Before we get into the details here, I should state, as a reminder, that I'm not in favor of passing laws mandating net neutrality, as I believe that there is a very strong potential for negative unintended consequences. Yet, I do think that the principle of network neutrality is important, and that it would be a serious mistake for ISPs to look to erode it. Basically, the issue is a lot more nuanced than it is often made out to be. But one thing that is quite clear, is that some of the claims on all sides of the debate have gone to ridiculous levels. You may recall, for example, the flat out lie by lobbyist Mike McCurry, saying that Google paid nothing for bandwidth and its push for net neutrality was to keep getting bandwidth for free. That's a complete lie.

And now, a whole bunch of you have sent in the story about how a top cable industry lobbyist, Kyle McSlarrow, of the NCTA, is claiming that any net neutrality mandate would violate ISP's First Amendment rights. What he doesn't explain is how. And that's because he can't. He stacks a few different concepts on top of one another to argue that net neutrality could prevent cable companies from "delivering their traditional multichannel video programming services or new services that are separate and distinct from their Internet access service." Except, there's nothing in the suggested FCC mandates that would do that. And even if it did, it's still difficult to see how it would be a First Amendment violation.

There are tons of very good reasons why we might want to avoid mandating net neutrality through law. But arguing that it will be a First Amendment violation isn't one of them... and it makes me wonder why lobbyists fighting against the regulations keep bringing up such bad arguments.

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He barely knows how to talk yet, but he's already a better ukulele player than I'll ever be. (Thanks, Gabe!)

Riktov writes "I came across this at a Tokyo toy store last week, and it's one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time. Jigazo Puzzle is a jigsaw puzzle, but you can make anything with it. It has just 300 pieces which are all just varying shades of a single color, though a few have gradations across the piece; i.e., each piece is a generic pixel. Out of the box, you can make Mona Lisa, JFK, etc, arranging it according to symbols printed on the reverse side. But here's the amazing thing: take a photo (for example, of yourself) with a cell-phone, e-mail it to the company, and they will send you back a pattern that will recreate that photo. This article is in Japanese, but as they say, a few pictures are worth a million words. And 300 pixels are worth an infinite number of pictures."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Maker Shed has put together a great electronics tool kit, with all of the essential tools one needs to get started in electronics. The kit includes a 30w adjustable soldering iron, a digital multimeter, a soldering stand, a Panavise Jr, various handtools, solder, spools of hook-up wire, and a Maker's Notebook. It even comes with a kit to practice on, the WeeBlinky.

Those rascally elves in the Shed have combined the toolkit with our new Make: Electronics book to create the Deluxe Make: Electronics Tool Kit. The regular kit sells for $114.99. The Deluxe kit sells for $124.99. So, basically, you get Make: Electronics (normally $34.99) for ten bucks! What a deal!

Check out the FREE shipping offer from the Maker Shed.
(orders of $100 or more, Contiguous US only, not to be combined with any other offers)

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A medical marijuana dispensary in Denver is taking a fun new approach to distributing pot — it's marketing itself as a restaurant. Called Ganja Gourmet, it has a full menu of international dishes — lasagna, pizza, paella, jambalaya — made with medical marijuana. The waiters are all dressed in tie-dye and they offer free rides home to people who are too high to drive after their meals.

I'm thrilled to announce our latest offering from O'Reilly/Make: Books, Make: Electronics, by Charles Platt. This is a book that we've wanted to do for awhile. Many of us at Maker Media have had an interaction that goes something like this: You're at a talk, Maker Faire, or elsewhere, and someone spirits you aside, like they're going to confess to a petty crime or some marital indiscretion. What they want to whisper sheepishly into your ear is that they love MAKE, all of the excitement they see over open source electronics, and the cool kits we sell in the Maker Shed, but they have NO IDEA how electronics work, and the "beginner" books and resources they look at online zoom quickly over their heads and frustrate their efforts to learn. Ultimately, they find themselves too embarrassed to admit their lack of high-tech smarts or to ask questions (which is why they've taken you behind a dumpster to confess their ignorance).

So we decided to make it our mission to create a book that would patiently lead readers into the world of electronics in a way that was fun, clear-spoken, graphical, and experiential. Charles dubbed it "learning by discovery." He has you experimenting with parts right out of the gate, licking batteries (really), breaking and frying stuff, and then you learn what happened and why, the theories behind the parts and processes you're using, and how to do the experiment correctly. For all of those would-be makers and wireheads who've been looking for a book that will finally let them in on all the fun, we made this one for you!

In 340+ pages, Make: Electronics takes you from the most basic aspects of electronic components and theory to techniques, such as soldering and using a multimeter, gathering basic tools and setting up a workshop, all the way to working with integrated circuits, microcontrollers, and building sophisticated devices such as robots. The book is full-color, with hundreds of photos, illustrations, schematics, even fun cartoons. Charles Platt, being the true Renaissance man that he is, did all of this himself. So the book has something of a charming, handmade feel to it.

To give you an idea of what the book feels like, we've put together this 40-page PDF. It contains the cover, table of contents, two complete projects from the book, and the index.

A hearty congrats to Charles and everyone at O'Reilly and MAKE who worked so hard on to make this book happen, especially Brian Jepson, Rachel Monaghan, Ron Bilodeau, and Nancy Kotary. And to the amazing Bunnie Huang, who served as our technical editor.

In the Maker Shed:


Make: Electronics
Our Price: $34.99
Want to learn the fundamentals of electronics in a fun and experiential way? Start working on some excellent projects as soon as you crack open this unique, hands-on book. Build the circuits first, then learn the theory behind them! With Make: Electronics, you'll learn all of the basic components and important principles through a series of "learn by discovery" experiments. And you don't need to know a thing about electricity to get started.

Check out the FREE shipping offer from the Maker Shed.
(orders of $100 or more, Contiguous US only, not to be combined with any other offers)

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hackingbear writes "Beijing Internet users are scrabbling for downloads from BitTorrent websites following speculation that authorities will shut them down as early as this week. Internet experts told China Daily the failure might be caused by an overload of users seeking last-minute free downloads. As the largest BT download website in China with 5 million downloads each year, VeryCD has been on the verge of closure after the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) shut hundreds of similar peer-to-peer file sharing sites, including the 50 million-user BTChina, during the last 10 days in its latest attempt to fight pornography and piracy online."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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.

There's a new study that's making the rounds, noting that the average American consumes about 34 gigs worth of data/information each day. That number has been increasing at a pretty fast pace as well. This is, obviously, not just internet data. It includes TV, radio, mobile phones, newspapers, video games, etc. However, what struck me is that more and more of that is moving to the internet, and that seems like a trend that will continue. And, yet, we still hear stories of ISPs looking to put in place broadband caps that are as low as 5 gigs per month. Clearly, something has to give. Even Comcast's relatively generous cap of 250 gigs per month could run into trouble at some point as well.

And, indeed, this is part of what concerns me most about efforts to put in place broadband caps. As we consume more data and a growing amount of that data consumption moves to the internet, more and more people may find themselves butting up against those caps. Even though plenty of studies (and many comments from the technology -- not policy or marketing -- people at ISPs) show that ISPs can easily invest in infrastructure upgrades to keep pace with the traffic, the move to put in place broadband caps may create serious unintended consequences for broadband. They add a mental transaction cost to any kind of internet usage (you have to think if it's worth it) and limit the interest and/or ability to build newer, more powerful internet applications and services that can serve what we need.

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I have seen lots of junk sculptures in my time, but few if any have impressed me as much as this one by artist S. Allen which, as of this morning, was available for sale at Seattle's Great Stuff boutique. And since it's reportedly priced at $4,500 US, it probably still is. [via Boing Boing]

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Rick Warren has officially come out against the proposed laws in Uganda that would make homosexuality a crime, punishable by death in some cases. In an open letter to the pastors of Uganda (with whom Warren has a great deal of influence from his missionary work) the American mega-pastor says,

As an American pastor, it is not my role to interfere with the politics of other nations, but it IS my role to speak out on moral issues ... the potential law is unjust, extreme and un-Christian toward homosexuals, requiring the death penalty in some cases. If I am reading the proposed bill correctly, this law would also imprison anyone convicted of homosexual practice ... I urge you, the pastors of Uganda, to speak out against the proposed law.

Obviously, Warren holds (and reiterates in the letter) beliefs about sex and about queer men and women with which I thoroughly disagree. But I want to thank him for doing the right thing here, for putting his influence and power to use to save the lives of innocent people. Hopefully, Warren's letter will make a difference.

Rick Warren: Letter to the Pastors of Uganda

An anonymous reader writes "About fifteen years ago, I did something that I've come to regret on a university computer system. I was subsequently interviewed by a Federal law enforcement agency, although no charges were pressed and I have no criminal record as a result of my actions. At the time, I discussed the matter with a friend of mine who went on to mention it briefly in a text file zine with a small distribution list. I've generally tried to keep a low profile online and until recently there's been very little information about me available from the major search engines. Unfortunately, that zine mention was picked up by textfiles.com at some point and mirrored across the world. I've tried to address this with the owner of the site, but couldn't get anywhere. Even if my name in the source file is altered, cached copies will continue to link me with my youthful mistake. Have any other Slashdot readers had a similar experience? What practical steps would your readers recommend to prevent this information from hurting me? I am concerned that future employers may hold my past actions against me should they look for me online as part of their screening process."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the common claims that is brought up by patent system defenders when we discuss the idea of a greatly limited or eliminated patent system is that it doesn't make sense for anyone to innovate, because others will just copy them. Of course, historically we have plenty of evidence that this isn't true -- and it makes sense if you think about it logically. Just copying something doesn't give anyone a reason to buy from you -- and depending on the product, copying them will take time, combined with the additional time to even let people know you've got a product in the market. By that time, the real innovator may be much further ahead. Steven points out that a recent Dilbert cartoon makes this point perfectly:

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Ask MAKE is a weekly column where we answer reader questions, like yours. Write them in to mattm@makezine.comor drop us a line on Twitter. We can't wait to tackle your conundrums!

Brett writes in:

Hi, I am building an automated brewing system for home brew beer. It will be controlled via an Arduino and network interface. I am using 15 gallon stainless steel kegs as brewing vessels. What is the best method or type of sensor to use to accurately detect liquid levels in the kegs? The liquid won't be water alone, and all three vessels will be heated. I was thinking of using an external sight glass + a pressure sensor of some kind. Maybe someone in the Make community has a better idea or has done this before?

I have been a Make subscriber for the last two years(since I found out about you guys) keep up the great work!

Thanks Brett! So, you want to measure the level of a liquid in a tank. These are some of the ways that I can think of to do this:

• Capacitive: Measure difference in dielectric constant between air and water
• Differential pressure measurement: Measure pressure at bottom of liquid
• Optical: Use an array of light sensors to sense where liquid is/isn't
• Float: Put a float on a stick, then measure the displacement of the stick
• Weight: Weigh the liquid, and calculate volume based on density
• Conductivity: Measure liquid conductivity at a few discrete points

Out of these options, what would be best? I think for your project, the best way to go is probably to use a differential pressure sensor, like you suggested. It seems like it would be the most reliable and least invasive method. Also, it just so happens that the folks who wrote the Practical Arduino book have a Water Tank Depth Sensor project that might be a good starting point.

If you only want an approximation of the amount of liquid in a tank, a simpler way to go would be to test for conductivity at a few points along the side of the tank. You wouldn't be able to sense the exact amount of liquid present, but it would be a fine way to check if the tank is half-full or not. The folks at electronics labs built a single-point Water level detector using a PIC microcontroller, which could be expanded to measure multiple points

Capacitive sensors might work, but might be hard to set up in a metal tank. Optical sensors work the same way as the conductivity sensors, and would be more expensive, so they probably aren't worth the trouble. A float could potentially work, but could get gummed up by hops or dead yeast, so it might be unreliable. The weight sensor could also work, but I think it might be tricky to keep it calibrated.

Good luck, and remember to let us know when you have it working!

Have you attempted a system like this before? Have some experience to share, or a better way to accomplish this? Sound off in the comments!

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dtmos writes "Tired of seeing poor-quality patents issued? Have a great way to solve the problem? Well, here's your chance to be part of the solution. The USPTO has issued a Request for Comments on Enhancement in the Quality of Patents (PDF), seeking public comment on ways to improve 'the process for obtaining the best prior art, preparation of the initial application, and examination and prosecution of the application.' Comments should be sent to patent_quality_comments@uspto.gov by February 8, 2010."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Want to make your diet more sustainable? Buy your fish frozen, not fresh. Researchers studied the ecological impact of salmon and found that, "the questions of organic versus conventional and wild versus farmed matter less than whether the fish is frozen or fresh. In many cases, fresh salmon has about twice the environmental impact as frozen salmon." (Via New York Times)

CWmike contributes this excerpt from Computerworld: "For a technology that's all about being fast, 802.11n Wi-Fi sure took its sweet time to become a standard, writes Steven J. Vaughan Nichols. In fact, until September 2009, it wasn't, officially, even a standard. But that didn't stop vendors from implementing it for several years beforehand, causing confusion and upset when networking gear that used draft standards from different suppliers wouldn't always work at the fastest possible speed when connected. It wasn't supposed to be that way. But, for years, the Wi-Fi hardware big dogs fought over the 802.11n protocol like it was a chew toy. The result: it took five drama-packed years for the standard to come to fruition. The delay was never over the technology. In fact, the technical tricks that give 802.11n its steady connection speeds of 100Mbps to 140Mbps have been well-known for years."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I normally try to steer clear of weapons-related posts, but this "full auto" crossbow from YouTuber TheDuckman666 was too cool to pass up. There's lots more crossbow-y goodness on his personal site. [via The Automata / Automaton Blog]

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Improv Everywhere travels back in time to 1971, or mind-lock virus? (Via Arbroath)

Artist Audrey Kawasaki posted a bunch of photos of her in-progress paintings, which will be unveiled at her Hajimari solo show at Jonathan Levine Gallery in NY this coming Saturday.

Sneak peek at Audrey Kawasaki's upcoming Hajimari show

Well, people have asked in the past how Google and Microsoft's search engines are really all that different from some of the file sharing search engines, and now we've finally got a lawsuit to at least explore some of that. It's not a major label, but a small indie blues label called Blues Destiny is suing Google and Microsoft along with RapidShare. At issue, of course, is that people are uploading Blues Destiny music to RapidShare, and searches via Google and Microsoft can find them. As Eric Goldman notes in the writeup linked above, the label isn't particularly clear in what it's upset about, so he believes the real issue isn't even that Google and Microsoft link people to RapidShare, but that it finds other sites that then link to RapidShare. That seems like many degrees removed from actually infringing -- and it's difficult to even see a clear claim for "inducing" infringement. Goldman also notes that the lawsuit is complicated by Blues Destiny's imprecision and vagueness in a series of (increasingly exasperated) takedown notices, which is coupled with Google not complying -- but potentially that is due to the failure of Blue Destiny to properly state what needed to be taken down. Either way, it's difficult to see how either Google or Microsoft is going to be found liable here, but the lawsuit is still worth watching, given the questions about where the fine line is drawn between just being a search engine and being a contributory infringer.

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eldavojohn writes "A new report from the FTC is claiming minors have access to explicit content via online virtual worlds such as those found in online games. The report makes five recommendations to keep little Johnny away from the harms of Barrens chat: Use more effective age-screening mechanisms to prevent children from registering in adult virtual worlds; Use or enhance age-segregation techniques to make sure that people interact only with others in their age group; Re-examine language filters to ensure that they detect and eliminate messages that violate rules of behavior in virtual worlds; Provide more guidance to community enforcers in virtual worlds so they are better able to review and rate virtual world content, report potential underage users, and report any users who appear to be violating rules of behavior; Employ a staff of specially trained moderators who are equipped to take swift action against rule violations."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A 25-year-old chemistry student died when he chewed chemically treated gum that exploded and blew off part of his face.

Are you ready for the TSA to ban chewing gum?

"A loud pop was heard from the student's room," the ukranews.com portal said, citing an aide to the city's police chief. "When his relatives entered the room they saw that the lower part of the young man's face had been blown off."

A forensic examination established that the chewing gum was covered with an unidentified chemical substance, thought to be some type of explosive material.

Police questioning revealed that the student had a bizarre habit of chewing gum after dunking it into citric acid. On his table, police found both citric acid packets and a similar-looking unidentified substance, believed to be some kind of explosive material.

Ukrainian student killed by exploding chewing gum (Via Arbroath)

(Boing Boing guestblogger Ned Sublette is a writer, historian, photographer, and singer-songwriter based in New York. His latest book: The Year Before The Flood.)

"Singer/songwriter/guitarist, musical anthropologist, and one of rock and roll's pioneering forces in the Dominican Republic, Luis Días, passed away from a heart attack and other health-related complications on the morning of Dec. 8th, in Santo Domingo."

That's from an obit at Kiko Jones's blog, written by someone who knew Luis Días and felt what he was about.

I borrowed the photo from writer-photographer Eliseo Cardona's fine music blog Blue Monk, which also has an appreciation of Luis's life and work.

In the Santo Domingo daily paper 7 Días, Alfonso Torres writes a eulogy (in Spanish):

Nadie como él desafió la muerte, la noche terrorífica del último cuarto del siglo 20 dominicano, con su lírica estremecedora, su irreverencia, sus acordes exóticos tan lejanos y tan cercanos de nuestra cultura popular.

Which I crudely translate to (though I have to repunctuate):

Nobody could defy death—the terrorific night of the last quarter of the 20th century in the Dominican Republic - like him, with his shake-you-up lyrics, his irreverence, his exotic chords so far away from and so close to our popular culture.

Luis Días was a folklorist, albeit an unorthodox one, and a Dionysian theorist of his own musical culture. He and his generation had to find a creative cultural response to a national history that still lives in a direct way the consequences of 16^th-century Spanish conquest, the 18^th-century Haitian Revolution, and 20^th-century US clientism. (In 1965, when Días was a teenager, US President Lyndon B. Johnson invaded the country with tens of thousands of troops and blockaded it with the US Navy to keep the Dominican government right-wing so that it wouldn't become "another Cuba.")

Días not only spoke truth to power, he spoke Dominican truth to Dominican power. To understand his importance fully, you have to know something about the insults endured by Dominican music.

Rafael Trujillo, who from 1930 until he was assassinated on May 30, 1961 was "the dictatingest dictator who ever dictated" (Junot Díaz's Pulitzer-winning words), unsubtly imposed on the country a musical monoculture of one strain of Dominican music that he favored, along with a murderously racist anti-Haitian ideology that demonized the republic's hardest-laboring class, to say nothing of his near-total disinterest in educating children. Moreover, because Trujillo's brother owned the radio broadcasting industry and didn't want competition from records, there was almost no recording of Dominican music for thirty years—three decades of music, wiped out of history. (This story is told in Deborah Pacini Hernández's Bachata: A Social History of a Dominican Popular Music.) So the fact that Luis Días was a student and connoisseur of the diverse unrecorded, under-researched musics of his land — a precious, neglected cultural legacy — was a case of speaking rhythmic truth to power.

After Trujillo was assassinated, the music called bachata began to be heard. Días was at the head of a new songwriting movement that valorized this romantic but realist guitar-driven music of the Dominican underclass. He was at the cutting edge of a brilliant Dominican artistic generation in the years preceding the megasuccess of Juan Luis Guerra (who titled one of his albums Areíto, something Días had done eight years before; areíto was the indigenous form of music of the Taínos). His rock band, Transporte Urbano (urban transport), is often credited as the beginning of a Dominican rock movement. His megahit, "El Carnaval," first recorded with his great interpreter Sonia Silvestre, became a street-and-stadium anthem in 1985 as sung by Fernando Villalona; with its simple, impossibly catchy refrain of "Baila en las calles de noche, baila en las calles de día," it's a carnival perennial 25 years later.

His Dominican colleagues, including Silvestre, Guerra, Sergio Vargas, and Víctor Víctor, remember him (in Spanish) at hoy.com.do

Luis Días was the kind of person about whom everyone has a story. My friend Henry Mena is a songwriting Dominican rocker in New York and leader of the band La Ruta, which in summer 2009 played a short set of Días's Transporte Urbano classics as a birthday present to him at New York's Quisqueya on the Hudson Festival. Henry recalled a hang with Luis:

"One afternoon I dropped in on Luis at his and then-wife Laura's apartment in Manhattan's Stuyvesant Town. He confessed not having more than $5 on him but, regardless, asked me to accompany him to get a six-pack and spend the afternoon listening to Soundgarden. As we made our way back to his place form the corner bodega, he noticed the mail had arrived and with it, a check for a few hundred bucks: airplay royalties from "Carnaval (Baila en la Calle)".

Sweet!

"But the best part came a few hours later: between beers, 'Superunknown,' and tales from his days working with Dominican record producer/music biz impresario Cholo Brenes—'I've got a smash for you, Cholo. A hit. Send the messenger with the money, so I can send you back the cassette,' and then after hanging up with Brenes, he'd proceed to hurriedly write the promised winning song, heh heh. Invariably, Brenes would excitedly call back a short time later: 'Damn, Luis! What a song!' heh heh—ASCAP called asking if he'd stop by or would he prefer they mail him a royalty check for $2,000+ he'd earned from 'Si He de Morir,' which Luis had contributed to Marc Anthony's debut salsa album.'Man, you're my lucky charm!' he said to me. And so, we rushed uptown to get that loot."

I said to Henry, what makes this story perfect is the listening-to-Soundgarden part. He answered, "The man loved his rock and roll, Ned."

[PHOTO: Eliseo Cardona]

---

The Flux Factory, a not-for-profit arts organization in Long Island City is having a night of "performances, music, free booze, and excellent people." Go check out some really great artists; there will be limited-edition work for sale by Brandstifter, Bread & Butter Collective, Andrea Dezso, Kerry Downey, Heather Jones, Aya Kakeda, Miwa Koizumi, Simone Meltesen, Nick Normal, Ward Shelley, and Swoon.

Flux Factory box set fundraiser
Thursday, December 10
Open bar cocktails at 7:30
Performances at 8:30
39-31 29th Street
Long Island City, NY 11101
Suggested Donation $20

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1sockchuck writes "A supercomputing center in Quebec has transformed a huge concrete silo into the CLUMEQ Colossus, a data center filled with HPC clusters. The silo, which is 65 feet high with two-foot thick concrete walls, previously housed a Van de Graaf accelerator dating to the 1960s. It was redesigned to house three floors of server cabinets, arranged so cold air can flow from the outside of the facility through the racks and return via an interior 'hot core.' The construction and operation of the unique facility (PDF) are detailed in a presentation from CLUMEQ."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This gentleman couldn't figure out why food was going missing in his high-storey NYC apartment. His girlfriend denied taking it. So he set up a hidden camera to see what was happening, and shortly thereafter, he saw a strange woman creep out of a deep storage crawlspace over the kitchen, let herself down onto the kitchen table and help herself to his pantry. He phoned the police (he was in the apartment), and they told him after investigating that they believed the woman had been secretly living in his apartment for weeks.

Creepy Creeper!

About a year ago, we wrote about the massive success of musician Corey Smith, creating not just a sustainable living as an independent musician, but a multi-million dollar operation -- built on a combination of closely connecting with his fans, using free music, touring relentlessly, working hard to gain new fans (including reserving some cheap tickets to shows) and (the important part) really great music. What caught everyone's attention was that this totally independent musician, with no record label, no radio play, no massive publicity campaign had grossed about $4 million in 2008. Now, of course, tour grosses (which made up the lion's share of that amount) are a bit misleading, as the venues take a cut of that, and there are certainly other expenses to be paid, but as a starting number it's still really impressive. Luckily, Corey is now sharing some more details about his path to success.

Corey recently did a fantastic podcast with CDBaby where he details how he went about building up a fan base and building up support, and it basically involved exactly what we discussed before: good music, a real connection with the fans, hard work through touring and careful targeting. While he jokes about the $4 million gross touring number, he does admit that his "corporation" (as he now has a support staff) netted over $2 million last year. Frankly, that's more impressive than the $4 million gross numbers. He notes, of course, that there are still expenses on top of that, including staff (manager, accountant, full-time salaried musicians who play with him, recording expenses and touring expenses -- especially in support of new markets, where the return isn't guaranteed). But, even with all that, bringing in over $2 million in topline revenue is really impressive for a musician without any additional outside backing.

One of the things that he discusses in the podcast is that what really got him started down this road was realizing that it could be done. He read Dave Kusek and Gerd Leonhard's excellent The Future of Music, and it made him realize "hey, this is possible." And that, alone, made a huge difference. It's amazing what you can do once you realize that something is possible -- and one of the great things we've seen in writing about Corey and numerous other musicians and their success stories is that they, in turn, inspire many other musicians who realize that it really is possible to do quite well despite the naysayers and the doom and gloom. There are a bunch of people who seem to have a vested interest in tearing down the success stories (in many cases because they profit from having naive musicians sign over their lives), but the obvious success stories shine through and inspire many more who follow. It doesn't mean that every musician is guaranteed success. In fact, Corey's story highlights the amount of hard work and dedication that was needed, combined with some great music and a bit of luck as well, to make all of this work.

The podcast also has an interesting section where Corey discusses the various major labels who have approached him, and how it's even tempting at times to go that route, since it could lead to more people hearing his music (especially by getting radio play, of which he doesn't get very much). But, so far, he's realized that it just isn't right -- and that everything that's made this model work for him probably would work against him at a major label (for example, they would try to polish up his sound and clean up his lyrics, which would actually make his music sound less authentic to his biggest fans who have supported him all along). As he notes, one of the key things that he and his manager and other partners have been doing is trying to build a business model for the long term, rather than the typical music industry "flash in the pan" model, whereby a label tries to make a musician huge and then squeeze as much money out of them, as quickly as possible, before that artist dries up. While that star might burn brighter, it's a lot less likely to ever burn at all, and the chances of a very quick flame-out are high. Instead, Corey has shown what's possible by focusing on what makes the most sense for building a long term, sustainable, and quite successful music career.

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Google CEO Eric Schmidt says privacy isn't important, and if you want to keep something private, "maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" (in other words, "innocent people have nothing to hide.")

Bruce Schneier calls bullshit with eloquence: "For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that -- either now or in the uncertain future -- patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable."

But JWZ has the kicker, when he reminds us that Eric Schmidt's Google blackballed CNet's reporters after CNet published personal information about Schmidt's private life: ""Google representatives have instituted a policy of not talking with CNET News reporters until July 2006 in response to privacy issues raised by a previous story..." "To underscore its point about how much personal information is available, the CNET report published some personal information about Google's CEO Eric Schmidt -- his salary; his neighborhood, some of his hobbies and political donations -- all obtained through Google searches...."

Hey, Eric: if you don't want us to know how much money you make, where you live, and what you do with your spare time, maybe you shouldn't have a house, earn a salary, or have any hobbies, right?

Jan writes "Microsoft has open sourced the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool by releasing it under the GPLv2 license. The code is now available on CodePlex, Microsoft's Open Source software project hosting repository, over at wudt.codeplex.com. The actual installer for the tool is now again available for download at the Microsoft Store (2.59MB). (Microsoft previously took responsiblity for the violation.)"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kermit the Frog joins Minnesota Public Radio's "In the Loop" to sing a song in support of Iran's Green Revolution protests, which have had a resurgence over the last couple of days.

Spotted in the Make Flickr pool:

David Chatting built this Arduino Eye Shield so that he could hook up an analog video camera to his Arduino. It sounds pretty crazy, however by utilizing an LM1881 video sync separator chip and some comparators, he was able to use the Arduino to capture at least 8 1-bit monochrome values from each line of video data. With a bit more work, it sounds like the resolution could be doubled, and more color bits could be added. Pretty impressive for a tiny microcontroller! He's using the shield for his Reflections in Cider exhibit, and has more photos of the installation in his Flickr set.

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While he has no official say in the matter, it is still worth noting that Chris Weitz, the director of the movie New Moon has said that he thinks it's "terribly unfair" that a 22-year-old girl was jailed and now faces felony charges because her attempt to film some of her sister's birthday celebration caught less than four minutes of New Moon on her video camera (found via Copycense). Weitz is not the copyright holder and has no real say in what happens, but he does note that he's talking to Summit Entertainment, the studio who made the film, to let them know of his concerns, to see if there's anything that can be done.

Of course, what should be done is that the law should be changed so we don't have these ridiculous situations at all. And hopefully he would stand behind such a proposal. In the meantime, it's just yet another in a long line of examples of the law creating punishment that is way out of proportion with the "crime" when it comes to copyright and copying of content.

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snydeq writes "Security researchers have spotted the Zeus botnet running an unauthorized command and control center on Amazon's EC2 cloud computing infrastructure. This marks the first time Amazon Web Services' cloud infrastructure has been used for this type of illegal activity, according to threat researcher Don DeBolt. The hackers got onto Amazon's infrastructure by hacking into a Web site hosted on Amazon's servers and then secretly installing their command and control infrastructure."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

So here's a classic dilemma for me: I need to do an interview with somebody for a story I'm writing. It has to be in-person. It's in a place where lugging around my laptop and typing while the the person speaks isn't particularly feasible. And I won't have time post-interview/pre-deadline to go through a recording and transcribe the necessary notes 'n' quotes.

And here's a solution: Livescribe's Pulse Smartpen, a nifty piece of technology that can record audio every bit as well as my old voice recorder, while simultaneously making a digital copy of my handwritten notes and linking both notes and audio into a seamless whole.

I saw the Pulse for the first time last May at Maker Faire and promptly spent several months dithering about whether or not it was going to break my heart. I bought one last month, to help me keep track of research and interviews for a book I'm writing, and I'm happy to report that the Pulse lives up to my expectations. Granted, it's expensive and not particularly useful for everybody. But if you do a lot of note-taking (writers, journalists, college students, researchers... I'm looking at you), I think it's worth the investment. Here's why...

First off, let's talk money. I always hate it when tech reviews dangle something awesome in front of me and then spring the price tag at the end. This being my first tech review ever, I'm going to take the opportunity to switch things up. The Pulse Pens work with Mac or PC. There's a 2 Gb model for $169 and a 4 Gb version for $199. Both come with a couple of ink cartridges, a USB charger, and a small starter notebook. This is, however, not the end of your financial dealings with Livescribe. Ink cartridges will have to be replaced. Each fine point tip is supposed to last through about 56 pages of writing and replacements are $6 for a 5-pack. You'll also need special paper to use the Pen. A 4-pack of single-subject, college-ruled notebooks is $20, and there are lots of other notebook options, including Moleskin lookalikes. You can, however, also print pages of the stuff, for free, from any PC with a Color LaserJet Printer that is Adobe PostScript compatible and can print at 600dpi or higher.

Now, the fun. That special paper is important because it's covered with tiny dots that create a positioning system for the infrared camera in the Pen. The camera turns on when the Pen's tip is pressed into the paper, and turns off again when the tip is lifted. It's not really recording what you write, so much as it's recording the position of pen tip, on a coordinate plane formed by the dots.

I figured that out when the first Pen I got malfunctioned. Instead of turning off when I lifted the Pen away from the page, the camera would just stay on continuously. What I wrote on the physical page looked normal. But when I uploaded the digitized writing to my computer, I got not clean handwriting, but a crazy scrawl with a line recorded for everywhere the pen moved—whether on the paper or through the air above it. And that was how I learned Livescribe has great customer service. I called their phone line, the lady who answered was able to quickly figure out what was wrong, and she immediately got me a replacement in the mail. There was absolutely no hassle. Good stuff.

The replacement pen works perfectly. What I write on the physical page is recorded and looks great. I can use it without audio to make a digital (i.e., less lose-able) copy of my notes. If I want to record audio and writing at the same time, I use the control "buttons" that are printed at the bottom of every page of the dot paper—I just tap the space printed, "record", and tap "stop" when I'm done. To replay the audio, I tap the pen on the text I've written. I probably don't need to point out how incredibly useful this could be for note-taking during interviews, lectures, or even just keeping better track of your own thoughts and observations while you work. Plus, if you want, you can share your recorded audio and notes either with select friends, or the public, via a "Pencast". Observe:

So yeah, it's pretty sweet. The printed pseudo-buttons also allow you to set and jump between audio bookmarks, jump to a position in a recording, adjust playback speed, Pen volume, and set other Pen controls. There's also a calculator. Yeah. It's printed on the inside cover of the notebooks and you just tap the "keys" with the pen to make it work.

Another neat application: The piano. Choose this setting and the Pen will prompt you to draw eight boxes on the dot paper. Each box then becomes a note in the scale, which you can play by tapping it with the Pen. This is how you amaze your friends and make yourself feel better about not owning a smart phone. In my experience. Speaking of which, the Pen also has an online ap store, where you can pick up free and paid games, reference tools, a unit converter, a Spanish dictionary, and even a tool to teach yourself Hebrew chanting. Seriously. Right now, there's only a handful of applications. But I'm really looking forward to seeing how this grows in the future.

Bottom line: This thing does what it says it does, and does it well. If you're in school, or you have the right sort of job, the Livescribe Pulse Pen could really make your life easier. Someone also mentioned to me on Twitter that the Pen could be useful for people with memory problems, and I think it could work for that as well—provided the memory problems weren't so severe that you couldn't remember how to use the Pen. If none of this applies to you, though, the Pen is really just a nifty toy and probably not worth the cost of ownership. That said, you should still find a friend that does need it and get them to let you play with it a bit. Because it's really, really fun.

David Ng from the Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique sez, "Just a heads up that we have some new science scout badges up, including a number that revolve around programming geekiness, one that focuses on science-y art, and a badge all about science dystopias (with sage advice from an expert in the area no less)."

Increasing the N! (Thanks, David!)

Gizmodo's Joel Johnson, "back on active nerdy," reviews the NatureMill Pro XE Composter. It represents the "miracle of decay at home," he writes, and works very well.

Stéphane Massa-Bidal (AKA Rétrofuturs (Hulk4598)) has created a set of posters depicting various popular web services as though they were vintage paperback covers. The set is absolutely beautiful, and is for sale in various sizes.

web services covers therapy (via Superpunch)

(Boing Boing guestblogger Ned Sublette is a writer, historian, photographer, and singer-songwriter based in New York. Embedded audio in this post: Ned reads an excerpt from chapter one of his latest book, The Year Before The Flood, live at Joe's Pub in New York City. After the jump, the full text of that chapter, republished in entirety here on Boing Boing.)

New Orleans is a subjective town that demands a point of view. Depending on where you're coming from, you have a different vision of the city. So I felt it was necessary to tell people where I was coming from, so to speak, before I could tell my story of New Orleans.

I'm not from New Orleans, but I lived in Louisiana until I was nine years old--in Natchitoches, Louisiana, which is 282 miles northwest of New Orleans and four years older, the first town the French founded in what later became the Louisiana Purchase. That was back in the bad old days, the 1950s. In August 1960 (just before the desegregation battle erupted in New Orleans) we moved away, to El Paso. I never lived in Louisiana again, until 2004, when I was fifty-three. Returning to Louisiana all those years later, I was a kind of insider / outsider. As I tried to learn the ropes of living in New Orleans, all kinds of long-buried fragmentary memories came surging forward. Like, I already knew what it meant for a deliveryman to leave a package "under the house," because the houses are raised up off the ground. And no one had to explain to me about southern racism, because I went to a segregated school.

The main body of The Year Before The Flood is Part Two, which tells the story of our year in New Orleans. But there's a shorter Part One, a childhood memoir that explains what I was bringing to my New Orleans experience. Here's an excerpt from the first chapter of the book, which is called "Jump Jim Crow." If you want to listen along while you read, here's a clip of me reading it at Joe's Pub on November 20.

THE YEAR BEFORE THE FLOOD: CHAPTER ONE
(MP4 audio link)

Even in slavery days, "white" and "black" children might have personal contact, but in the South of my childhood we were kept as separate as humanly possible. We literally didn't know each other. I lived until I was nine in an approximately half-black town without ever having any social contact with a black kid. I don't mean I didn't have any as close friends. I mean I never had a single conversation with an African American child. As people say when they talk about those days, that was just the way it was. I can remember having it explained to me that no, their color didn't rub off when they touched things.

The polite way of describing southern society in those days is to say that it was segregated. But it is also fair, if less polite, to say that it was a white supremacist society. The program of the Ku Klux Klan had been implemented. African Americans were overtly, legally, literally second-class citizens.

When Mrs. Harrison asked us if we knew why our school would always remain all white, I hazarded a guess. "Because the Negroes have schools of their own?"

"Yes, they do," she replied, "and they're just as good as ours!"

Bullshit, they were just as good as ours.

She probably believed it. A lot of white people lived in fantasyland. But the push to integrate schools didn't come because black people loved being around white people so much that they wanted to come hang out with them. It was because if there were two separate school systems, the black one would get less of every resource. In 1950, "colored" 1 schools in Shreveport had no electricity, and the students used outhouses.

Which is not to say that no educating took place; African Americans who came up in that system remember heroic teachers. Jerome Smith, born in New Orleans in 1939, told me: "We had the worst books that you can imagine, but we had such dedicated educators that it gave us a kind of readiness... We didn't recognize that [at the time], but in the years that followed, we had a foundation." Not everyone was so lucky, and the deck was stacked against African American children getting an education. Overcrowding was the norm for their schools; the Macarty school in New Orleans's Ninth Ward had 2,536 children in a building designed for 1,200. No wonder Fats Domino dropped out of that school in the fourth grade.

No, Mrs. Harrison explained, the reason Northwestern Elementary would always remain white was that the nuns who deeded it to the state had included that as one of the conditions.

Well, that settled it. The deal had been cut long before we were born.

Our white-forever school was a lovely place. Located on the campus of Northwestern State College, where my dad taught, it had expansive, handsome grounds, with a long, sloping hill that led down toward Lake Chaplin, and big airy classrooms with a piano in every one.

We were raised with the southern ideal of the innocent, indolent child. With its pretensions to aristocracy and perhaps a French aversion to exercise, Louisiana was never big on making kids do calisthenics, so for physical education we played Drop the Handkerchief and singing games. I was what was later called hyperactive--I always had a rhythm, or a rhyme, or a song going on--and visibly bored. The class seemed to work on the alphabet all through the first grade.

My parents, being teachers, had taught me to read and do arithmetic at home, so I was considered a gifted child when I started school. This was surely, presumed my biologist parents, the result of good genes, though I think it was more the amount of attention and care they gave me. It was the era of IQ tests, and I was given batteries of them. When I was seven, in some kind of educational experiment that my parents must have had a hand in promoting, I was placed five grades ahead of my level, into a seventh-grade class, for two weeks. I found I could handle the academics pretty well, not because I was a genius but because they weren't that tough. Socially, however, I wasn't prepared to be in a roomful of seventh-graders all day.

That was the year Attack of the 50 Foot Woman came out--where is this kind of inspiration today, when our cinema needs it?--and I felt myself surrounded by fifty-foot women. There's nothing as mysterious to a seven-year-old boy as a passel of twelve-year-old girls. To further heighten the eroticism of the experience, they had portable transistor radios, and could summon up rock 'n' roll at recess. I could read better than they could, but so what? They had something else going on.

One of my enduring memories of Natchitoches dates from that surreal stint among the giants and giantesses of the seventh grade. The social studies class was instructed to break up into groups and write, and act out, scenes that were to dramatize . . .
A slave auction.

They had us play slave auction in social studies class.

I'm not sure what the purpose of that exercise was. But what it demonstrated for me was that some people lived between the piety of knowing that slavery was bad and the desire of living it once again. It proved something I already knew, even at that age: the white South loved to reminisce about slavery days.

Since I wasn't a bona fide seventh-grader, I was an auditor for this event, not a participant. No one interpreted the slave roles. No one would have wanted to. The slaves were imaginary. One kid, playing the role of an auctioneer, read haltingly from the script he had laboriously written himself:

"I. Don't. Like. To. Break. Up. These. Families," he read.

"But. What. Can. I. Do?

"It's. My. Job."

(c) 2009 Ned Sublette

An anonymous reader writes "European researchers have developed a new approach to artificial intelligence that could let computers to respond to behaviour as well as commands, reacting intelligently to the subtle nuances of human communication. It's no trivial feat – many humans struggle with the challenge on a day-to-day basis"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Jenine.net shared this pic of her unique copper-palmed persistence of vision box -

I'm making a "Persistence of Vision" toy, which will show a programmed message in eight red light- emitting diodes. In the Fab Lab we have a roll of copper foil backed with a conductive adhesive. I used a knife to cut out a hand shape. (In this case, I found it faster to work this way than to use the vinyl cutter.) I covered a small metal container with a vinyl sticker to insulate the foil board from the conductive tin. I soldered some surface mount LEDs and resistors onto the copper. I still have more to do!

Very creative circuit design - have a closer look on Flickr

In the Maker Shed:

MiniPOV kit

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Eleven signed East Totem West posters by psychedelic artist Joe McHugh from the late 1960s are up for auction on eBay as a set. His famed "White Rabbit" poster (detail shown inset) is included. This image was the cover for the book "The White Rabbit and Other Delights." The book documented the East Totem West "hippie business" McHugh founded which produced many iconic, psychoactively-inspired works of poster art during its brief existence. As BB reader scifijazznik says in the comments, the posters make you "wanna take the elevator to the 13th floor (which is eight miles high) and have [your] 19th nervous breakdown while writing the 23rd strawberry letter, which is basically 10,000 words in a cardbord box, man." In closing: duuuuude.

We've seen plenty of stories of "astroturf" campaigns by lobbyists looking to influence public policy by pretending that there's grassroots support for some corporate position. And, we've seen stories of virtual goods scams taking place on various social networks, which are used to get unsophisticated social gamers to sign up for subscriptions to things that they don't want. But what happens when you combine the two?

Nicholas Carlson has an astounding story about a health insurance astroturf group that is using those social gaming "offer" services to get gamers to contact their elected officials to oppose health care reform in exchange for virtual currency in games. Yes, health insurance companies are basically trying to bribe a bunch of Farmville and Mafia Wars players on Facebook to send messages to their representatives, that say: "I am concerned a new government plan could cause me to lose the employer coverage I have today. More government bureaucracy will only create more problems, not solve the ones we have." In exchange, you get some virtual currency to spend.

The group behind this virtual bribery astroturfing effort is backed by a who's who of insurance trade associations... and when Carlson tried to contact them for comment, the email bounced. Nice to see that some of the scammiest lobbying groups out there have found some of the scammiest marketing techniques out there as well.

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Never in my life could I imagine the job that came from using the words Star Trek Pez LED menorah all together in one title. Joyce and Kaufman made this kitchy creation using one of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories delux LED menorah kits. Just terrific!

In the Maker Shed:

Deluxe LED Menorah Kit

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eldavojohn writes "The real fallout of climategate may have nothing to do with the credibility of climate change. Daniel Henninger thinks it's a bigger problem for the scientific community as a whole and he calls out the real problem as seen through the eyes of a lay person in an opinion piece for the WSJ. Henninger muses 'I don't think most scientists appreciate what has hit them,' and carries on that vein in saying, 'This has harsh implications for the credibility of science generally. Hard science, alongside medicine, was one of the few things left accorded automatic stature and respect by most untrained lay persons. But the average person reading accounts of the East Anglia emails will conclude that hard science has become just another faction, as politicized and "messy" as, say, gender studies.' While nothing interesting was found by most scientific journals, he explains that the attacks against scientists in these leaked e-mails for proposing opposite views will recall the reader to the persecution of Galileo. And in doing so will make the lay person unsure of the credibility of ALL sciences without fully seeing proof of it but assuming that infighting exists in them all. Is this a serious risk? Will people even begin to doubt the most rigorous sciences like Mathematics and Physics?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Everyone has those days when they need a little inspiration, something to give those neurons a boost. On a good day, it might be a cup of coffee to get you going, on a bad one, who knows what will work? The following is a roundup of gifts that will hopefully help inspire creativity in their recipients.

Books

Twyla Tharp: The Creative Habit (Simon & Schuster, $25)
When I first saw acclaimed choreographer Twyla Tharp's Catherine Wheel performance, I was in awe of the creativity and discipline in evidence. As I watched, I tried to image all of what would go into conceiving and executing such a complex and muscular dance piece. That creative discipline, developed over a lifetime of Tharp being one of the most creative, celebrated choreographers of our time, is laid out in this impressive creativity workbook. Reading The Creative Habit makes you realize how horribly most self-help books are written. This one is a joy to read, filled as it is with great stories, eye-opening insights about the creative process, and exercises that you likely won't be embarrassed to try. Given Tharp's incredible resume, and her intense work-ethic, it's not surprising that this book is extremely practical and focused on developing a discipline around your creativity. As the title makes clear, she argues that creativity, the ways and means for it to happen, anyway, can be practiced and become habitual. Even if a high degree of order in your creative chaos is not your style (it certainly isn't mine), there are all sorts of great lessons and exercises to take away from this book. In fact, I can't imagine anyone reading it and not getting smarter in how they approach their creative process. -- Gareth Branwyn

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In my latest Publishers Weekly column, I explain why I'm not even going to try to sell downloads of the audiobook of the my forthcoming experimental short story collection, With a Little Help: Apple won't carry it without DRM; Audible won't carry it without an abusive EULA; and all the major digital delivery systems are crufty and needlessly complicated.

For my next book, Makers, we tried again. This time Audible agreed to carry the title without DRM. Hooray! Except now there was a new problem: Apple refused to allow DRM-free audiobooks in the Apple Store--yes, the same Apple that claims to hate DRM. Okay, we thought, we'll just sell direct through Audible, at least it's a relatively painless download process, right? Not quite. It turns out that buying an audiobook from Audible requires a long end-user license agreement (EULA) that bars users from moving their Audible books to any unauthorized device or converting them to other formats. Instead of DRM, they accomplish the lock-in with a contract.

I came up with what I thought was an elegant solution: a benediction to the audio file: "Random House Audio and Cory Doctorow, the copyright holders to this recording, grant you permission to use this book in any way consistent with your nation's copyright laws." This is a good EULA, I thought, as it stands up for every word of copyright law. Random House was game, too. Audible wasn't. So we decided not to sell through Audible, which I was intensely bummed about, because I really like Audible. They have great selection, good prices, and they're kicking ass with audiobooks.

With a Little Help: Can You Hear Me Now?

An upcoming round of negotiations for the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA, the notorious, punishing secret copyright treaty) is schedulef for New Zealand in April 2010. Under the terms of the treaty, New Zealand could be forced into accepting the "three strikes" rule that was defeated after a lengthy parliamentary battle last year ("three strikes" means that if someone you live with gets three unsubstantiated accusations of copyright infringement, you and everyone you live with loses access to the Internet and it becomes a crime for any other ISP to hook you back up again).

The opposition movement that formed in response to the "three strikes" rule is ready to take action on ACTA, to make sure that New Zealand's information policy is made democratically, and not through secret meetings in back rooms. They are organizing their response to the ACTA negotiations next April, and given their amazing mobilization against "three strikes" the last time around, I expect great things. If you're from .nz or live there now, tell your friends and loved ones about this: your family's ability to communicate, earn a living, get an education and participate in civil society could be jeapordized by the decisions the elite plan on making in your country.

And hey, Mexico! There's an ACTA meeting headed your way in January. Got anything planned?

Welcome | acta.net.nz (via Michael Geist)

Looks like TheMason76's digital synth/audio processor is coming along swimmingly. Very neat touch/stylus interface with ton of twaekable params … and, ummm … oh yeah - it sounds great! Project documentation to come.

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We've certainly discussed the work of David Levine and Michele Boldrin plenty of times before -- and both were kind enough to participate in our CwF+RtB experiment earlier this year. If you haven't read their book, then you are missing out. Now, Levine and Boldrin have a new editorial up in the CSMonitor, explaining why they think the patent system should be abolished. If you've read their work, there's nothing surprising, but if you have not, it's a quick summary of the key points:

As a matter of theory, intellectual property is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, giving a reward increases the incentive to innovate. On the other, allowing the monopolization of existing ideas taxes the creation of new ones, thereby decreasing the incentive to innovate. The bottom line: Contrary to widespread belief, economic theory does not provide support for the continuous extension of IP. The only answer to the question of whether IP serves the desired purpose must be empirical. Does it work in practice?

A great deal of applied economic research has tried to answer this question. The short answer is that intellectual property does not increase innovation and creation. Extending IP rights may modestly boost the incentive for innovation, but this positive effect is wiped away by the negative effect of creating monopolies. There is simply no evidence that strengthening patent regimes increases innovation or economic productivity. In fact, some evidence shows that increased protection even decreases innovation. The main finding is that making it easier to get patents increases ... patenting!

No matter what your stance on this topic is, you have to admit it's impressive to see it getting attention in a mainstream publication like the CSMonitor.

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An anonymous reader writes "Facebook launched new privacy settings this week. Cosmetically, this means that the settings are explained more clearly and are marginally easier to manage. Unfortunately, some of the most significant changes actually make preserving privacy harder for its users: profile elements that could previously be restricted to "Only Friends" are now designated as irrevocably publicly available: "Publicly available information includes your name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, friend list, and Pages" Where you could previously preserve the privacy of this information and remain publicly searchable only by name, Facebook now forces you to either give up this information (including your current city!) to anyone with a Facebook account, or to restrict your search visibility — which of course limits the usefulness of the site far beyond how not publicly sharing your profile picture would. That Facebook made this change while simultaneously rolling out major changes to the privacy settings interface seems disingenuous."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On November 14th, 1984, astronaut Dale Gardner used a Manned Maneuvering Unit to travel, untethered, from the Space Shuttle to the Westar 6 satellite. And caught it. And serviced it. And came home, safe and sound.

Astronaut Dale Gardner using MMU to travel to Westar VI satellite (via Fogonazos)

Assassin's Creed 2, The Beatles: Rock Band, Borderlands, Brutal Legend, Dragon Age: Origins, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, Left 4 Dead 2, Modern Warfare 2, New Super Mario Bros. Wii. There, are we done? For the majority of top 10 of 2009 lists spreading fungally across every site covering games, probably, and they're not at all particularly wrong. But 2009 was about a lot more than that handful that we knew would top their respective Metacritic charts (and retail sales lists) six to nine months before their release date, and -- as I did with last year's Offworld 20 list (with a near-identical intro, I've just re-discovered, woops!) -- this list for Boing Boing will instead focus on the games that left their own strong mark on the year, just, sadly, a mark that in most cases went mostly overlooked. Split into two sections, the first part of the Boing Boing 20 list will focus on console and handheld releases, while next week's will round up the ten best indie and iPhone games, organized alphabetically rather than by any arbitrary ranking, with plenty of room in the comments for your own additions to your top gaming moments of the year. Without further ado, then, the best collection of pre-adolescent royalty, retro revivalism, at least two kinds of rhythm, stretchers, scribblers, and succulents the year had to offer, and one bona-fide blockbuster that managed to rise above the rest (it's the one not listed above, can you guess before you reach the end?):

Little King's Story [Marvelous, Wii]

Little King's Story was a true left field surprise this year: a game about managing a township unwittingly put under your control, about protecting them and conquering the things they fear, a game about expanding your reign through exploration and field conquests, and a game that managed to do a better job of the mini-micro-management of your troops than even Nintendo's re-released Wii-control Pikmin that must have inspired it.

Its crayon and pastel fantasy surely didn't help curry any favor with the gaming hardcore, which is a shame mostly because it a.) belies the surprisingly challenging and strategic game underneath and 2.) be honest, lends the game an undeniable storybook charm. Truly one of the year's best adventures that too few have played.

Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes [Capy, DS]

Coming in as the year's best 11th-hour surprise, Toronto indie Capy's puzzle/strategy/RPG take on the Might & Magic universe was just covered here on Boing Boing, so I'll reiterate that here:

Like Puzzle Quest -- Infinite Interactive's similarly dangerously time-devouring puzzler -- before it, Clash overlays its fantasy RPG tale with battles that play out via color-matching vertical lines of troops to create, fuse and link attacks launched against your enemies, and doing the same horizontally to put together defensive lines to guard against theirs.

Its ruleset is so intricately devised and delicately balanced that it'd take an article in itself to explain them fully, but for all its richness and complexity, it's a system that takes only minutes of practice to mentally snap together, and all your remaining hours of the day to happily master. If you have any proclivity toward brainy puzzling, do not hesitate to pick this up: it's got all the trappings of being one of the handheld's underdog classics.

Noby Noby Boy [Namco, PS3]

Those that said that Noby Noby Boy -- the Katamari Damacy follow-up from creator Keita Takahashi -- had no point themselves missed the point. While it's true that the design of each individual play session is as lackadaisical and boundless as the BOY himself, its overarching goal is an achievement in itself as gaming's most massive massively-multiplayer undertaking.

Underneath the surface is a story of, ideally, countless BOYs (as of this writing we're just ten players shy of 100,000) all vying to impress the universe's only GIRL by doing the only thing they were put on Earth to do: swallow and stretch their coiled bodies as far as they can. By converting those impressive and hard-earned meters into the love that propels her own body further into the solar system, in real-time, she unlocks the planets she reaches for all the players in the world.

So, yes, there is a goal, and there is an end-game, which we'll only see if and when our PlayStation 3s (or, very soon, iPhones) are still functioning in the time it takes to push her the remaining ponderous distance from Jupiter to Pluto.

Is it a willfully and near-recklessly devised design, particularly for thrusting hugely delayed gratification on a generation of players accustomed to instant/constant feedback and reward? Absolutely, and that's exactly what makes it one of the year's best.

Plants Vs. Zombies [PopCap, PC/Mac]

It would be easy, and cynical -- and more importantly, wrong -- to assume that casual powerhouse PopCap simply rode the crest of tower-defense and zombie-lust that defined much of gaming in 2009. Instead, it appears to have brilliantly anticipated it, having started and been in production nearly two years ahead, and could be instead seen as instrumental in propelling both memes into wider consciousness.

Going viral by nature of its basic premise alone, and then again by Laura Shigihara's perfectly ludicrous music video, it would have been disastrous if the resulting game couldn't fulfill expectations. Thankfully, it did, giving the tower defense genre a much-needed shot in the arm of accessibility without uprooting the core entirely, and the imminent move to iPhone -- letting us finally take the game away from our desktops -- is still one of our most anticipated.

Retro Game Challenge [Namco, DS]

Publisher XSEED had an unenviable task on their hands in bringing Retro Game Challenge to the West: taking a game that's inextricably derived from Japan's best games-related TV show that the rest of the world has never seen (Game Center CX), and is soaked through with references to Famicom nostalgia rather than the U.S.'s own NES nostalgia, and somehow making it relevant to us.

So we'll forgive them in going a half-step too far in shoe-horning in the 80s of Max Headroom and Valley Girl, and for working in 90s era U.S. game magazine references that flew over the heads of all but about ten people outside journalist-circles, because in the end none of that really mattered.

Well, the nostalgia does, because that's precisely what Retro Game Challenge is a game about: that once-every-three-months-a-new-game past of our collective youth, that afterschool poring over cheat codes past, a time when developers were inventing genres as often as games themselves.

Challenge is at heart a collection of remade early-days NES classics that never were, and your task (as goes the title) is to work your way through a series of prescribed challenges in each, whether it be finding hidden warps or defeating RPG bosses, and it manages to perfectly evoke that nostalgia that we thought only emulators could manage to do these days.

The sad news is that even as one of the year's most original and rewarding games -- a game that overtly celebrated the games culture that made up its target audience -- sales don't seem to have been up to snuff for the publisher to consider Westernizing the Japanese sequel, leaving a whole other legacy of first-gen Game Boy and 16-bit era "classics" behind.

Rhythm Heaven [Nintendo, DS]

Rhythm Heaven probably won't be showing up on near as many 2009 lists as it should, not because it's not brilliant -- it is -- but because it took so long for Nintendo to finally bring it to the West that it feels like ancient history (in digital years, obviously) to its core supporters who had imported and impotently raved about it long before.

Heaven's the truest example of a music game that's purely about rhythm, and not just about Simon Says-ing patterns or following bars down your screen to the tune of your dad's favorite classic rock. It's about rhythm as an unbroken line, or (at its best) an unbroken agreement between performers, about teaching and keeping steady tempo.

It's also one of the year's funniest, and desperately deserves some December love, if nothing else than to prove to Nintendo that a game this non-traditional can still find a wide, appreciative audience.

Rock Band: Unplugged [Harmonix/Backbone, PSP]

Though clearly overshadowed by its big console brothers and their new friends The Beatles, Unplugged -- and to a slightly lesser degree the DS version of Lego Rock Band -- were semi-shoutouts to the fans that made developer Harmonix the stadium-supergroup headliners they are today.

Take away its hard rock 'performance' and replace it with looping techno rave-up ambiance and you're right back where the developer began: flipping back and forth through lanes of sound, trying to keep each alive in sequence to make the parts a whole song, just as they pioneered in their PS2 originals Frequency and Amplitude.

You didn't need to know this, and you don't need to care, for Unplugged to work its magic: you just need the willingness to escape into music without the fake plastic mediator in between.

Recent news that Harmonix would no longer be converting its massive library of original recordings for Unplugged DLC stung fractionally harder than the bait and switch of offering only a five-song Lite version as the PSPGo's pack-in, with still no full download available on the PlayStation Network (which has to be down to digital publishing rights for particular bands and not willful neglect, right?), but for those still clinging to Sony's UMD-laden past, this is one of the UMDs most worth clinging to.

Scribblenauts [5TH Cell, DS]

Alongside Plants Vs. Zombies, Scribblenauts was the game that carried itself best throughout the year on a tidal wave of viral acclaim solely for its premise alone. But what a premise that was: it promised to let players conjure essentially any object imaginable -- krakens, keyboard cats, Gods, time-traveling robot-zombie-smashing T-rexes -- to solve puzzles via the furthest-most outer-reaches of our imaginations.

Did it work? Errr... yeah, I mean, mostly: developer 5TH Cell will be (and overtly has been) the first to acknowledge that its very touchy touch-based controls could have used some refinement. But even more surprising (for me, anyway), was in just how limited my own imagination was when it came time to put it to the test.

Need to rescue a cat off a roof, or wave away an angry bee? Much to my disappointment, I found I was just as apt to use, you know, a ladder and a bit of bug repellent, rather than any flights of fantastical fancy.

But its essential magic -- even if that 'magic' was simply the fortitude to sprite-sketch their way through untold reams of dictionary entries -- remained untouched, and it's still a thrill to try and stump the system and learn that they've got you covered.

Shadow Complex [Chair, Xbox 360]

Shadow Complex was the best retro revival this year that had no predecessor of its own. For once, it wasn't lazy to give the game the comparative nod back to Super Metroid: it was unabashedly right there in front of you, in its color coded barriers, in lead character Jason Flemming's tight crawls through narrow passages (here just crouched, rather than rolled into a morph ball), straight down to a 'Justin Bailey' referencing achievement.

And yet even the ones most prone to cry foul -- to call the game out for taking some of Japan's best classic design and running it through a Western mill until its plot and characters were offenders of the worst nameless, faceless, bottom-shelf would-be Tom Clancy degree -- had to admit: fair enough to that, but the game turned out completely wicked.

Harnessing the full power of Epic's Unreal Engine 3 for charmingly/ironically yester-year ends, this was exactly where we thought our 16-bit games were headed at the time: recycled but beloved design with drastically improved fidelity. We were wrong then, of course, but Shadow Complex proved maybe we shouldn't have been.

Uncharted 2 [Naughty Dog, PS3]

My pithy one-liner to encapsulate Naughty Dog's blockbuster adventure? It's the finest rollercoaster of the year that makes you climb off the train and rebuild the engine at the bottom of every hill.

Uncharted 2 easily managed to outshine the rest of the year's big-budget bids and managed to make a true believer even out of me, even if what it did best -- giving you some of the most hyper-vivid, lush and gargantuan ancient ruins and relics any developer has offered to let you explore -- was punctuated by over-technical firefights with your constant trigger-happy pursuers.

That's not to say the shootouts didn't work well on their own -- they are, probably, some of gaming's most realistically modeled, with every unwilling and amateur participant pressed firm against or dancing between cover and skittishly hazarding the occasional shot -- but the frequent breaks to dispatch another round of guards felt at times at odds against the relentlessly cinematic flow of the exploration.

In the end, you pressed through, though -- you had to -- guided by the promise of an even greater cliff-hanging thrill than the one you just narrowly scraped through, and the game never left that promise unfulfilled. Just next time, please, Naughty Dog: less of the shoot-shoot-bang-bang and more of the clamber-climb-marvel-amaze.

An anonymous reader writes "A large scale SQL injection attack has injected a malicious iframe on tens of thousands of susceptible websites. ScanSafe reports that the injected iframe loads malicious content from 318x.com, which eventually leads to the installation of a rootkit-enabled variant of the Buzus backdoor trojan. A Google search on the iframe resulted in over 132,000 hits as of December 10, 2009."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cool pics from Flickr user Avanaut. He describes the photography in this comment. [via The Brothers Brick]

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rapturizer noted the critical news that "Fans of Star Wars have a chance to see a free screening of the notoriously bad Star Wars Holiday Special next week in Minneapolis." Nothing brings out the Christmas spirit like watching what may very well be the worst TV ever produced. Sadly however, I'm not sure that this is the worst Star Wars merch ever made.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

rapturizer noted the critical news that "Fans of "Star Wars" have a chance to see a free screening of the notoriously bad "Star Wars Holiday Special" next week in Minneapolis." nothing brings out the christmas spirit like watching what may very well be the worst TV ever produced. Sadly however, I'm not sure that this is the worst *Star Wars* merch ever made.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wow - any medieval military gear made from refuse would impress me, but this guy went above and beyond by incorporating the colored tabs into a very intentional pattern. Godspeed, brave knight! [via Geekologie]

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As a bunch of countries and lobbyists continue to debate ACTA in secret, it's interesting to compare that to an ongoing effort by Christian Engstrom, one of two Pirate Party representatives in the European Parliament, to create an Internet Bill of Rights by asking people what they want. Which one sounds more like government for the people, by the people?

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MojoKid writes "Samsung is betting there's room for more in the smartphone market and has unveiled its new bada OS. The name 'bada,' means 'ocean' in Korean and was chosen to convey the 'limitless variety of potential applications which can be created using the new platform.' Samsung claims the OS is extremely simple for developers, saying that bada was built to be extremely interactive with its users — including flash control, motion sensing, fine-tuned vibration control and face detection. Samsung is hoping developers will take this user interface and create a variety of applications focused around it, and thus provide different types of apps than exist for the iPhone and Android OS. The bada OS has a variety of sensors, including accelerometers, tilt, weather, proximity and activity. Samsung will be hosting a series of Developer Days in Seoul, London and San Francisco, among other cities, throughout 2010."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot points us to the news that a lawsuit against Netflix and Blockbuster for patent infringement has been dismissed by a California court. At issue was a patent, 7,389,243, that is for a method for alerting users to the status of their rental queue. Read through the claims and look at the drawings and try to figure out how such a patent was possibly approved. It's patents like this one that make people question what patent examiners actually do. So it's nice to see the patent holder sent packing, though you have to wonder if GameFly, who had previously settled a lawsuit over the same patent is now regretting that decision.

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eldavojohn writes "Ars analyzes some knockoffs and near-knockoffs in the gaming world that led to problems with the original developers. Jenova Chen, creator of Flower and flOw, discusses how he feels about the clones made of his games. Chen reveals his true feelings about the takedown of Aquatica (a flOw knockoff): 'What bothers me the most is that because of my own overreaction, I might have created a lot of inconvenience to the creator of Aquatica and interrupted his game-making. He is clearly talented, and certainly a fan of flOw. I hope he can continue creating video games, but with his own design.' The article also notes the apparent similarities between Zynga's Cafe World and Playfish's Restaurant City (the two most popular Facebook games). Is that cloning or theft? Should clones be welcomed or abhorred?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ryan Begglen via JWZ.

Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon (the pair who produced the bestselling graphic adaptation of the 9-11 Commission Report) have a new book out: Che: A Graphic Biography.

In addition to narrating the remarkable story of Guevara's life, Che is a very good backgrounder on the geopolitics that gave rise to Guevara's pan-Americanism, the Cuban revolution, and his tragic and brutal execution (the press that published Che, Hill & Wang, were last mentioned here for their graphic biography of Leon Trotsky).

The graphic format is especially well-suited to these geopolitical sequences, in which multi-page spreads are used to connect the dots between historical events and nations to give a compact but extremely informative tour through the complex story of Latin American colonization and independence as well as the Cold War.

This background also sets the stage for the complex story of Che, the man; and Che, the symbol. Both are fraught -- Che, the man, was fierce, brilliant, flawed, vicious, and compassionate. As a symbol, Che has become a revolutionary icon devoid of any substance, for sale on mugs and t-shirts (a warped mirror of Guevara's veneration in Cuba itself, where his larger-than-life image has likewise become an ideological icon).

As with every biography, the biographers have had to take sides, and, by and large, they side with Che. They don't whitewash his actions in war, or the disastrous blunders in Africa; but they also give just appreciation to Guevara's bravery, his commitment to justice, and his integrity.

The contemporary popular narrative of Che has two grossly oversimplified sides: sneering neocons who dismiss him as a butcher or a fool and denigrate those who sport Che badges as naive kids; and the worshipful reification of Che as a kind of revolutionary saint who could do no wrong.

The reality is subtler and more important than either position has it. The colonial story is one of immense greed and profit-taking by rich countries at the expense of the poor; it's the story of corruption and brutal repression, and it's the story of revolutions attempted, betrayed, and destroyed by internal and external forces. Guevara's life is a lens for understanding what colonialism does to its participants -- as Guevara says, "imperialism bestialises men."

Che: A Graphic Biography

Olympus is offering European customers a free FL-14 flashgun if you buy one of its E-P1 mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras before the end of January 2010. The offer is valid for both body-only and kit purchases and starts on December 12th in the UK and 15th in mainland Europe. We've added this offer to our list of holiday season promotions.

Just look at it.

Commission Regulation (EC) No 2257/94 of 16 September 1994 laying down quality standards for bananas (as amended)

Carl Zeiss has announced it will make its 50mm and 100mm macro lenses in the Canon-compatible ZE mount. The Makro-Planar T* 2/50 and T* 2/100 ZE are both manual focus only and offer maximum magnification ratios of 1:2. The 50mm lens will be available this month, while the 100mm will follow in early 2010.

MikeChino writes "Researchers at Arizona State University have genetically engineered cyanobacteria to dissolve from the inside out, making it easy to access the high-energy fats and biofuel byproducts located within. To do this they combined the bacteria's genes with genes from the bacteriaphage — a so-called 'mortal enemy' of bacteria that cause it to explode. Cyanobacteria have a higher yield potential than most biofuels currently being used, and this new strain eliminates the need for costly and energy intensive processing steps."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Make: Online pal/guest writer Paul Overton, of Dude Craft fame, just launched a new blog, in collaboration with CraftyPod's Diane Gilleland, called Make & Meaning, which seems to focus more on the process of creation than on particular products thereof. I feel like blogging in general, and particularly blogging in the DIY community, needs more of this "long view" type analysis. Paul's new blog may be a step in the right direction. Kudos!

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We were just talking about how current child porn laws that make you a criminal based on incidental possession alone can be quite problematic. Reader Jesse highlights an example of this. If you happen to have been in Toronto on Monday, and received a copy of Metro Toronto, a popular commuter paper, buried a few pages in was a "featured picture" of some kids celebrating at an annual parade by jumping around in a hot tub. The only problem? The male in the photo appears to be, well... having a wardrobe malfunction. Not unexpectedly, a bunch of sites were having some fun with this... until some realized that these were high school students. At that point, even Gawker -- who will post almost anything -- removed the photo realizing that under current laws, it was likely child pornography. Jesse points out that this would appear to make a bunch of people at the Metro, all the recipients of the paper on Monday, many people who visited blogs like Torontoist and Gawker while they had those photos displayed... potentially at risk for possessing child porn (and in the case of Metro employees and these blogs, for distributing it as well) -- making them all potential felons who could be required to sign up to be on sex offender lists for the rest of their lives. Isn't something wrong with the law when that happens?

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Nikon has released a new 2x AF-S teleconverter, the world's first to include an aspherical lens element. The AF-S Teleconverter TC-20E III is a completely new optical design designed to minimise its impact on image quality. When used with the 300mm F2.8 VR II lens launched today it would offer an effective 600mm reach at up to F5.6.

The Voice Shield is an analog audio shield for the Arduino. It allows you to easily add audio to your next project. The Voice Shield uses a unique and very user friendly way to access different sound bytes making it easy to build "talking" devices. It can work with words, complete sentences, or use it to add sound effects.

Check out the FREE shipping offer from the Maker Shed.
(orders of $100 or more, Contiguous US only, not to be combined with any other offers)

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Nikon has launched a new 300mm F2.8 VR lens featuring the company's latest image stabilization system. The AF-S Nikkor 300mm f/2.8 ED VR II is designed to be small and light enough to hand-hold while the company says the VR II system can offer 'four or more' stops of compensation for lens shake. It also includes nano-crystal coating and is dust and moisture sealed. Recommended retail prices will be £5099.99 / €6050.00.

Responding to a Freedom Of Information Act request, the US government has revealed the operating costs of the America's Army game series over the past decade. The total bill comes to $32.8 million, with yearly costs varying from $1.3 million to $5.6 million. "While operating America's Army 3 does involve ongoing expenses, paying the game's original development team isn't one of them. Days after the game launched in June, representatives with the Army confirmed that ties were severed with the Emeryville, California-based team behind the project, and future development efforts were being consolidated at the America's Army program office at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama. A decade after its initial foray into the world of gaming, the Army doesn't appear to be withdrawing from the industry anytime soon. In denying other aspects of the FOIA request, the Army stated 'disclosure of this information is likely to cause substantial harm to the Department of the Army's competitive position in the gaming industry.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It really was just a couple months ago that the Royal Mail in the UK was using a copyright claim to stop websites from offering public postal code data. It made no sense that such data should be proprietary, and it appears that, finally, UK officials are realizing this. Starting next year, the UK will free up postal code data so that anyone can use it. There are still some questions as to how this will be done, but it's a huge step forward from shutting sites down to actually freeing up the data.

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dippityfisch writes "The Sydney Morning Herald reports that face recognition is being considered at Westfield's Sydney mall to catch offenders. The identification system matches images captured by surveillance cameras to an existing database of faces. Police said they could not comment on the center's intentions, but would welcome any move to improve security and technology in the area."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pirate Party MEP Christian Engström is drafting an Internet Bill of Rights for introduction into the European Parliament, and he's seeking your advice on the language:

I will give a first draft of an answer to the first question: What sections should be in the Internet Bill of Rights?

1. Fundamental rights. The European Convention on Human Rights should be respected on the net as well, including Article 8 (the right to privacy) and Article 10 (information freedom).

2. Net neutrality. Internet operators should provide neutral connections without any restrictions on content, sites, platforms, or the kinds of equipment that may be attached.

3. Mere conduit. I return for providing net neutrality, Internet operators and other suppliers of information infrastructure should not be held responsible for the information exchanged by their clients.

These are my first suggestions. Are there any other areas that ought to be covered by an Internet Bill of Rights? The floor is open, and all suggestions and comments are welcome.

Let's write an Internet Bill of Rights (via The Command Line)

Spanish Civil Guardsmen were dispatched to the Sigüenza Jazz Festival to gather evidence as to whether the Larry Ochs Sax and Drumming Core band were actually performing jazz or "contemporary music." Their attendance followed a complaint from a festivalgoer whose doctor "had warned it was 'psychologically inadvisable' for him to listen to anything that could be mistaken for mere contemporary music."

His complaint against the organisers, who refused to return his money, was duly registered and will be passed on to a judge.

"The gentleman said this was not jazz and that he wanted his money back," said the festival director, Ricardo Checa.

"He didn't get his money. After all, he knew exactly what group he was going to see, as their names were on the festival programme.

He added: "The question of what constitutes jazz and what does not is obviously a subjective one, but not everything is New Orleans funeral music.

"Larry Ochs plays contemporary, creative jazz. He is a fine musician and very well-renowned."

Spanish fan calls police over saxophone band who were just not jazzy enough

Crafter Tonky has produced a lovely xmas line of laser-cut and die-cut felt: sunny-side-up egg placemats, olive-and-pimento coaster, and alphabet wall hangings and necklaces.

Tonky's Holiday FELT-stival (Thanks, Tonky!)

National Geographic rounds up its favorite archaeological finds of 2009, from vampire corpses to pirate booty:

8. Blackbeard Pirate Relics, Gold Found
A sword guard, tiny gold pieces, and a coin are among newfound artifacts from a shipwreck off North Carolina--shown in exclusive pictures. The discoveries, announced in March, add to evidence that the ship belonged to the pirate Blackbeard.

7. World War II "Samurai Subs" Found--Carried Aircraft
Two advanced Japanese "samurai subs" were found off Pearl Harbor in February and announced in November--including a stealth aircraft-carrying submarine and a supersleek vessel engineered for utmost speed.

Top Ten Archaeology Finds: Most Viewed of 2009 (Thanks, Marilyn!)

The upcoming issue of Nintendo Power revealed that Capcom is working on Mega Man 10 for a release via WiiWare sometime in the future. "Like Mega Man 9 (released for WiiWare in 2008), Mega Man 10 remains true to the series's roots with 8-bit-style graphics and sound, and tried-and-true Mega Man gameplay." According to the early look at Nintendo Power's article, the game may include an easier difficulty mode, likely inspired by complaints that the previous game was too hard. It also previews one of the new bosses, who is apparently called "Sheep Man." Make of that what you wool.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SF author Mary Robinette Kowal sez,

Once upon a time, someone starting a new publishing house would either have a personal fortune or would seek large private investors. Crowdsourced fundraising allows the masses to chip in for projects they believe in.

Tu Publishing is worth getting behind. It is a small, independent multicultural SFF press for children and YA and they are raising money for startup costs right now. I've had the opportunity to correspond with Stacy Whitman, the force behind it, in my role as SFWA secretary and she's sharp, knows the industry and is passionate about YA and SF.

The catch is that the fundraiser only has four more days to go and they only have 40% of their total.

"Fantasy and science fiction, mystery and historical fiction--these genres draw in readers like no other. Yet it is in these genres that readers of color might feel most like an outsider, given that such a large percentage features white characters (when they feature human characters). It is the goal of Tu Publishing to publish genre books for children and young adults that fill this gap in the market--and more importantly, this gap in serving our readers. By focusing on multicultural settings and characters in fantastic stories, we also open up worlds to all readers."

Tu Publishing: a small, independent multicultural SFF press for children and YA (Thanks, Mary!)

Via Blaise we learn of a musician in Saskatoon, who heard that Google was going to be adding Saskatoon to its "Street View" efforts, and decided he was going to figure out a way to promote himself via Google Street View. He bought a sign with his band's name, and kept it in his car. He told all his friends to be on the lookout for the Google Street View car, and to alert him, but he actually spotted it himself while eating lunch one day. After following it around for a bit, he figured out the pattern the car was driving in, and set himself up a little ways ahead and was photographed. He dashed ahead again, and got photographed a second time as well: But here's the thing: his face is blurred out due to pressure from various governments to "protect" people's privacy from Google Street View. So this raises an obvious question: what do you do if you want to be seen on Google Street View, rather than blurred, and your government has taken away that ability?

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Praise be, this holy calf was born a week ago on a Sterling, Connecticut farm owned by Brad Davis. From WFSB:

Davis said, "Well, I think it's maybe a message from up above. I'm not sure. We're still trying to figure that out."

Megan Johnson of Sterling said, "Well I wasn't surprised. I wasn't surprised at all because the dairy industry has needed a miracle for a long time and this is it. I think it's divine intervention, personally. I'm in the breeding business and I know about reproduction and genetics and I don't think this could happen again in a million cows."

"Cow Born With Divine Symbol" (via Fortean Times)

Avant garde music mag The Wire posted a fascinating compilation of computer music pieces, each programed with a Tweet-length piece of code. The 22 artists from around the world wrote their pieces in SuperCollider, an open source programming language for audio synthesis that many laptop musicians use to compose live during performances. The compilation is titled "Supercollider 140" and is released under a Creative Commons license. From The Wire:

It started as a curious project, when live coding enthusiast and Toplap member Dan Stowell started tweeting tiny snippets of musical code using SuperCollider. Pleasantly surprised by the reaction, and "not wanting this stuff to vanish into the ether" he has recently collated the best pieces into a special download for The Wire's online readership...

Many of these pieces are actually generative, so if you re-run the source code (the track titles) you get a new piece of music.

SuperCollider 140 (SourceForge, via @chris_carter_)

"Best of Twitter tunes album released" (New Scientist)

eldavojohn writes "A new initiative is being piloted where 'green' patents are given special priority over other patents in the backlogged system. David Kappos (Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO) said, 'Every day an important green tech innovation is hindered from coming to market is another day we harm our planet and another day lost in creating green businesses and green jobs. Applications in this pilot program will see a significant savings in pendency, which will help bring green innovations to market more quickly.' The details of how you qualify for a green patent (PDF) are available with patent blogs offering opinions on this initiative."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"FedEx Joins the Internet of Things With SenseAware" - Richard writes -

International courier giant Fedex has just released a new tracking device and web service for packages. Called SenseAware, it keeps tabs on the temperature, location and other vital signs of a package - including when it's opened and whether it was tampered with along the way. Fedex is running a trial period of about a year with 50 health care and life science companies, for tracking delivery of surgery kits, medical equipment - and even live organs. We spoke with FedEx head of innovation, Mark Hamm, about SenseAware and how Fedex is tapping into the emerging trend called Internet of Things.

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There's lots of buzz going around concerning the news that an AT&T exec has admitted that to deal with the companies own inability to build out a strong cellular network (angering tons of iPhone users), that it's planning to put in place caps and charge more to high-end users. Of course, this is pure bait and switch. The company sold people on an unlimited data plan, failed to invest in its network, and pushed high bandwidth apps on people. And, of course, it's worth noting that while they now want to charge high bandwidth users more, they don't say anything about the low bandwidth users. No one gets a discount. AT&T is making a ton of money off of the iPhone. It could have -- and should have -- invested more of that into network upgrades. Now it's blaming it's most loyal users -- the same ones who it recommended high bandwidth apps to -- and expecting that everyone will be happy with that? AT&T may discover that people start looking for other alternatives if they dump the unlimited data offering that they sold people.

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The YouTube video "3000 Toothpicks In My Hair (new hair style)" is a response to "2222 Toothpicks in my Beard," and a bit more noodling around yields even more like this. I am both be-creeped and delighted. (thanks, Antinous!)

For half a century, my friend Loren Coleman has been obsessed with unusual animals, many of which may not exist at all. Loren is a cryptozoologist. He studies hidden and unknown animals, and the mythology, urban legends, folklore, and culture surrounding them. Sure, Bigfoot, Yeti, and Nessie are the big names, but there are countless others -- the Jersey Devil, the Thunderbird, the Mothman, to name just a few. Loren has written more than a dozen books on the subject and posts daily at the Cryptomundo blog, all from a firmly Fortean perspective. Does he actually "believe" in Sasquatch or sea monsters? No, because belief, he has said, "belongs in the providence of religion." He just tries to keep an open mind in order to accept or deny evidence based on examination and investigation.

Over the years, Loren has amassed an astounding collection of cryptozoology curiosities, artifacts, and oddities, from toys, beer cans, and t-shirts emblazoned with one cryptid or another to scientific specimens, plaster casts, and movie props. His collection, called the International Cryptozoology Museum, has been housed in part of his Portland, Maine home and viewable only by appointment only. (Two years ago, he gave BBtv a tour.) But all the while, Loren has dreamt of opening up his wunderkammer to the public. Last month, he finally made that happen. The International Cryptozoology Museum opened in a permanent space in downtown Portland, Maine, sharing space with a fantastically-fringe bookstore Green Hand Books. It has regular hours and admission is just $5. Loren answered my questions in between giving the steady stream of visitors personal tours of the collection.

More photos and interview after the jump!

Congratulations, buddy! You've been working towards the opening of a public museum for decades. Why is it so important to you?

March 2010 marks my 50th year anniversary of actively pursuing cryptozoological subjects, through doing fieldwork, going on expeditions, working on archival/library research, writing books, blogs, and articles, and appearing in documentaries, on television programs, and on radio shows. It also signals five decades of collecting original cryptozoology items, copies of cryptid casts, expedition artifacts, various forms of other evidence, popular cultural items, tourist souvenirs, cryptid sculptures, original cz art, plus written material, books, and photographs on this subject.

I learned in this field, early on, that people come and go, and other people specialized, usually in Bigfoot only, at the exclusive of other cryptids. Nevertheless, I remained focussed on preserving the history of the general field, holistically, comprehensively, and globally. The human element has been as important, sometimes as the cryptids, to me. The hunters, seekers, and searchers, as well as the artists, writers, and "experts," have their own history to add to the story. Therefore, I tried to buy, gather, collect, and receive items, papers, and books out of respect to the work that people who have pursued these unknowns, these as yet to be discovered species, deserved.

With limited resources, passion, and forward movement, with the stories of research archives destroyed, lost, and stolen being difficult to hear, I collected and collected.

Several years ago, I decided that the next major phase of my cryptozoological life would be creating a museum for these materials. I first decided to do this as an elaborate cabinet-of-curiosities museum in my home, six years ago. Researchers, television producers, filmmakers, and some members of the general public found it. But having anything in your home, especially with my rising popularity, causes some tension with the personal and private parts of your life. The eventual goal, to go public outside my home, was always there. But I had to start somewhere.

Why is it so important? I feel cryptozoology, as a science, is significant to the history of zoology, and I wanted to attempt to be a focal point where people would know that items of historical value could be preserved. While a few Bigfoot museums exist on the West Coast, no one had provided a scientific, educational, and preservation resource just for cryptozoology. Since I had the advantage of gathering so much for so many years, it seemed a natural outgrowth of my appreciation for this field and its researchers.

I needed to go public to extend that educational mission, and assist in the reduction of the fiscal burden of having a static collection of such volume.

What's your vision for the Museum?

In the International Cryptozoology Museum brochure, I have placed the official mission statement. Here it is:

Mission Statement

Cryptozoology is the study of hidden or unknown animals. These are usually larger zoological species that, to-date, remain unverified by science, such as Yetis, Bigfoot, Lake Monsters, and Sea Serpents, as well as hundreds of other yet-to-be-found animals (cryptids) worldwide, but which compelling ethnoknown evidence has been collected for their possible existence. It also encompasses the study of animals of recent discovery, such as the coelacanth, okapi, megamouth shark, giant panda, and mountain gorilla.

The International Cryptozoology Museum™ has as its primary mission to educate, inform, and share cryptozoological evidence, artifacs, replicas, and popular cultural items with the general public, media, students, scholars, and cryptozoologists from around the world.

This museum is the result of five decades of field research, travel, and dedication to gathering representative materials, native art, footcasts, hair samples, models, and other cryptozoological samples. Its director, Loren Coleman has moved his cabinet-of-curiosities collection featured on various cable programs on History, Travel, Animal Planet, SciFi, CNN, Fox, Discovery, ABC, NBC, CBS, BBC, CBC, and Boing Boing TV channels to downtown Portland, Maine. He and a dedicated battery of volunteers have opened the museum to the public on November 1, 2009, the world's first cryptozoology museum.

Realizing that cryptozoology is a "gateway science" for many young people's future interest in biology, zoology, wildlife studies, paleoanthropology, paleontology, anthropology, ecology, marine sciences, and conservation, the museum will fill a needed educational, scientific, and natural history niche in learning.

You built it and the crowds have been coming. What's the big attraction?

The attraction appears to be on many levels. Cryptozoology, in general, is very popular.

I am extremely visible in various media, via my books, my Cryptomundo blog postings, and my appearances on currently running and reruns of television programs ("MonsterQuest," "Lost Tapes," "In Search Of," "Weird Travels," and individual documentary television special interviews).

The International Cryptozoology Museum is the first and only museum of its kind in the world.

The museum's unique collection has writers talking about their own personal favorites, such as the Crookston Bigfoot, the P.T. Barnum FeeJee Mermaid, the Furbearing Trout, the Civil War Thunderbird, and other specific items, thus making the articles "personal." As opposed to the media treatments just being about Bigfoot, the diversity, fun, artistic variety of cryptozoology, the authentic and the fakes, the factual and the awful, are part of it, without judgement, as learning tools. For the media, it's a positive story, with a happy ending, about a topic you do not see covered everyday.

Portland, Maine's thriving art community within its rebounding Arts District is a center of some attention and great support in Maine and among artists. The museum sits at the edge of the Arts District, two blocks from the Portland Museum of Art and Children's Museum, next to Longfellow Square, which supports bookstores, cafes, and performing arts centers. It is a thriving, Bohemian, creative location that is exploding with new energy.

The museum opened in conjunction with Strange Maine Gazette newsletter editor and Strange Maine blogger Michelle Souliere's dream of having her own new business, a bookstore. This happened at the front of this location, and she invited me into the space, to share her rent. It was the right opportunity at the right time, and the media has loved this part of the story too. Michelle named it the Green Hand Bookshop, and she specializes in supernatural fiction, mysteries, Fortean books, pulp fiction from the 1930s-1950s, colorful paperbacks for the 1950s-1970s, and related material.

So far, what is the most popular piece on display?

The Crookston Bigfoot, created by Wisconsin taxidermist-artist Curtis Christensen in 1990, is by far the most popular piece that is part of the museum. It is located right inside the front door to the bookstore, serves as the first attraction in the museum, and everyone comes in to look at it, take their photos with it behind them, or just stare at it. The left front store window is the museum's, has a display in it, and the Bigfoot is sitting right behind that.

At the back of the Green Hand Bookshop is the ICM, so people have to walk through the bookstore, pay their five dollars, and then enter the back hallway and room that is the jam-packed museum.

The Bigfoot pulls many people into the bookstore who never even come into the museum, but, well, I guess that's my gift to the world. The Bigfoot gets everyone smiling and thinking. I like that. Some people take it seriously, some folks laugh and don't. That's okay. It gets a reaction that provokes thought, no matter what.

The Bigfoot itself is enormous, being 8 feet tall (8.5 tall with the stand) and about 400 pounds. It is a beautiful piece of taxidermy sculpture.

Were there any pieces that you just couldn't bear to let leave your house?

This museum is a beginning. I would like more room someday, but I had to start out smaller than desired to see if I can make the rent and expenses. I have kept the admission price at the lowest possible amount, five dollars for all ages, no discounts. One-year, five-year, and lifetime memberships are available. These first few year's prices are low so no one would feel mislead by the collection's size, which actually has multiple layers of exhibitions in 500 square feet, with two display cases in the middle of the room, shelves all around, items up front and in the hall, and more. For example, there are 15 ft ceilings in the space and the 11 ft long Fox-TV "Freakly Links Thunderbird" is displayed from on high. On another wall is the almost six foot long lifesize coelacanth.

Also, although I have some wonderful docents, headed by Jeff Meuse, my coordinator, and his wife Jessica, I am the only one who knows the collection, thoroughly, so I am conducting all the tours. I'm hoping to bring some of the volunteers up to speed in 2010, for I have talks to give and more documentary appearances to make. For example, I'm giving a keynote on "Bigfoot in Film" late in January 2010, and delivering a talk at a Mystery Cats Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, in March, then going on to Loch Ness.

Did I leave any pieces in my home that need to be in a future museum? Well, in a roundabout way, yes: My 40,000 volume cryptozoology library, which I would like to make part of a larger museum someday.

I would configure the museum differently, also, if I had more space for more display cases that would allow me to exhibit smaller, more valuable figurines I do not have now displayed due to the possible loss of them.

But, in general, I'm very happy with what I have been able to share with the general public in this initial offering. Also, I plan to rotate new exhibitions in, all the time, and actually change around an entire shelf subsection once every three months or so, to keep displays alive, so to speak.

What's your favorite piece in the collection?

My favorite piece, other than the sentiment value I attach to specific items that were gifted to me by my sons, is the original flag from the 1960 World Book expedition headed by Sir Edmund Hillary and Marlin Perkins, who were allegedly in search of the Abominable Snowman. (They were also spying on Tibet, but that's another story, altogether.) This flag, one of the first items I ever collected, parallels my entry into the field in 1960, and that the first cryptids that aroused my questions, curiosity, and interest were the Yetis.

Is there a particular artifact out there that you've always wanted to display but haven't been able to acquire?

I feel that within the present cultural milieu of what is recognized as significant in the history of cryptozoology and what I know is still out there someplace, I would like to obtain the Minnesota Iceman for the museum. Even though I understand it is a fake or copied model, I would be delighted with it. It has gone on and off the market for over $10,000 in the past, and I have always wanted to acquire it for my collection.

Bates College Museum of Art attempted to merely rent it for the 2006 Cryptozoology traveling exhibition curated by Mark Bessire and Rachael Smith, but I understood there were issues with transportation and insurance costs being much too high. I certainly know it would be a great centerpiece for the future expanded ICM, and that would be my reachable dream.

Bigfoot in a museum would be the great, but probably unattainable, Holy Grail.

dcblogs writes "IBM has released a new mainframe server that doesn't include its z/OS operating system. This Enterprise Linux Server line supports Red Hat or Suse. The system is packaged with mainframe management and virtualization tools. Its minimum processor configuration are two specialty mainframe processors designed for Linux. IBM wants to go after large multicore x86 Linux servers and believes the $212,000 entry price can do it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ever have the perfect shot framed with the exception that the sun is in the wrong place? Not to worry — you can always fake it. Back in MAKE Volume 13, in the Upload imaging section, Charles Platt taught us the quick and easy way to make your own sun. Check it out.

Make Your Own Sun
Create dramatic back-lighting effects with image editing software.
By Charles Platt

Taking photographs directly into the sun can create dramatic effects, but typically causes lens flare and tends to disrupt the color-balance circuitry in a digital camera (above left). How can we keep the highlights on the rocks and the backlighting of the cactus spines, while eliminating solar effects and restoring the blue sky? The technique described here won't salvage any pictures that you've taken already, but it will help you to avoid the problem in the future.

Step 1: Block the real sun.
When you're taking the picture, hide the sun, simply by sticking your fingers into the frame.

Step 2: Erase your hand.
After taking the picture, open it with a photo-editing application and replace the fingers with blue sky, using the Clone tool followed by the Gaussian Blur filter (in Photoshop) or any other technique that creates a smooth result. If you're on a budget you may find that Photoshop LE is affordable, especially on eBay.

The foreground looks unreal without any source of light, so with the next step let's make our own sun, which we can keep under control so that it doesn't ruin the picture.

Step 3: Insert a fake sun.
If you have Photoshop, use the Marquee tool to select the upper two-thirds of the sky, and use the Feather option to soften the edges of your selection. Now go to Filter → Render → Lens Flare. A little flare will help to make the picture look realistic.

Step 4: Adjust the brightness.
Make a circular selection, centered on the fake sun, and feather the edges a lot. Increase the brightness of this area. You can make repeated selections of different sizes and adjust their brightness until everything looks right.

Some will say this is cheating, but old-school photographers used all kinds of fakery with an enlarger in a darkroom. The difference is that digital processing is quicker, cheaper, easier, and a lot more fun.

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Frustrated by recent run-ins with her homeowners association over her inability to pay dues, 45-year old Sheila Jones of Indian Harbour Beach, Florida spray-painted this message on the side of her house: "Hitler would be a welcome neighbor here. Stop the harassment to my family."

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines — including Google — do retain this information for some time... we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act..." —Google CEO Eric Schmidt, in 2009. Here's Bruce Schneier's response, from 2006.

By now, you've probably heard that a team from MIT won the DARPA balloon challenge, whereby DARPA put 10 red balloons in the air around the country and wanted to see what people could do to find all 10 balloons. The rules were pretty loose, and the team at MIT took all of nine hours or so to locate all ten balloons, through an interesting "crowdsourcing" method. They basically quickly set themselves up as a clearinghouse of information, and made it easily shareable across different social networking platforms, and employed something of an affiliate program to encourage people to get their friends to sign up with the MIT team as well. If you signed up people who helped find the balloons, you got some of the prize money according to your friend network, and so on down through the social pyramid. The team claims that what was most important was the recursive nature of the pyramid, which gave people incentive to participate, even if they knew they couldn't find the balloons.

While some other DARPA challenges, like the autonomous vehicle challenge (to get a totally driverless vehicle to drive a few hundred miles with no help), are cool but seem limited in terms of application outside of the core area it was built for, this one actually does seem to hold a lot of useful lessons that can be picked up on right away, and which can be applied across a lot of different business, policy, IT, public good and many other areas. Some of the key elements:

• Recognize that there's power in numbers: Recognize that for certain projects, you need a lot of different minds (and eyes) working on things, and that certain tasks shouldn't just be done by "the one best" individual.
• Make it easy for more people to participate: Once you realize that you need a lot of people, you need to make it easy for them to participate.
• Give people multiple reasons to participate: Different people have different motivations. Some people just want to belong to a successful project or a leading team to bask in the glow. Others need additional types of incentive. The MIT team offered up monetary compensation in addition to recognition for participation.
• Give people a reason to get others involved: Sort of a corollary to recognizing the power in numbers, the MIT team worked hard to give people incentive not just to participate and to promote their participation, but also to recruit others to the team as well. This even made it so those who couldn't help finding the balloons directly could still participate in better finding the people who could find the balloons.
• Align incentives properly: Make sure that everyone is driving towards the same goal, and that the incentives work on top of one another to all push towards that same goal.
• Look beyond your immediate "group": One of the coolest things I thought about the MIT group was that there was nothing in there that limited it to MIT or the folks at MIT. They immediately recognized that it made the most sense to reach out to folks beyond their immediate circle, which is what helped them get the people they needed involved quickly.

Now, a lot of these may sound obvious, but it's often important to remind yourself of these basic concepts, and it's impressive to see how well (and how fast) these worked in the case of the MIT balloon team. I could see these lessons being applied in a lot of other areas as well. There is a separate issue that the team hasn't discussed yet, but promises to eventually: which is that it also had to deal with a number of bogus entries -- including at least some from a competing team trying to throw the MIT team off the scent. Finding out how they got around such problems would also be quite interesting in terms of better managing these sorts of group efforts.

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"Low Rising" is the lovely new single from The Swell Season, aka Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová from the film Once. The song comes from their latest album, Strict Joy. Interestingly, the video was directed by Sam Beam, who is better known for his musical recordings under the name Iron & Wine. I wonder if Beam was referencing Bad Luck Shleprock by having the rain falling just on their heads. Probably not, but it's still fun to think so. I had the opportunity to interview Glen and Mar before their recent Oakland, California concert. Stay tuned for more on that amazing experience, including a special performance for BB Video.

This gorgeous wasp sculpture, c.1980s by artist S. Allen, is for sale at Seattle's Great Stuff shop. It's 24" (h) x 34" (d) x 38" (w). The price is $4,500. "Centered around an industrial light bulb and hundreds of typewriter and printer parts, car door handles, sprockets and springs all assembled with fine-gauge wire; wings made from reclaimed 1/8" acrylic sheeting." Wasp Sculpture (Thanks, Michael-Anne Rauback!)

Looking to take a break from tinkering on your latest project this weekend? Here are some fine maker events to check out, from The Maker Events Calendar. Wish your event was on the list? Add it to the calendar!

Coming up this week:

RjDj: New software release party!
New York, NY
Friday, Dec 11, 2009, 7pm - 10pm

Dallas Embedded Workshop Meeting
Richardson, TX
Friday, Dec 11, 2009, 6pm - 8pm

Hacky Crafty Holidays @HackPGH
Pittsburgh, PA
Friday, Dec 11, 2009, 7pm - 10pm

Introduction to the AVR Micro Controller @Hive 76
Philadelphia, PA
Saturday, Dec 12, 2009, 5pm - 8pm

Bicycle Frame Welding - Beginning TIG @Willoughby and Baltic
Somerville, MA
Saturday, Dec 12 and Sunday, Dec 13, 2009, 10am - 4pm

Visible Storage Celebration Weekend
Mountain View, CA
Saturday, Dec 12 and Sunday, Dec 13, 2009

Arduino 102: Sensors and Relays @NYC Resistor
Brooklyn, NY
Sunday, Dec 13, 2009, 1pm - 4pm

Introduction to Electronics Workshop @Metrix Create:Space
Seattle, WA
Sunday, Dec 13, 2009, 2pm - 4:30pm

Crystal Radio Building Workshop @Bug Labs
New York, NY
Wednesday, Dec 16, 2009, 5:45pm - 7:30pm

Start planning for:

ComBots Cup
San Mateo, CA
Saturday, Dec 19, 2009 - Sunday, Dec 20, 2009, 2pm - 7pm

ITP Winter Show
New York, NY
Sunday, Dec 20, 2009, 2pm - 6pm and Monday, Dec 21, 2009, 5pm - 9pm

Classroom Arduino for Teachers @Willoughby and Baltic
Somerville, MA
Monday, Dec 28 - Wednesday, Dec 30, 2009, 10am - 4pm

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I don't know about you, but I've got multiple cookie exchange parties lined up in the coming weeks. If you're on the same page and need a clever idea or two, the NotSoHumblePie cooking blog has several great science-themed cookies, sure to make geeks, dorks and nerds smile.

Petri dish cookies are pictured above, but there's also:

• Chocolate Atoms
• Gel Electrophoresis Squares
• An Almost-Complete Periodic Table
• Lab Mice (which I think would be great with little cinnamon candies for eyes)
• Gingerbread Scientists

Heavens, they're tasty! And educational!

(Aha! Pharyngula is apparently the reason half my friend list was emailing me about these today.)

Here's a competitor in the 6th Robo-One Gate dance competition, held in Tokyo in November 2009. I wonder if the rules require the robots to look like scary cyborg schoolgirls?

Aspiritech, a Chicago based non-profit company, has launched a program to train high-functioning autistic people as testers for software development companies. The company says autistics have a talent for spotting imperfections, and thrive on predictable, monotonous work. Aspiritech is not the first company to explore the idea of treating this handicap as a resource. Specialisterne, a Danish company founded in 2004, also trains autistics. They hire their workforce out as hourly consultants to do data entry, assembly line jobs and work that many would find tedious and repetitive.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.