EagleHasLanded writes "Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman doesn't talk to journalists. Actually, he doesn't talk to anyone anymore. So we'll have to settle for insights via his biographer, Masha Gessen, who, strangely enough, has never talked to him either. But she has spoken with just about everyone who has ever had any significant interaction with Perelman, and the result is the book Perfect Rigor, which more than adequately explains why Perelman has gone into self-imposed exile, and why he probably won't collect the million dollars he won by solving the Poincare Conjecture."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here are my favorite articles from CRAFT this week!

Modernist Gingerbread Houses

Chocolate Chestnut Mousse Trifle

AXM Paper Space Scale Models

How-To: Make Paper Snowflakes

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Hugh Pickens writes "She was at sea for 221 days, alone, often in dangerous places, and usually out of touch. Most of the time she was out of contact underwater, moving slowly up and down to depths of 600 feet, safe from ships, nets, and storms. Her predecessor had disappeared on a similar trip, probably killed by a shark. 'She was a hero,' says Rutgers University oceanographer Scott Glenn after retrieving Scarlet Knight, the 7-foot-9-inch submersible robot from the stormy Atlantic off western Spain. An engineer working for the company that made the submersible said, 'We think this will just be a precursor, like Lindbergh's trip across the Atlantic. In a decade we think it will be commonplace to have roving fleets of these gliders making transoceanic trips.' The people responsible for building, funding, and flying Scarlet hope the end of the robot's successful voyage will mark a new beginning in ocean and climate research. From its position at each surfacing — when the glider surfaced and called home via an Iridium telephone parked in its tail — researchers could calculate the net effect of currents deep and shallow. After surface currents were measured, the scientists could then make inferences about what was happening deeper in the water column. Scarlet called home to upload data to researchers three times a day. 'When we have hundreds of them, or thousands of them, it will revolutionize how we can observe the oceans,' says Jerry L. Miller, a senior policy analyst at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, who accompanied the research team to Spain."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Make: Online has been chosen as a nominee for All My Faves' best sites of 2009. Vote for us!

And congrats to all the Make: Online team for this, and to all of you who visit and contribute to the site.

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Fans of Japanese culture and of tattoo art will find much to enjoy in this large format photobook exploring the diversity of Japan's tattoo scene.

Tattoo in Japan is divided into four chapters dedicated to different geographic regions: Tokyo, Chubu, Kyoto, and Osaka. Each area is known for a distinct style of ink art. They are presented here in rich color images accompanied by essays on the history of tattoo art in this country, and its contemporary expression.

The book profiles traditional tebori artists (and the rituals of respect that surround them), along with street shop inkers (for whom Western musical influences like punk and rockabilly reign).

After the jump, an exclusive Boing Boing image gallery of favorite photos from the book.

In Japan, the choice to adorn your body with ink is not without stigma: for instance, you're not allowed to enter a public bath (onsen) in Japan if you have tattoos. Boing Boing's resident Japan expert Lisa Katayama blogged earlier about a book on a yakuza boss' daughter and her tattoos over at Tokyomango. For the woman whose life was the subject of that book, tattoos were a way to reconcile her difficult childhood experiences with a self-determined identity. That same melding of history, culture, and individual spirit also manifests throughout Tattoo in Japan.

The volume contains some 250 photographs, on more than 300 pages, and weighs nearly seven pounds. It ends with notes on how and where one might go about getting a really nice tat in Japan, and by the time you reach the end, you'll be tempted. My coveted review copy will be occupying prime real estate on the living room table, right next to a related title also published by Edition Reuss -- Black Tattoo Art: Modern Expressions of the Tribal.

Tattoo in Japan: Amazon Link | Publisher website (Thanks, Marisa, images courtesy Edition Reuss)

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pmdubs writes "Following up on our earlier discussion, Michael Freedman updates us on experience with dubious DMCA takedown notices. As a result of the publicity his initial post received, the Video Protection Alliance has dropped Nexicon, the company to which they had outsourced infringement detection. In this case, while there may be little legal recourse to issuing invalid DMCA notices, the threat of bad press seems to have reigned in highly questionable practices."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Former New York AG Eliot Spitzer, in a NYT op-ed on what should be done with the emails backlogged on AIG's servers: "Before releasing its regulatory clutches, the government should insist that the company immediately make these materials public. By putting the evidence online, the government could establish a new form of 'open source' investigation."

Cambodia will deport 20 refugees of Uighur minority descent back to China, where human rights groups say they may be tortured or executed upon return. Hundreds of Uighurs were detained by Chinese authorities after a civil uprising, with official reports that 17 have been sentenced to death, but independent reports point to widespread use of torture extrajudicial killings, and grave human rights violations. (via Oxblood)

The US public radio program Science Friday recently produced an interesting episode about the benefits and perils of collecting data from cellphones and other mobile electronic devices. That data could aid research in many different fields, but the personal privacy implications of mobile data mining are worrisome. (via Oxblood)

Edition Reuss recently released Black Tattoo Art: Modern Expressions of the Tribal, a photographic homage to a particular genre of skin art. The book is curated by Marisa Kakoulas (lawyer, writer, circus lady, and blogger.) Above and after the jump, Boing Boing's exclusive peek at some of the hundreds of striking, full-page images you'll find inside.

The 536-page hardcover includes work by tattoo artists from Borneo, Argentina, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Europe and North America. The book weighs nearly ten pounds, and the binding is stitched with silver embossing. It's fat, heavy, and gorgeous.

"There has never before been a book on this style of tattooing in English," Marisa told Boing Boing over email. "The style is called 'blackwork,' where the artists are limited to one color and so they have to stretch their imagination in terms of design elements to create original works, rather than having a palette of colors and shading techniques to chose from as in other styles of tattooing."

Some of the photos we selected to share on Boing Boing also include the use of a single additional color.

Black Tattoo Art examines how indigenous tattooing has evolved over the years, beginning with a history section, then each of the styles that originate in tribal arts.

Lots more photos from the book after the jump. NSFW-ish warning: one of them is a human hiney.

I've seen a lot of black tats on friends' bodies in my time, but the 'Art Brut' chapter was new to me. "Popularized in France and Belgium, this style takes street art and harmonizes those aesthetics with the body -- a key element in tribal tattooing," explained Marisa. "It's a completely new tattoo style that has never been curated into any volume before until now."

Interviews in the book include Leo Zulueta, the "godfather of tribal tattooing," who popularized the NeoTribal tattoo movement. Another interesting profile in this book: Peter Schachner, who was imprisoned in Thailand in the early 1990s. There, he learned the hand-craft of Thai tattooing from fellow inmates during four years spent at Lard Yao prison.

The book also devotes an entire chapter to the use of stippling techniques, which resemble pointillism.

If you have tats like this, or know and love someone who does, I can think of no finer holiday gift. Except maybe more tats.

Amazon Link / Publisher's Link. Photographers include Sean Toussaint, Lars Krutak and Craig Burton (Images courtesy Edition Reuss)

Photo of people having a massive snowball fight last night in NYC's Times Square, by James Sims. #snOMG!

jammag writes "A veteran developer looks back — in irritation — at those times he had to work late and his unskilled manager stayed too, just to look over his shoulder and add worry and fret to the process. Now, that same developer is a manager himself — and recently stayed late to ride herd over late-working developers. 'And guess what? Yep, I hadn't coded in years and never in the language he had to work with.' Yet now he understood: his own butt was on the line, so he was staying put. Still, does it really help developers to have management hovering on a late evening, even if the boss handles pizza delivery?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week, the US Homeland Security department, Department of State, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Security Agency released 162 pages of intelligence oversight reporting, in response to a FOIA lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The reports provide new information on intelligence activities conducted under the Bush administration which are now believed to have been unlawful. According to reports, groups subjected to this improper intelligence-gathering include the Nation of Islam.

Related NYT piece, and here's a related LAT piece. Comprehensive information and document copies are here at EFF.org. The ACLU filed a related action, details on that here.

How can my two weeks of guest boinging be over already? I was just starting to get my blog on, and now it's time to bail. Thanks to Rob, and big big thanks to Xeni. I'll drop one last excerpt of the book on my way out the door. The Year Before The Flood replays the last year the city of New Orleans was whole, 2004-05. As such, it's about the way time passes in the city. (My previous book, The World that Made New Orleans, was about the unique space of the "Crescent City"; constrained from expanding by the swamp, New Orleans was dense and urban from early on.)

The party schedule gets intense. I write elsewhere in the book that New Orleans is "ruled by the year-long cyclical rhythm of festivals, saints' days, parties, and holidays. To relax in between, and to pay for everything, you have a job. It's a relief to go back to work after a big weekend." There's always another Sunday parade coming up. The whole year is modulated by the crescendo toward Mardi Gras, but then come what I heard a WWOZ announcer refer to as "the high holy days between Mardi Gras and Jazzfest."

It's something of a cliché that the past is always present in New Orleans. I used to think that was an overly romantic notion, even as I could feel its truth. Then I learned that cultural historians have a word for this: chronotope, which refers (among other things) to a community's concept of time.

Late in my writing project, I read a book that unexpectedly helped me get a handle on how time passes in New Orleans: Jan Assmann's The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharoahs, a cultural history that for the first time made the contours of ancient Egyptian history comprehensible to me. Come to think of it, it might not seem so surprising that Nilotic civilization should shed light on the Mississippi delta if you've been through Mardi Gras.

After reading Jan Assmann, I starting thinking about New Orleans in terms of cyclical time versus linear time. By that I mean: linear time is the time history takes place in, that progression of numbered years that's about to get to 2010. It's the scale of Christian philosophy, where there is a beginning, middle, and end. But cyclical time, in which each year is the same as the last, is pagan, and local; it's the time myth takes place in. And here's where I'm going with this: cyclical time relies on an elaborate schedule of festivals associated with the calendar to reinforce its timelessness, creating a rhythm that propels the year.

This excerpt from The Year Before The Flood samples the mythical year-wheel of New Orleans at the point known as the Ponderosa Stomp. (Note: in 2005 the Stomp took place in April, between the two weekends of Jazzfest, but in 2010 it will break out of its spot in the calendar rhythm, moving to an as-yet-undetermined date in the fall. Another note: the Mid-City Rock 'n' Bowl, seen above as it was in April 2005, re-opened after the flood but subsequently moved to a new location at 3000 Carrollton.)

Thanking you kindly, I remain Postmamboistically yours. We now join the 2005 Ponderosa Stomp in progress...

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The fourth annual Ponderosa Stomp took place at the Mid-City Rock 'n' Bowl, a two-level bowling alley that shared a strip mall with Family Beauty Supply and Thrift City in a low-lying part of town. With a bandstand on the second floor, as well as a short-order kitchen and a bar, you could bowl, dance zydeco, eat an alligator po'boy, and drink beer all at the same time. In an overwhelming two nights going from five p.m. to five a.m. each night, on the main upstairs stage and another simultaneous one downstairs, the Ponderosa Stomp presented an astonishing array of still-surviving sexagenarian-or-more legends of the regional first-generation rock 'n' roll scene, including swamp-pop, old-school New Orleans R & B, and rockabilly, with no small presence from Memphis.

The downstairs area boasted perhaps the densest nicotine cloud I had encountered in New Orleans. The music was so much fun that I tried to ignore the air quality, but I wound up taking frequent oxygen breaks to join the considerable party of fellow airheads accumulating out in the Rock 'n' Bowl's spacious parking lot. Which is how I found myself talking to a tall, skinny, bearded guy who turned out to be Paul Cebar, the Milwaukee singer-songwriter. He comes down every year for Jazzfest. We hit it off immediately.

We checked out Dale Hawkins (Mr. "Suzie Q") from Shreveport. There was Ace Cannon--how great is that?--down from Memphis with a darn good little combo. The surviving members of Elvis's band--Scotty Moore on guitar and D. J. Fontana on drums--played the early Elvis repertoire, with Memphian Billy Swan ("I Can Help") filling in on the Elvis parts, though it's understood with a thankless task like this that the voice is only a cipher. The real point was to watch Scotty Moore, the guy who played the guitar part on "Blue Moon of Kentucky," cut #1 on A Date with Elvis, playing the part live in front of me. Behind him, D. J. Fontana showed you exactly what kind of drummer Elvis had: a solid one.

Up till now, the music hadn't even been very loud. But that changed. Cebar and I were hanging out downstairs when Link Wraycame on. One of the most influential electric guitarists for the later loud-rock generation, Link Wray and his Ray Men had an all-time hit in 1958 with the crunchy, distorted, proto-psychedelic guitar instrumental "Rumble." Wray was about to turn seventy-six, making him the oldest bona fide punk I'd ever seen. He wore a leather jacket, looking like a '50s juvenile delinquent turned denture-wearer. His only facial expression was a scowl. Part Shawnee Indian, he'd been living in Denmark for twenty years or so, and he sounded for all the world like a loud European art-guitar band, though of course the influence ran the other way round. Most people tune their guitars silently now with electronic tuners, right? Not Link Wray. He had his much younger second guitarist--his son, it turned out--play through the amp while he tuned out loud to it, with the amp wide open. He didn't even get it close to in tune before he kicked off the first number, which was a timbral excursion into the harmonics generated by thick-gauge metal strings at high volumes.

"He's like your ornery grandpa who won't turn his amp down!" laughed Cebar, who by now I seemed to have known for years. Despite rocking out, Wray brought his domestic drama onto the stage with him in the form of his chunky, longhaired Danish wife, Olive, who stood onstage with him, bizarrely holding a plastic tambourine in the air and whacking it amusically against the heel of her hand the entire time, like something out of This Is Spinal Tap.She had been doing this since 1997, when she debuted as a tambourine nonplayer alongside Wray on The Conan O'Brien Show.

I'd known "Rumble" forever, but I'd never seen Link Wray play before. Nor would I again; he died a little more than six months later. He went out distorting.

I hadn't had this much fun in . . . well, maybe since Mardi Gras. Upstairs in front of the bowling lanes, I saw Classie Ballou, from Baton Rouge and now living in Waco, playing a Gibson SG just like mine. I'd never heard of him before, but I recognized the riff he played when he started doing "Just a Little Bit," It was the guitar lick the Beatles used at the beginning of "Birthday." Classie Ballou was the guy who came up with that lick, playing with Rosco Gordon on "Just a Little Bit." Herbert Hardesty, best known as Fats Domino's longtime sax man, was onstage with him.

And up came Rudy Ray Moore, better known as Dolemite, the dirty-talking comedian from party records and, later, blaxploitation films. He came onstage looking like a pimp from one of the lesser southern cities, resplendent in rhinestone-studded shades and ceremonially encrusted walking cane.

( Photo: Dolemite at the Stomp )

"I ain't gonna get no pussy tonight!" he shouted. Now there's an icebreaker for you.

"You know why I ain't gonna get no pussy tonight?" Pause. He pointed out a guy in the front of the audience. "Cause you done ate it all up!"

He sold Dolemite souvenir walking canes from the stage for ten bucks. You know I bought one, handed the money right up to the man onstage. It's been a personal power object for me ever since.

And then it was time for the surprise hit of the evening.

"How do you perform solo when all your hits are based on overdubbing your own voice in octaves?" asked Cebar, still laughing, as I cracked open another beer. Brenton Wood went for the higher octave when he came out to sing "The Oogum Boogum Song," "Gimme Little Sign," and "Baby, You Got It."

I had always thought of Brenton Wood as being from Los Angeles, but no, it turns out he was born in Shreveport before moving to Compton as a child--the LA-to-L.A. migration that so many New Orleanians made during the years of white supremacy. He was great, plus he played his album tracks. Brenton Wood's hits were on an independent label called Double Shot, which had only one other hit group, and a one-hit wonder at that: Count Five. Presumably because the label owned the publishing, Brenton Wood recorded a version of the Count Five's hit.

Which is how it happened that a sixty-three-year-old black man from Shreveport in a brown pinstriped zoot suit came to sing "Psychotic Reaction" in a bowling alley in New Orleans, complete with double-time freakout break. On guitar was Alex Chilton, a Memphian living in New Orleans, whose brush with permanent-rotation supermarket immortality was singing "The Letter" and "Cry Like a Baby" with the Boxtops), and on keyboards was Mr. Quintron. Cebar and I were howling. When Brenton Wood finally left the stage, we shouted, "Do 'Oogum Boogum' again! Do 'Oogum Boogum' again!" in unison at the top of our voices.

He did "Oogum Boogum" again.

I was getting hoarse. My bronchs were on fire from the intense tobacco haze. Lady Bo was starting up--Bo Diddley's female second guitarist for many years, she was the first woman to be regularly hired as a musician by a major rock 'n' roll group--but I was done.

I pointed the Saturn back to the Irish Channel and wheezed my way home.

I would have to miss Blowfly.

introspekt.i writes "Palm is building upon the Mozilla Bespin project to deliver an IDE for the Palm Pre entirely in the web browser. Apps can be developed on the server and then downloaded and deployed locally. It is an interesting tool, especially given that WebOS is so web-centric. This tool comes as a supplement to the existing development tools for Eclipse and the command line released by Palm earlier this year. The project is open to anyone who registers as a Palm developer, which is free to do."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Etsy seller VictorianDollhouse makes insanely detailed laser-cut balsabirchwood dollhouses to assemble at home. A little custom paintwork and some judicious modding would yield an epic haunted mansion, too.

Victorian Doll House Birch plywood Laser Cut Kit 2 (via Wonderland)

The Wall Street Journal reports that The National Enquirer acquired photos of Tiger Woods meeting another woman as long ago as 2007. It also claims that they won an unprecedented interview with Woods for sister publication Men's Fitness in return for not publishing them. Owner American Media denies it.

Hardware hacking goddess Jeri Ellsworth has been busy building her own pinball machine from scratch and with subassemblies she's cannibalized from other machines. On day three of the build, she runs through what she's done so far. Can't wait to see the finished machine.

Home Brew Pinball Machine - Day 3

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Salim sez, "If only I had some of these amazing cut-away diagram wall-charts of nuclear reactors when I was a kid. BibliOdyssey, curator of the Internet's finest collection of archival artwork has found this amazing trove of Atomic-era goodness. Please enjoy these fascinating diagrams of a bunch of 1970s nuclear reactors."

These images are derived from pdf files [UNM CSEL Nuclear Engineering Wall Chart Collection] hosted on New Mexico's Digital Collections portal for the Centennial Science and Engineering Library at the University of New Mexico on behalf of NEI. Something a bit different, to be sure.

Nuclear Reactor Wall Charts (Thanks, Sal!)

Kensai7 writes "Recently, Facebook provided us with some information on their server park. They use about 30,000 servers, and not surprisingly, most of them are running PHP code to generate pages full of social info for their users. As they only say that 'the bulk' is running PHP, let's assume this to be 25,000 of the 30,000. If C++ would have been used instead of PHP, then 22,500 servers could be powered down (assuming a conservative ratio of 10 for the efficiency of C++ versus PHP code), or a reduction of 49,000 tons of CO2 per year. Of course, it is a bit unfair to isolate Facebook here. Their servers are only a tiny fraction of computers deployed world-wide that are interpreting PHP code."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Video by generative video artist Michael Lascarides for "rRan" by Pronto, from their digitally-released album "The Cheetah." (via Mikael Jorgensen)

VValdo writes "As you may recall, the citizens of the US shelled out about $85 billion to bail out AIG and its creditors (Goldman Sachs in particular) last year. But as 80% owners of AIG, we still don't know what happened, exactly. That may change. In a new op-ed piece, former prosecutors (including former NY governor Eliot Spitzer) are calling for the US Treasury to force AIG to release its treasure-trove of emails to the public before allowing AIG to 'break free' of our control. As the prosecutors put it, 'By putting the evidence online, the government could establish a new form of "open source" investigation. Once the documents are available for everyone to inspect, a thousand journalistic flowers can bloom, as reporters, victims and angry citizens have a chance to piece together the story.' Good idea?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that auto enthusiasts across the country are dismayed by the news that General Motors is planning to shut down Saab, the Swedish carmaker it bought two decades ago, after a deal to sell it fell apart. Even with its modest and steadily declining sales, Saab, an acronym for Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget, or Swedish Airplane Company, long stood out as a powerful brand in spite of itself. 'It wasn't designed to be a fashion statement,' says Ron Pinelli, president of Autodata, which tracks industry statistics. 'It was designed to provide transportation under miserable weather conditions.' Many Saab owners consider the brand's glory days to be the 1980s, when Americans began buying cars again after a recession and energy crisis. 'The cars were communicative,' says Pinelli. 'They didn't try to numb the experience like cars do today.' The cars had odd touches and appealed to those who appreciate the unconventional. Swedish engineers assumed drivers would be wearing gloves, so they designed big buttons for the dashboard. Though the cars were compact, with long hoods and short rear ends, there was plenty of headroom inside. Now Saab, a brand that once had one of the clearest identities in the industry, seems headed for extinction just as automakers are searching for more distinctive designs to help set them apart. 'It's a shame that Saab is a victim,' adds Pinelli."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ham Cramwich: $25,000 Of Communications Gear In A $500 Car @ Jalopnik (they've been on a roll lately!)...

Ham radio appears to be more of an addiction than a hobby to the seller of this $500 Dodge. Every surface is covered with $25K in communications equipment for every conceivable band (FM/UHF/HF/VHF/SPACEMAN)

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Darren Ginter writes "I find many aspects of desktop virtualization compelling, with one exception: the cost of the thin clients, which typically exceeds that of a traditional box. I understand all of the benefits of desktop virtualization (and the downsides, thanks) but I'm very hung up on spending more for less. While there are some sub-$200 products out there, they all seem to cut corners (give me non-vaporware that will drive a 22" LCD at full resolution). I can PXE boot a homebrew Atom-based thin client for $130, but I'd prefer to be able to buy something assembled. Am I missing something here?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At Poynter Paul Bradshaw asks a question with an obvious answer.

Paul Bradshaw: In the E-mail Era, Who Owns the Interview?

Obviously the person who wrote the words owns the copyright. Fair use allows the reporter to quote them. I can't imagine a lawyer advising or a court deciding otherwise.

And of course this highlights the fact that a lot of people help reporters and news organizations, without any hope or expectation of compensation. It's funny that none of these people are mentioned in the sad pieces that wonder if the news industry has a future. And no one seems to see an even more interesting question -- in the age of blogs, do we still need reporters? (I think we do, but not as much as we used to.)

Mike Wheeler: "how about embedding links etc in geodata? Each service gets a 1deg X 1deg area of ocean and uses the decimals for numeric metadata"

Brilliant. Wish I had thought of it. A great idea that illustrates how silly this situation is -- where links are treated as an afterthought. Links, which form the foundation of the web, are shortened, made more fragile, meaning removed, the web made slower. If Tim Berners-Lee weren't alive he'd be rolling over in his grave.

But what Mike says is actually slightly practical. Come up with a way to map domains to tiny plots of ocean space (presumably people can't occupy space in the ocean and 2/3 of the planet is covered with water). How many domains would that be? A lot. Can you estimate the actual number? Any help would be appreciated.

Then the numbers to the right of the decimal points would map to URLs on the site, the same way short URLs map to them. Each site would manage its own space. Voila! No need to include URLs in the 140 characters. Goodbye shorteners. Now all you have to do is get the client companies (and that includes twitter.com, the largest client) to go along.

If it weren't so sad it would be funny. Maybe that's why it's so funny.

Come on Twitter -- Make room for the URL as metadata. It's way past too late.

Charlie Stross has a blog post up that tries to make sense of the mobile phone market and where it's going: where Apple, Google, and the cellcos fit in, and what the point of Google's Nexus One may be. "Becoming a pure bandwidth provider is every cellco's nightmare: it levels the playing field and puts them in direct competition with their peers, a competition that can only be won by throwing huge amounts of capital infrastructure at their backbone network. So for the past five years or more, they've been doing their best not to get dragged into a game of beggar-my-neighbor, by expedients such as exclusive handset deals... [Google intends] to turn 3G data service (and subsequently, LTE) into a commodity, like Wi-Fi hotspot service only more widespread and cheaper to get at. They want to get consumers to buy unlocked SIM-free handsets and pick cheap data SIMs. They'd love to move everyone to cheap data SIMs rather than the hideously convoluted legacy voice stacks maintained by the telcos; then they could piggyback Google Voice on it, and ultimately do the Google thing to all your voice messages as well as your email and web access. (This is, needless to say, going to bring them into conflict with Apple. ... Apple are an implicit threat to Google because Google can't slap their ads all over [the App and iTunes stores]. So it's going to end in handbags at dawn... eventually.)"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The publishers of What's Eating You?: Parasites -- The Inside Story were kind enough to send me a copy of this science picture book for young readers. This is exactly the kind of book I loved as a kid, full of gross and interesting facts about the incredible subject of parasites and their life-cycle. The book has loads of great gross-out moments (rabbit fleas leaving behind poo for their babies to feed on when they hatch from eggs) but quickly moves into the bizarre and wonderful ways that parasites manipulate their hosts (heron tapeworms infect stickleback fish, then turn the fish an easy-to-spot orange and cause them to swim to the surface, where the herons can eat them), the best being the Sacculina sea-crab parasite, which "grows tentacles into every single part of the crab's body, even its brain, to control everything it does...It doesn't breed, but rears Sacculina's babies instead...even male crabs."

Wittily illustrated with simple art, and written in a humorous and engaging style, this is a great kids' science book, and would be a wonderful accompaniment to an afternoon spent with a magnifying glass in the park, or online with a search-engine.

What's Eating You?: Parasites -- The Inside Story

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez,

If you've already made your Christmas gifts to EFF and Creative Commons and have a couple of bucks left over? How about buying a gift for the public domain!!

Public.Resource.Org just ordered another 41 titles and spent $560 on some really great FedFlix from the vaults of the National Archive, there is still plenty of great material out there, so we put together an Amazon Wish List. If you see anything you'd like to buy the public domain we'll take your DVD and upload the video to YouTube, the Internet Archive, and to our own rsync/ftp public domain stock footage library. <br clear="all"

Background: these videos were made at US taxpayer expense, and they are in the public domain. However, they aren't distributed for free by the National Archives; instead they're sold through Amazon as a money-maker for the government, which charges you to get access to the stuff you already own and paid for. The Archives get a minuscule amount of money by doing this: $3,273.66 over the past two years! In order to make a measly three grand, the National Archives have closed off the entire USA's access to its video treasures.

Public Domain Videos from the Vaults of the National Archives (Thanks, Carl)

The Pope has created a special (and weirdly incoherent) copyright in his name, image and symbols. This "copyright" appears to prohibit using these words and symbols to denote goods or services ("Pope Secondary School," "Pope Soap," "Pope Burgers"), all of which are covered already under trademark and fraud laws, and need no copyright to protect them.

The statement cited a "great increase of affection and esteem for the person of the Holy Father" in recent years as contributing to a desire to use the Pontiff's name for all manner of educational and cultural institutions, civic groups and foundations.

Due to this demand, the Vatican has felt it necessary to declare that "it alone has the right to ensure the respect due to the Successors of Peter, and therefore, to protect the figure and personal identity of the Pope from the unauthorized use of his name and/or the papal coat of arms for ends and activities which have little or nothing to do with the Catholic Church..."

"Consequently, the use of anything referring directly to the person or office of the Supreme Pontiff... and/or the use of the title 'Pontifical,' must receive previous and express authorization from the Holy See," concluded the message released to the press.

Holy See declares unique copyright on Papal figure (Thanks, Huw)

A team of Chinese architects just unveiled an art installation in Shenzhen that consists of two giant monster footprints in the middle of a public park. They're made of pink rubber and function as a children's play area.

MAD [via Dezeen]

The NY Times has a Bits Blog piece speculating on some of the fallout if the FTC prevails in its anti-competition lawsuit against Intel. The Times picks out two among the 26 remedies proposed by the regulator, and concludes that they add up to Nvidia being able to license x86 technology. This could open up 3-way competition in the market for combined CPU-graphics chips. There is a good deal of circumstantial evidence pointing to the possibility that Nvidia has been working on x86 technology since 2007, including the presence on its employment rolls of more than 70 former Transmeta workers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over at Fun Science Gallery, this English translation of a 2002 article by Giorgio Carboni describing, in great detail, the construction of a beautiful homemade rotating-objective panoramic film camera. It's made of brass and plastic stock. [Thanks, Billy Baque!]

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While exploring NYC late night with my friend Brian ("Hi, I'm Brian and this is my friend Brian") we stumbled into this great late night chess shop, Chess Forum, on 219 Thompson Street. We had a great talk with Chris, who was minding the store at the time. I asked about handmade chess sets, and when Chris showed us this wonderful Nuts and Bolts chess set, I knew I had to shoot some video.

Previously:

Hardware store chessmen
Hardware chess sets

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adeelarshad82 writes "Three library associations have asked the Justice Department to oversee Google's plans to create a massive digital library, so as to prevent excessively high pricing for institutional subscriptions. They said that there was unlikely to be an effective competitor to Google's massive project in the near term. They also asked for academic author representation on the Registry board. Google's plan to digitize millions of books has been criticized by a variety of sources and has recently been shut down in France."

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The Maker Shed robo-elves say:

We still have plenty of of our most popular kits, tools, toys, and books ready to ship. And in fact, we just unloaded a huge truck load of awesome new kits yesterday afternoon. Not only that, check this out: we picked 9 of our MAKE staff favorites and pre-wrapped them in Maker Faire posters (illustrated by eBoy). That's right, a tree-ready Maker Shed gift, wrapped in a Maker Faire poster by a MAKE staff member. It doesn't get any more hands-on than that.

Here's the deal though. We'll guarantee U.S. delivery by Christmas using 2-day shipping if you order by midnight tonight (as in 11:59PM Saturday the 19th). If you really like to live on the edge, we can still guarantee Christmas delivery on U.S. orders placed by 11:59PM Monday night, but you'll have to go with overnight shipping.

And if you're still undecided or you suddenly remember that favorite maker uncle on Christmas Eve, you can buy one of our awesome Maker Shed gift certificates suitable for printing or emailing.

Maker Shed Holiday Guide

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In my Principles of Technology class, we're using Sketchup to design the parts we will make for the Mendocino Motor. Though we'll fabricate the parts with hand and power tools, you can also use SketchUp to make the files needed to cut parts on a mill, MakerBot, ShopBot or other CNC tools.

The Mendocino Motor project appears in the Teachers' Pet Projects section in MAKE, Volume 20, page 79.

Here are some techniques to design parts for the motor:

First get familiar with the SketchUp interface. This is pretty easy; the software is rather intuitive. A good place to start is by making whole shapes with the rectangle and circle tools. Draw a shape, then use the Push/Pull tool to extrude it up or down. You can make a shape on the side of another shape, then pull it out or push it in. Make some shapes. Mouse over the tool icons and you should see the name of the tool in a popup.

You can also do some neat stuff with the Move tool. If you have a cube, draw a line at the midpoints (again, mouse over the lines of your design and watch for the popups). If you pull the line up with the Move tool. This will give you something that looks a lot like a roof of a house on the cube. If you pay attention to the color of the line while you are moving it, you'll see that it takes on the color of the blue axis if you are pulling straight up. This means that you are moving parallel to the Z or vertical axis.

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