Remember how AOL first became "famous"? It cluttered the world (and our garbage dumps) with millions upon millions of CD-ROMs offering "try AOL for free!" It seems that pollution is in AOL's genes, and it just can't get away from it. How else to explain AOL's new plan to rebuild its brand: to flood the internet with poorly written, but quickly written, content based on whatever search terms are hot. Danny Sullivan points out the amusing fact that AOL is looking to leverage search engines for more traffic this way, at the very same time as others, such as Rupert Murdoch, are claiming that Google is "stealing" from him in sending traffic, and he's considering opting-out.

But, of course, that doesn't make AOL's strategy very well conceived either. Farhad Manjoo makes the case for why this is a dumb plan, and there's plenty to agree with:

The trouble with AOL's plan, then, isn't that it's based on data-mining. Instead, it's what the company will likely do with search data--publish quick, vapid posts that do little to advance any hot story and instead feed readers a collection of factoids gathered from other places. How do we know this will happen? Because AOL's model is strikingly similar to that of Demand Media and Associated Content, two start-ups that also use search data and user contributions to build Web content. Indeed, AOL's Armstrong--who was an advertising executive at Google until earlier this year--is reportedly an investor in Associated Content, whose CEO is also a former Googler.

Associated Content stands as a cautionary tale for anyone looking to do news by the numbers. It is a wasteland of bad writing, uninformed commentary, and the sort of comically dull recitation of the news you'd get from a second grader.

Effectively, it's a plan based on adding crap into the system to trick search engines. It's pollution and web spam as a business model. But as folks like Umair Haque are fond of pointing out, business models based on tricking people and not adding any real value aren't business models that will last. They're short-term scams. Manjoo, in his writeup, helps explain why:

Will this plan do wonders for AOL's bottom line? It very well might, at least in the short run. If AOL can replicate the success of Associated Content across its network of sites, it will surely see huge gains in traffic and renewed interest from advertisers. But this plan hinges on something that can't be guaranteed for long--a weakness in search engines. By any measure, stories like those found on AC don't deserve top billing in search results. If you search for "Tiger Woods mistress pictures," you should get pictures of Tiger Woods' alleged mistress, not a story that repeats that phrase a dozen times. Google and other search engines constantly battle search engine spam, and over time they're sure to steer people away from sites that rely on such trickery to get visitors. Then what? Associated Content gets 90 percent of its traffic from search engines. Once Google and co. wise up to AC's schemes, its business model is toast.

A short-term strategy based on polluting the internet with bad content may be a last-gasp effort to revive a dead brand, but it's difficult to see how that's any sort of long-term strategy to survive.

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buswolley writes "The slicing the brain of the famous amnesic patient H.M. into giant histological sections is now in full swing, and is being streamed live. The brain specimen is frozen and sectioned whole during one continuous session that is expected to last approximately 30 hours."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

buswolley writes "The slicing the brain of the famous amnesic patient H.M. into giant histological sections is now in full swing, and is being streamed live. The brain specimen is frozen and sectioned whole during one continuous session that is expected to last approximately 30 hours."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

jshamacher writes "I've used MythTV for several years (first on Slackware, now via Mythbuntu) and it's good. But not great — I have a list of annoyances as long as my arm. For example, even 0.22 still has problems playing many DVDs and I frequently have to fall back on Xine. Since upgrading to new hardware, I've had issues with sound dropping out; these problems only occur for Myth, not for anything else. So now I'm trying out alternatives. Freevo seemed promising but when I tried it a few months ago but it had its own issues. I'm also increasingly getting pressure from my family to get things like NetFlix streaming working on this machine. This seems to imply migrating to a Windows-based solution. I threw XP on it and tried MediaPortal but could never get that to control my Motorola cable box via the IR blaster. So my questions to you: What DVR software do you use? Are you happy with it? What don't you like? Are there any packages out there that 'just work' as media hubs and for time-shifting cable TV?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Famed author Arthur C. Clarke once explained that he never patented the the concept of geostationary communications satellites, which many say he invented, because a lawyer told him the concept was "too far-fetched to be taken seriously." But what about things going in the other direction. If, in a book or a movie, you describe or display a technology that has already been patented, is it infringement? Most people would dismiss such a concept as flat-out ridiculous. But a company called Global Findability apparently disagrees. It has sued Summit Entertainment, the producers of the sci-fi film, Knowing, an apparently otherwise dreadful flick that includes -- as a central plot point -- an "encoded message [that] predicts with pinpoint accuracy the dates, death tolls and coordinates of every major disaster of the past 50 years."

Yes, Global Findability is claiming that its patent on "Integrated information processing system for geospatial media" (Patent 7107286) was infringed by this fictional device. Eriq Gardner, at THREsq, sums it up nicely:

We're familiar with patent troll lawsuits. We're also aware that Hollywood is prone to allegations of idea theft. But what we seem to have here is a strange new genre-bending legal claim where one can infringe technology in fiction similar to the way one can defame a person in fiction.

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RPM cameras sells handmade mat-board pinhole cameras, optionally cased in leather as shown above. They'll sell you a kit for half the price of a finished camera, and they also host a free tutorial on how to build a simple version for yourself. [Thanks, Billy Baque!]

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Vigile writes "Intel unveiled a completely new processor design today the company is dubbing the 'Single-chip Cloud Computer' (but was previously codenamed Bangalore). Justin Rattner, the company's CTO, discussed the new product at a press event in Santa Clara and revealed some interesting information about the goals and design of the new CPU. While terascale processing has been discussed for some time, this new CPU is the first to integrate full IA x86 cores rather than simple floating point units. The 48 cores are set 2 to a 'tile' and each tile communicates with others via a 2D mesh network capable of 256 GB/s rather than a large cache structure. "

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We had just been noting how Spanish courts seemed to be actually interpreting copyright law in a reasonable way, and slapping down industry attempts to abuse the laws. Of course, that couldn't last. It appears that Spain is now proposing new copyright laws that would bring its existing laws down the well-lobbied path of draconian punishment, increased third party liability and other mindless ideas that have more to do with propping up an old business model than encouraging the creation of new quality content. A bunch of professional content creators in Spain are organizing to protest these new rules, but do they stand a chance against the usual onslaught of industry lobbyists?

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An anonymous reader writes "Apparently the most prolific of users in the SETI@Home community has resigned his job as a school technology supervisor after it was revealed he had the software installed on some 5000 school machines. The school claims to have lost $1 million in upkeep on the affected machines."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Rotating Kitchen by Zeger Reyers started rotating last Friday and will continue to rotate until February 28th 2010.

Rotating Kitchen

I just wrote a piece about the J-school of the Future over on Rebootnews. After writing it, I sent a note to Doc Searls and JP Rangaswami of British Telecom, both of whom are participating in the Supernova conference in San Francisco. (I listened to JP's talk on the webcast and was, as usual, impressed with his thinking.)

I asked JP if any of the technologists he employs could explain why technology is important. It was kind of a challenge, because I find that so many people who call themselves technologists don't have an answer to that question. His talk was about this subject, so I thought it was fair to bring it up. Had I been interviewing him I would have.

Anyway, the answer: Technology is important because it empowers people. That's where you start. Not in novelty or neatness, not in the fact that it changes things, because it might change things by disempowering. Change is not in itself a valid reason for anything.

The only reason to have technology is that it gives people power to change things for the better. Note that the technology is not the subject of that sentence, people are.

I don't think you can even begin to be a technologist if you don't have a passionate view about technology's importance. It has to be the reason you're doing it. Not because you have an aptitude for it, or want to make a lot of money, or want to change the world, or prove yourself or show your father (uncle, mother, sister, brother, best friend) that you have the stuff to make it. None of those things make a technologist.

If you're not thinking about people, all the time, in everything you do, then you're not a technologist.

Usually I put an "imho" at the end of statements like that, but this one is so important, I'm leaving it off.

Mind Hacks reports on a study published in Forensic Science International about "legal highs" that contain synthetic cannabinoids that mimic the effects of marijuana. Apparently, these drugs are made by a "highly organized neuroscience-savvy industry" that stays one step ahead of governments that outlaw the designer drugs. As soon as one analog is outlawed, another one appears for sale almost immediately.

Two things came to mind when I read this. One, the US has laws that outlaw drugs that are chemically similar to illegal drugs, so I don't see how these "legal highs" can be sold legally in the US. Two, who knows if these analogs are safe? I keep thinking of that NOVA episode, "The Case of the Frozen Addict," about the guy who destroyed the part of his brain that produced dopamine after he took some kind of Demerol analog he'd cooked up. It turned him into a living frozen statue.

[D]rugs like speed, heroine, cocaine and ecstasy require legally controlled raw materials but the processing stage is low-tech. That's why some types of speed are called 'bathtub crank', because some of it is literally synthesised in a bathtub, as images of meth lab busts illustrate.

But this is not the case with cannabinoids which require a complex and careful lab process with many stages and sometimes the separation of mirror image molecules (enantiomers) from each other as only one of the 'reflections' is desirable. These are not trivial process. They can't be done in back rooms and they can't be done by amateurs.

What's more, these aren't just copy-cat syntheses done by your average underground lab who know the illicit process and just want to recreate it. These are new compounds, perhaps reported only a handful of times in the scientific literature and selected for their specific effect on the brain.

Spice flow: the new street drug pharmacology

(Image: Spice drug.jpg, GNU Free Documentation License, Wikimedia Commons)

Using a heart rate monitor, a hacked MP3 player and a LilyPad Arduino, Dana Ramler and Holly Schmidt developed a wearable bio circuit:

With each beat of the heart, Bio Circuit connects the wearer with the inner workings of their body. In this sense the garment functions like other biofeedback devices that use sensors to provide a person with information about their physiological state. With Bio Circuit, we are proposing that these kinds of devices could extend a person's awareness to include the environment.

[via Fashioning Tech]

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NYC artist David Foox has created these super cute organ donor figures wearing hospital gowns and organ-shaped heads. The doll versions are on exhibit at 323 East Gallery in Royal Oak, Michigan through December 18th, but you can also buy the vinyl toy versions for $15 each on the artist's web site. Seems like the perfect Christmas gift for your doctor friend — where else can you get figurines called Black Market Kidneys and Pickled Liver? David Foox's web site via The Underwire

Our friends at Arrested Motion have a bunch of photos of the new Shag exhibition at the Corey Helford Gallery in Los Angeles. Shag's new work is darker, weirder, and more complex than anything he's done before and I was blown away when I saw it in person. Shag used Adobe illustrator to draw the pieces (which measure 6 feet x 4.5 feet) and they are printed on canvas. Shag told me each drawing took about a month. Each one is limited to five copies and they cost $5000 each. (Photo above by deeselby)

Openings: SHAG - “Autumn’s Come Undone” @ Corey Helford Gallery

coaxial writes "In Denmark, it's legal to make copies of commercial videos for backup or other private purposes. It's also illegal to break the DRM that restricts copying of DVDs. Deciding to find out which law mattered, Henrik Anderson reported himself for 100 violations of the DRM-breaking law (he ripped his DVD collection to his computer) and demanded that the Danish anti-piracy Antipiratgruppen do something about. They promised him a response, then didn't respond. So now he's reporting himself to the police. He wants a trial, so that the legality of the DRM-breaking law can be tested in court."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've discussed in the past how Noble Prize winning economists have been worried about the impact of intellectual property laws, and how at least one Nobel Prize winning physicist is warning that strict intellectual property laws are harming science and innovation. Now we can add a Nobel Prize winning biologist to the list (his Nobel was for medicine). Sir John Sulston has written up a column for The Guardian explaining how intellectual property is "shackling" science:

The myth is that IP rights are as important as our rights in castles, cars and corn oil. IP is supposedly intended to encourage inventors and the investment needed to bring their products to the clinic and marketplace. In reality, patents often suppress invention rather than promote it: drugs are "evergreened" when patents are on the verge of running out -- companies buy up the patents of potential rivals in order to prevent them being turned into products. Moreover, the prices charged, especially for pharmaceuticals, are often grossly in excess of those required to cover costs and make reasonable profits.

He goes on to attack the massive growth in things like gene patents, which has resulted in: "research on certain genes [being] largely restricted to the companies that hold the patents, and tests involving them are marketed at prohibitive prices. We believe that this poses a very real danger to the development of science for the public good." He points to the long history of how scientific advance has come from collaboration and the sharing of knowledge, rather than the hoarding of it, and fears where things are heading now that knowledge is so often locked up:

For science to continue to flourish, it is necessary that the knowledge it generates be made freely and widely available. IP rights have the tendency to stifle access to knowledge and the free exchange of ideas that is essential to science. So, far from stimulating innovation and the dissemination of the benefits of science, IP all too often hampers scientific progress and restricts access to its products.

We keep hearing more and more people who recognize all of this speaking out against what is happening. But the politicians only seem to listen to the lawyers and the lobbyists who have every incentive to ignore the reality around them. How do we change that?

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The Engadget Show: Kindle etching and DIY adventures with Adafruit Industries. Some footage and a tour of the show at Adafruit, I hang out there quite a bit :) Josh writes -

If you'll recall, some months ago we held a little competition for readers to submit artwork destined for laser-etching on the backsides of Amazon's Kindle. After everyone voted on the top five out of the mountain of selections, we took the gaggle of readers down to our friends at Adafruit Industries (headed up by the lovely and delightful Limor Fried and Phil Torrone) for some time under the laser. While we were there getting our etch on with their massive laser, we convinced Limor and Phil to show off some of the other crazy kit they've got in the labs -- and we've captured it all on film... er, video. Take a look at our excursion into the world of dynamic DIY'ing -- we think you'll like what you see.

Adafruit posted some additional photos of the etched Kindles here - and you can also view the Engadget show M4V here... Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Culture jamming | Digg this!

An anonymous reader writes "In the wake of the recent release of thousands of private files and emails after a server of the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia was hacked, Prof. Phil Jones is stepping down as head of the CRU. Prof. Michael Mann, another prominent climate scientist is also under inquiry by Penn State University."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The BookMine, an old and rare book dealer, has been collecting funny conversations with customers and would-be customers. Here are a few:

(phone call)
Hello. I have some old books for sale.
What kind of books?
Old ones.
OK. What subject areas?
Where does it say that?

(grown-up, looks around)
Do you have any real books?
Yes.
Well, not like the ones you have here. You know, real books!?
I'm not sure what you mean.
You know, books that are real.
Sorry, none of our books are real!

(phone call)
I have some old books.
Really, so do I.
How much will you pay me for them?
Good question. What do you have?
I'm not sure.
Why don't you bring them by.
Drive all the way downtown?
That's usually the way it works.
You're kidding!
Not really.
How much do you pay for books?
Depends on what you have.
Are there any other bookstores in town?
Yes.
What are their phone numbers?
Hang on, let me look them up for you.
(After being left on hold for 10 minutes, he finally hung up)

Funny conversations between book dealer and customers (via TYWKIWDBI)

I don't even have an iPhone, but I'm digging these icon pillows. They're colorful, cute, happy, and soft, characteristics that I wouldn't ordinarily associate with a shiny black gadget. Etsy via Gizmodo

In other news, world's high school math teachers declare Wolfram Alpha, "dead to us."

Have you ever given up working on a math problem because you couldn't figure out the next step? Wolfram|Alpha can guide you step by step through the process of solving many mathematical problems, from solving a simple quadratic equation to taking the integral of a complex function.

[For example] When trying to find the roots of 3x2+x-7=4x, Wolfram|Alpha can break down the steps for you if you click the "Show steps" button in the Result pod.

Wolfram Alpha: Step By Step Math

(Thanks, Jamesbont!)

These signs (stickers? graffiti?) use simple computer commands to address elements of the urban environment. Love that these can have both a positive or critical message. If only you could command-z IRL... [via @alexislloyd]

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The city of Campbell in Silicon Valley just elected a 26-year old gay Asian man, Evan Low, as mayor. Campbell is 70% white and does not have a vocal gay community. We wish him the best!

Martijn de Boer writes "The book has been written to provide the reader with a short introduction to the concepts of Service Oriented Architecture with Java. The book covers the theory and analysis from the start and is progressing to a more intermediate level slowly throughout the different chapters. This book has been written for software architects and programmers of the Java language who have an interest in building software using SOA concepts in their applications. The cover hints to a series called “From Technologies to Solutions”, and that is exactly what this book tries to do, it tries to explain the SOA technology with different case studies and a path for solutions for your applications." Read below for the rest of Martijn's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rick Warren, the American mega-pastor who has worked with the Ugandan pastors and government officials pushing the death penalty for homosexuality in that country, has refused to condemn laws that would result in the life imprisonment of anyone caught having gay sex, the execution of anyone caught having gay sex repeatedly, and the prosecution of anyone who failed to turn in suspected gay-sex havers.

Warren has taken steps to distance himself from the Ugandan legislation, and apparently cut off ties with Martin Ssempa, one of its key proponents, in 2007. Which is why his refusal to take sides on the legislation now makes even less sense. From Newsweek's Human Condition blog...

Warren won't go so far as to condemn the legislation itself. A request for a broader reaction to the proposed Ugandan antihomosexual laws generated this response: "The fundamental dignity of every person, our right to be free, and the freedom to make moral choices are gifts endowed by God, our creator. However, it is not my personal calling as a pastor in America to comment or interfere in the political process of other nations." On Meet the Press this morning, he reiterated this neutral stance in a different context: "As a pastor, my job is to encourage, to support. I never take sides."

I'm not a big fan of putting words in the mouth of any deity, but I'm pretty damn sure that's not what Jesus would do. In fact, we know what Jesus does in this situation: He steps in to protect the condemned and shames the executioners into walking away. Maybe Rick Warren needs a reminder of that.

On last night's Colbert Report, author Sherman Alexie spent most of the interview ranting against digital books and how "piracy" was destroying the book business. The whole thing was odd not just because of how uninformed it was, but also because he seemed to contradict himself multiple times. I haven't read any of Alexie's books, but if his logic is so twisted, it's difficult to think that his books are worth reading: He starts out by insisting that he won't put his book on the Kindle or any digital book format because he's afraid of piracy -- but that makes no sense at all. By not giving readers what they want, he's actually encouraging more piracy. There are probably plenty of people actively willing to buy ebook versions of his book, and his response is that because of piracy, he won't offer it to them. How does this help? Those people now have more incentive to actually go and download an unauthorized copy of the book (and Alexie is fooling himself if he thinks they don't exist). How can not giving people what they're asking for and are willing to pay for be a smart business model?

He compares the book business to the music business, saying:

"When the music industry went digital, somewhere between 75 and 95% of music is pirated. Nobody makes money off their music any more. Everything is about live shows now."

First of all, it wasn't the industry that went digital. Music went online way before the industry even realized it, and one of the main reasons that the piracy rates are as high as they are (and his numbers are industry figures that aren't reliable at all) was because the industry held back for so long in giving people what they wanted: which is exactly what Alexie is now doing!

As for his claim that no one makes money off their music any more, that's obviously silly. He admits that they now make their money from live shows (which is making money off their music). And then later in the interview, he points out that one of the parts he enjoyed most about being a published author was doing live performances and readings of his works. In other words, he already does what he claims happened to the music industry. So why is he so worried about piracy? That's not clear at all.

He also seems rather uninformed about how file sharing has helped some authors.

I'd be really worried if I were Stephen King or James Patterson or a really big best seller that when their books become completely digitized, how easy it's going to be to pirate them.

Where to start....? First, Alexie doesn't seem to understand how book file sharing happens. It's not because the industry digitizes the books, but because others digitize those books, and, yes, they're most likely already available on file sharing networks, whether those authors released them in ebook form or not. It's not the official ebook they're sharing in most cases anyway.

Second, as for the claim that it will harm the biggest name authors most of all, Alexie might want to talk to Paulo Coehlo. Coehlo is the guy who quietly set up operations to "pirate" his own book and saw the sales of his physical books increase massively. Oh, and the book he chose to offer up via BitTorrent, The Alchemist is one of the best selling books of all time. Stephen King and James Patterson, by the way, do not have any books on that list -- though, to be fair, if you combine all of their books, King has sold more than Coehlo, and Patterson seems to be in a similar ballpark, probably selling slightly more than Coehlo, but both have published many more books.

Then, really strangely, he attacks "open source culture":

With the "open source culture" on the internet, the idea of ownership -- of artistic ownership -- goes away.

Now, beyond this just being flat out wrong about what "open source" means or what "open source culture" is, what's the most bizarre thing about this statement is who it's coming from. Alexie is most well-known for his writing about modern Native American life -- and Native Americans aren't exactly known for their strong believe in artistic ownership. In fact, much of the understanding of so-called "gift economies," which are sometimes (though not always accurately) used to describe the open source world are actually based on Native American gift giving culture of tribes in the Pacific Northwest, which is where Alexie is from.

Colbert actually does a good job pushing back on this, in his usual self-mocking manner, pointing out that sharing helps get the word out there, and the only reason he's so famous is because of how easily his content is shared via TV. Without that, he notes, he'd have to just go door to door shouting at people. To which Alexie responds: "I'm a fan of door to door shouting at people." Good luck with that.

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A happy 1958 Disney cartoon about the future of highway transportation. (Via Robert Popper)

Celebrate the holidays in style with these adorable MakerBot ornaments, by Thingiverse user rplumley. They don't seem to be available for sale, but you can of course print one at home with your own MakerBot (or Reprap). Perfect for the rapid prototyper in your life! [Thanks, Marty!]

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djBC writes, "After four years of Christmas collections, and with a 18/mo little girl, I decided it was time to take a stab at a Hanukkah mashup/remix collection. The 8 tunes (8 days, 8 tunes, get it?) have a sort of klezmer/traditional Kewish music meets dub/house/pop/hip-hop sort of feel, and the two bonus tracks are for laughs. One high point is Brasilia's FAROFF with his House of Pain vs Amsterdam Klezmer Band mash, with mp3 and video."

I love the description: "Ingredients: Frank Yankovic and His Yanks, Gwen Stefani, House Of Pain, Frank Zappa, Amsterdam Klezmer Band, Pa Brapad, several iterations of The Dreidel Song, several iterations of Hava Nagila, South Park, a dash of Chingy, Adam Sandler, The Star Trek Theme, Van Halen, James Caan, Charlton Heston, Fonzie, Sarah Silverman, Trio, Three Weissmen, Craig and Co, Alan Sherman, Pudie Tadow, and two seconds of Black Eyed Peas."

Menorah Mashups

Facebook, Google, Yahoo and eBay have written a letter to Britain's Pirate-Finder General, Peter Mandelson, objecting to his proposal to introduce the Digital Economy Bill with provisions that allow him to make up any copyright law and penalty he likes. He's responded saying, "Don't worry, no one would ever abuse that power, ever, ever. Why would they?"

"The law must keep pace with technology, so that the Government can act if new ways of seriously infringing copyright develop in the future," a spokesperson for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (Bis).

The consortium believe that if Clause 17, as it is known, is approved it will give "any future Secretary of State" the ability to amend copyright laws as they see fit.

"This power could be used, for example, to introduce additional technical measures or increase monitoring of user data even where no illegal practice has taken place," the letter read.

This would "discourage innovation" and "impose unnecessary costs" representatives of the firms wrote.

Bis said that clause 17 was a necessary extension of its plans to reduce copyright theft and that fears that government would mould copyright laws to their needs were unfounded.

Web giants unite against Digital Britain copyright plan (Thanks, Graham!)

Do you think Marilyn Monroe is smoking a joint or a hand-rolled cigarette in this video?

heychris writes "You've gotta love the Chicago Tribune's story on Tesla Coil hobbyists from the first sentence. 'Under a starry Saturday sky behind a Lake Zurich warehouse, three men unload a small flamethrower, electric cabling, neon-tube "light sabers," about 80 pounds of chain mail and two 7-foot devices that look like monster-movie props.' So what does one do with 1.6 million volts and a Tesla coil or two? Play 110dB music, of course."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jay sez, "My company built an office building out of shipping containers in Providence, RI. It's called the Box Office, it's energy efficient, it upcycles 32 shipping containers, and will create incubator office/studio space in a neighborhood that needs it."

BOX OFFICE october09.mov (Thanks, Jay!)

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 Meara O'Reilly, projects intern

I've been tinkering with the electronics on various cigar box guitars for a while, but I'd never had the chance to build one from the ground up. So when MAKE editor-in-chief Mark Frauenfelder wrote up a new how-to for an acoustic version of the guitar for the upcoming issue (MAKE, Volume 21, "Traditional Cigar Box Guitar"), I jumped on the chance to test-build it.

Mark Frauenfelder's new acoustic cigar box guitar in MAKE Volume 21, coming in January.

As always here in the Make: Labs, it can be quite an adventure trying to sniff out all the possible interpretations of instructions while at the same time learning new skills, and this guitar build was no exception! I made two orientation-related mistakes based on an early manuscript and had quite a time trying to finish the build. In retrospect, the misunderstandings seem silly, but once made it's really easy for mistakes like these to compound -- due to structural weakness, later on my guitar neck snapped, twice! -- so I thought I'd write about them here, even just as an ode to those mistakes you think you'd never make, but somehow end up making anyway:

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The Maker Shed is the exclusive US distributor of Gakken products, allowing shoppers to get high-quality kits from Japan without paying out the nose for shipping costs. Gakken's kits provide the perfect mix of DIY, science, and history as they entertain as well as educate. Gakken's popularity is certainly not limited to Japan, as their following has spawned tributes such as the Gakken Flickr pool where users are eager to show off what they've done with their kits. In addition to MAKE's relationship with Gakken, MAKE has a Japanese version of the magazine as well as a very active Japanese version of Make: Online. Make: Japan has also been very proactive in their own version of the Maker Faire (the successful Make: Tokyo Meeting series), having just recently completed the fourth round of this lively event. For your gift-giving guidance, here are a few of my favorite Gakken items for the Maker Shed, as well as a few other items I've found in my travels.

---

New Edison-Style Cup Phonograph Kit
This cup phonograph sits proudly on display in my home, and pretty much everyone who sees it wants to give it a try. This replica kit uses the same technology that Thomas Edison used, replacing Edison's waxed pipe and stylus with a plastic cup and a needle, but the end results are the same: You record your own voice on a plastic cup -- and play it back! Here's how it works, your voice vibrates the air minutely when it gets into the horn. Then the vibration is conducted to the needle and is translated into a wavy movement of the needle and carves a groove onto the cup. When replaying, the reverse is true, the waves of the carved groove vibrate the needle and the vibration is conducted to the horn and the sound is produced from the horn.

Price: $36.99

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For years we've all heard the stories about how bad the major labels are at accounting for royalties they owe bands. There have certainly been a large number of lawsuits from artists claiming that this rather opaque accounting system is used to hide money from musicians, with various multi-platinum selling musicians claiming they never saw a dime of royalties from their albums, thanks to major label accounting. This is, of course, rather amazing in this day and age where technology allows for amazingly accurate accounting practices -- even for massively complex operations. But, then again, these are the major labels we're talking about, and they're often proud of their technical cluelessness.

Still, it's quite interesting to see a blog post, sent in by Quentin Hartman and written by the singer for the band Too Much Joy, Tim Quirk. Quirk is in an interesting position. Having been a moderately successful major label artist who is now an executive at digital music company Rhapsody, he's seen different sides of the business -- and in his must-read blog post, he details the absolute fiction that is a royalty statement from Warner Music Group -- leading to the flat-out false claim that Too Much Joy earned a grand total of $62.47 in digital royalties over five years across their three Warner albums. You really should read the whole thing, as it's quite detailed about how the major labels view most bands on their roster.

Back to my ridiculous Warner Bros. statement. As I flipped through its ten pages (seriously, it took ten pages to detail the $62.47 of income), I realized that Warner wasn't being evil, just careless and unconcerned -- an impression I confirmed a few days later when I spoke to a guy in their Royalties and Licensing department I am going to call Danny.

I asked Danny why there were no royalties at all listed from iTunes, and he said, "Huh. There are no domestic downloads on here at all. Only streams. And it has international downloads, but no international streams. I have no idea why." I asked Danny why the statement only seemed to list tracks from two of the three albums Warner had released -- an entire album was missing. He said they could only report back what the digital services had provided to them, and the services must not have reported any activity for those other songs. When I suggested that seemed unlikely -- that having every track from two albums listed by over a dozen different services, but zero tracks from a third album listed by any seemed more like an error on Warner's side, he said he'd look into it. As I asked more questions (Why do we get paid 50% of the income from all the tracks on one album, but only 35.7143% of the income from all the tracks on another? Why did 29 plays of a track on the late, lamented MusicMatch earn a total of 63 cents when 1,016 plays of the exact same track on MySpace earned only 23 cents?) he eventually got to the heart of the matter: :"We don't normally do this for unrecouped bands," he said. "But, I was told you'd asked."

As you hopefully know, with a major record label, the band gets an advance to record the album. From then on, the label no longer pays the band anything. Even though the band accrues royalties on albums sold, those royalties simply go towards repaying the advance. Most label bands never fully repay the advance, and are thus considered "unrecouped." This does not mean (as record label defenders will claim) that such bands were money losers for the label. The labels still take their own hefty cut from any album sales. They just also hang onto the tiny fraction of album sales that are officially designated for the actual musicians.

Basically, what Quirk notes, is that whether through malice or indifference (or a combination of both), the general major label attitude towards "unrecouped" bands is that the accounting is meaningless, so they don't even bother. That means they make massive mistakes -- such as the time Warner just happened to make a $10,000 mistake in Warner's favor, and then mocked Quirk for even caring about such a measly sum.

Now, when it came to digital revenue, for most artists, Warner apparently doesn't even bother to tell artists what their digital royalties are. They're unrecouped, so it doesn't matter in the minds of Warner execs. Quirk, by nature of also being an industry exec was able to (thanks to a chance meeting at a conference and 13 months of waiting) get Warner to agree to detail his digital earnings. But, because the band is unlikely to pay off the nearly $400,000 in "unrecouped" advance money, basically Warner did a slipshod job of it all. What this tells you is that Warner either has no serious accounting system to track this sort of thing or has mastered the art of obfuscating everything and purposely acting like their accounting department is run by six-year-olds. I'm not sure which is scarier.

Now, Quirk is reasonably clear that he's just as likely to attribute all of this to a combination of indifference and incompetence than to malice -- and there's nothing to indicate otherwise. But, you do have to ask how seriously anyone can take any of the ridiculous numbers that Warner Music Group or the RIAA toss around concerning the music industry and "losses" due to "piracy" and such, when it can't even put together an accounting system that can track (let alone accurately count) the most basic information that it is contractually obligated to both track and report. It also should highlight, for any bands who still actually think signing a major record label contract makes sense, how little regard major labels like Warner Music Group actually have for most of the artists on their label. As Quirk notes in discussing the $10,000 error:

When I caught this mistake, and brought it to the attention of someone with the power to correct it, he wasn't just befuddled by my anger -- he laughed at it. "$10,000 is nothing!" he chuckled.

If you're like most people -- especially people in unrecouped bands -- "nothing" is not a word you ever use in conjunction with a figure like "$10,000," but he seemed oblivious to that. "It's a rounding error. It happens all the time. Why are you so worked up?"

So, perhaps, the next time that Warner Music claims that it deserves $22,500 for a "pirated" song, someone will point out that according to Warner Music's own accountants, such numbers are really just a "rounding error" and there's no need to pay them. Somehow, I get the feeling that Warner Music will take a different view on such numbers about then.

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The FDA has released a list of fraudulent H1N1 flu protection products. Highlights include: Sketchy, black-market flu vaccine (link included for maximum LULZ); all manner of home defense kits, ranging in price from the classic $19.95 to $570; and silver nanoparticle shampoo. Washing your hands: Still free. For now.

This "typewriter drawing" and accompanying letter of love/apology are dated from 1934 and come from the excellent blog Square America (which published them some months ago, but I'm just seeing them now, thanks Jesse Thorn).

The Boat Lullabies

Barence follows up to the ongoing Black Screen of Death Saga by saying "Microsoft says reports of 'Black Screen of Death' errors aren't caused by Windows Updates, as claimed by a British security firm. The software giant claims November's Windows Updates didn't alter registry keys in the way described by Prevx, which said that the Microsoft Patches caused PCs to boot with just a black screen and a Windows Explorer window. Microsoft is now blaming the problem on malware. Prevx has issued a grovelling apology on its own blog."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There'll be a lucky young steampunk somewhere this Christmas. [ebay]

From Thingiverse user gianteye. This is how I've seen the world pretty much since 1994 or so. CROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW!

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Last weekend, I happened upon a copy of Sterling's new Alice in Wonderland edition, with illustrations by Robert Ingpen. Ingpen's beautiful, dreamy illustrations are as lovely an interpretation of the subject as I've ever had the pleasure of seeing. Of course, the text is what it is, a masterpiece (it's the first book I ever read to myself, and I went on to marry a woman called Alice, so that should tell you how I feel about it). And Ingpen's art brings something genuinely new to it, a cloudlike insubstantiality tinged with a little bit of thunderhead, that makes me incredibly glad to own this book.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland illustrated by Robert Ingpen

Klubmoozak posted this vid documenting a typical bending process, complete with scrap-paper schematics, enclosure dremeling, and a final product demo. [via Matrixsynth] Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!

Guestblogger Paul Spinrad is a freelance writer/editor with Catholic interests, and is Projects Editor for MAKE magazine. He is the author of The VJ Book and The Re/Search Guide to Bodily Fluids, and was an early contributor to bOING bOING when it was an online zine. He lives in San Francisco.

If it's true that British Naval history is written in rum, sodomy, and the lash, one can't help but imagine what colorful fates have befallen drunken sailors early in the morning. Like many folk songs, "What Shall We Do With A Drunken Sailor," is a great template for verbal improvisation. For each verse, you just need four counts of lyrics, which you repeat between choruses. This provides ample time to set down your mug and gesture to your buddies, "Hey-- I've got a good one!" so they will give you the floor next time around.

I wish we could all be together now, singing sea chanties in some friendly tavern. That's not possible, but I think we can still have some fun coming up with and sharing new verses for What Shall We Do With A Drunken Sailor. I'll start, and if you have any, please post them in the comments:

• Ream his bunghole with a rusty scupper (repeat)
• Wring his sack in the starboard windlass (repeat)
• Soak his cheeks in the Devil's bath, now (repeat)
• Coat his mizzen-mast with tar and feathers (repeat)

(Obligatory Distancing Comment: Yes, this is totally immature.)

known_ID writes "The Large Hadron Collider — the most puissant particle-punisher ever assembled by the human race — has suffered another major power failure, knocking not only the atomsmasher itself but even its associated websites offline."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A journalism professor by the name of Tim Luckhurst is claiming that newspaper paywalls are needed to preserve democracy, and that free content online undermines democracy. We've heard this argument before, and it makes no more sense now than when it was first raised. The basic argument is that free content online isn't bringing in enough revenue to pay reporters, thus newspapers are going under and firing reporters. Thus, with fewer reporters, there are fewer people to watch the government and therefore corruption runs rampant. Or something like that.

Of course, there are so many fallacies wrapped up in this argument, it's difficult to even know where to start (though, one would have hoped that a journalism professor would have done the decent thing and checked into these things a bit more carefully before writing a silly opinion piece based on a variety of myths):

• Newspapers need readers to pay to survive. Not true. Not even close to true. First, newspapers have almost never made money from subscription fees or newsstand purchases. Those fees rarely even covered the cost of the newsprint and delivery. Newspapers have always made their money on advertising and classifieds (a form of advertising).
• Free content online is why newspapers are in trouble. Again, not true. In most cases, the publications that are in trouble are in that position because they took out tremendous amounts of debt. Most newspapers are actually still profitable on an operational basis, but aren't making enough to repay the debt. The problem was poor management thinking in believing that leveraging their futures to ridiculous levels made sense.
• Without old school newspapers, government corruption is not well covered. This one remains to be seen, but there is growing evidence that it, too, is not true. The power of the internet has made it such that many more people can hold our governments accountable by gaining a voice and speaking out against corruption or corruptive influences. It's not fixing the problem entirely, but then again, neither did newspapers. The fact is that it's much easier now to call attention to corruption, and there are more and more forums to help with that -- such as Wikileaks, combined with the ability to self publish or more easily contact those with a larger audience.
• Putting up a paywall will somehow fund more journalism. Again, remains to be seen, but there's little evidence to support this claim. There are numerous competing offerings providing news in the marketplace today. There is little indication that enough people are interested in paying directly for news to the level it would take to support news operations. Combine that with the decrease in ad revenue (the real source of revenue for most news organizations) from cutting off a large chunk of an audience, and it seems likely that these paywalls will actually serve to decrease overall revenue over the long term rather than increase it. It's not clear how that helps anyone.

On the whole, if one were to grade this professor's analysis, you'd have to give him a failing grade for basing an argument on outright falsehoods and unsupported statements.

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Once again, I'm delighted to return to a Boing Boing seasonal tradition: a charitable giving guide, a list of charities we personally support and want to give more attention to. And as in previous years, we invite you to add your own favorite charities to the list in the comments section. As with last year, this is a rough holiday for the charitable sector -- between Madoff collapses and econopocalypse, it's hard out there for everyone. But please, don't forget the charities that keep the world fair, free and healthy this holiday season.

US Charities

Electronic Frontier Foundation: As with every year, EFF gets the largest donation from me this year. Though I rooted for Obama, I harbored no illusions that his inauguration would usher in a golden era of civil liberties. Between secrecy -- suppressing publication of the torture tapes and the text of the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement -- and the Dems' traditional coziness with Hollywood (the DMCA was a Cliniton creation), it's more important than ever to have principled, effective civil liberties watchdogs on the scene. I've seen first hand how smart EFF spends, how much they do with just a little, and I know that every penny I can spare makes a difference.

Creative Commons: Now six years old, CC continues to grow in relevance and reach. More governments, schools, artists and corporations are finding freedom in the Creative Commons licenses. I make my living with CC, and so much of the media I love -- the media that changes and challenges me -- is released under CC licenses.

<img src="http://boingboing.net/images/sova-tb.jpg" height="69"
width="100" align="left">
Mark sez, Sova Community Food and
Resource Program operates three food pantries in Los Angeles to supply
very low income families in Los Angeles with groceries. "Nobody is
ever turned away without food."

Youth Radio: Pesco sez, "Youth Radio is an afterschool program that teaches journalism, media, and audio production skills to underserved young people, mostly high school age You can hear their stories on National Public Radio, local airwaves, and of course online. A lot of the graduates stick around for a while as paid writers, producers, engineers, and teachers."

Xeni sez, "Fundacion Sobrevivientes (In English, "Survivors Foundation") works to end "femicide" in Guatemala. They provide legal aid, psychological care, and protection for rape victims -- including children. They assist women whose children have been snatched from them to be sold illegally into adoption. They provide support for families of female assassination victims. Founder Norma Cruz was featured in the documentary Killer's Paradise. Her work links the murders of thousands of Guatemalan women to the country's 36-year civil war. She, her colleagues, and family are frequently targeted by those who seek to prevent the center's work.

Contact: asobrevivientes@yahoo.es or info@sobrevivientes.org

Tel: (502) 2285-0100 or (502) 2285-0139"

Free Software Foundation/Defective By Design: The Free Software Foundation's principled litigation, license creation and campaigning is fierce, uncompromising and has changed the world. You interact with code that they made possible a million times a day, and they never stop working to make sure that the code stays free.
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The Internet Archive: A free repository for all of human knowledge, a bottomless source of bandwidth and storage, the Internet's collective memory, the reinvention of the library right before our eyes. I don't know what I'd do without it.

The Gutenberg Project: The world's leading access-to-public-domain project. They have truly created a library from nothing, and oh, what a library.

The MetaBrainz Foundation: I'm on the board of this charity, which oversees the MusicBrainz project. MusicBrainz is a free and open alternative to the evil (dis)Gracenote, which took all the metadata about CDs that you and I keyed in and locked it away behind a wall of patents and onerous licensing deals. The org that controls the metadata controls the world -- this needs to be in the public's hands.

Last year: The Participatory Culture Foundation: I'm proud to serve on PCF's board as a volunteer, and I love the totally wonderful free media player they produce, Miro, an Internet TV program that just works . Because TV is too important to leave up to Microsoft and Apple.

The Clarion Foundation: I'm also a volunteer on Clarion's board, helping to oversee the world-famous Clarion Writers' Workshop, a bootcamp for sf writers that has produced some of the finest talents in our field, including Octavia Butler, Bruce Sterling, Nalo Hopkinson, Kelly Link, and Lucius Shepard. I'm a graduate myself, and an instructor (I taught in 2005 and 2007) -- I received a substantial scholarship to the workshop in 1992 and it changed my life. I will pay that debt forward every year.

Amnesty International: Just famed for their principled, effective campaigning for justice and fair treatment under the law, Amnesty has its finger in every pie -- freeing Gitmo detainees, defending jailed journalists, fighting torture and human trafficking, and standing up to bullies wherever they find them. They deserve every cent we can give them.

Hospice Net: I make a donation to this charity every year in memory of my dear friend, former Boing Boing guestblogger Pat York. Pat was killed in a car accident, and her family nominated this charity for memorial gifts.

ACLU: For the liberties the EFF doesn't cover, here in sticky meatspace, we have the ACLU. Fearless upholders of the Constitution -- an org that knows that you have to stand up for the rights of people you disagree with, or you aren't in a free society. Unwinding the violence done to fundamental freedoms over the past eight years will take time and money. The number of bad laws and regulations to overturn is staggering.

Child Rights and You: I travelled to Mumbai last year for research and was overwhelmed by the terrible, ubiquitous child poverty -- thousands and thousands of children, barefoot, disfigured, begging. I asked my Indian friends about it and was told that it was endemic to Mumbai and India in general, and that many children are exploited by desperate parents or criminal "pimps" who muscle them out of the majority of their earnings. As a new parent, I couldn't help but wonder again and again how I would feel if it were my child living in those circumstances. I'm no stranger to poverty -- I helped build schools with Nicaraguan refugees in Central America, worked to set up an NGO in sub-Saharan Africa -- but I'd never seen anything to rival this. On advice from my Indian friends, I investigated and made a donation to CRY). CRY works to remedy the root causes of child poverty in India, in cities and the countryside, with a special emphasis on protecting girls from exploitation. The problem is deep and huge, but the solution has to begin somewhere. CRY also maintains a UK site for British donors.

Canadian Charities

Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation: My aunt Heather died of breast cancer when she was only 41. My whole family is now involved with the society. I don't live in Toronto and can't join the annual run for the cure there, but at least I can donate to the cause.

UK Charities

Open Rights Group: As Britain's slide into the surveillance society continues, as unelected officials present insane proposals to dismantle privacy and due process to catch pirates, ORG just gets more and more relevant. Membership is up 25% since the Digital Economy Bill was introduced and it continues to grow. Your £5/month pays to keep the lights on for a group of activists working to keep DRM off the BBC, working to ensure that you won't lose your Internet connection because someone in your house was accused of infringement.

NO2ID: NO2ID stands as the nation's best, last bulwark against an Orwellian nightmare of universal tracking. NO2ID has won substantial victories against the New Labour's compulsive move towards a national ID card, keeping it at bay for years. The government wants to issue me (and other immigrants) one of these when my visa next renews, in two years. If they try to, I'll leave and take my family with me. My grandparents fled the Soviet Union rather than live under a ubiquitous surveillance system -- I'm not going to be enmeshed in one two generations later.

Liberty: Britain's answer to the American Civil Liberties Union. Every single time I read or hear a news-story about incursions on human rights in the UK, there's an articulate, knowledgeable Liberty commentator countering government's flimsy arguments and campaigning for our freedom. In an era where politicians spy on us seemingly through naked instinct, like ants building hills, it's groups like Liberty that present our best bulwark against tyranny.

MySociety: Software in the public interest -- it's a damned good idea. MySociety produces software like Pledgebank ("I will risk arrest by refusing to register for a UK ID card if 100,000 other Britons will also do it") and TheyWorkForYou (every word and deed by every Member of Parliament). It's plumbing for activists and community organizers.

[Warning - abruptly loud bits around the 1m50s mark]

Dave Wright's Magneto-Conga percussion sequencer is just dripping with handmade DIY awesomeness -

using three Hall Effect Sensors dc speaker is pulse width modulated for speed control mangets are placed on spinning mole can to make rhythms three channels - as many magnets are you can fit on it i only have four magnets right now sorry three twin-tee drum tones and small amp i was lazy and put them all on the same transformer im going to put another supply in just for the audio section but the motor interacting w/ the amp is funny was orig built on piece of wood as base - and then built case around unit from scrap

See more of Dave's work over at not breathing [via Matrixsynth] Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!

Cloacina was the ancient Roman goddess of sewers. Think about that for a minute. To the Romans, the ability to take vile, disgusting wastewater and just get it the heck out of Rome was such a miraculous feat that they created a whole deity to watch over and protect the pipeline.

Now, how much more impressive would Cloacina have been if she could turn the sludge into usable water again?

Today, cities around the world are shifting away from the historical focus of wastewater management (i.e. the miracle of making the wastewater go away somewhere where we can't see it) and adopting a new paradigm of re-use. David Sedlak, professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley, studies wastewater and spoke about water recycling at the 2009 Nobel Conference on water conservation issues at Minnesota's Gustavus Adolphus University. He said that people are often turned off by the idea of cycling water from the toilet to the tap and back again, but water recycling is very different from simply filling a glass out of the John.

In fact, you could be drinking recycled water and not even know it.

The idea of reusing wastewater isn't really anything new. Back around the turn of the 20th century, U.S. farmers used to set up shop at the end of sewage pipes, flooding their fields with wastewater fertilizer. Sewage farms grew massive, prize produce. Unfortunately, they were also breeding grounds for parasitic worms and other nasty gastrointestinal diseases.

It wasn't until the 1970s and 80s that people began to take a second look at watewater reuse. Orange County, Cali. began purifying sewer water in 1976, injecting it back into local aquifers to protect them against infiltration by salty seawater. Just about two years ago, the county launched a massive expansion of this program, opening the world's largest wastewater recycling plant. About 10 percent of the water people drink in Orange County comes from highly purified wastewater, Sedlak said.

"The system basically starts with effluent, the output from conventional sewage treatment, and subjects that first to micro-filtration, and then to reverse osmosis, and then to advanced oxidation and disinfectant and then out in the environment," Sedlak said. "Most of the advanced treatment plants built in the US use something called UV peroxide process, which treats water with ultraviolet light in the presence of hydrogen peroxide. The UV splits the hydrogen peroxide and forms hydroxl radicals, strong oxidants that break down organic contaminants and destroy microbes. Usually, the water isn't reused straight, but after these treatments it gets injected into a groundwater aquifer and recaptured later on."

And it's not just happening in the Southwest. Over the past decade, Sedlak said, cities in Texas, Georgia and Florida have picked up on water re-use as well.

The really interesting thing here, though, according to Sedlak, is that water recycling forces us to think about all wastewater in a different way. In reality, no matter where you live, effluent makes up a large part of the free-flowing rivers and lakes. That effluent is treated and cleaned, but nowhere near as extensively as the stuff coming out of Orange County's recycling plant. And, ultimately, it's recycled, too. Effluent-laced water is used by farms, it becomes a place where fish and other animals live, and it's part of the hydrologic cycle--eventually ending up back in the tap.

But most of us don't think of wastewater as something that's reused and we don't pay attention to what goes into our sewers. Sedlak hopes intentional community wastewater recycling will change that. We need to think about our sewers less like they're a fast train out of town, he says, and more like they're a part of our ecosystem.

Recognizing that water goes down the drain ends up in surface waters or drinking water supplies might decrease the unnecessary use of toxic household products, like socks that are coated with silver nanoparticles or shirts and hats that are coated with insecticides," he said. "These products are leached from clothing in the wash and end up in sewage. They'd be filtered out by a water recyling system like Orange County's. But the toxic compounds can pass through standard treatment processes, and they have the potential to harm aquatic organisms in rivers."

Watch David Sedlak's Nobel Conference Lecture

Image courtesy Flickr user glenjdiamond, via CC

1sockchuck writes "NASA has built its Nebula cloud computing platform inside a data center container so it can add capacity quickly, bringing extra containers online in 120 days. Nebula will provide on-demand compute power for NASA researchers managing large data sets and image repositories. "Nebula has been designed to automatically increase the computing power and storage available to science- and data-oriented web applications as demand rises" explains NASA's Chris Kemp. NASA has created the project using open source components and will release Nebula back to the open source community. "Hopefully we can provide a good example of a successful large-scale open source project in the government and pave the way for similar projects in other agencies," the Nebula team writes on its blog."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DxO Labs has issued a Mac update for its DxO Optics raw converter with a Windows version to follow. The latest Mac version, V5.3.6, includes support for fifteen new cameras and provides support for the Snow Leopard operating system (OS 10.6). The update is based around the inclusion of the cameras covered in DxO Optics 6 for Windows, but without the version 6 interface, a Mac version of which will be introduced in early 2010. A Windows update including support for the Canon G11, EOS 7D and Nikon D3000 will follow by 'mid December.'

An anonymous reader noted a bit from Ars saying Microsoft will be "switching internal focus from Windows 7 to Windows 8 in fiscal year 2010. Microsoft's fiscal year starts in July, which is only eight months away. According to Microsoft's roadmaps, the release of Windows 8 is scheduled for release in 2012."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Oliver Kosta-Théfaine is a Parisian artist who works in a number of media. But my favorite works of his are those that involve the absurdly simple technique of standing on a lighter with a disposable cigarette lighter and burning patterns onto a ceiling. [via Dude Craft]

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harrymcc noted a story talking about what might be the end of Google Gears. The concept has always been interesting, but it seems that Google is beginning to think of Gears as more of a proof of concept, and that focus will shift to HTML 5 which has the same functionality.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

dave blevins points us to the unfortunate news that game publisher Games Workshop seems to be attacking its biggest fans by ordering the super popular site BoardGameGeek to takedown all fan-made player aids. Basically, the biggest fans of Game Workshop's games have been helping make those games better, including "scenarios, rules summaries, inventory manifests, scans to help replace worn pieces." Basically increasing the value of those games so that it's easier to play them and easier to keep playing them. And, in response, Games Workshop sends out its lawyers? How does that possibly make any sense at all?

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When your bird friend passes (this one died of natural causes), what do you do? Make a macabre bird head pendant, of course! Check out lots more taxidermy art posts over at CRAFT. [Thanks, Moxie!]

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MBCook sends word on a possible solution to the mystery of the Voynich Manuscript, which we last visited nearly 6 years ago. "The Voynich Manuscript has confounded attempts to decode it for nearly 100 years. A person named Edith Sherwood, who has previously suggested a possible link to DaVinci, has a new idea: perhaps the text is simply anagrams of Italian words. There are three pages of examples from the herb section of the book, showing the original text, the plaintext Italian words, and the English equivalents. Has someone cracked the code?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Camera hacker Bhautik Joshi, who brought us the brilliant DIY tilt-shift lens hack, has produced another great optical device. Detailed instructions on his site walk you through the creation of the Phone-O-Scope, an optical coupler that allows an iPhone to accept a standard SLR lens.

Just to get the inevitable question of 'why' out of the way - well, why not? As far as I can tell, I think this is the first - I couldn't find any similar SLR lens to camera phone attaching attempts anywhere else online. The Phone-O-Scope doesn't take especially superb images, and it's a bit clumsy to handle. On the other hand, it's fun to shoot with and produces very analog (almost Holga-like) results. You also get the advantages of SLR lenses - that is, DOF effects, and the wide range of available focal lengths (i.e. macro to telephoto).

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An anonymous reader writes "Ben Kuchera from Ars Technica is reporting that EA/DICE has substantially changed the game model of Battlefield: Heroes, increasing the cost of weapons in Valor Points (the in-game currency that you earn by playing) to levels that even hardcore players cannot afford, and making them available in BattleFunds (the in-game currency that you buy with real money). Other consumables in the game, such as bandages to heal the players, suffered the same fate, turning the game into a subscription or pay-to-play model if players want to remain competitive. This goes against the creators' earlier stated objectives of not providing combat advantage to paying customers. Ben Cousins, from EA/DICE, argued, 'We also frankly wanted to make buying Battlefunds more appealing. We have wages to pay here in the Heroes team and in order to keep a team large enough to make new free content like maps and other game features we need to increase the amount of BF that people buy. Battlefield Heroes is a business at the end of the day and for a company like EA who recently laid off 16% of their workforce, we need to keep an eye on the accounts and make sure we are doing our bit for the company.' The official forums discussion thread is full of angry responses from upset users, who feel this change is a betrayal of the original stated objectives of the game."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've discussed in the past why we think that the cable companies' "TV Everywhere" strategy is destined to fail. If you don't recall, it's the way the cable companies are looking to respond to the rise of competition in the form of Hulu, Netflix, Redbox, Boxee and others -- not by offering something more compelling, but by putting up a giant wall around content and forcing you to keep your cable subscription (which fewer and fewer people seem to want) if you want to access TV shows online. Reid Rosefelt has a nice rant explaining why this won't work, pointing out (quite accurately) that all those competitors are winning because they deliver what people want, and locking things up doesn't make customers want cable any more:

Why do we enjoy free-with-ads sites like Hulu and Crackle? THEY HAVE FEWER ADS! And we can watch what we want whenever we want to.

What do we like about Netflix? For a fraction of the cost of cable, it gives you DVDs by mail plus the ability watch a lot of movies instantly, either on your computer or with their many compatible set-top boxes.

What do people like about Redbox. One buck! Pick it up and return it to the supermarket!

What do we like about cable?

Ummm, cable is a monopoly. You only get one store. You may only want a pair of socks and a shirt, but you are forced to buy a Yankee cap (even if you are a Mets or a Sox fan), cufflinks, perfume, towels, ladies underwear, two ties, a bedspread, low-slung hip-hop shorts, and a lamp. The kicker is that the price goes up all the time and the Calvin Klein shirt you actually came to buy costs extra. And of course LOTS AND LOTS OF ADS!

It's not that we don't like cable any more--we've always hated it!

But the key insight in the piece is how this, combined with Comcast's attempt to buy NBC Universal, show the backwards thinking of industry execs:

There's one tiny hitch though. Every single TV show and movie from NBC and Universal is available for free to anybody who has ten seconds to look for them. So what exactly is Comcast locking up? This isn't 1995, you know. Either you just shrug your shoulders about file-sharing or you start offering some alternatives that have benefits that people are willing to pay for like Hulu, Netflix, Redbox, and iTunes. Or maybe you work a little and come up with something new? Bill Maher said recently that the Republicans looked into the future and saw... radio. These entertainment giants are looking into the future and they see... cable.

Bingo. It's yet another case of execs looking to lock up content and block value, rather than providing additional value to users. It's people thinking about the way things used to work and trying to recreate it with a digital facelift, rather than looking to actually take advantage of what the new technology enables. That's only a snippet of Reid's analysis, so go read the whole thing.

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You know how, if you want to read a paywalled newspaper article, you can just paste its title into Google News and get a free pass? Those days may be coming to an end. Reader Captian Spazzz writes: "It looks like Google may be bowing to pressure from folks like News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch. What I don't understand is what prevents the websites themselves from enforcing some limit. Why make Google do it?" (Danny Sullivan explains how they could do that.) "Newspaper publishers will now be able to set a limit on the number of free news articles people can read through Google, the company has announced. The concession follows claims from some media companies that the search engine is profiting from online news pages. Publishers will join a First Click Free programme that will prevent web surfers from having unrestricted access. Users who click on more than five articles in a day may be routed to payment or registration pages."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Phase One's Capture One software now offers support for Panasonic G Micro series cameras as well as the Olympus E-P2. In addition to support for the G1, GH1 and GF1, version 5.0.1 offers a series of bug fixes and promises image quality improvements for a series of digital backs and the Olympus E-P1. The update can be accessed via Capture One's update feature for existing users or is available as a free 30 day trial.

Looking for the ultimate DIY gift for the holiday season? Yeah, me too! How about building your own electric car? It won't go more than 55 mph, and the seats happen to be green lawn chairs, but it will save you some money at the pump.

Anyhow, here's a brief review: the Hammerhead Eagle i-Thrust is a road legal car/shed that started life as a TVR Chimaera and underwent quite a few modifications to become a 21st-century range-extender, all built for considerably less money than GM would spend... on biscuits.

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

Javier "Barrapunto" Candeira writes, "Last Monday the Spanish Government sent the parliament the latest draft for the Ley de Economia Sostenible (Sustainable Economy Act), which contained riders modifying the current laws on copyright and interactive services. These amendments give the Spanish Ministy of Culture the administrative power to take down websites (or order ISPs to block those hosted overseas), all without a court order and in the name of 'safeguarding Intellectual Property Laws against Internet Piracy'. For this reason some of us have written a manifesto that is being published today all over Spanish weblogs and media."

A group of journalists, bloggers, professionals and creators want to express their firm opposition to the inclusion in a Draft Law of some changes to Spanish laws restricting the freedoms of expression, information and access to culture on the Internet. They also declare that:

1 .- Copyright should not be placed above citizens' fundamental rights to privacy, security, presumption of innocence, effective judicial protection and freedom of expression.

2 .- Suspension of fundamental rights is and must remain an exclusive competence of judges. This blueprint, contrary to the provisions of Article 20.5 of the Spanish Constitution, places in the hands of the executive the power to keep Spanish citizens from accessing certain websites.

3 .- The proposed laws would create legal uncertainty across Spanish IT companies, damaging one of the few areas of development and future of our economy, hindering the creation of startups, introducing barriers to competition and slowing down its international projection.

4 .- The proposed laws threaten creativity and hinder cultural development. The Internet and new technologies have democratized the creation and publication of all types of content, which no longer depends on an old small industry but on multiple and different sources.

5 .- Authors, like all workers, are entitled to live out of their creative ideas, business models and activities linked to their creations. Trying to hold an obsolete industry with legislative changes is neither fair nor realistic. If their business model was based on controlling copies of any creation and this is not possible any more on the Internet, they should look for a new business model.

6 .- We believe that cultural industries need modern, effective, credible and affordable alternatives to survive. They also need to adapt to new social practices.

7 .- The Internet should be free and not have any interference from groups that seek to perpetuate obsolete business models and stop the free flow of human knowledge.

8 .- We ask the Government to guarantee net neutrality in Spain, as it will act as a framework in which a sustainable economy may develop.

9 .- We propose a real reform of intellectual property rights in order to ensure a society of knowledge, promote the public domain and limit abuses from copyright organizations.

10 .- In a democracy, laws and their amendments should only be adopted after a timely public debate and consultation with all involved parties. Legislative changes affecting fundamental rights can only be made in a Constitutional law.

manifiesto en defensa de los derechos fundamentales en internet

(Thanks, Javier!)

(Image: ARTICLE 1, a Creative Commons Attribution image from art makes me smile's photostream)

Previously:

• Finland makes broadband a right - Boing Boing


• European Internet sinking fast under 3-strikes proposals - Boing Boing

Two years ago, a US judge ruled that a guy with an encrypted hard drive did not have to hand over his encryption key to the police, as it would be a violation of the 5th Amendment (the right not to self-incriminate). The argument there is that the encryption key is a form of "speech." This is quite a reasonable ruling -- but it appears that over in the UK they view encryption keys quite differently. Last year, we wrote about a UK court ruling interpreting the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) to mean that people could be required to hand over encryption keys, since encryption keys were not "speech" but an object that could be demanded. Unfortunately, this has now resulted in a schizophrenic man being jailed for refusing to decrypt his files. As many are noting, this seems to be an abuse of law enforcement, as the purpose of the RIPA law was supposed to be about stopping organized crime and terrorism, not dumping the mentally ill in prison.

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The Pololu 3pi robot is a high-performance mobile platform based on the ATmega168 micro-controller. This fully assembled robot features two micro motors, five reflectance sensors, LCD display, buzzer, and 3 user push buttons. The 3pi is capable of speeds exceeding 3 feet per second! Check out our How-To Tuesday: Getting started with the 3pi to learn more about this cool little bot.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Maker Shed Store | Digg this!

eldavojohn writes "Early last month a visually impaired gamer sued Sony under the Americans with Disabilities Act (and if you think that people with disabilities don't play games, think again). The AbleGamers Foundation has decided to step forward and provide a rating system for games that blends together a number of factors to determine a score with regard to accessibility. Visual, hearing, motion, closed captioning, speed settings, difficulty settings and even colorblindness options are all taken into account when compiling these scores and reviewing these games."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

APC Magazine details how Optus, an Australian mobile phone operator, has for months been deliberately blocking access to Android paid apps. "Optus is the exclusive Australian mobile carrier for the HTC Dream and Samsung Galaxy Android phones, and yet people who signed a long-term contract for these phones have to date been blocked from buying paid Android apps and getting the full Android experience. ... APC found many angry and frustrated comments on the Whirlpool community forums by Optus & Virgin Mobile customers." The article speculates, reading between the lines of the opaque comments offered by both Optus and Google, that the carrier is "demanding a cut of the sales revenue from Android apps if it is to remove its restriction on accessing them."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The latest thing of beauty to emerge from the Ukrainian cave of wonders operated by Bob Basset, a collective of steampunk leatherworkers, is this "Flapping Push Toy": a leather steampunk airship with flapping bat-wings, brass portholes, and intricate gears within. Bravo!

Flapping Push Toy/???????-????????, ???????? ???????

We've seen way too many stories of law enforcement officials blaming online tools like Craigslist, rather than using them proactively to help fight crime. Luckily, it appears that more and more folks in law enforcement are smart enough to know better. Robert Ring alerts us to a story about how gangs in New York are using Twitter to communicate and coordinate, but rather than blaming Twitter, the NYC Police Department is using it as a handy tool to find out what's going on:

Investigators are monitoring the traffic in hopes of sweeping up gangbangers before the bloodshed - and searching Twitter after attacks for clues.

"It is another tool ... just like old phone records," a police source said. "We can go through them [messages] to track these guys."

Nice to see these tools being used properly by law enforcement, rather than yet another public freakout over the wrong thing.

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Here in the UK, the Business Software Alliance is running its annual paid informant "Nail Your Boss" program, in which they give big cash rewards to people who fink out their employers for running pirate software. This happens every year, but it reminded me of one of the funniest incidents in my life as a copyfighter:

I was guest-lecturing for a week at a master class on issues related to international copyright to grad students at Budapest's Central European University. The speaker following me was the lawyer who ran the Hungarian division of the Business Software Alliance. He described the many means by which the BSA tried to combat piracy, and then he mentioned this paid informant program.

There was an audible intake of breath, emanating primarily from the Eastern Europeans in the room. They'd lived through the Soviet era. They knew how corrosive it is to pay people to snitch on their neighbors. They know that it leads to score-settling, axe-grinding, and blackmail.

The BSA man instantly recognized his mistake and held his hands up placatingly.

"Oh, we don't use paid informants in Eastern Europe! That would be culturally inappropriate.

"No, we use paid informants in England."

I get the funniest looks when I tell that story here in London.

Narc on Your Boss, Get Cool Cash

In Denmark, it's legal to make copies of commercial videos for backup or other private purposes. It's also illegal to break the DRM that restricts copying of DVDs. Deciding to find out which law mattered, Henrik Anderson reported himself for 100 violations of the DRM-breaking law (he ripped his DVD collection to his computer) and demanded that the Danish anti-piracy Antipiratgruppen do something about. They promised him a response, then didn't respond. So now he's reporting himself to the police. He wants a trial, so that the legality of the DRM-breaking law can be tested in court.

However, in the period up to today, Henrik heard nothing from Antipiratgruppen, although their lawyer Thomas Schlüter did speak to the Danish press, saying that it was a political matter but had nevertheless reported the issue to the Association of Danish Videodistributors for consideration. In response, their chairman, Poul Dylov, said they would have a meeting to decide whether to report the matter to the police. Antipiratgruppen said it would reply to Henrik by they date he requested. It seems they have broken their promise and strangely are insisting that they never received the email that Henrik sent them on the issue...

Henrik told us: "But who should I follow? Those that determine the laws in this country? Or those who are lawyers for the companies that i'm committing a crime against?"

But Henrik has a solution to their inaction. "I decided to try to see if I can report myself directly to the police, for the case must be resolved," he told us.

Anti-Piracy Group Refuses Bait, DRM Breaker Goes To Police

A Coast to Coast listener named Alan sent in this amazing photo of a creepy giant spectral eye staring down at he and his wife in their bedroom. Alan says the eye turned out to be "a bedside light reflecting off a stack of CDs." Too bad. "Creepy eye on ceiling"

(photo by Jason Weisberger)

Recent research suggests that spending time in nature actually makes people "more caring." The studies, by University of Rochester psychologists Netta Weinstein, Andrew Przybylski, and Richard Ryan, showed that people exposed to nature (well, mostly slideshows of nature) put a higher value on intrinsic aspirations, such as doing good in the world or having meaningful relationships, and lower value on extrinsic aspirations, like making a lot of cash or admired by many people. Now as I mentioned, the participants didn't actually live outdoors for a while or anything as part of the study. Rather, in three of the studies, they looked at images of either the built environment or landscapes and such. And in the fourth, some participants were assigned to work in a laboratory either with or without plants around them. Then they answered a series of questions or were given tests of generosity. "The result? People who were in contact with nature were more willing to open their wallets and share. As with aspirations, the higher the immersion in nature, the more likely subjects were to be generous with their winnings."

More info and a video interview with one of the researchers after the jump.

From the University of Rochester:

Why should nature make us more charitable and concerned about others? One answer, says coauthor Andrew Przybylski, is that nature helps to connect people to their authentic selves. For example, study participants who focused on landscapes and plants reported a greater sense of personal autonomy ("Right now, I feel like I can be myself"). For humans, says Przybylski, our authentic selves are inherently communal because humans evolved in hunter and gatherer societies that depended on mutuality for survival.

In addition, write the authors, the richness and complexity of natural environments may encourage introspection and the lack of man-made structures provide a safe haven from the man-made pressures of society. "Nature in a way strips away the artifices of society that alienate us from one another," says Przybylski.

"Nature Makes Us More Caring, Study Says" (University of Rochester)

"Can Nature Make Us More Caring? Effects of Immersion in Nature on Intrinsic Aspirations and Generosity" (paper abstract)

"The Moral Call of the Wild" (Scientific American, thanks Marina Gorbis!)

coondoggie writes "Soldiers may go into battle better prepared to handle equipment and with a greater knowledge of their surroundings after an intellectual property licensing deal Monday between Microsoft and Lockheed Martin that will deepen the defense giant's access to visual simulation technology. The intellectual property agreement between the two focuses on Microsoft ESP, a games-based visual simulation software platform for the PC."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Somali nautical pirates have established a stock-market where guns and cash are invested in upcoming hijackings, with shares of the proceeds returned to investors:

It is a lucrative business that has drawn financiers from the Somali diaspora and other nations -- and now the gangs in Haradheere have set up an exchange to manage their investments...

"Four months ago, during the monsoon rains, we decided to set up this stock exchange. We started with 15 'maritime companies' and now we are hosting 72. Ten of them have so far been successful at hijacking," Mohammed said.

"The shares are open to all and everybody can take part, whether personally at sea or on land by providing cash, weapons or useful materials ... we've made piracy a community activity."

Somali sea gangs lure investors at pirate lair (via /.)

(Image: File:MV-Faina-Pirates.jpg, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons)

Ted sez, "This website allows you to create posters of WoW characters. The company allows you to use a variety of backgrounds and designs, as well as inserting a character (in their currently loaded) armor into the poster, with pets and all (this is a big deal to hunters). Paper is high quality stuff."

PrintWarcraft Custom Prints (Thanks, Ted!)

PeaceLove sez, "Cory's recent post mentioning the 'books as objects' phenomenon compels me to mention the extremely delectable new Taschen book, Magic, 1400s-1950s. It's gargantuan, classy, profusely illustrated and expensive but if you are a magician or magic fan, you've just found the perfect holiday gift (hint, hint). Authors Mike Caveney and Jim Steinmeyer, along with contributor Ricky Jay, are all professional magicians, scholars and historians of the first rank. This is a serious work, as well as a gigantic love letter to the 500+ 'golden years' of magic. It's available on deep discount right now at Amazon."

Magic 1400s-1950s (Amazon)

Magic, 1400s-1950s (Taschen, lots of interior images) (Thanks, PeaceLove!)

Watch Rachel Maddow's superb post-speech comment on whether Obama is keeping the Bush Doctrine alive in Afghanistan. Spoiler: yeah. Follow Maddow on Twitter.

Black Sabbath, 1970. Inspired by a fleeting tweet from Raymond Leon Roker. May or may not be a "response video" of sorts to the news of the evening.

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 Optiopia, Squid Labs, Instructables, Potenco, and Makani Power.

On the day before Thanksgiving, while everyone was distracted buying (or pardoning) turkeys, the Obama team announced that the president will go to Copenhagen and promise to try to commit to a carbon reduction schedule for the United States.

(More links if you want to see the news repeat it over and over again: 1, 2, 3)

On one hand, I want to be excited about this because unless the US makes a commitment to CO2 reductions, it's exceedingly unlikely that the rest of the world will bother. On the other hand, no one should be jumping in the aisles till we look at the numbers more carefully.

It's probably useful to first update yourself on the climate science. Here's a well-written, critical, and objective summary of recent scientific results released a few months ago. It was prepared as an update between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of 2007, and IPCC AR5, which will not to be completed until 2013. The PDF of the full report is well worth reading.

In summary, the science news isn't so good. Greenhouse gas emissions have increased nearly 40% between 1990 and 2008. The temperature has been increasing at a rate of 0.19 degrees C, (0.34 F) each decade for the past 25 years. Ice-sheets, glaciers, and ice-caps are exhibiting accelerated melting. The existing sea-level rise predictions look to be underestimates by at least a factor of 2. Delaying action risks irreversible damage and we must peak in emissions soon, preferably between 2015 and 2020, if not earlier.

Those who claim recent cooling trends are ignoring the fact that we are currently at a solar minimum, a period of low solar activity that is partially offsetting the long term global heating trend. This is a bit like saying you don't need to change your eating habits because you lost weight while having the flu.

So, in light of this science, how can we understand what Obama's pledge means?

For starters, any public dialogue that talks about "percentage reductions in emissions" by a certain date is misleading. Because of the long residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere, it makes far more sense to talk about the amount of CO2 remaining to be released before we hit a peak CO2 concentration. Let's call this the "remaining cumulative carbon emissions" method. After those emissions, we essentially need to emit zero carbon. This way of looking at the climate was first popularized by Krause, Bach, & Koomey, in an excellent book called "Energy Policy in the Greenhouse" (1992). It was revisited as a tool of understanding the climate challenge in two great Nature magazine articles this year. (Nature magazine is probably the most prestigious, and rigorous, of all the academic journals.) In one of those, Meinshausen et al., used this method of analysis to look at how you would limit the planet to 2 degrees C of warming.

Two degrees is what most industrialized nations see as the upper limit of tolerable climate change, and it has become something like the default target before we see "dangerous levels of climate change." (Incidentally, the least-developed nations and the 43 small island nations of AOSIS are calling for limiting warming to 1.5 degrees.) The Copenhagen Diagnosis Update referenced above summarizes: "Meinshausen found that if a total of 1000 Gigatons of CO2 is emitted for the period 2000-2050, the likelihood of exceeding the 2-degree warming limit is around 25%. Between 2000- 2009, about 350 Gigatons have already been emitted, leaving only 650 Gigatons as the emissions budget for 2010-2050. At current emission rates this budget would be used up within 20 years."

The remaining cumulative carbon emissions is a useful framework by which we can now assess the pseudo-commitment (meaning unratified by Congress) that Obama will present in Copenhagen. According to the New York Times, "Mr. Obama will tell the delegates that the United States intends to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 'in the range of' 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050, officials said."

The first problem here is that most nations, including Europe, are committing to reductions based on 1990 levels, but the US is basing its reductions on 2005 levels. Here's the historical US data.

And I've put it into a public spreadsheet for you to see. This spreadsheet assumes meeting these targets with a linear fit between 2010 & 2020, and the same from 2021-2050. That is very likely an optimistic assumption.

As you'll note, a 17% reduction over 2005 levels means only a 0.3% reduction over 1990 levels.

What you'll also see is that Obama is making a commitment to emit 59 Gigatons from the US alone from 2010-2020, and a further 88 Gigatons from 2020-2050, for a total of 147 Gigatons of CO2. This is 22.7% of the 650 Gigaton limit implied by Meinshausen. This helps to see why it's hard to get an agreement in Copenhagen. In order to avoid "dangerous levels of climate change" the US is committing to reduce its output to "only" 22.7% of global emissions, despite having only 4.5% of the global population. The other point to note is that even these reductions don't satisfy the "emissions go to zero" aspect of this CO2 budget, as the US would still be emitting a gigaton of CO2 per year in 2050 under this plan.

There are a few things we might hazard a guess at when we look at these numbers:

a) The US government doesn't think that we should bother aiming at even a 25% chance of staying below 2 degrees C.

b) The US government believes the rest of the world won't notice the disproportionality of its emissions based on population.

c) The US government believes that we'll invent a magic technology for sequestering atmospheric CO2 at some low cost powered by a magic new energy source.

d) The US government has lost its ability to make hard choices, and to rise to the urgencies of the moment in a way that is required of a great nation.

I like to think of the modern era as "the age of consequence." We are starting to understand the consequences of our individual and collective actions. Although it's early in the modeling revolution, we are learning to model the results of our actions now as the play out in the future. The upside of the age of consequence, and having the internet out there for lots of people to look ponder it (the age of transparency), is that the general public can analyze policy such as the announcements Obama is making in Copenhagen, and critique it. Perhaps we'll even be able to use this elegant framework of "total CO2 emissions" to quite frankly say, "this is not good enough, your words and commitments don't match up".

I don't think public policy alone, whether from individual government or the entire international community, will meet the climate challenge. Individuals will need to lead by example and make personal reductions by demanding products and services that will meet the real climate challenge. Fundamentally, that means massive installation of zero carbon energy generation technologies, and likely quite large reductions in personal energy use. It would be fantastic if we re-defined the climate challenge in terms of how we do both of those things while increasing the quality of our lives. Unless individuals do this, it is unlikely that governments will see the demand for action and act appropriately.

The main criticisms and resistance to climate action are often because we frame it as a challenge of denying ourselves and negatively impacting our lives and economy. By framing it instead as a "how do we improve our quality of life?" question, more people are engaged in the debate and the actions we need. It's no longer a purely technological fix; we can more accurately frame the problem for what it is: a challenge for us all, where we can win if we think clearly about what we are trying to achieve. That's a better quality of life for all.

ref: Meinshausen, M. et al., (2009) Greenhouse-gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2°C. Nature 458, 1158-1162.

Clay Shirky's essay on the past and future of bookselling is provocative. I think he really nails something with his taxonomy of the reasons that people worry about bookstores, but I'm not sure I buy his conclusion -- that bookselling might be best served on an NPR/nonprofit model.

In my experience, people make this argument for one of three reasons.

This first is that some people simply dislike change. For this group, the conviction that the world is getting worse merely attaches to whatever seems to be changing. These people will be complaining about kids today and their baggy pants and their online bookstores 'til the day they die.

A second group genuinely believes it's still the 1990s somewhere. They imagine that the only outlets for books between Midtown and the Mission are Wal-Mart and Barnes and Noble, that few people in Nebraska have ever heard of Amazon, that countless avid readers have money for books but don't own a computer. This group believes, in other words, that book buying is a widespread activity while internet access is for elites, the opposite of the actual case.

A third group, though, is making the 'access to literature' argument without much real commitment to its truth or falsehood, because they aren't actually worried about access to literature, they are worried about bookstores in and of themselves. This is a form of Burkean conservatism, in which the value built up over centuries in the existence of bookstores should be preserved, even though their previous function as the principal link between writers and readers is being displaced.

I have been a bookseller for most of my life, off and on (I directly sell over 25,000 books a year through reviews on this site, which makes me a fairly large independent bookstore all on my own). I've worked in big, small, chain and specialist stores. I also obsessively check out bookstores, dragging my family into them wherever I go.

I think that Clay's probably right that the most traditionally profitable sector of bookselling -- mass-produced bestsellers -- is going to keep on migrating onto the web (that's where I get most of my mass-produced bestsellers, certainly). But I also think that there's something to be said for physical street-level stores de-emphasizing those products in favor of the simultaneous pursuit of the top- and bottom-end of the markets.

On the bottom-end of the market, there's the Espresso book printer, as currently in operation in the wonderful Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, Mass. This thing will print any public domain book that Google has scanned, in about 4 minutes, for $8. The margins are usually pretty good (they're lower on longer books, and a fat-enough book could be a money-loser, of course). And there are no warehousing, ordering, shelving or other expenses associated with them. Also, it's unlikely that we'll have them in our houses anytime soon (though we may get them at the library and community center).

At the Harvard Bookstore, they have someone who spends the day mousing around on Google Book Search, looking for weird and cool titles in the public domain to print and shelve around the store, as suggestions for the sort of thing you might have printed for yourself. This is a purely curatorial role, the classic thing that a great retailer does, and it's one of the most exciting bookstore sections I've browsed in years. And even so, there's lots of room for improvement: Google Books produces the blandest, most boring covers for its PD books, and there's plenty of room for stores to add value with their own covers, with customer-supplied covers (the gift possibilities are bottomless), and so on. I can even imagine the profs across the street producing annotated versions -- say, a treatise on Alice in Wonderland with reproductions of ten different editions' illustrations and selling them through the store's printer and shelf-space, restoring the ancient bookseller/book-publisher role.

Of course, most of the mass-produced catalog will probably end up in the print-on-demand catalog some day, and stores will be able to fill those orders, too. But if you already know what book you want, why bother going to a store? (Unless you're in too much of a hurry to wait for the mail).

On the other hand, there's plenty of ways that a physical store could offer added value on mass-market titles: localized covers, signed books, high production-value gift editions, a point-of-sale "donate to our neighborhood schools" kiosk that lets you print a book on the spot for a classroom that's requested it...

At the other end of the scale, the high-end, there's the book-as-object phenomenon. Taschen and a few other art-book publishers have figured out how to make a market out of this, and what's more, they've aggressively pursued non-bookstore retail channels (Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, etc) where the margins are lower, but the foot-traffic is much, much higher.

So yes, there's something really beautiful, and commercially compelling about a shelf or table full of books that are themselves beautiful -- beautifully made, beautifully presented. But what if there were more to it? What about hand-made books? Limited runs? The kind of thing that you mostly see today on the web (because the audience is spread too thin for physical retail to make sense), where they show poorly and make a less compelling case. Books in crazy trim sizes -- huge books like the Little Nemo treasuries, or even the gargantuan Bhutan book.

These are very expensive to inventory, and that suggests that they should probably be consigned, rather than sold (indeed, booksellers could serve as fulfillers for direct orders taken over the Web, since they're apt to be closer to the customer).

Both of these ends of the market are ripe for heavy localization, curated to suit local tastes and aesthetics. They can feature local artists, local choices, in a million ways, and serve as creative hubs for their communities. And both these ends of the market have good, healthy margins and (with the right consignment model) are also cheap to stock.

In that world, booksellers become a lot more like bloggers who specialize in all things bookish -- wunderkammerers who stock exactly the right book for the right people in the right neighborhood.

Local Bookstores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization

Bloomberg columnist Alice Schroeder reports that Goldman Sachs vampires are loading up on handguns to defend themselves against popular uprising:

"I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit," said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.

I called Goldman Sachs spokesman Lucas van Praag to ask whether it's true that Goldman partners feel they need handguns to protect themselves from the angry proletariat. He didn't call me back...

Plenty of Wall Streeters worry about the big discrepancies in wealth, and think the rise of a financial industry-led plutocracy is unjust. That doesn't mean any of them plan to move into a double-wide mobile home as a show of solidarity with the little people, though.

No, talk of Goldman and guns plays right into the way Wall- Streeters like to think of themselves. Even those who were bailed out believe they are tough, macho Clint Eastwoods of the financial frontier, protecting the fistful of dollars in one hand with the Glock in the other. The last thing they want is to be so reasonably paid that the peasants have no interest in lynching them.

Arming Goldman With Pistols Against Public: Alice Schroeder (via Making Light)

(Image: Eat the bankers, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Iain Winfield's photostream)

Two separate initiatives by cable companies are coming together in conflict. We've seen how many cable companies are trying to set up video portals that will let subscribers to cable TV get access to the same content online, as a weak attempt to reduce churn of consumers dumping cable altogether and concentrating on online options. But, at the same time, they're also looking to implement broadband caps with high overage fees. Those two concepts are shown together with Rogers offering both a video portal and low metered caps with high overage fees. So your incentive is to not use the video portal (which apparently is limited in the first place). How is that going to reduce the churn? It seems like a far better option is to just go with another provider that actually focuses on adding value rather than limiting it. Too bad there's so little competition up in Canada. Ahhh... that explains things, now, doesn't it?

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reginaldo writes to clue us that pirates in Somalia have opened up a cooperative in Haradheere, where investors can pay money or guns to help their favorite pirate crew for a share of the piracy profits. "'Four months ago, during the monsoon rains, we decided to set up this stock exchange. We started with 15 "maritime companies" and now we are hosting 72. Ten of them have so far been successful at hijacking,' Mohammed [a wealthy former pirate who took a Reuters reporter to the facility] said. ... Piracy investor Sahra Ibrahim, a 22-year-old divorcee, was lined up with others waiting for her cut of a ransom pay-out after one of the gangs freed a Spanish tuna fishing vessel. 'I am waiting for my share after I contributed a rocket-propelled grenade for the operation,' she said, adding that she got the weapon from her ex-husband in alimony. 'I am really happy and lucky. I have made $75,000 in only 38 days since I joined the "company."'"

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Incredible... Synth Britannia - BBC video of the birth of synth music. It starts off with Kraftwerk with interviews from OMD and whatnot... Thanks Jason! Parts 2 through 9 in the related videos on the YouTube page.

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It's great what we teach our kids these days. Some students at Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois, put together their student paper, but the administration apparently freaked out because there were articles about drinking, smoking and teen pregnancy (you know, stuff that's actually relevant to students). So they blocked the publication of the paper and gave the students two hours to write new stories or receive failing grades (found via Poynter). Nice of them, right? The administration claims they just delayed the paper "to provide more time for editing and layout," though that's quite a different story than what the students are saying. We keep seeing stories like this, and at some point you have to wonder why more student publications just set up shop online, totally outside of the school district, and just publish what they want?

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Romy Maxwell posted a blog piece on Craigslist apparently shutting off access to Yahoo Pipes. Maxwell was working on a project, one of 2,111 using Craigslist as a data source, for a (non-commercial) Pipes-based mashup. He sent Craig Newmark an invitation to the alpha test, after a few rounds of friendly communication — "...as a rule of thumb, okay to use RSS feeds for noncommercial purposes." The apparent response, 4 days later, was for Craigslist to redirect any request with an HTTP referrer of pipes.yahoo.com to the Craigslist home page. Maxwell writes: "It's a sad day for me. I'm not too upset about my own project, as Flippity was already removing Craigslist as a data source. With the likes of eBay and Oodle not only providing open APIs but encouraging and rewarding developers, spending my time wrestling with Craigslist is just plain stupid and exhausting. I'm sure I'm not the only person to have come to that conclusion, and I wish it were different. ... If Craigslist wants to keep its doors shut to the world, so be it."

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Jan Van Nuenen made this solar-powered strobe-opto-theremin-synth-thing, the Sunnan Synth. Built using a $20 desk lamp and a couple dollars worth of electronics, it lets you get your beeping and bleeping in while away from the grid. Want to make your own? The schematic and making-of photos are included on the project website. [via ikea hacker]

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A couple of years ago, we noted that US Immigration was making life difficult for touring musicians by changing the way they enforced the visas commonly used by musicians. Specifically, the usual visa required proof of popularity -- but had no systems in place to account for popularity via the internet. This resulted in various well known musicians (including, by the way, our friend Lily Allen) being barred from making expected appearances in the US. It appears this sort of thing is happening again. The law still hasn't changed, but US Immigration has again increased the strictness in how it interprets the existing laws for foreign musicians, leading some top acts to be barred from entering the country -- or just increasing the bureaucracy they need to go through. For many foreign acts, touring the US is quite important in attracting more attention.

The article discusses how this is harming some acts that have built a lot of buzz or won awards... but then have had trouble capitalizing on that with a US tour. It's kind of amusing that just as we hear from politicians talking about the importance of helping musicians with more and more draconian copyright laws, they're making it that much more difficult for them to tour, build their reputation and earn a living. The next time an American politician discusses the need for more draconian copyright laws to help musicians, perhaps a reporter can ask them about this particular issue as well.

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saddleupsancho writes "Today's NY Times reports that Cormac McCarthy is auctioning the 45-year-old Olivetti manual typewriter on which all his novels, screenplays, plays, short stories, and much of his correspondence were written, to benefit the Sante Fe Institute where he is a Research Fellow. What would happen decades from now if, say, Richard Powers or Neal Stephenson attempted to auction their desktops or laptops? Setting aside completely any comparison among the three authors, is there something more intrinsically interesting and valuable, less ephemeral and interchangeable, about a typewriter vs. a computer as an instrument of literary creation? Or is the current generation just as sentimental about their computer-based devices as McCarthy's generation is about his Olivetti? Would you offer as much for McCarthy's input device if it were a generic PC, Mac, or Linux box as you would for his Olivetti?"

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I received the new ThinkGeek catalog today, I really like them and their stuff - they're one of the best geek culture curator shops online, as well as developing their own merchandise. That said - I was surprised to see ThinkGeek claiming they invented LED throwies (check out the image above) it's from the catalog, page 22. It's on the lower right hand side of the photo above, the little monkey light bulb thing that says "Invented at ThinkGeek".

LED throwies made their first appearance and were popularized and developed by the Graffiti Research Lab a division of the Eyebeam R&D OpenLab in February 2006 (Wikipedia page). It's also in Make - Volume 06 - LED Throwies (Page 116).

The ThinkGeek online site it doesn't say they "Invented at ThinkGeek" like the print catalog does (see 1st image on this post) - here's what it does say.

Times have changed since you got caught for doodling that cute girl's name on your desk in elementary school. Now you can mark your territory in a non-permanent electronic fashion with the LED Magnetic Digital Graffiti. This set of 20 different LEDs each has a battery and a magnet attached. Pull the tab to activate, then toss them on any ferrous metal surface... they stick and glow brightly announcing to everyone in the vicinity that you were indeed there. But make sure you stick the LED Magnetic Digital Graffiti on stuff you own, or are able to remove them later... because gone are the days when you can post funny battery powered LED signs all over Boston and get away with it.

In 2008 I spotted this "LED "Art Object" Kit" and since 2006 there have been many uses of LED throwies in music videos to commercial merchandise, but this is the first time I've seen someone claim they invented them.

Maybe ThinkGeek added something like a pull tab, but that's been there from the start too. I'm pretty sure the folks at GRL don't care or don't mind if someone sells these (it's "open source"...) but I'd like to see ThinkGeek consider giving credit on the page somewhere and maybe reconsider the "Invented by ThinkGeek" claim. Lastly, I wonder if all the people who didn't like when GRL made these will also be as vocal towards ThinkGeek or maybe they just didn't like GRL. I've sent ThinkGeek an email and tweet'ed to them, I'll post any comments they have here. I'll continue to be a ThinkGeek customer too.

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Our pal Jake von Slatt has a great gift guide up at the Steampunk Workshop. Now, all you steampunk haters out there can calm down. This isn't a steampunk gift guide, just a guide from a maker who happens to work in the style of steampunk (as Jake puts it). The guide covers all sorts of tools and toys that Jake likes, such as the above Oxy/Acetelyne torch kit. Here's what he has to say about it:

I bought my first Oxy/Acetelyne torch kit nearly twenty years ago. I used it to dissasemble a 1971 Buick Electra 225 and cut it into pieces small enough so that I could place it by the curb for collection by the trashman, that was the cheapest way to get rid of it at the time.

The frame became a utility trailer that I towed behind my 1977 Lincoln car, and it had nearly as nice a ride! In fact, it was one of the stablest trailers I've ever owned and the only one that I could pilot through a 6 wheel drift while taking off ramps at . . . well, imprudent speeds.

Anyway, with an Oxy/Acetylene torch you can braze, weld, cut, and heat. Auto Mechanics call this tool 'the hot wrench" and with a little practice you will be able to use one to cut a nut off of a bolt without damaging the the threads. Furthermore, the process of "gas welding" is incredibly useful for all types of steel and the experience you'll get "pushing puddles" of molten metal around will prepare you well for learning all other types of welding.

Plus, fire hawt!

$169

Also, the most-talented artist and photographer, Libby Bulloff, has a Steampunk Fashion Gift Guide on the site (which has a pair of tabi books that are so awesome, I almost bought them on the spot!).

Jake's 2009 Steampunk Gift Guide - A few of my favorite things.
Libby's Steampunk Fashion Gift Guide

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