DustyShadow writes "In the case In re United States, Judge Mosman ruled that there is no constitutional requirement of notice to the account holder because the Fourth Amendment does not apply to e-mails under the third-party doctrine. 'When a person uses the Internet, the user's actions are no longer in his or her physical home; in fact he or she is not truly acting in private space at all. The user is generally accessing the Internet with a network account and computer storage owned by an ISP like Comcast or NetZero. All materials stored online, whether they are e-mails or remotely stored documents, are physically stored on servers owned by an ISP. When we send an e-mail or instant message from the comfort of our own homes to a friend across town the message travels from our computer to computers owned by a third party, the ISP, before being delivered to the intended recipient. Thus, “private” information is actually being held by third-party private companies.""

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Once again the Bay Bridge is in the news, and this time it seems obvious it's going to be in the news for years to come. So, what to do?

http://baybridgeblog.com/

Start a blog, of course !

A few months back, we wrote about how ad agency Denizen wasn't just claiming to have patented product placement (check it out: patent 6,859,936) but was suing another ad agency, WPP, for violating the patent. Perhaps Denizen's next patents will be on claiming ownership of obvious ideas and suing your competitors, because it's still at it. The latest is that it's suing media agency Mindshare for incorporating the brand Vaseline into the TV show Maneater.

What's really odd here, though, is that Denizen isn't actually asserting that patent in this particular lawsuit -- even though it mentions that it has it. Instead, it's claiming a trade secret violation, noting that it met with Mindshare way back in 2004 and shared this groundbreaking concept of integrating products into show, and worked out an agreement that "Mindshare wouldn't use, publish, disclose, communicate, or divulge information shared on Denizen's proprietary method of product integration." Specifically:

"During the meeting, Denizen disclosed to MindShare certain techniques...that could be used to implement program integrated advertisements, such as, but without limitation, ways to shoot the advertisements, strategies for obtaining Screen Actors Guild contracts, methods to gain access or rights to television program content, and how and when an advertising agency could work with a production house or network."

I'm at a loss to think of how any of that can be "proprietary," but perhaps Denizen has a creative lawyering department in addition to its regular creative advertising/marketing people.

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Vincent Pearase, of Oak Park High School in Winnipeg Canada, writes:

One of our talented Oak Park students, Andrew Vineberg, helped make this hilarious short, Hiding Your Sexual Orientation From Your Parents 101. The kid is a vlogger, too. He does an amazingly erudite, funny vlog under the moniker Volatile Chemical. Check it out! Andrew has asked to show this at our next school assembly.

Yeah, I'm just going to put this whole NSFW thing behind the jump. Read on for an in-depth look at bat blow-jobs, and insights into the evolution of such work, in general.

Figure 3. Copulation duration in Cynopterus sphinx according to whether the female licks the male's penis (Licking) or not (No licking). Means and standard errors are shown. Vignette shows a female performing fellatio, drawn by Mei Wang. (I assure you, I am not making any of this up.)

So, why do you think blow jobs happen?

This is not a trick question.

Most of us would probably go for the, "Hey, that feels nice," theory of oral sex. But researchers Min Tan, Gareth Jones, Guangjian Zhu, et. al., think there may be more to it than simple pleasure. As part of their attempt to prove a practical function for oral sex, the team conducted a study of the fellatio habits of fruit bats. The paper was published October 28 in the journal PLoS ONE. You can read the whole thing online.

The basic idea here is that there might be some benefit to blow jobs (beyond the obvious) and the fact that bats who engage in fellatio have longer sessions of sex than bats who don't could be evidence in favor of that theory. Why? Because it's showing that oral sex is correlated with a change in behavior and, the scientists theorize, there may be reasons why that behavioral change is beneficial to the animals. How beneficial? The team theorizes that oral sex could be doing everything from increasing the chances of sperm fertilizing egg, to killing bacteria on the penis and protecting both parties from sexually transmitted disease. Of course, the only thing proven is that oral sex means longer sex in fruit bats. The team concedes a need for further research...

In conclusion, we have documented fellatio in animals that may have functional significance. Of course, adaptive benefits remain unproven until tested, ideally by experimentation, but our study identifies potential avenues to explore if the null hypothesis of no benefit is to be rejected. We believe that ours is the first large scale observational study of oral sex in non-humans, and we extend the interpretation of such behaviour beyond that of 'pleasure giving' into an evolutionary context.

I'm not sure I buy that a behavior that results in a, erm, pleasurable response, really needs any other reason for existing. Although, it is worth noting that this appears to be the first time that fellatio has been documented as a regular part of adult sex outside of humans. Also, the paper contains some truly EXCELLENT quotes that need to be shared. To wit...

During copulation, the pair appeared to move forwards and backwards uninterruptedly and rhythmically.

When copulation was completed, the male licked his penis for several seconds. This self-licking occurred after all of 20 copulations, but was absent after three instances in which intromission failed to occur. Subsequently, the male often groomed himself or licked the inner surface of the tent, yet seldom flew away. Also, the female groomed herself and typically stayed close to her mate.

It is plausible that this female's behavior increased male arousal [22].

There's also a video. Enjoy.

Thanks to Chris Combs at National Geographic Newsfor alerting me to this study.

Thumbnail photo: Allesok [Flickr]

shreshtha contributes this snippet from MIT's Technology Review: "Martin Rinard, a professor of computer science at MIT, is unabashed about the ultimate goal of his group's research: 'delivering an immortal, invulnerable program.' In work presented this month at the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in Big Sky, MT, his group has developed software that can find and fix certain types of software bugs within a matter of minutes." Interestingly, this software doesn't need access to the source code of the target program.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've got lots of new content in the Make: Science Room, including a whole new Forensics series on the many methods of fingerprinting. Tired of those bitter family disputes over who ate the last ice cream sandwich? Take the wrapper to the lab and find out for sure!

We also have a lab on testing for lead paint and an introduction and series of labs on colloids and suspensions. What in blue-blazes is a colloid, you ask? Why it's a "two-phase heterogeneous mixture made up of a dispersed phase of tiny particles that are distributed evenly within a continuous phase." Think: homogenized milk. It has tiny particles of liquid butterfat (the dispersed part) suspended in water (the continuous part). That's a colloid.

And then there are sols, that's a "solid phase dispersed in a liquid continuous phase. Ordinarily, a sol is a liquid, but it can be converted to a semi-solid gel by adding a gelling agent. In some cases, the solid phase itself may also serve as the gelling agent."

An example of a gelled sol is the notorious Super Napalm B. And guess what? We show you how to make it -- just in time for Halloween. We're kidding. KIDDING! This is serious stuff, a cool experiment, but one with real dangers. This is seriously volatile burning material that's also a seriously sticky gel, a deadly combination (hence the notoriety).

Here's the door to the Science Room >>

In the Maker Shed

And don't forget all of the awesome science-related products now carried in the Maker Shed, including a Latent Finger Printing Kit and a Lead Paint Test Kit (seen above).

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Photographer Julia Baum spent four years photographing suburban tract comes in Sta Clara, CA. The houses were all built in the 1950s to look identical, but over the years, their owners have modified them in a very pleasing, very vernacular way to personalize them.

As I take a second look at these neighborhoods, I've found vast differences in what was once a uniform typology. Over the past 50 years these Houses have transformed from modest white cubes into a vibrant display of personality and present a rebellion against conformity. My work asserts that human individuality cannot be contained. Inevitably it shines through even the most average facade.

Houses (via Kottke)

Rishab sez, "Knowledge Ecology International is organising a petition to President Obama to make the US position in negotiations on the secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement transparent to the public. Boing Boing readers may remember previous posts on ACTA, the 'throw people in jail for sharing' agreement being developed in secret by rich countries who find the semi-public consultations in forums like WIPO tiresome."

Obama's administration has refused to disclose the drafts of ACTA on the grounds of "national security" (yes, really!), but we know from leaks and memos that it includes universal surveillance of the net; mandatory loss of Internet connections without trial for households where one member is accused of violating copyright; and a duty to search your laptop and personal devices at the border for infringing material.

Petition to President Obama, regarding transparency of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (Thanks, Rishab!)

From Samuel Aaron Ward, this motion-activated device lowers a scarythang when it senses motion. It's built around a Microchip PIC16F684 and is based on plans from the October 2009 issue of Nuts & Volts magazine. [Thanks, Vern!]

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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sean_nestor writes with this excerpt from The Register: "Some date the dawn of the net to September 12, 1969, when a team of engineers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) connected the first two machines on the first node of ARPAnet, the US Department of Defense-funded network that eventually morphed into the modern interwebs. But others — including Professor Leonard Kleinrock, who led that engineering team — peg the birthday to October 29, when the first message was sent between the remote nodes. 'That's the day,' Kleinrock tells The Reg, 'the internet uttered its first words.' ...A 50kbps AT&T pipe connected the UCLA and SRI nodes, and the first message sent was the word 'log' — or at least that was the idea. UCLA would send the 'log' and SRI would respond with 'in.' But after UCLA typed the 'l' and the 'o,' the 'g' caused a memory overflow on the SRI IMP. ... 'So the first message was "Lo," as in "Lo and Behold,"' Kleinrock says. 'We couldn't have asked for a better message — and we didn't plan it.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SteelWolf writes in to let us know about a blog post rehashing the idea of setting up a "music tax" to support musicians through a flat fee charged to everyone's ISP account:

Music is important. It is ubiquitous today with good reason: we just can't get enough of it, and its life-enhancing effect is ever-changing and ongoing.

If it had been possible for the past ten years to download nails, most of us would long ago have acquired all the nails we could possibly need, nail factories would have closed down, their workers and bosses found new jobs for themselves, and it would be a dead issue. But music-making is such an important act that millions do it even though they receive nothing for it. They always have done, even back in the heyday of the recorded music industry, when students bankrupted themselves to get it (I know I did) and bands scrambled to play gigs for next to nothing (guilty, again). So in the scheme of things music is at least as worthy of state subsidy than, say, the automobile industry. Music isn't any less precious than it used to be, it's just that its commodity status has eroded: unlike car workers the customary method of getting (some) artists paid is failing.

I am in favour of a flat fee on each internet connection, collected by ISPs, to encourage musicians to keep producing new work.

Now, I've gone into great detail on why a music tax is a terrible idea in the past -- but that was addressing ideas like Jim Griffin's Choruss plan (which, by the way, we're still waiting to find out who the tens of thousands of students who are supposedly already using it are, but we'll leave that aside for now). This idea, from Chris Ovenden, is slightly different. It is not a "download license" or a "download tax" as it's really a fund to pay for the creation of new music:

I would use such a fund to commission new works directly from up-and-coming and established artists. I certainly wouldn't try to monitor all downloads or anything hyper-impossible like that. If the problem of trying to monetize or prevent private copying goes away, so does the threat of monitoring all communications which is being suggested as a "solution" to the "problem" of filesharing... Keep the amount each person has to pay low, and spread the collected funds widely and evenly among as many working artists as is feasible. The more successful acts will most likely have other income streams and won't need a massive top-up; smaller artists will be grateful to have their next recording project funded. And everyone will benefit from an influx of lots of new work (released under CC license or similar).

This is, obviously a bit different than the usual suggestions for a music tax, but that doesn't make it much better. First as is noted in the comments on his post, if you open the door (even slightly) for this to happen in music, then you have to do it in pretty much every other content industry as well: movies will want their own tax, as will software, photography, newspapers, quilt making, painting, blogging and so forth. Where do you draw the line?

Second, this will still leave people who file share open to lawsuits. While he claims that the "threat" goes away, there's no way that the record labels say that they'll allow all past infringement in hopes of getting a few dimes sent its way from some bureaucracy.

Which, of course, brings up the third problem: you still have a bureaucracy, and how does it determine who to distribute the funds to? How is it possibly fair for someone -- rather than the fans themselves -- to determine who gets the money.

And that brings up the biggest point of all: this isn't needed. At all. There are plenty of ways for artists to set up a smart business model that allows fans to support them directly and to fund their future works. Why make it more inefficient by adding unnecessary and market-distorting middlemen? The only situation where this makes some sense is if there weren't ways for artists to go direct to fans with their own models. But there are -- and it's getting easier every day. So, instead of a "tax" give fans a "reason to buy" and it becomes a better situation for everyone involved.

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The rhythm game arms race continues -- if they miniaturize the guitar games, we will miniaturize the guitar game robots!

My friend Joe Bowers writes:

Rock Band has been released on the iPhone, and even though its a lot of fun, I would rather have something play it for me. Preferably a robot! The light sensor sends data to an Arduino, which is waiting for a spike in the data. The Arduino runs the sensor data through some averaging filters, and sets a threshold for on and off. The iPhone touch screen isn't like most PDAs. It uses a capacitive touch screen. I had some conductive foam laying around, its usually used for shipping sensitive electronics. If I used something non conductive, like a plastic pen, the foam would do nothing to the screen. My solution to this was to put thin copper wires into the foam (I also used these wires to attach the foam to the servos)... Add all of the above together into a modified Pelican case, with a lot of hot glue (non glittery) and you have a robot that will gladly beat all your difficult songs, sit back and sip some fine tea.

OhBowz blog

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lbalbalba writes "This morning, Nintendo announced the third upgrade to the DS family, the DSi LL (or DSi XL). It will be released in Japan on November 21, one year after the DSi debuted, for ¥20,000 (approx. $220). The LL's main improvement is the size of its screens, which have been increased from 3.25" to 4.2" with a moderate increase to the size of the chassis. The device also includes a much bigger stylus, which looks to be the size of a ballpoint pen, and battery life has reportedly been increased to five hours at maximum screen brightness."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

lbalbalba writes "This morning, Nintendo announced the third upgrade to the DS family, the DSi LL (or DSi XL), will be released in Japan on November 21, one year after the DSi debuted, for ¥20,000 (approx. $220). The LL's main improvement is the size of its screens, which have been increased from 3.25" to 4.2" with a moderate increase to the size of the chassis. The device also includes a much bigger stylus, which looks to be the size of a ballpoint pen, and battery life has reportedly been increased to five hours at maximum screen brightness."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gaston Dominguez-Letelier says:

Acclaimed novelist/filmmaker/painter Clive Barker is making his return to comic books in October with Clive Barker's Seduth, an especially horrific one-shot being presented with vivid 3-D effects. For Barker, who is joined on the one-shot by the Eisner-nominated art team of Gabriel Rodriguez and Jay Fotos (Locke & Key), along with co-writer Chris Monfette and 3-D art expert Ray Zone.

Who: Clive Barker, Chris Monfette and Ray Zone?
What: Q&A and Signing?
When: Thursday, October 29th, 2009 6PM?
Where: Meltdown Comics/Sunset Blvd. Map

I like where Youtube user DanieleMattei is going with his video Filter control via light blob tracking in Processing. Using OpenCV and Processing (what else!), he rigged up a way to control the parameters of his MIDI synthesizer by waving a flashlight around. It doesn't look too complicated to set up, and might be a fun way to compose something as a group. With a web cam built into your laptop, you could set up a mobile sound station that anyone with a flashlight (or bright cellphone screen) could play.

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Students at Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) developed a Dungeons & Dragons experience for the Microsoft Surface multi-touch table. From ETC:

The objective of the SurfaceScapes project is to create a proof-of-concept for playing tabletop role-playing games on the Microsoft Surface Table. We will be using Dungeons and Dragons as a basis for our prototype, with the option for future expansion to other role-playing games. SurfaceScapes will provide Game Masters and players with a set of features to enhance the combat and role-playing aspects of tabletop games. This will include the ability to interact with the digital environment using real objects such as miniatures and provide automated calculations and visual and audio feedback for actions performed by the player and non-player characters. We are taking traditional tabletop role-playing games to the next level, adding a new layer of immersive and intuitive gaming to the Microsoft Surface Table and assisting both GMs and players in enjoying exciting and engaging adventures.

SurfaceScapes... what lies beneath.

Okay things are getting interesting now that 50 percent of the Twitter users have the lists feature. And now it's getting pretty obvious that there are some serious omissions.

First the fun part.

I started a Twitter Babes list, but got really nervous about it, fearing backlash, so I deleted it and gave it some more thought. It came back to life as my Entourage list, very much gender-neutral, there are men and women on the list.

http://twitter.com/davewiner/entourage

These are people who I admire for their intellect, big heart, creativity, willingness to take a chance. Some I would trust my life with and others I'd trust my heart. They're good people to hang with. I don't agree with them all the time, I even compete with some of them. Some I don't know well but find interesting.

I'd love to say all this on the list, but there's no way to. That's feature #1. You must be able to explain what a list means. Even if it's only a link to a web page where you explain it.

A list is like a Twitter user. In fact some of my placeholder Twitter accounts will now go away. I no longer need the page of NY Times twitterers, or the Top 100, or even the Berkeley folk. So it makes sense that all the annotations, all the metadata that goes with a user, should also go with a list.

People are going to want a way to suggest a new addition to a list, and people with lists are going to want a way to have new additions suggested.

It should also be possible to include a list within another list. My friend Cori has a list of Bay Area people. She should be able to include my list of Berkeleyites, since Berkeley is in the Bay Area (of course). That way when I discover someone in Berkeley she automatically gets updated with that person.

All the ideas that we had for OPML directories apply to Twitter lists.

In fact there should be a way to export a list as OPML, and I think Twitter ought to do this, as a way to create systems that bridge in and out of Twitter hierarchies dynamically. Very powerful stuff. If they won't do it, I'm going to suggest that Matt get on top of this asap.

I'm doing so much stuff with WordPress these days, I'm starting to see it a bit as a platform the same way I view Twitter. I wonder if that's why Matt embraced rssCloud so quickly? Heh.

Anyway I have projects I'd like to try, but I'm really busy and probably won't get to them soon enough. If I were viewing lists as an entrepreneurial opportunity, the first place I'd explore is doing a list browser and editor, with a Suggest-A-User feature. If you want to start one of these, I'd be interested in participating, for equity.

BTW, lists are obvious gold for search engines.

A bunch of folks have been pointing to a recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review, discussing the speed and style with which some "mainstream" media sources and some "new media" sources corrected a particular story. Apparently a newspaper in Arizona misreported some comments by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and the misquote was picked up by numerous blogs and online news sites. However, once it became clear what had happened, the new media sites were much faster to issue corrections, while making it clear what was corrected (often leaving the original up and noting the correction). The mainstream paper -- who originated the story -- was much slower about fixing things, and when it did, simply deleted the mistaken part at first, before later putting up a vague note about the change.

To some extent, I believe this shows the different mindsets of some of these newer publications. I've talked in the past about how I view this blog as a conversation, not a reporting venue. And, as such, I don't delete stuff, even when it turns out that I made a mistake. Instead, I'll do a strikethrough or cross out, along with an update explaining what happened. I don't think it's right to simply "disappear" the original -- though I've had some traditional journalists (and one Hollywood lawyer) act as if I had done something horrible in using a strikethrough on mistaken content.

And yet, personally, I've found that, while I hate it when a story is wrong, the fact that I correct such stories fully and openly has built up greater trust. The few times we've needed to correct such a story, the response has almost always been universally positive rather than negative. As mentioned above, it's like the difference between a conversation and old-school reporting. Old school reporting sought to be "the source of record." A conversation is more about learning as you go. In a conversation, I might say something -- and the person/people I'm talking to may correct me, and from that we all learn. But for traditional reporters, such an error is seen as a huge black mark that requires rewriting history and "disappearing" the mistake -- rather than leaving it there, with a clear update, so that everyone can learn.

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Remember the La-Z-Boy DWI story Pesco blogged earlier this week? A local paper reports that the lounger is headed for eBay. See also this update at Smoking Gun on the case of Dennis LeRoy Anderson, who drank "eight or nine beers" before driving the motorized lounger into the street and smashing it into a parked car. Snip:

Anderson's customized vehicle, seen in the police evidence photos on the following pages, is powered by an eight horsepower Kohler lawnmower engine, and has a stereo, headlights, a built-in cup holder, and a "Hell Yeah It's Fast" bumper sticker. The ride, however, does not have a seat belt.

Proctor Police Chief Walter Wobig described Anderson as a "super-nice guy." The cops say they'll soon put the man's cherished chair up for sale on eBay, under state forfeiture laws (auctioning it off was one option, the other was using it for official police business, LOL). If anyone can find the eBay listing once it goes live, I'd sure love to see it -- and, hey, maybe bid on it.

Related articles: Proctor Journal, BBC, Duluth News Tribune, Wired.

Ken Pilot's "Sparky" is a haunted house prop of a guy getting fried in an electric chair. It would scare the wits out of my kids.

Electrocution prop par excellence

Send DNA 11 a fingerprint and get it blown up into a piece of frameable art. See also DNA Portraits, which for some reason seems creepier.

In Wired this month, a story about Futurama television writer Patric M. Verrone's very geeky hobby: sculpting plastic figurines of American presidents, and selling them on eBay. After reading the article, I moseyed over to Mr. Verrone's website, and enjoyed this tiny likeness of Dr. Martin Luther King (Verrone sculpts other historic persons, too, not just presidents). Only $30!

Sculptor in Chief: Futurama Writer Saves Line of Tiny Presidents [ Wired, via Chris Baker ]

AdmiralXyz writes "I'm a university student, and I like to take notes on my (non-tablet) computer whenever possible, so it's easier to sort, categorize, and search through them later. Trouble is, I'm going into higher and higher math classes, and typing "f_X(x) = integral(-infinity, infinity, f(x,y) dy)" just isn't cutting it anymore: I need a way to get real-looking equations into my notes. I'm not particular about the details, the only requirement is that I need to keep up with the lecture, so it has to be fast, fast, fast. Straight LaTeX is way too slow, and Microsoft's Equation Editor isn't even worth mentioning. The platform is not a concern (I'm on a MacBook Pro and can run either Windows or Ubuntu in a virtual box if need be), but the less of a hit to battery life, the better. I've looked at several dedicated equation editing programs, but none of them, or their reviews, make any mention of speed. I've even thought about investing in a low-end Wacom tablet (does anyone know if there are ultra-cheap graphics tablets designed for non-artists?), but I figured I'd see if anyone at Slashdot has a better solution."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Paul Devereux's book "The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia" presents the fascinating story of psychedelic use before the Hoffman/Leary era that we're all familiar with. Devereux travels way back, exploring shamanism, 'shrooms in rock art, the oracle at Delphi, the pre-Incan construction of the Chavín de Huántar temple, etc. In honor of Halloween, the Daily Grail's Greg Taylor, who republished The Long Trip last year, presents an excerpt from the book about possible links between medieval witches and hallucinogenic substances. Special bonus broomstick trivia is after the jump. From The Long Trip:

A Belgian witch called Claire Goessen confessed in 1603 that she had flown to sabbats several times on a staff smeared with an unguent. In northern France in 1460, five women confessed to receiving a salve from the Devil himself, which they rubbed on their hands and on a small wooden rod they placed between their legs and flew upon "above good towns and woods and waters." Swedish witches in 1669 rode "over churches and high walls" on a beast given to them by the Devil who also issued them with a horn containing a salve with which they anointed themselves. Members of Somerset covens admitted to smearing their foreheads and wrists with a greenish ointment "which smells raw" before their meetings...

...Folklorist Will-Erich Peuckert of Göttingen, for example, mixed an ointment made up of belladonna, henbane and Datura from a seventeenth-century formula and rubbed it on his forehead and armpits, bidding his colleagues to do likewise. They all fell into a twenty-four sleep. "We had wild dreams. Faces danced before my eyes which were at first terrible. Then I suddenly had the sensation of flying for miles through the air. The flight was repeatedly interrupted by great falls. Finally, in the last phase, an image of an orgiastic feast with grotesque sensual excess," Peuckert reported. Harner emphasises the importance of the greased broomstick or similar flying implement, which he suggests served as "an applicator for the atropine-containing plant to the sensitive vaginal membranes as well as providing the suggestion of riding on a steed, a typical illusion of the witches' ride to the Sabbat."

"A characteristic feature of solanaceae psychosis is furthermore that the intoxicated person imagines himself to have been changed into some animal, and the hallucinosis is completed by the sensation of the growing of feathers and hair," Erich Hesse claimed in 1946. In 1658, Giovanni Battista Porta informed that a potion made from henbane, mandrake, thorn apple and belladonna would make a person "believe he was changed into a Bird or Beast." He might "believe himself turned into a Goose, and would eat Grass, and beat the Ground with his Teeth, like a Goose: now and then sing, and endeavor to clap his Wings." Animal transformation is a primary aspect of the hallucinogenic experience, whether it is an American Indian shaman in the Amazon turning into a jaguar, or a Western subject in a psychological experiment.

Witches' Brews (Daily Grail)

The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia (Amazon)

About the image I blogged earlier this week, shot by Monica Szczupider who was a volunteer at the chimp rescue center where the scene took place. If the story of "Dorothy," the deceased chimp in the photo, doesn't break your heart -- man, you don't have one. Szczupider recalls:

Her presence, and loss, was palpable, and resonated throughout the group. The management at Sanaga-Yong opted to let Dorothy's chimpanzee family witness her burial, so that perhaps they would understand, in their own capacity, that Dorothy would not return. Some chimps displayed aggression while others barked in frustration. But perhaps the most stunning reaction was a recurring, almost tangible silence. If one knows chimpanzees, then one knows that [they] are not [usually] silent creatures."

The Story Behind Our Photo of Grieving Chimps (via Laughing Squid)

Boing Boing guestblogger Connie Choe is a health and culture writer by day and a professional kimchimonger by night.

A friend of mine snapped this photo in New Zealand a few weeks ago. It's exactly what it appears to be: children in giant hamster balls on a pool of water. It may not be full-on ZORBing, but it sure beats the ball pit Chuck E. Cheese.

From Instructables user Eric Kingston comes this Arduino-controlled Silly String shooting pumpkin. It's motion-activated, makes a Goblin-esque cackling noise, and Tweets a report each time it squirts another victim. Eric also wins a thousand internet video style points for making his whole point in five seconds with no talking!

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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DARPA is holding a competition to find ten large weather balloons. Winner gets $40,000!

To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA has announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the role the Internet and social networking plays in the timely communication, wide area team-building and urgent mobilization required to solve broad scope, time-critical problems. The challenge is to be the first to submit the locations of ten moored, 8 foot, red weather balloons located at ten fixed locations in the continental United States. Balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roadways.

The first person to identify the location of all the balloons will win a $40,000 cash prize.  The balloons will be positioned on December 5, 2009.

I predict Pascal to be the winner.

More information and rules here

olahau writes "Two weeks ago, improvements to the previously reported attack on WPA/TKIP, were presented at the NorSec Conference in Oslo, Norway. In their paper coined 'An Improved Attack on TKIP,' Finn Michael Halvorsen and Olav Haugen describes the improvements, which enables an attacker to inject larger maliciously crafted packets into a WPA/TKIP protected network, thus opening the probabilities for new and more sophisticated attacks against the well established wireless security protocol."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You can't say the entertainment industry isn't persistent in their attempts to shut down The Pirate Bay (though, a portion of the site's popularity can be attributed to their neverending campaign against the site). While the industry won its lawsuit against four of The Pirate Bay's founders earlier this year, the ongoing appeals process is taking too long for the industry -- and the court had not issued an injunction against the site, so it's still running (though, plenty of users have since bailed out due to concern about the failed attempt to sell the site). Still, the entertainment industry has been trying a bunch of different ways to shut down the site in the meantime. Initially it got an ISP serving the site to stop, which caused a brief downtime. However, the latest, as pointed out by brokep, is that the industry appears to have convinced the court to bar two of the defendants -- Gottfried Svartholm-Warg and Fredrik Neij -- from doing any work on the site (Google translation from the original, so would appreciate any detail corrections if the translation isn't accurate).

It's difficult to see what this accomplishes. Brokep points out that the two aren't involved with the site in the first place, and don't live in Sweden any more as well, so it's not clear what this does. On top of that, even if they were involved, it's not like others wouldn't quickly take their place anyway. The whole crusade continues to be a massive waste of time and resources by the entertainment industry for no clear gain.

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Toronto-based folk singer Taylor Mitchell died after coyotes pounced on her during a solo hike in Cape Breton national park on Monday. She was hospitalized with injuries from multiple bites, and died in critical care yesterday. Ms. Mitchell was 19 years old. More: LAT, BBC. Artist pages: Facebook, and MySpace.

As part of the summer-long Fame Festival in Italy that culminated in a final show last month, artists Blu and David Ellis spent a long week collaborating to create this amazing animation clip, made by filming morphing hand-painted murals. The video loops twice, in case you are beyond astounded the first time around.

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(Two Ravines. 1934. Watercolor on paper.)

Doug Harvey of the LA Weekly writes about a Charles Burchfield exhibit at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles called Heat Waves in a Swamp.

Between 1916 and 1918 he produced hundreds of watercolors -- half his lifelong output -- each one teeming with symbolic portent, decorative inventiveness and a dreamlike animism where the ominously anthropomorphic or blankly inert architecture of human civilization appears to be in a cosmic struggle with the wildly vibrating energies of the natural world. The Insect Chorus (1917), for example, affords only a background glimpse of the stylized gables of a house almost entirely engulfed in arabesque clouds of foliage, which, in turn, mutate indiscernibly into layered graphic patterns representing the songs of crickets, cicadas and katydids.

American Dreaming: Charles Burchfield

The UC Berkeley Biomimetics Lab has created DASH (Dynamic Autonomous Sprawled Hexapod), a cockroach-inspired robot made from laser-cut cardboard laminated with some polymer. It runs fast and can withstand falls of 28 meters, after which it just keeps on about its business.

From MAKE magazine:

In MAKE, Volume 19: Robots, Rovers, and Drones, learn how to make a model plane with an autopilot and a built-in robot brain. We'll also show you how to make a comfortable chair and footstool out of a single sheet of plywood, a bicyclist's vest that shows how fast you're going, and projects that introduce you to servomotors. All this, and lots more, in MAKE, Volume 19! Subscribe here, or buy the issue in the Maker Shed.

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$550, silver and Swarovski crystal, by Alexander McQueen. (Spotted: @reversecowpie)

binarybum writes "Often forgotten, but the independent open source spirit lives strong in the once Mozilla project — now SeaMonkey. Version 2.0 is finally out and rivals Firefox with similar features but integrated email with a small footprint." The Register has a short piece on the 2.0 release, which mentions that SeaMonkey is now based on Firefox 3.5.4. Stephen Shankland lists some of the features in a handy bullet-point style, too. I'm using the new release right now; it's crashed once — but only once — in several hours of use.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

All images by Koichi Mitsui Koichi Mitsui is a professional photographer in Japan. When he's not on the job shooting for magazines and ads, he wanders around Tokyo taking pictures with his iPhone 3GS. "The iPhone has a single-focus lens with no zoom, and this simplicity keeps me devoted to only composition and the perfect photo opp," Mitsui says. Keep reading for a selection of his work with tips on how you can take amazing photos with your iPhone, too.

I like to take photos of casual, unintentional scenes. That, or snapshots with an element of surprise. Always be on the lookout for change, whether that's lighting, or the movement of people, or just a slight difference in something ordinary.

Walk a lot. The iPhone camera has a fixed focal length. Whether you enliven or kill this feature is up to your footwork. If you need a close up, get real close. If you need distance, you exaggerate that distance. You use your feet to find angles. It's also important to venture far away from your comfort zone to find good subjects to shoot.

Don't just default to vertical shots; take some horizontal ones too. Change the composition little by little by finger-tapping to change the focal point.

Take advantage of your favorite apps. New iPhone apps are being released all the time, but find the ones that fit your taste and learn to create pictures that look just the way you imagine. I snapped this photo of my friends picnicking at the Tama River right when the setting sun and the light from their lantern were in perfect balance, also using Photo fx and CameraKit.

You can see more of his work on his web site, Sasurau.

The guys at Videogum found what may be the absolute most awesome "pumpkin dance" YouTube video of all time. This splendid little number, choreographed to "Ghostbusters," comes to the internets courtesy of a local news channel in Omaha, Nebraska. (via Gabe)

There have been an increasing number of questions raised about both the length of copyright and the fact that it passes on to heirs after the original creator passes on. The original purpose of copyright had nothing to do with creating a welfare system for the children of content creators, no matter how much some content creators would like it to work that way. Economist Greg Mankiw points out a "factoid" that drives home the oddity that comes from such long copyrights:

Royalties from The Great Gatsby totaled only $8,397 during Fitzgerald's lifetime. Today Gatsby is read in nearly every high school and college and regularly produces $500,000 a year in [F. Scott Fitzgerald's daughter] Scottie's trust for her children.

The article this comes from goes into great detail into F. Scott Fitzgelald's earnings over his lifetime, and what's striking is that with a different sort of copyright system in place, he barely seems to rely on copyright royalties at all to make money. Instead -- like most jobs -- he recognizes he needs to keep producing new works to earn money, selling stories to various publications, along with working for Hollywood studios in addition to his novels. How much things have changed.

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Mr Fixit Rick built a neat-looking "Spooky Tesla Spirit Radio" that could be used to provide background industrial noises for a Lynch movie. He shows you how to build your own at Instructables.

Spooky Tesla Spirit Radio

Interactive designer Lauren McCarthy used Arduino to make a wooly torture device hat that she calls the Happiness Hat — it has sensors that detect when you're smiling — when you're not smiling, it sticks a metal spike into your head. Here's a short description from her web site:

An enclosed bend sensor attaches to the cheek and measures smile size, a servo motor moves a metal spike into the head inversely proportional to the degree of smile. Through repeated use of this conditioning device you can train your brain to smile all the time.

Happiness Hat web page via Core77

BB reader Felix Jung says, "My coworker Jane took this photo of a mini-pumpkin tribute to a little boy and a little balloon that had us glued to our TV and computer screens. It was entered in to a contest taking place at her husband's office, and I'm betting it wins, hands down."

LOL. The online yoga instruction site YogaToday.com is offering a Star Wars-themed yoga session this week. The video promises to illustrate the "galactic connection" between asanas and Star Wars. No costumes, alas, but I do believe those are Leia-buns on the head of yoga instructor "Princess Neesha Zollinger," at left. (thanks, Paul Sixta)

It's been a long time since an operating system had a feature compelling enough for me to justify an upgrade. But last night I thought of one.

The web is totally getting reverse-chronologic and imho that's a good thing. It's becoming easy to find the new stuff everywhere. Everywhere but on my local area network, that is.

When something new arrives, a podcast or an enclosure, or I download a new app or a song or TV show, on any of my machines, I'd like it to roll up into a list that I can scroll through, and have a blog-like calendar structure that I can search.

That's all -- nothing more.

Also a follow-up to the post about the battery needs of my MacBook vs the Asus Eee PC. Jim Roepcke thinks it's somehow my fault that the MacBook either has a weaker battery or uses more juice. And that they decided it would be better if I couldn't buy a spare battery to travel with. I have no idea which it is and I don't care. I'm a user. He thinks it's the OPML Editor that's responsible for the disparity. But that's just plain wrong. I run exactly the same software on both the Mac and the Asus. Further, if you look at the performance monitor, Firefox is the hog, not the OPML Editor. It's generally using five or ten times the CPU that OPML is.

Another clue is that at the conference, the last row of the auditorium, the one with the power strips, was filled with Mac users. I didn't see a single netbook user back there. That's unscientific of course, but it was pretty shocking nonetheless. Traveling Mac users are drawn to power outlets much more than netbook users are. It's just a fact.

I think I'm going to do an A-B test. Put an Asus next to a MacBook, kill all the apps, unplug both, and see how long it is before each of them dies. That ought to put it to rest. (And don't forget that while the Mac is a nicer computer with a bigger screen and keyboard, it's also heavier and costs five times as much as the Asus. And it runs hotter too, your lap gets scorched using the Mac.)

Update: I see in his follow-up comment he thinks I'm sniping at Apple. That's nuts. I spent $1700 on the MacBook so I could snipe at Apple? I actually bought it because I hoped to take it on trips like the one I took to LA this week. It didn't work very well. You want I should say it did?

Barence writes "PC Pro has done a thorough test of the software bundled by nine of the leading laptop manufacturers to find out who installs the most crapware on their PCs. Manufacturers such as Acer add as much as two minutes to their boot times by stuffing their machines full of bundled software, with own-brand proprietary software being the worst offender. HP's bundled apps, meanwhile, have a memory footprint of more than 1GB. PC Pro has also reviewed three pieces of software which promise to remove rubbish from your PC — with mixed results."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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!

George writes in:

I've been wanting to make a prank project, that I can leave somewhere to play back a recorded sound and flash some lights. I'll use LEDs for the lights, but don't know how to play back sound. Do you have any suggestions?

Aha, this sounds like it could be a fun project. I'm going to assume you are using a microcontroller to monitor an input (sound? light? time? vibration?), and then initiate a sequenced event. It's a bit late for Halloween, but this would be a good way to make lawn props that react when someone comes near your house.

Because playing back sound takes a reasonable amount of memory and speed, it's not something that can be done easily with a standard microcontroller. Instead, the best way to handle this would be to hook up another device, that can be started by the micro and then do the heavy lifting of actually playing back a sound. At least three possibilities come to mind: using a Wave Shield, hacking an MP3 player, or hacking a cheap toy with a sound recorder.

If you are using an Arduino, the Wave Shield might be an ideal solution to your problem. It is an expansion module that allows you to play sounds off of an SD card, and there is a nice library to control it as well. It runs in at about $22 bucks, which seems pretty reasonable for what you get.

If you aren't using an Arduino, or already have an old MP3 player and don't want to spend the bucks on a project you will only use once, then you can try to use that. The best way to do this is probably to wire an optocoupler to the play button on the MP3 player, and then trigger that with your microcontroller. If you have more than one sound track that you want to trigger, you could also wire up the next button, but that might get tricky. The bonus for going this way is that you could recycle some electronics junk that would otherwise go to the scrap heap.

Either of the two above solutions are great if you are only thinking of making one or two of the devices, but what if you want to make a bunch of them? In that case, it might be more economical to try hacking a cheap toy, such as this one. Somehow these are still available, and are less than $2 in quantity. The sound quality probably won't be anywhere as good, but hey, the're cheap! If you are in a rush, you could also try hacking a voice recording card that you can pick up at a local store. Good luck!

In the Maker Shed:

Arduino WaveShield Kit

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John Gallone says: "Wanted to keep you informed as to what's afoot in the British Columbia mysterious foot finds. A new appendage was found in Richmond, near Vancouver B.C.,Tuesday October 20, this brings to seven the number of 'Mystery Feet' found so far."

The first severed foot, discovered in August 2007, was associated with a deceased man whose name police withheld at the request of his family.

A man's right foot found on Gabriola Island in August 2007 remains unidentified.

Two feet found on Valdez and Westham islands in July 2008 belonged to the same man.

And two feet found in Richmond in December 2008 belonged to the same woman.

Foot found on Richmond beach is seventh foot found on B.C. coast

In a new exhibit opening in just a few weeks, conceptual artist Jonathon Keats will propose an antimatter-based mirror economy designed to boom as the regular-ole economy continues to tank.

"Economic equilibrium is upset by our unbalanced pursuit of material wealth," says the artist. "My plan is to offset materialism with modern science, by exploiting the economic potential of antimatter, which is the physical opposite of anything made with atoms, from luxury condos to private jets."

More:

The bank will serve as a hub for antimatter transactions worldwide, eventually financing the building of antimatter infrastructure and providing the public with a full range of investment opportunities. "But our first order of business will be printing money," says Mr. Keats. "Cash is the foundation of any economy, and an anti-economy is no exception."

Issued in three convenient denominations, ranging from 10,000 positrons to 1,000,000 positrons, and initially trading at an exchange rate of $10 to $1,000, the anti-money will be backed by antimatter stored in the bank's vault. Because matter and antimatter annihilate each other on contact, antimatter positrons will be continuously produced on location by decay of the radioactive isotope potassium-40.

The First Bank of Antimatter show opens Nov. 12 at Modernism, Inc. gallery in San Francisco.
Press release (PDF)
Jonathon Keats (Wikipedia)

(thanks, Mark Robinson!)

Kodak has reported that its business division that includes digital cameras suffered a 49% fall in sales (compared to the same period last year) in the third quarter of 2009. "Continued declines in consumer spending have had significant impacts in the company's digital camera and digital picture frame businesses," it said. The sales drop has primarily been due to a decline of approximately $157 million in intellectual property royalty revenues, the company said.

It's new! It's different! Or is it? New Scientist has put together an outline tracing the origins of the H1N1 influenza virus. Surprise: The first date is 1889, the year that jockeying between H1 and H2 variants of flu set the stage for the 1918 influenza pandemic. The virus involved in that was an distant relative of today's H1N1.

The Timeline does a great job of explaining how viruses evolve, how the interaction of humans and viruses in the past influences their "relationship" today, and exactly why older people have an immunity to the 2009 H1N1 swine flu that younger people lack. Some other interesting bits:

1931

Swine flu is first isolated from a pig in Iowa.

1977

An H1N1 virus appears in north-east China and starts circulating in humans. It causes seasonal flu in every subsequent year. No one knows where it came from, though it looks like an H1N1 that circulated in the Soviet Union in 1950 and some suspect it escaped in a laboratory accident.

The virus causes a mild flu pandemic, which mainly affects people born after H1N1 flu disappeared in 1957. However, the real surprise is that it does not displace the previous, and more virulent, seasonal flu, H3N2. Instead, it continues circulating alongside it.

The antibodies people produce after being infected by this new seasonal H1N1 do not protect against 2009 H1N1. However, infections also trigger another reaction called cell-mediated immunity, in which certain white blood cells target and destroy infected cells. Tests of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic vaccine show that, unlike antibodies, cell-mediated immunity to seasonal H1N1 may help protect against the pandemic virus. This does not prevent disease altogether, but can reduce its severity

1998

The predecessor of the 2009 H1N1 swine flu virus emerges in the US. It is a hybrid of human, bird and swine flu viruses, and by 1999 it is the dominant flu strain in US pigs.

Thanks to Steve Silberman for pointing me to this!

Nikon has introduced the 'Learn & Explore' app for Apple's iPhone in collaboration with the 'interactive agency' Molecular. Currently available only to US customers, the app gives photo enthusiasts access to images, video lectures and audio commentary from the company's website and enables them to read and bookmark articles from the Nikon World magazine. It is available for download from the Apple App Store.

Writer Jeroen van Bergeijk lives in The Netherlands but is spending some time in Australia. He's posting his photos and observations on his blog. Today he came across a bike retrofitted with a small one-banger engine.

Saw this awesome - or I should say grouse - looking bicycle today when I went to Port Adelaide to pick up my stuff coming in from Rotterdam. It's a Dunlop Bushranger mountain bike with a small, one cylinder engine fitted on to it. The great thing is that all the original bicycle gears still work. I suppose the owner starts the engine when going uphill or something.

It has sprockets on both sides of the wheel. On the right side the original bicycle gears, on the left side a sprocket driven by the engine.

Looks like Mad Max's Bicycle

From photographer Kevin Van Aelst. [via Boing Boing]

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Over at Dangerous Minds, my pal Tara McGinley uncovered the insane allure of The Maskatorium, one person's incredible collection of weird masks from around the world. You can view EYE-talian's collection on Flickr. Here's what EYE-talian says about where it started:

"I've been collecting masks since 1989 when I first purchased a mask in Cancun, Mexico. I was intrigued by the weird hallucinogenic Mexican masks because they looked similar to the oddball sketches I was doing at the time.

On subsequent visits I purchased additional masks, usually buying the most unusual masks I could find and/or what my budget and baggage limits would allow. In the meantime, I stumbled upon some very cool German paper mache, and starched buckram Halloween masks at antique shows around Cincinnati and picked those up as well. I never had any intention of amassing a formal "collection" but one thing lead to another and then.... Holy Shit... Ebay!

The Maskatorium

Serenissima writes "Bad drivers may in part have their genes to blame, suggests a new study by UC Irvine neuroscientists.People with a particular gene variant performed more than 20 percent worse on a driving test than people without it — and a follow-up test a few days later yielded similar results. About 30 percent of Americans have the variant. 'These people make more errors from the get-go, and they forget more of what they learned after time away,' said Dr. Steven Cramer, neurology associate professor and senior author of the study published recently in the journal Cerebral Cortex."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I know that my grammar is not ideal, though I really do strive to get the basics right. There are times, however, when I feel that the strict "rules" that are put forth by grammar go too far. If the text makes the point in a way that people can understand, what is the problem? On top of that, there's the utter snobbishness with which some (no, not all!) grammar aficionados put down anyone who makes a silly mistake. I have no problem with someone letting me know about a typo or a grammatical problem in a friendly and useful manner -- but all too often the message is delivered in the tone suggesting that making such an elementary grammatical error suggests that I obviously never made it out of the second grade. So I'm glad to see an English professor taking on the grammar nazis.

Salon is running a review of a new book by English professor Jack Lynch, called The Lexicographer's Dilemma, which argues that grammar nazis should chill out. Grammar rules are mostly to make people feel elite, not to make them any clearer, according to the book. Again, I have no problem with basic grammar rules for the sake of clarity, but focusing too much on the rules over the clarity is a mistake, and it's nice to see at least some "experts" agreeing.

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Halloween is so two days from now. Which might as well be last week on the internet. I'm moving on to Xmas. From Berlin artist Oliver Fabel. [via Neatorama]

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If America's law students continue to be this amusing, there may be hope yet for the future of America's lawyers. From Craigslist:

You & Me Doing It v. You & Me Not Doing It (2009)
Using that IRAC method we've been learning about, a compelling brief on why we should hump each other's brains out.

Facts, Issue, Rule, Analysis, and Conclusions follow.

Thanks to Sarahpi, one of my favorite lawyers-in-training!

I got a kick out of this t-shirt design promoting RU Sirius's h+ Magazine. Of course, it can't compare to my Mondo 2000 "How fast are you? How dense?" t-shirt from the early 1990s, but that one seems to have, er, mysteriously shrunk. h+ Magazine t-shirt

Two years ago, I posted about graphic designer Jon Heilman's exquisite replica of the time portals map from Terry Gilliam's 1981 film Time Bandits. Now, Heilman has recreated the fantastic artwork emblazoned on Professor Marvel's wagon in Wizard of Oz. They're printed on canvas and available in a variety of sizes, starting at $36. I have one of Heilman's Time Bandits maps and the quality is impeccable, so I'm sure these are well worth the money too.
Professor Marvel Banner

Ponca City, We love you writes "The NY Times reports that after a journey of 7.3 billion light-years, a race between gamma rays ranging from 31 billion electron volts to 10,000 electron volts, a factor of more than a million, in a burst from an exploding star, have arrived within nine-tenths of a second of each other. A detector on NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope confirmed Einstein’s proclamation in his 1905 theory of relativity that the speed of light is constant and independent of its color, energy, direction or how you yourself are moving. Some theorists had suggested that space on very small scales has a granular structure that would speed some light waves faster than others — in short, that relativity could break down on the smallest scales. Until now such quantum gravity theories have been untestable because ordinarily you would have to see details as small as the so-called Planck length, which is vastly smaller than an atom — to test these theories in order to discern the bumpiness of space."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dyson has clearly won the Death Star contract: its latest all-white upright vac looks made to match the battle attire of stormtroopers. Though unable to hit the side of a bus with a blaster, they might finally get a fighting chance against kitty litter spills.

For the rest of us, the Dyson DC25 Blueprint LE is set apart by its relatively light weigh-in, industrial styling, and the manoeverability created by the ball. Like all of its kin, it's a object of consumed art, easy to love and laden with an elaborate set of accessories and tools. Also available is the DC24 Blueprint, which is only 12lb but has half the suck.

Performance was excellent: it handled all the solid spills we set it against, collecting them without fuss. Wisps of dog hair spun like cotton candy in the translucent bin. The ball makes a big difference to manoeverability, but there is an apparent trade-off: it doesn't have the same forward pull that everyday vacs do. It's also loud, especially when the motorized brushes are turned on, and could do with a retractable cable stash.

Both models are available at Target, priced at $430 for the DC24 and $530 for the DC25 (the big one is also offered at Dyson's online store). In each case, that's $30 more expensive than the standard edition.

It's not really worth the premium (which goes up to $50 if you buy a standard DC24 or DC25 from Amazon), but it sure is pretty. Bottom line: get a Dyson ball model if you don't like the angular, hamfisted movements that a normal vac encourages, or if you want to get the house cleaned in record time without cutting corners--and think that the 5-year warranty justifies a higher price tag.

Newsweek.com has a gallery of images that shows the evolution of contraception (or what we believed to be contraception at the time), from olive oil — recommended by Aristotle in the 4th century BC — to the hormone-releasing options that we can get at the gyno today. The History of Birth Control

You are lost in a maze of twisty house patches, all alike.

Akai's Miniak virtual analog synth is a blast, especially its combo of old-school vocoder, 37-key semi-weighted velocity-sensitive keyboard, and a goose-necked microphone. Capable and hefty, it could fit into a sports bag despite a full complement of features: 8 voices with three oscillators, hundreds of preset patches, and a (laborious) built-in sequencer and arpeggiator. I'll admit right now I fiddled with the editor for 10 minutes, broke down in frustration at the one-line display, then went to sit in a corner, sobbing and hugging Reason 4. Three 1/4" inputs slurp up external audio sources, to which the Miniak's filters and effects can also be applied.

It's made in partnership with Alesis, whose mic-less and cheaper Micron is similar stuff. Note that there's no USB, meaning you'll need to get busy with MIDI hardware (cheap, good) if you want to hook it up to a computer. At $500, it's also a bit pricey for those just wanting an occasional bang on the ivory. If you are a one-man digital band, however, the only conceivable improvement would be ... a keytar edition.

More info [Akai] — Product Page [Amazon]

Seagate's FreeAgent Theater+ is perfect for the media library you already own. Eschewing elaborate home theater features, baked-in storage or the need for a LAN, you just plug a hard drive or thumbdrive full of stuff into it and hit play. 1080p output over HDMI fixes the flaws of the last model, and an ethernet port's now included if you already have your media networked. Codecs supported include MPEG4 (Divx/xVid), WMV9 and raw DVD rips. It's $150, or $300 with a 500GB drive that slides into its dock.

Product Page [Seagate]

Casio's Exilim EX-FC100 puts fancy features from the high-end EX-F1 into a pocket-friendly format.

Able to record 1000 fps at 224x64, 420 fps at 224x168 and 210 fps at 480x360, it slows time at low resoltuion and with much noise in dim light. The 720p video is fantastic, however, and short 30fps bursts at even higher resolutions make it easy to capture the moment.

The best thing is pricing, now it's been out a few months: at $250, it's hard to find a better deal that covers so many bases. Cherry on top: 5x optical zoom.

Casio High-Speed Exilim EX-FC100[Amazon link]

Ableplanet's Clear Harmony LINX audio headphones claim top-shelf noise reduction at an affordable price: $100. They worked great with the dull ambient hum of home, but not so much so out in the streets. Audio quality is decent, but if you're going to spend this much, why not get something even better?

Product Page [Ableplanet]

Lessons 1 and 2 by Ben Turnbull: weapons whittled into wooden desktops.

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In the past couple of days I've received emails from two separate people who found that public domain material they put on YouTube was taken down to companies claiming ownership of the work. In both cases, the stories seem pretty ridiculous, and for all the complaining that copyright holders do about how awful it is that they need to "police" their own content on YouTube, it seems like those who are getting hurt are people who are putting up public domain material and getting shut down -- often with little recourse.

The first story comes to us from two self-described "hippies," Haint and Littia, who had put up a video showing some of Haint's works, and used as background music a song by a group called the Psalters, who put their entire album into the public domain so that anyone could do what they wanted with it -- such as using it for background music in a video. However, music licensing company Rumblefish, supposedly uploaded its catalog into YouTube's content ID system -- and apparently (and I'm still trying to figure out how, because no one seems to have a good explanation), the Psalters song is somehow in Rumblefish's catalog. Hence, YouTube took down the video. Apparently others have also been finding their perfectly legal and licensed content taken down thanks to Rumblefish as well, and were told that they needed to call and get Rumblefish's permission to get the content back up.

Haint and Littia note that they can't issue a counternotice, because Rumblefish never sent a DMCA notice which they can counter. The "takedown" was triggered by the content ID match, which still makes things a bit tricky, since "disputing" such things could potentially lead to a lawsuit, so there's a bit of a chilling effect in disputing a content ID match. Poking a big company with a stick where they can turn around and file a lawsuit is a bit scary -- even if you know you're in the legal right.

While looking into that story, reader Stephen Pate sent over his own story of having his entire YouTube account suspended. He's not entirely sure why, but believes it has something to do with video he posted of the recent "crash on the moon." The video was taken directly from NASA's live broadcast, which NASA makes clear is not covered by copyright.

But... along came everyone's favorite news organization, the Associated Press, and claimed the video was their copyrighted material. Nice of them. Due to at least one other similar incident, Pate's entire account was shut down, and to make matters worse, this apparently happened at about the same time that YouTube switched emails to gmail logins, leading Google to claim that it can't match his email to the email of the account in question.

I'm sure Google and YouTube are trying their best, within the confines of copyright law and various lawsuits, to handle such situations, but it seems like things are a mess -- and more and more users are finding that even if they have what appears to be perfectly legal content, they may face takedowns and even loss of their entire account, with limited avenues for recourse.

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An anonymous reader writes "Famous writer and minor television personality John Hodgman posits the end of the culture of Jockdom in favor of a cultural reverence for engineers, scientists and Slashdot readers: 'Jockdom is very noble. It's not deliberative. It's certainly the best way to win wars. It's the best way to motivate teams of people to fulfill a goal — not just war, but getting things done. The most important way to motivate a factory floor. But as you know, we're not as much of a manufacturing society as we were before. China and other big industrial nations are rewarding their nerds and technicians rather than creating a culture that makes fun of them — it would be wise for us to embrace the book-smart as much as our culture has traditionally embraced the street-smart, the jock-smart. I'm not saying nerds must have their revenge; I'm just saying the time for wedgies is at an end.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dark Horse just sent me a review copy of The Life And Times Of Martha Washington In The Twenty-First Century, a gigantic, slipcased hardcover containing the full run of the Give Me Liberty comics and associated titles.

I have Frank Miller's Give Me Liberty graphic novels to thank for getting me interested in graphic novels as a literary form. I read the first Give Me Liberty collection when I was seventeen, after having it thrust insistently into my hands by my roommate Erik Stewart. Erik judged -- correctly -- that I'd find in Miller's groundbreaking tale the same satisfaction I got from reading the best sf novels. He was so right.

Give Me Liberty is the story of Martha Washington, a kid from a futuristic version of Chicago's notorious Cabrini Green projects, simply called "The Green," who joins the US Army in order to escape from poverty. Martha finds herself serving in the army of a country locked in a death-spiral, plagued by political assassination, partisan division, secessionists, cynical corporatism... Her military education becomes a political education and on the way, Miller and Gibbons impart a raging, angry story about corruption and injustice, paced so relentlessly that I found myself buying the single issues between the collections and re-reading them looking for clues as to what might come next.

Miller created Give Me Liberty for Dark Horse after he jumped ship from DC, for whom he had made a fortune with his noir Batman: Dark Knight books, which changed the field forever. DC loved what Miller had done, but they wanted to impose restrictions on his creativity intended to assuage blue-noses who were worried that comics might corrupt the kiddees. Miller told them to pound sand and went to Dark Horse and created this remarkable story, which prefigures some of the best sf comics written since, including Ellis's brilliant Transmetropolitan and Brian Wood's fantastic DMZ.

The Life And Times Of Martha Washington In The Twenty-First Century is the perfect way to revisit that remarkable story or to discover it for the first time. A giant, heavy, high-quality book, it is made for a lazy afternoon on the sofa or the carpet, devouring the whole Martha Washington canon (along with sketches, notes and other assorted nice bits). It'd be a fine (and potentially life-changing -- see above) gift, and makes for a very satisfying indulgence, too.

The Life And Times Of Martha Washington In The Twenty-First Century

San Francisco's recent Alternative Press Expo was the last place I expected to turn up videogames, but it took less than a few minutes of circulating amongst the self-published sprawl until I stumbled on my first controller. I suppose it shouldn't have been as much a surprise as it was: the phoenix-like rise and return of indie/self-published and otherwise bedroom-coded gaming has followed near identical trajectories as indie music and publishing, it's just taken a bit longer to get here. But surprisingly, few indies have fully mastered the art of cross-media, whether by lack of interest, resources or knowledge, even though all of the necessary tools and channels are already directly in their hands.

It was Martin Robaszewski's controller that I stumbled on: a former programmer for Bay Area studio Secret Level (now Sega owned), Robaszewski's indie imprint Bioroid was showing off its debut Xbox Live game Cyborg Mice Arena, recently released on the console's 'Indies' channel.

Befitting of its label and bargain price it's a game that's rough around the edges (and is meant to serve as a proof of concept before refining the engine further), but with a core that's clearly well devised: designed as a simple 1-4 player party game, Arena lets players collect, unlock, and customize weapon and bio-mod enhancements for their individual mice, part of an underlying idea Robaszewski says he's had for years.

But it wasn't the game itself that got me thinking, it was the accompanying spread of merchandise at the Bioroid booth (at top), most notably a tag-along illustrated book/comic that tells the origin story of the Cyborg Mice -- something Robaszewski's taken even further cross-platform with a freely downloadable iPhone app that includes the comic and other Cyborg-ephemera.

Arena wasn't the only game at the APE: just a few tables down, Spelunky creator Derek Yu and fellow illustrators Hellen Jo and Calvin Wong were showing off the game they'd created for Giant Robot and Attract Mode's Game Over show (above) -- a game they'd spun off into print via a pitch-perfect faux-NES manual.

And across the concourse Brutal Legend creators Double Fine were proving themselves as gaming's most mainstream indie-at-heart with a humble collection of xeroxed comics, buttons, and T-shirts from the studio's staff, sold next to a small pile of the then-just-released game itself.

The concept of indie merchandising is, of course, not a new one: Polytron's opened their Polyshop well in advance of the release of Fez, and even Canabalt recently got its own limited run of work-wear.

It's more that it would seem that not enough have realized how much additional promotional power is in their hands (Team Meat withstanding, who created the cutely nostalgic comic above right as part of a promotional pack for their forthcoming PC/WiiWare game Super Meat Boy), and how much more involved players can be with the characters and tiny worlds we're creating.

We're well past reaching the point where everyone's a publisher, a print-maker and a merch manufacturer (and to the point where every console or PC indie can quite cheaply have its iPhone counterpart), and especially in this time of ubiquitous digital distribution, a little something to hold on to goes a long way.

Josh writes in to spread the word about the Muralizer verticle surface printer/plotter project - which is hopefully a kit in the making -

t's a drawbot that takes SVGs as input, letting you print vector graphics really big. The project was started at noisebridge, San Francisco's hackerspace, earlier this year, and we got a prototype going (a bit of video is up on the page).
I'd love to bring this piece of open hardware to the community as a kit, but need some help to do so. Inspired by the success of MakerBeam, I set up a kickstarter page. It would be great if people could pledge even a little bit to help make this tool available to artists (and those of us who want to be artists but are better at soldering than painting).

This could foreseeably give artist's assistants a run for their money (do they even get pay?) More on the project's planning and development can be found on Kickstarter & the Muralizer blog.

Related:

Hektor - The spray painting robot

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Lee sez, "Kevin Van Aelst, who photographs household objects to explain basic life processes. He uses gummy worms for DNA, clothes for the heart and other things you'd find around the house."

While the depictions of information--such as an EKG, fingerprint, map or anatomical model--are unconventional, the truth and accuracy to the illustrations are just as valid as more traditional depictions. This work is about creating order where we expect to find randomness, and also hints that the minutiae all around us is capable of communicating much larger ideas.

Kevin Van Aelst (Thanks, Lee!)

destinyland writes "A key component of a $10 billion nuclear fusion plant is vintage 2002 Indonesian coconut-shell charcoal. After a 20-year search, German researchers discovered that the coconut-shell charcoal is the best medium for 'adsorbing' waste byproducts sucked out of the thermonuclear reaction's vacuum chamber. In what will be the first fusion power facility that's commercially viable, magnetic fields will heat hydrogen isotopes to over 150 million degrees Centigrade. (Essentially, the super-hot plasma creates artificial stars.) As the article points out, 'It's not quite a Starship warp drive, but it does harness the power of the sun.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Remember GateHouse Media? The regional news company sued the NY Times for linking to it, claiming it was copyright infringement to include the headline and a brief snippet along with the link (you know, like Google...). Amusingly, it turned out that GateHouse Media was doing the same thing. Eventually the two companies settled, and apparently that's convinced GateHouse Media that complaining about such links is a good idea.

Via CitMediaLaw we found out that GateHouse Media has sent a cease & desist letter to an online forum, claiming not just that its stories are covered by copyright, but that its headlines and ledes.

We wish to advise you that the stories, headlines and/or ledes that you are copying are the copyrighted property of GateHouse Media... and that your copying constitutes infringement of GateHouse's rights under U.S. Copyright law. This infringement is not excused by links to the original stories or by indicating the name of the publication in which the content originated.

Of course, it's not clear that copyright law actually agrees with that. And, even if GateHouse is correct, this makes no sense whatsoever. It's not as if people reading the Masscops forums are doing so as a substitute for some GateHouse Media news sites. If anything, Masscops is sending traffic to them, and helping new readers discover GateHouse's sites. What sort of company turns down links and traffic? Not one that's long for this world...

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Dan Jones writes "The Los Angeles City Council has approved a US$7.25 million, five-year deal with Google in which the city will adopt Gmail and other Google Apps. Interestingly, just over $1.5 million for the project will come from the payout of a 2006 class action lawsuit between the City and Microsoft (Microsoft paid $70 million three years ago to settle the suit by six California counties and cities who alleged that Microsoft used its monopoly position to overcharge for software). The city will migrate from Novell GroupWise e-mail servers. For security, Google will provide a new separate data environment called 'GovCloud' to store both applications and data in a completely segregated environment that will only be used by public agencies. This GovCloud would be encrypted and 'physically and logically segregated' from Google's standard applications. Has cloud computing stepped up to prime time?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dan Jones writes "The Los Angeles City Council has approved a US$7.25 million, five-year deal with Google in which the city will adopt Gmail and other Google Apps. Interestingly, just over $1.5 million for the project will come from the payout of a 2006 class action lawsuit between the City and Microsoft (Microsoft paid $70 million three years ago to settle the suit by six California counties and cities who alleged that Microsoft used its monopoly position to overcharge for software). The city will migrate from Novell GroupWise e-mail servers. For security, Google will provide a new separate data environment called 'GovCloud' to store both applications and data in a completely segregated environment that will only be used by public agencies. This GovCloud would be encrypted and 'physically and logically segregated' from Google's standard applications. Has cloud computing stepped up to prime time?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Michael sez, "Library 101 is a song, a video (with pics of over 400 library staff who submitted them to be in the video), 23 essays from some of the most respected minds in 'Libraryland' and resource list of 101 hyperlinked things we think libraries need to know to succeed as technology changes so many things for us and society. The project even has over 1,900 fans on the Facebook page, almost all of them library staff (from over a dozen countries!)."

Library 101 (Thanks, Michael!)

Glyn sez, "TalkTalk, the second largest internet service provider in the UK, has threatened to launch legal action if the government implements three strikes [ed: the plan by which whole households will be disconnected from the net if one member is accused of violating copyright]. They claimed the government's plan was based on users being 'guilty until proven innocent.'

"The approach is based on the principle of 'guilty until proven innocent' and substitutes proper judicial process for a kangaroo court,"

"We know this approach will lead to wrongful accusations."

TalkTalk threatens legal action over Mandelson's filesharing plan (Thanks, Glyn!)

Far beyond simply open-sourcing the schematic, Eric Archer posted a full step-by-step for recreating his Mini Space Rockers drum-synth kit on protoboard. Hmm … I get the feeling he really wants us to build these =] - very awesome.

Included with the project is a list of 25 variations for achieving a wide range of different sounds, all the way from "Thump Bass" to "Space Hawk" -

First choose which sound you’re going to build. […] Thats how you determine what values to use for capacitors C1, C2, and C3. What they do: C1 and C2 set the pitch range and affect the pitch envelope. C3 determines the decay time of the sound. I’ve tried up to 100uF here, which gives some looooong sweeps.

So build a wee space rocker, won't you? - and be sure to post some audio of the results.

YouTuber datenkrieger75 built quite an excellent technobox featuring a patchable circular sequencer, a Gakken SX-150, and Mini Space Rocker circuits. Things start to sound prett wild (and eerily voice-like) around the 1m30s mark.[via Create Digital Music]

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palegray.net writes "The latest version of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) has been released. Offering numerous enhancements for both desktop and server environments, this release includes notable features like Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud images, the Ubuntu One "personal cloud", and Linux kernel version 2.6.31. Please be sure to use a release mirror close to your geographic location to help reduce the stress on Ubuntu's primary servers; using BitTorrent for downloads can help alleviate the load even more. If your organization has adequate network and server resources, please consider hosting a mirror as well."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Two years ago, a class action lawsuit was filed against the cable companies for not offering a la carte channels. This is an issue that gets people up in arms -- even as studies have suggested that mandated a la carte would cost consumers more (though, others dispute those findings). On the whole, I think that a la carte offerings that let people choose their own channels would certainly make consumers much happier (a good thing), but I have trouble believing that it should be mandated by the government.

So does the district court where the lawsuit was filed. It's now been dismissed, with the court saying that the plaintiffs failed to show the harm to the market. Of course, the case will be appealed, so this is a long way from over.

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Syngularity writes 'MaximumPC is featuring an article about one broadband provider's decision to sue the city of Monticello, Minnesota after residents passed a referendum to roll out their own fiber optic system. TDS Telecommunications had earlier denied the city's request for the company to provide fiber optic service. During the ensuing legal battle, which prevented the citizens from following through with their plans, TDS Telecommunications took the opportunity to roll out a fiber system.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Syngularity writes 'MaximumPC is featuring an article about one broadband provider's decision to sue the city of Monticello, Minnesota after residents passed a referendum to roll out their own fiber optic system. TDS Telecommunications had earlier denied the city's request for the company to provide fiber optic service. During the ensuring legal battle, which prevented the citizens from following through with their plans, TDS Telecommunications took the opportunity to roll out a fiber system.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This sturdy, portable DIY netbook stand is perfect for smaller models between 7-10 inches. [via liliputing]

In a nutshell, all you need are two IKEA shelf brackets, a drawer handle to hold them together, and some vinyl cabinet brackets to keep the laptop from sliding. You'll also need a drill, screwdriver, and hammer, but I'm going to go out on a limb and predict you've already got those lying around.

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Ponca City, We love you writes "Dr. Dobbs reports that Alex Waibel, professor of computer science and language technologies at Carnegie Mellon University, has developed an iPhone application that turns the iPhone into a translator that converts English speech into Spanish, or vice versa. Users simply speak a sentence or two at a time into the iPhone and the iPhone will respond with an audible translation. 'Jibbigo's software runs on the iPhone itself, so it doesn't need to be connected to the Web to access a distant server,' says Waibel. Waibel is a leader in speech-to-speech translation and multimodal speech interfaces, creating the first real-time, speech-to-speech translator for English, German and Japanese. 'Automated speech translation is an expensive proposition that has been supported primarily by large government grants,' says Waibel. 'But our sponsors are impatient to see this technology become more widely available and we, as researchers, are eager to find new revenues that will help us extend this technology to more of the 6,000 languages now spoken worldwide.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this year, the RIAA dumped its longterm anti-piracy partner MediaSentry and hired DtecNet instead. MediaSentry had lots of problems in terms of credibility, but it appears that DtecNet may be even worse. It recently came out with a report claiming that file sharing decreased massively after The Pirate Bay went down temporarily. Not surprisingly, this report is getting some press attention. The problem? The report appears to be based on a nearly comical misunderstanding of how BitTorrent works. TorrentFreak details numerous basic mistakes in the report, nearly all of which suggest the claims made by DtecNet have little, if anything, to do with reality. Considering that DtecNet is going to be leading the charge for the RIAA in any future lawsuits and various "three strikes" plans, the fact that it doesn't seem to understand how BitTorrent works suggests problems ahead.

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The Creepy CRAFT Bundle from the Maker Shed teaches you all about making creepy adorable hand-sewn mini monsters. Before you know it, these little creatures will overrun your entire house.

Start out your monster-making experience by reading the DIY hand-sewn, free-range, monster tutorial found in CRAFT, Volume 06. Next, crack open the DIY Mini Monster kit and make your first adorable little monster. When you're all done, use the included Maker's Notebook to sketch out some new designs.

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adeelarshad82 writes "Xerox announced a new silver ink that it's calling a breakthrough in printable electronics, a leading-edge concept that's generated a lot of discussion but few actual products to date. Why? Precisely because of the issues that Xerox claims to have addressed. In concept, printable electronics is just what it sounds like: using a printer, basically an inkjet, to print electronic circuits. If this can be done reliably, electronic devices can be printed for far less than current methods cost. One can also print the devices on a variety of new materials. The possibilities range from printing on flexible plastic, to paper and cardboard, to fabric."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

waderoush writes "Physicist Shahriar Afshar is famous as the designer of the 'Afshar Experiment,' a study first described in 2004 that called into question Neils Bohr's observation that it's impossible to observe light's wave-like properties and its particle-like properties at the same time. Not surprisingly, the idea met with widespread resistance in the physics community. While he waits for the controversy to settle down, Afshar himself is taking a detour into the video game world. He's now the president and CTO of Immerz, a Cambridge, MA-based startup building an 'acousto-haptic' interface that drapes over a gamer's shoulders and turns video game sound into (literally) chest-pounding vibrations. Xconomy was allowed to test the device, and has the full story behind Afshar's unusual journey and the company's hopes for enhancing PC and console gamers' experience of action/adventure/first-person-shooter titles."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Via Michael Scott, we learn about how the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) tried to shut down a blog critical of the group using a trademark claim. While the AFT eventually backed down, after pretty much everyone made it clear that it had no chance to win a trademark claim against a site that was clearly criticizing it, Ron Coleman makes the point that trademark is the "tort of choice for censors." I'd suggest that copyright isn't far behind, but it's really amazing how often trademark holders try to use trademark claims to censor any kind of speech they dislike about their mark. And even if the trademark claim has no chance of winning, it often doesn't matter to those who simply can't afford the time or the money to fight such claims.

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An anonymous reader writes "Motherboard.TV reports, 'In Monrovia, Liberia, there’s a guy taking the matter of a lopsided, state-run media and reshaping it into a free-of-charge, independent news-aggregator—all accomplished with dry-erase board and couple markers. (Sorry, internet!) Each morning, at 10:45 AM, Alfred Sirleaf wakes up and heads down to his bulletin board to post the day’s news, culling together a slate of stories his countrymen might otherwise never see. Grateful readers line up in droves, on foot and in cars, to read these updates, in what has been described as the country's — and probably the world's — only analog blog.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ars Technica reports on the nascent Google Wave RPG scene, in which wavesters are amusing themselves by using Google's collaboration tool s a surprisingly effective (for some games) means of keeping track of the action in game:

The few games I'm following typically have at least three waves: one for recruiting and general discussion, another for out-of-character interactions ("table talk"), and the main wave where the actual in-character gaming takes place. Individual players are also encouraged to start waves between themselves for any conversations that the GM shouldn't be privy to. Character sheets can be posted in a private wave between a player and the GM, and character biographies can go anywhere where the other players can get access to them.

The waves are persistent, accessible to anyone who's added to them, and include the ability to track changes, so they ultimately work quite well as a medium for the non-tactical parts of an RPG. A newcomer can jump right in and get up-to-speed on past interactions, and a GM or industrious player can constantly maintain the official record of play by going back and fixing errors, formatting text, adding and deleting material, and reorganizing posts. Character generation seems to work quite well in Wave, since players can develop the shared character sheet at their own pace with periodic feedback from the GM.

Unfortunately for those of us who are more into the tactical side of RPGs, it isn't yet well-suited to a game that involves either a lot of dice rolling or careful tracking of player and NPC positions. Right now, Wave bots are hard to get working reliably and widgets are scarce, which means that if you don't want to use the standard dice bot that Wave debuted with (dice bots are an old IRC favorite) then there isn't really another convenient option; rolls are either made with real dice and then posted on the honor system, or they're posted in batches and a GM then uses them in sequence.

Google Wave: we came, we saw, we played D&D (via Futurismic)

ThinkGeek's Star Trek onesies are a great change from the boring old Bob the Builder and Disney Princess junk you'll get heaped on you the second your kid emerges. I love that they have a redshirt version (for expendable babies!).

USS Warehouse Captain in Training (via Wonderland)

USC's "It's All in the Cards" feature is a Flash widget that celebrates a different card-catalog card every day. I remember the first time I was exposed to my school library's subject index and practically falling over at the thought that there was a way to find all the books in the school (which I assumed were all the books in the world) on any subject that mattered to me. I could look at these things all day.

Maybe I should find a surplus mountain of these things and tile a room with them.

It's All in the Cards (via Resource Shelf)

Michiel Rhoen writes in to tell us about photography instructor and author, Thom Hogan, who has embraced the CwF+RtB philosophy by offering a limited edition deal (only 25 spots available with 4 already taken at the time of writing this) where Mr. Hogan will sit down one-on-one with each buyer for 3 hours. During those 3 hours, Hogan is game for almost any kind of photography consulting, giving his professional advice on camera equipment, portfolio reviews, help with post processing work or just a long chat over a meal together. But that's not all... The complete Thom Hogan Limited Edition package (US$849) includes:

• A full normal package for the book, Complete Guide to the Nikon D700 (CD and To Go Guide), a US$49.99 value
• A full printed version of the main book in black and white, a US$29.99 value
• A full printed, signed, numbered version of the main book in color, a US$99.99 value
• All of the above shipped to you via Priority Mail
• All future updates of the book, if any, delivered free, a likely US$14.99 value or more
• Three hours of personal, one-on-one time with Thom, a US$750 value

So this deal is aimed directly at folks who own a very specific camera and who happen to be able to travel to see Hogan when he's available for the one-on-one time. It's not exactly going to make Hogan a millionaire (at best, it's going to make him $21,225 gross). But it's a great example of how an author can take advantage of actual scarcities (Hogan's time and expertise) as part of a business. I do find it interesting that Hogan's limited edition offer is an experiment that might demonstrate the advantages of selling an author's time over selling content that is already created. I imagine if this package sells out, that Hogan will expand this limited offer to other specific cameras. And I'd bet he'd even be able to crowdfund a new book if enough amateur photographers ask him to create his next "complete guide" for a camera he might not otherwise have reviewed.

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He's baaaaacck! Pleo, the long-hyped, short-lived robotic baby dino is back on the market. Robert Oschler, of RobotsRule, has posted a piece, The Inside Story Behind Pleo's Rise, Fall, and Resurrection, that includes an interview with Derek Dotson, one of the founders of Ugobe, and now the CEO of Innvo Labs, the company that acquired the rights to Pleo.

RO: Are there plans for any new accessories or new Pleo models?

DD: I can talk about the 2010 Pleo model. That model will look the same as Pleo does now except it will have a new paint job and eye color to differentiate it from the current Pleos. Over the coming year we intend to give Pleo more depth to his personality and utilize the sensors better. For example, Pleo doesn't do a whole lot with the camera in his nose right now. It's not the hardware since the camera is a good quality camera. However there's a lot of room for improvement in the software. An example of a specific feature people want badly is getting Pleo to come to you. The 2010 model will do that. Also, Pleo uses power more efficiently which will lead to longer play times. To make Pleo more realistic, Pleo will develop certain character biases at birth so that everyone's Pleo will be different. As for the sensors, the reason why they are currently underutilized is due to a bottleneck in the serial bus that connects them to Pleo's processor resources. That's something we can fix without drastically altering Pleo's architecture. Once that happens, we can do more with them when it comes to Pleo's hearing, vision, etc. Beyond 2010 there will certainly be new creatures other than baby robot dinosaurs.

From MAKE magazine:

In MAKE, Volume 19: Robots, Rovers, and Drones, learn how to make a model plane with an autopilot and a built-in robot brain. We'll also show you how to make a comfortable chair and footstool out of a single sheet of plywood, a bicyclist's vest that shows how fast you're going, and projects that introduce you to servomotors. All this, and lots more, in MAKE, Volume 19! Subscribe here. Buy the issue in the Maker Shed.

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oranghutan writes "The Obama administration is looking to the southern hemisphere for tips on how to improve the broadband situation in the US. The key telco adviser to the president, Sarah Crawford, has met with Australian telco analysts recently to find out how the Aussies are rolling out their $40 billion+ national broadband network. It is also rumored that the Obama administration is looking to the Dutch and New Zealand situations for inspiration too. The article quotes an Aussie analyst as saying: 'There needs to be a multiplier effect in the investment you make in telecoms — it should not just be limited to high-speed Internet. That is pretty new and in the US it is nearly communism, that sort of thinking. They are not used to that level of sharing and going away from free-market politics to a situation whereby you are looking at the national interest. In all my 30 years in the industry, this is the first time America is interested in listening to people like myself from outside.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

WGhost9 writes -

Designed, built, and programmed in about record three weeks! It runs C on an Axon microcontroller. It uses all digital servos and can lift over twice its body weight. The software (soon to be given out open source) allows for six synchronous degrees of motion. Future additions will include foot sensors and a remote control option.

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So, the stuff inside the balloon that makes the web is called HI-FLOAT, and it's a commercial product actually sold for injecting into helium balloons to make them retain their helium longer. It forms a skin on the inside of the balloon and keeps the helium from diffusing out so quickly. The "web" effect is created by applying the HI-FLOAT and letting it dry at one pressure, and then deflating the balloon, stressing it, and then re-inflating to a higher pressure, causing the film to detach from the walls (which, of course, means it's not working as a sealant anymore, but whatevs). I'm pretty sure this trick was developed in-house, by the company that makes it, to sell more HI-FLOAT. Still, it's pretty cool.

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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