The forthcoming DVD release of Star Trek: The Original Series - Season 3 includes a pilot episode previously only available on the bootleg circuit. Apparently a German film collector found a print of this alternate version of the second Star Trek pilot, titled "Where No One Has Gone Before," and brought it to Paramount. Above are some clips from that alternate version of the pilot, which has never officially been released until now. From The Live Feed:

The alternate version is in three parts with 1970s-style act breaks, an entirely different version of Captain James T. Kirk's opening monologue ("But now a new task. A probe out into where no man has gone before") and music that contrasts from the famous opening theme and an extended action sequence.

From the (press) release:

This version of "Where No Man Has Gone Before" was completed in 1965 and features archived footage that was not included in the pilot episode ultimately broadcasted.  Never-before-aired, this newly recovered version is believed to be what was originally screened for NBC, and the basis for their decision to broadcast STAR TREK.

Star Trek: The Original Series - Season 3, Blu-ray (Amazon, thanks Jason Weisberger!)

UPDATE: From Memory Alpha, more background on this alternative version of the pilot episode:

There is a different, pre-broadcast cut of ("Where No One Has Gone Before") in the archives of the Smithsonian Institution. This unique cut includes a few brief scenes trimmed from the aired cut of the episode, different opening titles, and a unique closing theme. The alternate closing theme can be heard on the GNP Crescendo CD Star Trek: Original Series (Volume 1) "The Cage" / "Where No Man Has Gone Before". The pre-broadcast cut is commercially available only in bootleg form, although it has been screened at numerous conventions. Paul Carr was credited as "Navigator" in the end credits of the original cut. The version on the first season box set may contain the alternate ending theme, but does have the changed credits. This cut will be finally be available commercially on the Season 3 Blu-Ray set.

At a UN-sponsored Internet Governance Forum in Egypt, anti-censorship group Open Net Initiative was startled by a demand from UN officials to remove a poster mentioning Chinese Net censorship. When ONI refused the request, security personnel arrived and took away the poster. The group was promoting a new book, Access Controlled, a survey of Internet censorship, filtering, and online surveillance. A witness said, "The poster was thrown on the floor and we were told to remove it because of the reference to China and Tibet. We refused, and security guards came and removed it. The incident was witnessed by many." Here is a video of the removal.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes "In the official record of the historic House debate on overhauling health care, the speeches of many lawmakers echo with remarkable similarities. Often, that was no accident. Statements by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten by Washington lobbyists working for Genentech. E-mail obtained by the NY Times shows that lobbyists drafted one statement for Democrats and another for Republicans. Genentech, a subsidiary of Swiss drug giant Roche, estimates that 42 House members picked up some of its talking points — 22 Republicans and 20 Democrats, an unusual bipartisan coup for lobbyists. ... The statements were not intended to change the bill, which was not open for much amendment during the debate. They were meant to show bipartisan support for certain provisions, even though the vote on passage generally followed party lines. ... Asked about the Congressional statements, a lobbyist close to Genentech said: 'This happens all the time. There was nothing nefarious about it.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SAME WE CAN BELIEVE IN: The Obama administration has granted Defense Secty. Robert Gates new powers to block the release of 21 color photos showing prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq being abused by Americans. The ACLU sued for release of the images. Federal courts previously rejected attempts to keep them secret. ACLU: "No democracy has ever been made stronger by suppressing information about its own misconduct."

Apple's filed a patent on a design for a device that won't let its owner use it unless that person demonstrates that she has complied with an advertiser's demands by paying attention to an ad and taking some action indicating her dutiful attention.

It's amazing how many of these vendors fail to understand Chekhov's first law of narrative: "A gun on the mantelpiece in act one is bound to go off by act three." That is, if you design a device that is intended to attack its user -- by shutting her out of her own files and processes against her wishes and without her consent -- someone will figure out how to use that device to attack its user.

Or as Mitch Kapor once quipped, "Architecture is politics." Designing your device ecosystem for 1984 gives you...1984.

Cue Apple Fanboys who want us all to understand that the infallible and immortal Steve Jobs would only use this power to show us lovely, interesting, and informative messages that we're happy to receive in 5... 4... 3... 2... 1....

Its distinctive feature is a design that doesn't simply invite a user to pay attention to an ad -- it also compels attention. The technology can freeze the device until the user clicks a button or answers a test question to demonstrate that he or she has dutifully noticed the commercial message. Because this technology would be embedded in the innermost core of the device, the ads could appear on the screen at any time, no matter what one is doing.

The system also has a version for music players, inserting commercials that come with an audible prompt to press a particular button to verify the listener's attentiveness.

The inventors say the advertising would enable computers and other consumer electronics products to be offered to customers free or at a reduced price. In exchange, recipients would agree to view the ads. If, down the road, users found the advertisements and the attentiveness tests unendurable, they could pay to make the device "ad free" on a temporary or permanent basis.

Apple Wouldn't Risk Its Cool Over a Gimmick, Would It? (via Warren Ellis)

JZ sez, "The OpenNet Initiative, a joint effort of U. Toronto's Citizen Lab and Harvard's Berkman Center, tracks Internet filtering by governments around the world. We published a book detailing such filtering in 2008 called Access Denied, and the sequel is about to come out, called Access Controlled. ONI colleagues Ron Deibert and Rafal Rohozinksi were at the Internet Governance Forum today in Egypt, where they hosted a reception about Access Controlled. It featured a poster describing the book. The poster contained the following sentence: The first generation of Internet controls consisted largely of building firewalls at key Internet gateways; China's famous 'Great Firewall of China' is one of the first national Internet filtering systems. That was apparently enough to trigger concerns on behalf of the Chinese government, and UN-liveried security guards knocked over the poster and then later removed it."

IGF 2009 event rattled by UN Security Office (Thanks, JZ!)

oliderid sends along a BBC report on progress toward Europe's home-grown GPS system. The Galileo concept will get an initial test via four "pathfinder" satellites that will be the first in the Galileo constellation. Galileo is intended to be complementary with the US GPS system — when all 30 Galileo birds are flying, a receiver with both GS and Galileo capability should enjoy 1-meter positional accuracy, vs. the several meters available through GPS alone, according to the article. There's a video tour of the facility where the pathfinders are being built. "After all the wrangling, the delays, and the furor over cost, Europe's version of GPS is finally starting to take shape. Due for launch in pairs in late 2010 and early 2011, the 'pathfinders' will form a mini-constellation in the sky. They will transmit the navigation signals that demonstrate the European system can become a reality."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The author of long-running "secret diary of a call girl" blog Belle de Jour outs herself. Dr. Brooke Magnanti is a science blogger--and respected health researcher. And she really was a sex worker, for about a year and a half, while finishing her Ph.D. Takeaway lesson: Graduate school is expensive, yo. Takeaway debate: Is this good or bad for female scientists/science bloggers? It shouldn't matter at all. But does it?

The Installer writes with this excerpt from an Associated Press report: "A couple of genetic testing companies are promising to match couples based on DNA testing, touting the benefits of biological compatibility. The companies claim that a better biological match will mean better sex, less cheating, longer-lasting love and perhaps even healthier children. 'How many dating services can you think of where they can suggest you might have better children?' said Eric Holzle, founder of ScientificMatch.com, one of the first online dating sites to use DNA. ... The idea is that people tend to be attracted to those who have immune system genes that are dissimilar from their own. Biologists say the HLA genes of the immune system — which are responsible for recognizing and marking foreign cells such as viruses so other parts of the immune system can attack them — also determine body odor 'fingerprints.' And people tend to be attracted to the natural body odors of those who have different HLA genes from their own."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

jammag writes "Some developers have gone to four-year universities, where they've also studied subjects like history and sociology, while other coders go to vocational schools and focus purely on writing great software. So why, asks a longtime developer, is there a stigma attached to not having a four-year degree, when 'blue collar' coders might be better trained? Why does the software industry keep emphasizing this difference — and generally giving better pay to four-year grads? Isn't being a developer about real skill level, not the piece of paper on the wall?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

badger.foo writes "The Australian rickrolling of jailbroken iPhones only goes to prove that bad passwords are bad for you, Peter Hansteen points out, as he reports on the further exploits of the password-guessing Hail Mary Cloud (which we've discussed in the past). The article contains log data that could indicate that the cloud of distributed, password-guessing hosts is growing. 'With 1767 hosts in the current sample it is likely that we have a cloud of at least several thousand, and most likely no single guessing host in the cloud ever gets around to contacting every host in the target list. The busier your SSH deamon is with normal traffic, the harder it will be to detect the footprint of Hail Mary activity, and likely a lot of this goes undetected.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Robert X. Cringely once again educates and amuses with his take on how we could clean up the garbage that's in orbit around Earth. I cannot vouch for his math, but it makes sense to me. Quoting: 'We’d start in a high orbit, above the space junk, because we could trade that altitude for speed as needed, simply by flying lower, trading potential energy for kinetic. Dragging the net behind a little unmanned spacecraft my idea would be to go past each piece of junk in such a way that it not only lodges permanently in the net, but that doing so adds kinetic energy (hitting at shallow angles to essentially tack like a sailboat off the debris). But wait, there’s more! You not only have to try to get energy from each encounter, it helps if — like in a game of billiards or pool — each encounter results in an effective ricochet sending the net in the proper trajectory for its next encounter. Rinse and repeat 18,000 times.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sometimes, from certain places, the light from the sun can briefly appear green. NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day explains,

Just as the setting Sun disappears completely from view, a last glimmer appears startlingly green. The effect is typically visible only from locations with a low, distant horizon, and lasts just a few seconds. A green flash is also visible for a rising Sun, but takes better timing to spot. A dramatic green flash was caught in the above photograph in 1992 from Finland. The Sun itself does not turn partly green, the effect is caused by layers of the Earth's atmosphere acting like a prism.

Astronomy Picture of the Day via Cliff Pickover.

In the early part of this decade, after the first dotcom crash, a lot of us thought that we'd all have personal servers by now.

We called them fractional horsepower servers because the issues were different. Ease of use mattered more than scalability. And communication between servers and authoring tools was also essential. Hence XML-RPC, OPML and RSS.

Instead, user generated content emerged as a business model, and many people went with the free hosting offered by startups. I never have depended on it, I've been inside too many tech companies to be willing to trust my writing with them, esp not long-term. The UGC business model only seems good for the users -- as they say if the offer appears too good to be true, it probably is. If you read the user agreement, they have no long-term obligation to host it. They probably don't even have to give you a copy of your own stuff.

People ask how I use River2 while I travel. Well, my ISP, AT&T, offers a plan where you get five static IP addresses. I'm pretty technical so I know how to set it up, and I have an old laptop in my house that runs River2. I log into it even when I'm getting on from the house, but I can check what's new from an airplane at 35000 feet, where I am right now. I've not mentioned this before, but a couple of people asked me how I do it, and I told them, and neither thought I was crazy. That's a good sign.

Not that Google Reader isn't an excellent product, it is. But it isn't what I like. It's okay, not everyone drinks the same beer or drives the same car. And with broadband becoming more popular, and computers cheaper, and old laptops lying around doing nothing, maybe for some people now's the time to start looking at having your own server running in your own house.

It'll be interesting to see what kinds of comments this post gets.

When I put together my Chumby Guts kit, I had to stop and scratch my head a few times because I didn't know how to orient a part or which screws to use. I filmed the second time around, to share with you how easy it comes together! Now all that's left is to build a plush enclosure for it. Keep an eye out for an upcoming CRAFT Video about that!

Subscribe to the MAKE podcast in iTunes, or download the m4v video.

More:

• Chumby in a box
  
• The Chumby has landed!
  
• Custom case for Chumby Guts
  
• Chumby Guts -- so delicious!
  

In the Maker Shed:

Chumby Guts

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theodp writes "Edward Moses and his team of 500 scientists and engineers at Lawrence Livermore's National Ignition Facility are betting $3.5B in taxpayer money on a tiny pellet they hope could produce an endless supply of safe, clean energy. By the fall of 2010, the team aims to start blasting capsules containing deuterium-tritium fuel with 1.4 megajoules of laser power, a first step towards the holy grail of controlled nuclear fusion. Not all are convinced that Moses will lead us to the promised land. 'They're snake-oil salesmen,' says Thomas Cochran, a scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council. Moses, for his part, seems unfazed by the skepticism, saying he's confident that his team will succeed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For most, there will have been only one game released this week (and that most includes a number of major publishers, who, gun-shy from the competition, have pushed their own releases to Q1 of next year): Infinity Ward's return to the Modern Warfare franchise they laid down in 2007. Modern Warfare 2 [Infinity Ward, PC/PS3/Xbox 360] The developer has twice courted controversy in recent weeks, one for the very unfortunately devised viral video gag (for which IW has yet to offer a formal apology), and the second with early leaked video of what it surely intended as its most emotionally charged level -- a scene in which an agent embedded with an arms trafficker is present for a civilian massacre.

Infinity Ward were correct on one count: taking the scene out of context is misleading, as the premise is the hook on which the global geo-political fallout that guides the rest of the game is hung, and your involvement in it has its own twist of fate. But they otherwise squandered what could have been a multi-faceted moral quandary and flattened it into a paper-thin action scene with no real ramifications.

Players, who experience the scene looking down the barrel of their own gun, can easily simply play witness to the horrors around them without once pulling the trigger, but IW make it impossible to actually finish the level without killing at least a few of the SWAT team that arrives when the damage is done (unless I missed a route in my hour-long trial to do just that). But simply observing also never overtly raises the suspicion of the rogue team you're embedded with -- that only comes if you deliberately try to hang back away from the group for more than a minute (and, I don't know, say, distract yourself by taking a closer look at all of the hardcover jackets in the airport bookstore).

Devoid of any real freedom of choice, then, and coming -- as it does -- far too early in the game for players to first become emotionally invested in its world, its execution (no pun) falls flat. That's a shame, too, because its bombastic volume drowns out a number of more genuinely affecting subtleties. Chiefly, the return of 'Soap' McTavish -- the rookie recruit who served as the first MW's player-character -- as a vet seasoned by your own actions in that game, now guiding and protecting you as an even fresher face (whose approval I found myself actively seeking in our duo levels).

As a summer-blockbuster-esque rollercoaster (and one clearly made by a team in love with the essence if not the lessons of HBO miniseries Generation Kill), it's hard to come away unaffected by the thrill of its ride, and -- as with the original -- its true long term draw the unique lite-MMO structure of its multiplayer (that unlocks abilities as you level up through wins and kills), but it's a shame that it doesn't require more of you than thinking -- in the Colbert-ian sense -- from your gut, for as much as it chides you for shooting from the hip.

Spore Islands [Area/Code / Maxis, web]

Also recently launched and well worth your time is one of EA's first forays into the Facebook gamespace with one of its largest brands: Spore. Created by NYC developer Area/Code (the studio behind masterful iPhone puzzler Drop7) in conjunction with original creator Maxis, the game feels more closely akin to the direction the Spore franchise was headed in in the earliest days of development.

Influenced by the biodiversity (and the high number of evolutionary experiments that died in their tracks) of the Burgess Shale, Spore Islands is a numbers game of statistic modifications to create a creature that can withstand both the elements and the set of creatures that inhabit your island -- or, with its deep social hook, the islands of your Facebook friends.

The catch is that your observations (the simulations that let you see first hand how your character is faring and what weaknesses or strengths it needs to focus on) and the DNA point modifications to tweak your character to flourish in its environment are unlocked over real-time (or by purchasing them outright), but it's one of the games on the platform that's actually worth that wait, and easily the smartest time-sink on Facebook.

Half Minute Hero [XSEED, PSP]

And finally, another game released just a week or two prior but still eating up most of my time (in very tiny chunks) is the PSP release of XSEED's Half Minute Hero, a game which tells you more about its premise in its title than you'd first believe.

Created originally as a miniscule freeware indie release that would be expanded to a full commercial production, Half Minute's hook is that of a traditional RPG, shooter, and strategy game played out in a world where there's only 30 seconds before total demonic annihilation.

What this means as a player is that your 8-bit hero is tasked with leveling up via CPU-controlled random battles and player-controlled returns to town for better equipment while staring at a rapidly decreasing timer, desperately trying to save up the precious last seconds to defeat the inevitable time-controlling demon at the end (and undertaking various seconds-long missions in between to get there).

It's a slow-motion version of the three-second micro-games of Nintendo's WarioWare series, and -- split as it is into easily digestible chapter missions -- is the perfect addition to a platform that's been very much in need of more portable plays. Already too much overlooked even by the hardcore, there aren't many other recent games that are more deserving of your 30 seconds at a time.

Alice spent the weekend in a Scottish hotel that Winston Churchill was a regular guest at -- even though he seems to have hated it, as is demonstrated by this sign in the lobby.

... and he hated it. by Crys

My last few trips to Canada, I've been puzzled by difficult-to-follow advocacy ads in which the broadcasters and the cable/sat operators have fought each other tooth and nail, begging Canadians to take side in a dispute over -- well, that's the problem. What was it over?

This Writers Guild of Canada YouTube clip does a great job of sorting it out. Both groups receive enormous subsidies to promote Canadian television (broadcasters get a "local programming fee" and cable/sat operators get a state-backed monopoly that keeps foreigners out). Both want more money, and both want the other guy to collect the fee, so they other guy looks like a jerk.

A pox on both their houses.

WGC: "Tv Tax?" "Save Local TV?" Here's the truth! CANADIAN tv! (Thanks, Emily!)

itwbennett writes "The percentage of devices on the Internet that are configured to accept DNS queries from anywhere — what networking experts call an 'open recursive' or 'open resolver' system — has jumped from around 50 percent in 2007 to nearly 80 percent this year, according to research sponsored by DNS appliance company Infoblox. As more consumers demand broadband Internet, service providers are rolling out modems configured this way to their customers, said Cricket Liu, vice president of architecture with Infoblox. Georgia Tech researcher David Dagon agreed that open recursive systems are on the rise, in part because of 'the increase in home network appliances that allow multiple computers on the Internet. ... Almost all ISPs distribute a home DSL/cable device. Many of the devices have built-in DNS servers. These can sometimes ship in "open by default" states.' What's worse, says Dagon, is that many of these devices do not include patches for a widely publicized DNS flaw discovered by researcher Dan Kaminsky last year."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jon Skovron's debut novel, the YA book Struts & Frets, is a dynamite, nuanced story about fannish love, musical obsession, first romance and true friendship. It follows the adventures of Sammy Bojar, a small-town, midwestern high-school senior who's life revolves around his band, a trainwreck of ego and conflict called "Tragedy of Wisdom." The band means everything to Sammy because music means everything to him. He frames his whole world with indie pop, seeking out authenticity with a driven, blinding passion.

Sammy's at the turning point in his life. His best male friend is coming out, his best female friend is in love with him (and it turns out it's mutual, though he didn't know it). The frontman for his band is a roiling, angry bully who is ever on the verge of physical violence. His beloved grandfather, a minor jazz legend, is sliding into incapacity as age and a hard life catch up with him.

The plot-points are all pretty standard YA set-pieces, but there's never a stale (or dull) moment in Struts & Frets. That's thanks to the incredible nuance and heart that Skovron brings to the interpersonal relationships, using these familiar emotional scenes as pivots for a deft emotional acrobatic act that is as moving as it is engrossing.

I was never a (good) musician, but I've always been passionate about music. I remember what it was like to be in the band, to be wrapped up in all the issues around creativity, friendship and identity; to seek out answers to life's big questions in music, to worry at the unanswerable questions of commercialism, success and popularity. Struts & Frets will feel instantly authentic to anyone who's ever felt the pride and shame of being an outsider.

Struts & Frets

I owe the Hacklab.to people an apology. Last spring I ran this post about how they'd tuned the motor on their laser cutter to play the Super Mario Theme as it repositioned itself, and I mentioned that it was too perfect, and wondered "if it's not just some video of a laser cutter with a flanged-out version of the theme cut into the soundtrack."

Yesterday, I dropped in at the Hacklab in Kensington Market (it's an amazing place), and saw the laser cutter do its thing. And you know what? It plays an absolutely perfect Super Mario Theme. Seriously.

Laser etcher plays Super Mario. It's real! Hacklab.to, Kensington Market, Toronto, ON, Canada.avi

pickens writes "Denmark has unveiled official research showing that two-year-old children are at risk from a bewildering array of gender-bending chemicals in such everyday items as waterproof clothes, rubber boots, bed linen, food, sunscreen lotion, and moisturizing cream. A picture is emerging of ubiquitous chemical contamination driving down sperm counts and feminizing male children all over the developed world. Research at Rotterdam's Erasmus University found that boys whose mothers were exposed to PCBs and dioxins were more likely to play with dolls and tea sets and dress up in female clothes. 'The amounts that two-year-olds absorb from the [preservatives] parabens propylparaben and butylparaben can constitute a risk for oestrogen-like disruptions of the endocrine system,' says the report. The contamination may also offer a clue to a mysterious shift in the sex of babies. Normally 106 boys are born for every 100 girls: it is thought to be nature's way of making up for the fact that men were more likely to be killed hunting or in conflict. But the proportion of females is rising. 'Both the public and wildlife are inadequately protected from harm, as regulation is based on looking at exposure to each substance in isolation, and yet it is now proven beyond doubt that hormone disrupting chemicals can act together to cause effects even when each by itself would not,' says Gwynne Lyons, director of Chem Trust."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An Open-Source Approach To Better Prosthetics @ NPR via Chr1s.

Before Jonathan Kuniholm had a tour of duty in Iraq, he worked for Tackle Design, an industrial design, research and development firm. After that tour, he was missing part of his right arm — which he lost when his Marine patrol was ambushed near Haditha.

When Kuniholm returned to his design shop, he brought along three prosthetic arms given to him at Walter Reed Medical Center — the same body-operated hook many veterans have used since World War I, a shorter utility prosthetic, and a new, state-of-the-art myoelectric arm. Each one had its drawbacks — and when Kuniholm and his Tackle Design colleagues disassembled them, they quickly concluded that they could improve on the designs. They founded the Open Prosthetics Project, an open-source collaboration that makes its innovations available to anyone. And Kuniholm signed on with Revolutionizing Prosthetics, an initiative of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.

Kuniholm's story — including the details of his injury and how his experience in Iraq has shaped both his work and views of the war — is featured in Michael Belfiore's new book, The Department of Mad Scientists: How DARPA Is Remaking Our World, from the Internet to Artificial Limbs. He joins Fresh Air contributor Dave Davies for a conversation about the Open Prosthetics Project and its goals.

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Raver32 sends news that the lost second pilot for Star Trek has been found, and will be released next month on Blu-ray. "Star Trek fans know there were two pilots for the original series. The first, 'The Cage,' was rejected by NBC for being 'too cerebral' (ah, some things never change). The second, 'Where No Man Has Gone Before,' replaced the actor who played the captain with William Shatner and was more action driven. That pilot had an alternate version which was largely lost and has never aired. Apparently, a film collector in Germany acquired the print and 'recently brought it to the attention' of CBS/Paramount. CBS is now releasing this version on Blu-ray Dec. 15."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

blueser writes "From Nov 10th to Nov 13th the Brazilian Government hosted a public hacking contest to test the robustness of its voting machines. 38 participants from private and public IT companies (including the Brazilian Federal Police) were divided into 9 teams, which tried several different approaches to try to tamper with the software installed on the machines, and even to physically interfere in other stages of the process. All attempts (aside from a minor one which would not compromise the overall results) failed, and observations from the participants and neutral observers will be taken into account to improve the process even further. Here is the official announcement for the contest (Google translation; Portuguese original). A summary of the results is available in the Brazilian press (original). Brazilian voting machines use Linux." US voting officials ought to be envious of their Brazilian counterparts, or ashamed, or both. Perhaps this MIT-developed cryptographic voting system offers a way forward.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"He is a black president, and he understands the slavery abolition movement and Lincoln's major significance for that movement. Thus, on [Tibet] we hope that President Obama, more than any other foreign leader, can better, more deeply grasp China's stance on protecting national sovereignty and territorial integrity." ● Obama arrives in Shanghai tomorrow. China is pre-emptively detaining dissidents (via Instapundit). ● Related: Obama snubbed the Dalai Lama in DC this week (and that's a first, Bush and Clinton met with him every time).

During the health care debate in congress, more than a dozen US lawmakers all parrotted talking points scripted for them by lobbyists working for biotech/drug giant Genentech. So what? Said one of those lobbyists, "This happens all the time. There was nothing nefarious about it."

Momma Tried: Colton Harris-Moore has a posse. And t-shirts. (previous post / thanks Jason Weisberger)

You can find a lot of crap on YouTube, but you know what? You can find gems like this, too. I don't know much about the origin of this video, but it's one in a series of three ten-minute chunks on YouTube -- rare color footage of Tibetan tantric masters meditating, in retreat. Looks a few decades old. Start at 0:39 and just zone out. According to the notes from the uploader, the last 3 faces you'll see in the video are:

1) His Holiness Dudjom Rinpoche, head of the Nyingma lineage in India
2) Venerable Kalu Rinpoche, great realized master in the Kagyu lineage.
3) His Holiness, the 16th Karmapa Lama (...) head of the Karma Kagyu lineage.

Video: Part 1. Part 2. Part 3.

Anonymusing writes "The FDA has announced an investigation into the safety and legality of alcoholic beverages containing caffeine. As a Wall Street Journal blog reports, two major beer companies, MillerCoors and Anheuser-Busch, stopped producing caffeinated alcoholic drinks last year after reports surfaced of increased negative effects compared to caffeine-free alcohol. CNN notes that, according to FDA rules, 'food additives require premarket approval based on data demonstrating safety submitted to the agency' — and caffeine is a food additive. The 26 targeted beverage makers have 30 days to respond."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Image: Koala, a CC-licensed photo by Mshai]

The Australian Koala Foundation reported this week that koala populations are declining because we humans continue to invade their habitats. Wildfires and global warming aren't helping, either. They could become extinct within a few decades. More: BBC, Reuters.

I've been wearing Vans slip-ons since I was a teenager. In recent years, Vans has made shoes featuring designs from pioneering underground artists I really dig like Robt. Williams and Rick Griffin. I was thrilled to find out that they recently added a series of shoes featuring the art of comix pioneer R. Crumb! Seen above are slip-ons emblazoned with Crumb's Fritz the Cat. They're $50. (Mr. Natural appears on a pair of high-tops.)

R. Crumb Slip-On Vans (Amazon)

This weekend I had an opportunity to attend a renewable energy workshop organized by the Southeastern Massachusetts Achievement and Retention in Technology group at Bristol Community College. The morning was packed with teachers sharing their lesson and unit ideas on ideas based around the STEM subjects of green technologies and energy.

The college offers a Lending Lab for tools and lab equipment that most schools are unlikely to stock. Through using these equipment resources, teachers can get their students' hands onto enough materials to for a series of lessons on windmill design, hydrogen cars, air purity testing, and more. Teachers shared their experiences in bringing this equipment into their classes and how it affected student learning.

The NEED Project was a new one to me, focusing on bringing the ideas of energy systems to the classroom. Their site has an extensive collection of materials organized by grade level that are ready to implement in the classroom, from background information to student handouts. Chuck Lawrence of Upper Cape Regional Technical High School shared his experiences of having his students evaluate the energy use of educational spaces in the school, and has encouraged his students to help their families understand their use of energy from environmental and financial perspectives.

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tugfoigel writes "Astrophysicists at the University of Warwick and Kiel University have discovered two bodies the size of earth with oxygen-rich atmospheres — however, there is a disappointing snag for anyone looking for a potential home for alien life, or even a future home for ourselves. These are not planets, but are actually two unusual white dwarf stars." The objects, 220 and 400 light-years distant, are believed to be remnants of stars between 7 and 10 solar masses. Such stars, the largest that evolve to white dwarves, have been sought for years. If the stars were a little more massive they would collapse to neutron stars, or so the theory goes. Here is the paper on the arXiv.

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One of my fave websites at the moment is Hizook, Travis Deyle's robot news portal. Here's a snippet from a piece he posted about the University of Stuttgart and University of Karlsruhe's open source swarm robot project:

I'm a huge fan of so-called micro robots -- those with cm length scales, thus ? m3. I've posted about numerous micro robots before, including the amazing Alice micro robot swarms from EPFL, and I am a long-time micro and nano autonomous sumo robot advocate (see RoboGames). Perhaps that is why I'm so excited about the SwarmRobot.org open hardware micro-robot swarm, developed by the University of Stuttgart and the University of Karlsruhe. All of the hardware and software is open (in the GPL sense), including parts lists, circuit board and chassis designs, and software. With a stated goal to produce sub-€100 robots, I'd really like to see this take off. Combined with a wireless power surface, a micro-robot in perpetual motion would make a great desk ornament!

Open Hardware Micro-Robot Swarm Project

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The scrub together table and lazy stool furniture pieces by designer Jason Taylor are pretty neat looking, but is anyone else thinking what I'm thinking? Thats right, they are just a motor away from becoming giant bristlebots! The bristles look like they might need to be bent over a bit first, though. [via dude craft]

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