

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Our copy chief, Keith Hammond, circulated this in internal Maker Media email. It's from a piece on Washington Post columnist Joel Achenbach's blog, from back in June.

Advice to graduates: Become an engineer. Design the future. Become someone who knows how to squeeze energy out of seawater or turn sunlight into electricity for pennies on the kilowatt.

Or how to make an American car that people want to buy.

Reading Michael Leahy's article this morning on GM auto workers -- including one who is a natural tinkerer and auto-didact ready to adapt to the next new thing to come along -- I thought of a quote from Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon" [cited in a Craig Nelson's book "Rocket Men"]:

"The Yankees, the first mechanics in the world, are engineers -- just as the Italians are musicians and the Germans metaphysicians -- by right of birth."

Lots of stereotypes there. But it wouldn't hurt to believe in ourselves -- in our engineering acumen. This has always been a society of tinkerers. But maybe somewhere along the line we took all the engineers for granted. That's a subtext in Nelson's book: That we've failed to appreciate the marvels of modern engineering.

If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we ...

We need more Manhattan Projects. Want a punch list for the country? A one came out last fall from the National Academy of Engineering:

1. Make solar energy economical
2. Provide energy from fusion
3. Develop carbon sequestration methods
4. Manage the nitrogen cycle
5. Provide access to clean water
6. Restore and improve urban infrastructure
7. Advance health informatics
8. Engineer better medicines
9. Reverse-engineer the brain
10. Prevent nuclear terror
11. Secure cyberspace
12. Enhance virtual reality
13. Advance personalized learning
14. Engineer the tools of scientific discovery.

Dang it, I'm going to go build something.

[Does staking tomatoes count as engineering??]

A Nation of Engineers

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Just wanted to make sure that everybody knows that we've started publishing the monthly Make: Newsletter again. The new version will have some original columns, exclusive features, special deals on subscriptions and Maker Shed products, and provide a bit of a behind the scenes look at Maker Media.

One of the new columns introduced in this first, October, issue is the Maker's Dictionary, a growing glossary of technical terms, jargon, and slang of interest to makers. I'll be writing this and am very excited to be back in the jargon and slang business. I was a co-creator of the "Jargon Watch" column in Wired and edited it for 12 years. I've missed being a "professional" word nerd, although I've never stopped being an amateur one. Now I have a place to publish some of the terms I've been scribbling in notebooks for the past five years.

Here's the October, 2009 Make: Newsletter
Here's the form if you want to subscribe.

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We already found it quite troubling that the Senate committee, working on a federal "shield law" that would help protect journalists from having to reveal their sources, switched from language that was pretty inclusive, to a bill that would greatly limit the definition of a journalist to only those who work for big time journalistic endeavors. Lots of smaller, independent or amateur journalists would get no protection at all. Sen. Chuck Schumer, a sponsor of the bill, was apparently responsible for kicking out all those independent journalists. In looking into why, Jason Linkins, was told that the Justice Department was apparently worried that everyone would just start claiming shield protection, and it would greatly limit their ability to investigate certain issues. That's a stretch, however. The law clearly could have been written in a way that would enable investigations, without removing protections over legitimate journalistic activity.

Either way, it might not matter at all. Apparently, even after all this, the Obama administration is asking for more concessions, such as not allowing any shield protection on any instance where the administration declares that the matter involves "significant" harm to national security. Now, you can understand why the administration would want that, but there's absolutely no oversight. Basically, under the administration's proposal, if the administration simply said there was such harm, the judge would immediately wipe out the shield.

If you want to create a chilling effect against any sort of whistleblowing on gov't corruption, that's what this proposal does. It basically lets the gov't say that the shield law only applies to whistleblowing that doesn't make the administration look bad. But, in any case where the administration isn't happy, it gets to wipe out the shield. Apparently, freedom of the press only applies to situations in which the administration is not embarrassed.

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We've occasionally discussed Ben Heckendorn's various console modifications, and he's now come out with a new one: a laptop version of the PS3 Slim. It has volume control buttons for the built-in speakers, and plenty of vents for cooling. The display is a 17" widescreen panel, and the Slim's hardware doesn't fill that much space in the case, so there's a neat little compartment for the power cord. Ben's blog post shows details of the laptop's construction.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've occasionally discussed Ben Heckendorn's various console modifications, and he's now come out with a new one: a laptop version of the PS3 Slim. It has volume control buttons for the built-in speakers, and plenty of vents for cooling. The display is a 17" widescreen panel, and the Slim's hardware doesn't fill that much space in the case, so there's a neat little compartment for the power cord. Ben's blog post shows details of the laptop's construction.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sigma has announced the DP1s digital compact camera, a slightly revised version of its DP1 large-sensor compact camera. Featuring the same sensor and processor as the DP1, it assigns the QS (Quick set) function from Sigma's DP2 to its digital zoom button and the ability to simultaneously shoot separate RAW and JPEG images. The company says it also performs better when shooting backlit subjects.

Jari sent in this Arduino mini based DMX strobe light controller. There is plenty of room for expansion and customization, which is good since you can control almost any DMX device with this type of hardware,

This one is a small project that I had to do twice to get right. It is a pedal used for controlling strobe light through DMX protocol. Technically it is built on top of a Pro Mini Arduino with simple DMX driver circuit. It has button to kick the action, rotating switch for choosing different presets and one switch for future expansion. You could basically control any DMX device with this hardware, but I built it for Stairville 1500DMX strobe light.

In the Maker Shed:


Arduino Mini Board, fully assembled

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The EFF's painfully slow patent busting project keeps on seeing success -- even if it's taking forever. The number one patent on the list was Acacia's streaming media patent, that was brought to court more than six years ago, basically going after anyone who did online streaming media. Acacia, of course, is one of the biggest and most well known of the patent hoarding firms that started getting lots of attention earlier this decade (the company now often tries to hide patents in shell companies, since the Acacia name is now so closely associated with "patent troll"). With this patent, Acacia was especially sneaky, in that it started by going after porn sites, figuring they wouldn't want to fight back.

Either way, a district court has just tossed out the 10 claims that it was asserting in its lawsuit against cable and satellite TV providers, claiming that they're all invalid. The EFF doesn't get credit for this one, since it wasn't through a USPTO patent review process, the overall impact is the same. For all intents and purposes, the parts of this patent that were being asserted against so many companies have been declared invalid. It doesn't change the fact that tons of companies have spent years and years fighting it and paying legal fees, but that's our patent system for you. Encouraging "innovation" the same way the mob encourages "safe neighborhoods."

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SpuriousLogic spotted this story on the BBC, from which he excerpts: "The High Court has given permission for an injunction to be served via social-networking site Twitter. The order is to be served against an unknown Twitter user who anonymously posts to the site using the same name as a right-wing political blogger. The order demands the anonymous Twitter user reveal their identity and stop posing as Donal Blaney, who blogs at a site called Blaney's Blarney. The order says the Twitter user is breaching the copyright of Mr. Blaney. He told BBC News that the content being posted to Twitter in his name was 'mildly objectionable.' Mr. Blaney turned to Twitter to serve the injunction rather than go through the potentially lengthy process of contacting Twitter headquarters in California and asking it to deal with the matter. UK law states that an injunction does not have to be served in person and can be delivered by several different means including fax or e-mail."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Like many other transit authorities, NY's MTA took a ridiculous stance that it owned train scheduling time, and threatened independent developers, demanding large licensing fees for creating iPhone or web apps. This has never made any sense to me. Even if those transit authorities have licensed the data in the past, you can't copyright facts and (much more importantly) the goal of any transit authority should be to get more people comfortable with using public transit -- and if an independent developer is willing to create a useful app that does that for free, it should be celebrated, not met with a cease-and-desist. It looks like some at the MTA are finally realizing this, as they're backing off some of their earlier threats, and letting some apps move forward (thanks ADM for sending in the link). They don't have an official policy on this yet, but do admit that it makes sense to "evolve" to keep up with what people are doing. Later in the article, they basically admit they never really thought about this, and the whole idea that someone else might make an app for them seemed foreign, and thus, they reacted poorly to it. Either way, it's good to see them come around to realizing that opening up data makes a lot of sense.

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On "Getting Over It," by Lauren over at Feministe:

What does rape do to you? Afterward? It changed me; there is before and after. Before, a child, playing with Barbies, looking sideways at boys, wondering. After, confusion. Depression. A litany of fuck-ups and fuck-its, whatevers, mistakes, trusting no one, least of all myself. Before, sex was mysterious; after, miasma. I was tarred as a Lolita. I was called jail bait.

Rape is not the only assault. Around rape is a large segment of the population that questions the victim, a culture that looks down on victims for allowing themselves to be victimized, or keep them victimized, questions about the victim's credibility, questions about the legacy of rape and how bad it is, because how bad is rape really? Rape, because various levels and forms of sexual assault are systemic and pervasive across all societies, exists alongside one's experiences of unwanted touching, wanted touching, sexual objectification, sexual desire, sexual harassment, incest, love, leering eyes, cat calls, roaming hands, consent, confusion, tits, vagina, rectum, penis, mouth, rape and not-rape, all of it loaded, all of it veering at rape's ugly legacy, co-mingling, the legacy that tells us to be more careful, to dress more conservatively, to BE BETTER AT BEING VULNERABLE, or BE MORE POWERFUL, or BE MORE FEARFUL, or GET OVER IT ALREADY. Rape leaks into healthy, consensual experiences. It lingers. It pervades.

Related: This Smoking Gun archive contains the entire "1977 grand jury testimony of the 13-year-old California girl with whom the director had sex after plying her with Champagne and a Quaalude at the Los Angeles home of Jack Nicholson."

A rape is a rape by any other name.

See also: Polanski's Victim and Me, by the celebrated novelist Robert Goolrick, who is also a survivor of child rape.

Finally, Polanski in his own words in 1979, an unrepentant abuser:

"If I had killed somebody, it wouldn't have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But... f--ing, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to f-- young girls. Juries want to f-- young girls. Everyone wants to f-- young girls!"

Edge Magazine is running a story about user-generated content — or rather, its failure to live up to the hype of the past few years. The author says it "turned out to be a niche. Not everyone has the chops to learn the tools, and even fewer gamers have an idea they want to see through. Instead of revolutionizing games, it merely adds another rung on the ladder from 'player' to 'game-maker.'" Instead, the games that have incorporated the concept in a fun way use what he calls "user-generated, machine-mediated content," and he points out the flexibility of Scribblenauts; the user supplies the imagination and the developer translates that to gameplay. "It shows us our reflection — however tiny, however distorted — inside our games, an experience that is guaranteed to mesmerize us. Ambitious players will still go pick up the tools and learn the languages that let them mod or make their own games; but while they're busy with that, [this system] can invigorate our content — and give us a little more of what we love: ourselves."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Boing Boing guestblogger Mitch Horowitz is author of Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation and editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin publishers.

(Mitch will be speaking in Los Angeles at the Philosophical Research Society this coming Saturday, October 3rd and Sunday, October 4th, at 2 p.m. daily on the history of the occult in America. Details here.)

Below is a rundown of books that were unique sources of inspiration to me as I was working on Occult America. Some of these authors are not esotericists at all; others cover topics that I fleetingly reference. But each work represents a carefully researched, keenly reasoned, and pioneering effort at comprehending occult topics and personas without lapsing into the kind of excessive credulity or a knee-jerk nay-saying that often clouds our ability to evaluate fringe movements. Each is a triumph of that rarest of traits: clear thought.

Al-Kemi by Andre VandenBroeck
A window into the intellectual and spiritual world of esoteric Egyptologist RA Schwaller de Lubicz, with an appreciative foreword by Saul Bellow. Posits intriguing ideas about the connections between Ancient Egyptian philosophy and the modern West - and also exposes the ethical failings of this brilliant intellect.

Hidden Wisdom by Richard Smoley and Jay Kinney
A 360-degree survey of modern esoteric beliefs by the editors of the legendary Gnosis magazine (the most fondly missed journal on the planet). Their tone is unfailingly judicious, thoughtful, and shrewd.

The Tarot by Robert M. Place
Perhaps the sole guide to Tarot that synthesizes a scholarly exploration of Tarot's roots in the Middle Ages with an understanding of the mystical allegory of its images.

The Rosicrucian Enlightenment and The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age by Frances A. Yates
Probably the most authoritative works ever written on the occult mood of Europe in the late Renaissance period. Yates was a world-class historian, a tireless scholar, and a uniquely empathic observer of religious/philosophical movements.

The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly P. Hall
The occult classic published in 1928 by the twenty-seven-year old auteur. This encyclopedia esoterica stands up remarkably well - its passages on Pythagorean mathematics, alchemical symbolism, and the competing histories of Rosicrucianism are especially sturdy.

Alchemy by Titus Burckhardt
A uniquely sensitive, subtle, and compact survey of the misunderstood history and ideas behind this ancient spiritual art.

Edgar Cayce by Sidney D. Kirkpatrick
The landmark historical biography - unparalleled in detail and breadth - of the grandfather of the New Age. This is journalistic historical writing at its finest.

Edgar Cayce in Context by K. Paul Johnson
A brilliant and engaging study of how the influential seer related to the spiritual trends around him. The author exhibits a rare combination of academic depth and spiritual understanding.

The Dawning of the Theosophical Movement by Michael Gomes
A vivid, precise, and deeply intelligent history of this enormously influential occult organization at its inception in America.

Each Mind a Kingdom by Beryl Satter
A beautifully written and highly original exploration of New Thought (or positive-thinking) as a progressive religious and political movement.

Marcus Garvey: Life and Lessons edited by Robert A. Hill and Barbara Bair
The Rosetta stone to understanding the Black-nationalist pioneer in a different light: as a spiritual-mystical thinker.

Pioneer Prophetess by Herbert A. Wisbey. Jr.
A painstakingly researched biography of one of the least-known but widely influential occult figures in American history: the Publick Universal Friend, a spirit channeler who became the nation's first female religious leader in 1776.

Spiritual Merchants by Carolyn Morrow Long
Wonderful insights into the growth of the African-American magical system called hoodoo. Likewise, see the comprehensive (and wondrous) work of hoodoo teacher-scholar-curator Catherine Yronwode at Lucky Mojo.

The American Soul by Jacob Needleman
The most incisive understanding of the collective spiritual search in America.

Early Mormonism and the Magic World View by D. Michael Quinn
Quinn employs rigorous scholarship to reveal the occult and esoteric influences on the life of Joseph Smith. A brave, thoughtful, and irreplaceable work.

Women of the Golden Dawn by Mary K. Greer
Fast-moving as a Dan Brown novel and filled with fascinating detail on the life and work of the women who shaped the 19th and 20th century occult culture in America and Europe.

They Have Found a Faith by Marcus Bach
Bach, who published this exploration of alternative faiths in 1946, was America's greatest religion journalist: A reporter who could go anywhere, venture into any belief system, and place himself at its center in order to grasp the values and aspirations of its participants (which is the only way to understand a religious movement). He was my journalistic hero.

We're always on the lookout for new experiments in media publishing, so keep on submitting relevant links, folks. So here's another one. Trying to target a "gap" between magazines and books, the Daily Beast and Perseus Books Group are teaming up to publish books in just 2-4 months, giving authors 1-3 months to write and then publishing the work a month later as an e-book (and then in paperback). These books are aiming to be 40,000 words long, or around 150 pages -- which sounds like a Twitter-like limit, designed to encourage authors to produce stories that are more topical and timely. And on the logistical side, these publishers are going to use the sales of the e-book titles to help anticipate how many paperback editions to print.

It's an interesting experiment because it begins to grasp that digital goods can be used both to promote content and also to assess the market for the related tangible/scarce goods. On top of that, the shorter publishing cycle will likely be more engaging to readers who won't have to wait very long for new books to come out. However, there are some possible pitfalls, too. If the e-books are too expensive (or poor quality because they're written in a rush), then obviously the promotional aspect of the digital content won't be there. They could also soon discover that their target audience is too tuned into digital goods, and the audience that buys printed books doesn't overlap much with Daily Beast readers (so they'd need to promote on a different channel). But at least the publishers won't be stuck with a ton of printed books in inventory, so the downside risk seems lower than traditional publishing. And, actually, that reduced risk might be the key part of this publishing plan. When digital distribution costs are minimal, the strategy of "throwing everything at the wall to see if it sticks" becomes more viable. The Daily Beast's website already leverages free content with news and opinion articles, so if it can also offer unique content with a quicker turnaround time, the reason to buy its books could surface as more and more "good" authors are discovered and recommended -- and commissioned to produce new content.

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Get your boards printed by a pro-service for a longer-lasting, better-looking project... By MAKE contributor Mikey @ PopSci!

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In the video above, which is making the viral rounds: a San Francisco police officer who IDs himself as "Officer Schwab, (badge number) 2099" arrests a skateboarder identified as Zach Stow, after Stow calls the officer a "fckng dck." Over at metblogs SF, Richard Ault says the officer's understanding of SF skateboarding codes is wrong. An article about the incident is here at the SF Chronicle. My two cents, as someone who is neither a lawyer, nor a skateboarder: taunting a police officer by calling him a "fckng dck" is about as dumb as it gets, but that does not give the officer the right to threaten to break the guy's arms, or arrest him for -- what was it, in the end, failing to carry identification? In any case: viva la video camera. (thanks, Jacob Appelbaum)

holy_calamity writes "DARPA's plans to create brain chips for insects so they can be steered like an RC plane are bearing fruit. Videos show that a team at Berkeley can use radio signals to tell palm-sized African beetles to take off and land, and to lose altitude and steer left or right when in flight. They had to use the less-than-inconspicuous giant beetles because other species are too weak to take off with the weight of the necessary antenna and brain and muscle electrodes."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

My old high school buddy Mitch O'Connell has a new show opening at La Luz De Jesus Gallery in LA. It runs from October 2 - November 1, 2009. Incredible stuff.

Mitch O’Connell’s imaginative, vividly colorful, smart and well executed artwork is undeniably and unabashedly old-school low-brow. As one of Chicago’s most well-known and busiest illustrators, O'Connell’s works have been featured in magazines from Newsweek to Playboy. His tattoo designs are also a fixture on the walls of tattoo shops around the word. His distinctive style fuses cartoony and iconic imagery plus an innate sense of humor to create pop-kitsch masterpieces.

Mitch O'Connell's "Pre-engagement Ring" art show