With newspapers struggling with declining sales and subscriptions, it seems that a few of the major newspaper chains have realized that when they have a newspaper with something of real value to a lot more people than usual, perhaps it makes sense to bump up the prices. Both Tribune Co. and E.W. Scripps are planning to raise the newsstand price of Thursday's paper, treating it like a standard Sunday paper, recognizing that many people want the paper just for the ad circulars that detail "Black Friday" sales. In some ways, it's yet another point of evidence that ads (relevant ones) represent content -- in this case, content that a lot of people are apparently willing to pay for.

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accido writes "As reported by The LA Times, Google has now decided to expand its marketing and data collection to include what you watch on your Tivo. The data collected would help Google, who sells TV ads, show who watches which commercials and who skips right over them. The article outlines how this could be bad for Networks who cash in weather you watch the ad or not. Does this mean fewer commercials for viewers? Not likely, but one can hope."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the Make: Online Toolbox, we focus mainly on tools that fly under the radar of more conventional tool coverage: in-depth tool-making projects, strange or specialty tools unique to a trade or craft that can be useful elsewhere, tools and techniques you may not know about, but once you do, and incorporate them into your workflow, you'll wonder how you ever lived without them. And, in the spirit of the times, we pay close attention to tools that you can get on the cheap, make yourself, or refurbish.

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One might think that a geek, a techie, a maker, might not be that particular about what he or she wears. We're certainly not likely to be paying attention to what the latest fashion crazes are or what's sashaying down the runways of Paris and New York. But ask said maker/geek about what he or she is wearing and carrying in his or her pockets, and you'll likely get a very long, precision rant on the functionality, durability, and methods of everything. Geeks might be no less particular about clothing, accessories, and personal items, they're just likely more focused on substance than style (or have a very unique take on style). We asked a bunch of folks in the maker/hacker community to tell us something about what they wear and carry and why. Here's a sampling of what they had to say.

We got such a tremendous response that we're going to split this Toolbox into two parts. Part 1 will cover clothing, shirts, pants, footwear, and outerwear. Part 2 will look at bags, pouches, and cases, pens, notebooks, and other carried items.

Shirts (with pockets!)
One of the first things we noticed as a trend was makers telling us they only wear shirts with pockets (so they can carry pens, small notebooks, etc.). This is a particular obsession of mine. I don't want to wear anything that doesn't have a pocket (including my T-shirts). It so bums me out that, even geek-targeted T-shirts don't have pockets! Hey geek/maker/hacker community (and that means you too, Maker Shed!) -- industrious, creative, big-brained people want to carry pens, 3x5 cards, and other tools that don't live so well in pants pockets. Give us pockets in our T-shirts -- and not those matchbook-sized ornamental pockets -- real pockets!

Keith Hammond, MAKE's Copy Chief, recommended Ben Davis shirts. Jeff Casimir, of HacDC and Jumpstart Lab, also recommended these shirts. Keith Hammond writes:

I'm a longtime fan of Ben Davis short sleeve shirts, 1/2 zipper front -- bombproof, grease-resistant work fabric (great for workshop or bike commute), cut loose (that's why hip-hoppers love 'em, also great for bike commutes), and not one but two shirt pockets, with a pencil slot on the left one. Plus, the ape logo, evoking our tool-using primate superiority.

 

Pants Not surprisingly, a lot of people said they're fond of cargo pants, but they didn't give specific brand recommendations. That's what I frequently wear. I especially like them when I travel because you can easily access the lower pockets from a plane seat (and there are plenty of pockets to hold all of your carry-on gear). I buy a lot of my cargos from Old Navy. For the spring and summer, I wear their thin, light cotton cargos. In the fall and winter, I switch to a thicker, more rugged fabric. Prices run from $20 (on sale) to $40. MAKE pal Kent Barnes swears by Blåkläder pants. "They take knee pad inserts, which is very important to me." Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Toolbox | Digg this!

It's been somewhat amusing over the last day or so to see a bunch of our usual critics all submit the same exact story with some sort of triumphant "I told you so!!!!!" (usually in less friendly language). It's a report that music sales are up in Sweden following the strict anti-piracy law that went into effect earlier this year. The claim is that this is proof that the RIAA/MPAA/IFPI/BPI/etc strategies work. To them, this is clear, irrefutable evidence that draconian measures to crack down on unauthorized file sharing really does make people buy. That would be quite interesting if true, but our friends employed by these companies might want to wait a bit before breaking out the champagne over a dead cat bounce.

First, there are some who are questioning the actual numbers. So far, the only numbers have come directly from the IFPI, who hasn't provided much in the way of detail (and have a long history of publishing questionable, fact-challenged numbers). In fact, the very lack of detail would likely indicate that there are extenuating circumstances here. And, when we're talking about Sweden, it has to also be noted that services like Spotify (which dragged the labels kicking and screaming into the modern world) were just launched at the very end of last year. So, it could be that it was one of these more modern services that helped convince people to buy music rather than any crackdown. But, of course, the bigger question is whether or not any boost is sustainable. It was reported that there was a drop in file sharing after the Swedish IPRED law went into effect (though, again, many argue that the "drop" was simply because more people started using encryption and those who measure file sharing traffic had no way to deal with it, so pretended they all stopped). Yet, it didn't take long for the traffic numbers to bounce back up.

And that's the issue. If your entire business model is based on whacking people with a stick and telling them what they can't do, you may get brief moments of compliance, but at the first chance they get to go back to a more consumer-friendly system, they will. So while our friends in the entertainment industry will likely misread this situation into believing that its strategy of pissing off pretty much everyone makes business sense, let's wait and see how this works out in the next year or so. Dead cat bounces can fool lots of folks, but there are very few industries that succeed by basing their future on such things.

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Interesting article over on New Scientist about Erin Rapacki's design for a "low-cost" robot that can be used by the wheelchair-bound to grip, turn, and push or pull on most kinds of doorknobs. Maybe my sense of how much this sort of thing should cost is way off, but $2000 still seems pricey to me, although I guess at the prototype stage it's pretty impressive. [via Popular Science]

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Jiilik Oiolosse writes "The KDE community has killed the term K Desktop Environment (previously the Kool Desktop Environment). 'KDE' had previously ambiguously referred to both the community, and the complete set of programs and tools produced by the KDE community which together formed a desktop user interface. This set of tools, including the window manager, panels and configuration utilities, which KDE terms a 'workspace,' will now be shipped under the term 'KDE Plasma Desktop.' This allows KDE to ship a separate workspace called 'Plasma Netbook,' and independently market the various KDE applications as usable in any workspace, whether it be the Plasma Desktop, Windows, or XFCE."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I guess it's natural to lash out at technologies and companies that undermine a business model built up on artificial barriers and scarcity, but it won't do much good in terms of actually adapting. But it's kind of amusing when it's done at the same time that someone is embracing those new technologies as they undermine other business models at the same time. Taylor Davidson points us to a photographer bashing the idea that microstock sites like iStockPhoto help "create new markets." It's actually been really depressing to see so many photographers react so poorly to new technologies, and this case is no exception. In the ranting post, he compares microstock sites to pollution in China and drug dealing. All the rant really screams out is "I'm so set in my ways that I can't compete or adapt my business model."

However, the really amusing part is highlighted by an anonymous commenter on the site who mocks the photographer for whining about how microstock sites are undercutting his old business model at the same time that he's advertising his own books and services online, rather than advertising in newspapers and phone books. As the commenter notes:

If everyone is supposed to stop posting their photos and selling to istock, how about photographers stop using the Web and advertise in phone books and newspapers so those jobs aren't lost? And maybe you can go back to using film instead of digital so that film manufacturers aren't put out of business? Sounds like to me you're all for taking advantage of technology except when others doing it hurts your bottom line.

And that's really a key point. Technology changes markets, and the more you look, the more you realize that it almost always enlarges the overall market for those who take advantage of it. Yes, there's more competition in the photographer market, and the model for stock photography has changed. But the nice thing about the microstock market is that it has opened new markets. A lot more people can and do buy stock photos than did in the past. If I can't find a decent Creative Commons/public domain photo for presentations, I'll go in search of one I can license from a microstock photo site in a second, because it'll just cost $1 or so. So I actually end up spending a fair amount on stock photos in the course of a regular year. Compare that to the situation seven years ago when we were working on a revamp of our corporate website. We went in search of a photo to use, and the licensing deals we saw wanted about $1,000 for just one year of usage. That meant we spent nothing, because that just doesn't make sense.

So, yes, the economics are changing, but if you're smart, you can take advantage of it. It may mean moving beyond just the stock photo market, or using such photographs (or even giving away works for free) to build up reputation for freelance or custom assignments. Most photographers I know never made much money from stock photos anyway, finding much more value in commissioned work. And recently, I've been hearing of success stories from some really good photographers who have used their existing work, given away for free, as strong advertising to get more (and more lucrative) commissions.

In the end, it really comes down to how you deal with it. Do you whine and stomp your feet and compare the new world to pollution? Or do you figure out how to adapt? Economic progress doesn't care in the slightest how much you liked how things used to be.

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Jim Grisanzio went to the Make: Tokyo Fall 2009 meeting and took some gorgeous photos of the event. For more, check out the Flickr sets by Yoshikawa Hiroyuki and whaleforset. Looks like it was fun! [Thanks Dale!]

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Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports that astronomers have invented a game to help uncover the basis of galactic collisions, showing players images of colliding galaxies and asking them to match those to simulations. These galactic mergers could be the key to why the Universe contains a mixture of different galaxies — some with trailing spiral arms, others more like compact balls of stars and astronomers say that humans are 'much better than computers' at spotting the patterns and similarities. 'The strength of the game is that it takes results from many people,' says Dr Chris Lintott from Oxford University, one of the members of the Galaxy Zoo team. The developers describe the game as a 'cosmic fruit machine.' The game shows players one real galaxy image and, on command, eight randomly selected simulations pop into the "slots" surrounding that image. The aim is for players to choose the simulations that look most similar to the real galaxy and take those through to the 'next round' to examine them further. The simulated images show the different aspects of galaxy formation, so as people play, they will generate data that will help astronomers' understand these collisions. 'These collisions take millions of years to unfold,' says Anthony Holincheck, a graduate student at George Mason University and another member of the team. 'All we get from the Universe is a single snapshot of each one. [With] simulations, we will be able to watch each cosmic car crash unfold in the computer.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

itwbennett writes "Neil Felahy of Newport Coast, California, has pleaded guilty to conspiracy and counterfeit-goods trafficking for his role in a chip-counterfeiting scam. Felahy, along with his wife and her brother, operated several microchip brokerage companies under a variety of names, including MVP Micro, Red Hat Distributors, Force-One Electronics and Pentagon Components. 'They would buy counterfeit chips from China or else take legitimate chips, sand off the brand markings and melt the plastic casings with acid to make them appear to be of higher quality or a different brand,' the US Department of Justice said in a press release. The chips were then sold to Naval Sea Systems Command, the Washington, D.C., group responsible for maintaining the US Navy's ships and systems, as well as an unnamed vacuum-cleaner manufacturer in the Midwest."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Liveblogging Hajj. Al Jazeera has live coverage of the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, including notes on how swine flu and the economy are affecting this year's observance.

The folks in Hollywood have been working overtime lately trying to convince the world that piracy is harming the industry, even as the industry is having its best year ever in terms of both money made and the number of movies released. It's an uphill slog, so lobbyists, lawyers and execs from the various studios have resorted to what can only be described as "making stuff up." But, like the poor corn farmers that NBC Universal lawyers think are being hurt by movie piracy, most of these claims don't pass the laugh test.

But, of course, the story goes even deeper than that. As we've noted before, despite claims to the contrary, "piracy" is almost always an indicator of unmet consumer demand and a failure on the part of the industry to meet that demand. Matt Mason's book from last year made this quite clear, and now the EFF's Fred von Lohmann has done a great job detailing how any "problems" that Hollywood might face from "piracy" are problems of its own making. He points to the attempts by the major studios to block Redbox and delay movie rentals.

It's the same thing we've seen over and over again. You don't win customers by taking rights away from them. You win customers by adding more value. But that seems to be total anathema to Hollywood. Instead, it seems to think that the only way to run a business is to take away or disable rights and features from users, and then charge them to re-enable them. It's not difficult to see why this is not just a recipe for failure, but one that will only drive more people to piracy, after the industry blocks them from getting what it seems perfectly reasonable to expect -- and what the technology clearly allows.

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coder4hire writes "The shopping cart systems that power online stores have evolved from simple homebrew solutions in the CGI era to far more powerful open source packages, such as osCommerce. But even the later systems are frequently criticized as suffering from poorly-written code and inadequate documentation — as well as for being difficult to install and administer, and nearly impossible to enhance with new functionality and improved site styling, at least without hiring outside help. These problems alone would explain the rapidly growing interest in the latest generation of shopping cart systems, such as Magento, purported to be outpacing all others in adoption. In turn, technical publishers are making available books to help developers and site owners get started with this e-commerce alternative, such as Magento: Beginner's Guide, written by William Rice." Read on for the rest of Michael's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Why make an exception for geographic data or which app created the tweet or which tweet it's in response to, or that it was retweeted by 7 people and who they are? Or who wrote it? And when?

These bits of data all live outside the 140 character "limit."

Every good idea people come up with for Twitter involves latching a new piece of metadata to a tweet. And in the middle you have a conflicted, slow and arbitrary (and opaque) decision-making process, controlled by one company.

Shouldn't the architecture of tweets be open to any kind of data that anyone thinks of?

If you make a Twitter client please, start pushing your users' updates to a RSS feed on a server outside of twitter.com. It's just a backup. That's the first easy small step down the path of free evolution. Once someone does that, there are more steps.

To get an idea of what's possible, I recommend reading A better design for Twitter retweets. Wouldn't it be great if we didn't have to wait for Twitter Corp to try this out?

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has released Peggy 2LE:

Peggy 2LE ("little edition") is a diminutive version of our popular Peggy 2 LED "pegboard" an open-source LED matrix display. Peggy 2 is big, designed to fit a 25x25 grid of 10 mm LEDs. Peggy 2LE is mostly the same, just smaller: it's designed to fit 5 mm LEDs.

What's New in Peggy 2LE?

Peggy 2LE supports the same basic functionality as the larger Peggy 2: it drives up to 625 LEDs of up to 5 mm size. Still open-source and hackable. Arduino compatible. Code-compatible with Peggy 2-- every Peggy 2 program can run on the Peggy 2LE.

The four main differences between the two are:

   1. Peggy 2LE is smaller-- about 1/4 the size.

   2. Peggy 2LE does not have a battery box. You can still use batteries if you want to (3xD cell) but a holder is no longer on board. Instead, it's designed to run off of an ac power adapter.

   3. Peggy 2LE does not have the breadboard-style prototyping area on board. (Did we mention that it's smaller?)

   4. Peggy 2LE can be built with a hardware serial port.

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[Photo by BB reader Todd Warner. More about the image after the jump.]

As promised, Wikileaks is releasing on to the 'net more than half a million confidential pager messages sent around September 11, 2001. The data includes pager messages sent by officials from the NYPD and the Pentagon, as well as citizens who witnessed the collapse of the twin towers. As I scroll through the archives, though, what strikes me as most fascinating is the jumbled mix: plaintive, automated cries from printers who've gone offline, or servers begging for a reboot -- those pings are jammed up against urgent ALL-CAPS messages from wives asking their husbands to please call and let them know they're still alive. There are commands for officials to "meet in the situation room." And texts from disgruntled corporate employees, asking why their bosses don't just give them the day off already. There's not much fodder for conspiracy theorists, but there's a lot of random weirdness:

2001-09-11 09:15:38 Arch [1376997] B ALPHA (27)Hey Honey! Can you bring some bagels when you get back? The pork chop is now crying about the World Trade Center plane crash. Geez! It is scray but no reason to cry. Talk to you later! I love you!

And personal messages like this, odd in the context of great tragedy:

Good morning sexy man!! Got my zebra thongs on!!! Feeling a little animalistic!!!

Others make you stop and think -- did this person die moments later? Did this person narrowly escape death?

2001-09-11 07:51:33 Skytel [002691994] C ALPHA TAKE YOUR TIME. I WILL NOT BE AT 1WTC UNTIL 9:30 A.M. THANKS, SHAWN

The mundane, the mechanical, the meta, all in one data dump.

Some media coverage: Guardian, Telegraph.

The people at Wikileaks say they published the intercepts as a "completely objective record of the defining moment of our time".

As Kevin Poulsen at Wired News points out, it sounds like the data may have come from an organized, collaborative effort -- not just one person.

"While we are obligated by to protect our sources, it is clear that the information comes from an organization which has been intercepting and archiving national US telecommunications since prior to 9/11."

So many messages from so many different network sources -- all carriers? Where did this data come from? My bet is on a military or government agency, or a firm that provides commercial analytics services. Or, some combination thereof.

Declan McCullagh, whose politech email list I stayed glued to on 9/11/2001 and on the days following, has the best last word on the pager intercepts. Snip from his report for CBS News:

This should be a lesson to anyone who would prefer their personal details not go on public display: Without end-to-end encryption, and perhaps even with it, your correspondence is vulnerable to interception and publication. And if you're the Secret Service responding to threats against the president, or FEMA organizing an evacuation to an underground bunker, why are you letting anyone with a $10 pager and a Windows laptop watch what you're doing?

9/11 tragedy pager intercepts. (Wikileaks)

Related: Reddit thread is here.

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ABOUT THE PHOTO: Click for full size.

Boing Boing reader Todd Warner shared this with us. See the cross-shape in the sky? He says it's a picture he took a few days after 9/11. Todd's life partner found it years later and scanned it for us to blog. My money's on lens flare. Todd explains:

You can see the smoke from the site. No one would ever publish it at the time, because I think they think I was some kind of religious nut... I'm not. Just find it interesting and kind of cool. This is a poor scan of the original picture but I checked the negative and the cross is there (upper right in the sky).

I was rollerblading on the west side of New York that morning headed south. When I was about a mile away from the World Trade Center, I noticed a low passenger plane out of the corner of my eye over midtown that looked like it was in trouble. I thought I was going to witness a terrible accident but assumed the pilot would try to go into the Hudson. Watched in horror as it plowed into WTC 1. Oddly, I immediately looked at my hands to see if I was really there. Literally thought I was having a nightmare. At that point since it was out of the clear blue, I assumed it was an accident. Couldn't fathom that anyone could have done it on purpose. By the time I got back to my apartment the second plane had hit.

Once again, Danny Sullivan is ripping to shreds the arguments being made by newspaper execs who are talking about how Google is a "parasite" on their content, despite sending tons of traffic. In this episode, Danny looks at the silly claim that visitors from Google are worthless, by comparing the situation to a regular shopfront and how they handle browsers vs. requiring a fee to get inside in the first place. He also goes on to look at how the Wall Street Journal (to which he is a subscriber) tries to monetize him online, and the only clear conclusion is that if News Corp. execs think that traffic from Google is worthless, it's only because they're making it worthless by doing an incredibly poor job capitalizing on all that free traffic.

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Paulina Sinaga was born in Poland and lives in California. She has a ton of ukulele videos on her MySpace page. (Thanks, Richard!)

Scott Holden of Sacramento, CA made this incredible life-sized Tauntaun costume using a 3D Studio Max mesh model, wood, clay, plaster, metal, foam, silicone, homemade stilts, and lots of fur. Cockeyed.com had Holden document the whole process in words and pictures. Scott Holden's Tauntaun costume

CuteSteveJobs writes "Children who feel they are being bullied, harassed or groomed online could call for help instantly using a 'panic button' on their PCs under a plan by the Australian Government's cyber-safety working group. The button shall look like a 'friendly dolphin,' who will connect the child victim instantly to police or child protection groups. Australian Internet Censorship Advocate Hetty 'Save the Children' Johnson says the Internet needs something like 000 or 911. Will this be another scheme wasting taxpayer dollars in lieu of parental supervison, or could it actually work? Are 1 in 4 children really sexually abused by the Internet? Can flaming and trolling be classified as bullying?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I wasn't going to bother going to see the new Disney cartoon, "The Princess on the Frog," first because Disney's campaign to turn princesses into pure little-girl-crack is tiresome-verging-on-offensive, and second because it looked like a trite and opportunistic way to bring in African-American viewers.

But Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams has me convinced. This sounds like a damned good movie. Maybe I'll take the kid to see it.

Tiana takes the princess role a step further -- she's not just Disney's first African-American to wear the crown, she's the first one with a regular job. (Unless you count Mulan's gig as a warrior.) She also, like "Ratatouille's" Remy, makes the case for great food as a social leveler and the cornerstone of a good life. Tiana knows that food "brings people together" with more reliable results than even voodoo.

But the strides here aren't just for princesses. Those Charming Guys of bygone days have traditionally been even less interesting than the ladies they rescue. Campos makes his Naveen such a cocky player that he doesn't stop seducing even when he's turned green and asks for just one kiss ... "unless you beg for more." He's a spoiled rich guy who needs to grow up, and the movie is just as much about his journey as it is about Tiana's.

And what a felicitous spot to take that journey. The Crescent City, in all her late 19th-century glory, shines like a jewel here: an enchanted, lively, multicultural town full of bright blossoms and infectious songs. As they say in the movie, "Dreams come true in New Orleans." Randy Newman [ed: ugh], who wrote the score, does a bang-up job of paying tribute to the city's rich musical heritage in a series of colorful, trippy numbers. There's a jazzy Armstrong-like song (featuring a crocodile named Louis), a gospel-tinged showstopper, a zydeco throwdown, and a boogie-woogie paean to the town sung by Dr. John [ed: that's more like it]. <br clear="all"

"The Princess and the Frog" is Disney royalty

Martin Klasch calls this ad for Evel Knievel's popsicles "sort of disturbing."

Last year we ran the story of Yves Rossy and his DIY jetwings. Yves spent $190,000 and countless hours building a set of jet-powered wings which he used to cross the English Channel. Rossy's next goal is to cross the Strait of Gibraltar, from Tangier in Morocco and Tarifa on the southwestern tip of Spain. From the article: "Using a four-cylinder jet pack and carbon fibre wings spanning over 8ft, he will jump out of a plane at 6,500 ft and cruise at 130 mph until he reaches the Spanish coast, when he will parachute to earth."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Of the many booklights I've tried, this one ($15 at Amazon) is the best. With four LED lights, two on the end of each flexible stalk, the clincher is that it's never clutter. It can be molded into a bedside lamp, hung around the neck for weightless book reading, wrapped around the wrist for plumbing jobs, and so on. Some suggested configurations: "The Charmed Snake", "The Helix," and "The Pistol." I understand that the official term for the configuration depicted in the PR photo is "The Screamer."

"Gimme Dat Christian Side Hug."

Christian youth groups finally have an alternative to normal, aka "front," hugs. As we all know, face to face embraces run the horrific risk of a clothed crotch graze. The Christian Side-Hug (or the CSH, as the kids call it) rids us of sin, as the only below the belt contact will be some good old-fashioned hip on hip action.

The Side-Hug: Youth Group Puts Down Sinful "Front-Hugs" With Rap

"There is a reason you don't have Mexican beer cartels planting fields of hops in the California forests," - Bruce Merken, Marijuana Policy Project. (via Andrew Sullivan)

Antonio at Fogonazos writes about this interesting optical illusion. The four rows of diamonds appear to be colored with different shades of gray, but all the diamonds are identical. In fact, the diamonds aren't solid gray, they are tinted with a gradient (lighter on the top, darker on the bottom).

Diamond optical illusion

Earlier this year, I wrote a post questioning whether the "inefficiency" found in multitasking was a bug or a feature. It was in response to studies pointing out that people who multitask tend to be less efficient at specific tasks. Folks like Nick Carr like to hold up things like that as examples of how modern technology makes us dumber, but more and more people are questioning that concept. While this is from a few months ago, Kevin Donovan points us an excellent piece by economist Tyler Cowen that challenges the concept that internet multitasking is a problem. In it, he makes a key point:

Multitasking is not a distraction from our main activity, it is our main activity.

That's a nicer way of saying what we said a few months ago. The "inefficiencies" from multitasking aren't a bug. They're a feature. Cowen goes on to explain it using the analogy of a long distance relationship compared to a stable marriage:

A long-distance relationship is, in emotional terms, a bit like culture in the time of Cervantes or Mozart. The costs of travel and access were high, at least compared to modern times. When you did arrive, the performance was often very exciting and indeed monumental. Sadly, the rest of the time you didn't have that much culture at all. Even books were expensive and hard to get. Compared to what is possible in modern life, you couldn't be as happy overall but your peak experiences could be extremely memorable, just as in the long-distance relationship.

Now let's consider how living together and marriage differ from a long-distance relationship. When you share a home, the costs of seeing each other are very low. Your partner is usually right there. Most days include no grand events, but you have lots of regular and predictable interactions, along with a kind of grittiness or even ugliness rarely seen in a long-distance relationship. There are dirty dishes in the sink, hedges to be trimmed, maybe diapers to be changed.

If you are happily married, or even somewhat happily married, your internal life will be very rich. You will take all those small events and, in your mind and in the mind of your spouse, weave them together in the form of a deeply satisfying narrative, dirty diapers and all. It won't always look glorious on the outside, but the internal experience of such a marriage is better than what's normally possible in a long-distance relationship.

The same logic applies to culture. The Internet and other technologies mean that our favorite creators, or at least their creations, are literally part of our daily lives. It is no longer a long-distance relationship. It is no longer hard to get books and other written material. Pictures, music, and video appear on command. Culture is there all the time, and you can receive more of it, pretty much whenever you want.

In short, our relationship to culture has become more like marriage in the sense that it now enters our lives in an established flow, creating a better and more regular daily state of mind. True, culture has in some ways become uglier, or at least it would appear so to the outside observer. But when it comes to how we actually live and feel, contemporary culture is more satisfying and contributes to the happiness of far more people. That is why the public devours new technologies that offer extreme and immediate access to information.

Many critics of contemporary life want our culture to remain like a long-distance relationship at a time when most of us are growing into something more mature. We assemble culture for ourselves, creating and committing ourselves to a fascinating brocade. Very often the paper-and-ink book is less central to this new endeavor; it's just another cultural bit we consume along with many others. But we are better off for this change, a change that is filling our daily lives with beauty, suspense, and learning.

The full piece is much longer, but beautifully written and quite convincing.

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My first introduction to 3D modelling, way back in 1999, was ray-tracing with the classic freeware Persistence of Vision (POV-Ray) package. The whole point of POV-Ray was (and is) to program a virtual 3D scene that can be rendered into still images very slowly, but in amazing detail, using ray-tracing algorithms. It was never about producing models for 3D printing or other computer-assisted manufacture techniques. But what was cool about POV-Ray was that, at least in its native implementation, there was no GUI or WYSIWYG interface. To make POV-Ray models, you used a text editor to program objects using so-called "constructive solid geometry" (CSG) techniques, in which complex forms were built up as unions, differences, and/or intersections of "primitive" shapes like cubes, circles, and prisms. It was all done in a special programming language native to the POV-Ray environment. To see what you'd made, you had to render the file.

Almost a decade later, when I started messing around with modern 3D modelling software for the purpose of rapid prototyping, I was disappointed to discover that my POV-Ray CSG skills did not port. Everything was resource-hungry interactive WYSIWYG interfacing, which definitely has its advantages, but also typically has a pretty steep learning curve as you learn just to move around the virtual 3D space of the modelling environment. It can be difficult to select exactly the point you want, to snap exactly to the distance you intend, and so forth. For a couple of personal projects, I manage to kludge together some tools that would let me design objects in POV-Ray and then convert them to STL files, but it was always an unreliable and wonky process.

So I was really stoked this morning to read this post over on the Thingiverse Blog about the advent of OpenSCAD, which does for 3D CAD what POV-Ray did for raytracing. At long last, you can program your 3D CAD models instead of sculpting them. And it's free! I can hardly wait to try it out.

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Hugh Pickens writes "CNET reports that the volunteers who create Wikipedia's pages, check facts and adapt the site are abandoning Wikipedia in unprecedented numbers with tens of thousands of editors going “dead” — no longer actively contributing and updating the site — a trend many experts believe could threaten Wikipedia’s future. In the first three months of 2009 the English-language version of Wikipedia suffered a net loss of 49,000 contributors, compared with a loss of about 4,900 during the same period in 2008. “If you don’t have enough people to take care of the project it could vanish quickly," says Felipe Ortega at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid who created a computer system to analyze the editing history of more than three million active Wikipedia contributors in ten different languages. "We’re not in that situation yet. But eventually, if the negative trends follow, we could be in that situation.” Contributors are becoming disenchanted with the process of adding to the site which is becoming increasingly difficult says Andrew Dalby, author of The World and Wikipedia: How We are Editing Reality and a regular editor of the site. “There is an increase of bureaucracy and rules. Wikipedia grew because of the lack of rules. That has been forgotten. The rules are regarded as irritating and useless by many contributors.” Arguments over various articles have also taken their toll. "Many people are getting burnt out when they have to debate about the contents of certain articles again and again," adds Ortega."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yesterday I got my LifeLiner tool working with Tumblr. Still some rough edges, but it's more or less doing the same stuff I have been doing with WordPress.

The goal is to have a single feed that captures all my online writing.

Moving toward what I call the Loosely-coupled 140 character message network.

Yesterday I also spoke with the lead developer at Posterous. We worked out an addition to their API that would make my software work with theirs. Got a note late last night night saying the feature was in. Today I'll test it, and if it works I hope to report that I have Posterous working with LifeLiner.

Meanwhile, TechCrunch has caught onto the idea I borrowed from Steve Rubel, almost. They noted that WordPress was growing while Twitter's growth has (perhaps temporarily) stalled.

The phenomenon is not, as some have said, the "death" of blogging (I hate that word!) -- rather huge growth in blogging at the low-end as NBBs discover its joys through Twitter and Facebook. Perhaps very few of them will want more, but even a few is a lot! Expect a huge surge in medium-range and high-end blogging in the coming years, with products like Tumblr and Posterous and WordPress perfectly poised to capture the growth.

Two things the Twitter guys should, imho, be thinking about:

1. How can they capture this growth as people move up-scale? Should they have a blogging network of their own? Or...

2. As people branch out they're not going to want to give up their networks on Twitter. An alternate to #1 is to fully open the Twitter architecture before the flow around it builds. The Internet routes around a funnel, which is largely what Twitter is, because it's too limiting for what users want to do. Maybe not today, but it's easy to see the day coming.

Historically it always seems to work this way. A company boots up a new activity, then people get familiar with it and want all the power and don't need the training wheels. An industry appears where there used to be a company.

More news.. The TypePad guys have also gotten in touch with news that they have a new simplified REST-style API coming for their new "micro" service. I was actually looking for it.

I totally get the sense that there's a critical mass developing. All these companies are competing fiercely, and they're sharp and focused and hungry. And attaining some success.

I got a note from David Karp at Tumblr saying that for the first time his site is in the top 100 of all sites on the Internet. That's pretty amazing and something to be proud of. Congrats!

One step at a time. This has been a pretty good week for getting things to work together.

I'll keep you posted as things progress.

Quote of the day: "As president, I believe that robotics can inspire young people to pursue science and engineering. And I also want to keep an eye on those robots in case they try anything." --Barack Obama, speaking to Washington D.C. schoolkids on Monday as part of his science education initiative. (Thanks, Aaron Ginoza!)

What's better for a holiday gift then LEDs? More LEDs! Trick out your festivities with these blinky kits!

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MiniPOV Kit ($18)
The canonical LED project, this persistence of vision (POV) kit spells out a message when you shake it. Perfect for someone learning to solder, the kit includes everything you need to build and display your own messages on a screen that you have to shake to see.

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Peggy 2 LED Display Kit ($100, LEDs extra)
An updated version of the original Peggy, this board should provide all of the LED action that one can handle. Solder up to 625 LEDs into the circuit board, program in some animations, and you've got a re-usable holiday decoration or radiant gift!

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Boing Boing pal Blackhound believes that Thanksgiving pumpkin pie is serious business, and he offers a photo-tutorial on how to prepare spices for said pie for maximum deliciousness.

Pie, like most of the food I make, I like to make from scratch. Call me a slow foodie, call me obsessive compulsive, just don't call me late for pie! So here, days before Thanksgiving, I start my meal preparations not with brining a turkey (a practice I frown upon, btw), but with the most basic of ingredients for that most essential of dishes: the pumpkin pie spices, (1) cinnamon, (2) ginger, (3) nutmeg, and (4) allspice.

But is grinding your own spices actually better?

Spoiler: Yes! Otherwise, this blog post would consist of the HOWTO instructions, "buy boxed spice-dust at grocery store. open container. shake. repeat."

PUMPKIN PIE SPICES, OR HOW TO ROLL YOUR OWN. Includes advice on tools and portions and where to find spices in the raw.

westtxfun writes "The STEREO satellites recently confirmed the existence of solar mega-tsunamis when they captured height data after a sunspot recently erupted. The scale of this tsunami literally dwarfs the Earth's diameter — it was 62,000 miles high and raced across the surface at 560,000 mph! STEREO A and B orbit 90 degrees apart and luckily, one was overhead while the other saw the eruption on the limb. This gave NASA scientists enough data to confirm the tsunami wasn't a shadow, solving a modern solar mystery. The images are simply stunning, to boot."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The world of startups can be a fast moving place, with lots of money thrown around quite rapidly at times. In such a world, it's no surprise to hear stories of pure outright fraud mixed in with all of the real stories of actual startups. They seem to come along every year or so -- and usually involve companies raising a ton of VC money and simply making up financial results, which the VCs never seem to check. Last year, it was Entellium who raised $50 million while totally making up revenue numbers. We wondered, at the time, how its investors never got around to actually auditing the company they gave so much money to. However, it really is par for the course for many investors to simply trust the management.

The latest such case, as revealed by TechCrunch, appears to be Canopy Financial, a high flying startup that had raised $65 million, but apparently made up a bunch of its revenue, potentially even forging audit statements from KPMG. Amazingly, the company's CEO is claiming he had no idea this was happening, which is either untrue or an incredibly damning statement on what sort of CEO he is. Once again, though, you have to ask what the investors were doing, and how they handed over such large sums without ever doing any serious due diligence.

These sorts of scams are pretty depressing for all those legitimate startups out there, who work hard to build real businesses, and sometimes even lose out on being able to raise money from these same VCs who were totally snookered by the scammers (though, honestly, would you want those same folks to invest in you really considering their ability to get taken in such a scam?). There's a lot of good things that happen in Silicon Valley... and a lot of money thrown around. Unfortunately, when that happens, it's inevitable that some bad characters jump into the game as well and just cook the books.

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It is safe to say that our primate ancestors and the early humans they begot never picked out sparkly snowflake paper, wrote up a missive about Og and Jane's many achievements in the last cycle and handed out copies to all their friends, relations and hunt/gather coworkers.

But, according to anthropologist Robin Dunbar, Ph.D., the social relationships that were forged during the dawn of humanity still influence everything from Christmas card lists to Facebook networks. I saw Dunbar lecture at the 2008 Nobel Conference in Minnesota, and called him recently to find out more. Dunbar, head of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oxford, says the size of the human neocortex puts a limit on the size of our social networks--a limit that can be seen in examples throughout history.

The discovery has its origin in studies that compared the size of non-human primate social groups with the animals' brain size. The idea is that larger social networks are good things: Offering physical protection against enemies, shared strength and ingenuity to accomplish difficult tasks and a safety net in case you, personally, don't hunt or gather up enough food. But managing those networks takes brain power. If you don't have enough, your clique can't ever get very big.

But say you're the one guy primate with a slightly larger brain and, thus, slightly bigger social network. You'd have a better chance of surviving adverse conditions. And, you'd have a better chance of meeting women who'd be interested in your monkey butt. The fact that a larger brain means a larger social network was probably one of the evolutionary pressures that turned humans into the big-brained species we are today, Dunbar said.

In the early 1990s, Dunbar applied the ratio between primate brain size and social network size to modern humans. By his calculations, 150 people is about the largest social network each human can maintain. You might know more folks than that, but the 150 will be the ones you really have an important relationship with--the ones you really care about.

And this is where things get kind of freaky. To verify his idea, Dunbar started looking at the size of documented social networks throughout human history. He found 150-person groups all over the place: It's the size of traditional villages in England prior to the Industrial Revolution; the size of religious communities; and the size of basic military units. And then there's the Christmas card lists.

Christmas cards are a big deal here in the UK, more than in America," he says. "It's expensive and so you think carefully about who you want to send your cards to. We found that the average list is typically about 150 people. There might be fewer households than that, but if you add up the people each household represents, you get 150."

In fact, the 150 limit is so pervasive that if you have a large, close-knit, extended family, you'll likely have fewer non-relative friends, Dunbar said. One way or another, he found that the size of a person's network balances out to be, roughly, Dunbar's Number.

The other really interesting thing: Dunbar's Number seems to also represent the invention of the "friend". Recently, Dunbar and his colleagues started looking at the brain size and social networks outside of the primate realm. They found that, in non-primates, large brain size is correlated with species that form groups of just two--monogamous pair-bonds that mate for life. Anyone who's married can tell you that maintaining a relationship takes a lot of brain power. But why, then, do we see a different pattern in how primates use that power compared to these other animals?

What we think primates have done is that, early on in evolutionary history, they've taken the same machinery that builds pair-bond relationships and used it to create friendships," Dunbar said. "The machinery is there to allow you to build these deep relationships and it's simply a question of who and how many you apply that to.

Watch Robin Dunbar's presentation from the 2008 Nobel Conference

Image courtesy Flickr user tiswango, via CC

mario.m7 writes "Poste Italiane, the Italian postal service, suffered yesterday from an abnormal computation in ATM and credit card operations, since the decimal comma was not taken into account. The whole sum was therefore multiplied by 100, resulting in a 115,00 Euro transaction being debited as 11.500 Euro! Thousands of accounts are deep in the red and locked (link pumped through translator), so that no more operations are possible. Poste Italiane is gradually recovering the problem, fixing the error and re-crediting the sum debited in excess. Consumer associations have offered support to clients in case this lasts longer and cause damage."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Something about Watchismo's latest timepiece makes me want a gold iMac. The steel edition also goes great with Deloreans.

I received an e-mail from Sal9000, the man who married his video game girlfriend on Sunday. Here's a translation of the letter he sent me, along with some photos:

Dear Ms. Katayama, Thank you very much for watching our wedding ceremony online. Because of your blog post, we received some comments from what appeared to be international viewers, and we were very happy about that. I had heard before the groom is very busy during a Japanese wedding, but this was much more than I expected!

Both the actual wedding space and the livecasting web site were full on the day of — I'm so happy so many people were able to witness this. There were over 3,000 connections and 7,000 comments made online, and the people who showed up in person at the ceremony also offered their congratulations. It was great.

Now that the ceremony is over, I feel like I've been able to achieve a major milestone in my life. Some people have expressed doubts about my actions, but at the end of the day, this is really just about us as husband and wife. As long as the two of us can go on to create a happy household, I'm sure any misgivings about us will be resolved.

As for what's next, we still haven't gone to see my parents, so we will be going home together on New Years to officially announce our marriage.

The two of us hope to continue to let our love for each other grow as time goes on.

Sincerely,

SAL9000 & Nene Anegasaki

An anonymous reader writes "Wikileaks is preparing to release 500,000 intercepted pager messages from a 24-hour period encompassing the September 11 terrorist attacks. The messages show emergency services springing into action and computer systems sending automated messages as buildings collapse. Wikileaks implies this data came from an organised collection effort."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Some Nixie tube eye candy courtesy of the ArduiNIX shield. More on its usage with Arduino over at Flock of Butterflies.

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Wish I'd thought of this gag first. The USB pet rock from ThinkGeek has all the functionality of the original pet rock, but is USB compatible.

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We were just talking about how the justice system in Spain seems at least somewhat more reasonable on the subject of file sharing, and here's yet another example. A court has overturned injunctions on two file sharing sites and fined the anti-piracy group that brought charges against them in the first place for "acting in bad faith." The case was dismissed because the court realized (yet again) that linking to infringing material is not infringing itself. But, the "bad faith" part involved the anti-piracy group, SGAE, tricking the operator of the sites into believing that two SGAE employees were representatives of the court and had the right to search his home and confiscate computer hard drives. We've seen such things allowed elsewhere, so it's nice that the Spanish courts are letting private anti-piracy groups know that they are not law enforcement.

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destinyland writes "'We already see a future in which the humble contact lens becomes a real platform, like the iPhone is today,' argues researcher Babak Parvis, 'with lots of developers contributing their ideas and inventions.' He provides an update on the contact lens with transparent circuitry that's being developed at the University of Washington. (Its components will eventually include hundreds of LEDs which form images in front of the eye such as charts and photographs). They've already developed a lens-with-LED prototype that's powered by 330 microwatts of wireless radio-frequency power, and believe the lenses could also be used as biosensors to deliver body chemistry readings (including blood sugar levels). But 'What we've done so far barely hints at what will soon be possible with this technology,' says Dr. Parviz."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For those bored by the portability of thumb drives, a 14GB furniture set designed to encourage data sharing -

The sofas were made by creative design studio Cabracega for last year's International Festival for the Post-Digital Creation Culture (OFFF). As you can see (you'll have to squint a little) the sofas have USB cables coming out of them. The 4 sofas store a total of 14GB of files which doesn't seem like a lot, but I'm pretty sure no other storage device can accommodate up to 4 people

Sure beats a built-in magazine rack! (unless of course you're laptop-less): [via Geekologie]

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An anonymous reader writes "The European Union has managed to do something that US Presidents often find difficult: to make 59 US Senators from both sides of the aisle agree on something. A group led by John Kerry (D) and Orrin Hatch (R) has sent a letter to the European Union, asking it to wrap up the investigation of the Oracle-Sun merger and let the deal go through. Interestingly, the letter emphasizes the damage the delay and uncertainty are doing to Sun." The article paraphrases a Gartner analyst, who points out that the Senators' letter "comes from a US point of view and doesn't take into account how the EU operates."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jeremy Holmes's There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly is a delightful picture-book based on the beloved nursery rhyme. Holmes's illustrations are grim and Gorey-esque, sepia-toned with lots of little comedy moments, whimsical annotations and elaborations (leathery bat-wings on a cow are unexpectedly fitting!). The book is an odd, tall shape (like a CD long-box), and the top third is the old lady's face, with her eyes staring owlishly from behind round glasses. The grand finale of the book ("There was an old lady who swallowed a horse/She's dead of course") is celebrated with a cute mechanical effect: when you turn the last page, the lady's eyes close and the accompanying illustration shows her arms folded across her chest, holding fly-swatter like a lily.

This is one of my favorite rhymes, along with "There's a hole in the bucket," since it contains such an important lesson about life: some solutions are really just problems in disguise.

There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly

As if autonomous swarming robots weren't cool enough. SensorFly, a prototype from the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, shows just how robust the current crop really is. Knock down one of these sensor-packed hovering whirlygigs and it reorients itself to take flight again in a matter of seconds. [via BotJunkie]

The SensorFly is a novel low-cost controlled-mobile aerial sensor networking platform. A flock of these 29g autonomous helicopter nodes with communication, ranging and collaborative path determination capabilities, can be extremely useful in sensing survivors after disasters or adversaries in urban combat scenarios.

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ChurchHatesTucker writes "The ABA Journal was unable to secure an interview with the USPTO chief, so they published a faux business method patent for securing an interview. Within four hours, they got their interview."

Yes, but the real question is whether or not the USPTO would approve the patent...

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Apple has released an update for its iPhoto image management software. Version 8.1.1 addresses issues affecting face recognition performance and accuracy, and fixes other minor errors. The latest version is available for immediate download from Apple's website.

shadowmage13 writes "After months of planning, I am happy to announce finally that the Ubuntu Massachusetts Local Community Team will be preparing a booth at the upcoming 2010 Anime Boston convention. We need support from the community to secure a booth and print materials, including copies of the Ubunchu! manga. I really believe the Anime fandom is a perfect match for Ubuntu, as they are by nature very much in line with open source and remix culture."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This wireless temperature sensor project uses an XBee, breakout board, and simple power supply to transmit temperature data to an Arduino base station. This looks like it could be easily expanded into a whole house monitoring system. [via Arduino.cc]

I decided to explore the more advanced features of XBee radios by building a remote temperature sensor. You can get quite a bit of control over an XBee radio without a microcontroller at all. You can configure the radio to send sensor readings at particular intervals when it detects changes on certain input pins.

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Joseph Franklin has written about how a group of universities have agreed to some basic principles (pdf) about providing drugs to developing nations at reasonable costs (or even free) in the interest of better global healthcare. However, Franklin wonders how well this will work in practice, and why it should only apply to developing nations, and not domestically as well. It's an interesting question, made more complicated by the fact that many drugs have their research started at universities -- frequently backed by government money -- but are later taken over by pharmaceutical companies who have no interest in such principles. I tend to think that such "principles" are nice to speak about, but are rarely effective in actually creating change. I would think that a much stronger argument is showing the economic benefits in keeping people alive. If you could rid some developing nations of certain diseases, you'd be able to open up vast new markets for other industries. Hell, imagine if you could get companies in other industries (food, clothing, transportation, etc.) to pay for drugs for the poor in developing nations, knowing that keeping them healthy will help those nations build their economy so they can start purchasing the same food, clothing and transportation...

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bleedingpegasus sends word that the US Air Force will be grabbing up 2,200 new PlayStation 3 consoles for research into supercomputing. They already have a cluster made from 336 of the old-style (non-Slim) consoles, which they've used for a variety of purposes, including "processing multiple radar images into higher resolution composite images (known as synthetic aperture radar image formation), high-def video processing, and 'neuromorphic computing.'" According to the Justification Review Document (DOC), "Once the hardware configuration is implemented, software code will be developed in-house for cluster implementation utilizing a Linux-based operating software."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Dangerous Book for Boys Essential Electronics kit presents electronics every kid should know through fun, engaging, and impressive experiments and activities. Read a brief history of the research and discoveries associated with electricity and electronics. A full-color, 32-page, manual guides you through 30 hands-on experiments. Don't let the name fool you, It's a great kit for boys and girls!

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Jenny "Shifted Librarian" Levine and the American Library Association threw an astoundingly successful National Gaming Day in America's libraries. This is the second year for NGD, and the participation more than doubled. Patrons played all kinds of games -- tabletop, board games, video games -- and discovered their libraries and their communities.

* Number of libraries registered to participate: 1,365
* Number of libraries that submitted # of players for NGD activities: 549
* Total number of players for NGD activities: 31,296
* Number of libraries in the national Super Smash Bros Brawl tournament (simultaneous): 42
* Number of libraries in the national Rock Band High Score tournament (asynchronous): 14
* Number of non-US libraries that participated (that we know of): 2 (Canada, Japan), with interest expressed from Morocco for next year)

* "...I really witnessed a sense of community as potentially shy teens reached across the table and helped one another by whispering tips to each player during their SSB brawl matches. Additionally, without any prodding, those waiting to play or those who had "lost" their match, began forming groups to try out and play the board games sent to us from North Star Games and Hasbro. It was wonderful to see middle school aged contestants and high schoolers come together to teach and play against/with one another."

* "It is usually very difficult to get boys into the library, but National Gaming Day changed that. On November 14th, there were boys waiting outside for the library to open! The boys all came for the Wii bowling tournament. Although our group was small, we had more boys in the library at one time (for a non-summer reading program) than I have seen in my eleven years working here."

Double the Fun - Final NGD2009 Numbers « National Gaming Day @ your library: (via Resource Shelf)

(Image: Gaming Day-4066)

Two US Senators, Bernie Sanders (I-VI) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH), have written to the US Trade Representative demanding that the text of the secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement be made public. This is the treaty that allows for criminal sanctions against noncommercial file-sharers, demands border-searches of laptop hard-drives and personal media players and phones for pirated material, requires ISPs to spy on their users, and gives movie and record companies the right to take whole households off the Internet with unsubstantiated allegations of piracy.

We are surprised and unpersuaded by assertions that disclosures of basic information about the negotiation would present a risk to the national security of the United States, particularly as regards documents that are shared with all countries in the negotiations, and with dozens of representatives of large corporations. We are concerned that the secrecy of such information reflects a desire to avoid potential criticism of substantive provisions in ACTA by the public, the group who will be most affected by the agreement. Such secrecy has already undermined public confidence in the ACTA process, a point made recently by Dan Glickman, the CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) - a group highly supportive of the ACTA negotiation, as well as by the members of the TransAtlantic Consumer Dialogue -- a group more critical of the negotiations.

We firmly believe that the public has a right to know the contents of the proposals being considered under ACTA, just as they have the right to read the text of bills pending before Congress.

Go, Sanders and Brown! Americans, call your senators and get them on this bandwagon. Citizens of other countries, find out why your elected reps aren't asking their governments to publish ACTA!

Senators Sanders and Brown ask White House to make ACTA text public (via /.)

derrida writes "After over a year of intensive development and refactoring, Inkscape 0.47 is out. This version of the SVG-based vector graphics editor brings improved performance and tons of new features, including: timed autosave, Spiro splines, auto-smooth nodes, Eraser tool, new modes in Tweak tool, snapping options toolbar & greater snapping abilities, new live path effects (including Envelope), over 200 preset SVG filters, new Cairo-based PS and EPS export, spell checker, many new extensions, optimized SVG code options, and much more. Additionally, it would be wrong to not mention the hundreds of bug fixes. Check out the full release notes for more information about what has changed, enjoy the screenshots, or just jump right to downloading your package for Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X." We've been following the progress of Inkscape for years (2006, 2005, 2004).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The newswires and blogs (and Boing Boing) have been burning up with the news that a man who's been believed to have been in a coma for 23 years was in fact conscious the whole time, something we've only discovered thanks to his newfound ability to communicate using special apparatus. But there's very little information about Rom Houben's communications, save for a few images. And these images appear to show Mr Houben and his aide speaking via "facilitated communication," wherein an aide helps a person with a disability or paralysis to painstakingly spell out words by lifting the disabled person's hand and responding to faint muscle signals.

And therein lies a problem, because facilitated communications has been widely discredited as a kind of Ouija board, in which the aide's unconscious movements guide the disabled person's hands around, without the aide even knowing that she's doing it.

Mr Houben's brain activity seems normal, and he can apparently communicate a little by moving one foot, but without more information, it's impossible to say whether the words attributed to him that we're reading are his, or a product of his facilitator's unconscious mind.

"If facilitated communication is part of this, and it appears to be, then I don't trust it," said Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics. "I'm not saying the whole thing is a hoax, but somebody ought to be checking this in greater detail. Any time facilitated communication of any sort is involved, red flags fly...."

"I believe that he is sentient. They've shown that with MRI scans," said James Randi, a prominent skeptic who during the 1990s investigated the use of facilitated communication for autistic children. But in the video, "You see this woman who's not only holding his hand, but what she's doing is directing his fingers and looking directly at the keyboard. She's pressing down on the keyboard, pressing messages for him. He has nothing to do with it."

According to Randi, facilitated communication could only be considered credible if the facilitator didn't look at the keyboard or screen while supporting Houben's hand, and helped him type messages in response to questions she had not heard, thus ensuring that Houben's responses are entirely his own.

The James Randi Educational Foundation has offered a million-dollar prize to a valid demonstration of facilitated communication, and Randi invited Houben to participate. "Our prize is still there," he said.

Reborn Coma Man's Words May Be Bogus

drroman22 writes "Schools are working to put real-world relevance into computer science education by integrating video game development into traditional CS courses. Quoting: 'Many CS educators recognized and took advantage of younger generations' familiarity and interests for computer video games and integrate related contents into their introductory programming courses. Because these are the first courses students encounter, they build excitement and enthusiasm for our discipline. ... Much of this work reported resounding successes with drastically increased enrollments and student successes. Based on these results, it is well recognized that integrating computer gaming into CS1 and CS2 (CS1/2) courses, the first programming courses students encounter, is a promising strategy for recruiting and retaining potential students." While a focus on games may help stir interest, it seems as though game development studios are as yet unimpressed by most game-related college courses. To those who have taken such courses or considered hiring those who have: what has your experience been?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On cranky usability guy Jakob Neilsen's Alertbox, this wonderful chart on the relative "consumption" characteristics of TV vs the web.

Velocity of Media Consumption: TV vs. the Web (via ResourceShelf)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's new Terms Of (Ab)Use project tracks news, litigation and fights related to abusive terms of service, EULAs and other electronic flimflam. Now's a good time to mention once again my own EULA, which I put at the bottom of my emails:

"READ CAREFULLY. By reading this email, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer."

Using a TOS, online service providers can dictate their legal relationship with users through private contracts, rather than rely on the law as written. In the unregulated and unpredictable world of the Internet, such arrangements often provide the necessary ground rules for how various online services should be used.

Yet TOS agreements also raise a number of concerns for the consumer, as they can be a vehicle for abuse by online service providers. For starters, TOS provisions are usually written by the service providers themselves. As a result, they tend to end up being one-sided in the service provider's favor, and are often designed to be beyond any judicial scrutiny. Even more importantly, most users never even bother to read, let alone understand, these agreements, filled as they are with confusing legalese.

The time has come to shed light on what these Terms of Service agreements actually say, and what it means to users. In conjunction with our TOSBack project, EFF is working to make the contents of these TOS more transparent for the average user.

Terms Of (Ab)Use

Today on the Worth1000 photoshopping contest, "Fudge and Sprinkles: Putting Delicious toppings on Everything!" Worth it for several of the images, but especially this delicious deep-sea banana split by "Mandrak."

Fudge and Sprinkles 5

John sez, "Candy Chang teamed up with Tenants & Neighbors to create a boxed set of 30 flash cards on tenants' rights."

Many residents in New York are unfamiliar with their housing rights. What is my landlord required to repair? How does rent stabilization work? When can my landlord enter my apartment? Thanks to a generous grant from Sappi Ideas That Matter, Candy collaborated with non-profit group Tenants & Neighbors to develop and produce a boxed set of 30 flash cards on tenants' rights. The flash cards translate New York's official Tenants' Rights Guide into a fun and friendly format that covers everything from security deposits and subletting to privacy and eviction so residents can enjoy good times while becoming empowered residents. The flash cards are available for $10 in Tenants & Neighbors' online store and all profits go towards their good work. Buy one for yourself and all of your friends - a righteous gift for anyone in New York state!

Candy Chang - Design - Tenants' Rights Flash Cards (Thanks, John!)

Erin sez, "This past weekend in the Mojave desert Mad Max fans got together for a 3-day, one time only 'Road Warrior Weekend' campout and built replicas of the Gyrocopter and Interceptors."

OK, so not only are these incredible vehicles and costumes -- but those are some damned stylish and attractive cosplayers. They should do a runway show.

Road Warrior Weekend (Thanks, Erin!)

The NY Times has an article about the rise of online "web series" shows that are suddenly popular, noting that many brands are creating such things as a way to produce interesting content online while getting some attention for their brand. It's yet another realization that advertising is content and content is advertising. The key point, that many say they realize (and hopefully they live up to it) is that none of this works if the content itself sucks. So they're working on these shows with a focus on making them good and enjoyable to watch first, and including the sponsorship as a secondary part of the effort. I'm sure there may be some backlash over this idea, but it actually makes quite a lot of sense. It gets more good content out there, and helps brands get themselves noticed and remembered not for intrusive and annoying advertising, but for sponsoring something cool.

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(CC-licensed photo by Francis Bourgouin)

As a gimmicky antidote to "energy drinks," several companies are selling calming beverages in a can. (No, not beer.) DailyFinance recently surveyed the choices:

Promising a "vacation in a bottle" or an "acupuncture session in every can," makers of anti-energy drinks, as they're known, say that after bailouts, foreclosures and Ponzi schemes, Americans nowadays would rather chill out than tweak out. To help us do so, they're spiking their new beverages with ingredients such as chamomile, melatonin, and valerian root -- all known for their supposed calming effects. Now in convenience-store display cases across America, drinks with names like Slow Cow, Ex Chill and Malava Relax are increasingly jockeying for space with their amped-up alter-egos like Jolt, Monster and Rockstar.

"It's my quest to relax the world," says Innovative Beverage Group Holdings (IBGH) CEO Peter Bianchi, who developed the anti-energy beverage Drank. "I saw America becoming more and more hurried. We are going to burn out after a while."

"Adios, Red Bull? Anti-energy drinks seek to soothe frazzled Americans" (via IFTF's Future Now)

The non-profit Wessex Archaeology organization created a virtual fly-over of Stonehenge and vicinity based on LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) data collected from the air. From the project page:

During production of the animation, we turned the LIDAR data into a solid 3D model of whole landscape surrounding Stonehenge. Aerial tours of the most famous sites and monument groups were animated in HD (720i) resolution. What is exciting is that much of the upstanding archaeology, from well-preserved barrows to the subtle earthworks of prehistoric field systems, are clearly visible.

To do this, we had to work out how to use the data at 1:1 for our animations (for this kind of task it is often necessary to reduce the complexity of the data by half or quarter (1:2 or 1:4) due to enormous memory and processing requirements). This we achieved, and using lighting techniques we have been able to show the archaeology of the Stonehenge World Heritage Site as it has never been seen before.

The Stonehenge Landscape in 3D (via Daily Grail)

(photo by Tom Ingvards)

Phil Agre, a professor of information sciences best known since the 1990s for his seminal tech/society email lists Red Rock Eater News Service and The Network Observer, has gone missing. Apparently, Phil hasn't been seen in quite some time but his disappearance has only now been made public by a missing person notice issued by his former employer, UCLA. From the notice:

Philip Agre was reported missing by his sister who resides out of state. She indicated that she had not seen Agre since the Spring of 2008 and that she became concerned about him when she learned that he had abandoned his apartment and his job sometime between December 2008 and May 2009.

Philip Agre is described as a White Male, 49 years old, with blonde hair and blue eyes. He sometimes wears a full beard. He is 6'0" tall and 120 lbs. Agre suffers from manic/depression. Agre is a former UCLA Professor.

Friends of Phil Agre

"Friends and Colleagues Mount a Search for a Missing Scholar, Philip Agre" (Chronicle of Higher Education)

"The Mysterious Disappearance Of Phil Agre" (NPR)

Starting at 3AM Eastern time on Wednesday, Wikileaks plans to publish over half a million US national text pager intercepts related to 9/11. The messages are said to come from devices used by persons operating in an official capacity (including Pentagon and NYPD), and cover a 24 hour period surrounding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.

newscloud writes "Writer Evan Ratliff tells how he managed to hide from crowdsourced searchers for 27 days. The first person to find him and photograph him would claim a $5,000 prize. In addition to hiding out as a roadie with indy band 'The Hermit Thrushes' for a week, Ratliff donned a variety of increasingly impressive disguises. It's an interesting read on how to disappear in the digital age: 'August 13, 6:40 PM: I'm driving East out of San Francisco on I-80, fleeing my life under the cover of dusk. Having come to the interstate by a circuitous route, full of quick turns and double backs, I'm reasonably sure that no one is following me. I keep checking the rearview mirror anyway. From this point on, there's no such thing as sure. Being too sure will get me caught. About 25 minutes later, as the California Department of Transportation database will record, my green 1999 Honda Civic, California plates 4MUN509, passes through the tollbooth on the far side of the Carquinez Bridge, setting off the FasTrak toll device, and continues east toward Lake Tahoe. What the digital trail will not reflect is that a few miles past the bridge I pull off the road, detach the FasTrak, and stuff it into the duffle bag in my trunk, where its signal can't be detected. There will be no digital record that at 4 AM I hit Primm, Nevada, a sad little gambling town about 40 minutes from Vegas, where $15 cash gets me a room with a view of a gravel pile...' Spoiler alert: We previously discussed the denouement of the contest."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

How the H1N1 vaccine is made... That looks like a pick and place egg machine...

The most striking feature of the H1N1 flu vaccine manufacturing process is the 1,200,000,000 chicken eggs required to make the 3 billion doses of vaccine that may be required worldwide. There are entire chicken farms in the US and around the world dedicated to producing eggs for the purpose of incubating influenza viruses for use in vaccines. No wonder it takes six months from start to finish. But we'll get to that in a minute.

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Like everyone else, I'm peripherally following the fur flying about Murdoch thinking about whether or not to block Google from searching his news sites. In the background I keep wondering if this isn't all a misunderstanding. I mean, do a lot of people get their news on Google? That's a question.

Okay I know I'm not average, so I don't mean to say my experience is statistically significant. For all I know everyone else is getting their news on Google. But I really don't think so. Here's what I think.

I think other sites grabbed most of the flow in news before Google got around to doing news, and such habits are hard to break. I guess that Yahoo is still the leader in online news and CNN and MSN are #2 and #3. After that, there's a lot of noise. Somewhere down there is Google. In the dust.

People say silly things like Google would be nothing without the NY Times, but it wasn't until relatively recently that the Times let Google index their news stories. I know this because I had a Long Bet with Martin Nisenholtz that I won more or less by default. Times articles couldn't show up in the ranks on Google because the Times wouldn't let them! It was dumb not just cause it meant that Martin lost the bet, but it was dumb because they let Wikipedia become the authority on so many topics that the Times would have done a better job at, imho. And they were throwing away flow, and flow is money.

So I think a lot of this debate is uninformed and generating a bit of heat and not much else. Kind of like a lot of what passes for news these days.

Wired has an article about a court dismissing a lawsuit by a guy who claimed the government was spying on him. The claims sound pretty much like your run-of-the-mill tinfoil-hat-wearing paranoid, so it's no surprise that the government tossed out the lawsuit. But, as David Kravets points out in the article, what if the government actually did put someone under 24-hour surveillance. Would there be any way to prove it? Since the government won't admit to things like who's on the no-fly list and still supports warrantless wiretaps, it could very easily make anyone who really is under surveillance out to be a nutcase tinfoil-hat wearing lunatic. It seems quite unlikely that was true in this case (or in most cases of such claims), but it does seem bizarre that if you really were in such a situation, proving it would be almost impossible as well.

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angry tapir writes "Two US senators have asked President Barack Obama's administration to allow the public to review and comment on a controversial international copyright treaty being negotiated largely in secret. The public has a right to know what's being negotiated in the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), Senators Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, and Bernard Sanders, a Vermont Independent, argue in the letter."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

To give his pepper plants some extra light during the winter months, João Silva decided to set up a solar-powered light that would charge during the day, then light a lamp after dark. Rather than simply scavenging a circuit from an old garden lamp, though, he designed his own SolarLamp circuit from scratch. It looks like a fun project, and he has a good explanation of the issues that he ran into when designing a circuit to work at low voltages. As a bonus, he used the open source circuit toolkit gEDA/SPICE/ngspice to design and simulate the circuit. Excellent work!

Related:

• Improved solar charger
Rural celly charger
• HOW TO - Make a home-made sun jar

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Panasonic has released firmware updates for its DMC-GF1 camera and six of its Micro Four Thirds interchangeable lenses. Firmware v1.1 for the GF1 promises a series of improvements to features such as autofocus in movie mode and the Manual Focus Assist function, as well as enhancing auto white balance performance. Firmware updates for the 14-45mm, 45-200mm, 14-140mm HD, 7-14mm and 20mm pancake lenses offer improved autofocus in movie mode and extend AF support to 'Full HD' mode for the 14-45mm and 45-200mm lenses. The firmware updates are available for immediate download from Panasonic's website.

Sports leagues around the world have been trying to put more and more restrictive rules on various journalists and news organizations when it comes to reporting on their events. In the US, both the NFL and the MLB have put ridiculous restrictions on what reporters can write about or post on their websites. While, technically, these leagues cannot stop news organizations from covering their events, they can restrict what kind of access they have. Of course, for basic coverage, when the events are televised, reporters could just as easily cover the event while watching it on TV. Still, it's been disappointing that the major news organizations have refused to stand up to the football and baseball leagues over this attempt to restrict their reporting.

Apparently, they only do that on sports that don't get as much attention (in the US, at least).

Last year, we wrote how the press was planning to boycott various cricket matches over similar attempts to limit reporting. And, once again, major news organizations like Reuters are proudly announcing that they will not be covering certain cricket matches due to the press policies. The Associated Press has announced similar plans, and says that the AFP is also refusing to cover the matches. At what point do these sports leagues realize that they're better off with press coverage than without?

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The coinage "fangst," referring to Twilight's genre of emo teen-girl vampire stuff, turns out to already be the name of a delightful and diaphanous hanging storage unit from Ikea.

sciencehabit writes "For what may be the first time, fMRI scans of brain activity have been used as evidence in the sentencing phase of a murder trial. Defense lawyers for an Illinois man convicted of raping and killing a 10-year-old girl used the scans to argue that their client should be spared the death penalty because he has a brain disorder. Some experts say the scans are irrelevant because they were taken 20+ years after the crimes were committed. Others point out that the scans are only being considered because the sentencing phase of a trial has less stringent standards about evidence than those used to establish a defendant's innocence or guilt." In the Illinois case, the fMRI defense didn't help the defendant, whom a jury sentenced to death.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is running another contest for 2010 centered on embedded systems and their embeddedSPARK platform, the Windows embedded software for hobbyists. The grand prize this year is a $15,000. The theme is "Fun & Games." See the embeddedSPARK website for all of the contest details.

embeddedSPARK 2010 Challenge

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