Great TED talk by Aimee Mullins: "How my legs give me super-powers."

Athlete, actor and activist Aimee Mullins talks about her prosthetic legs -- she's got a dozen amazing pairs -- and the superpowers they grant her: speed, beauty, an extra 6 inches of height ... Quite simply, she redefines what the body can be. About Aimee Mullins

A record-breaker at the Paralympic Games in 1996, Aimee Mullins has built a career as a model, actor and activist for women, sports and the next generation of prosthetics.

Aimee Mullins: How my legs give me super-powers

Google's latest privacy flap emerged this week when it announced its "interest-based" ads, which are behaviorally targeted banner ads based on a user's web-browsing activity. It's nothing particularly new or ground-breaking, and the company was kind enough to give people a way to opt out, but the way the company presented the new system to users was a little odd. It titled its blog post announcing the new system "Making ads more interesting," and it later said, "We believe there is real value to seeing ads about the things that interest you." But are better-targeted ads really something that delivers any benefit to users? The benefit to advertisers and marketers is obvious, but it's hard to see users really caring enough to forfeit some privacy just so they can help out advertisers.

But web browsing is just the tip of the iceberg: lots of marketers are looking at how to take information generated by mobile phones to hit users with targeted ads. They're not talking about the worn-out Starbucks example of hitting people's phones with a coupon when they walk past a store, but building profiles of people based on their travel patterns, favorite applications and web sites, and even gender, age and income information. Again, all of this info given up for the sake of seeing "better" or "more interesting" advertising. That really doesn't benefit the user, so why should they give up -- or be forced to give up -- all of this information?

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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arcticstoat writes "A new graphics company called Caustic Graphics reckons it's uncovered the secret of real-time ray tracing with a chip that 'enables your CPU/GPU to shade with rasterization-like efficiency.' The new chip basically off-loads ray tracing calculations and then sends the data to your GPU and CPU, enabling your PC to shade a ray-traced scene much more quickly. However, the company adds that 'if you've ever seen them demo their solutions you'll notice that while results may be fast — the image quality is underwhelming, far below the quality that ray tracing is known for.' According to Caustic, this is because the advanced shading and lighting effects usually seen in ray-traced scenes, such as caustics and refraction, can't be accelerated on a standard GPU because it can't process incoherent rays in hardware. Conversely, Caustic claims that the CausticOne 'thrives in incoherent ray tracing situations: encouraging the use of multiple secondary rays per pixel.' The company is also introducing its own API, called CausticGL, which is based on OpenGL/GLSL, which will feature Caustic's unique ray tracing extensions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This in from the comments:

Back in the late 80s, Maarten van Gelder had already come up with a set of origami gears:

Neat gears, but they only tell part of the story. Van Gelder's work is amazing, and his commitment to help explain it is fantastic.

Maarten van Gelder is a retired programmer, who has amazing skills in origami. His website details lots of his original designs.

On his site, he explains some of his history with folding paper:

At an age of about 8 years I got my first folding book. It was a Dutch translation of 'The art of Chinese paper folding for young and old' by Mrs. Maying Soong (1948). This book contains a series of models, but no explicit folding technique. So after that I didn't do real Origami, but just a little bit folding among a lot of other things.

But summer 1980 there was some information about Origami in the newspaper and I got wondering. Than at Xmas 1980 I received a book along with some real Origami paper. The next three months I did nothing but folding. I took some of the folded objects with me to my office.

Someday one of our University users came in, saw the Origami objects and told me about the Origami association. So I became a member and kept folding. Not as much as that first three months, but steady.

For several years I've been member of the editorial staff of the magazine 'Orison' of the OSN (Origami Sociëteit Nederland). And after that I've been member of the Model Commitee of the OSN for 10 years. In the meantime I've also done some work of the OSN web pages.

His site has loads of photos and links to numerous diagrams. This looks like a great place to start if you're just getting interested in origami, or if you already know it, but want to do more in fulfilling your paper-folding desires.

What do you like to fold? Have you seen stunning origami? Where do you find great resources and inspiration for learning more about origami? Tell us your thoughts in the comments, and contribute your photos and video to the MAKE Flickr pool.

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Today is the birthday of Joseph Priestley, the 18th century scientist, teacher, and political wonk who had a tremendous impact on the worlds of science and politics. He is credited with the discovery of oxygen (isolating it in its gaseous state).

Priestley has been the subject of two "recent" books, The Lunar Men (actually five years old), by Jenny Uglow, which I reviewed in MAKE Volume 17, and the recent The Invention of Air, by Steven Johnson. The Uglow book is about the Lunar Society, an amazing sort of Dorkbot of the late 18th century, whose membership rolls included Erasmus Darwin (Charles' grandfather), Josiah Wedgewood, the industrializing potter, James Watt, perfecter of the steam engine, and many more giants of science and early industrialism. Steven's book is a bio of Priestley and details his contributions to science, religion, and politics, and the significant, and frequently under-appreciated, influence he had on the founding ideals of America. In the book, Johnson points out that, for instance, in the 165 letters that passed between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, the name Benjamin Franklin was mentioned five times, George Washington three times, and Alexander Hamilton twice. Joseph Priestley, a foreign immigrant, is cited no fewer than 52 times.

From the Wikipedia entry on Priestley:

Joseph Priestley (13 March 1733 (Old Style) - 6 February 1804) was an 18th-century British theologian, Dissenting clergyman, natural philosopher, educator, and political theorist who published over 150 works. He is usually credited with the discovery of oxygen, having isolated it in its gaseous state, although Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Antoine Lavoisier also have a claim to the discovery.

During his lifetime, Priestley's considerable scientific reputation rested on his invention of soda water, his writings on electricity, and his discovery of several "airs" (gases), the most famous being what Priestley dubbed "dephlogisticated air" (oxygen). However, Priestley's determination to defend phlogiston theory and to reject what would become the Chemical Revolution eventually left him isolated within the scientific community.

Priestley's science was integral to his theology, and he consistently tried to fuse Enlightenment rationalism with Christian theism. In his metaphysical texts, Priestley attempted to combine theism, materialism, and determinism, a project that has been called "audacious and original". He believed that a proper understanding of the natural world would promote human progress and eventually bring about the Christian Millennium. Priestley, who strongly believed in the free and open exchange of ideas, advocated toleration and equal rights for religious Dissenters, which also led him to help found Unitarianism in England. The controversial nature of Priestley's publications combined with his outspoken support of the French Revolution aroused public and governmental suspicion; he was eventually forced to flee to the United States after a mob burned down his home and church in 1791.

A scholar and teacher throughout his life, Priestley also made significant contributions to pedagogy, including the publication of a seminal work on English grammar and the invention of modern historiography. These educational writings were some of Priestley's most popular works. It was his metaphysical works, however, that had the most lasting influence: leading philosophers including Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer credit them among the primary sources for utilitarianism.

Here's the video of Steven Johnson's recent appearance on The Colbert Report, talking about The Invention of Air:

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From MAKE magazine:

Check out MAKE, Volume 17: The Lost Knowledge issue!

Buy your copy in the Maker Shed
Subscribe to MAKE
Access the Digital Edition (if you're already a subscriber)

In Volume 17, MAKE goes really old school with the Lost Knowledge issue, featuring projects and articles covering the steampunk scene -- makers creating their own alternative Victorian world through modified computers, phones, cars, costumes, and other fantastic creations. Projects include an elegant Wimshurst Influence Machine (an electrostatic generator built entirely from Home Depot parts), a Florence Siphon coffee brewer, and a teacup-powered Stirling engine. This special section also covers watchmaking, letterpress printing, the early multimedia art of William Blake, and other wondrous and lost (or fading) pre-20th-century technologies.

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Last year, with all the talk of companies being "too big to fail" and governments bailing out such companies left and right, we had what seemed like a simple suggestion. Recognizing that it is possible for a company to be "too big to fail," in an intertwined economy, because the fallout would create even more problems, we suggested that a requirement for taking government money would be to become small enough to fail. That could mean spinning off parts, selling off parts, shutting down parts, exiting businesses, shrinking businesses -- whatever. There just needed to be some sort of guarantee that within a certain time frame, the company wouldn't be so tied up that if it failed it would bring down the rest of the economy. And, if a company didn't want to deal with those restrictions, then fine, it didn't need to take gov't bailout money.

The idea didn't get much traction (not surprisingly), and now some are pointing out that the opposite seems to be happening. Our solution to dealing with companies that are too big to fail has been to make them bigger and bigger, and pass off the question of "too big to fail" to other politicians in the future -- at which point the problems will likely be even bigger and harder to deal with. Propping up companies that are too big to fail, without a clear path towards making them small enough to fail, is a recipe for a future disaster.

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Urchin writes "In the early 1990s, the World Wide Web was a power-hungry monster unpopular with network administrators, says Robert Topolski, chief technologist of the Open Technology Initiative. They preferred the sleek text-only Gopher protocol. Had they been able to use data filtering technology to prioritize gopher traffic Topolski thinks the World Wide Web might not have survived. But it took computers another decade or so to be powerful enough to give administrators that option, and by that time the Web was already enormously popular." My geek imagination is now all atwitter imagining an alternate gopher-driven universe.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anonymous writes "According to Channelweb, the bloom might be off the rose in the Novell-Microsoft relationship: the two companies didn't sign a single, solitary large customer to a Novell Linux deal during the most recent quarter. 'So Novell, one of the biggest Linux distributors in the world, and Microsoft, one of the biggest companies in world history, couldn't find a single large customer on Planet Earth to buy into Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server software. Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian has stepped up and, rather than point fingers at Microsoft for that performance, put the blame on his company and its inability to strengthen its reseller channel.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lots of people wrestle with the question of what in their lives is public or private, particularly as they put more of them online. But it may pay to err on the side of caution, as plenty of instances continue to pop up to remind us that really, very little, if anything is private once it's online. Take the case of a Philadelphia Eagles stadium worker, apparently fired after he called the team "retarded" in a status update, for letting a player sign with another team. Or the New York City cop, whose update that he was watching the movie Training Day -- which features Denzel Washington as a cop who doesn't play by the rules -- in order "to brush up on proper police procedure" helped a suspect beat a gun-possession charge. Part of the issue is that as people get more and more friends online, even stuff they think is private essentially becomes public. That will undoubtedly have an effect on people's online behavior, and could hamper the growth of social networking and online life-sharing.

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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justechn writes "Tom's Hardware has an article about custom PC maker Puget Systems, who had just finished a custom $16,000 PC for one of their clients. So what exactly goes into a $16,000 system? How about: Four quad-core Opteron processors, 32 GB of memory, Windows Server 2008, Asus Xonar DX PCI Express sound card, 3Ware 9550SX-8LP SATA 3 Gb/s RAID controller, Two Western Digital 300 GB VelociRaptor hard drives in RAID 1, Two 1 TB Samsung SpinPoint F1s also in RAID 1, and Four 1 TB Samsung SpinPoint F1s in RAID 5. Puget went with MagiCool's Xtreme Nova 1080 radiator, Nine 120 mm fans, Four Koolance CPU blocks, Koolance combined pump and reservoir unit, and Cooler Master Stacker 810 case. In addition to all that hardware, it also runs very quiet and very cool. The temperature of the CPUs is 36 C at idle, 45 C at load."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TechDirt pointed out a recent bit of foolishness as a followup to California Assemblyman Joel Anderson's push to force Google and other online mapping/satellite companies to blur out schools, churches, and government buildings. When pushed, apparently his justification was that leaving these buildings un-obscured is the same as shouting fire. "News.com ran an interview with Anderson, where he attempts to defend his proposed legislation as a matter of public safety. He claims that there is no good reason why anyone would need to clearly see these buildings online, and that it can only be used for bad purposes. [...] Apparently, Anderson is the final determiner of what good people do and what bad people do with online maps."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You may have heard, recently, that some top name musicians went to Congress in support of the proposed Ticketmaster-Live Nation merger that has many people in the industry worried. Eddie Van Halen, Seal, Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins and the four members of the band Journey wrote letters to Congress favoring the deal. But, none of them mentioned a rather important fact, that Bruce Houghton is pointing out: every one of those musicians is managed or co-managed by Irving Azoff, who just so conveniently happens to be CEO of.... Ticketmaster. Doesn't that seem like a bit of a conflict of interest? Or, at the very least, something worth admitting to prior to pushing for the deal to be approved?

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Matt sez, "SF author James Morrow is hosting a film tribute to Lon Chaney Jr. at Seattle's Northwest Film Forum on Monday. Seattle area happy mutants might enjoy an opportunity to come down, meet James Morrow and enjoy some very cool atomic age B-Movies."

Jim Morrow's absolutely charming -- this sounds like a hot date to me, the kind of place you can take a prospective mate to and discover her/his romantic fitness in a single evening.

Award-winning author, satirist, and armchair cineaste James Morrow hosts Ghost of Frankenstein (1942, 60 minutes), and The Mummy’s Curse, two classic 1940’s “B” movies featuring Lon Chaney, Jr.

James Morrow, author of Towing Jehovah, The Last Witchfinder, and The Philosopher’s Apprentice, will be introducing these two classic 1940’s “B” movies featuring Lon Chaney, Jr. Morrow’s most recent novella, a postmodern extravaganza entitledShambling Towards Hiroshima, recounts the extraordinary adventures of Syms Thorley, a Hollywood horror actor based on Chaney, Jr. In 1945 Syms’s career takes a bizarre turn when the U.S. Navy hires him to don a rubber lizard suit and impersonate the giant mutant iguana Gorgantis, a new and terrifying biological weapon that might, if Syms can give a sufficiently persuasive performance, convince the Japanese to lay down their arms and end WWII. Morrow’s presentation will include critical observations and historical tidbits of interest to film scholars and movie buffs alike.

A Tribute to Lon Chaney, Jr. (Thanks, Matt!)

Time Magazine's published a photo essay on the abandoned, rotting, magnificent buildings in Detroit by French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre. Detroit and Buenos Aires are probably the two most interesting places on the planet for me right now, because, put together, they answer the question, "What do you do when your industry and your economy utterly collapse? What happens when the numbers on the spreadsheets tell you that the bricks in the walls have no value?"

Detroit's Beautiful, Horrible Decline (via MeFi)

Max Alexander's father and father-in-law died the same month. One received a typical American funeral. The other was a more DIY affair, including a homemade casket. During the course of the two funerals, Alexander learned a lot about the death industry and the resurgence of homebrew funerals. He wrote up his experiences for Smithsonian Magazine. From the essay:

In life both men had been devout Catholics, but one was a politically conservative advertising man, the other a left-wing journalist; you'll have to trust me that they liked each other. One was buried, one was cremated. One was embalmed, one wasn't. One had a typical American funeral-home cotillion; one was laid out at home in a homemade coffin. I could tell you that sorting out the details of these two dead fathers taught me a lot about life, which is true. But what I really want to share is that dead bodies are perfectly OK to be around, for a while....

A movement toward home after-death care has convinced thousands of Americans to deal with their own dead. A nonprofit organization called Crossings maintains that besides saving lots of money, home after-death care is greener than traditional burials—bodies pumped full of carcinogenic chemicals, laid in metal coffins in concrete vaults under chemically fertilized lawns—which mock the biblical concept of "dust to dust." Cremating an unembalmed body (or burying it in real dirt) would seem obviously less costly and more eco-friendly. But more significant, according to advocates, home after-death care is also more meaningful for the living.

"The Surprising Satisfactions of a Home Funeral"

Judging from their Web site, Crossings is a fascinating non-profit organization. They're a clearinghouse of information about home funerals and "green" burials. Apparently, as long as you're not in Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Nebraska, New York, it's perfectly legal for anyone to play the role of funeral director. Crossings even run, er, "hands on workshops" to teach you how to deal with the logistics of death at home. I'm not sure whether hands-on means that they provide a practice body or you have to bring your own. From the Crossings Web site:

How is home funeral care different from funeral care by a funeral director?
Funeral care refers to the time between the last breath and final resting - whether that be cremation or burial. Most people hand over this care to a funeral home, but in so doing limit their options to costly, impersonal, and sometimes invasive procedures provided by an emotionally uninvolved funeral director. Home funeral care refers to one's family and friends performing these last deeds of love - including the process of washing, dressing, and laying out their loved one's body....

What about embalming? You may be surprised to learn that embalming is almost nevcr required for the deceased. There are some situations where this is so, such as when out of state transportation is necessary. For the most part, however, embalming is not required and is undesirable due to the highly toxic chemicals used and the invasive procedures required for embalming. Embalming only delays the breakdown of the body, it does not prevent this breakdown. It also denatures the body and artificially changes it at a time when peace and tender handling are most important. Caution: Most funeral directors require embalming if you use their funeral home and choose to have a viewing of the deceased.

Crossings: Caring For Our Own At Death

Oh, and the Do-It-Yourself Coffins and Fancy Coffins books pictured above are real. From the DIY Coffins book description:

All of the tools and techniques needed to produce strong and beautiful coffins are presented here in clear, concise language. Color photographs illustrate every step in the construction of three pet-size and three human-size coffins. Detailed patterns are provided and different box construction techniques are revealed. One box design even doubles as a beautiful blanket chest or coffee table. Once the coffins are built, the discussion turns to the many moldings, appliques, linings, and finishes which may be used to make each coffin unique. A color gallery is also provided. With full color illustrations and detailed instructions, this book is a challenge to the novice and a joy for the experienced craftsman.

"Do-It-Yourself Coffins: For Pets and People"
"Fancy Coffins to Make Yourself"

Here's a TechFlash piece where a Google exec talks about a Twitter-like service. "There's relatively little data in Twitter," Bershad said. "I think if you could take a Twitter-like service and combine it with a lot of other data sources about the users, you might be able to come up with something more interesting."

He's thinking about having his own twitter.

Interesting!

Leo Laporte already has one.

http://army.twit.tv/

So do I. (Though far more humble than Leo's.)

http://home.smallpicture.com/

As you read those sentences, does something bother you?

Pause for a moment and think about it before you read on.

We're using the word twitter in a new way.

Up till now it was a company and a service.

Is it a trademark? Curiously there's nothing on the site (that I can find) that indicates that it is.

So here's the question.

If you accept the premise that some day there will be many twitter-like services, that it will be common for blogs to have their own community twitter like Leo and I do. And that corporations will have twitters for coordinating projects (narrating your work). That there will be services that are competitive with the original Twitter, perhaps from Google and Facebook, and others. If you accept some of these premises, then the question is -- what will they be called?

Will they be called microblogging services, which is the current nomenclature among techies, or will people take the shortest path and call a twitter a twitter?

Curious to know what people think.

Thomas M Hughes writes "Despite its learning curve, LaTeX is pretty much the standard in academic writing. By abstracting out the substance from the content, it becomes possible to focus heavily on the writing, and then deal with formatting later. However, LaTeX is starting to show its age, specifically when it comes to collaborative work. One solution to this is to simply pair up LaTeX with version control software (such as Subversion) to allow multiple collaborators to work on the same document at one time. But adding subversion to the mix only seems to increase the learning curve. Is there a way to combine the power of LaTeX with the power of Subversion without scaring off a non-technical writer? The closest I can approximate would be to have something like Lyx (to hide the learning curve of LaTeX) with integrated svn (to hide the learning curve of svn). However, this doesn't seem available. Google Docs is popular right now, but Docs has no support for LaTeX, citation management, or anything remotely resembling decent formatting options. Are there other choices out there?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The latest Ignite Show is up; this one features Andrew Schneider's DIY experimental performance devices... and cupcakes!

The format of Ignite is 20 slides that auto-advance after 15 seconds. When you are on stage giving an Ignite talk this can be quite exhilarating (sometimes terrifying). The added adrenalin really adds to the presentation and I think that will come through on the small screen.

Ignite has spread to over 20 cities in the past two years. We want to highlight speakers from around the world with the show. If your town or city has lots of geeks throw an Ignite to bring them together!

Ignite: Andrew Schneider - Experimental Performance Devices

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We've seen some awesome projects involving 3D printers over the last few years on the MAKE Blog. That same creativity drove Scott Crump, CEO of Stratasys, Inc., to set out and make his own 3D printer back in 1988. Since then, their business has grown, but Stratasys still wants to connect with Makers, builders and tinkerers, so we're happy to welcome them to Make: Day this Saturday.

Stop by their tables at Make: Day to see one of Stratasys' earliest 3D printer along side their latest desktop 3D printer, uPrint.

BONUS! For all you CAD designers who have a printable design, we've got confirmation that you can actually bring in a .STL file on a your flash drive and Stratasys will print it right there for you! For those who don't bring their own design, they plan on printing a bunch of money clips for visitors.

Make: Day is this Saturday, March 14th from 10am -3pm at the Science Museum of Minnesota!

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Just two months ago, we were pointing out how difficult it was to opt-out of copyright and put content into the public domain. We noted that it wasn't solved by Creative Commons -- who had a series of licenses that all relied on copyright, and none that removed all restrictions. Looks like the CC folks were listening (not to me, necessarily, but to others who raised similar issues). They have now released a new offering to help content creators declare their work to be in the public domain. They're calling it CC0. While it looks just like other CC licenses, it's not actually a "license," but a waiver/declaration that the content is in the public domain. This is a fantastic move, and we'll certainly be checking it out in more detail to see if it makes sense for us and the content posted here.

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Here's Penn Jillette -- a teetotaller for all substances -- calling for the legalization of marijuana on the incredibly sensible grounds that a) Many presidents, including recent ones, have smoked pot; b) Lots of other happy, well-adjusted people smoke pot; c) Imprisoning pot smokers by the millions costs a lot of money and ruins the lives of millions of otherwise fine Americans.

I'm with Penn. I don't take any mood-altering substances -- not even refined sugar! Well, OK, I'll have up to two cups of coffee, but only before noon (I bend this rule while travelling and jetlagged, though I shouldn't). I don't drink alcohol.

But hell, if you want to change your state of mind with a chemical, it's your goddamned state of mind to change. What liberty could be more fundamental than the liberty to choose how you think? Taking mood-altering substances is, in and of itself, victimless (though the drug trade that's sustained by drug prohibition has plenty of victims, and people can certainly destroy their lives with drugs, a tragedy that is vastly exacerbated by prohibition). I've lost several dear friends to drug overdoses and none of them were suicidal: they died because street dope varies wildly in potency and the heroin they took was purer than they'd anticipated.

As far as I'm concerned, everything that we call "drugs" -- including crystal meth, heroin, crack, and other drugs that destroy lives in vast swaths -- should be legalized and brought into the light of day so that the people who have problems with them can get help without the stigma of criminality and so that the people who don't have problems with them can get on with doing their thing.

Penn Says: Legalize Marijuana

techprophet writes to mention that a new take on self-healing plastic could provide a long-term solution to scratched screens. The new polymer, developed by scientists at the University of Southern Mississippi, uses UV light to reform bonds between molecules rather than embedded healing agents of similar systems. "At the core of their design is polyurethane, which is an elastic polymer that already has decent scratch resistance. To enhance its ability to withstand mechanical damage, Ghosh and Urban added two more components, OXE and CHI. OXE has an unstable chemical structure (a four-membered ring containing three carbons and one oxygen) that makes it prone to being split open. CHI is UV sensitive. The idea is that, if the polyurethane gets damaged by a scratch, the unstable ring structure of OXE will open to create two reactive ends. Then, UV light can trigger CHI to form new links with the reactive ends of OXE and thereby fix the break in the polymer."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Roq La Rue's Kirsten Anderson just got a clutch of fantastic signed Mark Ryden prints to sell on behalf of a private collector, including a few classic works that are scarcely seen for sale. The prints are too rich for my blood, but it's still fun to window shop. Ryden Prints

Dale tweets: "Did not know that you should reformat flash memory cards frequently for your camera. More to do." And points to this New York Times Gadgetwise column:

Reformatting ensures that the data on the card and the file structure are clean, which will help you avoid error messages or missing images. And the longer you go without reformatting a card, the better the chances that it will become corrupted. Another reason to reformat is, over time, your card will hold fewer images if you never reformat. So while it may stow 100 photos today, in a year that number could drop to 90.

Who knew? I've never reformatted a memory card in my life. As Dale says: more to do.

Camera Memory Card Tip: Reformat Often

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Continuing our exploration of Make, Volume 17, "The Lost Knowledge issue," we'll chat with Heather McDougal, author of "Your Own Wunderkammer," a how-to on building Cabinets of Wonders. She'll explain how anyone can make a mini-museum of the awesome and the bizarre in their own home. For more on the subject, visit Heather's blog: Cabinet of Wonders. Also, the hosts of Make: Talk will present their favorite tricks, tips, and tools for makers, and we'll be giving away prizes!

Make: Talk live show in 10 minutes (12pm, March 12, 2009)

Defeat Globalism writes to tell us that many journalists, bloggers, and media law specialists are concerned about a new ruling by a US Court of Appeals in Boston. The new ruling is allowing a former Staples employee to sue the company for libel after an email was sent out informing other employees that he had been fired for violations of company procedures regarding expenses reimbursements. "Staples has asked the full appeals court to reconsider the ruling, and 51 news organizations have filed a friend-of-the-court brief saying that the decision, if allowed to stand, 'will create a precedent that hinders the media's ability to rely on truthful publication to avoid defamation liability.' But Wendy Sibbison, the Greenfield appellate lawyer for the fired Staples employee, Alan S. Noonan, said the ruling applies only to lawsuits by private figures against private defendants, that is, defendants not involved in the news business, over purely private matters."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this month, we wrote about how a politician in California, Assemblyman Joel Anderson, was looking to force Google and other providers of online mapping/satellite offerings to blur images of schools, churches and government buildings. News.com ran an interview with Anderson, where he attempts to defend his proposed legislation as a matter of public safety. He claims that there is no good reason why anyone would need to clearly see these buildings online, and that it can only be used for bad purposes:

Who wants to know that level of detail? Bad people do.

Apparently, Anderson is the final determiner of what good people do and what bad people do with online maps. Then, when pushed on the fact that forcing companies to blur images of public locations might not pass constitutional muster, Anderson claimed that it was the equivalent of yelling fire:

But since when do you have a First Amendment right to yell fire? This falls under the same category.

I'm curious how that's anywhere near the same category. One is deceiving a bunch of people with an alarming false statement, where the resulting response can put people in danger -- and the other is an accurate representation of a building. Am I missing something?

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Some people care about bags; obsession is a better word. (See the Bags subforum of the Every Day Carry Forums for evidence.) How are the straps attached? Is that 1050 denier, or 1600? Makers like Crumpler, Ortlieb and Maxpedition inspire impressive brand-loyalty, but probably no bag maker has customers more enthusiastic than Tom Bihn's. (There really is a Tom Bihn, too -- he's been designing travel bags since he was a kid; now he has a factory with "all the cool toys" to experiment with designs and materials.) When I started looking for a protective case for my MacBook Pro, I discovered that a few of my coworkers were part of the Bihn Army, and after some Tupperware-style evangelism I was convinced to buy a few items from the Bihn line-up: a backpack (used); then a messenger bag (new); then a mid-sized briefcase, used, which is now my portable filing cabinet. (Take this bias for what you will; I stuck with my previous messenger bag for more than a decade.) For a just-completed trip to Israel, which I couldn't quite make in true one-bag travel fashion, I brought along one of the newest Bihn Bags — the Checkpoint Flyer — and found it to be worth its (considerable) price. Read on for my review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Recently on Offworld, Ragdoll Metaphysics columnist Jim Rossignol officially declared 2009 the year of the real-time strategy genre, French guerrilla artist Space Invader was caught on film, Dr. Mario talked Universal Health Care, and a new group is taking a games-centric approach turning NES/Famicom clones into classroom computers for the developing world. We also saw indie things: an upcoming PC game that lets you ghost-ride a moon rover, an excellent customizable pixel-platformer browser game, submissions open for worldwide indie showcase Indiecade, a teaser for the Alien Hominid/Castle Crashers dev's new game (above), a fantastic looking new downloadable DS game from the Boy and his Blob remake team, an audio preview of a new game from the creator of I Wish I Were The Moon, and a new DIY 8-bit retro console for you to make your own games. Console/handheld/PC things: the first video of Steven Spielberg/EA's Boom Blox sequel, a fascinating look at the peculiar appeal of Peggle, amazing new games built with just 4K of Java, action-man kung-fu-grip gaming with the PS3's Rag Doll Kung Fu, rhythm in real life with a new DS game, and retro-futurist downloadable Wii music game Bit Trip: Beat coming on Monday. iPhone things: a multiplayer game about personal/inter-relational growth, love, and money called KarmaStar, Japan signing up for the iPhone with a new dedicated magazine, ragdoll physics injuries with Stair Dismount and board game legend Reiner Knizia seeking iPhone devs. Toy things, and things to wear: a Metal Gear crossover with vinyl art progenitor Michael Lau, a custom Earthbound toy, a new games-like site from Argentina cutesters DGPH, a new Nintendo character T-shirt from kaiju artist Lamour Supreme for 8bitpeoples, and UNIQLO's massive game crossover T-shirt line revealed. Musical things: the excellent near Ed-Banger-esque soundtrack to iPhone game Edge, chiptuner Tettix vs Fighting Games, Rockstar/Timbaland's music tracker app back on track for a 2009 release, shoegaze made of hacked-firmware dot matrix printers, and Chamillionaire, Kanye, and Jay-Z done 8-bit style.

Just posted! Our hands-on preview of Canon's new perspective control lens, the TS-E 24mm F3.5 L II. As one of the more interesting announcements of a somewhat uninspiring PMA 2009, Canon's new TS-E design allows independent rotation of the tilt and shift axes relative to each other and the camera, answering the prayers of many an architecture and landscape photographer. We've had a pre-production model in the dpreview offices for just enough time to bring you a description of how the new mechanism works; click through to find out.

The Scopitone Archive is a fascinating site dedicated to 1960s video jukeboxes. Scopitones and Cineboxes were first introduced in Europe in 1959-1960 and came to the US a few years later. The coin-operated machines were quite popular but were swept into the dustbin of dead media by the 1970s. The Scopitone Archive is a near-complete catalog of the prototypical "music videos" made for Scopitones, Cineboxes, Coloramas, and other similar machines. From the Scopitone Archive:

Like Soundies (the films made for the Mills Panoram film jukebox in the 1940s), Cinebox films were printed so that the image is projected backwards when shown on a normal 16mm projector. The soundtrack is also printed in a non-standard manner, with the result that the sound lags behind the image by about half a second when projected on a normal 16mm projector. Perhaps because of these oddities, or because the Cinebox was never as popular in the United States as the Scopitone, Cinebox films are much harder to find than Scopitone films.

In the summer of 1965, there were reportedly 612 films available for the Cinebox.

Scopitone Archive

Derek Bledsoe, Boing Boing Video producer, is blogging daily Boing Boing Video episodes while Xeni's on the road in Africa.

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On Wednesday, March 11, 2009 the United Nations' Commission of Narcotic Drugs held its 52nd session in Vienna, Austria, just10 years after Kofi Annan's pledge to have a "drug free world" by 2008. Representatives from around the world attended the conference voicing support and opposition to the centuries old "war on drugs."

Working with Witness and the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union, we cut together excerpts from "Dare to Question? Using Video to Take on UN Drug Policies" and other testimonials appealing to the United Nations to reconsider its hardline policies combating the cultivation and use of illicit drugs.

Most experts agree that an ideal world would be a drug-free world but perhaps we should put that on the shelf among other concepts like a world without war, disease, or Fox News.

Some interesting facts according to drugstatistics.com:

75% of drug related arrests are related to marijuana 65% of drug related arrests are for simple possession of marijuana

The Hungarian Civil Liberties Union also staged a press conference at the entrance of the Vienna International Center speaking from wire cages, attempting to draw attention to unjust penalties and human rights abuses of drug offenders around the world.

We'd like to especially thank the Director of the HCLU, Mr. Balázs Dénes and Istvan Gábor Takács, HCLU's Video Advocacy Guru and Peter Sárosi, DPP Director. To learn more, you can visit Dare to Act and Drug Reporter.

Flash video embed above, click "full" icon inside the player to view it large. You can download the MP4 here. Our YouTube channel is here, you can subscribe to our daily video podcast on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are the archives for Boing Boing Video.

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(Special thanks to Boing Boing Video's hosting and publishing provider Episodic.)

Penguinisto writes "According to CNET, Knowledge Ecology International's FOIA request for information about ACTA was denied. ACTA is the pending copyright treaty believed to have been authored by lobbyists for the content cartels. Even stranger, the denial cited 'national security reasons (PDF). While it is not unusual for the White House of any administration to block FOIA requests for national security reasons, one would think that a treaty affecting civil interests alone wouldn't qualify for such secrecy. Not exactly sure what involvement the former RIAA mouthpiece Donald Verelli (a recent Obama pick for the DOJ) may have in this." KEI is not alone; the European Parliament wants to see the ACTA documents too.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I’ve always loved the constraint of a 4-track cassette recorder. So when I first came across FourTrack, a simple recording app for the iPhone, I figured I’d give it a whirl. I grabbed my trusty ukulele and laid down a little tune I often play to the kids. The audio records right from the iPhone’s built-in mic. The quality is impressive. Then I grabbed my three year old son Jack’s toy percussion kit, and banged along to the uke track. In literally 5 minutes, I had a finished song.

FourTrack let’s you download the raw track files by temporarily creating a web server, giving you an IP address to grab the files individually via wifi. You can then drag those files into an audio editor on your desktop. I dragged mine to GarageBand, quickly added a stupid bass line, applied a British amp distortion to the uke, then exported it to an mp3.

All in total, it took about about a half hour to create the final version. With vocals by our 8-month old girl, as well as me telling Jack to “hold on” while I finished up the drums. It’s certainly not a hit — but this app might just be what I need to get back into music making.

Slashdot points us to the rather unfortunate news that Amazon has sent a DMCA takedown notice to MobileRead, concerning a link that site had to a small piece of software that would allow ebooks purchased elsewhere (other than Amazon) to work on the Kindle. There are a number of issues here, all of which seem troubling.

First, MobileRead never hosted the software in question, but merely had links to the tool and some instructions. Such a takedown is only supposed to be used for sites that actually have the infringing material. However, thanks to the wonderful chilling effects of the DMCA, MobileRead removed the links.

Second, it's not at all clear how this script violates the DMCA. It doesn't remove copy protection at all. It just serves to open up the device for other eBooks to be used on the device. All too often we've been seeing the DMCA used in cases like this, where companies are treating the DMCA's anti-circumvention clauses to mean that they can stop just about any script they don't like from being available. This is clearly not what the DMCA was intended to do.

Third, the script was useful for allowing legally obtained ebooks from other stores to be read on the device. In other words, it was not a tool for copyright infringement, but for reading legally obtained works. This is a massive problem with the DMCA's anti-circumvention clause: it makes circumvention itself illegal, even if the circumvention is used for non-infringing purposes.

Fourth, Amazon's decision to send a DMCA takedown, in light of all of the above, is bothersome. One would hope that a company like Amazon wouldn't be quite so aggressive in trying to block out competition, in such ways -- especially to the extent of abusing copyright law. There have been a bunch of lawsuits in the past that have pretty much all said using the DMCA solely for anti-competitive purposes is not a legitimate use of the DMCA -- hopefully, someone can send Amazon's lawyers the various cases to make it clear to them that they're on the wrong side of the law here.

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This is creepy and weird in a totally "I SO want that on MY Roomba" sorta way! It's a cover for the Roomba, the "i-Toad," made from needle felted Romney and Jacob wool and glass eyes. And you thought the housepets were freaked out about your Roomba before!

I-Toad

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Tabloid journalism is often worse than none at all. But now, the NY Times reports, the media business' bottom feeders are going after the corporate sleazeballs who blew up the economy.

The tabloid media, of course, have always peered into the excesses of the rich and famous with a mix of puritan disapproval and voyeurism. But these outlets and other news organizations are now recording troubling uses of taxpayer money at country clubs, private airports and glamorous retreats and, in so doing, explicitly tapping into a fierce populist anger at corporate America, and even pressuring Congress to hold companies accountable.

TMZ, a Web site better known for unflattering paparazzi shots of Britney Spears and Rihanna, drove mainstream coverage and Congressional outrage with a blog post late last month that exclaimed, “Bailout Bank Blows Millions Partying in L.A.” The site reported that Northern Trust, a bank that received $1.6 billion in taxpayer money, had hosted hundreds of clients and employees at a golf tournament and a series of parties in Southern California. “Your tax dollars, hard at work,” the site wrote.

Northern Trust never sought the bailout funds, but agreed to take them last fall at the behest of the government. Regardless, the photos of Tiffany gift bags and the grainy video clips of Chicago and Sheryl Crow performing for the group angered readers —as well as Congressional Democrats, who demanded in a letter that Northern Trust repay what the company “frittered away on these lavish events.” The bank said it would do so “as quickly as prudently possible,” news that earned four exclamation points from TMZ.

Quite a few smart people I know seem to think that shit is really about to hit the fan. I'm talking hysteria, riots, complete global market collapse, extreme chaos. We'll see. If the apocalypse does arrive, I hope I can scalp my ringside seats. It's in that spirit that cultural critic Mark Dery took a look back at his classic millennial meditation, the 1999 book Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink. Mark has decided to offer up essays from that must-read in PDF form on Scribd, starting with "Cotton Candy Autopsy: Deconstructing Psycho-Killer Clowns." From the essay description:

Using as his point of departure Lon Chaney's chilling observation that "there's nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight," Dery deconstructs the postmodern archetype of the psychopathic clown. In this perversely funny, closely argued essay, Dery ranges broadly over the psychic geography of American culture. Balm for the souls of those scarred for life by childhood encounters with balloon-twisting bogeymen in fright wigs.

Keywords: evil clowns, clownaphobia, John Wayne Gacy, Cacophony Society, culture jamming, Batman, The Joker, R.K. Sloane, Shakes the Clown, Jim Knipfel, The Fool, Stephen King's IT, Quentin Tarantino, American pathologies, Bakhtin, the carnivalesque, Arkham Asylum.

More context on Mark Dery's Shovelware blog

Cotton Candy Autopsy: Deconstructing Psycho-Killer Clowns"

Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (Amazon)

An anonymous reader writes "Following the long-awaited release of FFmpeg 0.5, Phoronix has conducted an interview with three FFmpeg developers (Diego Biurrun, Baptiste Coudurier, and Robert Swain) about this project's recent release. In this interview they talk about moving to a 3/6-month release cycle, the criteria for version 1.0, Blu-Ray support on Linux, OpenCL and GPGPU acceleration, multi-threading FFmpeg, video APIs, their own video codecs, and legal challenges they have run into."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I've just finished Thomas Geoghegan's classic memoir of his life as a labor lawyer, "Which Side Are You On?: Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back," in its revised, 2004 edition (which includes a lengthy afterword on labor in the 2000s). This is one of the best books I've read about labor politics in America, striking a balance between the romance and heroism of the best labor struggles in US history -- the workers who risked everything to bring us vacation pay, a minimum wage, the weekend, overtime, an end to child labor, and fundamental free speech and free association rights -- and the venality, pettiness and criminality of the worst of labor, from the big unions' historic exclusion of the poor and non-whites to the corruption, violence and fraud that has dogged labor through its American history.

Throughout, Geoghegan keep the focus where it belongs: on the injustices faced by working people -- from labor, from management, from government -- and on the failures of these systems to improve their lot on life, and looks deeply into history, politics and sociology to explain why and how labor has failed laborers.

Geoghegan is a lifelong, old-time labor lawyer whose practice has encompassed defending unions from management to defending workers from unions -- representing clients whose corrupt Work Agents have had them beaten up, smeared and excluded; representing workers who've been robbed of their pensions, unfairly dismissed, even arrested, under the most shameful, sleazy circumstances. He writes like a poet, like a Hunter Thompson crossed with Studs Terkel, full of humility, wry humor, and a burning anger at all that's wrong in the world. He tells the stories of the fights he's fought -- with, for and against the Teamsters, the mine workers, nurses, pilots -- from union elections to wildcat strikes.

Geoghegan is unabashedly pro-union, even though he's seen the worst of what unions can become. In a world in which employers hold all the cards -- times like now, when every worker worries about job security -- workers who fight on their own to demand justice (fair pay, safe working conditions, fair treatment, pensions) always lose. Workers who fight together can win -- have won, anyway.

Of particular interest to me was Geoghegan's account of the changes in American labor law over the years, the systematic gutting of the legislation that unions won in the first half of the 1900s, changes that moved the fight from the right to strike to the right to unionize to the right to receive your pension to the right to be treated as an employee at all. In Geoghegan's view, it's this legislative failure that's put labor into its death-spiral -- and it was labor's failure to stand against legislative reform that paid the way for it.

It's hard to love imperfect things -- countries, movements, people -- but it's also fundamentally adult to acknowledge the imperfections in the things that matter to you, and to fight to improve them rather than writing them off.

For everyone who's ever retreated to the pat, easy position that "labor's gone too far," Geoghegan's book is an important, nuanced, gripping and immensely enjoyable rebuttal: proof that in many places, labor didn't go far enough.

Which Side Are You On?: Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back, Revised Edition

Well, well, well. You want to know why some journalists seem to be having so much trouble adapting to a changing marketplace? Perhaps it's because the folks who are teaching them their trade are equally as clueless. We've certainly seen it before, but this latest one is pretty stunning. Jay Rose points us to the news that Columbia journalism professor Ari Goldman, who also is the coordinator for the school's big "Reading & Writing I" class (a core component at what's considered to be the top of the top in journalism schools), told his class on the first day: "Fuck new media" and said that new media training was just "playing with toys."

While his point (as clarified later) is clearly that journalism skills, by themselves, are separate from understanding new media (i.e., you can learn important journalism skills that have nothing to do with new media), it still highlights how poorly he's preparing some of these students (most, we'd hope, know better on their own). To be a successful journalist these days, will require a closer connection to the community -- and that's going to be done via these new media tools. Pretending that the process of doing journalism is entirely the same with or without these tools is wrong. The entire nature of journalism is changing, and those who say "fuck new media" may discover it works the other way around.

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An anonymous reader writes "Cyber Warfare is a hot topic these days. A major reorganization may be looming, but a critical component is a culture where technologists can thrive. Two recent articles address this subject. Lieutenant Colonel Greg Conti and Colonel Buck Surdu recently published an article in the latest DoD IA Newsletter stating that 'The Army, Navy, and Air Force all maintain cyberwarfare components, but these organizations exist as ill-fitting appendages (PDF, pg. 14) that attempt to operate in inhospitable cultures where technical expertise is not recognized, cultivated, or completely understood.' In his TaoSecurity Blog Richard Bejtlich added 'When I left the Air Force in early 2001, I was the 31st of the last 32 eligible company grade officers in the Air Force Information Warfare Center to separate from the Air Force rather than take a new nontechnical assignment.' So, Slashdot, how has the military treated you and your technical friends? What changes are needed?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the University of Miami and at the Universities of Tokyo and Tohoku, in Japan, have discovered a spin battery effect: the ability to store energy into the magnetic spin of a material and to later extract that energy as electricity, without a chemical reaction. The researchers have built an actual device to demonstrate the effect that has a diameter about that of a human hair. This is a potentially game-changing discovery that could affect battery and other technologies. Quoting: Although the actual device... cannot even light up an LED..., the energy that might be stored in this way could potentially run a car for miles. The possibilities are endless, Barnes said.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Another featured Maker at Make: Day!

Keith Braafladt of the Science Museum of Minnesota is hosting an awesome hands-on activity using Scratch programming. Visitors can get a brief overview of the Scratch and learn how to use it to generate sounds/music from the manipulation of small kitchen sponges attached to a sensor board.

Scratch is an awesome introduction to computer programming, it's super accessible and lets kids learn without feeling like they're learning.

Make: Day is this Saturday, March 14th from 10am -3pm at the Science Museum of Minnesota!

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The folks who make the "cratemen" around Melbourne were invited to make a float for the Adelaide Fringe Festival, and here's what they came up with. From their account:

We were reluctant however to simply relocate our street based work into a radically different arena. Instead we were interested in the idea of a parade as being a cross between performance art, sculpture, and audience participation.

The crate sphere was designed to be rolled down the street as the final act in the parade. Comprising of 688 milk crates and being over 4.5 meters high, it had an estimated weight of over 700 kilograms. It was hoped that upon seeing us struggle with the beast, members of the audience would join in, and help us roll the sphere to a glorious end!

Unfortunately the reality was somewhat different.

People in their curiosity came closer and closer to the ball - but were reluctant to get involved and help, or move out of its way when it threatened to crush them. Our cries of distress were misinterpreted as part of the 'theatre' of the situation, as we struggled to maintain control. After completing about a quarter of the parade route, the organizers and the police decided to pull the plug, and ordered us to stop the ball.

It was rolled to the side of the street, and left to sit in a 'no parking' zone. Here it sat for a day or so, puzzling passers by, a strange visitor to the quaint streets of Adelaide."

What do you think they used to attach the crates to one another? Zip ties? Via Wooster Collective.

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I missed this one when it initially happened, but it looks like the MPAA is following in the footsteps of the RIAA -- who recently laid off a bunch of folks. Apparently the MPAA quickly followed suit and drastically scaled back after the studios cut the MPAA's funding by about 15 to 20%. Apparently some of the entertainment companies are finally realizing that the strategies employed by the RIAA and MPAA (lobbying for favorable laws and suing the crap out of anyone who dares to innovate) aren't actually helping them build a stronger business. Of course, it seems likely that they'll keep making the wrong moves, even at a reduced budget -- but maybe, just maybe, they'll finally start to realize that their recent strategy has been a colossal failure.

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TaeKwonDood writes "Do you want the bad news first or the good news? The good news is that about 80% of Americans think science knowledge is 'very important' to our future. The bad news is most of those people think it's up to someone else to get knowledgeable. Only 15% actually know how much of the planet is covered in water (47% if you accept a rough approximation of the exact number) and over 40% think dinosaurs and humans cavorted together like in some sort of 'Land Of The Lost' episode. What to do? Pres. Obama thinks merit pay for teachers makes sense. Yes, it will enrage the teachers' union, but it might inspire better people to go into science teaching. It's either that or accept that almost 50% of Americans won't know how long it takes the earth to go around the sun."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Paper Forest has a post about a Japanese artist living in France, Aoyama Hina. Hina says of her work:

They are super fine lacy-paper-cuttings done by a simple pair of scissors. My passion is to create a finest cutoff beyond the level of the very time-consuming needle lace making.

I don't follow traditional but I am trying to create a mixture of the traditional and modern styles and to produce my own world through this super fine lacy-paper-cuttings technique.

That's right. Regular scissors. Amazing.

IntriCut: The paper work of Aoyama Hina [Thanks, Patti!]

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Soon after the announcement of Samsung's 'NX' hybrid interchangeable lens system at PMA 2009 we met up with Mr Seung Soo Park, Vice President of the Strategic Marketing Team and Mr Choong-Hyun Hwang, Vice President of the Strategic Marketing Team's Product Planning Group from Samsung Digital Imaging Company to see if we could find out any more about their plans for the system. Check out the interview after the link...

A reader sends in news of what sounds like a hell of an offer:

The Hugo Awards and the Nebula Awards are the traditional yardsticks for fantasy and science fiction writing. Since 1953 when the Hugos began, (the Nebulas started in 1965) there have been 82 titles awarded one or the other prize - and 19 titles with the distinctive honor of winning both.

The Fine Books Company in Rochester, Michigan, is offering first editions of all the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novels for a cool $116,530. From Asimov to Zelazny, every book which won either (or both) award is here. And that's not all.

The listing includes 126 books, and 95% of them are signed or inscribed, and in fine or better condition.

David Aronovitz, from The Fine Books Company, describes the collection as a unique gathering of books that has never been offered for sale anywhere before and in all likelihood will never be offered again.

Science Fiction and Fantasy First Editions

Nothing complements the thousand-yard-stare of a gamer who's been through the Console Wars and seen the worst atrocities that toons can wreak against sprites than a medal to celebrate your achievement. Super Mandolini's "Console Wars Veteran" pins are those medals.

Console Wars Veteran I
Console Wars Veteran II
Console Wars Veteran III
Console Wars Veteran IV

(via Wonderland)

From the NYCResistor crew comes this action-packed crash-course in capacitors - complete with a cliffhanger ending! Here's hoping the saga continues with a miniature rescue mission via shrink ray (they must have one in their somewhere, right?)

If after that, cap functionality still seems a bit fuzzy, check out this rather helpful little web demonstration from Molecuar Expressions.

... and of course there's always this guy -

;)

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krou writes "The National Security Archive at George Washington University has awarded its 2009 Rosemary Award to the FBI for worst freedom of information performance (PDF of the award). Previous winners have been the CIA and the Treasury. The NSA notes that 'The FBI's reports to Congress show that the Bureau is unable to find any records in response to two-thirds of its incoming FOIA requests on average over the past four years, when the other major government agencies averaged only a 13% "no records" response to public requests.' The FBI's explanation, according to the NSA, is that 'files are indexed only by reference terms that have to be manually applied by individual agents,' and even then, 'agents don't always index all relevant terms.' Furthermore, 'unless a requester specifically asks for a broader search, the FBI will only look in a central database of electronic file names at FBI headquarters in Washington.' Any search will therefore 'miss any internal or cross-references to people who are not the subject of an investigation, any records stored at other FBI offices around the country, and any records created before 1970.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader from the Macmod forum wrote in with this appealing hack: "This is one of the coolest mods I've seen all year. Mac Moder EdsJunk submitted this mod to our forums late Thursday night. By cracking open a MacBook he was able to put a second monitor inside of the screen. The end result is sweet. The second monitor can make the Apple logo have any kind of background, like the clown fish, or the flurry screen saver."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's a group in the UK called "MusicTank," which is supposed to represent something of a "think tank" around the music industry. It was the head of MusicTank, back at Midem, who "joked" about how everyone there could solve the industry's problems, because all the stakeholders were present, "except the consumers, since they can't afford to be here." That should give you an idea of one of the main reasons why the industry is in so much trouble. It never really considers the folks who actually listen to the music to be a serious constituent.

That's become obvious again, as MusicTank is out pushing its new whitepaper, called "Let's Sell Recorded Music!", which is based on a series of talks that the group held. But reading through the actual paper, three things quickly become clear:

1. The group started with the wrong premise: how to sell recorded music. What they should have been looking at was how to make money from recorded music. The two things are quite different, and starting with the wrong premise entirely will lead you down the wrong road.
2. While this paper does consider the "consumer viewpoint" and does make some decent points about consumers and music, it never looks at how consumers interact with music beyond buying or downloading. It doesn't look at the many ways that a fan might support a band.
3. Most importantly, the paper spends a lot of time getting the perspective of the various collections societies. This gets to the root of the problem. These collections societies are middlemen who profit off of the inefficiencies of the old system. Asking them how to fix the system is always going to get the same answer: just create yet another licensing right and let us handle the collecting of it.

It's that last issue that is clearly the big problem with the music industry moving forward. You're never going to get an industry to move forward when you think that (a) the consumer (i.e., the demand side) isn't a major constituent and (b) you're asking those who profit from the inefficient system to define how the new more efficient system will work. The whole process of collective licensing is a joke that needs to be done away with. The collections societies not constituents -- they're the parasites feeding off an old system that doesn't need them anymore.

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Make a humane, compressed-air-powered bug trapper that removes unwanted, tiny pests from your world .Thanks go to Matt Lind for the original article in MAKE, Volume 06.
To download The Spider Rifle MP4 click here or subscribe in iTunes.

Check out the complete Spider Rifle article in MAKE, Volume 06 "Spider Rifle"
and you can see that in our Digital Edition.

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The SixthSense project from the MIT Media Lab aims to seamlessly integrate digital information with our everyday physical world.

The hardware components are coupled in a pendant like mobile wearable device. Both the projector and the camera are connected to the mobile computing device in the user’s pocket. The projector projects visual information enabling surfaces, walls and physical objects around us to be used as interfaces; while the camera recognizes and tracks user's hand gestures and physical objects using computer-vision based techniques. The software program processes the video stream data captured by the camera and tracks the locations of the colored markers (visual tracking fiducials) at the tip of the user’s fingers using simple computer-vision techniques. The movements and arrangements of these fiducials are interpreted into gestures that act as interaction instructions for the projected application interfaces. The maximum number of tracked fingers is only constrained by the number of unique fiducials, thus SixthSense also supports multi-touch and multi-user interaction.

Though still very much in development, the device seems quite effective, using relatively little interface hardware - camera, projector, and gestural markers. The number of potential applications are a bit overwhelming. Imagine having the datasheet for a chip you're working with automatically displayed in front of you -- all without putting down your soldering iron ;)

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Make a humane, compressed-air-powered bug trapper that removes unwanted, tiny pests from your world .Thanks go to Matt Lind for the original article in MAKE, Volume 06.
View the PDF of this project. and then subsribe to MAKE Magazine for other great projects
you can do over the weekend.

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Ed Felten and several colleagues have just finished a paper called "Fingerprinting Blank Paper Using Commodity Scanners" for the May, 2009 Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. It details a mechanism for authenticating documents based on known characteristics of the paper stock and individual sheets they're printed on.

This paper presents a novel technique for authenticating physical documents based on random, naturally occurring imperfections in paper texture. We introduce a new method for measuring the three-dimensional surface of a page using only a commodity scanner and without modifying the document in any way. From this physical feature, we generate a concise fingerprint that uniquely identifies the document. Our technique is secure against counterfeiting and robust to harsh handling; it can be used even before any content is printed on a page. It has a wide range of applications, including detecting forged currency and tickets, authenticating passports, and halting counterfeit goods. Document identification could also be applied maliciously to de-anonymize printed surveys and to compromise the secrecy of paper ballots.

Fingerprinting Blank Paper Using Commodity Scanners

angry tapir writes "One of the discussions at the Source Boston Security Showcase has been the militarization of the Internet. Governments looking to silence critics and stymie opposition have added DDOS attacks to their censoring methods, according to Jose Nazario, senior security researcher at Arbor Networks, with international political situations spawning DDOS attacks."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MAKE subscriber Dan Wagoner sent us this digital gear indicator project he spotted on the Arduino forums -

I did this as a practice project for building a gear indicator for my motorcycle. The idea is that by monitoring the revolution speed of the rear wheel and of the driving pedal I can calculate which of the 6 gears the bike is in. It’s not terribly useful on a bicycle but I think it will be handy on the motorcycle.

On the motorcycle I’ll be intercepting pulses to the tachometer to get the engine RPM. For the bicycle I’ve got a magnet mounted on the pedal arm and a reed switch on the frame that trips every time the magnet comes by. On both the bicycle and the motorcycle the rear wheel speed is detected the same way with a reed switch and magnet. The reed switches are both cannibalized from failed cycle computers.

"Terribly useful" or not, I'll take any excuse to ride around with a bike-mounted breadboard! Check out the Arduino code + info on Bill's site. Combining this with a few other onboard sensors could make for an info-tastic handlebar display - and course you could always add some LED matrix turn signals to fully deck out your ride. Just be sure to use some weather resistant enclosures.

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Meteotek is a Spanish high school project to build a meteorological sounding balloon equipped with temperature and pressure sensors, GPS, radio, and a still camera. They had a successful launched on February 28, 2009. Their Flickr pages are in Spanish, but the photos speak for themselves. It's just endlessly amazing to me that the technology now exists for amateurs, high school kids even, to be able to reach into space. Check out that back seat space command center!

Meteotek 08

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It never fails. Over the past few years, a variety of government officials in different countries have freaked out about a single video on YouTube and gone on to ban the entire site. There was Brazil, which did it first, followed by Turkey which has gone back and forth on the YouTube ban multiple times. Not surprisingly, China has banned the site as well. Then there were Thailand and Pakistan, as well. In the case of Pakistan, the method for blocking YouTube served to break the site across the world by effectively tricking routers across the globe into believing YouTube wasn't where it really is.

Of course, each one of these bans has done the exact opposite of its intended purpose. Every time, it's only served to draw more interest to the video in question. So, you would think, by this point, government officials might think twice before banning an entire site over a single video. No such luck. Jay writes in to let us know that Bangladesh is the latest to ban all of YouTube over a single video of a meeting between the Prime Minister and military officials who were unhappy about some of the Prime Minister's decisions. And, of course, now that it's making news, that video is getting a lot more attention.

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Here's a massive boatload of covers from vintage Soviet tech magazines -- most of these came from valiant Twitterers (@billnagel, @kwispel, @vr_quarksoup, @houbi) who responded to my call for the originating URL for an unattributed gallery of covers I found on another site, filling my cup to overflowing with a motherload of sovfuturkitsch that I'll be wallowing in for days. I want to wallpaper my office with these.

Update: Via Twitter, @vonross adds, "This was a youth-oriented futurist/kosmist zine started in the 20's, purged & retasked by Stalin during WWII, it went to roots of modernism."

2.5 GB torrent of PDFs of full issues of "??????? ????????" (!!!!1111!ONE!)

??????? "??????? ????????" (30? - 50?, ????)

'??????? - ????????'

??????? ??????? ??????? ???????? (29 ????)

(Thanks, Mike K!)

Pieter Michels wrote a nice actionscript/javascript bridge that allows you to use Facebook Connect services within a Flash application:

It currently supports automatic login, retrieving friend list and friend information (can take a while), current application users, sharing a link on Facebook, posting a predefined story and updating your story (make sure you set the status permissions first).

I have deliberately chosen to fully implement the results in Flash rather than merely providing a wrapper for the Javascript calls and dealing with the result in Flash itself. At the moment I'm of course limited to the things I program in Flash (the calls and the results).

But as we have to deal with automatic login and javascript popups, this way was easier to integrate in a Flash website and, moreover, the Javascript library is built with a HTML website in mind. So, it allows you to use the same library in your average website and listen to any event that passes along (login, disconnects, friends, a status that has been set, ...)

The code is all available on Github. It should be enough to get your started and if you need access to additional Facebook APIs, you can always incorporate them as needed.

Facebook Connect to Actionscript 3
Example Facebook Connect Flash App (pictured above)
FBFlashBridge at Github

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Eileen Gunn, writing on behalf of Seattle's Clarion West Writers Workshop, sez,

Clarion West knows how hard it can be to raise money for a writer's workshop, and after last year's laptop theft we know how generous our grads and supporters can be.

So when we saw the notice that Clarion South needs help, we decided to pitch in.

We're issuing a challenge to grads and supporters of the US workshops, Clarion and Clarion West. For every dollar a C/CW grad or supporter sends to Clarion South, we'll send a dollar too, up to a total of US$500.

Here's how it works: go to http://www.clarionsouth.org/donate.htm and make a donation. Then send an email to info@clarionsouth.org, telling them how much you sent and that it's for the Clarion West challenge. That's all. They'll check the info and pass it on to us, and we'll send them money.

Grads of Clarion South include Ellen Klages, Cat Sparks, and other exciting new writers. It's the only Clarion-style workshop in the southern hemisphere. It deserves to live!

PS: The three workshops are: Clarion West, Clarion South, Clarion

Donate to Clarion South (Thanks, Eileen!)

Crooks and Liars has early video-caps of Jon Stewart slaughtering Jim Cramer (CNBC's insane finance clown) on last night's show. If you only watch one Internet video this morning, it should be this one:

Tonight we had the big face-off, the heavyweight bout, the Super Bowl square-off between CNBC's Jim Cramer and Comedy Central's Jon Stewart. Cramer was especially upset about being included in a segment TDS produced on the horrible and almost criminal reporting CNBC has been airing as THE go-to business network after CNBC's Rick Santelli attacked average working-class people who got caught up in the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Santelli dubbed them as "losers." Well, the only loser tonight was Cramer and CNBC.

Jim basically sat there, starry-eyed like a lost puppy, and was virtually silent throughout the three-segment show featuring him. He basically waved the white flag and said, "You got me."

Comedy Central had to edit out eight minutes of video to accommodate the show format, and it will be available on their website tomorrow.

Stewart's point was that Wall Street got fat off of all our pension plans, 401K's and long-term investments, while the "Fast Money" crowd cashed in our long-term investments -- and CNBC was complicit in the entire gambit...

Jon Stewart creams Jim Cramer on the Daily Show

Warner Music's war on fair use has sunk to new lows, with the company sending takedown notices to YouTube over videos in which babies and toddlers interact with music in adorable ways:

Of course we can’t show you the videos since they’re, well, censored, but the YouTomb snapshots tell most of the story. One showed a 4 year old lip-syncing to the old Foreigner hit, “Juke Box Hero.” The other apparently showed a baby smacking its lips to the tune of “I Love My Lips”—a song originally sung by a cucumber in an episode of “Veggie Tales.” Both videos are obvious fair uses (these are transformative, noncommercial videos that are not substitutes for the original songs, and there is no plausible market for "licensing" parents before they video their own children singing) and perfectly legal—just like the video of a baby dancing to a Prince song that Universal Music Group took down in 2007.

The Fair Use Massacre Continues: Now Warner’s Going After the Babies

At Wednesday's Parliamentary roundtable on filtering and the Web, Robert Topolski of the Open Technology Initiative used a parable about the Web's birth to explain how the current generation of copyright, porn, terrorism (etc) filters equip network operators with the tools to murder the future-Web in its cradle:

Computing power has been rapidly increasing since the mid 1960s, as predicted by physicist Gordon Moore working in Silicon Valley at the time. By the 1990s, there was just about enough power to allow access to text and image-based files via the internet, and Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web was born.

But network administrators at the time preferred a streamlined text-only internet service, says Topolski, using something called the Gopher protocol.

He suggested that if those administrators had had access to data filtering technology, like that becoming popular with companies and governments today, they would have used it to exclude Berners-Lee's invention, and kill off the World Wide Web.

How Moore's Law saved us from the Gopher web (via Futurismic)

(Image: Gopher: screenshots)

Say you've bought a tool for infecting PCs and using them to send spam, harvest bank details and passwords, or some other criminal act -- but you lack the technical wherewithal to install and maintain the tool yourself.

Have no fear: a new "cybercrime-as-a-service" industry offers hosted, maintained malware deployments that you can rent time on, eliminating the humiliation of groveling before angry teenagers with the technical skills and spare time to get your badware running.

"It was inevitable that services would be sold to people who bought the malware toolkits but didn‘t know how to configure them," Vajdic said.

"Not only can you buy configuration as a service now, you can have the malware operated for you, too. We saw evidence of that this year."

"Investors get malware developers to write code for them and then get the writers to host and distribute it, too."

Vajdic showed delegates an email purported to be from a malware 'provider' offering hosted services for an extra $50 for three months.

Vasco's regional director for Pacific, India and Japan, Dan Dica, said company researchers buy the kits online and disassemble them to try to learn the secrets of their programming.

"The kits come with maintenance, support and a user guide," Dica said.

I keep waiting for really solid evidence that cybercrime is as pervasive as it seems to be. The best indicator I can think of would be a cratering of cybercrime prices -- say, botnet owners slashing prices and desperately spamming all and sundry looking for someone who'll pay to use their bots to DDoS an enemy or victim.

Cybercrime-as-a-service takes off (via /.)

Last year, a company called Platte Media came to light in the UK, after it started running a slightly bizarre spyware extortion scheme. The company would suck users in with a site promising licensed blockbuster movies, then take users through a registration process that involved installing some adware on their PCs. It didn't actually have the movies, just some trailers, and drove users to pornographic content. If users didn't cancel the "trial" they'd unwittingly agreed to in the process, they'd start getting popups on their screen, demanding payment of subscription fees. But the company has now shut up shop in the UK, though it's not clear if it's because the company wasn't properly paying taxes or because of scrutiny from the country's Office of Fair Trading. The company says it's pulled out for business reasons, but nobody will likely care too much, as long as it just goes away.

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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Quinn Norton reports from the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference, where Rebecca MacKinnon (one of the smartest people in the world on the questions of technology and democracy in China) discusses the state of China's fight against censorship, and what the rest of the world can learn from it.

Rebecca explains the current viral anti-censorship protest video: The song of the grass mud horse. (In this case an alpaca)

It features videos of alpacas while child sing about the grass mud horse, but the difference in tones between "Grass mud horse" and "Fuck your mother" is just a subtle tonal change. Since song tones override speaking tones in Chinese, it's a sweet choir of children singing "Fuck your mother." They sound very sweet. The alpacas are fluffy, but slightly creepy.

Definitely best misheard lyrics since "wrapped up like a douche bag in the middle of the night"

This video is coming to represent the fight against censorship. If you type in obscene or politically sensitive words often the software or the server will bounce you to an error message, so people use puns and slight changes in language to defeat the software, but everyone knows what you're really talking about. This is very like how people got around filtering in Napster oh so long ago now.

There's another older meme about a rivercrab wearing three watches. (Ethan mentioned this last year.) It's another homonym pun. It's a play on two government mottos: the "harmonious society" and the "three represents." Harmonious becomes rivercrab, and three represents becomes wear three watches. A rivercrab wearing three watches seems to be a bit about going along with the government plans.

Lessons from China for the World, Rebecca MacKinnon (Global Voices)

Sarah sez,

The author Joe Hill (son of Stephen King) is doing a great thing to promote the support of independent bookstores, both brick-and-mortar and online. He announced on his blog that he will draw a winner of a signed, slipcased edition of his new novel Gunpowder. All you have to do is to buy something at an independent bookstore and email him a copy of the receipt.

Subterranean Press liked the idea so much that they've added a list of limited editions as prizes, including a limited edition of Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book and two titles by Ray Bradbury, among other treasures.

He also does a quick FAQ about what constitutes an independent bookstore for his purposes.

I need to go out and read something by Joe Hill RIGHT NOW, based on this project alone.

Love Your Indie: The Contest (Thanks, Sarah!)

Anonymusing writes "In spoken Chinese, 'grass-mud horse' sounds virtually identical to an obscenity (hint: it begins with "mother-") — and as a cartoon character, it has become an amazing phenomenon. Meant as a subversive attack on censors, the alpaca-like mythical creature has led to a cuddly stuffed animal — selling over 180,000 in a few weeks — and a wildly popular YouTube video with children's voices singing words that are either completely benign or incredibly offensive, depending on how you listen." Update: 03/13 09:29 GMT by T : Since this story was set up, the originally linked video seems to have been pulled. Searching YouTube reveals that there are some alternatives available, at least for now.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Adam "Ape Lad" Koford sez, "Alex at Neatorama asked me to write about the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats, so I listed a few of my influences. There are many, many more, but I didn't want to get too esoteric."

Adam's Laugh-Out-Loud Cats book was one of the most delightful things I read last year, a hilarious, gentle, sweet and deeply satisfying cartoon collection that sent me reeling back in time to endless soft-humming sunny afternoons with a stack of paperback comic collections -- except that it seemed to have dropped out of a parallel universe in which Internet memes had seeped backwards into the teens.

Here's a very short version of the history of the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats comic strip (which you may or may not believe): in 1912, my great-grandfather Aloysius Koford created a short-lived comic strip featuring two hobo cats, Kitteh (the big one) and Pip (the small one). In spite of it's quick disappearance from the few newspapers that ran it, the world and words of the two filthy felines he drew somehow made their way into the cultural subconscious of America, and ultimately the internet. Though long dormant, Aloysius' influence finally resurfaced sometime within the past few years, in a much-transmogrified form, as LOLCats. If you are unfamiliar with standard-issue internet LOLCats, I am both shocked and somehow very happy for you.

As I mentioned, some have chosen not to believe this origin of the webcomic I've been saddled with for the past 21 months. That is their right. John Hodgman, in his introduction to my new collection of comics (the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats Sell Out, available now from Abrams ComicArts), makes a valiant attempt to disprove my tale. I leave it to you, the reader, to weigh the evidence and be the judge. But let's leave that debate for another time (I myself am not sure whom to believe anymore)...

Preston Sturges' 1941 film starring Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake is a movie about hoboes. John L. Sullivan (McCrea) is a movie director tired of making popular comedies. To research his career-shifting epic of the common man, entitled O Brother Where Art Thou?, he decides to hit the road as a hobo to see how the down and out live. Hilarity ensues, plots are twisted, lessons are learned, and Veronica Lake makes the best looking tramp you ever saw.

The Influences Behind The Laugh-Out-Loud Cats by Adam Koford

The Laugh-Out-Loud Cats Sell Out

Gerrit sent us a link to his Arduino project that syncs a strand of lights to the beat of the music. He uses Processing to analyze the sound, and an Arduino to control the relay. He plans on upgrading to solid state-relays in the future, along with making an enclosure for safety. Thanks Gerrit!

I used the minim library for processing for beat detection. It takes input from an iPod, detects the beats for it, and then sends commands to the Arduino board to turn on and off a relay switch.

More about Music controlled lights via Arduino

In the Maker Shed:


Make: Arduino

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You always hear educators discuss "rethinking education paradigms". But while it makes perfectly sense to find new ways to engage and connect teachers and learners, what is the right path educators should follow? Jay Cross shares his view in this article. Instead of still focusing on digital delivery tools, emergent learning seems to be the answer. Photo credit: Mopic

Before the World Trade Center attack, the world was more predictable. Knowledge was power. Adaptability has now taken its place. Our requirements have changed.

Adaptability. This is the starting point where educators should begin reconsidering the role of the education system. In a wold where uncertainty seem to be the dominating feeling, it is crucial to get rid of all the pre-packaged theories and approaches in favor of new learning patterns that can adapt to different needs and situations. That's why informal learning champion Jay Cross suggests a shift from "old" e-learning paradigms to emergent learning. In his own words:

Emergence is the key characteristic of complex systems. It is the process by which simple entities self-organize to form something more complex. Emergence is also what happened to that "utopian dream" of e-learning on the way to the future.

Here all the details:

Emergent Learning

by Jay Cross

Intro

That future has arrived. Today a healthy percentage of learning in corporations is technology-assisted. At first we thought it was all about content, but context-free courseware failed for lack of human support. Pioneering online communities turned into ghost towns. Then we realized that e-learning is a bundle of capabilities, not a silver bullet. When e-learning technology supplements traditional learning, it usually saves time, money and drudgery. Properly implemented, e-learning is a powerful, cost-effective tool. No longer the "next big thing," e-learning has hit the mainstream.

Adaptability Is the Key

Before the World Trade Center attack, the world was more predictable. Knowledge was power. Adaptability has now taken its place. Our requirements have changed. Corporations and government agencies are on permanent alert. Networks have taken the slack out of the system. Timing is the critical variable. The performance metrics for troops on a plane headed to a new hot spot and for systems engineers countering a new competitive threat are the same: How soon will they be ready to perform. Top-down, command-and-control organizations can no longer keep pace. Flexible hyper-organizations are sprouting up in their place. Teams, in-house functions, outsource providers and customers are linked in fluid, ever-changing value networks. Resilient organizations copy the architecture of the Internet: lots of independent nodes with the ability to route around damage. People farthest from the center sense changes in the environment first, so managers wisely take control by giving control. Bottom-up organizations adjust to change as effortlessly as flocks of turning birds, while old structures are too rigid to change without sustaining damage. This is shaky ground for the traditional training-and-development world. Biologists and complexity theorists have seen it all before.

Adaptive Systems

Businesses are complex adaptive systems. In a complex system, independent pieces join together to form something entirely different and unexpected. The best metaphor for a complex adaptive system is a living thing. Take a complex system apart, and you no longer have a complex system. As Verna Allee writes, "Cut a cow in half and you don't have two cows. You have a mess." In their book, "It's Alive," management theorists Stan Davis and Christopher Meyer make a compelling case that business entities are living, complex systems. Many nodes-brains-come together to form something new-the corporate body. As my friend David Grebow says, it even has a Corporate IQ and, according to author David Batestone, a Corporate Soul.

E-learning vs Emergent Learning

Emergence is the key characteristic of complex systems. It is the process by which simple entities self-organize to form something more complex. Emergence is also what happened to that "utopian dream" of e-learning on the way to the future. Simple, old e-learning has combined with bottom-up self-organizing systems, network effects and today's environment to morph into emergent learning. Emergent learning implies adaptation to the environment, timeliness, flexibility and space for co-creation. It is the future. We haven't figured it out yet. Or, from the perspective of complexity science, it hasn't figured itself out yet. Why do I suggest abandoning a word like e-learning? A new term refocuses our thinking on the future. We've got to cultivate emergent learning. Emergent learning encourages experiment and innovation; e-learning fosters incrementalism and complacency. Learning has become a core business process. Emergent learning enables us to push beyond the confines of e-learning to explore combinations with informal learning, storytelling, social network analysis, appreciative inquiry, workflow learning, conversation, contextual collaboration, organic KM, simulation, dynamic portals, expert location and blogs. I foresee exciting times ahead.

Originally written by Jay Cross and first published on Chief Learning Officer Magazine on March 1, 2004 as "Emergent Learning".

About the author Jay Cross is a champion of informal learning, Web 2.0, and systems thinking. He served as CEO of eLearning Forum for its first five years and has keynoted major conferences in the U.S. and Europe. He is the author of Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways that Inspire Innovation and Performance. Jay Cross currently helps teams apply informal / Web 2.0 learning approaches to foster collaboration and accelerate performance. He is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Business School.

Photo credits: Adaptability Is the Key - bornholm Adaptive Systems - ssh E-Learning vs Emergent Learning - Elena Volegzhanina

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Derek Bledsoe, Boing Boing Video producer, is blogging daily Boing Boing Video episodes while Xeni's on the road in Africa.

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Mononchrom’s Johannes Grenzfurthner takes us backwards through time to Cyberpipe’s Computer Museum, a huge collection of functioning vintage computers located in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Dunja Rosina, Head of Project and a founder of the museum, shows us the collection which includes such dinosaurs as the Commodore 64, the ZX Spectrum, and the worlds first widely used business computer the IBM XT. Dunja and Johannes share nostalgia of the days of pirating games from the radio, the importance of the mouse, and the golden age of gaming in one color.

The space is free, fully interactive, and provides Internet access, workstations, educational programs and more to the public at no charge.

Special Thanks to Eddie Codel for his help with this episode!

Flash video embed above, click "full" icon inside the player to view it large. You can download the MP4 here. Our YouTube channel is here, you can subscribe to our daily video podcast on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are the archives for Boing Boing Video.

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(Special thanks to Boing Boing Video's hosting and publishing provider Episodic.)

The idea of standardization around certain technologies makes some amount of sense. Once a standard is set at a lower level, it opens up plenty of innovation opportunities above that standard. However, in the past few years, we've seen a pretty massive problem with the combination of standards and patents. Basically, everyone starts looking for ways to somehow connect a patent to a standard -- but they often try to hide the details so that, once the standard is set, they can start demanding everyone pay up for patent infringement. This is even more likely when companies come up with an agreement to pool patents in a royalty-free manner for the sake of the patent. Companies try to keep their patents out so they can later demand money. It's way too common these days. The latest to do this appears to be Apple, who withheld a key patent on technology for online "widgets", which has recently been standardized. The standard was set by the W3C, who asked for companies to commit their patents royalty-free in order to move the standard forward so that everyone could benefit. Instead, Apple held out a key patent, and can now start demanding people pay up. On the whole, Apple hasn't been that aggressive in enforcing its patents, and hopefully that doesn't change now -- but it does show once again how important patents have become in the standards setting process, and how much trouble they can cause.

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mask.of.sanity writes "BitDefender has released what it claims is the first vaccination tool to remove the notorious Conficker virus that infected some 9 million Windows machines in about three months. The worm, also known as Downadup, exploits a bug in the Windows Server service used by Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Server 2003 and Server 2008. It spreads primarily through a buffer overflow vulnerability in Windows Server Service where it disables the operating system update service, security center, including Windows Defender, and error reporting. The Romanian security vendor said its removal tool will delete all versions of Downadup and will not be detected by the virus."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A TV show on the BBC is highlighting the ongoing problem of botnets -- by acquiring one of its own and using other people's computers in it to mount a DDOS attack on a security company's web site. The BBC says it had the security company's approval to do so, and that it didn't have any criminal intent, making its action legal. But some people aren't so sure, and say that intent doesn't offer a way out under British computer law. A tech lawyer says it's unlikely the broadcaster will face prosecution because there wasn't any real harm done, but those whose computers were used in the attack might disagree and view the methods used to make a point about computer security as a bit extreme.

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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Here's a fun project, and a feat in soft circuitry for sure: the musical bra, with very detailed instructions!

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A 13-year-old girl in Washington was killed last month by a registered sex offender who was being monitored with a GPS tracking device. The tragedy illustrates how such tracking devices -- whether fitted to criminals or children -- aren't magic bullets that offer total protection. In this case, the GPS device helped police corroborate the killer's confession, but it didn't stop the crime. He was being tracked passively, not in real-time, but even if he were, the fact that he was in a field wouldn't have helped anyone notice that he was trying to rape, and then killing, the girl. The devices may prove useful from an evidence standpoint, but that's only after a crime is committed. Perhaps part of the intention is that they'll also act as a deterrent, though sadly that wasn't any help in this case. Whatever the intention, it's important to remember that the devices themselves really don't offer much protection, and shouldn't be viewed as standalone solutions to preventing crime.

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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A few people submitted stories about a German school shooting this week, noting that the AP report on the shooting spoke to a friend of the killer, talking about how they used to play video games together, and that some of them were violent. I decided not to post it initially, because it was a small part of the story, and there was nothing saying anyone was actually responding to that aspect, yet. But... of course... it didn't take long at all. Politicians are leaping on the bandwagon and already some are calling for a total ban on violent video games, despite no actual evidence that violent video games had anything, whatsoever, to do with the killings.

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dp619 writes "Capped per-unit royalties make FAT licensing agreements permissible under the GPL, and SD Times has found that Microsoft's public license policy caps royalties at $250k. If the royalties are capped — as they seem to be — TomTom should be able to license FAT without violating the GPL. And if that is the case ... TomTom needs some serious explaining to do as to why they aren't licensing FAT. That said, Microsoft still needs to explain why it just cannot say that folks won't violate the GPL if they license FAT under its terms."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We miss Phillip loads already, as he enjoys his well-deserved MAKEcation. We figured he'd be far from idle. He writes:

Not too long ago there was an xkcd comic featuring the Kindle we knew someone would eventually laser etch a new Kindle 2 but we didn't expect it to be us! Here's the first ever laser etched Kindle 2! Sean brought his over to the Adafruit shop today and we "experimented" - it looks great!

First laser etched Kindle 2! The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - "Don't Panic"

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Gareth says:

Last Friday was the premier of our new live talk radio show, Make: Talk. It was really a lot of fun and we're looking forward to doing it again this Friday. In case you missed it, you can listen to the archived show below.

We also want to follow up each episode with Show Notes, links and information related to what came up in conversation. Here (belatedly) are the notes to last week's show. From now on, we'll have these up soon after the webcast.

Make: Talk Show Notes, Episode #001, March 6, 2009

• MAKE, Volume 17, The Lost Knowledge issue
• Steampunk magazine
• Sturgeon's Mill
• Sturgeon's Mill on Make: Online
• William Blake: Patron Saint of Makers Check out Blake's relief-etching process as I attempt to recreate it.
• Capturing the Knowledge of Mill-Wrights
• The Wikipedia page on Electrochemical Machining
• RepRap site

Make: Talk, Friday, March 13th, 12:00pm PT, 3:00pm ET
This Friday, we'll continue our exploration of Make, Vol. 17, the "Lost Knowledge" issue. We'll chat with Heather McDougal, author of "Your Own Wunderkammer," a how-to on building Cabinets of Wonders. She'll explain how you can make a mini-museum of the awesome and the bizarre in your own home. For more on the subject, visit Heather's blog: Cabinet of Wonders. Also, the hosts of Make: Talk will present their favorite tricks, tips, and tools for makers, and we'll be giving away prizes!

And don't forget, this is live, call-in radio. The show runs for 45 minutes. Call in during showtimes (12-12:45pm PT) and ask questions. The number is: (646) 915-8698. Dale, Mark, and I hope you'll join us this Friday!

Make: Talk on Blog Talk Radio

I was a bit disappointed earlier this week to see that Google had settled a patent infringement lawsuit filed against it by Judah Klausner. Klausner has been going around for years and years suing tons of companies, claiming that any sort of "visual voicemail" offering violates his patent. He's been quite successful getting big companies to settle, which suggests he probably sets his demands at a point just slightly cheaper than it would cost to fight him. It's difficult to see why the concept is even remotely patentable. I remember talking to people about similar ideas for ages. All it basically does is apply an email interface to voicemail. That's not anything special, and hardly "nonobvious to those skilled in the art."

But companies keep settling -- and it's obvious now why Google did so. Just days after the settlement, Google has announced its new Google Voice offering which (wouldn't you know it?) includes a visual voicemail component. These days, it seems like paying off patent hoarders even for ideas that plenty of folks came up with on their own, is just a "cost of doing business."

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In the this-sucks-if-true category, we hear from mobileread:

As some of you may already know, this week we received a DMCA take-down notice from Amazon requesting the removal of the tool kindlepid.py and instructions associated with it. Although we never hosted this tool (contrary to their claim), nor believe that this tool is used to remove technological measures (contrary to their claim), we decided, due to the vagueness of the DMCA law and our intention to remain in good relation with Amazon, to voluntarily follow their request and remove links and detailed instructions related to it.

I'm a (small) shareholder in Amazon. I own a Kindle. I question my decisions when I hear about stuff like this.

Oh, and by the way: Click here for lots of search links to the file that has Amazon in such a frenzy.

via Slashdot)

Over at Laughing Squid, guest blogger Chicken John introduces us to a modern day Noah with his own ark. From De Ark van Noach:

In 2005, a Dutch building contractor named Johan Huibers started to build a replica of Noah’s Ark with his own hands. The history of this Ark is very special. Huibers: "In 1992 I had a dream where I dreamt that Holland disappeared in enormous masses of water, something like the Tsunami in South-East Asia. That sounds pretty rough of course."

But Huibers is not expecting a new flood.

He sees it as his task to bring the Bible story back to people's attention through the Ark replica.

De Ark van Noach

This looks pretty interesting. Just got this info from Parallax PR:

The CO Gas Sensor Module is designed to allow a microcontroller to determine when a preset CO gas level has been reached or exceeded. Interfacing with the sensor module is done through a 4-pin SIP header and requires two I/O pins from the host microcontroller. The sensor module is mainly intended to provide a means of comparing carbon monoxide sources and being able to set an alarm limit when the source becomes excessive.

Features:
Uses the MQ-7 CO Gas Sensor
Easy SIP interface
Compatible with most microcontrollers

For details, visit Parallax and search on "27931." The module is priced at $30.

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Caption: Is this the future? A single IC, a battery, and some user interface components?

Kyle and our pals over at iFixit.com got ahold of the 3rd gen iPod Shuffle and they just had to tear it apart.

Amazingly, at least on our scale, both halves weighed 5 grams. That means the entire functional half of the iPod weighs only about 20% more than a single sheet of letter size paper.

iPod Shuffle 3rd Generation First Look

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I was going to pass on this particular story, but so many people have been submitting it that it seemed worth at least a quick post. Real estate giant Re/max apparently has some lawyers with free time on their hands now that the housing market has collapsed. It seems like they must, because they felt it was necessary to oppose the trademark application of a small real estate agency in North Carolina that goes by the name Rehava. Remax and Rehava aren't particularly similar, and neither are their logos: But, that hasn't stopped Re/max from complaining. It goes beyond just the "Re" at the beginning. Apparently Re/max lawyers think that the line somewhere near the "e" will confuse people. And then, it just gets ridiculous:

"If you chop the top off of the 'h,' you (almost) have the 'm' in Re/Max. The next letter is an 'a,' and if you take the 'v' then you have half of an 'x.' "

This certainly seems like a situation where the moron in a hurry test should apply. Tragically, however, our legal system never seems to be in much of a hurry, and so its costing Rehava plenty of time and money to respond to the opposition by Re/max.

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