Microsoft has been a big believer in patents lately, even though Bill Gates once classically noted that the computer industry would have been at a "standstill" if people had aggressively patented ideas back in the early days of personal computing. Since then, however, Microsoft has massively ramped up its patenting machine. But, of course, if you live by the patent, you should expect to get sued by the patent as well. Brian writes in to let us know that a patent holding firm, with a long history of suing a bunch of big name tech firms is now suing Microsoft as well, claiming that every copy of Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008 violate its patent 6629163 on "Demultiplexing a First Sequence of Packet Components to Identify Specific Components Wherein Subsequent Components are Processed without Re-Identifying Components." I have no idea if the patent is valid or not, but I always find it amusing when big patent system supporters find themselves sued for patent infringement as well.

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The Food and Drug Administration is holding up the delivery of MG Siegler's iMac because they apparently think it is an apple, not an Apple.

I don’t want to believe that either UPS or the U.S. Government are so stupid as to think that my Apple computer is actually an apple, but I can’t come up with any other explanation (and neither can people on Twitter). On my UPS tracking shipment screen right now all I see is “Exception” followed by a note that my iMac was held up in in Louisville, Kentucky because, “UPS HAS OBTAINED DOCUMENTATION AND SUBMITTED TO FOOD & DRUG ADMINISTRATION AND/OR DEPARTMENT OF AG/PPQ;AWAITING RESPONSE”

Dear FDA, Gimme My iMac

Barence writes to mention that Nokia is giving users a first glimpse at what promises to be a completely overhauled Symbian user experience this coming year. Nokia's chief exec blamed the user interface — as opposed to the OS itself — as the root problem. "The company will roll out a completely re-engineered user interface in 2010, aimed at addressing many of the criticisms associated with the OS. 'We will reduce the clutter and improve the input methods including multi-touch and single tap,' Kallasvuo told delegates. 'It should be just two taps to get to your favorite music or videos, rather than eight. We'll improve browser experience so that it's a quicker, flash improved, media experience with pinch-to-zoom and so on.' And, Kallasvuo wasn't stopping there. Aside from completely redesigning the interface, he also suggested that future Symbian OSes would be much faster."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Remember the Fit-PC2 we reviewed a while back? It's the only desktop PC smaller than a Mac Mini that's worth buying, and they just upgraded it.

I'm really sorry I'm going to miss this Machine Project workshop on Wednesday, Dec 9th, in Los Angeles.

An after dark exploration of the sidewalk cracks around Machine Project for local medicinal plants, led by Nance Klehm. Get ready for the long winter dry, cold haul with simple knowledge on how to identify common wild plants that can be used in herbal remedies.

Nance Klehm is a radical ecologist, designer, urban forager, grower and teacher. Her solo and collaborative work focuses on creating participatory social ecologies in response to a direct experience of a place. She grows and forages much of her own food in a densely urban area. She actively composts food, landscape and human waste. She only uses a flush toilet when no other option is available. She designed and currently manages a large scale, closed-loop vermicompost project at a downtown homeless shelter where cafeteria food waste becomes 4 tons of worm castings a year which in turn is used as the soil that grows food to return to the cafeteria. More information on Nance can be found at her website.

Echo Park Medicinal Forage with Nance Klehm

BPI and IFPI, lobbying groups that represent record labels, have been major supporters of Peter Mandelson's Digital Economy Bill, that will grant him powers to change copyright law at will, and to kick people off the internet based on accusations (not convictions) of file sharing. However, it appears that at least some record labels are realizing what an incredibly bad idea this is. EFF points us to the news that the boss of indie label Pure Mint Recordings has resigned from both the BPI and IFPI committee's he was a part of, citing his opposition to the Digital Economy Bill, and both organizations support of the bill:

Hall believes the proposed legislation has been rushed in a bid to get it through parliament before the next General Election, that it is in danger of disregarding some sacred legal principles (regarding process, presumption of innocence and burden of proof) and that it won't solve the record industry's piracy problems anyway.

In his resignation letter to the BPI, Hall writes: "I have enjoyed contributing to both [the BPI's] Rights [Committee] and the [IFPI's] ILC, but increasingly feel that my contributions are falling on deaf ears as an agenda has already been reached that I now consider is unmovable. As you know, I do not think the Digital Economy Bill is a sensible or well thought out piece of legislation. In my view it is being rushed through the last months of a parliament of an unpopular government and it is not legislation that I support".

Referencing clause 17 - the one that gives senior ministers the right to change copyright laws on whim - he continued: "I am particularly surprised that the record industry has chosen to endorse s.17 of the DEB, which I consider is wholly undemocratic and contrary to centuries of good practice regarding the forming of our copyright legislation. I also believe it may set a dangerous precedent going forwards (and could come back to haunt the industry)".

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Radley Balko posted about a woman in Wayne County who broke no laws yet had to pay $1,400 to get her car back when police seized it "after they mistook Vaughn’s co-worker for a prostitute."

From a Detroit News article:

The Wayne County Sheriff’s Office, which helps run the prosecutor’s forfeiture unit, took in $8.69 million from civil seizures in 2007, more than four times the amount collected in 2001. The Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office gets up to 27 percent of that money.

Obama’s Justice Department supports state asset forfeiture laws, says Balko:

It’s worth noting that Obama’s Justice Department filed an amicus brief on behalf of the state in that case. They weren’t obligated to. Though the solicitor general’s office is charged with defending all federal laws, the law at issue in Alvarez is a state law, not a federal one. In fact, federal civil forfeiture laws are much friendlier to property owners. So you could make a decent case that the administration could have argued against the Illinois law. At the very least, it could have kept quiet. Instead, it argued that the state should retain the power to take property from people without ever charging a crime (and not necessarily kingpins—the Illinois law in question applies only to property valued at under $20,000), and keep that property for a year or more before affording the owner a chance to get it back.

Taking property from poor people without due process of law in order to enrich local police departments. Seems like the sort of thing Barack Obama might have fought to change in his days as a community organizer.

How police departs abuse asset forfeiture laws to steal money from poor people

These television spots for LG Mobile featuring "Actors Studio" host James Lipton really get the Funny job done. Post with background over at Laughing Squid. The campaign site is here (warning: Flash, auto-load sound). There's an article about the purpose of the campaign here. I'm guessing they were created by the same agency that did "Subservient Chicken" for Burger King? I'm told the agency was Young and Rubicam.

Above, my favorite spot in the "Ponder" campaign, which includes a unicorn reference.

Russia-born illustrator Yulia Brodskaya creates beautiful type treatments in delicately cut and curled three-dimensional paper sculptures. There's a gallery at Illusion360, and a more extensive one on her website. Stunning. (via Chris Watson)

mit_team writes "As you might have heard, DARPA has announced a network challenge in the vein of the DARPA grand challenge. In this challenge, participants are tasked with finding 10 red weather balloons distributed throughout the continental US for 8 hours on December 5. The idea is to get this to be a crowd-sourcing kind of activity, where people will use social media tools to solve this problem. Our group, the MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team, based out of the MIT Media Lab, has created a system where you get money not just for finding balloons, but for getting people to join the hunt who find the balloons, or for getting people who get people who find balloons, etc. First you have to sign up. Then you can send invitations to others to join through your own unique URL, crediting you with recruiting them. While our team is interested in winning the contest, we are also interested in studying information diffusion in social networks. Does Twitter spread information faster than blogs? Is your blog effective at spreading information? We could use your help in getting out the word. If you sign up and blog about us you will be able to see the impact that your blog has on getting out the word in real time. Win money, help science, and help charity! Kind regards, The MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This tutorial shows how to take apart a spent zinc-carbon dry cell of the common household type. Besides making for an interesting object lesson in electrochemistry, taking apart a spent D-cell, for instance, allows you to salvage many materials which can be of use to amateur chemists--materials which would otherwise probably end up in a landfill. Separated from their reactive components, the leftover parts of the battery can be safely added to most municipal recycling streams.

A zinc carbon cell (Wikipedia) contains manganese dioxide, which, among other things, is useful as a catalyst in the production of oxygen gas from hydrogen peroxide. It also contains metallic zinc, which can be used, for instance, as a reagent in the production of hydrogen gas from strong acid. Finally, it contains a carbon or graphite rod which can be used as an electrode in any of a number of electrochemical experiments, such as the electrolysis of water and the construction of an arc light or arc furnace.

Note that the battery in this tutorial is a zinc-carbon dry cell. This tutorial does not cover the dismantling of an alkaline-type cell. Alkaline cells are of slightly different internal construction and contain the strong base potassium hydroxide as an electrolyte, which is rather more dangerous to handle than the ammonium chloride/zinc chloride mixture used in zinc carbon cells. Zinc-carbon cells are commonly labelled "general purpose" or "heavy duty," and will not have the word "alkaline" on the case.

Tools

• Small flat blade screwdriver
• Hobby knife
• Scissors
• Hammer
• Mortar and pestle
• Stainless steel or plastic strainer to fit coffee filter
• Stainless steel or plastic tray to work in

Materials

• Spent zinc-carbon or zinc-chloride D cell
• Wax paper
• Coffee filter

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From the department of "most ridiculous newspaper corrections evah," this from the Washington Post: "A Nov. 26 article in the District edition of Local Living incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number." (Via Quinn)

Microsoft recently got some attention for cutting off hundreds of thousands of Xbox Live players for using modded Xboxes -- even if there was no evidence they were used for cheating. This is already leading to talk of a class action lawsuit against Microsoft. Even so, Microsoft is now going even further, issuing temporary bans for all of Xbox Live for anyone using a certain "exploit" in Modern Warfare 2 that lets a player set off a grenade after they die in the game. It makes sense for Infinity Ward to create a fix for their own programming mistake, but it seems rather ridiculous for Microsoft to kick people out of the game for doing what the game actually allows. Why blame players for merely doing what is allowed by the game itself?

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A 22-year-old woman from Chicago recently spent two nights in jail and could face up to three years in prison for taping four minutes of the new movie "Twilight: New Moon". Samantha Tumpach and family threw her sister a surprise birthday party at the theater and captured much of it on video, unfortunately two "very shot segments" was enough to make theater managers want to press charges. "Tumpach insisted she recorded no more than three minutes while in the theater — and said not all of the video she shot was of the movie. There's footage of she and her relatives singing to her sister, she said. 'We sang "Happy Birthday" to her in the theater,' Tumpach said. She also took pictures of family members in the theater before the film began, but an usher who saw the photo session never issued them a warning, Tumpach said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Just look at it.

Banana Bunker (Thanks, Jeff!)

kkleiner writes "Organovo and strategic partner Invetech hope in 2010 to release a commercial version of their 3D organ printer capable of producing very basic tissues like blood vessels. While it is still limited to simple tissue structures (full organs are a long ways off), Organovo plans to deliver the printers to various research institutions interested in organ and tissue production. Working with these institutions, Organovo hopes to one day progress to creating a system that can print organs as easily as other 3D printers print plastic figurines."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thomas O'Toole points us to yet another issue with Google customer service, where an author who holds the copyright on his own books published them online but was denied the ability to put AdSense on the site, after Google told him it had found "it contains copyrighted material." Of course, this makes no sense. Nearly every website "contains copyrighted material," because any new creative content placed in a fixed form -- such as a website -- is automatically covered by copyright. What I'm guessing Google meant (even though it got it wrong) was that it thought the site contained infringing or unauthorized copyrighted content -- though, if that's the case, that's what it should have said.

And, once again highlighting Google's communication problem, the rejection came from an email address called "noreply," making it difficult for the author to get clarification. He did eventually get Google to "resolve" the issue, but Google's overall policy on the matter is not explained at all. Does Google have an official policy where its AdSense team tries to determine if content on a website is infringing? If so, do they have an official dispute process? Does the AdSense team take into account fair use? Google has, generally speaking, been very good on issues of copyright and fair use, but this particular policy seems rather strange.

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Building a self-balancing robot too easy for you? Why not take an extra step and trick one out so that it can breakdance! Attributed to Dr. GIY and Okamoto-san, the MANOI GO is apparently built of a heavily modified MANOI AT01.

It's pretty awesome, however if I was a human breakdancer competing against it, I would be tempted to argue that using a built-in motor to do head spins is kind of like cheating. Of course, it's probably not a good idea to argue with a breakdancing robot, so maybe I would just let it win. [via technabob]

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Techdirt pointed out an interesting retrospective by Scott Rosenberg, former managing editor of Salon.com, about their experiments with paywalls and how repercussions can last a lot longer than some might expect. "More important, by this point the public was, understandably, thoroughly confused about how to get to read Salon content. It took many years for our traffic to begin to grow again. Paywalls are psychological as much as navigational, and it's a lot easier to put them up than to take them down. Once web users get it in their head that your site is 'closed' to them, if you ever change your mind and want them to come back, it's extremely difficult to get that word out."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is your chicken on drugs. Wagner Mauricio Linares Aragon, a 32-year-old citizen of Guatemala, was arrested at Dulles Int'l. Airport when authorities discovered that the cooked chicken he brought with him on a flight from El Salvador was stuffed with about $4,000 worth of cocaine.

Inside the chicken's cavity they found two small, clear bags that contained about 60 grams - about 2.3 ounces - of powder cocaine.

Cavity, hehehhe. The chicken was cooked, not alive, but I like the trippy look in the eyes of the rooster above. [image: "Little Chicken," from the CC-licensed Flickr stream of hdodd/poppy]

Update: In the comments, Boing Boing reader Lobster suggests that this recipe for drug smuggling henceforth be known as "Chicken Cordon Blow." Win.

A 22-year-old medical student and blogger was arrested in Russia this week for "spreading rumors" about swine flu in the city of Saratov. He was charged with disseminating false information related to an act of terrorism. On Wednesday, he and other Russian bloggers discussed possibilities that authorities were concealing the extent of H1N1 fatalities and that the city may soon be quarantined. The next day, he was jailed.

Humans love putting stuff on cats. There's stuffonmycat, there are image macros (LOLcats) with text on cats. Now, there's a new book about putting wigs on cats.

The photos in this book are equal parts cute, funny, and creepy (in that "obsessive cat lady" way), and the combination is most enjoyable. The book is well-designed for casual flipthroughs and kitteh-obsessive pageturners alike, with vivid color reproduction with which to faithfully present all those technicolor wigs. I may buy several copies for teenage, female cat-fanciers on my holiday list. Something about the brand of humor here seems particularly fitting for that age group, and I do not say that with the intent to condescend (although, hey, if the wig fits...). It's sweet, ridiculous stuff.

Glamourpuss: The Enchanting World of Kitty Wigs (by Julie Jackson, photographs by Jill Johnson / Amazon)

Here's the project website, with out-takes from the photo shoots and more about the "making of." Oh, and -- they're selling the cat wigs.

Embedded above, a video trailer. (Thanks, Monkey!)

While telco lobbyists (or paid "think tank" commenters) have a long history of pushing the totally bogus concept of an "exaflood" of traffic that will take down the internet, more recently they've been pushing this idea of "bandwidth hogs." That is, they say that even if there isn't really a big threat to backbone bandwidth (which they had claimed originally) there is still a problem with "bandwidth hogs" at the last mile, using up way too much bandwidth. And, for that reason, they insist that ISPs should be able to cap and meter broadband, to make sure that the "low level users" aren't subsidizing the "bandwidth hogs." There are two big problems with this claim. First... in none of the experiments with metered billing have the "low level users" received a discount. Instead, they've kept paying the same amount, and it's just that the ISPs have tried to jack up the rates on higher bandwidth users.

But, an even bigger problem may be that the very idea of "bandwidth hogs" may be a myth (found via Slashdot). Benoit Felten is smashing that myth, in noting that there are certainly some folks who use more bandwidth than others, but contrary to claims from ISPs, he hasn't seen any evidence that they're causing any harm or congestion on the network. So he's presented a challenge to telcos to send over data that he can analyze to prove him wrong.

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In an age ruled by information great emphasis is placed on processing speed, memory capacity and sensor sizes. The advancement of such hardware is tied directly to the accelerated development of integrated circuits and exponential improvements of the transistor. When news hits that researchers successfully built a working transistor the size of a single atom, the next generation of devices don't seem that far-fetched.

Researchers from Helsinki University of Technology (Finland), University of New South Wales (Australia), and University of Melbourne (Australia) have succeeded in building a working transistor, whose active region composes only of a single phosphorus atom in silicon.

"About half a year ago, I and one of the leaders of this research, Prof. Andrew Dzurak, were asked when we expect a single-atom transistor to be fabricated. We looked at each other, smiled, and said that we have already done that", tells Dr. Mikko Möttönen.

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The Hearst Corporation has announced their intention to launch an e-reader competitor to Amazon's Kindle and a supporting store and platform that is much more "publisher friendly." More details are available form their official press release this morning. "Launching in 2010, Skiff provides a complete e-reading solution that includes the Skiff Service platform, Skiff Store and Skiff-enabled devices. Skiff will sell and distribute newspapers, magazines, books, blogs and other content. Skiff gives periodical publishers tools to maintain their distinct visual identities, build and extend relationships with subscribers, and deliver dynamic content and advertising to a range of dedicated e-readers and multipurpose devices."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last summer, after our Maker Faire in the Bay Area, I had a couple of speaking engagements in the Detroit area. One was at a Go Tech meeting in Ann Arbor, at the A2 MechShop. I had many people asking about a Maker Faire in Detroit and insisting that it would mean a lot to a region that was going through hard times. On the same trip, I met with curators at The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn and they too were interested in seeing a Maker Farie happen. Walking through the museum, I saw not just the creations of American makers, but the workshops of people like Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers, not to mention Henry Ford. I couldn't help but think what inspiration today's makers would find in the 100-year old legacy of the Model T, along with so many other important examples of how technology has changed our lives.

I'm happy to announce today that we have partnered with The Henry Ford Museum to create a Maker Faire in 2010 in the Detroit area. The dates will be July 31-August 1, 2010.

I look at it as a wonderful opportunity to showcase the technical and creative talent of the region, which was once the most productive city in America. Detroit needs to retool and rethink its opportunities, and quite frankly, I find this an exciting opportunity to be part of. If the manufacturing skills and design prowess of Detroit can be married to the tools for communication and expression that the Internet provides, something big will come of it. Already today, you can see the seeds growing. There's the emergence of hackerspaces like I3 Detroit and All Hands Active, co-working spaces like A2 MechShop and the Tech Brewery, and a thriving craft scene around Handmade Detroit. Add to that initiatives such as the tech incubator known as TechTown at Wayne State University and the excellent higher education system in Michigan.

We have come up with a tagline for Maker Faire Detroit -- From Motor City to Maker City. (Thanks, Diana). We hope as part of this process of organizing Maker Faire to create a Maker City that is a year-round guide to the amazing resources and talents to be found in this region. In short, stay tuned for more.

To keep track of developments for Maker Faire Detroit, check out makerfaire.com. You can send mail to detroit@makerfaire.com to be added to our mailing list and to receive notices about our Call for Makers and other event details. Please let me know if you have suggestions and ideas for Maker Faire Detroit (dale at oreilly dot com). We'll need lots of help and support but I'm sure that makers across the Midwest will participate and we'll be able to create an amazing event.

Whether you live in Detroit or not, Detroit's problems are our problems and Detroit's opportunities are ours as well.

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Gretchen Rubin has a list of 8 clues that you are being boring. She says her list is "utterly unscientific" but I think she's right on. Most of them are obvious, but boring people seem unaware that they are boring.

She also has a list of topics to avoid if you don't want to be a bore:

1. A dream.
2. The recent changes in your child’s nap schedule.
3. The route you took to get here.
4. An excellent meal you once had at a restaurant.
5. The latest additions to your wine cellar.
6. An account your last golf game.
7. The plot of a movie, play, or movie—in particular, the funny parts.

Of course, these topics are Gretchen's pet peeves. I just happen to agree with her about all of them (especially dream and golf). Some of these topics, however, might not be boring if you tell them to the right person. Number five would be interesting to a fellow wine collector, for instance.

UPDATE: Please participate in this one-question survey so we can find out how many people get bored when other people describe their dreams to them. (The dumb survey app I'm using will not show results to everyone. As of 11:24am PST, 362 people have taken the survey. 60% people have answered Yes, and 40% have answered No. I will update again later.)

Eight Tips to Know If You're Being Boring

With Tim Quirk's story about his fictional royalty statements from Warner Music, more people are beginning to talk about these kinds of things. Bob Lefsetz points to another report of a royalty statement of an unrecouped artist (and former major label exec), David Bach, who notes with some surprise that on his last royalty statement from Warner Music, the amount the band owed had gone up. In other words, the royalties that the band had accrued had somehow decreased:

In May of 2007, I wrote a post about the wacky world of record company royalty recoupment.

This week (Nov.-2009) - I received another royalty statement.

Wow!...we've gone backwards!

In May 2007, we were unrecouped to Warner Brothers to the tune of $174,073.84

Now...our balance is up to $174,717.56!

Talk about "pushing forward back!".

How is this possible?

Good question!

Now, to be fair, Bach still says that he was happy with his major record deal, in noting that it was effectively an "unsecured loan" in that he doesn't lose his house if it never gets recouped. He conveniently leaves out the clear explanation that the label is still making money based on the wholesale price of the album, which is many times over what royalties are due to recoup the advance. He also leaves out the fact that while it was an "unsecured loan," it also involved him giving up basically all rights to the music created under that deal forever (or, as the industry prefers, forever minus a day). Not sure that's really that great a deal. With a real loan, you don't also give up the lender something to keep forever. That's not a loan, it's a transaction.

Still, the bigger issue is this idea that the amount that still needs to be recouped has gone backwards over time. It again raises serious questions about how Warner Music accounts for what it owes bands, whether they're recouped or unrecouped. I recognize that accounting may be a boring topic, but it's an important one that Warner has contractual obligations to keep accurate. And... plenty of other businesses with similar challenges seem to be able to keep track of what royalties are owed to whom. Why can't Warner Music keep it straight?

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Astronaut Michael Barratt (Expedition 20 Flight Engineer) walks you through the International Space Station in this 20-minute long HD video, which covers the entire 167 feet of the space station's pressurized modules.

Barratts' commentary describes to Mission Control in Houston how equipment and supplies are arranged and stored, and provides engineers with a detailed assessment of each module-to-module hatchway.

NASA ASTRONAUT LEADS TOUR OF SPACE STATION IN HD [YouTube, spotted on ededition.com, via Jennifer Cisney]

An anonymous reader writes to tell us that Comcast and General Electric announced a joint venture yesterday to control NBC Universal with Comcast coming out with the controlling interest. Comcast's hopes seem to be on succeeding in a marriage of distribution and content where Time Warner failed. "The deal was approved by the companies' boards, and is subject to regulatory approval. GE said it expects the deal to go through in the third quarter of 2010. Congress has already said it will hold a hearing to investigate whether Comcast will gain "undue advantages" from the deal that gives it access to programming."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over at CRAFT I posted up a guide to getting started in wearable technology for the techy crafter on your list!

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Self-experimenter Seth Roberts cured his foot fungus when he bought more socks. Anti-fungal medication didn't work. He wrote about this on his blog, and other people are reporting success with his more-socks cure.

I remember reading on your blog about more socks as a cure for Athlete’s Foot and I had a fungal infection on my foot from climbing around barefoot outside, I think. I tried using two different antifungal creams. They didn’t work. To be honest I didn’t use them for the recommended time cuz it’s a huge fucking hassle. You have to put it on your feet, let it dry, rub it in blah blah blah. And it’s kinda gross to use. So I went to Uniqlo [a Japanese clothing store] and bought like 20 pairs of extra socks and forgot about it. But when I wash socks the washed ones get put in the back of the drawer so the effect is the socks I wear spend like 3-4 days away from my feet every time. Anyway, the infection COMPLETELY disappeared. There is a weird sense of satisfaction from this kind of cure. It feels like just by doing some small things ‘right’ all these health issues can be fixed.

Foot Fungus Cured With Socks

I can't wait for this documentary to come out!

Everybody loves... Babies. This visually stunning new movie simultaneously follows four babies around the world - from first breath to first steps. From Mongolia to Namibia to San Francisco to Tokyo, Babies joyfully captures on film the earliest stages of the journey of humanity that are at once unique and universal to us all.

(Via Ohdeedoh)

This instructional webcomic about a web design job gone horribly, eyestabbingly bad rings SO true. (via Glenn Fleishman)

Adam Ciralsky's Vanity Fair profile of Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater ("a company dogged by a grand-jury investigation, bribery accusations, and the voluntary-manslaughter trial of five ex-employees") reveals that Prince was a spy for the CIA while he was at the same time raking in over a billion dollars as a government contractor in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The truth about Prince may be orders of magnitude stranger than fiction.

For the past six years, he appears to have led an astonishing double life. Publicly, he has served as Blackwater’s C.E.O. and chairman. Privately, and secretly, he has been helping [the C.I.A.] to craft, fund, and execute operations ranging from inserting personnel into “denied areas”—places U.S. intelligence has trouble penetrating—to assembling hit teams targeting al-Qaeda members.

While his company was busy gleaning more than $1.5 billion in government contracts…Prince, according to sources with knowledge of his activities, has been working as a C.I.A. asset: in a word, as a spy.

Erik Prince: Tycoon, Contractor, Soldier, Spy (Via Disinformation)

Gentlemen of Bacongo by photographer Daniele Tamagni, documents a subculture of slum-dwelling men in the Congo who dress in luxurious handmade suits.

The movement, called Le Sape, combines French styles from their colonial roots and the individual's (often flamboyant) style. Le Sapeurs, as they're called, wear pink suits and D&G belts while living in the slums of this coastal African region.

In interviews with some notable sapeurs, Tamagni unearths the complex and varied rules and standards of Le Sape, short for Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes, or the Society of Tastemakers and Elegant People. Sapeur Michel comments on the strange combination of poverty and fashion, "A Congolese sapeur is a happy man even if he does not eat, because wearing proper clothes feeds the soul and gives pleasure to the body."

Gentlemen of Bacongo

An anonymous reader writes "Back in 2008, Lucas Ordonez lived what seemed like an ordinary existence. The 22-year-old Spanish student was an avid motorsports fan, but he lacked the suitable investment necessary to become a professional race driver and had virtually given up on racing. Besides, he was already knee-deep in trying to complete an Master of Business Administration (MBA). But it was Ordonez' passion for virtual racing, particularly his love of Gran Turismo, that made him stand out from his peers — both off the track and eventually on it. In just a few months, Ordonez' life was transformed from console dreamer to racing the real thing at a real race track in Europe . And Ordonez managed to do the unthinkable: go from the couch car to the race car, and win."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chris Anderson points us to a great example of ways to respond to criticism. It involves the company Microchip, which received a scathing video review of its PICKit 3 offering that the reviewer felt was worse in pretty much every way than the product it was replacing. As the video goes on and the reviewer, Dave, gets angrier, he posits that some "dickhead MBA" took over the management of this offering, and decided to kill off good features and save money by skimping on other things: Now, there are lots of ways to respond to such criticism, but none might be as clever as what Microchip actually did. Which was create its own video, showing the product planning meeting with the new product manager, one D. Head, discussing how to save money and squeeze more money out of customers... leading to his eventual firing and the engineers adding back in some of the missing features and explaining why it actually made a lot more sense to change some of the other features: It's funny, self-deprecating, clearly acknowledges the criticisms and either explains how the company is going to fix them or why those decisions were made in the process. Even if you don't know anything about the company or these products, there are a lot of things that anyone in any business can learn about the way Microchip handled this.

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Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez,

Did you know you can watch Richard Nixon explain why he's innocent, see the Hindenburg, or view an official bio of General George S. ("Georgie") Patton? All these videos have been buried in a vault.

I'll be testifying December 16 before the House Oversight Committee on the topic (take a deep breath) "History Museum or Records Access Agency? Defining and Fulfilling the Mission of the National Archives and Records Administration." The first panel will feature the new Archivist, the Secretary of the Smithsonian, and the Librarian of Congress. I'm on the second panel of citizens.

You can help me prepare my testimony by watching videos on YouTube or the Internet Archive. If you want to watch videos from the National Archives today, they try to talk you into buying a DVD from the official government partner, Amazon.Com. The government web site has a 320x240 2 minute preview, using an old Microsoft codec, and all the search results encourage you to purchase from "our partner, Amazon.Com."

I've got nothing against Amazon selling this stuff. It is public domain, after all. But, I do have a real problem when the government deliberately cripples itself by not making video available to all. To demonstrate to the Congress that if we liberated this wonderful content people would really care, I forked over $251 for 20 DVDs and posted them on-line.

I'll be counting the number of views and reporting that information in my testimony. Help me show Congress we care about history:

Watch videos on the Internet Archive.

Watch videos on YouTube.

Knock yourself out, view one, view them all ... help me make the case that the National Archives should be all about access and preservation and that exclusive deals that bottle up the public domain are just not a good idea.

My friend Paula LeDieu at the British Film Institute has a great riff on these commercialization efforts. We -- the taxpayers -- were the angel and Series A investors in this video, and our ROI is measured by how much of the video we get to see and use, and what new things get made with it. The argument that locking up the video and selling it to us allows for the production of more video basically says that a new investor -- the commercial partners of the government archives -- should be able to dilute our interest down to zero by contributing a paltry few new dollars to the project. That is, our return on investment should be obliterated so that a latecomer can clean up. If this was a corporation, we'd have a shareholder lawsuit -- and we'd probably fire the board of directors and the CEO.

National Archives and Record Administration (Thanks, Carl!)

The folks at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories are at it again, this time (get it?) with a kit version of the Bulbdial clock. We first saw the concept for this device over a year ago, when it was proposed by David Friedman of Ironic Sans. EMSL decided to take on the challenge of constructing it, and built a prototype. Now, just in time for the holidays, they have released it as an open source kit.

I was fortunate to see an early version of it in person, and can attest that it is quite beautiful.

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A course at the University of Michigan ends with a live concert featuring students using iPhones as instruments. “Building a Mobile Phone Ensemble“ teaches students to code musical instruments for the iPhone, using the Apple-provided software-development kit. Georg Essl, assistant professor of computer science and music, says, "What’s interesting is we blend the whole process. We start from nothing. We teach the programming of iPhones for multimedia stuff, and then we teach students to build their own instruments.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Antonio Stradivari was a 17th-and-18th century instrument maker who is still famous for having made beautiful, mysterious violins. Many thought he used a secret ingredient to create the brilliant varnish unique to his instruments. In a recently released study aimed at demystifying the Stradivari violin, researchers in France and Germany subjected five of his violins from a museum collection to a series of spectroscopic and microscopic tests. Quite anticlimactically, it turns out he was just using materials typical for that era, plus some red pigments for added color:

Stradivari first applied a layer of an oil comparable to the oils used by painters of the same epoch, without fillers or pigments to seal the wood. We did not find a mineral-rich layer, as some earlier work suggests. The master violinmaker next applied a slightly tinted oil-resin layer. We have detected nothing that would have suggested the use of protein-containing materials, gums, or fossil resins.

Secret behind the composition of the varnish on Stradivari violins revealed [via Physorg.com] Photo via The Alieness Gisele Giardino's Flickr

If you're in Phoenix tonight or tomorrow, don't miss this awesome (and big) show at Bragg's Pie Factory. Pictured above is Kris Waid-Jones' "Cherry Bomb Pie" (cast entirely in aluminum, even the cherries), various carved soap objects by Ann Morton, and a piece by Andrew Hadle.

Grand Delusion
An Exhibition of Works by School or Art Students in Fibers and Sculpture
Bragg's Pie Factory
1301 NW Grand Avenue (enter on McKinley)
Phoenix, AZ

Opening Reception:
First Friday, December 4th, 2009 6:30pm - 10:30pm
Closing reception:
Saturday, December 5th, 2009 6:30pm - 8:30pm

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For this week's episode of Kurt Andersen's Studio360 radio show, I produced a segment about David Boyle, a young Mormon film director who makes movies about Japanese culture.

mclearn sends in news of "a very large, 30-year study of just about everyone in Scandinavia" that shows no link between mobile phone use and brain tumors. "Even though mobile telephone use soared in the 1990s and afterward, brain tumors did not become any more common during this time, the researchers reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Some activist groups and a few researchers have raised concerns about a link between mobile phones and several kinds of cancer, including brain tumors, although years of research have failed to establish a connection. ... 'From 1974 to 2003, the incidence rate of glioma (a type of brain tumor) increased by 0.5 per cent per year among men and by 0.2 per cent per year among women,' they wrote. Overall, there was no significant pattern."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A lot of the commenters on YouTube say this is fake and that they can see a catapult, a track, a cameraman, and so on. The thing that makes me think it's fake is that this video exists. (Via about:blank)

Ferrofluids are basically just iron nanoparticles suspended in a liquid. In the presence of magnets, they do some pretty cool things. For instance, ferrofluids flow to place where the magnetic flux--the strength of the magnetism--is strongest. So if you magnetize the screw from a meat grinder so the magnetic flux is denser at the top than it is at the bottom, the ferrofluid will climb the screw like staircase.

Thumbnail image courtesy Gregory Maxwell, via CC

When you buy eggs in America, the carton usually carries this warning message:

SAFE HANDLING INSTRUCTIONS: To prevent illness from bacteria: Keep eggs refrigerated, cook eggs until yolks are firm, and cook foods containing eggs thoroughly.

I always wondered why. I eat raw eggs over rice almost every day when I'm visiting my parents in Tokyo, and then I fly back to California and promptly switch to scrambled eggs because of this fear that I'll get sick from eating raw eggs in America.

There's a 1 in 20,000 chance that an egg might contain salmonella, according to the American Egg Board. "The risk of getting a foodborne illness from eggs is very low, but the nutrients in eggs are also a good growth medium for bacteria," says Elisa Malobert, director of egg product marketing at the AEB. "To eliminate risk, we do not recommend the consumption of raw or lightly cooked eggs." It doesn't matter, she adds, whether you're eating organic and free range $8-a-dozen farm fresh eggs or super-processed $2 eggs. (Egg "grades" are determined by appearance and yolk-to-white ratio, not content quality.) Hens aren't affected by salmonella, so they can carry it and pass it onto egg yolk without anyone knowing. And if that doesn't happen, salmonella could enter through the shell after the bloom — the natural coating that protects the inside — is washed off after collection. Egg shells are super porous; there are anywhere from 7-17,000 pores on a single shell.

My brother got salmonella once from eating raw chicken at a high-end yakitori restaurant in Tokyo. I know, I know. Raw eggs are debatable, but nobody in their right minds eats raw chicken! This might imply that the Japanese are less concerned about food safety, but on the other hand, most restaurants there will never wrap up food to go precisely because food can go bad once it's no longer fresh and they don't want to be liable for that. If I can guess at any reason why the Japanese are more inclined to eat raw everything, it might be because the culture inherently appreciates and celebrates the purity of unprocessed, uncooked flavors. I don't have any numbers for the incidence of salmonella in Japanese eggs, but I'm assuming that, like American eggs, it's not that common.

Raw eggs are a great source of Vitamins B12 and D; they also have tons of protein. If you're willing to see past the USDA warning and try it, I highly recommend making tamago kake gohan — raw egg on rice — for breakfast.

Every installment of Taste Test will explore recipes, the science, and some history behind a specific food item.

Image via Gep's Flickr

Last month, we wrote about Zombieland director Rhett Reese, complaining on Twitter that the fact that his movie was a top unauthorized download would make it that much more unlikely that there would ever be a sequel. Others picked up that claim and ran with it, as if this was proof that piracy was harming the movie business. The whole thing seemed curious to us, since the movie has been quite successful at the box office, and has made a ton of money. Given that, who cares how much it's pirated. If it can make a bunch of money, of course it's ripe for a sequel.

And, guess what? Despite all the doom and gloom about how Sony would never make a sequel, Variety is reporting (you guessed it!) that Sony is about to ink a sequel for Zombieland, which will be done in 3D. Shocking. Even though the movie was pirated so much, the studio still wants to make a sequel? Could it be that there really are some people who recognize that how much a movie is pirated doesn't really matter if the movie can still make a ton of cash?

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As usual, check out protoblogger.com for a list of all the stories I write on the various sites I write for.

Here's a subset, the ones I don't think you should miss.

1. I'm sorry but we need government.

2. Ideas for a BitTorrent namespace.

3. What does the J-school of the Future look like?

4. Consumer Reports rates cell phone service in the US.

5. We need: A programmable Twitter client.

Closure is a blog, by jeweler Joycelyn Merchant, about the restoration, reconstruction, and replication of vintage book clasps, hinges, and other hardware. And although it has not been updated since April, there's tons of cool photos and good info already there. [via Propnomicon]

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darthcamaro writes "Yesterday we discussed Google's launch of its new Public DNS service. Now Metasploit founder and CSO at Rapid7, H D Moore, investigates how well-protected Google's service is against the Kaminsky DNS flaw. Moore has put together a mapping of Google's source port distribution on the Public DNS service. In his view, it looks like the source ports are sufficiently random, even though they are limited to a small range of ports. The InternetNews report on Moore's research concludes: 'What Moore's preliminary research clearly demonstrates to me is that Google really does need to live up to its promise here. Unlike a regular ISP, Google will be subject to more scrutiny (and research) than other DNS providers.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jake von Slatt sez, "Last week I went out to Sharon, Massachusetts to visit the home of Bruce Rosenbaum, a friend of a co-worker whom I was told was 'interested in steampunk.' When I got there what I saw blew me away!"

Bruce and Melanie Rosenbaum started ModVic (Modern Victorian) Home Restoration in June 2007 and have now moved onto steampunk Home Design. ModVic's mission is to authentically restore historic Victorian homes (1850 - 1910) to their original beauty and richness while completely modernizing the home's systems, functional layout and conveniences for the family of today (sound familiar?). Bruce and Melanie also love the steampunk design aesthetic of combining the best of Victorian high design and craftsmanship with modern functionality and usefulness...

A Visit to a Steampunked Home (Thanks, Jake!)

Jonathan Lethem's extraordinary new novel Chronic City tells the story of Chase Insteadman, a washed up, grown up child actor living off his sitcom residuals in wealthy, Upper East Side New York. Chase is caught between two improbabilities: his fiancee, a dying astronaut stranded on a space-station walled off from Earth by a Chinese orbital minefield, from which vantage she commands daily headlines; and Perkus Tooth, a media-obsessed Philip-K-Dickian ex-rock-critic who lives in a weed-smoke- filled cave of a rent- controlled apartment from which he obsessively watches obscure movies and reads obscure books.

Chase's story -- magnificently told in Lethem's most poetic language -- is the quest for authenticity. An actor, Chase finds himself acting the part of the grieving widower-to-be, of the handsome beefcake at the swanky party, of the sincere sidekick to the ascerbic and unintelligible Perkus Tooth. And as Chase begins an affair with Oona Lazlo, a celebrity ghostwriter autobiography writer, he finds himself even more drawn to the questions of what is real and what isn't?

For example: is America at war? Depends on which edition of the New York Times you read -- their "war-free" edition is flensed of all mention of the war. Or how about this: what is the true nature of the "escaped tiger" that is destroying Manhattan one bodega and run-down apartment building at a time? Is it really a two-storey-tall tiger? Or is it (as Chase's City Hall insider pal insists) a cover story for a rogue 2nd Avenue Tunnel-digging machine that got lonely and now marauds beneath New York?

The story grows progressive weirder and more mystic -- there's a sub-plot involving the true nature of Marlon Brando's relationship with the "Gnuppets" (a thinly veiled version of the Muppets); another involving a fictionalized version of Second Life; a third involving "chaldrons," mystical vessels that can only be found on eBay, where you are always, always outbid.

In some ways, Chronic City is the bookend to one of my favorite Lethem novels, the brilliant Motherless Brooklyn (if you can find the audiobook read by Steve Buscemi and only available on cassette, jump at it). Motherless is all about the gritty, the real, the urban -- street kids who work as hoods-for-hire for a dirty private eye. In its own way, it's also about authenticity -- about whether the "authentic" street identity of the characters is just a role, just another put-on.

By moving uptown to the genteel and posh precincts of rarified wealth and pathological intellect, Lethem is able to summon all his PK Dick chops, to channel the media-nuts who circulate in literary scenes, to ask important, hard-to-articulate and impossible-to-answer questions about what is genuine, what is artifice, and when it matters.

Chronic City

Steve Silberman sez, "A barn in Hopewell Township, NJ that housed the RESISTORS -- Radically Emphatic Students Interested in Science, Technology and Other Research Subjects -- a group of computer geeks who got together in 1967 to smoke pot, write primitive code, talk about the future of computing, and protest bad science education -- burned down yesterday."

In the salute to Kagan in 2007, it was noted there had been a 9-ton Burroughs 205 vacuum tube computer in the barn in the late '60s.

"Some of the other artifacts ... included an early typewriter with a piano keyboard, an early IBM paper tape punch that made square holes (not round), an official IBM song book, early prototypes of touch-tone phones, Teletypes, Flexowriters, an early IBM time clock, manual telephone switchboards, electro-mechanical telephone switches, and music boxes."

There had been a computer room "that looked like the Bat Cave in the '70s before there were computers," one friend said, and also a museum in the barn. A room full of antique telephones. A set of walkie-talkies from the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Computer barn crashes as historic stage burns (Thanks, Steve!)

(Image: Trenton Times)

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.

As a kid, I liked classical and easy listening music, not the rock or disco that other kids listened to. But at age 12 or 13, I was, for some reason, moved to tape Jesus Christ Superstar off of the radio. I played that cassette over and over again, memorized the whole show, then kept playing it and singing along whenever I got the chance. I played it loud, too, turning the volume up higher than I'd ever wanted to before. I was cranking JCS one evening when my dad came home from work. With an expression of curiosity, he asked me why I had the music up so loud. I said "I don't know," and then he asked if I'd gotten the idea from anywhere. I told him no, and he said, "Hmm-- interesting!" He didn't disapprove, but I got the sense that he recognized something happening to me.

JCS taught me the story of Jesus, which as a jewish boy in Los Angeles, I never knew. It had a huge impact on me. Ever since, I've looked at the world in terms of Jesus vs. Rome, righteous rebellion vs. institutional power, hippie values vs. capitalist values, love vs. control. As far as I'm concerned, the "hippie Jesus" of the 1960s and early 1970s is the true Jesus (and centuries of art bear me out on this, at least superficially). "Jesus Was A Hippie" -- that's the tagline for my imaginary ad campaign to take Christianity back from all the high-power imposters and restore it to its apolitical, communitarian roots.

Continued after the jump 

I've long outgrown my love for much music I used to like (Spyro Gyra, I'm talking to you), but never JCS. I was indignant when I flipped through the 1980 book The Golden Turkey Awards and saw Ted Neeley picked for "Worst Performance As Jesus Christ" in the movie version. And I've always been attuned to other JCS-lovers, other people who know all the words. Mitchell Morris, professor of Musicology at UCLA, you probably don't remember me, but I'm a friend of your grad school colleague Steve. About 15 years ago, when we were all having lunch one day, JCS came up, and I know you know all the words too! Some BB readers may recall Suck.com, which was the first website that had a new fun thing for me to read every day. One day on Suck, a cartoon character's speech balloon said, "Fools-- you have no perception! The stakes we are gambling are frighteningly high!" This is a line sung by Caiaphas in the song "Jesus Must Die," and seeing it in such a different context (which I also liked) gave an explosive jolt to my soul-mate radar.

In more recent years, the rock band Skycastle performed the show around Easter every year at the Transmission Theater in San Francisco, staging it with costumed singers, minimal props, and no scenery. I went a couple of times (I think they stopped, unfortunately), and it was always a thrill. Pretty much everyone in the friendly audience of like-minded JCS-heads sing along to the whole thing. I imagine that outside of a gospel church, there is no feeling more righteous than that of screaming, "Die if you want to, you misguided martyr!" with 200 other people over wailing guitars and crashing cymbals. My friends John and Sophia say that a band in Boston used to do the same thing over there, with the same annual success.

Which brings me to my business proposition. I love karaoke and sing-alongs, and I've been pleased to see the success of subtitled, sing-along versions of The Sound Of Music, Grease, Mamma Mia and other favorite musical movies. So how about a sing-along Jesus Christ Superstar? It's a trivial job technically-- just some time spent pasting lyrics into a video editor. I have the movie on DVD and I could do it bootleg, but I think it needs to be legal so that it could be advertised, shown in theaters and churches, and draw crowds. It would be good, clean fun-- who could object? I understand that JCS was disliked by many religious leaders when it was new, but if they had just felt threatened by the hippie-ness of it, I'm sure that has since faded.  

So it's basically a rights and distribution issue. I've tried to track down who subtitled The Sound Of Music, but had no success. I've asked two entertainment lawyers that I know where I might start with something like this, and they don't know. So: does anyone in Boingboing-land know how I might do this, or how much it would cost? Does anyone want to invest in the project? Did I just blow it by posting this, thereby possibly signaling the rights owner to inflate their price or do it themselves? I don't care-- as long as somebody gets it out there.

Over the last couple of years, the movie industry has pushed hard for stricter and stricter laws for anyone caught "filming" a movie in the theater. Of course, these days, with more and more people having portable video cameras either in their mobile phones or other devices, the likelihood of these sorts of laws being abused or misused only grows over time. Take, for example, the case of 22-year-old Samantha Tumpach, from Chicago, who took her sister out for a surprise birthday party at a movie theater recently. While there, she used her new camera to tape parts of the event, including her, along with friends and family, singing happy birthday to her sister. But, in the course of all this, she also caught two small segments of the film itself, less than four minutes, total -- hardly a representative case of "pirate" or "camcording" activity. Still, the theater pressed charges, and Samantha was arrested and spent two nights in jail -- and may now face three years in jail as a felon. Good thing Hollywood got those laws, so they can get young women celebrating their friends and families' birthdays put in jail.

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eldavojohn writes "Benoit Felten, an analyst in Paris, has heard enough of the elusive creature known as the bandwidth hog. Like its cousin the Boogie Man, the 'bandwidth hog' is a tale that ISPs tell their frightened users to keep them in check or to cut off whoever they want to cut off from service. And Felten's calling them out because he's certain that bandwidth hogs don't exist. What's actually happening is the ISPs are selecting the top 5% of users, by volume of bits that move on their wire, and revoking their service, even if they aren't negatively impacting other users. Which means that they are targeting 'heavy users' simply for being 'heavy users.' Felten has thrown down the gauntlet asking for a standardized data set from any telco that he can do statistical analysis on that will allow him to find any evidence of a single outlier ruining the experience for everyone else. Unlikely any telco will take him up on that offer but his point still stands." Felten's challenge is paired with a more technical look at how networks operate, which claims that TCP/IP by its design eliminates the possibility of hogging bandwidth. But Wes Felter corrects that mis-impression in a post to a network neutrality mailing list.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Security is mostly a superstition," wrote Helen Keller. "It does not exist in nature... Life is either a daring adventure or nothing."

If you know someone whose life is lacking excitement, perhaps you can kick start 2010 by giving them a few badly-needed thrills. But you don't want to go overboard, so we've developed the list to help you give gifts that fall somewhere between the tedious and the treacherous (with a distinct bias towards the latter).

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Make Your Own Gunpowder
In my latest book Absinthe and Flamethrowers, I explain how adding the right mix of danger to your life can make you happier and better adjusted. Now, there are lots of ways of adding reasonable danger, but one frequent suggestion I give maker friends is to attempt making their own gun powder. Sound dangerous? Okay, maybe a little. But not overly so. The directions are in the book and the ingredients are in the Maker Shed's Science Room.

Potassium Nitrate (MakerShed, $2.99)

Sulfur (MakerShed, $2.99)

Charcoal (MakerShed, $4.50)

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Start a Fire with Air
Your mom might disagree, but I think playing with fire is a good thing, and a good place to start is with a fire piston. The clear, polycarbonate fire piston kit from the Maker Shed (which I put together) is a great fire starting device that seemingly produces fire from thin air. The secret is that the specially-designed piston is rammed quickly into a sealed cylinder with a single stroke. The compression of the air causes the temperature to rise rapidly, to about 500 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough for the tinder on the piston face to ignite. It can then be withdrawn and transferred to a larger mass of kindling to create a fire.

Way, way cooler than using a match, or (shudder) a lighter, to start a campfire.

Fire Piston Kit (MakerShed, $19.99)

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The Poison Pepper

Eating hot peppers isn't really dangerous. Or is it?

According to the BBC, defense scientists in India are developing a throwing weapon containing not explosives, but super-hot chili peppers, so hot they make your typical jalapeno taste like a cinnamon stick. The pepper variety used in these "all-natural" hand grenades is called the Bhut Jolokia. Danger seekers with a horticultural bent can order the seeds and try their hand at growing some of these "dangerous" vegetables.

Bhut Jolokia Ultra Hot Pepper Seeds (New Mexico State Chili Pepper Institute, $5.00)

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The Ultimate Firework
Making fireworks is a great hobby, but you'd better know what you're doing. Mixing fuels and oxidizers the right way will impress your friends. Do it incorrectly and those same friends will nickname you "Stubby."

American Fireworks News has a ton of books on how to make fireworks. The Girandola is a spectacular flying wheel, and expert fireworks maker Tom Dimont's DVD, shows you how to make them. Click here for a video.

Girandola DVD (American Fireworks News, $40.80)

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Use the Force, Luke
Using a 50 mw green laser on a misty evening is as close to handling a Jedi Knight's light saber as I'll ever get. On a clear night, you can light up a water tower three miles away. But make no mistake; a Class IIIb 50 mW laser has plenty of capacity to damage eyeballs, so it's not a recommended gift for the young or the stupid.

50 mW Green Laser (ScientificsOnline, $189.99)

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Dance with the Green Fairy

The truly adventurous don't toast their escapades with beer or Scotch whiskey. Instead, they raise a glass of absinthe, the purportedly dangerous psychoactive liquor distilled from the poisonous wormwood plant.

Prepare the drink by dripping water through a sugar cube into the absinthe. The volatile oils will precipitate out of solution, turning it an opaline green, thus signifying the arrival of the "the green fairy."

Taboo Absinthe (Okanangan Spirits, $55.00)

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Got Thermite?
This combination of chemicals comes in handy when you need to field-weld a couple 5-inch I-beams or quickly purify some uranium ore. But even if you don't, what adventurous maker wouldn't enjoy experimenting with a chemical reaction hot enough to burn through concrete? The good people at United Nuclear sell the stuff you need to experience firsthand the power and glory.

Thermite (United Nuclear, $4.50)

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The Deal of the Century - The Ballistic Bundle
Is the Maker Shed's Ballistic Bundle the most awesome, intellectually stimulating, and kick-ass exciting combination of books and video on the entire system of tubes called the Interweb?

Yes. And I'd say this even if I wasn't the author of the books and the star of the video. The bundle includes Backyard Ballistics, The Art of the Catapult, the Barrage Garage video, and the classic MAKE, Volume 03. No matter how you look at it, $69 worth of books and fifty grand worth of excitement, all for $48, is a heckuva bargain.

The Ballistic Bundle (MakerShed $48.00)

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Absinthe and Flamethrowers
Not included in the above bundle is my latest book, Absinthe and Flamethrowers: Projects and Ruminations on the Art of Living Dangerously. Reviews say "The book is a sure-fire hit for people who want to get in touch with their inner MacGyver and for fans of television shows like MythBusters. (The book's projects ...) often involve building things that shoot or explode."

The book has been getting a lot of attention, from the New York Times to Popular Science to NPR's Science Friday. Lot of folks like the message that some risks are okay to take. And, it's on sale in the Maker Shed.

Absinthe and Flamethrower (MakerShed, $15.99)

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Whip it Good
Don't you hate it when your ox refuses to pull the cart anymore? Well, if you can handle a stock whip, you don't have to endure this obstinacy. A well-made whip transfers momentum from your arm to the popper on the end of the whip, causing a mini-sonic boom next to the beast's ear.

Even if you're not a drover, a bullwhip is a pretty fun thing to use. But wear safety glasses and a hat because novice whip crackers are living pretty dangerously.

Stockwhip (David Morgan, $170)

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Learn to Throw Knives

I experimented with knife throwing as a consequence of writing Absinthe and Flamethrowers. It's quite entertaining and I've been recommending knife throwing to anyone who'll listen (well, almost anyone.) It's a much different experience than, say, throwing pub darts. To me, one really can't compare the bold, red-blooded flush of satisfaction derived from a perfect, cold steel stick into a target with the rather dainty, epicene feeling one gets when tossing a dart. The right knife makes all the difference and this one's not bad.

Throwing Knife (Coldsteel, $13.99)

In the Maker Shed:

Want more? Stop by the Maker Shed. We've got all sorts of great holiday gift ideas, Arduino & Arduino accessories, electronic kits, science kits, smart stuff for kids, back issues of MAKE & CRAFT, box sets, books, robots, kits from Japan and more.

Holiday Shipping Deadlines in December:

04 (Fri) - Deadline for microscope shipping
11 (Fri) - postal shipping deadline
14 (Mon) - ground shipping deadline
18 (Fri) - FedEx 3-day shipping deadline
21 (Mon) - FedEx 2-day shipping deadline
22 (Tue) - FedEx overnight shipping deadline

*Customers experiences on orders with these ship methods placed after these dates may vary, the dates listed are what we call "safe dates"

USPS (Any Method):
Due to the high volume of mail that the postal service deals with around the holidays, order by Dec. 10th, however, many packages are lost or delayed in transit and we do not replace or refund any orders lost using this ship method, we strongly encourage you to not use this method in December.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Gift Guides | Digg this!

Ars digs into the proposition that movies will go the way of the music business, and finds some reasons not to be totally gloomy about Hollywood's immediate future. For one thing, the movie biz managed to introduce a next-generation format to follow the DVD, a trick that eluded the music crowd (anyone remember DVD-Audio? SACD?). Blu-ray isn't making up the gap as DVD sales fall, but it is slowing the revenue decline. Perhaps the most important difference from the music business is that movies aren't amenable to "disaggregation" — unlike CDs, which people stopped buying once they could get the individual songs they really wanted. Ars concludes: "The movie business is facing many of the same challenges that are bedeviling music, but it's not about to go quietly into that good night — and it may not have to."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot points us to the news that a patent (6,631,400 -- which appears to be incorrectly titled "Statement regarding federally sponsored research or development.") on managing spamming efforts has been tossed out as obvious by the federal circuit, following a similar ruling at the lower level.

What's most interesting here is that while some of the steps were thrown out due to prior art, the final step was tossed out due to "common sense." This is important. For quite some time, the courts seemed to insist that obviousness could only be proven through prior art. But something can be both obvious and new. In fact, the patent law has been clear that patents are supposed to be for things that are both new and non-obvious to those skilled in the art, but the question of obviousness was rarely discussed, as everyone just focused on the "newness." That's finally been changing, in large part due to the Supreme Court's KSR ruling that reminded people that obviousness is important, and that it's separate from newness. Since then, both examiners and the courts seem willing to put a bit more common sense into determining obviousness, and that's absolutely a good thing.

Of course, some of you might feel that having a patent on a spamming technique is a good thing, since it could be used to prevent others from spamming, but that didn't seem to be happening anyway, so let's just be happy that a bad patent has been rejected.

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Really cool video, with great experimental footage, chronicling the development of the so-called ALICE (ALuminum and water ICE) solid rocket propellant by a team from Purdue and Penn State. The key to the process is that the metallic aluminum is present as a nano-scale powder, and its oxidation by water thus occurs over a huge surface area and therefore proceeds very quickly, releasing amazing amounts of energy. The video starts with the acoustic mixing of the nano-aluminum with water to make a gray paste which is frozen, in a mold, to make a tubular rocket motor. It then proceeds through various test-bench firings and culminates (at 4:00) in the launch of an actual rocket using the mixture.

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The war of words between the old and the new media is heating up some more. Eric Schmidt has an op-ed in Rupert Murdoch's WSJ (ironic, that) explaining to newspapers how Google wants to, and is trying to, help them. Kara Swisher's BoomTown column translates and deconstructs Schmidt's argument, hilariously. A few days back, the Washington Post's Michael Gerson became the latest journo to bemoan the death of journalism at the hands of the Internet; and investigative blogger Radley Balko quickly called B.S. on Gershon's claim that (all?) bloggers simply steal from (all?) hard-working, honest, ethical print journalists.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Build a fun-for-all-ages mini car launcher for next to nothing.
Thanks go to Nancy Dorsner for the original article in MAKE, Volume 20.
To download The Rubber Band Power video click here and subscribe in iTunes.
Check out the complete Rubber Band Power article in MAKE, Volume 20 and you
can see that in our Digital Edition.

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Spotted over @ Matrixsynth, is this unusually fleshy-looking fingerboard synth known as the Imesco polifónico. Not much info aside from what the demo vids show us and some incidental descrips translated from YouTube-

this is the same instrument that was introduced some time ago, now a little over, also lack enough practice since the video was done in haste,
[…]
with a little practice you can play continuously, alternating between the surface and color sector

Fairly certain I saw one of these used by a lounge act in Existenz. More interesting instrumental creations can be seen on imesco's channel.

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Build a fun-for-all-ages mini car launcher for next to nothing.
Thanks go to Nancy Dorsner for the original article in MAKE, Volume 20.
View the PDF of this project. and then subscribe to MAKE Magazine for other great projects
you can do over the weekend.

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storagedude points out this article about one of the perils of digital storage, the author of which "says massive digital archives are threatened by simple bit errors that can render whole files useless. The article notes that analog pictures and film can degrade and still be usable; why can't the same be true of digital files? The solution proposed by the author: two headers and error correction code (ECC) in every file."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

KEI's James Love ended up on an airplane with USTR Ron Kirk, and was able to ask him some questions about ACTA secrecy. Kirk's response was that the document would be revealed after it was finished -- i.e., after those who it will impact most could have a say in the matter. He also claimed that some of those in the negotiations would "walk away from the table" if the documents were made public. It's difficult to see how that makes any sense -- but if it's true, is that a bad thing? Do you really want to be negotiating a big treaty like this one if some of the countries are afraid to stand behind the document to the public they're supposed to represent? I think the fact that some countries would walk away from the negotiations if they were made public pretty much explains why this process is so broken in the first place.

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If you forget your lines in front of a camera, this may be the project for you. Using an iPhone, some coroplast, a cd case, and duct tape, maker Ben Eadie fashioned the hardware necessary for a DIY teleprompter. A trip to the App Store yielded the requisite software. Apparently if you're looking for software for a DIY teleprompter, there's an app for that. [Thanks, Dave!]

Here's a podcast Ben made that runs through the build process:

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As a follow-up to Epic Games' release of a free version of the Unreal Engine last month, the company has now posted over 160 video tutorials which demonstrate the various uses of the Unreal Development Kit. Roughly 20 hours of footage were created by technical education company 3D Buzz, with topics ranging from user interface to game physics to cinematics.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

LegoWow created these tiny, perfect Lego guitars and amps.

lego guitars (Thanks, LegoWow!)

Scott Rosenberg has a column up at The Guardian where he discusses Salon's experience with a paywall back at the beginning of the decade, highlighting how the damage from a paywall can be a lot more troubling than many people take into account. He points out that Salon's various paywall experiments did bring in some revenue, but they then limited Salon's growth potential, first by confusing users on how they could get access to Salon content, and then with the psychological belief that Salon couldn't be read without paying:

More important, by this point the public was, understandably, thoroughly confused about how to get to read Salon content. It took many years for our traffic to begin to grow again. Paywalls are psychological as much as navigational, and it's a lot easier to put them up than to take them down. Once web users get it in their head that your site is "closed" to them, if you ever change your mind and want them to come back, it's extremely difficult to get that word out.

Indeed. As an early reader of Salon, I used to read it all the time -- and link to it. But as I got more and more confused over whether or not anyone reading Techdirt could read the links, I was less and less inclined to ever write about Salon stories -- and eventually that resulted in me dropping Salon as a source I read as well.

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[rvr] writes "Last Monday, the Spanish Government published the latest draft for the Sustainable Economy Act, which would enable a Commission dependent of the Ministry of Culture to take down websites without a court order, in cases of Intellectual Property piracy. On Wednesday, using Google Wave, a group of journalists, bloggers, professionals and creators composed and issued a Manifesto in Defense of Fundamental Rights on the Internet, stating that 'Copyright should not be placed above citizens' fundamental rights to privacy, security, presumption of innocence, effective judicial protection and freedom of expression.' Quickly, more than 50,000 blogs and sites re-published the manifesto. On Thursday morning, the Ministry of Culture Ángeles González Sinde (former president of the Spanish Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) organized a meeting with a group of Internet experts and signers of the Manifesto. The meeting was narrated in real time via Twitter and concluded without any agreement. On Thursday afternoon, the Prime Minister's staff had a private meeting with the Ministry of Culture and some party members (who also expressed their opposition to the draft). Finally, Spain Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero announced in a press meeting that the text will be changed and a court order will continue to be a requirement, but [the government] still will search for ways to fight Internet piracy."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Satpack is an ATmega644p controlled satellite tracker with doppler tuning. To calculate the position of the satellite, they use qrpTracker, which is an Arduino friendly program based on James Miller's Pan-13. Next, the Arduino tunes the radio to listen to the transmitted Morse code. Amazing! It's open source, so check out the link for a lot more information on building your own Satpack.

Here's a video of the Satpack code tracking a few satellites. Note that the tone of the cubesat drifts a bit. The keps were a bit old, but in a addition, I just got a letter from James Miller, the author of Plan 13 who recommends some constants that are more in keeping with the earth model used in today's GPS engines.

In the Maker Shed: Give the gift of Arduino this holiday season! Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arduino | Digg this!

ethorad writes "In the UK, in an attempt to promote the work the police do, some forces name and shame criminals that they catch and prosecute. All good so far as it helps the community see that crimes are being tackled (assuming they are ...)

However the Ministry of Justice has now said that police forces who do that must remove the details from their website after one month. Yeah, good luck with that. Place your bets now on how many third party websites (especially local community ones) will start scraping the details from police websites for long term storage?"

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A recent post at the Press Start To Drink blog examined the relationship the games industry has with copyright laws. More so than in some other creative industries, the reactions of game companies to derivative works are widely varied and often unpredictable, ranging anywhere from active support to situations like the Chrono Trigger: Crimson Echoes debacle. Quoting: "... even within the gaming industry, there is a tension between IP holders and fan producers/poachers. Some companies, such as Epic and Square Enix, remain incredibly protective of their Intellectual Property, threatening those that use their creations, even for non-profit, cultural reasons, with legal suits. Other companies, like Valve, seem to, if not embrace, at least tolerate, and perhaps even tacitly encourage this kind of fan engagement with their work. Lessig suggests, 'The opportunity to create and transform becomes weakened in a world in which creation requires permission and creativity must check with a lawyer.' Indeed, the more developers and publishers that take up Valve's position, the more creativity and innovation will emerge out of video game fan communities, already known for their intense fandom and desire to add to, alter, and re-imagine their favorite gaming universes."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sigma has added its Optical Stabilization system to its popular 17-70mm fast standard zoom lens. The 17-70mm F2.8-4 DC Macro OS HSM will be available in Canon, Nikon, Sony, Pentax and Sigma mounts. The latest version offers a slightly wider aperture at the long end of the zoom though gains weight and length and has a slightly reduced maximum magnification ratio. Adding image stabilization to a lens that already combines a comparatively fast maximum aperture range is likely to make it an even more tempting replacement for the kit lenses supplied with most DSLRs.

There's something simple and beautiful about the construction of this paper city from Australian design firm Qube Konstrukt. The paper city was built entirely from folded paper to fit within a 2.5 meter square. It looks a modernized version of a model train city.

You can see the paper city come to life in this clever 30-second animated TV spot, which advertises what you can do once you have your own piece of paper -- that is, your diploma.

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Box Brown sez, "New blog asks people to submit photos of themselves smiling like they're dead inside. It's fascinating and funny."

And creepy.

Smile Like You're Dead Inside (Thanks, Box!)

There's been some buzz about a recent research report claiming that streaming services are popular. There have been a few such reports, and there's not much surprising in them. They basically point out that if people can stream certain content, that's often easier than firing up a non-user-friendly file sharing service to get the same content. But, does that necessarily lead to the conclusion pushed by many in the industry and the press that "streaming kills piracy"? Not at all. As the folks at Freakbits note, this particular study didn't even bother to separate out authorized streaming services and unauthorized streaming services -- and includes YouTube in the calculations, which (as Hollywood keeps trying to let us know) often has a fair amount of unauthorized content. So, perhaps, people are suggesting that if the content is just "streamed" it doesn't count as "piracy." And, as someone who doesn't like the term "piracy" in the first place, perhaps that makes sense. But it does not appear that this is what's being argued. Instead, people are just assuming that all streaming is authorized, when that's hardly the case.

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Mara sez, "My friend recently made these chainmail tetris blocks." Nice work, friend! On sale on Etsy for a steep US$250, but that's a hell of a labor-intensive way of making a tetroid!

Chainmail Tetris Blocks (Thanks, Mara!)

Ardisson writes "Swiss iPhone developer Nicolas Seriot presented last night a talk on iPhone Privacy in Geneva. He showed how a malicious application could harvest personal data on a non-jailbroken iPhone (PDF) and without using private APIs. It turns out that the email accounts, the keyboard cache content and the WiFi connection logs are fully accessible. The talk puts up several recommendations. There is also a demo project on github."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A 45-year-old Atlanta man put on an elf costume, headed to a shopping mall, got in line to have his picture taken with Santa, then told Santa he was packin' dynamite. Police arrested the elf, and charged him with possessing hoax devices (memories of Boston!) and making terror threats. The mugshot's priceless. So is this local news headline.

Last month we discussed news that Microsoft had banned hundreds of thousands of Xbox users for using modified consoles. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has now pointed to this round of bans as a prime example of the power given to providers of online services through 'Terms of Service' and other usage agreements. "No matter how much we rely on them to get on with our everyday lives, access to online services — like email, social networking sites, and (wait for it) online gaming — can never be guaranteed. ... he who writes the TOS makes the rules, and when it comes to enforcing them, the service provider often behaves as though it is also the judge, jury and executioner. ... While the mass ban provides a useful illustration of their danger, these terms can be found in nearly all TOS agreements for all kinds of services. There have been virtually no legal challenges to these kinds of arbitrary termination clauses, but we imagine this will be a growth area for lawyers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Keith Lo Bue is a found-objects artist living in Sydney, Australia. Among other things, he makes these really cool art specs out of everything from hot dog tongs to rulers and cuff links to old drafting tools and nautical instruments.

You can follow his projects as they come together on his blog. [via Boing Boing]

Keith Lo Bue's Homepage

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Henry Rollins, who you may know best as either the Black Flag frontman, a television host, a radio DJ, or a spoken word performer, has an item at Vanity Fair about traveling to Bhopal:

I came to Bhopal to see what the 25th anniversary of the disaster would be like. I hired out a taxi for the day and went to the place where the speeches were going to be given and the yearly march to the U.C.I.L. plant would start. I stared at photos of dead bodies, children holding human skulls, dead cattle being put in trucks by winches. I sat in the sun under a beautiful blue sky and listened to more than three hours of men and women speaking and shouting in very impassioned Hindi while traffic roared by. The marchers were not many in number; the entire procession would take about a minute to pass you. It seemed that the majority of Bhopal had moved on.

As I watched the marchers start on their multi-kilometer walk, I saw the effigy of Warren Anderson roll unsteadily towards the plant, where it would be burned, I felt sad that for all practical purposes, U.C.I.L. and U.C.C. had perpetrated perhaps the most lethal industrial disaster in history and nothing had really been done about it.

Twenty-five Years After the Disaster, Bhopal Is Still Ill

Some Senators have introduced a bill that would limit early termination fees from mobile operators, saying they couldn't charge more than the subsidy they provided for the phone itself, and that the rules for any early termination fee needed to be quite clear. Not surprisingly, the mobile operators and their lobbyists are saying this is "unnecessary" because (due mainly to gov't pressure, not competition, as they claim) the operators have already made the ETF process less ridiculous by going with pro-rated fees based on how long is left on a contract. Of course, if it's true that the law is unnecessary, then it's not clear why they're against it...

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Looking for some great science books? Have a listen to this podcast... Great Science Reads @ The New York Academy of Sciences... Dean Kamen's pick Calculus for Cats is wonderful...

Seven scientists and science-lovers—Dean Kamen, Helen Fisher, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and more—recommend their favorite science books, fiction and non, for you to wrap up and gift for the holidays (or maybe just read yourself).

They also have some science related gifts in another show...

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Hatta writes with a snippet from from MaxConsole: "Nintendo has today lost a major court case against the Divineo group in the main court of Paris. Nintendo originally took the group to court over DS flash carts, however the judge today has ruled against Nintendo and suggested that they are purposely locking out developers from their consoles and things should be more like Windows where ANYONE can develop any application if they wish to."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Luca Leonardi alerts us to the news that at least some politicians in the UK are pushing back against Peter Mandelson's Digital Economy Bill, with Lord Lucas specifically pointing out that the real problem seemed to be one of the entertainment industry's own making:

"We need to bear in mind that the problems now facing the industry are, to quite a large extent, of their own creation," he said. "The industry has been extremely slow to listen to the demands of its customers, and has had something of an abusive relationship with them, seeking to punish them before thinking of how to serve them better.

"It has taken a decade for the industry to produce sensible alternatives to illegal file-sharing, and the fact that a generation of people have become used to an illegality comes down to the industry's sluggishness. It is still slow."

Lucas, who considers himself a libertarian, also questioned the use of IP addresses as identifying who was doing something online:

"I am not at all clear that we have the technology to go beyond the IP address, which comes into my router, to identify which user of perhaps one or two dozen who have access, has done the illegal downloading," he told the peers.

"We need to be very clear that we do not tip people into losing their internet connection, or worse, on a technically fallible basis."

Nice to see at least someone pushing back on the reasoning behind the bill.

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Months ago, MAKE engineering intern Kris Magri designed and built Makey the Robot, one of our major projects that appeared in MAKE Volume 19. I remember the love and passion with which she crafted the little guy, getting him ready to present to the MAKE community. You never know what impact the things you create may have or how far the effects will ripple. Needless to say, she was thrilled when she was contacted by MAKE reader Joe Mayer, explaining how he was leading a group of 4 boys, ages 7 to 10, with the assistance of their parents, in building Makeys of their own. First let's introduce these fine young makers.

Pictured above is Tommy Acuna, age 7, who has an impressive time machine he built in his backyard. Below are brothers Joey Prather, age 10, and Nicko Prather, age 7. Joey is teaching himself Flash programing, and Nicko is an accomplished builder of original Lego creations. And pictured below them is Luke Hoffman, age 7, who has wanted to build his own robot for years.

I asked Joe Mayer to offer some background on how the group came to be and this is what he said:

"I had been searching for a way to have the kids at our local elementary school get involved in robotics, inventing, or just making something with their own two hands. Many times when this was discussed with other parents, Jr. FIRST Lego League, and FIRST Lego League robots were brought up. The Lego idea did not progress forward, as I could see a way that the opportunity to participate would be equal to all. The Lego league age groupings would split up my kids, and I could commit to only one more endeavor. That coupled with the fact that for all the time and expense involved, only one robot is built.

"I have long had a interest in learning some electronics. I have a career as a scientific instrument designer/builder, and have long seen that joining mechanical and electronic design has many advantages. I just needed a way to push myself into it. Makey has been that way! Makey is a difficult first robot project, but the learning of basic electronics, then applying that new knowledge to Makey makes it seem almost magical. The other parents have certainly pushed themselves out of their comfort zones as well. Learning to solder at a time in life when the old eyes are not quite what they used to be, can be humbling. It is great for kids to see their parents strive toward a goal.

"Then, the same day after having once again told a parent of my concerns, I was at the local bookstore and chanced upon MAKE magazine Volume 19 with Makey right there on the cover. Yes, there was an answer: we would gather some like kids and their parents and build copies of Makey. If this was successful, we would try to get Makey into a school setting.

"1) First, I made an estimate of the cost of building Makey.
2) Next, I made a mental list of which kids had been asking me to build a robot for them; Tommy and Luke came to mind.
3) Showed the Makey article to some parents.
4) Talked with John Banks, a friend and neighbor about helping with the programing part of the build (having support in various disciplines is very helpful).
5) Sent the letter below to possible participants:"

Hi [Parents' Names]

I have been gathering information in order to form a group composed of kids and parents to build small autonomous robots. [Child's Name], of course, came to mind. Learning while enjoying the company of fellow builders would be the measure of our success.

This is my thinking so far:

1. Each kid would end up with their own robot.
2. Kids would help the 3 to 4 other kids in building their robot as well.
3. Parent(s) would need to be present to help/guide the construction.
4. Support on many levels is likely to be key, as the construction is estimated at 2-3 weekends for an adult.
5. Kids will need fuel for building, so perhaps a potluck of simple (easy) food.
6. Cost of parts is estimated at $150 per robot. I would like to order them soon.
7. Location of "building" could vary between houses depending on what items are being built/assembled.
8. Sundays, for a few hours, has been put forth as the possible time.

Please let me know if this seems like something [Child's Name] could be part of. Questions, feel free to ask away.

Thanks,
Joe Mayer

"6) Ordered parts for 6 robots.
7) Parts in. Made CAD drawings by scaling the actual parts and pulling measurements off Kris' drawings.
8) Made 6 copies of sheet metal "base." John Banks starts playing with Arduino boards.
9) Final membership of group is set.
10) First meeting. We talked to kids about what looked to be involved, what Makey would be able to do as built and initially programed. Talked with them about what might be possible with other sensors and programming. We then asked what they would like Makey to be able to do. Nicko said he wanted his robot to be able to play "tag" with the other robots (we are still looking into just how to do that).

"I chose Nicko's robot to be the lead build, so it would act as a sample for the others to copy. Nicko and I would try to work about a week ahead of the other builders. John Banks did this as well with the programing side of things. Many ideas as to what we could do next seem to constantly emerge. Presently we are close to a test of a combined
color-sensing and line-following addition to add to Makey."

As for the progress so far, Mayer reports:

"One robot, Nicko's, is complete. The others are in various stages. Tommy's and Luke's are very close to a successful run under battery power. Joey has been a great helper to all, and he has been quite interested in the programing side of things. His robot shows the least progress, but he has learned a lot. He is becoming proficient at soldering. His robot will be running soon."

Needless to say, this story is truly inspirational. There is much value in seeing how this group came together and what they've accomplished so far. I suspect all 4 of the boys will always remember making Makey, and the knowledge they've gained will stay with them for years to come. Good work, makers!

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After you come down from the Obama LSD that David was peddling yesterday, you can take some Obama ecstasy tablets.

UPDATE: It appears that these tablets are phony adulterated piperazine, not ecstasy. The Erowid Experience Vault reports suggest piperazine is a bummer. It's like the President Obama story in pill form! (Thanks, Xeni!)

Obama E!

It's the holiday season, and if you're stuck in an airport, this is a great opportunity to have some ham radio fun! You can listen to air traffic of flights as they take off and land. I find this amusing because it's like listening to a live airport reality TV show that you're a part of. You learn a lot about how the coordination of flights. Plus, there's the occasional drama when a pilot makes a wrong turn and causes other planes to have to be rerouted.

As you listen, you can actually hear the different air traffic communications of flights as they proceed through preparations to take off and land (clearance, ground, tower, and so on). Each step has a different frequency, after a flight finishes checking in at one level, the pilots tune the radio to the next frequency. After reading this tutorial, you'll be able to listen in and tune your radio to follow a flight as it passes through the different stages of landing or depart. Below is a description of the different levels, along with sample audio clips. A lot of communication is in special codes. You'll hear a lot of "alpha alpha one" or "delta five seventy-three." I'll explain what these mean as well. All you need is a scanner or handheld ham radio to listen. You can use these in the airport, and even on the plane, when use of electronics are approved.

Understanding Air Traffic Codes
Airline Name + Number: When you hear "Delta five seventy-three," or "Comair fifteen sixty-one," these are the names of different flights.
Letters: When you hear "alpha bravo kilo charlie echo lima," these are letters "A B K C E L." Sometimes, it's difficult to understand letters on the radio, so this spelling alphabet is used.

Frequencies and Procedure
You can find the frequencies for different airports and air traffic on this website. Following are the communication procedures for a departing and an arriving flight. After the pilot communicates with each, he tunes the radio to the frequency of the next.

Clearance/Delivery
Gives general directions for take off, including which runway to use, direction, and altitude, and transponder frequency ("squawk"). The transponder frequency helps radars to identify planes.

http://cdn.makezine.com/make/audio/ham/a.mp3

<!---->

Here is what you will hear in the first communication on the audio clip:
1. CLEARANCE: asks FLIGHT LAN Chili 533 if they are ready to receive the flight route.
2. FLIGHT LAN CHILI 533: says they are ready.
3. CLEARANCE: tells FLIGHT LAN Chili 533 their flight route then tells them the transponder frequency is 1642 by saying "squawk 1642".
4. FLIGHT LAN CHILI 533: confirms the flight route by repeating it back to CLEARANCE

Ground
Tells flights where to taxi and which runway to use. While a plane is on the ground, you have probably looked out the window and seen signs with letters (such as "KK"). When ground tells planes where to taxi, they use these letters to explain the route like street names. Numbers are used name runway.

http://cdn.makezine.com/make/audio/ham/b.mp3

<!---->

Here is what you will hear in the first communication on the audio clip:
GROUND: tells FLIGHT COMAIR 1496 to use runway 31. Taxi left at KK and left at B.
FLIGHT COMAIR 1496: confirms by repeating the directions

Tower
Controls the actual runway and gives clearance for take off. Once in the air, tower will say "radar contact" which means planes can be seen on the radar and should switch their frequency to Departure.

Departure
Gives planes initial directions in the air.

http://cdn.makezine.com/make/audio/ham/e.mp3

<!---->

Approach
Makes sure planes are lined up to land.

http://cdn.makezine.com/make/audio/ham/d.mp3

<!---->

Tower
Gives final clearance to land.

http://cdn.makezine.com/make/audio/ham/c.mp3

<!---->

Ground
Tells planes how to navigate to the gate by assigning a gate and a taxi route.

Licensed hams are also allowed to operate while aboard the plane with the pilot's permission. It would be difficult to set up an HF rig on an airplane, but a handheld radio works great, though it's a challenge to have a conversation with local repeaters because you are flying over them so quickly. Grab a copy of the Repeater Directory to tune your radio to the local repeaters as you fly over them. However, this is a fun way to pick up the local flavor of each city as you pass over.

For more information visit below:
http://scottsasha.com/aviation/plans/commshandout.html
http://scottsasha.com/aviation/airspace/operations.html
http://www.seattleflight.com/flyingvfrintoseatac.asp
http://www.westwingsinc.com/vfr.htm
http://www.ahart.com/newWeb/groundSchools/radio%20communications%20seminar.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_traffic_control
http://radio-scanner-guide.com/RadioScannerGuidePart3C-CivilAircraft.htm
http://www.qsl.net/n4jri/air_gen.htm
http://www.liveatc.net/search/?icao=kjfk
http://www.flightradio.com/frequencies/
http://www.airnav.com/airport/KJFK
http://www.atc-jfk.net/
http://www.radioreference.com/apps/db/?aid=1171
http://nycaviation.com/spotting-guides/jfk/jfk-radio-frequencies/

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Galen Raben of letsmakerobots decided to have some fun with a SpeakJet speech synthesizer and TTS256 text-to-speech processor, and designed this SpeakJet shield so that he could make his Arduino talk. The project schematic and code are available on the project page. Looks like a kit in the making!

The advantage of a hardware-based solution like this one is that it requires little CPU time to run, however it is also possible to directly synthesize speech on the Arduino. One promising candidate for this is the Cantarino project.

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Illustrator Michæl Paukner, whose poster art I've blogged a few times now, has started a terrific series of images paying tribute to the über-kitschy German science fiction television show Space Patrol (Raumpatrouille). Shown here, the Orion 7 craft. If you're unfamiliar with the show, this fan-site is a great place to start. Video clips and links to past appreciations of the TV series on Boing Boing after the jump.

Below, the opening sequence of an episode:

And here, a remix of the theme song with clips from various episodes:

Below, a misbehaving robot:

Below, some crazy dance moves:

Earlier this year, The Daily Sho did a segment about the New York Times, where correspondent Jason Jones had the classic line where he referred to the paper newspaper as providing "aged news". Danny Sullivan has posted an interesting rethink on that, noting that rather than "aged news," what if we just think of newspapers as "stored news," or more specifically "a TiVo for news" or an "iPod for news." It's based on a recent talk given by Kevin Marks, where he notes that despite all the hype about "real time" info, people will pay plenty to store and delay information, such as with a TiVo or iPod.

It's an interesting idea, but if that's the case, I'm not sure the newspaper is really the best or most efficient means of "storing" news. Part of the reason why the TiVo (or other DVRs) and the iPod have been so successful is not just because they allow for the storage of content, but because they allow for the customization of what content, and give significantly more control over how it's consumed. Newspapers aren't quite like that. They tend to be more "here's what we've decided you want," rather than a delivery of what you've asked for or chosen to store. I would think that something like an RSS aggregator would be a lot more like "TiVo'd news" than any newspaper.

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In Iran, a 26-year-old doctor who exposed the torture of jailed protesters died after eating a salad laced with an overdose of blood pressure medication. Political opposition members believe he was killed because of what he knew.