We've been getting on Palm lately for the widespread mistakes the company made in building out a strong developer community. Despite having had strong developer communities in the past, with the Pre, it seemed like Palm decided to simply copy everything (even all the bad things!) that Apple did with the iPhone app store. It was a terrible case of iPhone cargo cultism, that seemed to assume that if they just copied the iPhone's every move with developers, things would be just like the iPhone. Now that that's backfired, it looks like the company has come to its senses. It's brought in some Mozilla developers and opened things up wide. It's done away with the fee for developers. It's openly allowing people to offer their apps directly to Palm users without having to go through an insane and arbitrary approval process. And, the new folks promise this is just the beginning of a much more open offering. It's about time. This is the sort of thing that Palm should have done before it launched.

In the meantime... there are still other problems showing up, including odd complaints about hidden limits on how many apps you can get through the Pre app store, without any clear response from Palm. So, for every step forward...?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Photo: Dagmara Nall When Aleki Taumoepeau, a 42-year old ecologist, dropped his wedding ring in the murky waters of a New Zealand just months after he and his wife Rachel got hitched, he was determined to find it at all costs. Everyone — including Rachel — thought he was crazy. Quite miraculously, Aleki found the ring at the bottom of the sea a year and a half later. I got on the phone with Aleki recently to find out how he lost and found his wedding ring in the ocean. It's a story of love, faith, obsession, and GPS coordinates, and it starts in a beautiful harbor town on the southern tip of New Zealand's North Island.

I'm a fresh water ecologist at the National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research in Hamilton. My main job is to help the scientists survey lakes and vegetation, identify species, and advise the power company and regional councils on how to treat noxious plants. I usually work in fresh water, but on that day, I was helping the short-staffed salt water marine guys look for invasive organisms in Wellington Harbor. There were several divers with me on board the inflatable Naiad boat, and I was trying to start the engine when the ring just flew off my finger. We all saw it go in the water. I usually don't wear my ring when working on boats or diving — this was just the one time that i forgot to take it off. My first reaction was to grab an anchor and drop it where the ring went down. After that, four of the divers on the boat went down to have a look, but they couldn't find the ring or the anchor. The water was particularly murky that day, so after about thirty minutes I told them not to worry about it. It was Friday afternoon, and we still had one more job site to attend to. That was in March 2008, three months after I had married my wife Rachel. Three months later, I was at a conference in Wellington so I decided to go and have a look. I asked some of the delegates there to help me out — they thought it was a great cause and were keen to do so. So at 6AM on a cold wintery morning, four of us went out to the beach. The water was quite rough and cold, about 50 degrees fahrenheit. I brought Scuba diving gear, a metal detector, and a dry suit. We were at a sampling site when I lost my ring, so we had recorded its GPS coordinates on our field sheets. The area where I'd lost the ring was supposed to be about 100 yards from the shore and about three meters deep. When I got out in the water, though, there was so much debris in the area — pipes, old tire rims, coins, belts — that the metal detector just went off all the time. I also realized that I had brought the wrong GPS coordinates with me — the area where the lost ring was supposed to be a little bit further away. I was cold and the metal detector was going crazy, so I headed back to shore. Later that week, I had another go, but that was also unsuccessful. Rachel and I met on a golf course — we just clicked, and things went very quickly after that. We had a big Tongan island wedding in November 2007. When I told Rachel about the lost ring, she said she would buy me another one. But that was too easy for me. Everyone thought I was crazy, but I insisted that I was going to find my ring. Rachel and I returned to Wellington again this past July to attend another conference. I said to her, "Let's go a day earlier to look for the ring!" She said, "You're crazy. It's been 15 months. What are the chances of finding it?" I promised her it would be the last time I'd look for it, and that if I didn't find it she could buy me another ring. She was happy with that. So off I went to the beach again with my scuba gear and metal detector. We now have a baby son, so he and my wife sat on the shore while I went searching in the water. This time, I did a little bit more homework. I managed to get the field sheet from our original trip with the right GPS coordinates. I mapped them out on Google Earth &mdash with Google Earth I could actually see the physical landscape and the trees, which would be useful for me to relocate the site while swimming. I loaded the coordinates on my ETrex and swam out to the site. As soon as I got there, I realized that the terrain had physically changed. I was a bit concerned that recent storms could have moved the anchor. And even if the anchor was still there, the ring may not be next to it. Regardless, I knew that if I found the anchor, I'd have a very good chance of finding the ring. I dropped a little white marker with a plastic bag tied to a rope, put on my snorkels, and stuck my head under water. The water was so clear. I had never seen it so clear before. I had a good feeling that I would find it. I'm Christian, so I said a little prayer. I said, "God, don't make it too easy for me because I was feeling a bit confident that I would find it." Then I began swimming around. I figured weeds would have grown over the anchor, so every clumps of weeds I saw, I'd swim down and have a look. I covered a lot of ground to no avail. The water was quite cold, and I was getting tired. I said another prayer: "God, if the ring is here, it would be nice to show it to me right about now. I'm tired from bobbing up and down." I swam back towards my marker to start over again. I had told myself I would look for a minimum of three hours. I looked at my watch. Just over an hour. I stopped and took a deep breath, and started swimming again... And there it was! The anchor was right beneath me. I just couldn't believe it. There weren't even any weeds on it. I was just so excited, and I thought, wow, I better not lose this spot. I kept looking at the land to triangulate the spot. My plan was to go back to get my marker and put it on this spot. Before I went back, though, I decided to have a quick look &mdash so i went down to the anchor on the snorkel and circled it. Lo and behold, about three yards away, was the ring. It was lying flat on the shelly surface, glimmering in the water. I grabbed it, grabbed the anchor, and pushed up to the surface. And then I started cheering. Yeaaaaarhhhh!! Yahoooo! Rachel heard me from shore — she was talking on the phone to someone at work about how crazy I was to be in the water. A couple of people walking their dogs had asked her what the crazy guy in the water was doing. When I got back to shore, just Rachel and the baby were there. I held up the ring. It's a simple gold band with four rolls, kind of like four thinner rings connected together. It was slightly tarnished on the inside, and the gold was a bit dull, but you could still see it shine. I had had this elaborate methodical plan to lay out a search grid on snorkels, then get my scuba gear and metal detector from shore and check each square from my marker. But I didn't even need that. I just found it on my snorkels. "God, you're just awesome," I thought. People read a lot of romantic things into this, but for me it was sort of a challenge. It's not the same to buy a new one, you know? In the back of my mind, I knew I would find it. I have honed my diving skills and the ability to search for and identify things underwater from my job — I'm usually looking for plants, but I know that it's important to be familiar with the environment, for example, and to recognize different sediments and substrates at the bottom. I would have definitely had to use the metal detector if I'd lost the ring on soft sediment, but here I was dealing with sandy shell. I later talked to a scientist who maps sand movements, and he said that that particular area had a lot of sand movement. It's possible that the ring was buried in sand and then unburied again due to water movements and erosions. That explains why, on my first go at finding the ring, I only saw logs and murkiness. I found the ring on July 29, 2009. After that, the Hamilton Press picked up the story, and then it took off on a world scale. A lot of people emailed me saying what a nice story it was. On the Internet, some people believed in me all along, some people discounted God, and others thought I had just gone out and bought another ring and pretended I'd found it. I realized it had impacted a lot of people. This experience definitely strengthened my faith. It's just the power of prayer, I guess.

I sure like Booker White's slapping technique!

An anonymous reader writes "Nine weeks after Moxie Marlinspike presented at Defcon 17, null-prefix certificates that exploit the SSL certificate vulnerability are beginning to appear. Yesterday, someone posted a null-prefix certificate for www.paypal.com on the full-disclosure mailing list. In conjunction with sslsniff, this certificate can be used to intercept communication to PayPal from all clients using the Windows Crypto API, for which a patch is still not available. This includes IE, Chrome, and Safari on Windows. What's worse, because of the OCSP attack that Moxie also presented at Defcon, this certificate cannot be revoked." Update: 10/06 23:19 GMT by KD: Now it seems that PayPal has suspended Marlinspike's account.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I have to admit that I can't quite tell if Baltimore Sun columnist Dan Rodricks is being somewhat facetious in noting that for every "ephemeral" consumer wrong (ridiculous fees, interest rates, closing costs, lines at the motor vehicle bureau) groups of people are suddenly able to gather a constituency online and create a social movement. While some may mock the idea that a bunch of consumers might gather online to fight the good fight over lines at their local motor vehicle bureau (department, administration, whatever your local gov't calls it), it actually does seem indicative of how consumers are gaining more of a voice online -- and with that comes power. Yes, there are some ridiculous and overly broad complaints. But we're getting closer and closer to an age where companies that repeatedly screw consumers over will have a harder and harder time getting away with it. Too many businesses have been built on the belief that even if they treat consumers badly, not enough people will know (or care) to stop bringing them business. But we've already seen some signs of that changing, and that's only going to increase over time.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Interesting thread over on The Home Shop Machinist describing the use of H.J. Watts' 1918 US patent 1,241,176 drill, based on the Reuleaux triangle (Wikipedia), for drilling a (mostly) square hole.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Toolbox | Digg this!

vinodis and several other readers sent along the news that Eolas is suing 23 companies including Apple and Google for patent infringement. The company won $585M from Microsoft in a drawn-out, 9-year battle that the companies settled in 2007; in the course of it the USPTO upheld the "'906" patent several times. Now, Eolas is also in possession of a newly issued patent that they claim covers the use of any browser plugin with AJAX. Let's see how far this lawsuit gets before the Supreme Court plays its wildcard in the Bilski case, which we have been discussing for a while now.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As a huge fan of FlowingData, NPR and electricity, I'm super excited about this interactive map that gives you a clear view of the structure of the U.S. power grid. Clicking through, you'll see how areas of the country currently are (and aren't) connected to one another, what's in the works to improve the system, and why that matters (a lot) when you start talking about alternative energy sources. Good stuff.

In this picture, you can see the yellow lines that really seem to do a good job of efficiently linking up the whole country. Those power lines haven't been built yet. In the interactive part, you can take those off, revealing a clearer view of our current transmission infrastructure that looks more like a series of occasionally connected river systems than a grid.

KentuckyFC writes "The great power of Mendeleev's periodic table was that it allowed him to predict the properties of undiscovered elements. But can this arrangement be improved? Two new envisionings of the periodic table attempt to do just that. The first uses a new graphical representation that shows the relative sizes of atoms as well as their groups and periods. The other uses the same kind of group theoretical approach that particle physicists developed to classify particles by their symmetries (abstract). That helped particle physicists predict the existence of new particles, but may have limited utility for chemists who seem to have discovered (or predicted) all of the elements they need already."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over on DinoFab, Dean shows off his latest bike improvement, an LED light system that uses a generator built from an old printer stepper motor. He points readers to this article about how to generate electricity using steppers.

Stepper Motor Powered Bike Light

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Bicycles | Digg this!

These tiny cufflink lighters by Etsy seller YOUgNeek are sure to come in handy whenever you want to light something. I really like the idea of functional accoutrements- anyone selling a soldering iron version?

For occasions where it would not be appropriate to wear cufflinks, try the stove necklace instead.

[via technabob]

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!

I was recently having a discussion with a friend where I pointed out one of the biggest mistakes that people make in trying to understand economics is to assume, incorrectly, that "marginal benefit" or "marginal cost" means money. And, yes, this is actually a mistake that many economists themselves make -- and, in part, it's because the marginal benefit is often measured in monetary terms. So, people seem to think that if there isn't a monetary component it doesn't count. This makes for silly statements like "economics doesn't properly understand how people act." Almost every time that's said, when you look at the details, it's wrong. It's just that people assume that because someone does something for a non-monetary reason, economics can't account for it. That's simply not true. If people do things for a non-monetary reason, it's because they're receiving marginal benefits in some other manner, whether it's attention, pride, happiness, joy or "just because I want to." Those are all marginal benefits.

In fact, Clive Thompson points us to a study that highlights this in a really strong way. It's a series of studies that show that when people overestimate the monetary benefits (or costs) and underestimate the nonmonetary ones, they often set up really bad incentives.

For example, they've found that fewer people give blood when they're paid for it. For someone who thinks only in terms of the monetary benefits, this would make no sense. Why would giving people money lead to less of the activity. But the reasoning is that the real marginal benefit that people get from giving blood is the belief that they're doing good in the world and helping to save lives. Getting paid for it, actually hinders that feeling, by making the whole thing feel like a transaction. And the money paid is apparently a lot less than the decreased "good feelings" from the marginal benefit.

On the flip side, other experiments showed that fining people over certain actions (such as picking up their kids from daycare too late), actually increased the number of tardy parents. Again, if you think of this solely in monetary terms, this makes no sense. It now costs more, monetarily, to be late to pick up a kid. But, in making it a monetary transaction, it removed non-monetary costs -- such as the "guilt" of being late. As the article notes:

The fine seems to have reduced their ethical obligation to avoid inconveniencing the teachers and led them to think of lateness as simply a commodity they could purchase.

This is really fascinating stuff that is important for people to understand in setting up any sort of incentive structure. Money -- either on the cost or benefit side -- is not the only incentive. And thinking that it is often leads to miscalculating a series of other, potentially more important, costs and benefits. That doesn't mean that economics is wrong. It can handle all of that. The problem is when people assume that it's only the direct monetary costs and benefits that go into the equation. It is, unfortunately, a common problem, and leads to all sorts of confused thinking both about business models, but also about the economics profession itself.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "This summer, the London Stock Exchange decided to move away from its Microsoft .Net-based trading platform, TradElect. Instead, they'll be using the GNU/Linux-based MillenniumIT system. The switch is a pretty savage indictment of the costs of a complex .Net system. The GNU/Linux-based software is also faster, and offers several other major benefits. The details provide some fascinating insights into the world of very high performance — and very expensive — enterprise systems. ... [R]ather than being just any old deal that Microsoft happened to lose, this really is something of a total rout, and in an extremely demanding and high-profile sector. Enterprise wins for GNU/Linux don't come much better than this."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bob Self of Baby Tattoo says:

A massive 6 x 3 foot drawing (that's 72 x 36 inches, woo!) that Gary Baseman created while visiting Chaing Mai, Thailand is being auctioned on eBay. All proceeds will go to Cultural Canvas Thailand, a Chiang Mai-based organization that uses visual arts, dance, music and drama to give a voice to struggling and marginalized social groups in the local community.

Giant-sized Gary Baseman drawing for charity

Parallax has a new mid-sized (13" x 10" x 5.5") robot platform, called the Stingray, that looks pretty interesting, built around a Propeller multi-core:

The Stingray robot from Parallax Inc. provides a mid-size platform for a wide range of robotics projects and experiments. The Propeller Robot Control Board is the brains of the system providing a multiprocessor control system capable of performing multiple tasks at the same time. The Propeller chip provides eight 32- bit processors each with two counters, its own 2 KB local memory and 32 KB shared memory. This makes the Propeller a perfect choice for advanced robotics and the Stingray robot.

The Stingray retails for $300.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Robotics | Digg this!

You know, you kind of have to see it blown up to life-size before you realize just how creepy the "Operation" game really is. Outstanding costume build by Instructables user NavySWO91. It works just like the game!

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.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Halloween | Digg this!

Designer Stefan Ulrich has come up with what could be an early prototype of a real body pillow girlfriend. He calls it Funktionide, an "emotional robot" that changes form depending on how you hold it. Combined with advanced robotics, this could yield something that is soft, cuddly, humanoid, and capable of intelligent conversation. Yes, and it breathes. You can see a slightly intimate video of a guy and his Functionide above. Funktionide by Stefan Ulrich

eldavojohn writes "Star Wars Uncut has taken a novel approach to remaking Star Wars IV: A New Hope. You merely sign up for a 15 second clip, film it and submit it. The trailer is now complete and I will suspect you might enjoy the high quality (and low quality) of some of the already accepted scenes. 251 scenes remain in need of claiming with 688 claimed and 291 finished. Do your part to remake one of the greatest movies by filming fifteen seconds of yourself and your friends!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At Amsterdam's Platform21 design museum last month, kooky Japanese product designers Yuri Suzuki and Masa Kimura — both former assistants at the wonderful art collective Maywa Denki — showed a three-week-long installation that followed the process of him making a giant, functional Rube Goldberg machine that would automatically churn out a full breakfast — coffee, toast, and an omelet. The Breakfast Machine is quite big and impractical, but nonetheless wonderful. There's a video of the machine at work after the jump. Yuri Suzuki and Platform 21 Image: Johannes Abeling

This flag, for the long-defunct Benin Empire, may just be the ne plus ultra of sigils. I think that when I am god-emperor of some distant land, I shall install it as my standard.

Flag of the Benin Empire (via Kottke)

Instructables user cmachia made a simple bike trailer from some scavanged wood and two bike tires to fill a need to haul more stuff than fits in a backpack.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Bicycles | Digg this!

An anonymous reader writes "A Google study of DRAM errors in their data centers found that they are hundreds to thousands of times more common than has been previously believed. Hard errors may be the most common failure type. The DIMMs themselves appear to be of good quality, and bad mobo design may be the biggest problem." Here is the study (PDF), which Google engineers published with a researcher from the University of Toronto.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Via Poynter Online, there's a recent interview with Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau where he talks about his post-newspaper media plans and what he sees as his future options while newspapers face significant declines in their circulation numbers.

"Doonesbury" has been on the Web for 15 years, and the site actually makes a little money -- unheard-of for media sites. But it's not really a plan, just a presence. I don't believe there's anything I can do personally to prepare for a post-newspaper future, other than hope that the large media companies will come to their senses and form a gated Web collective along the lines of cable TV. They need to form a news utility, financed by subscription or micropayments because going it alone has been disastrous for all of them.

Trudeau continues on, saying that he believes that e-readers are promising because so many people are happy to pay for iPhone apps and Kindle content. He also says that his livelihood doesn't seem to be threatened in the short-term because only "big newspapers" with loads of debt are really going under -- and most small newspapers are still getting by and can support his line of work for the foreseeable future. But, essentially, Trudeau sounds like he's given up on his own plans for making Doonesbury into a business outside of syndication. (Or he's being much too modest about the "little money" he earns from his website, and he doesn't want to offend his current newspaper benefactors.) In any case, he seems to envision a giant news consortium that will be able to retain subscribers due to a form of monopoly advantage. And if that's really the future of journalism, that doesn't sound too promising.

Additionally, though, Trudeau asserts that the "Web is a lost cause" because everyone thinks content on the web should be free. But that statement directly contradicts the work of online cartoonists such as Randall Munroe and his xkcd webcomic (which just happens to be one of my favorite examples of a "free" online comic strip). Munroe has a significant following for xkcd and has proven that "free" can be a sustainable way to promote and publish his work. So can we help enlighten Trudeau? Munroe sells prints, t-shirts, a book, and even sponsored comics. Is there a path to becoming the "Trent Reznor of webcomics" for Trudeau? Or is there something unique about Doonesbury that makes it impossible for it to take advantage of "free" distribution?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Photographer Anthony Citrano roamed the burning hills above Los Angeles as the recent Station Fire spread. He captured a few photos of the spot where later, authorities would say the fire began. So why aren't law enforcement agencies or fire investigators returning his calls? Read his blog post, with photos, here. And in the LA Times, related reading: "Three weeks ahead of the Station blaze, the Forest Service sought to limit the use of local firefighting resources." Say it loud, people: no public option for firefighting!

Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade is reported to have commissioned a 160-ft high bronze statue commemorating the "African Renaissance." The AP says it costs $27 million to build. As you can see above, the stature, "shows a muscular man in a heroic posture, outstretched arms wrapped around his wife and child, who is balanced on one of his biceps," Note: Senegal contains no volcanoes. Cyrus Farivar blogs:

* President Wade, according to the AP: "[maintains] he is entitled to 35 percent of any tourist revenues it generates because he owns "intellectual rights" for conceiving the idea, with the rest to go to the government."

* AP adds: "Nearly 50 North Korean workers from the state-run Mansudae Art Studio in Pyongyang were brought in to build the statue because of their expertise with bronze art, and some Senegalese have complained of its communist-era design."

African Renaissance statue in Dakar angers locals

NCBI ROFL spotted this 1994 scientific paper extract describing an Indian man in the UK who blamed his crimes on ghostly possession. When exorcisms failed, he was treated for paranoid schizophrenia. That apparently helped. From the abstract in the British Journal of Psychiatry:

Treatment commenced using trifluoperazine and clopenthixol. RESULTS. The patient underwent remission during neuroleptic treatment, despite previous evidence of genuine possession. CONCLUSIONS. Many cultures give rise to apparently genuine cases of ghost possession. Neuroleptics may relieve symptoms of exorcism-resistant possession.

"Exorcism-resistant ghost possession treated with clopenthixol." (Br J Psychiatry)

While searching for the whole paper, I found a great analysis of the case by Vaughan over at Mind Hacks. Vaughan wrote:

So this might be an otherwise unremarkable psychiatric case if it were not for the fact that the prison chaplain, and several of the patient's cellmates, saw the spirit possess the patient as a ghostly mist. The chaplain was convinced this was a genuine case of possession, as had priests from several other faiths who had previously carried out exorcisms on the patient.

This begs the question, if the patient was treated for his belief in spirit possession and his apparent hallucinations as to the reality of the ghost, why were the chaplain and the others not considered to be ill ?

This article highlights the uncomfortable relationship between beliefs in the paranormal and the assumptions of psychiatry. The results of a recent Gallup poll suggested that over 40% of Americans believe in possession by the devil and 15% believe spirits can 'temporarily assume control of a human body'.

Although psychiatrists would argue that the content of a belief is not enough in itself to diagnose a delusion, the criteria for distinguishing between 'healthy' and 'pathological' beliefs are notoriously incoherent.

"Classic case: Psychiatric treatment of ghost possession"

Per Wigren writes in with news that Palm has just announced a number of changes its webOS development platform that should really be welcomed by developers — especially after the chilly reception that Palm seemed to be giving to open source in recent days. OS news notes that "This moves the webOS much closer to Android territory." Quoting TechCrunch: "The first is that they're allowing developers to fully distribute their apps via the web. What this means is that developers can simply submit their apps to Palm, and Palm will return to them a URL that they can then blog, tweet, do whatever they want to share it. When a person then clicks on that URL they can easily install the app, bypassing any kind of store. And while Palm is providing the URL, it is not going to be reviewing the apps in any way — a clear dig at Apple's approval process. The next announcement is that Palm is waiving the $99 yearly fee it normally charges to developers to make webOS apps if those apps are going to be open source."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At least, not tame yeast.

That's the gospel according to Ed Wood, a retired pathologist and sourdough bread expert. I called on Wood because I wanted to know where sourdough came from. Bear with me, because I'm about to sound a wee bit stupid, or at least baking-impaired.

I have seen people make sourdough--specifically, Amish Friendship Bread--by snipping off a bit of fermented "starter" dough and mixing it with flour and water. But it occurred to me last winter, while flipping through an old TIME/LIFE illustrated book on the cuisine of the American Northwest, that I had no earthly idea where the starter came from. ("Little plastic baggies handed out by old ladies at church" being an obvious, but not very satisfying, answer.)

Real sourdough, Wood tells me, begins with nothing but flour, water and your friendly, native microscopic flora and fauna. Set out a mixture of wet flour, and wild yeasts and bacteria will drop in to munch on it. The yeast produce fermentation and make the bread rise by consuming sugars in the flour and breaking them down into water, alcohol and carbon dioxide gas. The bacteria also eat sugars, leaving behind acids that give sourdough its tangy taste. There are starter recipes out there that call for store-bought yeast, but Wood brushes them off as flavorless junk. San Francisco's Exploratorium science museum has a more objective explanation. They say wild works best because yeast and bacteria are balanced. Purchase your yeast, and any wild bacteria will end up hopelessly outnumbered, unable to compete with yeast for sugary sustenance. No bacteria, no flavor.

I'm a pessimist by nature, especially when it comes to baking, so I had to ask: With all the wild bacteria and yeast out there, do you always get the right ones?

"Oh, no," Wood told me. "You have to be a little bit lucky to get a good wild yeast that will leaven the bread and a good bacteria for flavor. You don't always end up with something worth making bread out of."

How do you get it right? Trial and error. "Bad" bacteria will taste (or smell) worse. The wrong yeast will lead to flat bread. The good news: An unfortunate starter--no matter how funky--isn't likely to make you sick. The bad news: No matter how experienced you get, making starter remains more art than science.

But it was an art that worked for thousands of years. Again, I'm baking-impaired, but I had no idea that sourdough was the world's first type of rising bread. In fact, it was really the only type of rising bread until the middle ages, when European bakers began using the yeasty byproducts of beer-making, instead.
The first sourdough bread makers were the ancient Egyptians. Back in the early 1990s, Wood worked with National Geographic archaeologists to recreate Egyptian bread, using the wild yeasts and bacteria of Cairo and a recipe based on evidence uncovered at an ancient bakery once used to feed the men who built the smallest of the Giza Pyramids in 2470 BCE.

Egypt isn't the only place Wood has traveled in search of sourdough. Wood lived in the Middle East for several years and spent much of that time collecting samples of generations-old starter from bakeries throughout the region. Wood sells some of these starters online at Sourdough International, and he's also written a couple of books about the geographical and archaeological variations in sourdough recipes.

The Exploratorium also has some pleasantly non-intimidating instructions for making your own starter.

Thumbnail: Chris R. Sims

The fine folks over at Telart have been baking up some special cookies. Instead of worrying about making their cookies look appetizing, they instead focused their efforts on making them look like a fiducial, and then used an augmented reality program to put their logo on top of the cookie.

This is pretty cool by itself, but think of the potential for the technology. Don't like eating your veggies? Pop in the appropriate models, and appease your mom while nomming on delicious cookies. Want to build an obsolescence-proof kids cereal? Make fiducial-o's instead, and let your customers download the latest software when they want to eat them. Forget to make a cake for your significant other's birthday? No issue, just drop down a loaf of bread with one of these markers baked in, and viola! The possibilities are endless.

Check out their instructions to try this at home!

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Virtual Worlds | Digg this!

Say you're an average medieval Euro-Joe and you want to have sex with your wife. But first, you need to know, IS IT SINFUL? Digging through all those manuscripts of canon law can take forever (plus, as average medieval Euro-Joe, you can't read, anyway). Luckily, James A. Brundage has prepared a handy flow chart for sexual decision making the summarizes the medieval Christian church's take on when sex was OK (Think: In the dark, Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays only), and when you were totally going to go to hell.

Unfortunately, I'm not cool enough to figure out how to gank a picture from a Google Books page, so you'll have to follow this link to see the flow chart in all its glory.

Teen Brit ukulele sensation Rocky and Balls have a new song, called "Love Cake."

We love cakes. We love eating cakes and making cakes, so we wrote this song to sing whilst making said cakes.

It's always struck me that the strongest supporters of copyright law run into a lot of problems when it comes to educational institutions. After all, the whole purpose of an educational institution is to share knowledge and information as much as possible and continue to impart those ideas to others. But, it appears that copyright maximalism is seeping into the classrooms as well. In the last couple of years, we've seen a lawsuit over a note taking service -- claiming lectures are covered by copyright -- and a professor demanding that students destroy all their notes at the end of the year since the professor claims he holds the copyright.

Michael Scott points us to a similar story, involving a Harvard grad who is running a non-profit notetaking service. While there's no lawsuit or anything yet, there is a discussion on whether or not the professors' lectures are covered by copyright, with Harvard's General Counsel insisting that yes they are:

"under the federal Copyright Act of 1976, a lecture is automatically copyrighted as long as the professor prepared some tangible expression of the content--notes, an outline, a script, a video or audio recording."

In response, however, the copyright experts over at Copycense destroy that claim and lay down some knowledge (free of charge) for Harvard's AG:

Under the current Copyright Act, a work qualifies for protection only once it is original and then fixed in a way that people can perceive it (i.e. the "tangible medium of expression"). This is essentially what Section 102(a) says in basic terms.

The information from Harvard's counsel is incorrect because a lecture generally would not qualify for the "fixed" part of the equation. What Harvard seems to conflate is eligibility for copyright protection under Section 102(a) and the public performance right under Section 106(4).

But a professor can't have a public performance right under 106(4) if the work in question does not even qualify for copyright protection in the first place under Section 102(a). And a lecture, in and of itself, does not qualify as a protected work under the '76 Act because it is not fixed. (There also may be an argument against copyrightability based on originality grounds, but the lack of fixation is certain and terminal.)

The only way we can determine that a professor's lecture would qualify for copyright protection, assuming it was original, in the first place is if the lecture was recorded. Then there would be two copyrighted works: the lecture, and then the notes or slides. The professor's notes or slides arguably would qualify for copyright protection, but copyrightability in the notes is a separate issue from copyrightability in the lecture.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

eldavojohn writes "Previous estimates are now thought to skimp on the entropy of the observable universe. The researchers contend that super-massive black holes are the largest contributor of entropy. Since they contribute two orders of magnitude more than previously thought, the total of all the observable universe is correspondingly higher. The paper highlights (in gruesome detail) new issues that arise with these new calculations — like estimating us a little bit closer to heat death (moving entropy totals from 10^102 to 10^104 out of a maximum of 10^122)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This instrument is known both as a "glass harmonica" and a "glass armonica," and I personally favor the later spelling to distinguish it from the better-known free-reed mouth harp also called a "harmonica." The tone of a glass armonica is stunningly beautiful; a great 18th-century myth is that the purity of its sound will eventually drive a virtuoso to madness. Thomas Bloch's website has more info about his work and about the particular custom-built instrument shown here. [via Neatorama]

More:

• Crazy glass armonica

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Music | Digg this!

Digital devices this year, interesting...

Charles K. Kao, a British and U.S. citizen, won for "groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication." Willard S. Boyle, a Canadian and U.S. citizen, and George E. Smith, a U.S. citizen, "invented the first successful imaging technology using a digital sensor, a CCD (Charge-Coupled Device)." Kao in 1966 "made a discovery that led to a breakthrough in fiber optics. He carefully calculated how to transmit light over long distances via optical glass fibers..."

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Science | Digg this!

Barence writes "More than eight out of ten Mac owners also own a PC, according to a new piece of research. The NPD survey found that 12% of US computer-owning households have a Mac. However, 85% of those also own a Windows PC, suggesting that the Mac/PC divide is nowhere near as clear cut as both Apple and Microsoft suggest. Mac owners are also far more likely to have multiple computers in the house. Two thirds of Mac owners have three or more computers in the home, while only 29% of PC owners have two or more PCs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The fine artisans at Pressure Printing have been busy, following up their stunning Ron English piece with this lovely intaglio fine art print from a drawing by Amsterdam-based painter Femke Hiemstra. Femke also has a new book out, Rock Candy, collecting her phantasmagorical fairy tails. Last year, my wife purchased a small Hiemstra original from Roq La Rue Gallery as a birthday gift for me and it brings me spooky joy every day. The new piece from Pressure Printing, in a signed/numbered edition of 100, is 8.75" x 12.75" and sells for $150. It's titled "Haniwa." The Pressure Printing blog has terrific photos of the drawing and printmaking process.
Femke Hiemstra's Haniwa

Dave, the main character in this graphic novel, The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book (Fantagraphics), is an illustrator living in Cape Town, South Africa. He often gets frustrated by the freelance assignments he must accept to make a living (like drawing bricks for a catalog that the client insists must be "curious," "unique," "tasteful," and "reliable). He also has feet like a monkeys, which enable him to easily climb trees and buildings.

His best friend is Paul, who seems to have been permanently altered by ingesting too many psychedelics. Dave and Paul have good hearts, but they end up getting themselves into odd and dangerous predicaments that are never quite what they seem to be on the surface.

Joe Daly, the creator of of the characters, is a terrifically gifted artist with an ability to depict an environment that rivals Herge's. I loved studying the scenery when Paul and Dave drive through the city and hills of Cape Town, while they are engaged in long, funny conversations.

The two well-crafted mysteries contain twists that tricked me until the end. The first story involves a menacing Mexican man who lives in Dave apartment and wants to kill him. The second story starts with a hunt for an escaped capybara that leads to the discovery of a plot to destroy some wetlands to make room for a housing development. Daly's fondness for absurd situations might not be everyone's cup of tea, but if you liked The Big Lebowski or Pulp Fiction, you'll have no problem with Daly's brand of storytelling.

Interestingly, the artwork (especially the coloring) is tighter and more polished in the second story, as if Daly gained technical chops between drawing the first story and the second. But no matter, both stories are a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to more from Daly, who was nominated for an Eisner Award in 2007 for his other book, Scrublands.

The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book

Ella ja Aleksi is a Finnish musical group featuring two four-year-old rappers. This video for the song "Yöjuna Rovaniemelle " is an absolute delight. (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)

Private equity firms use borrowed money to buy undervalued companies, suck the cash out of the companies in the form of special dividends and other fees, and then rake in more fees when they unload the damaged and desperate company to another private equity firm, which squeezes more value out of it, repeating the cycle until the company is bankrupt.

In the short video accompanying a New York Times article about the 133-year-old Simmons Bedding Company's fatal entanglement with the private equity industry, Charles Duhigg, a financial projects reporter, remarked, "When I was in business school, there was nothing sexier in this entire world than private equity. It's exactly where you went if you wanted to one day own an island -- and one of my classmates just bought an island."

These private investors were able to buy companies like Simmons with borrowed money and put down relatively little of their own cash. Then, not long after, they often borrowed even more money, using the company’s assets as collateral — just like home buyers who took out home equity loans on top of their first mortgages. For the financiers, the rewards were enormous.

Twice after buying Simmons, THL [Thomas H. Lee Partners of Boston] borrowed more. It used $375 million of that money to pay itself a dividend, thus recouping all of the cash it put down, and then some.

A result: THL was guaranteed a profit regardless of how Simmons performed. It did not matter that the company was left owing far more than it was worth, just as many people profited from the mortgage business while many homeowners found themselves underwater.

At Simmons, Bought, Drained and Sold, Then Sent to Bankruptcy

Funnyman Rich Fulcher (Twitter), whose work you may know from The Mighty Boosh (he plays "Eleanor," "Bob Fossil," and other characters), has a new book out this week. "Tiny Acts of Rebellion" contains a wide assortment of little recipes for how one might stick it to the proverbial man.

To prepare for the book's launch, Mr. Fulcher is "sticking it" to a number of cities, quite literally, in a series of internet videos which feature the comedian giving the finger to all that we love and hold dear.

First: Hollywood.

(A special nod to Boing Boing Video editor Eric Mittleman, who shot and directed this fine piece of work, and to background dancer Ruth Waytz, whose moves are described as "Fosse-esque.").

Rich Fulcher flips off LA (YouTube)

Where could he possibly be headed next? fuckoffbigben.com.

The Tiny Acts of Rebellion book: official website / buy it on Amazon.

The song you're hearing in this video is "Jean City" by UK band Trash Money (web, MySpace).

One night more than twenty years ago, Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair fired up the photocopy machine at Mark's work and cranked out the first issue of bOING bOING, the print 'zine.* (Our new/old hand-drawn logotype at the top of this page is from that era!) Since those heady, dot matrix days of staples, stamps, and cyberpunks, quite a lot has changed. But some things haven't. Click to 2009. We're just a few months from our ten year anniversary as a blog, and are proud to have nearly 70,000 posts in the archives. We're honored that millions of people resonate with Boing Boing's take on technology, culture, and high weirdness. Thank you for your continued support. But as happy mutants, we must continue to evolve. And so we're pleased to present this re-imagining of Boing Boing.

As you probably noticed, we have a new design. Our goal with it is to highlight our most exciting, provocative, anomalous, and newsworthy posts, even after they've floated down the blog river off the front page. So, please do check out the "display case" of featured stories at the top and right of the site. Speaking of features, there will be more of those. Of course, we'll keep curating and contextualizing the most interesting things we find online, but we're also going back to bOING bOING's 'zine roots by presenting originally-reported articles. Who's writing those? We are, and the "we" is expanding in marvelous ways. We're thrilled to have several fantastic, and familiar, voices joining us on the front page:

• Rob Beschizza and Lisa Katayama, two of our favorite tech writers in the world, are shifting their efforts from BB Gadgets to the front page of Boing Boing. If you're a BB Gadgets reader, don't fret -- now all of that material will be hosted right here. Meanwhile, Rob and Lisa will also get a chance to go beyond the gadget realm to explore the other microuniverses that fascinate them. Rob is also busy as Boing Boing's first ever managing editor -- he does a masterful job of keeping us all in line, even if that line is quite curvy.

• Over at Offworld, Brandon Boyer has spent months charting the esoteric interzone of indie games. Henceforth, he'll also post columns and game reviews at Boing Boing that showcase the best bets for pixelated pleasure.

• Earlier this year, Maggie Koerth-Baker spent two weeks as a guestblogger and delighted us with revelations about giant squid, nasty cytokine storms, and parasites we should know and love. Now, Maggie will be here every day feeding our insatiable appetite for weird science, natural curiosities, odd anthropology, and the edges of eco-tech.

This relaunch was a major undertaking, and several people deserve a tip of the ol' propeller beanie: Rob Beschizza lit a fire under us, did the design, managed its implementation, and kept us calm. He is a creative force of quantum proportions. Master coder Dean Putney did the vast majority of the software development. As always, our stellar sysadmin, Ken Snider, kept things humming in the Jefferies tubes. Thanks to George Triantafyllakos, creator of BPreplay, the open source font we're using for headlines. And thank you to our partner John Battelle, our friend Jason Weisberger, and Federated Media's Mugs Buckley, Neil Chase, and Pete Spande for their business sense (and cents).

So with that, we hope you enjoy this evolutionary leap. Welcome back to Boing Boing: the brain mutator for higher primates.

(* Mark insists he reimbursed his former employer for the paper and toner!)

There was some news coverage last week of the UK's "equalities minister" (what the hell is that?), Harriet Harman, asking Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to shut down a prostitute review site called Punternet. As many legal commentators pointed out, this was ridiculous for a variety of reasons -- neither Harman nor Schwargenegger had any legal authority to shut down such a site. However, the really ridiculous thing is that all this request did was give the site a ton of attention. In a press release response, Punternet took issue with many of Harman's claims about the site, and then at the end noted how much she had helped the site's traffic:

How much extra traffic did you get on 30 September, the day the story first broke?

Just over 2.7 million hits, more than double the daily average. Here's the graph from my server statistics for September: http://www.punternet.com/daily_usage_200909.png

One must assume that wasn't Harman's intention. But, honestly, it makes you wonder what sort of politician these days doesn't realize that calling for the shutting down of a site will only boost the traffic to that site by a considerable amount.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

It takes about 4 hours to install a Pronto4 System autonomous vehicle kit onto almost any car. After that, the car can drive itself.

Vehicles retrofitted with the Pronto4 System can perform flexible roles in a tele-operational or semi-autonomous mode. The ProntoMimic Software Suite has a series of path creation / following interfaces that perform the task of path creation and maintenance using numerical data or aerial images and path execution in the form of GPS waypoint following.

Strap-on autonomous vehicle kit

Over at Autoblog Green, Sebastian Blanco has an extensive review/test-drive writeup about the Wheego Whip. Snip:

For your $19k - minus a potential $7,500 from the federal government - you get a compact two-seater that "when it makes a donut, it doesn't even leave a hole," Korchin said. Above all, this is a city car. There is no tremendous get-up-and-go in the Whip, but it performs just fine in city traffic.

Bottom line, according to the review: it's "solid." You won't be winning any cross-country speed races in this thing, but it sounds like a nice choice among NEVs -- that's shorthand for "neighborhood electric vehicles." Here's a PDF from Wheego with more specs.

nk497 writes "IBM scientists are working on ambitious research where nano-sized holes will be drilled into computer chips and DNA passed through to create a 'genetic code reader.' A DNA molecule would be passed through a hole just three nanometers wide, while an electrical sensor 'reads' the DNA. The challenge of the silicon-based 'DNA Transistor' would be to slow and control the motion of the DNA through the hole so the reader could decode what is inside it. IBM claimed that if the project was successful it could make personalised genome analysis as cheap as $100 to $1,000, and compared it to the first-ever sequencing done for the Human Genome Project, which cost $3 billion."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over at Credit.com I have a post about online matchmaker OKCupid's blog, which analyzes the messages its members send to each other and generates interesting charts and graphs from the data.

The OKCupid blog crunches data collected from millions of messages sent back and forth between its subscribers and reveals what kinds of messages and terms result in the most responses (along with the ones that are sure-fire turn offs). Even if you aren't looking for a romantic partner, you'll find that the graphs and charts offer fascinating insights into human nature.

Especially interesting is the post titled "Online Dating Advice: Exactly What To Say In A First Message." OKCupid analyzed the terms and phrases in 500,000 "first contact" messages. They found, for instance, that "the worst 6 words you can use in a first message are all stupid slang," such as ur, r, u, ya, cant, and hit. Using ur will drop the response rate from 32 percent to 6 percent! Another mistake is complimenting someone on their looks. If you say someone is "sexy" you'll almost halve your chances of hearing back from them. On the other hand, a greeting of "How's it going?" will boost the response rate to 53%. People also respond well to messages that make it clear you actually read the person's profile and have something to say about it (using "you mention" in a message increases the response rate to 49%).

Charts to Help You Succeed in Online Dating

alphadogg writes "Charles Kao, whose work in the 1960s laid the foundation for today's long-distance fiber-optic networks, has won a share of this year's Nobel Prize in Physics (PDF). Kao, sometimes referred to as the 'father of fiber-optic communications,' was formally honored by the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden 'for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication.' Kao's breakthrough discovery in 1966 was to determine how to transmit light over long distances using ultrapure optical glass fibers. This would extend the distance of such transmissions to 62 miles vs. the mere 65 feet allowed under previous technology held back by impurities. The first ultrapure fiber was created in 1970."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Instructables user Back Roads just posted this tutorial describing the low-cost pneumatic system he hacked together to build this haunted house prop. [via Hack a Day]

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.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Halloween | Digg this!

eldavojohn writes "A couple months ago news broke of a Firefox plugin named RECAP designed to share PACER documents. Normally these documents would cost a nominal fee but instead when someone pays for them and is using RECAP, they're uploaded to a public repository (public.resource.org). A 22-year-old programmer named Aaron Swartz decided to capture 19,856,160 records by simply installing a small PERL script at the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals library in Chicago — a script which uploaded a public document every three seconds to Amazon's EC2 cloud computing service. He then transferred them to public.resource.org so that users of RECAP could access millions of documents. That's when the FBI took interest in the programmer responsible for this effort and ran his name through government databases. How did he discover this? His FOIA was approved, of course, and he received the FBI's partially redacted report on himself."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mr. LemurBoy points out that some French politicians are pushing a law that would require a label on any marketing or advertising image that was photoshopped, airbrushed or edited in some manner. The idea, of course, is that they don't want ad campaigns to portray things in a manner that is not quite truthful. But shouldn't there just be a simpler rule against deceptive advertising (one I imagine must already exist)? If it's just a little edit to make the photo more reasonable, why should it require some special disclosure?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Are you one of the nine out of ten adults who purportedly believes you can tell when someone is watching you from behind? If so, does it occur to you that this is a kind of supernatural belief? Dr. Bruce Hood, Director of the Bristol Cognitive Development Centre at the University of Bristol and the latest subject of our ongoing series of interviews with notable Makers, has some fascinating theories about how such "routine" supernatural beliefs come about as natural consequences of the normal psychology of child development. He also talks briefly about how his own childhood enthusiasm for the paranormal eventually came full circle in his mature scientific interest in the psychology of paranormal belief. Fascinating stuff.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Makers | Digg this!

Dave sez, "On a trip to Shanghai to install an artwork, my cohorts and I stumbled on an area along Beijing street that was heaven for hardware geeks like me. I've loved hardware stores all my life, but I've never seen anything quite like this. I shot way too much video, and even felt compelled to sing about it later. It was that good."

China is full of places like this -- Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Shanghai... It's the world's factory, and there's plenty of making stuff all over the place.

Hardware Heaven (Thanks, Dave!)

ndogg writes "It's no secret that Stallman doesn't like Mono. Miguel, however, has been pretty quiet about those criticisms, until now. It seems he'll no longer be quiet. He's responded strongly to an article by Stallman that criticizes Codeplex about its aims due to its origin at Microsoft. Miguel says Stallman is fearmongering, and is missing an opportunity by his criticism."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've done the drawing for the winners of the tools that Garrett Wade so generously provided us with, namely a set of their Extra Heavy Duty Screwdrivers and one of their Push Drills.

The winners are:

Jonathan Fulton - Who gets the "tank screwdrivers"
Matt Kaake - Who wins the push drill

Congrats, fellas! Email sent. Please take some pics of projects you do with the tools and upload them to the MAKE Flickr pool. We'd love to see what you do with them.

We had over 270 responses to our drawing, and the question of what you would do with these tools. The comment thread is worth reading. It's a fascinating portrait of the diverse MAKE readership, the many different projects you're working on, or considering, and how you relate to your tools. There are even fond reminiscences of dad's and granddad's tools. All sorts of great stuff. As our editor and publisher Dale Dougherty said: "There are any number of tool makers out there who should read through these comments." It's definitely a decent peek at how a population of makers use and relate to their tools.

Thanks to everyone who participated, and thanks to the folks at Garrett Wade for these give-away goodies.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Announcements | Digg this!

Barence writes "It's not Windows Mobile 7, but at least it's here. PC Pro has posted its full review of Windows Mobile 6.5, as found on the new HTC Touch2 handset, which is also reviewed. If you're expecting something to challenge Apple OS and Android, prepare for a very large let-down. The damning quote: 'Business users, as much as consumers, deserve a phone that's quick and intuitive to operate as well as one that hooks in neatly to Exchange and Outlook and is easy to manage centrally. If this is the best [Microsoft] can muster in the year-and-a-half's worth of development time since Windows Mobile 6.1 appeared, we'll be dramatically lowering our hopes for Windows Mobile 7.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Thawte is ending their Web of Trust, including their free Personal Email Certificates, in less than 2 weeks' time. This hasn't been picked up by the media yet. Seems to me a lot of people, including myself, are hurt by this." Thawte is offering a 1-year free VeriSign cert to those holding valid Personal Email Certificates; after that you pay.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It would seem that Adobe has squeezed Flash onto the iPhone. It is not in its usual guise as a browser plugin, but rather as a method to build full-fledged apps downloadable from the iPhone App Store. This should come as good news to folks familiar with the popular content creation software. In one fell swoop Adobe has lowered the barrier of entry to developing for the iPhone.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in iPhone | Digg this!

The Marseille Figs are fast becoming my favorite new artists of the decade, if not the century. The eclectic trio play a startling variety of instruments in an indescribable blend of styles, reminding me of peak Violent Femmes at times, Tom Waits at others, with some Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and Cash Family for country cred.

Their new EP, Jumbo, is a superb addition to their canon. Jumbo's title track, a cross between Sergio Leone cowboy soundtrack and Godzilla monster music, has overtones of sinister circus music as well, a menacing, uptempo song about an elemental force that threatens the Earth.

The remaining five tracks keep the heat on: My Latest Mistake is a sweet C&W-inflected song with a stompin' clappin' back-beat about a complete screw up who fails at everything; Bad Bad Baby is more explicitly country, opening with "You done me wrong again and you done me wrong again," and hews to the heart-broke formula except when it doesn't, breaking into a roller-disco bridge that works in a way that is totally unexpected and altogether delightful; The Human Tragedy is another countrified screw-up's lament with accordion and hilarity; the standout on the album is the ballad The Long Goodbye, a drinker's anthem with a slow tinkling piano intro, transitioning into a swaying, horn-heavy drinking song.

My friend Stef, who introduced me to the Figs, calls them a "small big band," a trio whose prodigious musical talents and strange arrangements make them a genre unto themselves.

Jumbo is for sale on CD, digital download and 12" vinyl.

There's a launch party tomorrow night, too, at the Iambic Bar in London!

Marseille Figs: Jumbo

Glyn sez, "The Royal Mail has sent a 'cease and desist' letter to ErnestMarples.com, a website that provides a post code API allowing social projects to perform post code lookups [ed: due to the bonkers British law on database copyrights, the record of which post-code corresponds to which address is privately owned, though it was developed a public expense; the public can only use the database it paid for if it pays again for a license from the Royal Mail]. Amongst the many non-profit services that face closure today is Job Centre Pro Plus, which allows you to find jobs near you. Royal Mail is currently looking to reduce its workforce of 121,000 postal workers.

Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group adds, "It's outrageous that Royal Mail should be sacking workers and at the same time trying to close a service that might help them find work. Post codes were created with public money, so they need to be used for the widest public benefit. Ernest Marples have been showing how this can be done. Their ideas need to be legalised for non-profit use, not shut down. Intellectual property rules need to work for society, and not the other way round. An amicable solution to allow non-commercial use of post code data would be easy to create, via a key given only to non-profit organisations. Clearly, something that allows greater use of post codes is needed right now. Better access to information means more social and democratic benefits.

On Friday the 2nd October we received correspondence from the Royal Mail demanding that we close this site down (see below). One of the directors of Ernest Marples Postcodes Ltd has also been threatened personally.

We are not in a position to mount an effective legal challenge against the Royal Mail's demands and therefore have closed the ErnestMarples.com API effective immediately.

We understand that this will cause harm and considerable inconvenience to the many people who are using or intend to use the API to power socially useful tools, such as HealthWhere, JobcentreProPlus.com and PlanningAlerts.com. For this, we apologise unreservedly.

Ernest Marples Postcodes has been threatened by the Royal Mail

Royal Mail: closing job search over data dispute while sacking workers (Thanks, Glyn!)

Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan is the first volume in one of the most exciting new young adult series to come along since Uglies (or, for that matter, The Borribles). Leviathan is set in an alternate steampunk past, in which the powers of the world are divided into "Clankers" who favour huge, steam-powered walking war-machines; and "Darwinists," whose hybrid "beasties" can stand in for airships, steam-trains, war-ships, and subs (they even have a giant squid/octopus hybrid called the kraken that can seize whole warships and drag them to their watery graves).

Set on the eve of WWI, the story's two main characters are Aleks, the incognito orphan of the freshly assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand (fleeing his murderous uncle Emperor Franz Josef from Austria to the safe haven of Switzerland in a liberated battle-walker); and Deryn, a Scots girl who has dressed in boys' clothes to muster into Britain's Darwinist air-corps and finds herself a midshipsman on the Leviathan, a floating ecosystem a quarter-mile long, made up of whales, bats, bees, six-legged hydrogen-sniffing dogs, and all manner of beasties that make her the meanest thing in the sky.

Filled with gripping air and land-battles, political intrigue and danger, science and madness, Leviathan is part Island of Dr Moreau, part Patrick O'Brien. And to top it all off, the volume is lavishly illustrated with fabulous ink-drawings of the best scenes from the book, executed in high Victorian style by Keith Thompson. Thompson also produced contrafactual propaganda maps of alternate Europe for end-papers.

Westerfeld writes gripping, relentless coming-of-age novels that are equally enjoyable by boys and girls, adults and kids, and Leviathan is no exception. I'm looking forward to volume two -- and many more to come.

Leviathan is also available as an unabridged 8-hour audiobook on DRM-free CDs for a very reasonable $20. The reading is by Alan Cummings, who absolutely nails it, and the production -- bed music, editing -- is just superb, bringing the whole swashbuckling tale to life.

Leviathan

Two physicists who co-invented the CCD image sensor have been rewarded with a share of this year's Nobel Prize for Physics. Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith developed the charge-coupled device in 1969 while working at Bell Laboratories, producing the world's first solid-state video camera just a year later. Each receives a quarter share in the $1.4 million prize.

We've noted the trend of trying to cut down on scalping by using e-tickets to stop the transfer of tickets, but it appears that the Philadelphia Eagles football team also is trying to stop radio stations from doing promotional giveaways. The team has sued the owner of the radio station, saying that the terms on the back of the ticket forbid the use of the tickets for commercial purposes -- such as contests -- and also that the station is violating the Eagles' trademarks in naming them around the ticket giveaway promotion. This raises a bunch of questions about the right of first sale on a ticket. While the stadium may have the right to forbid entry to anyone, it seems like that would be a dumb move on the team's part. My guess is that the team's main concern is that it only wants partner (i.e., those who paid a ton for broadcast rights) radio stations to give away tickets -- but that doesn't mean there's a legal right there. If the tickets were legitimately bought, why shouldn't the station be able to sell them or give them away? And, considering that the radio station was accurately describing the team when using the name, that shouldn't be a trademark violation.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Tom sez, "A wonderful selection of suburban playgrounds and parks circa 1970: robot slides, space cruiser climbing frames and more."

These litigation magnets made me the lad I am today. I miss 'em. Sniff.

Playgrounds From the 70's (Thanks, Tom!)

(Image via George Campbell)

When I was asked to join on with BoingBoing as a contributing editor, my first thought was, "OMG, I'm a Boinger!"

And that immediately triggered a flashback to my childhood, specifically the part I spent rifling through my father's comic collection. If you're familiar with old, classic Bloom County, then you may recall Billy and the Boingers (née Deathtongue), a heavy metal band made up of Bill the Cat, Opus the Penguin, Hodgepodge the Rabbit and Steve Dallas the Formerly Sensitive Male. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, then run, don't walk, to your nearest bookstore and purchase yourself a copy of Billy and the Boingers Bootleg, which contains all the associated strips, as well as an LP of the ostensibly hit songs "You Stink, But I Love You" and (yes) "I'm a Boinger." Perhaps, with luck, your 8-year-old will get a hold of it and the circle of dorky life will continue.

With that, ladies and gentlemen, may I present "I'm a Boinger" as performed by the Harry Pitts Band.

Churba sez, "Leeds Hackspace is holding an Open Hack Day on Oct 10 at Old Broadcasting House, all tickets are free, with various events such as a Scrapheap Challenge, Micro-controller Workshop, the OpenLeeds Code-a-thon, and lightning talks, where anyone who knows about a topic can give a ten minute presentation about it. All are welcome, tickets are free, And Leeds Hackspace is Desperately Seeking New members, as they're one of the smaller hackspaces in the UK, and only recently started."

Announcing LHS HackDay! Saturday, October 10th 2009 (Thanks, Churba!)

Wondermark's wonderful Genre Fiction Generator

(Thanks, David!)

Just a reminder that the first promotional giveaway from this year's Halloween contest sponsors is currently underway. 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 on the announcement page describing what cool Halloween-themed project you'd make with it. The winner will be announced this 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.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Halloween | Digg this!

We recently discussed the release of the PSP Go, which drew criticism for many design choices that were of dubious value to consumers. Now, Phaethon360 sends in a story about why Sony felt the need to improve upon the old PSP. "As a format, the UMD was holding the entire platform back. Few people (if anyone) bought into the UMD movie hype Sony attempted to thrust back in 2005. Very soon after that, people realized they could rip their DVDs to a memory stick with the same quality. It's ironic how, as the price of Sony Memory Stick Pro Duo dropped and size increased, PSP UMD sales decreased along with it. It doesn't take too many Howard Stringers to figure out what the problem was." Indeed, Sony was complaining of rampant PSP piracy for quite some time. They cited "legal and technical issues" for not supporting the transfer of UMD games onto the PSP Go; undoubtedly they couldn't find a way to keep pirated games from being copied.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ryan Heshka is one of three artists in the "Envirus" show at Roq La Rue in Seattle, opening this Friday, October 9.

See Ryan's other paintings for the show here.

Just Posted: Our hands on-preview of the Leica X1. This retro-stlyed compact promises SLR-level imaging with its fixed high quality lens and large APS-C sensor, but in a much more portable package. We borrowed an early sample camera from Leica for a week to take a close look at its design and operation.

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

Dear boingers,

These past two weeks have been nothing short of amazing. Thanks for letting me share my stories and experiences with all of you. I will be contacting those who won the haiku competition via private message to coordinate the giveaway. I would like to stay in touch with everyone, so please feel free to follow me on Twitter or even add me on Facebook if that's not weird.

Next up for me? I will be leaving to Pakistan shortly to start filming a documentary on Abdul-Sattar Edhi. For those who do not know his work, here's a decent article on his work. In the 1950's he bought an old blue van and began transporting the sick and dead to their fated destinations. This small van called The Poor Man's Van was the first ambulance in the history of Pakistan. Though Edhi single-handedly created one of the most successful health and welfare network in Asia, he never lost his simplicity. He owns only two tunics to his name, sleeps on the floor of his foundations office in Karachi, and eats only a piece of stale bread every morning.

I met Edhi in August when he was on his yearly visit to New York. He shared with us the plight of the Internally Displaced People in Pakistan and said he never saw a situation so bleak before in his life. Edhi has been with Pakistan since its inception and has seen many leaders and governments come and go. There is not very much written about him in English, but you can find a translated copy of his autobiography at Desi-store.com. I remember asking him if he could sign a copy of his autobiography for me. Edhi doesn't speak or write much English, but he took his pen and wrote in English, "love human beings." As I read aloud what he wrote on the flap he looked to me, smiled, and said in Urdu, "it's really that simple."

Thanks again everyone.

(Picture of me taken by Omar Mullick.)

Edhi Foundation Website

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



Above, is a video piece Musa Syeed and I produced for TIME.com a couple of months back on Domestic Crusaders.

The Domestic Crusaders is a two-act play in its last week at the Nuyorican Poet's Café in New York City. I strongly recommend anyone in New York City that has a chance to see the play to catch it. Though it's not perfect, I can't think of a better glimpse into the Pakistani Muslim American life. I caught the play opening night on September 11th and enjoyed every minute of it. Every character in the play falls into a certain Muslim archetype, from the mildly racist yet caring mother to the head-wrap wearing over zealous daughter. And all these archetypes are awfully close to reality. Without a doubt, I am Ghaffur, the slightly naïve, college-aged Muslim poster boy.

There seemed to be social commentary on everything from racial profiling at the airport to the gender roles at home. All the topics touched on are authentic discussions that occur in South Asian homes all over America, but the sheer amount of themes injected just seemed like overkill. It was as if Wajahat Ali, the playwright, had a checklist of "most common Muslim topics needed to be addressed" and went down from there. The flow of the dialogue was constantly ruptured by long wooden soliloquies that seemed more Bollywood than Broadway. But this issue of checklist dialogue isn't a unique problem to Domestic Crusaders. In fact, it's a problem that many Muslims typically have. Since we're at the edges of the mainstream, whenever we're given the podium to share our thoughts we want to address every issue from terrorism to women's oppression to Muslim arts. Hell, just look at the posts Aman and I have been making these past two weeks.

Many Muslims, including myself, are constantly stuck playing the role of "Ambassador Muslim"  that we sometimes forget who we really are. Right after Obama's Cairo speech, many of my creative directors at work asked me how I felt about the speech, if I was moved and if I felt "more American." I look forward to the day where I'm less of a domestic crusader and more of Bassam. Besides, the play does a better job of playing that role.

Domestic Crusaders Website

Nuyorican Poets Cafe

HanClinto was among a number of readers to send word that Adobe has worked around the inability to run Flash on iPhones and iPod Touch devices. Adobe has been trying to work with Apple for more than a year to get its Flash Player software running on Apple's products, but has said it needs more cooperation from Apple to get it done. Now Adobe has come up with a work-around. At its Adobe Max developer conference in Los Angeles Monday, Adobe announced that the CS5 release of Flash Professional, due in beta later this year, will allow developers to write applications and compile the code to run on Apple devices. Getting these into the app store might be tricky, though.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This video from instructables shows a really simple way to make an outboard motor from a cordless drill. The drive shaft is a 10 mm wire rod that is attached to a right angle drill-head with a 3-blade propeller. You can extend the run time of this DIY outboard by adding an external battery. It would be really cool to add a solar panel on the dock that charges the battery when not in use.

In the Maker Shed:


Makers is a beautiful hardbound book celebrating DIY inspiration and the people behind the projects. Makers introduces you to a brigade of citizen engineers making their own cameras, clocks, airplanes, submarines, musical instruments, weapons, medical equipment, energy- saving devices, robots, and houses. They create their own tools to explore the outer atmosphere, the deep sea, and the behavior of tiny flies in their backyard.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this!

samzenpus writes "A restricted 2,400 page-document put out by the MoD designed to help intelligence personnel with information security has been leaked onto the internet. Wikileaks notes that Joint Services Protocol 440 (JSP 440), was published in 2001 and lays out protocols to defend against hackers, journalists, and foreign spies. it says, 'Leaks usually take the form of reports in the public media which appear to involve the unauthorized disclosure of official information (whether protectively marked or not) that causes political harm or embarrassment to either the UK Government or the Department concerned... The threat [of leakage] is less likely to arise from positive acts of counter-espionage, than from leakage of information through disaffected members of staff, or as a result of the attentions of an investigative journalist, or simply by accident or carelessness.' " Looks like it's time to write JSP 441.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

samzenpus writes "A restricted 2,400 page-document put out by the MoD designed to help intelligence personnel with information security has been leaked onto the internet. Wikileaks notes that Joint Services Protocol 440 (JSP 440), was published in 2001 and lays out protocols to defend against hackers, journalists, and foreign spies. it says, 'Leaks usually take the form of reports in the public media which appear to involve the unauthorized disclosure of official information (whether protectively marked or not) that causes political harm or embarrassment to either the UK Government or the Department concerned⦠The threat [of leakage] is less likely to arise from positive acts of counter-espionage, than from leakage of information through disaffected members of staff, or as a result of the attentions of an investigative journalist, or simply by accident or carelessness.' " looks like it's time to write JSP 441.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've discussed the state of "fansub" anime video and video games in the past, whereby many fans will team up and help translate a release for different markets. While there have been some complaints, many in the anime community have figured out how to embrace this and use it to their advantage -- in some cases using the fansubs to determine what other markets to look at for official releases. Earlier this year, we wrote about how one developer from 07th Expansion was thrilled about the fansub work being done -- thanking the fansubbers for "loving" his work so much.

An anonymous reader points out that 07th Expansion recently sold the rights of a new game to the company MangaGamer, which includes the right to translate the game. But the fansubbers were already working on their own version. So, would there be a clash? Apparently not. Both versions are moving forward legally with the approval of 07th Expansion. MangaGamer even did a good thing, offering to hire the fansubbers to do the translating for the official version, but they were unable to do so for work reasons. This did follow one bad move -- where MangaGamer asked the fansubbers to take down their version -- but after MangaGamer went back and learned of 07th Expansion's embracing of fansubbers, it changed its mind, and told the fansubbers they could continue with their effort.

Of course, even with the "competition" from fans, MangaGamer should have a huge advantage. The fansubbers admit that they're slow and doing it as a hobby -- so they fully expect MangaGamer to beat them to market by a long shot. But it's nice to see MangaGamer realize that this isn't the end of the world and to just compete in the marketplace, even without an exclusive monopoly on a translation patch to the game.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

George Norris, a 66-year-old retiree who ran a home-based orchid business was imprisoned for two years in a federal penitentiary because "he had failed to properly navigate the many, often irrational, paperwork requirements the U.S. imposed when it implemented an arcane international treaty's new restrictions on trade in flowers and other flora," reports claims the The Washington Times, in a story titled, "Criminalizing everyone." (The orchids themselves were legal.)

When 60-year-old Kathy Norris asked court officials why U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service's very own SWAT team had raided and ransacked her home, they helpfully explained, "You don't need to know. You can't know."

The judge who sentenced Mr. Norris had some advice for him and his wife: "Life sometimes presents us with lemons." Their job was, yes, to "turn lemons into lemonade."

The judge apparently failed to appreciate how difficult it is to run a successful lemonade stand when you're an elderly diabetic with coronary complications, arthritis and Parkinson's disease serving time in a federal penitentiary.

UPDATE: Read the comments for more context to the story. There seems to be more going on here than what the The Washington Times is reporting.

Here's an interesting post from 2004 about George Norris from Pollenatrix, a "botanical discipline" blog:

George Norris, a crusty old orchid grower from Texas, has yet again found himself squarely in the sights of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as well as the Department of Homeland Security.

George, along with his business associate Peruvian grower Manuel Arias-Silver, is charged with conspiracy to smuggle endangered phragmipediums (orchids) into the U.S. Since Manuel is one of only three growers to have been given permission by the Peruvian government to artificially propagate the newly discovered phragmipedium Kovachii, it appears that the U.S. government has singled out the pair for special attention over suspicions that this is the species they were smuggling. There appears to be little evidence of this, though it is likely the pair were taking some shortcuts on paperwork because of the challenges of importing other, legally propagated species, into the U.S.

In the orchid world, the CITES treaty is almost universally denounced; the charge is that it does nothing to stop habitat destruction, and actually encourages illegal smuggling of wild-collected plants because the regulations make it so difficult to trade in artifically-propagated specimens.

Federal SWAT Raid Over . . . Orchids

Aaron Swartz, co-founder of Reddit, was investigated by the FBI for participating in a project to take the publicly owned US court records from the PACER database (where they were very expensive to access) and put them on the web. He's requested his FBI file and put it on the web:

AARON SWARTZ has a profile on the website LINKEDIN, at www.linkedin.com/in/aaronsw. SWARTZ is listed as a writer, hacker and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. SWARTZ's education includes Stanford University, Sociology, 2004. SWARTZ's experience includes the following:

SWARTZ has a profile on the website FACEBOOK. His networks include Stanford '08 and Boston, MA. The picture used in his profile was also used in an article about SWARTZ in THE NEW YORK TIMES.

SWARTZ's personal webpage, www.aaronsw.com, includes a section titled "Aaron Swartz: a life time of dubious accomplishments". In 2007, SWARTZ began working full-time as a member of the Long-Term Planning Committee for the Human Race (LTPCHR).

February 19, Manassas, VA:

On February 17, 2008 [sic], SA [REDACTED] received an email from [REACTED] Administrative Office of the US Courts, with links to two published articles regarding the compromise of the PACER system.

On February 12, 2009, [REACTED] published an article in THE NEW YORK TIMES titled "An Effort to Upgrade a Court Archive to Free and Easy". For the article, [REDACTED] interviewed [REDACTED] and AARON SWARTZ regarding the compromise of the PACER system.

Wanted by the FBI

Margaret Killjoy from Steampunk Magazine writes, "One of the founders of modern steampunk thought, Professor Calamity, is facing multiple felony charges after having been accused of running a twitter account that communicated with protesters during the G-20 protests in Pittsburgh last month. To add insult to injury, they raided his house in Queens, confiscating everything from hammers to copies of SteamPunk Magazine."

EFF has all the court documents on this.

We put our hands out where they could see them. They ordered us out of bed. They wouldn't let us dress, but they did put a random assortment of clothes on some people. We were handcuffed, and although the upstairs and downstairs groups were kept separate initially, we were soon all together, sitting in the living room, positioned like dolls on the couches and chairs. We were in handcuffs for several hours, and we were helpless as our little bird, a Finch we had rescued and were rehabilitating, flew out the open door to certain death, after his cage had been battered by the cops in their zeal to open the upstairs bedroom doors by force. We shouted at them, but they stood there and watched.

And they stood and watched us for hours and hours and hours. 16 hours to be precise, 16 hours of the NYPD and FBI traipsing through our house, confiscating our lives in a fishing expedition related to the G20 protests of September 24th and 25th. The search warrant, when we were finally allowed to read it, mentioned violation of federal rioting laws and was vague enough to allow the entire house to be searched. They kept repeating that we were not arrested, that we were free to go. But being free meant being watched by the FBI, monitored while using the bathroom, not allowed to make phone calls for hours or to observe them ransacking our rooms. Being free meant they took two of us away on bullshit summonses, and even though this was our house, where we lived, if we left, we could not re-enter.

SteamPunk's Professor Calamity faces multiple felonies for twittering

Man Arrested for Twittering Goes to Court, EFF Has the Documents

The inaugural Reading and Democracy National Reading Summit is coming up in Toronto on Nov 12-13, and I'm coming to Toronto to speak at it. The plan is to "create a national reading strategy for Canada" -- a noble goal.

The TD National Reading Summit will engage participants in crafting a blueprint for a reading Canada. Over two days, delegates will hear from an impressive line-up of speakers from across the country and around the world. Ana Maria Machado (Brazil), Ingrid Bon (Netherlands), Elisa Bonilla (Mexico), Richard C. Anderson (USA), Cory Doctorow (UK/Canada), Tom King (Canada), Charles Pascal (Canada), and others will explore what it means to be a reader in a democratic society and share their research and experience in developing reading promotion programs. Conference sessions will inspire delegates to collaborate and lay the groundwork for new provincial and federal programs that will ultimately foster a reading culture in Canada.

Becoming a reader is at the very heart of responsible citizenship

The unintentional comedians of Conservapedia are at it again: this time, they're planning on producing an expurgated Bible that's had all "liberal bias" removed from the teachings of Christ and the gospels.

Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms as they develop;[3] defective translations use the word "comrade" three times as often as "volunteer"; similarly, updating words which have a change in meaning, such as "word", "peace", and "miracle"

Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction by using modern terms for it, such as "gamble" rather than "cast lots";[4] using modern political terms, such as "register" rather than "enroll" for the census

Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.

Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning

Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story

Conservatizing the Bible (Thanks, Fef!)

Today on the Worth1000 photoshopping contest: punk animals.

Punk Animals

Joe sez,

The mere fact that the Great Bearded Wizard of Albion, Mr Alan Moore, is behind a new journal, Dodgem Logic, should be enough to get a lot of us interested. But add in talents like the Josie Long, Graham Linehan, Kev O'Neill, Melinda Gebbie, Steve Aylett and others and I'm pretty much sold and I'd imagine so are most of us.

But it gets even better - this is a new underground journal that seems to be part entertainment, part grassroots activism/advice on all sorts of subjects dear to many boingers' hearts, from guerilla gardening to making your own clothes, living on no cash (something most of us will find essential these days!), steampunk guides to rebuilding collapsed civilisation...

Alan's daughter Leah and hubby John Reppion (themselves excellent comics writers) have the official release describing the first edition (which will come with a segment designed to take local content so it can be reworked for different areas - a great idea), which comes from Tony Bennet's great Indy comics press Knockabout (home to Hunt Emerson & Gilbert Shelton as well as UK publishers of the new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). Is it just me or is this the perfect sounding journal for BBers?

Announcing: Alan Moore's "Dodgem Logic" (Thanks, Joe!)

TechReviewAl writes "A new startup called Ginkgo BioWorks hopes to make synthetic-biology simpler than ever by assembling biological parts, such as strings of specific genes, for industry and academic scientists. While companies already exist to synthesize pieces of DNA, Ginkgo assembles synthesized pieces of DNA to create functional genetic pathways. (Assembling specific genes into long pieces of DNA is much cheaper than synthesizing that long piece from scratch.) Company cofounder Tom Knight, also a research scientist at MIT, says: 'I'm interested in transitioning biology from being sort of a craft, where every time you do something it's done slightly differently, often in ad hoc ways, to an engineering discipline with standardized methods of arranging information and standardized sets of parts that you can assemble to do things.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in February, Mark blogged about the forthcoming Melvin Monster anthology from Drawn and Quarterly, with much anticipation. I've just gotten a copy at the direct from the Drawn and Quarterly folks at the Word on the Street event in Toronto and read it in one gulp. What a hoot!

Melvin Monster was the creation of John Stanley, one of the principal writers on Little Lulu, Nancy and Sluggo, and others. Melvin is firmly in the Addams Family/St Trinnian's vein, a macabre and sweet kids' comic about a monster-boy whose parents (Baddy, a Frankenstein's monster, and Mummy, a mummy) urge him to do a bad deed every day, make him play with the family's vicious pet alligator, and demand that he follow in the family tradition of dropping out of school in kindergarten.

There's plenty of two-edged humor in Melvin Monster, stuff that parents will appreciate that might go over the heads of kids who are enjoying the slapstick. The art is fantastic, in a Marc Davis/Haunted Mansion vein, and the reproduced pages have been cleaned up just enough to make them neat without being sterile, some of the newsprint texture remaining in the scans.

Seth's book design, with wonderful tessellated Melvin endpapers and an embossed cover, make for a great package, perfect for a gift or for long-term love on your shelves.

Melvin Monster: Volume One (John Stanley Library)

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.

One of the most interesting aspects of folk religion in America is the enduring figure of Saint Expedite - a youthful, Roman-garbed saint barely tolerated or acknowledged within the upper echelons of the Catholic Church but the subject of loving circles of worship throughout Latin America and many parts of the United States. (I've encountered his statue in a Catholic Church in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico.) Simply put, Saint Expedite is the patron of those who need help in a hurry: with jobs, relationships, money, etc. In Brazil, he is the venerated helper of people looking for work; in America, so says Wired magazine, he is the "patron saint of the nerds," i.e., a figure who can help untangle internet connections and the keep communications networks flowing; to church authorities he is merely an icon of "popular religiosity" who never historically existed.

The story of Saint Expedite's existence dates back to logs of martyrs kept in the Roman Empire, where the surname appears. Some speculate that the Saint Expedite cult got started when a box containing the statue of an unnamed Roman sentry got labeled "expedite" for shipping purposes and fell into the hands (and hearts) of a Paris convent. Whatever the case, church authorities step carefully around Saint Expedite, not wanting to alienate his devoted following among many Latin American Catholics; Saint Expedite is also a focus of devotion among practitioners of the African-American magical tradition called hoodoo, among some New Agers, and followers of Santeria.

For the story of Saint Expedite, check out LuckyMojo.com and Wired magazine. I also write about him in Occult America.

Stephen Worth says: "Here is a song called 'The Tantrum' from a 1967 movie titled, The Cool Ones. Just try not to enjoy it, I dare you!"

The tiny Asian citrus psylid is killing citrus trees in California (High res image from UC Davis here).

Homegrown Evolution has an interesting story about Asian citrus psylid, and ant-sized insect that could spell doom for California citrus.

The Asian citrus psylid is not a problem in itself, but carries an incurable bacterial disease called huanglongbing (HLB). HLB, first reported in Asia in 1919, renders citrus fruit inedible and eventually kills the tree. Parts of Africa, Asia and South America are infected with HLB and in some regions of Brazil the disease is so bad that they've given up growing citrus altogether. HLB is in Florida and is adding to a nightmarish collection of other diseases afflicting citrus in the Sunshine State. Now California growers are panicking with the appearance of the psylid.

The State of California is taking all sorts of measures to stop the spread of the pest (including spraying dangerous pesticides), but Erik and Kelly of Homegrown Evolution are taking a Stoic approach to the problem.

Seneca [author of Letters from a Stoic] would say, do what is in your power to do and don't worry about what you can't fix. Taleb [author of The Black Swan] would advise always maximizing upside potential while minimizing exposure to the downside. My unsentimental conclusion: don't try to grow citrus. If I had a mature tree I'd leave it in place and rip it out at the first sign of HLB. Despite the state's offer to replace any HLB infected tree with a free citrus tree I wouldn't take them up on the offer. In our case we have three small, immature citrus trees that are already chewed up by citrus leafminers. I'm pondering pulling them up and replacing them with fruit trees unrelated to citrus. This follows our stoic, get tough policy in the garden. Planting a tree entails a considerable investment in time. It can take years to get fruit. Why not plant pomegranate instead and let other people worry about citrus diseases? If a pomegranate disease shows up, rip it up and plant something else. Following this approach will eliminate habitat for the psylid and negate the need for pesticides.

The end of California citrus?

Drew sends us The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, "An occasional webcomic detailing the adventures of Babbage and Lovelace. Much of the dialogue and ideas taken from Babbage's autobiography and Lovelace's letters, thereby proving that truth is indeed stranger than fiction. The artist is an animator and it shows in the splendid life and expression of the artwork."

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (Thanks, Drew!)

As we await the official shutdown of Geocities at the end of the month, Ivor Tossell is reminding everyone that today's internet hotspot -- Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc. -- may be completely gone in a decade's time. And, while it's good that sites come and go as the next big thing comes along, it does raise questions for those who are relying on these sites as some sort of archive of a life lived online. It's a good reminder of the importance of either being able to back up certain information -- or control it directly yourself.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

We're thrilled to announce that MAKE pal, and Advisory Board member, Limor Fried, aka Ladyada, has been honored with an 18th annual EFF Pioneer Award. Well-deserved, we say. Congrats, Limor!

Here's the little bio from the EFF announcement:

A pioneer in the field of open-source hardware and software hacking, Ladyada helps the general public engineer and adapt consumer electronics to better suit their needs. Her do-it-yourself ethic is founded on the idea that consumer electronics are best modified for use by customers, not corporations. Fried runs her own company, Adafruit Industries, which sells unique and fun do-it-yourself kits to help consumers make gadgets such as backup iPod chargers, green power monitors and programmable displays for bicycle wheels. She also hosts an Internet video program called "Citizen Engineer" that provides step-by-step instructions to help consumers build and alter their own home devices.

Congrats also to fellow-recipients Carl Malamud (of public.resource.org) and Harri Hursti, creator of the "Hursti hack," which uncovered vulnerabilities in Diebold optical scan voting machines.

Join EFF for the 2009 Pioneer Awards fundraiser honoring: Limor "Ladyada" Fried, Harri Hursti and Carl Malamud

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Announcements | Digg this!

Winners of the Ig Nobel Prize via GeekDad - some of my faves...

VETERINARY MEDICINE PRIZE: Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson of Newcastle University, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK, for showing that cows who have names give more milk than cows that are nameless.

CHEMISTRY PRIZE: Javier Morales, Miguel Apátiga, and Victor M. Castaño of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, for creating diamonds from liquid — specifically from tequila.

BIOLOGY PRIZE: Fumiaki Taguchi, Song Guofu, and Zhang Guanglei of Kitasato University Graduate School of Medical Sciences in Sagamihara, Japan, for demonstrating that kitchen refuse can be reduced more than 90% in mass by using bacteria extracted from the feces of giant pandas.

ECONOMICS PRIZE: The directors, executives, and auditors of four Icelandic banks — Kaupthing Bank, Landsbanki, Glitnir Bank, and Central Bank of Iceland — for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks, and vice versa — and for demonstrating that similar things can be done to an entire national economy.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!

yahoi writes "The financial crisis appears to be exacerbating fraud by bank employees: a new survey found that 72 percent of financial institutions say that in the last 12 months they have experienced a case of data theft by one of their workers. Meanwhile, most banks don't want to talk about the insider threat problem and remain in denial, says a former Wachovia Bank executive who handled insider fraud incidents at the bank and has co-authored a new book called Insidious — How Trusted Employees Steal Millions and Why It's So Hard for Banks to Stop Them that investigates several real-world insider fraud cases at banks." The article dispels one assumption that might commonly be made about such insider fraud: "Interestingly, it's not the stereotypical offshore or outsourced employee who's most risky to their organizations. Nearly 70 percent of financial institutions say their full-time employees are most likely to pose an insider fraud threat..." Technology workers placed third in the roster of the job categories most abused.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While we've been disappointed by some moves by the Obama administration (on copyright, federal shield law, civil liberties, warrantless wiretapping, etc.), one area where the administration has made really big strides is on opening up formerly locked up gov't information. The latest is that the Government Printing Office and the Office of the Federal Register have just opened up the "Official Journals of Government" -- a document that used to cost a mere $17,000/year and is now available for free, online -- and made the Federal Register (basically the list of what the federal gov't is doing every day) XML enabled, so that anyone can do cool stuff with it. Ed Felten's team at Princeton has already created FedThread, which let you not only search the Register, but also annotate and create customized feeds. This is really great...

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

A pair of "light duty" pliers printed out on a MakerBot. I assume the emphasis here is on "light," but still a cool design.

Light-Duty Pliers by Starno

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in 3D printing | Digg this!

Ben wrote in to share his latest labor of love, a homebrew VoIP-capable web server running on a... wait a minute, on a PIC? He admits that he isn't the first to attempt this, but the VoIP routing bit is pretty exceptional.

His system is based around the PIC18F26K20 microcontroller. To cram everything into 4MB of storage and 4k of RAM, the entire system is written in assembler. The example TCP/IP stack provided by Microchip wasn't up to his standards, so he went and wrote his own. Here are some of the features:

• Homemade TCP/IP stack
• supports 4 concurrent HTTP connections
• various timeouts to keep the board "in line"
• ~220kBps maximum transfer rate
• 4MB onboard storage, programmed via TFTP
• Custom lightweight file system (can open files by name!)
• PIC18F26K20 microcontroller clocked at 64MHz
• HTTP, Telnet, and TFTP servers
• audio input/output, 8-bit @ 8kHz sampling
• very basic VoIP capability with phonebook and automatic address resolution
• an alarm clock with separate settings for each day of the week

Project documentation appears to be served by the device itself, which is pretty cool, however there is a tiny capacity problem since it can only handle 4 concurrent HTTP connections. Anyone know of a mirror?

Update: a mirror of the project site is available here

. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Electronics | Digg this!

An anonymous reader sends us to Gizmag for a look at a recent auction of a large collection of antique TVs. The star of the show was the Teleavia type P111, one of the earliest examples of high-definition TV. This rare 1958 console-stand television was designed by Flaminio Bertroni, who was also responsible for the iconic Citroen DS. The TV featured dual resolution capability, with the higher setting offering better resolution than 720p — 819 lines. This early attempt at a high-def standard, originating in France in 1949, didn't catch on in the marketplace.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A bunch of folks have been sending in various versions of the story of a guy (described as an "anarchist") who was allegedly arrested for using social media tools like Twitter to organize protesters at the recent G20 Summit in Pittsburgh. The specific charges are for "hindering prosecution," but it seems like there must be some details missing. All around, the whole thing sounds pretty extreme. What's illegal about organizing protesters?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story