Yum! Gravy wave! "Carl Warner is a London-based photographer who makes foodscapes: landscapes made of food. In the picture above, a pea pod boat sails away from a land made of bread and potatoes, over a sea of salmon" ...

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An anonymous reader calls our attention to California's familial searching policy, which looks for genetic ties between culprits and kin. The technique has come to the fore in the last few years, after a Colorado prosecuter pushed the FBI to relax its rules on cross-state searches. "Los Angeles Police Department investigators want to search the state's DNA database again — not for exact matches but for any profiles similar enough to belong to a parent or sibling. The hope is that one of those family members might lead detectives to the killer. This strategy, pioneered in Britain, is poised to become an important crime-fighting tool in the United States. The Los Angeles case will mark the first major use of California's newly approved familial searching policy, the most far-reaching in the nation."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'm beginning to wonder if NBC Universal simply sends General Counsel Rick Cotton out to the press to make the most ridiculous, unsupportable statements for their PR value. Otherwise, you have to wonder how the man keeps his job, as pretty much any of his well-publicized statements should make shareholders question his business acumen. This is the guy who claimed that the government should force ISPs to filter unauthorized content because piracy was causing poor corn farmers to lose money (despite the fact that corn farmers are doing better than ever, and there's no evidence that they're impacted by piracy either way -- people can eat popcorn during pirated movies, too). He also suggested that police would be better off spending less on stopping bank robberies and more on piracy. Seriously. Then he was happy that NBC made it difficult for people to watch the Olympics online.

His latest claim doesn't quite reach the level of some of his earlier statements, but again it has you scratching your head over how he can have the confidence of his bosses. Over the weekend, he was apparently complaining that the only reason YouTube was worth $1.5 billion to Google was because the video of SNL's Andy Samberg "Lazy Sunday." He claims that YouTube received all of the benefit of this piracy, which catapulted it to stardom.

First of all, this simply isn't true. As a YouTube representative who follows Cotton noted, the Lazy Sunday video is pretty much impossible to pick out of YouTube's log files, since it had such little impact on traffic. But, more importantly, this is yet another case of a content provider overvaluing the content and undervaluing the delivery platform. Cotton seems to ignore the fact that the Lazy Sunday video on YouTube almost single-handedly brought a ton of people back to SNL after having given the show up. It made people pay more attention to SNL, in particular other Samberg videos.

Furthermore, if it's actually true that NBC got no value out of Lazy Sunday being on YouTube, then the entire NBC management team deserves to be fired. It was such a fantastic opportunity to rebuild SNL's brand, and here's one of the company's top executives flat-out admitting that he blew it. He really wants people to believe that he's so inept that a tiny startup with barely any revenue could capitalize on something that he could not? It's either amazing what poor vision NBC's management has, or it's just stunning that Cotton keeps his job.

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Adafruit Industries just released a new kit version of the Uzebox open-source gaming console -

After many months of looking at NTSC waveforms on my scope (go video-sync trigger!) I have finished the Fuzebox, a fully open-source, DIY 8-bit game console (based on the Uzebox I posted about a while back). It is based almost completely on an ATmega644 with some video encoding help from the AD725.

Check out Ladyada.net Cool project with a lot of potential and a neat enclosure - for more info and schematic, kits are available from the Adafruit store - Fuzebox

More:

Retro-minimalist homebrew game console

HYDRA Game Console

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Mike writes "Recently San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland unveiled a massive concerted effort to become the electric vehicle capitol of the United States. The Bay Area will be partnering with Better Place to create an essential electric vehicle infrastructure, marking a huge step towards the acceptance of electric vehicles as a viable alternative to those that run on fossil fuels." Inhabitat.com has some conceptual illustrations and a map showing EV infrastructure, such as battery exchange stations, stretching from Sacramento to San Diego — though this is far more extensive than the Bay Area program actually announced, which alone is estimated to cost $1 billion.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In this week's Boing Boing TV update:

* VIRGIN AMERICA LAUNCHES IN-FLIGHT WIRELESS: Our wireless tech reporter pal Glenn Fleishman was on the first Virgin America flight with airborne WiFi service. BBtv caught up with him over video chat from a Virgin America Airbus A320 aircraft (named "My Other Ride Is A Spaceship") 35,000 feet above San Francisco. Also joining us: Jack Blumenstein, the CEO of Aircell, the company providing the "GoGo" air/ground 3G connectivity. The bottom line: no content filtering on Virgin, so you can visit any blogs you like, and they will not block streaming content or video. But, voice over IP will be blocked because the general consensus among airlines and travelers in the US seems to be that nobody wants other people on the plane to be talking on the phone when you're all confined to close quarters. Disclaimer: we really like Virgin America, in part because they carry Boing Boing tv in their in-flight entertainment system.

* BB COMMENT THREAD POETRY CONTEST: Teresa Nielsen Hayden, aka She Who Disemvowels, announced a fun game/contest recently -- write some poetry inside the comment threads using "natively BoingBoing" themes. We can has a winner.

* OBFUSCATED CODE CONTEST: here's Joel's blog entry announcing the Safari Books / Boing Boing contest. The idea: write a string of "obfuscated code" that generates the words "Boing Boing." Here's the winner, and here's another example we thought was rad.

* DALE DOUGHERTY IS GUEST BLOGGING: He's been checking in from Banff, and I've particularly enjoyed his posts from there about snow, glaciers, and snowman newlyweds.

* DER UNTERGANG HOUSING BUBBLE REMIX: Mark spotted it last week, and lulz rang out throughout the land. One of many we dug.

---

Here's a downloadable MP4, and here is the BBtv blog post with instructions for subscribing to the Boing Boing tv podcast.

---

Special thanks to Q Burns Abstract Message for the track that appears in today's ep, UNCERTAIN T, courtesy Eighth Dimension Records.

Below: a snapshot from that Virgin America WiFi flight. I spy Brian Lam of Gizmodo, and Glenn Fleishman, and a few other familar blogging faces!

UPDATE: Hey, what kind of sites exactly was Gizporno's Brian Lam websurfing on that plane? Zoom in a little... wait.. there we go. AHA. Below, the reveal.

Wow - a Shell oil remotely operated vehicle in the Gulf of Mexico caught footage of this amazing squid!

Based on analysis of videos not unlike the one captured at the Perdido site, scientists know that the adult Magnapinna observed to date range from 5 to 23 feet (1.5 to 7 meters) long, Vecchione said. By contrast, the largest known giant squid measured about 16 meters (52 feet) long. And whereas giant squid and other cephalopods have eight short arms and two long tentacles, Magnapinna has ten indistinguishable appendages that all appear to be the same length. "The most peculiar structure is that of the arms," said deep-sea biologist Bruce Robison of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California. Referring to the way the tentacles hang down from elbow-like kinks, Robison said: "Judging from that structure, we think the animal feeds by dragging its arms and the ends of its tentacles along the seafloor as it drifts slowly above it."

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eldavojohn writes "A Wired blog looks at the real monsters behind Godzilla: his lawyers. Do you think Godzilla is basically a glorified T. Rex? Guess again, as his lawyers have tirelessly argued: 'He's erect-standing. He's got muscular arms, scaly skin and spines on back and tail and he breathes fire and has a furrowed brow, he's got an anthropomorphic torso. The T. rex has emaciated bird-like arms and stands at a 45-degree angle.' Read on to find out why they targeted the site davezilla.com but not mozilla.org. Another abuse of the American trademark & copyright system? You decide — just don't make a float of him or you'll find yourself paying an undisclosed sum to Toho Co. Ltd."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Unsatisfied with pricey iPhone docks Gekky Gadgets shows you how to make your own -

The 3G iPhone doesn’t come with a dock , unlike the 2G version, instead you have to spend an extra $29 on an Apple iPhone 3G Dock.
So we decided to make our own iPhone dock, that was easy for anyone to make and can be made from readily available materials.
We decided to make our dock out of cardboard, and wanted anyone to be able to print one off on their printer so we kept the size to A4.

Head over to the site for more info and template - Make your own cardboard iPhone dock

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Todd Lappin, of Telstar Logistics, made this sweet mobile home bar from an old SAS airline galley cart he got in an aircraft boneyard.

The Beautiful Utility of Airline Galley Carts

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Apparently, a woman in the UK came up with a rather novel approach to "crowdsourcing," when she used Facebook to ask her friends how they would vote in a criminal case for which she was on the jury. Not surprisingly, using Facebook in this manner got her kicked off the jury pretty quickly. Of course, I would guess this isn't the best way to get out of jury duty either, as I'd imagine such a stunt would put you at risk of getting charged with contempt of court as well.

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cavis writes "My organization just received an e-mail from the Intellectual Property enforcement division of the Entertainment Software Association. Click the link below to read part of their letter. It accuses one particular IP address with 'infringing the copyright rights of one or more ESA members by copying and distributing unauthorized copies of game products (through peer-to-peer or similar software/services).' It goes on to name the filename and the application: Limewire. Has anyone had any contact with this group? Are they following the RIAA's lead and pursuing litigation for peer-to-peer piracy? I'm just trying to evaluate what I am in for as I try to battle P2P within my network."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Innocently fuzzy by day, this subway post bear cap by Supakitch goes sinister @ night with glowing green eyes! Any NYers spotted this one in the flesh fur? [via Urban Prankster]

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ZOMG ZOMG ZOMG. Nipper, a Counterstrike map-hacker, has devised an incredibly detailed reproduction of the Haunted Mansion at Walt Disney World, a ride so fine I wrote a novel about it. Nipper's packed a jaw-dropping amount of detail into the map, even down to various behind-the-scenes sections, and has creatively improved some of the slacker moments in the ride, such as a set of Eschereqsue staircases to one side of the otherwise boring stair-climb. The only thing that could make this better would be modelling ALL the backstage areas, so you could tear through the break rooms and maintenance areas with your giant guns, hunting your fellow players.

YouTube: A ride-through of NIPPER's de_haunts (a "The Haunted Mansion" Counter-Strike: Source map), Download the map (Thanks, David, Nick, Jeremy, Dreambank, Waxy, and Justin!)

jcasman passes along a heads-up on Lunascape, a Japanese browser company that is releasing its first English version of its Lunascape 5 triple-engine browser. It's for XP and Vista only. There are reviews up at CNET, OStatic (quoted below), and Lifehacker. Both the reviews and comments point out that, in its current alpha state, the browser is buggy and not very fast; but it might be one to watch. "How many web browsers do you run? If you're like me, you regularly use Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Safari. Each of those browsers, of course, has its own underlying rendering engine: Gecko (in Firefox), Trident (in Internet Explorer), and Webkit (in Chrome and Safari). Today, a Japanese startup called Lunascape has released an alpha version of its Lunascape browser... that allows you to switch between all three of these prominent rendering engines. The company says that the Japanese version of Lunascape has been downloaded 10 million times and touts it as the fastest browser available."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In this week's Boing Boing Gadgets review episode on Boing Boing tv, Joel Johnson reviews the T-Mobile Cameo Picture Frame, which displays digital photos but also sort of works like a phone. Joel's thumbs were neither decisively up nor down, but rather pensively wrapped around a scotch SORRY, *BOURBON* tumbler.

Link to post on Boing Boing Gadgets where you can discuss (and by "discuss", I mean make fun of Joel's holiday sweater). Here is an MP4 for your downloading pleasure.

Below, a slide show of images submitted by Boing Boing Gadgets readers to Joel, for use in preparing this video review of the Cameo Picture Frame.

Update: Joel here. One correction from what I said in the video. There is a way to copy all the images off of the device onto an SD card at once. It didn't work for me the first time, but I then I tried it again later and it did. Don't know what I did differently, but it makes a big difference in how easy it is to get images from the Cameo to your computer.

Thanks to both Eric and Gunnar who simultaneously sent in the news of lawyers representing Dr. Seuss's estate who threatened the town of Louisville, Kentucky with a lawsuit if they didn't stop a planned "How the Grinch Stole Christmas"-themed celebration as a part of its Light Up Louisville holiday event. The lawyers pointed out that the characters are copyrighted, and could not be used. Legally, they may be correct, but as Louisville Mayor Jerry Abramson pointed out: "It appears these lawyers' hearts are two sizes too small." Given the very subject matter, and the joy which Dr. Seuss stories bring to kids, you would have thought that the lawyers might think twice on this one. Apparently not. I'm sure that all the Grinch-themed aspects of the celebration probably would have made new Seuss fans out of many kids, but apparently, Dr. Seuss' estate would prefer that not happen.

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Check it out - Makezine searching in the USA - Ranked by state with StateStats.

This tool shows you how popular a Google search query is in each U.S. state, giving a ranking like the one you see in the left column. It then compares this ranking with other ways of ranking states, like average income or population density, using Spearman's rank correlation. The middle column shows the results of these comparisons, with the strongest correlations listed first. High numbers (close to 1.0) mean that the rankings "line up" closely, which may indicate a relationship between the search query and the ranking metric. For example, mittens tends to be searched by users who are in northerly states (high latitude) and states with a lot of frost. Low numbers (close to -1.0) indicate a negative relationship -- that is, the rankings are close to being opposites...

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On this episode of Gomi Style, they build a low-cost telepresence robot. There are some "problems" with this video. It's not an "autonomous" robot if *you* control it and the show is called Gomi Style, and they say the robot is made of junk they have lying around, but then, it's made with the Vex robotics system, our MAKE Controller, a Mac Mini, an iSight camera, and an LCD monitor. Still, they manage to make a pretty decent telepresence bot for probably under $1000.

Sparky - Autonomous Telepresence Robot

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Yesterday I wrote a piece saying that point of view is everything. The newspapers always approach the question of their continued existence from their own point of view, which of course is understandable. But it doesn't yield an answer, because that point of view is what's disappearing. If they could consider other points of view, two in particular, they might get somewhere.

The two points of view are:

1. People with news.

2. People who want news.

Source and destination.

Reporters are distributors.

And editors are facilitators of distribution.

If the people with the news can publish it themselves, and they can; what's to stop the people who want the news from reading it directly.

When professional news people consider the Internet they think of it replacing them. Not so. It obviates them, makes them less necessary. If reporters are to remain relevant they have to recast themselves, more humbly. Don't think about "deputizing" us to do what you do. Instead think of the value of your rolodex, your sources. Cultivate and develop that rolodex. To the extent that you know who to call when a bit of news breaks, that's the extent of your value in the new world, the one we live in now.

An example I often cite. When there's a fire in Santa Barbara, I know where to go. Doc Searls has camped out that turf in the blogosphere. When there's a breaking story on his beat, his blog has all the pointers you need to get quickly informed. Pictures too.

Another example. Paul Krugman's blog. When the economy is crumbling, as it is now, he reads a lot of other blogs and points to the ones I need to read to stay informed. Without giving it much thought, he just does it, because it's the thoughtful thing to do. Sharing this kind of stuff is a human impulse. I doubt if Dr. Krugman gets paid anything extra to do this, and I know Doc doesn't, and I don't. This is the amateur spirit. And it's how we're going to route around the outage if the news industry collapses.

To the news industry, I suggest that instead of having another brainstorming session among news people, instead let's convene a conference where the people who speak are the users, the #1s and #2s, and the reporters, editors and owners do what they're supposed to do, sit in the audience and take notes. Later they can tell us what we said. Sounds boring perhaps? Well folks, that's what reporters do.

The solution to the puzzle is in the minds and hearts of the people who want to tell a story and the people who want to listen. And of course some days we might be in one category and the next day in the other. Or I might have expertise in one area, and need to acquire it in another.

So the first step in solving the problem is understanding what the users want from news. This is knowledge the news industry has carefully avoided attaining. Seriously. I'm not kidding. And it seems to me there's the problem.

ubermiester writes "The New York Times reports on research to develop autonomous battlefield robots that would 'behave more ethically in the battlefield than humans.' The researchers claim that these real-life terminators 'can be designed without an instinct for self-preservation and, as a result, no tendency to lash out in fear. They can be built without anger or recklessness... and they can be made invulnerable to... "scenario fulfillment," which causes people to absorb new information more easily if it agrees with their pre-existing ideas.' Based on a recent report stating that 'fewer than half of soldiers and marines serving in Iraq said that noncombatants should be treated with dignity and respect, and 17 percent said all civilians should be treated as insurgents,' this might not be all that dumb an idea."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over at Boing Boing Gadgets, our Joel has an extremely funny and acidic post up about a viral marketer who appears to be astroturfing in our comment threads on behalf of Motorola. Boing Boing Gadgets commenters respond in kind, and a comment war of wall-to-wall LOL ensues. Go read the whole thing, please: Motorola, could you please tell your viral marketer to get out of our comments? (gadgets.boingboing.net)

Oh, and hey, Joel -- I'm so glad my boss isn't like that! I'm working for Boing Boing right now, and became a huge fan of the Yeti Robot Sex blog post genre. I especially like YouTube dance remix. It's awesome!

My friend Elizabeth Stanley writes in to Boing Boing to share the video above, which explores how the digital world "allows many Iranians access to ideas and freedom of expression they haven’t had for close to thirty years." Elizabeth explains:

Kate Tremills wrote a "video essay" script for the Digital Design department at the Vancouver Film School (VFS) several months back. They turned it into this amazing piece – which has received attention from Motionographer. Here's the link on the VFS site and on the Motionographer site.

Meant to blog this when it came out, but it's one of the funniest/creepiest things I've ever read in the Times: a really odd Q&A with Karl Rove. By the time you reach the end, you half expect the guy to bust out the chianti and liver and start hissing at you:

Have you met Barack Obama?
Yes, I know him. He was a member of the Senate while I was at the White House and we shared a mutual friend, Ken Mehlman, his law-school classmate. When Obama came to the White House, we would talk about our mutual friend.

Did you have lunch together? Talk in the hall?
We sat in the meeting room and chatted before the meeting. He had a habit of showing up early, which is a good courtesy.

Are you going to send him a little note congratulating him?
I already have. I sent it to his office. I sent him a handwritten note with funny stamps on the outside.

What kind of funny stamps?
Stamps.

Party Loyalist (Deborah Solomon, NYT; thanks Susannah Breslin)

Previously on Boing Boing:
* Essay: "I'm the proud owner of Karl Rove’s father’s solid gold cock ring."
* Karl Rove's Pierced Family Jewels, part 2: Jim Ward interview (audio)
* Karl Rove's pierced family jewels, pt. 3: Fakir Musafar and PFIQ (audio)

Søren Ragsdale says,

In the months before the 2008 election, rumors were circulated by everyone from right-wing bloggers to Fox News and members of the McCain campaign about a secret tape containing alarming statements by Barack or Michelle Obama. David LaFontaine at HardNewsInc summarizes the events as the "secret tape" turns into a classic Spanish Prisoner / Nigerian 419 scam with a $150,000 price tag. "The Mountain Sage" deserves most of the credit for putting all the pieces together.

We've discussed in the past how ridiculous it is to call video gaming an "addiction" when almost all of the evidence suggests that compulsive video gamers are usually retreating to video games as a result of some other issue. In other words, rather than an addiction, compulsive video gaming is often a symptom of something else, and the treatment should focus on that other thing, rather than trying to "detox" someone from video games. It seemed like almost everyone who was screaming for video games to be declared an official addiction stood to benefit from such a classification (thankfully, the AMA refused to make it an official addiction).

Now, even those who would benefit from it being called an addiction are admitting that it's not. A clinic in Europe that was designed to treat video game addicts is now admitting that compulsive video gamers are not addicts, and shouldn't be treated with traditional "abstinence-based treatments" that are commonly used in dealing with various addictions. Instead, just as plenty of others have noted in the past, the trick is not to worry about the video gaming, but to actually figure out the root causes that made the person retreat to video games. Not surprisingly, it's often social issues, where kids feel isolated and haven't learned to communicate socially with their peers, leading to trouble at school. It's great to see that even those who were making money off of the false "addiction" claim are finally admitting that it's time to rethink how compulsive video gaming is diagnosed and treated.

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alphadogg sends along news that the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration has gotten plenty of feedback on its call for comments on securing the root zone using DNSSEC. The comment period closed yesterday, and more than 30 network and security experts urged the NTIA to implement DNSSEC stat. There were a couple of dissenting voices and a couple of trolls.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mister Jalopy hipped us to these amazing handmade radios from Tom Kipgen. The triangular wonder above is called Radio Moscow ('cause the finned brass plate cap Tom fabbed reminded him of Russian onion domes).

As Mister J points out, for something this beautifully crafted, the asking price is a song. Wander the site for other amazing finds. Tom also sells custom made components and cabinets, if you care to roll a handmade radio of your own.

Tom's Handmade Radios [via Dinosaurs and Robots]

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MacWorld is running a piece from MacJournals.com's for-pay publication detailing how the Safari browser's anti-phishing works. The article takes Apple to task for not thinking enough of its users to bother telling them when Safari sends data off to a third party on their behalf. For it seems that Safari uses the same Google-based anti-phishing technology that Firefox has incorporated since version 2.0, but, unlike Mozilla, tells its users nothing about it. "Even when phrased as friendly to Apple as we can manage, the fact remains that after installing Safari 3.2, your computer is by default downloading lots of information from Google and sending information related to sites you visit back to Google — without telling you, without Apple disclosing the methods, and without any privacy statement from Apple."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This Friday, MC Frontalot himself will be at the Austin premiere of Nerdcore Rising.

Tickets and more info here. Whether you're in Austin or not, enjoy this MC Frontalot music video from a documentary on text-based gaming:

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I originally saw this story Sunday night, about a guy suing McDonald's over naked photos of his wife showing up online after he accidentally left his phone (which contained the photos) at a McDonald's. I didn't write anything up because, while the story is attention-getting, there didn't seem to be much to say about it. However, we've had more people submitting it than just about any story I've ever seen -- so apparently folks think it's worth discussing here.

One point raised by numerous submitters is the question of liability. The guy is suing McDonald's specifically, along with various employees from the franchise where he left his phone. However, it's unclear why this should be McDonald's responsibility specifically. If the guy had left the phone on a bus, would it have been the bus company's liability? It seems like yet another example of something I've referred to as a Steve Dallas lawsuit, named after the character in the old comic strip Bloom County, who once suggested that a paparazzi photographer who was beat up by a celebrity (I think it was Sean Penn in the comic strip) sue camera-maker Nikon, since that was the company with the most money -- despite it not really being involved. The same thing seems to be at work here. The guy is suing McDonald's for $3 million.

Yes, I'm quite sure it sucks to have discovered his wife's naked photos online, and I'm sure it was embarrassing. But, isn't part of the problem the guy's own fault for (a) not protecting the content on his phone and (b) forgetting the phone in the first place? Shouldn't he take some responsibility for his actions, rather than suing a company that basically had nothing to do with the issue (other than being the place where the guy carelessly lost his phone) for $3 million?

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SpaceSlug writes "The world's largest digital camera is to be used to keep an eye out for asteroids heading towards Earth. The Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) has been built by researchers at MIT's Lincoln Lab. At its heart is a 1.4 billion pixel (or 1400 megapixel) camera that will scan the night sky looking for rogue near-Earth objects from atop Mount Haleakala in Maui Island, Hawaii. The system uses something called an orthogonal transfer CCD to remove atmospheric blur from images."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chinese artist Ju Duoqi has recreated Western masterpieces in vegetables to amazing effect.

"In the summer of 2006, I bought a few kilograms of peas, and sat there quietly for two days peeling them, before stringing them on a wire and turning them into a skirt, a top, a headdress and a magic wand. I used a remote control to take a photo of myself in them, and named it Pea Beauty Pageant. That was my first work of vegetable art," Ju Duoqi said, recalling her first vegetable composition.

The Guardian has a neat video of her process.

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smee2 writes "In the past, when a family member died, you could look through their files and address books to find all the people and businesses that should be notified that the person is deceased. Now the hard-copy address book is becoming a thing of the past. I keep some contact information in a spreadsheet, but I have many online friends that I only have contact with through web sites such as Flickr. My email accounts have many more people listed than my address book spreadsheet. I have no interest in collecting real world info from all my online contacts. The sites where I have social contact with people from around the world (obviously) require user names and passwords. Two questions: 1. How do you intend to let the executors of your estate or family members know which online sites/people you'd like them to notify of your demise? 2. How are you going to give access to the passwords, etc. needed to access those sites in a way that doesn't cause a security concern while you're still alive?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Download the MP4 Video or HD Version | Subscribe to CRAFT in iTunes | mov | 3g2

I made this scorpion toy with a Twitchie Robot Kit. I'm really afraid of scorpions where I live in Arizona, so I thought a friendly toy would help me get used to them. I made his plush body from some fabric I had around, aiming to make him look like an Arizona bark scorpion, which are tan/yellowish/translucent. Watch the video for build details, and here's a list of materials I used:

• Twitchie Robot Kit
• 3 pieces of scrap wood
• 1 drywall screw for non-driven front leg
• hot glue
• fabric for plush body
• plush stuffing
• thread & embroidery floss

Twitchie is Arduino powered and comes pre-programmed, so it's an excellent kit for beginners in robotics, because no programming is required! You can download and modify the code if you want, and it's pretty light on the soldering, too. I'd recommend Twitchie for young makers (boys & girls, too!) interested in robotics or moving plush toys. If you have an idea for what I should name my new friend, let me know in the comments! All I've come up with so far is "Scott."

Music in the video is "At the Crack of Noon" by Shuutobi.

Twitchie Robot Kit

More build photos:

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Cyber writes -

Some enterprising folks over at Google have collaborated via Google Documents to create holiday art using cells in a spreadsheet as the pixels. A time delay video was taken and is available over at YouTube and the result is pretty spectacular. More info on how they did this is available behind the scenes. They're inviting people to share their own masterpieces or post a video response over on YouTube.

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An anonymous reader writes "HP researchers have built the first functioning hybrid memristor-transistor chip. Lead researcher Stanley Williams and his team built the very first memristor — the '4th fundamental element' of integrated circuits after resistors, capacitors and inductors — back in April. Memristors can remember their resistance, leading to novel electronic capabilities. The new FPGA circuit uses memristors to perform tasks normally carried out by (many more) transistors and is therefore smaller, more power efficient and cheaper to make, HP says. Memristors could also turn out to be a more compact, faster alternative to flash memory."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You may recall that Steve Jobs proudly hyped up the fact that Apple had filed over 200 patents on the technologies related to the iPhone, as if that showed how special it was. However, as we noted, those patents hardly stopped others from filing patent infringement lawsuits against Apple. In the latest case, we have a company named EMG Technology claiming the iPhone violates its recently issued patent on viewing a mobile website.

The patent appears to cover the process of reformatting a website so that it can be more easily viewed on a mobile browser -- something that's been done for ages, since well before this patent was originally filed in 2006. Of course, the priority date on this patent may actually go back to March of 2000, since it appears that various continuations were filed -- a common practice among patent holders to be able to later add changes to a patent's language to cover actual innovations that others came up with, but which the patent holder now wants credit, even if the original patent application wouldn't have covered that technology specifically.

Either way, even if you were to grant the (somewhat laughable) idea that this patent is valid, this case again shows why the patent system, as currently constructed, makes almost no sense. It's quite clear that Apple did not get it's idea for how the iPhone browser would work from EMG's patent. Instead, it came up with the concepts on its own, knowing that it would be a useful way of implementing a mobile browser. Yet, now, this third party who had nothing to do with Apple's innovations gets to demand money from Apple. That's not promoting the progress. It's promoting waste and inefficiency.

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In anticipation of the great food holiday of Thanksgiving, I'm going to post several food-related items. I'm not necessarily suggesting these items for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner but they all come from a late Autumn harvest. We'll start with the humble but hot horseradish root.

The Horseradish Plant
Last spring I planted horseradish in the garden. I planted a section of root and its green leaves, tightly bunched, grew over summer. With colder weather, the leaves died off and the root can be harvested. This past weekend, I dug out a small piece and set out to make my own prepared or preserved horseradish.

The Peeled Root
You can see the root at the top of the photo. First, I cleaned and peeled the root. It is a lot like a cross between carrot and parsnip. Then I diced it. Wondering how it tasted raw, I chewed a small piece of the root. It was like a flash of white lightning. Very sharp, coming on in a sudden burst, a bit like wasabi but different. I spit it out, and then immediately regretted doing so. It's cool-hot like a radish, but it really is a horse of a radish.

The Prepared Horseradish
Next I put the diced horseradish root in a food processor, added cider vinegar, and gave it a whirl. That's all it took. As you can see from the photo, the result is milky white.

Next time, I will try to grate the horseradish instead of dicing it. The chunks of the horseradish from the food processor were a bit too coarse.

Now, this prepared horseradish can be tasted as is, and it is tasty. I could also add the horseradish to ketchup with some lemon juice for shrimp. Honestly I could skip the shrimp altogether and just lap up the horseradish sauce. It's a nice ingredient to add to salad dressings, especially Asian style dressings. Of course, it's an ingredient in Bloody Mary mix. My favorite horseradish application, though, is on a good piece of beef, like prime rib. I don't know how it would mix with turkey but I might just try it. Let me know if you have any ideas.

According to horseradish.org, Dagwood Bumstead enjoyed horseradish regularly in the popular comic strip, "Blondie," created originally by Chic Young in 1930.

alphadogg writes "Northwestern University researchers have developed a system that gives a heads up about traffic problems on the Internet, where there is no central management system. Their Network Early Warning System (NEWS), which latches on to a popular BitTorrent client, is designed to spot problems by encouraging feedback from end users who are experiencing problems. 'You can think of it as crowd sourcing network monitoring,' said associate professor Fabián Bustamante. He has a track record with BitTorrent users, having developed the popular Ono plug-in for speeding up P2P interactions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Noah Shachtman at WIRED's Danger Room blog says,

Russia's top investigator is claiming that their wartime foes, the Georgians, deployed a cadre of female snipers from Ukraine and Latvia. The shooters sound an awful lot like the mythical "white tights" -- the exotic, stone-cold, blue eyed, Olympic bialthete killers of Chechen war lore who were said to pick off hapless Russian conscripts.

Read the post at Danger Room, by Nathan Hodge: The Return of 'White Tights': Mythical Female Snipers Stalk Russians

Boing Boing reader Phil Lapsley, the guy who introduced us to details of the legendary phone phreaker Joybubbles' life after he passed away, says:

I just posted some oddly haunting old photos from an FBI file covering a 1971 blue box bust in Montana at blog.historyofphonephreaking.org. I thought you might enjoy them, especially the telephone handset with the evidence tag on it, which seems like somebody ought to be able to use for some cool art project!

Mike makes awesome squid hats - Estee's House of Fine Squid Hats - Cephalopod Über Kopf. The tentacles are mittens, nice touch.

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How do you combine your love of video games and bicycling? Make an LED bike light form an old NES controller of course!

I had an old broken NES controller lying around, and decided that it would make a cool case for an ultra bright LED bike flasher. It's designed to be easy to slip in your pocket, and easily attach to just about anything using velcro straps, like your belt, bike seat, seat post, rack, handlebars, etc.

More about DIY: NES controller bike light

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A new typeface designed as part of a new brand identity for the Dutch government. Love the sans u, m and n. A shame it probably won't be available to the public though (via). #

Here is our 2008 Make Holiday Gift Guide for kids. Hopefully these gifts will inspire you to go out and make new things, teach others what you know, or even learn something new. The best gift you can give any kid is quality time together. I tried to cover a lot of different ages, skill levels, and interests. If I missed something you think should be added to the list, please leave it in the comments below. Thanks!

If you are looking for cool projects to make with your kids over the Holidays, don't forget to check out the Make blog "Kids" category for hundreds, if not thousands, of great projects.

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Howtoons
Price: $15.99
Buy: Maker store - Link

As seen in Make Magazine. Part comic strip and part science experiment, Howtoons shows children how to find imaginative new uses for common household items like soda bottles, duct tape, mop buckets, and moreñto teach kids the "Tools of Mass Construction"! Howtoons are cartoons that teach 8ñ to 15ñyearñold readers "how to" build, create, and explore things. Combining a fun, fullñcolor cartoon format and real life science and engineering principles, Howtoons are designed to encourage kids to become active participants in the world around them.

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Drawdio Kit
Price: $19.50
Buy: Maker store - Link

You may have to put this kit together if you have younger kids, since it requires soldering. It's easy to assemble, and fun to hack! Drawdio has been kid tested at my house for many hours, and is a hit with everyone who tries it!

Drawdio is an electronic pencil that lets you make music while you draw! It's great project for beginners: An easy kit with instant gratification! Essentially, its a very simple musical synthesizer that uses the conductive properties of pencil graphite to create different sounds. The result is a fun toy that lets you draw musical instruments on any piece of paper.

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Update 8:40AM. I got hMailServer to work on one of my Windows servers. I had tried it before but couldn't get it to work. Seems perhaps as if the problem is solved.

I was over at Fred Wilson's blog and saw something interesting I hadn't thought of as an alternative to managing an email server. For background see yesterday's post.

Right now we're using Google Groups to send email to people who want to subscribe, but even that depends on us having a working mail server for us to send mail to from a script.

This is basically the only function I need a mail server for, so I was wondering if there's a web service somewhere I could use for this function? Fred uses FeedBlitz. I'm going to check it out, but I'm not sure if it'd work for me. They make users get an account. That sounds like too much of a committment.

Do any of you have any recommendations? Barring that, does anyone have a mail server I could use? I know that sounds pathetic, but I'm so fed up with mail servers. It used to be so easy, but then the spammers ruined it.

Any advice would be most welcome.

ekimd writes "Fedora 10, aka 'Cambridge,' was released today. Some of the major features include: 'wireless connection sharing enables ad hoc network sharing, better setup and use of printers through improved management tools, virtualization storage provisioning for local and remote connections now simplified, SecTool is a new security audit and intrusion detection system.' Versions of major software include: Gnome 2.24, Eclipse 3.4 and RPM 4.6. A features list can be found here." Reader Nate2 suggests LinuxFormat's detailed look at the new release, and adds a few more details about the software it contains: the release includes "a new graphical boot-up sequence, OpenOffice.org 3, many improvements to sound support via PulseAudio and other updates."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If only spammers actually had money and could be forced to pay up when they lose lawsuits... Facebook might have actually found a business model that paid. It appears a judge has ruled in Facebook's favor against a spammer, fining the spammer $873 million for phishing Facebook user logins, and then using account access to bombard other users with millions of spam messages. Of course, the spammer in question has pretty much disappeared, and it's difficult to believe Facebook will receive a penny from the guy, let alone anything near the $873 million (which is probably more than 3 times Facebook's revenue this year).

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holy_calamity writes "New Scientist reports on a simple coating for polyester that renders it unwettable — even after two months underwater it emerges dry to the touch. Water cannot attach to the new fabric thanks to nanostructured filaments and a structure that traps a constant air layer. One potential use is for low-drag swim wear."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is a wonderful animated short that was shown at the Encounters Short Film Festival. It's called "Don't Let It All Unravel", it was directed by Sarah Cox, and all the action is knitted - or frogged (un-knitted). (Thanks, Melody!)

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Surprised Giraffe writes "Symantec is warning of a sharp jump in online attacks that appear to be targeting a recently patched bug in Microsoft's Windows operating system, an analysis that some other security companies disputed. Symantec raised its Threat Con security alert level from one to two because of the attacks, with two denoting 'increased alertness.' The attacks spotted by Symantec target a flaw in the Windows Server Service that Microsoft says could be exploited to create a self-copying worm attack."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

james writes "What do you get when you combine a MSI Wind U100 notebook with liquid nitrogen? The new Intel Atom frequency World Record ... and some damn cool pictures! A large copper put is used, sitting on top of the gpu and chipset, and cold transfer through the original heatsink plate to the CPU. This was cooled down to about -20 to achieve the new world mark. (Intel Atom N270 @ 2315mhz) For more information you can check out the original forum thread.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE Flickr photo pool

B Light writes -

I took a laser cutting class at NYC Resistor this weekend, taught by Bre Pettis. I designed some tree ornaments.

The laser cutter is such a cool tool. To be able to design something and have the final piece in your hands 10 minutes later, it’s like living in the future.

- Get Yourself a Laser Cutter

- Tree Ornaments - Red on Flickr

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In hard times, nostalgic toys strike a chord - I think it's more than the economy that's causing parents to take another look at the classics, TinkerToys have always stood the test of time, they beat most cheap import crap-plastic-toy any day... give these to a kid and they're set for months - I think we're all demanding more value out of the things we buy, and from those things more "make-ability"...

Without a "must-have" toy fad this holiday season, and with parents facing a deteriorating economy, tried-and-true toys are being embraced by parents and toy makers alike - what one analyst calls a "back to the toy box" approach. "'Retro' or 'nostalgia' toys can be viewed as the 'comfort food' of the toy industry and I do think folks naturally gravitate to what made them happy when they were young, or what is familiar to them," said Anita Frazier, a toy analyst at NPD Group, a market research firm. Though most sales will occur over the next few weeks, Moe said Junior TinkerToys, Lincoln Logs and toy instruments have been among the big sellers in the past few months. "It's instinctive in tough times to reach back to a happier, simpler time," he said. "Parents remember how much they loved those toys, and want that same happiness for their children." Lauren Horsley, who has 5- and 1-year old boys and a 3-year-old girl, plans to buy TinkerToys...

The National Toy Fall of Fame shouldn't be a museum or sorts, it's a gift guide! Alphabet Blocks, Atari2600 Game System, Barbie, Bicycle, Candy Land, Cardboard Box, Checkers, Crayola Crayons, Duncan Yo-Yo, Easy-Bake Oven, Erector Set, Etch A Sketch, Frisbee, G.I. Joe, Hula Hoop, Jack-in-the-Box, Jacks, Jigsaw Puzzle, Jump Rope, Kite, LEGO, Lionel Trains, Lincoln Logs, Marbles, Monopoly, Mr. Potato Head, Play-Doh, Radio Flyer Wagon, Raggedy Ann and Andy, Rocking Horse, Roller Skates, SCRABBLE, Silly Putty, Slinky, Teddy Bear, Tinkertoy, Tonka Trucks, and View-Master. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Retro | Digg this!

Processing 1.0 is out - Arduino and Wiring are physical computing initiatives related to Processing, open source, data visualization, amazing work - and now it's 1.0!

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.

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The case against Lori Drew looks weaker and weaker by the day. The defense has rested its side, and the judge is considering whether to dismiss the case outright after it was established that it wasn't even Drew who set up the account used to communicate with Megan Meier. Based on that, it's even more ridiculous (and it already was ridiculous) to charge Drew with computer fraud for violating the terms of service -- considering she wasn't even there to review the terms of service, nor did she actually set up (or use, apparently) the account. This case has been a travesty from the start. Yes, people somehow want vengeance for Meier's suicide, but trumped up bogus charges against Drew don't help matters. It's nothing more than a witch hunt against someone who it appears did not actually break the law. If people want the law to be changed -- then work to change the law, but don't twist the laws to convict Drew.

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narramissic writes "Lenovo plans to announce on Tuesday a service that allows users to remotely disable a PC by sending a text message. A user can send the command from a specified cell phone number — each ThinkPad can be paired with up to 10 cell phones — to kill a PC. The software will be available free from Lenovo's Web site. It will also be available on certain ThinkPad notebooks equipped with mobile broadband starting in the first half of 2009. 'You steal my PC and ... if I can deliver a signal to that PC that turns it off, hey, I'm good now,' said Stacy Cannady, product manager of security at Lenovo. 'The limitation here is that you have to have a WAN card in the PC and you must be paying a data plan for it,' Cannady added."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

News from the Future! Mankind's new best friend? - Giant trained rats...

Reviled as vermin through the ages, rats are becoming unlikely soldiers in the struggle against two scourges of the developing world: land mines and tuberculosis.

In Mozambique, special squads of raccoon-size rats are sniffing out lethal explosive devices buried across the countryside, remnants of the country's anticolonial and civil wars of the last century.

In neighboring Tanzania, teams of rats use their twitchy noses to detect TB bacteria in saliva samples from four clinics serving slum neighborhoods. So far this year, the 25 rats trained for the pilot medical project have identified 300 cases of early-stage TB - infections missed by lab technicians with their microscopes. If not for the rodents, many of these victims would have died and others would have spread the disease.

"It's fair, I think, to call these animals 'hero rats,' " said Bart Weetjens, the Belgian conceiver of both programs.

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Eric and Bre teamed up to create a joystick-controlled robot arm using popsicle sticks and a twitchie kit - nicely done! -

We hacked an old Atari joystick to control the arm, and each servo is manipulated in turn as you press the red button. It really was a ton of fun to bring this project together, and I’m amazed at what we did in a few hours. Huge thanks to Bre for having the hardware all set to go and to Raph for his awesome Twitchie kit and all his advice along the way.

Source code and more info available here - DIY Robot Arm

Twitchie Robot Kit

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Barry Ritholtz sez,

In doing the research for the "Bailout Nation" book, I needed a way to put the dollar amounts into proper historical perspective.

If we add in the Citi bailout, the total cost now exceeds $4.6165 trillion dollars.

People have a hard time conceptualizing very large numbers, so let’s give this some context. The current Credit Crisis bailout is now the largest outlay In American history.

Crunching the inflation adjusted numbers, we find the bailout has cost more than all of these big budget government expenditures – combined:

• Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion
• Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion
• Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion
• S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
• Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion
• The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)
• Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion
• Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion
• NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

TOTAL: $3.92 trillion

Someone's got to reproduce these 1966 "phone scramblers" in all their silky, chunky plasticky glory, leaving all but one tiny corner hollow, filling that tiny corner with a modern crypto device.

This scrambler keeps private phone conversations safe from wiretappers and eavesdroppers. Fitted to an ordinary handset, it needs no electrical connection, has its own power source. To hear, a person needs an unscrambler coded identically. Delcon Division, Hewlett-Packard Co., Palo Alto, Calif., sells it for $275, keeps your name and code locked in its vault

Wiretap-proof telephone (Jan, 1966)

MAKE's put my latest column, "Selectable Output Control," online -- it describes a proposal to the FCC to allow broadcasters to shut down parts of your home theater while you're watching their channels, and the consequences for Makers.

Chances are, you haven't heard of Selectable Output Control (SOC), a proposed digital TV technology that would allow broadcasters or copyright holders to tag their video with a list of receiver-outputs that were allowed to carry it. That's because it's an insane idea.

Picture this: you power up your home theater, an near-incomprehensible tangle of game-consoles, AV switchers, cable boxes, PVRs, DVD players, 5.1 speakers, amps -- maybe a home theater PC or a projector, too. After some fiddling and locating the correct remote, you start to surf up the dial. All good. Then you hit MTV and the gorgeous, perfectly balanced sound stops. Why has it stopped? Because your cable-receiver has received a SOC flag from MTV disallowing high-end audio unless it has some obscure DRM that isn't compatible with any of your gear (especially not your beautiful hand-built tube-amp). MTV doesn't want you digitizing the songs that accompany the (increasingly rare) music videos they play, so if you want sound while watching MTV, you've got to turn on the tiny internal speakers that came with your TV.

You flip up the dial (get up again and turn off the internal speakers), and flip to HBO and your screen goes dark. That's because HBO is showing a movie that has been flagged as "no analog" -- which means that your beautiful, 42" plasma display won't work because you connected it via the composite analog video cables coming off the back of your AV switcher, rather than via the DRM-locked HDCP output. To watch the movie, you'll need to move the entire shelving unit (remember to take down the family photos first, doofus, otherwise you risk shattering the glass if they tip over), disconnect the analog cables, find the HDCP cable that came with the TV (or was it the cable box?) in the garage, and rewire your set. When the kids want to play a couple hours of Paper Mario on the Wii, you're going to need to move it again and reconnect things. (Coming soon to a Make issue: HOWTO put your home theater on wheels for easy rewiring).

Selectable Output Control

Stanford Magazine reports on the applications from psychological research Carol Dweck's work, which uses careful experiments to determine why some people give up when confronted with failure, while others roll up their sleeves and dive in.

Through a series of exercises, the experimenters trained half the students to chalk up their errors to insufficient effort, and encouraged them to keep going. Those children learned to persist in the face of failure—and to succeed. The control group showed no improvement at all, continuing to fall apart quickly and to recover slowly. These findings, says Dweck, “really supported the idea that the attributions were a key ingredient driving the helpless and mastery-oriented patterns.” Her 1975 article on the topic has become one of the most widely cited in contemporary psychology.

Attribution theory, concerned with people’s judgments about the causes of events and behavior, already was an active area of psychological research. But the focus at the time was on how we make attributions, explains Stanford psychology professor Lee Ross, who coined the term “fundamental attribution error” for our tendency to explain other people’s actions by their character traits, overlooking the power of circumstances. Dweck, he says, helped “shift the emphasis from attributional errors and biases to the consequences of attributions—why it matters what attributions people make.” Dweck had put attribution theory to practical use...

...[S]ome of the children who put forth lots of effort didn’t make attributions at all. These children didn’t think they were failing. Diener puts it this way: “Failure is information—we label it failure, but it’s more like, ‘This didn’t work, I’m a problem solver, and I’ll try something else.’” During one unforgettable moment, one boy—something of a poster child for the mastery-oriented type—faced his first stumper by pulling up his chair, rubbing his hands together, smacking his lips and announcing, “I love a challenge.”

Such zest for challenge helped explain why other capable students thought they lacked ability just because they’d hit a setback. Common sense suggests that ability inspires self-confidence. And it does for a while—so long as the going is easy. But setbacks change everything. Dweck realized—and, with colleague Elaine Elliott soon demonstrated—that the difference lay in the kids’ goals. “The mastery-oriented children are really hell-bent on learning something,” Dweck says, and “learning goals” inspire a different chain of thoughts and behaviors than “performance goals.”

The Effort Effect, Carol Dweck's book, "Mindset: The New Psychology of Success" (Thanks, Dad!)

MSI Wind U100 - Liquid nitrogen overclocking!

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The Best Online Collaboration Tools 2008, Collaborative Map is a live editable map of over 150 of the best free and low-cost online collaboration tools available, picked and selected by passionate users like you and me. Click the map to see the full, public, editable version That's right. This collaborative map has been created with the live help of over 100 individuals who have participated with me on November 17th in a unique event. During my session at the conference, which took place fully online, I decided not to leverage my personal knowledge with collaboration tools to show the best and most useful ones, as I have done so many times in the last two years, but to actually involve the participants (over 150 at the time) into creating a visual map of what THEY thought were the best online collaboration tools out there. And so I kind of played the visual moderator, by providing them first with a basic set of categories that they could attach tools too, and then by helping in moving tools to their best matching categories and removing technologies and services that were either inappropriate or not belonging to any of the listed groups. Within a week the map has cleaned itself up while growing considerably. It now lists over 150 live online collaboration tools in 13 different categories. All the tools listed are either free or have affordable rates (included only those who have clearly published such prices on their site). Now it is here ready for you to use. Whenever you have a collaboration need you may glance at this map and remember in a second which tools are available which could service your specific need. Note: A special thank you to Jay Cross, Tony Karrer and George Siemens who have trusted my explorative spirit and have gently allowed me to take a live group into a new real-time learning territory. Seeing a mind-map growing under your very eyes, node by node, thanks to the input of a multitude of many passionate individuals is a mind-opening experience.

What This Map Contains

This collaboration tools map has the objective of bringing together the most useful, free or low-cost technologies available today online. Originally the types of tools included by the participants in this experiment, ranged from real-time instant messaging and video conferencing tools to the main social bookmarking resources and microblogging tools as several participants felt that these too were relevant collaboration technologies. To limit its breadth and provide more specific usefulness to those who are looking for real-time collaboration solutions, I have later decided to sacrifice microblogging and social bookmarking tools, as I would prefer to gather those together in a separate social media and collaborative publishing group. The official focus is therefore on real-time or near real-time collaborative technologies in the groups that have been already defined.

The Key Categories

These the online collaboration categories covered in the map with over 150 technologies:

• VoIP - Instant Messaging Tools
• Video Conferencing
• Screen-Sharing, Remote-Control
• Web Conferencing
• Co-browsing
• Web Presenting
• Workgrouping
• File Sharing
• Document Sharing and Wikis
• Collaborative Document Reviewing
• Collaborative Event Scheduling
• Mind-Mapping
• Project Management

How You Can Contribute

You can personally contribute to this collaborative effort by accessing the "public" and open version of the map, and by adding new tools or specific information to the existing nodes. (To edit the map you will need to freely register at www.mindmeister.com, which will take only a few seconds.)

What You Can Add

The best thing you can do is to add relevant new tools to the map. The collaboration tools that fit this map are those that can match the following criteria:

• live collaboration and team-work oriented tools
• free or low-cost solutions only

If you are logged into MindMeister, you can add a URL, or some notes to any "node" appearing on the map. Simply select the node and then click on the relevant icon inside the right column dashboard to edit and add more info.

The Live Map Present Version and Future Updates

Click and drag inside the above map to move and see its different parts and / or use the zoom icons on the bottom left part of the map This above is the live collaboration tools map as of November 25th 2008. You can still go up and update it and in the future I will be releasing new updates to it. To be able to edit, add and contribute additional information, you need to freely register and login inside MindMeister. The map integrates a full revisions history feature and therefore it is easy to spot and remove spammy additions or incorrect information just like you would do in Wikipedia.
Disclosure: I am in no way associated or affiliated to MindMeister.com. I have selected their tool and service among others because it is the one that I feel most comfortable with and the one I find easiest to use for novices.


Originally conceived by Robin Good for LearningTrends2008 and first created in real-time with the participation of over 100 hundred different participating individuals on November 17th 2008.

Boing Boing Gadgets celebrates the bottomless creativity of the Pearl River Delta with this pocket-watch that's also a miniature train set. Chugga chugga chugga chugga choo choo!

Miniature train set hardly a Lionel, but it fits in your pocket, Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

Here's something for the less culinarily-inclined this Thanksgiving: a beautiful, glistening perfect papercraft turkey for you to print and fold.

Fun Stuff: Papercraft Turkey Dinner (via Make)

Photograph by Studio M, Tom McInvaille

Stacey Lee Webber likes her work long, repetitive, and painstaking. Just look at the life-sized carpenter's tools she silver-soldered out of pennies.

Only pre-1982 coins -- minted from 95% copper -- would survive her acetylene torch's high heat, so Webber spent hours flipping and sorting bucketfuls of mixed years.

"It's a mindless task to do while you're watching TV," she says. "I have a lot of those little tasks in my studio, it seems."

She spent months just twisting silver wire into the sheets of ornate filigree she used to build a set of jeweler's tools. When she moved on to screwdrivers, a hammer, and a handsaw, she meticulously cut her pennies (no, it's not illegal) and fused them together into panels with little gaps, so they rolled easily into the forms she desired. Darts cut in the flat swaths helped them to fold into the right shapes.

"A lot of the art is just figuring out the material and how to mold it into what I want," Webber explains. As she worked on the carpenter's tools, which showed this past August at San Francisco's

Velvet da Vinci gallery, she says, "I was thinking about labor that my grandpa would understand, about how we value it, and about putting labor back into currency."

While preparing the pennies, she laid them between towels to shield the decorative textures of their faces from her hammer blows. For looks, she plated the finished objects lightly with copper and added a patina using liver of sulfur.

She confesses, however, that the final pieces are not as exciting for her as assembling them.

"The act of making something can be what a piece is about. That's why tools themselves keep standing out to me," she says, adding, "I love the penny -- it's doing well for me."

From the column Made on Earth - MAKE 15, page 22 - Eric Smillie.

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Joseph Casbaria's Sequential Resonation Machine manipulates amplified sound via a (very custom) 12-position rotary switch on the console's face -

This switch is controlled by a variable speed DC motor. The signal path is accessed from the patch panel via switch jacks in the center of the panel (2 jack groups).
Next, the user can patch the switched signals into any one of the pipe jack multiples (4 jack groups).
From these outer jacks, the signal is sent to separate speakers underneath each of the twelve pipes spanning an octave C# 4 up to C5 (4’ pipe).
The result is a very simple sequencer, using pipe resonance to produce pitch.

Sound samples available @ Oddmusic

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Just Posted: Our Canon Powershot G10 review. The Canon 'G' series has been the most consistently photographer-focused family of compact cameras on the market. This, the 8th iteration of that dynasty includes a 14.7MP sensor and a 28-140mm zoom, offering serious flexibility. The family faces stiffer than ever competition though - from the budget DSLRs that now undercut it on price and from some compelling RAW-shooting compact peers that fancy a tilt at its 'king of compacts' crown. Is the ruggedly built G10 tough enough to weather such a grueling environment? Find out in our full review.

When Intellectual Ventures first came about, Nathan Myhrvold convinced tech companies to back him, with a business plan that was all about pooling resources to buy patents for defensive purposes. The original pitch was that by joining with IV, you could make use of the patent portfolio to protect yourself against potential patent lawsuits. Except that once things got going, Myhrvold admitted that to make this work, the threat of also suing people for patent infringement had to be on the table (though, it hasn't reached that point yet). So, consider me quite skeptical of some former IV execs who have gone off to start a new firm that sounds suspiciously like IV's original plan.

It involves getting a bunch of tech companies to pay up, so that this new company, RPX Corp., can buy up a bunch of patents "for defensive purposes only." The company insists it won't sue anyone with these patents. But, of course, the whole thing makes you wonder. For the companies that buy into RPX's deal (or IV's for that matter), they end up spending a bunch of money for a rather weak form of insurance that protects them in the very rare case where they might be able to use a patent in either firm's portfolio to maybe, possibly protect itself against an infringement lawsuit. It won't stop others from suing, of course. And, if RPX is serious about not suing for infringement, then why won't other firms just free ride? They get the benefit of those patents not being in litigious hands, but without having to pay. The whole situation just shows how ridiculous the patent litigation world is these days, that a bunch of companies feel the need to fund other companies to buy up patents just so they're not sued. That's not quite "promoting the progress."

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Here is another papercraft turkey to get you in the mood for Thanksgiving. This one is a bit lot more realistic than the one we made a while back.

As we head into the shortened Thanksgiving week, we'd like to offer our traditional holiday papercraft project. This delectable roast turkey was found on a Japanese site. We've bundled the templates into a single PDF:

More about making a papercraft turkey [swissmiss]

More:

Thanksgiving Turkey-Making Instructions (including the 3D turkey PDF!!).

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NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In one of the RIAA's 'John Doe' cases targeting Boston University students, after the University wrote to the Court saying that it could not identify three of the John Does 'to a reasonable degree of technical certainty,' Judge Nancy Gertner deemed the University's letter a 'motion to quash,' and granted it, quashing the subpoena as to those defendants. In the very brief docket entry (PDF) containing her decision, she noted that 'compliance with the subpoena as to the IP addresses represented by these Defendants would expose innocent parties to intrusive discovery.' There is an important lesson to be learned from this ruling: if the IT departments of the colleges and universities targeted by the RIAA would be honest, and explain to the Courts the problems with the identification and other technical issues, there is a good chance the subpoenas will be vacated. Certainly, there is now a judicial precedent for that principle. One commentator asks whether this holding 'represents the death knell to some, if not all, of the RIAA's efforts to use American university staff as copyright cops.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In one of the RIAA's 'John Doe' cases targeting Boston University students, after the University wrote to the Court saying that it could not identify three of the John Does 'to a reasonable degree of technical certainty,' Judge Nancy Gertner deemed the University's letter a 'motion to quash,' and granted it, quashing the subpoena as to those defendants. In the very brief docket entry (PDF) containing her decision, she noted that 'compliance with the subpoena as to the IP addresses represented by these Defendants would expose innocent parties to intrusive discovery.' There is an important lesson to be learned from this ruling: if the IT departments of the colleges and universities targeted by the RIAA would be honest, and explain to the Courts the problems with the identification and other technical issues, there is a good chance the subpoenas will be vacated. Certainly, there is now a judicial precedent for that principle. One commentator asks whether this holding 'represents the death knell to some, if not all, of the RIAA's efforts to use American university staff as copyright cops.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Adobe has released an update to its Camera Raw Plug-in for Photoshop CS4. Camera Raw 5.2, which replaces v5.1, extends support to seven more cameras, including Canon EOS 5D Mark II and Panasonic DMC-G1. The update includes enhanced color profiles, output sharpening and a new Targeted Adjustment tool. In addition, users can save all image adjustments and settings as a single snapshot for future reference.  

This is a great, cost effective, way of tracking objects via IR LEDs. It may not be the most accurate form of object tracking, but it has to be one of the cheapest. Check out the link for a lot more information on how to make your own.

This sensor is a short range obstacle detector with no dead zone. It has a reasonably narrow detection area which can be increased using the dual version. Range can also be increased by increasing the power to the IR LEDs or adding more IR LEDs.

More about how to Make your own IR obstacle detection sensor

Pololu 3pi Robot&ampClick=19209

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Sometimes lighting up the road ahead of you isn't enough. Sometimes, you want to light up the entire neighborhood. If so, the Kilo-Lumen bike headlight is for you.

I started biking to work this summer and needed a good headlight and taillight. I didn't want to spend a lot, but I wanted extreme visibility. For about $150 I ended up with a headlight that puts out somewhere around 1200 lumens, and a really effective tail light. The power source is an 18 volt Ryobi power tool battery which is both easily replacable, and quickly charged.

More about the Kilo-Lumen bike headlight

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A few weeks back, I wrote how, economically speaking, online news has no choice but to go free over time. It's basically the same argument we've made with other versions of digital content. It's an infinite good, and there's enough competition out there that prices will get pushed to zero (which has already happened in a lot of cases). Some people took offense to this, claiming that I was wrong. The main arguments are twofold: (1) there are some online newspapers that have been able to charge and (2) free newspapers have no value and shouldn't be produced.

Let's take the second critique first. It is a complaint we've heard before, and shows a fundamental confusion over the difference between value and price, which definitely comes into play in the news business. Value is only one component of price, playing into the demand part of the equation. But, price isn't determined by demand alone. It's the intersection of supply and demand -- and if supply is infinite, then pricing pressure will drive the price to zero. That does not mean the content has no value. It can be very valuable. But that doesn't change what the price is going to be for one simple reason: some competitors will figure out how to exploit the infinite nature of the content as free, and other will find it difficult to keep up unless they do the same.

And, of course, that leads us to the first critique: that there are some newspapers that have been able to charge and seem to be doing well. Again, this is one we've discussed at length, in the past. These sorts of changes don't happen overnight, but for the most part we've seen more and more newspapers move from paid models to free models (even the NY Times realized the math didn't make sense to keep a paid version online), recognizing that even if the paid version was something of a cash cow, growth was very slow (or negative), as people were moving to free online news that was "good enough." It's the classic "innovator's dilemma." Other models for revenue are growing much faster than trying to force people to pay for news, and it's nearly impossible to get a younger generation to ever agree to pay for news. It's just doesn't make sense.

With that said, it's a bit surprising to find out that one newspaper is trying to go in the other direction. Bluffton Today, considered one of the more innovative newspaper experiments -- combining a free newspaper with citizen journalism -- has decided to try switching to a paid model. The paper itself will have a paid subscription, as will an electronic version of the paper. Its website will remain free, but that appears to be more limited than the paper itself. It will be an interesting experiment to watch, but if I had to bet, I'd say that the paper will find it difficult to get enough paying subscribers to survive, unless it comes up with something else in its business model.

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ThinSkin writes "So many Web browsers, so little time. The folks at ExtremeTech have assembled the ultimate browser test to determine which Web browser is king. From speed tests to rendering tests, different browsers traded off wins, but Google Chrome came out on top."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

HOW TO - Tuesday! Make an "Invisible ink printer" - Take A New Twist On Lemon Juice.
By Mike Golembewski

Lemon juice has been used as invisible ink for centuries. Messages written in lemon juice are invisible to the naked eye. However, when brushed with a mix of iodine and water, they become quite visible. You can use an updated version of this technique by modifying an
HP ink cartridge so that it prints in lemon juice instead of ink. Here's how to do it.

TOOLS & MATERIALS
HP inkjet printer
Color ink cartridge
C-clamp
Hacksaw
Chisel
Latex gloves
X-Acto knife
Paper towels
True Lemon crystallized lemon juice ( 15 packets)
Small mixing cups ( 2)
Wide electrical tape
Zip-lock bag
2% iodine tincture

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A local report says that Nokia is considering setting up an MVNO in Japan, focused on its high-end Vertu line of handsets. Nokia has a small presence in Japan, making it one place -- along with the US -- where its market share lags badly behind its 40 percent or so global share. It would be surprising to see Nokia make a big move into becoming a virtual operator in any market, given that it sells most of its handsets through operators, and wouldn't want to jeopardize those relationships in any way. However, for its Vertu line, it could be a useful model. Vertu devices aren't your typical mobile phone: they cost upwards of several thousand dollars, and often don't include features common on much cheaper devices. They eschew many technical features in favor of expensive build materials and a concierge service for its deep-pocketed customers. Vertu handsets aren't going to be sold by or subsidized by operators, so Nokia could benefit by bundling service with the device as a virtual operator, making the Vertu brand the only one that has any contact with the customer. Given the small number of devices it sells, operators aren't likely to mind too much. But if Nokia made a bigger grab for the mass market, they'd certainly take exception.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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SpaceAdmiral writes "Forget cloning a woolly mammoth — should scientists clone a Neanderthal? Such a feat should be possible soon, although it raises a number of bioethics concerns, including where to draw the line between humans and other animals."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Survival Research Laboratories, the legendary machine performance project that started it all, turns 30 today. Founder Mark Pauline has a blog post up about this milestone, with a copy of SRL's first-ever ad, above. Mark says,

Id like to thank all those who have helped me make SRL what it is, both voluntarily and involuntarily. Im still having a blast. Even moving all 160 tons of my stuff to the new shop in Petaluma has been kind of fun. In a few more weeks, Ill be totally out of here and SRL will lurch into the next 30 year chapter. 2038 here we come!

A huge congrats and deepest respect to Mark, the SRL team, and their respective family members -- the meat-based kind, but also the magical metal machines who are the real stars of SRL. On behalf of all Boingdom, we wish all of you another 30 years of happy mutancy.

For BoingBoing readers not familiar with SRL, here's how they describe what they do:

Survival Research Laboratories was conceived of and founded by Mark Pauline in November 1978. Since its inception SRL has operated as an organization of creative technicians dedicated to re-directing the techniques, tools, and tenets of industry, science, and the military away from their typical manifestations in practicality, product or warfare. Since 1979, SRL has staged over 45 mechanized presentations in the United States and Europe. Each performance consists of a unique set of ritualized interactions between machines, robots, and special effects devices, employed in developing themes of socio-political satire. Humans are present only as audience or operators.

Below, an early photograph featuring Mark Pauline with one of his first creations. Performance artist Karen Finley and V. Vale of RE/Search Publications are among the bemused onlookers. (thanks, K0re!)

Electrohype 2008 is an exhibition of compter-based artworks in Malmö, Sweden. From the writeup on Cool Hunting:

The fifth such exhibit in a decade, this year's theme touches upon the rhythmic aesthetic of machines working toward a singular purpose. There promises a lot of whirring, buzzing with lights flashing in a way that seeks to challenge how we perceive time and space.

So for you Scandinavian makers out there, check it out!

Electrohype 2008

Through 25 January 2008

Drottninggatan 6A

212 11 Malmö

Sweden

Tel: +46 (0)40 18 26 90

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For a while now, we've been noting that whenever you hear people warning about the impending broadband crunch, it's politicians, consultants or lobbyists. When you actually talk to technologists, they point out that there's no problem and that normal upgrades will keep everything just fine -- even without having to do any kind of traffic shaping or violation of net neutrality.

Yet, that won't stop the lobbyists, consultants and top marketing execs from claiming otherwise. A trade group heavily funded by AT&T is out yet again, warning that the internet will collapse by 2012 if "something" isn't done -- with that "something" being basically big government subsidies to the telcos. Consider it the telco bailout plan of 2009. Hell, if we're already bailing out Wall St. and Detroit, why not telcos as well?

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Many collectors are makers, restoring the items they collect to working condition. Jack Judson created his own private museum, the Magic Lantern Castle Museum in San Antonio, TX. The magic lantern is the first projection technology, directing a light source through a lens to project images, which were initially painted on glass slides. Building this extensive collection of magic lanterns became Jack's obsession after he retired.

I interviewed Jack for Make:16 and I took the photo of him, below, in his workshop where he repairs magic lanterns and keeps them working. My excerpt below contains some parts of the conversation that didn't make it into the article.

DD: There's a wonderful collection here, and it's a beautiful thing. You started in 1986 after you retired. What was the first thing that you bought?

JJ: I worked for a large, international organization. I was visiting our London office, and I asked the the manager of the office, "What's to do here in London?" I hadn't been there before. He said, "Well, go to a street market. We have them all the time here." I went to one. I bought what was purported to be a magic lantern, and I brought it back -- when airlines would let you bring things back in your luggage. After doing a lot of research, I found out what I bought was not a magic lantern but a lantern enlarger. That was my first comeuppance.

DD: The museum has a collection of magic lanterns made as toys (above).

JJ: There was a huge industry. Everything that Daddy has, the kid gets too. While it’s never quite as much as Daddy's, still it's pretty cool. Most toys were made in Nuremburg, Germany. There were at least five makers that we know of there, and they made hundreds-of-thousands of various sizes and shapes.

DD: Mostly running off small oil lamps?

JJ: Yes. They didn't really project very well, but the kid in his little room could set one up, and project three of four feet onto a wall, and see what was not a very good image from a decal that had been stuck onto a piece of glass. They were lithograph-printed images. They were a little fuzzy, probably.

DD: From being a toy or a plaything, the magic lantern comes up to be part of the early film industry starting in the late 1800s. Then we see Edison’s home kinetoscope.

JJ: You had the home kinetoscope, and, of course, then the projecting kinetoscope, which was the one that was used by more professional people. You could project films but you could not buy them; you had to rent them. Netflix of the day, I guess you might say. There's nothing new.

DD: Right.

JJ: You could buy, for 50 cents apiece, the slides that had little, tiny images that you could project -- pictures in France, or England, or the holy land.

DD: Those early films, though, were not very long were they?

JJ: No, they were very, very short. The earliest ones were 50 feet, which is basically the length of the table that George Eastman could lay out the film -- it was liquid -- and let it solidify, and then roll-cut strips that were 35 millimeter long, and so at 16-frames per second, it doesn't last very long. At some point, I recall in an autobiography where this old man talked to Edison about how to show these films, and he said, "Well, just run them through three times so that they get their money's worth." There was no story. They had no message -- no nothing. They were just images of people moving, and, in fact, they were not moving. They were really sequential stills.

theraindog writes "We've already seen Intel's first X25-M solid-state drive blow the doors of the competition, and now there's a new X25-E Extreme model that's even faster. This latest drive reads at 250MB/s, writes at 170MB/s, and offers ten times the lifespan of its predecessor, all while retaining Intel's wicked-fast storage controller and crafty Native Command Queuing support. The Extreme isn't cheap, of course, but The Tech Report's in-depth review of the drive suggests that if you consider its cost in terms of performance, the X25-E actually represents good value for demanding multi-user environments."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Martha Stewart made mashed potatoes with Fatherhood star Snoop Dogg on her television show recently. About the very funny video clip above, she blogs:

[He] taught me some of his very own language called Snoop-guistics. He and his posse add ‘izzles’ onto the ends of words. It’s kind of a code, or a way of communicating so that others won’t know what they’re talking about. Example: fo shizzle is how they say, for sure. Snoop Dogg also shared –

* Crack-a-lackin – means get something poppin
* Chuuuch – means take God everywhere you go and everything will be all right
* All hood – means good
* Ball til ya fall – get as much money as you can before you die

Snoop makes Mashed Potatoes (Thanks, Shawn Connally!)

Via Core77, here's a real looker of a tailgate BBQ!

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Well, here's a fun one. A guy who was found guilty of faking his credentials to get a job as a maintenance engineer for the airline Qantas tried to get a lighter sentence by submitted four sterling references. But... it turns out that those references were faked as well (found via the Raw Feed). The guy didn't even do a particularly convincing job faking the references either. All four were formatted the same way and signed by the same hand, and one was from the president of a sports organization... that didn't even exist. You would think, in the age of the internet that people would assume that making up entire organizations wouldn't be particularly effective.

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Here's a snip from Virginia Heffernan's New York Times profile of Virgil Griffith, the creator of Wikiscanner, whom Pesco and I had the pleasure of meeting a few weeks ago at the Webby Connect conference. BTW, when we met, there were no hot girls clinging to him. But that was at lunchtime, surrounded by sandwiches, and the day was young. Also that is not actually his laptop case, above. Anyhoo:

Girls hang on Virgil Griffith. This is no exaggeration. At parties, they cling to the arms of the 25-year-old hacker whose reason for being, he says, is to “make the Internet a better and more interesting place.” The founder of a data-mining tool called WikiScanner, Griffith is also a visiting researcher at the mysterious Santa Fe Institute, where “complex systems” are studied. He was once charged, wide-eyed rumor has it, with sedition. No wonder girls whisper secrets in his ear and laugh merrily at his arcane jokes.

WikiScanner, which Griffith created last year, makes it possible to figure out which organization made which edits to a Wikipedia entry by cross-referencing IP addresses with a database of IP address owners. You can imagine how much fun this tool is to deploy — to see how someone with a senate.gov address tinkers with the Jeremiah Wright entry, or how Diebold apparently protects its reputation by deleting criticism of its voting machines and political connections. The promise of WikiScanner is to help free Wikipedia from both propaganda and sabotage. But Griffith says he also aspires “to create minor public-relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike.”

He’s a troublemaker, then. A twerp. And a magnet for tech-world groupies. At the WebbyConnect conference in Southern California last month, I saw it with my own eyes: Griffith, enjoying a White Russian that I first mistook for chocolate milk, reveled in the attention of his female fans. He smiled broadly. He seemed like a young Henry Kissinger, but sweet, or Arthur Fonzarelli, but not a dropout.

Internet Man of Mystery (Image: Kevin Van Aelst / NYT; Thanks, Richard Metzger)

An anonymous reader writes "One of the biggest complaints I hear from 'discerning' gamers is how few and far between well-written games are. Titles like Mass Effect and the Black Isle series just appear far too rarely. Writing and storyboarding are aspects of the industry that have always appealed to me — I'm an enthusiastic hobby gamer with a real passion for well-developed games. But there's very little guidance out there on getting exposure as a writer in this world. I'm interested in working in the field, freelance/part time initially as I break in, then with an eye to professional employ after a time. My questions to you are: How can I get involved in writing for the game industry? Are there any game startups out there with good design but weak story that could use writing help from a college graduate? How do the big guys get people to write for them — am I just going to the wrong booths at the job fairs? What kind of degrees or relevant experience in the field are they looking for? Should I just put on my Planescape t-shirt and stand outside in the rain?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

My friend Clayton Cubitt describes this spectacular little featurette by Digital Kitchen in four words: "Southern gothic art boner." Link to QuickTime file (contains blurry, fleeting art-nudity).

Found on the excellent artofthetitle.com, in a post linking the opening sequence for Alan Ball's killer (heh) new HBO series with the cultural roots of the film Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus.

Betty Pepper's jewelry made from books... via NOTCOT.

Never judge a book by its cover. Originally inspired by a poem this collection looks at what we choose to hide about ourselves and what we reveal to others, a secretive library where things are not always what they seem. Books are interesting to Betty in that, irrespective of the text within them, they tell stories. They carry inscriptions, scents and tell the tale of how they have been treated, or mistreated. Betty calls the books orphans and she finds them in charity shops already carrying their own secret stories, looking for new homes. The jewellery finds solace in the books as it too has a story attached to it, who it belonged to, when it was given, why?... Betty likes to use second hand textile in her work as she says it has a tactile, human quality and, like the books, it carries scents and stories, wears and fades like memories. All pieces are one-offs and are available framed or unframed. Pieces can be commissioned, perhaps incorporating fabric/book personal to client.

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An anonymous reader submitted an interesting article about a growing controversy among students at various video game universities, over who owns the copyrights to the games developed by students. The well known DigiPen Institute, for example, makes it clear that all work created by students is actually owned by DigiPen, and this is upsetting some students. Even though DigiPen makes this clear (and even tells students not to submit anything they "hold dear"), it seems troubling for a variety of reasons. It makes little sense for DigiPen to retain the copyrights here. It is quite different than when someone is working for a commercial company and developing games for them as an employee. With DigiPen, these are students who are paying to learn to create video games. As someone notes, if you paint a painting in art school, the copyright doesn't belong to the art school.

DigiPen's reasoning does not make much sense, either, claiming that it needs to do this to "avoid misunderstandings" between DigiPen and the gaming industry. However, it does not explain what those misunderstandings would have been. The whole thing seems questionable, and as some folks note in the article, diminishes DigiPen's reputation. First of all, it likely does (as it should) scare off some of the better prospective students, who fear having DigiPen "own" their creations. Secondly, the way the program is structured, it makes it that much harder to learn if the school itself is telling students not to actually make use of their best ideas.

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All you New York makers can stop reading this right now. However, if you're a maker who grew up with real NY pizza, then moved to a place lacking it, like, say, Los Angeles, this site is for you.

Jeff Varasano, a New Yorker in Atlanta, has spent years figuring out how to replicate the dough, get his home oven up beyond 800 degrees F, and perfect his sauce and toppings. His mile-long webpage chronicles it all in glorious detail so you can learn to do it yourself. I cannot look at his pizza photos without wanting to curl up into a ball, crying gently, waiting for someone to ship me back to 1983, to my buddy Carlo's dad's pizza place for a slice.

Heat is the real key to it all. You can't cook a good pie in 15 minutes at 500F. It's got to be more like two minutes at 850F. But most of us don't have coal-fired brick ovens. What's the secret? Hacking the safety latch on your electric oven and cooking with the cleaning cycle, which can get above 975F. You've got to be careful doing this, but isn't it worth it? Your home's got insurance anyway.

Jeff Varasano's NY Pizza Recipe

There is also a wonderful online community of other home pizza makers, check out the New York Style forum on Pizzamaking.com.

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I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "McDonalds has applied for patent WO2006068865, which carries the title 'METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR MAKING A SANDWICH.' John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, can eat his heart out (unless that's been patented, too). Undoubtedly, some people are contemplating whether there's anything novel in this patent that is somehow obscured by its generic title. Feel free to examine their flowchart for yourself and see exactly how novel their sandwich 'subroutines' are. The good news is that, given that it only mentions generic sandwich making 'tool(s),' rather than any specific machine, it might not survive after the In Re Bilski decision, which was meant to put a stop to absurdities such as this. But until McDonalds's application is rejected or invalidated, make sure you don't use their flowchart when making sandwiches. After all, if you 'apply appropriate condiments to appropriate compartment,' you might infringe upon their IP."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today on Offworld we woke up to a new profile on Jason Rohrer, the auteur behind low-res memento mori game Passage, and news he was acting as a consultant for EA's other Steven Spielberg produced game, the still-low-profile LMNO. We also saw two custom toy showcases (one significantly more grotesque than the other), looked at new footage of Infinite Line, the Nintendo DS space opera that promises to reaffirm your humanity for all of the vast emptiness of the universe, and thought about the very-near-future of gamers in all corners of public office. Elsewhere we got a new look at what could be the iPhone's first game to truly rival traditional DS and PSP offerings, Hand Circus's highly anticipated Rolando (pictured), played Doom in our browsers and Counter-Strike inside a Van Gogh painting, prepared to help space invaders 'get even' after 30 years of abuse, and filled our rage gauges in anticipation of being the proverbial bul-- well, minotaur, in the china shop. Oh, and somewhere in the middle there we showed up live on Air America Radio to try and explain as best we could just what it means to have a level 70 Tauren shaman on Obama's FCC transition team.

Riding with Robots writes "Today NASA announced it is officially proceeding with the Juno robotic mission to Jupiter. Scheduled to launch in August 2011 and reach the largest planet in 2016, the spacecraft will orbit the planet 32 times, skimming about 4,800 kilometers over the planet's cloud tops for about a year. The mission will focus on Jupiter's structure and evolution, and not on Europa or the other icy moons that may hide oceans under their surfaces — a disappointment if you ask me. Then again, all planetary missions so far have turned up amazing images and surprising scientific discoveries, and I doubt this expedition will be any different." We discussed NASA's deliberation of its short list a few days back.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.