WATCH: Flash video embed above, or download the MP4 here. Our YouTube channel is here, you can subscribe to our daily video podcast on iTunes here.

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Today's a Russell Porter double-header on Boing Boing Video. In this episode, our UK-based music correspondent introduces us to minimalist/electro/glitch trio Micachu and the Shapes. 21-year-old songwriter/musician/MC Mica "Micachu" Levi leads the band, with Raisa Khan on keyboards and Marc Pell on drums.

They're destined to win a Grammy for best use of a vacuum cleaner in a melodic noise composition. Well, whatever, maybe not, but I love that they use a "hoover" as a voice modulation accessory on-stage, and they build or mod other instruments from odd origins.

In our Boing Boing video interview, they joke about the vacuum cleaner thing being a gimmick, but it's cheap and punk and I like it. Micachu's debut record is due out in a couple weeks (early February, 2009), and was produced by the acclaimed electronic musician Matthew Herbert.

As is the case with many of the bands Russell introduces us to in these Boing Boing interviews, his timing is prescient. Music critics in the UK are using headlines like "Is Micachu The Next Big Thing?" which probably means: yes. But we wouldn't hear about them in the US otherwise for months.

Here's a snip from the band's Wikipedia entry which delves into the "maker" aspect of their act:

Micachu describes the music she performs with The Shapes as pop, but the term may be misleading, as her music veers away from much of pop's defining characteristics, including obvious choruses, and accessible lyrics, and often makes use of unconventional playing styles and use of noise like bottles breaking or a vacuum cleaner. There is also little or no bass line in much of her music, which is very uncommon in pop music. For these reasons, her music has been widely described as experimental, and difficult to categorize.

Inspired by experimental composer Harry Partch, Micachu uses unorthodox instruments which are sometimes customised or even homemade. These included a modified guitar played with a hammer action called a 'chu' and a bowed instrument fashioned from a CD rack. She also uses improvised instruments, such as glass bottles or a vacuum cleaner.

Here's more about Harry Partch, (June 24, 1901 – September 3, 1974), the pioneering American electronic musical instrument maker and composer Micachu cites as an influence. At left, an image of his "cloud chamber bowls," described here as "sections of 12-gallon Pyrex carboys, suspended from a redwood frame on ropes... difficult-to-find and impossible-to-tune glass gongs played very carefully by a percussionist who risks the anguish of splintered disaster." Partch obtained the original bowls at the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley, where they'd been used as cloud-chambers to trace the paths of sub-atomic particles.

Björk is said to be a fan of Micachu and the Shapes:

[O]ne of her mix tapes brought her to the attention of the east-London grime scene. But ask her about Bjork calling her up after a gig and she scrunches her face. "Yeah, that was nuts. We spoke but she didn't call me up. It's not like she had my number or anything. "But I spotted her dancing and I kind of stopped for a second."

Below, a promotional video about the band from their label, Accidental Records.

* Boing Boing Video Archives
* Previous posts with Russell Porter music interviews
* Russell's Porter Report website.

I'm not a smoker, but this graph makes sense to me. It probably applies to most bad habits.

How my cigarette tastes

We wrote earlier about comments made by a politician from the small island of the Isle of Man, suggesting that the government there implement a music tax on its broadband subscribers. The Register's done some more digging, and spoken to the island's e-commerce minister, who suggests the implementation of a one euro per year music tax (thanks to TD reader Ben Robinson for pointing it out in the comments), with an opt-out available to those who don't want to pay. While that sounds great for consumers, it's almost a laughable amount. As another commenter on our earlier post pointed out, one euro per year probably won't even cover the cost of the bureaucracy to collect and redistribute the tax. The minister told El Reg, "If you take a Euro a year from millions, then that's a lot of revenue." Perhaps, but it pales in comparison to the billions the music industry currently earns. For instance, the UK has some 16.5 million broadband subscriptions -- charging each one of them a pound or euro per year would pale in comparison to the one billion pounds the record industry in that country currently generates. Also, while it's nice that the minister recognizes that people shouldn't be forced to pay the tax if they don't want to, why must it be an opt-out system, rather than an opt-in one?

Let's take that a step further: why should the government get involved at all? If the record labels are interested in developing some sort of blanket licensing system, let them do it, and figure out how to collect and redistribute the fees. Of course, they've shown little interest in voluntary systems, preferring to go directly to ISPs or to universities. Currently governments, ISPs and universities don't force people to buy CDs; they shouldn't start forcing them to pay for music downloads either.

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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dp619 writes "Several months after joining the Apache Foundation, Microsoft has made its first code contribution to an Apache project. The project, known as Stonehenge, is made up of companies and developers seeking to test the interoperability of Web standards implementations."Reader Da Massive adds a link to coverage at Computer World.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today on Boing Boing Gadgets we flung ninja star tacks at the walls and listened to the buzz of clockwork bees. A wooden hand lifted an iPhone aloft in defiance. A turtle danced to our music collections and a LOLcat became a subwoofer. Sanyo announced their newest lineup of Xacti camcorders, while 4Chan invented an incredible scientific device. Coverflow became a useless shelf and Dr. Manhattan filmed the Apollo Moon Landings. Joel discovered why neatsfoot oil remains liquid at room temperature unlike other animal fats. Brownlee fantasized about riding on a mech robot's junk. We looked at a Golden Throat box from the good old days, and Rob thought the new Robocop should be carbon fire. There was a thrust-counting cock ring. Cut and paste came to the iPhone. A cute robot danced in a tuxedo. A guy demonstrated his awesome bionic arm while T-Mobile danced in Liverpool. LEGO went crackwhore and druggie. We discovered what a sink of packing peanuts dissolves into. And these are some bitching robot tattoos. Link

The Nuage Vert (or "Green Cloud") installation aims to heighten public energy awareness in Helsinki by outlining the emissions of a local power plant via green laser. As a previous commenter points out, there's a bit of irony present due to the high-powered laser's high-power consumption - still, altering the local mindset for the better seems worth it. - Nuage Vert “Green Cloud” Illuminates Emissions [via Mighty Ohm]

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(Kite aerial photo of dICEHOUSES by MNkitemnan. More of his stupendous photos of the art shanties here.)

Mt. Holly Mayor Mike Haeg says:

Where can one go to pedal up a pot of fresh brewed coffee on a bicycle, take a healthy sauna in a functioning distillery, liberate Poutine and French-Canadians through absurdo-political-mercantilism, hitch a ride in an art car taxi, listen to Chilly Willy pound out a drum solo, confess one's sins in a Norse church, and spend three hours playing the world’s largest cribbage board? Why, on the frozen Medicine Lake in beautiful Plymouth, Minnesota, of course.

These are just a few of the artist built ice fishing shacks and programmed events that are a part of the 2009 Art Shanty Projects.

This is the sixth year for the event that challenges artists to create outside of their disciplines and traditional studio-to-gallery environment and to make art accessible and engaging to the bundled up, general public.

The citizenry of Mt. Holly experienced the Art Shanty Projects for the first time last year and we were so inspired, that we submitted our own shanty idea this year; 5 giant, Oldenburg-esque dice stocked with dice, cards, and board games. We call them The dICEHOUSES Shanty. They reintroduce families, friends and strangers to to the conversation, warmth, and closeness fostered by the cadence of table games.

You can follow our building and updates at the dICEHOUSES bLOG.

mobile writes "In August of last year Fujitsu announced new 'zero-watt' displays. This means the screens use absolutely no power when put into standby mode, unlike most other screens that use less than 1 watt, but still require some power. Now Fujitsu has announced they will be showing a zero-watt PC later this year at the CeBIT show. The PC is called the Esprimo Green and marks a first, in that it's able to use no power while in standby mode — but this is a feature that will be required from 2010 for new PCs released across Europe."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Limited to 400 units, here's the Victorious Mongoose 1902a Concealable Ray Pistol.

Augmenting security with discretion, the Victorious Mongoose has been purposely produced at just over half the size of the earlier wave weapons, while still packing the punch of its big-boned counterparts. Snugly nestled in an unbearably dashing leather-embossed and satin-lined case, the world's first concealable ray pistol is at last upon us in complete and flawless glory.

Our much cherished pocket-size atomiser – the world's first concealable ray pistol and the fourth in Doctor Grordbrort's line of infallible aether oscillators – will become available for your fine and capable hands to clasp and fondle at will in July this year. With an edition size of a mere 400, this punchy little nipper will be flying off the shelves like a cash-eating flying fish attacking your wallet – and those of you who have had the privilege of such a rare encounter will know what curious jollies are to be had there. You know who you are.

It's US$535.50.

Every time I have a nightmare about zombie hordes, I swear off all forms of zombie-centric media, because the dreams are so grim and negative. Of course, I break my resolution every chance I get. I don't know what my problem is.

Today I received the The Walking Dead Omnibus Volume 2 and I'm ready to feed my nightmares once again. It's a massive hardbound, slipcased anthology of the terrific Image comic book series by Robert Kirkman about a small band of humans struggling to live in a world filled with undead flesh eaters.

Omnibus Volume 2 contains issues 25-48 of the comic book. Walking Dead Omnibus Volume 1 contains the first 24 issues. Used copies are on Amazon for $350. A better way to get caught up is by purchasing the hardback anthologies. Book 1 has the first 12 issues, and Book 2 has issues 13-24.

In today's EMS Labs project, Windell shows you how to connect two Meggy, JR RGB game units to one another, using a hacked CD-ROM-to-Mobo cable. The cable can also be used to provide a serial connection between any two Arduino-compatible devices normally programmed through a FTDI USB-TTL cable.

A tale of two Meggies

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The federal government has been trying to pass a law to "protect the children" online for ages. First there was the CDA, the Communications Decency Act, which was struck down as unconstitutional. Then, there was COPA -- the Child Online Protection Act. It tried to be more narrow... but was still a very questionable law, with rather vague wording. It bounced around the courts for years, including hitting the Supreme Court twice -- which sent it back to lower courts both times. Last summer, the appeals court knocked it down again, and today the Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal... meaning that COPA is about as dead as can be. This is definitely a big win for free speech online.

But, of course, just as COPA followed the CDA, have no fear that politicians looking for headlines and photo ops about how they "protect the children" are working hard on new legislation -- such as DOPA -- the Deleting Online Predators Act -- and will continue to push the boundaries of what sort of speech is allowed online. All this really does is waste taxpayer money on unconstitutional attempts to restrict free speech. And, for what? Recent studies have shown time and time again that the threat to children online is relatively small compared to the hype -- and the best response is educating children, rather than restricting speech for all. Somehow, though, I doubt politicians will recognize that any time soon -- especially when lobbyists for companies that sell filtering tools keep beating down their doors with stories of the horrors of online content.

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Indy Mogul shares this hi-speed how to on building your own cable track and camera mount for those cinematic fly-by shots - How to make a cable cam for cheap

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An anonymous reader writes "So I've finally gotten my DTV coupons, now I have to choose a converter before the analog signals go dark. I'd like to get one that is hackable, but haven't had much luck finding information about the internals of the units available. My question is, What chipsets do the different coupon eligible converters use, and which one is the most hackable? It'd be great to be able to send my own MPEG stream and have it displayed, or to grab the raw stream out of the device."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

davidwr writes "A state appeals court in Kentucky ruled that the state courts cannot seize domain names as 'gambling devices.' The court ruled that 'it's up to the General Assembly — not the courts nor the state Justice Cabinet — to bring domain names into the definition of illegal gambling devices.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Groovypancakes posted this SX-150 hacked into total funtime awesomeness with touch contacts, "weird sound switch", and the button mod we featured recently - Nice.

And along with that comes the conveniently handy Atari Punk Console flashlight -

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Against Monopoly points out that the Inauguration Committee apparently sold the broadcast rights of the Inauguration Concert (held this past Sunday night) to HBO (for a six month period). Because of that, HBO has been going around demanding all videos of the event be pulled down from YouTube. This appears to include privately filmed clips as well -- which seems pretty questionable. Sure, HBO probably wants to do more with the video, but is a short clip filmed from a camera phone really going to diminish HBO's ability to profit off this historic event? It would seem that such clips would only increase the value to HBO, allowing the company to do more with the full professional video.

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Alex, of Tinkerlog, writes:

The Problem:

Whenever I was prototyping on a breadboard I was annoyed by all the wires to setup before the actual project could begin. Arduino projects were much easier. The 6 pin ISP (In System Programming) header alone was troublesome. Make an adaptor to plug a 3×2 pin header on a breadboard. Then cut short wires and connect the controller to the header. Which pins are what? MOSI, MISO and SCK? So I decided to do it only once more.

The Solution:

These little breadboard headers are very handy. They occupy only one more row on each side as a controller would need.

ATtiny breadboard headers

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snydeq writes "InfoWorld offers the inside story of how FBI Supervisory Special Agent J. Keith Mularski, aka Master Splynter, penetrated and took over DarkMarket.ws, the infamous underground carding board hacked by Max Butler and later transformed by Mularski into an FBI sting operation. The three-year tour sent Mularski deeper into the world of online computer fraud than any FBI agent before, resulting in 59 arrests and preventing an estimated $70 million in bank fraud before the FBI pulled the plug on the operation in October."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I tried hard to pick a favorite (the sheep-skinned wolf? the colorblind test crossbones?), but each one tells too good a story: illustrator Thomas Fuchs and designer Felix Sockwell have put together 100 iconic mini-tales of a GOP in disarray for their 'Deconstructing Dumbo' book, self-published and available via Fuch's site. For more good icon-talk, see Sockwell's post-mortem on creating the icons for the New York Times' iPhone app, including his unfortunately unused skull-flowers for the obit section. GOP100 - Deconstructing Dumbo

Here's a fun combination of Wiimote, Flash, and a bit of physical computing, all cobbled together to make a little car that you can drive around the office Mario Kart style.

There isn't a whole lot of information available on this besides the video captions, but it appears to be using the WiiFlash Flash API for Wiimote input and Gainer for motor control output. WiiFlash looks like a particularly interesting tool for Flash developers. You can run the WiiFlash server component on a Windows or OS X desktop and then use a simple Actionscript API to access the Wiimote within your application.

kurukuru Kart
WiiFlash
Gainer

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mknewman writes with disappointing news for anyone with the money that it would have cost to fly as a space tourist, excerpting a story that says "Russia's space chief says there won't be any more tourists headed to the international space station after this year. Anatoly Perminov told the government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta that there will be no room for paying tourists because the space station's crew is expanding from three members to six."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With Circuit City finally giving up the ghost last week and deciding to liquidate and close down its remaining stores, you might think there would be some decent bargains on electronics. Not necessarily. Consumerist points out that a local TV station checked out some of the prices and found that, in many cases, the liquidation prices were actually higher than buying the same items at Wal-Mart online. Apparently, the liquidation experts running the sales figure that as long as people think they're getting a steal of a bargain, they'll really believe they are.

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WATCH: Flash video embed above, or download the MP4 here. Our YouTube channel IS here, you can subscribe to our daily video podcast on iTunes here.

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Today's Boing Boing Video installment marks the return of UK-based music journalist Russell Porter to our blog, doing what he does best: exposing us to acts music critics are freaking out over in London, just before they blow up in the states.

I'll be blogging another BB Video with Russell a bit later today, and I'll make a personal confession, too: nearly every report Russell brings us involves an act I haven't heard of, either. But more often than not, a few weeks after we hear about a band from him, I'll start seeing them pop up on American music blogs, or I'll hear DJs on my favorite radio station (KCRW!) hitting their tracks. And within a month or two, they're on SNL or Letterman or whatever, and voilá, history.

So, back to this episode above. Russell introduces us to Florence Welch, the voice behind Florence and the Machine. Their Myspace profile describes their work as " Grindcore / Acousmatic / Tape music / Melodramatic Popular Song," and you can get a taste by listening to tracks here, or watching both of the music videos embedded below (more on their YouTube channel here). I really dig the psychedelic-emo-crazy-art vibe.

The band's Wikipedia page explains that "[their] music has received praise across the British music media, especially from the BBC who have played a large part in Florence And The Machine's rise to prominence by bringing them into the spotlight as part of BBC introducing." They've been playing high on the headline list at some of the more prominent music festivals in the UK, and that's where our Russell caught up with them for today's conversation. We also get an impromptu, back-of-the-trailer performance from Florence in this episode, between sets at Standon Calling.

Florence says she's a big fan of The White Stripes, The Cockettes and Kate Bush, and it shows.

* Boing Boing Video Archives
* Previous posts with Russell Porter music interviews
* Russell's Porter Report website.

This is a blog post I've been really excited to hit "publish" on for a while. KCRW is my favorite radio station in the world. I listen to them when I'm driving around LA, but I tune in online when I'm traveling, and subscribe to some of their podcasts, too, so I can listen while I'm running on the beach or wandering around in some strange city overseas where all other sounds are unfamiliar. They've pretty much been the most important source for my own personal music discovery habits over the past decade or so, and the voices and personalities of the hosts are so familiar, they feel like friends or family, or guiding ghosts that point me towards all that is cool, beautiful, and audible.

So, it was a serious honor and a wonderful surprise when KCRW's Rachel Reynolds -- who reads Boing Boing! -- invited me to participate in the station's Guest DJ Project.

Even more sweet, the fact that this guest DJ session would be hosted by my favorite KCRW DJ (I swear I'm not making any of this up), the inimitable music curator and velvet-voiced host Chris Douridas.

Chris and Rachel asked me to select some songs that meant something to me personally, and told something about my life experience. Then, they invited me to come in and talk about the songs with Chris, and today, they've published the resulting music/conversation audio piece. It's the most personal thing I've ever done in public, if that makes sense? Telling the world about why your favorite songs are your favorite songs is like liveblogging your id, or having one of those dreams where you're riding the subway naked. So it feels weird to be typing this. But these songs actually do mean a lot to me, so I'm really excited to share the experience.

Links to Listen: Here is a downloadable MP3. Here's where you can listen on a streaming web player. And here's the text transcript.

Tracklist:

1.) Tomita - Claire de Lune
2.) Bad Brains - Banned in DC
3.) David Byrne and Brian Eno - The Carrier
4.) Lucho Gatica - Encadenados
5.) Ryuichi Sakamoto - Boing Boing video episode with Joi Ito

Keith Newstead is an "automatist" who makes the most amazing kinetic mechanical sculptures. Here are a couple of his pieces, recently posted to YouTube.

Keith Newstead Automata [via Dug North]

More:

• Cabaret Mechanical Theatre - A Museum of Automata (mechanical sculpture)
• Designing automata kit & cabaret mechanical movement

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TarrVetus writes "The Associated Press reports that a federal appeals court in Philadelphia has ruled that the Child Online Protection Act will not be revived, upholding a 2007 decision that the unimplemented 1998 law is unconstitutional. The law, which made it a crime for websites to allow children access to 'harmful' material, was declared a violation of the First Amendment because of existing elective filtering technologies and parental controls that are less restrictive to free speech than the 'ineffective' and 'overly broad' ban."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Photo by Brian Solis, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License)

The February issue of GQ profiles Elon Musk, the 31-year-old cofounder of Paypal and SpaceX and the chairman of Tesla Motors.

But this Monday afternoon is special, thanks to Tesla. October has just proven to be the single worst month for the auto industry in twenty-five years. Despite being a new kind of company making a new kind of car, Tesla isn’t immune from what is ailing Detroit. People aren’t buying cars, period, much less $109,000 electric sports cars with a 244-mile range -— a fact not lost on the venture capitalists Tesla relies on for financing. In recent weeks, Musk has had to close Tesla’s engineering office in Michigan, lay off 20 percent of the company’s staff (mostly from the Michigan office but also from the Silicon Valley headquarters), and announce a significant production delay in Tesla’s Model S—the $57,000 sedan that Musk (and those venture capitalists) have been hoping will broaden the company’s client base.

Yet more: That announcement about the S has nearly coincided with another, on the blog of Elon’s wife, the fantasy novelist Justine Musk, that he has left her and their five boys (4-year-old twins and 2-year-old triplets) for a 23-year-old English actress named Talulah Riley. (“By all accounts she is bright and sweet and of course beautiful, and about as personally responsible for the death of my marriage as she is for the dynamic that played out inside it. In other words, not very,” Justine wrote. “Also, she is not blonde, and I do find this refreshing.”) And about a week after that, a Tesla employee leaked information to a popular Silicon Valley blog about how low morale at Tesla had sunk, and revealing the proprietary fact that the company—which has taken more than a thousand deposits from buyers who haven’t yet received their Roadsters—was down to its last $9 million in liquid reserves. The same day the blog item appeared, Musk issued a statement confirming the $9 million figure while announcing his intention to bolster Tesla’s cash with at least $20 million in additional financing. Then, in search of the leaker, he sent a computer-forensics team to seize and search the computers of various employees. The only redeeming pieces of news about Tesla? Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, and George Clooney are all having their Roadsters delivered this week.

Elon Musk profile in GQ

Check out Sara, age 13, rocking out on Rush's YYZ. (Thanks, Joel Johnson!)

Ed Note: Boingboing's current guest blogger Steven Johnson is the author of six books, most recently The Invention Of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution and the Birth Of America, for which he is currently on book tour. He's also the co-founder of the hyperlocal community site outside.in.

All the hullabaloo about the news from Washington yesterday has been a distraction from the real event of the week: the fact that S05E01 of "Lost" is airing tonight, which means we are all about to be treated to another few months of utterly baffling prime time television. Though I've been known to argue in public for the growing complexity of today's popular culture, I've long since given up on trying to figure out what is actually happening on "Lost," and prefer to just sit back and let the byzantine plot twists and spatial-temporal jumps wash over me. But like many fans of the show, I suspect, I've always been fascinated by the question of exactly how much of "Lost"'s web the producers and writers of the show have planned out, and how much they're making up as they go along.

So it was delightful to read in the Times this weekend this profile of "Lost"'s script co-ordinator, Gregg Nations, who has apparently been maintaining a master document of all the various events and connections over the show's four year run. This line caught my eye:

Had he a background in computer science, Mr. Nations now says, he might have approached the “Lost” project differently. “The best thing would have been to create a database where everything’s linked, and if we’re talking about Jack and what was established in his first flashback episode, you could click on something that takes you there,” he said. But as an accountant, he was more inclined just to make notes in a ledger. “I’ve just created these Word documents, and I just write everything down.”

I think this captures exactly what makes these ultra-complex shows ("The Wire" being the other canonical, non-sci-fi example) so different from what has come before them on television: if you're trying to synthesize the entire history of the show, the proper form for conveying all that information is not a linear narrative. It's a relational database.

The latest record label revenue-generation scheme that's come into vogue is the music tax -- charging every ISP subscriber a flat fee that would give them a blanket license to download music from any source, even P2P networks. In theory, it sounds great, but it's a flawed idea for many reasons, not least of which because it necessitates a massive bureaucracy to levy and collect the tax (which the music industry likes to refer to as a "voluntary license"), then determine how to distribute it (or some tiny portion of it) to artists and other relevant parties. So it was a little surprising to see a government official from the Isle of Man voice his backing for such a tax on his island. The announcement was particularly ironic, given that that Isle of Man is a tax haven.

However, it seems that the government official was just offering up suggestions for the music business; Techdirt's own Mike Masnick was in the session at the Midem conference where the comments were made and says they appeared to be meant as suggestions from the official on how to best show off the Isle of Man's broadband infrastructure. Even with that in mind, it's not clear how levying a mandatory tax on every broadband subscriber shows off the network at all, as opposed to the island's tax collection prowess. What's interesting is that even the BPI -- the UK equivalent of the RIAA -- doesn't like the idea, preferring instead to cut deals directly with ISPs, hoping to maximize profits rather than rely on government-established rates. While ISPs selling out their customers to the music industry is pretty deplorable, at least in that scenario, customers have the opportunity to vote with their wallets and go to another provider. But when the government levies a tax on every broadband subscriber, solely to prop up the music industry's ailing business model, that opportunity doesn't exist.

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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nandemoari writes "Everybody was talking about Barack Obama's inauguration on Tuesday morning, and it showed. According to reports, a number of mobile phone networks faced overload circumstances that day until late afternoon, when the chat sessions finally began to dissipate. Having the most trouble that morning appears to have been T-Mobile, and AT&T also had some difficulty that morning."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This animated animal comes from Mark Weaver's Make Something Cool Every Day. (via Morbid Anatomy)

Hammocks: the symbol of lazy environmentalism (and proper permaculture design)

Regardless of your green ambitions, it's never hurts to know the shortcuts to more sustainable choices. Funny and in this category is this guide to green living, even featuring a sustainable introduction:

Anyone who thinks it's tough to be an environmentalist has got it all wrong. That's why I've gone to the considerable trouble of assembling a guide that even the laziest man on earth, who may or may not be yours truly, can follow to live according to ecologically friendly principles. Since I'm already exhausted from writing this, there will be no further intro. See? By stopping typing now, instead of fashioning a lengthier introduction, I will have saved energy that otherwise would've been wasted on further powering my laptop.

Here's an interview with Josh Dorfman, author of The Lazy Environmentalist and the guide above.

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Japan-based blogger Matt Alt has made an extraordinary discovery about America's new president. Why isn't the MSM covering this? Yet another example of citizen journalists breaking news that cowards like CNN are afraid to report, blogging truth to power. Snip:

This shot of our new Commander in Chief kickin' it under a kotatsu is only matched by the one where he's wielding a pair of gleaming katana blades. Check out the full photo set on the (Japanese language) Gamu Toys site. The doll is a 1/6 scale (roughly 12") figure produced by the Japanese Hong Kong based DID Corporation.

Link to Matt's blog post, and here's the source in Japanese. Really, that photo set is not to be missed.

Previously on Boing Boing:
* Japanese monsters, and how to survive their wrath: YOKAI ATTACK
* Hunting for the Kappa Monster in Tokyo, part 1
* Hunting for the Kappa Monster in Tokyo, part 2

Instead of throwing away crayon stubs, melt them into appealing shapes. (Via Craft)

How to make a tiny polymer clay orange. (via Craft)

Over at Boing Boing Offworld, Brandon points us to KNiiTTiiNG, forthcoming (?) software that uses the Wii-mote to teach knitting. Hopefully, it's more than just a fun idea. "Intangibuild training 'knitting heroes' with Wii-mote enhanced Kniitiing"

For those of us would like to drive a Tesla but are prohibited from doing so by a painful and embarassing medical condition known as checkingaccountis brokeosis, these Roadster Hot Wheels will have to suffice. (thanks, Sebastian)

Interesting glimpse at street life in London around the turn of the previous century. (Via TYWKIWDBI)

The UNC Chapel Hill Biology Department creates sharp "concert posters" for their distinguished lecture series. Each poster is 9" x 22" and hand screenprinted by The Merch, a Chapel Hill design group "influenced by skateboard culture, underground music, and contemporary design." Great idea, UNC!
Gigpsforscis' Flickr photostream (via easternblot)

Don Shank is painting several pieces of art for the upcoming Ancient Book of Sex & Science. They are terrific.

Laboratory Still Life 02
18" x 24"
Acrylic on Panel

Check out Don Shank's other paintings from the series here.

Buy The Ancient Book Of Myth And War on Amazon.

This week, human rights attorney Stanislav Markelov and young journalist Anastasia Barburova were murdered in Russia. Snip from Index on Censorship statement, who are calling for an investigation, along with PEN:

The crime is compounded by the knowledge that Russia has a culture where impunity reigns – and murderers are rarely brought to justice. Even in the case of a journalist as famous as Anna Politkovskaya, after a rare two-year murder investigation it is the alleged accomplices who are on trial - while the murderer remains at large.

Stanislav Markelov was well known for his work as a human rights lawyer, particularly in Chechnya. Markelov represented the family of 18-year-old Kheda Kungayeva, who was murdered by Yuri Budanov - the first senior officer to be convicted of human rights abuse during the Chechen campaigns. Markelov had announced that he would be challenging Budanov’s early release last week.

Those who are brave enough to expose human rights abuses in Russia risk their lives. Over the past few months, victims have included Umar Israilov, a Chechen who claimed that he had been tortured by President Ramzan Kadyrov and had filed a complaint to the European Court of Human Rights. He was shot dead in Vienna last week. Last November, Mikhail Beketov, a local newspaper editor, was assaulted in the Moscow suburb of Khimki and left in a coma. Beketov had been a fearless critic of the local administration. Last summer, Magomed Yevloyev, who owned the website Ingushetia.ru and also bravely exposed abuses, was shot dead in a police car as he was being taken away for questioning.

Russia: crimes without punishment (indexoncensorship.org)

Previously:
Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya murdered
Jasmina Tešanovi?: "I heard they are making a movie on her life."

bowman9991 writes "If your country was invaded and occupied by a foreign power, would you blow yourself up to fight back? If someone pointed a gun at your head and threatened to pull the trigger if you refused to sign a document you knew would lead to a hundred deaths (and you signed!), would that make you ultimately responsible? Does superior technology give you the moral right to impose your will on a technologically inferior culture? You wouldn't expect a mainstream television show to tackle such philosophically loaded questions, certainly not a show based on cheesy science fiction from the '70s, but if you've watched Battlestar Galactica since it was re-imagined in 2003, there has been no escape. The final fourth season is nearly over, and when the final episode airs, television will never be the same again. SFFMedia illustrates how Battlestar Galactica exposes the moral dilemmas, outrages, and questionable believes of the present as effectively (but more entertainingly) than any documentary or news program. It's not hard to see parallels in the CIA and US military's use of interrogation techniques in Bush's War on Terror, the effects of labeling one race as 'the enemy,' the crackdown on free speech, or the use of suicide bombers in Iraq."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Glyn sez, "The vote on concealing British MPs' expenses has been cancelled by the government! [This was a proposed law that would have made MPs' expenses a secret, not available through Freedom of Information requests] Over 7000 people joined a Facebook group, they sent thousands of emails to over 90% of all MPs. Hundreds of thousands of people found out about the story by emails, blogs, by visiting TheyWorkForYou to find something they wanted to know, reading an email alert, or simply discovered what was going on whilst checking their Facebook or Twitter pages. Almost all of this happened, from nowhere, within 48 hours, putting enough pressure on Parliament to force change. mySociety also ask if you want even more transparency in parliament that you join the Free Our Bills campaign."

Blimey. It looks like the Internets won (Thanks, Glyn!)

In 2007, I posted that artist Frank Kozik had issued an unusual pink plastic bust of Stalin smoking a cigarette. He's followed up with this Ho Chi Minh bust handcast in green vinyl. Only 50 of the 14" sculptures were made and they're $200 each from Juxtapoz.
Ho Chi Minh Bust

Announcing: Make:NYC Meeting 10 at Make:NYC!

Make:NYC Meeting 10 - Wednesday January 28th, 6:30PM

Oh, you know you want to! Come join us for Make:NYC Meeting 10!

Challenge: The Mechanism - One

Think you can assemble a ticking, spinning, working gizmo in under two hours? Who cares!? It'll be fun to try. Using basic building materials Make:NYC supplies, designs will be tested for accuracy. Specifications and rules for your gizmo will be provided when you arrive.

Yes, it's free.

Show and Tell

Meet your fellow NYC Makers and show off your creations! Bring your gadgets, gizmos, sketches, ideas, anything you'd like to put in the spotlight. We encourage NYC Makers to collaborate on and discuss DIY projects. If you're planning to bring a project, drop us a note at meetings@makenyc.org.

If you'd like to attend we have plenty of space for everyone, but please RSVP!

Location:

NYC Resistor, 5th Floor (Google Map)
397 Bridge Street between Fulton Mall and Willoughby
Brooklyn, NY 11201

A/C/F to Jay St-Borough Hall
B/Q to Dekalb Avenue

M/R to Lawrence Street

2/3 to Hoyt Street

Meeting time is 6:30PM.

See you there!

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Eliot @ Hackaday writes-

At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, Chumby unveiled their latest prototype. It’s a network connected digital picture frame that runs Flash widgets. Just like the current Chumby model, they’re publishing the software and hardware under a license designed to let you hack it. They let us borrow one of their open chassis evaluation kits to teardown and photograph. We’ve got more pictures, full specs, and the schematics...

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Nine years ago today, Mark posted the first-ever Boing Boing post: "Street Tech Reviews and news for gadget-lovers and propeller heads of all stripes." Nine years later, I find that I've somehow written 22,412 blog posts, and that all together, we've published 46,398 of the things! Boing Boing is crack for me. Every interesting thing I do or see, I itch to blog. When I stop blogging for a few days, I find myself scribbling notes of things to blog on bits of paper and shoving them in my wallet, until it swells up like a paperback that's been dropped in the tub.

This site has grown to be livelihood, confessor, community, pulpit, notebook and outboard brain, all in one. It throws out pods -- BBtv, Gadgets, Offworld -- and attracts happy mutants from all over the world and from every discipline. The nicest thing anyone ever said to me was, "Cory, you're one inch deep and ten miles wide." Boing Boing makes a virtue of that peripatetic approach to life.

I often hear from our readers about how much they look forward to reading Boing Boing. I get it -- because that's how much I look forward to writing it.

Thanks, gang.

Street Tech Reviews and news

Susannah Breslin has a knack for finding unusually... um... unusually unusual fashion and footwear designs on the internet. Here's an excerpt from a post she did about some shoe finds at a website she visits periodically for wacked-out shoe designs.

In addition to the fact that several are eight inches high and upwards, some glow in the dark, there’s ones with built-in tip jars, and a few include rubber duckies. And you thought those gold spiked Louboutins were hardcore. But it wasn’t until my most recent visit that I found the men’s section. Therein I discovered the mind-boggling pair you see here. The model is ”Pimp."

Would You Date A Man Who Wears These Shoes? (thefrisky.com)

Our pixelated pals at eBoy have released two puzzles of their fantastic Pixorama city artworks. The Tokyo puzzle is 1000 pieces while New York has 1500 pieces. Also new is the eBoy Pixorama art book, featuring works currently on display at the ROJO artspace in Barcelona. eBoy Shop

Super-barista and frequent Boing Boing video personality Kyle Glanville shares news of interest to all java devotees: the first-ever Specialty Coffee Association Barista Competition takes place this weekend in Los Angeles, January 23rd to 25th, in the beautiful Spring Arts Tower Building in Downtown LA. Above, a video about the competition. If you go to this event, here is my advice: do not walk up to these guys and ask them to make you a Venti half-caf goatmilk frappucino with extra foam and sugarfree caramel syrup, because you're likely to get barista-slapped.

Link to previous Boing Boing blog posts and videos featuring Kyle, and Link to previous coffee-related blog posts and videos here.

One of the most enjoyable parts of attending MidemNet was talking with various people in the industry who have learned how to embrace new business models and adapt to the changing market place. I ended up hanging out a lot with Martin Thornkvist, of the Swedish record label Songs I Wish I Had Written (some of that time spent wandering slightly lost through French villages post-midnight, after we discovered that there was no transportation back to the town where both of us were staying, but only a train that would drop us a few towns over, where the promised taxi cabs were found to not exist). We talked a lot about what's going on in Sweden, where there seems to be an unfortunate dichotomy. There are those who have learned to embrace the new market place and look for the opportunities, such as Martin's label, and a variety of other labels there. And, of course, there are folks like The Pirate Bay and the political Pirate Party, which actually has received some level of recognition in Sweden.

But there is also the other side. And they still appear to be in power. Apparently, Sweden's Justice Minister is reviewing a report that will recommend giving police the ability to go after file sharers. This still makes little sense to me. Copyright should be, for the most part, a civil issue. It usually makes little to no sense to ever get police or law enforcement involved -- especially when we're seeing plenty of folks in the recording industry -- such as Martin and other Swedish indie labels -- not only learn to live with things like file sharing, but to embrace it and actively encourage it. Of course, I have to admit that, while highly amusing, the Swedish Pirate Party's response to such a plan is a bit over the top:

"These laws are written by digital illiterates who behave like blindfolded, drunken elephants trumpeting about in an egg packaging facility. They have no idea how much damage they're causing, because they lack today's literacy: an understanding of how the Internet is reshaping the power structures at their core."

Of course, when you combine plans to have law enforcement go after file sharers with recently approved legislation to effectively tap all forms of communication in the country, things get pretty worrisome pretty fast.

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Link. (Thanks, Geoff Menegay!) Previously: Newspaper headlines of Obama election win, Nov. 5 2008

KentuckyFC writes "The pattern of citations between scientific papers forms a network that has remarkable similarities to the network formed by the web. So why not use Google's PageRank, the world's most effective search algorithm to rank these papers in the same way it ranks websites? That's exactly what a couple of US researchers have done for physics papers published by the American Physical Society since 1893 (abstract). The results make interesting reading because almost all of the top ten papers resulted in (or were linked to) Nobel Prizes for their authors. Which means that studying the up-and-coming entries on the list ought to be a good way of predicting future winners. Better get your bets in before the bookies get wind of this."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ANDY DIAZ HOPE - Blood, Money and Tears... via Dorkbot list (photos).

Blood, Money and Tears
2006
hypodermic needles, U.V. coated gel capsules, swarovski crystal, artist made chandelier chromed at a Harley-Davidson shop
54 x 96 x 96 inches

The human urge to modify itself has been a primary focus of my collaborative work with Laurel Roth. We have worked together on installations examining the utopian ideals promised by the pharmaceutical industry and recreational drug culture.

This series of chandelier sculptures drips with sparkling hypodermic needles and garlands of swarovski crystal, and colorful gelatin capsules. Viewed from beneath they create colorful mandalas on which to meditate on ones relationship to pharmaceuticals. The beauty of the object from a distance and the repulsion of the individual elements upon closer inspection create the tension of our cultures schizophrenic relationship to drugs.

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DJ Schneider put together a Redux video playlist of more than a dozen adorable pygmy animals, from a possum and elephant to a horse and an octopus. Little Itty Bitty Pygmy Animals

Print your baby via Fabbaloo

A clinic is offering mothers bronze models of their unborn babies.

The London Ultrasound Centre, near Harley Street, is the first in the country to offer the service, which allows parents to 'celebrate' their babies in the womb.

A 3D printer uses ultrasound images to build a cast of the child. The models cost £1,200, take up to two-and-a-half weeks to make, and are created when the mother is at a safe stage of pregnancy at 24 weeks.

Doctors say the technology could also help improve survival rates for sick babies.

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Beach drawn 80's style with fluorescent bacteria---

A San Diego beach scene drawn with an eight color palette of bacterial colonies expressing fluorescent proteins derived from GFP and the red-fluorescent coral protein dsRed. The colors include BFP, mTFP1, Emerald, Citrine, mOrange, mApple, mCherry and mGrape. Artwork by Nathan Shaner, photography by Paul Steinbach, created in the lab of Roger Tsien in 2006.

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suraj.sun writes "US regulators are examining Apple Inc.'s disclosures about Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs's health problems to ensure investors weren't misled, a person familiar with the matter said. The Securities and Exchange Commission's review doesn't mean investigators have seen evidence of wrongdoing, the person said, declining to be identified because the inquiry isn't public. Bloomberg News reported last week that Jobs is considering a liver transplant as a result of complications after treatment for cancer, according to people who are monitoring his illness."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you've got a couple milk crates and some fixed rollers, you can build yourself a saw feed roller for cutting long things on a table saw. It's not clear if this one is for feeding stock in or tailing off, but either way it looks like it could use a little extra stability, perhaps you could hang a low weight from the top plane to lower the center of gravity of the whole thing. Via Milkcrate Digest.

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A year ago, recording industry lobbying group IFPI successfully convinced a Danish court to force ISP Tele2 to block The Pirate Bay. This came after a similar ruling that forced Tele2 to block access to AllofMp3 (which, you'll recall was the big "threat" prior to The Pirate Bay). Of course, these blocks don't work particularly well, and seem incredibly annoying for those content creators who actually want their content distributed through systems like The Pirate Bay.

Tele2 appealed the ruling, and another court found that, indeed, ISPs should be forced to block access to The Pirate Bay. While that case is being appealed to the country's Supreme Court, it appears that other ISPs are being pressured to start blocking as well. Denmark's largest ISP, TDC, is now blocking access to The Pirate Bay.

Torrentfreak suggests that TDC is worried about a similar lawsuit, and did this as a preventative measure, but I have to wonder if some of the thinking is competitive. Last April, TDC announced a deal whereby its customers could download unlimited music... though it was really more of a subscription rental service that included DRM. So, basically, here's a way that TDC gets to block out a "competitor" to its own service, and then blame the legal rulings for being able to do so...

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nk497 writes "Writer makes the case that Windows 7 is a turning point for Microsoft, and we all might start liking them soon... 'While it's not winning everyone over, there are real signs that Microsoft has taken criticisms on board where it matters most: in the software and services that it provides. The idea of a faster, slimmer Windows is one that most Vista owners would automatically put on their wishlist, and it seems that Microsoft has genuinely done something about it. It's not just reignited interest in the Windows product line, but it's got users appreciating a fresh approach from Microsoft as well.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MAKE reader Mike points us to this Inhabitots article about Avik Maitra, a Colombia University graduate doing a research fellowship in Malawi. Malawi kids have been making some very cool toys out of found items; Avik is working on designing more toys that the children can make out of local materials and factory byproducts - let him know if you're nearby and have usable leftovers!

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brink2012 writes "Planum Boreum, Mar's north polar cap contains water ice "of a very high degree of purity," according to an international study. Using radar data from the SHARAD (SHAllow RADar) instrument on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), French researchers say the data point to 95 percent purity in the polar ice cap. The north polar cap is a dome of layered, icy materials, similar to the large ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica, consisting of layered deposits, with mostly ice and a small amount of dust. Combined, the north and south polar ice caps are believed to hold the equivalent of two to three million cubic kilometers (0.47-0.72 million cu. miles) of ice, making it roughly 100 times more than the total volume of North America's Great Lakes, which is 22,684 cu. kms (5,439 miles). The study was done by researchers at France's National Institute of Sciences of the Universe (Insu), using the Italian built SHARAD radar sounder on the US built MRO. SHARAD looks for liquid or frozen water in the first few hundreds of feet (up to 1 kilometer) of Mars' crust by using subsurface sounding. It can detect liquid water and profile ice. Mars southern polar cap was once thought to be carbon dioxide ice, but ESA's Mars Express confirmed that it is composed of a mixture of water and carbon dioxide. The study on Mars north polar cap appears in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, published by the American Geophysical Union."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A simple and portable design for evenly lit object shots -

In a quest to build myself a lightbox for some product-type photography, I managed to throw together this little solution using $18 of surgical tubing, doweling, some zip ties, and a dollar store plastic table cover. So far so good! I foresee an update in the near future that will have a sewn fabric diffusion screen. The whole project took about half an hour to build, The box is 2ft / side and the best part about it is that it folds into a convenient 2' x 4" bundle, making this solution easy to take anywhere!

The surgical tubing/ziptie joints are a nice touch. - DIY collapsable lightbox for $18

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An anonymous reader writes "'The secret to a more secure and cost effective government is through Open Source technologies and products.' The claim comes from one of Silicon Valley's most respected business leaders Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems. He revealed he has been asked to prepare a paper on the subject for the new administration."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Often, when we describe a certain business model put in place by one band that embraces the basic economics of the music industry, someone shows up in the comments to claim "while this might work for musician X, that's an exception... it'll never work for big/small/mainstream/niche/whatever artists." This sort of comment misses the larger point. We are not suggesting a single "business model" for the entire industry. In fact, we're just explaining the economic forces at play, and showing a variety of different business models that embrace those economics. It's those different business models that makes the market so interesting and dynamic and allows bands to stand out from the crowd.

For the latest example, reader James Saunders points us to the band Umphrey's McGee, who implemented a business model for their latest album that helped turn their fans into promoters. Saunders explains the band's "unique plan":

As more people pre-ordered, the band would add more "extras" to the release. There were eight tiers of potential content, each unlocked once a predetermined number of albums were purchased. The result was a massive effort by fans to promote the album for the band; if they got more people to buy it, their own purchase would have more value. I bought my copy over 2 months ago, and I convinced two friends to get it as well. Eventually, all eight tiers were unlocked, so a good number of albums must have been sold. The whole experience offered more to fans than just "music tracks" which could be pirated. Instead they were given a chance to help a band they love reach a wider audience, while at the same time "earning" more for what they were already willing to pay."

This is a neat variation on a similar model we've seen from musicians like Marillion and Jill Sobule to get fans to agree to pay up early in exchange for some benefit. The addition of having different beneficial levels "open up" just adds to the appeal, and it helps turn fans into promoters as well. Again, this is not "the" business model for all bands -- but yet another example of a band recognizing one way to implement a business model that really does focus on connecting with fans and giving them a real reason to buy.

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Urchin sez, "Researchers have found the oldest ever sample of weapons grade plutonium - inside a beaten up old safe at the bottom of a pit. The plutonium was the first batch produced as part of the Manhattan Project, but predates the first nuclear weapon test - Trinity - by seven months."

The potentially dangerous find was made at Hanford, Washington State, the site of a nuclear reservation, established in 1943 to support the US's pioneering nuclear weapons program.

Hanford made the plutonium-239 for Trinity, the first ever nuclear weapon test, on 16 July 1945. Just three weeks later, more Hanford plutonium was used in the nuclear strikes on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But sloppy work by the contractors running the site saw all kinds of chemical and radioactive waste indiscriminately buried in pits underground over the 40 years Hanford was operational, earning it the accolade of the dirtiest place on Earth.

In 2004, clean-up work uncovered a battered, rusted, and broken old safe containing a glass jug inside which was 400 millilitres of plutonium...

Earliest weapons-grade plutonium found in US dump (Thanks, Urchin!)

(Image: Washington Closure Hanford)

The National Journal just published an article with details about the hacking of Congress in 2006, possibly by agents in China, though the attack's origin is uncertain. The article notes the difficult work of the House Information Systems Security Office, which must set security policies and then try to enforce them on a population of the equivalent of C-level executives. The few members who have called attention to the issue of Congressional cyber-security have been advised to shut up about it, by whom the reporter did not discover. "Armed with this information about how the virus worked, the security officers scanned the House network again. This time, they found more machines that seemed to match the profile — they, too, were infected. Investigators found at least one infected computer in a member's district office, indicating that the virus had traveled through the House network and may have breached machines far away from Washington. Eventually, the security office determined that eight members' offices were affected; in most of the offices, the virus had invaded only one machine, but in some offices, it hit multiple computers. It also struck seven committee offices, including Commerce; Transportation and Infrastructure; Homeland Security; and Ways and Means; plus the Commission on China, which monitors human rights and laws in China."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yesterday, Dale Dougherty, editor and publisher of MAKE: Magazine, and John Park, the host of the Maker Workshop on Make: television spoke with Rebecca Roberts of the Kojo Nnamdi Show on WAMU 88.5.

"They're remnants of yesterday's old technology landscape: the VCR, the record player, the point-and-click, film camera. But a dedicated group of amateur tinkerers are retrofitting these analog toys for the digital era. We learn about a new public television show that's exploring quirky, fun and education Do-it-Yourself projects." Link

For our Washington DC viewers, Make: television is broadcast Saturdays at 5:30 pm on WETA

To see when Make: television is broadcast in your area, visit our broadcast listings page.

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artrat801's thorough SX-150 mod/conversion rehouses the analog synth kit as a desktop console along with a 'sq-150' homemade sequencer. Nicely done, those wood side panels that just seem to whisper "analog", don't they? [via Matrixsynth]

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The new whitehouse.gov is a nice looking site, it's centered around a blog. They promise lots of media, podcasts, videos, etc. In 2001 or 2004 even, it would have been a wonderful breakthrough and I would be singing its praise. But this is 2009, and we know so much more about the web.

Look at it another way. I don't know about you but I gave to Obama, I prayed for his election because we desperately need new approaches to the problems we face. We've postponed this day for too long. We must stop driving gas guzzlers, we have to invest in education, health care. We must prepare for the economy we now live in, not the one we used to. We have wars to end and bridges to build, "political wedges" to undo. All of this will require a very efficient flow of ideas and exchange of perspective. That's where, of course, the web comes in.

But whitehouse.gov violates the most basic rule -- "People come back to places that send them away." The White House should send us to places where our minds will be nourished with new ideas, perspectives, places, points of view, things to do, ways we can make a difference. It must take risks, because that is reality -- we're all at risk now -- hugely.

I don't advocate a blogging host like the Obama campaign website. There are already plenty of places to host blogs. But I do want the White House to be a public space, where new thinking from all over the world meets other new thinking. A flow distributor. A two-way briefing book for the people and the government.

We need the minds of industry, education, health care, government, people from all walks of life, to connect. It doesn't have to be whitehouse.gov, but why not, why wait?

We're all watching the new President very carefully. It makes sense that he's open to ideas from Republican columnists and Republican preachers. I get it. Inclusiveness. But when it comes to the best ideas of the web, the sign on the President's door says "Please wait" instead of "The fierce urgency of now." I think he was right the first time. You need the web Mr. President, now, and we need to get in there and do our work.

The Astra synthesizer from Not Breathing - 2 VCOs, 2 LFOs, VCF, noise source, ring modulator all built from salvaged parts

the keyboard is from a gutted lowrey wandering genie keyboard. i recycled most of the capacitors in the unit from the genie and a dead tr606

[...]

i didn't buy anything for this unit. i used some pretty crappy pots - but used good ones where it counts -
even the wire was from an old medical device

this is my depression era thrifter

All that plus some "dumpster wood" panelling makes for a fine lookin' thrifter. Oh and yup, it sounds good too. - Not Breathing STRIKES AGAIN

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?"Minimum_Module" by Limiteazero is an open source sound installation (you can download the source code for it at the link below) built with Processing where 4 frequencies are generated by 4 laptops and played through a subwoofer which creates vibrations on 4 steel plates which are picked up with microphones as visualized as a wave shape on the computers.

minimum_module

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It's a new morning in America.

The house on the hill.

A thousand points of light.

It's the economy dummy!

Compassionate conservative.

Yes we can!

PS: Yesterday's special home page is archived.

Back in September, the state of Kentucky tried to seize over 100 domain names, claiming they violated a local state law against "gambling devices." None of the domains were run or hosted in the state of Kentucky, which made this quite a stretch in legal terms. While many of the domain names were for gambling websites, some were merely parked domains. The politicians who ordered the seizure were quite open that this was an attempt to "protect" local gambling interests -- but it seems like an incredible legal reach to claim that because of local protectionist laws, the state somehow has the right to seize domain names from around the world. The domain owners complained, but a local Kentucky state court ruled in favor of the government. However, an appeals court quickly told the state to hold off seizing the domains until it could review the case.

That court has now overturned the lower court ruling saying that a domain name is clearly not a gambling device, and is not covered by the law. However, this does potentially leave the door open for Kentucky politicians to change the law to include domain names... at which point we'll need to go through this whole silly legal battle all over again.

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This is a fairly inexpensive head tracking system that uses an Arduino, an R/C gyro, and a 3-axis accelerometer for control. The maker claims you can build a complete 3-axis system for about $50. This, along with some video goggles, would be a great addition to any R/C plane or helicopter.

Turned out it is quite simple to interface with Microsoft Flight Simulator X to control the camera for testing. The final goal is to control the camera on my RC glider. My head tracker uses a sensing element from a cheap RC rate gyro, a cheap 3 axis accelerometer, and an ATMEGA168 micro-controller running arduino.

More about the Arduino 3DOF Head Tracker [RCGroups]

In the Maker Shed:


Make: Arduino

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It's now official: Online advertising rates for websites of all sizes and categories have gone through a significant decline in Q4 2008. If you had been wondering what you have been doing wrong to have your advertising revenues decline month after month, relax. It's not been your fault. According to the new AdPrice Index released by PubMatic, it has been the economic recession which has significantly influenced online advertising prices and rates for the last few months. Photo credit: PubMatic Bad news for online advertising rates also when it comes to specific vertical categories, which have also dropped from Q4 2007. The category Business & Finance underwent the biggest drop, falling from an average price of $2.13 in Q4 2007 to $0.83 in Q4 2008 – a 61% drop. In this climate of general discouragement for ad revenues, good news come from the just ended holiday season which surprisingly showed no significant change from Q3 2007 to Q4 2008. Under such circumstances online ad rates appeared to remain steady and may actually see some price boost in the near future. Here all the details:

The PubMatic AdPrice Index Q4 2008

Executive Summary

The data reflected in this report shows a significant decline in Q4 2008 online display ad pricing compared to Q4 2007 for all sizes of websites and all vertical categories, underscoring the fact that the US economy is in a recession and that the online advertising sector is not immune to it. However, the news isn’t entirely negative and shows some promise for the online advertising sector. While the ad price averages across most sites also dropped in Q4 2008 from Q3 2008, the quarter-to-quarter drops were not significant by website size or vertical category; this may be an indicator that holiday ad sales helped stave off the consistent bigger drops that happened from quarter to quarter throughout 2008. Some vertical categories even showed improvement from the previous quarter. It is clear that growth in online display advertising is slowing consistent with other advertising sectors, but not to the same magnitude. In the coming quarters the average pricing for display advertising may continue to drop consistent with seasonal cycles. However, with overall advertising budgets shrinking, the need for marketers to have more accountable advertising could bring more advertising dollars online in 2009 and start an upward trend as some vertical categories have already experienced.

Key Takeaways

• All sizes of websites (small, medium, and large) were down dramatically from Q4 2007; small, medium, and large sites dropped 52%, 23%, and 54%, respectively, from the previous year.


• All sizes of websites were also down from Q3 2008 to Q4 2008, but the drops were not significant, bucking the trend of larger drops from quarter to quarter throughout 2008; this may be an indicator that the online ad sector got just enough of a boost from holiday advertising to keep ad rates steady.


• Similar to sites by size, all vertical categories also experienced significant drops in their ad pricing from Q4 2007; the biggest drop by a vertical was Business & Finance, which fell from an average price of $2.13 in Q4 2007 to $0.83 in Q4 2008 - a 61% drop.


• Also similar to sites by size, no vertical categories dropped by a significant amount from Q3 2008 to Q4 2008, and some verticals even improved from the previous quarter; the Technology, Sports, Entertainment, Gaming, and Music verticals all had higher ad price averages in Q4 of 2008 than in Q3 of 2008.

Quarter-to-Quarter Trends by Website Size

Quarter-to-Quarter Trends by Website Vertical

Q4 2008 AdPrice Average by Size

Overall Ad Price Average (All Site Sizes)

• -48% from Q4 07
• -3.7% from Q3 08

Quarter-to-Quarter Pricing by Website Size

AdPrice Quarterly Average for Small Sites

• -52% from Q4 07
• 0% from Q3 08

AdPrice Quarterly Average for Medium Sites

• -23% from Q4 07
• -3.2% from Q3 08

AdPrice Quarterly Average for Large Sites

• -54% from Q4 07
• -5.6% from Q3 08

Q4 Ad Price Averages by Vertical

Quarter-to-Quarter Pricing by Website Vertical

AdPrice Quarterly Average for Business & Finance Sites

• -61% from Q4 07
• -3.5% from Q3 08

AdPrice Quarterly Average for Entertainment Sites

• -40% from Q4 07
• +15.2% from Q3 08

AdPrice Quarterly Average for Gaming Sites

• +31% from Q4 07
• +6.3% from Q3 08

AdPrice Quarterly Average for News Sites

• -36% from Q4 07
• -5.6% from Q3 08

AdPrice Quarterly Average for Sports Sites

• -54% from Q4 07
• -4.8% from Q3 08

AdPrice Quarterly Average for Social Networking Sites

• -8.7% from Q4 07
• +59% from Q3 08

AdPrice Quarterly Average for Technology Sites

• -41% from Q4 07
• +3.5% from Q3 08

AdPrice Quarterly Average for Music Sites

• -61.5% from Q4 07
• +3.4% from Q3 08

Segment Definitions

Small Web site segment: Less than 1 million page views per month. Medium Web site segment: Between 1 million and 100 million page views per month. Large Web site segment: Over 100 million page views per month. Aggregate Index: Data for All Web sites is computed using a weighting of 65 percent large Web sites, 20 percent Medium Web sites, and 15 percent Small Web sites based on an estimate of overall traffic in the online publishing market. (Note: The pricing data reflects net publisher monetization via ad networks and excludes ad networks' share of ad spends as well as inventory sold directly by publishers to ad agencies or advertisers.)

Originally written by Albert and Michele Madansky for PubMatic and first published on January 14th 2009 as "AdPrice Index - The Q4 2008 - The Original Online Ad Pricing Report".

About the Authors PubMatic is an ad network optimization service that automates and optimizes ad inventory decision-making for professional web publishers. Albert Madansky is a Ph.D., H.G.B. Alexander Professor Emeritus of Business Administration at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, and recipient of the 2005 American Statistical Association Founders Award. Michele Madansky is a Ph.D., media and market research consultant, former VP of Global Market Research for Yahoo!

Photo credits: Executive Summary - PubMatic Key Takeaways - Bora Ucak Small, Medium, Large Sites - Robyn Mackenzie All other images by PubMatic

It's now official: Online advertising rates for websites of all sizes and categories have gone through a significant decline in Q4 2008. If you had been wondering what you have been doing wrong to have your advertising revenues decline month after month, relax. It's not been your fault. According to the new AdPrice Index released by PubMatic, it has been the economic recession which has significantly influenced online advertising prices and rates for the last few months. Photo credit: PubMatic Bad news for online advertising rates also when it comes to specific vertical categories, which have also dropped from Q4 2007. The category Business & Finance underwent the biggest drop, falling from an average price of $2.13 in Q4 2007 to $0.83 in Q4 2008 – a 61% drop. In this climate of general discouragement for ad revenues, good news come from the just ended holiday season which surprisingly showed no significant change from Q3 2007 to Q4 2008. Under such circumstances online ad rates appeared to remain steady and may actually see some price boost in the near future. Here all the details:

The PubMatic AdPrice Index Q4 2008

Executive Summary

The data reflected in this report shows a significant decline in Q4 2008 online display ad pricing compared to Q4 2007 for all sizes of websites and all vertical categories, underscoring the fact that the US economy is in a recession and that the online advertising sector is not immune to it. However, the news isn’t entirely negative and shows some promise for the online advertising sector. While the ad price averages across most sites also dropped in Q4 2008 from Q3 2008, the quarter-to-quarter drops were not significant by website size or vertical category; this may be an indicator that holiday ad sales helped stave off the consistent bigger drops that happened from quarter to quarter throughout 2008. Some vertical categories even showed improvement from the previous quarter. It is clear that growth in online display advertising is slowing consistent with other advertising sectors, but not to the same magnitude. In the coming quarters the average pricing for display advertising may continue to drop consistent with seasonal cycles. However, with overall advertising budgets shrinking, the need for marketers to have more accountable advertising could bring more advertising dollars online in 2009 and start an upward trend as some vertical categories have already experienced.

Key Takeaways

• All sizes of websites (small, medium, and large) were down dramatically from Q4 2007; small, medium, and large sites dropped 52%, 23%, and 54%, respectively, from the previous year.


• All sizes of websites were also down from Q3 2008 to Q4 2008, but the drops were not significant, bucking the trend of larger drops from quarter to quarter throughout 2008; this may be an indicator that the online ad sector got just enough of a boost from holiday advertising to keep ad rates steady.


• Similar to sites by size, all vertical categories also experienced significant drops in their ad pricing from Q4 2007; the biggest drop by a vertical was Business & Finance, which fell from an average price of $2.13 in Q4 2007 to $0.83 in Q4 2008 - a 61% drop.


• Also similar to sites by size, no vertical categories dropped by a significant amount from Q3 2008 to Q4 2008, and some verticals even improved from the previous quarter; the Technology, Sports, Entertainment, Gaming, and Music verticals all had higher ad price averages in Q4 of 2008 than in Q3 of 2008.

Quarter-to-Quarter Trends by Website Size

Quarter-to-Quarter Trends by Website Vertical

Q4 2008 AdPrice Average by Size

Overall Ad Price Average (All Site Sizes)

• -48% from Q4 07
• -3.7% from Q3 08

Quarter-to-Quarter Pricing by Website Size

AdPrice Quarterly Average for Small Sites

• -52% from Q4 07
• 0% from Q3 08

AdPrice Quarterly Average for Medium Sites

• -23% from Q4 07
• -3.2% from Q3 08

AdPrice Quarterly Average for Large Sites

• -54% from Q4 07
• -5.6% from Q3 08

Q4 Ad Price Averages by Vertical

Quarter-to-Quarter Pricing by Website Vertical

AdPrice Quarterly Average for Business & Finance Sites

• -61% from Q4 07
• -3.5% from Q3 08

AdPrice Quarterly Average for Entertainment Sites

• -40% from Q4 07
• +15.2% from Q3 08

AdPrice Quarterly Average for Gaming Sites

• +31% from Q4 07
• +6.3% from Q3 08

AdPrice Quarterly Average for News Sites

• -36% from Q4 07
• -5.6% from Q3 08

AdPrice Quarterly Average for Sports Sites

• -54% from Q4 07
• -4.8% from Q3 08

AdPrice Quarterly Average for Social Networking Sites

• -8.7% from Q4 07
• +59% from Q3 08

AdPrice Quarterly Average for Technology Sites

• -41% from Q4 07
• +3.5% from Q3 08

AdPrice Quarterly Average for Music Sites

• -61.5% from Q4 07
• +3.4% from Q3 08

Segment Definitions

Small Web site segment: Less than 1 million page views per month. Medium Web site segment: Between 1 million and 100 million page views per month. Large Web site segment: Over 100 million page views per month. Aggregate Index: Data for All Web sites is computed using a weighting of 65 percent large Web sites, 20 percent Medium Web sites, and 15 percent Small Web sites based on an estimate of overall traffic in the online publishing market. (Note: The pricing data reflects net publisher monetization via ad networks and excludes ad networks' share of ad spends as well as inventory sold directly by publishers to ad agencies or advertisers.)

Originally written by Albert and Michele Madansky for PubMatic and first published on January 14th 2009 as "AdPrice Index - The Q4 2008 - The Original Online Ad Pricing Report".

About the Authors PubMatic is an ad network optimization service that automates and optimizes ad inventory decision-making for professional web publishers. Albert Madansky is a Ph.D., H.G.B. Alexander Professor Emeritus of Business Administration at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, and recipient of the 2005 American Statistical Association Founders Award. Michele Madansky is a Ph.D., media and market research consultant, former VP of Global Market Research for Yahoo!

Photo credits: Executive Summary - PubMatic Key Takeaways - Bora Ucak Small, Medium, Large Sites - Robyn Mackenzie All other images by PubMatic

Although this is a DIY Pizza Rack designed for an Xtracycle, I am sure it can be adapted to fit other bikes. The main parts of the rack can be found at Ikea and the total cost is about $30. This could be really handy for anyone who wants to carry larger "things" on their bike rack.

Wife and hubby team, Jeremy and Carrie, longed for the ability to carry pizza on their Xtracycle. Unfortunately, the square shape of a pie box leaves too much overhang when using a standard SnapDeck. Combine that factor with greasy, weak cardboard box and you'll quickly accessorize gravel with your fresh pizza.

More about the DIY Pizza rack for your Xtracycle [Slice]

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Nathan Halverson writes "The popular online radio service Pandora.com has added brief commercial interruptions to its service. Pandora says this is a trial and is targeted to a subset of listeners at this point. In one case, a brief ad for the Fox TV show 'Lie To Me' interrupted the music stream for about 15 seconds after ten songs had initially played, and the same commercial interrupted 22 songs later. 'But [Pandora's] founder promised the site will never carry as many audio ads as broadcast radio, despite the fact it pays substantially higher royalty fees to the recording industry.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've already discussed how badly the RIAA does not want the pretrial hearings in the Tenenbaum case to be broadcast -- as was requested by Tenenbaum's lawyers, and approved by the judge in the case. However, the reasoning from the RIAA is pretty laughable. Apparently, it's afraid that (gasp!) some of these tech savvy propaganda-ists out there might remix the video and "manipulate" it to take RIAA arguments out of context. Of course, in saying so, the RIAA has now pretty much guaranteed that's what will happen, but... that still shouldn't matter. We know the RIAA is against the whole concept of remixing, but we thought that was a copyright issue, not one where they actually think that such remixes are universally taken as fact. I wonder if the folks at the RIAA think that things like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are serious news programs rather than satire...

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Here is OddBot's next attempt at making a low cost DIY IR tracking system. I really like how he shares his successes and failures during the entire build process. This is a great resource for learning about IR LEDs.

My newest array, with navy blue IR LEDs works better as I've gone back to a single phototransistor for the sensor instead of two in parallel. The idea is that fewer lenses are better. The domed end of a LED or a phototransistor is a lens that focuses the light sent or received. The IR LEDs I'm using have a viewing angle of about 30 degrees. Check you datasheet of both LEDs and phototransistor as it can vary.

More about Making an IR object tracking system

More:

Make your own IR obstacle detection sensor

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Tom Taylor's Microprinter, a web-connected receipt printer for daily notifications via Waxy... Tom writes-

The microprinter is an experiment in physical activity streams and notification, using a repurposed receipt printer connected to the web.

I use it for things like reminders, notifications, and my day at-a-glance, but anything that can be injected from the web and suits text only, short format messaging, will work.

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The Onion's inauguration day issue stands as one of its finest moments (Obama Inauguration Speech Ruined By Incessant Jackhammering being torture-comedy of such exquisite caliber that it had me howling by the end) and it's at its absolute best in "Vice Presidential Handlers Lure Cheney Into Traveling Crate":

A team of nine specially trained handlers have successfully lured outgoing vice president Dick Cheney into a reinforced steel traveling crate in order to transport him back to his permanent enclosure in Casper, WY, official sources reported Monday. "He's a smart one. Once he sees the crate, he gets pretty nippy, but we've learned a few tricks over the years," chief VP wrangler Ted Irving breathlessly said while applying pressure to a deep gash on his forearm. "If we break a rabbit's legs and throw it in there, he will eventually go in to finish it off. Doesn't work with dead rabbits, though. Cheney only eats what he kills."

Vice Presidential Handlers Lure Cheney Into Traveling Crate

Robbo sez, "The viral video phenomenon of 'Where The Hell Is Matt?' - dancing around the globe - has now extended itself into the world(s) of gaming - with hilarious results. I especially loved what the characters do in Second Life." This is totally, absolutely awesome.

Where the Hell is Matt? - Team Fortress 2 Style (Thanks, Robbo!)

The IT Crowd, a nerd sitcom from Graham Linehan, the creator of the fantastic Father Ted, has just concluded its third season, and the DVDs are up for pre-order on Amazon. This was the funniest season yet -- the Friendster episode was nothing short of brilliant. The show has hit its stride and is triumphantly stalking the airwaves. Best of all were the shots of the densely decorated set, which was dressed by Boing Boing readers and fans of the show, who sent their favorite nerd memorabilia to the show for inclusion. The actors exist in a cave that is carpeted and wallpapered in awesome geek crap -- what a delight.

Previous DVDs in the series have sported totally badass easter eggs (subtitles in 1337, for example), and I'm sure this one'll be no exception. I can't wait to get mine. The title ships on Mar 16, and it's a region-free disc (yay!).

The IT Crowd: Series 3, The IT Crowd: Series 1-3 Box Set

A new study up in Canada suggests that pretty much all of the major ISPs are now throttling P2P activity -- with some admitting they do so even if there's no sign of actual congestion on the network. Of course, if there were enough competition (don't laugh) this would be an opportunity for a smart ISP to highlight and promote the fact that they don't throttle any kind of traffic, and aren't lying when they tell their customers what kind of bandwidth they sell.

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ahziem writes "With the final release two months away and an alpha version available, it's time to look at OpenOffice.org 3.1's new features: eye candy, better charts, replying to notes in the margin, overlining, macros in Base, RTL improvements for Arabic and Hebrew, and (believe it or not) better sorting. Download and report any bugs you find."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A high-frequency (HF) start box is a device used in AC arc welding that allows you to start an arc welder without having to "scratch-start" the arc. You used to be able to buy such an add-on device; apparently, they're now hard to find. William F. Dudley Jr. decided to build his own and shares the details on his project page.

[As with all high-voltage projects, the usual warnings apply (as in: don't try this at home unless you're familiar with HF and know what you're doing).]

High-Frequency Start Box

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Graffiti artist Poster Boy uses nothing but a razor to execute his works. Check out this video, via Wooster Collective. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!

We were somewhat skeptical of what kind of advantage Google could provide to selling ads in physical publications (initially magazines) when the program launched in 2005. At best, we thought that the relationship with advertisers could maybe bring in some advertisers who didn't traditionally advertise in print. But, there was no way to provide the customization and contextualization that made Google's ad programs online so effective. And, indeed, the original program was something of a failure. The company then took a second shot, which seemed to get a lukewarm thumbs up from some newspapers, but it was hardly a rousing success.

And, indeed, the company has now admitted that they're killing off the program -- which seems unlikely to be missed. There's certainly nothing wrong with experimenting with new business models and ideas, but it was never really clear what true advantage Google provided in this space, and the shut down pretty much confirms that the answer was that there wasn't much of an advantage.

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Voidsinger writes "The latest firmware updates to correct Seagate woes have created a new debacle. It seems from Seagate forums that there has yet to be a successful update of the 3500320AS models from SD15 to the new SD1A firmware. Add to that the updater updates the firmware of all drives of the same type at once, and you get a meltdown of RAID arrays, and people's backups if they were on the same type of drive. Drives are still flashable though, and Seagate has pulled the update for validation. While it would have been nice of them to validate the firmware beforehand, there is still a little hope that not everyone will lose all of their data."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today on Offworld, we rang in the new administration with our vote for gaming's best president: the mech-fighting, West Wing exploding commander in chief of Xbox import rarity Metal Wolf Chaos. We also saw a number of excellent looking games on the horizon: a WiiWare remake of Edmund McMillan's visceral platformer Meat Boy, Square Enix's troublingly addictive puzzler Yosumin, Jeff Minter's typically psychedelic Xbox Live Arcade remake Gridrunner+++, and, above all else, Arkedo's just-released brilliant looking firework-debris dodging DS arcade shooter Big Bang Mini. Finally, we heard about a new homebrew creation that uses Wii remotes to teach us how to knit sensible hats and octopus toaster covers, brought down Kyle Gabler's website by downloading his incredible World of Goo soundtrack, and, best of all, re-downloaded area/code entertainment's absolutely fantastic iPhone game Drop7 -- one of my top-most recommended iPhone games released thus far.

Comcast has already been slapped down -- well, slapped on the wrist, anyway -- by the FCC for violating Commission rules with its traffic-shaping efforts, and it could be on its way for a second rebuke. The FCC has asked Comcast for some more details on its newest "congestion management" system, which throttles heavy users' speeds for periods of time. As part of the penalty for its previous infraction, Comcast had to file details of the new system with the FCC, and the commission know wants to know if Comcast treats traffic from its own VoIP system differently than traffic from competing providers' VoIP services. The company apparently advertises the fact that its VoIP service doesn't get affected by heavy network traffic and slowdowns, giving the impression that it degrades other VoIP traffic in this new system, while leaving traffic from its service alone. This will be an interesting test of the new FCC administration, to see how it handles these sorts of complaints compared to its predecessor. It could also set an important precedent, because it sounds like Comcast handles its own VoIP traffic in a way similar to other cable companies, by setting aside a portion of bandwidth that's managed separately from a subscriber's internet traffic.

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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Clear your schedules, Boston-area web geeks! An extra-special joint event with fellow North Shore pals, Build Guild and the Markup & Style Society (new site coming soon) are co-hosting a meetup here in Salem on February 2nd. Special guest Eric “Rock Horns” Meyer will be in town — and when Mr. Meyer is in town, you gather up the troops and celebrate with frosty beverages and good times. You just do.

As usual, my M&SS cohort Mr. Marcotte has written up a far better summary of the night’s events. As has Mr. Meyer.

Hope to see you here in the Witch City for what is sure to be a wonderful night of markup, style and guilding. If that makes sense.

Martin Hellman writes " DeviceGuru.com ran my piece raising questions about the EPA's Energy Star program. For example, an Energy Star compliant TV that claims to draw 0.1 watts in sleep mode appears to do that — but only seems to sleep about 25% of the time that it is 'off.' The other 75% of the time it draws about 20 watts, for an effective sleep power draw from the user's perspective that is 150 times what the manufacturer claims. Based on the observations described, it is also questionable how many PC's really are sleeping when their screens are blank, even if the user has turned sleep mode on. Given the billions of dollars and tons of CO2 that are at stake, this situation demands more attention."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Boing Boing pal and frequent Boing Boing Video collaborator Eddie Codel is in Washington DC today, and has been videoblogging from the inauguration. Above: He shot this amazing, simple little video of the "helicopter of happiness" carrying George W. Bush and fellow war criminals out of DC, and back to the hell that belched them forth.

As I watched Eddie's chopper clip just now, I couldn't help but think of that scene in the Wizard of Oz where the wicked witch zooms off on her broomstick, then everything turns into dancing munchkins and everlasting uptempo musical numbers.* I poked around on YouTube and couldn't find the clip where the witch flies off to screaming violins, but I remember it looking a little like Eddie's video above. I did find the Oz clip that follows, which feels a little like America does tonight, with all the inaugural balls and "END OF AN ERROR"** keggers erupting throughout the land.

I suspect the next four years won't quite live up to the massive, collective, candy-colored orgasm of hope we experienced today. But progress, not perfection, is enough for me right now.

Incidentally, Wizard of Oz came out in 1939, in the waning years of our nation's first Great Depression. I don't think the present one's anywhere near over for us. But I hope its ending is as happy as this.

* I am not insinuating that Obama is Dorothy, or a friend of Dorothy.

Previously:
* BB Video: Shepard Fairey and the Obama Poster, on Inauguration Day
* BB Video: Sean Bonner reports from Obama Inauguration in DC

(** HT: Scott Shulman)

Update: Boing Boing commenter THEQUICKBROWNFOX points out that for them, Obama's inauguration ceremony hearkened back to the inauguration speech of Nelson Mandela in 1994. Mandela was, of course, South Africa's first black president, and his ascendance marked the end of apartheid. Link to video of that speech, over at msnbc.com (I couldn't find anything embeddable that included his speech in entirety).