RobGoldsmith writes 'ESA astronaut Frank De Winne became the first European commander of the International Space Station this morning with the departure of Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka who had filled this role since April. De Winne is the first non-American and non-Russian to take on this role. Watch the videos and view images here.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here are some of my favorites from CRAFT this week:

Computational Pop-Up Book

How-To: Make Garlands from Fall Flowers

How-To: Infant Pumpkin Costume

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

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.

Friends, It has been a pleasure to be a part of the Boing Boing nation as a guest blogger these past two weeks. I hope to stay in contact online and to meet some of you at various gigs around the country, including at the Esalen Institute, where Erik Davis and I will be delivering a weekend workshop on February 19-21 titled "The Occult in America: An Adventure in Arcane History." You can also see me next Friday at 9 p.m. EST on a Dateline NBC special about Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol.

While I was writing Occult America, the figure I came to most admire was Henry A. Wallace (1888-1965), Franklin Roosevelt's secretary of agriculture and second vice president. Wallace was not only a successful businessman (founder of Pioneer Hi-Bred) and an innovative politician (his policies saved thousands of family farms during the Great Depression), but he was also a genuine searcher into cosmic realms, freely exploring Theosophy, Tibetan Buddhism, astrology, Native American shamanism, and various strands of mysticism. His name may be largely forgotten, but he was a model of how to live with purpose.

I wish you farewell with two of Wallace's statements:

Religion is a method whereby man reaches out toward God in an effort to find the spiritual power to express here on earth in a practical way the divine potentialities in himself and his fellow beings.

Karma means that while things may not balance out in a given lifetime, they balance out in the long run in terms of justice between individuals, between man and whole. It seems to me one of the most profound of all religious concepts.

Selected Works of Henry A. Wallace

Henry A. Wallace Country Life Center

Hugh Pickens writes: "The New Scientist reports that with a hat tip to Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon" physicist John Hunter has outlined the design of a gigantic gun that could slash the cost of putting cargo into orbit. At the Space Investment Summit in Boston last week, Hunter described the design for a 1.1-kilometer-long gun that he says could launch 450-kilogram payloads at 6 kilometers per second. A small rocket engine would then boost the projectile into low-Earth orbit. The gun would cost $500 million to build, says Hunter, but individual launch costs would be lower than current methods. "We think it's at least a factor of 10 cheaper than anything else," Hunter says. The gun is based on the SHARP (Super High Altitude Research Project) light gas gun Hunter helped to build in the 1990s while at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California. With a barrel 47 meters long, it used compressed hydrogen gas to fire projectiles weighing a few kilograms at speeds of up to 3 kilometers per second."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes "When he gets some free time away from his gigs at startup Milo and The Register, you won't catch Ted Dziuba doing any recreational programming. And he wouldn't want to work for a company that doesn't hire those who don't code in their spare time. 'You know what's more awesome than spending my Saturday afternoon learning Haskell by hacking away at a few Project Euler problems?' asks Dziuba. 'F***, ANYTHING.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

quench writes "Hello! I have been away from Windows and Linux application software for 5 years or so, doingly mainly C-like embedded C++ programming.Now, I am about to start a project emulating embedded hardware on Windows. Been there, doing #ifdef WIN32 and #ifdef LINUX stuff, don't really want to go there any more. What I actually need is a platform independent lib covering Windows and Linux variants to handle sockets, IPC and threads abstractions. And a rock solid but simple embedded database to emulate flash memory. My reflex said, go for ACE and Berkeley-DB. Tell me, am I out of time? Am I missing something new and trendy, easier to use and better? Did time stand still?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lechuguilla Cave is part of the Carlsbad Caverns Natural Park in New Mexico and is regarded as one of the most beautiful caves, with some of the most unique geography, in the entire world.

You can't visit.

Because of the delicacy of many of the formations, the cave is only open to scientists and the explorers who are still figuring out what all is down there. Nobody else is allowed in. Or, rather, nobody else but David Attenborough.

This video from the Planet Earth TV series takes you down into Lechuguilla for some amazing sights and fascinating commentary on the chemistry and biology that make this cave so strange and lovely. Even more impressive, nobody knew it was there until 1986.

Psst, Nova has a whole page on Lechiguilla, if you want to read more.

Thumbnail image courtesy Flickr user n3pb, via CC

It does have vowels, it's not the oldest language in Europe, and, yes, it does have words for modern technologies. Welsh, or Cymraeg as we probably ought to call it, is spoken by more than 580,000 people and was one of the 55 Earth languages chosen to represent our global culture on the Golden Record launched with the Voyager spacecraft in 1977.

But it's still very much a small language and, to English speakers, a weird-looking one, so it's no surprise that tall tales abound. Garic, an evolutionary linguist and Welshman, is out to change that. He's written a series of posts that debunks pop-culture's worst Welsh fallacies and, along the way, makes some interesting points about the way speakers of common languages view the rare and unique tongues of the world...

No words for modern things. Welsh, apparently, lacks words for things like computers and aeroplanes. This is a stupid comment for two reasons:

1. It doesn't;

2. The arguments for the claim are entirely incoherent.

First of all, the Welsh words for 'computer' and 'aeroplane' are cyfrifiadur and awyren. Some words for other modern inventions are, similarly, based on Celtic roots; others are borrowings, like radio, which means 'radio'.

Secondly, the claim seems to be based on some bizarre assumption that other languages, like English, did not have to invent or borrow words for new inventions. The implication is that our ancestors failed us somehow in not forseeing the invention of the radio. I've actually heard people say that because Welsh "hasn't got words for modern inventions, it has to borrow them or make them up." This is of course true, but the idea that this is not true of any language spoken on the planet is so obviously, staggeringly dense that explanations for why it's stupid are unnecessary.

Thumbnail image courtesy Flickr user Spixey, via CC

A few months ago I met Mike Costa at Design Continuum. He had a Chumby on his desk which was set to monitor the energy usage of the building. At the time, he was working out the technical details of the system, and now has posted up some info about the project. Here are some highlights:

Real time power monitoring has been proven to effectively reduce power consumption due to waste. It is intuitive to consider that humans need some sort of feedback in order to recognize the presence of waste. For example if one leaves the faucet open one has sound and sight feedback indicating there is waste. What sort of feedback do we have for electricity? None really, this is why these systems can help with waste reduction

The system uses images from a camera to track changes on the power meter, which is then fed through the network, converted to data and ported to the Google Powermeter. The data can then be viewed online from any browser. The history page gives some more context on the data. Check out more about the project's impact on the Analysis page.

The data can be sent to any device as long as the device has internet access and can read a RSS feed. So a web browser can display it, as well as a cell phone that has internet access. The data that the chumby takes comes from this address. The Chumby application is a simple flash movie that reads from the above rss feed and displays the data. the color changes from green to red as we use more electricity. so at night the text will be green/yellow. This is a link to the exact same flash movie that is running on the Chumby. It updates real time. The data is being served from a web server I built.

More:

• Chumby guts -- so delicious!
• Smart grids, smart metering, and Make: Green
• Home automation gear
• Energy auditing for greater efficiency

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

Grab your favorite sugary cereal and pull up a seat. It's time for Saturday Morning Science Experiment! This week, we're finding out what happens to a gummi bear (i.e., sucrose) when it's dropped into molten potassium chlorate.

Got a video you want to see on Saturday Morning Science Experiment? Drop me an email, I'm taking suggestions.

Gummi bear thumbnail photo courtesy Flickr user Furryscaly, via CC.

An anonymous reader writes "Ian Clarke, creator of Freenet, has been working on a new open source project called Swarm. The concept is to allow a computer program to be distributed across multiple computers in a manner almost completely transparent to the programmer. The system observes the program executing and figures out how the workload should be distributed for maximum efficiency. Swarm is implemented in Scala. Its at an early-prototype stage, and Ian has created a good 36 minute video explaining the concept and the current implementation."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Check out YouTube user YellowWheels' channel for another pretty sweet chair costume.

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!

An editorial at GamesIndustry takes a look at a couple of problems many MMOs have failed to solve as the genre has evolved over the last decade: log-in queues and a split player base. The most recent example is Aion, which launched in Europe and North America a few weeks ago. Players on some of the game's servers had to deal with lengthy queues until enough people left the starting areas and spread throughout the game. To NCSoft's credit, the queues are mostly gone already, and it wasn't simply launching with too few servers that was the problem (nor was simply launching more servers a perfect solution, as Warhammer proved). In fact, several servers had no queues at all, but many players had set their sights on the more popular ones — a problem facing other MMOs as well. At this point, it becomes a matter of programming — how can the developers for these MMOs build the networking aspect of the game such that more hardware can easily be allocated when it's needed, and also make it easier for people to play together without the restriction of different shards or servers? EVE Online has done well with a single game universe, but it's not clear how far that model can scale upwards.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Self by Marc Quinn...

...a frozen sculpture of the artist's head made from 4.5 litres of the artist's own frozen blood taken from his body over a period of five months. This work is repeated every five years and will result in a unique record of the artist aging.

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

chrnb sends along this quote from a report at Reuters: "Filling your vehicle's tank with fuel made from algae is still as much as a decade away, as the emerging industry faces a series of hurdles to find an economical way to make the biofuel commercially. Estimates on a timeline for a commercial product, and profits, vary from two to 10 years or more. Executives and industry players who gathered at the Algae Biomass Summit this week in San Diego said they need to push for breakthroughs along the entire chain — from identifying the best organisms to developing efficient harvesting methods. ... So far on the list: finding the right strain of algae among thousands of species that will produce high yields; designing systems where the desired algae can multiply and other species don't invade and disrupt the process; and extracting its oils without degrading other parts of the algae that can be made into side products and sold as well."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Paul Carr, writing for TechCrunch, has posted his take on some of the flaws inherent to today's fast-paced news ecosystem, where bloggers often get little or no editorial feedback and interesting headlines are passed around faster than ever. His article was inspired by a recent story on ZDNet that accused Yahoo of sharing the names and emails of 200,000 users with the Iranian government; a report that turned out to be false, yet generated a great deal of outrage before it was disproved. Carr writes, 'Trusting the common sense of your writers is all well and good — but when it comes to breaking news, where journalistic adrenaline is at its highest and everyone is paranoid about being scooped by a competitor, that common sense can too easily become the first casualty. Journalists get caught up in the moment; we get excited and we post stupid crap from a foreign language student blog and call it news. And then within half a minute — bloggers being what they are — the news gets repeated and repeated until it becomes fact. Fact that can affect share prices or ruin lives. This is the reality of the blogosphere, where Churchill's remark: that "a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on" is more true, and more potentially damaging, than at any time in history.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CuteSteveJobs writes "Could microscopy be in for a new golden age? Wired previewed the desktop-sized Hitachi TM-1000 Electron Microscope a while back. Light microscopes can magnify up to 400X (1,000X at lower quality) — just enough to see bacteria as shapes — but this one offers 20X to 10,000X, giving some amazing pictures. Unlike traditional electron microscopes, this one plugs into a domestic power socket and specimens don't need any special preparation; it's point-and-shoot, much like your typical digital camera. So easy a grade-schooler could use it, and earlier this year that's what happened: The kids at Iwanuma Elementary School in Miyagi, Japan got their own electron microscope. At $60,000, you'll have to give up on the BMW, but the hope is with economy of scale (so far 1,000 have sold) and miniaturization, the price will continue to drop. The only bad news? It runs XP."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Type design legend John Berry writes in about his upcoming panel on Web font embedding: "It's all about getting new fonts onto a web page, so the content doesn't all end up in default Times or Arial. After a wide-ranging but inconclusive panel on web fonts at TypeCon in July, this time around some of the browser makers will be represented -- and the focus will widen to include *how* fonts are used on the web. "

I hope they put this on the web afterward!

Where: Typ09, the 2009 ATypI conference, Mexico City
When: 26-30 October (web-fonts program on Thursday, 29 October, at Anáhuac University campus)

Web fonts: the talk of Typ09 (Thanks, John!)

mindbrane writes "A scientist working as a subcontractor on a peripheral LHC project has been arrested as a terrorist. The CBC is running a story outlining the arrest of a man on Thursday in south-east France for suspected al-Qaeda links: 'CERN officials said the man, whose name has not been revealed, was working under contract with an outside institute and said he had no contact with anything that could have been used for terrorism. He had been at CERN since 2003, officials said. ... The news that someone with terrorist connections might have worked at the facility is likely to cause concern because of both the high profile of the giant physics experiment and also the technology in use, which has made some members of the public nervous.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Expanding on the T-Mobile data loss mentioned in an update to an earlier story, reader stigmato writes 'T-Mobile's popular Sidekick brand of devices and their users are facing a data loss crisis. According to the T-Mobile community forums, Microsoft/Danger has suffered a catastrophic server failure that has resulted in the loss of all personal data not stored on the phones. They are advising users not to turn off their phones, reset them or let the batteries die in them for fear of losing what data remains on the devices. Microsoft/Danger has stated that they cannot recover the data but are still trying. Already people are clamoring for a lawsuit. Should we continue to trust cloud computing content providers with our personal information? Perhaps they should have used ZFS or btrfs for their servers ...'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'll be in Brighton, England next Saturday, Oct 17 for a Battle of Ideas event entitled "The Future of Collaboration: Sharing and Work in the Networked Age." I'll be on a panel with Michael Bull from the University of Sussex and Nico Macdonald, chaired by Robert Clowes of Brighton Salon. It's at 8PM in the Jubilee Library and tickets are £7.50 (£5 concessions). Hope to see you there! (I'll also be doing a London Battle of Ideas event on Oct 31, "Rethinking Privacy in an age of Disclosure and Sharing")

The 21st century looks set to be age of online collaboration. While old forms of community and solidarity have waned, leaving us apparently more fragmented and individualised, the social web enables many of us to work, play and organise with others in ways previously unimaginable. Technologies like Flickr, Delicious and Wikipedia evidence new means of sharing information and working together. Many suggest these technologies will have far-reaching social implications, and even presage a new form of production and work outside the market system. While traditional free market capitalism is compromised by the worldwide recession, the world wide web is said to promise an exciting alternative. Wired's Kevin Kelly suggests we are entering a new collectivist epoch, a 'New Socialism'. Technology guru Howard Rheingold sees these developments as disruptive, and will change the way people 'meet, mate, work, fight, buy, sell'. Charles Leadbeater, author of We-Think, sees the new means of networked collaboration as presaging a new production model: 'Mass Innovation rather than Mass Production'.

The Future of Collaboration: Sharing and Work in the Networked Age

phantomfive writes "In Iowa and Scotland there are reports of a type of cloud not yet recognized by the World Meteorological Foundation. It seems the cloud does not match any of the clouds in the International Cloud Atlas, and thus there is a campaign underway to have it included. Some have said the clouds look like Armageddon has arrived."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Arizona Republic is plumbing new lows, quoting "psychics" as though they were experts on the future:

Consider the way the story starts. The word "apparently" is a tip-off that the piece is based on no actual data. Who's the source for this alleged mini-flood of new customers? Why, the people selling the product. Makes sense to me: In I-can-see-into-the-future territory, we can just take their word for it.

Not a single customer is quoted. We hear only from the people who are claiming to be getting this influx of new customers. Can't the newspaper find even one client?

Look. Newspapers run astrology columns -- something I'd ban if I ran a paper, period -- with no disclaimers that there is no scientific basis for what these planet- and star-gazers tell us. But the astrology columns run, typically, near the comics, which is the fiction section of the daily paper.

No newspaper, as far as I know, gives its pages over to self-described psychics. Yet the Republic's story quotes several, along with the astrologers, with a straight face.

Quoting 'Psychics' Like Experts: How Low Can News Judgement Go? (Thanks, Dan!)

I'm speaking at a Hoxton LibDems dinner in London on Oct 19 at 7:30PM, at the Hoxton Apprentice in Hoxton Square, near Old Street Station. The event is open to the public -- though they will try to get you to join/donate to the LibDems, whom I support for many reasons, not least because they're a national party who don't expect me to carry a biometric radio-enabled ID card as a condition of my spousal visa. Not surprisingly, I'll be talking on "Privacy, Civil Liberties and Technology - Is Privacy Possible in the 21st Century?"

Date: Monday, October 19, 2009
Time: 7.30pm - 10.00pm

We have a top speaker for our autumn dinner this year, the science fiction writer and civil liberties campaigner; Cory Doctorow. The theme is; "Privacy, Civil Liberties and Technology - Is Privacy Possible in the 21st Century?". Find out more on our website where you can book in advance at the cheaper rate of £10 (£12 on the door).

The venue is just 5 minutes walk from Old Street tube in near the City in Central London.

Hackney Lib Dems autumn dinner in Hoxton Square near Old Street tube, with special guest speaker Cory Doctorow

I'll be in Waterloo, Ontario on 22 Oct 2009 for the Perimeter Institute's Quantum to Cosmos event, which will also feature Neal Stephenson, Stewart Brand, Neil Gershenfeld, Stephen Hawking, Tara Hunt, Jaron Lanier, and many other distinguished scientists and writers. I'm doing a solo talk on copyright at 4PM and then a panel on AI and robotics for TVO's The Agenda at 8PM.

Quantum to Cosmos

Quantum to Cosmos tickets

ericatcw writes "Driven by increased crackdowns on BitTorrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, software pirates are fast moving their warez to file-hosting Web sites like RapidShare, reports Computerworld. According to anti-piracy vendor V.I. Labs, 100% of the warez in its survey were available on RapidShare, which, according to Alexa, is already one of the 20 largest sites in the world. V.I. Labs' CEO predicts file-hosting sites such as RapidShare will supplant BitTorrent, as the former appear better protected legally."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'm not entirely sure who made this video. I have this strange intuition it might be someone named "Werner Mehl," and that the video might be copyright 2009, and....somehow, that Werner's website is probably www.kurzzeit.com. Isn't it weird how sometimes stuff just comes to you?

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

Rachel Maddow did a segment on her always-superb show tonight about Ralph Lauren's recent bogus legal threats against various blogs -- including this one. Those DMCAs sent by lawyers for Lauren demanded the removal of a badly photoshopped ad which morphed a model into a lollipop-headed stick figure. The Rachel Maddow Show segment is embedded above, and is also here: Photoshop of Horrors.

P.S.: And here's Rob on ABC's Nightline. No embed, unfortunately!

Hugh Pickens writes Weston Kosova writes in Newsweek that Rupert Murdoch gave an impassioned speech to media executives in Beijing decrying that search engines — in particular Google — are stealing from him, because Google links to his stories but doesn't pay News Corp. to do so. 'The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content,' Murdoch says. 'But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators — the people in this hall — who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph.' But if Murdoch really thinks Google is stealing from him, and if he really wants Google to stop driving all those readers to his Web sites at no charge, he can simply stop Google from linking to their news stories by going to his Web site's robot.txt file and adding 'Disallow.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

1st Place, 2009 - Dr. Heiti Paves, Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia.

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