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The scientists first harvested smooth muscle cells and endothelial cells, the same type of cells that line blood vessels, from the animals’ erectile tissue. These cells were multiplied in the laboratory. Using a two-step process, the cells were injected into a three-dimensional scaffold that provided support while the cells developed. As early as one month after implanting the scaffold in the animal’s penis, organized tissue with vessel structures began to form."Laboratory-Grown Replacement of Penile Erectile Tissue"The cells were injected into scaffolds on two separate days, enabling them to hold almost six times as many smooth muscle cells as in the previous studies – which the scientists believe was a key to success. During an erection, it is the relaxation of smooth muscle tissue that allows an influx of blood into the penis. The relaxation is triggered by the release of nitric oxide from endothelial cells...
Functional testing of the implanted tissue showed that vessel pressure within the erectile tissue was normal, that blood flowed smoothly through it, that the response to nitric oxide-induced relaxation was normal as early as one month after implantation, and that veins drained normally after erection.
I have a chandelier in my dining room which is always in the way at parties when we move the dining room table against the wall. Here's a way to remedy that, putting the fixture on a track that slides the light out of the way. Not the most attractive look on the ceiling, but still an interesting solution.
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2,500 years ago, an army of 50,000 men left an oasis in western Egypt and were never heard from again. Now, archaeologists think they may have uncovered the missing troops, who were probably killed in a sandstorm.
...the team decided to investigate Bedouin stories about thousands of white bones that would have emerged decades ago during particular wind conditions in a nearby area. Indeed, they found a mass grave with hundreds of bleached bones and skulls. "We learned that the remains had been exposed by tomb robbers and that a beautiful sword which was found among the bones was sold to American tourists," Castiglioni said.
And now, unless popular film and novels have lied to us all, every last one of those skeletons will struggle to its feet and--enraged at the disruption of a centuries' long slumber--visit destruction upon archaeologist and Bedouin alike.
Vanished Persian Army Said Found in Desert, from MSNBC, via Martin Bosworth, who agrees with me about the inevitable walking skeletons. In your heart of hearts, you know we're right.
Image courtesy Flickr user spratmackrel, via CC
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This is not a book. It's a fabulous little clutch purse that looks like a book cover made by Olympia LeTan.
via Kottke.org
Electron Beam Free-Form Fabrication (EBF3) is a rapid prototyping technology developed by Karen Taminger of NASA's Langley Research Center. Dr. Taminger is prone to market EBF3 by analogy to Star Trek style "replicator" technology, which is nothing but shameless hype. Still, the basic idea is an interesting twist on extrusion-based 3D printing technologies (although there's not really any "extrusion" going on), and is under development with an eye towards space-based fabrication. Working in outer space would eliminate the system's major ground-based shortcoming, which is the requirement for maintaining a vacuum or inert atmosphere to prevent oxidation of the weld.
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I was driving along the San Francisco waterfront one morning when a sign on a white tent in the Marina Green parking lot caught my eye. It said Reactt: The Only Real Boot Camp in San Francisco. I was curious, so I googled it when I got home.
Originally, the term "boot camp" referred to the training program military recruits go through before they're deployed. In the mid-2000s, boot camps for rehabilitating juveniles caused a media frenzy when a boy's tragic death was caught on camera.
These days, it has become a popular title for extreme fitness programs that start really early in the morning and command lots of repetitive hard core exercise under the watch of really buff instructors. Reactt is one of them, and since I've always wondered what being at boot camp might be like, I decided to try it out. My instructors were two really buff guys with shaved heads and heavy boots. Sergio has an impressive personal trainer pedigree and Justin served in Iraq with the Marine Corps. Shortly after sunrise on a beautifully brisk Saturday morning, I arrived at their camp, where rows of equipment were neatly laid out on a patch of grass overlooking Alcatraz.
The concept of fitness boot camps is relatively new, but the tools we used here have been around for hundreds, even thousands of years. Here's a quick overview of the tools we used that day:
The kettlebell: A cast iron weight reminiscent of a bomb or a cannonball that originated in Russia centuries ago. It was brought to the US by a Russian special forces trainer named Pavel Tsatsouline, and is now a popular strength-training tool among martial artists. We did squats while pumping the kettlebells high above our heads.
Battling ropes: Braided manila ropes adapted for strength training by John Brookfield, a Guinness Record-holding fitness guru who once pulled a 24,000-pound truck over a mile. We made giant snake-like waves with the ropes, which become heavier as your arms get more tired.
Medicine ball: A weighted ballcommonly found in gyms and rehab centers that was once used by Persian and Greek wrestlers thousands of years ago, when they were just sewn animal skins filled with sand. We partnered up and threw one back and forth. By the way, if you want to make your own medicine ball, this web site has instructions on how to make one at home using a cheap plastic basketball.
For an hour, we did paced repetitions of these exercises, gradually upping the ante and trying really hard not to give up. Not using ultra-fancy gym equipment felt refreshing and authentic — even if it was nothing close to a real army boot camp. (I drove home and showered after the session, and I even got a friendly text message from Sergio the instructor thanking me for taking the class.) Also, it was fun! (Is boot camp supposed to be fun?) It was nice to exercise outside, I got a great workout, and I pushed myself way harder than I would have had I been on my own at a gym. I definitely felt the pain for a few days afterwards, though.
Typekit, “… a subscription-based service for linking to high-quality Open Type fonts”, is now live and available to all.
A superb desktop wallpaper by Alex Cornell. Loving the subtle text and texture of this one. Looks nice on the iPhone as well. (via ISO50)
Birdhouse for Your Soul is a touching post by Greg Knauss on why he loves the internet. Absolutely worth a read. (via)
Craig Robinson of Flip Flop Flyin’ has a new iPhone app out that boasts, “… 1,000 Minipops on your iPhone/iPod touch which you can look at whenever and wherever you want.” Minipops are blocky, pixel art renderings of famous people.
Authentic Jobs is having a No Retweet Necessary Contest with some pretty excellent prizes, some of which were hand-selected by partner sites (we chose a Nintendo DS Lite).
I also saw donut seeds for the first time. (via)
Michæl.Paukner's "The ancient Hebrew Conception of the Universe to illustrate the account of creation and the flood." Flickr link, but you really have to see it at the largest possible size.
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Extraterrestrial Life Forms: If they exist, do they look like they came from "Star Trek" central casting? In this Scientific American article, Michael Shermer runs some thought experiments about the appearance of E.T. His conclusion: Don't get too attached to this humanoid (or, even, bi-pedal) thing.
If there's one thing I can't get enough of, it is funny ways to tell time, and this catena wall clock definitely fits the bill. Instead of rotating a set of hands, or lighting a digital display, this clock works by slowly turning a chain that has a set of numbers attached to it. The current time is whatever number is closest to the top. It's a neat artifact, and could be a good use for an old chainsaw or bike chain that you have laying around. I could also see this being turned sideways, with a set of gears and different chains to represent both the time and the date. [via technabob]
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The big GAMA-GO caravan of savings heads down to Los Angeles on Saturday, November 14! Stop by the Bigfoot Lodge and say hi to our Yeti-lovin' pals.
This is surely one of the most adorable animal YouTubes in the history of all internets. (via @maggiekb1 via this blog).
Jan & Kjeld are Swedish brothers who made a number of banjo records in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Their rendition of "Tiger Rag" in 1959 was popular in Germany. (Via PCL Lunkdump)
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The one thing I've learned is that, like any other type of art, it evolves. So if you're a business that supports a type of art, you need to evolve with the art. Now, a lot of things have happened that have made creating art a lot easier with the computer. And it's also made the distribution of art a lot easier.... What I have chosen to believe is that if you look at your band with a modern filter, your band has so much potential to have all these different elements about it. You can create all this really cool merchandise and concert/live experiences. You can create a really cool portal on your website. You can mix all these elements together and I always believe that if the tools are available, you can monetize all these other elements, and not really worry about selling the record. In fact, I believe that, you should take down every barrier and put as much music out there for free...Of course, he notes that at the core of this is still good music. He says that you don't remember a band years later just for the marketing, but you need that to get attention, and then you need the music to live for itself, which leads to an interesting mantra:
In my mind, the way the music industry is changing is that music is easier to make and it's easier to give away for free. And that will enable the band and the music and the art and everything to be bigger than it's ever been. It's just how do you collect that and how do you build your business...
I think the internet's a funny thing, because anything... that cuts through the noise on the internet will get found. The beautiful thing about the Western world is that all good art will get found no matter what. It just might take a little bit more time for some than others.... To try to really make a presence known, a band needs to capitvate people online first, no matter what -- it can be with a video or a film. It can be a song or a live broadcast. It needs to be something that's really clever. To do that, you should study the campaigns that work....
The true art is not just creating the music. The true art is seeing how many people that music can touch in various ways. That's the art. Because you can be as artistic as you want and no one hears it and no one likes it. The true art is trying to break through the noise and getting millions of people to notice.Sounds quite a bit like the difference between invention and innovation that we talk about, doesn't it? Nice to see yet another artist who has this all figured out.
A woman who appears to have been inebriated fell onto the tracks in a Boston subway as a train was rushing towards her. People on the platform frantically waved at the train, which stopped in the nick of time.
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The exclusive rights of the owner of copyright in a sound recording under clauses (1) and (2) of section 106 do not extend to the making or duplication of another sound recording that consists entirely of an independent fixation of other sounds, even though such sounds imitate or simulate those in the copyrighted sound recording.The argument is that an MP3 file is a duplication of another sound recording, but is done as an entirely independent fixation of other sounds. In case you're playing along in the home game, clauses (1) and (2) of section 106 of copyright law pertains to reproducing copyrighted works or preparing derivative works. Now, whether or not an MP3 is actually an independent fixation that simulates the original or a direct copy is an open question which I'll let you argue about in the comments. Of course, if we were actually paying attention to what the copyright law actually says, people might have noticed (as at least a few lawyers have) that section 101 limits the use of the term "copies" to material objects -- and does not cover pure digital files. But, it's not like we should let what the law actually says get in the way of how we interpret it.
Pesco requested that I write about some of the books that inspired me as I was writing CULTS, CONSPIRACIES AND SECRET SOCIETIES. I'll need to ask for your indulgence, because I'm going to flash back to my boyhood. When I was in the sixth grade, I came across a mass market paperback called IMPOSSIBLE: YET IT HAPPENED, which, I just learned from the magic of the Internet, was written by R. Dewitt Miller in 1947. It was a prime exemplar of what is sometimes called Forteana, after Charles Fort (1874-1932), a failed novelist, close friend of Theodore Dreiser, and avid collector of news clippings about the eerie and the unexplained--he also gave his name to the magazine The Fortean Times (its cover story this month is about Masonic symbols in Washington, DC). Miller's yarns about spontaneous human combustion, ghosts, premonitory dreams, ESP, apparitions of air-born crucifixes in the smoke-filled skies over World War I battlefields, a fortyeight hour-long midnight that enveloped Colonial New England and I don't know what else, scared the living daylights out of me--but at the same time, I couldn't stop reading it, especially at night, by flashlight. It was an addiction and I eventually had the wisdom to go cold turkey, by giving the book away.
Or maybe I should go back even further, to when I was in the third grade, and we all trooped down to the school gym to look at the slides of ruins that a local character--a magician named James Randi--had snapped on his recent trip to the mountains of Peru. I can't remember exactly what I found so interesting about his lecture, but it made a huge impression on me. Maybe he did some sleight of hand tricks. A couple of decades later, Randi embarked on a second career as a Houdini-caliber debunker of psychic frauds. His take-down of Uri Geller on the Tonight Show is still devastating to watch.
Sometime during my adolescence, when I was an omnivorous consumer of Erich Van Daniken books, Edgar Cayce-inspired accounts of Atlantis and Lemuria, and Robert Heinlein novels about Ascended Masters (LOST LEGACY) and religious cults (STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND), I picked up a paperback about the Bermuda Triangle at a newsstand in the Port Authority bus terminal--LIMBO OF THE LOST by John Wallace Spencer. I stayed up late that night reading it, until I was brought up short by an account of a tragedy that I could actually remember reading about in the newspaper. I hope I'm getting this right--memory is a tricky thing and this happened a long time ago--but I think the story was about a fishing boat that had inexplicably disappeared off the Jersey Shore on a cloudless, windless day (Spencer's "limbo of the lost" was a lot bigger than the original Bermuda triangle). Did it sink? Or was it...transported somewhere? Only like I said, I had read about the incident when it happened--and what Spencer left out was that it occurred during a violent storm. It was a real epiphany for me, this discovery that some of the sensational things you read about in books aren't precisely true. Soon afterwards, I read my first book by Philip Klass--it must have been UFOS EXPLAINED--and discovered that science is more interesting than pseudo-science, that while it can be fun to indulge one's credulity from time to time (we humans seem to have an innate need to scare ourselves and stimulate our sense of wonder), critical thinking is infinitely more satisfying.
It was probably because of all those Frank Edwards books that I read as a kid that I devoted as much of CULTS, CONSPIRACIES, AND SECRET SOCIETIES as I did to UFOs, abductions, cattle mutilations, recovered memory, Satanic ritual abuse, and the like. I'm not comparing myself to the great Martin Gardner, the author of FADS AND FALLACIES IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE, who passed through a Fundamentalist Christian stage as a teenager before he became the dean of Skeptics (Michael Shermer, the editor of The Skeptic and the author of WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE WEIRD THINGS was also raised as a Fundamentalist--he started out as a Christian theology major in college) but my youthful indulgences in books about the paranormal made me more attentive to that side of things than I might otherwise have been.
There's this band of trolls camped out on the Amazon page for CULTS, CONSPIRACIES AND SECRET SOCIETIES who've seized on my "confession" that I used the Internet as one of my resources and made it a headlined feature of their one-star reviews. I scandalized some Masons the other day when I admitted that I'd had the presumption to write about Masonry without being a member. At the risk of providing more fodder to my enemies, I'm now going to reveal that a lot of my thinking about conspiracism has been influenced by works of the imagination. Since I haven't belonged to any secret societies or cults, or personally participated in any global conspiracies (some 9/11 Denialists would argue that my stance on their movement makes me complicit in the biggest conspiracy ever, but I won't go there right now), I turn to literature for insights into what I've called "The Conspiratorial Frame of Mind."
Vladimir Nabokov's PALE FIRE is a tour de force of oblique storytelling and its narrator, Charles Kinbote, is one of literature's most memorable madmen. Grandiose and delusional, his world is a reflection of his own obsessively-imagined conspiracies. Ralph Ellison's INVISIBLE MAN is many things--an epic of race and radical politics in Depression-era America--but it is also the story of a Kafka-esque conspiracy. The hero of Salman Rushdie's MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN believes that the history of post-Independence India was enacted on his own body--and that his mind is a radio transceiver, through which he communicates with a secret underground of misfits and pariahs. Strangely enough, Rushdie became an artifact of world history himself, when Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued a Fatwa calling for his execution.
Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's THE ILLUMINATUS! TRILOGY: THE EYE IN THE PYRAMID, THE GOLDEN APPLE, and LEVIATHAN is a wildly erudite, unabashedly trippy immersion in a world that's bound together by occult, philosophical, and political conspiracies--it's as paranoid as Philip K. Dick's VALIS, but much, much funnier. Thomas Pynchon's THE CRYING OF LOT 49 is a classic of conspiratorial thinking, about a private postal service that secretly influences the world. Just before I started writing CULTS, CONSPIRACIES, AND SECRET SOCIETIES, I read Umberto Eco's FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM, which is at once a brilliantly constructed thriller and an astonishingly erudite encyclopedia of esoterica--from Templar mysteries to Theosophy, from Kabbalah and alchemy to shamanism and right-wing synarchism. A Borgesian diversion on a grand scale, Eco's novel is also a cautionary tale about the perils of trying to make too much sense out of the world. I used this line from it as an epigraph for my own book: "Now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth."
The afternoon of September 11, 2001, I walked to the Red Cross blood center in downtown Brooklyn to donate a pint of blood. I was listening to the radio on headphones as a news reporter was opining that the fact that the day was the twenty third anniversary of the Camp David accords provided a key clue to the perpetrators' identity (I just fact-checked this and learned that while the agreement was reached on the 11th, the documents weren't formally signed until the 17th). Scraps of charred paper were drifting down from the sky; the passerbys faces were ashen and exhausted. Suddenly it occurred to me that I had walked into the pages of a Don DeLillo novel--into a world that had been upended by an Airborne Toxic Event. (DeLillo did eventually write his 9/11 novel--FALLING MAN).
LIBRA, DeLillo's fictional reconstruction of the conspiracy(ies) to assassinate President Kennedy, is so convincing to me that every time I reread it I have to remind myself that he made it up. Oswald's self-effacing grandiosity, his mother Marguerite's exasperatingly endearing neediness, Jack Ruby's glad-handing insanity, the rogue CIA man's despair--all of them feel so true-to-life. The book also contains a much-quoted passage that explains why conspiracy theories are so irresistible:
"A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act."
The BigShot digital camera is a kit designed to teach kids how they work while they assemble and use it. It's being developed by Shree Nayar and his team at the Computer Vision Lab at Columbia University. From the site:
The camera gives us a powerful means to express ourselves and communicate with each other. Today, the camera is almost exclusively designed for, and marketed to, adults. A typical consumer digital camera comes with a sleek silver or black exterior and is densely packed with components and features. If one tries to open up one of these devices to study its innards, it is unlikely to function when put back together. We believe that camera manufacturers have largely overlooked an important demographic in kids and a compelling application in education.
The camera's not currently for sale since the group is still doing field tests, but they're off to a great start. I learned some things about digital cameras just by reading through the build instructions. [Thanks, Peter!]
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I've written and even taught a whole lot about interactive narrative over the years, but rarely have the chance to play with this stuff. So last year, when a Canadian games company called to see if I'd be interested in collaborating with them on developing stories for a giant, multi-dimensional gaming universe, I jumped. It was like I was being given the chance to live out Jack Kirby's dream of world-building with Robert Anton Wilson's vision of multiple and overlapping perspectives.
The early results are finally making it online as the preview of a graphic novel, which spills out into the trailhead of at least one Alternate Reality Game, and also comprises the back story of the coming videogame series. This is a big big universe - a giant war for the future of humanity, of course - with maybe one overall timeline but many different pathways through the material. So people might follow my characters through a series of graphic novels, and learn something about them that they can then use in the games, or an artifact they find in the game might help them decode something in the comics. And even the ARG that people are beginning to play right now - through which they are "finding the others," and forging coalitions with other gamers in their own parts of the world to solve certain challenges - is a set-up for the bigger game, where these larger groups will be responsible for various aspects of the coming war.
The object of the game right now is for the players to build the "Darknet," an alternative network through which a global resistance can operate, and people can begin to piece together why NASA scientists are being rounded up and what the hell happened over the skies in Los Angeles.
While I know a lot of this has been tried before in different contexts, I haven't yet seen it work as such an organic extension of the game and game world - and, of course, I've never gotten to play it out on this side of the game before. It's as if the creation of the world and characters were itself a videogame being played among all the creative crew. (Then again, you're looking at someone who has really never gotten to work with other people, before.) I build a character, and then they stick her into one of their squads in the game; or they build a weapon that I then steal for the climax of one of the scenes in my comic. If we were trying to figure out whose IP was whose, we'd be sunk before we began - which is why we've developed a more "communal" model of creative control and ownership.
I'm proud of what we're doing, but I'm still intimidated by the audience and their expectations. A few months ago I went to Blizzcon, where I saw tens of thousands of Warcrafters more committed to a story and world than I realized was possible. I mean, people spend maybe ten or twenty hours with one of my books. They spend thousands of hours in a gaming universe, and moving through it with a level of awareness and expectation for novelty that people used to approach, say, James Joyce.
So please come check out Exoriare.
Hydrantables & Lunch Shelves Are Amazing New Achievements in Street Food Eating Technology
Those of us who love eating street food, but hate taking lunch back to our desks, have a common problem. Where should we eat? There are a number of indoor pavilions and outdoor seating areas scattered across Midtown, but sometimes I just wish there was a place right next to the carts to just saddle up and tuck in. Well thanks to Pratt Grad Student Ali Pulver, now there is. For her thesis she is developing a couple of tools to make it easier for us to eat on the street. And after testing out the "Lunch Shelf" and the "Hydrantable" last week, I've got to say these could represent the greatest advancements in street food technology since the invention of chicken and lamb over rice!
(via Making Light)
I'm digging this sled coffee table and rug, built by design firm Duffy London. The concept of suggesting a narrative through simple things such as a rug cut to look like snow with tracks in it seems really compelling to me. What would be an appropriate geeky version? A mars rover table with tracks in a red carpet? A siege engine with a flat top, tiny soldiers pushing it and tons of little footprints? The possibilities must be endless! [via curbly]
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A man runs. He falls down. He struggles back onto his feet and he runs some more. It's a simple narrative. Even without much detail, you can understand what's going on. Pause the video, though, and the scene isn't nearly as clear. Movement makes up for the lack of other visual information. Your brain can read and understand a video at much lower resolution than it would need to make equal sense of a still frame.
Meet Jim Campbell, a former Silicon Valley engineer turned visual artist. Inspired by early Bell Labs experiments with pixelated images, and by his own engineering work with digital filters, Campbell makes art that toys with the human brain.
I first saw Campbell's work in early October, at a conference about LED lighting. He was there to teach the techie types about art--which is somewhat ironic because, in Campbell's case, art comes from a very techie place. Specifically, the November 1973 issue of Scientific American. Much of the inspiration for Campbell's current work comes from a story in that magazine, written by Bell Labs' Leon Harmon, about low-resolution images and the minimum threshold of information the human brain needs to recognize faces. The now-classic example Harmon used was a 252-pixel, grayscale portrait of Abe Lincoln.
Since the '70s, plenty of artists have worked in pixel mosaic, but Campbell was more attracted to the the question Harmon was asking: How low resolution can an image or video be before we no longer recognize what's going on?
This boxing match video--using only 88 pixels--is probably the furthest Campbell has pushed the idea. "Most people still get it, but it might take some people 10 minutes. I don't think anyone would get it at all if it were in black and white," he says. "With color you need fewer pixels total, because there's more information per pixel."
It's that extra information per pixel--particularly the information provided by movement--that makes Campbell's art understandable at all. While he's read a little about brain science, most of Campbell's theories about what's going on between his art and viewers' heads is based on simple observation and guesswork. The way he sees it, his art is tapping into a more primitive sort of seeing. "It's pretty well known that there are different parts of your brain that are just looking at movement and rhythm. Just as there are parts that only look at color or just at analytical things," he says. "I think when you take away the detail and it's just movement, the image doesn't have to be analyzed as much. It's just there. You're getting at that primal vision, the simple job of hunting and survival."
To see it in action, just look at a still image from the "Running and Falling" video. The extra information of movement makes all the difference between completely clear, and completely abstract.
The other big thing Campbell has noticed is that low-res images--even moving ones--make a lot more sense once you've put them through a filter. At the end of the boxing match video above, Campbell comes into the shot and removes a plexiglass panel, revealing the blinking LEDs underneath. Suddenly, even if you were getting the idea of a fight before, the image loses most (if not all) of it's meaning.
Filtering is important to Campbell's art. The idea is based on what he used to do, back when he was a full-time Silicon Valley engineer, with digital reconstruction filters for processing sound and images in a computer. According to Campbell, a digitized image has a "stair step" effect. It's essentially broken into a bunch of individual pieces of information that are next to each other, but not really connected. Reconstruction filters take these pieces and smoosh and blend them, combining a bunch of separate dots into a coherent whole. "I took that idea and just created an optical process, instead of an electronic one," Campbell says.
He does this in several different ways. Besides the literal plexiglass filter used in the boxing match video, Campbell has also found that simply turning the art away from the viewer can have a similar effect. That's what's going on in this last video. Campbell has a square panel, with LEDs around the edges of it. He hangs it up, with the lights facing the wall. Instead of seeing the individual dots of light, you see the smoothed out, low-resolution video projected on the wall. If you didn't know ahead of time that the piece was cycling through scenes of a fire, freeway traffic and a walk through a park, you'd probably still have trouble understanding what you were seeing. But without the filter, you'd likely never get it.
Videos and still frame used with permission of Jim Campbell.
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JUSTICE GINSBURG: But you say you would say tax avoidance methods are covered, just as the process here is covered. So an estate plan, tax avoidance, how to resist a corporate takeover, how to choose a jury, all of those are patentable?Of course, these are the same Justices that have been pushing back on the patent world for quite some time. What about the newer Justices? Turns out they were pretty skeptical as well. There were some questions about new Justice Sotomayor, who had been an IP litigator at one point, but seemed pretty skeptical of these sorts of patents:
MR. JAKES: They are eligible for patenting as processes, assuming they meet the other statutory requirements.
JUSTICE BREYER: So that would mean that every -- every businessman -- perhaps not every, but every successful businessman typically has something. His firm wouldn't be successful if he didn't have anything that others didn't have. He thinks of a new way to organize. He thinks of a new thing to say on the telephone. He thinks of something. That's how he made his money. And your view would be -- and it's new, too, and it's useful, made him a fortune -- anything that helps any businessman succeed is patentable because we reduce it to a number of steps, explain it in general terms, file our application, granted?
MR. JAKES: It is potentially patentable, yes.
JUSTICE BREYER: You know, I have a great, wonderful, really original method of teaching antitrust law, and it kept 80 percent of the students awake. They learned things.[Audience laughter.] It was fabulous. And I could probably have reduced it to a set of steps and other teachers could have followed it. That you are going to say is patentable, too?
MR. JAKES: Potentially.
JUSTICE SCALIA: You know, you mention that there are all these -- these new areas that didn't exist in the past because of modern business and what-not, but there are also areas that existed in the past that don't exist today. Let's take training horses. Don't you think that -- that some people, horse whisperers or others, had some, you know, some insights into the best way to train horses? And that should have been patentable on your theory.
MR. JAKES: They might have, yes.
JUSTICE SCALIA: Well, why didn't anybody patent those things?
MR. JAKES: I think our economy was based on industrial process.
JUSTICE SCALIA: It was based on horses, for Pete's sake. You -- I would really have thought somebody would have patented that.
JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: So how do we limit it to something that is reasonable? Meaning, if we don't limit it to inventions or to technology, as some amici have, or to some tie or tether, borrowing the Solicitor General's phraseology, to the sciences, to the useful arts, then why not patent the method of speed dating?Chief Justice Roberts dug into the Bilski patent in question, and noted how ridiculously broad the claims were:
MR. JAKES: Well, first of all, I think, looking at what are useful arts, it does exclude some things. It does exclude the fine arts. Speaking, literature, poems, I think we all agree that those are not included, and there are other things as well. For example, a corporation, a human being, these are things that are not covered by the statutory categories.
JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: So why are human activities covered by useful arts?
MR. JAKES: Human activities are covered.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: What -- I'm looking at your Claim 1, in Joint Appendix page 19 to 20. How is that not an abstract idea? You initiate a series of transactions between commodity providers and commodity consumers. You set a fixed price at the consumer end, you set a fixed price at the other end, and that's it.He went on to point out that some of what the patent seems to cover has been around since the 17th century (history buff, apparently). Anyway, you never know how the Justices will actually rule -- and there are big questions well beyond just "allow/don't allow" that will be the really important thing to watch for in the decision. Will they set up a new "test" for patentability? Will they exclude certain areas (business models? software?) from patent coverage? Will they come out with a very narrow ruling that just focuses on Bilski's patent and leave the bigger questions for another day? That's where things will get interesting. But, at the very least, it seems likely that the worst case scenario of saying a patent like Bilski's is valid is quite unlikely to be the end result.
I mean, I could patent a process where I do the same thing. I initiate a series of transactions with sellers. I initiate a series of transactions with buyers. I buy low and sell high. That's my patent for maximizing wealth.
I don't see how that's different than your claim number 1.
The product designers over at MintPass have created these concept designs for real life calculators that look just like the calculators that pop up on a Windows or Mac OS screen.
via The Raw Feed
From Russian designer Vadim Kibardin. It's pricey, of course, but I think all you'd need for a remake is a bunch of closet rod, a miter saw, some wood glue, and vast patience. [via Neatorama]
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There's a lot of crazy going on with the "OpenOffice" mouse we posted up earlier, turns out it's not "authorized" but it did spark a lot conversations about mice with more than a couple buttons. Pictured above is the calculator mouse I picked up in Japan a few years ago a Tokyu Hands, I love it!
"Know It All No 2 Pencil Set" on Etsy, lovely.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
As a special preview for our upcoming Alex Rider Dream Gadget Contest, we're giving away two copies of Scorpia and Ark Angel by Anthony Horowitz, the fourth and fifth books in the Alex Rider series. Just leave a comment in this post and tell us why you or your kid(s) needs one of these books. Please make sure you include your email address in the comment form field (it won't be published). All eligible comments will be closed by Noon PST on Sunday, November 14st. The winners will be announced next week on the site. Good luck!
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On November 17th, we'll be launching the Alex Rider Dream Gadget Contest, to coincide with the release of the next chapter in Alex's adventures, Crocodile Tears . The book comes out the same day that MAKE, Volume 20 (the kid-themed issue) hits newsstands! In case you're unaware, Alex Rider is a young spy whose exploits are chronicled in a popular series of teen spy/adventure books. Alex uses all sorts of crazy high tech contraptions, made from things in his school backpack, to get out of sticky situations.
Attention all adventure-seekers, gadget lovers, and closet inventors. You are invited to join in the fun! If you were Alex Rider, what gadget would you want in the upcoming adventure Crocodile Tears? Design your Alex Rider dream gadget, inspired by an everyday object (i.e. an iPod, a toothpaste tube, a pen). The winning gadget will be built here at MAKE Labs. Send us a schematic, tell us what your gadget is made from, and how it works. Your entry can be a schematic, sketches, and/or an explanation by you. Remember that the winning gadget should be inspired by an everyday object that one could realistically build (as much as we wish we could create a pair of scissors that fly us to the moon)!
In preparation for the contest, we're offering excerpts from the Alex Rider books, highlighting the fantastic, clever (and entirely fictional) gadgets used by Alex. Up this week is the Radio Mouth Brace from Scorpia.
Radio mouth brace:This brace is a simple and easy-to-use tracking device. The radio transmitter is held on a circuit board printed over the top of the brace so that it lies against the roof of the mouth. The metal loops that hold it in place act as an antenna.
When it is worn, the brace transmits a steady and powerful signal, which is constantly monitored by MI6’s network of radio towers. Each tower analyzes the direction and strength of the signal, and by putting this information together, the location of the wearer can be pinpointed. The accuracy of the system depends on the amount of information available, but it is usually as close as one hundred feet.
A tiny switch built into the underside of the brace changes the frequency of the radio signal being produced. This is often used as a distress call.
The brace operates on kinetic power, in the same way as some modern watches. At the back of the device, in a hollow molded to the roof of the wearer’s mouth, is a small, flat box containing a capacitor, a small weight, and a microgenerator. As the wearer’s head moves, the weight moves back and forth, causing the generator to spin. This produces enough current to keep the capacitor charged and the radio signal transmitting.
You can download the high-res schematic for the bike pump and download a sample chapter from Scorpia to see how Alex uses it to get out of trouble.
Disclaimer: Excerpts from Alex Rider: The Gadgets by Anthony Horowitz are fictional and for inspiration only. Readers should not attempt to recreate these gadgets.
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From the MAKE Flickr pool
Cyrille built this MIDI fader box based on Arduino complete with desktop config software - looks perfect for one-handed live usage. Check out the photoset for the full feature list.
In the thread about Warmouse's unauthorized and many-buttoned OpenOffice mouse, Don Simpson points to ProHance's illustrious original. 40 buttons! It requires DOS 2.0. [AtariMagazines]
I have a 40-button mouse, the ProHance PowerMouse 100, from around 1990. ProHance Technologies in Sunnyvale, CA also made 3-, 12-, and 17-button mice. If you think "ProHance" is so silly a name that no-one else would have used it, just try Googling it by itself
Jeremy sez, "Video of a starlings swarming; rather amazing, and recalls for me many images from technology and nature."
Bird Swarm (Thanks, Jeremy!)
What, exactly, is Rupert Murdoch thinking? First, he announces that all of Newscorp's websites will erect paywalls like the one employed by the Wall Street Journal (however, Rupert managed to get the details of the WSJ's wall wrong - no matter, he's a "big picture" guy). Then, he announced that Google and other search engines were "plagiarists" who "rip off" Newscorp's content, and that once the paywalls are up (a date that keeps slipping farther into the future, almost as though the best IT people work for someone who's not Rupert "I Hate the Net" Murdoch!) he'll be blocking Google and the other "parasites" from his sites, making all of Newscorp's properties invisible to search engines. Then, as a kind of loonie cherry atop a banana split with extra crazy sauce, Rupert announces that "fair use is illegal" and he'll be abolishing it shortly.For whom the net tollsWhat is he thinking? We'll never know, of course, but I have a theory.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Jeffrey sez, "Nico Roig created this fantastic visualization of a mouth at the dentist. The image of the dentist is a real photo, and the mouth is Nico's creation. If you ever wanted to see what it's like sitting on the tongue like a piece of candy... here you go."
Dentistry in depth (Thanks, Jeffrey!)
Message Mandelson (Thanks, Jim!)
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MirlitronOne explains how to turn a Velleman MK107 LED Running Light kit into a simple 8-step sequencer for use with analog synthesizers. A handy kit hack, but it's also not too much work to build one from scratch.
Related:
When I first saw this proof of concept synchronized grid of iPods I wondered why somebody would go through all the trouble. I have to catch myself when I think like this. Sometimes it's best to just appreciate the polychromatic glow and short staccato chirping for what it is. [via Gizmodo]
The Alunda Church Choir put their backs into this performance titled "Harvest" using the land-amplifying terrafon instrument. The piece, created by Olle Cornéer and Martin Lübcke, is apparently part of an ongoing series (requiring some very sturdy and determined participants). Read more over at Create Digital Music.
Just Added: Our samples galleries of the Ricoh GXR camera system. We've been given a chance to get out and about with both the lens modules the company announced this morning. So here are a selection of Beta samples from both the A12 APS-C 50mm equiv. prime and the S10 1/1.7" 24-72mm zoom modules. We've prepared 52 shots taken at a range of ISOs, apertures and (where appropriate) focal lengths, including a mixture of camera JPEGs and RAW conversions. Comments Off [link]
I purchased my CupCake CNC Deluxe Kit from MakerBot Industries. This machine is from batch #8, and it's serial #000305. Future batches may be slightly different, so don't use this as an exact guide for making your own CupCake CNC. Here's what MakerBot Industries says about this version of the kit:
This kit has everything you need to build a MakerBot CNC and get started in DIY digital fabrication. Not only have we included all of the parts you need to build a CupCake CNC, but we've also included all the tools that you'll need to put it together and have the build go smoothly.
What exactly is included in the $950 deluxe kit?
- The laser-cut parts to assemble a CupCake CNC machine.
- 3 x NEMA 17 motors to drive your machine
- The nuts, bolts, and various hardware to assemble it.
- The belts and pulleys for it to move things around.
- All the bearings to make your machine nice and smooth.
- The highest quality precision ground shafts for the X and Y axes we could find.
- Pre-assembled 3rd generation electronics to drive it better, faster, and stronger.
- Magnetized, detachable build platform to make removing your finished prints easier.
- Pinch-wheel Plastruder to make things in plastic.
- 1lb of natural ABS to get you started printing in 3D.
- USB2TTL cable to talk to it
- cat5e cables to wire things up
- Standard ATX power supply
- Tools kit with all the hex keys, wrenches, and other bits you need to construct it.
- Full 5lbs of ABS plastic so you can print your heart out (in addition to the 1lb of ABS)
- Extra acrylic build surface, and a spare build platform
- SD card to buffer your prints
You can also save some money by purchasing the Basic CupCake CNC Kit for $750. Check out the link for more information about what is, and isn't, included in the basic kit. Then again, you could always build your own from scratch since it's totally open source.
Let the unboxing begin:
The first thing I found was a nice letter from the MakerBot team and a couple of postcards. I'm going to keep these filed away in a safe place. Maybe one day I'll be on the Antiques Roadshow and the host will let out a delighted *gasp* when I whip out my original, signed MakerBot Industries letter. Hey, you never know?!
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Lavie sez, "The Apex Book of World SF is the first anthology of SF/F/H stories from around the world, including Yang Ping's tale of Chinese hackers in a future game world, Aleksandar Ziljak's Men in Black meets Boogie Nights thriller and S.P. Somtow's classic examination of post-World War II Thailand and its most notorious serial killer. This rare anthology of international SF sets out to showcase some of the best international writers have to offer and the different perspectives of people from outside the American-British sphere of publishing - with authors from Malaysia, China, the Philippines, Israel and Palestine, France, the Netherlands and elsewhere."
The Apex Book of World SF (Amazon)
Apex Book of World SF Released! (The World SF News Blog)
(Thanks, Lavie!)
The Electronic Brick Starter kit allows you to easily connect various digital, analog, and I2C/Uart modules to any shield-compatible Arduino. The kit comes with 10 modules, and the sensor chassis. You can start building projects without the need to solder or breadboard. Just plug, program, and play!
Electronic Brick starter kit includes:
- (1) Arduino sensor chassis
- (1) LCD 16*2 Characters
- (1) Rotary Angle Sensor (Analog)
- (1) Button Switch
- (1) Piezo buzzer
- (1) Tilt Switch
- (2) LEDs
- (1) Light Sensor
- (1) Temperature Sensor
- (1) 2-pin Plugable terminal module
- (5) Fully-buckled 3 Wire Cables
- (1) 10-pin Colorful Ribbon Cable (for connecting the LCD)
The podcast is in eight parts -- I started reading it before I'd finished the story, so there's some minor inconsistencies that'll be fixed in the final cut. Next up I'll be reading "Martian Chronicles," my young adult story about free-market ideologues colonizing Mars, and the video games they play on the way to the Red Planet.
The doomed rogue AI is called BIGMAC and he is my responsibility. Not my responsibility as in "I am the creator of BIGMAC, responsible for his existence on this planet." That honor belongs to the long-departed Dr Shannon, one of the shining lights of the once great Sun-Oracle Institute for Advanced Studies, and he had been dead for years before I even started here as a lowly sysadmin.No, BIGMAC is my responsibility as in, "I, Odell Vyphus, am the systems administrator responsible for his care, feeding and eventual euthanizing." Truth be told, I'd rather be Dr Shannon (except for the being dead part). I may be a lowly grunt, but I'm smart enough to know that being the Man Who Gave The World AI is better than being The Kid Who Killed It.
Not that anyone would care, really. 115 years after Mary Shelley first started humanity's hands wringing over the possibility that we would create a machine as smart as us but out of our control, Dr Shannon did it, and it turned out to be incredibly, utterly boring. BIGMAC played chess as well as the non-self-aware computers, but he could muster some passable trash-talk while he beat you. BIGMAC could trade banalities all day long with any Turing tester who wanted to waste a day chatting with an AI. BIGMAC could solve some pretty cool vision-system problems that had eluded us for a long time, and he wasn't a bad UI to a search engine, but the incremental benefit over non-self-aware vision systems and UIs was pretty slender. There just weren't any killer apps for AI.
From EFF's Secret Files: Anatomy of a Bogus Subpoena
The government added insult to injury by also inserting this language on the first page of the subpoena: "You are not to disclose the existence of this request unless authorized by the Assistant U.S. Attorney. Any such disclosure would impede the investigation being conducted and thereby interfere with the enforcement of the law."The problem? The law doesn't require the recipient of a federal grand jury subpoena to keep the subpoena secret (which is why, typically, subpoenas often will "request" -- but not require -- a recipient's silence). There are certainly secrecy requirements for participants in the grand jury -- such as the jurors and the prosecutors -- but those requirements do not extend to witnesses (or potential witnesses such as a subpoena recipient). And although the SCA does provide the government with the option of obtaining a court order under 18 U.S.C. § 2705(b) requiring silence when the recipient's disclosure would have an adverse affect on an investigation, the government in this case did not obtain any such gag order.
In sum, without any legal authority to back up their purported gag demand, the government ordered Ms. Clair not to reveal the existence of the subpoena, a subpoena that as already described was patently overbroad and invalid under the SCA. This is exactly the kind of unjustified demand of silence that creates a fog around the government's often-overreaching surveillance activities. How many other subpoena recipients have remained silent over the years in response to such bogus demands, and how many of them violated their users' privacy by handing over data that the government wasn't entitled to? We simply do not know, and because of a lack of meaningful reporting about the government's use of the SCA, we cannot know.
We were determined that our client would not be one of the silenced, and that this illegal subpoena would eventually see the light of day.
I asked, "How are people selected for secondary searches?. She replied "It's random.""Where are all the white guys?" -- Update on "Do I have the right to refuse this search."I asked "Is there a mark on my boarding pass?" She replied, "We used to do that, but we don't do it anymore." She did not know why that practice had been discontinued.
I stated "So you look at people as they are entering the metal detector, you make some type of assessment, and then you select people for secondary searches, right?"
...At this point, I turned to look over my shoulder and observed a Caucasian woman in her late thirties or early forties standing inside the whole-body imager. I called my screener's attention to this and said. "Look over there. There's a woman in the scanner. You all picked me for a search, and then the very next person you select is a woman. Why didn't you pick a white guy? Where are all the white guys?"
She replied, helpfully, "We are understaffed today and we don't have enough male screeners to do pat downs. We are not allowed to do opposite sex pat-downs so we are only selecting women for secondary screening."
By this point, I was seated and she was patting down the bottom of my feet. The secondary search, more thorough than the last search I had been subjected to in Albany, but equally ineffective, was nearing completion. I said "If you are only selecting women, how is that random?"
She said, "You're done. You can collect your belongings, Have a nice day."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The University Library of the University of California, Santa Cruz, seeks an enterprising, creative, and service-oriented archivist to join the staff of Special Collections & Archives (SC&A) as Archivist for the Grateful Dead Archive. This is a potential career status position. The Archivist will be part of a dynamic, collegial, and highly motivated department dedicated to building, preserving, promoting, and providing maximum access both physically and virtually to one of the Library's most exciting and unique collections, The Grateful Dead Archive (GDA). The UCSC University Library utilizes innovative approaches to allow the discovery, use, management, and sharing of information in support of research, teaching, and learning.Grateful Dead Archivist (via Resource Shelf)Under the general direction of the Head of Special Collections and Archives, the GDA Archivist will provide managerial and curatorial oversight of the Grateful Dead Archive, plan for and oversee the physical and digital processing of Archives related material, and promote the GDA to the public and facilitate its use by scholars, fans, and students.
Gareth from Make sez, "Here's Collin's latest electronics video tutorial, on induction. He's the David Lynch of DIY The Scorcese of open source education The Tarantino of tutorials And he rocks it all in a natty suit and tie! What's not to love?"
MAKE presents: The Inductor
(Thanks, Gareth!)
TonyBot sez, "This video is from a talk I saw Professor Lessig give on Wednesday the title is 'It is About Time: Getting Our Values Around Copyright.' The talk was given at EDUCUASE a major technology in higher education conference. As an IT support guy for professors at a New England state school I run up against copyright every day, Lessig's talk is both informative and inspiring, though I'd be interested in ways the people would react to his concluding call for action."
It is About Time: Getting Our Values Around Copyright
(Thanks, TonyBot!)
After several weeks of rumors Ricoh has unveiled its first digital system camera, the GRX. The system takes a novel approach by offering interchangeable slide mount 'lens units' - sealed modules containing both optics and sensor, meaning it can switch from a large (APS-C) 12 MP CMOS with a fast prime lens to a tiny 10 MP CCD (with a 24-70mm lens). We've had a pre-production GXR system in the office for a week and have produced an in-depth hands-on preview which you'll find after the link. We've also taken lots of pictures with both lens modules so look out a little later today for an extensive gallery of samples. Comments Off [link]
John Boiles, who earlier this year showed us how to control an RC car using an iPod's internal accelerometer (and also how to control the lights on a dance floor in more or less the same way), is a member of Austin, TX, based engineering collective Waterloo Labs, who have up-gunned his iPod technology to control steering, brakes, and acceleration on a full-size automobile. Definitely not the safest hack I've ever blogged, but probably the most impressive. Great work, lady and gents. [Thanks, John!]
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"Setting Sail Into Space, Propelled by Sunshine"The (actual sail) is made of aluminized Mylar about one-quarter the thickness of a trash bag. The body of the spacecraft will consist of three miniature satellites known as CubeSats, four inches on a side, which were first developed by students at Stanford and now can be bought on the Web, among other places. One of the cubes will hold electronics and the other two will carry folded-up sails, (Planetary Society co-founder Louis) Friedman said.
Assembled like blocks, the whole thing weighs less than five kilograms, or about 11 pounds. "The hardware is the smallest part," Dr. Friedman said. "You can't spend a lot on a five-kilogram system."
The LightSail missions will be spread about a year apart, starting around the end of 2010, with the exact timing depending on what rockets are available. The idea, Dr. Friedman said, is to piggyback on the launching of a regular satellite. Various American and Russian rockets are all possibilities for a ride, he said.
Dr. Friedman said the first flight, LightSail-1, would be a success if the sail could be controlled for even a small part of an orbit and it showed any sign of being accelerated by sunlight.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Parallax has a new MCU module optimized for robotics that looks pretty cool.
The Propeller Robot Control Board provides all the necessary base circuits needed to build a very powerful mid-size robotics platform. The control board has an on-board USB serial interface to facilitate programming and communication with the Propeller chip. A dual switching supply regulates 6.5 - 20 VDC input to 3.3 V and 5 V at up to 3 A and contains green and red LEDs to indicate proper operation or an under-voltage condition. The on-board dual H-bridge motor driver makes it possible to directly drive DC motors up to 2.8 A and 20 V. The 24 available I/O pins are buffered through three 8-bit bidirectional voltage level translators providing direct 5V interface capability. The input voltage can come from a battery pack or a wall adapter using a standard 2.1mm barrel plug.
The 24 available I/O pins are connected to three TXB0108 8-bit bidirectional voltage level translators. They convert the voltage from 3.3V at the Propeller chip to 5V at the servo headers. These pins are fully bidirectional and are grouped as three ports with eight I/O lines each. Each group is brought out to a set of servo headers. A jumper selects either 5V or VIN for the group. All data pins on the servo header are at 5V signal levels, however should the need arise to directly access the Propeller chip I/O for 3.3V interfacing, solder points are provided to disable the translators and gain direct access to the I/O pins.
It retails for $100.
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Giles Turnbull @ The Morning News has a fun article about the family Nomenclature for LEGO... He writes -
It’s a scene that is replayed by kids and parents everywhere. And it’s the starting point for a unique quirk of language: Lego nomenclature.
Every family, it seems, has its own set of words for describing particular Lego pieces. No one uses the official names. “Dad, please could you pass me that Brick 2x2?” No. In our house, it’ll always be: “Dad, please could you pass me that four-er?”
And I’ll pass it, because I know exactly which piece he means. Lego nomenclature is essential for family Lego building.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Channel 4's documentary-style drama, The Execution of Gary Glitter, imagines an alternative Britain that reintroduces the death penalty. Celebrity sex offender Paul Gadd—AKA glam rock star Gary Glitter—is re-tried for his crimes and hanged. It's a story about the moral quandary of capital punishment, generously garnished with the British media's obsession with pedophilia.
The real Gadd was disgraced by a child porn bust and his subsequent residency in sex tourist hotspots. After 18 months in a Vietnamese jail on a conviction for child molestation, he was released in 2008 and flown back to the U.K. The tabloids now stalk him and run stories like "Gary Glitter changes the style of his beard."
Execution depicts a different outcome. Arrested hours after landing, he's put on trial to test new legislation that allows capital punishment for crimes committed abroad. He sneers, argues, and wheedles. Talking heads, politicians and members of the public pop up in news-style interviews. Then he is put to death. Channel 4's Hamish Mykura says that "this drama confronts the public with what many say they want."
The documentary style is clever, and Hilton McRae does an excellent job as Glitter. He is alternatively smug, sordid, humane and pathetic. But then there's that whole weird thing about portraying an act of rationalized mob justice on someone who is very much alive and free.
Among the rationales offered is that the movie confronts us with a difficult truth; namely, that Britain needs to see Gary Glitter executed if it is to come to terms with its own moral indecisiveness over capital punishment. But the movie's concept isn't really "Imagine if we made new laws that dealt severely with sex offenders." It is "Imagine if we made new laws that would make Gary Glitter the center of national attention again." His presence is a gimmick. Without him, it would be a dry exploitation flick about no-one in particular—but one that might at least make sense.
The film's legal devices exist only to bring the celebrity to the rope. Hangings within a month of conviction, without any right to a court appeal? The EU not enforcing the Convention of Human Rights just to keep Britain happy? Get real, little Englanders. Besides, Britain has an ample supply of bona-fide child murderers competing for eligibility: I guess Ian Huntley just doesn't look enough like Fu Manchu.
Moreover, if the filmmakers cared about depicting the reality of capital punishment, they could have at least cooked up a more convincing doom. Western executions, where they play, follow years of legal wrangling. They are usually dehumanized clinical events, not pathos-filled remixes of Saddam's last gasp.
In any case, the dramatics fade before the loopyness of the Glitter premise. How did Britain's fixation on sexual stranger danger get this baroque? I'm stumped, frankly. I'm ready to be told the whole thing was some kind of deadpan black comedy. But a few ideas do spring to mind.
My countrymen often complain of the nanny state, but that modern taste for risk-peddling seems an international phenomenon. Throw pedophiles in the mix, however, and the outcomes start getting really weird.
Take, for example, the recent actions of Watford local council, which banned parents from being with their own children in a public play area. Then there's the 82-year-old woman accused of being a possible pedophile after taking photos of a swimming pool. And so on. This suggests confusion over the proper areas of association between kids and adults.
Then there's concern over youngsters' wellbeing in general. Britain's children are supposedly the unhappiest in Europe. Those responsible for their happiness were given a scathing review by UNICEF, which suggested British families are the least nurturing this side of the former Warsaw Pact. Though Britian's schools remain among the world's best, the rankings fell sharply over the last decade, and reports of its state childcare system make for grim reading.
There's also a broader anxiety over childrens' place in society at large. That younger kids are given few of the freedoms and pleasures older generations enjoyed is another problem hardly isolated to the U.K. But our fear of older youths is manifested in the press as a distinctively British moral panic. Tabloids seem to treat the nation's offspring either as hapless victims of predatory adults, or as dangerous, vaguely subhuman livestock.
Perhaps this sort of thing lets us forget that most childrens' problems are the result of familial and institutional neglect, not the likes of Gary Glitter.
Finally, there's the case of the bleeding obvious: media the world over sexualizes children, but Britain's is particularly ready to project its hypocrisy at deserving targets--or anyone who addresses the subject matter without the required solemnity.
Satirist Chris Morris produced the original "Paedogeddon" mockumetary in 2001, ridiculing the media's voyeuristic obsession with the subject. He got pols and celebs to repeat nonsensical urban legends, making fools of the lot. Condemnation of the show was nearly universal, but reinforced his point over and over again. One Daily Star article slamming the show ran next to an item praising a 15-year old singer's breasts. The Daily Mail described Morris as "unspeakably sick"--even as it ran a photo of the bikini-clad royal busts of princesses Beatrice, 13, and Eugenie, 11.
In one of the final scenes of The Execution, the condemned man says "they're not going to execute Paul Gadd." This makes a point about celebrity, about how it trades in mediated personas. The "thought-provoking" question is clear enough--is something other than a man being destroyed?--but it's a thought buried under the batshittedness of Glittergeddon.
If The Execution of Gary Glitter sounds barbaric, rest assured that it was merely inane. He isn't some metempsychotic vessel for the nation's unease over child abuse or the death penalty, after all. He's just a dirty old man, and he gets what he deserves.
Have too many Roombas and don't know what to do with them? Instead of letting your cats ride on them or taking pictures of how they work, why not make a real-life Pac-Man game? Thats what a group of enterprising engineers from Colorado State University did with Roomba Pac-Man. In the game, a human controls Pac-Man using a joystick, and each ghost acts autonomously to find and chase our hero.
My favorite part is that the dots are actually bits of paper that the Pac-Man roomba has to physically vacuum up. [via hacked gadgets]
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This funny soap dispenser promises to wash away all sins.
