For the past 37 years, The International Animated Film Society, ASIFA-Hollywood has produced The Annie Awards. The Annies have grown from a small gathering of "old timers" at the bar of the Sportsman's Lodge to being animation's highest honor, a high profile event widely seen as a precursor to the Oscar picks. This year's Annie honorees include Tim Burton, Bruce Timm and Jeffrey Katzenberg; and the host for the evening is William Shatner. The ceremony takes place at Royce Hall, UCLA on Saturday February 6th.

Hollywood may sometimes seem like a private party without your name on the guest list, but the animation community is totally different. Anyone who loves animation is welcome to attend the Annies, and tickets start at just $25. The event is sure to sell out this year, so order your tickets soon if you plan to attend.

After the jump is a fun little video starring Spongebob Squarepants and voice actor Tom Kenny that screened at last year's Annie Awards... "Spongebob and Tom's Best Day Ever!"

See you at the Annies!

While everyone was focused on the new Kindle app store or the new royalty rates, perhaps a more interesting new thing slipped quietly by: without telling anyone, Amazon is now giving publishers the option to remove DRM from ebooks. It's odd that Amazon wouldn't publicly announce this, but I'm sure it has its own reasons. I doubt many publishers will actually go DRM-free for now, but at least a few can, and I would imagine that will make some Kindle users a lot more comfortable about buying those ebooks. Update: Hmm. In the comments someone points out that another take on this is that it's actually allowing some publishers who didn't use DRM before to use it. That would explain why it wasn't mentioned...

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

This 360-degree video view on the ground in Haiti is one of the more interesting things I've seen CNN do online.

ruphus13 writes "As the pure-play Open Source companies continue to dwindle, Red Hat has thrived through the recession. Its support revenues have grown 20+%, and account for 75+% of its revenues. 'Instead of the traditional strategy of selling expensive proprietary software licenses, as practiced by the Microsofts and Oracles of the world, Red Hat gets the vast majority of its revenues from selling support contracts. In the third quarter of last year, support subscriptions accounted for $164 million of its $194 million in revenue, up 21 percent year-over-year. All 25 of the company's largest support subscribers renewed subscriptions, even despite a higher price tag.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The data nerds at OKCupid cataloged over 7,000 photographs to find out what kinds of profile photos generated the most interest from its members. As expected, men and women should employ different strategies. For instance, it's good for young men with good abs to show off their stomachs, but its creepy for older men to flash their six-pack. For women, cleavage shots are always good, but they're even better for older women than younger women.

There are differences when it comes to smiling and looking at the camera, too:

Now, you're always told to look happy and make eye contact in social situations, but at least for your online dating photo, that's just not optimal advice. For women, a smile isn't strictly better: she actually gets the most messages by flirting directly into the camera, like the center and right-hand subjects above.

Notice that, however, that flirting away from the camera is the single worst attitude a woman can take. Certain social etiquettes apply even online: if you're going to be making eyes at someone, it should be with the person looking at your picture. Men's photos are most effective when they look away from the camera and don't smile.

The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures

Mind Hacks reports that a nail penetrated the shoe of a 29-year-old construction worker, causing great pain. But the hospital workers discovered that the nail had passed harmlessly between his toes.

A builder aged 29 came to the accident and emergency department having jumped down on to a 15 cm nail. As the smallest movement of the nail was painful he was sedated with fentanyl and midazolam. The nail was then pulled out from below. When his boot was removed a miraculous cure appeared to have taken place. Despite entering proximal to the steel toecap the nail had penetrated between the toes: the foot was entirely uninjured.

Mind Hacks says this is related to "somatisation disorder, where physical symptoms appear that aren't explained by tissue damage."

Hard as nails

via Mag.ma / Andrew Baron.

We got this wonderful letter from MAKE subscriber Jim Kelly that we thought we'd share with all of you:

Make: Team,

Issue 21 is, in my opinion, the best issue of MAKE to date. I'm blown away by all the DIY fabrication tools that are now available to the small business or hobbyist. Reading through this issue reminded me of an article in an older issue of MAKE - after a few minutes of digging, I found it. Issue 3, page 44, The Maker's Ultimate Tools by Saul Griffith.

Isn't it amazing how far we've come in less than 5 years!? MAKE Issue 3 (2005) suggests a 3D printer for $25,000, a 3D scanner for $30,000, and a plasma cutter for $10,000! Jump forward five years and we've got the MakerBot (page 46) for under $1000, the DIY 3D Scanner (page 54) for under $100, and the OpenSource plasma cutter called RepTab (page 66) for around $1000.

My son will be 8 years old in 2015. At this rate, he may have access to all of this technology in his classroom. If I have my way, he'll definitely have access to it at home.

MAKE Volume 21 is the Desktop Manufacturing issue, with how-to articles on making three-dimensional parts using inexpensive computer-controlled manufacturing equipment. Both additive (RepRap, CandyFab) and subtractive (Lumenlab Micro CNC) systems are covered. Also in this issue: instructions for making a cigar box guitar, building your own CNC for under $800, running a mini electric bike with a cordless drill, making a magic photo cube, and tons more. If you're a subscriber, you may have your issue in hand already, and can access the Digital Edition. Otherwise, you can pick up MAKE 21 in the Maker Shed or look for it on newsstands near you!

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

Photos of frog design's early tablet prototypes for Apple from the 1980's.

The "Bashful" -- named after the story-book elf in Snow White -- was created alongside the Apple IIe as an extension of the Snow White design language that frog Founder Hartmut Essligner helped create for the company in 1983. Concepts for this early pre-touch tablet included one with an attached keyboard and one with a floppy disk drive and convenient handle for maximum portability. An attached stylus helped the user interact with the screen. One frog/Apple tablet concept also included an attached phone.

From the Archives: frog's Early Apple Tablet

The wonderful Arts and Letters Daily points to an article in Der Spiegel: Did our Neolithic ancestors start to grow crops in pursuit of... beer? Imagine: a hairy Stone Age-r picks up a rotten piece of fruit and munches. "As alcohol entered the bloodstream, the brain started sending out a new message—whatever that was, I want more of it!"

snydeq writes "With a setup ripped right out of a reality show — or, perhaps more fittingly, 'The Shining' — a French-language public broadcasters association will put five journalists in a French farmhouse for five days, giving them no access to newspapers, television, radio, or the Internet, save Facebook and Twitter, to see how much world news they can report. The reporters will report this news on a communal blog. 'Our aim is to show that there are different sources of information and to look at the legitimacy of each of these sources,' said France Inter editor Helene Jouan. 'This experiment will enable us to take a hard look at all the myths that exist about Facebook and Twitter.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When I saw these photos, I thought Erik and Kelly of Homegrown Evolution had started eating grubs. But it turns out these are crosne.

This week I just completed the world's smallest harvest of a root vegetable popularly known as crosne (Stachys affinis). Crosne, also known as Chinese artichoke, chorogi, knotroot and artichoke betony is a member of the mint family that produces a tiny edible tubor. While looking like any other mint plant, the leaves have no smell. The tubers look all too much like the larval form of the Michelin tire mascot and have the taste and texture of a Jerusalem artichoke.

That ain't a bowl full of larvae, it's crosne!

twoyoutubevideosandamotherfuckingcrossfader.com. (via Ehrich)

Back in October, we reported on rumors that the movie studios were so upset with MPAA boss Dan Glickman that many thought he wouldn't make it to the end of his contract. While he had said all the usual stuff about "evil piracy," apparently the studios were upset that he couldn't stop technological progress with the wave of a magic wand, and wanted someone who would attack file sharing even more aggressively. At that time, the MPAA revamped to focus more on content protection -- which is the exact wrong thing to be focused on. They should be focusing on providing increased scarce value that gets people to buy -- but instead, they wanted to focus on building up artificial scarcity that technology (and much of the market) will ignore.

Of course, right after the rumors, Glickman came out and announced that he would be stepping down at the end of his contract in September of 2010. So it seemed like maybe the studios would let him stick around to the end, since it was clear he wasn't coming back. Apparently even that plan has been thrown out the window, as Glickman has now announced that he's leaving as of April 1 in order to take over Refugees International, which seems like a worthy enough cause.

The real question, though, is who is going to take over, and just how much more of a mess of things will they make. One could hope for more enlightened leadership, that actually focuses on adapting to the modern age, but all signs suggest the studios have no interest in doing that any time soon.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

I respect any woman who dresses up like Ernst Blofeld in her wedding announcement. And the rest of the video is pretty awesome, too. (And, no, I do not personally know this couple—though I kind of wish that I did.)

Jeff Wong and Erin Martin Get Married

(Thanks, Wade Kwon!)

An anonymous reader writes "The OMOP Cup is a competition to find new methods for detecting drug side effects. There have been several cases over the last few years where drugs have had issues that haven't been detected for years after they were released. The proliferation of electronic medical records and pharmacy claims provides a large and potentially powerful new data source for faster detection. The problem is that the techniques for doing this on a large scale are immature. The OMOP Cup is trying to help fix that. They've already given out $5,000 for top methods, and there's $15,000 still up for grabs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mikal Hart's original "reverse geocache" puzzle ended up making a big splash when we first posted about it last October. Now Russ Weeks has produced his own version using an Arduino, an HD44780 display, a servo, and an EM406 GPS. Like Mikal's version, Russ's puzzle will only open in one particular location on the surface of the Earth. If it's elsewhere, pushing the button just gives a readout of the linear distance to the location it wants.

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

Is a snow shovel left on the front porch a violation of neighborhood association laws? This email exchange shows what happens when suburbanites stop being polite ... and start getting real.(Thanks, Mark B.!)

For the second time in as many years a student has made a discovery while participating in the Pulsar Search Collaboratory (PSC), a joint program between the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and West Virginia University designed to get students and teachers involved in analyzing data from the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT). This time it was high school sophomore Shay Bloxton who discovered a brand new pulsar. "For Bloxton, the pulsar discovery may be only her first in a scientific career. "Participating in the PSC has definitely encouraged me to pursue my dream of being an astrophysicist," she said, adding that she hopes to attend West Virginia University to study astrophysics. Late last year, another West Virginia student, from South Harrison High School, Lucas Bolyard, discovered a pulsar-like object called a rotating radio transient. His discovery also came through participation in the PSC."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We already spent a bunch of time debunking many of the claims in the IFPI's new "Piracy Bad!!!!" report. But the folks over at TorrentFreak have dug up a bit more info. Apparently the research for the report was put together by Forrester, and the underlying research showed that when it comes to the growth in digital music sales, those who partake of unauthorized file sharing are also the best customers of authorized digital music. No, this is not saying that file sharing automatically leads people to buy, or that all file sharers buy. Obviously, that's not the case. But it does suggest that demonizing those people might not be the smartest thing.

But the IFPI report doesn't mention any of that. Instead, it claims that people file share for one reason and one reason alone: because it's free. If that were the case, though, then why would any of those who partake also buy? And why would they be the industry's best customers for digital sales? It seems like the IFPI should be embracing them to see how it can get them to choose to buy more -- but instead, it totally ignores what its own researchers found, insists that it's just because content is free, and then spends most of the report demonizing its best customers and asking governments of the world to kick those people offline.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

For the second time in as many years a student has made a discovery while participating in the Pulsar Search Collaboratory (PSC), a joint program between the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and West Virginia University designed to get students and teachers involved in analyzing data from the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT). This time it was high school sophomore Shay Bloxton who discovered a brand new pulsar. "For Bloxton, the pulsar discovery may be only her first in a scientific career. "Participating in the PSC has definitely encouraged me to pursue my dream of being an astrophysicist," she said, adding that she hopes to attend West Virginia University to study astrophysics. Late last year, another West Virginia student, from South Harrison High School, Lucas Bolyard, discovered a pulsar-like object called a rotating radio transient. His discovery also came through participation in the PSC."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over the course of this week, you've probably heard at least a little about the controversy surrounding a mistake in the IPCC's 4th Assessment Report from 2007. Short version: The Working Group II section, which covers observed and projected impacts of climate change, states that Himalayan glaciers are "very likely" to disappear by 2035. Glaciologists say that's bogus. And the IPCC report, itself, sources the claim to a position paper put out by the World Wildlife Fund, rather than any peer-reviewed research. The error was first pointed out by scientists within the climate research community. As of yesterday, the IPCC has apologized, and is reviewing how such a sketchily sourced factoid made it into the final report.

So what should you take away from this incident? Two things:

It's a mistake. But mistakes happen, and this really isn't even a big one.

Climate science is science, not a religion. It makes no claim to infallibility. In fact, the whole thing with science, in general, is that it assumes mistakes will happen. Systems like peer review exist to catch those mistakes. Standards, like reproducibility and independent verification, push our knowledge, over time, closer to the truth. The basic facts about climate science—that climate change is happening and that human activities are the most likely cause—don't stand and fall on single sources. They're based on hundreds of peer-reviewed papers that, combined, lead to a robust conclusion. That's different from this claim, which was based on one source, and a flimsy one at that. It shouldn't have made it into the IPCC report. There are some critics who say there are other, similar, mistakes going on in Working Group II. But neither of those things undermines the real science.


It's also worth pointing out that the Himalayan glaciers really are retreating, just not so very fast.

The real problem lies in how the IPCC responded to criticism
While the mistake doesn't undermine the well-sourced facts about climate change, the way it was handled does undermine public confidence in those well-sourced facts. And that's a big problem. A scientist who reviewed the Working Group II report says he spotted the mistake before publication, and was ignored. A scientist who pointed out the mistake after publication, in a report prepared for the Indian government, was publicly criticized as a practitioner of "voodoo science" by IPCC chairman Rajendra K. Pachauri.

It's not OK that it took resounding pressure by the scientific community and the press in order to get this addressed.

Climate scientists have to deal with a whole lot of crap. Most of the time, that crap is about as well-sourced as this glacier claim. So it is, on one level, understandable that some scientists have developed a knee-jerk "circle the wagons" response to criticism. But that response is very, very bad when it starts being applied to any criticism. The Internet can't make us all armchair experts, so we have to rely on the people who really are experts to tell us what's going on—and we have to be able to trust them to self correct. The experts did that here, but they did it in a way that—to the average layman—made it look like they're more interested in being "right" than being accurate. That can't happen when there's so much at stake.

Where'd this all come from? Check out my IPCC Glacier Controversy reading list:

• New York Times: Climate Science Panel Apologizes For Himalayan Error
• Climate Progress: Memo to IPCC
• New Scientist: Debate Heats Up Over IPCC Melting Glaciers Claim
• Brave New Climate: Real Holes In Science
• The Green Skeptic: IPCC Sucker-punches Itself Again
• The New York Times: U.N. Panel's Glacier Warning Criticized as Exaggerated
• Agence France Presse: UN Climate Report: Scientist warned glacier forecast was wrong
• BBC: UN Body Admits Mistake on Himalayan Glaciers
• Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: A Primer on Egregious Errors in IPCC Working Group II on Disasters
• Real Climate: The IPCC Is Not Infallible (Shock!)
• Treehugger: IPCC Reviewing Disputed Glaciers Gone By 2035 Claim ... Will This Now Be Understated, Too?
• NYT Dot Earth Blog: Heat Over Panel's View of Asian Ice
• The New York Times: Glaciers in Retreat
• Thaindian News: Pachauri Calls Indian Govt. Report "Voodoo Science"

Image courtesy Flickr user ricardo.martins, via CC

Josh from imsolidstate built this circuit to answer the age old question,
how much electric current does a truck really use? Actually, he was having trouble with the alternator (electricity generator) on his vehicle, and wasn't sure if he should replace it with a regular one or a high output version, to help power his horse trailer. To figure out what to use, he built this current measuring circuit, which uses a hall effect sensor to measure the current coming from his alternator. After installing it in his vehicle, he used the system to measure how much current was drawn in a variety of situations. Since the trailer didn't appear to draw much power, I can assume he went with a standard alternator. Schematics and source code are available on his website.

I'm guessing that most people don't have a huge need to monitor their alternator like this, however the circuit can be used anywhere you need to measure current. I could see it coming in handy when designing a battery-powered robot or benchtop cnc machine. [via embedds]

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

An anonymous reader writes "Judge Michael Davis has slashed the amount Jammie Thomas-Rassett is said to owe Big Music from almost $2,000,000 to $54,000. 'The need for deterrence cannot justify a $2 million verdict for stealing and illegally distributing 24 songs for the sole purpose of obtaining free music. Moreover, although Plaintiffs were not required to prove their actual damages, statutory damages must still bear some relation to actual damages.' The full decision is also available."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Monday, BB contributor Arthur Goldwag posted a survey of conspiracy theories around the Haiti earthquake, mostly rants about how a US weather weapon disguised as an atmospheric research system in Alaska called HAARP (image above) actually triggered the catastrophe. Now, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez has reportedly jumped on the bandwagon, blaming the earthquake on a test of the "tectonic weapon." From PressTV:

President Chavez said the US was "playing God" by testing devices capable of creating eco-type catastrophes, the Spanish newspaper ABC quoted him as saying.

The outspoken leader had earlier accused the US of occupying Haiti "under the guise of the natural disaster..."

Venezuelan media have reported that the earthquake "may be associated with the project called HAARP, a system that can generate violent and unexpected changes in climate."

HAARP, the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, is a study run in Alaska directed at the occasional reconfiguration of the properties of the Earth's ionosphere to improve satellite communications.

Former US Secretary of Defense William Cohen in 1997 expressed concerned over countries engaging "in eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves."

Chavez says US 'weapon' caused Haiti quake

TEDx is a new series of local, independent, self-organized TED-esque conferences in small group settings. Today is TEDxSoMa in San Francisco. There's a diverse group of smart folks slated to speak for ten minutes each, including Aardvark co-founder Damon Horowitz, Lucas Licensing's Howard Roffman, graphic recording and visualization pioneer David Sibbet, and my dear friend and colleague Marina Gorbis, executive director of Institute for the Future. Yesterday, I got a sneak preview of Marina's presentation, titled "Digital Mirrors," about how our daily lives may be changed by the massive amounts of data about ourselves that will become collected and available through pervasive networks, sensors, and augmented reality. It's a very smart and funny performance piece. (Above is one of her slides.) The program streams live starting in one hour, 1pm PST, and Marina is on at 4:30pm.

TEDxSoMa

"IFTF Executive Director Marina Gorbis to speak today at 4:30 (PST) TEDxSoMa"

I just sent this via email to a Twitter board member.

Thanks for including me on the new Suggested Users List, but I have to ask to be taken off it, for the reasons outlined in this piece.

http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/01/22/twitterRevampsTheSulAddsAT.html

People might think that I held back criticism for Twitter if I got this boost from the company providing the communication platform.

I know this because I've already felt inclined to withhold criticism because getting the approval feels nice.

I imagine it feels good from the other side, to be able to control who gets approval and not. This is why I feel very strongly that you should immediately, as an urgent priority, get a new system in place that returns your company to being a service provider with absolutely zero interest in how your system is used by individuals.

Dave

superapecommando writes "Too many hours spent playing videogames indoors is contributing to a rise in rickets, according to a new study by doctors. Professor Simon Pearce and Dr Tim Cheetham of Newcastle University have written a paper in the British Medical Journal which warns of the rickets uptake – a disease which sufferers get when deficient in Vitamin D. The study boils down to the fact that as more people play videogames indoors they don't get enough sunlight and this has meant the hospitals are now having to combat a disease that was last in the papers around the time Queen Victoria was on the throne." At least the kids are eating enough snacks with iodized salt that we don't have to worry about goiters.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

digitalPhant0m writes to tell us that IBM researchers have set a new world record for areal data density on linear magnetic tape weighing it at around 29.5 billion bits per square inch. This achievement is roughly 39 times the density of current industry standard magnetic tape. "To achieve this feat, IBM Research has developed several new critical technologies, and for the past three years worked closely with FUJIFILM to optimize its next-generation dual-coat magnetic tape based on barium ferrite (BaFe) particles. [...] These new technologies are estimated to enable cartridge capacities that could hold up to 35 trillion bytes (terabytes) of uncompressed data**. This is about 44 times*** the capacity of today's IBM LTO Generation 4 cartridge. A capacity of 35 terabytes of data is sufficient to store the text of 35 million books, which would require 248 miles (399 km) of bookshelves."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last weekend, I had a great time hosting The Boing Boing Cartoon Circus. This Saturday afternoon, I'll be presenting an all new show... Adventures in Music.

A lot of college students volunteer at the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive. I always ask what sort of music they listen to. Usually, they admit that they've never really listened to any music earlier than the Beatles. This is a shame, because as good as current music is, the history of music from the first half of the 20th century holds many more treasures. Animators in particular need to be aware of that history. Music has been an integral part of animation since before the era of the talkies. Animation timing is built on a musical beat. Music isn't just fun... it's important.

Late last year, I created a series of screenings for Woodbury University to expose their students to the best of 20th century music. Saturday afternoon, I'll share a lot of that great stuff with you right here on Boing Boing. Don't miss Adventures in Music!

The Welcome to MAKE bundle is perfect for any of our online readers that haven't subscribed to the print edition of MAKE Magazine. For a limited time we are offering the Welcome to MAKE bundle at an amazing discount of $48. That's 46% off the price if you purchased these items individually.

The Welcome to MAKE bundle includes:

• A Year subscription to MAKE Magazine $34.95 value
• The Best of MAKE $34.99 value
• A Maker's Notebook $19.99 value

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Maker Shed Store | Digg this!

This comes as no surprise, but is still somewhat disturbing. A lawsuit the EFF was involved in over the federal government's warrantless wiretapping program has been dismissed by the court because it "was not a 'particularized injury' but instead a 'generalized grievance.'" This same issue has been raised before. If the government illegally spies on people, how can you prove it? You can't go to court unless you prove that you were harmed by the action, but as long as the government keeps it secret then you can't know. That's why the one case where the gov't accidentally revealed some info is so important. But, still, in this other case, the EFF plans to appeal noting the ridiculousness of the situation:

"The alarming upshot of the court's decision is that so long as the government spies on all Americans, the courts have no power to review or halt such mass surveillance even when it is flatly illegal and unconstitutional," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

You know what English sounds like to people who cannot understand it, but have you heard how people from abroad make fun of English, as a foreign accent in their own languages? Exhibit A: The star of 1970s childrens' TV classic The Magic Roundabout is better known to English speakers as Dougal. But in the original French scripts he was Pollux, a stupendously British dog. A thousand years of mutual resentment are summed up in every cheeky round of "Oh Oh Oh!" that graces this lovely pop song based on the character.

Need a datacenter rack but don't have one? Never fear, someone figured out that the Ikea "Lack" side tables work perfectly with 19" hardware like Ethernet switches.

The LackRack is the ultimate, low-cost, high shinyness solution for your modular datacenter-in-the-living-room. Featuring the LACK (side table) from Ikea, the LackRack is an easy-to-implement, exact-fit datacenter building block. It's a little known fact that we have seen Google engineers tinker with Lack tables since way back in 2009.

The tongue-in-cheek LackRack website offers a number of tips and hints, some of which are (seem?) serious.

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

Neuroscientists think they may have found a scientific method to identify post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) using a brain imaging method call magnetoencephalography (MEG). In the test study the scientists studied 74 vets with PTSD and 250 civilians without and were able to spot the PTSD sufferers with 90% accuracy. "MEG machines are a fast, sensitive and accurate way to measure electric activity in the brain. Whereas CT scans and MRIs record brain signals every few seconds, MEGs can do it by the millisecond, catching biomarkers and brain activity that the other tests inevitably miss. The study could be a breakthrough for the military, who've been scrambling to address a surge in post-traumatic symptoms among newly returning vets. Right now, troops are evaluated by mental health experts, but diagnosis is a crap-shoot: symptoms can take years to show up, and vary from person to person, even among those exposed to the same traumas. The Pentagon's already been pushing for more objective, systematized diagnosis tools, like portable at-home sleep monitors and genetic testing to detect PTSD vulnerability. They've even launched a program to create stress-mitigating pharmaceuticals."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It looks like the judge who oversaw the Jammie Thomas-Rasset case realized that the original $1.92 million award was just ridiculous -- even if the Justice Department supported it. Instead, the court has reduced the award to $2,250 per song, saying that seems much more reasonable:

The need for deterrence cannot justify a $2 million verdict for stealing and illegally distributing 24 songs for the sole purpose of obtaining free music. Moreover, although Plaintiffs were not required to prove their actual damages, statutory damages must still bear some relation to actual damages

While I question the use of "stealing" here, and still think that $2,250 seems pretty high (even the judge admits that if he weren't reducing the amount from the jury and had been able to set the amount originally, he probably would have gone even lower), this case had all sorts of problems from the start -- with tremendous evidence (well beyond just an IP address) that Jammie was, in fact, doing a fair amount of file sharing. Her defense and attempted reasoning were weak and not at all helpful. This seems like a case where she would be better off paying this off (somehow) and moving on.

It's now in the hands of the record labels if they'll accept this or if they want to have a new trial concerning damages. Again, for them, this might be a situation where they're best off accepting it and moving on. The original $80,000 damages got the labels a ton of bad press, with even the musicians whose music was shared speaking out against the case and other musicians arguing it was a reason to disband the RIAA.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

FiReaNGeL writes to tell us that recent observation of slime mold could eventually lead the way to improved tech like better computer and communications networks. "This revelation comes after a team of Japanese and British researchers observed that the slime mold connected itself to scattered food sources in a design that was nearly identical to Tokyo's rail system. Atsushi Tero from Hokkaido University in Japan, along with colleagues elsewhere in Japan and the United Kingdom, placed oat flakes on a wet surface in locations that corresponded to the cities surrounding Tokyo, and allowed the Physarum polycephalum mold to grow outwards from the center. They watched the slime mold self-organize, spread out, and form a network that was comparable in efficiency, reliability, and cost to the real-world infrastructure of Tokyo's train network."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Frits Stam developed this patch of grass with embedded conductive fibers and fiber optics. I think it'd go well in a Wonderland-type interactive art installation. [via Fashioning Technology]

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

brothke writes "The fact that President Barack Obama has over 7 million Facebook fans, and First Lady Michelle Obama over 650,000 fans, are confirmation that social media has come of age. That is a far cry from former President Bush's comment in 2006 that he used the Google . While it is relatively easy for the President to get millions of followers, the challenge for businesses of all sizes is how to use social media to get fans and followers, and use them to drive business." Read below for the rest of Ben's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ron Mueck is my favorite contemporary sculptor. His massive, hyperreal figures are obsessively detailed, down to every pore and wrinkle. A new exhibition of Mueck's work opens today at Australia's National Gallery of Victoria International. From the museum:

Often naked and suspended in states of self-consciousness, introspection or deep contemplation, his figures present both emotional and physical states of exposure. As viewers we experience a level of unease that is borne of a voyeuristic awkwardness, as though we have invaded some kind of personal space. However, we also identify with the human condition these poignant moments express. Astounding in their apparent realism and compelling in their ability to invite interaction Ron Mueck's works have earned him a singular place as the creator of some of the most evocative sculptures of our time.

Ron Mueck image gallery at LIFE

If you've been living under a pop-cultural rock the past couple of weeks, you might have missed the "Pants on the Ground" meme, birthed on American Idol, that's been going around. Basically, there was some Idol contestant, "General" Larry Platt who performed a song he "wrote" himself called "Pants on the Ground." It's awful in that "wow, this is going to be an internet meme" kind of way... and the Idol crew milked it for all it was worth. Not only are lots of people recording their own versions of it, Platt is appearing everywhere. However, this is a "mine, mine, mine" society, and Rose M. Welch alerts us to the news that Platt is complaining that he hasn't received a dime from everyone using the song, and he's lawyering up to try to fix that.

How ridiculous is this? The guy just got a ton of publicity and has made his name and his song known around the world. You don't cash in by going back and demanding cash -- you cash in by doing something new for money. He shouldn't be hiring a lawyer, but a business manager. If people had to pay for every use of his song originally, no one would even know who he is.

Separately, the link above claims that "Platt never copyrighted the song," but that's not right. Platt automatically gets a copyright on the song once it's been set in fixed form in some manner. So if he wrote it down somewhere or recorded it or something, he has the copyright. What they probably mean is that he didn't register the copyright, which would limit his ability to do anything about it. Plus, I would imagine that the lawyers at Fox and American Idol made sure he signed over all sorts of rights before performing that song on the air....

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Resting by the basement window on an abandoned house near where I live, this jar of Frito Cheese Dip remained for several months. Each time I'd drive by, its continued presence would become just a little more unsettling. I took this shot a few weeks ago, thinking I might post about it. Today, however, it was finally gone. Except for the lid.

Unequivocal writes "Spammers hiding behind a WHOIS privacy service have been found in violation of CAN-SPAM. It probably won't stop other spammers from hiding (what can?), but at least it adds another arrow in the legal quiver for skewering the bottom feeders. Quoting from the article: 'A recent decision by the Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has determined that using WHOIS privacy on domains may be considered "material falsification" under federal law... Although the ruling does not make use of WHOIS privacy illegal, it does serve as a clear message from the court that coupling the use of privacy services with intentional spamming will likely result in a violation of the CAN-SPAM act. This is an important decision that members of the domain community should refer to prior to utilizing a privacy shield.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Three Holiday Inn locations in the UK are offering a human bed-warming service: "If requested, a willing staff-member at two of the chain's London hotels and one in the northern English city of Manchester will dress in an all-in-one fleece sleeper suit before slipping between the sheets." (thanks, Antinous)

Anyone who suggests that we might fix the atmospheric carbon problem just by recycling carbon dioxide from the air and turning it into, say, plastic, probably hasn't run the numbers: the 3% human contribution to annual global carbon dioxide emissions is 23 billion metric tons, whereas annual global plastics production amounts to only 91 million metric tons. Even if the necessary technology were practical, in other words, the entire annual global human plastics demand would consume less than 1% of the entire annual global human carbon dioxide surplus.

Still, every little bit helps, and this copper-based catalyst recently developed by Elisabeth Bouwman and co-workers at Leiden University in the Netherlands represents a vast improvement over previous atmospheric carbon-dioxide-fixing processes. Most of these are poisoned by oxygen, which means that you can't just pump air into the reactor without removing the oxygen first. Bouwman's catalyst, however, reacts with carbon dioxide but not oxygen, producing oxalate, which is a useful feedstock for the manufacture of methyl glycolate and other organic compounds. And while Bouwman's material is not a "true" catalyst in that it actually forms a compound with carbon dioxide and has to be regenerated in a second reaction, the regeneration step can be done electrochemically with remarkably little energy.

Here's the abstract of Bouwman's recent paper in Science, and here's an audio interview with Bouwman from the Science podcast.

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

Following the report earlier this week that the FBI regularly broke the ECPA law, in obtaining information from telcos without going through the proper process (and, in some cases using just a post it note!), some interesting details from the full report have come to light. The two key ones? First, "the Obama administration issued a secret rule almost two weeks ago saying it was legal for the FBI to have skirted federal privacy protections." And, second, the original idea to use these bogus "exigent letters" didn't come from the FBI, but from an AT&T employee. We noted in the original report that no one seemed to be placing any blame on the telcos for allowing this, and why they're clearly abusing the law, in giving out such info without the proper rules being followed, seems like a big question:

The telecom employees were supposed to be responding to National Security Letters, which are essentially FBI-issued subpoenas. But those Patriot Act powers say the target must be part of an open investigation and that a supervisor has to approve it. While they require some paperwork, FBI agents have been issuing about 40,000 such NSLs a year.

But an AT&T employee provided the unit with a way around some of those requirements. The employee introduced them to so-called 'exigent letters.' Those letters, first used immediately following 9/11, asked for information by saying that the request was an emergency and that prosecutors were preparing a grand jury subpoena. The letter falsely promised that the subpoena, which gives the telecoms legal immunity, would be delivered later, the report said.

What's more, the report noted that the cozy relationship between the bureau and the telecoms made it hard to differentiate between the FBI and the nation's phone companies.

"The FBI's use of exigent letters became so casual, routine and unsupervised that employees of all three communication service providers told us that they -- the company employees-- sometimes generated the exigent letters for CAU personnel to sign and return," the inspector general reported.

In fact, one AT&T employee even created a short cut on his desktop to a form letter that he could print out for a requesting FBI agent to sign.

Even that became too much. Agents would request "sneak peeks," where they'd ask if it was worth their time to file a request on a given phone number, the inspector general noted. The telecom agents complied. Soon it graduated to numbers on Post-it notes, in e-mails or just oral requests.

No wonder the telcos were so adamant about getting immunity on the warrantless wiretapping. It appears that the issue of telcos ignoring the rules when it came to your privacy goes pretty deep.

As for Obama issuing a rule saying that breaking the law is legal... how does that work? The president doesn't get to just declare something legal, especially when it clearly violates both the letter and intent of the law.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

cyclone96 writes "Internet access on the International Space Station went live this morning. The crew now has full browsing capability via a special LAN and the Ku-band data link on the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite network, as described in the NASA press release. Flight Engineer T. J. Creamer used the access to post the first tweet from orbit about 7 hours ago. Previous astronaut tweets had been posted by a third party on the ground via email."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's been a year since Canada's National Film Board -- a publicly funded body charged with promoting the cause of Canadian filmmaking -- put its archives online in embeddable, streamable wrappers. A year later, they're calling it a success, and they've released a TON of crunchy stats to prove it.

Since the beginning, our philosophy has been to try to be open, transparent and accessible wherever we could. Not only does that mean making our films free to the public - but it also means opening the way we work. Using open source software, sharing code that we develop and participating in conversation wherever you want to participate.

Part of this "opening the NFB", also means sharing our statistics. We want filmmakers (and the film industry in general) and the Canadian public to see these stats and possibly benefit from them.

Here they are...

Total Film Views on NFB.ca (Jan 2009-Jan 2010)

* 3.7 million total online film views since we launched a year ago
* 2.2 million online film views in Canada (59% of views)
* 1.5 million views International (not including Canada) on the web
* Total international views: 1.45 million views
* Total views: 3 768 628

One year after putting NFB films online - Here are the stats... (via Michael Geist)

Another interesting sound project which made its public debut at Handmade Music Austin - the SimSam sample rate cruncher designed by Dann Green of 4ms Pedals.

Unveiled at the beginner's class at Handmade Music Austin #4 (Jan 2010), the SimSam is a "sample-rate cruncher" that's glitchy as all get-out, but only costs about $8 in parts (including pcb and battery snap). It's an effect with an input and output jack; and it's a noise-maker since a jumper shorts the output back into the input when nothing is plugged into the input jack. We built 28 SimSam's in a couple hours at the workshop... heh heh.. thats a lot of messed up sounds...

Schematic, layout and code available @ 4ms Projects.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!

netbuzz writes "Eighty percent of US federal agencies — including the Department of Homeland Security — have missed a deadline to deploy DNS Security Extensions, a new authentication mechanism designed to prevent hackers from hijacking Web traffic. The deadline that whooshed by was Dec. 31, 2009. Experts disagree as to whether this level of deployment represents a failure or reasonable progress toward meeting a mandate set by the Office of Management and Budget in the summer of 2008. OMB officials declined to say why the agency hasn't enforced the DNSSEC deadline for executive branch departments."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

netbuzz writes "Eighty percent US federal agencies — including the Department of Homeland Security — have missed a deadline to deploy DNS Security Extensions, a new authentication mechanism designed to prevent hackers from hijacking Web traffic. The deadline that whooshed by was Dec. 31, 2009. Experts disagree as to whether this level of deployment represents a failure or reasonable progress toward meeting a mandate set by the Office of Management and Budget in the summer of 2008. OMB officials declined to say why the agency hasn't enforced the DNSSEC deadline for executive branch departments."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the issues we've had with the use of IP addresses as "proof" of file sharing, is that there can be many users and many computers coming from a single IP address -- and lots of times we've seen parents sued for actions of their kids or even their kids' friends. Now, under any common sense approach to the world, you would think that this would be seen as a problem. Occasionally, we've heard entertainment industry execs say that it doesn't matter, and it should be the responsibility of whoever pays for the connection to make sure it's not misused. For the most part, though, our judicial system realizes that you don't blame the wrong party.

Apparently, over in Germany they feel differently. A woman, whose son apparently used file sharing programs despite the mother's explicit ban on such things, has been held responsible for the son's file sharing. The court said that simply banning her children from file sharing was not enough -- she should have actively monitored the connection. That seems like an incredible stretch -- and even makes you wonder if the judge has children.

Either way, I can see no reasonable argument for blaming a third party for someone else's actions, and it's even worse when that third party specifically told the others not to take part in the activity.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

First a few necessary recitals.

1. I've written about the Suggested Users List many times.

2. It was a terrible idea and poorly implemented, because...

3. It created two levels of users, insiders and outsiders, illustrating and propogating the bad attitude of Silicon Valley tech companies relative to their users.

4. It screwed with the integrity of every person and organization that was on the list, or who hoped to be on it. Would they be more likely to praise Twitter, and less likely to criticize them, if they're on it or want to be on it? I think it was pretty obvious at times that they used it as a tool to control the press.

5. It destroyed the value of the one potential metric for authority, follower count. For people on the list, the number became meaningless. The argument that no one pays attention to follower counts is easily disproved by countless press reports where number of followers is cited as evidence of popularity and authority.

6. It also screwed with the integrity of people who aren't on the list. Tim O'Reilly accused both Scoble and myself of criticizing the list because we weren't on it. So cynical! (And wrong.) He had lots of company in making that accusation, btw.

7. Further, recommendation engines are not and never have been rocket science. There are a number of developers, without access to all the information that twitter.com has, who've done a much better job than the SUL or its new incarnation (more on that in a bit).

8. Facebook has a recommendation engine which is eerily good at predicting who I'll be interested in hooking up with. It tends to spot people who I've decided deliberately not to befriend. Annoying, but proves the point that this is one thing that algorithms do better than humans.

9. Probably the worst thing about the SUL is that it rubs our nose in the fact that we're slaves to corporate media, that our presence here is owned and controlled by a company that hasn't established any boundaries of what it will and won't do, no matter what effect that might have on editorial content. People who assume that Twitter won't do something because it's unfair, unwise, or hurts the integrity of the users or the platform, are making a baseless assumption. They've proven otherwise, through the horrific example of the Suggested User List.

Okay, so yesterday they released a new version of the SUL, and it's missing one of the most disturbing things about the SUL -- that it created a random list of 20 elite Twitterers for each new user to follow. How new users find followers now is again a mystery -- but none of my business. I totally don't care about that. That really is between Twitter and the new users. But the damage is done. Follower-count is a meaningless metric. There are two levels of users. Maybe the integrity issue is gone, but who knows what the next iteration of the SUL will look like. They haven't said.

Now, the twist. They put me on the new list. Since I found out I was there, I haven't posted anything on my Twitter account, because that's a terrible place to discuss something like this, and until I decide what to do I want to be very clear about whether I've gained from being on the new list. I can't benefit from it if I don't post. Also there are still too many unknowns about the new setup. There's been no communication from an officer of the company about what this means and what the future holds.

I'm going to stop right there for now. If you have any thoughts please post them here. As usual, personal comments will be moderated. You can use your own blog for that. Stick to the topics in this post, and no name-calling. Thanks.

Update: Twittercism calls it the "Same old SUL with a different coat of paint."

KentuckyFC writes "The vast majority of motors that power our planes, trains, and automobiles are heat engines. They rely on the rapid expansion of gas as it heats up to generate movement. But attempts to shrink them by any significant amount have mostly ended in failure. Today, the smallest heat engines have a volume of some 10^7 cubic micrometers. Now group of Dutch engineers has built a heat engine that is seven orders of magnitude smaller than this. The engine consists of a piezoelectric bar that expands and contracts in the normal piezoelectric way. However it also heats up and cools at the same time causing a thermal expansion and contraction, which lags the piezoelectric displacement. By carefully choosing the frequency of the driving AC current, the Dutch team found a resonant effect in which the thermal expansion and contraction amplifies the mechanical motion, making it a true heat engine. Operating the thermodynamic cycle in reverse turns the device into a heat pump or refrigerator. The total volume of the device is just 0.5 cubic micrometres."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the coolest things about being a Dad is getting the chance to pass on the books I loved as a kid to my daughter. I was bummed to discover that my favorite larval maker book, Why I Built the Boogle House, was long out of print and not suited to review here (though I do have my much-loved copy for the kid!), but that sorrow was dispelled by my discovery of a pocket-sized board-book edition of Al Perkins and Eric Gurney's 1969 classic, Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb.

Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb is a great, rhythmic poem about monkeys playing drums, with an infectious, earwormy refrain: "Dum ditty dum ditty dum dum dum." It opens with one monkey drumming on his drum with one thumb, and progresses until "millions of monkeys" are drumming on drums (dum ditty dum ditty dum dum dum).

It's not (just) the refrain that makes this book so great -- it's the monkeys. Illustrator Eric Gurney's drumming monkeys are a motley collection of comic beatnik simians, sporting sweater-vests, giant muttonchops, goatees, and big golden rings. Each one bears an expression of such incredible cool and mischief that I could look at them all day.

I'm clearly not the only one. When Poesy wakes up every morning, I go into her room and change her diaper and say, "Did you have a nice sleep, Poesy? What did you dream about?" Every morning this week, she's said the same thing: "Monkeys drumming on drums!"

The pocket-sized edition is great for trips, and the rhythm is a perfect distraction for grumpy car-rides, impatient restaurant meals, and interminable waits for the bus. And unlike many of the kids' books and videos that Poesy wants to play 200 times in a row, I don't get tired of this one, either.

Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb

An anonymous reader writes "A lawsuit that accused Microsoft of misleading consumers to download and install an update for Windows Genuine Advantage under the guise that it was critical security update will go forward, but not as a class action. A federal judge has refused to certify the lawsuit as a class action, which would have meant that anyone who owned a Windows XP PC in mid-2006 could join the case without having to hire an attorney. As Windows XP was easily the most popular operating system at the time, the ruling means Redmond has managed to avoid hundreds of millions in potential damages."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Perhaps if you've been living under a pop culture rock for the past few years, you were unaware of the popular hobby of creating subtitled videos of an angry Hitler reacting to something going on in the world today, using a clip from the German movie Downfall. For example, here is Hitler responding to NBC's snafu with late night television programming with Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien: While there have been reports of takedown notices sent on these videos, apparently the director of the original movie quite likes them. davebarnes alerts us to a short interview with Oliver Hirschbiegel, the director of the movie, and he's a fan of the clips:

"Someone sends me the links every time there's a new one," says the director, on the phone from Vienna. "I think I've seen about 145 of them! Of course, I have to put the sound down when I watch. Many times the lines are so funny, I laugh out loud, and I'm laughing about the scene that I staged myself! You couldn't get a better compliment as a director." Some of Hirschbiegel's favorites are the one where Hitler hears of Michael Jackson's death, and one in which the Fuhrer can't get Billy Elliot tickets

Of course, as director, and not producer, he probably does not hold the copyright and has no say in whether or not the clips are allowed -- but it is worth noting that he seems to quite enjoy them.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Check out this German TV clip highlighting the failure of the new, privacy-violating full-nude scanners going in at an airport near you. As Bruce Schneier notes, "The scanner caught a subject's cell phone and Swiss Army knife -- and the microphone he was wearing -- but missed all the components to make a bomb that he hid on his body... Full-body scanners: they're not just a dumb idea, they don't actually work."

German TV on the Failure of Full-Body Scanners

DesScorp writes "In a blow against the commercial space industry, a federal panel warned NASA not to use private companies to ferry astronauts into space. While the Obama Administration wants to outsource some NASA activities, insiders at the space agency are resisting any moves to use commercial alternatives. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel 'cautioned that the private space companies rely on "unsubstantiated claims" and need to overcome major technical hurdles before they can safely carry astronauts into orbit. The report urged NASA to stick with its current government-run manned space ventures, and said that switching to private alternatives now would be "unwise and probably not cost-effective. The findings are likely to provide a boost to NASA officials who want to keep nearly all manned space programs in house.' Private companies such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing argue that they're capable of human transport in space safely and at competitive costs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's a Xmas-time publicity stunt from German engineering conglomerate Siemens AG, which counts a couple of wind power companies amongst its vast holdings. The "Siemens Superstar" was created in collaboration with Munich multimedia artist Michael Pendra and installed on a large wind turbine in Fröttmaning at the gates of Munich, overlooking the A9 autobahn. It was up from November 29 through January 6. The Siemens publicity site has lots more info and some beautiful video. [Thanks, Rachel!]

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

mr crypto writes "User interfaces make copious use of pictures and symbols, but how abstract should images be? Lukas Mathis has an interesting blog entry on where to draw the line."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The experience of reading Nasty, Brutish, and Short: The Quirks and Quarks Guide to Animal Sex and Other Weird Behaviour is eerily similar to the experience of listening to Quirks and Quarks on CBC radio: a series of short, pleasurable, informative stories told with a lot of charm and enthusiasm. The Quirks team have made Bob McDonald, the presenter, into Canada's greatest science teacher, a font of fascinating facts and corny jokes that grab your attention and make you smarter.

Nasty, Brutish and Short is written by long-time Quirks producer Pat Senson, and draws heavily from the animal behavior stories that have appeared on the show, following their format as well: some introductory material (with a corny joke), comments from a scientist who's discovered something remarkable, and then a deeper explanation with context grounding. Die-hard fans of the show (like me) will even recognize scientist quotes transcribed from the interviews conducted for the show. And, like the show, each segment takes just a few minutes to read and digest (making it perfect for reading aloud to friends, keeping by the toilet, or using for a goodnight story), but stays with you afterwards for days and weeks.

Animal behavior is a great and fundamental subject, dealing as it does with sex, poop, kids, fighting (and more sex and more poop). Nasty, Brutish and Short has got everything you need to satisfy your sciento-prurient interest, from two-penised spiders that tear one organ off at mating time so they can keep up with their mates to crazy spiralling duck-penises to savage bowerbird love-battles to bisexuality in beetles to sea slug aqua-orgies. They also do a good job covering the awesomely weird and gross world of parasitism, as well as an illuminating chapter on what scientists have to do to get up close and personal with their subjects (my favorite: the neuro-anatomist Bruce Young, who's made a name for himself by aggravating wild cobras in order to track the beautiful geometric patterns made by their venom-spitting).

I was raised on Quirks and Quarks, driving around with my parents to the grocery story on Saturday or sitting around the house listening on the kitchen radio. It inspired and fed my love of science. Today, even though I live thousands of kilometers away on another continent, I still listen to the podcast religiously (or, rather, atheistically). Nasty, Brutish and Short really captures the feeling of the show, and will enliven your family's car-trips, lazy weekends, and pleasure reading.

Nasty, Brutish, and Short: The Quirks and Quarks Guide to Animal Sex and Other Weird Behaviour

benz001 writes "In the run-up to everyone's favourite tablet, Phil Gyford goes back through his gadget collection and compares text entry speeds to see which one comes out on top. It's not what you'd call a rich data set, and of course the Qwerty keyboard comes up trumps, but the iPhone virtual keyboard came in a surprisingly close second, just edging out the Treo — and all the keyboard solutions regardless of how small and fiddly beat real pen and paper. This probably matches most people's experience (when was the last time you had to handwrite more than a bullet point in a meeting?) and gels pretty well with Macworld's predictions but I'm still hoping for sub-vocal voice recognition. (Jump straight to the final results here)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Turn your R/C car into a secret spy vehicle with this simple project.
Thanks go to Ben Wendt for the original article in MAKE, Volume 20.
To download The Remote-Controlled Camera Mount video click here and subscribe in iTunes.
Check out the complete Remote Controlled Camera Mount article in MAKE, Volume 20 and you
can see that in our Digital Edition.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Weekend Projects | Digg this!

ABC News fires up the archival video time machine and refreshes our memory regarding what was cutting edge tech 31 years ago. Satellite feeds, laser discs, and TV-printers? - The future is now! then!

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!

Turn your R/C car into a secret spy vehicle with this simple project.
Thanks go to Ben Wendt for the original article in MAKE, Volume 20.
View the PDF of this project. and then subscribe to MAKE Magazine for other great projects
you can do over the weekend.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in MAKE PDF | Digg this!

There have been a bunch of silly lawsuits over the use of competitors' trademarked terms being used in ads on Google AdWords. There are a bunch of different legal issues related to those lawsuits, including whether or not Google should be liable for actions of advertisers, whether it's trademark infringement to mention a competitor in an ad, and whether it's trademark infringement just to have an ad triggered on a competitor's trademarked phrase. There's a company called Rescuecom that has been particularly aggressive in these lawsuits, suing Google for a competitor having ads triggered on their trademarks. While a district court rejected that claim, last year an appeals court sent it back to the lower court to try again. And yet... at the same time, it appears that Rescuecom is involved in a lawsuit on the other side with Best Buy. Best Buy claims that Rescuecom is infringing on the "Geek Squad" trademark, and Rescuecom claims that it has a fair use defense... yes for the very same thing it's accusing others of doing. You have to imagine that's going to be pointed out in both of those lawsuits. Some have suggested that Rescuecom doesn't really care either way, and it believes that these lawsuits are a good PR campaign -- which could explain its different view in each lawsuit. If that's the case, it seems like a rather big abuse of the legal system.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

It's beyond me why anyone would want to start a car before they got into it, but if you're looking for an interesting aftermarket mod for the next car show, this prepaid wireless remote car starter is just the thing. [via engadget]

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

MS sez, "Charles Dickens said that my home town of Harrogate was weird ("The queerest place with the strangest people in it leading the oddest lives...")! I set up this blog using rediscovered 'photos' that seem to prove his point."

Very nice work indeed, MS.

WEIRD HARROGATE (Thanks, MS!)

coondoggie writes "While its sister rover Spirit has garnered most of the attention lately, NASA's other Mars traveler, Opportunity is chewing up Martian dirt and unearthing the mineral and chemical makeup of the red planet. NASA scientists said this week the rover uncovered "one of the coolest things Opportunity has found in a very long time:" a dark, basketball-sized rock known as 'Marquette Island.' According to NASA, the Marquette Island rock is a coarse-grained rock that indicates it cooled slowly from molten rock, allowing crystals time to grow. Such composition suggests it originated deep in the crust, not at the surface where it would cool quicker and have finer-grained texture, NASA stated."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canon has announced it is working on updating the firmware for the EOS 1D Mark IV. The forthcoming firmware, version 1.0.6, will improve the camera's performance when tracking receding subjects and subjects that are approaching the camera slowly. The firmware will be available from late January, the company says.

When recently asked to help make sense of an unintuitive keybed design (from a Casio CTK-510) - I quickly recalled my own frustrated attempts to repurpose a similar assembly. Though I never did fully 'get' the logic of that key matrix, I was really just surprised there were no example analysis to be found on the Google. Luckily, a couple years later, that status has changed after coming across Highly Liquid's primer on basic keyboard matrices. Good stuff that'll likely come in handy for hackers/benders/synth-DIYers out there.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!

While it still seems like the common belief is that "txt spk" and other sorts of abbreviated elements of the English language harm kids' ability to write properly, we've seen study after study after study after study after study after study has found exactly the opposite. They've found that most kids can tell the difference, and do understand what's proper and what's not. On top of that, heavy texters tend to be better spellers, because they're much more used to writing -- even if they tend to abbreviate the language when communicating via technology.

So it almost seems superfluous to mention that yet another one of these studies has come out and it, too, has found that those who regularly use txt spk have very strong literacy skills. But what's annoying is that both the researchers and the BBC act as if this was a "surprise." It's as if no one bothered to check to see if similar research had been done before, and found the many, many, many studies all saying the same exact thing.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

We're proud to announce the public beta of our new Galleries feature, providing a place for you to upload and share your photos. It's something we've talked about wanting to do for many years so we're really excited to be able to launch the first wave of features. Every dpreview.com member automatically has a free account, providing the ability to upload up to 200MB worth of images per month, up to 1,000 images in total. Pro accounts with unlimited upload capability will follow soon, along with a raft of other features. Galleries already offers the ability to upload, tag and arrange images into albums with a simple way to including photos into forum posts. It's a beta for now, so may be prone to the occasional bout of hiccups, but we think it's too much fun to keep to ourselves.

Critical Commons has created its own entry in the great Hitler in the bunker remix meme. Steve Anderson sez, "The video is also promoting the fair use advocacy site Critical Commons, which is a fair use advocacy and media sharing site, funded by the MacArthur Foundation. This is currently the most radical media-sharing site on the open internet. Designed for media educators and students, Critical Commons makes high-quality, copyrighted media publicly available by placing it in a critical context and informing users about their rights under fair use."

Critical Commons

Vigile writes "When the OnLive cloud-based gaming service was first announced back in March of 2009, it was met with equal parts excitement and controversy. While the idea of playing games on just about any kind of hardware thanks to remote rendering and streaming video was interesting, the larger issue remained of how OnLive planned to solve the latency problem. With the closed beta currently underway, PC Perspective put the OnLive gaming service to the test by comparing the user experiences of the OnLive-based games to the experiences with the same locally installed titles. The end result appears to be that while slower input-dependent games like Burnout: Paradise worked pretty well, games that require a fast twitch-based input scheme like UT3 did not."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Though the announcement this week of the Student Showcase winners in this years Independent Games Festival might seem necessarily secondary to the main festival's competition, it's important to remember that some of gaming's recent best has been plucked directly from its former finalists. Most notably, Valve's much-beloved Portal was borne from 2006 student entry Narbacular Drop, the same year that Cloud would propel thatgamecompany forward to create their PlayStation 3 art-games flOw and Flower. 2007's And Yet It Moves is currently one of the upcoming lynchpins of indie representation on Nintendo's downloadable service WiiWare, and de Blob would later be revamped as a cult success for publisher THQ, while 2008's The Misadventures Of P.B. Winterbottom is just weeks away from an Xbox Live Arcade release from BioShock publisher 2K, and 2009's The Unfinished Swan still remains one of the most anticipated games to come from the festival. The point being: while the main IGF entrants are still the best temperature gauge for what the indie scene is up to, the student entrants are no less important a guidepost to the teams that will be moving it forward in the years to come. And so, as with Boing Boing's guide to the main IGF finalists, below is a breakdown of the ten student showcase finalists -- with links to downloads for nearly all the games to play yourself -- which this year brought a refreshing amount of genuinely compelling and moving experiences:

Boryokudan Rue • PC • UCLA • www
Can I Play It Right Now? Not yet.

Following very confidently in the point and click tradition of dramatic adventure classics like Beneath a Steel Sky, the unfortunately titled Boryokudan Rue is a year 22xx cyber-noir thriller that manages to even get the occasional drop on Hideo Kojima's Snatcher for nailing Blade Runner's broken grey future. Fantastically atmospheric with its limited pixels and challenging without losing accessibility, it does a stellar job of keeping the point and click tradition alive.

Continuity • web • Chalmers University of Technology / University of Gothenburg • www
Can I Play It Right Now? Yes!

Continuity should look familiar to regular readers: it was previously featured as the web hit of the week in early December, for its smart and simple platforming action split into and laid across a deck of cards that you rearrange like a classic slide-puzzle, and a wickedly bombastic synthed-out score counterpointed with the card-shuffle's light ambiance.

Devil's Tuning Fork • PC • DePaul • www
Can I Play It Right Now? Yes!

Devil's Tuning Fork isn't a half step away in concept from last year's student showcase finalist The Unfinished Swan, for taking standard first-person platforming fare and turning it into an exercise in feeling your way through a discomforting void.

In Fork's case, though, that void is even more frightening by design: its midnight blackness can only be navigated by echolocation -- or how we might visually translate the sensation of actual echolocators -- and the stuffed-toy objects it's your goal to collect are each crying out in childrens' voices about monsters and pain, adding to the overall sense of primal scared-of-the-dark dread.

Dreamside Maroon • PC • DigiPen • www
Can I Play It Right Now? Yes!

Easily the best surprise of this year's showcase, Dreamside Maroon is 2010's version of the first time you played a thatgamecompany game: it's visually arresting, effortlessly stylized and quietly evocative in a way that's still too rare in gaming today.

Your Dreamside goal is to grow a single vine to the moon, with no real enemies or challenges standing in your way, but the game truly opens up in a smell-the-roses sense as you realize that the gorgeous painterly floating islands you're surrounded by have lanterns that can be lit, each of which unlocks a small poetic verse and attracts groups of fireflies to collect and bring along in your journey upward.

Utterly unmissable, if you can only bring yourself download one game from this list, make it this one.

Igneous • PC • DigiPen • www
Can I Play It Right Now? Yes!

DigiPen's other strong showing this year outside Dreamside Maroon is Igneous, which is gaming's equivalent to Indy Jones's trademark boulder-chase scene, stretched out across a series of increasingly harrowing levels.

Playing the part of a miniature rolling totem, all the game asks you to do is go -- and fast -- escaping from a wall of lava constantly nipping at you from behind, jumping over rivers of magma and ground that's continually falling out from beneath you: a game happily unforgiving and consistently nervewracking.

Paper Cakes • PC/Mac • Utrecht School of the Arts & USC • www
Can I Play It Right Now? Yes!

Created as part of a student design challenge for Wacom's ongoing efforts to bring fun to their pen/tablet interface (but still just as fully playable with only a standard mouse), Paper Cakes is an adorably ingenious point-a-to-point-b puzzler about leading your sketch-drawing player to cake.

To do so, as the other half of the title would suggest, you guide by drawing paths and -- here's where the clever comes in -- by origami-folding the paper the character lives on to its flip side, which can cover up obstacles, join floors, and open new routes to cross otherwise inaccessible routes. The character's post-cake-binge "itis" snooze is probably the cutest thing you'll see in the Indie Games Fest this year.

Puddle • PC • ENJMIN, France • www
Can I Play It Right Now? Yes!

Between the main IGF's entry Vessel, Q-games' recently released PixelJunk Shooter and Puddle, it seems as though fluid dynamics modeling is becoming this year's "it girl" mechanic. Played out with only your joystick's shoulder buttons to tilt levels left and right, Puddle sees you guiding an amount of liquid through devilishly difficult laboratory levels, with bunsen burner flames and pitfall cracks draining your allotment along the way.

Puzzle Bloom • PC • DADIU, Denmark • www
Can I Play It Right Now? Yes!

Somewhere on par, thematically, to the Oddworld series and Flower, Puzzle Bloom brings an environmental and anti-industrial message to puzzle mechanics that see you hopping from character to worker-drone character, taking control of their bodies to work through switch-gates and hit checkpoints that cause factory control rooms to bloom with greenery. Created in Unity, it's a good showcase (alongside the work of Flashbang and Infinite Ammo) of where 3D web gaming is headed.

Spectre • PC/Mac • USC Interactive Media • www
Can I Play It Right Now? Yes!

One of this year's most narratively ambitious games, Spectre attempts nothing less than telling the story of one human's life from start to finish, spread out metaphorically through various 2D platforming challenges.

Each playthrough lets you select nine memories -- and your goal is to avoid the darker bits of main character Joseph's past and concentrate on the glowing brighter ones -- with over fifty end-game themes and a uniting theme that's there for you to uncover via repeat play.

Ulitsa Dimitrova • PC • Kunsthochschule Kassel, Germany • www
Can I Play It Right Now? Yes!

Finally, Ulitsa Dimitrova might be the most surprisingly affecting game entered this year that uses the least amount of mechanical ingenuity to make its point. Watching the guided-tour video above will give you basically the entirety of what it attempts to do, but it might be better told through your own discovery.

Cheerfully drawn in broad, broad and utterly bleak ballpoint pen strokes, it's a character portrait of homeless Slavic seven-year-old Pjotre, capturing a slice of life that consists of little more than nicking Mercedes hood ornaments and stealing huffable glue and cheap liquor, all to trade away to support his chainsmoking habit.

There's no winning, the city loops endlessly in classic Hanna Barbera style and echoes the nihilistic pointlessness of Pjotre's life -- all you can do is keep moving and repeating each empty day, because stopping means freezing to death in the St. Petersburg streets.

Gabriel Hargrove, Lynn Lim and William Newhouse at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Architecture, Interior Architecture and Designed Objects department found the perfect way to keep students from drilling through the drill press table: hold a kitten hostage. [via Core 77]

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

An anonymous reader writes "Google's spat with China could affect Motorola as it vies to crawl back into the mobile market, but recent partnerships will allow it to pursue the Chinese mobile market alone. Circumventing the fallout, Motorola on Thursday introduced its own Android app store for China and a deal with Baidu, the leading search provider in China."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

eldavojohn writes "A list of notes from game developers (PDF) was sent in a letter to the FCC which represented a net neutrality discussion between the developers and FCC representatives. Game Politics sums it up nicely, but the surprise is that developers are concerned with latency, not bandwidth, unlike the members of many other net neutrality discussions. One concern is that each and every game developer will need to negotiate with each and every ISP to ensure their traffic achieves acceptable levels of latency for users. 'Mr. Dyl of Turbine stated that ISPs sometimes block traffic from online gaming providers, for reasons that are not clear, but they do not necessarily continue those blocks if they are contacted. He recalled Turbine having to call ISPs that had detected the high UDP traffic from Turbine, and had apparently decided to block the traffic and wait to see who complained.' It seems a lot of the net neutrality discussions have only worried about one part of the problem — Netflix, YouTube and P2P — while an equally important source of concern went unnoticed: latency in online games."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Okay, so we had said that we were just going to do one post debunking Jaron Lanier's new hatred for everything about "open culture," but WNYC recently had a nice little debate between Nina Paley and Jaron Lanier -- and the thing that amazed me is how unprepared to debate these topics Lanier appears to be. Admittedly, some of it is just that Lanier loses his train of thought a few times, but that's really not what stands out. He rarely seems to have an actual point. You can pretty much sum up his position as "but, artists need to make money and after 10 years, they haven't been able to online, so it's a failure." But that's it. Nothing in what he says explains how to change things. It's just pining for the way things used to be. And whenever he's confronted on specific points, he either falls back to saying "well, I made up that argument originally, but now I know it's wrong" without ever explaining why it's wrong, or saying "well, I'm not an absolutist, so I could maybe see how free could be helpful." His discussion about the length of copyright and whether copyright should go to kids and grandkids is quite telling. He doesn't seem to understand the issues at play, doesn't have a clear train of thought, and goes back and forth and makes totally arbitrary claims, such as, "well, I don't know, I think it's okay to pass it on to your kids, but if it's for your grand kids, okay, I guess I can see that that's starting to be too much." Why? Not clear.

The one point that really does need to be refuted is that he seems to believe that artificial scarcity somehow makes people pay. He talks about the importance of a "social contract" to have people "pay for others' brains." He says "people need to be secure that they're earning their dignity and don't need to sing for their supper every night." But that confuses a few different issues. Having the government step in and ramp up copyright laws doesn't earn anyone their dignity. Providing products that people actually want to pay for does. And that's the point that Lanier seems to miss. He tries to support the importance of "artificial scarcity" by using money as an example, saying that money only works because it's artificially scarce. But that's a total misunderstanding of money. Money works because it's a proxy for value, so it isn't actually artificially scarce at all. It's legitimately scarce, because if you print more money, the value of the money already in the system goes down (inflation) meaning that you have to pay more to get the same thing. It works because it's a proxy for that scarce value. It's not an artificial scarcity at all. He later agrees with Nina when she talks about the importance of real scarcity, but fails to recognize that real scarcity makes sense, whereas artificial scarcity is actually economically limiting.

Lanier also makes an odd claim that the old studio/label system allowed for a "middle class" of content creators. But that's really not true. For most who go through that system it's totally hit or miss, with most missing. But with new business models, we're seeing more and more people who are able to make a perfect middle class living by not having to wait for the gatekeepers. More people are making money due to their music today than ever before, and it's because they have all sorts of different ways to make money.

Nina, not surprisingly, does an excellent job responding to each of Lanier's points. He brings up the inevitable claim that "but people could take your film and do stuff with it!" and she points out that she wants that, and knows that her fans are smart enough to know the difference between her original and what others do with her film.

All in all it's a fun debate to listen to, but I have to admit that I would have found it a lot more interesting if Lanier actually sounded like he understood the topic at hand beyond the superficial level.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Hebrew language and Judaica software makers Davka released an iPhone gematria calculator. Gematria is a numerology system often used in Kabbalah to calculate the hidden meanings of words and phrases. Smartly, Davka is hoping to attract a wider audience than high-tech Jewish mystics. From the product page:

Need an original idea for a speech at a Bar/Bat Mitzvah, wedding or other Simcha? iGematria is the perfect solution! Just enter the Hebrew name of the celebrant, and iGematria will instantly find the Torah verses or words that share the same Hebrew numerical value as the word you entered.

iGematria (Thanks, Mark Pescovitz!)

They musta scared easy in 1936, judging from this ad for Eveready batteries headed "Stark Terror Was Squeezing at My Heart."

Stark Terror Was Squeezing at My Heart

Clever work by Matt Robinson and Tom Wrigglesworth: they drew the same piece of sample text in several fonts at large scale using transparent Bic pens, then measured the remaining ink in the barrels to show the comparative consumption used by each face. Yes, you could probably write some code that calculated the area used by the faces described in their PostScript files, but where would the fun be in that?

Measuring Type (via Kottke)

Murraymullet's Threadless submission features literal Peanuts -- unshelled peanuts painted to resemble Charles M Shulz's creations. Nice!

Peanuts by murraymullet

The Campaign to Legalize Democracy is circulating a petition in response to yesterday's ruling that legalized unlimited political bribery by corporations in the USA. Signatories include Bill Moyer, Howard Zinn, Jim Hightower, Billl McKibben, and Tom Hayden.

We, the People of the United States of America, reject the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United, and move to amend our Constitution to:

* Firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.

* Guarantee the right to vote and to participate, and to have our votes and participation count.

* Protect local communities, their economies, and democracies against illegitimate "preemption" actions by global, national, and state governments.

"We the corporations" (Thanks, Rodney!)

bonch writes "Following in YouTube's footsteps, Vimeo has now introduced its own beta HTML5 video player, and like YouTube, it uses H.264 and requires Safari, Chrome, or ChromeFrame. The new player doesn't suffer the rebuffering problems of the Flash version when clicking around in the video's timeline, and it also loads faster. HTML5 could finally be gaining some real momentum."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon is selling Kindle books without DRM, but they still won't answer three fundamental questions: 1. Whether the terms prohibit moving DRM-free books to non-Kindle platforms; 2. Whether patents or other IP prohibit making third-party readers for the Amazon DRM-free format format; 3. Whether they can still revoke DRM-free files, or disable their features, and if so, which features can be disabled and what circumstances would lead to revocation. The answer to these three questions is the difference between owning a book and having an innocent book used as bait for a tawdry lock-in scheme.

Remember the MATRIX? No, not the movie, but the highly controversial gov't database that was to store and access all sorts of information on people, and kick out any individual's "terrorist quotient," if necessary. After a lot of negative publicity... and someone hacking into the database, the project was shut down in 2005. But, apparently the guy behind it is back with another attempt at a massive database. Michael Scott points us to a profile of the guy who ran the MATRIX (turns out he's a former drug smuggler, so that should make you more comfortable), who since then has started another operation that is also trying to build up another big database of private info, and is using the always popular method of positioning it as something useful "to protect the children."

Apparently, he's set up the database to help find missing children and track down those who abduct them. This is absolutely a worthy cause -- but there are some serious questions about the method here. He's letting law enforcement use the technology he's developing for free, but in exchange many believe he's trying to get access to government databases to add more data to his own collection. Certainly, some government officials are happily using his technology, but others were turned off by some of the meetings, where they felt that the guy was asking for way too much -- including financial records and even movie rental history.

It's no secret that there are a bunch of big database companies out there creating huge profiles of pretty much everyone... but it does seem a bit sketchy when a guy who has tried to do similar things in the past (and had them shut down) shows up again trying to gain access to private government databases to include in his own system, in exchange for giving the police free access to that system.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Have you wanted to build an iPhone app but didn't know where to start? Me too! I'd like to build applications that allow me to control electronics on an XBee network remotely via a host computer, or hack an interface to the powermeter on my bicycle. So it was very exciting to be at this month's Geek Dinner in Providence RI, which doubled as the launch party for Jonathan Stark's new book, Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, edited by O'Reilly Senior Editor and Providence Geeks co-founder Brian Jepson. Jonathan discussed the pros and cons of developing "native apps" versus "web apps" for the rapidly changing mobile phone platforms. He also discussed several nice open source tools for facilitating iPhone application development. This book is perhaps the most informative, accessible, and concise guide to iPhone coding I have come across. Very cool!!

One great benefit of Jonathan's book is his extensive use of the open source application development framework PhoneGap. It gives many of the benefits of native iPhone applications yet provides the ease of developing a web application. This is a great tool for those who want to create iPhone applications, but don't want to jump through the hurdles required to become a registered developer and wait for application approval. I am also rather impressed by the free HTML version available online.

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

awkwardstockphotos.com (via William Gibson).

The Isle of the Dead

Arnold Bocklin was a 19th century symbolist painter whose work influenced and inspired Salvador Dali, Sergi Rachmaninoff, Marcel Duchamp and H. R. Giger. Adolph Hitler owned eleven of his paintings and cited Bocklin as his favorite painter.

Click through the jump for a gallery of weird and wonderful art by this little known, but profoundly influential artist...

The following images come from this great Japanese site devoted to Bocklin's work. (Too bad I don't speak Japanese!)

Here are some other great 19th century symbolist and romantic painters to check out at the same site...

Henry Fuseli

Thomas Cole

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

George Frederic Watts

John Martin

Jean Delville

Louis Janmot

Evelyn De Morgan

Gaetano Previati

Can you hear me Major Tom? Amazing photos from the Puschino Astronomical observatory @ English Russia...

The first initiative to create big radio telescopes in the USSR is dated 1951. They were intended to observe the sun radiation and radiation of other space sources on centimeter and millimeter waves.

The displays appear to be nixie and/or VFDs too (warning: site loads lots of videos and chugs CPUs).

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

We were as surprised as anyone that a UK court correctly realized that OiNK itself didn't violate copyright law, and thus admin Alan Ellis hadn't done anything illegal. But rather than understand the difference between infringing copyrights and hosting a tracker, the recording industry is now flipping out and insisting that Ellis must be punished somehow, and it may file a civil suit against him because apparently punishing people is more important than actually coming up with business models that work.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

An anonymous reader writes "If you use Tor, you're cautioned to update now due to a security breach. In a message on the Tor mailing list dated Jan 20, 2010, Tor developer Roger Dingledine outlines the issue and why you should upgrade to Tor 0.2.1.22 or 0.2.2.7-alpha now: 'In early January we discovered that two of the seven directory authorities were compromised (moria1 and gabelmoo), along with metrics.torproject.org, a new server we'd recently set up to serve metrics data and graphs. The three servers have since been reinstalled with service migrated to other servers.' Tor users should visit the download page and update ASAP."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This 80+ page project doc, from a German maker, obsessively details every aspect of the construction of a scale model jet airplane, with working jet engines. The text is in German, but the images speak for themselves.

Su27 Project

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Toys and Games | Digg this!

Photo by James Moss (makesnow.net)

As one of the biggest storms of the winter is hitting Lake Tahoe, MAKE Volume 21 is about to hit newsstands. What do these two phenomena have in common? Snow! In the DIY Outdoors section, we're featuring a Combo Snow Gun project written by one of our own former MAKE engineering interns, Steven Lemos. As a matter of fact, I distinctly remember when we were interviewing Steven, asking him what types of projects he had made. When he said he made his own snow gun, I was sold, and we knew we had to have him write it up for the magazine. Steven teaches you how to make your own for about $90.

Then, in Forrest M. Mims' Country Scientist column, he teaches you how to evaluate snow on the ground as a heat island indicator as well as a particle collector. Mims takes it further and shows you how to use ImageJ image analysis software to study your snow pictures.

MAKE Volume 21 is the Desktop Manufacturing issue, with how-to articles on making three-dimensional parts using inexpensive computer-controlled manufacturing equipment. Both additive (RepRap, CandyFab) and subtractive (Lumenlab Micro CNC) systems are covered. Also in this issue: instructions for making a cigar box guitar, building your own CNC for under $800, running a mini electric bike with a cordless drill, making a magic photo cube, and tons more. If you're a subscriber, you may have your issue in hand already, and can access the Digital Edition. Otherwise, you can pick up MAKE 21 in the Maker Shed or look for it on newsstands near you!

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this!

Charles Phoenix writes:

This is not an art installation in a snooty, big city gallery or museum. (Although it could be and should be.) This is the perky polka dotted wall of a sunshine state souvenir stand dressed with dozens kooky characters. They are to coconuts what tiki gods are to palm tree trunks. Each is hanging there just waiting to be bought, bagged and taken to a new, more permanent home like a patio, tiki bar or rumpus room. Each one has been carefully carved, painted and finished by hand then imported from the exotic island it came from for our pleasure.

Together on the wall they're certainly mesmerizing and nearly hypnotizing. They look at you every time you walk in the room. No two are exactly the same. Each has his, (or her) own personality. I'm not sure that today they would all pass the test of political correctness. Which one would you choose? Or do you just want them all?

Coconut heads on pegboard, Florida, 1960

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.

Slashdot points us to an article trying to debunk the concept that "IT should be run as a business," with "employees" as customers. Of course, like many catchy phrases, I don't think that many IT departments really followed this concept to the ridiculous logical conclusions. It does have some useful concepts -- such as giving IT folks more reason to actually listen to what employees have to say. But it misses the larger point, that IT is there to serve the business as a whole, and that means making the overall business more efficient, while keeping it secure, and that can sometimes conflict with the views of individual employees.

The argument made in the article, and it makes sense, is that IT really needs to be much more tightly integrated with the overall business, to really understand how to help. When it's viewed as a separate silo or even "business," then the solutions that come out of IT really aren't as helpful as can be. Separately, it also increases the likelihood of outsourcing the IT function, since it can be easily "separated." But by more closely integrating the IT function into actual business processes, not only does IT make itself more indispensable, it can focus on creating actual process improvements and solutions, rather than just taking a list from someone of what they think they need (perhaps without understanding what the technology enables) and delivering it to spec.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

If anyone wants to know what I want for my birthday, it's a jumbo sized framed photo of this incredibly creepy photograph from the Life magazine archives. This is the bedroom of Ed Gein, the psychotic murder who was the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" and Tobe Hooper's "Texas Chainsaw Massacre". They say you can tell a lot about a person by looking at their home... If that is true, this picture tells me things I don't want to know!

If you aren't squeamish, click through the jump to see more totally disturbing photos of the REAL Psycho house...

Ed Gein was a notorious murderer and grave robber who lived in Plainfield, Wisconsin back in the 1950s. While investigating the disappearance of a local shop owner, police stumbled across a horrifying scene in this modest house. The garbage filled rooms contained body parts stolen from local cemeteries, bones and human skin, as well as the body of the shop owner, trussed up in a shed like a deer. Ed was a meek little loner who babysat his neighbors' kids and always gave packets of venison to his friends during hunting season. After he was caught, he admitted that he had never shot a deer in his life.

The photographer for Life magazine showed up at Ed's house just as the police were packing up and leaving. Curious neighbors swooped in on the house and started peeking in the windows and checking the locks on the doors. The photographer entered the house with them and shot these uncomfortably revealing pictures, which were published in Life magazine in 1957. In March of 1958, the house burned to the ground under mysterious circumstances. The rumor was that the locals didn't want the house to become some sort of serial killer theme park. Many speculated that the police hadn't really done a thorough job of checking out all the nooks and crannies in the house. No doubt, the fire ensured that many of Ed's secrets would remain secrets forever.

Inside, the house was in a state of total squalor... with the exception of one room. The living room was orderly and neat- exactly as Ed Gein's mother had left it when she passed away a decade earlier, leaving Ed all alone in the world.

The kitchen held many of the worst horrors. Organs were in glass jars in the refrigerator. The shop owner's heart had been cooked in a pot on the stove. A bowl made from the top part of a human skull stood on the kitchen table.

For years after these chilling photos appeared in Life, midwestern children would scare each other by whispering about the strange man that lived all by himself in the woods that was going to come to town and "Gein ya!"

Now, thanks to the Life magazine archives, you can hang these historic photos in your own home, custom printed and framed to fit any decor... Well, almost any decor... Just click through the image you like and click on the "BUY PHOTO" button. Go on! I double dare ya!