The 130,000 missing inflatable breasts that went astray between China (where they were manufactured) and Australia (where they were to be included as a give-away in a dumb lad's magazine) have been found: they were on the wrong boat and ended up in a box in Melbourne.

They had been due to dock in Sydney last week, but have since turned up at a Melbourne dock, where they've been sitting for a week.

Workers are now frantically working to put them in bags to go out with the December 15 issue.

Ralph editor Santi Pintado said the incident had cost the magazine $30,000.

"If we'd found them a day later, it'd have been too late to get them on the next issue," Pintado said.

"You'd think the Chinese economy was in enough trouble without misplacing 130,000 pairs of boobs."

Missing inflatable breasts found (Thanks, Itsumishi!)

Dear Cat elevator cat...

Meet the cat treadmill feeder cat...

It's cat day here today it seems...

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firthisaword writes "I will be teaching an enrichment programming course to 11-14 year old gifted children in the Spring. It is meant as an introduction to very basic programming paradigms (conditions, variables, loops, etc.), but the kids will invariably have a mix of experience in dealing with computers and programming. The question: Which programming language would be best for starting these kids off on? I am tempted by QBasic which I remember from my early days — it is straightforward and fast, if antiquated and barely supported under XP. Others have suggested Pascal which was conceived as an instructional pseudocode language. Does anyone have experience in that age range? Anything you would recommend? And as a P.S: Out of the innumerable little puzzles/programs/tasks that novice programmers get introduced to such as Fibonacci numbers, primes or binary calculators, which was the most fun and which one taught you the most?" A few years ago, a reader asked a similar but more general question, and several questions have focused on how to introduce kids to programming. Would you do anything different in teaching kids identified as academically advanced?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Fred von Lohmann is cautiously optimistic at the news that the record labels are considering offering a blanket license to college campuses that will legalize their students' file-swapping. Fred's glad to see the record-saurs finally declaring a truce in their war on the Internet. But, he warns, we have to make sure the universities and the artists are getting a fair deal for their money:

Universities would pay Choruss, a new nonprofit collecting society, in exchange for an end to the "John Doe" subpoenas seeking student identities, DMCA notices, lawsuits against students, and legislation mandating copyright surveillance of campus networks. Students who pay will be free to download whatever they like, using whatever software they like, in whatever format they like (and presumably keep it all when they graduate, since there would be no way to claw back DRM-free MP3s). The monies collected would be divided up among artists and rightsholders, based on relative popularity. The rest of the details are still to be determined, including whether it would be a mandatory fee for all students, or an opt-in fee (complete with continued lawsuits for those who fail to pay?). It's also not clear what the fee would be, although those familiar with the talks suggest less than $5 per student per month...

So we are cautiously optimistic. There are lots of hard issues that will need to be addressed. How will a collective licensing approach protect user privacy? What will universities do to stop "leakage" to ISPs whose users have not opted in? Will independent artists get a fair shake from Choruss? But it sounds like the labels are, for the first time, interested in having the right discussion.

Labels Open to Collective Licensing on Campus

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Fred von Lohmann is cautiously optimistic at the news that the record labels are considering offering a blanket license to college campuses that will legalize their students' file-swapping. Fred's glad to see the record-saurs finally declaring a truce in their war on the Internet. But, he warns, we have to make sure the universities and the artists are getting a fair deal for their money:

Universities would pay Choruss, a new nonprofit collecting society, in exchange for an end to the "John Doe" subpoenas seeking student identities, DMCA notices, lawsuits against students, and legislation mandating copyright surveillance of campus networks. Students who pay will be free to download whatever they like, using whatever software they like, in whatever format they like (and presumably keep it all when they graduate, since there would be no way to claw back DRM-free MP3s). The monies collected would be divided up among artists and rightsholders, based on relative popularity. The rest of the details are still to be determined, including whether it would be a mandatory fee for all students, or an opt-in fee (complete with continued lawsuits for those who fail to pay?). It's also not clear what the fee would be, although those familiar with the talks suggest less than $5 per student per month...

So we are cautiously optimistic. There are lots of hard issues that will need to be addressed. How will a collective licensing approach protect user privacy? What will universities do to stop "leakage" to ISPs whose users have not opted in? Will independent artists get a fair shake from Choruss? But it sounds like the labels are, for the first time, interested in having the right discussion.

Labels Open to Collective Licensing on Campus

This handmade "Neo Victorian" mouse is pure steamporn -- from the old keyboard keys (emblazoned with cryptic symbols) that serve as the buttons to the gears intermingled with the tarnished bones of a real mouse to the functional, gleaming brass gearing. The maker did a fantastic job explaining his process and materials -- plenty of leads for anyone who wants to try their own hand and making one of these.

After completing my custom keyboard, I was constantly annoyed with seeing my ugly plastic mouse sitting next to it, so I knew a new project was inevitable. I decided to make a custom matching mouse! At first I felt this project was beyond my abilities, since I had to make actual moving and working parts, but after hours of staring at a dissembled mouse and my boxes and jars of random found objects, I developed a plan of attack. The mouse I started with was a generic 5 button mouse with scroll wheel. The two main left/right buttons were the largest obstacles for I couldn’t find anything that would both look and function well. My first though was to use the two sides of a bottom jawbone of some rodent I had lying around, but they ended up being too small and fragile for constant use. I then decided I will just carve some pieces out of wood. After this, I made a mount using brass tubing and brass I-beam shaped pieces. To match the keyboard, I decided to add vintage typewriter keys to each of the finger points on the main 4 buttons of this mouse. I used Alchemy symbols to replace the original letters in the keys. These symbols may or may not have been chosen for a specific significance in this project.

The Paradox Mouse!! Custom Computer Mouse (via Make)

This handmade "Neo Victorian" mouse is pure steamporn -- from the old keyboard keys (emblazoned with cryptic symbols) that serve as the buttons to the gears intermingled with the tarnished bones of a real mouse to the functional, gleaming brass gearing. The maker did a fantastic job explaining his process and materials -- plenty of leads for anyone who wants to try their own hand and making one of these.

After completing my custom keyboard, I was constantly annoyed with seeing my ugly plastic mouse sitting next to it, so I knew a new project was inevitable. I decided to make a custom matching mouse! At first I felt this project was beyond my abilities, since I had to make actual moving and working parts, but after hours of staring at a dissembled mouse and my boxes and jars of random found objects, I developed a plan of attack. The mouse I started with was a generic 5 button mouse with scroll wheel. The two main left/right buttons were the largest obstacles for I couldn’t find anything that would both look and function well. My first though was to use the two sides of a bottom jawbone of some rodent I had lying around, but they ended up being too small and fragile for constant use. I then decided I will just carve some pieces out of wood. After this, I made a mount using brass tubing and brass I-beam shaped pieces. To match the keyboard, I decided to add vintage typewriter keys to each of the finger points on the main 4 buttons of this mouse. I used Alchemy symbols to replace the original letters in the keys. These symbols may or may not have been chosen for a specific significance in this project.

The Paradox Mouse!! Custom Computer Mouse (via Make)

Last year, we pointed out that teachers are increasingly complaining that students are cyberbullying not each other... but the teachers themselves. Of course, in a lot of cases these seem overblown. Yet, that hasn't stopped some teachers from arguing that cyberbullying should be a criminal offense. Yet, when teachers overreact and consider just about any criticism "cyberbullying" you're going to run into problems. Take, for example, the case of Katherine Evans. As a high school student who didn't much like her English teacher, she created a Facebook group called "Ms. Sarah Phelps is the worst teacher I've ever met!" That doesn't seem like cyberbullying. That seems like garden variety student-bitching-about-teacher. Even worse, Evans' fellow students told her it was a stupid group, and expressed support for the teacher, such that Evans decided to take down the group herself

But, the school apparently felt this was a big problem, claiming that this was cyberbullying harassment and "disruptive behavior." It suspended Evans for three days and pulled her out of various advanced placement classes. Now, Evans is suing the school for violating her free speech rights. As the Wired article notes, there have been lawsuits about free speech in school in the past, but the internet makes the issues a bit different here. Either way, it's quite difficult to see how the school can claim that such a group is actually cyberbullying, and punishing the girl for venting hardly seems like a reasonable response (especially for an issue that was dealt with by other students in a reasonable manner). What is this world coming to when people can't take the slightest criticism and insist that it's somehow "cyberbullying" that requires punishment or discipline?

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This is clever ... "Cartoon Particles" - The building blocks of a Disney cartoon character via Waxy.

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Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Joel's turned up survival bracelets woven from 15-20 feet of 550-lb test paracord.

Each of these "Survival Bracelets" has 15 to 20 feet of 550-pound test paracord inside. If you ever need to use the cord for something, just unravel the binding. When you're done, you can send it back to manufacturer Survival Straps and they'll rewind it for you free of charge.

Most people probably wouldn't ever end up using it, but I think they're pretty attractive in a ultra masculine way. They're available in a variety of colors with either steel or plastic clasps for around $20-$25.

Survival Bracelets wound from paracord, Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Joel's turned up survival bracelets woven from 15-20 feet of 550-lb test paracord.

Each of these "Survival Bracelets" has 15 to 20 feet of 550-pound test paracord inside. If you ever need to use the cord for something, just unravel the binding. When you're done, you can send it back to manufacturer Survival Straps and they'll rewind it for you free of charge.

Most people probably wouldn't ever end up using it, but I think they're pretty attractive in a ultra masculine way. They're available in a variety of colors with either steel or plastic clasps for around $20-$25.

Survival Bracelets wound from paracord, Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

Some might think Johnny Ryan and Jenny Ryan's Soft 9/11 trivializes a horrible tragedy, but that kind of knee-jerk reaction prevents them from contemplating this profoundly heartfelt work of art. (Compare it to crass exploitative garbage like this.) It belongs in a museum.

Soft 9/11 sculpture by Jenny Ryan

My friend Emily spotted this fantastic radiator-chair, a one-of-a-kind sculpture from Von Thiel and Co. at a shop in Toronto. At CDN$1,490, it's a little pricier than you might want to spend on a chair that probably won't be all that comfortable for protracted use (Emily assures me it was great for a short sit-down, though!), but it's a better world that has this radiator-cum-chair in it.

The Radiator Chair (Thanks, Emily!)

Roland Piquepaille writes "University of Delaware (UD) scientists and engineers are currently working at South Pole under very harsh conditions. This research team is one of the many other ones working on the construction of IceCube, the world's largest neutrino telescope in the Antarctic ice, far beneath the continent's snow-covered surface. When it is completed in 2011, the telescope array will occupy a cubic kilometer of Antarctica. One of the lead researchers said that 'IceCube will provide new information about some of the most violent and far-away astrophysical events in the cosmos.' The UD team has even opened a blog to cover this expedition. It will be opened up to December 22, 2008. I guess they want to be back in Delaware for Christmas, but read more for additional details and references, including a diagram of this telescope array built inside ice."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If ever there was a thing made for me, this is it. Cosmocopia is a novel by Paul Di Filippo and a 513-piece jigsaw puzzle and color art print by Jim Woodring, beautifully packaged in a cardboard box radiating with eldritch vibrations.

I've just started the short novel by Di Filippo (who was a frequent contributor to the zine version of bOING bOING) and I'm hooked. It's about an aged illustrator who seems to have been partially modeled on Frank Frazetta (His first name is Frank. He had a stroke. He started drawing comics in the 1950s: "funny animals, noir molls, hillbillies, car racing jocks." He painted "hyper-real yet fantastical book covers for paperback original novels in the 1960s and 1970s: a galley of demons and brawny warriors, luscious-bottomed maidens and brawling barbarians, aliens and otherworldly explorers." Really, who else could it be?).

Since I haven't finished the novel, here's the publisher's description of the story:

Frank Lazorg's gone mad. The elderly ego-driven dean of fine art fantasy illustrators has reached the end of a lifetime of dreams fulfilled. His creative powers have failed him, his mistress spurned him, and younger rivals threaten to eclipse him. Is it any wonder he eagerly falls upon a strange new drug that promises to reinvigorate him, as both man and artist?

But his reliance on the organic high soon turns to addiction. Lazorg finds his grasp on reality slipping. He's suddenly plunged into a world inhabited by monstrous parodies of humanity, living in a culture that bears a skewed resemblance to the world Lazorg knows. The oddly rejuvenated artist soon discovers this new dimension exhibits its own dangers and delights, enemies and lovers, including the remarkable being known as Crutchsump.

What Lazorg experiences is merely the first rung on the Cosmocopian ladder.

The first edition is limited to 500 sets. Buy one for a friend and buy one for yourself.

Cosmocopia: $65

I don't usually read manga, but I did read both volumes of Blank Slate by Aya Kanno, because my wife Carla wrote the English adaptation. It's about a criminal named Zen who's lost his memory and doesn't know anything about his past identity. Zen hooks up with a bounty killer hired to bump him off and embarks on an adventure to find out who he really is and where he came from. I enjoyed it.

Aya Kanno draws her characters as stylish, androgynous David Bowie types. I think this look is called bishonen in Japan, and manga with these kinds of characters are popular with female readers in Japan. There's also an undercurrent of homoeroticism in Blank Slate -- I remember reading a Comics Journal article about a sub-genre of manga called yaoi, which, according to Wikipedia, is a "popular term for fictional media that focuses on homosexual male relationships yet is generally created by and for females."

Blank Slate Vol. 1 | Blank Slate Vol. 2

Jenny Hart taught me how to embroider at Maker Faire Austin in October. When my 11-year-old daughter saw my handiwork, she decided to give it a try herself. Instead of using an iron-on pattern, she used a pencil to draw an elephant on a tea-towel. She embroidered it while Carla and I went out to dinner and presented it to us as a gift when we got home.

I didn't know Feijoas were sold in supermarkets. From my experience, they have a one-day window of peak ripeness, so they don't seem to be good candidates for supermarkets. These puny, shriveled feijoas cost $1.79 each at a supermarket here in Los Angeles. That means I've eating at least $17.90 worth of feijoas every day. Luckily for me, they're free because I have a tree full of them.

The Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based around a microcontroller. It accepts inputs, such as signals from sensors (light, temperature, moisture, etc.) or data from the Internet or wireless devices, and sends output signals to devices, such as LEDS, motors, speakers, MIDI sequencers, computers, and so on. You can write programs for the Arduino on a Mac, Windows, or Linux machine and load them onto the Arduino with a USB cable.

Recently, Make published a book called Getting Started with Arduino, written by Massimo Banzi, the co-founder of Arduino. It's only 116-pages long and uses attractive hand-drawn illustrations to get even the most clueless newbie up to speed. Filled with easy-to-understand examples and projects, I wish there were books like this about everything I was interested in learning more about, from beekeeping to furniture making to investing.

Getting Started with Arduino

An anonymous reader writes with a followup to the story posted last week about Warner Music's plan for a music tax for universities. "There's been some debate about this plan and Techdirt has a detailed explanation of why a music tax is a bad idea, noting that it effectively rewards those who failed in the marketplace, punishes those who innovated and sets up a huge, inefficient and unnecessary bureaucracy. Meanwhile, plenty of musicians who are experimenting with new business models are finding that they can make more money and appeal to more fans. So, why stymie that process with a new bureaucracy that simply funds the big record labels?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It caught some attention yesterday when the rate on four-week US treasury bills went to zero yesterday, but an even more astounding data point occurred when the yield on three month US treasuries briefly went negative. Yes, this meant that companies were willing to lend the government money for three months, knowing they wouldn't make back all their money.

If you want to know just how bad things are out in the market right now, this means that companies feel more comfortable losing some money to the government than investing in anything.

As for the obvious question of why would anyone invest in a bond that's guaranteed not to earn them a return, it simply comes down to alternatives. In theory, you could keep all that money in cash, and not lose any of it -- but that's not practical. If you literally kept it in cash in a giant vault somewhere, you'd pay so much to protect it, effectively you'd be "losing" more of it anyway -- not to mention the very real risk that some of that cash would be stolen. But why not leave it in a bank? Well, again, this comes down to how much of the money in a bank account is actually federally insured to be there. Insurance only covers so much, and since there's a small, but very real, risk that certain banks might just up and disappear, many companies recognize that treasuries at a loss are the best investment. In other words, they feel that no matter what they do with their money, they're going to lose money. So the strategy of investing in a negative t-bill is to lose as little as possible.

Of course, some might point out that going negative doesn't really mean that much. After all, if the return on the t-bill was less than inflation you were losing money in real purchasing terms anyway already. However, from a psychological perspective, it's still rather stunning that on a purely nominal basis, the return is negative. As a basic indicator of just how scared companies are to invest money right now, it's pretty powerful.

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Daniel Pon's "Paradox Mouse" is an amazing piece of macabre retro-tech art. Too bad those 9mm rounds he used in its construction have already been fired. Where's the excitement in that? Really an impressive piece of work. While you're on his site, check out his equally impressive "Neo Victorian" monitor and keyboard.

After completing my custom keyboard, I was constantly annoyed with seeing my ugly plastic mouse sitting next to it, so I knew a new project was inevitable. I decided to make a custom matching mouse! At first I felt this project was beyond my abilities, since I had to make actual moving and working parts, but after hours of staring at a dissembled mouse and my boxes and jars of random found objects, I developed a plan of attack. The mouse I started with was a generic 5 button mouse with scroll wheel. The two main left/right buttons were the largest obstacles for I couldn't find anything that would both look and function well. My first though was to use the two sides of a bottom jawbone of some rodent I had lying around, but they ended up being too small and fragile for constant use. I then decided I will just carve some pieces out of wood. After this, I made a mount using brass tubing and brass I-beam shaped pieces. To match the keyboard, I decided to add vintage typewriter keys to each of the finger points on the main 4 buttons of this mouse. I used Alchemy symbols to replace the original letters in the keys. These symbols may or may not have been chosen for a specific significance in this project.

The Paradox Mouse!! Custom Computer Mouse

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In 1992, William Gibson released "Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)", a haunting poem about loss and memory that came on a floppy disc that erased itself as you played it. Here's a screen-capture of the Agrippa poem being read out inside a Mac classic emulator. There were other editions, even more esoteric, that you can read about on Wikipedia; as lovely a literary piece as this is, it was an even lovelier artifact.

A “Run” of William Gibson’s “Agrippa” Poem from a Copy of Original 1992 Agrippa Diskette, Wikipedia on Agrippa (via Beyond the Beyond)

Off the Rails writes "The BBC reports that evidence has been found for both water vapour and carbon dioxide on a planet 63 light years away. The planet is a 'hot Jupiter' with a surface temperature of 1173K and an orbital period of just 53 hours. The gases were found spectroscopically once its orbit had been deduced from observation. NASA hailed the news as proof that Kepler will be able to do its job of finding planets capable of supporting life." Wikipedia also has an entry on the planet, dubbed HD 189733b.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a new study, researchers scanned the brains of people as they were deciding whether someone should be punished for a crime, and what that punishment should be. It turns out that regions of the brain associated with rational thoughts and also emotion light up during the process. A team of law and neuroscience researchers from Vanderbilt University conducted the study. They hope to shed light on how complex legal decisions are made. Eventually, the line of research might also help determine whether judges and other arbitrators come up with judgements using the same mental processes as the rest of us. From Science News:

“Our judicial system based on third-party punishment is usually seen as cold and detached as opposed to … punishment by the victim of a crime,” Marois says. The new study shows that emotions play a part in impartial judgment too.br>
Scientists have used functional MRI, or fMRI, before to scan the brains of people who are trying to decide whether to retaliate against someone who has cheated them in an economic game. But the new study is the first to examine which parts of the brain are active when an impartial third party makes decisions about guilt and punishment...

The amount of activity in (brain) areas involved in determining responsibility and whether to punish did not correlate to severity of punishment. Instead, harsher penalties were associated with increased activity in the amygdala and other parts of the brain involved in processing emotion. The degree of punishment matched the level of activity in the amygdala...

That doesn’t mean people make punishment decisions based on emotion, Jones says. “The causal arrow could run in the other direction — having decided to punish someone severely could cause an emotional response.”

"In the brain, justice is served from many parts"

Some days you just wonder if entertainment execs wake up in the morning planning to shoot themselves in their collective foot. The latest display of entertainment exec short-sightedness is that the Hollywood Studios have apparently forced both the Apple iTunes store and Netflix's download store to remove certain movies just as they're getting close to being available for TV. As you probably already know, Hollywood makes a lot of money through a "windowing" system, where they release movies in different formats at different times: theaters, special locations (airplanes, hotels), DVD, cable and finally network TV. Of course, they're working on adding some more tiers to this as well, but apparently they convinced these online download stores that they need to kill certain movies as the timing reaches where the movies can appear on TV.

The studios' myopic reasoning is that TV broadcasters pay a lot of money for those rights, and they don't want to piss them off: "It wouldn't make any business sense to do it any other way," claiming that allowing the videos to be downloaded via these online stores would kill some of its biggest money makers. Of course, this makes no sense. The movies are already released on DVD and the studios don't prevent Blockbuster or Netflix from offering the physical DVD for rent, so why do that with the download version? If people really want to download these movies, they're more likely to just go get them from an unauthorized site, rather than bother to watch the network broadcast version (which, given recent MPAA statements, they'll probably try to prevent you from recording via your DVR anyway). If TV networks have been willing to pay good money for the broadcasting rights all these years while DVDs and unauthorized downloads have been available, are they really suddenly going to stop paying because legal downloads are available? Unlikely.

So what are we left with instead? A bunch of consumers really pissed off at the movie studios yet again. One of these days movie studio execs will discover that business models are much harder to implement when a large percentage of your customers hate you.

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Pamela Latrimore, 42, has cancer, arthritis, and no insurance. So the Fort Pierce, Florida woman is hoping to make some cash auctioning off an MRI of her brain that contains an image of the Virgin Mary. From TCPalm:

In 2002, Latrimore had an MRI of her brain done and the results were stashed in her thick pile of medical records. Her sister-in-law looked at the sheet recently and pointed out what appeared to be the image of the Virgin Mary.

Having seen where other supposed images of Mary or other religious icons were sold for thousands of dollars, Latrimore plans to post the MRI scan on eBay, the online auction site. She hopes to earn enough money to pay off some of the medical bills she and her contractor husband cannot afford.

"Virgin Mary in Fort Pierce woman's brain scan; next stop: eBay"

CWmike writes "Microsoft says attackers are now exploiting a critical Windows bug that it didn't get around to fixing in its biggest batch of security patches in more than five years, issued yesterday. Microsoft said that 'limited and targeted' attacks are in progress by hackers exploiting an unpatched vulnerability in the WordPad Text Converter, a tool included with all versions of Windows. If Microsoft patches the WordPad problem on its monthly schedule, the first opportunity for fixing the flaw would be Jan. 9, 2009."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The EDAR is like a miniature pop-up camper designed as a portable shelter for homeless people. Hollywood movie producer Peter Samuelson (Revenge of the Nerds) came up with the idea and sponsored a prototype contest at the Art Center College of Design. Eric Lindeman and Jason Zasa won with a shopping cart-inspired version. Now, the non-profit EDAR Foundation is starting to distribute the shelters in the Los Angeles area and looking for donations to manufacture more of them. From the Los Angeles Times:

With a donation from former EBay President Jeff Skoll, he took the design to Precision Wire Products, a manufacturer of shopping carts in Commerce. Precision produced a succession of prototypes, at least nine, to address critiques of the device: too big, too small, too flimsy, not readily collapsible. The units have been thrown down flights of stairs (they're sturdy) and left in the rain (they don't leak).

Three months ago, Samuelson decided to distribute 60 EDARs for testing. With the help of churches, missions and shelters, he and his assistants identified chronically homeless people who could benefit from an EDAR in the short term and might be willing to develop a lasting relationship with service providers...

Does the EDAR enable homelessness by making it more bearable? No, he insists.

"Why is the EDAR not regressive?" he said. "Because it is not nearly as good as a shelter bed. There's no pretense it's as good as permanent or temporary brick-and-mortar housing." But it is, he says, "infinitely better than a damp cardboard box."

"Upgrading from a cardboard box for the homeless"

On December 31, at 23:59:59 UTC, a leap second will be added to the official timekeeping clocks of the world. That's because the timescales of atomic clocks and the earth's rotation aren't perfectly in synch. The last leap second was added in 2005. From Smithsonian:

Earth’s rotation is the traditional form of timekeeping. It is what defines a day. However, while we call a day 86,400 seconds, it is really 86,400.02 seconds. All those .02 seconds add up over time. In addition, the earth’s rotation is not constant (it has been slightly slowing, and 900 million years ago a day was only 18 of our hours). Time as we know it changes.

"Leap Second Added to Your Calendar"

James "Dr. Krazy X" McCracken III sent us pictures of his steampunk-y take on the Gakken Mini-Theremin kit build.

Mini-Theremin The theremin, invented in 1919 by Russian scientist Leon Theremin, is one of the world's earliest fully electronic instruments, and is also unique in that it was the first musical instrument designed to be played without being touched. The eerie, other-worldly tones as heard in the films mentioned above are created by the proximity of the player's hands to the metal antennas, with the resulting radio frequency interference being transformed into musical tones. Instructions are in Japanese but  features highly detailed assembly pictures, sorry no English translation at this time. Easy to build and play! Price: $29.95

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Ok gang, here is is our MODDING and ART contest! The SPEAK VISUAL™ Contest at the NVIDIA® Modification Station with MAKE!

Do you SPEAK VISUAL^TM? - Speak in pictures, movies, games and maps - with a graphics processor from NVIDIA® you can speak the one language that never needs translation - NVIDIA® has teamed up with MAKE and created the "Modification Station" a special section on MAKE that celebrates "SPEAK VISUAL^TM" - from PC mods to amazing motion graphics this section will have some of the most amazing mods and visuals you've ever experienced. But that's not all - together, NVIDIA® and MAKE bring you the "SPEAK VISUAL^TM" contest. If you're a Maker who has an amazing PC mod, gamer station or PC hardware creation you can win amazing prizes -- from a new computer to the latest graphics cards from NVIDIA®. Not a PC modder? That's ok, if you do motion graphics, data visualization or anything that uses a graphics processor to bring your imagination to life you can enter too!

How to enter the contest!

There are many ways to enter this contest, remember it doesn't need to be a MASSIVE PC mod it can also be some cool graphics you've created that run great on a graphics processor. If it speaks visually, you're golden.

Enter individual photos, videos and artwork at the follow locations:

• Flickr: tag your photos with "modificationstation" and also add it to the Make: Flickr photo pool.


• YouTube, Vimeo, blip.tv: tag your videos with "modificationstation".


• Submit your project link via the Make: Submit form.


• Instructables, tag your project with "modificationstation".


• You can also send links to your videos, photos or more to us via email.

Prizes and more!

One lucky modder will win a Digital Storm PC!

• Intel Core i7 920 2.66GHZ (Quad Core) processor
• ASUS P6T Deluxe (Intel X58 Chipset) motherboard
• 3GB DDR3 1333MHz Corsair memory
• 500GB Western Digital (16MB Cache, 7200 RPM, SATA) hard drive
• NVIDIA GeForice GTX 280 1GB video card
• Read more for complete specs!

5 runners up with win the BFG GeForce GTX 260 OC MAXCORE graphics card combines the power of 24 more processing cores (versus the standard GTX 260) with BFG's out-of-the-box overclocking to rip through DirectX 10 games at blazing fast frame rates and enable realistic physical motion and massively destructible environments with NVIDIA's new PhysX technology. This graphics card delivers an amazing visual computing experience you have to see to believe. Check out the specs and more here...

We'll be giving away 10 copies total of two great PC modding books from MAKE!

Building The Perfect PC 2nd Edition - Regardless of your technical experience, Building the Perfect PC will guide you through the entire process of building or upgrading your own computer. You'll use the latest top-quality components, including Intel's Core 2 Duo and more. And you'll know exactly what's under the hood and how to fix or upgrade your PC.

Make Projects: Small Form Factor PCs is the only book available that shows you how to build small-form-factor PCs -- from kits and from scratch -- Included in the book are projects for building personal video recorders, versatile wireless access points, digital audio jukeboxes, portable firewalls, and much more. This book shows you how to build eight different systems, from the shoebox-sized Shuttle system down to the stick-of-gum-sized gumstix.

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Hey, folks. I'm getting ready to head into Manhattan to get ready for Fünde Razor, our yearly fund raising event for the Child's Play Charity. If you like to drink beer, play Guitar Hero and Rock Band, and win prizes to raise money to keep kids entertained when they're at hospital, please stop on by. Unless you hate children/to rock. And it's not just New York: there are sister events happening in Denver and San Francisco. But if you can make it to the New York event (now in our fourth year!) please come say and tell me hello! And as always, if you can't make it, you should toss a few bucks in the box for the kids. Times, locations, information, and more (not that much more, really) [FundeRazor.com]

An anonymous reader writes "Given the OpeniBoot project is just a breath away from getting Android onto the iPhone, maybe Apple should consider opening up the platform. This post has five reasons, but I think there are far more. Without open source, Apple will find itself in the same position as today's Microsoft in seven years."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The news is filled with stories of the latest bailout: this time of the US auto industry, and for some reason it has me thinking about Joseph Schumpeter. Schumpeter, as (hopefully) many of you know, was an economist in the first half of the 20th century, who today is probably most well-known for two things: his championship of the concept of "entrepreneurs" and ongoing innovation as the process of economic growth, and the creation of profits, as well as the idea of "creative destruction" brought about by those entrepreneurs, taking down old industries with new ideas, new products and new processes. There is much that Schumpeter got wrong in his analysis (in general, I'm not a huge fan of much of Schumpeter's work), but throughout it all, there were some very important ideas that have been proven time and time again.

It's important to revisit his work, as we're seeing a sudden influx of economic philosophy "battles" between different schools of economists over how to deal with the financial crisis. The new Keynesians still believe that through government tweaking, we can guide the economy to some sort of "soft landing." The more free market-focused economists fear the end result of such tweaking. The split in schools of thinking has become significantly less pronounced than in the past, and ideas seem to permeate back and forth among these and other economic philosophies, but some core beliefs are common across most economists, and they've been shown to be correct time and time again.

Competition and Innovation

Innovation, driven by competition, is the core of economic growth. Competition drives companies to keep innovating, creating better and better products (often for less and less money). Companies that rest on their laurels get beaten in the marketplace, and that's good for everyone (except, temporarily, employees and shareholders of those companies). It gives the public better products, made more efficiently, and it keeps companies from becoming burdens.

Encouraging competition should be a key goal of government, but in most cases that means staying out of the way. Unfortunately, things don't always work out that way, and the government has often been much more involved than necessary, later causing problems. This is often seen in a rush to send antitrust lawyers after a company for being successful, but not when it's doing any actual harm on the market, or preventing any real competition from happening.

We also see it as a problem in the government's intellectual property policies, which often do little to encourage innovation, and plenty to hinder it by creating defacto monopolies.

If the government should be involved at all, it should be to enable (not create) the infrastructure that's necessary for further innovations. It should be enabling the next generation of entrepreneurs to be creating the next great businesses.

Too Big To Fail

But, rather than doing that, we see the government looking to prop up non-competitive, non-innovative behemoths that are being called "too big to fail." These are companies that, often with the help of government regulations and subsidies, have become so intertwined in the economy, that a failure on their part really would cause significant ripples throughout the rest of the economy. While there are some who suggest they should be allowed to simply fail anyway, the economic risk in doing so is quite large -- in part, as a result of bad gov't policies for many years, abused and exploited by these companies.

Simply giving these companies more money and new regulations isn't going to make a difference. It only puts off the inevitable, and potentially will make things even worse when the problems resurface. The regulations and "oversight" will seem like a good deal at first, but over time the companies will twist the regulations to their advantage. They'll create new and larger loopholes, and the regulations won't do what they're intended to do, but will instead have created massive new problems. It's what almost always happens.

Creative Destruction

So perhaps it's time to go back to Schumpeter, with a big twist. If we grant the premise that some of these companies are too big to fail, and they absolutely need gov't bailouts to make them work, then why not set the terms of the bailout as being that they need to use the money to become small enough to fail? That is, they can get the money, one time only, and then need to look at breaking themselves up into separate pieces (even competitive pieces) that, by themselves, are no longer too big to fail.

The end result is that you aren't left with the same terrible situation, while also creating a new generation of "spinoffs" that can innovate and compete against both older firms in the space, and new upstarts that can more readily enter the market, rather than face a few giants. That way we're enabling more competition and innovation, leading to economic growth, while dismantling the structure of "too big to fail."

It's not quite that simple, of course. But, on the whole, it makes absolutely no sense to be "bailing out" companies that are too big to fail while leaving them as too big to fail. The end result is just going to keep sucking in more bailout money and wasting it, rather than encouraging innovation and competition.

A Cold Douche

This, obviously, is not the "creative destruction" that Schumpeter was talking about at all. In fact, at times he toyed with the idea that companies too big too fail were where the market would eventually end up. But, he also recognized the power of destroying old industries and setting the path for new innovations -- and he knew that the process was often messy, tied to business downturns.

In economist Robert Heilbroner's excellent The Worldly Philosophers, Heilbroner recalls sitting in Schumpeter's class at Harvard during the Great Depression:

When he lectured on the economy at Harvard in the midst of the depression, Joseph Schumpeter would stride into the lecture hall, and divesting himself of his European cloak, announce to the startled class in his Viennese accent, "Chentlemen, you are vorried about the depression. You should not be. For capitalism, a depression is a good cold douche." Having been one of those startled listeners, I can testify that the great majority of us did not know that a douche was a shower, but we did grasp that this was a very strange and certainly un-Keynesian message.

And, indeed, this economic restructuring is a good cold shower (though, some may prefer douche), but we don't get that sort of restructuring when the government is propping up exactly what needs to be restructured.

So, let's repurpose creative destruction with a clear plan: if you accept government bail out money because you're too big to fail, then that money needs to be used to make you small enough to fail.

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Best-selling author William Gurstelle (Backyard Ballistics and MAKE Magazine contributing editor) blends science and humor into an explosive new instructional DVD. It's the hobbyist's ultimate video guide to all things that go boom. Bill shares the origin, historical significance and simple step-by-step instructions for safely creating high-voltage experiments including the Night Lighter 36 Taser-Powered Potato Cannon, Smoke Bombs, a Jam Jar Jet engine, and the world famous Mentos Fountain. You can also check out Bill's new site BARRAGE GARAGE.

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Today is the 15th anniversary of the release of Doom, the groundbreaking first-person shooter vidgame. Boing Boing Offworld is celebrating by skinning the site and linking to a variety of Doom-related fun, including various version to waste your day with, and how to buy Doom coder Dave "iddt" Taylor's old car with bonus stuff inside like this one-of-a-kind sweater. Join the nostalgia in the Offworld comments.
"Offworld goes to hell" and "Buy the car that Doom bought"

Robodance is a popular robot control program that allows you to control a number of commercially available toy and hobby robots via your computer and a number of control interfaces, including the Nintendo Wiimote and nunchaku attachment. This is probably the easiest way to expand the programming capabilities of your i-SOBOT.

The i-SOBOT Hacking Blog didn't breathe live for very long, but while it did, its author managed to post some useful explorations of the robot's control, power, and servo systems:

The i-SOBOT power supply

i-SOBOT Controller Overview - covers disassembly and includes two detailed and annotated photos that show all the major connectors and functionality.

i-SOBOT Controller Overview 2 - digs deeper into the i-SOBOT controller including servo connections, the on  board gyro, and quite a few pin-outs.

Right-Arm Control - covers the servo signals and protocols

More About i-SOBOT Servo Protocol - Includes the i-SOBOT frames and protocols in quite a bit of detail.
[Via Robots-Dreams]

i-SOBOT teardown analysis report (Translated Japanese page)

i-SOBOT Battery Specs & Spare Sets

i-SOBOT Easter Eggs:

Here are 8 of them. I took a guess as to what they are called.
•Upper Guard / Taunt?
•Soundeffect & Pose
•Soundeffect & pose (reversed)
•Eye Blaster?
•Blow Whistle
•Odd Vocal & Pose
•Odd Vocal & Pose (reverse)
•Spells out "TAKARA TOMY" with body
[via RobotSavvy]

More Easter Eggs here and here.

World's smallest humanoid robot can run Linux

More:

Buy i-SOBOT in the Maker Shed.

Holiday Gift Guide: Robots!

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Anonymous Coward writes "The Open Source Coffee Machine [video link] is a recycled coffee machine, controlled by a PC running Beremiz, and using some MicroMod CANopen I/O nodes from Peak-System. This machine have been prepared by Peak-System and Lolitech for SCS-Paris-08 exhibition. It served free coffee during four days at Peak-System's booth, and has been donated to IUT of Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, France, so that students can have fun practicing automation."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This fantasy-themed music video for rocker Chris Dane Owens's song "Shine On Me" is like an, er, Renaissance Faire romance done up Hollywood style. It was directed by special effects artist Robert Short who won an Oscar for makeup in Beetlejuice and also worked on Splash, E.T., and The Predator. (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)

BaadSheep is an online retailer mostly specializing in vintage ugly sweaters, Christmas or otherwise. They also host Ugly Sweater Parties in Long Beach, California. BaadSheep ugly sweaters

You just knew this was going to happen eventually. Pretty soon after the attacks last month in Mumbai concluded, reports started coming out about how the terrorists made use of a variety of modern technologies to plan and execute the attacks. A few reports claimed that they had used Google Earth to familiarize themselves with the locations involved in the attacks (some reports had claimed that the terrorists had never been to Mumbai and just used Google Earth -- but other reports contradicted that).

However, an Indian Court is now calling for the software to be banned saying that it "aids terrorists." Of course, so do maps or photographs of hotels, such as those placed online by the hotels themselves, but people aren't overreacting and calling for a ban of those things as well. Yes, we can understand the kneejerk reaction here, and the anger over these horrific attacks. But, banning Google Earth isn't the answer. If Google Earth weren't available, the attacks still would have happened. It's just that the planning would have been different. It's perfectly natural for people to lash out at technology used in a bad way after a tragedy, but hopefully the court won't overreact and will eventually realize the anger should be at the people who actually performed the attacks, not the tools they used.

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Joe Decker writes "The Nevada Lightning Laboratory has experimented with Nicola Tesla's methods of wireless power transmission to push 800 Watts over 5 meters, besting MITs mark of 60W over 2 meters last year. (May I dream of wireless laptop power? I hate power cords.)"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Or car? Somewhere in between is this project from SJSU:

(via Ecofriend)

Here's the homepage for Dr. Hsu, and here's a presentation he gave on solar cells (pdf).

At $4,000 and 30 mph with a 60-mile range, sounds like a good alternative to smaller gas-powered scooters!

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Boing Boing Offworld editor Brandon says,

Clearly still struggling through Infinite-Jest-esque urges to purchase beauty-enhancing video phone masks and the anxiety of talking to yourself while staring into a tiny, lit, terrifying Hal 9000 eye-hole, I've made my official non-gnome deathknight debut on BBtv.

In it I recap what we've been doing on the site (most notably, the debut of Monster Mii), recommend Dr. Awesome, the first game that's felt to me like a proper 'iPhone game,' versus a game that's merely been made for the iPhone, and let you know what's happening on the site in the coming weeks.

Bonus points for recognizing any of the ephemera in the background, and, as usual, a direct download link so you can blow it up full screen and shoot suction darts at my scruffy mug.

Join the comments thread on this episode over at Offworld blog.

Compared to this beauty-enhancement technology of Ye Analog Days gone by, wheatgrass and colonics sound positively tempting. "Woman wearing a magnetic collar to dissipate wrinkles and slow aging process of cells." Bel Air, CA, US, 1961. Photographed by Allan Grant for LIFE Magazine. (via, thanks Susannah Breslin!)

Artist Jennifer Khoshbin makes beautiful music boxes out of old books -- a new collection of works are on display at Rose and Radish, in San Francisco.

Music Books: Place ear to book, turn crank and listen (via Cribcandy)

When I was a kid my grandmother gave me a subscription to World magazine, it was a kids version of National Geographic - I grew up in the middle of nowhere and we also didn't have TV - each month I'd wait outside on the dirt road for the postal delivery of the magazine. It was magical, photos from far away places, simple how-tos of things I could make, puzzles, games - it was one of the best things I remember growing up. It's safe to say I wouldn't be working on MAKE if it wasn't for that modest gift all those years.

When parents and grandparents talk to us at Maker Faire or send us emails we hear similar stories - they got their loved ones a year of MAKE and over a long summer the kids did projects from the magazine, took apart an old busted toy or discovered that science and how-to resourcefulness is a very fun. Sometimes it's a Mom & Dad who got MAKE for themselves and it turned out to be to-do list for fun things to do with the kids. Other times, it's just someone who wants to learn electronics and now years later, it's a new career.

If you're not sure what to get someone this year consider a gift subscription to MAKE, it's one of those things that gives all year and it's value isn't just in it's pages, it's in the experiences you get from making something. To give the gift of MAKE - a year of MAKE, click here.

We have a special section on MAKE where you can print out / download gift cards telling someone you're giving the gift of MAKE, you can get those here.

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The folks at GOOD Magazine invited each of the Boing Boing editors to contribute essays to their online edition, and my first submission is now up. I wrote about reactions in a remote K'iche Maya village in Guatemala to the election of Barack Obama.

So, despite many years visiting their homes and sharing their difficult life experiences, we were surprised by their reaction to the Obama election. It was of great symbolic importance. That sudden jolt of aspiration felt around the world? It struck here. Hard. It meant hope. It meant a renewed belief in change, for a people who have survived natural disasters, racism, and 36 years of civil war that many describe as the Mayan genocide. If a black man can enter the Casa Blanca, they are saying, maybe a Mayan person can one day become president of Guatemala. Maybe we will live to see a true democracy here, the thinking goes—a government that represents the rights of Guatemala’s First People, instead of representing their destruction.

There are no landline phones in this village. Some heads of households have cellphones (the inexpensive kind, called “frijoles,” because they’re cheap and bean-shaped), but not everyone has even this basic connectivity. Don Victoriano, the local leader of the international nonprofit, travels to the one nearby internet cafe once a week or so, and pays a few quetzales to correspond with us over a Hotmail account. On November 3, we received an email which read (I’ll translate from the Spanish and K’iche here):

“We are preoccupied with concern over the elections in your country. We are praying for you, so that your country doesn’t suffer such a horrible depresiòn caused by bad governments. We hope in Ajaw [the Mayan creator god] that Obama wins. I don’t know how you feel, but that’s how we feel.”

To understand why Don Victoriano and others felt such intense preoccupation with what happens in America, all you need to do is look at the walls in their homes. They are covered with snapshots of sons who left.

In the Highlands, Hope (GOOD)

mantex writes "The title of this book combines two coded terms — Web 2.0 and 'The Enterprise' — for which read social networking software' and Big Business. And the purpose is to show how the techniques and concepts behind Web 2.0 applications (blogs, wikis, tagging, RSS, and social bookmarking) can be used to encourage collaboration efforts in what was previously thought of as secretive, competitive businesses." Read on for the rest of Roy's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's been an interesting (and somewhat troubling) behind the scenes fight going on concerning library catalog data over the past few months. The Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) is a nonprofit, made up of member libraries that basically tries to help facilitate access to information among libraries. That seems like a good thing. One of its offerings is WorldCat -- basically a big online catalog of library collections, so that it's easy for anyone to find books that are available at other libraries. This, obviously, seems quite useful, and many libraries agree and are a part of WorldCat. However, a month ago, OCLC announced new policies for WorldCat that effectively allowed OCLC to claim ownership over the records that any library put in its system -- and, upon doing so, limiting what libraries could do with that data (such as, say, giving it to competing cataloging services).

This has many in the library community quite reasonably worried, with specific questions about who should be allowed to "own" library records. As that last link shows, there are a number of different people and organizations involved in the creation of a basic library database record, and basically the only thing OCLC is doing is putting it online. It's difficult to see how they can then claim ownership of it.

While this may be new in the library space, this type of debate has raged for years in other arenas, and some of the findings from those earlier battles may be instructive. The issue has to do with the concept of "database rights." Normally, factual information is not subject to any sort of copyright or ownership rights for rather obvious reasons (how do you own a fact?). However, some believe that there should be separate "database rights" that allow ownership of the compilation of certain factual information. For the most part, the US has denied this right, while Europe has allowed it -- and the results have shown, quite clearly, that the US made the right decision. Ownership of database rights tends to damaging to business while allowing the data to remain free can help build booming industries.

In this case, the scenario is a little different, because OCLC isn't trying to claim a government backed "database right" over the content, but instead wants to achieve the same effective result via a unilateral change to its terms of service -- including a bit of viral licensing code that forces the "ownership" to travel with the data. OCLC doesn't really appear to have any legal authority here, but are trying to force it through by contract -- for which I'd say there's a decent chance it wouldn't hold up in court, though no one wants it to get that far. Between the unilateral change, the claiming of ownership of others' works (including public domain contributions from the Library of Congress) and the lack of database copyrights, you could probably make a good argument that the OCLC's policy change has no weight. Still, in the short term, a much better solution would be for OCLC to back off its silly ownership claim, recognize the power of open sharing of information, and focus on adding additional benefits and services for why libraries should want to work with OCLC over competitors, rather than trying to use slimy contract terms to block out competitors. And, of course, hopefully OCLC learns that pissing off your partners and customers by dumping draconian ownership claims on them is never a good business strategy.

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World Gross Domestic Product -- fabricated in wood via Beyond the Beyond.

Beech wood, poplar plywood; 40 × 60?×?20?cm;
The data sculpture Fundament shows the allocation of the world’s gross domestic product in comparison to the worldwide derivatives volume. The statistical data was aquired from the CIA World Factbook and the International Monetary Fund. The sculpture consists of two layers which visualize two data sets with the same principle. The lower half is a mapping of the world’s GDP and the top half is a mapping of the derivatives volume, alloted to the coordinates of the countries on a map. This sculpture is a statistical map, a hybrid between physical and conceptual space. The horizontal arrangement equates to the Mercator projection of a world map and the vertical axis metaphorically corresponds to the financial activity of the country.

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Miracle Jones writes "Nintendo is going to start publishing ebooks for the DS in conjunction with HarperCollins. The first cartridge will go on sale December 26th in the UK, will cost around 30 dollars, and will feature 100 classic books — stuff like Charles Dickens and Jane Austen."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Crafters are up in arms over a seemingly disastrous unintended consequence of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA), which will require lab certification that lead and phthalates are not present in toys or clothes -- sounds good, but crafters warn that this means that "a toymaker... who makes wooden cars in his garage in Maine to supplement his income cannot afford the $4,000 fee per toy that testing labs are charging to assure compliance with the CPSIA."

The law takes effect on February 10th and the toymakers and small clothing designers are getting very worried indeed.

In 2007, large toy manufacturers who outsource their production to China and other developing countries violated the public's trust. They were selling toys with dangerously high lead content, toys with unsafe small part, toys with improperly secured and easily swallowed small magnets, and toys made from chemicals that made kids sick. Almost every problem toy in 2007 was made in China.

The United States Congress rightly recognized that the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) lacked the authority and staffing to prevent dangerous toys from being imported into the US. So, they passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) in August, 2008. Among other things, the CPSIA bans lead and phthalates in toys, mandates third-party testing and certification for all toys and requires toy makers to permanently label each toy with a date and batch number.

All of these changes will be fairly easy for large, multinational toy manufacturers to comply with. Large manufacturers who make thousands of units of each toy have very little incremental cost to pay for testing and update their molds to include batch labels.

For small American, Canadian, and European toymakers, however, the costs of mandatory testing will likely drive them out of business.

Handmade Toy Alliance, Fashion Incubator (Thanks, Sarah!)

Ed. Note: Boing Boing's current guestblogger Clay Shirky is the author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. He teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, where he works on the overlap of social and technological networks.

---

The Adaptive Design Association is an NYC non-profit that "works to ensure that children with disabilities get the customized equipment they need to participate fully in home, school, and community life." Lofty goal, but pricey, no? After all, regular equipment for disabilities is already expensive; how can customized equipment be in the reach of anyone but the rich? By constructing it out of cardboard.

The beauty of the Adaptive Design folks is that cardboard engineering lets them create work that is custom, playful, and cheap, and improves the quality of social life and autonomy, rather than just defending against medical harm. Pictured above is a before and after picture of a chair made for a child who can't sit on her own; she was in 3rd grade and it was the first time she could join her classmates in the cafeteria and sit properly.

Below is Hannah; Adaptive Design has created over two dozen pieces of equipment for her over a few years, because rapid prototyping with cardboard lets them move from a design regime of one-size-fits-all to one-size-fits-one, even for growing kids. And of course all of this is R&D for patterns that can be further adapted for other children.

They run training and workshops to help others adopt this kind of form-fit/rapid design/personal need approach to adaptive technology. They're also operating well outside the traditional reimbursement economy of the health care system, so they live on grants and donations--they're listed on JustGive.org, and run the whole thing on just $42K in administrative expenses a year.

Says my ITP colleague Marianne Petit, who first showed me this stuff "I know these items are so intensely low tech that you can't believe they don't exist or no one has created them, but, they don't exist. And in the case of most of the kids they work with, their needs are so completely individual there is no way for something to be pre-made - hence the fantastic-ness of working with cardboard."

Adaptive Design | Adaptive Design catalog | Adaptive Design on JustGive

Photograph by Tom Kennedy

Riding a red double-decker bus in London is all about the view. The yellow Topsy-Turvy School Bus, currently touring the United States, is all about point of view.

Usually, when Tom Kennedy builds and drives art cars, he's taking his own artistic vision for a spin. This time, the driving forces were graphic artist Stefan Sagmeister and Ben Cohen, who makes Chunky Monkey ice cream and roving political statements. Their point of view is straightforward: federal budget priorities are topsy-turvy. Their school bus motif suggests one alternative to reserving half of discretionary spending for the Pentagon.

Cohen and Sagmeister chose Burning Man denizen Kennedy to transform a political viewpoint into mobile artistic expression -- anything but straightforward.

Kennedy and visual artist Haideen Anderson were the initial team that cut up two buses, revealing structural challenges that would send most people looking for an exit ramp. Destined to be driven by volunteers during the long 2008 presidential campaign, Topsy-Turvy had to be strong, but not top-heavy.

This artwork was not for the faint-fingered. Kennedy describes the organically formed crew of joiners as "multi-skilled freaks." Making it up as they went along, they operated a ceiling crane, welded, ground, cast, fabricated, lighted, wired, and painted in a West Oakland, Calif., warehouse. Engineer Michael Prados assessed structural progress weekly.

To convey point of view artistically and practically, the makers transformed the passenger compartment into a theater. They painted budget charts on the ceiling and the stop sign, and constructed a speechmaker's platform atop the wheels-up roof. A second gas tank uses biodiesel fuel.

During Kennedy and Anderson's delivery drive to Vermont, Topsy-Turvy proved roadworthy, and rain revealed the exact location of holes in time to fix them. Now its makers and shakers hope the yellow double-decker bus reveals the exact location of national priorities, in time to redirect them.

>> Tom Kennedy's Art Cars: tomkennedyart.com

From the column Made on Earth - MAKE 13, page 26 - Karen K. Hansen.

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mr sanjeev writes "Australian researchers are reducing the divide between science fiction and science reality by bringing the development of mind-controlled robotic limbs a few steps closer. Even the most fertile science fiction imagination might not see a link between the behavior of ant colonies and the development of lifelike robotic limbs, but that is the straightforward mathematical reality of research underway at the University of Technology, Sydney. The technology mimics the myoelectric signals used by the central nervous system (CNS) to control muscle activity. Artificial intelligence researchers have long used the complex interactions between ants to construct a pattern recognition formula to identify bioelectric signals. PhD student Rami Khushaba said 'swarm-intelligence' allows scientists to understand the body's electrical signals and use the knowledge to create a robotic prosthetic device that can be operated by human thought."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

mr sanjeev writes "Australian researchers are reducing the divide between science fiction and science reality by bringing the development of mind-controlled robotic limbs a few steps closer. Even the most fertile science fiction imagination might not see a link between the behavior of ant colonies and the development of lifelike robotic limbs, but that is the straightforward mathematical reality of research underway at the University of Technology, Sydney. The technology mimics the myoelectric signals used by the central nervous system (CNS) to control muscle activity. Artificial intelligence researchers have long used the complex interactions between ants to construct a pattern recognition formula to identify bioelectric signals. PhD student Rami Khushaba said 'swarm-intelligence' allows scientists to understand the body's electrical signals and use the knowledge to create a robotic prosthetic device that can be operated by human thought."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For years and years Diebold Election Systems (now Premier Election Solutions) had always vehemently denied that its e-voting or optical vote scanning machines had any problems -- despite mounds and mounds of evidence of problems. We were shocked, this past summer, when the company finally admitted to a glitch with some of its machines, but the company still downplayed the significance of this, claiming that it didn't believe the glitch (which loses votes) had actually impacted any elections.

Yet, even after this glitch was officially revealed, in the election just last month, we're now finding out that Diebold machines caused 200 lost votes in an election in California. Even worse, no one would even know about this at all if it weren't for a highly ambitious and very unique program set up by some voting activists to ensure there was real transparency. They convinced the local government to let them scan every single ballot and put it online for anyone to view. It was that separate process where they discovered the ballot counts didn't match, and that Diebold seemed to show absolutely no records of the missing ballots, despite having scanned them.

Makes you kinda wonder how many other areas lost votes that absolutely no one knows about because they didn't have such a system in place, huh?

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A MAKE: magazine favorite! Here's a quick peek at John Park demonstrating how to use a motor from an old VCR and use it to drive an automated cat feeder. Check it out above, or get the M4V and/or subscribe in iTunes.. And don't forget to comment.

Don't forget, MAKE: premieres in January on Public Television and online at www.makezine.tv.

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Kiteman has a very romantic Instructable on collecting real-life fallen stars - meteorites.

In the Maker Shed:

Find The Best of Instructables in the Maker Shed!

Instructables.com has become one of the most popular magnets for makers and DIY enthusiasts of all stripes. Now, with more than 10,000 projects to choose from, the Instructables staff, editors of MAKE magazine, and the Instructables community itself have put together a collection of technology, craft, food, and home how-to's from the site. The Best of Instructables Volume 1 includes plenty of clear, full-color photographs, complete step-by-step instructions, and tips, tricks, and build techniques you won't find anywhere else. Over 120 projects!

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Disney's running an ingenious web-promo; you enter the name of a loved one and they automatically edit a fake video news story about Walt Disney World being given over to that person. I have to admit that I felt a little quickening of my pulse as I watched the video (and the automated editing is really good!). Then, of course, I immediately set about checking the profanity filter to see what kaka-doodie names I could get into the picture. "Shit pissfuck" didn't work, but "Lizard Jesuspants" did!

Doctorow's Kingdom? Disney turns its world over to unknown (Thanks, John and Benjamin!)

Ian Lamont writes "Microsoft recently updated ESP, a virtual reality modeling platform that until now has primarily been used to model aircraft and flight simulations. Microsoft has plans to expand it to other industries such as real estate and urban planning, but one of the most interesting possibilities could be what one observer refers to as a 'simulation of everything,' based on Virtual Earth and perhaps even user-generated content. Indeed, Microsoft's research chief has been promoting the idea of commerce applications and other tools built on top of what he calls the 'Spatial Web', a blend of 3D, video, and location-aware technologies. He gave an example of a shopkeeper creating 3D models of his store's interior and goods with Photosynth and then uploading the results into a large 3D model of local shopping district. Customers could 'visit' the area, browse products, and order them for real-world delivery."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ian Lamont writes "Microsoft recently updated ESP, a virtual reality modeling platform that until now has primarily been used to model aircraft and flight simulations. Microsoft has plans to expand it to other industries such as real estate and urban planning, but one of the most interesting possibilities could be what one observer refers to as a "simulation of everything," based on Virtual Earth and perhaps even user-generated content. Indeed, Microsoft's research chief has been promoting the idea of commerce applications and other tools built on top of what he calls the 'Spatial Web', a blend of 3D, video, and location-aware technologies. He gave an example of a shopkeeper creating 3D models of his store's interior and goods with Photosynth and then uploading the results into a large 3D model of local shopping district. Customers could 'visit' the area, browse products, and order them for real-world delivery."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Don't know what to get for your offspring? Bored with the predictable offerings of the chain retailers? Here are 10 unexpected toys that you should consider for your kids this holiday season.

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A little over a year ago, the recording industry was surprised to learn that Madonna wasn't signing a new record label contract, but instead was signing a deal with Live Nation, a big concert promoter, to handle pretty much everything having to do with her business, including releasing new CDs. The WSJ Magazine is running a long feature story about Live Nation, its founder and its ongoing strategy, wondering if it's the new business model for the recording industry. Basically, the guy behind Live Nation knows that there's good money in concert promoting, but that the margins are low. So, he's betting on a few of these "360 deals" where he gets a much larger margin on all other aspects of the business.

It's an interesting strategy that appears to be a step in the right direction, but it's unclear if it really is the future of the industry. Live Nation's strategy seems pretty risky. It involves huge upfront payments for a small number of star performers (whose older, more well-known, music is still under the copyright of earlier labels). It also doesn't seem to do much to embrace new technologies and distribution methods. Instead, it's just this guy making a grab for some big names, and trying to consolidate all their sources of revenue, taking a cut of each one. There's something to be said for that, but it would probably work better in combination with newer technologies and music distribution means -- and without those huge upfront costs that may sink the whole operation.

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Smivs writes "The BBC are reporting that a German team has confirmed the existence of a Black Hole at the center of the Milky Way. Astronomers tracked the movement of 28 stars circling the center of the Milky Way, using the 3.5m New Technology Telescope and the 8.2m Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. Both are operated by the European Southern Observatory (Eso). The black hole is four million times heavier than our Sun, according to the paper in The Astrophysical Journal. According to Dr Robert Massey, of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), the results suggest that galaxies form around giant black holes in the way that a pearl forms around grit."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Noah points out this article over @ bunnie's blog, showing some pretty smooth FPS gaming on the open-source squeezable -

xobs, a developer at chumby, showed me one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a while on a chumby: a full port of Quake. He got the whole thing running under SDL and hacked up the event layer so that the accelerometer (tilting) is used to move in the game, the bend switch is used to fire, and a touch anywhere on the screen is used to jump/activate items. So now you can hug a Linux computer and frag bad guys at the same time. Practical? no. Cool? yes.

- Quake on Chumby

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The WAMI Dome is a theremin-style musical instrument constructed out of a plastic dome with embedded photocells that detect hand gestures around it. Speakers are placed around the surface of the dome along with LEDs that illuminate based on the sounds it produces. Check out the video for the full effect.

via The BeeHive

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Bud Cook writes "While the text of William Gibson's elusive electronic poem AGRIPPA is widely posted around the Web, it has not been seen in its original incarnation — custom-built software designed to scroll the poem through a single play before encrypting each line with an RSA algorithm — since 1992. Today is the 16th anniversary, to the day, of the poem's initial release. A team of scholars at the University of Maryland and UC Santa Barbara used forensic computing to restore the code from an original diskette loaned by a collector and have placed video of the complete 'run,' as well as never-before-seen footage from the night of AGRIPPA's public debut in 1992, up on a Web site called the Agrippa Files. There's also a detailed essay documenting the forensic process, plus a mess of stills, screenshots, and a copy of the disk image itself."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CBS's Lesley Stahl takes an inside look into the world of Saudi Aramco, the world leader in crude oil production - there are a lot of political, energy, social and security comments that I'm sure folks will have, but you must check out the GIANT 220 foot screen in the command center. It.is.crazy... The engineers control the drill bit real time, 500 miles away over "instant messaging" as they drill.

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This iPhone app called "Record 001" by Hiroshi Okamura is a cool way to proclaim your dedication to old school records and turntables. The app lets you scratch a record on the device, the way you would on a regular turntable. You can backspin, pause, and scratch just you can an ordinary record, of course you'll feel a screen instead of vinyl, but it's less kit to carry with you to a show. Check out the video link below to see it in action.

Video, Record 001 via DVICE

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Excellent interview with Anthony Dunne (and his work with Fiona Raby) -- Design Noir, Dunne and Raby wrote in their 2001 book Design Noir, “Beneath the glossy surface of official design lurks a dark and strange world driven by real human needs.”.... via Beyond the Beyond.

In one well-known project, Dunne and Raby designed an inflatable pillow with an LCD screen imbedded in it. The pillow responds to changes in the local radio frequency environment within a range of about 200 meters, detecting the presence of mobile phones, pagers, and even baby monitors. These changes are registered as visual patterns that drift across the screen. Of course, all the waves that are passing through the pillow are also passing through our bodies. Which raises the question: What effect are they having on us? The only clue that Dunne and Raby offer is a selection from an interview with an elderly lady who “adopted” the pillow. Far from resolving the issue, this lady says the pillow reminds her of a dead pet, “It’s sort of like my little dog I used to have except my little dog was black and brown.”

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?This sculpture from Norway was made from hundreds of old vintage lamps in an attempt to create a "crowd" like atmosphere of inanimate objects in the wild. Interesting use of light and furniture to create this installation.

via Environmental Graffiti

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We've seen an awful lot of lawsuits over the years concerning the "right to anonymity" for online commenters. While other countries tend to be pretty quick to take away anonymity, rulings in the US have pretty consistently allowed anonymous posting. However, the issue keeps coming up -- with the latest battle taking place in Maryland's Court of Appeals, where a business owner is demanding the identity of two anonymous posters on an online message board, who complained that the owner's Dunkin' Donuts location was "one of the most dirty and unsanitary-looking food-service places I have seen" on the site NewsZap, owned by the company Independent Newspapers.

Recently, in a similar case, a court ruled that a newspaper can keep its comments anonymous under the same rules that allow it to keep any sources anonymous. It doesn't sound like this argument came up in this case, but it might be worth considering.

But, more to the point, this seems like it could also be a SLAPP suit. The complaint was clearly a statement of opinion. And, of course, in bringing this lawsuit, it seems like all Zebulon J. Brodie has really done is draw an awful lot more attention to the fact that people think the Dunkin' Donuts he owns in Centreville, Maryland isn't particularly clean. Maybe he would have been a lot better off just making sure that it was clean. And, if he really felt that the message was unfair, why not just post a message pointing out that it wasn't true (hell, put up a photo) and invite anyone to come in and check it out. Wouldn't that have been a lot easier, cheaper and more effective?

Either way, Brodie chose a different route for whatever reason -- but as Public Citizen's Paul Levy argued in court, the issue with anonymity is that once it's removed, you can't go back. A court should be quite cautious and convinced that defamation has actually happened before removing that important right.

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RumblePhones uses an Arduino and a pair of parabolic hand mics to allow the wearer to physically feel sound in a busy environment. This looks really interesting, too bad there isn't any video of the final work. I'll keep you updated.

RumblePhones consist of a pair of noise canceling -20 Db ear protecting headphones, two microphones, two vibration motors, an amplification circuit, and an Arduino Microcontroller. The microphones, mounted on the headphones themselves, will pick up sounds from the surrounding environment, and feed this data, after amplification, to the Arduino as an analog value. This value will be used to control the speed of two vibrating motors, mounted in the cups of the headphones themselves. This process translates the sounds of the surrounding environment into vibrations felt on the ear of the user.

More about RumblePhones

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jamie found this blog post up on the HeliOS Project, which brings Linux to school kids in Austin, TX. It makes very clear some of the obstacles that free software faces in the classroom. It seems a teacher came upon a student demonstrating Linux to other kids and handing out LiveCDs. The teacher confiscated the CDs and wrote an angry email to HeliOS's founder, Ken Starks: "Mr. Starks, I am sure you strongly believe in what you are doing but I cannot either support your efforts or allow them to happen in my classroom. At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful. ... This is a world where Windows runs on virtually every computer and putting on a carnival show for an operating system is not helping these children at all. I am sure if you contacted Microsoft, they would be more than happy to supply you with copies of an older version of Windows and that way, your computers would actually be of service to those receiving them..." Starks pens an eloquent reply, which contains a factoid I have not seen mentioned before: "The fact that you seem to believe that Microsoft is the end all and be-all is actually funny in a sad sort of way. Then again, being a good NEA member, you would spout the Union line. Microsoft has pumped tens of millions of dollars into your union. Of course you are going to 'recommend' Microsoft Windows."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is a really interesting interactive project that uses skateboards and MAX/MSP along with Ableton Live to create some really cool audio. There is a lot more information about the hardware and software used on the website. Make sure to check out the videos, they are really amazing.

More about Skate Sonic: Skateboarding with sensors [Jason's Daily Blog]

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Google, of course, is on the receiving end of numerous patent lawsuits (and the number seems to keep growing). In one, brought by Erich Spangenberg's Bright Response LLC (you may recall Spangenberg's name from the fact that he recently was told to pay $4 million for violating a settlement in one of his other patent lawsuits, where he promised not to sue the same companies over the same patents), the patent holder is demanding Google turn over all information concerning its lobbying efforts on patent reform. As Google notes in response, its lobbying efforts on patent reform have absolutely nothing to do with whether or not there's any infringement on automatic message interpretation and routing systems -- a patent, by the way, that the EFF has designated as one of the ten worst patents out there.

This seems like a pure fishing expedition to (a) try to create more work for Google for no good reason and (b) have a well-known exploiter of the current patent system get access to what patent system reformers are talking about in DC. It has no bearing on the case one way or the other, and hopefully the judge agrees.

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One of the main steps to become a successful online publisher is to build a strong online identity. The more you establish yourself as a reliable source of information, the more the people will seek you for help and visit your site. Photo credit: Robin Good In this short video tutorial, Robin Good explains how to build a strong online identity. Is it all about a fancy name or writing good content? No. What really matters is your passion and desire to share your knowledge and explore. And don't be afraid to get your hands dirty, it's part of the game. Want to know how to build a strong online identity while increasing your credibility and reputation online? Here is a short video from Robin (with a full English text transcription) sharing with you some simple advice: Intro by Daniele Bazzano

Building A Strong Online Identity

Duration: 6'
Full English Text Transcription

Hi guys this is Robin Good for MasterNewMedia, answering your key questions received from my email inbox at Robin.Good(at)masternewmedia.org, and focusing mostly on professional online publishing and related topics. This time I've got an interesting request from you: "Let's say I want to create a strong online identity. How do I do that? Is it all about having a fancy name like yours? Is it so?" That's a great question I think.

The Identity Is Not A Name

Let's re-focus it. Topic is: Online identity. How do you build one. Is it about the name? Is it about the content? Is it about the overall personality, impression, feeling that you give out? It's probably about all of these things. An online identity is not so much built by thinking up a fancy, memorable name, that reflects who you are, and what you're trying to do, but it can be enabled also by that. In fact, I generally suggest people who are opening a new blog, not to start with their name. because the blog name is quite important and nobody is going to search for your name outside of your own friends. If your focus is in video publishing, call your blog "Video Publishing - by Jerry O'Hara", but put video publishing as the main thing there because it's the topic you're talking about.

Develop Your Identity Along The Way

Many times people are trying to built an online identity thinking that this is something that they can strategize from the very beginning. I don't think this is the case, and it wasn't the case with me. MasterNewMedia was out there before Robin Good existed for a long time. Until I realized I wanted to have and identity, that the person behind MasterNewMedia was for many people ore important than the MasterNewMedia brand, realizing that MasterNewMedia was not easy to memorize, and to spell out again, and to pronunciate for many people to this day, also knowing that my name was very long and complex, and not easy to pronunciate for people that are not from my country, then I put that mechanism in place. But, otherwise, you should always state that first.

The Identity Is What You Do

You should do something valuable, and good, and great, and then, once you've done that, you are probably going to develop your own identity and personality naturally, to which you can inject more character, a better name and so. But you can't really build a personality by deciding a fancy name, or a cool logo, or that. That character, that identity, is a result of something you do, not just of a name you have. It can be as fancy, and a memorable as you want, but unless it is deeply, and strongly, and repetitively associated to something that characterizes, that matches up, reinforces that name in some way, then is going to have no value.

Always Give The Best You Have

So Robin, how am I going to build my online identity? You build your online identity by bringing out the best you've got. The best you've got about the things that you're most passionate about, and you've decided to cover on your site, on your newsmagazine, on your blog, or e-zine, whatever you got. You should come out, using your own singular pronoun for yourself, and not talk always like you're a team.

• Come out yourself,
• show your face,
• say what you think,
• take a stand,
• defend some people who are not in an easy position,
• challenge somebody,
• bring in tremendous gifts to your audience.

That's what you can do to build an online identity no matter what's your name. That's really how you can do it, by really having a conversation with them, not just publishing stuff, putting content out there. But trying to come up as a direct human being there that has some special traits, whatever they are: that you scream all the time, that you complain all the time, that you find only the greatest tools, and you're always amazed by them, and you analyze why they can be so great, whatever that is.

Be Like Robert Scoble

Give space to a personality to give out, and that's how you can build a strong online identity. Robert Scoble didn't think up it's name. Why does he have such a strong online identity? Because he has dedicated his recent life just to this. To share, to give to other people, to explore, to make mistakes, get criticized, get squashed by other people who don't appreciate what he does. And not defending, not trying to o fight, but just trying, and trying, and hopefully learning something from all out of this. That's the way I think anyone, without expecting to become as popular as Robert Scoble, can develop a tangible, memorable, unique online identity. It's not in the name. It's in what you do. That's what I strongly think, and I recommend you do it. This is all from Robin Good. Write me more, ciao!

Do you have more questions you want Robin Good to answer? Post them here below inside the comments area. Do you want to learn more about other key strategies in professional web publishing? Check out POP, a new video blog site where Robin Good shares his expertise with "in-depth" video tutorials to help professional online publishers to monetize their sites.

Originally shot and recorded by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia and first published on December 10th 2008 as "Building A Strong Online Identity: Robin Good Video"

This looks like a really interesting touch screen music synthesizer. They claim to be creating a how-to soon. Check out the link for more information.

Broadly, the purpose of this project was to create an Analogue modeling musical synthesizer; that is, a synthesizer implemented using both analogue and digital components that intends to emulate the sounds of traditional analogue synthesizers, whilst being controllable through modern-day digital protocols such as the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI).

More about the DIY synthesizer

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Medieval Cow writes "Sir Paul McCartney has a side project called The Fireman and he's just released their new album, Electric Arguments, as a digital download. Why this is of interest to this community is that he released it 100% DRM-free. You can purchase just the digital files, or if you purchase a physical CD or vinyl copy, you are also given access to the digital download. Not only that, but the download is available in 320-kbps MP3, Apple Lossless, or even FLAC format. If you're interested in trying before you buy, you can listen to the entire album in a Flash player on the main page of the site. It's so nice to see a big musician who gets it. Bravo, Sir Paul!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Rob's spotted this umbrella with a set of brass knucks on the handle:

It used to be that a gentleman could arm himself with a sword cane, ready to whip his blade out at the first sign of unseemliness. Since parliament has banned anything that may be sharpened to a point, defense of oneself has become a more subtle skill.

Some gentlemen learn the unarmed arts, but in the face of villainy, stronger means are occasionally required. Hence the Umbuster, an umbrella combined with knuckledusters.

Umbuster is part umbrella, part knuckleduster Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

The prestigious MaxPlanckForschung journal needed some Chinese text for the cover, so they printed a "classical poem" that turned out to be a menu of erotic services from a brothel in Macau.

There were red faces on the editorial board of one of Germany's top scientific institutions, the Max Planck Institute, after it ran the text of a handbill for a Macau strip club on the front page of its latest journal. Editors had hoped to find an elegant Chinese poem to grace the cover of a special issue, focusing on China, of the MaxPlanckForschung journal, but instead of poetry they ran a text effectively proclaiming "Hot Housewives in action!" on the front of the third-quarter edition. Their "enchanting and coquettish performance" was highly recommended...

On anti-cnn.com, a foreigner-baiting website set up after a commentator on the US broadcaster made anti-Chinese comments following the crackdown in Tibet in March, the reaction was mostly "evil fun". One wrote, "Next time, please find a smart Chinese graduate to check your translation", and another said they should try writing "I am illiterate".

Chinese 'classical poem' was brothel ad (via Of Two Minds)

Remember the woman who got a new trachea grown from her own stem cells? Well, she almost didn't -- because the discount airline EasyJet decided that flying with stem cells presented a "security risk" and wouldn't let the scientists carrying them onto the plane.

"On arrival they said it couldn't go on because it would be a security risk - but I had been talking to people on a regular basis," he said.

"I was so furious, trying to explain months of work.

"The clock was ticking. We'd taken the cells out of their culture media an hour before.

"We thought about driving to Barcelona, but that would have taken too long..."

The professor paid the 14,000 pounds it cost to charter a private jet out of his own pocket, though the cost was later reimbursed by Bristol University.

A spokesman for easyJet said: "We do not have any record of the passenger's request to carry medical materials on board the flight.

"However as a gesture of goodwill easyJet has refunded the passenger for the cost of his flight."

Easyjet 'threatened to derail stem cell transplant' (Thanks, Heal Emru!)

A commentary in this week's issue of the journal Nature argues that cognitive performance-enhancing drugs should be made widely available, and sets out an ethical and legal framework for doing so in a way that maximises the social good of being able to choose what state of mind you're in. Contributors to the article include a Stanford law prof, a Cambridge research psychiatrist, a Harvard med-school prof, and other distinguished personages.

Human ingenuity has given us means of enhancing our brains through inventions such as written language, printing and the Internet. Most authors of this Commentary are teachers and strive to enhance the minds of their students, both by adding substantive information and by showing them new and better ways to process that information. And we are all aware of the abilities to enhance our brains with adequate exercise, nutrition and sleep. The drugs just reviewed, along with newer technologies such as brain stimulation and prosthetic brain chips, should be viewed in the same general category as education, good health habits, and information technology — ways that our uniquely innovative species tries to improve itself.

Of course, no two enhancements are equivalent in every way, and some of the differences have moral relevance. For example, the benefits of education require some effort at self-improvement whereas the benefits of sleep do not. Enhancing by nutrition involves changing what we ingest and is therefore invasive in a way that reading is not. The opportunity to benefit from Internet access is less equitably distributed than the opportunity to benefit from exercise. Cognitive-enhancing drugs require relatively little effort, are invasive and for the time being are not equitably distributed, but none of these provides reasonable grounds for prohibition. Drugs may seem distinctive among enhancements in that they bring about their effects by altering brain function, but in reality so does any intervention that enhances cognition. Recent research has identified beneficial neural changes engendered by exercise10, nutrition11 and sleep12, as well as instruction13 and reading14. In short, cognitive-enhancing drugs seem morally equivalent to other, more familiar, enhancements.

Many people have doubts about the moral status of enhancement drugs for reasons ranging from the pragmatic to the philosophical, including concerns about short-circuiting personal agency and undermining the value of human effort15. Kass16, for example, has written of the subtle but, in his view, important differences between human enhancement through biotechnology and through more traditional means. Such arguments have been persuasively rejected (for example, ref. 17). Three arguments against the use of cognitive enhancement by the healthy quickly bubble to the surface in most discussions: that it is cheating, that it is unnatural and that it amounts to drug abuse.

Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy (Thanks, Guido!)

Boing Boing has a post that caught my eye about Cantor Fitzgerald's plan to offer bonds based on the performance of movies, basically allowing movie studios to "hedge" bets on the investments they make in certain movies. Now, in theory that could make a lot of sense, but as we've seen with the credit default swap market and the resulting financial meltdown, what starts as a "hedge" can often turn into something very different. Either way, it struck me as odd that any financial firm would be rolling out some new, high profile, product like this in the midst of so many questions about similar products. The Boing Boing post also includes a pointed criticism of the plan.

However, the story was also intriguing because in the back of my head I vaguely remembered that Cantor Fitzgerald had purchased the Hollywood Stock Exchange years back. HSX had been something of an early web success story -- getting people to bet on the success or failure of certain movies and actors -- but it had all been with play money. In wondering about this, I did a quick search here on Techdirt, and actually found a remarkably similar announcement from seven years ago, all about how Cantor Fitzgerald was getting ready to launch a real futures market for movies. Of course, even more noticeable was the date on that post: September 4th, 2001. That's exactly one week prior to September 11th, and the attack on the World Trade Center... where Cantor Fitzgerald was headquartered. 658 employees from the company died from the attack in one of the many tragic stories to come from that day. I'm not sure if the Hollywood futures market actually will do very well, but it's still interesting to see them revive this idea.

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Using the undocumented MPTVOutWindow class, Steven Troughton-Smith was able to update his iPhone Doom port to enable TV-out and on screen controller support. Doom on the iPhone on a TV is a pretty big deal to start with, but the bigger story here is that in addition to the TV-out features, he was able to get the touchscreen input and display working concurrently.

Now, if you make an app with TV out support, you can use the iPhone for motion and touch input, as well as an additional output device, which might be useful as a heads up display.

The MPTVOutWindow patch is included in the latest iPhone Doom source. You can try it out by following Erica's instructions over at Infinite Loop. It amounts to swapping out a couple files, adjusting a few settings, and rebuilding the project in Xcode.

iPhone Doom with TV-out: Try it yourself @ Infinite Loop
iPhone Doom

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Zonk points out some big news for fans of the Everquest games; Sony Online Entertainment has rolled out a system which allows the exchange of real money for items used in the game. Sony is making use of a transaction system called Station Cash which charges your credit card in exchange for a virtual currency which is then spendable on the items. Massively has a walkthrough of how it will work, and shows some of the items up for sale, including vanity armor, non-combat pets, and potions that make various aspects of your character better. "Each of these types of flasks comes in a tier. Tier I flasks increase XP by 10% and cost $1.00. Tier II flasks increase XP by 25% and cost $5.00. Tier III flasks increase XP by 50%, and cost $10.00 each. All flask tiers last for 4 hours on use, and more than one can't be used at a time." Further details on the system are available in the FAQ and the Terms of Service. This comes alongside news today that upcoming MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic will not be subscription-based, but entirely based on micro-transactions instead.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today, National Public Radio re-aired their piece on Ukulele badass Jake Shimabukuro. If you haven't yet watched the above 2006 performance of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," please do. I promise you won't be disappointed. "In the Hands of a Master, the Ukulele Is No Toy" (NPR, thanks Bob Pescovitz!)

Mark J. Perry (a professor of economics and finance in the School of Management at the Flint campus of the University of Michigan) of Carpe Diem asks why people who make much less than United Auto Workers doing the same kind of work should fork over their taxes to keep them employed.

[A] UAW assembler earned 91% more in monetary wages than the average worker in the manufacturing sector, and a UAW electrician earned 123% more in wages than the average manufacturing worker.

...

This is actually a tribute to the amazing success of the UAW - it was able to not just build a middle-class of autoworkers, it was actually able to elevate its members from the middle class into the upper-income class, even though most UAW workers had (have) only a high school degree. Unfortunately, that success could not be sustained in the long-run, and UAW wages have to come to back down to realistic levels, e.g. the $16.78 average hourly wage that prevails in the rest of the manufacturing sector, before the wages push the Big Three into bankruptcy. Is there anything so special about auto assembly manufacturing work that it justifies a 91% premium over the rest of the manufacuring sector? I don't think so.

Maybe we should subsidize all manufacturing jobs in the US so everyone earns as much as a UAW assembler. Isn't that the fair thing to do?

UPDATE: Media Matters investigates the figures presented here and concludes they are false.

And here's an excerpt from an AP article that mentions UAW wages:

But GM, which negotiated the four-year deal that serves as a template for UAW deals with Chrysler and Ford, says its total hourly labor costs dropped 6 percent this year from pre-contract levels, from $73.26 in 2006 to around $69 per hour. The new cost includes laborers' wages of $29.78 per hour, plus benefits, pensions and the cost of providing health care to more than 432,000 GM retirees, GM spokesman Tony Sapienza said.

Middle-Class UAW? How About Upper-Class

Friend of MAKE Mikey Sklar writes in:

Everyone has pallets. Wendy Tremayne explains just how easy it is to convert your standard pallet into a beautiful adirondack chair. The only costs involved is a few dollars in nuts, bolts, washers and screws.

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Keyper7 writes "The first programming course I had during my computer science schooling, aptly named 'Introduction to Programming,' was given in C because its emphasis was on imperative programming. A little before I graduated, though, it was decided that the focus would change to object-oriented programming with Java. (I must emphasize that the change was not made because of any hype about Java or to dumb down the course; back then and still, it's presented by good Java programmers who try to teach good practices and do not encourage excessive reliance on libraries.) But the practices taught are not paradigm-independent, and this sparked a discussion that continues to this day: which paradigm is most appropriate to introduce programming? Besides imperative and object-oriented, I know teachers who firmly believe that functional programming is the best choice. I'm interested in language-independent opinions that Slashdotters might have on this matter. Which paradigm is good to introduce programming while keeping a freshman's mind free enough for him/her to learn other paradigms afterwards?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There was a silly debate soon after the awful tragedy of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last month, where people started questioning whether or not Twitter was a legitimate news source. There were many reports from people on the scene via Twitter, and it was a fascinating (if somewhat depressing) "real-time" way of keeping up on some of what was happening. But some criticized the reliance on Twitter-as-journalism by complaining that it wasn't journalism because Twitter reports got facts wrong. That sounds good, but if that's the actual standard, then, well, pretty much nothing is journalism. As Slate is reporting, early reports from the mainstream press seemed to get much of the story wrong as well.

In the heat of an ongoing crisis, it's no surprise that details and facts are somewhat cloudy, and sources aren't (and often can't be) checked, but in the rush to get the news out, information, whether or not it's accurate, is going to get reported anyway. That's not necessarily a bad thing -- so long as it's clear that the information hasn't yet been confirmed. It's better to get the information out there. However, as the Slate report notes, what newspapers could do, is do a much better job cleaning up after the fact -- as we suggested in our story last week about a newspaper's incorrect report that quickly spread around the internet. Rather than put up a correction, the newspaper simply deleted the wrong article and pretended it never happened.

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Wow, here's some home decor for the synth music maker: the Roland 808 synthesizer pillow and the Big Muff Pi pillow.

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snydeq writes "Ars Technica's Nate Anderson and InfoWorld's Paul Venezia provide worthwhile commentary on a recent speech by FCC Commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate (PDF), in which she praised DRM as 'very effective' and raised a flag in favor of ISP filtering. Anderson: 'Having commissioners who feel that the government has a duty to partner with and back educational classroom content from the RIAA; who really believe that ISP filtering is so unproblematic we can stop considering objections; and who think that universities worry about file-swapping because tuition might be raised to pay for the needed "expansion of storage capabilities" (huh?) isn't good for the FCC and isn't good for America.' Venezia: 'Leave the ISPs out of it — it's not their job to protect a failing business model, and a movement toward a tiered and filtered Internet will do nothing to stem the tide of piracy, but will result in great restrictions on innovation, freedoms, and the general use of the Internet. There's nothing to be gained down that path other than possibly to expand the wallets of a few companies.'"

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After being subject to widespread ridicule for forcing Wikipedia in the UK to block a page for an album cover graphic from 32 years ago, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has withdrawn its block on the page and said it's fine. Apparently "given the age and availability of the image," the group no longer thinks it's appropriate to be on the list. Of course, the age and availability of the image was true before. Though, if anything, this attempt at blocking the image only made the image more available.

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Ed. Note: Boing Boing's current guestblogger Clay Shirky is the author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. He teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, where he works on the overlap of social and technological networks.

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This is a graphic of the Standard and Poor's stock index's annual returns, placing every year since 1825 in a column of returns from -50% to +60%. As you can see, it is a rough bell curve, with 45 of those 185 years falling in the +0-10% column. There are only 5 years each in the 40-50% and 50-60% return columns, and, through 2007, there were only one year each in the -31-40% and -41-50% columns. You can see where 2008 to date falls.

(UPDATED: From DailyKos, via Greg Mankiw.)

Maya + Python + Arduino + Servo (Part 1) from Dan Thompson on Vimeo.

Maya + Python + Arduino + Servo (Part 2) from Dan Thompson on Vimeo.

I spend my days using a 3D animation package called Maya, and my nights building projects with Arduinos. Daniel Thompson is a visual effects artist who has combined Maya and an Arduino to drive a servomotor. My worlds just collided!

This post covers the scripts he used to do it. He has since built a Maya Python plug-in that is more accurate and can be keyframed. This is the really useful part, as it goes from being a very expensive 3D virtual knob to being a fully animateable animatronic system.
I'd love to see if he can get it working bi-directionally, so that the servo can act as a go-motion controller for Maya.

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Today on Offworld, we watched the new Arkham Asylym game trailer, which made us long for Batman in BioShock's Rapture, found out Disney games filter obscenities via a locally stored copy of puerile Urbandictionary.com definitions -- as a plain text file, and played the new LucasArts-esque Strong Bad game: Dangeresque Roomisode 1: Behind the Dangerdesque. We also saw a delicious looking version of Katamari Damacy, found a new game based on your grandmother's favorite Love Is... comics duly disquieting, saw retro Mario and Duck Hunt remakes in EA's Boom Blox, heard about Sony's lawyers going after data-scraping LittleBigPlanet social site Sackbook, and pieced together desire for a Tetris bracelet. Finally, we heard that Eskil Steenberg's unbelievably gorgeous painterly MMO Love was nearing alpha, considered the irony of a game blocked from store shelves by Nintendo about to make a new appearance on the DS, heard about how Dune II took inspiration from the Mac desktop, and, most amazingly, saw a new LittleBigPlanet user created level that lets people play a clockwork and magic game of Reversi.