ObsessiveMathsFreak writes "Google has expanded its remit once again with the quiet launch of Google Dictionary. Google word search definitions now redirect to Google Dictionary instead of to Google's long term thesaurus goto site, Answers.com, which is expected to take a serious hit in traffic as a result. Dictionary pages are noticeably more plain and faster loading than their Answers.com equivalents, and unusually feature web citations for the definitions of each word. This means that, unlike most dictionaries, Google considers ginormous a word."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Got an old digital photo frame that you don't use any more? I did too, so instead of throwing it away, I decided to turn it into a written word clock. The basic idea is to use a computer program to generate a picture for each minute in a 12 hour clock cycle (720 in total), and then set the photo frame to advance pictures every minute. My cheapo frame didn't have an option to set the delay time between photos, so I added a little microcontroller circuit to press the 'forward' button every minute.

I chose to spell out the time in words, however this design would also be great for making a clock that integrates your favorite photos, shows really slow animations, or changes color during the day. It could also make a nice gift for that special someone! Schematic, source code, and directions are all available on the project page.

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

AMESN writes "Ways to bend light around objects and render them invisible are becoming a major field of scientific study and gaining ground. While no actual invisibility cloak exists yet, researchers are also theorizing on how to beat the perfect cloak."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Recently, Kent noticed that Etsy member AbrahamBook has been bitten by the Chumby Guts bug. He's converted several ancient objects into modern wifi-enabled chumtainment devices. I asked Abraham about what he was aiming for in this latest piece:

My Chumby creation started with an original Chumby although I have produced three similar devices from the Chumby Guts kit. I much prefer producing my devices with the Chumby Guts kit as it is always a messier build when having to undo a stock Chumby configuration. On the occasion that I set out to create the "Chumbaphone" I had used all of my "Guts" kits and Maker Shed had since run dry.

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

An anonymous reader writes "Tehran's leadership faces its biggest crisis since it first came to power in 1979, as Iranians at home and abroad attack its legitimacy in the wake of June's allegedly rigged presidential vote. An opposition effort, the 'Green Movement,' is gaining a global following of regular Iranians who say they never previously considered themselves activists. The regime has been cracking down hard at home. And now, a Wall Street Journal investigation shows, it is extending that crackdown to Iranians abroad as well. Part of the effort involves tracking the Facebook, Twitter and YouTube activity of Iranians around the world, and identifying them at opposition protests abroad. People who criticize Iran's regime online or in public demonstrations are facing threats intended to silence them."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lexta writes with an interesting tidbit from IEEE Spectrum: "'Karsten Nohl, chief research scientist with H4RDW4RE, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based security research firm, is mounting what could be the most ambitious attempt yet to compromise the GSM phone system.' The intended approach is to create an open source project to spread the computation of a giant look-up table across more than 80 machines. Interestingly, they've openly stated that nVidia's CUDA technology will be used to execute parallel elements of the problem on GPUs as well."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

gyrogeerloose writes "During its last mission, astronauts from the Space Shuttle Atlantis installed an Automatic Identification System antenna on the outside of the International Space Station that will allow astronauts aboard the ISS to monitor signals from the AIS transmitters mandated to be installed on most large ocean-going craft. Although these VHF signals can be monitored from the Earth's surface, their horizontal range is generally limited to about 75 km (46 mi), leaving large areas of the ocean unwatched. However, the signals easily reach the 400 km (250 mi) orbit of the ISS. The European Space Agency sees this experiment as a test platform for a future AIS-monitoring fleet of satellites that will eventually provide worldwide coverage of sea traffic."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Just look at it.

Banana Slicer

Joe Quimby writes "Microsoft and Yahoo have finalized and executed their Web-search agreement after five months of deliberation, the companies announced Friday. Microsoft and Yahoo reached a revenue-sharing agreement in July to combine their search businesses. Under the 10-year agreement, Yahoo's Web search would be powered by Bing and Yahoo would retain most ad revenue from its site."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Just look at it.

Banana Saver Clip by Evriholder Products (Thanks, notthemessiah!)

DesScorp writes "Aviation Week reports that the USAF has confirmed the existence of a new, formerly secret stealth aircraft, designated RQ-170 Sentinel, developed at Lockheed's legendary Skunk Works. Rumors of a secret new jet have been flying since 2007, with longtime aviation journalist Bill Sweetman dubbing the possible aircraft 'The Beast of Kandahar' because of the urban legend-like reports from Afghanistan. The aircraft is a UAV, a pilot-less drone that appears to have some kind of reconnaissance-only mission for the time being. It's a tailless flying wing that resembles a fighter-sized B-2 bomber."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

David sez, "Almost two years ago, I came up with a concept for a 'Bulbdial' clock. Instead of physical hands, it has three shadows cast by a series of rotating lights indicating hours, seconds, and minutes. Nine months ago, Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories developed a working model using three rings of LEDs. Now Bulbdial Clocks are available as a kit from EMSL. They did the hard work on this, coming up with a cool Mantel Clock implementation in various styles. You can get one at their site here."

A Bulbdial Clock (Thanks, David)

Noah sez, "When I wake up in the morning I make a pot of coffee then read all of my favorite webcomics before I go to work. I'll open my entire bookmark group into their own windows and just roll through them. This one was a pleasant surprise. If I hadn't been paying close enough attention I would have thought I'd actually read an XKCD."

xkcd++ String Theory (Thanks, Noah!)

An anonymous reader writes "Two years ago, Matthew White searched Limewire for porn. He was looking for 'College Girls Gone Wild,' but ended up downloading some images of child pornography. This was accidental, according to White, and he quickly deleted the images. A year later, the FBI showed up on his family's doorstep and asked to search the computer. After thorough sleuthing, the FBI found some images 'deep within the hard drive.' According to White, the investigators agreed that he himself could not have accessed the files anymore. Matthew now faces 20 years in jail for possession of child pornography. On advice from his lawyer, he intends to plead guilty so that he will 'hopefully' end up with 3.5 years in jail, 10 years probation and a registration as a sex offender. 'The FBI could not comment on this specific case, but said if child pornography is ever downloaded accidentally, the user needs to call authorities immediately. They may confiscate your computer, but it's better than the alternative.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here are some great hobby radio gift ideas, ranging from radios themselves, to books, to the perfect radio-related vacation, everything you need to transmit a bit of holiday cheer. di-di-di-dit dah-dah-dah di-di-di-dit dah-dah-dah di-di-di-dit dah-dah-dah.

Radios

When looking for radios, I really like Universal Radio. They have comprehensive descriptions of all of the radios they carry and model comparisons of different brands. The site is easy to understand, especially for someone without an electrical engineering degree (such as myself).

Elecraft KX1 ($299.95, Elecraft)
For those who like the challenge of QRP (operating with low power), this is a great kit for a super deluxe, high performance CW (continuous wave) transceiver. Very low power radios transmit Morse code, which uses less power than voice. Small Wonder Labs has a more affordable kit for $55.

---

Yaesu VX-3R ($154.95, Universal Radio)
This is a really great handheld radio for someone getting started who doesn't have an operating license. The VX-3R is the smallest HT (handheld transceiver) and is super portable. It's great for listening to local repeaters, nets (meetings on local repeaters), police and fire departments, air traffic control, weather, etc. It has good receive-coverage, but doesn't transmit very far since it's such a small, low-power radio. For more power, check out the Icom IC-91A ($274.95) which works well for both receiving and transmitting. These handhelds operate on VHF/UHF frequencies and can receive broadcast shortwave stations.

---

Yaesu FT-817ND ($599.95, Universal Radio)
This low power (5W) radio is great for portable operation. Like the handhelds, it transmits on VHF and UHF, but also on HF (high-frequency), which can travel hundreds, even thousands of miles (as opposed to VHF/UHF which only communicates locally). However, since this radio is low power, the coverage is not as good as the larger portable and desktop radios. A comparable radio is the ICOM IC-703 ($729.95).

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

American student Amanda Knox was found guilty of murder in Italy today, despite prosecutorial shenanigans and the lack of forensic evidence in a case where one would expect it to be abundant. If you're surprised, you may labor under a misapprehension or two about how things work in the land of my fathers.

Despite its wealth and nominal status, Italy's counterparts in Europe look at it with derision and dismay for the circuses of which the Knox case is but one more. Public life in Italy often evinces these pious but oddly inscrutable outcomes, produced with alarming regularity by legal and political institutions that are like cargo-cult copies of those possessed by other nations.

This institution, however, may be easier to understand than most. The jurors wore Italian flags while the judge read their verdict.

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from TGDaily: "Researchers from Harvard and MIT have demonstrated a way to build better artificial visual systems with the help of low-cost, high-performance gaming hardware. [A video describing their research is available.] 'Reverse engineering a biological visual system — a system with hundreds of millions of processing units — and building an artificial system that works the same way is a daunting task,' says David Cox, Principal Investigator of the Visual Neuroscience Group at the Rowland Institute at Harvard. 'It is not enough to simply assemble together a huge amount of computing power. We have to figure out how to put all the parts together so that they can do what our brains can do.' The team drew inspiration from screening techniques in molecular biology, where a multitude of candidate organisms or compounds are screened in parallel to find those that have a particular property of interest. Rather than building a single model and seeing how well it could recognize visual objects, the team constructed thousands of candidate models, and screened for those that performed best on an object recognition task. The resulting models outperformed a crop of state-of-the-art computer vision systems across a range of test sets, more accurately identifying a range of objects on random natural backgrounds with variation in position, scale, and rotation. Using ordinary CPUs, the effort would have required either years or millions of dollars of computing hardware. Instead, by harnessing modern graphics hardware, the analysis was done in just one week, and at a small fraction of the cost."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

eldavojohn writes with an update to the CRU email leak story we've been following for the past two weeks. The peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature has published an article saying the emails do not demonstrate any sort of "scientific conspiracy," and that the journal doesn't intend to investigate earlier papers from CRU researchers without "substantive reasons for concern." The article notes, "Whatever the e-mail authors may have said to one another in (supposed) privacy, however, what matters is how they acted. And the fact is that, in the end, neither they nor the IPCC suppressed anything: when the assessment report was published in 2007 it referenced and discussed both papers." Reader lacaprup points out related news that a global warming skeptic plans to sue NASA under the Freedom of Information Act for failing to deliver climate data and correspondence of their own, which he thinks will be "highly damaging." Meanwhile, a United Nations panel will be conducting its own investigation of the CRU emails.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Guestblogger Paul Spinrad is a freelance writer/editor, 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.

It's fantastic that so much written knowledge is becoming generally accessible and cross-linked these days, but this is just an intermediate stage-- a universal library on the way to becoming a universal brain. The missing piece is encoding the underlying meaning of the stored text, the deep-structure logic behind it. It's one of the oldest challenges in Computer Science, and there has been lots of progress and companies dedicated to doing this. Powerset, for example, has software that has parsed and can answer questions from all of Wikipedia.

The thing is, you really still need a person to get it most reliably right, because people understand the way the world works. Luckily, we already have people whose job is very close to doing this already-- they're called fact-checkers or researchers, and they work for every reputable publication.

I don't think the fact-checking process is very well understood by the public-- it's hidden from view and uncredited (which is lame), and I didn't understand it myself until I began working with magazines. Basically, someone combs through a piece of text and makes sure every fact is verified. They look things up in established references, they call people on the phone, they call their friends who have experience in some area, or whatever else it takes. If they're doing it on paper, they start with a printout of the article, and then when they're done every word, every clause, and every spelling of every proper name, has a pencil mark through it.

I have wondered for years, as magazines, newspapers, and other news organizations have been hemorrhaging money and employees, why someone hasn't gone into the contract fact-checking business. Like, it could be an extension of Snopes.com. There's a huge redundancy in every publication having their own research desks, so they could lay off all of their fact-checkers and then outsource the job to the new, independent company that the best of them then all go to work for. Meanwhile, the company could also be hired by anyone else. Then, when the public sees the "Fact-Checked by MiniTrue (SM)" seal on someone's independent blog, they know the information there has the same credibility as the big boys.

Now, what if these fact-checkers didn't just vet and correct the text? While they dig into the logic and accuracy of everything, as usual, they could also use some simple application to diagram the sentences and disambiguate the semantics into a machine-friendly representation. Just a little extra clicking, and they could bind all the pronouns to their antecedents, and select from a dropdown box to specify whether an instance of the string "Prince" refers to the musician Prince or to Erik Prince-- the president of XE, the company formerly known as Blackwater-- within an article that for whatever reason mentions both of them.

Then you would really have something. The text wouldn't just be fact-checked; its underlying meaning could be added into a shared pool of human knowledge, chained through, verified or denied, and used in other ways by any technology that may now exist or may exist in the future.

Many of big ideas that computer visionary Douglas Engelbart came up with in the 1960's have come true, but a couple of them haven't yet. One of these is his notion of the "Certified Public Logician." Engelbart predicted that a new class of knowledge worker would act as front-ends to the machine-enabled collective intelligence. Part logician, part notary, these "Certified Public Logicians" would review texts for logical consistency and then tag them up with appropriate envelope information and enter them into the machine. It's a great idea, and I think we could promote all of our fact-checkers into Certified Public Logicians pretty easily.

olsmeister writes "As previously noted here on Slashdot, Verizon Wireless has been increasing their early termination fees and actively charging non-data customers who accidentally press the wrong button and go online. The FCC has now sent them a letter asking why. The PDF of the letter can be viewed online. Maybe someone at the FCC does read Slashdot."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jeff of mightyOhm uses OS X's built-in RSS screensaver to keep up with the Printed Circuit Boards Group he admins on Flickr. Of course the feature will work with any Flickr feed (including our own). Commenters on Jeff's post point out that Picasa can be used for similar results on Windows machines. Nice - this gives me reason to once again run a screensaver.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!

astroengine writes "Science fiction is stuffed full of examples of pill-popping space explorers and aliens enjoying psychedelic highs. After all, space is big; it can get boring/scary/crazy up there. It's little wonder, then, that our current space explorers consume a cocktail of uppers, downers, tranquilizers and alcohol to get the job done. Robert Lamb on tranquilizers in the space station: 'Sure, it hardly makes for a civilized evening aboard ISS, but it beats someone blowing the hatch because they think they saw something crawling on one of the solar panels.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Australia refused to give Rebellion's new Aliens Vs. Predator game a rating, effectively banning it in the country. Rebellion says it won't be submitting an edited version for another round of classifications, however. (As Valve did with Left 4 Dead 2.) They said, 'We will not be releasing a sanitized or cut down version for territories where adults are not considered by their governments to be able to make their own entertainment choices.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GeekDad Day at the Wired Holiday Store This Saturday (today)... MAKE has some items at the store too! Ken writes-

If you haven't heard the word via Twitter or elsewhere, here's the official plug: GeekDad has been invited to curate three "GeekDad Days" at the Wired Holiday Store in New York this year, and the first one is this coming Saturday from 1:00pm to 2:30pm local time. We'll be playing with LEGO Mindstorms NXT kits, doing build challenges with LEGO bricks, and even giving away some toys. And it'll all be led by yours truly! If you can make it and bring your kids, please leave a message in the comments so I'll know to say hello, thanks!

Wired Store
415 West 13th Street
New York, NY 10014

Open noon to 9pm.

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

MaryBethP writes "Scientists in Italy announced Wednesday that Pierpaolo Petruzziello, a 26-year-old Italian who had lost his left forearm in a car accident, was successfully linked to an artificial limb that was controlled by electrodes implanted in his arm and connected to the median and ulnar nerves. He has learned to control the artificial limb with his mind. According to CNet, Petruzziello says he could feel sensations in it, as if the lost arm had grown back again. The BBC has a brief video showing the arm in operation."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the unfortunately named "Hot Chicks With Stormtroopers" site, this femtrooper ballerina.

Femtrooper Friday 8/28/09 (via JWZ)

Alexander Malloy from Golden Robot Army sez, "Golden Robot Army is a rock and roll band in Seattle that gives away its music for free and writes songs about schadenfreude guilt and homeless drunks and zombies. The band will be touring and filming a short film in Japan in March of 2010 (Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya)."

Matija Strlic and colleagues write in the ACS's Analytical Chemistry about "material degradomics," a techniques by which the odors emanating from old books are noninvasively analyzed to figure out which books are rotting and need preservation:

Matija Strlic and colleagues note in the new study that the familiar musty smell of an old book, as readers leaf through the pages, is the result of hundreds of so-called volatile organic compounds (VOCs) released into the air from the paper. Those substances hold clues to the paper's condition, they say. Conventional methods for analyzing library and archival materials involve removing samples of the document and then testing them with traditional laboratory equipment. But this approach destroys part of the document.

The new technique, called "material degradomics," analyzes the gases emitted by old books and documents without altering the documents themselves.

'Smell of Old Books' Offers Clues to Help Preserve Them

(Image: Books of the Past, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Lin Pernille ? Photography's photostream)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Ed Bayley has written an excellent introductory white-paper on whether click-wrap, browse-wrap, and other online terms of service are enforceable:

In other words, it's not merely clicking the "I Agree" button that creates the legal contract. The issue turns on reasonable notice and opportunity to review--whether the placement of the terms and click-button afforded the user a reasonable opportunity to find and read the terms without much effort. In practice, the enforceability of each TOS implementation often falls on a sliding scale, depending on the degree of notice it provides the user. At one end, presentations that require the user, before clicking, to scroll to the bottom of a set of terms, or through an adjacent scroll box, guarantees the entirety of the TOS appears at least once, even if the user chooses to ignore it, and has been held to be enforceable. At the other end, by contrast, if a user must click on a hyperlink, or series of hyperlinks, to view the terms, the significance of clicking "I Agree" as showing assent diminishes, depending on the difficulty in actually finding the terms and whether a reasonable Internet User would have done so. Finally, in addition to the placement of terms, courts also consider the inclusion of conspicuous statements on websites that instruct users to read the TOS and inform them of the consequence of clicking "I Agree."...

Whereas courts have been willing to give clickwraps their blessing, attempts to legally bind users with browsewrap agreements have been more controversial. Unlike clickwrap agreements, browsewraps do not require a user to engage in any affirmative conduct, like clicking on a box, in order to show that they agree to a set of terms. Instead, websites with browsewrap agreements often purport to bind their users by passive conduct, unrelated to the TOS itself, like continuing to use the website or proceeding past its homepage.

The Clicks That Bind: Ways Users "Agree" to Online Terms of Service

A woman who tried out her new pocket camera by video-recording a few minutes of her sister's surprise birthday party at a showing of "New Moon" has been charged with a felony -- "camcordering" a movie.

Penalties for camcordering have been ratcheting higher and higher (and have been introduced in international treaty negotiations, as well as in bilateral trade agreements with the US, which demands that its trading partners imprison people operating video recorders in cinemas). But the actual incidence of camcordered pirate DVDs is declining relative to "screeners" and other leaks from the industry itself.

The movie industry has turned into an alcoholic dad who beats up his family at the slightest transgression while ignoring his own gross failures -- blaming everything on external forces and refusing to confront its own problems.

Meanwhile, 22-year-old Samantha Tumpach spent two nights in jail for recording her friends singing "Happy Birthday" at a movie theater, for capturing less than four minutes of a feature film. She is charged with a felony and if convicted, could lose the right to vote, to work with children, to hold office, and to partake in full civil life.

And the movie industry's pitch to us remains, "Please stop pirating our discs, because if you don't stop, we may be driven out of business and then society would suffer from our absence."

Charged With Felony After Taping 4 Minutes Of "New Moon" (Thanks, Blaire!)

(Image: Camcordering, a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike photo from kowitz's photostream )

Bildheinzer built this Video Circuit Bending Glitchbox, the "BGB-03" to control analog video with music -

Video Manipulation Unti reacting to incoming audio.The RGB colours are split and sent through 3 Effect ways which react to bass,mids or heights....you can choose by the patch cables which colours goes which way.. S-Video in/out RCA in/out

Once the Glitchbox is calibrated to each signal, the visual effects are quite strong and surprisingly pretty. And this one's not alone - Bildheinzer has produced quite a few glitch-strumentation consoles.

Related:


MAKE Interview: DIY video mixers and more with Karl Klomp

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!

KingofGnG writes "An impressive confirmation of the Dolphin Wii emulator's capabilities comes from a YouTube video, which shows off recently-added video clips of New Super Mario Bros. Wii in full HD. It demonstrates the growing compatibility of Dolphin with the latest games published for the Nintendo console."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's a fascinating heat map showing the number of geotagged Wikipedia articles by country. It's a map of the "known unknowns" -- areas where there are likely to be many articles still to write.

Mapping the Geographies of Wikipedia Content

CWmike writes "Microsoft has revamped the browser ballot screen demanded by European Union antitrust regulators and may get final approval as early as Dec. 15, a source familiar with the case has told Computerworld. As first reported by Bloomberg, Microsoft modified the ballot screen after rivals, including Opera Software and Mozilla, demanded changes. Last month, Opera, Mozilla and Google submitted change requests to the European Commission, asking that the order of the browsers be randomized and that the ballot be displayed in its own application, not in Internet Explorer. According to the source, who asked not to be identified because the terms of the settlement have not been officially approved, the top five browsers — IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Apple's Safari — will appear in random order each time the ballot is displayed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rumors of Apple buying cloud-based music service LaLa have circulated for some time. Tonight, news that the deal is all but done. NYT, Bloomberg. Make way for a downloadless iTunes?

Over at Steampunk Workshop, Jake pays a visit to the home of Bruce and Melanie Rosenbaum, in Sharon, Mass. Bruce and Melanie run ModVic, a Victorian home restoration company. They've also embraced the steampunk aesthetic and do steampunk mods, as they've done in their own amazing home, seen here.

A Visit to a Steampunked Home

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

Good thing Oprah quit that show, because 4Chan pwned it. I think this happened a couple years ago, but I'm just now seeing the video. Sorry, I'm lame and slow. "His group has over nine thousand penises, and they're all raping children." (thanks, Sean Bonner!)

Update: Among the many remixes this spawned, Pedobear techno.

Reminder - Darpa's Network Challenge is in 24 hours...

To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA has announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems.

The challenge is to be the first to submit the locations of 10 moored, 8-foot, red, weather balloons at 10 fixed locations in the continental United States. The balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roads.

Sorta reminds me of a web 2.0 -ish crowdsourced happy version of the "Total Information Awareness System" that DARPA canceled. It's smart, DARPA has made more leaps and progress with their projects by offering prizes and having the public compete (DARPA challenges with autonomous cars, etc). Happy balloon hunting.

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

I've discussed in the past why I'm not thrilled about the use of the word "piracy," even as it has become rather standard for describing unauthorized file sharing. It's inaccurate, and is used by the entertainment industry to paint a picture of pure evil, where a more nuanced and accurate view might help. At the same time, with the rise of "The Pirate Party" in various countries, a group of folks have tried to take the word back -- but I still wonder if the name limits the party's upside, even as it may have enabled some of the initial attention (and vote-getting ability).

That said, Nancy Baym points us to an interesting analysis of piracy in the context of "language of spectacle", by Gabriella Coleman, and how that can help drive political messages and involvement:

But what keeps me interested in the politics of piracy is how it can speak the language of spectacle, which can be a powerful tactic and technique for broadcasting a political message. Here I'm just paraphrasing and cribbing the work of Stephen Duncombe, who has argued, I think quite persuasively, that we cannot rely solely on reasoned debate for building political programs. Duncombe does not argue that we must toss out rationality and truth seeking (these are absolutely necessary) but notes how on their own or if not clothed in some other cloak, they may not be enough to convey and compel, especially in this day of total media saturation. Or to put a but more poetically by him "Reality needs fantasy to render it desirable, just as fantasy needs reality to make it believable."

Much (though not all) of contemporary digital piracy follows the logic of spectacle. It builds and conveys a fantastical drama of right and wrong, of new possibilities, of freedom from the noose of the law; it signals and speaks to the thrill and fun in twisting, even breaking, existing structures and constraints; and provides a window into another way of acting/behaving. In many cases what it provides is a commons (and I will be exploring it in depth in my class next semester on the commons) and many folks, I imagine, turn to piracy simply for the free stuff, and a number of them come out of the other side transformed into copy fighters willing to engage in a politics beyond sharing stuff and waving the pirate flag.

It's an interesting thought, and it gets me thinking. Folks like Bill Patry make compelling arguments that the use of moral panics and folk devils with words like "piracy" distort the debate in negative ways, but Coleman suggests that by embracing that term, people may be able to build a stronger case on this particular issue. Which seems more compelling? Or is it a combination of both?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

SETIGuy writes "SETI@home Project Scientist Eric Korpela has responded to many of the allegations made by Higley Unified School District administrator Denise Birdwell regarding the difficulties caused by the installation of SETI@home, which led to the recent firing of the school's technology supervisor. One of the project's founders, David Gedye, takes issue with Dr. Birdwell's claim that 'an educational institution ... cannot support the search for E.T.' Meanwhile, the fired supervisor denies misusing school computers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Shocklee points us to an awesome little app that lets you type in whatever lyrics (or, well, words) you want, hit play, and whatever you type will be sung for you, using clips from various famous songs. It's a really fun little app (though, I was amused that they have no clip for the word "lyrics" despite the service being all about lyrics) and can get pretty addictive. In fact, if you want to hear this entire post sung outloud via this system, just click here (please note, this will take a really long time to load, but it's totally worth it). However, like with many other cool music projects, I'm left wondering whether or not some would consider this to be copyright infringement. All of the clips are tiny -- one word, or in many cases, less than a full word, but they do seem to come from various popular and well-known songs. It's not hard to identify some of them. I have no idea if the company behind this service cleared all the licenses (it's possible), but if that's the case, you'd have to imagine that this service would get ridiculously expensive very quickly. If a simple lyric of, say, 8 words, involves a dozen clips, with royalties needing to be paid for each, such a service would quickly become impossible. Doesn't it say something when copyright law would effectively outlaw an awesome and fun app like this one?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

My favorite iPhone game (and my son’s) is new and improved and now free. Grab Ramp Champ if you haven’t already.

The Raphaël JavaScript library does some interesting vector drawing stuff. The chart demos are particularly cool.

A newly-produced Muppets version of Bohemian Rhapsody? Yes, it’s real (and quite awesome). (via)

There are many reasons to love Pictory, a new photo magazine from Laura Brunow Miner and Jeff Croft. Editorally-driven submissions from photographers and storytellers around the world, beautifully executed.

I also stumbled upon Instant Chewbacca, which will likely come in handy at some point. (via)

Just about a year ago, ABC TV exec Anne Sweeney was telling people at CES that they were in the providing good content business, and she wanted to see it delivered however people wanted to watch it, on whatever device they wanted. But, it's a little more difficult to apply that message to her own family, apparently. In the opening to an article about the whole "web vs. TV" debate (as if there really is one) in light of the Comcast/NBC deal, the piece opens with a story about Sweeney forcing her daughter to bring a television to college, despite the younger Sweeney's protests that she had no need for a TV:

"Mom, you don't understand. I don't need it," her 19-year-old responded, saying she could watch whatever she wanted on her computer, at no charge....

"You're going to have a television if I have to nail it to your wall," she told her daughter, according to comments she made at a Reuters event this week. "You have to have one."

Perhaps it's time to recognize that more and more people don't need a TV?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Already have every kind of clock imaginable? How about a human powered one? Well, then you might want to check out the REAL TIME project by designer Maarten Baas. Rather than using a motor to turn some dials, or a computer to blink LEDs on and off, his creations have a human inside of them who redraws the clock every minute or so. My only question is, how do the humans know what time it is? [via MoCo Loco]

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

Guestblogger Paul Spinrad is a freelance writer/editor, 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.

I love Tom Geisler's art illustrations, which combine the life-improving spirit of chindogu with the obsessive precision of antique technical drawings (he's also a technical illustrator). Tom is working on a book, "Reduce. Reuse. Reinvent: Free Patents That Will Save Our Galaxy," and here's some material from it, including an hilarious series of pages that illustrate the inventor's personal history.

Reduce. Reuse. Reinvent.

From the slippery slope department: A Brazilian senator has drafted a bill to criminalize the "import or distribution of offensive video games." The senator says he wants to "curb the manufacture, distribution, importation, trading, custody, and storage of video games that affect the customs and traditions of the people, their worship, creeds, religions, and symbols." (thanks, Guido!)

On November 26th (Thanksgiving), the Washington Post put up an article about the group Public Enemy and its efforts to help the homeless in DC. Nice enough. However, there was one oddity in the article. It claimed that the band's famous song 911 is a Joke was about the attacks of September 11th. Yes, this is a song that was released in 1990. And if you've ever heard it, you know that it's about the phone number you call for emergencies. I mean the first line of the song is "I dialed 911 a long time ago....".

Now, I guess this is a mistake that anyone could make if they were totally unfamiliar with Public Enemy or its music -- but you would think that someone writing an article about the band would at least learn a little about the music it released. Furthermore, we're constantly told about how the mainstream press is important because they have fact checkers. Apparently, they took Thanksgiving off.

But, a bigger point is brought forth by Mathew Ingram who points out that people in the comments of the article pointed out the mistake really quickly and it took an entire week for the Washington Post to get around to making a correction.

Now, everyone makes mistakes now and again, and there's nothing wrong with that, but it does demonstrate a few things. Just claiming you have fact checkers doesn't make you significantly more accurate at times. Separately, we've pointed out in the past how bad newspapers seem to be with actually engaging with commenters on their site, and this highlights why they're making a big mistake. Yes, it's work. Yes, sometimes there can be a lot of junk in the comments, but you can also learn a lot -- such as when you've made a huge mistake.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

An anonymous reader tips news that Intel has canceled plans for a consumer version of their long-awaited and oft-delayed Larrabee chip, opting instead to use it as a development platform product. From VentureBeat: "'Larrabee silicon and software development are behind where we had hoped to be at this point in the project,' said Nick Knuppfler, a spokesman for Intel in Santa Clara, Calif. 'Larrabee will not be a consumer product.' In other words, it’s not entirely dead. It’s mostly dead. Instead of launching the chip in the consumer market, it will make it available as a software development platform for both internal and external developers. Those developers can use it to develop software that can run in high-performance computers. But Knuppfler said that Intel will continue to work on stand-alone graphics chip designs. He said the company would have more to say about that in 2010."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reader mick alerts us to a legal fight in Australia with Apple working hard to stop computer firm Macpro from being able to keep its name. The company has been in business since 1983, prior to Apple introducing the Macintosh (which happened in early 1984). In other words, Macpro should have priority on the name. When Apple tried to register a trademark on Mac Pro, Macpro opposed it and won, but Apple keeps fighting, and Macrpo's boss thinks the company is just trying to force them into bankruptcy with legal bills (he's already spent $200,000). He says he's offered reasonable settlements to Apple, but gets no response. Again, given Apple's early trademark fight with the Beatle's Apple Corp., you might think that it would be sensitive to bullying other companies over trademark issues... but apparently Apple thinks different(ly).

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

adeelarshad82 writes "Truly open-development, open-source phones like the Nokia N900 will never hit the mainstream in the US because wireless carriers in the country hate the unexpected, writes PCMag's Sascha Segan. The open-source philosophy is all about unexpected, disruptive ideas bubbling upwards, and that drives network planners nuts. So, you get unsatisfactory hybrids like Google Android, which uses some open-source components but locks third-party developers into a crippled Java sandbox. The bottom line is that while Linux the OS, the kernel and the memory manager are attractive to phone manufacturers, Linux the philosophy and users banding together ad hoc to create new things is anathema to wireless carriers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In this segment from Fatman and Circuit Girl, "Ken" drops by Jeri's studio in Portland to demo some Wimshurst Machine experiments.

Fatman and Circuit Girl

From MAKE magazine:

Check out MAKE, Volume 17: The Lost Knowledge issue!

Buy your copy in the Maker Shed, Subscribe to MAKE, or Access the Digital Edition (if you're already a subscriber).

In Volume 17, MAKE goes really old school with the Lost Knowledge issue, featuring projects and articles covering the steampunk scene -- makers creating their own alternative Victorian world through modified computers, phones, cars, costumes, and other fantastic creations. Projects include an elegant Wimshurst Influence Machine (an electrostatic generator built entirely from Home Depot parts), a Florence Siphon coffee brewer, and a teacup-powered Stirling engine. This special section also covers watchmaking, letterpress printing, the early multimedia art of William Blake, and other wondrous and lost (or fading) pre-20th-century technologies.

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