Serious Eats is curious if you've ever experienced Pine Mouth, a long-lasting metallic taste in your mouth after eating pine nuts.

Roger Hyam's blog post outlines the issue and links to a medical article which confirms the syndrome but offers no obvious cause. Are Chinese pine nuts to blame?

Tips for avoiding Pine Mouth. Reports from Chowhound & Yelp. Official position from the International Nut and Dried Fruit Foundation.

[Image: Nuno Tavares via Wikimedia Commons, cc licensed]

Miles O'Brien has released a new episode of "This Week in Space", a weekly web video produced with Spaceflight Now. In this edition...

A decision nears from President Obama on the future of the manned space program, Elon Musk of SpaceX VEHEMENTLY denies his rockets will be unsafe for astronauts, the clock ticks down to the launch of the shuttle Endeavour, the rover Spirit moves (but just a little), and Miles checks out the lunar inspired artwork of moonwalker Alan Bean

Boing Boing reader Linda Constant writes,

Some pretty surprising and offensive news from Leica, via this post on Leica Rumors: Leica is actually releasing special edition cameras for the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China! I've worked a lot in international human rights policy and the role that culture plays in these matters, and I really cannot believe that this edition was okayed by the Leica team!

Assuming the rumor's true, perhaps these cameras are equipped with automated lens-smashers or umbrella cops, to foil any photographic documentation that might run afoul of Communist Party censors?

krebsonsecurity writes "The Web browser wars often focus on which browser is more secure, but the dirty secret is that insecure plugins are a serious threat to all browsers, from the perspectives of both stability and security. Krebsonsecurity.com features an informative look at the administration page for a popular browser exploit kit called Eleonora, which suggests that plugins like Adobe Reader and Java are leading to successful compromises for users surfing not just with Internet Explorer, but also with Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've seen all sorts of attempts to get around Section 230 safe harbors by various companies -- almost all of which have failed. But they keep on trying. Paul Alan Levy alerts us to a new case, in which he (and Public Citizen) are helping out, that involves a company called Vision Media TV, whose business has been heavily criticized in the press. According to the various reports, the company calls organizations to get them to take part in a TV show with a semi-famous host, which they claim will be shown on TV. Eventually, the reports claim, it comes out that the "production costs" are over $20,000 and the TV coverage is either non-existent or significantly less than suggested. I've actually received similar calls (though I don't know if it was from Vision Media). It seems like it should be pretty common knowledge that if someone is asking you to pay to get on a TV program (especially one you haven't actually seen on TV), you should proceed with caution.

However, Vision Media TV disagrees very much with those news reports, though it has not sued the likes of the NY Times that wrote them. Instead, it has gone after smaller players. The latest case, which Paul wrote about, involves the rather useful site 800notes.com, which lets people discuss telemarketers. There was a section of people discussing the calls from Vision Media, and so Vision asked 800notes to take them down. Of course, 800notes is protected (reasonably) by Section 230 safe harbors. Vision Media TV apparently responded by suggesting that it knows how to get around Section 230 safe harbors and later filed suit against the site, suggesting that it would be a lot less expensive to just remove the comments than to deal with the lawsuit.

To get around Section 230, the company apparently tried a bunch of things. Public Citizen summarizes in its brief:

It pleaded claims for "false light," "tortious interference with business opportunity," and "trade libel," and attached a potpourri of documents that were apparently intended to show the loss of business that the message board postings had occasioned. In an effort to plead around Forte's Section 230 immunity, Vision Media repeatedly but generally alleged that Forte had authored some content on the web site, that she had deliberately removed favorable postings about Vision Media to make it look worse, that she had "substantially alter[ed] and edit[ed' others['] posts," and that she had "actively encourage[d] circumvention of legally binding agreements" that forbade unidentified persons from disparaging Vision Media.... The complaint also mentioned in passing Vision Media's trademark and used the terms "dilute" and "infringement," but did not plead any claim under the trademark laws. Although the complaint went on for 16 pages and included 20 pages of exhibits, the complaint neither set forth the allegedly defamatory (or false light) posts nor specified the portions of posts that were allegedly authored by Forte.

The point about her removing favorable posts is explained because Forte was alerted to about two dozen favorable posts about Vision Media that showed up at around the same time, but came from just two IP addresses -- so she made the reasonable assumption that they were spam and deleted them. However, she did suggest to Vision Media that they identify themselves and respond to critics publicly -- which the company did, and those posts remain on the site, showing that she has no problem with positive posts, just not ones that appear to be spammy.

Anyway, it appears that all of this is to hope that the company can at least get around a quick Section 230 dismissal to burden the site with legal costs, and Levy and the crew at Public Citizen are making the case that Section 230 obviously applies here. Hopefully the judge agrees.

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Remember the Screen Gems stylized "S" logo that appeared at the end of such great TV shows as Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, The Monkees, and Partridge Family? My old friend Rodney Ascher was so traumatized by that graphic that he made a documentary/horror film about it, based on interviews with other "survivors" of The S From Hell.

Here are three trailers for Trimpin: The Sound of Invention, a documentary film about engineer, sound artist, and inventor, Trimpin. The film is currently making its way around the festival circuit. Has anyone here seen it? It looks awesome. [Thanks, Patrick Reilly!]

Trimpin: The Sound of Invention

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CWmike writes to share a recent manners-rant that has some great gems about how not to be "that guy" on a cell phone. What rules of engagement are absolutely necessary and what social penalties should become standard practice for repeat offenders? "It's easy to be rude with a cell phone. A visitor from another planet might conclude that rudeness is a cell phone's main purpose. Random, annoying ring tones go off unexpectedly. People talk too loudly on cell phones in public because of the challenge of holding a conversation in a noisy environment with someone who's not present. Cell phones need their own rules of etiquette, or we'll descend into social barbarism."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MarkWhittington writes "The Wall Street Journal is reporting that starting with the FY2011 budget request for NASA, the Obama administration intends to propose a new program to encourage the development of a commercial space flight industry. 'The controversial proposal, expected to be included in the Obama administration's next budget, would open a new chapter in the U.S. space program. The goal is to set up a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar initiative allowing private firms, including some start-ups, to compete to build and operate spacecraft capable of ferrying U.S. astronauts into orbit—and eventually deeper into the solar system. Congress is likely to challenge the concept's safety and may balk at shifting dollars from existing National Aeronautics and Space Administration programs already hurting for funding to the new initiative. The White House's ultimate commitment to the initiative is murky, according to these people, because the budget isn't expected to outline a clear, long-term funding plan.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A bunch of folks have been sending in this wonderful Public Domain Manifesto, put together by Communia. It's a wonderful read, highlighting the importance and value of the public domain, and putting forth a series of general principles which appear to make a lot of sense. It also discusses other aspects of related issues, such as the importance of individuals choosing to not use copyright, as well as the value of fair use and fair dealing. The point is both to highlight how important the public domain is to a vital thriving culture, and also to point out how the public domain has been steadily eroded over the last few decades. A key point is found in the first principle, and it's to remind everyone that copyright is an exception to the public domain, not the other way around:

The Public Domain is the rule, copyright protection is the exception. Since copyright protection is granted only with respect to original forms of expression, the vast majority of data, information and ideas produced worldwide at any given time belongs to the Public Domain. In addition to information that is not eligible for protection, the Public Domain is enlarged every year by works whose term of protection expires. The combined application of the requirements for protection and the limited duration of the copyright protection contribute to the wealth of the Public Domain so as to ensure access to our shared culture and knowledge.

Unfortunately, it's rarely thought about like this. Instead, most people consider copyright to be the rule, and things like the public domain and fair use to be exceptions. This is a problem, and it impacts how people view, understand and respond to things like copyright and the public domain itself.

To be honest, I have no idea how useful something like this manifesto really will be. Very few politicians seem to understand or care about the public domain and its importance. The manifesto might not have much of an impact on its own, but as a general set of principles for people to understand and gather behind it does seem like a good thing.

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These detailed technical drawings for various cocktails were first created, per the revision log, by one RJ DININO in 1978, and most recently updated by one J GOTTA in 2008. You can download a printable PDF at FlowingData. [Thanks, John!]

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Pentax has announced the Optio E90 budget compact. The camera features a non-slip rubber coating and a simple, large-buttoned interface similar to previous E series models. It is built around a 10MP sensor, includes a 2.7 inch LCD and 3x optical zoom lens (32-95mm equiv). It gains smile recognition to ensure shots are snapped while your subject smiles.

Pentax has released the premium-styled Optio H90 digital compact. It features a 12MP sensor and the 28-140mm equivalent zoom lens seen in the i-10. The company's new 'functional beauty' concept lends the H90 a pleasant minimalism but the lack of optical image stabilization suggests the austerity might have gone a bit far. The H90 can shoot 720p HD movies and is optimized to work with Eye-Fi wireless SD cards.

Pentax has unveiled the Optio I-10 compact camera that replicates the look of the company's Auto 110 micro-SLRs. Behind the cute, retro styling is a 12MP sensor, 2.7" LCD and a 5x zoom covering a 28-140mm equivalent range. It also includes sensor-shake image stabilization, 720p HD movie shooting, a dynamic range expansion feature, the ability to be remotely controlled and can recognise the faces of cats and dogs.

Take Your Love With Me (The Ukulele Song) by Sophie Madeleine

Bandcamp's new BCWAX label has just released Sophie Madeleine's album, Love. Life. Ukulele. The LP and art are fantastic (as is the music). Bandcamp setup a discount code "boing" that's good for 15% off the $30 price.

Designed by the inimitable Dan Stiles, this limited edition package includes a mind-bendingly beautiful LP (pressed onto 200 gram candy apple red vinyl, what else?), stunning 12"x12" print of the cover (silkscreened onto sumptuous French Speckletone paper with a metallic silver ink not present on the jacket), and an immediate download of the 10 track album in your choice of 320k mp3, FLAC, or just about any other format you could possibly desire. Download includes the never-before-released bonus track, "I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I love you."

Sophie Madeleine limited edition print, LP, and download package

Lanxon writes "'In the universe there is intelligent life, I'm confident about that,' SETI founder Dr Frank Drake (of the Drake Equation) affirmed earlier today during a talk at the Royal Society in London, 50 years after SETI was founded. One of his visions to prove this, and to show that the last five decades were not a waste of time, is to station a radio observatory not in near-Earth orbit, but on the far side of the moon. He also suggests that another craft could later be stationed 500 times further away from the Sun than the Earth, using the Sun itself as a giant magnifying lens to resolve alien worlds."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From @pendrift: Belgian Senator Monfils plans to submit proposals for a three-strikes copyright law. [English translation]

MAKE editor and master crafter Becky Stern made designed and fabricated this rad ASCII Heart necklace using Sterling silver. She originally only made one for herself, but is now offering them for sale through her Etsy shop. It could be a great Valentines day gift for that special geeky someone!

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Hypertalented stop-motion animator (and sound designer!) Pes 's latest short is a made this fantastic battle sequence titled "KaBoom!". Don't miss the fabulous "Making of KaBoom!" too.

I had just been thinking that one of the nicer things about the Midem conference this year was that no one really seemed to still be complaining about "piracy" as a problem, and really seemed focused on more positive opportunities for going forward (more on that later). However, not everyone got the message, apparently. In a discussion on the "manager's role" in developing an artist in the digital era, Chris Morrison -- who manages Blur and the Gorillaz, among others -- waited until the end to start trashing "pirates." What was odd was that earlier in the panel he was talking about how much attention and free publicity the Gorillaz got when their latest single showed up on file sharing sites last week. He even seemed proud of all that free publicity, but then later in the panel, he declared that if he could find out who had put the file up first, he'd bring him into his office and have all of his colleagues "give him a good kicking." Then he went on the typical anti-unauthorized file sharing rant, saying, "I believe that piracy can be stopped and should be stopped."

Back on the first day of the event, legendary producer/musician Pharrell Williams had noted that file sharing is "like taste testing," in explaining that he wasn't worrying about it, noting that if people liked the "taste" they could then find something worth buying. But Morrison was having none of it: "It's not a taste. It's like giving them the whole bloody meal!" That's an interesting viewpoint for a manager to have, and one that makes me wonder. I can see how a record label -- who tends to really only own the recording -- could see things that way, but as a manager, he must realize that there's a lot more to sell out there than just the music itself. So, no, it's not the whole meal (bloody or not), but a taste of what the band itself has to offer. And many of the things bands have to offer are not easily copied and shared -- and any manager who wants to cope with today's digital market needs to understand that.

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A team of computer scientists from the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, CA are claiming to have found an "effectively perfect" method for blocking spam. The new system deciphers the templates a botnet is using to create spam and then teaches filters what to look for. "The system ... works by exploiting a trick that spammers use to defeat email filters. As spam is churned out, subtle changes are typically incorporated into the messages to confound spam filters. Each message is generated from a template that specifies the message content and how it should be varied. The team reasoned that analyzing such messages could reveal the template that created them. And since the spam template describes the entire range of the emails a bot will send, possessing it might provide a watertight method of blocking spam from that bot."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Christopher Beam and Josh Levin of Slate imagine Steve Jobs giving the State of the Union address:

Thank you for coming. And thank you to President Obama for asking me to deliver this year's speech. We're going to make some history today.

You know, it was just a year ago that we announced our economic plan for 2009. We said we were going to turn around the recession. We said we'd create jobs. And we said we'd do it in 12 months. What happened? We did it in three. It was the most successful period in the history of the United States. And 2010 is only going to be better. How awesome is that?

(APPLAUSE.)

How did we do it? Simple. We made a stimulus package. It had the most features of any package we've ever created—more jobs, more money, more everything. We could have stopped there. We could've said, Hey, that was great. Let's go do something else. But you know what? It wasn't enough. The American people deserve something even better and more revolutionary.

The iState of the Union

An anonymous reader writes to tell us that Bach Technology has rolled out an updated MP3 file format in a bid to combat music piracy. Dubbed "MusicDNA," the new format offers embedded "updatable premium content" like lyrics, videos, news updates, and album artwork. "Using the new technology, music labels and bands will be able to send updates to the music files – with tour dates, interviews or updates to social networking pages – while illegally-downloaded files remain static. ... No major labels have signed up to use MusicDNA so far, but British record company Beggars Group and US label Tommy Boy are both on board. However, the files are likely to be more expensive than MP3 files – according to the BBC – and will have to compete with Apple's iTunes LP, which already provides additional content such as bonus tracks, lyrics and video interviews."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tetraxis puzzle

By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics

People have been making geometric puzzles for centuries, with each design adding new twists. At The Museum of Mathematics, we have a large puzzle called the tetraxis, shown above. The name comes from the fact that the pieces line up along four axes. Most people are familiar with the 90 degree relationship between the standard XYZ axes, but are confounded by these parts, which line up in the directions of the four long diagonals of a cube. This puzzle was made by John and Jane Kostick, who incorporated magnets to make the parts lock together nicely. The outer shape comes from a family of related puzzles by Stewart Coffin, whose book The Puzzling World of Polyhedral Dissections, gives instructions for woodworkers on making their own copies of many geometric puzzles.

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Becky Stern sez, "Many of you requested I make available a version of my <3 necklace, so here it is!"

New <3 Necklace, for sale this time (Thanks, Becky!)

Here's the new issue of MAKE on the newsstand at Barnes and Nobles in Dearborn, MI. It's always a delight for me to find it and see MAKE next to other magazines. MAKE is like a little brother who somehow gets attention by being a bit different. At this newsstand, the computers and business categories run into each other. We're in standing out in a row with MaximumPC, Consumer Reports, Business Week and Wired.

Also, Wired's new issue, "The Next Industrial Revolution," pairs nicely with MAKE's "Desktop Factory" issue.

Is there a consensus emerging that we're entering into a new era of manufacturing? The big idea is that complex tools for making things are becoming available to more people, just as desktop printing gave consumers capabilities that were available previously to professionals with typesetting and printing equipment. The learning curve required to operate this equipment and interface it to computers is making it possible for more people to get involved. So, in lots of areas but especially in manufacturing, professional-grade tools are coming within reach of hobbyists and small businesses. The future is open to anyone who wants to make something and even start a business.

Let a thousand factories bloom! And I write this from Detroit, which will be looking in this direction for its future.

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Michael Manning points us to a writeup of a new study by Harvard professor Anita Elberse (who has long been a critic of things like "the long tail" concept) concerning the "iTunes effect" on music sales. Most of the article focuses on the fact that (*gasp!*) given the opportunity to just buy the songs people like, rather than an entire album, many will do just that. Shocking. But the writeup seems to suggest that this is the fault of iTunes, rather than the fault of the recording industry for putting out album after album where only a couple of songs are worth buying. There's no cosmic law that says people need to buy albums, and to blame iTunes for it, rather than the industry for not creating products worth buying seems incredibly backwards.

Of course, it then gets even more ridiculous:

Not all of that lost revenue was profit. That album revenue was partly subsidizing the discovery and publishing of new music, which in turn created new buyers of music, tour tickets, posters, t-shirts, and so on. That revenue in turn helped develop that artist's next venture, and discover yet other artists. Significantly decreased revenues breaks the cycle that helps find new talent that will generate more revenue.

And yet, as we've seen more new music is being made today than ever before in history, so it's not like this is really harming the production of new music. And this totally ignores how the internet has totally changed the economics of discovering, publishing and distributing new music -- such that you don't need to rely on the major record labels to seek out new music for you. And, even if you do rely on major labels to "discover" the next big thing, new technologies have made that much cheaper for the industry as well. They now have the internet to help them find bands and judge their buzz and sound even without having first found them at a club as was often done in the past. To ignore all of those other impacts seems highly questionable, and puts a cloud over the research as a whole. Besides, just thinking about it logically makes it ridiculous to think that iTunes has somehow limited new music discovery. For many, many, many people, it seems likely that it has increased new music discovery, and done so by taking the record labels somewhat (not entirely) out of that loop.

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When thinking up a way to promote the awesomeness of engineering, IBM Fellow John Cohn did what came naturally - a music video parody of a Coolio track, of course! [via Adafruit Industries]

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At the Astrobiology Science Conference 2010 in April, scientists working on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) will debate whether it's a good idea to systematically start transmitting interstellar greetings into space. Of course, there have been isolated efforts to reach out to our space brothers before. For example, SETI pioneer Frank Drake created the 210 byte message seen here and transmitted it from the Arecibo telescope in 1974. It's not expected to reach its detination, the star cluster M13, for another 25,000 years though. Can we come up with communications that might be easier for an ET to grok, perhaps also using mathematics and pictures? And even if we can, should we? From New Scientist:

(SETI Institute's head of the Interstellar Message Composition program Douglas) Vakoch, who will chair these sessions, is all in favour. "I have long held the position that after broad-based international consultation, we should be doing active SETI," he says.

It's an approach that worries ex-astronomer and science fiction author David Brin, who was a member of the International Academy of Astronautics SETI panel until 2006. He resigned when the committee backtracked on the wording of a protocol that called for discussion before deliberately broadcasting into space. "I dislike seeing my children's destiny being gambled with by a couple of dozen arrogant people who cling to one image of the alien," says Brin. Since then three other members have quit for similar reasons. Vakoch has some sympathy with Brin's point of view. "These issues are much too important and too complex to be resolved after only a few days of discussion."

If the enthusiasts for active SETI get their way and there is a real effort to send a message, the next question is: what should we say?...

"Redundancy really helps," says Shostak, as it allows a recipient to make a guess about the meaning and then check it, like in a crossword. He suspects that all the polite efforts to be understood might be unnecessary. "A lot of people wonder what we should send. Music, mathematics or pictures? My first thought is it probably doesn't matter," he says.

Instead, (SETI Institute senior astronomer Seth) Shostak suggests that we just gabble. "My conclusion is that you would just send them the Google servers. That's an enormous amount of information, much of it redundant and pictographic. Much of it is pornographic too, but I expect they could handle that." (Although it raises questions like, can Earth handle a trillion orders for Viagra?)

"Exolanguage: do you speak alien?"

Recently there were some complaints from certain users outside the US stating that they were no longer able to access SourceForge.net. SF.net (who shares a corporate overlord with Slashdot) has outlined the reasons for these bans, and until someone with sufficient power to alter US law or the lists governing who is allowed to access what data from where, there is unlikely to be a change in these bans. It is worth noting that SF.net is not alone in these difficulties, as the same problems have been reported from other repositories, like Google Code. "As one of the first companies to promote the adoption and distribution of free and open source software, and one that still puts open source at the center of its corporate ideals, restrictions on the free flow of information rub us the wrong way. However, in addition to participating in the open source community, we also live in the real world, and are governed by the laws of the country in which we are located. Our need to follow those laws supersedes any wishes we might have to make our community as inclusive as possible. The possible penalties for violating these restrictions include fines and imprisonment. Other hosting companies based in the US have similar legal and technical restrictions in place."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sean Michael Ragan of Makezine writes: "Matthew Albanese [is] a photographer who builds meticulously detailed landscape models and then lights and shoots them to achieve amazing realism. My personal favorite is the Martian landscape made from paprika and charcoal." Also show here: Tornado made of steel wool, cotton, ground parsley and moss.

Matthew Albanese's Strange Worlds

Today, the Royal Society in London kicks off a conference on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. In one session, Arizona State University physicist Paul Davies will explain why he thinks we should be looking in our own backyards to support the possibility that life evolved on other planets. For example, US Geological Survey scientist Felisa Wolfe-Simon is exploring whether "alien" lifeforms could thrive in aresenic-contaminated environments that would seem to be a bit, er, inhospitable. Davies addresses some of these ideas in his forthcoming book, The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence. From The Times Online:

Professor Davies will argue that demonstrating that life has appeared more than once on Earth would be the best evidence yet that it must exist elsewhere in the Universe.

He told The Times: "We need to give up the notion that ET is sending us some sort of customised message and take a new approach."

According to Professor Davies, "weird" microbes that belong to a completely separate tree of life, dubbed the "shadow biosphere", could be present in isolated ecological niches in which ordinary life struggles to survive. Likely hiding places include deserts, scalding volcanic vents, the dry valleys of Antartica or salt-saturated lakes.

Not all are convinced by the "shadow biosphere" concept. Colin Pillinger, who led the Beagle 2 Mars landing mission, said: "I prefer to deal in scientific fact -- this is wildly science fiction. You'd be off your trolley to go searching for arsenic-based life."

Professor Pillinger, who is due to speak at the Royal Society today, argues that Mars remains the best bet for finding alien organisms.

"Royal Society meet to discuss if extra-terrestrials are here on Earth"

Want to design robots that excavate on the moon? I thought so. NASA is running a competition called Lunabotics for undergrad and grad students. The deadline for team registration is February 28, 2010. There are cash prizes and VIP Kennedy launch tickets up for grabs! [Thanks, Rachel!]

More:

• Handmade telescope
• First computer on the moon
• Eavesdropping on the moon, circa 1969
• Your own personal moon
• Glow in the dark moon table

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Robots + Monsters will be reopening on Monday January 25th, with the donations going to Doctors Without Borders and their Haiti efforts. From their press release:

The destruction and human suffering wrought by the earthquake in Haiti has touched us all, whether we have a personal connection to the country or not. Robots + Monsters is committed to help alleviate the suffering of the Haitian people by partnering with the humanitarian group, Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders.)... More than 1,000 injured people have been treated by Doctors Without Borders medical teams in the first 24 hours following the earthquake and we are currently transporting additional staff and emergency supplies into Haiti.... Robots + Monsters has been fortunate enough to secure the very limited drawing time of many amazing contributors from the illustration and visual arts world, like Adam Koford, John Martz, Matt Rebholz, and Molly Crabapple, as well as many others, who will all be helping out for this great cause. Visit www.robotsandmonsters.org for more info.

Consollection is an elegantly-presented page about more than 100 different videogame systems from history in the collection of a gent named Phil Penninger. The site is tied to a German book by the same name, designed by Patrick Molnar Design. (Thanks, Mathias Crawford!)

alphadogg writes "The cost of a data breach increased last year to $204 per compromised customer record, according to the Ponemon Institute's annual study. The average total cost of a data breach rose from $6.65 million in 2008 to $6.75 million in 2009. The Ponemon Institute based its estimates on data from 45 companies that publicly acknowledged a breach of sensitive customer data last year and were willing to discuss it. In tallying the cost of a data breach, the Ponemon Institute looks at several factors, including: the cost of lost business because of an incident; legal fees; disclosure expenses related to customer contact and public response; consulting help; and remediation expenses such as technology and training."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

How did Haiti get to the place it is today, and where can it go in the future? Alexis Madrigal at Wired has a wide-ranging reading list for anyone interested in better understanding the social, political and technological histories of Haiti.

Health care cost per person per year on left, life expectancy on right.

Related: a futile attempt to use logic to convince teabaggers to stop hurting themselves.

Health care cost -vs- life expectancy chart from National Geographic.

At the heart of pro-Prop 8 arguments—and the whole point of the Alliance Defense Fund's existence—is the idea that "the democratic process" and "mob rule" are indistinguishable from one another. Says Fred Clark on the Slacktivist blog, "Perry v. Schwarzenegger may not settle the question of marriage equality in the short term, but it has demonstrated for all to see that in the long term there is only one outcome constitutionally possible. Once the bullies have been revealed as nothing more than that, the rest is inevitable."

I'm at the Midem conference this week, and in preparing for it, Steven Masur asked me to write up a chapter for a book he was putting together of thoughts from various thinkers for a gathering of the International Association of Entertainment Lawyers (IAEL) here at Midem. Below is what I submitted. If you're a regular reader of the blog, there's little that will surprise you, but even so, it may be a good read, as it's got a whole bunch of different things I've discussed about -- things like "CwF+RtB" all summarized in one single place. Later, I'll do another post on what I discussed this year at Midem, since it builds on what's written below, and digs in much deeper on how to create compelling reasons to buy.

It's no secret that there's a lot of concern these days about what the music industry will look like going forward -- especially from those who work on the label side of the business and have been around for a bit. A variety of things have caused rapid change in the market. Competition from other forms of entertainment, such as the internet, movies and video games, have put more pressure on the industry, as consumers have been presented with significantly more options for their entertainment attention and dollars. And, of course, there's the ever-present specter of unauthorized file sharing -- or, as the industry prefers to call it (accurately or not), "piracy."

While the industry spent many years fighting the rise of the internet as a distribution and promotion method for music, it was eventually forced to recognize it. The labels eventually licensed music to Apple and iTunes (as well as some other stores). It took them way too long to recognize that people wanted DRM-free music, but they've finally come around to recognize that as well.

But the big new questions are all about licensing. New services are starting to show up on the scene, such as the industry's new darling, Spotify. Then there are attempts, such as those by Choruss and Warner Music, to set up something that is somewhat akin to a blanket license. For the most part, the industry hasn't shown much willingness to do these sorts of deals in manners that allow the underlying companies to survive, let alone profit. Numerous innovative startups have suffocated under burdensome licensing terms -- and as each one fails, it just gives consumers fewer and fewer reasons to actually use these services, wondering how long each will last until it goes out of business.

However, there is another solution: stop worrying and learn to embrace the business models that are already helping musicians make plenty of money and use file sharing to their advantage, even in the absence of licensing or copyright enforcement.

In simplest terms, the model can be defined as:

Connect with Fans (CwF) + Reason to Buy (RtB) = The Business Model

Sound simple? It is, if you understand the basics -- and it can be incredibly lucrative. The problem, of course, is that very few seem to fully understand how this model works. However, let's go through some examples.

Trent Reznor, the man behind the band Nine Inch Nails, has done so many experiments that show how this model works that it's difficult to describe them all. He's become a true leader in showing how this model works in a way that has earned him millions while making fans happy, rather than turning them into the enemy.

Reznor has always reached out to his fans, and has an amazingly comprehensive website, with forums, chat rooms and many other ways of interacting. He encourages fans to better connect with each other as well. While companies like Warner Music forced all the music videos of their artists off YouTube for many months, Reznor actually aggregates all the videos his fans take at concerts (he encourages them to bring cameras) on one page on his own website. He does the same for photos. He released a (free) iPhone app that allowed fans to locate each other, and communicate with each other, while sharing photos and videos as well. It's all about connecting with those fans, and helping them better connect with each other, so they feel like a part of a club.

From there, he gives fans real reasons to buy. Lately, he's taken to releasing everything he records for free online, knowing that the music will show up on file sharing sites anyway, so he sees no reason to fight it. Yet, he adds many other options that people might want to buy. With his release of the album Ghosts I-IV, he released all the tracks under a Creative Commons license that allowed anyone to share them online for free. Yet, he also set up some cool "reasons to buy." You could get the two disc CD, if you wanted, for just $10. Above that, though, was a Deluxe Edition Package, for $75. It was, effectively, a box set, but around a single album. Beyond the two CDs, it also included a DVD and a Blu-ray and a photobook of images.

Where the experiment got even more interesting was that he offered up the $300 Ultra-Deluxe Limited Edition Package -- of which there was a limit of just 2,500 available. This was an even more impressive "box" that also included the songs on high quality vinyl, and some beautiful giclée print images. But, most interesting of all was that that limited set of 2,500 were all signed by Reznor himself.

It took just 30 hours for all 2,500 to sell out, bringing in $750,000 in just over a day.

For music he was giving away for free.

But, by connecting with fans, and giving them a reason to buy, they did. In the first week alone, combining all the other offerings for Ghosts I-IV, Reznor brought in $1.6 million. Again, this is for music he was giving away for free.

The idea that you "can't compete with free" or that free means there's no business model is a myth. As Reznor and others have recognized, when the music goes free, it opens up new opportunities for better, stronger, more efficient business models.

Reznor's next album, The Slip, was released just a few months later, and again, was given away entirely free, but it was released the very same day as he announced his next Nine Inch Nails tour. All he asked, if you wanted to download the music, was that you provide an email address. He then gave fans the option of what quality to download the songs -- all the way up to lossless FLAC files. All for free. But, if you downloaded the files, you also learned about the tour, and the tickets were quickly snapped up.

The free music didn't hurt Reznor's ability to earn money. It enhanced it.

By connecting with fans and giving them a reason to buy, he's been able to thrive.

Some have complained that Reznor is not a representative example. After all, that huge fanbase came about in large part because of his success under the "old" model, where he was signed to a major record label who helped promote his album and turn him into an international rock star. While some may quibble with how much the label actually helped Reznor, it's worth exploring how this model has also worked for many other artists -- from the superstars to new up-and-coming acts.

Josh Freese is a session drummer based in Los Angeles, who appears on well over 100 albums and performs with many different bands. He's played with (among others), Nine Inch Nails, Guns 'N Roses, Sting, Devo, The Vandals, the Offspring. Yet, outside of certain musical circles, he doesn't have a huge individual reputation with fans. So, when he released his first solo album, called Since 1972, in March of 2009, he decided to set up a system similar to Reznor's Ghosts I-IV experiment, but made it more fitting to his own personality -- which meant making the options extreme and hilarious.

There were cheap options to get the music and CDs, but at $50, you would also get a personal 5 minute "thank you" phone call, where he said you could ask anything you wanted (his suggestion: "Which one of Sting's mansions has the comfiest beds.") There was a limited $250 option to get lunch with Freese at a PF Changs or a $500 chance to get dinner with him at Sizzler. The lunches sold out in about a week.

Then Freese took the model to a different level altogether. At $2,500 (limit of 5 available), he would provide a drum lesson, where you'd get to keep one of Freese's snare drums. You'd also visit the Hollywood Wax Museum with Josh and one of a rotating list of his rockstar friends (depending on who was available). Finally, you'd get to take and keep any three items from Josh's closet.

At $10,000, you'd get dinner with Josh and a rockstar friend, before hanging out at Disneyland (where Josh's father worked for many years, and where Josh got his start as a professional drummer) with Josh. And at the end of the day, you would get to keep Josh's Volvo station wagon -- after dropping him off at home. Obviously, there was only one of those available.

There were also $20,000 and $75,000 options available, including many more offers, like having Josh join your band or be your personal assistant for a few weeks. You'd also get to go on tour with Josh. He would also write and record a five-song EP about you. A teenager in Florida actually purchased the $20,000 option, and spent a week with Josh, including a night on the Queen Mary cruise ship, a pizza party at Mark Mothersbaugh (of Devo)'s house and a game of mini-golf with the singer from Tool.

Once again, by connecting with his fans, and giving them something of scarce value, Freese was able to create a business model that worked.

Connecting with Fans (CwF) plus a Reason to Buy (RtB) worked again.

However, some still complain that he's a product of the "old" industry, even if he was little known outside of it.

The next example is Jill Sobule, who had a hit song in 1995 with "I Kissed A Girl" (not the Katy Perry song). Since then, however, she's been dropped from two record labels and had two independent labels she was signed to go out of business. When it came time to record her latest album, she decided to get her fans to help fund it. She'd already done an excellent job connecting with her fans, regularly interacting with them on Facebook, where she would hold fun contests each day and actually chat with them and respond to questions.

She launched a website called "Jill's Next Record" that -- like Reznor and Freese -- offered up many options for how her fans could support her to fund a new album. They could pay $200 and get free access to any shows for a year. They could get their name mentioned on a "thank you" song. At $5,000, she would do a home concert at your house. She even noted you could charge for that one, and maybe even make some money. She ended up doing five or six such concerts. At $10,000 (described as the "weapons grade plutonium" level) you could sing on the album. This was meant to be a joke, but a woman in the UK purchased it, and Jill had her flown out to LA where she did, in fact, appear singing backing vocals on the album.

Her goal was to raise $75,000, and she had no idea if she'd be able to reach that number at all. Yet, she broke through that number and ended up raising over $80,000 in just 53 days. With that, she was able to go into the studio and record a full scale production, including hiring famed producer Don Was to handle production.

CwF+RtB worked again.

Again, some complain that Jill is not representative, due to her hit song in 1995 -- though, again, they'll ignore her being dropped from two record labels and and having two others go out of business.

So, let's look at Corey Smith. In the earlier part of this decade, Smith was a high school teacher, playing open mic nights on weekends. But then, he started focusing on building his music career. He started playing numerous live shows, and really worked hard to connect with fans. He gave away all of his music for free off of his website, and used that to drive more fans to his shows. On top of that, he offered special $5 pre-sale tickets to many shows, which has a useful side effect: his biggest fans would convince many others to go as well, building up his fan base, and getting more people to go to more shows. He tried pulling his free music off of his website as an experiment, and saw that his sales on iTunes actually dropped when he did that. In 2008, mostly thanks to live shows, Corey was able to gross nearly $4 million. While giving his music away for free. Connecting with fans and giving them a reason to buy worked wonders.

Jonathon Coulton was a computer programmer. In September of 2006, he decided to write, record and release a new song every week for a year -- with all of the songs being released under a Creative Commons license, so anyone could share them. And share them they did. Coulton became a cult sensation, and was making a good living within months of this decision. His fans were supporting him along the way, even creating music videos for every song he released. He started using services like Eventful to more strategically target concert opportunities. If enough people requested a show in a certain location, he knew it would be profitable and started "parachuting" in to do shows that he knew would make him money. Again, by connecting with fans and giving them a real reason to buy, he was able to build up a great following and make a good living.

Moto Boy is a singer/songwriter in Sweden on the wonderfully named label "Songs I Wish I Had Written." Moto Boy and his label purposely put all of his songs on file sharing networks -- including The Pirate Bay (the label's founder, at times, has shared an office with one of The Pirate Bay's founders). But, Moto Boy has worked quite hard to connect with fans. He has a great website, where fans can interact, and he encourages sharing his music in creative ways. When a bunch of his fans started filming his concerts and putting them on video hosting sites like YouTube and Vimeo, his label found the best such vidoes, and put them all together into a "YouTube concert." Compare that to record labels like Warner Music forcing their content off of YouTube. While all of Moto Boy's music is free, he's continued to connect with fans in fascinating ways. Last year, he began selling wind-up music boxes, that play one of his songs. Just recently, he launched a limited edition (only 25) of those music boxes in beautiful, hand-crafted wooden boxes, signed by Moto Boy, with a CD and the music notation inside the box. Connecting with the fans and giving them a reason to buy beyond just the music has turned Moto Boy into a star in Sweden.

Amanda Palmer is a singer who made a name for herself as a member of the "punk cabaret duo" The Dresden Dolls. While she put out a solo album on Roadrunner Records (a subsidiary of Warner Music), she found that they had little interest in promoting her, and took things into her own hands. She reached out directly to fans on services like Twitter, often setting up "flash gigs" where people would show up wherever she wanted to perform. In June of 2008, one such flash gig at a beach in Los Angeles ended up with an impromptu, beautiful, music video for a song that Palmer had just learned that morning, due to a suggestion from a fan on Twitter. And she's doing a good job making money, as well. Bored in her apartment one evening, she started twittering with fans and came up with a jokey t-shirt suggestion, and set up an immediate store, selling $11,000 worth of t-shirts in days. Another night, she started a live video stream from her apartment, and started an impromptu online auction for various items in her apartment associated with a recent tour, often with a personalized twist. In three hours, she brought in $6,000. Connecting with fans and offering them something fun and unique to buy worked wonders. To date, she hasn't received a single royalty check from Warner Music on her album.

Matthew Ebel is a singer in Boston who started building a fanbase by playing live and actively participating in social networks and other sites. He started regularly performing in Second Life, for example. At one point, he decided to set up a "subscription" backstage pass offer, whereby fans could pay $5, $10 or $15/month to get various benefits -- including access to new songs every couple of weeks, as well as having new recorded shows sent to them. Depending on the level of support, they could get access to special shows, gift bags or other opportunities for unique offers not available to others. Ebel has discovered that he's making enough so that music is his full-time job. Subscription revenues represent nearly 40% of his income, which is about equal to live gigs and sales of CDs and digital songs combined. Connecting with fans and giving them a real reason to buy has made it so that he can have career as a musician.

Moldover is an electronic musician based in San Francisco. Being in such a high tech hub, he had an interesting idea for his next album. Along with the music itself, the CD case would be a working circuit board, with all the songs spelled out in soldered electric circuits. These connected various components to make the CD case itself an instrument. Pushing a button on the side of the case, would light up the center and make a noise, which could be modified through a pair of light sensors, creating a virtual theremin. The case even had a line out jack, so it could be plugged into a computer or an audio system. The CDs themselves were sold for $50, and Moldover discovered the demand was far stronger than he expected. Yes, even though we're told that no one will pay for music (without strict copy protection), this less well known artist is doing brisk business selling $50 CDs.

Of course, these are just musicians, but these sorts of models impact the wider ecosystem. Companies like TopSpin, Nimbit and Kickstarter are making this work today (for artists big and small). TopSpin has helped enable musicians to better connect with fans and give them a reason to buy over and over again -- and found that, when it's done right, people absolutely buy. One of TopSpin's artists recently had an average transaction price of over $100, and multiple artists have seen their average transaction price at over $50. The claim that fans just want stuff for free is not borne out by these examples. Across all of TopSpin's artists, they've seen an average transaction price well over $20 -- more than the cost of your average CD. By enabling bands to connect with fans while giving them something of unique value to buy, beyond just the music, these bands are thriving.

And, of course, there's a role for labels to play as well. Terry McBride runs Nettwerk, a Canadian-based label that has tremendous success embracing these sorts of models with a bunch of different artists. McBride has declared that copyright won't even matter within a decade, and he's acting accordingly. But he's making sure that his acts really do connect with fans. With a recent album release by the hip hop artist K-OS, before the album was released, they released all the stems from the songs to let the fans do their own mixes. These weren't "remixes" because the original mixes weren't even out! Rather than worrying about an album leaking, K-OS and Nettwerk purposely got the core of the music out themselves and let fans do what they wanted with it. They then set up a system to submit the fan mixes and to vote on them, such that the best mixes were then put on their own album, and both the "professional" and the "fan mixed" albums were released at the same time -- leading many fans to buy them both. Both albums, separately, but at the same time, ended up in the top 50 on the charts.

As you look through all of these, some patterns emerge. They're not about getting a fee on every transaction or every listen or every stream. They're not about licensing. They're not about DRM or lawsuits or copyright. They're about better connecting with the fans and then offering them a real, scarce, unique reason to buy -- such that in the end, everyone is happy. Fans get what they want at a price they want, and the musicians and labels make money as well. It's about recognizing that the music itself can enhance the value of everything else, whether it's shows, access or merchandise, and that letting fans share music can help increase the market and create more fans willing to buy compelling offerings. It's about recognizing that even when the music is shared freely, there are business models that work wonders, without copyright or licensing issues even coming into play.

Adding in new licensing schemes only serves to distort this kind of market. Fans and artists are connecting directly and doing so in a way that works and makes money. Putting in place middlemen only takes a cut away from the musicians and serves to make the markets less efficient. They need to deal with overhead and bureaucracy. They need to deal with collections and allocation. They make it less likely for fans to support bands directly, because the money is going elsewhere. Even when licensing fees are officially paid further up the line, those costs are passed on to the end users, and the money might not actually go to supporting the music they really like.

Instead, let's let the magic of the market continue to work. New technologies are making it easier than ever for musicians to create, distribute and promote music -- and also to make money doing so. In the past, the music business was a "lottery," where only a very small number made any money at all. With these models, more musicians than ever before are making money today, and they're not doing it by worrying about copyright or licensing. They're embracing what the tools allow. A recent study from Harvard showed how much more music is being produced today than at any time in history, and the overall music ecosystem -- the amount of money paid in support of music -- is at an all time high, even if less and less of it is going to the purchase of plastic discs.

This is a business model that's working now and it will work better and better in the future as more people understand the mechanisms and improve on them. Worrying about new copyright laws or new licensing schemes or new DRM or new lawsuits or new ways to shut down file sharing is counterproductive, unnecessary and dangerous. Focusing on what's working and encouraging more of that is the way to go. It's a model that works for musicians, works for enablers and works for fans. It is the future and we should be thrilled with what it's producing.

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If you've got free time and the ability to follow simple directions, you can help enter information into a database that's being used to put Haitians in contact with missing loved ones.

Police in Mississippi pulled over a peanut truck and found many peanuts along with $672,439. They took the money (not sure about the peanuts). They want to keep the money so they can pull over more peanut trucks.

"This is really going to help if it works out and we get to keep the money," Morton Mayor Greg Butler said.

The latest crop of high-end DSLR cameras are capable of shooting beautiful video, however they can be difficult to use because they cannot autofocus while in movie mode. It turns out that film movie cameras work the same way, and the solution is to have really accurate manual controls that you can use to make sure that the camera is always focused to the correct position. Of course, really accurate manual controls also means expensive, so it's nice to see this hack by Mac user slerman, a follow and rack focus rig. He used the gears from an old hand drill to make a focus lever for his Canon camera, which allows him to change camera focus by turning an easy-to-use crank. [via Gizmodo]

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With the recent release of Firefox 3.6, Mozilla has also decided to try out a new development model dubbed "Lorentz." A blend of both Agile and more traditional "waterfall" development models, the new methodology aims to deliver new features much more quickly while still maintaining backwards compatibility, security, and overall quality. Only time will tell if this is effective, or just another management fad. "If the new approach sounds familiar, that's because Unix and Linux development has attempted similar kinds of release variations for iterating new features while maintaining backwards compatibility. HP-UX, for example, is currently on its HP-UX 11iv3 release, which receives updates several times a year that add incremental new functionality. The Linux 2.6.x kernel gets new releases approximately every three months, which include new features as well."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Agitator just infected me with a nasty little mind virus called The Game.

I would just like to tell you that you should feel regretful about spreading the meme-virus of “the game” by means of your blog several years ago.  If by some miracle you have forgotten about this by now, let me remind you: the game is, when you think of the game, you lose.  The “losing” part of this turns out not to be conventional, like losing at a real game.  Rather, the losing is the distraction and annoyance you experience when this useless, stupid thought intrudes itself upon your consciousness.  For me, this happens every few months, for a few days or weeks at a time popping up every few hours.  During really bad times, the very thought of recall becomes infected by the game, and whenever I think about remembering anything I remember the game.  I don’t think I will ever permanently forget.

One of the worst parts of the game for me is my knowledge that I can never tell anybody about it unless I want to spite them.  Because I do not want to subject them to this virus of thought.  Why did you not have the same thought before you recklessly posted this on your blog?  I hope that you feel at least some pangs of conscience over this act.  You have done some really wonderful things through your journalism, and in many ways I admire you, but–and, please understand, this e-mail is NOT in jest–I wonder how you could have done such an ugly, inconsiderate thing.

Undoubtedly, writing this e-mail will make me think more often of the game for a little while.  That is unfortunate, but I have thought about writing this note many times.

One More Thing: You All Just Lost The Game

Someone who goes by the YouTube handle The Faking Hoaxer makes realistic videos of UFO visits, encounters with ghosts, and other phony events. Above, a video of the Space Shuttle destroyed in space.

A video I made to show how the Shuttle may look if it was destroyed in space. Filmed from the ISS or maybe another Shuttle. All made with real photos of the Shuttle then I used Photoshop to make it look damaged and in pieces. Then I put it in space using After Effects.

Don't miss his other videos, especially 2 UFO's fly under the Space Shuttle, and Green Sphere UFO.

The Faking Hoaxer's YouTube Channel (Via Forgetomori)

A fascinating article points out that the government could make the process of filing your tax returns significantly easier by simply sending you pre-filled out forms of what they know (basically what's been sent in from your employer(s)) so that you could just take the pre-filled form, check it over, make any additions or changes as necessary and submit it. Apparently, many places that have done this have had great success with it. But it's not happening in the US in large part due to heavy lobbying from Intuit, who fears (perhaps correctly) that this would put a big dent into its tax preparation software business. Of course, that's not how Intuit puts it. The company first claims that this functionality is "already available" (it's not) and that it is a "conflict of interest for government to be both tax collector and tax preparer." However, that is also inaccurate. No one is asking the government to be the tax preparer, but just to share the information it already has so that individuals aren't forced to rebuild the info themselves. As one person quoted in the article notes, it's "as if Visa sent customers a blank piece of paper, requiring that they assemble their receipts, list their purchases -- and pay a fine if they forget one." So, everyone, thank Intuit for making tax season that much more frustrating.

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Oxford_Comma_Lover writes "IDG News Service is reporting that several human rights organizations focusing on China have been hit by DDoS attacks this weekend, including Chinese Human Rights Defenders and Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch. The latter works on issues of mental persecution (dissidents being thrown into mental hospitals where they were forced onto medication or beaten with electric batons) and eminent-domain type problems (seizure of farmland or urban land without compensation when the government is working on a project)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is not, in fact, an actual volcano. It is, rather, the work of Matthew Albanese, a photographer who builds meticulously detailed landscape models and then lights and shoots them to achieve amazing realism. You can view more of his work here. My personal favorite is the Martian landscape made from paprika and charcoal. [via Neatorama]

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Michael Geist sez, "The 7th round of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement negotiations begins tomorrow in Guadalajara, Mexico. The negotiation round will be the longest to-date, with three and a half days planned to address civil enforcement, border measures, the Internet provisions, and (one hour for) transparency. Over the next five days, I plan to post a five-part ACTA Guide that will include sourcing for much of the discussion on ACTA, links to all the leaked documents, information on the transparency issue, and a look at who has been speaking out."

Karl Schroeder writes:

Starting on February 1, 2010, and running through until May 30, I will be Toronto Public Library's Writer in Residence, working out of the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculation at the Lillian H. Smith branch at College and Spadina. In this role, I'll be helping members of the public who are interested in writing and publishing science fiction and fantasy; I will be conducting workshops, holding readings, and editing and critiquing submitted manuscripts through to the end of May...

If you're in the Toronto area, submit your manuscript for an opportunity to have a one-on-one evaluation with me or attend the writer-in-residence readings and workshops

Holy cats is this ever cool. Karl and I met when I was a teenager through one of these writer-in-residence programs. At the time, the library was called the Spaced Out Library, and it had been founded with sf legend Judith Merril's personal collection of science fiction books. Judy served as the writer-in-residence, and made a habit of putting together writers whom she thought would work well together. She put Karl and me together in a workshop that folded, and then in another one that is still going today, the Cecil Street Irregulars, which sports several wonderful writers that you've seen mentioned here many times. What a great thing for Karl to come all the way around full circle -- talk about paying it forward!

Writer-in-Residence Karl Schroeder (Thanks, Karl!)

Yana from Oxfam sez, "I thought you'd enjoy watching this short animation from Oxfam America that follows our gas dollars, to show where they really go. Oxfam has been working hard to deliver aid to victims of Haiti's earthquake, but they're also working to achieve transparency about oil and gas companies' payments to foreign governments - Empowering people living in resource-rich developing countries to demand that such revenue can be used to address basic needs (education, clean water, health care, etc). The animation was done by Talking Eyes Media."

Follow the Money (Thanks, Yana!)

I was visiting my friends' house in the Hollywood Hills, and noticed a built-in niche under the stairs in the living room. My friends don't know what the niche is for.

The house was originally built for Jean Harlow in the 1930s. When I tweeted these photos a couple of days ago, my twitter followers replied that the niche might have been built to hold a champagne bottle and a couple of flutes, but we tested that and a champagne bottle won't fit.

Other suggestions included: a place to hold the mail (not deep enough for mail), film awards (seems too small), candles (fire hazard), glove warmer (not in southern California), milk bottle holder (weird location for that), martini shaker holder (that would be better in the bar), phone (too small), pneumatic tube station (in my dreams).

None of the above guesses seem right. What do you think it is?

What Digital Camera has arranged an auction of camera gear in aid of the victims of the earthquake in Haiti. All the goods have been donated by their respective UK distributors and all the proceeds will go directly to the Disasters Emergency Appeal (DEC) Haiti Earthquake Appeal (a collaboration of 13 major UK aid agencies, led by the Red Cross). Lots include compacts, premium-brand accessories and even a Nikon D3000. Bids must all be made by PayPal and all auctions end on January 30th.

Kerry Jia Yi Lin designed this "hermit" shelter for public napping. While I agree with Syuzi Pakhchyan that the use of RFID to open and close the shelter is a bit of overkill, the servo-conrolled opening and closing of the hood is pretty nifty. Did I mention I also like naps? [via Fashioning Technology]

More:

Body Technology Interfaces

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Jud Turner sez, "'Duel Nature' is my latest 'Impossible Flying Machine' sculpture. It's about the unnatural act of war-making, expressed by heavily arming 2 trees; it's also about the fact that much of what appears to be pastoral nature is also a war between plants for sunlight and nutrients played out very slowly."

"Duel Nature" (Thanks, Jud!)

Slashdot frequent contributor Bennett Haselton writes "The EFF is seeking over $400,000 in attorney's fees from Universal Music Group after Universal sent a DMCA takedown notice to YouTube, demanding the removal of a video posted by user Stephanie Lenz. Lenz had posted a video of her toddler dancing to a 30-second clip of the Prince song "Let's Go Crazy"; after Universal sent the takedown notice, the EFF sent YouTube a counter-notice on behalf of Lenz arguing that the video was fair use, and YouTube restored it. Now the EFF is asking the judge to award them attorney's fees for their work." Use your magical clicking device below to read many more words.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alicia Traveria's scrummy brain-slug cupcakes were made for a birthday party, using "gum paste, with royal icing eyes, and flower stamen antennae." There's also "some slight grenadine flavor" in the buttercream icing brains.

Brain Slugs! (via Neatorama)

In the past we've had an ongoing discussion with some folks on this site concerning whether or not it's now a better time to be a musician than before the internet became central to everything music-related. We've argued that today there are more options and more opportunities for bands than ever, and that's only a good thing. It doesn't mean that every band will be a success or can make a living. That's never going to be true (and has never been true, either). Many will still fail, but there are more tools and opportunities that if you learn to embrace them, you can absolutely do much better than you ever could under the old system -- which required massive backing to become successful. It was the golden lottery ticket story of musical stardom.

Last week, we wrote a post about an interview with Tommy Boy Entertainment boss, Tom Silverman, claiming that just 14 unsigned artists "broke the obscurity line," -- which was defined as sales of 10,000 albums. Amusingly, three days after this post, I met Silverman on an airplane over the Atlantic... and only realized it was him when he started talking to the guy seated next to me about my post not realizing who I was (small freaking world). We had a brief, but quite enjoyable conversation, and while I see his point, I'm still not convinced his conclusion is correct on the issue of breaking artists (his view of business models, however, seems right on). Meanwhile, in the comments to our post, Peter Wells from TuneCore disputed Tom's numbers. Since then, both have expanded on the discussion.

Tom provided more details on the number of totally independent success stories (decreasing the sum from 14 to 12 due to the fact that they had mischategorized 2 of the bands) over at the MusicianCoaching.com site. He then went on to claim that the long tail doesn't seem to be working for the music business:

Clearly the ease of making and distributing music does not benefit "breaking" music. Breaking music requires mass exposure which requires luck or money or both. I can say with great authority that less new music is breaking now in America than any other time in history. Technology has not helped more great music rise to the top, it has inhibited it. I know this is a bold statement but it is true.

Certainly bold words, though they did not address my original criticism with the point -- which is that number of albums sold is a poor measure of "obscurity" (or non-obscurity, as the case may be). As I said then: "You don't have to sell albums to become well known, and just because you're well known, it doesn't mean you sell albums. It's not the best proxy for figuring this stuff out." This week, at Midem, musician Hal Ritson of The Young Punx put it much more succinctly: "Sales are not how you measure success any more. You figure out how to get as many people as possible to hear your music, and then you figure out if you're profitable." Also, I still think it's wrong to only count totally independent artists in this list, because many artists signed to labels (both indie and majors) may use new technology to help breakout (with or without massive support from their labels).

Either way, even beyond that, it looks like Silverman's numbers may be suspect. Peter Wells followed up the comment on our site with a super detailed post about the problems with Silverman's numbers -- which rely on Nielsen SoundScan data, which Wells notes is massively incomplete. He quickly names multiple artists who sold hundreds of thousands of tracks, which aren't measured by SoundScan, and suggests the real issue isn't that new artists can't break, but that the measuring system doesn't take into account how they break these days.

I have to say that Wells' post is quite convincing. It's incredibly well-detailed and provides multiple examples of clearly successful (and hardly obscure) artists that aren't counted by Silverman's method. I still think that the points raised by Silverman about new business models in his original interview were dead on (and even he made the point that sometimes it made sense to release albums totally for free and use other ways of getting money -- which under his own definition would have made them impossible to "break out."). But it seems like there's an awful lot of evidence that our original assertion is still true: there are plenty of artists that are, in fact, breaking out thanks to new technologies -- and many are able to do so without a label. Whether or not it's "harder" to break out today due to increased competition may be another issue, but I'm not yet convinced this is a real problem.

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jibjibjib writes "Some of Australia's largest ISPs are preparing an industry code of conduct to identify and respond to users with botnet-infected computers. The Internet Industry Association, made up of over 200 ISPs and technology companies, is preparing the code in response to an ultimatum from the federal government. ISPs will try to contact the user, slow down their connection, and ultimately terminate the connection if the user refuses to fix the problem. It is hoped that this will reduce the growth of botnets in Australia, which had the world's third-highest rate of new 'zombies' (behind the US and China)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

jibjibjib writes "Some of Australia's largest ISPs are preparing an industry code of conduct to identify and respond to users with botnet-infected computers. The Internet Industry Association, made up of over 200 ISPs and technology companies, is preparing the code in response to an ultimatum from the federal government. ISPs will try to contact the user, slow down their connection, and ultimately terminate the connection if the user refuses to fix the problem. It is hoped that this will reduce the growth of botnets in Australia, which had the world's third-highest rate of new 'zombies' (behind the US and China)"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last June, the folks from Make: television teamed up with the Lemelson-MIT Program to capture stories from young inventors at the 2009 Eurekafest. They wanted to find out what inspires young people to invent, what the invention process taught them, and what problems they were trying to solve in the world.

Over the next few weeks, we'll share some of the videos they made and give props to some smart and creative students from all over the country.

First up, the Teen Technology InvenTeam, from Bridgewater, New Jersey, discovered a need to help African communities with their sorghum production. After a few wrong turns, they eventually settled on a creative and effective design using a pedal-powered thresher.

More about InvenTeams

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An anonymous reader writes "Wish you could start your car via your cell phone, but don't feel like ponying up the $40k for a Chevrolet Volt or $499 (plus $29 a year) for an aftermarket system from Viper? This hack relies on a cheap prepaid cellphone that has had its vibration motor surgically removed, replaced by a couple of leads triggering the car's starter. Whenever the phone receives a call it starts up the car — a somewhat dodgy proposition if a telemarketer ever gets hold of your number, but an interesting solution nonetheless. Total cost of the project: $71.03."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

waderoush writes "The secrecy surrounding the expected Apple tablet computer is only the latest example of the company's famously closed and controlling culture. Yet millions of designers, musicians, and other creative professionals love their Apple products, and the Apple brand is almost synonymous with free-thinking creativity. How can a company whose philosophy of information sharing is so at odds with that of most of its customers be so successful? This Xconomy essay explores three possible explanations. 1) Closed innovation, overseen by a guiding genius like Steve Jobs, may be the only way to build such coherent, compelling products. 2) Apple's hardware turns out to be more 'open' than the company intended — Job originally wanted to keep third-party apps off the iPhone, for example. 3) Related to #1: customers are pragmatic about quality, and the open source and free software movements haven't produced anything remotely as useful as Mac OS X and the iPhone."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's like one of those champagne fountains at a wedding. Except, you know, made of urinals. And running water (er, one hopes) instead of booze. A "Duchampagne" fountain, perhaps? No, SRSLY: It's a 2005 installation called "American Standard" by Vancouver artist Reece Terris. [via Boing to the Boing]

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Rose M. Welch points us to the news that Summit Entertainment has won an injunction against the makers of a Twilight fanzine, claiming that the zine was not for journalistic purposes. A journalist would have a strong free speech claim on the right to make use of these photos (which were found on the "press" page for the movie itself), but Summit claims that the zine is not journalism, but a business. To be fair, it is true that the creators of the zine is a company that sells trading cards, but does that mean that a fanzine is suddenly no longer protected by the First Amendment? In an age when who is and who is not a journalist has become a lot more complicated, it seems like a pretty questionable decision to put an injunction on a publisher just because they have a good business model. Separately, it's worth pointing out that Summit is being pretty ridiculous here in shutting down a zine for fans. Stop trying to punish fans and focus on giving them what they want.

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Goats The Corndog Imperative is the second collection of the transcendently silly webcomic Goats, a surreal car-crash of a comic that reads like a raunchy Douglas Adams as filtered through a couple thousand Slashdot posts.

In volume two, our heroes, Jon and Phillip, two greyscale geeks from the Manhattan 3 dimension continue to suffer for the sin of killing God, turning him into a porkchop and eating him, then replacing him with Woody Allen bearing a laptop that he doesn't know how to work. First they spend an eternity in a transdimensional bar, then they are separately kidnapped by interdimensional cults who expect them to reprogram the fabric of reality to correct the Mayan 2012 date bug.

Dimension-hopping and epic, Goats veers between obscene jokes, thought-provoking philosophical rumination on the nature of reality, geek humor, and super-violent action sequences. Reading these pages, one can only conclude that Jonathan Rosenberg's browser history must be a thing of beauty to behold.

Rosenberg continues to walk the razor-edged line between silly and dumb, and does not slip onto the dumb side. Goats is recommended reading for those who believe that the universe is configurable and contingent, for those who laugh at comments in source-code, and for those who are interested in extended "farmer's daughter" jokes that turn, somehow, into jokes about the difficult business of embracing both freedom and heavy armaments.

Goats The Corndog Imperative (The Infinite Pendergast Cycle)

Buy direct from the author

Goats, the webcomic

(Thanks to Jonathan Rosenberg for supplying a review copy of The Corndog Imperative)

Yet still another sweet piece of kit debuted at Austin's monthly Handmade Music event - the Nebulophone from Bleep Labs incorporates a digital synth running on Arduino compatible hardware with a stylophone-like PCB keyboard. Additional features include a light-controlled analog filter, LFO, and IR-synced arpeggiator - want want! Code + schematics can be found over at Bleep Labs. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!

Hugh Pickens writes "Scientific American has a story on researchers from the University of Utah who have calculated that 1.2 million years ago, at a time when our ancestors Homo erectus, H. ergaster, and archaic H. sapiens were spreading through Africa, Europe, and Asia, there were probably only about 18,500 individuals capable of breeding in all these species together (PNAS paper here). Pre-humans were an endangered species with a smaller population than today's gorillas and chimpanzees. Researchers scanned two completely sequenced modern human genomes for a type of mobile element called Alu sequences, then compared the nucleotides in these old regions with the overall diversity in the two genomes to estimate differences in effective population size, and thus genetic diversity between modern and early humans. Human geneticist Lynn Jorde says that the diminished genetic diversity one million years ago suggests human ancestors experienced a catastrophic event at that time as devastating as the Toba super-volcano in Indonesia that triggered a nuclear winter and is thought to have nearly annihilated humans 70,000 years ago."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jake van Slatt sez, "Last week I got an opportunity to tour a New England furniture manufacturer's abandoned building. It was a fascinating morning and I took some photos I'm quite pleased with. But I was also shown a steam engine that lies at the core of this facility, one that was mothballed in pristine condition and desperately needs saving now that the building is coming down around it."

Skinner UnaFlow Steam Engine Needs a New Home (Thanks, Jake!)

Clever spamfighters are allowing botnets to infect one isolated computer, then analyzing the spams it sends to figure out the template used to generate its messages. This template is then propagated to spam-filters:

"This is an interesting approach which really differs by using the bots themselves as the oracles for producing the filters," says Michael O'Reirdan, chairman of the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, a coalition of technology companies. But he adds that botnets have grown so large that even a 1-minute delay in cracking the template would be "long enough for a very substantial spam campaign".

Funny: this was a sub-plot in True Names, the Hugo-nominated novella that Benjamin Rosenbaum and I published last year.

To beat spam, turn its own weapons against it

(Image: File:Zombie-process.png png, Wikimedia)

What gives with multi-touch on the Android OS? It would seem both the hardware and software support multi-touch, but you won't see it implemented in any of the built-in applications. That's OK because folks like cyanogen go out of their way to explore the possibilities.

Though, the easiest way to get multi-touch features on an Android 2.0+ phone is to download the Dolphin browser.

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Well, well, well. A few days ago, News.com had a story that got a lot of attention saying that Verizon was kicking users off of its service after it had received accusations of file sharing. At the time, we wondered if this was a misstatement by a Verizon spokesperson, and in an update, Verizon insisted that News.com had misquoted its spokesperson, and it had not kicked anyone off. And yet, lots of folks are still reporting that Verizon is kicking users off for file sharing. And, now, News.com has come back and stands by its original story.

Reading through the details, what it appears to have happened was that a Verizon person misspoke, and News.com accurately reported the misstatement (suggesting that users had been kicked off). Verizon is still claiming it "reserves the right" to kick users off, but has not actually done so. Hopefully it realizes that doing so based solely on accusation is a huge mistake and one over which it would almost certainly face serious backlash.

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Several readers have sent word that George Hotz (a.k.a. geohot), the hacker best known for unlocking Apple's iPhone, says he has now hacked the PlayStation 3. From his blog post: "I have read/write access to the entire system memory, and HV level access to the processor. In other words, I have hacked the PS3. The rest is just software. And reversing. I have a lot of reversing ahead of me, as I now have dumps of LV0 and LV1. I've also dumped the NAND without removing it or a modchip. 3 years, 2 months, 11 days...that's a pretty secure system. ... As far as the exploit goes, I'm not revealing it yet. The theory isn't really patchable, but they can make implementations much harder. Also, for obvious reasons I can't post dumps. I'm hoping to find the decryption keys and post them, but they may be embedded in hardware. Hopefully keys are setup like the iPhone's KBAG."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kenko has announced a range of three teleconverters available in both Canon and Nikon mounts. The 1.4x and 2x convertors allow communication between the camera body and lens to maintain full AF and exif data. The PRO 300 AF 2.0x DGX, MC4 AF 1.4x DGX and MC7 AF 2.0x DGX also feature multi-layer lens coating to reduce flare and ghosting.

Mobile hacker Brandon Roberts has managed to shoehorn Android onto his N900 along with the Maemo 5 OS for a dual boot setup. [via livbit]

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FleaPlus writes "A group at NASA has been formulating a 'Flexible Path' to Mars architecture, which many expect will be part of the soon-to-be-announced reboot of NASA's future plans. NASA's prior architecture spends much of its budget on creating two in-house rockets, the Ares I and V, and would yield no beyond-LEO human activity until a lunar landing sometime in the 2030s. In contrast, the Flexible Path would produce results sooner, using NASA's limited budget to develop and gain experience with the technologies (human and robotic) needed to progressively explore and establish waypoints at Lagrange points, near-Earth asteroids, the Martian moon Phobos, Mars, and other possible locations (e.g. the Moon, Venus flyby). Suggested interim goals include constructing giant telescopes in deep space, learning how to protect Earth from asteroids, establishing in-space propellant depots, and harvesting resources/fuel from asteroids and Phobos to supply Moon/Mars-bound vehicles."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A slightly ambivalent ode to Amtrak. If you like American trains, you should try those in Europe and Japan!

Wikileaks is an incredibly useful and important site, but there are many (mainly in the government) who would prefer it go away. It's somewhat upsetting to find out that PayPal has (for the second time) frozen all of WikiLeaks' assets. Apparently, the last time this happened it took nearly six months to resolve. That seems problematic:

Paypal has as of 23rd of January 2010 frozen WikiLeaks assets. This is the second time that this happens. The last time we struggled for more than half a year to resolve this issue. By working with the respected and recognized German foundation Wau Holland Stiftung we tried to avoid this from happening again -- apparently without avail.

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The Gakken Mechamo Inchworm kit is a perfect project to build on any cold winter day. Stay inside, grab a hot chocolate, and get started on your robotic insect collection. The Maker Shed is proud to be the exclusive distributor in North America for these brilliant kits, part of Gakken's Mechanical Animals Series.

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Rarebeats' Wicks Looper is a box. The box makes noises. The noises are strange.

The wicks looper has 3 main controls; The sound control adjusts the frequency of the tone in the first half of the dial and the level of noise in the second half of the dial, giving two distinct sounds. The second control is Tempo, which controls how fast the loop is played. Write the loop at a slow tempo then speed it up for a great effect. The third control is the write button, when pressed it writes a sound to memory which is then replayed next time the loop is run. With the sound control knob adjusted anticlockwise, you can add a rest to the loop by pressing the Write button.

Also consider the SwoofTronic and StrobeTronic, which react to light rather than programmatic manipulation--but otherwise get on with the noble business of making strange noises. Wicks Looper [Rarebeats' Etsy Store]

The USB Hourglass combines a sand timer with a rotating mechanism and an optical beam through the center of the timer to observe the falling sand. The amount of light reaching a detector is digitized at frequent intervals and processed by a microcontroller to determine when to rotate the hourglass. The digitized light levels are also sent by USB to a host PC where they can be used as a source of random entropy. Power is supplied over the USB cable.

[via Embedded projects]

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ub3r n3u7r4l1st sends along this snippet from Science Daily: "Computer games have a broad appeal that transcends gender, culture, age and socio-economic status. Now, computer scientists in the US think that creating computer games, rather than just playing them, could boost students' critical and creative thinking skills as well as broaden their participation in computing. ... 'Worldwide, there is increasing recognition of a digital divide, a troubling gap between groups that use information and communication technologies widely and those that do not,' the team explains. 'The digital divide refers not only to unequal access to computing resources between groups of people but also to inequalities in their ability to use information technology fully.' There are many causes and proposed solutions to bridging this divide, but applying them at the educational and computer literacy level in an entertaining and productive way might be one of the more successful. The team adds that teaching people how to use off-the-shelf tools to quickly build a computer game might allow anyone to learn new thinking and computing skills."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Photo: Andrew Ferguson

Dan Jones writes "Kiwis have built an entire school IT system out of open source software, in less than two months, despite a deal between the New Zealand government and Microsoft that effectively mandates the use of Microsoft products in the country's schools. Albany Senior High School in the northern suburbs of Auckland has been running an entirely open source infrastructure since it opened in 2009. It's using a range of applications like OpenOffice, Moodle for education content, Mahara for student portfolios, and Koha for the library catalogue. Ubuntu Linux is on the desktop and Mandriva provides the server. Interestingly, the school will move into new purpose-built premises this year, which include a dedicated server room designed based on standard New Zealand school requirements, including four racks each capable of holding 48 servers for its main systems. The main infrastructure at Albany Senior High only requires four servers, suggesting an almost 50-fold saving on hardware requirements."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Morgan Library in New York is currenty exhibiting one of the great masterworks of medieval illumination, the Hours of Catherine of Cleves. All 157 miniatures have also been digitized.

From the website

This digital facsimile provides reproductions of all 157 miniatures (and facing text pages) from the Hours of Catherine of Cleves. The original one-volume prayer book had been taken apart in the nineteenth century; the leaves were shuffled and then rebound into two confusing volumes. This presentation offers the miniatures in their original, fifteenth-century sequence.

The Hours of Catherine of Cleves is the greatest Dutch illuminated manuscript in the world. Its 157 miniatures are by the gifted Master of Catherine of Cleves (active ca. 1435-60), who is named after this book. The Master of Catherine of Cleves is considered the finest and most original illuminator of the medieval northern Netherlands, and this manuscript is his masterpiece.

For other illuminated manuscript collections online, see The Pages from the Past, Central Asian Miniature and LUSAMUT Studio's Armenian Miniatures. You can see a few more pages from Books of Hours in this RIT collection to give you some idea of just how impressive this manuscript was. [via MeFi]

Does your 1947 tenement apartment suffer from the kind of disease-bearing insects that thrive in filth? Why not protect your children from this infectious influence by wallpapering every surface with DDT-impregnated wall-paper? It's hygienic and stylish! Available with Disney trademarks!

Protect your children!

I know nothing about this ToiletFall art installation except that it is both great and made of toilets.

Update: Now I know more. "American Standard is an installation that featured fifteen functional urinals arranged in a pyramid formation on the wall of the men's washroom in the Alexander Centre studio at Simon Fraser University. Transforming the facility into a public indoor fountain, water overflowed from the uppermost urinal and splashed its way down through the formation creating a deluge of water flooding the sunken floor. Visitors enter the space via tiled stepping stones, providing access directly to the sink and preexisting toilet, leaving the facility fully functional and open to both sexes."

Toilet Falls Ensures No Privacy (via Cribcandy)

theodp writes "If you're in the market for a new job, Fortune has just published its list of 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2010. Topping the list this year is SAS (jobs ist), the largest privately held software company, which Fortune notes is populated with more statisticians than engineers or MBAs, and led by a Ph.D. founder whose first love is programming. Google (jobs), which once viewed SAS as model for employee perks, took the #4 spot, and Microsoft (jobs) checked in at #51."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Every chemist (and arguably every scientist, and arguably everyone else in the world), whether amateur or professional, should have an elements collection. Theodore Gray has written eloquently about the hows and wherefores of collecting the chemical elements, so I won't belabor the point here other than to say: chemistry has been called the central science, and arguably, chemistry's greatest achievement has been the discovery of the chemical elements, the realization of the periodicity of their properties and its implications for atomic structure, and the isolation of each of those elements in its pure or "standard" state. Collecting the individual elements lets you participate in that incredible story in a way that no amount of book-learnin' ever will.

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This week on CRAFT, we saw:

Dr. Who Soft TARDIS

How-To: Set Drywall Anchors

Recipe: Vegetarian French Onion Soup

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Miracle Jones blogs about the petition against the Google Book Settlement created by science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin, winner of five Hugo awards and six Nebulas. Leguin is urging professional writers who are opposed to the terms of the settlement to sign her online petition before the January 28th deadline. From the petition: "The free and open dissemination of information and of literature, as it exists in our Public Libraries, can and should exist in the electronic media. All authors hope for that. But we cannot have free and open dissemination of information and literature unless the use of written material continues to be controlled by those who write it or own legitimate right in it. We urge our government and our courts to allow no corporation to circumvent copyright law or dictate the terms of that control."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ed Diment is working on a minifig-scale aircraft carrier. The picture above shows an anti-aircraft battery -- imagine the detail on the entire ship!

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"The story of any community is mostly about its people, not its streets and buildings. The P.S. 99 class photographs taken over the years are one of the best records we have of the people who have grown up here over the past decades. There are links below to 310 class photos."

Kew Gardens was an immigrant neighborhood in Queens, New York which rapidly flled with European war refugees during the early 1940's. PS 99 was the one public school. Building construction had been halted due to the war efforts, so morning classes were given in the auditorium. Children wore ID tags like the one below "in case of a bombing."

Kew Gardens is now one of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the US. The Kew Gardens History site is collecting class photos that show the evolution of this New York neighborhood.