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Harry Nicolaides was arrested last August over a 2005 book called “Verisimilitude,” which includes a paragraph about the king and crown prince that the authorities deemed a violation of the Lese Majeste law… Only 50 copies of the book were published, and only seven were sold.

The law states: "Whoever defames, insults or threatens the King, the Queen, the Heir-apparent or the Regent, shall be punished with imprisonment of three to fifteen years."

CNN has chosen not to repeat the allegations made by Nicolaides because it could result in CNN staff being prosecuted in Thailand.

I'm interested in artists' and DIYers' workspaces. I like to find out how they organize their tools and supplies, and how they set up their workbenches and drawing boards. When I went to sculptor Jessica Joslin's fantastic show at Billy Shire Fine Arts last week, I asked her about her workspace. She kindly had some photos taken and posted them to her Flickr site.

She told me that she doesn't weld or solder any of her sculptures, because the heat could destroy the finishes of the metal pieces she incorporates into her work. Instead, she drills and bolts the components together.

Making a Monkey -- Jessica Joslin shows us her workspace

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

Everybody seems to be messing with Arduino lately. So today was my chance to give it a go. Jimmie Rodgers of Willoughby and Baltic helped me set up the software on my laptop at Noise Night. It was incredibly easy, and he helped me to understand that the IDE for the 'regular Arduinos' is different for that used on the Minty POV and Brain Machine.

Stephanie, one of my Programming students had a piece of code running on her laptop and wanted to test it with four LEDs. We set up a breadboard with the LEDs, and she got her program to run. She had it going Cylon style, where the light would pass from side to side. After she left, I noticed the breadboard sitting on the table, still hooked up to the arduino, so I figured I would give it a whirl. I plugged it into the USB port, fired up the IDE and saw her program run.

Then I decided I wanted to mess with it on my own, so I did a search for "Hello World Arduino" Hello World is usually the simplest program you can run in a computer language. I wanted simple, so I could understand what it was doing. I found the code, which is also in the Help Menu under something or another, but I couldn't find it easily. I recalled that Jimmie had told me that Blink is the first program you want to run.

I copied the code and pasted it into the script window. Then I had to figure out how to get it to the board. I hit the Compile window, which looks like a play button, and saw that it compiled. I tried changing a few things, and broke it.

Earlier, Stephanie had some basic problems as well, such as not spelling the variable names exactly the same throughout the code. Hand typed code is case sensitive, so it's important not to mess with it too much. When we were debugging her code, I put some comment marks ( // ) in front of the lines that were throwing the errors. Eventually, we figured out that the problem was capitalization.

After compiling, I saved the file, and then downloaded it to the board. I was very happy when I saw that one LED blink. After about a half a minute, I got bored, and started messing with the code. I tried changing the duration of the blink and pause, and then I made each of the four LEDs do thier blinky thing.

So now I have made an Arduino blink. There is so much more that can be done, but it all has to start someplace. This step for me has been a major block. For some reason, I haven't been able to get it going. But now it is going. Hopefully others may find this moment useful. If you do, let us know in the comments. Take some photos and video of your experimentations and add them to the Make Flickr pool.

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From the Make: Flickr pool

Most would agree that the safest way to control home lighting is by using the pre-existing wall switch ;) Stuart of Oomlout shares this instructable for dead-simple switch control using Arduino and a mini servo motor. The design uses acrylic plates from Oomlout's kit but specs to build your own are also provided. - Easy Home Automation

Jake von Slatt carries a purse -- and he's man enough to call it that. He's also geek-maker enough to want to properly organize its innards with desired compartments. I've never thought of making additional organizing inserts with accordion folders, file folder stock, glue, and packing tape, but it sure looks like it works well. And who cares if it looks funky? No one is really going to see it inside your bag, and your lipstick... er... I mean your Flash Drive, won't care. I especially like the etched Altoid's tin containers and the holsters for TWO Leatherman tools.

Purse Organizer

"If you see only one version of Forrest Gump this year, make it The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." (Thanks, Liz!)

Homegrown Evolution has a neat garden work table made from a pallet - very simple. It would make great greenhouse shelves, too. I've heard that pallets are pretty much all chemically-treated so they don't rot - does anyone know if this is true?

Here's part 1 of a fascinating Robert Williams lecture at Oakland Museum of California. Too bad the video shaky and the sound is so-so, this is a captivating presentation on the history of lowbrow art.

If you ever wanted to learn about how the “Low Brow” art movement started, this series of videos posted by sketchv might interest you. Broken into 11 parts (Part 1 seen above), these videos recorded the lecture of Robert Williams at the Oakland Museum of California a couple months ago that was part of the L.A. Paint show (currently showing still). Although not the best quality, Williams can be heard covering a wide variety of topics as well as talk about over 60 of his paintings. For example, he discusses his masterpiece, Appetite for Destruction, which AM coincidentally saw for sale at Art Basel. This painting was used on the cover of his first book, which was instrumental in coining the term “Low Brow” art - a term that still remains controversial to this day.

Boing Boing reader Jesse Hattabaugh spotted this scene over the pre-inauguration weekend, in San Francisco's Mission district. View larger. Previous Obamaphemera observations on BB this week: Run*DC, Obamarley, Yes we (Can).

Obama's not standing in for Jesus on that candle, he's standing in for St. Martin de Porres, a 17th century mulatto Dominican brother noted for his devotion to the poor in Peru. In fact, he's the patron saint of the poor.

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There's been a great deal of chatter about the technological sophistication of the Obama campaign and the transition efforts: the YouTube video addresses, the Citizen's Briefing Book that I posted about last week, even Obama's own Blackberry addiction. But as exciting as it is to see these new tools adopted by our President-elect, I'm actually rooting for Obama to integrate a twenty-year-old software application into his communication efforts.

I think Obama needs to use PowerPoint.

Okay, okay, hold your fire for just one second, please. I hate conventional PowerPoint just as much as the next guy. I might even hate it as much as Edward Tufte. I do not want to see Obama's soaring rhetoric tomorrow undermined by "next slide please" requests and stale bullet point sentence fragments. There's already a hilarious parody of what the "Yes we can" speech would have looked like as a PowerPoint deck:

And of course there's the timeless rendition of the Gettysburg Address, including the sublime slide 4:

Review of Key Objectives and Critical Success Factors

• What makes nation unique
- Conceived in Liberty
- Men are equal

• Shared vision
- New birth of freedom
- Gov't of/for/by the people

So many of the epic problems that Obama is going to be wrestling with over the next four years involve systems of great complexity and scale: the bailouts and stimulus programs, our national energy use, the immense expenditures involved in fighting two wars, the global scope of climate change. Tufte would be the first person to argue that complex systems like these are not easily explained using sentences and statistics, particularly when we're talking about such vast numbers. I can imagine a White House address on the stimulus package, or his long-term plan for energy independence, where instead of sitting at a desk reading from a teleprompter, he's actually walking us through the problem and his proposed solution with a backdrop of visually arresting and memorable slides. That would actually make for more stimulating television, and at the same time do a better job of communicating the issues. We've heard a lot from Obama about how the nation needs a CTO. But maybe we need a Chief Information Designer as well.

Bob May, the fellow inside The Robot on Lost In Space, died at age 69. "Farewell, Will Robinson."

'Lost in Space' actor Bob May dies at 69 in Calif. (Thanks, Antinous!)

A calls for artist entries from 3rd Ward -

3rd Ward Spring Solo Show: A hunt for one artist with a groundbreaking voice and a hunger for exposure.

3rd Ward Wants You! Our 2009 Spring Solo Show will award one amazing artist with fame, fortune and an incredible Solo Show! This nationwide open call is open to artists working in all mediums - sculpture, photography, painting, printmaking, illustration, installation, graphic design, video, and more!

Gawker Artists joins us again as a sponsor and this Spring's Judging Panel includes: Janet Ozzard, Editor at New York Magazine, Liz Dimmitt, Curator at Gawker Artists and Jarrett Gregory, Curator at the New Museum.

The Selected Artist will be announced in 3rd Ward's quarterly publication with a 2-page spread and will receive:

• $1,000 cash grant
  
• 1-month residency at 3rd Ward with FULL facility access
  
• A solo exhibition in 3rd Ward's gallery, complete with a massive opening reception
  
• City-wide exposure
  
• Submit your best work now through February 11, 2009.

www.3rdward.com/springsoloshow

Q4 Technologies, Ltd is a UK company that makes a line of software to control the WowWee toy/hobby robots. Anyone who's spent any time using a WowWee controller to remote-control or script program routines for their bot knows how tedious, and limiting, this method can be. Go-Robo Studio works with most of the WowWee Robotics line, some with more control options than others, and sells for GBP60 (about $87). Go-Robo Choreography is for creating dance routines for Femisapien (about $58), and Dawg Trainer is for programming Wrex the Dawg ($58). The programs are all Windows-compatible only.

Go-Robo [via BotJunkie]

See also Robodance (which is free)

More:

• All the WowWee coverage on Make: Blog

Instructional video shows you how to make "black magic" -- crude freebase caffeine. The ingredients are ground coffee and ammonia. It's sounds gross and dangerous.

(Via Unique Daily)

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Widely regarded as the best U.S. mutant animal film of 1954, Them! features this billboard, which I am using as my guide for things to cover on Boing Boing this year. (The list is in reverse order of interest.)

MONITOR ALL NEWS FOR:

1) kidnapping/missing persons

2) unsolved mysteries

3) alleged suicides

4) migrations of wild life

5) thefts of sugar, syrups, sweets

6) strange phenomena as:
Flying saucers
Strange odors
High pitched sounds
Unnatural things alive or dead

(via)

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

Man finds lizard taped to his car door (Via Arbroath)

I also recently licensed a really clever t-shirt design from an Etsy seller who could not keep up with production.

Also, an update from The Prez Dispenser design that you originally wrote about. Unfortunately the licensing company responsible for Pez licences sent us a cease and desist, and even though they expressed and interest in entering a proper licence agreement with me, have now finally killed it. Very unfortunate as it was a very popular design, and of course could be argued as fair use, but that's the way it goes.

Here's the original post:

The 2008 Hugo award nominations have opened -- if you were a member of the 2008 WorldCon in Denver, or have bought a membership to the 2009 WorldCon in Montreal, you're eligible to nominate. I'll be sending in my nominations this week, and just in case you were wondering, here's the stuff I wrote that's eligible for this year's ballot:

* Best novel: Little Brother, Tor, 2008
* Best related book: Content, Tachyon, 2008
* Best novella: True Names (with Benjamin Rosenbaum), published in Fast Forward, Pyr Books, 2008, edited by Lou Anders
* Best novelette: The Things That Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away, Tor.com, July 2008

Nominating Ballot for the 2009 Hugo Awards and John W. Campbell Award

Brett O'Connor wrote an informative article on using Amazon's EC2 service to host a Bittorrent client. For an estimated $75/mo, he can feed his torrent addiction without impacting the bandwidth on his local network.

For me, at home, trying to maintain my ratio has caused big problems for my evening Left 4 Dead sessions, and can sometimes even make day-to-day web browsing a frustration.

So then why not then move Bittorrent out of the home/office and into the cloud? This weekend I was able to do just that with great success. Using Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and TorrentFlux (a web-based Bittorrent manager which runs on top of Bit Tornado). I created a web-based, open-source Bittorrent "machine" that liberated my network and leveraged Amazon's instead. I can access it from anywhere, uploading Torrent files from wherever, and manage them from my iPhone.

Apart from the bits about setting up TorrentFlux, this is actually a great introductory guide to configuring and using the Amazon EC2 service. Those of you who have used EC2 would probably agree with me that it's a more concise and straightforward introduction than Amazon's own documentation.

Use Amazon EC2 for Bittorrent

I've been tracking the approach of Duncan Jones' forthcoming "space miner" feature Moon, and thought I'd blog a few of those sources today, on the occasion of its debut at Sundance.Kevin Spacey plays the voice of an AI presence, Sam Rockwell plays the space protagonist, and the film is directed by David Bowie's son -- so, I'm in already. Over at i09, Meredith Woerner writes:

The dark but beautiful space-isolation movie Moon, starring Sam Rockwell, is finally starting to explain why our astro-miner starts losing his mind. Moon will screen at Sundance this year and I couldn't be more excited to learn more about what David Bowie's son Duncan Jones (aka Zowie Bowie) thinks about space madness.

Moon evokes many things -- the nature of the human experience, the nature of employee-management relations, how the odds are fairly good that the future will be exactly like today, but more so. With all of its far-flung inventions, impeccable visual design and Clint Mansell's eerie score, Moon boils down to a single man having a long conversation in isolation, telling himself a few lies and opening his own eyes to a few truths; Rockwell, playing the only person for tens of thousands of miles, has no one else to act against, and much of his plight has to be conveyed through special effects that gave him little or nothing to work with on-set.

Many reviews of Moon will go to great pains to preserve its twist -- as will I -- but let it also be said that Moon is more than just a film defined by its twist. Moon has a cat in the bag, yes, but it knows when to open the bag and bring out the cat, fairly early on, so we can take a good look at both and think about what they really mean. Jones (who, not coincidentally, is David Bowie's son; Sam Bell and Major Tom could be distant relations) has made a science fiction film that's not about aliens but instead about alienation, not about future technologies but instead about the people who'll have to live and work and cope with them.

Video demonstration of a variation of the Yoshimoto cube, invented in 1971. Link includes a video on how to make one yourself out of paper, as well as an introduction to the Banach-Tarski paradox ("a pea can be chopped up and reassembled into the Sun").

Made up of eight interconnected cubes, it’s capable of unfolding itself in a cyclic fashion. That means you could keep folding, or unfolding it, indefinitely.

In the toy Brocoum’s mom bought him, the cubes were also cut into two identical polyhedra, each capable of forming a Yoshimoto cube containing a hollow space inside with the exact shape of another Yoshimoto cube “open” as as dodecahedron (several other shapes are also possible).

If that sounded somewhat complicated, the animated GIF on the right may illustrate the miracle of the multiplication of Yoshimoto cubes better. It’s simply that a solid Yoshimoto cube can unfold into two hollow Yoshimoto cubes.

There was a graded association with average sleep duration: participants with less than 7 hours of sleep were 2.94 times (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.18-7.30) more likely to develop a cold than those with 8 hours or more of sleep. The association with sleep efficiency was also graded: participants with less than 92% efficiency were 5.50 times (95% CI, 2.08-14.48) more likely to develop a cold than those with 98% or more efficiency. These relationships could not be explained by differences in prechallenge virus-specific antibody titers, demographics, season of the year, body mass, socioeconomic status, psychological variables, or health practices. The percentage of days feeling rested was not associated with colds.

Conclusion Poorer sleep efficiency and shorter sleep duration in the weeks preceding exposure to a rhinovirus were associated with lower resistance to illness.

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Last fall, the Great Central Railway in Leicestershire, England saw the roll out of The Toronto, the first steam-powered train to be built in the UK in nearly half a century. Funding for the project was raised by the A1 Steam Locomotive Trust, a group of UK railroad enthusiasts. The engine is based on the Pacific locomotives, designed for the London and North Eastern Railway in the 1950s. The cost of the project came in at around three million pounds. With the addition of extra water capacity and required safety systems, The Toronto can be operated as a modern, work-a-day, mainline train.

First steam engine built in Britain for 50 years takes to the tracks

More:

• Superconducting Maglev train models
• Live Steamers club in Los Angeles

If I'm right that, as I argued on Friday, there's a cultural gap between the patent bar and the technology industry on the subject of software patents, an interesting question is how we got them in the first place. After all, it wasn't that long ago that software was widely believed to be unpatentable, and major technology firms were hardly clamoring for patent protection. Peter Mennell, a Berkeley law professor who spoke at last Wednesday's Brookings patent conference had an interesting perspective on how this came about. He argues that the impetus for software patents came from patent attorneys within major software firms who spread the "gospel of patenting" within their companies. Not surprisingly, CEOs tend to delegate patent issues to their patent lawyers, and of course patent lawyers will tend to have more pro-patent views than their bosses. And so despite the fact that few technology executives were enthusiastic about patenting, the patent lawyers who worked for them pushed their firms in that direction. And of course, once some software firms started acquiring significant numbers of patents, it sparked the arms race that we've talked about here at Techdirt.

To be clear, I don't think that firms' patent attorneys were deliberately flouting their bosses' orders or working against their companies' interests. Rather, I think that patent lawyers genuinely believed (and still believe) that software patents would be good for their own firms and the broader software industry. This is similar to a phenomenon I noticed when I was researching eminent domain abuse: even lawyers who made their living defending property owners against abuses of the eminent domain system didn't think it should be illegal to take someone's property for private profit. Rather, they tended to think that the solution was to add additional layers of review to filter out the worst abuses. Obviously there's an element of self-interest here. Scaling back the number of eminent domain cases or software patents means fewer jobs for eminent domain or patent lawyers, respectively. But I think the far more important explanation is that when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you're an expert on the minutia of a particular body of law, you're naturally going to think that the solution to any given problem is to fine-tune that body of law. They tend not to think about reforms that would involve getting the lawyers out of the picture altogether.

I think the good news (if you can call it that) is that the patent system is getting so dysfunctional that it's starting to generate interest from corporate CEOs, most of whom are not patent attorneys. A Hill staffer, who spoke on the same panel as I, mentioned that he's seen an increasing trickle of tech companies coming to Capitol Hill to lobby for patent reform. As it becomes more obvious that software patents do little to promote innovation and are mostly a wealth transfer from the software industry to the patent bar, I think we'll see more tech industry CEOs paying attention to the patent problem. And most of them will be less committed to software patents than their patent lawyers are.

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

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Here's a house that announces its energy efficiency (or lack thereof):

With large intentions, its mission is to demonstrate an alternative method of building that allows levels of flexibility and sustainability beyond the reach of typical residential construction. This building requires NO FURNACE, even in Maine, and provides owners with real-time, easily understandable feedback of energy use through its "mood ring" LED fixtures. An off-the-grid option is also in the works.

Even better is the design philosophy:

The BrightBuilt project is unshakably committed to two overarching concepts:
Sustainability as a goal, and
Open Source Collaboration as a method to reach that goal.

More at Inhabitat and the Brightbuilt blog

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The Impossible Project - The reinvention of instant film

We aim to re-start production of analog INTEGRAL FILM for vintage Polaroid cameras in 2010. We have acquired Polaroid's old equipment, factory and seek your support.

Polaroid is transforming itself from an analog Instant Film Production Company to a global Consumer Electronics and Digital Imaging company.

Production of analog Instant Film stopped in June 2008, closing the factories in Mexico (Instant Packfilm production) and the Netherlands (Instant Integral production).

Impossible b.v. has been founded with the concrete aim to re-invent and re-start production of analog INTEGRAL FILM for vintage Polaroid cameras. Therefore Impossible b.v. has acquired the complete film production equipment in Enschede (NL) from Polaroid, has signed a 10-year lease agreement on the factory building; and has engaged the most experienced team of Integral Film experts worldwide.

The Impossible mission is NOT to re-build Polaroid Integral film but (with the help of strategic partners) to develop a new product with new characteristics, consisting of new optimised components, produced with a streamlined modern setup. An innovative and fresh analog material, sold under a new brand name that perfectly will match the global re-positioning of Integral Films.

Photographer and Boing Boing pal Glen E Friedman, who shot many of the iconic photographs of the hiphop band Run DMC, shares this t-shirt with us -- he's seeing them everywhere in NYC, I understand they're all over the place. But this was the first time I'd seen the design, so I LOLed and blogged. Larger view. Link to a few related shots.

Previously: Obama Inauguration street vendor ephemera, Venice Beach, CA, 01-18-09.

People either love the shot or hate it, mostly because of the darker implications of putting Obama there. My goal was to foster discussion, especially since race is still the elephant in the room. For reasons very worthy of discussion, Obama was the only candidate NOT to visit the Lorraine...

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Cinghialino has some great photos of Chinese artist Liu Jianhua's recreation of the Shanghai skyline from dice and poker-chips.

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

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This might be the next Diet Coke & Mentos...