
Here are some of my favorite posts this week from the Craft: Blog:
We've covered this simple kitchen-table science project before: how to make a spectrometer from a cereal box and a CD. Here, PopSci offers a 5-minute video on the project.
More:
A CD - cereal box spectrometer

From the MAKE: Flickr pool
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A - Appendages | B - Bioengineering | C - Caffeine | D - Dirigible | E - Experiment | F - Freeze ray | G - Goggles | H - Henchmen | I - Invention | J - Jargon | K - Potassium | L - Laser | M - Maniacal | N - Nanotechnology | O - Organs | P - Peasants (with Pitchforks) | Q - Quantum physics | R - Robot | S - Self-experimentation | T - Tentacles | U - Underground Lair | V - Virus | W - Wrench | X - X-Ray | Y - You, the Mad Scientist of Tomorrow | Z - ZombiesA Young Mad Scientist's First Alphabet Blocks (via JWZ)
Update: Andrew Waser (Chief Mad Scientist, Xylocopa Design) sez, " I
wanted to make a small correction - the blocks actually come five to a
set (with 26 unique illustrations), not 26 individual blocks. I don't
want anyone to be disappointed if they order in confusion!
You and your readers also might appreciate that the blocks have a
super-secret built in encryption function - if you rotate any block
180 degrees, it'll encode to ROT13. If it's good enough for Adobe
Acrobat, it's good enough for Mad Science!"
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Thanks to Star Simpson (famous for exposing Boston Airport's absurdity) for this tip on a new wiki covering an important topic: where to find good trash. Trashwiki is still very new and sparsely populated, but it's a start. Please comment with any other links you have to trash- (aka treasure-) locating resources.

You too will be this happy when you find a bag of edible donuts in the garbage:)
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I'm a longtime Twitter user, and as you may know a very regular user of FriendFeed. Each has its strengths but if I had to choose, sort of like Sophie's Choice, I'd have to go with FriendFeed. I finally figured out why this is a few days ago as I was experimenting with a real-time photo-flow app. It could be done in either Twitter or FriendFeed, but in FF it's graphic and in color, in Twitter, it's like a command-line operating system. Then it hit me, Twitter is to FriendFeed (in 2008) what MS-DOS was to the Mac (in 1984). Have we come full circle? Amazingly I think we have.
But it's undeniable, when a picture shows up in FriendFeed it looks like a picture, not like a url. And when a YouTube video appears, yup -- it looks like a video not a url. MS-DOS users sniffed at WYSIWYG back then, as Twitter users today sniff at a visual twitstream, but the MS-DOS users were wrong, history proved that, and I think the Twitter users are wrong too.
“The study of H. M. by Brenda Milner stands as one of the great milestones in the history of modern neuroscience,” said Dr. Eric Kandel, a neuroscientist at Columbia University. “It opened the way for the study of the two memory systems in the brain, explicit and implicit, and provided the basis for everything that came later — the study of human memory and its disorders.”"H.M., An Unforgettable Amnesiac, Dies at 82"
Living at his parents’ house, and later with a relative through the 1970s, Mr. Molaison helped with the shopping, mowed the lawn, raked leaves and relaxed in front of the television. He could navigate through a day attending to mundane details — fixing a lunch, making his bed — by drawing on what he could remember from his first 27 years.
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Macula offers a downloadable papercraft of Krampus, a creepy companion of Saint Nicholas.
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Macula offers a downloadable papercraft of Krampus, a creepy companion of Saint Nicholas.
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Cardboard Playhouse is a Wonderful, Green Holiday Gift for Younger Kids
This Little Piggy's Playhouse, designed by an architect for their kid, is an all-cardboard playhouse, made in the USA from 100% recyclable materials. They come in regular cardboard brown, or white - all the better for coloring! And, I have to say, compared to similar items we've seen elsewhere, it's pretty reasonably priced.
10 Christmas Songs I’m Already Sick Of (and 10 Geeky Alternatives)
We are scarcely into the month of December, and I am already dreadfully tired of classic Christmas music and, for that matter, many of its more contemporary alternatives. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got Christmas Spirit™ to spare, but the relentless audio assault of this holiday-themed musical fare has long since crossed the threshold from seasonally appropriate and into the realm of the obnoxious.
GeekDad Holiday Gift Guide #5: Toys for Dads & Kids to Share
A long-winded title but it points out a truism: the best thing about being a geek are the toys, and the best thing about being a GeekDad is playing with your kids with those toys.
The GeekDads Episode 33: The Dragon Really is a Duck
The GeekDads talk about videogames for the whole family with X-Play host Adam Sessler.
Coming Soon: The Twelve Days of Geekmas
Starting December 12th, we at GeekDad will be celebrating the 12 Days of Geekmas (or 12DOG, for those in the know). We will be taking a look back over the amazing year we've had on GeekDad, and giving away some pretty awesome stuff, including special items from Wil Wheaton, ThinkGeek, Arts & Entertainment Television, and many of our HipTrax bands. So activate the nostalgia circuit, and stay tuned!

Hierarchy of Beards Print,
Hierarchy of Beards -- large image
(Thanks, Dave!)
Trotsky's broom army
(Thanks, Dad!)
This is the "voluntary" child-porn filter that we hear very little about. The process by which pages are added to the repository of child porn sites is secret, the list of child porn sites is secret, and the process for correcting errors is secret. At issue are images such as a Scorpions cover that shows the naked chest of a little girl, and a still from a 1938 documentary on the struggle to end child marriages.
British ISPs restrict access to Wikipedia amid child pornography allegations
(Thanks, Seth
Rwanda's Internet Revolution
(Thanks, Mitch!)
On 19 March 2003, we were on the roof of the Zanón ceramic tile factory, filming an interview with Cepillo. He was showing us how the workers fended off eviction by armed police, defending their democratic workplace with slingshots and the little ceramic balls normally used to pound the Patagonian clay into raw material for tiles. His aim was impressive. It was the day the bombs started falling on Baghdad..."Occupy, resist, produce" (Thanks, Malgas!)The movement of recovered companies is not epic in scale - some 170 companies, around 10,000 workers in Argentina. But six years on, and unlike some of the country's other new movements, it has survived and continues to build quiet strength in the midst of the country's deeply unequal "recovery". Its tenacity is a function of its pragmatism: this is a movement that is based on action, not talk. And its defining action, reawakening the means of production under worker control, while loaded with potent symbolism, is anything but symbolic. It is feeding families, rebuilding shattered pride, and opening a window of powerful possibility.
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Cinematic Titanic -- the creator-driven successor to the fantastic Mystery Science Theater 3000 -- has a new installment just in time for the holidays: this month, the guys kick the crap out of "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians" (which has plenty of crap to kick!). For those of you who haven't been following this excellent series, the premise is simple: the five Cinematic Titanic comics are present in silhouette, superimposed over the picture, coming up with snappy jokes every second or so. I average about two belly laughs a minute, and about ten times more chuckles. The Cinematic Titanic guys are basically an artist-owned co-op who record and release this stuff off their own bat, direct to you at $15 a pop. Screw "It's a Wonderful Life," and to hell with the merely kitschy experience of watching "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians" without commentary. It is only through the auspices of Cinematic Titanic that the holidays can truly be realized.
Cinematic Titanic: Santa Claus Conquers the Martians)
The Zeptotools blog posted this demo of an iPhone application they are hoping to release. I haven't used the application or seen it outside of this video, but I like the idea of adding whiteboard features to the iPhone by sending screen data to a nearby laptop with an attached projector.
What would really be something is if someone extended this idea to allow multiple iPhones to draw collaboratively to a single projector screen.
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James Grimmelmann of New York Law School has written a terrific essay on privacy issues and social networks services entitled Facebook and the Social Dynamics of Privacy.
Grimmelmann is trying to do nothing less than re-shape our attitude towards privacy on social networks, building an erudite and extensively documented argument that our framing of privacy problems, and most of the solutions we have in mind, are bad fits for social networking services.
There are no ideal technical controls for the use of information in social software. The very idea is an oxymoron; “social” and “technical” are incompatible adjectives here. Adding “friendYouDontLike” to a controlled vocabulary will not make it socially complete; there’s still “friendYouDidntUsedToLike.” As long as there are social nuances that aren’t captured in the rules of the network (i.e., always), the network will be unable to prevent them from sparking privacy blowups. [...]
Another reason that comprehensive technical controls are ineffective can be found in Facebook’s other "core principle": that its users should "have access to the information others want to share." If you’re already sharing your information with Alice, checking the box that says “Don’t show to Bob” will stop Facebook from showing it Bob, but it won’t stop Alice from showing it to him. [...]
There’s also another way of looking at "information others want to share": If I want to share information about myself -- and since I’m using a social network site, it’s a moral certainty that I do -- anything that makes it harder for me to share is a bug, not a feature. Users will disable any feature that protects their privacy too much.
For me, the essential pair of insights in this paper are that a) our attitudes towards privacy are shaped by industrial norms -- the individual vs. the corporation or the state -- while on social networks, the most important class of privacy violations are in fact peer-to-peer and b) that these violations, when they happen, are a side-effect of the system doing what it is designed to do, which is to facilitate the spread of personal information.
The first challenge is re-shaping our sense of what a privacy violation means in the context of social network services, and the second is to accept that, since a full stemming of these violations is prima facie impossible, we need a new set of practices around minimizing them where possible and improving recovery from them where possible.
Because of the enormity of the head-shift required to think through peer-to-peer privacy risks, and because Grimmelmann has worked through the issues so carefully and thoroughly, I think this should be required reading for anyone thinking about privacy as it is actually lived.
Facebook and the Social Dynamics of Privacy
James Grimmelmann of New York Law School has written a terrific essay on privacy issues and social networks services entitled Facebook and the Social Dynamics of Privacy.
Grimmelmann is trying to do nothing less than re-shape our attitude towards privacy on social networks, building an erudite and extensively documented argument that our framing of privacy problems, and most of the solutions we have in mind, are bad fits for social networking services.
There are no ideal technical controls for the use of information in social software. The very idea is an oxymoron; “social” and “technical” are incompatible adjectives here. Adding “friendYouDontLike” to a controlled vocabulary will not make it socially complete; there’s still “friendYouDidntUsedToLike.” As long as there are social nuances that aren’t captured in the rules of the network (i.e., always), the network will be unable to prevent them from sparking privacy blowups. [...]
Another reason that comprehensive technical controls are ineffective can be found in Facebook’s other "core principle": that its users should "have access to the information others want to share." If you’re already sharing your information with Alice, checking the box that says “Don’t show to Bob” will stop Facebook from showing it Bob, but it won’t stop Alice from showing it to him. [...]
There’s also another way of looking at "information others want to share": If I want to share information about myself -- and since I’m using a social network site, it’s a moral certainty that I do -- anything that makes it harder for me to share is a bug, not a feature. Users will disable any feature that protects their privacy too much.
For me, the essential pair of insights in this paper are that a) our attitudes towards privacy are shaped by industrial norms -- the individual vs. the corporation or the state -- while on social networks, the most important class of privacy violations are in fact peer-to-peer and b) that these violations, when they happen, are a side-effect of the system doing what it is designed to do, which is to facilitate the spread of personal information.
The first challenge is re-shaping our sense of what a privacy violation means in the context of social network services, and the second is to accept that, since a full stemming of these violations is prima facie impossible, we need a new set of practices around minimizing them where possible and improving recovery from them where possible.
Because of the enormity of the head-shift required to think through peer-to-peer privacy risks, and because Grimmelmann has worked through the issues so carefully and thoroughly, I think this should be required reading for anyone thinking about privacy as it is actually lived.
Facebook and the Social Dynamics of Privacy
James Grimmelmann of New York Law School has written a terrific essay on privacy issues and social networks services entitled Facebook and the Social Dynamics of Privacy.
Grimmelmann is trying to do nothing less than re-shape our attitude towards privacy on social networks, building an erudite and extensively documented argument that our framing of privacy problems, and most of the solutions we have in mind, are bad fits for social networking services.
There are no ideal technical controls for the use of information in social software. The very idea is an oxymoron; “social” and “technical” are incompatible adjectives here. Adding “friendYouDontLike” to a controlled vocabulary will not make it socially complete; there’s still “friendYouDidntUsedToLike.” As long as there are social nuances that aren’t captured in the rules of the network (i.e., always), the network will be unable to prevent them from sparking privacy blowups. [...]
Another reason that comprehensive technical controls are ineffective can be found in Facebook’s other "core principle": that its users should "have access to the information others want to share." If you’re already sharing your information with Alice, checking the box that says “Don’t show to Bob” will stop Facebook from showing it Bob, but it won’t stop Alice from showing it to him. [...]
There’s also another way of looking at "information others want to share": If I want to share information about myself -- and since I’m using a social network site, it’s a moral certainty that I do -- anything that makes it harder for me to share is a bug, not a feature. Users will disable any feature that protects their privacy too much.
For me, the essential pair of insights in this paper are that a) our attitudes towards privacy are shaped by industrial norms -- the individual vs. the corporation or the state -- while on social networks, the most important class of privacy violations are in fact peer-to-peer and b) that these violations, when they happen, are a side-effect of the system doing what it is designed to do, which is to facilitate the spread of personal information.
The first challenge is re-shaping our sense of what a privacy violation means in the context of social network services, and the second is to accept that, since a full stemming of these violations is prima facie impossible, we need a new set of practices around minimizing them where possible and improving recovery from them where possible.
Because of the enormity of the head-shift required to think through peer-to-peer privacy risks, and because Grimmelmann has worked through the issues so carefully and thoroughly, I think this should be required reading for anyone thinking about privacy as it is actually lived.
Facebook and the Social Dynamics of Privacy
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In one episode of the Make: television show I do an Input >> Arduino >> Output demonstration to explain how the microcontroller reads a button press and plays a light pattern on some LEDs. To keep things clear visually, I mounted the buttons in one MAKE Project Tin, the Arduino in the middle, and the LEDs in another tin. I also used one of these tiny breadboards to wire it up (I ran out of time to solder anything). All hail the humble Altoid tin!
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