Fershteh Ghazi (@iranbaan) tweets that Hamed Derakhshan, brother of jailed Iranian blogger Hossein "Hoder" Derakshan, just said on @bbcpersian his brother has been held in solitary confinement for 10 months. Hoder was first arrested on November 1, 2008.

Yesterday, Hoder's father wrote a letter to Iran's judiciary to appeal for his son's release. That letter was published on the website of Salaam, a reformist newspaper from Iran. (both items via Cyrus Farivar).

Funny how this works, right? Just a week or so after it's first ever quarterly loss and an admission that it totally screwed up in the smartphone market, Nokia suddenly sues Apple for patent infringement over the iPhone. It looks like the old adage is true again: if you can't innovate, litigate! It's the same story all over again. A company that was a leader in the market but got complacent and lazy, suddenly finds that it lost its lead to a more innovative upstart. Since it's so far behind, even scrambling around doesn't help it to catch up, so it just starts suing over patents.

This story nicely highlights a few other points as well. We keep hearing from patent system supporters how the patent system is necessary because, without it, the market leader would always just immediately copy the upstart and "steal" their idea. Of course, Nokia has had two plus years to "steal" Apple's idea, and where is it in the smartphone market? It's not so easy to just copy someone else's idea -- especially if you're a huge player like Nokia, who will often view the disruptive innovator as not being worthy of paying attention to (which basically was Nokia's reaction to the iPhone).

Separately, remember how confused we were when Steve Jobs proudly hyped up the fact that Apple had over 200 patents on the iPhone concept? We've pointed out that it's hardly done anything to stop lawsuits. Apple has been sued over and over and over and over and over and over again for patent infringement. Welcome to the tragedy of the anti-commons, where it becomes impossible to do pretty much anything innovative without facing massive legal costs. Basically, if you build anything even remotely innovative these days, you're going to get sued for patent infringement, probably multiple times. It's become a massive tax on innovation, rather than a lever for innovation.

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In Tokyo today, Sony unveiled a 3D display that can be viewed from any direction. No glasses required, and several users can see the 3D images simultaneously from various angles. Snip:

The cylindrical display case is 27 cm tall with a base of 13 cm in diameter, and features a 96 by 128-pixel resolution that looks better than might be expected. The screen displays 3D objects including a cartoon character, car, globe, and people. Sony created these objects either in 3D on a computer or by taking photographs of them from various angles. The result is that the objects appear to have depth, and can be viewed from any angle on the horizontal plane by walking around the display screen.

Sony's keeping details under wraps, and hasn't explained how it works. We do know that it uses an LED light source, and that Sony claims it took about three years to develop the two demo models shown off today. The company has no immediate plans to commercialize the device, but a rep says they will develop versions with larger displays within the coming year.

More: physorg, Network World TV. (via @GreatDismal)

An anonymous reader writes "After months of prodding by developers, HTC has finally released the long-requested Android source code for the HTC Hero. This follows up on a recent report on Slashdot concerning device manufacturer HTC's perceived stonewalling over releasing source code for the device after repeated attempts to initially obtain source were met with vague responses."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dave Gugel, of Davenport FL, knows a thing or two about outdoor Halloween decorating. He does a wee bit of it each year (see above pic). Here, he offers a how-to on turning some PVC pipe, dribbles of hot glue, and flicker lights into some pretty convincing outdoor pillar candles.

Halloween Decorations: How to Make Electric Candles

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What you're looking at is the art of bacterial adaptation. It's beautiful. It should also make you a little uncomfortable, and a little hopeful. Part of a collaboration between Professor Eshel Ben-Jacob, of Tel-Aviv University, and Professor Herbert Levine of UCSDs National Science Foundation Frontier Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, these pictures are a visual representation of the way bacteria evolve to overcome life-threatening obstacles---like, say, hand gel. The art is also about the way bacteria fight back, which involves a form of communication. The researchers hope to use that skill against the bacteria to create a new generation of antibacterial weaponry.

While the colors and shading are artistic additions, the image templates are actual colonies of tens of billions of these microorganisms. The colony structures form as adaptive responses to laboratory-imposed stresses that mimic hostile environments faced in nature. They illustrate the coping strategies that bacteria have learned to employ, strategies that involve cooperation through communication. These selfsame strategies are used by the bacteria in their struggle to defeat our best antibiotics. Thus, if we understand the mechanisms behind the patterns, we can learn how to outsmart the bacteria - for example, by tampering with their communication - in our ongoing battle for our health.

The once controversial idea that bacteria cooperate to solve challenges has become commonplace, with the discovery of specific channels of communication between the cells and specific mechanisms facilitating the exchange of genetic information. Retrospectively, these capabilities should not have been seen as so surprising, as bacteria set the stage for all life on Earth and indeed invented most of the processes of biology. As we try to stay ahead of the disease-causing varieties of these versatile creatures, we must use our own intelligence to understand them.

See more by following the link to Prof. Ben-Jacob's site.

mhammond writes "Mozilla Messaging has just unveiled a Mozilla Labs project, Raindrop, an experiment with Open Messaging on the Open Web. Raindrop uses couchdb as a storage engine and to serve the HTML/CSS/Javascript application itself, while the back-end is primarily written in Python. Although it is early days yet, the concept that you own your data may be what sets this apart from Google Wave."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Our own Matt Mets put me onto this program called Montage from the open-source ImageMagick suite. Shown above is Matt's image "Things in my kitchen," and here is the command line to Montage that produced it:

montage +frame +shadow +label -tile 10x8 -borderwidth 1 -background white -bordercolor white -geometry 200x133 *.jpg stuff.jpg

As you can see, Montage takes all the work out of combining a bunch of individual images into an array of images, dealing automatically with all the resizing, cropping, arranging, and/or labeling headaches automatically.

Below is my own experiment with the software, "A visual guide to necklines," which I made because I never have any idea how to describe women's clothes.

Montage arrayed the images, added drop shadows, and labeled them based on their file names automatically. The only real work involved was tracking down the images online and saving them as appropriately-named files, but it wouldn't be hard to write a script to do that, either. Then one could conceivably go from a typed list of nouns to a complete visual index of those nouns completely automatically.

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While I'm no fan of Gartner, and tend to think its analysis is pretty weak in many cases, a recent lawsuit filed by ZL Technologies, because ZL doesn't like how Gartner ranked it in Gartner's famous "magic quadrant" analysis, is pretty silly, and hopefully will get thrown out quickly. Gartner has every right to rank companies as it sees fit -- just as courts have noted that Google has every right to rank websites as it sees fit. Even if there are questions about the integrity of Gartner's rankings, I don't see how that's a legal issue at all. All it might do is call into question the value of relying on Gartner's ranking system. But that's a business issue, not a legal one. The court will hopefully toss this lawsuit out quickly on First Amendment grounds, and let Gartner go on pushing out magic quadrants, no matter how flawed they might be.

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CWmike writes "Engineers from North Carolina State University have created a new fingernail-size chip that can hold 1 trillion bytes (a terabyte) of data. They said their nanostructured Ni-MgO system can store up to 20 high-definition DVDs or 250 million pages of text, 'far exceeding the storage capacities of today's computer memory systems.' Using the process of selective doping, in which an impurity is added to a material whose properties consequently change, the engineers worked at nanoscale and added metal nickel to magnesium oxide, a ceramic. The resulting material contained clusters of nickel atoms no bigger than 10 square nanometers — a pinhead has a diameter of 1 million nanometers. The discovery represents a 90% size reduction compared with today's techniques, and an advancement that could boost computer storage capacity."Instead of making a chip that stores 20 gigabytes, you have one that can handle one terabyte, or 50 times more data," said the team's leader, Jagdish "Jay" Narayan, director of the National Science Foundation Center for Advanced Materials and Smart Structures at the university."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dennis LeRoy, 62, of Proctor, Minnesota, pled guilty to driving his tricked-out, motorized easy chair while drunk. After leaving a bar where he had at least eight beers, LeRoy smashed his chair into a parked car. The chair features a lawnmower engine, built-in stereo, headlights, and some sharp pinstriping.
"Man pleads guilty to DWI in motorized La-Z-Boy" (Thanks, Carlo Longino!)

Wondering what all that strange stuff is in your DIY chemistry lab? Well, then you should definitely watch this lab safety video by the The Sounds of Science! [via boingboing]

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We've talked in the past about the sneaky nature of Washington DC lobbying, whereby the real lobbyists' goals are hidden as some sort of bogus grass roots campaign involving some random group of people. It looks like that's about to happen again, as a bunch of satellite TV and telcos have put together what is officially a "sports fan" lobbyist organization. However, it appears to really just be an anti-cable effort. The initial campaign is likely to be an attempt to stop the cable firms from their current effort to block competing television service providers from being able to carry cable-owned sports networks. The real fight is about who gets to control what TV sports content, but it sounds much nicer to pretend that it's "concerned sports fans" as a lobbying group, rather than "cable company competitors."

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FleaPlus writes "Buzz Aldrin and twelve other astronauts have published a joint endorsement of commercial human spaceflight, stating that 'while it's completely appropriate for NASA to continue developing systems and the new technologies necessary to take crews farther out into our solar system, [the astronauts] believe that the commercial sector is fully capable of safely handling the critical task of low-Earth-orbit human transportation.' They are confident that commercial systems (which NASA already relies on for launching multibillion-dollar science payloads) can provide a level of safety equal to the Russian Soyuz and higher than the Space Shuttle, while strengthening US economic competitiveness. They also support the expected endorsement of the White House's Augustine Commission regarding NASA's use of commercial spaceflight — the Commission's final report will be released today." And here's the Augustine report itself (PDF).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Heather Sparks writes for and about the medical industry. She has contributed to Wired, Popular Science, and many other publications.


Justine Cooper is a multi-disciplinary artist living in Brooklyn whose work lies at the intersection of science, medicine, art, and commerce. Following up on HAVIDOL, a fake marketing campaign for an imaginary drug, Cooper has launched Living In Sim. This latest online and offline work presents the real and imaginary lives of medical mannequins via blog, video soap opera, installation, and photography. Living In Sim opens today, October 22, at the Daneyal Mahmood Gallery in New York City.

HS: Most people have probably never seen one of these mannequins in the real world. Can you explain how they're used?

JC: Medical mannequins serve as simulated patients in hospitals, universities, and clinics. Typically there is a two-room setup: one is where the simulation takes place, the second is where people direct the simulation and where everything is recorded.

Software controls the mannequin's vital signs according to a script. While the simulation has a plotline, it can branch off depending on how the clinicians respond and what the learning goals may be.

The whole thing can seem like improv theater or like a dress rehearsal for the real performance. The simulation finds out how the clinicians will handle everyone's needs. It can be very gripping. The Center for Medical Simulation (in Cambridge, MA) where I had a residency this past year is very advanced in their use of simulation. They stage cases that probe the limits of human and medical communication.

HS: What is it about the mannequins intrigued you in the first place?

JC: I was introduced to them in Queensland, Australia four or five years ago. I work like a dung beetle; that first meeting was just a particle that got rolled along, growing and picking up ideas along the way. I started with their portraits in my last show, Terminal, but I wanted to turn their situation around and make them something more than the passive recipients of endless crises. So I made them the doctors and nurses--in fact, the whole hospital staff--and gave them a voice on the Web.

HS: What do you mean when you describe Living in Sim as a "mixed reality" artwork? JC: Living in Sim is like our lives right now--where online and real-world realities are so intertwined. So much of what we do now is a hybrid. Online communication has real world ramifications, and so do medical simulations, which rely on the suspension of reality to actively seek improvements in healthcare.

HS: To that end, how would you rate the level of "realness" of the mannequins compared to our Internet- and media-saturated lives?

JC: Both are equal in that both impact our "real" lives. The mannequins help reduce the number of accidental deaths and medical error. But by giving these mannequins a voice on their blog [lead writer is Jason Lindner], and allowing them to act out their dramas in their soap opera, they're more real, and more like us, than ever.



HS: In the soap opera piece, Indemnity General, a patient's insurance takes his wife in exchange for his medical treatment. Why did you choose to play out such an outlandish drama?

JC: I really wanted to express how absurd the health industry is now. Hospitals are basically run by insurance companies like medieval fiefdoms. No, they do not take your wife as payment for services rendered, but they can be responsible for you losing your home. In fact, three-quarters of the people who are bankrupted by medical bills actually had insurance when they got sick.

But the absurdity of Living in Sim is also intended to be playful and engaging. I'm interested in finding out if discussions about health care or medicine can be humorous. There's been so much serious debate and depressing rhetoric, is it possible to have a forum that leaves you smiling and not suicidal about the state of affairs?

HS: There are so few actual humans in Living in Sim but instead features all this technology intended to ensure human life. Let's talk about that contradiction.

JC: I think it's telling that even the small bit of humanness that the mannequins have is enough to make people engage with them very seriously in medical simulations. It's also telling that we're so surrounding by technology in our healthcare system that people insist on using it most of the time. Your knee hurts for a while and you insist on an MRI, not physical therapy. Technology shouldn't negate common sense in healthcare, but it often does.

HS: You also have taken several photos of the mannequins with religious and classical symbolism in them. Why did you decide to include these?

JC: It's meant, in a way, to reference how in our Internet-mediated social lives, we see the same images over and over. Religious and classical symbolism is a kind of imagery that we're also socially familiar with. Throughout history we see these religious paintings with the same symbolism: the saints pointing their index and middle fingers upward, the single bare breast. They're images that you see over and over. We still use the bunny sign, but we're no longer saints--we're happier than ever to show off those fleshy parts. 

Living In Sim

Yesterday the earth shook, and at first glance you might think it just shook in Silicon Valley, but I think a few years from now we'll look back and realize that the earth was shaking just as hard in the media industry.

I've had this really strong feeling ever since I got enamored of Twitter in 2006 that it was something the news and entertainment world would jump on if it had leadership that was as bright and ambitious as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates at their prime. Alas, those days must be long gone, because they busily tried to litigate peace in the old war, which they lost long ago, looking for the reparations that are due the loser who manages to make the victor feel guilty. (In other words the crumbs left on the table after the meal is over and after the cleaning people have made their first pass.)

"Look over here!" I've said over and over. "You should be competing here."

"We don't see why," they respond.

Here's why.

Twitter got Google and Microsoft to pay for the content that the media industry should have been hosting instead of Twitter. There was money here. And as we all know, the media industry can't find enough money to keep going. They're looking for handouts from the government. Meanwhile there was money everywhere. They just had to evolve.

I'm not saying this payday means Twitter has it made, they don't. Google and Microsoft are sharks and Twitter may be a goldfish. It could be that Evan Williams and his team have the competitive instincts of a Gates or Jobs, if so, they certainly have a few tricks up their sleeves, or they wouldn't have done these deals. They better, because Google and Microsoft are almost surely executing an Embrace & Extend. What that means for Twitter is that they have clones of Twitter in development. The race is certainly on. Have they cross-licensed their streams? In other words, does Twitter have reciprocal rights to any realtime content generated by users of Google's TwitterLand? Microsoft's? Even if they do, could they handle the load? My guess is that both Google and Microsoft will quickly take the search function away from Twitter. Now everyone has the Twitter stream. What streams can Microsoft and Google add to differentiate theirs?

And what business are they in now? I believe they're in the news business. This isn't tech anymore. This is what the Times and CNN should have become, what CBS, NBC and ABC should be. What Jay calls a pro-am system where everyone collaborates to create the realtime stream of news on all levels, national, international, local, broad coverage and specialized stuff. Everything from newsletters to nightly news. Everything flows through the same pipes, and curators pick off the good stuff and route it to people who are interested. This is the way news is done from here-on. We're not talking about the future, we're talking about now. And the moguls of the media industry, without a single leader thinking in advance of the wave, are sitting on the sidelines, hoping someone will give them some money because they're such great writers or whatever it is they're so great at. Soon they'll be looking for reparations.

They should own the platform.

And it's bad for the rest of us that they don't because the moguls of Silicon Valley have a very crude understanding of what news is. Witness the longevity of the 140 character limit and the inability of Twitter to carry any type of content other than text. The horror of the Suggested Users List. I don't expect Google or Microsoft to do much better, but they'll probably have the sense to hire a few news pros to advise them on how to build a system that works for news. The Twitter guys are fumbling around, and in doing so, holding all of us back.

And FriendFeed. Oh man what a wasted opportunity that was. If they had an ounce of competitive spirit they would have noticed that the news industry wasn't seeing their way into this space, and they would have gotten on a plane and camped out in NY and found someone, anyone, with a good flow of news to partner with, to guide them toward creating the fantastic news system that Twitter wasn't building. They had the technical ability to do it, but they were too much of homebodies, they enjoyed the comfort of other engineers too much.

This is what we still have to do -- create the connections between people with technical knowhow and people who can make the news flow to create a safe harbor for the millions who want to participate in news to do so, without being owned and controlled by the titans of tech.

Tomorrow, Friday the 23rd, at noon Pacific time, we will be giving away another prize bundle consisting of one Microchip Technology PIC10F Cap Touch Demo Board and one MCP1650 Multiple White LED Demo Board.

This time, the winner will be selected from among our Twitter followers. Send us an @reply containing the phrase "Microchip Technology giveaway theta" and your name will be in the hat, too.

The winner will be announced Friday afternoon through our Twitter feed. If you enter, please be sure to check your Twitter account promptly after the contest is over; DMs are the only way we have to contact you if you win!

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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Gaming blog UK Resistance has obtained several present-day photos of a depressingly bare, archaic video game arcade in Pyongyang. The person who took and submitted the photos chose to remain anonymous for safety reasons. Speaking of North Korea, the current issue of The Paris Review has an amazing article by Barbara Demick about two young North Koreans who risked their lives to make a romantic relationship work. Inside a North Korean arcade

The Underwater Land project recently supplied me with an MP3 download of their CD, "Underwater Land," created by the late, great and sorely missed Shel Silverstein. This was the pitch:

I'm writing you on behalf of the Shel Silverstein estate's Underwater Land project. Underwater Land is a kid's music project created by Shel Silverstein. This project was Shel's final major music project and also his final children's recording. Shel wrote Underwater Land, produced it, travelled to Nashville in 1997 to handpick the best musicians and studios there, and sings on several tracks with the primary singer and old friend Pat Dailey. Kim Llewellyn, Shel's longtime graphic designer, designed the lovely 32-page liner notes which features many previously unpublished Silverstein illustrations and all the song lyrics and verse.

And here's my take: this is some seriously awesome kids' music, full of Silverstein's flawless, legendary rhyme, his wicked humor, and some damned fine music and playing beneath it. It's fast, witty, and full of jokes that work on levels that can be appreciated by pre-verbal toddlers -- the broad, comic recitations of songs like "Fish Guts," a kind of "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General" for the fish-kingdom -- by kids, and by adults, who will appreciate the snatches of extremely grown-up jokes woven into the whimsy.

Some of my favorites: "Dale and Shale," a rapped advertisement for a notional store selling naught but tales (think of Tom Waits's "Pasties and a G-String" except about fish, not strippers); "Captain Octopus" (a rollicking sea chanty recounting the eight things a sailing octopus can do at once); and "Poor Anna," the sob-story of Anna, a flounder from Havana whose love affair is pull of superb and terrible fish puns (every now and again Silverstein and Dailey break each other up on this track, and I defy you not to do the same).

If you're a Silverstein fan, a fish fan, a kid, a grownup with a kid, or have an intact sense of humor, you will enjoy the heck out of "Underwater Land."

Underwater Land (Thanks, Kenyon!)

David Hlynsky's striking collection of store windows from Communist Europe is a peek into a weird, bleak, and sometimes comical view of consumer culture in a non-consumer society:

Between 1986 and 1990, I made approximately 8,000 color, Hasselblad images on the streets of Communist Europe. I purposely avoided dramatic moments and newsworthy events. In a cityscape without commercial seduction, banality seemed to signify everything. At first I was interested in simple pedestrian traffic. Later I doggedly documented store windows. These seemed to signify the real difference between East and West. Without the garish ad campaigns of the West, these streets felt more neutral... devoid of trumped up and pumped up urgency.

David Hlynsky Communist store windows (Thanks, Zoran!)

krow (Brian Aker, long-time MySQL developer) writes "Richard Stallman's comments on the Oracle Acquisition of Sun left me scratching my head over his continued support of closed-source licensing around open source software. Having spent more than a decade in the MySQL community, I feel that his understanding of the dual-license model is limited, and is at odds with his advocacy of free software. For this reason, I believe his recent statements concerning it need to be addressed. By pushing for the right to turn GPL-licensed software into the heart of a proprietary business model, he is squandering an opportunity for advocacy of open source within the European Union."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lots of companies are aiming to create all kinds of "viral advertising," and certainly automated "prank calls" that are really ads (often for movies) have become common in the last few years. But that doesn't do much to excuse Toyota's behavior. Apparently, the company put together a promotional campaign that allowed friends to freak out their friends, by convincing them they were being stalked. Here's how Toyota described it:

YourOtherYou is a unique interactive experience enabling consumers to play extravagant pranks. Simply input a little info about a friend (phone, address, etc.) and we'll then use it, without their knowledge, to freak them out through a series of dynamically personalized phone calls, texts, emails and videos. First, one of five virtual lunatics will contact your friend. They will seem to know them intimately, and tell them that they are driving cross-country to visit. It all goes downhill from there. The Matrix integrates seamlessly into the experience and you can follow the progress of your prank in real-time online. Each piece of the campaign assures that the experience is as Google-proof as possible.

Sound like fun? Not really. Especially not for Amber Duick, who "had difficulty eating, sleeping and going to work" after receiving a bunch of phone calls from this prank, believing that some "lunatic" stranger was on his way from England to see her. At one point, she even received a bill from a hotel that this stranger supposedly "trashed." Har har. Buy a Toyota.

How does Toyota defend the campaign? By claiming that Duick agreed to it. How, you ask? Well, Toyota sneakily inserts "permission" into a personality test it sends the "victim" of the prank, from the "friend" who initiated it. It's difficult to see how that kind of agreement stands up in court. Hiding an agreement for something entirely different (and pretty damn creepy) inside the agreement for a personality test from a friend? How is that informed consent?

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This article about a farmer in Ohio who grew creepy pumpkins with human faces on them was apparently in the January 1938 issue of Popular Science. via Modern Mechanix

Pink Tentacle has found several great images of what a 1969 edition of the Japanese comic magazine Shonen Sunday called Computopia — a future in which computers will teach our children, perform surgeries, and infiltrate our lives in otherwise useful and fun ways. Computopia: Old visions of a high-tech future

As an unruly second grader I often endured the chalk-throwing rage of Mrs. Seaman (*giggle*). Not much fun, but at least I wasn't being corporally punished by these "watchful robots that rap students on the head if they lose focus or act up."

This vision of the future, ominously entitled "The Rise of the Computerized School", was illustrated by Shigeru Komatsuzaki for an article in a 1969 Sh?nen Sunday magazine. The "Computopia" feature predicted that by 1989 our lives would be equal parts carefree and terrifying thanks to the pervasiveness of computers, telecommuting teachers, and pugilistic enforcer robots.

[via Pink Tentacle] [Thanks, Contorto!]

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lbalbalba writes "A Dutch court ruled today that The Pirate Bay has to remove a list of torrents linking to copyrighted works. The list is to be provided by BREIN (similair to the RIAA, in Holland), and is similar to the earlier ruling against Mininova. The defendants are given three months to comply, if not, they will face penalties of 5,000 euros ($7,500) per person, per day."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

<img src="http://www.boingboing.net/200910221128.jpg" height="337" width="422" border="0" align="left" hspace="4" vspace="4" alt="200910221128" /

Avi Solomon says: "If you search Google Images for "Google  books fingers" you get poignant images (to my lights) of scanner worker bee hands. Makes me value the massive,  anonymous and underpaid effort that goes into maintaining the 'digital' economy." Here an example.

Google Books fingers

If we humans weren't so bare, we would probably not wear robes. And then there would be no reason to disrobe. If there were no bare skin, there would be no Hefner as we know it.

And, according to Mark Changizi from the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the reason we're bare is because we can see in color.

More talk of nudity and other dirty things after the cut...

Changizi's theory, which he details in a post over at ScientificBlogging, is based on both research and speculation. But I kind of love these evolutionary "Just So Stories" like this, not necessarily as hard science, but for their ability to inspire imagination and curiosity about who we are and where we came from. The fact is, without basically re-doing human evolutionary history in a lab, we probably won't ever know for sure why certain features evolved. Or why we have some features that other animals don't. But I do find the speculation fun.

As I have argued in my research, our color vision is a distinctive kind of color vision, one that is specialized for detecting the color changes that happen in skin due to the physiological changes in blood (e.g., oxygenation). Most varieties of color vision - like that in birds, reptiles and bees - do not have this extraordinary capability. Our color vision is for seeing blushes, blanches, red rage, sexual engorgement and the many other skin color changes that occur as one's emotion, mood, or physiology alters. Color is for seeing embarrassment, fear, anger, sexual excitement, and so on.

Our primate ancestors once had furry faces, and one was born with our style of color vision, able to detect the peculiar changes in our underlying blood physiology. Although the faces this ancestor looked at were furry, some skin would have been visible, such as around the eyes, nostrils, lips and any lighter patches of fur. This ancestor would have been born an "empath," able to see the moods of others. Color vision of this kind would thus spread over time.

And once it spread, animals could then have evolved to "purposely" signal colors indicating their mood, and then bare skin would have evolved to have more canvas for signaling. Many of our skin color changes are indeed "purposeful," i.e., not simply inevitable consequences of our underlying physiological state. For example, Peter D. Drummond has shown that peoples' faces blush more on the side which people can see.

Image by Flickr user shufflepath, via CC

A couple years ago, we discussed how Universal Music CEO Doug Morris gleefully explained how clueless he was about technology -- while also being quite ignorant of basic economics and business models. It's amazing that Vivedi has allowed him to remain in charge. One of the more stunning statements was that the idea that you had to give up some money now to make more in the future just means "someone, somewhere, is taking advantage of you." Apparently, the guy has never heard of investing and has no bank accounts that earn interest, because that's just "someone, somewhere... taking advantage."

With that said, the following really isn't all that surprising. Gerd Leonhard highlights the explanation of why concert video site FabChannel shut down:

No money means no content. That is the way the labels (major and independent) look at potential partnerships with internet companies. Even when it is obvious a service provides added value in promotion and sales, the mantra stays the same: no money, no content. Even when a service invests substantial amounts of money in creating high quality concert footage and an award winning platform to show it to the world, the mantra stays the same: no money, no content.

When you look at it from a label point of view, it might even look logical. Their business models have been hammered the last ten years by decreasing CD sales. Their radio, TV and newspaper partners are not doing their promotional job as they used to. And last but not least: the majority of consumers are now downloading tracks for free. All bad things for companies that invest in recordings of artists.

So the most important feature that new partners have to have is: MONEY. Money to counter the decrease in CD sales. Promotion has turned into a dirty word. MTV for example got big and wealthy by showing video clips paid for by the labels. So now these labels think: We will not let that happen again. From now on everybody who wants to become a media partner online is going to have to pay up front to even start.

It's hard to think of anything more short-sighted or suicidal. Here are all sorts of online companies looking to help promote your works better so that you can make more money, and the you decide that unless they give money up front, they need to be shut down. And we've seen this over and over again. It's why every hot new music startup ends up getting sued by the record labels, with the end result being either the site gets shut down, or the startup gives a big equity chunk to the labels, in combination with promises of impossible-to-afford payments. The record labels with their "no money, no content" mantra have destroyed their own business. So many services that could have helped better promote musicians killed off because of this silly and suicidal mantra. It makes you wonder how the management at those record labels keep their jobs. Don't they have boards and parent companies who monitor what's happening?

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I wonder if giving viral videos an old-timey silent movie treatment will become more popular. As for the actual content of the video, I thought it was sad. I hope the man in the video receives the help he needs to recover and stay well. He may not have been drunk. Maybe he was in insulin shock or something like that. (Here is the original video).

In 2007 James Gunn posted this gallery of truly frightening before and after photos in which normal little girls are turned into waxen nightmares.

The Creepiest Thing You'll Ever See (Via PonyPonyShow)

A couple of days ago I posted a photo of a container of "Dairy Drink," which turns out to be sugared and watered down skim milk. The above drink is just plain old milk, but did the person who came up with "Dairylea" really think it would make people want to drink it?

Dairylea sound like a gastric disorder...

Barence writes "Amazon has stripped several key features out of the international edition of the Kindle, PC Pro has discovered. Newspapers and magazines are delivered without any photos, and the web browser has been disabled, presumably because Amazon doesn't want to foot the data bill. There's also a 40% premium on books bought via the Amazon store. 'International customers do pay a higher price for their books than US customers due to higher operating costs outside of the US,' an Amazon spokesperson confessed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers found that male McCain voters experienced a drop in testosterone after the tribe leader they were backing lost the election. "The findings indicate that male voters exhibit biological responses to the realignment of a country's dominance hierarchy as if they participated in an interpersonal dominance contest," wrote the researchers, whose paper appeared in the PLoS ONE peer-reviewed journal.

The present study investigated voters' testosterone responses to the outcome of the 2008 United States Presidential election. 183 participants provided multiple saliva samples before and after the winner was announced on Election Night. The results show that male Barack Obama voters (winners) had stable post-outcome testosterone levels, whereas testosterone levels dropped in male John McCain and Robert Barr voters (losers). There were no significant effects in female voters.

Dominance, Politics, and Physiology: Voters' Testosterone Changes on the Night of the 2008 United States Presidential Election (Via NY Mag Daily Intel)

Ask MAKE is a weekly column where we answer reader questions, like yours. Write them in to mattm@makezine.comor drop us a line on Twitter. We can't wait to tackle your conundrums!

Jen writes in:

I'm making a circuit to blink an LED at different speeds, that I can control using a button switch. It wouldn't work until I added added some 'debounce' code. What does that mean, and why did I have to add it?

Good Question! Switch bounce is one of those rare electronic effects that is actually a caused by a mechanical shortcoming The issue is in the way the switch works. When you flip a switch (or press down on a button), you are really pushing one piece of metal against another. If this happens with sufficient force, one or both of the pieces will deform slightly, and then bounce back in the other direction. Depending on how well the switch was designed, this could go on for a number of times before both pieces stop moving. Now, all of this bouncing means that from an electrical perspective, the switch looks like it is opening and closing rapidly until the bouncing dies down. It happens very quickly, however digital electronics are fast enough to see this as a bunch of switch presses!

There are three ways to deal with this: mechanically (building a better switch), electrically (building a filter out of discrete electric components), or digitally (with software).

In your question, you mentioned that you used some debounce code, which is probably the best solution for you. For this solution, you write a software routine that runs when someone presses a button, then waits for a short time (long enough for the bouncing to have stopped) before reading the switch state. This effectively ignores any spurious signals from the switch contacts bouncing without any extra hardware. If you happen to be using the Arduino platform, try this tutorial.

If you aren't using a microcontroller, though, software isn't going to help, and you will have to try one of the other solutions. The traditional way to handle switch bounce on a breadboard is to use a resistor-capacitor (RC) filter in a low pass configuration. What this does is prevent the output of the switch from going high too quickly, which effectively filters out any high-speed signals. Check out this tutorial if you would like to try out this method.

So, how could you re-design the switch to prevent bounce? It turns out that the most common thing to do is to wet the contacts with mercury. Because mercury is a liquid at room temperature, it's surface tension keeps the contacts connected even when they do bounce. The only issue with this is that mercury is pretty toxic, so you should only use this if you absolutely need to, such as when you are controlling high-power machines at fast speeds.

[photo by Flickr user russ_j_taylor]

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AVee writes "Engadget (amongst many others) reports that Nokia is suing Apple because the iPhone infringes on 10 Nokia patents related to GSM, UTMS and WiFi. While the press release doesn't contain much detail, it does state that Apple didn't agree to 'appropriate terms for Nokia's intellectual property,' which sounds like there have been negotiations about those patents."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While the "classic" Nigerian 419 "advance fee" scam was based on telling someone they had been awarded/won millions of dollars, which is just held up by bureaucratic problems, a popular variation that's been around for years is buying something online with a bogus check written for significantly more than the amount sold. This scam hit eBay users pretty hard for a while. Basically, it relies on a fundamental misunderstanding of how check processing works. As an example, a check for $10,000 is sent on an item that only costs $2,000, with the buyer asking the seller to send back a check for the difference along with the product. The seller deposits the check and a few days later the bank says that the check "cleared." Banks have to clear the checks in a short period of time. Then the buyer sends off the product and the excess money... only to find out a few days (usually about a week or so) later, that the check is a forgery and the money is gone (along with the product and the legitimate "difference" check that was sent out).

The real issue here is that banks say the check "cleared" which people assume means that the check is legit. But it's not. Fix this problem and this particular scam would disappear overnight.

Of course, most of these scams are based on playing on someone's greed. To brush aside anyone's concerns on these types of deals, sometimes the buyer will ask for only some of the difference back, making the seller think they actually got away with making more money.

But, if you're going to base on a scam on greed, why prey just on small-fry eBay sellers? Why not go after the bigger dogs... like lawyers? You might assume that lawyers would be more sophisticated and not as quick to fall for this sort of thing, but at least with some (and, no, I'm not painting all lawyers with this brush), you'd be wrong. Earlier this year, we wrote about a lawyer who fell for exactly this trick... and then (of course) suded Citibank for letting him make this mistake -- which cost his firm nearly $200,000. Not bad for a simple scam... and thus, it appears that more lawyers are being targeted with just such a scam, even to the point that local bar associations are warning lawyers to watch out for it.

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Mark.JUK writes "The European Parliament has surrendered to pressure from Member States (especially France) by abandoning amendment 138, a provision adopted on two occasions by an 88% majority of the plenary assembly, and which aimed to protect citizens' right to Internet access. The move paves the way for an EU wide policy supporting arbitrary restrictions of Internet access. Under the original text any restriction of an individual could only be taken following a prior judicial ruling. The new update has completely removed this, meaning that governments now have legal grounds to force Internet providers (ISPs) into disconnecting their customers from the Internet (i.e. such as when 'suspected' of illegal p2p file sharing)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Must. Resist. Yakov Smirnoff. Joke. This is a war memorial, after all, and to a particularly nasty bit of a particularly nasty war, at that. Still, in the same way that Italians can laugh about the fact that, yes, it can be a bit of a pain to renew your driver's license in Italy, or that Estadounidenses can admit that, yes, we have been known to occasionally over-commercialize certain things, even patriotic Russians will see that there is something of the stereotypically Russian in this story.

This memorial was erected in Ukraine shortly after WWII to commemorate the legions of fallen dead. For 50 years its eternal flame burned natural gas piped in under the Soviet administration. Then...well, things fall apart, as everyone knows. With the breakup of the USSR, the flow of free natural gas into Ukraine stopped and it became too expensive to keep the torch lit. I'm sure it was a sad day that finally saw the flame go out.

Apparently it sat unlit for several years until this compromise solution was achieved: The flame would be converted into a cell-phone tower, the antennae concealed by a round facade bearing a pixelated flickering LED-flame image funded by the cell-phone company. One of those capitalistic solutions where everyone wins, but only kind of.

To my eye, this is in awful taste. But the story, I think, is kind of beautiful. If it's really true that the only two alternatives were to leave the flame unlit or to replace it with a cheesy simulation, I think, ultimately, that I would have made the same choice. And as we continue to oxidize the world's supply of hydrocarbons, sooner or later the sensibility of keeping fossil-fuel flames burning "eternally," only for symbolic purposes, may well become an issue in other parts of the world. [via Hack a Day]

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What the internet is for: this video of a beautiful LEGO recreation of Kinkaku-ji, a Zen Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan constructed in the 14th century. The guy who built this LEGO replica says the project required 4,500 pieces. Don't miss the splendid golden pavillion reveal - watch the whole thing. (via brothers-brick, thanks Sebastian!)

This LED eyelash getup by Soomi Park is pretty neat, and uses a set of headphones to house the tilt sensor and other electronics. A little spirit gum goes a long way for affixing things to your face! [via Fashioning Technology]

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An amazing piece in Mother Jones on how the No Child Left Behind Act made it possible for military recruiters to gather personal data on millions of unsuspecting American teens.

When I asked him whether he'd ever talked to a military recruiter, Travers, a 19-year-old African American with a buzz cut, a crisp white T-shirt, and a diamond stud in his left ear, smiled wryly. "To get to lunch in my high school, you had to pass recruiters," he said. "It was overwhelming." Then he added, "I thought the recruiters had too much information about me. They called me, but I never gave them my phone number."

Nor did he give the recruiters his email address, Social Security number, or details about his ethnicity, shopping habits, or college plans. Yet they probably knew all that, too. In the past few years, the military has mounted a virtual invasion into the lives of young Americans. Using data mining, stealth websites, career tests, and sophisticated marketing software, the Pentagon is harvesting and analyzing information on everything from high school students' GPAs and SAT scores to which video games they play. Before an Army recruiter even picks up the phone to call a prospect like Travers, the soldier may know more about the kid's habits than do his own parents.

A Few Good Kids? (Mother Jones, via @dangerroom; image: Nina Berman/Redux, via Mother Jones)

Michael Scott points us to a column by Shelly Palmer that clearly articulates a point I've tried to make in the past, but haven't been able to make that clearly: arguing "free vs. paid" is the wrong debate. Professional content is always paid for somehow -- it's just a question of how. In some cases it's a third party paying. In some cases it's a user paying. And, in some cases, it's a user paying not with money, but with something else, like time or attention, which helps give a third party the reason to pay:

Can you frame this conversation as free vs. paid? No. Not if you are trying to get someone to pay you cash directly for something that is ubiquitously available for free. Free vs. Paid is not the great debate, it's a no-brainer -- free wins! Valueless vs Valuable, Scarce vs Ubiquitous, Demanding of attention vs Commanding of attention are the debates and the winners will be the individuals and organizations that can most effectively translate the value of content into wealth.

Exactly. This is why the focus on "free" is almost always misplaced. People stop thinking once they hit that big oval zero -- and forget that free is simply a part of a larger business model, which is often about bringing in a larger audience that gives other reasons to pay.

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Sometimes, nature needs a metal soundtrack.

The BBC posted two videos of golden eagles hunting baby reindeer in Finland. They don't have an embed option, so you'll have to follow the link to watch. It's the first time this has ever been filmed. In fact, the native Sami people have been saying for years that eagle on reindeer violence was going on, but most experts didn't believe them until scientist Harri Norberg from the University of Lapland gathered forensic (and, now, this video) evidence for his Ph.D. thesis. His incredibly awesome Ph.D. thesis.

You look tasty, but I'm saving my appetite for the baby reindeer. Golden eagle image (man pictured NOT Harri Norberg) courtesy Flickr user mikebaird, via CC

To kill a reindeer, the birds strike it in a specific region in its withers, driving their talons into the mammal's lungs. "They are not killing anything instantly so they have to ride like a rodeo cowboy on the back of the calf," explained Dr. Ted Oakes, [the television producer who worked with Norberg on the filming]. "This is an extremely dangerous thing for an eagle to do, because the prey is much larger and heavier."

The downside: The video was taken from fairly far away. But even with the squinting, this is pretty cool.

An anonymous reader writes "A new report published by The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission wags a finger at the People's Republic of China for conducting Internet-borne espionage operations against United States high-tech companies. The paper, written by defense giant Northrop Grumman, provides a detailed case study of one such intrusion that moved large volumes of sensitive tech data out of a US firm in 2007. From a Wall Street Journal article, '"The case study is absolutely clearly controlled and directed with a specific purpose to get at defense technology in a related group of companies," said Larry Wortzel, vice chairman of the commission and a former U.S. Army attaché in China. "There's no doubt that that's state-controlled."' Wang Baodong, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, criticized the commission as "a product of Cold War mentality" that was "put in place to pick China to pieces." He added: "Accusations of China conducting, or 'likely conducting' as the commission's report indicates, cyberspace attacks or espionage against the US are unfounded and unwarranted.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fatlimey sez, "On the Arachnopets board, people enjoy keeping nature's nightmares as pets. and you can read about the owners going all squishy about their pets and their little arachnobabies. This thread is a whip scorpion love story with mysterious dances, spermatophores and 'cute baby whipling' pictures."

Well, I have a pair of adult D. variegatus and this evening I put them together. The male touched many times the female body but she reject him. After that, I left them alone, more "private" and 2-3 hours late i found the male walking out of the cork and the female was behind a "drop", I think it was the structure where the sperm is guarded (I don´t know the english word, sorry)

Damon variegatus male and female sex! :-P (Thanks, Fatlimey!)

Dane sends us this, perhaps surprisingly, simple non-digital mod for adding a delayed auto-off to an inexpensive taplight -

Analog circuit design has been relatively abandoned in comparison to digital design. Sure, its more complex to get working, and sometimes finicky in terms of noise, but it excels in other areas, like filtering and other simpler designs. In the simple cases, like above, its wonderful. When i first contemplated this idea, i was thinking, 'well i would have to get a 555, or an attiny...', then i realized that was silly and a waste of good hardware. The general idea here is simplicity can also be elegant. Oh, you also get that nice analog fade as it shuts off. :)

The project uses just 4 components - and you won't even need a USB programmer/etc. Assembly and functionality detailed over on Dane's site.

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"Celebrate the launch of Windows 7 by illegally downloading your very own copy!" Video link. (Funny or Die, thanks, @serafinowicz)

Last summer, Crafster user Enemyairship debuted this magnificent 7' x 7' Raccoon Mario Rug, hand crocheted from 3.5" granny squares. ZOMGwonderful.

He's made of 386 granny squares, each one representing 1 pixel (3.5" each) that makes up Raccoon Mario. I learned to crochet in February by watching youtube videos and recently watched another video for granny squares and got started on this project right away. I had originally thought that it would take me over 1 month to complete if I made about 10 granny squares per day.

7x7ft Raccoon Mario Rug! (via Wonderland)

I often get email from writers who are starting out asking for career advice for "breaking in" to the field. I'm somewhat helpless to answer these queries -- my first professional sale was more than a decade ago, that sale itself represented a further decade of hard work on both my craft and my career. I can tell you a lot about how to break in from a standing start in 1988, when I sold my first story, but not nearly as much about how to break in today.

Enter Jeff VanderMeer's Book Life: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st-Century Writer. Jeff and I were classmates at the Clarion workshop in 1992, and he is both a talented, prolific writer and a shrewd and successful trailblazer in 21st-century publishing and promotion.

Talking about arts careers can be a little icky, because, well, there's a fine line between career-management and self-obsessed personal promotion. Likewise, it's hard to talk about what you do in the realm of imagination without sounding a little like someone droning on about his absolutely fascinating dreams of the night before.

But Book Life avoids both of these pitfalls. It presents a well-organized masterclass in understanding how to fit both writing and a writing career into your life (hence "booklife"), covering everything from health and mental health advice (the chapter on envy should be required reading for everyone in the creative arts) to philosophical and practical advice on managing a blog, YouTube channel, MySpace/Facebook profile, and podcast.

Like Jim Munroe's Time Management for Anarchists VanderMeer's book is about how to balance the desire to be a creative free-spirit with the preparation and planning necessary to arrange your life to maximize your freedom to pursue your creativity. It's not quite a book on how to write, more a book about how to be a writer at a time when the job of "writer" is in tremendous flux. Covering subjects from managing your relationship with agents, editors and publicists to avoiding flamewars on your blog and averting despair in the face of an uncaring world, Book Life is an ambitious and successful attempt at a comprehensive guide to maintaining your sanity while chasing your dreams.

Book Life: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st-Century Writer

Nik Software has announced a new version of its Viveza selective color and light control plug-in for Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom and Apple Aperture. Version 2 brings in a host of new features and improvements including global image adjustment feature that allows users to control most of the color and light adjustments in a single step.The plug-in will be available from December for $199.95 or $99.95 to existing users.

Beautiful photographs by Tina Buescher of Jim Donnelly's orrery based on the mechanism known as "Ferguson's mechanical paradox." Good information about the orrery is provided by Ian Coote's page. As for the "paradox," well, it boils down to this: the three apparently-identical stacked gears on the end are driven by a single gear, yet move at different rates, which, of course, would be impossible if they were truly identical. News flash: They're not. But I'm sure it was harder to fight boredom in the 18th century than it is now, and the build is undeniably gorgeous.

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Fotograf writes ""Yahoo's latest embarrassment seems like a sign that the company is just trying too hard to be cool. The latest debacle is earning the company some additional publicity. After Yahoo hosted Taiwan Open Hack Day, a special event for engineers and developers that was held last weekend, a series of photos found their way onto the internet — as ill-thought out decisions often do. Yahoo offered lap dances to the attendees of the hack event. Since the pictures have come out the company has decided to apologize."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Northwestern University's Medill Innocence Project is a very cool program for journalism students, teaching them investigative reporting techniques in the real world, by having them investigate potential wrongful convictions. As the program's website notes, it's helped free 11 wrongfully convicted individuals, five of whom had been on death row. However, some prosecutors don't really like being proven incorrect. In one of its latest projects, the Innocence Project has provided enough evidence to reopen the case of Anthony McKinney, who has been in jail for 31 years for allegedly killing a security guard.

However, state's attorneys in Illinois are now subpoenaing all sorts of excess information on the students themselves, including their grades, the grading criteria, student evaluations, and private notes and and off-the-record interviews that were used in gathering the information necessary for the case. While the state's attorney Anita Alvarez is defending this overreaching subpoena effort, it has many concerned that this is really just an attempt to intimidate the students and create a serious chilling effect on this type of investigative research. It's difficult to see how the student's grades make any difference at all in whether or not McKinney is innocent or guilty.

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An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica took the time to talk to three members of the Windows 7 product development and planning team to find out how user feedback impacted the latest version of Windows. There's some market speak you'll have to wade through, but overall it gives solid picture regarding the development of a Windows release."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

1sockchuck writes "The risks and rewards of raising the temperature in the data center were debated last week in several new studies based on real-world testing in Silicon Valley facilities. The verdict: companies can indeed save big money on power costs by running warmer. Cisco Systems expects to save $2 million a year by raising the temperature in its San Jose research labs. But nudge the thermostat too high, and the energy savings can evaporate in a flurry of server fan activity. The new studies added some practical guidance on a trend that has become a hot topic as companies focus on rising power bills in the data center."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In need of a way to transmit a video signal to an aging antennae-input TV set, John rigged up a working RF modulator from salvaged parts (plus 5V supply) -

I decided not to build my modulator from first principles. A simple design with a UHF cavity oscillator and simple sound and vision carrier and modulation circuits is not impossible to make using parts from a scrap TV set, but when so many set top devices already have a modulator built into them why bother? Instead I lifted the RF modulator from a scrap Salora satellite receiver I picked up at a radio rally.
[…]
To power this modulator I built a simple 5 volt regulator using the ubiquitous 7805 IC. I simply soldered a TO220 heatsink to the module case and built the circuit around it. My choice of capacitor values was based on those I had to hand. I also included an LED to serve as a pilot light to indicate that the unit was turned on.

You've likely come across one of the shiny metal modulators if you've ever disassembled a scrapped VCR - read on for more of details of the conversion over @ TechnoToad.

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eldavojohn writes "Wired is reporting on a simple hack putting some 65,000 customers at risk. The hack to gain administrative access to the cable modem/router combo is remarkably simple: '[David] Chen, founder of a software startup called Pip.io, said he was trying to help a friend change the settings on his cable modem and discovered that Time Warner had hidden administrative functions from its customers with Javascript code. By simply disabling Javascript in his browser, he was able to see those functions, which included a tool to dump the router's configuration file. That file, it turned out, included the administrative login and password in cleartext. Chen investigated and found the same login and password could access the admin panels for every router in the SMC8014 series on Time Warner's network — a grave vulnerability, given that the routers also expose their web interfaces to the public-facing internet.' If you use Time Warner's SMC8014 series cable modem/Wi-Fi router combo, watch for firmware to be released soon that they are reportedly in the process of testing."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Frank sez, "Looking for a Halloween decoration? Place this on your table and watch it pump blood from around an eye socket, flowing into the mouth, of the undead! This Zombie Head measures 7 inches tall and it runs on standard 120v power source with an indoor adaptor. No doubt an eye-popping for your guests with this gruesome Eyeball Fountain."

I can't believe they're trying to sell this without a video of the head in action! Also: does it make gurgling, sucking, choking noises as it drinks its own blood? It says, "uses tap water," but can you put in other stuff? Rum? Chocolate? Kaopectate? Blood? Also: could you fit it with a small digital clock and a lamp so you could keep it on the bedstand?

Spinning Eyeball Fountain

Better link: Spinning Eyeball Fountain

(Thanks, Frank!)

Update:video here -- Thanks, Fester88!

My friend Dr Alan Banack is a former GP and emergency room doctor who now practices in Toronto as a clinical hypnotherapist, mostly working with performance athletes. I've written before about him -- he's the guy who helped me get over a five-year bout of writers' block in my early twenties, and helped me quit smoking for good in 2003. Now he's making some of his relaxation/focus audio available online -- given that he's stopped taking on new patients (he's getting close to retirement), this is about the only way you'll get to benefit from his talents!

Dr. Alan Banack's Anti-Stress Program (Thanks, Alan!)

Via Michael Geist comes a link to this segment on the Canadian sketch comedy/political satire show This Hour has 22 Minutes, where it totally mocks the claims that file sharing is killing the music business by highlighting the previous "copying technologies" (home taping, VCR, photocopier) that the industry insisted was killing content providers: While I actually think the bit could be funnier, it's pretty striking to see that sort of thing on a mainstream television program. More and more people are realizing that copyright industry claims have little support in reality, and that concept is starting to go mainstream.

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Tired of reading all of those racist, anti-Semitic, gross, nasty, hateful, and just plain dirt-dumb stupid comments on YouTube? Now you can make everyone as smart as a rocket scientist, or at least as smart as a Nobel Prize-winning physicist (and prankster, juggler, painter, bongo player, and lock-picker), namely Richard Feynman.

FeynTube is a Greasemonkey script that replaces all YouTube comments when quotes from Feynman. You can switch off FeynTube simply by switching off the Greasemonkey icon at the bottom of your browser.

The FeynTube page describes how to install both Greasemonkey and the FeynTube script. [Thanks, Blake!]

More:
Richard Feynman Video
Feynman and ants
Cross-Stitch Your Favorite Physicist
Richard Feynman: The Douglas Robb Memorial Lectures

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An anonymous reader writes "According to the Google blog, it has partnered up with Twitter to bring tweets into its search results in the next few months. While this is an exciting news, how the feature is going to present itself is a huge question. Indiblogger presents a comprehensive list of how it should be. From the article, the points discussed are: relevance of tweets with the search term, twitter and Google advertising, even a Google-Twitter API."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pentax has released a firmware update for its K-7 mid-level DSLR. Version 1.02 adds a new Fine Sharpness 2 custom function for extra sharpness in images. In specific shooting conditions, it improves image processing performance and stability. The firmware is available for immediate download from Pentax's website.

There was no shortage of attendees (or noises!) at Austin's first Handmade Music event. The mass kit-build was a definite success, with all participants bringing home fully-functional mini sound modules. Kit designer Eric Archer came equipped with 25 different capacitor recipes for his Mini Space Rockers - thus keeping the sonic landscape fresh - and loud! Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Music | Digg this!

This 4lb, two liter "Tankard of Terror" World of Warcraft mug would be a fantastic addition to your kid's birthday party or family Thanksgiving dinner.

Tankard O' Terror Replica Stein (via Geekologie)

Marilyn sez, "Charlie Hamilton James took some incredible photos of flashy Eurasian kingfishers diving and swimming underwater to spear a fish in a stream. The kingfisher's got a translucent membrane that protects its eyes, and you can see its eye very clearly in this underwater photo as it captures its prey. From National Geographic magazine, November issue."

Blaze of Blue (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Brian sez, " The third annual Ontario GNU Linux Fest will be this Oct 24th in Toronto at the Days Hotel and Conference Centre Toronto Airport East. I've been making the trip from Rochester, NY every year and wouldn't miss it. We've got a van full making the trip up this Friday. They've modeled the event after Ohio Linux Fest so it's not a vendor-centric sales pitch event. There's something for everyone take a look at the the list of talks. The most difficult choice is which talks you're willing to miss while attending another one."

Ontario GNU Linux Fest 2009 (Thanks, Brian!)

Someone anonymous sent in an explanation by the Town News for its decision to use the Associated Press' hNews "watermarking" system which is the AP's silly and meaningless attempt to stop copying of AP content. The General Manager of Town News, Marc Wilson, explains why they signed up for the program using the totally unsubstantiated scare tactic, claiming that there are these awful content thieves out there stealing content:

Probably the biggest issue within the newspaper/Internet world is controlling the re-use of content posted on the World Wide Web.

Actually, I'd say that the biggest issue is figuring out a business model that works. If you're trying to control the use of content you put online, you're doing it wrong. And, oops, the hNews format doesn't do much to stop content reuse due to the magic of the world's worst copyright infringement tool: cut-and-paste.

Honestly, I'm still trying to figure out who believes this myth that copying news content is some massive problem. Sure, there are some spam sites out there, but they get no meaningful traffic. There are some claims that they cause search engine trouble, but that's overblown as well. Google and others are pretty good at sussing out where the content originated. But, according to Wilson, this is a huge problem:

But what they don't like the rise of the many companies that copy or scrape content off of newspaper Web sites -- and end up competing with the sites that originated the content.

Again, where are these mythical content copiers? There are spam sites, but they get no traffic and they go away pretty quickly. Besides, if you can't compete against a spam site scraping your content, you're definitely doing something wrong. If your brand and your community management is so weak that a spam site can compete with you, you don't deserve to be in business.

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bennyboy64 writes "The Australian Classification Board is seeking to censor mobile phone applications under its National Classification Scheme. 'I recently wrote to the minister [Senator Conroy] regarding my concern that some so-called mobile phone applications, which can be purchased online or either downloaded to mobile phones or played online via mobile phone access, are not being submitted to the board for classification,' Australia's Classification Board director Donald McDonald told a Senate Estimates committee. I wonder if they know that there are over 80,000 applications on the iPhone platform alone?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Or is it "carton-pierre?" Anyway, it wins. "Ghostess" Deanna did a great job documenting the process of building "Goliath," who is based on the eponymous character from Disney's Gargoyles cartoon. Hard to believe he started out as glue, craft paper, and PVC pipe.

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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Curious young minds can learn the basics of electronics with the Snap Circuits Jr. kit from the Maker Shed. You can build more than 100 projects with this award-winning kit including sound effects, alarms, touch circuits, and games. No soldering is required. It's a great way to teach your kids about electronics!

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Adobe has released a beta version of its Photoshop Lightroom 3 workflow and image editing software. Available immediately for free download from Adobe Labs, the new version includes features such as 'intuitive' importing, improved noise reduction, enhanced slideshows and direct online publishing options (such as Flickr).

Way back in 2003, there was some discussion around the idea of having a "remote stop" feature on car telematics systems, in case a car gets stolen. There were some serious worries about how this could make things dangerous for other drivers on the road, but two years ago, OnStar enabled just such a service, and now we've heard about it being used on a carjacked car. OnStar "disabled the gas pedal," remotely, thus forcing the car to slow down, and allowing the cops to catch the carjacker (after he fell into a pool while running from the cops). While effective in helping to catch this guy, you still have to wonder about the safety of remotely stopping a car like that.

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Lensbaby has announced the addition of Fisheye and Soft Focus lenses to its Optic Swap system, offering focal lengths of 12mm and 50mm respectively. Both are compatible with Lenbaby's Composer and Muse body units, and Soft Focus can also be used with the Control Freak. The lenses both use Lensbaby's familiar removable disk aperture system, although unlike earlier optics, they do not feature a 'sweet spot' of focus. The Fisheye optic is now available for $149.95, while the Soft Focus Optic is $89.95.

ZuneHD Video MP3 Player, $220 Microsoft's ZuneHD is an excellent alternative to Apple's iPod touch, but not if you like apps or dislike the Windows-only media sync software.The new model's 3.3-inch, 480x272 multitouch display and compact form prove that MS can get the design right given a couple of tries. ZuneHD's squared-off geometry (53mm x 102 mm x 9 mm) is trendy and unpretentious, and frames a smooth, Tegra-powered user interface. It comes in 16GB or 32GB, black and silver, $220 and $290. Once loaded with music and video, you're all set ... assuming that's all you care about. Offered with it is a convincing subsription plan: $15 for all you can eat music over WiFi, locally cached, and you get ten keep-'em-forever MP3 downloads each month. ZuneHD's ability to output 14Mbps 720p video over HDMI is a killer app: this tiny PMP, three of which may fit in a deck of cards, is also a serviceable living room media center. There are annoyances. In bright sunlight, that lovely OLED display disappears behind glassy reflections. Microsoft's bloated software reminds us why it's just not necessary to jazz-up mundane, straightfoward stuff like media organization. ZuneHD doesn't show up as a USB drive, either. Its lack of an internal speaker is a likely annoyance for those used to the iPod touch: could you imagine having to wear headphones to enjoy games or hear incoming app notifications? Moreover, the first batch of available programs are amateurish and slow to load, with interstitial advertisments playing before they open. Let's not even get started on the lack of a cellphone edition or the platform's obvious superiority to Windows Mobile 6.5. Get the ZuneHD if you like the looks, run Windows, and don't care about apps. ZuneHD [Official website] Zune HD 32 GB Video MP3 Player [Amazon] Umid mbook, $600
Photo: Dynamism.com Umid's mbook miniaturizes the laptop to the point of near-absurdity: weighing just 0.7 pounds, it's 6" wide, 4" deep, and 0.7" thick. Smaller even than Fujitsu's U-series, it has a 4.8" display, a similarly tiny QWERTY keyboard, and netbookish hardware running Windows XP. Intel's 1.33GHz Atom, 512MB of RAM and a 32GB SSD lurk within. Outside are a microSD card slot and a single micro-USB port. Assuming you can type on it--and don't assume you'll be comfortable doing so until you've actually used it--other flaws mar it. The hinge only lets it fold back about 130 degrees, making it difficult to view and use two-handed. There's no trackpad or nub, just the touchscreen and a stylus: bearing in mind that XP is not very accessible to touch in any case, finessing that high-PPI 1024x600 display is often a chore. An option for 3G internet would have added some magic. Finally, there are better-looking MIDs about to hit stores, including Sharp's NetWalker and Nokia's N900. That said, if you want a real computer that fits in a normal pocket, this is currently the leader of that very small pack. UMID mbook M1 product page [Dynamism] Lenovo IdeaPad S12, $430 With its 12" display and Via Nano chipset, Lenovo's IdeaPad S12 is larger than most netbooks, but doesn't quite qualify as a mainstream machine. The 1280x800 screen resolution offers 200 more lines than most Atom-based miniatures, and the $430 price tag keeps it competitively priced against them. On the other hand, Windows XP and dismal 3D video performance suggest the same old limitations. 1GB of RAM doesn't go far these days, either. In practice, the Via processor and HD display do lift the the S12 out of accessory territory, making it a productive and useful machine with an attractive budget price. And if the choppy full-screen YouTubes and lack of HD video get you down, it can be configured (for another $70) to have Nvidia's ION graphics chipset, which adds graphical grunt and 1080p HDMI output. The design is clean and unfussy, a stout plastic chassis in black or white, with no silly keyboard shenanigans to make typing a pain. BlueTooth, WiFi, a 160GB hard drive, an ExpressCard slot and a 6-cell battery round it out. Lenovo's S12 hits a sweet spot between compact size and practicality. It'll be most interesting to those who've been turned off by the experience of cheap netbooks, but who are still looking for something small. Product Page [Lenovo]

yog writes "An assistant at a grocery store in Clackmannanshire, Scotland, was ordered by the Performing Right Society (PRS) to obtain a performer's license and to pay royalties because she was informally singing popular songs while stocking groceries. The PRS later backed down and apologized. This after the same store had turned off the radio after a warning from the PRS. We have entered an era where music is no longer an art for all to enjoy, but rather a form of private property that must be regulated and taxed like alcohol. "Music to the ears" has become 'dollars in the bank'."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A few years back, the Australian tech research agency CSIRO was awarded a patent with several claims over basic concepts used in WiFi. While we have tremendous problems with the idea of any government agency patenting anything, CSIRO wielded this patent and aggressively fought against a bunch of large tech companies, and it recently convinced them to pay a $200 million settlement. At some point, tech firms realize it's often just cheaper to pay up than to keep fighting a bogus patent claim.

So now it's interesting to see CSIRO claim that it's taking $150 million of the $200 million and investing it in innovation (found via Slashdot). So... basically, it sued the companies that actually innovated (brought working products to market) and got them to cough up money that CSIRO is going to invest in innovation? Why not just leave the original innovators with their money to keep innovating?

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Michael writes in...

The latest Jameco catalog has a picture of a breadline during the Great Depression on the cover. Curious, I opened the front cover and read:

"...We at Jameco understand these times of economic uncertainty. When you struggle, we struggle. At a time of high unemployment, the Jameco management team has taken salary cuts to ensure the continued full employment of the trained professionals you have come to depend on for the past 35 years"...

If, like me, you are impressed by this, you might consider giving them as much business as possible.

Thoughts?

[Editor's Full Disclosure: Jameco is one of MAKE's advertisers]

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An anonymous reader writes 'Multiple sources say Google is preparing to launch Google Audio. According to people familiar with the matter, Google has been securing content from record companies. Is Google about to go head-to-head with Apple's iTunes?'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes 'Multiple sources say Google is preparing to launch Google Audio. According to people familiar with the matter, Google has been securing content from record companies. Is Google about to go head-to-head with Apple's iTunes?'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For the past couple of years, telcos and cable companies have been pushing for metered broadband, usually with the bogus claim that "it's not fair" for a light user to be subsidizing a heavy user. This is a neat little disingenuous trick that implies "light users" would see their bills decrease under metered billing plans. However, the same telcos pushing for metered broadband on connections are the same telcos who have wireless operators as well... and for mobile users, they're doing away with the metered billing option at the lower end, forcing everyone into a much higher priced all-you-can-eat model. Oops. Metered billing has nothing to do with fairness. It's an attempt by telcos to squeeze more money out of customers in a market where they often have little in the way of competitive options. Because, as we've seen, when there's real competition, it's a lot more difficult for providers to offer such plans.

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Its creator calls this a "groundbreaker" zombie, and since he obviously knows way more about Halloween gadgetry than I do, I should probably bow to his usage. But I have to say I feel like "groundbreaker" should be reserved for props that actually, you know, appear to break out of the ground.

Semantics aside, this animatronic zombie is so well done I was tempted, for a moment, to believe it was a fake--like, a person in a costume half-buried in a hole. Found it in this thread at Haunt Forum. Well done, Dr. Morbius!

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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Ten days and counting until Halloween! This week's flashback is another tasty morsel from Make: Halloween Special Edition, which hit newsstands back in August 2006. In this project, Dug North shows us how to make a mechanical automata-infused top hat using a bicycle brake lever, cable, and the monster of your choosing. If you're like us and can't get enough of Halloween, you can still pick up Make: Halloween in the Maker Shed. And be sure to enter our Make: Halloween Contest 2009!

Surprise Top Hat
Spook your friends with this monster-popping trick hat!
By Dug North

I routinely wear a derby hat around town. So when the Halloween season approaches, I feel the need to wear a hat that really makes a statement. I decided to combine my fondness for old-style hats with my love of mechanical automata. The result is this trick top hat. A little monster hides inside the hat and springs out of the top whenever I squeeze a hidden hand lever.

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There have been a few reports lately claiming that file sharing is decreasing. Often, the "explanation" is that more people are switching to streaming services. But that doesn't seem to make much sense, given that the streaming services are still greatly limited and have their own share of problems. And, indeed, it looks like at least some of these reports are being misinterpreted. The most recent story that got a bunch of headlines claiming that P2P was "dying"? Turns out that it's all relative. What the report actually said was that P2P file sharing is growing less fast. So it has a smaller overall marketshare -- but in terms of absolute numbers? It's still growing. However, given the size of the "market," that's not too surprising. It's pretty saturated.

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Mantrid42 writes "Researchers have been able to affect the brains of lab mice using light. Working in a new field called Optogenetics ("optical stimulation plus genetic engineering"), scientists injected lab mice with genes that can stimulate or inhibit neural activity based on the color of the light they're exposed to, and can be targeted to infect only on certain cell types. Additionally, another gene has been added to make neurons glow green when firing, allowing two-way communication between a brain and a machine."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Looking to take a break from tinkering on your latest project this weekend? Here are some fine maker events to check out, from The Maker Events Calendar. Wish your event was on the list? Add it to the calendar!

Coming up this week:

Milton Keynes Science Festival
Central Milton Keynes, United Kingdom
Saturday, Oct 17, 2009 - Sunday, Oct 25, 2009

Sewing Workshop
San Francisco, CA
Friday, Oct 23, 2009, 7pm +

Manchester Science Festival 2009
Manchester, United Kingdom
Sat, Oct 24, 2009 - Sunday, Nov 01, 2009

Make:RDU inaugural meeting
Durham, NC
Saturday, Oct 24, 2009, 2pm +

Twin Cities Maker Halloween Extravaganza
Near Stillwater, MN
Saturday, Oct 24, 2009, 2pm - 6pm

CPUs 0b1100101: Intro to computer processors
Brooklyn, NY
Sunday, Oct 25, 2009, 1pm - 3pm

Hacky Halloween
Pittsburgh, PA
Wednesday, Oct 28, 2009, 8pm - 1:30am

FPGA Workshop
Washington, DC
Wednesday, Oct 28, 2009, 7pm - 10pm

Start planning for:

High Fashion Low Voltage (part 1) Arduino Lilypad
Saint Paul, MN
Saturday, Oct 31, 2009, 9pm - 12pm

Workshop: Circuit Bending
Baltimore, MD
Saturday, Oct 31, 2009, 1pm - 4pm

Mobile Art && Code
Pittsburgh, PA
Friday, Nov 6 to Sunday, Nov 8, 2009, all weekend

World Championship Punkin Chunkin
Sussex County, DE
Friday, Nov 6 to Sunday, Nov 8, 2009, all weekend

PCB Design Using Eagle
Brooklyn, NY
Saturday, Nov 7, 2009, 2pm - 5pm

Intro to Soft Circuits
Pittsburgh, PA
Saturday, Nov 14, 2009, 1pm - 4pm

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Hu2 makes some pretty excellent vinyl wall stickers. This one in particular is pretty crafty. Wrap your wall outlets with some old-school science.

UPS recently asked us to create a series of three videos, where we try to explain some of the stuff we talk about here on Techdirt in under two minutes, using a white board. You can check out the first video here, where I attempt to give a quick visual explanation of the economics of abundance. It's a complicated topic -- so narrowing it down to less than a minute obviously involves simplifying some of the concepts greatly, but it should kick off a fun discussion. There are two more videos that will come out in the next few weeks. And... since we've been having this big disclosure discussion lately, yes, UPS sponsored these videos (as is clearly noted in the video itself), though we had free reign in creating the scripts. As you'll see, I think it's pretty clear that nothing in the videos is any different than what I normally say, and none of it is somehow "influenced" by UPS.

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I love these physical expressions of digital data. Here, a computer trashcan filling up is reflected in an inflating balloon. Empty the trash, and the balloon deflates. Lots of other nice physical computing examples on this page.

Tangible Prototypes Lab

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