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Here's Suzanne Nolen singing about a casket sale at Walmart.

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I've posted before about my illustrator pal Dustin Amery Hostetler, AKA UPSO. His psychedelic, bold, graphic style has been featured on Burton snowboards, Chuck Taylor sneakers, Kid Robot Munnys, and in a slew of magazines. Dustin just created the art for this delightful animation in the FUEL TV Signature Series of station IDs. The music is by GoLab. For more on Dustin, check out his UPSO site and also the new issue of Faesthetic, his curated art 'zine.

"As it made clear previously, the Court was prepared to consider a more expansive fair use argument than other courts have credited—perhaps one supported by facts specific to this individual and this unique period of rapid technological change. For example, file sharing for the purposes of sampling music prior to purchase or space-shifting to store purchased music more efficiently might offer a compelling case for fair use. Likewise, a defendant who used the new file-sharing networks in the technological interregnum before digital media could be purchased legally, but who later shifted to paid outlets, might also be able to rely on the defense."

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I wish I had a blacklight to fully appreciate the groovy day-glo ink on the pages of Ultraviolet: 69 Classic Blacklight Posters from the Aquarian Age and Beyond, by Daniel Donohue.

Going through this book was like mainlining the 1970s. It brought back memories of my friend and I sneaking into my friend's big brother's bedroom, turning on the blacklight, and tripping out to some of these truly bizarre posters loaded with drug references (and which our local Kmart sold for $1 each), our sensory high no doubt enhanced by the fear that the big brother would catch us in his room and beat us up.

Ultraviolet: 69 Classic Blacklight Posters from the Aquarian Age and Beyond

When I was back at my family farm in Missouri this past September, following a circuitous 3,000 mile motorcycle ride through the Southwest from my home in Palo Alto, California, I spent some time going through old things. Among the things that still survive is this magnificently mod 3-ring binder, which my best guess is from around the third or fourth grade, which would put it from somewhere between 1969 and 1971.

Like many things of its era, it's clearly aesthetically inspired by the work of Peter Max, but it also has that great 'filled-in-with-colored-markers' look that was also popular at the time. I myself was a marker fiend, and would spend hours drawing outlines in black and then coloring them like this. Do you remember those awesome 'El Marko" markers? And the sets of finer-tipped colored markers that were becoming very prevalent in the late 1960s and early 1970s - all great!

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Etsy sellers Stil Novo Design make one-off hand-crafted furniture from reclaimed French white oak wine barrel staves. The pieces are good-looking and quite reasonably priced for handmade furniture. [Thanks, Camilla!]

The claims arise from a longstanding practice of the recording industry in Canada, described in the lawsuit as "exploit now, pay later if at all." It involves the use of works that are often included in compilation CDs (ie. the top dance tracks of 2009) or live recordings. The record labels create, press, distribute, and sell the CDs, but do not obtain the necessary copyright licences.

Instead, the names of the songs on the CDs are placed on a "pending list", which signifies that approval and payment is pending. The pending list dates back to the late 1980s, when Canada changed its copyright law by replacing a compulsory licence with the need for specific authorization for each use. It is perhaps better characterized as a copyright infringement admission list, however, since for each use of the work, the record label openly admits that it has not obtained copyright permission and not paid any royalty or fee.

Over the years, the size of the pending list has grown dramatically, now containing over 300,000 songs. From Beyonce to Bruce Springsteen, the artists waiting for payment are far from obscure, as thousands of Canadian and foreign artists have seen their copyrights used without permission and payment.

I like these ice records by artist Katie Paterson. She recorded sounds from a number of melting Icelandic glaciers, then pressed the recordings into ice to make single use records. Besides being a neat statement about how the glaciers are disappearing, it's also some cool technology. Who knew that you could make records out of water? Needless to say, the records melted during playback, however she did make a recording as they played. [via neatorama]

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I feel confident in stating that if I took the test I would get a score of 0.

Question 6. When Eve works, she produces exactly one apple per hour. Adam is completely unproductive and can produce nothing at all. Eve’s income is taxed at a flat percentage rate, with the proceeds delivered to Adam. What determines the optimal tax rate? What does “optimal” mean here, and what philosophical justification would many economists give for adopting this tax rate?

To make the problem concrete, you can assume that both Adam and Eve, if it were both possible and necessary, would be willing to work up to 1 hour for 1 apple, up to 2 hours for 4 apples, up to 3 hours for 9 apples, and up to x hours for x^2 apples. Now what is the optimal tax rate? (Your answer should be a number.)

Question 8. The five Dukes of Earl are scheduled to arrive at the royal palace on each of the first five days of May. Duke One is scheduled to arrive on the first day of May, Duke Two on the second, etc. Each Duke, upon arrival, can either kill the king or support the king. If he kills the king, he takes the king’s place, becomes the new king, and awaits the next Duke’s arrival. If he supports the king, all subsequent Dukes cancel their visits. A Duke’s first priority is to remain alive, and his second priority is to become king. Who is king on May 6?

Chileans often speak of "the first 9/11" -- referring to September 11, 1973, the day Augusto Pinochet ascended to power in a military coup. Within days, thousands of citizens were rounded up as enemies of the state and arrested. Many were executed.

One of them was Victor Jara, a popular folk singer and advocate for the human rights of the common Chilean. He was arrested, tortured, and murdered just days after the coup.

His wife buried him in a hurried, clandestine funeral 36 years ago, then fled into exile with their two daughters. Over the weekend, his remains were laid to rest again, after a series of public events in which she and thousands of other survivors of Pinochet's brutal regime honored Victor Jara, and the countless "disappeared." Pinochet left power in 1990.

Jara's remains had been exhumed for the purpose of forensic analysis to learn more about the circumstances of his death. We now know how Jara died, but we still don't know who killed him -- or thousands of other Chileans who died in political executions. His widow Joan Jara, now 82, says all deserve justice:

"There's a tendency to say, and even government leaders say this, that we're working for justice particularly in the emblematic cases," she said. "Victor is an emblematic case. I can have the hope that we can discover the truth and perhaps even achieve justice, that those responsible could be sentenced. But it's not right that so many other cases are left unresolved."

Via Dinosaurs and Robots:

Josh Gosfield built an entire media world of magazine covers, snapshots, advertisements and album covers of a fictitious 1960's singing star, Gigi Gaston. Charting her rise and fall, Josh creates a completely believable alter universe in which Gigi hangs out with the Beatles, is a paperdoll or appears startled by paparazzi flash. A painstakingly thorough archive of something that never happened.

Gnome Chomsky the Garden Noam (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Short but stunning gallery of high-resolution old photos of people grouped together by gender.

Pouyan Mokhtarian designed a concept container to keep a baby alive a for few hours while getting the hell away from a disaster site.

Inside you’ll find the communication unit and LED screen. You can look at the baby and the baby can look at you, too! This screen is also near several airblowing units. On the top of this screen unit there’s an orange LED light in the form of the Samsonite logo which shows the quality of the air inside the pod.

Inside you’ll also notice the auto rocking unit operated by a small servo unit located between the wells. Auto Diaper around the bottom of the baby has a moisture sensor which gently flushes away waste with water, the same with solid waste, all flushed away with tubes to the waste storage unit at the front of the case.

A 29-year-man, wearing a full-body "stinger suit," was stung on the face by an Irukandji jellyfish while diving from a yacht off the coast of Australia. They can kill a person in minutes.

The jellyfish's sting can lead to "Irukandji syndrome," a set of symptoms that includes shooting pains in the muscles and chest, vomiting, restlessness and anxiety. Some symptoms can last for more than a week, and the syndrome can occasionally lead to a rapid rise in blood pressure and heart failure... because the jellyfish leave almost no mark on their victims, scientists believe they are responsible for many deaths that were attributed as drownings or heart attacks...

Photo Irukandji-jellyfish-queensland-australia.jpg by GondwanaGirl from Wikimedia Commons released into public domain.

This post is part of the IT Innovation series, sponsored by Sun & Intel. Read more at ITInnovation.com. Of course, the content of this post consists entirely of the thoughts and opinions of the author.

// This code was writtend by [the guy]
// and is the property of [his company]...Copyright 2005,2006,2008,2009
// This code MAY NOT BE USED without the expressed written consent of
// [his company].

A couple of years ago, I wrote Midnight Girl, a YA vampirish (as in, not your classic vampires) novel just for the fun of writing a book without an outline, something I haven't done since my first novel. It became the story of Cat Medianoche, a girl who discovers on her fourteenth birthday that both sides of her family are part of a war that began long before recorded history. Each sees her as the key to their victory. I sent it to an editor who wrote back, saying, "I don't just love it, I LOVE LOVE LOVE IT!!! Cat is one of the most kick-ass heroines I've ever come across. And talk about conflict and things at stake! (I keep having to tell authors to beef up the conflict because there's never enough.) First [spoiler deleted]. Then [spoiler deleted]. And *then* she has to make an impossible choice between two equally horrible fates. I love every single character in the book... I couldn't put the manuscript down. I devoured it in one sitting. Anyway, that's how much I love it."

Sounds like a sure sale, right? Alas, her boss didn't like it. So I did a rewrite, sent it back, and the boss still didn't like it. So my agent sent it out to the major YA publishers, and they all passed. The ones who gave a reason said they thought the vampire fad was cresting. My agent recently sent me this note: "I was on the phone today with one of the editors at [Major Publishing House]. He loved Midnight Girl, and went to bat for it. The word he used was "brilliant." Unfortunately, powers that be felt otherwise. But at least you now know that it did have an in-house fan. He's a young up-and-comer, so I've made a note for future work of yours."

Since this book doesn't fit the demands of traditional publishing, I decided to do what the cool kids do and release it in formats for free or purchase, and I've made the book available through Lulu.

P.S. Creating the book didn't cost me a penny. I formatted the text with OpenOffice and found cover art at Wikimedia that I manipulated with the Gimp. Thank you, open source and Creative Commons!

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Here's my pal J. Edgar Park showing how to assemble the laser cut Mystery-Box that was featured in MAKE. Plans for making a mystery box are here. If you don't have access to a laser cutter, but are still desirous of a mystery box, you may buy the laser-cut components for the Mystery Box from the Maker Shed for $38.99.

On March 1, 1964, he brought a fledgling Jimi Hendrix into his band, Hendrix may have adopted his visual style from Penniman, dressing and growing a mustache like his. He toured with Little Richard and played on at least a dozen tracks for Vee Jay Records between the spring of 1964 and 1965.[59] Three singles, including a cover of Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On, would again hit the charts with moderate success. In 1966, Hendrix was quoted as saying, "I want to do with my guitar what Little Richard does with his voice."

The first real winter storm of the season is is supposed to hit my part of the country tomorrow, inspiring childlike joy in those of us who work from home and grudging misanthropy in everybody else. With that inspiration, I offer the following slideshow combining gorgeous snowflake photography and fascinating snow science, sure to turn even the most frustrated commuter frown upside down.

Next time you find yourself digging your car out of a snowbank, stuck behind several miles of backed-up traffic, or nose-first in a ditch waiting for rescue from the highway patrol, you can think back on cool facts like...

The largest snowflakes ever measured occurred in Fort Keogh, Montana, in 1887. Flakes as large as 15 inches wide were reported.

...and smile.

Treehugger: The Unbelievable World of Snowflakes

Fifty years on, Naked Lunch still delivers the gut-grabbing jolt of the autoerotic hangings that punctuate its pages, every death erection and post-mortem ejaculation described with a grim relish that walks the line between cry of conscience and shudder of fetishistic pleasure.

It was these gore-nographic sequences, which Burroughs insisted were a sardonic critique of capital punishment, that resulted in the book's landmark obscenity trial in 1965. Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer offered spirited testimony in the book's defense--regrettably not included in the new Grove edition, but front and center in the 1982 Black Cat edition that electro-shocked my world--and in 1966 the Massachusetts Supreme Court found that the book possessed "redeeming social value" and was therefore not obscene.

Of course, Naked Lunch is obscene, in the sense that it's slimed from head to toe by the moral obscenities it wrestles with. In "Howl" (1956), the poem that introduced America to the Beat generation, Ginsberg banged his head against the padded walls of a soulless society "of cement and aluminum" that institutionalized its freethinkers, "bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination." Burroughs, by contrast, shoves America headfirst into the bilge of its hypocrisies, its blood-soaked history, the Pepsodent-smiling brainlessness of its consumer culture. The Beat sensibility, at least as embodied in Ginsberg, was about Whitmanesque brotherly love, a Blakean embrace of cosmic interconnectedness. By that definition, the misanthropic Burroughs, who aspired to a reptilian cool, was no more a Beat than Marcel Duchamp was a surrealist.

Naked Lunch: 50th Anniversary Edition (Amazon)

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Today's hi-tech propagandists tell us that the book is a tree-murdering, space-devouring, inferior form that society would be better off without. In its place, they want us to carry around the Uber-Kindle.

The hi-tech campaign to relocate books to Google and replace books with Kindles is, in its essence, a deportation of the literary culture to a kind of easily monitored concentration camp of ideas, where every examination of a text leaves behind a trail, a record, so that curiosity is also tinged with a sense of disquieting fear that some day someone in authority will know that one had read a particular book or essay. This death of intellectual privacy was also a dream of the Nazis. And when I hear the term Kindle, I think not of imaginations fired but of crematoria lit.

The Nazis often were, by their own lights, well-intentioned idealists working for a better tomorrow. And their instrument was modern technology, aspects of philosophical and aesthetic modernism and the old religious concept of supercession implicit in the Christian notion of progress. Jews were outmoded, useless, they said. Most high level Nazis, like Himmler or Heydrich or Eichmann, did not feel visceral hatred towards the Jew. Rather, they looked upon them coldly as something that simply needed to disappear so that the new life could get on its way. And the means by which they sought to do so was first through a propaganda campaign that portrayed Jews, in Wagnerian terms, as a drag on the visionary energies and bursting vigor of the new Aryan man, and then by the implementation of this decision to eliminate Jews through ever more sophisticated state corporate and scientific technological means. And yet, during the war crime trials at Nuremberg, while Nazi Jurisprudence was tried and hanged, Nazi technological attitudes were not put on trial.

The victorious Allies did not mandate that technology, which had been turned to such murderous ends, must pass an ethical standard review from an international body, like a UN of technology. No such body of decision came about. To the contrary, even while the war crime trials of Nazi chieftains were in session, American and Soviet governments were recruiting high-level Nazis to their intelligence services, military armaments industries, and space programs. So that, while in jurisprudence terms Nazi social and political values were delivered a blow, the Nazi fascination with technology merged seamlessly with that of their conquerors: us.

We're thrilled to be introducing a new weekly feature here on Make: Online: Math Mondays. Every week, guest author George Hart, from the newly-formed Museum of Mathematics, will post a fun, experiential, puzzling little item, exploring some intriguing aspect of mathematics. The Math Museum is dedicated to raising people's awareness of the wondrous mathematical patterns and structures that exist all around us. They do this through such experiential means as their Math Midway, a traveling circus of hands-on exhibitions, that brings math to life in tangible and fun ways... and now, through a weekly column on MAKE.

We hope you'll make George feel welcome, and that you'll get a good educated kick out of what he'll be offering up each week. This week, he starts by offering up... breakfast. -- Gareth

Mathematically-Correct Breakfast

Start your day right by making this challenging bagel cut, and see if you're really awake yet. Can you figure out how to slice a bagel into two congruent halves which pass through each others holes, like two links of a chain? Hint: The motion of the knife follows the surface of a two-twist Möbius strip. If you hack up a dozen bagels and still haven't solved the puzzle, you can check out the instructions here.

[Editor's note: Although the cream cheese might make it hard to discern, these two bagel halves are continuous and inter-locked.]

Officers say they found 418 stolen items in her car, ranging from cards and books to games and jewelry...

The stolen items are valued at $2,200 dollars. Altena is charged with grand theft, which is a class four felony.

Two anonymous posters mentioned Child's Play: "the charity run by Penny Arcade to donate games to children in hospitals."

Another anonymous reader says: The purpose of the Afghanistan Women's Clinic (which is just starting to get off the ground) is to improve the health of women and children in the remote provinces of Afghanistan. The site has tons of info about the plight and difficulty of women's healthcare in that country. Currently they are trying to raise enough money to provide training for midwives.

From MrsBug: "Sustainable Harvest: Teaches poor (mostly) Central American farmers how to farm sustainably and organically, while helping them with low-tech solutions to feed their families (wood-conserving stoves, more diverse crop selections, etc)."

From DloPwop: "My favorite charity is Clean Water for Haiti, of which I am the director. We are a small, volunteer run NGO that sells Biosand water filters at a subsidized price. Our budget is only about $200,000 per year but virtually all of it goes to help the Haitian people find access to drinking water. If you want a more intimate picture of what we do in Haiti you can look at my wife's blog.

Dan Schnitzer adds, "Please consider giving to EarthSpark International, which develops local businesses to provide access to clean energy technologies. We are presently focused on Haiti. Full disclosure: I'm Co-Director of EarthSpark.
You can also see what I've been up to here.

EMJ recommends Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF): "Our mandate concerns emergency relief, and the principles we honour while carrying out our work are contained in the MSF Charter. We launch our operations in areas where there is no medical infrastructure or where the existing one cannot withstand the pressure to which it is subjected. In most cases, relief programs change to rehabilitation projects that may run for several years after the most urgent needs have been met."

Another anonymous reader says, "A vote for the Office of Letters and Light, the group behind National Novel Writing Month, Script Frenzy, and the corresponding Young Writers Programs. They're working towards creative expression, literacy, and literary appreciation - and they're the people who keep us going every November and April.

wackyxaky testifies: "I've always found particular inspiration from Partners In Health (pih.org). They do comprehensive medical care in the most extreme poverty areas, such as the upper plateau of Hati, Malawi, Peru, and more. PIH is very highly rated in efficiency and success rates. I'm a little biased, because it was established in part by Paul Farmer, my idol.

Part of what has made them so successful in providing healthcare is that they take a holistic view of healthcare, reforming and educating the way people think about health, improving hygiene and access to clean water, employing locals to do a tremendous amount of follow up work, etc. I can't recommend them enough."

Our Maggie has a bushel-load:

Harlem Children's Zone is an innovative non-profit that seems to be developing a new, actually effective model for improving the lives of underprivileged children over the long haul and breaking the cycle of poverty. You can read more about them in this Washington Post article.

Scholarship America strives to make post-secondary education available to all.

Big Brothers/Big Sisters, you know what they do. I'm a Big and this is a great program.

National Alliance to End Homelessness is just what it sounds like and their mission is particularly important today, when homelessness rates are at a recent high.

The Salk Institute is doing the basic lab research necessary to find cures for a whole host of human diseases.

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria does important work getting preventative treatment and affordable medications to all parts of the world.

michaelocc says, "I'd ask any Torontonians interested in helping a worthy cause at http://hohoto.ca. The most mind-blowing holiday party ever to check out - our Twitter-powered giant Seasonal love-in for the geek, creative and marketing crowd in the GTA. Last year's event (recap) raised $25K for the Daily Bread Food Bank. Food bank use is up 18% this year - they desperately need our help. Tickets are dirt cheap and the party is just phenomenal. Trying to raise $40K this year. Help the world suck a little less and party your ya-yas off while you're at it."

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She had a yearlong odyssey into the maw of the IRS. After being told she couldn't survive in Seattle on so little, she was notified her returns for both 2006 and 2007 had been found "deficient." She owed the government more than $16,000 — almost an entire year's pay.

She couldn't pay it. Her dad, Rob, has run a local painting business, Porcaro Power Painting, for 30 years. He asked his accountant, Driver, for help. Rachel's returns weren't all that complicated. At issue, though, was that she and her two sons, ages 10 and 8, were all living at her parents' house in Rainier Beach (she pays $400 a month rent). So the IRS concluded she wasn't providing for her children and therefore couldn't claim them as dependents.

Zach Lieberman's been working with the Virtual Magician on Magic Projection 1.0, an OpenFrameworks-based projection system for interactive magic shows. Very cool!

More:

The EyeWriter

Follow up Chandra Rathakrishnan (Fusion Garage, maker of the CrunchPad, er, was/is) did that video call today. There is new information, but it seems the proclamation of the tablet being "open source" from the start isn't being addressed at all... Here's a run down from engadget.

JooJoo will be $499, available at thejoojoo.com on December 11. Talking pricing and availability: "There are dreams, and then there are hallucinations." Saying Arrington's dream of a $200 device was unrealistic. Comparing it to iPhone 3GS with a 3.5-inch capacitive touchscreen at $299 on contract, netbooks at $399 with no touchscreen.

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Over at NYCResistor, Devon shows off his handmade satchel of durability plus some of the unique pieces it holds therein. Perfect accessory for your next renaissance fair outing!

Related:


Chainmail chess set

Tired of switching having to manually switch between his headphones and computer speakers, Peter Lavelle decided to go all out and built a LAN-controlled audio switch to solve the problem. Using a (double pull double throw) DPDT relay, Arduino and ethernet shield, he can now control where his sound goes from the comfort of his browser. While this solution is probably overkill for this particular application, the project is well documented and would serve as a good starting point for more complicated tasks.

In the Maker Shed:

Make: Arduino

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To be fair, it doesn't predate Aloysius "Gorilla" Koford's classic 1912-1913 comic strip. But this image, from the March 1929 issue of Parents' magazine, could be the first captioned photograph version of the LOLcat. Unearthed by</strike> digital archivist Jason Scott, The photo was advertised as the perfect decoration for a child's nursery. Although, in that context, I personally find it a little nightmare inducing. I can haz yer soul for to nom?

UPDATE: Digital archivist Jason Scott says, "I didn't unearth it - a helpful person off Flickr had hundreds of scans of magazines from the 1920s and this was one of the scans. It's from a 1929 issue of Parents' Magazine. It has well been established that Harry Whittier Frees predates this by at least 20 years. I would call this an "Early" LOLcat but hardly the first."

See the full vintage ad over on the Mental_Floss blog