I'm delighted to introduce a new occasional guest blogger on Boing Boing, Dr. Jacques Vallee, who will contribute posts every so often. In the world of computer science, Jacques is best known for his pioneering database research in the 1960s at Stanford Research Institute and then, during the next decade, for leading the development of the the world's first network-based computer conferencing system for the ARPANET. He launched that project, called PLANET, in 1972 at Institute for the Future (IFTF), the non-profit thinktank where I'm a researcher. At IFTF, Jacques and his colleagues studied the social impact of online communication and explored its applications in industry. In 1976, Jacques founded InfoMedia, the first computer conferencing and groupware company. I met Jacques in person several years ago when he popped into IFTF for a visit. It was quite exciting for me as I was quite familiar with his work, albeit in a very, very different context.

For nearly fifty years, Jacques has studied the history and culture of the UFO phenomena and written a slew of fantastic books on the subject, always calling for a scientific investigation of reports rather than an approach rooted in belief. Among ufologists, Jacques is very much a "heretic among heretics" for opposing the typical opinion that UFOs are nuts-and-bolts spaceships piloted by extraterrestrials. Jacques once said, "I'll be disappointed if (UFOs) turn out to be only spacecraft from outer space." Whenever I see the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I get a kick out of François Truffaut's character Claude Lacombe insisting that the UFO phenomenon "is an event sociologique!" That is exactly something Jacques would say, and indeed Steven Spielberg based the character on him. My favorites of Jacques' books are Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers, Messengers of Deception, and The Invisible College, where he considers whether we're living inside an information-based control system, a mind-spinning idea that's now embraced by many physicists.

Recently, Jacques published the second volume of his personal journals, titled Forbidden Science, and is now completing a new book about ancient UFO sightings. He also works as a partner in a venture capital firm investing in emerging technologies with potential space applications. Jacques's intellectual rigor around anomalous phenomena and weird science has inspired me since I was a teenager. I'm thrilled to have his voice on Boing Boing.

DesScorp writes "Over the past few years, the City of Chicago has installed video cameras all over the city. Now the Wall Street Journal reports that the city has not only installed its own cameras for law enforcement purposes, but with the aid of IBM, has built a network that possibly links thousands of video surveillance cameras all over Chicago. Possibly, because the city refuses to confirm just how many cameras are in the network. Critics say that Chicago is becoming the city of Big Brother. 'The city links the 1,500 cameras that police have placed in trouble spots with thousands more—police won't say how many—that have been installed by other government agencies and the private sector in city buses, businesses, public schools, subway stations, housing projects and elsewhere. Even home owners can contribute camera feeds. Rajiv Shah, an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has studied the issue, estimates that 15,000 cameras have been connected in what the city calls Operation Virtual Shield, its fiber-optic video-network loop.' There are so many camera feeds coming in that police and officials can't monitor them all, but when alerted to a situation, can zoom in on the area affected. The ACLU has requested a total number of video feeds and cameras, but as of yet, this information has not been supplied."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'm actually writing this post just minutes after passing through TSA security at JFK, where I was stopped to investigate the fact that I have a candle (a gift) in my carry-on luggage. I'm not sure if this sort of thing makes us any safer (I have my doubts about this kind of "security theater"), but the overall experience was fine and the TSA folks were perfectly nice and professional and let me go on my way (yes, with the candle) in less than a minute. However, apparently some TSA agents have decided that they should serve a purpose well beyond their assigned domain of air travel security. They've been investigating other crimes as well, sometimes going on pure fishing expeditions if they think something looks suspicious, even if it has nothing to do with air travel safety. For example, people have been detained for traveling with large quantities of cash. However, after being sued multiple times, the TSA recently agreed to change its rules to limit its agents actions, so that they are no longer allowed to investigate random crimes and are officially limited to just focusing on air travel security.

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Motherboard has this wonderful look inside the world (and workshop) of Ralph Baer, creator of Pong, Simon, and other electronic/video game classics.

Ralph Baer and His All-Purpose Boxes

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Two workers at a Lexington, Kentucky public library were fired after it was discovered that they had teamed up to keep a copy of Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier out of circulation.

According to the story, Sharon Cook, 57 and Barbara Boisvert, 62, basically colluded to keep the book out of circulation -- Cook, who had become disturbed by the book's imagery, checked it out for a year, meaning no one else could check it out. However, when an 11-year-old girl put it on hold, Cook was unable to continue her delaying tactic -- and Boisvert stepped in, removing the hold, and keeping the book out of circulation.

Both were fired for their actions. The Jessamine County Public Library has not commented on what they call a personnel matter.

Cook seems to have some kind of obsession with the book -- she's still carrying it around in her knapsack, the dirty parts marked with Post-Its. This, despite what she describes as her mortal danger when reading the book:?

"People prayed over me while I was reading it because I did not want those images in my head," she says.

Alan Moore, destroyer of library workers

Technorati Tags: Comics

Entropy98 writes "It seems that the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Cyber Crimes Center, known as C3, has replaced its '$8,000 Tableau/Dell server combination' with more efficient and much cheaper $300 PS3s. Each PS3 is capable of 4 million passwords per second, and C3 currently has 20 PS3s with plans to buy 40 more. Naturally this is only being used to break encryption on computers seized with a warrant and suspected of harboring child pornography."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Among the hairier of my hare-brained schemes involves formulating a safe-to-drink chemiluminescent cocktail. I think the first person to do it will become a very wealthy laughingstock, which, as I understand it, is the very definition of The American Dream.

So I got really excited when I first saw this post over on TheDieline.com, because I thought somebody had pulled it off. Unfortunately, it's just the labels that are glowing, not the booze itself, but still it's pretty cool. If you ignore the crass commercialism, the shameless marketing, the horrors of alcoholism, drunk driving, etc., etc. [via Geekologie]

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Earlier this year, we noted that Apple and AT&T had been sued for patent infringement concerning Shazam, the popular service for identifying music. At the time, we noted how this was a clear demonstration of the difference between just the idea and the actual innovation. Shazam has been around for ages, and despite having a good idea (ability to identify music just by hearing it), it struggled for many, many years until the iPhone came along, and there was a platform on which its concept made sense. During that time Shazam kept trying out new things and improving its service. The basic concept behind Shazam (identifying music) isn't that interesting. It was all the work that Shazam kept doing over the years to find the right mix of things that consumers wanted that made it worthwhile.

But, of course, patent holders continue to insist that it's the original idea only that's important.

So, once again, Shazam's service is involved in a patent lawsuit, this time from Digimarc, who has sued Shazam directly, claiming infringement. Now, Digimarc claims that Shazam is infringing on its patents, even though Digimarc does not offer a similar service at all. In fact, Digimarc is in an entirely different business: it's really a DRM company who wants to try to stop people from sharing or appreciating content, by locking it down. More recently, Digimarc has been focused on patenting its watermarking concept (despite plenty of prior art), and going the lawsuit route.

So, we have the tales of two companies who have been around for quite some time. One is focused on providing unique and compelling solutions that make consumers' lives better. And the other is focused on locking things down and talking about its intellectual property. Guess which one's getting sued by the other? So, please, explain again how patents encourage innovation? Once more, it looks like patents are being used to prevent actual innovating by those who prefer to lock up ideas.

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eqisow writes "The new default policy for Fedora 12 allows local, unprivileged users to install signed packages without root access. This change apparently went mostly unnoticed until after the Fedora 12 GA release, at which point it sparked a mailing list thread that is, as of this writing, over 100 posts long."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Barring any major uptick in stupid, this will be the last time I poke the 2012 believers with a stick. I swear. (At least, until January 2013.) Besides, this is a slightly different take than the usual debunking. The Santa Fe Reporter (the paper) sent Santa Fe reporter (the person) Corey Pein into the heart of the End of the World Industrial Complex to capture a slice-of-life that is by turns frustrating, fascinating, depressing and hilarious.

To be precise, there are 1,149 days until Dec. 21, 2012, when something will--nay, must--happen. It won't be the end of the world but, if it is, SFR regrets the error.

And later,

One nine-part YouTube film claims "The Illuminati Freemasons" have conspired over centuries to erect the new tower of Babel, aka the Freedom Tower, over the World Trade Center site in 2012. ("Anti-Semitism tends to float behind some of the conspiracy theories," Hoopes says.) The sublimely paranoid film also claims that since the 1970s, this cabal has "conveniently conditioned you to accept that global warming is all your fault," when actually "Your SUV's have little to do with it.. THEY.. conditioned you to become AFRAID of the SUN and CO2." Another production--by a man whose résumé boasts a few years' work long ago as a CNN field producer--makes the exact opposite argument, assailing "global warming deniers" for hiding evidence of the coming catastrophe. "In 2012, Americans will be burying their dead as their forefathers did during the Civil War--by the thousands. By the tens of thousands," the narrator says solemnly. (He goes on to pitch a "2012 Survival Guide," $34.90 plus shipping.)

My Oh Mayan! from the Santa Fe Reporter

Image courtesy Flickr user schoschie, via CC

The owner of this electric shaver with a faulty power switch taught it a lesson it won't forget. I think it's great that he fixed it instead of throwing it away and buying a new one.

This fellow has a good story to share. (Via Cynical-C)

Any hams out there that need a quick-and-dirty morse code beacon? Then you might be interested in Mark VandeWettering's Arduino Based Morse Beacon. I really like the clever way that he stores the code sequences for each character:

It's a little bit clever (a very little bit) but I guess it does require some explanation. Morse code characters are all length six or less, and each element is either a dot or a dash, so it would seem that we can store the pattern in six bits. Let's say that dits are zero and dahs are one. Lets store them so the first element gets stored in the least significant bit, and the next in the second most, and so on. The only trick is knowing when there are no elements left, because otherwise we can't tell (for example) K (-.-) from C (-.-.) To do that, we store a single extra one after all the other elements are taken care of. Then, when we are looping, we do the following. If the pattern is equal to one, we are done (that's our guard bit). If not, we look at the least significant digit. If it is a zero, we have a dit, if we have a one, it's a dah. We then get rid of that element (by dividing by two, or shifting right if that floats your boat) and repeat. Voila. Each character takes only a single byte to store its pattern, and decoding is just done in a few instructions.

Mark admits that using an Arduino for this is a bit of overkill, however I think that convenience trumps component cost for one-of projects like this. If you are up for the challenge, however, you could probably build one with more esoteric components, such as an EEPROM+counter, or even a music-box type mechanical system. Anyone create something crazy cool like that?

In the Maker Shed:

Make: Arduino

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In this video, Michelle Phan shows you how to apply make-up to look like Sailor Moon.

A nice tutorial on creating your own textured backgrounds from two stock images by Ali Felski (who’s site is beautifully textured in its own right).

Ligature, Loop & Stem, “creators and curators of ?ne typography-related products”, has launched. Ingenious site layout and presentation, and some wonderful ampersand-related products are already for sale.

Microsoft announced an early look at IE9 for developers. Notable stuff includes support for the border-radius property. No vendor-specific extension. Good reason to include actual CSS3 properties along with vendor-specific ones today. Also mentioned is support for more CSS3 selectors. I’ll be more excited if there’s word on text-shadow, box-shadow, RGBA and transforms.

The FontFont library is now availble on Typekit. This is quite huge news. It also looks like the available fonts have been optimized for web use. Bar: raised.

From $50 bamboo T-shirts to environmental coloring books handed out by petroleum companies, greenwashing continues to be high on my list of "Things That Make Me Want To Rip My Hair Out and Then Go Do Worse to the People Responsible." The worst part, of course, is that it's often not easy to know when your green is coming to you heavily laundered. ClimateCount is an organization that's trying to help on that front. They put together an annual scorecard of Fortune 500 companies that breaks down these firms' real record on the environment. Then they rate the company's commitment to environmental responsibility as Stuck, Starting, or Striding. Everything is separated out by sector, so you can easily find the companies you want to check up on. Granted, I'm not convinced that Airlines, as a category, are ever going to move much beyond Starting. But I'm also frankly impressed that any are even at that point. So, tradeoffs.

Couple of major downsides. First, this list is by no means comprehensive. We're talking Fortune 500 here, so that won't help you if you don't do a lot of business with those companies to begin with. For instance, the Beer category is sadly limited to Anheuser-Busch, Molson Coors, and SAB Miller. And what a cold, sad world that would be.

Second, this is all a little subjective. Proctor and Gamble may get a Striding rating, largely for setting up energy use reduction goals that produced some results, and that may make them more green than their competitors. But does that really make them a green company? Overall, I think this might be better for helping you figure out which companies are totally blowing smoke up your various orifices than it is at helping you know which companies are truly awesome. But even that is useful.

ClimateCount 2009 Scorecard
Interview with ClimateCount's Executive Director, from New Hampshire Public Radio

wiedzmin writes "DeCODE Genetics, a genetics research firm from Iceland, has filed for bankruptcy in the US, and Saga Investments, a US venture capital firm, has already put in a bid to buy deCODE’s operations, raising privacy concerns about the fate of customer DNA samples and records. The company hasn’t disclosed how many clients signed up for its service, but provides a number of customer testimonials on its site, including Dorrit Mousaieff, Iceland’s first lady."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Note to self: If I am reborn as a crocodile, I must remember never to run across the backs of hippos.

We recently wrote about how booksellers were freaking out over the "price war" between Amazon and Wal-Mart, whereby they're starting to offer certain books at a very cheap price to bring in more customers. The whole thing was a bit silly. Reader Robin Trehaeven alerts us to a fantastic opinion piece in the Library Journal by Barbara Fister, a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, in which she does a superb job mocking what she refers to as the "accessibility paradox" where those who are used to being gatekeepers to information at the same time as they're supposedly promoting the benefits of greater information, suddenly start whining when information really does get more accessible. This includes those booksellers:

I'm also taken aback by the horrified response of the book industry. I thought the big crisis was that nobody reads. Now it turns out the problem is that books are so popular with the masses they're being used as bait to draw in shoppers.

Come on, guys, get your story straight! Which is it?

But most of her brilliant sarcasm is directed at those in her own profession, who both work hard to get information for free, at the same time they complain about how the internet has made it so easy to route around librarians:

It strikes me that this issue is somewhat parallel to the love-hate relationship that many academic librarians have had with the Internet. Although our complicated relationship is improving, there are still some silly assumptions floating around. Oh no, our reference stats are down! Hurrah! People are able to find answers without our help. That's awesome! Anybody can publish on the web, unlike scholarly journals which are peer-reviewed. Fine, but don't tell me all peer-reviewed journal articles are shining examples of reason and academic brilliance. A lot of them are finely-sliced research rehashing the same findings, or are closely examined and exquisitely detailed trivia. Besides, there are plenty of examples of peer review failing in spectacular ways--and examples of wonderful peer-reviewed journals that were born free online.

But this is my favorite: Unlike information you find on the web, we pay for the information in our databases, and you get what you pay for. No, actually, with what you pay for you get a lot of junk that you don't even want, but you have no choice.

You want this journal? You have to subscribe to this pricey bundle. Either that, or you purchase one article at a time for your users, something more and more libraries are doing. You spend less, but the information never visits the library--it goes straight from the publisher to the desk of one user. All the library gets is the bill. Apart from failing on its merits, the argument that paid is better than free is self-contradicting. We can't tell students that purchased information is by definition better than free and, at the same time, beg faculty to recognize how broken the current system is and please, please, please make their work open access.

It's a great overall column, and nice to see a librarian lay the smackdown on hypocrisy within the bookselling and librarian worlds.

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Yesterday, I posted that injured soccer player Robin van Persie flew to Serbia for a "placenta oil massage" he hoped would heal him. Apparently, the placenta treatment worked, but the Telegraph reports that it may have been more invasive than a massage: "The injection of horse placenta on to the affected area is claimed to speed up the recovery process and, while it is not known whether (teammate Yossi) Benayoun and Riera have been subjected to that treatment, both have returned to Liverpool ahead of schedule with their rehabilitation." (Thanks, Carlo Longino!)

Jacques Vallee is a computer scientist, partner in a venture capital firm, and author of more than 20 books, including Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers, The Invisible College, and The Network Revolution.

When it was revealed that the U.S. resorted to torture to extract information from prisoners, many people my age must have had a very somber thought for the thousands of young Americans who had given their lives on the beaches of Normandy in a brave effort to rid the world of governments that engaged in such shameful practices. Two other thoughts flashed to mind: the stupidity of giving up the high moral ground at a time when the U.S. had earned so much goodwill thanks to its stand on democracy and human rights; and the pointlessness of such interrogations, often stated by our military experts, since the victims will generally admit to anything in order to stop the pain.

My friend, French Résistance leader Jacques Bergier, who was tortured multiple times by the Gestapo, made the ludicrous "confession" that his network planned to invade Corsica. In reality they were looking for heavy water and for Werner von Braun's rocket base.

As a child of World War Two who remembers its limitless horrors, my revulsion at the practices of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib was so great that it took me a while to realize the more positive implications: if our henchmen used waterboarding, a practice so primitive it placed us in the same hateful historical imagery as the caves of the Inquisition and the cellars of the Nazi, this can only mean that all the fancy interrogation drugs developed in classified labs in the 60s and 70s have failed: there is no truth serum. We should be relieved about that.

We already knew that LSD, once hyped as the ultimate key to the mind, did little more than propel you into colorful delusions. But evil doctors had other tricks and claimed to be working in secret on even better, kinder biotech ways to crack open the human soul and read it like a book. Using everything from neurotoxin derivatives to functional MRIs, the State would soon overcome personality defenses, in the interest of our collective safety. It would finally control not only our deeds but our thoughts as well, thus achieving law and order on a grand scale.

Evidently the scheme hasn't quite worked out as predicted: If we could simply slip a little green pill to the bad guys to find out their plans, we wouldn't have to resort to messy medieval practices that don't work. So let's go back to the legal methods of interrogation recommended by the professionals. And let's thank waterboarding for the realization that our intimate thoughts, prayers and dreams, flaky though they may be, will remain safe from chemical violation a little while longer.

Welcome to Ozark, Arkansas, where police officers taser 10-year-old girls.

itwbennett writes "Pity the poor engineer who had to find this one. One of the more interesting of the handful of bugs that have appeared since the launch of Verizon's Droid smartphone has to do with the on-board camera's auto-focus. Apparently it just didn't work. And then suddenly it did. Naturally, this off-again, on-again made the theories fly. But the real reason for the bug was revealed in a comment on an Engadget post by someone claiming to be Google engineer Dan Morrill: 'There's a rounding-error bug in the camera driver's autofocus routine (which uses a timestamp) that causes autofocus to behave poorly on a 24.5-day cycle,' said Morrill. 'That is, it'll work for 24.5 days, then have poor performance for 24.5 days, then work again.The 17th is the start of a new "works correctly" cycle, so the devices will be fine for a while. A permanent fix is in the works.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Remember the June 2005 Supreme Court eminent domain ruling that gave Pfizer Pharmaceutical the right to bulldoze a housing neighborhood in Connecticut to make way for a $300 million private development project? Some of the homeowners didn't want to give up their homes but Pfizer took them to court and won.

Last week Pfizer said it was shutting down its center.

This Democracy Now video has interviews with a former homeowner and a lawyer who represented the homeowners who wanted to keep their homes.

From Seth Roberts' Blog:

One of the last things Jane Jacobs wrote was a friend-of-the-court letter in the Supreme Court case Kelo v. New London where eminent domain was used to take property from private landowners and give it to a private corporation (Pfizer). It was just as outrageous as that sounds. And Pfizer got away with it.

Pfizer, After Having Its Way with the Good Citizens of New London ... )

The copyright industry lobbyists absolutely love to throw around the bogus and debunked stat that copyright contributes $1.52 trillion to the economy. That number is derived by taking any business that kinda sorta maybe touches copyright (including things like furniture and jewelry) and then assuming that all of the revenue they make is entirely due to copyright. Yes, that's ridiculous. But, if the copyright lobbyists are going to use such bogus methodology to push their agenda, it seems only fair for those on the other side to use the same methodology. Last week, we wrote about a biased editorial by two newspaper industry lawyers in the WSJ (who failed to note the conflicts of interest), claiming that Google violated copyright law, and attacked the concept of fair use.

In response, Ed Black, from the Computer & Communications Industry Association wrote a letter to the editor highlighting those lawyers factual mistakes as well as the importance of fair use throughout the industry (thanks to Yano for sending this in). Most of the (short) letter discusses all the wonderful things that fair use allows, and then has this wonderful line at the end:

Businesses dependent upon exceptions to copyright contribute $2.2 trillion to the U.S. economy. They are responsible for one in eight jobs, for a total payroll of $1.2 trillion in 2006. Fair use is serious business; it is the glue that holds the Internet and new technology together. It is worth protecting.

This is fantastic. Of course, the number is just as bogus as the $1.52 trillion used by copyright maximalists, but I think that if they're going to use their methodology to make such ridiculous claims, it's only fair to do the same for the contributions to the economy of exceptions to fair use, and as the CCIA clearly demonstrates, the businesses that rely on weaker copyright contribute significantly more to the economy than those that rely on copyright. Thus, by the copyright maximalists own logic (and numbers), shouldn't we be fighting to expand the exceptions to copyright law?

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dag writes "Drupal 6 Social Networking is an interesting book about how to build social networks and why Drupal is a good choice as a platform for building communities. Even if you don't have any Drupal experience yet, this book explains what is needed when you start from scratch and looks at the different facets of a social network." Keep reading for the rest of Dag's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Saul Griffith is an inventor and entrepreneur. He did his PhD at MIT in programmable matter, exploring the relationship between bits and atoms, or information and materials. Since leaving MIT, he has co-founded a number of technology companies including www.optiopia.com, www.squid-labs.com, www.instructables.com, www.potenco.com, and www.makanipower.com.

You might have just driven home. When you filled your car with gasoline, most likely you didn't even see the fluid as it was pumped into your gas tank. Once home, you probably turned on some lights, some music, your computer, and maybe even heat, so you could read this web page. You can't see the power running through the electrical lines that lead to your light bulb, and you don't feel it, but you do enjoy the results. Our society has made energy invisible. This invisibility makes energy convenient to use -- and the modern age is arguably wonderful as a result -- but it also makes it easy to take it for granted. Here we try to make our appetite for energy visible.

Climate change is a phenomenon we now recognize as one of the most important challenges to ever confront humanity. Like energy use, it is also mostly invisible to us, and in two important ways.  Firstly, the enormous volumes of green-house gases -- carbon dioxide, methane, CFC's etc, are quite literally invisible to our naked eyes. Secondly, the changes in climate progress so slowly that they seem invisible amidst the hustle and bustle of our daily lives. Because these consequences accumulate over decades, generations, and centuries, it is easy to not see them as pressing and urgent. Here we try to make visible these complicated and largely invisible things.

The global energy and climate conversation is about choices, both individual choices and collective choices. By choosing the amount and type of energy we consume, we are choosing the look and feel of our future. Everyone is involved in that choice. Don't be fooled: individual choices collectively have enormous effects.   A large coal power plant has a power output of 1GW (GigaWatt) which is 1 billion (1 000 000 000) Watts.  If 1 billion people reduced their power needs by just 1 watt ( About what is required to keep a compact fluorescent burning for just 1 hour a day), that's a coal fired power plant you don't need to build.  

This material tries to help you make those choices in a more informed manner. We also hope this material influences the governments, organizations and corporations who make the decisions about our energy future on a macro level.

These posts are about energy, climate change, finite resources, and the future. Unfortunately, the creation of this material is implicated in the very climate change and energy challenges we wish to avoid. You chose to read this, which means you chose to use some energy. These posts are not "carbon free" or "carbon neutral". At the time of its publishing there was practically no way that it ever could have been. Nearly every choice you make involves energy and all those choices have implications for the environment.

Two people wrote this stuff. We both ate food produced by modern industrial agriculture to power ourselves while writing. We used at least five computers at different times to do the calculations, write the words, and edit the layout. After we had done our work, editors and designers used computers to further refine the text and images. Each of those computers ran for many hours, consuming somewhere between 20 and 200 watts of power each as they did so. The computers themselves were made in factories in China and Japan with chips produced in the United States, and cases probably made from bauxite mined in Australia and processed in Argentina.

If you print this out, the paper it is printed on was probably made from trees that were cut down in Canada. The chainsaws that cut the trees ran on two-stroke gasoline. The trees were lifted onto a truck with a crane powered by diesel fuel. The truck drove the trees to the sawmill using diesel. Before the trees from which these pages were made had even been pulped, three internal combustion engines had been fired up, burned a fossil fuel and emitted some carbon dioxide. How much CO2? Not a lot. But all the little pieces add up.

If you are just reading this on the web, there are disks and processors in data centers in numerous places running from coal plants, gas plants, even hydro and solar plants where the production of the cement and silicon was itself done using fossil fuels. The point is, it's a really complex system.

As these paragraphs show, the global supply chain for energy is complex. This was in small part inspired by the pamphlet "I, Pencil - My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read." (1958). A piece that highlights just how interconnected our modern world is.

We fill our cars with gas regularly, but don't even see the liquid go into the tank. If we were to imagine that we had to fill a backpack with the fuels required for a day of our lives, what would we be filling our energy back-pack with each day?

Each day the average American sets out with:

OIL = 10.81 L/Person/day (2.9Gallons)?

COAL = 9.54 kg/person/day (21 pounds)?

NATURAL GAS = 5.88 m^3/person/day (208 cubic feet)

Which roughly converted to those other units is around 22 Pints of oil per day (one per hour!), 21 pounds of coal (another per hour) and 200 cubic feet of natural gas.

I used the annual consumption of coal and natural gas, and the daily consumption of oil, and converted it to the daily average by dividing it out by the population of the US.

The data is here.

This beehive bracelet was modeled using OpenSCAD, a tool I'm looking forward to exploring! It was made by Thingiverse user Catarina; she printed it on her MakerBot. Stylish!

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Sony's begun taking pre-orders for its new flagship "Daily Edition" reader (Think Kindle DX with less bitter DRM magic beans) for delivery next month. B&N Nook pre-orders are live, too.

Got a pedal-powered TV, but still have to keep replacing the batteries in that remote? Then you might want to keep an eye on this piezoelectricity batteryless remote (machine translation), being developed by NEC and Soundpower. Energy harvesting devices are nothing new, but this one seems interesting because it is apparently efficient enough to work off of the vibrations caused by pressing the buttons on it. They claim that it uses piezoelectric elements, which can generate electric current when bent or deformed, to capture the kinetic energy of your button press.

Of course, if you don't have access to fancy piezoelectric development tools or want to wait for their device to come out, you could probably whip up something similar by combining one of those shake flashlights and a regular remote. Anyone try that yet? [via technabob]

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An anonymous reader writes "The Enlightenment window manager project has shared on its website that it now has the backing of a major (top-five) electronics manufacturer that will be actively sponsoring the project and using Enlightenment on its devices. No manufacturer was named, but Phoronix has dug deeper and found out that Samsung is sponsoring Enlightenment. Phoronix provides independent confirmation along with citing a new Enlightenment program that Samsung sponsored and then released under the LGPL-3. They also have videos of some of the new work to this window manager that Samsung funded."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new video game called Mass: We Pray brings new family fun to those who can't wait until Sunday to go to church. It has a cross-shaped motion-sensing controller reminiscent of a Wiimote, and you can collect "grace points" in order to unlock holy mysteries. The release date is slated for Spring 2010, but it's available for pre-order now. Mass: We Pray main page via The Raw Feed

I'll give you a hint: It has absolutely nothing to do with Star Trek, Star Wars or Dr. Who. (To my knowledge. Fanboy schooling commences anon.)

More commonly called Freeth's Nephroid (which makes it sound less like a tentacled devourer of souls and more like a little boy's pet monster), it's actually a special plane curve--which is also not as weird and confusing as it sounds. Yeah, we're talkin' about a math thing today. (This was always my "B" subject, so feel free to let me know if I'm being wrong on the Internet. Again, fanboy schooling commences anon.) Onward to knowledge...

Pictured: Not the Nephroid of Freeth. Courtesy Flickr user cole24, via CC

Plane curves are really just curved shapes that exist in a two-dimensional, as opposed to three-dimensional, space. Think circle vs. sphere. "Special" plane curves are the ones that turned out to be interesting enough that mathematicians gave them their own name. Our friend the circle is a special plane curve. Ditto the parabola (aka, the curve that's kind of shaped like a boob). And, because this is math and they just like to mess with you by making "curve" not mean what you think it means, so is the line. Yeah, the "line" is really a specific thing that the general public uses as a generic term. Like kleenex.

But back to the Nephroid of Freeth. Now we know what this thing is, in general. But why is it interesting? And what's with the name? For my own sake, I'm starting with the easy question.

Nephroids are special plane curves that are shaped sort of like kidneys. (Not has fun of an analogy as the parabola, but hey, I didn't make this one up.) They often have the appearance of something produced by a bunch of mathematicians playing with a Spiro-graph. Technically, though, the shape has to do with with the way rays of light reflect off a semicircle.

The classic example is the pattern of shadows that you see at the bottom of a coffee cup when it's set out in the sun. Light reflects off the semicircular sides of the cup and you see nephroids on the bottom.

Freeth is a dude. Rather, was. Specifically, one T.J. Freeth, an English mathematician who died in 1904. He was pretty into strophoids, plane curves that are shaped like "a belt with a twist." They are all fancy like that.

Strophoids are curves, but they're also things that happen to curves. Plane curves that get their panties in a bunch, if you will. So that image above is the strophoid of a line. Freeth's Nephroid, on the other hand, is the strophoid of a circle.

See how that works?

Yes, of course you do. But you're still wondering why you care. On a practical level, I'm told that you can use the Nephroid of Freeth as a jumping off point to drawing seven-, 21-, 35-, etc.-sided shapes inside a circle. Which is great, the next time you need to do that. However, astronomer David Darling has a more practical suggestion, writing that the Nephroid of Freeth "has been described as the perfect shape for a multi-seat dining table." I'm assuming he means the kidney shape with the strophoids becoming a cutout on one side, in which case, I'd be inclined to agree.

It's also the name of a pub quiz team made up mostly of mathematicians from the University of London.

Nephroid coffee image fair use via University of Minnesota Geometry Center.

Strophoid of a line image fair use via MathCurve


Nephroid of Freeth image fair use via the Geometry Atlas.

Spotted today in the remarkable, newly renovated upstairs gallery at the (amazing, wonderful) Evolution Store in Soho, NYC: this exploded human skull, in a bell-jar. I covet this -- I'd settle for a replica, too. Anyone with a 3D printer want to knock one up and stick it on Etsy?

Exploded Skull photos

The Evolution Store

Ars Technica has allowed the cable industry lobbyists' top lawyer to explain why the cable industry supports breaking your DVR in a misguided effort to add more windows to movie releases. Not surprisingly, he simply repeats the MPAA's flat out lies and misrepresentations on this particular issue. For example, he claims that the movie studios need this or they won't get content out to the industry early enough. But that's wrong. There is nothing stopping the movie studios from releasing content whenever they would like. In fact, we've already seen that some of the major studios are releasing movies in exactly this manner (prior to DVD release), despite claiming that it's impossible to do so without enabling this form of DRM.

If the movie industry wants to add a new window where they release movies for pay-per-view offerings before they come out on DVD, there is nothing stopping them from doing so today. Nothing.

The claim that this is about preventing "piracy" is flat out bogus. Even the movie studios themselves claim that nearly every movie is already "pirated" by the time the movies hit the theaters. And these pay-per-view offerings (they like to call them video on demand, but it's really pay per view) are for a window later than the theater release. So the movies will already be available via unauthorized channels. That won't change at all.

So, what are we left with? The two main arguments simply don't make sense at all. There's nothing stopping the studios from adding this window now. And enabling selectable output control (SOC) to stop your DVR from recording these movies won't do a damn thing to reduce unauthorized file sharing of the same content. The only thing it will serve to do is make legitimate customers pissed off, because they'll be confused and annoyed when the DVR they purchased to record what comes out of their TV sets refuses to record this movie that they legally are accessing, but want to time shift (which, again, is perfectly legal).

Contrary to the MPAA and the NCTA's bogus claims, this has nothing to do with enabling some "awesome" new service. This has everything to do with trying to lock down your TV and DVR in an age when consumers are finally getting back some control. What's amusing, of course, is that this comes just as the TV industry is finally realizing that letting consumers do what they wanted with DVRs didn't harm the TV industry, but helped it. One of these days, maybe the MPAA and the NCTA will come to that realization as well. In the meantime, though, they want to get a foot in the door to let them stop your DVR from working as advertised, in the misguided belief that they need to push back on what legitimate consumers want to do with the content they watch.

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EnjoyMobil's Metabots are incredibly detailed poseable papercraft mecha robots that you assemble (and then decorate) from $10 kit books. Man, I can't wait until my kid's old enough to build these with.

Metabots

Noryungi writes "The interestingly named 'Topless Robot' has a real trip down memory lane: how the computer graphics of the original Star Wars movie were made. The article points to this YouTube video of a short documentary made by Larry Cuba, the original artist, that explains how he did it. In 1977."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Every other week, MAKE's awesome interns tell about the projects they're building in the Make: Labs, the trouble they've gotten into, and what they'll make next.

By Steven Lemos, engineering intern

Making the Hydrogen-Oxygen Bottle Rocket (that Adam Savage is posing with on the cover of the new MAKE, Volume 20) was a pretty basic endeavor, with the exception of the circuit. The original schematic diagram had a flaw in it, but only after we breadboarded the circuit -- twice -- did we catch it.

I guess that's the reason we MAKE interns build the projects that run in the magazine, so it's us who bang our heads against the table and not you. I will kindly take that cookie now.

The experience showed me that, sure, when working with electronics it's easy to misplace a component or wire, or completely miss something, which I already knew, but it's just as easy to have a diagram be the culprit. So a word to the wise (a word I'm sure all the experienced hobbyists have already discovered for themselves): if you take care when putting together these tedious circuits it will pay off, for if you can trust in your work, then you'll know the culprit lies in the plans, and you won't spend hours chasing that metaphorical wild goose.

Twice we breadboarded this bad boy before discovering an error in the schematic -- so you won''t have to.

But on to the actual launch. :) We had talked to the local electronics store owner, who at the time was making his own hydrogen using a more sophisticated apparatus, and who was interested in what we were doing with ours. So he came to watch, and brought along his professional pyrotechnician friend, who showed us how to make fuses with 12V and tiny resistors (basically the resistors pass so much current that the wire heats up and can act as a fuse to light stuff -- voilà, cheap fuses).

Our beautiful 2-stage HHO rocket ready for test launching -- before being crippled by a crash.

The first launch was a success, with the two stages going off rather quickly in succession, so we dialed in a little more delay time in the circuit before the stage 2 ignition. This was good and bad. We got more height out of the rocket on our second launch, but on its return it landed electronics side down. This resulted in our circuit behaving oddly.

So, not ready yet to call it a day, we began firing off only one stage at a time, adjusting the proportions of HHO (hydrogen and oxygen gases), water, and air, and testing the makeshift fuses, which worked fine for a single stage, but due to the time they take to ignite (3sec@12V) might not work for 2 stages.

We probably launched 12 times that day, attracting passersby. Good weather, new friends (who like blowing stuff up), and multiple launches. All in all, a good day. Houston, we have liftoff.

• Related: MAKE, Volume 20: "For Kids of All Ages"

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Lucy Knisley's comic "Downloading Optimism: Pessimism Detected" is a thoughtful response to a panel where great indie comix creators (Linda Barry, Jules Feiffer, Matt Groening, Chris Ware) decried online comics and online reading. Click through for the whole thing.

Downloading Optimism (Thanks, Ape Lad!)

Someone's apparently developing a live-action CGI motion picture adaptation of the Smurfs. It gets weirder: John Lithgow is rumored to be cast as Papa Smurf. First the Chipmunks, now this atrocity? (via Steven Leckart)

For his latest project, British art director Adam Richardson used Photoshop to superimpose Space Invader characters onto pics he took in Afghanistan and Iraq. Adam Richardson main page via NotCot

Very clever idea commercialized as the X-flex Blast Protection System, in which a high-tensile-strength composite film is applied to the inside of a masonry wall to reinforce it against lateral impact. The video embedded above was produced by Popular Science, who included the X-flex system in their Best of What's New 2009.

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This week the Codeplex Foundation announced its first project, the ASP.NET Ajax Library Project, as part of its first sponsored gallery, the ASP.NET Gallery. The CodePlex Foundation is now two months old, and Foundation President Sam Ramji has agreed to answer questions about the Foundation, its first project, and overall progress to date. Usual Slashdot interview rules apply.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sony Pictures' CEO is Michael Lynton, the guy who recently claimed that "nothing good" has come from the internet, and that piracy is killing the movie business. He made that statement less than a month ago. And yet, as Dave Title points out, Sony Pictures just announced that its international box office results have already set a new record for the year, hitting $1.63 billion. The company is bragging about this new record -- as it should. But it does seem a bit disingenuous to brag about revenue records just weeks after claiming that piracy was destroying your business and asking for government help to protect the business model. Someone might notice that these two things do not seem to agree.

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As the holidays approach this year, money is tighter than ever for everyone. When thinking about gifts to give, consider the gift of DIY electronics and kits, not only could a loved one learn a new skill, but it could start them on a journey to a wonderful lifetime hobby, possibly a career! Helping someone learn electronics is more than just giving a circuit board and a bunch of parts, you're giving the gift of time, hours of new experiences exploring the wonders of engineering and science. In the end, they'll also have something to show and share!

So let's get started. I've put together my 20 favorite (mostly) under $20 electronic kits and resources, some are from the Maker Shed, some are from other places (SparkFun, Adafruit, Instructables, TechShop, Solarbotics, Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, Parallax). Many of them are open source hardware projects, so if $20 is still too much, you might be able to put these together on your own and print out the instructions for free too! Our gift guides are meant to inspire your suggestions, so if you know of a great $20 or under electronics kit, post it in the comments!

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eldavojohn writes "A blog tipped me off to a government site that allows me to see where my tax dollars went when the nebulous 'scientific stimulus' was granted. You might be able to find this information in a bill, but you can click on your state in this interactive site to see what has happened locally to you. Perhaps it's a sign of more government transparency in regards to spending or just more propaganda."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Photojojo is giving away three Nikon D3000s, just because they love you (we do too)! They've opened up the giveaway to you, the talented, creative, awesome readers of MAKE and CRAFT. Just think of all the how-tos you could make with this thing! I'm getting jealous just thinking about it. There are many ways to enter, please do so as many times as you like! In addition to the ways to enter on the Photojojo site (like following them on Twitter), here are the ways to enter through MAKE and CRAFT:

• Subscribe to the MAKE and CRAFT Newsletters. Each subscriber gets an automatic entry to win the camera! These are monthly newsletter to keep you up to date on what's going on in our neck of the woods. (We won't spam you, scout's honor!)
• Follow us on Twitter. That's MAKE, CRAFT, make_tips, and craft_tips. All our Twitter followers are automatically entered!
• Submit a tip! What special tricks do you use when making and crafting? Send a reply to @make_tips or @craft_tips for yet another entry.
• Become a fan of MAKE and CRAFT on Facebook!

The giveaway ends at 5pm PST next Monday, November 23rd. Best of luck to you!

More:

Project Excerpt: Photojojo! by Amit Gupta with Kelly Jensen

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Croatian designer Robert Matysiak has made a delightful array of these "robolamps" by kit-bashing from plumbing supplies and variously colored light bulbs. They are, alas, not presently for sale.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Furniture | Digg this!

In the "social experiment" to end all "social experiments", a Minnesota father claims he put his computational linguistics Ph.D. to good use by speaking Klingon--and only Klingon--to his baby. Yes, for the first three years of its life, this kid was subjected to in-real-life parental trolling. The story doesn't explain why the experiment was stopped, but apparently it ended too soon to produce any lasting effects. The child, now a teenager, does not speak a word of Klingon. Thanks to Julio Ojeda-Zapata.

It's been widely known for years that Google does not use metatag description comments in ranking its search results. Indeed, this simple fact is part of what made Google more reliable than other search engines, since many website owners used fake metatags to "optimize" their results in search engines. While this was quite obvious for many years, Google had never publicly admitted it (it doesn't like to talk about its algorithm) until just a few months ago. Still, the company was just confirming exactly what was widely known for the better part of a decade or so.

And yet, for years, people would bring trademark infringement lawsuits, insisting that metatags represent some sort of trademark violation. In one recent case, that we've discussed, the CEO of software company Jenzabar, Ling Chai, has sued the makers of a documentary about the Tiananmen Square uprising. Chai had been involved in the uprising and doesn't like how the filmmakers portrayed her role. The filmmakers, on their website, mention that Chai works for Jenzabar, and included the word "Jenzabar" in the metatags, which Jenzabar insists violates its trademarks.

The documentary makers brought on Public Citizen lawyer Paul Alan Levy, who noted in a blog post the simple fact that even Google says it does not rely on metatags, and in response, Jenzabar tried to block his being brought into the case, by saying that Levy's pointing to the Google blog post was hearsay.

Now, the company has gone even further. It's found an "expert witness" who will claim that metatags do, in fact, influence Google results, even as the company itself insists they don't. The guy in question, Frank Farance, claims in his affidavit that "metatags are used by every Web search engine to determine search results and rankings." It's not clear how he has expertise in this particular realm or how he knows that Google uses metatags when pretty much everyone in the space has known for years it does not and Google itself has publicly denied using metatags to rank results.

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CWmike writes "Mozilla will add a new lockdown feature to Firefox 3.6 that will prevent developers from sneaking add-ons into the program, the company said. Dubbed 'component directory lockdown,' the feature will bar access to Firefox's 'components' directory, where most of the browser's own code is stored. Mozilla has billed the move as a way to boost the stability of its browser. 'We're doing this for stability and user control [reasons],' said Johnathan Nightingale, manager of the Firefox front-end development team. 'Dropping raw components in this way was never an officially supported way of doing things, which means it lacks things like a way to specify compatibility. When a new version of Firefox comes out that these components aren't compatible with, the result can be a real pain for our shared users ... Now that those components will be packaged like regular add-ons, they will specify the versions they are compatible with, and Firefox can disable any that it knows are likely to cause problems.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ah, yes, the old "affectionate kitteh" ruse! Video of cat who really, really wanted to befriend an officer who really, really wanted to finish writing a motorist ticket. (via @bbsuggest, thanks @dsjwhatnot)

Living in the UK, Jim hadn't experienced an earthquake firsthand. After watching recent quakes unfold in Indonesia, he decided to create a device that would keep him aware of the Earth's seismic events. His Seismic Reflector uses a Processing-based software monitor which feeds data to very motorized Arduino -

The aim is to build a device which responds to earthquakes being reported in near-real time via the USGS RSS feeds. The device responds by illustrating the magnitude of the reported earthquake via two fairly chunky vibration motors of the kind used in video game controllers. The device is connected to a PC via a virtual com port over USB (thanks to an on board Arduino). On the PC, an application sits there checking the RSS feed periodically and when a new event it posted to the RSS feed, the desktop app parses the data out of it and presents the magnitude of the quake to the Arduino which interpreters this as rate at which to activate the vibration motors.
[…]
I'd just like to stress that this project is about empathising in some small way with victims of earthquakes.  I'm not trying to make light of peoples anguish or suffering, and I'm not trying to play on peoples fears of an impending "big one".  I do not experience many earthquakes where I live, but I know a lot of people around the world (specifically around the Med and the Pacific) do.  This is my attempt to understand that feeling a bit better.

Check out the Seismic Reflector instructable for details.

In the Maker Shed:

MotorShield for Arduino Kit

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bth writes "A computer with the power of a human brain is not yet near. But this week researchers from IBM Corp. are reporting that they've simulated a cat's cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain, using a massive supercomputer. The computer has 147,456 processors (most modern PCs have just one or two processors) and 144 terabytes of main memory — 100,000 times as much as your computer has."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

bth writes "A computer with the power of a human brain is not yet near. But this week researchers from IBM Corp. are reporting that they've simulated a cat's cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain, using a massive supercomputer. The computer has 147,456 processors (most modern PCs have just one or two processors) and 144 terabytes of main memory — 100,000 times as much as your computer has."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

bth writes "A computer with the power of a human brain is not yet near. But this week researchers from IBM Corp. are reporting that they've simulated a cat's cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain, using a massive supercomputer. The computer has 147,456 processors (most modern PCs have just one or two processors) and 144 terabytes of main memory — 100,000 times as much as your computer has."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For years, Microsoft has been among the loudest complainers concerning "piracy" in China, so it's a bit of a surprise to see things switched around a bit. Mesanna was the first of a few to alert us that a Chinese court has found Microsoft guilty of violating the intellectual property of a local firm, Zhongyi Electronics, and demanded that the company cease selling Windows XP throughout China. The issue is the Chinese character fonts. According to Zhongyi, Microsoft licensed them for Windows 95, but not other versions. Microsoft, of course, insists that it is not infringing, and says it will appeal the ruling.

Still, with this ruling, as well as the recent attack on Google for violating copyright in China, it makes you wonder if China is doing this in an attempt to show American firms what might happen if they actually get what they "want" in terms of stronger copyright enforcement in China.

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samzbest writes "According to ComScore's qSearch, Microsoft's retaliation against Google search, Bing, has gained significant market share, now facilitating close to 10% of US searches. That's a gain of two large points in five months."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

samzbest writes "According to ComScore's qSearch, Microsoft's retaliation against Google search, Bing, has gained significant market share, now facilitating close to 10% of US searches. That's a gain of two large points in five months."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MojoKid writes "AMD launched yet another high-end graphics card based on their Radeon HD 5800 series technology, and this time it's a dual-GPU variant. Considering the fact that AMD's Radeon HD 5870 is currently the fastest single-GPU powered graphics card currently on the market, the new dual-GPU powered Radeon HD 5970 should offer performance that completely outclasses any other single graphics card on the market right now. The card has 3200 stream processors under the hood, though its graphics engines are built on 40nm manufacturing technology, so power consumption isn't actually too insane. The card does exceptionally well in the usual benchmarks, as expected." HotHardware has begun providing single-page views — a user-friendly decision. PCPer.com also has coverage. And pcpro.co.uk wonders whether, at 13" (33 cm) in length, the new card will even fit in most PC cases.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fresh out of 8-pin DIP sockets, I broke off a couple rows of female machine pin headers as a substitute - using the chip itself to align the pins for soldering. That was about a month ago, and I've continued using them ever since. Though it seemed a bit 'kludgey' at first, this process has proven a lot easier than trying to keep a variety of socket sizes at the ready. As always, your mileage may vary.

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See the Droidie site for observations on the tools I carried with me on my latest trip.

Via Romenesko comes this little gem of how the online editor of StlToday.com got upset about a "vulgar" comment that was left on a story. The editor, Kurt Greenbaum, noticed that the commenter in question's IP address was a local school, and contacted the school to alert them that someone from there had left a comment. And then:

"About six hours later, I heard from the school's headmaster...The headmaster confronted the employee, who resigned on the spot."

Lesson of the day? Don't post comments on StlToday.com or its editors may call your boss.

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If San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera gets his way a generation of club goers will miss out on the sickly sweet tang of caffeinated alcohol beverages like Sparks, Four-Loko, and Joose. Yet, all is not lost. A group of enterprising practitioners have seized the opportunity to handcraft a batch of Bathtub Sparks in an attempt to recreate the extreme libation.

The following drink was reverse-engineered from a vintage can of caffeinated Sparks and rigorously tested via blind taste-test by SFoodie and four people who agreed to come over to the author's house and drink this stuff, plus two random guys on the street who should be applauded for their daring and general zest for life.

Related:

• HOW TO make Moonshine Whiskey


• Garbage bag + rice cooker = alcohol still


• Home Distillation of Alcohol

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Banned Xboxs flood online marketplaces via BBG.

Hundreds of Xboxs have appeared on online marketplaces such as eBay and Craigslist in the wake of the mass Xbox live bans. Over the past week Microsoft has banned nearly one million users from the online gaming service after finding that they had modified their consoles to play pirated games. Since the ban is connected to the console rather than a gamer's online account, many modified Xboxs have appeared online being sold by banned users. eBay has issued a warning to users on its website to be wary of buying consoles in the wake of Microsoft's move. In a post on the website's guide section, it said: 'If you are looking to buy an Xbox 360 on eBay in the near future, ask the seller if it has been banned from Xbox Live and be sure to pay by PayPal in case they lie. If you do get a banned console, start a PayPal claim.'

Microsoft has said that all bans are permanent to the console and no affected units will be permitted back onto Xbox Live on any account.

You can get a banned console for $40 now. I know that a lot of Microsoft folks read MAKE so please Microsoft folks, figure out something else besides permanently crippling millions of devices. Sure they can be used to play offline, but I doubt the owners will keep them, so it's one stop to trashville. They'll end up in a landfill, at least offer a way to re-active them or something, anything.

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Casio has unveiled the world's slimmest 'rugged' compact in the shape of Exliim EX-G1 - its thinnest side measures just 20mm (0.78"). The first in the company's new 'Exilim G' series of weatherproof cameras, named in reference to the company's well-known G-Shock series of watches. The G1 is designed to be dustproof, waterproof up to 3 meters for an hour, coldproof up to 14 °F and shock-resistant for drops of up to 2.13 meters. It incorporates a 38-114mm equivalent lens, 2.5" LCD, 12.1MP sensor and includes features such as Intelligent AF, Best Shot shooting mode and Interval shooting. Priced at $299, the camera will start shipping from December 2009.

Jim did some experimenting with homemade thin-film zinc oxide and zinc-tin oxide, developing his own homemade transistors devices -

I did manage to achieve (with a liquid dielectric) voltage and current gain, as well as construct a functional astable oscillator using two of the devices constructed on a single substrate. While the speed of the devices (due to the liquid dielectric) is such that they are only interesting as a technology experiment, they've been a lot of fun to experiment with.

Some very interesting work here. There's really no better way to understand technology than to build it yourself. I can say firsthand, building a simple capacitor or LED from scratch is a lot of fun - a DIY transistor must feel like a straight-up triumph! Download the documentation of Jim's experiments in PDF format on his site.

Related:



MAKE Presents: The LED - and how to make your own from carborundum! Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!

"Bhaiya," a Hindi word meaning "big brother," has remarkable nuance, depending on how it is spoken and to whom. Dave Prager catalogs some of these inflections in a recent article on his life-in-India blog, "Our Delhi Struggle."

Jenny tasted the power of bhaiya while watching friends negotiate with autos, seeing housewives beat down stubborn vegetable wallas, observing clever coworkers convincing recalcitrant art directors to meet impossible deadlines. A woman takes a simple bhaiya--"buy-yaa", to transliterate--and bends the word around the fulcrum of the "y", modulating the final syllable to do her dastardly bidding.

Making that final syllable short and sharp expresses contempt ("Who do you think I am to quote me such a price?").

Adding a long, upward-fluctuating suffix feigns shock ("You would take such advantage of the sweet, innocent girl standing so humbly before you?").

And turning that final syllable into an angry cadenza up and down three different octaves--think John Coltrane at the end of Giant Steps, an animal howl, the fire in her belly that would have singed the quivering beedi right out of the hapless auto driver's mouth if she hadn't stuck a bhaiya in front of it--chastens even the most determined male foe...

on Hindi: the power of "bhaiya" (Thanks, Dave!)

Reader adeelarshad82 writes to lets us know that Spain has now codified a "Right to Broadband", thus following the lead of Finland. Spain's industry minister announced that citizens will have a legal right from 2011 to be able to buy broadband Internet access of at least 1 Mbp/sec at a regulated price wherever they live. The telecoms operator holding the so-called "universal service" contract would have to guarantee it could offer "reasonably" priced broadband throughout Spain.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With this award-winning Robotic arm kit, you can control the gripper, wrist, elbow, base rotation and motion, all from the tethered remote. The robotic arm has a vertical reach of 15", horizontal reach of 12.6", and lifting capacity of 100g. Features include a searchlight on the gripper and an audible indicator on all 5 gearboxes to prevent any potential injury or gear breakage during operation. Who is going to be the first to hack this with an Arduino?

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You just knew it would happen again. Every time the recording industry finally agrees to license a new music service to try to take the "sting" out of "piracy," it demands licensing terms that are ridiculous. From the execs at the labels' perspective, unless you pay an arm and a leg, you don't get to offer music. So, a few companies agree, and then realize it's impossible to make any money and shut down. In the meantime, the whole point of those legal licensed music services (to compete with "pirate" sites and services) is lost entirely. Wired is chronicling how all of the legal music sites are finding it impossible to survive and offer a free music service -- including MySpace music (which beyond not offering much of value in terms of user experience) "is struggling to keep up with its own payments to music copyright holders."

Of course, it's really no surprise that most of these sites have struggled. Beyond the ridiculously high licensing rates that the labels forced on them (often by negotiating through lawsuits), none of these sites put together a well thought-out business model. Instead, they all seemed to think that they could just slap ads on the site and that would be enough. But, of course, when you're listening to music, you're not looking at that website or paying attention to the ads -- and if the ads got too intrusive, they'd just go elsewhere. A real business model would have been setting up something more comprehensive, that gave listeners a real reason to buy associated with the music. Eventually we'll get there, but in the short-term, the graveyard of failed "licensed" music startups will grow, just as more and more "unauthorized" sites grow in popularity.

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We love bikes, just check out all our bicycle related entries. Unfortunately, sometimes our bikes break, and when they do it's a lot easier to repair them if you have a stand. Too expensive? Then make you own bicycle repair stand with a few parts form the hardware store.

I've needed a repair stand for a long long long time now. But....damn those things aren't cheap. Thankfully, I've got more than my share of blue collar blood in me....so I decided to build one. The process couldn't have been easier. I did a quickle google search on home made repair stands and saw some interesting solutions. In the end, I went with my own variation.

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circletimessquare writes "Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft, is self-publishing a cook book with scientific underpinnings. The man who presided over the original iterations of Windows has built a laboratory kitchen, hired 5 chefs, and plays with misplaced lab equipment: using an autoclave as a pressure cooker, using a 100-ton hydraulic press to make beef jerky, and using an ultrasonic welder for... he's not sure yet. The article includes a video on how to cryosear and cryorender duck. 'It's basically like a software project,' Dr. Myhrvold said. 'It's very much like a review we would do at Microsoft.' Is it possible to BSoD food?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's no secret that there are a bunch of companies out there that trick users into signing up for a regular monthly subscription service that's usually nothing more than an excuse to charge your credit card every month. Many of these are incredibly sneaky, such that many users have no idea they signed up for it until they get their credit card statements. Even worse, many of the "tricks" involve getting legitimate sites to offer these "services" to their users -- and those included Continental Airlines, Classmates.com, Priceline, 1-800-Flowers and many others. The government is finally cracking down on some of these, but its latest investigation -- into just three such services (and there are a bunch more) named Webloyalty, Vertrue and Affinion -- found that those three alone brought in over $1.4 billion. Not surprisingly, the folks who work there know quite well that they're misleading users and tricking them into signing up for stuff they don't want and don't need.

It's a bit surprising, by the way, that the investigation was done by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, rather than the FTC, who you would think would be in charge of stopping these sorts of activities. Of course, perhaps that's because the FTC has been quite busy with other scammers, such as BlueHippo, who the FTC had already reached an agreement with before and then decided to ignore it. The company basically collected millions from individuals without ever sending the promised computers. At one point, BlueHippo had delivered just one computer. After the FTC started investigating more thoroughly, suddenly BlueHippo found more computers to send, but still wasn't delivering computers to many of the people who qualified.

It's really stunning how many blatant scammers there are out there, who are able to get away with these things for so long.

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Nifty video (in Norwegian) of DIYer Morten Skogly showing off some of his vibrobot creations on a Norwegian TV show.

Vibrobots (Tekno S03E04)

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I've been ignoring this one, but people keep submitting it. BCG came out with a report over the weekend on a survey it did, claiming that about half of all people would pay for online news. It was amusing to see people react to this, as some reported it as "most won't pay for news" and others reported it as "oh my goodness, a lot of people will pay for news." Of course, the reality is that this is just a survey of what people say they'd pay for -- and history has shown that surveys are notoriously poor indicators in terms of getting people to accurately reflect what they will and will not buy. Besides, just a day later, a totally different survey claimed that 80% of people wouldn't pay for news online. The answer is that no one knows how many people would pay for content online, but I'd bet that the number is lower than what both of these surveys predict, and we'll see that soon enough.

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An anonymous reader passes along news that an Australian senator, Nick Xenophon, has denounced the Church of Scientology as "a criminal organization" from the floor of Parliament. "Senator Xenophon used a speech in Parliament last night to raise allegations of widespread criminal conduct within the church, saying he had received letters from former followers detailing claims of abuse, false imprisonment, and forced abortion. He says he has passed on the letters to the police and is calling for a Senate inquiry into the religion and its tax-exempt status." It wasn't that long ago that the CoS was calling for Net censorship in Australia; a month later the organization was convicted of fraud in France.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Artist Shepard Fairey and photographer Glen E. Friedman collaborated on the image above, adapted from a photograph Friedman took of legendary skateboarder Jim Muir. The poster goes on sale for $80 on November 19, in a limited edition of 450, signed and numbered by the artists and by Muir. A portion of proceeds will be used to pay Muir's medical bills -- he was badly injured in a surfing accident earlier this year.

Jim Muir Print (Obey Giant)

EddieSpinola writes "Everyone knows that lossless codecs like FLAC produce better sounding music than lossy codecs like MP3. Well that's the theory anyway. The reality is that most of us can't tell the difference between MP3 and FLAC. In this quick and dirty test, a worrying preponderance of subjects rated the MP3 encodes higher than the FLAC files. Very interesting, if slightly disturbing reading!" Visiting with adblock and flashblock is highly recommended, lest you be blinded. The article is spread over 6 pages and there is no print version.

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Reader Tina alerts us to an article about how some students in Venezuela have been arrested for using Facebook to monitor other students' activities, and then rob them while they were out. Of course, it appears the plan wasn't that foolproof, considering they were caught. The rest of the article discusses Facebook and Twitter usage in Venezuela, and how the police and the government are trying to use those tools to crack down not just on crime, but also on dissent... at the same time that government protesters are using the tools to make themselves more widely heard (and organized). There isn't that much surprising -- and it seems that the role of social networks is merely to amplify what is going on already in the country, which is about what you'd expect. Still, it is interesting to see this sense of wonder that some people have over the fact that not everyone who uses Facebook uses it for "good" reasons.

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Here's a mid-1980s CBC News scare-story about Dungeons and Dragons driving kids to suicide featuring (at 2:49 onwards) me and my classmates (the video is dated 1985, but I'm pretty sure this couldn't have been later than my graduation from Junior High in 1984). Ignoring the crazy-ass fearmongering, it's incredibly nostalgic to see all those kids I grew up with, playing with their minis and rolling their dice.

Dungeons & Dragons D&D Canadian Doc 1985 Part #2 (Thanks, Tim!)

Spotted in the MAKE Flickr pool:

ITP students Hana, Ania, and Greg built this augmented xylophone, the multixylophoniomnibus. Despite having a basically unpronounceable name, the project looks nice and they have a very in-depth review of the process that they went through in order to produce a working product. Nice job!

They also have a large number of photos available in their Flickr photo set.

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Do you think the TSA would let you past security with this USB memory stick in the shape of an itsy-bitsy grenade?

"Frat boys get abused worse during pledge week in college than that crap [at Abu Ghraib]. But it's what the media made of it. What the hell do you think they're gonna make of this?" Interrogation tapes for 3 decorated Army sergeants charged with the murder of 4 Iraqi detainees.

VC Bill Gurley has up an insightful piece on the strategy behind Google's releasing turn-by-turn mapping for free. He calls it the "Less Than Free" business model, and it is beyond disruptive. On the day that Google announced its new service, the stock in the two companies that had controlled the market for map data, Garmin and TomTom, dropped by 16% and 21%, respectively. (Those companies had bought Google's erstwhile map-data suppliers, Tele Atlas and NavTeq, in 2007.) "When I asked a mobile industry veteran why carriers were so willing to dance with Google, a company they once feared, he suggested that Google was the 'lesser of two evils.' With Blackberry and iPhone grabbing more and more subs, the carriers were losing control of the customer UI... With Android, carriers could re-claim their customer 'deck.' Additionally, because Google has created an open source version of Android, carriers believe they have an 'out' if they part ways with Google in the future. I then asked my friend, 'So why would they ever use the Google (non open source) license version?' ... Here was the big punch line — because Google will give you ad splits on search if you use that version! That's right; Google will pay you to use their mobile OS. I like to call this the 'less than free' business model. This is a remarkable card to play. Because of its dominance in search, Google has ad rates that blow away the competition. To compete at an equally 'less than free' price point, Symbian or Windows Mobile would need to subsidize." Gurley speculates that the company may broaden "less than free" to include the Google Chrome OS.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Visualizing empires decline by Pedro M Cruz, who explains: "The data refers to the evolution of the top 4 maritime empires of the XIX and XX centuries by extent. The visual emphasis is on their decline." Here's more on the data and methodology. (via @visualthinkmap)

With an offer that reminds me of the OLPC "give 1, get 1" promotion (but hopefully without the delivery complaints), Digg is selling a Digg-branded shoe, made by TOMS Shoes. For those who haven't seen its commercials, TOMS Shoes has the catchy promise (called One for One) that for every pair of shoes it sells, it gives away a pair of new shoes to needy kids in developing countries.



This bit of marketing is brilliant because it ties together a nice "reason to buy" story with a physical good (the shoes), and the whole story promotes both Digg and TOMS Shoes. Eventually, I assume Digg and TOMS could also easily create a Threadless-like store for more custom shoes (instead of T-shirt designs). The current shoe design was created by a Digg employee, but it seems possible that Digg users could submit shoe designs of their own. And apparently, TOMS shoes sells T-shirts, too, so Digg users may get to Digg/Bury some T-Shirt designs someday as well.

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A YouTube compilation of "100 greatest quotes" from the HBO series The Wire. As Aaron Stewart-Ahn on Twitter said, "Perhaps the closest US TV has ever come to a landmark novel."

A gay teenager was decapitated, dismembered, and burned to death in Puerto Rico. The police investigating his murder said he deserved it because of his 'lifestyle.' (via Calpernia)

I rather like the look of Ligne Roset's "Togo" couch, in "Shanghai" fabric by textile artist Cristian Zuzunaga. More images, and here's more on Zuzunaga's site -- there are matching dining chairs.

angry tapir writes "Workers at T-Mobile UK have been selling customer data to brokers who worked for the competition, according to T-Mobile and the UK's Information Commissioner's Office. Criminal charges are being prepared. 'Many thousands' of customers' account details, millions of records, were sold to several brokers for substantial amounts of money, the ICO said. In an announcement (PDF) from the ICO, the agency does not name the operator involved, but T-Mobile acknowledged that it had alerted ICO about the data breach. The BBC reports that after the other mobile operators said they were not the subject of the investigation, T-Mobile confirmed its involvement."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Quite a few people have pointed to the story about a Swedish company that has trademarked The Pirate Bay logo, and plans to sell USB keys with the logo included. The company claims that this is fine because The Pirate Bay had not registered the trademark itself. In the meantime, some folks associated with The Pirate Bay are saying they're going to try to overturn the ruling.

I don't know how Swedish trademark law works, but at least in the US there is a concept of a "common law trademark," which is supposed to prevent others from registering a mark on a brand that someone else is using -- even if they haven't registered it. It would seem like quite a silly trademark law if the Swedish trademark law doesn't include anything like that.

As for those who think it's ironic or even hypocritical that The Pirate Bay guys are somewhat bothered by this, you need to understand a few things. First, they clearly state that they have no problem with anyone doing anything else with The Pirate Bay logo. So, if this company just wanted to sell those USB keys by itself, it could do so. The issue they have is with this company "locking up" the trademark so others can't use it. That seems entirely in support with what they stand for.

Separately, it's worth pointing out (yet again, because some people still get confused by this) that trademarks are wholly different beasts than copyrights or patents. Trademarks are not about protectionism, but about preventing consumer confusion over who actually made or offers a specific product. It's a very different concept.

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It's the McLVDT, a linear variable differential transfomer, made from McDonald's straws. The creator writes:

I made a primary coil on a normal sized straw, and made two secondary coils on the outside of the larger McDonald's straw. Since the McStraw is large-bore (perfect for those thick high calorie shakes), the smaller straw with the primary winding fits nicely inside. The position of the inner straw can be determined by examining the amplitude and phase of the combined signals of the secondary coils, which is shown in raw form on the oscilloscope.

"Mc"LVDT

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