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Check out this fascinating little film from Timo Arnall and Jack Schulze, called Immaterials: The Ghost in the Field. Using photography, stop-motion animation, and a probe with an LED and RFID tag attached to it (to reveal what they call the "readable volume"), the invisible shapes made by the radio fields of these devices are revealed. The rest of their experiments and videos on RFID and "near field communications," found on their site, are worth your time, too. [via Tim O'Reilly's Twitter feed]
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There's an odd synchronicity here with last week's post about the coin-scavenging-crow training machine. This time it's a whack-a-mole style video game that you play by dropping glass bottles into the slots when they light up. See it work around 0:40.
In a side note, Volkswagen's Fun Theory Award is now definitely on my radar. Besides this project, their competition to incentivize socially-useful behaviors by turning them into entertainment also produced the world's deepest rubbish bin and the subway staircase piano keyboard. [via Hack a Day]
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Because of the Collapse of 2008 financial reforms, the big investment banks are able to borrow money from the U.S. government at 0 percent interest. Then they can turn around and buy short-term bonds that pay 2 or 3 percent annual interest. Now they’re making 2 percent on whatever they borrowed. They can use leverage to increase this number, by pledging some of the bonds that they’ve already bought as collateral on additional bonds.How Wall Street is making its billions (Via Dan Gillmor)
Amy, from Somerset, England, writes: "We all have kitty pics, but yesterday we had a little guest brought in by one of our cats that promptly made it's home in our PC. ... It was quite fun trying to remove it, but I think it was quite happy in there." 
Drewva sez, " This guy just outside San Antonio was clearing some brush on his land and finds a discarded 'surface to air missile launcher.' Apparently he called up all the federal agencies to come and pick it up and they couldn't decide what to do."
My first thought was abandoned LARP-prop, but that seems unlikely.
Man finds missile launcher in Comal County (Thanks, Drewva!)
"I had never seen it before," said Schule, a 34-year-old Web developer. "I looked at it, and it kind of looked like a missile launcher."
Schule took a closer look. It was a long, forest-green metal tube. A decal on it read: "Guided Missile and Launcher, Surface Attack."
The discovery was the start of a surreal journey for Schule. Somehow, an unarmed anti-tank weapon -- or a very good fake -- wound up on his land at Beck Road and Kirk Lane in the Hill Country, miles away from a military installation.
Joey Roth designed the bizarre, beautiful Sorapot, and recently turned his talents to audio. Out this fall in a limited edition of 200, the Ceramic Speakers are made of porcelain and cork. I asked Joey to tell us a little about himself and his inspiration.
ROB: Why industrial design?
JOEY: I started college at Swarthmore as a creative writing major, but realized that I was never going to be as good as the authors I loved. With design, I think I can contribute to the field as a whole while still constructing narratives and making each product an immersive world for the user.
ROB: Sorapot got a lot of attention; but was it a success?
JOEY: I designed Sorapot as a portfolio piece during my Junior year. I didn't intend to manufacture it until a writer for CoolHunting somehow discovered it and posted on it. The same day, I received a ton of emails from individuals and stores asking about price, availability, and minimum order quantities. They thought it was a real product, so I decided to make it one.
ROB: You make it sound easy!
JOEY: I ... found the right manufacturer through a great referral. I began to take pre-orders through my site, and was able to fund the first production run largely from these sales. About 2,500 Sorapots have been sold to date.
"Irony was the dominant approach a few years ago, and it's still popular. I think it has no place in design, since physical resources are consumed when something is mass-produced, and a joke is only witty for so long."
ROB: What do you see as your competition?
JOEY: I draw a distinction between competitors and enemies, although both motivate me to work harder. My competitors are designers and companies who make products that I respect, and would also earn the respect of my customers, current and potential. I don't want to see these designers/ companies fail, since I believe in what they're doing, but I need to make sure my work never becomes indistinguishable from theirs. This kind of competition keeps me on edge, and helps me make better products. If their products aren't directly competing with mine, I also like to collaborate with likeminded designers.
ROB: Enemies, then?
I see designers and companies whose work represents a disposable, ironic, trend-driven view of product design as my ideological enemies. Irony was the dominant approach a few years ago, and it's still popular. I think it has no place in design, since physical resources are consumed when something is mass-produced, and a joke is only witty for so long. My desire to design objects that represent a more thoughtful, sustainable view grew partially from the ironic, anti-design trend I encountered as I was getting into design. Even though these punchline-driven products don't compete in the same categories as my work, I'm motivated to work harder when I see them receive acclaim or recognition.
I don't see larger companies who make boring products as competition, even if their products are in the same categories as mine. It would be much harder for them to access the customers who actively seek out interesting new designs than for me to make something that appeals to a larger audience. They should be scared of small, blog-emboldened designers though.
ROB: How are new ideas born?
JOEY: When I start to sketch ideas for a new design, I pull from a mental material library that's filled only with sustainable, long-lasting materials. I want my products to become more beautiful as they're used: inevitable scuffs and scratches should make them feel broken-in and seasoned rather than worn out. At the same time, I never want to use a design's sustainable merits as a crutch for lazy or boring design.
ROB: Tell me more about the hardware used for the speakers.
JOEY: The speakers are made from hand-thrown porcelain in a workshop that usually makes vases. Their stands are made from Baltic birch off-cuts (smaller piece) and Paulownia wood (larger piece). Paulownia is a fast-growing tree that's best known for its use in surfboards, guitars, and traditional Japanese pottery boxes. The amplifier is made from stainless steel, and has a raw cast iron base and Paulownia volume slider. My goal was to bring the speakers out of the fast, trendy, disposable consumer electronic/ iPod accessory realm and make them objects that could last a lifetime, but are interesting in the moment.
The drivers are made by Tang Band, and they are a modified version of the W4-1052SD driver. (Specs here: http://www.parts-express.com/pdf/264-828s.pdf)
ROB: What's the worst sort of question you get asked?
JOEY: The worst question a writer can ask a designer is no question. Obscurity and irrelevance are nicely motivating fears that all good designers should have.
Sorapot and Ceramic Speakers are available to order at Joey Roth's website. Catch an early (and favorable) review at Gizmodo.
For a week I've tried to use Dyson's bladeless Air Multiplier as a giant bubble-blowing machine, to no avail. No combination of soap and speed setting succeeds, no matter how carefully coated the vent halo or the ring itself, or how much time I spend experimenting with detergents. And I'd better stop, before I break what amounts to a $300 desk fan.
Available from the manufacturer's website and "select design stores," the Air Multiplyer hides the blower in the base, forcing the air through a ring of vents which are aerodynamically contrived to "multiply" the strength of its airstream.
In ads and TV apperances, Dyson also claims that the resulting breeze is smoother than the "choppy" air produced by traditional bladed fans.
It has a 5' grounded cord, tilts and oscillates, and can be set on a continuum of speeds with a dial on the front. Dyson sells 10" models in pearly white or blue/gray, and a 12" model in silver.
The "multiplied' air feels good and it can blow as hard as similarly-sized fans, but design is what sets it apart. It looks like a portable Stargate by way of Cupertino (Imaginary Steve: what are all those hieroglyphics for? Remove them!) and even has a practical element--no accretions of greasy black fuzz in difficult-to-clean places. It comes with a microfiber cloth and is easy to assemble (pop the ring on the base, turn it on).
When it comes to noise, the Air Multiplier isn't quieter so much as it is different. Instead of the juddering white noise of a normal model, Dyson's motor (It sounds like a quieter version of the one in his hand-vac) produces a thin whine. But it is annoying enough at higher settings. It's not something that, say, audiophiles might consider using to cool the listening dungeon.
The biggest hurdle is the price: at $300 and up, you should wait until next year's first hot monday and cycle back to see how early adopters are doing. Durability and long-term performance, not sexy design, will determine if it's a sensible choice for the home or office.
Dyson Air Multiplyer [Official Store]
In this video, the fine folks at NerdKits show you how to use one of their kits and some aluminum foil to create a capacitive touch sensor that lights up LEDs when a hand is placed inside of a jack-o-lantern candy bucket.
Capacitive Touch Sensor: Learn Electronics with a Spooky Halloween Project
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I subscribe to a number of random photography blogs, and Mostly Forbidden Zone has just become one of my favorites. I like this photo of Michael Jackson getting his makeup applied for his role as the Scarecrow in 1978's The Wiz. Mostly Forbidden Zone. (Via Eye of the Goof)
We conclude that much of the problem with illegal sharing of copyrighted material has been caused by the rightsholders, and the music industry in particular, being far too slow in getting their act together and making popular legal alternatives available.Looks like David Geffen may need to start taking more UK politicians out for dinner...
We do not believe that disconnecting end users is in the slightest bit consistent with policies that attempt to promote eGovernment, and we recommend that this approach to dealing with illegal file-sharing should not be further considered.
Imagine how upset he would have been if his briefcase had been run over. (Via A Welsh View)
UPDATE:
"Mad" bus rammed 20 cars and in the center of PermPERM. On the morning of October 19, 2009 unguided bus rioted in the center of Perm. This affected about 20 cars, several people were injured.
According to "UralInformByuro" traffic police officer on the Perm edge Gaynanov Arthur, a 67 passenger bus route brakes failed. Multi-ton vehicle rolled down the hill, and having traveled 5 blocks the Komsomol prospectus, inhibited only the stage near the Cathedral Square.
On the way to the bus "collected" nearly 2 dozen "cars and". The exact number of victims is established. According to preliminary data, injuring 4 people who were in the bus torpedoed foreign car, all of them hospitalized. It is noted that the number of injured could rise.
According to unofficial information, "went berserk" assembled from various parts of the "Mercedes" 80 years of manufacture. At the time of failure of the brakes he was moving with a sufficiently high velocity, which explains its long-term uncontrolled "journey".
The last time we covered the Seeed DSO Nano oscilloscope, they hadn't produced any specification or hardware yet. Now, one month later, they have already shipped a limited number of beta units out for testing. Blair of Justblair got one of these units, and shared his review with us.
So, should you buy one? I think that depends on what you are looking for. If you need a quick way to debug microcontroller circuits, this could be a great way to go. It's limited to a single channel at 1MHz, so it won't help with your most advanced analog electronics projects, however it's also priced low enough ($89) that you can probably upgrade later if you need to. It's also probably the first scope ever to qualify as a stocking stuffer. So there you have it!
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The music industry has changed significantly in recent years, and technology now allows musicians to distribute their work and interact with fans more easily than ever before. As times have changed, the traditional process of signing with a record label is getting more and more competition. Here we describe one alternative vision for supporting musicians that focuses on the artist and aims to disrupt conventional music publishing. The subsequent task is for the Insight Community to suggest improvements to the plan, give feedback from an artist's point of view, offer advice on implementation, and even respond with possible arguments against this approach.
The Vision of an Un-label
The 4 pillars in the work of a musician are: compose, record, be on stage and on tour. The live show is more than ever a vital component of the career of an artist, but it can not exist without the production of new tracks. For the artist to tour, an album is a prerequisite.
As always, there are costs to produce an album, but the artist should ALWAYS retain ownership of his/her work. Without artist ownership, the genuine involvement of the performer is lost. But if the artist ultimately owns the work, the musician has an honest commitment to promoting every song and a vested interest in connecting with fans. That said, albums still need to be financed at times, and a complete support infrastructure to promote the artist and his/her work is still necessary as well.
For the financing of albums, an artist will sign a temporary exclusive license to his/her music in exchange for initial funding (if necessary) and a share of revenues from tours, shows, physical and digital sales, merchandising, etc. The artist will commit to live performances and interactions with fans through various channels (eg. press, TV, web, etc). The artist will be the brand behind the music, and the new 'Un-label' will provide financing, publicity and management as necessary. The Un-label has incentives to serve the artist since its exclusive license is temporary, and the artist will be free to go elsewhere after the contract is fulfilled.
Key points summary
Supplemental Materials
To further explain this vision, there is an accompanying presentation to discuss this concept:
How You Can Help
The idea behind this Un-label is hopefully easy to understand, but how does a business based on this philosophy attract and convince artists? Below are some questions that attempt to focus this discussion on improving this vision. These are not the only questions to answer, but they're a starting point.
Visit the CybearSonic Site (English translation)
This is a case from the Insight Community, a powerful new marketplace that connects companies with intelligent communities like Techdirt. Click here to learn more.
View Case Details at InsightCommunity.com
Here's a snip from Washington Post article about the meatspace hijinks today:
Pranksters stage Chamber of Commerce climate change event (Washington Post, via @tomzellerjr). Related coverage: GOOD, Roll Call, Talking Points Memo.The event, complete with fake handouts on chamber letterhead, at least a couple of fake reporters, and a podium adorned with the chamber logo, broke up when a spokesman from the real chamber burst in. What followed was a spectacle not usually seen in the John Peter Zenger Room at the National Press Club: two men in business suits shouting at one another, each calling the other an impostor and demanding to see business cards.
"This guy is a fake! He's lying! This is a stunt that I've never seen before," said Eric Wohlschlegel, an official at the actual Chamber of Commerce, who said he'd heard about the hoax event from a reporter who'd mistakenly shown up at the chamber's headquarters.
The fake Chamber of Commerce official, who called himself "Hingo Sembra," did not give his real name to reporters, saying only that he represented a coalition of climate activists.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Photographer Chris Jordan has published a series of images identified as dead albatross on Midway Atoll whose bodies are filled with bits of plastic they ingested.
Midway Island is an anemic little line of sand and coral reefs, way out in the middle of the Pacific. Now, I don't know Mr. Jordan personally, and haven't fact-checked the story behind the photos -- but presuming it's all as presented, this really is a horrifying set of images. Birds that live as far away from civilization as you can imagine, their innards packed with petroleum flotsam? Wow.
The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking. To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world's most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.Midway (chrisjordan.com, Thanks, Susannah Breslin and Sean Bonner!)
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Hpropman presents a group of four tutorials about how to connect common motion detecting devices to a microcontroller for triggering haunt props. He has separate tutorials for flood light motion sensors, wall switch motion sensors, X10 wireless motion sensors, and Parallax motion sensors.
Make: Halloween Contest 2009
Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.
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Hpropman presents a group of four tutorials about how to connect common motion detecting devices to a microcontroller for triggering haunt props. He has separate tutorials for flood light motion sensors, wall switch motion sensors, X10 wireless motion sensors, and Parallax motion sensors.
Make: Halloween Contest 2009
Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.
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Exclusive: U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets (Wired Danger Room, thanks Noah)In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It's part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using "open source intelligence" -- information that's publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.
Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn't touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what's being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.
"That's kind of the basic step -- get in and monitor," says company senior vice president Blake Cahill.
In today's New York Times, a terrific piece by John Schwartz about an attorney who traded 20 years of struggling to keep death row prisoners "from the executioner's needle" for a new job at a middle school populated by poor, at-risk, mostly black kids.
The turmoil of middle school turns many teachers away, said the school's principal, Danielle S. Battle. Students' bodies and minds are changing, and disparities in learning abilities are playing out.Once Convicts' Last Hope, Now a Students' Advocate (Image: David Walter Banks for The New York Times / thanks John Schwartz!)"A lot of people will say, 'I'll do anything but middle school,' " she said.
But this is precisely where Mr. Dunn chose to be, having seen too many people at the end of lives gone wrong, and wanting to keep these students from ending up like his former clients. He quotes Frederick Douglass: "It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men."
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Arrested Motion reports on a short film by Takashi Murakami called "Akihabara Majokko Princess."
Starring Kirsten Dunst singing a cover to the Vapors' "Turning Japanese", the video includes footage of Dunst dancing through the streets of the Akihabara district in Tokyo dressed as a colorful princess. If you look carefully at the front image of our "Pop Life" article, you can see Murakami next to a painting paying tribute to this experience entitled "Kirsten Dunst & McG & Me".
Does anyone know if the video is available for viewing online?
Murakami x McG x Dunst - "Akihabara Majokko Princess" in "Pop Life" @ the Tate Modern
Geoff at BLDGBLOG writes:
For his student thesis project at the Bartlett School of Architecture, Thomas Hillier produced an immersive narrative world, complete with origami-filled hand-cut book pages and an elaborate model of the story's architectural landscape. Hillier's project was called The Emperor's Castle and it was inspired by the work of Japanese printmaker Hiroshige.
I'm blown away by the intricacy of these models. Hillier's complexity and layering reminds me of the work of Sarah Sze.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
More bizarro goodness from artist Mark Jenkins. He set up "sleeping" mannequins in the street.
Street Installations by Mark Jenkins (Via Wooster Collective)
The Pew Research Center has an interactive map that shows marriage and divorce rates in the United States. The adjacent report, released this weekend, has some interesting statistics for trivia-hounds; for example, the District of Columbia has the highest percentage of single men (72%) as well as the highest median age of women at the time of their first marriage (30).
Interactive map — the state of marriage and divorce
Atelier Van Lieshout of Rotterdam is best known for its sculptures that look like human bodies or body parts. Here are a few of my favorites — even the one of the spilled guts looks artistically beautiful to me. If you like them, and you happen to be in London, you can check out some of his furniture at the Carpenter Workshop Gallery this week. 
Atelier Van Lieshout via Dezeen
(NSFW: sites linked in this post contain sexually explicit material). Required weekend reading: "They Shoot Porn Stars, Don't They?," Susannah Breslin's bold and ambitious photo-essay on the recession's impact in "porn valley," the epicenter of the adult entertainment biz.
"Originally, I wrote it for a publication, but subsequently pulled it," says Breslin. "When no other publication expressed an interest in publishing it, I decided to self-publish."
The story and images unfold over ten online sections. Here is a snip from the part devoted to shock auteur Jim Powers:
Read it all: theyshootstars.com (Note: site designed by Chris Bishop of "Obama Rides a Unicorn" fame). Photo: a man preparing for a bukkake shoot, shot by Susannah Breslin.Fascinating, horrifying, and amusing--oftentimes all of those things at the same time--Powers' celluloid world is one populated by midgets, bald chicks, and crazed men outfitted with monster-sized papier-mâché phalluses which spew torrents of goo onto the naked bodies of supine women, movies in which everyone has sex all of the time, and in which, most of the time, no one appears to win.
Take, for example, "The Bride of Dong," in which two young, unsuspecting women "inadvertently unleash the power and massive cock of an ancient fertility god when they decide to house sit for the summer," the result of which is the "call[ing] forth an ancient being from another time and world who bridges the cosmos to shove his massive tool up their asses," and the true star of which is neither the decidedly comely Gia Paloma or Julie Night but a six-foot prosthetic penis that belongs to an onerous, fanged beast that emerges upon a full moon. (An online reviewer noted dutifully: "It's hard to possibly make anything of this, other than to say that it's vintage Jim Powers," adding, "I haven't seen a prosthetic dong this big since 'Boogie Nights.'")
To decry Powers-helmed series--like "Gag Factor," in which women, not infrequently, hang upside down and perform oral sex on male costars to the point of gagging and sometimes vomiting; "White Trash Whore," in which seemingly innocent Caucasian women are gangbanged by roving packs of African-American men, and for which the box cover copy reads, "Mom, Dad ... I hate you this much!"; and "Young and Anal," again, the title here is self-revelatory--as "misogynist" is almost beside the point.
I was about to say that I'm just one of those people who understands things more fully once I see them in visual form, but I think that, when it comes to statistics, "one of those people" really just means "most of us".
Case in point, this great visualization of the facts about HPV vaccine safety and cervical cancer risk put together by the Information is Beautiful blog. For me, this really bridged the gap between knowing the facts and intuitively understanding them. Follow the link to check it out.
Alan Stein built this $10 Arduino beatbox for his first Arduino project. Requiring just three resistors and a piezo speaker (in addition to the really bare bones board he is using), it uses capacitive sensors instead of expensive buttons to keep the cost down. He also has a nice comparison of the Arduino to his longstanding favorite, the PICAXE. Source code and schematics are available at his website.
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My friend Barry and I went to Dr. Sketchy's figure drawing session last night, held at e3rd Steakhouse & Lounge in downtown Los Angeles and produced by Bob Self of Baby Tattoo Books. About 30 other artists came to sketch figure model Ruby Champagne ("the Mexican Spitfire of Burlesque") who posed and smiled in a way that reminded me of Gil Elvgren's work.
Above is a sketch of Ruby by Glenn Arthur. He won one of the prize giveaways last night for drawing the best Halloween themed illustration of the evening. His prize was a pad of nifty Whitelines graph paper, which uses white grid lines instead of gray or green lines. (Glenn's work is going to be featured in the upcoming Animal Instinct show in Costa Mesa on November 7th).
This morning Binary Slim, one of the other artists there last night, sent me a funny sketch of me that he did without my knowing it. I laughed out loud when I saw it.
"Biblical sex row over explicit illustrated Book of Genesis" (The Telegraph)"It is turning the Bible into titillation," said Mike Judge, of the Christian Institute, a religious think-tank. "It seems wholly inappropriate for what is essentially God's rescue plan for mankind."
"If you are going to publish your own version of the Bible it must be done with a great deal of sensitivity. The Bible is a very important text to many many people and should be treated with the respect it deserves.
"Representing it in your own way is all very well and good but it must be remembered that it is a matter of people's faith, their religion.
"Faith is such an important part of people's lives that one must remember to tread very carefully." Other leading religious figures have been more supportive of the work. "I didn't think it was satire," said the Bishop of Croydon, the Rt Rev Nick Baines.
"He set out to say; 'this is important, fundamental myth' and it seems to me he's done a good job."
A Seattle couple celebrated their wedding recently with this stylish Zombie Wedding cake, complete with a chainsaw-toting bride and bloody guests modeled after real attendees. It seems that the pair are really into zombies — earlier, the groom proposed by making a zombie movie featuring blood-spewing teddy bears in a graveyard.
noblerobinette's Flickr via Neatorama
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By deviantART user ~tallydragon. [via CRAFT]
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I finally got the "official" statement from Fairey late on Friday, just as I was about to leave work for the weekend, and the whole thing was so ridiculous that I just figured I'd leave it until today. Apparently, Fairey, for absolutely no good reason, tried to destroy evidence and then lie about which photo he actually used to make his poster. He's now come clean about this, and while he's right in his statement that this shouldn't have any impact on the underlying case, it certainly doesn't help. It was already pretty well known that Fairey was hardly the poster child of fair use -- given that he has a history of going after others who copy his own work, despite being an "appropriation artist" himself. But, even so, this is beyond dumb -- something I don't say lightly.
"We are talking about five students who are living a gay lifestyle that is leading them to dress a way we do not expect in Morehouse men," (vice president for student services Dr. William Bynum) said."All-male college cracks down on cross-dressing"
Before the school released the policy, Bynum said, he met with Morehouse Safe Space, the campus' gay organization.
"We talked about it and then they took a vote," he said. "Of the 27 people in the room, only three were against it."
Those breaking the policy will not be allowed to go to class unless they change. Chronic dress-code offenders could be suspended from the college.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
This projection mapping video by Telenoika at the Ingravid Festival in Spain is totally mindblowing. The video is long, but worth it. Made using OpenFrameworks.
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Leica has announced a delay in production of its new S2 autofocus medium format DSLR. According to the company, this delay has been caused by 'higher than expected' demand. To us it seems more likely that higher than expected demand for other recently announced Leica products may also be having a knock-on effect. The camera, announced at Photokina last year was supposed to hit the shelves this month, but will now be available from December 2009 (hopefully). Comments Off [link]
After however many years of living, do you still have things about yourself, who you are and how your brain works that you don't entirely understand? To celebrate their 150th issue, the email version of The British Psychological Society's Research Digest asked 23 top psychologists to write 150 words on their nagging questions about themselves. From human consciousness, to death and forgiveness, to the dark Dalek-y corners of the mind, the answers are a great read--and an excellent place to jump into asking similar questions about ourselves.
I know. I know. That's awfully heavy for a Monday. So, for the excerpt here, we'll go with Richard Wiseman's answer, about the nature of humor:
I have no idea why I occasionally think funny things. For example, the other day I was watching the film "District 9", which is about an alien race known as "prawns", and thought "I wonder if the alien in charge is called a king prawn?". I would be the first to admit that it was not the world's greatest joke, but still, where did that moderately amusing idea come from? And why are some people so skilled at creating funny stuff, whilst others wouldn't recognise a proverbial custard pie, even if it hit them in the face? My guess is that the creation of comedy will remain a mystery for centuries, although at some point in the not too distant future, I suspect someone will carry out functional MRI scans of comedians creating jokes, and claim to have identified the part of the brain responsible for producing humour. Now, that will be funny.
Pretty amazing yard art by YouTuber koUNit1. [via Geekologie]
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.
At Ectomo, John Brownlee has launched an investigation into those books from the former East Germany* that concern the heroic exploits of truck drivers.
Note the fleeing children. Each is rendered with the garish ineptitude of a palsied Mört Drücker, and each reacts to the crushing onslaught of Der Katastrophen Truck with bizarre discordance. Perhaps most understandable of all their reactions, the eyes of the first child seem drawn to the hovering ghostly head -- as massive as the sun -- of who I can only imagine to be Der Katastrophen Trucker-King himself, Michael Connors.
*Allegedly.
DDR Pulps [Ectomo]
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If you have any memory at all of Cold War-era editorial cartoons and rhetoric from the American perspective, this collection of Soviet posters from the same time period is both fascinating and mentally jarring. The English Russia Web site provides translations for most of the posters, but really, they're impressive in their ability to get everything across even if you can't read a word of Russian. One the most interesting things going on here, visually, is how easily the artists take the wacky, friendly stilt-walking clown Uncle Sam most Americans are familiar with and morph him into a figure more akin to evil Mr. Potter from "It's a Wonderful Life" (frequently featuring anti-Semetic over and under-tones). They don't even change his outfit, just the colors.
Thanks to Twitter pal pbump for pointing me to the page!
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
From the MAKE Flickr pool
Matt the modulator picked this rather sweet 80's Maplin Harmony Generator kit on ebay. Though nonfunctional after the initial assembly, a bit of rewiring got things up and running for the above-seen demo processing a Gameboy/LSDJ sequence. He was also kind enough to post the relevant schematics/article for those interested.
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The first presenter at last Thursday's Dorkbot Austin was a gentleman named Mikal Hart, who described his "Reverse Geocaching Puzzle." Designed and built as a wedding gift for an old friend moving to France, the box incorporates an Arduino with a custom shield. A prominent button on the lid, when pressed, returns a distance, in kilometers, on the LCD display (if a GPS signal can be acquired), and counts button-presses up to 50 atttempts. No directional information is provided, so the box must be moved about in order to triangulate the location it wants. Mikal also included a cunningly-disguised back door to allow it to be opened in the event of battery failures or bugs.
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From the MAKE Flickr pool
Flickr pool member fdecomite shares his recreation of George Hart's geometric sculpture, 72 Pencils - the intersection of four hexagonal tubes.
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Sources say that the Liberals have introduced a motion that would take these practices outside of the bill. In its place, they would define computer program as, among other things, "a program that has as its primary function...inducing a user to install software by intentionally misrepresenting that installing that software is necessary to safeguard security or privacy or to open or play content of a computer program." This sets such a high bar - primary function, intentional mispresentation - that music and software industry can plausibly argue that surreptitious DRM installations fall outside of C-27.And, of course, once the copyright lobby can put spyware on your machine, they want to be sure they can spy on you and use that information against you:
PIPEDA currently features a series of exceptions to the standard requirements for obtaining consent for the collection of personal information (found in Section 7). Bill C-27 includes a provision that bars those exceptions in cases involving computer harvesting of email addresses and the "collection of personal information through any means of telecommunication, if the collection is made by accessing a computer system or causing a computer system to be accessed without authorization." In other words, email harvesting and spyware would not be permitted and would not qualify for the PIPEDA exceptions found in Section 7.It's really stunning what kind of sense of entitlement the entertainment industry has -- insisting that it should have the right to install spyware on your computer without you knowing about it, and to then collect all sorts of private info about you and what you do on your computer. Shameful.
The copyright lobby is deeply concerned that this change will block attempts to track possible infringement through electronic means. The Section 7(1)(b) exception in PIPEDA currently states that collecting personal information without consent or knowledge of the individual is permitted if it is reasonable to expect that the collection "would compromise the availability or accuracy of the information" and the collection is "related to investigating a breach of an agreement or a contravention of the laws of Canada."
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These industrial robots move at inhuman speed while deftly maneuvering in unison and maintaining a sub-millimeter tolerance. [via BotJunkie]
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IO9's excellent "Where To Start With Young Adult Science Fiction" booklist won me over as soon as I saw Pinkwater's Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars on it, and then I saw that they'd been kind enough to include my novel Little Brother, and I was over the moon!
(photo by Michael L.)
Though some of the fuller featured multimeters offer similar abilities, this ATMega8-based transistor tester project, identifies pins, measures gain, plus resistance and capacitance. Looks like a welcome addition to the workbench - schematic + source code can be found here [via Electronics-Lab]
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"They're not just shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted -- the horse has left town, got married, and started a family."Well said. Then, earlier this year, TalkTalk's CEO also pointed out how naive it was to think that the industry could do anything to stop unauthorized file sharing, noting:
If you try speed humps or disconnections for peer-to-peer, people will simply either disguise their traffic or share the content another way. It is a game of Tom and Jerry and you will never catch the mouse. The mouse always wins in this battle and we need to be careful that politicians do not get talked into putting legislation in place that, in the end, ends up looking stupid....TalkTalk is continuing to show how silly the recording industry's plans are, by doing a little demonstration. The company sent out a security expert on staff to an ordinary street in Stanmore, Middlesex. Then it had him find all the WiFi connections there -- noting that many were totally open, and many others used weak security. From a few open ones, he went and downloaded some songs including Barry Manilow's hit Mandy and the soundtrack to the 1992 film Peter's Friends -- those two choices in honor of Peter Mandelson, the UK Business Secretary who suddenly because a supporter of kicking file sharers off the internet using a three strikes provision after dining with entertainment industry mogul, David Geffen.
If people want to share content they will find another way to do it....
"The Mandelson scheme is every bit as wrong-headed as it is naive. The lack of presumption of innocence and the absence of judicial process combined with the prevalence of wi-fi hacking will result in innocent people being disconnected."This, of course, is the same point that plenty of people have been making for ages, but the recording industry never has a good response. They also haven't been able to respond to a more important point: how will kicking people off the internet make anyone more interested in buying music?
Netbook hacker Rob928 created this excellent tablet mod by tearing apart his Dell Vostro A90 netbook, adding a Hoda Technology solderless touchscreen kit, and filling in the gaps with plastic epoxy. [via slashgear]
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Canon has posted a firmware update for its EOS 7D digital SLR. Version 1.0.9 improves AF accuracy during live view shooting. It also rectifies an occasional problem of abnormal color display in movie mode and freezing of the shutter release when using the built-in flash or an external speedlight. Comments Off [link]
This is very simple breadboard power supply kit that takes power from a DC wall wart and outputs a selectable 5V or 3.3V regulated voltage. The .1" headers are mounted on the bottom of the PCB for simple insertion into a breadboard.
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Nikal sez, "I wanted to draw your attention to a short webcomic history of the ongoing crisis in Honduras. The comic puts the current situation in historical context and offers an interpretation of how the current de facto government has its roots in the US-Honduras relationship. We believe our comic is artfully drawn, informative, and innovative in its treatment and explanation of the crisis. The authors are Dan Archer, a comix journalist and instructor at Stanford University, and Nikil Saval, a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University and an assistant editor at n+1 magazine."
The interface for this slideshow is diabolical (a "next" button would be useful!), but it's still a great and informative read.
Striking Graphic Novel Tells Story of Honduras Coup and Unrest
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This video, of high-speed actuation of robot fingers and tracking cameras (developed by researchers from the Ishikawa Komuro Lab at the University of Tokyo), gets the big Keanu Reeves "Whoa" Award. [via Boing Boing]
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Last Thursday evening I had the pleasure of attending my first Dorkbot Austin, at Cafe Mundi on E. 5th St. At least fifty were in attendance, and six people presented original work, most of which I'll be blogging over the next few days. First up, I wanted to mention this luminous flowerpot clock, with LED pistils and modeling-clay petals, by Flickr user Spyderella, aka Sharon Cichelli. It flip-flops two of seven LEDs to mark the hours, and gradually illuminates the remaining five at 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50 minutes past. It's controlled by an external Arduino for prototyping purposes, but eventually will be entirely self-contained. There's video here. Sharon credit's Syuzi Pakhchyan's Fashioning Technology for inspiration.
In the Maker Shed:
Fashioning Technology
Ready to take your craft projects to the next level? With "smart" materials, unorthodox assembly techniques, and the right tools, you can create accessories, housewares, and toys that light up, make sounds, and more.
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